diff --git a/TestFiles/GUARDIAN 1989.txt b/TestFiles/GUARDIAN 1989.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f441d1c --- /dev/null +++ b/TestFiles/GUARDIAN 1989.txt @@ -0,0 +1,12012 @@ + + +1 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 2, 1989 + +The year ahead: Nurse and worse - Health Care + +BYLINE: By MELANIE PHILLIPS + +LENGTH: 571 words + + + The ageing of the population is a phrase that has become common currency. The assumption that lies behind it is that as more of us get older, the greater the burdens will be on the health service and personal social services. Allied to this concern is the anxiety about the shortage of nurses which is also likely to worsen with the drop in the number of young adults. In fact, it is difficult to generalise. People in Britain are living longer, but there are now several countries, including Japan, France, Switzerland, Greece, Spain, and Denmark where both men and women can expect to live longer than they will in the UK. According to Promoting Health Among Elderly People, a report published last November by King Edward's Hospital Fund for London, one crucial reason for the discrepancy is proverty. The decline in mean household income after retirement age is steeper in Britain than in the United States, West Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Canada. At the same time, the report says, during the last half century the standard of living of elderly people has improved with better specialised housing, residential care and domiciliary services. Old age is accepted less as an explanation for ill health and the view is spreading that the common diseases of later life can be treated or cured more often or at least effectively managed. + However, it is a mistake to lump the elderly together as a homogeneous group. Although old age is healthier than it was, the accelerating problem is the steep rise in the number of people aged over 85 who do make heavy demands on health and social services with such specific problems as dementia, and the fact that the people caring for them are themselves becoming elderly, maybe in their 60s, with their own frailties too. Meanwhile, there is a crisis in nurse recruitment. Currently, one quarter of all appropriately qualified femal school leavers train as nurses. The Institute of Manpower Studies has estimated that, given a one per cent growth in the workforce, nearly one third of allfemale school leavers would need to be recrufited as nurses by 1992. yet westage from the profession is more than twice the teacher drop-out rate - 35 per cent from Registered General Nursing courses. + Jean Hooper, Director of Nurse Education for Portsmouth Health Authority, has had considerable local success in bringing mature entrants into the profession. In 1970, as a result of work done by Southampton University on jobs for women with young families, Ms Hooper started up her nurse training scheme specifically for women with domestic responsibilities - looking after children or aged relatives. The training takes place from 9am until 3.30pm with long holidays to coincide with schools. Most entrants are in their 30s. there's room for about 20 per year, and this year there are still 183 suitable women waiting. The wastage rate is only eight per cent, and some 70 per cent of graduates go onto full-time nursing. Husbands are interviewed to screen entrants for good family back-up; by the time women have got to that stage in their lives, she said, they are generally very committed. + 'There's a range of reasons why nurses give up', said Ms Hooper. 'Once we're over the teething troubles, the clinical regrading will be very positive. But health authorities have got to be more flexible with things like job sharing. And a few more men are looking at nursing now.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +2 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 2, 1989 + +The year ahead: Decline of the British teenager - Fewer births, longer lives + +BYLINE: By MELANIE PHILLIPS + +LENGTH: 376 words + + + The shift has been caused by two main factors. The birth rate which reached a peak in the 1960s, which caused the current peak of people in their early 20s and led to a rise of some 2 million people of working age between 1976 and 1986, dropped in the 1970s. As a result of that drop, the labour market is expected to grow far more slowly over the next few years, with a pronounced decline in the number of young people. Between now and 1995, the number of 16-19-year-olds is expted to fall by 23 per cent or nearly 600,000, while the number of 16-24-year-olds is expected to drop by some 1.2 million. + At the other end of the age scale, numbers are rising steadily, both because of the rising birth rate in the early years of this century and because people are now living longer, thanks to improvements in nutrition and public health as well as advances in medical science. You can now expect to live for an average 74 years - 71 if you're a man, 77 if you're a woman; three decades ago the average was 69 years, and three decades hence it is expected to reach 77 years. + And within this increase in elderly people there will be a further sharp rise in the numbers of the very old - from 1.8 million over-80s in 1985 to 2.4 million in 2001 and 2.6 million ten years later. The number of children aged under 15 is expected to rise from 10.8 million in 1986 to 11.7 million in 1996. + The government's main anxiety arising from these changes is their impact upon the labour force. But one minister involved in working out what it all means issues a health warning with the statistics. Mr John Patten, the Home Office Minister of State and by academic training a historical demographer, says no-one knows what will happen. 'Whatever projections are coming out of the Department of Employment and this place, they won't be exactly what we think they are going to be in 1995. They never are. Although you can say today there are so many people alive of a certain age and within a certain time only a certain number will enter the job market, this is only if certain other things are equal. We don't know how employers' and employees' behaviour are going to change. The demographic time-bomb will either be a firecracker or a hydrogen bomb. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +3 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 2, 1989 + +Social services face breakdown of care for elderly, warn nurses + +LENGTH: 235 words + + + Local social services would not be able to cope with the needs of the growing number of elderly by the end of the century, the Royal College of Nursing said yesterday. + It was inconceivable that they would be able to deal with the explosion in demand for 24 hour care, it said in a new year's message to Mr Kenneth Clarke, the Health Secretary. There would be 80,000-100,000 more dependent old people needing skilled nursing care. + As the number of people living beyond 75 grew, so would the number suffering from dementia caused by ageing. The RCN estimated that 10,000 extra residential and nursing home places would be needed each year for the foreseeable future. + It called for national planning to improve standards, and said the tendency of some old people to move to coastal resorts had made it possible for local councils to plan for the future. + 'It is the test of a civilised society that such individuals should not be left to the arbitrary effects of local democracy,' the college said. + 'It could threaten to overwhelm local government social services in those areas as the retired population becomes less active and more dependent.' + It was essential for health and social services to be combined in the future to provide effective care. + The needs of an ageing population should not be dumped on local authorities incapable of responding to them, the college said. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +4 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 3, 1989 + +Tuesday Women: Bulletin + +LENGTH: 513 words + + + EVENTS + Women Writers' Workshop + Sixth in the annual series run by the Commonwealth Institute. Two sessions, morning and afternoon. Workshop leaders include Margaret Drabble, Leena Dhingra, Merle Collins and Dorothy Hewett. Fee Pounds 13.80 (choose two out of eight workshops), concessions Pounds 8.05 (OPAs, students, unwaged, friends of the institute). Fee includes coffee and tea. Applications before tomorrow to Commonwealth Institute, Kensington High Street, London W8 6NQ. Contact: Christine Bridgwood (01 603 4535 ext. 263) or Roisin Tierney (same number but ext. 251). + Black Women in Business + A first-ever two-day conference to be chaired by ex-BBC governor, Jocelyn Barrow. Winner of the Black Businesswoman Of The Year to be announced at the conference. At the Commonwealth Institute (address as above) from February 14-15. Contact: Sue Page (01 978 4259). + Advocacy: Voicing the wishes of the older person + One-day conference for professionals and others working with older people. Speakers include: Andrew Rowe MP, Lydia Sinclair of Advocacy Alliance and Rosemary Laxton, author of Age Concern's Guidelines for Advocacy Schemes. January 31, 9.15am-4.45pm, Baden Powell House, Queens Gate, London SW7 5JS. Cost: Pounds 26.45 (includes lunch, coffee and tea). Contact: Linda Simmons, Age Concern England, 60 Pitcairn Road, Mitcham, Surrey CR4 3LL. Closing date for bookings: January 10. + Women Writers Network + Sara Fisher, foreign rights editor of literary agents, A M Heath, is the speaker at 7pm on January 16 at The American Church, 79 Tottenham Court Road, London W1 (nearest Tube, Goodge Street). Contact: Leslie Mandel-Viney on 01 399 7238. + Fat Women's Group + The first-ever National Fat Women's Conference will be held in London on February 11. The conference aims to highlight the oppression fat women suffer through society's chronic negative attitudes. SAE to The London Fat Women's Group, London Women's Centre, Wesley House, 4 Wild Court, London WC2 5AU. + POETRY + Margaret Atwood + Rare UK reading by the celebrated Canadian poet/novelist. January 27, at 1.15pm at the National Poetry Centre, 21 Earls Court Square, London SW5 9DE. Telephone: 01 373 7861/2 for details. + HELP + National Helpline + A new national telephone helpline operating from tomorrow to respond to women's needs for more counselling, support and information about cervical and breast screening programmes. Experienced female health professionals will answer the calls. Helpline number: 01 495 4995, 9.30am - 4.30pm, Monday to Friday. + PUBLICATIONS + Women Of The Arab World (Zed Books, Pounds 7.95 pb, Pounds 24.95 hb) + Arab women have become more active in recent years in confronting issues which face women in Muslim societies. A new organisation, The Arab Women's Solidarity Association, brings these women together and this book reflects their thinking. Edited by Nahid Toubia. Published: January 23. + PS + Pauline Willis is unwell and will be away for a while but please keep sending your items for Bulletin addressed to her. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +5 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 3, 1989 + +Britain Today: Elderly thrive in healthier nation - Population + +BYLINE: By MAEV KENNEDY + +LENGTH: 418 words + + + People are healthier and living longer, and the percentage of elderly people is increasing sharply. + Although there are still more births than deaths in Britain - 775,600 against 644,300 in 1987 - the fertility rate at 1.8 per cent is still well below the 2.1 per cent needed for population replacement. + The population is on the increase - partly because of immigration - but slowly. The 56.9 million population in 1987 makes Britain the world's 15th most populous country. It is expected to increase to 57.5 million in 1991, and 59.4 million in 2011. Since 1983, the traditional net population loss through emigration has been reversed. In 1987 there was a net gain of 2,000. + Late marriages, late conception, an increase in voluntary sterilisation by men and women, and smaller families are all slowing down population increase. More than a third of pregnancies occur outside marriage, and of these more than a third end in legal abortion. + In 1972, there were 480,000 marriages. In 1987 this had fallen to 398,000. + The trend in the 1960s to earlier marriages has been reversed. In 1986, of the population aged 16 and over, 60 per cent were married, 26 per cent single, 9 per cent widowed and 5 per cent divorced. + The divorce rate has been increasing steadily. It was 13 for every 1,000 marriages in 1987, compared to two in 1961. Both partners had previously been divorced in 12 per cent of all marriages in 1987. + The trend noted in last year's handbook, of children born in stable, non-marital relationships, is continuing. Two-thirds of illegitimate births, which make up 23 per cent of all live births, are registered by both parents. + Life expectation is 72 years for a man and 78 for a woman, compared with 49 and 52 in 1901. + The annual death rate has remained constant for 40 years, at about 12 per 1,000 of the population, but fewer of these are children or young adults. + The percentage of young people has fallen, and of elderly risen sharply - in mid-1987, 18 per cent of the population was over normal retirement age. + There are more women than men - although more male children are born, male mortality is higher at every age. + In every 1,000 live births, the mortality rate for infants under a year old was 9.1 in 1987 and for infants under four weeks, five. Maternal mortality is 0.06. + Better nutrition, rising standards of living and working conditions, and education and medical advances are all aiding the improvement in the population's health. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +6 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 5, 1989 + +Elderly risk eviction due to low benefit levels, say care groups + +BYLINE: By SARAH BOSELEY + +LENGTH: 293 words + + + Thousands of elderly and disabled people risk losing their place in a residential home because of inadequate benefit levels, says the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. + A report by the council claims that Department of Social Security board and lodging payments no longer cover costs for a well-run residential home. Some homes reduce costs, and standards, by employing non-qualified staff, while others have closed. + Ms Christine Peaker, author of the report, said yesterday: 'Individuals are being denied access to residential care of, in some cases, face eviction from private homes'. + Of 131 homes surveyed by the council last August, two out of three reported that they faced deficits: costs (staffing, maintenance, and capital spending) were rising faster than inflation, while for the past two years residents' DSS benefits had failed to keep pace with inflation. + Help the Aged, with a deficit of Pounds 174,000, is considering quitting residential care altogether. + Servite Houses Ltd, which commissioned the report, faces a deficit of Pounds 450,000, and has closed two homes, one being for the physically disabled. + Examples of individuals are given by the report, three cared for by a private nursing home in Surrey: a wheelchair-bound sufferer of multiple sclerosis, aged 54, with a pensioner husband; a confused widower of 92; and a stroke victim in her seventies. All three may have to leave, following a rise of Pounds 28 in the weekly fees to Pounds 255, but there is nowhere cheaper in the area where they can go. + Who Pays, Who Cares?: The Future Funding of Residential Care, is available from the Residential Care Project, NCVO, 26 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3HU, price Pounds 3 including postage. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +7 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 6, 1989 + +Hip patients 'starved and sedated' + +BYLINE: By AILEEN BALLANTYNE, Medical Correspondent + +LENGTH: 419 words + + + Elderly patients with broken hips are being kept 'starved and sedated' for up to 14 hours in hospital before they reach the operating theatre, according to a report published yesterday by the Royal College of Physicians. + In many cases, they are given such low priority that they are not operated on for two or three days after admission. By then, because they cannot move, pressure sores develop, which can mean a six-month stay in hospital at a cost of Pounds 25,000 to the National Health Service. + Miss Pamela Hibbs, chief nursing officer of the City and Hackney health authority and a member of the working party which produced the report, said: 'One of the problems is that such patients are so very quiet. They are often elderly women who don't look as if they are in a critical condition.' + In a busy ward, their operations could often be put back after they had been prepared for surgery, in favour of an emergency case. The report emphasises that old and frail patients with hip fractures who need the highest degree of clinical skill may be anaesthetised and operated on by less experienced doctors, often at night. + Patients from the upper social classes were most likely to be operated on by a consultant and were likely to wait less time, the report concludes. + The Royal College warns that the number of hip fractures is rising sharply and calls for urgent research into the reasons. After allowing for the fact that people are now living longer, the incidence has doubled in recent years. One theory was that people have become more sedentary in the last 30 years. + The report is critical of British Rail's introduction of marble-type station floors which become slipper when wet. It calls for more careful design to avoid the risk of falls. + Hospitals spend Pounds 160 million a year treating patients with hip fractures, who take up a fifth of all orthopaedic surgery beds. Almost 60 per cent of hip fractures occur in women over 75. + Dr John Kanis, president of the European foundation for osteoporosis and bone disease, and a member of the college working party, said one third of women suffered fractures as a result of bone thinning. + He said those most at risk of developing osteoporosis were women who had an early menopause, smoked heavily or abused alcohol. The report also recommends regular moderate exercise to avoid osteoporosis. + Fractured neck of femur; prevention and management. RCP, 11 St Andrews Place, Regents Park, London NW1 4LE; Pounds 5. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +8 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 6, 1989 + +Electronic tag to be kept on old + +LENGTH: 108 words + + + A social services department is to go ahead with a scheme to tag confused elderly people electronically in two council-run homes. + Humberside county council is to introduce the system for a six month trial. A spokesman denied it was a Big Brother system and said it would only be used with the consent of the person concerned or a relative. He said the tag could be fixed to footwear or clothing to enable staff to detect people leaving the home. + The social services chairman, Mr Eric Blackband, said: 'It makes sure they don't come to any harm when they cross over the doorstep. We are taking advantage of modern technology.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +9 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 6, 1989 + +Dead bank robber 'used murder to satisfy greed' + +BYLINE: By PAUL HOYLAND + +LENGTH: 357 words + + + A bank robber involved in the shooting of two police officers in coventry used murder and terrorism to satisfy his greed, an inquest in the city heard yesterday. + David Raymond fisher, a 20-year-old delivery van driver of Newport, Gwent, South Wales, shot himself in the head after he was surrounded by armed police at a house in Coventry. + Members of the West Midlands tactical firearms unit laid siege to the house in Stoneleigh Avenue where Fisher and his accomplice had sought refuge. + Earlier, Fisher robbed the Midland Bank in Tile Hill of Pounds 600. He and his accomplice broke into the house after a car chase in which PC Gavin Carlton, aged 29, was shot dead, and Detective Constable Leonard Jakeman, aged 38, was shot in the stomach and seriously wounded. Both officers were unarmed. + Recording a verdict that Fisher killed himself after his accomplice had surrendered, the Coventry coroner, Mr David Sarginson, said: 'I was absolutely delighted and full of admiration for the police and the way in which they dealt with this matter and acted with such great speed and efficiency and above all with the daring bravery that they showed throughout that morning of December 19. + 'Fisher had used murder and terrorism to try and satisfy his greed. He was surrounded and killed himself to avoid facing ignominy. It was a violent end of a violent man.' + Detective Superintendent Lyndon Farr, who led the investigation into the bank robbery and the shooting of the two police officers, told the coroner that Nicholas Anthony Hill, aged 20, of Rockfield Street, Newport, Gwent, had been charged with robbery, murder and attempted murder. A report was being prepared for the crown prosecution service. + An elderly couple who escaped after a pair of armed robbers broke into their home in Finham, Coventry, yesterday described them as amateurish. + Mr Horace Oughton, aged 80, and his wife, Beryl, aged 78, set off a burglar alarm after the two masked men attempted to make them disclose the whereabouts of a non-existent safe. In the confusion, Mr and Mrs Oughton fled. + The robbers left before police arrived. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +10 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 7, 1989 + +Weekend Money: House-rich have plans to generate cash - Home-owning pensioners can make their properties pay for them + +BYLINE: By TERESA HUNTER + +LENGTH: 880 words + + + The folklore figure of the poor old widow unable to afford a crust of bread has been superseded by the equally sad figure of today's asset-rich old woman, unable to afford decent meals or to keep warm. + 'House-rich, cash-poor' is the jargon used to describe the plight of thousands of elderly people who, having struggled all their working lives to pay a mortgage, find on retirement that despite having finally cast off that heavy load, they are still unable to live in comfort. + Just such a couple were Jeff and Dixie Jeffrey of Cornwall who discovered that after retirement their bills escalated far above the rise in their pension. Mrs Jeffrey, aged 74, says: 'Our rates bill in particular rocketed, but all the others as well just kept going up and up. We paid off our mortgage before we retired but it wasn't doing us any good.' + Harold Poore, aged 80, from Essex agrees: 'It was getting more and more difficult to make ends meet. The house needed some work and I simply couldn't afford it.' + And Mrs Renee Plummer, aged 79, of Essex says: 'My husband retired on a very good pension, but it wasn't index-linked. He died aged 60, and in a very short time his pension had dramatically devalued. It hardly went anywhere.' + The most efficient way for retired homeowners to boost their income is to move to a smaller property, releasing capital which can be invested to produce regular injections of cash. But for many pensioners, such as the Jeffreys, Harold Poore and Renee Plummer, leaving the family home and moving away from their friends was an option they would not consider. They chose instead a home income plan. + There are a number of variations on home income plans, some of which should be avoided. But in essence you mortgage your property and use the loan to buy an annuity, which provides a regular income until you die. Generally half the income from the annuity goes to repaying interest on the mortgage, on which you get tax relief, and the other half goes to you. + The ages at which home income plans can be taken out vary, but they become attractive only for single people over the age of 69 and married couples with a combined age of 145. Plans generally have a Pounds 30,000 ceiling because this is the limit for mortgage interest tax relief. + As with all annuities, you and the company are taking a gamble on how long you will live. It is possible to opt for limited capital protection, which means that if you die within the first few years of taking out a plan a proportion of the mortgage will be refunded to your beneficiaries. So if you die in the first year only a fifth of the mortgage must be repaid, two-fifths in the second year and so on until year five. This protection costs about Pounds 12 a month. + The Jeffreys took out a Pounds 30,000 plan secured against their Pounds 40,000 home three years ago. This has given them an extra monthly income of Pounds 103.17. Meanwhile their house has risen in value to about Pounds 80,000. Mrs Jeffreys says: 'Now we're letting the house pay for us instead of us for the house.' + Mrs Plummer took out an Pounds 18,000 plan 10 years ago, which has since given her a Pounds 125 monthly income. Her home, at that stage worth Pounds 30,000 is now valued at Pounds 90,000. + Harold Poore, who has no children, first took out a plan 10 years ago. Subsequent top-ups mean he enjoys a monthly income of Pounds 230 on plans totalling Pounds 45,000 secured against his Pounds 100,000 home. 'I run a new car, and keep my home in excellent condition. I could do neither were it not for the home income plan.' + But these incomes could be doubled if pensioners did not have to repay interest on a mortgage to a lender - in other words if they moved down market by Pounds 30,000, and then bought an annuity. A 70-year-old man could hope to get as much as Pounds 4,000 annually net of tax by moving and then investing Pounds 30,000 in an annuity. Moving fees have to be taken into consideration, but solicitors fees could become payable when arranging a home income plan. + Cecil Hinton, of specialist brokers Hinton and Wild, in Surbiton, Surrey, admits home income plans are not for everyone: 'There are other ways to raise an income on your home, and people should consider very carefully before opting for a home income plan. But if your children are already well-provided for, and you don't want to move, or can't move, this is one option you might consider.' + Roll-up home income plans look like an attractive version of these schemes, but they should be treated with extreme caution. Instead of halving income from the annuity by paying interest as you go along, these plans roll up the interest which is paid out of your estate when you die. + The problem is, interest rolls up very fast and the interest no longer qualifies for tax relief. There is thus a possibility, particularly at times of stagnating property prices, that the debt could exceed the value of the house. + Reversionary schemes are another variation with some attractions. In this case you sell your home to a company which permits you to remain in the house as caretaker for a pepper-corn rent. However, you may only receive between one-third and two-thirds of the market value, depending on your age. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +11 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 9, 1989 + +Financial Notebook: Reagan rides off leaving Bush to rein in the deficit + +BYLINE: By ALEX BRUMMER + +LENGTH: 1033 words + + + The release of President Reagan's valedictory budget today, like almost all its predecessors, will produce an incredulous yawn. In previous years the standard refrain has been dead-on-arrival, this year - as the Presidency shifts from Ronald Reagan to George Bush - the budget died before it went to press. + Nevertheless, if one ignores the bottom line numbers, including the projected deficit of Dollars 98.6 billion for 1990, the budget drawn up after months of work in dozens of government departments, agencies and outposts does offer some clues on spending trends and priorities. + Mr Reagan's las budget will bring the Pentagon budget full circle. It will reflect a new austerity under which military spending grows by some 2 per cent above inflation (against the near double digit increases in the early Reagan years). Certain older strategic systems including the B-52 bomber and an older generation of nuclear submarines are to be retired while production of the most modern systems, such as the B-2 stealth bomber, will be slowed. + Just how far circumstances have changed at the Pentagon will be reflected in terms of budget authority which will be an astonishing Dollars 176 billion less in 1990 than envisaged in a 1986-1990 spending plan. + Another indication of fiscal parsimony ahead will be Mr Reagan's efforts to restrain the amount the federal government spends on medical care for the elderly and the needy. The goal in the final Reagan budget (one which may well be adopted by Mr Bush) is to hold health care costs to 8 per cent in 1990 against the 14 per cent in the current financial year which began in October. + This is interesting in that it is the first serious effort in the Reagan years to grapple with the entitlements, such as old age pension (known in the US as Social Security), which have been regarded as politically off-limits. It is no coincidence that the Bush budget czar, Richard Darman and the bipartisan National Economic Commission have also latched on to this slice of spending which occupied 43 per cent of the 1989 budget pie chart (against 27 per cent for defence). + Given the budgetary legacy which Mr Bush will inherit on January 20 it is not surprising that even the most sacroscant areas of the budget, like the entitlements, are coming under scrutiny. In the period between the election and the release of today's 1990 spending blueprint two major new liabilites have emerged: the clean-up and refit of the US nuclear warhead production plants and the lifeboat for the savings and loans system. + The Energy Department has estimated the eventual cost of the nuclear clean-up at some Dollars 92 billion. This is a figure challenged by Congressional experts such as Senator John Glenn who suggests it will be closer to Dollars 200 billion. Either way the modest request of some Dollars 1.3 billion for the clean-up likely to be included in today's budget will be wholly inadequate: in keeping with the Reagan team's tradition of creative bookeeping. + Similarly, the Reagan Treasury's first efforts to deal with the burgeoning crisis in the savings and loans system (which historically performed much the same functions as Britain's building societies) also look wholly inadequate. The budget is expected to propose some Dollars 10 billion be set aside in 1990 to deal with the savings and loan problem. This would comprise Dollars 5 billion to support rescues already announed and Dollars 5 billion towards future transactions. A further Dollars 5 billion would be appropriated in each of the next four years. + This proposal begs more questions than it answers. Given the current rate of savings and loan insolvencies, which many experts predict will eventually cost the government Dollars 100 billion or more, the small amount of funding suggested would be hopelessly inadequate. The Congress through the new chairman of the House Banking Committee, Representative Henry Gonzalez, is already pressing for a more radical approach under which the most sick institutions are closed immediately and the insured depositors paid-off. He estimates the cost at Dollars 50 billion. + Critics such as Mr Gonzalez are deeply sceptical about the case-by-case approach currently being pursued by the regulators. Armed with generous tax incentives and deposit insurance funds the regulators have conducted what amounts to a savings and loan fire sale which has attracted a puzzling array of corporate buccaneers. + Among those rushing to jump on the lifeboat are a former Secretary of the Treasury William Simon, a former Secretary of Commerce Pete Peterson, the corporate raider chairman of Revlon Mr Ronald Perleman, the Texas billionaire Robert Bass and the most profitable industrial corporation in the United States - the Ford Motor Company. + What this ecletic group of financiers have in common is a recognition they are in a no lose situation. They are buying the right to conduct a wide ranging banking business at bargain basement prices and receiving sweeping government guarantees against future losses for the privilege. Mr Bass, for instance, gains control of American Savings' Dollars 14 billion of deposits for 3.6 cents on the dollar: not bad when Mexican loans sell for more than 50 cents on the dollar. + The purpose of the deposit insurance schemes for deposits, which were rooted in Franklin D Roosvelt's New Deal, was to protect depositors and prevent cascading collapses which hurt the small investor not to bailout poor and sometimes fraudulent management and replace it with some of the shrewdest financiers of the eighties. This is an expensive perversion of the system. No wonder Congress is removing the federal guarantees against losses. + What is absolutely clear is the Dollars 10 billion tossed in by the Reagan team into the 1990 budget as a parting gesture is no more than crude windown dressing. It has made no intellectual effort to deal with a crisis it helped create through deregulation of the financial system. It is bequeathing Mr Bush and the Congress a Dollars 100 billion headache and pretending its doesn't exist - providing an eloquent parable for eight years of Reagan fiscal misrule. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +12 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 10, 1989 + +Bush in fix over social funding + +BYLINE: By MARK TRAN + +LENGTH: 341 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + + + If President-elect George Bush really does want a 'kinder, gentler' nation, he will have to throw out large chunks of President Reagan's budget on social programmes. + He might start by dumping Mr Reagan's proposal to cut school-lunch and school milk programmes by reducing aid to 'non-needy' families - thus saving Dollars 626 million. + Other social spending cuts sought by Mr Reagan include the abolition of discretionary grants to distressed urban areas (Dollars 310 million), and special educational grants (Dollars 396 million). + Mr Reagan also seeks to restrain the annual increase in Medicare (health insurance for the poor), and also Medicaid (health insurance for the elderly) by reducing federal grants to states by 3 per cent. + Such proposals fly against the spirit of Mr Bush's election campaign, when he promised a raft of new social programmes and expanded funding for many existing ones. + Bush aides estimate that one key proposal, a child care package, which features a new Dollars 1,000 per-child tax credit for poor families, would cost Dollars 2.2 billion in its first year. Yet a single component of that plan, extending Head Start (giving poor children special help to catch up), would cost Dollars 2 billion to implement immediately. + Mr Bush will find it difficult to square increased social spending and the steady deficit reduction required by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law. + With his no-new-taxes pledge, he may have painted himself into a corner. + Still, Mr Bush's willingness to distance himself from Reagan dogma on social policy has heartened many. + 'Bush at least acknowledges that there are problems,' said Mr Robert Fersh, of the Food Research and Action Centre. 'They may disagree on how to solve them, but, compared with an administration that denied there even was a hunger problem, it's refreshing.' + As it is, many of Mr Bush's social ideas sound suspiciously like Democratic proposals. So, as Democrats see it, unlike President Reagan, he is already at the bargaining table. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +13 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 11, 1989 + +Company Briefing: Kunick nurses its profits + +LENGTH: 104 words + + + Kunick, the Leeds-based leisure and nursing homes group, reports pre-tax profits up 49 per cent at Pounds 5.1 million for the year to the end of September 1988. + Nursing homes and sheltered housing for the elderly led the growth, with a 330 per cent jump in operating profits to Pounds 977,000 - double the number of beds and five new homes. A Pounds 10 million 150-bed nursing home in west London to be called the Kensington Care Complex, has planning permission and will be built this year. + Pub juke boxes still contribute the greatest share of profits, up 41 per cent at Pounds 2.3 million in the year. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +14 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 11, 1989 + +Anti-abortionists draw new breath + +BYLINE: By MARTIN WALKER + +LENGTH: 448 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + + + The constitutional right of American women to an abortion, established in a landmark decision by the Supreme Court in 1973, was reopened yesterday as the new Supreme Court agreed to consider a new law which decrees that human life begins at the moment of conception. The law, passed by the state of Missouri, also bars the use of federal funds for abortions. + The case is unlikely to reverse the 1973 decision, but anti-abortion activists see it as their first chance to begin chipping away at abortion rights, and, more critically, as a roll-call to establish whether the court's traditional pro-abortion majority has been overturned. + 'This means a state of emergency for the nation's women,' said Ms Molly Yard, head of the National Organisation for Women, who announced a rally in Washington for April 9 'to send the message that American women will not accept the loss of their abortion rights'. + 'If the court upholds the Missouri decision, it will reflect an important change of direction - from a majority opposed as a reflex to any restriction on abortion to a majority permitting some meaningful regulation,' said Mr Douglas Johnson, a director of the National Right to Life Committee. + In the last legal battle three years ago, the Supreme Court upheld the right to abortion by five votes to four, the narrowest of margins. But last year's retirement of the liberal Justice Lewis Powell means the balance of the court now rests with the new Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was nominated to the court by President Reagan for his broadly conservative views. + Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the judgment in the landmark Roe versus Wade case of 1973, said recently that there was 'a distinct possibility the decision will go down the drain this term'. + This latest submission to the Supreme Court was given a powerful push by President Reagan's Solicitor General, who filed a brief to the court suggesting that this might be the right time to reconsider Roe versus Wade. + Mr Bush will almost certainly have an opportunity to remake the Supreme Court in his own moderately conservative image during the next four years. The three staunchest liberals on the court are octogenarians, Justice Brennan, Justice Thurgood Marshall and Justice Blackmun. + If the Supreme Court signals that it is ready to rethink the abortion laws, pro-abortion campaigners fear that this will transform the national climate, and encourage legislators in many states to pass stiff new state laws against abortion. + The Supreme Court, meanwhile, also agreed to consider whether a new law banning dial-a-porn telephone services infringes the constitutional right to free speech. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +15 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 11, 1989 + +Empty cots rock EEC + +BYLINE: By JOHN PALMER + +LENGTH: 324 words + +DATELINE: BRUSSELS + + + Having devoted years to the study of excess beef, milk, wine, wheat, and other food products, members of the European Parliament now plan to turn their attention to a new and critical 'shortage' facing the European Community - a looming deficit of babies. + Alarmed at signs that the birthrate is falling in a growing number of member states, a committee of MEPs is to study ways of reversing the tendency to fewer births and smaller families. + The MEPs echo the longstanding concern expressed by the French Government in particular at demographic trends in Western Europe. A motion before the Strasbourg Assembly states that the declining birthrate in the EEC poses the 'threat that there will be an excessive population of elderly persons'. + The issue has been referred to a special committee following the resolution put down by a Greek MEP, Mr Spiridon Kolokotronis, which claims that births in the EEC 'are not sufficient to ensure the natural renewal of the population'. + Mr Kolokotronis says that it is high time the European Communtiy took action to 'change attitudes towards births and large families'. + A number of MEPs from different countries and political parties are believed to support an EEC-wide strategy to encourage larger families. Mr Kilokotronis and his colleagues also want a Community-funded information campaign presumably to persuade young women who plan to limit their families to change their minds. + In a response which may have had at least half an eye on the likely reaction on those sections of the British popular press whose anti-Europeanism is equalled only by their interest in questions of procreation, Mr Glyn Ford, Labour MEP for Greater manchester, said yesterday: 'The motion effectively calls on people to bonk for Europe. It is nonsense. + 'If we had lots of children born as a result of this campaign, what would we do with them? There are already millions of unemployed.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +16 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 12, 1989 + +Thursday People: A better class of cast-off - Peter Lloyd + +BYLINE: By DENNIS BARKER + +LENGTH: 586 words + + + Strange how little awareness some politicians have of how fairly sensible remarks can boomerang, given the wrong context. + It cuts right across the political spectrum. It is not necessarily absurd to imply that people should get out their bikes to hunt for jobs, but Norman Tebbit found that, with unemployment at such massive levels, the idea sounded fatuous. + Ken Livingstone could not see that saying the IRA were more than 'just psychopaths', though historically accurate, would fall with a sickening thud at a time of murderous IRA outrages. + Now Peter Lloyd, junior minister for social security, has got bogged down by suggesting that old people on income support should buy second-hand clothes to save money. + Coming from one poor old person to another, such advice might not be resented by anyone, since it is a practical suggestion. But from the Conservative MP who represents Fareham, a resolutely middle class Hampshire constituency, a Lloyd's underwriter who comes from a public school (Tonbridge) and Pembroke College, Cambridge, it could be seen as presumptuous. + The Opposition called it 'patronising and insulting'. Second-hand clothes should be a matter of choice and not necessity, said the director of Age Concern, Sally Greengross. + Lloyd claimed to use local second-hand clothes shops. As critics pointed out, his constituency is the sort to have middleclass used clothes boutiques selling wearable stuff. + 'If the Opposition ever tried to build Peter into a demon figure, okay, that is politics. But it would be an operation doomed to failure,' said one MP who has worked closely with him yesterday. 'With someone as fundamentally decent as he is, it could not be done. If there is one person on whom a sort of Marie Antionette remark could not be hung, it is him. It could not be more out of character.' + As school, Lloyd had Liberal and Welsh Nationalist tendencies, which observers believe had not entirely disappeared when he became chairman of Cambridge University Conservative Association and then vice-chairman of the North Kensington Conservative Association. + From 1972 to 1973 he was chairman of the basically left-of-party-centre Bow Group and later editor of its magazine Crossbow. His voting record squares with this, though it is interlaced with some activities which tend to support his friends' picture of him as a traditional rightwinger, like introducing the Cinematograph Bill to control pornography in bogus film clubs. + He has been against attempts to bring back hanging, opposed Government pressure on athletes not to attend the 1980 Moscow Olympics, suggested higher direct taxation on the employed, and accepted a PLO invitation to tour the Lebanon. + Until he became member for Fareham in 1979, he was marketing manager of United Biscuits. Richard Fairley, commercial director of KP Foods, worked with him then: 'I am sure he meant it in the best possible way, because he was not the sort of guy to make that sort of remark. If anything, he was quite human in his ways, and tried to help people as much as possible.' + This 51-year-old son of a bank manager and JP, who once worked for the giant advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson, has perversely remained a rather anonymous character; and perhaps, in the light of yesterday's difficulties, anonymity suits him. One of his aides at the DSS said yesterday: 'Sorry. At the moment it seems as if he is not responding to the response to his remarks, if you see what I mean.' Definitely. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +17 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 12, 1989 + +UK News in Brief: Pensioner gives up fight + +LENGTH: 48 words + + + Miss Jemima Wilson, aged 68, has given up her fight against Bradford council after losing her High Court challenge to the Tory authority's plans to sell off the old people's homes where she lives and seven others. She has been told she can stay at the home even it it is sold. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +18 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 13, 1989 + +Financial Outlook: Yuppies - or how TSB lost its saving grace + +BYLINE: By ROGER COWE + +LENGTH: 732 words + + + How many of the TSB's seven million customers remember that its initials used to mean Trustee Savings Bank? Not many, to judge by the fact that its lending grew by 40 per cent last year while deposits rose only 17 per cent. + That is good news for TSB's profits, signifying a further rapid move away from its roots as a savings bank towards yet another diversified financial institution. (It begs the question of why we need yet another such animal, but that argument was lost when TSB was snatched from its customers in 1986 and flogged off to 3.1 million of the brave new shareholding public - nearly half of whom have proved to be not so brave after all, having dwindled to 1.8 million.) + The process has some way to go yet and it has become decidedly more difficult in the few months since the year end last October. Which explains why TSB shares are still languishing only a few pence above the Pounds 1 issue price, having slipped steadily against the banking sector after the initial euphoria of the flotation. Yesterday it was virtually the only UK bank share not to rise sharply. + In trying to become a general financial services group, TSB's problem always was that it had the wrong customers in the wrong place at the wrong time. + During the consumer boom which has just ended the money was made from young, southern professionals. They had more money than sense and so borrowed even more on credit cards, mortgages and through every other product the banks threw at them. + Poor old TSB, on the other hand, had lots of relatively poor, elderly customers in the north and Midlands. This group, with more sense than money, are the banks' least favourite people. + TSB has worked hard both to 'improve' its customer base and to diversify away from purely personal banking. So hard that it has been accused of paying too much for the privilege, notably when it refused to reduce its offer for Hill Samuel despite the stock market crash. + Hill Samuel brought in a small merchant banking arm and a considerable unit trust operation. (TSB is naturally smug about having sold stockbroker Wood Mackenzie and closed the Eurobond and gilt operations, in the light of others' disastrous experience since.) The other major purchase, Target, added a personal financial services operation - with a strong emphasis on the lucrative South-east. + Apart from these purchases, TSB has also built up a major mortgage business with Mortgage Express - another way of attracting those profitable young southerners. + All this explains much of the profits advance last year. Hill Samuel and Target added nearly Pounds 80 million profit. That is not the entire increase, despite appearances, since interest income fell by Pounds 42 million as the money from the flotation was spent. + Operating profits from the existing businesses increased by 15 per cent, thanks partly to the major advance in mortgage lending and despite a fall in profits from the existing unit trust business. + The second half of the year illustrated the sharp slowdown in late summer, however. Profits were actually slightly less than in the first half of the year. And while they were still higher than in the second half of the previous year, the increase was only just in double figures. + And despite assurances that the acquisitions would not dilute earnings per share, it is now clear that they did, with this figure rising by only six per cent on the year. That explains the very modest dividend increase, which helped to restrain any enthusiasm for the shares yesterday. + The fact is that, through no fault of its own, TSB has missed the boat. The yuppie boom is over with TSB still having too few on board. The bank is in a very strong financial position (which is ironically bad for profits since that means its funds are not working hard enough). And it now has a new leader in Sir Nicholas Goodison, the man who made the Stock Exchange what it is today (make of that what you will). + It faces a long haul, though, to build corporate business and the profitability of its retail base in a hostile economic climate. And in the meantime it also faces even greater competition. Abbey National is not only showing TSB how to privatise a mutual body, by accepting that it already belongs to its customers. It will also attack the areas where TSB is most differentiated from the other banks. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +19 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 17, 1989 + +Boris Yeltsin sails through constituency reselection + +BYLINE: By JONATHAN STEELE + +LENGTH: 634 words + +DATELINE: MOSCOW + + + Half a dozen policemen stood guard as several hundred people pressed up against the imposing portico of the House of Culture in the Moscow borough of Gagarin. + 'Only those with invitations,' growled the husky man at the door. 'Why aren't they letting people in?' a woman asked. A man shrugged cynically and turned away. + Gagarin is the borough represented on the Moscow city council by Boris Yeltsin, the former politburo member who has become a hero for many Russians because of his attacks on party privilege. + Already rejected as an official party candidate, the word had gone out that 'they' might be trying to stop him getting onto the forthcoming ballot to the new Soviet parliament, even as a constituency MP. + Upstairs in the hall, the suspicion of rigging hung heavy in the air as the chairman, Vladimir Mikhailov, called it to order. No one was sure how the borough council had distributed the invitations, and small groups of Yeltsinites did not know if they were in a controlled minority. + Under the election rules, any candidate has to get at least half the support at a meeting of 500 local residents. + Mr Mikhailov introduced himself as a pensioner, the chairman of a local veterans' organisation. In Gagarin, as in many other places, some of the most active party people are the veterans, the loyal mainstay of conservative Soviet traditions. The pro-Yeltsin people were not reassured by his presence. + 'Eight local groups called for this meeting,' he announced. 'Two party organisations, residents' committees in two blocks of flats, two veterans' groups and two women's councils. As candidate, they have all proposed Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin.' + Tension immediately eased and people began to applaud. Relief among the pro-Yeltsinites was everywhere. + 'Are there any other candidates,' Mr Mikhailov asked. An elderly man, Leonid Biryukov, put himself forward. Then a younger man stood up, a deputy in the borough. 'I think we should have someone who actually lives in our region,' he said. 'What about our mayor, Vladimir Kalinin?' + This brought knowing looks from some of the Yeltsin supporters. + Three more offered themselves as candidates. The list was closed. 'How shall we vote?' the chair asked. 'Why not vote for them all as a list? We are not limited to one,' a member of the audience suggested. Again the Yeltsinites were suspicious. An election commission has to study all the candidates put forward and then nominates a few. If Mr Yeltsin's name is just one among many, he might be rejected. 'Let's vote for them one by one,' someone shouted. This procedure was adopted. Second victory to the Yeltsinites. + The clapping spread. The Yeltsinites' blood was up. The whiff of a landslide was going round the room. + The mayor's announcement, that 'I see you want Mr Yeltsin. In that case I withdraw,' provoked prolonged clapping. + When the vote was taken 510 voted for putting Mr Yeltsin forward, three against and five abstained. + Ever since he spoke at last June's party conference, Mr Yeltsin's star has been rising among ordinary working class Russians. Unlike many of the young New Left, who talk of pluralism, developing a civil society, Trotsky, Gramsci and even social democracy, Yeltsin speaks the language of the system which Russians know. + He attacks party privilege, Calls for social justice, honesty and discipline. + Meanwhile, another face of the new Soviet politics appeared at a meeting in the Moscow borough of Sverdlovsk. Seven hundred people came together to propose Vitaly Korotich, the editor of the radical weekly Ogonyok, as a candidate to the Congress of People's Deputies. + However, 70 members of the rightwing group, Pamyat, disrupted the meeting, shouting 'long live Russia', and 'down with the Jews'. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +20 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 17, 1989 + +UK News in Brief: Bradford case revived + +LENGTH: 67 words + + + The High Court in London was asked yesterday if Mr Frederick Corris, aged 74, a disabled war veteran, can take to the House of Lords the case against Bradford council initiated by Miss Jemima Wilson, aged 68, over the use of the Lord Mayor's vote to approve the sale of old people's homes. Two High Court judges rejected the case last month. Mr Corris's lawyers continue their plea today. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +21 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 18, 1989 + +The Day in Politics in Brief + +LENGTH: 368 words + + + The employment minister of state, Mr John Cope, promised to look again at the possibility of compensation for families of young people killed on youth training schemes, after the High Court award of Pounds 20,000 to a Sheffield family. At question time, he told Mr David Nellist (Lab. Coventry SE) there had been 34 deaths since 1983, including 13 in road accidents which did not normally count in health and safety statistics. + * * * + Mr John Hughes (Lab. Coventry NE) was given leave under the ten minute rule to introduce a bill requiring the provision of essential fuel and energy to every home and abolishing standing charges for gas and electricity. He said it was aimed at helping the unemployed and elderly people. The bill has little chance of becoming law. + * * * + There were 917 complaints about low-flying aircraft last August, the worst month for two years, according to armed forces minister Mr Michael Neubert in a reply to Mr George Foulkes (Lab. Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley). + * * * + Twelve notices were served last year under the Tuberculosis Order to restrict the movement of deer and one to restrict the movement of alpacas and guanacos, the first such orders since 1985, agriculture minister Mr Donald Thompson told Dr David Clark (Lab. South Shields). + * * * + A total of 24,123 cases of human salmonellosis were reported in 1988, according to provisional figures from the Public Health Laboratory Service, Mr Roger Freeman, junior health minister, told Mr Martyn Jones (Lab. Clywd SW) in a written answer. + * * * + Around 5,000 passengers a week are carried on the seven riverbuses operated by Thamesline, Mr Michael Portillo, transport minister, told Mr John Bowis (C. Battersea) in a written answer. + TODAY IN PARLIAMENT + House of Commons: Trade and Industry questions; debates launched by the Opposition on child benefit and pre-school education; debate on Common Market beef rules. + House of Lords: Short debates on Scotland, money management education, and court procedures. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +22 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 19, 1989 + +Financial Outlook: 007, the musical - or why Delfont will run and run / First Leisure + +BYLINE: By JANICE WARMAN + +LENGTH: 773 words + + + Yes folks, this one is going to run and run. Yesterday the First Leisure extravaganza's star Lord Delfont took centre stage for a sparkling performance which belied his 80 years. + Back on the boards after a brief retirement, Lord Delfont gave a rousing rendition of that old Broadway favourite, There's No Business Like Show Business. + When Trusthouse Forte sold its leisure interests to the Delfont management team in 1982, it must have been relieved to be out of what was seen as a mature market. + With chief assets including Blackpool's Tower, three piers and the Winter Gardens, the show appeared to be in its closing stages. + But the elderly doyen of the West End has proved his instinct for a revival. The group has succeeded in shifting itself away from the pier and on to the dance floor. + And also into the bowling alley, as unlikely as that might seem. + Yesterday's 25 per cent year-end profits boost to Pounds 20.2 million came as no surprise after a 54 per cent half-time boost. + The figures included a 39 per cent profits improvement from dancing and sports, which has become the group's largest contributor at Pounds 13.3 million. + Both are prime examples of First Leisure's nose for a high margin. Ten-pin bowling, itself regarded as on the way out, owes its revival largely to the group. It has succeeded in shifting the perception of the game upmarket at the same time as improving margins. + While you wait for an alley, you may lounge in the bar, grab a bite to eat or play snooker. Even the scoring system has been simplified. + An investment of between Pounds 2.5 and Pounds 3 million is achieving the required 20 per cent return, with some producing a great deal more. The benefit of the four second-half openings will feed through into this year's figures. + The group's 29 discotheques work on the same principle - get them in at a reasonable price, sell them drinks at less reasonable prices, get them on to the dance floor. + Its stringent rules for return on capital are best illustrated by the 18-strong J M Inns pub group purchased in December 1987. It was originally intended as the basis for a chain of between 250 and 500 pubs. + The pubs have not performed up to expectations and are to be sold. 'They are not part of our core strategy,' said Mr Conlan. Unlike cafe-bars - which have greater capacity, higher turnover, and higher margins, producing five times the sales of a conventional pub. + First Leisure has already turned its attention away from pubs to other, more lucrative areas such as fitness - it already owns 16 squash and health clubs and 14 snooker clubs - and Europe targeted for discos and Superbowl. + Lord Delfont has not been neglecting the company's original assets: the resorts, including the Blackpool attractions, have boosted profits by 12 per cent to Pounds 11.4 million despite a poor summer. + Profits from its two West End theatres have declined, as the Time Rice musical Chess began to tail off at the Prince Edward. With advance bookings for Andrew Lloyd Webber's new Aspects of Love, starring Bond star Roger Moore, already at Pounds 2.5 million profits look likely to show an upturn in 1990. + The balance sheet showed a comfortable gearing level of 18 per cent by the year end and the group has succeeded in pegging a large slice of its borrowings at a modest interest rate. + The group has remained faithful to its promise of producing more than 20 per cent growth in profits and earnings per share. + It has also produced a 25 per cent increase in the year-end total dividend, a fact which should not fail to endear it to longer-term holders. + Despite its devotion to leisure, it claims some defensive properties in the face of a possible slow-down in spending as the squeeze on consumers continues. Most of its custom is in the North, where the consumer boom has not had the same effect, and most of its business is in low ticket items. + With overseas holiday bookings falling off, First Leisure is ideally placed to benefit from the stay-at-homes. + Given that property accounted for some Pounds 900,000 of profits, with a further Pounds 400,000 benefit from the accounting policy switch to non-depreciation of freehold and long-leasehold assets, the company's profits were somewhere at the lower end of expectations. + Between Pounds 23 and Pounds 25 million is expected in 1989. That produces prospective price/earnings at a premium to the market of up to 25 per cent. On present performance that seems a little steep; but given the star quality of the management, long-term expectations seem rather more attractive. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +23 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 19, 1989 + +Legal aid for council fight + +BYLINE: By MARTIN WAINWRIGHT + +LENGTH: 165 words + + + Legal aid was granted yesterday to a 74-year-old disabled pensioner, Mr Frederick James Corris, who is challenging the use of the Tory Lord Mayor's casting vote to push privatisation plans and spending cuts through Bradford city council. + The decision by the legal aid committee in Leeds eases the way for Mr Corris to take his way to the Court of Appeal in London at a hearing expected next month. The court will consider a High Court decision last month to uphold the use of the casting vote. + Mr Corris, who is in a wheel-chair after the amputation of both legs, took over the case from Miss Jemima Wilson, aged 68, a resident of an old people's home which the council plans to sell. She dropped out because of the media attention. Mr Corris is objecting to a Pounds 2.85 a week rent rise on his sheltered home which he is refusing to pay. + The council, which already faces Pounds 20,000 legal costs from the case, applied yesterday for an order to expedite the hearing. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +24 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 20, 1989 + +Hormone course cleared of risk + +BYLINE: By AILEEN BALLANTYNE, Medical Correspondent + +LENGTH: 307 words + + + The latest combined form of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for combating bone-thinning and other effects of the menopause does not involve an increased risk of cancer of the lining of the womb, a comprehensive study of 23,000 women published today reveals. + The old form of oestrogen-only HRT carries a three-fold risk. + Research at King's College Hospital, south London, involving 900 women, on the new form of combined oestrogen and progestogen therapy is confirmed by the study carried out by the University Hospital in Uppsala, Sweden, and the National Cancer Institute, Washington, US and published in today's British Medical Journal. + Mr John Studd, consultant gynaecologist at King's College, said it was tragic that only eight per cent of menopausal women were on HRT. A two-year study of 80 women at King's showed 80 per cent with depression responding to the treatment. Many doctors still confused HRT with birth pill side effects but 'for a quarter of the population HRT is the most important item of preventive medicine in the western world for half a century.' + This month, in a report highlighting the costs to the National Health Service of an increase in hip fractures among elderly women, the Royal College of Physicians also stressed the preventive effects of HRT. + Dr John Kanis, president of the European foundation for osteoporosis and bone disease, said a third of women suffer fractures from bone-thinning. + Sir Raymond Hoffenberg, president of the Royal College, said all women who had reached the menopause would benefit from HRT with the exception of those whose mothers or sisters had developed breast cancer or who had themselves had breast cancer. + Previous studies, based on oestrogen-only therapy, show HRT also providing additional protection against heart disease and strokes. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +25 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 24, 1989 + +ET curbs meals 'on feet' service + +BYLINE: By MARTIN WAINWRIGHT + +LENGTH: 170 words + + + A unique 'meals on feet' service, which ferries meat, veg and pudding to elderly people in a close-knit, inner-city area, is struggling to survive after changes in government funding. + The emphasis on training in the Employment Training scheme, which replaced the Community Programme, has cut the meals delivery team in Woodhouse, Leeds, from 11 members to two. + The staff, who collect orders for hot meals, cook them and deliver on foot every day of the year, have mostly been recuperating from psychiatric illness or breakdowns. + 'They're a tremendous help to the elderly, and that helps them in turn,' said Mrs Doreen Tinker, vice-chairwoman of Woodhouse community association, which began the project. + The problem under ET is that few of the workers need the formal training, including block-release courses at college, which the scheme requires. + Volunteers, many referred by Leeds social services, are keeping the scheme going while Leeds city council investigates funding possibilities. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +26 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 25, 1989 + +Health Guardian (Body Matters): Metal fatigue + +BYLINE: By JUDY SEAGROVE + +LENGTH: 157 words + + + Anyone who has ever cooked rhubarb in an aluminium saucepan will know how clean the pan is afterwards. Its surface has been eroded and swallowed alongside the rhubarb. When drinking water in Camelford, Cornwall, was accidentally contaminated with aliminium sulphate last year, no one knew the biological effects of aluminium. It was known to cause renal dementia in kidney patients exposed to high concentrations of the metal in dialysis fluid and antacids. Alzheimer's disease (senile dementia) has recently been associated with unusual amounts of aluminium deposited in the brain. + Substantial amounts of aluminium may also be consumed via medicines. Some commercial antacids contain aluminium hydroxide. Old people (who take aspirin containing aluminium) and kidney patients (who take large doses of antacids) may be unable to excrete the metal efficiently and risk softening of the bone, as well as Alzheimer's disease. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +27 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 25, 1989 + +Health Guardian: A hold-up down at the waterworks end - Prostate trouble + +BYLINE: By CHRIS BARTON + +LENGTH: 296 words + + + So you thought a prostate condition was amusing and affected only old men? I was 15 when I and 30,000 others watched the Australians at Old Trafford in 1961. Most of the spectators seemed to be standing right behind me in the gents as I failed to do what Bill Lawry had been doing to the England bowlers all day. + I managed it OK after the tea interval, entering a cubicle to ensure privacy. But for 20 years or so I believed I had a psychological problem condemning me to a lifetime of solitary urination. + There is no comfort for the person with acute urinary retention caused by enlargement of the prostate gland. So what happens when the cross-legged sufferer reaches the head of the queue in casualty? Catheterisation is the only answer. But having a tube passed through the penis to reach the bladder (which I had suffered before) is, as you can imagine, painful - but not when you are unconscious. On awakening from prostate surgery to relieve the obstruction, I found a double-track plastic tube already in place - running cleansing liquids in and urine out - which was eventually removed without discomfort. + On departure from hospital, patients receive an elderly-looking photocopy. Hidden away at the end of the list of bad news is a description of backwards ejaculation, the prospect of which has an inhibiting effect, but which does not, according to the photocopy, affect enjoyment. And, incidentally, it was left to me to warn my partner of the risk of sterility following prostate resection. + Overall, the workforce of the hospital were infinitely better at playing their parts than I was at playing mine. Now and again, I remember the whole business with something approaching nostalagia as, anxiety-free, I pee happily alongside other men. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +28 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 26, 1989 + +UN forces protest as Lebanese expelled + +BYLINE: By JULIE FLINT + +LENGTH: 433 words + +DATELINE: BEIRUT + + + Forcibly overriding the protests of United Nations peacekeepers, Israeli forces yesterday expelled 38 old men, women and children from the town of Shebaa in occupied south Lebanon. + It was punishment, the victims said, for their refusal to support the Israeli-controlled South Lebanon Army. + 'Our only guilt,' one of the women, Amal Nassib, told reporters later, 'was our opposition to their occupation.' + The incident, the largest expulsion of native Lebanese since Israel fenced off the so-called 'security zone' in 1985, followed a large anti-Israeli deomonstration in Shebaa on Tuesday night. + Witnesses said members of the South Lebanon Army opened fire on the demonstration, but without causing injury. + The UN peace-keeping force, Unifil, lodged an immediate protest against the expulsion of the 26 children, seven women, and five men over 50. + Its commander, General Lars-Eric Wahlgren, flew to Shebaa by helicopter to supervise an inquiry into the incident. + The 38 said more than 100 SLA militiamen and plain-clothed Israeli agents entered at dawn, broke into seven homes, and gave them 10 minutes to get out. + Mr Asaad Khalil, aged 80, said Norwegian troops from Unifil blocked the main street with a jeep, but saw it 'crushed' by an SLA armoured car. + SLA men 'confiscated' video cameras from the Norwegian troops. + Driven to the edge of the 'security zone', the 38 made their own way to Bar Elias in the Beka's Valley. + Here they decided on a sit-in in the local mosque, and sent a message to the UN Secretary-General, Dr Javier Perez de Cuellar, urging him to strengthen the role of Unifil and to help them return home. + It was the second time this month that Lebanese have been thrown out of south Lebanon. Another 27 were expelled on January 5. + The SLA, shaken by a near-fatal assassination attempt on its leader late last year, has faced the thret of increased pressure in the 'security zone' since lat December. + It was then that the Shi'ite movement, Amal, and the Palestine Liberation Organisation agreed to end their hostilities in south Lebanon. + The accord reportedly included agreement to concentrate the resistance to Israel, for the time being, inside the security zone. + Evidence of this came on Tuesday morning, just 24 hours before the attack on Shebaa, when two SLA soldiers died in a mine attack claimed by Amal. + In an indication of the tension building in the area, the SLA opened fire on Irish peacekeeping troops and bombarded a nearby village, forcing the evancuation of 50 children trapped in the local school. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +29 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 27, 1989 + +The Day in Politics: Smith says Chancellor robbed pensioners for budget surplus - Economy + +BYLINE: By PAUL NETTLETON + +LENGTH: 342 words + + + The shadow chancellor, Mr John Smith, yesterday made his return to the despatch box after his heart attack, and told the Chancellor that 'not much has changed'. + Leading a Labour assault on Mr Nigel Lawson's high interest rates policy and its effect on homebuyers, he said Mr Lawson was still boasting about a public-sector surplus when Pounds 10 billion of it was made up of asset sales, an exercise in transferring money from the balance sheet to the profit and loss account which would leave some people in the private sector liable to arrest, and the other Pounds 4 billion of which came from robbing old age pensioners. + He wished Mr Lawson luck over the coming weeks that the Prime Minister 'does not continually seek to express her disagreement with his policy on monetary affairs, on fiscal policy, or on mortgages'. + Mr Lawson replied: 'I observe with some envy that he has lost a great deal of weight, but apart from that nothing at all has changed. He is as entertaining as ever and as totally devoid of policies as ever.' + Mr Lawson said that investment growing at more than double the rate of consumption in 1988 was 'no flash in the pan'. Investment had grown faster since 1981 than in any other EEC country or industrial nation. + Mr Gordon Brown, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, asked if the Chancellor recalled previous statements that Britain would join the European Monetary System when the time was right, and his speech on Wednesday night that previous difficulties had diminished over time. 'Would the Chancellor now give us his own assessment of joining EMS and whether he has persuaded the Prime Minister.' + Mr Lawson said Britain would join when the time was right 'as indeed the Prime Minister has said on a number of occasions'. + Mr Peter Lilley, Economic Secretary to the Treasury, said mortgage rates showed no correlation with difficulties over arrears and repossessions. + The biggest single factor, he said, was marital discord and unemployment. + 'Happily the latter is coming down.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +30 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 28, 1989 + +Weekend Money (Cashpoints): Lambeth loans + +LENGTH: 290 words + + + Lambeth Building Society is offering elderly homeowners personal loans secured against the value of their home to supplement their monthly income. There are three options. A lump sum loan is used to buy an annuity which services the debt and provides a regular income. Interest payments qualify for mortgage tax relief. Then there is an annual drawdown facility which pays the money borrowed in annual instalments over a number of years where the interest due is added to the balance of the loan. + Alternatively a one-off lump sum may be drawn, subject to the age of the borrower, where all or part of the interest is rolled up. + As with all such schemes where the interest is rolled up it does not qualify for tax relief and there is a risk that the eventual proceeds from the house may not cover the full amount owed. The scheme is aimed at the 70-plus age group but the society will lend a 65-year-old homeowner rup to 10 per cent of the value of the house. + Option 70 is Eastbourne Building Society's variation of this, which offers two choices. Option 1 allows homeowners over 70 to borrow up to 40 per cent of the agreed value of the house, without making any repayments of capital or interest. Here again the deferred interest is added to the loan and repaid either from the eventual sale of the house, or from the estate on the death of the borrower. + Option 2 has the facility for paying a proportion of the annual interest at a fixed rate of 5 per cent with the balance added to the capital. + If you are considering either of these schemes, Age Concern has published a fact sheet, Raising Capital From Your Home. Send an SAE to Age Concern England, 60 Pitcairn Road, Mitcham, Surrey CR4 3LL. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +31 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 1, 1989 + +Eyewitness: Shamir honours Stern mentor + +BYLINE: By IAN BLACK + +LENGTH: 675 words + + + In shafts of sunlight glinting through the pine trees that shade the cemetery from the streets of Tel Aviv, the old fighters stood stiffly to commemorate their lost leader, as Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, echoed through the bright afternoon. + Yitzhak Shamir, neat in dark suit and brown velvet skullcap, bent briskly over the white marble grave ('Only death can liberate,' the headstone proclaims) to lay a wreath in the name of the Israeli Government. + Other floral tributes followed to Avraham Stern - Yair, they called him in those underground days - who led the most extreme of the Zionist groups struggling against the British and the Arabs. + No one in the Nahalat Yitzhak cemetery yesterday used the name Stern Gang - a byword for jewish terrorism during the final years of the Palestine Mandate. But Lehi - the Hebrew acronym for Fighters for the Freedom of Israel - is a name these old men are still proud to utter. + Comtemporary questions about terrorists and freedom fighters are easily answered. 'We were fighting for the freedom of Israel, and Arafat and his people want to destroy Israel,' insisted one bereted veteran, shuffling to the graveside to pay his respects. + Yehoshua Zetler, who commanded the Sternist hit-team that assassinated the Swedish UN mediator, Count Folke Von Bernadotte, in 1948, agreed: 'When you have an end, any means are justified. But what means do you use? Did we attack women and children? There is no room for comparison between us and the PLO. Yes, I attacked British targets. But Joe or Johnny wasn't an individual. He was a foreign occupier who was preventing us from living freely in our homeland.' + Most of those gathered here had code names 47 years ago, when Stern, a Pounds 1,000 bounty on his head, was gunned down by British detectives as he hid in a comrade's home. Mr Shamir, now Israel's Prime Minister, was called Michael and he ran the group's operations. + Stern, a handsome Polish-born poet, broke away from the larger Irgun group in 1941 to wage a war of assassinations and ambushes against the British. The gates of Palestine were closed and in Europe, while Jews were being herded into Hitler's death camps, the mainstream Zionist leadership was seen as too soft. + Ceremonies like this are held on the anniversary of Stern's death every year, part of the comforting ritual of old comrades who have elevated their own history into a part of the Jewish struggle for independence. + Until 1977, when the rightwing Likud swept to power, they were still outsiders in Labour-dominated Israeli politics. The Prime Minister's presence is the ultimate proof that they have shed their pariah status as gangsters and assassins. + Mr Shamir has always been reluctant to talk about this part of his life, but has said he has no regrets about the killings. + Stern was tracked down by monitoring of notes smuggled out of Jaffa hospital by two wounded members of his group. A party of British policemen found him hiding in a cupboard in a Tel Aviv house. According to Geoffrey Morton, the CID officer in charge, Stern was 'shot while trying to escape.' + Stern became a martyr, but his comrades carried on. Two of them killed Lord Moyne in Cairo in 1944. Yehoshua Becker was sentenced to death after robbing a bank and killing two Jewish cashiers, but was reprieved. 'They wanted to hang me,' he said yesterday, an old man enjoying unaccumstomed attention, 'but they couldn't do it.' Moshe Svorai was shot and captured by Morton while trying to escape down a drainpipe, but lived to grow a grey goatee and tell the tale. 'Now the PLO are fighting their was as well but attempts to make peace with them will fail,' he predicted. 'Only blood can decide who will rule here.' + Nissim Naamat wept uncontrollably under his brown hat as he left the cemetery. He hid weapons under the floor of his workshop and Stern's operations people came at night to collect them. 'What a man Yair was,' he sobbed. 'It was a black day when he died. Curse those who betrayed him.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +32 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 1, 1989 + +Leading Article: Got a migraine, get a transplant + +LENGTH: 1684 words + + + The Health Service (Prime Minsterial pledges notwithstanding) has not actually been safe in Conservative hands. And yesterday its future became even more insecure with the publication of the Government's fabled review. Two key changes - budgets for GPs and hospitals that can opt out - are unnecessary, undesirable and unfeasible in the near future. A third, tax relief for private health insurance premiums for the elderly, is a dangerous wedge which will erode a founding principle and provide no extra funds for the service. + It was the cash crisis in the Health Service which forced Mrs Thatcher to set up the review. Yet there is a mere .00005 per cent increase in next year's budget earmarked for clinical services: the initial cost of 100 extra consultants spread over three years. There will be extra money on top. Huge amounts for the computers, information retrieval systems and managers needed to transform the NHS from a health service into a health market. But that will be of no direct benefit to patients. + It's not surprising that the NHS is the last part of the welfare state to face Government reconstruction. It has always been the most popular service of the State. Not just more popular than housing, social security and schools: but even more popular than the Royal Family. The apprehension with which Tory backbenchers have awaited the conclusion of the Government's review is one reflection of this popularity. They are keenly aware that the changes which Whitehall intends to rush through are due to come on stream before the next general election. There is to be consultation; but it will be restricted to how, not whether, the proposals should be implemented. Doubt remains, however, over whether they will in fact be implemented. The last managerial restructuring of the health system, begun five years ago, is still not in place; but that exercise is the equivalent of taking a pulse compared to the heart transplant announced yesterday. Just as vital is the power of the medical profession. Doctors are not going to be pushed around like the teachers. + 'All in all,' says the peoples' guide to yesterday's proposals, 'Britain's Health Service is unsurpassed anywhere in the world.' The response to that paean of official praise is obvious: if it isn't broken, why mend it? No other health system in the western world is administered so cheaply. Its principle of providing a national framework, free at the point of service and available to all, has won the respect of administrators round the globe. Excellence is not just confined to London or the teaching hospitals. It was in Bolton that Dr Patrick Steptoe developed the procedures which produced the first test tube baby. + The Conservative Government's record is by no means all negative. It has recruited 6,000 more doctors and dentists and 70,000 more nurses. It has improved the productivity of the NHS. More patients are being treated in fewer beds. It has improved the managers of the service by increasing their authority and introducing performance-related pay. It has made the doctors more accountable through the introduction of clinical budgets, performance indicators and audits of their work. It was on the brink of improving the performance of GPs through a new system of monitoring prescribing patterns following the introduction of limited drug lists. + But there is an equally important negative record. Opinion polls indicate that this darker side is well understood by the public. The Government has been too ready to squeeze the NHS. It has also been supremely cynical. Compare the cuts in 1983/84 or 1985/86 with the four per cent boost in the pre-election year of 1986/87. It was the Conservative-dominted Commons Select Committee on Social Services which concluded last year that the cumulative under-funding of the NHS amounted to Pounds 2,000 million. The increase which followed that report only made good half that shortfall because of the nurses' pay rise. That rise, too, remains a monument to Whitehall mismanagement: a Pounds 1,000 million pay increase which increased dissatisfaction within the nursing profession. Nine years of Conservative rule produced the unprecedented appeal to the Prime Minister, from the presidents of the three royal medical colleges, to 'save our NHS.' It came after a year in which 3,000 hospital beds had been shut down because of the shortage of funds. + So we turn to yesterday's Pounds 1 million PR exercise by health ministers: a nationwide TV lining of studios across the country so that the goals could be explained to NHS personnel. Kenneth Clarke is right to complain that communication within the Health Service is still like a Cowley Car plant in the 1960s. That was one of the problems of the nurses' pay package. Yet, but for the leak of the Government's review to the Labour Party at the week-end, last night's exercise would have been more a national hoodwink than a national hook-up. + Ministers claimed yesterday that they wanted to improve the proper management of the NHS, increase its financial accountability, and extend the choice open to patients. These are important and fundamental goals; but none of the structural changes announced yesterday are needed to achieve them. The report expresses concern about other defects of the NHS: the 50 per cent variation in hospital cost for identical cases; the twofold variation in prescribing patterns of GPS; and the (dubious) 'twentyfold' variation in hospital referral rates of GPs. But the problem still requires urgent attention. Again, the structural changes are unnecessary. + There are two paradoxes in the package: a government which came into office declaring there were too many administrators is going to have to produce an army of them to run its new market model; and a government which believes in cutting costs is moving the NHS, internationally known for its cost controls, towards a model where costs are unconstrained. Prices in the UK private sector have far outstripped the NHS in the last decade. + So to the precise proposals: GPs are too be given budgets. All 32,500 in their 11,000 practices will have a drugs budget. In addition the 1,000 biggest practices - with over 11,000 patients - will be offered a practice budget with which they will be able to purchase hospital care for their patients from private or NHS hospitals. What's wrong? + The defects of the drugs budget is that it is bound to deter some doctors from prescribing important but expensive medicines: H2 blockers to prevent gastric secretions from stomach ulcers; hypolipidaemic agents to reduce high cholesterol in heart patients; or the new erythpoietic drug to stop chronic anaemia in patients on dialysis. The average prescription costs Pounds 5, but the stomach drug costs Pounds 200 a treatment; in many cases, however, it makes an operation unnecessary. The heart drug runs to Pounds 1,000 and the new dialysis drug can cost up to Pounds 5,000. + 'Government Curbs Drugs Bill' sounds OK. Written another way it reads: 'Patients' medicine withdrawn.' The Government says there is no question of cash-limited GP practices being left too short of funds to give out prescriptions. But five years ago nobody would have believed that ministers would have allowed entire hospital wards to shut when the cash ran out. The budgets will deter doctors from taking on expensive patients like the elderly, disabled and sick. The weighting which practices in socially deprived (that means Labour) areas will need could lead to the same political infighting that operates with rate support adjustments. + The change is designed to stop the drugs bill rising any higher. It is one of the last areas of the NHS where there are no central controls. Drugs now account for almost Pounds 2 billion out of the Pounds 26 billion NHS budget. But some perspective is needed. Prescriptions have only risen by six per cent since 1979, although prices have run at four per cent ahead of the rate of inflation. UK doctors remain one of the lowest prescribers in Europe - 6.8 per person per year compared to Belgium's 9.9, Austria's 14.9, Italy's 21.5 and France's 28.9. There was a better way than this. The Government should have established an independent assessment of new drugs (as happens through the Federal Drug Administration in the US); introduced new procedures which would have required the substitution of cheaper, but just as effective generic drugs, for brand names; and made bolder use of the prescribing monitoring agency. + The GP budget purchase scheme is equally wrong. It will mean less patient choice because GPS will want to send patients to the cheapest hospitals. Some of these will be dragging travel time outside the district. It does not deal with the GPS who make too many referrals, because most of them are in small practices. + Allowing hospitals to opt out is absurd. It will end the capacity of the NHS to plan its services and introduce a damaging encentive for hospitals to concentrate on profitable work: such as the non-urgent surgery which private medicine specialises in - like hernias, hysterectomies, hips and cataracts. But this end of the market amounts to three per cent of the NHS budget. It should not be allowded to wag the rest of system. There is no profit in chronic treatment: but that is one resason why the Health Service has been so important. + Of course there are some good ideas in the review: the introduction of appointment times in hospital outpatient departments should raise a cheer, together with the speed up in the results of diagnostic tests; regional pay; reforming consultant distinction awards; extending pilot management experiments. There is even an argument for experimenting with GP budgets and opt-out hospitals within one of the 14 NHS regions. + But this is the small change of big change. What the review has failed to justify is the introduction nationally of structural upheavals which will reduce choice, restrict access, increase inequality and impose new central controls on GPs, hospitals and managers. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +33 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 1, 1989 + +NHS Review: Tax relief to be allowed on policies for pensioners' private care + +BYLINE: By DAVID HENCKE + +LENGTH: 368 words + + + New-style insurance policies aimed at allowing the higher-rate tax payer to claim tax relief for the private health care of their elderly relatives are to be introduced next year following the tax concessions announced in the white paper yesterday. + The reference to the new relief is confined to one sentence in the report. 'The Government proposes to make it easier for people in retirement by allowing income tax relief on their private medical insurance premiums, whether paid by them or, for example, by their families on their behalf.' + The concesson follows the insistence of the Prime Minister, who will, incidentally, be one of the beneficiaries. + Mr Nigel Lawson, the Chancellor, in a written answer last night said the new concession will come into force on April 6, 1990. Everybody over the age of 60 will be eligible and relief will be given like mortgage tax relief for all basic rate taxpayers. Higher rate taxpayers will receive adjustments to their codes. + At present very few pensioners have private health care insurance because of the huge cost of the premiums and a reluctance by many private health insurance companies to cover them. + A typical premium is well in excess of Pounds 1,000 a year and may include many exclusion clauses, such as psychiatric treatment and cover for previous illnesses and disabilities. This compares with an average figure of around Pounds 600 for a family with parents aged around 40. + Many private health companies refuse to take on new patients over the age of 65. Others stop insuring existing patients when they reach the age of 75. + The new concessions will be of limited value to most pensioners, and none at all to the many whose income is too small to be taxed. + The scheme is expected to be of more benefit to the higher-paid who can afford to pay Pounds 1,000 a year premiums for their elderly parents or relatives, since they will receive Pounds 400 back in extra tax relief. + The concession will also lead insurance companies to examine whether they can offer a new 'whole life' cover scheme for people in work. New-style policies could mean that a proportion set aside for old age could qualify for tax relief. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +34 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 1, 1989 + +NHS Review: GPs may face dilemma of cash limits versus a suitable case for treatment - The doctor + +BYLINE: By AILEEN BALLANTYNE, Medical Correspondent + +LENGTH: 729 words + + + Dr Costas Dellaportas, a GP in a London inner city practice with a large number of elderly patients, says some doctors would welcome the chance of managing their own budget - if they are given enough money. + One advantage, for example, is that they could opt to employ a physiotherapist rather than spending money on vast amounts of anti-inflammatory drugs for elderly patients. But some element of weighting for the elderly would be essential. + 'If a patient with high blood pressure is well stabilised on an expensive drug treatment, it would be unprofessional to switch her to another type just because it is cheaper. If strict cash limits are be imposed on GPs there will have to be exemptions for some types of drug treatment - and for certain types of patients, such as the elderly,' he said. + Many general practitioners believe the Government's proposals to 'tag' each patient with a limited amount of money for treatment, operations and prescriptions, will put patient care at serious risk - and permanently alter the present relationship of trust that exists between doctor and patient. + Under the review proposals, if a doctor goes over his budget he will be penalised financially and will have to carefully balance the cost of treating the patient according to his best clinical judgment and staying within cash limits. + The following are examples from doctors of how they believe working within a fixed budget could affect their patients. + A 60 year old woman has shingles. The doctor can see it is progressing. If he thinks it is moving towards the eye, he should prescribe a course of anti-viral tablets to protect against the rare possibility that it might affect the patient's vision. But a week's course of anti-viral tablets cost Pounds 120 compared with the average prescription cost of about Pounds 4.50. + Does he follow his clinical judgment and give his patient the best treatment possible - or preserve his budget in case it runs out during an outbreak of meningitis among the children in his practice? + A 45-year-old man, who smokes, and gets bronchitis every winter comes into the surgery. As always it is difficult to tell if this is a bacterial infection, which will benefit from a course of antibiotics - or a viral infection - which will get better on its own. If the doctor prescribes nothing - and takes the risk of the cough progressing into something worse - he will save money on his budget. + A 40-year-old woman has her blood pressure checked. It is just on the high side of normal. The GP has a choice between the no-cost option of recommending relaxation techniques, and putting her on long-term drug treatment to control her raised blood pressure. Twenty years later, without drug treatment, she may have an increased risk of a stroke because her GP had an added incentive to choose the least expensive measure. + A man, aged 50, tells his doctor he is having intermittent diarrhoea and constipation. The doctor decides it's not worth sending him to hospital for a test to check to ensure that he does not have bowel cancer. It costs Pounds 50; the chances of finding anything are slight, and his budget is running out. The man develops cancer - which could have been far more effectively treated if it had been picked up earlier. + A women aged 28, has Aids. She is on Zidovudine (formerly AZT) which, in spite of its toxic side effects, appears to prolong life by about a year. It costs Pounds 5,000 a year. Dr Roy Robertson, an Edinburgh GP who treats more Aids and HIV positive patients than any doctor in the country, points out that already, many GPs are only too ready to say 'I don't want that sort of patient.' Unless the Government introduces special exemptions for such treatment, he says, the position will get worse. + Over 90 per cent of all our encounters with a doctor are with a GP. If cash has to be limited, some doctors argue, they would prefer to be the 'rationer' - rather than leaving the role to an administrator who, as one put it, 'knows as much about medicine as I know about plumbing.' + The main benefactors from the review are likely to be computer manufacturers poised to enter a growth market. As the GP looks up the state of his weekly budget, and checks the price of the drug he is about to prescribe, many patients may feel this is the end of the NHS as they know it. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +35 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 1, 1989 + +NHS Review: Best buy principle restricts choice - The patients + +BYLINE: By AILEEN BALLANTYNE, Medical Correspondent + +LENGTH: 410 words + + + The NHS review holds out hope of more choice for patients ' over the time or place at which treatment is given' - but the Patients' Association says the end result is that they will be 'packaged like a parcel' to the hospital which offers to do the cheapest operations. + In some cases elderly patients may have to travel 40 miles for an operation and continue to travel to the same hospital for follow-up treatment. + The review is critical of the long wait for treatment some people suffer, yet no new money is offered to cut waiting lists. The review simply points out that the Government is spending Pounds 40 million this year on an initiative to reduce the waiting. + Figures published by the Department of Health last July showed that a similar Pounds 30 million initiative last year resulted in a fall of only 1.3 per cent in the waiting list figures. There were still nearly 180,000 people in England waiting for over a year for surgery, according to Department of Health figures. It is difficult to see how the same initiative this year is going to significantly alter the waiting time for such patients. + The number of people waiting for hospital treatment in England last summer was 678,800 compared with 687,900 at the same time last year. A quarter of those had been waiting for more than a year for operations. + There is now no longer the assurance that a doctor will refer patients who need operations to the NHS surgeon he thinks will do the best job - the 'best buy' principle will have to be followed. + Patients whose long-term drug prescription are likely to be expensive may also find themselves going back and forth between hospital and GP unless special measures are introduced. For example: + A 35-year-old man has just had a kidney transplant but needs anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his life. He has also moved house and is looking for a GP who will provide the drugs because his hospital cannot afford to pay for them. When the GP had an open budget, this created no problem. Now, the man can find no GP willing to take him on. + A 30-year-old woman and her husband want to start a family. Tests have found that she is not ovulating. The hospital consultant prescribes a course of the fertility drug, Pergonal, which costs Pounds 500. The hospital's budget is cash limited so she has to get the prescriptions from her GP. Her GP tells her he has switched to a fixed budget - and cannot prescribe the drug. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +36 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 1, 1989 + +NHS Review: Unions fear privatisation as BMA voices unease - Mixed reception for the proposed changes + +BYLINE: By AILEEN BALLANTYNE, Medical Correspondent + +LENGTH: 799 words + + + The health service unions yesterday greeted the NHS review as the start of 'a two tier health system,' while the British Medical Association expressed 'serious reservations' about the Government's claim that the proposals will improve the quality of service. + 'We have always supported measures to improve efficency in the NHS, but the clinical needs of patients must come first,' said a spokeswoman for the BMA, which represents the country's doctors. 'We are particularly concerned that there is no provision for pilot studies, so that the changes will be introduced without anyone knowing whether they will work.' + Miss Ada Madocks, staff side secretary of the NHS Whitley Council, which represents NHS employees, said the review was a major step towards privatisation. + 'While there is no direct privatisation involved in the present proposals, it is crystal clear that the opted out 'super hospitals,' with their high degree of specialisation will be perfect candidates for privatisation in the future. + 'They will be able to sell their services to private hospitals.' She said the proposals would lead to the concentration of scarce NHS resources in the 'opted out' hospitals, while others would become 'second class institutions.' + Mr Toby Harris, director of the Association of Community Health Councils, the patients 'watchdog' body, said the review would reduce patients' choice. Calling it 'Working for Patients' was a disgrace, he said. + The idea of giving GPs limited budgets was 'frightening.' The end result would be a health service dominated by 'managers, cash limits and markets.' + Mr Martyn Long, chairman of the National Association of Health Authorities, welcomed the commitment to 'a high quality health service free at the point of delivery.' + However, the association would seek assurances that the 'self-standing' hospitals and GP budgets for hospital services would not detract from NHS's ability to provide a comprehensive service. It was essential that health promotion, services for the elderly and vulnerable, and teaching and research should not be adversely affected. + Mr Rodney Bickerstaffe, secretary of the National Union of Public Employees said the review was a cynical charter to dismember the NHS. The plans to encourage locall hospitals and health centres to opt out were 'a charlatan prescription for market medicine.' + Treatment would be 'price tagged,' leaving the poor, the chronically ill and the elderly out in the cold. 'Sick people will be shunted around the country in a scramble for the cheapest care.' + He said NUPE members would be mobilised to challenge the plans. + Mr Hector MacKenzie, general secretary of the Confederation of Health Service Employees said patients would be on the receiving end of a commercialised system where competition would breed needless over-treatment of those requiring profitable care, and chronic under-treatment of those most in need. + He said the United States was a tragic illustration of the failure of commercial medicine. + 'No private American hospitals want to take on the unprofitable burden of Aids sufferers, so such patients have to rely on very limited public drug programmes. Aids patients ultimately face destitution and homelessness - conditions that accelerate the spread of the epidemic.' + Mr Trevor Clay, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing welcomed the fact that the NHS would still be funded from taxation. He also welcomed the extra consultants, the extended role for nurses to help solve the junior doctor problem, and the review of regional heatlh authorities. + But he added: 'I do not see much consumer choice in these proposals. The choices will be made by doctors and managers. As patients, we all have a price tag on our heads now.' + Sir James Ackers, chairman of West Midlands Regional Health Authority, said: 'We feel that the white paper will take forward the improvement in management of the NHS started by the introduction of general management in 1984, and lead to speedier decisions, greater patient choice, and a more effective use of resources for the benefit of our patients.' + But the charity, Help the Aged, said the proposal to provide tax relief on private health insurance for pensioners was 'marginal to the real health needs of our elderly population.' + Only a third of pensioners paid tax. 'Of those who do, many cannot afford private health insurance.' + Mr John Mayo, the charity's director general, said: 'The proposal to give + large general practices the management of a fixed budget may have serious + implications for elderly people. They are intensive and expensive users of + health services and will therefore be unpopular patients for GPs operating a + practice as a business.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +37 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 1, 1989 + +Parliament and Politics: Cook warns of hospital sell-off + +BYLINE: By MARTIN LINTON and PAUL NETTLETON + +LENGTH: 714 words + + + Mr Robin Cook, the shadow health secretary, told the Commons yesterday that the proposal to allow hospitals to opt out of local health authority control should be exposed as a staging post to opting into the private sector. + Similarly the proposals for GPs to run their own budgets would not give them more freedom. 'In truth, they limit the freedom of GPs to decide what treatment their patient needs and replace it with the freedom to decide what treatment they can afford.' + Patients would have a price tag and GPs would have an incentive to turn away costly patients. The elderly, the disabled, the chronically sick would be told sorry, you do not fit. The minister 'had a brass neck to claim this white paper would increase patients' choice'. + 'Why does he not admit that his scheme means that the patients will not go to the hospitals they want to. They will go to the hospitals where their doctor has got the cheapest bargain,' he said. + The tax relief on private health care for the over-60s was a 'fatuous irrelevance' to the problems of the elderly. It spoke volumes about the Government's priorities, he said, that it proposed a subsidy for private hospitals but no relief for geriatric wards. + The white paper was the product of a review behind closed doors by closed minds. Junion ministers were consulted over dinner at No. 10, but junior doctors and nurses and patients were not consulted. + Mr Kenneth Clarke, the Health Secretary, said there was no question of hospitals leaving the NHS. The proposal was to allow hospitals to become self-governing and free of detailed restraints from health authorities and government. + Labour did not like proposals to give greater freedom to those with responsibility nearer the patient, he said. + The proposal to allow GPs to run their own budgeets would in no way inhibit the choice of a GP or a patient. 'Doctors seeking to increase their patients will have just as much regard, if not more so, to the quality of care which a hospital might provide to the patient and not just to the cost,' he said. + The tax relief proposals would help many elderly patients who had been paying for private health care but found costs increased when they reached the age when they most need extra surgery. + Mr Archy Kirkwood, the Democrats' spokesman, said the proposals could inflict great damage on the fundamental principles of the NHS. Leaving it to the vagaries of the free market was very unsafe. + Mr Clarke said: 'There is no prospect of any patient dropping through the system without either essential care or essential medicine or anything else.' He told Mr Jerry Hayes (C Harlow) there were no danger of surgery closures or patients being turned away through lack of resources under the proposals. + At Question Time the Prime Minister attacked Mr Cook for using leaked documents to disclose the contents of the white paper. + Mr Paul Marland (C. Gloucestershire W) said it had traditionally been agreed that there must be confidentiality in government. 'Would she take this opportunity of roundly condemning the grossly irresponsible behaviour of Mr Cook in receiving stolen documents and thereby aiding and abetting a criminal offence?' + Mrs Thatcher replied: 'I believe it is absolutely vital that confidentiality should be maintained. When the Labour Party was last in power that was the view taken by the then Labour Prime Minister and he was supported by the then Leader of the Opposition. + 'It seems to me now that the Labour Party is so bankrupt of argument that they seem to have appointed an official receiver.' + Mr Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader, intervened: 'Will the Prime Minister confirm that the last MP who was responsible for a major leak was given a knighthood and made a European Commissioner?' + Mrs Thatcher replied: 'The question was about receiving documents that can only have been stolen and we resent deeply on this side his strictures on my distinguished right honourable friend (Sir Leon Brittan).' + Dr David Owen, leader of the SDP, asked: 'Is the Prime Minister aware that it is because she herself cannot bring herself to use the NHS that she does not understand the NHS? The NHS is not safe in her hands because there is no place in her heart for the NHS.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +38 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 2, 1989 + +Boddingtons moves into nursing homes + +BYLINE: By BEN LAURANCE + +LENGTH: 223 words + + + Manchester brewer Boddingtons is moving into the nursing home business. A deal unveiled yesterday will give the company 12 homes and comes just months after a similar move by Sunderland-based hotels and brewing group Vaux. + Boddingtons is buying two businesses, Country House Retirement Homes and + Nursing and Health Care Services. It will pay up to Pounds 7.6 million, the + exact figure being determined by the size of the homes' profits. And the + company maintained yesterday that the move into care for the sick and + elderly is no more than an extension of its restaurant and property + business. + Country House was started just nine years ago. It owns and operates six nursing homes, two near Guildford plus one each at Leatherhead, Maidenhead, Hitchin and Maidstone. NHCS's homes are at Esher, West Byflett, Hayward's Heath, Uxbridge and Walton-on-Thames. + Boddingtons insists that the move is quite logical, fitting in with the company's steady diversification away from its traditional brewing roots. The group has already bought Village Leisure Hotels and the Bentley's group of restaurants. 'In considering areas for further expansion, Boddingtons identified care for the elderly as an important growth market which suited its existing retailing/hospitality and property management skills,' it said. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +39 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 2, 1989 + +Financial Notebook: Drinking their good health - why a famous brewer is moving into nursing homes + +BYLINE: By HAMISH MCRAE + +LENGTH: 468 words + + + A brewer is not the most natural purchaser of a set of nursing homes. The image it conjures has, to be sure, certain attractions: octogenarians pulling each other pints in the 'there's life in the old dog yet' scene in an olde English pub. At least it makes a change from lager louts. + But it is not what synergy is supposed to be about .. or is it? The significancce of Boddingtons' move into nursing homes is twofold. Here is a brewer heding its bets about the future and using its pub management skills to diversify into an area with greater growth prospects. + To understand the hedging element, you have to understand that the brewers run two businesses. One is a mass manufacturing business: running specialised factories (called breweries) which produce a product in high volumes. + The skills here are those of running factories efficiently to produce the product as cheaply as possible, and then the various marketing skills to make the product as attractive as possible to the punters. There are a small number of highly-automated plants, but with a fair-sized staff in each. + The other business is a service industry: running pubs, hotels and the like. There are a multiplicity of units, with low technology and a handful of workers at each unit. Some units are owned, some franchised. The key here is that of all service industry: to deliver a consistent service at a cost with allows adequate margins. + But putting the point in management school jargon you can see the difference: one is manufacturing, the other service; one large-scale, the other small. + The essential link, of course, is the tied house system, where brewers sell their products through their own 'shops'. + This, however, is likely to be swept away by the Monopolies Commission, which reports next month. It is not that likely that brewers will have to sell all their pubs. But it is likely that they will have to allow a wider choice and end practices where they sell the beer and other drinks to the pub at a price higher than the local supermarket charges. + At the moment, the brewers do not know what they will be allowed to do, so it makes sense to hedge their bets. If, eventually, they have to make a choice between being a manufacturer or a service industry, they will have more options if they have more service businesses under their wing. + And so the final point: running pubs is very similar to running nursing homes. The unit size is quite small; the choice of operator is vital; and central management can support the individual operators by supplying capital and expertise. + The big, big difference is that while pubs are a shrinking industry on the wrong end of social change, nursing homes are a growing one on the right end of demographic change. + Canny people, Mancunians. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +40 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 3, 1989 + +The Day in Politics: Elderly tax relief scheme will help the NHS, says Thatcher + +BYLINE: By PAUL NETTLETON + +LENGTH: 203 words + + + The Prime Minister yesterday strongly defended the Government's proposal of tax relief for elderly people's private medical insurance and said those who paid for private health care on top of their contributions to the health service were 'helping the NHS'. + At question time Labour leader Mr Neil Kinnock asked her: 'Do the changes the Prime Minister proposed for the NHS mean that she will actually use the service herself?' + The Prime Minister replied: 'Mr Kinnock always mystifies me that he's quite prepared to purchase a private house, but not prepared to purchase private health. I should have thought he would have realised that those people who both pay for the NHS and then pay again for private health are actually helping the NHS.' + Mr Kinnock said if she was saying that people could afford private health care, 'can she tell us why such people should get a tax subsidy to do so?' + Mrs Thatcher said people with private medical insurance coming up to retirement may find themselves facing higher premiums. 'We thought it right to give tax relief at that stage so that people can continue to use the scheme privately, and by using the scheme privately bring more benefit to the NHS.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +41 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 4, 1989 + +Weekend Arts: Family ways - Radio + +BYLINE: By VAL ARNOLD-FORSTER + +LENGTH: 761 words + + + Tricky creatures, prepubescent girls. The last two Monday plays (Radio 4) have both been about family tensions, with a young girl at the centre. And both illustrated very nicely the age old dictum: 'Where is a mother's place? Answer: In the wrong'. + Last week's The Playgirl, by Alan Berrie, was about 12-year-old Cordelia; her dad, Jim Brannigan, a weak, charming, Irish actor now 'resting' and looking after his daughter; and Helen, her mother, involved in her career. + Father and daughter play a long game of adoring fantasy together; mother, overworked and strained, resents the relationship. Brannigan, urged on by Helen, gets a plum part in a new TV soap, falls for a colleague and provokes in his daughter a furious reaction of jealous resentment. + Then the play moves into melodrama - daughter accuses father of sexual abuse; new girlfriend rejects him; he kills himself. But child abuse is melodramatic; and the fact that the accusation may or may not have been true did not alter the play's timely interest. + It all rang nastily true; the intensity of the father-daughter relationship was believable, and if Cordelia was a tiresome brat, well, we've all met those before. The three central performances from Tony Doyle as Brannigan; Frances Geater as Helen and Clare Travers-Deacon as the aptly named Cordelia were all beautifully judged. An easy play to over-act, over-produce or even over-write; but Richard Wortley's unfussy production was just right for Berrie's script. + Another, and nicer, young girl, Rosie, was to be found in this week's My Mother Said I Never Should (repeated today, Saturday, 2.30 pm) by Charlotte Keatley. Three generations meet to clear out the old grandmother's house. Gradually we realise that Rosie is not, as she believes, the sister of Jackie, the successful young professional, but Jackie's daughter. + Melodramatic, too, and here the malodrama is less believably handled. There's little in the relationships that lead us to believe in the final denouement with the child and old grandmother settled peacefully together. It is a common fictional device to portray a warm sympathy between the unhappy young and the elderly: and how handy it would be if it were more often true in reality. + The play certainly had well observed insights into the irritations between generations, and the way in which successive mothers try to fulfil their own aspirations through their daughters. Some humour, too, and strong performances, particularly from Sonia Ritter as Rosie. But the intrusive flashbacks and the muddled construction of the play made it difficult to grasp which mother had which ambitions, and why. And those inserts of little children chanting skipping songs are getting to be a production cliche. + Personally, I suspect the relationships in After Henry (Radio 4, Tuesdays and Thursdays) are nearer the mark. Maybe the grannie, as played by the admirable Joan Sanderson, is a bit of a caricature; and since the series comes into the general category of light entertainment, the reactions are oversimplified. But the three women - grandmother, mother and daughter - represent no more than a slight exaggeration of real life. One of the constant themes is grannie's belief that she has a meaningful relationship with her granddaughter; mabe she's been listening to too many radio plays. + Reality came clearly through in If You Will Make It So. (Radio 4, Saturday and Monday) - not surprisingly, since the play by Martin Staniforth was adapted from the autobiography of Winifred Haward Hodgkiss. It told of the love affair, and eventual marriage, between Winifred, a Cambridge-educated, upper-class woman who becomes a BBC producer, and Louis, a Lancashire miner. A gentle, moving play, warmed by a lovely performance from Anne Jameson as Winifred, happy in her late blooming romance and yet keeping the ascerbic streak in her character. + Next week is the start of a new classic serial in the Friday afternoon slot. Judging from my spot-check on a dozen well-educated persons, The Brothers Karamazov is, I suspect, one of those great novels that we all know something about but haven't actually, er, read. + This is an adaptation by Michelene Wandor, directed by Philip Martin, with Freddie Jones wonderfully fruity as father Karamazov, and Michael Maloney, Stuart Wilson and Tim Brierley in well-differentiated performances as the three brothers. A notable chance to hear a powerfully dramatic adaptation of one of Dostoevsky's most difficult novels; a pity there's no immediate repeat. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +42 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 6, 1989 + +Financial Notebook: Still waiting for Bush to face up to the deficit + +BYLINE: By ALEX BRUMMER + +LENGTH: 1037 words + + + The long bout of shadow boxing between George Bush and the Congress will come to an abrupt end this week when the new President unveils his February budget package before a joint session of the House of Representatives and the Senate. While Mr Bush, who has sweetly cultivated allies on Capitol Hill, is assured of an enthusiastic public reception it is plain his fiscal message will be rancourous at home and abroad. + In his own backyard there will be dismay that his budget supremo, Mr Richard Darman, has chosen to keep faith with the 'rosy scenario' - economic assumptions - which seriously underestimate the United States's borrowing needs on the financial markets. On the international front there will be public disappointment that Mr Bush is no more able to meet his Group-of-Seven committments on the deficit than Mr Reagan. + There are several developments in Washington clouding the horizon for Mr Bush's first important policy statement, which is likely to set the tone for his first 100 days in office, when political goodwill is traditionally at its maximum. + Firstly, new budget forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office (Capitol Hill's own fiscal watchdog) suggest that even if all the spending cuts and revenue raising measures proposed in Mr Reagan's valedictory budget were implemented the deficit would be Dollars 120 billion in the 1990 fiscal year, starting in October. If the budget were left on automatic pilot (ie no changes were implemented) then the deficit would reach Dollars 146 billion. In each case the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings mandatory target of Dollars 100 billion would be seriously breached. + Secondly, any hopes that the bipartisan National Economic Commission (NEC), formed in the wake of the Crash of '87, would come to grips with the US's medium to long term fiscal strategy in the manner of the Greenspan Commission on social security (old pensions) in 1982 have been dashed. + Instead of offering a detailed strategy including cuts in entitlements (such as medical care for the elderly) and tax increases, the Commission is likely to produce an anaemic report which does no more than issue warnings about problems already widely discussed including the spurious economic assumptions used by the White House Office of Management and Budget and the way in which the growing Social Security surpluses (as much as Dollars 90 billion annually) mask the underlying size of the deficits. + The stalemate on the NEC reflects the true state of the political economy in Washington. Despite all the inauguration talk of a bipartisan approach to national problems Mr Bush's no tax pledge effectively means the Democrats will not play ball. They are not willing to be lumbered with a record of having raised taxes when the Republicans refuse to come off the sidelines. As was demonstrated in 1987 only the financial markets can cut through the fiscal logjam. + Far from raising taxes Mr Bush's first financial package is expected to propose yet another tax reduction to go with the supply-side revolution of 1982. Like Mrs Thatcher's cuts in the highest rates of income tax Mr Bush seems prepared to buy a more permanent Republican/conservative majority by cutting the capital gains tax as promised during his election campaign. + Under the Bush proposal the top rate of capital gains, which is currently the same as income tax at 28 per cent, would be chopped to 15 per cent. Mr Bush claims that the supply-side effect, the new investment and profits unleashed by the move, means that the capital gains tax cut will pay for itself. But the Congressional Budget Office suggests it could cost the US Treasury billions in revenues widening the deficit further. + There is, however, a potential compromise here. The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, has suggested a sliding scale capital gains tax which would penalise short-term speculative profits such as those accumulated on Wall Street and reward the longer-term investor. It is an intriguing concept, first propoed by investment banker Felix Rohaytn, which could well prove acceptable to the Treasury Secre tary, Mr Nicholas Brady, were there to be serious negotiations between the White House and Congress. + Several other tax changes are also expected to be included in the Bush package - each of them honouring campaign pledges. With US domestil oil production currently on a downward turn Mr Bush will propose new tax incentives for oil and gas exploration; an idea which seems certain to become law given the regiment of Texans hotly pursuing a kinder and gentlier attitude to fossil fuels. + Tax incentives will also be used to fulfil campaign promises to provide child-care for the families of the working poor and to rebuild the inner-cities through Enterprise Zones. + The common theme which runs through each of these tax proposals is that the financing is murky at best. Indeed, the fear must be that they will considerably add to a budgetary shortfall which is being under-estimated anyway. Ironically, these costly ideas are causing less political angst than the one self-financing proposal being floated by the US Treasury - the rescue package for the Savings and Loans system. + Rather than add a further Dollars 90-100 billion to the US Government's considerable long-term budget liabilities the Bush team is proposing a self-financing solution. This consists of a charge of 25 cents on every Dollars 100 invested in a federally insured institution. While disguised as a 'user fee' for savings and loan investors it is, in effect, a large disguised tax increase. This means it both breaches Mr Bush's no tax pledges and shifts responsibility for paying for the savings and loans mess from the unscrupulous managers who created it to the depositors whose financial safety was put in jeopardy. + It is small wonder the S & L rescue is a contentious concept which will receive a rough ride in Congress. It at least, however, addresses the fundamental issue of cost. Whereas the shuddering reality behind most of the proposals likely to be included in Mr Bush's first financial statement is that the new President has yet to face up to the Reagan debt legacy. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +43 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 7, 1989 + +Obituary of Percy Hoskins: Crime and innocence + +BYLINE: By IAN AITKEN + +LENGTH: 583 words + + + Percy Hoskins, legendary crime correspondent of Beaverbrook Newspapers from 1924 until only a few years ago, has died after a brief but painful illness at the age of 84. He was the last of a long line of flambuoyant crime reporters who covered the activities of the old-fashioned Scotland Yard. + His outward personality was that of an amiable extrovert from the West Country. But it concealed a tough, iron-hard integrity which came to the surface at the time of the arrest and trial of the Eastbourne doctor John Bodkin Adams. + Dr Bodkin Adams was accused of murdering many of his rich but elderly patients with an overdose of painkillers, and then benefiting from their wills. Even the Rolls-Royce he drove was alleged to be the result of one such transaction. + But when Scotland yard finally began to investigate these allegations, Hoskins took strong exception to their choice of the detective in charge of the enquiry. He regarded the individual concerned as untrustworthy, following a number of earlier experiences with him. + When the police began to plant stories in national newspapers suggesting that Dr Bodkin Adams was a mass murderer, Hoskins became indignant. In spite of heavy pressure from the Daily Express news desk - pressures which went all the way up to the proprietor - he refused point blank to write matching stories. The Express increasingly took the view that it was being scooped by its rivals. + But Hoskins' indignation extended beyond the big black glass palace of the Daily Express. His anger against the police mounted, and he took advantage of his personal friendship with the then editor of the left wing weekly Tribune, Mr Michael Foot. He provided Foot with the background material for a series of articles exposing the yard's conduct, much of which was picked up by the national Fleet Street press. + When the Bodkin Adams case finally came to trial, the jury rejected the police evidence after 17 days of hearings and found Dr Adams not guilty. + There were two direct spinoffs from this verdict. The first took place a few minutes after it was delivered in the Old Bailey court room, when the phone rang on Percy Hoskins' desk. A familiar Canadian voice - that of Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor of the Daily Express - came on the line. + 'Percy,' said the voice, 'two people were acquitted in the old Bailey this morning - John Bodkin Adams and you.' + The other immediate outcome was that Dr Adams took his capacious hat down Fleet Street, seeking out of court settlements for the inevitable action he would bring against most of the natioanl newspapers for prejudging the outcome of the trial. The good doctor received massive payments from almost all the popular papers in Fleet Street, with the sole exception of the Daily Express. Percy Hoskins' conduct was therefore recorded in cash as well as moral terms. (When Adams died in 1983, he left Hoskins Pounds 1,000.) + The Express recognised the service Hoskins had delivered to them by keeping him on as an adviser until 1986, long after his formal retirement. But he would have been an outstanding crime reporter even if Dr Adams had never fallen foul of Scotland Yard. (His invaluable and extraordinary range of contacts was said to include J. Edgar Hoover as a personal friend.) He was, in a word, unique. He was appointed CBE towards the end of his career, but might well have been given something more exalted. + Percy Hoskins born December, 28, 1904; died February 6. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +44 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 7, 1989 + +Tuesday Women: Casting to type - The contempt with which we treat senior citizens is staggering. Too often they are presented as an uncomfortable statistic + +BYLINE: By BRYONY COLEMAN + +LENGTH: 855 words + + + Barbara Bush is news. 'My mail tells me a lot of fat, white-haired ladies are tickled pink' has become the darling quotation of the international press. Comparisons with her predecessor, Nancy, flow. As one tabloid put it: 'Move over, Barbie Doll; here comes Babs.' While Nancy's having another tuck put in, Barbara's letting out another seam. She's happy to look her age, even a little older, and to be counted among America's senior citizen brigade, bizarrely labelled 'The Grey Panthers'. + In 1988, a conspiracy among women's editors to popularise grey hair - it all started with Lacroix's model, Marie Seznec - was remarkably prescient. For this year is heralding the dawn of a silver age. And not before time. + It's not only Barbara's corpulence and crow's-feet that reassure. Printed on the mind is that picture of The First Granny of the White House: a benign matriarchal figure presiding over 28 members of the Bush dynasty at the inaugural ceremonies. The lapsed ideal of the family unit might appear to be born again. We have few such cosy set-ups in Britain and, even in the States, the Reagans' strained relationship with their dispersed offspring was easier to identify with. This protected and protective image of Barbara Bush may be a hit, but it's also a myth. + The contempt with which we treat our senior citizens is staggering. Patronised or ignored, the over-60s are too often presented as an uncomfortable statistic, lumped together as inflexible stereotypes: victim, valetudinarian, mother-in-law, Mrs Grundy. Whether pensioners are 85 or 65, an institutionalised neglect is depicting them as out of touch and a burden. + But circumstances change cases. Yesterday's baby boom is tomorrow's granny boom. By the year 2001 there could be over 4 million Britons aged 75 plus, a million more than in 1981. The grey area is spreading rapidly and, as average life expectancy continues to increase, the elderly will have to be addressed. Not just addressed, but courted. + Advertisers are only slowly recognising the huge potential of a granny culture. Roughly a third of the over-60s population has a healthy disposable income; their children are no longer dependants; they joined the property markets before prices shot up and interest rates have improved their position as traditional savers just as they have hit younger Yuppie borrowers. Here come the recently christened Woopies (Well Off Older People) and Jollies (Jet-setting Older People with Loads of Loot). A new magazine, Retirement Planning & Living, is glossy and brashly money-orientated - a sort of pensioner's Excel. Yet its advertising still centres on saving schemes, private health deals, travel and retirement homes. An underlying assumption persists that many products, from compact disc to Diet Coke, are simply beyond the ken of a senior citizen. Eastenders' Dot Cotton has probably done more than any advertiser to boost Walkman sales among the over-60s. Ad agency creatives, usually thirty-something or under, are still writing scenarios for their own dwindling generation. A blinkered snob factor's at work, resisting all the demographical signs that the young may have had their day. + The Government is facing not merely a U-turn but a youth-turn. Out with the new and in with the old. Last week, Mrs Thatcher's new plans for the elderly were unofficially outlined in the press. Whereas in the past few years many have been forced into early retirement to make way for school-leavers, now employers, tails between legs, are having to invite pensioners back to take up part-time work - whether as a source of cheap labour is not made clear. Norman Fowler envisages a 'decade of retirement' for those between 60 and 70, who would have the choice of continuing to work or not. Again, no indication is given as to the sort of provision to be made for those who do opt for retirement at 60 rather than 70 when the Government would prefer otherwise. And what about the over-70s? The Treasury has long considered state pensions an unnecessary financial drain and, on its past record; it seems unlikely that assistance will increase for those who need it most but can offer nothing in return. + Meanwhile, another third of all pensioners live on Pounds 41.15 a week. Even with income support, this wouldn't go far at a second-hand clothes shop. Queues for hip replacements and cataract removal are growing and private medicine is not always an option. We urgently need to put more cash into cures and treatments for age-related illness, if not out of a sense of justice to ensure dignity and comfort in later life, at least out of a mercenary desire to increase the mobility and therefore the 'usefulness' of the old. + The passion for retro-chic currently possessing style gurus could profitably be extended to people. After all, if we fail to stop treating our senior citizens as juniors, manipulating them at every economic whim, how should we expect to be treated when we approach our Biblical span? As Groucho Marx pointed out: 'Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.' Something to bear in mind. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +45 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 9, 1989 + +UN secures transport for Kabul airlift + +BYLINE: By KATHY GANNON + +LENGTH: 511 words + +DATELINE: ISLAMABAD + + + United Nations officials said yesterday that Ethiopian Airlines had agreed to fly 32 tonnes of emergency medical and food supplies to the Afghan capital of Kabul. + The announcement came after an EgyptAir crew on Tuesday balked at flying into Afghanistan because of fears of inadequate security at Kabul airport, a UN official said. + In Cairo, a senior official at EgyptAir's headquarters denied the company had backed out of the airlift. He said the airline wanted 'to make sure about the safety of the flight route from Islamabad to Kabul and also landing clearance in Kabul'. + 'Once we are sure the plane has the necessary overflight and landing clearances, the plane will go as planned,' the official added. + Egypt's state-owned Middle East News Agency quoted Mr Hassan Afifi, EgyptAir's operations director, as saying flights from Islamabad to Kabul 'have been postponed, not cancelled, until security conditions there stabilise'. + Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, who heads the UN programme to assist Afghan war refugees, said in a statement that his group 'does not share the apprehension of EgyptAir and is convinced of the urgent needs to be met'. + Mr Rene Albeck, a spokesman for the UN programme, said the Ethiopian airline would fly emergency supplies to Kabul from Pakistan's south-western border city of Quetta. + Mr Albeck said the staging area for the airlifts moved to Quetta because the UN has storage depots there and in Peshawar. + Mr Albeck said the flight 'could be in Kabul tomorrow (Thursday).' + Several airlifts have been planned, he said, and 'maybe we can do two per day within the next five of six days.' + The supplies were intended for the most vulnerable groups such as women, children and the elderly, he said. + The Mojahedin have blocked land supply routes to Kabul, causing acute shortages of food, medicine and other essential supplies. + In New York, a UN official said the rebels had agreed in principle not to attack UN flights into the Afghan capital in exchange for a promise that UN convoys would bring supplies into guerrilla-held regions. + 'We have been all the time of the opinion, with the messages that we got, that it should have been safe to fly into Kabul,' Mr Albeck said. + However, Mr Qaribur Rehman Saeed of the Majahedin's Afghan News Agency said: 'No one can guarantee the UN plane's safety. The Mojahedin don't know.' + UN teams monitoring the Geneva accords have made regular trips between Islamabad and Kabul. - AP + Seven people died in a rocket attack on central Kabul yesterday as the Mojahedin intensified their campaign to hamper the Soviet Union's hurried troop withdrawal, Reuter adds from Islamabad. + The rocket, which exploded among a crowd of people collecting flour and cooking oil from a distribution centre, was the first big missile strike after a period of calm in the Afghan capital. + Tass reported yesterday that the rebels had attacked posts along two roads out of Afghanistan which withdrawing Soviet soldiers are handing over to Afghan government troops. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +46 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 9, 1989 + +And umbrellas are down, too: How the weather is hitting traditional British winter behaviour + +BYLINE: By SHYAMA PERERA + +LENGTH: 721 words + + + A curious fact about the British is that, after years of complaining about snowbound transport and rocketing central heating bills, they greet a mild winter with almost as much suspicion as a big freeze. + Ben Nevis is stripped of ice and there are bees in Regents Park; the tabloids are starved of opportunities to snap naked girls frolicking in the snow; in the Yorkshire Dales, where roads remain unfrozen, there is a salt mountain to match anything the Common Market could cook up. + We could be celebrating, but instead of that there are stories bemoaning the problems in the Cairngorm ski resorts and warning of the threats to earlyblooming daffodils. There is an underlying concern that a cold snap will descent the minute winter woollies are stored. + Jokes about overcoat manufacturers going bust, however, are wasted - stalwart veterans of British winters buy their coats and hot water bottles in early autumn. As the January sales attest, by the New Year the winter stock is marked down for the fast sell and spring collections are on the racks. + A Marks & Spencer spokeswoman cheerfully confirmed yesterday: 'All our winter stocks were sold by Christmas. The buying pattern of the British public is to be prepared, so most of our winter stock went in September.' + For the average punter, these balmy February days promise lower heating bills and better health. And this means that as many as 20,000 lives could be saved amongst the elderly alone. Help the Aged recorded 42,000 cold related deaths during the severe cold snap of 1986. In the relatively mild winter of 1987, the figure was 25,172. + Press officer, Liz Juggins, said: 'Although the problem of inadequate heating remains, the results will be less acute. We are getting calls to our helpline all the time, but not in the same numbers as during a really cold spell.' + The good weather is considered a sliver-lined cloud by mountain rescue services. In some parts of Scotland it has rained heavily lately, but it is still very mild and there has been little snow. The voluntary team covering Ben Nevis and the north west Scottish highland had dealt with 16 call-outs this time last year. This year, there have been three. + Team secretary Andy Nichol said yesterday: 'It has had a very dramatic effect and things are obviously brighter from a rescue point of view. People just aren't coming out.' + On the east coast however, the prestigious St Andrews golf course has seen a 35 per cent increase in winter players. Club official, Mr Ian Forbes, commented: 'Normally the golfing season is from the beginning to April to the end of September, but in the last few weeks there has been an upturn - we are up 35 per cent.' + The cash registers of the Electricity Boards are not tinkling as handsomely. Although it is too early to say how electricity and gas will be affected by the mild weather, February consumption has dropped by five per cent. + A CEGB spokesman added: 'Peak demand is down by about 9 per cent and the number of units used by householders has dropped by 5 per cent in the last week.' + The mild weather has no doubt had a similar effect on the fortunes of British Gas, but their spokesman preferred to look on the bright side yesterday. 'The funny thing about gas is that there are very rarely major swings in its income. Of course, we add about a quarter of a million new customers each year which helps the swing,' he said. + The unpredictable nature of British winters in recent years is no doubt to blame for the suspicion with which the average Briton is treating the long mild spell. Thomson Holidays says that the demand for hot-spot holidays is as great as ever, and yesterday the British Tourist Authority was not aware of any rush for long weekend breaks in Aberdeen, which has boasted Britain's highest temperatures this week. + A spokesman for North Yorkshire County Council, which has so far saved nearly Pounds 1 million on its winter maintenance budget, pointed out dourly: 'Three years ago we had snow on the dales in May.' + But it is not just snow that has eluded us this winter. At the top London umbrella manufacturers, James Smith (established 1830), the manager admitted that the record shortfall of rain over the last four months had led to a noticeable drop in passing trade. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +47 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 9, 1989 + +Bush's budget will trim defence costs: Democrats expected to welcome spending changes + +BYLINE: By MARK TRAN + +LENGTH: 607 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + + + The budget that President George Bush unveils tonight in his first speech to a joint session of Congress will recommend slightly less money for defence and more for new domestic initiatives in keeping with his vision of a 'kinder and gentler nation'. + Mr Bush's Dollars 1.16 trillion budget request should set the tone for his dealings with Congres for the rest of his administration. + Mindful of the importance of the occasion, the President spent yesterday on the Hill, lobbying Democrats and Republicans for his plan. + 'I am under no illusions that we are going to keep everybody happy,' Mr Bush told Senate Republicans at a Capitol Hill luncheon. The administration will have to juggle its budget to meet reduction targets mandated under the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law. + But even Democratic congressional officials predicted at least a polite welcome for Mr Bush's budget, in contrast to the hostile reception that greeted all of Mr Reagan's budgets, 'Democrats found them really offensive - boosting defence while cutting social programmes. They will all be much more conciliatory towards Bush,' said one Democratic aide. + The President has already won plaudits for his handling of the savings and loan (the US equivalent to building societies) crisis. Congress liked the way Mr Bush took the lead in unveiling the administration's initiative to cope with the Dollars 100 billion mess, and gave the package a positive response. + Democrats will certainly acknowledge Mr Bush's decision to trim the defence budget as a step in the right direction, although there will be inevitable demands for actual cuts rather than slower growth. + After a heated debate between his top advisers, Mr Bush has opted for no real growth in military spending for the next fiscal year, about Dollars 2 billion less than President Reagan's farewell Dollars 300 billion plus budget proposal, which called for a 2 per cent increase to make up for inflation. + Mr Bush's proposal would mean Dollars 6.3 billion in cuts to Pentagon programmes next year, although the administration will end up actually saving only about Dollars 2 billion in 1990 because of the long lead time in procurement programmes. + Mr Bush's budget then calls for a 1 per cent increase after inflation in 1992, and 2 per cent growth over inflation in 1993. The Bush proposal would cut Dollars 50 billion in programmes over the next four years. On the other hand, President Bush will dump Mr Reagan's plan to cut spending on Medicaid (health care for the poor), although he will stick to proposals to reduce projected Medicare (health programmes for the elderly) spending by Dollars 5.5 billion next year. + While Democrats are expected to applaud Mr Bush's trimming of the defence budget and increased spending for the homeless, education, the environment, and child care, they will be less thrilled by the President's proposal to cut capital gains tax. + Mr Bush's belief that the measure will actually lead to a Dollars 5 billion gain in revenue has been derided by most economists and lawmakers as the President's own brand of 'voo-doo economics' and just a tax break for the rich. + The preferential tax gain was eliminated by tax reform in 1986, and Mr Bush promised to restore it. + The lower tax rate is expected to apply to sales of shares, land and other non-depreciable assets, but not to profits from the sale of art, antiques or buildings. + Nearly all the added revenue projected from cutting capital-gains taxes would be offset by proposed tax breaks, including incentives for oil and gas exploration, and tax credits for childcare expenses. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +48 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 10, 1989 + +Splits mar dream of Islamic rule: Attempts to reassert Afghan culture and virtue after the years of Soviet occupation + +BYLINE: By DEREK BROWN + +LENGTH: 928 words + +DATELINE: ISLAMABAD + + + This afternoon, in the gaunt cement meeting hall of the Haj complex on the edge of the Pakistan capital, 526 Afghans will try to build a new government for their battered country. + All will be men. All will be Muslims. Most will be extravagantly bearded, and in traditional sombre dress. + On the face of it, this shura, or Islamic consultation, will be the embodiment of Afghan culture and virtue, triumphantly reasserting itself after the dark and bloody era of Soviet occupation. But nothing in Afghanistan, or to do with it, is ever that simple. + The outcome of the shura, whatever it decides or fails to decide, will be bitterly contested by groups excluded from the process. Most obvious among them is the communist regime in Kabul, which insists that it will share power but not surrender it. + But among the Mojahedin rebels, who all reject any deal with Kabul, there are also deep currents of unrest. Monarchists, tribal leaders, members of the Shi'a minority, are to say the least unhappy about the composition of the shura. + Others who are nationalists first and foremost say that Pakistan is railroading the movement into premature judgement. Liberals fear the shura will be dominated by fundamentalists. + Military commanders who have fought and beaten the Soviets and now believe they are on the verge of a final victory for Islam, are offended by the incessant political feuding and incompetence. + Many seasoned and cynical observers say that it was ever thus; that Afghanistan is simply reverting to its pre-Soviet status as an ethnic, linguistic, and cultural stew. Government in Kabul was ever a polite fiction, they say, in a land where true power lay with the maliks (landowners), khans (traditiional rulers), mullahs (priests) and all manner of warlords. + Only now Afghanistan is more heavily armed, per head, than any country on earth. One third of its 16 million people are exiled refugees, another three million are displaced internally, and a million more have been killed. One civil war is already being fought by the Mojahedin against the godless communists in Kabul. In the worst analysis, the Islamabad shura could provoke a couple more. + Only a couple of days ago, the passions and frustrations of the post-Soviet era flared to the surface in the border city of Peshawar, when several thousand monrachists held a rally to protest against the shura in its present form. + There was much applause for Mr Azizullah Wasifi, a former culture minister under Mr Zahir Shah, who said the shura was unacceptable; an imposition by Pakitan, and against the Afghan national interests. + The same can be heard from a multitude of mouths in Peshawar, but this public proclamation was too much for a bunch of Hesbe-i-Islami fundamentalists. + Shouting 'Death to Zahir Shah' they rushed the platform, ripped down microphones, beat up Mr Wasifi and several other elderly men, and for good measure seized and smashed the camera of the watching American CBS news team. Three of the attackers were then shot and critically wounded, and in all 25 people were injured. + The rally was held outside the headquarters of the Afghan National Liberation Front. Its leader, Professor Sibghatullah Mojadidi, is the current chairman of the seven-party Mojahedin Alliance based in Peshawar. + He is also a monarchist. The Hesbe-i-Islami also belongs to the alliance. Its leader, Mr Engineer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is ardento for an Islamic republic. + For many years, Mr Hekmatyar has been the favourite of the Pakistan military and its intelligence service, the ISI. The head of the ISI, Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul, is the last survivor of the inner circle of the late dictator, Zia ul-Haq. + After Zia's death in a still-unexplained air crash last August, Mr Hekmatyar described himself as an orphan. Many colleagues and onlookers agreed, and believed he would fade from the centre-stage. He is still there, and still being stoutly backed by Gen Gul. + Indeed, many of the so-called moderate Mojahedin see the Islamabad shura as the intended creature of Mr Hekmatyar and Gen Gul. The former is vigorously promoting the cause of Mr Ahmed Shah, the 'prime minister' of last year's short-lived provisional government-in-exile, to be confirmed as head of the next Kabul regime. + It is an outcome which the anti-Hekmatyar faction is determined to avoid. Mr Ahmed Shah's government, they point out acidly, was actually dissolved after a few months. + Its only success was in persuading the Saudi Arabians to disgorge handsome amounts of dollars to set up an entirely useless secretariat. Only two of its 15 members had the remotest claim to experience or expertise in government. One of them, and many of the others, have since drifted away from Peshawar in disillusion. + The anti-Ahmed Shah forces insist that other candidates will emerge, though they offer no names. For that matter, the entire shura is an almost anonymous affair, in keeping with the far from exacting standards of Afghan democracy. + Each of the seven Peshawar parties have nominated 60 members. Another 80 have been allocated to the Shi'a parties based in Iran. + The clouds of intrige and speculation are unlikely to be dispelled during the two or three days the shura is expected to sit. The press will be excluded, and the delegates confined to the sprawling Haj complex. + At the end of each day the Mojahedin's own news agency (actually controlled by Hekmatyar) will release a communique which will astonish the press only if it says anything at all. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +49 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 11, 1989 + +Weekend Money: Window closing on income bonds + +BYLINE: By MIHIR BOSE + +LENGTH: 620 words + + + If you want to make the most of high interest rates now is your chance. Annette Burton, financial adviser iwth Berkeley St James's says: 'I would say the window of opportunity for such investment will be open for another month.' Investors may be encouraged to open the window by the fact that companies offering fixed rates of investment are already withdrawing their offers or cutting rates. + Last week Canterbury Life offered one of the best rates for three or four-year fixed rate investments at 9.05 and 9.25 per cent net. The offer has now been withdrawn. Hambro Guardian launched a February Bond paying 10.1 per cent net of basic rate tax guaranteed for one year. + Midland Bank cut its interest rates on its high interest deposit bond by half a per cent. The Midland bond, introduced to compete with the National Savings Capital Bond, which pays 12 per cent gross if held for five years, has already attracted Pounds 50 million. Since Midland cut the return it is not as competitive as some of the guaranteed income bonds on offer. + These bonds, like all such fiex interest investments, lock the investor into a fixed rate of interest for a fixed period of time - anything from six months to 10 years. Traditionally, such bonds have appealed to older people looking for security. But if you think, as the industry does, that interest rates are at a peak then it is a good investment to make. + Guaranteed income bonds are not the only form of fixed interest investments. They are sometimes offered by building societies, though generally they simply guarantee a fixed rate differential above the ordinary share account rate. The only society that offers a product to compare with guaranteed income bonds is the Portman. But while its 10 per cent is the same as that offered by Confederation Life on its one-year guaranteed income bond, the rate is fixed only for six months and the minimum deposit of Pounds 5,000 is five times that of Confederation Life. + Generally companies utilise unused tax reliefs to offer attractive interest rates, which is why guaranteed income bonds are often offered by smaller companies. Some guaranteed income bonds - those written by insurance companies as single premium bonds - also have advantages for high rate taxpayers compared with other fixed-interest investments. + Standard rate tax is deemed to have been paid on these bonds. If you are a higher rate taxpayer then you can take 5 per cent income annually 'tax-free' (the tax is in fact deferred for up to 20 years, when higher rate taxpayers have retired and pay standard rate). Over the first 5 per cent you pay the different between the standard and higher rate - 15 per cent on the quoted return. + ------------------------------------------------------------------ + GUARANTEED INCOME BONDS: THE BEST RATES + ------------------------------------------------------------------ + Rate Term Minimum + (%) (years) investment + ------------------------------------------------------------------ + Regency Life 10 1 Pounds 10,000 + New Direction Finance 8.75 2 Pounds 1,000 + Liberty Life 9.25 3 Pounds 5,000 + American Life 9 4 Pounds 1,000 + 9.25 4 Pounds 15,000 + Financial Insurance 9.25 5 Pounds 2,000 + Midland Bank 9.5 6 months Pounds 2,000 + Portman BS 10 6 months Pounds 5,000 + Hambro Guardian 10.1 1 Pounds 5,000 + ------------------------------------------------------------------ + Rates net of Basic tax. Source: Chase de Vere Moneyline + (01 404 5766). + ------------------------------------------------------------------ + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +50 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 13, 1989 + +Agenda: Tell me the old, old story - What do health professionals think of the government's review of the NHS / The Consultant + +BYLINE: By KALMAN KAFETZ + +LENGTH: 749 words + + + From its beginnings, the NHS, uniquely among health care systems, was committed to the care of elderly people when it took over the Workhouse Infirmaries. As a result, the principles and practice of a medical approach to elderly people developed, much admired worldwide, which makes the NHS ideally suited to coping with the ageing population. + The basis of the approach is that disability amongst elderly people is primarily caused by disease rather than age and that prompt treatment can prevent dependence and the need for institutional care. Such an outcome is preferred by elderly people and taxpayers alike. + Crucially, there needs to be involvement of specialists in the medical problems of elderly people in acute care to prevent the need for chronic care. Any separation of the so-called 'acute sector' and the so-called 'geriatric sector' is expensive and inefficient. + Nevertheless it is clear, both from the DHSS performance indicators and the reports of the NHS's own inspectorate, that standards of both acute and chronic care for elderly people are extremely variable. The elimination of such variability is a major aim of the NHS review. The chances of success, however, are questionable. + The major reason is that the review ignores the vast amount of money pumped into residential care of elderly people by the DHSS, recently strongly criticised by the Audit Commission. A proposal by Sir Roy Griffiths that this should be channelled to local authorities conflicted with the government's political aims of reducing council's influence. So the money continues to be spent. + Some of what is spent on paying for institutionalising elderly people could be more effectively transferred to treatment of the disabilities that lead to the institutionalisation in those districts where poor performance is due to poor resources rather than poor management or clinical incompetence. + Some of the money could also be transferred to GPs to increase their control of community care. The White Paper proposes that GPs in large practices should hold a budget for aspects of accute care. But they are unlikely to use this for elderly people partly because a defeatist attitude to care of the elderly is still rampant and partly because there will be no financial incentive. + increasing numbers of GPs are committed to the concept of primary care teams and are qualified in the care of the elderly. Devolving budgets to such GPs may be more appropriate than the porposals of the White Paper. They could buy institutional or community care within cash limits, invest in therapists in the community and be able to pay for adaptions to homes. + This would involve an extension of the current role of the practise manager. They would need to have support from, and instant access to a specialist hsopital unit, at no cost to their own budgets. + Tax relief for elderly people for their contributions to private health insurance will have a marginal effect. Increasing claims by elderly people from private health insurers will bring a disproportionate increase in costs because the elederly stay longer in hsopital than younger people. So premiums are likely to increase and at least balance out the discount to the consumer that tax relief will provide. + There is much in the White Paper that may inhibit health authorities and local authorities from working together. While one may have reservations about the roles of councillors on heath authroties, the fact remains tha tthey are elected by local people. Removing them, as is proposed, can only make joint working more difficult. + Elderly people will also lose out if their local hospital is less efficient than its neighbour, to which resources may be transferred. Admitted to a local hospital, fast and cost-effective throughput of elderly people can be arranged safely if there is co-ordinate ddischarge planning between hospital and community staff. + But discharge planning is more difficult the further away elderly people are from their own locality and to maintain cost-effectiveness they may find themselves discharged without plans. + They need to improve the quality of helath care of the elderly countrywide, so that the benefits of good practice in some areas can spread to all areas, is undeniable. This is the avowed aim of the NHS review, but there seems little prospect of engineering this sort of change by the proposals in the White Paper. + Kalman Kafetz is a consultant geriatrician. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +51 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 14, 1989 + +Charges dropped against tourist over deaths in Miami hotel fire + +LENGTH: 190 words + + + Charges of killing two pensioners in a hotel fire in Miami, in the United States, were yesterday dropped against Ms Tara Terry, 19, of Camberley, Surrey. + The holidaymaker had been charged with arson after a fire at the Nassau Hotel last September had killed two elderly Americans, an 82-year-old man and a 76-year-old woman. + The prosecution said she had set fire to her third floor room after an argument with her boyfriend Mark Richardson, from Berkshire. But he refused to return to Miami to give evidence against her and yesterday, as the case opened, the chief prosecutor, Mr Dexter Lehtinen, said the charges, which carried a maximum sentence of life, were being dropped. + Earlier, Judge Kenneth L. Ryskamp had questioned the basis of the case. 'There would be a problem proving wilful intent on the part of this defendant,' he said. + Miss Terry had been charged under an infrequently used federal arson statute, making it illegal to set fires in establishments doing inter-state business. + As she left the courtroom, Miss Terry told the prosecutor: 'You have put me through hell. You ought to go to church.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +52 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 14, 1989 + +Drug firm seeks court ban on anti-depressant warning + +BYLINE: By CLARE DYER, Legal Correspondent + +LENGTH: 349 words + + + A drug manufacturer yesterday asked the High Court to prevent the Department of Health warning doctors not to give elderly patients an anti-depressant that has been linked to at least 12 deaths. + A warning of the potential hazards of the drug, Bolvidon, is blocked by an injunction obtained by Organon Laboratories, pending a decision in its case, the first challenge to the Government's drug safety procedures to be brought by a pharmaceutical company. + The official Committee on Safety of Medicines' notice was to have appeared in Current Problems, the early warning bulletin for doctors. It advised them not to prescribe Bolvidon (also marketed by Beecham as Norval) for patients over 65, with two exceptions: those who fail to respond to other anti-depressants, or those with glaucoma or an enlarged prostate. + Following advice from the committee, the Department of Health decided to put similar restrictions on Organon's product licence for Bolvidon, whose generic name is mianserin. + The department's concern centres on patients suffering from agranulocytosis, destruction of white blood cells that fight infection. In 1985 Current Problems reported 113 blood reactions in patients taking Bolvidon, twelve of them fatal, and that the elderly appeared particularly susceptible. + The drug is Britain's third or fourth best-selling anti-depressant, widely prescribed for elderly people; one million prescriptions a year are written, worth Pounds 2 million in sales. A restriction on the British product licence could also have substantial repercussions for sales of Pounds 35 million worldwide. + Organon says that the department failed to take account of the relative safety of other anti-depressants to which patients would have to switch if the licence was restricted. It argues that studies show, for instance, that Bolvidon is safer than other anti-depressants if taken in overdose, and that it has fewer adverse effects on the heart. The department says it considered the latter in reaching its decision. + A court decision is expected by the end of the month. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +53 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 15, 1989 + +Company Briefing: Healthy profit at Egerton + +LENGTH: 170 words + + + Egerton Trust, the property developer with quarrying and other interests in the eastern United States and rapidly-expanding geriatric care activities, made healthy profit progress despite some temporary handicaps last year. Ahead of the presidential election, housing demand in the US was sluggish and a Pounds 2 million profit realisation on a property sale at home was delayed. + Turnover was consequently Pounds 3.7 million lower at Pounds 110.6 million after a strong start and some contribution from acquisitions. Led by UK housing, profit climbed by Pounds 2.1 million to Pounds 10.07 million. Minerals, were close behind, including initial contributions from two small US aggregates acquisitions. + Health care moved into the black and the link with Private Patients Plan presaging developments in which the frail elderly will be nursed in more congenial surroundings than the National Health Service can provide. + A final dividend of 4.5p, up 1p, makes the total 6.5p net a share, against 4.75p. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +54 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 15, 1989 + +Bush refuses to put the squeeze on spending + +BYLINE: By ALEX BRUMMER + +LENGTH: 451 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + + + President Bush has expressed strong opposition to any furthe tightening of US credit conditions despite new figures, released yesterday, which suggest consumer demand is growing too rapidly. + In a wide ranging interview with the Wall Street Journal Mr Bush said he would not like to see any tightening now, arguing: 'We've got excess plant capacity in the country.' + Mr Bush's remarks appeared to put him on a collision course with the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Dr Alan Greenspan who has been pushing up short term interest rates in response to fears of higher inflation. + The January retail sales figures released yesterday climbed by 0.6 per cent suggesting that consumer demand remains exceptionally strong. The Federal Reserve and Wall Street economists fear high demand in the US could threaten overheating of the economy and a worsening of the US's international trade position. + 'It's another element that edges the Fed in that (higher) direction,' warned Mr Greg Gieber, Vice-President of the New York brokers Smith Harris Upham & Co. The retail sales figures showed strength across the board from cars to clothing. + However, the Bush White House is counting on high growth and low interest rates to lower the budget deficit which it says will fall to under Dollars 94.8 billion in the 1990 financial year. + Mr Bush and his Budget Director Mr Richard Darman are being severely criticised on Capitol Hill for a financial sleight of hand which leaves his budget some Dollars 10 billion short of the cuts required to meet the deficit target even if the most favourable economic conditions prevail. + In his Wall Street Journal interview Mr Bush suggested that some of the cuts he is seeking could come from Medicare health insurance for the elderly while he also looked unfavourably at government grants to the Amtrak railway system. + The President is seeking an early agreement with Congress on a negotiating forum where budget diferences can be better resolved. + Among the other difficulties Mr Bush could face on the budget is the cost of the savings and loan rescue plan. With short term interest rates rising the cost of the bail-out could eventually prove greater than the Administration's current estimate of Dollars 90 billion of which some Dollars 50 billion will be borne by the federal authorities. + However, with growth in the US economy apparantly booming and inflation on the rise Mr Bush could find himself under pressure from the Federal Reserve - the US central bank which controls monetary policy. + While the dollar eased yesterday on Mr Bush's interst rate remarks many analysts believe the trend in US money costs will continue upward. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +55 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 15, 1989 + +Parliamentary Sketch: Food warnings to be taken with a pinch of salt + +BYLINE: By ANDREW RAWNSLEY + +LENGTH: 572 words + + + To clear up public confusion about food poisoning, this column's medical advisers have issued the following guidelines on which Government statements are now safe to consume. The short advice is: none of them. The longer advice is inevitably rather more complicated. + In general, the risk to the healthy adult from ministerial statements on the the safety or otherwise of eggs, cheese or other dairy products is quite small, providing anything said by ministers on radio or television is taken only as part of a normal balanced diet of light entertainment and comedy. + The elderly, the sick, babies, pregnant women, cheese producers, egg farmers and other vulnerable groups should not be fed any ministerial statements, which carry an unacceptably high risk of spreading panic and confusion. + Everybody should avoid anything produced by John MacGregor or Kenneth Clarke, where the Whitehall foot-in-mouth outbreaks is at its worst. + According to the Agriculture Minister: 'There is no question of banning sales of cheese made from unpasteurised milk.' According to the Health Secretary: 'John has said he is considering banning cheese made from non-pasteurised milk.' + All further statements by Mr MacGregor or Mr Clarke should be regarded as unfit for human consumption until further notice or they are told to hand in their notice, whichever is the sooner. The column's Chief Medical Officer has also issued the following advice about anything said by the Prime Minister. For healthy people there is the usual level of risk associated with believing anything said by the Prime Minister, whether hardboiled or scrambled. + Everyone should avoid listening to answers to questions made out of raw or chilled Thatcher. She is best served as she was in Question Time yesterday by Mr Kinnock - thoroughly roasted. + Answers made up of mouldy statistics or stale scorn - 'I really had expected better of you' to Mr Kinnock - are a reliable sign that she is in trouble, he has asked an excellent question and she knows it. + The Government's latest statement on cheese - read by Mrs Thatcher at Question Time - must be regarded as unsafe. Preliminary tests suggest it, too, is badly infected with the fatal mixture of confusion, panic and complacency which is sweeping Whitehall. + 'The position,' Mrs Thatcher said,' is that in Scotland there is already a ban on sales of unpasteurised liquid milk and cream to the general public ..' Yes, but read on. ' .. the Ministry of Agriculture is considering whether unpasteurised liquid milk and cream for sale to the public should also be banned in England and Wales ..' Notice the first symptoms of confusion. + Are the Scots more easily poisoned than the English or Welsh, or is their milk and cream more poisonous? Confusion is usually followed by a severe outbreak of consultation documents. ' .. a consultation document will be issued shortly ..' + After a while they will develop into a Code of Practice. ' .. A Code of Practice for major manufacturers has already been issued ..' Told you so. 'A Code of Practice for smaller cheese-makers is in draft.' By now confusion is epidemic. Why less urgency about smaller cheese producers? Are they less likely to be poisonous than taller ones? + Until further clarification is available, only buy cheese from Welsh dwarfs. In the meantime, take all Government advice about food only with a large pinch of salt. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +56 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 16, 1989 + +Hunt for masked gang preying on elderly in isolated farms + +BYLINE: By TONY HEATH + +LENGTH: 197 words + + + Police yesterday stepped up the search for a gang of robbers preying on elderly people living in isolated farmhouses in the Shropshire countryside after two raids within a few miles of each other. + In the first raid, three masked men forced their way into an isolated cottage outside Ludlow and tied up Mr Sidney Evans, aged 75, who suffers from arthritis and walks with the aid of sticks. After wrapping a blanket round his head, the raiders ransacked the house, ripped out the telephone and made off with Pounds 200. + In the second raid, less than an hour later, five masked men forced their way into a farmhouse at Bolden near Craven Arms. They tied up Mrs Edna Bradley, aged 60, and Mr Jack Wall, 73, and threatened them before searching the house for valuables and making off on the farm's tractor with Pounds 50 in cash after ripping out the telephone. + In both raids, the victims eventually freed themselves and raised the alarm. + West Mercia police described the gang as dangerous, and warned householders to be on their guard. + Thieves broke into an antiques shop in Llandrindod Wells, Powys, yesterday, making off with an 18th-century Welsh dresser. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +57 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 17, 1989 + +Third World Report: Apartheid's vicious assault on the poor - News Analysis + +BYLINE: By VICTORIA BRITTAIN + +LENGTH: 932 words + + + The link between poverty and powerlessness is the same the world over. So, in South Africa, where the government represents only 15 per cent of the population, it is hardly surprising that the gap between rich and poor is the highest in the world - way above, for instance, Brazil and nearly twice as high as the US. + Half of South Africa's people live below what is estimated as subsistence level, while in the reserves, 80 per cent of people live in poverty so dire their very survival is in question from day to day. But unlike the poverty of every other country, there is, in the view of South Africa's own academics, who have worked on this mammoth research project, a single precondition for tackling it seriously in their country and the surrounding region - the end of apartheid. + The second Carnegie Commission's eight-year study now reveals with a wealth of detail what its academic writers call, 'apartheid's assault on the poor'. Professor Francis Wilson and Dr Mamphela Ramphele of the University of Cape Town identify 'six major lines of attack .. the shift in policy to dispossession; anti-black-urbanisation, forced removals; Bantu education; crushing of organisation; destabilisation.' + The first Carnegie Commission in the 1920s was funded by the US-basded Carnegie Corporation to study the conditions of poor whites in South Africa. It was enormously influential and became the basis of effective state aciton to improve their lot. Could Carnegie II become a similar watershed for the South African Government and the many international agencies working there to confront the terrible evidence of the inexorably worsening poverty revealed in the vast statistical annexes of this book? + Can the fact that one-third, and in some places two-thirds, of black children are now underweight and stunted be tolerated as a side-effect of apartheid? + Or the old people found by one researcher 'in dark rooms, on ragged beds, mostly hungry, often filthy .. a paralysed old woman, persistently scraping the bottom of an empty pot and putting her claw-like hand to her mouth in despairing imitation of eating, or an old man bludgeoned by poverty into .. vacant apathy, alive only because he was not dead, who only said when asked what was wrong, 'I am hungry.'' + 'The countryside is pushing you into the cities to survive, the cities are pushing yuo into the countryside to die,' a migrant worker told one of Carnegie's several hundred reserachers. It is a simple formulation of the disaster of the social engineering project that lies behind South African government policy. + The book weaves together the structural and interlinked causes of poverty which have sprung in large part from the 'rapid and artificial increase' in the rural population of the reserves. The pressure of population in these areas has brought the fuel and water crises so familiar in much of rural Africa, and an ecological disaster which has produced 'dustbowl conditions.' + The drought of the early 1980s brought into sharp relief the accumulated vulnerabilities of rural life. The researchers found, for instance, in Gazankulu in the Eastern Transvaal where 50 per cent of rural families are landless, people paying 67 times more for their water than suburban dwellers in the Cape Town suburbs. And as the supply of wood for fuel dwindled under the pressure of people cutting it in ever-widening circles around their homes, families were found, in Bophuthatswana for instance, who cannot afford to cook once a day. + Against this background of poverty it is not surprising to find that two-thirds of black households have no electricity. But with South Africa generating 60 per cent of the electricity in the whole continent of Africa, it is surely legitimate to ask why this pattern cannot be changed. In addition, the data on the huge expense of fuel in urban areas 'clearly dispels the popular myth that most black households canot afford electricity'. + With urban unemployment running at a level measured in some areas, Grahamstown for instance, at a staggering 60-70 per cent, poverty in the towns is no less acute than in rural areas. The despair and powerlessness the researchers report are described as 'the inability of people without boots to pull themselves up by the straps'. + A vivid description of the Ithuseng community health project, which Dr Ramphele herself started when she was banished to a remote areas for a period in 1978, is one of many pinpricks of light in the grim picture this book presents. The authors expect no swift end to the apartheid regime, and in their strategies for the immediate alleviation of poverty concentrate on the 'empowerment of people', as Ithuseng did with its host of projects which grew from the health centre, and on the building of organisations. + Pretoria's banningo f 32 organisations during 1988, and the systematic withholding of power from 85 per cent of its population demonstrated by the conduct of last October's ethnic municipal elections, goes of course in the opposite direction. This research explains as nothing has in such detail before, the unprcendented upsurge of black revolt against the apartheid system which has spread from urban to rural areas since 1984. + Uprooting Poverty, The South African Challenge, by Francis Wilson and Mamphela Ramphele. Published in South Africa by David Philip, and to be published in Britain on March 8 by W. W. Norton, price Pounds 18.95. Picture from The Cordoned Heart, published as part of the Carnegie inquiry by Gallery Press/Norton, price Dollars 14.95 + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +58 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 20, 1989 + +Moscow Diary + +BYLINE: By JONATHAN STEELE + +LENGTH: 736 words + + + The sky outside my open window is blue, women are sunbathing on balconies nearby, and the first fly of 1989 has just settled on top of my word processor. Europe's warm spell has not missed Moscow out. The weathermen say there has never been a Russian winter like it for 120 years. + It has not been quite as warm as Britain, even though one day last week the mercury on the thermometer outside the kitchen window soared up to a cheery 15 degrees. For the last three or four weeks it has been hovering between five and ten degrees by day. + At night, of course, the temperature falls and therein lies the problem. Most of theh city's side-roads and pavements are covered in black ice. The warm days are not enough to melt more than a top coating of the snow which fell liberally in December. At night the surface freezes over, forming a slippery crust. The courtyards of virtually every block of flats as well as the sides of the roads are littered with piles of black snow. The accumulated grime and muck of a city where factory chimneys push out fumes with near-total impunity settles like a film on the pristine snow. + People walk along taking tiny awkward steps like pigeons. The hospital casualty departments are full of patients with fractured arms and legs. You see at least one car crash every day. Whatever else perestroika has done, everyone complains it has not improved Moscow's street-cleaning services. In the old days, they say, the formidable army of machines had the job done perperly. + Lorries would grit the streets. Machines with a sloping conveyor-belt contraption at the back and two metal arms at the bottom would gather in the snow as soon as it settled and lift it out of harm's way. Wielding old-fashioned brooms and shovels, retired grandmothers would handle the problem in every block of flats. + Anatoly Meshkov, who has the thankless task of running Moscow's clean-up operations, has a pile of excuses as high as the snow outside. Lack of government money, the need to make staff cuts, sloppy workers, no appropriate technology - he knows them all. The city's 2,177 snow-removal machines take four hours to handle a normal snowfall. + This sounds impressive, until he explains that this is too slow to prevent ice forming. Anyway, the machines are too huge to manoeuvre on pavements and side-roads so these get neglected. The city pays only 10,000 old people to clear the yards, which is two-thirds less that it needs. Another 1,000 were sacked in December. Many others find the work too arduous and give up. + The worst aspect of the warm climate is that it has ruined winter sports. The soccer fields and playgrounds which are flooded with water to make skating rinks are either a sea of crunchy mush, or when they freeze again they become a bumpy version of the moon's surface, craters and all. + In the woods around the city the snow is cleaner but we have only managed to get on our cross-country skis about four times. One of the best places is the monastery complex of Kolomenskoe beside the Moscow river where you can glide along within sight of snow-covered onion domes. Or there is the city's last forest at Bitsa. + The birch trees are packed close together and you ski down narrow paths, marvelling at the clarity of the contrasting light and shadows of branches on the snow. In desperation we tried again last weekend but the top of the snow is crusted with ice and the tracks worn down by other skiers are like hard mini-canyons. The fun went after the first three minutes. + So winter sports are reduced to being a spectators' thing, and not as popular as one might imagine. There is the ice hockey league at the stadium beside the great outdoor Olympic arena. It always has plenty of empty seats. Last week we were introduced to a new game, the world championships of bandy. The game is described as ice-hockey with a ball. It is played with eleven players on each side on a huge rink as large as a luminous orange thing which can be hit high into the air on goal-kicks. Only five countries took part in the world championships, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the Soviet Union, and the United States. We watched one match in which the Russians lost to Sweden. The crowd minded less than we expected. As far as we were concerned, the scores mattered less than the sight of an acre of smooth, lovingly tended ice, a hint of real winter beyond our reach. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +59 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 22, 1989 + +Health Guardian: Dying for information? - Are old people starving because so little is known of their nutritional needs + +BYLINE: By SIMON WOLFF + +LENGTH: 724 words + + + Much is known about the nutritional requirements of young, growing, fit people. But we know very little about what and how much elderly people need to eat. Accidentally, they may be starving to death. + The increase in the numbers of the elderly is new. The virtual eradication of life-threatening infectious disease, improved sanitation and housing, and less overt malnutrition has greatly increased life-expectancy. + But little research has been done on the special nutritional requirements of the old. Investigating causes of ageing and age-related disease are seen as low priority at a time of generalised cuts in research funding. + Our knowledge of the relationship between height, weight and health comes not from medical research but from life insurance statistics collected over decades. This information is based on young adults. How many 70-year-olds seek life insurance? Little is known even about their desirable weight range. Some old people lost weight dramatically, yet remain healthy for years. Others seem simply to waste away. Similarly, recommended dietary allowances (RDAs) of vitamins and minerals are based on young people, not on the elderly's special needs. + Old people who stay in hospital for extended periods often lose a lot of weight. It was always believed this was a result of increased metabolic rate caused by disease. But although it is true that young people experience weight loss and metabolic rate increase during acute illness, perhaps as part of the fight against infection, this does not occur in the chronically sick elderly. They lose weight for the simple reason that they do not eat as much as they did at home. + 'Institutionalised starvation' may occur despite the good intentions of nursing staff. Dietary habits are grossly disturbed by a move into hospital. Having to eat three standard cook-chill meals a day in hurried, uncomfortable circumstances can make elderly people lose their appetite. At home they may eat just one leisurely meal each day and lots of snacks when desired. + Another factor affecting food intake is the state of people's teeth. Poorly fitting dentures and missing or rotten teeth affect the desire and ability to consume enough food. + But the problem is greater than institutional care or bad teeth. As we grow old, we become more susceptible to infection and our tissues become damaged, resulting in arthritis, kidney failure and heart disease. This decline in function is not simply due to wear and tear. As we age, the rate of tissue damage probably increases alongside a decreased ability to repair such damage. + Recognition of the importance of vitamin D in bone growth helped eradicate childhood rickets, but how much vitamin D is required by older people to keep their bones strong? And how well do they utilise their intake of calcium? + The availability of fresh fruit and vegetable made scurvy, severe deficiency of vitamin C, rare. But little is known about the consequences of vitamin C subnutrition - less than optimal levels of intake. Vitamin C also acts as an antioxidant, protecting tissues against the damage caused by free-radicals, reactive molecules causing unwanting oxidation. + One theory of ageing and age-related disease is that free radical production increases over the passage of time. It may be that the elderly do not get enough vitamin C, and possibly vitamin E and selenium, for this vital protective function. + Levels of vitamin B2 may also differ between healthy old people and those with clinical disease, although it is difficult to assess how much of this vitamin is needed to maintain adequate tissue function. Recognising complete tissue breakdown is easier than measuring a decline which has not yet reached danger levels. + Widespread concern has been expressed about the lack of information on age-related disease and the importance of trace elements and vitamins in the diet. A recent workshop, organised by the charity Research into Ageing, highlighted these failings and the lack of basic information on desirable weight ranges, RDAs, and the worrying phenomenon of institutionalised starvation. The chance to reduce much of the pain and disability of old age remains slim until these questions are answered. + Research into Ageing, 49 Queen Victoria Street, London EC4N 4SA (01-236 4365). + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +60 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 22, 1989 + +Health Guardian: Under pressure - Hypertension - the 'silent killer' + +BYLINE: By ANN ROBINSON + +LENGTH: 642 words + + + High blood pressure (BP) is known as the silent killer. It contributes to heart disease - the commonest cause of death in western nations - plus strokes, kidney damage, eye problems, and hardening of the arteries. + People with very high BP are about four times more likely to suffer a heart attack than people with low BP. It is believed to affect about 15 per cent of people over the age of 30, but only half are known to their general practitioner. + There is no such thing as normal BP, only a range within which people fall, depending mainly on age and sex. It is described by an upper (systolic) and lower (diastolic) figure recording the pressure of blood in blood vessels. + BP can be as low as 60/30 during sleep and shoots up to 150/90 during sexual intercourse. It varies throughout the day and many normal, mildly stressful activies such as driving can cause it to rise. When pressure is high for a long time it indicates that the blood vessels are damaged. + Most people feel fit and well when they learn they have high BP (hypertension). Contrary to belief, headache, dizziness, or palpitations are rarely signs of the condition. + BP over 160/95 must be treated, although there is dispute over the importance of treating borderline cases (over 140/90) and elderly people. + No one should be told that their BP is raised on a single measurement. Ideally, at least three measurements should be taken over a few weeks. Simply visiting the doctor is enough to cause a transient rise in BP. + General practitioners have been urged to measure BP at least once every five years, as it rises from birth to adulthood and in men continues to rise with age. It is lower in women until the menopause, when it starts to rise. + Apart from age, sex, and a family history of hypertension, environmental and lifestyle factors are important. Obesity, dietary factors, and heavy drinking have all been shown to contribute to its development. The first step in reducing BP is changes in lifestyle. Moderating salt intake can help and also ensure that BP does not rise so fast with age. + Vegetarians have lower BP than meat-eaters, which may be due to the beneficial effects of high levels of potassium in fruit and vegetables. High BP is also more common in soft water areas. The magnesium in hard water may be protective. + Simply losing weight may be enough to reduce hypertension without resort to medication. For each stone increase in weight, systolic pressure increases by 4 mm of mercury. Continuing to smoke increases the risk of a heart attack or stroke. And people who drink more than 10 pints of beer or 20 glasses of wine a week should cut down. + Stress control and relaxation techniques, such as yoga, meditation, and biofeedback, can be remarkably effective in lowering raised BP. Hypertensives should also consider stopping or changing any drugs which cause BP to rise, such as some contraceptive pills. + While lifestyle modification may do the trick, medication is often necessary. Today's range of drugs, aiming to reduce diastolic pressure to below 90 mm in most cases, can all have unpleasant side-effects, including headaches, sleepiness, flushing, and impotence in men. They include beta-blockers, diuretics, calcium antagonists, and ACE inhibitors. + The most important advice for anyone with mild to moderately high BP is to learn to relax, to lose excess weight, to drink less, and to stop smoking. + The diet should also be improved by reducing consumption of saturated fat, salt and sugar, and increasing consumption of fruit, vegetables, and unrefined carbohydrates. Regular exercise strengthens the cardiovascular system and aids weight loss. Home-monitoring devices are a new development in control (the cheapest machine costs around Pounds 30) but their reliability is reported to be variable. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +61 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 22, 1989 + +Leading Article: The trial and the odd, old men out + +LENGTH: 666 words + + + Kafka's The Trial is scheduled for publication in Prague in 1992, now that the authorities have nervously authorised a limited edition of The Castle for the first time in over 20 years. The trial of Mr Vaclav Havel, the Czechoslovak playwright arrested after the demonstrations last month in Wenceslas Square, was summarily settled yesterday with less delay. The sentencing of Mr Havel to nine months of harsh regime in jail echoed the brutal repression of those demonstrations by the Prague authorities and their defiance then of international as well as domestic opinion. Their action had coincided with the signing in Vienna of the new international accord on human rights, and it offered western sceptics a free handful of ammunition against glasnost, much to Soviet annoyance. Last week Mr Gorbachev pointedly lectured the Czechoslovak Prime Minister Mr Ladislav Adamec on the need for democracy, and a Soviet newspaper called for a reassessment of the 1968 invasion. + Yesterday's court decision means that Prague has again chosen to isolate itself from the mainstream of state socialist reform. Its conservative leadership still seems well entrenched, lagging so far behind the mood for change in Hungary, the Soviet Union and now Poland as to appear to belong to an earlier generation. Yet to cling to the neo-Stalinist line now means increasingly to lodge Czechoslovakia in a state of floodlit anachronism - another Romania or Bulgaria. And how many Czechs or Slovaks really relish that sort of comparison? The inner signs of conservative weakness are visible behind the talk of defending the gains of socialism against its enemies. Mr Jan Fojtik, the party head of ideology, urges a tough campaign against the human rights organisation Charter 77. But interestingly he does so on the grounds that the government has 'underestimated' its strength. Mr Milos Jakes, the party's General Secretary of just one year's standing, and the party purger after 1968, keeps quiet. Those who were purged - fully one third of the party at the time - remain outside. This is both an obstacle to reform because it represents a real threat to the authorities, and a reservoir for long-term renewal. Meanwhile Mr Miroslav Stepan, head of the Prague party organisation, tries to open some doors towards the alienated intelligentisia. + Reform has been frustrated so far in Czechoslovakia largely because its historical trauma - the 1968 Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion -was so recent. Most of those responsible have not aged sufficiently to take the chauffeur-driven car and retire. The struggles to neutralise Stalinism in the Soviet Union and to broach the taboo of 1956 in Hungary have taken much longer. And the Polich trauma - which also dates back to 1956 - is only beginning to be seriously dismantled after eight years of apparent political stale-mate. The relatively stronger Czechoslovak economy (until recently) also helped to anaesthetise public opinion which settled on the whole for a process of reluctant adaptation. In his famous open letter to President Gustav Husak in 1975, Mr Havel acknowledged that a sort of stability had been created. 'True enough, the country is calm,' he wrote. 'Calm as a morgue or as a grave, wouldn't you say?' + Summing up this enforced normalization, the Czechoslovak dissident writer Milan Simecka has called 1968 'the penultimate chapter' in the struggle. The final chapter, he wrote prophetically, 'may well be provided by anotehr country, or more than one country at once.' Here we return to Mr Gorbachev. Two years ago, when he attended the party plenum in Prague, the Czechoslovak conservatives could still find support in the Soviet press. Tactically, Mr Gorbachev at that time would not have been helped by political convulsions elsewhere. Now his own future may depend in part on the momentum for reform being maintained on the periphery as well as in the ceentre. The Czech conservatives are playing a deeply dangerous end game. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +62 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 23, 1989 + +Hirohito's mourners vie for diplomatic gains + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL WHITE + +LENGTH: 456 words + + + TOKYO + President George Bush arrives in the Japanese capital today to head an extraordinary congregation of world leaders assembled to pay tribute to the late Emperor Hirohito and to the economic ascendancy of modern Japan. + Mr Bush will arrive after Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Foreign Secretary, but ahead of the Duke of Edinburgh. The Duke's every public move in a 48-hour trip will be scrutinised by journalists eager to sense the mood of the irascible second world war veteran towards a fellow-royal who led the losing side in a Pacific conflict notorious for racial bitterness. + The duke will apparently join others in making 'an act of reverence', likely to be a minimalist nod or bow, before the coffin. On Saturday he will pay a visit, not his first, to the Commonwealth war Graves Cemetery at Hodogaya. Sir Geoffrey will also attend. + The familiar twin rirtuals took place in Tokyo yesterday of intense security precautions and frantic efforts to secure diplomatic advantage in bilateral exchanges on the margins of tomorrow's state funeral. + Police announced at Narita international airport, as close to central Tokyo as Reading is to Charing Cross, that two 90-centimetre mortars with primed time-firing devices had been found in a forest a mile from the runways. + Neither contained explosive charges, but they were construed as one of the threatened leftwing attacks upon the 'emperor system' which could yet mar the elaborate ceremonials. Suicides by the elderly bereaved on funeral day are not being ruled out either. + On the diplomatic front, the Soviet Vice-President, Mr Anatoly Lukyanov, one of tomorrow's Second X1 guests among the 163 countries to be represented, met the embattled Japanese Prime Minister, Mr Noboru Takeshita. They appeared to agree to disagree over the centrality of four Kurile Islands. Their competing claims for the isalnds have delayed a post-war peace treaty between Russia and Japan. + Mr Bush will present no such difficulties. Before leaving on an arduous direct flight from Washington - which would have necessitated a three-day 'jet-lag' dawdle for ex-President Reagan - he again spoke of 'renewed partnership' with the US's key military ally, and economic rival, in the Pacific. + Japan is juggling efforts to accommodate bilateral meetings at appropriate levels with all the visitors, though some will have to be collective efforts. It has hinted that welcome condolences should not be accompanied by inappropriate demands on its fat wallet. + Amid the flurry of kings and presidents, both British VIPs will meet the new Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko before flying home - separately. Sir Geoffrey flies British Airways, the Duke the Queen's Flight. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +63 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 23, 1989 + +Drug injunction waived + +BYLINE: By CLARE DYER, Legal Correspondent + +LENGTH: 297 words + + + Organon laboratories, makers of the anti-depressant drug mianserin, yesterday agreed to waive a high court injunction preventing the publication of a warning about the drug's side effects. + The Government drug watchdog, the Committee on Safety of Medicines, will now publish its findings in the bulletin Current Problem, which is distributed to doctors. + The high court imposed the injunction after Organon challenged a Department of Health decision to restrict the use of the drug, which is sold under the trade name Bolvidon. The department had intended to try and get the injunction lifted today but Organon yesterday agreed to a compromisie in which the wording of the warning was changed. The warning will no longer recommend that Bolvidon should only be used for elderly patients if other anti-depressants failed. + The case is the first in which a drug company has succeeded in preventing the safety committee from warning about drug hazards. + Concern about the drug centres on reports from doctors of blood problems in patients including the potentially fatal agranulocytosis, destruction of the white blood cells that fight infection. More than 130 reports have been received by the department, including 18 deaths. + Organon won a high court ruling last week quashing the department's decision to restrict Bolvidon's use in patients over 65. The department proposed to limit its product licence to patients under 65, except for those with glaucoma or symptoms of prostate enlargement, or those failing to respond to other anti-depressants. The high court held that the department made a legal error in ruling out evidence that Bolvidon may be less likely than other anti-depressants to prove fatal if taken in overdose. The department is appealing. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +64 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 24, 1989 + +Leading Article: Caring questions + +LENGTH: 567 words + + + After the nanny state, the granny state. By the end of this century the number of people over 85 will have increased by 50 per cent, to over one million. Although the vast majority will still be looked after by family, friends and neighbours, the demands which they will make on the health and social services will be immense. And one group will be particularly difficult: the psychogeriatric suffering from dementia or other mental illnesses. Degenerative changes in the brain and its blood vessels in people over 65 result in a large increase in mental illness. There are other age-related factors as well: retirement, bereavement, poor mobility, physical ill health and the unwanted side effects of medication. A joint working party of physicians and psychiatrists looked at some of these challenges in a major report published yesterday. + Their first concern is the informal carers - the families who spend 24 hours a day looking after granny. Even the most stoic carers can be worn down dealing with the same question from the armchair in the corner from morning to night. Yet this is often the lightest burden compared to the restlessness, aggression, disturbed nights and incontinence which many people with dementia suffer from. No health system can cope with the numbers involved. But even with informal carers, the costs are high. There have to be day centres where the demented can be taken to provide some relief. Community nurses are needed to monitor the patients and provide links to the hospitals when acute care is needed. + The working party estimates that there are presently about 250 consultants dealing with the psychogeriatric. It cannot begin to cope. That force in the field will need to double in the next decade. The report calculates that a population of 20,000 pensioners produces 300 new hospital referrals annually, continuing contact with another 400 existing patients, some 400 admissions a year and about 4,000 home visits from the staff of the psychogeriatric unit. + Few will want to argue with the main thrust of the findings. It maintains the trend fo the alst two decades: reducing to a minimum the numbers who have to go into longstay hospitals because of the cost and the inhumanity of institutional care. The aim has been to treat the medical problems of the elderly as quickly as possible in an acute hospital so that they do not get worse and the patient can return home. But the prospect of psychogeriatric services developing in the way which the report wants looks considerably less likely since the Government unveiled its new plans for the health service. Under those plans, hospitals will become more autonomous. One area which hospitals will not want to extend into is psychogeriatrics, with its low status, high staffing ratios and longer than average use of beds. It also requires close links with community medical services. Theoretically, these could be linked to the hospitals; but in such doctor-dominated institutions, the wards will take priority over community services. The more one looks at psychogeriatrics the move obvious becomes the need of a co-ordinating health authority which can require hospitals to provide particular services. The system is already in place, but the Government believes a health market would be better. here is an area of special and growing concern; and, in this area surely, it must be wrong. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +65 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 24, 1989 + +Day-care services 'haphazard and failing to reach needy' + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE + +LENGTH: 219 words + + + Day-care services for elderly people are growing in a haphazard way and are sometimes failing to reach those who need them most, according to a study published today. + Services need to be better coordinated and defined, the study says. There should be a distinction between day care, with emphasis on therapy and support for individual, and day facilities offering primarily social activities. + The study, by the Centre and Policy on Ageing and funded by the Department of Health, says: 'In the interests of 'normalisation' we do not consider that older people whose main needs are for social contacts should necessarily be taken away from their homes to spend all day in a centre which they may find stigmatising. + 'The less gregarious people may prefer social contacts on a smaller scale in their own or neighbours' or relatives' homes. Others may appreciate help in travellng to a local pub, restuarant, cinema or bingo hall, or to a hairdressing salon, rather than going to receive meals, entertainment or hairdressing all in the same place, however convenient that may be for service providers.' + Ms Susan Tester, the author, urges the creation of a national body specialising in day-care issues. + Caring By Day: Bailey Bros & Swinfen, Warner House, Folkestone, Kent, CT19 6PH; Pounds 11. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +66 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 24, 1989 + +Dementia forces families to make agonising choice + +BYLINE: By AILEEN BALLANTYNE, Medical Correspondent + +LENGTH: 561 words + + + Up to one in five couples is likely to have an elderly parent suffering from dementia and 'living and moving in a time and space that is are not our time and space', said Professor Bernard Isaacs of Birmingham University, an expert on geriatric medicine, yesterday. + He had regularly seen marriages break up as a result of the strain of coping with someone who needs total care, turns night into day, and may accuse neighbours of 'stealing things' they think they have lost. + 'Sometimes a husband will just walk out on the grounds that his home is no longer his own, and tell his wife: 'You have to choose between your mother and me.'' + Professor Isaacs finds that in the many areas with lengthy waiting list for NHS long-stay beds, the alternative to the burden falling on a daughter and her partner is often 'one frail elderly person caring for another frail elderly person with dementia', or finding a private home at a cost of around Pounds 250 a week. + 'That is if you find one,' he added. 'Many homes will say they don't have a place, because demented people can upset other residents.' + Dr Colin Godber, a consultant old-age psychiatrist in Southampton, said that often a family caring for a demented relative also teenage children - and is forced to choose between the needs of the two. + Both Professor Isaacs and Dr Godber are are members of working party on the care of the elderly whose report is published today. + The growing problem of dementia is peculiar to developed countries: the likelihood of getting it increases sharply the longer you live. Experts now put its incidence at one in 20 in those aged over 65; for those over 80 (whose numbers will increase dramatically in the next decade) it is one in five. + As a result, said Professor Isaacs, up to one in five couples is likely to have an elderly parent suffering from dementia. + There is no treatment, and no immediate prospect of one being found, for a disease that slowly robs a person of their intelligence. + 'It often starts with a loss of memory for recent events, and progresses to a loss of ability to do basic tasks like cooking and dressing yourself, then on to incontinence. Eventually, the sufferer is hardly able to walk or talk,' said Dr Godber. + Yet even after the disease is advanced, and much memory has been lost, the sufferer may still retain many of their skills, points out Professor Isaacs. + Dementia comes in two types. + Alzheimer's disease, which is thought to be caused partly by an imbalance in the chemical messengers to the brain, leads gradually to considerable personality changes and severe memory loss. + The other, commonly referred to as 'hardening of the arteries', is caused by a series of 'mini-strokes' to the brain. + Without an effective treatment, doctors admit it is not economic to order a brain scan to decide which type of dementia is involved. Although the causes are different, the prognosis is the same: total care, 24 hours a day. + Tim Radford adds: Neuroscientists at Boston University report today in the British science magazine, Nature, that Alzheimer patients often have a poor sense of smell, and sufferers were found to have abnormalities in the olfactory, or smelling, nerves in the nostrils; biopsies from the lining of the nasal passages may be a way to diagnose the development of the disease. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +67 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 24, 1989 + +It's like living with someone who has already died / Coping with aged relatives with mental disorders + +BYLINE: By ANGELLA JOHNSON + +LENGTH: 514 words + + + Former deputy headmaster Sam Wood has to be tied to a chair at meal times and when his wife needs to work in the house. He is incontinent, unable to wash or dress himself, speaks incoherently and will wander for miles if not watched constantly. + Mr Wood, aged 73, suffers from Alzheimer's disease - a progressive brain disorder for which there is no cure. He is cared for by his wife, Elsie, aged 68, at their home in Shepperton, Surrey. It is a thankless task done out of love which, she says, she can no longer continue without damaging her own health. + 'I'm getting very little sleep because he wakes up at nights and gets restless. If he messes his incontinence pads I have to change and clean him. It's like looking after a child, except there is no joy in watching a once alert and active man decline into a vacant shell,' she said. + Mrs Wood treats her husband as one would a truculent, hyperactive toddler. 'Sometimes he won't stand still while I'm getting him dressed and I have to slap him on the bottom. I try not to lose my temper with him, but it's difficult not to feel angry when someone regularly wakes you two or three times at night.' + In 1980, Mr Wood retired from his job teaching maladjusted children and the couple moved to their two-bedroom bungalow. Soon afterwards, Mrs Wood noticed her husband was displaying some early signs of the disease - memory loss, hypochondria and dramatic personality changes. + Once patient and placid, he suddenly became aggressive, bad-tempered and difficult to live with. It was not until 1985 that Mr Wood was diagnosed as suffering from Alzheimer's disease and in the last eight months his condition has deteriorated. + Mrs Wood said: 'It's like living with someone who has already died - everyday is a living bereavement and I am slowly being worn down.' + Once an active member of the county Women's Institute, Mrs Wood had to pass up the chance of becoming chairwoman when she joined the army of about two million people - most aged between 40 and 60 - who care for elderly, sick or disabled relatives at home. + She can no longer cope and is trying to put her husband into a residential home where he can receive 24-hour care. But it has been a difficult and fruitless task trying to find the right facilities in many local authority institutions. + 'Most charity or DHSS-run places can only cater for elderly people who have a certain amount of independence. They have not got the staff to care for someone who is as demented as my husband,' she said. + Inquiries to the local private nursing home showed it would cost Mrs Wood about Pounds 1,000 a month for her husband to be 'locked-up in a room for most of the day'. This would take all his pension and more, leaving very little for her to live off. + 'I do get some assistance from the local hospital - they take Sam for about six hours three days a week and for two or three weeks every year so I can go on holiday.' + Mrs Wood feels she was given little information by her doctor about what to expect as her husband's condition worsened. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +68 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 24, 1989 + +More psychiatrists urged for elderly + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 503 words + + + The number of consultants working in old age psychiatry needs to be doubled over the next 10 years because of the rising number of elderly people with mental disorders, according to the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Psychiatrists. + Health services in many parts of Britain are failing to help families cope with the problem, the colleges say in a joint report published today. 'There are few families who do not have some experience of looking after confused elderly relatives. + 'Many such families have difficulty obtaining prompt help at times of crisis.' + As a first step, the colleges want the Government to recognise old age psychiatry as a distinct specialism. At present, they say, it has no place in over-all health planning and monitoring, and is losing out to less pressing sectors. + The report comes from a working party set up to review services for the ageing population, expected to include 1 million aged over 85 by the end of the century. + It admits that specialist services for old age psychiatry have been pioneered in Britain and have expanded rapidly in recent years. + But it says that progress has been patchy, and that some health districts have yet to start making provision. Variation among health regions can be such that Oxford provides three times as many specialist consultant sessions as North West Thames. + A survey quoted by the report found that at the end of 1986, no psycho-geriatric service was available to 30 per cent of the UK's elderly population, and that just 243 consultants were working in the specialty, only 87 of them full-time. + The colleges say that 240 more full-time, or 290 full and part-time, consultants will have to be recruited over the next five to 10 years to attain minimum service standards of one full-time post for every 20,000 people aged over 65. This number could be expected to generate 300-400 patient referrals every year. + A clearer central policy is needed, as well as more commitment from those teaching hospitals which have shown 'limited enthusiasm' for encouraging students. + In the community, the report says, priority must be given to guarding against the 'overloading' of informal carers who look after mentally ill relatives and others. 'In the management of demented patients, attention has to be paid to those aspects which wear carers down, such as restlessness, aggression, disturbed nights and incontinence.' + Assistance and training in basic skills are needed for staff of residential and nursing homes, day centres, sheltered housing wardens, home helps and non-specialist doctors and nurses. + The colleges say: 'With appropriate help, a family can often continue to manage. Without it, they may be unable to do so and hospitalisation - which most people wish to avoid - may become necessary.' + Care of Elderly People with Mental Illness - Specialist Services and Medical Training; Royal College of Physicians, 11 St Andrew's Place, Regent's Park, London NW1 4LE; Pounds 5. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +69 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 25, 1989 + +Diary: A trembling of the almond blossom + +BYLINE: By JOHN MORTIMER + +LENGTH: 1294 words + + + You drive from Marrakesh across the High Atlas, where white almond blossom is flowering against blue skies on the snow line. Precipices beside the road fall to lush, green valleys. On the way you pass 'Le Sanglier Qui Fume', a bistro with red and white checked tablecloths, vin ordinaire from Meknes and a stuffed boar's head smoking a pipe, a relic of the French occupation of Morocco. Then you see nothing but a very few mud brick villages, people dressed as though they had emerged from a children's illustrated copy of the Old Testament and engaged on the endless walks that men and women must have taken from village to village in Victorian England. + Earlier this century you might have expected to have had your head cut off by bandits on this road, or at least have been captured and held to ransom. Now there are only a few old men trying to sell sparkling quartz and amethyst or armies of children who appear from nowhere holding up handfuls of wild flowers and calling out for dirhams and cigarettes. + Then you come down into the southern plain and drive towards Taroudant, a town with pink, castellated walls where the Saadis once rose against the Portugese and established an independent principality. + On the way into Taroudant you come to this hotel, where waiters in long white djellabahs lay log fires in your bedroom. Round the pool, high above the incessant twitter of the birds, the cries of donkeys and the roaring winds from the desert, insistent English voices are heard discussing Chipping Norton and Henley-on-Thames, listeria in supermarkets and the M40 extension. + I see long forgotten faces I was at school with, or perhaps I was at school with their fathers. I sit writing every day under the bougain-villea and pay the inevitable price of having shown my face on British television. 'I say,' an elderly Englishman comes tottering up. 'We know who you are. But who are you?' + What I am writing is fiction, which I have always thought of as a way of telling the truth and not merely the spinning of yarns, although plots are, in my opinion, essential to keep the reader turning the pages. Often fiction has to sound more probable than fact; in writing 'Rumpole' stories I have often found myself toning down the description of things which occured in law courts because they would have been thought too absurd to be possible. Witnesses reveal more of the truth by the stories they make up than by their efforts, never, even with the best intentions, entirely successful, to describe what actually happened. + The best thoughts on this subject came from two accountants I heard talking beside a Moroccan pool. One was reading a novel. The other said, 'I never read fiction. If it isn't true, why bother to read it?' 'Well,' said the novel reading accountant, 'you could say exactly the same thing about accounts.' + The people of Morocco seem to have swung between periods of comfortable sensuality and movements of great puritanism when wine, women and even music were considered to be works of the devil. At the moment it seems blessedly free from Islamic fundamentalism. Older, blue robed country women are veiled but most of the young women in the market in Taroudant are unmasked. + Meknes rose and Moroccan beer are very good and there seems to be no strong prohibition on drinking. Perhaps we exaggerate the resistance to alcohol in the Arab world. I remember going to Oman and welcoming the thought of being teetotal for a week, to the great benefit of my weight and health. I only had to step into my hotel to see the 'Allo! Allo! Bar' filled with Omanis in dish-dashes downing pints of draught Bass and smoking Hamlet cigars. + Islam, a religion which speaks specifically of tolerance - the Koran says, 'You have your religion and I have mine,' - has shown a detestable face in the death threats and fierce and unjustifiable reaction to Salman Rushdie's book. + Listening to the World Service I discover that Muslims in England are asking for a bill of rights and calling, among other things, for our blasphemy laws to be extended so that those who say or write impertinent things about Mohammed may be persecuted together with those who print the sort of poems about Christ for which the editor of 'Gay News' was, on a bad day for English justice, sentenced to a suspended prison term. + The moral is that we should never have allowed the medieval concept of blasphemy to creep back into our legal system. It's very doubtful whether any religion that cannot stand up to criticism and ridicule is worth having. Christianity and Islam are certainly strong enough to do so. + The other lesson is that 'Charter 88s' may be dangerous and two edged weapons. + Like blasphemy laws everyone may want one, for entirely different and, perhaps, mutually destructive reasons. + A great advantage of being far from English newspapers south of the Atlas mountains is the restful sensation of not being involved in British politics. + Perhaps the worst aspect of life in our country today is the feeling of living with a government which has run out of things to do and can only satisfy its craving for activity by finding things to spoil. Everything from television to the legal system and the local bus services has to be changed, and always for the worse. + Queen Elizabeth the First had a foreign policy which, I seem to remember, historians called 'masterly inactivity,' which is what our government needs to learn. + Just before I left England I spoke from a City pulpit (I suppose as the statutory atheist) and the Rector told me that his friend Michael Ramsay was telephoned one evening by Harold Macmillan and asked if he'd care to be Archibishop of Canterbury. When the flatered cleric said he would like a little while to think the matter over and asked if he could call back in the morning and what time would be convenient, the Prime Minister answered, 'Oh, any time. I usually spend the mornings lounging about with a book.' + How greatly the quality of life in England would be improved if Mrs Thatcher could be induced to spend her mornings lounging about with a book. + Talking of the proposed changes to the legal system, it's extraordinary that barristers, who lay claim to being the sole practitioners of the magical arts of advocacy and persuasion, are so inept at arguing their own case. As I left England Lord Mackay, in the popular esteem, was running rings round Mr Desmond Fennell, QC, the Chairman of the Bar Council, who was managing to sound like the most entrenched defender of tradition and privilege. + The bar should make concessions. It is absurd to think that judges have to be drawn from the ranks of advocates. In fact the best advocates make terrible judges because they will take sides and won't shut up. There also seems no reason to deny rights of audience in all courts to solicitors. + Anyway most solicitors are making more money sitting in their offices and don't want to spend hours hanging about court corridors. + But there is a great deal to be said for the freelance, independent barrister, not tied to a big law firm or bound by government supervision. On such legal hacks our constitutional freedom depends. + The Bar should hire a good advocate to defend it. + At sunset we ride around the orange groves and through the villages on placid horses which only trot on verbal instructions from Omar, our leader. The houses all have television aerials but no electricity. The villagers, in their Old Testament costumes, walk about carrying old batteries on which their TV sets run. + Such are the priorities of our world, television comes before electricity. + John Mortimer's novel, Summer's Lease, has just been published in paperback by Penguin. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +70 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 1, 1989 + +Health Guardian: Inhale and breathe easy - A new treatment that brings relief to asthmatics + +BYLINE: By DAVID LOSHAK + +LENGTH: 406 words + + + A new type of inhaler, launched after seven years of research and development, could prevent many of the 2,000 deaths caused by asthma in Britain each year. Unlike conventional press-and-breathe pressurised aerosols, which provide relief for only about half the number of people suffering asthma attacks, the new device is triggered by inhalation. + An asthma attack narrows the airways, sometimes to the size of a virtual pinhole, producing much the same effect as strangulation. This is extremely frightening. Many patients liken it to trying to breathe in through a straw, inducing the sensation of drowning. Recovery can take days and even breathing out, which requires no muscular effort, becomes hard work. + There are about three to five million asthmatics in Britain. Asthma affects around one in ten adults and one in seven children at some time in their lives. It may disappear after puberty although it can endure into old age. + Its causes are unknown. It can be triggered by all kinds of allergens, including pet hairs, pollen, dust, house mites, feathers, smoke, various chemicals, foods (particularly cow's milk in babyhood), and by violent exercise or emotional upset. + There is no known cure. Although the condition can be relieved by the pressurised inhalers that have been available for the past 30 years, they all require patients to co-ordinate pressing the trigger with inhalation. That can be difficult both for children and for elderly people. + Made by the Loughborough company 3M Health Care, the Aerolin Autohaler overcomes this major problem. According to respiratory physicians, conventional inhalers often fail to deliver salbutamol (the most widely used broncho-dilating drug) to the lungs because of difficulties in proper inhalation. The Autohaler provides the correct dose of the drug every time it is used. It needs no co-ordination. There is no loss of the drug due to wrongly-timed pressing, ineffective inhalation, or accidental triggering. Nor do patients waste doses with test firing. + In na study of 70 adults carried out by Dr Graham Crompton, a respiratory physician in Edinburgh, over 60 per cent of patients were able to use the inhaler efficiently after reading instruction pamphlets, compared with only 39 per cent who used a conventional inhaler. + And when patients were given further verbal instructions, efficiency in using the new inhaler rose to over 90 per cent. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +71 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 1, 1989 + +Ethics of rock have judges mixed up + +BYLINE: By ALEX BRUMMER + +LENGTH: 425 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + + + The nine venerable justices of the US Supreme Court, including its three less than spritely octogenarians, were yesterday wrestling with the alien issue of whether attempts to lower the decibels at loud rock concerts is an interference with free expression. + At an unusually jovial public hearing, which at times bordered on high farce, one of the country's best known civil rights lawyers, Mr William Kunstler, struggled to educate the justices in the ways of rock n' roll. + 'Is there such a thing as quiet rock music?' queried Justice Thurgood Marshall, aged 80, who seemed totally befuddled by the technical intricacies, including such concepts as 'sound mix'. + The case of Rock Against Racism versus New York City has aroused some strong emotions, despite the good-natured hearing before the Supreme Court. Since 1979, Rock Against Racism has held concerts and readings in New York's Central Park to raise funds and draw attention to apartheid. + As the concerts have become more popular, New York City, with the support of some residents on Central Park West - notably the inventor of the Foundation, the author, Isaac Asimov - has insisted on controlling the sound mix. + 'Whoever controls the mix controls the noise,' Mr Kunstler said yesterday. + Explaining this to the old Supreme Court fogies was no easy task. So, in a brilliant exposition, Mr Kunstler sought to enlighten the justices. + The sound mixer in a rock band and the conductor at a symphony concert performed broadly the same functions, he explained. 'It is as if the city said we are going to put George Solti in there instead of Zubin Mehta, because Solti plays andante and dolce and Mehta always plays loud.' + Even this did not quite resolve matters. Justice Marshall wanted to know whether a symphony orchestra could be as noisy as a rock band. Mr Kunstler suggested respectfully that the sound of the kettle drums and cannon at Carnegie Hall during the 1812 Overture was certainly comparable. + Justice Antonin Scalia, a mere stripling at 52, offered an astounding confession. He admitted that as a young man at Harvard he 'occasionally' went to parties 'that got a little loud'. + All of this music-speak seems to have so confused the justices that they are holding off final judgment until early summer - just in time for this year's Central Park concert. + In the end, however, the case if likely to turn on fundamental first-amendment rights to freedom of speech and expression, Mayor Koch and Mr Asimov's sound sensitivity not withstanding. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +72 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 1, 1989 + +Patients to try out 'life-saving' care cards + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 511 words + + + The National Health Service today takes a small but significant step into the 21st century in the unlikely surroundings of Dr Robin Hopkins's surgery in Imperial Road, Exmouth. + Mr David Mellor, the Health Minister, will be in the Devon town to launch a pilot scheme which may lead to the use of computer 'smart cards' throughout the NHS and, as the Guardian disclosed yesterday, by the Department of Social Security as well. + The minister will joint the 9,000 Exmouth residents, one in four of the town's population, who have in the past week been issued with a 'care card' - a blue plastic card including a microchip containing a summary of the patient's medical records. + The card, intended to be carried voluntarily at all times, is designed to be read whenever the patient is seen by a family doctor, dentist or hospital staff. Pharmacists can also consult it when the patient seeks advice about over-the-counter drugs. + Dr Hopkins, who is in no doubt about the merits of the scheme, says: 'I wanted them to put a warning on the card which said: 'Failure to carry this card could cost you your life.'' + Smart cards are already used by health services in parts of France. But Bull, the computer company supplying the Exmouth cards, says the NHS trial is the first time the idea has been comprehensively applied. + Exmouth was chosen partly because of its integrated care structure; partly because of its proximity to Exeter University, which is monitoring the scheme; and partly because it has a large population of elderly people who are expected to benefit. + Cards have been issued to all the patients of Dr Hopkins's group practice, the under-fives and over-65s of a larger practice, and every diabetic in the town. Equipment to read and write on the cards is installed at both practices, a large dental practice, the casualty units at hospitals in Exmouth and Exeter, and Exmouth's eight pharmacies. + In addition to comply with data protection legislation, a 'card viewing room' has been made available at Dr Hopkins's surgery so that patients can see the information on their cards by slotting them into a reader and entering a personal identification number. + There has been early concern about others having access to the information. Bull insists that security is total: that nobody can read the card without the combination of the right equipment, a separate key card and knowledge of passwords. + Pharmacists, for example, cannot read the clinical information and laboratory data on the cards and can only write prescription details; dentists cannot write on them at all. + For a dentist, the card gives accurate information about anything which may cause a patient to react adversely to anaesthetic. For a pharmacist, it offers similar reassurance about medicines. At casualty, staff will know without asking often confused elderly patients, or checking with their family doctors, what drugs they may have been taking and why. + Dr Hopkins says the cards give him an up-to-date snapshot of his patients' health records. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +73 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 6, 1989 + +Law Report: Commission must consider all effects + +BYLINE: By SHIRANIKHA HERBERT, Barrister + +LENGTH: 616 words + + + Queen's Bench Divisional Court + Regina v Medicines Commission and the DHSS, ex parte Organon Laboratories Ltd + Before Lord Justice Glidewell and Mr Justice Pill + February 17 1989 + When the DHSS, in its capacity as the licensing authority for drugs, is considering varying a product licence in respect of a drug, it should take account of all factors which are relevant in relation to the grant of a licence. + Thus when varying the licence for an anti-depressant drug, including restricting prescriptions to elderly patients, because it is said to cause blood circulation disorders, it is wrong to ignore evidence that the drug is safer than other anti-depressants in that it is less likely to result in overdose deaths. + THE FACTS + Product licences under the Medicines Act 1968 were granted in 1976 for Mianserin based anti-depressant drugs which were made and marketed by Organon Laboratories. From 1979 reports appeared which suggested that the drugs caused disorders of the blood circulation system. + In 1988 the Committee on Safety in Medicines (CSM) advised the DHSS as licensing authority to vary the licences under section 28(3)(g) of the Act which provides for the suspension, variation or revocation of licences on the ground that the drugs could 'no longer be regarded as products which can safely be administered for the purposes indicated in the licence ..' It was suggested that use of the drugs for the elderly should be restricted. + The Medicines Commission, after considering the matter in accordance with the statutory procedure, affirmed the CSM's conclusion and advised the DHSS accordingly. The DHSS notified Organon that the product licences were to be varied. + Organon challenged that decision on the grounds that the Medicines Commission had refused to take into consideration evidence that Mianserin based drugs were safer than other anti-depressants in that they were less toxic and overdoses were less likely to result in fatality. + Organon applied for judicial review by way of certiorari to quash the decision. + THE DECISION + Lord Justice Glidewell said that section 19 of the 1968 Act sets out the factors which are relevant to the determination of an application for a product licence. By section 19(1) the DHSS is required to take into account the safety, efficacy and quality of the medicinal product. Section 19(2) provides that the efficacy of competing products is not to be taken into account but as between two products of equal efficacy their relative safety may be relevant. + If at the licensing stage comparative safety was urged as a relevant factor, the DHSS should normally take it into account. That could include evidence of a lesser risk of overdose. Organon argued that it would be strange if a factor which was relevant at the original licensing stage under section 19(2) was not relevant under section 28(3)(g) at the stage of variation. + In his Lordship's judgement that argument was persuasive. Factors which were relevant in relation to the grant of a licence must be equally relevant in considering its variation. + While some overdoses must be deliberate (suicide attempts), others would be accidental, specially in the category of patients for whom these drugs were prescribed, so that even on the stricter reading of section 28(3)(g) urged by the DHSS, the lesser risk of fatality from overdose was a relevant factor to be taken into consideration. + Mr Justice Pill agreed, and the application was granted. + Appearances: Ronald Walker QC and Alexander Hill-Smith instructed by Waltons & Morse for Organon; Michael Beloff QC and Richard McManus instructed by the Treasury Solicitor for the DHSS. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +74 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 6, 1989 + +Benefits threat over 'too many rooms' + +BYLINE: By ALAN TRAVIS, Local Government Correspondent + +LENGTH: 388 words + + + Children under 10, regardless of their sex, may have to share bedrooms or their parents could face a reduction in housing benefit payments under a draft parliamentary order expected next month. + The proposal arises in stringent new criteria for assessing whether people applying for housing benefit have too many rooms in their homes. + The maximum accommodation rules for benefit claimants arise under an obscure parliamentary order laid under section 121 of the 1988 Housing Act. + The legislation gives powers to rent officers to determine whether a family has too many rooms. This could lead to a cut in the housing benefit subsidy paid by central government to the local authority. + Councils will face the choice of cutting benefit payments or making up the difference from rates or poll tax. + The draft order allows one bedroom for each of the following groups; a married or unmarried couple; for each adult; for two children of the same sex; two children less than 10 years old, regardless of sex; or for a single child. + One living room is allowed for up to three people, two rooms for four to seven people, and three rooms for more people. + The proposals have united local authority associations. The Conservative-led Association of District Councils' housing committee is concerned that the accommodation standards are too severe. Its housing officer, Mr Paul Johnson, said the standards were only just above legislation against overcrowding. + 'It means an elderly couple would have to share the same bedroom and that is not always appropriate.' he added. 'It also does not specify the size of the rooms. You cannot put two children in a box room.' + Grandparents who kept a spare room for visiting relatives could be penalised. + Mr Mike Reardon, housing officer for the Labour-led Association of Metropolitan Authorities, said the criteria were stricter than those used by councils and housing associations in allocating property. + The proposal has also attracted criticism from the Institute of Housing, the professional body, which said it believed everyone should have the right to a room of their own. + The draft order is expected to be debated in the Commons this month. It will apply from April to new lettings to housing association and council tenants in 'assured tenancies'. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +75 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 7, 1989 + +Futures: Quickening thoughts and a faster flow of blood - A new drug that shows promising ability to restore failing memory and learning power + +BYLINE: By JOHN NEWELL + +LENGTH: 493 words + + + A new drug may help to restore failing memory and learning power to elderly and senile people. The first scientific test of its powers, carried out on aged rabbits, showed it can restore learning ability to that of youthful bunnies. If it has the same effect in people, it may help the victims of Alzheimer's Disease and other forms of senility. + Nimodipine was first used to improve the flow of blood to the brain in elderly people with chronic problems with blood circulation, especially people who had had or were at risk of strokes. + The doctors giving the drugs to such patients couldn't help noticing that their memory and ability to learn new things sharpened up while they were taking Nimodipine. + So as to get a proper scientific measurement of its effectiveness, Dr John Disterhoft and his clleagues in Chicago University's Medical School tested Nimodipine in rabbits. They gave the drug to ageing rabbits, more than three years old - that's old for a rabbit - and tested the rabbits to see if the drug helped them to learn a simple response faster. They also gave Nimodipine to young, three-month old rabbits and compared their learning rates, and those of the elderly rabbits who had been given the drug, with the performance of both old and young rabbits who had not been given Nimodipine. + Results showed not unexpectedly that the young rabbits given Nimodipine did best of all. But the elderly rabbits given Nimodipine performed very nearly as well as the young rabbits who hadn't been given the drug. + Some of the elderly rabbits who hadn't been given Nimodipine, on the other hand, found it very difficult to learn the task at all. + Altogether, the results were startling. If they turn out to apply equally to human beings, and if the simple test used turns out to be a fair reflection of more complex learning tasks, then elderly humans who become forgetful and find it harder to learn new things could become nearly as good at it as when they were young. Alzheimers patients could benefit too. + Dr Disterhoft isn't certain how Nimodipine works. At the molecular level, it reduces the flow of calcium in to cells. Calcium stimulates muscle cells to contract. So one way in which Nimodipine works is probably by preventing the muscular walls of arteries from tightening up, thereby increasing the flow of blood to the brain. + There may also be a direct affect on brain cells. There is evidence that too much calcium leaks into elderly brain cells and perhaps into brain cells affected by Alzheimers Disease, and that this can harm the cells. Calcium inflow inhibitors such as Nimodipine could restore things to nearer normal. + Proper human trials of Nimodipine are now being planned. Whatever the results, the fact that drugs can have such startling effects in animals, must mean that sooner or later drugs which really can rejuvenate some functions at least of the ageing brain are going to become available. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +76 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 7, 1989 + +Channel 4 chief Michael Grade to head crime working party + +LENGTH: 226 words + + + Mr Michael Grade, Channel 4's chief executive, has been put in charge of a Home Office working party which will investigate how the combat fear of crime. + Mr Douglas Hurd, the Home Secretary, said the move was aimed at making sure the 'good news' about the fights against crime was put across. + 'I was anxious to put in charge of that working group someone whose background has been with the media rather than in the field of crime prevention,' Mr Hurd added. + 'I am particularly glad that Michael Grade, a man with an outstanding career in broadcasting, has accepted my invitation to take the chair of this working party.' + He urged politicians, voluntary organisations and the private sector to make 'good news' on crime available to the media, to help give people a more balanced picture. + Mr Hurd unveiled research by his officials, showing that elderly people are rarely attacked - but their lives are often blighted by fear of crime. + Mr Hurd said a third of elderly women felt very unsafe out at night. But only one in 200 was the victim of a street crime in 1987. + 'In general, the fear of becoming a victim of crime increases with age, while the risk of becoming such a victim actually diminishes,' Mr Hurd told a meeting at Conservative Central Office in London. 'Most violent crime involves fighting between young men.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +77 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 9, 1989 + +Public's lack of confidence in NHS boosts Nestor-BNA + +BYLINE: By ROSEMARY COLLINS + +LENGTH: 276 words + + + Private health group Nestor-BNA is profiting from continued loss of public confidence in the NHS, with pre-tax profits up 44 per cent at Pounds 4.7 million last year, a figure that would have been Pounds 200,000 higher but for delays in regrading nurses pay. + The nursing agency was obliged to supply nurses at 1987 rates for much of the year, and was simultaneously hit by NHS nurses' reluctance to change jobs while waiting for their grading-related pay settlement. Mobility is now almost back to normal, and BNA is currently supplying 8,500 nurses a week on 12,400 nursing assignments, 40 per cent of that business going into NHS hospitals. + Mr Mike Rogers, group managing director, is optimistic about the Government's proposed changes in the health service. 'Making people within it become more commercial can only lead to better use of resources', he says. 'It will not pose a threat to the private sector. The NHS has been giving away free for years what we have been selling, and that must be competition. If the NHS starts charging it will make less competition, not more.' + Nestor bought its first hospital, New Hall near Salisbury, last year and at the same time diversified into the supply of non-health personnel like computer engineers and industrial efficiency experts through the acquisition of the Scott-Grant employment agency, with 6,000 skilled personnel on its books. + Supplying nursing staff has dropped from 75 to 55 per cent profits, but running top-of-the-market nursing homes for the elderly and infirm was 80 per cent more lucrative for Nestor in 1988 than in 1987 and the group is keen to buy more hospitals. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +78 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 11, 1989 + +Leading Article: Doctor, they're in trouble + +LENGTH: 569 words + + + Imagine the fuss if an untested and untried drug appeared on the market? Doctors would be in the van of the protests. And ministers would be right in there behind them. So how should the doctors respond if something much more fundamental than a new drug is being introduced: a nationwide restructuring of the NHS that is untried, untested and not at all thought-through? Meek compliance is clearly what ministers want; but they are not getting it. Not one of the 70 divisional meetings of doctors held so far has supported the Government's proposals. Several have voted unanimously on the unacceptability of the package. Yet, far from becoming emollient, ministers have waxed more provocative in face of these genuine misgivings. + In his speech to the Royal College of General Practioners this week, the Health secretary, Kenneth Clarke, referred to the need for the Government and GPs to avoid a pointless battle. Amen to that. Mr Clarke says he wants to improve family doctor services and appeals to doctors not to doubt 'the sincerity of my motives.' Fair enough. Yet, in his very next sentence, the Health Secretary ignored his own prescription with a gratuitous insult. The very mention of 'reform,' he suggested, found 'the more suspicious of our GPs. . . feeling nervously for their wallets.' His deputy, David Mellor, has been equally cutting about the 'Dr Noes.' + This is not the language of ministers who want to have a genuine discussion with the medical profession. Certainly, the BMA has had an inglorious history of opposing genuine reforms - from Lloyd George's health service for workers to Nye Bevan's comprehensive NHS. But ministers delude themselves if they believe this third war is following a similar pattern. It is not. Thee is overwhelming public opposition to the Government's plan (fewer than two out of 10 support the idea) and the divisional medical meetings already show that the opposition of GPs is even more united. + Ministers may be able to divide the hospital doctors because the opt-out proposals have attractions for the surgeons, even though there are grave disadvantages for the more numerous, but less glamorous, specialties. They may also be able to rig the subsidy system so that the incentive to opt out becomes too attractive for hospitals to turn down. But hospitals only deal with a small minority of NHS patients. Nine out of 10 people who use the NHS turn to their GP. Messrs Clarke and Mellor had better come to terms with the fact they may well end up the losers in 'a pointless battle' with the GPs. + More important still, the grievances being expressed by the family doctors are genuine. The proposed financial system, designed to encourage GPs to attract more patients, means doctors will have less time to visit the elderly and carry out screening programmes for the young and vulnerable. Inner city practices, where as many as one third of all patients move on within a year, would be unable to reach the proposed immunisation targets and miss out on the bonuses. It is still unclear what will happen to patients if a GPs drug budget is spent before the end of the year. GP contracts with specific hospitals means patients will have less choice. None of this is trivial. Far from gearing up for a pointless scrap, the GPs are defending fundamental principles. Mr Clarke should take a dose of his own medicine; and call in the doctors. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +79 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 14, 1989 + +Tuesday Women: Working class heroine - Pat Barker thought the way to write was to be 'sensitive and polite', then she got the message and wrote about the real people she knew + +BYLINE: By MICHELE HANSON + +LENGTH: 1249 words + + + Maggie used to spend 'eight hours a day, five days a week shoving chickens' legs up their arses'. Along with other factory workers, prostitutes and worn out women with too many small children or varicose veins, she is one of Pat Barker's heroines. Barker writes about working class, regional women, 'the sort who are not taken seriously in any terms, specifically not as material for literature'. + It's difficult subject matter. You need impeccable credentials to write about the working class and even then no one's waiting to read about it. Pat Barker has those credentials. These are the sort of women she has lived among for most of her life, there's nothing quaint or condescending about her observations and she never was just an outsider goggling at life in the raw. + 'My family, for a variety of reasons, was dominated by women,' she says. 'They had to be strong because no one was doing them any favours. They certainly didn't mince up their emotions out of existence by overanalysing them.' + With the support of her grandmother, who brought her up, Barker went to grammar school and university. 'In those days accents were corrected. You weren't to speak the way your family spoke. It's a terrible thing to do to a child.' Although now happily married to an academic, she was never quite comfortable crossing the class divide. 'It's not a matter of decision. You either make that transition or you don't (D H Lawrence did; Alan Sillitoe didn't). It's entirely possible to get stuck and this is what I've got stuck with.' + It took her some time to work that out. Her first attempts at 'sensitive and politer' novels were repeatedly rejected. She's been successful only since, encouraged by Angela Carter, she began writing about what she knew. Reviewers have admitted to crying over her books. I cried. Her first novel, Union Street, about the lives of seven women from Middlesbrough, has been described as a long overdue working-class masterpiece and is now being made into a film starring Jane Fonda and Robert de Niro and set in Boston. + This suggests that the plight of Barker's women, their courage and endurance, is universally recognisable. The problem of the North/South divide shrinks from that distance. 'The Americans brush all that aside and just identify with these lives in Union Street. And a fire in someone else's back yard is never bad news.' + Fonda may not be quite the right build for Iris King, the Middlesbrough matriarch but she has been on the look out for roles about older women who are courageous. Naturally such roles are few and far between. Iris may not at first seem very palatable. She slaps her 16-year-old pregnant daughter around the hospital ward, more or less forces her to have a back-street abortion and disposes of the foetus herself but somehow, like all Barker's heroines, she commands only respect. You're not meant to think: 'Look at what this poor woman has to put up with.' You're meant to be exhilarated. + Barker takes a close-up look at what ought to be the nastier details of life, wretched, sorded or pitiful and demonstrates that they are nothing of the sort. To Pat Barker 'polite' has become almost a dirty word and she denies her characters even the thinnest coating of manners. You're taken almost near enough to smell them and then made to stay and look properly. But it's never a prurient look. + 'My husband tells me that inside this moderately well-selling serious novelist there's a wrestling pornographer waiting to get out. I'm sure he's right.' It doesn't look as if the pornographer will ever escape. But can you look so hard at the potentially rotten side of life, at deprivation, murder and sex, without being corrupted yourself? Pat Barker faced that question when she wrote Blow Your House Down, a novel about a group of prostitutes coping with the threat of a serial killer. + 'It's very difficult to write about the sexual victimisation of women in any way which doesn't reinforce it and make women feel that this is bound to happen to them. By not looking at it at all you tend to be a Pollyanna but to look into the abyss is to fix your imagination in a way that endangers you, assuming that we're vulnerable to the nasty attitudes that go with contemplating violence. + 'I think one of the most disappointing things about women is that they find misogyny very, very easy to understand. You'd never get a man to empathise imaginatively with hatred of men. He wouldn't understand what it was all about but all women, at some level, know what a misogynist feels like. I remember going to a police talk on the Ripper before they released the details. There were, in the room, some very nice ladies, from the CAB, the Samaritans, a social worker or two. God, were we nice. And when the details were revealed we were very accurate. Everybody could imagine what the Ripper did.' + Fortunately, when considering men, Barker doesn't only try to get inside the mind of a murderer. In her latest book, The Man Who Wasn't There, she looks at women through the eyes of a young boy who is being brought up, as she was, in a female household. 'I'm asking to what extent can a boy be nourished by strong women and to what extent does he need, not necessarily a father but a friendly, supportive man.' She feels that women cannot supply everything for the boy needs. he turns to film for his images of masculinity and the films are misleading. + And so her women are not all-powerful but they do as much as they possibly can with the very little they have. 'I'm interested in the creative moment in a fairly bleak and unpromising landscape. Whatever the people have they create with. A lot of people have a lot more and destroy with it.' + She now has more herself and lives, surrounded by prison warders on an estate next to one of Durham's large prisons. It's enough for people to assume, wrongly, that there is great divide between her present and her past. 'Somebody said: 'Here you are living with this kind of life and there was your Mother scrubbing floors.' But he was thinking in terms of the lecturer whose father was a miner. It's never quite like that for women. The idea that everything has been liberalised is complete rubbish. Some tasks get easier but nothing changes very much. I think this is why women make such good historical novelists. They've got a way back in. Their world within the house hasn't changed violently.' + Some of the more distasteful tasks have been moved out of sight, like Maggie's job in the chicken factory. 'Another effect of women working in these awful conditions is that we don't have to pluck and truss our own chickens any more or bake our own cakes. They're our equivalent of the people who used to toil below stairs. You don't have the hassle in your own house. + 'I feel very rarely consciously angry or even mildly irritated but in some sense my books are angry, so it's there somewhere. I'm capable of it, but I don't go around being militant about anything. You only devalue your currency.' + Angry young men have looked at the working classes, but woman has rarely looked back at woman. 'There was Mrs Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte but they were writing very much from the outside.' And so Barker never expected to be published. But her women deserved and needed a spokesman. They still do. Such stoics are often too busy and too tired to think or to speak for themselves. + The Man Who Wasn't There by Pat Barker, Virago, Pounds 10.95. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +80 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 15, 1989 + +The Budget: Low paid disappointed as reforms take a rest - Income tax + +BYLINE: By MARGARET HUGHES, Personal Finance Editor + +LENGTH: 838 words + + + In sharp contrast to last year's Budget when he cut two pence off the basic rate of income tax, slashed the higher rate bands to one top rate band and rasied allowances by twice the rate of inflation, the Chancellor has done little this year to further his reform of the nation's income tax structure. + Despite again stressing the Government's commitment to 'reforming and reducing taxation' as part of its key economic objectives, the Chancellor has neither cut the rates of tax nor raised allowances by more than inflation. But there are concessions for the elderly. + The basic rate remains at 25 pence and the higher rate at 40 pence. + And although a rise in tax allowances by up to twice the rate of inflation had been generally predicted to help the lower paid, they have only been raised in line with inflation - by 6.8 per cent. + The single person's allowance goes up by Pounds 180 to Pounds 2,785 and a married couples allowance by Pounds 280 to Pounds 4,375. + The basic rate threshold above which taxpayers become liable for higher rate tax has been lifted by Pounds 1,400 to Pounds 20,700. Similarly age allowances go up by Pounds 220 to Pounds 3,400 for a single person and by Pounds 350 to Pounds 5,385 for a married couple. The changes mean that an averae earner of Pounds 12,500 will now be 87p per week better off. + The extra allowances previously given to those aged 80 and over are now being extended to those aged 75 and over. These allowances will be Pounds 3,540 for a single person and Pounds 5,565 for a married couple. + Mr Lawson estimated that this change would mean a further 15,000 married and single elderly people would no longer be liable for tax. 'Three quarters of all those aged 75 and over will not be liable for income tax at all,' he claimed. + By not raising the allowances thresholds by more than the rate of inflation the Chancellor has failed to help the lower paid. Mr Alex Bryson of the Low Pay Unit said he was extremely disasppointed, pointing out that each percentage rise above the rate of inflatian would have taken 80,000 people out of the tax net. Even those taken out of the tax net by virtue of the indexation of the tax allowances will find that the higher income which they received as a result will affect the eligibility for benefits. + The rise in the tax threshold combined with the changes in National Insurance contributions produced a total benefit of only Pounds 2.55 a week for a married couple earning Pounds 120 a week - half the average weekly wage. + By comparison a single person earning five times average earnings - Pounds 1,270.50 a week - is now Pounds 5.17 a week better off. + The changes in National Insurance contributions have replaced three small proverty traps by one large one since those who earned more than Pounds 43 a week would now have to pay 2 per cent on their earnings up to Pounds 43 and 9 per cent on all their earnings above that threshold instead of 5 per cent on the whole amount up to Pounds 75 a week. + A change in the way schedule E income is assessed will simplify the system for around half-a-million directors and tohers who regualry receive pay some time after the year for which it was earned; the prime example being December 31 bonuses which the employee doesn't actually get until January tyeTthe following year. From 6 APril, income tax will no longer be assessed on the amount earned for the tax year but on the amount received in the tax year which brings it into line with the PAYE cash basis. + --------------------------------------------------------------------- + Tax rates and allowances + --------------------------------------------------------------------- + Before the budget After the budget + --------------------------------------------------------------------- + Taxable Tax on Taxable Tax on + income Rate band income Rate band + (Pounds ) (%) (Pounds ) (%) (Pounds) + --------------------------------------------------------------------- + 0 - 19,300 25 4,825 0 - 20,700 25 5,175 + Over 19,300 40 Over 20,700 40 + --------------------------------------------------------------------- + --------------------------------------------------------------------- + Personal allowances Old New + --------------------------------------------------------------------- + Allowances for people under 65 + Single person and wife's earnings 2,605 2,785 + Married man 4,095 4,375 + Age allowance for people aged 65-74 + Single person 3,180 3,400 + Married man 5,035 5,385 + Age allowance for people aged 75 and over + Single person 3,310 3,540 + Married man 5,205 5,565 + Income limit for age allowance 10,600 11,400 + Additional relief for single parent 1,490 1,590 + Widow's bereavement 1,490 1,590 + --------------------------------------------------------------------- + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +81 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 16, 1989 + +Grassroots: Fuel's paradise + +BYLINE: By ALAN COMBES + +LENGTH: 313 words + + + A way of life is coming to an end in our village. The only outward sign of change to passers-by is the vulgarity of yellow pipes crushing the crocuses at the roadside. But if you parked your car and ambled up Yedmandale, you would see a fearsome machine which nods like a donkey and crunches up earth and tarmac on every downward stroke. For the gas man cometh. + I never believed he would. Our village is full of elderly people and it's already rejected gas once, years ago. A new plebiscite was called with a ten per cent demand required to make it viable. A showroom display was arranged on the car park of the main pub. The following month the solid fuel people booked the same spot for their counter punch. + Gas won. Where did the swing come from when rejection had been so emphatic last time? The answer is Harold and Edith. + Our good friends and neighbours Harold and Edith have done a complete volte face. They approach their late sixties with the realisation that 'hoiking in mucky coal on a miserable winter's neet' is no dignified manner in which to warm oneself in age. But, more important even than that, they've realised that gas is not as explosive as they once believed. + Nellie it was who sold us our house and left for York three years ago. When she moved into her new hme, she had all her new neighbours openmouthed. All the gas appliances were taken out because she felt that gas was not to be trusted. People she had left behind in the village felt the same. + So I'm going to have to place an advert in the local freebie: 'One eight-year-old Rayburn in excellent condition throughout. Has operated six-radiator central heating. Sale due to gas conversion.' I'll miss that range - it is at one with the architecture, both human and brick, of this village. + Though it is worth pointing out that the bloody thing has just gone out again. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +82 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 17, 1989 + +Commentary: Victims of a careless scandal + +BYLINE: By MELANIE PHILLIPS + +LENGTH: 1034 words + + + A shameful anniversary was marked yesterday. one year ago, Sir Roy Griffiths published his recommendations on care in the community. Nothing has been done with that report. There is no immediate prospect that anything will be done with it. It has foundered on Prime Ministerial prejudice and ministerial indifference, despite the fact that Sir Roy is (or was) Mrs Thatcher's most trusted adviser on welfare matters, that other reports before and since have emphasised the urgency behind his proposals, and that the wasteful shambles, confusion and misery that fuelled them continue to accelerate. None of these facts seems to count for anything, because of the Prime Minister's hysterical opposition to anything which accepts that local authority social services departments have a useful and positive role to play - albeit a role which, if Griffiths were implemented, would involve a substantial shift in their whole approach and thinking. + Sir Roy was not the first person to criticise the current chaos. The Audit Commission had said in 1986 that much of the Pounds 6 billion being spent on care of the elderly, handicapped and mentally ill through the NHS, local authorities and private homes was being misspent. There was particular concern that social security spending was going through the roof, with payments to residential homes soaring from Pounds 10 million in 1979 to Pounds 1 billion per year. So along came Sir Roy, managing director of Sainsbury's, trusted acolyte of Mrs T, a true believer with all the appropriate ideological baggage in his trolley. + And his diagnosis was absolutely in line with current political orthodoxy. The existing system, he said, was a disorganised mess, almost designed to produce a patchy performance because of the split in funding between the three arms of government. He wanted one system under a new Minsiter of State who would set standards and objectives, meeting up to half the bill from central government and with poll tax and charges making up the remainder. There would be more consumer choice, controlled experiments with vouchers and experiments with insurance and tax incentives. + So far, so ideologically acceptable. But Sir Roy also concluded that the lead body for coordinating all this care should be the local authority social services department. Never mind that his proposals massively increased central control over those departments; never mind that they would become for the first time managers of mixed packages of local authority and private provision. + One look at the dread phrase local authority and the PM took to Sir Roy's report like a dose of listeria. + It was published - or rather, is sidled out - while Sir Roy himself was on sick leave. Ever since, despite being endorsed by an inter-departmental working party, it has been passed back and forth between ministers and advisers desperate to find some lead authority for community care other than the local authority. The trouble is (to coin a phrase) there is no sensible alternative. If there were, you can bet Sir Roy would have found it. + Meanwhile, the toll of confusion and distress increases. Everyone behaves as if we have a policy of community care, even though in some cases the care just doesn't exist. Health authorities continue to close down hospitals regardless and decant their mentally ill and handicapped patients into a vacuum. Such behaviour is itself a kind of collective insanity, a delusion on a grand scale. The results can be seen pitifully wandering the streets of our cities every day. Handicaps that once would have killed are now containable, so that there are more and more very handicapped people to be cared for. Hospitals under pressure to increase throughput, in the jargon beloved of Sir Roy's supermarkets, are sending patients home earlier to complete their recovery in conditions of patchy or indifferent or even non-existent care. + Health authorities and social services departments are paralysed, the development of their community services blighted while they wait fruitlessly for some order to be constructed out of chaos, for someone to be chosen to take a lead and set out a coherent policy. Because there's no clear responsibility, money is being spent on meeting relatively easy needs rather than the people with multiple handicaps and problems who require the kind of coordinated planning that at present is just too much hassle. + And all this is happening when the numbers of old and very old people are remorselessly and rapidly rising - more who need help with dressing or bathing or shopping, more who can't cook any longer, more who are incontinent, more who are demented. The burden is falling upon their relatives - where they have them - whose lives may be blighted by such unrelieved pressure, who may themselves be elderly and whose own health may crack under the strain. + The situation is nothing short of a scandal. It is even more remarkable when compared with the government's behaviour over the NHS, the most efficient system of health care in the world, now about to be subjected to a root and branch upheaval and at breakneck speed. Compared with community care, the health service is an absolute model of efficiency and effectiveness; yet this government, which is supposed to be attracted towards inefficiency and waste like a heat-seeking missile, has chosen to leave the more desperate problem unattended. + The conventional wisdom is that the NHS deeply touches each and every voter and is thus far more politically sensitive than any other social policy. Community care? How boring. Shroud-waving is what gets onto the television news, after all, and gives ministers a nasty turn. But demography and medical science are changing the political landscape under the government's feet. + More and more families already have, or are likely to have, a dependent relative to care for. The crippling burden of unrelieved care is turning into the same kind of anxiety as disease management, one that crosses class and voter boundaries. There are shrouds here as well, some of them for the living. Perhaps Sir Roy should start thinking of ways to wave them on the television, too. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +83 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 17, 1989 + +The Day In Politics: Cook derides Lawson's 'Bupa budget' - Budget debate + +BYLINE: By PAUL NETTLETON + +LENGTH: 897 words + + + The Chancellor was guilty of 'crazy economics' in proposing tax relief for the elderly to buy private medical insurance, the shadow health secretary, Mr Robin Cook, told MPs yesterday. + In the continuing Budget debate in the Commons he challenged Mr Nigel Lawson's calculation that the measure to assist 'people like the Prime Minister' will cost only Pounds 40 million. + 'This indeed has been a Bupa Budget. The subsidy offered is substantial,' he said. It was 'an old-fashioned hand-out to the private sector'. + Mr Cook said Mr Norman Lamont, Treasury Financial Secretary, had claimed the cost per taxpayer of the relief would be around Pounds 100. But the Bupa premium for a 60-year-old wishing to continue with the kind of cover provided by employers was Pounds 1,080 a year. 'At 40 per cent tax relief that means a cost to the public purse of not Pounds 100, but of Pounds 430.' + Mr lamont had also suggested that the average cost to the NHS was Pounds 1,000 per elderly person. but his own white paper showed that the cost of hospital services for a 65-74 year old was Pounds 415. + 'I'm beginning to understand why the forecasts given by this Treasury team are often so widly wrong. What that means is that the Treasury is proposing to spend more in subsidy to wealthy elderly people to go private than it would cost to treat them in the NHS. + 'This is crazy economics, but of course the whole Treasury team knows it is nothing to do with economics. It is entirely the product of political dogma.' + The cost was estimated at Pounds 40 million to cover existing elderly private patients and a maximum of 10 per cent more. But Bupa expected the number of patients to rise from 350,000 to one million. 'They add that the one million is a modest estimate.' This meant the true cost would be Pounds 120 million, he claimed. + But even if we accepted Pounds 40 million, it was sufficient to pay the annual salary of 3,000 nurses or 1,000 consultants. 'It is enough to purchase 20,000 ventilators or 1,300 ambulances. It is enough to meet the operating costs for 35,000 cataract removals or 17,000 hip replacements. + 'Those are the substantial lost opportunities of putting this money into private care rather than into the NHS.' + The effect of this subsidy was to target help on those who were most fit and least in need of help. 'The private medical sector, unlike the NHS, screens applicants to make sure they're well enough. Unlike the NHS there's no Hippocratic oath in the private sector to treat the sick when they discover them. The private sector smartly passes them back to the public service.' + Mr Tony Newton, the Trade and Industry Minister, had opened the debate by saying it was a measure of the Government's successful economic policies that for the second year running Pounds 14 billion in national debt was being repaid. + The economy had been transformed in the past 10 years, and predicted growth next year of 21/2 per cent meant this would be maintained. + Productivity had increased by more than a half since 1980, and was now the best of the seven leading industrial nations, the British industry had overcome its past failure to invest. + Since the Budget there had been news that capital investment in 1988 was nearly 11 per cent higher than in 1987, with the volume of manufacturing industry investment up by 91/2 per cent. In February car production was up 14 per cent, with production for export up by 21 per cent on a year ago. This was 'striking evidence' of progress in an industry which had long been in decline. + Also unemployment in February had fallen by 41,000, the thirty-first successive monthly fall. + But Mr Newton conceded when pressed by mr Christopher Hawkins (C. High Peak) that the 'somewhat moderated' growth expectations would have implications for the continuing rate at which unemployment falls. + Mr Newton said that the beneficial effects of the Government's policies were now being felt throughout the United Kingdom. In the North of England, for example, unemployment had fallen by a third in the past three years. + 'It's now clear .. the effect of our policies is now being increasingly felt in areas which had felt themselves left out in the past from the general improvement in the economy. The mood in places like South Wales, Newcastle, Merseyside, Manchester and Bradford and Leeds, and almost wherever one goes, is of a much greater degree of confidence and optimism about the way things are going.' + Pointing out that for seven years the growth of investment had outstripped the growth of consumption, Mr Newton defended the levels of imports of capital goods and semi-manufactures. He said they were a necessar part of the process of strengthening the British economy 'to build up the capacity of our industries for the future'. + Mr Dale Campbell-Savours (Lab. Workington) asked if Mr newton could see a connection between these imports and the 'very areas that we've lost to British industry.' + Mr Newton replied: 'What I can see .. is the difficulties of many parts of British industry that were associated with the policies pursued not least by the last Labour government which left them in a significantly weakened state which it had necessarily taken time to overcome.' + He said: 'You can manifestly see a restrengthening of important parts of British industry.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +84 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 18, 1989 + +Weekend Arts: Murder most masculine - Radio + +BYLINE: By VAL ARNOLD-FORSTER + +LENGTH: 702 words + + + Those who take the 'damned lies' view of statistics won't, presumably, be listening to the new five-part series, A Year Of Dying Dangerously (Radio 4, Wednesday, to be repeated today). It's about homicide (murder, manslaughter and what used to be called infanticide); and this week started with a collection of 1986 statistics, the latest year for which the figures are near completion. + The figures could surprise the saloon bar experts; 685 dead - leaving aside death by drunken or reckless driving, or as a result of terrorist attack. You're most at risk if you are a baby (probably male) or a 16 to 30-year-old man (that's the group that accounts for more than half the increase in murder over the last 10 years). Women are less at risk than men; the elderly are not particularly vulnerable. Murder is often a domestic crime: the victims are likely to know their assailants, for in less than one in four homicides is a stranger killing stranger. Sundays are the dangerous days; the home of the victim is the most dangerous place. + Set these against the 5,382 killed on the roads, the 100 a year who die falling out of bed and the death once a week on a DIY job. Let alone the figures for cancer or heart attacks. + Presenter Hugh Prysor-Jones and producer John Forsyth are careful to be careful, not to sensationalise nor yet to take the crime lightly. These programmes, it was made clear, were a cut above mere media interest in murder, which was illustrated by a few racy headlines - though the news bulletins used seemed to be television rather than radio. The first serious examination of homicide, for many years, we were told, was the implication that this was an establishment job - they had got the officials of the Home Office, the Scottish Office and the Northern Ireland Office to help them 'make sense of the figures'. + But statistics, however accurate and however interesting, only take you so far. What is the reality like? We'd heard that three-quarters of homicide victims were killed by people they knew; but the two moving interviews we heard were with the families of two victims, a girl, killed in her bed, and a 17-year-old boy stabbed in a post pub brawl. Both were killed by strangers - the boy, alas, part of an increasing number of deaths in his age group, but the girl, murdered while her parents slept nearby, was, thank heaven, a totally untypical victim. + One of the problems of statistics is that they whet the appetite. Listen to those saloon bar discussions, just the thought that these programmes are meant to put right, and other questions arise. Those increased statistics for the murder of young men, for instance: what part does alcohol play? How easy is it to buy those lethal knives? What about the murdered babies: what sort of support for young mothers is needed? We may get answers in the rest of the series. + And in plenty of saloon bars, too, there will be questions about race. Will we get an ethnic breakdown of victims or assailants? I doubt it. + A New World In The Mourning (Radio 4, Monday to be repeated today). Greg Cullen's play, or maybe farce, takes Emlyn Parry, a headmaster standing as Labour candidate for Parliament, through a series of headlong adventures. A varied bunch of farcical characters, from a bomb slinging Welsh Nat schoolgirl to an ex-policeman turned religious bigot, even includes God, portrayed as a scaly and foolish hermaphrodite - rash, perhaps, in these blasphemy conscious days. The plot is complex. Who's going to get blown up? What's happened to the photographs of the gay encounter? + In Adrian Mourby's production, it's all at an unrelenting energetic pace, full of ear jangling background noise and with a confusing cast of Welsh actors at a full throttle. But in among the bluster there's a serious theme. This was the election of 1987: how far should a Labour candidate trim the Left-wing sails? Do people vote for anti-nuclear policies and support for the miners' strike, or for local schools and roads? Politics, as Mr Cullen perceives, has its ludicrous side: there was an authentic note to the refrain of the gloomy political agent .. 'You've lost a lot of votes there, Emlyn'. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +85 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 18, 1989 + +Weekend Money (Budget Extra): Four cheers for the Chancellor - The Budget helped ease some of the burden for pensioners + +BYLINE: By MARGARET HUGHES and JILL PAPWORTH + +LENGTH: 626 words + + + If this was anyone's Budget it was the pensioners'. The Chancellor introduced four changes to ease their financial lot in retirement. + He abolished the earnings limit which cut their state pension if they work, reduced the tax penalty on their earnings, lowered the threshold at which the higher aged allowance is paid, to 75, confirmed government plans to allow tax relief on medical insurance premiums for the retired from next April as well as making it easier for those in company schemes to retire early. + Earnings rule. The Chancellor's most wide-ranging measure to help the elderly was to scrap the much-loathed earnings rule. + Now, men between 65 and 69 and woman between 60 and 65 who continue working, lose 50 pence of their state pension for every Pounds 1 they earn a week between Pounds 75 and Pounds 79. Once they earn Pounds 79 a week they lose Pounds 1 of their pension for every Pounds 1 they earn until their earnings reach Pounds 118.15 a week when they lose all their state pension of Pounds 41.14 a week of they're a single and Pounds 65.90 if they're a married couple. + When the rule is abolished on October 1, the elderly will be able to earn as much as they like without losing their state pension. + Age allowance clawback Changes to income limits linked to age allowances - which determines how much a pensioner's incomes is taxed - will affect fewer of the elderly. + On retirement an age allowance replaces the single person's or married couple's allowance giving more tax-free income - Pounds 615 if you are single or Pounds 1,010 if you are married. People older than 75 receive a further allowance of Pounds 140 if single and Pounds 180 for married couples. Previously this top up became available at age 80. + This allowance, however, is only available if your income does not exceed a specific limit. If your earnings exceed this toal income threshold you gradually lose part of your age allowance until you reach a maximum threshold where you lose the extra age allowance and receive the single or married couple's allowance. + This threshold has been increased in the Budget by the rate of inflation, from Pounds 10,600 to Pounds 11,400, whether you are single or married. The earnings ceiling at which you lose all your age allowance have similarly been raised as the accompanying table shows. + Until the Budget, the rate at which you lost your age allowance was Pounds 1 for every Pounds 3 of income earned within this band so these pensioners were effectively being taxed at a higher rate than higher rate taxpayers. + This has been eased to a Pounds 1 loss of allowance for every Pounds 2 earned. + This means that, whereas previously the clawback of age allowance meant that pensioners were suffering the equivalent of a tax charge of 41.67 pence for every Pounds 1 they earned within the band, they will now be effectively taxed at 31.75 per cent. + For instance, a married man aged 65 will payt tax at the basic rate of 25 per cent on any earnings above the married couple's allowance of Pounds 5,385 as their earnings do not exceed Pounds 11,400. + Their maximum tax bill will thus be Pounds 1,503.75 on earnings of Pounds 6,015. However, were their earnings to total Pounds 11,600 - Pounds 200 more than the income threshold - their age allowance would be reduced by Pounds 100 to Pounds 5,285 - Pounds 1 for every Pounds 2 earned. + Earnings of Pounds 200 above the threshold would therefore be taxed at an effective rate of 37.5 per cent making their total tax bill Pounds 75 higher at Pounds 1,578.75. + Anything they earn above their upper earnings ceiling of Pounds 12,910 will be taxed at 25 per cent in the normal way until earnings reach the normal higher rate threshold. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +86 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 20, 1989 + +Commentary: Labour in a litter local difficulty + +BYLINE: By IAN AITKEN + +LENGTH: 1035 words + + + Almost 20 years ago, on the Monday after Labour's defeat in the 1970 general election, a few of us hacks were idly propping up the Strangers' Bar in the Palace of Westminster when who should walk through the swing doors but a former Treasury minister. Though shellshocked, he had held his own seat in spite of the national result. + After accepting a consolatory drink this man, who had just been controlling the nation's destinies, remarked that he'd been forced to come to the House by public transport for the first time for years. + 'And do you know how much it costs to get here by tube from Kentish Town nowadays?' he asked us, in genuinely shocked tones, 'Yes,' we replied, almost in unison. 'And the fact that you don't know is one reason why you lost the election.' + This trivial vignette has remained in my memory as a permanent reminder of the way Jacks (and Jills) in Office can lose touch with the most elementary things, and how they sometimes pay the price. The man on the Clapham omnibus, together with the woman on the clapped-out tube train, rightly resent the indifference of their masters to the way they have to live their lives. + Few things fall more clearly into the category of imporotant trivia than the matter of filth in the streets. It is only necessary to look at the faces of middle aged or elderly people, as they pick their way through the mountains of rubbish on city pavements, to realise how much they hate it. Yet it is only recently that politicians, and specifically our principle politicians, have begun to take notice. + To be sure, Mrs Thatcher did momentarily become aware of it some years ago. It happened as she was being driven back to London from Heathrow after visiting some European capital. Gazing idly out of the window, she noticed how scruffy the roads were compared to those she had just left. + She reacted indignantly, expressing patriotic shame about the contrast. But her response was to condemn the delinquents who 'throw things down,' not to galvanise those responsible for picking things up. Then she wound up the window and averted her eyes for several more years. + Next came last year's comic episode of the 'photo opportunity' in St James's Park, with the black bag and the stage-prop litter. Once again, the Prime Minister tut-tutted about people who 'throw things down.' But she had precious little to say about clearing it up, beyond her Fred Karno-ish exhibition with the plastic bag. + Now, however, it looks as if the subject has got through to her at last. Presumably someone at Tory Central Office (it couldn't have been Nick Ridley, whose nose is too high in the air to notice) has told her that clearing-up litter is also part of the green cause to which she has become converted. + Indeed, they seem to have persuaded her that litter in the streets is a vote-catching issue. So last weekend, at Scarborough, she unveiled her latest toe-curling slogan. It was 'Bag it and bin it, and that way we'll win it,' in which the 'it' was clearly the next general election. + Not surprisingly, the Government is now planning legislation based on the proposition that it is town halls and not Whitehall departments which are responsible for keeping the streets clean. Its aim will be to force local councils to discharge this duty. 'We are going to make them do it,' said Mr Ridley at the same Scarborough conference. + And quite right, too, you may be tempted to say. For it is undeniable that keeping the streets clean is one of the prime duties of a local authority, just as it is undeniable that many local authorities do it very badly, if at all. So isn't a good idea tochuck a firecracker into the council chamber, and force them to get on with it? + Well, yes, up to a point. No one can deny that many urban authorities have been outrageously remiss in this respect, and have preferred to spend their ratepayers' money on more glamorous or more ideologically satisfactory services than emptying litter bins and sweeping the streets. Moreover, many of the dirtiest areas either are, or have until recently been, controlled by recognisably'loony councils.' + All this is self evident, particularly to residents (like the present writer) of certain London boroughs. Few London Labour councillors could seriously deny that it was their past behaviour, and that of the unions which organise council employees, which made possible the ruthless attack on local government which has become an essential feature of phase two Thatcherism. + Yet if the antics of the loony left triggered the government's attack on town hall democracy, the relatively small number of remaining loony councils cannot be used to justify it. And the latest move in the Prime Minister's campaign is at least as outrageous as its earlier stages. + For what Mrs Thatcher and Mr Ridley are now proposing is to nail local authorities to the wall on street cleaning just at the moment when they have made certain that most councils won't have the money to do it. When they fail to deliver the spotless streets and empty litter bins which the Finchley Housewife demands, it will be the councillors who will have to carry the can all the way to the polling station. + It is, one has to admit, as neat a piece of Catch 22 politics as any so far devised by the devious and unloveable Nicholas Ridley. Never forget that it was Ridley who hatched the plan to destroy the NUM by enticing Arthur Scargill into an unwinable strike. + But even Mr Ridley is fallible, as the embarrassing fiasco of the Water Privatisation Bill demonstrates. So it remains possible that even this latest trick will backfire, and that a fairminded electorate will see through the litter wheeze and realise where the ultimate responsibility really lies. + They won't do so, however, without some help and encouragement from the Labour Party, and in particular from its erstwhile 'loony' councils. They could do what they like doing best, which is to launch a nice big campaign. But they could also have a go at doing what they do worst, namely, collect a little of that damned litter. Or, to put it in someone else's words: 'Bag it and bin it, and then they might win it.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +87 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 21, 1989 + +Futures (Daedalus): Zoom with a view + +BYLINE: By DAVID JONES + +LENGTH: 532 words + + + All of us, as we grow older, find it harder to focus on small print or anything else that needs to be looked at closely. Bifocal, trifocal, and even distributed-focus glasses are a very imperfect solution; in any case they merely trade strained eyes for an arthritic neck. + So Daedalus has been recalling the variable-focus glasses he once invented, with flexible plastic-film lenses that could be pumped up with water to vary their focal length. He now returns to the idea with the key improvement needed to make it practical and popular: autofocus. The autofocus systems used by modern cameras are not ideal for this job. They cannot reliably improve the eye's focusing, because they cannot tell how well it is focused already. So Daedalus's ingenious Autospecs take their cue from the eye's own focusing efforts. + As you look at something closely, the flexible lens of your eye thickens to increase its optical power. This makes the surface of the eye, just in front of the lens, bulge slightly. The movement is detected by infrared position sensors on the frame of the Autospecs, and triggers their own lenses to inflate in sympathy. Thus Autospecs follow and amplify your own instinctive focus movements, and as long as you have even the slightest focusing ability, they can make up the deficit. Their action is entirely 'transparent'; you will have no sense of being tracked by an optical mechanism, but will merely find your focusing range magically extended. + Daedalus prototype Autospecs are unavoidably heavy and clumsy. They contain not only glass corrective lenses and variable-focus liquid lenses, but a fair amount of electronics as well. Dreadco's opticians are working hard to miniaturise them, while Daedalus himself hampers their efforts with repeated suggestions for useful added features. Thus he is arguing for a vastly greater focal range than any natural eye, so that the wearer can focus closely and minutely without needing a magnifying glass. He wants the focusing signal to be able to drive a servomotor on a suitable microscope, camera, or pair of binoculars, so that Autospecs can automatically focus these instruments too. He likes the idea of telescopic and zoom facilities - which make his opticians cringe at the added weight and complexity. + These arguments should ultimately be resolved, and some commercial form of Autospecs will then hit the market. They will be snapped up, not only be middle-aged and elderly citizens, but also by watchmakers, fine mechanics, entomologists, stamp collectors, and interpreters of insurance contracts. For everyone who now struggles with bifocals, or multiple pairs of special spectacles, or newspapers scrutinised at arm's length, the world will snap blissfully into fine focus. + Daedalus even hopes for sales among the careless young, who can focus perfectly well as they are. With Autospecs, he argues, their eyes will always be perfectly relaxed: the specs will focus for the. Their eye lenses will be saved from constant focus flexing and the fatigue and work hardening that it causes. They will enter middle age with eyes so youthful that they will never lose their close-focus ability at all! + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +88 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 21, 1989 + +Nuclear missiles stuck in the mud + +BYLINE: By MARTIN WALKER + +LENGTH: 292 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + + + Part of the West's nuclear deterrent was out of action throughout 1986, and nobody noticed. + While Reagan and Gorbachev were at the Reykjavik summit, a squadron of the Minutemen intercontinental ballistic missiles was n ot capable of responding to an order to launch. + Incorrectly programmed with launch codes by Strategic Air Command technicians, the elderly Minutemen would have remained in their silos, the Pentagon confirmed yesterday. + 'As a result of the incident, a number of procedural changes have been introduced into the coding process, and during subsequent coding changes all missiles were correctly programmed,' a spokesman for SAC said yesterday. + Confirming the exclusive story of the sudden failure of the Minuteman in yesterday's Washington Times, SAC insisted that only a few of the 1,000 Minutemen missiles were affected, and that 98 per cent of America's strategic missile force remained on 'ready alert' status. + But the rogue missiles at Malmstrom air force base in Montana were showing 'ready alert' throughout the year, although they were effectively out of commission. + And retired SAC officers yesterday charged that the failure of part of the force to respond to preliminary launch orders would have thrown into disarray the rest of the 50-strong Minuteman squadron at Malmstrom. + At least five missiles were fed the incorrect codings in late 1985, during the annual recoding procedure, and the error was not discovered until a year later. The codings are part of the fail-safe system which guards against accidental launch, and if the electronic launch orders which the missile receives does not accord with its own check code, the Minuteman will not fire from its protected underground silo. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +89 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 21, 1989 + +Win for woman mayor completes a personal triumph for Rocard + +BYLINE: By PAUL WEBSTER + +LENGTH: 616 words + +DATELINE: PARIS + + + The election of Mrs Catherine Trautmann as the Mayor of Strasbourg in the French municipal elections on Sunday completed a personal triumph for the Prime Minister, Mr Michel Rocard, while relaunching the Alsatian city's drive to become the European capital. + Mrs Trautmann's bid to be the first woman mayor of a big French city was backed by Mr Rocard. His hold on the premiership was also reinforced by Socialist gains in 35 towns of more than 20,000 people with the loss of 14 to the right. Socialists or allies now control 136 big towns and the Communists 68 (one gain, 15 losses). The Gaullist-RPR control 80 (13 gains, 20 losses) and other rightwing parties 82 (19 gains, 28 losses). + While President Francois Mitterand's supporters have seized or maintained control of cities like Marseilles, Lille, Brest, Avignon, or Nantes, the Strasbourg victory destroyed a traditional rightwing stronghold. Mrs Trautmann's success was achieved despite falling out with the local Green party leader, Mrs Andree Buchmann. + The 38-year-old future mayor had been given little chance of winning. Less than a year ago, she lost a parliamentary election and had to give up her first government post as junior Minister for Old People. + Her comeback was achieved by a model campaign. She was opposed by Mr Marcel Rudloff, a veteran centrist politician who took over the city of 250,000 people in 1983 from Mr Pierre Pflimlin, the last Fourth Republic Premier. Rather than stress Socialist policy, even refusing to use the rose emblem, Mrs Trautmann attacked the mayor for failing to push Strasbourg's claims as European capital. + Mrs Trautmann accused Mr Rudloff of refusing to enter the fight for Strasbourg's international role. Mrs Trautmann, a Protestant like the Prime Minister, also blamed Mr Rudloff for losing high-technology European Community contracts to more progressive cities like Grenoble and for apathy over future extension of the TGV super speed train network. + But Mrs Trautman, who studied seven languages including English and Hebrew at Strasbourg's theology faculty, also gained votes by neglecting working class areas to seek middle class support against Mr Rudloff's pet project - a highly-automated Metro that would have taken 10 years to build. Instead, she lobbied for a tram system, the main claim of Green Party rivals. + She was so successful that part of the Green electorate switched between rounds, giving Mrs Trautmann 42 per cent of the vote, while Mr Rudloff polled 36 per cent. The Greens, who scored more than 12 per cent in the first round, saw their share drop to less than 9 per cent after Mrs Trautmann accused the movement of being rightwing reactionaries who wanted to turn Strasbourg into a museum. With Mr Rocard's support, Mrs Trautmann has promised to lobby European civil servants and MPs in a major campaign to ensure Strasbourg is not relegated as a European centre. She hopes to win over apathetic international journalists by building a modern Press Centre that was refused by the previous mayor. + Her main critics could be the Greens who are mounting a big campaign for the European elections in June. The Strasbourg leader, Mrs Buchmann, a 33-year-old university teacher, answered Mrs Trautmann's criticism of the local Greens by saying it was the Socialist candidate who was a reactionary, refusing to support her party's proposals to give votes to immigrants. The issue was exploited by the racist National Front in Strasbourg where Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen's party took 12 per cent of the poll with more than 10,000 votes. + Rightwing parties' refusal to deal with the National Front cost Gaullists and centrists several towns. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +90 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 22, 1989 + +Wednesday Women (First Person): Death on the clock - When the end is inevitable, why not accept it? + +BYLINE: By JEAN DAVIS + +LENGTH: 661 words + + + As I waited in the queue at the supermarket I could not help overhearing the elderly woman (obviously a grandmother) who was pouring our her story: 'They took him back in .. then she had to travel all the way to the hospital every day .. poor little mite .. nothing but trouble .. if he had lived he would never have been right ..' + Her companion could do nothing but make sympathetic noises and I pondered on the tale of a baby, born with defect so severe that all the aids of modern technology had proved useless. + As she reached the check-out the grandmother said: 'You know, in the old days, they let them die and we had to learn to live with it. I think it was kinder.' + Which left me wondering. Was that acceptance necessarily a sign of uncaring? Was it fatalism, or a shell grown to protect the soul from hurt and was it so wrong to come to terms in the knowledge that some things were just meant to be? + Nowadays, it seems, modern medicine, modern surgery, is clutching at straws and that miracles not only are but should be, all the time, the order of the day. Faced with malformation, abnormality, malfunction or any hiccup in the human condition everything possible should, of course, be done. But every day sees more disorders, diseases, rarer and rarer symptoms and syndromes, until each quirk brings with it another category, and, like the Victorians naming hitherto unknown plants, whole new genera find their way into medical books. + To that grandmother, all the to-ing and fro-ing from hospital to clinic, from waiting room to surgery, and the dedicated work of doctors and nurses, to try to undo what harsh nature had produced, was a lost cause. Moreover, she considered them unkind, unnecessary and unnatural. + It could be argued that while that particular child could not have been saved, what was learnt through the vain attempt would benefit some other future case, but meanwhile the cost in the suffering within that family needed to be calculated. + Daily there are occasions when life-support systems are at the centre of moral dilemmas and when old people are kept alive (sic) long after the Shakespearean stage of 'sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything' made life anything but worth living. The old midwife and doctor, working together, when faced with this sort of dubiety, helped the old to die with dignity, or put the baby on one side to concentrate on the mother and knew what they were doing. They followed through the heartbreak and hard work that would face parents with helplessly malformed children, or families with senile, incontinent elderly relatives, and were not afraid to leave some things to nature. If the child revived, then that was meant to be and if the old lingered, that, too, had to be faced, but using energy, resources and over-reacting to what was unalterable was regarded in a harsh society as a waste of time. + Death is the one thing, in these days of openness, frank talk and no holds barred, that is unmentionable and not a subject for polite society. + We are bombarded with programmes wherein people's innards are pulled hither and thither, cut into and sewed neatly back together again. + But that five-letter word is swept under the carpet, is euphemised and regarded as obscene, because it is the one finite reality. + It is a wonderful fact that the strides made in medical science over the past century have improved the quantity, as well as the quality of life: it is equally wonderful that every disability, affliction, handicap, should be fought, tooth and nail. But that grandmother was quite right, too. + Her instinct to accept, sometimes, what must be without subjecting baby or family to protracted - and, more than likely, useless - treatment, was based on the acceptance of life as it is. + We all have to die of something, at some time or another. Perhaps it is time we came to terms with the fact that there is virtue in accepting that. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +91 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 22, 1989 + +Burton head gloomy over retailing + +BYLINE: By ROSEMARY COLLINS + +LENGTH: 316 words + + + Sir Ralph Halpern's Burton Group is suffering from depressed levels of high street spending. Pre-tax profit rose 7 per cent to Pounds 117.5 million, slightly ahead of City forecasts, in the six months to the beginning of March and the shares rose a few pence to 213p on the news, but Sir Ralph presents a gloomy picture of current trends and future prospects. + 'We are trading in a very difficult market,' he says. 'The general economic situation is tough, the Budget has changed nothing at all, and we now believe the difficulties will last longer than anyone expected.' + Burton's retail sales were up 12 per cent at Pounds 851.9 million in the half year, with trading profit 2.3 per cent higher at Pounds 104 million, but margins fell a full percentage point, only partly because of increased costs. The group claims 11.5 per cent of the UK clothing market, half a per cent up on last year. + Debenhams performed best of the retail division, with Top Shop for teenagers and the Principles shops for 'the older, sophisticated woman' doing worst. Burton has already given 50,000 square feet of retail space from Top Shop over to Dorothy Perkins or Champion Sport and more will follow. Top Shop's problems are due to demography, says Michael Wood, Burton's finance director. + There are fewer young shoppers than there were. We have an ageing population, and a new chain for older men, by which Sir Ralph means the over-35s, has opened experimentally under the name Huttons. + The trouble at Principles was that the customers did not like last autumn's merchandise, Sir Ralph admits. + The problem is being addressed. Costs are to be cut. Burton's property division doubled profits to Pounds 12 million at the trading level on turnover which rose Pounds 10 million to Pounds 45.5 million. The group has 4 million square feet of retail and commercial property under development. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +92 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 25, 1989 + +Holiday traffic imprisons Lake District dwellers + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL MORRIS + +LENGTH: 461 words + + + There's a flower that shall be mine. 'Tis the little celandine. + Wordsworth's daffodils and celandines tremble this Easter as the sheer pressure of traffic in the Lake District threatens to ruin the beauty which visitors come to see. + Every holiday weekend - but worst at Easter, if the weather is good - nose-to-tail queues stretch 12 miles from near Kendal to Ambleside, after a 40-mile long crawl on the M6 motorway. + The congestion can amount to more than 24,000 vehicles a day throughout the district during peak holiday periods. + The situation has become so bad that some of the elderly between Windermere and Bowness are forced to stay at home because they fear to cross the road. Double yellow lines gash even small villages, like Glenridding and Patterdale. Parking is becoming a problem in remote valleys like Kentmere. + Lake-lovers say it is time to weigh the cost-benefit of tourism in Britain's most famous national park (Pounds 256 million spent in 1985) against its devastating effects. + The problems are exemplified in the daffodil and celandine-spangled park at Ambleside, where the building of a relief road is feared. Mr John Toothill, the national park officer, says the only cure for the problems is fewer cars: it is just not tenable to go on improving and widening roads, let alone building new ones. + But Friends of the Lake District are worried that the relief road, to start in 1992, will be extended (from nearby Waterhead) through the park and fields to the Keswick road. + The county council says it would be logical to extend the relief road at the northern end to Rydal, but acknowledges it is a sensitive issue. + 'It is too nice to spoil,' commented Mr Peter Spurrier, a retired chartered surveyor, whose house overlooks the route where Wordsworth walked from his home at Rydal Mount to visit a local artist. He said that to break through a scenic area would just 'shuffle traffic from one place to another.' + The Staveley bypass between Kendal and Windermere, just opened, has its first real test this weekend. Mr Toothill expected that it would move the bottleneck to Windermere. + Windermere resident Mrs Sally Sim, a solicitor's wife, is getting up a petition for a zebra crossing. She has joined forces with Mrs Sylvia Hicks, warden of a sheltered housing project for old peoople, in moves to get a new crossing. So far, the only hope is a mid-road refuge. + Mrs Hicks said many of her residents, mostly in their 80s, would not go out at Easter, or other busy weekends, as they found it virtually impossible to cross the main road. + Mrs Neil Hudson, who is nearly 90, said: 'I can only walk with difficulty, and if I cross over, I just have to take my heart in my mouth and hope for the best.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +93 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 28, 1989 + +Private medical tax plan 'could hit NHS shake-up' + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 451 words + + + Plans to give tax relief on private medical insurance for the elderly could wreck the Government's health shake-up, ministers are warned today. + The warning comes from one of the few NHS groups to be broadly supportive of the reforms. In evidence to the Commons Social Services Committee, the Institute of Health Services Management says: 'The success of implementing the measures in the white paper will depend to a large extent on winning the hearts and minds of the million or so staff who work in the NHS. + 'This support is unlikely to be forthcoming as long as funds that could be used for much-needed public expenditure programmes are used to give an artificial boost to the private health insurance market.' + The criticism will scarcely surprise Mr Kenneth Clarke, the Health Secretary, who is known to have doubts about the wisdom of the plan, thought to have been forced through by the Prime Minister, to offer tax relief to people over 60. + He will, howver, be concerned at the tone of the institute's wider appraisal of the reforms. Compared to its earlier enthusiasm, the IHSM appears markedly lukewarm. With the medical and nursing professions ranged against him, Mr clarke badly needs its backing. + The institute also criticises the speed at which the changes are to be introduced, the lack of any pilot schemes and the absence of any attempt to tackle the 'endemic underfunding.' + Questioning claims that market forces will balance work-load and funding, the institute says: 'Hospitals will still be able to provide more care than their funding allows and the district health authority will have to impose restrictions on the volume of patients because of its own limits on funds.' + The institute welcomes the proposals to bring doctors and nurses into the management process through budgeting and medical audit procedures. However, it is concerned at plans for family doctors to run their own budgets. It also fears confusion and fragmentation if some hospitals opt out, leaving health authorities buying care from one hospital while providing care in another. + The institute urges authorities to avoid this problem by putting all their care services on an arms-length contract basis now. + Judging the reforms against the four founding principles of the NHS, the institute expresses doubts on all counts. It says that while the comprehensiveness of services could be improved, it could also suffer; that access to the services might be boosted but not on the basis of equality for all; that equity will be damaged by tax relief for the elderly; and that the ideal of free services at the point of delivery is already being damaged by prescription charges. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +94 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 28, 1989 + +Strike threat over licensed teacher plan + +BYLINE: By DAVID GOW + +LENGTH: 396 words + + + The National Union of Teachers yesterday threatened strikes in individual schools if the Government imposed licensed teachers as a way of easing chronic shortages. + Mr Doug McAvoy, deputy general secretary of the NUT, the largest teacher union, told its annual conference in Blackpool: 'I believe the scheme will be resented and resisted by a majority of our members because it is an insult to them. It is not a means of solving teacher shortages; it downgrades teaching and says anybody can do it.' + The issue was of such fundamental importance to the profession that many teachers would simply refuse to work alongside licensed teachers or help to train them, but the boycott could, he realised, conflict with trade union legislation. + Mr Kenneth Baker, the Education Secretary, plans to introduce the scheme in September. It would allow people aged 26 or over with minimal educational qualifications to switch careers and start teaching immediately, with only on-the-job training. + The conference had earlier strengthened the union's opposition to the scheme, and demanded that the executive draw up strategies to defeat 'an unacceptable dilution of the profession'. The executive had originally wanted to tone down the policy motion. + NUT policy will be to insist that teaching is an all-graduate profession. It wants Mr Baker to deal with growing shortages by encouraging qualified teachers, particularly women, to return to the profession, and older people to join through access courses leading to fullscale training. + Mr Don Winters, the union's treasurer, told delegates Mr Baker's scheme would dilute the profession and cheat children by bringing in people without the necessary standards and with no training at all. + 'I'll tell Mr Baker what to do: send these licensed teachers to Eton, Harrow, Roedean, and Winchester. Privatise them. Let them practise on the children of the rich,' he said to loud applause. + Ms Ann Moran, for the executive, declared: 'I don't want someone who has been burned out by ICI and pensioned off at 40 to be let loose in any school I am connected with.' + Mr Peter Griffin, another executive member, said the licensed teachers device would not do. + 'Mr Baker cannot have high standards of teacher-training and education in schools and this shabby, back-door route to qualified status at the same time.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +95 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 29, 1989 + +Leading Article: Come up with the answer I want + +LENGTH: 640 words + + + Undaunted by the failure of her health review to produce a viable reform, the Prime Minister is about to plunge into a new social policy review. Her newly assembled ministerial committee on community care is the third on this issue in the past three years. The first, by the Comptroller and Auditor General, identified the problems. The second, by Sir Roy Griffiths, provided the solution. This third is designed by the Prime Minister to produce a different solution. For all Sir Roy's impeccable credentials - Sainsbury's managing director, deputy chairman of the NHS management board and the Prime Minister's special adviser on health - not even he could persuade the Prime Minister to accept the obvious sensible course: to make local council social service departments responsible for co-ordinating the present diverse and unco-ordinated services for the elderly, disabled and mentally infirm. + Everything about local authorities is anathema to the Prime Minister. Not even the prospect of a further year of unco-ordinated policies, unintended policy developments and worst of all, uneconomic programmes has deterred her from blocking Griffiths. The cash involved is huge: an estimated Pounds 6 billion when all the various contributions by different state agencies - health, social security and social services - are added up. The main thrust of the Griffiths report has been welcomed by all the relevant agencies except the agent in Downing Street. + The present system is a mish-mash of waste and underfunding. Much of the waste is linked to residential care where the social security system's open-ended commitment to people in residential accommodation has seen this subsidy rise from Pounds 18 million in 1980 to almost Pounds 1,000 million this year. The Audit Commission noted this unintentional development and the discrepancy between the 30 per cent increase in the over-75s between 1975 - 85 and the 70 per cent increase in the number of residential places. This is not just a problem of the diversion of funds which might have been used to allow elderly people to remain in their own homes: there is the additional dilemma of the abuse which old people are suffering in some private and public residential homes. Yet in the face of all this, key community care elements remain underfunded. The number of NHS beds occupied by the mentally ill, mentally handicapped and geriatrics dropped by 35,000 in the last decade but the number of extra day care places increased by only 9,000. + If, as all sides agree, the main problem with community care is divided responsibility and unco-ordinated programmes, there are three options open to ministers: a new agency; an NHS-led service; or the Griffiths solution of local social service departments with improved lines of responsibility and accountability. A new agency would only create new boundary disputes, new gaps between the new and old services for clients to fall through, and several years of disruption as the reorganisation was put into place. An NHS-led service is neither appropriate (since many of the needs of the clients are not medical but practical like cleaning, shopping, getting dressed) nor viable, absorbed as the service is with its own restructuring. This leaves local social service departments. + Sir Roy looked at all three options much more closely than Mrs Thatcher's new committee of cabinet ministers will have time to do. In a warning which Mrs Thatcher has foolishly ignored he reminded the Government that the separate agencies providing community care are not like a Rubik Cube, only waiting for a great co-ordinator to twist them into a perfect solution. There is no perfect solution. Nor, more importantly, can the Prime Minister become 'the great Rubik co-ordinator.' That has already been demonstrated by the health review. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +96 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 29, 1989 + +PM urged to free care homes market: Councils by-passed in scheme for residential choice + +BYLINE: By DAVID HENCKE, Westminster Correspondent + +LENGTH: 581 words + + + Proposals to let people place their mentally ill or handicapped, elderly or disabled relations in residential homes of their choice at the state's expense are to be put to a cabinet committee, chaired by the Prime Minister. + The proposals - being drawn up separately by the right wing Adam Smith Institute and the No Turning Back group of MPs - aim to extend the ideas of opting out of the National Health Service and building an internal market within it. They would involve an important role for charities in providing care. + The plan also conflicts with one of the main recommendations of a report on community care by Sir Roy Griffiths last year in curbing the role of local authorities. + Under it, money allocted for the care of a disabled person would go to the relatives who would be entitled to spend it at a home of their choice up to a fixed limit. + Different limits would be set for each disability and the area where a person lived. Top-up money from private sources would be allowed for relatives who wanted superior facilities. + The aim would be to transfer the placing of sick people from the professions to parents and guardians. + There would be no change in the system for ordinary residential care of the elderly which will continue to rely on the present means-tested social security payment system. + Doctors would have to certify people to decide whether they qualified for the higher level of community care. + The proposals are to be discussed by Mrs Thatcher's personal policy advisers at Downing Street this week. + Other suggestions include: + Residential homes should have the option to become 'budget holders' - like GPs under the NHS reforms - receiving money for each person placed there by relatives. + Charities which provide residential care should be allowed to apply for 'budget holder' status to attract residents. + Successful homes which attract residents should be allowed to expand and those which fail left to close. An indemnity body - based on the Association of British Travel Agents which protects holidaymakers against tour operators which collapse - would guarantee all residents in a failed home an alternative place. + Two new agencies - one for England and Wales, the other for Scotland - should be set up to co-ordinate the new scheme. They would take over powers from the Department of Health and local councils to inspect premises, check fire regulations and approve conversion of homes. + The local authority role should be reduced to approving planning permission for new homes. Mr Kenneth Clarke, the Health Secretary, and Mr Malcolm Rifkind, the Scottish Secretary, would appoint members of the agencies' boards. + The proposals will be published by the Adam Smith Institute and the No Turning Back Group next month. + Both groups are confident that the Prime Minister will be sympathetic to the proposals which will be put on the agenda of a Cabinet committee set up to review community cre. + They follow a flurry of activity over the last week by right wing groups determined to influence government policy. + Mr David Willetts, director of the Centre for Policy Studies, the Conservative think-tank, held a meeting to discuss reforms, attended by Mr Clarke and Sir Roy Griffiths. + The institute held a meeting with several providers of private community care to discuss its proposals. The meeting came out firmly against extending the role of local authorities, favouring new agencies. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +97 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 30, 1989 + +Thursday Women: Nuclear power can't destroy my mum - The ranks of those protesting against atomic power stations include more than the young, fit and single + +BYLINE: By BEATRIX CAMPBELL + +LENGTH: 1331 words + + + My Mother is a criminal. For the last two years she has been perpetrating premediated acts of alleged criminal damage against the leaky nuclear power station near the Lake District that not even a name change can launder, Sellafield. + She is Catharina Barnes, a 72-year-old former nurse, the subject of local paper headlines like, 'I'll go to jail says demo gran.' + 'I don't really believe in doing things against the law. But people had to break the law during the last war to resist the facists when they cam eto my country (the Netherlands). And I believe it is war crimes to use nuclear bombs agianst people.' + Catharina Barnes took up with criminal damage a couple of years ago after many years as a peaceful peace campaigner. her mantra is the memory and the message of Hilda Murrell who was murdered five years ago this week. 'She was 78, she led a very Quaker, respectable life, had taught herself about nuclear power and she was clever enough to foresee all the problems we are having with nuclear waste. I admired her very much. She was a rose-grower and I love that - to create beauty in this world. She was murdered, and the fact that she was silenced in this terrible way, I can't put the thought away just so easy, I feel if I don't protest against it, I condone it. + 'Young people get into trouble and get a bad record if they do things against the law, so it is up to me to take up her protest because I've got nothing to lose - I'm older, I can't lose my money, I've not got any; I can't lose my job because I'm pensioned off. + 'I don't know of any better way than to ptotest against Sellafield, because it is on my doorstep. It is there not just for nuclear power but for bombs. + 'I used to go to Greenham, But I never stayed there because, at my age, I'm always worried that I'll be a bit of a liability.' But she did join the young anarchists' Stop the City demo in Londona few years back. 'It was to bring to our attention that it is the money business that makes war. The police were hacking very viciously into the young people and calling them scum - and they were just like our kids and their friends. I thought there ought to be a lot more older people, who people would think were respectable. So when some of the young people went to sit in front of a bus, I went to sit down as well. + 'A young policewoman came up to me, she obviously thought I was a poor old lady, and she said: 'Are you all right, dear, do you wan tto go to the other side? And she tried to help me up. I said: 'No, I just want to demonstrate.' One of the police said to me: 'You're not in with this scum?' + That was followed by the civil disobedience campaign, the Snowball, launched in 1984 when, as at Greenham COmmon, people cut the wire at a US base. + 'So we started to cut the wire to breing to the attention of the public the wall of secrecy and lies around Sellafield. I was around and had young children when the big fire happened in 1957. Over the years there have been more accidents and leaks. + 'About 100 women went to mark the fire and the six babies who died around there that year. The gates were very securely closed. It looked so very strong and inaccessible. But I was walking around a bit and realised that nomatter how strong the gates were, underneath the fence was just soil. SO I started to scrape it away, just withsticks, and then we got under it. We looked a terrible mess. The others tried to get some of the babies' coffins through, too, but that was hard, because they were rigid, and we were not. + 'The guards had not noticed us at first, but then they started coming towards us, looking like robots. And then I got scared. We'd been warned thast the police were armed - I don't know if they are, but I'm more scared of dogs than guns - because guns are clean in a way. 'So we marched up to them - it seemed such a long time before we met, it was like High Noon. We didn't know what to expect, because we hadn't planned anything, but anyway we handed over one of the coffins to a guard and said we wanted to give it to him as a token of mourning from the women of Cumbria. His first inclination seemed to be just to grab it - you do when anybody hands you something - but then he pushed it away. + 'When I said: 'Thanks very much, we want to go now,' he was very pleased. 'Certianly, madam!' + SInce then seh's been arrested half a dozen times, and appeared in court about 20 times. 'I'll do anything, even go to jail, I don't know any other way, the other ways don't seem to be enough. Nobody likes to be arrested, and I'd be scared stiff to go to jail, but I am prepared to go if it gives any more attention to what Hilda MUrrell did. She lost her life, and we are trying to make what she did more worthwhile - in the end she didn't have her life in her own hands, but I have. + 'The first time I got arrested I was trying to cut the fence - it's such a good fence you never get through it, but I've made two or three scratches. And they confiscated my tools and, me being a pnesioner, I can't afford really good tools. But the Crown Court judge said it was 'a very understnable attempt to convince the public that what is going on at Sellafield is perfectly intolerable.' + 'We had a celebration there last summer, and I had learned off by heart the speechfrom Agincourt. I'd taken our old broken, electric hedgecutter and was waving this great big rusty, oily thing around like a sword. 'A nice young police lassie comes up and says: 'Are you trying to get through the fence?' + 'I'm not getting very far,' I said. 'Have you come to give us a hand?' and she said: 'No, I'm coming to arrest you.' + 'We've never done any damage really, but the people who live around there are so eager to cover up the danger because they're frightened of it; it is very suppressed there, and the magistrates act accordingly.' + The 1971 Criminal Damage Act says it is excusable to do damage if it is to prevent bigger damage, 'and every time I've been in court I've said Hilda Murrell was murdered and I feel I ought not to sit back and let her be silenced; I would condone her murder if I didn't protest. I find the court an ordeal, but I do it with my eyes open and I don't get any joy out of being againtst the police person who is just doing a job - one time there were seven police people there for this little scratch. My battle is with the powers who spend Pounds 3 million on a visitors' hall at Sellafield when mental hospitals are run down.' + Most of my mother's convictions have resulted in fines, which have ended up being dismissed ultimately, but she is always, of course, bound over to keep the peace. That's what she's doing anyway, she says. 'I'll be back, mister,' she says as she leaves the court, always joined by supporters with flowers, game for a cup of tea and a cake ot celebrate. + Our reactions to my mothr's mission vary: her teenage grandson follows her court career assiduously. My father, an activist himself, was always anxious. 'It upsets me. I see this little body faced with those people. I'd like to put the judges and the Sellafield management on trial, it's arse about elbow.' He joins the supporters handing out leaflets during her court appearances and savours her performances - always iconoclastic and yet polite, almost to the point of parody. + My brother thinks she is a heroine, which of course she is, my sister thinks she is, well just like our mother would be. And me - I worry, after all she is not a well woman, though she told at least one judge who asked her how she was that with her pacemaker she was probably helathier than he was. But heroism can be a health hazard and she promised me sh'd live forever. + The last twist in my mother's criminal career thwarted the court's misplaced magnanimity, when it tried to 'commute' a substantial fine to community service. She had served her community for 40 years, my mother said, but service as a punishment? Oh, No. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +98 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 31, 1989 + +Murder plot nurse jailed for 10 years: Patient attacked during rest home convalescence + +LENGTH: 496 words + + + A rest home nurse who tried to kill an elderly patient was jailed for 10 years at Liverpool crown court yesterday. + Mr Justice Sanderson Temple, QC, told deputy matron Ruth Thomas, aged 37, that her conduct was 'revolting and abominable.' + She pleaded guilty to attempting to murder Mr Abraham Rosenfield, aged 67, at the Sharon Jewish rest home in Southport, Lancashire, by poisoning him with a cocktail of whisky and drugs during a late night card game. + Thomas, of Southport, Merseyside, also admitted drugging the home's matron, Mrs Monica Sawitz, and Mrs Maggie Korwin-Grantford, the owner of another Southport rest home where she had worked. + Thomas's lover, Robert Burns, aged 19, of Dumfries, who admitted burgling Mr Rosenfield's flat in Blakely, Manchester, stealing his Pounds 19,500 savings, was put on probation for two years. + A care assistant at the home, Sara Wrighton, aged 24, of Southport, pleaded guilty to administering a noxious substance to Mr Rosenfield endangering his life, and two charges of handling stolen goods. She was jailed for 4 1/2 years. + The judge told the two women: 'The account of the way in which you behaved almost beggars belief,'. Mr David Turner, prosecuting, told the court earlier that Thomas and Wrighton held a late-night card game with Mr Rosenfield in his room at the rest home where he was staying for a fortnight's convalescence last June. + They gave him the whisky and drugs and Thomas then hit him over the head with a wine bottle and kicked him, shouting: 'Die, you bastard.' + The pair attacked him to cover up the flat burglarly, which took place after Mr Rosenfield told Thomas where he hid his savings. Thomas earlier drugged Mrs Sawitz. + Thomas and Wrighton previously worked at the Brooklyn rest home, Southport, and Thomas drugged Mrs Korwin-Grantford, its owner, before stealing Pounds 1,500 and splitting the money with Wrighton. + Mr Rosenfield said later that he was 'full of bitterness, hatred and poison. I looked upon Ruth as a friend.' He plans to sue the rest home. + Police managed to recover Pounds 8,000 of his stolen money but that had all gone on nursing home bills as he recovered. + Asked how he had managed to survive after being left naked all night in a pool of blood, he said: 'I have no idea. I wasn't meant to die - I was meant to live, that's all I can say.' + Detective Inspector Phil Walker, who led the investigation, said after the hearing: 'If the two women hadn't been caught, it doesn't bear thinking about. They had hit on a formula which worked and this could have gone on and on.' + After getting rid of blood-stained clothes, Thomas and Wrighton were stopped by police and, Mr Walker said, Wrighton claimed Thomas told her to run down the police officer as he got out of his car. + Fortunately, Wrighton refused to carry out the order. 'The officer was absolutely astounded later when we told him he could have become one of their victims.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +99 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 1, 1989 + +Weekend Money: Age-gauge in full measure + +BYLINE: By TED NICHOLAS + +LENGTH: 706 words + + + Having escaped from their parents in their late teens, an ever-rising number of people face the spectre of life with mummy all over again in middle-age, as she survives, ever more querulous, into her nineties. Parent Plan, a new and revolutionary insurance scheme launched by National Provident Mutual of Texas, now offers yo a polcy which will pay some or all of the costs of her living elsewhere. + 'In many cases one parent coming to join a married couple can ensure husband and wife end up in the divorce courts,' says James Habbish, NPM's director who dreamt up the scheme. 'Our plan aims to build up capital so that people can cope with the costs of sheltered housing for their parents when the time comes.' + The premiums vary depending on where you live, for the cost of sheltered accommodation in London can be up to 10 times the rate charged in Wales. But research in NPM's American base shows that the cost of accommodation is only one of the factors the company has to consider when setting its premiums. + 'We talked to our potential customers before we started and now realise just what a difference personality can make,' says Habbish. 'Remember that the older people get the more pronounced their characteristics become. Parent Plan assess elderly parents on three grounds before we work out the premiums. The overall idea is to mesure how much emotional pressure - or blackmail - parents can bring on their children in old age and just how tough the children can be in resisting it.' + Inevitably that's where the snags start. Middle-aged people who take out parent Plan certainly don't want their parents to know that they've done so. So National Provident Mutual's 'relationship consultants', many of them moonlighting social workers, have to see the family covertly. They often come to look at the parents on a family visit, usually pretending to be friends or business acquaintances of the children. + What do they assess? Inter-personal relationships - or the vibes factor as the professionals call it - comes first. Some mothers talk only to their child, others include their son or daughter-in-law in the conversation, and just occasionally they will even include any children there may be on the visit. Spotting body language showing boredom or irritability, like the tell-tale wagging foot, is crucial for the relationship consultants. Parent Plan insists meetings go on for at least two hours so they get the full feeling of how parents and child inter-relate. + Observers also check how often the old people will produce references to members of the family who've been dead for 10 or 20 years. The potential insurees - MACARS (or middle aged children at risk) - will normally tell NPM's consultant the names which are likely to come up more than two or three times at each meeting. + Finally comes the 'age gauge', to use parent Plan jargon. The social workers have to decide whether the parent treats his or (overwhelmingly) her child as under 12, between 12 and 18 or as a fully-fledged adult. 'The more a son or daughter gets treated as a child, the more they have to pay in premiums' says Habbish. 'The reason is easy. If children remain in emotional short trousers for all the time between their first and second childhood, they are far more prone to give in to their parents when they ask to come and live with them.' + National Provident Mutual wants access to doctors' files on the elderly parents concerned, and is surprised and angry that the British Medical Association has blocked their request. + 'Perhaps we got off to a bad start', announced NPM's sales director Avril Primo. 'We didn't know the etiquettes. We wouldn't have offered GPs a 10 per cent discount for their own Parent Plans in return for a quick glance at their patients' records. If we'd realised people thought it unethical, we would never have done it .. but we've stopped now.' + Parent Plan, for the moment, goes ahead without a medical check on parents, using what actuaries call 'the mean infirmity factor' in working out its calculations. Certainly the new insurance policy is going to be controversial. But it could at least save a lot of middleaged heartache provided people start saving early. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +100 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 1, 1989 + +Weekend Money: Pain relief aims to lure the over-60s - Private medical insurance incentive proposed to ease burden on NHS + +BYLINE: By DEBBIE HARRISON + +LENGTH: 788 words + + + With the introduction next April of tax relief on private (PMI) for the over 60s the Government aims to reduce the burden on the National Health Service by attracting as many of the elderly as possible into the private sector. At present only 4 per cent of the over 65s have PMI compared with about 10 per cent below this age. + The Budget statement gave the bare bones of the proposals but much of the detail is expected to be published in the Finance Bill. What is certain is that individuals over 60 will receive tax relief on private medical insurance premiums at their top rate. Basic rate tax relief will be awarded at source, as it is under Miras for mortgages up to Pounds 30,000, while higher-rate taxpayers will receive the excess relief through their PAYE codes. + One welcome clarification in the Budget is that basic rate tax relief will be available to everyone - not just taxpayers. This is the Inland Revenue's way of saying that non-taxpayers - a large proportion of the over 60s - will have their private medical insurance subsidised to the tune of 25 per cent by the Treasury. + In effect, what will happen is that the insurers will reduce their premiums for the over 60s by 25 per cent and will claim a rebate from the Revenue. For taxpayers this will be a rebate against tax paid, while for non-taxpayers it will be a subsidy. + A second group will also benefit from the tax relief. Where younger individuals are prepared to pay for elderly relatives, they will be able to claim full tax relief. + If you fall into one of these categories and want to take advantage of the tax perk you should examine carefully exactly what you will get for your money. + For the average retired couple standard cover, which offers unlimited refunds on treatment, curretnly costs between Pounds 1,300 and Pounds 2,200 a year. Even with tax relief this will be too expensive for most people. + Several leading providers, including BUPA and PPP, have introduced special schemes for the elderly over the past two years. It is likely that many similar plans will flood the market in the lead-up to next April. These schemes, while worthy of consideration, do need a health warning. + In order to avoid the high premiums associated with the risk profile of the elderly, these insurers have taken a cut price/cut benefits approach to the market. As a result, for a modest annual premium of between Pounds 250 and Pounds 420 a year, depending on age, subscribers are covered to a maximum of Pounds 15,000 under BUPA and Pounds 6,500 under PPP (plus an extra refund for open-heart surgery). + You might get a cataract operation or just about squeeze a hip replacement out of the budget scheme, but anything more major, or two minor operations in one year, will bust the budget and land you with a large medical bill. + Furthermore, an important feature of several plans for the elderly, including those offered by PPP and Sun Alliance/Healthfirst, is that treatment which can be obtained within six weeks is dealt with by the NHS. To encourage subscribers to try to obtian state treatment, insurers offer a sweetener in the form of a cash payment of about Pounds 20 a night for treatment under the NHS. Clearly, this reduces the number of claims considerably, particularly for serious emergency treatment, and is a major factor in providing low premiums. + The government has indicted that the inclusion of cash benefits for NHS treatment may be unacceptable - for obvious reasons. The whole point of the introduction of tax relief is to get as many people as possible out of the NHS. Schemes which cut underwriting costs by trying to reduce claims in this way do little to ease the NHS burden. + The position of the schemes will be clarified in the Finance Bill or possible in the statutory regulations which follow. If the Government refuses to sanction schemes which incorporate an NHS cash benefit, insurers will be caught in a cleft stick. If they drop the cash payment the palns will seem less attractive, but if they abandon or reduce the six-week deferment period they will face increased claims and have to push up the cost of premiums considerably. + Tax relief on pre-funding schemes is expected to be announced in the next Budget. In a similar way to pension schemes, individuals would get tax relief for contributions during their working life to pay for a private medical insurance benefit in retirement. + Pre-funding is an essential element of the Government's plan to encourage the elderly to use private rather than state medical resources, since many people will not be able to afford private treatment in retirement unless they build up a fund during their working lives to pay for it. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +101 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 3, 1989 + +Austria's last empress is buried with pomp as thousands turn out for rainy farewell + +BYLINE: By IAN TRYNOR + +LENGTH: 651 words + +DATELINE: VIENNA + + + Romanesque vaults of Vienna's 13th centry St Stephen's Cathedral echoed to the strains of the old Imperial anthem for the first time in more than 70 years on Saturday when Austria said farewell to its last Empress. + Thousands lined the streets in pouring rain for the funeral of Zita, Empress of Austria, Queen of Hungary, to give but tow of her many titles. + Tokyo tourists and the pious elderly women of Vienna jostled for a glimpse of the former empress as the jet black carrigage made the one mile procession from the cathedral to the Cappuciner crypt, where Zita finally came to rest beside her dynastic predecessors. + There were four hours of pomp and ceremony for the woman who spent only two of her 96 years as empress and had spent the past 71 years in various places of exile till her death in Switzerland a fortnight ago. + The spectacular solemnities that brough Europe's royalty back to Vienna evoked a tidal wave of imperial nostalgia that the media were eager to capitalise on. 'Vienna the empire city once again,' one tablid daily wrote on its front page yesterday. + The elements cotnributed to the spectacle. The heavens opened just as the ceremonies were beginning and, uncannily on cue as Mozart's Requiem began on the stroke of three, thunder and lightning split the skies, putting an end to the best weather the capital had seen for the time of year since Zita's birth in the 19th century. + As Mozart boomed out triumphantly in the cathedral, European royalty joined the grieving family, led by Zita's eldest son, dr Otto Habsburg, and leaders of the Uastrian Republic around the coffin, draped in balck velvet and red, white and green, black and gold, representing all the peooples of the empire. + President Kurt Waldheim put in a rare public appearance to head Uastria's official representation. A few rows behind him stood a grim-faced Dr Alois Mock, the conservative People's Party leader, who faces a mounting chorus of demands for his resignation following recent election disasters. Chancellor Franz Vranitzky, the Socialist leader, had a pressing engagement elsewhere. + A frisson of controversy was clearly required to pierce the pieties and add an edge to the proceedings. This was duly supplied by Vienna's Archbishop Hermann Groer, who said the Requiem Mass, flanked by an army of clerics. + He told the assembled royals and dignitaries - not to mention the publics of + Austria and Hungary watching the proceedings live on television - that we + were witnessing not a state event, but a 'national funeral' that testified + to the 'love and loyalty' of Zita's people. 'Mozart's Requiem is worthy of a + ruler, an empress,' he declared, dismissing the notion of nostalgia. + And standing a few paces away from the President of the Republic, the + Archbishop sounded riskily restorationist, when he qupted glowingly from + the last interview Zita gave for the Austrian public when she was finally + permitted to visit the country at the time of her 90th birthday, 60 years + after the death of her husband, the last emperor, Kaiser Karl: 'I am + convinced that the lands of the Danube will once again stand under God's + protection.' + The Vatican appeared sympathetic to such sentiments when the Archbishop opened the Requiem bny reading the Pope's message in Zita's honour. It was addressed to her son and heir, Otto, as his 'Imperial Highness.' + From the cathedral, the funeral cortege made its way to the imperial crypt, the black carriage drawn by six black horses. + Three knocks on the bronze doors of the crypt. Who wants to enter? demanded the doorman. Zita, Empress of Austria, Queen of Hungary, came the reply. Sorry, can't come in. + The procedure was repeated then, to the question who is there? came the reply, Zita, a mortal and a sinner. Finally the gates opened and Zita was granted her place beside her forebears. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +102 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 4, 1989 + +Tuesday Women: Workforce waiting in the wings - Now that pensioners' earnings are de-limited, employers can learn from the US's unretirement programmes + +LENGTH: 846 words + + + + BY MAGGY MEADE-KING + Americans are now accustomed, as perhaps we shall become, to finding 'senior citizens' serving up their hamgurgers in McDonalds, carrying-out the groceries at their local supermarket or looking after their children at their day-care centre. While many organisations here operate a recruiting ban on the over-35s, US comapnies like IBM, Wells Fargo, Aeroscpace, and The Ravelers comapnies are encouraging their retirees to come back to work. + The Travelers insurance and financial services company saw a match between their need for temporary workers and their retirees' interest in part-time work and set up a highly successful 'unretirement program', with a Retiree Job Bank, as long ago as 1981. They have since moved on to hire retirees from other comapnies and other US employers are following their lead. Barbara Greenberg, spokesperosn for The Travelers, says they also discovered some hidden benefits in that 'older workers have a very strong work ethic and theys erve as positive role models for younger people within the organisation.' + Now the Chancellor has abolished the eranings limit for pensioners, it seems likely that, with a skills shortage looming in the 1990s, far more workers will be encouraged to stay on or start a new career after retirement. The over-65s represent a considerable job pool, with their numbers already totalling 8.8 million and considerable increases expected over the next decade. + Some companies in the south-east are already operating a 'wrinklies' policy to try and attract older workers to fill their increasing staff vacancies. The retailer, DIxons, for instance, is trying to attract women over 40 in some parts of London by offering them the chance to work in shcool term times only. Sainsburys and Tesco are chasing the over 50s; agencies are looking for pensioners to work as temprary secretaries and the Norwich Union is recruiting. + However, despite these pointers, many organisations are stilll operating a recruitment age ban, particualrly for training positions. A recent survey by MSL, the human resources consultants, found 88.5 per cent of the positions. A recent survey by MSL, the human resources consultants, found 88.5 per cent of the positions described in a sample of 928 ads specified an upper age limit of 40. + These sort of advertisements are illegal in the US, as are any sort of limitations or classifications of workers on the grounds of age, and compulsory retirement before 70. The Conservative MP, Barry Field, has introduced a private member's bill to ban age discrimination in job ads. He says he was inspired by a man who, having lied about his age, was still working for him at 77, and by his three constituency secretaries who all responded to the challenge of another career late in life. + 'I realised there were hundreds of thousands of people who find themselves without a job later in life, but who can't get the opportunity to present themselves at interview, because the advertisement precludes them from applying,' he says. 'We've got to get employers attuned to that tremendous reservoir of talent and ability.' + Baroness Phillips has entered a similar bill in the House of Lords but neither, as private members' bills,s tand much chance of success. They may, however, drop some hints to a Government tha tis already concerned to lengthen people's working lives. As the Prime Minister, now 63, seeks a fourth term of office, the message from Whitehall is that the elederly will be encouraged to stay in paid employment until they are 70 or even older. + In the absence of any legislation to back up that encouragement, there is, nevertheless, one weapon, at least, which can be used to combat age discrimination. Mary Jones, a careers advisor, backed by the Equal Opportunities Commission recently won a sex discrimination case against the University of Manchester's Careers and Appointments Service on the grounds that the University had applied an age requirement which was indirectly discriminatory against women. The University's advertisement had stated a prefered age rang eof 27-35 and Ms Jones, who was 46 at the time, was not shortlisted for a careers advisory post for which she was well qualified. + 'It was the last straw and I felt I had to do something about it,' she says. 'I'd applied to 12 or 14 universities after I'd completed my degree in 1983 and, apart form one temporary job, I was always turned down because the adverts all said 27 to 35, or I found out later that was the standard they were using.' Sixty per cent of university careers advisors are men, as are 91 per cent of heads of carers services. + 'i knew there were other people suffering like me and that this would be a test case,' says Mary Jones. 'I hoped it would set a precedent that would help everybody, men as well, who have been turned down simply on the ground sof age. I've got to know people in Job CLubs around here and they're capable, keen and qualified; there's nothing wrong with them, except their date of birth.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +103 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 5, 1989 + +Health Guardian: Deceiving the doctors - Bizarre phenomenon + +BYLINE: By JOHN ILLMAN + +LENGTH: 605 words + + + Every schoolchild in Germany has heard of der Lugenbaron, the lying baron, a swashbuckler notorious for exaggerating his military and sporting exploits. But until now Baron Munchausen (1720-97), the subject of Terry Gilliam's new film, has been forgotten in Britain - except by doctors. + Patients who present with a harrowing history and acute symptoms requiring emergency treatment are very occasionally found to be imposters. Their stories sound so plausible, however, that serious surgery may be undertaken leaving severe scars. The malingerers wander from hospital to hospital attempting their deceptions. In 1951, the late Dr Richard Asher (father of the actress Jane) gave the disorder the name Munchausen's syndrome because, like the baron, these patients 'have always travelled widely and their stories are both dramatic and untruthful.' The syndrome describes people who seek treatment they do not need either for themselves or their children. + Munchausens fake heart attacks, alter urine specimens, and feed themselves with salt - to produce bizare biochemical reactions. Older people may present themselves as heroes, sometimes dressing the part. One man hired a naval uniform for his story of extensive wounds in the Battle of the Atlantic. Alleged wartime injuries are popular among older patients to explain scarring caused by needless operations. + One man fell off a lorry and telephoned the emergency services pretending first to be a policeman reporting the accident and then to be a bystander summoning an ambulance. He was put into splints by an ambulanceman, only to be recognised as a veteran Munchausen. In the classic tradition, he jumped off the stretcher and ran off before he could be persuaded to see the hospital psychiatrist. Some cases are more bizarre, involving self-mutilation. One young woman was referred to hospital with a baffling high temperature. It was discovered that she had been drawing blood from her arm, mixing it with salad cream, and then re-injecting it. + Doctors are mystified by Munchausens who actually yearn for the surgeon's knife, particularly for abdominal operations. But some motives are comprehensible - someone may want to be the centre of attention or seek a way out of a difficult life via acute illness and hospital admission. The most worrying cases of all, however, are those known as Munchausen by proxy, where parents induce symptoms of illness in their children. + In one case a child was admitted 12 times, had seven X-rays, six examinations under anaesthetic, was given unpleasant drugs, her urine was analysed 150 times, and 16 senior doctors were involved in attempting to understand what was wrong with her. In another case, a mother made bogus patients out of both her children. The boy (aged five) underwent more than 100 investigations for 'bizarre neurological symptoms' - he had been poisoned with a drug. And the girl (aged two) was treated for diabetes for six months after sugar had been added to her blood. The insulin she was prescribed could have caused brain damage if the mother had not swapped it for distilled water. + Parents may make patients out of their children as a way of expressing anxiety. A mother might fake symptoms to ensure further medical attention should she fear that her child has not received adequate treatment. But why will someone subject themselves to unnecessary treatment? One recent study could conclude only that Munchausens have a defective personaltiy characterised by sexual difficulties and deviancy, a history of alcohol abuse, and an extensive knowledge of the workings of hospitals. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +104 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 5, 1989 + +Eyewitness: When marketing launches itself into a grey area + +BYLINE: By MAEV KENNEDY + +LENGTH: 582 words + + + All over the nation the Grey Panthers and the Lions, the Pippies and Woopies, pace up and down the unmodernised kitchens and bathrooms of their mortgage-paid homes, baying for someone to come and relieve them of their Pounds 70 billion a year discretionary spending money. + The Yuppies have fallen into the sere and yellow leaf, bare ruined choirs where once the lager lout sang. The baby boom has bust. There's no growth market like an old growth market. There's no other growth market at all. + For three days at the Barbican, London, a gathering of bright young advertisers, market researchers and sales persons is considering every aspect of the proposition 'the grey market - a golden opportunity?' + If they can only crack the code. Yesterday there were only five grey heads among them, and three of those were on young shoulders. One of the problems of 'advertising and marketing to the over-55s', the experts kept telling them, is that the market researchers, the advertising copy writers, the product designers, are all young, and the past of the Well-Off Older People and the People Inheriting Parents' Property is a foreign country to them. + 'The leading edge of the 50-60 age cohort is the class of '52', Greg Watson, aged 46, media director of the advertising agency, Holmes Knight Ritchie, told them. + Mr Watson has been studying these people for the last two years. he gave the audience a check list of events from ancient history that will, arranged int he correct order, help to sell non-slip bathroom surfaces, coach holidays and age-specific cosmetics in older-friendly packaging: rationing, Concorde, the conquest of John F Kennedy, and the Three-Day Week. + Mr Gerry Smith, aged 42, the managing director of Headland Press, sent out a fieldworker, who identified four main groups. The problem was the researcher so loathed some of those he had defined, particularly the 'poor but proud' non-drinking, guilty and labour-saving devices and staunchly Thatcherite neo-puritans, that Mr Smith had to inject a little editorial balance before publishing the results. + Mr Smith has also published a study of the Baby Boomers. 'The Mature Consumer - Segmenting the affluent over-55s through psychographic grouping' - is outselling it by 20-1. + 'We're all arthritics now,' Mr James Woudhuysen, of the design company, Fitch & Co, said sadly. Mr Woudhuysen is beginning to have difficulty with child-proof packaging, due to a spot of keyboard-induced repetitive strain injury. Mr Woudhuysen found he couldn't read the label on the bottle yesterday morning as he was stealing his wife's body lotion. Mr Woudhuysen is 36. + Coming later this week, the good news - the over-45 man drinks on 9.2 days of the month, 0.3 days more than the average; the worrying question - 'but do they drink enough?'; and the possibly related topic - Sex and the Older Man, Money, Freedom and Immortality, the Over-45s usage and attitude to Fragrance and Personal Care. + Dr Eric Midwinter, director of the Centre for Policy on Ageing, condemning the ageist question but admitting to 57, floated a cloudlet of gloom into the bright grey dawn. + 'Some older people are undoubtedly well off, but two million are living on the state pension. And that, compared to the average industrial wage, is still the equivalent of people living on the 1908 state pension, or the 1840 Poor Law handout.' + The PLOPLs, nobody's idea of a golden marketing opportunity, are with you always. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +105 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 8, 1989 + +Red Tape: Government repair job takes a beating + +BYLINE: By DAVID LAWSON + +LENGTH: 348 words + + + Plans to reform home improvement grants have come in for a hammering from the most unlikely quarter. That bastion of tradition and free enterprise, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, is almost as blistering as bodies such as Shelter about changes due to come in next year. + Elderly and disabled people will suffer because of what the Government calls a streamlining exercise meant to concentrate on those very groups, according to the property industry's elite corps. One of its typically severe and official-looking responses to policy changes is enlivened by fiery terms such as 'grossly unreasonable' and 'virtually incomprehensible'. + At the heart of the protest is despair at the relentless bureaucracy promised against anyone foolish enough to call for government aid in future to repair or improve their home. 'The proposals are far too complex and will not lead to a high take-up from those who most need help,' say the surveyors. No grants would be given for adapting homes to the disabled because all landlords' applications would be discretionary. It was also 'grossly unreasonable' to expect disabled people to plough through so much bureaucracy. + The elderly, living in some of the poorest housing, would be reluctant to spend their limited income. The RICS says there should be no means test for anyone over 65. But even the ordinary owner-occupier, faced with tests of income and savings, and the need to produce detailed plans without being sure of a grant at the end, would have to be very determined to pursue an application. The proposals were hard enough for professionals to understand; they would be virtually incomprehensible to lay people, says the RICS. The more difficult a scheme was to understand, the more likely to miss the people at whom it was aimed. + Shelter says pensioners live in about 500,000 of the 3.5 million unfit homes in England and points out that home improvement grants have been more than halved since 1984. The Government says it will not be cutting spending from next year but targeting it at the neediest. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +106 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 8, 1989 + +Protesters pursue Clarke in hospital: Ministers and doctors clash again over NHS reforms + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE and TOM SHARRATT + +LENGTH: 574 words + + + Demonstrators yesterday chased Mr Kenneth Clarke, the Health Secretary, through the corridors of a Manchester hospital as ministers and doctors clashed again over the Government's health service reforms. + Mr Clarke accused the British Medical Association of making 'scandalous and untrue' claims about the reforms in leaflets it is distributing to patients. + Mr David Mellor, his deputy, said there was evidence that public money, intended to improve services, was being used by family doctors to give themselves more leisure time. + Dr John Marks, chairman of the BMA council, last night likened the reforms to a leaky old tub. 'Any other master mariner would put in to port to make his ship seaworthy. But not Captain Clarke. Instead he has turned on the crew.' + Mr Clarke's confrontation with demonstrators came at the Hope Hospital, Salford, where he was making one of a series of hospital visits to try to whip up support for the reforms. + About 20 health workers and trade union officials had gathered outside to protest. When they found that Mr Clarke had entered by a back door, they brushed past police and pursued him. + One of the demonstrators, Mr Mike Graham, an official of the North-west TUC, shouted: 'Why are you afraid to talk to us, Mr Clarke? This is pathetic.' + The minister replied: 'You are illustrating by your behaviour exactly why a meeting with the TUC would have been pointless. My visit was arranged at short notice and I have no time to spare for a political barney.' + As Mr Clarke was ushered behind a curtain in the hospital's accident department, police escorted the demonstrators from the premises. + Later, Mr Clarke said the BMA's campaign against the reforms was seriously alarming many sick and elderly people. Its arguments were distorted and its leaflet made five points which were inaccurate. + Contrary to the leaflet, he said, family doctors would not run out of money; they would be monitored, not restricted, in their access to funds; they would remain free to prescribe all necessary medicines; medical incomes would be unchanged; and they were not being forced to take on more patients than they could cope with. + However, a specialist in the care of the elderly in Salford warning that the reforms posed 'a greater threat to elderly people than Alzheimer's disease'. + Professor Raymond Tallis, professor of geriatric medicine at Manchester university and consultant to Salford health authority, said the elderly needed integrated caring services. The reforms would instead fragment services. + Mr Mellor's comments came as he addressed the Brighton conference of the Royal College of General Practitioners, a body which ministers still hope will support the reforms. + He said it was not clear where extra government money for primary health care was going. While many GPs were using the funds very well, 'I must also point out that research .. calls into question just how far these extra resources have gone into better health services and how far into increased leisure time'. + Mr Mellor said the Government would not shirk its duty to safeguard taxpayers' money through better managerial control. + Dr Marks said Mr Clark's assurances had a familiar ring. 'They came off the same assembly line as the pledge that hospital ward closures would cease, that there would be no charges for eye tests and that differential eye tests were not on the agenda.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +107 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 11, 1989 + +Whitehall eyes over-sixties to plug jobs gap + +BYLINE: By DAVID HENCKE, Westminster Correspondent + +LENGTH: 515 words + + + The Government is considering a campaign to recruit thousands of well educated people in their 60s to meet a growing shortage of suitably qualified civil servants. + A confidential Treasury report discloses that Whitehall will be facing a severe staffing crisis in 1990s when the pool for its two principal areas of recruitment - the 16 and 18-year-old school leaver and the graduate trainee - plummet by as much as 22 per cent. + The report, sent to the senior establishment officer in every ministry, discloses that the Treasury is considering more than 20 initiatives to attract staff, including a plan to 'sell' the advantages of becoming a civil servant by brightening up the bureaucratic image. + The report shows that Whitehall, the armed forces, the National Health Service and the teaching profession face a serious skilled labour shortage only 10 years after the Government encouraged thousands of people to take early retirement in their early or mid-50s. + Although the number of civil servants has fallen from more than 733,000 in 1979 to just under 600,000, there is little scope for further cuts. There has been an increase in administrative staff since 1984. + The report admits civil servants' pay will have to go up, conditions improved and offices made more attractive and offices made more attractive to compete with other employers. 'The increased competitiveness of the 1990s means that the civil service can no longer rely on the kind of young entrants we have traditionally recruited.' + The proposals amount to a reversal of policy with a plan to encourage people aged 60-64 to join the service as executive, clerical and administrative staff. + The report identifies a pool of some 700,000 men receiving early retirement pensions, some of whom could be lured back to work with the offer of an additional index-linked pension. It says the civil service pension scheme could offer pension rights after just two years service to the over 60s. + Other plans include ending the traditional retirement age of 60 in ministries which have a shortage of staff and reintroducing a 'sweetener to discourage staff from leaving at 60 by allowing them to collect their lump sum retirement benefits and then be re-employed at the same grade. + The other two areas of recruitment are married women aged 25-44 now bringing up a family and the growing number of young people from ethnic minorities. + The report points out that the proportion of young blacks and Asians will increase. 'It will therefore be important to ensure that recruitment and selection methods attract applications from ethnic minority candidates and do not unfairly discriminate against them.' + The report says career breaks must be made more attractive for women looking after families. + More part-time jobs and job sharing must be introduced at a senior level. More creches, holiday playschemes and more generous parental leave is proposed. + Other measures include relocation of more civil service departments away from London and the Midlands to East Anglia and the South-west. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +108 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 11, 1989 + +The Day In Politics: Kinnock on work of the nineties + +BYLINE: By PATRICK WINTOUR + +LENGTH: 495 words + + + The Labour leader, Mr Neil Kinnock, yesterday called for radical work changes, including more job opportunities for women and the elderly, to prevent a demographic time bomb from exploding in the face of employers. + In the third of a series of economic lectures, Mr Kinnock also endorsed the call for more flexibility at work, so long as it genuinely benefited workers as well as employers. + The lecture at Newcastle upon Tyne set out Labour's vision of the workforce of the nineties. Mr Kinnock argued that government had a legitimate role in preparing the workforce for technological and demographic change. + The Government had failed to help employers to adapt to the projected 20 per cent drop in the number of 16 to 24-year-olds joining the labour market in the next five years, he said. + The labour force would grow by a million by 1995, with increases of more than 15 per cent in the 25-34 and the 45-59 age groups. There were nearly a million people who had been unemployed for more than a year, and to these should be added the many women and older people who would like to work, or carry on working, but were prevented from doing so. + Instead of leaving employers to scramble for young talent, 'a rational government would now be planning - and providing - to ensure that these groups take over the flexible mobile role traditionally played by the young,' he said. + This new pool of flexible labour could be encouraged by high-quality training and retraining, inproved employment rights and conditions for older workers and part-time workers, and 'a significant expansion of childcare services'. + There was no systematic provision at present to help women back into work after childbirth. 'Women who are well trained or even professionally qualified often abandon their employment when they have children, or move into jobs which do not make full use of their skills, frequently as part timers'. + Company child care facilities were important, he said, but the Government should also provide facilities available to all. + Legislation was needed to give mothers statutory time off after birth and allow them to work shorter hours while their children were young. + Mr Kinnock also promised to end compulsory retirement ages and move towards 'the concept of the flexible decade between 60 and 70, where there is a greater choice about retirement and semi-retirement'. + Labour's vision of flexibility recognised that 'the old model of employment has limited relevance to the nineties'. In future workers would be employed for periods tailored to their individual needs. + A departure from the standard negotiated working week need not be a threat to union agreements, he said. 'If workers and their organisations take the lead in securing flexibility, they prevent attempts to use new technology to impose inferior working conditions on unprotected working hours, and instead secure the advantages of flexible new technology.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +109 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 12, 1989 + +Police criticised over hospital deaths + +BYLINE: By IAN TRAYNOR + +LENGTH: 438 words + +DATELINE: VIENNA + + + The Vienna police and health authorities faced growing criticism yesterday over the key question of how the wave of murders of elderly patients at one of the capital's main hospitals went undetected for so long. + The official number of murder victims in the biggest criminal case in Austria's post-war history rose from 44 to 48. + The protests grew after the disclosure on a television programme on Monday that police had been called to Lainz General Hospital last April to investigate the death of an elderly woman patient. + The Interior Minister, Mr Franz Loeschnak, defended the police against charges of laxity, saying there were no grounds for prosecution in the case. A post mortem had found the woman died from natural causes. + Earlier, the mayor of Vienna, Mr Helmut Zilk, accused the police of negligence. But despite Mr Loeschnak's support, the police chief, Mr Guenter Boegl, who has described the deaths as the 'biggest series of murders ever committed in Europe,' appears under growing pressure, as do local hospital and health service managements. + One question being asked with increasing vehemence is how hospital orderlies - three of the four in custody were orderlies - gained access to the drugs with which they are alleged to have overdosed the victims and how they are allegedly able to continue carrying out injections of insulin against hospital rules. + Likewise, the reliability of the post mortems is being questioned, given reports that the trail of 'mercy killings' of frail, elderly and dying people - a motive that has failed to convinced almost anyone here - goes back to the early 1980s. + One MP asked why the post mortems had failed to reveal water in the lungs after police statements that the leading suspect, Waltraud Wagner, had confessed to killing more than 20 patients by forcing water into the lungs. + The hospital authorities were also forced further on to the defensive by Ms Wagner's statement, through her lawyer, that medical supervision in unit five, where the murders occurred, was virtually non-existent. + 'The doctors usually told me to do it and then they went to bed,' she said of procedures for administering injections on the night shift. + But Dr Franz Pesendorfer, the unit's medical chief, rejected charges of lax regulations. 'It is I and my entire team that, through our incessant work, have uncovered monstrous crimes such as have never been seen before in this country.' + He claimed credit for discovering the 'criminal administration' of insulin to a non-diabetic - the case which was spotted and led to the murders being uncovered. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +110 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 12, 1989 + +Charity goes into business to help aged + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 331 words + + + Help the Aged yesterday broke new ground for charities by launching a profit-making consultancy and advice venture to promote services for the growing number of elderly people. + Age Care and Leisure Services, trading as Partnership in Practice, has been set up jointly with a Danish charity, EGV Services, in anticipation of the opening up of the EEC single market in 1992. + All the big charities are considering how to adapt to the commercial opportunities emerging in community care which will mushroom once the Government makes its policy decisions on the care of elderly, disabled, mentally ill and mentally handicapped people. + Whatever policies are adopted, it is certain that charities will be invited to take a bigger role in service provision, if they can reconcile it with their traditional aims. + Help the Aged said while its main objective would still be raising funds to relieve poverty and isolation, 'it has been impossible to ignore the mounting requests from organisations within the public, private and voluntary sectors for support and assistance, other than financial, to confront the challenges of an ageing and increasingly frail population.' + Help the Aged and EGV have each put in Pounds 60,000 initially for two years, and profits will be convenanted to the parent charities. + Mr John White, the company's chief executive, said the service would offer comprehensive advice on issues including social work, nursing, architecture, building, supplies and research and evaluation. 'We believe that the environment is absolutely right for this sort of service to be provided.' + The company has already negotiated four contracts: to advise Basildon and Thurrock health authority on services for the elderly; to develop a housing scheme in east London for pensioners and medical students; to create a retirement leisure and care centre in Haslemere, Surrey; and to review elderly care services provided by an as yet unnamed London borough. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +111 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 14, 1989 + +Budget agreed + +BYLINE: By ALEX BRUMMER + +LENGTH: 331 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + + + After two months of talks White House and Congressional negotiators yesterday broadly agreed on a compromise 1990 budget designed to keep the deficit below Dollars 100 billion in the 1990 financial year. + The package, however, seems unlikely to impress the financial markets since many of its most important details - including how to raise new revenues - remain unresolved. The most important component of the package is the agreement to chop some Dollars 14 billion from public spending with the defence budget taking almost half the cut: a far larger figure than President Bush had originally proposed. + The Defence Secretary Mr Richard Cheney indicated last night that some of these cuts will have to come from hitech weapons systems in which the Pentagon has placed so much faith in recent years. + Mr Cheney is looking for at least Dollars 6.4 billion of immediate cuts and is said to considering a slowdown in the production of the advanced Trident 2 submarine - which is also to become part of Mrs Thatcher's nuclear arsenal. + Other spending cuts to support Mr Bush's programmes for a kinder and gentler nation, including greater education, child care and environmental spending, will have to come from escalating Medicare payments for the health care of the elderly. As much of Dollars 2.5 billion of cuts could be found in this category. + The most contentious aspect of the budget package, which has been prepared in time for passage of the Congressional budget resolution on April 15, is likely to be on the revenue side. + The negotiators have specified some Dollars 14 billion in increased 'non-tax' revenues of which around half could come from asset sales and higher user fees for government services. + However, the negotiators and the White House remain divided on the rest with the Administration wanting a capital gains tax reduction and Democrats disputing forecasts of higher revenues and seeking to close existing tax loopholes instead. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +112 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 14, 1989 + +Police shoot dead two raiders + +BYLINE: By GARETH PARRY + +LENGTH: 666 words + + + Police marksmen shot dead two armed robbers and wounded another yesterday, after a Flying Squad chase in a suburban road in north London. + The three men had sprayed bullets and gunshot at the police officers, wounding one in the ankle, in their attempt to escape after an abortive battering-ram raid on a post office. + An elderly man somehow walked unscathed through the cross-fire in the street, which is lined with semi-detached houses. He thought it was all part of a realistic film set. + It was the fourth occasion in two years that police have shot dead armed robbers. + Commander John O'Connor, the head of the Flying Squad, later said the officers from Scotland Yard's 'Blue Beret' PT17 Squad acted 'correctly and courageously'. + They had prevented any members of the public getting hurt in the gun battle in Twyford Road, West Harrow. + The shooting has been justified by police sources as the inevitable response to armed robbery. + The incident began just before 9am when the three men, who the police suspected of specialising in ramming security vehicles, pushed a steel girder out of the back of their Ford van and, reversing at high speed, used it as a battering ram to smash through the rear doors of Rayners Lane Post Office, close to streets busy with commuters and shoppers. + Although the three, in balaclavas and motorcycle helmets, got into the Post Office, they failed to reach the area where valuables were kept. They had chosen the wrong doors. They aborted the robbery, and drove off in a stolen Ford Sierra. + Flying Squad and PT17 officers, who had been covertly observing them, gave chase but the robbers abandoned the car after weaving through side-streets. + Mr O'Connor said the robbers then embarked on what he described as 'a classic ploy', running down an alleyway so the police car could not follow them. They had left a getaway car on the other side of the alley which runs from Rayners Lane Station, over a railway bridge and down into Twyford Road. When the robbers got on to the bridge, they opened fire on the pursuing officers. + Mr O'Connor said: 'A warning was given that they were armed police officers, and to surrender. They continued firing. Police officers returned fire.' + Police discounted suggestions by local people that officers were waiting for the men and 'staking out' the stolen getaway car in Twyford Road. + Mr O'Connor said the robbers continued firing in Twyford Road, spraying 'bullets everywhere'. + In all, about 30 shots were fired. Some bullets from the shoot-out lodged in parked cars and spent cartridges still littered the scene several hours later. + Mr Paul Duego, who lives in nearby Welbeck Road, said: During the shooting, an old man was right in the middle of it. He turned back and said, 'What are they doing - are they shooting a film?' He was completely oblivious to what was really happening.' + Tony Dewsnapp, aged 48, a married man of Margate, Kent, died at the scene. James Farrell, 52, also married of Hanwell, west London, died in hospital. The third man, who has not been named, has shoulder and leg wounds but is not in a serious condition. + The robbers were armed with a sawn-off shotgun, a Colt 45 pistol and a Luger-type automatic handgun, Mr O'Connor said. 'With that kind of firepower and with that number of bullets, there is no doubt that they intended to shoot their way out and would not have hesitated in killing police officers.' + Although the robbers were being observed police did not know for certain that they were armed. 'It's a fair assumption,' said Mr O'Connor. + Acting Deputy Assistant Commissioner Malcolm Campbell, in charge of + specialist operations, said later: 'I have to say we are dealing with a hard + core of ruthless and sophisticated criminals. The officers who + courageously tackled them ought to be praised.' + Mr Campbell said police regretted incidents involving loss of life and extended sympathy to the dead men's families. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +113 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 15, 1989 + +The 'cowboy' robber who paid the ultimate penalty + +BYLINE: By SHYAMA PERERA + +LENGTH: 457 words + + + Men like Jimmy Farrell - shot dead by police during the bungled Post Office raid at Harrow, north London on Thursday - are the cowboys of the robbery trade. + Just as new technology has put safe breakers and explosives experts out of a job, hard line policing has sent most would-be 'blaggers' into low-profile industries like drug dealing and fraud. + Farrell, aged 52, was killed with Terry Dewsnapp, aged 48, as they attempted to escape after the abortive raid. A third robber was wounded. + There is no entry into the more sophisticated trades of drugs and fraud for older men like Farrell, recently released after serving 10 years of a 17-year prison sentence for armed robbery. It was almost inevitable that someone of his background would drift back into villainy. But his modus operandi was high risk, out-of-date, and promised little return. + The police have made it clear that they will shoot in such situations, and the professional robbers know this. + Farrell's only hope of 'retiring' was to grab the 'big one.' It meant shooting from the hip in a cowboy operation involving a battering ram. + A reformed armed robber said yesterday: 'Men like that are still living in the past. It is the classic get-rich-quick type of crime. It doesn't require a lot of pre-planning, but it does need derring-do.' + Farrell claimed he had been 'set up' over the bank robbery of which he was convicted in 1978. In 1985, after new evidence was uncovered in a BBC Television programme, he and three others were granted an appeal which failed. + A friend said last night: 'I think when he finally came out, he was a little stir-crazy. That was how he became involved in such a scheme.' + Farrell, an Irishman living in West London with a woman identified only as Sharon, went for what seemed the easy option, but he was out of touch. A former prisoner said: 'These crimes are no longer viable as in the sixties and seventies. + 'The only robberies that work these days are the ones with connections; the big operators who get a bit of help from inside Scotland Yard.' + Walter 'Angel Face' Probyn, once the most wanted man in Britain, said last night: 'They live in a time warp. They come out and find that people younger than them are involved in drugs or long firms - where you buy lots of things on credit and then disappear. + 'When Farrell came out of prison he probably had no abilities, no skills, no family and no incentive - when you have nothing to lose, your life does not carry the same sort of weight.' + The shootings will be investigated by Mr John Wright, assistant chief constable of Hampshire, not a senior officer from Sussex as previously announced, the Police Complaints Authority said yesterday. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +114 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 19, 1989 + +Health Guardian: Home hazards - Only a fraction of the chemicals, used around the house have been safely tested + +BYLINE: By BRIAN PRICE + +LENGTH: 659 words + + + Two hours after switching on her new central heating, Eileen found she could not breathe. Choking flumes, released from the paint as the radiators warmed up, had filled the flat. She was admitted to hospital overnight and then had to stay with friends until the fumes had dispersed. + Two years on, she still suffers from coughing fits and has been unable to resume her career as a nurse. She has become sensitised to formaldehyde, a chemical she would encounter during her work. + The factory-applied radiator paint was found to release formaldehyde and other toxic fumes when heated. Four staff in the laboratory where the paint was tested were reported to be affected by coughing and running eyes when the paint was heated for analysis. + Formaldehyde is a well-known irritant, allergen and suspected carcinogen and its effects seem to have been aggravated by the other substances released. + Uncured epoxy resin - an ingredient of some everyday glues - was also found. It, too, is a powerful irritant to lungs, eyes and skin. + We tend to assume that if a chemical is on sale it is safe providing we follow instructions. Yet only a small fraction of the 60,000-odd chemicals in common use in the home and at work have been tested for safety. Where tests have been carried out, they may not be relevant to the domestic situation since their aim is to protect industry employees. + Safety limits for exposure are normally based on a fit young male working an eight-hour shift, with proper industrial precautions. Elderly people, pregnant women, people with lung disorders, and young children exposed to paint fumes until they disperse will not be as resistant. + Most people know that bleach, caustic oven cleaners and insecticides can be harmful, if misused. But there are other, more insidious, domestic chemical hazards. + Substances in air fresheners have been linked with feelings of muzziness, unreality and depression. Dr Richard Lawson, an Avon GP, has treated 50 people complaining of these and similar symptoms which improved when exposure to products ceased. + One of his patients, Justin, suffered uncharacteristic near-suicidal depression which cleared up when carpet fresheners, perfumed fabric conditioners, biological detergents, and air fresheners were banished from his home. + Some people seem to be susceptible to some chemicals and may develop sensitivity after a single exposure. We all respond individually to toxic materials and certain groups are particularly vulnerable without being allergic. + The harmful effects of lead - still present in potentially lethal concentrations in some paints - on the intellignece of young children are now well documented. + Pregnant women, those trying to conceive, the elderely and the very young have their own susceptibilities. Hydrocarbons and other solvents, for instance, have been linked with birth defects in the children of parents of both sex exposed to them. These materials are present in adhesives, paints wood treatments and many other household and DIY products. Young children breathe in more air per unit of body weight than adults and their lungs are more efficient at extracting pollutants such as solvent vapours, leaded dust or toxic gases from the air. + When chemicals are used in the home, air pollutants can build up to levels which would require through-ventilation or protective clothing in industry. Painting a radiator in a small room, for instance, can lead to very high solvent concentrations and noxious fumes as the paint cures. + Sick building syndrome is a growing source of physical and psycological illness in office workers. Yet we are in danger of turning our homes into sick buildings with solvent-based and other chemical products and the obsessive use of synthetic fragrances. + Brian Price is the co-author, with Michael Birkin, of C for Chemicals - a new guide to household chemical hazards (Greenprint, Pounds 4.99). + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +115 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 19, 1989 + +Washington Commentary: Buggins' turn that loses the bully pulpit + +BYLINE: By ALEX BRUMMER + +LENGTH: 1019 words + + + The Opprobrium heaped upon the Speaker of the House Jim Wright may perversely turn out to be a blessing for the Democratic Party. Like the elderly mourner who is convinced the spouse is still there knitting or reading the newspaper, the Democrats have never seriously come to grips with bereavement. + A series of humiliating defeats in the Presidential elections (five out of the last six) have been shrugged off by the party elders. They have engaged in a form of group therapy to convince each other that the White House doesn't really matter. It is the Congress which counts. With each successive election, as the Democratic stranglehold in the House grows and the majority in the Senate strangthens, the self-deception becomes more chronic. Some of the more celebrated and cerebral party leaders - Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey and House Majority leader Tom Foley of Washington State - have even managed to convince themselves that more power attaches to their perches on Capitol Hill than to the White House. + All this is patently untrue. There are not many among us who can reverentially recite the names of recent Speakers, majority leaders or committee chairmn, but only a minority would have trouble with the Presidents. Few institutions (with perhaps the execption of the Fourth Estate) are more reviled outside Washington than the Congress. It is consistently blamed in the opinion polls for all that hurts governance, and even its own members are inclined to adopt populist poses and attack the breadwinner when making speeches in Kalamazoo, Lubbock or Peoria. As Mark Twain so aptly observed, America has 'no distinctly native criminal class except Congress'. + The Wright imbroglio potently pricks the myth that, somehow, power in the Congress is sufficient for the Democrats. It has demonstrated that Mr Wright is a deeply unsatisfactory party leader and that the Democrats, despite all the protestations of success in Congress, are a rudderless political force which has still to decide how to recover from three successive Republican victories. + Any system which throws up men of Mr Wright's calibre as the hhighest elected official in Congress (and second in succession to the Presidency) must be suspect. Because so many House elections are all but uncontested (the re-election rate is around 98 per cent), a deathly system of seniority and Buggins' turn determines the House leadership. It is by scrambling up this particular ladder to power, rather than by any display of charisma, that Mr Wright rose to the Speakership. As a loner he rules by diktat rather than consensus, springing all manner of surprises on his colleagues - including a mishandled peace initiative in Central America in Reagan's final days. Moreover, his treacly voice and manner make him entirely unsuitable to be the party's most senior spokesman. But most damaging of all, his petty enriching activities (which have produced what amounts to 69 separate indictment) have robbed the Democrats of the moral high ground which appeals to the nation's puritanical soul. + While Mr Wright struggles vainly (like John Tower) to preserve his own reputation, it is the Democratic Party which will suffer. Although there is a credible and respected alternative, majority leader Tom Foley, standing in the wings, it is the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Ron Brown, who must keep confidence high. Mr Brown, the first black to hold office, points to the recent Democratic upset in Dan Quayle's former House seat in Indiana and the potential victory in Defence Secretary Dick Cheney's vacated House seat in Wyoming as evidence of a Democratic resurgence nationally. This, as they would state plainly in Iowa, is hogwash designed to keep up the morale of the troops. + Mr Brown leads a party spinning out of control. Its leading candidate for the 1992 Presidential election, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, remains as unelectable as in 1984 and 1988. His meddling in the Chicago mayoral elections earlier this month helped provoke a white backlash of unusual ferocity. Now he threatens the same divisive nonsense in New York's mayoral race. He has signalled that he will not back Mayor Edward Koch even if he becomes the Democratic nominee in September. Thus Mr Jackson, whose tantrums of pride unsteadied Mike Dukakis at last year's Atlanta convention, is now destabilising Mr Brown - the wealthy Washington lawyer and insider who ironically managed his Atlanta gala. Moreover, the primary rules which Mr Brown negotiated for Mr Jackson, in the hothouse of an Atlanta summer, are now being seen by political analysts as an obstacle on the road to the White House. + The Wright affair offers the Democrats a rare opportunity to face up to the reality of Congressional impotence in the face of the White House juggernaut and to prepare for 1992. This can be done firstly by deposing Mr Wright swiftly and cleanly (allowing the matter to drag until December would be a disaster), and elevating Mr Foley, a man of Presidential calibre, sound judgement and a pleasant persona, to the high profile position of Speaker. + Secondly, the party should reopen the question of primary rules. By rebelling against Richard Daley, the official (and non-racist) candidate in the Chicago elections, Mr Jackson for all his moral power and authority, has forfeited his right to dictate the party rules. + Finally, it is up to Mr Brown to show that he is chairman and powerbroker in the true tradition of such heavyweight lawyers as Robert Strauss and Edward Bennett Williams. He must do this by persuading leaders such as Sam Nunn, Bill Bradley and Mario Cuomo that responsibility for a high purrpose in domestic and foreign policy cannot be trusted to a Republican Administration or be achieved in Congress or the governor's mansion. + The pinnacle of power - the bully pulpit as Lincoln called it - dwells at 1600 Pennsylvania: Capitol Hill is second best. + Alex Brummer is the winner of this year's Overseas Press Club award for the best foreign reporting of the United States. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +116 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 20, 1989 + +Inspectors damn bleak mental hospital + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 842 words + + + Conditions at a hospital for mentally-ill people in Staffordshire have been described as deplorable in an report by government inspectors. + They found that the circumstances in which more than 200 elderly patients were living at St Edward's hospital in Cheddleton, near Leek, provoked reactions of 'shock and anger'. + Although the report has just been published, changes are under way in response to the criticism. + The inspectors visited the hospital last summer and the local health authority was warned of the report's contents. + The report is bound to renew concern about standards of care in long-stay mental hospitals at a time when the alternative, care in the community, is under attack and the Government is under pressure to halt its gradual hospital closure programme. + The inspectors, from the National Health Service Advisory Service and the Department of Health Social Services Inspectorate, were checking services for elderly people in North Staffordshire health district. + Their report says services generally lack 'direction, shape, style and leadership'. But the strongest criticism is reserved for St Edward's, a typical Victorian asylum with, at the time of the inspection, 700 beds including 265 for the elderly mentally ill and almost 100 more for rehabilitation patients aged over 65. + Behind an entrance and front garden maintained to a reasonable standard, the inspectors found poor maintenance with, on wards for the elderly, little sign of significant expenditure for several decades. + In many wards, there were as many as 24 beds in four rows without any form of screening and with unacceptably little space between them. Some wards had upgraded toilet and bathroom facilities, but provision remained inadequate. + Because of problems recruiting domestic staff, with vacancy rates at 14.5 per cent, cleaning was concentrated on the wards and was below standard in corridors and elsewhere. + The inspectors note that the hospital's annual furniture and equipment budget was only Pounds 19,500; ward kitchens were well below environmental health standards; there was a lack of diversional therapy for patients; and the shift system for nurses and domestic staff discouraged recruitment. + Elderly mentally ill patients had been 'relegated to the worst wards'. + In language rarely used in such documents, the report says: 'The wards lack homely amenities, are sub-standard in design, bleak and inconvenient for nursing frail, disabled, confused and incontinent patients. Dormitories and washrooms are mainly featureless, lack of comfort, domestication and privacy. + 'The effect of these profesionally isolated, drab, depressing and de-personalising wards for elderly people on newly-admitted patients, relatives and new staff is one of shock and anger.' + Care standards were correspondingly poor. 'The invariably inaccurate 'day and date' board on each ward reflects the hopelessness, apathy and resignation. + 'Care is largely unstructured, kindly but misguided and defensive. Cotsides and Buxton chairs are much in evidence.' + Cotsides are used to keep patients on their beds. Buxton chairs are similarly used to constrain them in a seated position. + The inspectors, who concluded that it would be better to close the wards than to improve them, and to spend money on community-based care homes, have prompted action six years ahead of changes planned under a new strategy for mental health care in North Staffordshire. + The report should have appeared in February but was apparently held back while hospital improvements were agreed. + West Midlands regional health authority has allocated Pounds 5 million to develop services for elderly mentally ill in neighbourhood hospitals and Pounds 2 million for two day hospitals. The district authority is to spend an extra Pounds 750,000 a year on 65 more psychiatric nurses and revised shift patterns. + Elderly mentally ill patients will be moved out of St Edward's during the next three years, with beds in neighbourhood hospitals being freed for them by transferring 219 other elderly patients to private residential homes. + Responsibility for care of the elderly mentally ill is being transferred from North Staffordshire's mental health unit to its elderly care unit. + Mr Chris Calkin, elderly care manager, said yesterday: 'This report reflects the change of attitudes and approach to care for the elderly that has been taking place in the past few years. What it has done is to accelerate the pace of change.' + However, Mr Bill Finney, deputy district manager, who was seconded to St Edward's shortly after the inspectors' visit, felt the report was too harsh. 'I personally think that the team went a little over the top. + 'I don't think they struck quite the right balance so that they stimulate change without having a counter-productive effect on the local population and the nearly 1,000 people working in the hospital.' + Many changes had taken place at St Edward's and it had a flourishing future, he said. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +117 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 21, 1989 + +Commentary: Time to apply the brakes on divorce + +BYLINE: By MELANIE PHILLIPS + +LENGTH: 1038 words + + + Single parents are becoming a hot political issue. Last month, official figures were published suggesting that nearly four marriages out of every ten were heading for divorce. The number of one-parent families has now passed one million, with nearly one child out of eight cared for by a single parent. Such figures are alarming. They imply a large and widening pool of emotional and material deprivation. They seem to furnish ammunition for the case bieng made by Mr John Moore, the Social Services Secretary, that something has to be done about single parents, who now claim some Pounds 3.4 billion per year in benefits. + He has tried to dress up the issue as a moral concern, conjuring up the image of the typical single parent claimant as the feckless teeenager who brings a child into the world in order to cement her dependence upon the state. His concern, however, is probably rather cruder than a desire to alter the moral climate. It is much more likely that it is rooted in his endless quest to cut back his huge expenditure. + Single parents are useful since they can be presented as the undesereving poor, people who are disadvantaged only through their own wilful behaviour. That is why the image of the pregnant teenager is so potent. And some girls do get pregnant to jump the housing queue. But they are very much in the minority. The vast majority of single parents being housed ar older women who have been divorced. Suddenly, perhaps, not so undeserving. In fact, such women are often in the unfortunate position of receiving non-existent or inadequate maintenance. Depriving the woman of social security benefits would hardly address the central moral issue; it would seek to attack the effect while ignoring the cause. For the issue that needs attention is not the single parent and whether the state should sever her financial lifeline; the issue is divorce. + Divorce is, quite simply, getting out of hand. Britain now has the highest divorce rate in Europe, and we're galloping up to the US rate too. At the same time, there's increasing evidence that the misery is causes to the warring marital partners as well as to the children has been underestimated. A study published last year by two researchers at Bristol Univeristy, Gwynn Davis and Mervyn Murch, revealed that a substantial proportion of divorced men and women wished they had stayed married to their former partners. Even among those who had remarried, 37 per cent of the men and 21 per cent of the women wished they had remained with their previous spouses. + The evidence about the children is even more disturbing to those who may fondly imagine that our allegedly liberal attitudes have created a more benign environment. Research published last year by Ms Ann Mitchell of Edinburgh University found that nearly half the children she interviewed thought their parents' divorce was only temporary; five years after the divorce, one child out of six longed for the parents to be reconciled, even when one or both of them had remarried. Ms Mitchell concluded that children were more distressed by the break-up of the marriage than parents realised, and that most children would prefer to continue living with both of them, despite the marital discord. + Parents who are unhappy with each other often justify their decision to divorce on the grounds that their children would be made even unhappier if their parents persevered with a dead or destructive relationship. This sounds like the worst form of dishonest self-justification in the light of the findings in Second Chances, a book by American researchers Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee, which demonstrates that to a child the divorce of its parents is akin to a bereavement with traumatic and lasting ill effects. All the children interviewed would have preferred their parents to stay together; most still hoped for a reconciliation, even five years later; three out of five felt rejected by at least one parent, 'sensing they were a piece of psychological baggage left over from a regretted journey'; more than ten years later they were vulnerable and anxious about their own relationships. + The authors comment that children don't see divorce as a second chance; they feel their childhood has been lost forever, and almost half became worried, under-achieving, self-deprecating and sometimes angry adults. + We have surely to seek ways of minimising this damage and distress from which spring so many social ills. The radical right think the way to do it is by making divorce more difficult; a recent pamphlet by the Social Affairs Unit implies that the sole reason for the huge leap in divorce is our liberal divorce law. Accordingly its author, George Brown, is scathing about proposals by the Law Commission to remove the notion of fault from divorce, thus appearing to make it even easier. In fact, this is a simplistic and unhelpful diagnosis. As the Law Commission points out, all kinds of social and cultural shifts have fuelled the rate of marriage breakdown, which is growing even in countries where divorce is prohibited. + Once the marriage has really broken down, the current divorce procedure which encourages argument and acrimony can only deepen distress. But the Law Commission's proposals, which would entail a divorce process taking about a year, would probably help reduce the divorce rate. For there is evidence that the present legal aid procedures, under which divorcing couples get only a limited amount of a solicitor's time, actually help rush the process through. The couple gets divorced at breakneck speed and only then starts to realise the effect on the children or the descent into poverty. Time is necessary; and so are conciliation and counselling. If more unhappy couples were counselled over time, then not only would the distress of separation be lessened for all concerned; all the evidence is that a significant proportion of those marriages could be saved. + If the Government were to start talking about a national conciliation scheme and a far higher priority for marriage guidance, then one might begin to take ministers' protestations about family life and parental responsibility a little more seriously. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +118 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 22, 1989 + +Green Front: A small start for big changes - Changing patterns of rural life, changing priorities in education are keeping the village school under pressure + +BYLINE: By DAVID GOW + +LENGTH: 1298 words + + + In the old days, not really that long ago, the teacher lived 'above the shop' and the school closed every now and again for acorn-picking and gathering rosehips. Every child's name was written in elaborate copper-plate on a bound blue volume and several recurred as generation after generation spent their childhood and early adolescence here. + Nowadays, village schools, even those along muddy lanes deep in the heart of Constable country, have to grapple with multi-cultural education, an ageing population, demanding parents who have recently bought up a local farm but commute to London and a Government that is engineering convulsive change in social and economic relations as well as education. + The old school in Stratford St Mary, Suffolk, now houses a computing firm while the first house you see by the river, on entering the village, is an expensive restaurant (set luncheon menu Pounds 15) with BMWs and Vauxhall Carltons jamming the carpark. The five pubs are deserted except by a small passing trade and Main Street is empty. Posters on the wall advertise a coffee morning for Armenia. + The new school, built only four years ago, is as smart and squeaky clean as the neighbouring executive houses, neo-Georgian, with white sutters and double garages, American-style gardens and paths in front. In it you find all the problems and tensions, excitement and noise, talent and achievement, you might expect but, too, the heightened dilemma faced by 'progressive' teachers in a small community. + Village schools have lived constantly under the threat of erosion and closure but now the pressures are of an altogether tougher nature. Ruth Eccles, deputy head (that is, second of two full-time teachers) at Bentley, says wryly: 'Mrs Thatcher's policy of selling council homes and the rise in house prices are going to doom us.' + The school lies to the side of 70 acres of woodland, with a 100 foot drop at the rear rising to a council estate where houses are being sold the second time around at around Pounds 80,000. 'We're going from a younger village to one where retired people are moving in; lots of elderly people from London,' says Ruth. 'You can't be a first-time buyer here with prices at those levels.' + The school has 49 children but only one 'rising five' joined at the start of the year. 'If ever I see a Volvo going past with four babies in it, I feel a baby-snatcher,' jokes David Leney, Bentley's new head (and the only other teacher). The school came under review when a previous head left but has survived. + At Stratford St Mary Terry Stendall is the very model of a modern head, open, thoughtful, progressive, but under severe stress. The day before we visited the governors had met to discuss sex education. One is the local Baptist minister who declared that he would insist from his pulpit that sex must come with marriage but realised he had no right to impose this view on others .. + The result, as in other areas of the school's curriculum, is a constant compromise: recognising the parents' demand for traditional values but leaving teachers free to answer questions in an honest manner which opens the children up to experiences more common in the inner city. A village school cannot live unless it takes its parents with it, much more so than the urban comprehensive paying lip-service to such notions of community. + 'The staff and myself have to be very sensitive to different views. At the one extreme we have people who arrive with CND stickers on their cars and at the other we have strong supporters of the Government. I think it would be silly to pretend there are not differences. We set out with the view we are one school,' Terry declares seriously. (The 86 children are encouraged to wear uniform and do). + Suffolk insists that both schools adopt and enact multi-cultural policies. Neither school has a black face in it though Stratford did an exchange with a predominantly Asian school in Leicester. Terry insists that this is right and proper because 'children from this priveleged background can end up as employers making decisions about people from different racial origins and countries so I think it's imporant the question should be raised and discussed even at primary level.' + Just as he needs to convince parents of the need for this, so he has to bend the curriculum to meet pressures from parents that their children learn the basics - writing, spelling, reciting tables. David Leney agrees. His school is re-evaluating its reading scheme and thinking of abandoning it but he recognises that if the staff handle it badly it could be putting across an ethos that would make the village throw up its hands in horror. + The links between school and community are close and estranged at the same time. Most of the staff live their own lives, often up to 20 miles away, where they can escape the ever-present scrutiny. Yet they play a pivotal role, especially the heads, using the schools as a community resource, encouraging nonworking mothers to help out or take courses on the school's computers, giving the village (and the surrounding ones which form their catchment area) a sense of social cohesion. + It might be something as simple as putting on the school panto in the village hall (at Bentley they have little choice as the main school room houses the TV and video, piano, workshops, and accommodates physical education lessons as well as ordinary lessons). 'An elderly woman came up to me and said how much she'd enjoyed it as she had sung 70 years ago in the school's production of The Pied Piper of Hamelin.' + Or a group of parents deciding that the children deserved better than to walk almost a mile to the nearest playing fields (which would mean carrying equipment with them) so they commissioned plans, wielded shovels and wheelbarrows, and built a new playground at the back. + But the economic and demographic changes mean that the experience of people like Muriel, the school secretary, is becoming rarer. 'I've been here 24 years. I was a pupil here. So was my father, he's in the blue book .. When I was here you stayed until you left school at 14 .. I started off as the cleaner and secretary, then I dropped cleaning and became a dinner lady, and then I dropped that. Now there's only teacher and head left and I'll have done it all.' + What's more, the Government's reforms and those of the local education authority have to be met. Both heads have to teach but are being driven into ever-stronger management roles: like fitting Mr Baker's new curriculum into their carefully-drafted timetable which relies heavily on staff working with different age-groups in the same room and pupils working, sometimes alone, on different subjects, as well as on part-time help and peripatetic teachers. + 'Two teachers, unless they are renaissance man and woman, are not going to be able to have expertise in the full range of the curriculum,' says David Leney, pointing to the core of a village school's dilemma. If he really carried out Mr Baker's diktat he'd be in the school every day of the week. 'I can name you four curriculum innovations which I could tackle now. You can't do that with two teachers unless you're prepared to sit up all night and I'm not.' + Carol Faiers, a parent governor and part-time helper, is positive and enthusiastic. 'It meant a lot of heart-searching in terms of standards and achievement when we decided on the school. But up to the aged of 11 we can cope with that because it gives them such a good grounding. Perhaps they can build up a broader range of experiences at a later date,' she adds cautiously. Here, as at Stratford's St Mary's, close contact between staff and pupils and between school and parents outweighs all the disadvantages. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +119 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 22, 1989 + +Deng's decade of decline / A test of the mood of the crowds in Beijing's Tiananmen Square who are clamouring for change in China + +BYLINE: By JASPER BECKER + +LENGTH: 1098 words + + + The size of the crowds assembling last night in Tiananmen Square before today's cremation of former party leader Hu Yaobang suggests that China is about to experience one of the political upheavals which have marked its history every 10 years since 1949. + After the founding of the Communist state in 1949, the disastrous Great Leap Forward in 1959, and the peak of the Cultural Revolution in 1969, it was another 10 years before Deng Xiaoping lauched China down the road of reform. + History rarely runs according to such neat timetables - however they are calculated - but whatever happens over the next few weeks, a political reckoning is long overdue in China. For 10 years Deng with the other old men who have led the party for over half a century have introduced profound changes but have left the political system practically untouched. + The party cannot continue to run a burgeoning free market economy with a Stalinist political system. Nor brush aside its responisiblity for the Cultural Revolution and the backwardness of much of the country. + 'Seventy years after the May 4 movement, our country is still poverty-stricken and ruled by wolves' said a public letter read out by students from Tianjin. Chinese students have traditionally served as a catalyst for change since 1919 when they were beaten by police demonstrating in Tiananmen Square for demanding western science and democracy. They played a key role in the Thirties, rallying they country against Japanese imperialism, took the lead during the Cultural Revolution, played a part in 1976 when the Gang Of Four fell, and last showed their power in 1986, when student demonstrations were used by his opponents to bring about Mr Hu's downfall. + Although the students who have been protesting since Mr Hu died of a heart attack last Saturday are as disorganised and muddled as they were three years ago there is enough dissatisfaction on every level of society to make this an explosive moment. + Mr Hu, the man they are now venerating and whose death has become a long-awaited pretext for revolt, is a symbol of failure. Backed by his lifelong ally and mentor, Deng Xiaoping, he had thought in 1986 to push through the political reforms which Mr Deng had promised in 1980. Mr Hu had also tried to pension off the old guard in the provinces and the army. But when students demonstrated in his support, and social unrest followed the economic confusion created by the last round of reforms in late 1984, the conservatives united to bring him down. + Nothing has gone right for Deng since then. His own authority has steadily diminished since he failed to stand by Mr Hu, his succession plan is in ruins and reform has come to a stop. 'If Deng had retired five years ago, as he had promised, we would still love him but now we hate him. He is blocking change,' a student on Tiananmen Square said yesterday. + The little bottles which were hung around the square during the 1976 demonstrations to show support for Mr Deng, whose given name, Xiaoping, can mean little bottle, have been ritually smashed on university campuses. + The anger and cynicism is astonishing. Mr Deng's leadership has, after all, overseen the fastest rise in living standards this century, but confidence in the government is at its lowest ebb for more than a decade. An inflation rate of 36 per cent has hit many people badly. The peasants are angry over low grain prices. The army is running short of funds and has turned to profiteering. The education and medical care systems have been run down and the earnings of the intelligentsia keep falling against those of workers and traders. Corruption and greed have warped the entire society. Almost nothing can be bought or negotiated honestly. Public anger is directed against party officials who can manipulate supplies form the state sector to speculate on the free market. It is especially directed against the children of senior officials, including Mr Deng's and partly leader Zhao Ziyang's who can peddle their influence but remain immune from prosecution. + Since Mr Hu fell two years ago the party has swung wildly from attempting to push ahead with new price reforms to the currrent attempt to return to central planning. Premier Li Peng's 'readjustment' policies are already seen as a mistake. Consumer production keeps growing but vital industries, such as energy, transportation and raw materials, are declining. Energy shortages have caused many factories to close and the policies designed to favour the state sector over the freebooting rural industries are creating a recession in the countryside where most people live. + All this is dangerous enough. But the example of the political reforms in the Soviet Union, Poland and Hungary, are another powerful factor. 'If the Soviets can have direct elections why can't we?' many students ask. The party has ruled out such democratic reforms as inappropriate for China but the students believe the only way to control corruption is through public supervision. + 'We want a system of checks and balances, a free press, a proper legal system and a government that listens to the people,' students told me. 'We want to limit the power of the bureaucracy and a system of dictatorship which allows one man to say we will now earn everything from the East or everything from the West. We need a better education system so people will understand democracy and why we need it. We want to end the feudal society which tolerates dictatorship and autocracy,' they argued. + Many admitted they had little hope the government would now bow to their wishes but said the demonstrations would serve to educate the masses. + The regional unrest that has torn apart the Soviet Union under Mr Gorbachev is hardly encouraging even for those within the leadership who would like to follow his example. Without strong central control China, with a population nearly four times as big, could become ungovernable. It is a political rule learned in China over several millennia. + But as Mr Deng enters his 85th year amid evidence that the political career of party leader Zhao Ziyang, his natural successor, is already over, the fierce political struggle must be about to climax. Neither diplomats nor students have any idea which leaders could now emerge to replace Mr Deng or the others. Nor how the economic reforms can continue without price rises which will stoke further social unrest. Yet it is clear that the message of the demonstrations is that powerful support exists in favour of faster political and economic change. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +120 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 22, 1989 + +Weekend Money: UK part-timers less equal than others / A look at the record of European countries on employment rights for part-timers + +BYLINE: By MIKE GEORGE + +LENGTH: 716 words + + + The European Commissioner for Social Affairs, Ms Vasso Papandreou, called for a pan-European code of practice on pregnancy and maternity rights and better childcare provision at a recent TUC Women's Conference. + Unlike many other countries in the EC, and elsewhere, both employment rights and welfare benefits in this country vary considerably, depending on your hours of work, length of service, and rate of pay. Those on low pay and those working part-time have significantly fewer rights and lower entitlements to benefits than others. + In most other European countries, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece and Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden, part-timers have the same rights as full-timers. In West Germany, manual workers on less than 10 hours a week have no sick pay entitlement for six weeks, but are equal in all other respects. Only Ireland and Italy appear to discriminate against part-timers. + Britain's attitude appears strange, to say the least; especially as this country's current and future success supposedly depends on a more flexible work force and ministers are currently trying to encourage married women, and older people, to re-enter the labour market, as the supply of teenagers declines. + The Budget eased the restrictions on earnings for pensioners and reduced the National Insurance 'poverty traps' somewhat, but did not attempt to tackle other continuing inequalities of net income and rights which are so often barriers to obtaining decent employment. + A great deal could be done financially to encourage more flexibility and re-entry. For, quite apart from the continuation of very high marginal tax rates for poorer families, the system of rights and benefits for those in work can penalise the very people supposedly in demand. + The following checklist illustrates this point; almost all the employment 'rights' below can have financial consequences. + Available to all employees are: + Rights against discrimination on grounds of sex or race; rights regarding health and safety; the right to joint and be active in a union; the right to time off for ante-natal visits. + Low-Earners may lose out under the following 'rights' which are related to earnings and/or National Insurance contribution records. Loss of rights to full or partial benefit usually affects those not making NI contributions on earnings of Pounds 41 or less a week: + Unemployment benefit; statutory sick pay; sickness benefit; invalidity benefit; widow's payment; widow's allowance; widowed mother's allowance; widow's pension; statutory maternity pay; maternity allowance; retirement pension(s). + The other major point of discrimination affects people whose normal weekly hours are between eight and 16; those working less than 8 hours are entitled to none of the following rights. Unless otherwise stated, the period of continuous service needed for 'under 16 hours' workers to gain these rights is five years. + The equivalent periods for those working over 16 hours a week are: + Right to an itemised pay statement - on or before first wage payment; protection against unfair dismissal - after two years; written reasons for dismissal - after six months; redundancy pay, and rights - after two years; minimum period of notice - after one month; statement of terms and conditions of employment - after 13 weeks; guaranteed pay, if laid off - after one month; medical suspension pay - after one month; time off for trade union duties - immediately. + A few other rights and benefits, apart from these main ones, generally fall into the same framework. People on fixed-term contracts are also liable to lose rights and benefits, especially if the contract is for less than three months. + It is still unclear whether 1992's 'harmonisation' in Europe will affect the rights of part-time and low-paid workers in this country. And there is quite a political tussle ahead for Vasso Papandreou over whether her 'Social Charter,' which includes these employment rights, can be effectively hitched to the single European market process in Brussels. + Not the least of her concerns is the British government's objections to any 'levelling up' in the so-called Social Dimension of Europe: a great many people must be hoping that she succeeds. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +121 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 26, 1989 + +Health Guardian: Stopwatch on caring - Patient care is more than just treating ailments, it involves spending time and sympathy on discovering the underlying distress. Proposals in the White Paper and GP contract make some doctors worry that they just won't have the time + +BYLINE: By JUDY SADGROVE + +LENGTH: 1078 words + + + Susan had a skin complaint which had bothered her on and off since adolescence. There seemed to be no effective treatment for the crop of angry boils that she suffered from time to time. One day she decided to consult her new GP. The doctor had a look and then encouraged Susan, aged 34, to talk about her life in general. + It transpired that Susan was deeply frustrated by seven years in a dead-end job and a series of unsatisfying relationships with married men. After 40 minutes, Susan emerged from the consulting room strengthened by her GP's sympathy and determined to tackle her real problems. + Janet Millar is a GP in the London borough of Hackney. She is well aware that the patient's presenting complaint, such as Susan's boils, is frequently not the real reason for attending. Dr Millar says that when she does not feel under pressure, she can listen carefully and 'penetrate the layers of reality' of the patient's complaint so as to understand the underlying distress. But this, she emphasises, takes time. At the moment, when she is busy, she invites people in need of counselling to return for a protracted appointment. + This is standard practice. It has been estimated that up to 30 per cent of patients consulting a GP have an underlying psychosocial problem although they present with a specific physical condition. They often turn up at a time of stress, when they have come to discuss far more than their physical health. + One of the things worrying Dr Millar about the proposals of the White Paper and the new GP contract is that any increase in the number of her patients (an elightened administration in Hackney encourages smaller lists) to maintain income via fees per head will mean less time to listen to the patient. She doesn't think that she will change the way she practises medicine, but she does think that she will suffer financially as a result. + Janet Millar chose to become a GP because she believed in the healing relationship between doctor and patient. This is likely to be eroded by the accent on mass screening and immunisation, which will not only cut listening time but also shift the emphasis on to crudely measurable indices of health. The person will be pared down to his or her basic physical functioning. + Dr Millar also draws attention to her elderly patients, three or four of whom turn up every morning. They won't learn how to use the season ticket because what they want farm more than their repeat prescriptions is the opportunity to talk. + Dr Eleanor Clarke, a GP in comfortable Chorleywood, agrees. She characterises the need to talk as the 'While I'm here, doctor' pheonomenon. Some patients, like Susan, proffer a specific complaint, going on to inquire whether it might be caused by stress - the stress of caring for an elderly relative at home, say. Others enter the consulting room and burst into tears, sobbing that they can't cope, that their child is being bullied, that their marriage is breaking up and that, by the way, they also have a bad back. + Dr Clarke is concerned about the financial pressure to try to increase list size and the disincentive to take on extra medical staff, because of the proposed changes in the basic practice allowance. This will mean less time for patients and will discriminate against part-time women doctors, often preferred by female patients. + Why do people turn to the GP? Dr Paul Julian, who also practices in Hackney, is convinced that in this secular age the doctor's experience of death, disease and distress is unique. Knowledge of the dark side of life prompts people to trust their GP with all sorts of shameful disclosures. According to Dr Julian, the new emphasis on prevention is a cop-out. 'Anyone can carry out screening,' he says, 'but only a doctor has the training and experience to deal with disease and, above all, help people come to terms with it.' Other doctors who support prevention might disagree. + People's unquestioning trust in the GP will be eroded, Julian predicts, by competitiveness in the NHS - founded on the spirit of co-operation. He describes elderly patients lost in the new split between health and social services and reports patients already saying to him: 'You won't want to deal with me. I cost too much.' + Dr Dipak Kalra, another inner-city GP, uses the following case to illustrate how financial constraints on prescribing and referral practice will create an 'explosion of mistrust' between doctor and patient, and the growth of defensive medicine as practised within the US free market economy: + Michael had had a headache for days. Fearful that he had a brain tumour, he went to his GP, who reassured him that cancer was unlikely and a brain scan or referral to a neurologist unneccessary. In the future, Michael might see his doctor as a tight bastard, unwilling to shell out for a scan. And his GP, fearing litigation in the event of Michael developing cancer, might decide to send him for anxiety-provoking tests. + Presently, patients trust their doctor to act in their best interest and save money only where appropriate. But the concept of the cheap doctor anxious not to overspend raises anxieties about inferior treatment. Tranquillisers, for instance, cost less than anti-depressants or a course of psychotherapy. Likewise, admision for surgery might be delayed so that the patient is sent to the cheapest hospital, rather than to the best hospital, the nearest one or the one with the shortest waiting list. + Professor Andy Haines, professor of primary health care at London's University College, points out that 70 per cent of the population consult their GP once a year (women and children more frequently) and 90 per cent every five years. The average length of patient consultation stands at around eight minutes. + He predicts that longer lists (where they occur), the inevitable concentration on activities that maintain income, such as trying to achieve screening and immunisation targets (where possible), tests on new patients and all the new administration of the practice income and expenditure is likely to affect the quality of time spent with patients. + Additionally the changes in general practice combined with those proposed for the hospital sector will lead to greater fragmentation of health care and make it particularly difficult to look after vulnerable groups, such as the elderly and the mentally ill, who require close co-ordination of care. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +122 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 26, 1989 + +The Day in Politics: Clarke berates the BMA for 'scurrilous' leaflet - NHS shake-up + +BYLINE: By NIKKI KNEWSTUB + +LENGTH: 438 words + + + The Health Secretary, Mr Kenneth Clarke, rounded on the British Medical Association yesterday for the campaign it is orchestrating against his National Health Service white paper and plans for GPs' contracts. + During lively health questions in the Commons, Mr Clarke said the new contracts would encourage new services for patients. The BMA's leaflet outlining its opposition, which it has distributed to GPs, was 'scurrilous', he said. + Several Tory backbenchers asked questions about the care of the elderly under the new contracts, saying they had received frightened calls from elderly constituents who had been told by the GPs that they would not be able to be treated when the new contracts came. + Mr Clarke said: 'The contract is designed to improve services to the elderly. It is scandalous nonsense to claim any elderly patient is threatened by it.' + 'I can only assume that the action of doctors is influenced by the information put out from Tavistock Square (the BMA headquarters).' The leaflet 'contains scurrilous nonsense. It is a long time since I have encountered a trade union that is prepared to spend millions of pounds of its members' money on spreading untruths.' + Ms Harriet Harman, the shadow health spokesman, said patient care would suffer because of cash incentives to the doctors to take on more patients. + Mr Clarke said: 'Arguments about waiting lists are a complete red herring. Doctors will enhance their incomes by taking on new services and reaching a new performance targets.' + Mr Robert Adley (C. Christchurch) said Mr Clarke should demand an apology from the BMA for the 'distortions with which they are trying to frighten patients.' + Mr Clarke replied: 'It is most unfortunate that in the course of negotiating this contract, some doctors have gone out of their way to cause needless alarm to patients. There are no threats to patients arising out of it.' + Later, during Prime Minister's question time, Mrs Thatcher endorsed a condemnation of doctors by Mr Tim Smith (C. Beaconsfield), who accused them of using patients as a 'political battering ram' over the reforms. + He said they had 'used' patients in general and frightened elderly and vulnerable patients about the proposed reforms. 'Some doctors have behaved in a most irresponsible manner.' + Mrs Thatcher said she 'wholly' agreed with Mr Smith. The Government's aim was to improve the service. + 'The objective of the NHS white paper is to give better health care and greater choice and produce greater satisfaction to those working in the health service who respond successfully to local needs.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +123 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 26, 1989 + +Parliamentary Sketch: Overweight health minister ignores doctors' orders + +BYLINE: By ANDREW RAWNSLEY + +LENGTH: 561 words + + + Kenneth Clarke, the Health Secretary, told MPs that over the coming month he would be seeing 'hundreds and thousands of doctors.' + Oh dear. Everybody already knew that Mr Clarke's condition was serious, but few of us had realised it was quite this bad. Worse still, all of the doctors the minister sees appear to be giving him the same black diagnosis. He is far too over-weight with dogma and hopelessly addicted to privatising the health service. + It has already led to a nasty rash of bad publicity and loss of opinion poll. Mr Clarke's only chance, according to the British Mecical Association, is to give up his plans for the NHS before it is too late. + Unfortunately, Mr Clarke is resisting treatment. Over and over again yesterday he insisted that there was nothing wrong with him. + But, if anything, his condition was actually deteriorating before our eyes. For, minutes into his appearance at the despatch box, Mr Clarke came out in a terrible hot flush of rhetoric about the BMA leaflets warning that elderly patients would suffer because of the Government's proposals. + 'The leaflet contains scurrlous nonsense,' Mr Clarke raged. 'Alarmist ..absurd .. scandalous ..untruths.' It was a very severe attack. It took Mr Clarke some minutes to recover. Ron Leighton, the Labour MP for Newham North East, tried to refer the minister to some consultants. Mr Leighton had 'conducted a poll of all the doctors in my consituency.' Forty0seven of the 50 doctors polled, 94 per cent of the sample, oppossed the Government's proposals. + Mr Clarke preferred the results of his own poll of a representative sample of one Health Secretary. One hundred per cent of him supported his proposals. Mr Clarke, who enjoys his food, is a fairly large sample of opinion, but not perhaps an altogeether representative one. + All the same, his attack on the BMA did seem to catch the mood of Tory backbenchers. To a man and woman they thought that all the Government needed to cure its difficulties over the NHS proposals was a dose of hot adjectives about the doctors. Dame Jill Knight fumed about 'misinformation and lying attacks' by the BMA. Robert Adley preferred 'mindless barrage of propaganda'. A near-hysterical Robert Jones fulminated against 'this outrageous campaign of frightening little old ladies.' + Certainly one old lady appears to have been at least a little frightened by the doctors. For in the subsequent question time Mrs Thatcher went out of her way to adopt a slightly softer, more conciliatory line towards the doctors, certainly rather more so than Mr Clarke or her backbenchers. She was wearing to fashion-conscious colleagues, Gunmetal Grey with a hint of Caring Pink. And thought there was plenty of the grey in her remarks about the doctors, there was also an un-characteristic hint of the pink. + We were back with a more familiar Mrs Thatcher when the subject turned to her row with Chancellor Kohl over the modernisation of Nato's nuclear artillery in West Germany. + The Prime Minister was again on the offensive against the Germans. She announced that she will personally be leading an attack into German territory at the weekend to drop huge amounts of her opinions on Herr Kohl. + Yes, I know we were supposed to have stopped fighting them more than 40 years ago, but it is too late to tell the old girl now. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +124 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 28, 1989 + +Law Guardian: Home-made misery - The abuse of elderly people in residential homes was exposed in a TV documentary last year. Today a report on the first 96 cases to come before the Residential Homes Tribunal is published + +BYLINE: By SARAH HARMAN + +LENGTH: 1096 words + + + Five years ago, amid growing concern about the standards of care in private residential homes, Parliament passed the Registered Homes Act. Four years ago the Registered Homes Tribunal which was set up to adjudicate in disputes between the home owners and the new registration authorities (local councils and health authorities) began work. + What has happened since? Our study of the first 96 cases to come before the Tribunal shows indecisive and inefficient registration authorities, wide variations in the standards applied by councils, insufficient powers for the authorities to impose specific conditions on dubious proprietors, inconsistent rulings by the Tribunal on whether poor standards of care is sufficient for disqualification, and a reversal of Parliamentary intent so that the burden of proof now rests not on potential proprietors but on the registration authorities to prove inadequate standards. + The Act requires homes caring for more than four residents to be registered and gives the registration authority power to refuse registration, cancel registration or impose certain conditions upon registration. + At the same time as the Act came into force, a working party sponsored by the DHSS and convened by the Centre for Policy on Ageing, published a Code of Practice, Home Life, which was intended to assist registration authorities in carrying out their duties under the Act. Many involved in the care of elderly and disabled people wre concerned because the Act is not particularly detailed and they would have liked to have seen the Code of Practice given the force of law. + The sheer scale of the responsibility on registration authorities to ensure good standards in private residential care is enormous. The numbers of people cared for in residential homes in the private and voluntary sector is simply staggering. The Government itself, through Income Support, was in May 1988 paying for some 140,000 residents to be cared for in the private sector. The amount paid to these homes is now nearly Pounds 900 million per year - which represents an increase in public funding of 8,780 per cent since 1979 and is equivalent of 28 per cent of total local social service expenditure. + The cases show that some people in residential care homes have been subject to the most appalling physical and emotional abuse. Residents have been verbally abused to make them sign over cash benefits to proprietors, bound with cord, left on commodes for hours on end, called foul names, left to lie in linen soiled with excreta and sodden with urine by way of punishment, neglected to the extent that some have suffered severe injury in falls, and been placed in overcrowded, 'institutional' type accommodation. Many home-owners have turned out to have serious criminal convictions for such matters as deception and assault, and some, although without a criminal past themselves, have made close business associations with the most undesirable people. + The Act empowers the registration authority to cancel or refuse registration where an owner is not a 'fit person' to run a home. Unfortunately, the Act gives no guidance as to what constitutes a 'fit person' and the Tribunal, lacking clear guidance, has made some inconsistent and unsatisfactory decisions. + Poor standards of care and inadequate levels of staffing ought to be sufficient to indicate that an owner is not a 'fit person'. However, the Tribunal has not adjudicated consistently on this point and has allowed homes to continue where registration authorities have tried to close them because standards of care have been little short of appallilng. In a recent case in which the Tribunal found there had been many early shortcomings, it allowed the owners to continue to see if they could do any better. + The Code of Guidance emphasises the importance of all residents in private and voluntary care being allowed privacy, autonomy and dignity. Residential homes should be as like a resident's own home and as uninstitutional as possible. The Code requires that every resident, unless there are special circumstances, should have the opportunity to have their own private room. Unfortunately, some registration authorities have not given as much weight to this as others. + Because the Code of Guidance does not have the force of law and because the Act does not give registration authorities the powers they need, many efforts made by authorities to close homes have been unsuccessful and residents continue to live in circumstances far from satisfactory. + When the Act was first passed, some registration authorities were under the impression that inherent in the legislation was a power to insist on certain conditions being met if a home was to continue running. At various times, registration authorities have, for instance, insisted that particular undesirable persons had no involvement in the home, have insisted that safety precautions be installed and required any other steps they though necessary to safeguard the interersts of the residents. However, the High Court in adjudicating on cases referred to them on appeal have made it clear that the powers of registration authorities in imposing conditions on the running of the home are extremely limited to such matters as conditions controlling the age, sex or categories of persons who may be admitted to the home. + Similarly, the early decisions recorded indicate that the Tribunal was u9nder the impression that if it allowed a borderline appeal, it could make the continued running of the home subject to certain conditions. Again, the High court has considered this point and had taken the view that the Tribunal, like the registration authority, is restricted under the Act to imposing only the most basic conditions relating not to the way that the home is run, but to the type of resident who may be admitted. + Mr Justice Roche in a recent appeal judgment in the High Court has stated that the 'primary duty' of a registration authority is to register a home, the burden of proof being on the authority to prove that standards are not adequate rather than on the home-owner to show that he or she can run a good home. Since it was clearly the intention of Parliament when passing the Act to ensure good care for those in residential homes, this is a particularly unfortunate interpretation. + Parliament must act swiftly to amend the Act and give Home Life, the Code of Guidance, the force of law. + No Place Like Home by Harriet Harman MP and Sarah Harman, published by NALGO, price Pounds 1.50. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +125 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 29, 1989 + +Diary: Strudel at Bloom's in the Spring + +BYLINE: By JOHN BYRNE + +LENGTH: 1064 words + + + To Aldgate and Bloom's, just a couple of doors up from the Whitechapel Gallery where the miraculous Joan Miro is at play, for a chinwag with the pencil-thin Peter Fluck of Spitting Image. Invariably forget how tall he and long-time partner, Roger Law, are. Seven feet ten, at a guess. Also forget that London always a good ten degrees warmer than Wormit. Shirt sleeves in April. Whatever next? The restaurant is busy, lots of coming and going. An elderly waiter in immaculate white jacket greets us at the door and shows us briskly to our table. Chopped liver and a restorative glass of beetroot borscht for me, something-I-don't-quite-catch and chips for my companion. The elderly waiter disappears in a crackle of starch. + Peter and I mourn the passing of so many old-style eateries up and down the country where one might dine well for ninepence and have one's boots polished whilst waiting for the fish course. + The elderly waiter is back in a trice, an ice-cream scoop of chopped liver and the something-I-didn't-quite-catch and chips laid before us. Something else, gentlemen .. a pudding, something sweet .. the strudel, perhaps? Our waiter hovers, pencil poised. I am touched at his solicitude. I order something that isn't the strudel but it's the strudel I get. Some coffee? Tea? + It is explained to me that the waiters in Bloom's pay for the customers' orders out of their own pockets and are reimbursed only when said customers stump up at the end of their snack/lunch/dinner/whatever. No risk to proprietor. Hence the hovering. What a perfectly ingenious system. But what anxiety for the poor waiters. There is a visible relaxation of the trapezoids when my host scribbles out a cheque at luncheon's end. There must surely be a wider application for this obviously successful, of somewhat medieval, arrangement of Mr Bloom's. Or perhaps it is enough that one doesn't have to ask for the bill twice. + Back to Plumbers Row, E1, where I am introduced to the extraordinary Mrs Thatcher. I marvel at her body language, the way she moves, the casual shrug of the shoulders under the pinstripe suit. I am assured by Peter Fluck that her eyeballs are glued in a fixed position but can't help feeling that her gaze follows me around the room. Decidedly spooky. I marvel at the sheer brilliance of the technology, the work of engineering genius, Jim Hennequin, whose patented air-bag-computer-allied 'aminatronics' system is an obvious world beater. It does the heart good to know that not only will he and Spitting Image make us thrill and laugh but that the disabled will derive enormous benefit from the team's pioneering work. Computer whizz-toddler, Steve, lets me have a peek inside the box of electronic vermicelli he's lobotomising. Wondrous. Arise, Sir Jim. Arise, Sir Peter. + Slow crawl from E1 via Fleet Street to the Strand by taxicab. Message at hotel. Mad dash across river to Olivier where hot-ticket Hamlet about to go up. Stalls, Row C, Aisle 4. Sprint upstairs. A minute in hand. Ask lighting guy inside auditorium which way? He points. I follow his finger. The houselights dim. I look down at the floor. Who can recite the alphabet backwards in the dark? A surge of dry ice from the onstage trap. Hamlet's Father's ghost walks. 'Scuse me, 'scuse me .. sorry, beg your pardon. People are very patient. I make it to my seat and peel off several layers of wool. Quite forget that London theatres are invariably a good 20 degrees, etc. + Lots of young women in audience come to see Daniel Day-Lewis's Prince. And who can blame them? He's terrific. What courage, what conviction. I believe him totally when he tells Laertes how he loved Ophelia. And what an Ophelia! Stella Gonet, whom I haven't seen since she played Bernadette in The Slab Boys Trilogy at the Court, has to be the most affecting Ophelia of recent times. Her 'madness' is both chilling and heart-rending. Such bravery and intelligence in our younger actors. Bravo! + To Joe Allen's in Covent Garden till the wee small hours. Do they still send round flowers to all first-night West End casts, I wonder? Bless you, Joe. Delicious lemon sole. Just as lively an atmosphere as in New York branch but less customer traffic between the tables and no TV show-reviews. A haven. Unlike NY where you stumble down the steps at curtain-down for your five-alarm chille and there you are .. or, rather, there's your baby .. being torn limb form limb and devoured raw by some no-neck bimbo on live television. And everybody's watching. + So, when do we get a Joe Allen's in Glasgow? Mind you, they'd have to stay open a bit later than two in the morning when things are just starting to hum along Sauchiehall Street. For all I know there already is one in Glasgow, I'm never up that late myself. And so to bed + Get up late. Well, latish. No, definitely late. The day flashes in. To the Queen's in Shaftesbury Avenue for the 6 o'clock matinee of Alan Bennett's Single Spies. Twenty minutes in before I twig it's Prunella Scales as Coral Browne in first of two-play bill. She is uncanny as HMQ in second play, A Question of Attribution. Author himself brilliant as Anthony Blunt, distant yet sharp; a perfect miniature, the tempera never once over-egged. Beautifully directed by Simon Callow who also appears as Guy Burgess in Play One and a Kelvinside-accented Special Branch man in Play Two. Am especially impressed that his accent, a touch heightened, remains consistent throughout. Have duly placed a small tick against his Spotlight entry. A thoroughly enriching evening at the theatre. I recall with great pleasure seeing Forty Years On at Apollo 20 years ago. Particularly enjoy the way in which Bennett interweaves art history and covert lives in Blunt play into seamless raiment with crewel-work decoration at its centre. Again, bravo! Out into the night air and long stroll through Covent Garden maze to car park with me navigating. + Barely time to pick up baggage and grab a Chinese before hurtling towards Euston and overnight Motorail. Busman's holiday on the whole but nonetheless bracing for that. Who says the West End is dead? Oops, just noticed that Single Spies is National Theatre transfer. Ah, well. And so to Fife. + John Byrne has just completed a three-part series on Glencoe for BBC television and has also written a six-part drama for BBC tv in Glasgow. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +126 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 29, 1989 + +Ex-offenders 'allowed to run nursing homes' + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 446 words + + + Convicted criminals have been declared fit to run private homes for the elderly and disabled against the advice of local authorities, according to a report published yesterday. + In one case, a woman convicted of stealing more than Pounds 1,000 from a home where she had worked was allowed to run a home in Wiltshire and handle its residents' financial affairs, the report says. + The ruling was made by the Registered Homes Tribunal, which hears appeals against decisions by local authorities responsible for registering nursing and rest homes. + The tribunal has heard about 100 cases since its inceptionn in 1985. + The report, by Ms Harriet Harman, the Labour health spokeswoman, and her sister, Ms Sarah Harman, a Kent solicitor, sets out 96 cases and criticises decisions by the tribunal and the legal framework in which it works. + Ms Harriet Harman said: 'These cases show a scandalous situation where some elderly people, some people who are mentally ill or mentally disabled, are the victims of cruelty, greed, incompetence or neglect.' + The number of private homes for elderly and disabled people accounts for 45 per cent of all nursing and rest-home accommodation. The social security bill for people in residential care has grown from Pounds 10 million in 1979 to about Pounds 1 billion today. + The report, No Place Like Home, published by Nalgo, the local government union, says this represents a bottomless pit of public subsidy for private homes which are too often badly run and poorly policed. + 'There is evidence of abuse, binding residents with cord, misuse of drugs, fraud, fire hazard, lack of hygiene, and a sorry tale of bruised and miserable residents. And yet the cases in the report represent only the tip of the iceberg,' it says. + The Harmans plan to draft a parliamentary bill which would tighten the law concerning private homes. They want to make serious criminal convictions an automatic disqualification, require applicants to disclose all convictions, and bar anyone who has one home de-registered from running another. + Dr Paddy Carr, general secretary of the Registered Nursing Home Association, said he accepted there were sub-standard homes and sympathised with the view that people with criminal records should not be placed in charge of vulnerable residents. + 'Where the report talks about improving quality, we would fully support it. The problem is that it goes over the top when the issue is really all about the poor standard of inspection by many health authorities and local authorities.' + No Place Like Home; Local Government Section, Nalgo, 1 Mabledon Place, London WC1H 9AJ; Pounds 1.50 plus p&p. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +127 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 1, 1989 + +Agenda: A touch of Utopia - Socialist Utopianism still flourishes in the New Britain + +BYLINE: By HILARY WAINWRIGHT and BOB HOLMAN + +LENGTH: 1351 words + + + A new performance of socialism will be stealing the limelight this May Day. It comes from the Ginger Rogers-Fred Astaire tendency. Come on, you're thinking, it may be true that socialists nowadays have to lurk in camouflage but what on earth do two dancers of the Thirties and Forties have to do with May Day in the Eighties? + Quite simply, they were, like Charlie Parker in modern jazz or the best players on the cricket field, virtuosos of improvisation on the basis of a resilient structure. And the only kind of socialism which has survived the last 10 years with integrity and confidence is a vision of mprovisaton based on a structure. To put it another way, it is a vision which projects a foundation of public wealth and democratic institutions on which human individuality can be universally expressed. + A remarkable film is to be shown on Channel 4 tonight in which different angles on this view are presented, through the portraits of 11 socialists, ranging from Jack Jones improvising to build the pensioners movement to Marsha Marshall struggling to maintain the framework of a community in the pit village of Darfield Main. Included are the sacked workers from the Silent Night furniture company who, rather than go alone into the jungle of the labour market, formed a co-operative which now thrives on the custom of local residents. + Running through their political choreography is the idea of socialism as a foundation of economic and political equality on which people will step out to create diverse and unpredictable relations. + Improvisation upon a structure means the pensioners' sheltered homes and community facilities in Southwark which the elderly residents themselves partly manage. It means the GLC funded Westway Launderette in Notting Hill, fought for and run by local women seeking conviviality and pleasure as well as clean clothes. + It embraces the care and dignity which patients and staff contribute and gain at NHS health centres like the Gill Street Centre, Limehouse; the solidarity and commitment of campaigns within the black community with A. Sivandanan of the Institute of Race Relations describes and the mutual self education which Marsha Marshall from the mining village of Darfield Main found in Women Against Pit Closures. + These projects, precarious in Mrs Thatcher's Britian, sing of a wider, but underestimated, vision. Underestimated because it has been marginalised in the East by a socialism crunched and crippled into monolithic structures and in the West, by a socialism flattened into pragmatism - improvisation without a structure. It needs to be affirmed against the false prophets who have arisen out of the crises of these socialisms past. + First, it should be asserted, against the prophets of the New Right who hypocritically deny that structures exist in a capitalist society, in Mrs Thatcher's words that 'society does not exist, only individuals' - thereby making socialism appear as the sinister imposition of structure on previously free individuals. Even casual descriptions of Thatcher's Britain point to the working of structures. In Mark Carlin's film tonight, Jack Jones refers to the deaths from hypothermia amongst old people. Such deaths cannot be explained by the individual behaviour of each pensioner who died. Forget Edwina Currie's diagnosis: they died not because they failed to knit woolly hats but because their pensions were too low and their rents too high to afford the heating they needed; this in turn is because their labour was no longer valued on the market. + Similarly Dr David Widgery describes how 70 per cent of the ailments of his East End patients are caused primarily by social deprivation and not individual pathology. As structures are revealed to constrain and sometimes determine individual lives, the question ceases to be that of the individual versus social structures and becomes that of which structures will meet the needs and realise the capacities of every individual. + At the other end of the spectrum are those who deny individuality; who see individual needs as static and given, to be met from above with benevolence or contempt. As these assumptions have been blown apart by the stroppy insistence of groups whose needs could not be anticipated and neatly categorised, some of the advocates of this approach, whether in its Communist or its Social Democratic version, have retreated into a muddled individualism. + Some have given up the shaping of alternative social frameworks or foundations entirely, as if out of guilt, or perhaps a sense of revenge, for a God that failed. Some have ended up welcoming Mrs Thatcher's revolution because she's destroyed the structures about which they now feel so ashamed but for which, at the time, they had no alternative and little criticism. + This is where the Ginger Rogers tendency can hold its head up high on the May Day of Thatcherism's tenth anniversary - not to crow but to show the direction for a new political decade. + The political tradition which advocates an egalitarian economic foundation for the fluidity of popular participation includes the people - like David Widgery, Sheila Rowbotham, Bob Rowthorn and Sivanadan on tonight's film - who from the early 70s were already critical of the welfare state and existing forms of public ownership. Not from the standpoint of the market but as the result of a commitment to democratic control by workers, users and the community. + That's not to say they had the answers or could spell out the precise character of such a fuzzy goal. But in books and pamphlets written from experience of working both in and against the state; in critical magazines produced locally and by minorities in different unions; and through the initiatives of the women's movement - as well as of far-sighted shop stewards like those at Lucas Aerospace - they warned of the impending demise of a socialism that blocked off the improvised processes of popular power. Against the tradition of power concentrated in a centralised state, they pressed forward proposals for the popular management of public resources, in practice, though rarely in theory - which in part explains how easily their ideas are overlooked. They kept hold of both sides of a tense dialectic; the need for wealth to be publicly owned on the one hand; on the other, the need not only for open, accountable government but for democratic self management of all the institutions of daily life. + The film 'Utopias' updates this tradition presenting its responses to old problems in new forms: the problem, for instance, of how to organise un-unionised workers this time in the form of office and technical workers working for the new finance sector in Docklands or casual, part-time women workers in shops and private services. Or its tentative answers to new problems arising from the left's control over limited local resources: the problem for instance of with whom in a community should a local council share its increasingly sparse resources, and how the decisions are to be made. + The big underlying problem is that in Britain this tradition is strikingly separate from party politics, and therefore with a media whose political coverage is dominated by the lobby, rarely gains full expression, let alone access to power. 'Utopias' is trying to find ways of expressing a politics which officially does not exist. + In some European countries, Germany in particular the Green Party has provided a voice but the British Green Party has been too concerned to differentiate itself from socialism - portrayed as a monolith - to provide a satisfactory political focus. + Still, the achievement of improvisation upon a structure has never been easy, in any sphere; after all, intense agony, strain and sheer hard work, lay behind the apparently spontaneous and fluid harmony of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. + Utopias will be shown on C4 tonight at 10.45pm. A longer version of this article will appear in the May/June issue of Interlink, available (Pounds 1.10p) from 9 Poland Street, London W1. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +128 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 1, 1989 + +Consumers to be given legal teeth and a voice in Cabinet + +LENGTH: 377 words + + + A Minister of Cabinet rank at the head of a new Department of Consumer Affairs would be appointed by a Labour government to give the public power over the quality of their lives and to protect them from unscrupulous producers, a draft report of the consumer and the community policy review group states. + The report, prepared under the joint leadership of Mr David Blunkett, a member of the national executive, and the party's education spokesman, Mr Jack Straw, says the priority of the new department, to be shadowed by a parliamentary select committee, would be a review of Britain's 30-year-old consumer protection law. + Its aim would be to give consumers truthful and comprehensive information about products, to give them legal protection when firms go bankrupt, and to establish in law a duty to trade fairly and safely. + A Foods Standards Agency would be set up to monitor the quality of food and its production, while new funding to the National Consumer Council and other groups would give consumers powers to take class actions for compensation. + In addition, a system of no-fault compensation woudl be introduced covering medicine, transport accidents, infected food and unsafe products, and advertisers would be required to publish corrective advertising where the original had been proved inaccurate. + The public and private utilities, such as gas and electricity, would have to draw up customer service contracts specifying the service to be expected and the redress available. Disconnections without a court order would be made illegal, and outlawed altogether where young children or elderly people were concerned. + Consumers would also be entitled to elect a consumer interest member on the board of the utilities, and to elect the management committee of a regional watchdog for each utility under the control of a new National Utility Consumer Council. An Office of Regulation for each utility would meanwhile oversee the strategy, pricing and investment and deal with any complaints which had implications for large numbers of consumers. + The report also says savers should have more control over how their money is invested, and proposed a new class of director accountable to savers rather than shareholders. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +129 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 2, 1989 + +Pledge to launch drive on violence + +BYLINE: By MARTIN WAINWRIGHT + +LENGTH: 311 words + + + Northumbria police have confirmed they will go ahead today with the launch of a long-planned campaign against violent crime. + A spokeman for the force said yesterday that the Monkseaton shooting had reinforced the need for the six-month initiative, which will include the extra use of special constables, a policy of seeking remands in custody in all cases involving violence, and disrorderly behaviour in pubs. + During the campaign, which the force's chief constable, Sir Stanley Bailey, acknowledges will lead to an apparent rise in crime, police will give extra consideration to pursuing prosecutions when victims are unwilling to take further action, and will encourage timid people through publicity to report attacks. + Crime patterns over recent years will also be re-examined to identify when and where violence is most common. + The campaign is also concerned to put violence in perspective. + As the force believes 'fear can be just as damaging to our lives as crime itself', leaflets will point out that only 3 to 4 per cent of all recorded crime involve violence. + 'Many categories, such as attacks on the elderly, are much less widespread than people think,' said the spokesman. Last year, over-60s in the force area had a 1-in-4,048 chance of being attacked, compared with 1-in-35 for men in their 20s. + 'Last year also showed that 32 per cent of serious assaults and 22 per cent of other assaults reported, were between spouses or couples,' + However, Northumbria has seen an increase in most categories of violent crime in recent years, although the successful detection rate has also been high. The homicide category, for example, rose 64.6 oer cent last year, to 130 crimes, with all but one being successfully detected. Most such crimes were threats to murder which were not carried out, and all of which were detected. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +130 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 6, 1989 + +Weekend Money (Cashpoints): Loan offers for the elderly + +BYLINE: By MARGARET HUGHES + +LENGTH: 136 words + + + Two more building societies are offering elderly home owners personal loans secured against their homes. The Cheltenham & Gloucester's 60 Plus Loan allows homeowners to raise interest-only lonas up to 25 per cent of the value of their hosue. Borrowers do not make any repayments as long as the loan balance is less than 75 per cent of the value of the house. if it exceeds this figure they will have to start making repayments, otherwise the debt is settled by the future sale of the property. Interest at a current APR of 13.9 is rolled up and added to the loan. The minimum advance is Pounds 2,000. + Both schemes put borrowers who need smaller amounts at a disadvantage as the survey and legal fees are the same for larger loans. On a typical Pounds 75,000 house these could amount to Pounds 250. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +131 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 9, 1989 + +Health 490 million pounds underfunded + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 226 words + + + Health authorities in England are being underfunded this year by at least Pounds 490 million, and cumulative underfunding has reached more than Pounds 3 billion, the National Association of Health Authorities claims today. + The figures have been produced before a debate in the Commons on Thursday on the Government's health changes. The association says the white paper on the changes makes virtually no reference to underfunding. + Mr Philip Hunt, the association's director, said: 'It is vital for the Government to recognise and understand this history of financial pressures on health authorities if the reforms proposed by the white paper are to be successful for the benefit of patients.' + The underfunding calculations, said to have been made on the same basis as comparable estimates by the Commons social services committee, contrast actual spending with national target spending totals. + These include amounts necessary to meet the growing numbers of elderly people, the higher costs of advances in medical technology, and the extra costs of some government policies such as community care. + The estimated underfunding of Pounds 490 million in 1989-90 is based on an inflation rate of 7 per cent. + No allowance is made for the bill facing authorities for the higher pay grades being won on appeal by thousands of nurses. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +132 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 10, 1989 + +Health Guardian: Shelf-life or death - The fears and facts of food irradiation + +BYLINE: By JUDY SADGROVE + +LENGTH: 628 words + + + Food irradiation has been banned in Britain since 1967. It is permitted in 36 countries, including the US and France, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Luxemburg. Six other EC nations forbid it but if Britain and another change over, irradiated food will be sold throughout Europe. + Irradiation is not popular. In a 1987 opinion poll 93 per cent of respondents were opposed to the ban being lifted and 85 per cent said they would not buy irradiated food. Tesco, Marks and Spencer and the Co-op have said that they will not stock it. Yet the Government is determined to introduce it. + Are consumers merely suspicious of a new method of preserving food? Or are misgivings about exposing food to by-products of the nuclear industry well founded? What does irradiation do? + Food is exposed to a source of low energy ionising radiation (Cobalt 60 and Caesium 137). Low dosed below 1 kilo Gray (kGY) inhibit the sprouting of potatoes and onions, delay the ripening of fruit and kill pests in grains and spices. Medium doses (1-10 kGy) reduce yeasts, moulds and bacteria. Higher doses sterilise food. + As the chemical changes and their biological effects are invisible, it is impossible to discern fresh from irradiated food - without a label. A marketable test is essential. Strawberries, for instance, which normally rot within a few days, remain fresh after irradiation for three weeks. Prolonging shelf-life has advantages for producers and facilitates global transportation. But has quality been altered? + There are variable losses of vitamins, claimed by proponents to be no greater than those of cooking. Irradiation damages most vitamins, particularly A, B1, folic acid, E and K, destroying 5 to 15 per cent in different foods. Vegetables lose vitamin C during irradiation, through prolonged storage, and then in the saucepan. + This loss could affect groups with marginal intakes, including the elderly and children who eat chips, cola and chocolate. Irradiated grains stored for three months lose nearly three times the amount of vitamin B1 and E as non-irradiated grains, and further depletion occurs after longer storage. Such losses could affect the nutrititional status of people in the Third World. The London Food Commission has highlighted animal studies which suggest that vitamin supplementation is required to maintain health on an irradiated diet. And chromosomal defects have been found in malnourished children fed freshly irradiated wheat. + There is concern about the proliferation in irradiated food of free radicals, thought to be involved in ageing and in the development of cancer. They are caused by the oxidation of fats, a process initiated by irradiation, which cannot therefore be used for fatty foods (irradiated red meat has an unpleasant 'wet dog' flavour). But it can be used on chicken. Irradiation would kill of the salmonella riddling British chickens without having to tackle the problem at source. + The World Health Organisation has approved irradiation to date, presumably because it kills the pests and microorganisims that spoil food and cause diseases, such as salmonellosis, toxoplasmosis and campylobacteriosis. But the British Medical Association has pointed out that although it reduces the bacteria, it leaves behind the toxins that make people ill. + Fears have been expressed that it could be used fraudulently to camouflage contaminated food. Prawns have been refused by British port authorities and then accepted after clean-up ('Dutching') in the Netherlands. It is also not clear whether irradiation would prevent listeriosis (dangerous in pregnant women) and there are worries that it might, by killing off competitive yeasts and moulds encourage the emergence of deadly botulism. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +133 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 10, 1989 + +Guardian Tomorrows: Fine words that could widen the great divide - The idea of flexible retirement has at last caught the Government's imagination, but, its policies could actually reduce choice for the elderly and increase the gulf between rich and poor + +BYLINE: By ALAN WALKER + +LENGTH: 1537 words + + + It seems that no idea is more irresistible than one shoe time has come and which also has the support of the Prime Minister. Thus it was with a mixture of surprise and foreboding that I read recently that both Margaret Thatcher and her Secretary of State for Employment have criticised fixed age retirement as 'anachronistic'. The idea that appears to have caught the imagination of senior government ministers is that of greater flexibility in retirement between the ages of 60 and 70. + My surprise was caused by the fact that policies I and others have been advocating for more than a decade had, apparently, been accepted in the highest government circles. Yet when my colleague, Frank Laczko, and I first put forward the concept of a 'decade of retirement' to a Select Committee on Social Services inquiry on the age of retirement in 1982, it was rejected in favour of the DHSS proposal for a common retirement age of 63 (though this was itself subsequently rejected by the Government). What explains this turnaround in the space of seven years? + Back in 1982, unemployment was high and rising rapidly. At that time everyone, it seemed, was jumping on the early retirement bandwagon. The degree of political consensus on this policy was remarkable, with public figures as diverse as Arthur Scargill, Norman Tebbitt, Jim Prior and Lord McCarthy, as well as the TUC, CBI and DHSS, all nodding approvingly in the direction of earlier retirement. + The Government itself was actively using the Job Release Scheme to encourage older workers to take early retirement. Between 1979 and 1986 the labour force participation rate of men aged 60-64 fell from 73 per cent to 5 per cent while the rate for those aged 55-59 fell from 91 per cent to 80 per cent. + Seven years later, demographic pressures coupled with economic ideology have forced a change of mind. The numbers of elderly people, particularly very elderly, are rising (an increase of 1.5 million people aged 65 and over by 2021) and the numbers of young people entering the labour market are falling (by 1.2 million over the next 10 years). + These changes have alredy prompted government action to reduce the public cost of pensions and what is perceived as the 'burden' they represent to the young. Despite the substantial pensions cuts already made - the change in the uprating index from earnings to prices alone has reduced the pension of a married couple by more than Pounds 17 per week - and the modest projected future costs of pensions (7.6 per cent of GDP in 2010, compared with 17.3 per cent in France and 22.4 per cent in Italy), further measures are deemed necessary. This explains my sense of foreboding. + The Government sees greater flexibility in retirement as a means of encouraging more older workers to stay on in their jobs and so reduce the cost of public pensions: a policy of upward flexibility. The danger with this strategy, however, is that some people who need or want to retire may be pressurised into staying on. Furthermore, genuine choice about deferring retirement is likely to be confined to only a few jobs unless legislation is introduced to outlaw age discrimination by employers. + The Social Services Committee recognised this problem in 1982: 'fine talk about flexibility is not enough. It must be translated into the language of employment protection.' But this is an interventionist path the Government will be reluctant to go down. If it does not do so the policy of greater flexibility is likely to widen the gulf between Britain's two nations of affluent and poor elderly people as the former are able to exercise more choice and the latter are forced into retirement or early retirement. + In contrast, the package we put to the Social Services Committee was designed to promote real choice for older workers and to ensure that those suffering from ill-health were able to withdraw from the labour market without being penalised. + There are six components to the package. First, following the US example, the ending of mandatory retirement before the age of 70 and, if there is further support from older people, the abolition of age-barrier retirement altogether. Second, the introduction of flexible retirement between the ages of 60 and 70 for both men and women. Third, the introduction of a partial pension scheme to give older people the opportunity to combine part-time employment with a reduced pension. Such a scheme has worked well in Sweden for more than 12 years, providing employers, trade unions and older workers with an attractive alternative to early retirement and redundancy and easing the transition towards full retirement. Partial pensioners report being more rested and take-up of the scheme has been hight. Fears were expressed initially, chiefly by employers, about the difficulty of finding sufficient part-time jobs. But with employers keen to reduce their workforces and with most partial pensioners remaining in their old jobs, these fears proved unfounded. + There is a risk, however, that a policy of flexible retirement could be transformed into one of early retirement through the customary acceptance of a lower age-barrier by employers and trade unions. This was partly the experience in Sweden following the introduction of its partial pension scheme in 1976. Flexibility is already built into the British social security system, which allows for deferred retirement, but the force of legislation is necessary to encourage employers and trade union negotiators to be flexible. Thus, fourthly, anti-age discrimination legislation, similar to that passed in the US, is required to protect older workers from redundancy and to counteract discrimination in recruitment. + fifth, it is important to recognise that the main reason for taking early retirement is ill-helath and, therefore, a disability pension scheme (including a partial pension) is an integral part of this flexible retirement package. The final component is an increase in state pension, to ensure that those who want to retire do not have to live on poverty level incomes. + Although the Social Services Committee rejected this package as a whole, considerable sympathy was expressed for parts of it. In line with evidence from the DHSS, CBI, and TUC the Committee dismissed the lowering of male retirement age to 60 on the grounds of cost, but recommended greater flexibility in retirement and sex equality in retirement ages. + The Committee accepted the DHSS proposal, which was supported by the CBI, for a common retirement age of 63, a low-cost compromise which, on its own, would have strengthened the trend towards early retirement among men while denying women the right to a full pension at 60. To help prevent this they suggested employment protection up to the age of 65. + The Committee supported the principle of phased retirement, as did all of the main parties giving evidence, but the only practical suggestion they made was for an exploration of the potential of job-sharing as a mechanism for partial retirement. While expressing 'sympathy' with the desire fo those approaching retirement age to retire gradually, a partial pension scheme was not regarded as feasible. However this option was not explored fully and no detailed costings were carried out. + The Government did not act on the politically sensitive recommendation for flexibility around a common age of 63 and it continued to encourage early retirement. + By selecting only one component from the package outlined her, without suggesting any commitment to equalising pension ages at 60, the Government has indicated that it is interested primarily in upward 'flexibility', from 60 for women and from 65 for men. + Therefore we are witnessing the start of a new phase in the fluctuating fortunes of older workers that has seen them being used, over the course of this century, as a reserve army of labour, dependent on the supply of younger people and political concern about the socalled burden of pensions. + We have seen the beginnings of a government propaganda campaign to persuade older people to prolong their working lives. However, it will not be easy to reverse the trend towards early retirement that has become so entrenched over the alst decade, encouraged by government policy. It will be especially difficulty to change the ageist attitudes of employers and recrutiment agencies without positive action to curb discrimination. Moreover, the approach the Government is taking is not likely to lead to the sort of flexibility that older workers are looking for. + On the positive side, though, a government campaign to promote the 1990s as the 'decade of the senior citizen' offers the labour Party a golden opportunity to propose a policy aimed at promoting genuine flexibility in retirement, with the financial security of enhanced full and partial state pensions, and thereby provide millions of older people with a clear political choice. In fact, Neil Kinnock has already argued in favour of a flexible decade of retirement, sex equality in pension ages at 60, training for older people and part-time employment. + Alan Walker is Professor of Social Policy, Sheffield University. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +134 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 10, 1989 + +A union battle Tories may lose: The fight for political survival north of the border + +BYLINE: By PETER HETHERINGTON + +LENGTH: 1180 words + + + Among the feudal acres on the north bank of the Tweed, within sight and sound of England, Donald Moffat knows that the old Union has rarely been under great strain. + Until recently it would have been unthinkable to contemplate a crumbling Tory vote around Coldstream, family seat of Lord Home of the Hirsel. Rulers and the ruled, whether squires or servants of the former prime minister, voted Tory out of duty or deference. + Then came Donald Moffat, former farm worker and longstanding Scottish Nationalist, who briefly served Lord Home as a beater during the grouse season. Five weeks ago he gained the local regional council seat from the Tories in a byelection caused by the retirement of John Askew, the elderly major who represented the area for over 50 years. + Mr Moffat says locals in the ruling party were shocked and 'quite annoyed'. But instead of blaming poor organisation, he says they would look elsewhere. + 'This was one of the weakest areas for the SNP, but Mrs Thatcher has changed all that. She's our greatest asset. People see her as an English nationalist representing only the South-east and they can't identify with her'. + The Tory candidate, Mr James Boyle, a retired RAF parachute instructor, acknowledges that the new SNP councillor had a far superior organisation. His complaint echoes around Scotland. 'If more Tories got off their backsides I could have easily won - the Nationalists had a good team - but I don't think I should say any more. People in the party know my views.' + But Berwickshire is not exceptional. With uncharacteristic frankness, senior Tories acknowledge that their organisation in much of Scotland is in a mess. Talk to the odd minister, party officials and - most of all - beleaguered activists fighting for their political life in a hostile nation and the message is the same. Many believe that the Unionist ground is slipping away fast - a fear reinforced by a weekend MORI survey in The Scotsman. It showed that Scots are now seriously questioning their economic and political ties with England. + Not surprisingly, senior Tories acknowledge that independence is no longer 'inconceivable'. Some polls show majority support for the SNP's new strategy of 'independence within Europe'. + In an attempt to thwart the Nats, the North Tayside MP, Mr Bill Walker, is leading fellow right-wingers from north and south of the border in calling for a referendum to present voters with the stark choice of 'separatism or unionism'. The hierarchy opposes such a step because it is not confident of victory in what could develop into a vote on Thatcherism. + Today, Scottish Conservatives gather in Perth to hear speeches from the Prime Minister and six cabinet colleagues. As of now they remain unconvinced by the Government's apparent strategy - more Thatcherism and resolute unionsim - as a means of regaining lost ground in a nation which has decisively rejected the lady and her works. Tory support is stuck at around 20 per cent and shows no sign of recovery. + But for ministers and some officials the target is not so much the Prime Minister - although a few confide she is becoming a liability - but the party machine in Edinburgh, described by one minister as 'abysmal'. They tend to blame the messenger, not the message, and complain that a much-vaunted re-organisation after the last election, when Tories lost 11 of their 21 Scots MPs, has failed to lift morale. + 'Unless there's some quick action to revive the grassroots, it's highly unlikely they can get out of this pit,' complains a former official. + Such concern, of course, raises another question - namely that once-loyal Tories are lying low because they dislike both the message and the prime ministerial messenger. In the words of one of several critical motions to the conference - but not selected for debate - the party has to project a 'stronger Scottish identity and develop a more relevant Scottish message'. + But will it? Can it, with Mrs Thatcher so opposed to any constitutional change? Those close to the Prime Minister say she is genuinely puzzled by continuing Scots hostility. Mr Andrew Thomson, her former agent in Finchley, who recently retired to the Scottish borders, points to a dilemma which haunts some Tories. 'Margaret has broken so many records now that to win the next election and be faced with a constitutional crisis would make her very unhappy and miserable. I think she is concerned.' + Mr Thompson, a Glaswegian, who says he is devoted to the Prime Minister, argues that critical Scots Tories are simply making the Government an excuse for poor organisation. 'They are failing to get their act together and blaming it on Thatcherism'. And criticise they do. Last year Lord Goold, the Scottish party chairman, felt it necessary to tell the faithful that he was fed up with fellow Tories blaming 'that woman' for the party's ills. + Some now detect the emergence of an ideological split between Michael Forsyth, the right-wing Scottish Education and Health Minister - a Thatcher favourite - and a pragmatic new team taking over the leadership of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Association (SCUA), which represents the constituencies. + A liberalish Glasgow lawyer and academic, Professor Ross Harper, recently won the SCUA presidency after forcing a rare election. His friends are now pushing for Harper to become party chairman (a prime ministerial appointment) in succession to Lord Goold, thereby combining both posts. The chairman oversees party organisation. + Harper concedes that time is not on his side. He wants to reorganise branch structure, take a 'battle bus' to constituencies to convince closet Tories that conservatism is worth fighting for, and launch an efficiency audit of local Tory associations. They will have to show they are up to the job, 'and if not we'll take over'. + Meanwhile, the tireless Forsyth has been making waves at the 9,000-strong Scottish Office, which oversees domestic government north of the border. He is clearly frustrated by endless delays in pushing through plans for a new corporate image, prepared by an advertising agency. The aim is to raise the Government's profile, and make Scots aware that they already enjoy considerable administrative devolution. + For the time being, many Scots Tories - unlike their English counterparts - are hoping for a Labour revival. They desperately want Labour to retain Glasgow Central in the forthcoming byelection, since Labour is still a unionist party, after all, tenuous though the label may be to many activists. The resurgent, and increasingly belligerent nationalists - ahead of the Tories in the polls - are the real enemy. + But if the SNP bandwagon gains further momentum in the run-up to the next election, some senior Tories are convinced that the party will have to change constitutional course - whatever Mrs Thatcher might say. + 'If there was an upsurge something would have to be done,' one senior office bearer confided. 'After all, there'd be pressure from the Palace downwards.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +135 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 10, 1989 + +The Day in Politics: Medical tax relief 'blank cheque subsidy' to old - Finance Bill + +BYLINE: By PAUL NETTLETON + +LENGTH: 339 words + + + Tax relief for the elderly on private medical insurance was condemned yesterday by Mr Gordon Brown, Labour's Treasury spokesman, as 'an unjustifiable subsidy of incalculable cost.' + He was speaking as MPs started scrutiny in committee on the floor of the Commons of the Budget proposals contained in the Finance Bill. + Mr Brown called for the scheme to be postponed until after the next general election, a proposal scorned by Mr John Major, Chief Secretary to the Treasury. + Mr Major said Mr Brown's suggestion assumed that Labour would win and then kill off a relief which many elderly people welcomed. + Mr Brown said the Government was proposing 'an open-ended subsidy in which commercial medicine receives a signed cheque and effectively writes the sum upon it'. + Arguing that NGS administrative costs were lower than those of the private medical insurance companies, Mr Brown said: 'This Government wants to support the private sector not because it is efficient, but simply because it is the private sector.' + He quoted a survey published yesterday by the National Association of Health Authorities, which claims a Pounds 3 billion underfunding of the NHS since 1980, including some Pounds 490 million this year. But he said the only question the Prime Minister asked was what help could be given to the private sector. + For the Democrats, Mr Alan Beith said the proposal was 'part of the route to a two-tier health service.' He did not object to people choosing to provide for themselves, but saw no reason for the taxpayer to subsidise that choice. + Mr Brown pressed Mr Major to say whether Mr Norman Lamont, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, had been correct in a written answer that half the Pounds 40 million relief would go to the 5 per cent of pensioners who were top-rate taxpayers. + Mr Major said the Inland Revenue estimated that more than 80 per cent would go to basic rate taxpayers or non-taxpayers. + Pressed again to answer, Mr Major said: 'I do not expect that to be the case.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +136 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 10, 1989 + +Spotting the pasta gap in Belgium + +BYLINE: By MAEV KENNEDY + +LENGTH: 416 words + + + The boring Belgian, the chauvinist French, the Italian household full of bambini and grannies, and other cherished stereotypes are vindicated in a survey published today. + The British don't worry about repaying their debts, the Italians all want to buy a new Italian car and a motor bike, and German wives are the most dominant, according to European Lifestyle, an attempt to nail down the European consumer in 1,000 pages for guidance of the European producer as 1992 approaches. + The research director of Mintel Publications, Mr Frank Fletcher, contributed a few new prejudices of his own. + The survey describes Germany as 'an ageing matriarchy' and suggests that the combination of falling numbers in employment and falling birth and marriage rates with an increasing population of single elderly women may spell the end of the economic miracle. + Mr Fletcher amplified: 'After killing the gentlemen off, the ladies are living on the proceeds of our very hard working lives.' + The survey showed, to a thicket of raised eyebrows at the press launch, that Spain and Italy were the most sympathetic to low-alcohol drinks, and Britain and Belgium the least. + The survey indicated several openings for entrepreneurs, he said. On the face of it, the most glaringly obvious is selling Italian food to the Belgians. Italian is the foreign food most liked in all the other countries surveyed - Britain, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and West Germany. + Germany, Mr Fletcher says with brutal frankness, has 'hideous cuisine' which nobody else likes. But Belgium is unique: in every other country a majority of the natives like their own dishes. In Belgium, only 37 per cent admitted to liking native food. + Spain is the exception to almost all the other European statistics: it has a surfeit of young males, has had a slight fall in personal prosperity, and has the highest official unemployment rate, 20 per cent. + Mr Fletcher believes that, as with the italian figures, this masks a massive black economy, since consumer spending figures don't match this picture of gloom. + Together with Italy, Spain has the highest proportion (14 per cent) of people with second holiday homes. Mr Fletcher thought this might be a reflection of tending to live in very large families and needing to get away from them. + The survey utilised both published statistics and interviews with over 7,000 adults in the seven countries. + European Lifestyle; Mintel; Pounds 5. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +137 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 10, 1989 + +500,000 old people 'at risk of abuse': Relatives coping at home lack support, say doctors + +BYLINE: By AILEEN BALLANTYNE, Medical Correspondent + +LENGTH: 552 words + + + Up to 500,000 of the rapidly growing number of elderly, highly dependent people in the UK may be at risk of physical or mental abuse - often by members of their own family - according to a report today. + The report, drawn up by the British Geriatrics Society which represents 1,500 doctors who specialise in care of the elderly, concludes that this type of abuse cuts across social barriers and is 'closer to home' than many might admit. + The doctors are holding a one-day conference in London today to draw up a plan to combaat the problem. + The doctors are holding a one-day conference in London today to draw up a plan to combat the problem. + Dr Elizabeth Hocking, consultant physician in geriatric medicine at St Margaret's Hospital, Swindon, says in the report that abuse was typified by the case of an unmarried daughter who was looking after her mother. + 'Elizabeth was a sensible woman. She had severe rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes and needed lifting on and off the commode. The unmarried daughter left her own flat to sleep on the sofa in the living room of her mother's wardened flat .. Elizabeth refused to go to hospital. The daughter did not get help from other relatives. At last she counted the number of times she had been called in 24 hours to lift her mother on to the commode: 17 times. + 'One day, when the home nurse visited, she found the daughter tightening the towel around her mother's neck.' + The report stresses that 'careers' have no specific training in caring or nursing 'yet they have to peerform the duties of a nurse 24 hours a day, week in, week out, often single-handed.' + Carers in the home lack proper support, while in hospitals and residential homes under-staffing often causes carers to abuse. + In another case, an elderly woman, being cared for by her son and h is family, suffered from a squint, deafness, partial paralysis on one side, and fluctuating attention. + Eventually she admitted the cause of the bruising on her back to the sister at the day hospital which she attended. 'The children had to get to school, the son to work and she 'took ages' on the toilet. She was helped off .. pushed to one side, walked over, and eventually kicked out of the way.' + Later, after further falls, the health visitor found her in 'a wet bed, the window open 'because of the smell' despite snow outside. There was not heating. The bloodstained pillow had not been changed since the visitor's previous visit two months before. + 'She was just under 60 years old, but as no one else would admit her, she entered a geriatric unit.' + The classic victim of abuse, the report concludes, is a 75 year old woman, likely to be in-ccontinent, lonely, and living at home with an adult child. + Dr Stephen Webster, consultant geriatrician at Adden-brooke's Hospital in Cambridge, and public information officer for the society, said yesterday that it was planned to draw up an 'at risk' register for the elderly. + He stressed that often those caring for dependent spouses were pensioners themselves, adding: 'Often the abuse is carried out by very caring people, who are at the end of their tether due to lack of support.' for carers. + Abuse of Elderly People, Pounds 2 from the British Geriatrics Society, 1 St Andrew Place, London NW1 4LB. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +138 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 12, 1989 + +Legionnaires' disease blamed for four deaths at council home + +LENGTH: 179 words + + + Four elderly residents of a council-run home who died last month are believed to have been victims of a rare strain of legionnaires' disease. + A total of 30 people at Greville House home for the elderly at Richmond, Surrey, were affected by the outbreak between April 7 and 29. + A rare organism of legionella bacterium was discovered in the home's water system. + Dr John Williamson, head of community medicine and medical officer for environmental health, said yesterday that all further admissions to the home had been cancelled while tests were carried out. + All those who died were frail and elderly and with one exception had serious conditions other than chest infections. + Nine staff were also said to have suffered from mild symptoms. + Dr Williamson said: 'We treated the outbreak as legionnaires' disease although there is no evidence to confirm it yet. + 'The bacteria were discovered in the water system and we have killed them off. + 'There is absolutely no danger to the public since it was confined to the home's domestic system.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +139 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 12, 1989 + +Pensioners lose by block on EEC + +LENGTH: 254 words + + + + BY JOHN PALMER + BRUSSELS - Labour yesterday seized on what it regards as a political blunder by Mrs Thatcher in blocking cut-price travel and other benefits for British pensioners on holdiay in EEC countries. + Mrs Ann Taylor, a member of the Labour front bench, described Britain's decision to veto its pensioners getting the same concessions as others in the EEC as 'truly astonishing' during the run-up to the European elections next month. + The EEC commission is recommending cards guaranteeing over-60s concessionary travel fares and cut-price tickets for theatres, exhibition and other cultural attractions. + Mrs Taylor pledged in Brussels that the next Labour government would reverse the Tory decision. She gave a similar pledge if the Government goes ahead with its threatened veto of the EEC Lingua programme, which is designed to improve foreign language teaching in primary and secondary schools. + Labour MEPs believe that whatever the support for Mrs Thatcher's stand in defence of 'national sovereignty' over European legislation voters will not support blocking schemes to help children learn languages or give pensioners privileges. + Opinion polls have warned Conservative leaders that Mrs Thatcher's anti-EC campaign could lead to Tory voters abstaining in next month's European elections. Mrs Barbara Castle, who is retiring as a Labour MEP, has been pressing for the pensioner scheme for three years. She said voters should make the issue a key part of the campaign. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +140 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 16, 1989 + +Tuesday Women: Seeking out the carers - One 90-year-old woman looks after her husband, who is 101 / These are the kind of people a new campaign is trying to reach + +BYLINE: By MICHHELE HANSON + +LENGTH: 1490 words + + + Put your elderly relatives into residential care in this country and you commit them to a hell smelling of urine, parolled by cruel matrons and filled only by people 'too poor, too mad or too unloved ot be anywhere else'. At least that's what it was like a century ago and that is what many ofus, deep down, still expect. + 'The workhouse casts its long shadow still,' says Jill Pitkeathley, Director of the Carers' national Associaiton. 'The idea that it's better to be in your own home than in any kind of residential care is deeply rooted in our national consciousness and governments have ridden on the back of that for 20 years, taking us down the community care road for reasons which I believe are rooted in history and economics, not logic.' + In reality, home care is rarely a pleasan toption. It isn't all kind Mr Wemmicks looking after smiling Aged Ps who sit, cleanly and obediently eating toasted muffins by the fire in their own little castle. 'The kind of fantisies people have about caring always amazes me,' says Jill Pitkeathley. 'They somehow expect that the father they've never got on with and thought was an awkward old devil will become a sweet and grateful old man. Caring for him now will make up for the bad relationship of the past. Of course it doesn't happen like that. It gets a whole lot worse.' + It's often very difficult to cope with the change of role - with the mother who wiped your bottom when you were a child, with the husband who used to sign all the cheques and make all the decisions. An dno one has a chance to prepare themselves for caring. It either happens suddenly or creeps up on them insidiously, starting with Friday night visits, then meals at weekends, then fulltime. + 'there's no time to think: 'I'm going to be a carer; what do I need to do this job?' They don't see it as a job, just part of being a daughter, sister of wife, which makes problems for an organisation like ours. First we've got to get through that barrier. People must recognise themselves as carers.' Only then can they be provided with the support, advice and help tha thtey need and deserve. + Accroding to the Government's own figures (from an anonymous survey) there are around 6 million carers in the UK, saving the country between Pounds 15 and Pounds 24 billion a year. One year ago the Association of Carers (AOC) and the National Council for Carers and their Elderly Dependents (NCCED) merged to become the CNA and, to celebrate its first birthday, CNA is launching an appeal to find these hidden carers. + They seem to need finding, liek the lady in Yorkshire, aged 90, who cares for her husband, aged 101 and doubly incontinent. She's done this for 30 years; her GP has visited every month but no one has ever told her about Attendance Allowance or any other help she could get. 'She only rang us because she had tennis elbow and couldn't lift him any more.' She may be older than most carers in their 70s and 80s are commonplace, typically looking after a spouse. + Then there's the blind lady in her 80s, main carer for her sister with Alzheimer's disease, the child of nine lookin after a mother with multiple sclerosis and a vast range of people in he middle of this age span. There are rewards to caring - sometimes backhanded ones like the feeling that you're doing your duty - but, whatever their age or situation, all carers suffer a central core of problems. + Their lives are all, in some way, restricted by caring. They are very isolated and cannot easily leave the house. 'Two thirds receive no help whatsover from anyone, not a neighbour, friend or relative and if granny tends to take her clothes off in the living room, throws her food about and sicks up at the table, even the family aren't going to want to be there.' + They have financial problems. aTCaring is costly and allowances are totally inadequate. Carers are usually poor, have to give up their jobs and chances of promotion or work only part-time. 'When did you last hear of a Granny creche at work? And there are far more in the carer category than there are women with young children.' People are carers for love, duty or a complex mixture of both. They do not think that this role gives them a right to some benefit and so they don't ask for any. Even when they do ask, they don't always get anything. When a benefit like Invlid Care Allowance is hedged around with difficulti4s for claimants, you wonder whether he difficulties ar epart of Government policy. + Alongside the practicla problems, there are the emotional ones (58 per cent of all carers have a physical or mental problem as a direct result of caring). 'GHuilt is the over-riding carer's emotion,' says Jill Pitkeathley. 'Above all they feel guilty. Whatever they do it isn't enough. It's important to realise that caring takes place within a relationship but in two respects caring is unlike other relationships. There's no reciprocity and there's very little negotiation, partly because the cared for person may be demented and unable to negotiate and partly because the carer gave up negotiating rights early on for the sake of a quiet life. It's much easier to go when Mother calls. + 'The nature and quality of that relationship begins at a early stage in your life, not when caring begins. You've got a lot of unfinished business in that relationship and services given to carers need to be sensitive to that.' + One woman, when pressed by a consultant to take her father home, was more than usually upset. She eventuallyr evealed to CNA that her fathe rhad sexually abused her as a child. She had not been able to tell the consultant. 'She isn't the first or the last of htose and she would hav ehad to set his catheter. That's what carers are expected to do and it all ties up with expectations of women. There are male carers, 2 1/2 million of them, but the really heavy end of caring is still women, because society expects it of them and they expect it of themselves. It's their duty.' In fact it's very like a job of the worst sort - no pension, very poorly paid, no holiday entitlement, no fringe benefits, no friendships. ALlowances are stopped the instant the cared-for person dies. A carer isn't even allowed the dignity of mourning. They're sent straight 'from the graveside to the job-centre.' + But they want so little, says Pitkeathley, 'not 24-hour cover, not ten holidays a year, not even increased allowances - just recognition and understanding of what they're doing'. If doctors knew what benbefits existed and could say: 'Are you getting so-and-so, he or she has identified the person as a carer, given a name to what they're doing and so given them 'permission' to claim entitlements.' + Carers are not the most militant of people. 'They lvoe the person they're looking after, they're wornm out, some are angry, the vast majority are not. CNA lobbies on their behalf. We put them in touch with people who can help. We're an information and advice service but we only hav eone office. We need them all over the country and workers in all areas. We in London can't tell someone in Wigan what's available to her there.' Workers and offices cost money but are becoming more vital. + 'The situation is going to deteriorate, with the closure of hospitals, rate capping, lack of services and provison and more people living longer. We have the highesst elderly population in Europe and a smaller working population to look after them. + 'Poll tax is tax on caring. It's an example of the gap between what the Government says it wants to do and what it's doing. Poll tax will have to be paid on elderly parents living in your home, but not if they're in care. If you leave your home and go and look after Mum and stay in herhome for six months, you're liable to poll tax in both places. There's also a conflict between getting women back to work and wanting them to stay at home and look after relatives. I've never worked at a time when there is so much division between people making the policy and the people providing the services.' + Community Care is chronically underfunded and still noone's direct responsibility. As the Griffiths report suggested, it is 'everybody's distant relative and nobody's baby,' but the Government is still procrastinating. It is able to do so because the carers pick up the tab. If a District Nurse is cut the need doesn't go away. More carers do more work for nothing. And it isn't just someone else's problem. One person in five between 45 and 64 is a carer, seven on every full double-decker bus. Next week it could be you. + Donations and information: Carers' National Association, 29 Chilworth Mews, London W2 3RG. + It's My Duty Isn't It? by Jill Pitkeathley, Souvenir Press, HB Pounds 12.95, PB Pounds 7.95. + Who Cares? A series of six programmes for people caring for relatives at home. BBC-2 TV May 11-June 15. Repeated on BBC-1, Sundays, May 28-July 16. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +141 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 17, 1989 + +Electricians launch seven-point charter to protect older workers + +BYLINE: By SIMON BEAVIS + +LENGTH: 172 words + + + Companies discriminating against older workers would be committing an offence under a seven-point cahrter adopted yesterday by the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications, and Plumbing Union to combat the 'demographic timebomb'. + The charter, adopted after a successful motion from the executive at the union's conference in Jersey, would also forbid mention of age limits in job advertising. + It notes that there will be fewer school-leavers in the 1990s and more need for the skills of older people, women, and ethnic minority workers, and says companies should provide initial and follow-up training, particulary for older employees. + The charter wants the state retirement pension at 60 for both men and woman and advocates a combined tax and benefit system to narrow the gap between state and occupational pensions. + The Government should set up a committee of inquiry into the needs of older workers and give priority to social services like publicly-funded health care, public transport, and housing. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +142 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 18, 1989 + +Ethiopian army rebellion shifts towards Eritrea + +BYLINE: By LINDSEY HILSUM + +LENGTH: 534 words + +DATELINE: NAIROBI + + + Fresh fighting broke out in the Ethiopian capital yesterday and soldiers in the north appeared to be joining leaders of the coup attempt, prompting President Mengistu Haile Mariam to cut short a state visit to East Germany and return home. + Despite government claims that the coup was spoiled, fighting continued in Addis Ababa yesterday. In Asmara, the capital of the northern province of Eritrea which is the base for 150,000 government forces, rebel troops last night took over the radio station. + Calling themselves the Eritrean Revolutionary Forces and Popular Police Forces they broadcast a statement condemning President Mengistu and his strategy in the war against separatist rebels in the province. + The statement said: Mengistu has forcibly torn teenagers away from their families and youths from their brides and sent them to the northern warfront, leaving many widows and elderly people without support.' + On Tuesday evening, Ethiopian government radio had broadcast a statement, saying that a coup attempt led by several generals had failed. + However, one Western diplomat described the situation in the capital as 'still fluid'. 'I could not say for certain that the coup attempts are over.' + Yesterday morning, the radio announced that two conspirators, an army Chief of Staff Major-General Merid Negusie, and the head of the air force, Major-General Amha Desta, had been killed. + Both men are long serving senior officers, previously seen as close allies of President Mengistu. About eight other generals were reported to have been arrested yesterday afternoon. + In the early morning yesterday, diplomats reported hearing a loud exchange of fire at an important army base in the south-west of the city. + 'Artillery and shelling made the houses shake,' said one. + Sporadic gunfire continued around the centre of Addis Ababa throughout the morning, and the only vehicles on the streets were driven by the military. Government radio advised people to remain at home. + A witness said that a large infantry detachment arrived at the Defence Ministry in the morning. 'A few soldiers went in, and loud sustained gunfire started up and continued for five minutes. We think it was the sound of executions,' the eyewitness said. + On Tuesday, sources in Addis Ababa monitored a radio broadcast from Asmara that announced the police and army's 'wholehearted support for the overthrow of dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam'. + Despite the Eritrean rebel officer broadcast, government radio claimed yesterday evening they had the support of troops in Asmara and the other main stronghold of Keren. + Previous reports suggest that these trooops, who are in the front line of the battle against the secessionist rebels of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, are disillusioned with President Mengistu's leadership in the 27-year war. + The EPLF claims that the army in Asmara gave President Mengistu an ultimatum before he left for East Germany. + They are said to have demanded that the president bring an end to the war, and establish a transitional government. The EPLF said it had joined forces with what it described as the 'Ethiopia Free Soldiers Movement'. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +143 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 19, 1989 + +China in Crisis: In the eye of the storm + +LENGTH: 431 words + + + Deng Xiaoping: The man who took on the Gang of Four while Mao was sinking was china's favourite leader when he launched the post-Mao reform. Twice a Time magazine cover-hero, he was also admired by Western government for putting the economy first. + Mr Deng opened China to the West, and the Sino-Soviet summit should have completed his triumph in normalising relations with both superpowers. + Mr Deng had a stormy relationship as Mao Zedong's secretary-general in the 1960s. Described during the revolution as 'short, chunky and physically tough,' the recent behaviour of Mr Deng, now 84, has much in common with the old chairman. He also appears to share Mao's belief that a bit of blood-shedding may do not harm. He has swept most of the old men out of the way in the name of 'rejuvenation.' Tragically, many consider, he left himself on the throne. + The landlord's son was brought to Beijing by Mr Deng Xiaoping 10 years ago. with his Western suits and easy smile, Mr Zhao Ziyang's economic skills complemented the late Mr Hu Yaobang's political talent. + But two years ago, the conservative backlash left Mr Zhao in Mr Hu's vulnerable job as party secretary-general. Foreign diplomats still praised him, but Mr Zhao had only lukewarm support form frustrated reformers at home. + He staked everything on his plan to open the Chinese eastern seaboard to foreign trade and investment. But his super-economic zone on Hainan island has become notorious for corruption and concessions to the Japanese. + Mr Zhao seemed to have stabilised the situation two weeks ago, but he ducked student demands for genuine dialogue, and kept silent when the first hunger strikers appeared on Tiananmen Square. + Li Peng: It helps to be the adopted son of Premier Zhou Enlai. And there was applause in the Soviet embassy two yeas ago when the 59-year-old Mr Li Pneg - educated in the Soviet Union - took over from Mr Zhaio Ziyang as Premier. + The Chinese public has instantly identified with the students' derisive cry of 'Come out, Li Peng.' Mr Li only joined the party Central Committee in 1982 and the Politburo in 1985. + At the National People's congress last month, Mr Li called on the whole nation to 'practise thrift and live a plain life'. + Such statements from one of the leaders who features on the students' nepotism blacklist are universally regarded as 'empty words.' + Mr Li's personality appears even more colourless by comparison with his 'father', the late Premier Zhou Enlai, whose picture was being carried by the protesters yesterday in Tiananmen Square. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +144 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 20, 1989 + +Leading Article: The force will still be with them + +LENGTH: 596 words + + + The sending in of troops to Beijing yesterday was the revenge of old men who have been humilitated by a nation of young people. As the lights were turned off yesterday in Tiananmen Square it became sadly clear that Mr Deng Xiaoping has chosen the sterile option. The built-in majority of party orthodoxy has forced Secretary-general Mr Zhao Ziyang into apparent political impotence. The lukewarm Premier Li Peng has warned of stern action to prevent 'anarchy.' The students recognise the authentic voice of repression and are on the retreat. The flags and the smiles were starting to be furled overnight. + But it is not a safe option any longer for Mr Deng. He has compounded his grave mistake of two years ago, when the late Mr Hu Yaobang was forced by conservative elders to resign. Then at least Mr Zhao still had the political muscle to revive national morale and promise better things. Mr Li commands no respect in any section of society and can revive nothing except the spirits of a few tired bureaucrats. There is absolutely no guarantee that the flags will not unfurl again in six days, or six weeks, or perhaps in October to greet the 40th anniversary of the revolution. And at any time it could turn into a more deadly military option, without even any guarantee that the armed forces will remain united. + It is the rule rather than the exception that politicians, east and west, muff the chance for the imaginative leap which changes the world. (The exception has just left China, pondering on what he saw.) For Mr Deng, it was the leap into a well-earned retirement which he had already imposed on the other revolutionary veterans. For Mr Li, it would have been to walk down the steps of the Great Hall of the People and join the students two or even three weeks ago. Mr Zhao has also muffed his chance to outflank those who have been eroding his position for the past year by clearly identifying with the students' demands for dialogue and democracy. Tactically he remains stronger than the late Mr Hu two years ago. Morally he has probably forfeited what was already a dwindling public reputation. + This is not the ebb and flow of Chinese politics which leaves the shore dirtier but much the same. This time the tide of popular assertion has washed to the brink of the vermilion walls behind which the new emperors occupy the pavilions of the old. No previous movement has politicised so many people, from workers to journalists. Neber before have students and intellectuals joined forces in protest. Overseas Chinese (and some Chinese officials abroad) have identified with the new spirit of patriotic endeavour to cleanse the nation of corruption and bureaucratic rule. The authorities from now on will jump at every hint of protest on the overcrowded streets of urban China, knowing how quickly it could escalate not into good-humoured student demonstration but into real 'anarchy.' + The gap between the swift pace of economic reform and the sluggishness of political reform remains the central contradiction in China for the 1990s. Mr Li Peng must be casting around for gestures which will promise some progress in the future. He has four months to reshape the national modd before National Day, and the task is probably beyond him. Mr Deng could still wait for the pavements of Tiananmen Square to be scrubbed clean, and then resign for 'health reasons.' (Those who saw him on television this week will regard this as an entirely convincing excuse.) For even if there is a vacation of sorts, both men know the students will be back. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +145 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 20, 1989 + +Care workers in private nursing homes 'exploited' + +BYLINE: By MARTYN HALSALL, Northern Industrial Correspondent + +LENGTH: 415 words + + + People like Karen are already vitally important members of an exploired workforce, as demand escalates for care of the elderly. By 2021 the number of people over 80 is expected to rise by 750,000. Karen is in her early thirties, maried with three children. She earned Pounds 2.20 an hour for 33 hours a week - 11 at night - working as a care assistant in an old people's home. She received the same pay when working overtime and nothing when on holiday. + 'I know I'm stupid; I know we're exploited,' she said. 'The two owners (of the home) are married and their husbands have got jobs .. But I still want another job working with old peolple. It's what I want to do.' + Karen is typical in an industry which trades on the most exploitative aspects of female employment, said Maggie Hunt, whose investigation into pay and conditions of care workers in private old people's homes was published this week. + The most damaging assumption is the myth that the mainly female workforce is working, for pocket money, said Ms hunt, a project worker with the West Yorkshire Low Pay Unit. + She hopes her study might bring together representatives from all those involved in the care of the elderly and disabled, to fill the gap where a comprehensive policy ought to be. + She found that three-quarters of the unqualified care workers examined earned Pounds 2 an hour or less. Rates started at Pounds 1.20 and the best were well below Pounds 3. + 'There is no legal minimum for this kind of work,' Ms Hunt said. Low pay was accompanied by a high level of responsibility and stress. + The owners of the home in West Yorkshire, interviewed as part of the study, claimed they were also being treated unfairly. Costs were rising while government benefit payments, which made up a large proportion of the owners' income, were being cut in real terms. Average costs rose between three and four times the amount of benefit increases between 1986 and 1988, according to one study. + Mr Barry Hartley, a Kirklees delegate to the National Federation of Registered Residential Care Home Associations, said worrying signs of 'money-grabbing' home owners and managers were emerging within a mammoth growth of private care. + He called for good codes of practice and sensible guidelines and for those who flouted them to be refused the right to operate. + The Cost of Caring, by Maggie Hunt, Pounds 3 from West Yorkshire Low Pay Unit, Field Hill Centre, Batley Field Hill, Batley WF17, 0BQ. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +146 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 20, 1989 + +Nepal's defiant democrats fight for power: The political task of the much persecuted Congress Party + +BYLINE: By DEREK BROWN + +LENGTH: 966 words + + + In a cramped rented house near the Royal Palace in Kathmandu, where all power lies, a group of elderly men meet daily to talk of democracy. + This is the headquarters of the Nepal Congress Party, the biggest faction of a splintered, persecuted, but defiant opposition to the personal rule of King Birendra. + 'Our demand is for a national government, and that means a government which includes us. We do not hide our greed for office,' says the party's president, Mr Krishna Prasad Bhattarai. + The last time Congress held power was in the early 1960s, during King Mahendra's brief flirtation with multi-party democracy. The present King Birendra, who came to the throne in 1972, has continued to exercise personal rule behind the 'democratic' cloak of the panchayat system in which local and national assemblies are elected on a non-party basis. + In 1979, the King was compelled by student riots to announce a referendum on the system. The poll, held almost exactly ten years ago, became a 'King versus politicians' issue and the deeply conservative Nepalese voted for the status quo by 55 to 45 per cent. + King Birendra is not an absolute monarch in a tyrannical sense. There is a prime minister and a cabinet, answerable to the rashtriya panchayat, or national assembly. But he has the last word on every issue of moment and represents the country in summit meetings. + A senior government official acknowledges that the King's word is paramount. But he insists: 'He wants to develop the system of government in such a way that the world will say, 'here is a genuine democracy'.' + The official says the aim would be to guarantee its citizens 'all the rights you have in Western democracies' but not turn them into 'the pawns of political parties in the way you see in some developing countries.' + The path to democracy has been, to say the least, rocky. The Congress leaders say that 10,000 people have been imprisoned in the past 20 years and 1,000 murdered or killed in demonstrations. + The party headquarters is thronged with supporters, all of whom, according to the leaders, have spent time in jail. Mr Bhattarai, a former speaker of parliament, served 14 years. + Since the referundum, there has been less repression. The Congress leaders, most of them veterans of the last elected government, are allowed to meet openly in their Kathmandu headquarters. But they must not hold public meetings, display flags or posters, or enrol members. + In spite of the restrictions, the party's general secretary, Mr Girija Prasad Koirala, claims 50,000 active members and at least 200,000 supporters. Like the other senior Congressmen, he believes the country's economic crisis could give the party it sbest chance of forcing reform and regaining power. + 'Without the development of democracy, economic development is not possible. We have said so all along, and now it is being proved. The crisis demonstrates the failure of this government,' he said. + Specifically, the party blames the government for Nepal's overwhelming economic dependance on India, for failing to encourage indigenous production and for a lack of new markets for exports and new sources of imports. + Those failures have been cruelly exposed, say critics of the government, by the partial trade embargo imposed by India since March 23. + But the opposition has a major problem in exploiting the crisis. As loyal Nepalese, they do not want to divide the nation at a time of crisis. And in the case of Congress Party members, they must not fuel the widespread impression that they are 'pro-Indian'. + The party's links with India (which is, of course, also ruled by a Congress Party) go back to the early 1950s when, with Delhi's help, it overthrew the reactionary Rana clan of hereditary prime ministers, to restore King Tribhuvan, grandfather of the present ruler. + 'We are neither pro- nor anti-India,' says Mr Koirala. 'Similarly we are neithr pro- nor anti-China. We have fought for 30 years to restore democracy, so naturally we feel some affinity for democratic India. We basically are pro-Nepal.' + What of the suggestion, widespread among government supporters, that the opposition parties are being exploited by Delhi as a means of destabilising Nepal? + 'It isn't India which is the destabilising factor,' says Mr Koirala. 'It is the system itself which is not stable.' + The government, studded with members of the royal family and the still-powerful Rana clan, apparently sees little direct threat from Congress. As officials point out, the party is run by old men but supported mainly by young ones. + The age gap, the lack of governing experience, the association with India and the concentration of Congress Party organisation in the cities, all work to its disadvantage in mobilising the largely rural, conservative Nepalese society. + One senior official admits, though, that the economic crisis could be damaging: 'So long as it remains an issue of Nepalese sovereignty, I think it will strengthen the system, by uniting the people behind the present leadership. But people have short memories and if the situation gets much worse, with long queues for all kinds of things, then there could be problems.' + So far, His Majesty's opposition, battered and hounded over the years by His Majesty's supporters, has remained remarkably loyal. The Congress leadership, vilified by its enemies as the pawn of a foreign power, is horrified by any imputation of republicanism. + 'The King must stay,' Mr Bhattarai says firmly. 'Every country must have a head of state. And we are confident that he will come to see our cause is just. The problem now is he is surrounded by sycophants and the kind of reactionaries we overthrew in 1951. In that sense we have come full circle.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +147 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 22, 1989 + +Liberals ill prepared to break conservative mould + +BYLINE: By JOHN GITTINGS + +LENGTH: 615 words + +DATELINE: BEIJING + + + As the struggle between the old guard of the Communist Party and the vanguard of the Chinese people hangs in the balance, are there new leaders waiting quietly for the opportunity to give China, and the party, a new chance? + One of China's most famous intellectuals campaigning for democracy takes a gloomy view. 'In the party they are nearly all conservatives,' he says. 'The system tames their aspirations.' If there is hope, for him it lies only at the base of the mass party membership. + Another radical scholar is more optimistic: 'Who succeeds the old men is not the question today. There are plenty of good people in the party. Our job is to get rid of (senior leader) Deng and then we'll see.' + But no one can easily name those who might emerge from the chaos and reconstruct some respect and hope for the Communist Party. + At the power apex of the politburo's five-man standing committee, the only man with a liberal reputation is Mr Hu Qili, who has fatally compromised himself by voting against the proposal by the Secretary-General, Mr Zhao Ziyang, to compromise with the students. + Less than four years ago, the senior leader, Mr Deng Xiaoping, was congratulated for 'rejuvenating' the party. A 'third tier' of leaders was established who were in their 30s to 50s, and were supposed to be capable of breaking new ground. + Yet the weakness of this age group is that it had been formed in the politically conformist decades of the 1950s and 1960s. The most famous of them is the ex-carpenter, Mayor Li Ruihuan of Tianjin, who later joined the politburo and two years ago was even considered for the job of Premier Li Peng. The last conservative backlash in 1987 had already led to a reconcentration of power in the first and second tiers of ageing leadership in the politburo and its standing committee. No members of the party's 'rejuvenated' secretariat has spoken out in the present crisis. + Another unwelcome result of 'rejuvenation' was that too often the new blood was related to the veteran leaders who had supposedly stepped down. New faces, like the Beijing Deputy Mayor, Mr Chen Yuan (son of a former foreign minister) and the head of the overseas Chinese office, Mr Liao Hui (who took over from his father) have featured on the students' nepotism blacklist. + The vocal advocates of reform are found, not in the central party hierarchy, but to one side of it, among the intelligentsia recruited to staff the government's new research institutes and thinktanks. + Their vocal arguments in the mid 1980s led to the 1987 crackdown and enforced resignation of Mr Hu Yaobang who had acted as their patron. + Today they look - though with less enthusiasm - on Mr Hu's successor, Mr Zhao Ziyang as their only hope in the leadership, if he can regain power. + Support by Chinese journalists for the democracy movement - more than 1,000 have demonstrated - poses, perhaps, a more deadly threat to the conservatives. Although this weekend the press was again cowed, the journalists must sometime fight back against censorship, having tasted a week of freedom of expression. + Some of the most visible conservative targets in the 1980s have been journalists. They include the ex-editor of the People's Daily, Mr Wang Ruoshui, and the specialist in expose reportage, Mr Liu Binyan. + If the conservatives last card of martial law fails, an entirely new set of leaders is unlikely to be waiting prepared in the wings. Democracy activists will probably have to settle for the less than full-hearted patronage of Mr Zhao Ziyang and the 'third tier.' The only alternative would be a more direct challenge to the party's 40 years of dictatorship. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +148 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 22, 1989 + +Tax incentives would help to cut cost of elderly, says think-tank + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 307 words + + + Tax incentives should be introduced to encourage people to provide for thier independet care in old age and so reduce the financial burden on the state, a report from the rightwing Adam Smith Institute recommends today. + The report also proposes measures to make it easier for elderly homeowners to release capital tied up in their properties, and the creation of an agency - which it says could be privatised - to vet people's elegibility for state beneift support in residential care. + It says social workers, like family doctors, would still recommend people for residential care, and those considered eligible by the suggested agency - which would take the final decision against standard criteria - would then be free to go to a home of their choice. + The proposals, which the institute says reflect 'internal market' principles already being introduced in education and the health service, have been fed into the Government's protracted review of policy on community care. + Following the publication last year of the Griffiths Report, which suggested that local government should take a leading role in community care, ministers are now being urged by the National Association of Health Authorites to bring the review to a conclusion. It says authorities cannot judge the implications of government changes in acute health care until they know what is to happen to care of the elderly, mentally ill and mentally handicapped. + Age Concern has meanwhile written to the Prime Minister with a call for the Griffiths Report to be implemented in full, without further delay. + Today's Adam Smith proposals are, however, likely to appeal to senior ministers who are known to be reluctant to give full responsibility to local government. + Extending Care: Adam Smith Institute, PO Box 316, London SW1P 3DJ; Pounds 10. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +149 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 22, 1989 + +Nurses backed on disclosing cruelty + +BYLINE: By MARTYN HALSALL + +LENGTH: 294 words + + + Nurses who disclose the increasing abuse and neglect of old people should be given full legal and personal support by the National Union of Public Employees, delegates said yesterday. + They called on the union, the fifth largest with 600,000 members, to back unconditionally any nurse who 'blows the whistle.' + Nupe should also highlight cases where reports of incidents or neglect had been whitewashed, delegates decided in Scarborough. + They called for a nationwide system to investigate complaints covering the NHS social services, private and charitable sectors. Britian needed nationally recognised training for all nurses and carers to identify the many abuses of elderly people, the conference agreed. + Ms Anne Broad (Isle of Wight), proposing the motion, said nurses had been restrained from reporting abuse by fear of intimidation or persecution. 'Sadly, this sometimes comes from their own colleagues.' + She called for spot checks on old people's homes. 'Cruel and despicable deeds are taking place out there. We must and can stop them.' + The union's general secretary, Mr Rodney Bickerstaffe, said government policies 'have sent people to their deaths. We've had 20,000 women dying in the last 10 years through cervical cancer and their lives could have been saved.' + But the conference rejected a motion calling for a pay campaign, including preparation for all-out industrial action, after leadership opposition. + The proposer, Ms Lyn Martin, a nurse representing Staffordshire hospitals, said low pay was the most important issue facing members, who were among the worst paid in the country. She said many members faced poverty. In local government, many members had to rely on overtime or second jobs to make ends meet. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +150 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 22, 1989 + +UK News In Brief: Women die in fire + +LENGTH: 23 words + + + Two elderly women died in a fire at a holiday home at Seahouses, Northumberland, yesterday. Their husbands and a son escaped. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +151 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 23, 1989 + +Futures (Introns): Skeleton key + +LENGTH: 295 words + + + Our bones store as much as 95 per cent of the lead in our bodies and it has always been assumed that this toxic element was locked up tight in the bony matrix and was therefore harmless. Recent research is shaking such comforting thoughts and showing that, in the long term, bone lead may be a potent poison in the elderly, and especially in post-menopausal women. + Different bone types store lead for different time periods. Researchers at the University of Lund Hospital in Sweden have shown that the half-life of lead in spongy bone (for example, vertebrae) is less than five years, while in dense bone such as the thigh, the lead may be held for anything from 10 to 20 years. In women, however, pregnancy, lactation and the menopause, all result in substantial bone attrition with a resulting release of lead into the blood stream. The problem is exacerbated in childless women as the body is given no opportunity to dispose of its accumulated lead. This lead is then carried into late middle age when the menopause invariably produces rapid bone loss. Severe cases (osteoporosis) can result in blood lead levels up to 22 per cent higher than in pre-menopausal women. Experiments with rats by Deborah Cory-Slechta of the University of Rochester (NY) School of Medicine, have shown that much of the lead released from bone accumulates in soft tissues like the brain, kidney and liver. Ellen Silbergold, a toxicologist with the Environmental Defence Fund, believes that low-level accumulation of lead during the first half of life may be released 'in potentially toxic amounts' during osteoporosis. So, childless, post-menopausal women may be particularly at risk at precisely the time that their physiological condition makes them vulnerable. KL. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +152 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 23, 1989 + +Ministers clash over hiving off community care for the elderly + +BYLINE: By DAVID HENCKE, Westminster Correspondent + +LENGTH: 592 words + + + Ministers at the Department of Health are at loggerheads with right-wing theorists and their supporters in government on how far to privatise local government activities in looking after the elderly, mentally ill and handicapped. + The issue has divided the National Health Service Cabinet review committee. + Alternative proposals diminishing the role of local government have been put by separate right-wing groups to the committee. + The proposals have met a cold reception from Mr Kenneth Clarke, the Health Secretary, and his deputy, Mr David Mellor, who want local government to retain an important stake. + At the heart of the row is how to handle the report from Sir Roy Griffiths, which ministers have had for more than a year, on co-ordinating community care by transferring most of the responsibility from health authorities to social services. + Ministers have to take a decision on the report by July so that community care can fit into the new system for the NHS under legislation being drawn up for the next parliamentary session. + The most extreme option, supported by ministers outside the Department of Health, involves a proposal agreeing to local councils taking over responsibility for community care while taking away their duty to provide it. + This would mean introducing controversial legislation ending the statutory right for county councils and metropolitan districts to provide community care. + It would force councils to sell off old people's homes, and homes for the mentally ill and handicapped, either to their managers or the private sector. + Supporters, who include Mr Nicholas Ridley, the Environment Secretary, argue that the idea would fit in with Sir Roy's argument that local authorities have the expertise in this area but at the same time should move from 'providers' to 'enablers' in line with Government's moves on housing and other local services. + Mrs Thatcher is thought to be impressed. + She has personally backed the first 'opting out' of schools for the mentally handicapped from local authority control which starts next year under the Scottish education bill going through Parliament. + Detractors say the idea is politically daft since it would start a row with county councils, some of which have only just returned to Conservative control in this month's election. + The alternative plan has been launched by the Adam Smith institute, the right-wing think tank, in proposals published on Monday. + These have been circulated privately in advance via the No 10 policy unit to Mrs Thatcher's Cabinet committee. The institute does not want local government to take over responsibility for the funding of community care. + Instead, after the initial assessment of a person by a GP and social worker it wants an Independent Assessment Board to take over responsibility for funding, with a direct line to a minister. + The institute wants an internal market set up, with local authority, charitable and private sector homes competing for elderly, mentally ill and handicapped people, who would be grant assisted. + Health ministers, however, are known to be very wary of either scheme after the political furore over the current NHS review. + Ministers are particularly disparaging of the Adam Smith Institute, which they believe is having a disproportionate influence on policy-making. + They are tabling proposals for a more pragmatic restructuring, arguing that local authorities should assume responsibility but should not be stripped of their powers to provide. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +153 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 25, 1989 + +China's scion of the revolution falls from grace + +BYLINE: By JASPER BECKER + +LENGTH: 809 words + +DATELINE: BEIJING + + + Posters up all over Beijing University yesteray showed a middle-aged man with hush puppy features dressed as a Nazi general. + This was Premier Li Peng. Students and most other citizens in the capital are baying for his blood after he signed the order to impose martial law on Saturday. + Instead of a bloody blot on China's history, the event has become a fiasco. Despite some tense moments, the city is far from the 'anarchy' Mr Li was describing on Firday. Instead it was a far more polite and safer place than it has been for years. + It is hard to see how even a scion of the revolution can survive this humiliating and shameful loss of face but the party leadership is still locked in a power struggle and many were frightened of the outcome yesterday. + Despite his placid features and low-key presence, Mr Li has been determined to take a tough line since he succeeded Mr Zhao Ziyang two years ago following the downfall of the liberal former general-secretary Hu Yaobang. It was Hu's death six weeks ago which triggered the recent unrest. + In March, Mr Li resorted to the gun again to impose martial law on Lhasa. This is still in effect following several months of unrest by Tibetan lamas and townspeople. + A firm advocate of central contorl, he was chosen as premier as a concession to the elderly conservative veterans whose influence is still immensely strong despite Hu's attempts to ease them out of their posts. + Ironically, the students are pilloring a man who has the highest education of any Chinese leader this century and the only prime minister with a degree. Even his much lamented step-father and predecessor, Zhou Enlai, never attended university although he did go abroad on a study scholarship to France. + Mr Li earned few credits when he headed the State Education Commission and presided over the abysmal decline of China's education system, and the student demonstrations in 1986. + He then ordered that entrance qualifications should stress ideological commitment over academic abilities. + In other respects, his career has been unremarkable. The scanty official biography released by the Communist Party highlights no achievements which would seem to qualify him for the third highest post in the Communist hierarchy. + Until that is, it touches on family background. Mr Li is the son of a famous martyr. His father, Li Shuoxun, was one the party's earliest members who took part in the heroic but ill-conceived Nanchang uprising in 1927 and was killed in Hainan Island by the Kuomintang when his son was three years old. + After his mother's death in 1939, he was adopted by Premier Zhou and at 17 went to study at the party's first technical college at Yenan. + A year before the founding of the People's Republic of China he was among the elite sent to study in Moscow where he stayed for seven years earning an engineering degree at the Moscow Power Institute. + By a strange coincidence, Mr Li was a contemporary of Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow although the two never met. + Mr Li had denied that his Moscow years have made him pro-Soviet or pro-central planning but he has emerged as the technocrat par excellence. + A dour organisation man with no charisma and little political flair, he spent many years in the power industry, escaping persecution during the Cultural Revolution by virtue of his connections with Zhou. + Most Chinese believe that his rise is solely attributable to his background which has inspired confidence in the revolutionary veterans. He has no credentials with the People's Liberation Army and has sought to make his mark by backing unsuccessfully the rapid expansion of China's infant nuclear power industry and the construction of the world's large dam at the Three Gorges on the Yangtse River. + Mr Li has been adopted as the protege of the cautious reformers as economist Chen Yun who stresses the leading role of state-owned industry and believes that the economy should be restricted in a bird cage of central planning. + In his two years as premier, Mr Li has made little effort to change his image. During the two press conferences he has held, he resolutely refused to answer controversial questions, giving nothing away about his background, his personal views or policies but confined himself to parroting party documents. + He gives every impression of a humourless man out of touch with the masses, verging on the disdain one might expect from a member of China's communist aristocracy. The only hobbies that he admits to are reading and learning English. + Western diplomats maintain that he has sharp brain and an impressive grasp of technical details and on foreign tours shows an enthusiasm for visitng factories and power stations. + Only his knowledge of engineering political power, will save him now from suffering total ignominy. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +154 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 25, 1989 + +Convicted sing of facing death for no fault 'but the colour of our skins' + +BYLINE: By DAVID BERESFORD + +LENGTH: 763 words + +DATELINE: UPINGTON + + + The greatest film director, intent on bringing tears to an audience, could hardly have staged it better. + At 8.40 yesterday morning, the iron gates at the back of the court building in the small town of Upington swung open. Snarling Alsatians, leashed back by their police handlers, surrounded the yellow prison van as it drove in, the vehicle rocking to the stamp of feet and deep, melodious voices which are forever South Africa. + The steel door at the back of the van swung open and the volume of the Xhosa song doubled: 'We are going to fight for the freedom of our land.' One by one, the 26 on trial clambered down, still singing, some of them carrying empty lunch boxes and spare clothes. + They disappeared from sight, then re-emerged coming up the stairwell into the court, to be met by more policemen, with long rubber batons and 9mm pistols strapped to their waists. A new song began: 'We are being punished here for the colour of our skins; the fault is God's for colouring us black.' + In the gallery, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, 'township mamas' with cheerful faces and dignified old men in carefully pressed sports jackets, waved at the 26 and then, caught up by the rhythm of the singing, began silently dancing among the wooden benches. + The court rose as Mr Justice Basson stalked in, a bespectacled and ageing Rupert Bear with long white hair. He sat and the court fell silent as, with bland voice, he resumed the business of sending people to their deaths. + By the end of yesterday's proceedings, he had already found no grounds for extenuation for 10 of the 25 convicted of murder, a finding which implies mandatory death sentences. The 26th defendant has been convicted of attempted murder. + About 10,000 people live in the black township of Paballello outside the white town of Upington. The unemployment rate runs at about 31 per cent and of those employed, 92.4 per cent earn less than Pounds 100 a month. + There was some trouble in the local high school early in 1985, students boycotting classes over the standard of teaching. A student organisation was formed and in November 1985, the youths pushed the older generation into calling a public meeting to discuss broader community issues. + The meeting, in the local community hall, went off peacefully, but afterwards police fired teargas at groups of youths who had allegedly thrown stones at them. + Amid rising tension, a second community meeting was called three days later. + About 3,000 residents gathered on a local football field on November 13. Riot police dispersed them with teargas. + What followed was an incident tragically familiar to South Africans at the time. Some 300 members of the infuriated crowd fleeing the soccer ground turned on the home of a particularly hated policeman, Lucas 'Jetta' Sethwala. + The policeman opened fire on them with a shotgun, wounding a child. He then fled, was tackled and hit over the head twice with his own gun, one of the blows killing him. His body was set alight with petrol. + The ensuing trial has been strikingly similar to the world famous case of the Sharpeville Six, with one distinction: in Upington the actual killer was identified in the person of Justice Bekebeke, aged 28, a male nurse who was found to have struck the fatal blows. + But they were all convicted, as in the Sharpeville case under 'common purpose', that controversial doctrine imported from English law. The presence of the 'actual' killer in the Upington case made the grounds for the other convictions even more startling. + Twenty-one were found guilty of murder for throwing stones at the policeman's house, the judge in effect claiming that they were taking part in a conspiracy to drive the policeman out and to his death. + A woman was convicted of murder for shouting that she had seen the policeman in his house, a labourer was deemed guilty for attacking the body. + A striking aspect of the Upington case is the confidence the accused appear to have in the legal system. They have shown bitter contempt towards Mr Justice Basson; as the findings of 'no extenuation' were handed down this week, the 25 convicted of murder ostentatiously shook hands in sarcastic congratulations. + But when I spoke to them yesterday, they were confident of the final outcome. 'We've got faith in the appeal,' said the man who struck those fatal blows, Justice Bekebeke. + It is a faith which needs to be rewarded. The lives of the accused may be in the balance, but it is the South African judiciary which is now on trial. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +155 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 27, 1989 + +Pensioners turned to robbery to pay 115,000 pound mortgage + +LENGTH: 215 words + + + Two pensioners turned to armed robbery because they were overwhelmed by debt, the Old Bailey was told yesterday. + Herbert Butler, aged 65, and his Greek-born wife Eleni, 60, confronted amazed staff at the Abbey National building society in Hayes, Middlesex, wearing wigs and balaclavas on new year's eve, the court heard. + 'Because the elderly couple wer not typical of armed robbers, the cashier only realised they were holding guns when she asked if she could be of assistance,' said Mr Kenneth Macrae, prosecuting. + She told Butler: 'Don't be silly,' but handed over Pounds 2,500 in cash when she saw a gun. + The grandparents carried two, one real and one imitation. They were arrested at traffic lights soon afterwards. + The court heard their monthly mortgage and endowment payments were over Pounds 1,400, while Butler's pension was Pounds 27 a month. They owed Pounds 115,000 on a six-bedroom house in Acton, West London. Butler, a former soldier, told police: 'The bailiffs were round before Christmas. We needed the money to pay the mortgage.' + Judge Raymond Dean adjourned the case until next month for reports. The couple admitted robbery and possessing firearms. Charges of robbing an off-licence at gunpoint, which they denied, were left on the file. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +156 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 29, 1989 + +China leaders fear loss of party support + +BYLINE: By JASPER BECKER and JOHN GITTINGS + +LENGTH: 594 words + +DATELINE: BEIJING + + + China's Communist Party leadership has been unable to rely on the support of many of its 40 million members in the Current political crisis, the Chinese President, Mr Yang Shangkun, told a meeting of senior military officials in a secret speech detailing the conflict between Mr Deng Xiaoping and his would-be successor, Mr Zhao Ziyang. + The speech lifts a veil from the intrigues of the past month, revealing that Mr Deng alone signed the martial law order which Mr Zhao, the party's general secretary, had refused to endorse, pleading ill-health. Some had queried the legality of Mr Deng acting alone, the President said. + According to President Yang, Mr Deng said that 'of all the many mistakes in my life, the worst was to employ Zhao and Hu Yaobang (the reformist former leader whose death sparked the demonstrations).' + The speech paints a picture of a clique of crotchety old men who saw the democracy demands in terms of a challenge to their power by Zhao, a man 'whom we had built up'. 'If we fall from power, the Chinese People's Republic will collapse. Then there will be a restoration of capitalism,' President Yang warned, speaking for himself and six other octogenarian veterans. + The implicit admission that many party members stood back from the struggle casts doubts on Mr Deng's ability to carry through, in the long run, a purge of Zhao supporters. + The Supreme People's Court called yesterday for 'severe punishment of the 'chief culprits' responsible for disrupting public order'. The veteran leader, Mr Li Xiannian, said the main cause of the 'complicated and grave situation' lies with 'some individuals in the leadership of the party', the first public admission of the power struggle. + Although many intellectuals now fear for their safety, the reaction of some officials attending political meetings to anounce the party's new line has been boredom and derision. + 'I just had to laugh at the folly of these old men peddling the same nonsense when I came out of the meeting,' one middle-ranking official said. + Copies of the highly confidential speech by President Yang, who addressed an enlarged meeting of the party's Central Military Commission last Wednesday, were being publicly distributed in Tiananmen Square yesterday. + Students held a relatively subdued demonstration of about 25,000 in the square and said that, despite the immediate failure to win their aims, they had scored a moral victory. + The students are now planning a 'long-term campaign'. Some intend to hold a ceremony tomorrow when the sit-in will be formally abandoned, set up a nationwide autonomous student union and turn April 27, the day the movement started, into a national holiday. + The government continued to broadcast messages of support for the martial law declaration, including from Mr Wan Li, Chairman of the National People's Congress. + Mr Wan had tried to convene an emergency meeting of the congress in a bid to dismiss the Prime Minister, Mr Li Peng. 'The imposition of martial law is in keeping with and safeguarding the constitution and it is absolutely necessary to resolutely stop turbulences and rapidly restore order,' he said. + But he also appealed for the 'patriotic enthusiasm' of the students and masses to be protected and said students who have voiced 'extremist opinions' should not be punished. + He still appears to be manouevring for room and hinted that a meeting of the NPC's standing committee scheduled for June 20 would be delayed unless there was 'an atmosphere of unity and stability'. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +157 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 30, 1989 + +Mr Clean puts Brazil's old men to flight + +BYLINE: By JAN ROCHA + +LENGTH: 698 words + +DATELINE: SAO PAULO + + + A tall, good-looking young man in a navy blue suit is confounding the experts and giving Brazil's veteran presidential candidates sleepless nights. + Mr Fernando Collor, aged 39 and governor of the third smallest state, Alagoas, has streaked ahead in the opinion polls. He is how clear favourite to win the November presidential elections, the first in 29 years. + Mr Collor, karate black belt, is mobbed like a pop star wherever he goes. He has captured the public imagination as the 'new face', Brazil's Mr Clean, promising public morality and an end to the corruption associated with the government of President Jose Sarney. + His credentials are his consistent anti-Sarney stance) he was the only governor to oppose an extension of the president's term) and his well-publicised fight against the privileges of the Marajas, the super-salaried high functionaries of the civil service. + Son and grandson of politicians, he began his own poilitical career under the wing of the military regime. He was federal deputy and then mayor of the Alagoas capital, Maceio, representing the tame official Democratic Social Party (PDS). Like many others he changed sides as the regime came to an end. + Now he describes himself as a progressive, closer to the Workers' Party (PT) candidate, Mr Luis Inacio da Silva ('Lula'), than anyone else. + According to Mr Collor 'morality belongs neither to right nor left. Society is divided into conformists and reformists. I am a Christian reformist.' + For veteran candidates like Mr Ulisses Guimaraes, aged 72, president of the majority Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, Mr Janio Quadros, also 72, former president of Brazil and ex-Mayor of Sao Paulo, and Mr Leonel Brizola, aged 67, pesident of the Democratic Labour Party ex-governor of Rio, who have waited over 20 years for the chance to run for president, the Collor avalanche spells disaster. + In contrast to the glamorous Mr Collor they appear jaded, leftovers from times which most of Brazil's 80 million voters do not remember. + Even last year's election novelty, the Workers Party, which seemed set on a triumphant upward trend when it won Sao Paulo and other cities in municipal elections, has lost appeal as PT mayors struggle with the harsh reality of bankrupt cities. + The PT is now involved in government, and the mood of the elctorate is definitely anti-government and anti-politician. + Although the left derides Mr Collor as a rightwing wolf in sheep's clothing, he has infuriated some of the military by calling the head of the national intelligence agency, General Ivan Mendes, 'a little general'. + Politicians are hastily abandoning their own parties and joining the tiny National Reconstruction Party created as a bandwagon for the Collor campaign. The vagueness of his programme of 'moralism, capitalism, privatisation, modernisation and social justice' suits everyone. + The other powerful virtue of the young candidate is that he puts paid to the threat of what is known as 'the monster Brizlula', a potential victory of either leftwinger - Mr Brizola or Lula - made possible by the new two-tier voting system. + The possibility of a leftwing victory, in the absence of any effective conservative or even moderate candidate, had already led to a spate of bomb attacks. One, ascribed to the hardline right, destroyed a monument to three strikers shot dead by the army last November. + But there are still six months togo. Brazilian voters are notoriously volatile, and a chaotic economic situation could change the scene. + Monthly inflation will be back in double figures for June because prices have been freed after a partial freeze and strikes have achieved some substantial wage rises. The only weapon left for a discredited and isolated government near the end of its term is a stop-go policy of freeze and unfreeze, each shorter than the last. + President Sarney, famous for his indecision, has presided over three currency changes, five central bank presidents, and enough ministers to fill two double-decker buses. + Businessmen, farmers and overseas investors long for economic stability and planning for more than a week at a time. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +158 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 1, 1989 + +Obituary of Claude Pepper: Saviour of Roosevelt + +BYLINE: By ALEX BRUMMER + +LENGTH: 732 words + + + To a recent generation of Americans, Congressman Claude Pepper (Democrat, Florida) was an eloquent and effective leader of the elderly who retained enough passion in his octogenarian years to crusade against repeated Republican attempts to curtail the social security (old age pension system). + The intensity he brought to this thorny and at times unpopular issue, at a time of crushing US budgetary problems, was typical of a turbulent political life in which this son of the Confederacy worked alongside and against nine Presidents from Roosevelt to Bush. + Pepper, who briefly campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1948, first entered the national political scene in the 1936 election when he captured a Florida Senate seat running as a Roosevelt Democrat from the South. In his maiden speech to the Senate delivered in his native Alabama drawl, he elegantly rejected calls from within his own Democratic Party for a cut in costly New Deal government spending. 'If I knew anything then,' Congressman Pepper recalled in 1981, 'I knew the South needed help, and Roosevelt was our only chance to get it.' + He quickly became Roosevelt's most assiduous supporter on Capitol Hill and was an early advocate of Social Security, the minimum wage law, national health insurance and other social programes which eventually were to become part of America's post-war social safety net. In 1940, at the age of 40, Pepper made his first appearance on the cover of Time magazine under a caption which read: 'A Florida fighting cock will be a White House weathervane.' + Both Pepper and Roosevelt sailed to victory in 1940 and the Senator quickly became the Democrats most outspoken advocate of rearmament in the face of the Nazi threat. In 1940 he proposed conscription, angering his more isolationist colleagues who reviled him as a traitor and a warmonger and resorted to hanging him in effigy on the grounds of the Capitol. A year later it was Pepper who introduced legislation to support lend-lease to the European allies, a bill which columnist and political adviser Walter Lippmann helped to draft. + Despite his support of then unpopular causes he managed re-election by a relatively narrow 10,000 margin in 1944. After the war Pepper briefly enjoyed great stature in Europe for his efforts on lend-lease and travelled to Europe to meet with Churchill, Stalin and Eisenhower. he argued forcefully, but to little avail, that the Soviet Union should receive aid under the Marshall Plan because of its staunch defence against the Fascists. + But his flirtation with Moscow and perceived left-wing leanings - including a proposal that the atom bomb be unilaterally abolished - were never forgiven by his political enemies who with the help of the Du Pont dynasty, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and a range of commercial interests found a candidate George Smathers to run against him from the right. The Senator was besmirched as a Communist and labelled 'Red Pepper' by the coterie of enemies from within the Democratic Party and fell from grace in 1950. More than four decades later his opponent Mr Smathers acknowledged 'a vicious campaign, a smear campaign of guilt by innuendo.' Pepper lost the election, the first victim of an emergent McCarthyism. It was not until 1962 that he re-entered Congress to begin a second career as representative of a polyglot Miami district and a national constituency of the elderly. + Claude Pepper was born in Chambers County, Alabama the son of a veteran of the Confederate forces in the civil war. In his first campaign for the Senate Pepper would tell voters: 'I was born and reared on a farm in the east Alabama, went to a one teacher country school where I usually walked or rode a horse and for lunch ate from a tin bucket.' From this inauspicious beginning Pepper worked his way through the university of Alabama as a miner shovelling coal on the dawn shift but still finding time to become college president. In the summer of 1921 he travelled North to Harvard, equipped with Dollars 100 in his pocket and two suits. 'If that was the greatest law school in the United States I wanted to go,' Pepper would later recall. Armed with his Harvard law degree he went on to teach at the University of Arkansas where William Fulbright was among his most illustrous pupils. + Claude Pepper, born September 8, 1900; died May 30. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +159 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 1, 1989 + +Eyewitness: Canvassing Steel back on the two Davids show + +BYLINE: By MARTIN KETTLE + +LENGTH: 420 words + +DATELINE: FABRIANO + + + If proof was ever needed of the length to which a modern politician will go to get himself on television, then David Steel provided it in Central Italy yesterday. + There was nothing he wouldn't do for the cameras. Pose by another statue or in a picturesque doorway? Of course. Get soaked walking across Florence to provide a better location? No trouble. Shake hands with this group of old men playing bocce in the park in Gubbio? His pleasure. When he handed out sandwiches at lunchtime to hungry hacks it seemed a recognition of respective roles, rather than evidence that the former Liberal leader is a nice guy. + Mr Steel is back in Italy for the third time in a month campaigning in the European parliamentary constituency for which he has been nominated by an alliance - unfortunate word - of three Italian centre parties. On Tuesday he was in Rome, yesterday Florence and Ancona. If it's Thursday today, then it will be Rome again. He will return for two days before polling here on June 18. + His campaign consists of short press conferences, meetings, and gruelling bus journeys. Mr Steel is no stranger to electioneering by bus, of course. His 'battlebus' has been a prominent part of the last three general elections. In Italy, though, everything is more decorous. No constant churning out of press releases here. Just a cigar and a look at the scenery before the next engagement. In a bus driven by probably the only Iralian never to have broken a speed limit there isn't much choice. + The formal business in Florence yesterday was a press conference. But the real purpose, in the eyes of British, press and of Mr Steel was to get the candidate filmed in front of a recognisably Florentine background. Steel was astonishingly willing to march through Florence in rain to stand beneath the more famous David in town, Michelangelo's statue in the Piazza della Signoria. + A dash back to the bus and it was off again over the green hills to Gubbio in Umbria, and more photo opportunities. A talk with an old man driving his van through a medieval gateway. A handshake for a bunch of regulars, all Communists, playing cards in the Santa Lucia bar. A chat with a cabinetmaker eating a lunchtime sandwich (till his dog snatched it from him). And an introduction to the elderly afternoon bocce players. 'If you get elected, come and play with us again,' one of them suggested. 'I could get to like this,' reflected Steel and he headed back to the bus and the next stage of his journey to Ancona. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +160 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 1, 1989 + +On a wind and a prayer: How the locals are feeling the chill of protest from China + +BYLINE: By SIMON WINCHESTER + +LENGTH: 1695 words + +DATELINE: HONG KONG + + + Bowen Road, a pedestrians-only country lane that winds round one of the middle contours of Victoria Peak, shaded by old forests and loud with the rush of waterfalls, is a little like the esplanade in Eastbourne - a place where Hong Kong island's elderly can come for their morning constitutionals, for a little harmless gossip, for a genial passing of the time of day. + But yesterday at dawn Bowen Road was unusually crowded, with unfamiliar faces, all Chinese. Something quite inexplicable to most Western imaginations was clearly Up. + A number of little stalls had opened under awnings of red-and-blue canvas, and schoolgirls, their faces lit by hissing Coleman lanterns, were busy selling oranges and incense sticks and wads of fake money made of bright red tissue paper. Venerable old ladies dressed in smartly pressed samfoos were lighting small pyres by the roadside, which flickered in the half-light of the tropic morning. They then set to a-bowing before the flames with expressions of manic intentness. + A gaggle of equally old men who normally populate Bowen Road in a state of trance-like concentration, performing the glacier-slow ballet of Tai chi chuan, were likewise in prayer, kneeling before smouldering piles of incense, and placing piles of fruit, or bottles of rice wines, or setting fire to the banknotes, in obeisance to the unseen gods who run the daily lives of the Chinese masses. + Just another feast day on the feast-filled Chinese lunar calendar, probably - a day, unmarked in Western diaries, when people would rise before dawn to implore their ancestors or the fishing gods or moneylenders or snakes or fortunetellers to visit good luck and long life on them, and perhaps a safe bet on a rank outsider in the nine o'clock at the Happy Valley races .. + Or were the prayers for something more than that? This past fortnight has been a time of exceptional nervousness for an already jumpy Hong Kong, and one can well imagine people - especially the old people, those who fled from China after the Maoist revolution and thus have good reason to feel a certain queasiness - restoring to prayer to restore some equilibrium to their lives. They would have been bewildered, this Bowen Road gerontocracy, to see some of the sights of the past few days. + Each afternoon, for example, the skies over Central and Causeway Bay and Wanchai have been filled to the mutterings of helicopter rotors. Police choppers, normally never seen over so politically placid a city, have been hovering, their TV cameras unblinkingly focused downwards, over vast demonstrations and marches, 'expressions of solidarity' and Cantonese pop music concerts, which have been suddenly organised to give moral support to the students of Tiananmen Square. + The huge upwelling of sound which old hands here call the 'Hong Kong symphony' - the immense roar of pneumatic drills and stonecrushers which can be heard all the way up the mountainside as Hong Kong tears herself apart and rebuilds herself - has been replaced this past few days on Bowen Road with an upwelling roar of student protest, anger and puzzlement. A city that had found it difficult to muster a quorum to protest the gravest injustice has been in the last week in the grip of the mob - though a superbly behaved mob, like convent children on their Sunday walk. + 'I was almost in tears when I saw them on Sunday,' said an Australian who has lived here for the past 20 years, and has never seen such a thing before. 'I never believed the local people could never feel so strongly about anything, except making money.' + Two views are now popularly expressed hereabouts. There are those who are saying that the political climate of this colony will now never be the same again - that Hong Kong's citizenry, goaded and shamed by the bravery and steadfastness of their brothers up in China, have suddenly attained what was supposed to be a eternally unattainable political maturity, and are now likely to take charge (from the pusillanimous and perfidious British) of their own destiny. + On the other hand, there are those who say that matters are now going to become extraordinarily grave for Hong Kong, and the seismic events in Beijing have ruined for ever such trust and confidence as existed in the colony (which wasn't much at the best of times), and that the flood of those who want to get out is now going to become a cross between a stampede and a tidal wave, with the slow death of Hong Kong as the obvious corollary. + The real consequence, of course, will be a combination of, or a compromise between, these two extremes. Sober analysis of what has happened in China is probably more easily available here than anywhere else in the world, given the level of experience, especially among the old guard of the Hong Kong civil service. And already the outlines of this analysis is beginning to trickle down into the popular (ie, the middle-class Chinese) Hong Kong view, via the multiplicity of Chinese newspapers, most of which take keen and responsible interest in reading the runes. (Unlike the main English-language paper, Murdoch-owned, which has applied standard hysterics to its coverage.) + A view currently gaining ground, enunciated by a senior Hong Kong bureaucrat-cum-sinologist at the height of the Beijing troubles last week, goes: 'You first have to recognise who those Tienanmen Square students were. They came from five or six universities, and thus from 13 or 14 main Beijing high schools, where virtually all the children are from the families of senior cadres or from the upper ranks of the military. There was absolutely no possibility that there would have been a confrontation between the soldiers and the students - would grandfathers have ordered shots fired at their granddaughters? Improbable, at best. + 'Then you have to recognise that these students, part of what has to be admitted is a very real Chinese aristocracy (one writer today refers to 'one of the most elaborate and pertinacious class systems in the world' that exists in modern China), want a variety of things. They don't all want what you and I regard as 'democracy'. Some of them held up posters of Mao. If life was hellish under Mao, as the Westerners seem to think the students are saying, then why do that? + 'Next you have to wonder what the majority of the Chinese people in the countryside want. This protest movement has been urban, aristocratic, organised by students who have studies overseas and, to the government's naive surprise and dismay, have come back home wanting change. But do the peasants want change? The 900 millions beyond Beijing and Shanghai and Wuhan and Canton? They've kept pretty mute, have they not? + 'All that has really been highlighted by the protest is that the Beijing government has been naive, inflexible and corrupt. Not that its ideological message has been wrong, or actually unpopular. Just wrongly interpreted, and poorly applied. + 'The course the Chinese government has to follow now is fairly clear. It has still to cleave to its basic principles of socialism. It has to clean up its act, halt the nepotism and so forth. It has to be more aware of the likely impact of the open door. And it has to be firm. + 'This suggests that one man is likely to be installed - probably a soldier-figure, a man who seems to stand tall for China as China, and is untainted, and obviously professional and correct. That will happen within the year and matters will get back to normal. There's no suggestion of a pressure-cooker of discontent in China that needs to be clamped down. To believe that is to be utterly foolish.' + Such is the message that the more sensible leader-writers in the Chinese press are beginning to convey to the more sensible readers (who are not necessarily the same as those who, in their tens of thousands, many wearing Giordano-designed 'Democracy' T-shirts, listened tearfully to local popu stars who performed got up as Angela Davis or in the hastily-assembled uniforms of the Weather Underground). And the message is beginning to get across. + 'Me leave? No, not yet,' said Eddie Chang, a middle-aged hotel worker who would be an obvious candidate for a oneway trip to Vancouver for a Canadian passport. 'I have this feeling things are going to work out in China now. This Beijing business will shake up the government there. They'll always be conservative Communists maybe, but more flexible, and more determined to be honourable. That will be all right for Hong Kong, I think. I'll keep my fingers crossed.' + Maria Tam, a local legislator, said much the same today. 'It would be wrong to think that just because the conservatives have won the day in Beijing that all is ruined in Hong Kong. A sensible conservative government up there is probably a good thing for us. Better than chaos, that's for sure.' + There are some signs of acute unease, however. After a month in which a small trickle of Hong Kong firms have announced their departure for the more stable political climate of Bermuda, one of the giant firms still here has found that its ability to borrow a much-needed Pounds 300 millions has suddenly evaporated. + Hopewell Holdings, whose boss Gordon Wu hitherto has been one of the most vocal supporters of the coming handover of the territory, will now have to look elsewhere for the money to finance a new motorway between Hong Kong and Canton, as well as a vast new hotel, to be the tallest building in Asia. Nervous investors - underwritten by the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank - pulled out yesterday, saying they were worried by events in China. And as a former chairman of the Hongkong Bank, Michael Sandberg, once said: 'If the Hong Kong people lose faith in themselves, then that's the moment to get worried.' + One small sign, from which it is probably not wise to draw too many conclusions. Otherwise, for the moment, Hong Kong is in an oddly sober, introspective mood - drawing breath, talking it all in, regarding it with uncharacteristic seriousness and, like the old men and women up on on Bowen Road at dawn, realising that much is at stake, doing some serious praying. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +161 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 1, 1989 + +Leading Article: Curbing the power of a great potentate + +LENGTH: 595 words + + + Boris Yeltsin is a working class Russian politician with a deserved reputation for plain speaking. Yesterday in the Soviet parliament he said that Mikhail Gorbachev has amassed enormous powers and could easily become a dictator. Gorbachev's supporters, East and West, would do well to ponder this uncomfortable truth. + Under the revised Soviet constitution, Mr Gorbachev is Chairman of the Supreme Soviet and thus President of the Soviet Union, as well as General Secretary of the Party and head of the National Defence Council. It is he who nominates the prime minister and the vice-president, he who lays down the main lines of domestic and foreign policy, and he who signs international treaties. + The growth of Mr Gorbachev's formal powers has been paralleled by a great increase in his personal influence over all three of the major Soviet agencies of control - the party, the army, and the internal security services. After the expulsion of Yeltsin, the retirement of Gromyko, and the demotion of Ligachev, there is now no one in the Politburo who can challenge him in the name of the whole party. Most of the elderly marshals who spoke for the armed forces inside the top party bodies are also gone, replaced by younger officers whose role is seen as strictly professional, and the new head of the KGB no longer has a seat in the Politburo. + Mr Gorbachev has stopped short of purging the party of all its conservatives. That may have been, initially, because he was not sure whether such a purge would be succesful. But at least as far back as last summer's special party conference it was clear that he had grasped the political usefulness of occupying the middle ground. Some conservatives are to be allowed to remain because they allow Mr Gorbachev to assume the role of arbiter, playing off hardliners against reformers and radicals, a tactic which further enhances his dominance. + It might be argued that Mr Gorbachev has nevertheless brought into existence a new kind of Soviet parliament with genuine legislative functions which in itself constitutes a very real check on his powers. This, after all, is the very body in which Mr Yeltsin is permitted to level his charges against his former mentor. But 86 per cent of the members of the People's Congress, and a higher proportion of the smaller Supreme Soviet which will be the real day to day parliament, are members of the Communist Party operating under the rule of democratic centralism. The way these members vote and the legislation they initiate is decided in caucus outside the chamber by the Party leadership - in other words, and here we come full circle, by Mikhail Gorbachev and his associates. As Mr Yeltsin puts it, 'the democratisation of the Party is lagging behind the democratisation of society.' + The Supreme Soviet does have the theoretical right to dismiss the president. But again, democratic centralism means that such a vote could not take place unless Mr Gorbachev had utterly lost control of the party. If it did, it would be the climax of a coup rather than the operation of a constitutional mechanism. He is indeed already a dictator, a denevolent dictator who believes in certain freedoms, but a dictator, nonetheless. + All of us, East and West alike, have concurred in this, because the magnitude of the changes Mikhail Gorbachev is trying to bring about seems to demand that, for a time, one man has to have such extraordinary powers. But it is also true that the final test of Mr Gorbachev's reforms may well be whether or not he can reform himself. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +162 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 1, 1989 + +Deng rumour sparks job struggle + +BYLINE: By JASPER BECKER + +LENGTH: 732 words + +DATELINE: BEIJING + + + Rumours that Mr Deng Xiaoping is in poor health are being taken seriously by diplomats in Beijing, and some believe his contemporaries have now joined the succession struggle. + Mr Deng has not been seen or heard of since he met the Soviet leader, Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, a fortnight ago. Soviet sources said that he appeared to have been drugged before the meeting and had difficulty focusing his thoughts. + Chinese sources claim that Mr Deng has already suffered from two minor strokes and hass been in hospital recently. Several sources alleged that he relies on an oxygen mask. + Rumours that Mr Deng is at death's door are a perennial feature of Beijing, but he will be 85 in August and some Western diplomats believe the question of his health is now influencing the current power struggle. + The political crisis has undermined Mr Deng's standing and at the same time a number of octogenarian veterans have taken a prominent role. + 'The party elders are now demanding a greater share of political power and are vying to succeed him,' a Western diplomat said. + Among the candidates are President Yang Shangkun, aged 82, who is in robust health and announced the martial law declaration on May 19. Another is his predecessor, Mr Li Xianian, aged 80, a hardliner whho made a veiled criticism of Mr Deng in his speech in favour of martial law last weekend. + The influential bur rarely seen Mr Chun Yun, the 83-year-old economist who is thought to have clashed with Mr Deng over the pace and scope of the economic reforms, joins the list. + The most openly critical veteran is Mr Peng Zhen, aged 86, who was Mr Deng's deputy and Mayor of Beijing until Mr Deng betrayed him at the start of the Cultural Revolution in order to protect himself. + Mr Peng was tardily rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution and has since been frustrated in his ambitions to be elected to highest party body, the politburo standing committee. + In his speech on Monday, he praised the motives of the students and observed that China 'must aim for the rule of law, not the rule of personality' and that 'everybody is equal before the law'. + This is being interpreted as a swipe against Mr Deng for gathering too much power and flaunting the constitution. + A political compromise is being hammeered out to allow Mr Deng to convene a meeting of the Central Committee within the next five days, according to sources. Under the agreement, Mr Zhao Ziyang would be dismissed as the party's general secretary but the charges of being a 'traitor and counter-revolutionary' would be dropped. + Mr Wan Li, the head of China's parliament, the National People's Congress, returned to Beijing yesterday after he cut short his trip to Washington for health reasons and then flew to Shanghai late last week. + Some observers suspect that in return for concessions over Mr Zhao's dismissal, Mr Wan may have agreed to persuade the NPC to accept the martial law order. + The government's offensive against the students continued yesterday with grotesque counter-demonstrations organised in two suburbs of the capital. + In the Daxing County 3,000 demonstrators, including schoolchildren, were paid to march with banners and listen to speeches in support of the government. Effigies of Professor Fang Lizhi, China's most famous dissident, and another of a 'conspirator' were burnt. A speaker said that because of Mr Fang the peasants had been unable to sell their water melons. + 'Peasants plant rice, they don't nurture defeatist manure', 'Down with anyone who opposes martial law, socialism and Deng Xiaoping', 'Big rally against chaos' were the slogans. + Most of the participants said they were 'against chaos' but others were plainly embarrassed to be asked. One finally admitted that he had just been told to attend and had no idea what it was about. + In the capital, several large hotels hung long banners proclaiming their allegiance to the party's four principles, the open door policy and their oppositions to bourgeois liberalisation, the party's code word for Western political ideas. + Money is pouring in from overseas supporters for pro-democracy students, but the protesters face problems in converting foreign currency. Chinese citizens, whose monthly income averages Pounds 34 in cities, have contributed more than Pounds 1,700 since May 13, according to a student leader. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +163 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 1, 1989 + +Woman saved in dog mauling + +BYLINE: By PAUL HOYLAND + +LENGTH: 212 words + + + An elderly woman yesterday described how she had to be rescued by three men from a Rottweiler that killed her Yorkshire terrier. + Mrs Nelly Williams, aged 75, was dragged along the ground by the Rottweiler, which bit her arms and hands as she tried to protect her dog in Braunstone Park, Leicester. She said: 'The dog's owner came running to me when I was shouting for help. He tried to get it off me. A park attendant also came down and he had to help as well. In all, three men tried to get the dog off me. I was screaming for help and I was terrified.' + The Rottweiler was put down yesterday. 'People should not have those dogs,' said Mrs Williams. 'The rest of them should be put to sleep.' + Also yesterday, a policeman successfully appealed to Worcester Crown Court against a magistrate's order that his Rottweiler should be destroyed. In separate incidents the dog had attacked a neighbour and a golden retriever while on exercise with other Rottweilers owned by the police constable, Mr Gordon Brindley. + Mr Greville Janner, Labour MP for Leicester West, said yesterday he would table Commons questions to the Home Secretary demanding legislation to put various breeds of dogs, including Rottweilers, into the same legal category as wild animals. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +164 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 3, 1989 + +Baby 'poorly' after cot attack by Rottweiler + +BYLINE: By SUSAN TIRBUTT + +LENGTH: 272 words + + + A six-month boy was very poorly in Birmingham Children's Hospital last night after being savaged by a Rottweiler in his cot. + The attack came on the same day that the Environment Secretary, Mr Nicholas Ridley, refused to introduce a national dog register to control ownership of dangerous breeds, as recommended by the RSPCA. + Mr Ridley said: 'People should not take responsibility for dogs of this kind unless they can look after them properly and keep them under control.' Dogs were already legally required to carry identification tags. 'So far there has been no difficulty in identifying the owners of the Rottweiler dogs involved in attacks.' + Mr Ridley refused to list Rottweilers and other dangerous dogs under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act, saying it was not designed to deal with pets. + The RSPCA called for a national compulsory dog registration scheme policed by dog wardens following recent attacks on children and old people by Rottweilers. + Yesterday the baby, Andrew Little, was attacked while he was staying with his grandparents who owned a two-year-old Rottweiler. + Mr Robert Naylor, East Birmingham hospital general manager, said the grandparents found Andrew in a pool of blood in his cot early yesterday. Andrew underwent emergency surgery for cuts and bites. + The Midland Rottweiler Club criticised the child's grandparents for leaving him alone with a Rottweiler. 'The high-pitched squeal of a youngster triggers off some instinct in the dog which makes it attack. One should never forget that Rottweilers hunt in packs and eat meat - they will pick on the weak, ailing and old.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +165 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 3, 1989 + +Weekend Money: Retirement home developers try to ease worries + +BYLINE: By DAVID LAWSON + +LENGTH: 706 words + + + Nagging doubts hanging over retirement housing, since a burst of criticism last year when service charges appeared to be rising faster than expected, have prompted leading operators to introduce schemes aimed at easing those fears. + The need for this has gained greater urgency lately with the collapse of the property market; buyers are proving hard to find as the elderly become locked into long housing chains, so anything that deters potential purchasers has come in for reappraisal. + The House Builders Federation has warned off novice developers from this minefield and is set to launch tough rules which insist that buyers are given full financial details without hidden charges. + The big fear for pensioners is that, while their incomes are fixed, charges for services such as wardens, gardeners, repairs, heat and light will drift upwards over the years. Financial groups have mined a rich vein of business among ordinary home owners by helping them tap the increasing value of their property to meet this burden, and such methods are now migrating into sheltered housing. + Anglian Secure Homes, Britain's second largest developer, has teamed up with the Sussex County Building Society and CGA Financial Services (the former Country Gentlemen's Association) to produce what amounts to a deferred payments scheme to cover service charges for buyers over 60. The Sussex will take over payments for the rest of the owner's life or time in a sheltered home, then recover the total cost on death or resale from the price of the property. + It will not do this for nothing, of course. The money is lent at 1.25 per cent above the society's basic rate, which can add up to a significant amount over the years as the loan increases. But Peter Edmonson, chairman of Anglia, says this must be set against the peace of mind from never having to worry about service charges again, while potential increases in property values should easily cover the outstanding debt. + The scheme is an alternative to the sort of equity-sharing offered by Anglia's larger competitor, McCarthy & Stone, and some building societies. McCarthy is tackling the crisis of confidence by proposing to extend indefinitely its current two-year limitation on service charges in exchange for a 2 per cent share of a property. For 5 per cent, payments would be frozen at current levels. + The Anglia approach means owners or their beneficiaries do not sacrifice part of the profits on resale, but this has to be weighed against the swelling debt which must eventually be repaid. Any advantage depends on the relative performance of interest rates, property prices and inflation in service charges over the life of the loan. + Things work out perfectly in Anglia's illustration of an Pounds 80,000 home with an annual service charge of Pounds 1,000 rising by 8 per cent a year if property prices are assumed to rise by an average 10 per cent annually over 20 years. The home would by then be worth more than Pounds 538,000 and the loan some Pounds 190,000 - less than 15 per cent of the total - based on the current 14.9 per cent interest rate charged by the Sussex. As an added bonus, the residual debt can be set against inheritance tax, which Colin Studd of the CGA estimates will cut some 40 per cent of the burden for many beneficiaries. + But the figures are not so appealing on an average 5 per cent annual rise in property prices, which would leave the home worth only Pounds 212,000 in 20 years. Payments would have been discontinued long before then and the burden switched back to the owner, as loans will never be allowed to rise above three-quarters of the value of a home. + The Anglia and its partners do not believe things will get anywhere near this bleak, based on what has happened in the last two decades. Property prices have risen by an average of more than 13 per cent a year and mortgage interest rates averaged less than 11 per cent since 1969. Some experts feel the property bubble has burst and history will not repeat itself. On the other hand, the population is ageing and only a relatively small number of retirement homes are being built, so this type of housing could perform much better than everything else. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +166 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 3, 1989 + +Weekend Money: Holiday risk business - Cover for old, sick or disabled people + +BYLINE: By MIKE GEORGE + +LENGTH: 1356 words + + + The small print on holiday insurance policies can be crucially important for the elderly and people suffering from some disability or chronic medical condition. + Many policies seem to regard anyone aged over 65 as automatically constituting a medical risk, regardless of their actual health, and others exclude people suffering from some kind of disability but who are otherwise perfectly healthy. + Nevertheless, a substantial proportion of the more than 14 million people of pensionable age, and of the 6 12 million people with disabilities in this country do take holidays abroad. It is thought about two million people over 65 go abroad on holiday each year. But though insurers admit that in some ways, such as the care of luggage and belongings, older people are more careful and make fewer claims than others, many policies either refuse to cover them at all or charge double premiums. + Travel agents and tour operators can usually offer reasonably cheap comprehensive policies; the ABTA-endorsed Travel Guard policies, for example, can offer families Pounds 2 million worth of medical expenses cover, delayed or missed departure compensation of up to Pounds 1,000, and personal accident cover of Pounds 20,000, for Pounds 33.50 a fortnight in Europe. But policies like these may not include adequate medical cover for people with a disability. + Many application or proposal forms do not have space for questions and answers about health, and this may make it hard for people with a chronic illness or recurring condition to obtain adequate cover. The Insurance Ombudsman Bureau has highlighted this problem, and has also criticised the industry for failing to make clear the exclusion clauses or limits of cover which may apply to elderly or unwell people. + Many so-called policies are in fact just summaries, squeezed on to the end of a glossy brochure, and most crucial exclusion clauses are in tiny print. So if you are in any doubt, or need better information, you should contact the insurers or underwriters directly, who are generally willing to discuss your condition and needs in detail. This should not automatically mean paying a higher premium, as you are helping to define the risks; indeed, most people with a disability or existing medical conditon are more likely to know about health risks and how to avoid them than so-called healthy people. + The AA, for example, says that it may ask you a great deal about your medical conditions and needs, and then either accept you at the standard rate or not at all. Its 5-Star personal insurance policy, available with the 5-Star motoring holiday policy, costs Pounds 14.20 per person in Europe and includes Pounds 1,000 cancellation cover and medical costs including compensation of Pounds 20 a day for every day you have to spend in hospital: there is no age limit. + On the other hand, their needs may be more specialised. If you may need access to a kidney dyalisis or heart unit, for example, you should contact the medical counsellor at the embassy of the country you are intending to visit to find out where they are; alternatively, the particular country's 'desk' at the Foreign Office may give advice. Then tell the insurance company, so that swift transport can be insured should the need arise. As many use special assistance companies to arrange this, such as Mondial or Europ Assistance, it is worth contacting them direct to see what insurance cover they can arrange for you themselves. Europ Assistance, for example, arranged for a three-year-old, who suffered from several congenital conditions, to be put on a ventilator and flown by air ambulance back from the US, and the Pounds 46,000 cost was fully covered by insurance. + Basically, if you think you may have any special needs you should tell the insurers about these 'material facts', even if the application form does not specifically cover them. You still cannot assume that everything will be all right as there are near-universal exclusion clauses. If you travel against your doctor's advice, any medical assistance claim is likely to be nullified. If you are pregnant and expect to give birth within eight weeks you will not be covered, and if you are an in-patient or on a waiting list you will find it difficult to get holiday insurance; so much may depend on the nature of your complaint. + People who are terminally ill could face difficulties too, though as with other conditions you should be able to get reasonable cover if your doctor agrees that a holiday will not be medically detrimental. + Many people find it easier, and sometimes cheaper, to arrange holidays and insurance through more specialist organisations. The Holiday Care Service will provide information for elderly or disabled people, Age Concern produces fact sheets on holidays for older people, often with insurance included, and the Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation (RADAR) has holiday guides including a fact sheet on holiday insurance cover which suggests several specialist brokers and insurance companies. + Tour operators such as Saga Holidays will arrange both a holiday and appropriate insurance for older people; one of Saga's off-season apartment holidays in Portugal for 28 nights costs Pounds 229, and that includes insurance giving cover of Pounds 1 million for medical and related expenses. And organisations such as the Winged Fellowship Trust cater for people with fairly severe disabilities. Your Citizens Advice Bureau should also be able to put you in touch with these specialists. + Several insurance companies specialise in additional insurance cover such as the provision of a replacement wheelchair, or make available a multilingual team in Britain which can liaise with local doctors abroad; the Traveller's Medical Service, for instance, can provide travel and hotel expenses for a friend, relative or qualified nurse to come abroad to help you if necessary. + Campbell Irvine Ltd have just launched a personal travel insurance scheme for physically disabled people. This includes the provision of a companion if you are separated from your original relative or companion, cover for an alternative flight if the original carrier will not take you because you are in a wheelchair, or for alternative accommodation if the hotel is not wheelchair accessible. + Other specialists, such as the Impaired Life Insurance Bureau, will provide 'bespoke' policies. Disabled drivers can get cover for a motoring holiday through the Disabled Drivers' Bureau though you should be a member of their association first. + For a great many people though it is simply important know that the scope and quality of cover of more general policies are adequate and effective by careful checking of exclusion clauses. Beware, for example, of a common catch-all clause which excludes people suffering from a mental illness or disorder, often including anxiety or depression. + Though some, like the National Westminster's Travel Protector Insurance, view this as discriminatory and specifically avoid this exclusion, in a number of unfortunate cases people's holidays have had to be cancelled because of the onset of a neurosis, and insurers have sought to reject consequent claims. + As it is particularly hard for a disabled or unwell person to argue a claim with insurers, avoiding problems in the first place is important. Regardless of what insurance you take out, it is always advisable to take with you two Department of Health brochures; SA40 'Before You Go,' and SA41 'While You're Away'. The first contains form E111 which will ensure that you are treated as if you are a national in most European countries if you have a medical problem, though this may still mean paying as not all countries run a free health service. The second provides details of what to do in each country if you do have a problem. Both are available from travel agents and libraries. + ABTA: 01 637 2444. Age Concern: 01 640 5431. The Disabled Drivers Association: 0508 841449. The Holiday Care Service: 0293 774535. Impaired Life Insurance Bureau: 0753 25064. RADAR: 01 637 5400. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +167 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 3, 1989 + +Sakharov faces angry jeers + +BYLINE: By JONATHAN STEELE + +LENGTH: 446 words + +DATELINE: MOSCOW + + + President Gorbachev and the entire presidium of the new Congress of People's Deputies rose to their feet in a thundering ovation yesterday as an Afghan veteran denounced the former dissident, Dr Andrei Sakharov, for allegations he had made about Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan. + In one of the most emotional moments of an already turbulent Congress, Mr Sergei Chervonopisky, who lost both legs in the war, raised comments which Dr Sakharov first made in a Canadian newspaper interview. He claimed to have evidence that Soviet troops fired from helicopters on their own wounded, or surrounded men to avoid them falling into Mojahedin hands. + 'The essence and aims of the irresponsible accusations by deputy Sakharov are not clear. We are outraged by his irresponsible and provocative assertions,' he said. Deputies stood to applaud. As the elderly physicist and human rights campaigner came to the podium to defend himself, deputies jeered. + 'I deeply respect the Soviet army and Soviet soldiers,' he responded as the live broadcast on national television showed furious army officers shouting at him. + 'I never insulted the heroic Soviet soldiers who served there, but the war itself, which was a criminal adventure and a huge crime by our country, which cost the lives of almost one million Afghans. It was a war of annihilation, a terrible sin.' + Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the respected former chief of staff, said there was never an order for Soviet troops to fire on their own men. 'All this is a lie and Academician Sakharov will not be able to find any documents to confirm his lie,' he said flatly. + A woman deputy from Uzbekistan broke down in tears as she said, 'Comrade Academician, with just one step you have cancelled all your actitivies. You have insulted the entire army, the entire nation, all our war dead. I express our common disgust to you.' + A man who lost his 23-year-old son in Afghanistan, rushed to the podium to defend the Soviet army. Colonel Valery Ochirov, commander of an air force regiment which served in Afghanistan, called Dr Sakharov's claims slander. Even in the gravest conditions, helicopter crews flew out to pick up wounded. + Another veteran said more helicopter pilots died in the war than infantry because they risked their lives rescuing the wounded. + Dr Sakharov claimed that he was still receiving new evidence to back his assertions, though he gave no details nor explained his sources. + Apparently deciding that attack was his best form of defence, he reminded the congress that he had been sent into internal exile by the late President Brezhnev precisely because of his opposition to the war. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +168 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 5, 1989 + +Leading Article: They must not get away with it + +LENGTH: 737 words + + + It is, for all who watch and wonder about the Communist world, the ultimate obscenity. Worse even than Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan; for there the tanks and troops were alien invaders, rolling across borders in the fashion through time immemorial of big powers knocking little powers into line. But in China it is the People's Army turned against the people: shooting them indiscriminately in Tiananmen Square, on the streets, on their doorsteps; crushing them beneath the tracks of the tanks; sweeping them from sight in a sea of bloodshed. A bankrupt, desperate, geriatric government; an edifice of ideology and aspiration flaking and toppling before our eyes. + At such a moment the noraml calculations of political analysis - can Li last? is Deng peripheralised? - fall from the board. We have been confronted, this week-end, by one of the great punctuation marks of twentieth century history. No-one in the largest nation in the world will ever forget the first week of June in Beijing; and the whole world is enmeshed in these events. In Chinese terms, a surge of desire for greater freedoms - not democracy as we know it, but an opening of society, a spirit of glasnost - has posed ultimate questions to a group of old men; and, ultimately, at whatever cost, they have moved to stamp it out. There was a chance, only a handful of days ago, that a more liberal strain of thinking within the Chinese Communist Party could, by its success in the backroom struggle for power, have harnessed the yearning for glasnost. But the old men won. + It matters hugely what happens next. If the politicians who ordered a manifestly stricken army into action survive, if they can still the cities and choke information to the distant countryside, if they can get away with it, then a second set of great questions will dominate debate. Are the manifest death throes of the Communist monoliths manageable? Can they be predicted and relied on? Could Tiananmen Square come to Red Square and savagely end a period of burgeoning hope? + The point is a starkly simple one. We, sitting comfortably in the West, assume that a spark in the individual human condition - a spark called freedom - must, in the end, make a bonfire of the system that seeks to snuff it out. We assumed, from the peripatetic Nixon on, that China - by its own, complex lights - could gradually evolve into a nation which had made its peace with liberty; that the business culture, the Americans with cheque books, would inevitably bring some form of democracy in their wake. How else could the British sign away Hong Kong and millions of its citizens to the old enemy to the north? Beijing, surely, needed and would nurture Hong Kong's wealth. + Tell that, this bloody, awful morning, to the marines. The human beings who walk the streets of Hong Kong can no longer be thought of as pawns, signed away and forgotten. And meanwhile, patrolling the Berlin wall, looking East, we must suck our thumbs. Gorbachev has put glasnost ahead of perestroika. His people have increasing freedom to demand a better life but not yet the system to provide it; the reverse of Deng's approach China. How frail is the Soviet spark? + There is comfort on dwelling on the different roads towards capitalism. The Soviet people - because glasnost came first - may have acquired a patina of sophistication that the students of Beijing, seeking to destroy a regime by peaceful but utterly confrontational protest, lacked. The Soviet Union, driven on from the top, is seeking to devolve power, to provoke argument, to manage change. The pensioners of the Chinese establishment had, long since, run out of ideas. You have a different generation and a different impetus. But still: there is the conundrum of desperation, of men, backed the wall by a tide of events. + As the rest of the world, therefore, moves today beyond statements of shock and horror, there is a common interest never hitherto perceived. They must not get away with it. In the eyes of the West, because of the spark. And in the eyes of those who watch from Moscow, too, because the nightmare of Deng is theirs as well. We all, at root, know that the Chinese march towards liberty must be resumed. We must see the old men, constitutionally and not in further chaos, defeated and removed. We have a duty, to the Chinese people, to make a thunderous voice of revulsion insistently heard. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +169 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 6, 1989 + +Pensioners have more money under the Tories, says Moore + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 194 words + + + Pensioners are no longer badly off, Mr John Moore, the Social Security Secretary, said yesterday. + 'For most people, retirement is now a time to look forward to with confidence,' he told a conference on sheltered housing in London. 'By 1986, pensioners' net average incomes from all sources had grown by 23 per cent more than prices since 1979 - twice as fast as the income of the population as a whole. It is simply no longer true that being a pensioner tends to mean being badly off.' + Mr Moore's claim follows his recent assertion that poverty was disappearing from Britain. + Pensioners' groups last night challenged his statement. They said two out of three retired people depended on state benefits. + Mr Moore admitted that some elderly people needed state help. They had 'not shared as much' in increased prosperity, he told the conference organised by Help the Aged. + Ms Sally Greengross, director of Age Concern, said later: 'While we welcome the greater prosperity that is enjoyed by some elderly people . this does not extend to the two-thirds of pensioners who still depend on state benefits for 80 per cent of their income.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +170 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 7, 1989 + +Anglia hit by housing slump + +BYLINE: By ROSEMARY COLLINS + +LENGTH: 212 words + + + Anglia Secure Homes is finding that selling sheltered housing to the elderly is not a recession-proof activity. + Prospective buyers are unable to sell their own homes because of the slump in the housing market, last year's reservations are being cancelled, and in the six months to the end of March only 187 ASH units were sold. + There are 360 unsold retirement homes still on the books. + 'There appears to be no meaningful resistance to our product or pricing policies', says Peter Edmondson, Anglia's chairman. 'The problem is that our purchasers are experiencing considerable difficulty in organising the sale of theri own property.' + The company has introduced loan schemes to help people, mostly single, elderly women, who wish to move but cannot and remains confident about the medium to long term future. 'Demogrphic and social economic data point to the specialist retirement market maintaining its growth profile when the re-adjustment in the housing market has taken place', said Mr Edmondson. + The market takes a shorter view, and Anglia's shares fell 21p to 212p on yesterday's news that pre-tax profits rose in the six months to March by only Pounds 360,000 to Pounds 2.76 million on turnover 14 per cent down at Pounds 15.26 million. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +171 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 8, 1989 + +Thursday Women (Rockers): Age old problem - Knowing when to call it a day wasn't part of the Sixties' vocabulary + +BYLINE: By JANE ELLISON + +LENGTH: 1230 words + + + The bride looked radiant in white, lilac and green satin. There were three bridesmaids bearing bouquets and a page. Father Thaddeus Birchard had a message for the congregration. He had studied the horoscope of the groom (a Scorpio). 'Listen to this,' he told him and 170 of his closest friends. 'You will be happier when a loved one agrees to an exciting idea.' + The loved one, of course, is Mandy, 19-year-old child bride of ageing Rolling Stone bass player, Bill Wyman, who has boasted all over the tabloids of 'bedding' more than 1,000 girls. Old enough to be her father at 52 (indeed his 28-year-old son Stephen was best man) Bill had made a special effort for his wedding, with fleshly hennaed hair and blue suede shoes. His friends did their best to give him a good send off. Here was Elton John, Eric Clapton, Georgie Fame and all the Stones, including Keith Richards - a sight to frighten the horses and cause little children to burst into tears. + Bill had obliged the world's media with privileged invitations. Watchin on television the procession of ageing rock stars strutting up to pat him on the back, I turned to my companions with a derisive comment on the horrific appearance of all these haggard old men, grinning away for the cameras like gargoyles. But I was rudely silenced. Far from recoiling in disgust, my companions were gazing reverently at Ronnie and Keith and Charlie; a tender smile played about their lips. 'Don't they look great,' someone whispered. 'Look there's Mick. Isn't Keith incredible?' Someone else wiped a tear from his eye. We sat, for a few minutes, in silence. + It was a bleak illustration of the generation gap. As someone who 'came into' the music scene in the early Seventies, I had difficulty even then joining in the rapturous worship of Dylan, Lennon and the Stones. But look at them today. Age has indeed withered them. It is a miracle of science that many of them are still alive. to the post-Sixties people they are merely a collection of raddled old men, prancing about in pathetic imitations of their former selves. But to those who were young in the Sixties, they will never grow old. Stupefying as it is to the rest of us, to their Sixties fans they are still legendary, they are still the stuff of which heroes are made. + What would the Stones do at 40? It was a question which perplexed and baffled their fans, especially when it became clear that (with the exception of poor Brian Jones, lost along the way) they were all actually going to reach this great mid-life turning point. Would they symbolically renounce their guitars? Would they go into stock-broking or personal management like the tiny Adam Faith? Would they go mad and live in gloomy isolation in the 'mansions' they all immediately bought when they became rich and famous? + They did none of these things. They simply went on making records. Mick has done a couple of solo albums; Keith made his own solo debut last year. Having crossed the great divide, they can now do what they like. Unthinkable though it might seem, there is presumably no reason why the Stones should not continue to make records into their sixties and seventies. + The Stones are not the only rock stars clinging to eternal youth. Many others, too, are engaged in the undignified struggle. Bob Dylan, 48 years old, plays Wembley today in the first of three concerts here this month. Most of the audience will be as old as he is, turning up to sit in hushed silence and pay homage to the Master, described by this paper as the 'singing Messiah'. Paul McCartney, rich beyond the imagination, could retire with a sumptuous pension, yet still goes on churning out his pretty tunes. His new album, Flowers in the Dirt, has just come out to enthusiastic reviews. + Jerry Garcia, laid-back West-coast guru of the Grateful Dead, has brought his group out of retirement with In the Dark. Jerry is now portly (to put it kindly) and grey haired, but prints beside his grandfatherly portrait the following epigram: 'Every silver lining's got/a tough of grey/I will get by/I will survive.' + Other elderly survivors include Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground, Leonard Cohen, Brian Wilson, former Beach Boy, Eric Clapton, ex-wild man of Cream. Even lesser men don't know when to call it a day. Cliff Richard is into his second century of hit singles. One unfortunate by-product of the Hillsborough tragedy has been the return of the much-decayed Gerry Marsden still reworking his ghastly You'll Never Walk Alone. + Why do these middle-aged, unlovely performers still inspire such devotion in a world where rock was once only for the beautiful people? Perhaps it is partly to do with the fact that they are still here at all. Anyone who has lived on the outer edge of experience for any length of time, does acquire a certain heroic status simply from having survived. The ones with a real taste for danger, of course, like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin or Jim Morrison, the famous trouser-splitting Rimbaud enthusiast of The Doors, are no longer here to make their 100th single and live only in their fans' devoted memories. + But the Stones are no strangers to excess. Which of them do you thinks looks worst today? The grey-haired, staring-eyed Charlie Watts - 'I wish Bill all the best but I've never said this would be a good match.' Or what about Jagger: 'We just flew in from France for this and we're very tired.' Although he now espouses a life of jogging, health foods and cricket at Lords, Mick's face seems to be made of corrugated plastic covered by Max Factor waterproof pancake. + But there is no doubt that Keith 'I wouldn't have missed this for the world' looks the most alarming. Substances of all known varieties have passed through his system. Back in 1981 Keith was admitting to his interviewer, Victor Bockris, that there was a 'fairly high fatality rate' in rock and roll. Bockris wondered if Keith was worried that drink and drugs might finally get him? He wasn't. 'Well, I mean if they haven't done it by now, no. I mean, 'cos it must be fairly obvious to everybody now that they've 'ad a go with trying.' It is fairly obvious. Keith has made no contribution to his own survival and yet here he is, still grooving, still practising rock and roll. + Perhaps the secret of their survival is that all those Sixties people adamantly refuse to let them grow old. After all, none of them ever expected to reach 30 themselves, let alone middle-age. 'Hope I die before I get old,' sang Roger Daltrey of the Who (now the star of an American Express commercial). + You can see the point, but few of the Sixties people actually felt like calling it a day when they reached that fateful fourth decade. Unfairly, life did not arrange for them to vanish softly and suddenly away. They persisted, grew fat, bald and boring. They became accountants and chartered surveyors, librarians, bus conductors, just like everyone else. But their ideals have not been quite extinguished. Though they are all now the wrong side of 40, they still cherish those fantasies of dropping out, getting themselves free and feeling groovey. The sight of the Stone refusing to go out quietly, is their inspiration. If Mick and Keith can still do it, maybe there is still some small hope left for the rest before the old age pension claims them. Perhpas a Mandy awaits them somewhere. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +172 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 8, 1989 + +Ground policing 'envy of others' + +BYLINE: By GARETH PARRY + +LENGTH: 462 words + + + The policing system at Hillsborough was the envy of other forces and policing on the day of the cup semi-final had been magnificent, Sergeant John Morgan told the disaster inquiry at Sheffield yesterday. + 'Sheffield is not Bungletown,' he said. Some of the inspectors and sergeants on duty were veterans of big police operations such as inner city riots and strikes and the media criticism had been an insult to their professional integrity.' + Sergeant Morgan told Mr William Woodward, counsel for the south Yorkshire police, that the huge crowd of late-comers rushing the turnstiles had not been unpoliceable. + 'No. If there had been 20 PSUs (public support units) in riot gear then it would have been sorted. But we were not approaching the match as a riot.' + He agreed with Mr Andrew Collins, QC, counsel to the inquiry, that ticketless fans had somehow orchestrated the crush outside. Leppings Lane in order to force their way in - as suggested by one officer earlier. + But the sergeant, who was the first officer to force his way down into the terraces where the deaths occurred, added that the Liverpool fans had been painted whiter than white. 'That is certainly not the case.' + PC Stephen Fry, one of 10 Merseyside mounted officers on duty at the ground, had said earlier that the crowd had ignored his appeals to back off and continued to push against his horse. 'It was becoming a determined effort to get in at any cost. They were begining to lose their reason, I think.' + Another mounted officer from Merseyside, Sergeant Phillip Smith, veteran of 300 soccer matches involving Liverpool supporters, said that he had never seen fans so hostile or drinking so much in the streets before a game. He added: 'I never saw anyone who was leglessly drunk.' + Three hours before the kickoff, and the death by crushing of 95 people, fans were drunk in the streets around the stadium. As thousands arrived late and without tickets the mood became angry as police vainly attempted to hold them back from the turnstiles where the disastrous crush was generated. + PC Frank Grunnill, who has spent 20 years policing Liverpool's Kop, said he feared that his horse might panic and injure someone as the crowd pressed around him lifting the animal off his feet 'like a piece of soap being squeezed. + 'A horse always likes to feel sound, whether its standing on your foot or on the ground,' he said, adding that he finally managed to ease his mount out of the crowd. + PCW Alison Tagg, said the crowd pinned her against a wall. 'Older men turned up at the turnstile. They were so drunk they could hardly stand up.' PCW Tagg, who was slightly injured, said that she gave a 12-year old boy cardiac massage and he recovered. + The hearing continues. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +173 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 9, 1989 + +Vauxhall Byelection: Democrats come out fighting + +BYLINE: By DAVID SHARROCK + +LENGTH: 561 words + + + Mike Tuffrey, the Social and Liberal Democrats' candidate, yesterday christened himself 'the man they tried to gag', after receiving a writ from Labour's candidate Kate Hoey. + The Democrats have been running a pugilistic campaign, prompting the writ from Ms Hoey about a leaflet claiming she blocked a public inquiry into the death of a baby in council care. It has inevitably brought 'smear' accusations from Labour, and last week the Health Secretary, Mr Kenneth Clarke, said he thought it an unsuitable issue for a byelection. + Mr Tuffrey has been hammering away at Ms Hoey's record as a Labour councillor for the best part of two weeks. His minder, the Democrat MP, Mr Simon Hughes, said the fact that Labour had opted for a writ instead of an injunction preventing distribution of the leaflet, which has reached 42,000 homes in Vauxhall, showed lack of confidence over the matter. + Mr Tuffrey added that he would look back on the day he received the writ as the day he won Vauxhall. 'This attempt to gag us will rebound upon them. People will recognise that we are hitting home on the Labour record.' + He has not felt the need to concentrate his fire on the Conservative challenger, Mr Mike Keegan, with the same intensity. 'By Sunday night I had seen fewer than a dozen Tory posters throughout the entire constituency - and not a single one on a council estate.' On the Wyvil Estate, Mr Tuffrey scored a minor coup on film. + An elderly gentleman, who emerged from his maisonette blinking in the television lights, said sorry, but he would vote Conservative. Mr Tuffrey spent nearly five minutes pointing out the records of Conservative central and Labour local governments before the man said: 'All right, you've probably convinced me,' and retreated. + But Mr Tuffrey's entourage appears to lack the hard-edged thoroughness of the other two main parties' machines. Doors are missed and he is allowed to stand and ramble. + Last week, on the Aveline Estate, a helper idly watched one of the very few residents at home slip away while Mr Tuffrey posed for a photograph. When asked why he had made no effort to canvass her, he removed a cigar from his mouth and replied: 'Who, me?' + He is also handicapped by lack of recognition. At every encounter he must explain: 'I'm from the Social and Liberal Democrats, that's the old SDP and the Liberals,' which is about as succinct as it can be put. Even then, confusion still swam in many eyes. + One pensioner told Mr Tuffrey he had always voted for his party. Asked by reporters afterwards he replied: 'That's right, I've always voted Labour.' + Back on the Wyvil Estate, Mr Tuffrey was being taken through the litany of Lambeth council complaints. A Mrs Harvey wanted to show him her new flat, which she has been trying to move into since March after two years in B&Bs. Furniture was heaped in one room while cracked windows and holes in walls and ceilings awaited repair. Mr Tuffrey sympathised and promised to look into her case if he was elected. + Mrs Lilian Hurley, secretary of the Wyvil Estate tenants' association for the past 10 years, described life in Vauxhall as having gone 'from bad to worse'. + She was not won over by Mr Tuffrey's byelection slogan, People Matter Most. 'I may not even vote, for all the good they do you. Politicians are all the same, aren't they?' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +174 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 10, 1989 + +Weekend Money: When life is a stretch just above the breadline - Is poverty a thing of the past? + +BYLINE: By MIKE GEORGE + +LENGTH: 1116 words + + + The Social Security Secretary, John Moore, has argued in recent weeks that poverty 'in the old absolute sense of hunger and want' has been wiped out in Britain. Yet many of the elderly, sick, single parents and unemployed eke out a living precariously close to the breadline. + Nearly 10 million people are receiving state retirement pension. Catherine Hind, who lives in Brighton, is a widow and a pensioner. Her weekly income is Pounds 52.17p, a mixture of retirement pension and income support, plus Pounds 3.5 a week from her late husband's occupational pension. She has Pounds 55.67 a week, and health problems make her unable to supplement this by working. She lives on her own in a flat, bought with the aid of a small mortgage. Catherine is getting all her social security entitlements, so how far does Pounds 55.67 stretch? + Mortgage repayments, plus the compulsory 20 per cent of rates that everyone now has to pay take Pounds 11 a week. Water, gas and electricity bills cost Pounds 9.70 a week, household insurance takes Pounds 2, a TV licence costs Pounds 1.30 a week (she lives on her own and doesn't regard her TV as a luxury), she also has to put aside Pounds 2 a week for ground rent and basic maintenance. She has a phone, which to her is a necessity, and this costs Pounds 4 a week. + So, her basic outgoings run to Pounds 30 a week, leaving just Pounds 25.67 to pay for food, household items, clothes, shoes, bus fares, the hairdresser, and something for Christmas and birthday presents, not to mention an occasional holiday. + She does manage to live on Pounds 25.67 a week, but has to be very careful. Two weeks ago, for example, she had to have part fo a burner unit replaced on her cooker, British Gas gave her a small concession, but even so the bill was Pounds 25.87 - more than a whole week's disposal income. And over the past year new social security rules meant that she had no increase in income support, even though she had to start paying 20 per cent of rates, and her mortgage repayments increased. + Catherine is in no way untypical of the millions of single pensioners in this country. But younger people, too, don't always have it good. In a family with a single wage-earner, say a man on average male earnings, if he became unemployed the family income could drop from about Pounds 185 (his take-home pay), to just the Pounds 56.10 a week obtainable from unemployment benefit. If he became sick, and like many others wasn't covered by a generous occupational sick pay scheme, family income could drop to the Dollars :52.10 available under statutory sick pay. Depending on family circumstances it might be possible to get a little more via income support, but even so the scale of loss is substantial. + A couple with one small child would normally get no more than Pounds 73.05 a week from income support. If Catherine Hind can only just manage on her Pounds 55.67 a week, the problems compound for two adults and a child to manage on just Pounds 17.38 more. Income support is the major plank of the social security system. + Then again social security isn't only for those made unemployed, or for people who are sick. Carol Parker from Barnet is a lone parent with a small child (there are over a million children in families in this situation). + She has to rely on child benefit income support, and housing benefit for her income at present. Child benefit is Pounds 12.45 a week for lone parents, housing benefit pays her rent, and 80 per cent of her rates, and her income support top-up is nearly Pounds 45 a week. + Out of this, her rates, water bills, gas, electricity and phone bills take Pounds 15 a week. She rents a TV, and regularly puts away Pounds 13 a month for the rental and licence bills. Carol finds the cheapest way to get clothes, shoes, etc., is to pay through a mail order company, which takes Pounds 10 a month. This leaves her with about Pounds 15 a week for food and household materials, and Pounds 14.60 a week for any other expenses, including bus fares, or items for the home. + Like most other people relying on social security, she can seldom get credit, so buying larger items is a big problem. It took Carol four years to save up enough for a settee and a front room carpet. + To put Catherine and Carol's finances in perspective, the government's Family Expenditure Survey shows that the median average household income is over Pounds 195 a week; Pounds 38.64 is spent on food, the average spent on cars and other transport is Pounds 28 a week, and gas and electricity bills are Pounds 10.45. The average disposable income for a couple is Pounds 206.59. So in relative terms, people on income support, unemployment benefit, statutory sick pay and the like are receiving something like a third of the income of the so-called average family in Britain. The difference between spending Pounds 15 a week on food and household items (for two people), and the Pounds 53 plus spent by an average two-person household is immense in terms of quality and quantity. + The much-publicised Family Credit scheme, which helps out families who are earning but on low pay, does not necessarily bring these poorer families anywhere near to average levels of income. For example, a couple with a 12-year-old child and take-home pay of Pounds 85 a week would get Family Credit of Pounds 25.36, bringing their weekly income up to Pounds 110.36, which is just over half of the average household income. This is a means-tested benefit (like income support), and take-up is consequently low, although several million people are in a low paid job - there are 2 1/2 million people covered by the remaining Wage Councils, with rates of Pounds 2 an hour or less being commonplace. + The main social security payments do appear low. Unemployment benefit is just Pounds 34.70 a week, rising to Pounds 56.10 for an adult dependant, with no extra money available if you have children. Income support pays a single claimant Pounds 34.90 a week, but it's reduced to Pounds 27.40 if you're under 25, and just Pounds 20.80 if you're under 18. And in real terms unemployment benefit levels have increased by only 0.7 to 0.8 per cent since 1979, with retirement pensions up by just 0.6 per cent. + If the security security system is just a basic safety net, consider 19-year-old Daniel Evans. He suddenly became ill with kidney failure; he hadn't had the chance to work and build up his National Insurance record, so now has to live on just Pounds 28.40 a week from income support. His disability creates many additional costs for him, but the system is unable to cope with this reality. The safety net does almost nothing for Daniel. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +175 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 10, 1989 + +Weekend Money (Cashpoints): Home income + +LENGTH: 128 words + + + Derbyshire building society this week launched a home income plan, Harvester, where a variable-interest loan is raised against the home to buy an annuity, aimed at homeowners aged 70 or over. The minimum loan is Pounds 15,050, on the current interest rate is 13.25 per cent. The Society has also introduced Liberator, an quity release mortgage where the interest due is rolled up and added to the loan and the debt is settled from the proceeds of the eventual sale of the house. Loans, from Pounds 15,050 up to 30 per cent of the value of the property, are currently charged at 14.5 per cent. + Age Concern has updated its booklet. Using Your Home as Capital, which advises elderly homeowners on how to liberate the cash tied up in their property. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +176 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 12, 1989 + +Doubts on how long before Deng goes to join Chairman Mao: Back to the past as Beijing watchers again start studying the name-lists + +BYLINE: By JOHN GITTINGS + +LENGTH: 910 words + +DATELINE: BEIJING + + + It was back to close study of the Chinese leadership name-lists this weekend, when Mr Deng Xiaoping reappeared with his team - minus one or two crucial people. + It ws all so reminiscent of the years when Chairman Mao's rare meetings with foreign visitors were carefully analysed to see whether he was still in control of his faculties. + Mr Deng had a terrible twitch at the side of his mouth, and repeated himself three times trying to express his gratitude for the army's intervention against the 'counter-revolutionary rebellion. + Then the speech was taken over by the announcer, who did not stammer at all. + It is also like old times when people just cannot agree on whether it is remarkable that Mr Deng can make any sort of speech - and must therefore still be in control - or whether it was a pathetic performance perhaps designed to warn the Chinese people that it will not be too long before Mr Deng, like Chairman Mao, goes to 'meet Marx'. + With a full array of proud military uniforms in the audience, Mr Deng certainly seemed anxious to assure them that they had done tremendously well. + Our army is worthy as the People's Army and the iron Great Wall of the state,' he assured them. + Is this appeasement of an army whose mystifying maneouvres of the past week must indicate a very significant increase of political power? It may be, but we are still hearing the authentic Deng, who since 1980 has insisted that the People's Democratic Dictatorship (a classic Maoist concept now 40 years old) must be defended by the full weight of the state apparatus? + The fact remains that nothing that has been done in the past week goes beyond what is licensed by Mao's and Deng's belief that the state is entitled to use every means at its disposal to deal with 'counter-revolutionaries.' + The name-list accompanying the meeting on Friday contains some clues as to where the power-struggling is heading. The most significant feature was that the party elders were no longer given an honorary mention ahead of Mr Deng's team. + Though now depleted by the absence of the party secretary-general, Mr Zhao Ziyang, the Politburo's Standing Committee was up in front. + The three surviving members - the Prime Minister, Mr Li Peng, Mr Qiao Shi, Mr Yao Yilin - were now ahead of ex-President Li Xiannian and the elderly advisers, Mr Peng Zhen and Mr Bo Yibo. + The determination of mr Deng and his team, backed by President Yang Shangkun, to use force against the people may, in the narrow circle where power is apportioned, now give them the upper hand over those with more conscience. + We must wait to see whether the aged military marshals who three weeks ago assured the students that the army was not directed against them will now be obliged to express support for Mr Deng's 'important speech'. + Mr Deng also called on the Communist Party to 'think over the future as well as the past with a sober mind'. + Although at first sight this looks like a veiled apology, it is more likely to indicate another familiar theme from the past: a sober head is needed to spot and prevent those counter-revolutionaries who would destroy the Socialist state and the leadership of the Communist Party. + The evidence from the provinces suggests that, despite the formal messages of support to Mr Deng, many local governments will seek to put distance between themselves and Beijing's punitive behaviour. + The senior party figures in both Shanghai and Tianjin have been seeking to defuse the demonstrations with promises of careful examination of where the party has gone wrong. + Meanwhile, in Beijning the source of government authority is even narrower than usual, with two out of the five standing committee seats (Mr Zhao and the wavering Mr Hu Qili) effectively vacant. + The most likely successor to Mr Zhao as secretary-general is still the security chief, Mr Xiao Shi, who used Radio Beijing last week to make his bid public with a message of support addressed with emphasis to 'Mr Qiao and the standing committee'. + According to one worst-possible-case rumour, Mr Hu's place could be taken by the ex-general President Yang, who is generally credited with authorising the army's counter-kill tactics a week ago. + Mr Li's appearance last week, with a fascistic sweep of his arm, implies that he at least regards himself as the ultimate boss. Few believe that he is. + Those looking for continuity find some comfort in Mr Deng's reassertion of the principles of reform and the open door. + So he did, yet in the end he has shown himself unable to cope with the assault on traditional political values encouraged by his policies. + The demotion of the Vice-Premier, Mr Wan Li, from fourth to eighth place is noted without surprise. + Two weeks ago enormous hopes were being placed upon Mr Wan's return to convene the standing committee of the official National People's Congress and (presumably) sack Mr Li Peng. This now appears as an irrelevant legalism. + It is not even clear whether the party's own standing committee has met since its internal split a month ago which precipitated this crisis. + Meanwhile, some recall that Mao once called Deng an able person whom one could never trust. Around Beijing yesterday that was quite a popular verdict, with the rider that nothing will really change until he dies. + Who would have thought, said one citizen in the street, that the old man had so much life in him? + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +177 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 13, 1989 + +Tuesday Women: There's nothing to fear but fear itself - The victims of crime in the home + +BYLINE: By SALLY HUGHES + +LENGTH: 1216 words + + + Mrs Thatcher had us all worried about crime, back in 1979. That was one of the reasons for the election of a Conservative government. The Tories would restore law and order. Frightened, insecure people thought that tough punishments and more police would turn back the rising tide of crime. + Since then a lot of money has been spent: on rocketing police pay, community police, riot police, short sharp shock and other tough sentences. Much of this has led to the depressingly uniform conclusion (long recognised by researchers) that more policing does not necessarily reduce crime and that punitive deterrents don't deter. So then there was a belated flurry of Prime Minister-led crime prevention. It's hard to tell whether neighbourhood watch and better locks and bolts are really working across the board but the concept of home-as-for-tress has certainly caught on, sometimes with disastrous results. + Out on the streets there's less confidence. The resort to private patrolling and the uncritical welcome accorded to the Guardian Angels is an indicator of immense fears. In response we are now told that those fears are unfounded. Michael Grade has been recruited by the Home Office to help persuade us that the crime wave on which many a Conservatie candidate has coasted to victory is a mere swell, an illusion fostered by the media. + We have, it seems, nothing to fear but fear itself. Elderly ladies are not routinely beaten up by drug-crazed hoodlums, young mothers are rarely raped at knifepoint by insane strangers. And all that net-curtain twitching and new ironmongering may have paid off in the form of a small dip in the burglary rate. Which is an enormous fudge of what is really going on. It's women who are being told not to be sissy and afraid. And it's women who really suffer from crime and well-founded fear of crime. + We don't cause it, provoke it, do it or enforce the laws against it, except in a very small minority of cases. Yet most of the policy-making and money-spending on crime prevention and control is done without reference to us. When I wrote a publication on voluntary sector crime prevention I was impressed by the fact that outside the mainstream of lock-fitting schems, youth work and the like, the things that women are struggling to establish, like after-dark transport and a safer public environment are ignored or underfunded. And in spite of some improvements in law enforcement, the submerged iceberg of domestic violence is scarcely regarded, outside feminist circles, as a suitable case for remedy. + Women's relationship to crime is rooted not so much in their femininity as their economic status. Yes, there are misconceptions about crime. As the Home Secretary says, the vast majority of crimes are committed against property rather than people. But here you bump into another myth, less clearly explained. Affluent suburban homes are not the main targets for burglary. Your chances of being burgled are much higher if you live on a council estate or in older, rented inner-city property. + The same goes for most crime. Women, young and old and often poor, are concentrated in this type of housing. At least three million elderly women live alone (far more than men of the same age group) occupying a disproportionate amount of council and rund-down privately rented property. More than half of divorced and separated women heads of household, 44 per cent of widows and 31 per cent of single women are council tenants, against an average of 28 per cent all heads of households. Single women predominate in the private rented sector. + Poor areas suffer more in every way. Even their 'non-violent' crimes inflict enormus pain on victims. Graffiti, rubbish-dumping, vandalism, personal and racist abuse and harassment, often physically harmless and carried out by children, make life a misery for the vulnerable. + Few women trapped in poverty and bad housing own or drive cars compared with the rest of the population. This lack of security crosses class boundaries. One in ten women over 70 holds a driving licence (half of their male contemporaries do). A greater proportion of younger women drive but they are less likely than men of the same age to drive, own a car or to have primary use of the family vehicle. But while motor thefts figure in the statistics and official concern, there is little record of the fear and exposure of those without the security of a car. Some of the most horrific, if unusal, attacks on women occur on public transport or on the streets while they are making essential journeys. + The great outdoors has become a no-go area for women, particularly after dark and in urban areas. A recent television documentary found that nine out of ten women surveyed were afraid to go out at night. Rather than taking other measures to improve safety on the streets the police force has always favoured this voluntary curfew, urging women in times of specific threat, such as during the series of Yorkshire ripper murders, to stay at home. Now the Home Office would like us to be reassured that it is mostly young men (free and unafraid) who suffer violence. That takes no account of the lesser things - theft, harassment and the generally hostile atmosphere of street life after dark which many fear almost as much as physical assault. + Physical improvements to the environment have been hit by the cuts in local authority spending during the 1980s. Further privatisation of public housing and open scace will retard progress even more. Collective responsibilities have been supplanted by a private market for the protection of property belonging to the affluent and the commercial sector. The Home Office still dithers over widespread improvements in street lighting, event hough existing research, not to mention common sense, shows that it works. + In any case, women are not necessarly safe in their own homes. However remote the chances of being attacked or murdered on the street, they are greatly compounded at home. Sandra Horley has claimed on this page that 'woman abuse' accounts for 25 per cent of all recorded crime and various estimates put murder of women by their partners at between 20 and 30 per cent of all homicides (four-fifths of 'domestic' murder). The Home Office itself unwittingly pointed up the contradictions of its own platitudes when it announced in February that a third of rapes were committed by rerlatives or partners and a further third by acquaintances. So much less to fear than rape by a stranger in a back alley? + Violent domestic crime is one of the few areas which seems to benefit from tougher law enforcement. But the long-term prognosis is bound up with women's economic dependency. Sexual crimes have more to do with power and control than sexuality. And women cannot escape the threat without the ability to set up independent homes for themselves and their children. + Much of the impact of crime on women is invisible. Recognising it and putting it right would mean that those who benefit from the women's ghetto - chiefly government, employers and consumers who rely on their cheap or free labour - would have to pay for better living standards and a safer public environment. They might also face a more equal spread of the threat of crime. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +178 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 13, 1989 + +European Elections: Tories accused on pensions 'misery' - Britain trying to avoid parity with Europe, says Cook + +BYLINE: By MARTIN LINTON + +LENGTH: 616 words + + + Labour yesterday accused the Government of providing the lowest pensions in the European Economic Community and trying to block progress on the social charter which would force Britain to increase pensions and other benefits. + Mr Robin Cook, Labour's health spokesman, used EEC figures to show that Britain's basic state pension was only 46 per cent of average industrial pay against 79 per cent in France, 81 per cent in Italy, 82 per cent in Germany and 93 per cent in Netherlands. + He told the party's European press conference: 'Mrs Thatcher describes this as 'socialism through the back door'. I welcome her candid admission that socialism is about adequate pensions and that if Britain wants adequate pensions its electors must vote Labour. + 'They are anxious to block this proposal because they know they cannot compete with the rest of Europe on the provision of pensions which are lower in Britain than in any other country.' + Mr Cook said that Labour would increase the basic state pension immediately by Pounds 5 or Pounds 8 a week and would uprate it annually in line with earnings rather than prices with a bonus for people over the age of 75. A Labour government would also provide more flexible retirement for men and women so that they could retire at 60, continue working until 70 or combine part-time retirement with part-time work. + Mr Cook said Labour would phase out standing charges for fuel, review cold weather payments, restore free eye and dental tests, offer a Pounds 600 advance for funeral costs and guarantee concessionary fares on all public transport. +Mrs Barbara Castle, the former leader of Labour's MEPs, said that pensioners were treated more shabbily in Britain than any other European Community country and the social charter would help to lift them out of misery. + She accused the Government of blocking community proposals for a Euro-pass for all retired people which would entitle them to the same concessions on travel, museums and entertainments enjoyed by elderly people in the country in which they were travelling. + Voting at 16 is among the new policies proposed by the Democrats in a new 'white paper' on civil rights and liberties which will go to the party's Brighton conference in September. + They also propose that full British citizenship should be conferred on all British Dependent Territories' Citizens, which would give 3.25 million people in Hong Kong entitled to British passports an automatic right of abode in Britain. + The document would make discrimination against homosexuals and lesbians illegal, make it an offence to incite hatred on grounds of sexual orientation and introduce a common age of consent for heterosexuals and homosexuals. + It would also make the Metropolitan Police accountable to an elected police authority in London, enact a bill of rights, restore trade union rights at GCHQ in Cheltenham and introduce a statutory Press Council and right ot reply. + The white paper, launched at the Democrats' European election press conference yesterday was drawn up by a policy review team including Mrs Shirley Williams and the former Liberal chairmen, Mr Richard Holme and Mr Des Wilson. + The chairman of the working group, Mr Tim Clement-Jones, said: 'The last six months has seen the curtailment of many vital civil liberties: the right to silence in Northern Ireland, the Sinn Fein broadcasting ban, the imposition of a life-long duty of confidentiality on security service officers, the denial of a public interest defence in the Official Secrets Act, the rights of officials to gather poll-tax information and introduction of legalised burglary under the Security Service Act.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +179 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 13, 1989 + +Cash threat to future havens for elderly + +BYLINE: By ALAN DUNN + +LENGTH: 153 words + + + The only complete Georgian square left in Liverpool has been restored at a cost of Pounds 1.5 million by the local housing trust for use as sheltered housing for the elderly. + To mark the completion of Friendship House, in Falkner Square, Toxteth, 24 winning works from an anti-racist art exhibition will be displayed in the corridors of the 1830s terrace of nine houses, now converted into 31 flats for people from Chinese, Afro-Caribbean, and Muslim communities, many of them former seamen who settled in Liverpool. + Finance came from the Housing Corporation, plus Pounds 150,000 from the EEC and Pounds 20,000 from English Heritage, but such schemes are threatened by the 1988 Housing Act, which forces housing associations to seek private financing to supplement reduced corporation grants. Private money may not be forthcoming for areas such as Toxteth, where risks are high and capital values low. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +180 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 14, 1989 + +Young Guardian: Rogues who are giving folk a good name - In Glasgow, people are deserting Kylie for ceilidhs, the new faces of folk + +BYLINE: By DENIS CAMPBELL + +LENGTH: 576 words + + + If you thought folk music was all about grinning men with beards and beer bellies, singing the praises of whisky and Co. Kerry, think again. + Up in Glasgow, A Parcel Of Rogues - four teenage veterans of the flute, fiddle, tin whistle and bodhran - are revitalising the most misunderstood music around. Their irresistible tunes, jigs and reels are starting to win some of today's Kylie and Jason-fixated generation over to music most thought was reserved for their aunties and uncles. + 'The problem with folk music is its 'old' image,' says classically-trained flute and fiddle-player, Kevin McCarthy, who's 18. 'Young people think it's played by old men in old men's pubs and you don't go there because it's boring. It's meant to be music your mum or dad buys. We want to get away from that.' + 'At school, even among my pals, if I said I was playing in a folk group they'd say my group was crap before they'd even heard the music because they're not willing to listen,' chips in fiddler and tin whistle player, John McCusker, the youngest Rogue at 15 and a part-time student at Glasgow's prestigious Royal Academy of Music. + Bodhran player, Francis McDonald, who's also 18, cringes in agreement. 'I get embarrassed sometimes, saying I play in a folk group because you can see people imagining you wearing a kilt and eating haggis. What turns them off is the image.' + But A Parcel Of Rogues aren't too discouraged. They believe that many people's prejudices disappear when they actually hear their music and realise just how tuneful it is. 'You might be busking in Glasgow and a couple of your pals pass by. You know for a fact they don't buy Chieftains' records but they still say 'Oh that's really good,' they appreciate it,' says singer Pat Murphy, another 18-year-old, who wanted to be a professional footballer before the Rogues got together. + A Parcel Of Rogues formed three years ago when they were all pupils at Holy Cross High School in Hamilton, Lanarkshire. 'We're going into folk music with a younger mind,' explains Kevin. 'Too many folk bands simply copy what's gone before and do their version of well-known tunes. That way music gets left in a rut. We're trying to update it by mixing it with more modern stuff as well, like a bit of jazz.' + That the Rogues prefer to play Some Hae Meat, a 'new folk' song about Third World famine, to numbers like The Wild Rover shows that their horizons extend far beyond the traditional and their refreshing, innovative approach to folk has already earned them TV appearances, radio sessions and critical acclaim north of the border. They release their first record on a Scottish folk label in the autumn. + With their emphasis on traditional instruments like the bodhran (a handheld Irish drum), the Rogues are encouraged by the recent success of acoustic-based performers like Tracy Chapman, Tanita Tikaram and Enya. 'The fact that they've broken through shows that people are more openminded than ever,' says Francis. With more and more trendy young people in Glasgow starting to go to ceilidhs rather than 'proper' nightclubs, musical tastes are definitely changing. + John tells me about a session the Rogues did lately for Glasgow's Radio Clyde. 'The DJ announced us by saying 'Listen to the music, it's great. They're not what you expect folk musicians to look like.' What do you expect folk musicians to look like - Aran jumpers?' + Not any longer, thank goodness. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +181 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 15, 1989 + +Thursday Women (Open Space): Hang on in there, babe (2) + +BYLINE: From PETER FRANCIS-MULLINS + +LENGTH: 75 words + + + Suppose a man submitted to Guardian Women the converse of Jane Ellison's piece last week - a hatchet job on some middle-aged women who failed, in his view, to act their age. Suppose he sneered at lined faces and post-maternal figures. Terms like 'sagging' and 'menopausal' would doubtless appear. He might even call them raddled old women. How long would it take his manuscript to hit the bin? + Peter Francis-Mullins + London SE22. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +182 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 15, 1989 + +Meat research centre to close + +BYLINE: By DAVID HENCKE and TOM SHARRATT + +LENGTH: 170 words + + + A leading meat research laboratory at Bristol is to be closed with the loss of more than 120 scientists' jobs, the Government announced yesterday amid protests from MPs over the latest food poisoning outbreak. + Mr Kenneth Clarke, the Health Secretary, apologised for misleading MPs after denying on Tuesday that any research on botulism took place at the Institute of Food Research which will close next year. + Clostridium botulinum toxin type B has been found in a can of hazelnut puree made by Young's Fruits, of Folkestone, the firm thought to be linked with the current outbreak of botulism poisoning in Northwest England and North Wales, the Department of Health confirmed. The toxin may have been formed because of a processing fault. + The number of suspected cases rose to 20 yesterday with the admission of two elderly women to hospital at Blackpool. The women, aged 72 and 74 were said to be stable. A 21-year-old man from Newton-le-Willows has been admitted to Walton Hospital at Liverpool. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +183 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 16, 1989 + +The Day in Politics: Retirement age choice would ensure equality + +BYLINE: By DAVID HENCKE, Westminster Correspondent + +LENGTH: 333 words + + + Men and women should be able to choose when to retire between the agest of 60 and 70, with full pensions paid to both sexes at the age of 63, an influential House of Lords Select Committee recommends today. + The proposals, which would cost taxpayers an additional Pounds 700 million a year, follow an investigation into how Britain should implement an EEC draft directive demanding equal treatment on social security for men and women. + The directive is being negotiated between Britain and its European partners with the aim of introducing equal rights for social security claimants and pensioners during the next decade. + The House of Lords committee considered a common retirement age at 60 at a cost of Pounds 3 billion or raising it to 65 for women, saving taxpayers Pounds 500 million a year. It opted for a compromise solution of a choice with pensions paid at 63. + To protect women's existing pension rates, the peers suggest that a ten year transitional period, allowing women to retire on full pension at 60 after the changes would be implemented. + Peers warn that the growing number of elderly people will need to work longer in the next century because of labour market shortages. Present trends show a sharp decline in the number of men working beyond 60 - from 82.0 per cent in 1971 to 54.6 per cent in 1987. + The committee calls for an end to discrimination in widow's benefits. Widows and widowers should receive equal payments, even if the level of benefits has to be scaled down, it says. + But peers reject proposals under the EEC directive for child benefit to be paid either to the father or mother. This will complicate procedures for paying the benefit, they say, and Britain should be allowed to keep its own system. + Peers also want the directive to include equal treatment for part-time workers. + Equal Treatment for Men and Women in Pensions and other Benefits. House of Lords Select Committee on the European Communities. HMSOI Pounds 13.90. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +184 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 16, 1989 + +Important day for people who count + +BYLINE: By ERLEND CLOUSTON + +LENGTH: 552 words + + + PC 5138 was slumped, jacketless and perspiring, on a bench in the gymnasium of Linden Street primary school, Denton. He was keeping a sharp eye on the eight polling booths huddled nervously in the middle fo the cool parquet. If he blinked he was liable to miss the spectacle of the great British public exercising its democratic right to send someone it has never met to a place it doesn't care much for. + In 1984 a miserable 30 per cent of Greater Manchester East Euro-constituents turned out for an election that packed Labour 'oceanologist' Glyn Ford off to Strasbourg. Yesterday party activists, sizzling in the little shade thrown off by Linden Street's sleek modern design, were hopeful that the people might put on a better show this time. + 'I would say it is looking brighter than the local elections at least,' said Margaret Burns, clad in scarlet T-shirt and coral toe-nail varnish and crouched on a grey plastic chair borrowed from class three. + As proof, Mrs Bramah was produced. Her 22-year-old son Tony had insisted on voting for Labour at 7.05 am, just three hours before he had his tonsils whipped out at Manchester Royal Infirmary. By 11.00 however voters were still shamelessly turning up at the rate of only one every three minutes. + Ms Burns and her colleague Joe ('I'm not from round here, but I'm a union man.') were employed in 'number-snatching'. 'We see sho's voted and who hasn't. Maybe in the evening we'll go round knocking on doors.' They were allowed to desert their posts in the afternoon to hand out red balloons in Denton market. + The Conservatives had a number snatcher out as well. Twelve-year-old Carol White glared out of a blue, padded chair. 'I'm not really political,' she admitted, adjusting her Lager Lout T-shirt. 'The woman across the road asked me if I wanted to do it. They pay Pounds 5 and your dinner and your tea.' The Labour team looked slightly superior. 'We don't use children if we can help it,' whispered Margaret. 'They usually start-messing about, especially if there's two of them.' + The weather was definitely in the oceanologist's favour. Denton, an ancient community subsumed by eastern Manchester, used to be the hat-making centre of the universe because its extraordinarily foul climate preserved felt longer. + 'Terrible conditions, they were,' said Joe, filling in the lengthy time between number snatches. 'All their hands were shrivelled with arthritis from working in steam and water.' + By early afternoon Labour cars were disgorging old age pensioners by the ton. Of Tory, Democrat and the Green machines there was no sign. + 'They're not fighting for our votes any more,' complained three Conservative Deltonians alighting from an electric blue Honda saloon. Fred and Gwen had picked up Elsie of their own accord. 'Otherwise it would have been a vote wasted, wouldn't it?' + None of the Labour voters appeared interested in Euro-issues. Crosses were put against Mr Ford's name 'to get rid of HER' or 'because my husband was Labour.' Nobody had been converted by campaign literature or a meeting. + PC 5138 was taking it all very seriously, however. Had any of Denton's elderly electorate been giving him any trouble inside? 'I am not allowed to tell you,' he said, gravely. Democracy had its limits, after all. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +185 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 17, 1989 + +Diary: Ambushed in streets of the sneaky pun + +BYLINE: By JULIAN BARNES + +LENGTH: 1225 words + + + Yesterday two pensioners were sentenced for an armed raid last December on an Abbey National office in Hayes, Middlesex. It was one of those comic-pathetic cases where real danger (a loaded Walther automatic) vies with real incompetence (looking up bare-faced at the security camera). What snagged by attention, though, was not so much the babbling drama as the address of the elderly couple: Goldsmith Avenue, Acton W3. They can't live there, I thought. That's where I used to live; that's were I spent the first 10 years of my life. What the hell's happened to Acton? + I hadn't been back in 30 years to the half-dozen streets where my childhood was played out: a mixture of apathy and superstition. Now I have myself a professional reason to return. I have a novel out this week, and am disguising anxiety by fretting about the next book instead. It's a toss-up, I think, between the Obsessive Love novel and the London novel - unless it turns out that one fits inside the other, as with those recipes where you stuff a duck into a goose and cook them together. But where to begin with London? Well, why not where I began, arriving in my Moses basket from Leicester aged x weeks. + The problem with looking back isn't so much sentimentality as reverse sentimentality: making it all as clogs-and-blacking-factory as you can. In my memories I have pictured Acton as a place of narrow streets and mean houses where the darkness was bituminous, the municipal pig-bins out of Dante, the street dangers Bronxian. In fact, the only moment of deep fear I can locate in my first 10 years came when a boy called Kelly stepped out from behind a tree in Goldsmith Avenue, stuck something into the small of my back, and snarled: 'Don't move or I'll plug you.' + I was terrified for several elastic minutes before he let me go. As I fled, I looked back and saw that he was holding in his hand a three-pin 15-amp electric plug. My first introduction not just to fear, but also to wordplay. No wonder I distrust puns as cheap, sneaky things. + The walk from Acton main line revealed bursts of gentrification: carriage lamps, entryphones, ruched blinds like baggy knickers, and Neighbourhood Watch badges (in my day all we had in the windows were Job Done stickers to deter Scouts). But Goldsmith Avenue itself seemed less tampered with, less skip-happy. It also didn't confirm my recollections: the street was wider, lighter, greener, the houses were more handsome. I hadn't lived in a mean semi after all, but in one half of a sturdy Edwardian red-brick villa. I approached number 55 warily, alert for an ambush of memories. + The front garden had been concreted into a car-stand; the door had been stripped and now sported an antique letter-box saying LETTERS (were postmen very thick; what else might they put through the flap?). I half-expected to be disbelieved - 'Another burglar, Mum' - and to my surprise I was allowed to look around. That piece of leaded window by the lounge door, which I'd smashed by throwing a shoe at my brother, was now reeded glass; but the pretty fret-worked banisters and the patterned tile floor were still intact. I hopefully inspected the room in which I'd first slept, and recognised the period '55' in coloured glass above the front door; but in 20 minutes nothing stirred. I felt more like a house-buyer than a revenant. + The Polish lady who lives there told me the OAP gangsters had run a bed-and-breakfast a few doors away, causing a lot of late-night minicab traffic; their arrest had restored quiet to the street. Her small son Mark, who now sleeps in my bedroom waved me goodbye with the TV channel-changer. 'When I lived here we didn't have television,' I told him pompously. 'We had to go over the road to watch the Coronation'. + I left Goldsmith Avenue and turned along Shakespeare Road, crossing Milton Road, Cowper Road, Myrtle Road, and Spencer Road (I think Myrtle is the odd one out). I walked this poetic way to school every day: the tuck shop is now the Shakespeare Superstore (Grocerty and off Licence). Did any sly literary imprinting take place? It's possible. After all, in another part of Acton in the Fifties the infant Peter Ackroyd was clutching his teddy; or, more likely, precociously mugging up the works of Chatterton. Together we form the Acton school of fiction. + I walked around for a bit then escaped with a certain relief: no forgotten monsters had emerged. + Doubtless I have concreted over bits of my infancy as our front garden has been concreted over; but if the best you can hope for from childhood is to escape without too much damage, perhaps the same also goes for your memories of childhood. So no wires were tripped and the London novel didn't get a useful bump-start; now we're back on Obsessive Love. In general, though, beginning a novel isn't difficult; at least, compared to finishing a novel, isn't difficult; at least, compared to publishing a novel. + It's not so much fear of bad reviews, but something wider and more nugatory: fear of being exposed, fingered, pinned down; fear of getting caught out in some piercing manner. Still, I reflect, as I await publication day, it's only a book; and I console myself with an example of Getting Caught Out in a much more final and spectacular way. + Simon Schama's enthralling Citizens includes the story of Condorcet, one of the many stirrers of the French Revolution who were later engulfed by it. In 1794 he escaped from house-arrest in Paris and walked to Clamart where, feeling hungry, he went into an inn and caarefully ordered a modest, sansculottish omelett. 'How many eggs?' asked the patronne, to which the philosopher and marquis, unfamiliar with such culinary cross-examination, replied: 'A dozen.' Whereupon he was promptly rearrested; he died in his cell, possibly from poison. Now that's what I call Getting Caught Out. + The final paragraph of a Diary is habitually reserved for an old buffer's grouse. The ne plus ultra of this tradition was Anthony Howard's grave complaint in the New Statesman Diary some years ago that single-edged razor blades had become unobtainable in this country. His protest had little effect chez Gillette, I'm afraid; though it did mean that any Statesman employee who went to the States was expected to return with several dozen packets of blades to coddle the editor's cheek. + My own buffer's grouse is about the televising of cricket. This season has brought the introduction of double-ended coverage, an Australian perversion which means that you are always given the shot from behind the bowler's arm. The batsman's vision of approaching menace is therefore sactificed; worse, viewers lose the important sense of watching the match from a particular spot in the ground. + So that's TV cricket ruined. And soon the radio ball-by-ball commentary is to be discontinued. And in any case,you can't find when the cricket is on the TV and radio any more after the most insulting pro-advertiser, anti-consumer redesign of the Radio Times in world history. Which means that in future if you want to experience cricket, you'll jolly well have to go along to a game in person and actually sit there. In which case, perhaps all's for the best after all. + Julian Barnes's novel, A History of the world in 10 1/2 Chapters, published by Jonathan Cape, June 22. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +186 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 19, 1989 + +Eyewitness: Liberty's torch lifts in defiance and mourning + +LENGTH: 825 words + + + + By ED VULLIAMY + HONG KONG - It was one of Hong Kong's most emotionally charged moments of proximity to the rebellion and subsequent state barbarism to the north, in China. + A monumental replica of the Statue of Liberty, modelled on the one smashed in Tiananmen Square, yesterday raised her torch again. This time it was across Hong Kong Harbour, looking north towards the frontier and Beijing, on a stretch of green in Victoria Park bordered by towering offices, banks and blocks. + Grandiose in glistening white plaster, her gaze classically confident, she rose high above the thousands who had converged through the bustle of Sunday shopping for a rally to mark her unveiling. + They sat under an impenitent sun in the humid heat. It was a family day out; they took photographs of each other with Freedom's torch as a backdrop, they played a bit of badminton or mah jong by the refreshment tent, then they gathered under the monument. + They were mainly young, but in the shade of the tropical trees the elderly sat, also in black armbands, drinking sugarcane juice from cartons, or Coke through straws. + The students in the field wore the Benettonised gear that Hong Kong's youth cherises - splattered with T-shirts showing the face of Chai Ling, the 23-year-old Bejing underground leader. Their elders under the trees wore naked, wrinkled chests and tradition straw hats, and perhaps carried little tropical birds with them in ornate cages. + The talk in Hong Kong this week has been of anxiety, of 1997 and of obsure body-swering by the British government. But yesterday, all that was submerged beneath a curious bittersweet mix of mourning and defiance directed at, and for consumption in, Beijing rather than Whitehall. + A speaker said that a hundred lived for every student who died, and that this statue now stood for the one that had fallen. + At a cue from the speaker's platform and a single, all-too-familiar chord from the PA system, the crowd rose and moved forward like a foller-coaster. The chord was the opening of the Song For Freedom. It has been ubiquitous in Hong Kong this weekend - whistled by shoeshine boys and waitress at the dim sum tables in sweaty back street. + The anthem was written and first peerformed by a Band-Aid-style umbrella of Hong Kong rock and pop stars. It was exported north, where it was eagerly adopted in Tiananmen Square before the massacre. + 'Love, love the people; Fight, fight for freedom,' it goes. Yesterday, they pushed their hands into the air with the peace/victory sign raised, and coached grandparents and little children as they sang along. + The sound rose, past the statue's gaze and the hugh dragonflies which hovered, catching the merciful breeze blowing north across the harbour. + The song was born four weeks ago when almost every rock entertainer across the Pacific edge came to Hong Kong to join 300,000 people for a stadium concert in solidarity with the students occupying Tiananmen Square. + The concert organiser was Hong Kong's leading (radical, although highly successful) film producer, Johnny Shum. He has not touched movies for four weeks, preferring to become an important though clandestine bridge between the Hong kong movement and the revolution on the mainland. + Johnny, who was in Beijing until the day before the massacre, talked about the statue the night before its unveiling over a few drinks in a few clubs. + 'It is a statue of freedom and it is the statue of our movement. It got mixed up with the American Statue of Liberty, which is not what they wanted at all. this is a statue of freedom for the Chinese people, and for all people.' + As they dispersed yesterday, a second rally organised by leftwing students began. It attracted about 800. + Copies of the Internationale were distributed and a man in a black T-shirt with a clenched fist on it explained some amendments made in Tiananmen Square. 'The Internationale unites the human race' has become 'The Internationale is for democracy freedom and equality'. + 'These ae ideas which came from the French Revolution, but under the capitalism that followed there was still oppression,' he told the cheering crowd. 'Then they came again in communism, but still there is oppression again.' + The crowd stood silent through a chilling theatrical re-enactment of the massacre in Beijing, complete with screams, a drumroll and the laughter of soldiers as they covered bodies in red satin. + One speaker said people in Hong Kong should fight for the right of abode in Britain. Another denounced him, saying: 'We are Chinese and we must stay and fight them here.' + Harry and Mabel Chan, who work in an export company and a jewellery shop respectively, had sauntered over. 'It is so different now,' said Harry. 'Maybe there is now some hope for China, so we should stay with them until they win. But maybe there is now no hope in China, and so we should go.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +187 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 20, 1989 + +Ageing peasant generals await next challenge from children of reform: Beijing returns to customary surliness and lies which have become survival skills these past 40 years + +BYLINE: By JASPER BECKER + +LENGTH: 1079 words + + + Beijing is back to what it was. The evasive lies, the cagey suspicion with which everyone answers the phone, or the surly sloth with which work is done once again betray the suppressed anger of a resentful and alienated people. + 'We don't need to show you the new regulations. I have told you what they are,' an official at the customs office said last week when I asked for written evidence of taxes totalling Pounds 20,000 on the import of a nine-year-old car. + The anti-corruption campaign of a few months ago has been forgotten and cadres are feastiing each other in expensive restuarants again. + But the heroism and humanity that people in Beijing showed in the weeks leading up to June 3, when they shook off their fear, showed how wrong it was to assume, as I did when I first arrived here four years ago, that Beijingers are simply an unpleasant lot + Now the pervasive fear is there again and the walls, physical and mental, which the Chinese learn to erect to protect themselves against their arbitrary and callous masters. + The rift between the rulers and the ruled has been exposed in a way not seen for 40 years, and while people are back at work, little work is being done. + 'Why should I take you there if you don't know the address?' snarled a taxi driver the other day. 'Everyone is on a sort of go slow, as a protest. Why should we work?' another explained later. + The stream of nauseating propaganda since June 3 has added few new facts to events behind the bloodbath, but it does suggest that Mr Deng Xiaoping and the other octogenarians are genuinely worried about the threat of 'bourgeois liberalism'. + What passes for a bourgeoisie in China has for the first time led an effective challange to the power of the largely peasant generals who conquered China 40 years ago. + The students had demanded the right to question the authority of a group of old men who have never been called to account for their mistakes. + Ten years of reforms produced in China the beginnings of a middle class of professionals, intellectuals, well-to-do peasants, private entreprenuers, and the post-Cultural Revolution generation who saw what was happening outside China and wanted the same. + They are a drop in the ocean of China's vast population and found in and around the main cities where they are exposed to foreign influences and enjoy growing material independence. + Faced with their challange, China's gerontocracy feels that only their children can be trusted to succeed them, and it was no coincidence that President Yang Shangkun's nephew led the bloody assault on Tiananmen and it was planned by his brother. + The treat posed by this new class is not just to the leaders but to their followers in the party and bureaucracy who run the inefficient, and often corrupt, state sector. + The reforms which Mr Zhao Ziyang wanted to push forward - bankruptcy laws, stocks and shares, labour and capital markets, a civil service appointed not by personal recommendation but through exams - posed a direct threat to the vested interests of this bureaucracy. + Many were already losing out in the competition for raw materials between the state and non-state industries and would only do worse in the future. + The economic competition also made many of these staterun corporations accountable for the first time, forced to explain why a silk factory in Shanghai had to close while another collectively run in the countryside was thriving. + The bands of motorcycles which zoomed around Beijing at the height of the student demonstrations and the photocopiers and fax machines at the disposal of the protesters bears witness to the new and independent wealth of some sections of the population. + The wealth of the private and collective sector has begun to buy political influence, too, and there have been heated debates within the party as to whether millionaires ought to be allowed to join the party. + Last year, Mr Zhao had begun introducing multi-candidate elections for posts such as deputy provincial governor or mayor, which naturally alienated many of the losers. + A degree, however limited, of economic and political competition and the concern to root out corruption, requires a freer press. This was particularly regarded with fear by the party's old guard and their hangers-on used to acting in secrecy and without question. + Not only could their decisions and the corruption that permeates the party to open to scrutiny but some embarrassing questions could be asked about the past. + The history of much of the party's 40 years in power remains taboo, and many of the octogenerians now back in power have blood on their hands going back many years. All of them are guilty of failing to prevent the Great Leap Forward which cost upwards of 20 million lives or the Cultural Revolution to mention only the most obvious 'mistakes'. + As long as these men remain alive, China will not be ready to re-evaluate its past in the way that Hungary or the Soviet Union are doing now. + The party's leadership remains accountable only to itself. By design or accident, they can still rely on the obedience of the majority of Chinese, semi-literate peasants cut off from the rest of the world and steeped in a tradition of unquestioning loyalty to the state. + Most peasants are likely to accept the government's version of the events in Beijing and Maoism has taught them to be distrustful of intellectuals. + Even by Third World standards. China's record in education is appalling and the reforms have done little to reverse that. The democratic reforms in South Korea, with a similar autocratic political heritage, were propelled by the huge 'middle class' which had sprung up as a result of a massive investment in education. + Many Chinese intellectuals argue that even if the economic crisis worsened sufficiently to provoke a peasant uprising, it would only lead to another form of dictatorship, just like the Communist Party it would replace. + The support the educated urbanites need to successfully change China's political culture will come only with an education system that enables more than a small minority to think for themselves. In the meantime, China's intelligentsia will continue to be the victim of purges and campaigns as they have been for four decades. + Award-winning television reporter Kate Adie, aged 43, flew home from China yesterday to become the BBC's chief news correspondent. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +188 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 21, 1989 + +Young Guardian (Outloud): Deep in Soviet personal space + +BYLINE: By BENJAMIN STEELE + +LENGTH: 332 words + + + Soviet families seem to have a very strong life together. My friends say they have too much. They spend a great deal of time in close contact since no Soviet family has its own house. Instead they live in flats which are usually small. + Many people have grandparents living with them. Because of the severe winters and because even in summer there is less to do outside in the evening they stay at home a lot. + My best friend, Borril, lives with his parents and brother in a two room flat. Both his parents work; his mother is a lecturer at Moscow University and his father is a skilled worker in a nearby factory. His mother is usually at home when he gets back from school and his father gets home at about 5 o'clock. + Because of this close environment adolescence can be very difficult. Another friend of mine, Vadim, spends most of his time on the streets drinking. He says that the nicest time of the day is very early in the morning before anybody else is up. + The school programme does not allow for many family days because there is school even on Saturday. But there are a lot of holidays, like Soviet Army Day or International Woman's Day when the parks are full of families. On these days the few remaining old men parade around displaying their war medals while the old women look on. + Most old women live with their grown-up children because of the shortage of flats and because they are expected to move in if their husbands have died. These old ladies are an integral part of the Soviet Union. They keep the country going during winter when they are out in force clearing the streets of snow and grit. + They all live through Stalin and have had a terrible life. Just three months ago an old lady jumped out of a fourth floor window of the building directly opposite my school in an attempt to commit suicide. Amazingly she survived unhurt. The miserable pension they receive is only 60 roubles, or Pounds 50 a month, so most of them are forced to work. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +189 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 21, 1989 + +Young Guardian (Input): Rock's living death legends + +BYLINE: By SEAN FRENCH + +LENGTH: 708 words + + + It is sad that one of the first disconcerting signs of growing old is when policemen start looking younger than you do. However, a far more comforting aspect of my life as I've grown older has been that the top rock stars have never started looking younger than me. They are as many years older today as they've ever been. + Back in 1974, when I was exactly half the age I am now, who were the top names in the rock world? Pink Floyd were playing in large stadiums. Genesis, David Bowie and Brian Ferry were beginning to make names for themselves. Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen had just produced their first albums. + Other more established names were Steve Winwood (who had just gone solo), Randy Newman and Van Morrison. Of the older generation, Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan were emerging from years of seclusion. The Who and The Rolling Stones were undertaking massive world tours while people ironically quoted Pete Townshend's line about hoping he died before he got old. + Paul McCartney was struggling to establish himself with his new group Wings and escape from the shadow of the Beatles. Meanwhile, Cliff Richard was soldiering on and on. + So what has changed? In the last couple of weeks Cliff Richard has celebrated his millionth single, or whatever it is. Paul McCartney has released a new album in which, according to who you read, he is either a) finally escaping from the Beatles' spell or b) finally recapturing the Beatles magic (delete where applicable). The Who have just set off on yet another reunion tour of the United States, for which they will earn a rumoured Pounds 10 million. + The punk revolution has come and gone, virtually as if it had never happened, while the aged rockers that it was designed to replace are still firmly in place. The normal journalistic cliche would be to talk about eternal youth but eternal youth was scarcely the appropriate term to describe the wrinklies who were spied tottering down the aisle to celebrate the wedding of Bill Wyman and Mandy Smith the other week. They looked more like poorly preserved first world war veterans than rebels and rock legends. + Some, like Van Morrison and Randy Newman, have remained creative. But most of them - The Rolling Stones, The Who, McCartney, Dylan - haven't recorded a single song in the last decade that has added a jot to their reputations. Instead, they are resuscitated every couple of years and trundled out on to the road to perform their ever more ancient greatest hits. A form of music that was invented as a form of youthful rebellion has now become dominated by a collection of rich middle-aged men. + A lot of this has to do with the crass conservatism of the record industry. But much of it is simply related to demography (the science of populations). The explosive growth of the pop industry in the sixties happened because of the baby boom in the optimistic post-war years in England and the United States. In the years around 1950 there were simply far more babies born and this extra-large cohort exercised huge cultural influence as it grew older because of its buying power. + In its early teens it liked the Beatles, in its late teens flower power, in its twenties its tastes mellowed. Now it's in middle age and it's into nostalgia. The baby boomers are buying compact discs of the music they used to like when they were younger. In fact it could be argued that it was only conceivable for a medium as expensive as the compact disc to be invented once the baby boomers had become middle-aged and prosperous. + Furthermore the baby boomers have now grown up and occupied the Establishment, which is yet another reason why it's virtually impossible to switch on the TV without seeing an interview with Paul McCartney or Pete Townshend. + The baby boomers are one of the most spoiled generations in human history. Through their economic clout they've been able to foist their own taste on everyone else and as a result we'll probably all live to see Roger Daltrey and Mick Jagger hobbling around the world's stages on walking frames. + Pete Townshend didn't die before he got and it looks like we're going to have to wait for his generation to get old and die before other generations can get a look in. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +190 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 21, 1989 + +Special Report on Social Services in London (1): Chronic case of a hole in the heart - The staff shortage crisis hitting London's social services + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE + +LENGTH: 1260 words + + + Social Services in London seem to be in permanent crisis. Offices are closed to the public, cases go unallocated to social workers and residential homes are kept going by expensive temporary agency staff. As one survey put it, quoting a hardpressed director of social services in one of the 32 London boroughs, services in the capital have been giving the appearance of imploding. + The essential problem is staff shortage. Although problems are by no means unique to London, the boroughs in general do face an unparalleled combination of high vacancy rates and high turnover. + A study published last week found that the vacancy rate for 'field', or non-residential, social workers was running at 16.4 per cent in Greater London and that 20.1 per cent left jobs in the course of a year. David Jones, an assistant director of social services in Haringey, north London, says: 'Our services are very much geared to respond to crises and the heavy, dramatic, statutory end of the work. That unfortunately means that some other client groups, particularly those with physical disabilities and elderly people, get even less priority than they tend to normally in a social services department.' + The recent focus has been on child abuse work. Last year, at the height of the Cleveland affair, a report by the Government's Social Services Inspectorate identified more than 600 London children who were registered as at risk of abuse or having been abused, but who could not be allocated to a social worker. Only 14 boroughs were found to have no unallocated cases; in the others the proportion unallocated ran as high as one in three. The inspectorate concluded: 'Where there are large numbers of such cases with very limited oversight, they must represent situations of considerable risk to the children involved.' + If the picture has been this bad in respect of child abuse, what price the rest of the social services workload? Overall, the inspectorate said, those boroughs unable to keep abreast of demand had no fewer than 4,630 unallocated cases of all kinds. Small wonder that a more recent study commissioned for Nalgo, the main trade union for social services staff, found that workers in London were feeling a backlash. + The study, carried out by researchers at Southampton University, looked at conditions in six representative social services departments in Britain, including one London borough. None was named. Compared to the average, London workers reported suffering high levels of stress, physical violence, threats and abuse. Yet the study also suggested that conditions in the borough were above average in many respects, notably training, supervision and facilities. + Moreover, it is clear that the 'London effect' is not as bad as it was a year or two ago and, then as now, is worse in some boroughs than others. Mervyn Eastman, deputy social services director in Enfield, north London, says: 'We have had difficulties, but I would not say we have had major problems compared to other boroughs. Social workers do cover for each other quite well, so in terms of crisis work, dealing with emergencies, we do cope. It's the longterm, more developmental work which we are not able to get a handle on.' + Even so, Enfield does share London-wide shortages of some specialist staff, such as mental health workers and occupational therapists - in short supply nationally and chronically so in some parts of the capital. + Last week's study, by the Association of Directors of Social Services (ADSS) and the Local Authorities Conditions of Service Advisory Board, calculated a vacancy rate of 21.1 per cent for full-time occupational therapists in Greater London. Their turnover rate was put at 23.3 per cent. In Hammersmith and Fulham there is a 30 per cent vacancy rate for occupational therapists, or rehabilitation officers, who visit elderly and disabled people in their homes to assess their case needs or help with exercises. + Hammersmith's deputy director of social services, Simon White, says: 'It's an essential part of community care and ensures that people are not relapsing into bedridden dependency at home. As long as we have these shortages, it just means longer waiting lists.' + A previous ADSS survey, carried out exclusively in London and published last year, identified five ways in which staff shortages were affecting service delivery: + Closures, emergency-only duty systems, slower responses, unallocated cases. The ADSS said: 'As a means of limiting demand, these strategies undoubtedly work. Serious concern must be expressed, however, that this is a very crude method that leaves the potential for cases of serious risk .. not being handled.' + Higher caseloads of higher-priority cases. The association said: 'This cannot go unchecked, however, before this tends to the remaining workforce being put under intolerable stress, increasing the likelihood of errors and, importantly, of staff leaving - thus creating a vicious downward spiral.' + Reduced supervision, with social workers having to act above their grade. This, the ADSS warned, increased potential for errors in unsupervised work, heightened stress among staff and left gaps in the routine caseloads of social workers acting above their grade. + Frozen places in residential homes and temporary closures. 'Apart from being an effective use of scarce resources, this is delaying service to . the most dependent and frail in our society,' the association warned. + Use of temporary agency staff. This is often the only way to keep residential homes open but, the ADSS said, it is a cause of poor care standards and inefficient in expenditure terms. + Although charges vary, an agency worker costs a borough about 20 per cent more than a staff member. But the cost in respect of quality of care is incalculable. Mr White, dealing with 20-25 per cent vacancy rates among residential workers in Hammersmith, says: 'In residential work, continuity of staff is very important in making these institutions feel more like home. If there is always a different person coming in every night, the personal relationship between the staff and residents is not there in the same way and the outcome is not really satisfactory.' + The premium costs of agency staff have aggravated financial problems in boroughs which have been rate-capped. In Haringey - which has vacancy rates of 35 per cent among residential staff, 30 per cent among occupational therapists and 19 per cent among field social workers - spending cuts have recently included the scrapping of the social services department's separate recruitment advertising budget. Advertisements are now paid for out of the salaries budget. + Mr Jones, at Haringey, says that while the picture is slowly improving - thanks, in part, to moves by Haringey, in common with other boroughs, to offer higher basic pay rates to social workers - nobody can really gauge the full effects of the continuing shortages. 'Take today. I was involved in somebody's application for a telephone. In a case like that, when staff are not available to take a lot of details, the assumption tends to be made that it's not that urgent or that the person has a network of support. + 'We then have absolutely no idea whether it's a crisis situation unless other agencies or people who know the ropes tell us it is a crisis, or there is a crisis just round the corner. Those that don't know how to work the system are simply not able to articulate their needs and, I am afraid, they suffer as a consequence.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +191 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 21, 1989 + +The Day in Politics in Brief + +LENGTH: 452 words + + + Labour was defeated in an attempt to impose on the Scottish Secretary a statutory duty not to discriminate in favour of schools which opt out of local education authority control. The move by Mr Dennis Canavan (Lab. Falkirk W) was lost by 266 votes to 193 (Government majority 73) at report stage of the Self Governing Schools (Scotland) Bill. Mr Canavan believed that if parents saw extra funds being channelled to schools which opted out it would have a 'snowball effect' on applications for self-governing status. + * * * + The Prime Minister has decided that three items of ivory and silver jewellery she received as gifts during her visit to Zimbabwe earlier this year should be retained by Customs and Excise in view of the ban on ivory imports announced on June 9. + * * * + Water workers will be offered free shares worth around Pounds 70 at the privatisation offer price, plus about Pounds 2 worth of shares for every year of service, Mr Michael Howard, the water minister, announced. They will also be offered two free shares up to a maximum value of Pounds 400 for each one bought at the full offer price, and a 10 per cent discount on up to Pounds 2,350 worth of additional shares. Employees will be given priority in applications for further shares up to a Pounds 12,000 limit. + * * * + A Bill to make dog owners contribute to the cost of cleaning parks and pavements was given a first reading in the Commons. Mrs Theresa Gorman (C. Billericay) said dog owners should have to give details of their dogs on poll tax registration forms. + * * * + Emergency shutdown valves must be fitted on pipelines rising to offshore oil and gas platforms under regulations laid before Parliament by the Energy Secretary, Mr Cecil Parkinson, as part of the Government's response to the Piper Alpha disaster. + * * * + The Licensing (Amendment) Bill allowing clubs to serve alcohol on Sundays during the same hours as pubs was given an unopposed third reading in the Lords and now goes to the Commons. + * * * TODAY IN PARLIAMENT + House of Commons: Trade and Industry questions; debate on Opposition motion 'food safety, research and the nation's health'; Local Government Bill, third reading; motions on Scottish Social Security and Community Charges regulations. + House of Lords: Debate on problems facing the government and people of Hong Kong; debate on improving child care facilities, the care of the elderly and steps to enable more women to join the workforce. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +192 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 22, 1989 + +Leading Article: Back off the burner + +LENGTH: 548 words + + + Not all organisational problems are like Rubik's cube. Some do not have a perfect solution. There is no perfect solution, as Sir Roy Griffiths told ministers, to the crucial gaps in the network of different services provided for the elderly, mentally ill and mentally handicapped, but Sir Roy's report came with the best answer: major responsibility must rest with local social service departments. This was too much for a Prime Minister pathologically opposed to giving local councils more reponsibility. Undaunted by the waste exposed by the Audit Commission in the Pounds 6 billion services, she has spent the 15 months since the Griffiths report was published searching for some alternative answer. For 15 months all changes to community care have been blocked. The deadlock meant even the Government's white paper on the health service could not refer to the issue because yeat another ministerial review had been set up to examine the problem. Tina, however. Belatedly, Mrs Thatcher has accepted Griffiths. The green light was given this week by a Cabinet committee she chairs. + Full details aren't available yet, but at last work can start on substituting concrete policies for political rhetoric. Community care has been debated for 30 years but it remains under-developed, unco-ordinated and under-funded. Responsibility is divided between multiple agencies - health authorities, housing departments, social services, private residential homes and voluntary organisations. Unintentional policies have often had a bigger impact than the intentional. The social security system's open-ended commitment to people in residential homes has seen the subsidy to private homes rise from Pounds 18 million to almost Pounds 1,000 million in less than a decade. Meanwhile, intentional policies, like the 35,000 reduction in the number of NHS beds for the mentally ill, mentally handicapped and elderly, have not been matched by a commensurate increase in community facilities. The number of extra day care places has only increased by 9,000. + Now Griffiths can be given a chance. Social service departments will be expected to draw up plans for their areas. Around 1.5 million people already receive some form of help; but these numbers will leap in the next decade as the numbers over 85 increase by 50 per cent. The main idea is not to turn councils into monopoly providers but, instead, to encourage councils to purchase the most cost-effective care for clients from competing suppliers in the private, voluntary and public sectors. All three forms of residential care would be placed on an equal footing with no public finance available - as it is at present - without 'an assesment of need.' Thus there should be more incentive to keep people in their homes, supported by domiciliary services, instead of in more expensive but less human institutional care. + None of this, presumably, was opposed by the Prime Minister. It was the other parts of Griffiths, equally vital, which will have made her jib. It will be important to see they are in the package too: the recognition that local networks cannot be managed from Whitehall but must be left to local managers; and the even more urgent need to ensure there are adequate resources to match the new responsibilities. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +193 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 24, 1989 + +Weekend Money: Grey market grows in home loans - It's easier now for older people to get mortgages + +BYLINE: By NICHOLAS COLE + +LENGTH: 883 words + + + The single, self-employed woman aged 55 spoke with the bitter certainty of one labouring under the delusion not dispelled by hype about the new-rich older generation: 'I'd never get a mortgage at my time of life'. + She was surprised to discover that borrowing to buy her first home could actually become easier after entering the 'lean and slippered' sixth age. + It's a common misconception among older people that they can't get a mortgage; they are almost apologetic about asking', says Nationwide Anglia which, like most major building societies, offers interest-only mortgages to would-be borrowers aged 60 and over. + Under such schemes, the borrower pays only the interest on a loan, at rates identical with those of ordinary repayment mortgages; the capital debt is repaid by choice during the term or on death through sale of the property asset. + The borrower will probably be offered up to 75 per cent of the property's value, and may be expected to take out insurance to protect the mortgage. + Over-55s form the smallest proportion of the first-time buyers' market - under 10 per cent of all borrowers, according to the Building Societies Association. + The Halifax building society, whose interest-only scheme operates under the 'Retirement Home Plan' banner, has about 150,000 borrowers aged over 55 - around 7 per cent of its total roll. Between 70,000 and 80,000 of them are first-time customers for the society but some may have had previous mortages elsewhere. + While the trend generally is, as the society says, away from age discrimination and towards 'mortgages to suit all needs', policy and practice vary between societies. The common features, as indicated by Abbey National, are lenders' readiness to consider each applicant on merit, insistence that property offered as security is sound, also that borrowers 'demonstrate their ability to pay'. + Abbey's own guidelines on interest-only mortgages allow branch managers to consider a wide range of risks, including council tenants exercising their right to buy flats in some prefabricated tower blocks. + An independent test of the two largest societies' flexibility produced instant agreement in principle to lend. 'Twenty-five thousand? Perfectly okay', Abbey told the researcher, a semi-retired professional woman aged 60 who is separated from her husband, living on Pounds 7,000 a year before tax (including a company pension, which societies regard as excellent security) and genuinely thinking about moving from her lease-hold flat to a small freehold house. The Pounds 25,000 would just enable her to do this. + The Halifax was willing to advance Pounds 20,000 - 'they said it would have been more if my income was higher' - and added that the mortgage would have to be re-negotiated after 10 years. Their calculations indicate that her monthly commitment would amount to about Pounds 168, including term assurance at Pounds 11.89. + Mortgages starting when you are in your 70s and extending - on paper - for a 40-year term, are not uncommon; most lenders, however, are keen to avoid, and to be seen avoiding, 'fast-buck business', says the Bradford & Bingley, which is 'seriously considering' introducing its own interest-only mortgage product. + Their aversion to exploiting elderly people in frail health and on reduced income is coupled with concern about 'roll-up' schemes that land the borrower with an interest payment demand for, say Pounds 1,000 in one lump sum after a so-called interest holiday. + No reputable lender will object to participation by another family member, or to the borrower's solicitor being appraised of every step - and may well encourage this. + Like building societies, banks operate borrowing schemes which use the equity in a property not covered by the mortgage; but they do not, so far, customarily offer home loans to older people. + Indeed, they are unlikely to lend where the mortgage term would end after retirement at 60 or 65. 'I wouldn't like to say we never do it: it's much more a case of a personal approach rather than a scheme approach', says National Westminster. Midlands's age limit on such a term is 70. + The Trustee Savings Bank has an interest-only plan 'on the drawing-board'; this could well be similar to its Equity Release account, which essentially provides a secured revolving overdraft. + Mature borrowers represent 'a better bet' than the youth market, the TSB adds. It is not alone in such thinking. They are bigger savers, have fewer commitments, and their disposable incomes are rising nationally; over-55s, who will form more than a quarter of the population by 2000, already enjoy spending power estimated at over Pounds 25 billion a year. + One sign of the trend is the interest-only, flexible repayment mortgage for borrowers over 50 launched by Yorkshire building society in April; it is based on a limit of three times' actual or likely annual retirement income, and charged at the society's base rate. + This brings into its scope not only senior citizens but all those individuals who may previously have had cause to regard themselves as hopeless cases - notably early retirers, one-parent families, and divorce survivors - able at last to contemplate accommodation more ample than a small rented flat. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +194 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 27, 1989 + +The Day In Politics: Response soon to Griffiths report - Labour attacks delay over inquiry into care services + +BYLINE: By NIKKI KNEWSTUB + +LENGTH: 597 words + + + THE long-awaited government response to the Griffiths report on community care services will be announced within a fortnight, Mr Roger Freeman, the junior Health Minister, told the Commons yesterday. + He was speaking at the start of a Labour-initiated debate on care in the community. Mr Robin Cook, the shadow health and social security secretary, opening the debate, criticised the delay in dealing with the report, which was published in March last year. + Mr Freeman, standing in for Mr John Moore, Social Security Secretary, who was in Strasbourg, pledged results of the wide-ranging Whitehall study of the inquiry led by Sir Roy Griffiths, the Government's adviser on the health service, will be published soon and debated in the Commons before the summer break. + During the debate, Mr Nicholas Winterton (C. Macclesfield) warned about the sale for redevelopment of large Victorian pyschiatric hospitals after the dispersal of inmates into the community. + He said: 'I personally believe there is a permanent need for long-stay hospitals for many mentally-ill people, particularly those suffering with schizophrenia. I think it is a tragedy that for purely economic reasons some sites are being closed and redeveloped.' + Those discharged into the community were often inadequately cared for, and hundreds ended up in prison 'or sleeping in cardboard boxes on our streets'. + Mr Cook also said MPs could see for themselves people sleeping rough 'near here.' + Mr Cook said that from 1979-86, 28,500 long-stay patients had been discharged into the community from mental hospitals, but only 2,230 extra places had been provided in day centres. + Mr Cook accused ministers of behaving like 'paralysed rabbits' in the face of the Griffiths' proposals and claimed that the Government had delayed its reply because of implications that more reponsibility and cash must go to councils. + He said: 'Local authorities are the largest single providers of residential care. They have the experience and the where-with-all.' + Mr Freeman justified the time taken on the complicated nature of the proposals, involving many different Whitehall departments. He said: 'There has been a considerable amount of time given to considering the implications of the Griffiths' report ..It's very complicated to work through the implications of what Sir Roy Griffiths said. But it's important to get the analysis correct rather than rush it.' + Mr Freeman said the Government wanted to help the elderly stay in their own homes as long as possible for their dignity and independence. Sir Roy Griffiths had not been asked to consider levels of resources, but how it was decided who should be cared for in the community, who should decide, and who should pay. + He emphasised that before a mental hospital shut, care facilities had to be set up in the community. But he conceded that the provision of care at home was not uniformly adequate 'and some authorities have discharged patients from mental hospitals without making sure there was adequate care'. + Mr Ronnie Fearn, for the Democrats, said: 'It is an absolute disgrace that so many vulnerable people should be left without the support services they so desperately need and, in some cases, such as mental health patients discharged into the community, without even a roof over their heads.' + A Labour motion accusing ministers of failing to expand community care services to match the closure of mental hospitals and the growth of the elderly population was rejected by 281 votes to 197 (Government majority 84). + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +195 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 28, 1989 + +Parliamentary Sketch: Timid Ridley lets through six from hooligan attack + +BYLINE: By ANDREW RAWNSLEY + +LENGTH: 566 words + + + DAVID Evans, the Conservative backbencher and chairman of Luton Town Football Club, told the House that many old people in his constituency quaked with fear whenever football supporters were about. + Certainly one elderly gentleman, called Nicholas Ridley, looked absolutely scared stiff as MPs prepared to debate his Football Supporters Bill. This was the moment the Environment Secretary had been dreading. The moment when he would finally have to produce some arguments for the Government's football identity scheme. He sat on the frontbench with the Sports Minister, Colin Moynihan. For months they had been menaced by soccer fans clearly bent on taking them and their scheme apart. The most aggressive, Dr John Cunningham, Labour's Environment spokesman, had brought nearly his whole gang with him for the debate. And, just as Mr Ridley feared, they were about to give him a terrible beating. + Almost as soon as he rose to the despatch box, the Environment Secretary was menaced with Opposition cries of 'Nonsense!', 'Rubbish!' and 'Send him off!', the traditional tribal chants when they scent a minister in trouble. + The Environment Secretary would have fared a little less badly if he had once managed to convey the impression that he had ever actually been to a soccer match. The truth is that probably the last London club he visited was Pratt's. + But it was with the rules governing the operation of the scheme that he got into really supreme difficulties. Children will be exempted from carrying identity cards to get into grounds. Pensioners, on the other hand, will not. Try as he might, Mr Ridley could convince no-one of the menace of OAPs, even OAPs supporting Millwall or West Ham, attacking each other or the police with walking sticks and zimmers. + Dr Cunningham then rose to deliver the most relentlessly, mercilessly destructive assault on a minister in this parliament. He began with a popular soccer song which might have been dedicated to Mr Ridley. 'Football crazy, football mad. It's football that's robbed him of the little sense he had.' + Then Dr Cunningham began shooting question after question past the Environment Secretary. Why was the Bill not being delayed until after the Hillsborough disaster inquiry had reported? Mr Ridley stayed silent. 1:0. + Why had he claimed that the clubs now supported the scheme, when they did not? Mr Ridley stayed silent. 2:0. + Why were women not excluded from carrying the cards? Mr Ridley stayed silent. (Presumably because of the other well-known menace of transvestite soccer hooligans.) 3:0. + Why were the police still opposed to the scheme? Mr Ridley stayed silent. 4:0 Why were English fans included in the scheme, but Scots excluded? Mr Ridley stayed silent. 5:0. + 'What will happen at an England-Scotland match at Wembley?' asked Dr Cunningham. Still silence from Mr Ridley. + In calculated exasperation, Dr Cunningham turned on him: 'If the Secretary of State has got an answer, I'll gladly give way.' Mr Ridley, silent as ever, showed no sign of having any answers at all. Labour erupted in jeering. Suddenly Mr Ridley shifted on the frontbench, as if to get up. 'It lives! It lives!' they cried. But his response was just to point at Mr Moynihan. That was not just a poor answer, but a ridiculously short one. Everybody laughed. + Final score. John Cunningham: 6. Nicholas Ridley: 0. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +196 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 29, 1989 + +Arts: And pigs might fly - Sprocket holes replace bullet holes as the ultimate threat at Southfork - Television + +BYLINE: By NANCY BANKS-SMITH + +LENGTH: 802 words + + + THE good news is that the worst film in the history of the motion picture industry, 'JR Is A Pig, So There!', is not to go on public release. Sue Ellen Ewing, who used to fall down in gutters a good deal, you remember, has recently triumphed as a tycoon. First she was very big in knickers, then she bought a film studio. 'JR Is A Pig, So There!' is a searing expose of life at Southfork in which she accuses JR of sleeping with tramps. And I must say I'm surprised. I didn't know they had tramps in Texas. + The bad news is that she might release it any day. 'If I hear you are coming after me, or if you cross me for any reason, or if I get up on the wrong side of the bed one morning, then I'll release the movie and you, JR, will be the laughing stock of Texas.' And, snarling enigmatically, she flounced off. + This is the last of the present series of Dallas (BBC1), but it's not a cliff hanger in the grand old tradition which invariably has one of the Ewings, perforated in several places, forgiving their enemies - always a lengthy procedure - in a private room at Dallas Memorial Hospital. The script, I see, was written by the producers and producers do tend to take films and their release more seriously than the rest of us. + Ian McShane, proposing to Sue Ellen, had to say as fervently as the line allowed 'We'll form our own production company,' and she replied: 'I'll get back to you soon.' You do feel that Lewis and Lakin, the producer/writers, have not been into much wooing recently. + Mark you, we are not as young as we were. The afternoon re-run of an earlier Dallas reminds you what a lot of hair they had in those days. You can't go around perforating elderly gentlemen indefinitely. + Nevertheless I have a fondness for the old folk based on the feeling that, for all their big talk, they are not really very well off. The way none of them can afford a house of their own, Miss Ellie's simple sacks, Lucy's sadly stunted growth, Sue Ellen's terrible dingey tin earings. 'Hurrah, they're back!' cried the secretaries at Ewing Oil as JR and Bobby return from Russia. And they threw two small paper streamers. + IT HAS strengthened me in my decision not to become a commando. My lasting recollection of How To Make A Royal Marines Officer: part 1 (BBC1) will be poor old Michael Jackman on Dartmoor in November shuddering with such a delicate, dreadful, trembling motion that you could have tuned a piano with him. 'Keep still, sir, keep still,' ordered Sergeant Mick Eccles, a Falklands veteran. Jackman heard but the shivering was deaf. + This was, I think, after they had swung across a lake naked, pushing their kit in front of them. ('It's not cold at all, sir. It's freezing.') The sleet came down like a whip. The faces of the young men taking the officers' training course looked blue, leaden and deathly, like figures on a war memorial. Jackman, the only black man in the group, was on detachment from Barbados and from the beginning the cold had laid its bony finger on him. + He had taken, like all the rest, the mockery about his clothes: 'Mr Jackson, that shirt is something else. It is a corker. What does this tie mean? Is that the Barbadian Beach Boys' Club, you know?' Dean rolled in mud at five o'clock in the morning with the others as some sort of initiation rite. ('The sort of beauty treatment society ladies pay through the nose for,' said Ian Wooldridge, narrating. He knows better than that). + He had been ordered to shave. 'I don't shave, actually, sergeant.' + 'What do you use, sir, a delapitory cream?' + 'Pardon, sergeant?' + 'There's a hair. You will shave in future sir.' + When his deep frozen fingers could no longer feel, the others helped him with his buckles but he left the course, heartbroken, as one in three will. + Deprived of every civilised comfort, they fell back on the instincts of our eternal ancestors, the apes. 'It's very like Hamadryad baboons playing with each other,' said one. 'Picking nits out of each other's backs and, in the same way baboons go in troops, we move in troops. What a marvellous analogy.' His fellow baboons whooped their amusement. + It was remarkably like public schools. The stress on the right sort of clothes. ('Look for a new sports jacket. Properly tailored. With vents.') And cleanliness. ('Wash your hair every day, under your arms, your crotch and your feet. Now, we'll have a demo from Mr James.') Clean but not sweet. ('Imperial Leather is perfumed. Start using perfumed soap and you smell like a posy, sir, and you can be smelled for miles.') And abominable food. ('Mutton. Place contents in a quarter of a pint of water and boil. And boil. Add oxtail soup.') It probably helps if you have been to a public school in a very cold place. Though, as we know, not necessarily. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +197 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 29, 1989 + +Eyewitness: Sweet Thames flows softly through the Pimms + +BYLINE: By MAEV KENNEDY + +LENGTH: 537 words + + + THE elderly Oxford couple was perfectly rigged out for Royal Henley: waxed cotton jackets, oiled yarn sweaters, cords, green wellies, picnic in a plastic carrier bag. + It wouldn't have got them into the Leander club or the Stewards' Enclosure, but they were stumping down the muddy towpath away from the nasty wind and nasty tempers whipping around the lunch queues in the Stewards' ('You said we needn't bother to come early'). And Leander (the same but with pink tableclothes). + 'Oh Lord, it's like queueing for the ski-lifts,' said a disgusted female voice three places behind the man who left in horror after finding he was standing in line for an exhibition, not a drink. + Actually the exhibition, celebrating 150 years of Henley Royal Regatta, was very educational. The queue was full of elderly bladers poring over the yellow photographs looking for themselves. The exhibits proved that in 150 years little has changed - not the rain, not the excruciating silliness of the hats, not the oarsmen's aloof contempt for the charabanc middle classes coming to eat and drink, not even the hospitality tents. + The contemporary painting proves that in 1891 the river must have been entirely invisible from the towpath behind a wall of two-storey houseboats groaning with Victorian corporate guests. In the foreground a skiff carrying a Pears Soap banner had plonked itself under the artist's nose. + Back on the towpath past the tents where, lit by chandeliers, the corporate guests, backs to the river, were watching Wimbledon on television, the price of Pimms fell steadily. + By the time the last champagne tents came into view, some of the towpath brigade felt a shade underdressed. + Mr Tony Conner 'Hats for the Gentry' was happy to be of service. Boaters Pounds 10, panamas Pounds 12, plain blue or naff Henley Regatta souvenir ribbons. 'Bad day for straws' he said gloomily. 'Wet and blowy, more of a day for felts.' But didn't the gentry, well, arrive ready-hatted? 'You'd be surprised' said Mr Conner darkly. 'They see one then it gets infectious.' + Unhatted, un-Pimmed, the Putney Rowing Club was marching to the starting line. + Due to circumstances beyond their control ('We just weren't fast enough': former vice-captain Dick Malt) Putney is not actually in the water at this Henley, though they beat NxW-Mt bank in the qualifiers. Dick Malt, Simon Maxwell and Doug Parnham almost fell into the river at the happy memory of NatWest hitting the bank and smashing their blades. + Some Cockney stalwarts set out a week ago rowing up to Henley and camping on the banks. Messrs Malt, Maxwell and Parnham, an archaeologist, a computer programmer and a women's rowing trainer respectively, crewed a car instead, a much more perilous journey on a rail strike day. + The undoubted highlight of a magnificent day was still to come: University College Galway, Ireland, average weight 11st 13lb, over Cherwell Boat Club, average weight 13st 1lb, by a length. + Mr Parnham (average weight about 14) gazed towards the bridge just visible through the rain one mile 550 wet cold yards away. 'Awesome when you think you've got to get all the way down there,' he said with a sigh of admiration. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +198 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 1, 1989 + +Weekend Money: Builders' code sets out service charges for sheltered housing + +BYLINE: By BEN LAURANCE + +LENGTH: 351 words + + + HOUSEBUILDERS providing sheltered accommodation for the elderly this week unveiled a new code of conduct. It sets out information which managers of sheltered housing schemes must give to residents about service charges; and developers will be required to give purchasers information about their rights and liabilities when they buy a new property. + But the code applies only to new developments and does not cover the 32,000 elderly people who have bought sheltered accommodation since 1977. Also there is as yet no full ombudsman service to resolve wrangles between managers and residents in sheltered accommodation: disputes over charges still have to go to court. + The code gives rules on disclosure of accounts, so residents know how management fees are spent and where the money contributed to sinking funds for repairs ends up. But the code offers no guidance on how management fees should be set in the first place. + There have been several widely publicised complaints about service charges from residents in some sheltered housing schemes run by the country's largest developer McCarthy&Stone. And the Guardian reported last year on a dispute at an Anglia Secure Homes development where the manager admitted the company was providing fewer services than its lease specified but said that it could meet its obligations only if there was a huge increase in charges. + Mr Michael Jack, the Conservative MP, who helped draw up the code, says more than 50 MPs have had complaints from constituents about their sheltered accommodation. 'This voluntary and effective action has avoided the need for legislation but if the industry does not fully respond to the challenges .. legislation may follow.' + The new code is being brought within the House-Builders Federation's Buildmark warranty scheme. + It says the buyer of a sheltered housing unit must be given information on his or her legal rights, a summary of any lease spelling out ground rent, charges and services, information on any residents association, regular accounts, projected budgets and details of warden cover. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +199 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 1, 1989 + +Property: The wrinklies turn inland - Despite soaring prices, Spain is still attractive to elderly British buyers + +BYLINE: By LARRY ELLIOTT + +LENGTH: 755 words + + + WITH the UK property market on its knees and the pound sagging against the peseta, it's little surprise to find that some of the glitter has gone out of the Spanish scene as well. + However, the fundamentals of the market still look good, as a glance at Europe's demographic trends shows. + In 20 years time Europe will have 50 million people of retirement age, many of them with the cash to buy a place in the sun. Estimates suggest they will generate a demand for 50,000 homes per year between now and the year 2010. + In addition, since most people buying in Spain tend to be middle-aged or elderly, and have paid off the lion's share or all of their mortgage, the effects of high UK interest rates are mitigated. The target audience for Spain is not the yuppies with their massive mortgages but the wrinklies with their minuscule home loans and big assets. + A more likely reason for the Spanish slowdown is that couples planning to retire to one of the Costas are finding it hard to shift their homes in the UK. + There is also evidence that people defer buying property when the economic outlook looks unfavourable. With inflation at 8 per cent and rising, interest rates double what they were a year ago and the pound kicked around on the foreign exchanges, the psychological conditions for buying abroad are all wrong. + Prices have also soared in Spain over the past few years. The pressure of demand has had a marked effect, and costs have spurted substantially. Builders - and most of the UK household names have now diversified into Spain - say prices High rise . the costs of buying a place in the sun have soared have increased by 30 percent over the past year. The days when it was possible to pick up a two or three bedroom villa for less than Pounds 10,000 are a thing of the past. + Now a decent property on the coast can cost Pounds 100,000 or more, which is worth remembering when deciding whether to pay for the villa or the 'free flight' offered by some firms. + The smart money is moving away from higher-priced areas like the Costa del Sol. Attention has now focused on the fact that there is more to Spain than a coastal band, and buying a farmhouse 20 km inland is cheaper, quieter and far better value for money. + The coast is, or course, the main hunting ground for the timeshare industry. So many stories circulate about the hard-sell tactics of some unscrupulous outfits that it is difficult to believe that people can still be parted with large sums of cash. But, apparently, they can be. + After taking limited steps to clamp down on estate agents, the Government is expecting the Office of Fair Trading to come up with a new code of practice for timeshare operators, a move which is welcomed by the Timeshare Developers Association, the respectable face of the industry. + The TDA has a list of 13 points which should be checked before entering an agreement, ranging from invitations to visit to cancellation periods, maintenance fees, exchange facilities and resale. + If a firm is a TDA member, it will offer a cooling-off period of at least five days after buyers have signed up for them to change their minds. + Many people are also daunted by the complications involved in the Spanish legal system and the differences in mortgaging a property. The UK financial institutions have not been slow in spotting this potentially huge market, and many now offer a comprehensive service. + The National Westminster announced last week that its Spanish subsidiary, Banco NatWest March, was now offering a full mortgage service to UK residents. + BNWM will offer up to 70 per cent finance in pesetas, sterling or a variety of other currencies up to 15 years. Interest rates are set half-yearly and are linked to Eurocurrency market rates. + The Spanish legal system is also different to the UK, with no direct equivalent of the solicitor. The hiring of an independent lawyer - or Abogado - to handle the purchase is desirable, with the NatWest willing to recommend one. + A good Abogado will sort out problems over taxes, which vary between 10 and 15 percent of the value of the property. In the past, Spain has been seen as something of a tax haven, but that reputation is fading fast now that the authorities have started to get tough with offenders. Be warned. + TDA: 01-821-8845. Copies of 'Buying Timeshare You Can Trust', free from 23 Buckingham Gate, London SW1E 6LB. NatWest's European Business Section, 11 Old Broad Street, London EC2 1BB. Tel: 01 920 5975/5288. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +200 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 1, 1989 + +Motoring (Helpline): A round trip goes full circle + +LENGTH: 235 words + + + I VOLUNTEERED through the WRVS to deliver library books to five housebound elderly ladies; this involved a six-mile round trip every three weeks. I checked with my insurers, Sun Alliance, that I was covered by the normal social and domestic policy. I was then asked for a further Pounds 12 premium to cover business use. I have declined to pay, so there is now one fewer volunteer for community work. + I, too, have checked with Sun Alliance. It seems your policy has been taken out through Automobile Association Insurance Services, and that you asked it for advice. Confusion arose between AAIS and Sun Alliance, the former having made a judgment without consulting the latter. Sun Alliance tells me that if there is no payment, voluntary work is covered by the normal domestic policy; that you should not have been asked for extra premium, although this is not necessarily the case with other companies. + ENTHUSIASM for owning and maintaining classic cars has grown to the extent that Mid-Warwickshire College of Further Education, at Leamington Spa, is offering Pounds 45 Saturday-to-Sunday courses in car restoration. If there is sufficient demand, mid-week courses will be arranged during August. + The basic course covers investigation and preparation of the areas to be restored, practical demonstrations, and actual restoration. Contact Richard Adams or Enid Barnes on 0926 311711. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +201 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 3, 1989 + +Walking sticks that go 'walkies' add to 1,000 pounds a week health bill + +BYLINE: By MAEV KENNEDY + +LENGTH: 219 words + + + SAVAGE health cuts in Worcester are being aimed at hearth rugs and runner-bean stakes. Worcester district health authority has found that its care in the community programme has been extended to DIY. + Health authority beds have patched fences, walking sticks have been spotted in vegetable plots smothered in runner beans, and bed hoists have been seen raising engines from cars. Sheepskins have moved from beneath the bedridden elderly to pride of place in front of fireplaces. + Equipment is haemorrhaging at a cost of Pounds 1,000 a week. Officials calculate that a quarter of their Pounds 56,000 of home-care equipment goes over the garden fence each year. + Dr Neil Phillips, manager of the community services programme, said that problems - such as wooden equipment being sawn up into book cases - often arose when elderly patients died at home. + 'We think it is claimed by relatives as part of the spoils of the estate because they do not realise it belongs to us. It is a mammoth task trying to keep track of the property we loan out.' + A week-long amnesty has been launched, in cooperation with the BBC Hereford and Worcester radio station. Anyone sitting comfortably with their feet on an ethical dilemma is invited to phone in. A plain white van will come around and take it away. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +202 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 4, 1989 + +Education Guardian: Graduates go to waste - Firms which don't make the most of graduates + +BYLINE: By AUDREY SEGAL + +LENGTH: 871 words + + + FOR GRADUATE job hunters, 1989 is the best since vintage 1979, confirms Brian Putt, of the Graduate Careers Services' Central Service Unit. It's the third year that graduate recruiters have failed to hit their targets. Government is offering financial carrots for higher education to take on more students - but candidates facing top-up loans may get a different message. Will recruiters get the graduates they think they will need in 1995? + A higher proportion of 18-year-olds (plus mature students) must be attracted to degree courses though applicants won't fall in line with the overall drop in the age group. Even so, there will be fiercer competition among institutions for students and between them and employers for young recruits. + The A-level entry grade war is about to break out, with polytechnic departments teaching basic engineering disciplines likely to be the first to lose out to universities. Leeds Polytechnic director Christopher Price predicts that poly engineering courses will only survive if they meet a specialist demand. + But no one knows what the actual shortfall of graduates will be in the 1990s. Demand for graduates from non-traditional sectors - retailing, leisure and travel, even the print industry - is still rising. But evidence also suggests employers waste the graduates they recruit. Helen Price, head of management development at Price Waterhouse and chairman of the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR), believes at least 20 per cent of young graduates may be wrongly or underemployed. + Then, even though the number of 16 to 24-year-olds falls by 1.2 million between 1987 and 1995, the total work force will actually rise by nearly a million. Employers are being told to make more use of (older) women, ethnic minorities, and of course the growing numbers of spritely senior citizens. + Helen Perkins says the answer to shortages is for employers to make better use of the talent they already have, to be certain they are recruiting for real needs, and not to oversell opportunities and undermanage raw graduates. Some 40 per cent of graduates currently leave their first employer within 3 to 5 years so savings can be made here. + These strategies could ease demand for new graduates. But recruiting methods still have to change. Helen Perkins says the problems have already had some positive effects as some of the better recruiters venture beyond their traditional hunting grounds and find top talent in supposedly lower-league universities and polytechnics. + Jim Fox, Yorkshire Bank's Controller (personnel), endorses her message that recruiters, schools and parents should be more aware of the teaching quality in polytechnics. He's financially backing Sheffield City Polytechnic's accountancy and financial studies department, on its track record in preparing students for professional qualifications. + Sponsorship - 'topping up' student grants and guaranteeing successful graduates a job - looks like a good strategy for catching 'em early but green 17-year-olds are quite different people when they graduate four or five years later and they can't be legally held to the earlier commitment. + Jim Fox is to sponsor six students a year with work experience, on Sheffield Polytechnic's new financial services degree course. But he admits it will be 'a challenge to make the bank attractive enough to make them want to come and work here.' + It's hard to sell sponsorships to 17-year-olds who want to put off choosing a career. Under 20 per cent now decide on their careers before going into higher education. Marks & Spencer, also going into sponsorship for the first time, is offering cash (plus job on graduation) for just the final year, and only after students have had a year's work experience with them. + There's no sign yet, anyway, of any massive increase in the number of firms offering sponsorships - amongst AGR members it was up only 5 per cent, to 90 organisations, in 1988. Numbers of sponsored students, though, have risen more (by 23 per cent) but for engineers it's still a problem finding them - the shortages are such that one major firm can fill only a third of their sponsorships. + The M&S model, especially as it is open to students whatever they study, may look much more attractive once loans are a real factor. + Recruiters are sure to come up with attractive financial packages - average first salaries are about to break the Pounds 10,000 barrier - which could take account of loans. But no one expects much-hyped benefits like 'golden hellos' to figure - killed off by the Crash of 1987 (under 2 per cent of AGR members offered them in 1988). Most recuiters say graduates are more interested in job satisfaction and career prospects than over-inflated salaries and benefits. + One as-yet little-discussed problem is the potentially damaging competition between higher education and employers for 18-year-olds, although the Engineering Employers Federation (for example) is telling members not to risk graduate supply by competing for bright A-level students. + Christopher Price foresees extensive development of more courses on which students will be work-based and study for degree on release from their job. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +203 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 6, 1989 + +Cities and wedlock are out in fast-growing population: The latest Regional Trends survey + +BYLINE: By OWEN BOWCOTT + +LENGTH: 466 words + + + AS A nation, we are moving out of cities, bringing up more children out of wedlock, and speeding up our population growth rate, according to the Regional Trends survey published today. + The annual 160-page report produced by the Central Statistical Office provides, in the authors' modest words, 'snapshots of Britain' broken down by region and by subject. + Its extensive columns of figures, collected by government departments and compiled by the CSO's statisticians, chronicle the contemporary evolution of society through such indicators as Aids, refrigerator ownership, and household radiation levels. + There were 56,930,200 of us in mid-1987, a rise of 0.3 per cent on the previous year and nearly 4 million more than in 1961. + By the year 2001, the Government estimates there will be nearly 59 million people in the 242,494 square miles of Britain. + The population of East Anglia has been growing fastest, in contrast to falls in Scotland, the North, Yorkshire and Humberside and the North-west where there have been fewer job opportunities. + Births outside marriage continued to increase. In Lambeth, south London, they accounted for nearly half (463 per 1,000) live births. The national proportion nearly doubled from 1981 to 1987 when it reached 23 per cent. + The growth of the elderly section of the population continued. More than 18 per cent were over pensionable age in 1987. In the South-west the proportion was more than 21 per cent. + Southend-on-Sea, Essex, has the largest proportion of pensioners (24.8 per cent) and of those aged over 75 (10 per cent). + Although the housing stock increased by 5 per cent in the six years to 1987, 117,000 people were accepted as homeless in the last year of that period. More than half of local authority lettings in Greater London went to homeless people. + The less well off had their hopes blighted further by the rise in property prices, calculated to have averaged 80 per cent nationally between 1981 and 1987. In London, the figure was 100 per cent, in Northern Ireland 46 per cent. + The cheapest homes were in the North where in 1987 the average price paid by people with mortgages from building societies was Pounds 27,300. The overall number of people living in urban districts declined by 0.9 per cent in the five years to 1987 and apart from London and parts of Manchester, the trend is expected to continue. + The statistics confirm the extent of many recently established trends. The number of self-employed rose to nearly 3 million last year, nearly 10 per cent of the workforce. The North had the lowest proportion of self-employed. + Industrial disputes increased in 1987 with 3 1/2 million lost days compared with fewer than 2 million in 1986. + Regional Trends 24, HMSO, Pounds 19.50 + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +204 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 7, 1989 + +BMA annual conference: Doctors demand stop on mental hospital closures + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 421 words + + + CLOSURE of mental hospitals should be halted until adequate alternative care is available in the community, the annual conference of the British Medical Association said yesterday. + Dr Michael Harris, a consultant psychiatrist from Nottingham, told the conference: 'What started as a well-intentioned move to bring mental handicap and mental health services into the 20th century has been hijacked by those people who see savings to be made by the closure of the large Victorian asylums.' + The Government is under intense pressure to order at least a temporary suspension of the mental hospital closure programme when it makes its long-delayed announcement on community care policy this month. + Figures published by the Department of Health this week show that in mental illness alone, about 35,000 long-stay patients were discharged from hospital between 1977 and 1987, but only 4,000 extra residential places were created in the community. + The BMA still backs the community care policy in principle, but believes that care for mentally ill, mentally handicapped, and elderly people is inadequate. + Although the Government had created the initial pressure for closures, it was the health authorities themselves which were now keen to raise cash by selling off lucrative development sites. But there were costs to be met. + 'Community care properly done is undoubtedly more expensive than institutional care, so any savings are going to be at the expense of a proper service,' Dr Harris said. + Dr Patrick Bennett, from Surrey, said the state of community care was a national scandal, blighting not only the inner cities but also areas like his own. + 'We don't have many of the problems of the denizens of the cardboard cities sleeping under the arches of London's Victorian railway stations. We don't have any of the seedy seaside boarding houses filled by cynical social services departments with not the drop-outs of society, but the throw-outs of society. + 'But we do have our quota of psychotics who have reneged on treatment and who literally terrorise their parents and upset whole neighbourhoods.' + The conference went on to deplore the Government's delay in responding to the Griffiths report on community care, published in March last year, which advocates fundamental changes, including giving local authorities a leading role in arranging care. + Dr John Callander, from Lothian, said standards of care throughout the country were deteriorating in the absence of a coherent policy. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +205 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 8, 1989 + +Weekend Money: Poll Tax - All you wanted to know! + +BYLINE: By MALCOLM DEAN + +LENGTH: 1157 words + + + REGISTRATION is only the start. Now that you have filled in your local council's registration form for the poll tax, what happens? First, do not forget to return it. As it says on the form: failure to do so makes you liable for a fine of Pounds 50. + The first community charge bills will not arrive until next April. Local councils have not set the tax because they do not know how much subsidy they will be getting from central government. What they have complained about is a shortfall in government aid to finance the cost of setting up the new system. The local authority associations estimate they still need another Pounds 200million otherwise they will be forced to increase the community charge or cut their services. + What is known is the list of people exempted from the tax, the qualifications for rebate, student arrangements, second home charges and rebates. About 40 million people will be required to pay the tax although up to 10million will be eligible for some rebates. + Exemptions. People who will not have to pay the poll tax include: + Children still at school who are under 19 and for whom child benefit is still payable; + People who are seriously mentally handicapped (either from birth or through accident or injury). Formal confirmation from a doctor of the mental impairment must be sent by the parent or guardian; + Adults whose main or only home is an NHS hospital (This will include people who have given up their home, or intend to do so, to live in hospital and also anyone detained under the Mental Health Acts.); + Adults whose main or only home is a nursing home, residential care home or hostel where they receive a substantial level of care; + Adults working as volunteer care workers - like Community Service Volunteers who live with and provide care to elderly or disabled people in return for board, lodging and pocket money; + Monks and nuns who will be automatically exempt provided they have no income or capital of their own, do not draw state benefits, and are involved in prayer, contemplation, the relief of suffering or education; + People in prison unless they have been imprisoned for not paying a fine or the community charge; + People staying in night shelters or short-stay hostels, although the residential staff of such hostels are not exempt; + Foreign diplomats and foreign service personnel. + Students. All students will be required to pay 20 per cent of the charge to the council where they live during term time. Students may be asked for a certificate from their college, polytechnic or university confirming their status as a fulltime student (defined as at least 21 hours of tuition for 24 weeks of the year). + There is no rebate on the reduced charge for students. All students - including overseas students - will have to pay the 20 per cent. Part-time students must pay the full community charge subject to the rebates and exemptions listed below. + Student nurses who are part of project 2000 (or on academic courses at university or polytechnic) will only have to pay 20 per cent. All other student nurses - which is the vast majority - who receive pay as well as training will have to pay the full charge subject to the rebates to which they may be entitled. + Second Home Owners. The poll tax or, to give it its full name, the 'personal community charge' has to be paid to the council where your main home is situated. A second charge, known as a 'standard community charge', applies to second homes. This can be up to twice as high as the personal community charge for the particular area. There will be no rebate scheme for the charges on second homes. (There is no charge for second homes occupied by tenants because the tenants will be charged the personal community charge.) Registration officers will decide which is a person's main home. There is an appeal system. People who are buying a new home have a three month charge-free period to cover situations in which they temporarily own two. Councils have discretion to extend this period if necessary. + Rebates. An estimated 10 million will be eligible for some rebate. If you claim income support (the old supplementary benefit) you should be sent a rebate claim form by the Department of Social Security in the autumn. You should fill it in and return it to the DSS. + If you are on housing benefit your council should get in touch with you in the autumn. Your housing benefit claim can be treated as a claim for a rebate. If you do not get either income support or housing benefit, you need to apply to your local council for a rebate claim form. + If you are married, claims can be made by either the husband or wife. This is also the case if you are unmarried but living as man and wife. Either partner can fill in the form. You will usually get half the joint rebate each. Normally rebates will be taken off the community charge bill. You will then pay the reduced amount. The bill can be paid in 10 instalments. + Unlike the old rate rebate schemes, the poll tax will have a maximum rebate of 80 per cent. Everybody, with the exception of the exemptions, will have to pay at least 20 per cent of the charge no matter how poor they are. Social security benefits will be increased to take this into account but there will be large numbers of winners and losers because the increase will be flat-rated. + You can apply for a rebate at any time - with your registration form, in the autumn when the DSS should send out rebate claim forms or next March when the first bills arrive. Do not delay beyond next March. Rebates may not be backdated. + The rebates will all work on the same formula. It has three elements: the size of your savings (under Pounds 3,000 will be ignored; income on savings of between Pounds 3,000 and Pounds 8,000 will be taken into account; over Pounds 8,000 makes a person ineligible); the level of income (people with low incomes who are not receiving housing benefit or income support should ask their local councils for a rebate claim form); and a needs assessment (which will depend on whether the person is single, looking after children or a disabled person). + There will be local review boards to deal with disputes about rebates. + The Appeal System. You cannot appeal against the level of community charge. That is fixed by local councils. The appeal system will deal with disputes over registration (wrongful inclusion, disputed designations over who is responsible for filling out the forms), student status and second homes. + The initial appeal must be in writing to the Registration Officer, who must reply within two months. If they do not accept your arguments then you can appeal to a Valuation and Community Charge tribunal. + Appeals to the tribunal must be in writing but are dealt with either on the basis of written evidence or, if you prefer, at a hearing where you can appear in person or be represented by a friend. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +206 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 8, 1989 + +Clarke to sound retreat over community care + +BYLINE: By DAVID HENCKE, Westminster Correspondent + +LENGTH: 452 words + + + THE Government's climbdown over its attempt to prevent local government from taking over community care is to be announced by Mr Kenneth Clarke, the Health Secretary, to MPs on Wednesday. + A cabinet committee chaired by the Prime Minister meets on Monday to hear the final draft of the Government's long delayed response to the Griffiths report on community care of the elderly, handicapped and mentally ill. + Barring last-minute objections from other ministers on the cabinet economic committee, government business managers have pencilled in a Commons announcement by Mr Clarke on Wednesday. + It will be the second climbdown by the Government in a matter of days on a controversial issue, coming as it will only a week after Lord Mackay, the Chancellor, rowed back on his radical changes for the legal profession. + In contrast to the clashes over the National Health Service proposals, ministers are hoping that the pragmatism shown by their response will mean a warm welcome for the community care plan. They are under enormous pressure to avoid a further dispute in the NHS. + Mr Clarke will announce, as predicted in the Guardian on June 21, that local councils rather than a new statutory board, will take over from health authorities management responsibility for community care from health authorities. + The decision marks a victory for the pragmatists who supported Sir Roy Griffiths, the Sainsbury supermarket chief, over his original plan. It will amount to a defeat for the Prime Minister, and rightwing theorist groups like the Adam Smith Institute and the No Turning Back group of MPs. + In the last two weeks rightwing groups have lost even further ground following arguments in the cabinet committee over the future role for local authorities. Mr Nicholas Ridley, the Environment Secretary, has been defeated over plans to take away the powers of county councils and metropolitan districts to run old people's homes and homes for the handicapped and mentally ill. He will have to be satisfied with more incentives to encourage voluntary organisations to run homes. + Proposals from Mr John Moore, the Social Security Secretary, to curb spending on the elderly have also not been incorporated in the response. + Instead, he has accepted that spending on social security, like the funding of local authorities for their new role, will have to be negotiated with the Treasury during the current spending round. + The Government's response to Griffiths is expected to be vague in the section on resources. Ministers have not yet agreed on the level of social security spending or the extra money to be spent on community care through poll tax support from the Government. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +207 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 12, 1989 + +Nalgo claims 90 per cent on strike + +BYLINE: By SIMON BEAVIS, Labour Correspondent + +LENGTH: 459 words + + + THE SECOND half of a two-day strike by the local government officers' union, Nalgo, is expected to disrupt council services today with a three-day stoppage in store for next week. + There is no prospect of negotiations between the union and employers to resolve the dispute over pay and changes to national agreements. + The strike yesterday and today, which followed a one-day stoppage last week, is part of a three-week programme of escalating action. Three 24-hour stoppages are planned for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday next week. + Nalgo said up to 90 per cent of the 500,000 officers took action, disrupting many facilities including social services, nurseries, day care centres, libraries, housing and rates departments. + But the employers' body, the Local Authorities Conditions of Service Advisory Board, which represents 500 councils, said support was down to 10 per cent in other areas. There was a slight decline in support compared with last week. + The dispute is over a 7 per cent pay offer - which the employers say they cannot raise - and plans to alter national grading, overtime and unsocial hours payment structures. + Although the current national pay structure is to be maintained, the employers want authorities to be given greater local flexibility in fixing pay grades. The union says this threatens national bargaining. + Talks broke down last week after only 10 minutes. The employers are not planning a meeting to discuss the dispute for more than 10 days and the chances of early negotiations are slim. Nalgo has warned that a ballot on all-out action might be called if there is no progress. + The union also said 12 councils including Shropshire, Gloucester, Reading and Tory-controlled Warwickshire had expressed support for its case. It detected a division among employers. But a spokesman for Warwickshire said the council supported changes to national grading agreements. + Nalgo wants national agreements left unchanged and has claimed a 12 per cent pay rise or Pounds 1,200, whichever is greater. + Several other unions representing 1 million local authority manual workers will next week present their pay claim. + Mr John Daley, Nalgo general secretary, said the high turnout for yesterday's strike reflected the anger of Nalgo members at the employers' refusal to negotiate sensibly. 'We call on employers to start negotiations with us again otherwise more disruption to the public will continue.' + This week's action was expected to close one in five libraries. It severely disrupted leisure centres, refuse sites and reduced the number of civilian police staff and traffic wardens outside London. But emergency services and meals-on-wheels for elderly people were being maintained. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +208 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 12, 1989 + +Carers 'rely on dependants' + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 326 words + + + THE INCOME of people who care for elderly and disabled relatives is so low that they often live off the social security benefit of their dependants, a study for the Department of Social Security shows. + Ms Caroline Glendinning, who made the study while a research fellow at York University, called yesterday for increased benefit rates for carers and for a non-means tested carer's costs allowance. Carers also needed opportunities for part-time work, flexi-time employment, and job sharing. + There are an estimated six million carers. The number of people aged over 80 is projected to triple by 2025. + Ms Glendinning told the Social Policy Association's annual conference in Bath that she had studied a sample of 30 carers looking after 29 dependent adults, all reliant on benefit. + Two carers, a brother and sister, shared the care of their father. Of the other 28, 23 were looking after their mothers. All but four dependants were over 60 and 13 were over 80. + Employment opportunities of the carers were found to be severely restricted: of the 13 looking after a dependant single-handedly, 11 had no earnings and were reliant upon social security, none of them receiving more than the former supplementary benefit rate. In between a third and a half of these households, the dependant's benefit was subsidising the carer because it was paid at the higher, disability, rate. The effect was that the carer had returned to financial dependency on a parent. + 'This renewed financial dependency in their 30s, 40s and 50s was considerably more precarious than the financial dependency of childhood, because the maintenance of their current standard of living depended upon someone whose health - and survival even - was far from certain,' Ms Glendinning said. + In the 16 households with three adults, including the dependant, there was not the same degree of hardship. But there was a subsidy, usually from carer to dependant. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +209 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 13, 1989 + +Outbreak of listeria halts pate sales + +BYLINE: By JAMES ERLICHMAN, Consumer Affairs Correspondent + +LENGTH: 290 words + + + PREGNANT women and other vulnerable people were warned yesterday to stop eating all types of pate after high levels of listeria were found in supermarket tests on some Belgian brands. + The Department of Health said some people now suffering from listeriosis believe they ate pate before becoming ill. A woman who has just given birth to an infected child believes she also ate contaminated pate during pregnancy. + The outbreak was first discovered in Taff-Ely in Wales, but contaminated pate has since been found in Bristol and Leeds. The Public Health Laboratory Service has been ordered to conduct a nationwide survey. + Pregnant women, their foetuses, the elderly and people with lowered immune systems are most prone to the infection. + The first infected pate was a Matteson brand found in a Gateway supermarket by environmental health officers investigating a food poisoning complaint. Gateway's Van der Rousen brand was also implicated, and the store said yesterday that it was removing all pate from its 800 stores. Matteson, part of the Unilever group, said it had suspended supplies of imported pates. + Professor Richard Lacey, the Leeds University microbiologist critical of government food policy, said: 'This appears to be the latest failure of the cook-chill method which really must be abandoned.' + The Department of Health said it had alerted the EC and Belgian authorities, but contamination of domestic pates has not been ruled out. 'Pate is an excellent medium to grow bugs in and we must assume that if some brands are contaminated, then others could be as well,' said the spokeswoman. + The major supermarkets, said they were withdrawing from sale all pates which come from Sanpareil in Belgium. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +210 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 13, 1989 + +Councils win role on care of the elderly + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 534 words + + + RESPONSIBILITY for care of the rapidly growing number of elderly people is to be given to local authorities after the Government yesterday belatedly announced it would implement the thrust of the Griffiths report on community care. + Almost 16 months after the report was published, Mr Kenneth Clarke, the Health Secretary, declared: 'We have concluded that the best way forward will be to build on local authorities' existing responsibilities.' + The announcement ended protracted wrangling among ministers over the report by Sir Roy Griffiths, the Prime Minister's special adviser on the health service. Mrs Thatcher and others were reluctant to increase local authorities' powers until every other avenue had been explored and rejected. + The decision, which applies also to mentally ill and mentally handicapped people, was generally welcomed by critics who had warned that the Government's indecision was blighting community care developments and harming those in need of support. + However, Mr Clarke made no commitment on extra funds. + Mr John Rea Price, chairman of the Community Care Now! pressure group, said: 'There is a real danger that without resources, responsibility for community care cannot be discharged properly.' + Under the new system, to come into effect in April 1991, local authority social services departments will arrange assessments of people's care needs and organise provision in their own homes or in residential or nursing homes. + The key financial change will affect the Pounds 1 billion a year social security bill for income support payments to people in private or voluntary homes. These payments, of up to Pounds 223 a week, have been regarded by ministers as a 'peverse incentive' for elderly and disabled people to be recommended for residential care. + Although people now in care will be unaffected, central funding for those assessed after 1991 will go to social services departments, instead of being channelled through social security. Rates have not been specified. + For the mentally ill, this care grant will go first to district health authorities which will spend it with social services. + Local authorities will be discouraged from expanding their own residential homes as they will get no grant for people they place in council homes. + Mr Clarke said: 'It is not necessary for local authorities to provide all this service directly and they should make maximum possible use of the voluntary and commercial sectors so as to widen individuals' room for choice, increase the flexibility of services and stimulate innovation.' + Further details of the plans will be published in a white paper in the autumn. Yesterday's outline statement suggested ministers had rejected Sir Roy's recommendations that funds given to local authorities be earmarked or ring-fenced, a practice disliked by the Treasury, and that the Government take a central role in planning and monitoring care. + In announcing that Mr David Mellor, the Health Minister, would take responsibility for community care, the Government side-stepped Sir Roy's proposal that a minister be appointed with a specific brief. + Politics, page 6; Leader comment, page 22 + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +211 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 13, 1989 + +Public spending freeze wins cabinet backing + +BYLINE: By CHRISTOPHER HUHNE and ALAN TRAVIS + +LENGTH: 695 words + + + TREASURY plans to further reduce the share of national income going in public spending won cabinet approval yesterday. + The decision highlights the Government's determination to tighten economic policy and bring inflation under control. + Ministers indicated that the Government's hope, according to unpublished Treasury forecasts, was to reduce inflation to six per cent by the end of the year and four per cent by June. + Although the Cabinet's statement was similar to last year's formula, the reality is likely to be a cumulative and sharpening squeeze on spending. Ministers are being asked to hold to similar cash totals, despite the rise in inflation. + The statement released after the cabinet meeting yesterday said ministers had agreed 'that the objective should be to maintain the downward trend in the ratio of public spending excluding privatisation proceeds to gross domestic product and to hold as close as possible to existing plans.' + The ratio has fallen much more sharply than expected as inflation and growth have increased national income so the base from which the reduction will start is substantially lower than planned. The form of words allows no catch-up in the next few years to compensate for the drop in spending in real terms in both 1987/88 and 1988/89. + The Chancellor, Mr Nigel Lawson, warned ministers that existing policies aimed at restraining private demand must not be undermined by imprudent public spending. + The Treasury, expecting a tough spending round, has left itself with an escape hatch if certain ministers prove recalcitrant because it is changing the definition of the planning total of public spending this year. + But in practice, such muddying of the waters is unlikely to prove necessary as ministers were said yesterday to be united in their determination to arrest rising inflation and tackle a record balance of payments deficit. + Discussions between the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Mr John Major, and spending ministers will take place over the summer. Officials say a star chamber - a special cabinet committee to adjudicate disagreements between the Treasury and the departments - will be convened if difficulties cannot be resolved. + More than Pounds 10 billion of bids for extra spending over previously agreed plans have been received against a background of dissatisfaction with infrastructure, lobbying from the National Health Service, and the effect of rising inflation on social security spending. + The social security budget is likely to be at least Pounds 1.5 billion over because of higher than expected inflation, the Pounds 375 million cost of abolition of the pensioners' earnings rule which allows them to keep state pensions whatever their earnings, and an additional Pounds 200 million for older pensioners. + The rise in retail prices was expected to be only 5.5 per cent over the year to September, but it could easily reach 7.5 per cent or more. Each 1 percentage point increase in the annual rate adds Pounds 455 million to public spending. + The roads white paper in May also committed the Government to more spending when resources permitted, but this is clearly going to be one of the hotly contested areas. + Yesterday's decisions also send out a signal that the Government is unlikely to be pushed into generous concessions by the rash of public sector disputes. + The Government's desire to reduce inflation is being used to explain to Tory backbenchers the need for a clamp on public spending despite the large budget surplus. + Labour's Treasury spokesman, Mr Gordon Brown, said last night that holding the public spending target to Pounds 179.4 billion meant reducing services. + 'When ministers say public spending will face a difficult year they mean they are planning for reductions in services with more congestion on our railways, less investment in our environment, and more neglect of our hospitals, schools and vital services.' + Mr Brown said that parents, patients, commuters and communities would all pay the price for the Chancellor's economic mistakes with deterioriating public services. + Baker seeks more cash, page 5 + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +212 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 13, 1989 + +Leading Article: At last, the right caring conclusion + +LENGTH: 574 words + + + ULTIMATELY, there was no alternative. Roy rules OK. Try as she might, the Prime Minister has been unable to find any better option for the reform of community care than the model produced by her special health adviser, Sir Roy Griffiths, 15 long months ago. His solution won the support of all the main agencies, except the agent in Downing Street who could not stomach the idea of giving local councils more responsibility. Hence her special review of a problem which had already been reviewed by Griffiths, the Commons Select Committee on Social Services and the Audit Commission. But the conclusion was still the same; Roy was right: the only logical way of closing the gaps in services for the elderly, disabled and mentally infirm is to make local social service departments the chief co-ordinators. Kenneth Clarke, the Health Secretary, announced the decision yesterday - and can take a bow. + Theoretically, there were two other options. A new community care service could have been set up; but this would only have created more gaps for clients to fall through. Health authorities could have been given the co-ordinating role; but they have enough troubles already digesting the Government's NHS reforms and, in any case, would have been an odd choice as the main need of many clients is practical (cleaning, shopping, being dressed) rather than medical. + Instead, there will be a single budget, under the control of local councils, to cover the cost of community care. The present perverse incentive to get people into private residential homes - so that social security pays the cost - will be removed. Existing claims will be maintained, but the Government has committed itself to transferring the resources, which would otherwise have been spent on social security payments, to local councils. This is a large sum. It has grown from Pounds 10 million in 1979 to Pounds 1,000 million today. Existing commitments will mean only a gradual transfer (plus allowance for projected growth) but the principle is important. It will mean the public purse will only finance residential care for those who really need it. Local councils will have more flexibility to develop their domiciliary services so that elderly people can stay in their own homes longer. There will be even more discretion than Griffiths planned because the budget will not be 'ear-marked.' + Local councils will be both providers and enablers. They already provide 150,000 residential places. They will now take over responsibility for financing the majority of the 150,000 places in the private sector. Financial incentives will ensure future growth in the voluntary and private sectors. To maintain unified standards, a national inspectorate was needed; but responsibility for the moment will remain with local councils. This is bound to lead to further complaints from the private homes of double standards. The abuse in Southwark council's home for the elderly was just as bad as the neglect in the Kent private homes exposed by Yorkshire Television. For once, HMG can be accused of giving local councils too long a rein. + The main thrust, however, is right, even though a final verdict should be withheld until the precise financial details are known. What is missing is any commitment to the informal carers - the relatives, neighbours and friends who in bruising reality carry the main community care burden. Next stop: a carers' charter. . + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +213 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 13, 1989 + +International News In Brief: Bonn party aims at over-60s + +BYLINE: By ANNA TOMFORDE in Bonn + +LENGTH: 74 words + + + A new political party for West Germany's older generation, the Greys, was born yesterday, promising to fight for pensioners' rights and greater social acceptance of the increasing numbers of over-sixties. + At the founding congress in Munich, the party announced that it would stand in next year's general election. It would reserve 50 per cent of its seats for representatives of organisations fighting for the rights of older people. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +214 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 15, 1989 + +Learners: Equality shifts into third gear - Women are driving hard into that male preserve of motoring + +BYLINE: By I FRAMPTON GLEED + +LENGTH: 634 words + + + AT LAST the truth about women drivers is emerging. It is not that they are necessarily better, or worse, or safer, or slower, or scatty, or preoccupied, or even different. + It is simply that they are there. More and more of them are there. And there will be more. + The distaff boom is pretty well documented across the whole spectrum, of course. Professional chroniclers tell us that in the last 35 years or so the proportion of women in the population between 15 and 59 went up from 43 to 66 per cent; that over the same period married women in employment soared from 21 to 61 per cent; that by the mid 1990s four out of five new jobs will be taken by women; and that by the year 2000 working women will outnumber working men in Britain. + Female progress has been most marked in the professions. One in four of the nation's self-employed are now women, 44 per cent of all first class degrees are awarded to women graduates, and almost half the newly qualified doctors and solicitors are women. The number of women entering accountancy has doubled in the course of the 1980s. + All this plus the easy-buy boom and a galloping national prosperity which has thrust second and third cars into every self-respecting household even where wives slave loyally over sinks between taking the children to school and bringing them back. + At the last ILEA count 78,000 children in London's 10 central boroughs were getting to and from schools by private car, making no small contribution to the capital's peak-hour problems). + Little wonder therefore that the motor car, that essence of freedom and mobility and symbol of personal success, is fast becoming as much the preserve of women as of men. + More men may now hold driving licences - 17.1 million as opposed to 10.7 million women - but the number of women holders increased by 50 per cent between 1973 and 1980, and more than 2.7 million women own cars, spending more than Pounds 1,000 million a year on their motoring. + And if these figures send a shiver down the corridors of male privilege, there are much chillier ones to come. + Look at the learners. For every three men waiting to qualify behind the wheel there are five women. Of the 4.8 million learner drivers currently holding provisional licences, 1.8 million are men and 2.8 million are women. + Among the young, for whom driving is a natural aspiration, there are almost as many girls as boys - and from 21 years of age onwards it is females who line up in the greater numbers, right up to the age of 70. + Even among the septuagenarians who are trying to obtain, retain or recover their licences, there are as many women as men. + What does it all add up to? Raw statistics are always dangerous, and there are no figures on the fall-off of licence-holders. But since women L-drivers are now passing the test at virtually the same rate as men, and since the pass rate is around 50 per cent, it is a simple calculation that 1.4 million new female drivers and 900,000 new male drivers are joining the already seething cohorts on the roads every year, though of course relatively few of them - mercifully - become immediate car owners. + IF THIS proportion is maintained, let alone if the trend to women steepens, as many women as men will hold licences to drive in Britain in 2003 and the total number of licence-holders will - given natural wastage among motoring's senior citizens - have ascended to somewhere around 50 million. + Whether the car population will have been allowed to keep pace is another matter, of course, but I can imagine that somewhere along the way the vexed question of a licence to own a car could become rather more important than a licence to drive one. + And the men will undoubtedly be saying that it is the fault of women drivers. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +215 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 18, 1989 + +'Half families in inner-city area' hit by serious crime + +BYLINE: By JOHN CARVEL, Home Affairs Editor + +LENGTH: 465 words + + + HALF THE households in inner cities has in the past year either been burgled or had an offence committed against a member of the family, according to a research report published today at the British criminology conference in Bristol. + Dr Jock Young, head of the Middlesex Polytechnic Centre for Criminology, said that, in contrast to his findings, Home Office figures masked the seriousness of inner-city crime by presenting a 'blancmange' of national statistics. + He called for an independent body to evaluate police performance, with agreed standards, 'to end the practice of a public body creating its own performance indicators and the unseemly free-for-all which accompanies the interpretation of the annual crime statistics.' + Dr Young chose to focus his survey on Hammersmith and Fulham in London as being a relatively wealthy inner-city area which would not be expected to have an exceptional crime record. But he found half the households had experienced serious crime last year, and two in five women imposed a virtual curfew on themselves because they were afraid to go out alone after dark. The problem of crime was seen as second only to unemployment. + Dr Young said the government-favoured Neighbourhood Watch scheme was a failure. 'The average citizen in Hammersmith and Fulham sees a burglary once in every 42 years. Their lace curtains would tear and their eyeballs ache before they saw a break-in,' he said. + He argued that public enthusiasm for the scheme should be channelled into preventing environmental dumping or pollution and street harassment. + He was also sceptical about the value of government enthusiasm for 'target hardening' of property with locks and security devices; in principle it was a good idea, but in practice it cost more than it saved. + 'The cost of target hardening your own house is to make your neighbours more vulnerable. The cost of making an inner-city school more vandal-proof has become greater than the cost of vandalism. The cost of a successful concierge system in a typical London borough is in excess of Pounds 200 million. We are creating safe houses for old people which effectively cut them off from day-to-day contact with the outside world.' + Fear of crime was causing more people to own dogs, 'but dog noise and mess are now seen by an extraordinary 73 per cent of people as the major nuisance of their area.' + While Dr Young found people were very dissatisfied with the police's performance in clearing up the crimes that most disturbed them, there was also general dissatisfaction with services in the inner city. + As well as calling for a true record of crime in order to fight it, Dr Young recommended more anti-crime education in schools, since most crime was committed by adolescent males. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +216 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 19, 1989 + +Greys set to shake up West German political scene + +BYLINE: By ANNA TOMFORDE in Wuppertal + +LENGTH: 693 words + + + WEST Germany, which has Europe's youngest pensioners and oldest students, now has a rebellious Grey Party claiming that 'old is beautiful' and calling for a greater say for the over-60s. + The leader of the new party, Mrs Trude Unruh, aged 64, says she has decided that remaining quiet is 'no good.' Clubs for old people should be turned into 'centres for political education and agitation.' + Mrs Unruh (her name in English means 'restless') spent just more than two years sitting as a Green in the Bundestag. But she says the Greens used her to attract pensioners' votes without rewarding the Greys with promised constituencies. + Equipped with a cloth cap and megaphone, she is ready to take on the established political parties in next year's general election. She will campaign for a guaranteed minimum state pension of up to DM1,500 a month (Pounds 500), and pledges to put an end to 'old people being totally at the mercy of the system and the welfare mafia.' + As far as possible, the Greys want to do without homes for the old, care institutions or psychiatric establishments. Old people should have a free choice of residence, where their freedom would be maintained and the necessary level of care provided. + 'We want to lead autonomous lives, and move away from the concept that old people must be manageable,' she said at the party's spacious headquarters in Wuppertal, which is also a 'cultural centre' for pensioners. + Among her aims is to lure old people away from the growing attraction of the new, extreme-right, Republican Party. + She is fully aware that to realise their ambition, the Greys, with 30,000 members and 170 regional centres throughout West Germany, need to win parliamentary seats, so as to be able to push through legal changes to the social welfare system. + An opinion poll published yesterday said the party would muster 6.5 per cent of the vote in a general election, which would give it representation in the Bundestag. + The Green Party has regretted the loss of its 'Grey branch' and said it was a pity the environmentalists had failed 'to integrate the old rebels.' A much stronger response has come from Chancellor Kohl's ruling Christian Democrats, who are steadily losing votes and who have recently set up a Pensioners Association which the CDU claims has 60,000 members. + The government's Family Minister with responsibility for the old, Professor Ursula Lehr, has warned against an 'intensified struggle between the generations.' + By the end of this century, 40 per cent of West Germans will be over 60. At present they number 12 million. + 'We need cooperation and not polarisation,' Professor Lehr said. Both the economy and society had to face the enormous challenge of adjusting to the demographic changes caused by a drastic fall in birthrates, she said. + But she added that a minimum pension would not solve the problems linked to aging. 'The Greys have opted for the wrong path.' + At present, some 90 per cent of the two million West Germans who need care are looked after by their families, and 600,000 people live in homes. But staffing problems in hospitals and in the care sector have reached alarming proportions, and reports of 'scandalous conditions' in old people's homes make headlines almost every week. + The anger of those involved in caring for the old has recently been fuelled by a decision of a Mannheim court which, in response to a complaint from residents in a small town in Baden-Wuerttemberg, ruled that old people's homes should not be situated in 'high-quality residential areas.' + The plaintiffs argued that they were 'disturbed at night by the sound of ambulances and occasional screams from home inmates.' + It was high time, Mrs Unruh said, that those in power in Bonn realised that West Germany was fast becoming a society hostile not only to children, but also to the aged. + She said her proposals for greater integration of the old and reduced dependence on the state welfare system had exposed the serious gap between private care provided by the family and the official welfare system in hospitals, homes and other institutions. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +217 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 20, 1989 + +Private health insurers welcome tax relief plans for pensioners + +BYLINE: By MARGARET HUGHES, Personal Finance Editor + +LENGTH: 210 words + + + THE Government yesterday announced details of the types of medical treatment covered by private health insurance schemes which, for those aged 60 and over, will be eligible for tax relief from April 6, 1990 - even when the premiums are paid by someone else. + The two major insurers - BUPA and PPP - welcomed the move which makes most treatments covered by their schemes eligible for tax relief. It includes transport to and from treatment, as well as speech therapy and chiropody. + But there is disappointment the Government has not ammended its ruling on cash benefits which limits the payment to Pounds 5 a night and will exclude many schemes aimed specifically at the elderly. + These relatively low cost schemes are designed as adjuncts to NHS treatment, giving subscribers access to private health only when an NHS bed is not available within six weeks. + Where patients do receive NHS treatment the plans play cash benefits of up to Pounds 25 a night. These schemes will now have to be ammended if they are to become eligible for tax relief. + At present only 5 per cent of the over 60s have medical insurance cover but the Government hopes that tax relief on premiums will increase the take up and so reduce pressure on the NHS. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +218 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 21, 1989 + +Obituary of Kazimierz Sabbat: Some Polish exits and entrances + +BYLINE: By W L W + +LENGTH: 699 words + + + KAZIMIERZ Sabbat, fifth President of the Polish Government in Exile, died in London on Wednesday just as General Jaruzelski was reluctantly accepting, by one vote, the presidency of the Polish Government in Warsaw. + It seems a dark coincidence worthy of the pen of one of those Polish expressionists like Gombrowicz or Tadeusz Konwicki, but there was poignancy as well as irony in it. Like most of the old men who still meet in the Cabinet room of the house in Eaton Place, where yesterday the red and white flag was flying at half mast, Sabbat lately had at last become convinced that he would now one day be able to return to the land he had not seen since he escaped across the frontier as a young cadet officer in 1939. + He had just returned from America where he had been giving seminars in comparative politics to the graduate students of his friend Professor Edward Rozek at the University of Colorado. 'Now it seems within eyesight', he told a reporter from the local newspaper a couple of weeks ago. 'I would not say six months or six years, but for the first time it seems possible.' Before leaving London he had run a high temperature which failed to respond to antibiotics, but he had insisted on making the trip. + He was 76, and had succeeded to the Presidency three years ago on the retirement of Count Edward Raczynski (the Polish ambassador to the Court of St James from 1934 to 1945). Before that, he had been for ten years Prime Minister of the Council of Ministers in London, not so much a shadow cabinet as a cabinet of political ghosts whose dogged persistence over nearly half a century and apparent constitutional legitimacy once more haunts the Warsaw government deriving its legitimacy chiefly from the Realpolitik of Yalta. + Kazimierz Sabbat was of more modest bourgeois family than some other political colleagues like Count Ludwik Lubienski, the former adjutant of General Anders, who yesterday mourned his friend's intelligence, good temper, and ability to get on with all sorts of people in politically delicate situations. + After law studies at the University of Warsaw, and his escape to Hungary after the Nazi occupation, Sabbat served with General Maczek's armoured brigade in France before the collapse, and then was seconded to the General Staff in London. + After the war he started a small sports' good manufacturing business. At school and university he had been active in the scout movement. Now he persuaded the world Scout movement to accept the membership of the Polish scouting movement outside Poland which he represented as International Commissioner. From 1960 to 1986 he was chairman of the Independents' grouping in the Polish National Council (a Sejm, or parliament in exile), and played a significant part in the talks in the early Seventies which finally reconciled the opposing factions in Polish emigre politics. + His death comes at a time when the government in exile, recognised by most of the Polish communities in Europe and North and South America (and, London claims, emotionally still by many Poles at home), begins to be seen once more as a fact and not a figment of Polish politics. + In an interview in America earlier this month, Sabbat said that if the Communist Party were to lose power, he would return, but not as a leader. His mission, he said, would be to return the constitution to Warsaw 'when the first freely elected goverment meets.' + What would actually be returned would be the original Presidential seal, the old crimson flag with the Polish eagle from the Presidential Palace in prewar Warsaw that hangs now at the head of the staircase in Eaton Place, and the document of 1935 amending the constitution which provided for the government's continuation should the country be overrun. By this instrument, the President of that continuing government, which Eaton Place sees itself to be, is required to nominate his successor Ryszard Kaczorowski sworn in just before midnight on the night of Sabbat's death, has already placed the name of his successor in a sealed envelope. + Kazimierz Aleksander Sabbat, born Bieliny, Kielce Province, February 17, 1913; died London, July 19, 1989. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +219 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 21, 1989 + +Books (Poetry): Review of 'Available for Dreams' By Roy Fuller + +BYLINE: By CAROL ANN DUFFY + +LENGTH: 407 words + + + Available For Dreams, by Roy Fuller (Collins Harvill Pounds 11) + IN THE seventy-fifth sonnet of this lovely book, Roy Fuller asks 'How did an old man's daily doings seem/Even remotely apt for poetry?' Available For Dreams has much in common with the recent, and forthcoming, collections of the irrepressible Gavin Ewart; being written, as Ewart put it, from 'the last ten years of a life'. Poets in their seventies appear to experience a kind of second adolescence in relation to the Muse, bounding roguishly across to it with a drink in each hand and life in the old doggerel yet: I shouldn't object too much to dropping dead Were I then versing, moderately boozed. + Fuller's new collection consists entirely of varying approaches to the sonnet form, all of which exhibit skill, wit and intelligence. We begin in his kitchen, where the poet birdwatches; nips in to replenish the drinks while listening to the jazz of Sidney Bechet, or Rachmaninov's 'cherished songs'; or potters about between the Elizabeth David and the oven. We are very much in a life here, and in this sense Available For Dreams rewards most when it is read straight through, like a diary. The poet is feeling such an intense, though double-edged pleasure in the ordinariness of being alive that he can't scrub a muddy potato from Egypt without taking imaginative leaps far beyond the kitchen sink. + Did in past ages associations bring A deeper sense from every household thing; And those who threw out broken pots from Troy Imagine they'd tell of tragedy and joy? + Fuller orders this book into seven sections of subject. Poems about the changing seasons, about times past, old friends, the arts, suburban England, are all suffused with a common-sense awareness that time is running out. The emotional tone is restrained, perhaps held in check too long by the intellect; but such diffidence works positively, making a poem like The Elderly Husband particularly effective. ('What gods can possibly/ Exist to whom thanks must be breathed for this?') Part Seven, The Cancer Hospital, concludes the collection and deals largely with the illness of the poet's wife, a presence who figures offstage in many of the previous poems. It is more than 'remotely apt' to this erudite, humane book that one reads with pleasure these lines: Although when I receive at length the news That you're to live I find another cause For living, and realise I needed one. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +220 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 22, 1989 + +Weekend Money: Paying at the double + +LENGTH: 342 words + + + A NUMBER of elderly people, particularly widows and widowers, will apparently have to pay the community charge twice - in the form of the personal and standard charge. The standard charge can, of course, be twice the amount of the personal charge. + This problem affects mainly old people who retain ownership of their home but, as a result of declining health or extended convalescence, have become de facto residents in a relative's or friend's house. + For example, a widow in her eighties who went to live at her daughter's house in the same local authority when she came out of hospital three years ago, has remained there and has been registered as a resident on the community charge inquiry form. She has been told that she will have to pay the personal community charge at her daughter's address and the standard charge for her own flat. (At present she pays one set of rates - for the flat - which is used occasionally by a visiting relative.) The oddity of the situation is that family residential care of an elderly relative apparently puts the elderly person in the category of the undeserving rich with two homes. + Whereas in reality an elderly person in poor health is probably retaining an unoccupied home simply to retain and store their possessions, to draw on them as needed and, of course, the psychological benefit of ownership. There is too the practical advantage if the relative's accommodating household dissolves and the elderly person returns to his or her own home with the support of some care and assistance. + But, on available information, such a person may have to pay up to three times the personal community charge - ie the personal charge plus the, perhaps, doubled amount of the standard community charge. + The number of people affected by this problem may not be enormous but it must at the least run into thousands - perhaps tens of thousands. Undoubtedly some families will take such cases to appeal, where the issue will be whether there should be exceptions to the unoccupied house rule. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +221 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 22, 1989 + +Engel's Angle: Old friends who had to leave the party early + +BYLINE: By MATTHEW ENGEL + +LENGTH: 741 words + + + THE OPEN barely seems to have started, has barely taken any shape, yet already it is time for people to push off home. There were narrow escapes for Woosie, Sandy and Ben Crenshaw (though surely another year slips by). But it is so long, Larry Nelson, Fuzzy Zoeller and Jeff Sluman - major winners all. And au revoir Nick Price, the nearly man of '88, to the local boy Sam Torrance, to Brian Barnes and his shorts, and to Jim Noon, the man whose great-grandfather David Brown won the Open in 1886 (pity, there was a headline in Noon and Troon). + Farewell Peter Baker, Barry Lane and Paul Broadhurst, rising Brits; to Steve Jones, rising American; to Jerome O'Shea, the Ealing upholsterer; to Rodger Davis, who had a terrible tournament; to nice Andy Bean. + Goodbye to the three former champions, Player, Jacklin and Weiskopf, who pottered round together like Compo, Foggy and Clegg. And goodbye - much more emphatically - to Arnold Palmer: 82 shots on Thursday, 82 again yesterday, symmetrical golf but disastrous. The man who effectively started the modern Open Championship, simply by travelling across to play in it, had finished the two days 156th and last. + Old footballers go off and manage Fourth Division clubs and then grow older fast. Old cricketers go into the radio box and slag off young cricketers. There is something delightful about the way old golfers just keep playing golf. Palmer is exempt from qualifying for the Open until his 65th birthday, in 1994. The question is whether he wants to go on playing like this. + 'I couldn't be rational about my feelings right now,' Palmer said, shaking his head. 'I played so poorly. I'm upset.' Now any analyst of the game could have told him why this might happen: his swing was all unbalanced, all wrong - the right heel in the address position and his top hand in the follow through, or something. But they first told him that 35 years, 90-odd tournament wins and several billion dollars ago. And, anyway, even now it was not his driving that let him down: it was the silly little stuff. 'Thirty-six holes and he never holed one putt,' sighed his caddie, Tip Anderson. + Arnie's Army of followers has now dwindled to a mere platoon. But there was a mellow warmth in the applause as he walked down the 18th (scrambling out of the rough) that only Nicklaus could match. And, though the kids ignored him as he walked off, the old men jostled for his autograph. + Anderson has his own ideas about retirement. Next year the Open is at St Andrews, his own home town and the venue when Palmer first arrived 30 years ago to begin restoring a slightly dilapidated championship to its present magnificence. He wants to talk his boss into playing just one more. But then in 1991 it is Birkdale after that and he won there . so who knows? + The one man whom everyone expected to disappear quickly refused to do so. Wayne Stephens, the traditional Thursday nobody, is still right up the leader board on Saturday morning, and revelling in his Warholian moment of fame. + Stephens got a 72 yesterday - solid pars at the start and finish, a few adventures in the middle - but he handled everything with aplomb: not just the golf shots but the questions too, and the gracious raise of the sponsors' visor as he took the unfamiliar cheers. He loved it all: seeing himself on telly, his landlady crying with joy when he arrived back home on Thursday night, his friends ringing up, his name all over the papers. + What Stephens did not know was how unpopular he was with all the media. Nothing personal. But the last thing any journalist wanted after a long opening day was some bloke who hardly rates a line in the reference books bursting through the field just before deadline. 'I don't want to go home,' said an American journo wearily. 'I don't want to have a beer. I don't want dinner. I just want to go and interview Wayne Stephens.' + It turned out that Stephens was a grand interviewee and, just maybe, a more substantial golfer than people imagined. As he strides on to the tee again this morning, he will be able to enjoy the thrill of the tournament that Palmer rebuilt. The great man can still get a kick out of that, too. + 'One of the things on my mind when I first came here was to get international golf revived,' Palmer said. 'And I must say it's exceeded my fondest thoughts. That gives me pleasure.' Even on days like these? 'Even on days like these.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +222 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 24, 1989 + +Agenda: The threat to community care - Government proposals for community care may only further fragment the NHS unless new laws come with new safeguards + +BYLINE: By TREVOR CLAY + +LENGTH: 1259 words + + + THE Government has finally announced its decisions on Sir Roy Griffiths' report on Community Care. At least a major area of doubt and uncertainty has been removed but I feel that the Government's proposals will further fragment the NHS, fail to take into account all the developments since Sir Roy first reported and most importantly will not help the most vulnerable in our society. + I was able to share these concerns with a number of Conservative MPs last week several of whom showed their unease about the idea of hiving off responsibility for community care on to local authority social services departments. + There are also, no doubt, a number of opposition MPs who, whilst not wishing to decry local government, may have nagging doubts about whether local councils can cope with the scale of the responsibility they are being asked to shoulder. + By accepting most of Sir Roy Griffiths' analysis and proposals, the Government has set up a mechanism whereby it can absolve itself of responsibility for the care of elderly people and people with mental handicap or mental illness. One of Sir Roy's proposals which was not accepted was the appointment of a Minister for Community Care. This confirms the view that the major concern is simply to delegate what many believe should be a prime government responsibility. + Local authorities are at present implementing the community charge, changes to housing legislation and, in London, setting up education departments to take over from the ILEA. Many are already overburdened and many social workers are overstretched. And these problems are worse in areas of highest deprivation where vulnerable groups need the very highest standards of community care. + The strength and reliability of the National Health Service lies in the comprehensive nature of the range of services it provides and that it is a National Health Service. British people can expect the NHS to provide fair and equal treatment from Dundee to Dartmouth. NHS levels of skill and expertise have been spread fairly evenly throughout the country, largely due to the fact that in reality there is a single employer. + Local government, by its very nature, will make provision of community care uneven. Community care will now be in the same bracket: it will be dependent on the priority given to it by local politicians as they assess the many calls upon their resources. + Implementation of the Griffiths' proposals could well coincide with the establishment of the first self-governing hospital trusts. Thus at a time when there could be major changes in the organisation of hospital, community care will be in the melting pot too. No one can predict with certainty the effects of the Government's proposals for change in hospitals and in the way general practitioners work and liaise with other health care professionals. Whatever the inadequacy of the present system I can see ways in which a seamless robe of care between the general practitioners, hospital and community is working and can be improved. All of this is to be overthrown for an untried and untested regime, with increased uncertainties and, I believe, fragmented provision. + I am also concerned that in all the debates about the future of care in the community there has been a failure to identify the needs of the growing number of elderly people who will require intensive nursing care. There will be a dramatic increase in the number of people aged over 75 who will be frail and dependent and who will need looking after. There has been little attempt to cost the care for such people in the community, although the impression given is that it will be the cheaper option. Effective community care for dependent people requires resources and it requires planning. The Government proposals provide a planning framework and the funding mechanisms are to be stream-lined, but there is silence about any commitment to provide sufficient resources to meet society's needs. + The real challenge, which the Government has failed to address, is to provide a comprehensive system of community care invoving all forms of enterprise currently engaged in health and social care provision. The uncomfortable reality is that the private sector and voluntary sector, policed by local authorities will not, even with the best of intentions, be able to deliver care on the scale that is required. The private sector is subject to commercial pressures and we have seen many private residential care and nursing homes go under because they have been subject to the vagaries of fluctuating interest rates. At the same time there has been a rapid growth in the number of private homes, making the job of local authorities to police the homes even more difficult. The public sector can, and should, play a leading role in extending and developing community care provision. The public sector has given us one of the most effective health services in the world. It should not be left merely to step in when the private and voluntary sector cannot cope. + There was a general assumption last week that there was no alternative to accepting Griffiths' proposals. However if Ministers and civil servants had sat down and thought carefully about a co-ordinated health policy then we could have had a genuine alternative to the mish-mash of policies we have at present. Instead, by the autumn, the Government will have produced two White Papers, neither of which, either independently or together, provides a coherent strategy for Britain's future health care. + The fragmentation which the RCN predicts will result from the Government's plans for health care in this country is symbolised by the lack of co-ordination of their proposals in the White Paper 'Working for Patients' and the Griffiths report. The RCN has long advocated that District Health Authorities and Family Practitioner Committees should be merged, and that regional health authorities should be abolished. This would have allowed the establishment of a primary health care team answerable to the merged authority, involving doctors, nurses and social workers, which could have led to an integrated community care system. + This is not a plea for the self-interest of nurses but it is a plea to make maximum use of the variety of expertise currently available within the NHS and social services departments. The system I am suggesting would provide a forum to enable maximum input from the professionals and authorities involved to assess the needs of clients in these vulnerable groups. The system proposed by Sir Roy Griffiths still divides resources between two authorities and will not overcome the problems identified by the multi-disciplinary team where there will be variable and complementary needs between social and health care. + If, however, the Government insists on pressing ahead with its proposals for community care in their present form we must ensure that standards and provision of care are as uniform as possible. The very minimum required to do this will be: + a nationally trained inspectorate to look at health and social care delivered by both the private and public sectors + a defined budget for community care + national standards set for both the private and public sectors + a Minister for Community Care to argue for adequate resources to maintain standards + Without these safeguards I fear that adequate community care will never be a reality in this country. + Trevor Clay is general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing of the United Kingdom. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +223 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 25, 1989 + +Company Briefing: Housing slump hits McCarthy + +LENGTH: 283 words + + + Housing slump hits McCarthy Frozen house-selling chains in the south of England have knocked the stuffing out of many builders' shares, but McCarthy & Stone, the pioneer in retirement homes for the elderly, has suffered as much or worse than any other, with the exception of Kentish Property, the docklands apartments developer that has already indicated it is having difficulty in meeting its financial obligations. + McCarthy's spread, ranging from nursing home development and administration to second home construction in France, provides some protection, but, as a builder of new housing almost entirely for buyers who need to sell their existing homes, it has a short-term problem that necessitates some cutbacks. + McCarthy says its building program exceeded targets in the north, but the shortfall in the south is 'drastic'. Some minor branch closures and lower employment of architects hardly impinged much on outgoings running at over Pounds 100 million annually and interest charges up by over 80 per cent to Pounds 5.6million in the first half of this year. + But even if selling prices have to be reduced sharply below the recent average of Pounds 60,000, the market will recover. + The company believes it will be sooner for it than in housing generally, because of the pent-up demand for suitable accommodation for the elderly. + The shares only managed a recovery of a few pence to 172p, after last week's 61p slump. The financial year ends next month and the May warning that last year's Pounds 34million surplus would be difficult to repeat, in spite of the further rise in the first half, has clearly been left behind by events and the market, or lack of it. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +224 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 27, 1989 + +Alerts called for as 'smog' levels rise + +BYLINE: By JAMES ERLICHMAN, Consumer Affairs Correspondent + +LENGTH: 437 words + + + AIR POLLUTION is putting the health of one in five people at risk, but the Government refuses to issue alerts or set tougher controls, a report by the environment group, Friends of the Earth, claimed yesterday. + And as 'smog' levels have risen dramatically in the heatwave, three charities caring for the elderly and other vulnerable groups yesterday backed the FoE report. + According to the London Scientific Service, a monitoring body, levels of ozone - which irritates the lungs - exceeded World Health Organisation guidelines at the weekend. Breaches of the guidelines for sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, oil particulates and carbon monoxide have also been recorded. + But the Department of the Environment yesterday denied any complacency or threat to public health. It said that Britain adhered strictly to European Community directives controlling three pollutants - sulphur dioxide, oil particulates and nitrogen dioxide. + The department went on: 'We would issue pollution alerts if necessary, but the occasions when the guidelines are breached are neither frequent nor severe,' adding that recent ozone levels posed 'no serious health risk'. + Ms Fiona Weir, for FoE, said that EC guidelines were lax, and failed to cover either carbon monoxide or low-atmosphere ozone, which is a health hazard. She added that the Government's prime monitoring site in central London is down an alley in Victoria where pollution would be lower than in a busy street. + Infants, the elderly and those with heart and chest complaints are most vulnerable to the effects of air pollution, and FoE said studies showed 20 per cent of the population fall into these risk categories. + Britain had refused to adopt the WHO guidelines, which are much stricter than the EC's and cover all the major pollutants. The United States, Japan, Switzerland, and Holland had all adopted even tougher rules. + Dr John Rees, for the British Lung Foundation, backed the demand for immediate information on pollution and measures to cut excessive levels. Frequent pollution alerts are published or broadcast in the US, Japan, West Germany, Holland, France, Sweden, and Denmark. + Professor Desmond Julian, of the British Heart Foundation, said heart patients were particularly sensitive to air pollution, and their risk of death increases 'when there is an increase in the level of pollutants'. + Mr Mervyn Kohler, for Help the Aged, said the elderly are the largest group at risk, and they deserved 'smog' alert warnings. + Air Pollution and Health; Friends of the Earth, 26-28 Underwood Street, London N1 7JQ; Pounds 5. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +225 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 31, 1989 + +Golf: Charles puts on a winning grip + +BYLINE: By DONALD STEWART + +LENGTH: 442 words + + + BOB CHARLES romped away to win the Volvo Seniors British Open from Billy Casper at Turnberry yesterday - using a putter with a grip that will soon be declared illegal. + 'I only discovered recently that the putter grip I have been using for the past 30 years does not conform to regulations. It will have to go at the end of the year. I will be very sorry to lose it,' said Charles, whose win yesterday earned him a Pounds 25,000 first prize. + Putter grips that bulge at the top and are moulded to fit the hands have been banned by the US Golf Association. The ban will also apply in Britain. + Nevertheless, the putter served the 1963 Open champion well yesterday. He needed only 29 putts in a round of 66 that shot him to a seven-stroke win over the former US Open champion Casper, who had begun the day two strokes in front. + The American stretched his lead to three when the left-handed Charles bogeyed the 2nd hole, but there was a dramatic turnaround at the 5th and 6th holes. + Casper double bogeyed each of them, having to take a penalty drop from a sandpit at the 5th and then requiring three putts after bunkering his tee shot at the short 6th. + Charles took full advantage by holing a 25ft putt at the 5th for his second straight birdie, and this five-stroke swing in two holes altered the complexion of the battle. + Casper was now struggling and heading for the same runner-up position he occupied last year. Charles put the final stamp on his success at the 15th and 16th holes where there was a four-stroke swing to the New Zealander. + The American dropped three shots here and Charles picked up another birdie. + As though to emphasise his authority, the tall Kiwi birdied the 17th with a 12ft putt and very nearly holed a sand-wedge for an eagle at the last. + Kyle Burton, a director of golf at the Indian Wells club in California, came within two shots of matching his 64 years, his four-under-par 66 containing not one bogey. + But at 292, 12 over par for the tournament, he was well out of the running for the Pounds 2,000 cheque available to the leading player aged over 60. + That went for the second straight year to Christy O'Connor, who fired a final 68 to finish four over for the 72 holes and in seventh place behind Charles. + The Ryder Cup veteran had a fascinating battle with his playing partner, Arnold Palmer, who still has an army of faithful fans. + Both men gave their gallery something to cheer about near the end, Palmer finishing with an eagle and a birdie for a 70 and a total of 286, and O'Connor stealing a two-stroke march on him with a birdie at the 17th in his round of 68. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +226 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 31, 1989 + +Salmonella outbreak passes 300 + +BYLINE: By Staff Reporter + +LENGTH: 372 words + + + THE number of people affected by salmonella in Chester and North Wales last night passed the 300 mark amid investigations into a possible link with a fresh outbreak in the North-east. + The Clwyd Health Authority stated that 152 suspected cases had been reported in North Wales, with 106 confirmed. + In Chester, there are 202 confirmed cases. + Scientists from the Communicable Diseases Surveillance Centre were last night checking for links between those outbreaks and another in Northumberland and around Consett, County Durham, where at least 45 people have been affected. + The Department of Health said a further 19 people were suspected to be suffering from salmonella in the outbreak in the North-east. + It has been disclosed that all the victims in the North-east had attended one of three functions in the area. + 'We are investigating the possibility that all three were supplied with cooked meat by one supplier,' said a spokesman for the research centre, in Colindale, north London. + Scientists were analysing the type of salmonella in the North-east outbreak to identify whether it is the same type as the one in the earlier outbreaks. + The spokesman added: 'We will not know until later today or tomorrow whether there is a link. + 'We have no evidence that it was the same meat suppliers as in the outbreak in the North-west. It could be a dead end investigation, but we have to follow it through.' + The outbreak in the North-west, in which two elderly people have died, has been traced to cooked meats prepared by the Flint butchers Joss Williams and Son, and distributed by them and another Flint company, Ascot Cooked Meats. + A Clwyd Health Authority spokesman said that after the public alerts about suspect cooked meats, it was hoped the number of cases would decrease. + He added that five patients were in hospital in North Wales, and the condition of one elderly man continued to cause concern. + In addition, experts were investigating four patients at the Llwesty Hospital for the elderly in Holywell, who could prove to be victims of the outbreak. 'They are being tested, and new admissions to their ward have been stopped, but none is seriously ill,' said the spokesman. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +227 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 31, 1989 + +Call for cuts in tranquilliser prescriptions + +BYLINE: By PAUL MYERS + +LENGTH: 145 words + + + THE prescription of some tranquillisers for treating anxiety and insomnia should be reduced, the Association of Community Health Councils for England and Wales says in a report today. + More than 25 million prescriptions are issued each year for benzodiazepines which reduce anxiety and help offset insomnia, it says. + These tranquillisers can have side effects, including double vision, poor memory, and mental confusion, and are prescribed long after they are most effective, the report says. + With an estimated three million chronic users the report calls for measures to reduce benzodiazepine dependency. It wants repeat prescriptions reduced. + The elderly and women aged between 25-35 and 45-54, have been pinpointed as the main users. In some cases elderly users have become very confused and loss of physical co-ordination has led to falls. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +228 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 1, 1989 + +Tuesday Women: The incredible ageing woman - To find out how the old were treated, a young New Yorker disguised herself as an elderly woman and tramped the streets in cities across America. She discovered some disturbing and frightening attitudes + +BYLINE: By LUCIE YOUNG + +LENGTH: 1745 words + + + IN AN amazing three-year experiment, Pat Moore, a young product designer, lived as an elderly woman on the streets of New York. As 'Old Pat' she roamed around trying to find out what it was like to be old. During the controversial experiment, Pat, now 36, was shortchanged by shopkeepers, verbally abused when she got in the way and assaulted and left for dead by a gang of youths out for drugs money. Police pleaded with her to give up her double life. + Finally, after the attack, Pat Moore collapsed from nervous and physical exhaustion and was forced to give up her experiment. But she considered the attack a minor event. Overall, it was overshadowed by feelings of loneliness and frustration as she found those who treated 'Young Pat' so well were condescending, aggressive and only too willing to take Old Pat for a ride. + Pat Moore's experiment in disguise - which she started at the age of 26 - developed initially out of her work. She is one of a handful of young and brilliant women working in product design. She trained under the Fifties guru of good taste, Raymond Loewy - the man behind the first Greyhound bus, the Nabisco logo and packaging of the Frigidaire fridge. Products for everyday and for everyone. Or almost. Pat Moore became increasingly aware that one group in society was being excluded: 'There is ageism in design. The belief that you don't have to tackle the elderly as consumers.' Even her own work fell short. She had designed an interior for a public vehicle which her own grandfather would find difficult to use. + Pat Moore was aware that no company would cater to the needs of the older client out of altruism, so she persuaded Loewy that to ignore the elderly was financially shortsighted. This was not a difficult task considering that those over the age of 50 control more than Pounds 160 billion - more than half of America's discretionary income. Loewy in turn encouraged her to study gerontology at Columbia University. But here she could only read and talk about the elderly. The young Pat Moore wanted hands-on experiences. + By going into disguise, she had intended to find out hard architectural, design and engineering data. She would test out various products and find out exactly where they fell short. But soon her strict design aims were lost in the welter of new and shocking experience. + One of the most alarming discoveries was the difference in attitude the same people had to the Old and Young Pat. Typically, a shop assistant in aManhattan stationery store ignored the old Pat. He barked at her when she asked if he sold typewriter ribbons and when she genuinely misheard his question about what kind of typewriter she owned, he yelled out her mistake to humiliate her. + To ensure she wasn't encountering people on off-days, Pat would return to the same store the next day as her young self, with shoulder length blond hair, young tanned skin and often the same cheap print dress as the Old Pat - not that anyone ever noticed. In the stationery shop the next day, the exchange followed the exact same format, right down to her making the same mistake. This time, however, it elicited laughter and a jovial response. The young Pat left distraught and dazed. Irascible behaviour became almost a Pavlovian response to her 'aged' appearance. + Verbal abuse was upsetting, but she also had to watch out for people taking physical advantage. Being shortchanged and being physically out manoeuvred in a queue were commonplace. 'At the beginning, it was all I could do to stop myself from ripping off my wig and giving them as very unladylike piece of my mind,' she says. She didn't, of course. And as time wore on, she found herself becoming more and more submissive. 'I became so intimidated by the attitude of others, by the fact that they would be exasperated with me. I started to move aside to let people pass and began to say to myself, after all, old ladies have plenty of time, don't they?' + Moore was to discover later that the elderly's submissive behaviour is a classic block to gerontologist's work: 'A lot of the researchers find the elderly have been lying to them. Telling them what they think they want to hear and not the truth. They don't want to be any trouble. They are frightened that if they tell the truth about what they have been eating and doing, they will be locked away.' + But to ensure that her own ill-treatment was not just a bi-product of New York, Old Pat travelled to 116 American cities. She looked for differences in attitude between small and large towns, between different nationalities. She found none. The only small difference came with religion. 'I don't want to sound like Shirley Maclaine,' she says. 'And I don't care what religion a person is, but if he or she has some kind of faith in a being outside themselves, it makes them less narcissistic - more trusting.' + During the experiment, she withdrew to a large extent from her contemporaries and family. As she empathised more and more with Old Pat she found new friends among the elderly. She 'came out' to a discreet circle of elderly women. They took her shopping, advised her on what situations to try out and what to avoid. As far as the disguise was concerned though, the clothes were the easy part. + With the help of friend Barbara Kelly, a make up artist for NBC, accustomed to pre-ageing stars like Dustin Hoffman and Angela Lansbury - they built up a latex mask. It proved laborious to put on and take off. It involved chemicals such as ammonia which nightly made her skin itch and burn and within a short time gave her benign facial cysts - which still periodically have to be burnt off. But, with the help of a little powder, a custom made wig and glasses she could sit among her colleagues at Columbia University and not one of them discovered who she really was. + To simulate as many of the sensory conditions of the ageing as possible was as important to her as the facial ageing. She put high density 'steelworkers' wax in her ears to impair her hearing and dabs of baby oil in her eyes to cloud her vision. For her body, she developed a wrap that stopped her standing upright and even gave her a slight dowager's hump: 'Just thinking about the weight of the wrap now gives me backache,' she says. + Small splints of balsa wood placed at the back of each knee restricted her flexion and a tight tube of material around both thighs stopped her separating her legs too widely orwalking too fast. She taped her fingers to simulate arthritic hands and the gloves on top both concealed the tape and further ensured she could bend her fingers only with difficulty. + The two features which risked giving her away were her voice and her bright white teeth. A paste of crayon and oil stained her teeth and an actor friend advised her that a paste of salt and water held at the back of the throat repeatedly for several minutes ensured a rasping voice for the next six hours. + Despite the success of the disguise, Pat Moore continually felt guilty that she could change back to being Young Pat. 'I was always painfully aware the disguise was just a shell for me.' To her surprise, however, when she voiced this guilt to her elderly friends, they confirmed the feeling. They too felt they were in a shell - young minds trapped behind old faces. + This discovery was a turning point for her. It confirmed her in the growing knowledge that the elderly weren't handicapped by their own physical disabilities so much as by the attitudes and psychological barriers set up by others: 'Part of the problem is our own fear of morality,' she says. 'We try to ignore or hide the evidence of our growing old.' A fear of ageing is even built into the English language. We ask, 'How old are you?' Whereas other languages ask, 'How many years?' or, 'What age?' + The only way to overcome such fears is by restoring confidence that old age can mean independence, competence and pleasure. Pat Moore, with her training as a product designer, was ideally placed to make the everyday environment a better place for the elderly - and indeed for everyone. After giving up her disguise, she set up her own firm, Moore Associates, to design goods which would help the least able members of society - whether old or young or temporarily sick and disabled - and which would also have practical advantages for everyone. + The products didn't have to be big and costly. One of her most successful designs was for a new soap powder box. In place of the impenetrable 'pierce and open' cardboard triangle of old, she designed a re-sealable plastic flap. Perfect sense - for everybody. Other projects include laser distance sensors to make car parking a simple aural or visual task, rather than a contortionist feat. And a pill box which automatically registers how many pills have been removed and when they were removed. This is the kind of device that women on the pill would find invaluable. In all, Pat Moore and her team have developed more than 100 products and plans are afoot for many more. 'We are currently working on a large transport system,' she says. But the details are under wraps until its launch next year. + Advertisers must take the blame for a lot of the attitudinal problems in society, says Pat Moore. 'Advertising treats the young as the only consumers and it shows invariably that mythic creature the perfect user, when in reality we all go through periods of lessened ability - when we are young, or sick.' She will only be happy when advertising reflects the view that 'there are no elderly, only people older than ourselves and there are no disabled, only differently abled people'. + One of her greatest successes is not in design at all, but in the mixing together of the elderly and pre-teen children in schools. 'It is really combining the child daycare centres with the senior citizens' centres. So instead of the old folks being wheeled out each day to the tune of, 'Okay gals, let's make another ashtray,' the pre-teens and the grandparents make things together.' + This joint teaching experience should help long term attitudes to the elderly. Meeting a six-year-old boy on the beach who chatted to her as a friend and an equal is one of 'Old Pat's' fondest memories. The child responded to her naturally and without hesitation, because he didn't know any better. + Pat Moore, Moore & Associates, 280 Chestnut Ridge Road, Montvale NJ07645 USA tel; 201 391 3110. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +229 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 2, 1989 + +Greek killers get 500 years + +BYLINE: By HELENA SMITH in Athens + +LENGTH: 311 words + + + THE end of Greece's most sensational murder trial this century saw Christos Papadopoulos, a former Socialist mayor, smile broadly yesterday when he was given eight death sentences and 150 years in prison for master-minding the killing of eight elderly people to inherit their wealth. + The high court decision to sentence Papadopoulos and his 25 accomplices, dubbed the League of Murderers, to a total of 500 years in jail followed three months of court proceedings and broke all judicial records. + The public was kept spellbound throughout the trial by a series of chilling tales that depicted him and his league of lawyers, doctors and policemen winning the confidence of lonely, elderly people, forcing them to sign blank pieces of paper and killing them after they had forged their wills. + They gained more than three billion drachmas (Pounds 11.5 million) over a seven year period. + The gang was uncovered when the brother of one of its victims, the shipowner, Charalambos Typaldos, suspected the circumstances of his brother's death and employed a private detective to look into it. + Two months later the private investigator traced Papadopoulos and other gang members to an isolated farm house whose elderly owners were about to be murdered. + Of the group's eight victims only one, Efrosini Fragoulaki, was not killed by suffocation. Instead, the court heard how the leader of the gang bludgeoned the 67-year-old woman before burying her alive. Other victims included a blind lottery ticket seller and Papadopoulos's mother-in-law. + In his defence last week, Papadopoulos, who was mayor of a working class Athens district from 1982 to 1984, denied the charges levelled at him, preferring to liken himself to a latter day Robin Hood who 'stole from the rich to give to the poor.' + The death sentence was abolished in Greece in 1972. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +230 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 2, 1989 + +Guardian Tomorrows: When care takes over from career - The emotional trap of a growing number of unsung heroes + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE + +LENGTH: 971 words + +DATELINE: ROSALIND Walsh was once something in the City + + + a senior secretary/PA earning good money and perks such as private health insurance and a 3 per cent mortgage scheme. Seven years ago, she quit to look after her mother. + 'The doctor said: 'You can take her home now'. No negotiation. No training. That was it. Just devastating.' + Rosalind is one of Britain's six million carers. Largely unsung and wholly unrewarded, they bear the principal burden of tending to the needs of the elderly and disabled. Community care may be in for a shake-up but life for these community carers is going to continue much as before. + As Kenneth Clarke, the Health Secretary, acknowledged in his policy statement last month: 'The great bulk of community care will continue to be provided by family, friends and neighbours .. I admire the dedicated and self-sacrificing way in which so many members of the public take on serious obligations to help care for elderly or disabled relatives and friends.' + What the minister did not say, however, is that many more members of the public will find themselves taking on these serious obligations as the elderly population burgeons over the next few years. Many more Rosalind Walshes will be expected to give up their jobs to look after mother - and father. Today, the 2.3 million women over the age of 75 outnumber men of the same age by 2:1; in 40 years, official estimates suggest, there will be 2 million men over 75 and the equivalent ratio will have shrunk to 3:2. + Employers, now belatedly fretting over demographic trends among school-leavers, have yet to wake up to the longer-term but potentially more serious implications of the ageing nation. + The full impact of the falling number of young entrants to the labour force will be felt in the mid-1990s. From 1992 to 1994, the Department of Employment predicts, the male workforce will actually be cut as the number of men retiring exceeds the number leaving school and college. Thereafter, however, the problem will ease for 25 years or so as a reflection of the recovery of birth rates in the late 1970s. + A cursory glance at DoE projections might suggest there is no cause for alarm: the population over 65 is put at 8.7 million today, 19.6 per cent of the total over 16, and is expected by 2000 to rise to less than 9 million, or 19.9 per cent. What this conceals is that the growth will be in the more elderly, aged over 75, who number 3.5 million now and are projected to be 4 million by 2000. During the same period, pensioners under 75 (including women aged 60-65) are expected to fall from 5.9 million to 5.5 million. Most significantly, the number of over-85s, the most frail and dependent, is anticipated to grow from 700,000 now to 1 million by 2000. + Liz Bargh, head of the Industrial Society's Pepperell Unit, which campaigns for equal opportunities at work, says: 'In the mid-1990s, just at the lowest point in the number of people entering the labour market, the elderly population will be rising fairly rapidly and presenting a problem that very few of us are going to escape.' + Rosalind Walsh is already caught. Her sisters and brothers were married, heavily mortgaged or living overseas when their mother became ill. Rosalind, single and then 31, felt she had no alternative but to move back to her mother's council house in Romford, Essex, to provide the necessary round-the-clock care. + 'I have had no support whatsoever, apart from my GP. I knew nothing about social security, having never been out of work, and had to work it all out for myself. The first four years were the worst.' + As an unmarried daughter, Rosalind fits the popular image of the carer. The General Household Survey of carers, published last year, found that no fewer than 29 per cent of single women aged 45-64 were carers in 1985. So, too, were 24 per cent of married women in the same age bracket. + Melanie Henwood, a policy analyst with the King's Fund research institute, says it is a cruel irony that women will increasingly be expected to become carers between the ages of 35 and 54 - when having raised children, if any, they might wish to resume a career. + 'With more women in the labour market with higher education and career experience, the willingness to throw it all away is going to diminish,' says Ms Henwood. And with a trend to smaller families and a divorce rate of one in three marriages, and rising, the career-care clash is going to become more acute. + Liz Bargh thinks little will happen until employers stumble across the problem in the mid-1990s, just as they have recently stumbled across the vanishing school-leaver. For the time being, the focus will remain on child care policies to encourage young mothers back to the workforce to plug gaps. + Put bluntly, caring for the elderly is not likely to win as much sympathy from employers as does having babies. It is not as attractive, can last for a very long time and has no off-the-shelf solutions like workplace creches. + Jill Pitkeathley, director of the Carers' National Association, says the need is for a range of measures including special leave for carers, flexible hours to suit, support groups and, if approached sensitively, day centres for the elderly with hours to fit local employment patterns. + 'The most important thing is that somebody recognises how appallingly difficult it is to try to balance a job with caring for a sometimes very awkward elderly or disabled relative, and how appallingly difficult it is to get back into the workforce once you have taken time off for a period of care.' + Rosalind Walsh, committed to caring indefinitely, meanwhile prays for a cash grant which would enable her to take on part-time professional help while she embarked upon a new career. 'If I had say Pounds 80 to Pounds 100 a week I could employ somebody to be me.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +231 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 2, 1989 + +Guardian Tomorrows: The wanderings of Walter ..and a daughter's dilemma - The difficulties which can follow when the cash runs out and the elderly are forced to keep moving + +BYLINE: By ANNE MCHARDY + +LENGTH: 678 words + + + WALTER was an ordinary, steady family man. He served in the trenches in the first world war, then spent 40 years working as an accountant with a firm in Leyland and bringing up his two children. + Two years after he retired his wife died of a heart attack while they were visiting his daughter in Surrey. He had been born in the south of England and didn't fancy going back north alone. He found a small flat to be near his daughter and his two grandsons. + Nearly 20 years later, when he was becoming less able to look after himself, he moved into sheltered accommodation, still near his daughter. Her two sons, now grown up, were still at home, so he couldn't live with her; in any case the sheltered home allowed him to keep his independence. + Six years later he had a slight stroke. He deteriorated to the point where he needed full-time nursing, and the sheltered accomodation couldn't cope. His daughter says that it just happened one step at a time. The staff and doctors at the sheltered accommodation said he needed more help than they could provide. His daughter and her husband were still not in a position to give him a home; neither was her brother, who was himself seriously ill. + The people in charge knew of a 'nice little rest home'. It was Pounds 180 a week, but he had savings of less than Pounds 3,000, so the Department of Social Security would help. He duly moved and settled in happily. + In the nursing home the nurses were kindness itself. They even found a way around the fact that he would light a cigarette and forget it. They would make time to sit him in their staff room to smoke. + Eighteen months later the home, which had been run by an owner-matron, was taken over. For the first year all was well, but then the fees went up Pounds 4 a day, Pounds 28 a week. There were three rises in quick succession, and the DSS would not meet the increases. His daughter, whose husband had now retired, couldn't afford to meet it herself. She was put it touch with charities which were willing to help, but only up to a point. As each charity reached its limit she was passed on until she had five helping. The final rise was more than the charities were prepared to pay. + Walter's savings had drained away, making up the weekly shortfall between the DSS money and the nursing home costs. His daughter and her husband in any case had moved from Surrey to West Sussex when they retired. They had been travelling to visit him. It seemed sensible to move him nearer to them. They found a home in West Sussex and put him on the waiting list. That was in September last year. In December a place became vacant and he moved. Seven weeks later he was dead. + He was 92 and his health had been failing. The first home had not been equipped to deal with him once he became doubly incontinent and he could no longer communicate much. + His daughter wonders if the move hastened his death. 'One of the last things he managed to say to me was that he was very happy in the new home, so he did seem to be aware of the change. But I do know, from talking to doctors and people who work with the elderly, that it is not advisable to move people,' she says. + Four of the nurses from the home he had been forced to leave went to his funeral, and his daughter has nothing but praise for them. 'It was all friendly; the only problem was myself and the new owner, with me saying we could not afford to increase, and him saying he was very sorry, but there was nothing he could do. + 'I don't know whether the increase might not even have been because they knew he was getting worse and the owner wanted me to make the decision to move him. They didn't have the staff to provide the nursing he needed.' + Walter's daughter can see the problem from both sides. She couldn't have coped with the 24-hour care her father needed and recognises that providing professional care must be expensive. She does, however, feel that there ought to be some proper scrutiny of nursing home accounts, to make sure that they are not making excess profits. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +232 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 2, 1989 + +Guardian Tomorrows: At the end of the line - The elderly - Britain's burgeoning burden? / A look at the problems of caring for the old and the infirm + +BYLINE: By JAY SIVELL + +LENGTH: 1749 words + + + 'YOU CAN be born on the NHS in a hospital, live all your life in a council house and when you get a bit infirm they'll perhaps find some council Part III accommodation, the equivalent to a rest home. But when you've got beyond the facilities of the rest home you are out on your ear.' + Mrs Barbara Batchelor manages a tiny Citizens Advice Bureau in Haselmere, Surrey, at the sharp end of the buck-passing between the overstretched social services and health authorities. Her staff of volunteers has had to become adept at finding benevolent funds. + 'There is no state provision. People at that stage of their life, suddenly more frail and vulnerable than they have ever been, are on their own, expected to cope and expected to go private,' she says. + It is estimated that nearly a quarter of those aged over 85 live in nursing homes or other care. Many need help washing, dressing, eating and going to the toilet. But care costs. + State support for the chronically sick is at present about Pounds 190 a week, rising to Pounds 235 for terminal cases. Yet each patient costs a nursing home between Pounds 220 in the Midlands and North, and Pounds 280 in London, according to Peter Stanniland, of the management consultants Nursing and Care Associates, who surveyed the audited accounts of 120 homes around the UK. + Staff wages make up to 75 per cent of the total - against about 10 per cent for food, heat and drugs - and proprietors' pay is not included. + Mr Stanniland is a Conservative, chairman of the party's Axbridge branch in Somerset, but he is not pleased with the Government's response last month to recommendations by Sir Roy Griffiths that responsibility for the elderly be handed to local authorities. Health Secretary Kenneth Clarke's figures are 'up the pole', he says. 'They say they will maintain spending, but at current levels spending is approximately 25 per cent below actual cost.' + Under the new system, to come into force in April 1991, local social services departments will assess people's needs and tailor care provision to them. Central funding, at present Pounds 1 billion a year, will go direct to the social services, but no rates have been specified. + 'It is shuffling the responsibility from Mr Clarke to the local authorities so that he can say 'Well, I gave them responsibility but they did not do the job'. The fact is, he is not planning to give them the money, either,' says Mr Stanniland. + 'It has got to the stage when the chronically sick need people to fight on their behalf.' + The burden of paying for the very old is falling increasingly on the 'children', often themselves retired. 'We had one appeal from a woman whose elderly mother was in hospital after a fall,' says Mrs Batchelor. 'The daughter, who was a pensioner herself, was told the mother could not go back home and she would have to find a nursing home for her. So she did. And the sole help from the social services was: 'If you cannot finance it, take out a bank loan.' + And what if one half of an elderly couple needs a nursing home? The other may still be living in the family home, with bills to pay there. Even including pension, the present state support can leave a shortfall of up to Pounds 100 a week. + Already octogenarians are being shunted into cheaper rooms when the money runs out by families who can neither provide 24-hour care nor find the fees. The upheaval can be fatal. + Even for pensioners with homes to sell the arithmetic is grim. 'You are talking about Pounds 15,000 a year going on fees. So how long does it take to run through even a Pounds 90,000 house? Five or six years? And the fees go up. Not many people have savings to cope with their old age at these figures,' says Mrs Batchelor. + Charities are facing a flood of heartbreaking letters. 'I had one recently from an old gentleman of 80 whose wife was in a nursing home. He had a shortfall of about Pounds 90 a week to find. He had no idea where to turn and was trying to get himself a part-time job,' says Sheila Cooper of BEN, the Motor and Allied Trades Benevolent Fund. 'Obviously, we helped. But the trouble is that charities are being pushed to the wall; we are being squeezed dry. + 'The level of income support is totally inadequate and the Government must look again, because what will they do if the charities say we simply cannot pick up the bill any more? Where will they put the people we are currently supporting?' + Charities are being hit twice; many have their own homes but are also paying the shortfall for increasing numbers of people in private care homes. + Voluntary organisations, caring for some 50,000 people, 'teeter on the brink of financial collapse' because benefit levels do not cover costs, according to a survey by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. It found some charities were facing shortfalls of more than Pounds 1 million and that two thirds of homes for the elderly could not cover their expenses from what residents were paying. Corners were being cut; homes were closing. + The Registered Nursing Home Association agrees that bankruptcies are rising. 'There's an enormous changeover at the moment. We've noticed a lot of selling and buying. Bigger groups. Court Cavendish have just paid Pounds 30 million for half of Gables, of Ladbroke,' says RNHA chairwoman Tinia Galletly. 'Nobody's knocking the large groups, but that's not going to help the person on DSS support because they won't be taking that type of clientele.' + The association claims private homes save the Government Pounds 2.9 billion a year, an eighth of the NHS budget, by keeping income-supported patients out of hospital beds. 'A bad winter could cause a crisis,' says Mrs Galletly. + Private homes reckon to lose Pounds 50 a resident a week. Yet in Britain's three NHS nursing homes - which unlike private ones have no mortgages to pay off - Mrs Galletly reckons costs are over Pounds 260. 'Why should our patients cost less to care for than NHS ones?' + She, too, spends a lot of time trying to find charities, but that is because families are not always supportive. 'Profit is not a dirty word. We are not the baddies. In fact I think we are the goodies because we are doing a service to the community which the health service for whatever reason isn't. + 'In Brighton alone we've got more beds than the hospital. The health service would collapse if we all said no.' + More and more the welfare services themselves are appealing to the charities to help keep people in private homes. 'Most of our cases are referred by statutory authorities, including GPs, district nurses, hospital social workers and the social service,' says BEN's director, Geoffrey Atkinson. 'Once they are successful, they come back.' + Charities are having to set limits, too: some restrict aid to Pounds 10 a week or will not assist anyone anyone under 90, and more and more are banding together to support each resident. Others do not contribute to the shortfall until capital is down to Pounds 1,000, 'leaving people enough to bury themselves,' says Ms Cooper. + In the last three years the charities have had to set a table of 'fair' rates - up to 50 per cent higher than the Government's limits. And if private homes ask too much they refuse to pay, says Mr Atkinson. + Britain has about 250,000 charities and benevolent funds, ranging from pawnbrokers to stockbrokers, and the figure is growing by 3,000 a year. BEN, one of the top 100, for which Mr Atkinson estimates one in ten of the population is eligible, has quadrupled over 11 years. + 'We are having to grow. Ten years ago this charity had a turnover of Pounds 600,000; last year it was Pounds 4.7 million. We have got to continue expanding and growing to meet what we foresee as an absolute boom in demand.' + The charity movement has had to toughen up, he says. 'The wonderful, bumbling amateurism' has made way for more aggressive fund-raising and tighter management. + Up to now a lot of charities have not had to build in profit margins nor allow for capital outlay, which meant many could keep within the Government's limits. Now they are having to build. 'Last year we broke even overall; the residential side was down Pounds 530,000, but because we are a very aggressive fund-raising organisation we managed to make up the shortfall. The figures for the first six months of this year are Pounds 320,000 - we are not likely even to break even this year. We are seriously worried. + 'The smaller private operator will find it increasingly difficult to fill his home up with people who can afford to pay the fees, not just when they go in but until they need to leave. So one would expect to see those disappearing.' What you've got, he says, is a 'truly Thatcherite marketplace situation', and smaller operators will close. + In response to lobbying, Peter Lloyd, the then social security minister, told the Commons last week: 'The level of charges in the homes is a matter between the residents and the owners to agree, based on the services provided.' + Ministers review income support, fees and costs each autumn. 'They consider they are at a realistic level,' said a spokeswoman for the Department of Social Security. + Mr Stanniland disagrees. He does not believe the DSS listens to the voluntary groups and homeowners and he doubts extra money will be forthcoming when the Griffiths proposals become a White Paper in the autumn. It is time to shout, he says, for the ones who cannot shout for themselves. + Mr Atkinson agrees: 'The Government can get away with under-catering for the old because we as a society do not like our old people. Some think-tank recently referred to them as spongers on the state. The people who battled their way through two wars for us and actually laid the foundations of our current economic success are now scroungers?' + We operate, he says, a sort of apartheid system of care: income support for a disabled young person is Pounds 235 a week - Pounds 45 more than for an old one. 'You are establishing that there is a rate for providing nursing care, then saying we must give 30 per cent less care. Where do you make 30 per cent cuts? Food? Heat? Light? That if nothing else illustrates the attitude we as a society have.' + 'It is not just enough to lean on government,' says Mr Atkinson. 'A huge education job is needed on society as a whole. There are going to be a lot more old people, and we are going to be among them ..' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +233 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 3, 1989 + +Ice cream survey finds listeria peril + +BYLINE: By JAMES ERLICHMAN, Consumer Affairs Correspondent + +LENGTH: 274 words + + + NEARLY half of the ice cream bought during a survey contained unacceptably high levels of bacteria, including listeria and other food poisoning organisms, the Consumers' Association said yesterday. + Soft ice creams bought from vans showed most contamination, followed by scoop hard ice creams. + A total of 47 ice creams bought in London and Yorkshire were tested, of which 21 failed to meet acceptable hygiene standards, according to the survey results published today in Which?, the association's journal. + Two contained listeria, the food poisoning organism which thrives in low temperatures and can be fatal, especially to babies and elderly people. + One scoop sample contained listeria and E. coli, the bacterium associated with faecal contamination. All five samples of hard, wrapped ice cream passed the bacteria tests. + None of the samples taken came from supermarkets. + The Food Safety Advisory Centre, set up by the main retailers after the salmonella in eggs affair, said supermarket brands of ice cream had been found to be free of listeria. + Blame was laid on poor handling by van operators and other outlets which failed to clean their machines daily, contaminated ice cream with hamburger and other meats, and failed to keep utensils clean. + The infective dose of listeria is not yet known. Sixteen samples had bacteria counts exceeding 50,000 per gram, the limit commonly held to be unacceptable. Seven exceeded one million. + 'Large numbers of bacteria may not cause more than a stomach ache at most, but they are a sign that ice cream hasn't been handled carefully enough,' the association said. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +234 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 7, 1989 + +A Country Diary + +BYLINE: By MARK COCKER + +LENGTH: 360 words + + + NORTH RONALDSAY: This four-mile-long island, the most northerly of the Orkney Archipelago, is a remote spot. It is as far from London as Marseilles, and feels as different to the English capital as the Cote d'Azure. Its community of about 90 crofters speaks a lyrical dialect, distinct even from that of the other islands. To hear a conversation between two elderly men is to listen to a different language. A person feeling low and listless, for example, is described as 'fleepsie'; the + English word 'mean' seems a lifeless thing when compared with the island equivalent - 'scrunty'. Running the 20 kilometres of its shoreline is a continuous wall that keeps at bay the island's unique breed of sheep. Related to the Soay sheep of St Kilda, these are curious, small, short-tailed creatures with disproportionately long spindly legs. Denied the island's relatively fertile interior, they live almost entirely on kelp seaweed, which results in a dark and highly-flavoured meat. Previously a major source of protein when the island's human population was five times what it is today, the 5,000-strong herd has become something of a problem, stretching the workforce to the limit in the next few weeks. For autumn is the time for punding, when the islanders attempt to herd, pen and shear their portion of the flock. At present, however, these attractive animals wander freely, following shoreline tracks that they may well have used for 5,000 years. It takes longer to identify the other factors that create the island's special atmosphere, since they consist of absences - absence of artificial noise, artificial light, and, even way after the solstice, an absence of true darkness. This Celtic magic, unfortunately, is not enough to prevent a slow ebbing away of the human population. Nor does it disguise a looming ecological crisis, as an excess of fishing vessels literally hoovers up from the surrounding sea its populations of sand eels for fishmeal. Unless the trend is reversed, these measures, by removing the basis of this marine ecosystem, could bring about a catastrophic decline in the seabird populations of the Scottish isles. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +235 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 8, 1989 + +Futures (Daedalus): When it's sauce for the gander + +BYLINE: By DAVID JONES + +LENGTH: 523 words + + + THE relationship between the sexes is very asymmetric. A woman can accept a lover with relatively little instinctive fervour - a fact long exploited by the oldest profession. A man, however, needs to demonstrate unequivocal biological interest. Often this is lacking; hence the centuries-old search for a true aphrodisiac. Hence also the male obsession with achievement in such damaging activities as war, technology, and politics, which (at least according to some psychologists) all ultimately derive from erection anxiety. Now Daedalus has the answer. + He recalls the intriguing fact that the basic mechanism of male sexual excitement is relaxation. The muscles around the local arteries must relax to let the blood in and erect the penis. Nerve poisons which relax such muscles can cause erection, as well as other more unpleasant symptoms. + Now recently a well-known nerve poison, botulinum toxin, has been used to suppress muscle spasms. This deadly bacterial toxin can occur in undercooked meat; it featured in a recent food-poisoning scare. + It paralyses its victims by preventing their muscles responding to their nerves. But injected in an extremely small dose, it merely weakens the muscle's response to nervous stimuli. In the muscles of the face, for example, it can abolish distressing tics and spasms without preventing normal voluntary smiling. It degrades extremely slowly: a single injection can work for as long as four months. + So Daedalus is seeking volunteers for a study of botulinum toxin as a local aphrodisiac. A carefully measured locally injected dose should subtly weaken the contractile power of the penile arteries. For four months afterwards, erection should be much easier to achieve and maintained, perhaps almost automatic; and the treatment can easily be repeated. + Elderly gentlemen facing the decline of their virility, unhappy husbands fighting to maintain troubled marriages, Casanovas unnerved by scornful feminists, all would welcome this novel biochemical assistance. A great blow would be struck for sexual equality: for neither party to a liaison would now need to have much real interest. And a novel and appealing cure would possibly open up for warmongers, technomaniacs, and politicians. + But Daedalus goes further. Botulinum inhibits the nerves and paralyses the muscles; but other toxins, like dendrotoxin snake venom, work the other way. They switch the nerves permanently on and drive the muscles into steady contraction. So an injected 'anti-aphrodisiac' should also be possible. Based on dendrotoxin, it will reinforce the contraction of the penile arteries and abolish erection for months at a time. + Unlike the current drastically feminising hormone treatments, this neat local sex inhibitor will be perfectly controllable, reversible, and without psychological side effects. + Eager customers for the new treatment will include monks seeking to defeat temptation, sexual offenders anxious to curb their criminal tendencies, and persons wishing to demonstrate their long-term purity - such as candidates for high political office in Japan and the US. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +236 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 9, 1989 + +Arts: Canvases after Camden - A show which follows an artists' long and fruitful journey from his painterly roots in north London + +BYLINE: By TIM HILTON + +LENGTH: 1213 words + + + IN A conversation with Freddie Gore one might discuss theology, the early history of lawn tennis, his Hell's Angels acquaintances ('rather an elderly chapter'), Soho past and present, art world politics and the correct dating of Florentine altar pieces. He is the most surprising of Royal academicians, though one of the oldest of their number. + An authoritative manner mixes with relish for the unusual. Patrician by nature, Frederick Gore RA occasionally looks like a statue of himself, chiselled by some third century Roman sculptor. The next second there's a chuckle, and the face changes: the senator suddenly becomes a clever, disobedient youth. + He is the son of the painter Spencer Gore, the central figure of the Camden Town group. A great-uncle was Charles Gore, successively Bishop of Worcester, Birmingham and Oxford, the editor of that famous 1889 collection of essays in liberal theology, Lux Mundi. + So when Freddie Gore writes to the Times in defence of the Bishop of Durham, Mrs Thatcher should know that he invokes a significant Anglican tradition. His attitudes to painting are similarly deep-rooted. To this day, Gore the younger talks of Sickert, Gilman, Ginner, Bevan - even of Whistler and Degas - as his immediate forebears. + Gore is sometimes called the last of the Camden Town painters. It's an inaccurate description, as his large exhibition at the Royal Acadamy now shows. There are of course points in common. Gore shares their love of French art of the last decades of the nineteenth century. His palette - at first sight - seems to be heightened in a Camden Town manner. + He believes that painting begins with observation, and preliminary drawings from the motif often help his decisions on canvas. He has a penchant for theatical subjects, and paintings like the 1942 Snow in Charlotte Street are obviously within the Camden Town catchment area. + This is binding inheritance, however. Gore has a lot of background but still seems to be a child of the Sixties. In ways that are hard to define, his paintings seem to belong to a quite recent avant-garde. When he talks of Picasso, 'that dreadful fellow who has ruined all our lives!' he sounds like a buffer, one of the very old men of Burlington House. In the next breath, though, he praises Jackson Pollock, who 'liberated me from concern with what kind of painting I did.' + When was this liberation? Probably at the end of the Fifties, when Pollock's painting astounded progressive British artists. No point in trying to find the exact moment in Gore's life, for the Royal Academy show, though it has pictures old and new, has not been devised as a retrospective. Instead, we find an exhibition that emphasises a personality. This is Gore's own celebration; and a show that tiptoes through influences and periods is not his idea of a party. + Freddie's knowledge of parties came after he had left Lancing (head boy, of course) and was reading Greats at Oxford. There was a lady friend at the Clarendon Hotel. More decisively, Oxford offered the Ruskin School of Drawing, conducted in those days by Albert Rutherston, Spencer Gore's best friend. + Gore the younger skipped lectures to draw at the Ruskin every morning: lunch times were spent drinking sherry with the avuncular Albert. + Oxford and Freddie had soon had enough of each other. The Slade took him, and in this way he became a professional artist. Gore is of the generation whose painters had their first exhibitions just before the war and who had to start over again in the late Forties. + He had some ambitions to become a mural painter, as the two panels, Silenus and Peasant Dance show. They are derivative in a way that is not really Gore-like. It does not suit him to be acquiescent to a respected model. He likes to force a painting to work because he himself is painting it. + Hence the untraditional waywardness of quite a number - if not the majority - of the paintings now in the Royal Academy (and hence, perhaps, the reason why his paintings don't much enter public collections: you'll look in vain for a Gore the Younger in the Tate.) And here is the importance of the easel to Gore. Paint with a mural scope at the back of your mind and you'll end up with public balance. Even Pollock found this. Working at the easel, though, it's possible to push at corners and passages until they are yours, not the public's. + Gore, an open-air painter of Greek and Provencal landscapes, thinks that artists should be strong and fit. Recollections of athleticism are entirely Corinthian. Freddie talks a lot about the county coaches, the half-mile and the public school championships at the old Stamford Bridge track. + Limber strength in a painter, I gathered, has two main purposes. It helps him to dance all night, but also enables the artist to take easel, canvases and paint box to distant and hot places. + Gore takes all this equipment, by bus or bicycle, to some remote spot. Then he humps it all through the country until he finds a site for his picture. He likes to paint landscapes in places where he feels that danger lurks. The emotional charge of a wall of a dozen Greek paintings is very odd, anyway, unlike any other British landscape I can think of. + The tension must have been established by Gore's experiences in Crete in the latter stages of the war. There is a related edginess in the roomful of Provencal scenes, mostly from the Eighties, that hold this queer and emotional show together. + Strangely, perhaps, Gore's love of Russian dancing finds no place in his work, though there are many paintings of his family, home surroundings and other interests. Russian dancing is a passion, and maybe it cannot be represented in paint without loss of passion. + Everyone gasps when they first see Freddie in Cossak costume, leaping to enormous heights, swirling, cymballing and thudding - but landing on the stage as though it were a trampoline, then soaring off to lead his Balalaika Dance Group through ever more complex and strenuous routines. + How does he manage it, in his seventies? Practice. And how does it fit in with the scholarly Academician, whose book on the National Gallery's della Francesca Baptism includes such sentences as 'Of great interest to all the Neoplatonists of Piero's day and to many good churchmen before them, who had approved it, was the Doctrine of the Pagan Vestiges of the Trinity ..' + Well, why not be interested in dancing as well as in the fathers of the church? And interested in Norman Wisdom and Ian Dury for that matter, the subjects of two energetic paintings. Both music-hall types, one notes, so perhaps the pictures can be regarded as part of the Camden Town tradition. + Fifteen pictures, on the whole the largest ones in the show, are of street scenes in New York. These are all recent: Gore had not been to America before 1980. You can't easily set up an easel in Manhattan's streets, or not the ones where the action is, so Gore has based most of these pictures on photographs. + The resulting pictures have an air of experiment but at the same time are quite uninhibited. Only Gore could have painted them, but nobody could have anticipated that this is what he would paint next. + Royal Academy, until 10 September. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +237 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 9, 1989 + +Commentary: Down and out in Brussels and London + +BYLINE: By JOHN PALMER + +LENGTH: 1235 words + + + IF THE Government really wants to de-rail the 'European social dimension' bandwagon, it may have to restrict access to continental holidays. There can be little doubt that the increasing familiarity with everyday living in most of our European Community neighbours, made possible by modern tourism, is seditiously eroding traditional British views of comparative standards of living. + The Government may suggest that the quality of public services is frequently higher in the United Kingdom than elsewhere in the Community, but the facts - or rather popular perception of the facts - suggests otherwise. A number of admittedly chance conversations with holiday makers in several European countries in recent weeks confirms an impression of growing discontent with conditions at home. + It is also increasingly common to meet tourists returning from Britain genuinely shocked at how run-down some of our public services have become. British friends holidaying in Italy, for example, have been embarrassed by tales of dirty and unswept streets in Wimbledon during the tennis fortnight. + The French and Spanish, often at the receiving end of unfavourable comment 40 years ago for the unsavoury state of some of their public toilets, confess surprise at the appalling standards of comparable facilities in British high streets, trains and public houses. A well-nigh universal complaint heard from European visitors to London and other British cities is the quality of rail and bus services by comparison with other European centres. + British holiday makers frequently have the opportunity to compare medical and hospital services. Although simple comparisons are misleading, even modestly sized Belgian, Dutch, French, West German and, increasingly, Italian hospitals appear better equipped and more generously staffed than at home. + Hearsay evidence from the growing army of British workers who come to the Continent is equally unflattering about British schools. + Senior citizens are also more aware of how better off their contemporaries are in some EC countries. The fact that the Dutch provide free annual holidays for their pensioners and even economically poor Ireland finds it possible to give free radio and TV licences to their elderly folk has not gone unnoticed. + It would be ridiculous to suggest that all comparisons with the rest of the European Community cast Britain into a bad light. Conditions in Greece and Portugal are clearly inferior by almost any yardstick and for all the striking advances made by Italy and Spain in recent years there are social groups who live in worse conditions than the most disadvantaged in Britain. + That said, the increasingly common experience of more and more British people is that British standards are close to, if not in all instances at the bottom of, the comparative league table. It is this which gives the whole issue of a 'social Europe' such political resonance. + If it was just a question of some interfering or power-hungry 'Socialist' Eurocrats in Brussels agitating for higher common social standards in the Community, Mrs Thatcher could rest easy. But too many British voters have seen too much for themselves to buy that simplistic message any longer. They may not like the Brussels Euro-machine, nor feel much sympathy for evangelical Europeanisers, but they are aware of the extent to which Britain is becoming a kind of third world enclave in Western Europe. + Ironically this awareness is almost certainly most firmly rooted among the better travelled middle class who either holiday or live in Europe. But the growing numbers of skilled and semi-skilled craftsmen and women who now work, particularly in Holland and West Germany, are also able to bring wider horizons and different expectations to the European political debate All in all this must be counted as good news from the Labour Party's managers who have abandoned traditional anti-Common Marketry for an increasingly enthusiastic but ill-defined enthusiasm for the European dimension. Labour's campaign for a full-blooded European social dimension - and not merely the Commission's very milk and water promise to raise minimum standards for health, safety and other rights - is likely to cut increasingly with the electoral grain in the next few years. + But Labour's leaders show not the remotest indication of understanding where this logic must take them. During his visit to the European Parliament in Strasbourg last month, Mr Kinnock made great play of Labour's support for a far bigger European Community commitment to tackling economic and social inequality, and he rightly identified the lack of such a commitment as a long-term threat to the viability of the 1992 single European market. + Labour front-benchers have also stressed the need for a massively greater European budget to make possible large-scale economic transfers from the richer to the poorer regions of the Community if moves to European economic and monetary union are to have the remotest prospect of success. The more the Labour Party edges towards support for full British membership of the European Monetary System, the more urgent will become the need for common fiscal, expenditure and social policies in the EC. + But it is precisely at this point that the logic of the Labour front bench begins to give way. For at the same time as they are urging higher common economic and social standards - and berating Britain's ever more obvious backwardness - they are attempting to preserve as much as possible of the traditional sovereignty of the British state. + The two objectives are in hopeless contradiction. Mrs Thatcher's vision of a purely free market Europe is consistent with a minimalist European Community in which the national state enjoys an unchanged political prerogative. Labour's vision of a social and economically more interventionist Europe demands a radically new political settlement. This requires the UK nation state to cede power over both policy and spending both upwards to the European institutions and downwards to the regions. + There is more than enough in all of this to occupy a goodly proportion of the Labour Party conference in six weeks' time. Indeed this is why Mr Ken Coates - one of the new intake of leftist pro-Europeans who won seats in the June elections - has tried to persuade Walworth Road to devote a whole day to the subject in Brighton. + He is unlikely to succeed. Perhaps the Labour leaders fear that the European debate could move the party further and faster in the new direction than they want. They may also be worried that the European debate could provide a backdoor for the Left to reopen a number of controversial questions such as nuclear weapons, industrial democracy, public ownership, trans-national economic planning and a post-Cold War strategy of non-alignment between East and West which they want kept off the agenda. + Whatever the reason, the practical conclusions being drawn from Labour's European re-think open up precious little space between Mr Kinnock and Mrs Thatcher. This is territory which in the past might have been exploited by the centre parties. Today it must look inviting to the Greens, who cannot fail to see that their European co-thinkers have enjoyed their great success when they challenged the drift to the concensus centre by the continental social democratic parties. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +238 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 10, 1989 + +Old to dominate health future + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 339 words + + + THE growing number of people over 65 may account for as much as 58 per cent of UK expenditure on health care by 2015, according to estimates by the Geneva-based International Labour Organisation. + At present, the ILO calculates, the 65-plus age group is responsible for a little over 41 per cent of UK health spending. The projected increase reflects both the rising number of elderly people and the belief that they take a greater share of any rise in total expenditure. + The figures, just published in a Europe-wide ILO survey of population trends, show why the Government is anxious to exert more control over health spending through the health service reforms and the Griffiths community care shake-up. + However, the survey suggests that the UK will by no means feel the worst effects of the ageing European population. While the number of people over 80 is projected to rise by 479,000 or 28 per cent in the UK between 1985 and 2025, this increase is, after France, proportionally the second lowest of any of the 12 European Community states. + The 80-plus population of Portugal is projected to rise by 115 per cent and of Spain by 104 per cent, while Italy is expected to have to deal with an extra 967,000 in the age group and West Germany 904,000. + The ILO says that the UK will be able to cushion the economic effect of the ageing population by continuing to cut unemployment. If the dole queues remained as long as they were in 1985 (13.1 per cent), the ratio of people over 60 to those aged 20-59 would increase 23.2 per cent by 2025. If unemployment was eradicated, this dependency ratio would actually fall by 16.7 per cent. + Research in France showed that, between 1970 and 1980, the elderly took a sharply rising share of expenditure. On this basis, the ILO projects a rise to a 58 per cent share in the UK by 2015, matching the European average. + From Pyramid to Pillar - Population Change and Social Security in Europe; ILO, Vincent House, Vincent Square, London SW1P 2NB; Pounds 12.10 + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +239 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 14, 1989 + +Leading Article: Septuagenarian dog in the laager + +LENGTH: 606 words + + + UNCERTAINTY about the immediate prospects of three septuagenarians overshadows South Africa as it approaches another important political watershed. Nelson Mandela, 71, is still a prisoner but may be freed before Christmas. By then his release may well have lost the epoch-making significance hitherto routinely ascribed to it. Oliver Tambo, also 71, his friend and fellow-leader of the African National Congress, is in a British hospital after a stroke. This could portend a change of direction by the ANC, which seems to have shelved its armed struggle and to have lost its way over future strategy. P. W. Botha, 73, has recovered from his own stroke in January sufficiently to reassert his crumbling presidential authority in a manner calculated to cause maximum embarrassment to his ruling National Party. Mr Botha's farcical intervention in the plans of his would-be heir might just be the last straw for the NP, struggling to hang on to power after 41 years. Mr F. W. de Klerk, his personal prestige enhanced by a high-profile visit to Mrs Thatcher, was all set to collect another important certificate of respectability in the form of a meeting with President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia. This encounter, it was confidently announced in Pretoria, had the blessing of President Botha. The value of anything blessed by Mr Botha is a moot point, but does not arise on this occasion because he vehemently asserted that he was totally opposed to the assignation. Mr de Klerk promptly hijacked the cabinet by inviting it to his home and persuading it to join him in a united confrontation with the skulking ogre today, like the one which demanded Mr Botha's retirement and anointed Mr de Klerk. It was a smart piece of damage-limitation, but it may still not be enough. + Mr Botha is supposed to retire, if not gracefully at least finally, after the parliamentary election on September 6, to which the black majority has not been invited. Quite a lot was done inside and outside South Africa to give Mr de Klerk a fair wind for a smooth takeover and an immediate return to 'reform' as once reluctantly espoused and happily ditched by Mr Botha. The assumption on which all this preparation has been based is that the NP will win the white poll against the double challenge from the left and, more threateningly, from the ultra-right which has clearly bounced back from a lull. It is just possible that even the decades of gerrymandering since 1948 may not now guarantee the NP the absolute majority in the white chamber upon which everything, from electing the president to white domination, directly depends under a blatantly manipulative constitution. If there is such an upset the blame will belong to Mr Botha, who has done more than anyone in his 11 years as leader to diminish the party with which he has been associated for half a century. + Mr Botha still has all the trappings of an office with truly formidable powers which have proved themselves, in the hands of an incumbent without imagination, incapable of stabilising South Africa. He clearly wishes to go on exercising them to the bitter end. Unfortunately his party managers have given him enough time to extract maximum mileage from his chosen new role of dog in the laager. It is a singularly bitter irony that at this delicate moment in South African affairs the ANC should also be in thrall to a gerontocracy of its own. There is a tremendous moral victory waiting to be won by the side which is the first to emerge from self-inflicted paralysis in a fit state to take the initiative. Those who prefer to bet on calculated risks should bide their time. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +240 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 15, 1989 + +Diary + +BYLINE: By ANDREW MONCUR + +LENGTH: 732 words + + + WELL, buffing up the public image of Westminster City Council (prop. Lady Porter) is a demanding task. I mean, just think of having to explain in bright tones the sale of those cemeteries for 15p. They're now appointing a new head of public relations and publicity - the seventh, I would guess, since Shirley P took office in 1983. This time round the city is having to pay a 'recruitment and retention bonus' of Pounds 3,500 to gain a PR person used to explaining away entire government policies. Liz Drummond, who takes over the Westminster job in early October, is a former chief information officer at the Department of Education. She has been head-hunted from the Institute of Chartered Accountants, where her salary, all in, was Pounds 36,000 plus private medical cover. Even taking into account the car that goes with the job, Westminster's pay package amounted to a trifling Pounds 33,174. Hence the thumping bonus. A leading PR executive, Philip Cream, comments: 'Personally, old boy, I sometimes confuse my salary and my fax number. That's off the record, of course.' + A TINY hint that the government, in line with its general approach to health, is about to lay hold of some decent old bodies and give them a thorough shaking. Specifically, those responsible for nurse and midwife training. It comes in the form of a news release rushed out by Michael Forsyth, Health Minister at the Scottish Office. Odd. National changes being announced from Edinburgh? Whoops. A touch over-eager, he's jumped the gun by a week. + THANK you, Toby Jessel, for the good news about the poll tax, delivered in a really positive, upbeat way to a 74-year-old retired baker and his wife. The Twickenham Tory MP's advice to the elderly worried about the extra expense, seems to amount to this: you can always save money by dropping dead. Witness the letter he has sent to Edward and Pat Quirk, quoted in the Richmond and Twickenham Times. The couple had pointed out that their poll tax bill will exceed their present rates by Pounds 200. Mr Jessel's reply: some households with two adults may pay more. 'However, there is one delicate point that I cannot avoid mentioning. As, alas, we all have to die some time, then when one partner goes only one community charge will be paid instead of two.' Helpful, eh? + MEANWHILE, the London borough of Barnet has had to pay Pounds 2,000-odd and frame an apology to Jeffrey Archer, the great story-teller, in order to avoid a legal action. This little local difficulty arose from an item on the agenda which - to general surprise - came up for debate at the council meeting at the end of last month. Mrs Kitty Lyons, a Labour member, had put down a motion which was expected to languish in those parts of the agenda councillors do not normally reach. This sought to condemn a local school for inviting Mr Archer to do the honours on its prize-day; made not-so-fragrant references to events in his career; and instructed schools not to use this sort of 'specimen' for the purpose again. The Tory leader, Leslie Pym, then asked for the order of business to be changed to bring the item up for debate. 'I had hoped that the Labour councillor would say she wished to withdraw it,' he explained yesterday. She didn't. Enter m'learned friends. Barnet has now agreed to pay Mr Archer's legal fees and to review its standing orders, touching on motions whose wording could be legally contested. + TIME for a dip into the Margaret Thatcher World History Book, compiled by diary readers. 'Slave trade: an excellent example of private enterprise training the workers without jobs for the jobs without workers' (Harpreet Kohli); 'Boston Tea Party: frustrated at their chronic inability to make a decent cup of tea, crazed colonists threw chests of the stuff into Boston harbour' (Tim McCullen); 'Land Enclosure Acts: the first signs of a Green policy' (Ted Sheppard). + THIS is far-fetched enough to shape up as an opera. A Japanese party visits Glyndebourne and, by all accounts, leaves picnic beside lake. Unfortunately, it contains raw fish. They return to find it surrounded by ducks. In a fit of passion, one of them (tenor, probably) hurls defiled plastic bag over ha-ha and into fields. Next thing you know there's a cow blundering about with bag over head (contralto). Gardener (bass) flies to rescue. Exit cow, chorus of ducks, Japanese, etc. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +241 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 15, 1989 + +UK News in Brief: Chase crash + +LENGTH: 35 words + + + Three elderly women suffered bruising and shock when their car overturned in Streatham, south-west London, after colliding with a stolen car being chased by police. Two youths aged 16 were arrested. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +242 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 21, 1989 + +Agenda: The death of patience / A day in the life of an ambulanceman + +BYLINE: By JON HONEYSETT + +LENGTH: 1838 words + + + Saturday, May 27, was just an average day in ambulanceman Jon Honeysett's life - a serious road accident, a woman dying of cancer, routine domestic violence and the frustrations of dealing with the NHS. He logs his shift and argues that the galling lack of breaks reflects a deeper breakdown in the service + I CLOCK ON with my colleague, a 52-year-old ambulancewoman, at 15.00 to start an eight-hour shift. At 15.15, Control send us to admit a man to hospital with a bleed from his urinary tract. In bright sunlight, we pull up outside a neat bungalow, then make our way in through the already open front door. Inside, the man is visible, still seated on the toilet, with a catheter from his penis to a plastic bag, strapped to his left thigh, full of blood. The quickest of appraisals and the same procedure used a thousand times before - the reassurance, the portable lifting chair, blanket and incontinence pad, a deft movement lifting him on to the chair and within one minute he is sitting up comfortably on the ambulance stretcher, with his grateful wife as escort. + Conversation is a form of therapy: he tells me he had been captured at Calais in 1940, as von Rundstedt's panzers swept around the British Expeditionary Force, and had spent the second world war in a POW camp in Silesia, before being liberated by 'Red Army women on horseback, toting sub-machine guns'. The nine miles to hospital are reeled off as quickly as the heavy traffic will allow. At 15.55 we admit him to his ward bed - no luxury of porters to take the patient from us - and are 'green', the code for being ready for further duties. Control had an inter-hospital transfer ready for us. + This particular hospital has a maternity unit 200 yards away, but because of some blunder in the planning department there is no tunnel or walkway connecting the two buildings, so all 'sitting-case' and stretcher patients travelling between them are dependent on ambulance transport. At 16.05, we lift the pregnant women into our ambulance, escorted by a nurse who is irritated by the delay over such a ludicrously short distance. Regulations forbid her to push the patient in a wheelchair from point A to point B, even though it would take only three minutes. + After wheeling the women up to her ward, we are 'green' at 16.15. Control promptly orders us to a large geriatric hospital more than eight miles to the east of the city to admit an elderly woman suffering from a bowel obstruction and dehydration. + At 16.35 we enter the old building and lift the elderly woman on to the American-designed FW stretcher. We are away within a few minutes. No talking therapy here - just a vacant stare from the patient. At the main hospital we wheel her up to the ward and hand her over to the waiting nurses. + Green again at 17.05 and Control asks us to return to base. We are pleased: we appreciate meals at reasonable times and can now look forward to tea at 18.00. Our hopes are quickly dashed, however, because just a mile short of base, Control are back on the radio. A multi-vehicle pile-up on one of the main roads from London to the West Country has meant ambulance units from stations north of us being moved up for cover and we are ordered to attend a traffic accident 999 call outside our normal operating area. + Switching on our blue lights, headlights and siren, we drive across the periphery of the city and travel out along narrow country lanes to reach the scene of the accident at 17.35, 15 minutes after we were alerted. A policeman and three passers-by are clustered around two people lying by the roadside. An upturned motor-cycle lies just beyond them. The patients are a man and his 12-year-old son, knocked from their machine by a car. The young lad has a nasty gash on his lower right leg and his father has a shoulder injury. + NORMALLY, such an incident would warrant two ambulances, since both patients require stretchers, but we know it is pointless requesting back-up - there is none. Making up the 'sitting-side' stretcher, we gently lift both father and son aboard and set off for the nearest casualty hospital, in the centre of the county, having first found out the extent of their injuries and dressed the injured limbs. + We arrive at 18.00 and the casualty unit doors swing open. Again there are no porters to assist us. The staff nurse is busy preparing for the first of the casualties from the major accident Control had mentioned earlier and there is momentary confusion as she mistakes us for a crew dealing with that incident. Seconds later, with a police motorcycle as escort, the expected ambulance pulls in, but not before our two patients have been unloaded, wheeled in and transferred to the hospital stretchers. + It is now 18.20, more than five hours since we last ate or drank anything, and the hospital canteen is closed. Carrying food on ambulances is forbidden because of hygiene reasons and so we were pleased to be told to return to base by Control. + When we arrive at our station, 29 miles away from the emergency call, our F-registered, three-litre Ford ambulance needs refuelling. The fuel gauge is never allowed to drop below half, and 56 miles have been covered since 15.15, when it was three-quarters full. + At 19.00, we finally sit down to eat: the tea has been poured and little more than a sandwich eaten when the red phone blares out a 999 call from a woman whose arm has been badly cut in an argument with her boyfriend. + The milk of human kindness is apt to turn sour at times such as now, especially with this type of call. The woman is a slovenly, overweight, 18-year-old, living in a five-storey block of council flats, where the surrounds and stairwell are encrusted in filth, litter and graffiti. The woman's arm has been lacerated deeply; it appears that she deliberately pushed it through a broken window to 'spite' a leering 'drongoid' specimen of a boyfriend seen hanging about on the concrete landing outside. + We dress the injury, walk her down to the ambulance (leaving an unattended ambulance in urban areas risks theft and damage from the usual groups of youths who congregate, sometimes jeering, at any incident) and by 19.40 the woman has been booked into the crowded casualty unit. + WITH NO break in sight, control send us out into the country, 10 miles away, to a bungalow where a cancer sufferer who was visiting a friend had collapsed earlier in the afternoon. Her condition is so advanced that the care sister covering her case requires us to take her back to her flat in the city. We eventually find the address and, with difficulty, carry the heavy patient up the narrow path on our portable chair and into the ambulance. I administer oxygen to assist the woman's breathing rate and we drive off with her into the twilight. At 20.55, we find the suburban flat, lift her up the steep flight of stairs and put her into bed. She is still virtually unconscious, but her relatives are waiting for the GP to arrange admission to a nearby hospice. + With control's permission we return through the suburbs to the station, arriving at 21.10. Surely now we would have our break. When the red phone blares out again, we do not even grimace - there is no clause in our contract of employment which specifies a half-hour meal break within the eight-hour shift, nor do civil servants in the Department of Health seem concerned that few ambulance personnel live to retire at 65 in normal health. The patients we convey are too ill (and often too inarticulate) to complain to the Secretary of State for Health on our behalf; the district health authorities are composed of people who have no working experience of ambulance duties; and because of the undemocratic structure of the NHS, there are few ways in which questions of staff shortages, stress and violence we encounter can be constructively discussed. + Our 999 call is to yet another elderly woman, who has collapsed. We ensure she is made comfortable and telephone the patient's own GP. He arrives quickly and by 22.25 we have transporated the woman 11 miles from her home to the main hospital, wheeled her up to the ward and placed her on the ward's own stretcher. The GP had phoned ahead to arrange this, in order to bypass the tedious routine of admission via casualty. + We arrive back at our station at 22.45, by now very tired. At 22.53, with only seven minutes of our shift left, we have to respond, automaton-like, to yet another 999 call. A member of the public has reported 'someone lying in the gutter' in a suburb some three miles west of us. Wheeling out of the station, we 'timecheck' five minutes later; and discover that the someone has crawled up the drive of his house and into a conservatory at the rear. Using our powerful torch we see an elderly man inside locking the door to prevent our entry. He is wearing only a shirt and underpants, from which hang a mixture of diarrhoea and blood. We radio Control to advise the police to effect an entry. + Ten minutes later, the police arrive and manage to get the old man to open the front door. The sergeant and constable quickly move in and persuade him to accept hospital treatment. Just afterwards, our night crew arrive and put him in their ambulance. Control 'stand us down' and we arrive back at base at 23.45. + I clean up, drive home and crawl into bed at half past midnight. Due on duty next morning for the 07.00 to 15.00 shift, I had telephoned Control to say I would not be starting that shift until 08.00 - we are entitled to a clear eight hours between turns of duty. The first hour of that next morning's duty will be 'single-manned' unless one of the night crew can be persuaded to continue from 07.00 to 08.00. + Am I being mean-spirited and callous, or am I burnt out? People reading this would probably say all three, but unless they have working knowledge of the ambulance service they cannot understand why staff are so dispirited. The service is very small: only 19,000 staff in the UK, compared with 39,000 in fire brigades and 110,000 in police forces. My gross pay, after 15 years' service, is Pounds 10,093 per annum, with no perks. A fireman with similar experience would receive more than Pounds 12,000 a year, a policeman more than Pounds 15,000 per year plus housing allowance, free prescription charges and free public transport passes. + I cannot retire until I am 65 (if I live that long), nor is there the funding to take me off accident and emergency duties and put me on to less arduous day shifts without a massive loss of pay (Pounds 50 per week). Indeed, these day duties are increasingly being handed over to private companies who employ staff with no medical knowledge, unproven driving skills and, above all, no sense of community responsibility. Remember these facts when you next have to wait for an ambulance. + Jon Honeysett is an ambulanceman at the Hightown Station in Southampton. He is 47, has worked for the ambulance service for 15 years and is a NUPE shop steward. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +243 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 23, 1989 + +Health: Driven crazy - What the future may hold for non-car users - Britain's dying breed + +BYLINE: By ADRIAN DAVIS + +LENGTH: 609 words + + + TRAVEL by car is less safe per mile travelled than all forms of public transport - boats, planes, trains and buses. Yet we are becom- ing increasingly reliant on the car. + Mobility is becoming so important and cars pose such a threat to other, more vulnerable road users, particularly elderly and young pedestrians and cyclists, that many people who might prefer to walk or pedal have succumbed to driving. The Department of Transport claims that more and more elderly people, women and ethnic minorities are joining the motorists' ranks. + Over the next 35 years, according to the Department, traffic levels may increase by as much as two and a half times present levels. Growth on such a scale will almost inevitably result in more deaths and injuries and the further intimidation of non-motorised travellers. But instead of seeing road safety as a public health problem, the Department of Health seems to be leaving accident prevention to the Department of Transport, which is currently consulting on proposals to improve pedestrian safety. + Last year 5,041 were killed on the roads, of whom 39 per cent were pedestrians and cyclists, and 95,000 more casualties occupied hospital beds. In 1987 out of 311,473 road traffic casualties, 1,703 pedestrians died as a result of their injuries. The number of minor injuries sustained can only be guessed at since a vast proportion never get reported. + A survey by the Transport and Road Research Laboratory 10 years ago found that pedestrian accident victims stayed in hospital longer on average than vehicle occupants. The most common type of injuries are to the head and legs, followed by arms, chest and pelvis. + Young and elderly pedestrians feature disproportionately in road traffic accidents and there is also a steep social class gradient with regard to children hit by cars. Road accidents are the commonest cause of death in school-aged children, and children from social class V are over seven times more likely to be killed by a car than children from social class I. This class differential arises from where children live and play, and also from the fact that parents from higher social classes are more likely to own a car and to ferry their offspring around in it. + According to the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (Pacts), the cost of pedestrian casualties is estimated at over Pounds 1 billion. Mrs Jeanne Breen, Pacts coordinator, reports that 95 per cent of casualties occur in urban and residential areas, where there is strong justification for safety and traffic flow to be balanced more effectively. + Although 80 per cent of journeys under one mile are made on foot, walking half a mile to the shops is seen as unimportant in terms of road planning. As Dr Mayer Hillman of the Policy Studies Institute points out, the National Travel Survey is used to recognise changing trends in motorised travel. Road safety for pedestrians takes second place. + What does the projected growth in traffic volume mean for the public health? It means that life for those who cannot afford a car will become increasingly unbearable as streets become more congested and polluted. Surveys already suggest that less than one-fifth of all children take enough exercise to maintain or improve health and the only exercise many adults take is walking to and from work and the shops. + But as more roads carve up the community and more of us are forced into the motor car, we will soon require pedestrian sanctuaries for exercise purposes - to which we will doubtless have to drive. + Adrian Davis is London Road Safety Co-ordinator of Friends of the Earth. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +244 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 24, 1989 + +Eyewitness: Freedom chain marks an old captivity + +BYLINE: By JONATHAN STEELE in Vilnius + +LENGTH: 871 words + + + PUNCTUALLY at seven o'clock a million and a half people stepped into the road and held hands. The human chain stretching almost 450 miles from the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, to the Estonian capital, Tallinn, was the Baltic civil rights movement's way of commemorating the signing of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact 50 years ago yesterday. + It must have been one of the longest chains the world has ever seen. At least in the section I watched just outside Vilnius, everything seemed to go with extraordinary efficiency. People had been told where to stand, according to the places where they worked. + 'My institute has been given the motorway from the 194km mark to the 198km one,' a woman electronics specialist explained as she strode past with her family on the shoulder of the road. Four lanes of cars drove up both sides of the motorway trying to reach their designated spots in time. + Although the Lithuanian Communist Party was not an official participant in the mass event, state radio broadcast a live commentary on how the demonstration was building up. + At 6.50pm it announced every gap had been plugged and the chain was ready. Thousands of people carried the Lithuanian national flag, its red, green, and yellow colours draped with black ribbon to mourn the Nazi-Soviet protocols which put the Baltic republics under Soviet control. + A few lit candles and placed them on the ground. Many wore black. Those with radios turned up the volume so that the sound of a choir singing patriotic songs outside the national cathedral could be heard up and down the impressive line. + The road from Vilnius to Riga goes almost directly north. The organisers had decided the protesters should face West and turn their backs to Moscow. But in truth this was a safety measure rather than a political gesture. People had driven up the right side of the road and it was thought safer that while they waited along the grass verge they should face the traffic. + Among the older people the feeling of anger over the pact was almost entirely directed at the Russians. Feliksas Bartaska, a retired chauffeur aged 67, did not see the Russian troops when they arrived in 1940. But he well remembers their return at the end of the war. + 'Liberation?' he told us. 'Only a small number of people welcomed them. Everyone was afraid of the Communists. They took so many people away the first time they came.' + Aldona Vytkauskas, who was a farm girl of 12 at the time, recalled how surprised her family was to see the Russian troops in 1940, 'so thin and with such skinny horses. You couldn't be afraid of people like that.' + An assortment of small political parties held a rally in the park above Vilnius. + There were militants wearing lapel buttons showing the hammer and sickle and the swastika side by side. Some 2,000 supporters gathered to hear them, then joined the protest. + Police stopped the traffic as a man carrying a banner in English, saying 'Stop Communism in Lithuania' walked by. Two years ago such a sight would have been impossible. It was not that the man in blue could not read English. The banners in Lithuanian were stronger. + Soviet television put a brave face on the human chain in its main news programme last night. 'It was not a separatist demonstration but a sign of faith in justice, democracy, and human progress - the agenda of perestroika,' a commentator said. + In Moscow, the authorities used force to contain a demonstration organised by the radical Democratic Union. Men in uniform attacked demonstrators, ripping signs from their hands and pummelling them to the ground. + Some 13,000 people took part in two demonstrations in the south-western republic of Moldavia, which was also absorbed into the Soviet Union the year after the pact. + In Vilnius, outside the headquarters of the mass-based Popular Front, known as Sajudis, which organised the human chain with its counterparts in Estonia and Latvia, a poster depicted Hitler marrying a heavy-set woman in a white dress with a remarkable likeness to Stalin. + That poster apart, Sajudis' line is low key, skilful, and clearly more popular. Its spokesmen called for independence, but not yet secession. A rally they held in Vilnius the night before the demonstration brought out some 40,000 people. + But there are strains inside Sajudis as a morning meeting of their parliament of roughly 200 members showed yesterday. Radicals wanted to amend a declaration calling for Lithuanian independence so that it would say unequivocally 'outside the Soviet Union.' Sajudis's chairman, Vytautas Landsbergis, (who sits in the new Supreme Soviet in Moscow) argued against this. He wanted Lithuania's relations with the rest of the Soviet Union to be based in future on the original treaty of 1920 between Lenin's Soviet Russia and Lithuania. That, of course, was between two sovereign states. His phrasing was adopted. It was more diplomatic and therein lay the difference. + Of such are the subtleties in Baltic politics made. + As one man put it to a West German reporter beside me: 'The Berlin Wall is made of brick and concrete. Our wall is stronger. Why? Because it's invisible.' + Leader comment, page 20 + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +245 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 25, 1989 + +Records: Sealed with a disc - Keith Richards bridles at the suggestion that rock is a young man's game / Spruced up, rifts with Mick Jagger all forgotten, he and the Stones are back in the studio and on the road + +BYLINE: By ADAM SWEETING + +LENGTH: 2073 words + + + THE first track on the new Rolling Stones album, Steel Wheels, is called Sad Sad Sad and it has been forged in Keith Richards' image. It opens with a declamatory salvo of gale-force chords, as if Richards has flung down a chain-mailed gauntlet and is daring you to pick it up. Then he whips his squad of old codgers into line behind an iron wall of guitars. + Even Mick Jagger has stopped nimbying about for the first time in a decade. His voice sounds confident and sneery, with no trace of his farcical reggae pastiche, his absurd honky-cat funk voice or his preposterous Nashville yowl. He may even be paying attention. + Steel Wheels is no Exile On Main Street, although it's not far short of a Some Girls. It's futile to come searching for the insurrectionary clamour of Street Fighting Man or the 12-litre strut of Brown Sugar. But tracks such as Rock And A Hard Place and the single, Mixed Emotions, jab you in the ribs and remind you where they're coming from while Blinded By Love finds the Stones throttling back into their wistful, countryish mode. + 'They're all variations on a theme,' Keith Richards explains. 'Sometimes you're totally unconscious that it's a variation on a theme or riff you've done before until after it's finished and other times you do it deliberately, you wanna let them know this is the Stones. You want it to echo back.' + It's logical to assume Richards is in charge but he puts it down to organic effort. 'I guess I do a little bandleading now and again but I always feel I'm working for Charlie Watts, basically. Then Charlie always felt it was Ian Stewart's band anyway, and we were just custodians of it.' + Age has withered them, certainly. Bill Wyman is more than 50 and the Stones have sired 13 children among them. Four of these are Keith's, with his oldest, Marlon, now 20. Somewhat to his surprise, Richards finds he has been happily married to Patti Hansen for six years. + Yet this battered old troupe have been able to muster a rowdiness and vigour which is invariably processed out of the modern recording studio. Still, I suggested to Richards that the Stones should have stayed in retirement and could be viewed as a bunch of elderly gentlemen cashing in on their past. He found the suggestion mildly offensive. + 'I think that's a really shallow attitude,' he said. 'The fact is that nobody knows whether you can take this music any further because it's not been there yet. If anybody can find out it's the Stones, which is why I find the idea even more fascinating. + 'People only think of it as juvenile or young music because in its present form, known as rock 'n' roll, it's 30-odd years old. I would find it far worse to chicken out and not find out whether this thing can grow up. I don't see why you can't have very mature rock 'n' roll, that can still relate to young people as well as your own generation. That's what we're trying to do - at least, what I'm trying to do. What else would I do, you know?' + Richards emits the kind of chuckle which suggests a starting-handle being vigorously cranked on a freezing morning. He is slumped at a table in a bar in Barnes, just across the road from Olympic Studios where he and Jagger have been applying the finishing touches to Steel Wheels ('Put the fairy-dust on the bastard,' drawls Keith). As he works his way through an afternoon of interviews, his diligent publicist relays amber liquid in shot-glasses from bar to table. 'Bless you, Bernard,' gasps Keith gratefully, taking a gulp and chasing it down with a mouthful of cigarette smoke. + The legend of Keith Richards has at its centre a man of awesome physical and psychological resilience. The way posterity will remember it, he has walked unscathed through the hell of Altamont, been able to survive tours which involve no sleep and extraordinary quantities of stimulants and successfully faced down the entire British legal system. Heroin addiction couldn't finish him off, either. + In person, Keith cuts a slight, crumpled figure. As he talks, his hands flutter in front of him in slow motion, as if drawing out some piece of information from his large but erratically indexed memory banks. His voice is a curiously theatrical mix of Delta bluesman, south London lout and debauched aristocrat, somewhat at odds with the two-fisted man of action which appears to be Keith's image of himself. He's had fights with Ron Wood, for instance, and tells how he considered punching Chuck Berry during the filming of Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll. Not that the cantankerous Berry wasn't asking for it. + Yet, after 25 years in the eye of the storm, Richards has reached a plateau of imperturbable calm. The deep lines in his face imply a stoic acquisitiion of wisdom. By contrast, the younger Keith resembled the skull ring which adorns his third finger, right hand. + A less self-contained character would have succumbed to the notoriety, or the drugs. 'I was just glad to get that monkey off my back,' Keith reflects, of his heroin years. 'I enjoyed not having to spend 90 per cent of my time with that being the main thing in life. Getting it, and how to hide it, and whether it was any good or whether it was strychnine. All those junkie problems that we used to have. + 'Also I found that it's really not that difficult to stop. I ain't saying it's pleasant but I do find that the things I see in the media are a little heavy-handed. You don't need six years of counselling to get over it. You need three days of climbing walls and then you're clean, and then it's up to you. + 'Of course, you go back out and the only people you know are junkies and dealers. But when guys were trying to turn me on, get me back in the trap, I used to get off on watching the disappointment on their faces that they couldn't get me any more. + 'ALSO, there was no way I could get arrested any more. One more time and it was bye-bye. I couldn't do that to my kids and family and I couldn't do it to my band. I'm more hooked on the Stones than ever I was on that shit.' + While Mick Jagger has tried, embarrassingly, to behave like a man 20 years younger, Richards has maintained an Olympian detachment, casting a sceptical eye over Jagger's aerobic antics and maintaining his faith in the Stones. He is unswayed by sentimentality and Good Causes - 'Don't trust 'em, don't know where the money goes' - and assumes that humanitarian gestures by the Rolling Stones would be greeted with hoots of derision. + 'I'd want to know an awful lot about it before I'd want to get involved. I think yeah, they shouldn't cut down the forests in the Amazon, I need air for my kids to breathe. I think they should plug up those holes in the ozone layer as soon as possible. I agree with all of that but whether these shows actually do much to help, I dunno.' + 'I HAVE always thought there was still a lot more in the Stones and this year's proving it,' Keith is saying. 'There're a lot of interesting things we could do without having to sit on nostalgia, which I don't think anybody in the Stones could bear to do. It would be cringeing, to do a Beach Boys and just go around playing Brown Sugar. As long as there are new things - and I think there are - it's a very interesting band to work with, especially when they're all clicking together.' + He attributes the band's relative vitality to the fact that, for once, at least some of the musicians had been keeping their hands in during their time apart. Ron Wood toured with Bo Diddley and played with a Swedish blues band. Jagger made a solo album called Primitive Cool, which Keith thought was insufferable twaddle, and toured in Japan for oodles of yen. + Richards himself teamed up with Steve Jordan, Ivan Neville and others and knocked out an album called Talk Is Cheap which, despite a few abrasive guitar riffs, was scarcely the album we'd been anticipating for the last 20 years. He'd toured with it, too, assembling a band called the Ex-Pensive Winos and by all accounts enjoying himself on the road as much as he could ever remember doing. + 'The consistency of working does wonders for your playing, for ideas, the continuity of it,' Keith slurs. 'When Mick and I began working together in February, I said to my old lady, 'Look, I'm going off to Barbados to write songs with Mick for a couple of weeks. So I'll either see you in two weeks or two days.' He pauses for a rattle of laughter, as his cigarette dangles precariously over his drink. + 'And we found it incredibly easy to work by ourselves, without any outside influences to worry about. The Stones have been together for a long time and it is to a certain point an organisation. All organisations go through this eventually, where people feel they have to take sides, then you have to take a stance. I'm talking about Mick and myself. You're obliged to defend other people's so-called honour instead of just sitting in a room together and saying, 'Look, we've got to get rid of this problem.' It became impossible.' + Where Stones albums routinely took years to finish, Steel Wheels has been hammered together in a fleeting six months, from initial songwriting to final mix. No doubt the planned American tour, booked to start at the beginning of September, was a spur to getting the job done. Most significantly, though, the album found Jagger and Richards working in harness again. When they made the Dirty Work album, for example, Jagger's presence in the studio was virtually undetectable. + Naturally, the revitalised Stones will only be visible as dots on the horizon. Richards admits he can't feel really happy playing in stadiums and domes when he's only recently experienced the delights of playing to theatre-sized audiences with his own band. + 'Playing in the open air to the elements is like a Test Match - has it rained overnight? What's the pitch like? Will we get any lift off the ball today? You can have the biggest and the best sound system in the world but with a crosswind across the stage, some guy three miles down the road who's just got off work and wants to sleep gets the best sound in the world.' + SO WHY do it? Richards advances the familiar argument that with demand being what it is for the Stones, the stadium shows are the only solution. + 'If there's that many people want to see you, what are you gonna do? You can't just play for yourself. It's something more than music, it's tribal. There are far deeper things involved than a new Stones record or a new Who record. It's a sort of drive, a necessity, to come together, if there's anything halfway decent to provide some background music. It's like a feeling of security and you don't have to make any decisions. Maybe it's the pressures of society that have made that even more necessary.' + Or the pressures of marketing and bullshit. As long as people are desperate for tickets, or think they are, the megashows will go on. Yet Richards expresses scepticism about The Who's current comeback tour, especially regarding Pete Townshend's acoustically dampened cubicle at one side of the stage, to which the veteran chordsmith can retire while session men play his guitar parts. + 'It has to be a bit suffocating in there, I would have thought,' Keith ponders. 'It's a bit Spinal Tap, innit? I can imagine what the incentive really is to do it, and good luck.' + You mean money? + 'Something like that, maybe, you know. I don't know if I could handle that - 'Excuse me, I must go into my booth.' It's intriguing, Peter. Ha!' + But aren't the Stones doing the same thing? + 'Well, we shall not be in pods. The stage will be different, we'll just be trying to put on a good show and play well at the same time.' + Surely you can't hope to recapture the glory days? + 'We were there at a point where everything was almost an innovation and now it's a much bigger business. But I wouldn't consider it glory days as such. Those years were nothing to do with bands or music, those years that we were doing that, there was quite a ferment going on in society. It sort of coincided. + 'But to me as a musician, I certainly look forward to putting on some good shows and still being able to surprise a few people, including myself. I'm not trying to recapture my youth, anyway. I'm more interested in finding out what I can do with the rest of my life.' + Steel Wheels is released by CBS on September 1. The single Mixed Emotions is out on Monday. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +246 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 25, 1989 + +An offer that Merthyr's miners could not refuse: British Coal's golden handshake for the closure of another South Wales pit has created a legacy of bitterness + +BYLINE: By PAUL HOYLAND + +LENGTH: 833 words + + + THE dozen men laughing and shouting as they posed for a group photograph outside the Gordon Lennox Conservative Club yesterday looked like members of a works syndicate who had come up on the football pools. + Each clutched a sheath of papers detailing their various rewards for agreeing to the closure of mid-Glamorgan's Merthyr Vale colliery. Those with long service get up to Pounds 35,000. + The older men could not resist the golden handshake, but many felt betrayed by British Coal's abandoning the oldest pit in Wales, snatching 526 jobs from a community that has never recovered from the Aberfan disaster in which 116 children were engulfed in a sliding slurry tip 23 years ago. + Young miners bitterly complain of the 'blackmail' that obliged them to vote for closure to safeguard the redundancy terms for those who had spent a lifetime at the pit, which was sunk in 1873. + British Coal would have withdrawn the lump sums if the men had not agreed to the closure by tomorrow. + The result of the ballot, in which the shutdown was accepted by a large majority, came as 125 job losses, with the threat of more to come, were announced at Merthyr Tydfil's biggest employer - the Hoover washing machine factory, three miles along the road. The combined jobs blow sent shivers down the valley. + For the old man walking his dog through Aberfan, history was repeating itself. 'I can remember when there were three pits just one mile from here, but they closed them down,' said Mr Leslie Jones, aged 67, a former miner who worked at Hoover for 40 years. + 'I feel sorry for the youngsters that are in this valley and dependent on Merthyr Vale colliery. Where are they going to go? + 'Most of the people down here work at Hoover's, but they're making people redundant. The small factories they're putting up in the valley aren't taking on more than 25 to 30 people. + 'Merthyr has been going downhill for donkey's years. We're dependent on rebates in rates because people are on low incomes.' + Mr Jones recalls every moment of the Aberfan disaster but, like most of the locals, he prefers not to talk about it. + There is the same sort of reticence at the Aberfan Social and Democratic Club, where an electrician spoke quietly of the problems that killed the Merthyr Vale colliery. + 'They weren't getting the coal up,' he said.' They opened one face and went 15 yards and the weight came on the face and they couldn't move.' + Miners' leaders insisted, however, they had not been given a chance to save the pit, which British Coal said had lost almost Pounds 2 million this year and Pounds 7 million last year. + Mr Leighton Owen, aged 40, a lodge representative, will receive Pounds 21,224 after 14 years' service. He was almost speechless with anger. + 'It's chickenfeed, and I voted to fight on,' he said. 'The board have shown total contempt for men who have busted their guts over the past couple of years with exceptionally bad conditions. + 'We could have come into profitability in the very near future, but they have put a gun to the men's heads. Men have been offered up to Pounds 35,000, but if the vote had been to fight the closure those poor buggers would have been turned out with Pounds 5,000 instead. It's disgusting. We've given our all to this industry and now they have shit on us.' + Some felt that defeat in the miners' strike was the root cause of the sweeping pit closures in South Wales over the past four years. 'That woman Maggie Thatcher set out her stall after the miners' strike,' said Mr Owen. 'There will be no coal industry in South Wales in less than four years because the board are butchers with Thatcher as their henchman.' + One young miner spoke angrily on the dilemma he and many others had found themselves in. 'My uncle, who is 38 and has been down the pit since he was 16, was going to lose Pounds 20,000 if we voted to fight on,' said Mr Leighton Jones, aged 24. 'That was in the back of my mind. And he would have had it in his mind that by voting for closure he would cost me my job. I've got nearly Pounds 3,000 for eight years' work. That's rubbish.' + British Coal has promised other jobs for those who wish to transfer, but as there are only six pits left in the coalfield, that promise may prove difficult to honour. + Miners such as Mr Russell Barnard, aged 30, are happy to take the money and leave. 'The morale hasn't been very good and I'd get Pounds 8,200,' he said. 'This is what I've always wanted. I'll get a job with private contractors.' + But Mr Peter Evans, the lodge treasurer, who has been offered Pounds 23,351, is equally determined not to leave the industry. + 'I'm going to transfer to Deep Navigation colliery,' he said. 'I firmly believe that the redundancy terms will increase in line with the European Community and that by next year a new scheme will come in. + 'British Coal's blackmail tactics are only designed to save them money and give the men a lot of heartache. I'm staying.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +247 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 26, 1989 + +Leader faces double opposition + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL SIMMONS in Warsaw + +LENGTH: 637 words + + + THE minimal honeymoon of Poland's new Prime Minister, Mr Tadeusz Mazowiecki, ended yesterday, almost as soon as it had begun. + Confronting the biggest in-tray in Europe in his Warsaw office, he could be forgiven for thinking that he now faces much passive as well as active opposition. + The active opposition, expressed by just four Communists in the parliament on Thursday, will at first be restrained. + It knows that whoever accepted the job of Prime Minister of Poland is, in the recent words of one deputy, a kamikaze specialist bent on self defeat to save the country. + Mr Mieczyslaw Rakowski, the party leader, is said to be bitter still about how Poles have failed to understand his reform programme and turned against him personally. + But passive opposition is something quite different. In its most clearly recognisable but not totally definable form, it is to be found in the inertia of many Poles, a refusal to believe in work and a need to be unscrupulous to survive. + Old age pensioners literally fight each other at 9.15 every morning, having queued for some hours to get into an old established but poorly supplied sweet shop on the Warsaw Uprising Square. It looks degrading, and is, but the sweets in many cases are only being bought to be sold again at artifically inflated prices. + Across the road from where these fights take place are some of the offices of the State Planning Commission, a body of questionable usefulness in these days of reform and gradually being stripped of its centralist powers. + In the factories, thousands of workers at any given time are idle - because raw materials are not forthcoming or cannot be afforded, because spare parts cannot be obtained for essential repairs, or because, all too often, the habit of work has been virtually lost. + One of Mr Mazowiecki's special pleas from the outset has been that he wants Poles to support him by showing that they really can be motivated to work. + The general in charge of the economy before Solidarity came along was Piotr Jaroscewick. He and his mentor, Mr Edward Gierek, the party leader, took the party into a morass of self interest, corruption and perpetual latent crisis. + It was this administration which took the country recklessly into debt. It had started with good will in the West and borrowing was easy; now that debt is nearly Dollars 40 billion and almost unrepayable. Interest payments are supposed to be nearly Dollars 3 billion a year but it has not worked out. + Roughly two-thirds of the total is owed to Western governments and one-third to Western commercial banks. + At political management level, there are the two enormous obstacles to progress represented by the system of nomenklatura and the media. + In a Warsaw suburb, a small factory is producing machine tools. It used to be run, under the Communist-led government, by a Communist Party appointee - a member of the nomenklatura promoted purely on political merit. + Today it is run by the same person as his company: he fixed things so that he could lease the land - formerly state property - for a nominal sum. + In the media as elsewhere, the nomenklatura is also strong. + Finally there are the security forces. Now being investigated by a Parliamentary Commission looking at the Interior Ministry, Mr Mazowiecki needs to be speaking the same language as the forces of law and order. + Solidarity has strong views on such people, and it became ominously clear in a north Warsaw suburb the other day that they also have specific views about Solidarity. + A dozen or so people became engaged in a drunken brawl in a busy shopping area, and a concerned passer-by rang the police. The duty officer heard the complaint and said: 'Why don't you get Solidarity to deal with it?' and slammed down the phone. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +248 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 29, 1989 + +Tuesday Women: The sharing of sorrow - A Tiananmen Square eye-witness finds images indelibly etched on the mind + +BYLINE: By RUTH CHERRINGTON + +LENGTH: 839 words + + + TEARS welled up inside me as I listened to a radio programme about American Vietnam War veterans. Their recounting of years of emotional turmoil touched my own vein of sorrow suddenly and deeply. I recognised the symptoms of unexpressed grief. + It is not that I had experienced the sustained degree of horror and brutality they had both witnessed and committed. What I went through was relatively short-lived and should have been, perhaps, easier to come to terms with. + My own trauma was to witness a small part of the Beijing massacre at the beginning of June, when an unknown number of young people were killed by the troops of the old men struggling to maintain their own political lives. The scenes of that tragic night will no doubt remain for the rest of my life although the shock and horror have passed. + It's over now. My bruises healed quickly but the repercussions are a long time in being felt. It is the disturbing aftermath of such experiences, described so vividly by those Vietnam veterans, which triggered my tears and pain. + The recurring sights and sounds of the early hours of June 4 are not easy to live with but are not the only problem. I got out safe and sound but those I saw shot did not and I can't forget them. As with the former soldiers, the memories tend to interfere with the peaceful normality of life back home which is no longer so 'normal'. + All my senses and emotions were roused that night before being brutally bombarded, as were the Chinese students and those who sought to help them. That is where the continuing problem lies. How do people come to terms with such a burden of anger and grief? + The Vietnam veterans talked of withdrawing from the company of those who had waited patiently for their return. Isolation. I recognise this as a phase in the 'post-massacre syndrome' as I call it. I feel that a gulf now exists between myself and those who care about me, put there by myself, not them. I seem to be thinking too often: 'I was there, you weren't'. + It becomes increasingly difficult to talk about the massacre, but since my life as a political writer was so closely associated with China's fortunes, I can hardly discuss anything else. I don't wish to dwell on the issue and subject my friends to the same conversation over and over again. It's better, therefore, to withdraw, retreat, stay away from people. 'They'll understand, it's better all round,' I tell myself. + Some of the Vietnam veterans talked of isolation and running away both in literal and symbolic terms. Taking to the hills or to drugs were not uncommon strategies for dealing with feelings of social incapacity. I just try to keep myself to myself and be busy. + But, all alone, how can I grieve for the dead? Mourning is usually a very social ritual when those who share the loss can share the burden of grief. Unexpressed sorrow can be destructive if it does not find an outlet. I'm a foreigner to the Chinese but I want to mourn for those I saw dying and for the great loss that China suffered that night. + I think of the mothers who still wait for their son or daughter to return from the capital, not knowing whether they are dead, in prison or in hiding. Their grief also, perhaps, has been put to one side, their mourning postponed until there is news of their children. + Without a body the mourning ritual cannot begin, the necessary release of sorrow is put off indefinitely. + But I realise I cannot postpone the inevitable grief without suffering some sort of psychological damage. There is no body for me to cry over, no funeral service to attend, just the vivid pictures in my mind's eye of those young people. These images tear at my heart and spirit, just as the dead haunted the Vietnam vets. I don't want to forget the brave students and workers who died for their ideals but I must be able to carry on my life, in acceptable co-existence. + I have to avoid the drawn-out route of those pitiable American soldiers. Being men and heroes, they were not expected to cry but carry on where they left off. Some found this impossible. I find it difficult. Another solution must be found before I give up on people or they give up on me. + Recognising the need to grieve goes some of the way to overcoming the emotional impasse. I must share the sorrow with those who feel the same. I cannot return to Beijing and be with Chinese friends there, so I seek them out elsewhere. Those who were fortunate enough to be out of the country still feel the anguish and horror of the killings. I must be with them even if I have to travel a long way. + I want to cry without self-consciousness, without embarrassment and to tell my story again. In doing so, maybe the isolation will be ended and the pain of that night eased. Then I can pick up the pieces and gain some inspiration and strength from the students' sacrifice. To share the grief with Chinese friends who will now be exiles may be the key to helping myself and showing proper respect for the dead of Beijing. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +249 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 31, 1989 + +Virginia exhibits its black record + +BYLINE: By MARK TRAN in Richmond, Virginia + +LENGTH: 535 words + + + THE former capital of the Confederacy clings resolutely to its Civil War glory. A drive down stately Monument Avenue takes you past statues of the South's heroes: Jeb Stuart, Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson. + An attempt to close down the palatial United Daughters of the Confederacy building and evict the last nine elderly ladies was roundly rejected by the courts. + But Richmond, established by English settlers on the James River in 1637 and now Virginia's capital, is coming to terms with the obverse of that romantic past - the city's treatment of its blacks. + The effort is being spearheaded by the Valentine Museum, in Court End - once Richmond's most fashionable district and now dominated by the Medical College of Virginia complex, only a few blocks away from the Museum of the Confederacy. + The Valentine, under the leadership of its director, Mr Frank Jewell, and a young staff, has embarked on a project to reinterpret the city's history through a series of exhibitions called New Nation, New City. + Given the tenor of the city, where only a black entertainer, Bojangles, has been honoured by a statue, the effort constitutes an overdue exercise in historical revisionism. + Currently on show is the fourth in the Valentine's series, Jim Crow: Racism and Reaction in the New South. Before the Civil War, Jim Crow was a minstrel character who epitomised the happy slave. + As race relations changed in the aftermath of emancipation, Jim Crow became synonymous with legally and socially condoned segregation and racism in the South from the Reconstruction period after the Civil War until 1940. + The exhibition portrays the efforts of white supremacists to demean blacks through specious scientific theories, and black attempts to achieve full political rights until the Virginia Constitution of 1902. + That put paid to black gains since the Civil War by using requirements of property tax, literacy and Confederate credentials to reduce the number of black voters from 6,427 to 760. + The show goes on to look at white intimidation of blacks through organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan as Richmond evolved into a segregated city. + 'It's remarkable the show exists at all,' said the Valentine historian, Ms Marie Tyler-McGraw. 'It's not something many museums, if any Southern ones at all, would have scheduled.' + Exhibits include books which strive for scientific proof of black inferiority. A work by JC Nott and GR Gliddon is typical, containing a white man's profile, followed by a black man's, followed by a monkey's. + Blacks are not only represented as victims. The show depicts black responses to racism which presage the debate between Malcom X and Martin Luther King. + John Mitchell, the editor of the Richmond Planet, was the most outspoken and militant defender of black rights at the turn of the century, and led a boycott of the segregated streetcar system. Successful black middle-class women such as Lillian Payne and Maggie Walker led predominantly female efforts at inter-racial civic co-operation. + If the show has a fault, it is that it tends to be wordy. Many exhibits are documents or extracts from documents lacking visual impact. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +250 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 1, 1989 + +Israel mourns at a bleak shrine in Jerusalem's hills: How the victims of the holocaust remember their terrible history + +BYLINE: By IAN BLACK + +LENGTH: 641 words + +DATELINE: YAD Vashem + + + Israel's holocaust memorial - is a bleak place. From afar, the low grey concrete buildings on a Jerusalem hillside look like one of the Nazi death camps whose victims they commemorate. A tall stone column pierces the sky like a smokestack. + Memorial services and ceremonies are a common occurrence; they are the reason the Heroes and Martyrs Remembrance Authority exists. Yesterday was different. The 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the second world war aroused memories that are still piercingly sharp. For in Israel, the past is not yet another country. + The veterans come every year, leaning on walking sticks, forearms bearing their faded blue camp numbers, chests bedecked with the medals of the armies in which they served. Their Hebrew is heavily accented. Polish, Russian and Yiddish are their mother tongues. + 'I always attend,' says Zvi Vilk, who fought as a partisan and went with the Red Army to Berlin before emigrating to Israel in 1957. 'But this year many more of us are here. Each of us has his own terrible history.' + Mr Vilk, aged 72, proudly wears the copper-badged green beret of the Organisation of Disabled Soldiers and Partisans of the War against the Nazis. Others are in the stiff blue caps of the World Organisation of Former Jewish Combatants, Partisans and Camp Inmates. + The very names of these associations are an inventory of a terrible century. Six million Jews - a third of the entire people - died in the second world war. Israel, in Zionist ideology, rose from their ashes, took in those who remained and vowed that such a disaster would never happen again. + Yad Vashem is a monument to pain, but there is heroism as well. At the end of the tree-lined Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles - planted to honour non-Jews who helped Jews hide or escape - is a little wooden boat used to smuggle holocaust survivors past the British naval blockade of Palestine. + In a country where the younger, native-born generation can be cynical about past horrors, the ritual of remembrance is long-practised and finely honed. A legless, wheelchair-bound veteran lights the eternal flame, a trumpet sounds and the speeches begin. + Snatches of history echo through the hot, windless air. Names like Molotov and Ribbentrop, terms like appeasement, ghettoes, gas chambers and crematoria sound alien in the setting of gnarled olive trees and terraced hillsides. + Anti-semitism, racism, intolerance and neo-Nazism require vigilance, the speakers warn. Someone quotes the stirring lines by Avraham Shlonsky, the Israeli poet: 'I have vowed a vow to remember it all. To remember, and to forget nothing.' + Suntanned, chiselled faces of old men and women stare ahead. A little girl whispers a translation to her grandfather in halting Yiddish. 'Eli, Eli,' the haunting anthem by Hannah Szenes, the Hungarian woman who left Palestine to parachute to her death behind German lines, brings tears to many eyes. + 'I will always remember those years,' says Aharon Katushnik, who lost his entire family to the Nazis in Lithuania and survived a hard war with the Red Army to tell the tale. 'Now, when I hear that song, I want to cry. It hurts.' + Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Defence Minister and the man responsible for handling the bitter conflicts of the present, mounts the podium. 'The world is pulling down barriers and limiting military force,' he says. 'Totalitarianism is creaking under the weight of democracy. + 'Our duty to the coming generations is to create a safe haven for the Jewish people. But it is also our duty to explore all options for peace. When the world celebrated its great victory over the Nazis, we collected our dead. We are a people that dwells alone, even if some are sympathetic to us. We can trust only ourselves. No one will give us their help and we will not seek it.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +251 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 2, 1989 + +Time Off: Paradise under an English sky - The pleasures of a day out among the deck-chairs and slot machines of Clacton-on-Sea + +BYLINE: By ADAM SWEETING + +LENGTH: 720 words + + + THERE IS a rather far-fetched theory that the English seaside resort is enjoying an upswing in its fortunes. The notoriously xenophobic English punter (the story goes), sick of being trapped in squalid airport lounges with vomiting oiks and fed up with the 'foreign muck' served in the Algarve or the Peloponnese, is coming back to the new-look English coast. + Could Clacton-on-Sea claim to be paradise rebuilt? At least you will be comparatively safe swimming off its 'Euro Award Clean Beach', unlike, for instance, Southend, where you take your life in your hands if you go near the water. Butlins and Pontins, those erstwhile Colditzes of British leisure, have been replaced by self-catering, self-contained resort complexes like Highfield Holiday Park, with pool, sports facilities, disco and gym. + Even the draconian Boarding House Landlady of popular legend has succumbed to market forces to the extent that keys are offered to guests staying out later than 9pm. Basil Fawlty would not be welcome under this streamlined new regime. La Dolce Vita has come to the Essex Riviera. + It was warm when I dropped in on Clacton, the sun breaking through the mid-afternoon cloud. A crowd gathered on the beach as the temperature climbed. A light aircraft, joyriding from the local airstrip, wobbled out over the pier and back. Picturesque barges ploughed up the coast towards Felixstowe or Lowestoft as a handful of elderly ladies played bingo in the arcades just off the seafront, squinting hard through horn-rims under tight silver curls. + I met some sun-seekers down on the prom. 'A day's enough, innit?' observed one girl, swinging pale legs over the concrete parapet. She'd driven out to Clacton from London that morning, with her boyfriend. Why Clacton? 'I used to come 'ere when I was little,' said her boyfriend. 'I wouldn't want to stay here, mind.' They'd been to Austria a couple of weeks earlier. Neither thought the night-life was worth waiting for. 'It's all old-time dancing and old fogies,' the girl reckoned. + I WANDERED off past the ranks of deck chairs, sagging under the weight of comatose people holding ice-creams and the Daily Mail. + Things happen in slow-motion here, as you would expect in a town crammed with senior citizens. I pottered out to Holland-on-Sea, a residential suburb favoured by retired couples seeking shelter from the storms of life. My aunt use to live here, among the identi cal brick-and-tile bungalows, terrifying silence, and elderly motorists trying to park Allegros. You could get arrested for not loitering. + Still, Holland is like Manhattan compared to Jaywick, on the south-western flank of the town. You reach it by driving past the housing development where Butlins used to be, by the Martello towers. + 'There's a waiting list for those houses,' the lady at the Waverley Hall Hotel confided. 'I think yuppies from London are buying them.' Jaywick resembles a derelict desert town in the aftermath of a biological war. The chemist has been closed for eight years. The streets, with names like Sea Flowers Way or Sea Glebe Way, are lined with cowering rows of sad, weather-beaten bungalows. You can't even see the ocean behind the sea-wall, so it's as if Jaywick has been shoved to the edge of a void and abandoned. Appropriately, there's a pub called The Never Say Die. + BACK AMONG the comforting semi-bustle of Clacton proper, the hoteliers say business was looking up this year, though much of it would inevitably be coach parties of pensioners from the North. One hotelier revealed that the average English family still likes a traditional breakfast complete with fried bread, while his recent guests have included 'a few foreigners from Harwich'. + There was a feeling that while the town is clean and well-kept, the council hasn't put much thought, or money, into providing the kind of facilities which could form the basis of an aggressive marketing effort by local business types. 'What is there for the younger people?' demanded one hotel manageress. 'Only bloody slot-machines.' + Antibes it isn't, and, as one elderly couple from Preston put it, 'the name puts you off, like Blackpool'. But it's the studied lack of style that gives Clacton whatever charm it possesses. There's no danger of Nouvelle Cuisine poisoning here. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +252 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 7, 1989 + +Drug gives hope for older breast cancer patients + +BYLINE: By AILEEN BALLANTYNE, Medical Correspondent + +LENGTH: 459 words + + + WOMEN who develop breast cancer at the age of 70 and over are likely to do just as well without surgery if they are given a simple drug treatment, doctors at King's College School of Medicine in London announced yesterday. + Mr Michael Baum, the college's professor of surgery, said 400 breast cancer patients aged 70 and over volunteered for a study in which half were treated by mastectomy or lumpectomy and half were treated only with the drug, tamoxifen. + After five years, the survival rate in both groups was the same. Tamoxifen is regularly used for breast cancer patients to prevent remaining cancer cells from being stimulated by the hormone oestrogen. + Unlike chemotherapy, tamoxifen has few side effects and is taken daily by thousands of women. Breast cancer affects one in 12 women in Britain. + Professor Baum told the Fifth European Conference on Clinical Oncology in London that 15 per cent of patients who had tamoxifen only had a complete remission from the disease. + Twenty per cent had a partial remission and for half of those on tamoxifen, the tumour remained about the same size. Some still had to have surgery but this could be delayed if, for example, the patient was too ill for surgery initially. The delay seemed to cause little harm in most cases. + Only about 5 per cent of the tamoxifen users had to have surgery in the first three months. + Mr Baum said there were no plans to carry out similar studies on younger women. 'We have only had the courage to test this in women over the age of 70. We would be worried about taking the risk when we already have a preventive treatment.' He stressed that the findings were important for older women who developed breast cancer and hid the fact from their friends, family and doctor because they feared surgery. + 'Women should be counselled about the options and reminded that untreated breast cancer is extremely unpleasant. It ulcerates, it bleeds, and it stinks,' he said. + In a separate study, doctors at Birmingham Children's Hospital have found that in Dudley in the West Midlands, children are developing a rare form of childhood cancer almost five times more frequently than the national average. + The form of solid tumour cancer, which often affects the ovaries or testes, occurs in two in every million children every year but in Dudley the incidence has gone up to the equivalent of nearly 10 in a million between 1971 and 1984. + Doctors believe this may be a result of industrial carcinogens and point out that the area is noted for metal processing industries. + Dr Michael Stevens, consultant paediatric oncologist at the hospital, stressed the need for further studies into the significance of local industry in childhood cancer. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +253 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 8, 1989 + +Commentary: Battle for the high ground of citizenship + +BYLINE: By MELANIE PHILLIPS + +LENGTH: 1024 words + + + IN ONE week, we've seen the two faces of British youth. On Wednesday night we saw the ugly reflection of football hooliganism in Stockholm. A few days previously, the Prince of Wales stepped through the looking glass to offer an alternative image of a caring and concerned younger generation when he revealed his initiative to set up a volunteer community army of up to 100,000 young people to work alongside the professional caring services. + Time was when such an idea would have been dismissed as an off-the-wall utopian dream. It would have been reviled either as a device for papering over the cracks in the welfare state or for depriving workers of real paid jobs. But this week the suggestion has received a respectful, even warm reception from both left and right. + The proposals came jointly from the royal charity, the Prince's Trust, and the Speaker's Commission on Citizenship, an all-party group of MPs, union leaders and educationists. The idea is to give everyone aged between 16 and 25 the chance to spend three months on full-time projects, anything from helping old people to working in homes for the handicapped to reclaiming derelict land. + Although the Government has been careful to distance itself from the proposals - presumably because they will invariably involve spending money - it seems that cautious approval has been gained across a political spectrum stretching from Douglas Hurd, the Home Secretary, and Nicholas Scott, the Social Security Minister, through the TUC General Secretary Norman Willis to Labour MP David Blunkett and the former Ilea Leader and now secretary to the Commission, Frances Morrell. Moreover, public opinion polls indicate that young people are extremely keen to get stuck in to some community caring. The volunteer, it seems, has come in from the cold. As the Prince commented, when he floated the idea in the past, all it received was a raspberry. So what's changed? + The first thing that's changed is public awareness of the ominous demographic trends which indicate that the number of people needing some kind of care is leaping ahead of the numbers in paid employment to look after them. We've seen it this term in education, with the frantic scramble by schools to plug the gaps in the classrooms by hiring teachers from abroad. + Trends indicate that by the end of the century probably half the population will be composed of children, retired or handicapped people, all of whom will need some degree of looking after. By then, the number of people aged over 85 will have gone up by half as much again, while advances in medical science mean that all the time people who would previously have died from their handicaps are surviving to require ever more specialised care. + The realisation has taken hold that unless official services are supplemented by some kind of informal caring networks, the welfare system will simply grind to a halt. Other countries, after all, have a more realistic attitude towards volunteers. The proportion of young people doing community work in Britain is one of the smallest in the European Community. In part, this is because other countries tend to use this work as the alternative to military service; nevertheless, in countries such as West Germany the welfare services would simply collapse without it under the sheer volume of caring to be done. + The trouble with the present British Government's approach is that although it makes noises in this direction, it doesn't back up the rhetoric with the money needed to make it work. After all, the original intention was to apply poll tax to volunteers, and although an exemption was eventually wrung out of the Government the change of heart has not yet actually found its way into the small print of the proposed legislation. So the commitment is half-hearted, as no doubt will be the response to the royal initiative. + But there is another, deeper reason for the change in public perception. The battle is on for the moral high ground of citizenship. This concept was floated on to the contemporary political stage by Douglas Hurd as his response to the apparently rising tide of soccer hooliganism and lager loutishness that threatened to besmirch the reputation of his office and bring into disrepute the Tory rhetorical commitment to law and order. + Thus the active citizen was born, the new moral soldier who would not sit back passively and wait for the state to act against crime or produce a welfare system, but who would join Neighbourhood Watch and commit his company to funding programmes to keep young people out of prison while looking after his ancient and disabled mother (or, more probably, getting his wife to look after her). + Behind this concept of citizenship lurked the anxiety that the Government was stained not merely with an uncaring image but that it was directly responsible for fostering a climate that exalted selfishness and materialism and the cult of the individual. This is why Mr Hurd's initiative drew such a robust and indignant response from Labour's David Blunkett, who claimed citizenship as the historic platform for socialism. + Now here is Mr Blunkett welcoming Prince Charles's initiative in that same spirit, saying that it will encourage unselfishness rather than promoting the cult of looking after Number One. Yet those on the left of politics have until now been extremely suspicious of encouraging volunteers on the grounds that these roles are properly the responsibility of the state. + The consensus that appears to be emerging on this issue is reminiscent of the issue of environment, on which left and right similarly appear to be finding some common ground. The political camps come together in the shared apocalyptic view that the structures of civilised society are about to suffer some catastrophic fracture unless everyone wakes up to the dangers, that we're all about to pay an awful price for rampant materialism and unchecked selfishness. + Similarly, those who once wouldn't have been seen dead in the company of volunteers now fear that they will be seen dead precisely because they are not. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +254 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 8, 1989 + +Elderly patients 'were stripped and force-fed in sister's ward' + +LENGTH: 224 words + + + A HOSPITAL sister ran a geriatric ward for three years where force-feeding, stripping and tying patients to chairs was commonplace, it was alleged at a disciplinary committee yesterday. + Sister Mary Rutter, aged 48, who has been a qualified nurse for 27 years, denied 28 allegations of misconduct at Stanfield Hospital in Stoke-on-Trent between November, 1983, and August, 1986. + The UK Central Council for Nursing committee was told that she left patients sobbing, 'without dignity and naked' in wash areas where cleaners kept their mops and brooms; that 80-year-old women were punished unless they ate all their food; and that laxatives were used so much that 'normal bowel movement' was lost. Patients were kept from using the toilet when they wished. + The allegations came to light in March, 1986, when staff nurse Valerie Noble complained about patient care, said Miss Katrina Wingfield, for the council. + The allegations of misconduct included claims that 'she caused the foot of a patient to be strapped to a wheel chair; caused the leg of a patient to be tied to a chair, that she was aggressive to patients and that she left a patient naked in a sluice for a wash causing stress.' + She was also accused of 'refusing to allow a patient suffering from cystisis to go to the toilet.' + The hearing continues. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +255 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 9, 1989 + +Roy Hattersley's Endpiece Column: The foolish focus of snap misjudgments + +BYLINE: By ROY HATTERSLEY + +LENGTH: 973 words + + + LAST WEEK'S description of my visit to Edinburgh's Canongate Tolbooth was a disgrace to serious journalism. I intentionally omitted a report on an incident which, by all the criteria of objective reporting, should have been included. At the beginning of my tour of the museum that tells 'the people's story' I took part in another round of the contest in which I have competed for years. It amounts to hand-to-hand combat with press photographers and it is based on the question 'How much of an idiot is he prepared to look in order to get his picture into the paper?' + I was introduced to the game when Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection. In those days, I made a lot of public visits to shops and markets where cameramen would entreat me to hold either a very large cucumber or two melons. Sometimes politicians are confronted by more subtle opponents. The Economist once printed a staged tableaux (almost vivante) of the Gang of Four playing cricket in preparation for their party conference. Shirley Williams was keeping wicket in batting gloves. The moral is obvious. Never hold or wear anything offered to you by a press photographer. + Hats are a particular temptation. I have stood outside fire stations all over Britain, tipping, lifting and waving my section leader's hat to imaginary firemen on imaginary fire engines. The result has always been absurd. There is also a terrible danger in arm movements. 'Point,' says one photographer. 'Over here,' says another. The result is a picture in which you are pointing left but looking right. I always hope that charitable newspaper readers regard such photographs as proof that I am cross-eyed rather than demented. + A similar problem arises with hand-shakes. Professional photographers can catch a football in mid flight as it flashes between boot and goal, but it takes them agonising minutes to capture the Lord Mayor's welcome or the Chairman's congratulations. As a result, I have spent much of my life publicly holding hands with elderly men - and doing so with my elbow bent in order to ensure that we are both immortalised in the same small picture. I find it impossible to prolong a look of gratitude when the object of my sudden affection is so close that I can feel his breath on my neck. Local papers all over the country have pictures of me recoiling from civic dignitaries. + In Edinburgh the problem was different. The Canongate Tolbooth illustrates the people's story with life-size waxworks which wear the clothes, perform the tasks and appear to listen to the music of earlier times. Inevitably, I was required to insinuate myself into the perfectly contented family gatherings and interrupt the various heroic workman at their noble toil. The whole thing started amiably enough with me making sure that I was the first person present to suggest a 'Which is the dummy?' caption. Then the photographers proposed that I examined a towel which a polystyrene inter-war housewife was hanging on her genuine 1930s clothes line. I announced that it was still damp enough to iron and moved into the Eighties. + The way we live now was represented by a multi-racial group of very small people who demonstrated their harmony and friendship by standing very close together. Had I posed in front of them, the whole yardfull of neighbours would have been totally obscured. I was, therefore, required to edge between father and daughter. You are hoping to read that I flattened half the family and was subsequently arrested by a waxwork policeman. No such thing occurred. Nor would it have mattered. + No politician has ever been pilloried for being clumsy. You can fall in the sea and still become the leader of the Labour Party. Stumbling down aircraft steps did not prevent Ronald Reagan's re-election. It is acts of intentional idiocy which are damaging - for example, sitting on a table in an imitation of a garden gnome to demonstrate what a really foolish photograph would look like. I did it and the picture appeared in the Independent the next day. + My problem with the Edinburgh family was that I behaved not badly but too well. I treated it as if its members lived and breathed. Taking up my position was particularly difficult. I was determined not to cause offence to the daughter of the house by rubbing against her. Once in position I did not know what to do with my hands. By the time the flash-bulbs exploded I was leaning drunkenly to the right with my left hand nonchalantly on my hip. I expected the waxwork head of the household to announce: 'We don't want any of your sort round here.' I left the exhibition by tramcar - by which time Pygmalion had nothing on me. I treated every one of the dummies as if it were alive. It was probably the genuine tramcar seat which finally pushed me over the edge. I swung the back over on its hinges to ensure that I could face forward when we left the terminus clanging in the opposite direction. Then I saw the conductress staring at me with the loathing I recall from the days when I ran down the centre aisle swinging all the seats from facing forward to facing back. I swear to you that the Scotsman published a photograph of me apologising to a lump of plastic for not having the right change. + It is not only photographs that have the capacity to humiliate politicians. In Edinburgh I was interviewed by a gentleman who expressed interest in my appearances on Question Time and being caricatured on Spitting Image. I gave my well-rehearsed answers. Somehow, they became confused within his notebook. My relationship with Robin Day was, in consequence, revealed in a new light: 'I'm projected as the old bumbler .. I'm the bumbler who comes to your house on Christmas Day to mend the fuse and blows it.' Serves me right for having all those silly photographs taken. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +256 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 9, 1989 + +Forced feeding denied + +LENGTH: 338 words + + + A HOSPITAL sister charged with mistreating elderly patients yesterday denied she had forced them to eat food they did not want, but said she felt they should have a 'balanced diet'. + Sister Mary Rutter, aged 48 and a qualified nurse for 27 years, was appearing before a disciplinary committee of the Central Council for Nursing. She is facing 28 counts of misconduct at Stanfield Hospital in Stoke-on-Trent between November 1983 and August 1986. + The committee had heard evidence that she threatened to send patients on to the veranda as punishment. + But Ms Rutter said that she only put patients on the veranda, a covered activity hall beside the ward, for ward cleaning. She also denied that patients were refused permission to go to the toilet when they wished. There were set toilet times, though, she said. + Patients could also have an afternoon nap and go to bed when they wanted to. 'I don't think anyone should threaten old ladies; no one would gain by it,' she said A witness, Mrs Vera Hopwood, told the hearing that a paralysed patient who needed a lot of help was left crying 'please Lord help me, please move my head,' but Ms Rutter just told her to shut up. + Mrs Hopwood said that crying patients forced to go onto a veranda by Ms Rutter would 'hug and kiss her' in gratitude when they were put back on the wards. One patient who wet herself because she was forced to wait two hours before she was allowed to go to the toilet by Ms Rutter was called a 'dirty madam' by the sister. 'She was crying and humiliated,' added Mrs Hopwood. + Mrs Kathleen Cooper, who started to nurse at Stanfield at the same time as Ms Rutter, said a patient who was sweating and very ill was 'dragged out of bed in the morning and forced to sit in a chair.' + Ms Rutter claimed there was nothing wrong with her and she was seeking attention, the council heard. + Mrs Cooper said the patient was 'most uncomfortable and abused until she died three weeks later.' + The case has been adjourned until October 17. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +257 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 11, 1989 + +Chinese reformers say leaders will fall: Massacre ended hopes of progress, Zhao men argue + +BYLINE: By LARRY JAGAN + +LENGTH: 732 words + + + THE Beijing massacre of June 4 abruptly killed China's chances of economic reform, two leading advisers to the disgraced party boss, Mr Zhao Ziyang, said in London yesterday. + The leadership 'completely overturned the accomplishments of the last decade and cannot hope to continue to cling to power for very much longer,' Mr Wan Runnan said. + Mr Wan, a guest of the Democrats and attending their Brighton party conference, added that China needed the plurality of political parties that Britain has. + Mr Wan and Mr Chen Yizi are also rallying support for the inaugural meeting of the Front for a Democratic China, to be held in Paris later this month. Both were prominent members of China's loosely organised reform movement. + The government crackdown was to be expected, argued Mr Wan, because for years the party bureacrats had feared economic reforms. 'The market mechanisms that the reforms sought to introduce threatened their vested interests. And when reformers, in 1987, began demanding the separation of party and state functions, their political privileges were being directly challenged.' + Although Mr Deng Xiaoping might still believe in economic reform, said Mr Chen, it is the veteran party hardliners, Mr Chen Yun and Mr Yao Yilin, who have taken control of the economy and are pushing the country back towards a centrally planned economy. This is the price Mr Deng had to pay for the octogenarians' support in crushing the students. + Both Mr Wan and Mr Chen were at the centre of the struggles within the party about economic reforms in recent years. Mr Chen headed Mr Zhao Ziyang's influential think-tank and had been actively involved in the implementation of the agricultural reforms since 1979. + They believe that Mr Zhao is under house arrest near the party headquarters of Zhonganhai in central Beijing. Mr Zhao remains unrepentant, arguing that he made no mistakes and that the student movement was patriotic. + Mr Zhao's successful rival, Premier Li Peng, is thought to be seeking not only to have Mr Zhao put on trial but to secure his execution. + Until the events of June forced Mr Wan, aged 42, to flee the country, he was a successful entrepreneur who personally benefited from economic liberalisation. His Stone Corporation, employing 900 highly skilled electronics workers, was the country's biggest electronics producer. + 'Being an entrepreneur is not an apolitical activity,' he insisted, 'since economic reform cannot be isolated from political reform.' + Creating new businesses in China, he said, also created a new model for China's future. After 10 years of economic reform, it became obvious that individual property ownership was needed to revitalise the economy. + Mr Chen and Mr Wan, leading members of the organising committee for the new Front for a Democratic China, outlined the four demands which unite all those who will attend the congress: an end to totalitarian government, the reinstatement of human rights, the establishment of property rights and the restoration of a genuinely democratic republic of China. + 'We do not want to destroy the Communist Party,' said Mr Wan, 'but we can no longer tolerate a situation where it is the only party. It is now evident that political reform from inside the party is impossible. Eventually we will be organisationally operational in China, but under the current government restrictions, it is impossible openly to communicate with our sympathisers inside.' + Solidarity has been an inspiration to the Chinese movement, they agreed, and China needed a Polish solution. The front was not a party but a political movement committed to non-violent action. + Mr Wan's Stone Corporation became a model factory, producing most of China's word processors, and the country's biggest export earner. It exported electronics equipment throughout the world, even opening up branches outside China. Mr Wan was labelled a model worker and appeared on national television on May Day this year. + Now he is one of the party's biggest critics and one of the Chinese Government's most wanted men. He embodies the government's worst fears that economic reformers are inevitably political reformers. + More than 200 delegates from all over the world - China, Europe, the US, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, Japan and even Taiwan - will attend the front's opening congress in Paris. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +258 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 12, 1989 + +Tuesday Women: Bulletin + +BYLINE: By PAULINE WILLIS + +LENGTH: 503 words + + + EVENTS + Whither Women's Organisations? + Tonight Jane Grant, the director of the newly formed National Alliance of Women's Organisations (NAWO) will be speaking at an open meeting organised by the Fawcett Society (01 587 1287) about the past, present and future in the history of women's organisations. 6.30pm at the University Women's Club, 2 Audley Square, London W1. Pounds 5 at the door (including a drink on arrival). + The Directory Group American women of all ages who live here by choice or because of their spouse, temporarily or permanently, are invited to the annual September social of the Directory Group, which is an association of American professional women abroad offering support and monthly meetings on all subjects. 4 pm on September 17 at the Royal Free Hospital Recreation Club, Fleet Road, London NW3. Contact Eve Hersov on 01 794 7162 for more information. + 25 Years Of Brook An open meeting on September 20 will be held to celebrate 25 years of Brook Advisory Centres. Amongst other speakers, Angela Willans, editor of Woman's Own problem page for 25 years, will be talking on a quarter of a century of problem page letters and new educational materials will be on display. 5.30 refreshments. 6.30-8 pm. National Children's Bureau, 8 Wakley Street, London EC1. 01 708 1390 for details. + The Hen House This women's holiday and study centre in a beautiful part of Lincolnshire is holding a four-day residential course for those working with, treating, or just close to those suffering from anorexia and related conditions. From the evening of September 27 to lunch on October 1. Pounds 150 plus VAT full board. Ring 0472 840278. + PUBLICATIONS + Common Murder Val McDermid (The Women's Press, Pounds 4.95) Intrepid Glasgow journalist and sleuth Lindsay Gordon, heroine of the author's Report For Murder, appears again in this crime novel which takes place against the background of what is obviously meant to be Greenham Common where a murder of a prominent member of the ratepayers' association has taken place. Good mystery with some feminist philosophising thrown in. + To Make Ends Meet ed by Jo Stanley (Older Women's Project, Pounds 2) More than a score of women, all over 60 and from many different backgrounds, have written here a short account of their working lives in paid employment often giving graphic details and perspectives which never appear in history books. Older Women's Project, established in 1985 and part of Pensioners Link, promotes and publicises the importance of older women and goes from strength to strength with its plans and activities. (01 278 5501). + PS + The Maypole Fund gives small grants (up to Pounds 500) to individual women/women's groups with new, imaginative ideas and projects designed to further world peace with justice, nuclear disarmament and international links between women for these purposes. Send sae plus one page saying why you need the money to Box 25, 136 Kingsland High Street, London E8 2NS by September 15. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +259 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 13, 1989 + +Homes for old to be sold + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 397 words + + + DEMOCRAT and Conservative councillors have allied behind a plan to sell off all 22 old people's homes run by Wirral District Council on Merseyside. + The move, which is subject to a vote of the full council on September 26, is expected to be similarly matched by other local authorities in anticipation of the Government's community care reforms. + More than 300 people attended a stormy meeting of the council's social services committee on Monday night, which agreed the sell-off. + No one party has overall control of the council, and Labour members oppose the sale. + Mr John Thornton, a Democrat social services spokesman on the council, told the meeting that only two of the authority's homes met the standards which it required of the private sector. + 'The quality of care provided by our staff is excellent. However, in the majority of cases the state of the buildings themselves is deplorable,' he said. + 'In many of our homes residents have to share bedrooms - up to eight per room in some cases; there is a backlog of repairs; and furniture and fittings are often old and shabby. We have not even been able to keep up with fire regulation requirements.' + The homes would be sold to a non profit-making group, such as a housing association or charity, which would also take their 850 residents. The Pounds 6.7 million a year saved would go to develop community services for the elderly. + A report to the meeting by Mr David Rickard, Wirral's social services director, warned that the community care reforms would present a 'much more difficult scenario' if a decision were not taken now. + Under the reforms, local authorities will have to meet the full cost of care in their own homes, but only a proportion of the cost for people they place in private or voluntary-sector homes. + Ministers expect many councils to sell their homes so that they become purchasers of care, rather than providers. + Mr Keith Rimmer, Wirral's Labour social services spokesman, told the meeting that the experience gained by the council in more than 30 years of caring for the elderly could not be matched: 'The Tories and Democrats must learn that most people in Wirral believe it is their responsibility to look after the needs of our elderly through the rates.' + A petition against the plan, with more than 12,000 signatures, was presented to the meeting. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +260 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 16, 1989 + +Weekend Money: Builders' spark a chain reaction to tempt buyers + +BYLINE: By DAVID LAWSON and NICK PANDYA + +LENGTH: 691 words + + + HOUSEBUILDERS nervous about the way their profits are drifting into oblivion as homes stand empty are coming up with increasingly clever ways of tempting first-buyers back into the market. + Berkeley Homes specialises in up-market mansions and rarely sees a first-buyer. McCarthy&Stone produces retirement property for last rather than first purchasers. But they recognise that life is tough at the bottom of the housing ladder and if first-timers don't buy, the ones above can't sell and move upwards to mansions and sheltered housing. So both companies have decided to pass some largesse down the chains. + Berkeley has added new meaning to the term 'traveller cheque' by offering a pay-back cash bonus which travels hand-to-hand from top-level purchaser down to first-buyer. It may offer, say, Pounds 10,000 to a prospective purchaser of a Pounds 200,000 home. This might seem a minor incentive but the bonus swells in significance when passed to the next link in the chain, because the house being sold to help finance the Berkeley purchase will be valued at, say, Pounds 150,000. + The further down it goes, the bigger the incentive appears relative to the house price, until it reaches the first-buyer who can suddenly achieve a price of perhaps Pounds 85,000 rather than Pounds 95,000. In effect, the chain of sellers has reduced prices by Pounds 10,000 each and all achieved a sale. + They could do this for themselves - in fact, the market is starting to move again in some areas as prices settle. But there will always be someone in the chain too greedy or too hard-up to cut their price without some incentive, and the chain reaction breaks down. Berkeley's Homelink scheme could also give slowcoaches a kick because the subsidy cheque is valid for only 12 weeks. + McCarthy&Stone has suffered badly from the housing slowdown as its buyers are usually at the end of long chains. But at the cheaper end of its sheltered housing market are elderly people with homes to sell which would suit first-buyers, particularly in the provinces. So the builder has promised to pay Pounds 200 a month for two years to anyone able to free-up one of its prospective customers. This is most likely to benefit first-buyers as the scheme applies only to those without their own home to sell. + Marketing director Kevin Holland believes this is a better bet for a buyer than taking on one of the many deferred-interest mortgages available, as the subsidy would not be added to the eventual cost of a loan. + Barratts Developments' Mastermove package is a series of inducements to housebuyers which include a Deposit Savings Scheme, where the builder will contribute Pounds 25 for every Pounds 100 saved to buy a Barratts house. Under the terms of Parternership mortgages, buyers with 5 per cent deposit pay interest on 75 per cent of the house value for the first four years. + These housebuilders are joined by the mortgage lenders in their attempts to jump start the stalled housing market. + The Woolwich Building Society is the latest big lender to offer a fixed-interest home loan. The interest rate for an endowment or a pension-linked mortgage is set at 12.50 per cent for two years. + Among such schemes introduced by smaller rivals, West Cumbria has the best deal at 12.25 per cent fixed for two years. Leeds Permanent and Cheshunt are offering home loans at 12.75 per cent fixed for three and two years, respectively. For those looking to reduce their monthly payments, the Cheshunt also has a deferred-interest option at 10 per cent for the first two years. The Heart of England has come to the aid of first-buyers who have saved at least 5 per cent of the value of the house by softening its lending criterion. + The society will advance Pounds 46,250 to first-time borrowers on a joint income of Pounds 14,500. The mortgage repayments are based on an interest rate of 12 per cent for the first five years. The repayments go up by 7 per cent each year to avoid the hefty rise in the sixth year of the mortgage when prevailing interest rates apply. Unpaid interest is added to the total debt at the end of the term. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +261 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 16, 1989 + +Old face 'dark hours of neglect' + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 528 words + + + URGENT action must be taken to improve community services for the rapidly growing numbers of frail and confused elderly people, an official report said yesterday. + The report by the Government's Social Services Inspectorate warns of 'major challenges' posed by mental disorders among the over-80s and criticises the standard of many of the services for those continuing to live at home. + It quotes the case of one woman, mildly mentally disordered and physically disabled, whose curtains were closed at 1.15 pm every day by her part-time care assistant and who was then left alone in the dark until 8.30 am the next day. + It also cites the case of a 'very distressed' woman who asked how she could launder her mentally disordered mother's disposable incontinence pads because she could not get a proper supply of fresh ones. + The report says: 'Many carers continue in circumstances which appear to the outsider to be quite intolerable.' + Publication of the report came yesterday afternoon in a low-key statement by Mr Roger Freeman, the junior health minister responsible for mental health policy. + A separate inspectorate report on services for mentally ill people was also released, concluding that developments there were 'patchy'. + Mr Freeman said the two reports reinforced the Government's plans to develop community care along the lines of the Griffiths report, which recommended that local authorities should be given a central role in the planning and commissioning of services. + However, the reports will be seized on by groups arguing that the Griffiths recommendations can only be implemented successfully if the Government makes a big cash investment in services. + Mr Mervyn Kohler, public affairs manager of Help the Aged, said last night: 'These people can be catered for in their own homes, but they need services much more attuned to their specific needs.' + These included 'feeding, incontinence, cleaning themselves, cleaning their homes, and also some guidance on how to conduct themselves in society.' + Population projections suggest that the number of over-85s will double between 1981 and 2001, with as many as one in five affected by dementia. + The report, based on assessment of 172 elderly people in six local authorities, says that more than half of them lived alone. More than a third of the sample were found to be receiving services worth less than Pounds 25 a week, equivalent to less than seven hours' home help or two to three hours' plus one day's attendance at a day centre. + The report says: 'There is urgent need for extended and flexible services, with emphasis on supervised meals, help with putting to bed and getting up, ensuring warmth and night sitting. Without increased input from statutory services and greater involvement of the community, the least able among us will continue to be neglected for long dark hours on end.' + Other problems identified in the report include shortages of day centres, transport to and from centres, confusion of roles between local and health authorities, availability of laundry and bathing services, and anxieties over personal financial affairs. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +262 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 16, 1989 + +New York Diary: A race up the avenues + +BYLINE: By W. J. WEATHERBY + +LENGTH: 548 words + + + AVETERAN Harlem resident described David Dinkins's victory this week as 'the greatest event since Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling'. He seemed to think Dinkins had already become the first black mayor of New York city and was disappointed to learn he was only halfway there. + Admittedly in winning the Democratic Party's nomination, Dinkins knocked Mayor Koch, who wanted a record fourth term, out of the race. But from now until November he has to match wits with the Republicans' candidate, Rudolph Giuliani, the former Federal Prosecutor who made a name winning court cases against the Mafia. + Because there are more Democrats in New York then Republicans, Dinkins is theoretically the favourite, but whereas being black helped him in the Democratic primary it may not help him enough in the election. In the primary he won almost all the black votes, half the Hispanic votes and about 30 per cent of the white votes. A lot of white Democrats voted against Koch as much as for Dinkins. In the election many of them may vote for Giuliani because they don't want a black mayor. + Dinkins is well aware of the scare factor and is masterly at conveying a calm, elder statesman image. He is the opposite of the black militants who haunt white middle class nightmares. Many of his beliefs are radical, but he expresses himself so mildly that not even the most paranoid New Yorkers could be upset. + Early on it was Giuliani who appeared to be the militant, crusading against evil and threatening to overturn much of the Big Apple to get at its rotten side. His almost fanatical intensity, exaggerated by TV, frightened some undecided voters. It is noticeable that since the paternal Dinkins became his opponent, he has worked hard on a more relaxed image, even dancing at old people's centres with boyish gusto. + Both candidates have promised to keep race out of the campaign, but in practice that is impossible in a violent, multi-racial city. One of Dinkins's problems will be his black militant supporters who could scare away some white voters. Giuliani may have a similar problem with his far-right, conservative backers, who could drive more liberal Republicans into Dinkins's camp. + The recent racial incident in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in which a black teenager was killed by a white group, undoubtedly helped to swing white votes to Dinkins. An incident close to election day in which the situation was reversed could win the election for Giuliani. + Running this huge, fabulously wealthy city is a prize worth having and already the campaign is becoming more bitterly personal. Dinkins, in his inimitable paternal way, has branded Giuliano as a Ronald Reagan throwback, and Giuliani has attacked Dinkins as one of the old Koch team. Dinkins has promised to bring harmony to this multi-racial city, Giuliani has promised to clean up its corruption. Elder statesman black figure versus right-wing white crusader - these are the roles they are likely to play until November. + Giuliani is a familiar figure because New York has had many anti-corruption candidates. It is Dinkins who is the challenge. New York seems to be in the mood for change, and Giuliani must be worried when he remembers several major American cities have already elected black mayors. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +263 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 18, 1989 + +Terms of reference: A haunting sight - the hollow men of a New Age old age + +BYLINE: By GEOFFREY TAYLOR + +LENGTH: 963 words + + + PERSONAL observation, though it still awaits statistical support, suggests there are many more old people in the North of England than in the South. Moreover the old people in the North are younger, healthier and better off than their southern counterparts. They may also, I don't know, be sadder. + You have only to stand in the main street of one of the smaller Yorkshire towns (and I believe the same is true in Lancashire) to be aware of this relatively new phenomenon. Droves of men with short grey hair, most wearing loud cardigans and many in yachting caps, no matter how far we might be from the sea, wander up and down the street from 10am to 4.15pm. The women are built to less uniform specifications but there can be no mistaking them once they are seen. + The droves of both sexes look in shop windows but do not, generally speaking, enter shops because they already have all the consumer goods they can use. They do, however, transfer money from one building society to another. A more detailed study is needed to say for sure how they arrive and depart. Undoubtedly some come by coach and some come in their own cars. But others, I suspect, appear and disappear like images on a screen, except that they are three-dimensional and owe their apparent embodiment to physical processes not yet fully understood. + They do not, as far as one can see, come with any purpose other than the purely existential one of being there. Since nothing comparable to this has happened in the history of the human race, it is surprising that none of the universities has, to the best of my knowledge, carried out an investigation. + To bring some academic discipline to bear on the subject one would presumably start by dividing elderly persons into those with a purpose in going on living and those without. The people I am talking about - the marauding bands of pavement obstructors, shop window monopolisers and normal urban activity preventers - are all in the latter category. + A commercial traveller with whom I was discussing this unexpected aspect of late 20th century Britain agreed that in his experience of North Country towns there were indeed more middle-aged old people about, most of them moneyed. He also had useful additional data. + In the course of his job he calls at several of the new wooden chalet sites which are growing up in parts of Yorkshire. The owners of these sites have to apply for planning permission for their chalets. It is invariably refused on the grounds that the chalets don't have adequate gas and electricity supplies, drainage and roads, or that they are a visual eyesore, or that their occupants are liable to place too heavy a burden on the local health and social security services. + However, the applicants have found that if they pester long enough they will eventually succeed, because planning authorities are composed of individuals, and are we all totally certain of the rightness of our judgments? Do we not waver in the face of incessant demands? + Anyway, my friend the commercial traveller has occasion to visit these sites. Originally the chalets provided holiday homes but now they are in permanent occupation. He discovered one reason why. A number of the occupants had recently sold their homes in the South-east of England and moved North. They had bought their chalets for less than one-tenth of the price they had received for their brick-and-mortar houses, and by prudent financial management were able to live off the interest on the remainder. + That would certainly account for the relatively young age of some of the North's elderly and economically inactive population, but it could not account for the sheer numbers of people involved. Again one is forced into the suspicion that not all these people have objective reality and that some are emanations from a transcendental psyche. Come to think of it, I have never had physical contact with them and cannot offer any evidence (except that of sight, which can be notoriously misleading) for their corporeal existence. + Eliot foresaw the phenomenon more than half a century ago: We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men .. / Our dried voices, when we whisper together / Are quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass / Or rats' feet over broken glass in our dry cellar. + Or put another way, they are people from the Book of Ecclesiastes who did not bethink themselves in the days of their youth and for whom, in their age, 'the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the window be darkened .. And the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail, because man goeth to his long home and the mourners go about the streets'. + In the North of England the sound of the grinding is low (though that of the check-out till has never been more lively) and they are mourners, these people who go about the streets of our North Country towns, whose desire has failed and for whom the grasshopper, at least metaphorically, has become a burden. Their pitcher has been broken at the fountain and their wheel broken at the cistern. They are the hollow men: 'Shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion.' + So I don't know what they are doing or what they portend, the existential ones, drifting up and down the High Street, climbing in and out of their coaches, appearing and disappearing at the pull of a mad scientist's lever. + Are they forerunners of a new social class? Do they offer a vision of the future? For I suspect their fate will come to us all in time. We shall have to hide away and never dare to go out, for fear of the obloquy of the young, of the gilded ones for whom the years have yet to draw nigh when they shall say, I have no pleasure in them. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +264 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 18, 1989 + +Eyewitness: Tide of Ukraine marchers demand religious rights + +BYLINE: By JONATHAN STEELE in Lvov + +LENGTH: 770 words + + + MORE than 100,000 Ukrainians took over the centre of Lvov yesterday in the biggest Catholic gathering ever held in the Soviet Union. + For eight hours, the streets of the western Ukrainian capital were swept by a tide of hymn-singing people calling for the legalisation of the Uniat Catholic Church, closed by Stalin. + 'We want President Gorbachev to legalise our church when he meets the Pope in two months' time,' Mr Ivan Gel, the head of the Initiative Group for the Defence of Believers' Rights, said. He read out two telegrams, to the Pope and to Mr Gorbachev, calling for all bans on the church to be lifted. + The controversy is a stumbling block to the normalisation of Soviet-Vatican relations, which will be discussed by the two men in Rome in November. If the meeting, the first between a Soviet President and the Pope, is successful, the pontiff may visit the Soviet Union as early as next year. + The Uniats are the largest 'catacomb' church in the world. Until earlier this year their priests celebrated mass in private homes or forest clearings. If caught, they were often sentenced to long prison terms. The atmosphere eased this spring, as priests and congregations became bolder, and the authorities less repressive. + Nevertheless, the Lvov authorities only agreed to permit yesterday's procession at the end of last week. The Communist mayor, Mr Bogdan Kotyk, threatened to resign unless the hardline party leadership in Kiev authorised the gathering. + Scarcely a dozen police accompanied the marchers as they wound through the streets. Women in floral headscarves wept as the parish banners of about 20 underground congregations were carried along with the blue and yellow flags of the pre-revolutionary Ukrainian Republic. + The fiesta of national and religious revival began in a park in the upper part of the old town. Lvov escaped from the war almost undamaged, and its skyline is still marked by the baroque spires and domes. + Priests set up a makeshift altar under chestnut trees. Elderly people dominated the crowd, the men in neat dark suits, the women wearing scarves. + Many remembered the day - 50 years ago yesterday - when Soviet troops entered Lvov, then under Polish rule. Their arrival was one of the disastrous consequences of the secret protocols to the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact. + A neatly dressed lady beside me explained what had happened after the Soviet troops arrived. 'At first we thought they might bring benefits, like free education - before we had to pay. But things were very different. My father was a pharmacist. He was taken away and executed. I don't know why. Maybe he was politically active. I was only 16 at the time.' + The Nazis came two years later. 'People welcomed them at first,' she went on. 'At least they ended Stalin's rule. The Nazi occupation was not what we wanted, but things became easier.' + After the war she was in the Ukrainian National Organisation. She was arrested in 1947 and spent 14 years in camps in Kazakhstan and Siberia. 'When I came back, I was not allowed to live in Lvov,' she said through tears. + Until her retirement, she worked as an economist. 'Gorbachev has done a lot for us. We hope he will legalise our church. Without hope, you cannot live. Look how many people are here. I think it must happen now.' + Mr Gel, the organiser of the procession, was in prison from 1969 to 1987. Yesterday he walked through the town like the king for a day, urging people through a loudhailer to stay calm. The renaissance of the Ukrainian Catholic Church is a personal triumph for this burly man with a grey beard, who wore a traditional embroidered shirt under his suit. + Along the pavement, hundreds watched in silence as the banners went by. It was not the quiet of hostility or mere curiosity. The procession was meant to be religious rather than political, and without applause. Ukrainian onlookers were almost universally in favour of legalising the church. + The Uniats are sometimes known as Greek Catholics, or Catholics of the Eastern Rites. They worship in the Orthodox style, and their churches have the ornately carved screens, separating the nave from the sanctuary. + But they came under the authority of Rome in 1596. Stalin put them under the Russian Orthodox Church in the hope of breaking the strong link between nationalism and religion, as he Sovietised his newly-conquered western Ukraine. + The Russian Orthodox hierarchy continues to maintain that the Uniat tradition has no validity and Mr Gorbachev will have to persuade the Orthodox Patriarch to give up his control. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +265 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 19, 1989 + +Eyewitness: Devotees try to repay a Mother's love + +BYLINE: By DEREK BROWN in Calcutta + +LENGTH: 732 words + + + SHE is a Nobel prizewinner, a household name, an inspiration. Here in the house for the dying, she is simply Mother. + 'Welcome to Mother's first love,' says one of the crisp white signs in Nirmal Hriday. It means pure heart and is the first of about 350 houses of care and devotion which have sprung from the love of Mother Teresa for the poor of the earth. + Beyond the sign are three lines of low metal charpoys, or string mattresses, where 50 men are being healed or eased with dignity in their last struggle with a brutal life. + In another high, clean and spartan room lie 60 women, some in the last stages of emaciation, who are about to escape the cares and indignities of the world. + Most of the men are labourers or rickshaw pullers, in the last big city where humans are required to be beasts of burden. + After a few years of hauling their fellow beings, they are old men, diseased and spent. Many get tuberculosis, and when they are vomiting blood and can no longer work, they come to Mother's house to die. + In fact, as many as half of the patients pull through, with basic medicines, simple care, and the awesome, all embracing love of the sisters and their volunteer helpers. Then they return to the horrors and evil humours of the city's underside. + Now Mother herself, who has always understood the power of death, lies in the intensive care section of a nursing home in Alipur, in Calcutta's affluent south side. Since September 5, her sisters and her countless devoted admirers have prayed for her, and distinguished doctors have striven to maintain the heart that has inspired so many. + Yesterday, the news was good: Mother's temperature was down again, almost to normal. But the prayers go on. 'The sisters here are praying day and night in shifts,' said Andy Wimmer. 'We know Mother is 79 and very exhausted after working for 40 years or more.' + Andy is a Bavarian, 'a banker and computer man'. He is 35, and looks 10 years younger, with a fresh enthusiasm which seems to infect all those who work with Mother. Andy first came here in 1985, as a curious traveller. He has come back every year, for at least half the year, and now hopes to stay on for a couple of years more. + In the space of half an hour, he could be seen chatting to journalists, taking medicines to the patients, shaving them, bringing them comfort. He found time to explain the work of the house to two girls who arrived with a tourist map and a lot of questions. They put away their map, put on aprons, and went to work in the women's ward. + Many people, not all young, drift by to help, maybe for only a day. The rich come too: Jerry Brown, the former governor of California, did three weeks of uncomplaining drudgery. So too did an anonymous businessman, who as his last task donated an Aids clinic. + This is an essential part, and a slightly worrying one, of Mother's work, said Andy. 'She is one of the greatest personalities of this century .. She is not only the mother of the poor; she attracts rich people too. + 'She goes to see presidents, kings, prime ministers all over the world. She is a very charismatic figure and everyone wants to see her. If another sister was to take over maybe there would be problems,' he said. + Of course, the Order which Mother Teresa founded will continue. In little more than 30 years, it has sprung from the crawling bustees of Calcutta to embrace the world. It is a multi-million dollar movement, drawing tribute from the conscience of the well to do to the best-known Albanian in the world. + None of this formidable organisation is apparent at the headquarters in Lower Circular Road, Calcutta. There, behind gaunt cement walls, there is a simple courtyard resounding with prayer, with the supplications of the poor, and the mundane sounds of a community in touch with life. + Novices in white, with smiles to knock you sideways, patter around in instant welcome. Sister Priscilla, an Indian lady of more formidable aspect, her face etched with anxiety for Mother, greets yet more journalists with a sigh. 'We are all so busy.' + Then, in an open room on an upper floor, the sisters sing their devotions. The Ave Maria, in English, is an ethereal counterpoint to the toiling, broiling city outside. In its eye-stinging sweetness, it seems the perfect praise of God, of human compassion, and of a Mother's love. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +266 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 20, 1989 + +Third Person: Credit lines + +BYLINE: By HELEN CHAPPELL + +LENGTH: 689 words + + + DEREK and Marie's new pawnbroker's shop is a reassuring symphony of subdued lighting, soft carpets and twinkling glass cabinets. No wizened old men wearing fingerless gloves squat in shadowy corners, rubbing their hands with glee. Derek and Marie are in their forties and look thoroughly modern and businesslike. + In spite of their up-market image, both can remember the times when poverty and desperation were the pawnbroker's stock-in trade. 'When my uncle started a shop in the Fifties,' says Derek, 'he'd still get mothers in to pawn the old man's best suit so the family could eat that week. Even though it's completely changed now, the old ones still have a prejudice about us.' + What a new generation of affluent northerners has discovered, though, according to Marie, is that popping the odd watch or dress ring is a quick, easy line of credit. Especially if the faceless ones have already cut up your credit card and put you on a blacklist. 'Most people who come to us are not really hard up,' she says. 'They may just need some cash for an extra holiday or new set of car tyres. There's no stigma about it at all.' + Nor should customers feel bashful if their mortgage payments are pinching or they need a few quid to pay off the VAT man. 'There are some people we feel sorry for,' insists Marie, 'because we're not hard-nosed people. Some of our customers are trying to pay for private health care for a problem that's come up suddenly and they can't wait.' + And why should they? How can you put a price on someone's peace of mind? Instead of existential anxiety, it seems, the 1989 consumer will cast a gimlet eye over his or her disposable assets and make straight for the three golden balls (nowadays just a discreet notice). Derek or Marie will take their Rolex oyster (or whatever) in their experienced hands, fondle it lovingly and offer a realistic price. If it's a deal, the cash is handed over along with a ticket redeemable within the following six months. + If the item is not redeemed, the shop will sell it by auction. If it is - and nearly everything is - then a 5 per cent interest fee is payable. 'It's a business like any other,' says Derek. 'We're very tightly controlled by the Consumer Credit Act.' + His biggest bugbear is lost redemption tickets. There are very strict rules about the procedure he has to follow, including issuing a special form which must be signed by a solicitor or magistrate. Anyone careless enough not only to exceed their credit limit but also to lose their pawn ticket is a royal pain. Of course, royal pains come in all shapes and sizes. Not a day passes but Derek and Marie experience a 'character' who enters their shop with some crazy story or another. Marie recalls the drink-sodden young couple who had spent a small fortune on 12 pairs of shoes at a luxury shopping mall, sobered up and decided they needed an injection of funds to bale them out. They had tried to raise some cash on a paste necklace inherited from a grandparent and worth precisely nothing. 'When I told them that, they called me every name under the sun,' says Marie. 'It was very unpleasant.' + Diplomatic skills were called for too when an old man staggered in with a vast cardboard box stuffed with old Lonnie Donnegan albums and yellowing copies of Man and Woman magazine which he believed to be priceless. 'We sent him off to a car boot sale,' says Derek. + Not so easy to dislodge was the trio of young lads who wanted to offload an extremely suspicious-sounding consignment of video recorders and personal stereo sets. Derek was adamant in insisting that he was not the person they were looking for but by then the boys were spoiling for a fight. Only the sight of the family dog (a mastiff) sent them packing. + 'People can be very stupid with money,' says Marie, 'but it's not my job to moralise. They have to find a way to solve their own problems. What we do is a sort of social service, but that doesn't mean we are a branch of the DHSS.' And, in any case, Derek and Marie have their new upmarket image to protect. Business is business and charity begins at home. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +267 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 20, 1989 + +Guardian Society: Agenda: More care for the carers - Government policy is to castigate 'welfare dependency' and to promote notions of consumerism. But who knows what help people need? + +BYLINE: By TESSA JOWELL + +LENGTH: 857 words + + + 'EVERY night I put off the moment when I draw the curtains because whenever I do I feel as if I am the last person left on earth.' This is Mr Adcock, 78, whose 82-year-old wife has Alzheimer's disease. She is incontinent, sleeps fitfully by day and is awake for most of the night. + They have been married for 52 years: she no longer knows his name. Slight and frail, he suffered a minor stroke two years ago but for the last four has cared for his wife while the dementia has steadily dismantled her personality. + There is nothing particularly unusual about the Adcocks. Mr Adcock is one of five million people whose efforts make it possible for their disabled and elderly relatives to live at home rather than in institutions. + Social policy jargon defines Mr Adcock as an 'informal carer.' Not much by way of beneficial recognition accompanies the title. But his ungrudging devotion to his wife's needs is seized upon as a validation of government policy which seeks to reinstate family values, castigates welfare dependency, and promotes consumerism as the essence of the new individualism in social care. + Yet social services make generalised assumptions about the needs of people like the Adcocks with little or no regard for their preferences. + It is inconceivable that Marks & Spencer, for instance, would undertake a major re-vamping of any aspect of its retail services without extensive market research and analysis: if the customers do not like the service they get, they will go elsewhere. + The freedom of the market is non-existent to most of the people who seek to supplement their own caring resources from local authority and local services: they use these services precisely because they cannot exercise the conventional freedom of choice which consumers in the marketplace enjoy. + Increasingly, service providers are beginning to realise that the people who actually use their services are a rich source of practical information and advice which can be tapped to guide the better use of existing resources - both people and money. This is more than mere consumerism, market-style. And it highlights some of the raw pain which users experience daily for the public service organisations which have until now given off a powerful whiff of indifference to the actual object of their apparent concern. + It takes time, patience and a commitment to change, rather than a lot of money, to translate the vast range of individual experiences into service changes that are recognisable to the people who use them. My own work in developing consumer-led community care for Birmingham City Council has demonstrated how collaboration with both carers and people with a disability presents rich opportunities for a new partnership between those who use the services and those who provide them. + Far from discovering that service-users hold unrealistically high expectations, we found that they tended to range from the minimal to the highly surrealistic, and that information about existing services in ordinary language rather than jargon would certainly make what is available much more accessible to the intended recipients. + We also discovered that many carers regard what is provided for them by local authority services as marginal. Carers cope largely through their own resources. While service providers talk crisply about 'packages of care' for each of their 'clients', people with disabilities and their carers are invariably looking for friendship and a human touch and see the provision of services as a way out of their isolation as much as the delivery of a defined commodity. + Above all, the people who use community care services are sensitive to the quality and image of the services they receive. By and large, carers are looking after their relatives extremely well and would rather forego desperately- needed respite for themselves than see their relatives confined to a day centre or residential home where the care on offer is evidently inferior to that being provided at home. + What is needed is the re-direction of already existing services in small, practical ways to make them relevant and helpful to particular individuals. + Take the mother of four children, one of whom is mentally handicapped. The local authority delivers her handicapped daughter back from a day centre at exactly the time she has to collect her other children from school half-a-mile away. This means she has to arrange for a friend to be at the house when the bus arrives with her daughter. Re-rota the bus and the problem is solved at no cost. + Local authority provision is a badly directed mish-mash whose ineffectiveness frustrates or dispirits the provider and often demeans the beneficiary. The solution in local authorities is to listen to the customer. If they fail to do so, no- one else is waiting to pick up the business of providing help and support to Mr Adcock without regard to the profit to be made from doing so. + Tessa Jowell is Director of City of Birmingham Community Care Special Action Project and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Policy Studies Institute, London. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +268 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 21, 1989 + +Alzheimer skin test hope + +BYLINE: By NIGEL WILLIAMS, Science Correspondent + +LENGTH: 304 words + + + NEW research suggests that a simple skin test could soon be used to diagnose Alzheimer's dementia, and that the disease may result from a defective protein circulating in the blood. + The disease, estimated to affect one in 20 people over 65, is a progressive dementia. Distinctive 'plaques' of a protein called amyloid A4 are found in the brains of patients, but Dr Dennis Selkoe and colleagues at Harvard Medical School and Brigham Women's Hospital in Boston, report today in the journal Nature that deposits of the same protein can occur in the skin, intestines, and blood vessels of some Alzheimer's patients. + 'A reliable diagnosis would be a tremendous breakthrough,' said Dr Ray Baker of Merck, Sharpe and Dohme neuroscience research laboratories in Harlow, Essex, yesterday. 'The possibility of drug treatments within five years or so will be helped enormously by accurate diagnosis, particularly if this can be done at an early stage,' he added. + In the US study, eight out of 11 Alzheimer's patients had the abnormal protein at sites outside the brain, whereas only three of 26 elderly people without the disease were positive for the test. 'The tendency is to distinguish the Alzheimer's patients,' said Dr Selkoe, 'but it is not yet clear-cut in this small sample. We need a much larger study.' + Work on the cause and possible treatments of the disease have focused on the brain, but, Dr Selkoe believes, 'our results suggest it is coming from the blood vessels'. + A reliable skin test will need to reflect the amount of the protein fragments in brain plaques. Some encouragement comes from a rare inherited disease in Iceland, where a correlation has been found between amounts of a different defective amyloid protein in skin and in the brain, but a test could take two years to develop. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +269 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 22, 1989 + +Weather may have caused New York crash + +BYLINE: By MARY BRASIER in New York and Reuter in Paris + +LENGTH: 506 words + + + A MECHANICAL failure or appalling weather conditions at the time of take-off are the most likely causes of the crash at New York's La Guardia airport on Wednesday night, in which two people died and 45 were seriously injured. + The USAir flight to Charlotte North Carolina, with 64 people aboard, skidded off the end of the runway into New York's East River after the pilot attempted to abort the take-off at the last minute. + The plane, a Boeing 737-400, broke up as it sank into 20 feet of water with its nose resting on the end of a pier. Passengers climbed to safety on the wings which were partially submerged. The two who died, both elderly women, were found in the buckled centre cabin of the plane. + Rescue workers said the casualty toll would have been higher if part of the plane had not been left resting on dry ground. Some passengers were trapped inside for more than an hour . + Torrential rain, high winds and low cloud combined to produce adverse conditions for planes taking off from La Guardia, which is the city's airport for domestic flights. + Flight 5050 had already been delayed for more than three hours and it was nearly midnight when it was cleared for take-off. + Passengers reported yesterday that the plane appeared to be having trouble early on as it taxied for take-off, with the pilot unable to increase power. They said the rear engine and brakes were slammed on to stop the plane but it shot past the end of the runway and spun round in a skid which broke off the tail section of the plane. + One possiblity being investigated by National Transportation Safety executives at the site of the crash yesterday was that winds on the runway and last-minute wind shear had forced the pilot to abort the flight. An engine or hydraulic failure could be another cause of the decision to abort. + The Charlotte flight is the first accident involving a 737-400 aircraft since the crash of a British Midland Airways flight in Britain earlier this year when the flight crew shut down what they believed was a faulty engine. An aviation expert yesterday described the engine of the 737-400 as the cutting edge of technology and said it had encountered some problems. + Meanwhile, military search teams have found one of the two flight recorders of the French DC-10 airliner which exploded over Niger, killing all 170 people aboard. + The discovery could give investigators the first clues to the cause of Tuesday's explosion high over the Sahara desert. + The French airline, UTA, believes the crash was caused by a bomb on board. Two calls were made, apparently by the pro-Iranian Lebanese extremist group, Islamic Jihad (Holy War), claiming responsibility. However, the French Government has treated the claims with scepticism. + Investigators searched the wreckage amid shifting sand and in temperatures of 113 degrees Fahrenheit. Speed in the search was said to be critical since sand could cover the wreckage and remains in a few days. It was the third crash of a DC-10 in two months. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +270 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 22, 1989 + +Haggis economy comes under fire: An SNP plan for a budget to challenge Whitehall + +BYLINE: By PETER HETHERINGTON + +LENGTH: 543 words + + + THE Scottish National Party yesterday agreed a notional budget to produce more jobs, relieve poverty, and reform taxation, after hearing that such a budget was crucial to prevent Scotland from becoming a 'haggis and heather economy'. + The 'Salmond budget', largely the work of Mr Alex Salmond, MP for Banff and Buchan, provided the most fundamental challenge to the 282-year-old Act of Union which merged Scotland with England, delegates to the SNP's annual conference in Dunoon, Strathclyde, were told. + Nationalists realise the economic debate will become the centrepiece of the next general election campaign. The Conservatives and the Scottish CBI will warn that independence, or more limited self-government, will threaten jobs and drive business out of Scotland. + Mr Salmond, one of the SNP's four MPs and a former economist with the Royal Bank of Scotland, believes a Scottish Exchequer, boosted by oil revenues, would have more freedom of manoeuvre, since it would not be 'boxed in by the inflationary pressures of the South-east of England'. + He advocates a 'medium-term regeneration strategy' embracing a research and development programme aimed at universities and companies, and a development action fund for industrial projects and road and rail improvements. + Retirement pensions, social security benefits, and health care budgets would be increased and a cold-climate allowance provided for the elderly. The poll tax would be replaced by a local income tax. + Although the total cost of the budget in its first year would be almost Pounds 1.7 billion - bringing a 12 per cent increase in gross domestic product - Mr Salmond told delegates the plan was not pie in the sky, 'but pie on earth'. + 'The task facing us is to demonstrate that constitutional change can significantly enhance Scotland's economic performance; that a free Scotland can free Scots,' he said. + Mr Alex Neil, another SNP economist, said the budget, aiming at full employment, contrasted sharply with Labour's 'neo-Thatcherism'. He said: 'The economics of the union mean more deprivation, more unemployment, more poverty, and more depopulation and emigration from Scotland, so we would end up as a haggis and heather economy.' + Meanwhile, differences have emerged between Scottish and Welsh nationalists over co-operation with other parties in the run-up to the next general election. + The leaders of the SNP have rejected suggestions from Plaid Cymru that it should consider pacts with the Greens or the Democrats. Plaid Cymru is keen to enter such arrangements to push the case for a federal Europe and a common environmental programme. + Mr Dafydd Elis Thomas, president of Plaid Cymru, told SNP delegates he would be attending the Green Party's conference at Wolverhampton, and his party had invited the Welsh Greens to its annual conference. + Last week he attended the Democrats' conference at Brighton to suggest that 'all of us who wanted a federal Europe of 100 flags' should co-operate, he said. + But the SNP remains determined to pursue its independent course. Earlier this year, it withdrew from a cross-party constitutional convention drawing up a home-rule package to present to the government. + Greens' conference; page 6 + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +271 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 25, 1989 + +Schoolteacher contests abuse charge after spanking pupil + +BYLINE: By MARK TRAN in Washington + +LENGTH: 189 words + + + A FLORIDA headmaster has been designated a 'perpetrator' of child abuse for spanking a pupil too hard. + Last May, Mr Gerald Winsett, of Tampa, gave a 13-year-old boy a whacking, as he was entitled to do under Florida law, which allows corporal punishment. + But the state's health department believes he overstepped the mark: it says a whacking which leaves a bruise that stays visible after 24 hours is excessive. + As a result, Mr Winsett has been designated a 'perpetrator' on the state's Child Abuse Registry - a confidential list used for state-required screenings of child-care workers on which over 70 school employees have been listed this year as confirmed abusers. + Mr Winsett, who has been in education for 24 years and is the headmaster of Stambaugh middle school, in Auburndale, has gone to court to have his name removed from the registry. Under Florida state law a confirmed child abuser is disqualified from working with the elderly, the disabled, in day-care centres, or in jobs that deal with adoption, but schools are also affected. + Florida's teachers have closed ranks around Mr Winsett. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +272 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 27, 1989 + +Commentary: The queues to escape from a better life + +BYLINE: By JONATHAN STEELE + +LENGTH: 1186 words + + + LEV HAS never had it so good in Moscow. Since Gorbachev came in, things have looked up enormously. For one thing, ordinary people can get licences to operate a small business. So Lev gave up his job at an institute, and started to use his battered Zhiguli as a taxi. The licence costs him 60 roubles a month, which is less than he earns in an average day. Another change is that he can talk freely, say what he thinks and become friendly with foreigners without any fear. + But all this is not enough, Lev says, presenting me with a paradox. He has decided to emigrate. Along with all the other improvements, the prospects for Jews to leave the Soviet Union are also better than ever. He is leaving while the door remains open. This summer he, his wife and their baby went to southern Russia where his elderly parents live. The family conference discussed and debated for many hours, and then decided they would go. 'My parents have had very tough lives. I want to be able to give them some comfort in their old age,' he explained. + Lev has always been something of an internationalist. He is an enthusiast for Esperanto. He believes that an 'international lingua franca' will encourage human contact. But the daily queueing, the slog for food and basic necessities, and the hours at the wheel give him little time. 'In spite of all the changes here, it's hard to have any broader ideas, or entertain any notions of improving the world when you're trying to feed a perpetually hungry family.' + Twice a day Lev stops his taxi beside the US embassy and registers his name on the unofficial list of those who want to leave. Most are Armenians or Jews, but there is an increasing number of Russians. As with so many aspects of life here, money talks. Just to get inside the embassy there are two queues. The 'live' queue consists of people living in Moscow. For every hundred people on the list there is a self-appointed marshal who maintains the roll-call. If you do not turn up every morning and evening, they ruthlessly strike you off. + The 'live' queue has about a thousand names. The last man on it will get inside the embassy in about five months' time. There he will hand in his application and discuss his case with a consular official. (Because of the pressure of work the Americans then take 10 months to clear it.) The 'dead' queue, which has some 13,000 names, is made up of people from outside Moscow. They come up to Moscow, give in their names but only come back when the marshals phone them and tell them their time is near. It is a lucrative business for the marshals. The live queue is hard to manipulate since everyone in the street is watching like a hawk. The 'dead' list is another matter. It is padded with non-existent names, so if you slip the marshal the right tip, he can put you high up the queue. + Sometimes fights break out between the 'dead' and 'live' queue people. There is an unofficial pact that every day 40 dead and 10 live get into the embassy. But there is always suspicion of queue-jumping. Last week a joyful Lev announced that he had moved from 567 on the live queue to 219. A friend on 219 got impatient and paid a marshal 500 roubles to go to the top of the dead queue. Lev took his place. + He is still nagged with doubts about the decision to emigrate. Presumably they will pursue him to the airport, and long after he arrives in the United States. 'You're a journalist. You're doing something serious. You're telling people in Britain what's going on here,' Lev told me the other day. 'Maybe you think that leaving here now is escapism. I feel that too. That's what has held me back for so long.' The advent of glasnost has broken the old certainties and caused a psychological and intellectual crisis for Lev and his friends. 'You may not believe it, but in Brezhnev's time people still had more faith in the system. The ideological pressure from the propaganda machine had its effect. We knew less then, both about this country and the outside world.' + Another impulse to go is fear of instability. Pessimism has always been a strong element in Russian life. Many Russian Jews suffer from a double dose. He says there were rumours of imminent anti-Semitic pogroms a few weeks ago. His wife's parents were so worried that they came to stay the night. Lev finds it hard to explain what prompts such fears. 'It's not that I think Russians will suddenly turn on the Jews as scapegoats. But there's a climate of instability everywhere - the violence in Fergana, in Uzbekistan, Sumgait and the Caucasus. Will it spread? Who knows?' + In cooler moments, he accepts that perestroika is irreversible. 'I don't think Tiananmen Square could happen here. The political reforms have gone too far. The Congress of People's Deputies is a safety valve. For 70 years this country was moving towards something unknown. Perhaps now we are moving towards normal standards of civilisation and a better standard of living. I believe the capitalist and socialist systems will converge, although our government has rejected this for years.' + Just in case it does not happen, Lev wants to watch developments in the Soviet Union from the tranquillity he hopes to find in the US. Over there he is likely to run across people in the professional Moscow-watching community who are less well-disposed towards the Soviet Union and even more pessimistic. Doomsday speculation has a long pedigree in the US, fed partly by Cold War stereotypes and partly by the fact that many of the watchers are themselves long-time emigres who need the subconscious reinforcement of feeling they made the right choice. + Squeezed between these camps, those of us who feel that reform in the Soviet Union will muddle its way forward without major violence or repression are in an exposed minority. We can take comfort from some crumbs. US Sovietologists failed to predict Gorbachev or that change would come so far so fast. Why should one believe their speculations now? Surely it is better to analyse in detail the kaleidoscope of changes going on today than indulge in glib long-range predictions. + In Russia pessimism has a long and justified pedigree. All but a handful of Russians have been powerless spectators all their lives. Under Gorbachev the perspective has changed; a pluralistic society is emerging but the fact of powerlessness still remains uppermost for most people. Hence the anxiety which Lev and his family feel. Around them they see rising crime. The television shows pictures of apparently pervasive ethnic violence. There is loose talk of a Russian backlash, and even civil war. Meanwhile, the ruling apparatus is still in charge. Why should people who have never seen political conflict resolved by peaceful and democratic means believe it can ever happen? + Westerners have no such alibi. We know it can. Every day that perestroika lasts gives more and more Soviet citizens a taste of power, a sense of making a contribution to a society in flux. Which is why I continue to argue with Lev that things will gradually improve. But I don't blame him for leaving. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +273 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 28, 1989 + +Thursday People: Banned writer finds comfort in Joy of Sex + +BYLINE: By MARTIN WAINWRIGHT + +LENGTH: 411 words + + + IRELAND'S vigilant book censors made a sad mistake when they banned Alex Comfort's Joy of Sex from their shores more than 14 years ago. Now that they have relented - in a decision announced this week by the grand-sounding Censorship of Publications Appeal Board - their countrymen will find it easier to get to know an engaging man. + Many of them are already good friends of the doctor, author and poet whose reputation has been hopelessly skewed by the enormous success of Joy of Sex, just one of a whole shelf of Comfort books. + The bulk of Dr Comfort's medical career has been devoted to the elderly. He is a respected novelist. And then there are the molluscs. + Browsing through the land snail collection of Dublin's National Museum, off-duty book censors can hardly have realised the small, delicately-shelled creatures are the gift of the same Dr Comfort, the banned writer. + Collecting has taken him to Nepal and beyond. But frequent visits to Ireland led to a large sample of Irish snails in his personal collection. Many were rare and not in Dublin's cabinets. Would the museum like his, he asked? + They jumped at the offer and the molluscs (hermaphrodite, incidentally, so perhaps deprived of the Joy of Sex) duly crossed the water. + Now 69 and with his most recent book examining quantum physics (look out, Prof Hawking), Dr Comfort is undisturbed by his lop-sided public image. + Do elderly patients on his NHS locums step back when the nurse introduces him? + 'They'd be more likely to step forward,' he suggests. + For next week he lectures at Charing Cross hospital on 'Sexual problems in later life'. + He began in medicine as a paediatrician, after schooldays at Highgate and student life at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he showed plenty of evidence of the all-rounder he was to become: scholarships in classics and natural sciences preceded a medical scholarship to the London hospital. + The golden promise coincided with the outbreak of the second world war, but Dr Comfort was a conscientious objector. He was assigned to medical work, and soon came his first visit and lasting fondness for Ireland. + Comfort became a devotee of Yeats and corresponded famously in the Irish Times with Flann O'Brien. + He is happy the board has now removed its funny hat with bells on. The Irish will benefit from the latest edition of the book, updated to take account of Aids and medical developments in the sexual field. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +274 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 28, 1989 + +Scarborough Sketch: The Doctor mans the balustrades + +BYLINE: By MAEV KENNEDY + +LENGTH: 551 words + + + IT WAS jaw-jaw and war-war. A hundred delegates turned to their nearest reporter and beseeched them to use the headline: 'We will fight them on the beaches'. + 'Ah don't you love these open-air religious revivals', cried one. It was the hour for heroes. Tony Linforth-Hall, who had already wrapped his tweed jacket around a conference organiser shivering in a little black dress, manhandled a loudspeaker on to the stone balustrade. + There was only one doubter who feared that the BBC cameras might still be inside the bomb-scared Spa Hall gleefully filming rows of empty seats. + The platform party fell in on the steps. John Cartwright, sans galoshes, sans overcoat, stood above the Doctor looking noble. Rosie Barnes stood below, good-as-gold hair ruffled by the wind, cheeks flushed pink, eyes blazing as she gazed out to sea, a Britannia figurehead come to life. + And the Doctor! One tanned hand rested on the balustrade when it wasn't needed to sweep the most charismatic forelock back from the most vote-catching widow's peak in British politics, all of the terraced gardens rising above him as he pledged to clean up the earth, all of the bay before him as he urged the faithful to look beyond Poland and Hungary to the Soviet Union. Well .. + 'The cartoonists had the idea that the party would be meeting in a telephone box - some telephone box, some party!' + Elderly women on their way to lunch in the Clock Cafe with their poodles and scotties, paused to listen, stayed enthralled, and there wasn't a yap out of any of them. + 'There is no humiliation in speaking the truth.' They were ready to face that, particularly those who'd been at the review the previous night and heard the sneak preview of the Doctor's address to the 21st century SDP conference: 'We will fight six seats in the next election if we can borrow Pounds 5 from each member to lend to David Sainsbury.' + But it wasn't that truth. It was the other one - that unless everyone else falls into step with the Doctor in his Kinder Gentler Coalition, Mrs Thatcher will be re-elected. + 'Let me sketch out for you what the alternative government could look like ..' + He didn't even pencil in Paddy Ashdown, but he was very nice about the Greens, and very very nice about Labour. He was even prepared to treat Neil Kinnock as an equal. 'Neil Kinnock wouldn't get his way on every occasion. David Owen wouldn't get his way on every occasion either. Might be very good for him too.' + They cheered for everything. They cheered for hedges and teachers and Poland. When he told them 'There are trains and buses to be caught, coaches to be er .. mounted, and cars to be driven' every breast swelled with martial ardour. + 'We must go out from Scarborough and explain, explain, and explain again,' cried the Doctor. Hugh Gaitskell never managed such a battle cry, but then he never had such a backdrop. + Since they were already standing they just cheered so much louder that a flock of birds rose up in alarm from the Italian gardens up the cliffs. + John Cartwright got the last word. 'That was the speech they couldn't stop to the party they couldn't kill,' he said, and looked very pleased with himself, as well he might. + SDP conference, page 6; Leader comment, page 22; 'Poll pact vital', page 24 + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +275 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 29, 1989 + +Company News in Brief: US problems hit Saga + +LENGTH: 175 words + + + Saga, the holiday firm for the elderly, saw pre-tax profits fall 4.4 per cent to Pounds 1.18 million in the six months to the end of July. But the problems were not those of other UK tour operators, hit this year by a slump in demand for foreign packages. + Saga's tour bookings in the UK rose by 3 per cent over the period and the chairman, Roger de Haan, says that his elderly customers are mostly sheltered from economic factors such as high interest rates: 'They have paid off their mortgages years ago and their children are grown up.' + The problems came in the US, where Saga had a 'disappointing' six months, resulting in an overall loss which Mr Haan will not quantify. + The UK still accounts for 60 per cent of Saga's turnover of Pounds 49.2 million in the half-year, and here bookings for domestic holidays held steady at last year's level, while long-haul holidays and cruise bookings rose sharply. + Saga pensioners now travel to Malawi to trace the footsteps of the missionaries, or go trekking in Nepal or Iceland. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +276 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 2, 1989 + +Sixty charged after rampage in Blackpool + +LENGTH: 176 words + + + ABOUT 60 soccer fans will appear in court in Blackpool today charged with public order offences, criminal damage, and burglary after a weekend of violence in the resort. + Birmingham City supporters went on the rampage before and after their team's defeat in a Third Division match against Blackpool. + 'Two hundred fans arrived without tickets and there were 3,000 in the town causing all manner of problems, terrorising elderly women and children,' said Chief Superintendent Kenneth McKay, head of Blackpool police. + Police in riot gear were called to the Bloomfield Road ground after ticketless fans tried to force their way in. During the second half, police moved onto the terraces to part fighting fans. + Trouble started on Friday when seven arrests were made. + A jeweller's shop was the target of smash-and-grab raids. A woman assistant was injured. + The Football Association will today launch an inquiry into the crowd trouble. Last season it made Birmingham City's away matches all-ticket after trouble at Crystal Palace. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +277 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 4, 1989 + +Some People: Frantic about books - Paul Minet + +LENGTH: 1566 words + + + Paul Minet, the Huguenot terrible of the old book trade, publishes later this week Late Booking, his own first book. He earns a catalogue entry by writing racily about a human sub-species that really needs a zoo to itself; by owning up about money (his own or others') in a trade that prices financial discretion above an 1865 Alice in Wonderland; and by not being William Rees-Mogg of Sotheran and Rome and Propriety and Other Newspapers. (Try visualising the ennobled Mogg knee-deep in a garageful of dampish books, or fighting a lost or Liberal cause, or dedicating his book to two wives, past and present.) Paul's own Frantic Press, located in Frant in Kent near Rochester whither he recently moved his full fathom shelves of books, could do with a Pedantic editor and proof-reader. But he has been a Wodehouse-worshipping friend of ordinary book collectors who cannot undertake the shortest journey without a book, 'not rare books, or finely bound books, or good investments - just books.' + IN THE course of my private buying of all books, I have met many interesting people in houses ranging from hovels in South London to suites in Kensington Palace. I remember once getting a phone call to go over to Bethnal Green to look at what was described as 'a flat full of books.' The list of tenants had been vandalised, there were no lights in the lifts and there was a caretakers' strike in progress. I hung around a bit and eventually found a woman who turned out to be the wife of the tenant, although she didn't say so. We travelled up in pitch blackness, my guide muttering to herself, and stepped out on to an open walkway some twenty storeys above the street. I suffer from vertigo, so I cringed against the wall and bolted through the door my guide opened. Her husband, an elderly man in grubby clothes, showed me heaps of books piled against the walls, under tables and lining the passages. + 'I used to be a barber at the House of Commons,' he explained. 'I knew all sorts of people there. I've always been interested in books. When I retired I sold my house for Pounds 20,000 and invested the money. She didn't want to come here, but I needed the money for my books and my investments and this was all the council offered us. She can't stand heights. See those marks on the walls - she stabs them when I'm not here. I expect she'll end up in some sort of home. I go out looking round all the market stalls in the East End ..' + I mumbled that the books weren't quite what I wanted and made a determined move towards the front door. Outside, I tumbled into the lift, which stopped at various points on its downward descent to let male passengers into the blackness. As we got out at the bottom, a murderous-looking young man informed me that most of the women in the block now walked down the stairs, since the lifts weren't considered safe. I found myself sympathising with them. I discovered later that I wasn't the first bookseller to have been in the place. The ex-barber liked the company of booksellers. Nobody ever bought anything. + Another telephone call and another cavernous, ill-painted and graffiti-covered block of concrete, with the usual galleries open to the biting wind. Fortunately, the flat I wanted was on the ground floor off the Gray's Inn Road. A voice asked me weakly who I was and grudgingly let me in. Its owner was a surprise, an elderly, handsome man with a goatee beard, well spoken but obviously very weak. He led me through a gloomy passage to a tiny sitting-room furnished with some rather fine 1930s furniture and some Globe Wernicke bookcases, those ones with the glass doors that open upwards. + He lay back in his armchair and closed his eyes. He told me of his two wives, his theatregoing, his reading, his life and his hopelessness. He had been a Lloyds broker and it turned out that, years ago he had known my uncle John and knew also of my father. I poured him a stiff drink and he told me to look at the books. He had had two strokes and he said that he had a son who was coming to arrange for him to move to a home and the flat to be cleared. + There were about 1,000 books, all virtually mint in dust wrappers, in paper bags. The vast bulk had been bought between 1942 and 1960, just long enough ago to make their condition quite exceptional. Many of the titles from the period of paper rationing between 1943 and 1951 were new to me and must have been most unusual in that condition. I never knew quite why he collected them, but he had certainly lost interest in them. From an habitue of Covent Garden, a discriminating reader and 'City gent' he had pottered down to this dingy council flat. Among the printed matter were heaps of theatre programmes, and about four hundred long-playing classical records from the late 1950s and early 1960s, all hardly played. I bought the records for myself and also two fine art nouveau vases. I hope the Pounds 1,800 I gave for the books helped make their owner's remaining days or weeks more cheerful, but I doubt it. The last I saw of him was a weak wave from his armchair: 'Time for me to go', he said sadly. + At the end of 1978 I was called out to look at the remaining books at Bridgefoot, Martin Secker's splendid old mansion in Buckinghamshire. Secker had recently died in his nineties, a legend in his lifetime. He has lived out his last years in almost total blindness in a stable flat after passing the main house on to his children. His blindness did not prevent him from conducting a voluminous correspondence with both publishers and booksellers. His main collection went to Tulsa University, which specialises in literature of the nineties. George Sims, the first edition dealer, had also combed the place fairly thoroughly. + There was a fair amount left, however, concentrated mainly in some rather damp garages and an old tack room behind them. In order to keep the damp off the lower shelves, Secker had fallen into the habit of creosoting the shelves, but he had not bothered to remove the books first, so there was a sticky black line across the lower spine of many of them. It was a fascinating collection - imperfect 'returns' from before the war, sample copies of late printings of books from Grant Richards, Martin Secker, Secker and Warburg, the Unicorn Press and the Richards Press and ephemera from over seventy years of publishing. I don't think there was a great deal of profit in it, but there was a great deal of fun. + On another memorable day (in 1982), I found myself concluding a modest deal in a famous stately home in Hampshire which I could remember paying to see inside as a boy. Night was coming on around five o'clock and I had to drive hard back to London to view a load of books in an icy terrace house in Tottenham, North London, on the way. The local vicar was pottering about, clearing odd bits of furniture, for he had been left the residue of the contents for the benefit of his play-group. The late Miss Jiggle sounded, from what he said, to have been a genial person with a passion for travelling. As well as the background reading to fifty years of travel, her books reflected a very wide range of interests. I felt that I would much prefer to have had tea with Miss Jiggle herself than to be clearing her remaining books on one of the coldest nights of the year. The vicar told me the house had been 'charmed' out of her on her deathbed for only Pounds 7,000 by a repair man, thereby cheating the church of the house and leaving the almost worthless furniture instead. I have a feeling that churches in Tottenham cannot afford that kind of disappointment. + A more rewarding private call was to a large vicarage in Blackheath, where I was greeted by some pleasant young people whose father had recently died. The house was a late Victorian one, half hidden by trees, and the interior seemed little changed with the years. The vicar had, I gathered, been very high church and his congregation had dwindled with the years. He had been rather a fine organist and the house contained two or three small organs, one rather old, with a selection of good books on the subject. The reception rooms downstairs contained a fairly general selection of his own books, but the upstairs was crammed with heaps of remains from twenty years of jumble sale bookstalls - there must have been several thousand. I think we took about three van loads of books out of the place in the end, plus an attractive bust of Dante I bought for myself, not to mention several bookcases. The house itself was to be demolished: a block of flats would cover its site and that of its vast, neglected garden. + As often happens, I built up a picture of that vicar which made me regret never meeting him. He was a renegade American from Farmington. His rambling and neglected vicarage, his virtuosity with the organ and his alienation from his parishoners, his two Rolls-Royces of ancient vintage and his pile of catalogues from every major exhibition in London for many years aroused in me a curiosity which I had not, of course, any means of assuaging. + It is only by turning over someone's house that you learn the questions: but you can't do that until they have gone beyond the possibility of answering them. + From Late Booking: My First Twenty-Five Years in the Secondhand Book Trade (Frantic Press, Old Knowle, Frant, Kent, TN3 9EJ) at Pounds 12. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +278 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 5, 1989 + +Labour at Brighton: Kinnock ally lined up for the hot seat + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL WHITE + +LENGTH: 457 words + + + MR Kinnock put another piece of his election campaign jigsaw into place last night when a conference session of the Labour NEC agreed that his close ally, Mr Tom Sawyer, should be put in line to be Labour's chairman in the crucial 1990-91 session. + Mr Sawyer is the deputy general secretary of Nupe, the public service union, but, more importantly, the Labour leader's principal union ally in pushing through the two-year policy review which is being ratified this week. He is committed to the further changes in party structure and strategy which the leadership wants. Under seniority rules the vice chairmanship in the coming year could have gone either to Mr Sawyer or Mr John Evans, the Labour backbencher who was once parliamentary private secretary to Mr Michael Foot. + Tomorrow Mr Dennis Skinner, one of the few leftwingers not reconciled to the new strategy, hands over the chair to Miss Jo Richardson. Mr Sawyer will either be chairman in election year itself or in the last Labour conference before the election. + Media tycoon Mr Robert Maxwell appeared briefly on the sixth floor balcony of the Grand Hotel in Brighton last night as journalists sacked on his Pergamon publishing company protested in the driveway below. Twenty-three members of the NUJ are seeking reinstatement after they were sacked following a one-day official strike in May. Last night they were asking MPs attending a reception held by Mr Maxwell to lobby him on their behalf. + Mr Brian Sedgemore MP was escorted from the hotel by police at the request of the hotel management after he tried to deliver a petition to Mr Maxwell signed by more than 500 Labour conference delegates. + The Labour Party has increased its membership by 42,000 so far this year, the first signs that its mass membership campaign has been having an impact. The party released figures showing that 25,000 members had been recruited centrally and that further 17,000 had been recruited by the constituencies. Most of the new members have not come from Labour Party affiliated unions, but instead from the white collar union Nalgo, the National Union of Teachers, the Association of University Teachers and the National Association of Schoolmasters. + Conference applauded two pensioners from the Wirral, Cheshire, who were helping to organise opposition to the 'privatisation' of 22 local authority old people's homes in their area. + TODAY'S BUSINESS Conclusion of debate on care in the community; debates on health, local government and poll tax; policy review report on democracy for the individual and the community; debates on constitutional reform, rights in a democracy, law and criminal justice, funding for political parties, and Northern Ireland. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +279 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 5, 1989 + +Labour fears privatised home helps + +BYLINE: By MARTIN LINTON + +LENGTH: 543 words + + + THE Government yesterday did not disown a document leaked to the Labour health spokesman, Ms Harriet Harman, which suggests that the use of private firms to provide meals on wheels, home helps and domestic care for the elderly will be encouraged. + The document, apparently an early draft of the forthcoming white paper on community care, talks of the promotion of a 'flourishing independent sector', and the entry of private providers into the 'domiciliary care market'. + Ms Harman described it as the privatisation of the home help service. She said that although there was no hint of how the Government hoped to achieve it, 'clearly it is not going to be voluntary'. + The Government was already using cash limits to force local authorities to make increasing use of private old people's homes and it could force them to use private home helps in the same way. + Mr Kenneth Clarke, the Health Secretary, issued a statement saying it was not true local authorities would be forced to use private firms to deliver home care to old people. + 'They will make their own, voluntary or private provision according to which they judge the best way of providing the best quality service,' he said. + His statement was the first unambiguous indication that he wants private firms to enter the sensitive area of domiciliary help - until now the preserve of local authorities and voluntary non-profit organisations such as the WRVS. + Mr Clarke claimed to have made this clear in July when he gave the Government's long-awaited reply to the Griffiths report on community care. Close examination of his speech reveals he did talk about making more use of the commercial sector, but this was taken to refer to the rapid growth of private sector old people's homes, not to home helps and meals on wheels. + Ms Harman outlined three ways in which the Government could ensure that local authorities had to use private firms for domiciliary services without making it a legal obligation. + They could revive the experimental scheme in Northern Ireland where elderly people were given a social security grant to pay for a private home help or meals on wheels service, or they could oblige local authorities to contract out their home help services or pay outside organisations to provide them through community care grants. + Whichever way, the local authorities would have to monitor the service and safeguard standards in a private care industry which was already attracting its share of cowboys. It would be difficult to check that private home helps were paying daily visits and doing the job properly when many of their clients were confused and forgetful. + When the Government accepted the Griffiths report in July, it had put responsibility for community care firmly on local authorities, but now it was emerging that they would only be 'the policemen, not the providers,' she said. + Mrs Judith Carter, national officer of the Confederation of Hedalth Service Employees, said: 'Home helps, care attendants, meals-on-wheels, are the vital link for housebound old people with the outside world. Cowboy private firms would reduce these essential services to costed mechanistic tasks which would not begin to meet the needs of service users.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +280 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 6, 1989 + +Labour at Brighton (Health): Pledge to abolish eye test charges and restore all hospitals to NHS Health + +BYLINE: By PAUL HOYLAND + +LENGTH: 474 words + + + THE shadow Health Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, yesterday pledged a Labour government to restore free eye tests. On current trends, four million people would not go for an eye test this year because of the Government's introduction of charges, he said. Some were putting their sight at risk. + 'Labour will abolish the charges,' said Mr Cook. 'We will restore that vital preventative service and we will make it free again.' + Mr Cook also pledged to make sure the National Health Service was run by people who were committed to the public health service. There would be no tax handouts to the private medical sector, and any hospital that had opted out would be brought back into NHS control as a first priority. + He condemned the Government's proposals for the health service. 'That white paper is not about reforming the NHS, it's about commercialising the NHS,' he said. 'The moment you apply a hospital to trade for every penny, from that moment it is not what services are most needed, it is what services can we make most money out of.' + There were only two references to elderly people in the white paper, and both referred to tax relief for their private medical care. Mr Cook contrasted that with the experience of one woman who had been told by a hospital that they could not spare her mother a clean incontinent pad until next Tuesday. + 'There will be no room on our NHS policy board for three big businessmen, each clutching his own private medical insurance cover,' he said. + 'I don't believe Kenneth (Clarke) can get the best out of the health service when every time he opens his mouth to speak about the people of the health service he speaks of them with contempt. Today he has been describing the doctors as absurd. Last month he described the ambulancemen as ludicrous. They are all wrong, it is just him, Kenneth Clarke, who has got the right answer.' + The health secretary wanted to hand over power to local people, and Mr Cook challenged him to hold local ballots on whether hospitals should opt out of the NHS. + Last month the director of estates in the NHS had told a conference there was a potential 'goldmine' in selling hospital sites and premises, but they were not his to dispose of in a closing-down sale of the NHS, Mr Cook said. + A nursing assistant, Ms Ann Denman, said members of her union, Ze, would hold ballots on whether hospitals should opt out if Mr Clarke refused to do so. + Mr Cyril Taylor, of the Socialist Health Association, told delegates: 'Market forces are totally incompatible with the health workers' ethic of providing what is needed and what is best for the patient.' + A junior hospital doctor, Ms Ruth Gilbert, added: 'I haven't trained in the NHS for the last 12 years to become an accountant where services are tailored to make profit and not to serve needs.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +281 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 6, 1989 + +Batons and water cannon drive back railway rioters + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL FARR in Bonn and agencies in East Berlin + +LENGTH: 440 words + + + POLICE using batons and water cannon drove back thousands of demonstrators shouting 'We want to leave', as trains passed through Dresden station on Wednesday night carrying refugees from Prague to West Germany. + Witnesses said several people were injured and arrests made. Protesters ripped up cobblestones and hurled them at police, smashed windows, and set fire to at least one car. + Church sources said that one East German was run over in Dresden by a train and lost his legs. Ambulances wailed through the streets of the city on the River Elbe. + East Berlin paid heavily for its insistence that the refugees travel briefly through East Germany territory on their journey from the Czechoslovak capital to the West. + Earlier, according to some estimates, more than 10,000 people gathered around the station and in the appropriately named Prager Strasse (Prague Street) waiting for the special trains. + They sang the Internationale and shouted: 'Gorbachev. Gorbachev'. + The Soviet President, whose reforms have inspired young East Germans but been resisted by their ageing leaders, was due to arrive in East Berlin today for the 40th anniversary celebratiKo #!e Communist German state. + The festivities opened in East Berlin with a nocturnal military tattoo, held at the same time that police were deployed in force to drive people back in Dresden and elsewhere along the train route. + The three-hour riot ended around midnight after a small group lobbed cobblestones. Police flailing rubber truncheons and carrying shields drove the crowd away from the station and dispersed them with water cannon. + The casualty toll was not known. Nor was it known whether anyone had been detained. + Eyewitnesses said the crowd consisted mainly of young people, but some older people also took part. + Sources said that many wanted to express their frustration at the absence of reforms in East Germany like those in Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union. + Police action to clear and seal off the track to prevent people jumping on to the trains - as some had successfully done when the first refugee trains passed through at the weekend - resulted in long delays to the eight trains from Prague. + 'This is the first riot we've had yet,' a diplomat said. Another said: 'I think the people are increasingly seeing the Gorbachev visit as their opportunity. + 'First we had Leipzig and now we have Dresden. Who knows what will happen in Berlin?' + On Monday well over 10,000 East Germans marched through Leipzig, calling for political change and the legalisation of the main independent reform group, New Forum. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +282 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 6, 1989 + +Eyewitness: Little response as Honecker makes wreath-laying round + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL SIMMONS in East Berlin + +LENGTH: 416 words + + + ERICH Honecker, the dapper 77-year-old on whom so many thousands of young East Germans are turning their backs, was on public duty in Berlin yesterday with people he knew he could trust. + Slightly slower in his movements as a result of his recent illness, but still neat, he was among the military top brass, senior policemen, as well as members of the Socialist Unity Party he has led since 1971. + The crowds which turned out to see him in brilliant sunshine, were surprisingly sparse. He is not as popular as he once was. It was a day for wreath-laying. At breakfast time it was in the suburbs at the main memorial for dead Communists, and then at Treptow Park where the remains of some of the thousands of casualties of the Red Army, which liberated Berlin in 1945, are buried. + By the time other Germans were snatching a coffee break, the little man and his chosen entourage were in Unter den Linden at the Neue Wache (the new guard house) in the heart of the old Prussian capital. + This building, like many of East Germany's veteran Communists, is bullet and shell-scarred and it saw some of the most intense fighting of the last hours of the second world war. + Inside, an eternal flame burns in memory of two unknown Germans. One was a resistance fighter, many of whom were Mr Honecker's comrades in arms before being shot by the Gestapo. Some were executed not far from this spot even as the Russians closed in on the innermost core of Hitler's so-called 'citadel'. + The little man, his white hair ruffling in a gentle breeze, was flanked by his similarly aged Prime Minister, Mr Willi Stoph, and his elderly Politburo colleague, Mr Horst Sindermann. + The group was preceded into the guard house by soldiers bearing sweet-smelling wreaths, mainly of red carnations and followed by rank and file party loyalists. + Afterwards, a large band played, to which the marchers, jackbooted and employing high rigid steps, strutted past. + For Mr Honecker and those close to him the war has been in many senses their raison d'etre as national leaders. Unfortunately for Mr Honecker, the war theme cuts little ice with the average East German. After the march past, the old people, suddenly isolated, waited for their official cars - Mr Honecker for a Citroen limousine and the other veterans for Volvos. + Mr Honecker waved to the lines of people two or three deep at the most, who were watching it all from the other side of Unter den Linden. Almost nobody waved back. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +283 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 9, 1989 + +Poll tax shift to aid Conservative marginals + +BYLINE: By ALAN TRAVIS, Political Correspondent + +LENGTH: 495 words + + + MINISTERS hope to avert the threatened Tory backbench rebellion over the poll tax when they announce concessions on the 'safety net' proposals at the Conservative Party conference on Wednesday. + It is expected that the Local Government minister, Mr David Hunt, will meet demands for Pounds 650 million Treasury cash to cushion the impact of the safety net in marginal Tory seats by unveiling a package financed jointly by the Treasury and by all local authorities. + The safety net is intended to ease hardship in poorer districts over the first three years of the tax and has angered Tory backbenchers because they see their voters subsidising 'profligate' authorities. + The Cabinet is also believed to have considered a more generous rebate scheme for the poorest and extra help for those who live in homes with low rateable values. + While these concessions will help environment ministers face the Tory conference this week their civil servants have caused consternation in the Lords by tabling 144 pages of amendments to the Housing and Local Government Bill for consideration over the next three days. + The book of amendments is almost as thick as the bill and provides further evidence that the Government timetable is so overloaded that it will probably delay the Queen's Speech from November 8 until November 22. + A Labour environment spokesman, Lord McIntosh of Haringey, said last night: 'A Government with any self-respect and control over its civil servants would tell them to go to hell. You cannot at this late stage of a major bill try to remedy practically all the mistakes you have made in the last four years.' + Among the hundreds of new clauses and additions are several time bombs which could spark Tory backbench revolts. + They include proposals to remove protection from business rate increases of 50-100 per cent a year from companies which move premises after next March. Those companies which stay put will be able to enjoy a 20 per cent ceiling on any annual business rate rises imposed as a result of the radical reform of the business rating system next April. But legislation to sell off sheltered housing for the elderly to residents, and to raise council house rents sharply to link them with prices paid by tenants who have bought their council homes, are potential trouble points for the Government. + Mr Hunt will try to meet Tory concern on Wednesday by announcing new exemptions from the poll tax for the sufferers of Alzheimer's disease and for older pupils who stay on at school. But the disclosure yesterday that MPs will be exempt from paying poll tax on their second homes will not help the presentation problems. + As the table shows, the attempt in July to recast the safety net still left the constituents of practically all cabinet ministers having to paying substantial contributions to the safety net. The compromise should cushion the impact on these Tory areas. + Patten recants, page 3 + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +284 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 9, 1989 + +Media: Now no sex please, we're on the telly - Lorra laffs, or Saturday night cringe? / Blind Date + +BYLINE: By MELANIE MCFADYEAN + +LENGTH: 1170 words + + + IN THE first of the new series of Blind Date Cilla wished a couple a 'lorra lorra luck' in Cyprus, 'birth place of Aphrodite, whoever she was.' + Perhaps it's the deliberate absence of the Aphrodite touch that makes Blind Date such a bizarrely sanitised and anodyne experience. Cilla added that she was looking for the first engagement. + 'When we cast the show,' says producer Kevin Roast, 'we make the mix as wide as possible, perhaps it's a bit foolish and that's why we haven't got a romance yet.' + Roast's team of researchers go around the country canvassing for daters. 'We put posters in big stores, and it gets round that we're coming to town.' They see everyone who has returned application forms, enclosing a photograph and personal details from height to hobbies to phobias. Roast claims looks don't come into it. The reason the plain and dumpy don't get on the show is because, 'people who appear are extrovert and performance-literate,' or as Zoe McIntyre, LWT press officer, comments: 'They're all too vain to go on less than glamorous.' + Lonely hearts are 'weeded out, it would be cruel to put them on the show because it is not very likely statistically that you might meet the person of your dreams,' says Roast. + Roast selects the final contestants. 'It's a show about kids having fun, although we do use the oldies. I predominantly choose 20-22 year olds because that's when most people aremost interested in dating. They enjoy the date most; older people are more pernickety.' + Perhaps it has something to do with advertising, although Roast says he is independent of marketing pressures. But advertisers are chasing the 16-24s. Although 12-14 million people watch Blind Date on average, and the programme has the highest ratings of any apart from the soaps, 36 per cent of the audience is 55 and over, while only 11 per cent are 16-24. + The cost of the show remains a trade secret, but Roast said with a smile: 'It's a shareholders' delight.' For the contestants there is no fee. They compete to appear, it's their choice to be the objects of fun, voyeurism and embarrassment. A genuinely touching moment is almost as rare as a white fly. Their reward is 15 minutes of fame and a chaperoned blind date. Tacky though Blind Date is, it isn't trash TV in the American sense; nobody gets weird or wild, or breaks Cilla's nose. And upfront sexuality is not encouraged. 'They can be saucy and cheeky but you wouldn't want the show to be raunchy.' + Winners are chaperoned during their dates and stay in separate hotels. Roast says no dater has yet revealed any steamy intimacies, he wouldn't put it in the show if they did. 'It's a blind date, not a honeymoon. You mustn't confuse TV with real life. And I'm not very interested in whether they're bonking or not.' + Roast may not be very interested but 12 million viewers probably are. He disagrees. 'What viewers want to know the next week is whether they were right about how the picker picked.' + But what is Blind Date about if not love and sex? 'It's a spectator sport, you can sit at home and play matchmaker. It's a game show, it's meant as fun and entertainment, it's meant to make you laugh.' But where is the line between laughing and squirming? + For him Blind Date is more about romance than sex. 'Karen and Allan were very romantic,' he says happily. Karen was wearing a dress that perched perilously on her bosoms in a visual display of sexual innuendo as she and Alan gazed at each other and Cilla glowed with pleasure. + A couple of weeks ago, as Cilla gave her blessing to a prizewinning couple, she wondered if next week we would find out whether the earth moved or not. Earth moving in this context is not something done while building motorways, as we well know. Allusions to sex come thick and fast but they're safe, British and banal. + 'It's pretty squeaky clean really,'says Roast,'but that's happened naturally, it's not policy.' + And to preserve Blind Date's cleanliness, contestants aren't allowed to tell their backstage stories to the tabloids. It's partly to protect them, says Roast. They aren't familiar with the wiles and lures of the media. 'We have an obligation to look after them as well as we can.' + And to make sure they don't kiss and tell, when contestants sign up, they undertake not to discuss the show with 'any other person, or company' including the media. Roast doesn't like backstage revelations, 'I don't want to know how Superman flies, it destroys the illusion, the show has a bit of mystique and that's good.' + What about the mystique when it comes to the unspontaneous and trite questions and answers given by contestants? Contestants are asked to come up with a dozen questions of which Roast picks three. Some are streamlined to extract more than a 'yes' or 'no' answer. Are they fixed? 'That's a hoary old chestnut. It's preposterous to expect people with no TV experience to come on with no preparation,' so there are rehearsals with Equity stand-ins. But rather than manipulating the 'pickers and pickees' , says Roast, 'it is more a case of nannying and reassuring.' + And why does it seem there is an absence of people of other races apart from WASP? 'This show isn't social work. We find that with those groups, although we actively try to contact them, they're not very interested in appearing on TV, it's not part of their cultural day-to-day life.' + And there has never been a gay Blind Date. Roast says, 'I don't think that would be appropriate for a game show on a Saturday night at 7.30. Blind Date is a heterosexual show, I'm trying to make the best entertainment I can with the best mix of people I can; people who will enjoy themselves on TV. I'm not sure whether gays would enjoy themselves or not. It's not something we've thought about. It doesn't interest me so I suppose as long as I'm producing it, it won't happen. I'm not anti-gay, but you have to think about the audience. We're looking at a prime-time entertainment show where you have to get maximum ratings, it's meant as popular entertainment and that's where I pitch it. + 'Your contestants are your assets, your most precious commodity. My discomfort would be in making them pawns, playing games with them.' Who then is playing games with whom? Twelve million viewers, eight contestants, Cilla Black and the production team? It's a uniquely contradictory and questionable late 20th century phenomenon. + The new touch in this series, the video camera following daters, might lessen the mystique - it certainly threatens the schmaltz. A couple videoed recently in Hong Kong couldn't even muster the usual sucrose coyness. They looked bored. Still, it's all part of the naughty-vicious fun in the tradition of Blind Date standard insults: 'I'd put his moustache in a gro-bag,' 'The lunch was very, very good. It was a pity I had to share it with him ', 'She was slim and small, which was an advantage. That was about her only advantage.' All part of the spectator sport really. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +285 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 12, 1989 + +Mild winter helps reduce death rate + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 282 words + + + LAST winter's mild weather contributed to the lowest number of deaths for 22 years, according to figures released by the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys In the first three months of this year, 149,446 deaths were recorded - 6 per cent fewer than the same period in 1988, and the lowest for the quarter since 1967. + A breakdown by age shows reductions occurred typically, but not exclusively, among the elderly - indicating that the mild conditions were partly responsible. + However, medical experts believe improvements in diet and health education may have helped, particularly the greater awareness of the dangers of hypothermia. + The statistics show 65,700 people aged 65-74, and 168,700 aged 75-84 died in the first three months of 1989. These figures are down by 6 and 5 per cent on the first quarter of 1988; 5 and 3 per cent on the first quarter of 1987; and 13 and 16 per cent on the first quarter of 1986. + Compared with 1988, deaths among men of all ages from bronchitis fell by 14 per cent, and from pneumonia by 11 per cent. Among women, deaths from accidental falls were down by 7 per cent. Across both sexes, suicides were down by 20 per cent. + Professor Peter Millard, a specialist in geriatric medicine at St George's hospital, south London, said elderly people were especially vulnerable to falls in severe winter weather; and those with heart conditions often suffered attacks clearing snow. + He said the general rule is the lower the temperature, the higher the death rate. But he added: 'It's probable that the mild weather, the absence of a flu epidemic and the greater stress on health education all combined to produce this result.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +286 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 12, 1989 + +Conservatives at Blackpool: Terminally ill will get attendance allowance - Benefits + +BYLINE: By ANDREW CULF + +LENGTH: 350 words + + + TERMINALLY ill patients are to qualify for attendance allowance, the Social Security Secretary, Mr Tony Newton, announced yesterday. + He told the conference that the extension of the allowance would 'do more to help the terminally ill, their families, and others such as hospices which do so much dedicated work caring for people who are dying'. + Later he said it was hoped that the change, partly a response to vigorous pressure from hospices, would be implemented within months. + During the conference debate on pensions, Mr Sid Cordle (Sheffield) described the retirement pension as totally inadequate. Huge poverty gaps had been left. + Wing Commander Derek Martin (Wessex) called for the pensions of the 50,000 remaining second world war widows to be uprated. They received about half the pension of those widowed after 1973, he said. + In his speech Mr Newton said pensioners' net incomes had increased by as much every year under the Tories as they had in all five years combined under Labour. + The abolition of the pensioners' earnings rule had benefited 400,000 people, and special benefit increases for the least well-off pensioners aged over 75, or disabled, had helped 2.5 million of the most needy. + He accused Labour of trying to beguile pensioners and benefit claimants with 'multi-billion pound promises' they could not keep. 'What we promise, we will deliver.' + The recent abolition of the earnings rule, which had stopped old-age pensioners from claiming a pension if they carried on working, and rises in benefits for the least well-off pensioners showed that commitment. + 'These are not a couple of gimmicks to give me something to say. They are part of a consistent development of policy to meet the needs of this increasingly important section of our society.' + The Government was fully committed to the basic state pension but wanted to boost the number of retired people with extra income. + TODAY'S BUSINESS: Debates on Farming and Food, Defence, Economic Policy and Taxation, EC and Overseas Affairs, Transport, Drugs and Sunday Trading. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +287 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 17, 1989 + +S African rightwing warns of backlash: State newspapers demand restraint from ex-prisoners + +BYLINE: By WILLIAM MACLEAN in Johannesburg + +LENGTH: 493 words + + + FEARS of a white backlash grew in South Africa yesterday after jailed black nationalists freed at the weekend resumed political activity and vowed to fight on against apartheid. + The Conservative Party the main white opposition to President FW de Klerk's National Party said the release of the eight top political prisoners risked bringing chaos and eventual black Marxist rule to the country. + Pro-government white newspapers warned the eight elderly men against political militancy, saying it would hinder Nelson Mandela's release and delay reform. + Most of the eight spent the day relaxing with friends and family, but the former African National Congress secretary-general, Mr Walter Sisulu, aged 77, held meetings at his home near Johannesburg. + 'He never stops. He went to bed late last night and this morning he was the first up to start working,' a friend said. + Mr Sisulu and the other activists held a news conference within hours of their release, calling for redoubled efforts to end apartheid and white minority rule. + The eight, seven of them leading ANC members with an eighth from the Pan Africanist Congress splinter group, have never renounced the use of violence in the anti-apartheid struggle. + The pro-government Citizen newspaper said continued black protests following the release of the eight men on Sunday after long prison terms could provoke a backlash from minority whites. + It added: 'White counter-action to black rallies, marches and acts of defiance will become a growing threat, especially when the internal ANC misuses its new-found freedom to act openly.' + The Afrikaans-language Beeld said the eight would be sorely tempted to play a militant political role. + 'We would seriously plead with them to resist those petitionings .. If there is to be reconciliation it must come from both sides.' + The neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement, which wants a whites-only state, is considering suing the government for the releases under anti-Communist legislation. + Mr De Klerk says black domestic reaction to the release will determine when Mr Mandela, South Africa's longest serving political prisoner, is freed. + His release would signal that Pretoria is ready for talks with the ANC on easing 40 years of apartheid and giving voteless blacks a role in government. + The ex-prisoners' news conference was the ANC's first in South Africa since the organisation was banned in 1960. In another sign that the organisation is emerging from the shadows, statements with the ANC letterhead were issued to news organisations in South Africa on Monday for the first time in years. + The state-run South African Broadcasting Corporation said the ANC's concept of armed struggle 'belongs to a past political era.' + 'Participation in the negotiation process must be comprehensive, involving authentic leaders of constituencies across the political spectrum, from left to right,' it said.- Reuter. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +288 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 20, 1989 + +Health: Self-Help + +LENGTH: 154 words + + + (An alphabetical directory of self-help groups) Alzheimer's Scotland, 33 Castle Street, Edinburgh EH2 3DN. Tel: 031-225 1453. + Aims: To provide support to those caring for dementia sufferers by offering them the chance to share their experiences with other carers. + Association for Postnatal Illness, 7 Gowan Avenue, Fulham, London SW6 6RH. Tel: 01-731 4867. + Aims: To provide support through a nationwide network of women who have suffered and recovered. Free information pack. Send SAE. + Association for Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus, 22 Upper Woburn Place, London WC1H OEP. Tel: 01-388 1382. + Aims: To provide information, advisory and welfare services and practical assistance. + Association of Carers (Renamed Carers National Association), 29 Chilworth Mews, London W2 3RG. Tel: 01-724 7776. + Aims: To give information and support to carers looking after the elderly or disabled at home. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +289 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 21, 1989 + +Pressure grows on pension age + +BYLINE: By DEBBIE HARRISON + +LENGTH: 288 words + + + PRESSURE on the Government to equalise state pension ages intensifies today as the Campaign For Equal State Pension Ages holds it first national conference at the Quaker International Centre, 1 Byng Place, London, WC1, from 10.30am to 5.30pm. + The state pension age in Britain is 60 for women and 65 for men. Even if a man retires early he cannot claim his state pension until he is 65; a discriminatory practice that can cost him thousands of pounds in lost income. + CESPA's aim is for equality in the treatment of men and women in pension schemes, in particular the state pension scheme, which it believes should be available without penalty at age 60. + The organisation, formed in 1986, says other benefits and concessions for older citizens, such as reduced rates on buses and free prescriptions, are dependent on entitlement to the state pension. + The EC is likely to force the Government to to pay pensions at 60 within the next 10 years. + From the Government's point of view this issue is a political hot potato. On coming to power it revealed a firm commitment to reduce the burden on the state of providing pensions. + So, it is likely to resist stubbornly the reduction in the male pension age to 60 since this would impose a further burden on resources. Yet to raise the female pension age to 65 would prove extremely unpopular and politically dangerous in the run-up to the next general election. + While the Government prevaricates, so too will most company pension schemes which still maintain unequal pension ages, despite the legal requirements to provide equal retirement ages for equal jobs. + For information write to Cespa, 36 Orchard Coombe, Whitchurch Hill, Reading, RG8 7QL. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +290 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 24, 1989 + +Tuesday People: Seeking out the guilty Nazis - Thomas Hetherington + +BYLINE: By DENNIS BARKER + +LENGTH: 401 words + + + THE retired Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Thomas Hetherington, is an amiable man who appears to believe in openness and goodwill. His amiability stops with certainty when it comes to Nazi war criminals, even after half a century. + The thought that some of the men and women who eagerly murdered and tortured Jews and others in the second world war could now be frail, in poor health and might cut misleadingly pathetic figures in the dock does not make him reluctant to bring them to court. + Sir Thomas, whose report on war criminals now living in the United Kingdom was a lynchpin of yesterday's London conference on prosecuting them, is 63 and was just too young to take part in the second world war or to witness any of the Nazi death camps at the time. + After Rugby school and Christ Church, Oxford, he became a barrister and went to the legal department of the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance the following year. By 1975 he was deputy Treasury Solicitor. + Two years later he was made Director of Public Prosecutions and bombarded with easy decisions (like dodging the lady who wanted him to prosecute London Zoo for not putting knickers on its monkeys) and with extremely sensitive ones, like authorising the prosecution of Mr Jeremy Thorpe, the former Liberal Party leader, and asking the media not to name a Colonel B in a security court case after his real name had been mentioned in the Commons. + Sir Thomas (known as Tony because he could not pronounce Thomas as a baby) focused on four certainly prosecutable alleged war criminals now living in Britain - the fourth died the same day Sir Thomas was in the Ukraine checking him out. + 'There is a realistic prospect of conviction if the witnesses can be brought before a court in one way or another - it would be best if it were personally but, if not, then by satellite.' + Since he was appointed to the war crimes inquiry last year he has travelled to Australia, Canada, Israel, Germany, the United States and Moscow (four times). 'I must have seen 30 to 40 officials and 40 to 50 potential witnesses. + 'If anyone says these war criminals are now pathetic old people I would say the final decision whether they should be prosecuted or not would be taken in England by the DPP, and that is one of the factors he takes into account. The state of health of the potential defendants does not worry me.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +291 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 25, 1989 + +Victorian school to help children master the past + +BYLINE: By MARTIN WAINWRIGHT + +LENGTH: 305 words + + + CLASSROOM forays into the Victorian past have become so popular in West Yorkshire that a 19th century school is to be uprooted and rebuilt at Bradford industrial museum. + Stone by stone, the disused village school at Burley Woodhead, on the edge of Ilkley Moor, will be moved next year to a cobbled street outside the museum, 10 miles away. + Apart from visits by schoolchildren, the building may develop a medical use. Mr Eugene Nicholson, who conducts lessons in the museum's present Victorian classroom dressed in frock coat and steel-rimmed glasses, is discussing visits by elderly people suffering from degenerative conditions like Alzheimer's disease. + 'It may be that returning to a school similar to those of their childhood could trigger something in the memory,' he said. + Records from Bradford education department allow the present mock school, one of 15 in Britain, to operate a range of time-travelling, from the 1870s to the eve of the first world war. + Authenticity includes the use of a 19th century teachers' trick to impress school inspectors with a class's keenness and high standards. + When visitors call, every hand shoots up in response to Mr Nicholson's questions. By a prior conspiracy between him and the children only those using their right hand know the correct answer. + The rebuilt Burley Woodhead school, complete with its yard and antique outside lavatories, will give room for military PE sessions for boys and embroidery classes for girls. The museum also hopes to offer a whole day session, with children at school in the morning and - like their predecessors - working in the museum's woollen mill in the afternoon. + The verdict of class five from Tickhill Estfeld first and middle school, Doncaster, who visited the museum this week, was unanimously 'brilliant.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +292 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 25, 1989 + +Church urged to cast net wider + +BYLINE: By WALTER SCHWARZ, Religious Affairs Correspondent + +LENGTH: 283 words + + + BISHOPS and vicars should seek out potential priests among engineers, writers, doctors, farmers, mechanics and other groups, a Church of England report says today. + The report, Call to Order, by The Advisory Council for the Church's Ministry, highlights the expected shortage of priests as older men retire. + It suggests professional people could work full-time or part-time in the Church. The move would be a departure from the tradition of people answering 'a call' to the priesthood - 'a somewhat haphazard method,' according to the report. + Young black Anglicans should be 'targeted' as candidates for ordination and women should be encouraged to become deacons. + The secretary to the group which produced the report, the Reverend Charles Richardson, said yesterday: 'If women were allowed to be priests tomorrow, many of these problems would go away.' + Mr Richardson, Vocations Adviser at the Church of England's headquarters, said the Church should improve stipends and training to encourage people to give up professional careers. Lay volunteers could take over parish work, especially in inner cities. + Ordinary churchgoers should help spot potential priests or lay assistants, says the report. It concludes: 'If we are to take seriously the belief that the church is a community of called and gifted persons, we may expect to see new forms of representative ministry continuing to emerge, which the Church will have to decide whether officially and formally to adopt.' + The report, by a working party chaired by the Very Reverend Peter Baelz, the retired Dean of Durham, will be considered in dioceses. + Call to Order, Church House, London SW1P 3NZ. Pounds 2. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +293 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 26, 1989 + +Arts: A stage further - A staid Yorkshire spa taking an adventurous line in drama + +BYLINE: By MARTIN WAINWRIGHT + +LENGTH: 1023 words + + + HARROGATE is an easy place for the highbrow to guy, with its elderly ladies commuting sedately between Betty's tearooms, the Valley Gardens and the shops in Parliament Street. Its supreme cultural moment remains the rediscovery of Agatha Christie in the Old Swan hotel in 1926, after her breakdown and famous disappearance. + But the town has started to earn a different sort of dramatic reputation since 1987, when its repertory theatre came back to life after an agonising year in the dark. Audience walkouts, bad language, gay and vasectomy plays, and now, opening today, A Man with Connections, the contemporary Soviet two-hander previously performed only at the Royal Court and the Traverse. What is going on in the quiet, respectable North Yorkshire spa? + Part of the plasterwork frieze in the Victorian theatre lobby gives a clue. Two sprightly young bas-relief figures tease a third, bearded and ancient, above the explanatory heading: Fun and Frolic Mocking Time. The Harrogate Theatre is having a high old time in the hands of a young board of managers and an artistic director with flair and a gift for constructing eye-catching seasons. + 'I've frequently found myself reading a script and thinking: that's a bit dodgy for Harrogate,' says Andrew Manley, 44 and now in his fourth year of heading the theatre's productions. 'But then I start analysing why it might be dodgy, and I find that so interesting that I decide: well, let's do it. Perhaps the audience may find the process interesting too.' + To start with, they didn't appear to. Normal Heart, the gay play, did under 40 per cent business in the first season after the year's closure; and that was in spite of several highly-publicised walkouts. But jollity and quality, like the domestic Prime Ministerial saga Anyone for Denis? and Wilde's The Ideal Husband set in modern, insider-dealing times, balanced the box office. The season was the best financially for 20 years. + It came most strikingly in the rep's regional premiere of Serious Money, Caryl Churchill's sometimes foul-mouthed onslaught on the City. There were more walkouts but business was well up. 'These challenging plays may never do so well, but if you keep on doing them, they'll do better,' says Mr Manley. 'Gradually you build an audience for less well-known, serious material.' + The critics, nationally as well as locally, were won over rather more rapidly than 'gradually', with standards praised by the Financial Times as well as the Yorkshire Evening Press. Such laurels helped to counter any suggestion of bumptious young people thumbing their noses for the sake of it at a staid town which kept them in work. + The year's closure was also handy. Mr Manley started at Harrogate only a year before the crisis, too late to be linked to the sleepy artistic policies which had helped to bring it about. (Lord Rees-Mogg sliced its Arts Council grant and left it with Pounds 90,000 to pay off.) Instead, Mr Manley was endlessly featured in 'Save Our Theatre' initiatives, rallying local patriotism from thousands who had seldom gone near the place. He had no previous connection with Harrogate - the son of a Birmingham sheet-metal worker, his CV ran from the Central School of Drama in London to the Touch Theatre in Milford Haven. But the campaign won him acceptance. + Reconstituted, with the debt paid off, the theatre earns 60 per cent of its roughly Pounds 530,000 costs, with the balance from Yorkshire Arts, North Yorkshire and Harrogate Council. + In turn, Mr Manley likes the town. His children are at local schools and due to be goblins in this year's Harrogate Theatre pantomime, Mother Goose. The annual pantomimes themselves are another important source of local approval. Written by Mr Manley and his actress wife Jennifer Granville, they are militantly traditional. + These comfortable strengths, and the physical cosiness of the theatre, plush seats and only 476 of them, are seen by the 40 rep staff as a reassuring setting for the fireworks in their annual programme. 'I know newspapers can't resist phrases like 'storming out' when people leave,' says Mr Manley, who directs 90 per cent of the theatre's output. 'But it isn't really like that here.' + He proved the point by skulking outside the theatre to monitor the angry Serious Money exit one Saturday night. 'Only one couple came out,' he says. 'I thought: this can't be right. So I went up to the bar, and there were about half-a-dozen others who weren't going back in to the play. But they were quite happy finishing their ice creams and chatting. + This may have been a regional determination to salvage a pre-paid evening out; but the theatre's administrator, Stella Morrell, has only ever had one letter asking for a ticket refund. That was from someone who hated last year's David Mamet adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, which the Guardian described as 'first class, world class theatre.' Ms Morrell politely sent him the clipping and got the tart reply: 'The Guardian - well, really!' + Harrogate, though, is not wholly the Daily Telegraph-land of its image. There are anti-vandal patrols in the Valley Gardens. More positively, lively Southern refugees are colonising the Dales to the north and west. + Plays like A Man With Connections attract plenty of their theatregoers from Leeds and Bradford. + The theatre's board, which includes the playwright Ken Blakeson, whose Excess Baggage got the BBC into trouble, is meanwhile 'young, vigorous and out there pitching for us all the time,' in Mr Manley's words. Its meetings are lively and critical, which he welcomes too. + For the future, with houses now averaging 74 per cent, Mr Manley extends this concept into approving murmurs about the value of 'the Chinese concept of continuous revolution.' A distinctively Harrogate revolution, though. After A Man With Connections, the company is putting on Denise Deegan's subversive schoolgirl hoot Daisy Pulls It Off. Harrogate Ladies College has booked the entire theatre for an evening. + Fresh approach .. director Andrew Manley is winning audiencesPHOTOGRAPH: ASADOUR GUZELIAN + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +294 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 26, 1989 + +Warning on social reform + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 300 words + + + MANY social services departments are unprepared for the changes they will have to make under the Government's community care reforms, the Audit Commission says today. + The new policies, including progress on care in the community and giving senior social workers budgets, could cause great problems for mentally handicapped people unless departments act quickly. + A commission survey of 50 departments found that only Kent and East Sussex had the kind of management and budgetary system that will be necessary by 1991. The commission says the changes, particularly senior social workers' taking responsibility for a budget, will come as a shock to staff and councillors. If they do not adapt quickly, the system 'will simply not work'. + The Government is about to publish a white paper setting out plans for social services departments to take a lead role in arranging community care for mentally handicapped, mentally ill and elderly people. + The commission supports the move, but its survey paints a picture of unreadiness among social services departments, and slow progress in working with health authorities to transfer 124,000 mentally handicapped people from long-stay hospitals to the community. + Only 40 per cent of departments had reached agreement with health authorities on joint strategies, and even in those cases 'achievement has been slow and getting slower'. + One problem has been the negotiation of 'dowries' from health authorities to social services for people transferred from hospitals. Mr Howard Davies, Audit Commission controller, said the typical Pounds 12,000 a year dowry contrasted with actual costs of Pounds 20,000-Pounds 30,000 for an adult in a group home. + Developing Community Care for Adults with a Mental Handicap: HMSO; Pounds 4.25. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +295 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 26, 1989 + +Patient home care urged + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 332 words + + + THE HEALTH service could save more than Pounds 100 million a year by treating some patients at home instead of in hospital, a report today suggests. + Hospital-at-home services not only save money in the long term, but also are popular with patients and staff and can release hospital beds for more urgent cases, according to the report by the King's Fund Centre, a health research unit. + Although such services are minimal in Britain, the report predicts a surge of interest when the Government's health and community care reforms are implemented. + Its author, Mr David Taylor, said: 'If there were a drug which was not only preferred by patients but which could reduce the need for hospital beds, improve rehabilitation and increase staff satisfaction, it would have been vigorously marketed.' + Interest in hospital-at-home services was aroused in the 1970s, and a scheme began in Peterborough in 1978. + In 1988-89 it cared for 320 patients as an alternative to hospital admission or as an aid to early discharge in cases needing more than conventional district nursing. + The scheme involves a minimum of two home visits a day. Patients with hip fractures stay in hospital for eight days on average and are then cared for at home for nine days, compared with up to 22 days of conventional hospital treatment. + The report argues that the system could easily be extended to knee replacement patients, elderly people with disabilities or chronic health problems, stroke victims, Aids victims, and mental health cases. + However, Mr Taylor gave a warning that hospital-at-home was expensive to set up, compared with simply opening extra hospital beds. But the coming reforms, including a requirement for hospitals to count capital costs in their charges to health authorities, would make it more attractive to health managers, he said. + Hospital at Home: the Coming Revolution; King's Fund Centre Communication Unit, 126 Albert Street, London NW1 7NF; Pounds 1. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +296 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 26, 1989 + +Aid deal offered to offset freeze on child benefit + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE and ALAN TRAVIS + +LENGTH: 722 words + + + THE Government last night appeared to have made a net saving by freezing child benefit for a third year and spending only some of the cash on measures to help poorer pensioners, families on low incomes, the long-term sick and disabled. + Mr Tony Newton, the Social Security Secretary, confirmed in the Commons that child benefit would remain at Pounds 7.25 per child, the rate set in 1987, until at least April 1991. + Announcing the annual uprating of pensions and benefits for next April, he unveiled instead what was called a 20-point plan to help the three groups 'whose priority is, I believe, recognised in all parts of the House'. + Mr Newton was repeatedly challenged to acknowledge that he had fought for child benefit to be uprated, but had been defeated by the Treasury. + He said only that in deciding not to uprate the non-means tested benefit 'I have taken account of the fact that an increase in child benefit does nothing for the least well-off.' + Freezing child benefit saves about Pounds 250 million. According to Mr Newton, the special measures announced yesterday will cost Pounds 100 million for disabled people, Pounds 75 million for families and Pounds 115 million for the elderly; a total of Pounds 290 million. + However, a more objective total would be Pounds 190 million because Pounds 100 million of the cash going to the elderly is for routine uprating of the income support limits for people in residential care. + At a press conference, Mr Newton conceded: 'It could be argued that we would have made some changes to the residential care and nursing home limits anyway, but the fact is there is no definite commitment to do so, the position is they have to be reviewed each year and it is money which has to be found.' + Owners of care homes will, even so, be angry that the limits are to increase by less than inflation. The basic residential home limit for elderly residents rises by Pounds 10 or 7.1 per cent to Pounds 150, while the rate for very dependent elderly people goes up by Pounds 10 or 6.5 per cent to Pounds 165. Many home owners say they are already subsidising residents on social security. + Most other benefits and pensions rise by the September inflation rate of 7.6 per cent or, in the case of income-related benefits, by 5.2 per cent, equivalent to the inflation rate less housing costs. + The general uprating will add Pounds 2.5 billion to government expenditure and, as Mr Newton pointed out, the overall bill will be running at more than Pounds 1 billion a week for the first time. + Under the additional 20-point plan, low-income families will be helped by higher increases in family credit and income support rates. Lone parents will get bigger rises in housing and community charge benefits and will be able to earn Pounds 25 a week, rather than Pounds 15 as now, without losing benefit. + Most help is being channelled to disabled people. Measures include higher rises in existing benefits, a new income support payment of Pounds 10 a week for informal carers already receiving invalid care allowances, and extension of the mobility allowance to 3,000 deaf-blind people. + Mr Newton described these steps as an interim response to the Government's review of disability benefits, with further proposals likely this year. + The Disability Alliance umbrella group called the concessions 'a drop in the ocean of need'. + The Child Poverty Action Group, which calculated that child benefit had been eroded by Pounds 1.35 over three years, called on the Government to come clean on its plans so that a proper debate could be held. + Rebel Conservative MPs indicated their intention to vote against the child benefit decision when the Commons is asked to approve the regulations implementing the benefits package next month. + Sir Ian Gilmour, the former minister and MP for Chesham and Amersham, said: 'The fact that this is the third year running that the Government has made this mean and wrong-headed decision to freeze child benefit can only mean that the Government believes couples with children have no greater expenses than couples without children, or single people.' + Last year 16 Conservatives voted against the Government and a similar number abstained, bringing the Government's majority to below 50. + Day in politics, page 6 + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +297 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 26, 1989 + +The Day in Politics: Lords inflict two-pronged defeat on Government - Housing Bill + +LENGTH: 473 words + + + THE Government was last night defeated twice as the Lords voted for amendments to the Local Government and Housing Bill. + There were Opposition cheers as a cross-bench amendment to the Local Government and Housing Bill, preventing subsidised rural housing, intended for the low paid, from being sold on the open market, was carried by 111 to 38, a majority of 73. + Lord Stanley of Alderley (C) launched the amendment. + It was also backed by former the Conservative Cabinet Minister, Lord Prior. + The Government's part-ownership scheme will allow housing associations to build starter-homes on land where planning permission would not normally be granted. + Young people and low earners will be able to buy a part-share in the homes, but the amendment prevents them from selling on the open market. + Instead, when they move on they will have to sell back to the housing association, so that their home can be passed on to others in similar circumstances. + Lord Stanley, moving the report stage amendment, said: 'The Government scheme, good though it is on intention, just will not work. + 'Under the Government scheme, the occupier has the right to sell on the open market, so losing the house for a new person if the housing association doesn't purchase within four weeks of being invited to.' + He added: 'We need to prevent yuppie second home-owners from living in a low-cost, part-owned home in a beautiful village.' + The Bishop of Worcester, the Rt Rev Philip Goodrich, said: 'There has been a flight from the countryside. + 'People cannot find low-cost housing and have to commute from the town to the country.' + Lord Dean of Beswick, for the Opposition, welcomed the change. + But Lord Hesketh, for the Government, argued that the right to home-ownership was paramount. 'The proposal is that shared owners in rural areas should not be able to staircase to full ownership of their properties. + 'Housing associations can impose an arbitrary ceiling on the amount that they should own. The right to home ownership is a fundamental plank to the Government's housing policy.' + He said that early this year the Government announced measures to prevent homes under shared ownership passing on to the open market in areas where need was particularly great. + Later, the Government was defeated again when an Opposition amendment curbing the right-to-buy for council homes suitable for the elderly and disabled was carried by 94 to 36, majority 58. + The change limits the right-to-buy to homes completed before the date the bill comes into effect. + Lord Hesketh, unsuccessfully resisting the amendment, said elderly people wished to have the same rights as everyone else. + Government business managers must now decide whether to seek to reverse the votes when the measure returns to the Commons. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +298 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 31, 1989 + +Barlow Clowes brokers received secret payments, court told + +BYLINE: By Financial Staff + +LENGTH: 759 words + + + BROKERS who channelled tens of millions of pounds of elderly people's savings into the now collapsed Barlow Clowes investment funds were yesterday accused of receiving secret commissions paid into Swiss bank accounts. + One third of the Pounds 140 million which savers put into the Gibraltar-based Barlow Clowes International fund was invested through Investment and Pensions Advisory Service (IPAS), a partnership run from Addlestone, Surrey and a sister organisation, IPAS Ltd, based in the West End of London, the High Court was told. + Mr David Gray and Mr David Myers, both of whom were partners in IPAS and directors of IPAS Ltd, are accused of concealing the true levels of commissions they received for introducing investors to Barlow Clowes. + Mr Philip Heslop, QC, representing the Securities and Investments Board, said the brokers were involved in business transactions which were 'wholly inconsistent' with their position as independent financial advisers. + Mr Heslop said concern that assets were not being properly dealt with mounted after two 'astonishing' incidents involving Mr Gray. + On a business trip, Mr Gray 'lost' a briefcase containing half a million Swiss francs - almost Pounds 200,000. + He also lent AusDollars 200,000 (about Pounds 100,000) in cash to a businessman in Australia - but failed to trace him again after leaving a note he had made of his number in a telephone box. + 'This must raise extraordinary doubts as to the man's probity,' Mr Heslop continued. + Mr Gray and Mr Myers were accused by Mr Heslop of falsely telling Fimbra, the watchdog which oversees financial brokers, that their commission on Barlow Clowes investments was only one per cent plus a further 0.5 per cent for annual renewals. + A significant proportion of the commissions properly payable to IPAS Ltd had been diverted by Mr Gray and Mr Myers into Swiss bank accounts held for their personal benefit, said Mr Heslop. + He was asking Mr Justice Mervyn Davies for compulsory winding-up orders against IPAS and IPAS Ltd. Nearly 4,700 clients of the two firms, most of them elderly, put an average of Pounds 10,000 each into Barlow Clowes' Gibraltar-based scheme. + The IPAS businesses also introduced another Pounds 18 million to Barlow Clowes Gilt Managers, a UK-managed fund. Both Barlow Clowes companies collapsed last year. + Mr Heslop said that it now appeared that the majority of Barlow Clowes investors were facing 'a substantial shortfall'. + Recommendations made by IPAS and IPAS Ltd to invest in Barlow Clowes companies 'were influenced wholly or in part by secret commissions' paid by those companies into the Swiss bank accounts controlled by Mr Gray and Mr Myers. + Although Mr Gray and Mr Myers held out their businesses as 'independent' financial intermediaries, the connection between them and Barlow Clowes was so close that they 'were unable or unwilling to distinguish between the best interests of their investor clients - many of whom were elderly and unsophisticated in financial matters - and those of Barlow Clowes'. + The 'closeness' was apparent in the secret commissions, the manner in which Mr Gray and Mr Myers helped devise new Barlow Clowes 'products' and the various joint ventures they were in the process of setting up with company chief Mr Peter Clowes. + Mr Heslop said the IPAS companies continued to recommend investment long after Mr Gray and Mr Myers had learnt that there were reasons for suspecting that such investments were risky. + Money paid over to Barlow Clowes for investment ostensibly in gilt-edged securities was, in fact, being put into speculative investments. + Funds invested in the Barlow Clowes companies appeared not to have gone as intended into the purchase of gilts, but into a range of corporate and other enterprises associated with the directors of those companies. + Fimbra suspended both IPAS businesses in June last year and investigations were begun into their affairs three months later. + Mr Heslop said the winding-up petitions were now not opposed by the IPAS businesses. + Both Mr Gray and Mr Myers, who were not represented in court, accepted their businesses were insolvent, but blamed the proceedings taken against them for that position and 'vigorously denied' the allegations of malpractice. + Both believed they had been 'badly served' by the Department of Trade and Fimbra, who had had serious misgivings about Barlow Clowes but had taken no steps to warn them until it was too late. + The hearing will continue today. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +299 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 31, 1989 + +The Day in Politics: Concern for plight of Old Maggie in the street of fear / Sketch + +BYLINE: By ANDREW RAWNSLEY + +LENGTH: 556 words + + + MANY women are increasingly scared of travelling about Britain, the House of Commons heard yesterday during Question Time to the transport ministers. Some elderly women were so frightened of being violently attacked, MPs were told, that they locked themselves indoors. + Certainly one old lady, a pensioner from Finchley, has not been seen outdoors for some time. She has been violently attacked on several occasions in the last few days. + Time was that Old Maggie, as she was known, would potter out and about all over the country, giving her views on everything and everybody. + But yesterday she was nowhere to be seen. She had bolted herself in at home in No 10 and pulled across the chains. She had not been out all day, confirmed the No 10 press office. + Perhaps, with advancing years, Old Maggie was just finding things were a bit too much for her nowadays, having some difficulty keeping her wits about her, getting a bit forgetful. After all, only the other day she lost an entire Chancellor of the Exchequer. + More likely it was the terrible climate of fear on the streets of Britain which had caused her to lock herself indoors. The terrible fear that she might lose her job as Prime Minister. + The weekend newspapers were full of the terror. Opinion polls said that she was the most unpopular Prime Minister since records began - even when using polling samples carefully excluding members of the Cabinet. + All weekend she had been pursued by marauding gangs of Opposition politicians, newspaper reporters, TV interviewers and alienated Cabinet colleagues. She had taken a terrible beating. It might be fatal. So, at least, many hoped. + At lunchtime she was due to see some close colleagues, including Cranley Onslow, the chairman of the Tory 1922 committee, and some other senior Tory backbenchers, and some close enemies, including Sir Geoffrey Howe. + The policemen at the top of Downing Street were not, as is customary, allowing reporters to go down Downing Street to stand outside No 10. + 'I'm sorry, but you can't go down there today, sir,' said one of the constables, manning the gate. So she was unable to see visitors? It was even more serious than we had thought. + Over in the House of Commons, MPs were trying to concentrate on other subjects, like women's safety on public transport. But it was a thinly-attended, distracted House. + Ms Diane Abbott, the Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, told the transport ministers at Question Time that fear of attack meant many women would not use London's Underground. + She told the ministers: 'Many women in my constituency are frightened to use Finsbury Park tube station at night.' + The junior minister at the despatch box, Michael Portillo began his reply with the words: 'I had reason to go to Finsbury Park station recently.' It was not clear whether he was offering this as a reassurance - or an explanation - for the fears of Ms Abbott's women constituents. + Whatever, Ms Abbott was not satisfied. She insisted: 'The situation about women's fears has got worse.' + This grammatical lapse was excusable. For one thing, Ms Abbott had an educationally deprived upbringing - she went to Cambridge. + For another thing, she, like everybody else, was still distracted by the worsening situtation of one woman. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +300 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 1, 1989 + +Society: Private hopes versus public fears + +BYLINE: By ALAN DUNN + +LENGTH: 795 words + + + RESIDENTS, relatives and staff at three of Wirral's 22 homes for the elderly were united last week in a desire to stay under the umbrella of the local council. And they were annoyed at being left out of the planning by others of their future. + At Mapleholme, in Bidston, which had a Pounds 800,000 facelift two years ago and has a bar and social room used by residents from other council homes, resident Ernest Camden said: 'What they are planning is an unknown quantity. I would like things to stay as they are. I cannot see private people doing it for love and I don't trust that. Once they've got the homes they will have a free hand to do what they want.' + Mrs Linda Andrews, a care assistant, said: 'It's the uncertainty of it all. We are being told different things by different people and we don't know what is ahead. When you work for the council and are content in your job, you never think you will be looking for other things.' + Care staff were already looking for other work, so uncertain were they of the future, said Mrs Valerie Rayner, a care assistant. 'Our conditions are good and we are quite happy and the residents are all wonderfully looked after. We have patiently built relationships with people moved here from Chester mental hospital, and we are concerned that any change of staff could knock them right back.' + At Meadowcroft, Bromborough, Mrs Florence Corris purred over the cleanliness, food and care. 'There is no need for change. No one could run this home better. Many people here need a lot of care and patience and they get both from the staff, who often have trying situations but never bat an eyelid.' + Mrs Lilian Houghton, who married fellow-resident, Bill, in August, said she didn't think they would get the same standards under private ownership 'because they couldn't afford the same amount of staff. They would cut down on staff immediately. We have no worries here and complete freedom, and I don't want to be transferred. I want to stop just as we are.' + Mrs Eileen Murphy, a domestic, said that the staff were worried about the future for the confused and infirm. 'Anchor are reported as saying that they want to convert homes to provide single rooms with en suite facilities. That sounds fine, but 75 per cent of our residents have senile dementia, and to leave them with their own bathing facilities is positively hazardous. And in altering the property they could halve the accommodation. No one in the private sector wants the severely confused, who need 24-hour care, so where will they go? I fear we will end with a workhouse situation.' + Mr Elfed Morgan, officer in charge, said that everyone in the home had total security for life. 'If they run out of money they are still safe and you cannot say that for the private sector. Here they have their own pocket money, but they don't under private. The council are presenting only one option.' + Relatives of residents at Meadowcroft have formed an action committee to oppose any transfer. Mrs Edith Priest, whose sister Ruth is in the home, says: 'At the moment everyone is happy and settled with a caring staff who understand individual problems. But we cannot get any written guarantees over the future if the homes are privatised. They say nothing will be done to the detriment of residents, but who decides what is detrimental? If they say my sister will be better elsewhere, who decides? As they are dealing with people's lives it should be only proper for relatives to be party to any arrangements. + 'We want to be clear what is happening to them. There should be a clear, guaranteed package offering the status quo, and we want the detail of what is to happen before it happens. After all, we are fighting for our relatives and our own future.' + Rosewarne, at Bidston, a wood-panelled old mansion, is regarded as the worst of the 22 homes for modern facilities. But Mrs Florence Hatton is totally content. 'Private homes are not in contact with each other as we are. We have six homes near here and we exchange visits and social evenings. + 'Yesterday we had a day on a barge to Chester. That is what we are fighting for - our freedom. You won't find the private sector doing that. The staff here will do anything for you. This is affecting our families. We are like a lot of sheep waiting to see who will pay the most, and they are not thinking of us.' + Mrs Esme Williams distrusted talk of possible future benefits in a switch of ownership. 'They are just like political candidates offering everything before the vote. Once they are in anything can be changed.' + Mrs Eileen Peters was quietly convinced. 'I would prefer it to stay just as it is now. There's no particular reason - I just prefer it. We are all very happy.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +301 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 1, 1989 + +Society: Private hopes versus public fears A controversial plan by + +BYLINE: By ALAN DUNN + +LENGTH: 1273 words + + + Wirral Council to sell off all its homes for the elderly, and finds an implacably hostile response to the scheme among the residents and staff of the homes, who are furious at the lack of consultation + THE Social Security Minister, Mr Nicholas Scott, will tomorrow be drawn into a controversial plan by the politically hung Wirral Council to become the first in Britain to transfer all its 22 homes for the elderly en bloc to a new owner, possibly a major housing association. + Scott will meet Wirral council leaders and Frank Field, Labour MP for Birkenhead. They are seeking, among other things, funding guarantees for a scheme which anticipates the Government's White Paper on community care, due out later this month, but could also put Wirral at the head of the queue of councils looking to sell all their homes, partly to make revenue savings to reduce the impact of the poll tax in England and Wales next year. + Mr Field, who like Labour members of the council, opposes the scheme, will also be pushing his alternative plan for Wirral to set up its own housing trust to take over the homes. The council would have a 20 per cent stake and the major voice in policy, while transferring most of the running costs to government and safeguarding jobs. + Both schemes are among a number all councils are considering as government pressure grows for more local authority community care to be switched to the private or voluntary sectors, leaving councils as enablers rather than providers. Some have already sold all their homes in parcels, but Wirral's plan retains the unity and structure of its homes under a new umbrella while releasing revenue funding for other community care. + The transfer of the homes, possibly to Britain's largest housing association providing care for the elderly, Anchor, was proposed by the minority group of 10 Liberal Democrats and backed by the 24 Tories. It follows an analysis by the council's director of social services, David Rickard, of the Government's response to the Griffiths Report on community care. + In the response, Health Secretary Kenneth Clarke said that councils should make the maximum use of the voluntary, not-for-profit and commercial outlets. And from 1991 he will increase pressure on councils to do so by changing the financial rules. These will make councils, through a new community care budget, continue to pay the whole cost of care in their own homes, but only a proportion of the cost in non-public homes, with the rest being paid by the Government. + At present a private home resident on state pension pays about Pounds 35 of the pension and qualifies for up to about Pounds 150 a week in income support from the Department of Social Security, a cost borne by the taxpayer. In public homes the cost, after a similar deduction from the pension, is wholly borne by the ratepayer. + From 1991 it is believed that while public financing will stay the same, private homes will be entitled to a government boarding allowance of, say, Pounds 60 a week, with the local authority making up the difference. The details of what will be paid will not be known until the White Paper comes out, but Mr Rickard says that the method will increase the financial squeeze on local authorities, in their role as enablers, to persuade potential clients to go private. + Sixty per cent of the 850 residents of limited means in Wirral council homes would qualify for DSS grants if transferred to the non-public sector, he says, bringing more money to the Wirral economy as a whole. Already those in private homes can retain at least Pounds 3,000 capital in applying for a grant, but the limit for council tenants is Pounds 1,200 before they start to contribute extra. + Mr Clarke also said that the success of a community care package depended on adequate services being on offer. Mr Rickard told his council that its services were inadequate and that one way to find the money to improve them was to explore disposing of its elderly people's homes. This would release about Pounds 6.5 million of revenue now spent on the homes. + Some of the money would be used towards the Pounds 5 million refurbishment needed in the homes, only two of which might pass the council's own standards if they were private. Labour claims, however, that much of it would be used to keep the poll tax low, while the Liberals and Conservatives say that an extra 200 staff could be employed in other services. + Rickard argues that government constraints on borrowing for capital spending mean the council already faces a continual struggle to maintain the homes, one of many priorities. There is no such artificial constraint in the non-public sector, only the willingness of a bank to loan. And a housing association could attract capital from the Housing Corporation. 'All we are doing is pointing out what government intentions are,' he says. 'If it doesn't intend us to run the homes, then any money saved should be put into domiciliary services.' + The local government union, Nalgo, with 30 home officers in charge and thousands of members in other council departments, is holding a ballot on non-co-operation, including refusal to handle work linked to a transfer. + 'The haste gives great cause for concern,' says Derek Jenkins, Wirral Nalgo branch secretary. 'We know, for instance, that council homes are getting the type of client the private homes won't take - the confused amd less able. And there has been no nursing home provision for patients from the geriatric wards being closed at hospitals. We see no safeguards, no reference to union consultation, and no mention of the need for extra resources as demand for care grows from an ageing population.' + Meanwhile, Anchor isn't totally sure it wants to become involved if it cannot improve standards. Ken Wray, regional director, says: 'Wirral has 22 care homes for the elderly. Anchor also has 22, with another 49 in development, all considerably better equipped than Wirral's. There is no point in getting involved if we cannot achieve anything. At the moment only two of Wirral's homes might achieve registration standards. If they were private, Wirral would have to tell them to achieve the standards or close. But if all we can do is get to registration standards I am not too sure we would want to take them on. Our standards are way above registration demands, appropriate for the last years of the century.' + He denies claims that Anchor has no experience of multi-care homes and has no staff training. 'We have 850 residents in our housing-with-care, with 1,700 places at another 49 homes being developed.' + Anchor, with 2,500 staff, was not anti-union, he said. It has a staff association with negotiating rights and staff can join the association or a union. + He could not give a commitment to keep all the homes open. 'We haven't seen them yet and if it proved to be physically impossible to get them up to registration standards, Wirral would tell us to close them.' + Part of Anchor's strategy would be to have its own nursing homes as well on the Wirral, to complement residential care. 'We would hope to be involved in developing a wider strategy for elderly people,' says Mr Wray. 'We are not looking just to run the homes in isolation. We would be looking to use them in a full role for non-residents, too. We would want to continue day care and expand it, and staff would also work in the community to help people in their own homes. + 'We would offer respite care, and develop as a resource for all Wirral, reaching out to help others in the community. It is a fascinating challenge.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +302 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 1, 1989 + +Clowes advisers 'lacked morality' + +BYLINE: By Financial Staff + +LENGTH: 294 words + +DATELINE: THE financial advisers who channelled Pounds 65 million + + + largely belonging to retired and elderly people - into Barlow Clowes were yesterday accused in the High Court of 'a total lack of independence and commercial morality'. + It was alleged that Investment and Pensions Advisory Services and IPAS, both largely controlled by David Gray, had persuaded vulnerable people to invest in Barlow Clowes while Mr Gray was 'hand in glove' with its chief executive, Peter Clowes. + The accusations came from Jeremy Orme, enforcement director of the Securities and Investments Board, on the second day of the hearing into a petition to wind up IPAS. + In an affidavit read to the court, Mr Orme said evidence demonstrated Mr Gray was manifestly unfit to carry out investment business for vulnerable people. + He claimed Mr Gray and Mr Clowes had embarked on joint ventures and, contrary to Mr Gray's assertion that he never had social contact with Mr Clowes, it appeared they met frequently. + Mr Gray had visited Mr Clowes's luxury yacht and there was 'a disturbing degree of intimacy between Mr Gray and Mr Clowes' which should have been disclosed to clients. + Investors had not been told of an offshore commission payment to IPAS of more than Pounds 500,000 from Barlow Clowes, it was alleged. + Mr Gray and his partner David Myers have 'vigorously denied' the accusations made by SIB. They accept a winding-up of IPAS only on the grounds of insolvency rather than alleged malpractice. + It was claimed in court that the running costs of IPAS's so-called Gemini product were paid by Barlow Clowes and IPAS acted as a 'front'. + The hearing continues. + The firms IPAS and IPAS Ltd have no connection with Independent Professional Advisors Services of Finchley, North London, which is still trading. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +303 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 2, 1989 + +The Day in Politics: Smooth passage for housing bill + +LENGTH: 105 words + + + THE Local Government and Housing Bill was given an unopposed third reading in the Lords last night. It now returns to the Commons. + Its smooth passage reflected the Government's willingness to accept report stage changes giving the right to buy to elderly people, except those living in sheltered homes. + Lord Hesketh, the Junior Environment Minister, said the Government was prepared to table further changes which restore its jurisdiction over sheltered housing after accepting Opposition amendments to this end. He said the right to buy should be given to disabled people in houses suitable for pensioners. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +304 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 3, 1989 + +The Day in Politics (Points of Order): Lawson's biggest indiscretion + +BYLINE: By IAN AITKEN + +LENGTH: 717 words + + + IT'S claimed that the thing which shook Mrs Thatcher most about Nigel Lawson's statement in the Commons on Tuesday wasn't the stuff about icebergs or mad professors but the bit about privatising the Bank of England. The fact that he had even discussed the matter with her had been classified as ultra-top secret, your-eyes-only, burn-before-reading, etc. + For the fact that the idea had been raised at such a high level was totally unknown to Robin Leigh-Pemberton, the Governor of the Bank, and to his colleagues in Threadneedle Street. It must have startled them. + It's a fair guess, though, that Mr Leigh-Pemberton would have been delighted to benefit from this ultimate manifestation of the Adam Smith spirit. Getting successive chancellors off their backs has been the ambition of generations of governors, and the oddest feature of the episode is that it should have been Mrs Thatcher who dished it on sound democratic principles. + The episode recalls the period when the Wilson government was being buffeted by what were colloquially known at the time as the Gnomes of Zurich. Mr Michael Foot, still a backbench gadfly in those days, made a number of ironical suggestions for demonstrating the financial rectitude of the Labour government. They included horsewhipping a couple of old age pensioners up Whitehall for the benefit of Swiss television, or getting ministers to tear down the hospitals with their bare hands. + But Mr Foot's ultimate proposal was at least as radical as Mr Lawson's. He suggested that maybe the time had come for the Labour government at last to nationalise the Bank of England. + ONE of the most surprising features of the election for the 18 places on the Shadow Cabinet is the role still played by the Bennite Campaign Group. Though it is a busted flush in policy terms, it continues to wield a baleful influence over PLP elections by virtue of the 40-odd hard left votes it still commands. + The most obvious victim of this phenomenon was Martin O'Neill, the party's official defence spokesman. He narrowly failed to secure an elected seat in the shadow cabinet, even though his crucially important portfolio demands a key place on the Opposition front bench. + Mr O'Neill is a Tribunite soft-leftie. His willingness to go along with the Kinnock line on nuclear weapons ensured that he didn't get the Campaign Group vote this week, and he doesn't seem to have got much of the rightwing vote either. Margaret Beckett, on the other hand, got Bennite support - and so did Ann Clwyd, who was on the Campaign Group slate. + Some MPs now wonder whether enough of the PLP is serious about winning the next election. They ask what kind of a party would refuse to elect its Shadow Defence Secretary to its top policy-making body, but is ready to elect someone who got herself sacked from the front bench team for defying the party's new defence policy - ie Ms Clwyd? + THE Campaign Group, on the other hand, certainly is serious about winning internal party elections. Its members are even required to show their filled-out ballot papers to each other, so that there can be no clandestine backsliding. It's a moot point whether this is glasnost, or just old-fashioned democratic centralism. + On the other hand, the sheer dishonesty of some MPs about the way they exercise their secret ballot is legendary. One Scottish MP recently decided not to run after doing badly in the previous two shadow cabinet elections. His name was not even on the ballot paper, yet he was assured by half a dozen solicitous colleagues that they had voted for him. + LIKE the Greeks, Old Etonians usually have a word for it; the trouble is that it's often an entirely different word from everyone else's. Being an old boy of Windsor Comprehensive isn't just a way of life, it's a language. + So when Tim Renton (Eton and Magdalen) was overheard telling Douglas Hurd (Eton and Trinity) that moving from the Home Office to be Chief Whip was 'like being elected President of Pop without having been in the Library', no one had the faintest idea what he was talking about. Points of Order is advised that the Eton library isn't really a library, but a club of senior boys. Pop is a club of even more senior boys. Being president of it is therefore very grand indeed. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +305 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 6, 1989 + +Media: Countering the cult of youth - A new TV show aimed at older viewers + +BYLINE: By VAL SAMPSON + +LENGTH: 631 words + + + THE VOICE of experience is set to counter the callow whine of youth, according to one producer of Primetime, a new weekly afternoon magazine programme aimed at older viewers. + 'Primetime is a reaction to Def II and all that's been done for young people,' says Miriam O'Callaghan, who will also present the half-hour show starting this Wednesday alongside veteran broadcaster David Jacobs. 'The cult of youth has been pushed too far by the BBC.' + The corporation responded with unusual speed to criticism about the lack of programmes aimed specifically at older viewers made during See For Yourself, a report on how the licence fee is spent, broadcast in January. + Anthony Cherry, then producer of David Jacobs' Radio Two show, approached BBC Director-General Michael Checkland with the idea for Primetime. Within a month he had agreed finance for it. + Cherry says: 'We wanted a show which would cater for the kind of people we were already entertaining on Radio Two. We knew the audience was there but they did not have much representation, particularly in terms of music, on television.' + Primetime's two musical slots each week, therefore, will be devoted to artists like Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and George Gershwin. + Presenter David Jacobs, 63, has clear ideas about the thrust of the programme. 'We are not going to direct it at the old, infirm and lonely. While there are many of these, there are also an enormous number of people who are active and play a huge part in the community. They are interested in leisure activities, fashion and sex. Our remit is wide. Even though we may discuss the subject of death - and why not? - I still see the show as having an air of glamour about it.' + The research, according to Anthony Cherry, indicated potential viewers want a programme that acknowledges the past but is not overwhelmingly nostalgic. 'Everybody has become aware that the elderly are the fastest growing section of the population. They make up a political force. Many are fed up with being ignored.' + The dilemma facing any programme aimed at predominantly older viewers is catering satisfactorily for the huge range of income levels, interests and attitudes which make up that audience. + Channel Four, which pioneered programming for older people seven years ago with the weekly magazine programme, Years Ahead, changed format this autumn in response to the difficulties of meeting a mix of requirements in one programme. + Says Bob Towler, Commissioning Editor for Educational and Religious Programmes: 'The main problem is the sheer variability of the audience. If you do something of interest to people who have a background in trade unionism, you immediately alienate all those people in the CBI.' + Channel Four has retained the news section of Years Ahead, rechristened Senior Service, which is a weekly 15-minute campaigning slot and advice shop. It is followed by Gold, the first of a number of documentaries profiling achievers over 60. + ITV, so far, has remained reluctant to devote an entire programme to an older audience, possibly conscious that advertisers feel too much of the network attracts older, poorer audiences anyway. + Getting On, produced by Central TV, was axed 18 months ago and there are no plans for a new series. Granada's This Morning will reintroduce Not Born Yesterday, a weekly eight-minute slot in the daytime magazine show, after Christmas. In the last series it tackled subjects such as making a will, face lifts and euthanasia. + A spokesman for the ITV Association commented: 'As the audience ages ITV will have to look to respond accordingly. But in the future if franchises are auctioned off to the highest bidder only the well-off, professional elderly will have programmes made for them.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +306 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 9, 1989 + +Books: Undead reckoning / Review of new fiction + +BYLINE: By JUDY COOKE + +LENGTH: 803 words + + + Natural History, by Juan Perucho (Secker & Warburg, Pounds 12.95) + Within The Ribbons, by Frank Manley (Barrie & Jenkins, Pounds 12.95) + Good Intentions, by Joy Fielding (Macdonald, Pounds 12.95) + Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, by Allan Garganus (Faber, Pounds 12.99) + NATURAL History is a picaresque novel by the Catalan writer Juan Perucho, the first of his books to be published outside Spain but not, I hope, the last. Set in the 1830s, it is a witty yarn about a young nobleman, Antoni de Montpalau, who gets bitten by an enthusiasm for botany and zoology. + One of his formative experiences takes place in a botanical garden in Barcelona where he observes a carnivorous tree 'whose foliage was exceptionally dense and luxuriant' devouring a pack of sewer rats. His scientific curiosity is further stimulated by rumours of a vampire and he sets out to pursue the beast in a spirit of objective curiosity. An Index of Proper Names helps the less scientific reader to understand such technicalities as: 'Flying reptile, the: Survivor of prehistoric times. Talked like a parrot. Slow and dreamy, it frightened dogs.' + The story is a delightful spoof which never gets out of hand. The possibilities of danger and horror are jealously guarded so that the hero's journey across Spain is recounted in an atmosphere of genuine suspense. The vampire leaves a trail of victims, exploiting the fact that his country is ravaged by civil war. Even General Calabra, a King's man, succumbs to the two-fanged attack and he is on the side the vampire favours. Eventually the dreadful creature is driven to confess. He is an undead nobleman of the thirteenth century, 'the sadly declasse Onofre de Dip,' capable of transmogrifying into an elephant or an ant but now, at the end of his career, driven to assume the identity of a right wing military leader. 'Given that I needed some disguise, I chose one . . . in keeping with my authoritarian and absolutist beliefs.' + Frank Manley's stories are concerned with the delusions that age and isolation can effect. His characters are mainly elderly people in the American rural South like Daisy Feed in the title story Within The Ribbons, a fearful woman left alone after her mother's death who gatecrashes a wedding and frantically tries to find significance in every detail. + Most of the stories begin in confusion and end in violence although this is sometimes presented as a kind of release, a vision of God. There is an overwhelming insistence on spiritual poverty, racism, self-destruction. I could hardly press on through. + Good Intentions is an easier read but only for those so addicted to new fiction that, should the real stuff be in short supply, anything in a dust jacket will do. It's a sort of buddy novel, since social worker Lynn, deserted after 14 years of marriage, consults a woman lawyer, Renee, who then takes the whole case history to realise that she herself is being done over by her psychiatrist husband Philip and his odious daughter. 'You turned yourself into a chocolate-guzzling mess.' That's what he says to her. And he's been screwing her sister. They interact in Florida. + Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is an extraordinary achievement, not least, in being 700 pages long and consistently well written. It is an historical novel, paying conscious tribute to Gone With The Wind but aiming higher than romance. A first person narrative, it tells the story of the American South through the lives of two formidable people, Captain William Marsden who marched off with the Confederates when he was a mere boy and his wife Lucy, a Southern belle with a difference, whose marriage at the age of 15 to the then 51-year-old veteran proves as tempestuous and ever-changing as the war and its consequences. + Marsden's closest friend is shot almost immediately, giving him an early motive for revenge. His return home is horrific: he finds his mother more dead than alive from the burns she sustained when their plantation house, The Lilacs, was destroyed and then abandoned by the newly freed slaves. But it is a slave woman, Castalia, who nurses her back to health and gives the Captain the strength to rebuild his family fortunes. By the time Lucy enters as a young bride the scene is set for a classic confrontation, slightly reminiscent of Rebecca but with a far more complex resolution. + If there is a meaningful distinction to be made between genre fiction and literary fiction, then this novel (Garganus's first) transcends it. Subtle and persuasive in its interpretation of historical fact, it is boldly imaginative as a portrait of a society torn apart and slowly reaffirming its identity. And at Pounds 12.99 it's one of the few hardbacks to be anywhere reasonably priced. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +307 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 9, 1989 + +Books: A throng at twilight / Review of two new studies on age + +BYLINE: By RONALD BLYTHE + +LENGTH: 977 words + + + History of Old Age From Antiquity to the Renaissance, by Georges Minois, translated by Sarah Hanbury Tenison (Polity Press, Pounds 29.50) + A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age, by Peter + Laslett (Weidenfeld andNicolson, Pounds 16.95) + THESE studies are presented as correctives to what the writers, one old, one young, have found to be persistently erroneous conclusions. We retire into a hinterland of cliches. The fact that they don't fit seems not to threaten their use. Georges Minois sifts through 5,000 years of written attitudes to reveal that, more or less, we go on saying the same things about getting old now as we did when the pharaohs reigned, whilst Peter Laslett continues his crusade for a fresh and positive redefinition. With the disturbing realisation that nearly all of us are going to live long after 60, the year which for centuries qualified us as 'old,' there could be no better preparation than a wary glance at these two complementary books, if only for ammunition to fight-off the many ghastly 'caring,' commercial and other agencies which are now feeding on old age with a vengeance. Cruelly mocked in the past, it is insulted in a different way now. + Minois trawls the classics and his finds are much what might be expected. Socially tolerable - even admirable - old age is that of man contemplating God, or confessing the tricks of his trade to his descendant. Poets from Horace to Shakespeare display a brilliant pitilessness in their tirades about ugly old people. Something not nearly enough appreciated now is the misery lifted from old age by hygiene, dentistry and spectacles. The aged used to present a shocking sight - and smell. The not so old knew no way of not becoming like them. + Minois gives a wide, dark view of the sufferings caused to the old by their ugliness. In earlier times there was no middle-age. One was young and then one was old. To the Church, breakdowns such as Shakespeare's 'seven ages' were meaningless. The most fascinating chapters of Minois' book are those dealing with old age during the Medieval period when no Christian was any age at all according to the Church. He analyses the strange conflict between the liturgical calendar - 'a vast enterprise aimed at abolishing time through a cyclical and mystical process' - and the tragically real and unavoidable encounters with time made by the individual. He also writes about a world without retirement. + Statistics are hard to come by. Countless people played, toiled and died who did not know their age. or ourselves one word about them. Perhaps this absolute anonymity towards the investigator is what Simone de Beauvoir is referring to when she said that it was impossible to write a history of old age. But Georges Minois has made a far more detailed and enlightening stab at it than most. On the whole it was regarded as a calamity which set the individual outside or beyond what the non-old thought of as desirable activities, and people dreaded it. The ferocity with which it was attacked in the theatre is evidence of society's fear of it. It had to be unnatural. + 'The situation of old people expresses the ambiguity of the human condition more fully than do the other ages of life. Living in this world, they are already felt not to belong to it.' + Peter Laslett, of course, will have none of this. He insists that we rid ourselves once and for all of the platitudes and categorisations of centuries, and take a sensible look at the over-sixties in the 1980s. Do they have anything at all to do with, for example, Cicero's much quoted 'sententious lucubrations' or indeed with their own parents' concept of getting-on? Very little, that is until they become over-eighties, and then, perhaps, quite a lot. He lists the 14 fears of the old; number one is death. In his now famous role as a past-sixties' postivist and enemy of the unpleasant stereotyping of the old, Laslett crusades against the incipent deathliness which so often accompanies retirement. It is then that we leave the age of earning and saving, and enter upon that of personal fulfilment - the Third Age. A Fourth may follow, and this will certainly be that of decrepitude and death. So here is his honest and cheerful realignment of all our days. 'Our situation is inescapably, irremediably new. It calls for creation.' + The blight of the Third Age is torpor, the giving-in to the running down of things. It is nonsense to believe that one could still be suffering from tiredness due to the war or hard times early on. It is a waste of one's potential for a special kind of happiness to succumb to telly and vapid tripperism around anything open to the public. It is often unwise to emigrate to the south coast. Laslett says much about what he calls mass indolence, both of the unemployed and the old, the shapeless months, the degredation of the spirit. He is fierce regarding the under-funding of cultural institutions and suggests that Third Agers would be just the people to run libraries, galleries and museums after 5 pm. + Some of the rights he demands for them are rather odd, such as having their own special public swimming-pool hours so that the more youthful do not see their bodies. Ideally, the Two, or Seven or Four Ages of Men, according to whether one lives in the 12th, 16th or 20th century, should be lived in full view of humanity. Third Age theories and education (U3A) are revolutionising our later years but care must be taken to see that they do not gradually create a club. Laslett is a vigorous explainer of what we ought to do with our new long lives, and touches on such intriguing matters as that contradiction which we all feel about our own personal calendar and biological clocks. Why don't they tell the same time? Is it really our birthdays which should tell us our age. + OVERNIGHT FILE + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +308 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 9, 1989 + +Ambulance crews angrily stand by to be employed as 'the last resort': A bitter mood among suspended workers prepared to carry on + +BYLINE: By ANDREW CULF + +LENGTH: 586 words + + + THREE ambulance crews from Fulham, west London, dealt with emergencies yesterday after the 999 calls were put through to them. + After taking their patients to hospital, the six ambulancemen involved were all suspended without pay for refusing to work normally. + They joined the rest of their colleagues - most of whom had already been suspended - in the rest room of Europe's largest ambulance station, where they were watching a video of A Bridge Too Far. + The choice of film seemed appropriate on the day the simmering dispute boiled over with growing frustration and bitterness among the staff, many of whom attended the Clapham rail disaster and are veterans of dealing with the aftermath of IRA bomb blasts. + Outside the station fluttered a banner with the plaintive message: 'We are not on strike'. Inside, crews expressed their willingness to answer emergency calls, and despite being suspended, said they had no intention of going home. + Evidence of their commitment to the 999 service came as three separate emergency calls were received at Fulham, and crews responded to two road accidents and a medical collapse. + Mr Alan Thomas, who has been in the service for 28 years, took a motorcyclist with leg injuries to Charing Cross Hospital after an accident in Kensington. + 'The call came through in the normal way, and we dealt with it as we normally would,' he said. + 'Several minutes after we returned, my station officer called me into his office and warned me that as I was not working by London Ambulance Service guidelines I would be stood down without pay.' + He added: 'They seemed to be using us as a last resort. It seems they could not find anyone else to answer the call, so they came to us.' + Mr Charles Sawyer, an ambulanceman for five years, was also suspended on his return from taking an elderly woman to hospital following a crash in Chelsea. 'I told them I was prepared to answer emergencies for no pay, and I'm staying on until the end of my shift.' + Mr Bob White, acting shop steward, said that there was no animosity towards the police or St John Ambulance, who were handling calls. 'We have even offered to go out with the police in their cars to help.' + There would be no antagonism towards troops, who would simply be acting under orders. + He described the offer of 6.5 per cent as insulting, and denounced management's inclusion of London weighting artifically to boost the offer to 9.3 per cent in the capital. The union just wanted arbitration. + Mrs Elaine Wake said that her 18-year-old brother takes home Pounds 205 a week working in a supermarket. After five years' service, she clears Pounds 515 a month. + 'Will Kenneth Clarke tell my five-year-old daughter why she will not get a bike or a doll's house for Christmas? Let us hope it is Mr Clarke who needs an ambulance that has been stood down.' + The scale of opposition to the Health Secretary became clear as staff crowded round the lunchtime TV news. When Mr Clarke was interviewed, his answers were greeted with cries of outrage. One ambulanceman summed up the mood as he muttered: 'Absolute rubbish.' + Ambulance staff broke off a protest march yesterday in an unsuccessful attempt to save an elderly man who collapsed in the street. Workers from stations in Hackney, east London, were marching across Waterloo Bridge when the incident occurred. + The man was put in a police car for the short journey to St Thomas's Hospital, where further attempts to revive him failed. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +309 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 10, 1989 + +East German Crisis: End of Wall signals new era in world + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL SIMMONS + +LENGTH: 679 words + + + WHATEVER comes of the intense arguments for and against the re-unification of Germany, the post-war order as we have known it for nearly 45 years has certainly changed out of all recognition. + The Berlin Wall was the cruellest of all blows to a defeated Germany, the highest price its people had to pay for the atrocities of Hitler. It was built for sound economic and political reasons from the East German point of view, but it caused more anguish to Germans on both sides than any amount of stringent demands for compensation or de-Nazification. + Mr Egon Krenz, the new East German leader, was just eight years old when the second world war ended. His predecessor, Mr Erich Honecker, now in his late seventies, spent 10 years in a Nazi prison. He supervised the building of the Wall and - taking into account what we have learned of the man in the past few weeks - he probably did it with some conviction that he was doing the right thing. + After it went up in 1961, it was rationalised by speech makers and justified by policy makers but never rejoiced over. Mr Walter Ulbricht, then the East German leader, conceded he did not 'enjoy' being surrounded by barbed wire. The then Soviet leader, Mr Nikita Khrushchev, was later reported to have said he thought it 'ugly' and 'a defect'. + Mr Krenz by opening the frontiers his predecessors held so dear, has flown in the face of the notion that he was Mr Honecker's protege. He has also demolished some of the most important justifications that the German Democratic Republic presented to the world for its existence. + The crossing points beween East and West Germany - particularly in East Berlin at the Friedrichstrasse railway station and at Checkpoint Charlie - presented some of the most wretchedly depressing sights in central Europe in the late 20th century. + Old age pensioners, queueing interminably with carrier bags full of goodies, were scrutinised, cross-examined and often searched by uniformed bureacrats carrying out their masters' bidding, trying to prove that these crossing points were international frontiers, that the two Germanies - as Mr Honecker said when he was in the Federal Republic two years ago - were as incompatible as fire and water. + Though the German frontier has run resolutely along the whole length of the border of the two states, it was always at its most symbolic along the line where it divided Berlin. + Here, in the heart of the old capital, well over 50 East Germans have been shot dead trying to cross to the West and at least twice that number have been injured. More than 3,000 people are said to have been arested making the attempt. + On the East German side, the Wall was not discussed but it was rigorously controlled. There are hundreds of watch towers and guard dog runs, ditches deep enough to swallow tanks and patrol cars as far as the eye can see. The familiar 9foot concrete structure stretches for nearly 30 miles across the city and for 70 miles around its perimeter. + Houses and churches have been demolished to make way for it and roads and railway lines blocked. + In 1986, at the Wall's 25th anniversary, Western leaders denounced it and demanded that it should come down. Mr Gorbachev kept quiet, but Mr Honecker, belligerent to the very end, celebrated with a parade and had a commemorative postage stamp, showing smiling militiamen, printed. + Today's demonstrators have obviously not been satisified to have got rid of Mr Honecker personally. + They have insistently demanded reform, they have specifically demanded the freedom to travel. + Mr Krenz has made his most important gesture so far to appease Germans who have been hurt by the frontier. + The separation of the two Germanies has de facto been brought to an end and there is now new ammunition for both sides to use in the re-unification debate. + He has also re-opened the debate on the viability of the East German economy with or without the Wall. And he has challenged his own leadership to find new arguments in support of the legitimacy of the GDR. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +310 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 14, 1989 + +French novelist 'squeezed out' by Nazi row + +BYLINE: By PAUL WEBSTER in Paris + +LENGTH: 235 words + + + THE Goncourt prize committee, which will announce France's top book award next week, met without the novelist, Michel Tournier, at the weekend, in an apparent reaction to his suggestion that old people should be annihilated rather than abortion encouraged. + Mr Tournier, whose Le Roi des Aulnes is one of the world's most translated books, yesterday denied that he had been squeezed out of the 10-member committee, which is headed by the novelist, Herve Bazin, aged 78. + But Mr Tournier's absence from the committee and a weekend bookfair in Brive, central France, added to the controversy. Although considered the country's leading candidate for the Nobel Prize, his pile of books went unsold at Brive. + Mr Tournier, whose close friendship with President Franois Mitterrand has added an extra complication to the affair, told an American magazine that he considered abortionists as the 'sons and grandsons of the monsters of Auschwitz.' + The novelist, aged 65, said that when French demographers complained that there were too many old people and too few babies it was the fault of abortionists. + 'Instead of killing 200,000 babies a year, they should kill 200,000 old people,' he added. + Mr Tournier denied that he was being excluded from the Goncourt committee, where most members are of pensionable age, and condemned the 'lies, stupidity and hate' that had followed his statement. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +311 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 14, 1989 + +Arts: Arsenic And Old Lace - Derby + +BYLINE: By ROBIN THORNBER + +LENGTH: 359 words + + + PROGRAMMING a regional rep is not like running the Royal Court. For a start, most of them have more seats and a smaller catchment area. And audiences are, well, more conservative with a small c. + So when Annie Castledine moved from being a freelance director-and, for my taste, one of the best in this country in terms of richness and depth-to running her own building in Derby, she had to make some adjustments. Like bringing the audience with her. + In a spirit of listening and being responsive to her board and box office which I find wholly admirable, she has gone back to get them with Joseph Kesselring's 1941 comedy thriller-a play which has been done to death by the amateurs but maybe deserves a decent revival. + Arsenic And Old Lace is, in my opinion, a fairly ramshackle and empty old potboiler that's probably best forgotten but audiences do seem to like it. Rather than deny this demand, I could go along with offering them a superb production. + We hadn't quite achieved this by the preview that I saw. It was worthy, smart, even interesting in parts but it didn't really bring the creaky old monster to vibrant life. Annie Castledine would have done a better job on a new play that she really believed in. + This is supposed to offer starring roles for two mature actresses as the old ladies in Brooklyn comfort, poisoning passing old men as a favour. In fact Miriam Karlin and Muriel Barker were virtually wasted in their cliched character parts. + The show was stolen by Christopher Wilkinson as their psychopathic, Boris Karloff-look-alike nephew, extracting every ounce of both horror and comedy in a superbly physical performance. Such calculated hamming is what the show's about-but not quite such an over-the-top performance as Gwynn Beech's playing of his brother. + Steven Richardson's fine, angled setting didn't really make sense-why was this opulent house so bare?-but it didn't seem to matter. The comments I overheard on the way out were on the lines of 'Haven't seen such a good show for years'. I just hope they'll come back for a worthwhile text. + Derby Playhouse (0332 363275) until December 2. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +312 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 15, 1989 + +Social Fund hit by further freeze + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 468 words + + + WELFARE agencies reacted angrily last night after it emerged that the Government is virtually to freeze the Social Fund for the second year running. + They said the decision to increase the fund by less than 1 per cent in 1990-91 was a recipe for severe hardship and destitution among people lacking basic necessities. + The Department of Social Security said the fund remained adequate to meet 'greatest need'. It said there was no evidence that high-priority claimants were being rejected. + The fund was introduced in April 1988 in place of the former social security system of single payments or grants for people lacking the money to buy essential items such as clothes, beds, chairs and cookers. + Under the new system, claimants such as people leaving long-stay hospitals or prison, or elderly or disabled people needing special help, can apply to the fund for discretionary community care grants. Most claimants can only apply for repayable 'budgeting' or 'crisis' loans. + In 1988-89, the Government allocated Pounds 60 million for grants and Pounds 143 million for loans and, after demand was slow to pick up, totals were frozen for 1989-90. The 1990-91 allocations were not announced at the time of the general benefits uprating last month. Mr Tony Newton, the Social Security Secretary, has revealed in answer to a parliamentary question that the limits will be Pounds 61 million for grants and Pounds 144 million for loans. + Ms Carey Oppenheim, acting director of the Child Poverty Action Group, said the total of Pounds 205 million ought to be Pounds 231 million if the budget was uprated by inflation. + She said: 'It's shocking that the Government is effectively freezing the Social Fund a second time. These claimants are already being refused grants for basic necessities which the Government recognises as priorities. This runs entirely counter to government claims to be targeting resources on the poorest.' + Mr Gary Craig, a research fellow at Bradford University who specialises in the Social Fund, said the 1989-90 budget was already under enormous pressure and being kept on course only by benefit offices increasing the proportion of applications they refused. + For grants, refusal rates were running at 56 per cent compared with 49 per cent in 1988-89; for budgeting loans, refusals were 46 per cent compared with 39 per cent. Some offices had hit such trouble that Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, had by September been rejecting 77 per cent of grant applications. + 'What's the point of a system of last resort when you are telling eight or nine out of 10 people: 'Sorry, there's no money for you',' Mr Craig said. + The DSS said there was 'no reason to believe that the budget available will be insufficient to meet high priority needs this year or next'. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +313 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 16, 1989 + +Councils 'duped' over care policy + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 269 words + + + LOCAL authorities are being duped into thinking that plans to be published today will give them a decisive role in the organisation of community care, Mr Robin Cook, the shadow health secretary, said yesterday. + In reality, he claimed, the white paper on care of the elderly, disabled and mentally ill would be a thinly-veiled strategy for privatisation of existing services. + 'You can forget the rhetoric about local authorities being the lead agencies in community care and letting local people have flexibility on these services,' Mr Cook said. 'The white paper threatens more central direction to strip local authorities of the services they provide to their old people and their disabled people.' + Mr Cook said he had seen late drafts of the white paper to be unveiled by Mr Kenneth Clarke, the Health Secretary, and was in no doubt that the thrust was to promote privatisation. + Local authorities would be required to report regularly on their use of private sector residential homes for elderly and disabled clients. There was also the 'implication' in the white paper that home help services should be put out to tender. + 'I cannot think of a provision which is more vital to keep in the public sector. I warn Kenneth Clarke now that it will be easier to privatise the nuclear industry than the home help service,' said Mr Cook. + In addition, the white paper would require local authorities to charge clients the full economic cost of care services. Although people on social security would be protected, millions of others with incomes just above benefit levels would be hit hard. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +314 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 17, 1989 + +Outdoor cold 'is main risk to old' + +BYLINE: By SAFFRON DAVIES and JOHN ILLMAN + +LENGTH: 134 words + + + THE picture of elderly people dying in cold weather by slowly freezing at home - hypothermia - is misleading, according to a report today in The Lancet medical journal. + Being outdoors in a cold snap, for example waiting in a bus queue, and suffering a stroke or heart attack is much more likely to kill the elderly. + A team led by Professor Bill Keatinge, of The London Hospital Medical College, found that sudden exposure to moderate cold for as little as 30 minutes can promote blood clotting and possibly trigger an attack. + Professor Keatinge warns: 'Though dramatic, hypothermia actually accounts for just a small proportion of winter deaths. Stroke and heart attacks are the biggest killers; it looks as though even short outdoor excursions in cold weather are mainly to blame.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +315 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 17, 1989 + +2 billion pound role for private sector + +BYLINE: By ANDREW CULF + +LENGTH: 410 words + + + THE role of the private sector in health care consists mainly of nursing homes and residential homes, a market worth more than Pounds 2 billion a year, says Mr William Laing, a health care consultant. By comparison the market for home care - about Pounds 20 million - was 'small fry'. + There are three categories of people in residential or nursing homes: those who pay the full amount, those who receive topped-up income support, and those only getting income support. 'Those on income support have access to nothing more than shared rooms in the cheapest accommodation in the private sector,' Mr Laing said. + With some 9,000 residential homes for the elderly and 3,000 nursing homes, this part of the private sector is already well established. Growth in private provision of home helps and care attendants is likely to be much slower, according to Ms Lucianne Sawyer, chairman of the newly-formed UK Home Care Association. + 'The profit margins are minute,' she said. 'If you are to provide services at a price which the average consumer can pay and not exploit carers, it is very difficult to make a go of it.' + She was concerned that people in the middle ground, who did not qualify for Independent Living Fund money, could fall through the net. + There would be a real danger of corner-cutting and slipping standards if local authorities were forced to opt out, or accept lowest bids for services. + A more optimistic picture was painted by Mrs Pamela Boyce, general manager of Independent Home Care and Nursing Service's Woodford Green branch. + The company provides home helps, nursing auxiliaries, meals cooked in the home, and qualified nursing for the terminally ill. At Pounds 6.90 an hour the cost is high, but Mrs Boyce stressed the quality of care and the nursing back-up. 'The private sector will carry on growing and become more important.' + In the voluntary sector, Crossroads Care provides more than one million care hours in the home for the disabled and mentally handicapped each year, reaching 12,000 families. Its director, Mr Ian Croft, says there are another 7,000 families on its waiting list. + 'There are quite a number of private agencies operating community care. What we want to see is more options for more care. + 'Some people will use resources to buy in services, but I believe the voluntary sector has a great deal to offer. Given the right resources we could expand and extend our services.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +316 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 17, 1989 + +White Paper charts switch to private care: Ministers back strategy to place burden on the voluntary and commercial rather than the public sector + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE + +LENGTH: 856 words + + + THE heavy emphasis that ministers are placing on future delivery of care services by private and voluntary sectors, rather than by local authorities, is revealed in the white paper, Caring for People, published yesterday. + It does not propose any overt privatisation of services for elderly, disabled, and mentally ill people. In fact, it says the Government 'has decided against extending compulsory competitive tendering to social care services'. But there can be no doubt that local authorities will come under great pressure to make use of the private and voluntary sectors when social services departments assume a leading role in arranging and purchasing care in April 1991. + A key paragraph of the white paper says: 'The statutory sector will continue to play an important role in backing up, developing and monitoring private and voluntary care facilities, and providing services where this remains the best way of meeting care needs.' + Where people are considered to need residential care, the white paper says, social services 'will be expected to make maximum possible use of independent providers'. It adds: 'No local authority should deprive those people assessed as needing residential care of the opportunity to enter an independently run home meeting the required standards of care.' + Although local authorities are expected to retain the ability to offer all services, when private and voluntary sectors cannot, it is implied that this is likely to be for people with 'high levels of dependency or particularly challenging patterns of behaviour'. + Local authorities will anyway have a strong financial incentive to use private and voluntary sector homes. Where they place people in authority homes they will, as now, have to meet the full cost. Where they place them in independent homes, they will meet the cost but take a portion of the resident's social security benefit. + The paper says: 'All authorities will need to review the extent to which they need to maintain homes of their own in these circumstances. Some rationalisation is likely to be required.' + Services for people cared for at home will also be increasingly provided by the private and voluntary sectors. The paper acknowledges that non-statutory domiciliary, day care and respite care services are not as well developed as are residential services. This is the likely reason for not enforcing competitive tendering. + However, it is stressed that the Government will be looking particularly at how local authorities encourage independent providers in the non-residential care field, making 'greater use of service specifications, agency agreements and contracts.' + Such scrutiny will come in the checking of local authorities' proposed three-year community care plans, updated annually. Ministers will have powers to intervene 'to stimulate improvements'. + The white paper fleshes out the statement in July in which ministers accepted the broad thrust of the Griffiths report on community care and, in particular, agreed to local authorities taking a leading role. + It rehearses the pressing reasons for action to co-ordinate care: a projected increase in the number of people aged over 85 from 695,000 in 1986 to almost 1.15 million in 2001; an expectation that there will be 900,000 severely disabled adults living in the community by 2001; and an official estimate that 6 million people are acting as informal carers for others, 1.4 million of them doing so more than 20 hours a week. + Practical support for carers is given as a key objective of the proposed changes, which will apply broadly equally in England, Wales and Scotland. But the white paper recognises that the needs of some people are best suited to residential care and that others, 'in particular elderly and seriously mentally ill people and some people with serious mental handicaps together with other illnesses or disabilities', can best be helped in hospitals. + This leads on to the controversial issue of the rundown of long-stay mental hospitals and the alleged dumping of patients in the community without adequate support. + The white paper admits there are 'legitimate concerns that in some places hospital beds have been closed before better, alternative facilities were fully in place'. It restates the assurances given in July that no further mental hospital closure will be approved until it can be demonstrated that proper community services exist. + Significantly, referring to the role of health authorities in assessing local needs, the possibility is raised of some areas needing more hospital provision. + The white paper leaves uncertainties about community care funding. There will be a single budget covering care costs for all people receiving residential or domestic care. + Those admitted to residential homes after 1991 will no longer get special social security rates, now costing the Government more than Pounds 1 billion a year. Instead, they will be entitled to standard benefit plus a 'care' element of the former rates. + Caring for People - Community Care in the Next Decade and Beyond; HMSO; Pounds 8.10 + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +317 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 18, 1989 + +Out to Lunch: Why not in front of the children? + +BYLINE: By MATTHEW FORT + +LENGTH: 660 words + + + FAMILIES welcome, said the sign outside the modest pub near Ulverston in the Lake District. Keen anticipation. We had the family. We had the welcome. In we trooped: Lois (six months), Edward (20 months), + Ellie (four years), Lawrence (seven), Hugh (seven) and George (eight). Then there were Tom and Linda and Johnny and Mary and Lindsay and myself as the minders - a largish party, but undeniably a family. + We made our way to the saloon bar and settled in. A young couple were brooding over each other at one table and an elderly gentleman was brooding over his paper at another. And that was it. The joint wasn't exactly jumping. Our small tribe comfortably took over what was left. There was the sound of laughter from the next bar. + 'OK, who wants what?' produced the usual babble of responses which, after five minutes' vociferous debate, boiled down to chips and Coca-Colas all round for the children and beer for the adults. Different crisps for different children but crisps nevertheless. + The landlord appeared and took the order. + 'That'll be eleven pounds and sixty pence, please,' he said. 'And,' he coughed nervously and glanced towards our placid flock, 'can you please keep the noise down?' + 'Oh yes,' we said placidly, 'Definitely.' + I wasn't quite sure what he meant. The brood were making no more noise than your average extended family unit, a bit of chatter, a bit of attention-seeking, but it wasn't the French Revolution out there. But the landlord's remark rather took the edge off our festive mood. + 'Not so loud, Hugh'- 'There's no need to shout, Lawrence' - 'They are cheese and onion, Ellie', became the order of the day. The couple in the corner went on brooding. The elderly gent continued to peruse his paper. + It was when we ordered another round of drinks and nibbles that the landlord, a mild-looking man, issued his edict. + 'I'm afraid I must insist you keep those children quieter. We can't have noise like that in here.' I pointed out that there was a greater volume coming from the piped-music speakers than from our crowd. He was not impressed. The mothers began to look for alternative accommodation outside. The sun had vanished. Two elderly ladies came in. The landlord apologised for the noise and the children. + 'Oh no,' said one, 'we like babies and children.' + 'It's all right madam, they're just going outside.' + I lost my temper. + I like my pint or three in the quiet like anyone. But, ye gods, what do people expect? That children should lie quietly curled up underneath our chairs like dogs? Families talk. Families argue. Families make noise. That's what families do. To expect them to do otherwise is to misunderstand the nature of families. + But there is something more deeply-rooted at work here, something peculiarly English. We don't actually know what to do with our children in public. There is precious little place for them in most pubs or clubs or restaurants. They are excluded from most forms of public entertainment that isn't expressly designed for them. + This is nonsense. It doesn't happen in France or Italy or Spain, Belgium or America - civilised countries. These countries have exuberant eating and drinking cultures. Yes, it has something to do with a culinary tradition. But it also has something to do with the fact that each generation is properly schooled in those traditions by being exposed to them from an early age. Families eat and drink together in public as well as in private. So children feel at home in restaurants. + No wonder we have such a paucity of decent eating places in Britain. Small wonder that pubs are struggling. They thrash around, trying to get out of the quagmire of their own making. They become theme palaces. Conversation is blitzed by fancy sound systems. Desperately they lurch from marketing gimmick to marketing gimmick. But there is no place for simple human values, no place for families with children. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +318 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 21, 1989 + +Engel's Angle: Billiards - Still the kid brother in the eyes of Joe's public + +BYLINE: By MATTHEW ENGEL + +LENGTH: 1256 words + + + EARLY next month, an elderly gent will set out from his home in North Wales and drive slowly to Leeds to take part in the British Open Billiards Championship, get knocked out - more than likely - in the first qualifying round, collect his Pounds 150 and drive home again. + So what? The competitor's name is Fred Davis, and his appearance at Leeds will mark his 60th year as a professional billiards and snooker player. It is a record that may never be beaten in any sport, ever. + He is 76 now. In 1929 Fred started earning his living in his father's billiard halls. Since then it is not just his own career which has had ups and downs: the twin games he mastered have had the most extraordinary peaks and troughs. Very few people now even know the rudiments of billiards; it has become almost as outdated as pinochle or ruff. Yet every maiden aunt in England knows that black follows pink as surely as night follows day. And Steve Davis, Fred's namesake, is more recognisable than any footballer. + Only one snooker player has ever achieved greater standing, and that was Fred's older brother. Joe Davis died in 1978 after five decades in which he was almost synonymous with the sport: undefeated world champion, unbeaten in a non-handicap match by anyone until Fred himself did it. It is only really since Joe's death that Fred has acquired his own special status: as snooker's smiling, twinkling elder statesman. + He is every bit as avuncular in the flesh as he looks on the telly. Twenty years after the first of two bad heart attacks, he is in excellent nick, living with his daughters on a farm near Denbigh with a practice table where the turkey run used to be. He still likes to enter the competitions to keep in touch. Only the arthritis in his left leg lets him down - he can no longer stand with his old solidity. His eyesight and his skill remain undimmed. + Fred is one of only two men to become world billiards and snooker champion. But the other was Joe. The overriding factor in Fred's sporting life has not been his own remarkable ability, nor his even more remarkable durability - but the fact that he was Joe's brother. The full effect of this would probably have to be sorted out by a psychiatrist; since I have rarely met anyone less in need of psychiatric help, there is no point. + But Fred's version of their relationship is a fascinating one, and not at all what I expected. He is thoughtful on the subject but not entirely without bitterness. Joe Davis was world snooker champion every year from 1927 to 1946, when he stopped entering. He was 12 years old and already amateur billiards champion of Chesterfield when Fred was born. By the time Fred was conscious of anything, Joe was rapidly becoming a national celebrity and their father was giving up the pub he ran and taking over billiard halls. + Fred says his brother neither taught nor encouraged him. 'The first recollection I have that Joe even knew I existed was when I was knocking the balls about and he said: 'Wipe that bloody grin off your face.' 'Joe could never understand me smiling. We were complete opposites in that way. He was as black as thunder when anything went wrong. I would laugh it off. It was a tough business to be in and if truth be known he didn't want me to do it. He was a complex character and he wasn't always easy to know. + 'Without wishing it to sound harsh, Joe was only interested in Joe. Apart from his great ability, he had a great PR sense. I realised there was no way I could turn public opinion and make people think of me as better than him. It made my attitude very strange. I played without any great interest.' + Fred struggled in his early days as a professional until he realised that his eyesight was the problem and an optician made him a pair of swivel-lens glasses, then a great novelty. One can see that a man as intense as Joe might have resented the presence of a less able, less caring kid brother. + 'Joe would always say he practised eight hours a day. It was never seven and it was never nine. I never took it as the literal truth. It can't have done him any good. Even as a teenager I was mentally tired after an hour. + 'What Joe had was presence. He would walk in there like King Kong and most of the players would be terrified. In my early days I was the same. But strangely enough I always felt I could beat him.' + And in the end he did. Joe had retired as undefeated world champion in 1946. The next year Fred lost unexpectedly to Walter Donaldson. But in 1948 he was world champion so when a challenge match was mooted, there was no way Joe could insist on giving him a start. They played at the old Thurston's Hall in Leicester Square, and Fred won. Even so, no one believed it. 'As far as the public were concerned, he must have let me win. They didn't know Joe. He wasn't like that.' + Fred was champion every year bar two between 1948 and 1956. It was the wrong time. At first snooker had been only a novelty game, a diversion. What mattered were the great billiards contests, played out over a week or a fortnight like timeless Tests. Then, in the 1930s, the top players perfected the nursery cannon, which enabled them to perpetuate breaks to infinity. The game simply expired of boredom. + Snooker then flourished briefly. But just when Fred became champion, it began to be knocked senseless by television. Fred knew the game was up the night he was giving one of his 10-guinea-a-night exhibitions at a club and only six people turned up. And anyway, people hardly noticed him. 'Right from the start I realised there was no place for me in the public mind. Because of Joe. If he was on the BBC they introduced him as world champion and Joe never contradicted them.' + Fred just shrugged. His late wife ran a 100-bed hotel in Llandudno so there was always money coming in. And anyway his rule was never to touch his cue from April to September. He was still around when TV acquired colour. Someone thought of Pot Black ..and the rest you know. + In those later days the brothers became much closer, perhaps because they were no longer a threat to each other. Joe was watching Fred's tense semi-final in the 1978 world championship against Perrie Mans when he was taken ill; he died a few weeks later. + Two years later Fred appeared on Frank Keating's TV programme Maestro and predicted the name of the next world champion: his name too would be Davis. 'I played Steve when he was 20 or so. I had great admiration for him even then. All the modern players are tremendous potters. The difference is that he can play billiards. He can manipulate the cue-ball. With most of the others, it's all crash, bang, wallop. If it doesn't go in and they come up against someone like Steve they'll get slaughtered.' + So I asked the obvious question: Joe v Steve. 'No comparison. When Steve played Dennis Taylor he won the first eight frames and lost. That couldn't have happened to Joe. No one ever gave him eight frames and beat him.' + Fred still reckons he could have beaten anyone. But to most of snooker he will be only the third-best Davis. In his professional longevity, though, no one can touch him. Sixty years is an incomparable record, and his old cue has been with him all the way. + 'I know if I give the game up or if I have to give it up, there is only one way from then on. You have to keep doing what you do to make life interesting. But I'm probably the last player you would have expected to keep going. You see, I was never an enthusiast.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +319 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 23, 1989 + +Thursday Women: Gift of the gab - Katie Campbell talks talk + +BYLINE: By KATIE CAMPBELL + +LENGTH: 823 words + + + GOSSIP. I love it. Unashamedly, unrepentingly. Most people do, though few will admit it these days. To gossip: to natter, to prattle, to chatter, to tittle-tattle, to jabber, to jaw. As far back as 700 BC Hesiod was wary of it: 'Gossip is mischievous, light and easy to raise, but grievous to bear and hard to get rid of.' In other words, mud sticks + But gossip hasn't always had such bad press. Even Oscar Wilde called it charming - granted he was one of history's great gossipers, but he was an even greater gossipee. It has often been noted that while barbarians fight with hatchets, civilised men fight with gossip. Well, frankly, I'd rather have a little mud than a hatchet thrown at my back. And gossip needn't be malevolent; my Little Oxford Dictionary defines it simply as 'informal talk, esp about persons.' In any case, when someone gossips well they are called a wit or a conversationalist; only those who gossip badly are tarred with the appellation 'Gossip'. + Good gossip must have an esential core of truth to it, and a dose of compassion, concern or at least good humour attached; it is bad gossip that has no basis in fact, that is driven obviously and primarily by maliciousness. That sort of gossip certainly should be condemned; that is the sort Hesiod warned against. But even he went on to say that gossip has 'a kind of divinity'. And Seneca seven hundred years later spoke of 'that most knowing of persons - (the) gossip'. + The word gossip itself actually means 'God's kin'. Originally it was a term of respect denoting a godparent - as Queen Elizabeth I was the gossip at the baptism of her godson James VI, or indicating friends with a common spiritual bond. Following the peasant habit of referring to any elder as 'Mother/Father' or 'Grandmother/Grandfather', the word was also applied to any gathering of older folk. It was only when it began to be associated exclusively with women that gossip began its slippery slide into the gutter. From denoting women friends or gossips, the word came to denote the speech of gossips. And so it acquired its contemporary, pejorative connotation of idle chatter. + There is a theory that gossip is a form of speech particular to women - to women, old people, servants and slaves. In other words, to the powerless. But while Daisy and Rose were gossiping in the downstairs pantry, does anybody really doubt what Lord Bellamy was doing upstairs in the drawing room? Discussing affairs of state - no doubt. The sort of affairs that lose elections and topple governments. Not philosophy, not theology, but - you guessed it - gossip. + A psychiatrist friend of mine recently returned from an international conference in Athens. When I asked him what those eminent shrinks did with themselves in the evenings he explained that they gathered in the hotel bar. 'And what did you all talk about?' + 'Shop-talk: who's getting ahead, and how, and why; who's feuding with whom; who's working with whom; who's screwing with whom.' + 'Oh, you mean gossip.' + 'No!' he protested, indignantly. 'We were talking shop; it was shop-talk, not gossip.' + When Lawson resigned the pundits gathered, and mused, and offered up their conjectures and reflections, and it was called Political Speculation. When women gather to do the same, it is called gossip. + When academics delve into someone's life it is called Biography; when therapists posit theories on human behaviour it is called Psychology; when sociologists ruminate on society it is called Sociology. When women ponder on an individual, emotion or social phenomenon, it is called Gossip. + So what exactly is gossip - this thing that is so reviled and condemned? Gossip is Speculation. About human affairs, about human motives, actions and desires. As women are largely responsible for the emotional wellbeing of society, it is hardly surprising that the shop-talk of women is gossip. + Gossip is Old Wives' Tales. Women's wisdom has long been feared: Old Women, Witches, Sibyls, Seers. Those who scorn or censure women's talk diminish women. Or seek to. + Gossip is Stories. Stories provide entertainment, but also instruction. The best, most satisfying gossip is like the best, most satisfying art; it is cathartic. Through gossip we learn from other people's lives without undergoing the pain or danger of their experiences. + In short, gossip is a chronicle of humanity. As Ogden Nash put it, 'Another good thing about gossip is that it is within everybody's reach/And it is much more interesting than any other form of speech ..' + Imagine if Colette or Jane Austen or Dorothy Parker or Chaucer or Shakespeare or Marcel Proust had lived in a world without gossip! Their works would be skeletal; their insights would be meagre and mean. You can keep your philosophers speculating on language or your theologians speculating on God, I'll speculate on the human heart - gossip's good enough for me. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +320 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 23, 1989 + +The Day in Politics: Labour launches winter campaign + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE + +LENGTH: 227 words + + + LABOUR published six main amendments to the bill which they said would form the basis of the party's 'winter campaign to save the NHS', writes David Brindle. + Mr Robin Cook, shadow Health Secretary, said: 'We could not have chosen a better issue to put centre stage for the first televised session of Parliament.' + One amendment would make any hospital opt-out plan subject to a ballot of local people. + A second would give patients a guaranteed right of access to the hospital of their choice, and general practitioners a right to refer patients to the consultant of their choice. + A third would give GPs an explicit right to prescribe the drugs their patients need without any cash limit, while a fourth would specify that all contracts for care must protect quality, not just promote cost competition. + The remaining two amendments apply to the community care plans. + One would 'ring-fence' or protect the grants to be given to local authorities so they could not be used for other purposes; the other would give elderly and disabled people in local authority residential homes the same social security rights as those in private or voluntary sector homes. + This last amendment would have the effect of removing the deterrent which local authorities will face if they place people in their own homes and have to meet the full cost. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +321 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 25, 1989 + +Football: Shakers stirring things up in the Third - Bury coming alive at last and reaching out for promotion + +BYLINE: By CYNTHIA BATEMAN + +LENGTH: 735 words + + + WHEN Stockport turned up at Bury a few years ago with three players and their manager adrift - in the snow, as it happened - they still managed to win. They would not find it so easy now. Three points today against Crewe, and Bury could go top of the fiercely contested Third Division, ahead of the two Bristol teams. + A celebration is being planned at a posh Manchester hotel, but this shindig has nothing to do with the Shakers' lofty position in the table. Tickets for the annual dinner-dance are Pounds 25 a head, and Bury need the money. No matter how well the team performed in the past, it made barely a jot of difference to the attendance figure. + But this season, playing success combined with enterprise off the pitch has resulted in gates in the first quarter starting off - where previously they have peaked - at around 3,300. Still a low figure for a ground that once held 39,000, and can now accommodate only 8,000, but Bury are pleased. + The boost has come largely from the sale of Pounds 10 season tickets to youngsters and old-age pensioners. Bury's chairman Terry Robinson says: 'It won't do us much good in cash in the short term. But we hope in the long term that the youngsters will grow up into supporters. In recent years we feel we may have lost two generations.' + Bury has always been proud of its family atmosphere, the club always a part of the town and stiffly resistant to a move by a previous chairman to change its name to North Manchester. The Shakers would not leave Gigg Lane, with its reputation for one of the finest pitches in the land. + 'Bury's ground is the most attractive in the North-west,' wrote Simon Inglis in Football Grounds of England and Wales. Yet Gigg Lane has a Cemetery End, which no doubt has led to countless Dead But Not Buryed headlines. + But Bury has never been a soccer hotbed like its Lancashire neighbours. It has never produced a legend, a Nat or a Stan or a Tom, although Neville Southall and Colin Bell began their careers at Gigg Lane, and the club had a reputation for producing good players: Terry McDermott, Danny Wilson. + The Boltons and Burnleys 'have a residue of perhaps 10,000 fans who start to come back when their team is doing well. We have no such support. Our gates are half what they were 10 years ago,' says Hugh Eaves, Bury's latest source of income. + Eaves holds 149,000 of Bury's 200,000 shares and has put Pounds 300,000 into the club in the past four years. He is Bury born but London based, a member of the Stock Exchange with interests in 'venture capital'. + Eaves says: 'This season there is a self-belief and, if you talk to any of the players, they are expecting promotion. I think we have the best opportunity this season that we have had for a long time, with a new management team and new players.' + Bury had never laid out more than Pounds 15,000 on a player until this year, when suddenly their spending topped a quarter of a million. Swansea's beanpole central-defender Alan Knil broke the record, costing Pounds 95,000. Chris Withe, from Notts County, and Tony Cunningham, the former Manchester City and Blackpool forward, each cost Pounds 40,000. + They were prepared to pay Pounds 250,000 for Crystal Palace's forward John Salako, but the player did not fancy the move. + The physio Wilf McGuinness, a former Manchester United manager, says Bury have the strongest squad in the 10 seasons he has been there. It is a mix of home-grown players brought through from YTS trainees who have picked the skills of the veterans Sammy McIlroy and Kenny Clements and are just beginning to fulfil their promise. The most striking is the 22-year-old David Lee, a quicksilver ball player. + Sam Ellis, who took over as manager in the summer after leaving Blackpool, refuses to be drawn on the subject of promotion ..or much else, come to that. It is all too soon. + Bury's heady days were nearly 100 years ago when they shook the First Division. But it is 30 years since they were in the Second. They won the FA Cup twice in their early years, beating Southampton 4-0 in 1900 and Derby 6-0 in 1903, still a Cup final record. + But even that led to tears a few years ago. Bury's only permanent prize of any note was the ball from that match. But they loaned it for an exhibition and, when the organisers went bust, Bury's ball went to appease the creditors ..and nobody ever gave it back. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +322 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 27, 1989 + +UK News in Brief: Fears for elderly + +LENGTH: 34 words + + + Elderly and vulnerable patients may be 'pushed to one side' if National Health Service reforms go ahead, says the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, which plans a day of protest on Thursday. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +323 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 28, 1989 + +Racing: Ascot jump into evening racing + +BYLINE: By KEN OLIVER + +LENGTH: 224 words + + + ASCOT is to stage its first evening meeting for 25 years next May 1 and the all-sponsored card will be the richest ever evening National Hunt fixture, writes Ken Oliver + With no financial support from the Horserace Betting Levy Board, the Charterhouse Mercantile Group are bringing together six sponsors, who will support the meeting not only with prize money but also by making a substanial contribution towards Ascot's cost in opening the racecourse for this additional fixture. + Four of the six races already have sponsors and negotiations for the remaining two are in hand. The sponsors' total contribution is Pounds 54,000, with Pounds 28,000 in prize money and the rest going towards expenses for staging the meeting, which will start at 5.30pm. + Senior citizens will be allowed into Tattersalls at half-price, Pounds 3, while a Members' badge will cost the usual Pounds 10, but will be valid for the next day's afternoon flat meeting which features the Victoria Cup. + The evening will not be short of entertainment for there will be a band and also a group of strolling minstrels. + Piers Bengough, the Queen's representative, said: 'The Ascot executive are delighted to have been granted this evening fixture, as additional meetings are hard to come by. We are hoping that it will become a permanent fixture.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +324 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 28, 1989 + +Tuesday Women: Prime numbers - Why cosmetic manufacturers are at last putting age before beauty + +BYLINE: By PENNY RICH + +LENGTH: 1175 words + + + WE ARE getting older. Already one out of five people in the UK is over 60, and in 20 years' time this will have risen to one in four. As we enter the 1990s, 60 per cent of women will have celebrated their 30th birthday, and no matter how many offspring we produce by the turn of the century, it won't stop the decline in the annual birthrate. + This means that manufacturers of all consumer goods will have a new market to woo, and they will have to change the way they try to sell their products. The most radical changes will be in the cosmetic industry, because they also have to change the very products they sell to us. For the first time ever, they must also reconcile beauty and old age. In an industry in which models were once not allowed to smile in advertisements, in case they showed a laughter line, the dilemma is how to show the cracks yet still imply that beauty products turn back the clock. + Barbara Attenborough, who as Creative Adviser to Boots has helped make all their cosmetic brands UK best sellers, has been working on this problem for some time. Several years ago, Boots predicted that 17 cosmetics, its leading youth brand, would be 25 per cent down in sales by 1992 due to a lack of teenage purchasers. So last year they launched 2000, a range of skincare products specially formulated for older women, with a complementary range of cosmetics individually mixed to match customer's needs. Within two months it had claimed 0.5 per cent of the market and has gone on to be even more successful. + According to Attenborough, however, this initial strategic about-face is just the tip of the iceberg. 'The cosmetic industry as a whole is currently formulating products that work for the older woman,' she says. 'As you age, too much make-up only makes you look older, so we will see less make-up more cleverly applied. Tomorrow's cosmetic counters will display fewer high fashion shades and more wearable colours - browns and beiges - in all the standard ranges. Eyeshadows won't have pearl or glitter in them, because they exaggerate the contours of looser, older skin. Lip and eye products will be matt and moisturising, to balance the dryness of mature complexions, and lipsticks will adhere better, so they stay on longer and don't bleed into the fine lines around the mouth.' + The other change looming for the industry will be to make 'treatment' products, because older women don't just want products that look good: they want products that do good. Lancome, at the premium end of the market, have been leading the research in this area for some time. According to UK PR Cassandra Duncan, the new priority is to make products that work against the signs of ageing. 'Already every good skincare product contains anti-ageing ingredients that screen out harmful UV rays, fight free radicals which cause wrinkles, and put as much moisture back into the skin as possible,' she says. 'The next step is super hydration, to make the skin's moisture content as high as possible, using powerful ingredients in light, gel-like textures which penetrate easily. We are perfecting foundations with treatment properties, but also with very light textures so they are not heavy and ageing on skin. All mascaras will contain ingredients such as keratin, to condition eyelashes.' + But eventually may not be soon enough for most of us. The latest figures prove that already the majority of cosmetic users are showing on their faces the first signs of age. In the year ending June 1989, women over 35 purchased 58 per cent of all skincare products and 47 per cent of all make-up sold in the UK. And to keep selling to them, it is more than just product formulations that the industry must change. The basic design of the twist-up lipstick hasn't been altered since Guerlain invented it in 1910. But according to Attenborough, new product packaging is the next vital thing to tempt the new majority market. + 'Quality packaging has always been more important to the older woman than to teenagers,' she says, 'because they pay more for products and expect luxury in return.' But the entire industry will now have to make products that are more sophisticated as well as looking more glamorous. Compacts will become slimmer and micro-thin, with built-in one-dose applicators, less plastic and more glass. They have to have a 21st century feel and be sleek, tiny, hi-tech, beautiful and modern. + Yet there is one area of the UK cosmetic industry still firmly entrenched in this decade - up until now, no company has dared to sell products to the older market by advertising make-up worn with wrinkles. And no glossy magazine has been brave enough to put an older celebrity on its cover without serious retouching to the photograph first. In America, however, where there are already more people over the age of 40 than under it, the media have confronted the new market head on. Six years ago, Lancome signed on the oldest house model in the business for their worldwide advertising campaign - Isabella Rossellini, now 36 and a mother, is still with them. Last year Revlon used Audrey Hepburn, aged 60, in its long-running series of American advertisements featuring 'the most unforgettable women in the world'. Their latest ad has Frank Sinatra, aged 74, with his fourth wife Barbara. And the biggest success story in American publishing is Lear's, a magazine 'for the woman who wasn't born yesterday', launched last year. The average age of its readers is 49, the editorial photographs show real women looking their age -and advertisers are lining up to book space in it. + In the UK, advertising is lagging behind and wrinkles simply don't feature. Marion Kelly, Director General of the Cosmetic, Perfumery and Toiletries Association, believes this is because the beauty business is about selling dreams, rather than reality. 'The dilemma facing the industry now is not to exclude older purchasers by showing products advertised on teenagers, nor to lose the younger market by showing products on older women,' she says. 'The current compromise is by using ageless models - womenin their prime. We'll have to see slightly older faces in the next five years. But not real wrinklies, because people don't want to be wrinkled so why would they buy a product advertised on a wrinkled face? It contradicts the message of any beauty ad, which is that wrinkles are to be avoided with good skincare.' + But if the cosmetic industry is going to change to sell to the new ageing, majority market, then the consumer herself will have to change first. Once enough of us have real wrinkles, perhaps we will learn to admire them as the signs of a life well lived. Barbara Attenborough, who has just turned 60, thinks that women now look more glamorous as they age. 'The odd wrinkle no longer means that you should become invisible or retire. I think we may yet see attractive, grey-haired, wrinkled models. It will take one company to do it. But it will be the bravest, best and cleverest thing any advertiser has ever done.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +325 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 2, 1989 + +Money (Cashpoints): Warning for elderly + +LENGTH: 87 words + + + ELDERLY homeowners considering raising cash from the value of their house are warned that they could be made homeless if they take out an unsuitable plan in a new booklet launched by Cecil Hinton of Hinton & Wild. + He is worried by home income plans which roll up the interest or link the loan to an investment bond. + Free copies of the booklet - Raising Income or Capital From Your Home? - Some Important Questions You Should Ask - is available from Hinton & Wild Ltd, Freepost, Surbiton, Surrey KT6 7BR. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +326 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 4, 1989 + +Arts: Out of the valleys of despond - Keith Baxter's travels with his play + +BYLINE: By KEITH BAXTER + +LENGTH: 775 words + + + AN ELDERLY man with halitosis leaned towards me. We were in a tavern in Greenwich Village. 'My home is in New Jersey, but my heart is stuck in Pontypool.' His voice was low and every breath a razor. 'In this very room,' he said, knocking back a vodka stinger, 'Dylan Thomas drank himself to Death!' I had met Dylan Thomas once, in 1953, just before I was posted to Korea and a few months later, bivouacked above the Imjin, a soldier told me he was dead. Now three-and-a-half decades later I was surrounded by The Welsh Society of America, talking of Thomas and talking of Wales. + I did not tell the old man that the Wales his fellow exiles all remembered had died; it had died around the same time as the Poet. So when I wrote Barnaby And The Old Boys it was to be about an exile crossing the Atlantic after a long absence, in time for Christmas with his family in a South Wales he would find hugely changed. + My agent in New York was grim. 'Why such a large family? Couldn't some of them be dead?' I said it was a team play. 'Producers don't like 'team plays'. What producers like is a short comedy, two hours maximum, one set and four actors - and a fat part for A Star.' Three London producers rejected it instantly. The first said he no longer did 'straight' plays; he was now 'only into musicals'. The second wouldn't read it unless it was a vehicle for a star. The third said the Welsh words (24 of them) had given him a headache and wasn't the play dirty? + I heard Toby Robertson was doing remarkable work in Wales and Barnaby And The Old Boys duly opened under his direction at Theatr Clwyd. Apart from the woman who hissed 'Antichrist' at me in Welsh the local response was unanimously enthusiastic. + We delayed the start of the play seven times as a result of telephone calls from London; seven times the seats were still empty at the end. One producer came up to Manchester for the funeral of a friend but 'alas it was a day when Theatr Clwyd was closed.' Another would send her trusted emissary, but it rained and fearing 'flu, he turned back at Hendon. + One producer did indeed make the journey north and was enthusiastic enough to assemble a cast for a March transfer to London. We had some anxiety about his finances and our fears were increased when he postponed rehearsals until June 8. On June 7, he went into liquidation. I took out a mortgage on my house and tightened my belt. + The director of a theatre on the outskirts of London gave me a drink. He was firm with me: he was not interested in doing work simply to transfer into the West End and the play absolutely did not need a Star Cast. Strangely however, without telling me, he sent the play to Julie Walters. Now Miss Walters is an actress of shattering accomplishment and indisputably A Star but hers would not be the first name that would spring into anyone's to mind when casting a middle-aged Welsh grandmother and quite rightly she said so. The director no longer returned my calls. 'Barnaby' was on the loose again and mortgage rates went up. + Glynis Johns called me from Los Angeles. She had read the play. Could we discuss it when she came to London? That week I opened a letter from a young producer with impeccable credentials - the Manchester Royal Exchange, the Lyric Hammersmith. He and his partner were determined to do new work; they had read the notices and sent for the play and wanted to produce it. I took Glynis Johns to lunch at Joe Allen and the producer was at the next table, scrutinising her over his menu. He approved. On February 22 Glynis agreed terms; on February 27 she was back in Los Angeles. 'I love the play but I don't feel well.' + The mortgage rate went up again, and a swingeing tax demand arrived, together with a Keith Baxter ..struggle peremptory letter from Lloyds Bank. + On June 15 I had a message from ABC TV in New York asking me to accept a two-year assignment in their longest running soap, for which they would pay me a million dollars. If I accepted it Barnaby And The Old Boys would have to be abandoned. I had come such a long journey with the play I couldn't give up now. I telephoned New York and got more drunk than I'd been since Korea. On July 4 I went to the theatre in London and a theatre-owner saw me at the bar. It reminded him of my play - he went home, looked at it, read the notices, and the next morning we were offered his Vaudeville Theatre; as perfect a home as anyone could wish. + This morning a friend telephoned: 'Isn't early December the very worst time to open a play?' + Barnaby And The Old Boys, written by and starring Keith Baxter opens at the Vaudeville today. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +327 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 7, 1989 + +Barlow Clowes' death toll rises: More than 600 claimants die awaiting compensation + +BYLINE: By DANIEL JOHN + +LENGTH: 380 words + + + More than 600 of the original 18,000 investors caught up in the collapse of the Barlow Clowes investment empire have died during the 18 months long battle to secure compensation, it was revealed yesterday. + The death toll has worked out at the equivalent of seven a week since the two companies responsible for investing 190 million Pounds (pds) in government securities went into liquidation last June. + Many who invested in UK based Barlow Clowes Gilt Managers and its Gibraltar sister operation, Barlow Clowes International, were elderly people whose plight has been made worse by the loss of their savings. + The latest number of deaths were released yesterday as the Barlow Clowes Investors Group (BCIG) sought to secure the release of the Parliamentary Ombudsman's report into the Department of Trade and Industry's role in the affair. + The draft written by Sir Anthony Barrowclough, the ombudsman, is currently in the hands of the DTI for factual checking. Investors have been expecting its publication for the last two weeks but are fearful it will be kept back for the week when Parliament goes into the Christmas recess. + That will prevent MPs scrutinising the report in detail and from questioning Trade Secretary Nicholas Ridley about the DTI's role in allowing Barlow Clowes to operate over the years leading up to its collapse. + There are also indications that the current criminal investigation into Barlow Clowes may prevent the most sensitive parts from being release. + BCIG representatives, including chairman John Dyer, yesterday lobbied key MPs in an effort to secure the report's earliest release. An early day motion has also been put down in the House of Commons supporting their case. + A spokeswoman for the Ombudsman's office said the draft report was still in the hands of the DTI and that publication could not take place until it had been returned. + Labour's City spokeswoman Dr Marjorie Mowlam yesterday claimed the delay was part of a Government attempt to avoid further embarrassment over the affair. + The possibility that the report would not appear before Christmas would mean another miserable time for investors. 'How many more have to die before the report is published and they receive compensation,' she said. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +328 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 11, 1989 + +Elderly care crisis warning + +BYLINE: By DAVID BRINDLE, Social Services Correspondent + +LENGTH: 302 words + + + Britain will face a spiralling demand for long-term residential care of the elderly unless funds are made available for the rapid development of community services, a report warns today. + The warning that Government community care policies may fail to halt the residential care boom comes from Professor Nick Bosanquet, professor of health policy at the University of London, and Dr Alistair Gray, a research associate at Wolfson College, Oxford. + They calculate that the ageing population is adding 1 per cent annually to health service costs. Between 1986-95, they estimate a 33 per cent rise in the number of over-75s hospitalised for short-stay treatment alone. + As a result, they say the health service must quickly adjust to big shifts in demand among specialties: while general surgery patients will rise by just 4 per cent between 1986-95, those in geriatric medicine will increase by 35 per cent, and those in urology by 42 per cent. + However, the report - commissioned by the National Association of Health Authorities and the Society of Family Practitioner Committees - warns that the main danger is a spiralling of demand for long-term residential care. + It says that without building on existing community services, residential care will expand even faster than the 1 billion Pounds (pds) growth in the 1970s, as measured by social security costs. + Claiming the 1980s have been wasted in the development of elderly-care services, it suggests a three-year programme of community services development costing 700,000 pds - or another 1 per cent extra funding - in each health district. + Will You Still Love Me? - New Opportunities for Health Services for Elderly People in the 1990s and Beyond; NAHA, Birmingham Research Park, Vincent Drive, Birmingham B15 2SQ: 15 pds. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +329 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 12, 1989 + +Hype raises crime fear, says report + +BYLINE: By JOHN CARVEL, Home Affairs Editor + +LENGTH: 265 words + + + A 40-point plan to reduce the public's fear of crime was presented to the Home Office yesterday by a working party under Mr Michael Grade, chief executive of Channel 4. + "We believe many people are paying an unnecessary and unacceptable price for the hyping of crime prevention," it concluded. + Sections of the community with the greatest fear of crime were those least likely to be affected - notably elderly women who commonly imposed an after-dark curfew on themselves in spite of very low risks. + The report criticises the media for failure to present comprehensive information about crime patterns to balance horror stories. + It said Crimestoppers TV commercials should be abandoned if they cannot avoid violent reconstructions which increase public anxiety. Mr John Patten, the Home Office Minister of State, rejected the report's finding that government crime-prevention advertising boosts fear. He also challenged a proposal that crime statistics should be published less frequently. + The group said that police forces should be more open to the public with efforts to increase ethnic minority recruitment. Local authorities should also set up special units to tackle the fear of crime, improve pedestrian subways, unlit car parks and litter-strewn streets. There are also recommendations to improve safety on public transport. + The working party included Mr Dan Crompton, the Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire, That's Life TV presenter Esther Rantzen, Mr Louis Blom-Cooper, QC, chairman of the Press Council, Home Office experts and leading academics. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +330 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 13, 1989 + +Ombudsman set to rule on Barlow Clowes + +BYLINE: By ALAN TRAVIS, Political Correspondent + +LENGTH: 391 words + + + The Ombudsman's report on the Barlow Clowes affair in which 18,000 investors lost 100 million Pounds (pds) will be submitted to the Commons before the Christmas recess begins next week. + The Ombudsman, Sir Anthony Barrowclough, is telling MPs that the report is being finalised, though an early draft is believed to recommend that not all the investors should be compensated for the losses they suffered when the investment group crashed 18 months ago. + It is believed that the report will be highly critical of ministers' role in the affair, despite a claim last year by Lord Young, the former Trade and Industry Secretary, that an internal investigation concluded his department could not be held responsible. + Sir Anthony, whose official title is Parliamentary Commissioner, is expected to criticise successive corporate affairs ministers at the department, and could throw the spotlight on the role of Lord Young. + The case turns on whether the department was legally responsible for supervising the group's unauthorised offshore arm, Barlow Clowes International, where most of the losses were incurred. Some 11,000 investors had money in the offshore fund. + The report - which has taken more than a year to prepare in one of the most complex inquiries undertaken by Sir Anthony's office - will address the question of when the department first became negligent if it is shown to have been aware of the possible difficulties. The report will also examine the department's decision to license Barlow Clowes's United Kingdom fund. + The report has been with the department's accountants for more than three weeks as they check its factual accuracy. The exercise has enabled the officials involved in the original decisions to respond to the findings. The Government will publish its response when the report is released. + Sir Anthony wrote yesterday to Mr Alf Morris, Labour MP for Manchester, Wythenshawe, two of whose constituents were the subject of a test case. The couple, in their mid-70s, lost their life savings of 65,000 pds and had to sell their home. + Mr Morris said: "Many of the investors in Barlow Clowes were elderly people and some 500 have died since they lost their money. If the Ombudsman's report recommends that compensation should be paid, the Government should act urgently and honour it." + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +331 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 13, 1989 + +Wednesday People: Veteran looks back in anguish - Dick Trafford + +BYLINE: By DENNIS BARKER + +LENGTH: 319 words + + + When he was 28 Dick Trafford went to work in Ormskirk as an ambulance driver at in that now mercifully defunct institution, a workhouse, where the elderly poor worked for their keep. + When he was 50, he and his wife took over, as superintendent and matron, the old Oldham workhouse which had by then, with the advent of the National Health Service, become the Westlands Old People's Home. He and most others thought the workhouse conditions gone for good. + But yesterday, on his 91st birthday, Trafford, whose wife died in sheltered accommodation four years ago, told a community nursing conference in London, that, though a Tory voter all his life who thought most of what Mrs Thatcher was doing was good, he saw a danger that old people might be heading back towards the workhouse if the Government went ahead with NHS cuts and changes in community care. + Trafford's moral right to speak was unassailable. Now the spokesman for the First World War Veterans' Association, he joined up at 15 on the first day of the war, giving his age as 18. In the King's Liverpool Regiment, he went through Loos, the Somme, and Passchendaele and was wounded twice - a thumb torn off by shrapnel, his neck pierced by a bullet. + In 1926, when he first became an ambulance driver at Ormskirk workhouse "conditions were not "tip-top." Men had to wear rough cotton shirts and white corduroy jackets and trousers, to be easily visible. + The able-bodied had to saw up old railway sleepers and then chop up the pieces for sale as firewood. One day a week, the men were allowed a dark suit to go out for the day to visit friends or relatives. + "Old people get pensions now, so much pocket money in old people's homes and + better clothing. But the government is cutting down, whereas they shouldn't. + I should think it is working the way of bringing back the workhouse through + having too much economy." + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +332 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 14, 1989 + +Books: The gas chamber mentality - Review of 'Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism 1870-1945' by Paul Windling + +BYLINE: By NORMAN STONE + +LENGTH: 877 words + + + Paul Windling: Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism 1870-1945 (Cambridge UP, 55 Pounds (pds)). + As I write, two deranged men pass up and down outside my window. One thinks he is a bishop, the other would, without the mental derangement, be a good craftsman. Both have been released into "the community," and spend their time walking up and down, periodically knocking at doors. + I do not pretend to understand the reasoning that puts these poor men on the streets, but finance, I suppose, plays a part: harmless lunatics can be "farmed out" of asylums, and there are old-age pensioners who are glad of the money to take care of them - probably better care than they would receive in asylums. The Nazis had another answer: gas chambers. + Paul Weindling's book is about the rationality of gas-chambers. In all of Europe, around 1900, worries occurred about the "inferior" elements of society. Doctors grew strong, their influence on public health-policy very strong. Industrialisation created great problems - of overcrowding, family-break-up, alcoholism. + For the middle classes after the 1880s, there was an especial problem, in that their birth-rate, relative to the peasant or working classes, declined. Was society then going to reproduce is least promising elements? Germany, and, particularly, Prussia and Saxony, saw these problems most sharply, and her medical sociolgists form the centre of Weindling's book. The outcome is, of course, horrible. + On the one side there is the Nazi theory of sterlisation, of euthenasia, and, for the sake of the future of the Race, the gas-chambers. On the other side, which Weindling does not mention, is the German Democratic Republic. I read in the latest Spiegel that that state, or ex-state, has a record second to none in coping with Aids. Its solution? It tests foreigners, and expels them if they are HIV positive. Weindling indicates, towards the end of his long book, that the Communist authorities took over a signficiant number of Nazi personnel. Attitudes live on: and Spiegel now says, with relief, that the German Democratic Republic contains fewer Aids victims than any big street in any large West German city. + What is the balance between authoritarian moralism and let-it-all-hang-out destructiveness? The problem, nowadays, comes up with Aids and drugs. But it is an old one - in the old days, to do with a strange mixture of causes, in which syphilis and drink had their place. + Paul Weindling's book is very good indeed. I owe to it many things - in particular two nuggets of information which should be passed on. There were, in the Twenties and Thirties, such strong links between Germany and the United States in medical research that the work of Dr Josef Mengele was subsidised, for a time, by the Rockefellers. Then again, in the 1930s, one piece of Nazi-Soviet collaboration which went on was a research institute, in Moscow, on racial qualities. + This book, which has a scholarly backing of immense power, needs to be read by anyone embarking on a cultural history of the European world of 1990. the world which gave us a Freudian anser - if answer it was - also gave us the Nazi's gas chambers. Its chief opponent was the Catholic Church, and Freud, when asked, just after he arrived in London in exile from Nazi persecution, did say that his main enemy was not Hitler but Catholicism. And Catholicism, frequently unacknowledged, is the hero of Weindling's book. + The book is too long and encyclopaedic - an outcome, probably, of its author's fundamental indecision as to which side he is on. Again and again, there are lists of names, of doctors, of societies for this and tht, of scholarly endeavours started, and scholarly endeavours aborted. + In the 1970s doctors were liberals: leave us alone and all will be well. By the 1890s, a kind of professional imperialism took over: leave us to dictate, and all will be well. In Germany, the limits of democratic accountability were such that this "professional imperialism" could be more successful than in other countries. In the Nazi period, the doctors had a field day. Hitler, a teetotal vegetarian with a passionate hatred of smoking, was all for enthusiasts abortion of "life-unworthy" women, and medical experimentation on human beings - though not, be it said, on animals. "Eugeincs" - in effect, selective breeding - came into its own; Auschwitz is its monument. + If Hitler had won the War, the continent would have contained about three hundred million blond, blue-eyed goody-goodies doing nothing but reproduce themselves: the sort of paradise which the more boring elements in the "caring" professions might wish to see. Still, in his horrible way, Hitler was pointing to a problem that is constant and, in today's "underlcass," very serious. How do you stop single teenage mothers from breeding up tomorrow's football hooligans? How do you deal with the mentally deranged, and should they be sterilised? What powers should be given to public health authorities? Weindling himself is, I suspect, rather schizophrenic about this - on the one side, admiring the medical endeavour that developed in modern Germany, and on the other, seeing how it could be abused. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +333 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 14, 1989 + +Books: Senile curses and a Swedish con / New fiction + +BYLINE: By NORMAN SHRAPNEL + +LENGTH: 830 words + + + Gloria's Birthday, by Norma Levinson (Century, 11.95 Pounds (pds)). + The Magnetist's Fifth Winter, by Per Olov Enquist, translated by Paul Britten Austin (Quartet, 12.95 pds). + The Sacred Night, by Tahar Ben Jelloun, translated by Alan Sheridan (Quartet 12.95 pds). + Their Own Kind of War, by Tom Hart (Bellew, 12.95 pds). + Time, we learn from the opening words of Gloria's Birthday, is a great healer - not the most expected or accurate of thoughts in the context since the setting of Norma Levinson's new novel turns out to be an old people's home. + The residents of The Haven, or some of them, would themselves be the first to relish the grave joke. As the heroine of this emotionally uninhibited book soon discovers, they like a laugh when they can find one. A youngish woman, mentally disabled by domestic tragedy, she has been sent to work there for therapeutical reasons, and receives at least as much help as she is able to provide. She soon finds that what is left of life for these old people is more than senile grumbling or a muttering of maxims. They help each other and, when necessary, their helpers, if only with curses. There's no place like home, even when it's a Home. + Truisms are unavoidable, and so is sentimentality, though one of the novel's appeals is the way they all seem to feel the need to fight it. These senior citizens sometimes address each other in terms that would be considered discourteous in a rugby scrum, while in extreme cases old ladies as fragile as stick insects bellow insults which must make The Haven quiver. + Current fiction is not conspicuously soggy with loving-kindness, and when saints and sinners confront each other there's little doubt which of them has the edge; it isn't virtue triumphant that normally sends writers and publishers whistling to the bank. When the confrontation takes place within a single character, that makes things more difficult. Per Olov Enquist's novel, The Magnetist's Fifth Winter, is a solemnly interesting though baffling book about an early nineteenth-century faith-healer who achieves seemingly miraculous cures through mesmerism, winning hysterical popular acclaim. + Con-man or spiritual revivalist? We are invited to work it out for ourselves. Can this be an early alternative medicine-man, setting himself against the orthodox practitioners of the faded age of enlightenment who were still, after all, clinging to their leeches? by dating him where he does, Enquist seems to be signalling the turn of the rational tide and the beginnings of a more inspirational era. But it's not as straightforward as that; the enigma remains. After some genuine cures, the healer is exposed in a major deception, beaten up and brought to court. So bald an outline gives no idea of the complexity of a novel that probes into all manner of moral and philosophical corners before finally leaving the hero, or anti-hero, in the dock without a verdict. Which seems, I must say, a bit of a Swedish tease. + The Sacred Night, by Tahar Ben Jelloun, a Morocco-born writer working in Paris, is a highly individual novel with a heavily charged Eastern air that seems to beguile and mock with the same perfumed breath. An old woman weighed down by memory sheds the load by telling the story of her life. This she does in a series of episodes which might make her seem a senior Schherazade, were it not that, while shocking, amazing and strange beyond belief, nobody would call these tales entertaining in the usual sense of the word. They are obsessed with method and structure; Ben Jelloun mixes naturalistic scenes with dream and allegory, makes equal citizens of ghosts and humans, builds everything as solidly and theatrically as an expressionistic stage set. The opening is an enchanting mix of the mundane and the other-wordly: a truck-driver breakfasts in a transport cafe on sheep's head and mint tea, a scent of jasmine and sewage and a muezzin shouting into a microphone. + But if this promises ribaldry the reader may be reassured or disappointed. The tone as it settles is solemn to a fault; the storyteller in the market-place laments that the bread is stale, the meat is spoiled and the camel butter is rancid - "as rancid as our times, O passing friends. We tell of life, and the passing vulture looms high." + After two such complex works a plain story, plainly told, can sear the responses as if with a lack of protective clothing. Their Own Kind of War is a novel like that. The First World War has for most people stopped being autobiography and turned into history, though if centuries can have autobiographies it is, and for countless writers will remain, the shaping base of the 20th. + Tom Hart makes an eloquent contribution, all the more telling for its simplicity and freedom from ponderousness. His theme is conscientious objection, at a time when this could demand its own kind of heroism; and the forthright, dolorous tale is almost laconically presented. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +334 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 15, 1989 + +Leading Article: Digging deeper + +LENGTH: 573 words + + + If you're in a hole, the first thing you do is stop digging. But the Health Secretary was still busy with his spade even as the fourth round of talks in the 14-week ambulance dispute broke down yesterday. In a press interview, Mr Kenneth Clarke seemed unbending. There could be no further concessions to the ambulance workers. Under no circumstances would he intervene. Arbitration was ruled out. So was a pay review body, like the one the nurses have. By the end, he was six feet deeper. Today the ambulance workers intend to escalate their action. + A baby, who might possibly have been saved with immediate and expert emergency help, died earlier this week in Hertfordshire before a delayed army ambulance arrived. An 80-year-old man in south London died last week from a heart attack after an army ambulance took two hours to arrive. The army are doing sterling service. There are now over 90 military ambulances trying to bring relief to the dispute. They are handling some 700 calls a day. But the military do not have the same expert training as the professional ambulance crews. These emergency crews have progressed far beyond the rudimentary first aid of an earlier age. They are now able to use highly technical procedures which allow them to resuscitate heart attack patients, replace fluid intraveneously after severe blood loss and maintain air supplies through intubation to unconscious patients. All of this is beyond the reach of the army crews. So, too, are some of the more basic skills needed to handle very elderly patients, people the army don't normally have to cope with. + Yet now a 14-week dispute looks set to stretch into the New Year. No new talks are scheduled. Managers are about to shut up shop for Christmas: a period when, often because of drink, some of the worst road accidents occur. London alone has some 455 ambulance vehicles. Compare that to the 90 military ambulances now covering the entire country. And a bad situation is going to get worse with the threat from the ambulance workers that, from today, they will not receive any calls from central control headquarters. Instead they will only accept calls direct from the public, doctors or police. + To their credit, the ambulance crews have still been providing unpaid emergency cover in many areas. Their anger is understandable. So is their tactic: if the Health Secretary is so intractable, then the heat is going to have to be turned up. But today is too early. Far too few people know the ex-directory station numbers. Twenty-four hours is far too short a period to properly publicise them. The crews should hold their hand. They should remember how much public support they can still command. Only six out of 100 people in the last Gallup poll published earlier this month supported the Government. Some 85 per cent backed the crews. They would be foolish to throw away this crucial support. + The best tactic is to maintain the pressure on Kenneth Clarke. The idea that he cannot intervene is specious. In almost every interview, he contradicts this supposed non-involvement by discussing - and then dismissing - various options: arbitration, review body, more cash. Mr Clarke cannot duck his responsibility. This is not a dispute which can be resolved any longer by managers; only ministers have the power to authorise the compromise that is needed. He should act now before there are further unnecessary deaths. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +335 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 16, 1989 + +The Decade (Villages): Back-to-back to the future - Alan Bennet on life as a museum + +BYLINE: By ALAN BENNETT + +LENGTH: 696 words + + + I read in The Guardian a few weeks ago that the Victorian school at Burley Woodhead in Yorkshire was to be taken down and re-erected in Bradford Museum, where it will be visited by (among others) patients suffering from Alzheimer's Disease, in the hope, presumably, of jogging their memories. This transubstantiation of school comes handily at the end of the decade to remind me of a stage play I wrote as the decade opened and which predicted just that. + This was a play called Enjoy! The title was possibly a mistake (and certainly the exclamation mark) but it was about an old couple who live in one of the last back-to-back in Leeds. The mother's memory is failing and the father is disabled but while he lands up in hospital, the end of the play sees her still happily living in the back-to-back but now lovingly reconstructed in a museum. The fact that one of the social workers who effect this transformation is their long lost son in drag may have had someting to do with the less than ecstatic reception the play received but that apart the whole notion of the play was dismissed as too far-fetched, expressionistic even. A back-to-back in a museum! I was told in future to stick to the particularities of dialogue and niceties of actual social behaviour that I was supposed to be good at. + Of course there were things wrong with the play .. the title, maybe, the drag certainly, particularly since it persuaded some critics that I cherished a shamefaced longing to climb into a twinset and pearls. James Fenton, I was told, even referred to the drag character as "the playwright." Mr Fenton's subsequent abandonment of dramatic criticism to become the Independent's correspondent in the Philippines was one of the more cheering developments in the theatre in the Eighties, though when President Marcos claimed to be a much-misunderstood man I knew how he felt. + However, if only in a spirit of "I told you so," I noted in the course of the Eighties various news items, like the reconstruction of the school at Burley Woodhead, which bore out the central thesis of the play and proved it to have been, though I say it myself, prophetic. For instance there was the creation in 1984 at Park Prewett hospital in Basingstoke of a room furnished as it would have been 40 years ago in order to assist elderly patients in "reminiscence therapy." There was the exhibit, also in 1984 at the Miami Zoo, of Urban Man in his natural habitat, a man in a sitting room in a cage. There was the proposal (later abandoned) to reconstruct part of the Death Railway in Thailand as a tourist attraction. Most pertinent of all (and, of couse, this is the cutting I have lost so you will have to take my word for it) was the devoted reproduction in a museum somewhere in England of the last of the prefabs, with the couple who had lived in it doing a regular stint as curators. + I am long past wringing my hands over this cosiness of thinking there is anything to be done to stop the world turning into Disneyland under one's feet. Nor is there any escape. The village in Yorkshire where I spend all too little of my time now sports one of those DoE brown Heritage signposts declaring it as a "Dales Village" and it's only a matter of time before the inhabitants start playing it up as "Dales Folk." We're fortunate not to be in "Herriot Country" or the temptation to act the part might be even greater. But its toytown now on every hand, dignified and stately barns converted into bijoux residences with bottle glass windows and carriage lamps that bring with them a view of the countryside that is equally folksy. The village shop becomes The Village Shop, the confectioners The Village Bakery; it won't be long before some well-meaning parish council will be employing some of those turfed out of psychiatric hospitals as Village Idiots. + I find this make-believe worse in the North than the South and certainly more offensive. Brutish though London has grown in the last 10 years, it causes less heartache. If you really want to fume and fret go to the country. And, I suppose, Enjoy! + Alan Bennett is currently working on six poetry programmes for Channel 4. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +336 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 16, 1989 + +Hopes grow over compensation for Barlow Clowes investors: As the Parliamentary Ombudsman prepares to report, the government could be about to set aside up to 50 million Pounds + +BYLINE: By DANIEL JOHN + +LENGTH: 805 words + + + Amost 19 months after the collapse of the Barlow Clowes investment group, investors left facing financial ruin appear on the verge of getting some compensation from the government. + The Cabinet has agreed, in principle, to compensate investors. Details remain unknown but it is believed the government could be setting aside as much as 50 million Pounds (pds). + The Barlow Clowes Investors Group reports growing financial hardship, particularly among many thousands of pensioners. + Savings have been wiped out, old people have been forced back into work and homes sold while the affair has dragged on. + Hopes of a pay-out rose this week with expectations that Parliamentary Ombudsman Sir Anthony Barrowclough will rule against the Department of Trade and Industry when he reports next week for its role in licensing Barlow Clowes and allowing it to continue trading despite warnings from several official bodies. + Sources indicate that Sir Anthony, has been heavily critical of the DTI and has recommended that compensation be paid. It is thought ministers will reject Sir Anthony's cirticism, but a decision not to pay may be almost impossible to defend in the light of his recommendations. + While news of compensation will be welcomed by investors, it is the fine print which is most eagerly awaited by them and their legal representatives. + The crucial question remains who will get compensated if the government pays out as expected. Sir Anthony's brief has been to carry out a wide-ranging inquiry into all aspects of the UK operations of Barlow Clowes, a task which has also involved him in the controversy surrounding its overseas sister business, Barlow Clowes International. + The investors' case for total compensation - that is for all 18,000 people involved and not just the 7000 who invested in BCGM - rests largely on the one argument: that if the UK business had not been licenced by the DTI then the international fund could not have credibly operated given the reasons for refusal - even though it did not, technically, come under the department's responsibility. + This point was developed further by the Barlow Clowes Investers Group which, in August this year, prepared a 27-page document supporting its case with factual evidence. + They pointed out that the two funds were linked on the basis that: BCI came from the same parnership (BCP) as Barlow Clowes Gilt Managers; Peter Clowes, the former head of the business, was the principal director of both; both funds dealt in gilts and, perhaps, most importantly both were managed from London and trading in UK securities. + As yet, there is no official acceptance of these points. The Le Quesne inquiry, which was ordered by former Trade Secretary Lord Young to establish the facts of the DTI's role in the affair, proved to be inconclusive. + Sir Godfray Le Quesne's 60 page report devoted just six pages to the international fund and stated, variously, that the DTI did not know of BCI's formation at the time it was incorporated, that the department only became aware of the company in 1986 and that when BCP (the partnership) applied for the renewal of its DTI licence in July 1987 - a year before its collapse - the company declared it had not referred "investment-type business" to BCI. + Of the 100 million pds which may be lost as a result of the collapse, the bulk of the money - around 85 million pds - was held in BCI. It also attracted the highest number of investors, 11,000, on hopes of exceedingly large returns. + If the government does not fully accept linkage, a sizeable proportion of people will not be that much better off. Some hardship has been relieved, in part, by the interim pay-outs made by the Barlow Clowes liquidators. But even here there is controversy. + Because of the complex legal nature of the case revolving around where the money went, which bank accounts it went through and who it actually belongs to, BCIG has actually been forced to take court action blocking payments to BCI investors. The aim is to ensure an across-the-board settlement rather than one which benefits individual investors who could do very well out of highly-accurate tracing claims at the expense of those whose money cannot be found. + With partial compensation, the government may decide to only help the investors in BCGM, who can already confidently expect to recover about 65 p in the pound from the liquidators. + But if it is prepared to set aside as much as 50 million pds, some 20 million pds could be used to increase BCGM investors compensation up to 90 p in the pound, leaving 30 million pds to ease the plight of the Gibralter savers. This could then increase their anticipated 30 p in the pound from the liquidators to 50 p. + The least likely - but best - outcome would be a full payout. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +337 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 16, 1989 + +McCarthy glum as it faces 5m Pounds loss + +BYLINE: By BEN LAURANCE + +LENGTH: 381 words + + + Mr John McCarthy, chairman of Britain's biggest builder of sheltered housing, yesterday tried to pin part of the blame for his company's profits collapse on the greed of offspring of the elderly for whom the homes are designed. + An increasing number of children are pressurising their elderly parents not to sell their houses in order to move into McCarthy & Stone sheltered accommodation, said Mr McCarthy, as he revealed an 80 per cent profits fall. + Offspring wanted parents to hold on to the family home until the market picked up, rather than sell for less than it was worth 18 months ago. + McCarthy & Stone has tried to tackle its financial problems by cutting its staff by two-thirds, as well as by selling undeveloped sites which had been earmarked for new sheltered housing development, and other assets. + Analysts believe the company will lose at least 5 million Pounds (pds) this year. + Profits for the 12 months to August slumped to 7.1 million pds from 34.1 million pds a year earlier. + McCarthy says that in the long-run, its business is bound to grow: the number of Britons aged 75 or over is likely to increase by 4 million between now and early next century. + The latest figures underline the severity of the squeeze on a company such as McCarthy which relies on a bouyant and fast-moving property market. + It sold 1,571 retirement flats in the full year - an average of between four and five a day and down by 40 per cent on the previous 12 months. + The downturn has become even worse in the past three months. McCarthy has sold only 193 sheltered apartments, the equivalent of two a day, which marks a 57 per cent fall. + McCarthy & Stone had nearly 2,000 units completed and ready to be occupied by the end of its financial year, but unsold. A further 1,000 homes were under construction. + The company is forecasting no pick-up in the market before the end of next year. The results came 24 hours after Anglia Secure Homes, which also specialises in retirement housing, announced losses of 4.4 million pds. + McCarthy & Stone's underlying sales downturn in its core business was 24 per cent. Its interest bill rose from 8 million pds to 14.4 million pds. + Yesterday's news left the shares at 106 p, a fall on the day of 5 p. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +338 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 18, 1989 +Correction Appended + +Media: Glasnost adds the gloss - The world turns upside down in Eastern Europe, but that is doing no harm to the publications of Britain's Marxist and Socialist left + +BYLINE: By NIGEL FOUNTAIN + +LENGTH: 1241 words + + + In Soho is a model company of Thatcherite enterprise. The United States takes 40 per cent of its product, while the Japanese market is booming. Its 20 per cent home sales are almost icing on the cake. + But, as editor of the New Left Review, Robin Blackburn won't be getting a Queen's Award. The journal has for three decades been the main home of Marxist theory in Britain, selling an upmarket 9,000 copies bi-monthly. Alongisde it is its sister company Verso, probably London's leading left publishing house. + "Margaret Thatcher has done her best to strangle us by maintaining an artificial exchange rate for the pound," observes Blackburn, "but we are one of the few exporters to have survived all this." + Glasnost and perestroika have done no harm to the NLR, or indeed to the other main periodicals of the tiny but tenacious Socialist and Marxist left. "Sales of stuff on Eastern Europe just sells out like that," adds Blackburn. + The last decade of Thatcherism has squeezed dry some of the more exotic revolutionary currents. Amongst the survivors there is a reappraisal, coupled with an acceptance, that the changes in the East are positive. None would say that the 1989 revolutions have hit sales, indeed they would echo Blackburn's views on the insatiability of demand for analysis on the phenomenon. + But after that, paths diverge. For magazines located around the Labour Party the East can be a new opening for democratic socialism; for Britain's Euro-Communists, the elderly Leninist baby is likely to follow the Stalinist bathwater down the plug-hole; for Trotskyites, the upheavals confirm their diagnosis of Stalinism, and open the path for real Leninism, socialism - and revolution. + There are exceptions, a few unreconstructed Stalinists, and those with ideological guidance systems taking them so far into deep space that terra firma won't reappear much before Sirius B. For a few, even, Gorbachev is Trotsky's heir. + With a 35,000 weekly sale the New Statesman and Society leads on circulation. Sales have climbed by around 10,000 since Stuart Weir took over as editor. But years of rundown and the closure of its distribution company has left it urgently searching for new backing. Robert Holmes a Court, a potential if unlikely saviour, lost interest after looking at the books. Meanwhile Weir emphasises the magazine's pitch towards cultural politics, targeted at the under-35s regarded by most editors as the key market. In its wake come a gaggle of bi-monthlies, monthlies and weeklies. The Labour Party/Fabian Society's New Socialist began the decade as a brand leader, with bi-monthly sales topping 30,000. Now after (resolved) clashes with the Labour leadership, fluctuations in design, location and direction, retiring editor John Willman reckons the magazine is reviving, albeit on a 10,000 circulation. Tribune, also a frequent subject of death-threats, has stabilised, following the installation of a two-year trade union-financed life support system. But the editor, Phil Kelly, concedes that the Labour Party's "parish magazine" isn't booming on 8,000 sales. + On the far left, where attrition has been high, the strong runners are the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and the smaller Revolutionary Communist Party. The SWP focuses on its 16,000-selling weekly Socialist Worker. Its monthly, Socialist Worker Review, sells 6,000. + The RCP has pushed its monthly Living Marxism hard, with W H Smith's distribution since February. That, plus street sales, leads editor Keith Flett to claim a 20,000 sale. The RCP's brand of Leninism makes them elusive. A visit to Flett's annonymous headquarters was ruled out on "security" grounds, so we settled for a Soho tea-room. The RCP is no friend of the Communist Party of Great Britain, or its monthly, Marxism Today, but Flett concedes that the latter's success in getting into W H Smith in the early 1980s eased Living Marxism's path. + Under editor Martin Jacques, Marxism Today it has been left publishing's + success story. "He's the best editor on the Left," says John Willman. Over + at its offices deputy editor Jane Taylor rehearses the familiar epithets + directed at the product; yuppies, designer Marxists, Champagne Socialists + .. "Marxism Today has been virtually alone in trying to regenerate some + form of critical political debate," she says. + The result has been mainstream media attention, despite a still modest 16,000 sale. But not everyone is happy. Disgruntled CPGB members cite the magazine's iconoclasm as a factor in the party's decline. Blackburn suggests that Marxism Today has sometimes taken discussions initiated in the NLR - which he welcomes - and extracted the sting. For Socialist Worker Review's Lindsey German, Marxism Today's politics, and the Eastern European events are two - welcome - sides of the collapsing edifice of Stalinism. + "Before anyone else Marxism Today realised that the Left doesn't have to be drab," says John Willman. "And it has some good writers - Eric Hobsbawm and Charlie Leadbetter are miles ahead of the field." + And the bad news? "The content is terribly general. Their 'the Left's washed up, the Right has history going for it' broad sweep of argument makes people very depressed about what the chances are. It's fine writing about how 'distant' the health service is, we can all write that, but what are we actually going to bloody well do about it?" + So what's the Labour left been doing? asks Taylor. "For the last 18 months we have been more descriptive/analytical and the magazine isn't yet at a stage where it is heavily prescriptive. The radical right was prescient in seeing the possible dynamism of a right programme. But that isn't Marxism Today's fault. But we do need to do more about revealing what socialism has to offer people who are on the losing side." + What do the magazines have to offer? For Weir's Statesman the argument is for "a new politics of radical democracy, which sets people free." Blackburn stresses links with "the new type of left activism emerging in Eastern Europe" and cautions against "the wave of democracy ending up in a market-Stalinist dead end." Kelly aims to mix "unfashionable collectivism" with a "suspicion of the state" and provide a place for activists and "future cabinet members" to float ideas. New Socialist works on a 1990s agenda, and outside the direct Labour orbit the Socialist Society plans a spring relaunch for its Catalyst into "the real space for socialism." + For most of the editors, Leninism, always unappealing, is now stone dead. For them the survival of far left magazines remains inevitable - and irrelevant. + Blackburn demurs, noting the big attendance of "Thatcher's Children" at SWP gatherings, contrasted with the smaller, older crowds that Marxism Today pulls in. Such recruits that the SWP and RCP attract burn out fast, charges Taylor, but German says that older people are coming in too. Both she and Flett argue that behind the CPGB journal is an organisation too weak to move in on Marxism Today's success, and without the politics to do so, if we move into an era of "Labour reformism without reform." + While, out east, the world turns upside down, in London cash flows and saleable cover images preoccupy many leftist journalists. Looking back at the Statesman's booming ssles and talent in the mid-1960s, Weir admits to some bewilderment. "What on earth happened?" + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: December 19, 1989 + +CORRECTION: + The editor of Living Marxism is Mick Hume and not, as stated in Media Guardian, Keith Flett. + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +339 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 20, 1989 + +The Day in Politics in Brief + +LENGTH: 266 words + + + A private member's bill to introduce payment for Crown servants who were exposed to radiation during nuclear weapons tests and have since contracted leukaemia and other cancers, and to the dependants of those who have died, was presented to the Commons by Mr Bob Clay (Lab Sunderland N). Mr Clay drew eighth in the ballot for private member's bills, but with only seven Fridays available for second readings has limited chances of seeing his bill made law. + The Social Fund budget is to be increased by 3 million Pounds (pds) to increase allocations to 100 offices where applications have been higher than expected, Mr Tony Newton, Social Security Secretary, announced in a written answer. Mr Newton also announced that the amount of savings elderly people may have before cold weather payments are reduced will be increased to 1,000 pds. + Subsidies totalling 11.6 million pds will be paid next year towards essential ferry and coastal shipping in the Northern and Western Isles of Scotland, Mr Malcolm Rifkind, Scottish Secretary, told Sir Hector Monro (C Dumfries & Galloway) in a written answer. + Final allocation of water shares were 46.875 per cent to the public; 39.25 per cent to institutions and 13.875 per cent to overseas investors, Mr Michael Howard, water minister told Mr Graham Allen (Lab Nottingham N) in a written answer. + Today's Business House of Commons: Scottish questions; Christmas adjournment debate; Consolidated Fund Bill - all night session of short backbench debates. House of Lords: Debate on international action to protect the environment. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +340 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 22, 1989 + +Three die in salmonella outbreak + +BYLINE: By TOM SHARRATT and JAMES ERLICHMAN + +LENGTH: 376 words + + + Three elderly women patients have died after contracting salmonella at an Oldham hospital, it was disclosed yesterday. + Another five were said to be "very poorly" after being transferred to a hospital specialising in infectious diseases. + A total of 10 women patients and a nurse in the geriatric ward of the Royal Oldham Hospital in Greater Manchester have been infected by the disease since the first case was diagnosed last Thursday. + Admissions to the 17-bed ward have been halted and nurses have been ordered to wear special disposable gowns in hopes of preventing the infection spreading throughout the 1,000 bed hospital. + Investigations have so far failed to identify the cause of the infection. + Mr Peter Shrigley, general manager of Oldham health athority said: "There is nothing to suggest any connection between hospital catering and this outbreak. Inquiries are being pursued to try to identify possible sources and part of that is obviously to eliminate the possibility of food." + Hospital sources said yesterday that the Royal Oldham was not using the controversial "cook-chill" method which permits food to be cooked elsewhere, quick chilled, and then re-heated by microwave on the ward. + Food poisoning bacteria can multiply rapidly when stringent controls on temperature and shelf life are ignored. + Mr Shrigley said that two of the infected women had died from the serious illnesses which caused their admission. + The death of the third woman, however, might have been hastened by the additional complication of salmonella, he said. + The five women described as "very poorly" have been transferred to the Regional Infectious Diseases Unit at Monsall Hospital in Manchester. + The worst modern outbreak of salmonella in a hospital happened in 1984 at the Stanley Royd Psychiatric Hospital in Wakefield when 19 patients died and another 355 patients and 106 members of staff were affected by a strain of salmonella typhimurium. + An inquiry concluded that cold rare beef, previously contaminated by chicken and left to stand too long, was the source of the outbreak. + Crown immunity, then in force, has since been removed from hospitals allowing them to be prosecuted under food hygiene regulations. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +341 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 22, 1989 + +Arts: Irma La Douce + +BYLINE: By ALLEN SADLER + +LENGTH: 347 words + +DATELINE: TAUNTON + + + Taunton's Brewhouse Theatre continues its Christmas tradition of shows that have nothing to do with Christmas with the opening of the Century's tour of Irma La Douce. Touring reduces a full-scale dancing and singing show to a chamber musical and is an ambitious venture. Century engage actors who are also musicians. It is entertaing to see a group of loushe Parisian types forming a street band or filling in for cabaret. + Bob Eaton has many bright ideas for direction, but the show lacks a really winning song. There are lots of bright and witty numbers but The Language of Love is the nearest to a heart-schmaltzy ballad and it isn't very convincing. + Irma La Douce is a musical based on the farce mechanism, with a cast of Damon Runyon characters, transferred from Brooklyn to the Pagally. Irma, a prostitute and a really nice girl, falls for Nestor, a young law student, who is jealous of her clients. Nestor invents an elderly admirer, who can pay enough for Irma to dispense with other clients. The elderly admirer is Nestor himself in a false beard and Irma, who is clearly short sighted as well as dim and really nice, hardly notices the difference. + Nestor gets jealous of his other self and stages a killing of his rival, for which he is arrested and convicted. Well, a law student might have spotted that a man cannot be convicted without the dead body being around. Elementary. But this ruse gives a chance for Nestor and the gallery of small time crooks and pimps to be transported to Devil's Island, an escape on a raft in a storm and end up at the North Pole for a sequence with a dancing penguin and a polar bear, to give the show a Christmas gloss. + Shelley Willetts plays Irma like a grubby angel. She gives a wistful version of the title song, but her Irma is more East-Enders than Montmatre. Wayne Morris is very active as Nestor and surely has a career in regular farce. Irma La Douce is lightweight entertainment, held down by the off hand commentary of Liz Spenz as the owner of the back street cafe where the plot keeps boiling over. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +342 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 22, 1989 + +Troops battle demonstrators in Bucharest + +BYLINE: By Our Foreign Staff + +LENGTH: 531 words + + + The centre of Bucharest resembled a war zone yesterday, according to accounts from East European news agencies and diplomats in the Romanian capital. + Helicopters hovered overhead and automatic weapons could be heard, the reports said. Police cars and ambulances surrounded the area. + Thousands of demonstrators in the centre of Bucharest "are surrounded by Romanian army soldiers, special troops armed with truncheons and plastic shields and security forces," the Soviet news agency, Tass, reported. + "Choppers are patrolling over the city," Tass added. + Military tanks rolled through the capital and formed a circle around several thousand, mostly young people at a main intersection, according to a Yugoslav journalist who reported deaths and injuries. + Earlier in the day, the correspondent of the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug reported from Bucharest that armoured vehicles ran over students, while police sprayed crowds chanting "Down with Ceausescu" and "Down with the killers" with automatic weapons fire during demonstrations that erupted at a government-organised rally in support of President Ceausescu. + Journalists from Eastern European news agencies provided graphic eyewitness accounts through the day of the slaughter on the streets of the capital, which remains closed to the eyes of the Western media. + "Tanjug's Bucharest correspondent, Peter Tomic, witnessed armoured vehicles running over students, while police shot at everything that moved," the agency reported. + Tass confirmed the report, saying that demonstrators were killed when armoured personnel carriers ran them over. Security forces attacked protesters with automatic gunfire when they tried to rescue them, it added. + "When the group of witnesses rushed to pull those injured from under the wheels of the armoured personnel carrier, they were fired on by automatic weapons," Tass reported. + Tanjug said demonstrators outside Bucharest's Intercontinental Hotel tore up pictures of President Ceausescu and sang an old nationalist song, "Wake up Romania." + "Several thousand people, mostly pupils and students, found themselves surrounded by police and tanks," the agency added. "Police began firing on the trapped mass of people. Eyewitnesses said many were wounded and probably dead." + "Police first fired teargas and then opened fire," Tanjug went on. "The policemen were armed with automatic rifles and protected by helmets and shields." + It said some demonstrators held small children over their heads. "Today in Bucharest there was a repeat of Timisoara (scene of last week's massacre of demonstrators)," Tanjug said. + Tass's correspondent in Bucharest said people were hiding in doorways, while others chanted "Freedom" and "Down with the dictatorship." + "Along the central street of the capital, tanks are moving, following the lines of submachinegunners pushing back the crowds. Bursts of automatic weapons fire are being heard. Panic-stricken people are hiding in doorways and courtyards." + The Bulgarian BTA news agency said that, during the brief period when shooting stopped, elderly people appealed to members of the security forces not to shoot. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +343 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 23, 1989 + +Property: Aunty Lou's war - The problems of providing suitable housing for the elderly and disabled + +BYLINE: By DAVID LAWSON + +LENGTH: 929 words + + + Aunty Lou was as stubborn as a mule. She impressed on me at an early age how determined the elderly can be, steadfastly refusing to move in with the family even though she was disabled and frail. She valued familiarity with her crumbling little house more than breakfast in bed. And she worried who would take care of her even older friend next door. + It is now a national problem as crucial decisions loom about how to cope with an extra 600,000 elderly people by the end of the century - most of them widows over 85. + Many are happy to move, and more than 13 million local authority sheltered homes have been built for them in England alone. But suitable housing is becoming harder to find as spending levels are slashed. Last month's decision to extend the right of purchase to tenants of non-sheltered homes suitable for the elderly will make things worse. + Housing associations have struggled to plug the gap with another five million purpose-built homes but the burden is being increasingly shifted on to private developers who have taken in more than 50,000 elderly people over the last five years. + Soaring property prices brought profits on ordinary family homes for the elderly to pay for these private schemes. But just when needs are becoming acute, these developers have faltered in the face of stubbornness from the government and a thousand Aunty Lous. + McCarthy & Stone and Anglia Secure, the two largest specialist builders, are heading for losses and have slashed output. Both insist that business will revive in a couple of years through the sheer pressure of demand from an ageing population but a big gap is opening as building sites stand empty and sheltered homes are sold to ordinary buyers. Half the 8,000 sheltered homes built this year are standing empty. + The government's stubborn insistence on high interest rates has deterred buyers from purchasing the family homes the elderly must sell to pay for special accommodation. And many a last-time buyer is showing rock-like determination not to compromise by cutting prices to attract a sale, even though builders have slashed theirs by up to 15 per cent. + Developers are trying every trick in the book to attract business, including chainbreaking, shared ownership, restrictions on service charges, price discounts and annuity income schemes. + Anglia, whose sales almost halved to 455 in 1989, sees some chinks of light. More than 250 potential buyers have reserved new homes - providing their own can be sold through the new chainbreaking scheme. Another 37 are still classed as 'soft' reservations because they refuse to cut asking prices for their homes. + 'But we will win them round to the reality of the situation,' says Anglia chairman Peter Edmondson. I just hope there is no-one on the list related to Aunty Lou. + Thoughts are aimed beyond what builders see as a temporary slump, however. New problems will arise as current buyers age further into frailty and need extra nursing and Anglia is trying out a more comprehensive service to meet these needs. The scheme ranges from a morning check, meals and laundry for a fee of 90 Pounds (pds) a week, through more intensive medical care costing 140 pds, to full nursing home accommodation for 300 pds a week. + This reflects a drift towards catering for the better-off elderly as builders find more attraction in expensive homes than the ubiquitous single-bed flats in blocks served by wardens, dayrooms and other communal facilities. Anglia's average prices are 80,000 pds. 'Buyers still average 74-plus but they are wealthier and are looking for better quality accommodation and services,' says Edmondson. + Edmondson points out that sheltered housing specialists can sell services to local authorities forced to farm out welfare activities by the proposed revolution in communuty health care. He plans a network of nursing agencies for people who remain in their own homes or are restricted to rented accommodation. Anglia is already marketing the 24-hour emergency call-out system common in warden-assisted housing. McCarthy & Stone has similar plans, although it was forced to reduce the breadth of service by selling loss-making nursing homes to BUPA. + The government is pressing local councils to farm out home-care services, following an investigation by Prof Anthea Tinker of King's College, London. She found many an Aunty Low wanting to remain at home, and that this solution was cheaper than sheltered or nursing home accommodation. But the economics takes little account of the need to care for homes as well as the occupants. + The elderly live in some of the nation's poorest housing and Age Concern is worried about the future of a network of voluntary 'care and repair' agencies which could lose their grants after yet another university study comes out in the new year. + Peverel, McCarthy & Stone's management arm, says the private sector can help here as well. It is linking with the finance group Home For Life to look after elderly people who sell their homes for a lump sum and annuity rather than moving into sheltered accommodation. + The service involves both health and property care but both Age Concern and the Bristol researchers are sceptical about the scope for the elderly to tap the capital tied up in their homes. They point to problems of high interest charges and the wish to bequeath property to children. + 'Some will have considerable wealth tied up in their property but there are many obstacles to overcome in making use of it,' concludes the Bristol study. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +344 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 23, 1989 + +Salmonella in ward spreads + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL MORRIS + +LENGTH: 412 words + + + The number of cases of salmonella has risen to 14 at a hospital ward in Oldham, Lancashire, where three elderly women have already died, it was disclosed yesterday. + The total has risen by three since Thursday when 10 women patients and a nurse in the geriatric ward had been infected by the disease. The first case was diagnosed nine days ago. + Mr Peter Shrigley, general manager of the Oldham health authority, said that investigations pointed to the infection having been brought into the ward rather than originating in the hospital. + Dr Dennis Jones, director of the public health laboratory in Manchester, said that if there had been a problem with the hospital the disease would have been found in other wards. + He suggested that the infection might have been caused by a visitor bringing in contaminated food. 'By the time you investigate the evidence has gone,' he added. 'But the sort of outbreak it is, means it is not hospital food. And it cannot be so because there would be a lot more patients affected.' Five of the patients have been transferred to an isolation hospital. + Dennis Johnson adds: Five people have died from meningitis in new 'clusters' of the disease across the west country during the past month. A total of 24 cases has been reported, though health officials were unable to say whether the disease was of the same strain which caused deaths and illness in the Stroud area of Gloucestershire in the mid-eighties. + In Plymouth there have been eight cases and three deaths - an 18-month baby boy, an 18-year-old youth, and a 40-year-old man. In Avon, there have been 11 cases, with two teenagers dying, Mark Taylor, aged 15, and Sorab al-Masri, aged 17, both from Bath. The Gloucester area has had five cases. + The South-west regional health authority said the cases did not appear to be connected and they were still testing to identify the precise strain. + In the past few years, incidence of the disease nationally appeared to have been declining slightly, with 1,001 cases up to December 1, this year, compared with 1,189 in 1987. + The flu epidemic is past its peak, the Royal College of General Practitioners said. During the week ending December 19, the number of cases dropped to 260 per 100,000 from 290 per 100,000 the previous week, while those with flu-like symptoms fell 'substantially' from 260 to 208 per 100,000. + There were 102 deaths from flu-related illnesses in the first week of December. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +345 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 27, 1989 + +Leading Article: The need to take care seriously + +LENGTH: 403 words + + + So was grannie on her own at Christmas? Contrary to popular myth, probably not. Just as they do for the rest of the year, families would have been looking after the majority of dependent elderly grandparents this week. These invisible carers now number over six million. Without them, there would be little community care. They provide the bulk of help for the growing number of dependent people. A survey of 75-year-olds for Age Comcern found three-quarters of those with surviving children were visited every week, two out of six more frequently. One out of six lived in the same building as their children. + Tey there are three reasons why society is right to be concerned by the needs of ther elderly. Firstly, many have no children to help them - over 40 per cent of elderly women are members of a generation whose plans were shattered by the first World War. Secondly, because the total numbers are so large, small proportions will add up to many people. There are 10 million retired people; three million live on their own. The third cause for concern is demograghic: the increase in the number of elderly and the reduction in those available to provide help. If child care was the issue of the 1980s, care of the elderly will be the issue of the 1990s. + Meanwhile, the carers are changing. Of adult carers identfied in the most recent survey, 3.5 million were women but 2.5 million were men. Their burden will grow. Neither the reconstructed Health Service nor over-stretched social services will be able to cope. The response has to be at many levels. Technology should allow more elderly people to shop and bank from home and improve emergency alert services. Companies will have to follow IBM's lead in providing more support for employees who have care burdens. Local councils and voluntary organisations will need to provide more relief services for over-burdened carers. Most crucial, HMG will need to reassess its health and social service plans. The NHS reorganisation poses threats to the elderly including the demotion of geriatrics, removal of some essential services to distant hospitals and increased difficulties in coordinating health and social services on hospital discharges. The Government has provided sufficient protection to the community care budget to ensure funds do not leak into other services. Until it does so, the elderly connot look forward to a happy new year. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +346 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 28, 1989 + +Rebirth of Romania: Life returns to normal in birthplace of the revolution + +BYLINE: By BARNEY PETROVIC + +LENGTH: 196 words + +DATELINE: TIMISOARA + + + As mothers took their babies out in prams for a drive in the December sunshine, Timisoara yesterday seemed far removed from what has been the worst fighting seen by Europe in its post-war history. + People rushed out to carry away paper bags full with more food than they had seen for decades. And old age pensioners gathered in front of Christmas trees in the city centre, free for the first time to criticise both the old and the new authorities. + Unlike Christmas elsewhere in Europe, however, army patrols are all over this town of 300,000 people in western Romania, where the spark that toppled Ceausescu was ignited. + Tanks stood with guns pointing over the crowds in the streets and toward the newly-renamed Victory Square in front of the bullet-scarred Opera House. All crossroads and public buildings were under guard. + 'The struggle is not over, this is just the beginning,' said one resident. But most people seemed unaware of the negotiations in Bucharest over the new government and were happy just to walk around, even though last night shooting was still being heard at intervals. The resident warned: 'You'd better get away to be safe.' + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +347 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 28, 1989 + +New technology strains alarm insurers: Employers likely to be forced into radical changes in working practices to avert RSI epidemic + +BYLINE: By LISA BUCKINGHAM and SIMON BEAVIS + +LENGTH: 705 words + + + Radical changes in working practices are likely to be forced on employers whose staff are considered at risk from repetitive strain injury (RSI) by insurance companies, which are preparing for a huge increase in claims in the 1990s. + Employees using computer keyboards are particularly susceptible through the repeated hand movements involved. Although insurers are coy about revealing details of RSI claims, they consider the problem so severe that they are sending accident surveyors to alert employers. In some cases, the insurers are recommending changes in the working environment to reduce the risk. + It is estimated that RSI accounts for 1 per cent of the 370 million Pounds (pds) a year paid by employers and their insurers for industrial injuries, and nearly 2 per cent of all cases. However, it is clear that RSI is becoming much more costly. + Claims for this form of industrial injury have been averaging well under 10,000 pds. But a recent Midland Bank case involved a 45,000 pds compensation award for a keyboard operator. + Unions are trying to improve the level of awards. The National Union of Journalists is considering a 'representative' action centred on an individual case at the Financial Times, which has been particularly severely affected. + Insurers are concerned that RSI may follow the claims experienced for other industrial injuries such as deafness. Traditionally, the level of compensation starts low but accelerates rapidly once a condition is widely recognised. + One of the reasons that claims are so low is that only two forms of RSI are recognised by the Government as 'prescribed' workplace injuries - meaning only some sufferers can claim disability benefit. Efforts are expected to widen the recognised categories of RSI. + Employees in Britain, unlike those in Australia, which like Japan has suffered an RSI epidemic, are forced to prove they are suffering from a work-related injury and that effectively their employer realised the risk and was negligent. + Australian law allows for no-fault compensation whereby an employee can be compensated without lengthy proceedings to prove negligence. Renewed demands for no-fault compensation are likely in Britain. At present, most RSI sufferers are women - they tend to do the jobs which are most vulnerable to the injury and least protected by employment rights. + They have also tended to be the least vocal. However, with the fall in young workers, more older women are likely to be required to fill jobs, particularly in high-risk areas such as keyboard operation and check-out work. + The Health and Safety Executive is understood to be planning a large research project into RSI and an ageing workforce in the coming year. + Two studies have just been completed for the executive by the university of Birmingham and Edinburgh. The first, looking into workplaces - which was hampered by a lack of co-operation from employers - and the second, looking at sufferers being treated for the condition. + Executive guidelines to be published next month are likely to recommend steps employers can take to prevent RSI, followed by further advice for specific industries. + The emphasis is that companies can avoid RSI if the right preventative steps are taken, saving them money and increasing productivity. For example, there were nearly 4,000 reported cases of RSI at Telecom Australia between 1981 and 1985. This cost the company A Dollars 15 million in lost time and medical costs alone. Susceptibility to RSI varies, but key elements in the growth of the condition are thought to be the increased speed at which some people are forced to work, the design of the equipment, job stress, and working patterns. + RSI has been around for years - familiar in the weaving, printing and poultry industries, for instance - but the introduction of new technology into more 'middle class' environments (not least journalism) has raised its profile and provoked more claims. Traditionally, people suffered in silence. As with the emergence of any industrial injury, sufferers are confronted with the vested interest of the Government, employers or insurance companies not to recognise the problem in its broadest terms. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +348 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 30, 1989 + +A Country Diary + +BYLINE: By AUDREY INSCH + +LENGTH: 305 words + +DATELINE: HAYES COMMON + + + In the London area this common is unusual because it is a wood. The trees are a deciduous mixture with oak predominating - December is a good time to see trees, like going to the life class of art class. 'They bear the weight of sky and clouds upon the fountain of their veins.' Recently they've also carried the strength of high gusting winds. Top, slender branches churn around before them. The trunk picks up the power and starts to sway backwards, then, as the gust diminishes, forwards. When the wind dies down the trees stand apparently immovable. The rain has returned so that areas of grassland are glowing with an Irish beauty. The leaf litter is soggy. Everything looks more alert, but the wild life is quiet apart from the numerous squirrels chasing up and down trees, growling and chattering or hurling themselves from one tree to another, glowing in their silvery grey winter fur. One stopped to take a good look at me. Sitting on its hind legs, his hands (you might say) clapsed over his stomach he looked ready to audition for a Beatrix Potter pantomime. As it is on top of a hill the air here is always exhilarating. Nowadays an outing to Hayes Common from the centre of London would probably be ridiculed yet when the railway opened in 1882 it became very popular for a day's outing. No wonder. It was the site of Hayes Fair which in 1804 had boasted of amusements such as: 'A Match at Grimace or Grinning through a Horse Collar. A Match at eating Hot Hasty Pudding, by Boys. A Match at drinking Hot Tea, by Elderly Ladies. As Ass Race .. with various other amusements.' The hazards which might gather around such high spirits were also recognised: 'No Ladies permitted to enter the Prize Lists who may appear to have drunk too freely of Strong Waters.' This seems a suitable end to my diary year! + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +349 of 349 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 30, 1989 + +Money: Now wives and Woopies can look forward to a happy New Year + +BYLINE: By MARGARET HUGHES + +LENGTH: 692 words + + + The past decade has proved just how fool-hardy it would be to gaze into the crystal ball and confidently predict what lies ahead in the next 10 years. But it is possible to make a few predictions for 1990. + Next year will certainly be a time for married women although their husbands will also be able to benefit from the personal tax changes which come into force on April 6. This is the date which will see the taxman treat a married woman as a person in her own right. + She will be taxed independently of her husband, allowed to complete her own tax return and pay her own tax. She will also have her own tax allowance, be entitled to her own standard rate band and have her own capital gains tax exemption. + Apart from bestowing long overdue financial independence on married women, the changes also offer couples the chance of substantial tax savings. Non-working wives with incomes from savings or investment will be among the main beneficiaries as they will be able to receive tax free income or interest equivalent to their personal allowance. But to get the full benefit of the new tax regime these married women will need to look for investments that pay interest gross. That will tend to be offshore as banks and building societies in this country have to deduct tax at source. + But as the deadline approaches look out for new products, such as cash unit trusts paying interest gross, as the banks and building societies battle to hang on to those deposits. + This will also be the year when Woopies - well off older people - get a tax break. For April 6 is also the day when the over 60s will be eligible for tax relief on the premiums they pay for private medical insurance. Although primarily part of the government's plans for reducing dependence on the National Health Service, the main beneficiaries will be the Woopies since it is they who can afford private health insurance in the first place. + At the other end of the age range employees who have not taken advantage of the incentives to contract out of the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS) should do so before they dwindle away altogether. If you're not one of the 3.5 million who have already contracted out you will have lost out on the chance to back date for up to two years the National Insurance Contributions rebate plus the extra 2 per cent 'bribe'. + Meanwhile, 1990 will again be a year when we will have to live with high interest rates. And that will mean resisting those tempting offers from lenders designed to encourage us to take on more debt by making the initial costs appear cheaper, but which store up trouble for the future. + It will also pay to weed out credit cards which either charge high interest rates or an annual fee, unless combined with an especially low rate of interest. + And if retailers do indeed start charging less for cash purchases than for those bought on credit cards, ensure that this is precisely what they are doing and not merely surcharging credit card users. + On the other hand there will be a greater onus to shop around for the best home for whatever spare cash you may have. Despite the government's bail-out of investors, the Barlow Clowes scandal should have shown the value of placing funds in safe hands. Then it will be a matter of finding the best returns, taking advantage of the already fierce competition between banks and building societies. And as this competition intensifies we should become more demanding so that we actually get the kind of services and products we want. + We should park a little of our funds in those societies either tipped to convert to a public company or ripe for takeover to benefit from any freebies that may be on offer. + The stock market is unlikely to have much allure for the small investor although the start of the electricity privatisation may provide a temporary fillip. What equity investment there is will be best placed in the regular savings schemes offered by unit trust and investment trust schemes with higher rate tax payers using the tax shelter of PEPs. And Europe, rather than green, is likely to be the flavour of 1990. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 2000 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited + diff --git a/TestFiles/GUARDIAN 1993.txt b/TestFiles/GUARDIAN 1993.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9d0e77c --- /dev/null +++ b/TestFiles/GUARDIAN 1993.txt @@ -0,0 +1,13811 @@ + + +1 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 4, 1993 + +NORTH SEA NIGHT OF HORROR 40 YEARS AGO LIVES ON IN MEMORY OF FLOOD SURVIVORS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 4 + +LENGTH: 639 words + + + FORTY years ago this month, the North Sea swept across the sea defences of eastern England killing 307 people and flooding dozens of town and villages in the worst peace-time disaster in living memory. + In Holland, more than 1,400 people lost their lives and large areas of the country were devastated. + At sea, 128 people were lost when a ferry, the Princess Victoria, sank. Two trawlers and their crews disappeared, the frigate Berkley Castle capsized in Sheerness docks, and hundreds of fishing and pleasure boats were damaged or destroyed in harbour. + The horrors of the night of January 31, 1953, are etched in the memory of those who lived through it. Mike Child, now a National Rivers Authority flood defence engineer, was seven when a tidal wave ran through King's Lynn in Norfolk. + "We heard a lot of banging and shouting down the street, it was the only warning. My parents moved us all upstairs, then the lights went out. My father went out to get some sand bags, and he did not come back. + "The water was rushing in. We sat at the top of the stairs watching by candlelight as it rose up the stairs step by step." + Mr Child cannot remember how many hours he sat there huddled with his family before he was rescued, and reunited with his father. He can recall that troops came to mend the breaches in the sea wall, his bike was badly rusted by the salt water, and the garden was full of dead fish. Fifteen elderly people were drowned in King's Lynn, and 1,000 had to be evacuated. That night of disaster was caused by the combination of a 113 mph wind in the North Sea, the highest then recorded, and a spring tide that piled up the water and overwhelmed the sea defences. + Nowhere on the East Coast escaped. Apart from King's Lynn, 55 people were drowned in the Norfolk villages of Hunstanton, Snettisham and Heacham when the sea came over the wall and swept away bungalows on the sea front. Among the dead were 15 American servicemen from a nearby airbase. At Great Yarmouth, only six died but the sea poured through breaches in the wall leaving 1,000 homes under water. + In Essex Canvey Island was submerged and 58 people drowned, most of them bungalow dwellers. Many people managed to climb onto the roofs of their homes, and were rescued by a fleet of boats assembled by servicemen and civilian volunteers. In all, 13,000 people were evacuated. + In places where the surge did not carry the sea over the defences, huge waves driven by howling winds hammered the concrete walls to pieces. At Jaywick Sands near Clacton, the promenade and holiday bungalows sheltering behind it were demolished, leaving 21 dead. + In Suffolk, 28 drowned, including nine children, when the Orwell burst its banks at Felixstowe. Lincolnshire had 50 miles of sea defences damaged or swept away. Mablethorpe and Sutton-on-Sea were completely flooded, with water 20 feet deep in places, and 30 were drowned. The floods penetrated four miles inland, drowning many farm animals. + In the first desperate days after the disaster 14,000 troops were mobilised to repair the sea defences. Thousands more joined Red Cross, St John Ambulance, Womens Royal Voluntary Service and civilian volunteers in rescue work, evacuation and feeding and sheltering the homeless. With rationing then in force, evacuees were given emergency cards to replace those lost in the flood, and adults got a lodging allowance of 10s 6d a week, with 5s 6d for children. + In total 1,200 breaches of the sea wall were recorded. Five million sandbags were airlifted from Europe to repair defences. A disaster fund distributed clothing, linoleum and furniture. + The RSPCA rescued 10,390 animals including "527 dogs, 372 cats, 229 tame rabbits, 5,000 tame mice, three ferrets, five tortoises still in their winter sleep and a monkey". + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +2 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 5, 1993 + +MAN, 80, FOUND BEATEN TO DEATH + +BYLINE: MARTIN WAINWRIGHT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 100 words + + + POLICE conducted house-to-house interviews in a North Yorkshire fishing village yesterday, after a man aged 80 was found bludgeoned to death in his bungalow. Percy Noble, a retired cattle market foreman who had lived alone for 20 years in Sleights, near Whitby, was "beaten with a blunt instrument in a vicious and cowardly attack," said Det Supt George Chadwick. "This may have been a burglary which went wrong." + Mr Noble was last seen on Saturday by a neighbour. A warden for the group of elderly people's bungalows called police on Sunday after finding his spectacles on his back path. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +3 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 5, 1993 + +LEADING ARTICLE: THE GRIM LESSON OF THE LION'S CAGE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 16 + +LENGTH: 536 words + + + DOES it really need a lion to make us take mental illness seriously? It is now five days since Ben Silcock, a schizophrenic, was seriously mauled after climbing into the lion cage at London Zoo. That case still dominates the news. Understandably. Yet, with the exception of the most recent chapter, his story will be all too familiar to families caring for mentally ill members: a despairing saga of revolving hospital doors, inadequate community support, homelessness, a cycle of doctors delivering different diagnoses -plus, in the case of schizophrenia, the further burden of dealing with a disease with no known cause or cure. + No one can accuse Virginia Bottomley of inaction. By Saturday the minister had told the Press Association of her "urgent wish" to see "a shake-up of the Mental Health Act" - with a readiness to examine a new compulsory treatment order for patients in the community refusing to continue with medication. Compulsory treatment at present can only take place in hospitals. Since Saturday, Mrs Bottomley has been media omnipresent. A succession of mental health pressure groups was called to Whitehall yesterday as officials proceeded with the Health Secretary's urgent review of the 1983 Act. + Time for a pause. There is nothing more dangerous than policy-making on the hoof. All ministers are prone to it, particularly in a parliamentary recess. Individual incidents achieve a momentum of their own. Before she does anything else, Mrs Bottomley should follow her own New Year's Day advice. In a Daily Telegraph interview, she specifically declared that she did not "shoot from the hip". She liked to think "hard and long before taking decisions". Precisely what's not happening in the Silcock case. + Ben Silcock was not refusing his medication. Quite the opposite. He had turned to hospitals for treatment, but been refused. There is a small group of patients in the community failing to take prescribed medication, but this is a small problem compared to the large numbers denied help and support. Moreover, new HMG guidelines on community care are warning local councils not to tell disabled or elderly people of the care they need if it cannot be provided by available funds. + Community treatment orders (CTOs) have been discussed for almost a decade. The British Medical Association has been trying to meet ministers to talk about them; but has been rebuffed for over a year. Yet many of the early advocates are now opposed. There are obvious dangers: breaches to civil rights, a substitute for community care, and an opportunity to include cases where hospital detention could not be justified. Mrs Bottomley, thankfully, has been rowing back. By yesterday she was talking about CSOs (community supervision orders), rather than CTOs. But before we introduce further measures, we need to give existing procedures a chance. There is already a programme for providing people discharged from mental hospital with a key worker, but many managers are unaware of this duty. New, specific grants have been stalled for lack of local authority contributions. And, despite ministerial denials, under-funding is chronic. We have the tools: but we are not doing the job. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +4 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 6, 1993 + +EYEWITNESS: ELDERLY PERISH IN SARAJEVO'S BLEAK WINTER + +BYLINE: ALFONSO ROJO IN SARAJEVO + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 483 words + + + THEY had wrapped the old people's bodies in blankets and tied them round with strips torn from sheets. Then they laid them out like packages on the freezing flagstones. + Yesterday, there were 10 corpses - three men and seven women. In all, 137 people have died at the Nedarici old people's home since the United Nations, international aid organisations and the local authorities were warned of their impending plight almost five months ago. + "They don't make a sound," Lidia Grozniz said. "They curl up, go to sleep, and are found dead in the morning." + The Nedarici old people's home stands on the road which leads to the airport, in Serbian territory, close to the front. Less than 100 yards away, an armoured personnel carrier of the French "blue helmets" is on permanent duty. + "We can do nothing," Dr Grozniz said. "We can't even give them a change of clothing. There's no heating in the rooms, and at night the temperature goes down to minus 15 C." + Before the war began on April 6, there were 302 people living in the home. Yesterday, 108 remained. By today, it is likely there will be only 106 left. + In 1984, Miroslav Jancic's powerful voice rang out across the stage of Sarajevo's opera house. Yesterday, the singer lay shivering in his bed, incapable of uttering a word. + In the next room, a woman was in her death throes. In her delirium, she had fallen several times to the floor. She was smothered with excrement. + There is neither water nor electricity in the home. Those residents who can no longer move lie around all day, soaked in their own urine. + The more robust sometimes venture out into the courtyard, but it is dangerous. On December 29, a sniper killed a resident, aged 72, with a shot to the head as he was chopping firewood. + "They have wounded more than 30 and killed 16," Dr Grozniz said. "There used to be 106 people working here. Now there are just six of us left. Some left because they had children, some because they were Muslims and were afraid of being killed by the 'chetniks'. Others went because they just couldn't put up with the horror." + Dr Grozniz is a psychologist and a Croat. A Serbian nurse and four cleaning women are all the staff she has left. Two of the cleaners' husbands take care of the corpses. + "On August 14, I wrote to the UN, the humanitarian organisations, and to the Muslim, Croat and Serb authorities, asking them to evacuate the old people, but it didn't do any good," she said, pulling out a copy of the letter she sent to Unprofor. "Already 57 people have perished, and when winter comes, many more will die of the cold," it warned. + "Until then, the 'blue helmets' hadn't given us a thing. After the letter they began to send us medicine and food. Today, they brought us the first eight stoves," Dr Grozniz said. Their commanding officer also authorised them to remove the 10 corpses. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +5 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 6, 1993 + +LEADER OF THE PACK + +BYLINE: MARY BLACK + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 536 words + + + A PITHY little phrase haunts all social workers: "If anything happens . . ." It comes to them in the middle of the night and the middle of the day. It comes when you remember a call you should have made, when you know your case file isn't up to date, when a visit is overdue. It comes when you've done all you can, and you know it isn't enough. + The phrase is used with abandon. Letters to the department reporting a family for being noisy, dirty or unsociable, or just being there, contain it. Demands to remove a drunkard, squatters, the mentally ill, the woman who sits all day in the park feeding pigeons, contain it. Sometimes the phrase is made explicit, sometimes not, but it always means "If anything happens . . . it will be your fault." We received a call from Mrs Jones to let us know her next-door neighbour Mrs Smith hadn't been seen for some days. Mrs Smith was an elderly woman, who lived alone. She attended a luncheon club five days a week and visited her daughter in Bognor every weekend. + Brigid, the duty worker, began the investigation. The neighbour confessed she hadn't seen Mrs Smith for weeks. The daughter said her mother last visited two weeks ago. The Luncheon Club said that Mrs Smith hadn't been in all week. Brigid informed the police and checked local hospitals. We obtained a key from the daughter to enter the flat. The flat was like a new pin. But no sign of Mrs Smith. We opened the fridge, the cupboards, all were bare. There were clean sheets on the bed, clean towels in the bathroom. + We reported back to Mrs Smith's daughter. She said we should have been keeping our eye on her mother and if anything happens . . . We told the neighbour, who said it was disgraceful that the welfare could just let someone disappear like that, and if anything happens . . . We told the Luncheon Club, who said the Mrs Smith owed them pounds 2.35. + We contacted her GP. He told us that Mrs Smith had been depressed and worried about her memory. She kept forgetting things, and couldn't find where anything was. She had lost her Poll Tax forms and her Rent Book. He had referred her to a psycho-geriatrician and she hadn't kept the appointment. There didn't seem anything else we could do. So we held a meeting. + Mrs Smith's daughter came, dressed head to toe in black. I thought it rather premature, but in grief we do as we must. We invited the GP. His presence deflected some of the acrimony but he had to rush off to surgery and we were in the front line again. We heard how much she loved her mother. And although her mother could be vindictive, and did not always appreciate all that her daughter from Bognor did for her, she had never in her life said a wrong word to her beloved mother. And in view of the present circumstances, this knowledge gave her some comfort. But to think it was all cut short because of our ineptitude. She advised us to seek the services of a good solicitor because she intended to go straight to the top. But not just the top; the top-top. + The daughter asked if Brigid could accompany her to her mother's flat. She said she knew she would break down the minute she set foot in the flat, what with all the memories and everything. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +6 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 8, 1993 + +MOTOR RACING: GRAND OLD MAN ROARS PAST 25; +Alan Henry profiles Ken Tyrrell, for whom winning is no longer everything + +BYLINE: ALAN HENRY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN SPORTS PAGE; Pg. 15 + +LENGTH: 609 words + + + WHEN Britain's newest grand prix star Damon Hill opens the Auto Sports Show this morning at Birmingham's National Exhibition Centre, a central attraction will be the tribute to Ken Tyrrell, who last year celebrated 25 years as a Formula One team owner. + Amid all the back-slapping it is easy to forget that Tyrrell has been a loser for 10 years - Michele Alboreto provided his last victory at Detroit in 1982. Yet, at 66, one of GP racing's senior citizens has no plans for retirement. + He is the great survivor in a sport that has claimed many casualties. While other teams juggled budgets in excess of 20 million pounds, he made do with 5-6 million pounds and paid for his own engines. + All that changes this year when his Surrey-based team will have free and exclusive use of Yamaha V10 engines developed in conjunction with the British specialist John Judd. This represents an important milestone in a career steeped in conservatism - perhaps his greatest strength, and weakness. + Although Tyrrell's scrupulous financial husbandry has ensured his survival on what has often appeared to be thin air, there is also the matter of the lean years which have followed his wonderfully successful partnership with Jackie Stewart. + Blame is too strong a word, but Tyrrell is not a gambler and boldness can pay rich dividends in the high-risk business of F1. Who dares wins; Tyrrell no longer does either. + It was not always so. After a moderately successful career as a driver in the 500cc F3, Tyrrell was among the first to identify Stewart's outstanding talent, and the young Scot drove for him before going into F1 as team-mate to the late Graham Hill - Damon's father - in 1965. + In 1967 Tyrrell decided to take the plunge into GP racing after watching Jim Clark win at Zandvoort in a Ford-powered Lotus 49. "Knowing that Jackie was unhappy at BRM, I came straight home and fired off a telegram ordering three of those Ford engines at 7,500 pounds apiece - which, of course, I hadn't got. + "We were impressed with the performance of the French Matra chassis we had been using in F2 so we approached them to build us a car. Jackie wanted pounds 20,000 to drive for us, which was underwritten by Ford but eventually paid out of the pounds 80,000 sponsorship from Dunlop." + Stewart won the 1969 world championship at the wheel of the Matra, and two further titles in 1971 and 1973 at the wheel of Tyrrell's own Tyrrell-Ford challenger. After the Scot's retirement the Tyrrell baton would have been passed to Stewart's dazzlingly talented team-mate Francois Cevert but the charismatic Frenchman had been killed practising for the 1973 US Grand Prix. + Thereafter the Tyrrell team would never again scale such peaks. The facts speak for themselves: with Stewart and Cevert, Tyrrell won 26 grands prix between 1968 and 1973; only seven victories have followed. + After Stewart, Tyrrell recalls the young German driver Stefan Bellof, killed in a sportscar race at Spa in 1985, as his most outstanding young F1 driver. "I'm sure he would have won the world championship. I blame myself for giving in to him and releasing him to drive in that race against my better judgment. It was tragic." + Away from the instant pressure of the moment, Tyrrell has always retained a broad perspective on life, as is expected of a man whose main passion is cricket. Old hands recall the time Stewart brought his Tyrrell into the pit and began complaining about the car's handling. Before he had finished talking, Tyrrell thrust his head into the cockpit and bellowed: "Problems? You think you've got problems? England are 120 for nine!" + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +7 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 9, 1993 + +ARMY HELICOPTER FIRES ON IRA SUSPECTS IN REPUBLIC + +BYLINE: DAVID SHARROCK IN BELFAST + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 7 + +LENGTH: 249 words + + + AN ARMY helicopter last night fired across the border at suspected terrorists in the Irish Republic after an IRA gun and mortar bomb attack on the security forces in Northern Ireland. + The Lynx helicopter was one of two shot at from south of the border soon after two mortar shells were fired at the permanent border checkpoint at Kinawley, Co Fermanagh, the army said. The IRA in Co Fermanagh claimed responsibility for both attacks. No one was reported injured, the army said. + Two youths tarred and feathered by the IRA have been ordered to leave Northern Ireland with five others for "anti-community activities". + An IRA statement issued to the Derry Journal accused six named youths of car theft, joyriding and breaking and entering the homes of elderly people in the city. "The IRA has been very reluctant to take action because of the ages of some of those involved. However, due to the increasingly organised activities of the named individuals against the community here, their activities could no longer be tolerated. These six youths have been ordered to leave this city within 48 hours or face the consequences." + On Wednesday evening two of the youths, aged between 15 and 17, were tied to fencing and submitted to a tar and feathers-type punishment which the IRA described as "military action". + The seventh man ordered out was named yesterday as 22-year-old Christopher Donnelly from Dungannon, Co Tyrone, who was shot in both legs by the IRA a week ago. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +8 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 11, 1993 + +FRIGHTENED OLD MAN WHO SLIPPED THE WELFARE NET; +Sarah Boseley on the elderly estate tenant whose solitude, independence and frailties took him outside a diminishing care service + +BYLINE: SARAH BOSELEY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 708 words + + + CHRISTOPHER Spong died a lonely death. He was found two weeks later, lying on the living room floor of his flat in Hackney, east London. His cupboard was bare - no food or even takeaway packaging was found. + He was 78, but there was nobody to give an account of what he had done with his years. No relatives or friends have been found. The only clue was that his flat was full of books. + His death last September ended a troubled, uncomfortable and frightening year. He lived in a first floor flat in the Holly Street estate that even Hackney council describes as crime-ridden and desolate; it is scheduled for demolition. Mr Spong's flat was broken into seven times. On one occasion he was taken to hospital with head injuries. He told an emergency social worker he was afraid to go home. + There are many elderly people like Mr Spong, and as the population ages there will be many more. In April the Community Care Act will come into force, providing funds for local authorities to help keep old people in their own homes. Social workers fear the money will be insufficient, however, to provide the services that will be needed. The British Association of Social Workers notes that care in the community is being promoted for the elderly just as its drawbacks for the mentally ill are coming to prominence. + Mr Spong was cantankerously independent and refused assistance from the social services. For about eight months of 1991 he had a home help, until his abuse to staff led to the service being withdrawn. If neighbours, relatives and friends do not keep an eye on them, there is a serious danger that such old people will slip through every welfare net. + "Elderly persons are entirely at liberty to refuse services and many of them do," said Gail Tucker, assistant general secretary of the BASW. "There are not these days the levels of staffing and resources in local authority social services that allow them to routinely visit. We need some sort of community care neighbourhood watch system." + Mr Spong, whose case is featured tonight in a Channel 4 film for the Cutting Edge series, shared his block with many old and mentally infirm people, according to the home beat police officer, Dave Underhill. + "There was a spate of crimes last spring around that particular block. There were a lot of very similar old people there and they seemed to be targeted. + "They were vulnerable because of the state of the estate. The security of the doors and windows was very poor. Sometimes they would open the door and a man would push his way in past them." + The tenants' association tried to help. "He was a very intelligent man and very well educated," said Peter Danciger. "He used to come and have a cup of tea and a fag. He was quite happy but he thought people were taking liberties with him. I walked him home many a time. I was shocked when I found his electricity meter was ripped off the wall. He told me it had been like it for a number of months." + Mr Danciger and the association chairman, Dick Martin, called the police when Mr Spong arrived last April saying he had been forced at knifepoint to hand over his pension book and pounds 45 to a man who broke in through the balcony. + "We phoned the social services about his pension but they wanted us to bring him round. We had no way of doing it. The police were fantastic. They drove him to the Department of Social Services." + On April 24, Mr Spong received a crisis loan of pounds 31 and an interim payment of one week to tide him over until his new pension book came. It did not arrive. In May he was sent another interim payment and a declaration form, which he did not fill in. On July 2, Mr Spong collapsed in the street and was taken to Homerton Hospital where he told a social worker that he had not eaten for some time and had no money. + Mr Spong was then helped to complete and return the form. A pension book and Giros for pounds 249.99 and pounds 241 arrived. But on July 15, the DSS asked for the book back, to make deductions for the loan. On July 21, since Mr Spong had not complied, the DSS stopped his pension. + On September 9, Mr Spong was found dead. The DSS sent his arrears to Hackney council to pay for his funeral. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +9 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 12, 1993 + +ADVANCE IN STUDY OF ALZHEIMER'S + +BYLINE: TIM RADFORD, SCIENCE EDITOR + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 4 + +LENGTH: 306 words + + + BRITISH scientists yesterday claimed to have linked Alzheimer's disease - which afflicts more than 350,000 sufferers in Britain - to a particular protein produced in the brain, ironically in part to compensate for memory loss. + As humans grow older, between 55 and 60, the neurons in the brain begin to die. The surviving neurons try to compensate for this by resprouting to fill the gaps. + In the course of doing this, each brain cell produces a substance called beta amyloid precursor protein (APP). But if it produces too much, the cell is in effect poisoned by its own chemistry. This sets up a "domino effect" because the surviving cells have to continue the process, with tragic results. + APP had earlier been found in those sufferers with an inherited genetic abnormality, and in those cases where a head or brain injury produced chemical results similar to those found in Alzheimer's patients. + According to Dr Gareth Roberts, of the serious mental afflictions research team at St Mary's Hospital, London, the damage occurs in an area of the brain associated with memory called the medial temporal lobe. With colleagues, he studied post-mortem brain material from both healthy individuals and Alzheimer's victims, and found a link between the disease and overproduction of APP. + The finding was greeted by the Mental Health Foundation, which with the Medical Research Council supported the study, as "another piece in the jigsaw". + It is the latest in a series of sometimes stumbling advances into the fourth biggest killer in the Western world. It helps to explain why older people are more at risk, but it does not explain why some suffer and others don't. + "We don't know enough about the fine tuning of this mechanism," said Dr Roberts. "But we'll know a damn sight more in two years' time." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +10 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 13, 1993 + +SHADES OF GREY: WANDERERS SET THE ALARM BELLS RINGING; +Electronic tagging of elderly in care + +BYLINE: TIM LINEHAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 828 words + + + LAST April a resident left a home for elderly people with dementia and wandered out of the grounds. By the time staff realised he was missing it was too late. + Police found him dead in a ditch. The man was the second person in 12 months to die after wandering from the home. Both were old and frail and in each case the coroner returned a verdict of death by natural causes. For Elaine Anderson (not her real name), owner of the home, her sense of loss was tinged with anger and frustration. + After the first death Ms Anderson asked her social services department for permission to install a tagging system in her home. Electronic tagging - or personal safety device - consists of a bracelet worn by the resident which sets off an alarm when he or she leaves home. Anderson believes the device could have saved the lives of her two residents. + Next month Counsel and Care, an advisory group for elderly people, will draw up a consultation document on tagging. It is an issue that sets many people on edge in an industry which has a hard time shaking off its shady image. + Ms Anderson's request was turned down, even though she said the tagging system would only be used with the permission of relatives and social workers. The social services department issued a statement saying: "Electronic tagging is not regarded as a dignified way of dealing with the situation. We would prefer to deal with practice issues such as staffing levels and qualifications, managing the environment, keeping residents occupied and making sure they are assessed first." + But pressure groups are coming round to the idea. Age Concern is not opposed to tagging, as long as it is not used as a substitute for good care. The Centre for Policy on Ageing is withholding its original opposition to tagging while it reconsiders the issue. + Maureen Solly is sales support manager of Co-tag, a company which makes tagging devices. She argues that the electronic tags preserve residents' rights. "It extends their freedom because they don't have to be locked in anywhere, they don't have to be sedated, they don't have to be tied into chairs or beds; and health care experts admit this goes on in some homes," she says. + Ms Solly's argument is not simply a hard sell. Her father lived in a home and used to wander from it. Once he was found walking along a railway line. Another time he was discovered wandering through heavy traffic. When she says tagging would greatly relieve worried relatives, she is speaking from experience. + But others disagree. Dorothy White, founder of the Relatives Association - a support group for people with elderly relatives in care - is uneasy. To her tagging is "an infringement of the liberty of somebody, even if they have lost their ability to know who they are or where they are. It is treating them as if they were no longer human . . . it should only be used in exceptional circumstances." + Tagging has already been installed at four acute geriatric wards at Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridgeshire. Jenny Egbe, manager of the department for the elderly, describes the system as "brilliant". She says it is impossible to watch over all the residents, many of whom are in unfamiliar surroundings and more likely to wander. Tags are only put on patients most likely to wander and, again, relatives are always consulted. Currently no one on any of the wards is tagged. + To Eileen Salem, manager of Compton Lodge, a home in London run by Hampstead Old People's Housing Trust, tagging is anathema. "The word alone horrifies me. I don't find it acceptable at all. I wouldn't want to be treated like that. I wouldn't want my family treated like that." + She says tagging is only used on elderly people because they are less likely to resist it than any other group of people in care. She says residents usually wander if they are bored, unhappy or unsettled. Staff need to get to know residents well to understand their interests and habits and make them feel at home. If residents wander, it is up to staff to either accompany them or to distract them by chatting or by finding an activity to interest them. + The home has an open door policy, allowing residents to come and go as they wish. "People say you can't watch them all the time, but then you only have as many people who wander as you can cope with. You mustn't take on extra residents who wander until the others are settled and happy there," says Ms Salem. In nine years no resident at Compton Lodge has come to any harm from wandering. + Caring for elderly confused people can be a draining job. Tagging would remove the anxiety and guilt staff feel when a resident disappears, particularly in winter, when an elderly person can fall prey to hypothermia in 20 minutes. But while some practitioners are cautiously coming round to the idea, others retain an instinctive aversion to tagging. Counsel and Care's consultation document + will be eagerly awaited. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +11 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 13, 1993 + +SHADES OF GREY: OLD SEEK A FUTURE WITH A CARING FACE; +Pensioners' need to organise a strong political voice + +BYLINE: JULIAN MACQUEEN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 1009 words + + + PETE TOWNSHEND'S paean to youth, My Generation, has been turned on its head. Far from dying before they get old, Townshend's contemporaries can expect to live well into their seventies. The number of people aged between 65 and 74 stands at just over 5 million and is expected to increase by 21 per cent over the next 30 years, causing journalists Charles Leadbeater and John Lloyd to comment in their book, In Search Of Work, that footing the caring bill in industrial societies will present a knotty problem for governments: who will pay for the "grey hordes"? + The free market solution is simple: cap the total amount of resources available and let the market do the rest. But Professor Grimley Evans, head of geriatric medicine at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, has found that privatised medicine regards older patients as too expensive. His co-authored report on Britain's + 14 million "third ages", the 50-74 age group, says evidence exists to show that older people are being denied access to medical services through age-related admission policies. Won't such blantant ageism spur the elderly into action? + With 10 million of pensionable age, the pensioners' lobby's potential is immense. But divisions abound. Robert Stansfield, editor of Pensioners' Voice, says the Government has created divisions by making many newly retired better-of through private occupational pensions. There are other divisions: pensioners reliant on the state are a million miles away from the "upper crust" of the Retired Peoples Association; those on small occupational pensions don't qualify for income support and fall into a poverty trap; and there are more women than men on basic pensions, yet women's interests have often been ignored by traditional political organisations. + Max Druck, who chairs the TUC's pensioners organisation in Manchester, believes pensioners must find common ground: "We need to find a common denominator. In my opinion, this is health, the ability to travel, a decent home, and the wherewithal to be part of the community." + In America, the grey lobby is strong. The Gray Panther Movement, modelled on the radical direct action movements of the 1960s, has turned society's eyes towards the problems of the elderly. The Panthers, however, are a tiny organisation with 80,000 members. The American Association of Retired Persons represents a different approach, mixing commerce with politics by providing its 3 million members with financial services and generic medicines as well as a lobbying voice. Both organisations have been effective in getting grey issues on to the political agenda. + Lou Kushnick, a lecturer in American politics at Manchester University, believes the decline of the political party in American politics has pushed single issue pressure groups to the forefront. "There's less party discipline and this provides an environment for the Gray Panthers to operate in," he says. By making the connection between being old and having served society, the grey lobby has elicited a favourable response. + The two strands of American grey politics are making an appearance in Europe. Earlier this year, the Danish direct action group, the C-Team, organised sit-ins to keep old people's homes open in the face of government pressure for closure. In the UK, the growing awareness of greyness as an issue is linked to the trade union movement. + In 1980, some retired trade unionists in Manchester started a magazine called Grey Power. The magazine's editor, Wilf Charles, who was active in the Amalgamated Engineering Union, has seen circulation climb from a hand-delivered 2,000 to 13,000 copies, distributed equally between pensioners' organisations and the unions. Does the magazine's success represent a turning-the-corner for grey politics in this country? Mr Charles believes so: "The leadership of the (traditional) pensioners' movement feel that old people don't want politics," he says. "We are saying there's no future for pensioners because it's Westminster that decides where the money goes." + Britain's tradition of public health and welfare provision will make influencing government policy the focus of grey politics. Jack Jones, president of the recently reconvened National Pensioners' Convention, which had its first conference in Birmingham last year, defines its politics as such: "We try to influence individual members of parliament but if you're going to change things substantially, you have got to win over the Government or the alternative government - both if possible." + But if the movement is union-inspired there's a growing awareness of its wider constituency. "The National Pensioners' Convention was formed in 1979 by the TUC, which financed it. But by not covering Age Concern and Pensioners' Voice, it was obvious that it needed to speak out for a much wider constituency and bring together more disparate organisations," says Mr Druck. + The Government's community care policy will be a test case for the impact of the pensioners' lobby. Mr Jones says that every local authority he has spoken to has told him that the money put aside for community care isn't enough. "By the end of the century we'll have 4.5 million over the age of 75, the best part of a million over 85, and I'll be amongst them," he says. "It's a matter of human understanding. Either we look after our old people, who are increasingly becoming dependent at an older age, or you might as well bloody well shoot them." + The National Pensioners' Convention, with about one million members, is the biggest pensioners' umbrella group. In March, it organised a successful European senior citizens' parliament in Luxembourg, and 1993 is the European Year of the Older Person. To reproduce the Swedish experience, which has 75 per cent of pensioners organised nationally, would go some way to realising Gray Panther founder Maggie Kuhn's words: "We are a new breed of old people and we are looking to the future." Without a strong political voice, the future for older people is bleak. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +12 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 13, 1993 + +SHADES OF GREY: A BIG JOB FOR ROSIE'S GRANNY; +grandparents as childminders + +BYLINE: LYNN HANNA + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 11 + +LENGTH: 1160 words + + + THE video recorder has been tested to breaking point, but not Noreen Tingle. At 62, she confesses that caring for a toddler is tiring, although she denies it has anything to do with her age. "I defy anybody to have our Rosie for a coupleof hours and not say 'Oh my goodness, let's have a cup of tea'," she says, recalling her granddaughter's dogged inquiry into every household appliance. + But no domestic mishap would make Mrs Tingle miss mornings with her grandchild.She even rearranges the hours of her job as national organising secretary of Grandparents Federation to ensure she can care for Rosie while Rosie's mother - Mrs Tingle's daughter - works. "It's important for all of us that I have her," she explains. + Grandparents who look after their grandchildren are important to many of Britain's working mothers. A survey by the Policy Studies Institute found that 36 per cent of women returning to work left their children with grandmothers, more than relied on childminders, nurseries and nannies put together. "They have been called the largest unpaid childcare agency in the country," says Francis McGlone, community care researcher at the Family Policy Studies Centre, whose own children are cared for by his mother-in-law while he and his wife work. + Grandparents' support for working mothers shames the state, and most companies. Yet they are the hidden sector of childcare. "They offer an amazing amount of support, but it is totally unrecognised," Mr McGlone says. Their contribution also challenges some of society's cherished myths about age and the family. Grandparents who care for children are reversing the conventional caring equation, and confounding the forecasts about the burden of an ageing population. "We're talking about the role of older people as an immense resource," says Sally Greengross, director of the charity Age Concern. "As women assume they are going to work, then grandparents may take on more and more." + Longer life, better health and early retirement, now taken by almost two-thirds of men and nearly half of women, may be redefining roles within the family: the grandad taking a toddler on a slow trail through the park can give more time to childcare than when his own children were small; and grandmothers are promoting an economic role for their daughters that they themselves may have been denied. + Grandparents' increasing responsibility for children also prompts a new view of the past, demolishing the popular belief that the extended family has died out. Recent historical research suggests that the tranquil rural idylls captured in Victorian novels were untrue, and that villages had shifting populations where extended families were often cut down by early death. It may even have been the hard life of the early towns that made families more mutually dependent. + Peter Wilmott, of the Policy Studies Institute, describes new family networks that are no longer so close geographically but are now linked by cars and telephones. "We can dismiss the myths about the family having done a lot more in the past than it does in the present," he says. "It's still where people turn for help." + Many working mothers choose to leave their children with grandparents because itis convenient and offers continuity of care. According to the last British Social Attitudes survey, 44 per cent of women thought care from a relative was very suitable for children under three. + Equally, many grandparents see their grandchildren as a great gift: "In some ways it is richer than having your own children, because you're too worried about it then," says Mr Wilmott, who speaks from experience. + The mutual value of the relationship is also stressed by Mrs Tingle, whose organisation helps the growing number of grandparents denied access to their grandchildren by divorce or because they are in care. "We can give children an idea of their past. And of course they are our hopes for the future," she says. + But these are hard times for many young families who face an uncertain economic future. With cheap private childcare scarce, the financial incentive to keep it in the family is strong. The great majority of grandparents care for their grandchildren for love, not money. Mrs Tingle is shocked at the question of any financial arrangement between herself and her daughter: "There's absolutely none. Often grandparents are in a position to help their children, not the otherway round." + Grandparents may be anxious to assist when sons and daughters are struggling to stay solvent. Families may have provided much informal care in the past, but looking after children while parents work is a big commitment. "Grandparents want to help out, but they don't want to become the main support. And they don'texpect to become the main source of childcare in the country," Mr McGlone says. + If a grandparent is sick or frail, the child could feel responsible in a way that could damage its development, says Sebastian Kraemer, consultant psychiatrist at the Tavistock Clinic. He also stresses that a good relationship between mother and grandmother is essential for shared childcare. + When disputes do arise over treatment of the children, there is no paying professional relationship within which to resolve differences. The National Childminding Association had calls on its helpline for parents whose arrangements with grandparents have broken down. The organisation would like the Children Act, which requires childminders to register with a local authority, to be extended to all day-carers for children. As blood relatives, grandparents are exempt from the safety inspections carried out on childminders' premises, and from the regular health checks some local authorities run on any childminder they consider elderly. + There are other dangers in relying on grandparents to provide so much childcare unaided. It is women in their early sixties who provide most care for others, and some may be responsible for very elderly relatives, as well as children. " Because there's an army of grandparents out there doing an excellent job, the risk is that the Government will say things are fine," says Mr McGlone. "We have to recognise the job that they do, and we've got to talk about the immense pressure it puts on people." + Mr Wilmott too feels that recognition of grandparents as childcarers is timely, particularly in the context of the Government's planned community care for the elderly. "There is another phase in life when support from relatives is particularly important, and that's when people have young children. You need a system that will give support to those carers," he says. + Nearly half of Britain's workforce is now female, and working mothers are reshaping the family. But although they are causing a social revolution, some things have stayed the same. For childcare, as in other parts of government policy, the family must still fend for itself. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +13 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 15, 1993 + +FINGER OF PHONEY PEACE POINTS THE WAY TO HEART OF WAR; +At the narrowest point of the Serbian corridor, there is an unofficial truce, writes Yigal Chazan in Brcko, north Bosnia + +BYLINE: YIGAL CHAZAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 530 words + + + THE war-hardened Serb inhabitants of Brcko do not scare easily. As the deafening booms of artillery duels reverberate around the town, they stroll through their battered neighbourhoods and chat idly on street corners, seemingly oblivious to the almighty cacophony. + "We're used to it," said an elderly woman, filling up plastic containers at a fresh water pump, while a gang of boys joked and teased outside a nearby block of flats, whose windows shook with each detonation. + Sandwiched between Croatia in the north and Bosnian forces who control much of its southern suburbs, Brcko is the narrowest and most vulnerable point of the so-called Serbian corridor linking Serb-held regions of western Bosnia with Belgrade. + The town, perched on the bank of the Sava river, the frontier between Bosnia and Croatia, lies just south of a ferocious trench war between Serb and Croat troops, who relentlessly bombard each other's positions. But only the occasional shell crashes into Brcko, accounting to some extent for the nonchalance of its residents. + In exchange for Croatian restraint, Brcko's Serb authorities refrain from lobbing shells at villages on the opposite side of the Sava. + "We've got a kind of unofficial ceasefire agreement - we don't fire at them and they don't fire at us," said the town's police chief, adding that similar deals had also been struck with the predominantly Muslim forces to the south. + Here, the fighters in both sides are local men, still on speaking terms in the midst of battles. "We talk every day on the radio about things we have in common, asking after friends and relatives, even though there's fighting," continued the police chief. + But these local truces are the exception rather than the rule along the corridor. Both the Croatians and the Bosnians repeatedly attempted to sever the Serbs' all-important highway. + A devastated hamlet east of Brcko is testimony to the most recent attempt. All that remains of the battle is a lone Croatian tank, brought to grief no more than a hundred yards from the main road. + Buses and trucks speed along this stretch, hoping not to fall victim to periodic Croatian shelling. As the corridor snakes its way westwards, rarely more than six miles in width, so the Croatian artillery threat diminishes, while that from the Bosnians increases. An air raid siren wails in the town of Doboj as gunners south of the town fire off mortars into its suburbs. + Just as in Brcko, Serb residents pay little attention to the warning, remaining out of doors as the bombardment intensifies. "People are hard to discipline," said an army captain, Slavko Zmaric. + In the neighbouring frontline village of Teslic, a Muslim mortar attack earlier this week killed five. For one young mother the assault was the last straw. With her two children, she set out for Belgrade on what turned out to be a nightmare corridor journey. Their bus was delayed in Doboj at the height of a bombardment, and broke down near Brcko close to the Croatian front line. + "The shelling's been accompanying us all day," she sighed as a motorist stopped to whisk the unfortunate family off to safety. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +14 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 16, 1993 + +HOME INCOME PLAN VICTIMS LEFT TO PONDER THEIR PLIGHT + +BYLINE: DIANE BOLIVER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 31 + +LENGTH: 783 words + + + HUNDREDS of elderly victims who have been sold inappropriate home income plans have been left pondering their plight despite a three-day High Court battle for more compensation from the Investors Compensation Scheme. + The court decided it needed more time to consider the case after London-based solicitor Barnett Sampson challenged as "unreasonable and unlawful" the methods ICS used in assessing how much compensation it should pay victims whose brokers and advisers are now insolvent. + Home income plans are designed to boost the income of the elderly by allowing them to unlock equity in their homes. + But thousands were thrown into debt as investment bond-linked schemes turned sour, mortgage rates soared, property prices fell and the stock market slumped. + "The ICS formula differs markedly from that adopted by the Insurance Ombudsman Bureau and Lautro in handling similar cases where the salesman was a tied agent for an insurance company," says solicitor Richard Barnett. + He is also challenging an ICS ruling that the claim of a person with no spouse is extinguished when they die. At least 17 of his clients have died over the past year. + Although he and three other firms are representing 2,000 victims, they believe up to 10,000 people could have a good claim for compensation. + Neil Stevens of Salisbury-based solicitors Trethowans says: "Most cases don't come to light unless the firm of advisers goes bankrupt, fraud is uncovered or victims hear of legal action being taken. Most people probably go back to their adviser, who will say 'you had the warnings that the stock market could go down, we will help you all we can, but there's not a lot you can do'." + Another fear is that victims may be taking bad advice from solicitors who know little about the schemes or are not taking legal advice at all because they think they won't be able to afford it. "We make no charge, and recover our costs from the firms," says Mr Stevens, who is investigating 750 home income plan cases - 250 of them involving Royal Life. + Money Guardian this week added two more Royal Life victims to his caseload. Unaware that good legal help was available to them, John and Shirley Flower have been fighting their own battle for redress for the past 18 months. + They owned their flat outright and were budgeting well on Mr Flower's pension and occasional income from Mrs Flower's part-time work until the introduction of the poll tax more than tripled their rates of pounds 400 to pounds 1,300. + Voicing their financial worries to the owner of their local taxi service seemed to provide the answer to their prayers. "He told us he had sold his business and was now a salesman for Royal Life, which had just the product to solve our cash-flow problems," says Mrs Flower. + It seemed nothing could go wrong. With no mortgage, they had plenty of equity in their pounds 55,000 property. So in October 1990, they borrowed pounds 14,000 through the Cheltenham & Gloucester's 60-plus mortgage, paid off pounds 5,000 of loans on a car and central heating and invested the rest in Royal Life's Selector Bond. + "We were always assured the bond would grow sufficiently to pay the mortgage interest and provide a pounds 75 monthly income to pay our poll tax bill," says Mrs Flower. This week their mortgage debt is nearly pounds 18,000 and the Selector Bond is worth pounds 10,168 - thanks only to the stock market's recent surge. + Despite numerous letters to Royal Life, Lautro and the Insurance Ombudsman, the Flowers have heard nothing since last June. When Money Guardian spoke to Royal Life a spokesman said: "We accept that perhaps this should have been settled sooner and that we should have kept the Flowers notified of our progress. But these problems are very complex." He confirmed a compensation offer would be made soon. "We are coming to the conclusion that the Flowers should not have been sold this product in the first place." + Mr Stevens described the Flowers' case as "unique". + "It is the first loan I have come across below pounds 15,000 which means it falls under the Consumer Credit Act. It looks as though Royal Life and possibly even Cheltenham & Gloucester don't have a leg to stand on here." + - For further information: Barnett Sampson, tel 071-580-7757; Trethowans, tel 0722-412299); J. Keith Park of St Helen's, tel 0744-30933; and Harrison Clarke of Worcestor, tel 0905-612001 are providing free advice to 2,000 home income plan victims. + Using Your Home As Capital, written by Cecil Hinton, price pounds 3.50, is available from Age Concern, 1268 London Road, London SW16 4ER. + Money Guardian is edited by Margaret Hughes + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +15 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 16, 1993 + +REFLECTIONS: A DROP OF GUINNESS AND RYDE; +Philip Norman recalls the elderly coterie who were his childhood companions + +BYLINE: PHILIP NORMAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 1137 words + + + THE WORLD of squalor, ignorance, prejudice and heavenly comfort created by my grandmother was not magical to small children only. I can remember no adult from my boyhood's cast of thousands who did not likewise succumb to her raffish gypsy charm. She headed our family like a Mafia chieftain, controlling the purse-strings with the benign despotism of Don Corleone and defining much the same moral or, rather, amoral universe. For those Grandma Norman loved could do no wrong. + In 1954, when my father deserted my eight-months-pregnant mother and me, he knew there was one person with whom he could play the injured party. Poor lamb, she told me afterwards. When he arrived, he had such a bad cold. So that night I made him come and sleep in my bed. None of us at the time saw anything remotely odd about this. + But, under her Sicilian hugs, smacking kisses and extravagant endearments, the real Grandma Norman, I now see, was strange, solitary and unknowable. Her sea captain husband, a man twice her age, had gone down with his ship in 1918. She never remarried, although tall and darkly good-looking and a denizen of Chelsea throughout the bohemian Twenties. There had evidently been numerous suitors, chief among them a half-Maori painter who filled her house in Clapham Old Town with vaguely erotic stippled watercolours. But I didn't want to marry him, she would say, still defiant 20 years afterwards. I was afraid he'd start telling my two lovely sons what to do. + Since the late Thirties she had lived with a man named Walter Hall in a fond but totally sexless arrangement that evidently suited them both. Uncle Wally was part of our family, a gentle, irascible government clerk with a grizzled moustache and half-moon spectacles. Each morning he put on a grey Homburg hat and left for the City; at seven each night he returned, bringing the Star newspaper and a faint breath of pale ale on his moustache. Later he would sit collarless at the green baize-covered kitchen table, shaking the tobacco from his day's cigarette-ends to be rolled into fresh cigarettes tomorrow. + Apart from Uncle Wally and her two ghastly sons, the only company my grandmother truly enjoyed was that of the very young or very old. Every holiday I spent with her featured a round of pilgrimages to the numerous much older ladies implicitly under her protection. So similar were they, in penury, immobility and decrepitude, that I thought of them as a guild or society, obeying common rules and conventions, with Grandma Norman as their peripatetic, pep-talking president. + All seemed to inhabit tiny brocaded bedsitting rooms in Wimbledon a name which, to my childish ear, even had the faltering silhouette of an old lady. All had lost their husbands many years before. All smelt either of violets or cake-mixture. All wore faint mauve knee bandages and smoked Churchmans Number 3 cigarettes, from the dark green packet. All would eventually be wooed to have a drop of Guinness from the pint bottle we had brought with us. To every one at Guinness time my grandmother told the same little joke: Shall I say Pass your glass or Pass your glass, you silly arse? + At 10 I was more used to being with old ladies than with children my own age. I knew everything they talked about together smog, Mr Churchill, chiropodists, the mild winter, the Food Office. I knew about all their ailments, their rheumatism, their arthritis, their phlebitis (or, as I thought, flea-bitis) their bunions, their wicklows, their chilblains. I knew all the remedies they swore by: Bile Beans, Fynnon Salts, Iron Jelloids, Friar's Balsam, belladonna poultice. I was accustomed to spending the night with up to two at once in Grandma Norman's great brass bedstead; watching the tying of waist-length plaits, the bestowal of false teeth into tumblers, the covert use of rose-bordered chamberpots; breathing that familiar aroma of flannelette, cornplasters, Mintoes, unwashed hair and Vick. + AGAINST my own fractured, apprehensive life, being old seemed an existence of wonderful comfort and non-upheaval. No school on February mornings, no cross-country runs through spattering mud, no boxing tournament, no brutal foreign prefects, no slippering. No wondering if my father was ever coming back again, and whether we really were going bankrupt. Just sitting still beside fires, warming teapots and complaining about cosy-sounding things like rheumatism. + Grandma Normans Isle of Wight years were still richer in hangers-on, not all of them elderly but all uniformly bizarre and down-at-heel. The back room of her sweets and rock kiosk at Ryde pier gates often seemed a refuge for every shyster and misfit to be found on the Esplanade. Invariably they would be said to possess hidden qualities which only she could detect. Miss Wade, the grime-covered fruiterer and junk dealer, for instance, had started life as a lady's maid. Johnny, the octogenarian newspaper seller, with his cloth cap and old-fashioned celluloid collar, had hands as smooth as a woman's. The black-bearded, newspaper-girdled tramp she regularly supplied with tea and Mars bars, was an educated man, who slept rough purely from aristocratic whim. + On a slightly higher level was Mrs Dunwoody, who came down from South Shields to help her in the kiosk every summer. Auntie Geordie, as I called her, was stout, flatulent, greedy, quick-tempered and good hearted. Under one arm she carried a marmalade coloured Pekinese named Sue-Sue. She was not an employee but a friend, which she underlined by ostentatiously leaving the kiosk for two hours each afternoon. As she went, she would lean across the serving window and take a handful of paper bags, loudly explaining that they were to wipe Sue-Sue's bottom. + Auntie Geordie made spasmodic efforts to ameliorate the sordidness of Grandma Norman's flat above the disused pub in Castle Street. But it was beyond redemption. Every crevice not stacked with sweet cartons was clotted with hideous antiques foisted on us by Miss Wade. My top floor bedroom was shared with my cousin Roger, a waiter on the Queen Mary, who would sometimes bring three or four fellow stewards back to doss down for the night. We had also adopted an ancient, incontinent black cat named Judy whose messes in the bath or kitchen sink were hailed as a sign of discriminating intelligence. For those Grandma Norman loved could do no wrong. + The only other visitor we ever had was a mad London niece of hers who goggled in fear even when persuaded to sit in the filthy back kitchenette and have a drop of Guinness. Just as she raised her glass, a terrible squelching sound came from Judy in the sink. + Oh! the mad niece quavered. Whatever's that. + It's nothing, Grandma Norman replied calmly. Just the cat leaving her visiting card. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +16 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 19, 1993 + +SOUNDBITES + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 19 + +LENGTH: 150 words + + + - HELEN FISHER takes 300 pages to tell us what we already know. We meet, we fall in love, we reproduce, we get drunk and drag a workmate into the stationery cupboard at the Christmas party. + Tony Parsons reviewing Anatomy Of Love, Daily Mail + - WHAT is really sleazy is the number of Tories sticking their snouts in a trough of their own creation. + Richard Littlejohn on leading Conservatives on the payrolls of former nationalised industries, the Sun + - IT WOULD be further economic madness to force the elderly to stay resentfully at work while keeping enthusiastic younger people on the dole. + Leader on government plans to deny pensions to women until they reach 65, Daily Mirror + - GOING to bed with a gigantic plaster stuck on one or another part of your anatomy isn't exactly erotic. But neither is smoking. + Susannah Frankel on the nicotine patch, the Independent + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +17 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 19, 1993 + +THE LOOK OF HATRED; +The barriers may be down but, says Julia Pascal, look different and you still have to jump + +BYLINE: JULIA PASCAL + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EURO PAGE; Pg. 15 + +LENGTH: 732 words + + + AT AN old people's afternoon tea dance where I go to learn about grassroots French politics an old man throws a paper pellet at me. "Why?" I ask my companion. "Because he thinks you're an Arab." + In a cafe a partly-drunk unemployed man starts to make disparaging remarks about Arabs. He looks at me provocatively to see how I'll respond. The people I'm with giggle nervously, their embarrassment making me furious. The man may be drunk and unemployed but is that any excuse for racism? I often travel between Britain, France and Germany and suspicion of foreigners is intensifying all the time. + "Judge a person by the colour of their skin and you end up with the gas chambers," I say to the unemployed man. + He goes pale. + "I'm not an Arab, I'm a Jew, but if I were an Arab I'd be proud of my identity." As I say this I wonder what it means, to be proud of one's identity. After all, identity is merely an accident of birth. I talk to defend the Arabs and the irony of it strikes me. Which Arabs are we talking about? In this small northern French town of Maubeuge there are Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians. + Sous Le Bois is the pretty name of the immigrant and poor white district under renovation, courtesy of state and town hall funding. I go to the Arab social centre, a meeting place for the mainly unemployed young. I watch young men smoke and drink Coke while arguing with the chief of police and the socialist mayor about the delinquent minority who cause trouble for the rest. + This generation are the sons and grandsons of those brought here to work in the once-flourishing steel industry. Few have ever found employment. Job advertisements in the press do not state that applications are welcomed from all members of the community. The children of Algerian immigrants are resented more than the Moroccans or the Africans. + The Socialists may be working to alleviate the tensions but they have started to make racist remarks themselves. Their efforts are not always well received. One 30-year-old Arab tells me he's going to vote for the Right next time. "The socialists put us all in the same bag but at least the Right recognises the Harkis [second generation Arab immigrant]." + In another meeting an exquisitely beautiful young woman says how pleased she is that the town has become so well-cared for. But there is one problem: "Maubeuge is such a pretty place, it's such a pity there are so many Arabs walking around to mess it up." + Last summer in Germany I was asking a rail clerk about trains when an elderly woman behind began to talk over me. The clerk explained quite politely that he was serving me. The woman continued to ignore me, after all I was only a foreigner. To elderly Germans I look like a Turkish gastarbeiter - a "guest worker". + I am like Woody Allen's Zelig in reverse: instead of becoming like the people I interact with, I am always the stranger, the undesirable gypsy. + I fly back to Heathrow from Munich three days before neo Nazis murdered Turkish women they mistook for Jews. I hear the familiar voice of the Special Branch by my side: where have I come from? Why was I there? How long did I stay? When someone gives Special Branch an Identikit picture of a female Arab terrorist, they must hand them my photograph. + Little by little the plain-clothes interrogator distances himself as he hears my voice. Little by little he decides I'm not a Middle-Eastern terrorist or a drug pusher. He disappears: sorry, madam. + Perhaps I am forgetting my childhood. The anti-Semitism was there but being British, it was often indirectly expressed. In primary school I remember early history lessons. The teacher pointed to each child to illustrate the various invasions of Britain. Mysteriously she passed me over. I wanted to be the daughter of a Roman soldier and didn't understand why I wasn't. At playtime a five-year old blonde with a ponytail yelled: "You killed Jesus, you killed Jesus." + "No I didn't," I shouted, "I wasn't born yet." + This month the barriers have come down, but will I be able to cross frontiers without problems? Somehow I doubt it. In the meantime I'll just go on standing up for whichever minority I'm taken for. At least that way I'll be able to measure the temperature of neo Nazism. + - Julia Pascal's version of The Dybbuk is at The Lilian Baylis Theatre from February 1-6. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +18 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 19, 1993 + +A LITTLE ASPIRIN A DAY MAY KEEP DEATH AT BAY + +BYLINE: JOHN ILLMAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 19 + +LENGTH: 401 words + + + ASPIRIN is good for headaches. Its anti-inflammatory properties reduce inflammation, providing relief against arthritis. Its clot-busting power prevents heart attacks and strokes. Now it seems it could protect against public enemy number one: the British weather. + The winter cold claims 50,000 lives a year in Britain, with heart attacks and strokes accounting for more than half the total, according to Professor William Keatinge of Queen Mary and Westfield College, London. + With each cold snap, deaths from heart attacks and strokes stand out as a pinnacle on the graphs used to plot medical statistics. The reason lies in the response of our blood to the cold. "Blood becomes more concentrated in the winter, but this is not true of all blood factors," says Professor Keatinge. "There are factors which both promote and prevent clotting. We need to find out which factors are most affected, and which are the most important in causing thrombosis in winter. Very low dose aspirin (a quarter of a tablet a day) is protective against heart attacks, but there haven't been any clinical drug trials into excess winter deaths." + Without such trials, no specialist would recommend mass medication. "Once you talk about mass medication for 5 million people or more, you're talking about an awful lot of deaths if you get it wrong," says Prof Keatinge. + Low dose aspirin can cause stomach ulcers. One in every 20 suffers severe stomach upsets. One in every 500 people are allergic to it. Keatinge believes there is a case for elderly people taking low dose aspirin in winter if they have to go out into the cold. But he stresses: "I would not advise anyone to start low dose aspirin without first taking medical advice." + Short excursions into the cold can be enough to trigger heart attacks or strokes. Deaths may occur one or two days later - with no mention of cold on the death certificate. Small wonder then that many elderly people under-estimate the potential danger. The over-50s are most at risk because many have arteries which are in poor shape and which provide rough surfaces on which blood can clot. Heart attacks occur because blockage in blood vessels starve heart muscle of oxygen and nutrients. Do not be lulled into a false sense of security by the recent warm days. The seasonal toll starts in September, with deaths increasing in proportion to the fall in temperature. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +19 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 20, 1993 + +COUPLE WINS CASE OVER CARE HOME + +BYLINE: CLARE DYER, LEGAL CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 7 + +LENGTH: 398 words + + + A JUDGE has broken new legal ground by allowing a family home to be turned into a private community care home for psychiatric patients discharged from hospital, despite a covenant in the property's deeds banning trade or business use. + The ruling by Judge Bernard Marder, sitting as a member of the Lands Tribunal, is the first to vary a restrictive covenant "in the public interest" to permit a care home to be opened. The mental health charity Mind said the decision was "of great significance for future developments of this kind". + Richard and Penelope Lloyd, of Worthing, West Sussex, want to use their detached house in Charmandean Road, Broadwater, Worthing, as a home for up to 10 former patients. The house is in a middle-class residential suburb where neighbouring properties sell for around pounds 140,000. + Eight objectors, including a builder and a general practitioner, were ordered to pay half the LLoyds' estimated pounds 25,000- pounds 30,000 costs. Their own costs could total pounds 30,000. + The judge rejected as groundless their arguments that the home would reduce the value of their properties. There was no evidence that the patients' behaviour "would be more or less objectionable or anti-social than . . . 10 residents chosen from the community at large." + The home would cause less disturbance to local residents than a school, which was allowed in the covenant, the judge said. Another property in the street was a home for the elderly, and the proposed home would not affect values further. + The Lands Tribunal has discharged a covenant in the public interest only twice before, in both cases to prevent the demolition of a building. + The judge said his decision was in the light of government policy to discharge patients into the community. The need for community care homes in Worthing was "desperate", the house was suitable and the owners well qualified. Mrs Lloyd, a psychiatric nurse, is a ward manager at a psychiatric rehabilitation unit, and Mr Lloyd manages a care home owned by the couple for 31 elderly residents. + The Lloyds' solicitor, Brian Knowles, said if they had lost, they could have faced costs of up to pounds 60,000. Ian Bynoe, legal director of Mind, said: "It is ignorance and groundless prejudice which so often leads people to object to such schemes. This ruling should discourage future protests." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +20 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 20, 1993 + +ROW GROWS OVER DECISION TO HONOUR ISRAEL'S LONELY PROPHET OF THE LEFT; +Ian Black in Jerusalem reports on the furore surrounding a nonagenarian peacenik + +BYLINE: IAN BLACK + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 596 words + + + BITTER controversy is raging over a decision to award Israel's most prestigious prize to the philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a trenchant critic of nationalist values who says soldiers should refuse to serve in occupied Arab territories. + Professor Leibowitz, aged 90, has been the scourge of established thinking for decades and is the guru of the country's humanistic and doveish left. The proposal to grant him the Israel Prize has sharply highlighted some of the deepest fissures in a complex society. + Yitzhak Rabin, the Labour prime minister, is said to be extremely upset by the decision and asked on Sunday whether it was irreversible. "It fills me with disgust," his Likud predecessor, Yitzhak Shamir, said. + Even the prize committee, composed of three officially chosen intellectuals, has reservations about some of Prof Leibowitz's more outrageous statements. But supporters say it is a mark of a mature and confident society to honour a lonely prophet who has spent his life admonishing his own people. + Prof Leibowitz has often been called the "conscience of Israel". However, most of his countrymen reject that description of a man who has spoken of a "Judaeo-Nazi mentality" and gone far beyond the consensus by urging soldiers to listen to their consciences by disobeying orders in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. + Born in Riga in 1903, he studied chemistry, philosophy and medicine in Berlin and Basle and has taught all of these at Jerusalem's Hebrew University since 1935. He was chief editor of the Hebrew Encyclopaedia and has published many works on science, religion and politics. + Deeply pious, he has tried to adapt Jewish orthodoxy to the needs of modern man. But he is a hero to secular Israelis for calling for the separation of state and religion and is loathed by the clerical and nationalist establishments. + His most controversial pronouncements have been about relations with the Arabs. He has described Israel's military victory in 1967 as a disaster and the idea of "Greater Israel" as a "catastrophic monster". + On Israeli identity, he has written: "The great problem of the Jewish people results from the fact that for the majority there is no other content to their Judaism than a coloured rag attached to a pole, military uniforms and acts carried out in the name of these symbols." + The Jerusalem Post said yesterday: "That this hostile, embarrassing man with a repulsive record of ugly, Cassandra-like prognostications can be recommended for the Israel Prize is an offence to national sensibilities." + One man has appealed to the High Court against the decision and a group of soldiers have said they will refuse to serve in the West Bank and Gaza if the prize is awarded. + Prof Leibowitz countered on a chat show on Monday by referring to the news of the fatal shooting by the army of "an 11-year-old female terrorist" in Gaza. + Clearly enjoying the attention, he insists he will accept the award because to refrain from doing so would be arrogant. + But he adds: "There are people who will be very impressed by the fact that the State of Israel wishes to grant me this prize, out of a liberalism so generous that it will present an award to a man who is one of its bitterest critics. I am not impressed." + He says that young people who come to him with problems tell him: "We cannot talk to our teachers or advisers because they are uncertain when we ask them important questions." + He says: "Many come to me, and that is more important than a prize from the government of Israel." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +21 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 26, 1993 + +BRITAIN LOW IN EC PENSIONS SURVEY + +BYLINE: JULIE WOLF IN BRUSSELS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 4 + +LENGTH: 302 words + + + BRITAIN'S elderly are among the least satisfied in Europe with their state pensions, according to an EC survey. + The Eurobarometer poll, carried out for the European Commission to launch 1993 as the "European Year of older people and solidarity between generations" comes against the backdrop of an ageing European population. Over the next 30 years the percentage of over-60s is expected to rise from 20 to nearly 30 per cent. + Fifty-seven per cent of Britons and 43 per cent of all Europeans would accept higher taxes to pay for their old age. Seven in 10 older people in the EC and 58 per cent of elderly Britons blamed low state benefits and pensions for their feelings of financial insecurity. + Only the elderly of Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands considered their pensions adequate. + In Britain 51 per cent of older people said their pensions were somewhat or very inadequate, compared with 39 per cent "just about enough," and 9 per cent "completely adequate." + Spain and Italy ranked about level with the UK and Greeks and Portuguese were the only elderly less satisfied with their pensions than the British. + When the elderly were asked to list sources of financial security, the state pension system in the UK was ranked lower than in any other EC member state, and well below pension systems in other northern European countries. A small majority of elderly Britons listed property as their main financial security. + Padraig Flynn, the EC's social affairs commissioner, wants pension and care schemes improved but the commission said it was encouraged by the number of younger people expressing concern for the older generation. The survey showed that most Britons and Europeans preferred the state rather than the private sector to care for the elderly. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +22 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 27, 1993 + +'WHISTLEBLOWER' PINK ELECTED TO NURSING REGULATORY BODY + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 212 words + + + NURSES have elected Graham Pink, the "whistleblower" contesting his sacking by Stockport health authority, to the profession's regulatory body, it was announced yesterday. + Mr Pink will serve on the UK Central Council for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting, which has power to strike off the register people it finds guilty of misconduct. + He is one of 12 successful candidates backed by Unison, the trade union being formed by the merger from July of the Confederation of Health Service Employees, the National Union of Public Employees, and the National and Local Government Officers' Association. Unison ran a slate of 32 candidates in the first direct elections to the council, where 40 vacancies were being contested. + A Unison statement said: "The UKCC has been dominated for too long by those who are remote from the front line of direct practice, typically managers and academics who have failed to defend clinical nurses, midwives and health visitors against unacceptable pressures as they strive to maintain professional standards of care." + Mr Pink lost his job as a charge nurse after campaigning for more staff on his wards for elderly patients at Stepping Hill hospital, Stockport. His case comes before an industrial tribunal in March. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +23 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +January 27, 1993 + +SAVINGS, NOT HEALTH, DRIVE HILLARY CLINTON TASK FORCE; +Cost-cutting reforms planned for medical care system within 94 days + +BYLINE: MARTIN WALKER IN WASHINGTON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 1021 words + + + HILLARY CLINTON may be the first First Lady to be assigned an office in the power corridor of the White House west wing, but she will spend most of her working hours in a new "war room" in a next-door office building, planning the legislation for a reformed national health system within 94 days. + President Clinton's urgency on health reform was emphasised yesterday when the congressional budget office warned that the federal budget deficit would more than double to $ 650 billion ( 417 billion pounds) within a decade unless taxes are raised, or the swelling Medicare and Medicaid budgets are cut. Their costs are rising by 15 per cent a year. + The United States already has a national health system, even for the 37 million Americans without private health insurance. But it is woefully inefficient. When the poor or uninsured are sick or wounded, they go to hospital emergency rooms, which reluctantly treat emergencies and recover the costs by increasing the charges for insured patients. + "If we do this [reform] right over the next eight years you are going to see huge savings in tax dollars and even bigger savings - more than twice the savings - that will free up literally hundreds of billions of dollars," President Clinton said, announcing his wife's appointment to chair a presidential task force on health reform. + The US spends 14 per cent of gross domestic product - more than $ 800 billion a year - on health care. This is more than double the share of British GDP, and more than the 9.2 per cent of GDP spent in Canada, or the 8.4 per cent in Germany. + What this means for the average American family is steeply rising insurance premiums. In Florida, the annual premium for a family insured through the state employee system rose from $ 840 in 1980 to $ 3,756 in 1990. Florida has a large population of retired people, but even so, this year it will become the first state to spend more on its Medicaid programme (which subsidises health care for the poor) than on its schools. + There are three main reasons for rising health costs: The success of medicine in keeping more elderly people alive for longer; the high pay of the medical profession and the high costs of its insurance against being sued for malpractice and the need of the private insurance system to make a profit and run its large bureaucracy. + The three powerful health lobbies - insurance companies, doctors and the public - are too formidable for any president to confront at once. So Mr Clinton has compromised by proposing to retain private insurance, while forcing it to compete to drive down costs. + To do this, he will concentrate purchasing power in the hands of a few large health-care providers, in what is called managed competition. Big employers, like the federal government and large corporations and state employee networks, already haggle with insurers. Now, small companies and individuals will be merged into large purchasing groups, which will force insurance companies to bid for their business. + The role of the government is to define a set of minimum health care standards that all insurance plans must meet. Anybody who wants a higher level of service pays extra. + Mr Clinton is pushing further down a road already explored by the private sector, through an increasingly popular system of Health Maintenance Organisations (HMOs). + In Washington DC, a family of four wanting full medical and dental coverage from the vast Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurance group will pay almost $ 10,000 a year. The same family can apply to the Kaiser Permanente HMO for full coverage for just above $ 4,000 a year. + The difference is that if the customer signs up with the HMO, Kaiser must provide all medical care in its own clinics and hospitals. The customer cannot choose his or her own doctor, nor opt for a world-class hospital or surgeon for a particular operation. + The HMOs are also often accused of screening out high-risk families and patients in the application process. This shifts the costs of caring for the chronically sick on to insurers such as Blue Cross, which take all comers, or on to the Medicaid system for the poor. + The other way Mr Clinton hopes to save money is by copying Kentucky's new system. There, a health care authority chivvies doctors into doing more preventive medicine, customers into bringing fewer malpractice lawsuits, and pharmacies into providing generic drugs rather than the more expensive brands. The Kentucky medical profession is fighting the changes. + But Mr Clinton is already receiving promises of support from insurers, who believe his reforms at least preserve their basic structure. If costs continue to soar, their very existence could be at risk from an even more fervent reformer. + Insurance companies also recognise Mr Clinton as a clever politician who is looking for ways of increasing public pressure on them and on doctors, and deflecting it from the White House. He has asked members of the public to write in with ideas. After her husband's successful two-day economic conference in Little Rock last December, Mrs Clinton also plans a similar national teach-in on health reform. + But the real decisions will be made in the "war room", where Mrs Clinton will assemble people, including her friend Donna Shalala, the newly appointed secretary for health and human services, and her husband's old Oxford friend, Ira Magaziner, presidential adviser on policy reform. + The task force also includes the defence secretary, Les Aspin, and the veterans administration secretary, the treasury secretary, Lloyd Bentsen, the budget director, Leon Panetta, and the chair of the council on economic advisers, Laura Tyson. + The membership is instructive. Mrs Clinton will chair a committee more concerned with national finances than health care. Savings, rather than health, are the driving force behind the biggest reform on Mr Clinton's domestic agenda. + - Mr Clinton yesterday nominated Thomas Pickering, George Bush's UN envoy during the Gulf war, as his ambassador to Russia. + Leader comment, page 16 + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +24 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 6, 1993 + +ANNE'S PASSPORT TO PIMLICO; +The sprawling block of flats chosen by the Princess Royal as her London base once housed de Gaulle and Vassall. It is not Balmoral, but SEBASTIAN FAULKS discovered a certain faded charm + +BYLINE: SEBASTIAN FAULKS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 25 + +LENGTH: 1558 words + + + LAST THURSDAY morning tenants at Dophin Square received a memo from the general manager, A K Crawford, CBE, FBIM. "Dear Tenant, You will have just received a circular from Thames Water Customer Services. Please ignore this as our water is provided from our own artesian wells and not by Thames Water. Yours sincerely." + The slightly desperate attempt at exclusiveness is characteristic of the fading glamour of this 10-floor, red brick rectangle of flats in which the Princess Royal and her husband Commander Tim Laurence have chosen to make their home. + Built in two years on either side of the Abdication, Dolphin Square was a triumph of design by Gordon Jeeves and Oscar Faber for the adolescent Costain company. With soundless corridors, art deco trimmings and Cunardish streamlining, it had cachet, fizz and security. It was an urban miracle: a river view, vast private gardens and still only a stroll from the House or Sloane Square. + In the intervening 50 years, Dolphin Square has moved via the raffish to the edge of seediness. The radios installed in each sitting room no longer work: the Bakelite control on the wall, that once switched to Home, Light or Third, is reminiscent of an NHS hospital in need of a refit; the silent speaker above the door has a look of Orwellian intrusion. The long corridors of Hood House in powder blue paint with a dolphin-swirl patterned carpet have a whiff of the institutional. + From the swing doors of the houses, all named after English admirals, there now most frequently emerge not debutantes or rising businessmen but elderly women with heavy face powder, small dogs and the tottering walk made famous by the late Dick Emery. + All four sides of the rectangle open inward on to the garden and backward on to the street. It should be simple enough to secure the two entrances to the house in which the Princess rents her flat. If, as is rumoured, this is in a house at the front, with a view of the river, then it will be free from the dangers of being overlooked from the backs of houses in the parallel streets. + There would be no joy for mad marksmen; though what the couple will do about the shattering noise of the Embankment traffic is another matter. + In her book about London neighbourhoods, Metropolitan Myths, Glenys Roberts wrote: "Nobody ever reports anyone in Pimlico because they neither know whom to report nor whom to report them to . . . Old men with baby brides, youngsters with ageing floosies . . . marriage partners living with other people's marriage partners, marriage partners living with their own unsuitable marriage partners . . . get off scot-free without so much as a raised eyebrow in Pimlico . . . It is vicarious and anoymous, lonesome yet playing at being part of the Establishment." + With its endless corridors and air of anonymity, Dolphin Square would be the perfect place for a Greene-ish affair. Its inhabitants are of the kind who need never be told to "forget" having seen something. It is a place for which the term "off the record" might have been invented. + It is also very handy for Cdr Laurence's work at the Admiralty. He is not the first Dolphin Square resident to take the 20-minute stroll to the office. As he came down from his eighth floor flat one morning in December 1962, the Admiralty clerk John Vassall saw a burly man sitting in the hall, watching him intently. + All day long he saw worrying portents - faces at the window, strange cars waiting. In the evening, as he left work, he was arrested in the Mall on suspicion of spying for the Russians. He was subsequently tried and sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment. + Vassall had got wind of something a few weeks earlier when there was a kock on the door of his flat. "I opened the door to find three men dressed in white overalls and with a ladder," he wrote in his autobiography. "They wanted to check the kitchen on the excuse that someone had spilt acid down the sink above mine." Ah, the subtlety of MI5 . . . He checked with the Dolphin Square maintenance staff, who knew nothing of it. + And they are an efficent team: a young woman who lives in Frobisher House said this week she had had her (genuinely) leaking sink fixed within 10 minutes on a bank holiday. When she moved into Frobisher last year an elderly man on the stairs said: "Ah, young people, marvellous, just what we need round here. Make as much noise as you like. We're all stone deaf, you know." Another veteran resident refused to evacuate his flat during a bomb scare last Christmas on the grounds that Hitler's Blitzkrieg had not moved him and he was damned if the IRA would. + Between seven and 9.30 the 60-foot pool is reserved for residents. "In the early morning," said the young woman in Frobisher, "you see a lot of old flesh wobbling across the grass in dressing gowns to do their regulation lengths before it opens to the local schools." + Above the pool is a mural of the Thames's course, winding down to a sunny pre-fire Windsor Castle. At the deep end the pool is 8 feet 3 inches, or about 25 hands to Her Royal Highness. + Overlooking the water is the main restaurant. In his novel The Sweets of Pimlico, A. N. Wilson "improved" the Jeeves-Faber design so that diners would be on a level with the swimmers, but in fact it's easy enough to see the aged flesh moving uncertainly through the chlorine. "I was drawn to the secrecy of the place," said Wilson. "It seemed the ideal home for such a morally ambivalent character as the hero of the novel". + The restaurant has a bar with ragged stools; the carpets are worn and the banquettes are shiny with wear. Music pipes forlornly from a speaker and a large piano with the ubiquitous dolphin motif offers the silent threat of evening cabaret. The food has been through strange processes of preservation and reheating: the boiled potato last Thursday lunchtime was at once like flour and glue. + The Princess will be able to use the in-house launderette if the royal washing machine lets her down, and there are a grocer and greengrocer on hand. "Most of us prefer Tesco because it's cheaper," said a Hood resident, "but they're good in a crisis." The butcher has closed, but the hairdresser and paper shop flourish. If the princesss is visited by any family member who enjoys a nip, the Dolphin Square off-licence can provide. + Right opposite, on the other side of the Embankment, is the White Elephant restaurant, a favourite with the Princess of Wales in her bun-throwing days and therefore equally unlikely to receive the Princess Royal's regular and wholehearted endorsement. + "We had a pleasant carol concert at Christmas," said a Howard resident. "The Salvation Army band played in the garden and there was free Bovril for residents." On the day itself a turkey dinner is delivered on request to those too old or indisposed to cook for themselves. + While this is unimpeachably kind, it suggests a different kind of place from the one that received the exiled General de Gaulle in 1940 when he came to rally the Free French, or that was home to the radical lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall, the Mitford sisters, C. P. Snow, Susan Hampshire, whose mother gave dancing classes in the square in the 1960s, or even Christine Keeler. + Nowadays the residents are mainly retired. The nameplates of the houses HAWKINS, GRENVILLE, NELSON, and so on, are smaller than the accompanying signs that say QUIET PLEASE. The knee-high walls about the well-stocked shrubberies have their edges painted in bright white paint to prevent the barking of elderly shins. The centrally provided heating is set at a level suitable for the thinnest blood. + There are said to be more than 50 MPs with flats in the square, though Dr Jack Cunningham is one of the few listed on the internal telephone directory. The others apparently live under oher people's names because they fear their flats being used by colleagues for overnight stays, or worse. + A young female resident in Raleigh House was greeted in her first week by the words: "Ah, you must be an MP's daughter." The square is a popular base for politicians' children when their parents are having to put in an appearance in the constituency. + The cheapest flat, one room with kitchen and bathroom, is pounds 4,600 a year, including heating, hot water and sewerage. There is no service charge. The most expensive, with four rooms kitchen and bathroom, is pounds 13,600 a year. The square is owned by a trust which initially charges market rates, but limits rises so that longer-stay tenants benefit. + While the grand days of Dolphin Square are certainly past, its position still makes it attractive for people who work in the centre of London and don't mind an institutional feeling. Although it is not obviously or heavily policed, women on their own say they feel safe there. Suspicious-looking men are challenged at night. + One native of the Elephant and Castle was unimpressed when shown the Princess's future home this week: "It's like Peabody buildings without the washing", she said. This is a bit unfair. It is certainly not Balmoral, but it has a kind of colourless charm. As Glenys Roberts put it: "Pimlico is anonymous. You need no passport to get into it. Pimlico is No Man's Land. And from No Man's Land you can move in any direction". + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +25 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 6, 1993 + +ONE IN THREE LESBIANS 'RISKS DEATH FROM BREAST CANCER' + +BYLINE: BARBARA SELVIN IN NEW YORK + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 11 + +LENGTH: 300 words + + + NEWSDAY: ONE in three lesbians may develop breast cancer by the age of 85, three times the risk faced by heterosexual women, according to a doctor at the National Cancer Institute. + Lesbians are less likely to bear children, more likely to drink alcohol and to smoke, and to be overweight than heterosexual women, all of which raise the risk of breast cancer, according to Dr Suzanne Haynes, chief of health education in the division of cancer prevention and control. + Lesbians are also less likely than heterosexual women to be screened for breast cancer, she said. One in nine American women is likely to develop breast cancer by the time she is aged 85, and "lesbians may be at three times the risk of the average woman," Dr Haynes said. "When I added up the extra risks . . . you could actually expect that one in three lesbians might be at risk of dying from breast cancer." + At the request of the National Lesbian and Gay Health Foundation, Dr Haynes reviewed the literature on risk factors for breast cancer and reports on lesbian health. + Lack of childbearing greatly increased the risk of breast cancer, Dr Haynes said, and 70 per cent of lesbians were childless. These women had an 80 per cent greater risk of breast cancer than mothers. + The link between childlessness and breast cancer "has been known since the 1700s from studies of nuns". + Lesbians were less likely to see a gynaecologist regularly, in part because they did not need birth-control prescriptions. They were less likely to have their breasts examined and get referrals for mammograms. Nearly two-thirds of lesbians aged over 55 did not check their breasts for lumps, compared to a third of all older women. + Heavy drinking increased the risk of breast cancer by 40 per cent, Dr Haynes said. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +26 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 6, 1993 + +SHORT CUTS + +BYLINE: ROBERT LEEDHAM + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN WEEKEND PAGE; Pg. 52 + +LENGTH: 451 words + + + COMING OF AGE + There is a touch of foolhardiness about Age Concern's new advertising campaign. In an attempt to counter "ageism" it is putting up lots of posters with the faces of grinning elderly people on them. Printed next to each is a phrase like "Old codger" or "Silly old moo". Clever. The photos were taken by David Bailey, now 55, who makes his opinion of the campaign relevant: "Ageism is a big problem and will affect you and me. When you are old, people expect you to be serene and wise, but at the same you are dismissed, patronised and called names." Ignoring the uncharitable theory that Bailey was in fact talking about the reviews earned by his latest collection of photos, it was unfortunate that the Times newspaper - which has a high number of crinkly readers - should run this quote opposite a story actually about the clearance of a backlog of legal cases, had the headline: "Old Bailey oils wheels of justice". + A STATE OF BLISS + "What we call happiness," wrote Freud, "in the strictest sense of the word comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree." A resort in Jamaica, called Hedonism II, has identified Britain's dammed up needs. Its advertising entices: "Give up counting calories, Stay up late, Sleep in, Have a drink before noon, Dine in shorts, Talk to strangers, Don't call your mother, Don't pay for anything." This column prefers the definition offered by Gareth Roberts, leader of the British team that uncovered the causes of Alzheimer's disease: "It was like looking for a needle in the haystack and finding the farmer's daughter." + PARADISE POSTPONED + Thinking of where else to go on holiday this year? Or looking for places to avoid? Helpfully, a recent rash of articles on "green tourism" has been fingering guilty hotspots, which are then dubbed as "paradises lost". Among them so far are Goa, the Fijian islands, Hawaii, Loch Leven, St Gervais, East Germany - for women, apparently, America, California specifically, the Cote d'Azur, Alverstoke, Dubrovnik and Todi - an Italian town described by researchers from the University of Kentucky as "the most beautiful, most life-affirming and life-supporting city which mankind has ever created" and subsequently overrun by tourists. But not only places receive the dubious accolade. Also labelled as "paradises lost" are: pre-packed lasagne, ITV, a missed opportunity for sex with two bank employees, the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Jacques Delors' plan for pan-European social justice and Seve Ballesteros's waning genius with a golf club. It's enough to cause an outbreak of "Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy/and moonstruck madness". + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +27 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 12, 1993 + +THE DAY IN BRIEF + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 571 words + + + - THE junior health minister, Tim Yeo, defended funding for care in the community, which comes into effect in April. He said claims that it would be short of pounds 250 million were "bogus" and claims by the Association of Metropolitan Authorities that a cash shortfall would put 12,000 elderly and disabled people at risk were "scaremongering". "Next year directors of social services will have at their disposal pounds 565 million for the reforms. That money has been ring-fenced to ensure it reaches its target. If councils want to spend more of their resources on community care, they are free to do so." The success of community care now rested "on the shoulders of the directors of social services." MPs were debating funding of community care. David Hinchliffe, for Labour, accused the Government of introducing a "back door method of closing council homes" by discriminating in favour of independent providers. The Government was shunting its funding problems on to local government. Nigel Jones, for the Liberal Democrats, welcomed care in the community as a progressive proposal, but said there was not enough money to implement it. + - THE Prime Minister welcomed President Clinton's initiative over Bosnia. He said during question time: "The best way forward, the only credible way forward that had yet been found, is the Vance/Owen plan which we strongly support. I welcome the policy statement from the US government." + - JOHN Major rejected criticism over the appointment of the chairman of Carlton Communications, Michael Green, as chairman of ITN. John Heppell (Lab. Nottingham E) questioned the impartiality of "a known Conservative supporter and donor." + NEXT WEEK IN PARLIAMENT + House of Commons - Monday: Questions to Social Security ministers and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster; backbench debate on "the housing crisis"; Bankruptcy (Scotland) Bill, Lords amendments; Judicial Pensions and Retirement Bill, remaining stages. Tuesday: Employment questions; questions to the Prime Minister; Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Bill, report; Hill Livestock (Compensatory Allowances) (Amendment) Regulations. Wednesday: Trade and Industry questions; Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Bill, remaining stages; Revenue Support Grant (Scotland) Order; Local Government Finance (Scotland) Order; Housing Support Grant (Scotland) Order. Thursday: Northern Ireland questions; questions to the Prime Minister; Foreign Compensation (Amendment) Bill, second reading; Appropriation (Northern Ireland) Order. Friday: Backbench business - Right to Know Bill, second reading. + House of Lords - Monday: Video Recordings Bill, committee; Criminal Justice Act (Contracted Out Prisons) Order; Social Security sick pay, contributions, benefits and pensions orders; debate on Kenya's elections. Tuesday: Appointment of Medical Ethics Select Committee; Housing (Fitness Standard) (Amendment) Bill, committee; Asylum and Immigration Appeals Bill, committee. Wednesday: Debates on the Maastricht treaty, students' cash difficulties and calls to establish a Humanities Research Council. Thursday: Welsh Language Bill, report; European Communities (Definition of Treaties) (International Railways Tariffs Agreements) Order. Friday: Not sitting. + TODAY + House of Commons: Backbench business - Representation of the People (Amendment) Bill, second reading. + House of Lords: Not sitting. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +28 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 12, 1993 + +DOLE PUSHES DSS BILL TO POUNDS 78.3BN; +Spending set to hit pounds 92.7bn by 1996 - Cuts search looks at invalidity benefits + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 505 words + + + STATE spending on social security is running pounds 3.7 billion ahead of government forecasts made a year ago and rising unemployment is chiefly to blame, the Department of Social Security said yesterday. + Social security spending is projected to rise to pounds 92.7 billion by 1995-96, an increase of 18 per cent on the pounds 78.3 billion in 1992-93 and 89 per cent up on the pounds 49.1 billion in 1987-88. + The estimated pounds 78.3 billion spending for 1992-93 is said to be 67 per cent higher in real terms, after allowing for inflation, than the total in 1978-79 when the Government first took office. The figures underline why ministers this week made social security a main target in their scrutiny of state expenditure. Peter Lilley, the Social Security Secretary, said at the weekend that "at the very least we must curb the long-term growth in spending". + The latest figures for social security spending came in the annual DSS report. The pounds 92.7 billion projection for 1995-96 is made up of pounds 64.5 billion for the department itself and pounds 28.2 billion for local authorities, which administer housing and council tax benefits. + A breakdown of the pounds 3.7 billion overrun on last year's projection shows that pounds 1.5 billion in 1992-93, and pounds 2.1 billion in 1993-94, is attributed to extra spending on income support benefit. But pounds 405 million and pounds 339 million respectively is put down to additional claims for invalidity benefit. + This benefit, already claimed by 1.5 million people and projected to cost pounds 7 billion by 1995, is considered a prime target of the spending scrutiny. Ministers believe it is being wrongly awarded to many long-term unemployed men in their fifties and early sixties. A comparison of spending by claimant group, expressed in constant prices, shows how benefits intended for long-term sick and disabled people are the main growth area. By 1995-96, it is projected, they will account for 22 per cent of total benefits expenditure, compared to 14.2 per cent in 1987-88. + By contrast, benefits for elderly people - commonly assumed to be the main cause of concern for ministers because of the ageing population - will by 1995-96 represent 44 per cent of total expenditure, compared to 49 per cent in 1987-88. By 1994-95, spending on retirement pensions is forecast to cost pounds 750 million less than anticipated because of a downward revision in pensioner numbers following the 1991 census. + The report's projections are based on assumed inflation of 2 per cent for 1992-93, and 3.5 per cent for 1993-94, and assumed unemployment of an average 2.8 million for the whole period 1993-96. + In a statement launching the report, Mr Lilley said the Government's commitment was "to maintain support for those who need it most and to keep its pledge to the elderly, families and people with disabilities". + The Social Security Departmental Report: the Government's Expenditure Plans 1993-94 to 1995-96; HMSO; pounds 9.90 + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +29 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 15, 1993 + +WINTER AND BLOCKADE RAVAGE ARMENIA; +Only the wealthy few escape the misery of the home front, writes David Hearst in Yerevan + +BYLINE: DAVID HEARST + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 801 words + + + THE babies in the orphanage were unlike others who lie awake in their cots. They did not wriggle or cry. Each had a tiny woollen hat and a blanket. A small kerosene stove burned inadequately in the centre of the room. Their hands were freezing. + Their nappies were drying in the unheated stairwell outside, in what seemed an unequal fight against the damp and the cold. The day before, the gas pipeline though Georgia, Armenia's sole energy supply, was blown up for the second time in three weeks. The whole of Armenia was blacked out as thick snow fell outside. + Downstairs at this orphanage, 10 children were huddled around a primitive diesel-powered contraption, upon which was placed an open boiling pan of water. It was the nursery's pride and joy, but we looked on horrified. A Snoopy doll, still in its plastic wrapper, was pinned to the wall out of arm's reach, a glimpse of what it would be like to have the toys that other children had. + Two of the children started screaming. Before we went, the director pleaded with Joe Kennedy, the US congressman. "We have no transport. The children you see here never leave this house all the year round. They have no way of knowing what nature looks like because they have no contact with it. If only we had a minibus . . ." + It was the first of many pleas for help to the congressman who had arrived with $ 25,000 worth of medical supplies, and a group of fourth generation Armenian-Americans, determined to keep the cause burning brightly on Capitol Hill. + Mr Kennedy kept trying to smile that broad, confident Kennedy smile: "Hey, you there," he said reaching out to a two-year-old orphan from Spitak, a town which still lies in ruins from the earthquake which levelled it five years ago. The little boy recoiled, clutching the chewed wooden bars of his cot even tighter. + In the old people's home the scene was much the same: cold and hungry bodies wasting away in their blankets. As Armenia struggles through its third winter without fuel, the average elderly Armenian has lost 11 pounds in weight in the last three months. They know that from the autopsy reports. + Most of these people were Armenian refugees from the Azerbaijan capital, Baku. As each republic lay siege to the other, there was a brutal exchange of each other's minorities. + In the midst of the mayhem of pleas surrounding the congressman's party, a man burst forth: "I am a professional person." He was wearing a battered pin-stripe suit. "A group of 30 came one day and tore my house apart. Then the police arrived and put me on a ship. And that was three years ago. Why does nobody put pressure on Azerbaijan to stop this war? Here we are in our third winter and life in Yerevan is like the siege of Leningrad, during the war. The fascists!" + Come dusk, Yerevan is a city of unheated concrete husks. Its population is swollen by 360,000 refugees. Yesterday all electricity except to the city's main hospital and the office of the president, Levon Ter-Petrossian, was cut off. + By day city dwellers scavenge for wood and food in the thick snow. By night they huddle around stoves, kerosene burners and candles. They live mainly off bread and potatoes. It costs 40 roubles for a candle and 8,000 roubles for 20 litres of petrol. That is four times the monthly average salary. + But some buildings are lit with private generators and have kerosene heaters in abundance. "They belong to these people we call businessmen," said Igor Karapitian, the head surgeon at the main hospital. + "We have not got any electric bulbs for the lights in our operating theatre. We have no respirators. There are no ambulances running. The telephones don't work. We are going to have an epidemic of intestinal infections and salmonella when spring comes, because raw sewage is going into the water supply, and yet there are people in this city who are rich, have light, warmth, anything they want." + According to US aid workers, Armenia has until next week before it runs out of wheat. There will then be a gap of 10 days before the next shipment arrives. And yet no one in Armenia is prepared to even think of suing for peace with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. + A senior Armenian diplomat explained the official line: "There are reasons to think we will get a ceasefire in Karabakh this year. There is a parity of weakness. We inflict heavy losses on the Azeris in Karabakh which they can ill afford. They inflict the economic blockade which we can ill afford." + But this is a high-risk strategy, with which the oil-rich Azeris may not comply. + Mr Karapitian shakes his head in sorrow: "It is not possible to give Karabakh away. I know this. But we have to stop the fighting. It is crucifying our country, and the best have already left it." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +30 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 15, 1993 + +AMERICAN NOTEBOOK: CLINTON'S BATTLE PLAN INVOLVES SHARED SACRIFICE + +BYLINE: MARK TRAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 1071 words + + + PRESIDENT Clinton formally unveils his counter-revolution against Reaganomics when he addresses Congress on Wednesday, almost 12 years to the day afterRonald Reagan ushered in an era of supply-side economics. + Mr Reagan strode into the House of Representatives on February 18, 1981, and declared that the US was approaching a "day of reckoning". In a bold challenge to economic orthodoxy, he slashed taxes, boosted the military budget and curtailed social programmes while promising to balance the budget. Twelve years and $ 300 billion later, it is Mr Clinton's turn to lay out a political philosophy and economic agenda designed to take the country in a new direction. + Returning to the format that served him so well in the election campaign, Mr Clinton told a meeting in Detroit that the middle class should brace itself for a tax increase. To show that government was doing its part, he announced a 14 per cent cut in administrative costs over the next four years, coupled with the elimination of 100,000 federal jobs. + He rounded off the week by denouncing the pharmaceuticals industry for making inflated profits "at the expense of our children". And in a break with precedent Mr Clinton will give a TV address to talk about his economic package even before his message to Congress. + After a rocky start over the issue of homosexuals in the military and the selection of an attorney general, Mr Clinton has recovered his footing just in time for the decisive battle over the economy. + The markets, through a fall in long-term interest rates, have anticipated Mr Clinton's seriousness in getting to grips with the budget deficit. + THE elements of a deficit reduction package are already clear. They include raising the top income tax rate from 33 per cent to 36 per cent, a major reform in collections from foreign companies operating in the US and new energy taxes, which will hit the middle class hardest. For the elderly, an increase in the taxation of social security benefits for couples with incomes above $ 32,000 is in the offing. It will be "shared sacrifice", as Mr Clinton said in his inauguration speech. In all, the increase in taxes should net about $ 60 billion. + On the spending side, Mr Clinton will cut defence more sharply than President Bush, curtail the space station and the supercollider programmes, limit deductions for mortgage interest payments and trim domestic programmes that will save a total of about $ 35 billion. + Despite much flak from economists, Mr Clinton will press ahead with an investment and stimulus package of about $ 20 billion. Though reduced from the $ 60 billion mooted during the campaign, critics cavil at the need for such fine-tuning at all given the pace of the US economic recovery. + This part of Mr Clinton's economic package bears the hallmarks of Robert Reich, the Labour Secretary, who argues that the administration should aim for less deficit reduction and more spending to ensure growth. Mr Reich has had to cede much ground to more mainstream thinkers such as the chairman of the National Economic Council, Robert Rubin, who is emerging as the President's most influential economic adviser. + But stimulus there will be. The philosophical heart of the administration's economic programme reflects an activist, neo-Keynesian economic approach, more common in Europe, that leaves free-marketeers uneasy. The stimulus package makes political sense as it will sugar the pill of higher taxes, especially at a time when unemployment remains stubbornly high despite the economic recovery. + The economic payoff of the stimulus package depends on the extent to which Mr Reich has been able to win the battle of ideas on the training of America's workforce for the 21st century. + AMERICAN industry has found it difficult to recruit workers to fill jobs not requiring a university education. The chairman of Xerox recently declared that the skill levels of American society have the "makings of a natural disaster", while New York Telephone had to test 57,000 applicants to find 2,100 people qualified to fill entry-level jobs. + Demographic trends portend worse to come. Of the new entrants into the workforce, white males - the best educated sector of the population, especially in science, technology and engineering - will comprise only 15 per cent. The rest will be women, minorities and immigrants, the latter making up the two fastest growing segments of the workforce. + Since minorities and immigrants have generally gone into low-paid, unskilled jobs, there exists an enormous potential mismatch between educational levels and the forecast demand for jobs requiring technical or higher education. Unlike Germany, Sweden, or Japan, however, the US has a haphazard approach to job training. + During the campaign, Mr Clinton considered making companies set aside 1.5 per cent of their spending on training. Those that did not meet this requirement would pay an equivalent amount into a fund used to set up regional training centres. Mr Clinton backed off after companies objected strenuously. But that 1.5 per cent target still remains and Mr Reich may offer employers tax incentives to reach that goal. + US companies now spend about $ 30 billion a year on training which comes from less than 10 per cent of all companies. In the long run, most economists agree with Mr Reich that training can be an investment that more than pays for itself. Studies during the late 1980s concluded that company-sponsored training programmes boost workers' wages by 4 per cent to 11 per cent over the long run. + A 1.5 PER CENT training budget would cost companies an extra $ 21 billion a year and could cause them to restrain wages and hiring in the short run. But it would also generate $ 63 billion in economic activity and 2.5 million new jobs over three to five years according to the American Society for Training & Development. Even opponents of the mandate agree that the goal is worthwhile for Americans to compete globally. + Mr Reich's emphasis on training and infrastructure stems from his belief that a well-trained work force backed up by good communications will entice global investment its way, as he argues in his book, The Work Of Nations. It is a work that Mr Clinton has taken to heart, hence his determination to press ahead with a stimulus programme that would have been anathema under Reaganomics. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +31 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 16, 1993 + +HIDDEN GUNMEN SEND DEATH FROM THE HILLS + +BYLINE: IAN TRAYNOR IN SARAJEVO + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 701 words + + + WHEN the anonymous, unseen sniper turned his high-velocity rifle on a busy Sarajevo intersection last week, he set his telescopic sight on Dejan Stanisic. + Dejan, aged 13, now lies on his side in the children's ward of the city's Kosevo hospital. It is too early to say, explains his doctor, but Dejan may be paralysed from the waist down after falling prey to the scourge of Sarajevo, the Serbian sniper. + "I was just walking around when I was hit," Dejan explains listlessly. The single shot struck him in the upper left thigh, making him one of almost 400 people wounded in Sarajevo last week, according to Bosnian government figures. + Many of those injuries - and many of the more than 8,000 people whom the government says have died in Sarajevo since Serbian forces laid siege last April - are victims of the ruthless marksmen in the hills to the south of the city and in Serb-held tower blocks. + The snipers are arguably the most pernicious aspect of the siege. They distinguish Sarajevo from other cities at war, and are also the most damning indictment of the Serb offensive, since civilians are more often than not the intended targets. Their victims include a three-month-old baby and numerous elderly women. Their bullets have hit schools, flats, hospitals and clinics, and have turned large parts of the city into no-go areas. + The Sarajevo siege effectively started when Serb snipers picked off a handful of demonstrators marching last April to demand that their multi-cultural city be left intact. Ever since, and every day, the killers use the streets of Sarajevo as a shooting gallery and the zing and ricochet of high-velocity bullets echo through the valley in which the city lies. + They are devilishly accomplished marksmen, allegedly trained early in the war by Yugoslav army experts at a base outside Sarajevo. The city grapevine has it that there are snipers who go for the head, others who are neck specialists or heart experts, and those who choose to maim by hitting the lower part of the body. + And there are even more skilled gunmen who excel at hitting rapidly moving targets, cars that race down the deserted, debris-strewn main dual carriageway at 70 mph or faster. In the last few days, at least two people driving on this route were shot in the head. One was killed, the other survived. In the past week, at least four foreign journalists' cars were hit; one photographer survived after a bullet passed through his neck. + Three days ago, at a busy but treacherous intersection exposed to the hillside assassins, a single shot rang out and a middle-aged civilian fell, clutching his leg. Cars screeched to a halt and reversed rapidly into the cover of a building. Pedestrians scattered. Another car drew up, the victim was bundled in and taken to hospital. + Every night, the marksmen come into their own when hundreds of desperate people try to flee across the airport runway. The airport is controlled by the United Nations and offers a chink of light in the encircling darkness. Anxious not to offend the Serbs who handed them control of the airport, UN troops turn back the would-be escapers. They use bright lights to spot the fugitives who, like rabbits frozen in a car headlights, are then picked off by the gunmen. + Two nights ago, two men and a woman at the airport were wounded by Serbian snipers. + The aim of this callous target practice is to bully, demoralise and terrorise the city, but the weary population refuses to be cowed. It has become masterful at darting through dangerous areas, and has developed relatively safe routes across the city which offer cover from the gunmen in the south. + Open areas and intersections exposed to the southern hills are banked up with buses, articulated lorries and huge metal containers that are now twisted with thousands of perforations from the snipers' bullets. + Every morning, Sarajevo is a city on the move. Thousands of people walk or cycle to visit relatives, fetch water or wood, or simply to take the air in an attempt to keep their spirits up. But it was while out walking that Dejan Stanisic was shot in the thigh. Now he will probably never walk properly again. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +32 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 16, 1993 + +NEW IDEA BUT OLD WOES ON THE FARM; +A pragmatist is now leader of Lithuania, where voters view change wryly, reports Jonathan Steele + +BYLINE: JONATHAN STEELE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 693 words + + + LIKE many other former collective farm peasants, Birute Monkiewicz always intended to vote for Algirdas Brazauskas, the new president who won a sweeping victory in Sunday's poll. + "There's no one in charge in this country. Everyone just looks after their own pockets. At least Brazauskas may do something," she said resignedly as we sat in the kitchen of her wooden farmhouse. + Her words come as something of a shock. In Russia, the radicals want to break up the collective farms and allow private land ownership. In Lithuania, where it has already happened, the reaction has started much earlier than expected. + "They sent a man from the regional centre to take charge of the farm and replace our director. He got rid of everyone. He sold the cows, the pigs, and a lot of the equipment, and kept the money for himself," complained Maria Stefanowicz, as she plaited dry straw in a side room of her house across the street. She now makes bunches of dry flowers to sell to tourists. + Under a law passed by the now defeated parliamentary majority of Sajudis, the Lithuanian Popular Front, the farms were abolished at a stroke of the pen last year. Outside liquidators were sent in because it was thought they would share the assets more objectively than the old farm chairmen. + Instead, to judge by peasants' accounts, many turned out to be crooks. + "This is my share of the farm," Birute Monkiewicz's elderly mother-in-law told me, as she hunted for a scrap of paper. It was denominated 12,500 talons, equivalent to about two months' salary for 40 years of work on the farm. + Like everybody on what was the Akmene farm, she is a Pole. They know that Poland, even under communism, had a long history of successful private farms, but that is no consolation. + The old woman remembers how Lithuania's Stalinists collectivised the place when she was a girl. "They took all our animals. My brother initially refused to join the farm. But then we got used to it," she said. Her parents had eight children, and they were always short of land. + Now they have had a new shock. There was no violence during de- collectivisation, but they are still stunned. + What made the abrupt de-collectivisation worse was a law passed by parliament giving previous owners the right to have their land back. Offices in every town are flooded with claims which will no doubt pass to the courts. + "It's a disaster," said Julius Veselka, Lithuania's new economics minister. Farm output has gone down by two-thirds. "In 1940 [when Lithuania was annexed by the USSR] 70 per cent of the population lived on the land. Now it's only 30 per cent, so thousands of city-dwellers who will never return to farming have a right to the land," Mr Veselka said. + The new government, installed last autumn by Mr Brazauskas before he ran for the presidency on Sunday, is preparing tax reforms to penalise people who leave land idle or use it badly. + Another key change, already introduced by Mr Brazauskas's team, is a ceiling on the profits of dairies, meat-packers, and other food-processing plants. The ideologues of rapid privatisation let them become uncontrolled monopolies in each district. Farmers were paid little for their produce, while the firms charged consumers high prices, in some cases making profits of 230 per cent, according to Mr Veselka. "We have imposed a 15 per cent ceiling on profit," he said. + Lithuania's collapse in agriculture has been almost matched by the fall in industrial output. The republic's gross national product has dropped by 47.6 per cent in three years, a bigger drop than in Latvia (42.5 per cent) and Estonia (39.7 per cent) over the same period since independence. Problems in paying for natural gas from Russia have also left the republic with little hot water. + It is hardly surprising that Lithuanian voters on Sunday turned back to Mr Brazauskas, a pragmatist who knows the system and helped the republic to defeat Moscow's blockade three years ago. + He took about 60 per cent of the vote. His only rival, Stasys Lozoraitis, a diplomat who has spent all his adult life abroad, took 39 per cent. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +33 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 19, 1993 + +EVERY GREY HAIR COUNTS; +Spain: grey panthers stalk the streets + +BYLINE: ANTONIO CAMPOS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EURO PAGE; Pg. 14 + +LENGTH: 296 words + + + IN 1950 there were around 2 million people over 65 in Spain, today there are 4.2 million and by 2001 there will be some 6 million, or 15 per cent of the population. + Women predominate among the country's elderly - there are 2.7 million of them. Some 84 per cent of old people live in cities and only 16 per cent live in rural areas. + About a third of the Spanish elderly (31 per cent) have trouble making ends meet and 58 per cent live in their own homes, according to statistics supplied by the National Congress of Organisations for the Elderly. Their calculations show that 73 per cent receive less than 50,000 pesetas ( pounds 300) a month, 8,000 pesetas ( pounds 48) more than the minimum professional wage. The principal income for 35 per cent of Spanish families is a retirement pension. + The increase in the number of elderly people in Spain is reflected in their growing desire to play a more active role in society. Some 35 per cent of the elderly have said they would participate in and vote for a party made up solely of "grey panthers". + But while there has been a swing in the attitudes of Spain's old people, the elderly Spaniard usually spends his time watching television (52.4 per cent) or strolling through parks (50.7 per cent) and more than half never read a newspaper. They have been hindered by a society which deprived them of an education and obliged them to become part of the national economic effort at the end of the civil war, as is shown by the fact that 44.6 per cent did not complete primary education. + The greatest aspiration of elderly Spaniards is to improve their economic position (48.9 per cent). Other desires are better health care (24 per cent) and more participation in leisure activities (18.4 per cent). + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +34 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 19, 1993 + +EVERY GREY HAIR COUNTS; +This is no age to grow old in. In the East, communist care of the elderly has collapsed. In the West, capitalism has little to spare in a recession for its older citizens. Jay Rayner looks at Europe's attempts to highlight the twilight years + +BYLINE: JAY RAYNER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EURO PAGE; Pg. 14 + +LENGTH: 1201 words + + + EUROPE is fast going grey. Just under a fifth of its population is already 60 plus, which will rise to over a third by 2020. The unthinkable is beginning to be seriously asked: will tomorrow's young people earn enough to keep their old folk in the manner they deserve? + An anxious European Community last month launched the European Year Of Older People And Solidarity Between Generations 1993, an admirable if clumsily titled effort to counter ageism in the workplace and bring attention to both the cultural and educational needs of the aged. + A substantial 7.5 million Ecus ( pounds 6.25 millioncorrect) has been allotted to staging conferences, seminars and awards. But the real debate is not so much how to stop older people being discriminated against as how to save them from real financial hardship, shivering in blankets and clutching hot water bottles against the cold to save on heating bills. + Already the percentage of pensioners experiencing poverty, defined by the EC as an income below half the national average, is alarming. The last major survey, in 1985, put it at 20 per cent of pensioners in the EC, or 8.5 million people. The situation is undoubtedly worse now. + For the architects of western Europe's welfare systems, those public administrators who searched the rubble of the last war for a workable compromise between ideals and practicalities, it must be seriously galling. Their very success at creating a system that could service its citizens' health and welfare has produced a problem that may prove its undoing: a demographic time bomb. + For any welfare system to be stable, enough money has to be paid in for those who need it to be able to take out. There is now serious doubt in some circles that there will be enough people paying in. Over the next 30 years the number of people contributing to the upkeep of each pensioner in the EC will drop from three to two. + Not everybody agrees about the seriousness of the problem. According to Alan Walker, Professor of Social Studies at Sheffield University and a leading expert on the care and social welfare of the elderly in Europe, the ageing issue is being used by certain European governments as an pretext for cutting pensions. + "The strongest rhetoric tends to come from right-wing governments, led by Britain in the 1980s, who broke the link between pensions and earnings. The result was pensioners in the United Kingdom found themselves up to 20 per cent worse off than they had been at the end of the 1970s," he says. "The main response to the ageing issue will be that people will work longer and therefore carry on paying in. As they are going to be healthier there is no reason why they shouldn't." + His research for the year of the elderly found that two-fifths of European pensioners would like the opportunity to work beyond retirement age. But that in itself suggests that a demographic revolution of sorts is taking place in Europe which will demand changes to the pension system. + Most welfare states began with some sort of pension provision and it remains the largest element of welfare state spending. As much as 47 per cent of the benefits budget is spent on pensions in Germany, against 34 per cent in the UK. + Trying to compare systems is difficult, but there are basically two types: the flat rate, as in Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK; and the earnings-related, as in Germany. Various supplementary benefits - like free health care or cheaper food - confuse the issue further. + A common comparison is to look at pensions as a proportion of the beneficiary's final income. In Italy and Portugal, pensioners can expect more than 75 per cent of their final salary; in Germany, Greece and Belgium the figure is nearer 60 per cent. According to a study by Labour Research magazine released at the beginning of January, a UK pensioner on average earnings can expect to receive between 35 per cent and 43 per cent. + But this statistic fails to consider the different living standards across the community. When that is added in, Portugal, with one of the highest pension entitlements, actually comes at the bottom of the European league table. Ireland is next, followed by the UK. The richest pensioners are Danes. One thing is clear: as the population ages, the ratio of pension entitlement to previous earnings is likely to deteriorate. + Governments have many options. They can raise the retirement age and discourage early retirement (as they did in Germany); increase the amount taken from workers in contributions (Spain); extend the number of years used to calculate average earnings (France); or encourage workers to place their retirement needs in the private sector (UK). + But change brings problems of its own. When the Spanish raised the level of contributions, the result was industrial unrest. When the Italian government last July approved a mixture of just about all the reforms on the menu, it received a torrent of abuse from older Italians. + For many years Italian pensioners were the most privileged in Europe. Proposals for reform - three since 1984 - had always foundered because the government of the day feared the effect on its popularity. That the government finally decided to act, and with such force, is one measure of how serious the situation is. The minimum contribution period was raised from 15 to 20 years, incentives were introduced to stimulate the private pension market, and the pensionable age for men and women was raised from 60 to 65. + That option, favoured by many EC members including Britain, is also fraught. "If we're going to encourage people to work for longer what is going to happen to people at the other end of the age scale? Lots of young people are already having problems finding a job to start with," says Janet Paraskeva, director of Britain's National Youth Agency, which is concerned with employment for young people. + For the pensioners of the former Eastern bloc, such debates are luxury. Pensioners' welfare is well down the list of priorities for the newly emerging market economies. Last summer, charities forecast that hundreds of thousands of elderly eastern Europeans would die this winter, unable to afford heating as well as food. + Mark Gorman of HelpAge International, a network of non-governmental organisations working with the elderly, says: "What we have seen in places like Poland and the Czech republic is that as the economy starts to develop, inflation takes off. However, the pensions are not index-linked. It's very difficult to monitor what is going on exactly, but you can be sure that with temperatures at minus 20C in places like Bucharest and the water cut off for a month, the situation is very grim indeed." + Pension provision is symbolic of the principle behind any welfare system: the promise of basic care, by the state, from the cradle to the grave, which, ironically, was first voted for by those very people now experiencing the reforms as pensioners. + That the pension systems' ability to maintain itself adequately is now in doubt must also raise questions over how the rest of the EC's benefits systems will hold up in years to come. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +35 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 19, 1993 + +EVERY GREY HAIR COUNTS; +Netherlands: like to try a kangaroo house? + +BYLINE: SUZANNE BAART + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EURO PAGE; Pg. 14 + +LENGTH: 262 words + + + FOR THE first time in history, the Netherlands is being confronted with a society made up of four generations. Women now live until they are 80, men slightly less long. + Furthermore, 70-year-olds today are much healthier than people aged 70 were 20 years ago. They also have more money and energy than previous pensioners, so these days 70-year-olds can be found studying at university among the 18-year-olds. They also now have the time and money to travel more than in the past. + The third phase of life, from 65 to 75, has many possibilities. That is not true for the fourth phase. People over 80 are very frail: many live in residential or nursing homes for the elderly. Some 80 per cent of people above 65 live independently, but above when they get beyond 75 that percentage declines rapidly. The number of people living in residential or nursing homes for the elderly is higher in the Netherlands than in other European countries, but the government is trying to reduce this by making it possible for the elderly to live independently as long as possible. + Various experiments are underway. There are so-called "kangaroo houses", in which an ageing parent lives downstairs and the adult child and his or her family upstairs. "Tandem houses", where parent and child live near each other, also being tried. Special flats for the old often provide special services, such as alarm systems, maintenance, a caretaker, meals and sometimes a resident nurse. All that costs money, but those currently retiring often have pensions above the minimum level. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +36 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 19, 1993 + +EVERY GREY HAIR COUNTS; +Italy: television as a shot in the arm + +BYLINE: MARIA CHIARA BONAZZI + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EURO PAGE; Pg. 14 + +LENGTH: 336 words + + + THE elderly in Italy suffer from serious drug and television addiction. On average, each of them takes medicine twice a day; 59 per cent keep the television set on from morning to evening, and more than a third of all suicides are committed by people over 75. Pensions are low and 95 per cent regard social assistance as insufficient. In the past two years, the state has tried to reduce the number of elderly in hospital, improve home medical assistance and increase admissions to state-subsidised old people's homes. The state has begun to give families economic support to persuade them to keep the elderly at home. The results are all but invisible. + Italy is rapidly greying. Today its population has the 14th highest proportion of elderly people in the world; because of the current zero population growth, it will leap to the top of the list by the year 2000, with nearly 10 million people over 65 years of age. + Old is still synonymous with poor and lonely in Italy. More than half (58 per cent) of Italy's elderly people stay at home or in a geriatric institute all the time (where 75 per cent of patients have contact with people from outside only once a month). Only 15 per cent ever go to a bar, 14 per cent for a walk in the park, and only 9.7 per cent ever go to a meeting place for the elderly. + The lack of solidarity afflicts the so-called quarta eta (fourth age): according to research by the Agnelli Foundation, 9 out of 10 elderly people feel abandoned by relatives, don't find anyone disposed to look after them and complain about not being respected by young people; 74 per cent have problems finding useful things to do. + The changes to the extended family wrought by the urbanisation and economic development of the post-second world war period have deprived the elderly of the presence and care of children. Rare in the cities, the extended family survives mostly in the south, in the communities emptied of young people who emigrated to the North in the 1950s and 1960s. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +37 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 19, 1993 + +EVERY GREY HAIR COUNTS; +Russia: out in the cold when pensions go West + +BYLINE: ISOBEL MONTGOMERY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EURO PAGE; Pg. 15 + +LENGTH: 392 words + + + THE Soviet Union was its own kind of granny state, a place where babushkas held sway over the morals of the nation. + Under communism these indomitable, woolly-hatted guardians of public behaviour reprimanded teenagers for their dress and behaviour, prevented queue-jumping and watched every coming and going of their neighbours. But nobody is listening to them now. + They can be seen on the streets selling plastic bags or cheap Bulgarian cigarettes and queueing at the soup kitchens. Pensions were never high but the removal of price controls and subsidies last year and Russia's galloping inflation rate makes it virtually impossible to live on a state pension of 2,500 roubles (about $ 4 or pounds 2.70) a month. One old woman outside a metro station joked that even getting her pension proved difficult: often the authorities give pensioners one 5,000 rouble note to be split between two. They live on a diet of bread, macaroni and potatoes. A loaf of bread now costs 20 roubles. Sugar and dairy products are a luxury and meat, at 700 roubles a kilo, is totally beyond their reach. + The collapse of communism has made the lives of most old people worse. They belong to the generation which built socialism and thought the dream would come true. Most are confused and bitter as they watch their world disappear in Russia's chaotic rush towards a market economy. + Those who survived the siege of Leningrad have not forgiven Anatoli Sobchak, the city's current mayor, for renaming it St Petersburg. At a ceremony to mark the 50 years since the end of the siege, they surrounded Sobchak and prevented him from laying a wreath. + Old people, frightened by stories of the mafia and the breakdown of law and order, are scared to go out alone at night. And where can they go? The organisations they once belonged to were often funded by the Party and either no longer exist or are desperately short of money. The latest threat to them are the government's proposals to abolish free health care. + So Russia's over-60s sit at home and watch their televisions - shocked by reports of wars in the once peaceful republics of the former Soviet Union and by the capitalist values which are trampling what they held dear. There is one consolation. They can now advertise for friends in the lonely hearts columns of the newly free press. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +38 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 19, 1993 + +AS THE YEARS GO BY; +Now for the elderly revolution, argues Francisco Umbral + +BYLINE: FRANCISCO UMBRAL + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EURO PAGE; Pg. 15 + +LENGTH: 415 words + + + El Mundo + IT SEEMS that 1993 is European Year of Older People. Nowadays, every year has to be dedicated to something: the year of the Expo, Holy Year, Olympic Year, the Year of the Child, of the whore, the stupid, the tree. But the years go by just the same and we grow older and neither the tree, nor the woman, nor the stupid, nor the elderly notice anything. They are just ways of passing the time, of getting through the year. + We will not rid the elderly of rheumatism just by dedicating a year to them. Every day of the year has to be dedicated to the elderly and that is just what families don't want, a good-for-nothing grandfather or a bingo hall mother-in-law (today they leave them in the bingo halls, bingo is a car-park for the gambling dead). + But Santiago Carrillo [former leader of Spain's Communist Party], though 78, is not old. He is Aristotelian and dynamic, thinking, working, getting things done. It is the middle-aged civil servant with no other interest than dominoes who is "elderly". + What needs to be done for the elderly is not to dope them up with television and pills, nor take them in herds to Benidorm out of season, but to keep them informed and on form, alive, connected to society, responsible, so that they feel needed and are needed. Now that medicine has greatly increased life expectancy, there is an ill-considered and hysterical rush to scrap our old people, retire them. Bureaucracy, they say, tends to cut short the life that science lengthens, chopping from society the patriarchs that pass on their wisdom to new generations. Our official culture doesn't worry about preparing people for old age, about filling life with interests and virtues so that it is still relevant at 75 or 80. + In 10 years of a new society under the Socialists, we have not done away with the old formulas of retreats for the elderly, the tourism of death, collective charity and a special disdain for the elderly. No one has wanted or has known how to prepare people for old age, involve them in society in such a way that they grow with society and don't become fossils. + For 10 years we've been talking about the women's revolution and the computer revolution, but nobody has raised the question of the revolution of the elderly. Let's learn, now that the state doesn't teach or do anything apart from hold a few tombolas and set up a few charity stalls, let's learn from our elderly and keep being young. + Copyright: Guardian/El Mundo + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +39 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 20, 1993 + +TRAVEL + +BYLINE: TRADER HORN + +SECTION: WEEK-END; Pg. 37 + +LENGTH: 597 words + + + A WEEK is a long time in Benidorm, or I might succumb to its paid sirens luring me to go back and see how goes the rehabilitation. To hear the rhapsodies you'd hardly tell it from its pristine state, except for its new national park - and you could bottle the sea water for the picnic trade. And what a marvel the young men doffing their boaters to elderly ladies, though of course you do get the odd one . . . Let's face it, they add, everybody wants to be good, but not all the time. + This is not the only little green shoot. I read an item last week on the Galapagos, whose author was chuffed to learn that, while in redefining the status of the islands the government of Ecuador couldn't stop citizens settling there, the tourist volume was absolutely restricted to 45,000. Green bullseye. Well done, Ecuador! But little more than a lustrum has passed since I was there sidestepping the boobies to reach the Darwin Station, and toast the news that the government was absolutely restricting the number of tourists to 26,000. + But it's encouraging that airlines and huge tour operations want to be green, even if not all the time. You can practically guarantee that any new tourist minister will eagerly dustbowl the topic between the shark's fin soup and the oeufs de tortue cocotte. The literature is mostly unsexy, being pre-pubescent. When taking a tourism degree, major on sewage. + The awareness has reached Moss Bros. "Dinner dance or function?" asked the young woman, the first Moss Sis to fit me with evening dress. I was going to the Tourism for Tomorrow Awards. "Will the answer change what I get?" I asked. "No, but I have to ask. Market research." "Tourism function," I answered. "Not white tie, then. Black tie or green tie?" "Green tie, I suppose." She wasn't finished. "Plain or Paisley weave?" "Er . . . Paisley." "You'll be wanting," she decided, "the green Paisley cummerbund and hankie too." I recalled a broadcast on the Boat Race by our commre for the evening ahead, Judith Chalmers, when she confessed she was wearing Dark Blue underwear, but I stuck to externals, helped by a green Montecristo. + The Awards were founded by the BTA, with the Tour Operators Study Group, and ITV's Wish You Were Here, and David Bellamy to chair the judges. This year they invited King Stork to join, in the shape of British Airways, whose new MD spoke at some length about the many awards won by BA, and its concern for the environments it flew over, so that I began to imagine that one day it will pop its super-jumbos into a green livery, and the top award would go to Heathrow. + The UK rosette was pinned to the chest of the Central Manchester Development Corporation for regenerating Castlefield Canal Basin. Europe must try harder: nothing but commendations for an electric bus in Austria and a waste recycling project in Malta. The long-haul and overall winner was the 14,000-hectare Londolozi game reserve in Eastern Transvaal. Their achievement is the integration with village social life and the people outside the perimeter. + Indeed, getting on a wavelength with people is the tricky bit for the green tourist. Going home, I recalled a poignant episode in the Dutch Antilles. Walking in the scrub with a local man who loved wildlife, brothels and playing guitars to tourists, I saw an iguana taking the sun on a large cactus. "You like iguana?" said my keen friend, "We see him from close." Before I could speak, he'd knocked it off with a direct hit from a stone. It wobbled away to a secluded rocky spot. DOA, or soon after, I fear. G + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +40 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 20, 1993 + +HOME FRONT: SEX, HIGHS AND VIDEOTAPE; +Robin Skynner assesses sex education on TV and tape and finds their relaxed approach surprisingly frank yet non-pornographic + +BYLINE: ROBIN SKYNNER + +SECTION: WEEK-END; Pg. 14 + +LENGTH: 1138 words + + + CHANNEL 4 recently screened a programme in which a panel had reviewed a range of the new sex education videotapes, and announced their first four choices. For those who missed this useful guide, these were: Lover's Guide 2, Making Love, Better Sex, and Super Virility. These were considered not only the most helpful but also the most arousing. + But should they be arousing? A controversy continues about whether such videos are valuable educational resources which should be freely available at our friendly neighbourhood bookstore, as at present, or pornography in disguise requiring control. + The survey had not put these four videos in any particular order, so I chose Lover's Guide 2 because I had already been much impressed by Dr Stanway's writings. I should emphasise that I have only seen the clips of the alternative recommendations that were shown as part of the survey mentioned, and have no reason to suppose that they differ in usefulness. + Until my recent retirement from practice I had been dealing for 20 years mainly with marital problems, usually requiring some focus on the sexual relationship, and had in the past seen not only pornographic movies but many videos of all kinds of sexual activity as part of attending or providing sex education courses for professionals. But the explicitness of Lover's Guide Two came as a shock, even to me. + By this I don't mean that I disapproved or found it unpleasant; quite the reverse. It was simply a surprise - and a very pleasurable surprise - to find sex described and demonstrated with such complete openness and naturalness, in a way that captured the sense of pleasure and fun yet also felt absolutely wholesome and healthy. + The main reason is the choice of couples. They are (or certainly give the impression of being) in caring and committed relationships, relaxed and at ease in this most intimate of relationships, and conveying in their physical contact strong feelings of tenderness and affection. At times they have been helped to forget the camera sufficiently for normal fun and mischief to bubble up. I found myself smiling warmly, because it was just so lovely. + This relaxed atmosphere is clearly facilitated by Dr Stanway, whose easy, relaxed commentary - matter-of-fact, light yet serious - counteracts any embarrassment due to one's inevitable feeling of voyeurism. He is like a physicist at one of those Christmas scientific lectures for children, enthusiastically demonstrating the fascinating changes of colour obtained by mixing chemicals, a television gardener showing us how to grow more beautiful flowers, a television cook helping us to prepare the most delicious dishes. Simmer gently for 45 minutes, adding as many spices as you can find; then turn the gas right up, stirring briskly, until it all boils over completely. + One criticism I have heard is that the couples are mostly young and attractive and older people are under-represented. This is true, but since older people will have grown up in a time of greater sexual prudishness and inhibition, their needs may require somewhat different treatment. I imagine that such videos are being made, if they do not exist already, but I believe any reasonably normal couple of any age (up to 70, at any rate; I can't be certain what it's like after that) is bound to be helped to a happier sexual adjustment by a video of this kind. + Which brings me to ITV's own Good Sex Guide, presently screening on Monday evenings. This has come in for a bit of a clobbering from the "Some people may need it, but there's nothing wrong with me" school of television criticism, but I think it's just brilliant. + It is inevitably less explicit and detailed than the videos on sale, though a lot more frank and direct than anything I have seen before on the main TV channels. But it makes up for this in its presentation. To make themselves acceptable as educational, the videos tend to damp down the excitement with their more serious "We doctors believe . . ." commentaries. + But whatever else sex is, at its best it it is raunchy, animal, wild, abandoned, extreme, and above all playful fun, as well as (whether at the same time, or at other times) tender, gentle, loving, considerate. It is akin to fighting, indeed sometimes develops out of it, and a visiting Martian could be forgiven for assuming it to be a form of combat. I cannot imagine how it could be really good and also restrained, dignified, controlled, though of course a certain self-discipline is necessary as part of it to ensure the maximum pleasure of both. + The Good Sex Guide solves this problem by carrying the excitement, liveliness and fun in its script, and in the extraordinary performance of its presenter, Margi Clarke. Stunning, enormous fun, yet direct, straightforward, reassuring and natural; the girl next door, or at least, the girl we would all have liked to live next door to, she conveys a complete acceptance and enjoyment of her physical being and invites us to enjoy our own. Her remarks are raunchy, often outrageous, but with perfectly timed humour and a total absence of anything offensive. + The fragments of interviews where members of the public answer very frank questions about their sexual lives provide wonderful models of sexual confidence and enjoyment. And the humorous sketches - the International Sex Olympics, the penises on parade - are often corny but usually amusing, to me at least, and like the rest of the programme they manage to startle us into a more open-minded acceptance of sex by going just beyond the limits of what we are expecting. + The inhibited and inarticulate are, admittedly, under-represented in the programmes, but other videos can be made focusing on particular problems; indeed, some are already used for sex therapy. And as John Cleese says at the beginning of Life And How To Survive It: "If you wanted to write a book about how to paint, or play chess, or be a good manager, you'd start by studying the people who were good at those things. And you wouldn't expect heavy sales of a book called Play Championship Golf By Learning The Secrets Of The Worst Twenty Players In The World." + So, are these programmes pornographic? I can only speak for what I've seen, but I saw not the slightest sign of it in Stanway's video, and ITV's Good Sex Guide is about as far from pornography as you can get. The essence of pornography is the deliberate separation of sex from warm human concern and affection, and the charm of these educational programmes is the way they show these aspects of human nature so completely integrated. It is this model of enjoyment, and combination of warmth and excitement, love and lust which is the most effective teacher and healer. G + Dr Skynner regrets he cannot deal with correspondence. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +41 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 20, 1993 + +RUSSIANS STEER BREAKNECK COURSE FOR FREE MARKET; +Subsidised soup kitchens offer the destitute a safety net, but many more people can no longer get by in an era of runaway inflation. As rival leaders battle it out in Moscow, Jonathan Steele in Ryazan reports on a town whose pro-privatisation mayor is 'getting on without them' + +BYLINE: JONATHAN STEELE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 1076 words + + + A RAGGED group of elderly people, the women's heads wrapped in kerchiefs, the men wearing patched black overcoats, sit at tables eating what looks like a surprisingly palatable meal: red cabbage soup, a chicken leg and mashed potatoes, a glass of stewed fruit juice. + Every day, 1,200 people totter up the stairs of Ryazan's newly opened free canteen. At a table on the second floor they show a card from the social security service, verifying that their income is below the poverty line. + "In Soviet times," says Svetlana Chufistova, a local councillor who runs the canteen, "many single old people just sat at home. No one knew about them, or cared. The Red Cross visited some, but their lists were never complete." + Now that Russia's social problems are no longer hidden, and beggars are not swept off the street as they used to be, life for the most lonely and destitute has improved. + The free canteen is financed partly by the council and partly by donations from Munster, Ryazan's twin town in Germany. Staff also take meals to 250 people who are bedridden or too weak to leave their flats. A doctor attends the canteen once a week to examine people who ask for help. There is a free pharmacy on the premises. + Yet, while services for the very poorest have improved, they have worsened for a larger number of people who used to be able to fend for themselves before the era of high inflation. "More people need help these days. Since controls on prices were lifted, pensions don't go as far as they did. People just cannot afford a decent meal," says Ms Chufistova. + She used to be a factory engineer, but volunteered to give up her job to run the canteen. The fear was that even this modest venture, linked to hard currency from Germany, could become riddled with corruption in Russia's rogue market economy. + About 140 miles south of Moscow, Ryazan is a typical central Russian town of 500,000 people, with its own Kremlin, crumbling 19th-century buildings in the centre, and huge modern housing estates beyond. I have visited it three times in the last three years, the previous time just after the August 1991 coup when Valery Ryumin, its energetic mayor, had succeeded in preventing the local Communist Party establishment from declaring an emergency in support of the coup. + Now Mr Ryumin is steering the city towards the market economy at breakneck speed, enjoying a virtually free hand that would be the envy of President Boris Yeltsin in Moscow. The Communist authorities are no more. Under local government laws passed since 1991, the head of the region's administration - a friend of Mr Ryumin's - was nominated by Mr Yeltsin. The regional and town councils have been reduced in size and have had almost all their powers stripped from them, except that of approving the budget. + Although he is a member of the Russian Congress of People's Deputies, Mr Ryumin takes little interest in the constant battles in Moscow. "Let them fight it out. We are getting on without them," he says. + Last November, Russian towns were given the right to tax local factories, and charge them for gas, water, and electricity. They can draw up their own budgets, and no longer have to apply for grants from "the centre" for every item of expenditure. The town has also set up its own municipal savings bank, which offers a higher rate of interest than the national savings bank, providing extra funds for local development. + An advocate of the free market, Mr Ryumin is moving faster than most other Russian mayors. The free canteen's council subsidies may be the last. Ryazan is rapidly switching to a pared-down, safety-net concept of welfare. "We're practically forcing people to take over their council flats," he says. + In the Soviet period, when almost no one owned their own flat, 40 per cent of property belonged to factories, the rest to the town. "In May, the factories are giving us all their flats. They cannot afford to maintain them any more. We will then hand them to their tenants as well as the flats we own," Mr Ryumin says. + The move has a clear economic motive. The city is as unwilling as the factories to pay for upkeep. Under the new scheme, management units will be set up for each block, and people will pay a maintenance fee, - expected to be 15 times their present low rent. "No one will have to pay more than 10 per cent of their family budget for housing," Mr Ryumin promises. There will be a means test, and those who cannot afford the new fees will get a housing benefit. + Mr Ryumin has already privatised the town's shops. They were handed to their staff, who were free to sell them. At least half the shops have already found private owners. One difficulty is that the profit margin on certain items is low, and the town continues to buy milk, grain, and cooking oil from collective farms, and to deliver them to the shops, controlling their prices. + Despite being a strong Yeltsin defender, Mr Ryumin dismisses as "worthless bits of paper" the vouchers that the Russian government has issued to every citizen to buy shares. In Ryazan, factory shares have been distributed in part to management and workers. The rest were sold for cash. + Mr Ryumin's privatisation programme has many critics. Dr Lyubov Minashkina, the deputy director of Ryazan's main hospital, thinks supplies have got worse since January. "The public mood is very bad. Who knows what will happen?" + Galina Zaitseva is the political reporter for Priokskaya Gazeta, the main local paper. "To call Ryumin an optimist is an understatement," she says. "Most people here just live from day to day. No one has any confidence in the future . . . It may seem quiet now, but Russia is unpredictable, a country of extremes." + One reason for the lack of protest demonstrations is, she says, that people "don't know what to demand if they go out into the street. Two years ago they could blame the party dictatorship. Now they don't know who to blame." + Mr Ryumin's methods are the same as the old Communist Party secretaries, Ms Zaitseva says. About 50 per cent of the town's old establishment figures are still in key jobs - often their old ones. + Mr Ryumin concedes that the few private farmers in the district are collective farm chairmen who had siphoned off the best land while still in their old posts. But Mr Ryumin sees no harm in this. It is the basis of a new private farming sector, he says. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +42 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 20, 1993 + +HIGH COURT REJECTS HOMES GAMBLE PLEA BY PENSIONERS + +BYLINE: MARGARET HUGHES AND TERESA HUNTER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 29 + +LENGTH: 694 words + + + THOUSANDS of pensioners have lost up to 10,000 pounds each following a High Court rejection of their plea for bigger compensation after salesmen persuaded them to gamble with their homes. + In a test case this week, two judges rejected the argument that victims of the failed schemes should be entitled to the same compensation as they would receive through a successful civil action. + These investors are victims of the Government's decision to establish a one-stop complaints procedure for those who bought plans through financial advisers. They have had to direct their complaints to the Investors Compensation Scheme, operated by the main city watchdog, the Securities and Investment Board. + When deciding on this procedure, the Government acknowledged that it could put these investors at a disadvantage to those who bought their plans through salesmen or tied agents of insurance companies. + Their complaints have been handled by the Insurance Ombudsman and Lautro, the life companies watchdog, which has generally forced the life companies to restore investors to the financial position they were in when they were first sold the plans. + However, the maximum "fair compensation" which the ICS can award is 48,000 pounds - far short of what people might expect to be awarded in the civil courts. + Solicitors Barnett Sampson, handling the test case for 450 pensioners, will appeal against the decision. + Barnett Sampson had challenged the ICS's interpretation of fair compensation together with its refusal to pay damages for illness, stress, anxiety and inconvenience. + The only positive outcome was the ruling by Lord Justice Mann that the heirs of those eligible for compensation were legally entitled to launch or to continue to pursue claims against the ICS after the claimant's death. + Investment bond home income plans were widely promoted in the late 1980s as a means of boosting the income of elderly people whose wealth was tied up in their homes. The secure route to releasing capital tied up in a property is through a home income plan, which invests the proceeds from a fixed-rate mortgage raised against part of the value of a pensioner's home in an annuity to provide a fixed income for the rest of their lives. + However, investment bond schemes use the proceeds raised through variable rate loans to invest in the stock market. They were launched when property prices were soaring, building societies were falling over themselves to lend and the stock market was booming. + They turned sour when mortgage rates soared, property prices plummeted and the stock marked slumped, throwing thousands of pensioners into debt, many losing their homes. + In a related move, Barnett Sampson is returning to court next week in an attempt to get the ICS compensation paid to pensioners who bought home income plans before the scheme was set up in 1988. This would help pensioners such as Don and Jeanette Bryan, of Bromley, Kent, who were sold a home income plan by the now defunct Aylesbury Associates in 1987. + Mr and Mrs Bryan were advised to borrow 30,500 pounds against their home to invest in insurance bonds and unit trusts. + Aylesbury invested 15,000 pounds in a Scottish Mutual bond, which was supposed to pay the mortgage, although the Bryans were not told then that it met interest payments only. + The rest was invested in a range of unit trusts, which were continually bought and sold. The unit trust part of the portfolio was churned 18 times. + All the investments were made in September, 1987, just before the crash. Within a couple of years, Aylesbury had gone bust, the Scottish Mutual investment had disappeared completely, and the unit trusts had still failed to recover. + Mr Bryan, a former BT employer, decided to retrieve what was left of the investment and reduced the loan to 25,000 pounds, which he still owes to the Cheltenham & Gloucester. + He says: "This has caused us enormous distress, which has gone on for years. We had never owed anything to anyone all our lives, and now at this time in our lives we are saddled with a huge debt we have no means of repaying." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +43 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 22, 1993 + +REFUSAL TO SAY A SHORT SENTENCE LANDS ISRAELI HUSBAND A LONG ONE + +BYLINE: DEREK BROWN IN JERUSALEM + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 1 + +LENGTH: 366 words + + + FOR the past 30 years, Yihya Avraham has been three words away from freedom. Ever since the 80-year-old Israeli was imprisoned in 1963, he has refused to say "I am willing" - words which would free him, both from prison and from his 52-year marriage. + In Israel, personal law, including divorces, is the preserve of rabbinical courts. But even if such a court grants a divorce, the husband must still give his consent. If he does not, he can be jailed indefinitely. + Although Mr Avraham's case is extreme, intransigent husbands are not unknown. Last month the Jerusalem Post reported the bizarre ending of a marriage at Ben-Gurion airport, after an erring husband was intercepted by his abandoned wife and taken before a hurriedly convened rabbinical court. + In that case, the wife - married in the former Soviet Union - had come to Israel in 1989, while the husband had gone to the United States. Since then there had been no contact between the two. But when she heard that he had come to Israel as a tourist, she successfully filed for divorce from the Haifa rabbinical court. + For two days, the wife kept vigil at the airport. When she finally spotted her husband, the police detained him and he was taken before the ad hoc airport court to face an ultimatum: agree to the divorce, or miss the flight. He took the first option. + Mr Avraham, though, has never wavered in his refusal to divorce his 64-year-old wife Ora, whom he married in Yemen when she was 12 years old. They separated 40 years ago. + Last week, seven rabbis and religious judges made the latest attempt to persuade Mr Avraham to do the decent thing. According to one account, they even sang to the old man to put him in a compliant mood. But later the director of rabbinical courts, Rabbi Eliahu Ben-Dahan, said Mr Avraham had flatly turned down all inducements, including a place in an expensive old people's home. + "I cannot. Leave me alone," was his crisp response, according to Rabbi Ben-Dahan. + Ora, the unwilling Mrs Avraham, told the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper: "He's ruined my life. May his name be blotted out. He told my daughter he'll give me a divorce only when I'm in my grave." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +44 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 22, 1993 + +NURSING HOME OPERATOR PLANS POUNDS 100M FLOTATION + +BYLINE: FINANCIAL STAFF + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 153 words + + + A PRIVATE nursing home operator, Westminster Health Care, announced yesterday that it is to seek a pounds 100 million stock market flotation in the spring. + WHC, whose chief executive is Patrick Carter, is a subsidiary of one of the largest US healthcare providers, National Medical Enterprises. The company owns 39 nursing homes in the UK, with 2,620 beds, soon to rise to 3,230. + With nearly three out of four elderly people needing long-stay care, it has become big business. Long-term care cost about pounds 7 billion for the year to the end of March 1992 - of which the private sector claimed pounds 2.2 billion. + The market will continue growing, according to WHC. On a turnover of pounds 17 million, the company yesterday revealed interim pre-tax profits of pounds 4.3 million for the six months to the end of November, compared with pounds 2.1 million for the corresponding period in 1991. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +45 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 22, 1993 + +RAIL PRIVATISATION COULD PUT ELDERLY OUT OF HOLIDAY MARKET + +BYLINE: REBECCA SMITHERS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 416 words + + + RAIL privatisation will have a devastating effect on the UK tourism industry, according to Saga Holidays, British Rail's largest commercial customer, which provides holidays for more than 200,000 senior citizens every year. + By making rail travel unaff-ordable and impractical for older people - "an assault on the quality of their life" - next year's sell-off could threaten the prosperity of numerous resorts which rely on business from older people in the off-season. + In the Saga magazine published today, the company's chairman, Roger de Haan, says: "There is a real threat that a truncated rail system will mean not only fewer visitors but that it will no longer be practicable for Saga to operate certain holidays. + "Today, Saga customers travel with the benefit of discounted fares. Tomorrow is another matter." + He has made this point in a letter to the Transport Secretary, John MacGregor, and has also written to MPs representing constituencies with resorts most likely to be affected, including Tenby, Scarborough, Torquay and St Ives. Those which were accessible by heavily subsidised, loss-making branch lines would be particularly vulnerable to possible closures, he said. + Mr de Haan claims the planned break-up of the network will create difficulties for Saga in negotiating discounts on block holiday bookings with up to 40 different private operators, compared with one at the moment. + Last month the RMT, the biggest union representing rail employees, warned that one-third of tourist travel by rail could disappear in the short term as a result of higher fares. + Saga is formally launching a campaign to preserve easy rail access for the elderly, and hopes to get support from groups such as Age Concern and Help the Aged. + It is particularly worried about the future of the Senior Citizens' Railcard, which has 700,000 users. Because it makes a loss, some private operators may not wish to provide it, and it may not be valid on the entire network. + Last week, amendments tabled by Opposition members of the standing committee, to make it a statutory requirement on private operators to provide Railcards or Travelcards, were narrowly defeated, with the exception of the Disabled Person's Railcard. + London transport minister, Steven Norris, said the Government's view was that legislation would restrict operators' flexibility to develop products. "The last thing a good marketing initiative needs is the heavy hand of legislation." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +46 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 22, 1993 + +A PRAYER FOR AN END TO THE PEACE; +And another thing . . + +BYLINE: ANDREW MONCUR + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 660 words + + + FOUR actors are to be set loose on the London Tube to play the Invisible Man, faces obliterated by a cocoon of bandages. They will be at large for a couple of months apparently, promoting Philip Hedley's staging of the play as a West End musical. + There's a Great British Embarrassment shaping up here. + Spare a thought for the Londoner who, having spent a lifetime perfecting the art of being invisible in transit, glances up to find one of these bandaged figures. Oh, lord. Please, don't let him start talking to me. Let's pretend this isn't happening. + There is another Great British Embarrassment of our age already. It's called, oddly, The Peace. It is sponsored by the Church of England. + This is the moment when members of the congregation, steeped in traditions of reserve and leaving other people alone, are obliged to turn, shake hands and even, for God's sake, speak to perfect strangers. There may be peace processes which have caused more anxiety and cringing desire for floors to open, but I can't for the moment think of any. + The Order for Holy Communion, Rite B, from the Alternative Service Book (can you conceive of anybody going to the stake for Rite B?) sets it out like this: + Priest: The peace of the Lord be always with you. + All: And with thy spirit. + All may exchange a sign of peace. + At this point, elderly ladies, rigid with embarrassment, fling prayer books, hankies and handbags into the air. Mutter, mutter, goes the congregation - bobbing, shaking and finally stooping to pick up collection money scattered over the floor. + Greeting strangers is bad enough; what about the people you already know? Last Christmas I could feel the tension rising as The Peace approached. My wife had realised that she was sitting directly behind the neighbour (the one with the mean, macho car) with whom she had been waging a four-year guerrilla war over parking space. Like it or not, they would have to go through the rite. + You may say it's what Christianity is all about. But, it's not English. In the event, he cut her dead. Now that isn't very Christian but, by God, it is English. + The only church I have attended which feels as though it knows how to cope with this business is in Greenwich. The Peace in this church is an excuse to mingle for what seems like 20 minutes as people wander and talk about lunch and things. The Invisible Man would have his hand wrung. They would ask about his operation. + The Great British Embarrassment is caused by sudden and unsought visibility, as in having a striptease nun-a-gram inflicted upon you in a public place; being identified at an auction as the man in the green sweater who is told, in patronising tones, that he's bidding furiously against himself; being trapped in an endless shampoo cycle in the car-wash; creeping out in nightie and bunny rabbit slippers to collect the milk and finding the front door slam locked behind you. + The liturgy is ideal for such purposes. As a schoolboy I was drafted as a last-minute substitute to read a lesson at the big Christmas carol service. The original choice, a policeman, had cried off. + As they waded into the last verse of the hymn, I gulped and started the long plod from the back of that enormous, packed abbey towards the distant lectern. This was exposure enough. And then another figure rose from his pew and stepped into the central aisle ahead of me. + The policeman had tottered from his sickbed. There were two of us marching in step up the same aisle to the lectern to read the same lesson. He was oblivious. I could see the entire disaster unfolding before me. You know the feeling when a thousand eyes are regarding, fascinated, your reddening neck. + I can only claim divine guidance. I simply dived into the seat he had vacated. My appearance there prompted the startled reaction from his wife that you can now see on any Sunday when it comes to exchanging The Peace. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +47 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 23, 1993 + +FRUIT AND VEG TIPPED AS GROWTH AREAS FOR BUSINESS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 375 words + + + BUSINESSMEN looking for 1990s opportunities should move into the soft drinks, fruit and vegetable or household insurance markets, but avoid tobacco products. The forecasts are contained in the 1993 analysis of British consumer patterns of income and expenditure, published by Mintel. The report shows the trends over the past 10 years and predicts changes in the next decade. + "We believe the main growth areas will be educational fees, prepared foods, household insurance, soft drinks, domestic and garden help, and fruit and vegetables," said Mintel's senior analyst, Bill Patterson. + But markets in long-term decline included tobacco products, cleaning and laundry, coal, shoes, clothes, furniture repair and meat and fish. There could also be a real decline in the 18-30 holiday market as the structure of British society changed, with an ageing population, fewer marriages, smaller families, more people living alone and a declining workforce, said Mintel. + It predicted growth of nearly 3 per cent in population by 2002. A decline in the numbers aged under 30 would be counterbalanced by "dramatic growth" in the 30-59 age group. + "These changes will have impacts on many UK markets," said Mr Patterson. "Can the health service cope with the growing needs of older people? How will the state pension system cope with the increasing number of pensioners?" + Other findings included: + - The average size of households continued to shrink, from 2.7 people in 1981 to 2.4 in 1991, and is predicted to drop to 2.3 by 2000. + - There were an estimated 350,000 marriages last year and 174,000 divorces, compared with 398,000 and 156,000 in 1981. + - Average annual household disposable income stands at pounds 18,251, compared with pounds 9,201 in 1982, a growth in real terms of 16 per cent. + In a separate report, Mintel estimated that taxpayers last year paid more than 8 billion pounds they could have kept, or 13 per cent of all Treasury revenue. Among other things, 2.5 billion pounds was wasted by the over-45s not making proper use of personal pensions, and 426 million pounds was collected through Inland Revenue error. + The British Consumer: Patterns of Income and Expenditure 1993; Mintel; 895 pounds. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +48 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 26, 1993 + +RIGHTFUL PENSIONS + +BYLINE: SANDY SULAIMAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 13 + +LENGTH: 618 words + + + THE OLD argument - whether a woman's contribution to marriage is as valuable as a man's - has taken on a new twist as the number of divorcees approaching retirement escalates. A whole generation of women who were responsible for home and children, while their husband was responsible for the income, are finding that divorcing him also means divorcing his pension rights. + Pension rights are second only to the matrimonial home as the most valuable asset of a marriage. Yet occupational pension rights usually remain with the husband, as the ex-wage earner. Sandy Bishop's marriage ended after 24 years as a fulltime housewife. As she was not in paid employment she will only receive the basic state pension at the age of 60. Meanwhile, her husband is eligible to retire on a handsome company pension. "It incenses me that there is no recognition of the contribution I have made to the marriage and family." Women end up dependent on their ex-husband for maintenance payments, even after reaching retirement age. Or they simply get by on a state pension. + One in three marriages currently ends in divorce, and the situation looks set to worsen. The Family Policy Studies Centre predicted in a recent report that there will be a fourfold increase in the proportion of elderly divorced people over the next 35 years. + The proportion of women over 60 who are divorced is expected to increase from three per cent in 1985 to 13 per cent in 2025. "Among today's 30-to-40 year olds, one in seven women can expect to reach old age as divorcees," pointed out the author of the report, Francis McGlone. "Britain's divorce laws have overlooked pension rights for women, the majority of whom do not contribute to either a personal or occupational pension." + There is currently no legislation that property acquired during marriage should be shared equally. Claire Meltzer of solicitors Collyer-Bristow advocates that family courts should have powers to allocate pensions fairly between ex-partners. "It is not a difficult thing to put right, yet it affects the majority of couples who have longstanding marriages where the wife has not earned for the most part." + Younger working women may think this is a problem facing only the older generation who didn't have access to their own occupational pension. But millions have similar prospects ahead. "At the moment only 57.1 per cent of female employees belong to an occupational pension scheme, compared to 73.6 per cent of male employees," points out Dorothy Robson of the Equal Opportunities Commission. Women are frequently in part-time or low-paid jobs that are not eligible for pensions. When women with occupational pensions enter retirement they are still considerably worse off than men. The average occupational pension received by men is pounds 61 per week: for women it is just pounds 30. + But change is definitely in the air. The Pensions Management Institute (PMI) and the Law Society have just launched a joint working group, and a report will be launched this spring. + Richard Malone of the PMI said he would like to see a system similar to the one in Scotland, where the net value of the matrimonial property (which includes occupational pension schemes) is shared equally. In the Netherlands, California and Germany, pension schemes are also split equally when couples divorce. Pensions are an area where women need to take control. Thirty is is the time to start looking at pensions, says Dorothy Robson. + What faces those who don't or can't afford to make their own arrangements is the prospect of falling into the same poverty trap as the current generation of retirement-age divorcees . . . unless the law gets changed. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +49 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 27, 1993 + +GOVERNMENT TO END AUTOMATIC FUNDING WHICH ALLOWS ELDERLY TO CHOOSE A HOME + +BYLINE: JILL PAPWORTH + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 28 + +LENGTH: 847 words + + + CHANGES to the way help is provided to vulnerable adults who are unable to live on their own without some support will mean an end to automatic funding for elderly people on low incomes who choose to go into a private residential or nursing home. + The new regulations will be introduced in April. + At the moment, elderly people on low incomes who satisfy the eligibility rules for Income Support, have a right to claim financial help towards the cost of a place in an independent home. + The rules are complex, but basically, an elderly person is entitled to help if they have less than 8,000 pounds in capital and savings. When calculating an individual's capital worth, the value of their former home can be ignored in certain circumstances, such as when a partner still lives there. + Providing the conditions are met, the amount that can be claimed towards fees starts at 175 pounds a week outside London and goes up to a maximum of 340 pounds a week for a nursing home in London catering specially for physical disablement which began before pension age. Up to 12.20 pounds a week is allowed on top for personal expenses. + From April, the new legislation shifts resposibility from central government to local authorities. + Under the new system, local authorities will buy in and pay direct for care services. They will not be legally able to give people cash payments towards their own choice of care. Instead, getting financial help with fees will depend first on undergoing a "need of care assessment" where the local social services will assess whether someone needs care and, if so, what type. + Concerned groups fear these decisions may be governed too much by budgetary restraints. The local authorities are claiming that the money soon to be transferred to them to meet the costs of providing care in the community from central government is too low. + "So people will be at the mercy of what their local authority can afford and believes they need," a spokeswoman for the Carer's National Association said. + Where demand for care services is high and funding is tight, an authority may decide, for example, that an elderly person who wants to go into residential care could survive as well in their own home with the weekly visits from a home help. + A spokeswoman for Age Concern said: "In theory these things should not happen, because the assessment is supposed to take into account the feelings and wishes of individuals, but in practice they could." + Social services will be obliged to provide help for those who feel they have been unfairly assessed and to investigate complaints. + Where a local authority agrees to arrange a place in a a residential care or nursing home, it must try and accommodate the individual's choice of home, provided it does not cost more normally expected to pay for someone with similar needs. + The criteria for accessing assessment and services will vary from authority to authority. The only standardisation in the new system will be that if a person is assessed as needing residential care, a means test determining how much money they will have to contribute towards the cost will be the same throughout the country. + The entitlement to financial assistance will be broadly aligned to present rules. Where someone has less than 8,000 pounds in savings, the local authority will assess their ability to pay some or all of the cost of the place in the home. The person will be left with a certain sum of money each week for personal expenses. Any difference between the person's assessed income, including benefits, and the fees of the home will be met. + There is a difference in these rules which may particularly affect home owners. The present rules entitle an elderly person who is entering residential care and who owns a property to claim income support while the property is on sale. + The statutory period allowed is 26 weeks after ceasing occupancy, but, given the current state of the property market, this is often extended, sometimes for several years, without the DSS imposing any charge on the capital value. This means that care fees are paid by the state. + But, from April, the local authority will be entitled to take a legal charge against the value of the property from day one. Nick Tyler, of independent financial advisers Nursing Home Fees Agency, says: "People planning to enter care who own a home which doesn't look likely to sell are therefore advised to do so before April." + The new arrangements do not apply to those already in a home who will have "preserved rights" to the special higher levels of income support. In most cases, this will be so even if they are currently paying the fees themselves but their own money runs out after April or they move to a different home. + - For more information, contact your local social services department, home help, social worker, family doctor or district nurse. Specialist IFAs: Nursing Home Fees Agency 0865-750665; Advisory & Brokerage Services 071-405 8535. Freeline Social Security 0800-666555. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +50 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +February 27, 1993 + +WHY COUNCIL TAX COULD BE CHARGED BY THE BACK DOOR + +BYLINE: ADAM WISHART + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 28 + +LENGTH: 521 words + + + CARE home residents and bedsit tenants may face unjust and arbitrary council tax bills in April, according to charities and tenants organisations. + Simon Hardwick, General Secretary of the Leonard Cheshire Foundation, discovered last year that charitable care homes, whose residents were free from poll tax, will be liable for council tax. Through their fees, residents will pay a proportion of the property element of the tax - averaging 110 pounds per year - estimates Mr Hardwick. But, not being directly liable, they will be ineligible for transitional relief or benefits. + Mr Hardwick says the council tax liabilities will discourage charities from moving towards more progressive independent living arrangements. + The Leonard Cheshire Foundation and 25 other charities have formed the Council Tax Action Group to demand legislative changes to protect charitable homes' tax exemption. The National Care Homes Association, representing private care homes, calls for these to be included too. + The Action Group has met Robin Squire, the junior Local Government Minister. But he is unlikely to concede. A spokesman for the DoE said the problem will be minimised by discounts and through social service budgets. + Elsewhere, the DoE is working fast to plug a loophole which will allow landlords of bedsit tenants with rents set by the Rent Officer or the Rent Assessment Committee to have these increased to include a proportion of council tax. + Geoff Cutting, chair of the Small Landlords Association, says: "It is a welcome move which will redress what would have been an inequitable law." Without it landlords would have been unable to increase these rents. + Nick Beacock, of the Campaign for Bedsit Rights, says: "It is disgraceful that the Government has only got around to sorting out these administrative arrangements at the very last minute." + He is concerned that this rent reregistration could overwhelm the bureaucracy and create uncertain delays for tenants. And rent officers may not have sufficient training or time to make fair decisions. + The new regulations - being introduced through a statutory instrument - will only affect a small proportion of the 2.5 million bedsit tenants in England and Wales. Most are unlikely to have any written contract and their rents will be effectively up for negotiation in April. + Assured shorthold tenants will escape rent rises until the end of their contracts. Assured tenants, with written agreements, will only suffer rent increases if the contract allows. + For Nick Beacock the statutory instrument does not have sufficient safeguards to prevent landlords overcharging for council tax. + He says: "Many tenants will still be left vulnerable to the free market. We are particularly concerned that the council tax will be used as another excuse to further increase rents and for landlords to profiteer." + - A briefing leaflet, The Council Tax and Older People, is available free from the Distribution Department, Council Tax, Age Concern England, 1268 London Road, London SW 16 4ER. Send a large stamped addressed envelope. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +51 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 2, 1993 + +PRIVATE EYE OF PIGALLE; +Obituary: Eddie Constantine + +BYLINE: RONALD BERGAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 17 + +LENGTH: 573 words + + + EDDIE CONSTANTINE, who has died aged 75, was the true American in Paris of the cinema, not Gene Kelly's tourist version. In the 1950s, Constantine's pock-marked rough-hewn face would loom out from giant coloured posters outside cinemas along the crowded boulevards of Place Pigalle. + As Lemmy Caution, derived from Peter Cheyney's detective, in films with titles such as Le Grand Bluff, Du Rififi Chez Les Femmes and Lemmy Pour Les Dames, Constantine played the American private eye the way the French like them - tough, cynical, womanising and whisky-drinking. + The films also had the advantage of being homegrown. There was no need for dubbing or sub-titling, and the denizens of the unsmart Parisian arrondisements could recognise their own surroundings. Crude, naive and cheaply made as the pictures were, they were the forerunners of French films noirs, such as Jean-Pierre Melville's series of gritty freewheeling crime thrillers. + Recognising Constantine's Lemmy Caution as a popular icon, Jean-Luc Godard appropriated the actor and character for his eerie comic-book futurist tales, Alphaville (1965). Godard cleverly used the trappings of American pulp fiction and the Caution movies to make telling political points. + Constantine, who was born to Russian immigrants in Los Angeles, was sent in his late teens to Vienna to study voice by his operatic baritone father. But after returning to the US, he got no further than the chorus of Radio City Music Hall. + When his wife, the dancer Helene Mussel, joined the Ballets de Monte Carlo in 1948, he followed her to Paris, where he began singing in bars and cabarets. His gruff voice and American accent soon gained him popularity and the intimate friendship of Edith Piaf. + After some years touring and recording, he was offered the role of Lemmy Caution in Cet Homme Est Dangereux, the first of a dozen such action films. In an attempt to humanise the thuggish side of the character, the actor would turn on the charm. + In one of the later Caution films, he grins at a stewardess on a plane, who peevishly asks him if he thinks he is irresistible. He is taken aback for a moment and then asks an elderly woman sitting next to him what she thinks of his smile. She replies enthusiastically, "Irresistible!" + Constantine did not travel well outside France, though he turned up in a number of minor British films, the best being SOS Pacific (1959), in which his plane crashes on a desert island, the site of a nuclear bomb test. Curiously, he dies in the American version, but survives in the British one. + In later years, Constantine seemed quite content to caricature his persona, as in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Beware Of The Holy Whore (1970), in which, wearing shades, wide-brimmed hats and jeans, and swearing and drinking profusely, he played the star of an ill-fated German film being shot in Spain. + Previously, he had played himself in Sloth, the Godard section of Seven Deadly Sins, as a famous movie idol who is too lazy to respond to the sexual advances of a young starlet. + Constantine remained fond of his screen alter ego, even naming his son Lemmy. When French television showed a number of the films a few years ago, he declared, "It's incredible. They still love those old films in spite of all the new stuff that's been around in the cinema since." + Eddie Constantine, born October 29, 1917; died February 25, 1993. + +LOAD-DATE: June 4, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +52 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 3, 1993 + +NOT AS YOUNG AS WE WERE; +We're already feeling our age, but new census results reveal an unpredicted explosion in Britain's elderly population + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 13 + +LENGTH: 591 words + + + ANY DOUBTS that ministers will raise the state pension age for women have surely been dispelled by new official population projections, showing a steep upward revision in the expected growth of Britain's elderly population. + The figures, published last week but largely unnoticed, have profound implications for health and social policy. Planners were already working on an assumption of an ageing society, but the new projections suggest this will be + far more pronounced than they thought. + On the basis of existing pension ages of 65 for men and 60 for women, the estimates now suggest the number of pensioners will soar by 50 per cent in the first 30 years of the next century. By 2031, there will be 79 dependants for every 100 people of working age, compared with only 63 in 1991. + The new projections come as Peter Lilley, Social Security Secretary, is about to announce which option the Government is to choose for equalising the pension age in response to pressure from the European Community. A consultation paper 14 months ago offered alternatives of age 60, 63 or 65 for both sexes, with the first costing an extra pounds 3.5 billion a year and the last saving at least pounds 3 billion; the choice of 63 would be cost-neutral. + Although the paper appeared to favour 63, ministerial opinion has swung towards 65 and the new population estimates may have clinched the case, increasing by 1.2 million in England and Wales alone the previous prediction of the number of pensioners in 2031. + The estimates also ratchet up the future bill for community care of elderly people and make NHS funding look even more of an unsquareable circle than at present. Pensioners account for more than 45 per cent of health spending. + The projections, by the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, are made every two years. The new set is based on mid-1991 population figures, compared with mid-1989 statistics on which the previous estimates were calculated. Although the forecasts are for England and Wales, the pattern for the UK as a whole will be little different. + The key change is a sharp increase in the projected numbers of people over 45, which the OPCS attributes to "appreciable" reductions in forecast birth and death rates. The number of those over present pension ages are expected to increase slowly from 9.1 million in 1991 to 9.6 million in 2001, but then to spurt by 50 per cent to 14.4 million by 2031. Within this group, the number of those over 75 - the heaviest consumers of health and social services - is now expected to reach 6.1 million by 2031 (compared with 3.6 million in 1991), a figure 18 per cent higher than that previously forecast. + By contrast, the number of children is projected to grow 7 per cent, from 10.3 million in 1991 to 11 million in 2001, but then to fall to 10.1 million by 2031. The population of working age is expected to grow 5 per cent over 20 years, from 31.3 million in 1991 to 33 million in 2011, and then to fall 7 per cent to 30.8 million by 2031. + The especially bad news here is that the initial increase in this working population group is almost entirely attributable to those over 45. The number of adults under 30 is projected to fall by 18 per cent between 1991 and 2031, from 10.8 million to 8.9 million. Not only will there be fewer workers supporting more dependants, but the workers will be no spring chickens. + OPCS Monitor PP2 93/1, pounds 1.80; Information Branch (Dept M), OPCS, St Catherine's House, 10 Kingsway, London WC2B 6JP. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +53 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 5, 1993 + +ATTENTION CENTRES ON CULT'S CHILDREN IN TEXAS STAND-OFF; +FBI finds body outside compound as Koresh releases two more minors + +BYLINE: SIMON TISDALL IN WACO, TEXAS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 12 + +LENGTH: 631 words + + + THE fate of 18 children held inside David Koresh's besieged cult compound here may hold the key to the outcome of an unfolding tragedy which has claimed at least six lives so far. + A small army of FBI, police and other federal agents, backed by national guardsmen and Huey attack helicopters from nearby Fort Hood, kept the estimated 108 members of the Branch Davidian isolated from the outside world yesterday - the fifth day of the siege. + After saying on Wednesday that he was awaiting "instructions from God", Mr Koresh was said to have told telephone negotiators that he had now received them. God had told him not to give up, not yet at least. There are believed to be 18 children, 47 women, and 43 men still inside the Mount Carmel compound. + The Foreign Office said yesterday that 45 British men, women and children may be inside. "We now have a list of 45 people who have gone to the ranch recently and may still be there," a spokesman said. + Justice department sources had earlier estimated that 43 foreigners were inside the compound, most of them British. + Officials were reportedly preparing to cut off electricity to the compound yesterday, even though it has its own generators. It was confirmed, meanwhile, that two children, both Americans, had been released, bringing to 20 the total of children allowed to leave the compound, in addition to two elderly women. + Painstaking negotiations continued, and portable office buildings and toilets were moved to the area, another sign that the stand-off may be a long one. An FBI spokesman, Jeffrey Jamar, said the authorities were determined to do "whatever it takes to settle this matter without further bloodshed". + He said that Mr Koresh "seems to have recovered miraculously from wounds he said he received during Sunday's raid." Mr Jamar also revealed that the body of an unidentified white male had been found north of the compound. + Former cult members, and friends of Mr Koresh, said they feared that the man who claims to be the son of God would die rather than surrender. + Marc Breault, a former cult member, said Mr Koresh had led discussions on how to commit suicide by taking cyanide. He said most of the children still in the compound were probably related to Mr Koresh, who is a polygamist. None of the released children was his offspring. + "There is a pattern," Mr Breault told the Waco Tribune-Herald. "He teaches that his children are the only ones that are righteous seed, legitimate in God's eyes. By releasing these children, I believe he's saying that that these children are not worth sacrificing . . . By sacrifice, I mean becoming martyrs." + Other former associates said that Mr Koresh, aged 33, believed that, like Jesus, he would be crucified only to rise again - thereby proving his claim to be the Lamb of God as in the Book of Revelations. One suggested the crisis might come today, because Jesus died on a Friday. Jesus is believed to have been 33 years old when he died. + The continuing presence of many children in the compound is one reason why the FBI has eschewed any further use of force so far. President Clinton, who has been kept informed of developments in Waco, has expressed his personal concern for the welfare of the children. + The governor of Texas Ann Richards, said meanwhile that she was considering tougher gun laws in the state, on weapons like assault rifles which "aren't for anything except killing people". + - A Californian family was watching television reports about the Texas cult stand-off when a man invaded their living room, screamed he was Jesus Christ and yelled "Take me to Waco!" Jeff Terrell, aged 31, of Los Angeles, is in custody charged with suspected burglary and making death threats to a police officer. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +54 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 6, 1993 + +FBI SAYS CULT BOSS 'CALLING THE SHOTS' + +BYLINE: SIMON TISDALL IN WACO, TEXAS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 12 + +LENGTH: 513 words + + + DAVID KORESH, the self-proclaimed son of God who is holed up in a besieged compound here, is lucid and irritable by turns but adamant that he will not surrender, federal officials said yesterday. + "We believe that Koresh is in total control of the people in the compound," said Bob Ricks, an FBI spokesman. "He continues to indicate that all the adults are free to leave at any time." Only two adults, both elderly women, have so far done so. + Another child, Heather Jones, aged nine, was freed from the Mount Carmel ranch yesterday, leaving a total of 17 children, 47 women, and 43 men inside. Up to half the adults are foreigners, the majority believed to be from Britain. + Mr Ricks said negotiators talking to Mr Koresh by telephone were effectively in the 33-year-old cult leader's hands. "We are not able to negotiate for the release of specific individuals. We are bound by his schedule with regard to the children. We have been focusing on the children." + More than 20 children have been freed since the siege began last Sunday, when at least six people died in a bungled assault by federal agents. Under criticism for the raid, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) and the FBI have vowed to end the affair without further bloodshed. + Mr Ricks said Mr Koresh was sometimes lucid, sometimes irritable. "We have long conversations about the scriptures." + But Mr Ricks admitted that Mr Koresh was calling the shots, often refused to discuss issues raised by his interlocutors, and was sticking by his earlier insistence that he was awaiting "instructions from God". + "We have no specific bargaining items in place," Mr Ricks said, explaining the way the negotiations were being conducted. "We're not engaged in bargaining. We are still in the same situation. He says he has received a message from God to wait and that has not changed." + The FBI spokesman said, however, that Mr Koresh had assured negotiators that he had no intention of committing suicide, or ordering cult members to kill themselves. + He was addressing concerns that the group might resort to a mass suicide such as that in Guyana in 1978, when more than 900 followers of the evangelist Jim Jones took their lives. + He added that Mr Koresh had objected to comparisons of himself with Jesus. "He seems to see himself more as a prophet or messenger." + Mr Koresh changed his name from Vernon Howell some years ago. Koresh is a Hebrew word meaning prophet and is also Hebrew for Cyrus. King Cyrus is held to have freed the Jews from their captivity in Babylon in 539 BC. + Mr Ricks said the negotiators were taking advice from biblical scholars. He gave no indication of any break in the siege. + Although the FBI said that Mr Koresh told them his followers are free to leave the compound whenever they want, the agency believes the standoff will not end until Mr Koresh himself walks out. + An ATF spokesman, Dan Conroy, said: "I can't say what his long-term goals are. His mindset last Sunday was very violent, I'm not sure that has changed at all." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +55 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 8, 1993 + +PAST NOTES: SPIRIT OF BOSNIAN INSURGENTS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 351 words + + + March 8, 1877 + From an occasional correspondent + AT THE CHETA here I noticed certain Croatian elements among the men, showing that we are now on a more northern part of the frontier. Croatia is, in fact, only separated from Bosnia by the Unna, which at this point joins the Unnatz. The insurgers here, as elsewhere, seemed in good spirits and to want for nothing: and indeed, after visiting five insurgent camps, I am inclined to take a far more favourable view of the prospects of the insurrection than is usual outside Bosnia. Among the Slavs of the border countries there is a certain amount of dejection owing chiefly to the corrupt transactions of many of their own committees and soi-disant patriots; and in Croatia, especially, subscriptions have latterly fallen off. But once on the free soil of liberated Bosnia one breathes a purer air, and I do not doubt that the men I have met would shed the last drop of their blood rather than lay down their arms. No one here dreams of peace. + Most of the unarmed inhabitants of Unnatz succeeded in escaping before the Turks came, but five were murdered. I was told by a man that among the slain were two old women; one, Telka Petchianska, aged 85, and the other Simeone Mihailovich, of whose age I could get nothing more definite than that "she was old, very old, about 100". This great age is not improbable as there are instances of extraordinary longevity to be found amongst the Bosnian refugees. One is 107, and looks it! + My guide directed me across a bare mountain plateau to a wretched settlement of Rayah fugitives. There were about 30 in all but, from the lamentable state in which they were, many must have died since I saw them. Seven or eight of them were children - such little old faces, pinched and wrinkled and distorted with famine and disease, some scarcely able to stand. They had been living through the winter on what they could beg of the villagers of neighbouring poljes, almost as destitute as themselves. There are hundreds of such groups among these mountains, to whom no one can hope to penetrate with aid. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +56 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 10, 1993 + +NO HOME GOOD ENOUGH TO GO TO; +Volunteers:New community care legislation arrangements for discharging people from hospital may result in thousands of stranded patients clogging up beds + +BYLINE: ANDREW COLE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 13 + +LENGTH: 575 words + + + THE idea behind the British Red Cross's "home from hospital" service is a simple one, says its Norfolk co-ordinator, Judith Horner. "It's really about preventing elderly people coming back from hospital to a cold home, empty of food. I don't think you can get more fundamental than that." + Horner heads one of three similar Red Cross projects that were launched seven years ago - the others are in Derbyshire, Hereford and Worcester. Now the schemes, which cost about pounds 30,000 a year each to run, look set for rapid expansion. A Health Department start-up grant set up two more at the beginning of this year and several others are in the pipeline. + Staffed by a salaried co-ordinator and an army of volunteers, each scheme shapes itself according to local needs. But the overriding aim is to bridge the gap between hospital and home (and all too often between health and local authorities) by providing short-term help in the home to patients - usually elderly - who would otherwise be compelled to stay in hospital. + Patrick, 61, who has been in and out of hospital in recent years with heart problems, has good reason to be grateful to the scheme. For the past four years he has lived alone, for much of that time in an upper-storey flat in the centre of Norwich. + Each time he returns from hospital, Red Cross volunteers have been on hand to meet him, run errands for him, provide transport and even help furnish his home. "Sometimes it was just a matter of making cups of tea, but it's great to know there's somebody there to give you a hand," he says. "They've helped me get back on my feet. I'm not sure what I'd have done without them." + Not surprisingly, the Norfolk service is much in demand. Last year Horner and her 60 volunteers saw more than 500 clients, half of whom were over 80 and over two-thirds of whom were living alone. Horner expects the workload will increase further when the new community care regime, with its emphasis on stricter discharge procedures, comes into force. She also suspects that the scheme may change to some extent. Already it extends beyond home care to providing such things as a sitting service for the terminally ill. There are growing pressures, Horner says, to cover a wider age range and to move into hitherto unexplored territory such as mental health and child care. + Not everyone views such a prospect with equanimity. "It's not that volunteers can't do these things," says Bridget Penhale, social workers' team leader at the West Norwich hospital, who has worked closely with the Red Cross scheme. "But if there's a service that ought to be provided by statutory services, is it right to provide it by volunteers?" Horner insists the Red Cross is sensitive to this delicate balance. "I am very aware that we shouldn't be taking paid employment away. We are looking at and monitoring the sorts of referrals we get to ensure that doesn't happen. Our whole aim is to work with the agencies and to complement their care, rather than to compete with them." + But she points out volunteers can sometimes go where professionals cannot. "Often people will trust volunteers where they wouldn't social services, so we can act as a bridge." The Red Cross emblem also helps, Horner says. "That answers a lot of doubts for many elderly people who have very fond memories of what the Red Cross did for them in previous wars. It's quite interesting - and very fortunate for us." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +57 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 10, 1993 + +HOSPITALS: NO HOME GOOD ENOUGH TO GO TO; +New community care legislation arrangements for discharging people from hospital may result in thousands of stranded patients clogging up beds + +BYLINE: ANDREW COLE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 12 + +LENGTH: 1057 words + + + IT IS THE nightmare scenario, but it must have been disturbing the sleep of a growing number of hospital trust and health authority managers in recent weeks. + The nightmare centres on the new arrangements for discharging hospital patients, laid down in the community care legislation. The fear is that if, as many now suspect, these procedures prove too demanding to be implemented properly, the hospital system could clog up with thousands of beds blocked by stranded patients. + The consequence of that could be a fatal blow to managers' carefully-laid plans to reduce waiting lists and honour the central pledge of the Patient's Charter. The political fall-out could be immense. The irony is that all those caught up in this looming crisis agree that the new discharge arrangements are a huge improvement on current practice. Hospital discharge procedures have been one of the health service's more invisible scandals. + Communication between hospital and community services, and even between the discharging consultant and other hospital staff, has often been non-existent. The result has been that, all too often, frail and dependent patients return to an empty home or an equally dependent carer, with no back-up support in evidence. + The new arrangements seek to avoid that by identifying a key professional - usually a social worker - responsible for discharge arrangements, and stipulating that highly-dependent patients should have a full assessment and "care package" organised before they leave hospital. The whole procedure is founded on the paramountcy of the patient's needs - not the service's. + The Health Department recognised how central this was to the reforms when it stipulated last September that all local and health authorities should set up "robust and mutually acceptable" discharge procedures by the end of the year - or risk losing out on the next stage of the community care transitional grant. Not surprisingly, all authorities now have their arrangements in place. + That, however, may be where the real problems begin. In most cases the new arrangements lay down the criteria for discharge and assessment, as well as deadlines for the completion, but cannot guarantee the resources to turn paper promises into reality. As Pauline Ford, the Royal College of Nursing's adviser on nursing and older people, says: "You can assess people's needs till you're blue in the face, and draw up a beautiful plan of care, but if you don't have the resources, then those needs aren't going to be met." + Another factor in this highly complex situation is nursing home care. A large proportion of the most problematic discharges are of elderly people - 40 per cent of patients in acute surgical wards are over 65. Currently doctors can refer such patients, where appropriate, to a nursing home without going through a formal assessment process, with the bill in many cases being met by income support benefit. However, from April 1, social services will hold the purse strings and nobody can be referred without a full assessment. + Dr Andrew Vallance-Owen, head of the British Medical Association's central services, says most doctors accept the need for assessment. But what happens, he asks, if local authorities' budgets run out or individual patients referred by doctors are not considered high priority? + In some parts of the country, this will inevitably lead to further pressure on hospitals to hold on to patients. Elsewhere, he predicts, it could lead conversely to heavier demands on community services, in particular general practitioners, and that unfailing last line of defence, the informal carer. "There are six million carers at the moment. I would have thought we are likely to see that increase significantly," Dr Vallance-Owen says. The picture is not all bleak, however. In Hampshire, for instance, there is some optimism about the immediate future. Bucking the general trend, the social services department will be receiving nearly pounds 500,000 extra in its budget this year. + Simon Williams, area manager in Basingstoke, is reasonably happy with the local agreements on hospital discharge and assessment that he has helped to hammer out, as well as with general progress towards implementation. + Timescales are laid down for each stage of the fairly complex process of assessment, but it must be a little worrying that the whole process could take as long as 10 days. Williams insists that many, if not most, assessments will be much quicker than this. Nevertheless, he acknowledges there could be delays, leading to bed blocking, if the money starts to run out later in the financial year. + "None of us know whether the budgets are adequate to the demand," Williams says. "We are going into this knowing roughly what the expected flows from hospital are. If our information is right, we ought to have just about the right money, but it's impossible to say." + For other authorities the crisis may come sooner. One deeply worried trust executive is predicting that his beds could start to be blocked within five weeks. Others believe the crunch will come in the autumn when social services' finances start to dwindle. + The more far-sighted authorities are already planning for this. Some have put aside joint contingency funds, aiming to pay for services such as night sitting - that is, the provision of somebody to stay with a discharged patient who lives alone - or even a piece of equipment which could make the difference between discharge and continued hospitalisation. Others are examining the idea of short-term referrals to residential care. + Pauline Ford suggests one way forward would be to develop NHS nursing homes, providing convalescence and continuing care. It could well be a choice between investing in additional low-tech, low-cost beds, she says, or blocking much more expensive high-tech beds. + Above all, however, she believes the challenge highlights the conflict between quantity and quality in today's health service. "More patients are being treated, but nobody is looking at the quality of that care," Ford says. "Nurses are being made to feel they are failing unless they hit the turnover rates that have been set. The trouble is that no one seems to be looking at the quality of the discharge or the re-admission rates." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +58 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 10, 1993 + +NOBODY'S BABY; +Finance:When the community care shake-up starts on April 1, government bills should fall, and choices of the elderly and disabled should increase. But will it work out that way? + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 12 + +LENGTH: 318 words + + + CALCULATION of the funding for the community care shake-up was so complex that it was undertaken by a committee called the "algebra group". For the record, the resulting formula is T=(X-C)(N-P). In plain English, this represents a phased transfer of money from social security to local authorities as the latter gradually assume responsibility for services to elderly and disabled people. People already in residential care will continue to get social security. + The transfer will rise from pounds 399 million in 1993-94 in England ( pounds 472 million in Britain) to pounds 1.6 billion in 1995-96 ( pounds 1.8 billion), with authorities receiving an extra pounds 140 million in the coming financial year to pay for setting up the community care system. The English total of pounds 539 million for 1993-94 is pounds 289 million less than local authority associations said would be needed. The gap is made up of pounds 89 million to cover a claimed underestimate of 12,000 in the numbers of people who will come forward for services; pounds 146 million for the existing shortfall between social security rates and residential home charges; and pounds 54 million for start-up costs. + In a guidance note to its councillors, the Labour Party says: "The underfunding of community care may mean that budgets . . . could run out in mid-year - with serious political consequences." Ministers dismiss such claims as scaremongering. They say the claim that 12,000 people will be unfunded in 1993-4, and could therefore miss out on services, is based on faulty data: the funding, they maintain, in fact allows for services for more people than population projections indicate will be necessary. The Health Department forecasts there will be 332,000 state-funded residents of care homes by 1995; the community care funding is said to allow for 369,000; the local authority associations predict 425,000. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +59 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 10, 1993 + +NOBODY'S BABY; +Local government:When the community care shake-up starts on April 1, government bills should fall, and choices of the elderly and disabled should increase. But will it work out that way? + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 12 + +LENGTH: 1122 words + + + FIVE years ago next Tuesday, Sir Roy Griffiths coined the memorable adage that community care was "everybody's distant relative, but nobody's baby". On April 1, in long-awaited implementation of his proposals, it will become the baby of local government. + How the infant will thrive, and whether the parent can cope, are issues of enormous uncertainty. They hinge not only on the ability of local authorities to handle their new role, but also on questions including the adequacy of government funding and the willingness of other agencies - the continuing distant relatives - to muck in and help. + If the idea works, however, the result should be an appreciable improvement in the quality of life of elderly and disabled people and, as a spin-off, curtailment of the Government's spiralling social security bill for those in residential care. + Or is it a spin-off? Little has been heard of this aspect of late, as ministers have sought to play down any suggestion that the community care shake-up is designed as a cost-saver, but it was very much an imperative when Sir Roy was commissioned to make his proposals. The Audit Commission reported in December 1986 that the bill for social security board-and-lodging payments for people in residential care had risen to pounds 489 million - from pounds 39 million in December 1982. Rapid as that growth was, compare the 1986 figure of pounds 489 million with Whitehall's estimates for the equivalent payments plus disability benefits (attendance allowance and disability living allowance) for people in residential care if the system were to stay unchanged: pounds 3.2 billion in 1993-94; pounds 4.1 billion in 1995-96. + There is an imperative to constrain this startling increase, especially in view of the public spending squeeze, the Government's ambition to cut social security spending in the long term - and the new population projections estimating the numbers of elderly people will, by 2031, be markedly higher than once thought. But it would be unfair to suggest that ministers are not genuinely anxious to see community care changes that give elderly and disabled people more choice about where and how they live. + The aim of the changes taking effect next month is to harness the disparate agencies and efforts going into community care so that help may be better focused and, as a result, more people may be able to stay in their own homes. To do this harnessing, local government has been given primary responsibility. This may seem a surprising choice when local authorities are otherwise being stripped of functions and powers, but it is not envisaged that they will themselves provide many of the care services. As in the health service, a purchaser/provider divide is expected to evolve, with local authorities commissioning services from the voluntary and private sectors. + The key function of local authorities will be assessment of the needs of elderly and disabled people, drawing on expertise and advice from other agencies, such as family doctors, but with final responsibility vested in social workers trained for the task. + The authorities are being given funds to buy services appropriate to the assessed needs. However, individuals will be means-tested and required to contribute to the care costs according to their income and capital. One fundamental of the system is choice: individuals will be free to decline a service offered them and choose another, provided it meets their needs and costs no more. If it does cost more, it can still be chosen if the individual pays the difference. + What are the likely pitfalls of the system which, at least in principle, enjoys a broad measure of political and professional support? First there is the sufficiency of the Government's funding: pounds 539 million is being provided to local authorities in England in 1993-94, pounds 399 million of it a transfer from social security for the estimated number of people who would otherwise have gone direct into residential homes and claimed benefit. The money is earmarked for community care use only, but there is contention over whether it will prove enough. Stemming from this, there is anxiety and uncertainty over what will happen if an authority decides through assessment that an individual ought to have a certain service, but lacks the cash to pay for it. + Local authorities fear they will be dragged into the courts by people demanding their assessments are complied with. Guidance issued by the Department of Health before Christmas appeared to advise authorities not to tell individuals about their assessments if there was a risk of them not being acted upon. Clarification sent last week to authorities in the London area appears only to have made matters worse, concluding that "there will undoubtedly be a somewhat uncomfortable period of adjustment to these new requirements, in all probability steered by a number of judicial reviews". + The most likely immediate problems, however, are over co-ordination of services: liaison between local authorities and other agencies has not up to now been good in all parts of the country and there is, quite evidently, some resentment among health professionals at having to play second fiddle in the new structure. + Liaison will be critical in determining how fast patients can be discharged from hospital when they must first be assessed by social services. According to a recent survey, three in four hospitals expect discharge delays (see Hospitals, right). But liaison will also be vital for the very survival of residential drug and alcohol clinics which, because of a ministerial decision to reverse an earlier guarantee of their funding, will depend on local authorities which may see them as a low priority for limited community care cash. The clinics lost a recent, last-ditch attempt to regain their guaranteed funding by judicial review. Almost three-quarters of them say they face closure by the end of the year. + In the long run, private residential homes are also likely to suffer. The Audit Commission says that private homes have grown by 90 per cent in the past decade, while the over-75 population grew by just 20 per cent, and that some "will have to be managed down and closed". In the short run, the relative under-development of domiciliary care services will militate against many people being enabled to stay in their own homes rather than in residential care. + Even when domiciliary services are in greater supply, the burden of care will remain on what are delicately termed "informal" services. As is acknowledged by the Health Department's own leaflet on the new community care system, "family and friends give most of this help". + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +60 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 11, 1993 + +CODE SOUGHT ON USE OF ELECTRONIC TAGS FOR ELDERLY + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 252 words + + + GUIDANCE should be issued by the Government on the growing use of electronic tagging as a means to control elderly people and others in care, a report says today. + Many people feel that tagging devices are undignified and potentially dehumanising, the report says. But others regard them as an acceptable way of allaying worries about a vulnerable person leaving an establishment undetected. + Although it is not known how extensive tagging is, the report by the charity Counsel and Care for the Elderly claims it is "quite widely available" in health service hospitals and is in use in a number of private and local authority care homes. + The devices, worn or carried by the resident or patient, activate an alarm when passing a detector fitted to a door or gate. Development work includes the possibility of implanting them. + The report, prepared in consultation with 16 other organisations representing groups including local authorities, health authorities and trusts, care homes and social workers, says tagging raises fundamental ethical issues. + The Department of Health should clarify the legality of the devices, if necessary in legislation, and issue a code of practice on their use. In any event, tagging should be used only selectively and exceptionally, with steps taken "to ensure that the procedure is carried out in ways which respect dignity, privacy and autonomy". + People and Parcels; Counsel and Care, Twyman House, 16 Bonny Street, London NW1 9PG; free with A4 sae. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +61 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 12, 1993 + +CHELSEA AND WESTMINSTER COST OVERRUN CAUSES CASH CRISIS AT WELLFIELD HOSPITAL + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 324 words + + + THREE elderly patients from Wellfield hospital - Rennie Reeves, Alice Humbeles and Dorothy Hunn - are among the most pitiful victims of the cash crisis to which the Chelsea and Westminster's cost overrun contributed. + The hospital used to be in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. Plans to rebuild it were submitted to the Department of Health in 1987. + Two years later, the patients were temporarily transferred and the building demolished. + The plans were then shelved because of a capital spending freeze in the North West Thames health region, blamed officially on the property slump but also linked by critics of the Chelsea and Westminster to that scheme's spiralling bill. + The elderly women patients have languished ever since in their temporary surroundings 10 miles away in East Herts hospital, Hertford, a former Victorian fever unit. + Of the 16 patients transferred, 12 have since died. Eleven more have since joined them. + The 4 million pounds Wellfield rebuilding scheme remains without a start date, although the East Hertfordshire NHS trust, which is responsible for it, insists it still plans to go ahead with it. + Dr Paul Lambden, the trust's chief executive, said in a letter to campaigners in January: "The trust is fully committed to reproviding Wellfield as soon as the money is received." The money would be allocated in 1994/95 "as far as I know", he added. + A spokesman for the region said yesterday the rebuilding scheme was not definitely in the 1994/95 programme, as "the methodology for assessing relative priorities is currently under assessment". + While the region was aware there was a shortage of provision for elderly people in Hertfordshire, no commitment to a starting date could be made. + Eileen Bannister, whose mother, Kath Dixon, is one of the Wellfield patients, said: "It's literally hopeless. There is no hope of ever getting them back to Hatfield, which they were promised." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +62 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 12, 1993 + +FBI NAMES 14 BRITONS IN US CULT COMPOUND + +BYLINE: SIMON TISDALL IN WACO, TEXAS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 22 + +LENGTH: 662 words + + + THE FBI yesterday released the names of 14 Britons, mostly Mancunians, who are holed up inside the besieged Branch Davidian compound in Waco commanded by cult leader David Koresh. + The FBI spokesman, Dick Swensen, also pointed to a possible breakthrough in the 12-day siege when he said that three men had agreed to leave the compound and surrender to the 500-strong force of federal agents. + The men, one of whom was named as Oliver Gyarfas from Australia, were expected to come out later in the day, Mr Swensen said. + The Britons' names appeared on a list of 48 cult members the FBI said it has talked to during the negotiations. Official British sources said 28 British citizens were known to be in the compound, but the total could be 45. + Three British children were released last week. In all, 107 people are inside the Mount Carmel complex, according to Mr Koresh. + Mr Swensen said there had been no contact since Tuesday with Mr Koresh, who was wounded during the February 28 shoot-out which began the siege. + Another cult member, Steve Schneider, has taken over much of the negotiating. + But Mr Swensen said Mr Koresh, aged 33, was still "indirectly involved" and did not appear to have lost control of his followers. Mr Koresh had been wounded in the arm and the side but his injuries were not life-threatening, officials said. + "I think this is an outstanding sign, that three people are going to be coming out today," Mr Swensen said. "It's an excellent sign." + But he admitted that if something went wrong and the men did not give up, that would be seen as a significant backward step in the negotiations. + "We're just not sure whether he [Koresh] is holding any others against their will," Mr Swensen said. + But the negotiators' hope was clearly that they have broken the cult's unified front and that dissent was appearing in the ranks. + Last week, 23 people left the compound - 21 children and two elderly women. But there has been no movement since last Thursday, and pressure is growing on the FBI to bring the stand-off to an end - by force if necessary. + Additional armoured vehicles were moved to the perimeter of the compound on Wednesday night, joining at least four Abrams battle tanks. An appeal has been made by the Red Cross in Waco for blood donors amid fears of a violent end to the siege this weekend. + The weather has deteriorated sharply, with heavy rain and wind adding to the stress on the forces encircling the compound. + The mayor of Waco, Robert Sheehy, appealed yesterday for all residents to give full support to the law enforcement agencies and to pray for a peaceful outcome. + He described the recent violence here as not typical of the people of Waco. "We look at it as a sort of aberration - this could happen anywhere," Mr Sheehy said. + A hard core of heavily-armed cult members, who call themselves the "Mighty Men", are believed to be running the compound, where a majority of the adults are female. In the past two days, banners have been hoisted from windows by some cult members, appealing for help. + The 14 Britons named yesterday were: Yvette Fagen, aged 32, from Manchester; Zilla Henry, aged 55, from Old Trafford, Manchester, and her five children, Diana, aged 29, Stephen, aged 26, Paulina, aged 24, Phillip, aged 22, and Vanessa, aged 19; David Lloyd Lovelock, aged 37, from Withington, Manchester; Alison Monbelly, aged 31; Rosemary Morrison, aged 29, from Fallowfield, Manchester, and her daughter, Melissa, aged 6; Theresa Noberega, aged 48, from Winchmore Hill, north London; Anita Richards; and Doris Vaega (ages and home towns unknown). + The relatives of other Britons believed to be in the compound are now in Waco, including Denise Johnson, who believes that her cousin, Sandra Hardial, is inside. The FBI emphasised that the list was incomplete and included several phonetic name spellings. + Gun-happy Texans still call the shots, page 20 + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +63 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 12, 1993 + +AND WAKING SAY ALAS!; +This month marks the centenary of the birth of Wilfred Owen whose death at the end of the first world war was the greatest loss to English poetry since the death of Keats + +BYLINE: JOHN EZARD + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 4 + +LENGTH: 1847 words + + + WHEN peace came on November 11, 1918 Wilfred Owen's younger brother Harold was in Cape Town, where his Royal Navy battleship was on station. He "realised with a surge of happiness that the war had not broken my family . . . Wilfred would go on writing his poetry and I would go on with my painting." + A little later, he went to his cabin and saw his brother in the full khaki of an Army officer. "Wilfred, dear, how can you be here?" he asked, overjoyed. "It's just not possible." + The elder brother smiled. Harold looked away for a moment. When he looked back the figure was gone. He was filled with a certainty of loss. + As he found when the mailboat caught up with his ship at Christmas, their parents had received the telegram announcing Wilfred's death on Armistice Day itself, to the sound of church bells and crowds rejoicing in their home town of Shrewsbury. Owen had been killed a week earlier in the final onslaught of the war. + His death at the age of 25 was the greatest loss English poetry has suffered since the death of Keats. There is still a special "pain in the heart" about it, as former CND chairman Bruce Kent says. Owen died an unknown provincial, from a struggling Shropshire family which lived in fear of the workhouse. In his reverence for the vocation of poet, he was - as W B Yeats said of Keats - as touching as a child with its face pressed to a sweetshop window. + Above all, though he served as an officer and won the Military Cross, he had made himself recorder, tribune and avenger of the five million ordinary dead whose fate he was to share, a role which at his best he performed with the voice of an excoriating angel. To him the first world war was a monstrous parable in which old men reversed the Old Testament story by sparing the ram of pride and slaying "half the seed of Europe, one by one". The war shaped the work of almost every major writer for the next 30 years. Yet virtually none had fought in it; Owen was the finest of a few who spoke from inside the monster. + By 1918 only four of his poems had been published. Yet in that last year of his life he wrote 10 or more of the most powerful poems in the language, ranging from Anthem For Doomed Youth to Strange Meeting. His most celebrated words, scribbled in a trench notebook as a draft preface to a volume he never saw, and now partially inscribed on a plaque at Westminster Abbey, are: "Above all I am not concerned with poetry. My subject is War and the Pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity." + His legacy has so resonated down the years that the centenary of his birth on March 18, followed by the 75th anniversary of his death on November 4, will be more widely marked than were the centenaries of Eliot or Dylan Thomas; honoured by ordinary people, soldiers, the peace movement and children who read him at school as well as by his fellow-poets and the arts establishment. + The VIP event, led by Stephen Spender, one of the poets he influenced, is at the Imperial War Museum on March 17. A bigger crowd will fill a hall at Oswestry, his birthplace, on the 18th, when the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes will open a weekend of celebrations by reading the work of the boy of Welsh ancestry from the wrong side of the tracks who came to be recognised as "Owen the poet". This event sold out within days of being advertised - "that just doesn't normally happen in Shropshire," says an officer of the Wilfred Owen Association. + The 700-member association has raised pounds 25,000 with Arts Council help for memorials there and in Shrewsbury, where he spent his adolescence. There are 60 other independent events all over the country. A mini-panic broke out last year when a new book (Wilfred Owen: The Last Year, by Dominic Hibberd) raised inconclusive evidence that he might have been homosexual, which isn't supposed to happen in Shropshire either, but that hasn't affected the response as feared. + Caroline Thewles, association administrator, says, "I was rung up by a woman from The Lady magazine who said, I'm sorry it's only going to be a small article about your events because we don't approve of war. So I said, funny you should mention that, I don't think Wilfred liked it very much either." + Owen was killed while trying to cross the Sambre canal at Ors, a town of 600 people near St Quentin. He lies buried with 65 other soldiers in the town cemetery. One of the more remarkable recent pilgrims to his grave was the second Earl Haig, son of the first world war general. + Still lying on the grave, sealed in a transparent plastic envelope, is a verse which two other visitors, G and P Cotton of London, copied from his poem Asleep and left there on July 4 last year: "Under his helmet, up against his pack, / after so many days of work and waking, / sleep took him by the brow and laid him back." + In the countryside around Ors and the Somme a week or so ago, less sacred matters were having to be reconnoitred. A four-strong British expeditionary force led by the Wilfred Owen Association's research officer, Helen McPhail, spent a day sidling into cafes and murmuring to patrons, "Est ce qu'il est possible . . .?" What they meant was, can a coach party of 50 use your loo in six weeks' time without necessarily buying anything at your restaurant? + The barman at La Hauteville indicated that the pissoir would have to suffice. At Bellicourt there was no flush. It was no topic for Parnassus; but, as Colonel Graham Parker, of Flanders Tours appreciated, an army might march on its stomach but a coach party travels on its bladder. + The group was clearing the way to add an organised Wilfred Owen Trail to the multitudinous battlefield tours of north-east France. When the Western Front Association unveiled a plaque bearing his name on the canal bridge at Ors in 1991, the mayor Aime Hurson laid on a band, behind which much of the town marched to the ceremony, and afterwards a vin d'honneur in his parlour. + Partying aside, the first - heavily oversubscribed - tour in early April can expect a journey into a terrain whose past remains malignantly alive. Philip Guest, association treasurer, has found the field near Beaumont Hamel where Owen, soon after arriving in France, had his baptism of horror with 50 hours in a captured German dug-out full of corpses. + It is searingly cold now as you tread between the field's wheat seedlings. Owen was half-drowned in water in one of the century's bitterest winters, saw a sentry blinded and was then gassed. The experience prompted three of his pre-eminent poems, The Sentry, Dulce et Decorum Est and Insensibility: "Happy are men who yet before they are killed / can let their veins run cold, /whom no compassion fleers / or makes their feet / sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers." + Fifteen miles away at Peronne, the museum Historial de La Grande Guerre displays his poem Mental Cases beside Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and Brecht's Mother Courage. A French cultural historian, Roger Asselineau, has called him the best of all European war poets. The British Dictionary of National Biography mourns him as the lost link in a "native tradition" of English poetry running from Hardy to Philip Larkin. But this tribute appears in the DNB's newly published Missing Persons supplement. He was not widely enough known to be included in its 1921 edition, or for long after. + And that was very nearly the story of his life. His mother was born into a wealthy family but her brother squandered its capital. His father was a junior railway official. They aspired to middle-class standards but could barely sustain them. Harold Owen, in his superb family memoir Journey From Obscurity, recalled the "rickety look" the four children had. Wilfred, the eldest, opted to be a poet when he was 10 and worked late every night by candlelight. + He grew up with the increasing despair of a bright, dedicated child whose parents could not afford to help him go beyond the limits of the state schooling of his time. "I need help - and I just can't get it," he told Harold when he was 17. He missed the only university scholarship he was able to try for, spent a year as a parish assistant for pounds 1 a month and two years as a language tutor in Bordeaux, where he was when war broke out in 1914. + Oddly, the war gave him his chance. He enlisted "for the perpetuation and domination of my mother tongue" and, while training in London, met professional poets for the first time. Four months in France, starting with Beaumont Hamel, gave him shellshock which led to a spell at Craiglockhart psychiatric hospital, Edinburgh - where one of the earliest of the anti-war poets, Siegfried Sassoon, was a patient. + With Sassoon as a mentor, the stress that poured from him was shaped into work of a quality which fulfilled all his years of lonely experimentation with technique. When he was recalled to France, he wrote to Sassoon in gratitude: "You have fixed my life, however short." + And to his mother on New Year's Eve, 1917: "I go out of this year a poet, dear mother, as which I did not enter it . . . I am started. The tugs have left me; I feel the great swelling of the open sea taking my galleon." Describing his memory of men waiting to go to the front from a base camp, he said: "Chiefly I thought of the very strange look on all faces in that camp; an incomprehensible look which a man will never see in England. + "It was not despair or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look and without expression, like a dead rabbit's. It will never be painted and no actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I think I must go back and be with + them." + In France, Captain Owen led his men with a new flair and energy, earning his MC and writing a few more poems. He had begun to hope he might survive; but at Ors he was exposed in what Graham Parker believes was a gap in the Allied curtain of covering artillery. He is buried, fittingly, between two privates. + He leaves, supremely, Strange Meeting, in which the bayoneted German soldier/poet talks to his British counterpart in a moment as eternal as the figures in Keats' Ode On A Grecian Urn. The German speaks with despair of what his unwritten poems might have achieved after the war: "Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot wheels, / I would go up and wash them from sweet wells, / even with truths too deep for taint. / I would have poured out my spirit without stint." + Owen did so, in the time that he had, and it is not wholly implausible or over-sentimental to claim in his centenary year that his spirit and its influence may not only have washed the chariot wheels of major wars but stopped them as well. + Wilfred Owen: The Last Year, by Dominic Hibberd (Constable, pounds 14.95). OUP is reissuing Jon Stallworthy's biography ( pounds 9.99, pb). Chatto publishes Owen's Poems ( pounds 3.99, pb). Journey From Obscurity (OUP) is shamefully out of print. Centenary events details from Wilfred Owen Association, 10 College Hill, Shrewsbury SY1 1LZ. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +64 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 15, 1993 + +WHISTLE-BLOWING IN NHS 'ON TRIAL' + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 7 + +LENGTH: 389 words + + + THE right of health workers to speak out about their jobs will be the focus of an industrial tribunal starting today on an appeal against dismissal by the "whistle-blower" nurse, Graham Pink. + Mr Pink was sacked after campaigning publicly for more staff on his wards for acutely ill elderly patients at Stepping Hill hospital, Stockport. He has since topped the poll in elections to nursing's regulatory body. + The Manchester tribunal is expected to last up to two weeks. Mr Pink will be represented by Brian Raymond, a solicitor who specialises in civil rights cases, and John Hendy, QC. The same team represented Wendy Savage, Marietta Higgs and Helen Zeitlin, three doctors who also found themselves up against the health establishment. + Mr Raymond said: "This will be the first time that Britain's best-known whistle-blower will have had a chance to defend his position in public in front of an independent tribunal." + Stockport health authority, which sacked Mr Pink, will be represented by John Hand, QC. + Peter Milnes, the authority's general manager, said: "We will defend our decision to dismiss Mr Pink on grounds associated with breach of patient confidentiality, which is one of the golden rules of nursing." Mr Milnes said the budget for the case was in line with the pounds 50,000 which the Friends of Graham Pink group has set as an appeal target to fund the case. They have so far raised pounds 25,000. + Mr Milnes has also emphasised that the authority will not move for the hearing to be private, although a letter to Mr Raymond from the authority's solictors last month had declared an intent to do so on grounds of patient confidentiality. + Mr Pink's campaign came to public notice in April 1990, when the Guardian published extracts of his correspondence with health service managers, MPs and government ministers about conditions on his night charge wards. + He was sacked in 1991 on charges of breach of patient confidentiality, failure to attend a disciplinary hearing and failure to report an accident involving a patient. He had declined an offered transfer to a job in community nursing. + Mr Pink was elected this year to the United Kingdom Central Council for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting. He polled more than five times as many votes as the nearest candidate. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +65 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 16, 1993 + +WHISTLE-BLOWER 'UPSET PATIENT'S FAMILY'; +Nurse's 'torrent' of correspondence presented 'lurid and negative picture' of work on hospital's geriatric wards + +BYLINE: TOM SHARRATT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 566 words + + + AN NHS whistle-blower disclosed information about a dying patient in breach of confidentiality as part of a campaign to increase staff at the hospital where he worked, an industrial tribunal in Manchester was told yesterday. + Graham Pink, a charge nurse at Stepping Hill hospital, Stockport, was sacked in September 1991. He alleges unfair dismissal. + The breach of confidentiality was an account given to the press by Mr Pink of an incident concerning a dying patient, John Hand QC, representing Stockport district health authority, said. Although the patient was not named, his family had recognised him and were caused great distress, he said. + The account followed a "torrent of words" in letters to NHS managers and others, including the Prime Minister, in his campaign over night nursing levels on geriatric wards at the hospital. + Extracts from the correspondence were published in the Guardian. + Mr Hand said Mr Pink, aged 63, presented a "lurid and negative picture" of working life on the wards. + "He has complained that he was dismissed because of this campaign, because he has spoken out telling the truth as he sees it - to adopt not particularly elegant terminology, a whistle-blower who refused to be gagged." + Four disciplinary charges were brought against Mr Pink - failure to complete documentation, refusal to attend a meeting, failure to complete documentation about an incident involving a patient, and breach of confidentiality in relation to that patient. + Two of the geriatric wards at Stepping Hill hospital had a night staff of three nurses each, and the third had two nurses. There was also Mr Pink as charge nurse, and, if necessary, nurses from other wards and nursing management. + Staffing levels were determined by an assessment of those running the ward of the needs of the patients, Mr Hand said. Geriatric wards were very busy at night, with a high level of dependency among patients. + "In an ideal world, no doubt, it would be ideal to meet that dependency by having as many nurses as possible . . . But Stockport health authority lived - and lives - in a world of finite resources, the result of which is that the staffing levels . . . involve an element of balancing need against resources." In August 1989, Mr Pink started writing letters to the management, professional bodies, MPs, the Secretary for Health, and the Prime Minister. + Nearly a year later, in July 1990, an article appeared in the Stockport Express Advertiser detailing an incident involving an elderly patient. + The man's daughter complained about the distress caused by the account of a man found lying in a pool of urine after apparently having fallen. + Mr Hand said: "Our case is that that incident alone would have provided ample justification for the dismissal of Mr Pink." + However the authority offered Mr Pink a transfer to community nursing, which he declined. He was then dismissed. + Mr Pink's action in disclosing information to the press was deliberate, not inadvertent; it was done knowing that it was likely to cause distress to the family; and it was done knowing it was in breach of confidentiality and therefore in breach of contract. Mr Pink had claimed that his moral duty justified his actions, said Mr Hand. But the authority rejected that. + The hearing, which is expected to last for two weeks, continues today. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +66 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 16, 1993 + +HEALTH: BEYOND BELIEF + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 15 + +LENGTH: 229 words + + + THERE are many myths about the prostate gland, and none more enduring than the idea that "benign" enlargement of the gland is pre-cancerous. In his book, Prostate Problems, Jeremy Hamand explains the differences between benign and cancerous growths. + Benign ones occur in the part of the gland around the urethra (the tube carrying urine from the bladder to the penis) and gradually works outwards. Malignant growth, by contrast, begins in the outer part of the gland. + The benign variety occurs almost universally in middle aged and elderly men, apparently as part of the ageing process. Enlargement can obstruct the flow of urine from the bladder. What of the gland itself? Located just below the bladder, it fits like a collar around the urethra. + It is not a single gland, more a bundle of tiny ones arranged in three lobes which discharge secretions into the urethra on ejaculation. + These secretions make up about 10 per cent of the total volume of semen ejaculated. Prostatic fluid contains enzymes, substances that, among other things, neutralise bacteria and prostaglandins. These are hormones which act on smooth muscle and blood vessel walls and which are used medically to induce labour and abortion. + Further information is available in Prostate Problems: The Complete Guide To Their Treatment, by Jeremy Hamand (Thorson, pounds 5.99) + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +67 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 17, 1993 + +IN THE CITY: MARKETS HEAR SOMETHING TO LAUGH ABOUT, SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT + +BYLINE: DAN ATKINSON AND SARAH WHITEBLOOM + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 341 words + + + LAMONT wore grey, the City wore blue, the dealing screens wore red. + The Chancellor's much touted swansong Budget left financial markets distinctly underwhelmed, with many in the Square Mile seeking solace in hefty side stakes on the length of his address. + In the event he beat the bookies. Ladbrokes had him odds on for a shorter speech than last year's 71 minutes. The Chancellor romped home with an address that rivalled Sir Geoffrey Howe's marathon of the early 1980s, with one hour 53 minutes at the dispatch box. + The City's attention waxed and waned, with much of the focus on a personal hurt to be suffered by the movers and shakers themselves. The Chancellor's reform of company car tax did not go down well on the dealing floor of securities giant S G Warburg. The Chancellor's disembodied voice had been much ignored until the point when he said he would link car tax to the value of the vehicle. This was a blow to the dealers and traders, not known for their love of compact, environment friendly transport. + His promise to do something for charities brought looks of disbelief, coming as it did after his announcement that government borrowing will top pounds 50 billion next year. It is not that the chaps at Warburg do not care about the disadvantaged; it is just, in the words of one dealer: "Where's he going to get the money from?" + The soaring Public Sector Borrowing Requirement stunned even the hardened dealers at Britain's biggest security house. One reaction summed it up: "Oh, shit." + Elsewhere in the City, there were groans as the Chancellor sought to curtail subsidies for wealthy married couples. "How much is this costing me?" asked one dealer. + As for the Chancellor's concern for the planet's future, it brought nothing but hilarity from the air-conditioned offices of the Square Mile. Pink-cheeked young men in expensive suits scoffed at VAT charges on domestic fuel. "The old-age pensioners, let's get them frozen out," was one particularly caring remark at a small dealing operation. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +68 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 17, 1993 + +VAT: DOMESTIC HEATING INCREASE DRAWS ANGRY RESPONSE + +BYLINE: BEN LAURANCE AND PAUL MYERS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 616 words + + + NEWS that VAT is to be imposed on the cost of domestic heating drew a furious response in the Commons, and from pressure groups fighting for the poor. + Fuel supplies for domestic, residential and charity use, which are currently zero-rated, will be subject to VAT at 8 per cent in 1994/95 and at the full 17.5 per cent rate from April 1995. + The Chancellor conceded that people on low incomes will find the increases harder to cope with than the better-off. Government figures show that the poorest 10 per cent in society devote about 13 per cent of their household income to fuel; the figure for the richest is about 3 per cent. + Tony McClenaghan, VAT partner at accountants Touche Ross, said: "This is a very regressive change." + Norman Lamont said the impact on the poor will be taken into account when income-related benefits are next uprated: details are due after the next Budget in November. + But Fran Bennett, the director of Child Poverty Action Group, said: "Not only is the promise of compensation vague; it will be worthless to those who don't take up their benefits, and to the low-paid. He could have given a much firmer promise: he could have said that the main income-related benefits would go up to compensate." + John Smith, the leader of the Opposition, said people would be "shocked beyond belief" at the Government's cynicism, and recalled Mr Major's election promises that he had no plans to raise VAT or extend its scope. + The shadow health secretary, David Blunkett, accused Mr Lamont of "endangering the lives of many elderly people". + Dr Brenda Boardman of the National Right to Fuel Campaign, a pressure group looking at the problem of fuel poverty, said: "Winter mortality rates are higher in Britain than in any other European country, even those which are much colder than us. A fuel price increase will hit everybody from day one, and homes will become more expensive to heat." + British Gas was philosophical about the new VAT burden. It pointed out that gas prices went down by 5 per cent in 1992; since 1986, they have risen by 20 per cent less than general inflation; and even with VAT at 17.5 per cent, domestic gas in Britain will be cheaper than elsewhere in Europe. + In the South-east, a three-bedroom semi-detached house using gas for heating and hot water is reckoned to have an annual bill of about pounds 430. VAT at 17.5 per cent would increase that to pounds 505. + In colder parts of Britain, the impact of VAT will be greater - and thus the greater the impact on the poor. + Child Poverty Action Group also maintains that the poor have the least energy-efficient homes. + The Gas Consumers Council's director, Ian Powe, said: "This is a punitive tax on the warmth and comfort of low income families which must to some extent be returned through subsidised energy efficiency improvements to their houses." + VAT on electricity will add around pounds 56 to the average pounds 295 household bill. + Coal prices are set to fall over the next two years which should in turn cut electricity prices. These will offset the impact of the two-stage VAT move. Until now, the Government has insisted that it wants to have only one rate of VAT, currently set at 17.5 per cent. + "The 8 per cent rate on fuel is only for one year, it is transitional and it is limited to one sector, so he can argue that the rule still holds good," said Mr McClenaghan. + Widespread forecasts that Mr Lamont would further widen the VAT net by including books, newspapers and magazines, proved unfounded. Zero-rates, covering 15 per cent of consumer spending, will continue on most food, water and sewerage, and childrens' clothing. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +69 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 17, 1993 + +INCOME TAX: EXTENDED 20PC BAND BENEFITS ONE MILLION + +BYLINE: MARGARET HUGHES + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 11 + +LENGTH: 642 words + + + THE Chancellor has left intact the 25 per cent basic rate and 40 per cent higher rate of income tax. But by extending the 20 per cent lower tax band, which he introduced in last year's Budget, Norman Lamont said he was demonstrating the Government's "ultimate objective" of moving to a 20 per cent basic rate of income tax for everyone. + The lower band will be increased by pounds 500 to pounds 2,500 in the next tax year. This will take a further 1 million lower income taxpayers out of the basic rate band so that 5 million will be paying 20 pence in the pound rather than 25 pence as they were a year ago before its introduction. + It will also benefit all taxpayers paying tax at 25 per cent, giving them an extra pounds 25 a year, although some will be eaten by higher National Insurance Contributions and other indirect tax changes announced in the Budget. So, overall there are no net winners from this Budget. + The lower rate band will be extended to pounds 3,000 in 1994/95 and Mr Lamont promised that it would continue to be widened annually until it became the basic rate for everyone. + At the same time the Chancellor has reinforced this commitment to a 20 per cent basic tax rate by announcing that from April next year tax relief in three key areas will be restricted to 20 pence in the pound. This will apply to mortgage tax relief, tax credits on dividends and to the married couples allowance. + Mr Lamont said the extension of the lower rate band would help those on low incomes, while the restrictions on tax relief would mean that "everyone would benefit to the same extent". He pointed out that at present the married couples allowance of pounds 1,720 extends a benefit of pounds 688 a year to higher rate taxpayers while those paying the 20 per cent band only gain by pounds 344. The Chancellor argued that there was "no good reason why the better off should receive twice as much as the lower paid". + In future, he said, everyone would get pounds 344, based on the current allowance. + The restriction to the 20 per cent band will apply to married couples allowance paid to pensioners, but this would be offset by increasing their allowance by pounds 200 a year. Pensioners taking out home income plans would also be exempt from the Miras restriction. + Sally Greengross, director of Age Concern England, welcomed this concession, though said she had hoped that the Chancellor would raise the Miras limit "to make it easier for elderly homeowners to inccrease their income in retirement when taking out home income plans". + Despite Mr Lamont' stress on the Government's commitment to a fairer tax regime, Chris Pond, calculates that the Budget measures will mean an extra pounds 5 a week in tax and living costs for a low paid family. + The Chancellor's decisions to freeze all personal tax allowances, including the married couples allowance and the income limit for age related allowances, is effectively a tax increase in disguise - albeit a small one this time around as increasing them in line with inflation, as is usual, would have meant an increase of only 2.6 per cent. + Freezing allowances hits the poorer off by bringing more people into the tax net. + As part of his plans for reforming the tax regime, the Chancellor confirmed the expected change in the basis of taxing the self employed by changing from the previous year basis of assessment to a current year. + The effect of the change will be that in the year 1995-96 they will be taxed on profits earned in that year rather than on profits earned in the year to April 5, 1995. + In addition eight million taxpayers, including the four million self-employed, who fill in a tax return each year will be able to opt for self assessment - allowing employees to have income from different sources included in one assessment. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +70 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 17, 1993 + +THE ALMOST FOREIGN LONDONERS; +Britain's Irish have the highest mortality rate of all ethnic groups, the second highest unemployment rate and an identity problem. How are they coping? + +BYLINE: CLAIRE MESSUD + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 1746 words + + + SITTING in an ordered square beneath bands of fluorescent lights and a disused disco ball, the Irish Pensioners' Group is playing bingo. Almost 40 men and women bend over their cards, scratching in silence, looking up every so often at Tony. He, at the front of the room, calls up numbers on an electronic bingo box, and relays them over a microphone. The group has been meeting weekly for 10 years and its chairperson, Marie Sargent, says it includes members from almost every county in the Republic - but not from Northern Ireland. "It's in our constitution," she explains. "You have to be Irish." + A quick poll reveals that almost everyone has been in England for at least 30 years, some for as long as 50. They arrived on a wave of post-war immigration in the fabled days of "No Irish Need Apply" signs, and, in the face of what was then open hostility, they have made their lives in their own community. Although several have taken British citizenship, only one woman in the group married an Englishman, and nobody else married outside their Irish enclave. "Irish people don't mix with others," says one woman cheerfully, to a chorus of agreement. "You have lots of English friends," says the man beside her, "but once you're Irish you are always Irish." Everyone nods. + There are, however, some things about which they do not agree. When asked whether their lives are affected by the IRA's mainland bombing campaign, one woman snaps, "Not at all." "We think it's a terrible thing. It's a truly terrible thing," calls another from the other side of the room. "They're only fighting for their rights," hisses the first. + An elderly man stands and turns to me, shaking his finger. "You've no right," he rebukes. "No right to come in here and ask questions that make trouble among us. There are things we do not talk about." Political opinion has no place among the bingo numbers, beneath the glinting disco ball. + In the 1950s, when many of these pensioners came to London, approximately 200,000 young people, most of them unskilled, emigrated from Ireland, primarily from rural areas. Those who came to England filled traditionally low-paid jobs, in the building trade, for example, or in nursing. Their expectations were limited, their accepted place at the bottom of the socio-economic scale. Wanting to fit in to English society, they confined their Irishness to Catholic groups or groups such as this one, and as a community, they kept largely to themselves. + The 1980s marked a new, very different phase of large-scale emigration. According to "Over Here", research on Irish migrants in London commissioned by the Action Group for Irish Youth (AGIY) and published in 1991, "The more highly qualified a younger person, the more likely they are now to emigrate." Between 1981 and 1991, it is estimated that up to 500,000 people left the Republic, most of them from urban backgrounds, most of them under 25, and most of them for London. Although in the depths of the recession the exodus has slowed to a trickle, AGIY advises that "every projection shows the number will go up again". Obviously a proportion of these emigrants fit the "traditional" profile, but most do not: in 1988, a third of those finishing higher education in Ireland who found jobs found them abroad. + Many educated young people came in the 1980s not just for jobs or careers, but to broaden their horizons, or on trips of self-discovery or simply for a short break. But most will not go back. According to Joan O'Flynn at AGIY: "People come with a very inaccurate notion that it will be for six months a year. They don't see it as 'for life'. But the number who return is such a small proportion of the number who leave: it's very hard to go back, especially from Britain." + The accidental nature of this wave of emigration is echoed everywhere: Oonagh, 27, who works as a secretary in television, took leave of absence from her job in County Cork and found work in London - five years ago; Maeve, 28, a university secretary, was bored in Dublin and thought she would come for a year - in 1985; her younger sister, Nuala, 26, a physiotherapist, followed three years later; their friend and schoolmate, Mary, 29, who works in a lab, came four years ago. "I thought I'd come for a year," she says. "I'd like to go home, but at the end of the day, I don't think I will. I've changed." + Over the past few years, almost all of their friends have emigrated - if not to London, then to America or Australia. Nuala was recently offered a job in Dublin and she turned it down: "I was tempted - but there's nothing there for me now. It was a big decision." + Few, however, are forced to confront the decision as clearly as Nuala. As Oonagh says: "Everyone I know would like to go back, but I don't think they really believe in it. I just wonder what you could do back there - it seems to be at a standstill. I can't conceive of staying here always, though. It's not home." + Eugene Scanlan, who coordinates an Irish youth project in north London, sees this as a "trap": in his own experience, "I was saying 'I'm not staying here', not letting go. And then going back home and feeling I didn't belong." + For such young Irish people, questions of identity are clearly not easily resolved. Seeing their residence in Britain as temporary even after seven or eight years, considered permanent emigres back in Ireland, they are viewed by the British as neither foreign nor native: "You're like an extension - not allowed to have a separate identity," says Scanlan. + Mark Patterson, a 24-year-old graduate student from Northern Ireland currently working with Scanlan, puts it succinctly: "It's like 'foreigner' with a small 'f,' " he says. "You're a wee bit more foreign than a Scotsman." For Patterson, the issues are particularly complex: a Protestant from County Armagh, he has found that in England such distinctions are overlooked: to most, he is first and foremost Irish. In a variation on a common theme, he comments that his experiences have led him to reconsider his future plans. "The longer I stay," he says, "the more I find myself changing. I feel as though I'm growing out of Ireland. I wonder, could Northern Ireland accept me?" + Neither foreign nor English, truly at home in neither place, the young Irish are still less willing than earlier generations to turn to Irish-only groups for reaffirmation of their identity. "When the older generation came," says Maeve, "there was much more of a community. Now, it's great to have your Irish friends, but you want to meet more, different people." Part of the problem is perhaps that "traditional" identities for Irish people - those purveyed by British culture - not only do not fit the current generation but, in the light of their education and aspirations, provoke in them a justifiable rage and frustration. Surrounded by Irish friends, proud of their nationality, they still do not want to be constrained by anyone else's ideas of what their Irishness might be. + It is a question, according to O'Flynn and Scanlan, of redefining the community, of redefining Irishness. "When you come here," says O'Flynn, "the codes and contexts aren't familiar. You have to make your own signposts, define what it is that makes you Irish, your own identity." This said, she is adamant that there is an Irish community available to those who want to be part of it. "It's very diverse now," she says. "There are women's groups, housing groups, gay and lesbian groups, youth groups - its focus is much broader than it was in the 1950s, and reflects much more the diversity of Ireland." + O'Flynn and Scanlan both believe that formal and cultural recognition of the Irish as an ethnic minority in Britain is the way forward. AGIY has raised the issue with the Commission for Racial Equality, which now acknowledges the Irish as a separate ethnic group and recommends that others do the same. Such recognition is certainly the only way to closer analysis of the inequalities that persist for the Irish migrant community, and of the subtle racism to which the Irish are subject. + In London for example, where one in 10 women is Irish (the figure is one in six in Brent, which has England's highest concentration of Irish people), ethnically specific analysis would seem particularly necessary - especially because the existing statistics are so alarming: Irish immigrants have the highest standardised mortality rate of all groups in Britain; the highest rates of psychiatric admission; the second-highest unemployment rate; the lowest rate of home ownership; the second-highest suicide rate . . . the list goes on. And according to AGIY's 1991 research, among young immigrants there is an overall "mismatch between the level of educational achievement and the quality of employment obtained". In the face of such obstacles, says Scanlan, "we have to look forward. We have to look in at our own problems, as a community." O'Flynn says: "Lack of recognition perpetuates the invisibility of the Irish community - its needs and experiences. It hinders the extent to which Irish people can contribute to the larger British community." + Another major difficulty they face is the unwanted and unmerited burden of being associated with the IRA. Almost everyone has an account, if not of actual verbal or physical abuse, then of being made to feel culpable because of their accent - on the Tube, in pubs, in shops. The existence of the IRA is the one thing all British people know about Ireland, even if they cannot tell North from South, and it is - especially in the midst of repeated IRA attacks on London - a persistent preconception, a prejudice given weight by the law. "The Prevention of Terrorism Act gives a legislative context for prejudice," says Joan O'Flynn. "Under the terms of the Act, any Irish person in Britain is a potential terrorist suspect." + Fear of suspicion may also account for the demise of London's St Patrick's Day festivities: despite its huge Irish population, the city has no parade to rival, for example, New York's. But parades, like bingo games, are rarely arenas for political discussion. + Besides, the political questions are one area in which the younger generation resembles the older: "Irish people in London don't discuss it," says Bridget, who came here in 1966. "It's too emotive." "We're sick of it," says Maeve. And, Mary adds with resignation, "There's no solution, either." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +71 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 18, 1993 + +PAY RULE HITS CARE HOMES + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 5 + +LENGTH: 386 words + + + PREPARATIONS for the community care shake-up on April 1 have been hit by 11th hour confusion over payments to residential homes for elderly and disabled people. + Owners of homes have learned belatedly that the new residential allowance, to be paid to residents admitted from next month, will be withdrawn if residents are absent for more than six days at a time. + At present, residents receiving income support benefit are allowed to continue to claim for six weeks while away from the home, after which the benefit is reduced by 20 per cent. + Under the new system, most of the cost of a place will be met by the local authority social services department. However, residents will receive a residential allowance of 45 pounds a week, or 50 pounds in London. + Under regulations laid last December, but largely unnoticed at the time, this allowance will be withdrawn after six days of absence. + James Churchill, executive secretary of the Association For Residential Care, said almost every resident of a home would be absent for longer than six days at some stage during the year. + To avoid being out of pocket, the homes would seek recompense from the relevant local authority. + "This will mean extra work for the home, extra work for the local authority, and extra work for the Benefits Agency just to maintain the status quo." + Eunice Paxman, who chairs the National Care Homes' Association, said: "This could have a very serious effect on the security of tenure of the individual resident or patient. No authority or home owner is likely to be prepared to shoulder this additional financial burden for long." + A spokeswoman for the Department of Social Security said it would be the responsibility of the agency contracting for a home place - in this case the local authority - to make arrangements to keep the place available if the resident was absent for more than six days. + - The DSS is to go to the Court of Appeal to try to overturn a ruling last October by a social security commissioner that income support should be paid to 12 residents of a nursing home in east Sussex who were formerly in a long-stay hospital. + The case will test the DSS's contention that the residents are still part of a "hospital or similar institution" and therefore ineligible for benefit. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +72 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 18, 1993 + +VAT ON POWER BILLS FUELS POVERTY DEBATE; +Benefit rise will not meet increases - Low-income families to bear burden - Charity fears more winter deaths among elderly + +BYLINE: DAVID SHARROCK + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 11 + +LENGTH: 633 words + + + PROTESTS mounted yesterday over fears that the imposition of VAT on domestic fuel and power bills would hit the poor and elderly. + From April next year they will be subject to 8 per cent VAT, rising to the full 17.5 per cent rate the following year. + The Chancellor said in his Budget speech that social security benefits would increase to reflect the rising bills, but scepticism within the ranks of the Conservative Party was heightened last night when it became apparent that whatever the benefit rise, it will not equal the increase in fuel costs. + The Children's Society claimed that the Treasury admitted it was unable to guarantee that the poorest people would not be worse off. The society's director, Ian Sparks, said: "Any increase in fuel bills will have a disproportionate effect on poor families' outgoings. + "Families scraping a living on low incomes and benefits are already living below the breadline. Even a few pence off the weekly budget can mean a mother does not eat. This hits at the fabric of family life. It is just as important for an unemployed family to keep warm and cook as it is for the rich." + Age Concern estimates that a third of elderly people do not claim their income support entitlements. + It says thousands more in low-income groups, including pensioners receiving basic pensions slightly above the income support level, and disabled people on invalidity benefit, will bear the burden of increased fuel and power bills alone. + Help the Aged said that increased fuel bills would result in more winter deaths. Janet Johnstone, its director of public relations, said that more people die during the winter months in Britain than in colder countries such as Sweden and Canada. A 1991 survey of family expenditure found that a single elderly person living alone spent an average pounds 8.54 a week on fuel - 12.2 per cent of income. VAT at 17.5 per cent will increase that to pounds 10.03 a week. The average family spent 4.7 per cent of its total income on fuel. + Ms Johnstone said that the death rate increases during the winter for a variety of reasons, such as influenza epidemics. In 1991 there were 41,000 more deaths than in the summer. + "We know from older people that they are the most fearful group for incurring bills and debt. The risk is that when people start receiving bigger fuel bills they will not turn the heat up. We will be approaching Peter Lilley to ask that this is taken into account when income support figures are uprated." + Janet Allbeson, social policy officer of the National Association of Citizen's Advice Bureaux, said that fuel and power were basic necessities. + "We will be writing to the Chancellor to ask him to make sure that all low-income groups are protected - not just people on income-related benefits but also pensioners, the disabled, and all the low-income people in work. + "Our fear is that we will see people trying to survive with candles for lighting. Fires will happen. Children die because of candles being used." + Debt has become the main query at bureaux across the country, according to a report published in December. "We envisage this announcement will increase the Citizen's Advice Bureaux service in debt-counselling in quite a major way," added Ms Allbeson. + A Friends of the Earth spokesman said that cutting energy use was vital to reduce production of carbon dioxide and other pollutants, but called on the Government to ensure householders had access to information about insulation and energy efficiency. + He called for a pounds 1.25 billion-a-year programme to upgrade insulation in 500,000 low-income households; tough energy efficiency standards for domestic appliances and buildings; and links between mortgage relief and home energy efficiency. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +73 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 19, 1993 + +DISCOUNTS AND STATE AID + +BYLINE: JOE JOYCE IN DUBLIN, ANNA TOMFORDE IN BONN, AND ANDREW BELL IN PARIS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 431 words + + + ELECTRICITY and gas bills in Ireland have included a VAT element since 1988, with the rate now standing at 12.5 per cent. + However, households pay just over half of the cost, with a "special discount" from the state-owned Electricity Supply Board accounting for the difference. + Although Irish electricity prices have not been increased since 1986, welfare agencies say that fuel bills remain a big problem for people on lower incomes and benefits. + Pensioners get 300 units of free electricity every winter and 200 units in the summer. They and people on long term welfare payments also get a weekly fuel allowance of IR pounds 7 from October to April. + Other assistance can be granted by community welfare officers to people threatened with disconnection because of non-payment. + - Germany: domestic fuel and power bills have attracted VAT since it was introduced in 1967. This aspect of the tax - now standing at 15 per cent - has therefore never been an issue. + No social groups are exempt from VAT - which is levied at a lower rate of 7 per cent on food, public transport and print products - and all consumers pay an additional heating oil tax of eight pfennigs (3 1/2 pence) a litre. + Government statistics show that a pensioner couple in western Germany has an average DM2,300 ( pounds 978) a month for household spending. The figure for eastern Germany is pounds 765. Often the income is increased by savings, interest payments, and other sources. + As an example, Gerhard Zielinski and his wife, who have a monthly income of pounds 1,021, spend pounds 297 on rent, electricity and domestic fuels, with electricity and heating accounting for pounds 64. + However, further down the economic scale, the elderly account for between 30 and 40 per cent of the 4.2 million Germans who claim social security benefit, granted when monthly income is less than pounds 225. + Benefits are designed to cover heating and fuel costs. + - France: VAT is charged on all electricty and gas bills at a rate of 18.6 per cent for use, and 5 1/2 per cent for standing charges. The government has calculated that 120,000 households are cut off every year because of financial difficulties partly arising from this extra cost. + In response, a law designed to protect the poor was passed last year. It states that any person or family in a "precarious" situation has the right to state help to ensure water and energy supplies. + In practice, this means that anyone with an income at or below the minimum wage will have his or her power bill paid by the state. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +74 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 19, 1993 + +TAKING THE BRUNT ON THE COLD FRONT; +Points of Order + +BYLINE: MICHAEL WHITE AND JOHN CARVEL + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 4 + +LENGTH: 544 words + + + VOTERS must have wept at the sound of junior social security minister Ann Widdecombe floundering on Radio 4's Today programme about the extent of her department's willingess to "take into account" the extra VAT costs of Norman Lamont's Budget to hypothermic old people. + But old lags recall another occasion when that high-flying office (Mrs T once held it too) was hung out to dry by heartless senior ranks. Back in 1987, the newly-promoted minister of state, one J. Major, was obliged to defend the government line on "cold weather payments" in a severe winter. A Times leader said he sounded like Mr Gradgrind arguing with Mr Pickwick. + It's part of the Major legend that he took on Treasury meanies to extract more cold weather money on the sensible grounds - advanced again by Tory MPs yesterday - that you do not want old people to freeze to death with an election looming. Dead ones can't vote Tory. + THE first known ancestor of that twice-weekly bear garden known as Prime Minister's question time was a question asked in the Lords on February 9 1721, when Earl Cowper quizzed the Earl of Sunderland about a Mr Knight, who was helping police in pre-Delors Brussels with their inquiries about the South Sea Bubble scam, the City fraud of that century. + So say scholars Mark Franklin and Philip Norton in their new volume, Parliamentary Questions (Clarendon Press pounds 27.50), which tells the whole grisly story right up to planted, syndicated and other pseudo-parliamentary techniques of the televised 90s. + One reform endorsed by Norton is that Opposition frontbenchers show restraint in not "squeezing out backbench participation" so that ordinary MPs can get at ministers. Another would be for the Opposition to appoint fewer frontbenchers in the first place. + THE armour-plated Bill Cash, terror of the Euro-mafia, and his engaging wife, Biddy, held a party for fellow-sceptics at their Westminster military HQ this week. Lady Thatcher graced the assembly to raise morale of the troops, whose numbers included such formidable media riflemen as Lord Rees-Mogg and Paul Johnson, the most versatile columnar mercenary of his generation. + The buzz was that, notwithstanding the assurances of Attorney-General Lyell that Labour's amendment 27 will not foul up the Maastricht bill, ministers remain petrified that it will be passed, opening the social chapter up to that can of worms known as judicial review. + LADY Thatcher's friends say that the multi-millionairess has been saintly in her self-restraint as John Major ruins her legacy (sic). Thus, when she visited Denmark to stir things up, she did so with the minimum of UK publicity. + What is less well appreciated is the extent to which that formidable trio of Cashite legal sceptics, Martin Howe (nephew of Sir G.), Leolin Price and Michael Shrimpton, have been getting up the noses of Danish politicians. + According to Mikael Bramsen who runs the European Parliament's office in Copenhagen, the trio are presenting themselves to packed houses as independent British experts on the Maastricht treaty. + Europhiles like Bramsen are naturally cross that Brits, of all people, are lecturing others about the Maastricht muddle, let alone as "objective" experts. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +75 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 19, 1993 + +MINISTERS TOLD TO WITHDRAW ADVICE ON CARE NEEDS + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 292 words + + + MINISTERS must end the confusion over how local authorities should deal with people whose needs they cannot meet under the community care shake-up on April 1, MPs said yesterday. + The Conservative-dominated Commons health committee said current guidance on the issue was "unhelpful". + Whitehall guidance has appeared to advise authorities not to tell people their assessed needs if there is a risk of the service not being provided. + Fresh guidelines should be issued urgently and, if necessary, legislation introduced to ensure authorities would be able to make full assessments of unmet needs, said a report from the committee. + It also called on the Government to reinstate protection of funding for residential drug and alcohol clinics which fear run-down and closure under the new community care system. They lost a ministerial guarantee of their pounds 20 million funding even though private residential and nursing homes enjoy protection. + Local authorities, which must arrange appropriate care for elderly and disabled people coming forward for care from April, think the pounds 539 million they have been given will not be enough. They fear being taken to court if they fail to provide services which they assess as necessary. + Yesterday's report says it is vital that nothing inhibits collection of data on unmet need to ensure it will be possible to judge whether resources are adequate. + Civil servants had said there were no plans to collect such information in Whitehall. + Tim Yeo, junior health minister, promised "extensive monitoring" of the new system, though did not make clear whether this would include central recording of unmet need. + Community Care: Funding from April 1993; HMSO; pounds 12.15 + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +76 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 19, 1993 + +CITY IN BETWEEN BOOM AND BLIGHT; +David Gow, recently in Leipzig, reports on the contradictions as east Germans reach out for the future + +BYLINE: DAVID GOW + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 565 words + + + THE elderly woman returning to her native city from her new home in Bavaria looked around at the scores of building sites in the centre of Leipzig and shook her head in disbelief at the scale of change since she left two years ago. + "But it has not cheered up all the friends and relatives I've seen here," she said. "Far from it. They're all up in arms and just complain about the fact they have to pay 10 times the amount for the same lousy home." + Leipzig, perhaps more than any other east German city, is caught between boom and blight. + The skyline above the centre is crowded with 140 building cranes, for the biggest bout of construction in 80 years is in full swing. + New department stores and office blocks arise from empty sites while older, protected buildings are being renovated. + Meanwhile, entire blocks, apparently imploding behind their dirty, broken windows, testify to the decay inevitable in the slow and painful process of catching up with the west, suffocated by complicated planning laws, red tape and unresolved ownership disputes. + "You need 48 hours in the day simply to rush from one appointment with an official to another and cope with the sheer amount of procedure," a developer from Magdeburg says. + About half the shops and offices in the centre, according to Hans-Dieter Manegold, chief executive of the chamber of commerce, are empty because of such problems. He insists that rapid privatisation, bypassing the bureaucratic obstacles, is the only way to stop the blight. + This glaring contradiction between the opulent new and the decrepit old is heightening the social discontent caused by unemployment. The anger and incomprehension it produces are taking violent forms. + Last week about 100 youths rampaged late at night through a renovated shopping arcade crammed with unaffordable chic goods. + Every shop is western-owned, and the last east German tenants are being forced out by the soaring rents demanded by the new owner. + Shops selling watches at 40,000 marks each, designer fashion and the finest champagnes are seen as a provocation to people desperately trying to pay the rent on an unimproved home. People in work are said to creep out of their apartment blocks to avoid physical attack from jealous neighbours. + "What really maddens people here is that, even if they're lucky enough to be in work, they are earning far less than a west German and have to pay out a far bigger part of their wages for a home no west German would live in," says Helga Rostel, a reporter with the Leipziger Volkszeitung. + Elderly people who want to leave homes that are too big for them find themselves trapped because, on the free market, they would have to meet rents of DM1500 - more than triple their current outlay - for a flat hardly half the size. + Mr Manegold, pointing to 40,000 empty properties, says the way to end the bottleneck is to remove control of housing from the local authority and sell off homes cheaply to sitting tenants. But Ms Rostel insists that the costs of renovation, let alone servicing a mortgage and inherited debts, are prohibitive. + "People feel doubly punished, for the failings of the communist system and now for those of the new market system. They feel trapped, without a future perspective: all they can see is the collapse of the past and nothing new taking its place." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +77 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 20, 1993 + +RELIEF TEMPERED AS MIRAS CEILING STAYS PUT + +BYLINE: DIANE BOLIVER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 34 + +LENGTH: 356 words + + + NEWS that life annuity Home Income Plans will not lose mortgage interest relief at 25 per cent has been received as "a nice gesture" by the Chancellor, but falls far short of the hopes of elderly support groups. + "We wanted the Chancellor to double the Miras ceiling to pounds 60,000 so that the elderly can raise more cash from the value of their homes," said an Age Concern spokesman. + Life annuity home income plans are bought by people over 65 who want to boost their income by unlocking some of the value in their homes. + They take out a loan secured on their property and buy an annuity with the proceeds which provides an income for life. The Miras helps reduce their interest bill. + Home Income Plan specialist, Cecil Hinton, of Hinton & Wild, said: "It is good news that special consideration has been given to these plans, and continues the special treatment and separate legislation for them, which was first introduced in the Finance Act in 1974." Mr Hinton estimates between 30,000 to 35,000 people will benefit from the measures but agrees it was a tiny gesture. + Another Budget measure will mean the elderly who have to go into a nursing home will continue to attract mortgage interest relief on their homes for up to 12 months. Until now relief stopped immediately the home was left. + However, the Revenue says that to qualify the property must be put on the market and the tax relief is only available for 12 months starting from the date the old property stops being the borrower's only or main residence. The Revenue has discretion to extend this period and this extension is available to borrowers moving into rented accommodation, who are unable to sell their homes. + Until the Budget, the 12 month extension of relief only applied if a new loan had been taken out on the new property. If it had not, the interest relief stopped on the old loan as soon as the property was vacated. + "The Chancellor's intention is to give people moving into rented properties, who are unable to sell their homes at once, the benefit available to people who are buying new homes," the Revenue said. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +78 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 20, 1993 + +LAMONT FUELS FIRE OF DISSENT WITH DECISION TO TAX ENERGY + +BYLINE: JILL PAPWORTH + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 29 + +LENGTH: 948 words + + + CONSUMER groups, charities working on behalf of the elderly and other low-income groups - even Tory MPs - this week condemned the Chancellor's decision to levy VAT on domestic fuels. + Confusion stills reigns over its likely impact on poorer households, after the threat of a backbench revolt forced the Government to promise extra help to 10 million people on low incomes. But details of the relief are not likely until November. + As predicted in last Saturday's Money Guardian, the Government has used environmental protection - the need to combat global warming by cutting back on carbon emissions - to justify such punitive measures. + Domestic fuels are VAT-free or "zero-rated" and, under EC law, once they lose this status they can never regain it. + By charging VAT at 8 per cent on domestic fuel from April 1994 and at the full rate of 17.5 per cent from April 1995, the Government will be able to raise an extra pounds 3.25 billion by April, 1996 and a further pounds 2.85 billion by April 1997. + This will help to reduce significantly the Government's debt burden. + But it will add at least pounds 50 to the average household's energy bills next year and by upwards of pounds 100 the following year. The burden will fall heaviest on the poor. Government figures show that the poorest 10 per cent in society devote 13 per cent of their total household income to fuel. The figure for the richest is 3 per cent. + Poorer people generally live in the least well-insulated homes with little or no money to rectify the situation. The Hayes family (see below) can testify to that. The plight of pensioners and low-income families with small children or disabled members is particularly serious. + Research by Age Concern reveals that nothing has improved in the last 20 years. Older people still live in the coldest homes and are still dying from hypothermia at the same rate because they can't afford proper heat. + When asked what they would do with the money if the Government were to give them an extra pounds 10 a week, more than two thirds of the pensioners surveyed said they would spend nearly all of it on heating. + "Higher fuel bills will increase the risk of hypothermia-related deaths among the elderly," says Sally Greengross, director of Age Concern. "It is not too late for the Chancellor to change his mind and we urge him to do so." + In his Budget speech Norman Lamont said that the increased charges will be taken into account when income-related state benefits are uprated in November. But critics want guarantees that benefits will go up enough to compensate recipients fully for the extra costs. Liberal social security spokesman Archie Kirkwood says it would take around pounds 2 over and above the Government's normal upratings to compensate pensioners properly. + When pressed for assurances early this week, junior Social Security Minister Ann Widdecomb and chief secretary to the Treasury, Michael Portillo, ruled out any special up-rating of benefits for the poorest. + Despite Government pledges since that extra help will be available, the Government has refused to guarantee full compensation. + Thousands in low-income groups, including pensioners receiving small occupational pensions fall just outside the income support threshold They are likely to be hit hardest by the VAT charge. + To combat the tax increase, Friends of the Earth is urging average householders to "pull off the ultimate green tax dodge" by investing in improving energy efficiency at home. + "By spending about pounds 500 on energy efficiency measures over the next two years the average household should be able to avoid this burden," says the environmental campaigning group. "It will recoup its investment in fuel bill savings within three years and make cuts in pollution." + The programme, which assumes that households already have insulated hot water tanks and four inches of loft insulation, includes: + - Turning your thermostat down by one degree centigrade. Cost: pounds 0. Annual saving: pounds 17.50- pounds 47. + - Buying three compact fluorescent "low-energy" light bulbs and fitting in your most used lights. Cost: pounds 40. Annual saving: pounds 42. + - Draught-proofing doors and windows. Cost: pounds 50. Annual saving: pounds 30. + - Installing cavity wall insulation (if applicable). Cost: pounds 300- pounds 400. Annual saving: pounds 70- pounds 95. + - If you have gas-fired central heating, when you buy a new boiler fit an energy efficient condensing boiler. Extra cost on top of standard boiler, pounds 250. Annual saving: pounds 120- pounds 175. + - Always buy the most energy efficient applicances possible. Big energy savings can be made for little or no extra cost if you choose more energy efficient models of fridges, freezers, TVs and washing machines. Extra cost: pounds 10- pounds 20. Annual saving: pounds 20- pounds 40. + Home owners or buyers can assess their home's energy efficiency and find out how it could be improved through a home energy labelling audit; soon to become mandatory on newly built homes. + Two schemes are available: the National Home Energy Rating Scheme (NHER), costing pounds 75 for the average home, from the National Energy Foundation in Milton Keynes (0908-672787) and audits carried out by licensed assessors of Bristol-based company MVM Starpoint (0272-250948) which cost an average pounds 60. + Nationwide is offering first-time buyers, who take its one year fixed-rate home loan - 4.99 per cent for those who buy mortgage payment insurance and 5.75 per cent for others - a free home energy audit. + Money Guardian is edited by Margaret Hughes + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +79 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 20, 1993 + +SIGH OF SYMPATHY, SADNESS AND SAKE; +Obituary: Chishu Ryu + +BYLINE: RONALD BERGAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 28 + +LENGTH: 490 words + + + ONE OF the most extraordinary and long-lasting collaborations between a film director and actor was that of Yasujiro Ozu and Chishu Ryu, who has died aged 88. Ryu, who often played the director's alter ego, appeared in all but two of Ozu's 54 films. The extended Japanese family was Ozu's main theme, with Ryu representing the ideal father, wise and resigned. + Ryu's was the face most associated with Ozu's remarkably consistent oeuvre, the perfect actor to express the traditional concept of mono no amare (sympathetic sadness). His eyes reflected benevolence, a gentle smile concealing an existential pain, and his fluctuating sigh ranged from the melancholy to the contented, the latter often brought about by the frequent nocturnal sake drinking sessions that punctuate many of the films. + Ryu's sensitivity and gentleness are best seen in variations on the widowed father role. In There Was A Father (1942), he is a school-teacher close to his son but circumstances make them lead separate lives. However, he dies happy, having seen his son marry the daughter of his best friend. + Late Spring (1949) finds him living happily with his daughter but, suspecting that he is keeping her from matrimony, he leads her to believe that he is to remarry in order to free her. In An Autumn Afternoon (1962), Ozu's mellow and nostalgic valedictory film, Ryu plays an ageing company auditor who arranges a marriage for his daughter, then finds himself alone except for his drinking cronies. + But Ryu's most celebrated performance in the West was in Ozu's poignant, but never sentimental, Tokyo Story (1953), in which he and Chiyeko Higashiyama play an elderly couple who, on a visit to their children and grandchildren in the big city, begin to feel a burden on them and return home, where the wife dies. + Ryu spread a beatific aura, perhaps derived from his being the son of a Buddhist priest, who wanted him to become an acolyte. Instead, he entered the Shochiku Kamata studios as a bit player in 1925 and was kept busy for a couple of years in various minor roles until Ozu, who was around the same age, "discovered" him. + "I can't think of my own identity without thinking of him," Ryu said. "I heard that Ozu once said: 'Ryu is not a + skilful actor - and that is why I use him'. And that is very true." + Certainly he made little impact when working for other directors, such as Kinoshita (Carmen Comes Home), Kobayashi (The Human Condition) and Kurosawa (The Bad Sleep Well, Red Beard, and Dreams). He also appeared in Juzo Itami's The Funeral (1985), almost unrecognisable as the Rolls-Royce owning, money-grubbing priest. + In 1985, when Wim Wenders made his documentary Tokyo-Ga, the director interviewed Ryu about Ozu and the old man could hardly contain his tears as he remembered his friend and mentor, who had died more than 20 years previously. + Chishu Ryu, born May 13, 1906; died March 16, 1993. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +80 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 22, 1993 + +KING WHO RULES FROM THE HEART; +After 40 years, King Hussein of Jordan is the only Arab leader to command the respect and affection of his people. Now he is in a position to see his beloved Hashemite kingdom expand + +BYLINE: DAID HIRST + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 2226 words + + + WHEN Hussein bin Talal, 40th in the line of descent from the Prophet, was crowned king 40 years ago this May, few thought he would last long. His Hashemite throne was a legacy of the Arab Revolt which, with British aid, had driven the Ottomans from their last Arab provinces in the first world war. But now Britain was losing the will and means to uphold such proteges; worse, it had betrayed promises made to the new king's great grandfather, Sherif Hussein of Mecca, concerning the creation of a free and independent Kingdom embracing all those Ottoman provinces. Beneath the mandatory figleaf, Britain and France had carved them up between them; and, thanks to the Balfour Declaration, the Arabs had lost Palestine altogether to the Zionist settler-state. + Two years before, the new king's grandfather, Abdullah, founder-ruler of Transjordan, had been murdered before his eyes: it was the 16-year-old's first encounter with the kind of realm he was to inherit. The extrovert Abdullah had been disappointed with a son, Talal, who was not cast in his own "brave, intrepid, Bedouin" mould. He doted on his grandson instead. And for Hussein, his grandfather still remains "the man to whom I owe more than I can say." + Politically, Abdullah had been the dominant personality of the Arab East. He never hid his thwarted Hashemite ambitions. "Nothing," he used to say, "will prevent my accession to the throne of Damascus." + But by the fifties, new revolutionary forces, led by the emergent Arab champion, Colonel Nasser, were convulsing the region; they cast Abdullah, and his fellow-Hashemites in Iraq, as "imperialist lackeys" and "reactionaries" whom the people's wrath would sweep away. Abdullah had indeed enlarged his hitherto tranquil, Transjordanian backwater; but instead of Damascus, he had acquired that part of Palestine, the West Bank, which the Zionists failed to conquer in their 1948 "war of independence". His enemies said he had conspired with the British and the Zionists. In fact, his Arab Legion had done more than any other Arab army to save what could be saved of Palestine. The trouble was that the Legion still had a British commander, Glubb Pasha, and, in the climate of the times, such charges had a mischievous plausibility - especially for Abdullah's new subjects, the seething, destitute, resentful refugees. + It was a Palestinian assassin who, in July 1951, put a pistol to Abdullah's ear in Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque. As the boy rushed to his already lifeless grandfather's aid, he saw his "so-called friends, those men of dignity of high estate, doubled up, scattering like bent old women". He was so disgusted, he later said, that he never wanted to be king. + And he wasn't, immediately. His father, Kalal, came straight from his Swiss sanatorium to the Basman Palace, while he himself had to leave Victoria College in Alexandria for Harrow. There, "a man among boys", he felt spurned and lonely; he knew no one save his cousin Faisal, uncrowned king of Iraq; his schoolmates "gabbled their colloquial English" at an incomprehensible pace; they were "rather snobbish"; and instead of soccer, they played the strange game of rugby. But everything gradually sorted itself out - the diminutive Crown Prince even made an ideal scrumhalf. "I remember the glow I felt one day when a boy threw a long, low pass, shouting: 'Get moving, Hussein! It's yours'. " The privileged young Englishmen, with their "rigid codes and shibboleths", had finally accepted this highest-born of Arabs. + Before long, the gentle, incurably schizophrenic Kalal was declared unfit to rule, and the 18-year-old Hussain took full powers on May 2, 1953. It was to be a long time before his subjects granted him the kind of acceptance he had won from his Harrow schoolmates, but when they did, it was gratifying beyond compare. + Hussein is not merely one of the world's two or three longest-serving rulers, he is the only Arab leader to command the true respect and affection of his people. It all came to a head last November, on his return from cancer surgery in the US. A third of Jordan, Palestinian camp-dwellers among them, came out to greet him with a rapturous spontaneity unseen in the Middle East since Ayatollah Khomeini's homecoming after the fall of the Shah. + Arab intellectuals are puzzling over the metamorphosis in the fortunes of one of the region's numerous potentates. Seen in the context of the great ideological conflicts which raged upon his accession, his people's tribute amounts to a victory for the erstwhile "reactionaries" over erstwhile "revolutionaries", for the old over what was once so promisingly, so gloriously new. + It is as a Hashemite that he has done it. He insists on that. Not that his nobel lineage confers an automatic right to rule. "No, sir" - the honorific he bestows on all with the flattering charm that is a family trait - "No, sir, I would step down if I felt my people no longer wanted me." But, in the absence of any other, truer measure of legitimacy, democracy for example, he does believe that, being of "the oldest house, the oldest tribe" in the area, he has a right and duty to "help our Arab nation", that he can rise above "differences and interests"; and he must fulfil the trust his grandfather bequeathed him. + He has never been an intellectual, a political theoriser. But just as his common touch never impaired his regal bearing, so his basic simplicity never lacked guile. It is the ordinary, human virtues he exalts; and the old Harrovian in him, the under-stated semi-Englishman, contributes to his exaltation of one above all others - the modest, homespun ambition always to "do one's best." + That would not have sufficed without luck or without the sense of timing which is born of great patience in the taking of decisions, but great resolution, courage and occasional ruthlessness in carrying them out. + For all his vicissitudes, and the sudden, spectacular changes of course they have forced upon him, one can trace beneath them all a seam of personal and political consistency. His instincts were always liberal. He early nursed a desire to know what his people really thought of him, and, taking after a Caliph of Baghdad, he once spent two nights as a taxi-driver cruising for fares - until one of his loyalist Bedouins, ultimate bulwark of his throne, nearly beat him up for daring to suggest that "his majesty" left much to be desired. The impetuous 18-year-old ordered his first prime minister to relax controls on political parties and newspapers. In 1956, he peremptorily sacked the devoted, almost saintly, but irritatingly paternalistic Glubb, to his people's brief delight and the outrage of the rightwing British press. + Glubb forecast that Jordan would become "just one more unstable, passionate, bloodstained Arab country." It almost did. For such concessions were but hopeless sops to the surging, Nasser-led emotions of the time. Monarchs everywhere trembled on their thrones, but none was exposed like little Hussein, with his small, poor, British-subsidised realm hemmed in on three sides by richer, more powerful Arab states, and an aggressive, expansionist young Israel on the fourth. The refugees hung on Cairo Radio's every word, its bloodcurdling calls to rid the region of British puppets; ugly riots swept Amman; the Israelis staged murderous, wantonly provocative raids on sleeping frontier villages; neighbouring republics plotted coups with their local accessories. Would-be-assassins tried to poison him, killing off most of the palace cats instead. Once, piloting his grandfather's De Havilland Dove, he came under attack by two Syrian MiG-17s, and he extracted from that ageing aircraft feats of hedge-hopping aerobatics that almost tore it asunder in the most hair-raising of his many escapes. + In July, 1958, with his cousin Faisal's murder in the Iraqi Revolution, Hussein called the British back; the paratroopers flew in from Cyprus at six hours' notice. He survived again, but the Sunday Times noted that "when he drives out from his Palace, his car is escorted by 12 jeeps, each carrying four soldiers armed with Bren guns". The Washington Post said flatly that "Hussein will probably leave when the British do". + In the next seven years with the Eisenhower doctrine and superpower rivalry in the Middle East at its height, the King strayed furthest from the liberalism with which he had begun. Opponents were jailed, some were tortured, and a few died under it. + In June 1967, in his last reconciliation with Nasser, he made a defence pact with Egypt - and promptly lost the Palestinian half of his kingdom in the Six-Day War. That led to the second great crisis of his reign, the rise of Yasser Arafat's fedayeen [guerrillas] who, despairing of Arab regimes, republics as well as monarchies, launched a "popular liberation war" of their own - choosing a kingdom now reduced to its original Transjordanian dimensions as the place from which to do it. + In 1968, at a famous press conference, the King was obliged to declare: "We are all fedayeen." Two years later, in September, 1970, he unleashed his faithful Bedouins, and, in 10 days of fratricidal strife, broke the back of the guerrillas' state-within-his-state; then he drove them out of their remaining bases in a campaign so fierce that scores of them crossed the Jordan, surrendering to the Israelis rather than fall into the hands of his vengeful troops. To most Palestinians it seemed unforgiveable, and the struggle between them and the Hashemites, that most poisonous leitmotif of his and his grandfather's reign, took new and vicious forms; Jordan became the first target of the Black September terrorist organisation. + But, in due course, Hussein recognised the PLO as "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people", in effect renouncing his claim to what he had lost in 1967. The conflict gradually diminished; the PLO's standing declined as the King's slowly rose. Others were to do worse to the Palestinians, with less justification. And this became the central feature of a much larger reality. To be sure, the King owes his apotheosis to his own achievements, but nothing, in the measuring of them, has helped like the failings of others. + "Can one", writes Palestinian political scientist As'ad Abdul Rahman in a study of the King's extraordinary popularity, "compare regimes which kill tens, hundreds, perhaps thousands - publicly or secretly, no matter - with a regime which always did its utmost to kill no one?" + It was back in 1957 that his friend, Ali Abu Nuwar, newly promoted commander of the Arab Legion, gave Hussein his first taste of personal betrayal. "I could not bring myself to put him to death. I have certainly been criticised for this act of mercy. But there it is - I couldn't do it." Now, all his former adversaries pay tribute to this obdurate gift of reconciliation. Yaakoub Zeidin, the Communist Party leader 12 times imprisoned, met the King recently. "I told him we were once young and very extreme, and he replied that 'We, too, were young and made mistakes.' " In Jordan, former plotters regularly re-emerge as ministers and even, in one case, as chief of intelligence. + Glubb once forecast that if Hussein ever reached 45 and, like his grandfather, put behind him the impetuosity of youth, he would, like him, become "a great ruler". Sure it is that, for him, longevity has become an asset rather than the liability it usually is. Time has proved that, though an advocate of Arab-Israeli peace long before others dared to be, he has never "sold out"; others, President Assad, Arafat himself, now seem closer to that than he. And without the reserve of credit which time has conferred, he might not have risked the three great initiatives - his new "democracy", his juridical and administrative "disengagement" from the West Bank, his "independent" line during the Gulf crisis - which have now raised him, morally, far above any other regime in the region. + Is he cured of his cancer? It is not yet sure. But if he is, the tantalising question arises: does the last of the Hashemites now hanker after the larger, Pan-Arab ambitions of his grandfather? That he has gone over to the moral offensive is not in doubt, with his promotion of Jordan as a "model", his missionary zeal for democracy and human rights. + If this moral offensive leads to a territorial one, it will start with Iraq. Would he accept an Iraqi throne? "Sir," he replies with habitual modesty, "I don't believe I could handle it." But few doubt that he wouldn't mind having a go. Of course, his long and dubious association with Saddam, belatedly ended, has left him in moral debt with Kurds and Shi'ites. Kurdish visitors report that, when asked why he did not break the Arabs' shameful silence over the gassing of Halabja, it was with tears that he stammered out his apology. + But, among the people who know him best, the Jordanians themselves, favourable comments on his Pan-Arab, his renascent Hashemite dreams come from surprising quarters. "If he sticks to his democracy," said a member of the Palestine National Council, "I, for one, would gladly see him take not just Iraq, but Syria, Lebanon, and yes - though Arafat is my friend - what we can get back of Palestine too." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +81 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 23, 1993 + +SUFFER THE NOT-SO-LITTLE CHILDREN; +The state of the nation's health tomorrow depends on the fitness of today's teenagers. But how much are we really doing to ensure they look after themselves? + +BYLINE: AIDAN MACFARLAND AND ANN MCPHERSON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 19 + +LENGTH: 766 words + + + WHILE the elderly are assumed to be doomed to illness on account of their age, the young are assumed to be immune on account of theirs. Ageism is endemic. There are a billion teenagers worldwide, three-quarters in developing countries. About 100 million live in such poverty, deprivation and powerlessness that they are at high risk of premature death from Aids or violence, or from long-term health problems caused by malnutrition, smoking related diseases etc. + But UK teenagers, you may think, are immune from all this. Not according to suicide and accident statistics. Smoking, diet and early sex also have profound effects. So why are there so few specialist teen services? Why are the few existing ones being cut? Do we think that teenagers are not interested in health? Try counting the number of health articles in teenage magazines! Do we think they are too anarchistic to care? More than 80 per cent of 14-17-year-olds think they are responsible for their own health and accept that their lifestyle affects their health. Do we think they don't have health problems? One study showed that a third had seen their GP in the previous three months. Three-quarters had taken medicine in the previous month, suffered headaches and had teeth filled. + So what are the main threats to teenage health beyond unemployment and poverty, factors they cannot control. In The Health Of The Nation, the Government set these targets for the year 2000: + - Cut the smoking rate of 11-15-years-olds by 33 per cent - from 8 per cent in 1988 to 6 per cent. Nearly two thirds of adult smokers started before the age of 16. + - Cut calories from fat from 40 per cent to below 35 per cent of total calorie intake. Eating habits are embedded as far back as the womb, resulting in high cholesterol being laid down in the coronary arteries from an early age. + - Cut accidental deaths in the under 15s by 33 per cent - from 6.7 per 100,000 population in 1989 to no more than 4.5; and for the 15-24 age group, by 25 per cent from 23.2 per 100,000 to no more than 17.4. Accidents are the main cause of death in young people. + - Cut the pregnancy rate in under-16s by 50 per cent - from 9.5 per 1,000 girls aged 13-15 in 1989 to no more than 4.8. Teen pregnancies have a higher rate of prematurity and are associated with adverse socio-economic consequences. + - Cut the overall suicide rate by 15 per cent - from 11.1 per 100,000 in 1990 to no more than 9.4 (unemployment and male suicide rates seem to be linked). + These targets are welcome, but research shows they cannot be met by a cosy alliance of health and education services. For example, a family "no smoking" education project that worked well in Norwegian schools failed in the UK, perhaps because in Norway, the government simultaneously raised tobacco prices and banned cigarette advertising. + Teenagers are not a "race apart", though it is hard to know how best to improve their lot. On the one hand, they want to remain within their families with all their strengths and problems; on the other they want to strive for independence, and are rightly into experimenting - which inevitably involves risk taking. + The motivations behind risk taking behaviour is highly complex at any age. The gap between teenagers' knowledge - which is often good - about what endangers their health and how they use this knowledge is largely uncharted territory. What we do know is that interventions in a single area are unlikely to work in isolation. Peer group pressure, cigarette advertising, imitation of parents, boredom, the need to experiment and self-image all influence children's decision to begin smoking. We also have a good explanation as to why children continue to smoke: cigarettes are highly addictive. It is the proposed solutions that are simplistic. Having a health minister telling teachers to stop smoking is hardly the answer. + To change behaviour to meet the targets requires tactics to match the complexity of the problems. These should include asking young people themselves how to solve the problem, feeding back their own views to them, enacting effective laws and enforcing them. In a recent survey of 54 Oxford shops selling cigarettes, a 12-year-old was served in 13 of them. + These and other issues are all being discussed at a meeting of teachers, doctors and teenagers - The Health Of The Teenage Nation - at St Catherine's College, Oxford, tomorrow. Details from Dr A Macfarlane, Community Health Offices, Radcliffe Infirmary, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6HE. Tel 0865 224858, Fax 0865 240755. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +82 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 25, 1993 + +OBITUARY: CYRIL CRYER + +BYLINE: MARTIN WAINWRIGHT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 11 + +LENGTH: 259 words + + + CYRIL CRYER, the last of the 1,000 Leeds "Pals" who joined the colours in the initial, enthusiastic months of the first world war, has died at the age of 96. He was one of a handful of grand old men who lived to see a revival of interest in the poignant history of the volunteer units, which also included several "Chums" battalions. + Like the other Pals, he volunteered as part of a patriotic grapevine which used the office and factory friendships of men in the northern towns and cities to encourage joining up. The practice spread to Birmingham and the City of London, which both produced their own brigades. Training on the Pennine moors brought out Cyril Cryer's youthful talent for long-distance running and he took the bronze medal in Northern Command's cross country championships in 1915. Once on the Western Front, he became the battalion runner - carrying messages under heavy fire and twice suffering severe wounds. + Buried by shellfire, he was left permanently deaf in one ear. Another attack saw a fist-sized hole punched in his helmet, which fortunately took the brunt of the damage. Cyril , who retained vivid memories of the fighting to the end, recalled a follow-up attack, when he and his colleagues were ordered to check on the first wave but found nobody left alive. + After the war, he worked in the design department of the Leeds printers and game-makers, John Waddington's, and then retired to Devon with his wife Phyllis to be near their family. + Cyril Charles Cryer, born June 26, 1896; died March 21, 1993 + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +83 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 26, 1993 + +VILLAGERS BLAME OUTSIDERS; +Owen Bowcott visits Castlerock, the quiet community shattered by yesterday's killings + +BYLINE: OWEN BOWCOTT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 371 words + + + DESCENDING into Castlerock, a neat row of thatched cottages stands on the left. Ahead, the wide sweep of the North Atlantic lies deep and calm in the sunshine. + Behind the sand dunes stretches the quiet village, inhabited largely by pensioners and people who work in nearby Coleraine. + On the Goretree Park estate yesterday Royal Ulster Constabulary officers were busy washing the last stains of blood into the gutter. It was awkward work. An officer first tried dropping loose chippings, then resorted to a bucket and brush. + Nearby a squad of police searched in silence, picking their way through a rubbish skip full of builders' rubble. They were looking for forensic evidence from the gun attack which had just claimed the lives of four Catholic workmen. + Castlerock has never seen such violence in the long history of the Troubles. Perched on the edge of a remote County Londonderry headland, the village is predominantly Protestant, and locals are proud of their good community relations. + "The people here had nothing at all to do with it," said William Maguire, a retired resident. "They are disgusted by it. The people here are very peaceful-minded. There are very few Catholics but there's no problem. Everyone knows everyone and they get on extremely well." + In Goretree Park the neighbours were chatting with police officers. "That's my house they were working on," an elderly woman gestured. + "They were nice, hard-working chaps. Its so sad what's happened. They say the foreman's wife was expecting her baby today." + Everyone was reluctant to accept that any locals had been involved. "I think it would be outsiders coming in," one man suggested, "but someone must have been looking and watching. It comes as a shock. You don't expect that sort of thing on your doorstep. + "Those workmen were just trying to get a living. If there are two sides in this conflict then when they didn't show up on St Patrick's Day it was made clear which side they were on." + Not everyone expressed charitable thoughts about those who had died. "It will be interesting to see what kind of a funeral they get," one man said out of the side of his mouth. "They may get a paramilitary send-off." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +84 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 27, 1993 + +GIRLS' HOME MEMORIES MAY HELP SHAPE CARE FOR PROBLEM CHILDREN; +Three young women from establishment set up in Victorian times offer 'badly needed' insight to life in care + +BYLINE: MARTIN WAINWRIGHT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 598 words + + + THREE graduates of "village homes" founded for barefoot and destitute Victorian girls are making a unique contribution to the child care debate. + The Tyneside trio, who spent a total of 28 years in care, are organising a reunion and survey of pupils at the former Northumberland Village Homes in the Tyneside resort of Whitley Bay. + Helped by researchers from Newcastle University, they have organised the pounds 15,000 study in between looking after seven children and studying for careers in nursing, elderly people's welfare and film-making. Social workers see the potential findings - of children's experiences in care, views, and problems in adapting to independent life - as an exceptional addition to data about "problem children". + "This sort of thing is very badly needed," said John Heptinstall, a senior social worker on North Tyneside and the last headteacher of the village homes, which closed in 1985. "People in our profession have all sorts of theories as to what happens to children both during care and when they leave. But we don't actually know, because there has been no systematic attempt to find out." + Wandering round the cul-de-sac of gabled Victorian cottages, now a smart private housing development called The Village, the three budding social scientists overflowed with memories of life in care. + "It's too big a part of your life to forget," said Gerry Roe, aged 27, mother of four and training as a nurse. "You went in pretty innocent and came out hardened up for the real world. I used to think life can't whip out anything worse for me now. So perhaps I've been able to cope with things better than someone brought up protected, with a happy childhood." + Jackie Kerr, aged 26 and a film-maker from Wallsend with one daughter, went into care aged five months, and sharply remembers the shock of leaving at 16. + "It was all you thought of - leaving. It was like a honeymoon to start with," she said. "But then the reality of it followed. + "The homes tried to prepare you, by giving you a little flat in the cottage to look after - but suddenly you were on your own, only 16, in a real council flat and, in a lot of cases, with a baby on the way." + Tess Foster, aged 28 and cradling her second child Abbie, regularly went back to the village for a bed for the night. + Although the survey will cover only pupils since 1970, when the village became a council community home with its own school, the trio have been drawn to the history of their predecessors. "We'd like to clean this up," said Mrs Kerr, inspecting a mossy gravestone in Whitley Bay churchyard, which commemorates more than a dozen girls, like Emily Bell, aged seven, and Frances Little, 11, who died of cholera and typhoid at the homes in the 1880s. Contacts have been made in Canada, where many early pupils were sent as domestic servants. + "Every four years there was a passing out parade," said Mr Heptinstall. "Girls who failed to find local service were taken down to North Shields and shipped to Canada - with the then headmistress, who checked their employers and went back every four years to see how they were getting on." + Mrs Roe, of Dudley, near Cramlington in Northumberland, is co-ordinating the reunion at the Park Hotel in Whitley Bay on May 21. Guests will be asked to help establish a lasting network for former pupils. + "This will help us all to care for our own children," said Mrs Kerr, "while the survey, with luck, will add to authority's understanding of our experiences and benefit future generations of children in care." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +85 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 29, 1993 + +NEVER MIND THE BIG BREAKFAST, GET THE TEA OR COFFEE ON; +Leszek Mazan wakes up to Poland's new, snappy, early-morning television + +BYLINE: LESZEK MAZAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EURO PAGE; Pg. 17 + +LENGTH: 664 words + + + CUE throbbing music; cue big shiny kettle; cut to newscaster - wake up, Poland the world starts here, at 6 am on Mondays and Fridays, with Tea Or Coffee, the big, the only, breakfast television show. And with a warm welcome and an invitation to start the day with a cup of their favourite beverage, viewers - sleepy-eyed or not - are turning on in numbers that have astonished the pundits. + In its new zippy format, which came to the boil last September with the launch of the kettle logo, ratings soar from 4 per cent at 6 am to 6-7 per cent in the first half-hour to an average 19 per cent for the entire three-hour show. At times it claims to attract an astonishing 40 per cent of potential viewers. Obviously, the curse of the sofa does not apply here. The presenters and guests spread out over a three-piece suite in deep pink dappled with beige and grey streaks. + No item lasts longer than 4 1/2 minutes because, according to the programme editor Halszka Wasilewska, "we do not want people to burn their breakfast or be late for work." This short and snappy approach means presenters' chat is kept to a minimum, music videos are trimmed, "and guests never manage to finish their coffee", although speed "shouldn't detract from the pleasant, warm atmosphere". + THE show is a mix of regular items, interviews and pop videos linked by a theme that changes daily and might be romantic love, dreams, smiling, fairy tales - all recent examples. Regulars are news bulletins - five per show - keep-fit classes with curvaceous presenters, weather forecasts every hour, a press review, and recipes such as the "breakfast treat" and the "dinner dish". The daily theme is presented by celebs - journalists, writers, poets - and other experts who all appear live from the studio. + It all goes out live, with no rehearsal, and make-up touched up in the coffee bar at the last second. The programme makers boast 15-second precision, arguing that without it the show would lose its rhythm. + Audiences vary. At 6 o'clock they are mainly factory workers and young people in vocational training. Between 7 and 8 am they are office workers, schoolkids and students. After that it's mainly housewives. But a large section are old-age pensioners, who switch on at the crack of 6 am and keep watching. They are obviously crucial to the show's success but keeping them happy is not easy; they complain about too much rock racket. Conversely, the young ones want more of it. + Morning television only started on state television three years ago under the not very original title of Good Morning. It went on air at 8 am and ran for only an hour. Last June the task of running breakfast TV was delegated to a section of educational TV dealing with practical advice to viewers. The reason was that the section devoted half its time to trying to offer prescriptions for a contented life. The programmes were seen as "school of life". + The team now making Tea Or Coffee have been headhunted from national radio and television and have backgrounds in presenting and news journalism. They work under the direction of two very experienced directors, Krzysztof Buchowicz and Andrzej Dzwierczynski. + From next week Tea Or Coffee should appear Monday to Friday, with a radical change of direction. Halszka Wasilewska wants to get out of the one-subject-a-day trap and has proposed instead that each day will be aimed at a different market. So, Monday will go behind the headlines and the doors of the rich and famous; Tuesday will be mainly for men but with a neat twist - d-i-y and fly-fishing will be taken up by women while men will display culinary talents; Wednesday is for youth - music and problems; Thursday is for culture-vultures; and Friday will give a run-in for the week-end with sport, week-end breaks and leisure. + The Tea Or Coffee team just hope that it will not become too sugary or cold, and that the quality of service will not slip. + Copyright: Prze Kroj + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +86 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 30, 1993 + +LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION . . . JUSTICE?; +Ever since James Earl Ray was jailed for the assassination of Martin Luther King 25 years ago, he has campaigned from his cell for the case to be heard by a jury. At last he is to get his wish. But is trial by television more like a circus than a court? + +BYLINE: SIMON WINCHESTER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 1880 words + + + THERE is a comfortable, unchanging quality about the American South, which gives a town like Memphis its enduring charm. Despite the stiff midwinter wind the Mississippi River grumbles by, imperturbable as ever. The famous Peabody ducks waddle into their hotel lobby at eleven every morning, as they have for decades past. Fat old black ladies dress up for church each evening, as their grandmothers always did. And old men panhandle for spare change outside the old Daisy Theater on Beale Street, as they probably have been doing since W C Handy's day. + In recent weeks, however, something strange and very new-fangled has been going on in Memphis. At first blush it looks like a trial, a courtroom battle full of old Dixie courtesies and dignity. It is taking place on the first floor of the great Shelby County Courthouse, a magnificent building of Grecian marble and rosewood panels. Each morning a black-gowned judge enters and a sergeant-at-arms (complete with silver-handled revolver) bellows to everyone to be upstanding. Lawyers, buried behind piles of papers and with briefcases yawning on every side, assemble notes, whisper last-minute instructions. Reporters settle down in the press benches. A jury - half black, half white, just as it ought to be in Tennessee - sits back and waits expectantly for the day's revelations. In short, Shelby County these mornings has looked ready to act out yet another day of dispensing justice to its people, as it has done for scores of years long gone. + But on closer examination all is smoke and mirrors. For a start, there are what look like aluminium railway tracks running around the courtroom, and burly men with British accents are heaving a very large camera back and forth along them. + There seem to be an awful lot of cameras - two more behind the press benches, one suspended from the ceiling and moving on electronic commands from some unseen party, another behind red velvet curtains near the judge and revealed only occasionally when the curtains part, like a flash of thigh. Some of the lawyers have electronic devices clipped to their belts, others sport earpieces and seem to respond mysteriously to unheard orders. There is in addition a man, by the sound of him also a Briton, with headphones and a clipboard and a manner rather more magisterial than the judge beside whom he stands. "Take your positions," he says. "Quiet please, everyone. Okay judge, all yours . . ." + Finally, where one might suppose there might be a dock with a prisoner or an accused, there is a large Sony Trinitron television set and the crystal-clear image of a middle-aged man who looks uncannily like Samuel Beckett, but who speaks with accents a long, long way from Dublin. From Tennessee, it turns out, for this image, beamed live by satellite from a well-guarded waiting room 100 miles away at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution near Nashville, is of James Earl Ray Jr, the one-time drifter and petty criminal who has become notorious as the confessed killer of Martin Luther King. + All this paraphernalia - the judge, the jury, the lawyers, gavels, briefs, wood-panelling, the men with the cameras and the man with the headphones - represents what Mr Ray has campaigned for a quarter of a century to have: his day in court. Twenty-five years ago (after being arrested at Heathrow and extradited to Tennessee) he pleaded guilty to the premeditated murder of Dr King. There was no trial and, with almost indecent haste, he was shuffled off to serve a 99-year sentence, with no question of parole. + Yet just three days after his sentence started, Ray changed his mind, claiming that he had been forced into confessing - and that, to protect conspirators unknown, he had been hustled off into the silence of the penitentiary. He has pleaded his innocence on countless occasions since: but without exception the judges who have heard the pleas have rejected them as frivolous or irrelevant or otherwise without merit. He has used up every avenue of appeal - until today, when a new opportunity has been afforded to him, or which appears to have been afforded him, by these strangers with their film cameras and aluminium railways and their unfamiliarly British accents. + All of a sudden, James Earl Ray believes he has a chance to plead his innocence before what looks and sounds and feels just like a court of law. He and his lawyer think they will thereby be able to prove that Dr King was the victim, just as John Kennedy was the victim, of some murderous conspiracy; and moreover one in which James Earl Ray Jr was manifestly not involved. + But Ray is getting what he wants neither through the judicial courtesies of the State of Tennessee, nor even via the second thoughts of the United States government. His day in court stems from the commercial anticipations of an American cable television company, Home Box Office; from 15 years of obsessive fascination with his case by a Mancunian television producer named Jack Saltman; through the relatively deep pockets of the now disenfranchised, but still cinematically active Thames Television; and through the intellectual commitment of Channel 4. + The trial is taking 10 days to argue. Most of the central characters - a judge who is actually a law professor in New York City, a Western Tennessee state prosecutor, the London-based American lawyer who has been acting for Ray since 1985, the jury, the bailiff, the stenographers and all the witnesses - are being paid (Ray is not). Jack Saltman - a distinguished and respected TV producer and editor who recently "tried" Kurt Waldheim on television (he was found innocent), has long felt that Ray was set up, that he was a patsy. He feels passionately about the intellectual rigour of a wholly new kind of entertainment format of trial-on-television, and he is aiming to give his production - Guilt or Innocence: The Trial of James Earl Ray - as much verisimilitude, judicial fairness and propriety as possible. "This is not a drama, like Perry Mason. This is a real trial - the jury is sworn, the judge is independent, the lawyers are doing their best to convict and acquit the accused respectively. There is no script. This is the trial Ray always wanted. And it is quite probably his last chance." + Sitting through the proceedings - and, one morning halfway through the trial, watching as the judge turned away an entire string of defence witnesses because, he declared, their evidence seemed no better than hearsay - one swiftly realises that this "last chance" for Ray may be a slender chance indeed. "It seems more difficult to organise a mock trial than a real one," said the film's director, exasperated by what he considered the judge's academic pedantry. But leaving aside the judge's often questionable decisions, the format itself has proved so limiting as to render the process of very dubious value - and, for the hapless Mr Ray, possibly even a rather cruel joke. + There is no compelling reason, for instance, why anyone in television's court should ever tell the truth - there is no judicial sanction against perjury. Neither side can compel any witness to attend - the "court" has no powers of subpoena. Physical evidence that might be available in a proper courtroom - the alleged murder weapon, for example - cannot be produced for this event, Tennessee has ruled, in case there ever is a real trial, and the evidence might thus appear to have been tampered with. No plea for a mistrial - after the judge's odd rulings, for instance - can ever be entertained. And the jurors - no matter the demographic exactitude with which they have been selected - have no moral obligation whatsoever to bring in a verdict other than that which they think might be commercially amusing. The verisimilitude Mr Saltman wants - and which James Earl Ray supposes he is getting - is simply not there, for the very basic reason that this is circus, not court. + NONETHELESS the dramatic aspects of the production do give it some very real legitimacy and, moreover, some very considerable power. In order to keep up the suspense Jack Saltman has filmed the jury foreman twice, giving the two possible verdicts, and the courtroom audience's respective reactions. Unless a jury member gets drunk and gives the game away between now and Sunday - the 25th anniversary of the shooting, and the day when HBO and Channel 4 will show the three-hour distillation of these 10 days - the actual verdict will only be announced at the very end of the programme, just as in a real trial. For now, only Jack and his jurors know which way things have gone. + This alone, the programme makers believe, will guarantee huge audiences. The American public in particular will obey a compulsion to watch - since the implications of a verdict in favour of Ray, declaring his innocence, could be truly profound. If his lawyers manage to convince the jury that there is reasonable degree of doubt that their client shot Martin Luther King - not an overwhelmingly difficult task, despite the exasperating pedantry of the judge - then there quite probably will be huge pressure for a full judicial re-examination of the case - a re-examination that could well alter the course of modern American history. And if this does happen, everyone will declare that television has once again demonstrated its remarkable powers of participation in the mechanics of proper democracy. + But there is risk. The whole event is costing $ 3 million to stage. Senior vice-presidents at HBO in New York are especially nervous that three hours of unremitting courtroom argument could prove tedious for viewers who have grasshopper-like attention spans: they have already insisted on their own anchorwoman for their edition of the show, and may still argue with Jack Saltman that the legal debate be leavened with contemporary film clips, with interviews with the principals, with more telegenic "contextual material". + Everyone, after all, remembers the commercial success of Oliver Stone's JFK. Stone and Saltman have similar views about the assassinations; they are hugely sceptical of the notion that solitary lunatics were involved in the killings; conspiracy seems the more likely answer (the military-industrial complex felled Kennedy, says Stone; Hoover's FBI may have been behind King's killing, thinks Saltman). But they have very different ways of trying to persuade their publics that this is so. + Oliver Stone, using a combination of Kevin Costner, dramatised reconstructions and journalistic licence, quite probably realised his goal. Few Americans can now be found who imagine Oswald to have been the lone assassin: almost everyone who saw JFK has at least a small kernel of doubt about the case, a kernel that was skilfully planted there by Stone. But will Jack Saltman's device - the staging of a new trial-that-is-not-a-trial, the handing down of a verdict-that-is-not-a-verdict - be similarly persuasive? In Memphis it is the format itself that is more properly on trial - while the fate of James Earl Ray, still locked away in Riverbend, may well remain unresolved for many more years to come. + The Trial of James Earl Ray, a Thames production for HBO and Channel 4, will be shown on Sunday at 8pm. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +87 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +March 30, 1993 + +SOCIAL SERVICES: CARE ROLE PREPARATION BLIGHTED BY AXE FALLING ON KEY SERVICES + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 1017 words + + + Local authorities are cutting a swath through education and social services as a result of a budget squeeze hitting Tory shires as much as Labour-controlled inner cities. When the Government announced grants and spending limits to local authorities for 1993/94, Environment Secretary Michael Howard told councils that they "should be able to maintain the full range of services". But a survey by the Guardian of all education and social services authorities in England and Wales has found that the axe is being taken to old people's homes, student grants and voluntary groups. Charges are being levied or raised steeply for home helps, meals-on-wheels and school dinners. Of the 116 authorities surveyed, 71 gave figures showing cuts in real terms in social services spending, and 74 did so for education. Sixteen said they would be spending less on social services in cash terms than last year, and 17 said they would be doing so for education. Other authorities are making cuts, but declined or were unable to give figures. The cuts seem certain to mean more local government workers joining the 35,000 - 2.1 per cent of the total - whose jobs were axed last year. + AS LOCAL authority social services departments prepare to take over full responsibility for community care on Thursday - widely billed as their finest hour - the Guardian survey reveals that many are making swingeing and unprecedented cuts in their budgets. + Old people's homes are being closed or hived off, day centres and day nurseries are being shut, and charges for home helps and meals-on-wheels are being introduced or increased sharply. + Even services for the most vulnerable are not escaping the axe. Several departments admit they are cutting direct provision for people with learning disabilities or mental handicap, and grants to voluntary groups are being pruned radically. + Toby Harris, social services chairman of the Labour-led Association of Metropolitan Authorities, said: "The number of authorities having to make cuts is probably greater than ever before." + Social services directors have been warning that the squeeze on their budgets will take the shine off the community care changes, under which local authorities are assuming lead responsibility for assessing and meeting the care needs of elderly and disabled people. + The extra funding for the changes, pounds 539 million in England, is being initially "ring-fenced" or protected for community care use alone. But local authority associations say it falls short of what is needed by pounds 135 million, and they fear having to search for more in their mainstream budgets. + Even if the extra community care money is taken into account, official figures show that 26 of 108 authorities in England will have less to spend in 1993/94 than they budgeted for in 1992/93, given their individual limits set by the Government in the form of Standard Spending Assessments. + The Guardian survey found that at least 71 social services departments were making quantified cuts, 16 of them planning to spend less in cash terms next year than they did in 1992-93. Some authorities, such as Hammersmith and Fulham, say they have been forced to cut the cushion of extra money they had set aside in anticipation of a shortfall in the community care kitty. Stockport says it has "deleted" it. + Many authorities are closing old people's homes, or hiving them off to voluntary groups, as the new community care rules stipulate that 85 per cent of the funding being transferred from social security must be spent in the independent sector. Leicestershire, Coventry and Lancashire are among authorities closing homes. Manchester, now with no homes of its own, Cheshire and Cleveland are among those hiving them off. + Authorities introducing or increasing charges include Avon, which is to charge pounds 4 an hour for domestic services, Calderdale, Gwynedd, Walsall and Humberside. Wolverhampton is introducing a charge for a disabled person's bus pass. + Grants to, and use of, voluntary sector agencies will be reduced by authorities including Lambeth, Salford, Wiltshire and the Wirral. Lambeth has also made cuts in provision for under-fives, although many authorities have sought to protect children's services. + Authorities admitting to making cuts in services for people with learning disabilities include Southwark, Nottinghamshire, South Glamorgan and Dyfed. + Mr Harris said local authority associations had been warning that budgets not protected by ring-fencing would suffer in the tough spending round this year. + Although some had suffered more in the past, there had probably never been as widespread a crisis. + "We are promised that future years are going to be even tougher - and that's going to make it even more difficult for local authorities to maintain the kind of services they provided even before the community care changes took effect." + - Social services directors yesterday called for urgent talks with the Government and the local authority associations on the so-called "unmet needs" issue which has emerged as the main controversy over the community care changes. + The Association of Directors of Social Services described as "unrealistic" the official guidelines on the issue, which relates to the recording of the care needs of an elderly or disabled person when there is insufficient funding to provide the services to meet those needs. + There is widespread expectation that there will be High Court challenges to authorities unable to pay for services covered by statute. In its guidance, the Department of Health has appeared to advise authorities to minimise the risk of such challenges by not recording needs if they are likely to be unmet. + Peter Smallridge, the association's president and Kent's social services director, said: "Directors of social services should seek to persuade authorities that it is unrealistic to expect care managers or social workers to assess need properly if they are constrained by what they are allowed to record." + Leader comment, letters, page 21 + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +88 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 1, 1993 + +MINISTER FUELS FEAR OF COUNCILS' 'POISONED CHALICE' - ELDERLY FACE MEANS TEST TO CURTAIL SPIRALLING BILL + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 258 words + + + LOCAL authority social services today take responsibility for assessing the needs of elderly and disabled people seeking state-assisted care and for arranging the most appropriate services. + The change will affect mainly elderly people who previously would have gone into residential or nursing homes, receiving income support of between pounds 175 and pounds 310 a week subject only to a means test. + It was partly to curb the spiralling bill for this benefit - up from pounds 39 million a year in 1982 to about pounds 1.5 billion now - and partly to enable more people to keep living at home, that the Government introduced the new system. + People already in residential and nursing homes will be unaffected. But those seeking assistance with care for the first time will have to undergo a means test and a needs assessment, and it may be decided that residential care is inappropriate. + The assessments will be undertaken by social workers, drawing on advice and assistance from family doctors and other health and welfare specialists, with final responsibility resting with social services. + One doubt about the system concerns the alternatives to residential care. Services for people living at home remain relatively underdeveloped in many parts of the country. + Funding raises further doubts: for 1993-94, local authorities in England, receiving a transfer of pounds 399 million from social security plus pounds 140 million to get things under way, claim this falls short of what is needed by pounds 135 million. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +89 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 1, 1993 + +MINISTER FUELS FEAR OF COUNCILS' 'POISONED CHALICE'; +Do town halls have a 'real opportunity' or are they being left to sink or swim? Virginia Bottomley talks to David Brindle in an exclusive interview + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 1111 words + + + THE success or failure of today's long-awaited community care shake-up will depend entirely on the ability of local authorities to make the policy work, Virginia Bottomley, the Health Secretary, has made clear in an interview with the Guardian. + In what will be seen as a conspicuously "hands-off" approach, she said she had given the authorities perfectly adequate tools and expected them to get on with the job. If things went wrong, she would be highly reluctant to intervene. + "Local government has long sought this responsibility. They campaigned strenuously to be allowed to take the lead," Mrs Bottomley said. "It is a real opportunity, not only to improve the service for the frail and vulnerable, but also for local government to demonstrate their ability and skills of leadership." + On fears that some care services will be at risk of collapse under the shake-up, the minister insisted: "It is not my remit to provide a safety net round any particular institution or service. It is for the service to demonstrate their value and effectiveness to the local authority and to the health service." + When the Griffiths report on community care recommended in 1988 that local authority social services departments should take the lead role in assessing the needs of elderly and disabled people, and arranging the most appropriate care for them, sceptics warned the plan represented a poisoned chalice. Mrs Bottomley's comments will do little to ease such anxieties. + Despite fears in many quarters - including even the Tory-led Commons health committee - that funding for the departments' new role may prove inadequate, the minister would brook no criticism of the Government's preparations. + The funding, she said, is 35 per cent higher than would have been paid through social security under the former system. The planning, which has gone on for three years because ministers postponed the original start date of April 1991, has been "almost unprecedented" in its scope. "I think we are as well prepared for this change as we could be," the minister said. + Yet there remains a distinct feeling among observers that local government is being left to sink or swim; that the buck has already been passed by Whitehall; and any evidence of failure will be laid at town hall doors. + A "community care support force", set up last autumn to help local authorities and other agencies prepare for the new system, is disbanded today and its members returned to the jobs from which they were seconded. Where authorities are now supposed to turn for help with problems is unclear - even though Mrs Bottomley did admit the system will need to bed down. + "It will take time to use the new funding mechanisms to achieve the profound change in culture and approach to the provision of services and the development of a real partnership with users and carers," she said, underlining the official line of "evolution, not revolution". + Monitoring from Whitehall would be extensive and all parties should be prepared to "learn from experience", the minister said. Would she therefore intervene to sort out local problems or fine-tune the system? Not exactly. "As we look at lessons from those authorities, we will of course review where further training, further guidance, further direction and adjustment of the funding mechanisms is required." + The minister's apparent desire to keep a distance from practical implementation of community care is evident in her attitude towards the three key issues that have emerged in recent weeks. + The principal of these is the question of "unmet need", or what local authorities should do if they assess a person as needing a care service but lack the funds to provide it. Official guidance on the matter has been broadly criticised as inadequate, and local authorities feel they are being left to face inevitable challenges in the High Court on behalf of people denied services which their records say they ought to have. + Mrs Bottomley said she believed that "we have discharged the responsibility from the centre" in respect of guidance and that social workers assessing people's needs should not draw up "a wish-list without regard to the available resources". + At the same time, local authorities should not be courting legal action. "I shall be disappointed if the energy, the goodwill and the enthusiasm of the new community care arrangements, which marks such a dramatic improvement on the previous regime, gets dissipated in adversarial, legalistic wrangling." + The second area of concern is the fear of "bed-blocking", whereby hospitals may be unable to discharge patients who are otherwise ready to go because of delays in undertaking care assessments and arranging any further services they require. + Mrs Bottomley said "the ideal should not be the enemy of the good", and that assessment should not become a paper-chase. Where there was a problem, it ought to be dealt with at local level under liaison arrangements between health and social services - arrangements which had to be agreed by last December 31. + "Where there are issues where a resolution has not been achieved locally, by exception it is possible for the regional health authority and the social services inspector in that area to come in to assist. But we do expect, and have made clear the expectation, that such arrangements should be in place." + The third area of concern is the viability of services on the fringes of the new system, which fear they will be a low priority for local authorities. These include hostels for homeless mentally-ill people and residential drug and alcohol addiction clinics, which lost the protection of funding that ministers had formerly promised. + Mrs Bottomley said many local authorities had already set aside money for addiction services, citing Hampshire and the London boroughs of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea - three of the small minority of authorities reporting no social services cuts in a Guardian survey earlier this week. + "In this area, as across the board in the development of care in the community, we will continue to review the effectiveness of the different mechanisms in place," the minister stated. + But, again playing down the prospect of intervention, she said: "Essentially, we believe discussion should be in the local community, between the local authority social services departments and the drug and alcohol organisations, rather than top-down if at all possible. + "If a particular institution faces difficulties, they would be well-advised to discuss it with the local authority and the local authority associations." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +90 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 2, 1993 + +COMMENTARY: TORIES REBUILD THE WELFARE STATE AS AN EXCLUSION ZONE + +BYLINE: MELANIE PHILLIPS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 24 + +LENGTH: 1095 words + + + ONE OF the great achievements of the post-war welfare state in Britain was to remove fear from people's lives. If people were old or ill they knew they would be cared for. This element of security for the vulnerable was the hallmark of a civilised society, despite the imperfections of the system. + And there certainly were imperfections: over-regulated old people's homes, geriatric wards which disregarded the dignity of their patients, the brutalities meted out upon mentally ill and handicapped people behind the high walls of closed institutions. But insecurity, the fear of being simply abandoned in one's time of greatest need, was by and large eradicated as a feature of everyday life. + It is the achievement of this Conservative administration's 14 years of power that this fear and insecurity have now been restored to everyday experience. If one is old or handicapped or ill, there is growing reason to fear that one will not be properly treated or looked after, that one will indeed be abandoned. This is because the Government chooses to deny the welfare system the money it requires to provide for increasing levels of need, preferring instead to stuff the pockets of the better-off under the pretence of encouraging enterprise (hardly a tremendous success story there, either) but actually simply buying votes by catering for unashamed self-interest. + To add insult to injury, it is given to trumpeting this achievement as progress. If you stifle the truth by installing your placemen to run the show, threatening dismissal to everyone else and getting a cowed and supine Whitehall to massage your statistics for long enough, you can get away with saying "black is white", if only because there comes a point where everyone is too exhausted and the mountain of lies simply too high to climb. + The Health Secretary, Virginia Bottomley, is fond of boasting of new records of achievement in the health service: more money, more patients, more treatments, more of just about everything (but never, of course, more bureaucrats, of whom there are many, many more but whose burgeoning numbers are, mysteriously, kept quiet). Yesterday the Home Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, Mrs Bottomley's predecessor and the prime architect of the triumphant new NHS, was sufficiently moved by the latest announcements (more hospital trusts, more GP fundholders) to marvel at his government's creation. Why wallow in doom and gloom over coal, Maastricht and so on, he asked rhetorically, when there was such enormous progress being made in social policy? "Nobody is noticing how we are dismantling the old welfare state of Clement Attlee and completely rebuilding!" he enthused. + Well, we're noticing the first bit all right; it's the rebuilding that's a wee bit harder to spot. Particularly, but not exclusively, in the inner cities, care services are collapsing under the strain of under-funding and the imposition of a market philosophy that is inimical to care. Everywhere one turns, services are disappearing. The hospital service is in an appalling state, with patients who need urgent treatment being turned away and even dying because there is no money to treat them. With the new financial year, this situation may now ease somewhat but there is the backlog still to be dealt with; and how long will it be this year before doctors are again sitting idly in their hospitals while their prospective patients deteriorate and suffer? + The level of despair and anger in the hospital service cannot be overestimated. Yet the protests are muted because the health service has been transformed into a repressive system of management in which health care staff are being threatened, bullied and intimidated into keeping quiet about what is going on. It is becoming a service run by managers for managers, while nurses are made redundant and wards are shut down. Some rebuilding. + Now we have the unfolding drama of the community care revolution. One might reasonably ask: what community? and what care? Too many vulnerable people have found to their cost that the so-called community doesn't actually care for them at all and wants them placed as far away as possible from their own back yards. + On top of this has come the problem of money. Under the new system which started yesterday, local authorities have taken responsibility for assessing people's needs and buying for them the care they require, whether it is domestic support or a place in a nursing home. But, surprise surprise, the Government has not provided enough money to met the level of need. The shortfall that was so unsatisfactory under the old system between the cost of the care and the funds to buy it is set to deepen, despite the fact that more money than last year is being provided. Some fancy financial footwork has meant the local authorities have been short-changed. + So much is the sad old story. But the new element is the attempt by Mrs Bottomley and her apparatchiks to slough off all responsibility for this state of affairs to local government, while simultaneously advising councils how to get out of the legal obligation the law now confers upon them to provide for the needs they must assess. The Social Services Inspectorate, which one had naively supposed was set up to maintain standards, has shown it is staffed by cynical time-servers whose aim is not to protect the vulnerable but to ditch them in the interests of saving money and political face. Thus it advised councils not to tell people what care they needed if the money wasn't available. A study carried out by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in two council areas found that staff were doing precisely that anyway. They were solving the problem of reconciling growing need with no money by taking advantage of people's ignorance to diddle them out of the help to which they were entitled. + It's hardly surprising. Local government, as the Guardian revealed earlier this week, is having to slash its services. Despite the ring-fenced funds available under the new system, community care in these circumstances is a sick joke. Yet Mrs Bottomley has the gall to wash her hands of this sorry state of affairs on the grounds that it is now local government's problem. + Passing the buck has become this Government's stock in trade. No wonder they're cheery. For sick, old and handicapped people, with hospitals progressively shutting them out and community care no more than a pipe-dream, the destruction of the welfare state of which Mr Clarke so proudly boasts is a tragedy in the making. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +91 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 2, 1993 + +NOTES & QUERIES: WHAT'S YOUR POISON? + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 12 + +LENGTH: 3261 words + + + QUESTION: In the late 1960s, a professor from, I believe, the University of Arizona in Tucson ate a tablespoon of DDT to demonstrate that the pesticide wasn't harmful to humans. How is his health? + - ON NOVEMBER 16, 1968, eight scientists at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who were part of a project testing people exposed to DDT, decided to ingest it themselves in measured doses. They wanted to try to make some sense of years of uninterpretable research into how DDT is metabolised in the human body. There had been some earlier research on humans - prisoners had been forced to eat DDT - but the tests had been inconclusive, and the project members wanted to test it for themselves. + Dr Donald Morgan, a Tucson medical practitioner attached to the project, began by eating 20 milligrams of DDT in an emulsion base daily. The other seven took half that amount. One, George Ware, who is now Professor of Entomology at the University of Arizona, recalls spreading the mixture on his cornflakes every morning. + For six months they continued to eat the DDT emulsion every day, and their blood, urine and body fat were all tested for abnormalities. According to Dr Morgan, who had been taking the double dose, the only noticeable effect on him was in a liver function test; his alkaline phosphatase levels rose from lower normal to upper normal. When the test finished on May 15, 1969, none of them had recorded any ill-effects, although all of them had very sore buttocks, for it was from there that fat biopsies were taken for testing every month. + Almost 24 years later, one of the eight has died of old age (he was 79) and the other seven are living without any apparent ill effect. + And what did Dr Morgan's wife say when he came home and told her that he'd just ingested 20 milligrams of DDT? "She was completely indifferent. Look, it was not that heroic, for heaven's sake. People who regularly handled DDT had much higher levels in their blood and their fat than we ever did. None of them had any symptoms," he says. + The leader of the project, Dr Clifford Roan, who was then Professor of Entomology at the University of Arizona, is now 72. He is active in the community and describes himself as a "tax counsellor for the elderly". He says: "I never did suffer any ill effects, although I can say it was a big pain in the ass because of having a hunk cut off of your butt every now and then." + Weren't you just a little bit scared? + "Hell's bells, no! I was smoking cigarettes in those days all the time. Now if I wanted to be scared, that's what I should have been scared of. There's a lot worse hazards in this world than pesticides, when they are used properly." + We are working on a proposal for a television documentary about this. - Paolo A Black, producer, Today Television, London W12. + - DDT IS one of the least-poisonous pesticides, being no more toxic than aspirin. It has only killed people when mistaken for flour. A teaspoonful is quite a lot, but probably wouldn't do too much damage. + When it was introduced, DDT was highly effective and helped to eradicate malaria from Europe and other parts of the world, including large areas of Africa and India. Many countries stopped using DDT too soon and resistance has set in. Nevertheless, this much-misunderstood chemical has probably saved more lives than all antibiotics put together. + DDT is still widely used. More modern pesticides are highly toxic, and very dangerous in the hands of those who can't read the instructions or use the necessary protective clothing. DDT is volatile and evaporates rapidly in a warm climate, causing few environmental problems. + For an objective summary of the effects of DDT, see "Is Science Necessary?" by Max Perutz. - Daniel Barker, London NW5. + QUESTION: How can I become a ventriloquist? + - STUDY Hillary Clinton. - David Tebb, Guiseley, Leeds. + - GRACTICE. - Paul Tickle, Leicester. + QUESTION: What are the destinations in the song "Route 66" by Them, and what exactly does Van Morrison sing after "Flagstaff, Arizona, don't forget Winona". + - THE WORDS of the song, written by Bob Troup and published in 1946, tell it all: + . . . It winds from Chicago to LA, + More than two thousand miles all + the way. + Get your kicks on Route 66! + Now you go thro' Saint Looey [sic] + and Joplin, Missouri + And Oklahoma City is mighty pretty + You'll see Amarillo; Gallup, New + Mexico; + Flagstaff, Arizona; + Don't forget Winona, + Kingman, Barstow, San + Bernardino . . . + "Have your fun on the A41" somehow does not have the same ring to it: + It winds from London to Birkenhead, + Just over two hundred miles like + I said. + Have some fun on the A41 + Now you bypass Chester, + Warwick and Bicester, + Birmingham City is jolly pretty + You'll see Hemel Hempsted + Waddesdon, Berkhamsted too. + Tring, Banbury, + don't forget Aylesbury, + Bicester, Watford and + Wolverhampton . . . + Ah well, back to the day job. - Clive Ablett, Berkhamsted, Herts. + QUESTION: Humpty Dumpty is usually portrayed as an egg, but I can find no evidence in the nursery rhyme to support this. Are there other now-obscure verses, or are we just following the assumptions of illustrators like Tenniel? + - WHEN Alice first sees Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll's Alice Through The Looking Glass, she says: "How exactly like an egg he is." Humpty Dumpty replies: "It's very provoking to be called an egg!" (Later he says "My name means the shape I am, and a good handsome shape it is too"). Tenniel's illustration simply uses Lewis Carroll's text. + There is a belief that the verse was originally a riddle, and the answer is "an egg". This pre-dates the publication of Alice Through The Looking Glass, and Lewis Carroll made use of a common tradition. However, eggs are not normally placed on walls (although this may have been to make the riddle more confusing), and the verse has never appeared in a book of riddles. + The Oxford English Dictionary records that the expression "Humpty Dumpty" was the name of an ale and brandy punch in the late 17th century. The use of the expression "Humpty Dumpty" to describe a short or unattractive person first occurs in Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1785. The rhyme itself is not recorded before the early 19th century, when several variants were published in Britain and the United States, although these may have been of earlier origin. + All evidence suggests that "Humpty Dumpty" has always been a self-contained four-line verse. Some differences in the final two lines are recorded (for example "Threescore men and threescore more, / Cannot place Humpty Dumpty as he was before"), but all versions follow the same basic pattern. + Continental versions are also recorded in the early 19th century. For example, "Runtzelken-Puntzelken" and "Humpelken-Pumpelken" in Germany, "Boule Boule" in France and "Thille Lille" in Sweden. + Efforts to explain Humpty Dumpty as a siege tower (Notes & Queries, March 26) are not wholly satisfactory, as the verse makes it clear that Humpty Dumpty could not be repaired by human agency. An army could repair a damaged siege tower or build a new one, but human science cannot fully repair a broken egg. Of course, this ignores the possibility that the verse may have been devised for no other purpose than to amuse. - Robert Halliday, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. + - THE THEORY that the verses refer to a siege engine used at Gloucester in 1643 is merely a jeu d'esprit contrived in 1956 by Dennis Daube, and popularised subsequently by Richard Rodney Bennett in the opera, All the King's Men. - Roy Palmer, Dymock, Gloucestershire. + QUESTION: What would be the prospects for a legal action which argued that, in raising taxes, the Government is in breach of a verbal contract (well-recorded), made with the electorate at the time of the last election, to reduce taxation? + - REGARDING Sir William Goodhart QC's response (Notes & Queries, March 26), the ballot is only secret up to a point. The ballot papers and their counterfoils are numbered and stored by the district council for a year. + Not long ago it was revealed that Special Branch trawls the ballot papers to identify supporters of "extremist" organisations, so it should be possible to prove that the voter carried out his or her part of the contract by voting Conservative. It would remain to be proven that the Conservatives had failed to deliver on their part. But haste will have to be made. The year will be up on April 8. - Frank Branston, Bedford. + QUESTION: Chambers English Dictionary (1988) defines 'eclair' as "a cake, long in shape but short in duration". Are there unexpected signs of humour in other such serious publications? + - IN THE 1953 edition of the otherwise-straightforward Quickway Crossword Dictionary, Eskimos are defined as "God's frozen people". This was changed in 1977 to a normal definition. - Roger F Squires, Iron-Bridge, Shropshire. + QUESTION: Imagine two refrigerators, one full and one empty. Which will consume more energy? + - MR FROST (Notes & Queries, March 26) asserts that keeping your fridge full will minimise energy consumption; this is widely believed, but why should it be so? The fridge uses energy to keep its interior cold, and this depends on how much heat leaks in from outside, which in turn depends on the quality of the insulation, the room temperature, and how cold the inside wall of the fridge is. Thus, if all the food is kept at the same temperature it makes no difference if the fridge is full or empty. There would be small differences owing to changes in air circulation inside the fridge, but you can only save energy at the expense of some part of the interior becoming warmer. Stuffing unused shelves with paper would save some mixing of warm room air into the fridge when the door is opened, but other parts of the fridge (especially below those shelves) might then not be cold enough. Of course, if the fridge cools down more food, it will use more energy, not less. - Professor Harvey Rutt, Department of Electronics and Computer Science, Southampton. + - PERHAPS Mr Frost is not the first freezer salesman to try to convince us that full fridges are more efficient than empty ones. He's right, of course. Where's the efficiency in running an empty fridge? But the question was which consumes more electricity, not which is more efficient. Each time you put something into your fridge or freezer you need energy to pump out its heat. When you take that something out again, you need more energy to bring it back to "normal" temperature. + It follows then that the more you put in to the contraption, the more energy (electricity) you'll use. + Despite Mr Frost's assertions, no way can you possibly use less electricity by increasing the contents (assuming they are at "normal" temperature in the first place). + As for cold-storage buildings, their cold loss (or heat gain, if you prefer), is proportional to their external/internal surface areas. Just as a small fridge needs less energy to keep it cool than a big one, so too does a small cold-storage building. + Trouble is, you can't get as much in it - hence improved packing facilities in the form of mobile racks. - William Duxbury, Grandvaux, Switzerland. + - THE ANSWER provided by Mike Amos (March 26) - "an imaginary fridge consumes no energy" - is inexact. An imaginary refrigerator consumes mental energy. - Dr Graham Mole, Manchester. + QUESTION: I am at a loss as to the origin - etymologically and socio-linguistically speaking - of the word "spiv". I wonder if your readers can go beyond "palindrome of VIPs". + - BILL NAUGHTON may have given the word "spiv" national currency, as your correspondent says (Notes & Queries, March 26), but he was wide of the mark in suggesting it had anything to do with people of disreputable appearance. Brewer's guess that it abbreviates "spiffing" is also unlikely, as that was a public school word never used by cockneys. + My recollection is that it came into being among south Londoners during the war and originally meant someone who dressed in a certain flash style in suits tailor-made by a Mr Spivack. Spivacks, or spivs, came to mean civilians who dressed in that style (at the time of the zoot suit in America) and could afford to throw their money around. Bearing in mind wartime conditions, most were petty black market operators, some small-time criminals, sometimes itinerant, but not vagrants. Some spivs carried shivs (knives) so there was also an element of rhyming slang. - A E Meltzer, London SE13. + QUESTION: Would it be possible to construct an airship which was propelled and steered by sails? + - IT COULD be done. Gerald Haig is right when he says that a sailing boat works because it uses the opposing forces imposed upon it by the wind and water (Notes & Queries, March 19). The problem is to generate these opposing forces in mid-air. + There are two intriguing possibilities. The first is to adapt the principle by which unpowered, sail-less barges were once navigated on the river Hull in east Yorkshire. By dragging an anchor from the bow to reduce their speed to less than that of the tidal flow, such barges were able to steer effectively while travelling astern in the general direction of the current, the speed difference causing a steady flow of water over their rudders. An airship dragging an anchor over land, or a sea-anchor over water, could be steered in a similar fashion. + An even better possibility might be to exploit the fact that wind speeds and directions are far from constant at different altitudes above a given point on the Earth's surface. Thus, an airship flying at, say, 10,000 feet might be driven by a 15-knot wind, while at 15,000 feet the wind might be 30 knots. Obviously a "mast" long enough to exploit this difference would be impractical, but "sails" resembling a large kite or a modern steerable parachute could be launched up into the zone of faster winds, and the tension between airship and kite used to navigate in the same manner as a sailing boat. + There are obviously many technical difficulties with this approach, but theoretically "tacking", ie zigzagging into the wind, should be possible. If Richard Branson is reading this and would like to contact me, I could develop for him the means of crossing the Atlantic by balloon from east to West. Cash up front, of course. - John Ramsey, London E3. + QUESTION: Why is there a United States naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba? + - YOUR CORRESPONDENT (Notes & Queries, March 19) is correct that the US base at Guantanamo in Cuba traces its origins to the Spanish American War of 1898. This occurred when the US - for reasons which are hotly debated - chose to intervene in the Cuban war of national liberation against Spain. As a condition for subsequent withdrawal, it required "independent" Cuba to accept the Platt Amendment, which justified subsequent US interventions in order to protect "life, property and individual liberty" (sic). + However, she is wrong to say that the Amendment remained in force until the revolution of 1959, for it was abrogated in 1934 by F D Roosevelt, whose "Good Neighbor Policy" involved a renunciation of direct intervention in Latin American countries - not least because, in Cuba and elsewhere, such interventions had proved costly and counter-productive (see Bryce Wood, The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy). Conversely, the post-1934 Cuban regime was generally congenial to US strategic and economic interests. Castro's revolution changed all that, and his regime has had to suffer some less-than-good neighbourly policies. However, it did not have to abrogate the Platt Amendment, which was long dead, nor did it challenge the US presence at Guantanamo. - Alan Knight, Professor of Latin American History, Oxford University. + QUESTION: Does anyone use any of the hereditary titles created by Oliver Cromwell? + - YES. LOOK up Carbery, Baron 1715 in Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage in your local library and, if you read long enough, you will find my family and myself. - John E D'Arcy-Evans, Staines, Middlesex. + QUESTION: I am off to the pub. It starts to rain. Will I be less wet when I arrive if I run there? + - IT DEPENDS. A professor from Harvard University, writing in the Mathematical Gazette (October 1976) concluded that, to minimise the rain falling on the person over a set distance, the solution is "to keep pace with the wind if it is from behind; otherwise run for it!". + Or, on a damp journey to the pub, the questioner might like to remember: + When caught in the rain without mac, + Move as fast as the wind at your back. + But if the wind's in your face + The optimal pace + Is as fast as your legs can make track. + - D R Brown, Grantham, Lincs + QUESTION: Postmodernists say there is no objective truth. Why should anyone believe them? + - AS THE question suggests, postmodernism is self-sabotaging, like all sufficiently radical forms of scepticism and reductionism. Unlike some earlier forms, however, it is based on an elementary confusion between truth and certainty: although no person or group can justifiably claim complete objectivity, it does not follow that there is no truth, just that we should not place anything beyond the possibility of revision. Since postmodernism is a fashion statement rather than a philosophical position (I think many postmodernists would accept this), it need not be taken seriously intellectually. + It is, however, morally pernicious: if there is no objective truth, then it is not objectively true that The Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion is a forgery, or that the Gulf war took place - Baudrillard has in fact denied that it did. + Postmodernism also demonstrates, under the guise of opposing all-encompassing views of the world, the most extreme self-importance and intellectual imperialism: claiming as it does that the world consists only of texts, it implies that literary criticism encompasses all other disciplines. - Nick Gotts, Leeds. + QUESTION: Has anyone carried out any serious research into the beneficial or detrimental effects of aligning one's bed parallel to the earth's magnetic field? + - SLEEP laboratory experiments have confirmed that arterial blood pressure is at the minimum when the sleeper's head faces north. If the bed is rotated and the subject's head is in the west, blood pressure rises, sleep is disturbed and some have nightmares. North-south breathing is more relaxed and there is a feeling of general well-being. Second best position is head in the east. North-south direction facilitates the body's optimal resistance to the magnetic field, unless there is interference from power lines. + Incidentally, Charles Dickens always made sure his bed was north-south when staying in hotels. Non-domestic animals are also said to sleep instinctively with head in the north. If the questioner knows French he may wish to read Votre Lit Est-il a La Bonne Place? by Alexandre Remi. - Dr D H Mniszek, Brighton, W Sussex. + QUESTION: Can anyone suggest a use for a plastic squashed tomato? + - PLACE on the verge of a country lane as a warning to foolhardy hedgehogs. - David Jepson, Manchester. + - GIVE it tennis lessons then enter it for Wimbledon as the latest British hopeful: unseeded and out of shape. - Florence Huntley, Barnet, Herts. + Compiled by Joseph Harker + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +92 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 3, 1993 + +REFLECTIONS: STILL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT; +Geoffrey Dearmer is a poet. He is 100 years old. His Great War, writes Sebastian Faulks, was not Wilfred Owen's war + +BYLINE: SEBASTIAN FAULKS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN WEEKEND PAGE; Pg. 22 + +LENGTH: 1169 words + + + WILFRED OWEN'S one hundredth birthday passed by a week or so ago with modest celebrations in his native Shropshire. Some people were moved to look again at his poems and to wonder what he might have gone on to write if a German machine gun had not ended his life a week before the armistice. + Robert Graves believed Owen might have become a Labour MP, and at the time of Attlee's government in 1945 he would have been a very serviceable 52 years old. He could have lived through the Sixties and taken a peerage under Harold Wilson; his natural lifespan would have expired shortly before the arrival of Mrs Thatcher. Yet one thinks of Owen somehow as a historical figure, as remote in his way as Tennyson. Reading the awful names and dates that feature in his story serves to reinforce the impression of a time and a man that are separate from us and gone from common memory: the Somme sector, the Arctic winter of 1916-1917, the Hindenburg Line - these signs and markers seem to place him within cloth covers on a history shelf that, as the century closes, can barely even claim to be "modern" history any more. + This is a delusion. The effects of that war are still being worked out in the politics of the new Europe. The critic Paul Fussell has argued that the entire modern way of thinking - ironic, confrontational - was shaped by the war. On a less abstract level one can understand this better by going to talk to someone of Wilfred Owen's age, preferably a poet. + And so by train on a spring morning to Birchington on Sea, next on the line after Whitstable and Herne Bay on the north Kent coast. In a sunny flat not far from the beach lives Geoffrey Dearmer, 100 years old; born three days after Wilfred Owen, a veteran of Gallipoli and the Somme, and a much anthologised poet. He is not history. Only his words are between cloth covers. He himself is a tall, engaging, friendly man who has just returned from London where the publisher John Murray has brought out a selection of his poetry called A Pilgrim's Song. Murray's first published his poems in 1923. + "Why are there so few centenarians?" he asks, a little peevishly. Hard to say, though nine million men of his generation were not given a chance . . . Dearmer himself is not an advertisement for abstinence or herbal remedies: bottles of gin and vermouth stand commandingly in the middle of the dining table. + As he talks about the work of Thomas Hardy or Ted Hughes, it is occasionally necessary to remind oneself that these hands (he is keen on hands; he has written a poem about them) filled the sandbags, laid the duckboards, held the rifle, helped build the dugouts all along the line east of Albert that was to become the site of the greatest disaster in British military history - arguably in British history, tout court. + Nor will he conform to any expectations of "horror"; he won't tell any tales of waste or slaughter. "I never went over the top myself. It was fatal. It was fatal even to put your head over the parapet in daylight. It was all right at night. You could even go into no man's land." + And what about the living conditions, the rats, the lice, the Maconochie's stew, the cold, the mud? "I have no recollection of any particular discomfort. The dugouts were quite all right, really. I was a very young man, I didn't mind." The food? "No, no, the feeding was admirably managed." + Collectors of injustices or horror stories will be disappointed. A friend looks in to tidy up and empty the bins. "Geoffrey never complains about anything," she says. "You won't catch him moaning - will you, Geoffrey?" She gives him a peck on the cheek and disappears. She is quite right. Under pressure he concedes that "Most people did go through things," but for himself it was fine, it was quiet, it was tolerable. It is impossible to establish how much this is true (some people did have a quiet or "cushy" time), how much it is a willed response, or how much he has forgotten. + A LITTLE of each, perhaps. His brother Christopher was killed at Gallipoli and there is a moving poem in his memory. Dearmer was close enough to the action to write a harrowing account of it in a poem called Gommecourt, which recalls the six-day artillery bombardment before the attack on the Somme on July 1, 1916. Gommecourt was a village at the north of the attack, the focus of a bloody diversionary manoeuvre in which battalions who sent 800 men over the top were getting only 150 replies to the roll-call that night. + Yet in this and other poems there is always hope and salvation. Dearmer drew an extraordinary comfort from the persistence of the natural world (birds, plants, trees and so on) in the man-made hell and from his belief in a divine will. "Maybe I have overdone the natural world," he says. "Perhaps there is too much. But there is a great deal to be said for the language of flowers." + His father, Percy Dearmer, was canon of Westminster and an authority on hymns. His daughter, Juliet, is married to a bishop, so he is, as he describes it, "very bound up with the clergy". + So, in a way, was Wilfred Owen, with his strong beliefs inherited from his fiercely Calvinist mother, severely tested both by what he saw and by what he viewed as the un-Christian behaviour of the Church in condoning the slaughter. Yet you could hardly have two more different responses than Owen's and Geoffrey Dearmer's: Owen's appalled pity and Dearmer's providential optimism. + While Owen is incomparably the better poet, Geoffrey Dearmer's response is equally valid, equally "historical"; and, as Owen's biographer Tom Stallworthy wrote in a Foreword to A Pilgrim's Song, "He speaks for many less articulate victims of the Western Front." If it is important to a proper view of history to recognise that the events are terribly recent, that we can touch hands, literally, with the men who took part in them, it is equally salutary to be reminded that a general view, even a majority view, based on poetry and memoir, published or unpublished, is not the total picture. The "dissenting" record of men such as Geoffrey Dearmer, and many others, has a place. + After the war Dearmer read plays for the Lord Chamberlain, excising the occasional swear word, but banning only one show - about Christ's reincarnation as a Communist, which broke the law about representing religious figures. He also worked for Children's Hour until his retirement, filling the airwaves with stories and verses about animals. + Geoffrey Dearmer suffers from what he calls "the Brothers Itis - bronchitis and arthritis"; and at the age of 100 no one's memory is perfect. Perhaps it is too late to catch the past in him; perhaps in his faith and gentleness there was always a predisposition to forget. As he wrote in a poem called Envoi - (The Somme 1916): + But all grows dim - the rolling wagon-streams + To Amiens between the aspen trees, + The stables, billets, men and horses seem + But murmurs of forgotten fantasies. G + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +93 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 3, 1993 + +MINISTER AGREES TO DROP SIX-DAY RULE ON RESIDENTIAL CARE CASH + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 363 words + + + A REVOLT by private residential and nursing homes yesterday won a rapid about-turn by ministers on a key aspect of the new community care system. + Just 24 hours after the system started, the Government announced it was dropping a rule that would have cut off the social security payment to home residents if they were absent for six days or more. + Alistair Burt, junior Social Security Minister, said regulations would be laid in Parliament as soon as possible to extend the period before cut-off to an absence of six weeks in the case of a resident entering hospital, or three weeks in other circumstances. + Mr Burt said the move was a response to concerns raised in "a number of representations". + The change applies to the new residential allowance, worth pounds 45 a week or pounds 50 in London, which is the residual amount of social security being paid to private care home residents after the bulk of the former board and lodging payment has been transferred to local authorities under the new system. The six-day cut-off rule had been laid in December, but care home owners and local authorities awoke to the implications only in the past few weeks. Home owners protested that almost every resident would be absent for more than six days at one stage during a year. + They said they would have to renegotiate contracts with local authorities so the latter would undertake to make good any income shortfall following cut-off. + The change to three or six weeks, which will cost the Government an estimated pounds 1 million a year, compares with the former position whereby board-and-lodging payments were cut off after six weeks' absence. + The six-day rule threatened to alienate care home owners in the critical early weeks of the new system for arranging and funding the care of elderly and disabled people. The owners were already fearful that many homes might close as the system shifts the emphasis from residential care to looking after people in their own homes. + Sheila Scott, chief executive of the National Care Homes Association, said: "We are absolutely delighted that the Government has responded so quickly to our lobbying." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +94 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 3, 1993 + +CARERS' PLIGHT: LEAVE IT TO INDIVIDUALS TO CHOOSE WHEN THEY WANT TO RETIRE SAYS AGE CONCERN + +BYLINE: SALLY GREENGROSS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 32 + +LENGTH: 329 words + + + EQUALISING the pension age at 65 could only be supported if a pension at least equal to the present basic pension was made available to those who choose to retire at 60. + This is the view of the charity Age Concern which believes the answer lies in allowing people to chose the age at which they take a pension. + Should the Government equalise at 65 without taking this step, then any cost savings from the equalisation should be spent on people disadvantaged by the present system, such as women and older pensioners. + Equalising the State pension age at 65 would have a major impact on the employment patterns and lifestyles of women. In the five years before retirement at 60, 54 per cent of women are working but after the age of 60 only 7.5 per cent are. But there are serious qestions which need to be addressed about the prospective employment opportunities of these women given the current high levels of age discrimination in employment. + Women carers are another group which would be disadvantaged by fixing the pension age at 65. Women are more likely than men to be carers of elderly dependent relatives, and therefore to withdraw from the workforce or to reduce their working hours. Nearly one in three women aged between 45 and 64 are carers and 63 per cent of these work for more than 20 hours per week. + Women are less likely than men to have access to occupational or personal pensions and when they do so their pensions are likely to be smaller than men's because of broken work records, part-time work and lower earning power. They are, therefore, less likely to be able to afford to retire before they reach the State pension age. + If the pension age is raised for women then consideration must be given to levels of sickness and invalidity benefit necessary, so that women with long-standing illnesses and those doing physically-demanding jobs do not lose out. + Sally Greengross is a director of the charity Age Concern. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +95 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 3, 1993 + +PENSIONS BATTLE REACHES CRUCIAL STAGE + +BYLINE: TERESA HUNTER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 32 + +LENGTH: 550 words + + + THE battle over the equalisation of the State pension ages has moved into its final and critical stage. + The Government is on the brink of a decision which could see men retire at 60 with a full, basic State pension. Alternatively, it may opt to withdraw five years' pensions from women - taking away from them up to pounds 14,586 at today's prices. + Pensions minister Ann Widdecombe this week gave a strong indication that the Government would prefer, on cost grounds, to equalise pension ages upwards to 65 rather downwards to 60 - but she stressed that the final decision had not yet been taken. + She also called for more debate on this key pensions issue - even though the Government has already received its largest ever postbag on the subject. A decision was expected imminently but Ms Widdecombe hinted that it may now be delayed until the outcome of the Coloroll case. + Four main options remain. The Government must decide whether to require men and women to continue working until 65 before they could qualify for a full State pension - which it claims would save more than pounds 4 billion annually. This would be phased in over a number of years and only fully affect women currently aged about 40 and under. + It would increase the number of women in the workforce by 500,000 by the year 2015. Such an announcement at a time of high unemployment could prove unpopular. But this option does have cost in its favour and would also alleviate concerns about the rapidly-burgeoning elderly population. However, the Government is aware that this option is likely to prove "massively unpopular" and could alienate many women voters. Ms Widdecombe acknowledged: "The people who will be most adversely affected will be women who rely heavily on the State pension because they have no other pension provision, and who are in mundane low-paid jobs." + The most popular option with a majority of men, who already retire before 65, and with women's groups is to equalise at 60. As part of this, the DSS is considering splitting the age at which the basic and the earnings related pensions (Serps) could be taken - as a way of keeping the cost down. This could lead to a basic pension given at 60 with Serps at 65. + Another option is to ask women to work three years longer and equalise at 63, which would be largely cost neutral. Though not the clear favourite of any lobby group, it is the least disliked by most with strong views. Finally, a flexible decade of retirement would allow workers to choose their own retirement age between 60 and 70 and receive a larger or smaller pension accordingly. This is the employers' favourite, which actually reflects what is already taking place in the workforce. However, the Government believes everyone would take their pension at 60. + There is little time left in which to influence the Government's decision. But Money Guardian has tabled its own debate into this crucial issue. All too often women discover the inadequacies of their pension provision too late . There is a danger that this will happen again if they do not enter the debate over equalising pension ages now. + Men as well as women with strong views on the matter should write to the Prime Minister, Social Security Secretary Peter Lilley, and to their MPs. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +96 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 3, 1993 + +NEW CHARGING METHOD COULD STRAIN AFFINITY + +BYLINE: DIANE BOLIVER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 35 + +LENGTH: 373 words + + + CO-OPERATIVE Bank says it is receiving 5,000 calls a day for its "free-for-life" Robert Owen credit card which allows new cardholders to transfer existing debts on very competitive terms. But when cardholders realise the punitive terms they may regret the move. + Not only do cardholders have to spend more than pounds 300 to attract interest of 1.7 per cent a month (Apr 22.4) - which is typical of other cards on the market - they also have to repay their bills in full within 15 days of the statement date to avoid interest charges, compared with the more typical 25 days elsewhere. + David Cooke of Penrith, Cumbria was outraged to discover this on his March Royal Society for the Protection of Birds affinity card statement. The statement gave two different due dates. Only if he made a part payment would he have 25 days to pay. + Mr Cooke said: "How many customers, especially older people, will be confused and tricked into paying interest because of this?" + Co-op confirmed that when it launched the Robert Owen card in November, it decided to apply the same terms to its existing affinity cards (Labour, Liberal Democrat, Help the Aged and RSPB.) + It said that if, as Mr Cooke claims, he had received no warning of the new terms, he must take it up with RSPB, which was responsible for notifying card holders. + According to Save & Prosper the new charging methods are likely to become commonplace. S&P's Ian Overgage said: "It's an inevitable credit card development and is more acceptable than upping interest rates." + While the Robert Owen card is not easy to compare with other cards, the Co-op's traditional Visa credit card, which charges a pounds 12 fee and interest of 1.9 per cent a month, is by far the most expensive on the market, according to an S&P credit card survey. + Assuming an average outstanding balance of pounds 500 each month and a pounds 125 spend on the card each month, cardholders would incur pounds 140 in interest charges - more than pounds 10 more a year than the next most expensive card, Leeds Permanent's Visa card. + The S&P's own card, which charges an pounds 8 annual fee and interest of 1.5 per cent a month, would be the cheapest at pounds 100 a year in interest. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +97 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 3, 1993 + +MINISTER AGREES TO DROP SIX-DAY RULE ON RESIDENTIAL CARE CASH + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 363 words + + + A REVOLT by private residential and nursing homes yesterday won a rapid about-turn by ministers on a key aspect of the new community care system. + Just 24 hours after the system started, the Government announced it was dropping a rule that would have cut off the social security payment to home residents if they were absent for six days or more. + Alistair Burt, junior Social Security Minister, said regulations would be laid in Parliament as soon as possible to extend the period before cut-off to an absence of six weeks in the case of a resident entering hospital, or three weeks in other circumstances. + Mr Burt said the move was a response to concerns raised in "a number of representations". + The change applies to the new residential allowance, worth pounds 45 a week or pounds 50 in London, which is the residual amount of social security being paid to private care home residents after the bulk of the former board and lodging payment has been transferred to local authorities under the new system. The six-day cut-off rule had been laid in December, but care home owners and local authorities awoke to the implications only in the past few weeks. Home owners protested that almost every resident would be absent for more than six days at one stage during a year. + They said they would have to renegotiate contracts with local authorities so the latter would undertake to make good any income shortfall following cut-off. + The change to three or six weeks, which will cost the Government an estimated pounds 1 million a year, compares with the former position whereby board-and-lodging payments were cut off after six weeks' absence. + The six-day rule threatened to alienate care home owners in the critical early weeks of the new system for arranging and funding the care of elderly and disabled people. The owners were already fearful that many homes might close as the system shifts the emphasis from residential care to looking after people in their own homes. + Sheila Scott, chief executive of the National Care Homes Association, said: "We are absolutely delighted that the Government has responded so quickly to our lobbying." + +LOAD-DATE: May 5, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +98 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 3, 1993 + +CARERS' PLIGHT: LEAVE IT TO INDIVIDUALS TO CHOOSE WHEN THEY WANT TO RETIRE SAYS AGE CONCERN + +BYLINE: SALLY GREENGROSS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 32 + +LENGTH: 329 words + + + EQUALISING the pension age at 65 could only be supported if a pension at least equal to the present basic pension was made available to those who choose to retire at 60. + This is the view of the charity Age Concern which believes the answer lies in allowing people to chose the age at which they take a pension. + Should the Government equalise at 65 without taking this step, then any cost savings from the equalisation should be spent on people disadvantaged by the present system, such as women and older pensioners. + Equalising the State pension age at 65 would have a major impact on the employment patterns and lifestyles of women. In the five years before retirement at 60, 54 per cent of women are working but after the age of 60 only 7.5 per cent are. But there are serious qestions which need to be addressed about the prospective employment opportunities of these women given the current high levels of age discrimination in employment. + Women carers are another group which would be disadvantaged by fixing the pension age at 65. Women are more likely than men to be carers of elderly dependent relatives, and therefore to withdraw from the workforce or to reduce their working hours. Nearly one in three women aged between 45 and 64 are carers and 63 per cent of these work for more than 20 hours per week. + Women are less likely than men to have access to occupational or personal pensions and when they do so their pensions are likely to be smaller than men's because of broken work records, part-time work and lower earning power. They are, therefore, less likely to be able to afford to retire before they reach the State pension age. + If the pension age is raised for women then consideration must be given to levels of sickness and invalidity benefit necessary, so that women with long-standing illnesses and those doing physically-demanding jobs do not lose out. + Sally Greengross is a director of the charity Age Concern. + +LOAD-DATE: May 5, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +99 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 3, 1993 + +PENSIONS BATTLE REACHES CRUCIAL STAGE + +BYLINE: TERESA HUNTER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 32 + +LENGTH: 550 words + + + THE battle over the equalisation of the State pension ages has moved into its final and critical stage. + The Government is on the brink of a decision which could see men retire at 60 with a full, basic State pension. Alternatively, it may opt to withdraw five years' pensions from women - taking away from them up to pounds 14,586 at today's prices. + Pensions minister Ann Widdecombe this week gave a strong indication that the Government would prefer, on cost grounds, to equalise pension ages upwards to 65 rather downwards to 60 - but she stressed that the final decision had not yet been taken. + She also called for more debate on this key pensions issue - even though the Government has already received its largest ever postbag on the subject. A decision was expected imminently but Ms Widdecombe hinted that it may now be delayed until the outcome of the Coloroll case. + Four main options remain. The Government must decide whether to require men and women to continue working until 65 before they could qualify for a full State pension - which it claims would save more than pounds 4 billion annually. This would be phased in over a number of years and only fully affect women currently aged about 40 and under. + It would increase the number of women in the workforce by 500,000 by the year 2015. Such an announcement at a time of high unemployment could prove unpopular. But this option does have cost in its favour and would also alleviate concerns about the rapidly-burgeoning elderly population. However, the Government is aware that this option is likely to prove "massively unpopular" and could alienate many women voters. Ms Widdecombe acknowledged: "The people who will be most adversely affected will be women who rely heavily on the State pension because they have no other pension provision, and who are in mundane low-paid jobs." + The most popular option with a majority of men, who already retire before 65, and with women's groups is to equalise at 60. As part of this, the DSS is considering splitting the age at which the basic and the earnings related pensions (Serps) could be taken - as a way of keeping the cost down. This could lead to a basic pension given at 60 with Serps at 65. + Another option is to ask women to work three years longer and equalise at 63, which would be largely cost neutral. Though not the clear favourite of any lobby group, it is the least disliked by most with strong views. Finally, a flexible decade of retirement would allow workers to choose their own retirement age between 60 and 70 and receive a larger or smaller pension accordingly. This is the employers' favourite, which actually reflects what is already taking place in the workforce. However, the Government believes everyone would take their pension at 60. + There is little time left in which to influence the Government's decision. But Money Guardian has tabled its own debate into this crucial issue. All too often women discover the inadequacies of their pension provision too late . There is a danger that this will happen again if they do not enter the debate over equalising pension ages now. + Men as well as women with strong views on the matter should write to the Prime Minister, Social Security Secretary Peter Lilley, and to their MPs. + +LOAD-DATE: May 5, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +100 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 3, 1993 + +NEW CHARGING METHOD COULD STRAIN AFFINITY + +BYLINE: DIANE BOLIVER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 35 + +LENGTH: 373 words + + + CO-OPERATIVE Bank says it is receiving 5,000 calls a day for its "free-for-life" Robert Owen credit card which allows new cardholders to transfer existing debts on very competitive terms. But when cardholders realise the punitive terms they may regret the move. + Not only do cardholders have to spend more than pounds 300 to attract interest of 1.7 per cent a month (Apr 22.4) - which is typical of other cards on the market - they also have to repay their bills in full within 15 days of the statement date to avoid interest charges, compared with the more typical 25 days elsewhere. + David Cooke of Penrith, Cumbria was outraged to discover this on his March Royal Society for the Protection of Birds affinity card statement. The statement gave two different due dates. Only if he made a part payment would he have 25 days to pay. + Mr Cooke said: "How many customers, especially older people, will be confused and tricked into paying interest because of this?" + Co-op confirmed that when it launched the Robert Owen card in November, it decided to apply the same terms to its existing affinity cards (Labour, Liberal Democrat, Help the Aged and RSPB.) + It said that if, as Mr Cooke claims, he had received no warning of the new terms, he must take it up with RSPB, which was responsible for notifying card holders. + According to Save & Prosper the new charging methods are likely to become commonplace. S&P's Ian Overgage said: "It's an inevitable credit card development and is more acceptable than upping interest rates." + While the Robert Owen card is not easy to compare with other cards, the Co-op's traditional Visa credit card, which charges a pounds 12 fee and interest of 1.9 per cent a month, is by far the most expensive on the market, according to an S&P credit card survey. + Assuming an average outstanding balance of pounds 500 each month and a pounds 125 spend on the card each month, cardholders would incur pounds 140 in interest charges - more than pounds 10 more a year than the next most expensive card, Leeds Permanent's Visa card. + The S&P's own card, which charges an pounds 8 annual fee and interest of 1.5 per cent a month, would be the cheapest at pounds 100 a year in interest. + +LOAD-DATE: May 5, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +101 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 6, 1993 + +WHY OLD SIR ACHING-BONES JUMPED SHIP; +Hong Kong's G & T set may splutter but their ex-acting governor was right to go to Beijing + +BYLINE: SIMON WINCHESTER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 18 + +LENGTH: 882 words + + + WHEN Sir David Akers-Jones, who is as plummy an English colonial as his name suggests, decided to throw in his lot with the Chinese and abandon any further pretence of supporting Chris Patten, the Hong Kong establishment was thrown into a state of shock and confusion. + Sir David had retired as Chief Secretary and Commissioner of the New Territories five years ago, but had stayed on in the colony, filled many honorary posts, and was a force to be reckoned with. So his "outing", as the papers put it, caused extreme consternation - perhaps most noticeably down at places likes the bar in the Hong Kong Club, where old men with attitudes tempered by years of gin and tropic heat swore at the damnable impertinence of it all: it was almost beyond comprehension, they grumbled to one another that Old Aching-Bones had gone over to the Chinks. + Yet had they thought about it all a little longer, these same critics might have come rapidly to realise that Sir David's decision was well thought out, was logical, and was quite probably right. For Old Aching-Bones, as this soft-spoken, rather deceptively gentle colonial administrator has long been widely and affectionately known, is heir to a tradition that tells much of Britain's earlier relationship with China, but which has dramatically little to do with the new-fangled attitudes of today. + Sir David - a fluent Cantonese speaker, a man whose decades in Hong Kong have given him a depth of understanding and sympathy noticeably lacking in both Government House and Downing Street today - represents a school of thought perhaps best summed up by the following classic passage: + "For a Westerner - or for the West - to believe it is possible in any way to influence China is chimerical. When a Westerner comes to China, no matter how high his rank or how great his influence, all that he can achieve - all that he will ever achieve - is to add a grain of salt to sea-water. China, like the sea, is adamantine, and of unchanging substance." + Those lines appear in one of the best-loved and best-known accounts of colonial life in Hong Kong, a slim book published a quarter of a century ago, titled Myself A Mandarin, written by Austin Coates. + Mr Coates spent most of his life in Asia, working in Hong Kong for more than 20 years, much of the time as a magistrate and land officer up in the New Territories. He was by all accounts a kindly, compassionate administrator, someone who loved China deeply, who took the time and trouble to learn the ways and the mysteries of the people over whom he invigilated. + As with Austin Coates, so with Sir David Akers-Jones and a handful of other colonial knights who have given their years and their careers to the study and good running of this extraordinary little colony. Each of these old-school imperial servants viewed their task precisely as did the courtly Mr Coates - to do their level best to administer a manifestly non-subject people in the name of a faraway and benevolent Crown, but without any pretence of making the slightest bit of long-term difference to them. + China, they all knew, was very clearly no India. Here there were no people begging for the delights of the English language, for military ceremony, for western education, for such conceits as jury trials or parliaments. The Chinese as a people want nothing from us and never have. They have learned nothing of significance from us and never will. And they will erase all memory of us within moments of our having left their shores. + After all, when we Britons quit Hong Kong in four years' time we will have been there for just 156 years - a mere nothing compared with China's five millennia of organised existence. The Chinese, it must be recalled, enjoyed (or suffered) firm central government, a written language, examination systems, roads, canals and a postal service when we who now rule her southern islands were shambling about in skins and woad. This humbling perspective is what Austin Coates recognised; it is what David Akers-Jones soon came to realise; and yet it is what - in Sir David's view, and the view of his other more thoughtful critics in Hong Kong - Chris Patten and his team seems to be unwilling or unable to accept. + No doubt Sir David will come in for a good share of criticism in the days and weeks to come. His detractors will say he is a weak and ineffectual old buffer, someone who lacked conviction on those matters that to a Englishman should really count, someone who sold out to the Chinese, who gave in to the vested interests, who aligned himself greedily with the big businessmen (and he is a director of many local firms which might suffer in a prolonged row between Britain and China). + Such attacks would be as wrong-headed as unfair - people like Akers-Jones and his colleagues in fact have a real and long-term affection for a Chinese people they believe are likely to be squeezed unbearably by the current row. The Old Man, this quintessential Old China Hand, appears to recognise what we Britons in general - and Mr Patten in particular - fail so signally to understand: that the Chinese just want us out, and to be able to forget as quickly as possible that such barbarians ever violated the sacred shores of their Celestial Kingdom. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +102 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 6, 1993 + +ROOTING FOR FLOWER POWER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 19 + +LENGTH: 387 words + + + MILLIONS of Britons will seek refuge in the garden over Easter. Gardening, they say, is the perfect antidote to stress: a return to our roots. As a species, we have spent most of our history communing with plants, and there is scientific evidence to support our instinct that being surrounded by them is good for health. Today we say everything with flowers. + The journal Kew reports a US study showing that post operative patients recovered faster if their beds overlooked a garden rather than a building. In another study, natural scenery was found to reduce anxiety; urban scenes made things worse. + Flower power also helps disabled people. So much so that a new "horticultural therapy" course at Coventry University is bringing together horticulturalists and occupational therapists. Until now "garden therapy" has largely been run either by horticulturalists who did not know about therapy or occupational therapists who did not know about plants. + The course was the brainchild of the charity Horticultural Therapy which, in its turn, is the perfect antidote to all the hedonist mags which give the idea that anyone can transform their flowerbeds and borders into a mini-surburban paradise. + Horticultural Therapy actually concedes that gardening is hard work, and provides a wide range of practical, sensible advice for easy gardening. + Not for nothing do some 250,000 UK gardeners require hospital treatment each year. Gardening is a notorious causes of back trouble. The Chartered Society of Physiotherapy advises gardeners to begin like runners, soccer players, yoga enthusiasts and ballet dancers - with a few warm-up exercises. Just bending and stretching your back a few times to limber up can make a big difference. + As Rudyard Kipling observed: "Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees that half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees." God must have thought, more than once, that gardening exposes a basic design defect in the body machine. + Horticultural Therapy is based at Goulds Ground, Vallis Way, Frome, Somerset BA 3DW. Tel: 0373 464782. Membership costs pounds 15 ( pounds 12.50 for senior citizens and registered disabled people. HT also sets out to help disabled gardeners, those who work with them. For further details, please send A4 sized SAE (28P). + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +103 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 8, 1993 + +"HAMID'S HAIR AND CLOTHES ARE COVERED WITH LICE AND HE MAY HAVE TYPHUS. SPRING WILL BRING STILL MORE INFECTION" + +BYLINE: HARIS NEZIROVIC + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 1 + +LENGTH: 629 words + + + FACING starvation, the people of Srebrenica have been reduced to an animal-like struggle for survival. Cut off from virtually all aid for almost a year, Srebrenica's hungry say they have long risked death for food. + They have walked into enemy fire or fields full of landmines. Now, they scramble for meals dropped by United States planes, fighting and even killing for the precious packages. + In a year of war, local authorities say 2,000 people have been killed in fighting and another 500 have died of hunger. + In the morass of mud and begging refugees that fill Srebrenica's streets today, it is impossible to verify such figures. Every day, new arrivals stream into a town already packed as tight as a new box of matches. Thirty thousand refugees huddle in the town of 9,000, thousands more in outlying areas closer to Serb lines. + They straggle in, five to 10 at a time, women with babies, elderly with sticks, children caked in mud, from feet to waist, clothes worn and torn, hard shoes on bare feet, faces lined with pain. Nobody knows where to go. Some consider surrendering to the Serbs. Many eat only once every other day. + People hope vaguely for evacuation on United Nations convoys. At least nine people died in the frenzy to flee last week, and local authorities have stopped evacuations for fear they make the town more vulnerable to Serb capture. + Begging for food, people seek any kind of shelter. A family of five beds down in a wrecked car. A family of 10 sleeps in a wrecked truck. In the schoolhouse turned refugee centre, more than 50 people sleep in one classroom. + In one room, a man named Hamid lies motionless on the floor. His hair and clothes are covered with large lice and he is suspected of having typhus. + Spring will bring still more infection. Doctors fear epidemics of hepatitis, typhus and scabies. Hospitals are horrendous. Patients lie on the floor. + Before a surgeon and some equipment arrived last August, five doctors who had never operated improvised surgery, hacking off limbs with saws. The only two surgical knives were sharpened after every operation. The doctors operated only in daylight; lacking alcohol, they watered down battery acid for disinfectant. + Doctors said wounds were easily infected; injured legs and arms had to be amputated rather than treated. + Patients were tied down as doctors sawed their limbs. The screams reached the street, said one doctor, Ilijas Pilav. + In November, a United Nations convoy brought anaesthetics. But there was no muscle relaxant. During stomach operations, doctors struggled to keep intestines inside the body. + The convoy was one of only three to reach Srebrenica before March 8, when trucks arrived after Gen Philippe Morillon, UN commander in Bosnia, talked aid past the Serbs. + As long ago as last summer, residents say, food was short. + Civilians would follow Bosnian soldiers attacking Serb villages, to scavenge food. Some died in the attempt. + In the autumn, when crops ripened, hundreds ventured into dangerous no man's land on the fertile left bank of the Drina river border with Serbia. Easy targets, dozens died. + Mahmut Becirevic, a refugee who scavenged for grain, said the fields were mined and scores lost limbs. Others recalled people walking like zombies over corpses. By December, cold and hunger combined to kill. An official said that in Grabovicka Rijeka, about 12 miles from Srebrenica, more than 60 died in three nights. + As a last resort, people milled the flowers of hazelnut trees for bread. Then, even that ran out. + Haris Nezirovic, a journalist for the independent Bosnian weekly Slobodna Bosna, recently spent several weeks in Srebrenica. He filed this report for the Associated Press. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +104 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 8, 1993 + +STATE PENSION FOR ALL 'MAY HAVE TO GO'; +Inquiry floats idea of limiting help to the over-70s + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 459 words + + + THE concept of retirement needs to be re-thought, and the principle of a universal state pension may have to be abandoned, an independent inquiry today reports. + One option is to limit state help for older people to those over 70 or 75 and require others to live on private pensions, savings or part-time earnings, according to the inquiry, set up by the Carnegie Trust. + The trust is calling for full and open discussion on the options for changing the state pension. It says it is unacceptable for the pension to continue to wither in value, relative to average earnings, without that being a declared policy. + John Major is to get a copy of the report, in which there is strong Whitehall interest. + Terry Banks, director of the inquiry, said: "It is up to the Government to open this issue up so that we can have a proper debate about it." + The inquiry, which cost almost pounds 1 million, investigated the "third age" - 50-74 - in which more people are stopping full-time work and remain healthy and active. There are 14 million third-agers in Britain. + After publishing nine constituent studies, the inquiry team today releases a final report with more than 70 recommendations as a basis for further discussion and analysis, including a two-day conference later this month. + The report calls for urgent action to harness the abilities and energy of third-agers to stop them from being a drag on the economy. + On latest population projections, by 2031 there will be 46 people over the present state pension ages for every 100 of working age, compared with 30 now. + Sir Kenneth Stowe, the inquiry chairman, said: "For each of us, in our many different ways, the third age is an opportunity either for investment or for jumping into the dustbin." + The report identifies age discrimination and financial disadvantage as the main obstacles to unleashing the potential of third-agers. Four in 10 have private income of less than pounds 3 a week, and six in 10 less than pounds 20. + The Government's policy of uprating the state pension by prices rather than earnings is eroding its value and forcing more and more pensioners to claim additional income support benefit. + There is a "strong" case for restricting pension eligibility and giving the resulting savings to the poorest. + One option is to maintain the pension's value only for those over 70 or 75, uprating it by prices or less for the younger retired. + However, the report acknowledges there might be widespread public objection to a move that would, in the long run, defer the pension age by up to 10 years. + Life, Work and Livelihood in the Third Age; Bailey Management Services (Dept PH), 127 Sandgate Road, Folkestone CT20 2BL; pounds 19.50. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +105 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 8, 1993 + +EYEWITNESS: DOWN A FROZEN PATH TO REFUGE + +BYLINE: THOMAS GOLTZ AT THE MOUROVDAR PASS, AZERBAIJAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 12 + +LENGTH: 707 words + + + NEW YORK TIMES: THEY looked like black dots on the snowfields, descending the north slope of the 9,000ft mountain pass - three figures, trudging toward refuge in their own land. + Reaching the track, the three turned out to be five - an exhausted man in his early 30s and two women in their 20s carrying infant children. + All were snow-burned and in shock after a six-day trek through forests and mountains from Bashlibeli in the province of Kelbadzhar. + Armenian forces conquered the province region over the weekend, creating a refugee crisis of huge proportions. + Nagorno-Karabakh, under the rule of Azerbaijan but populated mostly by ethnic Armenians, has been the prize in a five-year undeclared war between Armenian separatists and Azeris that has cost about 3,000 lives. + When Kelbadzhar fell to Armenian troops, it gave them control of a swath of land stitching Karabakh to neighbouring Armenia from the north to the south. The first link, at Lachin, was opened last year and used to get troops and supplies into Karabakh. + During the fighting, Azerbaijan has imposed an economic blockade on Armenia. Armenia's sole supply of natural gas was interrupted over the winter when a crucial gas pipeline was ruptured by an explosion in neighbouring Georgia. + Armenians were left with no heat and limited electricity and relied on foreign aid to survive the crisis. Armenia said the explosion was the work of Azeri guerrillas. + About 39,000 Azeris fleeing the fighting have passed through refugee centres, leaving about 5,000 unaccounted for, according to local officials and 15,000 missing, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. + "When we left we were about 30 people, but we got split up during the journey and now we don't know what happened to the others. Maybe they are all dead," said Settar Tagiyev, the man in the group of five. + This band was probably among the last Azeri refugees to make it over the main, eastern pass to a refugee collection center at Khanlar. More than 30,000 men, women and children driven from their homes over the past week have passed through the centre. Other centres have handled some 9,000 refugees. + "Our information suggests there may be 2,000 to 3,000 left behind on the far side of the Dashkezan Pass," said a representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. + "We fear a very high casualty rate if they are not immediately evacuated, because those that remain are the most vulnerable - mainly the old, women and children. Even young men are coming across exhausted and in thermal shock." + Numerous cases of severe frostbite and more than 40 deaths have been reported among those who managed to cross the pass. The number of those who perished and were left behind is unknown. + In order to save those stranded, the refugee commission is now trying to secure safe passage for a corridor to the snowbound southern slope of the mountain to evacuate refugees by helicopter. + But prospects look bleak. Four Azeri army helicopters ferrying refugees or wounded crashed in the past week. The most recent was on Sunday, when an MI-8 helicopter was hit by Armenian fire. The three crew members were killed and nine people were wounded. + Another helicopter bound to pick up refugees trapped behind the Armenian lines further west had to turn back after coming under fire. + A greater obstacle to the rescue effort, however, is political: despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Armenian government continues to insist its soldiers were never involved in the conquest of Kelbadzhar in the first place, and that any ceasefire to evacuate refugees should be negotiated with the government of the self-styled "Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh", with which Baku refuses to negotiate. + Yerevan also said the Karabakh Armenians were only reacting to an Azeri offensive from Kelbadzhar and opened a second corridor to Armenia by coincidence. + Not only the government of Azerbaijan but eyewitnesses to the fall of Kelbadzhar point out that the assault was mounted from Armenia itself and that the new, northern corridor to Karabakh is more than 60 miles wide and represents a de facto annexation of the entire region. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +106 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 12, 1993 + +TELEVISION: WESTBEACH, THE NINETIES, EVERYMAN + +BYLINE: HUGH HEBERT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 654 words + + + ANY drama series that has to give you two family trees in the press kit is suspect. It was probably a wannabe soap that never lathered. And any script that places the two families at opposite ends of the social spectrum is several pages short of an idea. Witness the grinding Riff Raff Element on Fridays. Now on Saturday nights you are offered a bucket a week of Westbeach (BBC1), which in its first episode had elements of Eldorado, Hi-di-Hi, Dynasty, and Carry on Camping mixed in the sort of proportions you might use for concrete blocks. + Westbeach is a seaside resort that is now out of season all the year round. The town's business power is in the hands of Alan Cromer, a lean entrepreneur who did well in the eighties and runs the now deserted nighterie, the neglected pier, the bumless deckchairs, the cheerless chippie, the empty caravan park; and this is August, which will depress Eastbourne where it was all filmed. + But in the first episode Sarah Preston, Alan's long-ago flame and now business rival, has just returned from the US to inherit multiple freeholds, hike all Cromer's rents and upgrade the echoing spaces of the Royal Suffolk Hotel. The receivers close the holiday camp, a Cromer brother puts his back out in flagrante with a blonde fisheries inspector and has to be cut out by firemen, leaving the blonde to explain to her husband why his car went out a saloon and came back a convertible. By the end of Day One Tony Marchant's plot is too glutinous even to thicken, and the puns are painful. Westbeach is a hoot-a-minute cult or it is nothing. + It's nothing like Blackpool in the early thirties, seven million people booked holidays there each year: "Like wine!" one veteran said in The Nineties (BBC2), "you can drink it in, Blackpool, and you're like a new person." You could get a bed for 2s 6d a night, and landladies charged for use of the cruet. When the town was overcrowded, one former landlady said, "the lady across the road used to have them sitting up all night with their elbows on the table for half-a-crown." + The elderly in this rich series bask in remembrance. They recall the Blackpool ballrooms, the fun-fairs, the big wheel, the experience of captive flight at the end of great steel arms that raised and tilted as the machine spun them faster: and the old man, remembering, made shapes with his magically eloquent hands to describe the movement. At the end he and his sister had a squeezebox each and played Oh We Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside, the way the cinema organists used to do as the lift raised them into the dazzle of the spotlight. + In war, total objectivity is the privilege of those who are not there. No one who has read Ed Vulliamy's reports for the Guardian from Bosnia can be much surprised by his declaration of sympathies in Everyman (BBC1). "I believed that the bullies of history need not triumph. The war in Bosnia has changed all that. It's a war in which the worst always happens to the innocent, while brutality is rewarded and courage and decency punished." His judgment expressed in this programme is that the Bosnian Muslims want to go on living as a peaceful mixed community - Muslim, Croat and Serb as equal neighbours and friends - as they had done for decades, and that they must fight to restore that integral variety. The war has rent that. "In previous European conflicts the enemy has been easily demonised as Nazis or Reds. In Bosnia the demon lives next door." + Sometimes it is the detail in the margin that drives a story home. Sabina is 22, had been a nurse for six months and when the war came she became an interpreter. Vulliamy reads from the notebook in which she has written in neat longhand, alphabetically, the new English words she has had to learn, a personal dictionary of present terrors: "bayonet, bellicose, bloodshed . . . malefactor, manacle, mangle, martyr, massacre, missile, mortar. . ." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +107 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 14, 1993 + +FRONTIERS OF WORK : WHY THE OLDER DOGS CAN BE TAUGHT NEW TRICKS; +Victoria McKee reports on the value of experience + +BYLINE: VICTORIA MCKEE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 13 + +LENGTH: 1070 words + + + IF YOUR plane had to make a crash landing, would you prefer your commercial airline pilot to be aged 30 or 50? Should a surgeon be allowed to perform a delicate eye operation if he's nearing retirement age? Could a copy-typist of 72 be as fast as - and even more accurate than - one of 20? + The Carnegie Inquiry Into the Third Age, whose final report was published last week, favourably compared the skills of older and younger workers. + This may be because the ratio of working age population to pensioners is changing in a way that makes it expedient to encourage older people to stay in a job. According to the inquiry's predictions, a working population of 33.7 per cent will, by 2030, have to support pensioners comprising 14 per cent of the population. + Some of Carnegie's conclusions must, of course, be viewed in this context. + The health section of the report, subtitled Abilities and Wellbeing in the Third Age, conceded that "in a review of 25 empirical studies conducted over the last 30 years . . . there were studies showing improvement, deterioration and no change with age". But it chose to concentrate on those which offered the greatest hope for a future in which older people must play an active role for the economy to prosper. + Chris Trinder, director of the employment section of the Carnegie study, said: "The stereotypes that employers have aren't based on fact and older people often don't get the chance to show they can fit the bill." + Mr Trinder said: "Employers worry if they feel someone's only got a few more good years to work - but they may only get a year or two out of younger workers before they move on." + The real differences between the ages were that younger workers tended to have greater ambition, "trainability," flexibility, better health, information technology skills, qualifications and mobility, whereas older workers' strengths are their stability, reliability, commitment, responsibility, maturity and managerial skills. + Employers feared, too, that older employees may be "technophobic" and unable to relate to new technologies and changing working environments, a claim denied by Dr David Davies of Aston University. "Our research has shown that although those between 50 and 60 were slightly slower to learn, the rate at which they improved was the same as for younger people." + Professor Malcolm Hodkinson, who at 61 recently took early retirement from his post as professor of geriatric medicine at University College, London, is one of the senior academic authors of the study. He found that "as we get older, experience and skill can trade off against the deterioration in certain physical abilities". + Some skills improved with age while others deteriorated. Learning to distinguish between them could be the key to successful planning for the future, he said. + "Our work shows that you can teach an old dog new tricks. You may have to teach him in different ways and you may have to take longer doing it, but when allowed to work at their own chosen speed the performance of the older learner can equal that of the younger one," the professor said. + American research quoted in the study found in tests on typists aged 19 to 72 that "although reaction time tests increased significantly with age, speed of copy-typing remained constant across age groups. Furthermore, maintained speed was not at the expense of accuracy, as older typists also made fewer errors." + Margaret Savory, another of the report's researchers, found there were more differences within individual age groups than between them. "Age is never a good basis for automatic decisions on employment issues as individuals' abilities vary tremendously within each age range." + There were, however, arguments for compiling a rough guide to the "seven ages of skills," from the teens, through each decade of life, Professor Hodkinson said. + If the professor was in a plane about to crash land: "I'd prefer my pilot to be between 40 and 55, the mandatory retirement age for commercial pilots, rather than 30, because by that age they would have had a lot more experience of things going wrong and how to deal with them." + In pure mathematics, however, it is said that no great discovery is ever made by anyone over 35, so the optimum age for a pure mathematician would be between 15 and 25. "But if you are interested in applied mathematics - applying the concepts to complicated problems in real life as a statistician does, then experience begins to come into it and someone of 25 to 40 might be more desirable," he said. + Doctors might be "dodgy over 70," Professor Hodkinson said. "But if I was having a very finicky, difficult but routine operation - say on my eyes or ears - I'd feel more confident with an experienced 60-year-old surgeon than a 30-year-old although for very complex, uncertain, surgery that might involve rapid decision-making, I would prefer a much younger surgeon." + When it comes to senior managers, older people had more to offer in some respects than those in their 20s, 30s and 40s who have largely supplanted them from positions of authority in recent years, Professor Hodkinson said. + "If you're trying to manage change, then you need younger people - but you should have older ones on board to keep a good ship running," he said. + "I believe you need a mix of ages so that the younger workers can learn from the experience of the older and the organisation can benefit from the impetuosity and drive of the younger." + Professor Patrick Rabbitt, 58-year-old professor of age and cognitive performance at the University of Manchester, whose work is quoted heavily in the report, believes that 65 is probably a sensible "compromise" retirement age, if one has to be set. + "While the trajectories of ageing can vary hugely from person to person, there is little doubt that faculties start to decline after the age of 60 and that you're about as good as you're ever going to get by the age of 50," he said. + "But from our work it's very clear that people who were in their 50s in 1982 are ageing much less rapidly than previous generations due to better diet and health care, personal care and exercise - and, very plausibly, heightened expectation and motivation." + The Carnegie Inquiry's conclusions may enhance older workers' expectations and make third age power become a self-fulfilling prophecy. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +108 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 15, 1993 + +ROYAL OPERA DEFIES WARNING ON POUNDS 150M PLAN + +BYLINE: DAVID HENCKE, WESTMINSTER CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 656 words + + + THE Royal Opera House yesterday committed itself to its pounds 150 million redevelopment scheme in spite of Baroness Warnock's warning in a confidential report to the Arts Council that it could go bankrupt by proceeding with the plan. + Jeremy Isaacs, managing director of the Royal Opera House, and Angus Stirling, its chairman, predicted that the redevelopment would be complete by the beginning of the next century. + They were confident, after a meeting with John Major, that the Government would be sympathetic to the allocation to the project of some pounds 45 million from the National Lottery. + Mr Isaacs was also confident that Lord Palumbo, head of the Arts Council, would back the proposal. + The announcement of the opera house's determination to go ahead follows Westminster council's decision to defer planning approval for piecemeal development in Covent Garden until it was guaranteed that the scheme could be fully financed. + The opera house yesterday published Putting Our House in Order, a progress report, accepting some of the criticisms by Lady Warnock and management consultants Price Waterhouse, about the running of Britain's premier opera establishment. + Mr Stirling said tickets for the opera at Covent Garden will cost more than the old age pension next season. + Average seat prices will be pounds 62 for opera and pounds 27 for ballet, and financial pressure meant there was little hope of a substantial reduction. + The opera house rejected Lady Warnock's central complaint, contained in her confidential report urging the scrapping of the development scheme as it stood. It also declined to publish the report - leaked to the Guardian last month - because it would create a precedent for other critical reports to be made public. + The opera house agreed to implement 20 of the 27 recommendations - including changing appointments to its board, offering more subsidised performances to young people, the unemployed, students and the elderly, and stricter financial controls. + But it also said seat prices would rise by 4 per cent - on top of a 126 per cent rise over five seasons. + The opera house is also to close in 1997, following two extended summer closures in 1995 and 1996, re-opening on New Year's Eve, 1999. + Mr Stirling said he considered the development scheme essential. "It will provide 113 extra seats, improved facilities, a home for the Royal Ballet in Covent Garden and eventually lead to a reduction in seat prices," he said. + Figures in the opera house report showed that pounds 14.2 million had been spent on the development - and revealed that the overdraft facility at Coutts Bank - of which pounds 8 million had already been used by 1991 - had risen to pounds 11.6 million to finance the scheme. + The opera house also confirmed that its trust had submitted accounts on its development scheme late to the Charity Commission. + The progress report concludes: "Alternative schemes have been scrupulously studied, but none offers anything approaching value for money or the benefits required either in terms of the capital project or subsequent revenue gains. Any major scaling-down of our ambition seriously compromises our ability to increase access. We believe that while compromises may reduce initial outlay, they strike at the very heart of the strategy." + The opera house said an anonymous foreign donor had pledged pounds 2.5 million to help the scheme. + - Tickets for the Opera at Covent Garden are the most expensive in the world. A top single seat price of pounds 200 compares with + - pounds 75 at the Metropolitan in New York + - pounds 80 at La Bastille in Paris + - pounds 44 for at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin + - pounds 50 for the Sydney opera house. + A spokesman for Keith Prowse International said: "Covent Garden prices are astronomic - far higher than anywhere else in the world I've ever come across." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +109 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 15, 1993 + +IN RUSSIA AND ROME FORMER RULERS FACE THEIR ACCUSERS; +Moscow trial: Two years ago, Dmitry Yazov led a superpower's armed forces and Giulio Andreotti was in his seventh term as Italy's prime minister, an elder statesman who attended G7 summits. Yesterday, Mr Andreotti faced detailed accusations of mafia links while Mr Yazov was in court over the 1991 QBY:Jonathan Steele in Moscow and Ed Vulliamy in Rome + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 20 + +LENGTH: 620 words + + + VOROVSKY Street, where the Russian Supreme Court stands, had never seen anything like it. Barriers, guarded by police, were strung across it, and coming towards them yesterday was a motley crowd waving red banners and shouting "Freedom to the patriots" and "Yeltsin to court". Among the placards and banners were the faces of elderly men who, two years ago, had never attended an unofficial demonstration in their lives. + More than that, they were men who had spent a lifetime giving the orders which maintained a system that banned any expression of protest or dissent. In August 1991 they tried to restore it, by declaring a state of emergency, closing newspapers, and imprisoning the country's president. Now in Vorovsky Street on a grey April morning they were presenting themselves as democrats. + "I accuse Gorbachev of having taken part in the destruction of a great country," Gennady Yanayev told me, as we tramped past the puddles. Mr Yanayev was once the vice-president of the Soviet Union, a man who by his own admission was drunk on the day the coup decisions were taken, and by the evidence of those who later arrested him was drunk when the coup collapsed. + A woman rushed up, handed him three roses, and kissed him. "They are noble men," she explained when I asked what prompted her emotion. Her mother was illiterate but she had received higher education thanks to the October Revolution. "They took a great risk. They saw others destroying our Soviet Union, but they acted." + "We will not give in," boomed a deep voice behind me. It was Anatoly Lukyanov, a colleague of Mr Gorbachev's for 40 years, and once speaker of the Soviet parliament. + Nearby trudged Marshal Dmitry Yazov, former defence minister, his leathery face marked by furrows and trenches of worry. "I regret nothing," he growled. Not even that comment, "I was an old fool," which he made two days after the coup failed? "Now is not the time to discuss that," he parried, furrowing further. + Inside the court the 12 men first tried to argue that the three-man military tribunal had no jurisdiction. They are charged with high treason, and five of them with exceeding their authority. Mr Yanayev's lawyer said that as the judges were serving officers, they were subordinate to Mr Yeltsin's defence minister, and could not be considered objective. + Mr Lukyanov's lawyer said that as some of the events they were charged with took place outside Russia, that is at Mr Gorbachev's villa in Ukraine, a Russian court had no jurisdiction. He said they could only be tried by an international court representing the states of the former Soviet Union. + The court rejected the pleas, whereupon Mr Yanayev and Mr Lukyanov said they would refuse to answer any questions. + Outside the building the crowd of about 100 supporters kept up a vigil. For most of Moscow the coup plotters are the ultimate yesterday's men. In people's minds they deserve no sympathy but no anger either. Only the fanatics and the clowns care about them. + A man in a tattered blue cassock carrying an icon, and calling himself as Deacon Viktor Petyukhin, said he regularly went to the jail where the plotters were held for a year and a half before their recent release. + "With this icon I knew they would come out, and they did," he intoned. "But their cells should not stay empty. Yeltsin and his team should be put in there instead. + "Gorbachev was an agent, from his young days," he confided. "CIA?" I asked. "Hard to know," he admitted. + "You know who runs America. The Zionists, the Jews, and all those saxophone players, headed by that chief saxophonist, Clinton." I shuddered, and said goodbye. + The trial continues today. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +110 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 18, 1993 + +THE FINAL SAY: ASTRONOMICAL TARGETS + +BYLINE: PETE MAY + +SECTION: WEEK-END; Pg. 70 + +LENGTH: 676 words + + + THE QUESTIONNAIREVikram Seth + Rosanna Greenstreet + SO Arnold Schwarzenegger is to become the first advertiser in space. NASA's next mission, the Commercial Experiment Transporter (COMET), set to be launched in May, will have ads for Arnie's forthcoming movie, The Last Action Hero, on the fuselage, booster rockets and satellite payload, which will orbit the Earth for two years. No kidding. + Just what will the average space traveller make of a space satellite emblazoned with stills from a Schwarzenegger movie and, no doubt, neon logos for McDonald's and Coca-Cola? The scenario is not difficult to imagine: + Spock: Captain, ship's sensors indicate the presence of a 20th-century earth satellite. + Kirk: Put it on screen Mr Sulu. + Spock: Fascinating. + Kirk: The Last Action Hero? Schwarzenegger? Explanation, Mr Spock. + Spock: Captain, ship's computer states that Arnold Schwarzenegger was a creature of limited intelligence made of pure muscle, popular in your Earth culture's film genre known as "action movies". Most illogical. + McCoy: How did they ever get out of the 20th century? + Kirk: Spock, this picture on the satellite Spock, are you trying to tell me that man's human, Spock? + Spock: It's life Jim, but not as we know it. Schwarzenegger was a primitive model of an automaton life-form known as the Terminator, which later gained world domination through opening a chain of burger bars. + Kirk: Hasta la vista, baby! Rapid fire all phaser banks. Shoot to kill, Mr Sulu! + Many ad agencies are now considering advertising in space. Any alien life-form watching us will soon believe that the human race is doomed to extinction, as it consists almost entirely of Gold Blend drinking couples who take seven years to kiss and never actually have it off; and the only other intelligent life is elderly men reading books on fly-fishing by J R Hartley. + I have long maintained that the only way the Squidgygate and Camillagate phone calls could have been taped was by Thunderbird 5. Therefore John Tracy and his orbiting space station could be jointly sponsored by BT and MI5, with a whole new series of Maureen Lipman ads being transmitted into the cosmos. + Those who talk Britain down should take note of this new marketing opportunity. Soon we will be able to look beyond EC boundaries and enter the inter-global market. John Major's Citizen's Charter could be applied to Interstellar starways; more Happy Eaters (with burgers supplied by Schwarzenegger's Planet Hollywood chain) and more public lavatories for Venusian space truckers could be the big idea that wins the next election. + Scientists believe that Mars can eventually be made habitable by introducing plants and building isolated greenhouse communities. Peter Mayle could then write A Year On Mars (followed by A Year In Uranus), introducing us to funny Martian builders with strange accents who spend hours in the delicatessen deciding which tentacle to buy and are always presenting him with freshly zapped Zygons. + Think of the tourism opportunities. Inter-planetary travel buffs could congregate in youth hostel kitchens on various worlds, cooking pasta and exclaiming: "Yeah, Saturn was just so, like, spiritual . . ." + Graham Gooch could keep his stubble by claiming to be unable to shave in a low-gravitational flight situation, and on the borders of the galaxy England might even find some primeval planet they could beat at cricket. (If they did lose they could always blame it on the alien diet.) In fact there might even be life-forms somewhere who like Eldorado. + Mind you, there's a whole legal aspect to be thought of regarding space colonisation. Omni magazine recently posed the question "Who owns the moon?" According to "space attorneys" an international treaty determines celestial bodies to be the heritage of all humankind - which presumably means that the stipulations of Her Majesty's Inspector Of Taxes do not apply on the Moon. John Birt is already said to be looking into setting up an office there. G + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +111 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 19, 1993 + +VICTORY AND DEFEAT FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE, 50 YEARS ON + +BYLINE: JULIAN BORGER IN WARSAW + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 7 + +LENGTH: 781 words + + + EWA KUPFERT had spent all afternoon searching for the street corner where she was born 69 years ago. She recognized the names of the streets - Mila and Nalewki - but in post-war Warsaw they no longer joined. + Ewa was overcome by a wave of exhaustion. "Why did I come?" she asked herself out loud. "What am I doing here?" + She had come from Canada with her two daughters, the sole survivor of a Jewish Warsaw family of 10. Most of them were marched out of the ghetto to the Umschlagplatz [Deportation Square] from where they were loaded on to trains to Treblinka. She hid with her mother and sister in a basement, where they remained on April 19, 1943, when the ghetto fought back. + "We heard all the noises and we heard that the Germans are going house to house looking for Jewish people. And all of a sudden the ghetto was on fire. Jewish people were throwing Molotov cocktails, or whatever they had, they fought with bare hands. But the fact was that all the Germans ran away." + It was the first popular uprising against the Nazis anywhere - a last stand by about 1,000 young Jews, defending 60,000 old people and children hidden in basements. They were all that was left of Warsaw's pre-war Jewish population of 450,000, the largest Jewish community in Europe at the time. + German troops had to raze the ghetto to the ground and sift through the bricks in order to crush the resistance. + "When I was captured and marched out of the ghetto, it was one big ruin," Ewa said. + She was sent to Majdanek concentration camp, where her mother and sister died. + The Nazis cornered and killed most of the leaders of the ghetto uprising in May 1943, but isolated groups of fighters carried on fighting throughout the summer. + The only Jewish military leader to survive was Marek Edelman. He now works as a cardiologist in Lodz and is weary of being asked about the uprising. For him it is pointless to sift through the past if you fail to learn from it. He believes the Allies could have done more to slow down the Holocaust by bombing death camps and the railway lines leading to them. + And he thinks the West is still putting strategy before human life. + "What is going on in Yugoslavia now is Hitler's victory from beyond the grave. And the Western countries, beyond their wordy declarations, are doing the same thing as they did before." + On the streets of Warsaw it was clear yesterday that other lessons of the ghetto had still not been learnt. Ewa Kupfert stopped to talk to an elderly Polish Roman Catholic to exchange memories about the neighbourhood. Soon a crowd of local residents gathered around her, and the atmosphere quickly soured. + "We already have too many Jews here. How would you like it if Israel was run by Poles?" an old woman shouted. A young man in a baseball cap behind her said: "I went to London for three weeks and I had enough of Jews for my whole life." + Ewa shook her head as her daughters pulled her away. "I wanted to find something that would take me back again to my Warsaw, but I can't," she said. + Nearby, a crowd of 100 skinheads staged a noisy protest against the commemoration of the ghetto uprising, but elsewhere Polish Roman Catholics tried to redress the balance. + A senior church delegation went to Warsaw's last remaining synagogue yesterday to attend a remembrance ceremony for the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Archbishop Henryk Muszynski read out a message from the Pope calling on both faiths to unite against intolerance, to become jointly "a blessing to the world". + "I came all the way from Nowy Sacz [in the very south of Poland] to see this, an archbishop and a rabbi standing together. It's great," said Maria Darska, who looked on from the women's gallery in the synagogue. + As evening fell, Ewa Kupfert was beginning to cheer up. + She had come across an old Catholic, Tadeusz Rozmislowski, who had seen the ghetto burn in April 1943. He told her how proud he and other Poles had been of their Jewish neighbours for being the first to stand up to the Nazis. + He told her to ignore the anti-Semites. "They don't have the slightest idea about history. They don't know how much Jews and Poles suffered together," Mr Rozmislowski said. + In the synagogue, Rabbi Joskowicz read out a telegram sent to Hitler on May 16 1943 by Jurgen Stroop, the SS General responsible for the liquidation of the ghetto. "There is not one Jew left in Warsaw," the message said. + The rabbi lifted his chin with its long grey beard and surveyed the crowd of ghetto survivors and their children packed into the synagogue. "You were wrong, Stroop. Here we are!" he shouted. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +112 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 21, 1993 + +SUICIDE RUSH + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 35 words + + + Reuter: Dozens of elderly people in Jiangsu province, China, commited suicide last month after officials ordered that anyone dying after April 1 would be cremated, an official newspaper said yesterday. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +113 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 21, 1993 + +QUEEN'S AWARDS: DOC MARTENS TRIES TO PUT BOOT INTO AGGRO IMAGE; +Old ladies, bovver boys and bankers. Dan Atkinson tracks the rise and rise of the 'comfort shoe' + +BYLINE: DAN ATKINSON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 16 + +LENGTH: 446 words + + + MYTH after myth about Dr Martens footwear was exploded yesterday as a Queen's Award for Export Achievement propelled the brand's British manufacturers into the spotlight. + They were designed originally as "comfort shoes" for elderly women. Today, women make up a large part of the market. They are worn by bankers. These and other fascinating facts come from R. Griggs, the UK licence-holder since 1959. + Yet there is something about "docs" that will always make them somewhat blokeish. However hard Griggs try to shake off the bovver-boot label - and to be fair troublemakers and yobbos have always been no more than a tiny part of the market - connotations of aggression keep bursting through the corporate profile. + One learns that Griggs started business at the turn of the century making a shoe called Bulldog. Its biggest competitor was called Tuf. There was the big Korean War contract. Then, at the dawn of pop decade, the deal with the German entrepreneur Dr Maertens that launched the air-soled shoe on an unsuspecting Britain under the Britain-ised name Dr Martens. + Now the any-trouble image took off in earnest - skinheads in their thousands laced up the eight-hole cherry-reds and one seaside police force took to confiscating laces as offensive weapons. + Of course, as the company points out, nurses and labourers, shopfloor employees and manual workers out-bought the skins by a big margin. But to the doc-fearing classes the "comfort shoe" designed by the good doctor and friend Herbert Funck during wartime represented anything but comfort. + Docs were dogged by the bovver-boot tag right through to the 80s, when middle-class office workers - fed up with skyrocketing cobblers' bills and instant-scuff shoes - saw in the no-nonsense doc a cheap escape. + Now docs are going into clothes. No joke. "Avant garde fashion company" red or dead is to team up with Griggs to put the famous name on yer actual clobber. At first sight you would think the skins would have a fit, namby-pamby fashion houses not being their sort of thing. But inquiries show the clothes may not be that un-docish after all. No suits, but plenty of 1940s raincoats, tweedy jackets and waistcoats. + Meanwhile, docs have gone worldwide. Twenty two countries buy Dr Martens and 38 per cent of sales are accounted for by North America. Griggs employs two thousand people and its best-known product now has royal recognition. Dr Martens are respectable, putting the boot into the trade gap rather than rival fans' faces. + Somehow it seems unlikely that the hard image will ever fade completely. It also seems unlikely that owners would be happy if it did. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +114 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 21, 1993 + +SOCIETY: MUSCLE AND MUDDLE; +Traditional systems of local government are in retreat. What will replace them? + +BYLINE: DAVID DONNISON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 13 + +LENGTH: 901 words + + + NICHOLAS RIDLEY, the politician who did more than any other to put the boot into traditional forms of local government, said that town councils should in future only meet twice a year - to allocate the contracts. Shortly before his death he added, on an Analysis radio programme, that he was not joking. + In local government, as in the BBC and the hospitals, major changes are afoot. They will go much further, whatever government we have, for they are part of a worldwide trend - and it was in the private sector that the trend began. + Early in the 20th century, when industry's main task was to mass-produce standard products, the most powerful people in the land were the tycoons who owned the factories and employed the armies of workers. The Labour movement naturally demanded that the community take over these vast properties and employ the workers. Meanwhile, Conservatives fought to keep these things in private hands. That quarrel still leaves its imprint on all our thinking. + Faced with a far more varied and rapidly changing market, the industrial dinosaurs, public and private, have been losing ground to new kinds of enterprise which wield power through their control of money and electronic communications. The risks of owning things and employing people are subcontracted out. Richard Branson runs his businesses from his living room. Like other dinosaurs before them, the big, bureaucratic enterprises are losing ground because they are, in general, less efficient. + In local government, too, traditional bureaucratic systems are in retreat. Three competing systems are gaining ground. + There are market-like systems: privatised council housing, for example, and private nursing homes and childrens' homes bidding for contracts from council paymasters, and - within the public services - competing, independently managed schools. There's nothing new about market mechanism in the public services. In medieval times taxes were collected, on commission, by "tax farmers". + Entrepreneurial, managerial systems of government are also gaining power. Corporations appointed by the state - the TECs which run our training schemes, the Housing Corporations and the Urban Development Corporations are examples - are given a brief, millions of pounds to spend, and told to get on with it. Some do pretty well; but they are loose cannon rolling round our cities under no democratic control. Again, the system is not new. The Turnpike Trusts and the Paving and Lighting Commissions, which created the first road system and the first properly serviced towns we had since the Romans, worked in this way. Then there are community-based systems, usually depending on public funds but accountable to the users of their services. The housing co-operatives are among the best known but there are many other examples - credit unions, women's health groups, old people's clubs, community centres providing creches, youth clubs, advice on welfare rights and much else: often innovative and excellent, but always patchy in coverage and uncertain in staying power. Victorian health and social insurance services were run in much the same ways, through friendly societies and medical clubs. + The people in charge of the agencies now gaining ground - political appointees, drawn mainly from local business and gentry - have been described as a "new magistracy". They may be new, but their agencies represent much older power structures which have struck back. What we think of as the traditional public services are in fact the youngest of these systems. + Created by reforming governments and the public service professions, campaigned for by people such as the early Fabians, trained in places such as the London School of Economics, these services pushed aside the gentry of earlier times, but failed to root themselves sufficiently deeply in the hearts of the people to withstand a counter revolution. + Central government, which is busily breaking down the old system, is better at destroying than creating. They should bear in mind that civic leadership is still vital. We neglect it at our peril. Local politicians have played crucial roles in the cities which have responded best to economic disaster - Hamburg, Pittsburgh, Rennes and Glasgow are examples. Only they have the authority to develop a coherent vision of their city's future, to mobilise their own people in support of sustained and consistent policies, to bring in the private sector and central agencies, and to gain help from higher levels of government. + Civic leaders should beware imperialists of the public and the private sectors alike - passionate propagandists locked into the rhetoric of an ancient quarrel. All systems have a part to play. Pick and mix them in ways which best suit your own town's resources and traditions. Then monitor what happens and learn from experience. Whether in the public or the private sector, monopolies always tend to go wrong - particularly for the most vulnerable. + The old love affair with the state and public service professions is over, and we should beware of new temptations. Bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, professions and community activists have parts to play. But civic leaders have responsibilities which they cannot hand over to anyone else. Things will go badly wrong if they relapse into those two meetings a year promised by Nicholas Ridley. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +115 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 21, 1993 + +SOCIETY: SURVIVAL OF THE LOUDEST; +Intense lobbying saved one innovative community care scheme from the axe. Though care like this is supposed to be a top priority, other schemes have not been so lucky + +BYLINE: LYNN EATON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 15 + +LENGTH: 1007 words + + + DAWN EGAN learned the hard way that her job as one of a team of social workers in Leicestershire's adult placement team was under threat. "I found out from a local radio reporter," she says, still stunned that the team hadn't been told by the council first. "She'd phoned up to ask if someone could give their reaction if the council decided to axe the service." + Without the team, one of the county's most innovative examples of community care was in danger of collapse - at a time when such care was supposed to be a top priority. + That was in February. Two months of lobbying later, the many families who offer community care in their own front rooms by "fostering" elderly and handicapped people have managed to save the service - at least for this year. But they are numbed that the cuts could have been considered at all. + "I couldn't believe it," Dawn Egan says. "The director of social services said it was highly unlikely our scheme would be closed as it was way down the list. But we felt it wouldn't be on the list at all if it was not being considered." + Leicestershire's adult placement scheme began in 1980 with six families who offered to take in elderly people on a short-term basis. It expanded through the 1980s, eventually including people with learning disabilities, and now 53 host families offer short and long-term placements to up to 88 people at any one time. + The council pays them pounds 140 a week for each person, up to a maximum of three "guests". The declared emphasis is on a friendly atmosphere without the rules and regulations found in formal residential homes, where costs would be anything from pounds 185 a week upwards. + Despite the extra pounds 539 million of government money to help offset local authorities' new care responsibilities, Leicestershire is not the only social services department to face dilemmas about cutting services which form a vital part of community care. With new spending assessments and capping, 26 social services departments are still losing out at the end of the day, even with the new money. It was only after an outcry from carers and their "guests", that Leicestershire council hurriedly decided last month to drop the adult placement scheme from the long list of potential cuts. + LIZ FORSTER, from one of the original families who had for years quietly provided care to elderly and dying people, decided she had to take a public stand to save the service. "I was very angry. Angry that something that had been working so well was going to be axed. And angry that the people who were going to axe it just didn't know what we were doing. + "It was exactly what the Government said we should have been doing - getting people out of institutional care into better types of care. Here they were, going to axe us." + She helped to form a local association of adult placement families, lobbied councillors, wrote to the press and invited people to see for themselves the service she was providing. + "We'd always kept a low profile - but where did it get us? If something like this happens again, we will be more prepared, a stronger force." + Ironically, Leicestershire's social services director, Brian Waller, agrees it would have been a great loss. "It's such a good scheme," he says. + But the Tory dominated council needed to find between pounds 15 million and pounds 20 million to avoid capping. All departments were asked to draw up a list of cuts giving a 5 per cent saving. Adult placements ended as the next to last item on the list, Waller explains, just to show members they might have to consider pulling out of something as valuable as that at a time when they should be investing in community care. + "The way ministers talk about these things is that nationally social services have got an increase, and shouldn't everybody be grateful. It's true that in overall terms social services have increased, but it's spread very unevenly across departments. + "I'm at standstill. We're having pounds 8 million new money, but having to lose pounds 4 million from the main programme budget. We are taking one step back to go two steps forward." + It will mean cutting grants to the voluntary sector at a time when the Government wants to encourage its growth, and increasing charges for home help services which will be an essential part of community care. The biggest anomaly of all, Waller says, was having to put a recommendation to the social services committee that five social work posts with elderly and disabled people, target groups for community care, should be scrapped. + Similar stories are told by other shortchanged councils, among them St Helens, Rotherham, Newcastle, North Tyneside, Coventry, Solihull, City of London, Greenwich, Islington, Lambeth, Westminster, Barnet, Bexley, Enfield, Harrow, Havering, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Kingston, Waltham Forest, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, and Cumbria. + Residential homes and day centres, an essential back-up for community care, are being closed and charges introduced for home helps and meals on wheels. Voluntary organisations are facing grant cuts. + Social service directors warned from the outset that, despite the new community care cash, government policies towards local government would drive many councils to make cuts in other, crucial, areas of social services. Their predictions are proving true. + Leicestershire's adult placement scheme may have been saved but other, lower profile services have not been so lucky. While Brian Waller likes to believe adult placement survived because everybody realised its intrinsic merits, he is forced to admit that the heavy lobbying of councillors by carers and service users probably saved the day. + "Some schemes with a less public profile are much more vulnerable to cuts," he admits. And there, social worker Dawn Egan says, is the rub. + "You go to a meeting and sit next to someone whose service hasn't been saved. We've been lucky, but there are services that shouldn't have to take cuts." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +116 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 22, 1993 + +SPECIAL REPORT: COMPUTERS AT WORK: THE KEYS TO HEALTH AND HAPPINESS; +Keyboards and mice: Is your mouse a rat? Does your keyboard give you the hunch? Then it's time to switch to new, more user-friendly designs + +BYLINE: RICHARD DONKIN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 18 + +LENGTH: 977 words + + + EVEN if your PC is new, the ergonomic thinking behind it is probably so old you can hear it creaking. The basic design of the keyboard is 120 years old, while the mouse is a survivor from the 1960s - positively ancient in computer terms. + It may seem churlish to criticise these senior citizens, but it's only fair to warn you that they can seriously damage your health. Using a keyboard or mouse, combined with long hours, stress and lack of breaks, can cause repetitive strain injury (RSI), a complex of disorders causing pain in the hands and arms. + RSI is now the most common reported occupational disease in the US and is also the subject of expensive lawsuits in the UK. Many sufferers end up unemployed and severely disabled, experiencing pain from such everyday tasks as buttoning shirts or chopping vegetables. + Sandie Maile's career as a secretary almost ended in 1984 when acute pain in her wrists stopped her from typing. Despite medical treatment, the pain returned every few years. + Only three years ago did she manage to resume working normally, by switching to the innovative Maltron keyboard and taking regular breaks from typing. She now works as a personal assistant, dealing with workloads that would have been painfully impossible with normal keyboards. + The inventors of the Maltron, Lilian Malt and Stephen Hobday, designed the keyboard to encourage a relaxed posture. The keys for each hand are separated, allowing the wrists to straighten and the shoulders to relax from the "computer hunch" visible in any office. + The keys are arranged in a dish around each hand, reducing finger stretching and forearm strain. It looks almost as if the keyboard has melted in the sun and the keys have sunk into it. + While no keyboard can cure RSI, the Maltron has impressive testimonials from a number of RSI sufferers. Typically, their condition is so improved by its use that they can return to productive work, avoiding the too common fate of unemployment and severe disability. + The list of those using Maltron keyboards includes household names such as Boeing, British Gas and the Inland Revenue, and smaller organisations such as Lincolnshire County Council. Versions for disabled users enable the use of one hand or a mouth stick. + Even self-taught typists can benefit from switching keyboards, though two-finger typists may improve more by learning to touch type. + Martyn Wilkinson, a freelance computer consultant, had found that typing and using a mouse were becoming painful. He switched to the new Apple Adjustable Keyboard and found that it significantly reduced the pain in his wrists. + The Adjustable Keyboard is the first alternative keyboard from a major computer manufacturer. Unlike the Maltron, it is similar to existing keyboards rather than a fundamental re-design. It is essentially a standard flat keyboard split into two halves, one for each hand. Each half can be rotated to match the angle of the forearms, reducing wrist strain. The positioning of the shoulders and forearms is largely unaffected. + Many other alternative keyboards exist, most of them from small manufacturers. While they differ in design, their concepts are broadly similar: separate the hands and let them rotate outwards, thereby relaxing shoulder and arm muscles. Good posture remains important, but now the keyboard is a help not a hindrance. + While looking again at your keyboard design, it may be time to decide that your mouse a rat. The mouse is astonishingly simple in concept and construction, yet it can cause just as much pain as a keyboard - and its ergonomics are even less well understood. + Martyn Wilkinson took a novel approach to reducing mouse-related hand pain. Rather than replace his mouse, he upgraded it with a larger casing, called a Mouse Topper. This reduced hand pain from gripping a small casing, by letting his hand rest on the mouse. + Recently, more ergonomic mice have been unleashed by Apple, Sicos and others. Such mice are typically larger and rounder, to provide an easier grip. Unlike gloves, however, mice are rarely available in a range of sizes. + The trackball is the most common rival to the mouse. Indeed, it is essentially an upside-down mouse with a larger ball. The trackball stays stationary, while the user rotates the ball to move the pointer on the screen. Many mouse users have found that trackballs cause less pain, but the reverse may also be is also true for some. + The "activation force" required to press mouse and trackball buttons does not appear to affect the risk of RSI. However, once someone has RSI, a low activation force mouse is recommended. + Some RSI sufferers have found that a combined trackball and foot switch, such as one available from Curtis Manufacturing in the US, helps tremendously, especially on "click and drag" operations. + Ultimately, when we all live in cyberspace, such devices may be superseded by a direct connection to the user's brain. (Does this raise the spectre of Repetitive Brain Injury?) But until then, take as much care in choosing a keyboard or mouse as you would in choosing a parachute. + Apple Adjustable Keyboard ( pounds 195) and Desktop Bus Mouse II ( pounds 40): Apple Computer, 081-569 1199. Logitech Mouseman ( pounds 49): Logitech, 0344-891313. Maltron keyboard ( pounds 375, discount possible for RSI sufferers) and Sicos mouse ( pounds 55): PCD Maltron, 081-398 3265. Mouse Topper ( pounds 19. 95): Camargue Computing, 0453-890087. Curtis MVP Mouse ($ 89) and Foot Switch ($ 19): Curtis Manufacturing, New Hampshire, USA, (0101-603) 532 4123. + The Keyboard Company, stocks a wide range of keyboards and mice, including the Maltron and the Twiddler (another alternative keyboard): 0453-873291. + Richard Donkin is a computer consultant for a large systems integrator. + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +117 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 23, 1993 + +CARRY ON CAMPING; +Marc Almond's retrospective live album is a kitsch classic + +BYLINE: CAROLINE SULLIVAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 14 + +LENGTH: 712 words + + + THE DAY former Frankie Goes To Hollywood singer, Holly Johnson announced he was HIV-positive, Marc Almond was telephoned by a tabloid reporter chasing a rumour that the pop star had been seen leaving an Aids clinic. + "Well, I was coming out of a clinic," admitted Almond, worrying the silver skull rings weighing down his hands. "I'd had a test. I've had regular HIV tests, and as of three weeks ago I wasn't [HIV positive]. I said I'd say if I was positive - I feel there's no stigma attached to it. So many friends are HIV that I feel almost guilty when I get the letter saying I'm not. " + Almond's excesses during the eighties are well documented. They add up to what he calls "12 years of tears". A live album and video of the same name, chronicling the career he has managed to pilot through all the indulgence, has just been released. + Southport-born and now in his "very, very late twenties", (ie around 36), Almond is a British institution. He's the operatically camp diva loved by all the family, the gay man even homophobes like. His rhinestoned cris de coeur have been radio staples since Tainted Love in 1981. "Cabbies and builders have nothing but compliments for me. " Some of his strongest supporters, he adds, are elderly women who adore his cover versions of Brel and Aznavour. + Almond - it's his real name, incidentally - estimates that this is his 12th album, and the newly released What Makes A Man A Man his 30-something single. Recorded at a spectacularly sequinned Albert Hall gig last September, Twelve Years of Tears is, like Almond himself, coy, humorous and overwrought. It follows his musical lineage from the Soft Cell sex-dwarf days, through the five-weeks-at-No-1 Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart, to recent brow-moppers like Jacky. + Almond has always cast himself as a misfit, and even if this is belied by his wealthy star status, he's still a symbol to others who feel misunderstood. Many fans who bonded with him during the early days remain loyal: Almond's following is considered the most devoted in the business. + Some of his most popular tunes are openly homoerotic. Take, at random, Champagne, a downbeat vignette about a male stripper. Then there was Jacky (A Brel composition) and its references to "authentic queens and phoney virgins". Almond's subject matter makes his across-the-board acceptance all the more surprising. Why isn't, say, Holly Johnson, who also specialises in easy-care gay pop, equally loved? + It could be because Almond is so much less threatening. His highly coloured moods make it easy for detractors to dismiss him as a drama queen. However, the same neuroses that lead him to "shout and burst into tears" bring out people's protective instincts. + "I am introverted," he contends. "Before going on stage I'm sick with fear. I almost faint. I often forget words. It's that stress and strain of always wanting to be perfect that makes me temperamental - it's the whole diva syndrome. And I don't have a band to back me up - it's down to me, the focus is on me. " + Well, that's what makes a man a man. Speaking of which, the single of that name, an Aznavour ballad about a gay cabaret artist, is performing poorly by Almond standards. It has only reached No 60 on the chart, compared to the top five placings attained by his last single, The Days Of Pearly Spencer. Almond's erratic hits are often followed by relative flops, but he's suspicious this time. + "I think I'm encountering homophobia for the first time. It's had literally no radio play. Even my least commercial records usually get a few. I was booked on Richard And Judy to perform the song and, two days before, someone called and cancelled and was very rude. I asked why and they said, 'We don't have to give out a reason. 'But Mums love that song! It's an old one! I thought it'd be accepted. " + A Granada Television press officer responded: "A big story had come up the day before, so we had to cancel him. There was no intention of annoying or insulting him, and it was certainly not homophobic. " + So how does Almond see himself? "Am I one of those endearing British eccentrics, you mean?" He issues a vibrant cackle. "No - I just see myself as stumbling from one obstacle to the next. " + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +118 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 24, 1993 + +OUT TO LUNCH: ULTRA SWEET AND HUNKY DORY; +Tucked away down Devon's mazy lanes, Matthew Fort finds a pub with pukka grub + +BYLINE: MATTHEW FORT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN WEEKEND PAGE; Pg. 38 + +LENGTH: 902 words + + + THERE'S a bit in a poem by Walt Whitman which goes something like this: "They too turned from their path/ And, entering the Bayou of Plaquemene/ Soon were lost in a maze of sluggish and devious waters . . . " + I feel that way about the back roads of the West Country. Maze, sluggish, devious: those are the words. It was more by luck than good judgment that I found my way to the Drewe Arms, hard by the church in Broadhembury, at the appointed hour. + To be honest, I didn't really feel much like lunch. Two days of West Country hospitality had rather put paid to my appetite. However, when the happy honeymooning couple asked me to join them, what could I say, particularly when one of the parties was Fay Maschler, the premiere mangeuse among British restaurant crits? Her husband, Reg Gadney, is no uninformed nibbler, either. It's the kind of company that puts a chap on his mettle a bit. + In the event, of course, all was happiness and light, munching and mirth. For a start, the Drewe Arms is evidently popular with the elderly crowd. Mid-week, and personnel carriers of senior citizens decant outside this handsome, whitewashed and thatched pub at the heart of a handsome, whitewashed and thatched village for a spot of tucker and a bit of a chinwag. Judging by the joviality among the party of eight at the next table, they had arrived just as the bolts were being drawn back on the front door. But then they're no fools, these One-Foot-In-The- Grave types. The Drewe Arms serves up some notably above average grub. The bar snacks seemed to be pretty niftily priced and embraced such creations as The Gang Plank, an extended open sandwich laden with a supermarket of fish and meats, hot pastrami sandwich, gravlax, and so on, for between about pounds 3. 50 and pounds 6. 50, but we were there for the serious stuff - which, at pounds 16. 75 for three courses, including VAT and service, was quite seriously priced, too. + So it was on to the pickled herrings with acquavit, onion and anchovy bake, and beef salad by way of Act One; then turbot with herb hollandaise, a whole John Dory with sorrel, and monkfish in a spicy tomato sauce for Act Two; and hazelnut meringue, sticky toffee pudding, and treacle tart to see us out with. + As you can tell, fish is something of a speciality of the house. And, as the genial presence in the kitchen is Kirstin Burge, and she is Danish, this should not surprise. What does surprise in an English pub is the quality of the raw material. It comes, kerflip, kerflop, straight from Newlyn, apparently, and it shows. The John Dory, slashed and grilled with masterly precision, had the muscular density and sweetness of a fish that was scarcely aware that it wasn't still finning away in the briney. Reg spoke positively of his turbot (and of the herb mayo) and, while Mrs Gadney seemed more interested in her companions' dishes than she did her own monkfish, she didn't leave much for inspection by her fellow crit either. + Veg and other accompaniments were fine and well cooked, if a bit of the "I've seen this melange before" kind. This is one of the problems in judging pub food. Should one be surprised that they do it well, or should one be delighted that they do it at all? Should one apply the same fierce gaze as one would at a restaurant, or should we relax under the genial hospitality of a well-run public house? On balance, for pounds 16. 75, I think we have to apply the stringent criteria of the pukka restaurant; and, on that basis, I think that we should expect more than a couple of nice boiled potatoes and a bog standard mixture of admittedly good, fresh this and that. + My mother once said that of all anti-social foods, treacle tarts covered with nuts were the worst, because a properly made tart would lift any set of dentures clean off the gums, and the nuts would then infiltrate the gap, giving rise to intense irritation and much undignified denture clattering. I don't know how the old codgers coped with the Drewe Arms treacle tart, but I had some difficulty in keeping my fillings in place. Thank heavens there were no nuts. + According to legend, the sticky toffee pudding here is the best in Britain, and if sticky toffee pudding is the kind of thing you like, then this is the ne plus ultra of the kind of thing you like. Only Mr Gadney's hazelnut meringue disappointed, being too dry for easy conversation. + However, he had struck out boldly with the pickled herring and acquavit; fine, oily fish, clean flavours, crisp alcohol. The onion and anchovy bake, a kind of Jansen's Delight without the potato, was a seductive way to start a lunch - sweet onion, pungent anchovy. Mrs Gadney's beef salad - strips of beef briskly turned in the frying pan and annointed with dressing and set about with green leaves - looked a bit unpreposessing, I thought, but it tasted spritely and entertaining. Much like our time there, on reflection. + I drank two pints of amiable, nutty Otter Ale. The lovebirds drank wine (from a short but eminently sensible list, with plenty of half bottles) and the bill came to pounds 76. Or at least I think it did. Mrs Gadney walked off with the bill. A woman of rare sweetness, that. G + Drewe Arms, Broadhembury, Devon. Tel: 040 484 267. Open: 12-2, 7-10, all week, except Sunday lunch. Cards: Access & Visa. Vegetarian meals with prior notice. Children's helpings. + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +119 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 24, 1993 + +HELPING THE BAFFLED MILLIONS CLAIM THEIR ENTITLEMENT + +BYLINE: ROISIN MCAULEY. + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 31 + +LENGTH: 671 words + + + THE Child Poverty Action Group, which has recently published its latest guides to the benefits system, is calling for Government action to improve the take-up of state benefits and the service to claimants. Nearly pounds 1. 5 billion per year in means-tested benefits go unclaimed, says the CPAG, and 2. 5 million households are missing out on benefits to which they're entitled. + Age Concern, which has just published the 1992-93 edition of the Your Rights guide to state benefits for older people, also reports 21 per cent of pensioners entitled to income support and 19 per cent entitled to housing benefit do not claim. + "Claiming benefits can seem like an obstacle course with lengthy claim forms relating to labyrinthine regulations and a shameful level of errors in calculations and decisions," says CPAG director Fran Bennett. + Growing numbers of newly-unemployed are having to claim benefit for the first time and are often shocked at the low standards of service, she says. "The need has never been greater for accurate and up-to-date information to help with claiming benefits and challenging incorrect decisions. " + Mike Nicholson found this when he had to retire from his job as head porter at a Cambridge College. "I developed Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) in 1987. Every major muscle system was affected and I can only walk about 50 yards. I am in intense pain and on morphine. " + He now depends on Income Support, Mobility Allowance and Care Allowance but had no idea he was entitled to all three benefits until he asked the Cambridge Benefits Advice Centre for help. The centre also fought his case when his attendance allowance was reduced. + "I had to go to law to get the higher rate of attendance allowance reinstated and had to wait from February, 1990 until December, 1992 to get the back payments I was entitled to. They lost my file, missed out three months payments and I haven't had a penny yet. + "In three years they haven't got it right and it's not a new claim," he said. + Mr Nicholson points out the renewal of claims forms come in two parts, each 12 pages long. "An awful lot of people, especially the elderly living alone, won't be claiming benefit if they have to fill in forms like that on their own. " + The latest figures on income support claims reveal six out of 10 decisions are defective in some way. The chief adjudication officer's most recent report said that standards in applying the law correctly had "deteriorated", with quality competing with speed of decision-making. + The discretionary Social Fund is a "lottery", which is not meeting the urgent needs of claimants effectively, claims the CPAG. Its cash-limited budget has gone up by 37 per cent against a 71 per cent increase in the rate of applications, one result being that the refusal rate for community care grants is almost three in four, according to the latest figures. + With unemployment still climbing, the strains on the social security system will increase, says the charity, which hopes the publication of its authoritative guides will "at least help claimants and their advisers to get the accurate, prompt and efficient service that the Government and the Benefits Agency claim "they are committed to". + - The National Welfare Benefits Handbook ( pounds 6. 50 or pounds 2. 50 for benefits claimants, including postage) is a guide to claiming all means-tested benefits such as income support, family credit and the new disability working allowance. + The Rights Guide to Non-Means-Tested Benefits ( pounds 5. 95 or pounds 2. 25 to claimants) explains eligibility for and how to claim benefits such as maternity pay, widows' benefits, disability payment and pensions. + Both guides are available direct from CPAG Ltd, 1-5 Bath Street, London EC1V 9PY. + Your Rights 1992-93 costs pounds 2. 50 and is available from good book shops or direct from ACE Books, Dept Y92, Age Concern England, 1268 London Road, London SW16 4ER. Credit card order on 081-679 8000. + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +120 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 26, 1993 + +YELTSIN SCORES BIG WIN + +BYLINE: JONATHAN STEELE IN MOSCOW AND DAVID HEARST IN EKATERINBURG + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 1 + +LENGTH: 699 words + + + BORIS YELTSIN won an unexpectedly sweeping victory in the Russian referendum yesterday. He now has to decide whether it gives him the right to dissolve the Congress of People's Deputies, bring in a new presidential constitution, and call early parliamentary elections. + In the four-question referendum, the Russian leader scored best on the first question, which asked Russia's 105 million voters if they trusted him. A Russian television exit poll of 2,400 people taken in 16 cities across the country gave him 75 per cent on this question, far higher than pre-election forecasts. The same poll said that two in three people backed his radical reform programme in question two. + On question four, asking voters if they favoured early parliamentary elections, it was not clear late last night from the preliminary official results if he had achieved half the total electorate, as required by the constitutional court. But in one area of central Moscow, the 39th precinct of the Frunzensky borough, 57 per cent of electors voted Yes on this question. + Although none of the questions gives him a legal mandate, Mr Yeltsin had earlier said he would take "tough measures" to "neutralise" parliament if he won strongly. The draft constitution he published on Friday in outline would downgrade parliament and eliminate the key posts of speaker and vice-president, the two jobs occupied by his chief opponents, Ruslan Khasbulatov and Alexander Rutskoi. + But both men have said they will fight, and foreseeing just such a situation Valery Zorkin, the chairman of the constitutional court, said that even a striking victory on all four questions did not give the president the right unilaterally to bring in a new constitution or dissolve parliament. + Vasily Kazakov, chairman of the central electoral commission, said that in Far Eastern regions where polling had ended, the turnout had topped 50 per cent everywhere, the minimum level for a valid result. + Russians appear to have been impressed by Mr Yeltsin's television appearances. Mr Yeltsin made a final appeal for support in a nationwide television address on Saturday evening, saying the first and fourth questions were the most important. He countered his opponents' claims that he wants supreme power by saying that under a new constittuion for Russia "no one would ever be able to concentrate the fullness of power in one pair of hands". + He reminded the elderly that he had nearly doubled their pensions recently. He promised army officers that they would be entitled to a plot of land on retirement, which they could own or sell. "We have already passed through the most painful period of the reforms," he claimed. "It is now time to get down to the work of quiet reforms, without convulsions or fuss. + "Don't believe the honey-voiced singers who offer a velvet version of the reforms. You and I understand that there are no simple and painless ways out of the crisis. " + Mr Khasbulatov told viewers on Saturday that "permanent parliamentary supervision" was needed to stop those who wanted "unlimited power". The best solution was for a government of national concord answerable to parliament. After casting his ballot, Mr Khasbulatov said there was a danger of fraud. "In the Far East false ballots have been manufactured in large quantities," he said. + In the president's home city of Ekaterinburg, voters appeared to be solidly behind the president, overshadowing doubts they might have about his reforms. Taisia Urvantseva, a pensioner, gave a typical view: "Even though food is expensive, at least it is on the shelves, whereas before they were empty. I can't buy the more expensive things, so I buy cheaper things. That is how it should be. Yes, I trust Yeltsin. I have seen him on television and I think he is an honest man. " + The voting took place amid an unrelenting stream of government propoganda, telling people to vote "Yes, Yes, No, Yes" which in order are the answers to the four questions about support for the president, his reform programme, early elections for the presidency and early elections for parliament. + Full preliminary official results are expected tomorrow. + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +121 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 26, 1993 + +GOING PLACES; +For many women, to travel is to embark on a voyage of personal discovery + +BYLINE: ANGELA NEUSTATTER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 744 words + + + "I was 38 years old and free. The motorbike was powerful . . . I rode across a grassy, saucer-shaped valley which, millions of years ago, had been the crater of a volcano. The winding road was frightening, with sheer drops into canyons on one side, solid rock walls on the other. How I loved it. I revelled in the wide open spaces of the petrified forest and painted desert, sat alone on the rim of the Grand Canyon at sunset, at peace with myself. " + WOMEN TRAVEL differently from men. The motivation to go is often not the same, nor are reactions and encounters, but more significant is the psychic difference: that women's experiences are filtered through the fact of being female. + The resounding tale of travel is a male one. True, Dervla Murphy told wonderful, bold stories of crossing lands on donkey and bicycle, foot and bus; Robin Davidson's Tracks recounted taming camels and riding through the desert; Christina Dodwell related dazzling, terrifying incidents in trips to the remotest places. But they are drops in the ocean of tales of men's intrepid globetrotting. + It was this distorted vision that inspired producer Viv Taylor-Gee to make Maiden Voyages, a series of films following women making journeys. The first (Channel 4, Wednesday, 8. 30pm) follows Zenab Ahmed's journey through Pakistan, her father's homeland. Another goes with Frances Wharton, who left her home in Manchester to ride a motorbike across Northern Australia; a third accompanies Margaret Platt and Maureen Holmes, two widows in their 70s, to the rainforests of Belize. + Taylor-Gee believes that travel for women is often a personal challenge. "Men want to conquer things, women often want to conquer themselves. " She advertised for women who had a special trip they wanted to make and the 3,000 replies revealed how wide and ambitious are women's dreams. Some wanted to go to places like Egypt or China for educational reasons but far more wanted to break loose from domesticity, to learn about themselves and the world. + Margaret Platt and Maureen Holmes have been travelling together since their husbands died 20 years ago. They save their widows' pensions, hoard the odd gift, make their own clothes and eat frugally in order to go on at least one journey a year. They have made 47 trips so far, to Europe, Africa, Asia, Russia; Alaska is next on the list. Platt says, "Our lives are so full, so exciting. I listen to old people moaning about boredom and I say, 'Go off and see the Winter Palace or the Galapagos, then'. " + Miranda Davis is a seasoned traveller and co-editor, with Natania Jansz, of Women Travel (Harrap Columbus, pounds 6. 95). She says: "Most guidebooks neglect to notice that women may need to operate differently from men. I was determined ours should not be a list of do's and don'ts but an understanding of how things may be. " + To get the most out of travel, women often have to unlearn childhood lessons about not speaking to strangers or going to deserted places alone. But while sexual harassment is, inevitably, a feature of travel, Davis believes we are no more at risk abroad than at home. It is sensible and respectful, however, to learn a little of the culture of places you are visiting. Liz Straker admits she was pushing her luck when, in Africa, she took a lift in a local army truck. Stopping at a village for the night, she realised she could not afford a single room, so she suggested to a soldier that they share one with twin beds. "I suppose I was naive because as soon as the lights went out, I heard him get out of bed. I switched them on again and engaged him in an intense conversation about religion for the rest of the night. I was fortunate. " + Women have an advantage when travelling in that they will often have an opportunity to make friends with the local women, perhaps even, as happened to Davis in Morocco, be invited to stay. Quid pro quo is important, though: Lesley Reader stayed with a family in Bhutan and tried to repay their kindness by taking their photographs, cooking them egg and chips and helping them write letters. + Few people remain unchanged by travel. But women who have cracked fears and taboos, who have dared to go for personal development or simply set out boldly in the footsteps of their Victorian forebears, often express the experience as Laura Marshall did: "It made me realise that being a woman doesn't have to limit me in the ways I had felt before. " + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +122 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 27, 1993 + +'LIVES IN DANGER' FROM HEART DRUG + +BYLINE: JAMES ERLICHMAN, CONSUMER AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 437 words + + + THOUSANDS of people being treated for congestive heart failure have been put at risk with a drug that can kill at higher doses, its makers, Boots, admitted yesterday. + A warning to doctors and patients about its risks was required before United States authorities licensed the drug, Manoplax, last month. But no warning was required by the British authorities, which approved the drug last September. + Boots said that preliminary results of a continuing study with Manoplax among 3,500 patients had shown that those receiving the higher daily dose of 100 mg "have a significantly increased risk of death compared to those not receiving the drug". + The company was sending an urgent warning to doctors, telling them immediately to reduce the dose to no more than 75 mg a day. + On the stock market, Boots shares fell by 27p to 466p. The company has not had a siginficant drug discovery since the arthritis painkiller, Ibuprofen, nearly 30 years ago, and it had banked on the success of Manoplax. + A year's treatment costs pounds 650 and City analysts estimated annual sales of up to pounds 30 million, suggesting that more than 40,000 people in the US and in Britain are currently being prescribed the tablets by cardiologists and general practioners. + A Boots spokesman said yesterday that the company never claimed the drug reduced mortality in people with severe congestive heart failure. "We only said that it helped people do more and feel better. " + He added: "For registration in the US we were required to have product labelling, which does indicate there may be some risk attached to taking the drug, but this was not required in the UK. " + The study on 3,500 patients was conducted in Scandinavia, Canada and the US. Boots said no adverse effects had been seen at the 75 mg a day dose and it had "every confidence in the future prospects of Manoplax". + Congestive heart failure affects mainly elderly people. Nearly pounds 1 billion a year is spent on drugs which claim either to boost the pumping action of the failing heart or to relax blood vessels to allow improved circulation. Boots' drug claimed to do both. + In 1990 ICI faced similar problems with its congestive heart failure drug, Corwin. While the drug could help people with the mild form of the disease, it was shown that it could weaken the hearts and hasten the death of people with the severe form. + Dr Joe Collier, editor of the government-sponsored Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin sent to every GP, said: "All new drugs have risks and the problems with Manoplax illustrate how careful we all must be. " + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +123 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 29, 1993 + +CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS; +The power of the Mafia may be waning, but New York has plenty more rotten apples ready to take its place like the Colombian cartels, Jamaican posses and Dominican gangs + +BYLINE: DUNCAN CAMPBELL + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 2487 words + + + HARRY the Horse is singing to packed houses at the Beck Theatre on West 45th Street. Sammy the Bull is singing to packed houses at the Federal District Court on Centre Street. Harry, of course, is one of the characters in the revival of Guys And Dolls, the musical based on the fictionalised gangster tales of Damon Runyon. Sammy is singing without an orchestra. A former Mafia underboss and the killer of 19 people, he is giving evidence in a murder, racketeering and narcotics case against his former associates, John and Joseph Gambino, Matteo Romano and Lorenzo Mannino. + The Bull, or Salvatore Gravano, to give him his true name, has been cooperating fully with the federal authorities in exchange for a deal which gives him a maximum 20- year sentence and a minimum of probation. He is heavily protected, staying probably in a military base, and will be given a "new life" when he is finally released under a witness protection programme. + Court 318 is full and queues of the curious stretch outside, hoping for a glimpse of the drama. Inside, rows marked "Family Only" are occupied by people who are just that, in both senses of the word: elderly women conversing quietly in Italian, children drawing in crayons on the floor, Italian princesses with mighty hair and lipstick the colour of ketchup, gelled young heavies, too big for their suit jackets, having to content themselves for now with shooting only their cuffs. + Bruce Cutler, the defence attorney for the Gambinos and the man who last year defended mob leader John Gotti, also against Sammy's evidence, is in full flow. He is bald, bull-necked and histrionic - Mussolini meets Manhattan and splashes Chanel for Men on his jowls to sharpen his cross-examination. He addresses the ceiling with his arms in the air, he chucks one defendant under the chin, tugs the hair of another at the nape of the neck, tries the patience of Judge Peter K. Leisure with his observations and provokes enough calls of "objection, your honour" from the district attorney to fill an entire series of Perry Mason. + "Mr Gravano, you consider yourself intelligent?" + "I'm not as educated as you, but I'm not stupid. " + "You made millions of dollars, you killed 19 people, and you're facing probation - and you say you're not intelligent?" + Ripples of laughter flutter across the gallery and there are even chuckles from some members of the 18-strong jury: six are reserves in case of illness or some other sudden inability to deliver a verdict. Sammy has been explaining how one victim was left in the trunk of a car, how another was gunned down by a team liaising with "walkie-talkies and back-up shooters," how he once loan-sharked $ 1. 5 million at an interest rate of 52 per cent per year. + When Harry meets Sammy, it's hard to resist the temptation to see crime in New York as a game still played out mainly by men with lapels as wide as running-boards and names that end in i or o. The current Gambino trial and the preceding Gotti trial have reminded people that the Mafia is alive to the extent that they are still adept at making other people dead. But how much influence do they still wield? + Mike Cherkasky, one of the district attorneys who prosecuted Gotti, feels that the Runyonesque associations of gangland have allowed the Mob to be treated too tolerantly, that the true nature of their corrosive and destructive effect on the city of New York has not been properly appreciated. But at the same time he sees the Mob's power as on the wane, their impact on the daily life of the average New Yorker as minor compared to the real concerns of street shootings and crack and muggings. + New York used to be America's greatest port, he says, but now even the banana boats from the Caribbean go up the Hudson River to Albany, driven away by a greedy Mafia stranglehold on the docks. Conventions which could have brought millions of dollars to the city have been scared off by mob control of the exhibition centres, where a hundred bucks would be required to plug in a lamp. But Cherkasky says the days have passed when you could say that the Mafia had a hand in everything from delivering your newspapers to taking your remains to the burial plot. He worries about how safe his daughter will be when she goes to the shops, not whether he pays an extra cent on his milk because of some Mafia cream-off. + "They are dumb thugs," he says of the men he has prosecuted. "What makes them different is that they are willing to push the degree of violence a little further. " Their appeal to the American public stretches back to the Wild West, he says, to the country's fascination with Billy the Kid and folk-heroes measured by the number of notches on their guns. "But gentrification of certain areas has changed their ability to recruit and the Mob control in a number of institutions is now effectively destroyed. " + Sammy the Bull's co-operation is significant in that he has a broad overview on the Gambino family, who were the largest of the New York mobs, but the Genovese family remain and are "the least touched and the most sophisticated. " Cherkasky, a laconic man who earns around $ 100,000 as a DA, (much less than the ebullient Cutler) is discreet about his views on the deal that Gravano has been offered. He points to a Christmas card he received from someone he prosecuted, who had killed six people, and whose "deal" was 60-years-to-life, as an indication of what a more appropriate penalty might be. + But he argues that the use of such "event-specific" informers to nail Mob bosses can be justified by the message it sends out: "We rely on people having faith that law enforcement works. When you have someone who flouts the law, it establishes a bravado, a feeling that you could get away with anything. " And he dismisses the notion that the Mob will hunt informers to the ends of the earth: "They're not omniscient or omnipresent, it's the gang that couldn't shoot straight. " + In any case, says Cherkasky, the "gang" power is shifting, to the Colombian cartels, to the "unbelievably violent" Jamaican posses, to the street-level Dominicans. What will replace the Mafia is, in true American style, a multi-cultural syndicate of the future, where the importing will be done by Middle Eastern and Israeli criminals, who will use Italian middle-men, who will use African-Americans for distribution and enforcement of deals on the street. + Which brings us back to the real concerns of American city-dwellers - the safety of their streets and schools and homes and subways, and how well the police enforce it. + IN POLICING terms, what is happening in New York mirrors London in many ways: there is a new "can-do" commissioner, Raymond Kelly, making public noises about fighting racism; there is a new policy to put hundreds of additional police officers on the streets; there is an emphasis on localised, "community" policing; there is a rumbling corruption inquiry concerning allegations that detectives have been dealing in cocaine; there is anger among the ranks about the judicial system and the media; there is a row about how complaints against police are best investigated; there is a debate about crime statistics. + At the headquarters of the 28,000-strong New York Police Department, they are bullish about figures which show that the crime figures have started to fall. This drop includes both murders, of which there were 1,995 last year compared with 2,154 in 1991. + The figure of 2,000 has become the benchmark through which the homicidal temperature of the city is taken (the total for London, with a similar population and police strength is 185). Street crime has fallen, too, the total down 7. 8 per cent in the last year. Crime on the subway, targeted by the NY City Transit Police, is down 30 per cent. + But while this may be gratifying and is grudgingly recognised, even by some of the police's critics, there is little sign of a comparable decline in the level of the apprehension experienced by citizens or their preoccupation with violence. + Drugs remain the police number one priority, says Inspector Lawrence Loesch of the NYPD, and are seen as responsible for the debilitating muggings and burglaries, the turf wars and casual shootings by young men for whom a gun is as much a fashion accessory as a weapon. And it is drugs that take the police most frequently into confrontation with the city's black and hispanic populations. + Race, of course, plays a major part in any real discussion of law enforcement and crime. The percentage of black officers in the force is 11. 6, about half what it should be, but that share has barely changed in 10 years, reflecting a simmering suspicion of the police's attitudes, articulated by a black Brooklyn juror outside the Gambino court: "The old cops used to be all Irish. They were racist, sure, but you knew where you were with them. Now they're all kids from Long Island. " + Commissioner Kelly, an ex-marine and Vietnam vet, agrees. "Our department is disproportionately white," he told New York magazine when he took over from the black former chief, Lee P. Browne. He would like all his officers to live in New York city. In fact, about 40 per cent come from outside the city, but the NYPD remains optimistic that it can make the force look more like the people it serves: among would-be recruits who have applied to sit the latest police exam the total is higher, 23 per cent black and 25 per cent hispanic. The wages are not stunning: from $ 29,000 up to $ 110,000, but the job is secure, the half-pay pension comes after 20 years. The police have placed ads in local papers, complaining that they are paid worse than garbage workers. + Part of the city's recent drop in crime figures is attributed to the Safe Streets, Safe City policy which has poured millions of dollars of additional funding into putting officers on the street to make drug-dealing harder and to encourage the people who each year make nine million emergency calls to feel less beleaguered (here you dial 911 instead of 999). This project is the baby of Mayor Dinkins and he nurtures it carefully, well aware that his re-election may depend heavily on how well he is perceived to have handled crime. + Other routes are being attempted: two weeks ago Commissioner Kelly inaugurated the first Citizens' Police Academy, a 12-week three-hours-a-week course for community leaders who want to sample the police's own training courses. + Other initiatives are cited as evidence that crime need not be ever-increasing: being a media city, there are no less than 11 television programmes that appeal, via reconstructions and interviews, for witnesses to major crimes, offering rewards between $ 150 and $ 1,000 and claiming a high success rate. + A private foundation offers a $ 10,000 reward for information that leads to the conviction of anyone who shoots a policeman and the posters advertising this fact are splashed on the buses and sidewalks of the city. + It is 20 years since undercover cop Frank Serpico blew the whistle on his corrupt brother-officers, got shot in the head for his troubles, and became a book and a film (Al Pacino directed by Sidney Lumet. ) + He is long out of the service, living on a $ 350 a month pension in a cabin in upstate New York, but he casts a long shadow. "Why should the police change when nothing else changes?" he asks. + "People say - why all this violence? When he was our leader, Mr Bush showed us how violent our nation could be with what he did to the Iraqi people, but people don't make the connection. + "Look at what the government did in Waco. They think the people in Waco were brainwashed but so is most of America and the sad thing is they don't realise it. We create the criminals. " + ALTHOUGH corruption is seen as isolated rather than endemic, a major corruption inquiry into allegations of police involvement in cocaine dealing and protection is currently under way. Mindful of allegations that officers have used drugs, the department requires them to take random tests and, says Inspector Loesch, the lines are strictly drawn: "To walk into a restaurant and have a free meal is corruption. " + Serpico, whose sense of humour has remained intact, disagrees: "A free cup of coffee is not what corrupts you. In the law of thermo-dynamics, there are three rules: no use crying over spilled milk; (depending on which part of Brooklyn you come from) you don't get nothin' for nothin'; and you can't beat the system. " + What impact Clinton will have on all this is debatable. Different messages come from the President and Janet Reno, his attorney general: both have bullishly backed the death penalty and heavy sentences for gun use, but talked in liberal terms of alternatives to imprisonment. Bush shifted federal resources from the rackets to drugs but now the old Bush/Reagan initiatives on "interdiction", attacking drugs in their producer countries, are being run down and the drug tsar's office staff in Washington has been cut from 146 to 25. In other spheres, the last two Republican presidents presided over a 45 per cent increase in violent crime. Clinton has said that he wants more law enforcement officers, to bump up the national total from 500,000 to 600,000 via a form of national service, but he is fearful of being seen to be soft and that may rule out more radical moves, particularly on what seems to foreign eyes to be the most pervasive danger: the gun laws. + The Daily News columnist Michael Daly, an amiable American-Irishman who comments on the crime scene in the city, says that the newest drug for the moody teenager in New York is the gun itself, and however much everyone - cops, lawmen, politicians, fearful liquor store managers - laud the British form of control, there is no indication that anything will really change in a United States where there is one gun dealer for every three police officers. New York's gun laws are stiffer than most - but people just drive off to Virginia or Florida or Texas, where buying is easier, and bring them back. + Clinton has said he will sign the bill that mandates a five-day waiting period before gun purchase and limits access to multiple round clips, but he knows that any major measures will bring him sharply up against the powerful and vocal National Rifle Association and its espousal of man's inalienable right to fire bullets into the base of other people's spines from the window of a moving car. + But this is all academic stuff for Sammy the Bull. He is busy giving his performance of a lifetime, swatting Bruce Cutler's cross-examination questions - "Mr Gravano, did you have an epiphany of sorts, when you saw the Lord?" "No" - as if they were bluebottles hovering over the salami. As Legs Diamond says in another gangster musical, "I'm in showbiz. Only a critic can kill me. " + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +124 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +April 30, 1993 + +FIVE INJURED AS LOYALIST GUNMEN FIRE ON CATHOLICS IN BETTING SHOP + +BYLINE: OWEN BOWCOTT IN BELFAST + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 354 words + + + AN ELDERLY man was seriously injured and four others hurt when two loyalist gunmen opened fire into a crowded betting shop in North Belfast yesterday afternoon. + It is at least the fourth time in barely more than a year that loyalist paramilitaries have carried out an indiscriminate attack on a bookmaker's in a nationalist area. + Customers at Brian Graham's premises on North Queen Street, in the New Lodge district, said threats had been made within the last few weeks. + A security door had been installed but is thought to have been left open in the sunny weather. + One of the attackers' guns is believed to have jammed but four men were hit. + The most seriously injured, a man in his sixties, was shot several times in the stomach and chest. All the victims were Catholics. + There were around 15 people in the bookmaker's at the time and some of them escaped behind the counter. + "There was pandemonium," said one of the staff. "There was an old man shot in the stomach on the floor. He seemed very bad. There was another wounded man lying beside the gaming machines. " + The gunmen ran out into a waiting Metro and drove off. + A local woman returning from shopping said there were four men in the vehicle. "Someone in the car was shooting and he hit a fellow in the street. As they drove away they gave two fingers and shouted, 'You are all fenian bastards'. They were jeering and laughing. " + The man wounded outside the betting shop was not seriously hurt. The premises are only 100 yards from a police station. + A local Sinn Fein councillor, Joe Austin, said such an attack had been expected: "This is the loyalists' election manifesto unfolding. " + In a separate incident, a man in his fifties was seriously injured in an explosion in West Belfast yesterday lunchtime. + - Northern Ireland's Independent Commission for Police Complaints yesterday reported a 1 per cent rise in complaints against the Royal Ulster Constabulary in 1992 but a decline in those relating to detention in police holding centres. + Formal disciplinary charges were made against 24 officers. + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +125 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 1, 1993 + +NEWBURY BYELECTION: LARGESSE COMES GIFT-WRAPPED + +BYLINE: STEPHEN BATES, POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 543 words + + + VOTERS in Thursday's Newbury byelection are being showered with inducements from the Government in the hope that they will save the seat. + Ministers say the first byelection of this parliament - which happens to be in a Conservative seat - has nothing to do with their sudden concern for local transport and health facilities. + But the Berkshire town has been promised a bypass and a hospital since the byelection was called and ministers have been unable to resist pointing out the Government's largesse. + Yesterday Virginia Bottomley, the Health Secretary, used the Conservative candidate's press conference to confirm approval for the hospital by 1996, for which the town has been waiting for 20 years. She blamed the Liberal Democrat-controlled council for the delay in planning permission. + Mrs Bottomley added triumphantly: "Liberals prevaricate. Conservatives get things done," and pointed out that waiting lists for hip, knee and cataract operations were down to 15 months for elderly patients. + Newbury has two hospitals: 27 beds for geriatrics in a former workhouse and a 53-bed cottage hospital dating back to the beginning of the century. Any urgent cases have to go 20 miles to Reading, Oxford or Swindon. + Mrs Bottomley's announcement followed last month's approval by John MacGregor, the Transport Secretary, for a pounds 65 million bypass for which Newbury has been waiting 10 years. He too blamed the council for the delay. + David Rendel, the Liberal Democrat's candidate and chief challenger in the byelection, who happens to be a leading light on the council, indignantly denied any delays. "We gave planning permission for the hospital two years ago. " + Both sides have some right on their side. The new hospital has been in the regional health authority's plans for some time but has been held up by a complicated land deal. + The council wants the hospital to be built on a site between Newbury and Thatcham, the two main centres of population, but their plans have been skewed by an elderly woman named Mrs Rookes who bequeathed land several miles away for a hospital in her will. + A building developer offered to provide a site in the council's preferred location if he could have the bequeathed land for housing, which the council did not want in that part of town. + The new hospital now awaits a review which is likely to allow the bequest to be released for housing. The Government's contribution to the pounds 12 million cost will be about pounds 4 million. + The announcements have been noted with some cynicism in Newbury where the general election majority of 12,357 is under threat in the wake of the Government's unpopularity. + There are more shopping days before the byelection with John Patten, the Education Secretary, scheduled to visit early next week followed by Michael Heseltine, the Trade and Industry Secretary, and Kenneth Clarke, the Home Secretary. + Steve Billcliffe, Labour's candidate, said: "If the Government had given the health service a higher priority they would have built the hospital years ago. " + MPs pointed out the promise of a hospital and a bypass did not save the Conservative's skin at the Ribble Valley byelection in the last parliament. + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +126 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 3, 1993 + +WOMEN: BEAUTY IN FORCE AND FRAGILITY + +BYLINE: VAL WILLIAMS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 524 words + + + AT 39, Joyce Tenneson gave up her job as a photography professor in Washington and moved to the run-down garment district of New York. For Tenneson, whose work had been highly regarded in art circles for more than two decades, it was a question of "reclaiming an identity". + The spoils of the battle fought by seventies' feminists came a little late for women of her generation. Married shortly after college graduation, she feels women of her age were "the ones who got burnt". When she began work as a creative photographer, women's photography was seen as inconsequential and, like many, she had to combat a deeply rooted chauvinism: "My photographs were dismissed as 'women's work'. " + Now 47, she is recognised as one of those rare women in contemporary art who has managed to combine a personal aesthetic with the hard world of commercial photography. At first glance, the fragile beauty of her portraits seems at odds with strong, uncompromising photography. Her images are often of beautiful young men and women, angelic children swathed in gauze and pictured against a tracery of light. But a closer look shows her interested not only in the youthful and lovely, but in older bodies and shapes and sizes which many would dismiss as ugly. + When she photographed an elderly women gazing into a mirror, naked from the waist up (see below), she saw her not as a grotesque, but "as a goddess". Invited by Esquire magazine to contribute to a series of portraits, she chose the actress Jessica Tandy, then in her eighties: "When I called, she told me she'd lost her hair through cancer treatment. " Though Tandy assumed her changed appearance would result in the invitation being withdrawn, to Tenneson it posed an intriguing challenge. Her portrait, taken in 1991, makes no attempt to conceal Tandy's age or condition but it is as beautiful as any of her photographs of fashion models and graceful children. + Tenneson has also won recognition for her portraits of men. She chronicled her son Alex from childhood through adolescence, observing the changes in his body and persona with wistfulness and wonder. With the growth of the men's movement in the US, her audience has changed, too. Her workshops now include more male students and agencies which once hired her to document "women's issues" now look to her to make photographs around subjects of male health and sexuality - a campaign about impotency was a recent commission. + In her photographs, she tries to reflect relationships and tensions. In one revealing photograph made in 1986 she posed a child, dressed as an angel, in seeming supplication to an elderly man whose back is turned. The photographer acknowledges its violence and anger, its comment on the absent father. + She now lives very much by her intuition in what might seem a hostile environment. "Someone could look at me and say, 'My God, she's a middle-aged woman on her own living in a crack neighbourhood in New York City'. " For Tenneson, who deals in beauty but confronts it wryly and critically, who ponders on notions of belonging, it was an adventure which justified the risk. + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +127 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 5, 1993 + +WORKING CARERS 'IN STRUGGLE TO HOLD JOBS'; +Earnings losses average pounds 2,000 a year - Social services departments' role under community care shake-up leaves voluntary groups in quandary + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT, AND SALLY WEALE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 5 + +LENGTH: 1060 words + + + ONE in three workers is or has been a carer for an elderly, sick or disabled person or expects to become a carer and to have to take time off to do so, a survey showed yesterday. + Almost one in five working carers said they were having to take time off to look after a dependent person. Most reported loss of earnings averaging more than pounds 2,000 a year. + The survey, among 1,078 people, was conducted in February and March for Crossroads, a charity which runs schemes offering respite breaks for carers. Last year it helped 22,000 families. + Ian Croft, the charity's director, said many employees had declined to take part in the survey because of fears that disclosure of caring responsibilities would damage their job prospects. "Our impression is that carers are struggling to cope on their own with little support," he said. + The survey, carried out at a sample of workplaces across the country, found that 16 per cent of employees had current caring roles and a further 6 per cent had been carers. + Of those without experience as a carer, 16 per cent expected to have to take time off for future caring needs. Overall, therefore, 34 per cent of those surveyed had been, were or anticipated becoming carers. + Among those acting as carers at the time of the survey, 18 per cent said they had taken time off to do so in the previous month, 14 per cent said they had lost earnings and 10 per cent said they had avoided loss of earnings by using annual leave or working flexitime. + Asked if they knew about social security allowances for carers or their dependants, no more than 45 per cent of respondents showed awareness of any benefit when told its name. + Ten per cent of those acting as carers were receiving nursing help, 11 per cent home help, 10 per cent day care for their dependants and 21 per cent social work support. Thirteen per cent said they had received help from a voluntary group or charity. + Asked which professionals they would turn to for advice about caring, only 38 per cent of respondents said social services - despite the fact that the survey was held when the new community care role taken on by social services on April 1 was receiving publicity. + Under the shake-up, local authority social services departments are supposed to act as arrangers of care for elderly and disabled people, agreeing contracts with voluntary groups like Crossroads for provision of respite care and other services. + But a detailed assessment by the charity of the impact of the changes found that the community care shake-up has left many local Crossroads schemes in uncertainty and confusion. + Only one in 12 of the schemes had agreed formal contracts with local authorities up to two weeks after the changes took effect. Many of the rest said they had no idea what was going on. + Case history 1 + CHRIS Algar works full-time as a project manager for multinational computer giant IBM. She also cares for her husband Rob Winternitz who suffers from multiple sclerosis, writes Sally Weale. + Rob was forced to give up his job as a marketing executive four years ago. He is now confined to a wheelchair, is registered blind and his movement is restricted to the use of his left hand. + They manage by paying a small army of people to come in for the odd hour to provide care when Chris is at work. "He could do with having somebody there all the time but that's financially prohibitive," she says. + Even so the costs are considerable - about pounds 250 a month - and the emotional strain enormous. The alternative, they feel, is unacceptable. + Chris, now aged 41, has been caring for her husband since he first developed MS 15 years ago. With his support she is determined to carry on working, for her own sense of fulfilment, and to pay for the mortgage and care he requires. + "It is extremely stressful. You always feel guilty about something. You never feel you are doing anything quite as well as you could do," she said. + "You feel guilty when you are at work because you are not caring. You feel guilty when you're caring because you're not at work. There's a constant anxiety, particularly with the current economic climate. " + Chris considers herself fortunate in having understanding employers. Although there is no formal flexitime arrangement, she is able to organise her own working day. + She is even able to work from their home in Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne, on a laptop computer when her husband, also 41, is too unwell for her to leave. Others do not encounter the same level of employer tolerance and most carers Chris knows in similar situations have sacrificed their jobs because of the pressures. + She says: "In terms of financial support, I feel very strongly that working carers should get tax allowance. I pay over pounds 9,000 in taxes but get nothing back to pay for Rob's care. A small gesture by the Government would have a major effect. Without the money I earn, I don't know how we would survive. " + Case history 2 + PAT is one of thousands who find themselves having to give up work to take on a full-time caring role, writes Sally Weale. + She was a clothing machinist, living at home with her widowed mother who in August 1981 suffered a stroke. Pat, who did not want to be identified, has been caring for her 24 hours a day ever since. + Her mother is now 90. She is unable to walk or hold a conversation, is incontinent, and suffers from epileptic fits and dementia. She sleeps in a bed in the sitting room of their council maisonette in Hackney, east London, because she is too heavy to manoeuvre upstairs. Pat, who is 65, receives daily support from nurses who help get her mother up and put her to bed. The rest of the time she copes alone. + "I had to give up work. There was no way I could go on. I feel like I'm only living for her. I used to go out with friends, go away on holiday. After mum had her stroke I just lost touch with everyone. I can't even talk to her. " She survives on a weekly pension of pounds 61 a week, and receives the full 24-hour attendance allowance of pounds 44. 90 a week, but despite the financial hardship, it is the lack of emotional support which is her greatest source of distress. + "You feel forgotten half the time. Sometimes I go upstairs and I'm so frustrated I just scream out loud. " + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +128 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 5, 1993 + +COVENT GARDEN OFFERS CUT-PRICE SEATS TO STUDENTS AND PENSIONERS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 230 words + + + THE Royal Opera House yesterday announced a series of subsidised opera and ballet performances for people on low incomes. The company is willing to lose around pounds 30,000 a show to line up four Saturday matinees with prices ranging from pounds 5 to pounds 20. + Normally a seat at the Covent Garden theatre costs pounds 62 on average, with top prices of more than pounds 200. + Students, senior citizens and the under-18s are intended to benefit from the first stage of the Subsidised Saturdays scheme, and the company hopes to find ways of reaching others on low incomes. + Jeremy Isaacs, ROH general director, said the board had taken the decision because of concern about the level of prices it had to charge to balance the books. Initially more than 8,000 people will benefit from the scheme with two operas and two ballets scheduled - Madam Butterfly and The Magic Flute, and Romeo and Juliet and The Nutcracker. + Two more subsidised matinees will be scheduled later in the season, providing sponsorship can be arranged, and the plan is eventually to have 10 shows each year for people on low incomes. + Highlights of the new season, which starts on September 11, include Jose Carreras and Placido Domingo returning to the ROH. Domingo stars in Carmen and in Girl of the Golden West, and Carreras appears in the seldom-performed Fedora by Giordano. + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +129 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 6, 1993 + +CARE POLICY 'CLOSING HOMES' + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE. + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 143 words + + + ALMOST 500 local authority old people's homes are being closed or privatised because of the Government's community care programme, according to a trade union survey published yesterday. + The homes, about one in six of the total in England and Wales, are being off-loaded by council social services departments which are expected by ministers to concentrate on arranging care for elderly people, rather than providing it. The departments are required to spend 85 per cent of their community care funds in the private or voluntary sectors. + The survey, by the privatisation research unit run by leading public sector unions, suggests that 54 council homes were closed in the run-up to the April community care shake-up, 45 were earmarked for closure, 91 were transferred to the private or voluntary sectors and 301 were proposed for transfer. + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +130 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 7, 1993 + +HOUSING: HOMING IN ON A DUAL PROBLEM; +A scheme to rehouse the elderly is also reducing homelessness + +BYLINE: JOHN VIDAL + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 21 + +LENGTH: 423 words + + + WHEN the heroes returned to the South-east after the war, they needed homes. Councils provided them. Dull and utilitarian outside but spacious, well-built and desirable two-storey semi-detacheds sprang up by the score on the edges of towns - none more so + than in Reigate where the Woodhatch community of four linked council estates was born, grew up and now, it could be said, is growing old. + Three years ago Reigate and Banstead council found that 41 per cent of the people on its estates were over 60 - more than double the national average. And research showed that 25 per cent of their council houses were under-occupied, with one or two spare bedrooms after families had grown up and moved on. Meanwhile the homelessness problem was growing. It is not on a London scale but more than 170 families in bed and breakfasts or cramped flats is an expensive recipe for social misery. + Part of the solution to these two problems has come from an inspired piece of lateral thinking from the council, in partnership with Anchor Housing Association. If the elderly (most of whom were fit and independent) would like to move out of the homes they had known and often loved for so long, went the theory, their houses could be given to homeless families. + The only way to do it, says Peter Trowbridge, the council's principal development officer, was to offer very high-quality purpose-built homes that didn't smack of sheltered accommodation or dependency and were suitable for people to spend the rest of their lives in. + The result has been a development of 37 one- and two-bedroom units in the centre that have been snapped up by the elderly. Their new homes are in the centre of the community where they have always lived, close to the shops, a library and a new civic centre. There are lifts but no warden. "We didn't want people to feel they were going into a home," says Trowbridge. "They are totally independent but have access to a communal alarm system, so they are not isolated. " + The houses they have vacated are now being allocated to homeless families, on an ascending order to match needs with the space available. So pleased is the council that they are now about to repeat it with a similar development in nearby Horley. + If Reigate had just built houses for the homeless, says Martin Burke, Anchor's divisional director, it could have led to stigmatisation of a community, and we still would have had under-occupancy. The benefits this way are enormous. It must be applicable elsewhere. + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +131 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 7, 1993 + +COMMENTARY: WHY OUR EUROPEAN FUTURE IS AN ELDORADO NIGHTMARE + +BYLINE: MELANIE PHILLIPS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 20 + +LENGTH: 1113 words + + + MEANWHILE in the real world, away from fevered amendment or excitable byelection, certain uncomfortable facts about the relationship between Europe and the British economy somehow keep getting ignored. Some of our brighter and more honest politicians are now beginning to acknowledge the huge gulf that has emerged between leaders and led. They note with unease that the agenda preoccupying themseems to have less and less to do with the issues preoccupying the electorate. + They wonder aloud why this has happened and what they can do about it. Then they return to their various platforms of extolling the achievements of the Tories in reviving the British economy. Or decrying the failure of the Tories in creating more than three million unemployed. Or heaping scorn on both Tories and Labour for ruining the economy and coming up with no new ideas. All political parties, however, agree on one thing: unless we're "at the centre of Europe" (whatever that means), we can kiss goodbye to economic strength and social prosperity. + Alas, would it were that simple. Some people think that the facts indicate a rough time for our friend, Rosy Future, as a result of Europe. Two researchers from Warwick University have come up with an analysis which would give poor old Martyn Lewis migraine. Writing in Bristol University's quarterly, Policy and Politics, John Benington and Matthew Taylor argue that the European single market spells very bad news indeed for the British welfare state. Their argument makes the terms of the current debate on both right and left about how we might restructure the welfare state to cope with demographic and social change look singularly myopic. + Their main point is that the current crisis in welfare, caused by increasing levels of need (more old people) calling upon an already diminished resource base (fewer people in work), will be exacerbated by the workings of the European single market. + The aim of closer European integration, they write, is not merely to create a larger, more open market but to eliminate the massive overcapacity which is seen as an impediment to competitiveness with America or Japan. As a result vulnerable industries - not just the old smokestack industries but hi-tech ones such as computers or telephone exchange equipment - are going to be cut back. Sir John Harvey-Jones has estimated that by the year 2000, more than half the EC's factories will have been closed. Other forecasts are even more drastic. + The effects will be disproportionately heavy on regions where these industries are concentrated. Several commentators have concluded that there will emerge a prosperous "golden triangle", based on Frankfurt, Paris and Milan, and a "brown banana" of more disadvantaged regions on the periphery, including Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Southern Italy, Greece and - you guessed it - the dear old UK. With Italy, we stand to suffer the sharpest initial loss in jobs and then have the lowest long-term gain in employment of all European member states. + So far from the EC providing the motor for better job prospects for women, its emphasis on flexible working will push women further to the periphery of the workforce. As for ethnic minorities, they will be squashed even further into the shadowy sub-culture of an underground economy. + Poverty, which now affects huge numbers throughout Europe across a dramatically widening range of ages and classes, will further deepen and widen as industrial restructuring and increased unemployment coincide with an ageing population and burgeoning numbers of single-parent households. The fear is, the authors argue, that "social dumping" will occur. More skilled and qualified workers will move into the golden triangle with the better-off and active elderly moving into Mediterranean retirement homes, while an ever-more disadvantaged and dependent population will be left behind in the UK. + Even if this nightmare Eldorado is just too apocalyptic, the integrated market of nearly 350 million people will be badly undermined, they write, if nearly 50 million are just too poor to consume the goods and services it offers. At the same time, Benington and Taylor point to changes in policy-making which might have a further impact on the British welfare state. Welfare issues increasingly have to be dealt with not just at national level but also through supra-national and trans-national European networks; and the EC itself is taking more social policy initiatives. As a result, the prospect of greater welfare harmonisation looms ever larger. + This raises the possibility that the UK will increasingly move away from its own concept of welfare based on citizenship towards the European system of welfare related to employment. If that happens (and there are signs that it is already shifting in that direction), our society will become even more polarised and fragmented into haves and have-nots than it is now. And if social benefits were harmonised, would they be levelled up or down? For despite government opposition to harmonising benefit rates, since the European safety nets are set even lower than they are here, the trend to level down would surely, over time, be irresistible. + In fairness, Benington and Taylor also suggest possible advantages from integration, such as opening up debate and maybe promoting the spread of welfare pluralism. But the overriding point is surely this. Whatever welfare system is devised, by Peter Lilley on the one hand or the Labour Party's think-tank on the other, it must founder under the impact of the remorseless arithmetic of massive unemployment. Unemployment has to be brought down if any welfare system is to function. But the single market is pointing us pitilessly in the opposite direction. + And yet no political party is remarking on this. There is no influential political voice warning us that the recession wasn't just a blip but a harbinger of our Euro-future. If Benington and Taylor are correct - and they speak for a number of commentators - the Tories' recovery is a sick illusion, Labour's denunciations of the unemployment totals are a glib and meaningless travesty, and the Lib-Dems' europhilia is as misplaced as belief in any of history's misbegotten utopias. + Talk of electoral pacts thus becomes similarly irrelevant. What's the point of getting rid of a Conservative government if it is to be replaced by a Lib-Lab administration equally - if not more - committed to a political and economic scenario that is inimical to social justice? Is it any wonder that people increasingly feel that political debate parted company from reality some time ago? + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +132 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 8, 1993 + +BEWARE THE CLOUDS THAT CAN BLIGHT YOUR PLACE IN THE SUN + +BYLINE: ROISIN MCAULEY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 31 + +LENGTH: 863 words + + + Who to contact + DVICE on health provision abroad is available in leaflet E121 from the Overseas Branch of the DSS, Newcastle NE98 1YX. Write with your full name, date of birth and NI or pension number. + Citizens Europe Advisory Service answers queries between 2pm and 5pm on 071-973-1992. + Help the Aged has prepared a code of practice for elderly people abroad who need to be repatriated to a residential or nursing home in the UK. Send a SAE to Help the Aged, St James Walk, London EC1R 0BE. + Retirement Education Services has produced four audio tapes and a 60-page booklet on retirement, including advice on moving abroad. Available from Tony Wheeler Associates, 15a Station Road Industrial Estate, Wallingford, Oxon, OX10 OHX. + The Federation of Overseas Property Developers Agents and Consultants, FOPDAC, provides legal notes on buying property abroad. Tel 081-744-2362. + For Arminshaws Removals advice leaflet on moving abroad tel 0963-34065. + THE prospect of sun all-year round is appealing - but careful research is advisable before retiring abroad. + In particular, those taking early retirement should check if the health system in an EC country is available to all residents or is based on contributions. + "If it's a contributions-based scheme you can fall into an early retirement trap," says Emma Fallon, of the Citizens Europe Advisory Service. "In France and Spain, health cover provided under the E111 form runs out after a couple of years. + "Thereafter you're not automatically covered for health insurance unless you're in receipt of a state benefit like a pension so you have to buy into a system of health cover. That can be expensive. If you can't afford it, you shouldn't go. " + Since 1955, UK state pensions can be paid anywhere in the world. In countries where there is no reciprocal tax agreement like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, the pension is frozen at the level paid when the pensioner left Britain. However, pensioners living in EC countries and those with which there are reciprocal agreements receive the yearly increases and the pension is paid gross. + This made Spain very popular for retirement when the comparative cost of living was low in the 1960s and 1970s and there are perks for senior citizens - cheap local bus travel, 50 per cent reductions on inter-urban trains and buses and cheap holidays in other parts of the country. + For many elderly expatriates, the dream is turning to a nightmare because they are in poor health and have difficulty obtaining geriatric care. + "Medical treatment in Spain for British pensioners is free," says the British consul in Alicante, John Dove. "The problem is nursing care in old age. As Spain becomes more prosperous families move around more. Parents who used to be cared for get left behind. " + Spanish social services have not caught up with the gap and the number of elderly British needing intensive support is growing. Hundreds are moving back to Britain, sick, disillusioned and, in some cases, broke. + The 125,000 British residents registered with the British Consulate in Spain is an underestimate. People tend to register in danger spots, not in safe resorts. Mr Dove reckons 95 per cent of the 25,000 registered British citizens on the Costa Blanca are pensioners, with 40 per cent over 75 and 10 per cent over 80. Figures could be underestimated by up to 50 per cent. + The value of the pound has dropped, cutting the incomes of the retired living on savings. Removal companies are moving people back to the UK or to France where property prices are now cheaper. + "There are stories about people going back from here in tears too," says 58-year-old John O'Callaghan, who sold a house in London and retired to St Leonard de Noblat, near Limoges, France. "I looked around a lot. One of the things that made here attractive was the hospital. The pretty hamlets are splendid in terms of intimacy and getting to know the community but you really need to be near a town. I worked out that, with a population of 5,000 in St Leonard, it has a safety net of services. " + For those prepared to abandon the dream of fair weather, Ireland has advantages for the senior citizen. Kathleen Regan, 79, moved from Camberwell, south London to Boyle, Co. Roscommon in north-west Ireland in 1976. Her UK pension of pounds 56. 10 a week is paid monthly into her bank account in Boyle. + It's topped up by a means tested non-contributory Irish pension of pounds 7. 30 a week and a weekly living alone allowance of pounds 4. 40. Like all state pensioners she gets free travel, pounds 130 a year fuel allowance, pounds 143 a year electricity allowance and a free black and white TV licence. Living alone entitles her to free telephone rental. + "I was very happy in Camberwell when my husband was alive. Then it got lonely. Now I'm very content," she says. Mrs Regan qualifies for means-tested free health care. Those who don't qualify contribute to the residence based health insurance scheme. Long-term geriatric care is costly - unless you qualify for free health care. + Money Guardian is edited by Margaret Hughes + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +133 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 8, 1993 + +AGE CONCERN FORMS LINK WITH NATWEST TO OFFER FREE ADVICE + +BYLINE: JILL PAPWORTH + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 31 + +LENGTH: 504 words + + + AGE Concern, the largest voluntary sector provider of direct services for the UK's 10 million older people, has formed a joint venture to market the services of National Westminster Bank's independent financial advisory arm, NatWest Insurance Services (NWIS). + The charity, which has developed and sold a successful range of general insurance products to more than 300,000 older people in recent years, is now launching Asset Financial Planning, a service providing free, independent advice on life Insurance, pension and investment products. + "Many people find it difficult to assess their future financial needs and it can be just as unclear where they can go for straightforward, impartial advice," says the director of Age Concern, Sally Greengross. + Conscious that any service recommended by Age Concern will be seen as reliable by older people, Ms Greengross said that NWIS, one of the largest independent financial advisers in the UK, had been chosen to provide the advice for Asset only after extensive market research. + At the beginning of this year NatWest abandoned its role as the main high street provider of independent advice through its branch network but has retained NWIS as an independent arm. This was of vital importance to older people, she said, and its nationwide network was considered well-suited to the needs of Age Concern's 1,400 local groups. + No charge is made for Asset advice, even if individuals decide not to act upon it. Any profit earned in commission on products sold to clients will be split 50-50 between NWIS and Age Concern. + Steve Wells, the managing director of NWIS, said advice would only be given to individuals after a thorough assessment of their financial circumstances, their attitude to capital risk and their future needs. + "The typical investment advice we give to people with limited resources is to put their money into bank and building society accounts or National Savings products, none of which pay us a commission," he said. + However, Jean Eaglesham, head of money policy at the Consumers' Association warned anyone using Age Concern's new advisory service to be cautious. "The scheme may work well but users should bear in mind that independence is not a guarantee of good quality advice. + "Even where individual consultants are not paid on a commission basis, they will be aware that some products will be more profitable for their employer than others. " The CA suggests the best course for those seeking financial advice is to go to a number of advisers including at least one IFA. + - For further information write to Asset Financial Planning, Freepost (BS2614), PO Box 106, 37 Broad Street, Bristol BS99 7YJ (no stamp required) or call the Asset Helpline on 0272-263822. + The department of Environment and the Welsh Office have published a new, free booklet Your Home in Retirement, which provides housing advice for older people. Copies are available from the Department of Environment, PO Box 15, London E15 2HF. + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +134 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 8, 1993 + +NAPF WARNS OF PENSIONS CRISIS + +BYLINE: TERESA HUNTER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 36 + +LENGTH: 308 words + + + BRITAIN needs an urgent review of its pension policy as it lurches towards social disaster next century, delegates at a conference on pensions were told yesterday. + Serious social consequences would result as the country's elderly became increasingly poverty-stricken unless the Government addressed the pending crisis in pensions, warned Roy Amy, incoming chairman of the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF), which represents Britain's richest pension funds. + Mr Amy warned at the NAPF's 70th annual conference in Harrogate: "The adequate provision of pensions will be one of the most pressing socio-economic issues in the next century. The Government should set up a formal national debate to examine the future of UK pensions policy and, in particular, the future inter-relationship between private and state pensions. " He called on the Government to support freedom of choice for retirement planning, by providing for flexibility concerning equalisation of state pension ages. + But junior social security minister Ann Widdecombe told the conference that, although flexibility had not been ruled out, she believed it could push up costs if everyone took a pension at the earliest opportunity. + However, in the clearest indication yet that the timetable for the equalisation of state pension ages has slipped, she warned that the Government would not be rushed into a decision on whether to pay state pensions to men and women at 60, 65, or some other arrangement. After the crushing defeat for the Tories in Thursday's elections, resolving this issue will be even more problematic. + Ms Widdecombe said: "No proposal we could make would be popular with everyone, and our primary responsibility must be to future generations. We must plan now for a fair and sustainable pension system in the next century. " + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +135 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 10, 1993 + +OLDER LEARNERS: THE LATE LATE LEARNING SHOW; +Tony Craig looks at the popularity of education for active retirement + +BYLINE: TONY CRAIG + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EDUCATION PAGE; Pg. 4 + +LENGTH: 765 words + + + A YOGA session is taking place in a college gym in north London. The students, lithe and supple, are full of life. Claudie Chesters, one of the younger students here, is showing the poise and flexibility of a ballet dancer. + Yet Chesters, a former teacher from Paris, is 68 years old; many of the others are in their 70s and 80s. The yoga class is just one of their wide-ranging and intellectually stimulating courses within a vibrant and fast-growing University of the Third Age, or U3A. + These active retired people are part of a learning experiment that began in Britain just 11 years ago. Since then it has become a raison d'etre for many of its participants. + There are about 1,200 members in the U3A's London home. The activities range from psychology, philosophy and genealogy to poetry reading. For pounds 25 a year, members can enrol for an unlimited number of other activities. + U3A London is one of 212 distinct and autonomous Universities of the Third Age in Britain. Last year alone 40 new U3As began. A further 20 have been launched this year. + It is unlike any other university. The U3A confers no degrees or qualifications, and the distinction between tutors and "members" (students) is deliberately blurred. It is a self-help community: adults in the later stages of their lives combining to stimulate one another, to teach and to learn from each other. + The first Universite du Troisieme Age was founded in Toulouse in 1972 as part of the local university. In February 1981 Peter Laslett, the distinguished historian and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, convened a meeting of social scientists who wanted to establish a distinct, self-organising U3A in the UK. The first British U3As were launched in 1982 in Cambridge, Sutton Coldfield, Yeovil, Stevenage and Harpenden. + Now Laslett, 77, promotes the cause of U3As within academia and worldwide. But it is only this year that the Third Age Trust has been admitted to the International Association of U3As (AIUTA) - as an associate member, joining 236 international member universities from 26 other countries. + "Continental U3As are recognised by their own universities, even in a sense as part of them," Laslett says. "Continental universities feel the standards of our U3As are too low. But the notion of people at this age being taught to a university-standard level is absurd. " + Unlike U3As elsewhere in Europe, the UK model is based entirely on self-help. Peter Laslett says: "It gives old people some idea of their responsibilities to each other and gives them a voice of their own. It is tapping an entirely unused resource - the teaching capacity of people who have retired. " + He explains: "The most important divisive issue has been the use of the word 'university', which implies additions to knowledge and also research. The present administration of the U3A in Cambridge believes research is not something its members want. But in 1984 research was carried out by the Cambridge U3A on the elderly observing themselves on television. This has become an important academic source. + "The number of unexplored intellectual issues is large and there could eventually be a research academy within the U3As. " + Unlike on the Continent, this has from the outset been university on a shoestring. The "conveners" (lecturers/tutors) may or may not have academic backgrounds; the "members" may be postgraduates or they may have left school at 13. No one gets paid. + The range of subjects within the different U3As is vast. More than 200 distinct courses are currently available. + Laslett says: "We are self-supporting and quite independent, with between 1,200 and 1,500 members - and the Cambridge U3A has started being left money by members in their wills. + "The U3A movement is insistently independent and auton-omous. A U3A in France can exist only when it has a host university. But I believe there is no point in the Second Age teaching the Third. + "The Carnegie Inquiry into the Third Age (which defines Third-Agers by age - 50 to 74 - rather than by the social, physical and mental stage of their life) savours of Second-Agers commenting on the Third. We opposed the concept of Second-Age do-gooders teaching dependent Third-Agers. The Third Age can - and must - teach themselves. The key is to find your own purpose. " + For further information: Third Age Trust, U3A, 1 Stockwell Green, London SW9 9JF (tel. 071 737 2541); U3A in London, 44 Crowndale Road, London NW1 1TR (tel. 071 383 0323). Please include a stamped, self-addressed envelope. + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +136 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 11, 1993 + +PEAKS AND TROUGHS; +Television + +BYLINE: HUGH HEBERT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 493 words + + + ONE of the delusions in the dream of moving to a remote, beautiful, unspoilt, village in deep country is that you can escape from television. Don't believe it. Sooner or later the location scouts will sniff your hideout and you will wake to find film crews camped in your backyard with an armoured column of trailers, leaving lethal cables like spilt entrails all over the paths. The pub where you expected a quiet game of shove ha'penny with a peasant will be filled with the raucous banter of media folk. Derbyshire is the latest target. + Lucy Gannon's Peak Practice (Central) is about Dr Kerruish, who leaves his clinic in the African bush and joins a traditional English country practice. This is run by Dr Beth Glover who inherited it from her father and is a fine doctor but a hopeless businesswoman. She is about to be ambushed by unscrupulous rivals who have set up a new health centre. + Kevin Whately as Kerruish brings his lumbering integrity over from the Inspector Morse series, fancies Dr Beth (Amanda Burton) and pokes his nose into everyone's family problems. In any village this would make any newcomer as popular as a plague of rats. All Creatures Great And Small, minus cows. + In Mary Wesley's Harnessing Peacocks (Meridian, Sunday) Hebe is a lone parent in a distant village who supports her 12-year-old son by working as a peripatetic cordon bleu cook to a circle of well-off elderly women. She's a much better businesswoman than Dr Beth, and to pay the fees of the posh boarding school the son hates, she hires her body out to a select syndicate of local men. Only Nicholas Le Prevost as Mungo, the most manic member of Hebe's sex circus, tips the character over into the farce that is implicit. + This appealingly simple idea of the prostitute as innocent earner and sex as the gourmet's dessert gets devilishly complicated in the Wesleyan web of blood and bed relationships, and Andrew Davies's adaptation does nothing to help. You can ignore all that and just gawp at Serena Scott Thomas as Hebe the calm smiling beauty handing out favours and getting up the nose of the snobs. But the drama fad for English Heritage families is now tiresome and makes Peak Practice, for all its clumsy social luggage, seem welcome. + Tom Mangold's report Pack of Lies (Panorama, BBC1) maintained that the PR strategy forged by the tobacco giants in 1953, when the link between smoking and lung cancer was discovered, is the same today, and just as successful: to cast doubt on the scientific findings. The industry's own research organisation is ostensibly dedicated to making sure there is no health risk in its products. But the power here belongs to the corporate lawyers who are concerned primarily with avoiding law suits. So according to Mangold's analysis, the industry has been able to publicise research findings that can be presented as favourable, and to keep quiet findings that confirm the dangers. Surprised? + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +137 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 12, 1993 + +CROATS PRESS ON FOR PARTITION OF MOSTAR + +BYLINE: IAN TRAYNOR, EAST EUROPE EDITOR, AND REUTER IN MOSTAR + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 691 words + + + AS Bosnian Croat forces continued to expel Muslims yesterday from the key south-west city of Mostar, UN officials described their strategy as a mirror-image, if on a smaller scale, of the Serbian operations elsewhere in the war-ravaged republic. + About 60 rounds of heavy artillery rocked the city in one hour during the afternoon as the fighting raged for the third day, with the Croats ignoring Security Council condemnation of their offensive and demands for UN officials to be granted access to the sealed city. + "We're all Muslims. We're prisoners. This is a crime, a shame, and this is Europe," a Muslim woman prisoner whispered as up to 300 men, women, children and elderly people were hustled along at gunpoint to a factory outside the city. + At one point, Croat troops driving a car up the hill past the column slowed down and flung open a door to knock down several Muslim men. Soldiers then flashed Nazi-style salutes out the window. + Muslim prisoners said they were being marched to captivity in an aluminum factory 21 2 miles away. It was not clear whether this is the factory where several hundred men, women and children are being held after being taken captive on Sunday and Monday. + The deputy Croat military commander in Mostar refused to allow observers into the city centre. "The message is quite clear," a UN official said. "The Croats want us out of the way. " + An official of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said: "The Croats have been telling us that they want total implementation of the Vance-Owen plan. They say they support freedom of movement, by which they mean population exchanges. " + The initial aim of this politically driven campaign is to partition Mostar, the capital of Herzegovina, into Croat and Muslim areas, with the Muslims confined to the eastern side of the River Neretva, which bisects the town, and then to exchange populations between the provinces that the Vance-Owen plan gives to the Muslims and the Croats. + The Vance-Owen plan envisages the return of refugees to their homes, but its application by the parties on the ground entails an orgy of ethnic cleansing aimed at creating ethnically homogeneous areas. + For the past month, the main theatre of the current Croat drive to live without Muslims has been in central Bosnia around Vitez, entailing grisly atrocities, the torching of villages, and murders of women and children. + Since the weekend, the same campaign has moved into gear around Mostar in the south-west, an ancient city where the Muslims slightly outnumbered the Croats before the war but which the Croats insist is to be their regional capital. + Yesterday in Medjugorje, the Catholic shrine and place of pilgrimage just outside Mostar, rumours were rife that anyone found sheltering Muslims would have their homes blown up. Medjugorje used to be one of the biggest money-spinners in former Yugoslavia, but its hotels have lain empty for the past year of war. The spare beds notwithstanding, local officials have been telling relief workers for months that any homeless Muslims will be met with AK-47 assault rifles. + Three days ago, the Bosnian Croat leader, Mate Boban, a figure directly appointed to his post by President Franjo Tudjman last year, threatened to order an assault on the town of Jablanica north of Mostar. Jablanica falls within the "Croatian canton", but is at least 80 per cent Muslim. + In a meeting last week with senior UN officials, Mr Boban half in jest suggested that his Croat army was stronger than the army in Croatia itself. + International relief workers say that the Croatian authorities in Mostar have been making threatening noises for weeks about an imminent drive to homogenise the territory they claim as theirs under the Vance-Owen plan. + The Croat authorities made it plain to relief officials a couple of weeks ago that the region they claim had no room for any further Muslim refugees, that they were expecting an influx of 30,000 Croat fugitives from the Muslim-held region of Zenica in central Bosnia, and that Muslims would have to make way to accommodate the new arrivals. + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +138 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 14, 1993 + +LICENSE DRUG SELLERS, URGES POLICE CHIEF + +BYLINE: DUNCAN CAMPBELL CRIME CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 550 words + + + THE licensing of drug possession, use and supply should be seriously considered, according to experienced drug squad officers. The time had come to "think the unthinkable", a police conference was told in what is a significant shift in police thinking on drugs. + Commander John Grieve, head of the criminal intelligence branch at the Metropolitan Police, told the Association of Chief Police Officers in Preston, Lancashire, yesterday that a new, radical approach to drugs was essential. Too many vulnerable and elderly people were victims of drug-related crime. + "We are at the crossroads," said Mr Grieve. "Either we go to war on dealers across the globe, or we have to come up with new options. We need to think the unthinkable." + Licensing for all illegal drugs, including heroin, ecstasy and cannabis, should be explored, he said. Research should look at informal licensing systems around the world. One possible system would be that in force in Amsterdam, where a number of cafes are licensed to sell cannabis for consumption on the premises. Mr Grieve would not be drawn on how such a system might work in Britain. . + Licensing was the recommendation of about half of a 31-strong workshop at the association's annual conference, consisting of experienced drugs squad officers of all ranks. + "We need to undermine the acquisitive base of drugs crime," Mr Grieve told the conference, "and the economic base of organised crime. + "The Government and the Home Office ignore this message at their peril," he said. He acknowledged that it was a philosophy "born of despair". + All other methods of counteracting drugs had failed, he suggested. Licensing did not mean legalisation or decriminalisation although some would see it as that, he said. Decriminalisation was discussed by the group but was not promoted as a solution. Licensing might control the instability of the drug-dealing environment. + Mr Grieve said that he had seen thousands of dealers being sentenced to thousands of years in prison and believed it had made not a "jot of difference". + His suggestions were criticised by a number of the more than 100 officers attending the conference. He was questioned about the reasons behind sending messages to people that might suggest that drugs could be condoned. Mr Grieve responded that radical alternatives had to be thought about and it was the task of officers with experience in the field to come up with suggestions. + He agreed that education for young people on the dangers of drugs was essential in a prevention strategy. More research on the effects of drugs and the amount of drug usage in Britain was also needed if the problems were not just to continue getting worse. + The suggestion of licensing comes as senior police officers seek an overall strategy on the cautioning of people arrested for possession of cannabis. Next month, the association's crime committee is likely to discuss the recommendation of a policy for cautioning in general. + Keith Helawell, Chief Constable of West Yorkshire and chairman of this year's conference, said that a report on the conference would go to the crime committee for consideration. He stressed that the licensing idea was "contentious" and did not enjoy majority support at the conference. + +LOAD-DATE: June 4, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +139 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 19, 1993 + +WHY GRANNY IS DOWN IN THE DUMPS + +BYLINE: SALLY WEALE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 13 + +LENGTH: 581 words + + + THE IMAGE of an elderly woman abandoned in a hospital car park with a hastily scribbled "Please help me" notice pinned to her clothes as relatives disappear in a cloud of dust is more familiar in the US than Britain. But here too, where almost 1.5 million people care for relatives over 85, it seems to be a growing phenomenon. + Preliminary results from a study of elder abandonment (doctors and carers' organisations reject the emotive tag "granny dumping") revealed that at least once a year one hospital in three in England and Wales sees a case of "complete abandonment", when an elderly person is found in the hospital confines and relatives are difficult or impossible to trace. One hospital claimed more than 20 cases in a year. + Such statistics might sound alarming but the survey, carried out by the Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London, revealed that such cases are the tip of the iceberg. Hidden below the surface is a large number of more subtle cases of abandonment when families, often driven to breaking point by the pressures of caring, turn to their local hospital to take an elderly relative off their hands for a while, and then decide they cannot cope any longer and will not take the relative back. The study, based on responses by 107 hospitals, showed more than half received an explicit request every month to take in an elderly relative. One hospital had two requests a week. Three-quarters saw a case a month of relatives refusing to take an elderly person home after being admitted for in-patient treatment - one-third experienced problems on discharge every week and 10 per cent on a daily basis. + But the most difficult form of abandonment to identify is when an elderly person is brought to hospital for a minor problem - perhaps a sprained ankle - and the family uses it as a pretext for getting the relative admitted. Almost two-thirds of hospitals saw such a case every month, about a third did so every week. + Dr Sarah Harper, lecturer in gerontology and author of the study, said there was "very little evidence" of complete abandonment or granny dumping. "What we were looking at was: given the new Community Care Act with its emphasis on closing long-term care beds, would it put more pressure on families? We were looking to see if families were using hospitals as a way of gaining respite." The conclusion? "Families are clearly under strain. There are not enough resources given to community care. It's a good idea but we need resources." + One of the key concerns surrounding the Community Care Act is the responsiblity it gives to local authorities to assess the needs of the elderly seeking state-assisted care. The fear expressed from the beginning is that the individual's needs come second to local authority budgetary restraints. Local authorities in England have claimed that funding for 1993-4 falls short by pounds 135 million. + Dr Kevin Somerville, clinical director of medicine for the elderly at St Bartholomew's in London, sees a case of abandonment - usually of the less dramatic kind - about once every three months. "What we usually see is people presenting late, with exhausted carers who have limited help because they've not known how to go about getting it," he said. "Even if they have, it's often not the help they need. + "The thing that impresses me most is the large number of relatives that I encounter who box on against all the odds. I take my hat off to them." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +140 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 19, 1993 + +NEW LAW URGED TO SAVE ELDERLY FROM ABUSE + +BYLINE: CHRIS MIHILL MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 7 + +LENGTH: 213 words + + + OLD people should be protected by law against physical and sexual abuse, in the same way as children, psychiatrists and charities caring for the elderly urged yesterday. + Researchers said figures on "elder abuse" were hard to obtain, but there was evidence of some people suffering physical, emotional, financial and occasionally sexual abuse by relatives or other carers. + The Law Commission last week called for local authorities to be given a statutory duty to investigate suspicions of elder abuse, with officers having powers to enter premises and take away suspected victims under place of safety orders. + The Royal College of Psychiatrists yesterday backed the commission's proposals, which are now out for consultation and are supported by the charity Age Concern. + Dr Jonathan Fisk, of Airedale general hospital, said some British studies have suggested 2 per cent of over-65s are victims of abuse, but in one study of very frail old people in London this rose to 45 per cent if verbal abuse was included, with 14 per cent suffering physical abuse. + - Tim Yeo, junior health minister, says in a Channel 4 Dispatches programme on elder abuse tonight that new Department of Health guidelines for local authorities will be issued this summer. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +141 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 20, 1993 + +TELEVISION + +BYLINE: PAUL BAILEY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 547 words + + + "THEY found that when Mum wouldn't do anything - when shouting and talking and cajoling wouldn't get her out of the chair - they found that kicking her would," said a doctor in Elders 2, an updated edition of a report on the abuse of the elderly that was first transmitted in Dispatches (Channel 4) last autumn. The doctor went on to reveal that kicking the old woman had become a family habit. Would she have fared better in an institution? Yes, probably. + Richard Belfield's documentary cast doubt on the policy of care in the community with some pretty appalling evidence of familial mistreatment. The notion that the children and relatives of old people are most suitable to look after them sounds well enough, but scarcely takes into account such personal matters as resentment, loathing and greed. + One learned of wills being altered, and of a niece who contrived to extract pounds 30,000 from her infirm relation with promises she didn't intend to keep. A schizophrenic strangled his mother almost to death, and after her unlikely survival she removed herself from his caring presence. + Another woman, recently admitted to a residential home, explained the bruising on the inside of her thighs. "Oh, that's what happens when my son rapes me. " The voices of the victims were altered, to protect them from further degradation. Despite the fact that they sounded like a record being played at the wrong speed, what they had to say ought to give Tim Yeo, who appeared in the programme, and Virginia Bottomley, who was seen telling Peter Snow in 1991o problem of abuse of the elderly in Britain, considerable pause for thought. + Elders 2 raised, mainly by implication, serious questions about caring for the old and mentally unstable. The myth persists that residential homes, run by the National Health Service, would be grim places, lacking the warmth that a loving family can provide. Let the community care for its own, runs the government's argument, ignoring the terrible truth that many members of that community don't want to be bothered. The need for disinterested kindness seems ever more urgent now, in the face of Belfield's revelations. We talk too glibly of those "family values" Mrs Thatcher once espoused. + If it does anything, Richard Belfield's carefully researched and compassionate film will cause Yeo and Bottomley to consider those values. I suggest that they take a crash-course in Aeschylus and Euripides, who knew a little about life in the homestead. + This week's luminary in TV Heroes (BBC1) was Noele Gordon, whose talent as actress and singer was so fine as to be invisible. Danny Baker's tribute was as much concerned with Crossroads as it was with Gordon herself. + How on earth did it survive for 24 years? The answer came in a snippet in which one of Meg's Scottish chefs referred to "certain behaviours of pattern". Fans watched the wretched soap for those moments - and there were plenty of them - when the actors forgot their lines and the scenery moved. Sometimes both things happened simultaneously. + Eldorado has never scaled such heights of badness, and is now paying the penalty. Noele Gordon might have rescued it with a + guest appearance, were she not otherwise occupied at the motel in the sky. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +142 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 20, 1993 + +TREASURY EYES WIDER PRESCRIPTION CHARGES; +Portillo pledges to 'court unpopularity' if necessary + +BYLINE: STEPHEN BATES AND CHRIS MIHILL + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 639 words + + + THE National Health Service drugs bill - including prescription charges - could be one of the targets in what Michael Portillo, Treasury Chief Secretary, yesterday said would be the toughest spending round yet. + In a speech in London, Mr Portillo, in charge of the Treasury's negotiations over departmental spending, highlighted the recession with the "sobering thought" that a third of the projected increase in public spending in the next three years would go in social security payments and a third in debt interest, leaving the rest for all other spending programmes combined. + Early yesterday Treasury sources indicated that prescription charges could be extended to pensioners and young children not on benefits. + Later, on ITN's News at Ten, Mr Portillo denied he had any immediate plan to impose prescription charges on the old or on children, but did not rule it out. + "My job is to look at all sorts of options. We are going to face some tough decisions. I don't think that is one of the leading options," he said, adding that he had a "chosen list" of cuts to offer for the autumn statement. + Gordon Brown, the shadow Chancellor, last night said he would be demanding a statement from the Chancellor, Norman Lamont, today asking him to "come clean" about Mr Portillo's chosen list and "his failure to rule out a massive change in prescription charges". + David Blunkett, the shadow health secretary, said: "This confirms our worst fears. I believe the Government are preparing the ground for a major extension of NHS charges. " + Mr Portillo said the Government was committed to halving the national deficit from 8 to 4 per cent of gross domestic product in five years and would "court unpopularity" as a duty in this year's public expenditure round. + Reducing the pounds 50 billion borrowing requirement could not be done solely by raising taxes but also by controlling the expansion of public expenditure, he said. Mr Portillo is known to believe the NHS drugs bill, now pounds 3 billion a year, is too high and could well be a target for cuts. + The cost of prescriptions rose in April to pounds 4. 25, but at present all old people and children are exempt, together with people with chronic sickness, pregnant women and women in the first year after childbirth. + Four out of five patients get their prescriptions free - and the Treasury view is that it is unreasonable for better-off pensioners and children of wealthy parents to get the benefit when it could be restricted to those on social security benefits. Ministers have previously indicated that the drugs bill - which is rising by 14 per cent a year - has to be checked. However, the extension of prescription charges was being described in Whitehall last night as conjectural. + The view being floated by the Treasury that prescription charges could be a target is unlikely to be popular with Virginia Bottomley, the Health Secretary, and clashes between Mr Portillo and Mrs Bottomley seem likely to be the opening battles of this year's spending round. + A spokeswoman for Age Concern said last night: "We would be very worried indeed if this rumour turned out to be true. It would cause particular difficulty for the millions of older people who are entirely dependent on state benefits and may well need regular medical treatment for long-term conditions. " + A British Medical Association spokesman said: "Ill people should not be asked to bolster a seriously underfunded National Health Service. + "Many people who are on low incomes do not qualify for exemptions from prescription charges. We wrote to the Secretary of State in March asking for a review of the prescription charges system because we want to see a fairer system which avoids deterring patients from obtaining their necessary medical treatment. " + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +143 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 21, 1993 + +SPIRALLING DRUGS BILL COULD PROVE PRESCRIPTION FOR CHANGE; +Medicines charge has risen from 20p to pounds 4.25 since 1979 - Yield to NHS expected to be pounds 278 million this year + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE AND CHRIS MIHILL + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 569 words + + + AS MINISTERS often recall, it was Labour that introduced the principle of prescription charges. As now, the spur was Treasury pressure for savings in the National Health Service budget - though the service was then just one year old. + In a measure announced in 1949, though not enacted until 1952 under the Conservatives, a charge of one shilling was set for each prescription form. Today, the charge is pounds 4.25 for each item on each form, compared with 20p when the Tories came to power in 1979. + Current exemptions from prescription charges cover women over 60, men over 65, children under 16 and those under 19 in full-time education. Other exemptions are for people on income support or family credit, or their partners. + Women who are pregnant or have had a baby in the past 12 months are also exempt, as are those who receive a war disablement pension. A number of long-term medical conditions, but not all, attract exemptions, including epilepsy and diabetes. + Goverment figures say just one in six items dispensed is paid for by the patient, but 40 per cent of the population pays charges. + The pounds 4.25 charge is expected to yield pounds 278 million for the NHS in 1993-94. However, pressure to change the exemptions arises both from the general public spending squeeze and from projections of a sharp growth in the drugs bill. + A study issued last month by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology said the pounds 3 billion bill would rise by 12 per cent this year. + While ministers are suspicious of drug company profiteering, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry blames the growth in the number of elderly people, which it says has caused more than half the rise in the drugs bill over the last 10 years. + The number of prescriptions in England rose from 326,000 in 1978-79 to 415,000 in 1991-92 and was increasing by 4.7 per cent a year at the end of that period. + A Department of Health report says: "The reasons for this continuing increase, which exceeds what might be expected as a result of demographic changes, are imperfectly understood." + As well as using the charge to control costs, the Government introduced in 1991 an "indicative prescribing scheme," whereby general practitioners are told what they are expected to spend on prescriptions and are called to account if their costs much exceed this. + Additionally, the growing number of fund-holding GPs have to meet their prescribing costs from their own fixed budgets. In 1991-92, the first year of the fund-holding scheme, it seemed that these GPs had tightened up on prescribing more than the average. + In a further move to economise, the Health Department is examining whether to extend the so-called limited list - introduced in 1985 - by banning GPs from prescribing expensive drugs in 10 therapeutic categories, instead allowing them to use only the cheapest brands. + The potential blacklist will cover contraceptives, skin disease ointments, anti-rheumatic creams, medicines for allergic conditions, sleeping tablets, ear, nose and throat remedies, and anaemia and anti-diarrhoea medicines. + Finally, the department is seeking to renegotiate the pharmaceutical price regulation scheme, which limits the profits drug companies can make from the NHS. In the last five years, pounds 62 million has been recovered from companies under the scheme. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +144 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 22, 1993 + +THE LAST POST FOR LOCAL OFFICES? + +BYLINE: TERESA HUNTER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 33 + +LENGTH: 292 words + + + THE Government has been accused of attempting to close local post offices by encouraging the elderly to have pensions paid into bank accounts. + One in four pensions are paid directly through banks or building societies. So are 41 per cent of new pensions. + But cashing pensions through post offices has a number of advantages. Post offices are geared up to deal with small amounts of cash and pension problems. Also, the postmaster usually gets to know regular pensioners and gives them a more personal service than would be on offer at a large bank or building society. + Convenience is another major factor, particularly for the less mobile. Pensioners are likely to live closer to a post office than a bank branch, and the post office may be opened longer hours - although many now shut one mid-week and Saturday afternoons. + The major disadvantage of post office collection is security. A frail elderly person collecting a married couple's pension will be carrying pounds 89.80 in a wallet or purse - which can make them an easy target for muggers. Furthermore, those who live frugally can end up with wads of notes on mantlepieces or in tea caddies. + Banks and building societies allow smaller amounts to be withdrawn, and can further eliminate the need to carry cash if pensioners use standing orders and direct debits to pay their bills. Pensioners may also earn interest on unspent sums. + But charges are hefty when customers overdraw. Many pensioners have a horror of debt, and would not wish to risk painful charges for getting their sums wrong. Banks can also appear hostile to elderly customers, and surveys have proved that pension ers avoid cash machines, which would give them 24-hour access to their money. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +145 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 24, 1993 + +PENSIONERS WARN OF VOTE SWITCH IF PARTY FAILS TO CHANGE TRACK + +BYLINE: ANGELLA JOHNSON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 288 words + + + RAIL privatisation has stirred passions long dormant among the staunchly blue senior citizens of Christchurch and the surrounding east Dorset area. + Most are so fed up with "this current attack on the elderly" they are threatening to give the Government more than a bloody nose in the forthcoming byelection. "They'll also get two black eyes if they're not careful," warned Sidney Burtonshaw, aged 80. + Mr Burtonshaw has voted Tory most of his life, but is angry about what he described as the party's "blunderbuss" approach to governing. "It's not just British Rail, but the fuel tax, prescription charges and sub-post offices," he said. + The railcard issue is seen as yet another move against some of the more vulnerable people in society. At present anyone over 60 can buy one for pounds 16 a year and get a 30 per cent discount on all travel. John MacGregor, the Transport Secretary, believes operators should be left to decide whether or not to continue the concession. Pensioners in Christchurch, which has proportionately the highest elderly population in the country - 34 per cent are aged over 60 - want it to be statutory. + Edward Bently, aged 82, another of the Tory die-hards who helped to give the late Robert Adley his 23,000 majority, plans to switch his vote to the Liberal Democrats come the byelection. "Enough is enough. It's time they stopped messing about with us old folks. We are getting clobbered from all sides at the moment." + Patricia Judge, a 58-year-old charity worker who voted for Mr Adley, wants to be able to claim a railcard in two years' time. "At my age it's not pleasant to cope with the roads for long journeys, so I don't want it left to the whims of operators." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +146 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 24, 1993 + +PENSIONERS RESCUED + +SECTION: HOME; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 33 words + + + Arson was blamed for a fire in flats in Brighouse, West Yorkshire, from which firemen rescued nine elderly people yesterday. Five were taken to hospital suffering from the effects of smoke. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +147 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 24, 1993 + +HEALTH PLAN DIVIDES DEMOCRATS + +BYLINE: MARTIN WALKER IN WASHINGTON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 704 words + + + THE tension at the heart of the Clinton administration came to a head at an evening meeting in the White House last Thursday, as Hillary Rodham Clinton's outline plan for an American national health service came under intense fire from the president's economic advisers as too expensive and politically dangerous. + According to White House sources, all three members of the Council of Economic Advisers, led by the Berkeley economist Laura D'Andrea Tyson, told Mrs Clinton that the $ 60-90 billion ( pounds 40-58 billion) in new taxes her plans required would enfeeble the US economy and lead to "serious and damaging job losses" among small businesses. + This was more than the usual policy debate. The health reform plan, which President Clinton sees as the keystone of his presidency, has brought into the open the conflict between the "New Democrat" agenda on which he ran for office and the principles of traditional liberalism which appear to dominate his administration. + Mrs Clinton's leadership of the health reform task force makes this tension both acute and personal. But the revolt against Mr Clinton's budget and energy tax by conservative Democrats in the House and Senate reflects a similar clash between New and Old Democrats. + In his weekly radio address on Saturday, President Clinton denounced the rebels in his own party in classic Old Democrat terms. In attacking his energy tax, he said, they had become prisoners of the oil lobby. + "It is simply wrong for a powerful interest to try and opt out of this programme by asking the elderly and the working poor to contribute more so they can contribute less. I regret that otherwise good and responsible legislators would even consider this proposal. But I will fight it," Mr Clinton vowed. + "Some of my opponents want to cut social security and tax credits to working families with incomes of under $ 30,000 just to get a tax cut for the rich. The big oil lobby is trying to wiggle out of its contribution to deficit reduction and force senior citizens barely above the poverty line to get lower social security benefits." + There were signs yesterday that this tussle could be resolved by a traditional political compromise, laid out by Senator Pat Moynihan, chairman of the Senate finance committee. + Speaking on NBC's Meet The Press, Mr Moynihan said that the president's proposed BTU tax, named after the British Thermal Unit and designed to tax energy in all its forms, will be scrapped in favour of a more acceptable and tightly targeted petrol tax. The rebels agreed to swallow that, Mr Moynihan said, and he forecast the president's budget would be enacted by late July, and the health reform bill would wait until next year. + However, the underlying argument between New and Old Democrats will rage on while the health reform package is being defined. And it will do so while Mr Clinton's opinion poll ratings are steadily eroded. + Mr Clinton, bruised by allegations of cronyism in replacing the White House travel office with a new team led by a distant cousin from Arkansas, and by the fuss over his $ 200 haircut in Los Angeles, faces more battles with the senate over his nomination of veteran liberals to key positions in his administration. + Professor Lani Guinier, nominated to run the civil rights division of the justice department, has called not just for more black judges, but for them to be "not just physically black, but to hold a cultural and psychological view of group solidarity". She will face trouble in her Senate confirmation hearings, as will Dr Alicia Munnell, whose confirmation as assistant secretary for economic policy at the treasury labours under her advocacy of taxing pension contributions. + Mr Clinton, seeing his centrist allies criticise him for abandoning the New Democrat agenda, sought over the weekend to re-establish that he was not a traditional tax-and-spend Democrat. + "What I think your government owes you is to move beyond the two dichotomies . . . One says 'You're out there on your own.' The other says, 'We'll take care of you. We can do things for you.' Neither one of these approaches is right," he told a college commencement in New Hampshire. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +148 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 25, 1993 + +ELDERLY COUPLE TORTURED BY MASKED RAIDERS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 203 words + + + AN ELDERLY couple were subjected to 90 minutes of torture by two masked raiders who are thought to have broken the woman's fingers and stabbed her husband in the head with a screwdriver, police disclosed yesterday. + The man, a businessman with a number of interests, was doused in spirits and told he would be set alight unless he told the attackers where his money was hidden. + The raiders burst into the couple's four-bedroom house in Highgate, north London, on Sunday night after the woman opened the back door because their dog was barking. + During the ordeal, the raiders found pounds 6,000 but then subjected the couple to more beatings and demands for other money. + The men refused to take pounds 220 in 50p pieces and also threatened to return and kill the couple if they called the police. + The ordeal ended when the raiders locked them in the living room and left. + Police are not naming the victims, both aged 65, who were treated at the nearby Whittington hospital. They are staying with relatives. + One raider was described as white, about 5ft 10in, with a Scottish or Liverpudlian accent. The other was white or of mixed race, 5ft 9in, with short dark hair and thin lips. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +149 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 25, 1993 + +RISING COST OF YOUNG MOTHERS + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 5 + +LENGTH: 456 words + + + TEENAGE lone mothers are costing pounds 400,000 a day in income support benefit, according to figures yesterday which suggest that one-parent families now account for almost a quarter of the income support budget. + Department of Social Security figures for last May show that nearly a million lone parents were claiming income support, totalling pounds 65 million a week or pounds 3.4 billion a year. Of this, pounds 2.8 million a week, or pounds 145 million a year, went to those under 20. + A second fast-growing group of claimants, elderly people in residential and nursing homes, accounted for almost pounds 2 billion a year in income support last year, compared with pounds 39 million in 1982. + The income support bill is projected to top pounds 16 billion in 1993-94 and the benefit is expected to be claimed by an average 5.7 million people. + Yesterday's figures are based on 5.1 million claimants, of whom 1.7 million were unemployed, 1.6 million were over 60 years of age, 989,000 were lone parents, and 425,000 were disabled. + The number of lone-parent claimants was up 27 per cent on 1989 and 41,300 of them were under 20: 1,900 were aged 16, 6,100 were 17, 12,300 were 18, and 21,000 were 19. + On average, a lone parent received pounds 67.55 a week in income support, compared with an overall average of pounds 51.89 for all claimants. + Peter Lilley, Social Security Secretary, said that the latter figure had risen by more than a third since 1990. This proved the Government's commitment to those in greatest need, he added. + The principal reason for this increase, however, is that the rise in claimants since 1990 has been concentrated among those with family responsibilities, entitled to higher payments, who have raised the average. + The figures show that 235,000 elderly people in residential and nursing homes were last May receiving an average pounds 159 a week in board-and-lodging payments. This represents more than pounds 1.9 billion a year. + It was the spiralling of this bill that spurred ministers to introduce the community care shake-up in April, giving local authorities the job of assessing the suitability of people for residential care and paying for it. + According to yesterday's figures, more than one in nine income support claimants were having a deduction made from their weekly payment to repay a social fund loan. + The average such repayment was pounds 5.76 a week, bringing the residual average income support down to pounds 46.13 for the 586,000 people affected. + In addition, 245,000 claimants were having a deduction made in respect of poll tax arrears, 194,000 for gas charges, 96,000 for electricity charges, and 134,000 for water charges. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +150 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 25, 1993 + +DISCOUNT TRIPS THREAT ROUSED REBEL MPS; +Railcards are used by millions. But they may have no future. + +BYLINE: REBECCA SMITHERS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 566 words + + + THE demand for cast-iron guarantees on the future of railcards and travelcards is the driving force behind the backbench Tory rebellion over rail privatisation. + Railcard holders have been able to travel at reduced rates since the 1970s, when British Rail launched a campaign to attract new business and to fight off competition from cars and coaches. + The first railcard was for students (which has since become the Young Person's Railcard), launched in 1974, followed by the senior and family railcards. + These cards, run by InterCity on behalf of the British Railways Board, together have 1.5 million users, with the Senior Railcard by far the most popular. + The loss-making Disabled Person's Railcard, run directly by the British Railways Board, is the only truly concessionary card, and the only one so far whose future has been assured by the Government. + Until now, the Government has said compelling private operators to offer railcards or travelcards would restrict their marketing flexibility - BR has never been legally obliged to offer cards. + A Department of Transport policy document, produced in January and obtained by the Guardian, says: "Railcards are a commercial venture which improve BR's overall revenue position by creating an up-front revenue stream from the sale of cards and by generating additional journeys. But they are not significant money spinners." + The cards generated a profit in 1991/92 of about pounds 20 million, of which around pounds 10 million came from the Young Person's Railcard, and pounds 7 million from the Family Railcard. Four in 10 off-peak leisure journeys are by railcard users. + But organisations such as Saga Holidays claim that many elderly people would be unable to take holidays without their cards, and the fall-off in business might even lead to the closure of rural lines linking tourist resorts. + The leisure travel market is highly dependent on the extra business from railcard users during off-peak hours, with 40 per cent of leisure journeys purchased in this way. + Labour MPs on the transport select committee said yesterday that the future of regional travelcards had been wrongly left out of the rail debate by Tory MPs, with the London transport minister, Steve Norris, sending out "confusing signals" about the future of London's travelcard, they said. + Local travelcards, such as those in operation in London and Greater Manchester, allow users to travel on all forms of public transport, with a built-in discount. + In London the use of the Tube and buses has ballooned since London Transport persuaded the now-defunct Greater London Council to introduce the first travelcard scheme in May 1983. + Within five years, annual journeys had risen from 1.65 billion to 2.02 billion in 1988-89, before the recession struck and pushed numbers back to 1.9 billion in 1991/92. + But the problems of apportioning revenue from the card to a plethora of private operators means that if the London travelcard survives it will be more expensive. + Andrew Mackinlay, Labour MP for Thurrock, said yesterday: "Tory MPs cannot duck the fact that unless they vote with the Opposition against rail privatisation on third reading [of the bill] this week they will have acquiesced in the end of the travelcard for millions of their constitutents who use it for both business and recreation." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +151 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 25, 1993 + +HOME KEEPS TAGS ON ELDERLY + +BYLINE: DAVID SHARROCK + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 22 + +LENGTH: 303 words + + + PENSIONERS in residential care may have to wear electronic tags to prevent them from wandering off under a proposed pilot scheme. + The Halifax-based Calderdale council's social services committee will tomorrow be asked to approve the scheme for a home in Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire. + It was suggested by Marel Denton, social services director, following a recent incident when a confused woman wandered away from a residential home and was found drowned in a river days later. + Under the pilot scheme the pounds 50 electronic tags would be placed on the pensioners' wrists or ankles and would emit a homing signal capable of being picked up a quarter of a mile away from the home. + "I accept that the scheme is ethically dubious and would associate people with objects, animals or criminals," Mrs Denton said in a report to the committee. + "But it might be appropriate for a pilot scheme to be introduced." + If the scheme is approved it will be tested for a trial period at the Willowfield home in Sowerby Bridge. + Mrs Denton said: "Councillors have expressed concern for both residents and staff in seeking to manage the problems at Willowfield, and so it may be appropriate to test the merits of tagging there." + The leader of Calderdale's Labour group has condemned the scheme as barbaric. + "I'm horrified. As far as I'm aware tagging was originally conceived for offenders on bail. People aren't sentenced to elderly people's homes and should not be treated as prisoners who may escape. It's treating them like dogs or criminals." + Pat Askwith, a Tory councillor, has declared her support for the scheme. + "I believe that tagging is the way forward. If you're tagged you've got more freedom to walk about, depending on where you put the machine that monitors the tags." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +152 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 26, 1993 + +FAMILY RAILCARD CONCESSION 'MAY NOT HOLD WATER'; +Other transport operators will have to honour joint schemes - New powers for franchising chief + +BYLINE: REBECCA SMITHERS TRANSPORT CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 468 words + + + THE new concessions announced yesterday by the Government are good news for the 1.5 million holders of British Rail's Senior and Young Person's Railcards. But the absence of any guarantee for its Family Railcard will disappoint 3 million people of all ages. + Assurances that private operators will also be forced to "participate" in provision of travelcards covering different modes of transport were criticised by the Opposition as "inadequate." The Government claimed compulsion was legislatively complex. + The U-turn follows an earlier pledge given only for continuation of the loss-making Disabled Person's Railcard. Although only 250,000 people hold the family card, up to 3 million benefit from its travel concessions for up to eight people. + On a day which London Transport minister Steve Norris, described as "the most important legislative day for the railways in 50 years," the Transport Secretary, John MacGregor, agreed to amend the Railways Bill to give the Government-appointed franchising director powers to force new private operators to provide the Senior, Young Person's and Disabled Person's cards. + The Tory rebel Sir Keith Speed, MP for Ashford, had led the drive to enshrine the future of railcards in the legislation, saying they were "cherished by many hundreds of thousands" of elderly, disabled and young people, and must not be lost after privatisation. + Although in yesterday's Commons debate, guarantees were eventually given for "multi-modal" regional cards, as offered by many regional Passenger Transport Authorities, Mr MacGregor said this area was more complicated because of the involvement of other transport modes, and that it would not be possible for the Railways Bill to impose any requirements on providers of non-rail public transport to accept such cards. + Even after Mr MacGregor's assurances, Dr John Marek, Labour MP for Wrexham, warned that there was nothing to prevent franchisees putting up the price of travelcards beyond the reach of many pensioners, or reducing the discounts available. The salvaged concessions are: + Disabled Person's Railcard - has 40,000 holders, costs pounds 14, gives one-third off most fares, with discounts on some ferry services. + Senior Railcard - has 750,000 holders, costs pounds 16, gives one-third off most standard and most first-class fares. + Young Person's Railcard - has 750,000 holders, costs pounds 16, gives one-third off most fares, excluding first-class. + Future uncertain for: Family Railcard - has 250,000 holders, costs pounds 20, gives one-third off most fares, one-quarter off saver and super-saver tickets, and pounds 1 flat fare tickets for up to four children under 16. + Travelcards such as the London Travelcard, the Network card, and the Greater Manchester Travelcard. + +LOAD-DATE: May 31, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +153 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 27, 1993 + +ELDERLY TO BE 'TAGGED' + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 28 words + + + The social services committee of Calderdale council, West Yorkshire, last night approved a pilot scheme to tag electronically residents of a home for the elderly. + +LOAD-DATE: May 31, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +154 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 28, 1993 + +TORY FAITHFUL LOSING FAITH + +BYLINE: DAVID HENCKE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 404 words + + + THE British instinct to side with the underdog came out yesterday when the Tory faithful at Christchurch, Dorset, expressed their regret at the sudden departure of Norman Lamont. + "It's not his fault. He's just the man taking all the blame," said pensioner and Tory voter Fred Garrett. + Another Conservative pensioner, Kenneth Curran, said: "I feel sorry for Lamont. He's having to carry the can for John Major. It's John Major who should be resigning." + The reaction from Christchurch - Conservative majority of over 23,000 and a byelection pending - to the cabinet reshuffle does not augur well for the Government. None of those questioned was impressed by the changes, most wanted a change in policy rather than people. + Ten out of a dozen people approached in the town's pedestrian precinct were confirmed Tory voters, but only two expressed any intention of supporting the Conservatives in the byelection. Indeed the vehemence of the pensioners, who make up 34 per cent of the constituency's electorate - the highest proportion in Britain - was surprising. Two, Ivy Corley and Frank Beal, were particularly vehement about Kenneth Clarke, Norman Lamont's replacement. + "That Clarke fellow, he's completely arrogant. He's worse than Lamont," said Ms Corley, while Mr Beal said: "Fancy promoting a man who has ruined the health service, the education service and was on the way to ruining the police force, the best in the world, in charge of the economy." + Nor was there any support from voters for recent Conservative policy. Leonard Durrant said: "I voted Conservative last time but I won't in the byelection. Since they've been in they've put up taxes, and if they want to get anywhere they'll have to stop this VAT on fuel. There are thousands of elderly people here and they just can't afford it. + "This cabinet change will make no difference. I used to be a member of the Conservative Club but I can't afford to go there for a drink now." + Melanie Allen said: "It will take a lot to stop me voting Conservative but I must say the plan to charge motorists pounds 75 a year to use the motorway is going to hit me hard when I visit my mother." + The Conservative Club was reticent about allowing interviews with their members. A spokesman said: "We don't really want our pensioners distracted by press harassment. They come in here for a quiet drink and they don't like being disturbed." + +LOAD-DATE: May 31, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +155 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 31, 1993 + +MOSCOW DIARY + +BYLINE: JONATHAN STEELE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 16 + +LENGTH: 1050 words + + + MUMBLING curses and rubbing his bruised shoulder, a homeless man in his fifties staggered up the ill-lit stairs inside Moscow's Kursk railway station. "What's this?", shouted Alexei Golikov, a social worker from the Belgian voluntary organisation, Medecins Sans Frontieres, as he quickened his pace round the corner. We were just in time to see two uniformed policemen, and three assistants, scuffing and kicking a ragged group of tramps waiting outside the MSF room. + The police showed no embarrassment as we arrived. "Typical", said Alyosha, when they had gone. "We have verbal permission from the station-master to run this clinic, but the police still treat these people as animals." + When MSF started its medical programme for Moscow's swelling population of homeless a year ago, its volunteer doctors would see their patients anywhere in the station they found them. By common consent the Kursk station is the worst of the three Moscow terminals where MSF works. Even before President Yeltsin's market reforms, hundreds of people were slumped in the crowded waiting room, sprawling on top of their suitcases and bundles, or on the floor, at any hour of the day or night. The vast majority were not permanently homeless. They were waiting for trains. Trains were delayed or cancelled, or passengers had long periods in transit in Moscow, having arrived from other places and needing to change stations. + When permission for kiosks and small private shops was given at the beginning of last year, the already busy station became clogged with booths selling beer and cigarettes. Trellis tables offering pornographic papers appeared, and with the slump in the standard of living for most working-class Russians, lines of people now fill the concourse, holding out a pair of shoes or a bottle of vodka in the hope of a sale. Glass from broken bottles litters the pavement, and petty racketeers move up and down demanding their cut from the vendors. + A parliamentary reform two years ago stopped vagabonding from being an imprisonable offence. Though liberal in intent, it has added to the chaos. Now the homeless are free from forcible incarceration, but their life on the stations is grim. "Even they have to pay the racketeers. They get told they're begging on a good pitch, so they must share their takings," Golikov discloses. "No one cares if they die. They have no family. So they have to be careful." + He estimates there are at least 30,000 long-term homeless in Moscow, though if you add the people overnighting on the stations, the figure jumps to 100,000. The newest scandal concerns people forcibly made homeless. Now that people can buy their flats, gangs of thugs have started evicting elderly people who live in central Moscow, forcing them to sign away their rights in return for rooms on the outskirts. The gangs then sell the flats for dollars. + OUT OF this number of old and new homeless, Medecins sans Frontieres has only treated 2,000 so far. Its clinic at Kursk station is a small windowless L-shaped room, no more than 10 feet long. The organisation has two ambulances, which drive the seriously ill to two hospitals with which MSF has been able to establish contact. Although all the group's 13 regular doctors and six nurses are Russian, being part of an international organisation helps. "People are less willing to have arguments with foreigners," Golikov says. If the homeless go for treatment to a normal Moscow polyclinic, they are often not even allowed in. + So far this year 57 people whom MSF has found to have tuberculosis have been sent to a hospital some 20 miles from Moscow. In the winter they find constant bronchial problems. In the summer, skin diseases and problems with lice are intense. MSF sends people off to Moscow's de-lousing centre with a chit to the authorities. It pays the centre at the end of the month. "Only 40 per cent of the people actually go along," says Golikov. + Upstairs in the station beside a row of kiosks we find Anna and her 16-year-old son, Andrei. Andrei has been homeless since the age of two. His mother is an epileptic. He was born in a home for epileptics but was taken to an orphanage when he was two. His mother escaped from the home and found him again, and since then they have been living rough, either near monasteries in the summer or on railway stations. + Andrei is a serious kid, surprisingly well-turned out, considering where he lives. He has become an MSF assistant, and proudly dons a white coat and gloves to help homeless patients take off their filthy shirts and sweaters for the doctor to examine them. He has never been to school, but learnt to read from his mother. Neither he nor his mother has the internal passport which every Russian is supposed to have. MSF is planning to pay for him to have English lessons so that he can study computer manuals. He wants a career in electronics. + Two miles away, at Paveletsky station, MSF works in only slightly better conditions, in a brightly lit passage near the left luggage office. Behind three incomplete screens the tramps half-strip while curious passengers look on. The organisation has a room where patients go who need to lie down or undress completely. Officially, every station has a medical point, but they only treat passengers who fall ill unexpectedly. In any case their supplies of medicines are miserable, thanks to steep inflation. "At least we can provide most basic medicines, thanks to donations", says Dr Igor Svyatov, MSF's programme director, as we stand in the passage at Paveletsky station. "It's not just imported drugs which are expensive. Even Russian ones have shot up." + All of Dr Svyatov's volunteers belong to Moscow's new Association of Independent Doctors. They spend two evenings a week, five hours a time, helping the homeless on an unpaid basis. "We know these people have no other access to medicine," he says. But in Russia's tough new capitalism, such charity work is often kept hidden. Dr Svyatov is one of the few willing to give his name. "Many Russian doctors prefer to remain anonymous. It can lower their prestige if normal patients know they work here," says Golikov. "Even medical students who say they want to help us often back off when their professors find out." + +LOAD-DATE: June 2, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +156 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +May 31, 1993 + +EVERY POSTER TELLS A STORY + +BYLINE: ANGEL DEL RIO + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 366 words + + + THE FACES of the country's political leaders are hanging from every lamppost in Madrid. They look like they have been hung by someone proudly exhibiting his prize catches of game. The city is full to bursting with friendly smiling faces, meticulously made-up, with perfectly lacquered hair and kindly eyes. + They are everywhere. They are there when we get up in the morning and peer through the window, and when we go to bed at night, suddenly sleepy in the middle of the candidates' big TV debate. I step into the street and bump right into a huge poster of the PP, the Partido Popular, headed - quite literally - by Jose Maria Aznar. I scrape away that famous moustache to see what is underneath - a smile perhaps - but I only find a poster for the New Year's Eve ball, on top of which Aznar's visage has been pasted. + I turn a corner and there is Julio Anguita, looking guarded and serious. The leader of the United Left is the most serious of all the candidates, as if he were constantly reminding us of all the dirty tricks they seem to be pulling on him. I give him an encouraging pat on the shoulder and the wet ink starts to run. + I look up to see whether the clouds are still there, auguries of the squalls to come and I find myself in a veritable shower of "future" posters - the posters of the PSOE, the socialists. Veteran socialist, Felipe's former deputy Alfonso Guerra, says this is a great poster, much better than the one of Aznar, and in a way he is right. This is a real "beautiful people" type shot of Felipe - with the face of an aggressive entrepreneur, the yuppie on the board of directors. It's the updated image from 1982's photo which showed Felipe, then so unknown, so intense, so serene in manner. It's the image of trust, of confidence, designed to try to eradicate the traces of all the mistrust sown over the last 11 years. + We are meeting our politicians everywhere at the moment. In the market, at the football match, on the bus, at school and in the old people's homes. Let's make the most of this opportunity to shake them by the hand, get their autographs. After June 6, it's going to be practically impossible to get this close again. + +LOAD-DATE: June 2, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +157 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 1, 1993 + +ELDERLY COUPLE HIT BY STOLEN CAR + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 41 words + + + Police last night questioned a boy aged 15 after two elderly people were knocked down on a crossing in Sheffield by a stolen car. Colin Charlesworth, 71, was in a critical condition and Ann Marsden, 70, had serious internal injuries. + +LOAD-DATE: June 2, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +158 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 3, 1993 + +CARE HOMES 'NEAR TO BANKRUPTCY' + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 405 words + + + PRIVATE residential and nursing homes are heading for bankruptcy after only two months of the new community care system, the National Care Homes Association, representing 3,000 proprietors, said yesterday. + It claims many social services departments are failing to refer elderly and disabled people to private homes and vacancy levels are climbing at an "alarming" rate. + Sheila Scott, the association's chief executive, said: "Too many of our members are already facing financial ruin. This will, of course, be a tragedy for the home owner, but it will be even worse for the residents or patients . . . who are facing the threat of homelessness." + Since April 1, social services have had responsibility for assessing the needs of people seeking state help with care. + The association says its worst fears about the new system are being realised. Most of its members have had no referrals in the past two months. + Some proprietors are being warned by their banks that their vacancy levels cannot continue, the association said. + Ms Scott blamed the caution and unpreparedness of social services for the lack of referrals. She said one northern city authority had still not finalised its assessment procedures. + There were also reports of social services departments making all referrals to their own homes or homes recently transferred out of local authority ownership, she said. + John Gilliland, proprietor of a 23-bed, high-dependency care home in Selby, North Yorkshire, said he had had no referrals. He had three vacancies and would have four if a resident currently in hospital did not return. "If we reduce by another two, we will come under severe financial pressures," said Mr Gilliland, whose fees start at pounds 220 a week. + It has been widely assumed many homes, both private and council-run, will go to the wall in areas of over-provision. + Social services directors admitted referrals had been far lower than anticipated. John Ransford, secretary of the Association of Directors of Social Services, said many people entered homes in the last few weeks of the old system. The level of activity in April and May was consequently artificially low. + "It is far too early to draw conclusions," he said. + A Department of Health spokesman said the NCHA was making premature judgments. "Care homes which offer good quality services at the right price have nothing to fear." + +LOAD-DATE: June 4, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +159 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 3, 1993 + +LOOKING OUT FOR XERXES; +As European Community countries struggle with economic problems, rising unemployment, and 50 million living below the poverty threshold, more and more people are facing social exclusion. In its campaign to increase awareness of the problem, the European Commission organised a competition for trainee journalists, who had to write on the fight against social exclusion. Forty journalism schools entered. This is the winning entry + +BYLINE: SOPHIA KANAOUTI + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EURO PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 1032 words + + + Xerxes was the Persian king who followed the naval battle of Salamis, fought in 480 BC between his own fleet and that of the Greeks, from the mountain which is now Ano Perama + ON FOOT we climb an endless slope, steep and dangerous for cars. The same slope is scaled day by day by elderly people who have got used to an exhausting life. We are five students from the University of Athens, accompanied by two of the people in charge of the EC programme for the least privileged groups in the Community and we are in Perama, in a slum. + The view of the island of Salamis opposite, separating the sea from Piraeus is the only thing which does not hurt our eyes. All around us are wooden huts, where entire families live in two rooms. The most remote one, with rotting wooden walls and broken window panes, houses a family of five. The father closed his door to the help offered by the programme. Perhaps he felt he could keep his dignity by denying that he needed help. But the door he closed was simply a dirty rag. + What a contrast with the church, the House of God, with its immaculately white walls and blue dome, like an unreal picture. If God ever thinks of passing through here, He better not hope to be invited into one of these houses. + "What are you looking at? There is nothing to visit here." An old man hails us, laughing furtively like a small child pleased to be given some attention. "Are you all right?" "If we were all right, would we be here looking out for Xerxes?" Self irony and the glorious past as consolation for the miserable present of the mountain. But Xerxes, the enemy, has already come into their houses in the guise of Poverty. The old man has been on the run since 1952 when he left Drama because his crops did not yield enough to pay the rent for the field. What weapons has he left to continue the fight? + For those with very little training or skills, whatever work there is casual, mainly in the shipyards. However, these men are capable of spending their entire hard-earned pay on a night out or a luxury good. Extravagance? An attempt to deny a situation which bars them from even the smallest pleasures in life? Another popular escape is alcohol which, together with wife abuse and the banning of women from work, makes up the darker, more pernicious side of tradition. + The Community Programme, the third in a row designed to combat social exclusion, is based on the realisation that we cannot isolate certain manifestations of poverty or claim that it is merely an economic or social problem. With the help of social workers, the programme provides these people with counselling and shows them their rights and how to claim them. It has enabled some to find work, and has provided others with training in order to help them to return to employment. + It takes care of children who have dropped out of compulsory education and provides them with a realistic idea of job opportunities. The many disabled and bedridden people of the slum are being cared for by women to whom the programme has taught first aid and other such services, while day nurseries are made available for the children of women who work outside the home. + In no circumstances, however, does the Community project give charity, in the knowledge that the causes of poverty are not merely economic but are deeper and more complex. It tries to make people take up those activities which they had abandoned, as well as to increase their interest in and committment to the future. + The beneficiaries are always actively involved in these schemes. For instance, they take part in the repairs carried out to their broken-down old shacks, which often do not even have sanitary facilities. + The roof of the house we first headed towards is made of zinc. We are received by one of the sons, a young lad who does not know where to turn from shyness, in particuar before three girls. Looking down, he murmurs a greeting. "Come through to the lounge." + His mother shows us a room not much bigger than a table. It was built with the aid of the project, as were the toilets. We walk through the rest of the house; the rooms are partitioned off with brown cloth. The unmade beds were constructed with rotten boards which fall apart as we walk past; one grazes me as if to draw my attention. + "Shall I make you a cup of coffee?" "No, thank you, it's already midday." "Why not, girls?" Her question ironically hints at our real reason, which we dare not express. Our host seems to be noticing and condemning the fact that we do not want to have a cup of coffee in this house, in the blue, filthy kitchen, with its innumerable cages of canaries. She asks one of the project officials to take one, since she has rats in the house. + There is no doctor, chemist or shop in the area, Until recently there was even no water. + What can they expect from the authorities and their more fortunate fellow citizens? Sometimes the poor meet with pity, at best they counter indifference and a stock reply: "What can I do about it?" Being poor is a stigma, and people do not want to be confronted with your poverty. + In a television report, a little girl was asked how she felt about her poverty. The next morning her classmates snubbed her for being poor; they had suspected her for some time already. + Naturally it has not been established that poverty is contagious. However medical science has been known to make mistakes, and in any event being seen in the company of a poor person can damage one's standing. + The Community action programme to combat poverty is fighting this public and private tradition. Will it succeed? + As bitterness grows, you become resigned to your fate and ashamed of your own life. Exasperation grows. But none of this will put food on your plate. + And the hope that you will find something to eat dwindles all the time. When all is said and done, all kinds of people go hungry in Greece, whether they be from Albania, northern Epirus, Laurium or even Iraq. + But only to Xerxes, the Barbarian, does it matter that you are Greek. + Sophia Kanaouti is a student at the National and Capodistrian University of Athens + +LOAD-DATE: June 4, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +160 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 5, 1993 + +PAPERBACK DIGEST + +BYLINE: CLAIRE MESSUD + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 31 + +LENGTH: 582 words + + + Brotherly Love, by Pete Dexter (Flamingo, 294pp, pounds 5.99) + Dexter's novel about two generations of gangsters in Philadelphia from 1961 to the mid-1980s follows the life of Peter Flood from the day when as an eight-year-old he sees his younger sister killed by a runaway car, through the mob murders that ensue from that accident to his own initiation into the underworld and, eventually, to the day when something happens and blood ties are broken. The prose is suitably, almost parodically, clipped and tough ("The boy holding the compact is as grim as this street" or "She washes down the stairs like a flooded bathroom"), but Dexter's hand is sure and the story is both compellingly told and breathtakingly paced. What Dexter evokes so well is the overwhelming inevitability of the events, from the first tragedy to the last. + Serenity House, by Christopher Hope (Picador, 227pp, pounds 5.99) + Serenity House is an old people's home in north London, but inside things are far from serene. The sinister staff seem strangely eager to hasten their inmates to death; worse, one of those inmates, Max Montfalcon, may be a Nazi war criminal hiding under a more-English-than-the-English carapace. This novel uncovers dark truths both about Montfalcon and about the place he lives. Hope's satirical talents, honed in four previous novels, do not always seem to match the sombre themes of this book; and some readers may find his narrative too-controlling, highlighting as it does parallels between euthanasia in Serenity House and the mass killing of the Holocaust. But the novel pursues its quarry with intelligence and a quirky, vicious sense of irony. + Free, by Marsha Hunt (Penguin, 219pp, pounds 5.99) + This second novel from actress-turned-author Hunt is a readable account of the friendship between a young black stableboy, Theodore "Teenotchy" Simms, and an English aristocrat, Alexander Black. Set in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1913, the tale is interspersed with the recollections of Aunt Em, who is in fact the grandmother of Teenotchy and his sister Atlanta. Aunt Em carries the secret of life in the South many years before, when a white plantation owner raped both Em and then their daughter, making him both father and grandfather to the novel's protagonist. Hunt successfully conjures a time and place, but something about the narrative seems too familiar, as though Free should have been a made-for-TV movie rather than a book. + Outerbridge Reach, by Robert Stone (Penguin, 409pp, pounds 6.99) + Robert Stone's fine fifth novel is loosely based on the true story of Donald Crowhurst, an Englishman who, in the 1960s, decided to fake a winning solo sailboat trip around the world, and went mad in the process. Stone's protagonist, Owen Browne, is an American ex-Navy man who embarks on a similar scheme. But along the way, as his wife Anne says to their daughter afterwards, "He risked his life. He risked his sanity. He experienced everything. Very few men have ever done what he did. Very few men test themselves in that way." + The novel, complained one of the authors of a factual account of Crowhurst's exploits, has changed "enough to avoid copyright infringement but not enough to avoid some raised eyebrows" - an accusation Stone hotly refutes. It is, in any event, a moot point: Stone is an exceptionally good novelist and Outerbridge Reach is worth reading as much for the telling as for the remarkable story that is told. + +LOAD-DATE: June 7, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +161 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 7, 1993 + +FEELINGS OF BELEAGUERMENT IN A CONSERVATIVE FORTRESS; +John Ezard finds that in the Prime Minister's constituency, voters' worries go a good deal further than the closing of the public toilets + +BYLINE: JOHN EZARD + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 461 words + + + REFUSING to give their names and striving to look as inconspicuous as possible in Huntingdon high street yesterday, the thirty-something couple confessed: "All our neighbours think we are pinkoes. We are the only people we know who aren't Tory. We're a beleaguered minority: the Huntingdon Two." + Up the hill towers the main Conservative Club, a mansion with a huge car park and separate entrances for members and for staff. + But even in this quarter there were signs of volatile opinion among Tory voters yesterday, the day a Sunday newspaper reported that in a straw poll, one-third of Tory party chairmen all over the country want John Major, MP for Huntingdon with a 36,230 majority, to go as party leader. + Leaning on a walking stick outside Conservative headquarters, Adrienne Verclytte, aged 82, said: "Mr Major is a very honest, decent man, but he is not as strong as Mrs Thatcher. + "He should not have joined in shouting down that MP Winston Churchill, who was quite right. This country is liable to be overrun by immigrants. Since Mr Major got in, elderly people who depend on income from savings are being hit very badly." + Peggy Beaton, aged 75, weeding her garden at the almshouses opposite the Tory club, said: "I never liked Mrs Thatcher but I voted for Mr Major last year. He is a nice man but he needs a firework under him. I'll give him another six months, and supportsomebody else if he doesn't improve." + Steve Johnston, aged 35, sitting in Market Hill Square with his children, said: "The Government is just drifting along. Major doesn't give the impression of a strong leader. In most respects I would rather have Mrs Thatcher back; she was more capable. Clarke would tend to be the most obvious choice, but there are no really strong candidates." + The most eminent Tory in central Huntingdon yesterday, Kamil Hassan, had different reservations. Mr Hassan, owner of the Starburgers cafe in the High Street, canvasses for Mr Major at elections, gives money to the party and has been to celebrations at 10 Downing Street. + But he is not a happy man. In the last 15 years, he says, life has been sucked out of the town centre and replaced by banks, estate agents and 42 restaurants - Mr Hassan has counted them. + He has got 2,500 signatures for a petition that demands: "We want good toilets which are not locked on Sundays, no Sunday mar kets, and no more out-of-town superstores". + He has been promised an appointment to see Mr Major, at which he will ask for powers to decide such local matters to be given back to the old town council. That would reverse the whole trend of Conservative local government policy. But Mr Hassan warned that if he did not get some action, he would "reconsider" his support. + +LOAD-DATE: June 7, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +162 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 7, 1993 + +ELDERLY 'MUST GET MORE HOUSING AID' + +BYLINE: MICHAEL SIMMONS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 4 + +LENGTH: 206 words + + + INCREASING numbers of old people are battling to live independently and more will need support as the aged population increases, with 1 million over-85s by 2000, according to a report published today, the start of National Housing Week. + The report by the umbrella group, Housing Forum, calls for fewer financial restraints for community care policies and substantial increases for home improvement funding. + The forum says that the aim, in theory, of the care in the community policy is to support people who have care needs. + "In practice, resources are woefully inadequate, such support has to be rationed, leaving many older people in intolerable situations," it + says. + The report says that as the Government cuts the money available for new building and improvement schemes for older people's housing, so their pensions - which are already among the lowest in Europe - are being devalued by being linked to earnings rather than prices. + UK state pensions are less than a third of average earnings, compared to half in France and more than two-thirds in Germany. + All Our Tomorrows, by Christine Davies and Brenda Molnar, pounds 12 from the National Housing Forum, 26 Chapter Street, London SW1. + +LOAD-DATE: June 7, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +163 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 12, 1993 + +RADIO: GETTING NOVELTY TO WORK ON AIR; +A playwriting competition drew over a thousand entries for the World Service + +BYLINE: ANNE KARPF + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 28 + +LENGTH: 875 words + + + MAKE it new scream the critics and commentators, exhorting broadcasters to find novel forms and contributors. But how? Leviathan-sized institutions don't have their tentacles into street life or emerging sub-cultures; they waddle mainly in the official world. BBC World Service has tried to swim in wider waters by resuming its playwriting competition, which attracted over 1,200 scripts from 80 countries. + South African artist Andrew Verster's winning entry, You May Leave, The Show Is Over, showed that innovation isn't easily achieved. This was a redemptive play about Gwendolyn, a crabbed white woman in an old people's home, who finds her humanity through a relationship with a black maid called Mavis. + There were several problems with the piece. One was that it sounded like rather too many other redemptive plays about crabbed people finding their humanity (generally through a relationship with someone of inferior social status: a child, an old person, or an animal). + This is what tends to happen: people listen to the radio, hear what's on offer and then, when invited to try their hand, aspire to imitate the pros - hence more of the same. + Another problem with Verster's play is that the essential-goodness-of-the-human-spirit theme emerged rather too easily. A long-standing rift is healed off-air, for instance, without any sense of past bitterness or enduring hurt. (Why, anyway, are dramatists always trying to improve people, why can't they let them stay crabbed?) + And I couldn't help feeling uneasy about the terms in which the supposedly enriching friendship between Gwendolyn and Mavis was cast - G supplying M with a decanter and music by Mozart, M bringing G one of her colourfully decorated tablecloths - though Verster strove to avoid a Lady Bountiful meets Uncle Tom tone. + He also turned in a very fluent play (the first he'd ever written), with confidently constructed scenes moving between past and present, and a light humourous touch. And despite everything, he did draw you in. + On The Other Side, one of the five runners-up and also broadcast last week, couldn't have been more different. The first play for radio written by a prolific Bulgarian writer, Stanislav Stratiev, it was an astringent satire in the absurdist tradition (shades of Stoppard and Giles Cooper) on the state, the aged (again), and personal freedom. + Mainly a succession of monologues, it had perfect-for-radio stamped all over it, being set in a place where old people are thrown out of windows by their relatives or the State. But Stratiev took the concept of defenestration and played with it: an old man on the ledge affirms his sense of personal choice - after all he can hold on or jump; the crowd complain about the cuts in municipal throwing-out services; an old woman is angry that younger friends were thrown out before her. And there was an extraordinary peroration about windows as holes through which the world impinges. In all, an assured and impressive work. + A first-time presenter, an independent production company - singer Eddy Grant's new six-part series on West Indian popular music, Walking On Sunshine, by Rewind Productions for Radio 2, promised a fresh sound. The first programme failed to deliver. Grant's presentation style was irksome: spieling about the different Caribbean countries which the next song came from, he sounded like a facile tourist guide, rarely contextualising the music or its origins, though mercifully succinct. Radio 2 isn't Radio 3, but it has a good recent record on ethnic music (series on Jewish music, and Asian music) and it should be able to do better. + Radio 3 germinated a new form: a daily five-part, five-minute diary, Sleepless Nights. The first incumbent, David Owen Norris, broadcaster and pianist, filled his slot with the kind of arch aperus about life abroad (on an American concert tour) that makes one despair of the British. + Above all, the thing was too damn written: here was a chance for a bit of aural roughness - life with hiccups - to sneak on to Radio 3, but instead we got the usual shaped and polished anecdotes with their whimsical last lines, though Norris did manage to convey the ghastliness of life on the road for classical musicians - all early morning alarm calls, and if it's Monday, it must be Chicago. + The final programme in the present series of The New Recruit (Radio 4) sought to contrast newsreaders by pitting David Dunhill, reader of the last bulletin on the Home Service before it turned into Radio 4 in 1967, against Radio l's Tina Richie. This highlighted differences in gender and network style as much as changes between then and now, though it was amusing to hear Dunhill read Richie's speedy bulletin at the languid, seigneurial pace of a country which still thought it had an empire. + But the programme was most revealing in what it showed of radio's changed form of address: Dunhill noted how trails for forthcoming programmes mutated from "listeners may like to make a note of" to "I'm going to tell you about", and enthused about the general incursion of chumminess on to the airwaves - which folks, I personally loathe. Perhaps the old style had something to commend it after all. + +LOAD-DATE: June 14, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +164 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 12, 1993 + +PENSIONERS HIT BY COUNCIL TAX URGED TO SEEK DISCOUNTS + +BYLINE: JILL PAPWORTH + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 33 + +LENGTH: 761 words + + + THE charity Help the Aged has launched a campaign to help older people claim help with their council tax bills. + At least 700,000 low-income pensioners are missing out because they do not claim the income support they are entitled to, according to Government figures. People on income support do not normally have to pay any council tax. + "We also suspect that many elderly people do not realise that they can get a 25 per cent rebate if they have another adult, other than their spouse, living with them who is unemployed or earning very little," said a spokeswoman for the charity. "Others are unaware that to get the 25 per cent discount available to people living alone they have to apply to their local council first." + Help the Aged is offering free advice on the new tax to the elderly and their carers, relatives or friends on its SeniorLine information service. + "Council tax will hit many older people harder than poll tax since a great proportion of them live alone in large properties which once housed their family and which will have been valued quite highly," says SeniorLine manager John Aston. + "These people are 'house rich, cash poor'. They may have large houses but very low incomes. They can barely afford to maintain or heat them properly, let alone pay high rates of council tax." + Council tax is due on any dwelling used as a home. If a house has been split so that an older relative has their own self-contained accommodation with its own facilities and lockable front door, it will count as a separate dwelling. + No council tax is due on an empty dwelling if the owner is in hospital or a residential care or nursing home. A person who leaves their home empty because they go to live elsewhere to care for someone who is old, ill or disabled also pays no council tax. + Similarly, no tax is payable on a home left empty because its owner is old, ill or disabled and goes to live somewhere else, such as with a relative, in order to receive personal care. The rules about who counts as old, ill or disabled do not require the person concerned to get any particular state benefit to qualify. + After someone dies their property is exempt from the tax from the date of death until six months after their estate has been formally wound up. Anyone who thinks their property should be exempt from the tax should contact their local council. + When properties are valued for council tax purposes, a special provision applies where there is a disabled person in a dwelling. If there is a second bathroom or kitchen for use by a disabled person or an extra room which is predominately used for their needs, such as a room for kidney dialysis or extra space inside to allow them to move round in a wheelchair, then the property will be moved down one valuation band. If it is already in the lowest valuation band - band A - this does not apply. + People with low income and savings below pounds 16,000 may be able to get help with their council tax through a rebate scheme called council tax benefit. The maximum benefit is 100 per cent compared with the previous maximum poll tax rebate of 80 per cent. + Anyone who was receiving community charge benefit does not need to apply for council tax benefit because their council should automatically check their entitlement. But there are many people who did not get community charge benefit who are entitled to council tax benefit, says Help the Aged, and they will have to apply for it. + The 'second adult rebate' is a special benefit paid by local councils to those whose income and savings are too high to qualify for the standard council tax benefit. It is payable if you are single and have another adult aged 18 or more living in your home who is not paying you rent, not living with you as if you were married, not paying council tax themselves and is on a low income. + If the person living with you is on income support, you get a 25 per cent rebate. If their gross income is pounds 105 a week or less, you get 15 per cent and if their gross income is pounds 135 or less, you get 7.5 per cent. + - A council tax information sheet and a booklet on council tax benefit, Can You Claim It?' are both available free through Help the Aged's SeniorLine on 0800-289-404, open between 10am and 4pm Monday to Friday. Age Concern's fact sheet The Council Tax and Older People is available free if you send a large SAE to ACE England, PO Box 9, London SW16 4EX. Leaflet CTB1, Help With The Council Tax, is available free from DSS offices and Post Offices. + +LOAD-DATE: June 14, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +165 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 14, 1993 + +OLD EMOTIONS EXPOSED IN A NATURAL BREAK; +Endpiece + +BYLINE: ROY HATTERSLEY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 19 + +LENGTH: 927 words + + + FOR ALL I know, Frank Windsor may well be the movie mogul's next choice to play James Bond. Perhaps, to that dubious distinction, he is about to add the real glory of Lear at Stratford and Tessman on the South Bank. But to me, he will always be John Watt, the long-suffering and intolerably reasonable detective sergeant in Z-Cars. Towards the end of that admirable series he was promoted to inspector. Yet he remained indomitably non-commissioned - a character fit to eat in the NCOs' mess with Poins, Bardolph and, had they won the stripes to which their long service (if not their conduct) entitled them, Kipling's Soldiers Three. + Apart from Sergeant Troy (who was hardly typical of the rank on which all regiments depend), literature has been notably short of memorable warrant officers. So John Watt was part of an elite unit. Playing him no doubt prepared Frank Windsor for the role in which I saw him star the other afternoon. He appeared as the acceptable face of mortality. + As far as I now recall, the Broadcasting Act insists that advertisements for toys, bubble gum and video games are not screened during children's programmes. The prohibition is intended to safeguard young, and impressionable, viewers from exploitation. It seems that the same protection is not provided for vulnerable geriatrics. Last week, senior citizens who sat down in front of their television sets to enjoy an afternoon with Joan Crawford and Henry Fonda, had their innocent entertainment interrupted with the reminder that their number was almost up. + Mr Windsor - who has won his way into many elderly hearts with his genial promotion of a fertiliser which makes plants grow at the speed of a pantomime beanstalk - popped up on the twilight home screens during the second natural break. Just as pensioners, all over the country, prepared to fill their kettles or empty their bladders, the smiling but still grim reaper invited them to remember that the end is almost nigh and suggested that they equipped themselves for what lay ahead. His concern was not the destiny of their immortal souls but the finance of their funerals. The message was "Prepare to meet thy undertaker's bills" and the promise was not eternal life but the certainty of a respectable send off if pounds 6 a month was invested in a well known insurance company. + The commercial lacked details about the guaranteed size of the brass coffin plate and the quality of the mixed pickles which could accompany the ham sandwiches and pork pies, but the implied assurance that there would be no need to skimp on the sherry was reinforced by the offer of an old English-type carriage clock with every new policy that was taken out during the period of the special promotion. Youngsters like you and I might think that watching the time tick by is not the way in which men and women with death on their minds want to spend their declining years. But Mr Windsor seemed reassuringly confident that the fine example of craftsmanship would prove a great consolation. Reassurance was the hallmark of his performance. + There was, he promised, no obligation to fill in complicated forms and no medical examination was needed. Having failed my optician's challenge to complete the documents by which pensioners apply for free eye tests, I understood the attraction of the first undertaking. And I know that after a certain age, pride rather than modesty induces a profound reluctance to undress in front of a doctor or anyone else. So I could easily understand the attraction of an insurance policy which does not oblige the holders to take off their clothes. But the third of Mr Windsor's assurances seemed more open to doubt. Potential participants were promised that membership of the scheme would not result in unwelcome visitors knocking on their doors. I do not believe it for a moment. One day a gaunt old cove, dressed in a shroud and carrying a scythe over one shoulder will come to call. He will be followed by a mournful looking chap with black crepe round his top hat. That is what Mr Windsor's scheme is all about. + It was also about an instinct which I understand very well. I was brought up amongst men and women who were determined to go respectable into that good night. The small silver put in the cracked teapot on the kitchen mantelpiece, the subscription to the Welfare or Institute funeral club - perhaps even the modest payment made to the Co-op Insurance man who called round every Friday afternoon - were all intended to finance the journey into eternity. Their preparations had very little in common with the plans of those ancient Pharoahs who built their own pyramid tombs or the dreams of those Chinese emperors who thought that they could march into resurrection as long as they were surrounded by terra cotta armies. Hubris had nothing to do with it. Knowing that they would leave their sons and daughters very little, they were determined to bequeathe them neither the cost of a funeral nor the shame of a cut price coffin. + It was, in its humble way, a noble aspiration. I suppose that somebody - funeral directors as they used to be called, managers of savings clubs and stonemasons - made a profit out of it, but it was the product of an essentially private emotion and the continuous thrift of the reticent classes. Few of them would have talked about it in public, and I hated seeing the old emotions exposed in a television commercial. Long may the insurance companies' warehouses be filled with unclaimed old English-style carriage clocks. + +LOAD-DATE: June 14, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +166 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 15, 1993 + +SACKED HOSPITAL WHISTLEBLOWER GETS POUNDS 11,000 SETTLEMENT + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 20 + +LENGTH: 329 words + + + THE "whistleblower" nurse, Graham Pink, yesterday won his case for wrongful dismissal after he had spoken out over conditions on his wards for acutely ill elderly people. + Stockport health authority acknowledged there had been a technical flaw in the procedures used to sack Mr Pink. It announced he would be paid pounds 11,188 compensation, the maximum he could have been awarded by an industrial tribunal. + The authority's move is designed to cut short a hearing which ran for 10 days in March and could have lasted another two months. + The authority's projected costs were pounds 340,000. Tony Russell, authority chairman, said: "By choosing to defend, we willingly opened ourselves to public scrutiny. To continue now merely to achieve a Pyrrhic victory, diverting funds from our primary duty of caring for patients, is completely untenable." + Mr Pink's campaign for more staff on his wards came to public notice in 1990 when the Guardian published extracts from his accounts of hospital life, given in the scores of letters to his managers, MPs and government ministers. + He was a night charge nurse at Stepping Hill hospital, Stockport, responsible for up to 72 elderly patients with, he claimed, two other qualified staff and five auxiliaries. In 12 months, he counted 520 patient deaths. + He maintained he went to the press after exhausting all official channels, but he was sacked by Stockport in 1991 on charges including breach of patient confidentiality. + He has since been elected to the ruling council of nursing's regulatory body, which he had criticised for failing to support his campaign. + Mr Pink, whose tribunal costs have been met by supporters, said he would still like the resumed hearing on Monday to order his reinstatement. He estimated he had lost pounds 50,000 in salary and pension rights. + "The most important thing above all, though, is that there are still no more nurses on those wards," Mr Pink said. + +LOAD-DATE: June 15, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +167 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 16, 1993 + +CROSSBORDER: MICHAEL EMERSON + +BYLINE: TESSA THOMAS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EURO PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 653 words + + + How European are you? + After 26 years, I don't even ask myself the question. I have now spent as long on this side of the English Channel as the other. I see Europe as my state and France, Belgium and Russia as my counties. + Are the Russians European? + Culturally, Russia is very much part of the European family. But its people are split. There are the young, educated Russians, who are only too willing to switch culture and participate in a new, more western system. They are a remarkable resource not seen in any of the other CIS states. Then there are those older people and institutions who are truly stuck in the mud. Getting out of it will mean destroying many organisations, and the big question now is how many. + What are their virtues? + Character, resilience, patience and solidness. They are also hospitable, generous and very well-read. The average Russian knows far more Tolstoy and Chekov than the British do Shakespeare and Dickens. + They have very intense personal relationships. Over 70 years of the communist state, when the rest of life was such a misery, this was the flower they cultivated in the desert and, as a result, their relationships are rich and rewarding. In England, it is the other way around. The public culture is strong, and relationships with family and friends seem very offhand in comparison. + How does everyday life compare? + I am shocked whenever I return to Britain by the relaxed normality of everyday life. It seems like something out of The Archers - a relatively banal experience with few ups and downs. Life in Russia is a soul-wrenching drama. Every month brings burning issues of the sort that in England would be considered an event of the century. And they are often a question of physical survival. + How is leisure time spent? + My main pastime is collecting pictures. The dramas of Russia are built into all their paintings, and many are extraordinarily attractive. I particularly like the works of Social Realism, which most Russians think are horrible. + How has life in Russia changed? + The biggest change since 1991 is that you do not have to queue like you used to. And there are things in the shop windows. Eighteen months ago, the shop opposite my flat was a smelly, desolate, horrible place selling rotten potatoes and ancient jars of pickled cucumbers. Now it is not Sainsbury's but it has moved halfway. + What irritates you most? + The Russians have no concept of service. Even people working in shops do not know the meaning of public relations. Being insulting and small-minded comes naturally to them. Fortunately, it does not affect my own life much. + What are life's sensual pleasures? + In the winter, skiing down the Muskwa River. And in the summer, sitting in the shade of trees in my dacha, which is one of a group that Stalin presented to the Academy of Sciences. Those pleasures almost compensate for the food, which is comparable to the most deplorable English transport cafe fare. For the first year I was here, I had no lunch. It is extraordinarily difficult to eat out in the middle of the day and there was no bread for sandwiches. + How does Russia fit into Europe? + Europe's smaller countries, such as Denmark and Belgium, are very able to adapt and compete in a European market. They have refined their skills, found a niche and are now modestly confident about their roles. Russia is off the scale at the other end. It is huge and just decides to do things in a big way, without thinking about fitting into the international scheme. England is somewhere in the middle, without the modesty of the Danes or the power of the Germans. + Which phrases sum up the Russian approach to life? + "Normalna" which means "fine" and "nichevo" which means "OK" or "nothing". The first is good news, and the second neutral, but both point to a culture of oppression and resignation. + +LOAD-DATE: June 16, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +168 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 17, 1993 + +ASSASSINS AT THE GOAL LINE; +Best of the 20th century: strikers + +BYLINE: CENTIPEDE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 11 + +LENGTH: 960 words + + + IN OUR hour of national humiliation, it may be consoling to fall back on the virtues of the domestic game and look back at times when we had players who could score goals rather than let them in. + Players like John Campbell, of Sunderland, the most prolific goal scorer in British football in the 1891/92 season (32 goals), 1892/93 (31) and 1894/95 (22) or Dixie Dean, who dominated the late 1920s and early 30s, with his peak years of 1927/28 (60 goals, the league record) and 32/33 (44). Then there was Bongo Wearing, of Aston Villa, who banged in 49 goals and Ted Drake, of Arsenal, who was on target with 42 in 1935 - including seven in one game in 1935 - and Tommy Lawton, top scorer in 1937/8 (38 goals) and 1938/39 (35). + In terms of strike rate, Dixie again features high in the agenda, ballooning the net with 379 goals in 437 games. Arthur Rowley put away 434 between 1946 and 1965, and our very own Brian Clough hammered in 251 goals in 274 games, until his premature retirement at the age of 29. + (To put this in some kind of perspective, Artur Freidrich, of Brazil, scored 1329 goals in a career that ran for 20 years. Pele is the only other footballer who came close, with 1281 goals in 1263 games. But we are dealing with the home grown product in this Centipede dispatch). + There are other statistics to measure the effectiveness of a striker. For example, goals per game puts Jimmy MacCory in pole position with 1.004. Brian Clough crashes his way into second place with 0.916 with Dixie Dean in third place with 0.867. The contemporary snappers-up of the half chance, Ian Rush and Gary Lineker, can only come up with 0.564 and 0.539 respectively. + But being a striker isn't really about statistics, about putting it away, crashing it in, nodding it home. It's about style, panache, adrenalin, memory. It is difficult for anyone who came to football in the last 20 years to really appreciate the giants of the pre-television era, whose skills and style caught on old black and white film, seem curiously clodhopping, more muscular than artistic. We have to rely on the memories and tales of old men to fill out the flickering and blurred images and the memories of old men are notoriously given to poetry and embellishment. + It is also true that the game has changed, speeded up and closed down. Defence has become a sterile art form, hard graft the most prized attribute. But hard graft is the very antithesis of the great striker, a player like an assassin, who remains anonymous, unremarked and unmarked until his moment comes, and he cracks a fulminating shot past the helpless custodian of the net. + Some did this with a style marked by courage and flamboyance, like Denis Law, a man who apparently could suspend the laws of gravity to hang in the air for several seconds, high above the gawping head of some earthbound full-back before flicking the ball into the corner of the net with a whiplash move of the head. + There was Bobby Charlton of the majestic thunderbolt, with the screamers of Peter Lorimer and Charlie George not far behind. Then there are the predatory skills of Alan "Sniffer" Clarke, Alan Gilzean, or indeed Ian Rush and Gary Lineker, men who steal in to sneak goals from under the noses of defences. David Platt is a more spectacular version of this. + And then there are the artists, Jimmy "Wee Jinky" Johnstone, Charlie Cook and Rodney Marsh, perhaps not strikers in the true sense of the word, but players who scored their fair share of goals through flair and ball control and an ability to humiliate defences, to destroy their self confidence. The greatest of these was George Best, who was known to beat a full-back, go back and beat him again, and reduce him to a threshing buffoonery for third time just for the hell of it. + I remember one goal that he scored against Southampton when he received the ball in a crowded penalty area. He was standing on the right hand corner of the five yard box. The Southampton goalkeeper, Martin, came out to narrow the angle. Best drew back his right foot. Martin dived to cover the shot - which never came. As Martin lay helpless on the ground, Best popped the ball over his prostrate body and into the back of the net. It's all there - wit, imagination, courage, skill, impudence - and the notorious memories of an old man. + However even Best must take second place as a striker in terms of efficiency and consistency to Jimmy Greaves, the striker par excellence. Look at his record: top scorer in six seasons between 1958/59 and 1968/69 (curiously the only time George Best topped the tables was in the 1967/68 season). His record in each of those seasons was 32 goals, 41, 35, 29, 29 and 27. In all he scored six hat tricks in the 60/61 season, six hat tricks for England, 44 goals in 57 matches for England (still a record) and 357 goals in 514 games in all. His dropping from the England team by Alf Ramsey is still one of the most heinous decisions of modern football management. + For the most part, Greaves operated in the assassin mould, nicking goals past the helpless custodian of the net, stealing in through unwary defences, popping up to pop it in. But he could also turn on the style when the occasion demanded. + There is the picture of the famous goal that he scored for Spurs against Burnley in the 1962 Cup Final. Frozen in time and in flight the ball, hit from outside the penalty area, hurtles towards the the net in one direction while the hapless goalkeeper and all the Burnley defence are going in the other. + Is Centipede right? Letters contesting (or, indeed, agreeing with) this week's + verdict should be sent to: C20, The Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER. Fax: 071-239 9935. + +LOAD-DATE: June 17, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +169 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 22, 1993 + +BOOKS: FIRST NOVEL + +BYLINE: REBECCA ABRAMS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 14 + +LENGTH: 1017 words + + + Nude Men + by AMANDA FILIPACCHI + 342pp pounds 9.99 + Heinemann + IN 1959 Umberto Eco published an amusing seven-page pastiche of Nabokov's Lolita entitled "Granita." (recently issued by Cape in Misreadings), in which the young narrator, Umberto Umberto, reveals his insatiable desire for elderly women: the merest glimpse of a wrinkled face or skeletal arm reduces him to lustful jelly and in desperation he eventually kidnaps a friend's grandmother and makes off with her round Northern Italy, etc. etc. etc. Amanda Filipacchi's first novel, Nude Men, also plays with the Lolita theme, but here the twist is that the girl, not the man, is the relentlessly cunning seducer. Her mother, the inscrutable Lady Henrietta, far from being an unknowing bystander like the hapless Mrs Haze, actively collaborates with her daughter. Eleven year old Sara, to use the infamously misused phrase, is not entirely an angel. Her methods of seduction are subtle, ingenious and effective. + In the current ethical climate, this is clearly sensitive territory, particularly for a first novel, but whatever one thinks of her choice of subject matter, Filipacchi, having taken the risk, treads her way through the moral minefield with considerable skill. She is a competent and confident writer, strong on invention, humour and timing, wonderful on dialogue. The tone of the writing is light, but edged with a darkness that gradually envelops the novel, and the pace of this creeping malevolence is controlled with great assurance. + Jeremy Acidophilus, the 29 year old narrator, works as a fact checker for a New York magazine, but somehow never gets beyond filing cuttings. Even the secretary despises him. Jeremy the Maggot, he calls himself. "I have a pale, weak, flabby, thin but at the same time chubby body. . . My eyes are the colour of shit. My hair is the colour of shit. My face is the most average face in the world. You forget it the moment you see it." Jeremy's private life is as flabbily uninspiring as his physical appearance. Out of this unpromising material, Filipacchi succeeds in creating an extremely engaging character with sufficient modesty and self-awareness to keep our sympathy, and just enough arrogance and stupidity to keep our interest. + His trials begin when he encounters a portrait painter, Lady Henrietta, who specialises in male nudes and asks him to pose for her. His grateful, eager acceptance launches him on a highly unconventional voyage of moral, emotional and sexual discovery, which will transform him from Maggot to Murderer, from self-destructive passivity to self-destructive responsibility. The keystone around which all this revolves is his inability to resist the determined advances of 11-year-old Sara. Jeremy is not a paedophile or a pervert; he repeatedly insists that he's too old and she's too young, he is never in any doubt that what she wants to do is wrong, nor, when she has done it, that it was wrong. As in Mario Vargas Llosa's In Praise of the Step-Mother, in which a happily married woman is seduced with disastrous consequences by her young step-son, it is the child who is the predator, the adult, the victim. Where both novels become interesting is the point at which you realise that the child is also a victim, not of one individual's behaviour, but of a wider malaise, a victim of a society in which the only effective currency is sexuality, regardless of age or gender. In the process, the reader's perception of moral and sexual norms is also violently disrupted. + Nude men in this novel, wreak havoc. Flabbily uninspiring Jeremy is forced to trade on his sexuality, lured repeatedly into impossibly compromising situations, and has decisions about his body made on his behalf - by the daughter, her mother, his girlfriend. The naked male body, however passive, however exploited, is an instrument of destruction: it turns an 11 year old into a sexual predator, it blinds a mother to the impact of her work on her child, it distracts a woman motorist at a critical moment. The male body is both commodified and dangerous. Filipacchi is a conscientiously absent author, but by reversing the cultural norms of sexual behaviour, both in terms of age and gender, she illuminates how profoundly unacceptable normality is. + It would be wrong to give the impression that the book is only about the use and abuse of sexual power; it also has some entertaining sub-plots, in particular, the rise to fame of Laura, the dancing magician, and the evolving relationship between Jeremy and his spirited mother, who at 71 has taken to throwing lewd comments at men in the street to "see how pleasant men find [it]." There are also some interesting observations about art, portraiture and identity. Ultimately, this is a novel about concealment and revelation, about how the bizarre lurks in the commonplace, the tyrant lurks behind liberality, the predator dwells within the victim, and the sexual adult within the child. Face value is irrelevant, discounted, it has no value: the magician whose magic tricks contain no magic is hailed as a genius. Nothing is as it seems: the book starts with a Jell-O spoon and ends with a kitchen knife. Both are murder weapons in their way. + Without doubt this is an accomplished, well-crafted and often extremely funny novel. Where I do have doubts is in the moral sleight of hand that Filipacchi performs: she persistently dodges the implications of her plot: the monstrously liberal mother, the sexually precocious daughter, the weak-willed man, the fatally generous girlfriend - all are punished in one way or another for their mistakes, but their punishment is unconvincing, inconclusive: are they suffering for their misdemeanours, or are their misdemeanours part of their suffering? Filipacchi remains resolutely on the fence and the result is frustrating. Perhaps like Laura's magic tricks, there is nothing to it. But then, like Laura's audience, you are never quite sure. + Rebecca Abrams is a writer and critic. Her book, Woman In A Man's World, will be published in September + +LOAD-DATE: June 22, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +170 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 25, 1993 + +EYEWITNESS: REFUGEES CROSS FRONT LINES OF BOSNIA'S GRIM CHESSBOARD + +BYLINE: CHRIS STEPHEN IN TURBE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 24 + +LENGTH: 674 words + + + THE HUMAN face of the latest grand plan for Bosnia - to decant the three ethnic populations into separate cantons - was evident in the town of Turbe yesterday. + On the western outskirts, more than 750 Muslim civilians kept as prisoners and slave labourers for the past 12 months were shunted across the Muslim front lines by Serbs firing machineguns over their heads to speed them on their way. + On the eastern side of town, Muslims were brought across the Croat front line, while Croats were in turn allowed to cross from Travnik into Croat-held territory. All this took place in the pouring rain. + The Serbs have sent Muslims across their front line from the Banja Luka region, charging them 100 deutschmarks ( pounds 40) a head, with a discount rate of DM75 for children aged under six. + Usually, United Nations' trucks are allowed to cross the front line to pick up the displaced. But yesterday, the Serbs refused, demanding not only that the civilians walk across the front line with whatever possessions they could carry, but that they continue unaided for a further mile or two with no UN assistance. + Perhaps the Serbs no longer care about appearances, as the world has ceased to protest at their ethnic cleansing, which continues - albeit in a more systematic way - across much of their territory. + "We can't get any nearer or the Serbs will shoot," said a British liaison officer, standing by a tank as the Serbs watched from a forested mountain. + The troops watched helplessly as old men and women, mothers and fathers with children, and even a paraplegic stumbled along the road to safety, carrying their belongings in sacks and boxes and suitcases. + Long bursts of machinegun fire blasted over their heads from Serb frontline positions. "They were not shooting at us, they were firing to scare us," said a middle-aged woman clutching a bag under one arm and a blond baby boy under the other. + "We had to walk a long time, they would not take us to the front line. We were all very scared. We were told last night we had to go, and we went through the forests. We were scared all the time because the Serb military police were there, and we thought that somebody would shoot us." + The refugees said that as they passed through the front line, Serbian troops in nearby foxholes bellowed at them "faster, go faster", and fired their guns. + Some of the refugees had tears in their eyes as they described how many Muslims from the villages of Cevcije and Bukovieke, near the town of Doboj, were forced to work long hours without pay in local factories. "It was slave labour," one old man said. + "It's very difficult to explain what we have been through this last year," said an exhausted, tearful woman in a white blouse, who dropped a heavy bag full of clothes as she reached the British line. "There was not a single night that I slept through. Every night they would take someone and beat them." + The refugees were helped on to British army trucks under UN supervision. They were taken to Travnik, a town already bursting with refugees and at best a conditional sanctuary, after it was shelled earlier in the day - presumably by Serb guns. + On the other side of town, more transfers were under way. Some 80 Muslims taken prisoner earlier this year when the Croats held Travnik were allowed to return to their villages, some of which were no more than charred ruins. + In exchange, 270 Croats were sent to Croat-held territory. They had been overrun in their mountain village by this month's Muslim offensive, and were then offered protection in a school building by the mainly Muslim Bosnian army after death threats by the extremist mojahedin. + The two groups of civilians exchanged weary glances as they hobbled through the heavy rain and changed buses at the main roadblock in Travnik. "I don't know if they are relieved or sad," said the British soldier who was supervising the exchange. "Some are smiling and some are crying." + Why did they do this to us? G2 cover story + +LOAD-DATE: June 25, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +171 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 26, 1993 + +URBAN MYTHS: 41: THE SPANISH DOG + +BYLINE: HEALEY AND GLANVILL + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN WEEKEND PAGE; Pg. 59 + +LENGTH: 213 words + + + A friend of a friend was on holiday with a group of other senior citizens in Benidorm. + She loved animals, and every morning she'd save a few scraps at breakfast and feed the scrawny stray pooches on the beach. Being a soft-hearted old girl, she fell for the skinniest little wretch of the bunch, and cosseted it most of all. + When the holiday drew to a close she couldn't bear to leave her little chum to the hard life of the streets, so she resolved to smuggle the dog back to Blighty, ignoring the stringent quarantine regulations. + With the diversionary tactics of a few of her fellow holidaymakers, she breezed through customs and carried her little pal home with her. Once indoors, the lady introduced this new Spanish friend to her old cat. The tom immediately bristled and attacked. A terrible fight ensued. Plants went flying, curtains were ruined and an umbrella stand spilled over. + The elderly lady finally broke them up, but there was blood everywhere. She rushed the poor little dog straight to the vets. Apparently, the animal quack took one look and asked her what she thought it was. + "What can you mean?" said the elderly dame. "It's a dog." + "I've got news for you," said the vet sternly. "This, madam, is a giant gutter rat." + +LOAD-DATE: June 28, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +172 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 28, 1993 + +SICILIAN QUAKE + +BYLINE: ED VULLIAMY IN ROME + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 36 words + + + Pallina, a Sicilian town of 3,500 people, was living under canvas last night - with two elderly people in hospital - after an earthquake hit southern Italy at the weekend. Fifty-five houses were destroyed. + +LOAD-DATE: June 28, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +173 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 29, 1993 + +HEALTH: BARELY 30 AND MENOPAUSAL + +BYLINE: ANNIE SKINNER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 27 + +LENGTH: 596 words + + + EVERYONE worries about ageing - none more so than women who have a premature menopause because of disease, surgery or a spontaneous natural menopause. + Jo, 31, was confused and angry when her periods stopped suddenly. At first she thought it was anxiety related and that eventually her periods would restart. Eighteen months later, she sought medical help. Jo believed that she just needed "a kick start" to get her periods going again but, after a blood test, her GP diagnosed a premature menopause. + It came as a shock. In retrospect, she recalled how before her periods stopped, they had become erratic. She had also suffered hot flushes and sweats, which at the time she attributed to anxiety. At 31, you do not consider menopausal symptoms. Jo turned to books, but none mentioned a premature menopause: all were written for older women. In desperation, Jo visited a homeopath, but the menopause cannot be reversed. Women are born with a fixed number of eggs and the supply diminishes throughout life, culminating with the menopause. + One of the major risks for post-menopausal women is osteoporosis and/or arterial disease. A premature menopause increases risk of their early development. Experts recommended hormone replacement therapy for Jo to counteract osteoporosis and arterial disease. + There are other problems with an early menopause. You cannot have children naturally. Jo, who is single, felt unattractive and defeminised. She eventually accepted hormone replacement therapy which not only helped her physical symptoms (dry vagina, brittle nails, dry skin and hair) but gave her her periods back. This was of symbolic importance to her, but it did not lessen her grief. + An early menopause is hard to admit to - especially when your contemporaries in their 20s and 30s start having babies. Jo found some comfort in the idea that if she wanted a baby, she might be able to opt for a donor egg. This helped her come to terms with her condition, and made it easier for her to explain to friends what had happened. Initially she had been unable to do so. + Literature on premature menopause is limited, and focuses more on physical problems than emotional ones. Perhaps this is further evidence of our reluctance to come to terms with the problems of ageing - even a kind of premature ageing which can affect women as young as 18. Small wonder then that treatment is not as sensitive as it might be. Jo's menopause clinic was in the same building and on the same day as the ante-natal clinic. She found herself sitting between middle-aged menopausal women and pregnant teenage mothers. What could hurt more at a time when both your youth and fertility are taken away? + Moreover, she was told that her emotional state was due to her hormone imbalance - which she found crushing at a time when she was in most need of sensitive support. Redressing the hormonal imbalance was clearly essential, but to Jo only addressed half the problem. + In fairness, the menopause is no longer the taboo topic it once was. Women are being encouraged to voice their concerns and fears and more effective treatments are available. Unfortunately, there are not many NHS menopause clinics and local support groups are targeted at older women. This leaves women like Jo feeling isolated and helpless. Self-help can have an emotional healing power which is often elusive in even the best clinics. Today she feels back in control of her life, but it has taken a long time. + The National Osteoporosis Society is at PO Box 10, Radstock, Bath BA3 3YB. + +LOAD-DATE: June 29, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +174 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 29, 1993 + +LAW: WRIT LARGE + +BYLINE: MARCEL BERLINS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 31 + +LENGTH: 497 words + + + LEONARD WOODLEY QC is a Bencher of the Inner Temple, which means he is part of the ruling elite of that Inn. The other day, he drove into the Inn and was was about to park in the space reserved for Benchers when an elderly man emerged and courteously asked Woodley to park elsewhere, that space being reserved for Benchers alone. Woodley had other, tragic, things on his mind - he was on his way to his son's funeral, and was leaving the car at the Inn for convenience - and chose not to make a fuss. + To the surprise of the parking attendant he moved his car elsewhere; the attendant explained to the elderly gent that Woodley was indeed a Bencher. He expressed some surprise. After all, why should Lord Bridge, the eminent recently retired law lord, recognise the only black Bencher of his own Inn? + IF BARRISTERS' chambers were people, I have often thought, many of them would be locked up in an emporium for the sanity-challenged, on the grounds of being several wigs short of a judges' convention. Take for instance, Gray's Inn Chambers, which produces very good work, I'm sure, but appears to need several years of treatment by bearded gentlemen with Viennese accents. + GIC's condition is that it does not, it seems, appear to realise that one of its members is - how shall I put it - no longer alive. Indeed, he has been dead for around two and a half years. Yet his name still appears as a member of chambers, both on the board at street level and on the fifth floor, where the rooms are. I knew the chap in question, K.S. Nathan QC. He was an excellent lawyer, but so far as I know there is no custom allowing late and great luminaries to remain members of chambers in posthumous perpetuity. Perhaps, you're thinking, the chambers just hasn't had a chance to change the list. Not so. It has had at least two changes of membership or pecking order since Nathan died. Those alterations have been made; but Nathan has stayed. Weird. + COMPARE and contrast. About two years ago, two important legal committees were set up. One of them, the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, had the brief of looking into virtually every aspect of our entire criminal justice system, receiving often elaborate written and oral evidence from hundreds of organisations and individuals representing a wide range of interests and expertise, and preparing a full report likely to recommend significant changes to our laws and procedure. The other committee, under Lord Griffiths, was given the narrow and limited task of working out the rules which would apply to solicitors wishing to gain the right to appear in the higher courts. Just about the only evidence it had to study came from two sources, the Law Society and the Bar. The two committees are publishing their reports within a few days of each other. + I DON'T usually do this, but I will tell you that on the same day a couple of weeks ago, two stipendiary magistrates were appointed. Mr Wallis and Mr Simpson. + +LOAD-DATE: June 29, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +175 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 29, 1993 + +HOMOSEXUALITY: LOOSENING A LEGAL STRAITJACKET; +Attitudes towards homosexuality have ranged from tolerance to savage punishment, according to the era. + +BYLINE: PETER KINGSTON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EDUCATION PAGE; Pg. E10 + +LENGTH: 882 words + + + THE news that police are hunting the killer of a number of homosexual men has focused attention on homosexuality. People who are homosexual, or gay, are sexually attracted only or mainly to people of the same sex. In a society which has traditionally been based mainly on marriage between the sexes, homosexuals have often met strong barriers to an open expression of their sexuality. + These attitudes have often shown themselves as hostility, violence and persecution. Many gay people describe instances of verbal abuse or physical violence. The law also discriminates against homosexuals in a number of significant areas. + For instance, consensual sexual contact between two males can be a criminal activity. It is punishable by imprisonment if either is under 21. By contrast, heterosexuals - people attracted to those of the opposite sex - may legally have sex at age 16. There is also a reluctance to accept homosexuality in many official spheres. The army, for instance, can expel homosexual men and women. + Such officially approved discrimination against homosexuals has a long history in Britain. The Church, government and the courts have long had a negative attitude towards people who have performed sexual acts considered "unnatural" and "morally offensive". + Some of the modern-day British hostility towards homosexuality is thought to be rooted in Christian teaching. This was in line with older rulings within the Jewish religion. Many Christians interpret a number of Biblical passages as outlawing sexual activity apart from intercourse between men and women in order to produce children. + In the New Testament, passages from St Paul's letters to branches of the early Christian Church are interpreted as outlawing homosexual sex, whether between men or women. + In pre-Christian civilisations, attitudes towards "non-procreative" sex - that which does not aim at producing children - ranged from tolerance to savage punishment. + Ancient Greece is frequently cited as an example of more tolerant attitudes. Documents and archaeological evidence suggest that, in general, Greek men appreciated both male and female beauty, and apparently combined marriage with physical love for younger men. A passage by the philosopher Plato (429-347BC) implies that there was no disapproval in Athens towards older men who pursued younger men for their looks. + There was some disapproval, however, for younger men who succumbed to these sexual advances. Sexual conduct in Greece does not seem to have been subject to prohibitions but to codes of good taste. Acceptance depended on how well sexual passion was controlled, whatever people's age. + According to some scholars, the Greeks did not approve of sexual acts between mature men because these implied that one partner had to play the woman's role. This association of homosexuality with "feminine" behaviour is still present today. + Christian attitudes to homosexuality has not been uniform across the world throughout the 2,000 years since Christ. The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, which seeks to persuade Christians to re-think their attitudes towards gay people, says that the Church's teaching, that sex was "good" only when used for conceiving child-ren, emerged 500 years after Christ. + There are accounts of homosexuality between monks and nuns in medieval monasteries and convents. Church courts dealt with offenders but gradually the civil courts took over. Increasingly from the 14th to the 19th centuries, homosexuality was regarded across Europe as a sin and crime contrary to nature. The penalty in many different areas and times was death. + The first law in Britain aimed at punishing homosexuality was passed by Henry VIII in 1533, directed against certain sexual acts rather than specific people. Execution was one punishment. + It is only in the last century that people have been identified specifically as homosexuals. The term itself - from the Greek homos, meaning "same", and not from the Latin word homo, meaning "man" - was first recorded in 1892. For centuries beforehand, homosexual acts were legislated against together with other non-procreative sexual acts. This implies that homosexuality was not, until the 19th century, seen as a completely distinct tendency. + Nevertheless, a distinct homosexual subculture did develop in Britain in the 18th century. Just as many groups today have their own slang words, 18th-century homosexual groups developed slang that outsiders failed to understand. The language reinforced a sense of community and helped protect them from outsiders' interference. People would refer to one another as "mollies" and socialise in "molly houses". + The death penalty for sodomy was finally abolished in England and Wales in 1861 (28 years later in Scotland). It was replaced by prison with hard labour for between 10 years and life. In 1885 all male homosexual acts, in public and in private, were made illegal. For no clear reason, the law overlooked lesbian sex. + The total ban on sex between men remained in force until 1967 when the law was relaxed. It now permitted homosexual activity in private between consenting men over the age of 21. Obscenity laws, however, have continued to be used against gay men. + +LOAD-DATE: June 29, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +176 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +June 30, 1993 + +SQUARING THE CIRCLE OF COMMUNITY CARE; +Most of Europe is opting for care at home on the cheap. How do we measure up? + +BYLINE: MIKE GEORGE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 12 + +LENGTH: 1366 words + + + THIS might seem the worst of times to press for extra money, as the Government tries to hack back public expenditure, but representatives of nearly 40 charities lobbied Parliament last week to try to get a better deal for Britain's 6 million-plus unpaid carers. + Only a small minority receive the carer's payment, Invalid Care Allowance, set currently at pounds 33.70 a week, though surveys show nearly a quarter spend upwards of pounds 36 a week on the extra costs of caring for a long-term sick or disabled relative. + "start optThey have to foot additional bills for all basic necessities but often without the income to do so," Chris Algar of the Carers' National Association explains. + "end optIf they manage to remain in employment, they are not eligible for any tax relief on the costs of employing someone to provide substitute care, or any other costs associated with their caring situation. This often leads them to give up paid work, yet the benefits system fails to compensate them for doing so." + Carers point out that their efforts save the public purse an estimated pounds 16 to pounds 24 billion a year - which would be the equivalent cost of employing staff to care for some three and half million disabled or frail elderly people. + Meanwhile, like that of many other countries, Britain's population is ageing - the number over retirement age will increase from around 9 million to more than 12 million in the next 30 years. The biggest increase is likely to be among the over-75s.end opt + Getting older does not automatically mean we become disabled or otherwise dependent, but the vast majority of unpaid carers are supporting people over retirement age. start optOne of the motives for the introduction this year of care in the community was that care at home is usually cheaper than nursing or residential care; but only as long as there are plenty of unpaid carers to do the work. end optAnd there are fears that as the proportion of elderly dependants increases, it may be difficult to persuade enough relatives and friends to take on the taskd opt. + This has prompted the Government's advisory body, the Social Security Advisory Committee (SSAC), to sponsor research into how other countries compare. The first results have just been published.* + Seven countries were studied - the UK, Ireland, Finland and Sweden offer payments to carers, Italy France and Germany do not. But the payments available in the UK are the lowest of the four. + On the other side of the equation are payments made to disabled people themselves; this is important as the money received by dependants and carers is often pooled. Here, too, the comparison is not favourable - only Ireland offers less than Britain to the disabled. start opt + But straightforward comparisons like this only tell part of the story. Each country has its own peculiarities and history.end opt + Ireland has a similar state scheme for carers to Britain, although unlike the British version it is means-tested. There are shortages of carers, and the use of residential care for elderly or disabled people is quite high, so endoptthe Irish government is now considering more targeted payments to encourage people to provide informal care. + Elsewhere in Europe carers may receive financial assistance from a variety of sources which reflect both social attitudes towards care, and patterns of employment among women, who still make up the vast majority of carers. + In Germany, there is a constitutional obligation on relatives to undertake care within the family without payment. Only if this is not possible can carers claim through the employment-based health insurance scheme, or means-tested social assistance. Both have strict and complex eligibility criteria, and payments generally go to the disabled person rather than the carer. On the other hand, payments have improved recentlyI'm not sure what this means! which more expensive public services? Am I being stupid?. As in Ireland and the UK, there is a shortage of professional what does he mean by this, properly funded? well-qualifieddomiciliary services. + In France, extra payments are made to disabled people to help pay for care. They are worth up to pounds 90 to pounds 110 a week, depending on the age at which a person starts needing help (Austria is about to use a similar system). Unlike many other countries, which are trying to substitute care at home for residential care, the focus of these payments is on delaying entry to residential homes rather than providing an alternative. start optMost publicly provided services are modest, though there is a widespread home help service.end opt In a few areas there are direct payments to relatives who are carers, at a rate of about pounds 23 a week. + Local or regional arrangements are also important in Italy, where nearly 50 per cent of some local populations will be over 60 within the next 40 years. Those who need assistance can get up to pounds 75 a week through a "companion payment", used to buy in professional care or to pay a relative - but start optthere are big regional variations in both the level of payment and the numbers receiving it.end opt + Sweden and Finland have growing populations of older people, but both have quite extensive public care services and systems of financial support for families. These are under pressure, however. Some carers are directly employed by municipalities on the same wage rate as home helps ( pounds 82 to pounds 130 a week), although again regional variations are wide.pt + Governments in all these countries are looking hard at social services spending and, with the possible exception of France, hope to make savings by emphasising domiciliary care. So-called informal carers are a crucial part of this policy, and there are worries that payments may not be generous enough to attract or keep them. + In practice, however, most carers have taken on the task as a matter of personal responsibility what does this mean?????(this is said to be true of four out of five carers in Britain). + So the real political issue hinges more on social and economic justice. Should "informal" carers be expected to suffer loss of earned income, promotion prospects and pension entitlements to carry out otherwise expensive social welfare tasks? If so, what is a "fair" financial settlement? + These are deep and troubled waters, not smoothed by the beginnings of "volunteer" schemes (in Britain and elsewhere) with non-relatives paid a notional amount to carry out personal care and household jobs. Once again, recruitment is largely among women who have part-time jobs or no other earned income. For the foreseeable future, few Western governments are likely to match the growing needs of elderly or disabled people with extra professional or fully-paid social services staff. + The latest research suggests that governments may try to square the circle by fudging the distinction between waged and unwaged carers - creating a "grey" labour market of carers - mainly women on low pay. + start optIn this and other countries, care services are frequently provided by a mixture of professionals, relatively low-paid care assistants, paid volunteers, and relatives or neighbours who provide assistance, often without payment. + end optOne important and new factor in charting the future of the "caring business" is the strong possibility that migrants from the old Eastern Bloc countries could end up working in European countries as care assistants. + Caroline Glendinning, joint author of the new SSAC report, says this is already evident in Germany, where inadequate insurance payments for domestic assistants are encouraging the growth of jobs which are paid at way below normal market rates. Are we seeing the emergence of one underclass to look after another?doesn't this need something to back it up - a very bald statement as it stands + * Dr Eithne McLaughlin & Caroline Glendinning, Paying for Care: Lessons from Europe, SSAC (HMSO, 1993). Additional material from Payment For Care: cross-national perspectives and feminist dilemmas, Dr C Ungerson, University of Kent; forthcoming. + +LOAD-DATE: June 30, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +177 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 1, 1993 + +NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET; +Some say it's too powerful others that it's too feeble. But the real problems facing the Serious Fraud Office lie in the criminal justice system and in the City's regulatory culture + +BYLINE: ALEX BRUMMER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 1599 words + + + THREE decades ago, on August 8, 1963, an audacious group of British gangsters etched their names into folklore when they stole pounds 2.5 million - the equivalent of pounds 25 million at today's prices - from the Glasgow-London mail train and received 30-year jail sentences for their trouble. But by the standards of the late 20th century, when the most daring crimes are of a more cerebral kind and the proceeds start in the tens-of millions and can reach the billions, the Great Train Robbery looks modest. + Clearly, men in grey suits with grand jobs in public companies - from whose ranks Britain's biggest criminals are often drawn today - do not conjure up the Wild West images which endowed the train robbers. Yet the sums looted from company coffers, pension funds and bank accounts in recent years, by executives with all the trappings of power, have been enormous by the standards of regular criminality. Robert Maxwell, arguably the biggest crook ever to sit at the top of a group of public companies, robbed his workers of some pounds 500 millions of their life savings and could still look them in the eye. + Asil Nadir, who's case has become a political cause celebre, took investors on an astonishing roller-coaster ride. In a decade at the head of Polly Peck, where the riches were founded in the unglamorous trade of fruit packaging, Nadir took the company's shares from 8p each to pounds 35 pounds at their peak in 1983. In the process he made millionaires of investors who had put just pounds 1,000 into his company. But the growth in the business and the huge profits were a chimera. + At the last count the administrators, charged with making as much recovery as possible for shareholders and creditors, found that pounds 450 million had gone walkabout through a series of complex offshore banking arrangements with a complexity that made Hampton Court Maze look linear. + At the Bank of Commerce & Credit International, described by the Governor of the Bank of England, Robin Leigh-Pemberton, as the most fraudulent bank in the history of finance, directors siphoned off an estimated billions of pounds. They left a hole which has been estimated by some experts as being in the region of $ 10 billion. Such a sum would be all but impossible to stash away in a farm house. + But contemporary fraud is not just about men such as Peter Clowes, now serving a jail term, who made away with almost pounds 100 million of elderly people's money, or the more complex financial shenanigans which earned the Guinness defendants Ernest Saunders, Gerald Ronson and Anthony Parnes a stretch at Ford Open Prison. It is a burgeoning business, which is growing so fast that it is almost impossible for the lumbering criminal justice system to keep up with it. + New figures produced this week by the management consultants KPMG show that in the first four months of this year alone some pounds 571 million of new financial fraud was reported. This compares with pounds 671 million in the whole of 1992. The new wave of financial fraudsters are not the modest or grubby clerks of the kind portrayed in Arthur Hailey's novels which sold so well in the 1970s. Most of them are right at the very top of their professions - company directors or chief executives - and drawn from the high achievement age group of 41-50 years old. They are the glitzy figures of Oliver Stone's film Wall Street. None of these fraudsters is content with fiddling his expenses. + Indeed, it was because white-collar crime had become so pervasive and so complex that the 1987 Criminal Justice Act brought into being, for the first time in British law, a unitary body, the Serious Fraud Office, which brings together under one roof powerful investigators who would also act as prosecutors. But the cases, when brought, would continue to be presented to juries in the traditional way. In the collection of evidence the SFO, based in Elm Street, London WC1, was granted extraordinary powers not availiable to any other prosecutors in Britain. However the SFO has a particularly onerous task: bringing to court fraud cases of once unimaginable complexity. + Three major criticisms have been levelled against the SFO. The first is the Michael Mates case that the SFO is some sinisiter quasi-judicial body, involved in a series of overlapping conspiracies with other regulators from the Inland Revenue to the Metropolitan Police and the media, which has overturned the innocent-until-proven-guilty traditions of British justice. + The second criticism, which until Michael Mates's corrective intervention was very popular in the press, is that the SFO, with its huge annual budget of pounds 21 million, is a gold-plated prosecutor which has failed to deliver what was promised. The critics will cite the acquittal of defendants in later Guinness trials and the failure to arrive at safe verdicts in the Blue Arrow trial (where legal costs rose to pounds 40 million) as evidence that the SFO are a bunch of duffers. + The third group of critics (which would almost certainly include the Guardian) says that although the concept of the SFO is fine, there is a mismatch between what it is doing, the system of criminal justice in Britain and the whole framework for financial regulation. + What, then, of Michael Mates's charges? In the main they would appear to be off the wall. Asil Nadir has proved himself a magnificent manipulator of opinion. In the 1980s he manipulated many of the best minds in the City and some in the financial press into belieiving that he had created the most exciting conglomerate of all time when all he had were a few fruit plantations and packing operations. In the 1990s he has had the whole country believing that he has the goods on Tory Party financing: all he appears to have is a cheque stub for pounds 440,000 (not denied by Central Office), an entirely innocent meeting with Kenneth Baker, a chip on his shoulder about how he has been abandoned by the Establishment which once fawned on him, and a knack of spinning the few facts he has to maximum advantage. As Michael Heseltine remarked, if he has the facts he should publish them. Nadir has, by all accounts, taken Mates for the same kind of ride, by putting the most sinister interpretation on routine investigatory events. + Take his central allegation that somehow the media and the SFO are engaged in duplicity designed to bring down Polly Peck. It does not hold up to even the most minimal scrutiny. The police and press have always worked in tandem. Press silence about vital clues in murder cases such as the Yorkshire Ripper is in effect bought by a trade-off: when the accused is arrested they will be tipped off in time to make the morning editions. Defence lawyers may not like it, but it is the way things are done. + Similarly, Mates complained of the SFO's practice of seizing every document in sight at Polly Peck's Mayfair HQ, making it impossible to carry on his business. Maybe. But the shares had already collapsed, the administrators had moved in, and the most important of all steps to be taken in fraud cases is to make sure that evidence is not shredded. + IF MATES is then wrong, are the critics who say the SFO is underpowered correct? Certainly the SFO does have legal rights which are not availaible to other prosecuting authorities. Its accountants and non-police investigators have the right to question suspects without going through the normal process of caution required by the Police & Criminal Evidence Act. This together with its wide-ranging powers to seize documents and evidence without having to make a court appearance, ought (it is argued) to have ensured that when it does go to trial it has all the evidence needed. But even these powers prove useless if the case is badly handled, by making it over complex, and if (as is the case at present) the prosecution is denied access to the defence case. + These are believed to have been the SFO's main problems at the later Guinness and the Blue Arrow trials. But this is not the totality of the SFO's record. It may have lost the battle for headlines, but the reality is that, under its last director, Barbara Mills, and the incumbent George Staple, it has had a 70 per cent success rate in prosecuting serious fraud. This compares with 50 per cent before its existence. + The kernel of the debate about fraud and the role of the SFO is one of context and culture. The fundamental mistake made when the SFO was created was that this structured, all-encompassing fraud prosecution agency was grafted on to a half-hearted system of City self-regulation. If that system, operated by the Securities and Investment Board and its offshoots, had been more durable, then Robert Maxwell could have been cut off at the pass when the first pounds 50 was wrongly removed from pension funds. Similarly, if the Bank of England had not relied so heavily on the Governor's eyebrows to be raised as a means of regulation, then BCCI could have been stopped before it became a national bank taking deposits from the public and local authorities. + In the US, regulatory culture has been part of the national scene since the 1930s when Franklin D Roosevelt created the Securities & Exchange Commission and put a Wall Street fox, the late Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, in charge of policing his fellow speculators. + The SFO is learning fast. It is the foundations below and reform of the criminal justice system above which could help to make it a more effective policeman of the fastest growing crime in Britain. + +LOAD-DATE: July 1, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +178 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 1, 1993 + +POVERTY TRAP FEAR FOR AGED + +BYLINE: CHRIS MIHILL, MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 516 words + + + A GROWING number of middle-class people face impoverishment in their old age because of charges for care in the community, doctors warned yesterday. + Fees for nursing homes, residential homes and respite care were causing distress and anxiety to hundreds of thousands of people who were not entitled to free care, the British Medical Association said. + People with income or assets above pounds 3,000 get reduced financial support for care home fees and those with income or assets above pounds 8,000 get no help. + The BMA's annual conference in Torquay called for increased funding to ensure that community care would work properly. It cond emned local authorities which were demanding that old people sell their houses or property before being admitted to care homes. + Dr Mac Armstrong, secretary-designate of the BMA, said: "A ghastly middle class poverty trap is now yawning in front of people with relatives who need community care. The worst aspect of this is that this burden is falling on the very people who funded the welfare state throughout their entire working lives. + "These were the people who backed the welfare state, who believed the welfare state would look after them from the cradle to the grave. Now, when they are least able to support it, they are having their houses and assets and their husbands' pensions sequestered from under them." + Dr Armstrong, a GP from near Oban, Argyll, added: "It's all very well to tell people when they are 28 or 30 that they must prepare themselves for their needs in old age. But when you tell people throughout their entire working lives that the state will look after them and then throw them on the scrapheap at the end, many of us feel this is beyond the pale." + Dr Alistair Riddell, chairman of the BMA's community care committee, said although the policy had been in operation for only three months, there were already ominous signs that many people were failing to receive the care they needed. + Dr Riddell, a GP in Glasgow, said that in his area people who had previously been able to admit relatives for respite care for just pounds 37.50 a week, were now being charged pounds 300 a week. + The conference also criticised the Government's commitment to achieving the targets in the Health of the Nation white paper, published a year ago, because of a failure to consider the impact of poverty, unemployment and poor housing on health. + Dr Evan Lloyd, an anaesthetist from Edinburgh, said an insulation scheme for damp, cold houses in the Easterhouse area of Glasgow had dramatically cut hospital admissions and visits to GPs. + "There is a huge potential to reduce morbidity and mortality. Poor housing, poverty and unemployment must be tackled with vigour and honesty. Everyone knows unemployment, poverty and poor housing have an effect on health except the Government and the moneymen." + The meeting criticised the Government's Patients' Charter, saying that although doctors supported the rights of patients, it was pointless setting standards if money was not provided to fulfil them. + +LOAD-DATE: July 1, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +179 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 3, 1993 + +A COUNTRY DIARY + +BYLINE: WILLIAM CONDRY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 24 + +LENGTH: 306 words + + + MACHYNLLETH: I like to think of the long duration of some of our natural history and antiquarian societies and I enjoy reading the accounts of the field excursions they went on in the days when they had to go either on foot or in horse-drawn wagonettes. And just as we do today they had to fix their meetings months in advance and take a chance with the British weather. I am moved to these thoughts because last Saturday Shropshire came to Wales in the form of that old and honourable society, the Caradoc and Severn Valley Field Club which was founded a century ago by an amalgamation of two earlier societies. If our Shropshire visitors had stayed at home on Saturday they would have had a dry day. But they came to Cader Idris and got rained on. They also found themselves wrapped in mountain mist. All the same everyone kept cheerful and we managed to reach the high rocks where the purple saxifrage grows in abundance along with greenspleenwort, brittle bladder fern, parsley fern, lesser meadow-rue and other mountain plants rare or unknown in Shropshire. One particularly beautiful ledge was yellow with Welsh poppy which, though well known as a garden escape, is not regarded as a native anywhere in Shropshire. It could be said of our group that some members were not in the first flush of youth and it was heartening to see how well these senior citizens coped with the steep and rough mountain trail and then tackled a final scree of boulders to get up to the cliffs. I am glad to think of the many children of today who are being trained in outdoor pursuits and I trust that some of them, when they are in their 80s, will still have the enthusiasm to go botanising on the mountains. I hope too that the Caradoc and Severn Valley Field Club and all the other old naturalist societies will still be going strong. + +LOAD-DATE: July 5, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +180 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 5, 1993 + +NATIONAL CURRICULUM: FAMILY LITERACY PLAN TO KICK OFF DESPITE LOW FUNDING; +Jim Sweetman reviews a scheme which helps people tackle literacy problems by targeting their families as a whole. + +BYLINE: JIM SWEETMAN + +SECTION: EDUCATION; Pg. E9 + +LENGTH: 802 words + + + THE problem of adult illiteracy resurfaced on the educational agenda this month. The Secretary of State has decided to give pounds 250,000 to support a new family literacy project. + Announced at the annual conference of the Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit (ALBSU), the grant was a disappointment. ALBSU had asked for pounds 730,000 this year and pounds 9 million over the next four years. It means that ALBSU will now be able to run only one or two literacy programmes, rather than the six or seven it had pencilled in. + Yet the approach is interesting. Recent ALBSU-sponsored research has confirmed something that most teachers already know from their reading of absence notes and other correspondence with parents. That is, that most children with literacy difficulties who leave school without educational qualifications have a parent or parents with similar problems. + In fact, around 60 per cent of the survey group revealed this pattern - a high proportion, given the real difficulties faced by adults in owning up to literacy problems and the common, and quite understandable, tendency to avoid confronting them. + Family literacy projects are new because they target the family rather than individual members. They are reputed to have had considerable success in the United States and their possible advantages are clear. If a family can admit to problems together and tackle them as a group, individual members are more likely to cope with their literacy difficulties successfully. + There can also be some collaborative learning, with limited teaching resources economically deployed. And, so the theory goes, such learning is likely to be retained and consolidated in the longer term by changed family attitudes. + The grant, announced by John Patten, should allow ALBSU to set up at least one inner-city programme based on these principles. + But this is only one facet of ALBSU's work. Funded by the DfE and the Welsh Office Education Department, ALBSU also works closely with the Department of Employment. Drop-out rates on courses remain persistently high, but ALBSU reckons that around 130,000 adults are receiving some help with basic literacy and numeracy at any one time. It estimates that up to 300,000 adults attend some kind of course in a typical year. + While these numbers are rising, the extent of the underlying problem is hard to gauge. Press claims that six million adults have significant problems, that 42 per cent of 21-year-olds have a literacy level below GCSE and that one third are operating at the literacy and numeracy levels of an average seven-year-old are extrapolated statistics. They are based on some questionable correlations between examination grades and national-curriculum levels. + The introduction of workplace technology makes new demands on the literacy of employees and is more likely to expose problems than was so in the past. Yet the highest rates of illiteracy in society are still to be found among elderly people and not among the young. + Many ALBSU courses are organised through adult colleges with shared funding. In general terms, additional ALBSU funding is sufficient to allow most colleges to appoint a dedicated member of staff and to offer some kind of basic skills support for students. + Other courses are run jointly with employers. They are being urged by trade unions to put literacy and basic skills training on a par with vocational courses, which are - usually - more closely focused on the workplace. + One such option now under development will give two hours of training a week - one hour allowed by the employer in the working day and the other treated as overtime. There is a range of certification available. ALBSU has worked with City and Guilds on standard assessments of literacy and numeracy - "Word Power" and "Number Power" - which are mapped onto national curriculum and NVQ levels. + For the DfE, supporting ALBSU family and adult-literacy programmes is part of a policy which embraces reading recovery schemes and national-curriculum testing as other aspects of an attempt to raise national standards in literacy and numeracy. + Reading Recovery programmes in primary schools are moving up another gear in 1993-94, with almost pounds 1 million to be added to a budget already over pounds 3 million. Eventually, schools with control over their own budgets and some independence over resource allocation might be able to offer family literacy programmes of their own. Or they might introduce a basic skills programme similar to those now being run successfully by colleges. + Jim Sweetman's new guide to GCSE Examinations in English at Key Stage 4 is available from Courseware Publications, 127 Shrubland Street, Leamington Spa, CV31 2AR, price pounds 12.95 including p&p. + +LOAD-DATE: July 6, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +181 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 7, 1993 + +ITALIAN BUS DEATHS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 36 words + + + Reuter: At least 15 people were killed, 21 were injured and two were missing after a tour bus carrying Italian old age pensioners careered off a road in the Dolomite mountains yesterday, rescue workers said. + +LOAD-DATE: July 7, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +182 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 8, 1993 + +PAKISTAN FOOD OFFER TO STOCKPORT NEEDY + +BYLINE: TOM SHARRATT + +SECTION: HOME; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 325 words + + + PAKISTANI farmers are offering to airlift free food to pensioners and other needy people in Stockport, Manchester. + The offer, which is to be considered by councillors tonight, involves flying monthly shipments of fresh fruit and vegetables into Manchester airport for Stockport, which includes some of the wealthiest suburbs to the south of Manchester. + It is part of a friendship agreement proposed by the district council at Okara, south of Lahore and there will be reciprocal gifts of medical and technological aid. + Okra district extends across more than a million acres of mainly agricultural land with a population of 1.4 million in 921 villages. + The plan is modelled on a twinning scheme set up by Rochdale council five years ago to provide skills and support to the Sahiwal district of Pakistan, next to the Okara district. + The airlift is being coordinated by Mohammed Arif, who lives in Stockport. He says the idea comes from the chief officer and two leading members of Okara council. + He said: "They have advised me that, Okara being an agricultural district, the people of Okara would like to ship their local farm produce, such as seasonal vegetables and fresh fruit, free of charge to the council of Stockport for onward free distribution to senior citizens, pensioners, and other hard-up people on a regular monthly basis." + Mr Arif says a former council chairman has offered a jumbo load of fresh vegetables from his own farm as a gift to the people of Stockport next Christmas. + Mr Arif is to make arrangements for the airlift direct from Islamabad to Manchester. Both British Airways and Pakistan International Airlines are to be invited to take part. + The mayor of Stockport, Philip Harrison, said the offer was very kind. "However, I think there are parts of the world far more in need of food aid than this area and the suggestion, although very generous, will probably not be taken up." + +LOAD-DATE: July 8, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +183 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 8, 1993 + +CARD GIVES PATIENT A SAY IN TREATMENT + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 4 + +LENGTH: 428 words + + + GAY, a 45-year-old London woman who suffers manic depression, carries a crisis card. Should she suddenly fall ill, she knows it should guarantee her treatment of the kind she wants in conditions of her choice. + Crisis cards, like organ donor cards, are designed to be carried voluntarily by people with mental illness so that they both get treatment when they need it - even though they may not then be in a state to recognise the need - and exercise a say in what kind of treatment it is. + Distribution of the cards has so far been patchy and based on local initiatives. But yesterday's enthusiastic endorsement from the Commons health committee, and the committee's suggestion that the cards be given legal standing, looks likely to change that. + The cards vary in content, but Gay's gives her name and address and states: "If I appear to anybody to be experiencing 'mental health' difficulties that require decisions to be taken either against my wishes or in the absence of my agreement, then I require the following actions to be taken . . . " + Her card names a friend to be contacted. It also stipulates that her mother, with whom there have been previous problems, should not be told. It specifies that any medication should be in the form of Largactil, a tranquiliser which Gay is used to, rather than haloperidol, which gives her adverse side-effects. + "When I get really down, what I want most is for someone to play rock music and put their arms around me and say I'm a nice person - and my nominee knows that," said Gay, who works for a charity. + Survivors Speak Out, a group representing people who have had psychiatric care, has recently decided to launch crisis cards nationally. David Keay, its chairman, said it would be infinitely preferable to a supervision order if patients leaving hospital were required to carry a card. + "The [card] acknowledges on the part of the professionals that the user has a right to be respected as an individual and is very much part of the solution, not only the problem," Mr Keay said. + - A mental health review tribunal's release of a disturbed woman into the community, which led to the death of an elderly woman neighbour in a fire, was "irresponsibility that I find breathtaking", a High Court judge said yesterday. + Paula Bailey, aged 60, left Rampton special hospital in July 1990. In May 1992 she set fire to her semi-sheltered housing in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. She was convicted in May of manslaughter and arson and yesterday jailed for life by Mr Justice Rougier. + +LOAD-DATE: July 8, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +184 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 8, 1993 + +FUGITIVEW PENSIONERS ELUDE FRAUD INQUIRY DETECTIVES + +BYLINE: JOHN MULLIN + +SECTION: HOME; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 385 words + + + Innocent dupes or Thelma and Louise with wrinkles? A latter day tale of outlaws. To add spice, the fugitives are pensioners. Winnie Bristow, aged 75, and her sister, Joan Payne, 73, left the home they had lived in since 1936 in East Grinstead, Sussex, 15 months ago. + According to neighbours, the sisters believed they were only going for three days to Milford on Sea in Dorset. They believe they were effectively kidnapped by their nephew, John Horrod, 50, and his girlfriend, Angela Dodge, 51. Both are suspected fraudsters. Accompanying the group was Ms Dodge's 11-year-old daughter, Katie. + The sisters had worked for charity, and were popular with the people sharing their street. But they started acting strangely after the nephew moved in three years ago. There are even allegations of them being drugged. The sisters had always been careful with money. They begtan borrowing large sums. + Soon after they left, the home they had lived in 57 years was repossessed. And then there followed a trail of unpaid hotel bills and other fraud across England, Scotland and Wales. About pounds 10,000 was involved, say police. + There was something of a spat between the Irish police and their counterparts in Hampshire yesterday. It transpired this week the old women, accompanied by Ms Dodge and her daughter, had stayed the last seven months in a bungalow near Swinford, County Mayo. Mr Horrod was nowhere to be found. + There had been reports of them in Majorca, on the Italian Riviera, and even in Canda. Irish police interviewed them, and then let them go. Pleased the two women had been sighted safe and well, Hampshire police were less enamoured with their Irish counterparts decision to release them. + Detective Constable Barry Woodley of New Milton Police in Hampshire, said: "We thought we had them but the Irish police said they couldn't hold them. They just loaded up the old girls and they were off again into the wide blue yonder. They're living the life of Riley. If you didn't laugh, you'd have to cry." But he was pleased the old women appeared to be in good health. + Now the Daily Mail has stepped into the breach. It is offering pounds 2,000 for any sighting of the women. The only stipulation: the cash has to be spent taking an elderly relative on holiday. + +LOAD-DATE: July 8, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +185 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 9, 1993 + +SWORDS INTO SOCIAL WORKS; +The Red Army is marching home, to capitalism, reports Philip Cohen + +BYLINE: PHILIP COHEN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EURO PAGE; Pg. 15 + +LENGTH: 902 words + + + SERGEI Stepanovich Konin is described on his business card as the president of an "inter-regional, scientific industrial company", but his powerful outdoor looks suggest a previous, more open-air existence. + Konin, aged 35, used to be a major in the Red Army. Now, he is Russia's equivalent of a yuppie capitalist - one of thousands of former soldiers blazing a new trail since the free market became legitimate. + Konin served 15 years in Siberia before retiring in 1989 to his home in Kovrov, east of Moscow. Facing unemployment, he and two fellow officers set up a private company, PIC - Production, Information and Commerce. "At the time, business was the most interesting thing going and we wanted to be the first entrepreneurs in Russia," he says. + They raised loans from banks to start a business making overalls and uniforms. As this took off, they set up other firms in construction, transport and banking. They employ mostly other ex-army officers. Of 60 managers, 49 are from the military and Konin intends to take on 150 more. + These are the lucky ones. The Russian ministry of defence estimates that 270,000 officers are being made redundant this year and next. A further 200,000 have been discharged in the past two years. The plan to cut the armed forces to 1.5 million by 1995 creates the potential for huge social problems. + Unemployment appears to be rising as fast as inflation. At the beginning of the year, a million people in Russia alone were registered as available for work. But the soldiers who return to civilian life find that although the price of consumer goods has risen more than a 100 times since January 1991, average wages have only increased by about half. As a result, 80 per cent of people are thought to be living below the poverty line. + "These men are a high risk category for depression, alcoholism and suicide problems, which, unfortunately, are increasing for all Russians during these chaotic times," says Dr Antonina Dashkina, senior lecturer at the Moscow State Pedagogical University. + A shortage of housing is one of the main problems. Many former soldiers are thought to be homeless and living in hostels, small hotels or with friends. + President Yeltsin and his officials seem to be aware of the dangers presented by a surplus pool of unhappy ex-officers, even if the army has stayed out of the current political turmoil in Russia. They have provided financial help to new businesses and established retraining centres, where officers can learn practical skills to make them employable. The ministry of social protection provides start-up support for managers like Konin. In return, the businesses agree to give some of the profits to those in need. + "We understand that a lot of people need social protection. These are lonely old people, disabled people and children without parents. At first, we chose some families and helped by giving money to them and their children, and their schools. Now, we have set up an investment fund for social welfare and half our profits go into the fund for charity and welfare," says Konin. + The All-Russian Retraining Centre for Discharged Military Officers, with offices in Moscow and several other cities, is helping some 36,000 officers adjust to civilian life. It passes on skills like marketing, accountancy and farming. Dr Dashkina is training 1,800 of the former soldiers in social work. Many Russians see this as providing jobs and establishing a system to provide social services, which do not exist at present. + Dr Dashkina's project has received a pounds 40,000 facilities grant from the European Commission, pounds 5,400 from the British Council and pounds 16,000 from the charitable Westminster Foundation for Democracy, set up last year by Royal Prerogative. + Strange as it may seem to be transforming soldiers into social workers, many Russians believe the officers are equipped for the job since they all have a background in psychology, as well as relevant skills like discipline, punctuality and maturity. + ALEXANDER Vasilishin, aged 33, taught himself accountancy during his 12 years in the army. After he was discharged, he joined forces with Konin and tried to drum up loans from state banks, but he found that private enterprise was not popular then. So, he did the next best thing and set up his own bank. + "Our bank in Kovrov attracted resources mainly from other private businesses. When we started last July, we had only 5 million roubles (about pounds 4,000). In three months, we had 150 million roubles, and now we have 500 million. We have taken over some smaller banks," says Vasilishin. "The bank provides loans for their own corporation, the PIC, a plant producing excavators, textile factories and light industry. Now, we are setting up other branches in Vladimir, Ivanovo and in Moscow." + As Yeltsin hesitates over how far to go down the free market road, these new capitalists are forging their own version of the mixed economy. They want to make money, but they also have a social conscience. It is a unique experiment in a post-Soviet system riven by economic turmoil and political strife. + Konin says he left the army against the wishes of his parents, but he knows he is doing the right thing. Asked if his two sons might join up, he does not hesitate: "No, they will be in business and help people who cannot help themselves." + +LOAD-DATE: July 9, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +186 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 10, 1993 + +DIARY: GRASS ROOTS ARE GREENER + +BYLINE: DAVID BELLAMY + +SECTION: WEEK-END; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 970 words + + + Monday + Here goes: 7am train from Darlington. Now I've got my senior citizen's rail pass it makes it easier to travel the environmentally-friendly way. The only problem is that I can no longer travel Silver Standard, so I have to buy my own cup of coffee. And I need it. Twenty six weekend faxes still to deal with en route, and I manage, despite the fact that the train gets in 12 minutes early. + Tube crowded, but I make it to the Greenhouse Awards in time for the pre-lunch photocalls. Chris Smith, Peter Ainsworth, Cynog Dafias, Lord Norrie, Ken Collins, all good green MPs there to get their certificates and oak trees from Green Magazine. The only no-show was the Minister of Transport. Well, he did get the booby prize. + A dash to the Conservation Foundation to do the day's London post, then a minicab ride to remember. Trevor from St Lucia turned out to be a fan, so he said he'd take me to Sutton by the green route - and he did, complete with running commentary about the trees, parks and commons - ready for the launch of the Ecology Unit's latest publication about Green London. + Amazing, my old stamping ground still overflowing with wild flowers and informal greenpeace. The only trouble is that all my favourite courting spots are now nature reserves. + Tuesday + Overnight in Chiswick before an early start for Belfast on the shuttle to open a new laboratory at the Questor Centre in Queens University. Exciting new automatic gear from Fisons at the nerve centre of environmental monitoring in Ulster, with satellite links to the US and Russia. Real space age stuff. + Back to London to make an appearance at the birthday party of my elder son Rufus. Warm evening; Chinatown suffused with the aroma of my favourite fruit, the durian. Great party; well worth being landed with the bill. And he did pay for the taxi back to Chiswick. + Wednesday + Car booked for 9am; good news, a lie-in. But, no, the phone went, demanding an early trip back into Soho for a down-the-line recording to Adelaide about their fantastic zoo. Digital recording by satellite is pretty fantastic, too. + On to Maidenhead to take a party of schoolchildren around the Braywick Nature Reserve. Meeting with the mayor, Seiko (sponsors of the reserve) and old school buddy Jammy (now Councillor Jamieson). Jammy and I used to collect aeroplane numbers together at Heathrow when it only had one terminal. + Long cross-country drive to Lincoln. I hoped to get some sleep, but the driver originated from Kashmir, so we reminisced all the way. Dinner with the Lincoln & Lindum Rotarians to meet the winners of - and propose the toast for - their Environmental Awards. What better place, for of all our cathedral cities they have really got their act of conservation and heritage together; a role-model for protection, presentation and promotion. What an evening, complete with the Lord Lieutenant - and they made me an honorary member, too. + Neil Smith, who does his best to organise my life, picked me up at 11.15pm for the long drive home to the north-east. Sausage sandwiches at 2am on the A1M/M62 interchange is now almost a ritual. Came up to their usual standard. + Thursday + At home all day, so I indulged myself by taking Theo, my grandson, to nursery school. Then a long day on the phone and fax, plus interviews and photocalls to help launch my new BBC book and television series about herbal medicine, Blooming Bellamy. The sun shone and the garden looked great, but the pile of letters that remained looked daunting. + Friday + London-bound again. Good old BR: the train was seven minutes early so I got to the Youth Clubs UK headquarters in good time to judge the Craghoppers, Youth Action for the Earth Awards. Fine crop of projects, each one a window on the world of grassroots action for the environment. I reckon that each year at least 10 million work days are given by people - free, gratis and for the love of it - to help look after their own patch. + To the Foundation to work on the London Initiative, which plans to bring Academician Yablakov (who also won an award on Monday) and other key Russians to London for an environmental summit later this year. Farewell party for Clare, one of our willing workers, who's off to help manage a game reserve in Kenya. Then back to Sutton to open a wildlife garden at Manor High, my old school (why weren't headmasters like that when I was at school?), en route for Heathrow and the late plane to Belfast. + Saturday + Party in full swing at the hotel near the airport, which meant a short night's sleep, for the BBC car arrived at 6.30 am to whisk me off to the Cuilcagh Mountains in County Fermanagh. Although the film I was making was about how to conserve the dwindling peatland resource, part of it was made underground in the very important Marble Arch Caves. Stripping one asset (the peat) from off the mountains affects the chemistry of the whole landscape, and that includes the show caves underneath. + Northern Ireland is a very wonderful place, still as green as can be. Long may its peat bogs, lakes, mountains and tourist potential prosper. + Back to Heathrow, then home at last, with a welcome from Rosemary, Dogby, all seven cats and nine ducks, all the other pets, and 67 assorted faxes and letters. Oh well, it's Sunday tomorrow. + "David. Phone. It's Nicholas Partridge from Perth. Something about the Men of the Trees and Rocky Wrigglers." + The diary was there, so I took a quick look. Paignton, House of Commons (I had better avoid the Minister), filming in the Peak District National Park, gliding and caving sequences, climbing with Ken Fawcett. I'd better get some sleep. G + David Bellamy is a botanist. His new television series, Blooming Bellamy, begins on BBC1 on Friday, July 16. + +LOAD-DATE: July 12, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +187 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 10, 1993 + +WOMAN WHO KILLED AUNT JAILED FOR LIFE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 4 + +LENGTH: 322 words + + + A WIDOW was jailed for life yesterday after being convicted of murdering her husband's elderly aunt so she could inherit her money. + Hove crown court had been told that Sheila Bowler, aged 62, a music teacher, pushed Florence Jackson, aged 89, into the river Brede in East Sussex because her nursing home fees of more than pounds 1,000 a month were eating into her inheritance. + Detectives who investigated the case said Mrs Bowler, a mother of two, from Rye, East Sussex, had carefully planned the murder. + Mrs Bowler gasped as she heard the jury foreman announce its 11-1 majority verdict. + The court was told that on the evening of the murder Mrs Bowler collected Mrs Jackson from the nursing home at Winchelsea, East Sussex, for a home visit, but instead drove around until it was dark. + She then took Mrs Jackson, who could not walk unaided and was afraid of the dark, to the river and pushed her in. + She claimed later that her car had a puncture and Mrs Jackson was abducted after she had left her alone to go for help. + Det Supt Brian Foster, who led the murder investigation, said: "Elderly people are entitled to end their days in some dignity, not to be thrown into a river for a small amount of money." + The prosecution claimed Mrs Bowler had been spurred on to commit the murder by the "age-old motives of greed and money". + When her husband Robert died in January 1992 she found herself with full responsibility for the care of his aunt. A few months later she was admitted to Greyfriars nursing home in Winchelsea, Sussex, where the fees were pounds 252 a week. + Mrs Bowler decided on murder when she saw that the fees would quickly erode her inheritance, a small flat in Rye, Sussex, worth pounds 35,000. + The court heard that Mrs Bowler made pounds 6,000 a year from her private tuition, supplemented by her late husband's pounds 8,000 a year pension from the Post Office. + +LOAD-DATE: July 12, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +188 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 12, 1993 + +THEATRE: THE TERRIBLE VOICE OF SATAN; +Royal Court Upstairs + +BYLINE: LYN GARDNER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 7 + +LENGTH: 243 words + + + "I STRAP myself to the mast of my pen while the waves of my unconscious rise above me," declares Tom Doheny. So it is with the author Gregory Motton, whose language sings with the poetry of unfulfilled love, abandoned souls and lost dreams. This is a far cry from the lumpen dialogue of Motton's most recent play A Message For The Broken-Hearted, but then this is a more fantastical creation altogether, part folk tale, part parable, part web of magic, washed over by the constant roar of the sea. + "If you want to know a people's god, look at their devil," advises the man in the urinal to introduce the tale of Tom Doheny. Tom is an Irish Everyman or Peer Gynt figure, first seen trundling his elderly parents across the distant dunes, last glimpsed applauding his lost wife's conjuring tricks, a woman who has brought both pain and magic into his life. In between, he attends his drowned parents' funeral, gets involved with the IRA, travels beneath the ocean, drinks all the sea and spends a considerable amount of time discoursing with the "dry man" who may, or may not, be his elder or dead self. + As with several of Motton's previous plays I have to confess myself baffled as to what it is he is trying to say, but here at least he says it beautifully with vibrant language and vivid theatrical pictures. James MacDonald's witty production and Bunny Christie's brilliantly simple design gives the play's vivid imagination full rein. + +LOAD-DATE: July 12, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +189 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 12, 1993 + +MAJOR FACING TWO WEEKS OF AWKWARD VOTES; +PM may spend recess under threat of autumn leadership challenge, writes Patrick Wintour + +BYLINE: PATRICK WINTOUR + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 739 words + + + JOHN MAJOR faces a compression of awkward votes in the next two weeks which could see him enter the political asylum of the parliamentary summer recess with talk still rife of an autumn challenge to his leadership. + The timetable for the rest of July, traditionally the month for fractious rows between governments and their backbenchers, suggests there will be little room for the whips to relax. The opinion polls put the Tories in third place for the first time since 1986, and his own satisfaction rating at 19 per cent, the lowest for a prime minister since polling began. + July 13 Labour will seek, but probably fail, to stoke a government backbench rebellion over plans to impose VAT on fuel when the Finance Bill returns to the Commons for its report stage. The shadow chief secretary, Harriet Harman, yesterday released a survey showing Conservative councillors have, in town hall votes, been protesting against the impact on the elderly and the poor of the VAT charges. A total of 70,000 anti-VAT signatures will be presented to No 10. + Ms Harman claimed Tory councillors had been voting with opposition parties in Sandwell, Bath, Glasgow, Powys, Bedfordshire, Devon, Dover, Darlington, Solihull and Haringey, north London. At least two Tory backbenchers are expected to rebel. + July 14 Lord Tebbit and Lady Thatcher will return to the Lords to try to persuade peers to vote for a referendum on Maastricht at the third and final day of the bill's report stage. + The pro-referendum peers, headed by Lord Pearson, Lord Tonypandy and Lord Stoddart, have long seen the referendum vote as the best chance of swelling the sceptic ranks with senior constitutional figures who believe the issue is too important to be left to Parliament. + Lord Pearson said yesterday: "Victory is not out of shot. It's entirely a question of whether people come to vote with their minds open. We have got within 75 votes of the Government in committee stage, and 15 of those will support us on the referendum. + "All we need is about 10 per cent of the backwoodsmen to turn up. It is not beyond question." + Lady Thatcher said she would speak in the debate, insisting her vote would not be an attack on the Prime Minister. "It will be a furtherance of what I have believed in for a very long time." + July 15 The Lords is to debate a motion from Lord Tordoff, the Liberal peer, stating the rail privatisation bill is procedurally faulty and must be recast. His motion follows a Lords select committee report criticising the Government for not allowing a proper debate on BR pensions, post-privatisation. + Peers will also vote on whether the bill is a hybrid, that it includes matters of public policy - privatisation - alongside issues of private interest - the future of BR employees' pensions. + Labour's transport spokesman, Brian Wilson, said the issue would also have to be examined by the Speaker, Betty Boothroyd, when the bill returns to the Commons. "Given the mistakes the Government has made over this bill, it is quite possible they have made the biggest of all and it is a hybrid", he said. + July 22 John Major will give a difficult end-of-term address to the backbench 1922 Committee, calling for party unity. + July 26 Peers and MPs will simultaneously debate a motion on Britain's Social Chapter opt- out from the Maastricht Treaty. The Government cannot transfer powers granted under the Maastricht Bill to Brussels until after the debate. + The days before the vote will see a game of brinkmanship between the Tory sceptics and the Government when Mr Major, for tactical reasons, may suggest he will have to accept the Social Chapter as the price for the passage of the bill. + He knows the Tory sceptics will only vote for the Social Chapter if they believe that by doing so Mr Major will not accept it, and will instead abandon Maastricht altogether. + The precise terms of the Government motion, and Labour amendment, have not been tabled, and many of the influential elder statesmen within the Euro-sceptic group will not make up their minds until they have seen them. The Tory sceptic group, containing a hard core of 30 MPs, is known to be divided, but in theory has the ability to defeat the Government, particularly if the nine Ulster Unionist MPs vote against. + July 30 The result of the Christchurch byelection is expected, with Tory whips already braced for defeat. + +LOAD-DATE: July 12, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +190 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 12, 1993 + +A COUNTRY DIARY + +BYLINE: A. HARRY GRIFFIN. + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 21 + +LENGTH: 395 words + + + THE HIGHLANDS: Roadside banks of flaming gorse lighted much of our way up into the Highlands and, with the blue hills rising ahead, assured us we were really back in Scotland again - my annual retreat for nearly 60 years. One reason for this visit was to introduce a companion to Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the British Isles but little more than a long and tiresome slog by the tourist route. We were an unlikely pair - an octogenarian geriatric and a great grandmother with limited mountain experience - but we made it on a bad day of thick cloud and driving rain with about five feet of visibility on the summit. In younger days I rarely used the tourist route which is now even more stony and unpleasant than I remembered so this will be my last ascent of the Ben. Other days were rather more scenically rewarding although less meritorious - an ascent of Aonach Mor, but half of it by gondola, and ascents of Cairngorm and Cairn Lochan, with considerable assistance from chair lifts. From these summits, all around 4,000 feet, views over much of Scotland were enjoyed but we had no time to collect Benn Macdui, the second highest mountain in Britain, having wasted most of the day waiting for the clouds to lift. Merely motoring holidaymakers probably found the weather, day after day, delightful but, with the highest tops covered in cloud for much of the time, we felt ourselves restricted and were even reduced to looking at ospreys from the Loch Garten hide or trying out the whisky at Tomintoul, the highest village in the Highlands. It was delightful crunching through summer snow again and identifying favourite hills of 50 years ago but next time we will avoid the popular places. We must have encountered, dimly seen in the mist, at least a hundred people on Ben Nevis, despite the poor conditions and the chair-lifts were busily rattling away all day in the Cairngorms. One elderly retired gentleman, met during our descent of the Ben, told me he believed, and hoped, he had been the oldest person on the summit that day. He had been deceived by the woolly "Compo" tea-cosy covering my balding pate and I felt a little naughty telling him I had beaten him by 17 years. Aviemore, where I had spent my first honeymoon 56 years ago, has certainly changed in the intervening years but, even here, the recession seemed to be still biting. + +LOAD-DATE: July 12, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +191 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 14, 1993 + +CHARITIES: DISABLING THE HELPERS; +The clampdown on invalidity benefit is threatening the vital work being done by disabled volunteers + +BYLINE: LINDA SHEERAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 17 + +LENGTH: 1064 words + + + SANDRA and Ian Evans grasped the chance to help others. She was disabled; he was a diabetic and unemployed. They used to sit around the house feeling bored and useless. Then, about a year ago, they discovered voluntary work. + Suddenly they had a new purpose in their lives and for 12 months they did everything from changing a light-bulb to organising the rescue of snow-bound pensioners in the remote corner of north-west Scotland where they live. Once, the husband-and-wife team arranged a housing transfer for an elderly woman and her daughter harassed by drug addicts. More often, they would drop by for a chat with the housebound. + Last month, however, the Evanses, who have a 13-year-old son, gave up their community work for the charity Arthritis Care because of fears that Sandra would lose her pounds 56-a-week invalidity benefit. They felt they had no alternative after hearing about an unofficial crackdown on disabled volunteers. Sandra, a polio victim and herself an arthritis sufferer, says bleakly: "If invalidity benefit was taken away, it would break us up as a family. We would never be able to manage. Now we are back in the house, mentally stagnating, getting under one another's feet and of no use to anybody." + Sandra (whose name, and her husband's, have been changed here) is only one of a growing number of people on IVB who have felt obliged to give up unpaid work, some after many years of service, after learning that claimants are being told that if they are fit enough to volunteer, they are fit enough to take up paid jobs. The development has thrown charities and disability and voluntary groups into turmoil. Long-established members are resigning and branches face extinction. + Organisers are angry and bewildered that benefit offices should want to penalise charitable workers at the very time the Government has been emphasising the importance of the voluntary sector. Many believe the timing also threatens to undermind the policy of care in the community. Volunteers who offer irreplaceable counselling and support are now said to be working in a climate of fear. + The problem is particularly acute because of the growing reliance of charities on the unpaid work and leading roles being taken by the very people they were set up to help. It has also created a paradox: at the same time as the Government is pushing for a greater say for disabled people and for self-advocacy, action is being taken which deters them from speaking out and helping themselves and others. Ruth Horton, of the Volunteer Centre UK, which represents voluntary workers, says: "The situation is crazy. Excluding people from the opportunity is contrary to the message from the Prime Minister's own office." + Over the past few months, growing numbers of volunteers on IVB have been recalled for tough new medical assessments and warned they risk losing their payments, according to campaign groups. In Kent, Peggy Pryer, a 55-year-old wheelchair user, received a letter from social security staff saying she was fit for work. Officials told her that if she was capable of going to meetings of the local community health council and the charity Self Help In Pain, then she was able to work. + Publicity surrounding this case has sent alarm bells ringing across the country. In Colwyn Bay, North Wales, an entire branch of Arthritis Care resigned. Members feared they would be called in by social security staff following media coverage of the branch, newly set up. + Dial UK, a national network of advice shops run by disabled people for disabled people, faces mass resignations that jeopardise its future. Dot McGahan, the network's director, says losing just a few volunteers would be disastrous. + Calls have also been flooding into the head offices of the National Association of Citizen's Advice Bureaux and the National Association of Volunteer Bureaux from local managers in areas including York, Surrey, Manchester and the West Midlands. They have all had stories of volunteers who have lost their benefit or are resigning because they feel under threat. Peter Adeane, policy officer of Nacab, which boasts 14,000 volunteers nationwide, found a stack of letters on his desk on Monday. "One was from a volunteer whose benefit was suspended by social security staff after they received an anonymous tip-off that she was working. They didn't even question her first. This caused a lot of grief and it was two weeks before the benefit was reinstated." + Eileen Wimbery, vice-chairwoman of the NAVB, says she has seen a "tremendous" increase in letters from voluntary organisations complaining of members' resignations. She fears the very future of some groups is at risk. "I feel very pessimistic. Something will have to be done, otherwise the whole structure of user and self-help groups will collapse - particularly with the added pressure of cuts in the health service." + The Department of Social Security claims there has been no clampdown on volunteers, but admits there has been a tightening of administrative and medical procedures. People who fail to turn up to IVB medical examinations now risk losing their entitlement to the benefit. However, requests for explanations from voluntary groups have so far been ignored by social security ministers who have targeted IVB in their plans to curb the spiralling, pounds 80 billion social security budget. + Groups most affected are this week laying plans for a mass lobby of MPs and copies of typical members' resignation letters are being sent to Peter Lilley, Social Security Secretary, with demands for assurances that volunteers will not lose their benefit entitlement. However, few believe he will provide such reassurance before the December budget and while the whole future of IVB is under review. + Richard Gutch, chief executive of Arthritis Care, which has 70,000 members and 5,000 active volunteers, says: "It is an appalling situation. These people each contribute something to the community and it builds up to a huge amount. We would like to see Arthritis Care controlled by people with arthritis - but that kind of movement is going to be severely limited if they are scared to come forward." + For Sandra Evans, the issue is more straightforward. She says: "All I wanted to do was help others: giving up has left a void in my life - it all seems so unfair." + +LOAD-DATE: July 14, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +192 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 15, 1993 + +MUSLIMS REEL BEFORE SERB-CROAT PURGES; +New epidemic of 'ethnic cleansing' sweeps Bosnia + +BYLINE: IAN TRAYNOR EAST EUROPE EDITOR + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 11 + +LENGTH: 606 words + + + THOUSANDS of terrified Muslims were fleeing from Serb forces or were being driven from their homes by Croats in a fresh epidemic of "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia yesterday, United Nations sources said. + And in Croatia, rebel Serbs and Croats stepped up fighting yesterday. A senior UN official warned full-scale war in Croatia could resume. Serbs shelled the Croatian town of Karlovac and Croatian forces bombarded the Serb-held Krajina region on the Dalmatian coast. + As the Bosnian leadership in Sarajevo agonised over the Serb-Croat partition plan for their country, fierce Croat-Muslim battles raged around the vital south-western city of Mostar. The Croats were rounding up thousands of Muslims at gunpoint and penning them into a ghetto on the east bank of the River Neretva that dissects the town, the sources said. + "They will allow no relief workers or UN troops in the city so they can carry out their ethnic cleansing with impunity," a UN source said. + Barry Frewer, the UN spokesman in Sarajevo, said the Bosnian Croats fighting around Mostar were being reinforced by troops from Split in Croatia proper. He said it was "very likely" that these included Croatian army units. + The Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, said in parliament it was time for the European Community to consider extending the sanctions on Serbia to Croatia. On Tuesday, the German foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel, rejected calls for sanctions against Croatia. + UN sources said Croatian forces were evicting Muslim women, children and elderly people from their homes on the west bank of the Neretva and forcing them across the river. + "Local Croats are telling us that gunmen go door-to-door at night, looting and robbing, terrorising the Muslims from their homes and forcing them over the bridge by shooting over their heads," said a UN official. + At least 30,000 Muslims, half of them refugees, are penned into the ghetto, which the Croats are denying food aid. There is no electricity and the two water taps are both under Croat sniper fire. + Under the Serb-Croat scheme to carve Bosnia into three ethnic mini-states, Mostar is to be the capital of the Croatian statelet. Before the war, Muslims slightly outnumbered Croats in its population of 120,000. + Elsewhere in the region, at Tomislavgrad and Capljina, most Muslim shops have been blown up and hundreds of Muslim men have been arrested, British army sources said. The Croats are holding up to 6,000 men and some women at a helidrome outside Mostar, the UN said. Other prisoners are crammed into a nearby school. + Last night a Bosnian Croat spokesman confirmed that 3,000 Muslim men had been detained in Mostar. He made it plain they would be held until the war was over, but denied that women and children were being evicted from their homes. + Last week, the local Bosnian Croat authorities told the UN and international relief organisations that they would be shot if they tried to enter the city. Since then, the "ethnic cleansing" has moved into top gear, while the political leadership has claimed an "all-out offensive" by the Muslims in the area, the UN sources say. + The Croats have allowed no food aid into Mostar for almost a month. They have told the International Red Cross there is no need for its officials to visit the detainees because they are not prisoners of war. + Commander Frewer said 2,000 Muslims were en route to the central town of Travnik after being purged by the Serbs in northern Bosnia. There were unconfirmed reports of 2,000 Muslim fighters being held by the Serbs around the central town of Maglaj, he added. + +LOAD-DATE: July 15, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +193 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 16, 1993 + +CHRISTCHURCH VOTERS BITE BACK AGAINST ZIMMER FRAME IMAGE; +While not yet on the scale of Mrs Thatcher, John Major is becoming a negative factor + +BYLINE: PATRICK WINTOUR + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 658 words + + + THE voters of Christchurch - two-thirds of whom are not pensioners - are becoming upset at the TV portrayal of their home patch as a giant old folks' home in which the clink of the zimmer frame, the whirr of the electric wheelchair and the occasional feedback from hearing aids are the only sounds to disturb the south coast peace. + "They first showed us swans then the bowling green and then the next picture is an old lady pushing a trolley going on about pensions," said Gloria Rees, a distinctly under-60 Conservative supporter. "That's all you see. What do you have to do to prove that we don't all have grey hair down here?" + Local council officials, rapidly realising that the constituency's gathering geriatric image is doing little to attract inward investment, point out the presence in the area of strong defence related industries, which have produced, among other things, the black box flight recorder. + In the case of the Conservative Party, it seems only a question of whether it will be design fault or pilot error that brings it crashing to the ground in Christchurch in two weeks time. + So far it seems both. Rob Hayward, the personable Tory candidate, perhaps unwisely opens his doorstep repartee with the words "any issues you want to raise?". Back comes the reply: "Have you got three days to spare? I have never seen such a shower as you lot. It's not even muddling through. Your leader goes from pillar to post with no idea what he's doing." + Mr Major is rapidly becoming a negative factor, not yet, by any means, on the scale of Mrs Thatcher in 1990 but still worrying. + But time after time the voters, especially the 28,000 pensioners on fixed incomes, raise the issue of VAT on fuel. Sheila Hartington, standing on the doorstep of her well-kept bungalow complains: "We've been wondering whether we've done the right thing. Perhaps we should have gone into a flat and saved the money. If you're on a fixed income like us, and the fuel bill goes up pounds 100 a quarter, it hits you horribly". + Louis Williams, a few doors down agrees. "Can you begin to trust them any more? Mr Major says one thing and does another. . Rather than put it on the fuel it would have been better if they had said that we've got to put income taxes up - at least it's honest". + Not for nothing is there a handwritten sign in Labour's cramped campaign headquarters in Christchurch reading "It's VAT on Fuel . . . Stupid!" - an echo of the Clinton campaign assertion "It's the Economy . . . Stupid!". + Chris Rennard, the Liberal Democrats' byelection maestro, says: "VAT is not the only issue - crime is important - but VAT brings everything together - people's sense of betrayal, the Government's economic mismanagement and the feeling that the Government is not fair." + John Denham, a minder for the Labour candidate, Nigel Lickley, agrees. "VAT is an issue that hurts many people here personally. But it has also come to symbolise to many people what's wrong with this government - that it's out of touch and penalises the wrong people." + Yet pensioners' political allegiances are traditionally difficult to break. Some of them, Mr Hayward believes, are still wavering over whether to kick the Government. A personal supporter of capital punishment, he is trying to lure them back to the fold with a strong campaign against crime. + He also has a huge bedrock of support. In 1979, Christchurch returned the largest Conservative percentage majority - 66 per cent; in 1983 and 1987 it was the second largest. It will take 20 per cent swing for the 23,000 majority to be destroyed. + The outcome, Mr Rennard believes, lies in the 12 per cent of the vote that went to the Labour last time. If Labour voters, grouped mainly in two estates of Somerford and Burton, feel it is safe to stick with their first choice, on the basis that the Liberal Democrats will win anyway, the Tories might squeak home. + +LOAD-DATE: July 16, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +194 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 16, 1993 + +COMMENTARY: HOW MEMORIES OF OLD WARS DISTORT OUR MORAL CERTAINTIES + +BYLINE: MADELEINE BUNTING + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 24 + +LENGTH: 1083 words + + + I WAS in Central Russia and the Eastern Ukraine inter viewing the last survivors of the slave labour force the Nazis brought to the Channel Islands in the second world war. The men I met were in their late sixties, yet they were all still working; their pensions don't keep pace with inflation. But they put the anxieties of their lives aside to offer me the most astonishing welcome. I became the embarrassed recipient of repeated effusive thanks. What for? "For opening the Second Front. For helping us win the war. For saving my life." Cripes, the nearest I get to the second world war is a father whose national service conveniently started in 1945. But I was the first Briton many of these men had met since the liberation of Paris and they had not forgotten the Tommies and Yankees arriving in that heady August of 1944 and handing out mugs of whisky. One former slave worker dismissed himself from hospital to be at home for my visit; he covered my hand with kisses, put his entire month's ration of butter on the table and ordered his wife to wait on me. + It was very moving, but I was also taken aback. I had thought there would be some distrust to overcome after 40 years of cold war propaganda. To discover this reservoir of gratitude and affection was completely unexpected. It's hard to imagine old men in a small town in Middle England thanking the Russians for the body blows they dealt Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front. Last year was the 50th anniversary of two battles which marked the turning point in the war; John Major flew to North Africa to commemorate the Battle of Alamein, but little was heard about Stalingrad. + As these Russians and Ukrainians reminisced about their experiences of the war, I felt ignorant. In all my history syllabuses, the battles of the Russian Front had got squeezed out between the treachery of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet stranglehold over Eastern Europe. As the stories wound on I glimpsed a war vastly different from our second world war. + What struck me most forcibly was the honesty. People would tell of German atrocities but many could also recollect occasions when individual Germans had shown them kindness. Nor did they flinch from recounting how Russians committed equally fearful atrocities as they moved through Poland and eastern Germany. + Almost every corner of Europe is familiar with this second world war. They know first hand how occupation brings a myriad of choices about collaboration and resistance which shatter the nation state. European countries which were occupied learned painfully that in war, good and evil are not ranged against one another as absolutes, but shade into one another with infinite puzzling gradations. + Britain and America experienced none of this. For them the second world war was a titanic clash of moral absolutes. There was much to illustrate the evil nature of Nazism, so the goodness of the Allies could be safely assumed. The experience left Britain and America with an unshakeable sense of superiority and a simplistic moral perception of how nations deal with one another. This moral perception that good and evil could be appropriated by nations formulated our understanding of the cold war - we were godly, free, democratic countries fighting the barbaric, evil empire. + This second world war's legacy was a mainstay of eighties conservatism; Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were its greatest modern proponents. Mrs Thatcher was particularly astute at conjuring up that sense of British national identity forged between 1939 and 1945, of a plucky little country standing up for its principles to the last. Twice in the last 11 years this simplistic moral framework has been imposed on conflicts to make wars moral - against Argentina and against Iraq. Frequent analogies were made with the second world war, serving as a sort of moral shorthand with great resonance for the British and Americans. General Galtieri and Saddam Hussein were both likened to Hitler. + The second world war was the prism through which our own identity and our perception of the world has been refracted for nearly 50 years. The prism is now too flawed to be useful. Britian's pluckiness has cost us an inflated defence budget and delusions of self importance. All it is now getting us, in Europe, is an isolated back burner. We can't seem to put aside our suspicion that we alone stood up to Nazism in Europe and that if the nightmare was repeated the rest would come to some sleazy accommodation again. + Anything that didn't quite fit the second world war model - Northern Ireland is the most enduring - was marginalised as, well, just too hopelessly complicated and messy. + But we haven't been able to marginalise Bosnia and it is providing the most sustained challenge to the second world war legacy. It's the kind of war that Russians, Ukrainians, Poles and French - to name only a few - have bitter memories of. But for the British and Americans it cannot be explained in the terms we understand war. There have been confused attempts to squeeze Bosnia into a second world war model, with Serbia likened to the Nazis and the Muslims helpless victims like the Jews. For a moment we thought we finally understood this war. + The influence of that generation of political leaders and historians whose mindset was formed in the second world war is waning. As President Clinton clumsily fumbles after a new moral framework and John Major looks panic-stricken, there is nostalgia for the moral certainties we're losing but they are losing their dominance. + As the second world war's legacy loosens its hold, the myths of 1940 and 1945 are coming under scrutiny. They stir up a hornet's nest but also find a curious audience, evidenced by the outcry over J. Charmeley's biography of Churchill last winter and the revelations about the Channel Islands' occupation. The latter is a curious case of how effectively experience that did not fit into the British understanding of the war was marginalised. The occupation provided embarrassing evidence that the British are not made of sterner stuff, but resisted or sought compromise and collaboration in equal measure to any other country in Europe. + We're groping after a new self-perception and a more complex understanding of evil and how that can - or should - inform foreign policy. And there's a real danger that we don't bother, and fall back on expediency and narrowly defined self-interest. + +LOAD-DATE: July 16, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +195 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 16, 1993 + +100 CLUB EXCEEDS 8,000 AS WELL-FED BRITONS LIVE LONGER + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 26 + +LENGTH: 354 words + + + REACHING 100 not out is not what it once was. So many people are sprightly prancing into their second century that the achievement rarely merits a mention in the local newspaper. + According to census figures published this week, there were no fewer than 7,159 centenarians in Britain in 1991 - 85 per cent of them women - and the rate of increase means there are likely now to be more than 8,000. + Buckingham Palace says it sent 2,738 congratulatory messages last year from the Queen to people attaining 100 in the United Kingdom, eight times the number 30 years ago. Of the 1991 centenarians, 6,619 were in England and Wales. Ten years earlier, there were only 2,410. There were 1,240 in 1971, 479 in 1961 and only 271 in 1951. + It is well known we are an ageing society: life expectancy is 74 for a man and almost 80 for a woman, compared with 68 and 74 respectively in 1961, and one in four people is expected to be over present pension ages by 2029. + The census figures show how old many people are becoming. More than 2 million people were over 80 in 1991, an increase of 40 per cent in 10 years, and there were 232,840 over 90, a rise of 46 per cent. + Projections by the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys suggest there will be 5.9 million over-75s in England and Wales by 2029, against 3.6 million in 1991. + Of the 7,159 centenarians, only 1,055 were men. + Relative to over-60 populations by region, the fewest were in South Yorkshire and the most in the home counties, with 2,463 in the South-east. + Dr James Malone-Lee, consultant geriatrician at University College hospital, London, said the increase in very elderly people would continue until about 2020, then level off. The main cause was the sharp improvements made this century in nutrition and hygiene, the effects of which would still be seen in the "baby boom" generation which grew up in the 1950s. + "The mistake people make is assuming it's thanks to us doctors - you should never believe that for a minute," Dr Malone-Lee said. + 1991 Census - Persons Aged 60 and Over, Great Britain (HMSO, pounds 16.90) + +LOAD-DATE: July 16, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +196 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 16, 1993 + +MADRID ON THE MOSKVA; +Long ago, a group of Spanish children were exiled to Russia, but still they dream of home, writes Madeleine Bunting + +BYLINE: MADELEINE BUNTING + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 14 + +LENGTH: 1334 words + + + IN A hall three floors above one of Moscow's busiest shopping streets, a card game is in full swing. The group of elderly men talk rapidly, gesticulate wildly, and laugh openly. These are no ordinary Russians. Nicholas Gregorio, Fermin Vega, Ismael Hernandez and Alfredo Fernandez are Spanish. The walls are covered with posters of Velazquez paintings, and bullfighting; the only indication that these old men are in Moscow, not Bilbao or Madrid, is that the coffee machine is silent and there is no beer. + Some 750 Spaniards frequent the Spanish Centre in Kuznetskii Most, in Moscow. Most of them are the last remaining refugees of Spain's civil war. Vega was 10 years old and Gregorio was eight, when they were evacuated, together with 3,500 other Spanish children, to the Soviet Union in 1937. Gregorio was one of six children. His father was fighting at the front and his mother sent him to Russia for a few months to spare him from the bombing raids. She did not see him again for 31 years. + At the centre, the former refugees exchange the latest gossip and news; they all want to return to Spain but most now believe it is an impossible dream. Their Russian pensions are small. Most are married to Russians and have children and grandchildren. For them, Spain is little more than a picture postcard. + Some, however, have taken the plunge. A steady trickle of families has been returning to the homeland. The Spanish government is considering providing housing and pensions so that the last refugees can go home - 56 years after they were first crammed into ships bound for Leningrad. + Nieves Lago Rodriguez was only eight when she left Spain, but she still speaks Russian with a slight accent. Rodriguez was born in Asturias. Her father was killed in 1936 and her mother, finding it hard to feed her family, put two of her sons in an orphanage. She left the eight-year-old Rodriguez with her brothers for a couple of days. When she returned she found that they had all been evacuated to the Soviet Union. Rodriguez did not see her mother again until she was 38 years old, with a 13-year-old daughter of her own. + She still remembers her confusion on arriving in Leningrad. "We were distributed to different children's homes. I was separated from my brothers. We were disinfected and all our Spanish clothes were taken away and we were dressed in Pioneer uniforms. [Pioneers were a Communist children's league]. They even took away the gold earrings and chains that some of the children had. All the children's hair was cut in the same way, regardless of whether they were boys or girls." + Vega also remembers those first few months in Russia. He was 10 years old. He had been living with his aunt in Asturias and was taken to an orphanage after a bombing raid destroyed her house. Before his parents could retrieve him, he had been evacuated to Russia. "I remember that the children were all right during the day, but at night, they cried and cried. Even now when I think of that time, I cry," he says. + Once in the Soviet Union, the children were moved from town to town and from orphanage to orphanage. Rodriguez lists the cities: Leningrad, Moscow, Odessa, Kaluga and Tarasovka. Then the war broke out and she was moved to Bashkiria in the Volga basin. She managed to meet up with her brothers just once. The Spanish children were taken to an exhibition in Moscow and she got lost. A passerby took her, by chance, to the orphanage where her brothers were. They were separated again the next morning. She did not even know the Russian word for brother. + Most of the journeys around the Soviet Union were made by boat and after war broke out; the children were transported in cargo ships. Only Spanish was spoken in the orphanages and Rodriguez was nearly 20 when she learnt to speak Russian properly. + "None of us children thought we were in Russia for ever; all of us wanted to go back to Spain and we spent our whole time thinking about how to get home. I was the first in the orphanage to get a letter from my mother. It was at the end of 1937. There was a photo attached but - to my shame - I didn't recognise my mother. I think it was some kind of psychological shock that made me forget what she looked like." + The worst time for many of the children was the war: "Everything was done to save us but the conditions were terrible. There was never enough to eat; we had to dig in rubbish heaps for vegetable peelings," she recalls. + In the 1980s, the Spanish community in Moscow discovered that Franco had asked Stalin for the children in 1939 and again after the war, in 1945. The documents containing Stalin's decision are still buried in the archives; the first to return to Spain left in 1956, three years after Stalin's death. Between 1956 and 1957, about 500 of the child refugees returned to Spain. + For most of the refugees, including Rodriguez and Gregorio, by 1956, it was too late. They had both married Russians and Soviet citizens were not allowed to emigrate to Spain. It was not until 1967 that Rodriguez visited her mother for a month's holiday. + "It was an unforgettable feeling when I saw my mother. It was very hard to talk to her. She was so distant and yet so close. My mother kept asking why don't you come more often to Spain and she couldn't understand that I didn't have the money. My mother even reproached me for not helping her and I couldn't explain that the salary I received as a laboratory assistant was barely enough for myself and my daughter." + Rodriguez visited her mother once more in 1970 before she died. With the collapse of the rouble, a visit to Spain is now impossible. Moving back to Spain for good is even more remote, even though her husband has long since died. + "I've always felt an outsider here and I don't want the same to happen to my daughter in Spain, and I would never leave my daughter," she says. + It was difficult to be a foreigner in the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, says Rodriguez. Her mother-in-law had opposed the marriage and refused to allow anything Spanish in the flat they shared. Even Rodriguez's daughter, Marina, would pretend not to hear if her mother spoke in Spanish. Rodriguez lost contact with her Spanish friends and began to forget her own language. But despite the problems, Rodriguez never changed her surname. + "It was the only thing Spanish about me, so I kept it - Nieves Lago Rodriguez and I will never change it," she says. + Today, she is a mainstay of Moscow's Spanish community. Anyone with a query about emigration regulations calls her for advice. All her friends are Spanish and her life revolves around the parties and meetings organised by the Spanish Centre. + The Spanish government gave each refugee 18,000 roubles (then worth about pounds 25) last year and another lump sum this year; last summer, humanitarian food parcels arrived. Rodriguez gets parcels of new and second-hand clothes from her relatives. The gifts are gratefully received; all the refugees are now pensioners and it is pensioners who are worst hit in Russia's current economic chaos. + Even though her life is now just as hard as ever, Rodriguez says, "My daughter says that I am the most cheerful person in our apartment block. I never feel envy when I see someone living better than me. I'm not hungry and if I have a new skirt, I am happy." + Despite the cheerful camaraderie of the card game at the Spanish Centre, there is no attempt to hide their homesickness. Gregorio says he has a map of Spain on the wall by his bed. For Vega, the loss of his parents is still fresh 64 years on. A big, burly man, Vega says he still dreams of his parents every night. + Rodriguez wears a medal of the Virgin Mary around her neck. She doesn't believe in God. The refugee children were brought up as communists. But, she says: "The medal is close to my nature and by hanging it around my neck, it is close to my heart." + +LOAD-DATE: July 16, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +197 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 16, 1993 + +WEATHER WATCH: HERE IS THE SLUG FORECAST + +BYLINE: PAUL SIMONS + +SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 26 + +LENGTH: 307 words + + + OF ALL the garden pests, it's no wonder that slugs are one of the most sensitive to weather. Unless their wet, slimey coats are kept moist they risk death from dehydration. So when it turns dry, hot, or even cold the slugs burrow deep down into the soil and hide there until conditions improve again. + This moist lifestyle is reflected in slug pellet sales. In a typically wet year we spend about E7-8 million on pellets, but during the dry summer of 1990 sales plummeted to El million. Yet farmers tend to use pellets come what may, which is unnecessary, costly and contaminates the environment. + This is where the scientists are now stepping in. Gordon Port at Newcastle University has found that slugs are very predictable creatures, and knowing their little foibles he is working on a slug forecasting service. By taking the weather for ecast and the amount of water in the soil, he has found that slug activity can be safely predicted and pellets laid accordingly. So far the slug forecast is only in its pilot stages, but it's hoped eventually to launch it nationally. + Meanwhile, wild slugs have been suffering far more than their garden cousins, and one species was almost wiped out by the dry summers of 1900 and 1991. It feeds at night on lichens on stone walls, and perhaps to compensate for this somewhat dodgy lifestyle the slug lives to the ripe old age of three years. For most of the year the population is dominated by young slugs, but the dry summers decimated the youngsters and the population struggled on with middle aged and elderly adults. Now, thanks to the recent wet summers, the population is bouncing back again with a fine new crop of youngsters. + Incidentally, if you ever wondered what happens to snails during dry weather they simply crawl up into their shells and seal themselves in. + +LOAD-DATE: July 16, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +198 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 19, 1993 + +ZAGREB BACKS REMOVAL OF THOUSANDS OF MUSLIMS + +BYLINE: IAN TRAYNOR + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 1 + +LENGTH: 647 words + + + THE Croatian government plans to help Bosnian Croat forces to deport tens of thousands of Muslims from Bosnia-Herzegovina to third countries, according to United Nations sources in Bosnia who describe the scheme as absolutely abhorrent. + Bosnian Croat and Zagreb government officials have asked the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to assist in the campaign of "ethnic cleansing" against Muslims in the Mostar area of Herzegovina and are proposing to establish a large transit camp where the Muslims will be collected before being expelled to third countries. + The request was made to the UNHCR last Friday morning. It was summarily rejected. Later that evening Bosnian Croat television and radio announced that Zagreb was willing to provide 10,000 transit visas for the deportees. + "The Croatian government has clearly offered its good offices to the HVO [Bosnian Croat government] to facilitate this campaign," said a UN source. "The plan is absolutely abhorrent, but Zagreb does not seem to realise the impact this idea will have on the sanctions debate." + For the past several weeks, Bosnian Croat forces have been rounding up thousands of Muslim males in the Mostar area and herding them into detention camps, while driving Muslim women, children and elderly people out of their homes at gunpoint in Mostar and surrounding towns. + Some 10,000 males are being held, according to the UNHCR, the bulk of them at a helidrome near Mostar. Croatian government officials on Friday professed to the UNHCR that they thought the detainees had visas for third countries despite the fact that they are being held incommunicado, with UNHCR and International Red Cross access to them barred. + The detentions, the confirmation of Croatian atrocities against civilians during the fierce Muslim-Croat fighting in central Bosnia, and the plan Zagreb backs jointly with Belgrade to partition Bosnia have raised mounting calls for UN sanctions against Serbia to be extended to Croatia. European Community foreign ministers are to meet today to discuss whether Croatia should be penalised. + Zagreb has consistently denied that it is helping its brethren in Bosnia to prosecute their war aims. UN military observers say that in the past week Croatian military reinforcements have been moved up from the Adriatic coast to help the Bosnian Croats in the battles in and around Mostar which raged on yesterday. + The UN sources say the Bosnian Croat plan, aided and abetted by Zagreb, is to strip Mostar of its entire Muslim population. There are an estimated 50,000 Muslims in Mostar penned into a ghetto on the east side of the river Neretva that dissects the city. Muslims slightly outnumbered Croats in the city before the war, but the Croats have proclaimed Mostar the capital of the ethnically pure mini-state they are carving out of Bosnia. + The Bosnian Croats told the UNHCR that they plan to establish a large transit camp at Ljubuski on the border with Croatia, where tens of thousands of Muslims would be penned until they were offered shelter in third countries and could leave via Croatia. + The camp would be amply equipped with telephones, faxes, and telex machines to help the Muslims contact friends and relatives abroad to arrange visas. + Having detained the 10,000 males, the Croats appear in a quandary over what to do with them and desperate to get rid of them. They cannot be released for fear they will immediately take up arms against the Croats or be killed by Croat extremists. A Croatian government official yesterday said some 500 of the males were transported from Mostar to Croatia over the weekend, that further deportations from Herzegovina were expected in the next few days, and that Zagreb was appealing to third countries to take them off its hands. + Vuk Draskovic interview, page 8; Eyewitness, page 20 + +LOAD-DATE: July 19, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +199 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 19, 1993 + +PAKISTAN'S TWO WARRING LEADERS QUIT + +BYLINE: GERALD BOURKE IN ISLAMABAD + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 7 + +LENGTH: 538 words + + + PAKISTAN'S president, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, and his arch-enemy the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, resigned last night following strong pressure from the army chief, General Abdul Waheed. + The twin resignations will end a bitter power struggle between the elderly bureaucrat and his one-time protege that has paralysed the government for six months, sapped business confidence and forced the army to step in as honest broker. + Wasim Sajjad, chairman of the senate, immediately assumed the presidency in accordance with the constitution. + Mr Khan's final act as head of state was to swear in Moeen Qureshi, an economist and former World Bank vice-president aged 67, as caretaker prime minister. + Mr Qureshi will head a cabinet of supposedly neutral ministers approved by the outgoing president and prime minister, as well as by the main opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto. + Elections to the national assembly, which was dissolved, are due to be held on October 6. Polling for the country's four provincial parliaments will take place three days later. + Both Mr Khan and Mr Sharif insisted they were stepping down voluntarily, and had not been pressurised to do so. + Mr Sharif, a Punjabi industrialist aged 44, made his announcement on television and radio yesterday. "I have decided to leave the chair," he said, accusing "some people of creating hurdles" that had prevented him from governing. + During an hour-long fighting speech, Mr Sharif accused Mr Khan and Ms Bhutto, without naming them directly, of hatching conspiracies against his government and of creating an "artificial crisis". + "I have discharged my national duties," he said. "It is now up to you to decide the future of the country." + The five-year term of Mr Sharif's Islamic Democratic Alliance was not due to end until late 1995. + Mr Sajjad applauded the military for helping to resolve the crisis. "The armed forces have played a responsible role," he told members of the senate. + Mr Khan sacked Mr Sharif in April only to see him reinstated 40 days later, and thereafter worked behind the scenes to destabilise his former protege. + Mr Sharif contributed much to the political deadlock by underhandedly manoeuvring to regain control of his native Punjab, the country's biggest province, from partisans of the president appointed to run it after his dismissal. + Mr Khan, aged 79, a dour former bureaucrat from North-west Frontier province, retires in ignominy six months ahead of schedule. + Having resolved to scupper the IDA after the prime minister vowed to curtail his powers, the president is seen by many as the cause of political paralysis that has rendered the country increasingly ungovernable. + Ms Bhutto scented blood late last week when she too gave in to pressure from Gen Waheed, by calling off a protest that could have had hundreds of thousands of activists besieging the capital, Islamabad. + The protest was to have continued until Mr Sharif agreed to early polls. Gen Waheed apparently promised she would have her way. + * Five bombs went off in Karachi yesterday and seven bombs exploded elsewhere in Sindh province. At least two people were killed and several injured, police said. + +LOAD-DATE: July 19, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +200 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 20, 1993 + +WOMEN IN 50S BANNED FROM FERTILITY TREATMENT TO PROTECT CHILDREN + +BYLINE: CHRIS MIHILL, MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 319 words + + + WOMEN in their late 50s who want to have children cannot be given test tube baby procedures because of the difficulties children would face being reared by elderly parents, Britain's fertility watchdog body said yesterday. + Controversy arose over the weekend because of newspaper reports that a 58-year-old British woman was expecting twins after treatment in Italy, using donated eggs. + The woman, from London, who has not been named, received treatment from Professor Severino Antinori at his private clinic in Rome, after British specialists had refused to treat her. + It was also revealed that Prof Antinori turned down treatment for a second British woman, 56-year-old Jane Ward, because of criticism by UK experts, who said such pregnancies posed risks to women and raised concerns for the welfare of the children. + Yesterday Hugh Whittall, of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which has a statutory duty to vet the work of clinics carrying out in vitro fertilisation, said that although there was no upper limit for treatment in law, concerns for the children ruled out treating elderly women. + There were rules saying that egg donors should not be over 35, and sperm donors over 55, he said. + "We don't set an age limit for recipients of treatment as such, but rely on considerations for the welfare of the child. The law says that fertility specialists must take account of the welfare of the child. + "Broadly, we don't expect clinics to treat women well into their 50s. Most NHS clinics draw the line at 38, and for private clinics 48 or 49 is usually as high as it goes," Mr Whittall said. + Peter Brinsden, medical director of Bourn Hall, Britain's largest fertility centre, said the clinic had for some time operated a rule that it would only help women if they had an early menopause, using their own eggs up to 45 and donated eggs up to 50. + +LOAD-DATE: July 20, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +201 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 21, 1993 + +ITALIAN DOCTOR 'CONSULTED BY 50 WOMEN' + +BYLINE: MARIA CHIARA BONAZZI + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 1 + +LENGTH: 596 words + + + THE Italian gynaecologist providing infertility treatment for a 58-year-old London woman said yesterday that he had been consulted by 50 British women unable to obtain treatment in this country. + Professor Severino Antinori accepted 20 of them for treatment and eight were receiving fertility procedures. In the case of the London woman, Prof Antinori implanted two eggs in her and she is now expecting twins. + Defending himself against a wave of criticism for treating women regarded as past child bearing age, he said a number of British fertility specialists were enagaged in a professional conspiracy against him. + He had been due to arrive in London yesterday but declined to come after saying he received a threatening phone call on Monday night that he would be killed. + "I am outraged when a small part of England, which is such an advanced country, attacks me and doesn't want to understand the work carried out by us Italians. It is horrible to say I am putting these women at risk," he told the Guardian. + In Britain specialists generally decline to treat women beyond the menopause, unless there are exceptional circumstances, because fertility laws say all treatments must take account of the welfare of the child. In Rome, where Prof Antinori, aged 47, is based, the Vatican has criticised him for creating potential orphans. + Fertility experts in this country, including Professor Robert Winston of the Hammersmith Hospital, London, have attacked Prof Antinori as exploiting vulnerable women, exposing them to the dangers of late pregnancies, and failing to consider the welfare of children who would be brought up by people old enough to be their grandparents. + Prof Antinori, director of the Raprui day hospital in Rome, rejects these arguments, saying many children were successfully reared by grandparents. + "I am certain that pregnancy risks do not increase with age. The risks for women in their 50s are no more than the risks for women in their 30s. + "It is not unnatural to have an elderly mother. The important thing is to think of the child's welfare. An older woman is able to give more affection than a younger one who may neglect them and is liable to expose them to the trauma of a divorce. We must not forget that many children are raised by grandparents. + "Why give this opportunity [for fertility treatment] to a woman in her 30s who may be suffering from heart disease but not to a healthy woman in her 50s?" + He claimed he would only treat patients who were likely to live for another 30 years, so they would be able to rear the children, but did not explain how he judged this life expectancy. + Prof Antinori, who charges about pounds 3,500 for his services initially, and pounds 1,000 for subsequent attempts, said he could have treated all the British women, but he refused to do so on ethical grounds, taking only those who were healthy and stood the most chance of benefiting. He claimed his success rate in producing babies was about 25 per cent. + "I do not understand the limit where being under 50 is acceptable, but being 50 and a day is not. One must understand what being old means. Chronological age is not the same as biological age. It is an inalienable civil right to have a child." + Prof Antinori said many of his patients, including the 58-year-old expecting twins, had been referred to him by Professor Ian Craft, of the London Fertility Centre, in Harley Street. + Yesterday Prof Craft issued a statement saying he had no professional association with Prof Antinori. + +LOAD-DATE: July 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +202 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 21, 1993 + +FERTILITY BODY CALLS FOR DEBATE ON USE OF DEAD WOMEN'S EGGS + +BYLINE: CHRIS MIHILL MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 356 words + + + A PUBLIC debate should be started about the ethics and social acceptability of taking eggs from dead women and aborted foetuses to provide treatment for infertile couples, the statutory body charged with policing the work of test tube baby clinics said yesterday. + The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) also said that choosing the sex of babies for social reasons is morally and ethically unacceptable, although it can be carried out for medical reasons. + The authority repeated its opposition to enabling older women to have babies through infertility treatment. It emerged yesterday that one 52-year-old has been treated in this country, and a dozen women over 50. + Professor Colin Campbell, the authority's chairman, said it wanted a public debate about taking eggs from corpses and aborted foetuses. It will issue a consultation paper this year. + Prof Campbell told a press conference called in London to launch the authority's second annual report that eggs from dead women could be used for research into infertility, and might help answer questions about premature menopause or diseases such as ovarian cancer. + It was also possible to implant them into infertile women to provide children. There is a great shortage of donor eggs. + Prof Campbell said scientists were just beginning to consider the possibility of using eggs from corpses, and it was right that the morality and social acceptability of this was debated. + People might take the view that the procedure was no different from hearts or kidneys being used for transplant, but others would fear ethical or moral norms were being transgressed. + Prof Campbell said it was not yet known whether eggs from aborted foetuses would be too immature to be grown in culture for research or to produce children. + "This could be a new area of reproductive biology. It is in the early stages but it does raise issues of fundamental concern. We believe these developments will raise profound moral, philosophical and legal concerns. This authority would be wise to consult widely and have a public discussion about this." + +LOAD-DATE: July 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +203 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 21, 1993 + +MENOPAUSE FOR THOUGHT; +The limits of fertility are being stretched too far in allowing middle-aged women to become mothers + +BYLINE: ROBERT WINSTON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 16 + +LENGTH: 974 words + + + THE report this week that a 58-year-old British woman is expecting a twin pregnancy as the result of IVF treatment in Italy following egg donation has caused widespread concern. On the face of it, what Dr Severino Antinori in Rome is doing may seem laudable. After all, he has said he is simply helping desperate women to get pregnant and is quoted as saying "they want babies; I give them babies". This reported attitude, which seems to me to be debasing In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) treatments to the status of trading in a commodity, appears to many to trivialise very serious issues. + First, any pregnancy in a woman in her late fifties or early sixties carries considerable risks to her health. A twin pregnancy, after transfer of several embryos, seems even more fraught. Whilst pregnancy in the forties is now commonplace and easily managed, once a woman gets much beyond the age of 50, virtually all the serious complications of pregnancy are much more likely. High blood pressure, toxaemia of pregnancy, heart disease, diabetes, and thrombosis are all relatively probable and she is less likely to have the strength to care for her newborn in the event of its safe delivery. + Second, there is clearly a very significant chance that she may lose the baby at any time during pregnancy. Pregnancy loss is a shattering event at any stage of a couple's life but this group of older women are particularly vulnerable to suffer extraordinary psychological trauma. The few women who actually seek such treatment in their later years are often desperate people, sometimes quite disturbed emotionally. Clinical experience often shows that they have found themselves unable to come to terms with the cessation of their ability to reproduce. They are, in effect, undergoing a process of bereavement which becomes protracted if they are inappropriately treated. For such a person, getting pregnant and then losing the pregnancy will be a catastrophic blow and the risk of serious depression and greater emotional disturbance very high. + Yet another issue is the question of any child which is born as a result of such misplaced technology. A woman conceiving at 58 will be 70 when her child has not yet reached its teenage years. This seems to start any young person with a serious disadvantage in life, even if his or her parents actually survive until then. Children should reasonably expect that their parents should be young enough to play football in the park with them, or to have energy enough to indulge in the pursuits which are all part of growing up with their family. + While a woman at the age of 58 may well believe that she could cope with a toddler, as she advances in age her physical state is likely to be increasingly less resilient. It is no accident that the British regulatory body, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, has stated that practitioners of IVF should always bear in mind the welfare of any children who may be brought into existence as a result of conducting fertility treatments. + Moreover, these treatments seem to neglect the rights of those women who most altruistically decide to be donors of eggs. Because a woman of 58 cannot produce her own eggs, she can only become pregnant as the result of donated eggs being fertilised by her partner's sperm and then inserted to her uterus. Egg donors are very remarkable and courageous people. They give eggs, theirown unique genetic material, anonymously, because they sympathise with the plight of infertile women. In order to give eggs they need a surgical procedure. Before this they have to undergo long and quite hefty treatments with drugs to induce ovulation. Administration of these somewhat risky drugs to infertile women who might themselves benefit from treatment is clearly justified, but it is quite another dimension to undergo complex and demanding treatment from which one can derive no personal benefit. + I have spoken to hundreds of potential egg donors and all of them say they are horrified at the mere thought that their eggs, their own genetic children, might be given away to women 20 years older than themselves. + People ask if there should be a cut-off age point, beyond which fertility treatments should not be given. While I believe in a flexible and liberal approach, I think that it is one consideration to offer treatment to women who have suffered a premature menopause as a result of a pathological event, but it is quite another to use high technology to subvert a natural, biological event. To do so seems to me to debase the value of menopause, when our energies and experience may be better spent in more mature activities. + But what chiefly worries me about the activities of Dr Antinori and the publicity which surrounds them, are that they risk bringing a highly valuable and vulnerable technology into public disrepute. Many people have considerable anxieties about the new reproductive treatments which they view with suspicion because they consider that doctors and scientists are tampering with the very elements of human life. We practitioners of IVF must always be aware of these concerns. IVF is already a relatively privileged treatment, heavily rationed by ailing health services throughout the Western world. If we fail to be sensitive to the worries of ordinary people and our political representatives, we seriously risk jeopardising the whole funding and future of proper reproductive medicine. It would be a grave outcome indeed if the accessibility of our complex and expensive technology was limited to even fewer women and men. We have an important responsibility to ensure that many infertile couples continue to have a realistic chance of a healthy baby of their own. + Robert Winston is professor of fertility studies at Hammersmith Hospital, London. + +LOAD-DATE: July 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +204 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 22, 1993 + +INVESTORS WIN A RIGHT TO REFUNDS + +BYLINE: TERESA HUNTER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 15 + +LENGTH: 503 words + + + A HIGH Court ruling yesterday opened the floodgates for compensation claims worth millions of pounds for victims of incompetent or corrupt financial advisers. + Two judges found in favour of pensioners who were sold high risk investment bonds secured on their homes, who were previously denied compensation from the financial services industry's Investors Compensation Scheme because their claims arose from advice which pre-dated the scheme's inauguration in August 1988. + They decided that some compensation should be made available to such victims. Legal experts at the ICS are still studying the judgment but they believe that it will apply to all victims of advisers in default - not just home income plan investors. + The judges ruled that investors who were advised before August 1988 but completed transactions after that date should get full compensation. + They added that those who completed before August 1988 should receive compensation which reflected the loss sustained after that date, provided that there had been some further communication from the adviser - such as a statement. + Lord Justice Glidewell and Mr Justice Cresswell also ruled that the ICS had been wrong to halve compensation if a spouse died prior to an award. + Hundreds of elderly homeowners faced losing their homes after buying home income plans which comprised an investment bond bought with a mortgage raised on their homes. Many investors saw their investment wiped out by commissions and by stock market gyrations. As mortgage rates soared, many debts escalated well beyond the maximum permitted mortgage. + Margaret Weyell, 69, a widow, and John Veniard, 78, were both told by the ICS that they were not eligible for compensation because their adviser, Aylesbury Associates, had not conducted investment business for them after August 28, 1988. After the collapse of her plan, Mrs Weyell was forced to sell her pounds 160,000 home in High Mead Lane, West Wickham, Kent, and move to a less expensive property in Langdon Hills, Basildon, Essex. Mr Veniard and his wife had to sell their home in Croydon Road, Westerham, Kent, and move into nearby rented accommodation. + The judges said the ICS had wrongly argued that no compensation was due because the only business conducted by Aylesbury was the initial bad advice to enter into home income plans, and this was given before August 28. + But, although Mrs Weyell had been advised prior to that date, she did not take out the plan until September 1988. She is now entitled to be compensated by up to pounds 48,000, the limit the compensation rules provide for single people. + The judges said that the Veniards' case was different as they invested in a plan in October 1987. Their claim was restricted to the losses they had suffered because, in the regular six-monthly reports the brokers were obliged to make on the progress of their fund, Aylesbury failed to warn them of the increasing risks to their investment fund after August 1988. + +LOAD-DATE: July 22, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +205 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 22, 1993 + +SERBS PAY A HIGH PRICE FOR DAILY SURVIVAL; +Aleksandar Vasovic reports on how people are coping with runaway inflation in a deepening economic crisis + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 22 + +LENGTH: 976 words + + + DRAINED by sanctions and awash with worthless money, Serbians thought their economic situation could not get worse. Each day is proving them wrong. + With people having to exist on an average salary of 5 German marks ( pounds 2) a month, while the average monthly cost of living is 30 marks, everyone becomes an economy expert in the daily struggle for survival. + Because of the enormous inflation rate all prices are converted into German marks, but the dinar still remains the official currency. The Yugoslav national bank is about to issue a 50 million dinar note, worth less than 5 marks on the street. The largest note in circulation now is 5 million, worth 0.45 marks on Tuesday. When it was issued in May it was worth about 15 marks. + People know the next day's exchange rate, the best place to sell their foreign currency, and what kind of transaction they have to do. If they are not prepared for fast reaction and immediate buying or selling, they risk poverty. + Going shopping almost means carrying an extra bag for your money. A loaf of bread is relatively cheap - about 0.3 marks. A kilo of meat (5 marks), vegetables and eggs cost 7 marks - or about 73 million dinar, a two-inch wad of notes. A packet of cigarettes costs about 0.5 marks, which means that you can buy 10 packets for an average monthly salary. + Shops in central Serbia are almost always closed and only sell bread and milk when they open. Old people suffer most - the average pension is about 3 marks - queuing for cheap bread or even digging in rubbish bins. + Shoes and clothes are enormous luxuries. A pair of good Italian shoes costs about 100 marks, and American blue jeans 120 marks. Yugoslav shoes are about 60 marks and the quality is poor. + Credit cards are no longer used - only cash and cheques. Shops are also often closed to prevent an avalanche of buyers. People try to spend their money while it is still worth something. + Those who are rich enough to drive a car pay 3.5 marks for a litre of petrol - if they're lucky - otherwise it is 4 marks. + State pharmacies are almost empty so there are no antibiotics, pain killers, vital drugs or bandages. Almost everything can be found in the privately owned pharmacies, but prices are three times higher. + The worst thing is to fall ill and be hospitalised. There is no disinfectant, surgical instruments, or medicine, and the food is scarcely enough for survival. Doctors do their best, but their efforts are useless. Cases of tuberculosis are becoming more common and people are dying of infections after surgery because there are no antibiotics. + Those who want to be cured have to find and buy the necessary medicines, bandages, surgical thread, bed sheets and food. + Almost everything can be found, but for a high price, in German marks. + People are becoming increasingly angry and vicious - best illustrated on the overcrowded buses and trams. Buses keep breaking down, with spare parts in short supply, and ticket prices are 300 per cent higher than last week, which is an increase of 500 per cent from the beginning of June. Hardly anyone bothers to buy a ticket and the public transport authority does not dare to enforce the rules. + The key to survival is the black market or some other illegal business. People are spending their last financial resources to provide some food and other goods for the winter. + Almost everybody is trying to renew links with relatives in the country and secure flour, eggs, cheese, meat, vegetables and fruit. Money and other exchangeable resources like pianos, gold, family silver, paintings, are limited. + However, things are not idyllic in the country. The peasants are desperate. The official price of wheat - as promised by the state - is about 0.3 marks, but the real market price is about 1.5 marks. No one is eager to hand over his crop to the state, because all production costs (fuel, pesticides, fertilisers) were paid in foreign currency. + There is the prospect of the state confiscating the wheat by force - as in 1948 during Stalin's blockade of Yugoslavia. The peasants are expected to resist. + In the daily struggle for a few marks, or some meat for a reasonable price, work is almost forgotten. No one would waste eight hours for 5 marks a month. All efforts are focused on finding something which is better paid, even if it is not exactly according to the law. And the law is almost a joke. Now, nearly 50 per cent of workers in Serbia are out of work, or as the authorities like to put it, "they are on forced leave". + However, the number of enormously rich is increasing. They owe their wealth to the black market, smuggling and good relations with the war parties in Croatia and Bosnia. They are ruthless criminals who are ready for any kind of undercover business which can provide enormous profits. And - understandably enough - they are the most devoted supporters of the regime. + Crime is rising - murders, robberies and all sorts of embezzlement. Police brutality is always present, especially after the opposition demonstrations at the beginning of June. + A variety of weapons, from hand grenades to submachine guns, have found their way to the hands of the criminals. Shooting (for fun or on purpose) is normal. People are used to ducking for cover in case of sudden armed conflict. + No one can predict what will happen when the monetary system finally collapses. Food riots are very likely. + Some analysts claim that these riots will be the end of Slobodan Milosevic's regime - unless he finds an acceptable explanation for his desperate people. + But it is hard to feed a population with explanations, however acceptable. + Aleksandar Vasovic is a journalist with the independent Belgrade radio station B92 + Bosnian leaders to attend Geneva talks, page 11 + +LOAD-DATE: July 22, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +206 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 23, 1993 + +TELEVISION + +BYLINE: PAUL BAILEY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 577 words + + + AGNES McLEAN started dancing in the 1930s. It was a "form of escapism" from the harshness of life in Glasgow. At that time, there were "hundreds of wee dance halls" in every part of the city. She saw Carmen Miranda and George Raft doing the rhumba in a film and was instantly entranced. Now, at the age of 69, she dances twice a week at the Pollok Community Centre, with fellow pensioners who share her passion for the rhythms of Latin America. + The producer, Barbara Orton, and director Richard Downes watched Agnes in action and decided to send her to Cuba to experience the real thing. The result is a beguiling short film called In Cuba They're Still Dancing, which went out at the ridiculous time of 7.15 on BBC2 last evening. Agnes is a natural for television, since she treats the camera like a confidant. At the National School of Music and Drama in Havana, she learned that the rhumba is a world away from the camp malarkey one associates with such skilled performers as Donnie Burns and Gaynor Fairweather. + Agnes was at her happiest attending a back street rhumba party in the poorest quarter of the Cuban capital. She used to be an active communist in the days when she was working on the shopfloor of Rolls Royce, and is full of sympathy for the oppressed -even those living in a revolutionary regime. It was wonderful, she said, to see "people communicating with each other in dance" - as indeed they were doing, spontaneously. She shook her hips, and earned the admiration of the locals. + The dance historian Rogelio Martinez told her that in the genuine rhumba the woman flirts with the man and provokes him, and the specialist Olavo Alen revealed that the Carmen Miranda version she had loved in her youth was a Hollywood variation on the original. At the Tropicana show - once a tourist attraction "before Fee-dell kicked the Mafia oot" - she detected the influence of the cinema, and wasn't totally impressed. It was in Matanzas that she felt she was experiencing the authentic rhumba she had never witnessed before. She tried a few steps, and shook her hips again. + She addressed a group of elderly women, after joining them in their morning exercises. "We women must never give up," she announced to applause. "I came here looking for the rhumba," she remarked at the close of the programme, "and I found a lot more besides. It's a dance that brings people together." This marvellous woman was a delight to be with, and this out-of-the-ordinary feature merits an early repeat. + The Truth Lies In Rostock (Channel 4), a painstaking documentary by Siobhan Cleary and Mark Saunders, investigated the events leading up to the petrol-bombing of a refugee centre for Vietnamese on the Lichtenhagen Estate in Germany last August. It raised any number of worrying questions that might never be answered concerning the behaviour of the police, the Rostock City Council and the ministry of the interior. A fascist group, the Hamburg Liste, had been distributing leaflets on the estate with the message "Keep Rostock German" six months before the demonstrations and the ultimate arson took place. The blandness of certain officials was shocking to behold, as was the presence in the former East German city of David Irving, accompanied by Dr Gerhard Fray. In the meantime the Vietnamese are waiting to hear what will happen to them, and the Romanians, Serbs and Croats who have escaped to Rostock live in fear of their lives. + +LOAD-DATE: July 23, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +207 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 24, 1993 + +CHRISTCHURCH BYELECTION: BUTTERFLY BULLDOZED BY EVENTS + +BYLINE: LAWRENCE DONEGAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 440 words + + + "AS EACH day dawns so does a new promise. So far the Liberal candidate has committed her party to an enormous pounds 8 billion in extra spending - that is six pence on the basic rate of income tax, or pounds 662 in extra . . ." + Rob Hayward, the Conservative candidate, tried his best to wade through the debris of Thursday night's events at Westminster but in truth he was like a butterfly confronted by a bulldozer. + The theme of the party's press conference may have been "Dorset is leading the way to modern health care", but it was not a subject dominating conversation elsewhere in the constituency. + Events in the Commons have provoked fresh difficulties for a Conservative campaign which is now virtually under seige. + "John Major? At first I thought he was going to do good," said 69-year-old Jane Pledge as she wound her way through Ferndown town centre. "I thought young blood in the Cabinet would have been good but we know now that John Major is not strong enough. What we need now is a Winston Churchill, someone to fight for the country." + Retired soldier Dennis Bell took up the theme. "I don't think John Major is the man to vote for. You know, Maggie Thatcher would never have let all this happen - she knew what she wanted and got it." + Lady Thatcher parading through Christchurch in battle fatigues would undoubtedly tempt some defectors back to Mr Hayward, but the Liberal Democrat camp, overjoyed by events at Westminster, finally shed the caution which has tempered their campaign. + "We have seen a frightened rabbit of a Prime Minister, running a way from the will of the House of Commons, the will of a significant secton of the Conservative and the British people . . . His future as Prime Minister is now very limited," began Alex Carlile MP, before expounding on the prospects for a September general election. + If events were getting him down, Mr Hayward did his best not to show it at his 37th "At Home" - an informal chat with electors - of the campaign at an old folks' housing complex at Ferndown. It was a sedate affair, punctuated by an intervention by Jacqui Myers, the complex's sales manager. + "I am against a United States of Europe. I strongly feel that the history of Europe shows that the various countries can not get along," she said. + Mr Hayward paused before replying. "If we can learn to live together then there is very little likelihood of war . . . I hope we progressively learn to live together," he said. + The candidate could have been forgiven if he allowed his thoughts to drift momentarily away to Westminster and his Conservative colleagues. + +LOAD-DATE: July 26, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +208 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 26, 1993 + +LAW REPORT: HOME LOAN RULE BACKDATED + +BYLINE: SHIRANIKHA HERBERT, BARRISTER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 4 + +LENGTH: 636 words + + + Queen's Bench Divisional Court; Regina v Investors' Compensation Scheme Ltd, ex parte Weyell and others; Before Lord Justice Glidewell and Mr Justice Cresswell; July 21 1993 + ELDERLY investors who suffered irrecoverable losses, including that of their homes, by borrowing on advice which did not satisfy the rules of FIMBRA (the Financial Intermediaries, Managers and Brokers Regulatory Association Ltd), were entitled to compensation from the Investor's Compensation Scheme Ltd (ICS) even if the investor borrowed before the ICS came into effect. + The continuing obligation on the brokers to manage the fund implied a continuing duty to correct inadequate advice. + The facts + The ICS was set up to compensate investors if their civil claims could not be satisfied by a person authorised under the Financial Services Act 1986 to carry on investment business. + Margaret Weyell, John Veniard, Ivor Last, and Joyce Rowden were sold home income plans on the advice of Aylesbury Associates and Fisher Prew Smith Ltd, members of FIMBRA and authorised under the act. + Home income plans were sold by insurance brokers and other agents, and the purpose was to release part of the capital in an investor's home when the home was not mortgaged. The plan was to raise a loan secured by a mortgage on the home without reference to the borrower's income. + A large proportion of the money raised was invested in an equity-linked single premium investment bond. If the bond performed sufficiently well to meet the interest payments on the mortgage, without depreciating the capital invested, all would be well. But there was an inevitable risk the income would not service the mortgage if the return from the investment or the property value fell, or if mortgage rates increased. The capital would then diminish at an increasing rate. That was the fate which befell many home income plans from 1989. + Such plans proved attractive to elderly people who had paid off mortgages, but in many cases they either lost their homes or are living on much reduced incomes. There have been more than 1,100 claims on the ICS arising out of the default of the two brokers who acted for these four investors. + They complained the brokers breached FIMBRA rules by failing to give proper advice so they understood the risks, in particular that the mortgagees might claim possession of their homes, and by failing to take reasonable care to ensure that the transaction was the most suitable for each investor. + The ICS refused the claims of Mr Veniard and Mrs Weyell because Aylesbury Associates gave its bad advice before August 28, 1988, when the ICS took effect. It halved the claims of Mr Last and Mrs Rowden because they had entered into the plans with their respective spouses, who had died before the brokers were declared in default. All four sought judicial review. + The decision + Mr Justice Cresswell said that the brokers' liability arose not only for the initial unsound advice but also when they failed at any time to seek to correct it or to warn of the inherent risks. Thus they breached FIMBRA rules. It was the brokers' continuing contractual obligation to manage the fund, to value the holding every six months, and to report the result. That imposed an obligation to give competent advice when making the report. + Their Lordships also ruled against halving Mr Last's and Mrs Rowden's eligible loss. FIMBRA rule 2.02 did not preclude an application by the personal representatives of a deceased when the death occurred before the broker was declared in default. + Appearances: Nicholas Strauss QC and Neil Kitchener, instructed by Barnett Sampson, for the applicants; Michael Beloff QC and Richard McManus, instructed by Wilde Sapte, for the ICS. + Shiranikha Herbert, barrister + +LOAD-DATE: July 26, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +209 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 26, 1993 + +POUNDS 60 'MEDICARD' COULD REPLACE PRESCRIPTIONS + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 5 + +LENGTH: 559 words + + + THE Government could save more than pounds 1.2 billion a year by limiting free prescriptions to the very poorest and introducing a system by which families would pay about pounds 120 annually for their prescribed drugs, a rightwing think tank says today. + Ending the flat-rate prescription charge and instead requiring payment of a drug's market price is a natural development, according to a report by the Institute of Economic Affairs. "Just as doctors are expected to explain the risks and benefits of treatment, so the consumer of the future will also expect to be made aware of the price." + At present 48 per cent of patients and 82 per cent of prescription items are exempt from charge. Only 8 per cent of the total cost of drugs is met by the patient, yet the flat-rate charge of pounds 4.25 exceeds the cost of about half all items. + The report proposes that those with income below basic Income Support level continue to receive free prescriptions. Others now exempt, such as better-off pensioners, children in working families, and pregnant women, would pay. + Although prescriptions paid for one at a time would be full market price, people could buy a 12-month ticket, as is currently available at pounds 60.60. A family could cover all its members by buying two. Both exemptions and those with tickets would have the same plastic "medicard". + The authors estimate that 70 per cent of pensioners and 20 per cent of other people would buy season tickets, thus raising almost pounds 1.5 billion a year, six times the pounds 250 million raised by prescription charges. + - The modern welfare state has created a dependancy culture in which "false excuses and malingering" have dimmed its social democratic ideals and rendered its upkeep prohibitively expensive, a leading theoretician of the new right argues today, writes Michael White. + Professor Michael Novak suggests that throughout the advanced world the welfare state "has been so designed that it has become a substitute for responsibility, liberty, self-control and law. Its administrative system has been deliberately constructed to be amoral. + "It neither demands nor rewards responsible behaviour. It corrupts the virtuous and pays equal benefits to those who spurn virtue," he writes in a pamphlet for the Thatcherite Centre for Policy Studies. + Prof Novak, a prominent Catholic theologian and Thatcher-Reagan advocate, extols a return to "independence, hard work, and se lf-reliance". + Making what looks like a direct swipe at the Labour-led Commission on Social Justice examining rights and duties of the state and citizens, he urges replacement of state bureaucracies with private alternatives. + Prof Novak acknowledges that the welfare state has benefits for the elderly, but its impact on the young and on family life has been destructive to the point where illegitimacy is rife. Not only does the state cost too much and spawn "a new soft despotism", he argues that it puts democracy itself in doubt. "For the project of self-government depends on the capacity of citizens to govern their own passions, urges, habits and expectations." + Medicard: A Better Way To Pay for Medicines?; IEA, 2 Lord North Street, London SW1P 3LB; pounds 5.45 inc p&p. Crisis in the welfare state; CPS, 52 Rochester Row, London SW1P 1JU; pounds 4.95. + +LOAD-DATE: July 26, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +210 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 30, 1993 + +POLICE CONDEMN 'MADNESS' OF JAIL LEAVE FOR MURDERER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 7 + +LENGTH: 526 words + + + A PRISONER was jailed for life yesterday for the murder of a barmaid while he was on home leave from jail. + Malcolm Smith, aged 41, was convicted of murdering 26-year-old Jayne Harvell in her flat in Bournemouth, Dorset. + After the case the head of Dorset CID, Detective Chief Superintendent Des Donohoe described the murder as "brutal, callous and despicable". + "I really wonder if a man such as this has got a place in our society," he said. The decision to allow him out of jail, bearing in mind his previous convictions was "madness". + The criminal justice system was just as responsible as the killer for the death of Miss Harvell, he added. Mr Smith had 123 convictions yet on two separate occasions the prison service had allowed him home leave. On those occasions he tied up an old man and robbed him and had battered and killed a young girl. + Mr Justice McKillon said at Winchester crown court that it had been a "horrible and unpleasant tale". After hearing the accused had appeared in court on 21 occasions since the age of 11 - 15 times for dishonesty and violence - the judge told him: "You have become an extremely dangerous man." + Mr Smith, of no fixed address, pleaded not guilty to murdering Miss Harvell at her bedsit in Bournemouth's Westbourne area on June 1, last year. + The prosecution claimed he should have returned to the Verne Prison, Portland, Dorset, from four days home leave. + Miss Harvell, who worked at the Pelican wine bar, in Bournemouth, was found semi-naked on her bed with a pillow case over her head, and an electric cord around her throat. She had a broken nose, a sock had been used to gag her and she died from asphyxiation after inhaling her own blood, said the prosecuting counsel, David Lane QC. + Mr Smith had seen her photograph in the cell of a fellow inmate at the jail, where he was serving an 18-month term for robbery and false imprisonment - which involved tying up an elderly man who had befriended him while on parole. + He had served three months of that sentence when he was granted home leave to a Swindon hostel. But instead of going there he went to Bournemouth where he met Miss Harvell. + Over the ensuing days he was seen several times with the barmaid who was described to the court by witnesses as "friendly, innocent and trusting". + The accused told the jury he and Miss Harvell had become lovers four days before she died. The night before her murder she stayed with her boyfriend, allowing Mr Smith to sleep at her flat. + The judge said the precise sequence of events at the flat when Miss Harvell returned to get ready for work on the Monday morning and found Mr Smith still there could not be certain. + "At some stage in that terrible treatment of her the only sensible conclusion on the evidence is he raped her, probably as she lay trussed up and helpless on her bed," said the judge. + A Home Office spokesman said last night that the decision to grant Mr Smith home leave had been looked into and correct procedures had been followed. + "There was nothing to indicate Smith was likely to commit any crime," said the spokesman. + +LOAD-DATE: July 30, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +211 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +July 30, 1993 + +GHOST TOWN WHERE TERROR IS IN THE AIR + +BYLINE: DEREK BROWN IN AL-QULAYLAH, SOUTH LEBANON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 736 words + + + THE house is large and modern, sturdily built in concrete. Not sturdy enough, though, to resist an Israeli Defence Force TOW anti-armour missile. + It smashed in on Wednesday morning, punching through the thick, steel-reinforced floor, and exploding in the basement where the Daweish family was sheltering. + Mustafa Daweish, the head of the family, is now in the Jamal Amel hospital in Tyre. + He told his story through an interpreter: "He started to evacuate his family and bring them to hospital. He saw that people were wounded. It was dark inside the basement, with too much dust. He started to pull the stones away and saw his son cut into pieces and dead." + Hassan, Mr Daweish's son, was 13. As his father helped the rest of the family get clear, an Israeli helicopter returned and fired one more missile. Mr Daweish was wounded in his left leg. + The house in al-Qulaylah is empty now, with hideous blood smears at the entrance and in the basement. Poking through the debris yesterday, an officer of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil), said laconically: "There is a human piece here, I think. Yes, it is a finger tip." + Outside, the village is all but deserted. There used to be about 3,500 people here, but when Unifil searched it they found just 15 elderly residents. + "They said they didn't want to go anywhere else, but they were frightened," said Yrjo Hoysniemi, a Finnish major. + It's the same all around the Unifil area. Villages are silent, crops are untended. In one otherwise deserted street, an old, bent man hobbled with a stick past a couple of bewildered bullocks. + Israel's latest "anti-terrorist" tactic is working terribly well. Best estimates suggest that 200,000 Lebanese have fled the five-day onslaught. Most have headed for Beirut, just as the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, says he intended. He wants the refugees to bring pressure on the Lebanese government and on its patron, Syria, and force them to suppress the Hizbollah force of Iranian-backed Shi'a guerrillas. + Israeli officials insist that the aim is not to kill civilians or drive them out by sheer terror. But that is what has happened. Unifil puts the death toll at 111, with another 500 or so wounded. + Terror is in the very air, which shakes and trembles with the constant boom of heavy artillery. Helicopters prowl high above the ghostly villages, occasionally throwing out heat flares to divert possible missiles. + Offshore, small gunboats dash up and down the coast, occasionally pausing to shell suspected guerrilla bases, such as the Palestinian refugee camp outside Sidon. + The Israelis blandly admit that the bombardment, particularly with artillery, cannot be precise. According to Unifil sources, the Israeli land, sea and air forces have so far fired 20,000 rounds from heavy weapons, including missiles. That is 4,000 more than Unifil logged in the whole of last year. + Sometimes, the tactic works without a single shot. On Wednesday, the people of Tyre were told by the Voice of the South radio station, operated by Israel's puppet South Lebanese Army, that they would soon be shelled. It has not happened, but 80 per cent of the population fled. + Now the city seems peopled by small groups of nervous men, anxious to bolster their courage by vowing never to leave. + "We are not going," said Sherif, a property dealer aged 40. "This is our country, and we prefer to die here." + Tyre was, until Sunday, a boom town, with new buildings sprouting around its edges, evidence of the life that returned to Lebanon a couple of years ago after 15 years of savage civil war. + Now the confidence has suddenly drained away. There are 10,000 new refugees in the town, mostly miserably packed into school buildings. A few shops are open, and a couple of restaurants. They appear to be doing no trade. + The Jamal Amel hospital, however, has all the business it can handle. + Dr Ahmed Mrouweh reels off the statistics. On Sunday, he admitted 13 patients of whom two died; on Monday, 27, of whom four died; on Tuesday, 78, of whom six died; on Wednesday, 58, of whom five died; and yesterday up to noon, 15, of whom two died. + They are eagerly displayed for the visiting press: a seven-year-old girl with shrapnel in her stomach; another girl, a teenager, with a damaged eye; and Mr Daweish with his ghastly story of the basement. + +LOAD-DATE: July 30, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +212 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 4, 1993 + +RIGHTWINGERS' BENEFIT SHAKE-UP IDEAS 'NOT A BLUEPRINT FOR REVIEW' + +BYLINE: PATRICK WINTOUR + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 260 words + + + PROPOSALS for changing the welfare state, made yesterday by the No Turning Back Group of Tory MPs, have been welcomed by the Department of Social Security but it does not see them as a blueprint for the Government's review of state spending. + Peter Lilley, the Social Security Secretary, is a member of the group but is said to have played no role in preparing the proposals. They included a new means-tested and graduated benefit that would combine all non-contributory benefits, such as child benefit, disability and invalid care allowance, sickness, and maternity payment. + The proposals are seen as the maximum demands of the Tory rightwingers. However, some Tory social security specialists doubt it is possible to construct and administer such a complex scheme. + A claim by the group, that much child benefit was wasted on the wealthy, was denied by the Child Poverty Action Group. A recent parliamentary answer showed that only 8 per cent of child benefit went to families earning more than pounds 300 a week after housing costs. + Another argument propounded by the Tory group, that economic growth will be insufficient to fund increasing demands on the welfare state due to the rising elderly population, was challenged by Donald Dewar, the shadow social security spokesman. He pointed out that a recent paper by Mr Lilley showed that by 2000, social security as a percentage of gross domestic product would be only 12.4 per cent, a rise of 0.1 per cent, if growth reaches 2.5 per cent and unemployment fell to 2.75 million. + +LOAD-DATE: August 4, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +213 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 4, 1993 + +PENSIONERS CHALK UP RECORD BURDEN + +BYLINE: OUR CORRESPONDENT IN ROME + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 296 words + + + AS ITALY braces for a season of political and economic modernisation, the scale of the task has been illuminated by a report showing the country has more people on state pensions than in employment. + It enjoys this unique distinction despite having no fixed unemployment benefit, only a token payment of pounds 2.30 a day, not included in yesterday's figures. + It has increasing numbers of elderly people, who contributed to the 1992 surge in state pensions analysed by the Prime statistical agency. But in Italy, pensions can mean rather more than in other countries - and it is the plethora of state favours to its political servants that is blamed for raising the number of pensioners to 21 million last year, against 20.4 million in work. + The vast and infamously inept army of civil servants - invariably recruited through political patronage and family ties - could until last year retire at the age of 35. Most could take a second job even during the 15 years required to qualify for a pension, which is usually drawn in tandem with a second career. Reforms to this system provoked outrage last year. + Then there are prizes like the benemerito, or well deserved, pension given to anyone thought to be worthy of a special recognition by the political authorities. + The statistics show remarkable concentrations of invalidity pensions in areas where the Christian Democrat Party operates its most unapologetic patronage systems: notably Naples, Calabria, Abruzzi and Sicily. + Italy spends pounds 115 billion a year on pensions. The number of newly registered pensioners in 1992 was 850,205, compared with 772,478 in 1991: a new record noted by the director of the national pension authority, Mario Colombo, who himself retired a month later. + +LOAD-DATE: August 4, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +214 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 4, 1993 + +TRIAL STRIPS HOSPITALS OF CARE ROLES + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 20 + +LENGTH: 546 words + + + HOSPITALS will be stripped of responsibility for midwifery, psychiatric care and many services for elderly people and children under radical plans for east London which may foreshadow a shake-up of health care nationally. + The plans, drawn up by the North East Thames health region, involve a huge shift of power from hospitals to community health services. At least one hospital could be rendered unviable by the changes. An indication that the plans are setting the direction for the health service as a whole will come as soon as tomorrow, when a government report is expected to call for maternity services to be drawn away from hospitals. + The plans are set out in a confidential report sent to health service groups and local authorities in east London. The report identifies the health services to be placed in the hands of the East London Primary Care Development Agency, a body being set up for 18 months only to re-organise and boost family doctor and community services in the area. + The move is part of the Tomlinson review of health care in London and follows the recommendation by the review, accepted by ministers, that provision of acute and community health services should be separated and that integrated hospital trusts providing both should be unpicked. + The report says this provides an opportunity for a fresh look at where the divide should be between acute and community services. This should reflect local priorities and not merely the way institutions have developed. + The agency should take responsibility for all existing community services; family planning, cervical screening and midwifery; all mental health services, including child psychiatry; all services for people with learning disabilities or mental handicap; all rehabilitation services; all services for people with physical disabilities; and all therapy services. + It should also take over all child health services in Newham and all community paediatrics in City and Hackney and Tower Hamlets; and all care of the elderly in Tower Hamlets and continuing care and day-centre activities in Newham and City and Hackney. + The proposals would still leave the main east London hospitals with substantial incomes, the report says. But it acknowledges that "the viability of the Homerton [in Hackney] will depend on its level of income and its cost base". + Groups circulated have been given two weeks to comment on the recommendations, with decisions due next month, and there is widespread concern in the hospitals affected. + Critics of the plans say they risk causing further chaos in a health care system in the capital that is already in turmoil. They could open fault-lines between hospitals and community health services, down which patients could disappear. + Mike Fairey, chief executive of the Royal London hospital trust, which runs both acute and community services, said: "We believe that, overall, what the regional health authority is trying to do can be done in a substantially less radical way than it is proposing." + Hilary Scott, chief executive designate of the development agency, said that the report was striking a deliberately radical note and that its main aim was to reflect the needs of the patient, not the institution. + +LOAD-DATE: August 4, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +215 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 4, 1993 + +PEOPLE: KEEPING MUM; +Sarah Boseley on the family life of Iliescu, a job offer for Castro, sado-masochism and the policemens' union, and what to wear in jail + +BYLINE: SARAH BOSELEY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EURO PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 915 words + + + WHEN it comes to their mum, even the coolest politician gets hot under the collar. President Ion Iliescu of Romania is sueing Expres magazine for suggesting that he neglected and disowned his elderly mother. Out pours a torrent of emotional self-justification from the 63 year-old former communist aide to Nicolae Ceausescu. "At the age of one, I was abandoned by my mother, who never interested herself in me any more," he wrote in a letter for publication, claiming he sends her money for housing and food expenses each month. "I did not miss affection in the first years of my life. I received it from my grandparents and my father's family, and at seven from my adoptive mother, a daughter of peasants from the (north Romanian) Maramures area." Just to make his feelings quite clear, Iliescu signed the letter to the Romanian magazine's general manager "with all lack of respect". + - OFF to prison and don't know what to wear? Family weeping as you leave and you don't know how to placate them? Fear no longer: there is a survival guide which will answer all your needs and more. Mario Zamorani, a 45-year-old manager arrested during the ongoing Italian corruption scandal and sentenced to 117 days in prison, has written a manual to guide corrupt businessmen who have fallen foul of the clean-up campaign through the ordeal of prison and even retain a touch of class . . . + The most important question is, of course, what to wear. I mean, you don't want to look like just anybody, do you? The first item on the list is a pair of clogs: "They have high soles and when you take a shower it will prevent you from getting any nasty fungal infections on your feet". Then you need a tracksuit, socks, handkerchiefs - all the usual things. "Pyjamas, maybe stripey ones, like mine, make a good first impact on your cell mates: they laugh immediately, but it serves its purpose." The final item: "Two shirts, perhaps monogrammed: they add a certain tone." + Other useful items: glue (good for sticking up posters, pictures of your loved ones), a bottle of perfume to take away the nasty odours which permeate your prison cell; mosquito repellent and, of course, spaghetti. + Finally, remember when you leave your home not to spend too long hugging and kissing your family. "Stick to saying 'Don't worry, I'll be back - soon', and maybe give a little wry smile like Gary Cooper when he used to set off on his horse to face some terrible danger. It gives everyone a sense of security: there'll be plenty of time for tears later on." + Pfeffer at stake + THREE years ago, Helmut Pfeffer, or Helmut Pepper as he would be known in English, and a dominatrix friend opened a sex-shop in Cologne that offered a nice line in sado-masochistic equipment. Pfeffer, aged 57, also posed in magazines of that ilk in arresting positions. All harmless fun, he and his friends might say. But, 'Ello, 'Elllo, 'Ello, Herr Pfeffer is national chairman of the German Police Union. Was, wuld be more accurate. He has decided to resign the post. Unfortunately for his bank balance, he hasn't even a shop to go back to: the local bailiff has just seized it. And the dominatrix cannot be found for love nor money. Ouch. + - The Transylvanian town of Sibiu must be visible from some considerable distance even on a moonless night. It is home to two rival Gypsy kings who are trying to outdo each other in the glitter of their crown jewels. Emperor Iulian Of All The Gipsies, whose coronation is planned for Sunday , has a monster headpiece encrusted with 100 large diamonds and rubies which he now says he is insuring for $ 87,000. This announcement is seen as a bid to outshine his neighbour, King Cioaba of All The Gypsies, who has the advantage of being registered with the United Nations as the representative of world gypsydom. Cioba's crown, made in Italy for his own coronation last September, was said to contain almost two kilogrammes of 24 carat gold. + They claim as subjects some two to three million Gypsies within Romania. And if they can just stop bickering, there's a chance they can keep both sets of crown jewels in the family. Cioaba's daughter Lucia is married to Iulian's eldest son, who presumably is hoping to become Iulian II. + Empire in the sun + DIONYs Jobst, from Germany's Christian Democratic party, has come up with a novel proposal, according to the mass-circulation newspaper Bild. Given that "Mallorca has become practically German," he says, "the German federal government should approach Spain with the object of buying the island." His more moderate colleague Peter Ramsauer, is in favour of "a 99 year lease". Mallorca, this hypothetical "land" (federal state) number 17 of the Federal Republic, has more Germans living there than Spanish, Bild explained. And how much more convenient it would be for them to be able to pay for their shopping in marks and use German coins in public telephones. + THERE can be little more romantic end than to die of too much love. It's a consoling thought for the Italians as they mourn the gradual expiry of the country's most famous pine tree in Agrigento, Sicily. Pirandello's ashes were buried under the tree and for years fans and lovers have flocked to its bough to carve their names, romantic messages and endless hearts. Well-meaning they might have been, but the many deep incisions have let in so much pollution and so many insects that scientists have now had to give up hope of saving the dying pine. + +LOAD-DATE: August 4, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +216 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 5, 1993 + +LONG-STAY BEDS FOR ELDERLY 'CUT BY 40PC' + +BYLINE: FRANCES RICKFORD + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 616 words + + + THE number of National Health Service beds for elderly people with long-term illnesses has been cut by nearly 40 per cent in the last five years, a Guardian survey suggests. + The survey of a sample of health districts demonstrates how the NHS is shedding responsibility for this area of care, forcing people into means-tested private nursing homes. It suggests that in total more than 10,000 beds for elderly people in England and Wales are likely to have closed since 1988. + There has been no explicit government policy of long-stay closures, but the Department of Health has emphasised increased throughput of patients. + Bed closures have coincided with the growth of private nursing home places, funded on a means-tested basis through social service departments under the community care legislation. For many elderly people the result has been means-tested care in place of a free service. + The means-testing regulations for private nursing home fees mean that people with assets of more than pounds 8,000, including their homes, receive no financial help. As a result, nursing care is being financed by house sales. + The department does not collect figures on NHS long-stay care for elderly people. The survey was conducted by asking individual consultant geriatricians in two health regions, Northern and South Western, to provide figures on the number of these beds available in their districts now, five years ago and 10 years ago. Results were received from 16 of the 22 districts in the two regions. + In these, there were 2,536 beds in 1983, 2,288 in 1988 and 1,374 in 1993 - a loss of 1,162 beds, or 45.8 per cent, over 10 years and of 914 beds, or 39.9 per cent, over the last five. + During this period there has been a rapid growth in the number of very old people. Between 1981 and 1991 the number of over-75s in Britain increased by 27 per cent and of over-85s by 50 per cent, according to census data. + Carers' organisations point out that long-stay geriatric and psychogeriatric beds have traditionally been used as temporary accommodation for people being looked after at home to give carers a break. + Harry Cayton, director of the Alzheimer's Disease Society, said: "This survey confirms the fears that we have had from anecdotal evidence. There has been a huge withdrawal of the health service from the elderly with chronic illness." + Jill Pitkeathley, director of the Carers' National Association, said: "It may be the case that the correct direction to take is that if you own a house, that money should be used to fund your health care when you need it. But these changes are happening by stealth with no public debate. + "Every day carers contact us for whom it comes as a total surprise that owner occupation is being used in this way. People's expectation is still that if they have cared for someone as long as they possibly can, there will be good care available free when they can no longer cope." + Elaine Murphy, professor of psychogeriatrics at Guy's hospital in London, said: "The current situation is a fudge which is preventing us from developing a strategy to meet the real needs of real people. The Government needs to come out and say whether it is going to provide care free at the point of use for chronically ill elderly people or not, but it is afraid to do that for political reasons." + A Health Department spokesman said: "The white paper Caring for People states clearly that where people require continuous care for reasons of ill health it will remain the responsibility of health authorities to provide for this. This message has been reinforced both by ministers and in guidance to health authorities." + +LOAD-DATE: August 5, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +217 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 6, 1993 + +LEADING ARTICLE: PRIVATISING THE HEALTH SERVICE BY STEALTH + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 19 + +LENGTH: 494 words + + + IF THE radical new health policy exposed in yesterday's Guardian had been put before Parliament, it would have been vetoed: th e NHS is disengaging from continuous care. No one has announced this. There has been no debate. It runs quite contrary to government policy. And, if the voters of Christchurch had been told, the Conservatives might have even lost their deposit. A survey by the Guardian shows that the number of long-stay beds for elderly people has been cut by 40 per cent in the last five years. This is equivalent to 10,000 beds being shut. All this in a decade in which the numbers aged over 75 have increased by 25 per cent, and the numbers over 85 by 50 per cent. Before any further beds are shut - particularly with the numbers over 85 due to rise by one third to one million by 2001 - there must be a full debate. Do we want these beds closed? Should health authorities be stopped? + Tackled by our reporter, the Health Department declared that government policy still required health authorities to provide continuous care. It is set out in unambiguous terms in the white paper, Caring for People: "Health authorities will need to ensure that their plans allow for continuous residential health care for highly dependent people who need it". Yet our survey of 16 health authorities in two separate regions showed a 40 per cent reduction in longstay beds. Certainly there has been a big unplanned increase in private residential and nursing home beds because of the social security subsidies that were available until April of this year. These beds increased by over 40,000 between 1986 and 1990. But reports last year showed most health authorities are not replacing their own provision with contractual beds in private nursing homes. Only one third have contractual beds, and of these, half have 30 or fewer beds. So, thousands of patients are being transferred from free NHS beds into means-tested nursing homes. + If only more patients were aware of the law, they could halt this process. Official government circulars - and the Health Ombudsman - have upheld the obligation on the NHS to provide continuous nursing care. These obligations remain in place even with the introduction in April of the new community care scheme, under which the needs of dependent patients discharged by NHS hospitals are assessed. Just where the boundary between medical care (free, and on the NHS) and social care (means-tested social services) is drawn, has always been difficult to define. The dilemma of those who are too well for hospital, but too frail for residential care is not new. But genuine medical cases, both chronic and acute, are now being discharged into private nursing homes. A cash-strapped NHS is now using these homes to save cash. Ministers clearly want to fudge the issue, but patients have a right to know their rights. And Parliament has a right to insist that any radical switch in health policy has its approval. + +LOAD-DATE: August 6, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +218 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 7, 1993 + +WEEK IN NHS HOSPITAL COSTS OVER POUNDS 1,000 + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 5 + +LENGTH: 389 words + + + THE average cost of a hospital patient has topped pounds 1,000 a week after rising more than 8 per cent in the first year of the National Health Service market, Department of Health figures show. + The cost of caring for an in-patient for a week was an estimated pounds 1,072 in 1992, compared with pounds 991 in 1991 when the market-style NHS changes were introduced. The 1982 figure was pounds 489. + The figures, prepared by the Health Department, were used yesterday by the drugs industry to hit back at government plans to extend the "limited list" of medicines banned from being prescribed by doctors. The plans have been justified on grounds of the NHS's rising drugs bill. + According to the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, the 14 per cent growth in the bill in 1991-92 was attributable largely to rising numbers of elderly people, for whom more medicines are prescribed, and none of the growth was caused by price rises. + As a proportion of total NHS costs, those of pharmaceutical services fell from 10.5 per cent in 1991 to 10.3 per cent in 1992, when they were pounds 3.8 billion. The increase of 8.2 per cent in in-patient costs reflects what the association describes as "waste" in other aspects of patient care - particularly, it says, growing numbers of bureaucrats. + Dr John Griffin, the association's director, asked: "How can the Government justify further cutbacks in medicines when other costs in the NHS are so much greater?" + The plans to extend the limited list to an additional 10 clinical categories, from the seven introduced in 1984, were announced last autumn. The extra categories include treatments for diarrhoea, allergies and anaemia, as well as sleeping tablets and oral contraceptives. No drugs have yet been named. + The association says the Government risks driving manufacturers overseas. It estimates there is 60 per cent over-capacity in the industry in Europe, and says one leading company, which it will not name, is planning to cut its European plants from 12 to three. + At present, the association says, medicines are Britain's second-biggest earner of foreign exchange, with a trade surplus of pounds 1.3 billion. + Twenty-six Conservative MPs have signed Commons motions asking ministers to think again about extending the limited list. + +LOAD-DATE: August 9, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +219 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 9, 1993 + +THIRTY YEARS ON, IT'S PARTY TIME FOR RONNIE BIGGS + +BYLINE: JAN ROCHA IN RIO DE JANEIRO + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 1 + +LENGTH: 311 words + + + NO grey-haired train robbers or former Scotland Yard policemen turned up in Rio at the weekend to celebrate the 30th anniversary of one of Britain's most celebrated crimes with the man who got away, Ronnie Biggs. + Instead, a group of bemused Austrian tourists brought by their guide to see one of Rio's most enduring attractions - white-haired Mr Biggs - watched him celebrate his 64th birthday with more than 100 friends. + A punk band shattered the silence of the cobbled street on a Rio hillside where Biggs lives. "It was a good party, it went on until 5 o'clock in the morning," he said yesterday, chipper after four hours' sleep. "Fortunately nobody called the police." + Away from England, Ronnie has always got on well with policemen - an off-duty Brazilian policeman friend poured the drinks at the weekend party. And only last month he was entertaining ex-superintendent Jack Slipper of Scotland Yard. + It was the first time Mr Slipper had been back to Rio since 1974, when he made an unorthodox attempt to arrest Biggs which was thwarted by his Brazilian colleagues' insistence on the letter of the law. + "We were just two elderly citizens having a drink and remembering old times," said Biggs yesterday. + There were 14 other men with Biggs on the night of August 8, 1963, when they held up a mail train in Buckinghamshire. The only one to contact him yesterday was Bruce Reynolds, who phoned to say happy birthday. + As a petty thief whose previous crimes included robbing a railway booking office on a bike, Biggs's share of the spoils was small. But he has turned the train robbery into a meal ticket for life, earning enough from interviews and shows for tourists to live comfortably. + To Biggs, Brazil is home. He says: "I'd like to visit England, but I don't want to live there any more." + Past Notes, G2, Page 3 + +LOAD-DATE: August 9, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +220 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 10, 1993 + +DIY JUSTICE RAISES COMMUNITY'S SPIRIT; +LAWLESS BRITAIN: In the second of a series looking at the effect of crime on society, Sally Weale finds support for vigilantes in a Swansea suburb + +BYLINE: SALLY WEALE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 811 words + + + LAST month, at the far end of the Danygraig Road in the Port Tennant area of Swansea overlooking the docks, a teenager was found in the early hours of the morning lying on the ground, both legs broken in several places. + He told police it was a hit-and-run accident. An anonymous caller to the local newspaper, however, claimed it was a deliberate attack. + The youth's legs had been broken on purpose, the caller said, and his friend's hands had been smashed with a hammer. "People around here are fed up," the caller said. "It will not stop at that - it will happen again if things don't improve." + Anger and frustration is evident among people living in the small terraced cottages lining the streets of this working class area of Swansea. Almost everyone has a complaint. + They are fed up with their cars being broken into by joyriders, who career around the roads at 80-90mph, smashing into parked vehicles, then take them on to Kilvey Hill at the back of the estate, where they dump them and set fire to them. + The press locally and nationally reported the incident as vigilante revenge by residents. A councillor said the victims "got what they deserved". + The police, however, say they have found nothing to substantiate the vigilante theory. The youth with the smashed hands has not been traced and the family of the teenager with broken legs is said to be devastated by his injuries - he has metal pins in his legs - and the implication he had been involved in car crime, which they fiercely deny. + Whatever the truth, there is widespread support for DIY law and order in the area. The way people in Port Tennant see it, neither the police nor the judiciary seem able to do anything, they cannot afford to pay a private security firm to watch their property, so it is up to the community to act. + "You've got a problem, sort it out yourself - that's the way things have always happened around here," said one man, who keeps a stick at hand ready to chase anyone he sees breaking into cars. + "The boys I drink with, 20 or 30 of us, we've all got the same opinion. Fight fire with fire. We are fed up with it. Either they stop or the local people are going to stop them." + A man walking his Jack Russell terrier agrees - "I think it's a good idea. The police aren't doing anything." So does Grace Davies, aged 86, one of the many elderly people living in the part-private, part-council estate. "We should have vigilantes. We've got a terrible lot over here. They hit our car not so long ago. And the man next door had to pay pounds 2,000 for repairs when they hit his." + The shops on the small parade on Port Tennant Road have had metal grills fitted after being ram-raided. The general store half way up Danygraig Road has had video cameras and an outside security light installed. + According to Richard Lewis, a Swansea city councillor for 20 years representing the Gower ward, the men who carried out the alleged vigilante attack in Port Tennant had done "a great service to the community". + Councillor Lewis, a father of three, set up a group of vigilantes last September after a friend came to him for help when squatters took over her pounds 250,000 house. She had spent six months trying to get results through official channels. Mr Lewis "threatened to break a few arms and legs" and got them out in three days. + Since then he has dealt with about 200 incidents and gathered up to 30 vigilante volunteers, available at the end of a telephone line, including firemen, former soldiers, Welsh Guards and men from the Territorial Army. He has had cries for help from as far afield as Stoke-on-Trent and Yorkshire. + Earlier this year residents living in the Morriston area of Swansea called him in after a spate of vandalism resulted in pounds 30,000 of damage to their cars. "They knew who it was but they couldn't prove it," said Mr Lewis. "A few lads in balaclavas went up the street and sat on [the suspect's] garden wall and it ceased overnight." + It is dangerous work. He has been stabbed a dozen times and bitten to the bone when he went to help a neighbour involved in a fight outside his house. Now he would never get involved without being armed, he says. + Superintendent John Williams, of Swansea central police station, admits there is a problem with car crime in Swansea, like almost everywhere else. He admits he could do with more officers, and that there is frustration at the inadequacies of the legal system. But there is no excuse for people taking the law into their own hands. + "The correct and proper way is to come to the police," he said. His officers had made inquiries into the Port Tennant incident but found no evidence of vigilantes at work. + Should any fresh information come to light, it would be pursued. "I am not prepared to tolerate that sort of conduct." + +LOAD-DATE: August 10, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +221 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 14, 1993 + +CUT IS ALMOST PAINLESS + +BYLINE: BEN LAURANCE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 32 + +LENGTH: 523 words + + + LET US be clear about one element of the debate over health-care costs: making drugs is dirt cheap. Discovering them is expensive, yes: there are all those scientists to be paid, rats to be killed, tests to be done, authorities to be satisfied and doctors to be won over. + So by the time Megadrug Inc has jumped through all the regulatory hoops and actually got its whizzo acne cure licensed for sale in the main markets of the world, its accumulated research and development costs (including interest) will total perhaps pounds 150 million or more. Big money. + But once that has been done, the actual cost of producing most drugs is tiny. Once a company has perfected its potion and produced tablet number one, making tablet number two or tablet number 2 million costs a piffling amount. + Now, think what effect this has in practice. If Megadrug increases the annual sales of one of its products from, say, pounds 50 million to pounds 55 million, virtually all of that extra pounds 5 million flows through to the bottom line: it is extra profit. The economies of scale are enormous - as indeed they are in the production of countless things from compact discs to detective novels. + And this makes the modesty of this week's proposals to cut the price of NHS drugs by only 2.5 per cent particularly baffling. + The volume of prescription drugs being bought by the NHS is rising fast. Broadly speaking, the volume of drugs prescribed in the world's main markets has been increasing by 1 per cent a year or less. But in Britain the growth has been much greater: in round terms, volumes prescribed in the early months of this year were 4 per cent higher than 12 months earlier. + One could debate for ever why this has come about. Perhaps it is a consequence of NHS reforms in the last few years encouraging general practitioners to screen patients more thoroughly, which in turn has made it more likely that lurking ailments have been discovered and treated. + But the exact reason doesn't matter: what is important, for the drug companies, is the simple fact that it has happened and that they can therefore reap economies of scale by generating extra output at a tiny marginal cost. + And simply because of this alone, it stands to reason that drugs companies will make larger amounts of money from the UK market. Hence the 2.5 per cent cut looks a little timid. Even with that cut, the NHS's total bill for drugs - little more than one-tenth of the overall cost of running the health service, remember - is expected to rise by 14 per cent in the coming year, largely due to the increasing number of elderly people in the population and the use of newer, more effective, pricier drugs. + The message seems clear: everything else being equal, companies are going to make larger profits per pill, capsule, injection or whatever, as the volume of drugs prescribed increases. + Cutting the price paid for each of those pills and capsules may go some way to contain the Government's drugs bill. But don't shed a tear for the companies. As we demand increasing amounts of their products, they're laughing. + +LOAD-DATE: August 16, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +222 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 15, 1993 + +THE LAST WORD; +BAD HOUSEKEEPING: With bats in the belfrey + +BYLINE: DULCIE DOMUM + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN WEEKEND PAGE; Pg. 43 + +LENGTH: 725 words + + + MRS BODY returns from Marbella, disgusted with Abroad. Closer interrogation reveals that her disgust was provoked mainly by the behaviour of the British. Another reason for Euro-scepticism: it brings out the worst in us. Comfort her with brick-red tea and slices of Battenberg cake. Is Battenberg named after some obscure European dynasty? If it was called Bradford-on-Avon cake it would have been outlawed by EC edict by now. + Spouse enters, beams, admires Mrs Body's body (brick-red like the tea), panders to her xenophobia, then enquires if we may dump the kids on her on Sunday so we can go to the cricket - a foolish expedition, he admits later, as English cricket has gone to the dogs. + Children readily acquiesce as they will be able to ransack the Bodys' vile videos and perhaps devour oven chips shaped like dinosaur turds for tea. Weather is but so-so, but prospect of afternoon deux beguiling: the crack of leather on willow, the flap of white flannel, etc. However, minutes before we are due to leave Elaine rings to ask me over because she is a bit low. Invite her to cricket instead, at which she chirrups at the novelty of it all and runs off to dive into her sporty togs. + Sporty togs turn out to be glistening cream dress with pearls at throat and ears. Old men on the gate flirt with her, but I am apparently too old to ogle. Alice and Saskia would no doubt require me to be delighted thereat. Cannot help feeling a bit jealous instead, as own dress, and indeed own body, dowdy old tat. Cricketers however even worse dressed. No white flannel - instead horrid blue tracksuits. + "Supporting Gloucestershire," announces Spouse, "which used to be a pleasure, has now become social work." Elaine breaks into a peal of merry laughter. I know Spouse is amusing occasionally, but he's not that funny. Still, he goes on, they're doing better now, and in the middle of the field she will see the best wicketkeeper in the world: Jack Russell. + "What!" cries Elaine, "that little chap in the funny hat? He looks like one of the Flowerpot Men!" She giggles anew at the idea of his being a Jack Russell and says she is definitely a dog person. Evidently she is no longer a bit low. + At 3.30 a flickering halo of unearthly light hovers around Jack Russell's head. Is this a Sign from Heaven which the England selectors ignore at their peril? No, it is the first symptom of a migraine. + Retire to tea-tent and take pills in vain. Am driven home by Spouse with martyred air. Elaine sympathetic, though: soothes my throbbing brow with her wonderfully cool hand, and once home, puts me to bed, feeds the children, etc, despite my feeble insistence that Spouse can do it. + "Oh no, Dulcie, it's fine, I love it!" she whispers, her eyes alight with fun. "It's horrible living alone, you've no idea!" More evidence perhaps of her being a dog person. Suspect I am a cat person, though rapidly inclining to the dodo. Left to my own thoughts in darkened room. Laughter below. + Brain as usual refuses to go and lie in its basket. Instead it gnaws away at the the idea of dogs and cricket. Allan Border's Collies would top the Canine League. Can almost hear John Arlott growling, "Their play has a mordant quality, a dogged perseverance . . ." Even their names sound like a pack of dogs barking. "Mark! Mark! Waugh! Waugh! Warne! Warne! Warne! Boooooooooon!" Though Warne looks more like an engaging young pig who has had his snout in a bowl of cream. Drift off to sleep eventually and dream of Edward de Bono and Ronnie Barker. + Awoken by Spouse coming to bed at half past midnight. "Not tonight dear I've got a headache," he quips, and falls instantly asleep. Next day worst pain has gone, but feel as if I am an old stone pillar that crashed down into undergrowth aeons ago. + "How are you, old thing?" enquires Spouse. Object to his endearments and lament aloud that I am no longer as young as Elaine. + "She's a silly tart," he snorts, and even though it is a transparent lie, am grateful. Such are the threadbare courtesies of middle-aged marriage. + Manoeuvre myself painfully into the kitchen to find - astonishing - a letter addressed to me in the handwriting of that frisky young dog, Tom the Plumber. Ah. Had forgotten that old stone pillars can be of passing interest to frisky young dogs. + +LOAD-DATE: August 16, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +223 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 16, 1993 + +COMMENTARY: A PARTY OF MASS MEMBERSHIP? DON'T FOOL YOURSELVES + +BYLINE: JULIA LANGDON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 20 + +LENGTH: 1134 words + + + AWEARY member of Labour's shadow Cabinet who had just spent a day campaigning on the party's behalf recently confessed to the private suspicion that the days of a mass membership party were over. + This is heresy. Comrades are not allowed to think such things, let alone articulate them. Labour has always been a party of mass membership. In principle that is. Last year's Conference resolutions included over 30 on the topic of membership, which all asserted the central importance of mass membership to give the working people of Britain their voice, to win the next election and to advance the cause of socialism . . . etc, etc. This year's will certainly reflect the same view. It is, of course, the view of the activists, the people who already do belong to the Labour Party and are anxious that others should see the light or, anyway, that a greater number should put their money where their vote goes. + But is it not possible that the candid view of the shadow minister is correct? Is this not already the case - the statistics certainly suggest it might be. + The figures are slightly muddled for individual party membership, but they do not hide the trend. Last year's annual report from Labour's National Executive recorded that the total number of members at the end of 1991 was 261,000. This was 50,000 less than the membership for 1990 and the report drew attention to the steady decline in membership in recent years and that the fall would have been steeper but for the efforts of its Membership Services Unit. + During 1991 the efforts of this unit were rewarded by the recruitment of 30,000 new members. This is not an achievement likely to have been matched last year. Even though there was a general election, which usually enhances membership, the party had by then agreed to raise its full annual subscription to pounds 18. The impact has been disastrous for local parties. No official figures have yet emerged, but at least 40,000 had gone by this April. + "You can't ask people to fork out 18 quid in my constituency", said one Tyneside MP. "You'd be asking to get your block knocked off." The elderly and the unemployed can still join up for a fiver, but building a mass membership party out of pensioners and those out of work does not exactly concur with the vital new image of a Labour Party for tomorrow. + No cloud comes unaccompanied and the hefty subscription has seen Labour in the black for the first time anyone can remember. Even so, the size of the fees will be cut when the party meets at Brighton. + There will then be a great many speeches about mass membership. Yet a glance at the records suggests that this year's figure could be the lowest ever. In 1928, the first year that records of individual membership were kept, it stood at 214,970. The total rose steadily and, apart from dipping during the second world war, reached over a million in the early 1950s. It has been downhill ever since. + But why? And why, in particular, when an increasingly unpopular Conservative government which has been in office for 14 years has failed to manage the economy, devastated industry, achieved record levels of unemployment, why now are people not flocking to join the official opposition? + I suspect that the answer is that they don't see the point. The Labour Party was formed for a purpose and drew its intellectual, inspirational strength from that political purpose. Its members went to meetings, they campaigned, they canvassed, they proselytized and stood for elections because of an almost sentimental passion for their purpose. Today's members still do all of those things, but the people whose interests they are seeking to represent do not exactly share the party's beliefs, and therefore see no need to join up - especially not if it involves a large sum of money. + This is to some extent the Labour Party's own fault for neglecting political education and partly a factor of the improved standard of living through this century since that first meeting in Farringdon Road - just down the street from the Guardian - when the party was born in February 1900. + Labour's initial message was: "Vote for us and we'll make things better for you." But by the time the children had shoes on their feet, the reason for voting Labour was less obvious. + Margaret Thatcher got into office in 1979 on the votes of the children and grandchildren of men and women who had never voted anything but Labour. These new Tory voters would rather spend their spare time building car ports or re-decorating the spare room than attending lengthy, boring meetings about constitutional changes in the rules for electing Labour Party leaders. And who can blame them? + Joining the Labour Party has not been a very attractive prospect in the last couple of decades. There is still a delightfully sentimental side to its political appeal, but it has been swamped by the internal wrangling of its own members. Even before the constitutional rows of the late 1970s and early 1980s, spending an evening in one of the gloomy upper rooms in which the Labour Party normally does its business was not an entirely congenial affair. + C. Northcote Parkinson observed that "It is now known . . . that men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married", and most people would recognise some truth in this. My personal experience when I inadvertently got elected to a council in the 1970s (I had offered to fight a seat - for fun, I suppose - and they had told me I hadn't a hope of winning) was that none of my colleagues had anything resembling a normal happy private life. I sat next to one man, in his late 50s, who seemed quite socially conventional - and then discovered he still lived at home with his mum and dad. The truth was that Labour Party politics was a social prop for most of them. Spending the evening in the town hall was better than anything else they had on offer. + And while the Labour Party set about the business of tearing itself apart, those people who would, in other circumstances, perhaps have been members learnt to use their leisure in other ways. That is why organisations like the Worldwide Fund For Nature and the Royal Society For The Protection of Birds and The National Trust have membership totals in the millions these days. + After the Christchurch byelection, Margaret Beckett tried to dispel the talk of electoral pacts by calling for one last heave behind the Labour Party. It may be too late for that. It could be that the years of this century will exactly mark the history of the existence of the Labour Party as an organisation with a mass membership. Perhaps they should have started already to look at how they can move forward in these fundamentally altered circumstances. + +LOAD-DATE: August 16, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +224 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 19, 1993 + +COUPLE EVICTED FOR RACE TAUNTS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 108 words + + + AN elderly couple accused of racially harassing neighbours have been evicted by Leicester city council. + The pensioners lived in Highfields, which has a large Asian population. Racism is forbidden under the council's tenancy agreements, and in March the county court granted a possession order ordering the couple out of their flat by mid-June. Bailiffs arrived yesterday after an appeal by the couple was dismissed, and they left. + A council spokesman said it was the first such action, but should serve as a warning to others. Residents welcomed the eviction. One, Andy Bradford, said: "It is just a shame that it took so long." + +LOAD-DATE: August 19, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +225 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 19, 1993 + +PAST NOTES: WHERE ARE THE BATH-CHAIRS? + +BYLINE: BY H.K.C + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 331 words + + + August 19, 1939 + WHEN I was young the most prominent thing to be seen on the "front" of any seaside resort was the bath-chair. All along the promenade there would be bath-chairs being pulled or pushed, with an old gentleman or an old lady riding and a daughter or a companion in attendance. Resorts all along the coast owed their existence to the bath-chair brigade. Invalids, real or imaginary, and elderly people formed a large factor in the seaside half a century ago. People talked little of holiday resorts. They talked of seaside resorts and the publicity, such as it was, generally emphasised the curative or preservative effects of the climate. Some of these places were a little depressing to young people. We wanted far less than people demand of a resort nowadays, but perhaps we did wish sometimes that there were fewer old, infirm, and frequently disagreeable-looking people staying there. + Nowadays a bath-chair is becoming almost as rare at a seaside place as the old growler or the old bathing machine which was towed out to sea by a horse. Watching the crowds promenading on a fine morning not long ago, I wondered idly what had become of all the people who used to be wheeled up and down there in bath-chairs. One is apt to do this as the years increase on one's head, only to be pulled up short with a horrified calculation as to the age of such people had they survived till now. But we are told that we are becoming a nation of elderly folk. Have they no need of bath-chairs? And with that I tried to pick out from the promenaders, types who ought, by older notions, to have been in bath-chairs. Are the breezes of our seaside places more revivifying than 50 years ago? Decidedly not. Is life easier now, so that people age more slowly? Decidedly not. Were the people one used to see in bath-chairs merely paying tribute to fashion? Who can tell? Perhaps it is the "uppishness" of modern youth which develops a "die-hard" spirit in the elderly. + +LOAD-DATE: August 19, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +226 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 20, 1993 + +NHS DRUGS BILL SHOWS 13PC RISE + +BYLINE: CHRIS MIHILL + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 4 + +LENGTH: 372 words + + + THE National Health Service drugs bill increased by more than 13 per cent last year, the Health Minister, Dr Brian Mawhinney, announced yesterday. + A statistical bulletin on prescriptions shows that the basic cost of medicines dispensed in 1992 was pounds 2,858 million, up 13.4 per cent on 1991. + Dr Mawhinney said: "An increase in the drugs bill of 9.6 per cent in real terms cannot be sustained. While it is of primary importance to ensure that patients receive the medicines they need, more has to be done to eliminate uneconomic prescribing." + He said lessons from GP fundholders, whose drugs spending was 4 per cent less than non-fundholders, would be studied. Doctors would be encouraged to prescribe non-patent "generic" medicines instead of the dearer brand-name drugs and to control repeat prescriptions. + Last week the Department of Health negotiated a 2.5 per cent cut in drugs prices with pharmaceutical firms over three years. It is reviewing 10 categories of drugs, aiming to ban the more expensive brands in each. + Dr Mawhinney said the increasing range of treatments, the development of health promotion strategies and the rise in the number of elderly people were "bound to exert an upward pressure on the drugs bill", making it even more essential to reduce waste. + "If we spend more than we have to on meeting patients' real needs, we rob other parts of the health service of much needed growth money. . . + "As a society we have come to expect a pill for every ill. We should be ready to accept a doctor's advice and reassurance on minor ailments, rather than expecting a prescription at the end of every consultation." + A total of 425 million prescription items were dispensed in 1992, up 4.6 per cent on 1991. + On average each person had 8.8 items dispensed, up from 8.5. Four out of five prescription items were free to the patient; two out of five were for generic medicines; and the cost of drugs per person continued to be higher in the North. + Statistical bulletin: prescriptions dispensed in the family health services authorities: England 1982/92; Dept of Health Publication Unit, Heywood Stores, No 2 Site, Manchester Road, Heywood, Lancs, OL10 2PZ; pounds 2. + +LOAD-DATE: August 20, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +227 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 20, 1993 + +WEATHER WATCH: ACHES AND RAINS + +BYLINE: PAUL SIMONS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN WETHER PAGE; Pg. 30 + +LENGTH: 341 words + + + IT SOUNDS like a very whacky idea - using the human body as a weather forecaster. Imagine telling atmospheric pressure, humidity, temperature, atmospheric electricity, changeable conditions just from the way you feel. Yet ever since ancient times human ailments have been used to predict weather, and now there is some scientific evidence that it really works. + Sufferers of rheumatism and arthritis are painfully aware of changes in atmospheric pressure, when their swollen joints turn more painful. Arthritis sufferers are particularly good at predicting rain from their aches and pains thanks to changes in air pressure, as if their joints behaved like barometers. It may be, doctors now believe, because very sensitive pain receptors in the joints are triggered by the slight change in pressure. + Humidity can bring on asthma attacks, although the most dramatic cases occur at the approach of thunderstorms, when attacks can sometimes reach epidemic proportions. But whether this is because of the change in humidity or the intense atmospheric electricity is not clear. Yet thunderstorms are known to trigger at least one other very common complaint - migraine attacks, and maybe there is a link between this and the asthma attacks. + Weather complaints can reach life-threatening proportions. A recent study of elderly people living all day in well heated homes showed that just a brief trip outdoors in freezing cold weather could be fatal. The cold weather thickens blood, narrows blood vessels and can lead to blood clots, triggering coronaries and strokes. Added to that are the deaths caused by hypothermia in the cold brought on by poor circulation problems. + As if that wasn't bad enough, cold temperatures can also exacerbate pain, such as angina pain, by narrowing blood vessels. Probably the best known complaint of the weather is the common cold, although being soaked in the rain and cold doesn't necessarily cause colds. Cold conditions could depress the immune system and let viruses in more easily. + +LOAD-DATE: August 20, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +228 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 21, 1993 + +SARAJEVANS WANT PEACE AT ANY COST + +BYLINE: MAGGIE O'KANE IN SARAJEVO + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 673 words + + + THOSE Sarajevans who, a few months ago, spoke of fighting to the end argued yesterday that President Alija Izetbegovic had no choice but to accept the settlement terms put forward in Geneva yesterday. + "It's over now," said Nenad Kavlovic, a doctor aged 44. + Even the hardliners who have taken up arms and lost at the front are changing their opinions. + "The Serbs can eat us alive here if they want to," said a soldier, aged 24. "We are in no position to hold them back anymore." + A 20-year-old law student just back from the front where his best friend was killed two weeks ago nodded. "He [Izetbegovic] has got to sign," he said. + For most of the 18 months of war, Sarajevans had insisted it was only a matter of time before the West would intervene. Now, they no longer believe the cavalry will come. + "Izetbegovic has not betrayed us, it is the West," said Zid Radio, another doctor, aged 43. + As the water truck circulates around the city, bringing its inadequate supplies to the housing complexes, Ismeta Kurtovic, aged 59, her orange lipstick carelessly applied, impatiently fills her water container. + "I don't care. He has got to sign any contract to finish this." Four women chatting on Marshal Tito Street were also unanimous. + Zadnavika Gvozden, aged 34, said there had been enough suffering. Her nine-year-old son was killed a year ago. + "We have to do it to save the children," she said. Her companions nodded in agreement. "We know the men think differently from us - but they are changing too." + In the past 10 days, the city has had its longest period of calm since the war began 18 months ago. The Serbian forces have withdrawn from the hills above the city and a ceasefire is holding. + Outside the Holiday Inn hotel, where last winter a sniper victim lay screaming in the grass, elderly women were yesterday combing the brambles for berries. On "sniper alley", a road where only armoured vehicles dared to travel, the traffic had turned into bicycles or women pushing prams laden with water. + Most soldiers believe that, although many lives have been sacrificed in the war, the army would not resist if President Izetbegovic opts to sign in Geneva. + "There will be a lot of angry men. But they know in their hearts that it is finished. I don't know how he will explain all those deaths," said Samir Kadribasic, aged 20, an economics student and soldier. + The mood of the city has changed dramatically in the past two months. The tough talk of dying with honour with a gun in their hands has faded and the people are worn out. + The demands and expectations have diminished. + In the Cafe Lisac, which has just reopened, Igor Vinit, a soldier sits with a wounded friend drinking coffee and asks: "In Geneva, did they leave us a way to get to the seaside?" + Reuter adds: The United Nations accused Bosnian Croat forces yesterday of forcing thousands of Muslims to flee from the Mostar region in a new campaign of "ethnic cleansing". + "Credible reports from people fleeing the region point to a new campaign of so-called 'ethnic cleansing' that is as brutal as any so far witnessed in the Bosnian conflict," the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said. "There are numerous reports of brutal 'ethnic cleansing', murder, looting, rape and other abuses by Bosnian Croat forces throughout the region." + It said 15,000, mostly draft-age, Muslim men were thought to be held in Bosnian Croat detention centres in the Mostar region, in south-western Bosnia-Herzegovina. + Although the agency has had trouble getting into the area, it cited sources as saying there were detention centres in Rodoc (near Mostar), Gabela and Dretelj. "Detainees are reportedly being held in extremely poor conditions," it said. + Croat forces agreed yesterday to allow the first UNHCR convoy since June into the western, Muslim part of Mostar today, where 35,000 Muslims have been cut off by fighting, with token medical supplies, but refused to allow further aid convoys in. + +LOAD-DATE: August 23, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +229 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 21, 1993 + +SMALLWEED + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 20 + +LENGTH: 966 words + + + NOT every MP heads for the eremetical peace of coast or countryside as soon as the House goes down. Some stand tirelessly by their telephones awaiting the gladdening tinkle which tells them that the Press Association knows they are still alive. Once it was Michael Brotherton, the Mouth from Louth, who topped the fecundity tables. Later, titanic struggles took place between Anthony Beaumont-Dark, a thunderous graduate of Birmingham municipal politics, and the sprite-like, hyper-active Peter Bruinvels of Leicester. This summer's contest, though, looks like being a walkover. Since the House broke up for the summer, the Tory MP for Brent North, Sir Rhodes Boyson, has behaved as if auditioning for the role of Mr Inescapable. The sheer range of the issues on which the knight has delivered to various newspapers must be the wonder of Wembley. July 29: the rights of privy counsellors (Sir Rhodes is one) to get called ahead of the Commons small fry. August 2: Sir R on the ERM: "I think it is completely dead and we should rejoice at the funeral." August 4: Grave reservations about abandoning league tables for seven-year-olds. August 8: Failing to compensate pensioners for the cost of VAT on fuel will be "politically suicidal". August 11: Student loans are inflating the student drop-out rate. August 13: If transitional relief on the council tax is ended it could cost the Tories seats in the borough elections. August 15: Pushing ahead with bus deregulation could mean disaster for the Tories in London. August 16: Why is the civil service expanding while business is reining back? August 17: Taxes on papers and books will hit the poorest hardest. August 19: Muslims should have the same rights to voluntary-aided schools as the Christians and Jews. + Today? goodness knows. Has the wombat a future, perhaps. Or, does kedgeree rot the brain? This sort of activity is thought by MPs to guarantee their survival against any threat from voters or boundary commissioners. But if that is so, how come Brotherton, Bruinvels and Beaumont-Dark are all of them gone to that bourn where even Chris Moncrieff never rings? + WE all now know what drittsekk means in Norwegian, thank you, but one obvious question has yet to be answered: what is the meaning of Gummer? Sadly, no such word exists in Norwegian: the nearest Smallweed can find is gumler, an edentate mammal. In Swedish, gumma means an old woman, though it's also an endearment, roughly equal to "my pet". (A similar term occurs in west Somerset, where gummer means an old woman, or more specifically a grandmother: elsewhere in England the preferred version is gommer.) There is also an American term, gummers, which means braces holding up trousers, but these are not much help in this case. + Gummer himself might claim that the name is derived from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning man, or even a compound word meaning great-man, person of towering importance, Environment Secretary etc. The most practical derivation, though, in line with the names of such other practical politicians as Baker, Fowler and Thatcher, comes from the Oxford dictionary, which says a gummer is a workman who enlarges the spaces between the teeth of a saw: an undoubtedly useful function, but hardly one for great men. Additionally, since one meaning of "gum" is "impertinent talk or chatter", a Gummer could very well mean an impertinent talker or chatterer. I commend these interpretations to Thorbjorn Berntsen. + JOHN MAJOR (whose name derives from mauger, "a council spear", and not from a post of importance in the army) has despatched two Deans to the Lords, Brenda, a former trade union general secretary, and Sir Paul, once a Deputy Speaker. There they will join Lord Dean of Beswick, a former Labour MP. All this may be pure coincidence. Alternatively, Major may plan to establish a Bench of Deans, to rival the Bench of Bishops. Also in the latest list of new peers is Doreen Miller, a long standing friend of the Majors, a familiar figure at Conservative party conferences, and one of those women who undoubtedly would have been in the Commons had they been men. (The Labour side in the Lords is also full of such people). In Miller's case, her chief disqualification (being female) was compounded by her failure to give preferred answers at selection conferences. At one the hurdle which brought her down was her opposition to hanging. At another, in Hendon South, she was asked: "Does your husband know you are here tonight?" Indeed he did, she replied, "and so do my mum and dad". Failed again. They picked a business consultant; male, and a member of MCC. + EVERY morning the Times lights up the new-born day by publishing an anniversary list of births and deaths. Yesterday, for example, the list began with Benjamin Harrison, 23rd president of the USA, and proceeded via Poincare to Saul Tchernichowsky, Crimean poet. Unusually on Tuesday the list was topped by a name unfamiliar to Smallweed: an 18th century painter and book illustrator. Thomas Stothard was not much regarded as a painter in his day, though as an illustrator he was second to none. His life, too, was "pure and blameless": at its end, Leigh Hunt called him an angel. One would like to know, even so, on precisely what test he was elevated over such famous names as Davy Crockett, Oliver St John Gogarty, Wilfred Scawen Blunt and Mae West. Perhaps someone should ask the editor. He's a chap by the name of Stothard. + AN oddity to ponder at the Oval today. Who would have forecast that on the eve of the final test six Australian batsmen would be averaging over 50 for the tour, none of whom is Border or Taylor? And that the top bowler so far, with 12 wickets for 250 runs in 87.2 overs, 21 of them maidens, is a leg spinner who isn't Shane Warne? + +LOAD-DATE: August 23, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +230 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 21, 1993 + +GETTING RID OF THE VICAR COULD REVIVE YOUR CHURCH; +Face to Faith + +BYLINE: ROBERT VAN DE WEYER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 26 + +LENGTH: 907 words + + + IMAGINE living in a small English village. The pride of the village is a beautiful medieval church. And when new lead is needed on the roof, or crumbling stonework must be replaced, the whole village whirrs into a flurry of fetes, barn dances and gymkanas, in which large sums are raised. + But you rarely attend worship and only occasionally see the vicar, since he has eight or nine other villages on his patch. You feel a little sorry for the handful of elderly people who turn up to his services once or twice a month, enduring icy temperatures and dreary sermons in order to receive Communion. + And you wonder what will happen when this stalwart band dies off. But while the vicar makes no demands on your own time or wallet, you see no point in worrying. + Then one day a crudely printed leaflet comes through the door, from the churchwardens. It informs you that the quota which your parish must pay to the central authorities, in order to pay clergy salaries, is rising rapidly, and will soon reach pounds 3,000 per year. The reason is that the subsidies from the Church Commissioners to rural areas are being cut sharply, due partly to bad financial management. Thus parishes must in effect pay the salaries themselves. + A public meeting is held to focus on the sum to be raised. It is clearly impossible for the worshippers alone, yet equally the village as a whole won't meet it. Someone suggests a compromise: that some extra quota is paid, some fabric repairs are delayed to meet this sum, and a letter is sent to the church authorities explaining that even this small additional quota cannot be sustained year after year. + This series of events, or something very similar, is unfolding in small villages the length and breadth of England. The brute fact is that the figures don't add up, and many of our rural churches cannot survive in their present form. The combination of elderly and dwindling congregations, and relentlessly rising costs, is fatal. + So return to your cottage to contemplate your church's future. It may occur to you that the church building is worth quite a lot of money, if converted into a luxury residence - with the chancel making an excellent triple garage, and the lady chapel housing a jacuzzi. This has already happened to a number of rural churches, and the authorities have pocketed the money. Why not try to strike a deal with the authorities? + The church building would be vested in a local charitable trust, responsible for its maintenance. The chancel at the east end would be separated by glazing across the arch; the rotting choir stalls would be replaced by soft chairs, a carpet put on the floor and decent electric heaters installed - at a total cost of, say, pounds 5,000. + The congregation could continue to worship there in comfort. The parish would pay no quota, and no longer require the services of a vicar, so the churchwardens would have to lead prayers. + The local trust would naturally want to encourage new uses for the church. A meditation group might start in the chancel, using Hindu and Buddhist, as well as Christian, techniques; and this might draw people from nearby towns. Yoga and Tai Chi classes might also take place. A local choir or music group might form. Amateur painters and sculptors might exhibit their work. + Once the community's religious building was released from the tight grip of the ecclesiastical authorities and belonged to the people themselves, a quite astonishing spiritual renewal could occur. + People would want to maintain the great festivals, such as Christmas and Harvest. And since these would no longer be the responsibility of a beleaguered clergyman, struggling to stage special services in umpteen other places as well, local people would take over. + It wouldn't be long before someone realised that the nave would be suitable for badminton, soft tennis and even dances and discos. And since the chancel - the sacred part of the building - had been closed off, people would no longer feel inhibited about enjoying themselves in church. So the pews would be taken out and sold off, and the money used to put down a good new floor. + All this might seem very new but it would be re-creating, in modern form, the medieval church. Prior to the Reformation the nave and the chancel were divided by an ornate screen: the chancel was used for religious ritual, while the nave was open for harvest suppers, social gatherings and the great festivals. + If you emerge from your cottage and propose such a plan, you will probably find most of your neighbours supporting you. But don't underestimate the resistance you may meet from the authorities. Not only do they have a potential financial interest in selling off redundant churches; but by not paying the quota, and dispensing with the vicar, you are posing a direct threat to clerical job security. + Worse still, if religion blossoms in your village without a vicar, it might put the idea in people's heads that the clergy actually inhibit spiritual growth. And as for allowing other non-Christian religions to be practised in a church building . . . + But it's a fight well worth having, because the stakes are so high. The kind of spiritual renewal that could occur in our scattered country churches offers hope for society as a whole. + Robert Van de Weyer is pastor of the Society of Christ the Sower at Little Gidding in Cambridgeshire + +LOAD-DATE: August 23, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +231 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 24, 1993 + +HOPE OUT OF THE FLAMES; +On Kristallnacht the Nazis burned down 300 synagogues. One of them is being rebuilt. Anna Tomforde reports on the synagogue of the second chance + +BYLINE: ANNA TOMFORDE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EURO PAGE; Pg. 17 + +LENGTH: 695 words + + + AACHEN, Charlemagne's capital and one of Germany's oldest and most European cities, is about to add another jewel to its rich historic heritage by building a new synagogue. + Where other German towns and cities have put up plaques and memorials to mark the Nazi onslaught on Jewish places of worship, Aachen recently laid the foundation stone of a new Jewish Centre - complete with a school and flats for old people. + Cranes have taken over Synagogenplatz not far from Aachen's famous romanesque cathedral. The new centre will be built on the exact spot where Nazi thugs burnt down the old synagogue in the notorious Kristallnacht of 9 November 1938. + Rabbi Abraham Hochweit, underlining the deep symbolism and rarity of building a new synagogue in post-war Germany, said it was an act of moral reconciliation. "We say that a sin is expiated only if it is made good on the same spot where it was committed." + Jewish leaders see the construction as a sign of hope for a Jewish future in Germany, despite a recent rash of racist and anti-Semitic violence. "If you build, you want to stay," said Ignatz Bubis, head of Germany's Jewish community. + But, citing opinion polls that show a majority of Germans still consider even German Jews to be "foreigners", he said: "It will be largely up to the German people whether at all, and how soon, there will be Jewish life again in Germany." + Aachen's Jewish community, numbering 1,800 before war, has, like that of many other cities, grown rapidly in recent years as a result of immigration from the former Soviet Union. The city now has a Jewish community of almost 600 after Jewish life was all but obliterated under the Nazis. + In Germany as a whole, the influx has pushed up to 40,000 the number of Jews living here - compared with 600,000 in 1933. Almost half the present Jewish population is from eastern Europe and more than 50,000 are still waiting to come. In some towns and cities in eastern Germany, for instance in Potsdam, Rostock and Magdeburg, completely new Jewish communities have sprung up, consisting entirely of Russian and Ukrainian Jews. The Rostock community has brought its own rabbi from Odessa. + Most of the immigrants have experienced anti-Semitism at home, which makes them take a sober view of the present racial tension in Germany. "Materially we are better off here, morally it is more difficult," said Daniel Reznik, a 24-year-old physicist. + Most Jewish immigrants are highly skilled professionals or have an academic, cultural and artistic background. Because of their relative youth - between 20 and 50 - they fill an important generation gap in Germany's Jewish communities, which were threatened with extinction because of an aging membership. + There are, however, problems with social, religious and cultural integration as established Jewish communities are confronted with newcomers from an Orthodox tradition. Only a few of the older immigrants still speak and understand Yiddish. + "Friction is inevitable if suddenly Russian cultural groups are set up within the old-established communities," a study by the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute for German-Jewish History in Duisburg said. + Professor Julius H. Schoeps, the institute's director, said the influx reminded him of the flight of eastern European Jews from Tsarist persecution at the end of the last century to Germany, Austria and the United States. Jewish life in Germany was bound to change as a result of today's migration, he said. The renewal could, however, not simply mean the continuation of "pre-war traditions"; it would bear "distinctly east-European features." + According to Willi Jasper, the political scientist in charge of the Steinheim Institute's study, the sheer number of immigrants would produce both cultural revival and friction. But the east-west conflict within the Jewish community could release creative currents. The newcomers would, however, try to establish their own identity. + But, he added, the new dynamism arising from contradictions should not be regarded as an impediment. "It is a chance for both this country and for Jewish community life." + +LOAD-DATE: August 24, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +232 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 25, 1993 + +ELDERLY COUPLE KILLED IN HOME + +BYLINE: ANGELLA JOHNSON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 20 + +LENGTH: 463 words + + + POLICE launched a double murder hunt yesterday after the bodies of an elderly brother and sister were discovered in their flat following a burglary. + William Bryan, aged 71, was bound hand and foot while Annie Castle, aged 74, was found sitting upright in a living room armchair. + The flat in Bethnal Green, east London, had been ransacked when fire officers and police broke in shortly after 11pm on Monday night. There were no signs of a forced entry, and detectives say there were no visible signs of injury. + A Scotland Yard spokesman said last night that Mr Bryan died of asphyxiation, believed to be caused by a hand over his mouth, and heart disease also contributed to his death. Mrs Castle died of heart failure. Both were being treated as murder victims. + Mrs Castle, a widow since 1987, and Mr Bryan were believed to have lived together since the war. Mr Bryan had been given a medical discharge from the armed forces. + The alarm was raised by a a neighbour who saw a hall light on early on Monday. She knocked on the front door but received no reply. Later after seeing a balcony entrance open she called the police. + Scotland Yard said the couple had been victims of "a form of burglary", which went wrong. + Detective Superintendent Keith Fletcher said it appeared the couple had either left their door open or let someone in. + Neighbours in the low-rise block of council flats on the Minerva estate were shocked yesterday. Leonard Derrick, aged 32, who knew the couple for about 25 years, said: "I was gutted, I just couldn't believe it. It takes your breath away." + Asked if they had many valuables he replied: "Who has much to steal here?" + According to Helen Lewis, whose 78-year-old mother lives one floor above, it was not the first time the couple had faced an intruder. "Mrs Castle found a young man in her bedroom a while ago and locked him in, but he escaped by jumping over the balcony." + Mrs Lewis said the two families were very close and had moved into the block at about the same time more than 40 years ago. "Then we were always in and out of each other's houses. You could leave your doors open then without being attacked." + Sisters Elaine and Debbie Low, who live in the block, said there had been several break-ins recently. Elaine said: "They were lovely people. They loved the children and always gave them sweets." + Mrs Castle's son-in-law, publican Dennis Leonard, said: "The people who did this must have known her, because Annie had become very wary of opening her doors to strangers." + - Police launched a murder inquiry yesterday after the body of an 84-year-old man, James Alexander, was found with serious head injuries in his flat in sheltered accommodation in Hampstead, north London. + +LOAD-DATE: August 25, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +233 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 26, 1993 + +WEALTH GIVES THE SEYCHELLOIS A UNIQUE PATHWAY TO POLITICAL HARMONY; +Victoria Brittain reports on a process of reconciliation unequalled in the region + +BYLINE: VICTORIA BRITTAIN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 7 + +LENGTH: 614 words + + + CAMPAIGN posters for Albert Rene and James Mancham are still on palm trees and telegraph poles a month after presidential and legislative elections in the Seychelles which broke the trend of unsuccessful transition from one-party state to democracy in Africa. + Old political enemies bitterly estranged by a decade and a half of coups and counter-coups appear to have managed a reconcilia tion which has happened nowhere else in the region. + President Rene won nearly two-thirds of the presidential vote, and his Seychelles People's Progressive Front all but one of the seats in the national assembly, in a turnout estimated by the Commonwealth as over 90 per cent. + With a population of 70,000, everyone knows everyone in the minuscule political circle, and political allegiances are no secret. + It is symbolic of the mood of reconciliation that none of the posters - red for President Rene's SPPF, deep blue for Sir James Mancham's Democratic Party, yellow and white for the small United Opposition - has been torn down or defaced. + The DP's secretary-general, Paul Chow, who claims that from his exile in London he was the political brains behind the notorious failed South African mercenary coup against President Rene, now sits in a small neat office, planning new tax policies to contest the next election in five years time. + At the root of the successful transition and its contrast with failures in Africa, or Indian Ocean neighbours like Madagascar, lies the economic success of the 17 years since independence from Britain. + Sir James, the first president, had campaigned against independence and sought a dependent status like the Channel Islands, or Reunion, still a department of France. + Reunion, with 32 per cent unemployment, explosive political scandals and a 50 per cent abstention rate at the last elections, stands as a grim reminder of what might have been. + The businessmen who took the lead in voting against Sir James this year remember his year in power as a kaleidoscope of Arab princes, pop stars, film stars, and land deals at sky rocketing prices which excluded the Seychellois. + Mr Rene, prime minister in a coalition government with Sir James, ousted him in a near-bloodless coup within a year. In 16 years his SPPF regime has raised per capita income from $ 1,000 a year to $ 5,500. + The reputation of Mr Rene's as a Marxist regime was based on the SPPF's commitment to an equal chance for every child to escape from the fatalism of under-development, and for the elderly to live in dignity. Ten years free schooling was compulsory for every child, and health care was free. + But the reputation owed more to the propaganda of Sir James's friends than to any realities on the ground, where the middle-class found themselves with unprecedented prosperity. + The economic boom which has taken Seychelles into the higher-middle income bracket has been based on tourism, much of it small-scale and Seychellois-run. The international capital which the DP would bring in is a threat of competition. Middle-class Seychellois who now shop in Dubai or Singapore, and talk of taking Filipino maids, voted for the status quo without hesitation. + There is no unemployment; in fact the tiny population cannot fill all the jobs that exist. + The election showed how the style of the Seychelles has changed towards that of a developed country, while its links have swung towards the prosperous and well-ordered societies of south-east Asia, such as Singapore and Malaysia. + Older friends, such as Tanzania and Algeria, marked increasingly by economic crisis and political conflict, have little in common today. + +LOAD-DATE: August 26, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +234 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 26, 1993 + +GERMANS FACE HUGE RISE IN PENSION CONTRIBUTIONS + +BYLINE: DAVID GOW IN BONN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 596 words + + + GERMANS, accused by their chancellor yesterday of having lived way beyond their means for years, are reeling from the news that personal contributions to their generous pensions may have to rise to 30 per cent of gross earnings early in the next century. + Gunter Rexrodt, the federal economics minister charged by Helmut Kohl with producing a package of measures to ensure future German competitiveness, has publicly played with the notion of a huge contributions increase after the year 2010. + Already faced with cuts in social security benefits and tax allowances, and tax increases to pay for unification, ordinary Germans are enraged by Mr Rexrodt's remarks. + Meinhard Miegel, head of the independent Institute for Economy and Society, has fuelled their dismay by warning that cuts in pensions are inevitable after 2003. "Anybody younger than 55 today should be worried about his future old-age provision," he said this week. + Germany's problem of fewer children and a growing number of old people is the worst in western Europe, because its people enter employment later and leave it earlier than in any other country. Already the number of people over 60 is equal to 35 per cent of those actively employed between the ages of 20 and 59. + With a fertility rate of only 1.4 children per family, it is a rapidly ageing country. By the year 2040, elderly people will make up 27.6 per cent of the population, according to estimates by the Institute for the German Economy (IW). + IW experts have shown that between 1977 and 1992 the proportion of national insurance contributors under the age of 20 fell from 8.1 per cent to 4.7 per cent, while the proportion aged between 50 and 60 rose from 15.9 to 18.8 per cent. Young people now make up only 4 per cent of the employed labour force, compared with 12 per cent 30 years ago. + Currently 2.2 contributors pay for the pension of one retired person, but from 2035, the Association of Pension Insurers suggests, the ratio will become one to one. + The demographic trend worries Chancellor Kohl, who is determined to make this a key election issue. + He has already told his 80 million fellow-Germans they will have to work longer hours and retire later in order to remain competitive. But earlier this week he insisted that there could be no question of cuts in their pensions. + He has not said how this can be achieved after the impact of last year's pension reform - raising the early retirement age and setting the state pension at 68 per cent of net, rather than gross, income - has run out early next century. + Mr Rexrodt's "solution" of higher contributions, either designed to frighten voters or pave the way for a greater emphasis on private insurance, is dismissed by IW experts as premature and unfounded. + But Achim Seffen, a social policy analyst, said yesterday that contribution rates of more than 20 per cent could be possible. Already the rate is set to rise next year to 19.3 per cent of gross income from the current 17.5 per cent. + Mr Seffen added that growth in output and productivity were as important as demographic trends, and remained uncertain factors. But he admitted that pensions were unlikely to rise after the year 2010. + Germany's neighbours face similar problems. Britain's elderly, according to IW projections, may be only a fifth of the population in 2040 but the state will face a greater increase in spending on pensions than Germany. And the French will have to spend 72 per cent more then than in 1980. + Pressure for rate cut, page 10 + +LOAD-DATE: August 26, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +235 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 27, 1993 + +ETHNIC ZEALOTS WHO ONCE WERE ALLIES WRESTLE OVER GATEWAY TO SARAJEVO; +Ian Traynor reports on the battle for Mostar, a once-splendid city now the key regional prize between Catholic and Muslim areas + +BYLINE: IAN TRAYNOR + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 901 words + + + SEVERAL months after Bosnia's Muslims and Croats, erstwhile allies against the Serbian enemy, turned on one another in central and south-western Bosnia, their vicious fight for territory is now focused on the key regional prize, the ancient city of Mostar, capital of Herzegovina. + A once splendid town straddling the turquoise waters of the River Neretva, Mostar is gateway to Sarajevo and the Bosnian interior from the Adriatic coast. It links the Catholic heartland to the west with the inland Muslim centres to the north and east. That bridging function is encapsulated in the name of the city - Most is Slavonic for bridge - and symbolised by the high-arched 16th century bridge connecting east and west banks of the Neretva. + The bridge is now virtually impassable, signifying Mostar's transformation from an ethnically-mixed, cosmopolitan mini-Sarajevo to a partitioned city in the grip of ethnic zealots. The river now divides an increasingly desperate Muslim ghetto on the east bank from besieging Croatian forces concentrated on the west side. + For almost three months, some 50,000 Muslim elderly, women and children have been penned into the ghetto without much water, food or medicines. The first substantial aid to breach the Croatian blockade arrived on the east bank early yesterday. + Although the Muslim civilian population of Mostar is in desperate straits, militarily the Muslims have been routing the Croats across the region for months, and are sanguine about their chances of retaining control of much of the city. + Croatian nationalists running the campaign of ethnic cleansing claim the city as the capital of the ethnically pure statelet they are taking from the partition of Bosnia negotiated in Geneva. If they cannot have all of Mostar, they want it partitioned to their advantage. That means drawing a line not along the river, but further to the east, since the city's main airport lies a few miles south on the east, Muslim-held side. + The airport is critical to the Croats as the biggest in their putative statelet and point of arrival for hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who flock in peacetime to the nearby Catholic shrine of Medjugorje, the Bosnian Croats' biggest economic asset. The airport is now out of use, in no man's land. + For several months the Bosnian Croat command has run a brutal, yet inept and panicky, campaign across the region. It has lost territory by the day and forfeited international sympathy through ethnic cleansing, detention camps, slave labour, and massacres of women and children. + The Muslim-Croat war first surfaced late last year when the Croats burned hundreds of Muslims out of their homes in Prozor, north of Mostar. They then tried to cleanse nearby Gornji Vakuf but found the Muslims a match, producing a local stalemate. + At that time the Bosnian Croat militia, the HVO, was better armed, organised and run. Indeed in many areas, Muslim men comprised up to a third of the HVO forces. + But in January, the Croats moved to take control of Muslim majority areas ceded to the Croats under the now defunct Vance-Owen plan for Bosnia. The move backfired badly. They over-estimated their own prowess while neglecting to realise the strength of the Muslim backlash just when it became finally clear to the Muslims that the only moral of the Bosnian war is tha t might is right and that territory acquired by force need not be surrendered. + The Muslim hardmen of central Bosnia, Zenica and Travnik led an army of the displaced and the dispossessed, vengeful victims of Serbian ethnic cleansing elsewhere. Their strength lies in their numbers and commitment. Their weakness remains the relative lack of military materiel. + That is a mirror image of the Croat forces, who are well-supplied by Croatia proper, infinitely better-armed, but who have manpower problems and less stomach for the fight. + Croatian tactics at Mostar are the same as the notorious Serbian tactics in Croatia and Bosnia: long-range, indiscriminate shelling, deliberate targeting of civilians, siege, the use of food as a weapon and reluctance to commit infantry to take territory. + Since January when the Croats launched their political and military campaign to take control of central and south-west Bosnia-Herzegovina, the tables have turned. Town after town, village after village has fallen to the Muslims. + Despite their propaganda claims to the contrary, the Croats essentially abandoned the Lasva valley linking Sarajevo to Zenica and Travnik to the Muslims, organising the evacuation of their civilians in advance and asking international agencies to facilitate their scheme. They lost all this without putting up much of a fight, while claiming Muslim atrocities and massacres. + But there is a quid pro quo. In return they are determined to have Mostar. When the fighting around the city erupted seriously in May, the Muslims captured a Croat barracks north of Mostar in a daring night raid. Muslim agents at the barracks, still notionally serving with the Croats, allowed their co-nationals in as the Croat troops slept. Dozens of Croats were summarily killed, according to UN sources. + It was an illuminating display of the Muslims' new guerrilla prowess around Mostar, suggesting that the Bosnian Croats will be unable to take the city without substantial help from the army of Croatia proper. + +LOAD-DATE: August 27, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +236 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 27, 1993 + +POSTMARK SHANGHAI: SUFFERING THE JABS OF CHINA'S HEALTH CARE + +BYLINE: STEPHEN VINES + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 12 + +LENGTH: 536 words + + + FIRST impressions of Shanghai's Hua Dong Hospital seem to confirm the worst things you have ever been told about China's health care system. Old men in pyjamas wander aimlessly in the grounds, bits of rubbish are strewn around, and the staff seem to skulk about in what look like grubby uniforms but on closer inspection are cheap cotton overalls washed so frequently that the white cloth has turned grey. + An attack of acute tonsillitis and a disturbingly high fever finally persuaded me to seek treatment at the foreigners' clinic. + Barely through the door, I was already keen to edge out. I was persuaded to stay by a youngish man in shorts who tore himself away from a group stuffing their pockets with sticking-plasters. + "I'm the doctor," he announced, sitting me down for what he clearly intended to be a long discussion. As we had linguistic problems, and the sight of my swollen tonsils would have spoken for itself had he felt inclined to look in my mouth, I felt we were wasting time. + Eventually, he took a peek, and nodded enthusiastically. Yes indeed, this was tonsillitis. "Very serious", he said with satisfaction. + Chinese doctors love sticking needles into their patients. It seems a sign that value for money has been obtained. But needles are tricky these days. While I was keen for some penicillin, my anxiety led me to inquire if the needles were new. This stupid question had evidently been asked by troublesome foreigners before and was treated with a mixture of amusement and assurance. I was only partly reassured. + That confidence threatened to evaporate entirely when one of the nurses adopted the dartboard technique of injection, with what I suspect was undue relish. + Fully injected, I was sent away with a bag containing what looked like the proceeds of a lucky dip in a pharmacy. There were tubes of white pills, orange pills, boxes of Chinese medicine and lozenges. + As soon as the bag was spied by the many staff at my hotel, my stock rose immediately. The Chinese take illness seriously and like to be in the presence of someone arming for combat against a lethal ailment. Even more delight was registered when it became clear that battle was to commence with the help of both Western and Chinese medicine. (I must admit that the Chinese medicine was infinitely worse than my complaint, and was quickly retired from service.) + Treated like a conquering hero at the hotel, I made regular trips for more jabs. The more often I returned, the more I came to realise that this was actually quite a good hospital. The staff who had seemed indifferent were genuinely friendly once I was other than a complete stranger. + One of the nurses was embarrassed at having to charge 65 yuan (about pounds 8) for the consultation, the sack of pills and all the jabs. "We all have to make money now," she confided. Hospitals are not spared the new Chinese edict of self-sufficiency. + The grim hospital, with its wide corridors and lingering antiseptic smells, became strangely evocative. It dawned on me that it was just like a National Health hospital in the days before chronic overcrowding, when the staff seemed to have more time for their patients. + +LOAD-DATE: August 27, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +237 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 27, 1993 + +BACK TO LIFE BUT ONLY BY DEGREES; +To save their lives refugees abandon their all, but asylum in the West is not the end of their tale. Alma Sarajlic and Sherif Zukic talk to Sarah Boseley about their own struggles for survival. Right: the emergence of a European under-class + +BYLINE: SARAH BOSELEY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EURO PAGE; Pg. 11 + +LENGTH: 865 words + + + IT IS a hard road for a refugee who arrives in the West with no money, no English and in a state of cultural confusion - not to mention anxiety over relatives left behind. He or she has lost everything but life - including sometimes a very good job and the income and social standing that it brought. + Those with professional qualifications find that formidable obstacles - not least the language - stand in the way of rebuilding their lives. It is hardly surprising that many are still, years later, unemployed or working in fast-food restaurants, utterly demoralised. + Alma Sarajlic, a 34-year-old GP from Sarajevo, has been in Britain for 13 months. "I'm desperate, believe me," she said at the studio flat in Ilford where she exists on housing benefit and pounds 38 a week from the state. "My family is in Sarajevo and I brought out to Croatia my sister-in-law and my niece, who expect me to support them." + Her sister-in-law has been in tears on the phone to her, wondering how to keep her five-year-old daughter warm without a winter coat. Alma's brother remains in the beseiged city, looking after four elderly people - his own parents, his wife's mother and her aunt - in Alma's two-bedroom flat. The family home was destroyed in the fighting. + Alma left in a United Nations convoy because her family begged her to save herself, her sister-in-law and the child. Serbian soldiers over-ran her surgery on the outskirts of the city. Alma was determined to stay. "If there were casualties, I should be there," she said, but she and the remaining nurse made emergency plans. They would try to escape in the ambulance. As a last resort, they would jump from the roof. "I would prefer that to being tortured or raped," she said. + "I came back home and my mother was desperate," she went on. "She said if something happens to you, I will die. She said, I can't kiss you every day you go to work and think I will never see you again. My brother added to the pressure because he wanted his wife and daughter to go." Eventually she gave in, adding an elderly lady and a neighbour's little daughter to the party. + She came to Britain because she had friends here who assured her she would be able to work. In spite of having practised as a GP for seven years in Sarajevo, she soon discovered that it would not be so easy. Home Office rules do not allow asylum-seekers to work at all for six months after arrival, and now she must pass what is known as the PLAB test, the Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board, before she can apply for a job in medicine. It demands medical knowledge and a command of English to at least the standard of a senior house officer in a British hospital. In 1992, only 672 candidates out of 2,144 passed. + Unlike many of her compatriots, her English is excellent. But worries about the situation at home made it very difficult to study for the written medical paper and in spite of all her experience, she failed when she sat it in July. She must wait six months and somehow find the pounds 425 charged by the General Medical Council to resit. + Now, she says, she will take any job she can get - cleaning, anything - to make some money. She is determined to pass the PLAB test in January. "It is a question of how I will survive until then." + SHERIF Zukic, aged 23, whose family is of Albanian origin, left Kosovo in September 1991 rather than be drafted into the Serbian army and has applied for asylum in Britain. He holds the equivalent of a Higher National Diploma in accountancy, but has not yet been able to get any exemption from the exams of the Institute of Management Accountants. + "There are two types of refugees to my mind: those who try to get freed from the ties back home and those who do not and work just to send money back home," he said. + "Many people who come here have fled leaving behind a great mess. If you are Bosnian and educated you feel a moral compulsion to go back and fight. People from Bosnia and Croatia are trapped through this. In the back of their minds they know they ought to go back and fight. There is also pressure from their community." + Sherif, however, is on his own and feels the duty he owes to his family in Kosovo is to succeed in life. The past year he has spent learning English. "In the beginning I tried mundane jobs, but I got discouraged very fast. I could find two days work per week at pounds 2 an hour, but I thought it would be better, instead of washing dishes, to spend my time studying the English language. Otherwise I would be just feeding my stomach." + Now the job hunt has begun in earnest. He has sent off up to 100 applications for work as a trainee management accountant, which will also allow him to study for the institute's exams, but so far had only a couple of interviews. + If nothing in accountancy comes his way, he will look for any sort of job and try to study on his own in the evenings. But for membership of the institute he will need to have worked as a management accountant for three years, besides passing the exams. "I'm not going to give up," he said. "I just need to have a chance to prove to these people what I can do." + +LOAD-DATE: August 27, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +238 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +August 28, 1993 + +LOW-RISK WAYS FOR THE ELDERLY TO PUT A WINDFALL TO WORK + +BYLINE: JILL PAPWORTH + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 30 + +LENGTH: 1095 words + + + JAMES and Claire Mortroyd are typical of many elderly Money Guardian readers who, with little in the way of savings, now need to make serious investment decisions after inheriting a substantial sum of money. + According to a report published last week by Lloyds Bank, each year this decade almost one household in 50 will inherit property worth an average of pounds 26,000. + The Mortroyds, from Swindon, Wiltshire, have no mortgage left on their pounds 65,000 home, just under pounds 4,700 a year in state pension - based on Mr Mortroyd's entitlement - and interest on pounds 10,000 in a building society. + The couple want advice on the best way to invest pounds 100,000, inherited from Mrs Mortroyd's sister, to maximise income while using low-risk schemes to preserve as much of the capital as possible for their three children and seven grandchildren. + Money Guardian asked a selection of independent financial advisers to recommend a portfolio for them. Maximising their allowances, the couple can earn a further pounds 6,165 a year on top of their pension without paying income tax. They should not cross the age allowance threshold - pounds 17,200 at their ages of 74 and 70 - above which they would suffer an effective tax rate of 50 per cent on their income. + The advisers also agree that inheritance tax is unlikely to present the Mortroyds with any tax-planning worries. + Mark Bolland, technical director of Chamberlain de Broe, favours a plan where 30 per cent of the inheritance and existing pounds 10,000 savings is invested in a capital-reducing vehicle to generate monthly income of pounds 500 or pounds 600 with the balance invested in a capital-growth portfolio designed to replace the capital in the "income" fund at the end of five years. + He advises the Mortroyds to invest pounds 30,000 in a notice account such as Northern Rock's postal 30-day account - currently paying 7.8 per cent gross - and withdraw pounds 500 or pounds 600 a month. "This would be preferable to using a five-year annuity, for example, because when interest rates improve in a year or two, it leaves them the option of removing remaining capital and investing it at better rates elsewhere." The capital growth portfolio would combine National Savings Certificates, zero-dividend preference shares, Tessas and low-risk equity investments such as utilities - "all secure growth vehicles which only offer their full benefits if held for a specific period of time," Mr Bolland adds. + Another possible vehicle would be a guaranteed equity fund, such as that offered by Hypo Foreign & Colonial, which offers low-risk exposure to the FTSE 100 index by guaranteeing that capital will not fall even if the market does. + John Lang, of Chantrey Financial Services, recommends the couple use part of their existing pounds 10,000 savings as their first year's income, withdrawing up to pounds 500 a month, and also put pounds 33,000 into Britannia Building Society's instant-access postal account, paying 7 per cent gross. + Both husband and wife should add some inflation protection to their portfolio by putting the maximum of pounds 5,000 each into the National Savings index-linked sixth issue, guaranteeing 3.25 per cent above the rate of inflation over five years paid out in a tax-free lump sum at the term end. + Mr Lang suggests they put the maximum pounds 6,000 annual allowance each into a tax-free personal equity plan, one going into Cazenove's utility and bond unit trust PEP, yielding around 7 per cent, and the other into the Guinness Flight Income PEP, yielding just under 10 per cent at present. + A further pounds 24,000 should go into gilt unit trusts from Whittingdale and Kleinwort Benson, both with a current gross yield of between 7 and 7.5 per cent. + Finally, pounds 21,000 should be invested between two international bond unit trusts, Baring Global and Mercury Global, which offer scope for capital growth if European interest rates fall. All the investments would be split between husband and wife to utilise their respective tax allowances. + If Mr Lang's recommendations were implemented, the Mortroyds will raise their current pounds 4,700 annual income to over pounds 11,000 net - the equivalent of earning 8 per cent gross on the inherited monies - and the portfolio would offer some capital growth over the medium term. + Asset Financial Planning, set up jointly by Age Concern and National Westminster's independent arm NatWest Insurance Services, suggests a simpler route to achieving the same income level, but offering less prospect of capital growth. + To maximise income without risk, it recommends the Mortroyds put pounds 90,000 into National Savings Income Bonds, split pounds 55,000 for the husband and pounds 35,000 for the wife, currently paying 7.25 per cent gross and providing an income of pounds 6,525 a year, payable monthly. + Asset suggests dedicating the remaining pounds 10,000 of the inheritance to capital growth as a hedge against inflation. It recommends a with-profit investment bond, ideally retained for five years, as suitable for this risk-averse couple. Their pounds 10,000 building society savings should be maintained for instant or short-term access to emergency funds. + Finally, Joanna Stone, of Murray Noble, came up with probably the most diverse and complex portfolio which, at current yields, would provide the Mortroyds with pounds 5,300 extra income per year while making sure their capital was secure and kept pace with inflation. + She recommends putting pounds 5,000 on short-term deposit as emergency cash; a further pounds 10,000 on short-term deposit with a view to investing it in French francs over the long-term as soon as the French currency and economy stabilises; pounds 6,000 in Tessas - one each with Leeds and Holbeck Building Society; pounds 10,000 into UK gilts; pounds 10,000 into the National Savings sixth issue; pounds 10,000 into European bonds, such as the Hambro Emma continental bond; and pounds 15,000 split between Newton International fixed-interest bond, Commercial Union PPT global bond and Perpetual global bond. + Then pounds 20,000 should go into zero-coupon, fixed-interest preference shares and pounds 14,000 into defensive blue-chip UK equities such as GEC and utility stocks including British Gas and British Telecom via PEPs, as recommended by stockbrokers Charles Stanley. + - Asset Financial Planning 0272-263822; Chamberlain de Broe 071-235 5999; Chantrey Financial 071-436 3666; Murray Noble 071-936 3010. + +LOAD-DATE: August 31, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +239 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 1, 1993 + +OLD GERMANS NEED YOUNG MIGRANTS' PAY + +BYLINE: DAVID GOW IN BONN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 545 words + + + GERMANY will soon need an annual influx of about 300,000 immigrants, simply to be able to pay the pensions of its rapidly ageing population, Hans-Ulrich Klose,leader of the opposition Social Democrats, said yesterday. + His remarks gave a new twist to an increasingly acrimonious debate about how Germany's generous pension system will be financed when there are fewer and fewer people in work and paying social security contributions. + He joined the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) - members of Chancellor Helmut Kohl's coalition - in demanding new laws on immigration for a country where nationality is based on blood and the prevailing belief is that migrants are unnecessary and undesirable. + On Monday the FDP executive approved a significantly changed policy, based on immigration quotas and a reform of nationality laws dating back to 1913, that sets it at loggerheads with its conservative coalition partners. + Pointing out that about 2 million non-German employees contributed some 10 per cent of national output and paid DM90 billion a year in taxes and contributions, it said that Germany needed foreigners prepared to settle and work there permanently. + The FDP/SPD initiatives come when the country's 81 million citizens are being warned that by about 2010 pension contributions will have to rise to between 22 and 30 per cent of gross earnings to keep the system afloat. + Research by the DIW economics institute in Berlin, one of six leading forecasting units, suggests that, given moderate immigration, the population over 60 will by then have soared from the 1991 figure of 16.4 million to 21.3 million, in a total population of 83.7 million. + Assuming higher immigration, it projects 21.6 million aged 60 and over in a population of 85.9 million. + On both migration scenarios, the 60-plus will form a third of the population by 2040, while the under-20s will be only 18 per cent of total. + The FDP and SPD reluctantly abandoned their demands for new immigration and nationality laws late last year, and adopted the compromise on asylum-seekers that led to the July 1 legislation, which is designed to staunch an influx that had reached 1 million in three years. + Now, under demographic and economic pressures, they are determined to relaunch those demands before next year's spate of elections. The Free Democrats want annual quotas for immigrants based on official estimates of the labour and housing markets, and the scope for social integration. + The FDP, pointing out that 60 per cent of "foreigners" have lived more than 10 years in Germany, want automatic citizenship for second and third generations. It also wants it made easier for people to have dual nationality. + Meanwhile the increase in pensioners is threatening to overload German roads, traffic experts say. More elderly people are buying, retaining and driving cars, so the number of cars is likely to rise, given favourable economic growth, from 20 million now to 50 million by 2020. + - Police said yesterday that a Turk who claimed last week to have been the target of a racial assault in the north-west town of Lotte appeared to have faked the attack. + Witnesses contradicted his account of being clubbed unconscious by three men. + +LOAD-DATE: September 1, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +240 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 2, 1993 + +P.S. + +BYLINE: GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 18 + +LENGTH: 492 words + + + YESTERDAY'S Guardian reported a proposal that the conductor Kurt Masur should become President of Germany. I'm not sure whether this is good news for Germany and bad news for music, or bad news for both. + In countries like Germany, the president is a figurehead rather than an executive, as in the US. He or she plays the part of the sovereign in a constitutional monarchy. At best (or is it worst?) this means ceremonial duties; a president of the pre-war French Third Republic defined himself as "a man who has to wear evening dress during the day". At worst it means the same tricky decisions over, say, whether or not to dissolve a parliament, which our own queen may be obliged to take and which she can't possibly enjoy. The decisions are much the same whether the head of state is hereditary or not. + Australians who want to do away with the monarchy cite the Kerr affair, when the Crown (or its representative) supposedly exerted a malign influence over Australia's fair polity. They forget similar episodes in the Irish Republic, or Federal Germany, when the president was dragged into the arena of sordid political calculation and advantage. + On the face of it, Masur is an ideal candidate, for the dignified part of the job at least. As an East German, he played a distinguished part in the course of peaceful reunification. During the great demonstration against the old regime in Leipzig three years ago, his intervention prevented heavy bloodshed. On the other hand, he's said not to like the pettiness of party politics and, anyway, he has renewed his contract with the New York Phil. + My objection to his candidature is different. Politicians are a drug on the market. In any country, there are any number of elderly ladies and gentlemen whose lives of public mischief are near their end, who have small useful contributions to make, and who could do little further harm once installed in the presidential residence. But to fill a political position with an artist - a mediocre one, let alone a good one - simply isn't fair, or rational. As anyone knows who heard the two Proms on Monday and Tuesday, when he conducted the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Masur is a great musician - which is to say one of the last. + It becomes fogeyishly tedious to say they aren't making conductors like that any more. But nor are they. At least, if there are young conductors around to take over where Tennstedt, Sawallisch and Masur leave off, I don't know them, with the odd rule-proving exception. And who would want Simon Rattle to waste his time as British President? + Plenty of people could carry out the formal and undemanding role of president in Germany. Very few people indeed who can do what Masur can. Perhaps he knows Clemenceau's reaction when someone explained to him the background of the Polish leader, Paderewski. "C'etait pianiste, c'est premier ministre? Quelle chute!" I hope Masur doesn't take another fall. + +LOAD-DATE: September 2, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +241 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 3, 1993 + +SIR NORMAN LENDS AN EAR TO HARD-UP TORIES' WOES; +Martin Wainwright takes the temperature among the Tory faithful - and not so faithful - as the party chairman starts his nationwide tour + +BYLINE: MARTIN WAINWRIGHT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 582 words + + + CONSERVATIVES in the North, where Sir Norman Fowler started his low-key tour yesterday, are making the down-to-earth point: we need money - and that means policies designed to encourage our supporters to part with it. + Central Office economies have hit the party's famous election-winning network of paid agents, whose training and systematic approach to electoral registers, postal votes and other details are the envy of rival parties. + "We know we're not particularly popular at the moment," said Councillor Les Carter, chairman of Keith Hampson's constituency association in Leeds, where the Fowler roadshow takes soundings this morning. + "We can live with that. We're used to sticks and stones and grinning and bearing it. But we mustn't lose the advantage of our professional agents. He'll be hearing that we're not out in the wealthy shires here. It's a struggle to raise the money and we need help." + The point was echoed across the Pennines, where Sir Norman started his travels with private meetings in Manchester and Merseys ide. Agents have gone in both Blackpool and Rossendale and money threatens to dry up from one particular section of the faithful. + "VAT on fuel bills is what we want sorted out," said Michael Sheppard, agent in Preston, without a moment's hesitation. "That's the chief cause of unrest up here. It's something that's hitting our own supporters hard - older people living on fixed interest investments. We've got to get it changed. That's the backbone of our message to Sir Norman." + The wealthy farming constituency of Richmond, close to Teesside, where William Hague stepped into the boots of Sir Leon Brittan, is also suffering disaffection among its older supporters. The district has attracted so many retired people that the boundary commissioners are planning to lop 18,000 people off its electoral roll. + "They'd be extremely pleased if interest rates rose immediately, most of them," said Jim Lumb, the constituency's highly-experienced agent, who previously worked for Patrick Wall on Humberside and in traditionally-marginal York. "It's a quandary, because we also have a lot of small businesses which desperately want low interest rates. But I hope we'll also persuade Sir Norman to sing a bit louder about our achievements. We deserve some accolades. The trouble is, when a party has been in government so long, its business tends to be a rather unexciting mixture of details and fine-tuning, rather than grand, sweeping initiatives." + Bill Jones, taking a break from holiday gardening at Stockton South, where Tim Devlin survived handsomely at the last election, agrees on the need for better central office PR. "We do the right things, but we don't perhaps have the right way of telling people that we've done them," he said. + Michael Sheppard, 60 miles away in Preston, underlined the argument. "The message isn't getting through, not just to the voters, but from our activists. We want to tell Sir Norman 'please listen to what we are saying'." + Officials and activists are unlikely to give the chairman much punishment on the economy. Most are convinced that it is slowly coming right by itself. The emotional key to loosening supporters' purse-strings is seen elsewhere - in a traditional Tory sphere. + "The big issue is law and order," said Mr Carter in Leeds. "We have got to sort out the liberal approach to young offenders, in particular. We need draconian measures, just to protect people." + +LOAD-DATE: September 3, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +242 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 4, 1993 + +COMMENTARY: AN APPROVED CASE FOR BRINGING BACK BORSTAL + +BYLINE: EDWARD PEARCE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 23 + +LENGTH: 1083 words + + + A CARTOONIST'S view of vigilantism, shown on Wednesday, is of Americanesque suburban heavies beating up a prone victim/thief to the applause of a passing policeman. There might have been a cartoon, depicting a house, its goods and furniture scattered, its drawers tumbled, its electronics ripped out and its floor pissed on. This isn't to advocate vigilantism which one fears is more likely to end with the vigilante prone if not dead under the baseball bats of criminals. Vigilantism is a cry for help. It comes because the citizen doesn't meet a response from government. And as sure as Hell, he doesn't get one from intellectuals of elevated sentiments. + That cartoon speaks for a middle class sect, often academics, the tribe of professional activists who batten onto prison and police matters; it speaks for a busy elite. There was a Guardian leader close to the spirit of this elect group recently, suggesting that the Home Secretary could only possibly have cheap, contemptible motives connected with party conference in contemplating work and austerity in prisons. It is true that the Tories are free with facile, penal rhetoric. But what if Howard means it? And isn't it about time that we evacuated these comforting trench war assumptions? + There were once harsh, cruel, old judges of the Goddard, Avory and Hilberry stamp, delighted to inflict pain and death. That they should pass as redundantly awful old men, that the execution of Derek Bentley should be seen by a gentler posterity as a sick thing inflicted in blindness and indifference to his family, is not contested. + But does that view preclude one from also thinking the roaring growth of crime - housebreaking, street robbery, motor theft and criminal violence, intolerable? Does it stop one from observing that the chief victims of the sharp end of the simple lift-off since the early sixties, are the poor, the elderly poor and old, poor women alone? + I adhere without reserve to the doctrine of that useful Beelzebub, Kenneth Livingstone, who makes no secret that on crime, he is a hardliner because the main victims of crime are poor working people. Of course they are. Cartoonist and leaderwriter should spend an evening around the Scotswood Road or in any of the high-rise blocks in east London where the expectationof tenants is to be "done over", where elderly women barricade themselves in because other elderly women once did not barricade themselves in, and suffered. + The preachers of a weak, zero response system of juvenile law with punishment as thin as American beer, are morally incapable of understanding the harm they have done. But done it they have, to the most vulnerable, weak and defenceless. Take away reasonable fear of the consequences of crime and you create a reasonable fear of the consequences of poverty and frailty. The achievements of Home Office officials and the new politiques among judges, truckling to zero response, can be counted in facial bruises on old women, and in people like the elderly black lady in Hackney who wondered aloud after her latest break-in what there was to be alive for. + IHAVE praised before the astute efforts of Bernard Crofton of Hackney housing department to yoke civil with criminal law by taking out injunctions against youths charged with offences and regarded by the police as ringleaders of a local gang. It worked like a charm, bringing the breaking rate massively down. But it worked because the civil law steps clean round the enfeebling fetter put upon criminal law prohibiting punishment of the young. It says flatly, "you cross that threshold and you go to jail". + Nothing could be simpler, nothing further from the jungle-prose of criminological text books. It is a long way from the present fatuous Criminal Justice Act and from courts as clogged and harassed as they are disarmed. + Accordingly, unlike our leaderwriter, I am not troubled by Howard's motives. I would only observe that if to remarks about more austere and less idle prisons, he added specific criminal law reform, opening the youth equivalent of jail to a 14-year-old on his second conviction for breaking and entering, he would win the next election single handed. + The Tories talk retribution and law and order, but they never do anything. Treasury frugality and the zero-response lobby inside the Home Office combine with a justifiable distaste for those people at party conferences who uniformly ruin a serious case by their obvious pleasure in physical punishment. + Michael Howard is a practical politician, not an emotional one nor much given to high flown abstraction. He must, however, be depressed at the cumulative inheritance of innocent people hurt and offended against, and must want to reduce it. And as a practical politician in an unpopular government, he must know that there never was a better market on which to sell hard, concise action. + What then should he do? Firstly, he must amend the Criminal Justice Act out of recognition and empower magistrates now widely resigning their impotent office. Let those magistrates punish any second offender with detention of anything from six months down to 30 days. Second, he should provide for holding the young brutes by restoring the + borstal/approved school system. The mere names would be magic, sending a message out which would be cheered round the country. Third, make prison indeed a clean, decent place of hard, physical work and to this end, institute farm camps where eight hours a day pulling carrots, digging ditches and living the organic life, will do quiet wonders. + We are told by responsible prison officers that they are losing the upper hand. But then there never was an argument against the old maxim about idleness breeding evil. But if there is now no recourse against the criminal who smashes up his cell, the availability of an ineligible life planting potatoes at six a.m. would provide it, a therapeutic option hanging over behaviour in a conventional prison. The prison staff would acquire retribution. And retribution, clearly perceived, works. + There would be no additional long sentences, no physical punishment, only quick and readily perceived short consequences, a balancing of today's one sided see-saw. Such a package would have modest financial costs, would sharply cut juvenile crime and strengthen prison order. But isn't it an affront to the conscience of the elite? Much wiser to leave old women to their facial bruising. + +LOAD-DATE: September 6, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +243 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 6, 1993 + +EYEWITNESS; +Hungary riven by rehabilitation of 'anti-Semitic' chief + +BYLINE: IAN TRAYNOR IN KENDERES + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 624 words + + + THIS sleepy little town on the edge of the great Hungarian plain turned back the clock this weekend to glorify the memory of Miklos Horthy, Hungary's controversial leader between the wars. His remains were finally returned to the family estate from the British military cemetery outside Lisbon where he died in 1957. + The past was more than honoured. It was recreated. Magyar magnates strutted through the muddy fields, and thousands of elderly peasants flocked to the cemetery. They heard Horthy was a "kind and gentle man" who never uttered a word of prejudice, and forfeited his lands without complaint. + Budapest Jews shuddered at the prospect of the rehabilitation of a man who presided over an officially anti-Semitic state, as senior government ministers took their seats among the VIP ranks at Horthy's reburial. + The elderly Horthy loyalists of Kenderes never imagined they would see their hero returned after half a century of what they saw as communist "distortion" branding their idol a fascist. + Zsolt Makra, aged 83, was clad in astrakhan fur and black velvet that contrasted with his white Austrian imperial whiskers. He cradled a jewel-encrusted sword hailing from 1609. "My country could be happy in an era like that, with justice, security and the rule of law," he said. + Since 1989, large state funerals have provided the defining moments of Hungary's emergence from communism and the reclamation of national identity. + First came Imre Nagy, then Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty. Horthy, a much more controversial figure, followed on Saturday and Hungary has been riven by the dispute. + His apologists, including leading members of the centre-right government, have characterised him as an avuncular, ultimately benign figure. While not opposed to the reburial, critics charge that Horthy personifies a less than noble era, and that government sponsorship of the return is a tawdry vote-catching exercise. + Horthy, the last commander of the imperial navy, came to power in 1920, leading a wave of terror against those responsible for the short-lived communist regime of the previous year. + Over the next 25 years, he presided over a quasi-feudal system that favoured the gentry to which he belonged and systematically persecuted the large Jewish population. He devoted himself to recovering the lost Hungarian lands - the two-thirds of the country containing one-third of ethnic Hungarians that was ceded to its neighbours in the Paris peace settlements of 1920. + He failed to get them back, except briefly and partially, as a bribe for an alliance with Hitler. Relations between Budapest and Berlin ran "perfectly and harmoniously", Joachim Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister, said in 1941. The Nazis, who occupied Hungary in 1944, were succeeded by the Red Army a year later. + "He was not a dictator, he was not an authoritarian, he was not an anti-Semite," Tamas Katona, a leading government official, says. + "That's a lie," responds Peter Sipos, a historian writing a biography of Horthy. Between 1941 and 1944, while Hungary was fighting on the Axis side but not under German occupation, thousands of Jews were massacred or deported to death camps in Poland, Mr Sipos says. + From March 1944 when the Germans moved in, until October when Horthy was deposed by Hungarian fascists, Hitler's "final solution" was enacted with a vengeance. At least 450,000 provincial Jews were sent to the death camps, while Horthy managed to postpone the extermination of the Budapest ghetto. + The row is part of an attempt to set the historical record straight after decades of communist suppression. But the past has inevitably become part of the post-communist political battlefield. + +LOAD-DATE: September 7, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +244 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 7, 1993 + +JAPANESE BEAT RULES TO FLY HOME; +World news in brief + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 221 words + + + TWELVE elderly women yesterday beat the might of the Japanese bureaucracy by refusing to be cowed by the rules, writes Kevin Rafferty in Tokyo. + The women are Japanese who had migrated to Japanese-run Manchuria and China and wanted to come home. + One of them, in her eighties, obviously ailing and only able to walk with assistance, said: "I wanted to spend the remaining half year or year of my life in my own country." The women, with an average age of 67, defied the bureaucracy, got on an aircraft with a one-way ticket to Japan, arrived, and said they were staying. + This was in defiance of the rules that such people need "sponsors" who are permanent residents of Japan before they can be allowed to stay. All of them have full Japanese passports, but this is not sufficient. + After the women had camped for the night at Tokyo's Narita airport, the government relented and said they would be allowed to stay. + The women said they had got fed up with waiting for permission to come home. Most of them bundled a few possessions into a bag, spent their savings on a one-way ticket, and flew in. + An estimated 1,800 Japanese women who were taken to China when it was occupied by the Japanese imperial forces and got stuck there, are in a similar plight. Some have Chinese husbands and children. + +LOAD-DATE: September 8, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +245 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 7, 1993 + +WHEN THE SAG FACTOR LEADS TO THE SACK; +There is nothing to be said in praise of older men hooking up with young women + +BYLINE: JUDY RUMBOLD + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 22 + +LENGTH: 979 words + + + THERE was something more than usually repellent about the photograph of 57-year-old Michael Winner in a How We Met feature in one of the colour supplements at the weekend. While he was leering at the camera and giving it a load of the usual big I Am, Jenny Seagrove, 33, was pictured leaning on his shoulder, fiddling intently with his ear. An ordinary display of affection, you might think, except that hers seemed to be less the action of a besotted lover than the mild clinical concern a health visitor might register while examining the consistency of a baby's stools. + I may be wrong; Seagrove could have been quietly pleading with Winner to beat her senseless with a black leather whip. But I think not. A more likely speech bubble would read: "God, Michael, does your ear hair ever need a trim" + It did too. What small portion of Winner's generous form was visible in the picture revealed itself to be a veritable garden rockery of random tufts and sproutings. + Does Seagrove mind, or even notice, you wonder? She wouldn't be alone in her tolerance of the ravages of old age. Looking at the papers over the last few weeks, it is clearly a good time for randy dads to be casting off their cardigans and trying it on with younger women. And I don't mean the embarrassingly nearly-old like Bill Wyman and Rod Stewart; we're talking fully paid up members of old codgersville like Richard Ingrams, Sir Terence Conran and Anthony Quinn. Not to mention Sir Peter Hall's nauseating rantings in yesterday's Daily Mail. ". . . She was a fragile looking blonde with blue eyes, called Monica . . . I kissed her during Postman's Knock at a party. She seemed to find me absurd and I suppose I was". Too right he was. + What is it about these superannuated oldsters that makes young girls want to throw away their Bunty annuals and allow themselves to be seen on the arms of pot-bellied, halitotic old fogies? + Poor Jenny Seagrove might do well to consider what she has taken on with the geriatric battleground that is Michael Winner's body. She is youthful, radiant, blooming (a fact emphasised tenfold when pictured adjacent to the ageing Winner), yet the many-chinned director has the prospect of major heart surgery coming up and, after a lifetime of fulsome indulgence in cigars, women and fry-ups, possesses the failing stamina of an end-of-season housefly. "He doesn't like the long walks in the country that I like," admits Seagrove. + Already, her nursing duties must be piling up. Along with ear-trimming responsibilites, does she harvest his nasal hair and turn him in bed? She might save time later on by starting to read up now about bedpans, blanket baths and Complan diets. + Don't get me wrong; I've got nothing against old men - indeed, I believe they can be very usefully employed as car parking attendants and as seasonal department store Santas. As character actors in Yellow Pages adverts, they are irreplacable and as fathers, old men do a marvellous job. But while I have many feelings towards my Dad, the urge to rip of his herringbone effect tweed slippers and have wild sex with him - or anyone even remotely like him - isn't one of them. + The reasons an old man takes up with a young girl are familiar, well-documented and as transparent as his M&S string vest. A young girl makes an old man look good and provokes untold envy amongst his peers; her legs are usually as long as his ageing girth is wide; her hair is lustrous, her smile glad. Her brain languishes untroubled by anything as complicated as coherent thought and, best of all, she laughs at all those truly awful daddish jokes that, way back in history, his own kids found pathetic. + But it's the girls I worry about. They really let the side down. Why do they do it? I am 32 and the prospect of sleeping with anyone more than 10 years older than me max makes my stomach turn. Call me narrow-minded, but my reservations are purely physical. Weird things happen to genitals. Awful ravages occur in the jowl department. Smells develop; tea smells, tweedy tobacco smells, denture smells. No; given the choice between Horlicks and sponge cake with a pensioner and champagne and hanky panky with a toyboy, I know which I'd choose. + BUT for the girls who, despite all the warning signs, still vote OAP, an old man surely has limited appeal. What do they talk about? Once the girl has nodded sagely about his time in the Home Guard, marvelled about how wonderful flares were the first time around, and cooed over his collection of rare coins isn't she dying to get home to Take That, Keanu Reeves and Kellog's Pop Tarts? + And what about sex? I think, actually, that not much of it goes on. One of Sunita's Russells reasons for dumping Sir Terence - "It was a mistake. I admired him for his knowledge, his power and his kindness. But none of that is a substitute for real passion" - would seem to back this up. Indeed, I heard of one famous newspaper editor who does nothing more unhygeinic with his young bits of skirt than sit in bed clad toe to toupee in winceyette watching telly. Although in 78-year-old Anthony Quinn's case - who recently became a father for the 11th time - he must have been doing something a bit more lively than watching Baywatch with the sound down. + The really tragic thing about all this would be if Sir Terence Conran and the rest deluded themselves that it was anything other than power, fame, money and the fact that they remind young girls of the way their dads used to part their hair/put up shelves/read them bedtime stories, that brought the girls flocking to their sides. + Please tell me that Terence Conran didn't stand naked in front of a full length mirror a during his affair and say: "Tel, maybe you're not such a bad looking guy after all. In fact, you're rather sexy". That would be too horrid to contemplate. + +LOAD-DATE: September 8, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +246 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 8, 1993 + +STORM FOLLOWS HINT OF REDUCED HOMES CHECKS + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 467 words + + + MINISTERS moved quickly yesterday to limit the damage of a Department of Health letter suggesting the Government is considering reducing checks on old people's homes and could even scrap the existing system of regulation. + The letter says a radical review of regulation is being conducted as part of the Prime Minister's drive to ease the regulatory burden on business. It provoked a storm of protest that the elderly would be left to the mercy of uncaring and unscrupulous home proprietors. + The letter was sent to groups representing proprietors, but not to local authority social services departments responsible for inspecting homes. + John Bowis, a junior health minister, gave an immediate undertaking that there would continue to be a system of inspection. The review aimed to discover if there was any unnecessary regulation throttling small businesses. + "I believe there is a continuing need for us, as government, to monitor, to inspect, to look after homes in our care," Mr Bowis said on BBC radio. + The letter, sent to associations representing private residential and nursing homes, is signed by a relatively junior health department civil servant. Similar correspondence has been sent to other groups in areas in which the department has a regulatory interest. + The letter states: "We have been asked to assess the cost of regulation on business, to consider whether there is a continued need for regulation, and whether the system can be improved to reduce the burden in any way." + The associations are asked to collect sample data from their members on the cost of meeting the requirements of the Registered Homes Act 1984, by which residential homes are inspected by local authorities and nursing homes by health authorities. + Inviting the associations to comment on the need for inspection and registration, the letter warns of concern that standards could fall below acceptable levels. "You may, however, feel that essential safeguards could be maintained in some other way and have views on how this might be achieved. We should be interested to know." + There has been startling growth in the private care home sector over the past 20 years. The number of residential homes rising from 1,871 in 1975 to 9,235 in 1992, and the number of nursing homes from 1,000 to more than 4,000 in the same period. + Community care arrangements are expected to lead to the closure of hundreds of care homes over the next two or three years. + James Churchill, secretary of the Association for Residential Care, said he welcomed the chance to "fine-tune" the system, but opposed dismantling it. "This would open the door to the get-rich-quick merchants again, just after we have finally managed to squeeze them out of the industry." + Leader comment, page 17 + +LOAD-DATE: September 9, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +247 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 8, 1993 + +LEADING ARTICLE: CARE IS REGULATION + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 17 + +LENGTH: 461 words + + + MINISTERS must be writhing with embarrassment - and anger. Few recent missives from Whitehall have made them such hostages to fortune as the letter dispatched to nursing and residential homes on deregulation. Proprietors are reminded of the Prime Minister's new initiative to reduce the regulatory burden on business. Community care is now big business, with a pounds 2,500 million subsidy from Whitehall for the provision of residential and nursing facilities. This huge expansion of private residential provision was given a further boost by the restructuring of social services into purchaser and provider divisions. With local councils under both political and financial pressure to use private or voluntary homes, along comes the deregulation letter. The aim is to be "radical". What was the original purpose of each requirement? Is it still necessary? Are costs to the homes too high? + You don't need to be a political adviser to forecast what happens now. Some time in the near future, a new residential scandal will break out. Remember the Yorkshire Television documentary on Kent's private residential homes where old people were being dumped, unable to defend themselves or complain about the squalid conditions? Or, to select a home in the public sector, the scandal of Nye Bevan Lodge in Southwark where no-one blew the whistle about the ill-treatment of its residents? Both were only six years ago. Certainly, standards have improved in the last decade. But with thousands of homes and hundreds of thousands of clients, a future scandal is inevitable. Indeed, according to the Royal College of Nursing, one is just "waiting to happen" because of the large number of elderly people who should be in nursing homes but are being placed in the less expensive and less skilled residential homes. + Imagine trying to defend yourself when you've sent a letter asking whether regulation and inspection are still needed. No wonder ministers are worried about their credibility. Certainly John Bowis, the junior health minister, moved quickly to insist yesterday that registration and inspection would continue. Indeed, in the last two years, the Government has belatedly improved regulation by insisting on local councils setting up "arms length" inspectors in 1991, and then in 1992 by extending this inspection first to homes with even fewer than four old people, and then to children's homes. So what is going on? Whitehall got its wires crossed. The Health Department felt it must respond to the Prime Minister's initiative, instead of insisting on the differences between workshops and residential homes. An acute case of mandarin brain disengagement. But vulnerable old people are not widgets. Protection must be the first priority. + +LOAD-DATE: September 9, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +248 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 9, 1993 + +MAJOR INTERVENES IN BUDGET ROW + +BYLINE: STEPHEN BATES, POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 436 words + + + THE Prime Minister intends to call the bluff of rightwing ministers by rejecting any call to reopen discussion on the Government's Budget plans at today's first cabinet meeting for six weeks. + Any attempt by ministers such as John Redwood, the Welsh Secretary, or Peter Lilley, Social Security Secretary, to launch a call for public spending cuts to take priority over increasing taxation will be deflected, informed sources said last night. + With the party row over how to tackle the pounds 50 billion deficit threatening to permeate the Tories' autumn session, from the party conference through to Chancellor Kenneth Clarke's budget on November 30, Mr Major publicly intervened for the first time yesterday. + In an article circulated to regional newspapers, Mr Major warned of difficult decisions with a restatement of basic Conservative principle: "All social policy begins with economic policy. We can't spend what we haven't earned . . . the fact is we are living beyond our means . . . " + The article responded to rightwing concerns about public spending by acknowledging that social expenditure was outstripping inflation by 3 per cent a year. "That can't go on. We need to decide now how to create the resources to care for the vulnerable, the sick and the elderly in the future. We need to reduce government borrowing and control government spending across the board." + It did not add, as Michael Portillo, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has pointed out recently, that the scope for further immediate cuts in spending is extremely limited. + The message was reinforced in an interview given by the Chancellor to this morning's Daily Telegraph, rejecting cuts in public spending and leaving the way open for tax increases in Budget. + "The big decision in June was when the Cabinet agreed the public spending total which they all signed up to. The big activity for the next month is going to be delivering that remit." + Mr Clarke said: 'I regard myself as a keen supply-side economist. But you cannot have simplistic, self-denying ordinances that at no stage do you ever put taxation up." + Mr Major's article was ridiculed by Tony Blair, the shadow home secretary, who said spending what had not been earned was precisely what the Government had been doing by running up the deficit in the first place. + At Wellington, Somerset, yesterday Mr Major began a series of private regional meetings by attempting to reassure chairmen and party members from 43 West Country constituencies that the threat from the Liberal Democrats in the region was being taken seriously. + " + +LOAD-DATE: September 9, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +249 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 10, 1993 + +LETTRE: PAID OFF + +BYLINE: BRIAN BETHELL + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 25 + +LENGTH: 234 words + + + I HAVE today received the renewal notice of my Labour Party membership. With it came what? Exhortations to join the struggle? A vision of the party's aims for a fairer and more just society? An explanation and apology for the previous cockups? No. It tells me that there are a whole range of financial services available to me as a party member and the accompanying leaflet offers me free advice on any aspect of my finances. + I can get this from my broker or bank. What I want from the Labour Party is a bit of arsekicking on behalf of the desperate youngsters sleeping in the doorways of our towns and cities or the elderly about to face the winter with the worrying choice of whether to keep warm or eat regularly. On behalf of the unemployed driven to desperation or the poor devil hanging on to his or her home by their fingertips. + Out of date? Unrealistic? Utopian? Well Walworth Road might be interested, and then again they might not, but that is why I pay my membership in the first place not for some Red Rose sponsored private pension plan. Or to put it in a language that the bright spark responsible for this mailing might understand: my membership is an investment towards a better society and as we know if investors don't see the prospect of getting the dividend they want then they very soon stop investing. + Brian Bethell. + 3 Cherry Drive, + Canterbury, Kent. + +LOAD-DATE: September 10, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +250 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 11, 1993 + +DO IT YOURSELF; +AGE CONCERN PART 2 + +BYLINE: GARETH PARRY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN WEEKEND PAGE; Pg. 63 + +LENGTH: 477 words + + + WORK SURFACES in kitchens used by elderly people should be lower than usual, with frequently-used items stored on racks, hooks and small boxes just above them. Carousel units and open shelving with wire baskets to pull objects at the back of the cupboard out into the open, will also help prevent accidents caused by things falling out or by over-reaching. + Taps should be push-lever models. There are also kits to convert existing tap valves (provided they are made to British Standards BS 1010) allowing the water to be nudged on and off with just a half turn. Devices which grip the tap head at one end, and taper into a handle on the other, are less expensive options. + Stooping to reach electric sockets can cause dizziness, and kits to raise powerpoints to a reasonable height are available. Some elderly people find rocker light switches difficult to operate, or positioned too high on the wall. These could be converted to pull-cord operation. + Fear of falling, or shortness of breath makes climbing the stairs a serious challenge for some. Stairs should, in any case, be kept clear of all obstacles, and the handrails, and carpets regularly checked and secured. Chairlifts are an obvious, but expensive, solution. + Safety in the bathroom presents special problems because of the need for privacy. The hot, steamy atmosphere can make anyone feel light-headed, so it should be possible to open door locks from the outside. A personal alarm kept in the bathroom could also be valuable. + A fitted bathroom carpet is warmer and less slippery than vinyl as a floor covering. Bath mats must have a good quality backing, and non-slip rubber bath and shower mats are essential. Showering is so much easier and safer for elderly people (and children) if they can sit, and shower seats with simple flaps which pull down from the wall, or moulded plastic seats on sturdy legs are available. + Safety measures in the living room and bedrooms are more obvious. Radiant electric fires should be banned, and over-loaded power points avoided as much as the trail of leads and flexes to them. Electric blankets should be regularly serviced and replaced. + Light switches within easy reach of the bed are an important safety consideration, although an illuminated plug which slots into a 13 amp socket will emit a soft night light. Thick pile carpets are temptingly luxurious, but make it difficult for an older person to walk across a room. + Burglars often target houses where elderly people live, so encourage them never to leave reminder notes on the door for the milkman or tradesmen and to keep their savings in a bank or post office. Curtains should be closed at night, and the front door should be solid, with sturdy hinges, a deadlocking rimlock and a deadlocking mortice lock. Window locks are inexpensive and easy to install. + +LOAD-DATE: September 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +251 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 11, 1993 + +ELDERLY ABLE TO JUMP ON HOME LOAN BANDWAGON + +BYLINE: JILL PAPWORTH + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 31 + +LENGTH: 1081 words + + + THE growing availability of interest-only mortgages, where no capital repayment vehicle is required by the lender, means that age is no longer a barrier to getting a home loan. + This is welcome news for elderly people needing or wanting to buy a property, but without sufficient capital to do so outright. + Frances Chaney, from Dorset, has been landed with this problem following a divorce at the age of 67. + After the forced sale of the large home she owned with her ex-husband, she will be left with pounds 50,000 to buy a new home, but it will not be enough to purchase the size of property she wants in the area in which she lives. + Her son, Andrew Hirschhorn, wrote on her behalf to Money Guardian for help, explaining: "West Dorset is quite an expensive area and pounds 50,000 would not buy much. + "The problem is that my mother needs a fair size property with a big garden so that she can house her large collection of books and her two large dogs." + Mrs Chaney could get the size of property she wants for about pounds 70,000, which would mean her borrowing pounds 20,000. The maintenance payments she receives from her ex-husband plus her state pension should be enough to cover the interest payments on such a loan. + But, Mr Hirschhorn asks, surely no lender would be prepared to advance her a mortgage at her age? + "As far as we are aware, mortgages are only lent to younger people with a steady job," he says. + In fact, most lenders nowadays would be prepared to advance a home loan to someone in retirement, provided they can demonstrate that they, or their children, have sufficient income to cover the monthly interest payments. + "So long as they have the status and ability to repay it, anyone can get a mortgage no matter what their age," said a spokesman for the Woolwich Building Society. + The lender then has first charge on the property and redeems the capital loan from the borrower's estate when he or she dies, or earlier if the owner chooses to clear the loan by some other means, such as with the proceeds of a maturing endowment policy. + To be sure that the eventual sale of the property will be enough to cover the outstanding loan, lenders will generally insist that older people only borrow a relatively small percentage of its value. + The Halifax, for example, will advance a maximum of 75 per cent of valuation as an interest-only mortgage to the retired and elderly, while the maximum loan-to-value available from both the Leeds Permanent and the Woolwich is 60 per cent. + Mrs Chaney would pay pounds 99.89 a month in interest on a pounds 20,000 loan from the Halifax at its current variable mortgage rate of 7.99 per cent. She could also choose to take one of the society's fixed-rate deals with no obligation to take out any insurance. + She would pay pounds 84.39 a month plus a one-off arrangement fee of pounds 150 on the Halifax's two-year fixed offer at 6.75 per cent, for example, or pounds 93.14 a month plus a pounds 200 fee on the society's three-year 7.45 per cent fix. + Also commonly offered to older borrowers are short-term, repayment mortgages, again with the lender taking a charge on the property to protect its money if the buyer dies before the mortgage term is complete. + The most usual circumstance, under which older people request a mortgage to buy their own home for the first time, is where long-term council tenants decide to take advantage of the Government's Right-to-Buy scheme to buy a property at a sizeable discount to provide an inheritance for their children. + Discounts available on houses under the Right-to-Buy scheme range from 32 per cent to a maximum of 60 per cent or pounds 50,000 for someone who has been a tenant for over 30 years. + Four years ago, Herbert Monks, a retired BP engineer from Swansea, became a first-time buyer at the age of 81, to the benefit of both himself and his children. + Having lived in his terraced council house for over 40 years, he qualified for the maximum discount and was offered the property, then valued at just under pounds 15,000, for pounds 5,600. + With enough savings to put down a pounds 1,600 deposit, he made up the rest with a pounds 4,000 repayment mortgage from the Woolwich, repayable over seven years. + His monthly repayments when he first took out the loan were pounds 78 with the variable mortgage rate then a hefty 13.5 per cent. + This gave him a substantial saving on the pounds 30 a week he had been paying in rent, and the benefit has increased as the mortgage rate has fallen over the last 18 months. + With only three years left of the mortgage term, Mr Monks will soon be free of any payments on his home and will also be the outright owner of a property to pass on to his children. + Elderly people without a regular income sufficient to cover monthly repayments, however, will find it much more difficult to raise a mortgage. + Some lenders will consider repayment mortgages for those who have children able to fund monthly repayments on their behalf. + In Right-to-Buy situations, this is sometimes used by borrowers in their 40s and 50s as an effective way of investing towards their own retirement by buying their parents a property, which they will eventually inherit, at a discount. + What the majority of lenders will not do is lend money to older borrowers who cannot afford to pay anything back until the house is sold or they die. + The problem is that, if interest is deferred and rolled up into the capital loan, with the idea that the lender then redeems both capital and interest owed from the sale of the house when the borrower dies, it can mount up and exceed the value of the property within a relatively short period. + While this may not matter if house prices are rising fast, it is very risky for borrowers when the housing market is static or falling as in recent years. + Cecil Hinton, an independent adviser specialising in retirement planning, has long advised pensioners against taking any sort of deferred-interest mortgage, still occasionally on offer from smaller lenders. + "With such loans, the debt can double every four or five years, depending on the prevailing interest rates," he says. "If, for example, the average mortgage rate were 10 per cent, a pounds 30,000 deferred-interest loan would become a debt of pounds 77,000 after 10 years and pounds 200,000 after 20 years." + Money Guardian is edited by Margaret Hughes + +LOAD-DATE: September 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +252 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 11, 1993 + +HANS LINDSTROM SEEKS LIFT FROM LONGEVITY + +BYLINE: BEN LAURANCE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 37 + +LENGTH: 415 words + + + IN THE 40 years between 1985 and 2025 the proportion of Europe's population aged 65 or more is likely to rise from 13.6 per cent to 22.9 per cent. Not a lot of people know that. But Hans Lindstrom does - which is why he is about to ask investors to put around pounds 140 million into his company. + Mr Lindstrom runs Arjo, a Swedish-based enterprise specialising in hi-tech equipment to help lift, bathe and generally manoeuvre the elderly and handicapped in such places as hospitals and nursing homes. + The industry is large: Arjo's sales last year were more than SKr800 million ( pounds 65 million). And, simply because more people are living longer, demand for such equipment is expected to rise consistently over the next few decades. + Arjo's thinking is straightforward. A large amount of effort is expended by nursing staff in lifting and moving patients: back problems are common among nurses, and a typical injury can cost employers more than pounds 12,000 in sick pay - on top of any claim for compensation. + The company acknowledges that its equipment may be relatively expensive - a typical Arjo device for lifting a patient could cost around pounds 2,500 - but it argues that buying a mechanical lifting system, rather than relying on muscle-power, is a worthwhile investment. In simple, cold financial terms, a nurse with a back injury is bad news for his or her employer. + As the proportion of the population that is elderly increases, the number of people who need help getting in and out of bed is likely to rise. + In the United States, the number of people aged 65 and over is forecast to increase to 20.3 per cent of the population by 2025. + The number of Europeans aged 75 or over is likely to rise by 5.1 million between now and the year 2000, and by 19.5 million in the next three decades or so. + Many of them will require help to move around. Many of them will need to be bathed in one of Arjo's hi-tech baths, which can be raised up and down, to lift and lower them. The bath costs pounds 8,000. Hence, Arjo's optimism. + But the company is currently highly indebted, having bought the business in a leveraged buyout from conglomerate Malmros International at the end of 1990. Currently, about 38 per cent of the company is owned by CWB Capital Partners and Warburg Pincus Investors. Some of the shares to be offered to investors will come from CWB. Most of the money being raised will be used to pay off the post-buyout debt. + +LOAD-DATE: September 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +253 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 13, 1993 + +ENDPIECE: A WORKING MAN ABROAD IN MERRIE ENGLAND + +BYLINE: ROY HATTERSLEY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 17 + +LENGTH: 896 words + + + THE summer is over and I have still not killed a tourist. Readers who think that they detect a scintilla of regret hiding within that statement of predominant relief are right. For although I give thanks each night that the corpse of one of our European partners is not attached to the front bumper of my motorcar, there are moments of each day when I am sorely tempted to make The Twelve one less. + My uncharacteristic aggression is not solely directed towards citizens of the Community. Occasionally homicidal, I may be. But prejudiced I am not. I feel equally murderous about Japanese, American, Saudi Arabian and Mexican holiday-makers. At work, they are fine. At leisure in Westminster, they are intolerable. Their too visible presence is a terrible price to pay for invisible exports. + Let me begin to justify my briefly brutish instincts by describing how near to death so many of our visitors get and how assiduously I concentrate on saving their alien lives. As far as I can recall, there are motorcars in most of the countries from which they come. But most tourists seem to forget about the existence of that potentially lethal weapon as soon as they arrive in London. They simply step off the kerb into the path of what police reports call "oncoming traffic". + Those who remember that the British can drive seem to regret it - which is wholly unreasonable when you recall that we are driving cars that they made. Groups of giggling girls run, regardless of their doom, into the centre of the road, discover that a friend has paused on the kerb to admire herself in a pocket mirror, and run back again to keep her company. The male equivalent is far deadlier. Young men - usually smoking and sometimes drinking beer from cans - smile as they stroll elegantly across traffic lights which bid them to wait. Their whole demeanour is a challenge to drivers. The unspoken message is "kill me if you dare". + Those who remain on the pavement have one characteristic in common. As they wander along, they block the path of busy locals who are hurrying about their business. To be fair, they block it in a variety of ways. Elderly Americans wander, romantically, hand in hand. Columns of young Germans saunter, three or four abreast, behind a lady who holds aloft a coloured umbrella which is the oriflamme behind which they rally for instruction about buildings of historic interest. Benign Japanese, who seem to be making normal progress, stop so suddenly to focus their cameras on something which has caught their attention that pedestrians in their wake run into them like trains into buffers. + And that is only a list of the problems which are created by tourists who are moving in the same direction as I am. When they bear down upon me in an uncomprehending phalanx of training shoes, camcorders and unisex shoulder bags, they raise a profound and disturbing psychological problem. I have been on a collision course with tourists of every shape, size, nationality and age. Why am I always the one who steps off the footpath into the gutter? + The few visitors who condescend to speak to the natives, invariably ask questions which it is impossible to answer. I do not mind them enquiring about the identity of Big Ben. When I first went abroad I had a clear view about the shape of the Eiffel Tower, the size of St Peters and the colour of the White House. So ignorance about the landmarks of London encourages a feeling of national superiority which few Britons have felt since the age of the Raj. But requests for simple items of information are usually only the beginning of the cross examination. + Perhaps I ought to be flattered to be asked the time of the next bus to Oxford Street. It is not every man of my age who is mistaken for the holder of a PSV licence. + But have you ever tried to explain the difference between Westminster Abbey and Westminster Cathedral to a Kuwaiti with 20 words of English? Worse still, imagine how you would feel if it was assumed that you knew how to get tickets for Cats and Aspects of Love. + I seek consolation wherever it is to be found. All over Japan and North America, home videos are intriguing family audiences with Westminster's answer to Alfred Hitchcock, a disarmingly mysterious figure who passes silent and composed through the pictures of the House of Lords and the Jewel Tower. + Then there are the ice cream vans which park in Parliament Street for as long as the police allow. I never buy a cornet myself. But, with other almost forgotten delights of my youth, it is exciting to remember old indulgences. + All that is small consolation for what amounts to annual assault and temporary occupation by offensively friendly forces. The real trauma is the feeling that, since I am English, I live in a theme park and that I ought to play my part in the promotion of the national image by growing side whiskers and disguising myself as William Ewart Gladstone. + Last week, two men dressed as Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson lounged on the corner of Bridge Street and Parliament Square. I could not decide whether they were actors advertising a restaurant or patriotic neighbours joining in the spirit of things. I suppose that I pay the price for living half a mile from Buckingham Palace. Foreigners expect all the neighbourhood to be devoted to a pageant of Merrie England. + +LOAD-DATE: September 10, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +254 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 14, 1993 + +MND: THE TERRIBLE FACTS; +How the untreatable disease affects sufferers + +BYLINE: CHRIS MIHILL + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 4 + +LENGTH: 502 words + + + MOTOR neurone disease is a progressive degenerative disease affecting the nerves (motor neurones) in the brain and spine controlling speech and movement. + Intellect and memory remain intact in the vast majority of the cases, but the spread of the disease is insidious and around half of sufferers will be dead within five years. The cause is not known, and there is no treatment. + The initial symptoms and speed of progression vary widely between individuals, but common first signs are stumbling, weakened grip, cramps, a hoarse voice, progressing to loss of function of limbs and wasting of the muscles in the trunk and neck, eventually affecting all activities. Speech and swallowing often become increasingly difficult, and may end with the total loss of speech. + According to figures from the Motor Neurone Disease Association, 40 per cent of people will survive for five years, 10 per cent for 10 years, and a small number have lived more than 20 years. + It is estimated the disease affects between eight to 10 people per 100,000 of the population, and there are believed to be around 5,000 sufferers in the UK. + There are three forms of MND. The most common form, affecting 66 per cent of sufferers, is known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This affects the motor neurones in the brain and spine and is characterised by muscle weakness, spasticity, hyperactive reflexes and emotional lability. Age of onset is usually over 55 years, and average survival from diagnosis is 3-4 years. Males are more affected than females by a ratio of three to two. + Progressive muscular atrophy (PMA) affects around eight per cent of MND patients, and predominantly results from motor neurone degeneration in the spine. It causes muscle wasting and weakness, often starting with the hands, with loss of weight and muscle twitching. Age of onset is usually under 50 years, male predominance is five to one, and most patients survive beyond five years from diagnosis. + The third form of the disease is known as progressive bulbar palsy (PBP), and involves paralysis of the cranial nerves controlling speech and swallowing. Speech rapidly deteriorates, and swallowing difficulties may mean feeding by nasogastric tube becomes necessary. Most people retain use of their legs, but upper limbs progressively weaken. PBP occurs in older people, is slightly more common in women, and survival from onset of symptoms is usually between six months and three years. + With all forms of the disease fatigue is common, as are depression and other pyschological problems, pain and discomfort, and respiratory infections. Although no treatment for the disease itself is possible, some of the symptoms can be relieved. + Famous sufferers of MND have included Professor Stephen Hawking, Cambridge mathematician and author of A Brief History Of Time; actor David Niven and football manager Don Revie. + The Motor Neurone Disease Association: PO Box 246, Northampton, NN1 2PR. Tel: 0604 250505. + +LOAD-DATE: September 11, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +255 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 15, 1993 + +BACK TO THE FRONT WITH TOMMY; +'The scale and nature of this war were something beyond what people normally understood. In the numbers of dead and the manner in which they died there was something that taxed human understanding in the same way as Auschwitz'. Sebastian Faulks visits the killing fields of Flanders, the backdrop to his new and acclaimed novel, Birdsong + +BYLINE: SEBASTIAN FAULKS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 2039 words + + + IN 1988 I was sent by a newspaper to report on the 70th anniversary of the Armistice. I went with a party of veterans organised by the historian Lyn Macdonald who, in the 1970s, had seen the danger that most of these old men were dying without ever having told their stories. We stayed in Bethune, in the flatlands of north-eastern France, and I remember being amazed at the passion for tea evinced by these old men. In the morning we drove to the battlefields of Neuve Chapelle and Aubers Ridge, where in 1915 the British launched their first attacks of the war. + The old man sitting next to me on the bus took my hand as he explained how it felt to be wheeled on a general service wagon over rutted ground with the two parts of your shattered leg rubbing together. When we stopped and got off, he showed me where the fire trench had been; he pointed to the German line about 90 yards distant, still marked by the indestructible concrete pillboxes. + It was on this exact spot, he said, that his best friend had been blown to pieces beside him. "I picked them all up - none of them was bigger than a leg of mutton - and dropped them into a sandbag. I dug a hole in the ground and dropped the bag in. I marked it with a cross but they never found it." + The following afternoon I was walking with him in one of the eerily beautiful cemeteries maintained by the War Graves Commission where the air of tranquillity given by the clean headstones and neat jars of flowers is threatened only by the terrible number of graves. Suddenly my veteran friend gave a start. He was staring at a headstone at our feet. It was marked with the name of the man he had buried: someone had found the emergency grave and buried him properly. "Oh I say," he said, reunited for the first time since 1915, "Oh I say . . . " + For some time I had had the impression that the terrible scale of the Great War was something that had not been properly understood by people of my generation. Now, as I stood with the yellowish mud crawling over my shoe, I saw that it was not only larger but much more recent than I had imagined. It was not "history", something that could be kept comfortably at bay: this man was old, but he was cogent and alive. This was the place: here we stood in the same clinging mud - he and the rest of us whose grandfathers had survived. This was his life, and to some tragic but inevitable extent it was ours too. + Later I watched a burly young Australian who had travelled all the way from Sydney to visit the battlefields. Lyn Macdonald took him to the cemetery where his grandfather lay, among furlongs, among miles of headstones, and the young man's body seemed to convulse with grief and shock. + Initially the idea of that war repelled and bored me. One knew of great suffering and loss of life: that much remained from school history lessons. Yet it seemed unmanageably remote. The method of remembrance had a deadening effect: two minutes' silence on Armistice Day. More silence, more mystery to add to the self-imposed secrecy of so many of the combatants, few of whom talked of their experiences. Then there was the ambiguous poppy. Was it a lamentation or a symbol of Empire? Was it death or beauty? + In newsreels you could see Tommies with their upturned, obedient faces, shuffling at double speed to their cheery death. All that seemed to remain of their feelings was an improbable stoicism, mockingly recalled in their sentimental songs. On the mantelshelfs of old people I had seen photographs of boys in flat service caps and puttees, their faces rendered smooth by sepia, the sensations they had felt removed, distanced and forgotten. I remember thinking: it cannot have been like this. + But how to recapture or recreate what it was? The silence of the soldiers had all but buried the experience of war. Some did not speak at all for years; few talked about it openly. At the Armistice in 1918 Marshal Foch described it as a truce for 20 years. When the end of the subsequent conflict began to reveal the extent of the Nazi holocaust the world had something even more monstrous and perverted to remember. The existence of film and the insistent passion of worldwide Jewry made these events the touchstone of 20th century suffering. + So the men who had fought at the Somme and Passchendaele, who had seen extermination on a scale never before or since witnessed in war, became the victims, to some extent, of their own reticence. Because they could not, or did not care to, describe the scope of what they had seen they became remembered half-ironically: there was no museum of their holocaust, only songs and silence and quaint brown photographs. + Six years ago I wrote a novel called The Girl At The Lion d'Or, set in France in 1936, in the course of which I had to research the French experience of the 1914-1918 war. The Price Of Glory by Alistair Home, an account of the siege of Verdun, was the book that first confirmed what I had suspected: that the scale and nature of this war were something beyond what people normally understood. In the numbers of dead and the manner in which they died there was something that taxed human understanding in the same way as Auschwitz. + I suppose I had read Graves and Sassoon, but hastily, a long time ago. And these were the memoirs of officers, written with degrees of protective irony and suppression. I admit to being ignorant, but I believed that even well-educated people of my generation knew equally little. I asked my contemporaries about it. They shook their heads in sorrowful respect at the names of those foul places - Ypres, Verdun - but the truth was that they did not really know what had happened. I was not alone in my ignorance. + When I returned from the first trip to the battlefields in 1988 I began to read about the war. It was not long before I came across a paradox: the first world war may be inadequately remembered, but it is extremely well documented. From the official military history to the numerous collections of private documents there is an abundance of material - from the rigorous to the useless, from the poignant to the banal. I followed a haphazard course of study, through the lists of specialist publishers, public libraries, private collections and the vast and expertly marshalled resources of the Imperial War Museum. + I attended a lecture by its director Peter Simkins on "1917, the Year of Endurance". It was packed. Here was another paradox: perhaps the war was understood by few, but those who did were passionate about it. Excusing himself from talking about events on the Eastern Front or in Mesopotamia, Peter Simkins said, "I'm a Western Front man myself," and the audience let off a stifled murmur of approval. Later he showed a rarely seen film of the Battle of Arras. + Although all this was interesting, none of it was helpful to someone contemplating a novel. If your starting point is a belief that the scale of something is almost beyond human comprehension, then you feel a sense of presumption in attempting to go where the actual participants have gone before. If you then have to grapple with the extent of documentation and amateur knowledge in an area which you believe to be under-reported, it is hard not to be discouraged. + Soon I began to handle collections of documents. Here was the actual stuff: postcards written from the front, diaries and letters whose paper was wrinkled from rain that had penetrated the roofs of inadequate dug-outs. Here at last was food for the imagination unmediated by the selection and comment of another writer. + The raw material gave a view of a world I was sure had been forgotten. The feudal attitude of the private soldiers to their officers, for instance, was striking. They expected little from their superiors except courage under fire. Their contempt for the occasional coward is withering. The letters of condolence are frequently works of art. I remember one lamentation from a schoolmaster to the mother of a boy who had just been killed: he was the last of his beloved class to die, all that talent nurtured, trained and wasted. The teacher's private anguish almost overwhelms the politeness of his sympathy. Boys of 19 or 20 write astonishing prose, spangled with classical allusion; private soldiers write the cool, neat hand of the elementary school. + There was no typical attitude to war. One diarist who seems almost comically keen recounts in 1917 that he is to be transferred to a training job in Canada because he has not shown sufficient enthusiasm at the Front. Others lived and let live; few hated the Germans, but some emphatically did. Every man's war was different. + Even the documents were of limited use until two other things happened. The first was my discovery of the extent of the mining operations under no man's land. This was a kind of special concentrated hell, contained within the greater inferno; and it was something not much written about even by the professionals. If I was to try to recreate the experience of 1916, I felt I should at least examine some unknown aspect of it, and here was a way in. + Almost all the accounts of war stressed the strange persistence of natural life - birds, rats, dogs, cattle - even in the great bombardments and holocausts. The soldiers found it both perplexing and reassuring. In a book about mining I discovered the story of a cage of canaries that had broken underground, allowing the birds to escape. Each one had to be recaptured so that the enemy would not guess that there were mining operations in the area. One canary flew out into no man's land. Three snipers shot at it, but could not kill it. Eventually they brought up a trench mortar and bombed the bird. I did not use the story in the book, but its symbolism was suggestive. + The second development came about when I started to visit the Somme area. I looked at the great memorial at Thiepval, then wandered into the wood behind it, which had been the British headquarters on the terrible morning of July 1, 1916. The first thing I saw was a shell. + It seemed like a lucky charm. My research had been based on a kind of faith: that this war was far more recent than people seemed to understand. Now here was the proof. Later I learned that ploughing in the spring frequently yields a harvest of unexploded shells, but that did not matter: this was my shell. It was by repeated visits to the area and simple contemplation that I began to form a larger picture in my mind. I filled a little jam jar with earth from the Sunken Road on the British frontline and kept it on my desk while I wrote in the superstitious hope it would keep my hand steady. + As the hero I took someone who was not blue-eyed and innocent like so many who died, but compromised and involuntarily experienced before the war begins. Birdsong is in fact not a book about the war: it is a love story, the story of this man's life. Three of the six main characters are women; children play a peripheral but vital part. Yet at least half the book is about the war, an attempt to recreate the physical and emotional sensations of it, on both complete and minute scales: it is an attempt to understand. + Remembrance is prompted by emotion, but becomes useless if it is mere self-indulgence. If the lamentation of the dead is to be turned into something purposeful, it takes not just compassion, but will and judgment. We have learned to endure the footage of the concentration camps, more or less at the insistence of the survivors, and we are all humbled by it. But what took place on the banks of the river Ancre on July 1, 1916 when 60,000 British casualties were sustained in a single day; what took place at Arras and Passchendaele; the ripping up and evisceration of a country's youth, the fragmentation of its society, the grief of mothers, lovers and fathers, not some amorphous national sadness, but each pain, singly, multiplied - this was our holocaust, and I think it was this more than anything else that has shaped the century that in Britain, Germany, France, and even in Sarajevo, is drawing to a close. + Birdsong is published tomorrow by Hutchinson, price pounds 14.99. + +LOAD-DATE: September 15, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +256 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 15, 1993 + +EUROPE: EDDY'S ONE-MAN STAND; +Ewoud Nysingh on a Dutchman bent on distributing aid in Bosnia, by bike + +BYLINE: EWOUD NYSINGH + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EURO PAGE; Pg. 7 + +LENGTH: 614 words + + + volkskrant + POSSIBLY the most popular foreign aid organisation in Sarajevo is Eddy Nieuwboer's one-man operation, run from the suburb of Gorica, behind the destroyed military hospital. + Nieuwboer, aged 50, has been in Sarajevo since January. He has lost 20 kilos. He has narrowly escaped death once or twice, and he sometimes fails to cope with the horrors. But "Crazy Eddy" or "Eddy Hollandija" carries on cycling through the city delivering letters from Bosnians abroad and handing out food. + Nieuwboer (divorced, with two children) usually calls himself an "non-commercial fixer". He used to run a service company in Belgium, but gave it up when it began to grow. "I can't work in an organisation," he says. "I can't be myself." + He worked as a volunteer in Brazil for a year, and saw the Bosnian war on television when he returned to the Netherlands. "When I see something like that, I can't stay at home," he says. So, he joined a refugee reception centre in Roermond. But the stories he heard did not tally with the television reports. The refugees wanted to tell their relatives back home where they were and how to get to the Netherlands. So, Nieuwboer bought an old Opel and set off for Bosnia - delivering letters. + By mistake, he drove part of the way along the closed and deadly Zagreb-Belgrade highway. In Bosnia, he visited towns like Tuzla and Zenica, and a number of villages. He then tried but failed to get into Serb-controlled Banja Luka. With just a couple of letters left for Sarajevo, he then drove down Snipers' Alley, to the front of the Holiday Inn. "How could I know that that's where the snipers were?" he says now. + He had seen dreadful things on his trip, but Sarajevo beat everything. Nieuwboer stayed. + He found lodgings with a 92-year-old blind Serbian woman, who had been left behind by her relatives. "After a while, the Muslims said I was helping a Chetnik. Things got so tense that I decided to take her to Belgrade myself. They were very surprised when I came back. Some of them now think that I'm a spy." + Life in Gorica is not getting easier. When he leaves his house, he worries that someone will steal his modest provisions. Serbs ask him to help them leave Sarajevo: they are sick of the bullets and the hunger and the burning newspapers stuffed down their letter-boxes. + But Nieuwboer's main concern is the children and the old people. Gorica is a poor neighbourhood, with few contacts among the powers that be. "I've set myself the task of stopping people dying of hunger. I can't do anything against snipers and grenades." + No matter how near the front the address, he still delivers the letters which arrive at Unprofor. Sometimes he manages to deliver medicine, too. Most of the food he distributes comes from Unprofor soldiers or the French aid organisation Equilibre. He has no trouble getting cigarettes, the key currency of barter. "I could get very rich by swapping cartons of cigarettes for videos and other luxury items. A Croatian dentist offered me his brand-new Nissan to get him out of Sarajevo." Nieuwboer, an idealist who abhors the corrupt Ukrainian United Nations soldiers, remained unswayed. + "In February, I organised a massive childrens' party in Hotel Belgrade. Equilibre gave pasta and chocolate, Unprofor gave sausages and fish-sticks. Artists performed for the 122 children. It was a terrific success." + Nieuwboer would like to go back to the Netherlands to raise more aid. For the moment, however, he is staying. If he left, returning to Sarajevo could prove difficult. The UN bureaucrats want official papers. Eddy has none. + Copyright The Guardian/de Volkskrant + +LOAD-DATE: September 15, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +257 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 16, 1993 + +SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS; +Two London fringe productions share a taste for violence-and over-writing + +BYLINE: MICHAEL BILLINGTON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 19 + +LENGTH: 511 words + + + (London final editions) + CHRIS Hannan and David Spencer have a lot in common. Both are talented young dramatists (born in 1958), both are non-metropolitan (from Scotland and Yorkshire respectively) and both are clearly fascinated by self-mutilation. + Macu, the heroine of Hannan's The Baby, first seen at Glasgow's Tron in 1990 and now at The Bush, inflicts a thousand razor-cuts on her grief-stricken body. And the unseen pivot of Spencer's Land Of The Living, at The Theatre Upstairs, is a 50-year-old suicide who kills herself in the bath with "150 razor slices". But it is not the common preoccupation with violence that perturbs me so much as the strenuous over-writing that mars both plays. + Hannan's The Baby is reminiscent of Howard Barker in its use of history as metaphor. The setting is Rome in 78 BC, just after the death of Sulla: in place of order and reason we have intrigue and anarchy. Macu, a professional "wailer" at state funerals, loses her daughter in a street fire initiated by Pompey when she refuses to mourn the death of Sulla. In consequence, she is driven into a state of vengeful, love-denying dementia that can be satisfied only by her own or Pompey's death. + Hannan's portrait of Rome as barbarically chaotic in the wake of Sulla's reign of terror is highly impressive: well realised, too, in Polly Irvin's production, for Wild Iris, with its insistent drumbeats, rattles and metal-bashing sounds. But it was never clear to me whether Macu, who provokes Pompey by reminding him of his father's dismemberment, is meant to be a victim of a violent society or of her own inflammatory rhetoric. Nicola Redmond invests her with a dangerous manic gleam, and Tom Mannion is truly touching as her devoted lover; but you feel that Hannan himself is so fascinated by physical and verbal brutality that he has failed to tell his story clearly. + Spencer's Land Of The Living also cries out for tougher script-editing. The form of the play is fascinating. We see two Yorkshire sisters both in marital maturity, just after their mother's suicide, and in a state of post-pubescent graveyard-haunting curiosity. Not only is it unusual to find a male dramatist writing about women with such transparent affection; Mr Spencer also captures well the disillusions and disappointments of age, even down to the sister who says, of her instantly forgettable husband, "If I leave him in Sainsbury's I can never find him." + Sue Dunderdale directs sensitively. Lorraine Ashbourne and Sue Devaney as the older women, Sarah Doherty and Michelle Hardwick as their younger selves are impeccable. My one complaint is that when it comes to motivating the mother's suicide, Mr Spencer gives the characters wild, whirling monologues that obscure more than they explain. Like Hannan, he is passionately in love with language, but both writers need to remember that lucidity and economy are also vital weapons in the dramatist's armoury. + The Baby is at The Bush (081-743-3388) and Land Of The Living at the Theatre Upstairs (071-730-2554). + +LOAD-DATE: September 16, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +258 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 16, 1993 + +BOSNIANS 'MASSACRE CROAT CIVILIANS'; +Journalists see bodies of women, children and the old + +BYLINE: KURT SCHORK IN UZDOL, BOSNIA + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 745 words + + + Reuter: CROATIAN military officials vowed last night to avenge the deaths of more than 30 Croat civilians they claimed had been massacred by Muslim troops in the settlement of Uzdol in central Bosnia. + The bodies of 27 villagers were shown to reporters yesterday. Tony Vucic, a Croatian Defence Force (HVO) official, said up to 100 Muslim soldiers tried to capture the Croatian command post in Uzdol and killed all the civilians who could not escape. + Muslim military police identity papers were found on the bodies of attackers who died in a counter-offensive, he said. + The Bosnian Croat leader, Mate Boban, declared a day of mourning for the murdered civilians, while military officials vowed to retaliate against the Muslim enclave in Vitez, according to United Nations sources. + "The Croats made the linkage explicit after word of the massacre began to spread," the source said yesterday. "They issued an ultimatum warning everyone in Stari [Old] Vitez to vacate the area by noon or face the consequences." + Stari Vitez, with at least 1,000 residents, has been besieged by Croat forces for the past four months. Mortar, artillery and small arms fire into the Muslim quarter commenced in early afternoon and continued into the evening yesterday. + HVO soldiers in Uzdol said 54 people were killed during Tuesday's three-hour battle, including 11 Muslim soldiers, nine HVO soldiers and 34 civilians. No independent verification of the death toll was possible. + This correspondent and a Reuter photographer saw 21 bodies in a refrigerated lorry in the Croat-held town of Prozor, seven miles east of Uzdol, after they had been recovered. + All appeared to be civilians, mostly women, children and old people. One young boy had had his throat slit and a middle-aged woman had been burned. Others appeared to have died from gunshot wounds, some from close range. + The Reuter team also saw six dead Croats in the hamlet of Kriz, which is part of Uzdol and is accessible only by foot. + Martin and Kata Ratkic lay huddled together in a dark corner of their cellar - he with his right ear cut off and she with a crimson stain over the bullet wound through her heart. + Relatives said the grandparents , both in their mid-60s, had been unable to escape the house with other members of their family after the attack began. + "I crawled away, but they couldn't escape," said Martin's brother Ivan, aged 59. "There were bullets flying everywhere. I was fortunate to get away." + He said six of Kriz's 15 residents died in the attack and two were wounded. + Reporters saw a middle-aged woman identified by survivors as Anica Stojanovic sprawled on a muddy lane in Kriz with the top of her head blown off. Her elderly relatives, Franc and Sarafina Stojanovic, had died at their home just down the hill. + Franc, clad in trousers, shirt and a tweed cap, lay in the grass outside, one lens of his glasses missing. He had been shot through the left side, with a huge exit wound under his right armpit. + Inside, Sarafina, in black sweater and scarf, had been shot through the head. Pictures of the Pope, rosaries and crucifixes adorned the walls of her home. + Croat soldiers at the scene said Muslim troops attacked at dawn on Tuesday, slipping between reinforced defensive lines and encircling Uzdol, Zelenika and Kriz - three settlements clustered around a pair of Catholic churches. + "They attacked and burned the houses first and then they came after us [Croat soldiers] in the school," recounted Josip Prskalo, a Croat soldier. + Some houses in the three Croat settlements were still smouldering yesterday. Livestock wandered the streets and laundry flapped on clothes lines. + One bar in the centre of Uzdol with its windows shot out still had empty beer cans on its tables from patrons who had been there on Monday night. + "I would have cleaned up on Tuesday morning, but I never had the chance," said the elderly proprietor, who survived by hiding in his house. + Croat soldiers alleged that the purpose of the Muslim government forces was to put fear in the hearts of Croat civilians in remote areas, forcing them to abandon their homes. + "They killed my mother and burned her body in that house," Zarko Zelenika, an HVO soldier, said as he pointed to a smoking ruin. "They have killed many civilians in a terrible way, as you can see for yourself, but in the end the score will be even." - Reuter. + +LOAD-DATE: September 16, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +259 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 17, 1993 + +US MILITANT IN COURT AFTER 23 YEARS ON RUN + +BYLINE: SARA RIMER IN BOSTON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 12 + +LENGTH: 645 words + + + TWENTY-THREE years after going underground as an anti-war radical wanted for bank robbery and the murder of a Boston police officer, Katherine Ann Power has surrendered to police. + One of the last of a generation of fugitive student revolutionaries passionately opposed to the Vietnam war, Ms Power, aged 44, pleaded guilty in a Boston court on Wednesday to charges of manslaughter and armed robbery in 1970, when she was a senior student at Brandeis University, Massachusetts. + She is to be sentenced on the charge, which was reduced from murder after negotiations, on October 6 and could be given life in prison. + In surrendering, she shed the identity of Alice Metzinger, a small-town Oregon wife, mother, successful restaurateur, cooking teacher and taxpayer. She said she was "learning to live with openness and truth, rather than shame and hiddenness". + Ms Power was accompanied to court by her husband, Ron Duncan, an accountant, and her elderly parents, who said they had not seen or heard from their daughter in 23 years. + Ms Power became Alice Metzinger in 1977 and it was only a month ago that she told her son Jaime, aged 14, who she really was. Four days ago she told her Oregon friends at a goodbye party she gave for herself. + Her husband, whom she had married a year ago after a 13-year relationship, had known for some time. + Eighteen months ago, suffering from depression, Ms Power decided that she could not go on with her secret life. + She consulted an Oregon lawyer Steven Black, a former Vietnam pilot, and then one in Boston, Rikki Klieman, who had been an anti-war student radical. The two began negotiating Ms Power's surrender with the district attorney's office. + "She could not have intimate relations with people," Ms Klieman said. "There were all sorts of questions about who were her son's grandparents? Who was she? The only way to recreate her life was to own up to who she was and face up to the charges." + On September 23, 1970, Ms Power and four associates, armed with guns, robbed the State Street Bank & Trust Company in Boston of $ 26,000. The first police officer to arrive at the bank was killed by a shot in the back from William Gilday, who is serving a life sentence. Ms Power drove the getaway car. + In a statement released by Ms Klieman Ms Power acknowledged that she had committed "outrageously illegal acts", but blamed them on the Vietnam war. "At that time the law was being broken everywhere," she said. + The crimes she had committed, Ms Power said, were rooted in "a deep philosophical and spiritual [belief] that if a wrong exists, one must take active steps to stop it, regardless of the consequences to oneself in comfort or security". + She continued: "Although at the time those actions seemed the correct course, they were in fact naive and unthinking." + She expressed deep regret for the death of the police officer. + Mr Black said that Ms Power and her associates planned to use the money to buy explosives to melt down the wheels of trains that carried weapons and to arm the Black Panthers. + In 1970, Ms Power was obsessed with the Vietnam war. In April, the Nixon administration launched a bombing campaign in Cambodia. In May, four Kent State University students who protested against the bombing were shot dead by the National Guard. + A national student strike was called in protest, and at Brandeis its co-ordinators included Ms Power, Susan Saxe and Stanley Bond. All three took part in the bank robbery. + In 1972, awaiting trial for the murder of the police officer, Bond blew himself up in prison when a bomb he was making detonated. + Ms Power was on the FBI's most-wanted list until 1984, when the agency said they had no more leads in the case. By then, Ms Power was establishing her new life as Alice Metzinger. - New York Times. + +LOAD-DATE: September 17, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +260 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 17, 1993 + +IT'S OVER, LET IT GO; +P.S. + +BYLINE: NIGEL FOUNTAIN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 24 + +LENGTH: 472 words + + + JUST SHOW ME the empty pub, Mr Sherrin. The disinterment yet again of That Was The Week That Was has led Ned, its series producer, to trot out once more the TW3 catechism from the golden era of Christine Keeler and Billy Fury. "Nothing like it . . . is there a telly to watch it at the party? . . . nation rocked . . . outraged MPs . . . laughed so much forgot to put cat out . . . pubs emptied." + Like the JFK assassination, I know exactly where I was when TW3 came on: in the pub. And that was where I stayed. Call us young, call us foolish, but given the choice between Watney's draught Red Barrel and being in on the birth of ur-Luvvy, we kids knew where the action was. + And we were not alone. The public then were tuning into programmes like Bootsie And Snudge and Double Your Money, neither of which has, mercifully, been the subject of sustained media interest. No BBC programme, with the exception of that surreal masterpiece Compact, got within a guffaw of the Top 20. + Memories of late Saturday night pre-TW3 on BBC are of elderly gentlemen playing Tiger Rag to teen, woolly-jumpered jiving versions of Harold and Haroldina Wilson. Of course, in the aftermath of such shows TW3 must have been a relief, even - oh God, here it comes again - a breath of fresh air. + But who was inhaling it? The same people who were watching Harold and Haroldina, by and large. Progressive housemasters trying to fathom out what these young people were doing, unprogressive Moral Re-arming housemasters trying the same and poised for complaints to the BBC duty officer, bemused parents, and infants too young for Wimpy bars and too old for bed. The media, not for the first or last time, had invented its own version of what radicalism was supposed to look like. David Frost was to Lenny Bruce what Mark Winter was to Elvis. + There has, Sherrin added the other day, been nothing like it before or since. Well, maybe. Such utterances are part of a specious post-war history in which the 1960s erupt in a fit of media giggling and carry right on through Mini, Fab, Love, 'Nam and Lib before colliding with the Maxi 1970s. + Before? Subversion was around in the 1950s - a depressing, or illuminating, discovery is that Rattigan the upper-class snob was more of a radical than Osborne the petit-bourgeois snob - and Simpson, Galton and Hancock had more impact on sixties radicalism than any of TW3's interminable calypsos. + And since? Something called Not So Much A Programme followed in TW3's wake, with people like Michael Crawford pretending to be a mod, and young and old buffers carrying on with just the same self-congratulatory tone. And later still? Well, those guys certainly kept on the cutting edge of satire, even unto the seventh generation of Stephen Sondheim revivals. Just when will it be over? + +LOAD-DATE: September 17, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +261 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 18, 1993 + +BANKS SHUTTING THEIR DOORS TO THE POOR + +BYLINE: TERESA HUNTER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 33 + +LENGTH: 1048 words + + + THERE is mounting concern that banking services are being withdrawn from the poor and the growing army of unemployed, who now account for more than 10 per cent of the workforce, according to figures published this week. + Government advisers have started an investigation into the increasing number of people who have no access to affordable credit or mainstream banking services. + The Social Security Advisory Committee has commissioned an independent report into why a fifth of all households do not have a bank account. The report is due to be published early next year. + Extensive branch closure programmes by the big banks and building societies have led to banking services being withdrawn from many communities. Fears are growing that many of our poorer districts are becoming "red-lined" as far as financial institutions are concerned, as has already happened in many inner-city areas in the US. + In such areas, the more vulnerable members of the community, such as elderly people, single parents, the unemployed, and those on low wages, are robbed of all mainstream banking services, particularly access to credit, and are forced into the vicious circle of moneylenders and increasing poverty. + As Barclays announced the loss of 18,000 jobs and the closure of some 600 branches from its 2,500 peak two years ago, the New Economics Foundation this week claimed that 1,000 bank branches have already closed over the past four years, with the loss of 70,000 jobs. + The foundation, which is a voluntary sector think-tank, warned that 28 per cent of Birmingham's population has no access to a bank or building society because of branch closures, according to unpublished Bank of England figures. + The report calls on banks to stop discriminating between customers. The foundation wants further development of community banks, to provide cheap loans for less-well-off people. + The report's author, Ed Mayo, says: "The knock-on effect of losing a bank branch can be devastating for the community. Experience shows that other businesses often shut down in twilight areas where there are no safe banking facilities nearby, until the community loses all neighbouring enterprises, and the jobs that go with them." + The National Consumer Council is worried about the withdrawal of bank services from whole communities and is drawing up its own report, as are two academics - Professor Nigel Thrift of Bristol University and Dr Andrew Layshon of Hull University. + Dr Layshon says: "There is mounting evidence that the financial sector is retreating to a middle-class heartland. The banks would argue that with home banking there is no need to maintain branches. + "But access to home banking is much more rigorously credit-scored than ordinary bank accounts. Having a telephone is simply not enough to qualify for one. The first question most banks ask if you apply for an account is: what is your postcode? "Banks have become much more risk averse. They do not want low-balance, high-transaction accounts." + Dr Layshon and Professor Thrift hope to develop delocation programmes which would predict from which areas the banks intended to next withdraw. The banks are unapologetic for closing branches. A spokesman for the Banking Information Service said: "Banks are businesses, not charities. We do not provide social services." + But the Government does not believe it should take over the role of quasi-bank for the poor, as is already happening with the social fund and student loans. A spokesman for the Social Security Advisory Committee said: "There have been a number of developments in the Netherlands and the US on the social loans front. We commissioned the report to establish whether the same sort of cheap credit should be made available in this country." + In the longer term, the Government has good reason for wanting the entire population to have access to a bank account. A large proportion of the "unbanked" rely on state benefits, cashing their giros at post office counters. Should the Government proceed with privatising the counters at some later stage, there is no guarantee this service would continue. + But unlike the US and Holland, there are no real alternatives to the handful of major institutions. Community banking in the UK is in its infancy, although growing rapidly. Next year, Mercury Provident, Britain's oldest community bank, established about 20 years ago, is planning to launch its first current account. + It has a banking licence and offers building society-style savings accounts, investing the money in projects with so-called "added social value". Savers can chose between a variable rate account, at present paying up to 5 per cent, where Mercury choses where to invest the cash, or target accounts, where the investor chooses the project and also the interest rate he or she wishes to earn. This then sets the interest for the borrower. + The bank, which has had two bad debts in 20 years, is raising funds for the Shawford Mill project, in Winchester, where an old mill is being converted to a counselling centre, and the potato storage depot Five Stones in East Anglia, which is converting to wind turbo for its energy needs. + The Birmingham Settlement is hoping to set up the Aston Community Bank next year to provide banking for a community from which mainstream banks have largely withdrawn. + Industrial Common Ownership Finance, which grew out of the Industrial Common Ownership Movement to provide finance for co-operatives, is undergoing a shake-up. It lost its deposit-taking licence in 1978 and has since raised funds primarily from local authorities to finance co-operatives. + Next April, it plans to launch a new share issue to raise pounds 5 million to invest in social projects, which do not necessarily have to be co-ops. Shares will cost pounds 251 and will earn interest roughly in line with inflation. However, the value of the shares could go down. + An Icof spokesman said: "These investments are not for people looking to maximise their financial return. They are for people who want to invest in the communities of Britain, because they want to help create opportunities where they do not currently exist." + Money Guardian is edited by Margaret Hughes + +LOAD-DATE: September 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +262 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 18, 1993 + +AGE CONCERN CAMPAIGN GETS ON ROAD + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 34 + +LENGTH: 147 words + + + TRANSPORT and the problems it creates for the elderly is one of the issues that Age Concern Week, which begins today, will be highlighting. Tuesday's Transport Day marks the first step in a nationwide campaign to be launched in February with a national conference on transport and mobility. + Age Concern points to the increasing cost of private motoring and public transport as well as the diminishing access to and design of public transport. Bus deregulation and preparations for rail privatisation mean fewer and less reliable services. + Another concern is the decline of local services accompanying the growth of out of town stores and the increasing pedestrianisation of shopping areas. + - Your Retirement, a new guide published by Age Concern at pounds 4.95, is available from its publications department at Astra House, 1268 London Road, London SW16 4ER. + +LOAD-DATE: September 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +263 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 21, 1993 + +PAPERBACK ORIGINALS: HOPE SPRINGS MATERNAL + +BYLINE: ELIZABETH YOUNG + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 14 + +LENGTH: 744 words + + + Limestone and Clay, by Lesley Glaister (Secker & Warburg, pounds 8.99) + ALCHEMY must be one of the oldest metaphors for producing works of art. In her new novel, Lesley Glaister uses the natural substances of rock and clay to distill what Charles Lamb called "My proper element of prose." + Glaister's work has always had an elemental, primal aspect. In earlier novels this was less obtrusive, veiled with an appealing mixture of humour, social observation and gothic melodrama. Her books conspicuously lacked the narcissism, the near-autobiographical self-obsession that characterises many writers' early work. They were so pleasurable to read that it was possible to miss the structured rigour and strong rhythmical sense that underlay the fireworks. Glaister excelled at animating very old and very young personalities. The elderly left-wing couple in Trick Or Treat, with their dog Kropotkin and their bald cat Mao, were tenderly evoked, and in Digging To Australia Glaister achieved the difficult fusion of authorial voice and immature adolescent narrator. + Glaister's work has been developing rapidly, and she may have felt it essential to outgrow the confines of the Gothic mode - with its corpses and shadows, its groundswell of deviant behaviour. Limestone and Clay focuses straightforwardly on young adults. There is only one grotesque, an elderly fortune-teller with a pet raven who seems thrown in solely for old time's sake. + Simon and Nadia are an ordinary couple. Simon, a geography teacher, has a passionate interest in speleology. Nadia works as a sculptor and potter. She longs for a child and has suffered wretchedly through several miscarriages. Their relationship is threatened by Simon's ex-girlfriend Celia, cool, cynical - and happily pregnant. As the pressure mounts the characters spin off towards emotional devastation, chaos and destruction. Nadia's longing becomes obsession, and Simon courts death in the spectral caves beneath the moors. + Glaister here works earnestly within a web of heavy-duty symbolism and symmetry. At the most basic level, there are the yin and yang oppositions of rock and clay and the interdependency of these two substances. Clay, the ancient synonym, for flesh, is both impermeable and endlessly regenerative. It is insistently linked by Glaister with the cycles of fertility. Glaister suggests that beyond the daily avalanche of trivia, we are all driven by the most powerful, unreconstructed emotional primitivism. Fortunately, Glaister's sense of humour, and her lyrical gift for illuminating the natural world, saves the book from being strangled by a kind of Cold Comfort Farm portentousness. This particular combination of fertility and maternity, with a tempestuous landscape, both beautiful and threatening, is strongly reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, and it comes as no surprise to find Nadia brooding restlessly over the Collected Poems every time she miscarries. + The generosity and depth of Glaister's work augurs well for the future, if she can avoid the pointless fecundity of imagination that sometimes overtakes successful women novelists who drift into ceaselessly inventing and discarding new characters. The peripheral figures in this book - and even Celia - are sketched somewhat lightly in comparison to Glaister's early vivid portraits. In exchanging gothic sensibility for mature sense, Glaister may have lost a little of the ramshackle and idiosyncratic zest of her earlier work. Her spontaneous, ambiguous imagery has now become more laboured, more determinedly literary, and, although she gains in sombre insight, there is less vitality. + More broadly, Glaister's work incorporates two important trends. Much post-war fiction in Britain has mysteriously neglected a central function of art - making creative sense of the changes in society. It has been left largely to Britain's provincial poets to do this (like some of those in Bloodaxe's recent anthology, The New Poetry). She represents and interprets ordinary British lives against a background of profound shifts in personal behaviour and national identity. Secondly Glaister seems concerned to return the novel to its roots rather than straining against its inevitable limitations. Considering how much fruitless experimentation has been lavished upon what is, after all, a narrow form, and considering how seldom this form has produced first-class work, such an aim can hardly be deemed ignoble. + +LOAD-DATE: September 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +264 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 22, 1993 + +HOW WAS THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION FOR YOU? + +BYLINE: LINDA GRANT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 696 words + + + TWO YEARS ago, I placed a notice in the Bulletin section of the Guardian women's page, asking for women's experience of the sexual revolution for a book I was writing. The request found a wide audience and the response from women now in their 40s was particularly profound. "What sexual revolution?" they asked, bitterly. Single, divorced, unhappily married, they felt themselves to be the debris of a great explosion in sexual mores, which had promised women sexual freedom but had failed to deliver. + The most bitter were those who had once willingly embraced the prospect of a real enfranchising of desire. If the Pill had separated sex from reproduction and feminism had given them the right to say no as well as yes, if the new openness about sex had made it possible for women to talk about orgasms - why they didn't have them and how they might get them - then surely they had a lifetime to experiment? + In truth, there was almost no change in the way men related to women sexually, other than to welcome women's greater availability and later deplore feminism's condemnation of that apparent freedom. The sexual revolution had failed to shift that stubborn and all-pervasive icon of sexuality in our society, the young girl, against which all women were measured and generally found wanting. What women over 35 discovered - in all conditions of partnership or non-partnership, and in all classes - was that at the height of their sexual powers, they were forced to conform to a straitjacket image of what it was to be female (slim, young, large-breasted, etc) or become part of that great glut on the market, the unwanted older woman. + The freedoms of the sexual revolution, they felt, had been squandered: in the saturation of pornography, in rape, prostitution, child sex abuse, sexual violence. And even the grandes dames of feminism could hold out little hope: Germaine Greer promised that once they reached the menopause, they would be free of all those troublesome desires anyway. + But then there were the letters from young women: women who listened to Madonna tell them that they were young and bold and they could do what they liked. Madonna, they thought, was heralding a new sexual revolution: if only we were more open and honest about our desires, the world would be less screwed up. Older women, however, knew that we'd been this route before and it was a hiding to nothing. + I spent two years trying to find out if anything of value had emerged from the sexual revolution. I charted the social, political, cultural and technological forces that have informed the past 30 years. I concluded that, yes, of course there had been solid and hard-won gains, such as the 1967 Abortion Act, the availability of contraception to single women, the new choices that do not trap women young into marriage and babies. And feminism itself had grown out of the sexual revolution, in response to and revolt against it. + And yet male sexuality still dominates our culture, and even what we mean by sexual. The most shocking aspect of Nancy Friday's recent book, Women On Top, is the way in which women seem to have incorporated male pornography into their sexual fantasies. Even our unconscious has been structured by the male libido. + Lesbians have argued that women can make no sexual accommodation with men; that women's sexual problems would be solved if we loved other women. As someone burdened by heterosexuality, I believe that to write off men as irredeemable is to concede the defeat of feminism itself. + What we need is a new sexual revolution: to overthrow the cult of the young girl as the single symbol of sexuality in our society; to allow women, as well as men, the choice of having sexual partners throughout their lives; to address the political issues that trap women in loveless or violent or coercive sexual relationships. It's a big agenda but without hope that the future of sexuality might be female, we embittered old feminists leave no legacy but that of betrayal. + Linda Grant's Sexing The Millennium: A Political History Of The Sexual Revolution is published tomorrow by HarperCollins at pounds 12.99. + +LOAD-DATE: September 22, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +265 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 23, 1993 + +TWILIGHT ZONE'S NEW DAWN; +Hot flushes, hormone deficiency . . . must we think of the menopause as a disease of modern life? Or has it evolved because it carries benefits for both women and their kin? + +BYLINE: GAIL VINES + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 14 + +LENGTH: 1379 words + + + PUNDITS often claim that it is our brains that set us apart from the rest of animal creation, but what is really distinctive about humans is the menopause. Unique among our mammalian relatives, women shut down fertility when they are still hale and hearty. A woman's fertility typically tails off during her 40s, and disappears altogether as the ovaries stop releasing any mature eggs round about the age of 50. Women stop reproducing in their prime. + How are we to make sense of this peculiar phenomenon? One answer is to see it as a pathology of modern civilisation, an accidental side effect of living longer. This view became popular in the 1960s, largely thanks to the proselytising fervour of an ambitious Brooklyn gynaecologist, Robert Wilson, who became the doyen of the pharmaceuticals industry as he promoted universal oestrogen therapy for older women. "The unpalatable truth must be faced that all postmenopausal women are castrates," Wilson told his medical colleagues some 30 years ago. + Author of a best-seller called Forever Feminine, Wilson referred to the menopause as a hormone "deficiency disease" and listed 26 awesome symptoms, ranging from frigidity to suicide, which only his oestrogen "youth pill" could avert. Wilson's language now seems old-fashioned but his ideas aren't. One of Britain's leading exponents of hormone replacement therapy, John Stevenson, at the Wynn Institute in London, recently remarked that women are "hormone deficient for a third of their lives". + Nature had not intended women to outlive their fertility, these doctors argue. The menopause is best viewed as a "novelty" that arose as "an artefact of human civilisation", concludes Roger Gosden, Britain's leading ovarian researcher, in his Biology Of The Menopause. The Encyclopaedia Britannica warns that older women may need "medical management" in the form of "education to reduce fear and anxiety" as well as periodic physical examinations and oestrogen hormones. The menopause is even listed in the International Classification of Diseases. But must we think of it as a disease of modern life? Evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives threaten to undermine this particular medical diagnosis. + It looks increasingly plausible that the menopause has evolved because it carries benefits for both women and their kin - because, in the language of evolutionary science, it is "adaptive". A set of mathematical models, recently published by Alan Rogers, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, portray the menopause as an eminently sensible evolutionary strategy. + Rogers's work is a sophisticated reworking of the "grandmother hypothesis". This is the notion that a woman maximises the perpetuation of her genetic legacy if, in middle age, she stops having children and concentrates on investing in her last born and her grandchildren. + Rogers tried out and then discarded the idea that menopause might have evolved as a natural contraceptive because older women are more likely to die in childbirth. Relying on data from Taiwan in 1906, a well-documented agrarian society, he argues that rates of death in childbirth are not high enough, even as women age, to account for the evolution of menopause. Even a tenfold increase in the observed death rates makes no difference to his conclusion. So, as zoologist Linda Partridge concluded in a review of Rogers's work, "the peculiar hazards of human birth seem unlikely to account for the existence of the menopause". + Menopause becomes much more plausible in evolutionary terms once Rogers adds into his model the adverse effects of continuing fertility on the care of existing children and grandchildren. If you reckon that a newborn child would significantly reduce the care of these relations for at least three years, menopause becomes an evolutionary winner. + Rogers's models are, by his own reckoning, open to all manner of critique. What is most interesting about them is that they force researchers to put their cards on the table, and make explicit their assumptions. + Linda Partridge, at the University of Edinburgh, argues that Rogers could make an even stronger case for menopause if he took into account that a postmenopausal woman is more likely to die than a younger woman simply as a result of ageing. If she remained fertile, each new child would be more likely to be orphaned at a dangerously tender age. Moreover, very young children are much more physically demanding than older ones, draining her resources further. All this tilts the evolutionary odds towards menopause, Partridge argues. Menopause has been thrust upon human women - and no one else - as a result of the "protracted, costly and widely dispensed care of descendants". If men were left holding the baby, + they too might have evolved a menopause. + Yet does all this evolutionary theory tell the full story? Anthropologists too have recently rediscovered the menopausal woman, and the cultural accounts they bring back from the bush seem to jar with the "grandmother hypothesis". Menopausal women outside youth-crazed Western cultures rarely fit our stereotype of the kindly stay-at-home grannie looking after her grown-up children's kids. In a remarkable range of different cultures, middle-aged women freed of reproductive tasks are at the height of their social and political powers. Far from being the domestic skivvies of their high-powered executive children, these women at last can command the labour of their juniors. In many cultures, their ability to delegate chores allows them to travel more widely and to engage in political affairs, says Karen Sacks, anthropologist at the University of California. + As a result, women in Mayan villages actually look forward to the menopause, according to Yewoubdar Beyene, another University of California anthropologist. When she asked women about hot flushes, and other menopausal symptoms much talked about in our culture, she drew blank stares. "People thought I was out of my mind going around asking these questions," she says. + Jane Lancaster, a biologically minded anthropologist at the University of Mexico, has argued that such women have a painless menopause because their continual childbearing and breastfeeding have altered their hormones: high levels of the hormones prolactin and oxytocin in breastfeeding women might mask the hormonal fluctuations around menopause. + But on the Greek island of Evia, Beyene studied peasant women who have roughly the same number of children as American women, and she found that they too suffered few of the symptoms linked to menopause in the West. Like their Mayan counterparts, the Greek women also had few negative notions about menopause - perhaps because their culture does not idealise youth. + "Menopause is part of being a woman, but the menopausal experience is shaped by culture," Beyene argues. In the West, the menopause is laden with very different symbolic meanings. "Current Western ideology emphasises loss, especially of sexual attractiveness, leading to depression and withdrawal," says Margaret Lock, of McGill University in Montreal. + In many cultures, menopause does not signal the end of a woman's sexual interest - quite the reverse among the Lusi of Papua New Guinea, the Garifuna of Belize and !Kung women of Botswana. This can make the anthropologist's life a hazardous one, as Richard Lee of the University of Toronto recounts: + "I well remember the day that five !Kung women aged 50 to 65 jumped a male co-worker, Richard Katz, and myself, with shouts of hilarity, and tried to force us to have intercourse with them. However, our virtue was preserved by the timely intervention of a Herero neighbour and by the fact that we were all laughing too hard to continue." + Perhaps, in the end, menopause evolved because old women just want to have fun. + Sources: Alan Rogers (1993) Why Menopause?, Evolutionary Ecology, 7: 406-420. Linda Partridge (1993) Menopause For Thought, Nature, 364: 386. Virginia Kerns and Judith Brown (eds) In Her Prime: New Views Of Middle-aged Women 2nd edition, Urbana: University of Illinois + Press, 1992. + Gail Vines is the author of Raging Hormones, published by Virago on September 30, pounds 6.99. + +LOAD-DATE: September 23, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +266 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 23, 1993 + +EYEWITNESS: BOUNCING BACK ON THE CREST OF A COUP + +BYLINE: JONATHAN STEELE IN MOSCOW + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 1 + +LENGTH: 459 words + + + SOME call him the Pumpkin. The even less respectful say "the Fat Boy". Whichever nickname fits best, there was no mistaking the beam on the rotund and ruddy face of Yegor Gaidar yesterday. + Re-appointed to Boris Yeltsin's administration only last week, the architect of Russia's economic reforms was holding his first press conference since his return. + What better time to do it than the morning after the President's constitutional coup? "You can argue over whether this was the right moment, or whether he should have acted straight after the referendum in April," Mr Gaidar reflected. + Mr Gaidar is chairman of a recently formed group called Elections-Russia. Its main purpose was to push Mr Yeltsin towards dissolving parliament. The next is to get slates of candidates ready in constituencies, though Mr Gaidar will be stepping down as chairman. + "The situation is stable in most regions of the country," he smiled. "None of the efforts to drag people into protest meetings is working." + His delight was justified. Outside in Moscow's streets, it was business as usual. The kiosks were open. The rows of elderly women, holding up Pepsi bottles, cigarette packets and plastic bags for sale, stood glumly by the railway stations, as they have done since the reforms started. + Those behind the dissolution of parliament seemed to outnumber opponents by about two to one. "Good thing," said one young man hurrying past the Barrikadnaya Metro Station, not far from the White House where the anti-Yeltsin pickets' protests were being ignored. + "The time had come for Yeltsin to act," said Sergei Cherkazov, an electrician. The market reforms meant you have to work harder now, he added. "In the past I had no choice. Now everything depends on you, whether you earn your money legally or not. At least it's up to you. That means a kind of freedom." + Vera Popova, a veteran of the 1991 putsch protest, virtually exploded when I asked for her view of Mr Yeltsin's action. "He's a criminal. He's broken the oath he swore to defend the constitution. We had so much hope. Now we're returning to a new Stalin." + The rarest thing yesterday was a centrist line. One eventually emerged in the person of Grigory Yavlinsky, the economist who put together the "Grand Bargain" in 1990, an offer of western aid in return for market reforms. + "You cannot support either side unconditionally," he said. Parliament had behaved irresponsibly by appointing Alexander Rutskoi as president, but Mr Yeltsin's decision was clearly illegal. His main fear was that it would lead to a further loosening of the Russian Federation. + But on a day of varying images, it was the smile on the face of the Gaidar which remained the clearest. + +LOAD-DATE: September 23, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +267 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 27, 1993 + +TELEVISION + +BYLINE: NANCY BANKS-SMITH + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 7 + +LENGTH: 658 words + + + WHEN Kinsey brought out his deafening report on sex, our attitude, he said, was that the British didn't do things like that. It would not be safe to assume that MeTV: The Future Of Television (BBC2) really isn't us. On Friday BSkyB will start showing Barry Diller's shopping channel 24 hours a day. + Apart from religion and pornography on TV, it was shopping which gripped my attention in America this year. There seemed no moment of the day or night when elderly women were not snapping up showy jewellery on shopping channels. As the Marilyn Monroe lookalike presenter said, panting, "A cascade ring! Look at the rubies and diamonds! Oh, that's breathtaking. It's just a stunning, stunning ring." This was true. It could have felled a buffalo with one blow. + Barry Diller, who once ran Paramount, was introduced to television selling by his good friend, Diane von Furstenberg and anyone who doubles your money is a good friend. When he saw the selling floor at QVC (Quality, value and convenience), he said "My God!" He bought QVC, QVC bought HSC, its cheap and cheerful rival, and American women it seems, will buy anything. + Diane was to be observed selling one of her dresses, a little number in exploding begonias. I would really love to see it in a large size and, of course, the future of interactive TV is that the viewer will be able to call up anything they want. Including exploding begonias for the fuller figure. + It is possible to listen to American media pundits talking seamlessly for quite long periods without grasping a single concept. Barry Diller is oddly inarticulate, which is quite endearing, but he did manage to say "We have an enormous future if we don't totally screw it up." The enormous future is fibre optiks, which will allow 5,000 channels to flow through your house. River, stay away from my door. The point of the title, MeTV, is that these unmanageable numbers can be tailored by computer to suit you. Kathryn Montgomery of the Centre for Media Education said, "The corporation that runs this system will be able to know everything about you. Your viewing preferences, what makes you nervous, anything that will provide them with the ammunition to target you personally." Listen to the language. Ammunition. Target. + And suppose a malign computer decided to send you everything that made you nervous? + One charm of radio and TV is tripping over things by accident. Sometimes by cheerful human incompetence you have just got the wrong channel. Never again on MeTV would someone who hated fishing, for example, happen by accident on A Passion For Angling, and feel the goose calling evening wash over him. + At the time it went past like a postman with no message for me, but it turned up again in Royal Celebration (BBC1), a play about a street party on the day the Prince and Princess of Wales were married. The commentary as they left on their honeymoon: "So along the Mall, the escort under the command of Lieutenant Andrew Parker Bowles, Blues and Royals. Prince Charles and Lady Diana stayed with him and his wife, Camilla, in Wiltshire on two occasions at the end of the year. So they're among friends as they ride along the Mall. What a pretty hat!" This did not refer to Lieutenant Parker Bowles's hat, though his, too, was full of feathers. + What a shock you get from life's rear-view mirror. It's as if you had run over someone. + Danny Baker's son, called, reasonably enough, Sonny, turned up on Danny Baker After All (BBC1) to show that any six year old child can do a cereal packet jigsaw in four seconds. Any particularly chipper child called Baker. The infant looked as if Danny Baker had been well scrubbed and shrunk. Otherwise, an identical model. My local has a bar called Ma Baker's Bar, after Danny's gran. A colourful character apparently. How many grandmothers do you know with a bar called after them? The whole thing is genetic, wouldn't you say? + +LOAD-DATE: September 27, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +268 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 28, 1993 + +THE ANGELS OF DEATH; +A new TV film with a health warning: beware the caring killer + +BYLINE: JOHN ILLMAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 19 + +LENGTH: 578 words + + + THE CASE of Beverly Allitt received extensive publicity. The former children's nurse received 13 life sentences in May after killing four children, attempting to murder three more and attacking another nine. But the publicity did not really look beyond Allitt into the darker side of the caring professions. + We still like to think of nurses and doctors as dedicated and heroic. For years we looked to TV to reinforce these stereotypes. Why else were medical soap operas so popular for so long? There is no room for Dr Kildare in the new era of medical glasnost. The new fashion is for gritty realism: witness Casualty (BBC 1). + Even so, Casualty does not defy the traditional stereotypes in the way that Tender Loving Care does. Don't watch it if you are due in hospital on Monday. Small wonder that BBC executives were split over whether or not it should be screened at all. + Dawn French plays Elaine, a nurse. She is bitter, frustrated, disillusioned, tired, overworked, underpaid, undervalued - and bumps off lots of elderly patients. Rosemary Leach plays her ageing sidekick, a care assistant who meekly goes along with it all. Elaine, she believes, is one of the best nurses in the hospital. + This is a bleak, savage play. Producer Louise Panton insists that the theme needs to be publicly debated. I agree that medical controversy should not be kept from public view. Before "medical glasnost", medicine and nursing were the most publicly silent and privately critical of professions. The public was unaware of the great debates which were to determine maternity and the treatmemt of cancer and heart disease. Paternalism decreed patients were best "not worried". + Panton defends Tender Loving Care by pointing to her documentary credits in the 1980s: A Time To Be Born criticised the Britis h maternity system; and Breast Cancer exposed doctors who had withheld information from women. Both generated controversy. Both were justified, she insists. + Both certainly caught the mood of the moment and gave a sharp definition to public debate. Both have stood the test of time. But will Tender Loving Care do likewise? It is impossible to gauge the scale of the problem because "caring killers" like Elaine do not advertise their activities. + The medical newspaper General Practitioner recently reported that surveys had uncovered about 50 physician murderers in the West since the 19th century, excluding the numerous SS doctors involved in medicalised killing in concentration camps. + Elaine in Tender Loving Care becomes chillingly similar to the Nazi doctors who came to view killing as a therapeutic imperative. Writing in General Practitioner, Dr Raj Persaud, of the Institute of Psychiatry, said: "This process is a natural extension of the 'being cruel to be kind' philosophy which is widely adopted by physicians as an essential part of clinical practice. + "Most doctors regularly function at the border of life and death, taking part in abortion and, less overtly, forms of euthanasia. These practices entail an ability to cross over from the territory of preserving life into that of aiding life with relative ease." + The Nazi doctors actually felt "victimised" by their subjects and ended up feeling sorry for themselves rather than guilty for what they had done. Elaine felt hard done by because of the patients she had to look after. + Tender Loving Care will be shown on BBC1, Sunday, October 3, 9.05pm + +LOAD-DATE: September 28, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +269 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 29, 1993 + +HEALTH DRIVE FAILS TO STOP ONE IN 10 CHILDREN SMOKING; +Campaigners claim new figures confirm need for tobacco advertising ban + +BYLINE: EDWARD PILKINGTON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 5 + +LENGTH: 537 words + + + ONE in 10 children still smokes cigarettes despite the Government's efforts to discourage the habit, figures released by the Department of Health showed yesterday. + The disclosure, contained in the annual report of Dr Kenneth Calman, the Chief Medical Officer, was seized upon by the anti-smoking lobby as evidence that the Government's resistance to a ban on tobacco advertising was undermining its health strategy. + It also cast doubt on the department's ability to meet its target, laid down in the Health of the Nation white paper, to reduce child smoking to under 6 per cent by the end of next year. + The figures from the Office of Population, Censuses and Surveys showed that while the prevalence of smoking is on the wane among adults, it has remained stable since 1990 among the 11 to 15 age group - at 10 per cent. + Although teenagers are increasingly aware of the dangers of smoking, this has not translated into practice. The report also highlighted the health divide between the sexes. Men continue to have a lower life expectancy than women. + Dr Calman said the average British man could afford to stop smoking, cut down on alcohol and take more exercise. The frequency with which either sex took exercise was "remarkably low". + The gulf between the health of men and women was most pronounced at two peak age ranges: 14 to 25 and 55 to 70. In the younger bracket suicides accounted for a quarter of unnatural deaths, with men twice as likely to take their own lives as women. There were 5,541 suicides in England last year. + Other areas of concern emphasised in the report were: + - E coli, an organism transmitted in food which causes disease particularly among children and elderly people; + - Tuberculosis, which is still on the increase among the poor in certain areas; + - Mentally disordered offenders who are in danger on leaving hospital of falling into dereliction and crime. + Dr Calman agreed that childhood tobacco use remained too high: "This is is a very critical age. If you prevent children taking up smoking they are unlikely to start later in life." + But he declined to add his name to the campaign for an advertising ban and refused to divulge his advice to Virginia Bottomley, the Health Secretary. Forty health organisations have called for a 10 per cent increase in the price of cigarettes in the November Budget. They estimate this would raise up to pounds 1 billion in revenue, while stinging smokers into quitting. + The Health Education Authority has backed the proposal for tax increases and for an end to tobacco advertising. + Ill-health induced by smoking claims 111,000 lives in Britain every year. + Dr Calman underlined his concern by pointing out that in a sample group of 1,000 young people, of those who eventually died prematurely one would be murdered, six would be involved in fatal car crashes, but 250 would die from smoking-related illnesses. + Dr Calman said: "I do not regard the latest figures as a failure." This contrasted with a statement he made in June in which he warned that on current trends the Health of the Nation targets would not be met. + On the State of the Public Health 1992; HMSO; pounds 15.95. + +LOAD-DATE: September 29, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +270 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 30, 1993 + +WIDER VAT NET 'WOULD HIT POOR HARDEST'; +Clarke's hint at end to exemptions dismays welfare groups and has industry fearful for recovery + +BYLINE: LOUISE JURY AND MAGGIE O'KANE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 522 words + + + A GOVERNMENT threat to widen the VAT net to include food and children's clothing brought cries of outrage from welfare organisations, industry and the opposition yesterday. + Kenneth Clarke, the Chancellor, was accused of trying to cover up the Government's economic failure by making the poor pay, after his speech in Washington to the International Monetary Fund was widely interpreted as signalling an intention to lift VAT exemptions. + Alex Carlile, a member of the Liberal Democrat Treasury team, said such a move would clearly hit the poor hardest. "I thought that Mr Clarke intended to break away from the Thatcherite view that the poor are fair game." + Gordon Brown, the shadow chancellor, said: "Yet again the Conservatives are expecting people to pay for their economic mistakes irrespective of ability to pay." + Industry and welfare groups said extending VAT to items such as food, children's clothes, and water and sewerage would hit the poor, dent economic recovery and cost jobs. + "We are not talking about luxuries here, we are talking about 'buy or die' necessities," a spokesman for the charity Help The Aged said. + The temptation to extend VAT to food, books and water is considerable. At full rate, it would raise about pounds 17.9 billion a year. + By comparison, adding a penny to the basic rate of income tax would bring in only pounds 1.6 billion, at a time when the Government's public sector borrowing requirement is a record pounds 50 billion this year. The impact on spending of an extension of VAT would be comparatively small, said Peter Jenkins, partner at accountants Ernst and Young. + "To say the consumer will be hard-hit would be overdoing it. None of [the possible changes] will be as great as the fuel and power change. That was the most regressive change he could make. It hits charities and old people." + Ruth Evans, director of the state-funded National Consumer Council said: "When you tax essential goods - and fuel, food and water bills are essential - they will always bear most heavily on the poor. There is already clear evidence showing that the poorest families simply don't have enough money for a proper diet." + Mr Jenkins said the Chancellor's comments suggested extending VAT to more goods was the clear preferred option for the November Budget. + He said the Treasury was likely to have to introduce a second band at a reduced rate, probably of around 8 per cent. + In its pre-Budget statement yesterday, the Confederation of British Industry urged ministers to resist the temptation of tax increases which would jeopardise economic recovery. + - Imposing VAT on fuel will be less effective in achieving environmental objectives than the carbon tax proposed by the European Commission, and will leave poorer families worse off, according to a study published today by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, writes Roger Cowe. + Compensating poorer energy users will also cost the Government at least a quarter of the revenue raised, limiting the benefit to the Exchequer to little more than pounds 2 billion. + Leader comment, page 23 + +LOAD-DATE: October 1, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +271 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +September 30, 1993 + +EYEWITNESS: BROLLIES AND BARRICADES CHALLENGE YELTSIN'S BATONS + +BYLINE: DAVID HEARST IN MOSCOW + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 24 + +LENGTH: 703 words + + + "SHAME! Shame!" It was an odd war-cry but these were odd warriors - mainly middle-aged men and women with brollies and shopping bags, and even one mother with her child in a pram - all pressed up against two lines of riot shields. + As the 500-strong crowd was pushed back from one of the side streets leading to the White House, the besieged seat of Russia's parliament where MPs have been given until Monday to relinquish the building, there was the same mass shuffling of feet that you can hear on the Moscow metro, a sound devoid of chatter, giggles or normal human discourse. Just a mass of people pushed and pushing in silent determination. + As the first snow of the Russian winter began to fall, an elderly woman, pressed against a police truncheon, turned around and said: "So this is how we live?" + Someone got knocked over. We couldn't see who. There was the hollow sound of a truncheon hitting human bodies. The air was filled with screams, and abuse rained down on the expressionless faces of the troops. "Fascists! Dictators! Prosecute Yeltsin!" The troops stopped pushing and the crowd was left on the streets. + They stood in a small line, blocking Krasnaya Presniya street. A car screamed up to a toothless pensioner and braked. He hit the bonnet with a rolled up umbrella. Someone dragged a metal rubbish bin and placed it at the pensioner's feet. Just as quickly, metal railings and steel sheets appeared and were formed into a barricade. + Rows started with passers-by. Groups formed around anyone with a notebook: "They call us hooligans on our own television, but do we look like hooligans? I am a painter; he is a worker," said one man. + "They are all the same: Khasbulatov, Yeltsin, Rutskoi," said Svetlana Kurdiranshova. "But this is our parliament, our laws, the only laws we have got and we have to defend them." + A man in military uniform popped up in the crowd. Fifty yards away, interior ministry troops were massing to clear the barricade. "I am not going to tell you my name, because if I did I would be retired early. I am a major in the army. There are no sons and daughters of businessmen or the administration in the army. There are the children of workers. And if they knew what was going on in Moscow, they would be here behind this barricade. And then there would be blood." + By this time both sides of the street were clogged with traffic. Articulated lorries tried to turn around. A foreign diplomat's car tried to pass through, but thought better of it and backed away. Silently a line of riot shields cleared the crowd, kicking the metal bins down for the third time in 24 hours. + The women screamed abuse. They are called the "ladies in the knitted berets" and two years ago they faced the tanks, screaming for democracy, Boris Yeltsin and the end of communism. Yesterday they were nose to nose with riot shields and could not contain their rage at what the "demokrati", a word spat out with venom, had done to the country. + Two 17-year-old women, wearing smart Western macs, stood by unimpressed: "You call these people intelligent?", Marina said. One of the knitted beret brigade turned on her. "What money do you live on, then?" Another replied: "They are probably prostitutes." + Marina stood her ground: "My father is a plant director in Podolski and my mother works in a kindergarten" - as if this information was enough to flatten the highest of barricades. + The two girls were students "in flower arranging", one said proudly. + "So you know the price of things, on a grant of 8,000 roubles ($ 8) do you? You say that 8,000 roubles is enough to buy food and that you can live off that?" the older woman snarled. She had won the argument, implying, probably rightly, that the two girls lived off handouts from their parents. + The girls stood arguing, symbols of the new Russia that Yeltsin wants to promote. The old women turned their backs. The police cleared the barricade. "It will be here again tonight," jeered the crowd. + All this took place outside a metro station called Barricadnaya. I asked someone why. "Oh this is where the 1905 revolution started," came the nonchalant reply. + MPs get deadline, page 10 + +LOAD-DATE: October 1, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +272 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 4, 1993 + +EYEWITNESS: ELDERLY BRAVE BULLETS TO CHEER ON REBELS + +BYLINE: RICHARD BALMFORTH IN MOSCOW + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 1 + +LENGTH: 544 words + + + THOUSANDS of anti-government demonstrators cheered opposition forces who laid siege to Moscow's Ostankino television centre last night. + As defenders of the building and its attackers exchanged withering automatic fire, elderly women circulated among onlookers crouched on the street in the dark, handing out bottles to make Molotov cocktails. "Come on. We've got to help our children," said one trying to thrust a bottle into my hands. + Up to 3,000 people - communists and nationalists - converged by bus outside the Ostankino television studios on the northern outskirts. Many carried iron cudgels and riot shields seized from troops of the so-called OMON special forces in earlier fighting near the White House parliament building. They ended up using them not to storm the OMON defenders of the television station but to cower behind as bullets flew. + One terrifying explosion sent onlookers rolling on a grass verge. When they picked themselves up, a red-faced old woman smelling heavily of drink, who had sat unmoved, said: "It's all over children. Get up." + Many supporters carried red communist placards and called out slogans belonging to the bygone Soviet era. As gunfire crashed around, one old woman crouched behind a tree, her head covered in her hands with only a small red flag of the old Soviet Union sticking up. + But many others had come simply out of curiosity - a sideshow for an evening out. One young woman in designer jeans and make-up crouched in an embrace with her lover. "What are they doing now, Borya?" she asked as gunfire crackled from the building. + Across town at Sovietskaya Square, where the pro-Yeltsin supporters gathered, the crowd numbered 5,000 to 10,000 yesterday evening. "I'd have come earlier, if I had known where to go," said one middle-aged man who had defended the White House in August 1991. + Only a dozen men with arm bands stood in front of the gates to the Moscow Soviet, organising men into groups to protect the building. The crowd let cars pass freely. A group of boys, who had attempted to build a barricade out of planks across the street, were dissuaded by the crowd. "No one here has any weapons," said a women standing at the foot of Dolgoruky's statue. On the plinth, a young man was handing out blue, white and red badges to a crowd of boys. "Instead of hand grenades," he joked. + "I don't know if I would fight for Yeltsin. I'm here for peace," said one 17-year-old, pinning on his badge. He and his friend had been out for a walk and had come to Sovietskaya Square to see what was going on. Another man, standing apart from the crowd, asked: "Is it true that they've hanged Yeltsin?" He had just arrived from the country. + Support for democracy and the reform programme rather than direct support for Yeltsin had brought most of the crowd. + In much of the rest of central Moscow, it was business as usual. At Tverskaya metro station people stood selling kittens and puppies. In Pushkin Square the street portrait artists still had customers. The only sign that anything was happening was that McDonald's closed early and the crowds in the square had disappeared. + Richard Balmforth is a Reuter correspondent. Additional reporting by Isobel Montgomery. + +LOAD-DATE: October 5, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +273 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 4, 1993 + +POLL TAX DEBT 'PUTS SICK AND ELDERLY' IN JAIL + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 630 words + + + A THOUSAND people a year, most of whom are mentally ill or elderly, are being jailed for poll tax arrears, according to welfare rights campaigners. + The "medieval" legal provisions of community charge legislation are to blame, they say. + The poll tax was abolished last April, but its legacy is hitting some of the most vulnerable in the community, who are being sentenced to up to 90 days. + Some arrears amount to as little as pounds 10. Welfare rights lawyers predict that the thousands of poll tax cases will take years to wend their way through the court system. + More than 11 million liability orders have been issued against people who have failed to respond to councils' final demands. The latest Home Office figures show that by last March 39,000 people had received committal warrants for poll tax arrears which carry the threat of a prison sentence. + The average sentence imposed is 37 days. Campaigners estimate that well over 2,000 people have now served jail terms. + A solicitor, Richard Wise, is handling 200 cases for people he has managed to get freed on bail and for whom he has won leave to seek a judicial review. His workload represents 10 per cent of all judicial review cases in the country. + He expects many cases to take up to two years to get through the courts, each costing the taxpayer about pounds 20,000. + "Bolton magistrates court has sent 250 people to prison since January," he said. "Ninety per cent of these people should never have been sent to prison." + Poll tax arrears can be deducted from income support but not from other benefits such as pensions and invalidity benefit. So it is the mentally ill, the sick and disabled and the elderly whom councils are chasing through the courts. + The other most vulnerable group are married women financially dependent on their husbands. + "I deal with about three women a week from Drake Hall women's prison, Stafford," said Mr Wise. "In a significant minority of cases where the relationship is not so good, husbands won't give the wife the pounds 5 a week she needs to pay off the arrears, and the woman is arrested and taken to prison.' + Under the poll tax legislation, councils cannot cancel arrears, as they could under the old rates system, even though the cost of recovering the debt far exceeds whatever payment they might hope to get. + There is no legal aid for cases in magistrates courts. This becomes available, enabling the person in arrears to get help from a solicitor, only when the case goes to appeal - by which time the person could be in prison. + "Some of the things which have been going on don't fit into any concept of English justice," said Alan Murdie, a barrister and founding member of Captive, the campaign for those jailed for poll tax arrears. "I haven't seen one committal hearing where the magistrates have used the law properly. There is meant to be a proper means inquiry by the court before someone is sent to prison." + Dave Nellist, former Labour MP and now a welfare rights adviser, said people were borrowing money and going into another form of debt to pay off arrears. "To use fear of imprisonment or the bailiff to recover debt is medieval." + Mr Wise said people aged under 21 were being jailed for poll tax arrears, even though the legislation says custodial sentences should not be given to this age group. + He cited the case of a youth, previously sentenced to 26 hours' community service for handling pounds 4,000 worth of stolen goods, who got a 90-day prison sentence for poll tax arrears of pounds 350. + The Home Office said yesterday it did not collect separate data on poll tax arrears. A spokesman for the Department of the Environment said such prosecutions did not come within its remit. + +LOAD-DATE: October 5, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +274 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 6, 1993 + +TORIES AT BLACKPOOL: FULL SPEED ON RAIL SALE, MINISTER URGED; +MacGregor pressed to ignore opposition to BR privatisation - Home Secretary points to absent fathers as major cause of crime + +BYLINE: PATRICK WINTOUR, POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 605 words + + + THE Transport Secretary, John MacGregor, came under sustained Tory party pressure yesterday not only to brush aside public opposition to rail privatisation, but also to overturn the Lords vote to allow British Rail to bid for privatised rail franchises. + Mr MacGregor said peers had been badly misguided in thinking that his plans would have prevented BR managers from bidding. If British Rail was allowed to bid, he warned, it would deter BR managers from bidding for lines because they would fear unfair competition. With a group of Tory backbenchers threatening to defy their own whip if the Government decided this month in the Commons to overturn the Lords, Mr MacGregor refused to reveal his precise tactics. But he acknowledged the strong mood of delegates. "It's quite clear today that there is very strong support at conference for overturning the peers' amendment." + In his own speech to conference, he urged delegates to have faith and confidence in his plans: "Every big privatisation was criticised when it was going through Parliament. It was opposed apparently in the polls and certainly by the Labour Party, who pledged themselves to reverse it. Yet every one has been such a success that the Labour leadership has been forced to change their tune and privatisation has been copied all round the world." + Mr MacGregor sought to soothe doubters saying: "The taxpayers will continue to pay subsidies for socially necessary lines. We will maintain the national network. Pension benefits, safety standards and benefits of through-ticketing will be safeguarded. Unreasonable fare increases will not be allowed. Rail discount cards for the elderly, the young and disabled will be maintained. A national timetable will be published." + Privatisation was right, he said, because it would encourage innovation, new investment and involvement, as well as brushing aside outdated rule books policed by leftwing unions. + Not a single speaker opposed rail privatisation, with one urging Mr MacGregor to show greater enthusiasm for the scheme. Nicholas Wood-Dow said: "We in Britain need a smart, safe rail service run by highly motivated staff which is a pleasure, rather than penance to travel on." Privatised services would be "smarter, swifter, faster, smoother and safer". + Turning to the Lords' amendment, he said it had been passed "in the belief that it would allow those who know most about running railways to bid. It does not. It blocks the very people who know most because it blocks the in-house bids from BR's own employees. Secretary of State, this amendment must be overturned when the bill returns to the Commons to give in-house employees any chance or interest in preparing their bids." + David Campbell-Bannerman said privatisation would give British Rail a fresh start and warned that the Lords amendment would deprive the most enterprising staff the chance to run their own affairs: "It means nationalisation by the backdoor and no Tory should touch it." + Mr MacGregor also revealed that a public consultation on his road pricing green paper showed overwhelming opposition to motorists being required to buy permits to use motorways, although there was support for electronic tolling, so long as the income went back into the road programme. Mr MacGregor said no final decision had been made, but conceded the elctronic tolling option would take longer to implement than a permit. + Mr MacGregor also said that he would not be allowing any more public money to be put into local authority airport capital projects, as part of a drive to make them privatise the airports. + +LOAD-DATE: October 6, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +275 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 7, 1993 + +NATIONALISTS CHALLENGE MILOSEVIC + +BYLINE: BARNEY PETROVIC IN BELGRADE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 530 words + + + PRESIDENT Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia's problems will mount today when extreme Serbian nationalists table a no-confidence motion against his Serbian Socialist Party government. + The challenge is being headed by Vojislav Seselj, the Serbian extremist leader and Milosevic ally-turned-rival, whose Serbian Radical Party's votes are essential to keep the minority government in power. + The socialists have 105 of the 250 seats and have kept power through an informal pact with the Radicals, who have 79 seats. + Mr Milosevic has recently turned on his erstwhile ally to nip any challenge to his power in the bud. + Last week, the socialists turned on Mr Seselj, threatening to release police dossiers alleged to prove him to be a war criminal and confirming reports that he runs a private army blamed for atrocities. + To offset the no confidence threat, Mr Milosevic has been wooing the fragmented opposition parties. The main opposition party, the Serbian Renewal Movement of Vuk Draskovic, has said it will abstain. + A propaganda campaign through the official media has been unleashed aimed at discrediting Mr Seselj. But he has hit back, saying that the socialists were upset at the prospect of being thrown out of power. + While there is no suggestion that Mr Milosevic's grip on power is threatened, the economic problems wrought by two years of war and 18 months of sanctions and the world's highest inflation appears to be boosting Mr Seselj's popular support. + Mr Milosevic, having essentially won the wars in Croatia and Bosnia through Serbian proxies in both countries, is desperate to have sanctions lifted. He had assurances that they would be lifted if the Geneva peace plan for Bosnia, which he backs, was signed. + But last week the Bosnian parliament rejected the settlement, delaying any agreement and any progress on lifting sanctions. + The United Nations Security Council this week set new conditions for lifting them, implicitly linking their removal not just to a Bosnian settlement, but also to the situation in Croatia, where Serb rebels block implementation of the UN peace plan. + Mr Milosevic was furious with the security council decision and threatened to boycott future negotiations. + With Serbian inflation running at a monthly rate of 2,000 per cent, industry virtually at a standstill and two in three workers effectively jobless, the government's response, after starting to print billion-dinar notes, was to strike six zeroes off dinar denominations two weeks ago. + It is an economic policy that is of little comfort to ordinary Serbs. Food rationing has been introduced in a country where the average monthly wage is pounds 10, or enough to buy a pound of meat a week. Despite the rationing, even essential goods guaranteed by the government are missing from the empty shops. + In Belgrade on average every day an old age pensioner commits suicide because of privation. Local newspapers reported that an 83-year-old retired engineer who could only afford a bottle of brandy and a bottle of petrol, drank the brandy, summoning up the courage to douse himself with the petrol before immolating himself. + +LOAD-DATE: October 7, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +276 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 8, 1993 + +HAVE HANDBAG, WILL HIT BACK + +BYLINE: SUZANNE MOORE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 5 + +LENGTH: 1217 words + + + SO SHE IS back. Like Freddy Kreuger, like Banquo's ghost, like a mongoose hypnotising a snake, the not-so-repressed Lady Thatcher returns. And the political commentators mix their metaphors because no one metaphor quite captures the power of the woman, the power of the myth. + She shall go to the ball, they say, but this is no Cinderella awaiting her prince. As Major well knows, her standing ovation will always be bigger than his, so she must not be allowed to stand alone on the party platform. The back seat driver must never again be allowed to take the wheel. For, three years on, Thatcher has, according to Nigel Lawson, not come to terms with the manner of her leaving. She is hurt, betrayed, and although the Tory men only gesture towards it, we all know hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. + Three years on, though, I wonder if any of us is any closer to coming to terms with it. What role did we want her to assume? What role is there for an elder stateswoman? Did we really expect her to devote more time to her family? Or to become a cross between Ted Heath and the Queen Mother? She could have smiled beatifically and handed over the baton to a chosen one like a saintly grandma. But this does not suit her, for the doting elderly relative who sees no bad in her progeny is an entirely female part and one she has never wanted to play. + "We are a grandmother" she once said, that infamous "we" somehow turning a personal event into a political institution. Thatcher was always able to invoke her own experience as a woman, a mother, in such a way that glossed over the reality of family life for most women. She could domesticise politics - it's all a matter of housekeeping - when her own life wasn't a bit domestic. + The fantasy of family life that has once more gripped the Tories is enormously strong. It can withstand an awful lot of pressu re - and enormous contradictions. On one hand, John Patten can talk about the importance of parent power; on the other, we read that Carol Thatcher is thinking about emigrating because, largely as a result of her own parent's power and indeed policies, she cannot find work here. It is she who will take the place of the prodigal son, Mark, who has now returned from the desert and made good. It is the daughter who admits to not voting Tory in the last election, while the son ties up the big deals for Mummy's memoirs. + Of course, whatever Margaret Thatcher "meant" or means now goes far beyond the realms of her position within her own family but because she so cleverly used the idea of family to prop up the Thatcher myth, it is interesting to see where that has led her. In traditional families, as women age they are allowed a degree of power; they can become grand matriarchs, presiding over their clans or, in this case, the Conservative Party. + Anyone who has watched will know, however, that Thatcher is ambivalent about such a role, as she has been about every traditional feminine role. She is, on the contrary, a patriarch. Her heroes are her father and Winston Churchill. Her great strength is in bringing together masculine and feminine. As Beatrix Campbell wrote in her fascinating book The Iron Ladies: "She has not feminised politics . . . but she has offered feminine endorsement to patriarchal power." + Or, to put it crudely, as that other material girl Madonna did: "Pussy rules the world, but I have a dick in my brain." Thatcher is resentful of being tucked away to be brought out like a mascot for the adoring masses, for "the dick" demands a place in public life. Home is still not where her heart is. If she cannot be the giving matriarch, there is the terrifying possibility she will turn into the other archetype of the old spurned woman: the mother-in-law who knows the dirty secrets of her offspring, the witch who will destroy what she can no longer control. + For all the fuss about the damaging effects of her memoirs, the tedious in-fighting between newspapers, is anyone really surprised at what has been revealed so far? Did anyone think she would have thought any of her predecessors good enough? That she thought half her Cabinet intellectual drifters, even buffoons, is really no great shock. We all think that anyway. + The credence we give to her ability to destroy the entire government is a testament not to her actual political power but to the pull she still has over something that politics seeks so desperately to deny. The symbolic. The unconscious. + No better example is there than the continuous and barmy obsession with her handbag. Handbags are part of the great mystery of women. What on earth do they keep in there? What has she got in hers? Well, you never can tell. According to this paper, it is a cash register. The Sun, meanwhile, says: "That shiny black handbag is as lethal as ever." The Mirror captions her picture with: "Lady Thatcher checks her handbag is loaded as she is driven through the rain to appear as a star guest." + Now, you may not accept the Freudian interpretation that handbags and purses represent female genitals but you have to admit that we are pretty fixated on what she's got inside her bag. While senior Tories are clearly horrified at what might be unleashed, the party faithful are still aroused by her particular brand of passion. + Yet if Thatcherism were a coherent ideological project, a response to a particular historical situation, the question still remains: can it survive without her? Its supposed softening, its transmutation into "Majorism", is entirely unconvincing because, for all its social concern, it still ruthlessly seeks to blame the victims of the past 14 years for all that we can see has gone wrong. And that surely is more frightening than anything that might be revealed in Thatcher's book or even, God forbid, in the contents of her handbag. + FutherMoore + - "POWER is an aphrodisiac" may be very reassuring to revolting MPs and businessmen, but you do have to wonder at women who are turned on by such small amounts of "power" as to be ridiculous. At least Henry Kissinger, who coined the phrase, was by any standards a powerful man. Which is more than can be said for Stephen Norris, latest cheating MP. His position, apart from keeper of three mistresses, was junior transport minister. Can anyone think of a job title with less erotic charge than that? + - I LOVE the way men still feel entitled to prescribe correct feminine behaviour. I found out this week that something I had no desire to do anyway is undignified for women. Playing the didgeridoo. Thank you, Rolf Harris, for sharing that incredible insight. And now Tony Parsons, in Arena, tells me I shouldn't be doing something I do all the time. Drink alcohol. "Why should a woman never get drunk? Because being drunk makes you loud, obnoxious, sentimental, self-pitying and stupid. And most women are like that when they are sober." Cheers, Tony, mine's a pint. Oh, and pass the didgeridoo . . . + - THANK God for some sanity. Margaret Jagger, whose fiance was killed recently in Florida, has said the boys apprehended for it are too young to be executed. "I don't agree with capital punishment; neither did Gary." Braver words than any spoken in the hang-'em-high hysteria of the Tory party conference. + +LOAD-DATE: October 8, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +277 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 8, 1993 + +REVAMP IN THE VALLEYS; +The quality of housing in Wales's former mining villages is being transformed + +BYLINE: ENA KENDALL + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 21 + +LENGTH: 789 words + + + BUDDUG EVANS lives in poets' corner, part of the former mining village of Cwmaman where steep rows of houses honour Byron, Wordsworth, Burns and Spenser. Hers is Milton Street, a terrace built of sombre grey and brown pennat sandstone known locally as Cockshott rock after the band of stone in a nearby quarry from which it was hacked 100 years ago. + Cwmaman is in the Cynon Valley, a place rarely mentioned without the fact that it contains the Tower Colliery, the last working coal mine in South Wales, and that it is one of the poorest parts of Britain, with 60 per cent of the 67,000 population on incomes below pounds 4,000 a year. + Tower is rumoured to be under threat. If it goes, unemployment, now 21 per cent, could balloon to 40 per cent, and the valley's struggle for economic salvation could be even more savagely impeded. What silver lining may be glimpsed is an environmental rebirth following the death of heavy industry. It includes the rehabilitation of thousands of 19th century houses built cheaply by cottage companies at the height of the late Victorian mining boom. + Milton Street, where Buddug (pronounced Beethe-ig, Welsh for Boadicea) was born 80 years ago, is a row of three-bedroomed houses which cost about pounds 90 each to build in the 1890s. There are thousands of such terraces in the valleys where working class owner occupation, the highest in Britain, is deep-rooted. Many people bought their houses cheaply from the mining companies, a process accentuated when the NCB sold off its properties. Owners too poor to maintain them found their houses falling into disrepair. + The 1981 census showed that 15 per cent of houses in the Cynon Valley were without such amenities as plumbed-in kitchen sinks and washbasins, fixed baths or showers, hot and cold water, flush lavatories. By 1984 a council survey of each of the 20,000 private houses in the borough disclosed some of the worst housing in Britain, findings so staggering that the Welsh Office would not accept them until its own survey confirmed them. + The cost of tackling the backlog of disrepair was then estimated at pounds 64 million. Though in a poor state, many of the houses were substantial and well worth saving, and the local authority wisely decided to rehabilitate them rather than knock them down. + Since 1986, huge amounts of public money, pounds 46 million so far, have been pumped into tackling disrepair in this valley alone. The number of unfit houses is down to 3 per cent, most of them occupied by elderly people who cannot face the upheaval involved in repair. The Labour-controlled council takes a pragmatic approach: the Welsh Office, it is generally conceded, has been "pretty good" and a partnership, based on trust, has developed. + Initially, much of the exterior rehabilitation was by "enveloping" when whole streets, 1,200 houses in all, were fitted with new roofs, PVC windows and doors for nothing. But two years ago enveloping was replaced by group repair, seen as a fairer system. Last year, pounds 1.75 million was spent on group repairs to 266 houses, while this year's target of pounds 2 million on 250 houses has been cut to pounds 1 million. + The council selects streets in which there must be at least four houses, consecutively numbered, in a bad state. A meeting is called of the whole street, a quarter of whose residents should be claiming some sort of social security, and they are asked if they would like to take part. + "We can't make them," says Chris King, deputy director of environmental services. "We are looking at 23 schemes, large and small, and only four have dropped out. This tends to happen when we ask people to make a contribution. If their jobs are under threat, they might quite rightly have other priorities. Most people pay something but nobody pays more than 50 per cent and there's a sliding scale with the very poor not paying anything. It's complicated but fair, and houses are targeted to put a shining future back into a neglected area." + Renovation grants deal with interiors and last year pounds 6 million was spent on these, with a projected pounds 8 million this year. Buddug and her sister bought the lease of their house from the NCB in the 1950s and she remembers a small lobby at the back with a bench and a pan for carrying in the water when her three brothers cleaned up in a tin bath after a shift at the coal-face. "And," she adds, "we had a big old grate in the kitchen that I used to black lead after I'd blue-stoned the front doorstep." + Now she has central heating, a terrazzo doorstep and a new front door. A smart green-tiled bathroom has replaced the old lobby and she looks out not on tips but on a wooded hill. + +LOAD-DATE: October 8, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +278 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 8, 1993 + +SKETCH: CURSE OF PRE-MEMOIR TENSION COMES UPON THE LADY OF THE MIRROR + +BYLINE: SIMON HOGGART + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 24 + +LENGTH: 671 words + + + THE Tory Conference rose as one to acclaim its lost leader yesterday. There must have been hundreds cheering in the hall who wondered ruefully just what they had tossed away three careless years ago. + It was pungently nostalgic. The shimmering clothes, the beautifully coiffed blond hair, the gracious smile with the familiar steely glint in those piercing blue eyes. They cheered, whooped and whistled, till it seemed as if the whole conference would grind to a rapturous halt. + Yes, Michael Heseltine's first public appearance since his heart attack was greeted with near dementia. + His reception was noticeably better than the one for Lady Thatcher. It must have been terrifically galling for her. + She arrived at around 10.30. The car drove right into the building. One half-expected it to drive up on to the stage. Dame Wendy Mitchell, the conference chairman (they suffer from serious gender confusion here) announced coyly: "Hold on, ladies and gentlemen, I think we are going to have a visitor." + She appeared on stage and sat next to Dame Basil Feldman, the chap who acts as chairwoman of the Tories' National Union. Oh, there was applause all right, lots of it, but very many people remained seated and much of the clapping was artificially prolonged by her claque of irreconcilables. + The annual arrival is now a fixed event in Britain's calendar of colourful rituals, and is conducted according to time-honoured rules. At one point Lady Thatcher leans over to the chairperson and indicates she would like to hear the debate. Everyone knows this is the signal for the clapping to redouble, though yesterday it actually began to fade. Old people today have no respect for tradition. + The fact is that many of the delegates are very angry indeed about the leaked criticisms of John Major in her book. For her part she is clearly suffering from pre-memoir tension, or PMT. The curse is come upon her, like the Lady of Shalott, who also had trouble with the Mirror. + Cunningly, John Major arrived on the platform half an hour later. A brief handshake (to kiss or not to kiss - always a tricky social teaser, except when you hate the other's guts) and he won far and away the loudest stander of the day. They even stamped on the floor like a herd of stags preparing to rut. + Later Kenneth Clarke made a quiet sort of speech, at times as gentle as any sucking pig. He even cut out a joke: "John Smith is a good name for a pint of beer, but as a prime minister forget it." I do hope Mr Clarke doesn't take all this nonsense about booze too seriously. To us drinkers it's one of his most attractive qualities. Apart from the obligatory support of John Major, the speech was quietly received as well. + There were two theories for this. Possibly, with his threats of higher taxes, he has decided to treat the delegates like grown-ups - always a high-risk strategy at the Tory Conference. + Or else it was a double bluff. A tub-thumping rant would have been seen as a leadership bid, and so disloyal, thus harming his chances of winning the leadership. In order to appear a better man than John Major, he had to make a worse speech. Imagine if your job depended on such calculations, every single day. + Over in the MGM cinema, where The Fugitive is now aptly playing, Norman Lamont was discussing the Budget. This was not his resignation speech. It was even more downbeat than Mr Clarke's. Here was a reformed toad, a chastened toad, a contrite toad. + He did however say there should be no increase in taxes. Across the street Mr Clarke was asked what he thought of that. He chuckled and said: "I remember supporting Norman's last Budget when he increased taxes by pounds 111 2 billion . . ." + That's what I like about the Tories - you get hand-to-hand fighting every day. It's like that controversially violent video game, mortal kombat. They ought to have little captions floating above their heads saying "Finish Him Off!" and then rip out each other's spinal cords. + +LOAD-DATE: October 8, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +279 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 9, 1993 + +HOT FOOD HEADS FOR ICE AGE AS MEALS-ON-WHEELS FACES FRESH CHALLENGES AFTER 50 YEARS OF CARE IN COMMUNITY + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 12 + +LENGTH: 440 words + + + FIFTY years ago this month the first plateful of wartime rations was rushed from a communal kitchen to a housebound pensioner, and meals-on-wheels were born. + More than 200,000 people today rely on meals-on-wheels services for their daily hot meal. The growth of community care means demand is likely to rise sharply. + "If the aim is to keep people living in their own homes instead of going into residential care, the prospect is expansion - though perhaps with delivery of frozen meals, not hot ones," says Mandy Downes, director of food services with the Women's Royal Voluntary Service. + WRVS pioneered meals-on-wheels in 1943 when somebody came up with the bright idea of delivering food prepared at the British Restaurant kitchens staffed by women volunteers. + Delivery was then on foot, bicycle or tricycle. Today, the 68,000 WRVS volunteers involved in meals-on-wheels use usually their own cars, receiving only mileage expenses in return. + The service, the biggest voluntary organisation with 16,000 men among the membership as well as the 124,000 women, has agreements with local authorities to run more than half the local meals-on-wheels operations. + Ms Downes acknowledges there are problems. In some areas, central cooking facilities are limited and the meals go out somewhat earlier, or later, than the target time of between 11.30am and 1.30pm. + "If the food is prepared in a school kitchen, or a residential home, it often has to be done before the meals for the children or residents, which makes it all rather earlier than we would like. + "On the other hand, if you then try to alter it to something you might consider more reasonable, you often have the customers complaining it is too late." + It is also not unknown for meals-on-wheels to be ordered for an elderly person simply because he or she is lonely. + Ms Downes says this was more common until assessments began to be done more thoroughly about five years ago. + "The assessments are much broader now, asking whether the person really needs a hot meal, or a frozen meal, or whether it would be more appropriate to go to a lunch club or just have a shopping service." + Frozen food represents the most likely means of expanding the capacity of meals-on-wheels if demand does grow as expected. + The WRVS recognises there are limits to extending the traditional, hot-meals service. + Ms Downes, who is appealing for more volunteers to come forward, says: "It has got to be looked at carefully: we can't simply deliver double the number of hot meals we are doing now because we just haven't got the people to do so." + +LOAD-DATE: October 11, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +280 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 11, 1993 + +TELEVISION: KICKS FOR FREE + +BYLINE: HUGH HEBERT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 470 words + + + WATCHING Tim Firth's Money For Nothing (BBC1), you don't even think it's about Thatcherism, or the rise and fall of the yuppie, the Me generation, market chicanery or the ghost cash on which billionaires float their bubble reputations. It's straight, greatly enjoyable escapism, and it does for the property boom what Trading Places did for pork belly futures. + Gary is a mature and well scrubbed 16-year-old, a skilled player in classroom business games, whose best friend bets him a cheeseburger he can't become a real millionaire in the half-term holiday. Natural chutzpah and test drives in increasingly expensive cars impress gullible bank managers and greedy estate agents. Until he overbids and gets a baronial old people's home he can neither pay for nor sell, where Lisa the caring, vibrant young nurse turns Gary's thoughts to guess what. And naturally you guess wrong. No teenage sex, we're into classic romantic comedy of the Depression and the war, clean as a Scout's promise. + It's perfectly paced high quality pastiche of those smart Hollywood scripts about comic chancers and curvy innocents - one drink and the girl's flat out, to be gently wrapped and left intact. Gary's back at school on Monday. + Christien Anholt, age 22, provides a brilliant combination of cocky schoolkid and nervous conman, Jayne Ashbourne makes a zestful Lisa, and it's directed with exhilaration by Mike Ockrent. Even the music - John Dankworth - is kept in its place, now a rare virtue in television drama. And to qualify my first words, the seamless good humour does not blunt some shrewd satirical thrusts at those Thatcherite targets. + The epic art-historical Civilisation began a round of repeats, a bit undermined now by John Wyver's profile of its presenter K: Kenneth Clark (BBC2). He emerges as a superb arts administrator and populariser, - first step, director of the National Gallery before he was 30, where he revolutionised the idea of what a great public showcase should be. + But Lynda Nead rejects his vision of civilisation as developing in a single line, and sees him as a mere connoisseur, failing to connect art to the society that produced it. Charles Harrison is scornful of Clark's male, western bourgeois standpoint. Worse, Clark is accused of skewing British taste and patronage away from the abstracts of European modernism (as in Ben Nicholson) and towards an English romantic, figurative art as in Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and John Piper, though that ignores Clark's role as populariser at a time when abstract art did not suit the mood or purpose of a fatherly cultural leadership. Civilisation, ironically, was made after he had been the first chairman of the IBA, responsible for launching commercial television on the screens of a scandalised intelligentsia. + +LOAD-DATE: October 11, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +281 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 11, 1993 + +THE BRAIN: COPING WITH ALZHEIMER'S; +More and more old people are suffering from Alzheimer's disease - a loss of brain functions associated with ageing. As medical science tries to find a cure, carers and families must learn to cope. + +BYLINE: PETE MOORE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EDUCATION PAGE; Pg. E16 + +LENGTH: 1111 words + + + MORE than 600,000 people in the United Kingdom now suffer from Alzheimer's disease and every day another 42 people develop the condition. + The disease gradually stops the brain from working properly, so that those who are affected slowly lose the ability to remember, to learn, to think and to reason. + Alzheimer's disease is associated with old age, affecting one in every 20 people over 65 and one in five of those over 80. With improvements in living conditions and advances in medicine, people are living longer, and the number of Alzheimer's sufferers is increasing. Alzheimer's disease is not, however, always confined to the elderly. It can afflict people as young as 40. + The exact symptoms of Alzheimer's disease vary from person to person, and are similar to those caused by other diseases that lead to dementia. Dementia is a term used to describe all illnesses which cause a progressive loss of mental function. People with dementia have reduced abilities to think and reason. They may not remember events or people, nor what day it is, nor even where they are. + With Alzheimer's disease, such symptoms may at first be confused with forgetfulness or depression. It is often only when a loss of memory or change in behaviour starts to affect someone else that the disease is spotted. + A pattern of regularly forgetting incidents that have just happened, such as forgetting a meal that has just taken place, is frequently the first sign of the disease. Sometimes, the loss of memory can have potentially dangerous consequences, as sufferers forget the way home from the shops, or leave their kettles or ovens on. + The disease was first described in 1907, by a German doctor called Alois Alzheimer. He used a newly-invented technique of staining slices of brain + tissue to study the brain of a 51-year-old woman who had died after suffering memory loss and personality changes in the last few years of her life. + Her brain contained many dark spots, not normally found in healthy brains, and Dr Alzheimer believed that these caused the changes in behaviour. These dark spots are now called senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, and they are known to be made of a substance called beta-amyloid. + Diagnosis + Proving that someone has Alzheimer's disease, rather than any other dementia, is very difficult. Diagnosis is carried out by eliminating other possible diseases and can only be finally confirmed once the person has died, when parts of their brain can be examined under a microscope to look for the plaques and tangles. + However, we still do not fully understand why these plaques form or why they lead to dementia. + Sadly there are no cures for the disease, although treatments are being developed that may slow its progress. Meanwhile, careful observation of the kind of mental dysfunction - loss of personal memory, disturbed sense of direction, etc - is important to both help and care for the person properly. + It is therefore important that the disease is explained to carers, and to the family of the person with dementia. The symptoms of Alzheimer's disease overlap with other forms of dementia and observation of the person's behaviour may help consultants disentangle one form of it from another (see right). + Our brains are made up of several million cells, called neurons, that are designed to communicate with each other. Each neuron consists of a cell body, many hundreds of dendrites and an axon. The dendrites receive + chemical messages from other nerve cells and pass them on to the cell body, which sends a response down the axon. At the far end of the axon a chemical messenger, called a neurotransmitter, is then released so that the message can be transmitted to another cell. + As we get older, many of these neurons stop working and die. Scientists used to think that a person's ability to remember declined as these cells died, but even though we lose up to one-fifth of our brain cells by the time we are 90, most of us will still have more than enough to store all the information needed. The problem seems to be that, although many of the cells are still alive, they are no longer doing their job. In Alzheimer's disease the senile plaques interfere with the transmission of the signal from one neurone to another, and the neurofibrillary tangles prevent the transport of essential chemicals within the cell body. + The neurotransmitter that is released from the end of the axon is also in short supply in brains with Alzheimer's disease. + While different neurons use different chemicals as neurotransmitters, + in Alzheimer's disease the chemical which is most affected is one called + acetylcholine. Therefore some attempts to treat the disease involve drugs that increase the amounts of acetylcholine in the brain. + A genetic link + NO ONE knows what causes Alzheimer's disease, although there is no shortage of suggestions. + Quite possibly the disease occurs only when a number of conditions are met at the same time. There is nevertheless considerable hope that the causes will be found and that specific treatments and therapeutic techniques can be developed. + Some families suffer from Alzheimer's disease more than others, suggesting they might have genes that either cause the disease, or make them more likely to suffer from it. While some diseases are caused by only one faulty gene, it appears that many different genes are probably involved in Alzheimer's disease. + One clue to tracking down the relevant genes has come from the discovery that Down's syndrome sufferers are very likely to develop Alzheimer's + disease. As sufferers from Down's have an extra copy of chromosome number 21, scientists are studying this chromosome to see if it carries the genes involved in Alzheimer's disease. + At one point, scientists thought that aluminium might be responsible for Alzheimer's disease, as it is known to cause a type of neurofibrillary tangle in the brains of animals. This led to concern about the levels of aluminium in drinking water. However, recent research shows that aluminium is unlikely to be the cause of Alzheimer's disease in humans. + Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and Kuru are two human brain diseases that are known to be caused by virus-like particles. It is possible that Alzheimer's could also be caused by some similar particle, although this appears to be quite unlikely. Much research is now being directed not only to the genetic determinants that may be behind a susceptibility to the deposition of beta-amyloid, but also towards the therapeutic strategies that may slow progression of the disease. + +LOAD-DATE: October 12, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +282 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 12, 1993 + +PIT PROPS; +When the local colliery was closed a community discovered that unearthing their past provided a psychological lifeline + +BYLINE: MARTIN WAINWRIGHT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 2396 words + + + IF OLD HERODOTUS was allowed back on Earth for a spell, and happened to be flogging his mule along the A642 from Wakefield to York, do you think he would turn off to give his readers an account of Allerton Bywater? Would the Father of History deign to allow this little place the attention he reserved for "interesting places", which in turn guaranteed them a place in posterity? + Would he heck. Nothing of note has ever happened in Allerton, they would tell him, if he stopped for a drink at the Old George in Garforth. No wrecks and nobody drowned. In fact, they'd have done better to call the place Allerton Backwater. + And yet history, which comes in so many famous guises - as bunk, betrayer or haunting ghost - has appeared in modern Allerton Bywater in a most unusual manifestation. In the year since Michael Heseltine pronounced doom on most of Britain's coal industry, and since Allerton's own, last pit closed in the first tranche, the subject has been chosen as the stricken community's psychological lifeline. + Not history in the form of "heritage" recreations, which provide such a popular Aunt Sally for social commentators (especially those lucky enough never to have had to live in one of the real industrial communities for which they pine). But history in the weekly study - by redundant miners, young mothers, elderly residents of the Victoria sheltered housing complex, in fact just about everyone - of what, and particularly who, made Allerton Bywater what it is. + "Come here," whispers 77-year-old Elsie Harris from her armchair in the Victoria housing's common room, crooking her finger and glinting through her specs in a way which Herodotus would have found hard to ignore. "I haven't told you about grandfather's beard, have I?" + I listened captivated, crouching on the carpet at her knees, as she described how her grandpa had been struck by lightning in the 1890s while carving stone as a mason at the nearby (but now demolished) mansion of Kippax Park. + He survived; but his beard, apparently one of the most impressive in the district, was entirely singed away. Mrs Ellis described its destruction with a mixture of awe and the sort of enthusiasm which marks an excellent teacher. "You must tell the schoolchildren at Allerton Junior that story. They'd love it," I said. "I have," she replied. And they did. + The children have been down for regular visits to the history discussion groups and helped in collecting the old photographs, maps and paintings which now line the common room wall. "One discovery leads to another," says Derek Smith, a former deputy, or foreman, at the colliery. "If Mr X comes up with a picture of his great-grandmother, you can be sure that Mrs Y will say: 'I've got a much better one than that,' and she'll dig it out, too." + In the same way, the children have spurred on the central project of Allerton's communal history tutorial: a half-hour film on the story of the village since the first pit was sunk, and the population exploded, in 1863. + "We are proud to invite you," say the pale yellow cards in a stack ready for posting, "to the World Film Premiere of As Time Goes By at the King Edward VII Working Men's Club." The place will be packed to overflowing when the film is first shown on October 27. And European MPs and civil servants will see it shortly afterwards at screenings in Strasbourg, Brussels and London. + "The kids have been saying: 'You'll never do it' and thinking that it will be really tacky, with their mums trying to be Cecil B De Mille, but they're in for a surprise," says Judi Alston, a young specialist with the One-to-One video company of Wakefield, who has advised the production team technically. + CERTAINLY at a screening of the first, fully-edited 20 minutes this week, the amateur film-makers were full of the trade's argot. "I prefer this version of the voice-over," said Derek Smith, while two pensioners discussed the smoothness of segues taking the story through the 1920s. + In the next armchair, the flickering images cheered up a solemn little girl being child-minded by Angela Rotherforth, a young mother who was in on the very beginning of Allerton's venture into historical studies. In the dismal days approaching the pit's closure (the last of three in Allerton to go) a women's group was suggested by Kathy Eason, Leeds city council's local community worker. She was given exceptional help by a colleague, Ann Walker, a tutor-organiser at Leeds University's department of community and industrial studies. This outfit has a deserved reputation both for using the university's power and prestige to open influential doors, and for showing outsiders that the academic world is for them too. Within a few months, Angela and two friends were enrolled for weekend courses at Northern College, the "Ruskin of the North" at Wentworth Castle near Barnsley; they came home and created an editorial team who gave Allerton Bywater its first edition of The Newsletter. + "I'd originally joined Kathy's group when my baby was five days old and I just wanted something else to do," says Mrs Rotherforth, Allerton-born and previously in and out of office jobs in Leeds and at British Coal. "But then we started finding out so much about the village." They passed it on in three, ever-expanding issues of The Newsletter, which goes to press for the fourth time next month. They also came quickly to the underlying point of Allerton's history lessons: as a means of concentrating local minds on what the village should do now. + One of the century's best poems, Spain by W H Auden, contains the pessimistic lines: + History to the defeated + may say alas but cannot help or pardon. + Allerton's initiative is a frontal attack on that gloomy theory (which Auden later renounced). The village has been defeated, like so many others in history who have tried to prevent change. But the villagers are increasingly sure that the past can do more than just encourage them to wring their hands. + "You can derive lessons and draw strength from the village's achievements in the past," says Anne Walker. "You can see how Allerton Bywater has changed and adapted, the part local people have played - and, from that, turn to the possibilities and problems facing the community now." + One moment in the film makes this point with great strength. Archive clips of Northern seamstresses appear on the screen, while Elsie Harris's voice-over recalls the arrival of Montague Burton's ready-made clothing works in Harehills, a bus or (in those days) train ride away in East Leeds. + "We women had a wage all of a sudden, which was something we weren't used to," she says. "We could go out and spend it on nice things." A powerful economic balance to King Coal's habit of dominating his communities suddenly, unexpectedly appeared; Burton, an enterprising Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, found his perfect match in skilful, hard-working Yorkshiremen and women. + Today, Leeds is little-loved in Allerton. Brian Harris, Elsie's son, is one of many who complain about boundary changes which snipped the village off from its nearest town, Castleford, and tacked it on to the Yorkshire metropolis. + "We've got unemployment here over and above the 19 per cent in the Castleford area," he says. "But the statistics have us as part of Leeds, where unemployment is only 9 per cent. Consequently we don't get a look-in at Rechar (the EC's fund for former coalfield areas), or other special measures." A section of the script contributed by Clive Cowell, the last NUM secretary at Allerton, makes the same comparison: "Allerton is like an island of poverty in the wealth of Leeds." + But Leeds city council has provided Kathy Eason, the community worker; Leeds university has given Anne Walker; Leeds has currently laid on a big exhibition in its town hall honouring local mining, and borrowing exhibits from the Allerton group; and Leeds bulks very large and promisingly in the village video's history. Across the River Aire, Brian Harris admits, the traditionally Leeds-linked village of Methley has made a dramatic transition from mining community to dormitory village. + "There's even people from down South living there and commuting," he says. "Would you believe - they find it cheaper to live all the way up here." If true, there are only a handful; but anyway they are not necessary. Leeds's own economic power has unquestionably stopped Methley from slipping into the doldrums. + The city's famous diversity of trades, which has always seen it through recessions (including the current one) would now be reflected - in place of "Miner, miner, miner . ." - in a Kelly's directory of Methley occupations. There will be no depopulation, on the lines of Cumbrian coastal towns in the twenties and thirties, in the mining towns beside the M62. + "But commuters . . ?" Allerton's historians frequently wonder aloud, and in alarm, at their discussion meetings. "If they come, what will happen to house prices? Will incomers gradually force us and our children out? They're talking of building on the pit site, you know, and it would certainly be a private estate." All the history students, from children to pensioners, are familiar with the next village to the north, Ledston, which looks as if it has just landed in its entirety from the Cotswolds. A quaint, rose-tangled pub; a stunning, white limestone Elizabethan hall; and the price of everything set accordingly sky-high. + "On the other hand," says Laura Holmes, whose grandfather Butcher Holmes looks contentedly from an ancient photo of his shop on the common room's exhibition walls, "newcomers would definitely help the shops. They'd keep little businesses going which would be struggling otherwise." Mrs Holmes has relatives, too, in one of the flats made out of the imposing wings of Ledston Hall. The posh neighbour isn't quite as inaccessible as it may look. + SHE and others - and, above all, the film - also recognise that Allerton Bywater's green surroundings are one of its great assets. As Time Goes By is subtitled From Green To Black And Green Again, and it opens with pastoral music over shots of swans on the Ings, the lake which replaced the second of the village's three pits. + "Oooh, lovely," chorussed the audience at the editing session. "And it used to be so mucky when the pit was working, especially down this end of Allerton." Everyone applauds the landscape improvements under way by the South Leeds Groundwork Trust. Everyone enjoys the magnificent nature reserve on the flooded pit workings at Fairburn. + All the older villagers, too, have sunny summer memories of forays in the rolling grounds of Kippax Park and the other surrounding great estates. Nowadays, North Leeds is flagged by estate agents as the desirable side of the city; but ironically, the Victorian new rich only built there because the southern rim was sealed off by the gentry. The Meynell-Ingrams at Temple Newsam, the Lowthers at Swillington, the Savilles at Methley; as usual, the aristocrats had bagged all the best bits of land. + Their languid families have walk-on parts in Allerton's history studies; but the village's other great asset to emerge from the discussion groups, and to put beside its green setting, has been its "ordinary" people. Vigour beams from photo after photo in the sheltered housing exhibition, and it is reflected back in the enthusiasm the Allerton School of History has engendered. Look, there is Derek Smith's father, Jack, a professional double bass who handled the Kiosk ballroom at Castleford as deftly as opera engagements in the pit at Leeds Grand. Hey, here is a whole series of bonny Allerton Queens, at the village's annual Children's Day parade. Uh-oh, that's Dr Ashton in his surgery, sub-titled "A well-known village character." + "He'd never give thee a sick note," says Brian Harris, falling naturally into the colliery vernacular. "At least, not if tha worked at pit." + Tracking down these records has brought the 3,000 people in the long, straggly village together, according to Shelagh Daniels, warden at the Victoria sheltered housing, who is highly chuffed that her "girls" are getting so many guests and so much appreciation. "We love having all these people in here," she says. "And we've got so many interesting things to tell them." + Brian Harris, meanwhile, lights up with that eager pleasure in knowledge familiar in a Patrick Moore or David Bellamy. "Do you know," he says, "when mining started here, there was such a rush for work that 60 families were living on the River Aire in boats. Not that Allerton's been only about mining. We're keen to emphasise that. We've had farming, pottery, even ship-building." And it all goes back, venerably, to Domesday Book and an entry for "Alretun". + Most of the story is unexceptional, and none the worse for that. The historians can study human nature, undistracted by atypically dramatic human deeds. But there have been some exceptional events, including a terrible colliery explosion in the 1930s. And some Allertonians have made their mark in a very much wider world. + Henry Moore, whose father was a miner and later mining engineer in Castleford, explored as a boy along the Lin Dyke and through Owl Wood. Jim Bullock, head of Britain's first management union (of colliery managers) and Lord Robens' sparring partner, started life in a two-up, two-down at Bower's Row in the village. His father, also a miner, was a famous Allerton character who faced down Sir Charles Lowther when the coal owner was about to hand school prizes to young Jim and his older sister. + "Stop!" shouted Bullock senior from the hall. And then, before firmly leading his children away: "When people like you command my admiration and respect then, and only then, will I allow my children to salute or curtsy to you." + None of Allerton Bywater's students is under any illusion that history will re-employ the 1,000 men who worked at the last pit until last year. They know that the village needs a practical hand, and more than the 60 new jobs provided by the infant Enterprise Park. But their studies are clearly refreshing the springs of self-confidence which flowed so abundantly in men like Mr Bullock. History, in this neck of the West Riding, is anything but bunk. + +LOAD-DATE: October 12, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +283 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 13, 1993 + +COUNCIL DELAYS 'KEEP OLD IN HOSPITAL NEEDLESSLY' + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 338 words + + + PATIENTS have been sleeping in corridors in a west London hospital which says wards are full because it is unable to discharge elderly people, even though they are ready to leave. + Ealing Hospital is the first in the country to complain of "bed-blocking" under the community care programme introduced in April. There are fears that the problem could become widespread. + According to the community care rules, elderly patients ready for discharge must first have their needs for further care assessed by social workers, and any arrangements such as transfer to a residential or nursing home put in place. + The speed with which social services carry this out is critical for hospitals' throughput. Ealing claims that because its local authority is not acting quickly enough, it is stuck with patients whose treatments are complete. + The hospital maintains that Ealing social services takes between 28 and 50 days to find nursing home places for elderly patients, although it admits local nursing homes are all full. + It says up to 16 patients a night, including cancer and stroke victims, have been sleeping in beds placed in corridors because between 17 and 20 other patients cannot be discharged. Two people have died in beds in the corridors. + To ease the problem, the hospital has had to spend pounds 74,000 to reopen a 12-bed ward closed earlier this year because of lack of money. + Barbara Yerolemou, who chairs the social services committee of Conservative-run Ealing council, said yesterday that the council had been aware of the difficulty, but it had been sorted out last week. + "It appears at the moment that the social services department is receiving contradictory information from the hospital. We are aware of the hospital's problem of bed closures, and we will be asking them to examine what impact this had on the current unacceptable situation." + Ms Yerolemou said community care was not aimed at discharging patients to free beds, but at ensuring people got appropriate care. + +LOAD-DATE: October 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +284 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 14, 1993 + +EYEWITNESS: GREECE SEES ACTION REPLAY AT HIGH NOON + +BYLINE: HELENA SMITH IN ATHENS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 511 words + + + THE bishop turned to the president who turned to the prime minister and said: "We've done this before." Then, as the clock struck noon and the Athens smog deepened, the swearing-in began. + It was, of course, a ceremony most knew well which saw Greece's new cabinet sworn in. + Melina Mercouri, aged 70, was there. Giorgos Yennimatas, the terminally ill national economy and finance minister was there. Carolos Papoulias, the veteran diplomat once again at the helm of the foreign ministry, was there. + Only this time, eight years after the socialists' last and 12 years after their first landslide election victory, the faces were a little older, the hair a little greyer, the movements a little stiffer. + When Greece's new prime minister, the septegenarian Andreas Papandreou, tottered across the room to greet his fellow "dinosaur" President Constantine Karamanlis, the mood appeared to become a little sombre. + "You must succeed," the octogenarian head of state said. "The country needs success because it is facing very many difficult problems." With those words, the 30-minute ceremony was over. + Mr Papandreou, whose Pasok socialist movement won a stunning victory in last Sunday's elections nearly four years after he was kicked out of office amid seamy scandals, has moved fast to create a government. + "Our victory signals a new era - the Greek people deserve our serious work and responsibility," he said during the first meeting of his 43-member cabinet. + The ailing socialist leader, who has made his personal physician, the heart specialist George Kremastinos, health minister, sees his re-election as a personal victory that vindicates him of corruption charges during his last days in power. + It was his loyal followers rather than young and potentially headstrong socialists whom he promoted to key posts. + It is widely believed this is because of the fate meted out to Mr Papandreou's arch rival, the conservative leader Constantine Mitsotakis. Mr Mitsotakis, who has announced his resignation from New Democracy, was toppled after his former foreign minister and protege, Antonis Samaras, called on rebel backbenchers to join his new Political Spring group - a move that stripped his government of its slim parliamentary majority. + The government spokesman, Evangelos Venizelos, announced yesterday that Mr Papandreou had appointed his wife, 35-year-old Dimitra Liani, to head his private office. The position gives her a central role in who is allowed to see him. + Senior socialists hope Mr Papandreou, whose health has deteriorated since open heart surgery five years ago, will eventually step aside or delegate more. This, they say, would radically democratise the party which has been under his iron grip since its foundation in 1974. + In the meantime, it is business as usual. Down in the culture ministry which she headed for eight years from 1981, Ms Mercouri was blowing kisses yesterday and talking about the Elgin Marbles. + As the bishop said to the president: "We've done this before." + +LOAD-DATE: October 14, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +285 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 14, 1993 + +SURVIVORS OF SOBIBOR REMEMBER GREAT ESCAPE; +Julian Borger in Warsaw meets former inmates who returned to the site of the Nazi death camp on the 50thanniversary of one of the most dramatic and successful acts of defiance against the Holocaust's machinery + +BYLINE: JULIAN BORGER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 736 words + + + A HANDFUL of elderly men and women huddled together on a Warsaw street yesterday, trying to avoid being swept away by the lunchtime rush hour, and looking every bit as hunted and forlorn as the escapees they had been 50 years ago. + In that small knot of people were more than half the survivors from the 300 Jews who broke out of the Sobibor death camp on October 14 1943, in perhaps the most dramatic and successful act of defiance against the relentless machinery of the Holocaust. + The youngest among them is Thomas Blatt, who was 16 at the time. His role was to lure Nazi officers to the camp workshops where they were killed one by one. + "I went up to one Nazi and I asked him to come to a storeroom because we had found a beautiful leather coat for him and we wanted him to go to try it on. He did, and he was killed with an axe and a knife." + The inmates killed 10 Nazis and 13 Ukrainian guards and disconnected the electrified perimeter fence before making a dash for freedom over the wire and across a minefield. Mr Blatt was trapped under the outer fence as it collapsed under the weight of desperate escapees but instead of killing him it saved his life. + "Many of the people who went in front of me were blown up by the mines. When I was free, I followed the path of bodies into the woods." + Mr Blatt, a tough and combative 65-year-old who now lives in the United States, has fought for years for recognition of the 250,000 Jews who were murdered in Sobibor's gas chambers. Under the communist regime, official plaques and literature emphasised the role of the Soviet army and played down the Jewish nature of the camp and the revolt. At a ceremony today at Sobibor (which now lies where the borders of Poland, Bielarus and Ukraine meet), Mr Blatt will unveil a new, corrected plaque. + The revolt was led by a Jewish Red Army lieutenant called Sasha Pechersky (played by Rutger Hauer in a 1987 film) who died in obscurity a few years ago in Rostov-on-Don. The Soviet government, distrustful of anyone who had survived the camps, never allowed him to attend any reunions of Sobibor survivors. + "I went to see him and I told him he was a hero, but the regime just ignored him," Mr Blatt said. + Another of the escapees, Esther Raab, had arranged to meet one of the local Poles who had sheltered her and helped her to survive until the Soviet army arrived. Jan Marcyniuk was 17 when his father, Stefan, took in Esther and her brother and hid them in his barn. + "We used to take food to her at night. Me and my brother were still boys, with short trousers, and nobody paid any attention to us," Mr Marcyniuk said. + At the end of the war, Mrs Raab tried to persuade the Marcyniuk family to move to the US with her but they refused. Stefan Marcyniuk later died, but she has become a surrogate member of the family. As she spoke in a Warsaw hotel room, Jan fussed around her like an anxious brother. + "This family were special people who felt that what the Nazis were doing was wrong, and the only way to prove it's wrong, or to fight against it, was to save Jews," she said. + Not all the Sobibor escapees were as lucky as Esther Raab. Some were given away by local people. Thomas Blatt and two friends were shot by a farmer who stole their belongings. Mr Blatt survived by playing dead, but he still has a bullet wedged behind his jaw. + Kurt Thomas is one of the few survivors who decided not to come to Poland for today's 50th anniversary, because he could not bear to see the spot where his parents and his sister were killed. + "I cannot help them. To get there to face the mound of soil on which now grass grows makes no sense to me," he said on the telephone from Ohio. + He will use the money he would have spent on the trip to buy an air ticket for the Polish family that sheltered him when he was on the run, so they can visit their son, studying in California. + After the Sobibor breakout, the Nazis dismantled the camp and planted pine trees in its place. But they failed to wipe out all the escapees, who returned to bear witness to the extermination of a quarter of a million Jews, and to one moment of resistance, which Mr Thomas attempted to describe. + "We felt a great desire for life and freedom and an urge to rid ourselves of the humiliation inflicted upon us and, until then, accepted, because of the constant, systematic terror." + +LOAD-DATE: October 14, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +286 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 15, 1993 + +SOMALILAND FIGHTS A LOELY BATTLE; +'Small miracle' stands out as relief groups launch plea for 20m victims of war: A government which has successfully ended clan warfare is being ignored by aid agencies + +BYLINE: JULIE FLINT IN HARGEISA + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 13 + +LENGTH: 858 words + + + A SMALL miracle is taking place in the breakaway Republic of Somaliland, unseen and unappreciated by those whose armed humanitarianism has turned Somalia's famine into slaughter. + Two and a half years after seceding from the rest of Somalia, the former British Somaliland is mending its divisions by discussion rather than arms. Tribal conflicts have been contained and demobilisation set in motion for 6,000 young men who have exchanged their weapons for the rigours of a former British prison camp. + In this remarkable endeavour the international community is conspicuous by its absence. Last month a senior United Nations official recommended that it was "time to dismantle Somaliland and bring this nonsense to an end", prompting President Mohammed Egal to order the temporary expulsion of Unosom, the UN relief operation in the area. + Britain, like the UN, has promised much but delivered little. + "We were a British colony, but so far we have not received even a pencil from Britain," said Mohammed Handule, commander of the Mandera demobilisation camp. + "Unosom promised to fulfil all our needs, and has given nothing. But our government has supplied food - rice and tea - and we are satisfied. That's how we liberated Somaliland: on rice without sauce." + Somaliland "liberated" itself within months of the overthrow of Mohammed Siad Barre, the dictator who condemned the north-west to under-development and political insignificance before launching a genocidal war against the civilian support base of the rebel Somali National Movement. + At independence in May 1991, Somaliland was in ruins. Its capital, Hargeisa, was almost totally destroyed; towns and villages were sown with mines that still bring two or three victims a week to Hargeisa's rundown general hospital. + Throughout 1992, security deteriorated steadily under the incompetent President Abdirahman Ahmed Ali. + The turning point came in October 1992 when clan elders negotiated an end to potentially catastrophic clashes around Berbera port. Six months later, Somaliland's council of elders, the Guurti, negotiated a comprehensive peace agreement for Somaliland, drew up a new constitution and elected Mr Egal, a veteran politician, as president. + "In three months he has accomplished things that were not even dreamed of in the two previous years, " said Sheikh Ibrahim, the Guurti's septuagenarian chairman. + Mr Egal has appointed a government that not only has a wide clan base but includes many of the SNM leaders sidelined by the last administration. Hargeisa has a police force dressed in green uniforms - Unosom's single contribution to security. The supreme court is functioning again and Islamic law has been replaced by the post-colonial 1962 penal code, with minor amendments to make it acceptable to Muslim leaders. + In Hargeisa, 150 telephone lines are now working. Local businessmen run a small electrical grid off two bulldozer engines and give free electricity to police stations, courts, mosques, ministries and main streets. + In the last two months, taxes have been levied on Berbera port and on the leafy narcotic, qat. In Hargeisa, municipal taxes are being levied on street markets, meat, vegetable and milk sales, construction and transport. In the first eight days of taxation, pounds 1,000 was raised - to be divided between rubbish collection and salaries for 120 unpaid municipal workers. + For the moment, all government taxes are financing the demobilisation experiment at Mandera - the first of six camps planned for 50,000 militiamen. + "We must put all our efforts into security," said the health minister, Mahmoud Suleiman. "Some of these boys are threats to security today; some are potential threats. We must ease them back into productive civilian life. Everything else must be secondary." + So far the government is fighting a lonely battle. The United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef, which promised latrines for Mandera, has not built one. Unosom, which promised uniforms, food and vocational training, has provided nothing. Britain, which promised police training for the demobbed, has trained no-one. + "How much is being spent on forcible demobilisation in Mogadishu - $ 1.5 billion - and we are asking for $ 25,000 a month," exclaimed the vice-president, Abdirahman Aw Ali. + "Unosom's task here was to help reconstruction and rehabilitation," said the interior minister, Musa Bihi. "But they told us there was no budget for reconstruction; everything was budgeted for the war . . . The [operating] cost of their aircraft here alone would have paid for our demobilisation." + Somaliland faces a bleak future unless the international community belatedly makes good its promise of help. It has no salaries, no secondary schools, and no international recognition. + But it is not deterred. "It will not be an attractive survival, but I think we will somehow survive," said President Egal. A sympathetic Western ambassador in the region was less optimistic. "With these 6,000 guys," he said, "Egal has taken the tiger by the tail. If we don't help him, he'll be devoured." + +LOAD-DATE: October 15, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +287 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 18, 1993 + +STUDENTS: 2: PLAYING PATTEN'S RAGTIME BLUES; +Will student volunteers now have to pay a fee to fill in for the state, asks Laura Matthews. + +BYLINE: LAURA MATTHEWS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EDUCATION PAGE; Pg. E2 + +LENGTH: 792 words + + + WE can't charge a membership fee. It's not ethical to charge people for volunteering. Renting an office in the union for a year would bankrupt us. We can raise funds partly through student rag, but that'll disappear as well." + Paul Stowe, of Student Community Action (SCA) at Warwick University and a member of the national SCA committee, knows that unless volunteering is reclassified as a core union activity for student-union funding the projects his group undertakes could last another couple of years at most. + Under current proposals, volunteering is a non-core union activity - which means it will be unable to receive, even indirectly, public money, although the national SCA development unit estimates the value of student volunteers' work at pounds 9.6 million a year. Office space, sabbatical or full-time staff, telephone bills, volunteers' expenses, using the union's minibus for outings for people with disabilities or local children - all may have to be paid for at an "economic" rate. + There are 15,000 volunteers in 125 SCA groups in the UK, undertaking local projects including babysitting, teaching social skills to people with disabilities, and digging old people's gardens. The brochure for Hull University SCA warns: "You may come across drug abuse, alcoholism, mental illness or violence, but committed volunteers are most + welcome . . ." + Hull students fill the gap between the closure of a day centre at 6pm on weekends and the opening of the night shelter at 10pm. Indeed student volunteers seem to be filling-in increasingly for services no longer provided by public agencies. + The 300 students in Warwick's SCA run a driving scheme and are expecting increasing demand from their mostly elderly clients following the decision to end the public dial-a-ride scheme in Coventry. Although they raised enough money to buy the car, as Paul Stowe says: "We can only run it if we can afford to put petrol in it." + The students also help local people with literacy and are often the only group that will take on more challenging tasks. "One thing about students is that they are incredibly open-minded, and don't hold the same stigmas. People who do meals on wheels for the elderly can always get helpers, the mentally ill can't. But they can come to groups like ours." + SCA members at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol work between one hour a week and three hours a day on projects as varied as the Wednesday afternoon crche for the children of visitors to Horfield prison; decorating community centres; working night shifts at the Salvation Army night shelter; taking people with learning difficulties on day trips; or entertaining 150 toddlers at the annual teddy bears' picnic. + Simon Reid, SCA officer on the UWE student-union executive, is promising to do "something spectacular on the decorating front" as part of a student day of action against the Government proposals. He admits: "I would be very loth to impose a levy for joining, but it might come to that. We could keep going but it would be a struggle. The major expenses are publicity, training and travel, and we try to make no one out of pocket." + The group stands to lose a full-time staff co-ordinator whose wages are currently paid by the student union and who is the first contact for local agencies needing volunteers. + Rag, which also finds itself excluded from core activities, frequently funds SCA projects and donates money to small local charities as well as the large national ones. Rag makes grants of approximately pounds 2 million a year and its tradition goes back to 1865, according to Richard Turner, who founded the National Association of Rags. + "Students put themselves over very enthusiastically. The most significant thing is that money is raised from the grassroots, street collections and sponsored events, not by fat cheques from corporate donors. A lot of it goes back to local organisations in grants of pounds 50 to pounds 200. It's essential income for play schemes as well as community centres." + Increasingly, former student Rag organisers graduate to fundraising positions with national charities, reflecting the professionalism of their activities. Some Rags operate all year, not just for a week-long jamboree, and employ student sabbaticals and full-time staff. + A group of SCA organisers has met Department for Education officials to put the case for their services to be regarded as core activities. + Richard Turner says that the impact of the Government's proposals is uncertain. "Rag is a survivor and growing, but the key worry is that a lot of Rags get support in terms of offices and telephones in student unions. The proposals could slow things down." + +LOAD-DATE: October 19, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +288 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 21, 1993 + +PENSIONERS TURN THE HEAT ON CLARKE OVER VAT ON FUEL; +Angry senior citizens descended on Whitehall yesterday. Martin Linton reports + +BYLINE: MARTIN LINTON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 532 words + + + HUGH LAMBERT pays pounds 8.76 a week for lighting and heating - exactly the average bill for a single pensioner living on a state pension. But he draws no comfort from that fact. + The retired welder from Rastrick, in Yorkshire, knows that if the Chancellor goes ahead with the levying of VAT on heating bills from next April it will cost him another 71p a week. + He also knows how much the single state pension will go up in April as a result of the Retail Price Index announced last week - exactly pounds 1, leaving him with just 29p of his pension rise. + That so incensed him that he took out his best walking stick yesterday and set off for London, along with another 5,000 pensioners, to tell Kenneth Clarke just what he thought of his VAT on heat. + Jim McCabe, a retired pattern-maker from neighbouring Brighouse, joined him because he thinks VAT on heating is the worst thing this government has ever done: "It's just a disaster. It's like the poll tax. It wasn't thought through in the beginning," he says. + The promise of a special package of measures to help those in need cuts little ice with him. "The people it's going to hit worst are the people like me who have been putting a bit aside and are just above the benefit level. + "We're getting penalised for trying to help ourselves and that's supposed to be one of the doctrines of the Conservative Party, isn't it? And we've got no choice, have we? We can't go over the Channel and get French electricity or Italian gas." + "I'm lucky. I can get out and about, so I can keep my bills low. Hugh can't because of the stick and all that. But it's a risk. People are beginning to take risks because of this carry-on," he says. + He had to be fit to get to yesterday's rally because, apart from the journey, there were 71 steps to negotiate into Westminster Central Hall and another 20 into the Commons to lobby their MPs. + The hall was packed with respectable sexagenarians and septuagenarians who booed when Mr Clarke's name was mentioned and sprang to their feet to applaud John Smith, the Labour leader. + George Maskell, aged 65, from Enfield, north London, declared that he had voted for Maggie Thatcher and John Major "but I have been betrayed". The pensioners, a quarter of the electorate, would have to vote him out next time. + John Smith warned that some people could die as a result of the imposition of VAT and Sally Greengross, of Age Concern, pointed out that excess winter deaths are higher in Britain than in much colder countries such as Norway, Canada and Sweden. + The Liberal Democrat frontbencher, Liz Lynne, urged the Government to "stop this insanity before it is too late". + In the Commons yesterday, six Tory MPs signed an all-party motion expressing concern that "many hundreds of thousands of pensioners who miss out on benefits will have a real difficulty meeting the extra costs of fuel once VAT is levied". + One of them, William Powell, who was at the rally, said the compensation package would not begin to mitigate the worst effects of the VAT extension "because it won't meet those people who are outside the existing social security and pension nets." + +LOAD-DATE: October 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +289 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 22, 1993 + +WELFARE STATE EYED BY INSURERS; +Industry identifies big opportunities + +BYLINE: FRANK KANE, CITY EDITOR + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 1 + +LENGTH: 648 words + + + INSURANCE industry chiefs are drawing up plans to "cherry pick" parts of the welfare state in preparation for the privatisation of large tracts of the health and social security services. + Two Conservative politicians have helped with the plans. + An internal briefing document from the Association of British Insurers, the industry's trade body, has identified the National Health Service, the provision of long-term care for the aged, and unemployment benefit as areas offering commercial opportunities. + The document, the Transfer of Responsibility from the Public to the Private Sector, concludes that there are "major opportunities for partnership with the Government over the next two to three years". + It suggests that the ABI should explore with the Government how the industry could "assist in any re-definition of the welfare state", and how it could respond to "opportunities which may arise". + Two Conservative politicians - Dr Liam Fox, MP for Woodspring and parliamentary private secretary to Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, and Peter Campbell, head of the home affairs section of the Conservative Research Department - have recently attended ABI meetings to discuss the plans. + The insurers have identified areas where they see opportunities in taking over welfare state functions: + - Collaboration and joint ventures with the NHS to help reduce the pounds 37 billion budget for 1993/94. + - Expansion of private medical insurance beyond the current 6.5 million policyholders, either through fiscal incentives to the under-60s, or through a contracting-out system of certain NHS benefits. + - The private provision of long-term care for the elderly, possibly through the tax-assisted release of equity tied up in property, estimated to be worth pounds 400 billion. + - Private unemployment insurance. State jobless benefits are due to cost pounds 10.4 billion next year. + - The transfer of liability for industrial injury, social security and invalidity to employers, currently costing the state pounds 7 billion. + - Contracting out of the state pension, which currently costs pounds 26.6 billion. + Mark Boleat, the ABI's director-general, said: "I would not call it cherry picking. The Government has clearly signalled it intends to reduce the public spending burden of the welfare state, and our members can help them do that. + "It [the ABI document] has not been formally put to the Government, but I have lunch all the time with officials, ministers and politicians. So far there has been no concrete feedback. These are our thoughts, not proposals." + A spokeswoman for Peter Lilley, Social Security Secretary, said: "We are obviously looking at a number of things that can be done with social security involving insurance companies. The Government is willing to take on board any comments from other parties." + Gordon Brown, the shadow chancellor, challenged the Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, and Treasury Chief Secretary Michael Portillo to rule out welfare state privatisation. + "This is the most threatening document for welfare provision. It goes far beyond existing rightwing policy, with proposals for private unemployment insurance, health and care of the sick and elderly. If it were to go ahead, the Government would be washing its hands of responsibility for thousands of the sick, unemployed and disabled. It is clear that welfare is now seen simply as a business opportunity." + The ABI has already been approached by Mr Lilley's department to extend mortgage payment protection insurance, which generates premiums worth pounds 500 million a year. + Mortgage indemnity is likely to be made mandatory for all new housebuyers are likely in next month's Budget, so that those losing their job will not have their mortgages paid by the state, but by their insurance company. + Notebook, page 16 + +LOAD-DATE: October 22, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +290 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 22, 1993 + +BIG BANG THREATENS GLOBAL CLEAN-UP; +Diary + +BYLINE: MAEV KENNEDY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 22 + +LENGTH: 760 words + + + THE bit of the reconstructed Globe that has been finished, on Bankside in London, looks splendid. Just not very finished. Ever since the Diary admired the beauty and variety of his excuses for its state, torrents of reports and technical briefings have come from Sam Wanamaker, on the Globe's healthy progress. It is to be hoped today doesn't result in his most magnificent excuse to date. A team from Fort Nelson, the Royal Armouries artillery museum in Hampshire, is trundling towards London with a big gun. His Bankside neighbours have already been warned that a cannon will be fired, to launch an educational collaboration between the theatre and the Tower of London across the river. The gun is a replica early 16th century wrought-iron breech loader. The last time it was fired in London was a couple of years ago, from Tower Wharf, to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of Henry VIII. The original Globe, of course, burned to the ground in 1613, when the thatch roof caught fire after a cannon was discharged during the play Henry VIII. + AS they will be aware at the Globe, this is National Fire Safety Week. But everybody else should be told: this is National Fire Safety Week. Pay attention, or we all perish under the paper mountain: this is National Fire Safety Week. The first notice came from the Home Office press office last week, with a cunning little hole singed in the page. Then came Old Flames But the Embers Smoulder On, with a spent match taped to each copy. Then Will Your Bright Spark Burn Out Early, with attached birthday cake candle. Then one on elderly people, and another on children, mercifully without stapled grannies or toddlers. Then a two page speech from the Minister. Now it's chip pan fires, beginning uncomfortably: "Chips can kill with more than cholesterol." The Diary opened it very cautiously, but the Home Office seems to have forgotten to put in the boiling oil. + HURRAH for British Rail! Yesterday the train from Huntingdon arrived at Platform 9, Kings Cross Station, at 8.43 am, two minutes early! A tall, dapper, prosperous looking chap emerged from the first class compartment, and headed straight for the pay phone on the platform. Enthralled commuters couldn't avoid eavesdropping on the conversation with his office: "Michael here. Running late. Engineering works on the line." Michael's colleagues may have been sharp-eared enough to pick up, from the background hubbub, the commuters' chorus of "lying bastard". + MORE from Mr Gummer on VAT. The Environment Secretary was launching some free energy advice centres yesterday. Wouldn't he get into trouble with his colleagues over this, he was asked. Wouldn't more energy saving mean less revenue from VAT on fuel? "I would love to find that the Chancellor's return from VAT would be much less than he's expecting," Mr Gummer replied. + THE Conservative MP for Langbaurgh, Michael Bates, has been inundated with calls praising his hearth-warming policy shift over VAT on domestic fuel. His column in the Middlesbrough Evening Gazette said firmly: "VAT is the other gross mistake the Government will make. I think the horror of what they are doing is best explained by a pensioner who wrote to me this week: 'I am afraid of what the winter might bring'." He alternates the column, Your Local MP, with Labour's Marjorie Mowlam. The incendiary views were those of Ms Mowlam, though the name and the smiley photograph on top were certainly Mr Bates. + POOR old Boundary Commission, somebody loves them. The Consulate of Costa Rica has been in touch, on very nice Consulate note-paper. Costa Rica thinks the Boundary Commission's proposals for the Sparkbrook district of the Birmingham Small Heath constituency are "logical and sensible". Well, the letter is from Hilary Eccles-Williams, the Consul, who may be writing under his former hat as a Tory grandee of the Birmingham area. But it's nice to know Costa Rica cares. + ACROSS reader rings. "I am an extremely busy woman. I am a freelance writer and broadcaster, and I am gutting a house. I also loathe mixing with the hoi polloi. They frequently talk to me when I am shopping, especially about the National Health. I have rung Marks & Spencer at Marble Arch and left my name - but I have a feeling they are not going to call me back." + FROM the very correct Yorkshire Evening Press: "A report in last week's Evening Press which stated that sixth-formers at Pock lington School use 'a five-bedroomed cottage' as common rooms should have read 'a five-room cottage'." + +LOAD-DATE: October 22, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +291 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 22, 1993 + +ROCK/POP: TAKE THAT BACK + +BYLINE: CAROLINE SULLIVAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 11 + +LENGTH: 626 words + + + TAKE THAT: Everything Changes + (RCA 74321 169262) + THAT these blow-dried Mancunians have established themselves as the nation's top teen group is an indictment of our times. Take That could never have achieved such preeminence in the Eighties, which were dominated by the decidedly sexier Bros. Anyway, herewith their last three hit singles (Relight My Fire, Why Can't I Wake Up and the rather fine Pray) plus 10 others, all engineered to emphasise those trademark boyish harmonies. The most interesting numbers have already been released as singles; regarding the rest there is little to be said other than that they share the hits' sparkling blandness. It must be noted that there is a future beyond Take That for lead singer/writer Gary Barlow. His lyrics deal succinctly, if adolescently, with every aspect of love, from sexual jealousy, eg "I'm mad at you because of the things you do", to transvestism - "I came to your door to see you again, but where you once stood was an old man instead". Spicy! + BIKINI KILL: Pussy Whipped + (Wiiija WIJ28) + THE PRESS release included with the second album by these American rad-fems boasts that it is "total girl-powered punk rock". That can be taken to mean "freefloating fury meets minimal musical ability". It's unfortunate that this most politicised of the Riot Grrrl groups has chosen to submerge qualities such as irony and articulateness beneath ear-scything guitar blasts. Singer Kathleen Hanna is so enraged that words to fetching tunes like Hamster Baby and Star-Bellied Boy are transmuted to wild shrieks. Does Bikini Kill's notion of feminism as incoherent anger do women any favours? + PEARL JAM: Vs + (Epic 474549 2) + THE RELEASE of the sequel to their seven million-selling debut was delayed when Pearl Jam decided to change the album's title after the artwork had already been printed. Vs ("Versus") is said to signify the rivalry between the group and brother Seattle-ites Nirvana. The differences in their styles will preclude anyone ever confusing them - while Nirvana grunge away, PJ have moved on. Like its predecessor, Ten, Vs is, at least superficially, a cavalcade of cranked-up guitars weighed down by Eddie Vedder's histrionic vocals. It's quickly obvious, though, that this is a work of some depth and ingenuity. A few of the tracks, including Animal and the new single, Go, can be taken at thrashy face value, but for each of those there are two of the ilk of Dissident and WMA. The former is a heavyweight rockfest, the second a percussion-led jam whose muted sound induces a sense of claustrophobia. On Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town, Vedder's voice adopts the sardonicism of Elvis Costello and the poignancy of folkie Gordon Lightfoot. If you can hack the negative lyrics, there's much to love on this album. + ME'SHELL NDEGEOCELLO: + Plantation Lullabies + (Maverick 9362 45333-2) + THE FIRST female signing to Madonna's Maverick label is more intriguing than the average American rapstress. Her cool, solemn rhyming style is more evocative of Nina Simone than of other hip hoppers. Around half of the 13 songs proselytise about the African-American experience; the rest are straightforward love epistles. The common links are the unruffled soul arrangements (producer David Gamson's association with Luther Vandross is plain here) and NdegeOcello's reflective voice. Whether she's addressing black pride, eg Soul On Ice ("We've been indoctrinated and convinced by the white racist standard of beauty") or something baser, as in Picture Show ("The way you eat your cereal / So cute reading Shakespeare in your birthday suit"), the sense of calm contemplation never wavers. This is an album that will only improve over time. + +LOAD-DATE: October 22, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +292 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 23, 1993 + +UNPOPULAR SOCRATES FORCES FRENCH TO RETHINK THEIR RAIL PHILOSOPHY; +Ticket sales fiasco compels SNCF to consult unhappy passengers + +BYLINE: ALIX CHRISTIE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 39 + +LENGTH: 732 words + + + THE mother and daughter wondered where all the non-smoking cars had gone, while the dapper pensioner wanted to get a seat facing front. The professorial type announced his "shock and horror" at an unannounced 50 per cent fare rise as, beside him, the elderly gentleman with designer spectacles was getting increasingly agitated. + "Whatever happened to the idea of public service?" he finally exploded. "You are imposing a dictatorship of the obligatory reservation. The railway is no longer at the service of the passenger, it is the passenger who is at the service of the railway!" + Victoria station? Paddington? No, this irritable mob gathered last Wednesday at Paris's Gare St Lazare. And though it may seem incredible to British Rail travellers, even Societe Nationale de Chemins de Fer, the acknowledged paragon of national railways, can't keep customers happy these days. + One could almost pity the SNCF. It has built "gee-whiz" high-speed trains that leave and arrive on time, can be reserved by computer from home and only rarely suffers from that problem curious to South-east England: leaves on the line. + Last April it installed "Socrates", a computer reservation system aimed at making train travel more efficient without sacrificing affordability. But it brought protests from the public when the error-prone system cancelled trains, caused thousands of passengers to miss others, refused itineraries and pumped up fares. + "Railways are technical things filled with mostly technical people," said Serge Sacalais, Montparnasse station chief. "But it's true we sort of put our foot in it because we didn't know how to communicate." + The public fury has translated into an 8.8 per cent drop in passengers since January that will push the SNCF's 1993 deficit to an estimated Fr9 billion ( pounds 990 million) on turnover of more than Fr55 billion and force it to act. Hence the SNCF's Operation Dialogue, subtitled "We have so much to say to each other" (much of it unprintable). For four days this week 2,000 SNCF employees, from ticket sellers up to president Jacques Fournier, stood in the middle of 157 stations and let 100,000 passengers take verbal aim. + "It serves as a kind of escape valve," Mr Sacalais said. And one is needed, for the SNCF seems to have a knack of shooting itself in the foot. Only six months after the Socrates public relations debacle, it has just unveiled a new automatic ticket machine which unintentionally sums up what many perceive to be the grasping nature of the new, improved SNCF, when it announces: "Does not give change" before adding helpfully, "Overpayment accepted". + The notion of public service is increasingly at odds with modern commercial logic which the SNCF has adopted to compete head-on with air and road travel. The high-speed TGV, the first to break with the equal-pricing policy that was SNCF religion for decades, is the face of the future. SNCF's main lines will no longer be a public service geared to the typical passenger, known as "the widow from Carpentras". Instead, they will operate like airlines that must make money. + Judging from Socrates and its application on the new TGV Nord, many rail passengers do not like this vision. Only 49 per cent approve of their railway today, compared with 58 per cent in 1988. "People think of the SNCF as a public service - they think there should always be a train when they need it," says Mr Sacalais. "Our job is to explain that it isn't so." + Socrates, a Fr1.8 billion adaptation of the American Airlines reservation system, is demand-driven, allocating seats and choosing fares electronically. + Far more sophisticated than the old price structure of peak and non-peak periods, Socrates decides when peak demand will force prices up, thereby attempting to divert lower-paying passengers to trains now running half-empty. + In theory, it will allow those with fare reductions - the aged, families, students - more flexibility to take peak-period trains. So far, it has failed to do so. + But at least this week's communications exercise proved bracingly honest. + As one passenger, wondering why the computer always routed passengers on the most expensive itinerary, said slyly: "I hope you're not just doing it to make more money." + Whereupon the SNCF agent grinned and said: "We may be Manichean, but we're not yet to that point." + +LOAD-DATE: October 25, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +293 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 25, 1993 + +PORTILLO PREDICTS BIG WELFARE CUTS + +BYLINE: STEPHEN BATES, POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 22 + +LENGTH: 331 words + + + THE state should not be relied on for health services and welfare where people could make their own provision, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Michael Portillo, suggested yesterday. + It would not be able to sustain pensioners' standards of living in the 21st century, he told BBC TV's On The Record. He added: "I think we need to get away from dogmatic distinctions between private and public within the health service." + He criticised those who expected elderly relatives to be cared for by the state despite having the means to look after them. + His comments come after the Guardian revealed last week that an internal document from the Association of British Insurers identified business opportunities in health care, unemployment insurance and care of the elderly as parts of the welfare state are privatised. + Mr Portillo repeated his call for state spending as a proportion of national income to be cut from the present 45 per cent. Some on the right want the figure reduced to 25 per cent. + Politicians in all main parties have drawn attention to the burgeoning cost of social provision by the early years of the next century, but Mr Portillo is one who may still be around to take responsibility for it. + He said: "The conundrum we have is how can we enable people to have all the health care that they would like, to enjoy the standards that they would like and yet commit ourselves also to restraining the size of the state? + "I really believe that if it gets any bigger, it is going to impose such a burden on the wealth-creating sector of this country that it is going to crush it." + He urged people to provide for retirement through private pensions rather than rely on state pensions which could not meet rising expectations. + "One of the things in the 21st century you cannot rely on the state to do is to sustain the standard of living that you have achieved, which I think by then will be very high, into your retirement." + +LOAD-DATE: October 25, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +294 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 27, 1993 + +BUREAUCRACY FIGHTS BACK; +Drew Clode on the worry of a community care jobs coup + +BYLINE: DREW CLODE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 15 + +LENGTH: 991 words + + + DOES SOCIAL work have a future? It has been with us as a distinct profession for only just over 20 years, emerging from an array of child care staff, lady almoners, mental health workers and others who had provided the Beveridge state's response to the poverty and unemployment it believed were merely transient phenomena of Britain's post-war recovery. Today, however, social work is in danger of being usurped by a new youngest profession - care management. The issue is emerging as social services departments take on a new shape and it represents the basis of discussion at the opening session today in Solihull of the annual social services conference. The era of care management was heralded with the implementation in April of the community care shake-up. Grassroots accounts of how care managers are settling in are thin on the ground; there are almost as many definitions of their tasks as there are social services departments and neither the Department of Health, nor the Central Council for Training and Education in Social Work, has given the slightest clue as to what constitutes a workable job description or what training is relevant. Hard evidence, such as it is, suggests that two years ago local authorities in England and Wales were planning to create up to 2,100 care management posts in the run up to April, compared with some 25,000 practising field social workers in the United Kingdom as a whole. That figure of 2,100 will certainly have been passed this year. If the local authority associations were right when they calculated that an extra 100,000 or so referrals of elderly people would occur within the first year, with more down the line; and if an average, generous allocation of cases per care manager is 50; then either that caseload will have to increase, assessment time will have to shrink, some elderly people will have to be ignored, or local authorities are going to need some 20,000-plus staff to care for these new referrals as they enter the welfare market. The long-term question is: where are these staff going to come from? A joint survey by the Association of Directors of Social Services and Community Care magazine showed that some two-thirds of social services departments were planning to fill care management posts by redesignating some existing social workers. But recent evidence suggests that when these posts fall vacant, they are not automatically filled by those who were previously in social work or who even possess social work experience or qualification. They are as likely to be filled by occupational therapists, district nurses, home or domiciliary care managers and, in some cases, teachers. + EMPLOYERS are only too aware of the issues at stake. Ian White, immediate ADSS past-president and director of social services for Oxfordshire, says that although on the face of it there is still clearly a shortage of social workers, nobody at present knows precisely what the impact of care management will be on the social services staff profile over the next two to three years. There is, it is widely felt, a particular need to monitor closely the move from occupational therapy to care managers. A novel definition of the care managers' role was offered at a recent seminar held to examine training needs: "They're social workers without the stodgy glue," one participant said - a coarse definition of care management as an operationalised form of social worker. The emphasis is entirely on action whose outcomes can be measured, providing effective solutions to user needs and, perhaps somewhere further ahead, taking comprehensive responsibility for a delegated budget. Meanwhile, the "stodgy glue" discarded when care management emerges from its social work chrysalis is as likely as not to contain some traditional social worker roles such as counselling (as opposed to giving down-to-earth practical advice), what used to be called client-advocacy, as well as the habit of using a whole gamut of sub-Freudian psychodynamic jargon that leant itself more to analysis than action. More controversially, that "stodgy glue" will almost certainly contain beliefs inherited from the formative crucible of the 1960s and 1970s, that social workers are the moral guardians of the principles of social equality and the struggle against those oppressive forces which, as some see it, still permeate late twentieth century British society. And there lies the nub of the conflict. Advocating the interests of "clients" against the bureaucracy of the local authority "supplier" of services, for example, is given a completely different twist when the care manager is the chief agent of that local authority, and the local authority itself has long-since ceased to be the only supplier in the market. + IF SOCIAL workers are attacked on this high ground there seems to be only three fallback positions they can adopt. They can: + - Make substantial changes in their professional culture and embrace the new disciplines of care management. Not an impossible task, though there is scant evidence that they are either willing or able easily to make these adjustments. + - Concentrate their specialist skills on so-called heavy-end, complicated assessments, leaving the easier, more straightforward problems to care management. This is precisely what is occurring in councils such as East Sussex and Cornwall. + - Move wholly on to the provider side of their local authority, offering counselling and advocacy skills as and when care managers believe such therapies are part of their users' overall needs. But if the struggle between social work and care management hots up, the conflict will not just be about which profession is best suited to carry out what job. It will also involve the painful task of finding out just how much of the stodgy glue is lost forever, and how much of it - and in what for m - can and should be transplanted into the care manager's domain. + +LOAD-DATE: October 27, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +295 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 27, 1993 + +DOCTORS FORECAST BAD WINTER FOR 'FLU + +BYLINE: CHRIS MIHILL,MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 405 words + + + BRITAIN may be in for a bad winter from the influenza virus and vulnerable groups such as the elderly and heart disease sufferers were yesterday urged by specialists to have themselves vaccinated. + It is difficult to forecast the extent of influenza epidemics, but a leading researcher said early indicators pointed to a high level of cases. + Last year was a mild winter for 'flu, but an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 people still died. In the winter of 1989/90, considered to be an epidemic year, between 19,000 and 25,000 died. + Dr Douglas Fleming, director of the Birmingham research unit of the Royal College of General Practitioners, which monitors 'flu cases at GP surgeries throughout the country, said that in the past overall cases of respiratory illness, rather than just 'flu, had proved an accurate indicator of trends. + So far this year such cases were running at 50 per 1,000 of the population, compared with half this number for the same time last year. + "Forecasting is very difficult, but certainly at the moment respiratory infections are running at quite a high level. A number of strains of influenza have already been isolated. + "The message is that 'flu is about. It is desirable for people at high risk to get themselves vaccinated." + Speaking at a meeting in London organised by the Association for Influenza Monitoring and Surveillance, which is funded by vaccine manufacturers, Dr Fleming said it was a misconception that 'flu was a trivial illness, and every year, apart from deaths, it put an enormous strain on hospital beds as elderly people living alone had to be brought in for treatment. + Professor John Oxford, head of virology at the Royal London Hospital, said the current vaccine could provide around 70 per cent protection against the three strains of influenza circulating this year. Even where people were not fully protected, they were likely to suffer fewer complications. + He said protection would take place within five days of people receiving the vaccine, so although it was worthwhile getting vaccinated early, it was still not too late once an epidemic had started. + Department of Health advice is that the elderly and those with long-term conditions such as chest complaints, heart disease or diabetes should be vaccinated, as should residents of nursing homes, old people's homes and other long-stay facilities, where rapid spread is likely. + +LOAD-DATE: October 27, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +296 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 27, 1993 + +CARE IN THE COMMUNITY 'FAILING THE ELDERLY AND DISABLED' + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 253 words + + + PATCHY introduction of the community care system has left many elderly and disabled people in confusion and lacking the services they need, two reports claim today. + Complexity, delays and lack of co-ordination in some parts of the country are undermining the system's fundamental aim of offering vulnerable people a choice of care services, according to the reports by Age Concern and the National Federation of Housing Associations. + However, social services directors - who are running the system - have released survey details which, they say, show that community care has been introduced successfully. + The reports coincide with the opening today in Solihull of the annual social services conference which will review progress of the community care system introduced in April. + The survey by the Association of Directors of Social Services says that more are being helped to live independently. + The Age Concern report, however, describes the start of community care as very uneven and highlights "disturbing" variations in the system. + The report criticises jargon and complexity in assessment. + The housing associations' report says the social services "gate-keepers" are dividing people with equal needs into deserving and undeserving cases. + "It is only the elderly who are eating at the table of community care. Single homeless people, ex-offenders and people with drug or alcohol problems are not even entering the dining room. + "Community care jobs coup, G2 page 15 + +LOAD-DATE: October 27, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +297 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 29, 1993 + +COMMENTARY: THE TEENAGE MUM AS TARGET; +Commentary + +BYLINE: ANN HOLMES + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 25 + +LENGTH: 709 words + + + LET me begin by declaring an interest. My mother was a single parent. One of my great regrets is that I have never known her. In the late 1940s it more or less went without question that unmarried teenage mothers gave up their babies for adoption. + I have also been a single parent myself. In common with the majority so classified, I became a single parent as a result of ceasing to live with my children's father. Less than 35 per cent of lone parents are single and unmarried. + By contrast with many tenants, the equity from years of owner occupation allowed us the freedom to choose to live separately. But freedom of choice gives rise to additional households. Lack of freedom traps people in living arrangements they find undesirable. + This holds true not only for spouses but, for example, adult children, former friends and ageing relatives. Dealing with increasing numbers of households requires continuous investment in the process of construction and rehabilitation. That same process can be labour intensive and low on imports and, if pursued energetically, almost always enjoys a positive correlation with a vibrant economy. + Remarks to the Conservative Party conference by Sir George Young and others about single mothers have been viewed with some scepticism. What outcome was he hoping for when he implied such mothers were the reason young couples could not get decent housing? What message was he wanting us to take on board? + Was he admitting that the Government is incapable of ensuring an adequate supply of housing? With talk of yet further cuts in housing expenditure in next month's Budget, he might well have been. + Was he heralding a move to cut down on the number of households? Can we look forward to the elderly being encouraged to cohabit as a means of simultaneously reducing the number of households and coping with increased fuel costs? + Was he suggesting the thought that nowhere to live would deter teenage pregnancies? In fact, the number of births to teenage mothers has fallen by 37 per cent over the past 20 years and the vast majority of teenage mums live with their parents. Are we to look forward, however, to this group being drawn into line with students by having housing benefit withdrawn? + Or was the Minister simply trying to divert attention from the inadequacy of the Government's housing programme, by turning a group of its victims into scapegoats? + Households headed by lone parents account for less than 4 per cent of all households. The poverty of such households will inevitably mean a high percentage of that 3.8 per cent live in "social" housing. However, only 0.3 per cent of local authority tenants are women under 20. In 1992 only 2.4 per cent of new local authority lettings went to lone parents under 19. + We should also ask ourselves where such young women tend to find themselves being housed. As the effect of public expenditure cuts and financial contraints on local councils have combined with the effects of the right to buy policy, new lettings are increasingly confined to the less desirable dwellings on the less desirable estates. Many such estates are becoming residual pools of welfare housing where poverty and lack of hope are the hallmarks. + Despite evidence to the contrary, there has been talk about teenagers choosing to become pregnant as a way of buying a lifestyle. It would be hard to find a greater indictment of our society than acknowledging life as a single parent on welfare benefit on a run-down estate as representing achievement. Under-18-year-olds on income support receive a personal allowance of pounds 26.45 per week. + A teenage mum pushing a pram round a run-down estate is an easy target. But targets have a way of expanding. If young women have a right to keep their babies and we recognise the right of those babies to be decently housed, then the Government must set about ensuring housing is available. + It is not acceptable for government ministers to imply that it is only possible to house one group of people at the expense of another. That dilemma arises as a result of policies the Government has chosen to pursue. + Ann Holmes is director of the National Housing and Town Planning Council. + +LOAD-DATE: October 29, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +298 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 30, 1993 + +'NO ANGEL' JUDGE STOKES ANGER WITH NEW RULING + +BYLINE: LOUISE JURY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 5 + +LENGTH: 445 words + + + THE judge who called a nine-year-old victim of a sex attack "no angel" yesterday gave two men who had unlawful intercourse with a girl aged 13 a conditional discharge. + Judge Ian Starforth Hill, QC, said the girl had gone round "trying to find young men to satisfy her sexual desires" and that the offence was at the "bottom end of the scale." + Philip Lemon, aged 21, unemployed, of Thornhill, Southampton, and Keith Dyer, aged 19, a factory worker, of Hythe, Southampton, admitted the offences. + The judge, who is 71, told the men: "I have to pass a sentence because it is against the law and to prevent other young men from falling into the same trap. It would be folly on my part to pass a custodial sentence on you whatever the Court of Appeal may think." + Winchester crown court had heard evidence from police that the girl, now aged 14, was "more like (the model) Mandy Smith than the proverbial schoolgirl with pigtails." + Detective Sergeant Robert Bowness said: "She is an exceptionally attractive girl with a bad reputation for her involvement with boys." Her parents had tried to protect her from herself but she lied to them. James Counsell, defending, said the girl had handed Mr Lemon a note while they were driving explaining what she wanted him to do to her. Mr Lemon admitted having sex with her in the car. + Mr Dyer admitted sexual intercourse after she pestered him at a New Year's Eve party. "At first he ignored her telephone calls but she called at his home and persuaded him to have sex with her." + The judge added: "This girl may have been a very willing partner and encouraged you to take part in this offence, but girls of 13 years have to be protected, even from themselves. + "They may come across horrid old men, when the offence is serious, or it may be willingly with young men when they need protection against themselves. + "I had better not say she was no angel or the national press with have a hundred field days." + A youth, aged 17, who admitted intercourse with the girl, was cautioned on Crown Prosecution Service instructions. + Jane Kilpatrick, of the charity Kidscape which helps abused children, said the judge, who has made a number of controversial decisions in sex cases, showed an extraordinary ignorance of the natural development of adolescent girls and should be retired. + "Whatever a 13-year-old girl might look or sound like she is still only 13. They are becoming more aware of their sexuality, but they do not go around trying to seduce adults. + "Those who do are disturbed in some way and my question would be, why is she behaving in this way?" + Leader comment, page 26 + +LOAD-DATE: November 1, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +299 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 30, 1993 + +COMMUNITY CARE TO GET 20M POUNDS BOOST + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 559 words + + + MINISTERS yesterday produced a surprise pounds 20 million increase in funding for community care next year, despite the tough public spending round. Dr Brian Mawhinney, the Health Minister, told local authority leaders he wanted the extra money spent on services to enable elderly and disabled people to stay in their own homes rather than enter residential care. + Labour-controlled local authority associations said the total community care funding settlement of pounds 1.3 billion fell at least pounds 120 million short of what was required. But social services directors said they were relieved to have got as much as they had. + Both the associations and directors warned, however, that overall social services budgets could be torpedoed by the local government grant allocations in December. + The community care funding for 1994/95 was set out by Dr Mawhinney at the annual social services conference in Solihull. There had been fears he would announce a cut in the sum, announced last year, to be transferred from social security under the three-year shift of finance for the community care changes. + In the event, the minister confirmed the sum of pounds 652 million which, added to last year's transfer and other elements, produces the total pounds 1.3 billion. Of that, pounds 736 million, including the pounds 20 million increase, is "ring-fenced" strictly for community care use, 85 per cent being reserved for spending in the private and voluntary sectors. + The Department of Health is likely to have succeeded in protecting the cash transfer from the Treasury's grasp both because it had been signalled previously and because community care is seen as a long-term saving. The new system has capped the social security bill for residential care, which soared from pounds 10 million in 1978 to pounds 2.5 billion last year. + Similarly, the pounds 20 million increase will have been presented as a real saving, enabling 100 people in each local authority area to have respite or home care worth pounds 2,000 and thereby to stay out of more costly residential or nursing homes. + Dr Mawhinney said there was emerging evidence that the community care system, introduced in April, was enabling more people to remain in their own homes. In some areas, the reported rise in numbers of such people was already 10 per cent or more. + Although the pounds 20 million is not being designated only for home or respite care, the minister said he would be looking to see it spent in that way. + The Association of Metropolitan Authorities and the Association of County Councils criticised the overall cash allocation for including no extra money for staff training or infrastructure. The pounds 140 million allocated for this in the current year is simply to be repeated. + Peter Westland, AMA under-secretary, said an extra sum of between pounds 140 million and pounds 200 million was needed in respect of the costs of managing the additional 110,000 elderly and disabled people expected to need services during the year. + This under-funding and the likelihood of cuts in general local authority grants presented a "lethal mixture", said Mr Westland. + However, Denise Platt, president of the Association of Directors of Social Services, said directors had not expected any increase in community care funding. + +LOAD-DATE: November 1, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +300 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 30, 1993 + +YUGOSLAVS HUSTLE TO STAVE OFF HUNGER; +Serbia's burgeoning black economy is rife with hawkers, pimps and sharks as sanctions bite deeper, writes Yigal Chazan in Belgrade + +BYLINE: YIGAL CHAZAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 13 + +LENGTH: 651 words + + + RADE never misses a trick. Moments after buying three cartons of cigarettes from a kiosk, this Serb refugee was hawking them at double the price to people fed up with queuing. Having made a tidy profit, Rade, aged 37, shuffled off to his store at Zelani Venac market, lugging a huge sports bag stuffed with food and knick-knacks. + "You name it, I sell it," he said, winking. "These days you have to be a wheeler-dealer to survive." + Battered by sanctions and hyper-inflation, the Yugoslav economy is in a state of terminal decline. The closure of state factories and companies has left millions out of work, while those clinging to their jobs are paid a pittance. + To stave off penury and hunger, hordes of Yugoslavs swallow their pride and take to the street. + Nowhere is the black economy more visible than along Bulevar Revolucije, one of the city's main arteries. Petty traders line the road selling anything from stylish sports shoes to cosmetics, some displaying their wares on flimsy stalls, others on car bonnets. + Most merchandise has been smuggled to Serbia from neighbouring countries. Tourist agencies specialise in ferrying the touts back and forth to Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria, giving huge bribes to customs officials to turn a blind eye. + Zeljko, a postman aged 28, normally finishes his shift at 3pm and then dashes down to the Bulevar for a bit of overtime. In just a few days of trading, he can double his monthly income, equivalent to about pounds 12, which is barely enough to buy a week's worth of groceries for his family. + Zeljko's car bonnet is decorated with products including nappies, Swiss chocolate and toothpaste. He restocks on foreign shopping expeditions at least once a week. + "When we arrive, it's like a stampede at a winter sale. I love watching those on the trip for the first time. They stare wide-eyed at mounds of toilet paper, just because it's three times cheaper than in Belgrade. + "People haul all sorts of things on to the coach. Sacks of cement, onions, complete bathrooms. Unloading at home can take half an hour." + In contrast to the roguish antics of Zeljko and Rade are sharks preying on the most vulnerable. The elderly, often seen fishing out scraps from city dustbins, are being exploited by a growing number of unscrupulous estate agents. They offer pensioners between pounds 80 and pounds 120 a month - to pay for food and medical bills - in exchange for the title deeds of their flats when they die. + "It's a good deal for them and good business for us," bragged Gojko, the director of one agency. "Age, mobility and health," he said, "are important criteria when selecting clients. + "We don't want them to live too long. If the value of the real estate is high, then death within five or six years is still profitable." + Gojko has had to turn away scores of pensioners who do not fit the bill. "If they're too young we just tell them to come back in 10 years' time," he said. + The pages of Oglasi, Belgrade's popular advertising magazine, reveal another growth sector - the sex industry. Brothels and pimps recruit poverty-stricken women. + Two months ago, Tomo, aged 28, a former soldier, set up an "escort agency" in the back room of his flat. He left the Yugoslav army earlier this year after salaries were slashed. "It's not honourable, but neither are these sanctions," Tomo said. "I would go back to soldiering tomorrow, but it doesn't pay." + He says some of the women on his books are single mothers who would be even worse off but for his offer of "work". + Tomo plans to move into larger premises. He reckons his preference for local girls has given him an edge over pimps employing Russian and Polish protitutes. "No one's interested in them any more because they've been around too long, and the risks of catching something are high. Domestic women are better for business." + +LOAD-DATE: November 1, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +301 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 30, 1993 + +LAUGHTER'S LITTLE BIG MAN; +Obituary: Sydney Arnold + +BYLINE: PETER COTES + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 88 + +LENGTH: 426 words + + + SYDNEY ARNOLD was 93 when he died recently and for more than 70 years of a life of comic versatility, he played a variety of parts in revue, musical comedy, stage farce and pantomime. In all - especially panto - he made his audience share in the fun of living hilariously, through his diminutive frame, timing and personality. But he never became so typecast that he was thought incapable of playing anything but midgets. + Barely 5ft in height, and with an incorrigible roguish twinkle, he was made for the lighter stage, but like Wee Georgie Wood, who was even smaller, Sydney was well-proportioned. Unlike the incomparable Georgie (towards his end), the tiny Sydney retained his figure, even his boyish looks, until he was nearing his nineties. + He was a mite of a youngster, still learning his trade, when in his teens he landed a part with the legendary Robert Courtneidge (star picker and father of the immortal Cicely). + He was picked for Ian Hay's A Safety Match in 1921. With so much talent to watch ('Cis' became a reigning queen of revue), it was no wonder that Arnold found his most profitable career in stage comedy; also flirting with the circus as a clown for a short time and cinema as a street pedlar in the film of Oliver! + There were many screen appearances throughout that long career, not only in England but in America, where he played cameos in such favourite films as One More Time, with Sammy Davis Jnr, and a "feed" role, for which he was well paid, in the Kraft Television Theatre series. + Apart from 84 Charing Cross Road, much of his work on the small screen was in series such as The Sweeney, Robin's Nest, and Miss Jones And Son. Sydney was also one of the innumerable little old men in episodes of the Benny Hill Show. + Most of his career, because of his physique, was devoted to playing funsters and although panto, revue and slapstick farce predominated his career, he found time to become momentarily serious in a London production of War And Peace and pop up again in Crime And Punishment, in Leicester. + At the age of 80, he reverted to that side of show business he knew best - farce. He played George, the chirpy sparrow, in Wot! No Pyjamas, which was Whitehall farce with a vengeance and not very funny. It didn't last long. Neither did his marriage (to the actress Audrey Binham) last forever; ending in divorce. + The last five years of his life were blighted when at the age of 88 he contracted Alzheimer's disease. + Sydney Arnold, born February 21, 1900; died October, 1993 + +LOAD-DATE: November 1, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +302 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +October 30, 1993 + +SHORT CUTS: NEVER CROSS AN EMU + +BYLINE: ROBERT LEEDHAM + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN WEEKEND PAGE; Pg. 68 + +LENGTH: 312 words + + + Nominee for Headline of the Year: the Daily Star's "Biker killed by an emu". Despite inspiring visions of Hell's Angels being pecked to death and of Rod Hull grappling with a crack-crazed puppet, the facts behind the story are even more incredible. motorcyclist Stephen Cawthorne "fought off muggers in Mexico", was robbed in Peru and "survived a nightmare ride through war-torn El Salvador" - looking for trouble, was he? - before meeting his Australian nemesis, an emu that failed to look both ways before crossing. Stephen rode straight into it, did a somersault, and broke his neck. "I noticed a large puff of feathers as they hit," said eyewitness Keith Wright. + It's a complicated business, crossing the road; at least, in legal terms. New Jersey's Superior Court Judge Harold B Wells has just overturned the drunken-driving conviction of Paul Wagoner, 37, who was convicted of crossing a road while drunk - in a wheelchair. He wasn't driving, ruled the judge; he was "walking". In fact, he was jaywalking - which carries a $ 50 fine. Touche. + From the British Medical Journal: "Nuns have been known to have high rates of breast cancer since Ramazzini's observation of the association in 1713." However, it's taken the intervening 280 years to prove that social class and late childbearing have nothing to do with the link. The BMJ admits it's stumped for an explanation, so Short Cuts has a suggestion . . . radioactive crucifixes? + Turn on, tune in, drop out . . . and drop dead. That madcap Timothy Leary chap is back. And he's found a new drug to replace LSD. Goodbye ecstasy, hello . . . senility. Leary, obviously in full control of all his faculties, told students in Indiana that the onset of senile dementia is something they should look forward to. "This great high has been wasted on old people," he announced. Timothy Leary is 73. + +LOAD-DATE: November 1, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +303 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 1, 1993 + +'THESE PEOPLE SHOT ONE OF THEIR OWN. THEY'D HAVE SHOT ANYBODY . . . THEY SHOULD BE ROUNDED UP AND GASSED'; +Country and Western night out that became scene of terror - Relatives strive to come to terms with outcome of pub massacre + +BYLINE: JOHN MULLIN. + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 517 words + + + IN JOHN and Nellie Burns's council house, their 14-year-old daughter was bustling about, making tea and sandwiches for the vistors who poured into their home at St Canice's Park in the village of Eglinton yesterday. + It was hard to believe she had just lost her father, and knew her mother was fighting for her life after loyalists sprayed the Rising Sun pub in Greysteel with gunfire on Saturday night. Gillian Burns is the youngest of the couple's three children. Her father, who worked part-time in the old Ulster Defence Regiment, was a Protestant, killed by gunmen who claim to share the same faith. + She said: "They went to the Rising Sun every Saturday night. They loved the country and western music. These people shot one of their own. They would have shot anybody. You would be ashamed to be Protestant, you really would." + John Burns, aged 54, left the UDR several years ago. He had worked as a shop assistant, but had been unemployed for some time, said a friend. "He was a real happy-go-lucky fellow. If you wanted something, he would be the first to go for you. It didn't matter what religion you were. It doesn't matter whether gunmen who do this are the IRA or UFF. They should be rounded up and gassed." + In a bungalow just off the Ballygudden Road, they were mourning Moira Duddy, aged 59. She had bought the house 33 years before with her husband, John, for pounds 300. It was roofless then, and they spent their married life renovating it. They brought up five sons and a daughter there. They had five grandchildren. Des Killkey, her brother, said: "She lived for her family and this wee house. She had no interest in politics at all. Moira's death won't affect the situation in Northern Ireland. It is totally pointless." + Her son Chris, aged 25, broke down. "She was a Christian, hard-working woman. She looked forward to Saturday nights - it was the only night of the week she went out." + The oldest victim was James Moore, aged 81, of Meadowbank Place, father of Jimmy Moore, who had owned the Rising Sun for 22 years. He hadfive children and leaves behind a 77-year-old widow, Rosie. + Joe McDermott, aged 60, lived beyond neighbouring Eglinton. He was a single man, regarded by most locals as an eccentric, who would walk four miles to buy milk for his beloved cats, and almost 10 miles to the Rising Sun. He liked Saturday nights, because there were dances for older people. + John Moyne, aged 50, was a supervisor at the Dupont chemical factory in Londonderry. + Sweethearts Karen Thompson, aged 19, and Steven Mullan, aged 20, a joiner, were planning to get engaged at Christmas. + Jeremy Thompson, aged 20, Karen's brother, said: "She was a Catholic but she went to mixed schools. Nobody bothered about religion round here." + She and Stephen usually went to the pub for one drink on a Saturday before going to his house to babysit. + Karen had trained as a hairdresser but was to start work at a clothing factory in Londonderry this morning. "She was exciting about it but now she's going to be buried on my 21st birthday," he said. + +LOAD-DATE: November 1, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +304 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 1, 1993 + +BURGLARS DO IT GENTLY TO RAISE CASH + +BYLINE: DUNCAN CAMPBELL, CRIME CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 399 words + + + CONTRARY to popular belief, most burglars do not break into houses at night, do not steal to feed a drugs habit, and do not attack their victims, according to a comprehensive study published today. + But some victims are severely affected by the intrusions, burglars have little conception of the serious emotional harm they inflict, and the police response is often confusing and inadequate. + The study, covering 20,000 homes in Watford, Hertfordshire, and including extensive interviews with burglars, 300 victims, and householders, was conducted under the auspices of the Hertfordshire Care Trust involving police, probation services, and statutory and voluntary agencies. + It concluded that burglaries generally occur during daylight with only 25 per cent of victims at home during an attempted or actual burglary; that damage to property occurred in only 18 per cent of cases; that there were few cases of gratuitous damage, with one of a burglar urinating on the floor, three of cutting telephone wires, and six of consuming alcohol on the premises and that most burglaries are to pay debts, four times as many as those carried out to fund alcohol or drug habit. + A few burglars commit most crimes - of those surveyed 25 had committed 1,124 offences. + The survey also showed that many elderly people are victims of "artifice" - impersonation of a water or electricty board official. Houses with dogs, occupants, easy visibility, and alarms tend to be avoided. + WPC Sue Mantle, of Hertfordshire police, said that 30 per cent of burglaries were due to open doors and windows. Many people did not take even basic precautions.Victims found it disturbing that they were often visited by three police officers - one uniformed, one CID, one for fingerprints. + They felt they were not kept in touch with the investigation. + Helena Griffiths, of the probation service, said that burglars said victims could afford the loss, which was often untrue. Most said that shortage of cash and easy opportunity led to their crimes. + Sixty-one per cent of victims wanted custodial sentences and 32 per cent a community sentence. + Detective Chief Inspector Peter Seaman, of the Hertfordshire police crime prevention unit, said that many people could not afford the pounds 400 a burglar alarm system costs but better locks and secure windows could be major deterrents. + +LOAD-DATE: November 1, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +305 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 1, 1993 + +BYLINE: ANNA TOMFORDE IN BONN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 12 + +LENGTH: 499 words + + + THE decision to site the European Monetary Institute and, later, the European Central Bank in Frankfurt could be a timely boost for a city hovering on the brink of bankruptcy. + "We are proud that Europe has entrusted us with the responsibility of looking after its monetary policy, and we shall make a good job of it," Andreas von Schoeler, the city's mayor said at the weekend. + But as the champagne corks were popping, the mayor who rules the city of 650,000 in a precarious Social Democrat-Green coalition must have felt deep relief at the prospect of attracting new tax-paying institutions, with the potential of 4,000 new jobs, to Frankfurt, which holds the dubious distinction of being Germany's most indebted city. + It is a fact in stark contrast to the impressive skyline of Germany's business capital where there has so far been no threat of the trams stopping or garbage being left uncollected. + But, like most other German cities, Frankfurt has woken up to the fact that it has lived beyond its means for too long. It hopes to remedy its DM8.3 billion ( pounds 3.3 billion) deficit with drastic cuts in spending on culture and social institutions. + In charge of the cost-cutting drive is Tom Koenigs, Frankfurt's Green treasurer and a veteran of the 1968 students' movement. + Mr Koenigs has made headlines by hiring Wolfgang Nierhaus, a banker and leading member of Deutsche Bank, to help him trim spending. Deutsche Bank has agreed to continue paying Mr Nierhaus's salary during his three-year effort to try to balance Frankfurt's books. + "With 400 leading banks on our doorstep we would be crazy not to use their concentrated expertise," said the Green treasurer. A one-time anti-Vietnam war campaigner who donated a large private inheritance to the victorious Vietcong, Mr Koenigs said of Mr Nierhaus: "I don't care about the colour of the cat as long as it catches mice." + Mr Nierhaus said he was motivated by the banking community's concern for the city's image: "It is for us an almost patriotic task to help the municipal authorities." + Spending on unemployment benefits, social security and care of the elderly threaten to spin out of control. Public swimming pools, youth centres, theatres, cinemas, libraries and pensioners' clubs face closure. Even the city's elaborate concert halls will be made to feel the pinch. Schools and municipal offices will be cleaned less often. + The cash shortage means that for next year Frankfurt, a city with a desperate demand for affordable housing, will have a mere DM27.2 million to spend on new council flats. + Residents also fear that rent levels will rise dramatically with the arrival of the European institutions. + Mr von Schoeler, presenting next year's draft budget, said the measures only marked the beginning of Frankfurt's "slimming cure". + "We are only applying the emergency brakes. What's required is a total rethink by everyone of the notion that the city can do everything." + +LOAD-DATE: November 1, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +306 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 2, 1993 + +POOR PICKINGS FOR ARMENIAN LOOTERS AMONG THE BURNT-OUT BUILDINGS OF FALLEN AZERI TOWN; +Suzanne Goldenberg in Agdam reports on the desolation wreaked by the war in Nagorno-Karabakh + +BYLINE: SUZANNE GOLDENBERG + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 923 words + + + ONCE a town of 50,000 and the most important staging post in the Nagorno-Karabakh war, Agdam is now a place of charred buildings and deserted streets. + The only signs of life are ripening fruit trees and bundled-up old women who move like wraiths through the ruins. From abandoned gardens they pick persimmon which will be sent to Armenian forces on the front line nearby. + Clutching their laden sacks the women wait by the roadside for the lorries that will take them back to the enclave's capital, Stepanakert. Dozens of labels from the defunct local wine factory lie at their feet on the dusty road. + Although Armenian civilians have ventured into Agdam since its capture in late July, they say they feel uneasy amid the desolation caused by their armies. "This is an Azerbaijani town," said one old man, wheeling a trolley of pomegranates out of town. "Why should we want to live here?" + Some of the first looters who arrived in Agdam said they found burned corpses in the wreckage. Others are quick to load up with whatever they can salvage before they leave. + But despite the Karabakh government's claims that it is punishing looters, there is only one desultory checkpoint outside the town. + Although there is some evidence of the heavy shelling that accompanied Agdam's fall, the burnt-out buildings are testimony to the town's sacking after its capture. In the centre, there is hardly a building left intact, just blackened empty husks. + Agdam was the most strategic Azeri town to fall as the Armenian forces punched their way out of the enclave to occupy a huge swathof Azerbaijan. Its capture was followed by the seizure in August of Jebrail and Fizuli to the south, which cut off tens of thousands of civilians from Azerbaijan, forcing them to flee towards Iran a few miles away. + The few Western aid agency officials to have visited these areas have spoken of deliberate destruction through fires and looting. + Officials in Nagorno-Karabakh have not said so outright, but it seems clear that the land seized from Azerbaijan to the west, east and south-west of the enclave will act as a buffer zone until the war is over. + "We consider this our front line. We will keep the occupied territories as a no-man's land. The army is busy terminating strongholds as military bases," Manvil Sarkissian, the Nagorno-Karabakh ambassador to Armenia, said. + The Karabakh advance into Azerbaijan was halted by a ceasefire in early September, but the fighting to the south resumed a few days ago. A second exodus is in progress through a corridor carved out of the Zangelan region - destroying any hope of the ceasefire being extended when it expires next week. + Western aid agencies are warning of a new humanitarian disaster in Azerbaijan. + The Karabakh Armenians in Stepanakert have been buoyed by the military successes. They are relishing a rare period of peace since the war began in 1988. A besieged city 16 months ago, it is now easily reached from the Armenian capital Yerevan by coach and taxi. + However, the Karabakh authorities are angry at the international condemnation of their offensive and the focus on Azeri refugees. Last week they declared a state of emergency in the enclave, restricting the movements of all outsiders. + Even Armenian journalists are barred from battle zones and need entry and exit visas for Karabakh. + But with the Azeri forces so savagely defeated, the Karabakh authorities feel confident enough to begin resettling refugees in three regions of the enclave. Mardakert in the north - which changed hands several times before the Azeris were forced out in June - is the scene of the most ambitious resettlement. + Most people are eager to go back, although electricity has yet to be restored and the villages are as devastated as Agdam. + "This is my land. I cannot live anywhere else in the world," Asdghig Asarian said. She and her three children fled from the area to Yerevan in July 1992. They eked out a living on International Red Cross food and clothing handouts and a payment from the Armenian government of 1,000 roubles (less than $ 5). + Her husband lost the use of his right hand in the fighting but they were among the first to return to Zardakhaj village this summer. "There was nothing left, only the walls of my home," she said. "But life is simpler here; we can hope to survive." + Government construction workers from all over Armenia have been working in Zardakhaj and six other villages for the past two months, trying to guarantee each family one habitable room before winter. + The authorities in Karabakh and Armenia are anxious that people return home, to stop the drain on finances and to bolster the recent military victories. + But some observers in Yerevan are worried. They say the latest Karabakh attacks are born of desperation. With negotiations on Karabakh's future blocked at the conference on security and co-operation in Europe, Armenian troops are anxious to force the president of Azerbaijan, Geidar Aliyev, to negotiate by inflicting defeat after defeat. + The Armenian side is trying to extract a pledge from Mr Aliyev to gradually lift a two-year blockade of Armenia and Karabakh in return for a staged retreat from Azerbaijan. + But time is on Mr Aliyev's side. Despite the horrific Azeri losses, winter is approaching. Economic life in Armenia is already near standstill and it is unclear how many more sacrifices people are prepared to make on behalf of their brethren in Karabakh. + +LOAD-DATE: November 2, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +307 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 2, 1993 + +CIVILIANS CLING TO UN SOLDIERS IN BOSNIA + +BYLINE: KURT SCHORK IN VARES, CENTRAL BOSNIA + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 516 words + + + HUNDREDS of Muslim and Croat civilians gathered in the central Bosnian town of Vares yesterday in a desperate attempt to escape marauding soldiers. + "Many civilians are being terrorised in the area and are seeking our protection," said Captain Bjorn Borqvall, a Swedish medical officer on United Nations peacekeeping duty in Vares. "We are doing our best, but we haven't the men or the facilities to do the job we would like." + About 120 Muslims, mostly women and children, could be seen cowering on the main street of Vares behind UN armoured vehicles manned by Swedish peacekeepers. Heavily-armed Croat gunmen, who have been terrorising the local Muslim population for 10 days, swaggered past. + Croats fleeing soldiers of the mostly Muslim Bosnian army were seen walking into Vares from the north, where the village of Dubostica fell to Muslim forces over the weekend. Elderly Croat men led horses piled high with carpets, blankets and pots and pans salvaged from their abandoned homes. + Most Muslim men in Vares have been arrested and interned in two schools, under what UN officials describe as "dirty and degrading" conditions. + Masked Croat gunmen have been raiding Muslim homes every evening, robbing and beating residents. Many Muslim women and children were so frightened they planned to spend the night sleeping on the pavement in sub-zero temperatures next to UN soldiers rather than return home. + "I've spent four nights here on the street and I'm freezing to death," complained Huma Geko, aged 65, as she huddled among a group of women on a pile of blankets and suitcases. "I trust only the blue helmets," she added. "They saved my life last night." + Ms Geko said the only time she had been home in recent days, she had been grabbed by Croat gunmen who threatened to kill her. + More than 100 terrified Muslims are staying at an abandoned sawmill adjacent to the Swedish base outside Vares. + The Swedes transported 99 Muslims south across Croat lines to Muslim-held Dabravine yesterday. Swedish peacekeepers, who recently arrived in Vares, have had their hands full dealing with a surge of fighting between the Muslims and the Croats and the resulting flow of refugees. + They wonder why the International Red Cross and the UN refugee agency are not playing a more active role. + "I think that we are doing a lot of the work the Red Cross and the UNCHR should be doing," complained Captain Borqvall. "We have saved a couple of lives here. For the ones in Stupni Do we could do nothing, but for the Muslims here in Vares we have made a difference." The Muslim village of Stupni Do was obliterated in a Croat attack on October 23. + - A UN spokesman dismissed as "disinformation" a US newspaper report yesterday that UN peacekeeping soldiers in Sarajevo were clients at a Serb-run brothel staffed by captive Muslim and Croat women. The report in New York Newsday said visits to Sonja's Kon-Tiki, a restaurant and brothel about six miles north of Sarajevo, took place in the summer and autumn of 1992. - Reuter. + Force of impotence, page 18 + +LOAD-DATE: November 2, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +308 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 2, 1993 + +A COUNTRY DIARY + +BYLINE: JOHN VALLINS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 19 + +LENGTH: 315 words + + + SOMERSET: We have had crisp, bright, frosty conditions on the last two Saturdays for the nearby legs of the Wessex Grand Prix Carnival Circuit, at Castle Cary, by 7pm rows of eager tiny children, wrapped in blankets and topped by bobble-hats, were sucking toffee-apples in ad hoc grandstands. At Wincanton, the sloping bank of the churchyard, on the bend, is the favoured spot. We had a preview of one of the local floats. It was made up of one long and one short trailer, hauled by a big farm tractor. It measured a shade longer than a cricket pitch. It had 3,000 light bulbs, fired by the big generator at the back. Twenty-five to 30 people make up the club which, all year round, in a farmer's barn, prepares this float - theme, design, music, lights, costumes - for the new season. It costs pounds 3,000 to get it on the road. And it is just one of five or six giants of amazing sophistication. They compete for prizes in several categories: Best overall float. Tableau, Feature on vehicle and so on. There are family categories, juvenile categories, classes for Masquerade and Masquerade with wheels. Four teams of majorettes pranced, pirouetted, and twirled their batons. The route was lined in places, six deep. Through big front windows of the Castle Cary Red Cross Hall you could see senior citizens getting a good view from the warm inside, and sipping cups of tea. There are non-competitive participants - police, fire brigade, ambulance service, the Wessex Queen of Oueens and her entourage. The firemen put ladders up to top windows and climbed up to collect donations. Three marching bands competed with amplified sound from the floats. Entries numbered 1 to 84 at Castle Cary and 1 to 65 at Wincanton. Many of those who made up these hour-long nose-to-wheel processions will go on to join the Bridgwater Circuit. Bridgwater's carnival is the biggest of all. + +LOAD-DATE: November 2, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +309 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 3, 1993 + +HONOUR BOUND; +The voluntary sector is being called on to play an ever-increasing role. A new award backed by the Guardian applauds the work of innovators in QBY: David Brindle + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. S2 + +LENGTH: 721 words + + + MORE than 130 entries were received for the Guardian/Jerwood Award. They came from national associations and community groups, and they ranged from advocates of holistic healthcare to groups giving support to prisoners' families. + What all the entries had in common, though, was that they each highlighted the work of one individual who had made a distinctive contribution to the growth of a young charity in the social welfare field. And those contributions were deeply impressive. + No fewer than 18 entries achieved maximum marks on the tough criteria set for the award. The judging panel, chaired by Health Secretary Virginia Bottomley, then had to produce a shortlist of eight and, finally, select the winner and two runners-up. It was not easy. + Mrs Bottomley said: "I would like to congratulate the Jerwood Foundation and the Guardian for sponsoring this award. There were many excellent entries, but the judges decided that first prize should go to Alison Oldland, of the Living Paintings Trust, for her outstanding work in helping visually handicapped people share the joy of appreciating paintings." + The idea of the award was to recognise and promote excellence among those working for small and relatively new charities. Most entries were from charities with a turnover of less than pounds 100,000, and 80 per cent were from groups based outside London. + Joining the Secretary of State on the judging panel were Lord Rix, chairman of Mencap; Simon Armson, chief executive of The Samaritans; Lesley Ackers, director of Reliance Care and adviser to the Jerwood Foundation; and David Brindle, the Guardian's social services correspondent. + When the prizes were presented yesterday at a reception at the Savoy in London, Alison Oldland took the first prize of pounds 5,000 and the two runners-up, who each receive pounds 1,000, were Penny Dobson, of the Bristol-based Enuresis Resource and Information Centre, and Fiona Smith, of the Urban Farm Association on Merseyside. + But the other five entries which were shortlisted, but pipped at the post, underline the breadth of the charity sector. These included Christine Colhoun, of the Airedale Voluntary Drug and Alcohol Agency. The charity works to prevent abuse of drink, drugs and solvents in the Keighley area of West Yorkshire, and Christine, its project leader, has been the driving force behind its success. + Having previously worked in a local chip shop, bookmaker's, bingo hall and post office, Christine has the kind of community roots that set her apart from others with more conventional social welfare backgrounds. + Also in the final eight was Mary Thomas, founder of the Dark Horse Venture on Merseyside, which works to encourage elderly people to develop new interests and try new activities. The scheme is now being extended to Northern Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, with a view to going national. + Another excellent entry came on behalf of Mike Daligan, director of the Walter Segal Self Build Trust. The charity helps people, especially the homeless and unemployed, to construct their own homes. + Since he joined, Mike has galvanised the trust into fresh activity, and it is now working with groups including disabled people and residents of a drug rehabilitation project. One aim of the award was to mark the achievements of people toiling in more unfashionable fields. + The work of Prue Stevenson, of Wish (Women in Special Hospitals), a charity which has won the support and respect of both the authorities and women patients themselves, so impressed the judges that she too reached the last eight. + The shortlist was completed by Nicolle Levine, founder of Write Away, a charity based on the simple but enormously effective idea of providing penfriends for children with special needs. + Nicolle conceived the idea while working as a teacher with deaf children. The group now has 3,000 members and organises social events so the children can meet each other. + Like all those who entered for the award, Nicolle is continually developing the basic idea - in this case by planning a similar network for adults with special needs, who have complained that they feel excluded from the service. For any charity, reacting to such demand must be the real mark of effectiveness and success. + +LOAD-DATE: November 3, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +310 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 4, 1993 + +SOCIAL SATIRE AND SPECTACLE MARK FELLINI'S FINAL SCENE; +Ed Vulliamy in Rome jostles with Italy's meek and mighty for a glimpse of the absurdity and pretension at a cinema maestro's swansong + +BYLINE: ED VULLIAMY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. * + +LENGTH: 719 words + + + IT WAS Federico Fellini's last great scene, as though arranged for one of his more piquant sequences of social satire. Except that this time it was his own funeral: a spectacle which unfolded with all the absurdity, pretension and genuine affection of the director's masterpiece, Roma, in the church of Santa Maria dei Angeli, built by Michelangelo. + By far the most Fellini-esque element of the ceremony was the portable cellular telephones among Italy's fashionable elite. + They began squealing almost as soon as the ethereal, solemn bars of the De Profundis from Mozart's Requiem forced their way through the crackly speakers on the baroque walls. + "Pronto? Pronto?" answered well decked-out mourners, ostensibly too important to have switched off their gadgets in order to pay homage to the man whose death was being heralded in one newspaper yesterday as "the end of all cinema". + Fellini's lifelong companion, Giulietta Masini, had requested no flowers, saying that her late partner hated them and asking that money be donated instead to an artists' pension fund. + But there they were, arrays of huge wreaths being hauled about the altar steps by men draped in sashes. + The arrangements were in accordance with Italy's inimitable treatment of the "pezzi grossi" or big-wigs. They enjoyed a separate, heavily guarded entrance and section of the church away from the crowds who had queued for hours. + The latter were packed into the aisles so as to pay humble homage and indulge in Italy's favourite pastime of gawping at the rich and famous. + And there were plenty of those to behold: actress Monica Vitti, looking pallid, director Michelangelo Antonioni, Vittorio Gassman and Lina Wertmuller; there was fashion designer Valentino, directors Franco Zeffirelli and Francesco Rosi, and also the nation's adored television stars such as Sandra Milo. Hollywood was noticeable by its absence. + There were lots of women in late middle age who would remember well the days of the La Dolce Vita, now thin and dripping gold jewellery.The males in the VIP enclosure presented a more self-confident lot, strutting and sporting their November tans. + There were the politicians too - President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, who embraced Ms Masini warmly, and a phalanx of parliamentary dignitaries. Father Arpa, the Jesuit who defended La Dolce Vita from the censor, was also there. + Outside, the age range was remarkable: curious youths from the university department next door and elderly ladies mumbling liturgical responses. The doors had been shut 30 minutes before the service, leaving 10,000 in the square. + The coffin arrived, to a ripple of applause and sincere, heartfelt sobbing from the public. + Ms Masina, who had been waiting in the sacristy, emerged tearfully and was engulfed by a swarm of caring and compassionate politicians. + Cardinal Achille Silvestrini did his best to body-swerve Fellini's equivocal views on the clergy by saying that he had "criticised the church with irony and love". + The most poignant moment was the playing of a recording of the Flight of the Spirits by Nino Rota, as trumpeted in a memorable scene from Fellini's first major film, La Strada. + But within minutes, the droll Fellini movie had begun again, with a crushing, barging and shrieking as policemen secured a trouble-free exit for the pezzi grossi. + The funeral closes the exhaustive mourning of a man of whom Italy can be proud in times of international humiliation. On Tuesday, there had been an extraordinary wake at the Cinecitta studios, where Fellini's coffin was laid out under a painted blue sky. + The Milanese daily paper L'Indipendente, marked the funeral with a front-page editorial which echoed the widely held sentiments of many: "In the bars Fellini's death is a far less charged piece of news than the newspapers think . . . + "Fellini was an uncontroversial director, who never took intellectual or political positions which were awkward. For this reason, the death of the master is a timely one, because it puts into second place all the other things that are happening in this country." + The coffin will now travel to Fellini's home town of Rimini, where it will be buried and the main seafront square renamed Piazzale Federico Fellini. + +LOAD-DATE: November 5, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +311 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 5, 1993 + +FUEL BILLS AFTER VAT 'NO MORE THAN 1983'; +Major will referee Clarke - Lilley scrap on safety net + +BYLINE: MICHAEL WHITE, POLITICAL EDITOR + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 465 words + + + THE Chancellor's increasingly vehement opposition to sweeping concessions in the imposition of VAT on domestic fuel is to be reinforced by a Treasury campaign to persuade voters that even with the full 17.5 per cent tax they will be no worse off than a decade ago - thanks to falling real-term prices. + As Kenneth Clarke accused critics of raising groundless fears among the old and poor, it emerged that John Major himself will next week chair a meeting between the Chancellor and Peter Lilley, the Social Security Secretary, to resolve an impasse marked by growing antipathy on both sides. + At Question Time, the Chancellor acknowledged the fears of the elderly and said: "The Government is going to come forward with a package of measures to give some help in paying the new tax." But he stressed: "There has been such a fall in gas and electricity prices during the 1980s that even with the tax imposed in full, fuel bills will be no higher than they were 10 years ago." + In fact, fresh Treasury figures will suggest that, in post-inflation terms, prices have fallen 18 per cent since 1983, almost exactly the 17.5 per cent which the Lamont formula will impose in two stages, starting next April. Mr Clarke wants to help hardship cases without creating "massive exemptions" across the network of benefit recipients, which may create a precedent. + In the Commons the shadow chancellor, Gordon Brown, urged Mr Clarke to close tax loopholes and his deputy, Harriet Harman, revealed that more than 1,000 Tory councillors had voted for motions condemning the VAT switch. Mr Clarke called the loopholes illusory - "about as much use as brass washers". + The two-stage imposition of VAT on domestic fuel and heating, Norman Lamont's fiscal timebomb from the March budget, was not discussed at yesterday's cabinet. What Downing Street officials call a classic battle between the Treasury and a spending ministry will come back to cabinet when Mr Major has knocked heads together. + But other officials suggest it is becoming more personal, that Mr Clarke and his Thatcherite deputy, Michael Portillo, are increasingly irritable with the equally rightwing Mr Lilley, whose anti-welfare state rhetoric is not matched by deeds in the current spending round, they say. + Non-Treasury sources argue that Mr Lilley's pounds 70 billion budget is already bearing the brunt of controversial cuts, including restrictions on invalidity benefit. "He's already very much in the firing line and doesn't want to carry all the burden," said one. + In effect, the two ministers are engaged in role-reversal, with Mr Clarke refusing on philosophical as well as budgetary terms to reverse the 1980s shift from special tax exemptions and Mr Lilley wanting to protect his clients. + +LOAD-DATE: November 5, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +312 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 6, 1993 + +BAD BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS; +An estimated 1,000 people have been infected with the HIV virus by contaminated blood in Germany. DAVID GOW and ANNA TOMFORDE report on a scandal rocking a country that prides itself on efficiency + +BYLINE: DAVID GOW AND ANNA TOMFORDE AND ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY CHRIS MIHILL + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 25 + +LENGTH: 2906 words + + + THE nervous woman, her face white with fear, sits with her husband in the waiting-room of Professor Rolf Herzog, chief gynaecologist at Bad Godesberg's Protestant Hospital. She tells of the panic that has gripped her village since Germany's Aids scandal took on ever-greater proportions this week. + "It's not that they're stupid simply because they are village-folk," she says. "But the news that this Koblenz firm knowingly sold HIV-infected blood to hospitals has unleashed fear of an Aids epidemic. They know that they personally are unaffected, but they worry about friends, family, and say they will not submit to any operations from now on . . . All I can say is that, if I were faced with the choice after a dreadful accident, I would take the risk and agree to a blood transfusion." + Prof Herzog's desk is strewn with the latest fax from Bonn's health office listing batches of blood- and plasma-bags delivered to regional hospitals by this "Koblenz firm". Its name, which millions not only in Germany have learned to fear this week, is UB Plasma. It has been forcibly closed after the scandal erupted and four employees are under arrest. + Ulrich Mobius, a physician who has campaigned tirelessly to expose the story, believes 1,000 or more patients may have been infected with HIV-contaminated blood; three are known to have died. Two infected patients are suing different former health ministers for criminal negligence, while the current incumbent, Horst Seehofer, called this week for every German who has had an operation in the last 10 years or so to undergo an Aids test. Doctors accused him of wantonly panicking the nation. + Prof Herzog's hospital has just set up a special hot-line for worried patients. More than 40 have rung in the first 12 hours of its operations. They should be among the least-worried in a country gripped with collective hysteria: he uses so little blood in operations that even Jehovah Witnesses come to him from all the country. The hospital received no UB Plasma supplies. + Elsewhere, hospitals, official Aids-screening stations and self-help organisations for HIV-positive men and women report a huge increase in anxious callers. "I took a call today from an elderly woman who had had an operation in 1972 and has since been totally healthy," a counsellor at Bonn's Aids-Help office says. "Absolute idiocy!" + At a Frankfurt clinic, where up to 500 patients were given UB Plasma samples in 1991 and 1992 and one has since died, elderly men recovering from operations yesterday sighed with audible relief that no transfusions had been required. Fellow-patients there and elsewhere are, however, refusing life-saving operations from fear of HIV infection. + Germany's months-old Aids scandal now threatens to equal that of France in the late 1980s and early 1990s that, partially at least, led to the downfall of the Socialist government earlier this year. It could soon engulf senior members of Chancellor Helmut Kohl's government and party just a year before a critical general election. + Horst Seehofer, the youthful health minister determined to cast light on every aspect of the affair, has unleashed a trail of anxiety that may cost him his political career with his call for mass testing. Dr Mobius, the campaigning Berlin-based physician, who has now been offered a post as ministerial adviser, sees Seehofer as acting more and more insecure. "We're going to put more fire under his seat," he said yesterday. + The federal environment minister, Klaus Topfer, has seen his name dragged into the scandal because he was health minister in the Rhineland-Palatinate in 1986-87 when an anonymous UB Plasma employee warned the authorities of Aids-infected blood reaching the market - when the firm was not even licensed to handle blood products for human medicine. And, worst of all, it carried on trading until last week. + The international nature of the pharmaceutical marketplace has ensured that this is no longer merely a German issue. UB Plasma products have been bought by countries ranging from Sweden to Saudi Arabia, including Greece and Switzerland, Italy and France. And last night it emerged that two Austrian pharmaceutical companies, Immuno GmbH and Octopharma GmbH, also took blood serum from UB Plasma. The Vienna government said it would personally contact all patients treated with the blood products in question and offer them an Aids test "for their own peace of mind". + Members of the United States armed forces who were based in Germany may also have been infected. US military authorities are now tracking down Americans who may have received tainted blood transfusions at German medical facilities. + Hospitals and clinics in Switzerland also bought products from two German companies supplied with blood by UB Plasma. Last night the Swiss government announced it had banned their sale. + The trail has led too to Romania, where a Bucharest firm, said to be a UB Plasma subsidiary, has confirmed that it sent 1,545 litres of deep-frozen and untested plasma to Koblenz in May. It may have made other deliveries that were passed off as German products. + Britain, at least, has been told that it need not worry that any infected blood may have strayed into the health service, although yesterday a Department of Health official said Immuno had recalled eight batches of two products sent to Britain and the rest of Europe, but that there was no evidence they contained the Aids virus and that the measure was purely precautionary. + Dr Harold Gunson, director of the National Transfusion Authority, said that German blood was not imported into this country. Consultants who used specialised blood products, such as clotting agents and other constituents of whole blood, had the right to buy foreign products from commercial companies, rather than using UK supplies, if they thought these were better suited to particular patients. However, all imported blood products had to be tested for HIV and other infectious diseases by the National Institute for Biological Standards in North London. "They are all tested before use in this country," said Dr Gunson. "We are self-sufficent in blood itself and none whatsoever is imported. We should be safe." + Nor, officially, have members of the UK armed forces based in Germany been at risk. Colonel Mike Thomas, head of the army's blood transfusion service at Aldershot, said all UK servicemen and their families treated in military hospitals in Germany, or anywhere else in the world, were supplied with blood from the Aldershot depot. + In Germany, the scandal has exposed at least one rotten apple in the DM30 billion-a-year ( pounds 12bn) pharmaceutical industry. In a country where 100,000 regulations determine every aspect of human life, it also reveals gaping holes in the public supervision of firms prepared to use every manipulative trick to make a buck. + For Heribert Prantl, a senior editor with Munich's Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, it has revealed that for supervisory bodies like the Federal Health Agency or regional/supervisory inspection boards "there's not a jot of difference between a landlord serving beer and a laboratory producing blood plasma". Plasma, he says, has been subjected to as much control "as any old person running a canteen". + The scandal has laid bare structural weaknesses in the German federal system in which competing national, regional and local bodies assert their own authority - and, as has happened in the past few days and weeks, pass the buck to each other when a failure on this scale emerges. + It has also awoken Europe's most health-conscious people, used to regarding their country as the epitome of regulated efficiency, to the unpalatable fact that even enormous amounts of money cannot buy insurance or security against human error - or what Ellis Huber, head of the Berlin doctors' association, calls "mafioso practices", in reference to the importation of unchecked supplies from Romania. . + And, even with insurance, there is no guarantee that victims will receive adequate compensation. Television viewers were rocked on Thursday night when the Panorama programme on the first public channel disclosed that a Berlin man, infected by his wife with HIV after she received contaminated blood, had to fight for years before receiving a miserable DM1,000 ( pounds 400) a month pension shortly before he died. "It was like a hammer to our head, a catastrophe," one of his two surviving daughters said. + A 13-year-old Bonn boy, advised by Dr Mobius, is now suing another firm, the Darmstadt-based Biotest, which bought blood samples from UB Plasma, for insurance-based compensation of more than DM500,000 ( pounds 200,000), including a monthly "pain-money pension". He is infected but he does not know it, so Biotest insists it cannot pay up as the boy "does not know he is in pain". Dr Mobius commented bitterly: "It's cruel, but that's German law." + The boy's father, who insists on remaining anonymous, says: "We used to go to France camping a lot, but now we have to stay in hotels. My son, of course, always asks why. When puberty comes, and it won't be long, I'll have to tell him to be careful with the girls. It's very hard for all of us . . . " + How has it come to pass that Germany, the world's biggest consumer of blood plasma (2.15 million litres a year, according to the federal health ministry), has abruptly been forced to confront the fact that "blood is not an ordinary merchandise but very special stuff that can transmit life-threatening diseases", in the words of Dr Mobius? + The story of its awakening to reality resembles a detective novel, set in the opaque world of the relations between pharmaceutical firms and senior government officials and strewn with false scents and clues. At least three victims are known to have died because of UB Plasma's alleged machinations. But Dr Mobius believes that the number of non-haemophiliac patients infected through blood treatment may be more than 1,000. + Since 1985 in Germany all blood samples and donors - who make four million "donations" a year - have had to be tested for HIV. Normally, each 750 millilitre sample is individually tested, and new procedures for rendering the virus, and others, inactive are scrupulously followed. + Prof Herzog say that the risk-factor, depending on the type of blood or plasma, varies between 1 in 100,000 to 1 in a million. In fresh-frozen full blood, containing red and white corpuscles, it is probably lower than one in a million. In products derived from plasma, the yellowish fluid without the blood corpuscles, it is nearer to 1 in 100,000. + But the screening of regular donors has proved to be extremely lax. One firm, Immuno, operating near Hamburg's main station, is accused by local junkies of continuing to use them, even though they are in a high-risk group or have been proven to be HIV-positive. + UB Plasma donors, according to a Koblenz newspaper editor who works above their now-empty offices known as the death-lab, "looked as if they had crawled out of the last hole". They got DM30 ( pounds 12) a shot but Dr Mobius reports that regular donors can get DM80 ( pounds 32) for samples used in vaccine production. Blood donors can only give samples every two months but plasma donors can attend a clinic four times a month and earn up to DM200 ( pounds 80) regardless of health. + What Ulrich Kleist, chief executive of the Koblenz firm, and up to five employees stand accused of is systematically cutting corners and costs to try and keep their business alive when it was near-bankrupt. They "pooled" the tests for the Aids virus: of 7,000 samples, it has been disclosed, only 2,500 tests were carried out. + As long ago as the winter of 1991, reports say, the Berlin-based Federal Health Agency (BGA), now axed by Seehofer, found infection in two of UB Plasma's samples. But the firm was allowed to carry on normal working because - according to Georg Pauli, the BGA's chief virologist - "nobody could even begin to think the firm could have manipulated its samples". + Then, on April 14 this year, UB Plasma alerted a Fulda hospital after discovering a long-term donor had suddenly tested positive. It was too late to save two patients from infection. Besides, the hospital denies it ever received a clear warning. + In May, Pauli bought for DM1,000 ( pounds 400) six bags of frozen plasma from UB Plasma to aid his research. The firm had suggested that one might be contaminated, but he found that at least four tested positive. + He did not, however, alert the authorities in the Rhineland-Palatinate. His reason: "Would anyone sell the evidence of his criminal activity?" Only later, in October, did he come upon the notion of "mini-pools", and the police raided the firm's Koblenz premises. But Seehofer retorts: "If a firm had been shown to misbehave several times the relevant authorities should have been informed." + EVEN now, the four UB Plasma employees under arrest are being investigated merely for allegedly causing bodily harm through negligence. This is similar to the situation in France, where doctors at the national blood-transfusion centre, who knowingly distributed Aids-contaminated blood, were condemned for "deception about the basic property of a product". + Laurent Fabius, the then French premier, supposedly looks in his mirror and asks himself whether he is a murderer as 300 of the infected haemophiliacs died. + What this sorry German tale of greed and incompetence discloses is not just the woeful inadequacy of the law and supervisory procedures. The latter are bad enough. It has been underlined that the legal requirement for bi-annual inspections of plasma-producers has led to merely cursory examination of procedures and personnel. + It has also led to fundamental questions about medical production for profit, state control of blood donations, and the over-consumption of blood in German hospitals. + The German Red Cross, which supplies 80 per cent of national blood output, turns over around DM750 million ( pounds 300m) a year selling surplus requirements (around 80 per cent) to hospitals and firms. Its president, Prince Botho of Sayn-Wittgenstein, said yesterday that it knew of less than 20 cases of HIV infections resulting from its supplies of blood. Of 25 million donations since May 1985, only 382 had tested HIV-positive and been withdrawn. + He called on Germany to meet its own needs. Now the country has to import every year 1.07 million litres of specialist plasma-products from abroad, the overwhelming bulk from the US. Prince Botho, demanding a cut in such imports, urged more donors to come forward - on a day when his organisation disclosed a drop of up to 10 per cent in donors coming forward. + Dr Mobius, who insists that imports are made only because they are cheaper by at least a half and enable bigger profits to be earned, wants a Fortress Europe based on US and Belgian models. This would include a Centre for Aids epidemiology along the lines of the US Disease Centre in Atlanta, to which all cases of infection would have to be reported, including their causes. It would also include a criminal-investigation police force to examine drug-related incidents. + If compensation has to be given to donors, he argues, then it should be on Belgian lines where civil servants, for example, get free tickets for the opera or extra time-off and German clubs could organise the donations. Belgium, he points out, has a population of 10 million, but only 17 cases of HIV among haemophiliacs and a further 17 due to imported blood products - a near water-tight system. + Germany consumes far too much blood. "If a patient does not want a blood transfusion during an operation then he should not get one," Prof Herzog points out. "It's not required in more than 90 per cent of operations and may only be necessary in major surgery like removing a tumour from a kidney." + A new system of blood donation and transfusion, experts such as Dr Mobius argue, could minimise the risk of infection even further. Patients now supply only 10 per cent of their own blood for operations but it is estimated that this proportion could rise to as much as 25 per cent. + Seehofer favours a six-month quarantine for blood products which, after heat-treatment, would be stored in deep-freeze before being re-tested for the Aids-virus. Finally, Dr Mobius and a range of politicians believe, "there must be no commercial trading in blood which belongs under public control". + But this, as the federal health ministry pointed out yesterday, is not necessarily the point. The French system was entirely in state hands and its scandal showed that a state-run system was far from risk-free. "What we need are secure measures to ensure that firms stay strictly within the law." + Germans, a people prone to talk their way into a crisis, yesterday took stock amid what Huber called a mass-hysteria unleashed by "the criminals in the blood business". They clearly began to heed the advice of specialists that the risks of death via a blood transfusion remained lower than through anaesthetics. But they also increasingly demanded what the husband in Prof Herzog's waiting-room called "the political consequences of this dreadful national disgrace". + Additional reporting: Chris Mihill + +LOAD-DATE: November 8, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +313 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 6, 1993 + +COMMENTARY: A FLOWERING OF EMOTION + +BYLINE: MARTIN KETTLE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 27 + +LENGTH: 1073 words + + + I'M not sure when I began to change my mind about Poppy Day, but it was probably during a journey down Whitehall on a 172 in the days when London buses were still red and when, indeed, the 172 still ran between here and Westminster. + I had not taken any notice of the two elderly men sitting talking to one another on the seat opposite me until the 172 reached the Cenotaph. But as it did, they stopped their conversation. Then, without either consultation or embarrassment, they both raised their hats for a moment. The bus passed on. The two old men resumed their talk. My eyes prickled with tears, and I think maybe yours might have done too. + In those days I still thought it was possible to stand apart from the whole Remembrance Day ritual. It was a day that belonged to the generations who had fought the war, not to those of us who had not. And I felt alien to it too. It embodied a vision of Britishness and extolled a military culture which I felt no motive to share. The nation united in solemn remembrance seemed a sham in a society so divided and a state so dedicated to nuclear weapons. It was a common attitude among those who find it hard to identify with the trappings of Britain. And for many it still is. + But those two old men on the bus made me feel small-minded. I've no idea where, when or whom they fought, or even whether they did so. I've no idea what they believed in and I dare say that if we had all got into a conversation they might have started to say things with which I could never agree, even now. What I learned from them, however, was something for which the only word is respect. + On one level, it was the respect which the living will always pay to the dead, the feeling which impels one to behave respectfully at a funeral, in a cemetery or in a church. But those who are commemorated in these annual November rituals are not just any dead. They are people who died for something of which we are still part, whether we like it or not. Imperfect in innumerable ways, it is our community, our society, even our nation. And they died for it, and thus also for us. + I'm sure that I have changed. But I also think that Britain has changed too. The passage of time alters the way we see an event like the first world war, which is still the central stimulus for this whole network of remembrance. Seventy years ago, these were rituals which mattered directly, in a personal sense, to millions of bereaved families who had lost sons, husbands and fathers on a scale which this country had never known before or since. They were a focus of grief for the loss of people we had known. It was the Great War not because it was grand, but because it was incomprehensibly immense. + Thirty years ago, even though many of the bereaved were still alive, the rituals had become more questionable. The pain and immediacy of the lost generation had abated. The pointlessness of the slaughter was now a matter of public acknowledgement, but it was unreflected in changes to the ceremonies. We still bought our poppies and we still stood for two minutes' silence and it seemed somehow tainted with dishonesty. It was right to respect the dead, but it was no longer right to respect the war. + Today, both the war and almost all those who fought in it are deep in the past. For all but a handful of survivors, there is no impulse to take sides any longer. It was a war. Wars exist. In this case we can now focus our thoughts more on the human cost and simply respect our loss as such. + Strangely, this still remains difficult with the second world war. It was only this year that the youngest people to fight in the war started drawing their state pensions. Pride about the cause and the outcome are profoundly woven into our public life to this day. Fewer people died, but none are held to have done so in vain. There are millions among us who remember. When the Ulster Unionist leader Jim Molyneaux mentioned on television this week that he was at Arnhem, it was a useful reminder that, even now, our civic life is still formed by people whose attitudes were forged in that conflict. + Yet because we won in a cause it is still right to believe in, and because individuals were lost whose memory remains fresh, the second world war is very much a present experience. Even for those of us who are only the children of the war generation, it stirs genuine if inherited emotion. In some ways, in fact, you could say we have the best - or the worst - of both worlds. We did not live it directly, but our upbringing was saturated with it. + If I watch the Remembrance Day parade at the Cenotaph I am still largely unmoved save, I have to admit, by the sight of the Queen Mother, emblematic ageing witness of the changing order of things. Most of the rest is self-regard. Especially in Mrs Thatcher's day - though she looks great in black and doesn't she know it - it was all too redolent of that wartime poster which inadvertantly gave the game away by proclaiming words to the effect that Your Effort and Your Sacrifice will Bring Us Victory. One day, when the Queen Mother and the rest of the second world war generation are dead, the Whitehall ceremony ought to be scaled down, and then gently laid to rest. + But until that time, I will go on buying a poppy from the man on the station forecourt weighed down with medals. I will wear it because I think it matters, not because I feel I have to. I will go on noticing the names on the war memorial as I try to do each time I walk through town to do the shopping. If the two minutes' silence still existed I might even stop and observe it if it didn't make me feel too ridiculous. If I wore a hat more often I would doff it as I passed the Cenotaph and hope that someone might notice and ponder why. + And I won't indulge myself by affecting to be superior to the memory of the wars that the poppy seller, the old men on the bus and my parents' generation fought. For in the end, none of these acts of remembrance is about the false pride or cheap posturing that I once half thought they were. All of it is about belonging. In an age when the private locality of our identity feels as though it is being swept aside without a thought, and global forces threaten to deny the specificity of our own experiences and hopes, that paper poppy is far more than just a gesture. It is an affirmation that we still remember who we are. + +LOAD-DATE: November 8, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +314 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 8, 1993 + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 631 words + + + BENNY Wilson, aged 43, came to London from Jamaica with his family as a baby. He grew up and went to school in Stoke Newington, north London. + He had been in trouble with the police in his younger days but at the time of his arrest on January 11, 1991, he was working as a club DJ and looking after his daughter, aged four. He is now a voluntary care worker in an old people's home. + The raid took place at 10am as Mr Wilson was returning from dropping his daughter off at school. Mr Wilson says he was handcuffed during the raid but that he thought the police had made a mistake and the error would soon be sorted out. + But he said that the police then proceeded to produce plastic bags from the kitchen cabinet which he had never seen before and from the pockets of two jackets of his which were in the flat. + Then one of the officers produced a sawn-off shotgun and some ammunition, he says. They also removed a number of passports of his relatives, including those of his mother and sister. He was told he was being arrested in connection with a robbery in Edmonton, north London, and for possessing a Rhomer self-loading pistol and a sawn-off shotgun. + He was charged with 12 offences, including possessing cocaine, amphetamines and cannabis with intent to supply, and with dishonestly handling social security books and building society cheques. + Mr Wilson was held in Pentonville prison, north London, and refused bail. He was eventually offered bail but was unable to provide the pounds 50,000 in cash required. + "The police told me that by the time I came out of prison my daughter would be grown up," he said. If convicted, he could have been jailed for up to 10 years. + Mr Wilson protested his innocence in letters to the organisations Liberty and Justice. After six months the charges against him were all thrown out. + After his release, Mr Wilson was informed that Roy Lewandowski, a former detective constable at Stoke Newington police station who was facing charges himself, might have information that could assist his case. He went to the City of London magistrates court where Mr Lewandowski was appearing. He explained his case to him and Mr Lewandowski agreed to help. + In a statement made to Mr Wilson's lawyers, Mr Lewandowski said he recalled the case and that another officer who had previously served at Stoke Newington had approached him. "He wanted me to plant a sawn-off shotgun in the premises," he says. + Mr Lewandowski says that while he has no evidence that drugs were planted during the raid, he knows that all the drugs items found were easily obtainable by detectives. + He adds that all his experience of raids on private houses leads him to believe that users and dealers keep their drugs in one place. It would be highly unlikely for a dealer to keep his drugs in a variety of different places, he suggests, particularly if there was a small child around. + Mr Wilson has since decided to take a civil action against the police and has been interviewed by the Operation Jackpot inquiry team. + Graham Smith, of the Hackney Community Defence Association, which has campaigned for an inquiry into policing in Stoke Newington, said: "We have said all along that Lewandowksi was being scapegoated and more officers were involved in organised crime. This is the proof. Operation Jackpot and the police complaints procedure generally have been found wanting time and time again. Maybe now there will be a judicial inquiry." + Mr Wilson's lawyer, Jean Gould, said: "What concerns me is the difficulty of corroborating the evidence of Mr Wilson and Mr Lewandowski because the police are immune from full disclosure of documentation in civil actions because of the wide ambit of public interest immunity." + +LOAD-DATE: November 8, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +315 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 8, 1993 + +WORM'S EYE: BRITISH SENIOR CITIZENS TURN UP AS REFUGEES IN KENYA + +BYLINE: DAN ATKINSON IN MOMBASA + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 13 + +LENGTH: 442 words + + + KENYA is crawling with refugees, helpless people in flight hoping to find a safe refuge on the Equator. The refugees in question are not, as you might expect, hightailing it from wartorn Somalia. Rather, they are Britain's senior citizens, in full-scale retreat in the face of the council tax and the looming VAT-laden fuel bills. + It's really happening. For someone living on the state pension, it makes a lot more sense to spend pounds 5 a night in a half-oard hotel here in the sunshine than to hang around in England waiting for various government officials to confiscate your contribution to reducing their deficit. + Once upon a time, we exported engineers and soldiers to this part of the world. Now we send frightened old ladies. Not that the life is that bad. With the money left over they can purchase the International Express, the overseas version of Britain's daily, stuff themselves at the cold buffet in the evening and - in return for showing newly arrived Brits around Mombasa - they can expect a decent lunch and a few drinks. + Of course, it does mean living in a Third World country. Or rather, as a far from senior citizen pointed out in the bar the other night, another Third World country. In fact, plenty to make the Brits feel at home. Beggars, for instance. Ludicrous "heritage" shows put on for the tourists. And large numbers of people in security uniforms who guard banks and hotels to keep the public away from the trippers. We'll have them in Britain, too, for sure. + On top of these home comforts there are, of course, the British residents (packets of Embassy and Land Rovers). And the whole place is reasonably peaceful. Cousin Yank has his transporters parked on the runway at Mombasa for servicing the soon-to-be-axed invasion of Somalia. + Our lot are keeping a lower profile at the British base in the north. + All in all, it's not surprising that our persecuted oldies have headed here. There are a lot worse places to spend the winter. Of course, the idea of unleashing western welfare claimants on poorer coun-tries has long appealed to the free marketeers in our midst. They see it as a sort of cost-free aid programme. + It is not an idea entirely to be despised - British income support and other payments must do something for the local economy. It's just that some of us would rather see the elderly travel of their own free will. To do this they would need security at home. And what with the above-mentioned confiscation, plus the crime wave, they feel safer and richer behind the security guards on an Indian Ocean beachfront than at home. + It all seems rather shameful. + +LOAD-DATE: November 8, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +316 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 10, 1993 + +SOCIETY: REGISTERING CONCERN; +Fears that dishonest and violent people may be working in residential homes are behind calls for tighter vetting of carers + +BYLINE: ANNE FRY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 13 + +LENGTH: 772 words + + + IN THE absence of a nationwide register of care workers employed in private residential homes there is growing concern that dishonest, bogus, and possibly dangerous people are being hired and escaping detection. + Susan Brooks, who runs a training school for care workers, established the National Register For Carers in an effort to plug this loophole. She believes that violent workers, turned down for registration after 10 or more checks, may still be employed in hospitals and homes. "They could have been abusive to elderly patients, managers and us, but the weakness is we're powerless to act," she says. + Registration costs individuals pounds 15 for checking and 25p a week, and the register's confidential database holds informati on on 10,000 carers. Mrs Brooks is worried that in some cases up to 10 per cent of the workforce quits suddenly when private home owners announce compulsory registration. + Checks on the rest have revealed evidence of possible fraud in one tenth of applications for registration. Care staff keen to get an ID card and pin number sometimes supply forged birth certificates and driving licences. They provide glowing references, either written by themselves or supplied by other members of reference rings. The same sources can supply false medical information. + Worst of all, says Mrs Brooks, these irregularities confirm that a minority of rogue staff are working under false names in private residential homes where employers are unaware of their criminal past. Because most of them work as part-timers the employers do not deal with their tax or national insurance. + At present, Mrs Brooks claims, malpractice is often covered up. If sexual or physical abuse comes to light, perpetrators may be counselled and given a warning before being told to find a new job. Their managers are pleased the potentially scandalous problem has been kept quiet. But this effectively empowers them to commit further, and possibly worse, abuse elsewhere. + Sir William Utting, a leading campaigner for the proposed General Social Services Council, believes Mrs Brooks's allegations strengthen the case for a statutory body to prevent suspect workers getting employment in the personal social services. "Things are coming out that indicate more management vigilance is needed. People shouldn't be getting references. It's a disquieting situation that suggests tighter regulation is needed." + Critics condemn Mrs Brooks for going it alone and "muddying the waters" in relation to the proposed Council. There are complaints that her efforts overlap those of the influential UKCC (United Kingdom Central Council for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visitors). There are also issues of civil liberty in the compilation of a national blacklist of people apparently regarded as unfit to care. + The Royal College of Nursing has observer status on the organisation's advisory board, and its recently retired director of policy and research, Derek Dean, is surprised at the extent of the problems, adding that Mrs Brooks - and any RCN member with similar knowledge - has a professional duty to blow the whistle. + Susan Brooks established the register after researching conditions in 40 private old people's homes. Some are excellent and others horrific, with residents subjected to poor care, cruelty and abuse. At worst, low-paid, untrained workers, desperate for employment, carry out nursing tasks with inadequate supervision. "It's frightening," she says, "and the public hasn't a clue about what is going on." + The criticisms are rejected by Colin Grimes, of the British Federation of Care Home Proprietors. "These are not problems of which we are aware. She seems to be describing a criminal sub-culture which is foreign to us. We have no evidence of this and I need to know more about the motivation." Mr Grimes strongly defends standards, adding that 350,000 residents are cared for by 500,000 staff. + Three or four care homes get in trouble annually and he is unaware that fake identity is ever a factor. The register is welcome, he says, but anything a private individual can do will be weak. Compulsory regulation of all aspects of community care is needed. + But that is a large task. Peter Westland, of the Association of Metropolitan Authorities, believes one million people could be eligible for registration. While Liberty is satisfied that the National Register for Carers is covered by the Data Protection Act, and was set up with good intentions, it suggests the real answer is a vetting agency, based in the public sector and accountable to Parliament. + +LOAD-DATE: November 10, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +317 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 12, 1993 + +SCARS REMAIN FROM CARNAGE THAT COST A 'WONDERFUL GENERATION'; +John Ezard attends the packed service at Westminster Abbey to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Armistice + +BYLINE: JOHN EZARD + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 413 words + + + SIR Edward Grey, foreign secretary at the outbreak of the first world war, was vindicated in his world-famous saying, "The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our generation", a service commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Armistice was told at Westminster Abbey yesterday. + The Rt Rev Michael Mann, chaplain to the Royal British Legion, said the carnage had not merely decimated "a wonderful generation full of patriotism, honour and self-sacrifice. "It erased from the survivors that joyous spirit in which they set out. A light had indeed gone out, quenched by these bitter experiences. The scars are, even now, tender to the touch. + "If we think of remembrance as just a matter of old men polishing up their medals, and their memories of best-forgotten wars, we have missed the whole point." + The service filled the Abbey's 2,000 seats with veterans of both world wars. Others wanting to go could have filled it several times more. + For its climax Brigadier the Rev Charles Harris, aged 97, who saw cavalry slaughtered around him at the Battle of Cambrai in 1918 and went on to fight from 1943-45 in the second world war, spoke Binyon's poem We Will Remember them. + John McCrae's poem Flanders Field, ending "If you break faith with us who die/ we shall not sleep, though poppies grow/ in Flanders Field", was read by Sara Jones, widow of the Falklands Victoria Cross holder, Colonel H. Jones. + The Queen Mother led the act of national homage to the war generation intently and with barely a falter as she placed a wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier. + She spent nearly an hour at the service and opening the Royal British Legion flower garden of remembrance outside afterwards when she talked to the veterans, aged between 93 and 101. Henry Tinsey, aged 95, of Wymondham, Norfolk, recalled the exhilaration he felt as an able seaman at home on leave when the Great War ended on November 11, 1918, the "11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month". + "I was living near Farnham in Surrey and I was helping my father cut branches off oak trees when suddenly all the factory hooters started sounding," he said. + The Royal British Legion denied reports that yesterday's first world war services at Westminster and in France were the last which would officially be held. "Judging by the way things are going, there will still be veterans available to attend in 10 years time," an official said. + +LOAD-DATE: November 12, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +318 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 13, 1993 + +REAL LIVES: THE VILLAGE PEOPLE; +When British artists were commissioned to create work expressing their feelings about the coming of the Channel Tunnel, a series of inquiring critiques of the way we live now emerged instead. None was more critical than The Village, a study of a Sussex community by photographer ANNA FOX. + +BYLINE: VAL WILLIAMS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN WEEKEND PAGE; Pg. 30 + +LENGTH: 2551 words + + + IN 1994, the Channel Tunnel will open and Britain will no longer be an island. However logical and welcome that link must seem to business people, tourists and international commuters in south-east England, doubts over the coming of the Tunnel have been profound. There have been fears of blighted villages, desecrated woodlands and trains roaring heedlessly through an idyllic countryside. + Like a Moloch on the move, the tunnel seems to threaten not only a landscape but a heritage, a fabric of traditional life which has existed for centuries. Politicians, confronted with enraged rural constituents at the Sunday coffee morning or the summer fete, have felt the terror of those who challenge a deeply enshrined orthodoxy. + Arts funders in Britain are not known for their innovation. Aficionados of the well-crafted budget rather than the unpredictable obsessions of artists, they tend to steer towards the safe. The Cross Channel Photographic Mission, set up in 1987 and funded by the South-East Arts Board and Kent County Council, was a bold initiative to commission some of Britain's brightest talents to make artworks which would express their feelings about the coming of the Tunnel. + The Mission avoided the more predictable landscapists and selected instead photographers like montage artist and satirist Peter Kennard, who constructed Welcome To Britain, an installation of scavenged materials and distorted perspectives and Sunderland documentarist and film-maker Huw Davies, who photographed English families who had abandoned Britain altogether for the cheaper properties and more enticing lifestyle of the countryside around Calais. Paul Trevor, well known for his incisive photographs of inner city housing conditions, made bleak portraits of city commuters. The references to the Tunnel were oblique and tangential - no roaring trains or scarred landscapes. Rather than defending a heritage, these projects were inquiring critiques of the way we live now. + And none were more critical than Anna Fox's study of Compton, a tranquil Sussex village with a population of 200 retired people and prosperous commuters, some ten miles from Chichester. When she began to photograph Compton, Anna Fox was already well known for her 1988 photo documentary Workstations, an acerbic tale of office life at the height of the enterprise culture. + She had been taught in the 1980s by Martin Parr at the progressive photography department at West Surrey College of Art and became one of a new wave of colour documentarists who used bright, often garish colour to produce photographs which largely subverted the dignified classic photo-reportage epitomised by magazines like Picture Post and Life. + Fox, like Parr, used photodocumentary to peel away the surface of contemporary life, exposing vulnerabilities and vanities. When Anna Fox looked at Compton, the village where her elderly grandmother still lives, and where her mother spent some of her teenage years, she set out to confound a myth. + For the village is always with us. Even those who live in the heart of the city like to see themselves as rustic types with their own very local identities. The urban sophisticates who settle in Hampstead Village, Greenwich Village, Blackheath and Kew are tenacious defenders of the rural pasts of their highly protected neighbourhoods. + Being part of a village is like being a member of an extended family and city dwellers, often far away from their roots, long for this sense of belonging. Viewed from the city, village life seems so secure, with its bastions of the vicar, the schoolteacher and the local squire. The school is a cosy, well-disciplined place where the old values persist, a log fire burns in the pub and the troubles of the workplace and the home can be forgotten in its flickering ambience. + THE SHOP, often managed by former city dwellers is a place where information is exchanged, connections made. The modern village is a stage-set for our aspirations and our dreams of an idyllic past. It has a super-real and sometimes surreal authenticity. Cottages, which housed the desperately poor families of the agricultural working-classes now feature in the pages of The World of Interiors. Lovingly restored, they have become homes for two rather than for 10. They have French kitchens and Scandinavian bathrooms and are cleaned by the ladies from the council estate whose grandparents once lived in them. + Given that the English countryside has for centuries been a site of dire poverty and need, it may seem surprising that the village has been so idolised. A system of tied cottages, poor public transport and rigid class demarcation ensures that the rural poor are even more trapped than their urban counterparts. + The high value of even the smallest country cottage means that the sons and daughters of working-class rural families are unlikely to be able to raise their own families in the villages where they grew up. English villages are fast becoming retirement communities. Suicide rates in the farming community are among the highest in Britain. Country life, with its intricate web of gossip and intrigue can be a fearsome existence to those who do not fit in. + During the second world war, politicians and propagandists looked for ways in which they could encourage the British to defend their territory. The Shell Guides of the 1930s had employed some of Britaint's most exciting artists - Paul Nash, Edward McKnight Kauffer, John Piper - to extol the grace and charm of rural Britain and to deflect growing criticism of the invasion of the countryside by the motor car. + In wartime, this idealisation of the countryside became a potent morale booster. The mass circulation magazine Picture Post ran a three page story headlined What We Are Fighting For. The inhabitants of the industrial heartlands of the North and Midlands, of the docklands of London, Liverpool and Bristol (all prime German bombing targets) may have been surprised to see a set of deeply atmospheric photographs of a leafy lane and a thatched cottage. + It was an image of Beautiful Britain, unsullied by industry, a remarkable rural heritage. "The English", suggests radical second world two historian Angus Calder, "conquerors of a vast Empire, famous once all over Europe for the violence of their politics, the clarity of their philosophical thought and their innovations in business and technology, must now be portrayed as gentle, pacific until provoked and temperamentally at odds with merely rational thinking, with careful organisation, with new-fangled machines". + In 1947, John Hinde, pioneer of early colour photography, published his classic study of country life, Exmoor Village. One photograph showed a cheery couple sitting at the kitchen table in their cottage, posed against the background of a polished dresser set with gleaming china. It was a perfect reflection of post-war longing for a halcyon rural past. + At around the same time, photodocumentarist Edwin Smith and writer Olive Cook were compiling their chronicle of vernacular buildings in the English countryside. Published in the mid-1950s with titles like English Parish Churches and English Farmhouses and Cottages, they reinforced traditional ideas of a secret, undiscovered rural paradise. + As Britain became more prosperous, car ownership increased and a wartime dream became an attainable reality. Baby Austins took thousands of urban families to Snowdonia and St Ives, to the Cotswolds and the Yorkshire Dales. + FASHIONABLE pundits of the Forties predicted the terrible consequences of this mass invasion: "Motorists" wrote the BBC's in-house philosopher CEM Joad with alarm, "have turned the roads of this country into maelstroms of destruction and have, in their desperate eagerness to get away from each other, invaded the by-roads and lanes, where they are to be seen on banks and commons, picnicking determinedly in the shadow of their cars, inhaling oil and petrol and extracting music from machines". + Families moved out of the inner city and into the suburbs - with their cosy railway stations, nuclei of local shops and cunningly pastiched half-timbered houses, they were the practical realisation of a middle class dream. Even today, the fantasy remains. Books which recount a contented rural past are certain sellers. The photographs of Wiltshire farmer's wife, Vera Punter, were published recently. All her pictures pull at the heartstrings. + Anna Fox's photographs of Compton in the 1990s defy this meticulously crafted myth of country life. She has looked without nostalgia at the modern village, gone beyond the facade and portrayed it as an entirely modern phenomenon. Her portrait of Compton is more fearful than satirical. Like Gretel creeping towards the cottage of the wicked witch, she is both fascinated and alarmed by what she sees. But she edges her fear with irony. Like Jane Austen, the greatest portrayor of village life of all, Anna Fox appreciates that wit can be more incisive than anger. + As one of her research sources, Anna Fox used The Octagon, the parish magazine shared by Compton and its neighbouring villages. The Octagon is redolent with an irony and understatement which Austen would have appreciated. One terse entry in The Octagon reads "The ladies who do such a wonderful job cleaning the church would very much appreciate some more help. The cleaning is done on Thursday afternoons at 2.30." Who knows the simmering resentment and weariness which lay behind this polite appeal? And why, one might ask in this post-feminist age, are there no men on the cleaning rota? + In fact, the men of Compton figure little in this saga. Women do all the business here - adorning children as angels and madonnas for the Christmas play, weaving flowers into a bride's headdress with cruelly deft fingers, whispering, organising, planning, defending. When men appear, they are on the periphery, lost souls in a matriarchy, dazed, placeless and without any clear function. Former captains of industry, lawyers, financiers and soldiers they may be, but here they are powerless in a more arcane hierarchy, its membership unlisted, its rules unwritten, its rites the property of the properly initiated. + LIFE IN Compton emerges as a stately minuet, and everyone knows the right steps. When people kiss in Anna Fox's Compton, they do it politely, without uncomfortable passion. They have very practised smiles. Their fingers are emphatic and pointed, cutting the air as they speak. These are people who understand their agenda, who know all the movements in their carefully structured drama. + Life in the village is clearly divided between the public and the private; the many social events, coffee mornings, summer fetes, the harvest festival are the core of Compton's corporate life. Compton people are full of energy, raising funds for causes as disparate as dying children in Romania to church repairs. It is a kind of enterprise culture devoted to charitable aims. The presence of the Conservative Party is always apparent. + Elderly and retired people form a large percentage of Compton's population; no longer caught up in the drama of making their way in the world and raising their children, they have time on their hands. Everything is spotless and well-ordered. In Compton, old women keep up appearances, they roller their hair and wear elaborate hats and shiny blouses defiantly resisting the passing of time. They have tenacity and glamour, and if we fear them, perhaps it is because of their certainty and their disconnection from what we see as the real world. + Compton's women emerge from the photographs as decorated high priestesses - an awesome chorus of ancients who administer the rites, write the laws and, in genteel whispers, cast judgments on those who have erred. + When the socialising is over, the coffee cups washed and the bunting put away, Compton people live privately, in neat houses surrounded by lawns and hedges. Anna Fox's photographs show an eerie world, its inhabitants apparently whisked away to oblivion. There are patios where no one sits, summerhouses where no tea is drunk, topiary which forms close ranks against the casual stare of the passer-by. "Bleak and empty stage sets for a play which might never take place," wrote critic Joanna Lowry, "or which has, perhaps, been rudely interrupted and from which the players have fled. It was probably by Alan Ayckbourn or Mike Leigh and the characters have all gone indoors to murder each other over their afternoon tea." + WHEN Anna Fox set out to photograph Compton, she wanted to "subvert the image of the picture postcard; the images of thatched cottages, leafy lanes and quaint old people that are imprinted on our memories, fixed there by a desire to maintain our idea of the country as a pre-industrial haven, neatly packaged in the top pocket of the heritage industry". + The Village is a meticulous retelling and revision of an old story - while the characters and the plot remain fixed, the language has been subtly altered. Like an inquisitive being just landed from some distant planet, Anna Fox has explored a mysterious world of an alien people peeped over their hedges, crouched behind their shrubberies, wondered at their rituals and their conceits. There is, too, a sense of loss in these photographs, of a disappeared innocence. We are conscious of the disturbing presence of the wise child, laconically assessing the strange phenomenon of being grown-up. + Given the vehemence of many of these photographs, the villagers of Compton have been surprisingly undisturbed by their portraits. No one objected to being included in the exhibition (first shown at Worthing Art Gallery) and the villagers who visited it "loved the way it portrayed the secrecy of village life". + The mother of the bride who invited Anna Fox to photograph her daughter's wedding was delighted with the results. Teachers at the village school were only sorry that so few children were included, and Anna Fox's grandmother was disappointed that the village was not more identifiable, that few landmarks were on display. "It could," she said, "have been anywhere." + One of the photographs in The Village shows a dead pheasant, killed by a passing car. Its entrails, fringed by delicate wing feathers and downy underbelly, spill out from its body. In its revelatory quality, its awareness of the implied violence of everyday life, it encapsulates this saga of rural life in the 1990s, proves what happens when you strip away the surface of the everyday and penetrate to the gore inside. Jane Austen, who delicately unpicked the fabric of village society over a century ago, to reveal concealed ambitions and subsumed desires, would have been intrigued. + The Village: Compton, West Sussex 1991-1993, will be on show at The Edge, 92 Cromer Street London WC1 (071 278 9755) from December 7-22 1993 and from January 10-Feb 5 1994. Admission pounds 2. Other exhibitions organised by the Cross Channel Photographic Mission are currently touring the South East and will be on show in London during 1994. Whitsunday's Child: A Country Life in Pictures by Vera Punter is published by East Herts Publishing. Price pounds 14.99. + +LOAD-DATE: November 15, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +319 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 15, 1993 + +FOUR MEN WANTED: POLICE SEND NAZI WAR CRIMES FILES TO DPP + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 587 words + + + Antanas Gecas + In August, Gecas was named by the Wiesenthal Centre as the second-most wanted war criminal in the world, after Alois Brunner, Albert Eichmann's right hand man, writes Madeleine Bunting. + The 77-year-old Lithuanian, a former mining engineer who lives in Edinburgh, switched sides in the last years of the war to fight alongside the Free Polish in Italy and was decorated for bravery. He came to Britain in the late 1940s, and became a British citizen in 1956. + In 1941 he was a junior officer in the 12 battalion of the Lithuanian police - a unit notorious for atrocities committed in German-occupied Soviet territory. + Kurt Klebeck + Klebeck, aged 87, is unlikely to stand trial because of his age, according to a spokesman for the German Embassy. + Klebeck was deputy commandant in the only SS camp on British soil in the second world war, on Alderney in the Channel Islands. After the Guardian traced him to Hamburg in Germany last year, the local prosecutor's office opened an investigation into his wartime record. Klebeck served seven years in a German prison after a British military court sentenced him for lesser crimes committed in Germany during the war. But he has never been prosecuted for the crimes he committed in the Channel Islands. + Klebeck admits he was stationed on Alderney but claims he was an ordinary soldier. SS records prove he was a member, and that he also worked at the Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme camps. + The only war crimes which can still be tried in Germany are those directly implicating the defendant in murder. A spokesman for the German embassy said last week: "If the prosecution service has begun this investigation it must be because there is evidence of murder either in the form of documents or witnesses." + But he added: "There's not much hope of a trial in court. Klebeck is now 87 and procedures can take a very long time. At 88 or 89 an elderly person is not in a mental position to follow a trial." + David Winnick, Labour MP for Walsall North, who has campaigned for Klebeck to be brought to trial, said: "If the matter is delayed much longer, Klebeck will be dead. If the attitude of the German government is that now nothing can be done, that is most disappointing." + The names of the following cases are known to the Guardian but identifying them could prejudice possible future trials. + Case C + A retired 82-year-old carpenter who has lived in Surrey for 28 years with his wife and son. He admits he commanded a battalion responsible for atrocities and was present when men under his direct command killed civilians, but insists he never killed civilians or Jews. + A Catholic priest now living in Israel has given statements to the war crimes unit alleging atrocities committed in Mir, Belorussia, on August 23, 1942 by Case C. + Case D + The US Office of Special Investigations has begun proceedings to deport Case D, a British citizen, from his home in Florida where he emigrated in 1965 on the grounds that he lied on forms applying to live in the US. He is expected to be deported to the UK before the end of the year. + Born in Czechoslovakia, he is alleged to have been a Nazi concentration camp guard at Munthausen. His job was to shoot prisoners attempting to escape. His name appeared on documentation provided by former Eastern bloc governments when files were opened after the fall of communism. + Case D came to Britain in 1948 and worked in factories in Ashton-under-Lyne and Manchester. + +LOAD-DATE: November 15, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +320 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 15, 1993 + +EYWITNESS: MENTAL PATIENTS CAUGHT UP IN CROAT ADVANCE + +BYLINE: NATASHA NARAYAN IN FOJINICA, CENTRAL BOSNIA + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 674 words + + + CROUCHED against the wall, her arms and legs bare to the freezing wind, Inez flinched in imagined pain as gunfire echoed around the asylum. "Boom boom," she muttered, drawing her threadbare red pullover more tightly around her body. "It hurts inside my head. Are you taking us away from here?" + Inez and the 364 other inmates of the Bakovici mental hospital had little sleep on Saturday night as artillery and heavy machine-gun fire whistled over the building. The Croatian HVO had set up their guns 100 yards from the hospital, which was unlucky enough to be in the way of their advance on the Bosnian-held town of Fojinica. + Abandoned by their doctors and nurses, who had fled the Croat offensive, the patients were forced to take over their own asylum. + An elderly hunchbacked woman wandered in the road, her legs splattered with mud and snow. A group of Canadian and Danish United Nations soldiers looked on, wondering how to cope with the unfamiliar job of psychiatric nursing. + The soldiers explained they had to guard the hospital because there were fears that the advancing Croats might kill the Muslim and Serb patients. + Fojinica started to empty at the end of last week as rumours spread that the Croats were coming. On Saturday evening, hundreds of refugees were still trekking over the mountain roads out of the town. Bedraggled and desperate, most moved slowly through the falling snow, clutching their paltry possessions. + One elderly woman, her face blue from cold, lay on the back of a mule-drawn cart covered in snow. A mother and her two toddlers rested exhausted in a ditch. + Soon after daybreak yesterday the UN soldiers looking after the Drin hospital - home to 255 mentally handicapped adults and children - as well as the Bakovici hospital, went into Fojinica to find the staff. + The town was a scene of desolation. Houses were scorched, shops had smashed windows. Only five staff had turned up for work, all of them for the Drin. + Kadira Pesic, who has been director of the Drin for 25 years was in anguish "I can't leave these children," she said. "I feel responsible." + Back at the Bakovici hospital, as the UN soldiers arrived yesterday bringing bread, they found that one old woman had died overnight. A medical orderly said she had died from natural causes, but the lack of heating or electricity did not help. + "The patients have had no medication for days," he explained. "Even if we did have the medicines, we wouldn't know which ones to give them." + Inside, the air was thick with the odour of stale clothing, unwashed bodies and the stench from unclean lavatories. + The more lucid patients - called "trustees" - had taken over the job of caring for the others. They cooked lunch on wood-burning stoves and washed clothes in iron buckets. + "This is a metaphor for Bosnia," someone said. "The lunatics have taken over the asylum and the UN is here supposedly trying to stop them killing each other." + Marco was the chief trustee. He had spent years working in Canada and was in the hospital he said because he had broken his feet. + In the wards patients with shaved heads were feeding each other a thick paste. Another room was sectioned off. "We have to lock these people away for their own protection. They can hurt themselves," Marco said. + Yesterday at midday, the Croat advance party arrived at the hospital. Led by a commander in a flak jacket, they fired in the air. "No Muslims will live here," one fighter with a swastika headband bragged. + A Muslim woman in a red woolly hat came out of the asylum to meet them. Confused, she sang a Muslim song, smiling and dancing for the HVO fighters. They laughed and jeered and egged her on. One soldier spat on the ground and turned away, disgusted. + Pushing his friend's wheelchair through the yard, Nikola, an elderly Croat, seemed saner that the fighters outside. "In 1945 I served in the army. We fired at soldiers not civilians," he said sadly. "Our people should learn the ABC of democracy." + +LOAD-DATE: November 15, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +321 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 16, 1993 + +MODEL PATIENTS; +Embarrassed at gawping medical students? A new way of teaching could make intimate examinations less stressful + +BYLINE: JANE FEINMANN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 16 + +LENGTH: 818 words + + + WHEN Jane was 23 she stopped having periods and had to go to a London teaching hospital. "Come over here", shouted the consultant when he had examined her. "This is the first normal one we have seen today." Before she knew what was happening, an orderly queue of 10 embarrassed medical students were waiting to find out for themselves what a normal vagina felt like. + "Obviously I should have stopped it," says Jane. "But I wasn't given the opportunity. You're not in a position to make a fuss when you're on your back." + It is a common experience. Even worse, thousands of anaethetised women awaiting operations have been used as teaching material for gynaecological students. It was only two years ago that medical schools were warned that simply presenting as a patient at a teaching hospital did not indicate consent to examination by students. The warning followed findings by the Women in Medicine group that many medical schools had no inbuilt system of obtaining informed consent because of the belief that, if informed, insufficient numbers of women would consent. The group claimed that without consent, students risked prosecution for assault. + Concern about use of women as guinea pigs and the fear that insensitive teaching affects students' later attitude to patients has forced gynaecology departments throughout the world to rethink teaching methods. + In some American and Australian medical schools women are specially trained to teach the gynaecological examination while themselves being examined. The idea is to reduce student anxiety and enhance learning opportunities while "addressing the discordance in the perception of a vaginal examination between physician and patient." + The idea was considered by UK medical schools and rejected as culturally non-transplantable. It was felt that women would not volunteer and that medical students would become even more anxious. + Instead St Bartholomew's Hospital medical school has imported an idea from a medical school in Maastricht, Holland. Instead of practising on vulnerable, real flesh, students learn the technical skills of examination and other medical procedures on models. + This is not the first artificial vagina. St Mary's Medical School, London, tried one in the sixties, but a former professor there, David Paintin, explained: "It felt wrong so it didn't help students." + Three years ago, a medical sculpture company began to develop three-dimensional models using rubbers and plastics. There is a set of vaginas, made of leather and silicone, in a variety of forms: after the birth of one child, after a number of children, elderly and cancerous. + There is a model penis for practising urinary catherisation (20 per cent of which cause trauma in teaching hospitals). There are arms you can take blood from, breasts with and without lumps and a shoulder which lights up when given injection for arthritis correctly. + Dr Jane Dacre, senior lecturer in clinical skills at Barts, has been assembling the collection. Until last month, she kept the bits of body in her car boot and carried them to lectures, trying to look unobtrusive and keeping well away from nearby Smithfield Market. Now they are kept in Barts' new pounds 1 million clinical skills unit (the first in the country). + Dacre has been interested in other methods of learning clinical skills since, as a junior doctor, she was called in the middle of the night to put in a pacing wire in the chest of a man who had suffered a heart attack. It is a tricky, life-saving procedure and she remembers panicking, knowing she had to get it right first time. + She says students will always have to do procedures for the first time on people. "There is no substitute for the experience of putting your hand in someone else's vagina. Anything else will never be the same. But you can get to grips with the technology by trying it out on simulated models. You can find out which hand you need to hold the speculum in, which hand you use to spread the labia and so on. Only when you are comfortable with the technology do you move on to real people." + The hospital has always been at the forefront of taking women's rights seriously. The medical school dean, Professor Lesley Rees, has led the fund-raising drive for the pounds l million unit and sees it as "signalling a change in attitude to patients which students need to take notice of." + However, other medical schools are wary. Susan Bewley, gynaecologist at University College Hospital, says the key technique students need to learn is to earn the patient's trust. "Getting the consent of patients to do an examination is what matters. You do that by body language, by showing that you respect their privacy, by covering their tummies. If you're relaxed, the patient will tell you whether it hurts or not. I don't know whether the new toys will help with that or not." + +LOAD-DATE: November 16, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +322 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 16, 1993 + +DRUGS: THE LONG, PAINFUL BIRTH OF A DRUG; +As many as 10,000 potential medicines can be discarded in the search for a drug which has that star quality. + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN EDUCATION PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 964 words + + + IT IS small enough to hold between your fingers or balance on your tongue. It takes up to 20 years and costs up to pounds 150 million to develop. It saves millions of lives and is a symbol of the success of the therapeutic revolution of the last 50 years. Yet we hear very little about the way scientists pack life-saving power into pills and other medicines. + It is easy to see why we take the medicinal pill for granted. About five tonnes of aspirin are consumed every day. In Britain alone in 1990, doctors wrote 446 million prescriptions for drugs: eight for every man, woman and child. + There are vaccines to protect children from old scourges like polio, diptheria and tuberculosis; anti-inflammatory drugs to improve the quality of life for millions of arthritis sufferers; beta-blocker drugs which help to control high blood-pressure. + More people than ever before are living into their eighties and nineties. As they grow older they need more medical care. Drugs are not solely responsible for increasing life expectancy. Improved hygiene and living conditions reduced the annual death toll from 177 per 10,000 population in 1900 to 125 for per 10,000 in 1940, just before the introduction of penicillin, the first of the so called "modern drugs". By 1986, the figure had fallen to 117 deaths per 10,000. + But drugs could play an even bigger role if scientists find new ways of treating conditions like Aids, which threatens the young, and dementia, which threatens the elderly. The therapeutic revolution is not restricted to pills, capsules, sprays, ointments etc. Among the 25 or so new drug products in Britain this year is a contraceptive device which is implanted in a woman's upper arm (see page 11). Forty years ago the idea of such an implant would have been dismissed as science fiction. + How were this year's products born? Scientists begin by trying to find out the cause of the disease they want to treat. This helps to identify the target and provides clues to which types of chemical might work. As many as 10,000 potential medicines are discarded in the search for a new drug. The scientists seek drugs that, like natural chemicals produced in the body, can latch on to specially receptive sites in the body's cells. Few have that extra special something which makes for star quality. Many are rejected by computer analysis because of side-effects, cost or lack of stability or effectiveness. + Plants have provided nearly half of the world's most successful drugs and could yield many more. The painkiller codeine comes from the opium poppy, and aspirin comes from willow bark. A new cancer drug has been derived from the bark of the Pacific yew. Plants from threatened areas such as the world's rain forests are being nurtured in botanic gardens. The US National Cancer Institute is screening more than 10,000 tropical plants a year. Many antibiotics have been isolated from microbes in soil. Marine organisms such as sponges and corals also contain healing power. + The discovery of a potentially effective medicinal compound is only the first stage of pharmaceutical roulette - a game of high stakes with fabulous rewards. Zantac, the best selling drug of all time, is reported to have earned the British firm Glaxo more than pounds 10,500 million. The active ingredient in Zantac is called ranitidine and heals painful peptic ulcers which affect up to 10 per cent of Britons. The reason that it has been so successful is that it is very effective and causes few side-effects. It has improved the quality of life of millions of people. + However, only one in ten of new licensed medicines in Britain goes on to earn UK sales of more than pounds 5 million a year. Many potential products fall by the wayside of testing. New drugs are tested on small pieces of animal tissue. If these are successful, tests are extended to whole animals, usually rats and mice, sometimes rabbits, dogs and monkeys. The idea is not only to find out if a drug works, but if it has side-effects. New in vitro (in glass) tests means less animal experimentation. Increasingly, scientists use clumps of laboratory-grown cells, but they claim that much information they need can only be obtained through animal work. + After two to six years of research and development, only five chemicals might be in the running out of the 10,000 originally investigated; and after a further three to five years, perhaps only one. + Up to three-quarters of the time spent researching a new drug goes on human studies - starting with healthy volunteers. These early studies are designed to elicit further information about side-effects and to establish what kind of dose will be needed. The next phase typically involves groups of 200 to 400 patients and the third and final phase 1,500 on average. + This might seem a large number, but the thalidomide tragedy shows scientists cannot be too careful. Thalidomide was given to pregnant women in the late 1950s as a sedative. Many of the babies were born with seriously deformed limbs. + Although many countries reformed drug testing procedures after thalidomide, some dangerous drugs still became available. In the 1970s a drug called Eraldin was taken to control blood pressure but was later found to damage the eyes and the abdominal and connective tissue. In the early 1980s some patients died and others suffered sensitivity to light after taking the anti-arthritis drug Opren. It was also found to be linked to liver and kidney problems. + Before a company can obtain a licence for a new drug in Britain, it has to submit a dossier to the Medicines Control Agency which is responsible for licensing new drugs. These are to 40,000 pages long and document up to 20 years of research and development. + +LOAD-DATE: November 16, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +323 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 17, 1993 + +WHEN THE HELP RUNS OUT; +Calls for the regulation of private care agencies are growing more urgent but the Department of Health is sitting on the fence + +BYLINE: JOY OGDEN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 11 + +LENGTH: 847 words + + + HOME helps wearing aprons, wielding vacuums and popping to the shops for elderly people living alone are becoming a thing of the past. Care assistants are taking over, their duties changed in line with the profile of those they tend. + Older people who just need a bit of extra help are cut out by the demands of increasing numbers of very frail, vulnerable people who, since the introduction of community care, are to be looked after in their own homes. Household cleaning and pension collection are bottom of the local authority home care shopping list, although these are what older people want most. And huge increases in charges effectively deny such services to many people, according to No Time To Lose, a report on community care by Age Concern. + Top priority now is help with personal nursing care. Since councils are instructed to spend 85 per cent of the total community care budget in the private sector, they are turning to growing numbers of private agencies to fill in the gaps in the service. There's the rub. The agencies, which must register with the employment department, are subject to the same checks as those which supply office, shop or factory employees. But there is no requirement to register with the local authority social services department and the council has no right to inspect information about them. As duties become more intimate and patients more vulnerable, the need for regulation becomes more pressing. + David Hinchliffe, shadow minister for community care, plans to introduce a private members' bill providing for the registration of domiciliary care agencies in the new parliamentary session, assuming there is nothing in the Queen's speech. + But his bill would coincide with a blitz on red tape by the Department of Trade and Industry. This has spawned a letter from the Department of Health to care home proprietors calling on them to review "regulatory burdens" and asking if inspection could be reduced. + This is aimed at shielding small businesses from the cost of complying with regulations but it has enraged care professionals in all sectors. They fear that hard-won advances in safeguarding those least able to protect themselves will be lost. Luciannne Sawyer, director of Care Alternatives, and president of the United Kingdom Home Care Association (UKHCA), believes the deregulation drive could even be counter-productive: "A mandatory system of registration might well actually help the growth of private agencies." + Meanwhile the arguments for a level playing field have contributed to the London Domiciliary Care Initiative, set up after discussions between the UKHCA and the Association of Directors of Social Services (ADSS) to explore the case for a voluntary registration system across the capital. The organisation is to be launched next month. Agencies in the scheme will have to prove they have reached agreed minimum standards, while those outside will be increasingly squeezed. + The argument seems to have been won, according to Denise Platt, chair of the working group, director of Hammersmith and Fulham social services department and president of ADSS. Platt said the scheme, which has to be self-financing, will alleviate some of the problems for private agencies with different branches, operating across local authority boundaries. As de-registration must be notified to all London boroughs, who will review and possibly withdraw contracts, it will make it easier for the council to identify rogue agencies. + If the Government is serious about removing inhibitions to good practice and private enterprise while keeping costs to users under control, said Sawyer, it should start with the VAT regulations. These deter agencies from directly employing staff because they then have to impose VAT on both wages and commission. An agency which recruits self-employed people and introduces them to users, charges VAT only on the commission. But an agency can only supervise and dictate standards for staff it employs directly. + Lesley Bell, chair of the Joint Advisory Group of Domiciliary Care Associations, also believes the VAT regulations should change. But she points out: "Even registration is not a foolproof system, but when you had most of the market being supplied by local authorities you had a certain amount of control. The more you go in for a fragmented market - and some authorities have up to 30 different suppliers - the more necessary it is to have a framework, otherwise it leads to chaos." + Her research has also identified nurses' agencies as another area which is ripe for rationalisation. The agencies must be registered for providing nurses, but sometimes supply unqualified people who act as care assistants. + Meanwhile the Department of Health is sitting on the fence about the need for statutory regulation. A spokesman said: "If the industry feels there is a problem, or administrative difficulties come up, we will think again. We are very keen that the private sector should grow and that the Government should not bind them up with red tape." + +LOAD-DATE: November 17, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +324 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 18, 1993 + +PAST NOTES: MY LAI MASSACRE TRIAL + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 329 words + + + November 18, 1970 + AN ARMY prosecutor today accused Lieutenant William Calley of "shooting down in cold blood" unarmed and unresisting Vietnamese civilians during the alleged massacre in the village of My Lai two years ago. The lieutenant is accused of murdering or directing his platoon members to murder 102 civilians. + Calley's platoon landed by helicopter on March 16, 1968, on the outskirts of My Lai without coming under any enemy fire. They found in the village undefended and unarmed women, children and old men. These people were taken in a group to the southern side of the village and Private Paul Meadlo and Private James Conti were directed to guard them. The two men were told: "Take care of these people." They started to guard the people. When Calley returned he asked: "Why did you not take care of these people?" They replied: "We have," and Calley told them "I mean kill 'em, waste 'em." Captain Daniel said Calley and Meadlo, Calley using a rifle with full bursts of automatic fire, shot the unarmed and undefended men, women and children. Daniel said that some of the villagers tried to run but were shot down in cold blood. Meadlo was crying. The prosecutor said Conti moved his people to a large irrigation ditch and continued to guard them. He was later joined by Calley, Sergent David Mitchell and Meadlo, still crying. Calley ordered the people to be pushed into the irrigation ditch to be executed, and they were. + "Conti refused, but Meadlo did fire and he cried," Captain Daniel said. During the action Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson and Lawrence Coldburn were flying in a helicopter, and saw the bodies in the ditch. They could not believe it, so they landed. "Over 70 people were executed in that ditch," the prosecutor said. Captain Daniel said that when a child crawled from the ditch, someone had shouted: "There is a child getting away." Calley had picked up the child, thrown it into the ditch and, shot it dead. + +LOAD-DATE: November 18, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +325 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 19, 1993 + +PROTESTERS BLITZ MYSTERIOUS HESS MEMORIAL ON SCOTTISH FARM + +BYLINE: ERLEND CLOUSTON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 169 words + + + A MEMORIAL celebrating one of the second world war's most notorious parachute jumps was summarily blitzkrieged yesterday. + Anti-Nazi protesters moved swiftly into a field at Floors Farm, 15 miles south of Glasgow, hours after the discovery of a marble-and-slate monument to "brave, heroic Rudolf Hess", who descended, unexpectedly, on the same spot at the start of an abortive peace mission in 1941. + The owner of the 200-acre dairy farm, Craig Baird, had kept his head down at the Ayr cattle market as the demonstrators weighed into a structure whose building, according to Mr Baird's older brother, Basil, had been commissioned by "an elderly man from Yorkshire". Mr Baird emphasised that Craig, aged 55, a church elder and keen member of an East Kilbride curling team, was not political. + "I don't know what the financial arrangements were," said Basil Baird, whose grandfather and father took charge of their distinguished German visitor when he appeared, so to speak, out of the blue. + +LOAD-DATE: November 19, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +326 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 20, 1993 + +IL DUCE'S GHOST HAUNTS THE NEW ITALY; +This weekend's local elections could alter the country's political map. Ed Vulliamy reports from Naples on Mussolini's granddaughter's fight with the left + +BYLINE: ED VULLIAMY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 15 + +LENGTH: 1101 words + + + THE signals were clear from the start. "We are proud of our origins," the man at the microphone said, as he declared the rally under way in front of the monumental central post office of Naples, built during the fascist era. + The crowd cheered loudly, in an unusually chilly wind, and up went a forest of Nazi salutes to the chant of "Duce, Duce, Duce" as the star of the evening appeared, a flash of blonde hair. Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of the dictator, took the stage. + About 2,500 people had come to hear the finale of Ms Mussolini's campaign to become the mayor of Naples, which next year hosts the Group of Seven (G7) summit. + That 1994 marks the 50th anniversary of the allies' liberation of the city from fascism was an element in Naples' favour when the G7 venue was selected. The formal host of the gathering of the most powerful leaders in the world is traditionally the local mayor. There is considerable alarm in the White House and the US state department that the hand that greets President Bill Clinton may well be that of Mussolini's granddaughter. + Italy's flag hung at Thursday night's rally alongside red ones featuring a white circle in the middle and the black Celtic Cross of the contemporary European fascist movement, echoing the colours of Benito Mussolini's allies in the Third Reich. + The crowd too was mixed. Skinheads and trendy lads decked out in leather jackets at the front mingled with elderly ladies and gentlemen in trilby hats, and smarter admirers wearing fur coats or talking on mobile phones. + Ms Mussolini is certain to get through to the second round of balloting, which follows this Sunday's poll. Her main rival is set to be Antonio Bassolino, making the battle for Naples one between two extremes. + Mr Bassolino is a hardline Marxist. Although a member of the face-lifted former communist PDS, he opposed its decision to ditch the hammer and sickle along with the title of Communist Party. He comes from the hard-headed ranks of Naples' industrial working class movement. In rotten, collapsing Naples, the centre cannot hold. + The city has been run by an alliance of Christian Democrats, Socialists and Liberals, in cahoots with the Camorra Mafia syndicates, since the fall of Benito Mussolini, and the allied liberation. The entire leadership of all the parties is now under either arrest or investigation for bribery, corruption, embezzling aid after the 1980 earthquake, Camorra association and gross mismanagement of the health service and Aids emergencies, which have been used to harvest a fortune in kickbacks. + Both Ms Mussolini and Mr Bassolino claim to offer deliverance from these corrupt but powerful men. + "Bassolino - son of a whore," shouted the boot boys as Alessandra began to speak. "Sei bravi [you're great]," she replied. She protests that this is not a fascist campaign, but one of "moral renewal". + The former soft porn model and failed film actress (her aunt is Sophia Loren) gave a short and undistinguished speech at tremendous speed, in which she said she had seen "the real Naples, and what the Christian Democrats have done. I have seen it in the slums and in the prisons . . . Long live Naples! Long live the unity of Italy!" + We do not know yet whether Ms Mussolini's strong candidature is a farce signifying the dismal poverty of post-crisis Italian politics, or a serious threat representing the revival of a fascist right in southern Italy. Perhaps it is merely an exercise in crass populism; perhaps Ms Mussolini's Italian Social Movement (MSI) can replace the Christian Democrats as the main conservative force. + Either way, she has become respectable. None of the sycophantic Italian newspapers has dared print one of the hundreds of existing photographs parading her physical attributes. She is interviewed on television by serious political hosts, and weighty columnists have compared her to Eva Peron. + The lads in the crowd knew why they were there: "We love her because she comes from a great family," said Fabrizio, who works for the railways. "And because she'll kick the filthy Arab shit out of the city." The old men stood in rapture, perhaps recalling what they saw as better days. Others simply wanted to vote against the city's corrupt establishment, but refused to vote communist. + Yet Ms Mussolini finds it hard to form a coherent political manifesto. At the MSI headquarters in Rome on Tuesday, the telephone rang. Ms Mussolini had been contacted by a television station, and was asking advice on what to say. "I love the people; I hate the bourgeoisie," was a recent gem, along with "I am not a fascist, I am a democrat" and "I am an anarchist". + The MSI leader, Gianfranco Fini, was at the rally too, intent on dodging the fascist label, and promising "a fascinating challenge, the democratic conquest of consensus, with a vote which offers Italy the chance to rediscover herself around a national axis which can win the battle against the left." + Naples' new mayor will take on a city which has been governed more badly than any of comparable size in Europe. There is fabulous wealth, all of it the direct or indirect fruit of the Camorra cocaine business or of state grants secured by local politicians when they become ministers. + But in this Colombian-style arrangement, the Camorra's money is a private matter and the grants are embezzled. Little of this wealth filters down. Despite the lavish grants, the Naples local authority was unable last financial year to pay its telephone and electricity bills. + The roads are potholed; the water is polluted and hazardous; schools are often closed because the buildings are falling down; hospitals turn away emergency patients; traffic is out of control; rubbish piles up on the streets. (The refuse service, like everything else, is in the hands of the Camorra.) + The periphery of the town is a stinking concrete sprawl of unplanned housing, violence, cocaine, firearms and rigorous Catholicism. Children live on rubbish heaps; three died in a gas explosion last week. + For this responsibility, the ideologies of fascism and Marxism now compete. Opinion polls suggest in a play-off, Mr Bassolino would beat Ms Mussolini by 52 per cent to 48 per cent. + The lads fold their flags away, and those who can remember the good old days hobble off, invigorated. There is a message from Ms Mussolini for President Clinton: "When he comes to Naples, he will have to give me his hand, and I will take him on a trip around Naples to look at the beautiful views. What's the problem?" + +LOAD-DATE: November 22, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +327 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 20, 1993 + +WESTSIDE WOUND UP; +Money Watch + +BYLINE: DAN ATKINSON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 35 + +LENGTH: 309 words + + + THE Securities and Investments Board has obtained a High Court order winding up Westside Securities, the firm at the centre of allegations that pounds 2.1 million may have been defrauded from an elderly woman. + Westside, of Salisbury, Wiltshire, is now in the hands of the Official Receiver and it is being wound up in the public interest. + The firm was a category three member of Fimbra, the brokers' watchdog. It was allowed to advise clients and for a time was also authorised to handle client money. + Westside personnel are alleged to have concocted a fraud involving pounds 2.1 million of shares in drugs giant Glaxo, belonging to an elderly and infirm woman client. SIB and other investigations are continuing. + Fimbra has suspended: + - Gerald Anthony Buddell, of Aquila Financial Management, Crowborough, East Sussex. Mr Buddell has admitted falsifying clients' signatures on application forms; + - Christopher Maah & Associates, of Kings Langley, Hertfordshire. The firm - which was not authorised to handle client money - appears to have failed to maintain at all times sufficient financial resources to ensure that it meets its liabilities as they fall due. + Merchant bank Singer & Friedlander is at the centre of an application for judicial review by the High Court of the Securities and Futures Authority's handling of a complaint brought against the bank. + Bernard Panton, former chairman of quoted company Gresham Telecomputing, is claiming pounds 6,000 in interest from Singers for alleged delays in settling the sale of his stake in Gresham. + He wants the High Court to order the SFA to reopen its investigation of Mr Panton's complaints against Singers. + Mr Panton is challenging the SFA's view that Mr Panton's complaints were insufficiently serious to have Singers struck off from doing business. + +LOAD-DATE: November 22, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +328 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 22, 1993 + +LABOUR ATTACK ON 'BENEFIT ROBBERY' + +BYLINE: MICHAEL WHITE, POLITICAL EDITOR + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 20 + +LENGTH: 465 words + + + LABOUR last night denounced the Chancellor's plans to commit "the fiscal equivalent of assault and robbery" on unemployment benefit by halving eligibility from 12 to six months in his Budget on November 30. + But ministers' short-term need to ensure a politically successful first Budget for Kenneth Clarke is certain to keep out any money-saving changes that could be vetoed by a backbench Tory revolt. + Though ministers seem determined to announce a squeeze on unemployment entitlements, Mr Clarke will not legislate right away and legislation is not likely in this session, colleagues predicted. + The Treasury's long-term determination to cut the pounds 80 billion a year cost of the welfare state will reach into the heart of the middle class's welfare net as well as further squeezing the poor. + Though only some immediate changes can be expected in the Budget, they would eventually tax child benefit, force wives to make separate pension arrangements and make businesses fund sickness and injury insurance without reimbursement. + Above all, Treasury policy would reverse John Major's election rhetoric about ever-more widespread middle class inheritance of property by making elderly people use their own assets before the state's. In the words of one Tory strategist, people must be prepared to "eat your house". + It is certain that the Social Security Secretary, Peter Lilley, will legislate to impose stricter medical tests for invalidity benefit, and could cut reimbursement to employers for sickness insurance from 80 to 60 per cent - or even zero. + Cabinet moderates, William Waldegrave and Virginia Bottomley, were quick to rebut shadow chancellor Gordon Brown's charges that their plans "go right to the heart of the welfare state" with cuts in dole entitlement. + As with long-term efforts to force people to use their savings, that would require legislation which ministers may hesitate to risk while 2.9 million people are jobless. + Fears which ministers denounce as scare-mongering were again reinforced by Mr Brown himself who attacked last week's revelation of seven official committees examining long-term changes. If implemented these would seek to encourage volunteers to opt out of basic state pensions, unemployment and other benefits. It is a move which Labour expert, Frank Field, predicted would be attractive only to people in safe jobs - whose national insurance contributions would be lost to the Treasury. + Labour's social security spokesman, Donald Dewar, warned of scapegoating the most vulnerable. Given that millions had contributed to national insurance throughout their working lives, "it would be the fiscal equivalent of assault and robbery. The public loses both ways, paying more for less," Mr Dewar said. + +LOAD-DATE: November 22, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +329 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 23, 1993 + +THEATRE: WINGS; +Harrogate + +BYLINE: ROBIN THORNBER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 6 + +LENGTH: 357 words + + + ANYONE who knows someone who has suffered from a stroke must have wondered what it's like to be locked in your own head, imprisoned in aphasia, unable to say what you mean. Improbably, this new musical from America sets out to show you. + Not that writer Arthur Kopit has been there. But moved by his father's experience he researched among other apoplectics and came up with this sympathetic identification which is probably as near as we'll get until we can free up seized synapses. + The character from whose sanatorium armchair he has chosen to explore this enclosed world is, to point the contrast, a former aviatrix and wing-walker from the interwar days of flying circuses, when biplane aerobatics was a public spectacle in the States. + All the more moving that this frail, hesitant old lady who once danced daredevil with the clouds is now, in her own faltering words, "captured" - spoonfed by her condescending carers and "wrapped in the dark". + With the armchair's embrace enclosed in a cylinder of light Eve Shickle's performance as the indomitable and gradually recovering Emily Stilson is a triumph of both empathy and projection from a confined base. And the shifting screens and gauzes of Julie Henry's design, lit by Will Ballard, beautifully convey an uncertain claustrophobia. + The translation from its original form as a radio play to an operatically styled musical, with music by Jeffrey Lunden and book and lyrics by Arthur Perlman, isn't entirely successful, in spite of endlessly imaginative invention from director Andrew Manley. + So don't expect a thigh-slapping barrel of laughs, although there's a gentle humour to be relished. Go for a brave, perceptive adventure in understanding that uses music and drama as expressive tools. + And without stereotyping Harrogate as full of elderly people, the town does have a lot of nursing/retirement homes; how could Harrogate Theatre's artistic director serve that community of caring professionals better than by offering them the European premiere of a clinical case study with songs? + Harrogate Theatre (0423 502116) until December 4. + +LOAD-DATE: November 23, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +330 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 23, 1993 + +WRIT LARGE + +BYLINE: MARCEL BERLINS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 18 + +LENGTH: 629 words + + + I HEAR that Mishcon de Reya, the firm handling Princess Diana's pix-in-gym litigation, have recently been investigated by the Attorney-General, along with Lawrence Lever of the Mail on Sunday, over unauthorised access by Lever to a restricted High Court insolvency file in the Maxwell case. Creditors are one of the limited categories entitled to look at such files. Lever was able to get a sight of the file because forms signed by two clerks from Mishcon de Reya stated that the firm - which also acts for the Mail on Sunday - represented a creditor of the insolvent Bishopsgate Investment Management, which managed most of the Maxwell pension funds. It turns out that the Maxwell pensioner who authorised Lever to inspect the file was not, in legal terms, a creditor. Last December Mr Justice Vinelott referred the case to the Attorney-General, Sir Nicholas Lyell, to consider whether contempt of court proceedings should be brought. + I'm told the Attorney-General's department told Mishcon de Reya in August that no action was to be taken against the firm or any of its partners. Lever is still waiting to hear. + THE FOUR senior judges are soon to tell the Lord Chancellor whether they approve of the Law Society's plan for solicitors to get rights of audience in the higher courts. If they say no, it will be because they object to the society's insistence that solicitors outside private practice should also be eligible to appear in the higher courts. The judges feel iffy about Crown Prosecution Service lawyers conducting their own crown court cases. But if they say no to the whole scheme, what then? The society, I hear, has retained Sydney Kentridge QC to advise whether the judges' decision could be challenged in court by judicial review. But who would hear the case? Which judges would have the nerve and dispassion to entertain a legal attack on four of their most eminent seniors, including the Lord Chief Justice and the Master of the Rolls? And who would be the Big Four's solicitors? The Treasury Solicitor's department, the Government's lawyers, is made up of employed lawyers - precisely those the four judges would exclude from rights of audience. But judges aren't government: so would they have to go to private solicitors? I'm almost hoping for a "No" from them just to see what happens. + REMEMBER Sir Michael Davies, the judge who used to hear lots of spicy libel cases and became the first judge to apologise to a Volvo (his own) for nasty remarks he made about it? I think Sir Michael has managed another first. He's retired from the full-time bench, but still does a lot of judging. I came across a transcript of a case in which he had to decide something or other, and there it was, in brackets: "(pause in proceedings for judge to take telephone call)." A bit much, I thought. I'm a great fan of mobile phones but, call me old-fashioned, I feel the middle of proceedings in the High Court is not the time nor place for phone conversations. Besides, to whom had he given his number, no doubt coupled with an exhortation to "phone me anytime"? Alas, the truth was less exotic. It was, I discovered, a call from another judge involved in the same case, to discuss matters of urgent relevance. + THERE'S this big City law firm with video cameras in its offices. They're there for security, of course. But cameras film what they see. And what one of them saw recently was naughtiness of the kind usually seen in films prohibited to under-18s. Moreover, the number of people involved in the activity was not the normal two, but four. I know which firm is in the frame, but I just need confirmation. A bottle of champagne to the first informant; anonymity is, of course, guaranteed. A copy of the video gets three bottles. + +LOAD-DATE: November 23, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +331 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 23, 1993 + +POLICE WIDEN SEARCH FOR ELDERLY COUPLE TO BANKS OF RESERVOIR + +BYLINE: LAWRENCE DONEGAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 270 words + + + POLICE in Leicester yesterday extended their search for a missing retired couple to the banks of the Rutland reservoir. + Derek Severs, a former ICI executive, and his wife Eileen disappeared 10 days ago from their home in the village of Upper Hambleton, overlooking Britain's largest man-made lake. Police have already dug up the couple's garden. + A spokeswoman for Leicester police said last night that 60 officers, including a team specially trained in search techniques, were combing the seven-mile perimeter of a peninsula jutting into Rutland water. The use of divers was being considered. Detectives were also intending to speak to some business contacts of Mr Severs to see if they could shed any light. + Mr Severs, aged 68, worked in sales at ICI for more than 40 years and continued to do freelance work from his home. He is a prominent member of the local Conservative Party. Mrs Severs, aged 69, received an MBE five years ago for voluntary work. + The couple have not been seen since November 13, when Mrs Severs presented prizes at a charity function. Neighbours reported them missing last Thursday but police found their cars, a VW Golf and a Rover, parked in their driveway. + There were no obvious signs of a struggle, although detectives are treating the couple's disappearance as suspicious. + Mr and Mrs Severs were well known in the community of 40 houses and villagers told detectives that it was out of character for either to go away without telling anyone. + A 37-year-old man arrested on Friday in connnection with the investigation was still in custody last night. + +LOAD-DATE: November 23, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +332 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 24, 1993 + +TUMBLING RETURNS SEND THE ELDERLY INTO DESPAIR + +BYLINE: TERESA HUNTER AND NICK PANDYA + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 16 + +LENGTH: 494 words + + + FALLING savings rates will plunge many elderly savers, already concerned about how they would pay for Christmas, into despair. + NatWest Bank yesterday cut the rates on many of its savings accounts by at least 0.6 of a percentage point - reducing to just 3 per cent the net return on pounds 10,000. + The latest round of interest rate cuts will hit hardest those savers who depend on income from their bank or building society investment accounts. + These people are typically aged over 50 and retired; their cash accounts for 80 per cent of funds on deposit. + Such investors have already seen their returns slashed by more than half over two years. A pensioner living off pounds 10,000 would have enjoyed income of pounds 85 per month after tax in 1991. That nest egg now earns only pounds 34 a month - and this will shrink to just pounds 29 per month if savings rates are cut by 0.5 per cent across the board. Although building societies are anxious to do all they can to stimulate the housing market, they cannot afford to antagonise their savers - many of whom are deeply disgruntled at the interest rates they are already receiving. + A Woolwich Building Society spokesman said: "This must be one of the worst Christmas presents, which many savers were dreading. It will be a very bleak moment for people relying on their savings to live." + Funds have been pouring out of building societies for many months into equity-based investments. In June, July and August investors withdrew pounds 249 million more than they invested with building societies. Savings institutions are keenly aware of the difficulties they will face cutting savings rates around Christmas - which is traditionally the poorest time of the year on the savings front. + Societies are concerned that savers will desert them in droves, in favour of either gilts - yielding about 6 per cent gross - or equities, which are yielding 4 per cent. + Mercury Asset Management's spokesman, Jonathan Ruck Keene, said: "Many investors will ask themselves why, if they can get more income from a safe blue-chip share, should they stick with a building society where there is no prospect of capital growth." + Sales of unit trusts are already higher this year than they were for the whole of 1987, when sales were booming. + Unit trust sales last month were the highest October figures on record, with net sales reaching pounds 846 million, compared with pounds 37 million in the same month last year. Actual sales were 95 per cent up on a year ago. + The Association of Unit Trusts and Investment Funds' spokesman, Victoria Nye, said: "As long as interest rates are low we expect unit trusts to become increasingly attractive to private investors." + But before rushing to withdraw their funds, building society savers should remember that with inflation down to 1.4 per cent they are still getting a very low-risk real return. Shares prices go down as well as up. + +LOAD-DATE: November 24, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +333 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 25, 1993 + +THEATRE: MASTER BUILDER; +Edinburgh + +BYLINE: JOYCE MCMILLAN + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 7 + +LENGTH: 467 words + + + All eds London and Manchester + ONE OF the key exchanges in Ibsen's Master Builder comes early in the play, when the hero, Solness, is complaining to his friend the doctor about his fear of youth and how it will one day come banging on the door, forcing him to make way. "Well, what of it?" says the doctor. "Then that will be the end of Master Builder Solness," the answer roars back, all outrage and disbelief. For Ibsen's hero is a man in full rebellion against his own mortality and looming old age; and despite the occasional irony in what is often seen as a self-portrait of the artist as an ageing man, there can be no doubt that Ibsen saw his story as a tragic one. Everything about Solness - his childlessness, his sense of professional unfulfilment, the unhappiness of his marriage - cries out against the idea that this is where his life must begin to end; and when the young girl Hilde Wangel strolls into his office like a streak of sunshine he is utterly seduced, and lured on to a foolish death. + And what is strange about Brian Cox's Master Builder at the Royal Lyceum - co-directed by Cox himself and John Crowley - is that it captures every dimension of the play except that truly tragic one. Perhaps the mere fact of appearing in this most revealing of plays about male middle age, playing opposite his own much younger girlfriend Siri Neal, has simply used up Cox's capacity for self-exposure. At any rate, the Solness he gives us is rather held up for examination as a faintly comic, ridiculous figure - vain egotistical, a lovable rogue in a too-youthful suit - than entered into as a human being full of immense pain. + The result is a surprisingly brisk, pacey, amusing production, which makes fine comic play of the obvious affinity between the guilt-ridden Presbyterian cultures of Scotland and Norway, but rarely touches the wellsprings of pity and terror beneath the surface. The long exchanges between Solness and Hilde zip along at a fine pace, but seem simply to state and re-state the chemistry between the characters. And the effect of Cox's curious distancing from Solness's inner drama is to throw too much emphasis on the character of Hilde, who is really little more than a catalyst of Solness's crisis. Morag Hood does her best to invoke real sorrow and pain in her performance as Solness's grief-stricken wife, but the overall impression is too flippant, as if the pain of unhappy old men was something our feminist-influenced culture could no longer take seriously; or as if Cox had succumbed to the old exile's temptation of using his Scottish self as a vehicle for satire and reductive humour, and leaving the exploration of the full, terrifying range of human emotion to more complete cultures, elsewhere. + Until December 11 (031-229 9697) + +LOAD-DATE: November 25, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +334 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 25, 1993 + +AND GOD SAID: LET THERE BE STYLISH CASSOCKS + +BYLINE: DAVID PRESSWELL + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 13 + +LENGTH: 799 words + + + "THIS IS our most popular, the Childrey, more curvy and with a frill, though not overly feminine. This one, the Hasley, is definitely designed for clerical women with an hour-glass figure: defined waist, soft tucked skirt, curved shoulder wings, leg-o'-mutton sleeves." + The Reverend Betsy King enthuses her way along a rail of cassocks, drawing attention to every design detail and urging me to feel the fabric - a non-crease polyviscose. Each cassock comes in a range of colours, including chestnut, grape, hyacinth (the bestseller) and peanut shell, allowing, in the words of the Oxenford catalogue, each woman to "choose her most flattering 'required' colour". + "How about red?" I ask. + "You mean 'poppy'? No, not popular. Maybe that would still be too shocking - the scarlet woman and all that." + Yet evidently King has divined a ground-swell of the unorthodox among her fellow female clerics: the Milbrook, the most traditional cassock she stocks, is also the least popular - and less than 18 months after Oxenford was founded, it has attracted 200 customers. Next year, the company hopes to break into profit, capitalising on a new trend in mix 'n' match cassocks with detachable coloured frill collars. + King struck upon the idea of designing and selling cassocks back in 1988 when a day spent trying to find one ended in her buying material to make her own. In those days, not only was the choice of colours and materials "dismal" but none was designed specifically for a woman's shape. The experience was made worse by a fitting session with an elderly gentleman who clearly felt uncomfortable measuring a woman. + Taking up the post of minister at Temple Cowley United Reformed Church in Oxford, where King has been the minister for the past five years, she met Bridget Welland, an image consultant with the House of Colour, as well as an Elder of the church. King, who trained as a designer in America, realised their skills would be compatible and suggested the idea of a company. They set up Oxenford together, with Welland as marketing director and King as artistic director and designer. + What she had not fully appreciated were the particularities of designing cassocks. The sleeves need to be tight-fitting otherwise they might catch on the chalice during communion; the hem has to be ankle-height or the wearer is in danger of tripping over when genuflecting or climbing the pulpit steps. + Then there is the matter of changing, in what are almost always uni-sex vestries, and the aesthetic consideration of what the garment looks like from the rear at those moments of the service when the wearer has her back to the congregation. Among other innovations, King has introduced the replacement of the traditional stiff "dog-collar" with a softer collar in a more sympathetic curved shape. + However, the designing of cassocks for women is controversial in itself. Many people within the Christian Church simply do not believe that women should be doing this job and even among those not opposed to women priests, there are some who believe they should attempt to draw as little attention to themselves as women as possible. + King is impatient with these arguments, dismissing the idea that the function of a cassock is to "neuter" a priest, of either sex. "If neutrality is so important, why weren't women ordained generations ago?" + Underlying much of the criticism is the age-old stereotyping of women as more vain than men. It is one that has long been directed explicitly at female clerics, as in Chaucer's Prologue to The Canterbury Tales in which he pokes fun at the Prioress for her obsession with fine clothes. At a recent Christian Resources Exhibition, one old lady passing the Oxenford stand turned to her son and said: "Those aren't cassocks. They're gowns, women's gowns." + King's customers would not agree. One wrote to her recently: "Every time I put on a male cassock, I feel I am putting on a dressing gown. Now I feel good. I feel I can do the job." + A Scottish cleric wrote to say that such was her congregation's approval of what she was wearing that she eventually had to hang it on its own at the back of the church so they could take a closer look. + Oxenford already plans to expand. Next year will see the opening of offices in the US and the launch of a range of "accessories", including everything from crucifixes to a waterproof surplice for graveyard funerals. Whatever happens, however, King does not intend to give up being a minister or to spend more than one day a week working for the company. What she does hope is that she will soon be able to pay her own stipend from company profits and will one day be able to respond to repeated enquiries from male colleagues, with an Oxenford for Men. + +LOAD-DATE: November 25, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +335 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 26, 1993 + +FIRST PERSON: THE OLD GIRL NETWORK; +To strangers, they are frail widows, ageing, coughing, limping, shaking. To each other, they are freedom fighters + +BYLINE: ALISON MOTLUK + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 5 + +LENGTH: 697 words + + + THE LAST real conversation I had with my Polish grandmother, Babcia, was during the breaks in a TV docu-drama. We shouted over hucksters selling soap powder and insurance policies, and continued on a theme that had fittingly dominated the three-day visit: independence. Hers. She is 83 and independence, she impressed upon me, means ringing friends whenever you please and not having to explain the bill. It means staying in all day if you feel tired or going out late if you feel lively. It means spending an hour in the loo guilt-free. + Babcia has guarded these simple freedoms shrewdly since the death of my grandfather a decade ago. Arthritic ankles, high blood pressure and atrocious rents notwithstanding, she has insisted on living alone. At first, she kept up the family home; when that became too oppressive, she decided to move - not into the plush and welcoming home of her son but into her own flat in a building populated by other old people. To the unacquainted eye, this apartment building is like any other. Perhaps the flats are more cosy and contain rather more knick-knacks and family photographs. The corridors are tidier. The lifts climb and descend more slowly. None of this was decisive in Babcia's move, however. It was the subversives in the building that attracted her. + Who are they? Mostly frail widows, shrivelling with age, cradling brittle bones, coughing, limping, shaking. They are a most unlikely force. But they hold their ground. No amount of coaxing from relatives or slashing of social services weakens their resolve: they haven't lived 80 years to become baggage. They want their independence. And the only way to safeguard that is to exercise it - no small task for an octogenarian. + The resistance is elaborate and covert, a sort of ad hoc vigilante group. My suspicions were aroused when Babcia excused herself for a stroll down her corridor. She did not tell me where she was going or why or how long she might be. I waited, patient but perplexed. Ten minutes later, she teetered back in, satisfied, and announced that all was well. "Bette's TV was on, Lizzie's in, Agnes's son is visiting." + "You didn't talk to them?" + "No, no, I didn't want to bother them, just to make sure they were all right. I heard Bette missed bridge last night. But she's fine. She is watching the right programme." + Clearly I had been missing something all these years. What I had mistaken for spontaneous knocks on doors and random pleasantries was really part of a sophisticated network: Elders Resisting Dependence. Each old woman, it seems, has a beat. Thrice daily, she prowls her part of the building and files reports by telephone to the others. Inconsistencies are noted and followed up; in the event of an accident, building supervisors are alerted, ambulances hailed or relatives summoned. + For these old women, the job is taxing. Often it means struggling to understand conversation marred by stroke or Parkinson's. Sometimes it means discovering a close friend passed out on the floor. (In one notorious incident, the discoverer promptly collapsed by her friend's side.) It always means bravely facing the prospect of ageing and death. + That last conversation stays with me because later that night, my Babcia suffered a stroke. The morning found this sharp-minded, fastidious woman trapped in a drooling, paralysed body. Worst of all, she did not know. I was overcome, faint. I asked her to trust me - that we had to go to the hospital, that something was wrong - yet I couldn't bring myself to tell her what it was. + In the hospital, she suffered an even more powerful stroke. The doctors refused to speculate on her fate. We family members huddled together uselessly in the waiting room. For the first time, we contemplated alternatives to Babcia's living alone. For the first time, we admitted we had never really spoken with her about what she would want. + Five weeks have now passed. She has learned anew how to walk, to dress, to swallow. She can talk. She makes the same old jokes. Her mind is still razor-sharp. Most important, the freedom fighters at home say they are ready to take up her cause. + +LOAD-DATE: November 26, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +336 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 26, 1993 + +COMMUNITY CARE CHANGES 'HARM ELDERLY' + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 11 + +LENGTH: 391 words + + + DOCTORS alleged yesterday that serious problems have been caused by April's community care shake-up, with many patients getting a worse service. + A survey by the British Medical Association found that almost 85 per cent of doctors thought the service had either deteriorated or not improved since local authority social services departments took the lead in assessing and meeting the care needs of elderly, disabled and mentally ill people. + Among doctors specialising in the care of the elderly, 72 per cent found that hospital beds were being blocked because social services were not making rapid enough arrangements for patients fit for discharge. + The BMA called for an urgent review of community care. Dr Alistair Riddell, chairman of its community care committee, said: "The survey does not say that community care isn't working, but it does say that there are problems." + But social services directors said their research showed that community care was enabling more people to stay at home rather than enter residential care. Denise Platt, president of the Association of Directors of Social Services, said: "Our perception is that people are getting a better experience and better choice of care." + The BMA surveyed 2,000 doctors but got only 553 responses. It insists the sample is statistically valid. + Of those responding, 15.4 per cent thought community care had improved the service to patients, 45.1 per cent thought it had made no impact and 39.5 per cent thought the service had worsened. Among elderly-care specialists, 25 per cent reported an improvement and 43 per cent a deterioration. Among psychiatrists, the figures were 11 and 52 per cent. + One in three doctors said they knew of no system for emergency referral and those who did know of a system said it took an average of more than a week to get an assessment. + Dr Andrew Carney, a community psychiatrist in south London, said: "Probably what people have found has got worse is the bureaucracy - the form-filling, the increase in meetings required to get things done - and the slowing-up of discharge procedures." + A survey by the social services directors' association has suggested there have been no significant delays in assessments, no cases of people being given inappropriate care and no serious cases of beds being blocked. + +LOAD-DATE: November 26, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +337 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +November 27, 1993 + +DESPERATE BOSNIANS RISK MINEFIELD DEATHS FOR US ARMY RATIONS + +BYLINE: MAGGIE O'KANE IN MOSTAR + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 1 + +LENGTH: 662 words + + + NO ONE knew the dead woman's name. She lay in the basement corridor of Mostar hospital for a few hours, while a woman in a white bib and green overall mopped up her blood as it dripped slowly on to an icy tiled floor. + Her first name was Semsa. She was a refugee aged about 45. Saudin Guja met her in the crowd that flooded past his house at dawn to look for the emergency food aid air-dropped on the mountain by the Americans the night before. + He woke about 5am as the crowd shuffled by his window, searching for packages they knew had been dropped in the night from the hum of the planes. He had heard nothing, but saw the crowd heading towards the field around Jeha Deiho's house on Ravinica hill. + He decided not to go, to stay in bed. The field was mined and only a few hundred yards from the front line with the Serbs. He was hungry but it was not worth the risk. + Blaguj has been cut off for months. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has not visited, and the nine-mile road that leads to Mostar can be passed only at night. Sometimes a truck makes it through from Mostar with flour and oil, but it is not enough. Saudin had not eaten for two days. + For a while, he watched the crowd from his bedroom window coming back from Jeha Deiho's field carrying United States army rations. + Cardboard packages left over from the Gulf war, holding packets of chilli con carne and chicken a la king mix. Packages with Juicy Fruit chewing gum and brown plastic sachets of cherry and cocoa powder. Packages saying "Made in Kansas City" in white letters. + Saudin kept telling himself the trip was too dangerous, but the returning crowd was euphoric and he was hungry. "I saw old women coming down the street carrying bags full of the ration packs and then I couldn't stop myself," he said. + He met Semsa just outside his front gate. He knew her as one of the refugees who had fled from the town of Stolac. + "Are the packages in Deiho's field?" she kept asking. "It is for my children. I have nothing to cook for them. No food." + They walked quickly. She talked about her children. He wondered if there would be anything left. On the way up, they were passed by two soldiers carrying an old man. His leg had been blown off by a mine in Deiho's field. + As they reached the field, they saw another explosion in the distance. A mine detonated by someone else scavenging for packages. + They kept going. Semsa kept talking about her children being hungry. He nodded, let her ramble on. As they reached the field, the Bosnian soldiers called to them: "Don't go on, the field is mined." + But nobody listened. "They were calling to us: 'The Chetniks [Serbian soldiers] are at the end of the field, stay away.' But the people ran deeper and deeper into the minefield." + Another woman, a 22-year-old local called Colla, passed them on a stretcher. She had reached the hill at 5am and picked her way carefully through the field. But looking up, she saw a woman about to step on a mine and called to her to watch out. Then one exploded under her feet, breaking the bones. + Semsa and Saudin had gathered about 12 packages when he heard shouts from the end of the field. "Come on you Muslims. Come on over here and we'll give you some food." + "The Chetniks were laughing at us," Saudin said. Five Serb soldiers walked towards them. "Come on Muslims, get your American parcels." + They panicked. Semsa was running about 5ft in front of him when she hit the mine. It blew her apart. + A second later, he felt the blast under his foot. He heard Semsa beside him. "When she was dying, she kept repeating: 'My children, my children'." + They buried her at night in Mostar graveyard, wrapped in a brown wool blanket, in a coffin made from a teak veneer wardrobe. On it, they wrote: "Semsa". No one knew anything else about the refugee from Stolac, who died on the mountain. + Croats halt Sarajevo evacuation, page 13 + +LOAD-DATE: November 29, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +338 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 1, 1993 + +INCOME TAX: 'DEVIOUS' WAYS FOUND TO ADD TO TAX BURDEN + +BYLINE: MARGARET HUGHES + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 12 + +LENGTH: 558 words + + + THE Chancellor claimed he had introduced "no new measures to increase income tax". But the reality is rather different, with most taxpayers facing major tax increases over the next two years,increasing the tax bill for a pounds 20,000 earner by almost pounds 65 a month. + Mr Clarke said the three tax rates, at 20 per cent, 25 per cent and 40 per cent, would remain, adding that he had no plans to raise the higher rate beyond 40 per cent which is deducted from income of pounds 23,700 and above. But by once again freezing allowances, which is a tax increase in all but name, and by freezing the threshold at which people pay higher rate tax, he has dragged more people into the tax net. + According to the Low Pay Unit, more than 200,000 workers will be dragged into tax by freezing allowances. John Smith, the Opposition leader, branded the freezing of personal allowances for two years in succession as "a devious way of increasing income tax" and a betrayal of election promises. + Taxpayers will, in any case, be worse off in the next tax year, thanks to measures introduced in March by Norman Lamont, which mean the average married person earning pounds 20,000 a year will pay over pounds 38 more a month more in taxes and National Insurance contributions. + Part of this increase will be due to the one percentage point rise in employee NICs to 10 per cent. And Mr Clarke hinted at more pain to come by disclosing that he will join Peter Lilley, the social security secretary, in looking at moves to align income tax and NICs. + Mr Clarke has also taken a leaf out of his predecessor's book and announced tax changes which will store up future pain for taxpayers. He has used his chisel to chip away further at the married couples allowance, tax relief on maintenance payments and mortgage interest tax relief. Such moves will increase the tax bill of a married person on pounds 20,000 a year by almost pounds 65 a month in 1995-96. + Even pensioners have not escaped, for the Chancellor has reduced the tax break on private health insurance for the over-60s. Tax relief on medical insurance premiums, which can be paid by relatives as well as pensioners, will be limited to 25 per cent from April. + Miras and relief on maintenance payments, already restricted to 20p in the pound from next April, will be cut to 15p in April 1995. + The married couples' allowance, along with the single parent's allowance and the widow's bereavement allowance, which are being restricted to the 20 per cent tax band next April, will similarly be reduced to 15 per cent a year later. + The married couples' allowance, which the Chancellor described as an "anomaly", has been frozen at pounds 1,720 since it was introduced as a sweetner to replace the married man's allowance when independent taxation started in April 1990. Like Miras, the Government is clearly intent on phasing it out altogether. + The reduction to 15 per cent will apply to the higher age-related allowances enjoyed by pensioners, though there will be some offset in April next year when the married couples' allowance for those aged 65 and over will be increased by pounds 200. + The Chancellor's only concession was to unfreeze the blind peoples' allowance, frozen for the past four years. It will rise from pounds 1,080 to pounds 1,200 next April. + +LOAD-DATE: December 1, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +339 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 1, 1993 + +DIARY: COURT SHORT + +BYLINE: DESMOND CHRISTY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 7 + +LENGTH: 726 words + + + THINGS that go bump in the night. The Polish weekly Polityka reports on an unusual noise nuisance that has come before the district court in Wroclaw. Lawyers are arguing about the permissible level of noise during sexual intercourse. If a decibel level is agreed I will let you know. + A number of pensioners - "pensioners do it quietly" it probably says on a car sticker somewhere - have complained about noise from athletic neighbours. Polityka, not an organ to neglect such a tale, spoke to several troubled old people. "My neighbours are incredible," said one pensioner who has taken the lovers to court, "their orgies start at five in the afternoon and go on until three in the morning. I can hear them even though I take out my hearing aid." Some couples have already had their coitus interrupted by policemen who handed out on-the-spot fines. They loved not wisely, but too loudly. + - A FRENCH socio-psychologist, not a beast often seen on this side of the Channel, has taken out a full-page advertisment in Liberation, entitled England against Europe. This insertion cost Jean-Claude Charra a little over pounds 12,700. And what does he want to say? Why that "Great Britain has continued, with unceasing energy, to try to prevent any attempts at building a united Europe." So others have noticed, eh? Mr Charra goes on to criticise Britain's indifference to the Soviet threat to Europe after the second world war; Thatcher's behaviour at EC meetings; BA's refusal to buy Airbus and the Westland affair. That will be pounds 7,000 Mr Charra. Anything else, Mr Charrra? Certainement! GATT. Britain, you can read in the advertisement, is in cahoots with America to fashion a GATT deal that is against the interests of the rest of Europe and only joins EC projects when their success is guaranteed. + I do hope he advertises here. + Garlic dread + YOU might, as I have, felt got at by other advertisements. All those ones that persuade men of a certain age to swallow lots of garlic. It is not all that different in Romania. But it is a bit different. Evenimentul Ziliei, a daily mostly read (and believed?) by country folk, has been telling them to smear garlic over their doors and windows and rub it on the horns of cattle by nightfall yesterday, St Andrews Day, to ward off werewolves and other spirits that are said to wander around as good souls are celebrating the saint's day. As history has proved, it does not work against any werewolf calling itself Nicolae Ceausescu. + - IT will be interesting to see how and if Der Spiegel, Germany's top news magazine, responds to Claudio Abbado's triumph with the Berlin Philharmonic at the weekend. As I reported last week, they did devote many column inches to criticising him. Audiences, it seems, do not agree. + - WHAT are the monks at the Spanish Benedictine abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos, near Burgos, but pop stars? The choir has won two platinum and one golden disc after selling more than 160,000 copies of their recordings of Gregorian chants. The abbot, Clemente Serna, says he feels "bewildered and embarrassed" but denies that the monks are pop stars. Why does Gregorian chant sell so well? "Because," says Father Serna, "people need to find themselves, to search the deep internal peace of true happiness and find a real sense of themselves." If you want to listen to the monks, you'll have to go to Spain. Their records are not released here. + Bubbles burst? + YOU might think that the victory of French champagne growers over Yves Saint Laurent, who called his latest perfume Champagne, would be cause to pop a few corks. Sadly, the champagne growers are rather miserable nowadays. They have tried to keep the price of their bubbly up by hyping their region's reputation at a time when Spanish and Californian producers were learning how to produce something just as good as champagne, although they are not allowed to use the name. And the sacred name has cost the growers dear. They have employed a network of high-powered lawyers around the world to stop anyone using the name - even for a perfume that you probably wouldn't drink. The investment in the lawyers may now seem to be have been a folly of the most expensive kind. Many growers say they may not be able to survive as the fizz goes out of their lives. Time to turn to perfume making? + +LOAD-DATE: December 1, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +340 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 3, 1993 + +REBUILDING THAT TURNED TO RUIN; +Corina Courtney on how her corner of Leeds became a playground for vandals + +BYLINE: CORINA COURTNEY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 21 + +LENGTH: 617 words + + + UNTIL a few weeks ago, I was a council tenant, living in the Richmond Hill area of Leeds. Not so many years ago, it was what you would call a "desirable" residential area. Now I have been forced to move out and, thanks to the lack of forward planning and co-ordination of different council departments, the area looks more like a war zone. + It started in August last year when the land was earmarked by Leeds City Council for redevelopment by a local housing association. My home was in one of six blocks of terraced houses, some owned by former council tenants who had taken up the option to buy, some still rented. Properties, my own included, were maintained to high standards and the area was clean and tidy. + The council's clearance department told us of a three-phase plan which they intended to implement so that the houses would be emptied to allow for demolition. But as the first families started to move out and the properties became vacant, the vandals moved in - or rather broke in - and took all they could in the way of useful or saleable fittings, including roof tiles and guttering. + Pavements made of highly prized Yorkshire stone started to disappear piece by piece during the night, and joy-riders discovered that these streets were an ideal place for practising their skills. + Then the burglaries started of houses still occupied. It was not simply stealing for gain, more a case of vandalising homes for some sort of gratification. A few more tenants were frightened into moving prematurely and, as they left, their properties were broken into, sometimes wrecked and flooded and even burnt out. As the streets became emptier, the vandals became even bolder and started stealing, or stripping down or setting fire to cars - even during daylight hours. + Several of us pleaded with the council but without real results. The police, undermanned and under-funded, could no longer keep pace with the spiralling crime. Windows started to be smashed regularly in occupied properties, elderly residents told of being terrified by gangs of youths, and street lights were smashed to provide cover. + By this time, I was calling the police and/or the fire brigade three or four times a night, and some of us were contacting the council every other day to ask for empty houses to be made secure with metal shuttering. On each occasion, we were met with indifference and very little interest in our predicament, and some of us were made to feel a nuisance. By last March, the area was so devastated that it was used on television to represent a Belfast street at the height of the troubles. + One family I know of left to stay with relatives after being burgled three times in 15 hours. It was when joy-riders threw lighted matches into the petrol tank of a stolen car outside my front door that I began to fear for my own safety. + After a few weeks, I was forced to admit defeat and had to leave. I have now taken refuge with an aunt in another part of Leeds, but I know that within hours of leaving my Richmond Hill house, it was stripped and vandalised and everything I couldn't afford to put into storage was destroyed. + One of my neighbours, 74-year-old Michael, has stayed on. He is in poor health and now spends his time, terrified, living behind metal shutters in one room, too afraid to go out of his house. He says he has been told the council cannot house him. We have jolted a few individuals in the police and the council into taking action, but nothing has really changed. Meanwhile, Michael and I, and others like me who have left the area because we were frightened, are obliged to go on paying rent for the properties we used to call home. + +LOAD-DATE: December 3, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +341 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 4, 1993 + +OVER-60S HARDEST HIT BY TAX CHANGES + +BYLINE: NICK PANDYA + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 35 + +LENGTH: 458 words + + + PEOPLE who take out private health insurance plans will have to pay the new Insurance Premium Tax adding at least 3 per cent to their yearly healthcare costs. + The tax affects all health insurance contracts, including Permanent Health Insurance, which make monthly pay-outs based on policy-holders' income in the case of an accident or long-term illness. Under the new rules, from next April the period of tax-free replacement income has been reduced to 12 months from two years. + Hardest hit by the Chancellor's proposals are the over-60s whose tax relief on health insurance premiums is cut back to 25 per cent from the top rate of 40 per cent, for premiums paid on or after April 6, 1994. + However, the Chancellor has made it easier to claim the tax-break by abolishing the existing requirement that the Inland Revenue must certify private medical insurance contracts before they can attract tax relief, from July 1, 1994. + Tax relief on medical insurance plans was introduced in 1990 to reduce the burden on the National Health Service by attracting as many of the elderly as possible into the private sector. Currently anyone aged over 60 taking out health insurance, or a younger relative or a friend paying the premium, can claim full tax relief on the premiums. + Most of the tax relief has gone to people who already had private health insurance and simply switched from policies which did not qualify for tax relief to ones that did. + The limit on the tax relief and the Premium Insurance Tax could not have come at a worse time for private health insurance subscribers over 60, who face an increase of up to 6 per cent in next year's premium. + Health insurers routinely review their premiums twice a year in July and January. Next year, Bupa will cut rates on some of its plans and raise others. For example, from next January, a Bupa policy-holder over 60 on hospital scale A or B will see premiums go up by between 3 per cent and 6 per cent. This, Bupa claims, is thrust on it as elderly subscribers tend to make more claims than other policy-holders. + However, the health insurer is freezing prices for its older subscribers who are on hospital scale C, which generally means treatment at provincial hospitals. A Bupa spokesman said those affected can avoid some of the increased costs by choosing treatment at a provincial hospital or by paying a higher excess or switching into one of its no-frills policies. + But while Norwich Union, as well as Bupa, said it will try to reduce the impact of the new tax on its customers, other industry insiders warn that yearly premium rises are unavoidable as prices for medical treatment, products and equipment tend to go up much faster than other prices. + +LOAD-DATE: December 6, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +342 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 7, 1993 + +BIG CUTS FOUND IN LONG-TERM BEDS FOR ELDERLY + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 448 words + + + MORE than one in two hospitals have cut the number of beds for elderly people with long-term illnesses despite the growing incidence of dementia, a survey says today. + Almost three in four health districts are failing to provide the number of such "continuing care" beds indicated by guidelines drawn up by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, according to the survey by the Alzheimer's Disease Society. + Four districts Grimsby, East Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Kettering, are said to have no National Health Service continuing care beds, relying instead on buying care from neighbouring districts and the independent sector. + A similar survey earlier this year by the Guardian of the Northern and South Western health regions showed that the number of beds had dropped by 40 per cent since 1988. + Today's survey was conducted by MPs, on behalf of the society, among 64 health districts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in May and June. Of 48 districts able to provide comparable figures for 1990 and 1993, 56 per cent had cut continuing care beds by an average of 35 per cent. + Thirty-one per cent were providing more beds and 13 per cent the same number, but the society says the average cut by the majority represents "a massive abdication by the health authorities of their responsibilities to the care of chronic and terminally ill people". + Chances of receiving continuing care depend on where one lives, the society says. The survey found that 72 per cent of districts are failing to meet royal college guidelines, with 46 per cent supplementing NHS provision by funding beds in the independent sector. + Warwickshire health district is quoted as saying: "The health authority does not envisage direct NHS provision of continuing care within NHS provider units." + North Nottinghamshire is said to have stated: "We do not see the provision of continuing care for people who do not require active treatment or health interventions being the function of the health service." + By contrast, districts including Macclesfield and Dudley are shown to have increased their NHS provision. + - People wanting private operations should shop around, haggle and ask for no-frills packages, as costs between hospitals in the same region can vary by thousands of pounds, the Consumers' Association says today. + Its magazine Which? Way to Health, found in a survey that among 10 hospitals in the West Midlands and South Yorkshire a hernia repair cost from pounds 1,470 to pounds 738; among 10 in Essex varicose vein surgery cost from pounds 1,544 to pounds 567; and among 10 in Greater London a hip replacement cost from pounds 8,281 to pounds 5,320. + +LOAD-DATE: December 7, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +343 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 9, 1993 + +SELF-IMAGE: MIKE MCSHANE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 12 + +LENGTH: 313 words + + + ACTOR Mike McShane, 38, is best known for his appearances on Channel 4's Whose Line Is It Anyway. + What image do you have of yourself? + I am fat - but the word fat is not pejorative for me. I consciously use it because I don't like dancing around the issue. I have always been fat and had a very bad self-image as a kid. I used to be filled with self-hatred and try and ignore it. + Has your appearance affected your career? + Yes, some roles are completely defined by your appearance and I try to avoid those. It is irritating when journalists focus on my "heavyweight potential", ha ha. + What kind of clothes do you wear? + Loose clothes. I get them from High And Mighty, and the tailor Eddie Kerr builds my suits. He also dresses Robbie Coltrane and Lenny Henry, so he knows a fat person is not just a fat person but that our weight is distributed in different places. I have no ass, Robbie Coltrane has a big ass. + Do you exercise? + Yes, I got a trainer last year because I got very sick and couldn't climb the stairs. He had me doing two hours of exercise a day. + Are you happy with your body? + I am now. There was a period in 1985 when I went on a fasting programme and I lost 110 pounds. I was down to 190 pounds and was very thin. I thought it would solve all my problems, but I was still full of the same fears. I put the weight back on. + Do you diet? + No, I just try not to eat high fats. + Would you have plastic surgery? + I would only have surgery if I lost a great deal of weight and my skin didn't snap back, but I'm not going to have anyone hoover my butt. + Are you worried about ageing? + Yes, because we are the last of the baby boomers. We're ignoring old people now, but give it 15 years and we'll be racing around on matt-black zimmer frames, pushing kids out of line. It will be hilarious, and sad. + +LOAD-DATE: December 9, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +344 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 10, 1993 + +YOUNG 'MISLED BY ALCOHOL BENEFITS' + +BYLINE: CHRIS MIHILL, MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 4 + +LENGTH: 360 words + + + DRINK limits recommended by doctors and the Department of Health should be reassessed to produce lower levels for young people who were misreading messages about the health benefits of alcohol to excuse heavy drinking, liver specialists said yesterday. + The doctors accepted that two or three drinks a day had benefits for middle-aged and elderly people in reducing heart disease. But they said that messages about the protective effects of alcohol were sending the wrong signals to young people, who were predominately responsible for road traffic accidents, violence and crime when drunk. + Dr Peter Elwood, head of the Medical Research Council's epidemiology unit in South Wales, told a meeting organised by the Royal College of Physicians and the British Liver Trust, in London, that the benefits in reducing heart disease occurred in elderly people, who only gained a few years, whereas the deaths caused by alcohol in young people caused a much larger toll in terms of life years lost. + "To talk in terms of safe limits is misleading. It is a very complex issue and it is dangerous to simplify it by talking about limits. The possible benefits for heart diseases have to be balanced against the risk of vehicle accidents. It would be more helpful for public education to say the risks increase with increasing intake." + Current limits say that men should not exceed 21 units a week, and women 14. A unit is half a pint of beer, a measure of spirts or a glass of wine. + Professor Oliver James, of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, said liver damage from drink was rare in people who consumed less than 50 units a week. + "We are almost frightened to talk about the benefits of alcohol in case it opens up a Pandora's Box where it is said drink is good for you, which is just not the case." + The Department of Health and the British Medical Association expressed scepticism yesterday over the value of a drug called Detoxahol developed by American researchers which is said to be able to remove the effects of alcohol even after several hours of heavy drinking. Its makers hope to sell it in bars without a prescription. + +LOAD-DATE: December 10, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +345 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 11, 1993 + +THROW AWAY LINES; +Television + +BYLINE: PAUL BAILEY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 30 + +LENGTH: 446 words + + + "IF YOU'RE going to heckle, put your hands up first, because you all look alike to me," said the only black ventriloquist in Britain to an overjoyed white audience. Scarlet Watt, who comes from Huddersfield, is a big star on the club circuit, as Distant Voices, Still Lips, the latest film in the engaging series, Short Stories (C4) demonstrated. Scarlet learned his craft from Terri Rogers, a large, jolly woman who is regarded in the business as a "great vent". Scarlet worships her, and she thinks his fame is going to reach far beyond the pubs and clubs. She could be right, for Scarlet came across as an amiable young man. + There was one scene of quiet surrealism, when Scarlet took his dummy, Max, to his tailor for a new suit. Max was headless, the better to facilitate shoulder measurements. Scarlet treated himself to an outfit, too, and was almost in tears when the tailor produced the finished garments. The jacket probably had a vent at the back, but since we only saw the vent from the front, it was difficult to be sure. "The time is ripe for another vent right now," observed Scarlet's agent, the cheery Roy Gumble. + Nine months ago, Scarlet added a second dummy to his act, a racist skinhead, John. Max, who has some pretty awful views himself, refuses to speak to him, thus complicating the act. A tasteless, but funny, gag about Terry Waite went down a treat with the inebriated punters. Scarlet must be aware that he is in dangerous territory, playing the likes of Bernard Manning at their own suspect games. Yet Scarlet is at his most felicitous when he isn't being topical at all. He had Max pretending to be the vent, and the result was innocently silly, and wholly delightful. + Beadle's About (ITV) is not so much silly as stupid. Does anyone who is even moderately civilised enjoy practical jokes? Last night's programme contained an extremely unpleasant sequence in which an elderly man berated a couple of labourers who had dumped piles of pig manure outside his house. He went for the men with a pitchfork and threatened to run it through them if they didn't remove the - expletive deleted, with comic exclamation remarks - stuff. He then promised to do the same to an officer from the Department of the Environment. The folks in the studio roared their loudest when the near-demented pensioner advised the officer to stick his note of complaint up his ****. Beadle himself appeared at the close disguised as a policeman. Oh, the dreadful hilarity of it. To contemplate that this is one of the most popular series on TV is to know that hell itself, should it exist, can promise nothing more terrifying, nothing more repellent. + +LOAD-DATE: December 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +346 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 13, 1993 + +STATE HAS BETRAYED PENSIONS PROMISE; +If provision for retirement is handed over to sellers of insurance schemes, welfare of the entire economy is placed at risk + +BYLINE: WILL HUTTON + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 13 + +LENGTH: 1513 words + + + REMEMBER popular capitalism? Britain was going to become a nation of self-reliant share-owners whose rugged individualism would spearhead a new industrial revolution. The reality is different; millions with stock market-related investment schemes, many of which involve them being systematically fleeced and whose purpose they only vaguely understand. It is one of the cons of the century. + Perhaps the most serious area is pensions. The post-war settlement established a perfectly viable system of state provision with private sector add-ons - either through occupational schemes or insurance contracts - that have given those who retired over the last decade perhaps the best living standards ever enjoyed by the elderly. It will be a transient gain. + The public/private partnership smacked too much of collectivism for our Conservative governments - and in the name of individual choice and reducing the burden of taxation they have encouraged the growth of personal provision. The flat state pension has been degraded by indexing its growth to prices rather than wages, the value of the painfully crafted top-up, the earnings-related pension, has been capped, and a rebate offered to those who contract out of the state earnings-related pension. Here, as elsewhere, the realm of the public is being emasculated, and the private advanced at any cost. + The reasoning behind this is spurious on any number of counts - not least in terms of our personal finances. Begin with the flat-rate state pension. Year by year, indexation to price increases rather than earnings is making it progressively more worthless - for had the same process been practised since 1948, today's pounds 56.10 single pension would be worth only pounds 23 a week. Even to maintain today's real pension demands taking out a private contract to compensate for the progessive loss of value - but the two-thirds of Britons who earn average earnings or less can only lose out. + Brian Wilson at Bacon & Woodrow, a leading firm of actuaries, has computed for the Economics Page that a 30-year-old man earning pounds 18,300 a year would have to pay pounds 1,897 a year to a private insurance company to get the equivalent of today's married man's state pension. But his national insurance contributions from next April will be pounds 1,597 a year, and that buys unemployment benefit on top. Paying pounds 300 a year extra for just a private pension to match today's state pension is irrational by any standards, and the more earnings fall below the average the worse the deal becomes. The average man or woman is being conned - by their own government. + For its part, the Government insists that it must scale back the state pension because as the numbers of pensioners rise so the tax burden to maintain pensions' current relationship to average earnings will become insupportable. But this is nonsense. In the Rowntree Trust report The Future of Welfare, John Hills computes that taxes would have to rise gradually by just 2.3 per cent of national output up to the year 2030 to hold pensions' current value - no more than the increase in taxation planned by the Government over the next two years. But after 2030 taxes would fall as the number of pensioners fell. + The concern over the tax burden in the years ahead is scare-mongering to achieve an objective today - enlarging private provision. But here there are even larger grounds for concern, and they relate to the way the whole British private pension system is organised. + The principle of the pension fund is relatively simple. Stocks and shares are bought over time with tax-relieved savings to accumulate a fund on retirement that buys an annuity, which produces a steady income in old age. How much the fund grows depends upon the performance of the underlying assets - and, since the war, shares have produced phenomenal returns. + IN THAT time, the stockbrokers BZW calculate, the stock market has multiplied more than 30 times to produce an average nominal return on equities of more than 16 per cent; adjusting for inflation, the real return is more than 9 per cent. Anybody taking out a pension plan in the last 40 years has achieved returns higher than in history - and the funds they have built up have allowed them to buy relatively generous annuities. + These returns dominate everything. They are why the pension fund salesmen can promise large sums to even modest savers; why the public can believe them - and why the Government feels it can cheerfully shrug off its obligations to the elderly. The equity market has become the home for nearly all our savings, with insurance companies and occupational schemes alike betting that the returns from the last 30 years will reproduce themselves in the future. + Since 1988, 400,000 British adults, we learned last week, have been persuaded to transfer out of occupational schemes and buy personal pension plans investing directly in the stock market - again, deluded by riches beyond the dreams of Croesus. But this was wrong on two levels. First, they lost their companies' contributions, so necessarily they were worse off; but they also surrendered guaranteed returns, often extremely good, and substituted whatever their personal fund might buy when they retired - and that depends on the stock market. + But the market is fickle. If it is high on retirement day, they can do well; if not, with some poorly designed schemes they do badly. The new personal pension holders run the risk individually - and lose the protection of guaranteed rights and pooled risk. + But the 400,000 are only the most exposed of a more general trend. Even those who remain in occupational schemes are losing guaranteed rights; with three million unemployed, companies are eroding pension scheme benefits - and if the funds do well, the companies scale back contributions rather than improve pensions. Insurance companies are less and less willing to sell pension fund contracts with guaranteed bonuses that build up over time; rather they want to sell "unitised" contracts, laden with fees, that vary with the level of the stock market. They run less risk - that is suffered by the individual investors. + But can the fabulous returns continue? Those of the last 30 years have been produced by a combination of rising inflation and ever-higher dividend pay-outs. Yet companies now pay out 40 per cent of their profits in dividends, the highest ratio in the industrialised West; future dividend growth can be no faster than that of the underlying economy. + At the same time, if inflation stays low then another source of stock market buoyancy is removed, because it has been investors wanting the protection of rising money dividends to protect themselves from the depradations of inflation who have found equity investment so attractive. Low inflation, low growth and dividend saturation add up to the conclusion that the dazzling returns must disappear. + However, our pensions still depend upon the funds meeting those returns, and the industry is structured so that pension fund manager vies with pension fund manager to deliver the best return. Pension fund managers win their mandate by promising that they will be in the top quartile of performers; a promise that definitionally not all can keep. But the losers know the price for failure - somebody else will win the management contract together with its juicy fees. + This gives stock market investment its febrile short-term character. Companies know that their new owners need dividends above all else to justify their investment promises; and if they fail to deliver then they risk takeover and dismemberment. Dividends have doubled over the last decade as a proportion of national output as companies have struggled to meet the funds' demands, and investment has reached a 30-year low. The larger the pension funds, the worse British economic performance. + Which gives the lie to the Government's argument. Pensioners do not go away because they are no longer the responsibility of the state; it is just that their claim on future national output has changed. Under the current arrangements they make their claim partially through taxes and national insurance; in the future they will increasingly make their claim on company profits through the shares they have acquired. We can have a higher tax burden, or a higher dividend burden. To pretend that the latter is virtuous while the former is not is disingenuousness of a high order. + The system is a mess. As consumers we are sold plans on promises of returns that are increasingly unattainable while a viable state system is allowed to wither on the vine. The funds that invest on our behalf thus make impossible demands upon British companies, weakening the performance of the economy. And at any stage we are vulnerable to being ripped off by fraudsters and dodgy salesmen. + There is a remedy. This is our money. It should and could be spent as we want. That it is not is down to us. Some pension fund activism is long overdue. + +LOAD-DATE: December 13, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +347 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 14, 1993 + +D-I-V-O-R-C-E: HARD AT 30, HELL AT 50 + +BYLINE: NAOMI CAINE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 17 + +LENGTH: 1082 words + + + "MY HUSBAND walked out on me just before Christmas. I was 57 years old. Funnily enough, the thought of spending Christmas alone didn't really bother me. But the thought of spending the rest of my life alone made my heart go cold," says Caroline, recently divorced after 32 years of marriage. + Divorce is traumatic at any age. The aching sense of loss is as painful at 25 as it is at 55. But older women - women like Caroline - suffer particular problems after the break-up of a marriage. + "Women who divorce in their fifties must learn to stare loneliness in the face because the chances of an older woman finding another partner are slim," says Zelda West-Meads, counsellor at Relate. If the children have flown the nest, or if the divorcee is menopausal, the future will seem bleak. + "My ex-husband is making a new life for himself with a woman who is several years younger than me, but I feel too old to start again. When you are young, you bounce back. But I have lost the optimism of my youth." According to West-Meads, Caroline's reaction is not untypical of women her age. "Younger women recover from rejection more quickly than older women. Women spurned in their fifties often feel that their lives are all but over." + If rejection makes the nights seem long, guilt draws them out further. "Yes, I blame myself for the failure of the marriage," Caroline admits. "I lie awake at night wondering where I went wrong. Now I devote my life to my children. To put it bluntly, they are my only reason for living." + Married for 28 years, Maggie divorced her husband in 1991 when she was 55. "I married Peter for all the wrong reasons and I stayed with him for all the wrong reasons. Ours was not a happy marriage and I regret all the years we spent together. It would be unfair to list all his faults as if I were blameless, but he made my life hell." + Maggie had a brief affair when she was in her late forties and she says that Peter never forgave her infidelity. "After my affair, he watched me all the time, even hiring someone to follow me. He used sex as a sort of punishment and made me beg for it. It was only later that I discovered he spent hours watching pornographic videos. + "I thought my friends would back me up when I petitioned for divorce but my children were my only allies. Even my mother said I should have waited until after her death." + Divorce may have lost its stigma for the younger generations but people in their fifties often find it hard to shake off their traditional values. Chances are they will feel a shudder of social embarrassment at the mere mention of the word divorce. They may also suffer from divided loyalties and from the uncertainty cast over their own marriages by the break-up of another. + "You find out who your real friends are after you get divorced," Caroline confirms. "My ex-husband and I had a large circle of friends, some of whom we had known for 20 years or more. Now I hardly see any of them." + A woman in her thirties might use her career to stem the tide of pain but that option is rarely open to one in her fifties. As West-Meads says: "These are the women who held the career ladder steady while the men climbed to the top. They may be uneducated, untrained or both. Even stepping on to the first rung takes all the courage they can muster." + Employers grant women in their fifties a chilly reception at the best of times but in these days of high unemployment, that reception is likely to be downright frosty. However, Lilian Bennett, chair of recruitment agency Manpower, issues women with a call to arms: "Yes, it's tough but women who have run a house and raised a family have skills that are valued and recognised. They can find work if they want it." + They may have to. Divorce isn't just about losing your husband. It is also about losing your home and your means of support. Maggie is just one of many women who stayed in an unhappy marriage because she simply could not afford to get out. "I had given up work to bring up the children," she explains, "and I did not have the means to support them on my own." + David Pickering, a divorce lawyer in Manchester, defends what he describes as the even-handedness of the law. "Financial payments are not a way of settling old scores. Whatever the grounds for divorce, the payments are structured according to the same criteria." The law takes into account, among other things, a woman's income and earning capacity, as well as her needs, obligations and responsibilities. "But the fact is, unless the woman is working, the husband's salary will have to pay for the upkeep of two households instead of one. For women in their fifties with no income, low earning capacity and modest family wealth, the financial future is gloomy." + It might be a little brighter were the courts allowed access to pension funds. The law has always treated husbands' pension funds as untouchable, leaving women exposed at retirement age. However, recent legal decisions point to a more equitable distribution of pension benefits in the years to come. Change is on its way, say the lawyers, although it may be some time coming. + Lady Sarah Moon, founder of the Old Bags Club for divorced women, believes older women must shoulder some of the blame for paltry financial settlements. "The images are of ex-wives milking husbands dry or taking them to the cleaners, but the reality is quite different. Women born in the 1940s have learned the role of 'good wife' and arguing over money is simply not in the script." + Divorce may result in the loss of husband, friends and financial security, yet more and more women are doing it. Women instigate 75 per cent of divorces and although we do not know how many of them are older, more and more women are choosing a happy single life above an unhappy married one. + "Many women in their fifties have spent years subjugating their wants, needs and abilities to those of their husbands, but they are not prepared to put up with it any longer. As women's expectations of marriage shift and as economic independence becomes a possibility, they want to reclaim their own identity," West-Meads explains. + Maggie waited until the children had left home before she divorced her husband. She found herself a job, took up ballroom dancing and has never looked back. "I had forgotten who I was. It has been wonderful to rediscover myself and you know what? I happen to like me. I happen to like me very much." + +LOAD-DATE: December 14, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +348 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 16, 1993 + +IRELAND: THE PUSH FOR PEACE: LISBURN: ULSTER AWAITS BREAKTHROUGH; +'It's not a matter of politics, it's gangsterism which keeps it going' QBY: David Sharrock + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 371 words + + + IN THE Linfield bar on the high street in Lisburn, staff and customers knew all about history - and declarations in Downing Street by "a dance hall manager and a high-wire artist" weren't part of it. + "Historic day? The only historic day is the Twelfth of July ," grumbled Norman, a retired merchant seaman. "They've sold us out again. No one understands our background, that's the problem." + Lisburn, home to army headquarters in Northern Ireland, is James Molyneaux's power base. His constituents like to draw a comparison between him - "a gentleman" - and Ian Paisley, who is regarded in much the same light as Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein. The commercial centre was, as usual, ringed with checkpoints yesterday. An RUC officer wasn't impressed by the notion of peace by Christmas. "Bollocks," he said, waving the car on. + The Linfield bar is named after the football team that recruited their first Catholic player last year. Jim, the barman, had firm ideas about how to bring peace: "It's not a matter of politics, it's gangsterism which keeps it going. Let the army go into the ghettoes and clean them out." + He and his customers puzzled over the lunchtime TV news and then switched in disgust to a country and western cable channel. "No, it's not a good day here," said Jim. "It's never a good day here," said Wesley, who theatrically choked on his Guinness at the thought of paying "Free State" prices. + Andrew, who arrived from Cookstown to empty the vending machines, said: "I'd like to see peace, as long as it didn't affect me financially." + With this he retreated to Cookstown, pursued by taunts from the old men, who were keen to correct the assumption that they were from Lisburn. "Hell no, I'm from the Shankill. We're all blow-ins here. We were chased out of west Belfast in the 70s." + Lisburn is attractive to Protestant ladies as well. Zandra and Pauline, both in their 40s, from Portadown, had made the 20-minute journey for the "lovely shopping". + "There's too many people making money out of the situation," said Zandra. "Besides, the South can't afford to keep themselves, let alone us. It's a frightening thing for the next generation, but I'll never live to see peace." + +LOAD-DATE: December 16, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +349 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 16, 1993 + +MAN'S BODY FOUND IN FLAT AFTER 3 YEARS + +BYLINE: VIVEK CHAUDHARY + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 307 words + + + AN inquiry was launched yesterday after the body of an elderly man who had been dead for more than three years was found in his flat. + Workmen found the skeleton of John Sheppard, aged 72, on the Stonebridge Park estate in Harlesden, north-west London, last Wednesday when they entered the flat to investigate a water leak. He is believed to have died around June 1990. + His skeleton was in a chair surrounded by Christmas decorations from 1989. It was naked apart from a pair of socks. At first it was thought that he died that same Christmas, but his doctor later disclosed that he last saw him in January 1990. + Mr Sheppard's rent for his council flat was paid by direct debit from a private pension plan, but payments stopped last year. Brent council said it began eviction procedures against him in October 1992 after writing to him several times about the arrears. + "We did not visit the address to find out why there was no response to our letters - you can't go breaking down doors over rent arrears," a council spokesman said. "It is not possible for us to monitor every individual living in the borough." + Police said there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding Mr Sheppard's death. + They said they were puzzled why the council or social services had not chased up the pounds 4,500 rent arrears on the one-bedroom flat. The council said it was launching an investigation with police, its housing department and electricity and water companies into why the body was not discovered earlier. + Mr Sheppard was described as a recluse who was rarely seen around the estate. He had a history of heart disease and diabetes. + Neighbours had complained several times of bad smells from the flat but blamed it on drains. + Police said Mr Sheppard had no known next of kin. There will be an inquest. + +LOAD-DATE: December 16, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +350 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 17, 1993 + +BROADMOOR STAFF SUSPENDED AFTER SECOND ESCAPE + +BYLINE: JOHN EZARD + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 3 + +LENGTH: 482 words + + + WARNING sirens sounded from Broadmoor Hospital, Berkshire, yesterday after the eighth violent patient to escape in six years eluded escorts during a visit to a nearby hospital. + Kenneth Erskine, aged 30, who strangled seven elderly people in south London out of perverted sexual desire in 1988, ran away from two prison officers after using a lavatory at Heatherwood hospital, Ascot, where he was being treated for an injured hand. He was recaptured on Ascot racecourse. + The two prison officers escorting him, both men, were suspended by Broadmoor's general manager, Alan Franey. Earlier yesterday two other officers, a man and a woman, were suspended for failing to prevent the escape by a similar ploy of a double killer, Anthony Pilditch, on Wednesday. + Pilditch - who is still at large - slipped away from prison officers after saying he wanted to use a lavatory in a Reading pub where he and the officers were due to have lunch after a Christmas shopping trip. Police believe he may try to travel to Morocco, where his wife lives. He speaks Arabic and recently transferred pounds 1,000 saved from prison earnings to an outside bank account. + Pilditch, aged 47, and weighing 20 stone, was convicted of murdering two women. One of them was a waitress, Agnes Duff, whose decomposed body was found in a Luton bedsit in 1978. Pilditch confessed seven years later when arrested for another offence. + Wednesday's outing was his sixth in a rehabilitation programme. Mr Franey said: "I find it difficult to understand how a patient with two escorts can abscond when the instructions are clear that patients must be in sight of staff at all times." + Frank Mone, the general secretary of the Broadmoor branch of the Prison Officers' Association, said: "I think it was a knee-jerk reaction of a management who panicked when they saw the newspaper coverage of Pilditch's escape. Mr Franey believes that by losing sight of Pilditch the staff were in breach of policy. I do not accept that." + Mr Mone put the number of escapes this year as high as eight or nine, blaming a more liberal regime since Broadmoor came under the control of the Special Hospitals Service Authority four years ago. + "Patients have access to phones, to banking systems, their mail is not looked at or read. A number of patients are manipulating the prison system to their benefit." + The suspensions were "something that has been done to appease the public and throw the light from the administrators of the hospital". + The hospital's escapers since 1986 include a man convicted of threats to kill and of burglary with intent to rape; a rapist of two girls aged 11 and 15 who was described as a danger even to his own mother; a man convicted of sexual assault and wounding; a murderer; an arsonist and an armed robber who attacked three girls after escaping. Most were quickly recaptured. + +LOAD-DATE: December 17, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +351 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 18, 1993 + +HAPPY GIRL 'WITH MIND OF HER OWN'; +Father describes Suzanne as polite but naive child + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 4 + +LENGTH: 440 words + + + "SUZANNE was a fairly high-spirited but well-mannered girl," said John Capper, who became her step-father when she was just two. "She had a lot of friends. She was happy." + Her mother Elizabeth remembers her in much the same way: "She was fun-loving but not boisterous. She was like any 16-year-old girl who wanted to be out with her friends. Suzanne never brought any problems home. She enjoyed doing things for other people and was always giving love and affection. She was never interested in getting anything back." + She liked music, particularly Michael Jackson records, and had a passion for Atlantic 252, an Irish-based pop radio station. + Mr and Mrs Capper married in 1979 and separated in 1990 after several attempts at reconciliation; they now have no dealings with each other. Suzanne at first lived with her step-father, but later spent some time with her mother and with friends - including Jean Powell. At one point, she put herself into the care of the local council. She returned to Mr Capper's home six weeks before her murder, but Mrs Capper says she had planned to move in with her on Christmas Eve 1992. + "In those six weeks, she did more than her fair share of work around the house," said Mr Capper. "She was polite and thoughtful. I have asthma and she made sure she went to the front door to have a cigarette. She was a very polite child. And she was only a child. I would say she was naive." + John Watkins, head of Moston Brook high school, said: "She had a mind of her own - she wasn't meek or mild. Not lippy, but a strong personality. She made her wishes known. While she was in school, she was fairly conforming, not one of those regularly being bundled into my office for not doing what they should." + But Suzanne did not like school. "She liked wagging so that she could go to work," said Mrs Capper. "When she was 14, she had a cleaning job in a Manchester office when she should have been at school. She wanted to work as a care assistant in an old people's home. In the holidays she used to come to the home where I work and she was idolised by the residents. She used to do errands for them and take them out to the park." + Suzanne got to know Jean and Glyn Powell through Clifford Pook, Jean's brother. Suzanne always liked babies and she started minding Mrs Powell's three children and sometimes took them up to her grandmother's house. + But the friendship worried Mr Capper. "The involvement with those people had a very strong pull. Suzanne kept coming back and I'd try and lay rules down, mainly for coming in late at night. But in the end it didn't work," he said. + +LOAD-DATE: December 20, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +352 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 18, 1993 + +WHY PENSIONERS MUST BE TOLD THE DANGERS OF RISKING THEIR SAVINGS + +BYLINE: MARGARET HUGHES AND TERESA HUNTER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 29 + +LENGTH: 926 words + + + ADVISING elderly people on how to invest their life's savings is not an easy matter. But it involves an additional duty of care to ensure that they invest in the correct product and fully understand the nature of their investments and the risks involved. + Fimbra, which regulates independent financial advisers, has recently impressed upon its members that giving financial advice to pensioners and those approaching retirement should be dealt with more sensitively than other investors - bearing in mind that such people have no means of making good through earnings an investment which turns sour. + And the regulators have now told the Guardian that they are keeping some independent advisers under close scrutiny. They include Knight Williams, a firm of independent advisers which specialises in retirement planning. But while Knight Williams agrees that it is in constant contact with Fimbra, it strenuously denies this has any particular significance. + Director Robin Knight Bruce said: "We are breaking new ground in the investment world. The regulator wouldn't be doing its job if it wasn't keeping a close eye on us." + Knight Williams, which grew rapidly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, now has 24,000 clients. Its highly effective sales operation has turned the company into one of the biggest sellers of unit trusts. + But there is growing concern within the financial community about the Knight Williams marketing approach, for while advertising its position as an independent and impartial financial adviser specialising in retirement planning, part of its clients' money goes into its own unit trust company. + As an independent adviser, it is expected to review the entire market in making recommendations to investors. In this case, however, virtually every penny of investors' money which it advises should be invested in equities, is placed in Knight Williams' own unit trusts. According to Knight Williams' own figures, this represents some 40 per cent of each client's wealth. + Until recently, its salesmen were paid 20 per cent more commission for recommending KW's own funds than they were for recommending another company's bonds or trusts. + Knight Williams points out that its funds are managed by well-known companies, like Mercury and Schroders. The funds also allow the customer to switch between fund managers within the unit trusts. This enables Knight Williams to argue that it is acting independently and switching more cheaply between fund managers to the advantage of its clients. + It is also true that the regulations allow independent advisers to sell their own unit trusts - but only when these represent a better deal than anything else in the market. The Consumers' Association believes that acting as an independent financial adviser and selling your own unit trusts is a conflict of interest. + Jean Eaglesham, who heads the CA's money unit says: "I am still very concerned there might be a conflict of interest. It is a matter I have raised with the Securities Investment Board." The CA has criticised the firm on two occasions this year after complaints from readers of Which magazine, who, it claims, were told to sell all their existing investments to buy those of Knight Williams. + An additional concern is that the charges on Knight Williams' funds are about 20 per cent higher than the unit trust industry's average. The initial charges are more than 6 per cent - compared with 5 per cent usually levied elsewhere; and there is a growing industry trend towards abolishing front-end charges. The annual management charge is 2.5 per cent, compared with the 1.5 per cent generally charged by the rest of the industry. + Given that Knight Williams typically pays its fund managers 0.5 per cent, that leaves it earning an attractive 2 per cent of funds. This means that an investment must rise by nearly 9 per cent in the first year before a client begins to make any capital appreciation. + Knight Williams claims that the annual management charge brings investors other benefits such as free switching, free Personal Equity Plans, free bed and breakfasting, and free capital gains tax forms. However, there are free PEPs elsewhere on the market, and few investors really need to bed and breakfast. + Last year, there were 79 complaints - more than average - referred to Fimbra against Knight Williams. The firm itself has revealed that a further 50 complaints have been lodged against it so far this year. + The company claims that of 79 complaints against it made to Fimbra last year, only half of those went to arbitration and half of those were found in its favour. But this still means that half were found in favour of the client and the company was asked to compensate 16 clients. Knight Williams declined to give a figure for the total compensation paid but says the largest claim it settled cost pounds 12,500. + The majority of last year's complaints about Knight Williams followed the world stock market collapses around the time of the Gulf war. This year's complaints also mainly relate to market movements. + Selling at the bottom of the market is a not uncommon reaction by small investors - which can cost them their life's savings. This does not make unit trusts or similar products a bad investment. But it does mean that recommending such products to certain kinds of investors must be approached with caution. + If somebody sells at the bottom of the market, it raises the question of whether they should have bought in the first place. + +LOAD-DATE: December 20, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +353 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 18, 1993 + +NOTEBOOK: CORPORATE BRITAIN IS REALISING THAT SHARES ARE OVERVALUED + +BYLINE: EDITED BY ALEX BRUMMER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN CITY PAGE; Pg. 34 + +LENGTH: 1001 words + + + THE current buying frenzy on the London stock market seems overdone. Whichever way one looks at it, there is very little in terms of fundamentals to justify the pounds 40 billion rise in share values since the Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, announced his deflationary budget, which hoisted the FTSE to its current record of 3337.1. + When the market is rising, it is always easy for traders to find justification. At the moment the rise in equity prices appears to be built around the gilts rally, with the analysts arguing that a half-point drop in gilt yields has made equities more attractive. + Certainly, there are all kinds of economic reasons to be hopeful. On the global front this was the week in which the world issued a collective sigh of relief after the marathon seven-year Uruguay trade round was completed. Oddly enough, however, on the day that the US and the EU reached their historic agreement which unlocked the deal, equity prices fell. Then there has been some good UK domestic economic data: inflation seems under control, retail sales are rising (if modestly) and unemployment is falling. + But how is all of this likely to be reflected in corporate results? Low inflation will make it that much harder for companies to return the kind of profits increases and dividend yields which fund managers have come to accept. Just how difficult a marketplace it is has been evident from a stream of profit warnings and downgrading ranging from Fisons to Pentos and Trafalgar House. Now Asda is expressing concern about the margins pressure in the retail sector. If earnings are to be so precious then some current price-earnings ratios could begin to look top heavy. + Followers of this column might well point out that we have been issuing such warnings for much of this year, during which the FTSE has risen 600 points. Nevertheless, investors should be as cautious as ever. Price-earnings ratios are now higher than at the peaks before the 1987 crash (after adjusting for inflation), and the lack of hostile takeovers suggests that corporate Britain has concluded that shares are overvalued. It may not be necessary to sell, but buying at this point would be folly. + Knight errant + THIS has not been a good week for the financial regulators. The survey by KMPG Peat Marwick shows that, in the field of personal pensions, the regulators have a great deal of trouble enforcing their guidelines for the way in which plans are distributed. + Today's Money Guardian explores further weaknesses in the regulatory structure in the case of Knight Williams, a firm of independent financial advisers which specialises in providing assistance to pensioners (see page 29). The difficulty is that although Knight Williams offers independent advice, it also runs its own unit trust company. Indeed, some 40 per cent of the money it collects from the elderly is directed into those unit trusts. This is not surprising, in that until recently it paid its salesman higher commission for doing just this - recommending its own unit trusts. This practice ceased in September. + Higher commission or not, there is a matter of principle here: a firm describing itself as an independent financial adviser and advertising with the Fimbra imprimatur should not be running its own investment vehicle. There is no suggestion that this practice breaches Fimbra rules; neverthless, the rules need changing. However high the Chinese Walls between the distributor of financial advice and the supplier of the product there is a danger that the principle of independence is compromised. This is clearly a loophole which needs to be closed. Knight Williams and others in the same situation must decide whether they are independent advisers or representing one company. They should not be allowed to have the best of both worlds. + It also turns out, as we report today, that Knight Williams has received an unusual number of complaints from among its 24,000 clients. These complaints have been, or are now, under review by the regulators. However, would-be seekers of advice or investors in Knight Williams have no means of knowing that this review of complaints is taking place. Fimbra has no way of keeping consumers informed of potential problems. + In the US, the onus is on the regulators to let investors know if a particular firm or investment vehicle is under review. By making the system transparent, the seeker of advice or investor is at least alerted to potential difficulties. There is no such mechanism in the UK. Fimbra urgently needs to address this problem. If it is unwilling to do so then the Securities and Investments Board, as the senior City watchdog, should do the job for them. + Card crop + THE annual crop of Christmas cards is piling up in heaps around this office and adding some gaiety to the walls. St Paul's Cathedral may be the great appeal of the Lord Mayor of London, but it has fallen out of favour with the City card creators who, in a year when family turmoil has been so widely discussed, return in numbers to traditional images of the Madonna and child. + J.Sainsbury, naturally, have dug into their own wing at the National Gallery to come up with Wilton Diptych's fine Virgin and Child, while Midland Bank (thinking along the same lines but without the gallery) have a Benedictine monk painting the virgin and child. All of this seems much more tasteful than mammon. + As for HM Treasury, it has picked for its seasonal greeting a cartoon by Low of Sir Austen Chamberlain, who served at the Treasury three times between 1900 and 1921. When preparing his Budget in the post-first world war era, Sir Austen remarked that he was "unable to find out what our expenditure will be this year, and only able to make wild guesses at our future position". This piece of wisdom will not be lost on Chief Secretary Michael Portillo who this week apologised for misplacing pounds 1 billion in social security payments in last year's public spending round. + +LOAD-DATE: December 20, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +354 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 20, 1993 + +CRITICISMS LEAD HOSPITAL TO CAST CLOSE EYE OVER GERIATRIC CARE + +BYLINE: MARTIN WAINWRIGHT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 4 + +LENGTH: 248 words + + + A LEADING Northern hospital is introducing close monitoring of geriatric treatment after two reports criticised patient care. + Pinderfields hospital trust in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, will "audit" nurses, doctors, and consultants for a year, as well as review standards on elderly patients' wards. + The trust has been shaken by reports from the Royal College of Physicians and the Nuffield Institute of Health, which were called in after allegations of ill-treatment and humiliation dating back three years. + In spite of measures taken following relatives' protests and the successful suing of the trust for neglect, the Nuffield report concludes that patients continue to be treated with a lack of confidentiality, dignity, and respect. + Elderly patients expressed concern that staff would discuss their conditions publicly and as if they were not there. + The Royal College investigation, by two senior geriatric consultants, describes plans to integrate geriatric care with general medicine as vague. It recommends auditing medical and clinical care under the direction of a new steering group. The consultants, Professor Raymond Tallis, of Manchester University, and Dr Douglas MacMahon, of Cornwall Healthcare Trust, visited Pinderfields last month. + A spokeswoman for the trust said Pinderfields was making a determined effort to right wrongs. After becoming a trust, it had decided to audit departments and was starting with geriatrics immediately. + +LOAD-DATE: December 20, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +355 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 21, 1993 + +MILOSEVIC POLL GAMBLE PAYS OFF + +BYLINE: IAN TRAYNOR IN BELGRADE + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 687 words + + + PRESIDENT Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia went to Geneva for pre-Christmas peace talks on Bosnia last night confident that his gamble to call a snap general election had left his power base largely intact and anxious to make a strong case for an easing of United Nations sanctions against Belgrade. + As unofficial results of Sunday's ballot trickled in, Mr Milosevic's ruling Socialists claimed a "great victory" and predicted they would enjoy a slim but absolute majority in the 250-seat parliament. + But while opposition leaders conceded the Socialists would be the biggest single party in the new parliament, they claimed the ruling party would fall short of an overall majority, and prepared themselves for a possible coalition government. + The Socialists claimed to have won about 37 per cent of the vote, an improvement on their performance 12 months ago. That result would net them a majority of up to three seats - about 26 more seats than they held previously. + But Vuk Draskovic, the main opposition leader who heads the Depos coalition, said almost two-thirds of voters had opposed the ruling party, and that the fragmented opposition parties were entitled to try to form an anti-Milosevic government. + Yet Mr Draskovic's statement was half-hearted. Analysts were virtually unanimous that Mr Milosevic was the main winner. + It was unclear what impact Mr Milosevic's renewed confidence might have on the Bosnian peace talks that opened last night in Geneva. They are to continue tomorrow with European Union foreign ministers in Brussels. + Mr Milosevic is keen to deliver a Bosnian peace deal in return for the relaxing of the UN trade embargo against Belgrade. Under the terms of the proposed three-way partition plan, the Bosnian Serbs are to cede a further 3 per cent of their territory to the rump Muslim republic. + Some Western diplomats here expect the international mediators, Lord Owen and Thorvald Stoltenberg, to step up the pressure on the Bosnian side to accept a deal. Had Mr Milosevic suffered in the poll, the mainly Muslim Bosnians might have held out in the hope that sanctions would further weaken the Serbian president. + But it is still not clear whether Mr Milosevic can deliver a Bosnian deal acceptable to the Muslims, with guarantees on further Bosnian Serb territorial concessions. Similarly in Croatia, Mr Milosevic appears interested in a deal with Zagreb on the status of the rebel Serb minority, but may no longer wield decisive influence over the rebels. + His pitch to the mediators and the EU will be that the sanctions are no longer justified if his authority over the Bosnian and Croatian Serbs is in doubt. + Mr Draskovic warned yesterday that continuing Socialist rule would bring "apocalypse" within months, with the national currency being withdrawn, the elderly deprived of pensions, wages unpaid and farmers obliged to surrender their produce to feed the cities. + None the less, all the permutations for the next Serbian government favour Mr Milosevic. + A Socialist government is likely to continue - even one based on a narrow minority. The onus would then be on the opposition to bring down the government and trigger another election, a move that would be unpopular with the electorate and which Mr Milosevic could call irresponsible. + Alternatively, if the opposition is able to form a government, the president would retain his formidable powers while blaming his opponents for the economic disaster. + The centre-left Democratic Party, which quadrupled its seats from eight to a projected 32, could alternatively be wooed into a coalition with the Socialists. Its leader, Zoran Djindjic, is keeping all options open and calling for a cross-party government of national unity. + - The United Nations General Assembly last night recommended exempting the Bosnian government from the weapons embargo on former Yugoslavia, but the Security Council is unlikely to repeal its ban. + The United States supported the non-binding resolution, which passed by 109-0, with 57 countries abstaining including Britain and France. + +LOAD-DATE: December 21, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +356 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 22, 1993 + +HESELTINE PUTS GAS ON COMPETITION FAST TRACK + +BYLINE: SIMON BEAVIS AND STEPHEN BATES + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 1 + +LENGTH: 353 words + + + THE GOVERNMENT yesterday put the gas industry on a fast track to full competition within five years but immediately faced warnings that proposals to wipe out British Gas's monopoly could increase prices for many of the 18 million domestic consumers. + The Trade and Industry Secretary, Michael Heseltine, announced the changes as he overturned recommendations from the Monopolies and Mergers Commission which would have split British Gas into two companies and delayed full competition until 2002. + Instead he proposed that British Gas, whose privatisation in 1986 was widely criticised, be left intact. Competition is to be phased in between 1996 and 1998. + The announcement ends months of prevarication, made worse by rows between the Department of Trade and Industry and the Treasury. + At Westminster, the Government was accused of delaying its announcement until Parliament's Christmas recess to avoid further political difficulties over consumer fuel costs, already increased by the imposition of VAT. Mr Heseltine's supporters, however, said he had deflected the issue. + Mr Heseltine said: "I have approached these decisions with the primary objective of securing full, effective and self-sustaining competition throughout the gas supply market at the earliest possible date." + With some aspiring independent gas suppliers claiming that price cuts of up to 10 per cent or pounds 30 a year on average bills were in prospect, the industry regulator, Clare Spottiswoode, said: "Millions of gas users will reap the rewards of greater choice and lower prices." + But consumer groups, Labour and the unions said the most vulnerable could face higher gas bills. A National Consumer Council spokesman said: "Poorer consumers, who use less gas, such as the elderly, will be forced to pay significantly higher bills." + Labour's industry spokesman, Robin Cook, said that competition raised the prospect of independent companies cherry-picking markets and differential pricing. "Your gas bill will depend on how far you live from the North Sea." + City Notebook, page 10, MMC spurned, page 11 + +LOAD-DATE: December 22, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +357 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 22, 1993 + +THREE MEN ARE KILLED AS STORMS AND FLOODS BATTER THE CONTINENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 278 words + + + Reuter in Bonn + STORM havoc hit western Europe yesterday, killing at least three people in southern Germany, closing hospitals and schools, and curbing Norway's oil exports. + In France a high-speed train jumped off a rain-weakened track north of Paris at 185 mph but no one was seriously hurt. + Dutch air force helicopters rescued inhabitants of two swamped southern villages after the Maas, known in French as the Meuse, rose to its highest level since 1926. More rain was forecast for today and tomorrow. + The Rhine was closed to commercial shipping for a 32-mile stretch near Bonn. The Moselle reached a record level of more than 30ft at Trier, on the German border with Luxembourg and preparations were made to evacuate part of the city. + Towns were cut off and schools closed in wide areas of Bavaria, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saar states after weekend downpours worsened on Monday. + A state of emergency was declared in Saarbrucken, capital of Saar state on the French border, and in the Bavarian town of Cham near the Czech Republic. + A man aged 34 died when his car crashed into a tree felled by high winds in Schwabmunchen near Augsburg late on Monday night. Another driver died when his car slid off the road in floods near the south-western town of Trittstadt. In southern Bavaria a forester was killed by a unrooted tree and in northern Bavaria a girl was reported missing from a boat. + In southern Belgium flooding forced the evacuation of hospital patients, schoolchildren and elderly people. + Norwegian oil production was cut by nearly 1 million barrels a day because tankers could not load at offshore platforms. + +LOAD-DATE: December 22, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +358 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 23, 1993 + +IT WAS ONLY A WINTER COAT; +Here is a moral dilemma that could affect anyone. Your response will reveal what sort of person you are, so think carefully + +BYLINE: LINDA GRANT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 13 + +LENGTH: 802 words + + + A FRIEND COMES round to dinner on a cold November night. It is warm in your house and when she leaves, she climbs into her car and drives off, leaving behind her coat. You wait for her to arrive home, then you + call her. + "Don't worry about that," she says. "I'm off to Mozambique tomorrow for six weeks to photograph the aftermath of the war. I'll pick it up in the middle of December." + You go to put the coat away and as you hang it up, you note the very deep blue of its fabric, almost a black. It's like a duffel coat but with tiny white stitching along some of the seams. The buttons are fastened with long tabs, tapering to arrows. You think: "This is a very nice coat, I wonder where she got it?" You look at the label. It's a Nicole Farhi. + The question is, would you wear it while she was away? + I got on the phone at once to a friend, a good friend, though of relatively recent acquaintance, and put this profound ethical dilemma + to her. + "Oh no," she said, in the shocked voice of someone who has just been invited out on a burglary spree, specialising in the pension books of the elderly. "To start with, I'd be worried that someone would spill a bucket of paint over me while + I was out. But anyway, I couldn't. + I would think, it's not my coat." + "But you'd try it on?" + "No." + I had already tried it on and with two different outfits. I felt my ethical world tilt on its axis. I felt low and dishonest. I needed to find someone who might just be as morally unscrupulous as myself. Myra Hindley, perhaps? + The next person I tried was more encouraging. "Are you asking me would I, or should I?" she asked, cunningly. "Because if it's would I, then yes, I would but I'd do it in stages, first down to the post office, then perhaps a further outing." + "Would you be more likely to wear it if it was an old mac?" + "Oh no, I'd be much more likely to wear it if it was a Nicole Farhi. So have you worn it yet?" + "No, I haven't made my mind up." + I next tried my sister who had the added advantage of knowing the person whose coat it was. + "How come she's got a Nicole Farhi coat and I haven't?" was her first response. Then we settled into another bout of Jesuitical hair-splitting. "When you say, would you wear it, do you mean you in general or you in particular? Because + I would." + One would have to mention here that this is the sister who, when + I inadvertently left a skirt behind after going to university, had it taken in while I was away. And it was while at university, she reminded me, that one naturally regarded all the clothes of all the people one shared houses and flats with as a God-given extension + to one's wardrobe, so one was frequently rummaging around for that little black backless number to wear to a party, only to be informed that Debbie or Ceri or Patsy or Brenda had gone out in it only half an hour before. + Within two or three days, the BT airwaves were jammed with women, across the country, discussing the dilemma of the Nicole Farhi coat. It was a gripping subject of conversation over the dinner table, it came up at parties. Old friends looked at each other in a new light, stunned to discover a) their moral unscrupulousness or b) their puritanical possessiveness. + "Well, I wouldn't like someone else to wear my clothes," was countered with: "A coat is all right, I'd draw the line at trousers or anything else next to the skin." + There were accusations of descent into Thatcherite reverence for things over people. "Not let your friend wear a coat?" + "But she'd paid for that coat, probably saved hard for it." + A major check in all this seemed to be the hypothetical pot of paint which balanced perilously on ladders throughout Britain, ready to teeter over as soon as a Nicole Farhi coat hove into view. Nobody had actually heard of anyone who had ever had a garment destroyed by such a mishap but the threat of it loomed so large in so many people's imaginations that it utterly dissipated the desirability of the coat itself. + I got home one day last week to find a shivering message on my answering machine from a very cold friend, requiring a quick return of her winter protection. + "Ha, ha," I said. "While you've been away there's been such a funny debate going on." + She listened to my run-down of the various conversations I'd had. "That's nothing," she replied. "What would you do if Julie Christie left her silk knickers behind in a flat you had been staying in in Managua? I hope you did wear it. I would have done. It's to do with living communally for years. I was invited to a wedding recently and the first thing I did was to ring up all my friends to see what I could borrow." + Did I wear the Nicole Farhi coat while my friend was away? + Of course I did. + +LOAD-DATE: December 23, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +359 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 24, 1993 + +CONFLICT AND JOY; +For some it's a time of good, God and goodies. Others await its arrival with dread. Our guest writers tell what Christmas has meant to them + +BYLINE: JOHN MORTIMER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 4 + +LENGTH: 1469 words + + + CHRISTMAS EVE. The midnight service in the village church. The place is packed with weekenders, commuters to London, sons of merchant bankers and their girlfriends, trying to while away the longeurs of a family holiday spent in the converted cottage, all paying their annual visit to a place of worship. The few churchgoing regulars, elderly ladies, a retired schoolmaster, can scarcely find a seat. I am also there paying my annual visit. I stand up for the Creed but I don't add my voice to the casual murmuring around me. Why? Because I don't believe in God. + Not that I have total faith in my unbelief. It's more that if God did exist I'm not sure I'd like Him. I'm not able to cope with an all powerful, apparently all loving Creator who allows massacres, mass starvation, children burning to death in crashed mini buses, children dying of leukaemia. "Did heaven look on, and would not take their part?" Macduff asked when he heard of the slaughter of his wife and children. It's a question that has never received a satisfactory answer. I'm also unable to think of any circumstances which would persuade me to send my son out to be crucified. But, in spite of everything, there I am at a service in the village church on Christmas Eve. + My unbelief doesn't mean that I could do without churches. + The village used to have a school, a pub and a church. Now the school is gone, the pub has changed, like all country pubs, into a sort of restaurant for the consumption of carafino wine and lasagne verde. The church remains, I hope forever. I also couldn't do without the vicar, an irreplaceable cleric who sees much good in the Militant Tendency and spends his time looking after the homeless in the nearest town, to the annoyance of the commuters, who think the Church should keep its nose out of politics. Even the prayers are exciting, as he invites us to commend the TUC to the particular attention of the Almighty, to sharp intakes of breath from kneeling Conservatives. During the Falklands war I lived in the hope that he would invite prayers for President Galtieri, but he disappointed me. All the same, he is a good man. In the temporary absence of the Labour Party we have to depend nowadays, for sane and liberal opinion, on the judges, the Church and certain members of the Royal Family. + "Not all the steeple shaking bells" wrote John Betjeman, + "Can with this simple truth compare - + That God was man in Palestine + And lives today in Bread and Wine." + Is it true, I wonder, as the slow queue shuffles up to the altar rails and the vicar says: "You will be as much loved in this church whether or not you take Communion." Whether it's true or a myth I feel completely at home in this church at Christmas. Even as an unbeliever I am part of a Christian civilization; in its declining years, perhaps, but Christianity has been responsible for me. The poetry I value, the art that is important to me, have existed in a Christian framework and can't be understood without a reference to Christian values, even when they are rejected or outraged, or used as a cover for more ancient and pagan sensuality. The politics I admire come from the Sermon on the Mount by way of Victorian Christian Socialists and the preachers in Welsh chapels. + For this reason, if for no other, Christianity has to be treasured and learnt; without it we couldn't understand Shakespeare or Milton. Without the Bible, in the form it was in before the new translation wrecked it, spoken English is reduced to the meaningless waffle now heard in law courts and the Houses of Parliament. + So should I be sitting, huddled in my overcoat, while the others kneel? Why shouldn't the ungodly pay their respects to this great myth, this superb invention, if that's what they believe it is. Voltaire said that if God didn't exist it would be necessary to invent him. But does it matter if God is man's creation and He is, like the Greek gods, a supreme character in fiction. Fictional characters can influence our lives, and from the jumble of myth and history which, perhaps, produced the Christian legend there emerged the revolutionary idea which has changed us all for the better; the belief in the supreme importance of each individual soul. A character in Dostoyevsky says that if human beings invented God it was the greatest achievement of mankind. So celebrating Christmas in the village church is at least as important as going in procession to lay flowers on Shakespeare's grave. + The service is over, the militantly minded vicar is shaking hands with everyone at the church door. The bells are ringing and the cold in the graveyard slaps us across the face. December 25th was the first day of the year long before the peoples of the Angli were converted to Christ. They called it Mothers' Night and kept awake till dawn, in celebration, I suppose, of conception and birth. To the Victorian, Christmas, with magical trees imported from Germany, wasn't an entirely religious ceremony. For Dickens Christmas didn't mean the sacrifice of a son to redeem the sins of the world, it was all about helping the poor and buying them a socking great goose. + A Christmas Carol must be, outside the New Testament, the best known Christmas story in the world and it asks us to believe, not so much in God, as in ghosts. It is also a text of 19th century humanism. The Dickens who wrote it was not the man at prayer but the committee man, the visitor to Samuel Starey's Field Lane Ragged School, and the chairman of a meeting of the Manchester Athenaeum, founded to bring culture and education to the "labouring classes". His concern wasn't with the stable birth centuries before, but with the cry from the streets from the children of his day, "condemned to tread, not what our great poet called the primrose path to the eternal bonfire, but over jagged flints and stones laid down by brute ignorance". + He contempalted writing a pamphlet called An Appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man's Child. Happily for us he changed his mind and wrote a fictional story. Does it really matter if the founders of the Christian religion did the same? You could say Dickens' conception of Christmas was highly commercial, with the sale of huge birds, great puddings and plenty of port and brandy. Sue Townsend has described Adrian Mole's ghastly Christmas with his girlfriend's father, a puritan parson who believed the sacred day shouldn't be commercialised. There was no turkey, no wine and no presents. Adrian and his Beatrice had to escape to Soho and make love for a record period of time. I'm tired of denunciations of Christmas today. What's wrong with lights in Regent Street and people giving each other presents even if, and Christmas has to be a festival of tolerance, such presents consist of computer games and Lady Thatcher's memoirs? John Betjeman also said that, + "No loving fingers tying strings + Around those tissued fripperies + The sweet and silly Christmas things + Bath salts and inexpensive scent + And hideous tie so kindly meant + No love that in a family dwells + Carolling in the frosty air. . ." + can compare to a religious festival. Perhaps they can't, but it's no bad thing to have a day in the year when family life, an institution much idealised by politicians who are too busy sleeping with their researchers and attending all-night sittings to know much about it, consists of often warring, jealous, quarrelling and closely related people doing their best to give each other pleasure. It's also important to have festivals, and their enhancement of life doesn't depend at all on literal beliefs. The Roman centurion, posted to Britain after the birth of Christianity, may have started to doubt the powers of the old gods, but he still paid his dues to Vulcan and Mars. + Sinister news comes from Australia, where some dotty government commission has banned the singing of Christmas carols in kindergartens as they are "culturally irrelevant" (regardless of the fact that Christianity is the basis of one of the world's greatest cultures). An equally dotty London borough has apparently followed suit and banned nativity plays. The brave new world is threatening in all its greyness and its hideous attempt to impose a dictatorship on thought. The great advantage of the old gods is that they were true to life and so cared nothing for political correctness. No celebration we are likely to invent is going to be an improvement on a midnight service in a village church, or going home to put out mince pies and glasses of wine to be consumed by a mythical figure your younger children scarcely believe in. Happy Christmas. + John Mortimer is a barrister and writer. His latest book, Rumpole on Trial, is published by Penguin, pounds 4.99 + +LOAD-DATE: December 27, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +360 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 26, 1993 + +CLOSE THE BOX, KEEP THE MONEY + +BYLINE: DAVID SPITTLES + +SECTION: THE OBSERVER BUSINESS PAGE; Pg. 15 + +LENGTH: 571 words + + + EXPENSIVE gifts could prove a mixed blessing this Christmas. With burglaries on the rise and insurance costs soaring, new owners of valuable jewellery, art and other items will be wondering how to protect them. + Increasingly, people are turning to safe deposit boxes and companies providing such services report brisk business. Sophisticated surveillance systems, extended opening hours (every day except 25 December) and low charges are attracting customers who find insurance prohibitively expensive. + Nick Cook, of Metropolitan Safe Deposits, says: 'Some insurers won't cover costly items at all.' With four branches, the Metropolitan is the largest company of its kind in London. There are only a dozen or so in the capital, mainly in the West End. + Cook says customers reflect a complete cross-section of society, not just the 'seriously rich'. Another company says some elderly people keep not much more than their pension book and a little cash in a box, so worried are they about security. But all safe deposit companies confirm that boxes are popular with the Asian community, where dowries of gold and jewellery are common. + The Chancery Lane Safe Deposit, owned by Sterling Granada, claims to be the cheapest. It offers 14 sizes of box. The smallest, 2 ft long, 5 in wide and 2 in deep, costs pounds 44.59 a year. The largest, 2 ft x 2 ft x 18in, costs pounds 590 a year. + At Metropolitan, the smallest box costs pounds 125 a year, including pounds 25,000 insurance cover. The company can also arrange 'all risks' out-of-box cover for up to 60 days worldwide. Customers must specify items covered and the premium is pounds 2 per pounds 1,000. + A spokesman for Berkeley Safe Deposit, another West End vault, says: 'Most insurers want to know what is in the box before agreeing cover. But we don't want to know who you are or what you have - that's part of the service.' + Inevitably, some stolen goods are thought to end up in safe deposit boxes. But companies will usually accept firearms provided the owner holds a licence. + Berkeley operates the traditional two-key system, one held by the customer and the other by the company - both necessary to open the box. Metropolitan uses an electronic system; customers have a card and punch in their personal identification number to gain access. The company's Knightsbridge branch was robbed in 1987. Since then Sir Kenneth Newman, former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, has become a director of the company and each box is wired directly to the police. + Elsewhere, people who need to deposit bulky possessions can rent cabin trunks, or even their own walk-in vault. Christie's claims to offer the most advanced security system at its storage plant in London, where it is possible to keep small items (paintings, for example) for a few days, or customers can rent a cage for pounds 3,000 a year. + Selfridges and Harrods also provide boxes. Selfridges' prices range from pounds 65 to pounds 210 a year, with a pounds 50 key deposit. At Harrods, where there is a waiting list for large boxes and strong rooms, prices start at pounds 95 a year. + Most clearing banks operate a 'safe custody' service, but usually charge at least pounds 5 for each inspection. Sealed envelopes cost about pounds 10 a year to lodge. Lloyds says many branches also offer deed boxes costing between pounds 20 and pounds 50 a year, depending on size. + +LOAD-DATE: December 28, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +361 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 28, 1993 + +ETHICAL HURDLES WHICH WOULD THWART BRITISH CASE + +BYLINE: MICHAEL WHITE AND MADELEINE BUNTING + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 2 + +LENGTH: 369 words + + + IT IS not illegal for a woman in her fifties to seek infertility treatment in Britain. + But there are a number of hurdles which would prevent cases such as that of the 59 year-old woman who gave birth to twins two days ago receiving the kind of treatment in the UK which she found in Rome. + It was because she had been refused treatment at the London Fertility Clinic that she went to Dr Severino Antinori in the first place. + It was the ethics committee of the London Fertility Clinic which would have judged her case; comparable bodies adjudicate sensitive cases in hospitals - both in the private sector and the NHS - throughout the country under an arrangement put in place under the aegis of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). + The HFEA is not sympathetic to older mothers wanting to have children. Last July, the HFEA chairman, Hugh Whittal, ruled out test tube baby procedures for women in their fifties. He admitted there was no legal upper age limit but said there were concerns for the children being brought up by elderly mothers. + The HFEA has a statutory duty to vet the work of clinics carrying out in vitro fertilisation. Under its rules female egg donors should not be over 35 and male sperm donors over 55. + David Shapiro, secretary of the Nuffield Council of Bioethics, explained last night that the treatment given to the 59-year-old could only happen at a clinic licensed by the HFEA. + "Any clinic doing that sort of work would require licensing from the authority and would be expected to have an ethics committee which would worry about the implantation in a woman in her 50s. Who is going to be around for such a child's adolescence? + "It's not forbidden but there are arrangements for review that would take into account considerations of that sort. It is unlikely that you would get any English clinic willing to do this," Mr Shapiro said. + It is believed that most NHS infertility clinics draw the line at the mother being no older than 38 and private clinics will rarely go beyond 48 or 49. + But because there is no statutory age limit, doctors have some flexibility to consider the individual circumstances of each case. + +LOAD-DATE: December 28, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +362 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 29, 1993 + +HUNDREDS OF HELPLESS JOIN SARAJEVO JOURNEY FROM FEAR + +BYLINE: REUTER IN SARAJEVO AND IAN TRAYNOR + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 1 + +LENGTH: 578 words + + + HUNDREDS of women, children, elderly people, and wounded were bussed out of Sarajevo yesterday after queuing for hours in snow for a place in the exodus from 21 months of siege, suffering and fear. + About 1,100 people began the arduous journey over freezing and perilous mountain roads, most of them heading for refugee status in the Croatian port of Split. A mixed batch of Muslims, Serbs, and Croats have been waiting for months for a chance to leave Sarajevo, but the evacuation has been repeatedly delayed by bickering among the political leaders of the three sides. + Eight buses carrying several hundred Sarajevans left the sector held by the Bosnian government and made their way without incident across the frontline to the Bosnian Serb military barracks at Lukavica on the city's outskirts, United Nations relief officials said. + There they were to be organised into another convoy for Split, with up to 200 going in the other direction to the Serbian capital, Belgrade. Later, under a full moon, a second and final group boarded three buses which returned for them from the Lukavica shuttle. + A city official who organised the evacuation estimated that about 150 of the 1,265 people on the departure list had failed to turn up. + "There could be a variety of reasons," she said. "I know of at least one who died and there may have been others. Some are sick or wounded and too ill to travel." + Perched on crutches in the snow and peering anxiously at the surrounding mayhem, Josip Hodzek craned his head to glimpse the point where hundreds of Sarajevans were squeezing past police into the railway station. + "I was in the hospital when applications were taken. I'm hoping they will let me go because I'm disabled," he said. Mr Hodzek, who is 53, lost a finger and parts of his stomach to shell fragments in July last year. He was wounded again in January when a mortar bomb landed at an outdoor market and ripped through his legs. + "I've got to get out of the city," he said. "I live all alone and I don't have any wood for my stove. I can't survive the winter alone." + Before the buses arrived, women, children and war-wounded on crutches queued in the snow, dragging whatever luggage they could through the slush towards the building's shell-charred facade. + "These people are hungry and cold and they've been waiting to get out of the city for more than a year," said a representative of the city office of evacuations. + In the 21 months that the encircling Serbian forces have kept the Bosnian capital under siege, more than 50,000 residents - almost one in 10 of the pre-war population - have been killed or wounded by shelling and sniping, scores of them in a Serbian bombardment that marked the Christmas holiday. + The Bosnian Serb leadership, which has fought successfully to seize the lion's share of Bosnia and carve it into ethnic mini-states, has long demanded the evacuation of Serbs who remain in the city. + It intends to separate the population along ethnic lines as a prelude to dividing the city itself. + The mainly Muslim Bosnian government has sought to resist the evacuations, and Muslim and Serb officials continued haggling yesterday. + "You don't have to ask why I'm leaving, you can see I have two children," said Azra, a Muslim woman who was leaving her husband behind. "I am happy to be getting them out, but it's difficult to leave my husband behind under these circumstances." + +LOAD-DATE: December 29, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +363 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 29, 1993 + +HOMES' REFUSAL TO TAKE PETS 'DETERS ELDERLY NEEDING CARE' + +BYLINE: DAVID BRINDLE, SOCIAL SERVICES CORRESPONDENT + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN HOME PAGE; Pg. 7 + +LENGTH: 348 words + + + ELDERLY people and others needing residential care may be avoiding it because they fear being parted from their pets, a study says today. + Only a minority of care homes allow residents to keep their pets, the study found. Calling on homes to review their policies and practice on pet ownership, the study report says that the loss, or feared loss, of a pet can provoke anxiety and stress. + The study, carried out by psychologists at Warwick university and funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, is based on questionnaire returns from 276 care homes in six parts of Britain, followed by interviews with one in 10 of the homes. + In addition, animal welfare shelters in the six areas reported that up to 1,500 pets were placed with them each year because their owners were entering care. + The survey found that only one in five homes for the elderly, and one in 20 for children or people with learning disabilities or mental handicap, had any written policy on pets. + Only 27 per cent of homes for the elderly, and 20 per cent of others, said they always accepted pets. About half of all homes said they sometimes permitted pets, but almost a third of these said they excluded cats and/or dogs. + When the researchers contacted 35 advice bureaux they found that just 26 per cent could offer information on homes and pets. + More than a third of the 276 homes surveyed had encountered residents affected badly by being parted from their pets. All of those interviewed had come across people reluctant to enter care because of their pets. + The report says homes often reject pets because they think there will be problems of health or safety and extra work for staff. But the survey found very few such problems at homes which accept them. + Although 59 per cent of homes for the elderly, and 50 per cent of other homes, said they kept a communal pet, the researchers say this is no real substitute for somebody's own animal. + Pets and People in Residential Care - Social Care Research Findings 44; JRF, The Homestead, 40 Water End, York YO3 6LP; free + +LOAD-DATE: December 29, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +364 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 30, 1993 + +SAFETY FOR SARAJEVAN EVACUEES + +BYLINE: KURT SCHORK IN SARAJEVO + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 8 + +LENGTH: 527 words + + + THE first group of hundreds of civilian evacuees fleeing shells, snipers, cold and chronic shortages in besieged Sarajevo reached safety yesterday. + An official of the Serbian commissariat for refugees said by telephone that 76 evacuees from Sarajevo reached Banja Koviljaca in Serbia and would "remain there until arrangements are made for their accommodation". + More than 900 others, mostly women, children and elderly people, were heading for Croatia after their evacuation had been delayed for months by haggling between Serb and Muslim authorities. + Having finally won permission to pass through the battle lines around the Bosnian capital, the evacuees' fleet of ramshackle coaches was held up by fuel shortages and breakdowns. + "The convoy to Split [on Croatia's Adriatic coast] discovered it didn't have enough gasoline and that it needed another bus to carry all the people," said Ray Wilkinson, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). + Fuel and another bus eventually arrived and the 16-bus convoy set off from the Serb-held district of Lukavica, its first staging post just outside Sarajevo, at 4am yesterday. + "Everyone spent an extremely uncomfortable night huddled together on the bus for warmth," Mr Wilkinson said. + Meanwhile Muslim authorities in the besieged Bosnian city of Mostar issued an urgent appeal for food, fuel and medicine. + A radio broadcast said late on Tuesday that 55,000 Muslims trapped in the eastern part of the town by Croats had not received any food for 20 days, but the United Nations in Sarajevo denied the claim. + Mr Wilkinson said there had been no convoys since December 16 but one was scheduled for yesterday with 52 tonnes of flour and mixed foodstuffs. + "The situation is still very bad, but to suggest they [east Mostar] have not received anything for 20 days is not really true," he said. + The radio said people had started eating wild vegetables and grasses and indicated food poisoning was rampant in the eastern sector of the city. + In Sarajevo, the UN dismissed as "serious exaggeration" reports that 11 Canadian peacekeepers in Bosnia were subjected to a mock execution by their Serb captors a week ago. + The Canadian defence ministry confirmed, however, that its soldiers had been stood against a wall by Serbs who then opened fire around them. + It added that the Canadian peacekeeping forces would remain in Bosnia. + - The Yugoslav National Bank, facing record hyper-inflation which renders currency worthless within days of issue, chopped nine zeros off the dinar yesterday. + The last time the central bank knocked zeros off the dinar was on October 1, when six noughts were dropped; 18 zeros have gone in the past three years. + The monthly inflation rate hit 20,190 per cent in November and was running at 569,000 per cent in December. Economists predict it will exceed one billion for the year. + The decision to redenominate the dinar had been expected to go into effect on January 1, but new year holidays and monthly wage and pension payments prompted the bank to bring the move forward. + Letters, page 19 + +LOAD-DATE: December 30, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +365 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 30, 1993 + +LEADING ARTICLE: GINNY PLAYS A BLINDER + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 19 + +LENGTH: 291 words + + + OUR dominantly male political parties appear to have invented the most baroque of positive discrimination initiatives. Briefly, push off over Christmas and leave the women to do the work. Labour's trophy for unseasonal endeavour goes to Harriet Harman for her Bank Holiday report on the baleful effects of the last Budget. But the overall winner, without doubt, has been Mrs Bottomley. Indeed, those who think that rest and recuperation are health-giving may now be rather worried about Virginia. + The turkey was barely out of the oven before she was taking "decisive steps" to make sure that elderly ladies would never be allowed to conceive twins in an Italian clinic if the British Government had anything to do with it (which it doesn't). And yesterday, as her deputy readied another anti-smoking blitz, she herself was first into print with acid words for Gloucestershire social services department's decision to send a young offender round Africa at pounds 7,000 a trip. Mrs Bottomley, one guesses, is the all-purpose Duty Minister, available for quotation whenever mini-crisis breaks. From Italian twins to the Victoria Falls to rallying behind Tim Yeo, she's been mustard: so hot off the mark, in fact, that a groaning Michael Howard had to limp tardily towards a microphone yesterday lest revellers forgot all about him. Substance, on these occasions, is not important. Of course the DM knows enough about the workings and costings of Bryn Melyn to realise that its success rate with troubled young people makes it a Gloucester bargain not a scandal. But that's not the point when the seasonal soundbite rules. Her snoozing colleagues owe Virginia a debt of gratitude - and at least one day of silence for the New Year. + +LOAD-DATE: December 30, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +366 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 31, 1993 + +'DISAFFECTED MEN' BACKED ZHIRINOVSKY + +BYLINE: STEVEN ERLANGER IN MOSCOW + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 737 words + + + A PICTURE of those Russians who voted for the ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky in parliamentary elections two weeks ago is beginning to emerge from an analysis of polling data that suggest his electorate will not be stable. + The vote for Mr Zhirinovsky, an extreme rightwinger whose oddly named Liberal Democratic Party secured the highest percentage of the party-preference votes on December 12, has been interpreted as a vote against economic reform, crime and instability, and a vote for empire and Russian primacy. + But little information has been available about who voted for Mr Zhirinovsky or why. + Yuri Levada, director of the All-Russian Centre for Public Opinion and Market Research, one of Russia's best polling groups, stressed that the analysis was preliminary. He found that Mr Zhirinovsky's supporters are predominantly men, but of two very different kinds. + One group are middle-aged and older, mostly from cities with populations under 100,000 - workers with average skills and earning average wages in state-run industries. Mr Levada called them "a sort of lower-middle class", with below-average education. + These men are not jobless or poor, he added, but they work in a vulnerable sector of the economy that is already shrinking and is widely expected to shrink further. They are anxious about the future, for themselves and for their country, and they worry about crime and "weak government". They miss the great-power status of the Soviet Union, Mr Levada said. + Mr Levada said these Zhirinovsky supporters are "the old Soviet working class", while the core support of the revived Communist Party lies with older people already on pensions. + The second group of supporters, the researcher said, are men mostly under 25 years of age, better educated and from big cities, a group that had been considered essentially non-political. Mr Levada found that many in this group were drawn by Mr Zhirinovsky's intensive and skilful television advertising; more than a third of his supporters did not make up their minds until election day. + "This was an emotional movement of the younger generation, a young opposition, young men demonstrating their youth, energy and resolution," Mr Levada said. "They were drawn by Zhirinovsky's television propaganda and the sense of action and force." + These supporters seem to know little about Mr Zhirinovsky or his party, he said, "but for these people, he seemed very decisive". + While many people are angry or confused, Mr Levada said, "there were a lot of ways to protest," with votes for centrists like Nikolai Travkin or for Grigory Yavlinsky, a reform economist critical of the pro-government Russia's Choice party and its leader, the deputy prime minister, Yegor Gaidar. + "But a vote for Zhirinovsky was the most dramatic protest available," he said. "In a way, he seemed to be the only truly anti-establishment figure." + At the same time, some Zhirinovsky supporters already regret their votes, Mr Levada said, and up to a third say they would not vote for him for president. "So he may only be a temporary figure," Mr Levada said. "It seems to me his electorate will not be stable." + In a recent all-Russia poll of 1,655 adults, conducted from December 10 to December 26, Mr Zhirinovsky led all other figures as Russia's "Man of the Year", Mr Levada said, though with only 15 per cent of respondents. President Boris Yeltsin, who led last year with 22 per cent, got 14 per cent; Mr Gaidar got 10 per cent; the former vice-president, Alexander Rutskoi, who is now in jail, got 7 per cent. + "It means people don't really like anyone," Mr Levada said. "It's the crisis of our young democracy." + Mr Zhirinovsky and his party received 22.8 per cent of the party-preference votes on December 12; Russia's Choice got 15.4 per cent. But party-preference votes determined only half the 450 seats in the lower house of parliament, and Russia's Choice seems to have done well enough in the district-by-district voting for the other 225 members to win the largest bloc of seats. + Mr Zhirinovsky's party got 59 seats from the party lists but only five from constituencies. Russia's Choice, which won 40 seats from party lists, says 94 of its members or supporters won seats. The Communist Party is expected to have 48 seats and its partner, the Agrarian Party, 33. - New York Times. + Leader comment, page 21 + +LOAD-DATE: December 31, 1993 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + + + +367 of 367 DOCUMENTS + +The Guardian (London) + +December 31, 1993 + +TRAVEL LAPLAND: IN THE LAPP OF LUXURY; +Racing a dog-sled team through the Arctic is the ultimate adventure holiday, writes Perrott Phillips + +BYLINE: PERROTT PHILLIPS + +SECTION: THE GUARDIAN WEEKEND PAGE; Pg. 31 + +LENGTH: 1507 words + + + I have always wanted to snap the reins on a pack of Arctic huskies and shout "Mush!" So "mush!" I shouted. The 10 dogs strained forward until their eyeballs popped but the sledge didn't move an inch. My Lapp driver, huddled in furs like a character in Chaplin's The Gold Rush, looked at me pityingly. "You've still got the anchor in," he said, pointing to a chunk of metal embedded in the snow. + I didn't do any better on the reindeer sleigh. Valle, the reindeer, looked docile enough when I clambered aboard. "Mush!" I yelled again. This time, the reindeer shot off like a rocket, leaving me spread-eagled on the ice. The last I saw of Valle, he was well on the way to Murmansk, chased by his furious owner. + It was an inauspicious start to a winter adventure holiday at one of the most eccentric places on earth - Jukkasjarvi, 250 kilometres inside the Arctic Circle, in Swedish Lapland, where the winter sun shines for only three hours a day and temperatures can drop to -25C. + The first thing I saw when I arrived was a crowd of elderly people hurtling towards me clutching Zimmer frames on skis. They're called "kickers" in Swedish and you just scoot them forward uphill and hang on for grim life going down. It could make a great new Olympic event. + Jukkasjarvi is a pretty, 17th century village of icicle-festooned wooden houses, earth huts and a traditional Lapp "wigwam", where visitors gather for barbecued reindeer, the smoke funnelling out from a hole in the roof. + The doors of the houses have old, iron locks operated by keys as big as Colt revolvers and are full of antique country furniture: chunky, wooden chests and chairs, beds as warm as boiler-houses and spears and traps for catching bears. Not that there is much use for the spears these days as there are only 30 bears left in 20,000 square miles. + "We never draw the curtains in our homes", one woman told me. "Because every sliver of light is precious in this climate and, anyway, you shouldn't have anything to hide from your neighbours." + The Lapps here are called Same. And in the Same Museum, the curator showed me their bright summer costume of scarlet and blue and explained the tell-tale placing of the woolly pom-pom on the hat; brushed forward if married or backwards if single, pushed to the left if on the way home or to the right if going hunting. Little wonder the Lapps aren't particularly voluble; the pom-pom says it all. + I asked why the suitcases they carried were all rounded off, with no sharp edges at the sides or corners."That's so there are no corners for ghosts to hide," he said. + Jukkasjarvi's wooden church was founded in 1608 and has painted smokeholes in the ceiling to make the Lapp congregation feel at home. A lively, carved triptych shows the 19th century priest Lars Laestadius converting local boozers, fornicators - presumably they pulled their curtains - thieves and usurers. When it was first unveiled, the worshippers thought it was all too much like a comic strip and only by a narrow vote was it preserved. + The village old folks' home is now the Vardhus restaurant, serving regional dishes like char from the mountain streams, shiitake mushrooms - grown in disused mine workings - ptarmigan in juniper sauce, roast capercaillie and reindeer in every conceivable form. A bottle of Chablis can set you back pounds 38, but the "speciality dessert" is environmentally sound at pounds 8 - "a Lapland hut made from wafers and ice cream decorated with Arctic raspberries on a mirror of blueberry sauce". + Jukkasjarvi shares its New Year Snow Festival with the hairy-chested mining town of Kiruna, 16km away. This year, the main events will be held on January 28, 29 and 30. + Kiruna's iron-ore mine is the biggest underground workplace in the world with 400kms of galleries. The town plans to use it for the world's first underground marathon race. I am not making this up. The average age here is 36, with men far outnumbering the women. + This might explain the behaviour at the bizarre striptease show at the Ferrum Hotel, when a huge crowd of well-oiled miners shouted the local equivalent of "Get 'em off!" to a luckless stripper trying her best to please - not an edifying sight. Neither was the Saturday-night drunkenness, with revellers staggering through the streets, their shirts open to the waist, and bouncing off the walls of the disco. + One thing always mystifies visitors: the sight of cars apparently tethered by cables to the lamp-posts, like dogs waiting for their owners. "The Lapp culture is so deeply rooted here that we even treat our cars like stray reindeer," said Roger Soup, one of the festival organisers. + He was winding me up, of course. The cars are actually plugged into the electricity system overnight to prevent them freezing up. + For the festival, Kiruna's main square is transformed into a refrigerated art gallery; a deep-freeze of elaborate ice sculptures created by competing teams from all over Scandinavia. Well past midnight, sculptors are still putting the finishing touches to their work. Their greatest fear is a warm snap, which can turn every sculpture into an instant Henry Moore and transform a work of art into so many ice cubes. The more ambitious the effort, the greater the risk. + In the town, they were getting ready for the reindeer race. The streets had been cordoned off and every balcony was crowded. Blink and you miss it. The reindeer thunder down the main street pulling either sleighs and their drivers or grim-looking Lapps on skis. They skid round the corner, pick up speed, then vanish in a flurry of ice. + "Reindeer aren't very bright and they tend to bolt," said my guide, Yngve, a towering figure in a reindeer-skin outfit, a so rt of Arctic Davy Crockett. "The first time we held the race, they ran amok in the town. It was all over in 30 seconds." + The snow scooter was easier. With a group of other adventurers, I revved through the snow forests for 10 kilo-metres to meet Lapland's answer to Rambo - Lars Falt, the country's leading expert on Arctic survival. + Dressed in Swedish army kit, with more knives in his belt than an old-time butcher, he showed me how to brew pine-needle tea and make a fire from lichen. + "Anyone can name 10 types of car," he said derisively, "but not 10 edible plants. Yet they can be the difference between life and death." Lars can survive off the land for three weeks. Without training, most lost or stranded victims perish within three days, usually because they use up energy by aimless wandering. "Your best friend is not a dog, but fire," he told me. "If you can bring the tip of your thumb and little finger together in extreme cold, then you can make a fire and live." + As a souvenir, he handed me an "Arctic Lifesaver", a tiny metal rasp which struck sparks. I might need it, I thought, as I set out the next day on the Great Dog-sled Race, a 65km round trip, sleeping overnight in log cabins at Vakkarojrvi wilderness camp. + Our 10 huskies yelped with impatience as I wedged myself into the grotesquely-uncomfortable wickerwork seat. But the moment we were off, they fell silent. The only sound was the soft padding of their feet and the hiss of the sledge as they raced on at a steady 20kph, along narrow forest trails and across deserted, frozen lakes. + It was 4pm and already dark. My driver, a wild-eyed Lapp named Taisto, had a miner's lamp strapped to his head. In the beam, all we could see was a landscape like a black-and-white photographic negative and 10 twirly tails wagging ahead of us. Taisto has 70 dogs and goes all the way to Alaska to buy them for breeding at around pounds 1,000 each. I noticed that only the two lead dogs, Jennie and Algren, got hugs and kisses when we stopped for a rest. "It is a lesson to the others," said Taisto. + It was a white-knuckle ride in every way - spine-jarring bumps, twigs whipping the face and the temperature falling off the end of the thermometer. "Keep your legs in or you'll break them on the tree trunks!" shouted Taisto, urging on the dogs with a strange chirruping sound. + The dogs veered only when they saw a reindeer. There are 15,000 in the area, which explains why their meat - smoked, dried, roasted and stewed - is the staple diet. On the return run, Taisto and I came second, although he complained darkly of dirty tricks by the sledge in front which robbed him of the first prize of pounds 420. + The surreal experience wasn't over. I stayed on my final night at Jukkasjrvi's Arctic Hall Hotel. It is a huge igloo. They build it in December from 200 tons of snow and it holds around 20 people who pay pounds 18 a night to rough it in dormitory bunks. + Everybody has to check out by March. That's when it melts. + Eight-day husky-sledging tours in Lapland, including visits to Kiruna and Jukkasjrvi, are organised by Arctic Experience (0737 362321), from pounds 1,298. Information on Swedish Lapland from Swedish Travel & Tourism Council (071-935 9784). + +LOAD-DATE: January 3, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1993 Guardian Newspapers Limited + diff --git a/TestFiles/NYT 1990.txt b/TestFiles/NYT 1990.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7dc3e1a --- /dev/null +++ b/TestFiles/NYT 1990.txt @@ -0,0 +1,22792 @@ + + +1 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 1, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +For the Elderly, a New Way to ''Stay Well'' + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 27, Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Elderly citizens exercising at the Demotsis Senior Center in Astoria, Queens, as part of ''Stay Well,'' a fitness program developed by New York City's Department for the Aging. Page 28. (The New York Times/John Sotomayor) + +TYPE: Caption + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +2 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 1, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +A Legion of Volunteers Helps Elderly Keep Fit + +BYLINE: By KATHLEEN TELTSCH + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 28, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1088 words + +As older Americans strive for healthier, more active lives, New York City is offering to help, by sharing its innovative fitness regimen tailored for men and women over age 60. +Called ''Stay Well,'' the program was developed by the city's Department for the Aging and includes exercises, advice on stress management, invigorating walking tours and health education - all led by trained volunteers who must be at least 60 themselves. +Stay Well now reaches 3,500 New Yorkers weekly, mainly at 80 centers for the elderly throughout the city. Beginning in March, private donors have agreed to finance its introduction at five sites still to be selected in New York State outside the city. Several states also are studying Stay Well, as is the Federal Government. +''We're following New York City's initiative closely because it challenges the stereotype that there is no need to focus on health promotion once people are old,'' said Dr. Joyce T. Berry, acting United States Commissioner on Aging. ''We know much can be done to avoid some diseases with good health habits, exercise, diet control and proper use of medication.'' + +'You Are All Gorgeous' +The concept of using elderly people to teach their contemporaries was particularly appealing, Dr. Berry said. ''Older people represent a valuable resource which we can tap more than we are doing,'' she said. +At a Stay Well exercise class last week in Astoria, Queens, Anna Modifica, a 79-year-old great-grandmother, fired instructions, and 21 students obligingly flexed their feet, swung their arms, wiggled and stretched. ''You are all gorgeous,'' Mrs. Modifica said as she demanded more flexing and wiggling. +''She's not Jane Fonda, but she's a terrific model for other seniors,'' said Fran Friedman, director of Health Promotion Services at the city's Department for the Aging. ''It's less intimidating to be taught by one of your peers. You say to yourself, 'If she can do it, I can do it.' '' +Stay Well was originated by Janet S. Sainer, the departing Commissioner of the Department for the Aging. She secured financial support for an experimental three-year program from the Florence V. Burden Foundation, the New York Community Trust, the Exxon Corporation, Metropolitan Life and the Uris Brothers Foundations and Morgan Guarantee Trust Company. + +Concern About Hypertension +Impressed by older New Yorkers' response, the city agreed in 1986 to take over the program when the private sponsors ended their participation as planned. The program is a $200,000-a-year operation, a small item in the department's $88 million budget. +Dr. Prema Mathai-Davis, the department's newly named Commissioner, said centers for the elderly offered an opportunity to reach large numbers of the estimated 1.3 million New Yorkers over age 60. +Mrs. Sainer, who is 71 and became Commissioner in 1978, said Stay Well evolved from her concern about hypertension among older people. In 1980, she invited doctors from New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center to screen and monitor the blood pressure of participants at a center for the elderly at St. Malachy's Church on West 59th Street in Manhattan. +Today, blood-pressure testing and recording participants' progress is a regular feature of Stay Well. Instructors learn the technique during their orientation courses, which are given at least twice a year. +''We also wanted to get the seniors out of their chairs,'' Mrs. Sainer said, ''so we developed the exercise classes with technical help from the New York Academy of Medicine.'' #400 Volunteer Instructors Costs of Stay Well are kept low by using volunteers like Mrs. Modifica, who instructs two or three classes a week at the Hellenic American Neighborhood Action Committee center in Astoria, and Agnes Brown, who leads a class at the East Flatbush Senior Center in Brooklyn in association with the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Associations. +The two women are among 400 instructors. The only material rewards they receive are yellow T-shirts with the Stay Well rainbow logo that they get after completing 12 weeks of instruction and an intensive six-week follow-up course. +Mrs. Brown, a 67-year-old grandmother, ties her T-shirt smartly over her slim torso and begins her sessions with an inspirational poem. She ends it by insisting that her students open their eyes wide, growl and lunge like lions. ''I want you to go into lunch smiling as if you haven't a care in the world,'' she says. +Stay Well is not the only health-promotion program designed for the elderly, but it is in the forefront, said Dr. Stephanie J. FallCreek, director of New Mexico's State Agency on the Aging. +Dr. FallCreek said one of Stay Well's advantages was its adaptability for use at centers in lower-income neighborhoods. ''Many programs succeed with middle-class Anglo populations, which are easier to reach and generally have a higher health level than we find among the poor or minority groups - the groups that stand to benefit most,'' she said. + +Technical Advice +As a first step toward extending Stay Well, the Department for the Aging compiled a handbook on the program; 5,000 copies of the $10 manual have been distributed. Copies are available from Stay Well, the Department for the Aging, New York, N.Y. 10007. +To introduce Stay Well outside the city, all-day workshops will be held for health officials and community-center representatives. The department plans to continue providing technical advice and assistance to communities interested in developing programs. +These costs will be met by the Brookdale Foundation Group, which contributed $50,000; two anonymous donors who gave $25,000 each, and the Exxon Corporation's gift of $30,000. +In cooperation with the city department, the Brookdale Group also publishes the ''Age Base Directory,'' a national compilation of health-promotion programs for older adults. The directory is available without charge from the foundation, at 126 East 56th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. +The Brookdale Group combines three philanthropies established in the 1920's by the late Henry L. Schwartz, a founder of Paragon Oil, and his four brothers. +''We believe firmly that new and useful methods should not remain in one spot but should be replicated,'' said the foundation's president, Stephen L. Schwartz, Henry's nephew. +A third generation of family members is continuing a tradition of concern for the elderly that began, Mr. Schwartz said, ''when my uncle looked in the mirror one day and saw the gray in his hair.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +3 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 1, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Longer Lives for Aging Cargo Ships + +BYLINE: By AGIS SALPUKAS + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 31, Column 3; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1395 words + +With demand outstripping capacity and freight rates rising, the new year might seem ripe for a flood of orders for new bulk-cargo ships - a flood reminiscent of those in the early 1970's and the early 1980's. But that will not be the case this time, many people in the industry say. +Instead, some experts and executives say, the emphasis in the next few years will be on finding ways to extend the life of the current fleet of freighters and tankers. +''The world will have to be content with the existing fleet of elderly ladies - warts, face lifts and all,'' said Basil Papachristidis, the chairman of Papachristidis Ltd., a major shipping company in London. + +Recalling a Mistake of the Past +There are a number of reasons. Shipowners worry about repeating a mistake of the past: ordering new ships when cargo rates were rising only to have them delivered when the market had softened. +Lenders have made credit more scarce because many businesses have grown more reluctant to sign the long-term contracts that help guarantee a loan will be paid off, and because state subsidies for shipyards are falling. +Also, new ships have become much more expensive, and the capacity to build them has been cut so drastically that even the modest amount of current orders has filled up the leading shipyards. +As a result, shipyard capacity is expected to become even tighter in the coming years, industry executives say, and shipping rates are expected to continue to go up. +Another possible result, some industry people said, is an increase in spills and accidents that accompany the aging of the fleet, although most large spills have been caused by human error on newer tankers and ships. + +Higher Prices Are Expected +With the emphasis switched to maintaining the existing fleet, the value of ships is rising, leading to speculation and the buying and selling of many ships. ''The squeeze is on,'' said Michael S. Hudner, president of B & H Ocean Carriers Ltd., at a recent conference on shipping at the American Stock Exchange. ''In the next two to five years, you are going to see a big increase in the price of ships.'' +The Greek family that owns Tsakos Shipping and Trading is typical of many shipowners. Nikolas P. Tsakos said his company, which owns its own shipyard, could easily begin building new ships now that there has been a strong recovery in shipping rates. +Instead, he said, the yard in Uruguay is mainly being used to overhaul and upgrade some of the existing fleet of 35 ships. ''We believe we can do well by maintaining our second-hand vessels,'' he said. +Because such attitudes prevail, shipyard capacity is expected to grow by only about 2 percent in the next two years, Ocean Shipping Consultants reported. But demand for bulk shipping is expected to grow by about 2.5 percent. What is more, as the proportion of older vessels increases, the time consumed by breakdowns and overhauls rises, making capacity even tighter and raising rates. +Michael G. Jolliffe, the chairman of Global Ocean Carriers Ltd., said rates for bulk ships have been rising steadily. As an example, he said, one of his company's bulk carriers, the Global Star, had been chartered at $13,500 a day but would be re-chartered at $14,500 a day. +But many people in the industry think shipping rates will have to rise 40 to 60 percent before shipowners feel confident enough to place large orders for new ships. + +'It's Too Risky' +Shipowners recall that in the past big orders were placed in the middle of an upswing in cargo rates and the ships were delivered several years later, when the industry was in a recession. +''You can't order now and get a ship a year from now,'' said Roberto Giorgi, a managing director of V. Ships, a large shipping company. ''If you order now, it's delivered in 1992 or 1993. It's too risky.'' +He and other shipowners cite the example of the Sanko Steamship Company, a Japanese shipping concern that was forced to seek bankruptcy protection in 1985. The company, an operator of large tankers, with 263 vessels, had ordered about 150 new ships during the upturn that began in 1980, only to have most of them delivered after shipping rates had fallen. +Another reason for the slow growth in new orders, Mr. Papachristidis said, is that banks were more generous with credit in the past because businesses often agreed to long-term charter rates for a new ship. The long-term rates guaranteed a certain revenue even when spot rates fell and helped assure the owner and the bank that the cost of the ship could be paid off. + +Uncertainty About Rates +Now, because of greater uncertainty about the course of rates, businesses are more reluctant to lock themselves in for 10-year agreements. What is more, governments in nations like Japan and South Korea have reduced or eliminated subsidies for shipyards, vastly increasing the cost, and therefore the risk, of ordering new ships. +Some industry people predict that many of the reclusive families that own important shipping companies will therefore be forced to disclose their finances and operations to attract capital from the public markets. +''The older generation resists, seeking to keep it in the family by inheritance and marriages,'' said Costas Grammenos, a professor specializing in shipping at the City University Business School in London. ''A large percentage of the new generation have studied the industry and favor a different approach.'' +He said younger members of ship-owning families who favor a more open and modern company might be in conflict with their more conservative elders. + +Time-Consuming and Expensive +Even if money can be raised to order a new ship, building it has become more time-consuming and expensive. +Shipyard capacity has shrunk by about 60 percent in the last decade. The capacity that exists has been filled with orders, mostly for large tankers. A new ship can therefore not be delivered until about two to two-and-a-half years from now. +Employment at Japanese shipyards, which produce about half the world's ships, has shrunk to 34,000 from 150,000 in 1975, with many workers moving to high-technology industries. So it could be difficult to find skilled workers quickly to reopen a mothballed shipyard. In the United States, there is not much shipyard capacity left for building commercial ships. +Joachim Chao, a director of Global Ocean Carriers, a shipping company, said the Japanese have little incentive to increase capacity and instead are seeking to drive up prices to be able to make a profit. +''They are not going to repeat the mistakes of the past,'' he said. $85 Million Tankers Falling state subsidies, rising labor rates, general inflation and tightening shipyard capacity have all contributed to a large increase in the price of cargo ships. But while the price of a large tanker has risen to about $85 million, from half that amount 10 years ago, the Japanese yards are still unable to make a profit. +Vincent Cannaliato Jr., a senior vice president at the investment firm Smith Barney, Harris Upham, estimated that the true cost of such a tanker was $115 million and that the shortfall was being made up by state subsidies in Japan. +Thus, some industry experts and executives predict that the emphasis in the next few years will be on finding ways to extend the life of the existing fleet. +It could cost $200 billion to overhaul the world's shipping fleets in the next decade, said Mr. Grammenos of the City University Business School. +Some industry people worry that as ships age the risk of spills and accidents will rise. But many shipowners say the life of bulk ships, normally about 25 years, can safely be extended to 30 years with proper maintenance. But the task will not be easy, because some of the most vulnerable parts of a ship are hard to reach. + +Investing in Ships +There is also concern about whether companies that still want long-term charter agreements will accept them for older ships. +The lack of surplus shipyard capacity has stimulated the formation of new shipping companies that exist primarily to capitalize on the rising value of current ships rather than to operate ships long term. +Mr. Jolliffe of Global Ocean Carriers estimated that the six bulk-cargo vessels that the company bought with a public offering for $46.7 million in 1988 have appreciated to $55 million. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: photo of ships docked in Montevideo, Uruguay + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +4 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 1, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +SPORTS OF THE TIMES; +1989 Postcards Range From Tragic to Bizarre + +BYLINE: By George Vecsey + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 39, Column 1; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 1003 words + +BETWEEN a riot and an earthquake, death and scandal, the games seemed a bit anticlimactic this year. But for one wandering sports columnist, 1989 did have its moments, from datelines as diverse as Trinidad and Paris. +Paris in Kentucky, that is. Can't get cornbread in that other Paris. +TEMPE, Ariz., Jan. 2 - Almost Heaven, West Virginia, is no match for Subway Alumni, Mountain Alumni and all Irish rooters as Notre Dame wins unofficial national football title, 34-21, in Fiesta Bowl. +MIAMI, Jan. 22 - After riots following the deaths of two men in Miami, the Super Bowl begins under a pall. The finish becomes the best in the 23 games as Joe Montana produces a winning drive in the final minute for San Francisco's 20-16 victory. +SEATTLE, April 3 - Louis Ford, still wearing his mailman's uniform, flies in with an impromptu gift ticket minutes after his adopted son, Rumeal Robinson, sinks two foul shots to give Michigan the national basketball championship, 80-79, over Seton Hall. +LOUISVILLE, Ky., May 6 - Easy Goer proves he doesn't like the mud by finishing behind Sunday Silence in the Derby. +PARIS, Ky., May 7 - During a visit to horse country, the bluegrass authority Fara Bushnell takes photograph of columnist petting a large red stallion at Claiborne Farm. Photograph will become even more treasured later in the year when Secretariat is put down at the age of 19. +HARRISBURG, Pa., May 8 - Greg LeMond looks positively cadaverous as he huddles in bed with the flu. Recovering from shotgun accident, appendectomy and other injuries, biker barely finishes the first Tour de Trump. Anybody who could have predicted LeMond would win the Tour de France in July would have been summarily hooted off the tour's motorcade. +BALTIMORE, May 20 - Arthur Hancock, sometime country singer, belts out the chorus from ''R-E-S-P-E-C-T,'' the old Aretha Franklin R&B tune, after his Sunday Silence makes it two straight over Easy Goer in Preakness in one of the greatest stretch duels in Triple Crown history. +NEW YORK, June 10 - The mud dries just in time for the ground crew to give Long Island-based Easy Goer the hard surface he loves, and Easy Goer responds with one of the great Belmonts, roaring around the far turn to beat Sunday Silence. +WIMBLEDON, England, July 4 - Chris Evert gives her country a birthday present as she stages one of her finest rallies, from a 2-5 deficit to defeat Laura Golarsa of Italy in the third set. The soon-to-retire Evert, 34, joins elders John McEnroe, 30, and Martina Navratilova, 32, in the final four days of Wimbledon, giving cheer to old folks everywhere. But young Boris Becker and Steffi Graf of West Germany will win the heaviest hardware. +BRIDGEHAMPTON, L.I. July 31 - Michael Matz, who survived crash landing of United Flight 232 near Sioux City, Iowa, on July 19, wins the Hampton Classic horse show only 12 days later. So great is his concentration that he even gives lessons between his own rides. +MAMARONECK, N.Y., Aug. 7 - Casually scuttled by new owner in Dallas, a former Giant named Tom Landry comes home to be honored by Mara family and the old boys at a golf outing. +DETROIT, Aug. 18 - Inevitably, Dallas Green is dismissed, but in his closing weeks he has given the interfering Yankee owner a nickname that will live through the next dozen shuffles in the Steinbrenner reign of error: Manager George. +NEW YORK, Aug. 24 - Still denying he did anything wrong, Pete Rose is banned from baseball for gambling violations. +NEW YORK, Sept. 1 - Word arrives that A. Bartlett Giamatti has died of a heart attack at the age of 51, after only five months as commissioner, leaving a legacy of an eloquent passion for the sport. +NEW YORK, Sept. 5 - Chris Evert receives standing ovation after losing to Zina Garrison in quarterfinals of her last Grand Slam tournament. +TORONTO, Sept. 29 - For the first time, two black managers battle for a division title. Cito Gaston's Blue Jays will defeat Frank Robinson's Orioles, with baseball edging just a little closer to the time when race and color will not be an issue. +WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 - The former Yale first baseman George Bush entertains reporters at the White House, glad to talk baseball for 30 minutes rather than brewing Panama troubles. +SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 17 - Never have 15 seconds seemed so long as during the earthquake at 5:04 P.M.: long enough to watch light stanchions shimmy and concrete overhangs shake. As immensity of the disaster sinks in, World Series is postponed indefinitely. +SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 22 - Ignoring a few calls to cancel the games, the new commissioner, Francis T. Vincent Jr., sets Oct. 27 as date for resumption, citing Winston Churchill during blitz of London and saying, ''It is important for us to carry on.'' +SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 28 - The Athletics decline the usual champagne orgy in the clubhouse to stage a family celebration of the World Series sweep. In this tasteful setting, Nathalie Stewart is able to savor her son David's selection as World Series hero, for two victories and frequent visits to the disaster sites in their hometown. +PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad, Nov. 19 -Paul Caligiuri scores the most important goal in American soccer history, to beat Trinidad and Tobago, 1-0, and send the United States to the World Cup in Italy next June. After the game, broken-hearted fans, wearing red outfits, graciously congratulate American reporters, who can only mumble, ''Thanks for being such good hosts.'' +MIAMI, Dec. 6 - Nadia Comaneci is instantly transformed from heroine to pariah when it turns that out her defection from troubled Rumania was mainly to take up with a married father of four, in the same town where his family lives. +MIAMI, Dec. 30 - Although recently taunted via ''Catholics vs. Convicts'' T-shirts, Miami fans gird themselves to root for Notre Dame to stop undefeated Colorado in Orange Bowl on New Year's night, to maintain Miami's chance for a national title. +Miami fans rooting for Notre Dame? Bizarre ending to bizarre year. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: photo of Kelly Downs and his son (NYT/G. Paul Burnett) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +5 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 2, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +THE DOCTOR'S WORLD; +In Health Care, a Question of Quality: Cost-Control Efforts Raise Concerns + +BYLINE: By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D. + +SECTION: Section C; Page 3, Column 1; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 1155 words + +HAVE Government measures to control health care costs reduced the quality of care and increased death rates among the elderly? +Although there is no definitive answer yet, recent small studies have raised troubling questions that demand scrutiny, several health care experts say. +One of the latest studies tracked the death rates of elderly residents of Hennepin County, Minn., which includes Minneapolis, from 1970 to 1986. The age-adjusted annual rate declined steadily for years, but it leveled off after 1983, when Federal cost-containment efforts began in earnest and the average length of hospital stays started to decline. +Dr. Nicole Lurie, an author of the study, said the results prompted her team to initiate further studies because ''we need to learn if the problem is cause for alarm.'' +The cost-control measures are aimed at reducing the number of admissions to hospitals and shortening the length of stay for those covered by Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programs. Medicare covers the elderly and Medicaid the indigent. +Proponents note that it is often less expensive to treat people on an out-patient basis, rather than in a hospital. And they say that costs can be controlled without sacrificing quality. As an incentive to control costs, Medicare now reimburses hospitals a fixed amount for specific categories; previously, the payments were simply based on what the hospital charged. Researchers say that it is extremely difficult to assess whether cost-containment efforts are directly affecting the quality of care because so many variables are involved. Moreover, they note, the censuses that provide the raw material for study are conducted only once a decade, and publication of the nation's death statistics lags by several years. +In addition, the researchers said adverse effects may not show up in national surveys because of variations in the way states and cities provide health care. Adverse affects may also hit certain groups, like the poor or chronically ill, yet not be apparent in broader studies. +Thus studies limited to certain areas and groups may bring the problem into sharper focus. For that reason, the Minneapolis study, which was published in the November issue of the American Journal of Public Health, has stirred interest among health economists. +The study determined death rates by dividing the population by the number of deaths in a year. The rate is adjusted to account for age so that when two groups are compared, the rate for the group that includes more elderly people is not unfairly skewed. +In Hennepin County, the death rates were significantly above the projections for 1984 through 1987, Dr. Lurie's team said. The projections were based on the steady decrease from 1970 to 1982. +The study also reinforced concerns that the early discharge of elderly patients from hospitals to nursing homes may increase death rates. The researchers found that death rates for nursing home residents increased from 1982 to 1986. +The length of hospital stays for elderly people dropped by more than half from 1982 to 1986, the latest figures available, Dr. Lurie said. ''Our study raises warning flags that the same phenomenom may be occurring unrecognized elsewhere,'' Dr. Lurie said in an interview. ''When you see as drastic an increase in death rates as we have seen in Minneapolis, you need to be deeply concerned.'' +She said her team from the Hennepin County Medical Center and Minnesota Health Department is undertaking further studies to determine to what degree Federal and local regulations contributed to the change. +The local measures included a moratorium on additional nursing home beds, screening of nursing home applicants before admission, and a rapid growth in enrollment by Medicare beneficiaries in health maintenance organizations. H.M.O. enrollees pay a fixed amount for a specified range of care, if needed. +Because Dr. Lurie's study was designed to evaluate overall health statistics and not individual records, she said her team could not determine whether the quality of care might have contributed to the deaths. The team is now reviewing medical records of the nursing home patients. +The team is also studying whether more terminally ill patients in Minneapolis were transferred to nursing homes just before death under the new regulations. Such a shift might not reflect quality of care issues; rather, it may signal more efficient health care delivery. +But Dr. Lurie said, ''If hospitals are discharging sick patients who are not terminally ill to nursing homes that do not have the staff or equipment to care for them properly, then we have a serious problem.'' In earlier studies, Dr. Mark A. Sager and a team at the University of Wisconsin found that the proportion of deaths occurring in nursing homes increased significantly after the regulatory changes, while there were fewer deaths in hospitals. Because nursing homes seem to have assumed a greater burden in tending to sicker people, Dr. Sager said it is critical to learn whether the homes provide enough nursing and physician care. +Dr. Sager and other experts suggested that the Minneapolis findings may reflect an unusual confluence of Government regulations and local systems of health care delivery. A relatively large number of Minneapolis residents, including the elderly, receive care through H.M.O.'s. In emphasizing preventive medicine and cost containment, H.M.O.'s often provide incentives to staff members to keep patients out of a hospital. +If the findings are attributable to this combination of factors, ''the study has significant national policy implications,'' Dr. Sager said. ''The question is: how hard should Medicare push to enroll everyone in Medicare H.M.O.'s? Maybe they should not push very hard.'' +Earlier studies have found conflicting evidence about the impact of government regulations. +In 1988, Dr. Stephen Shortell and Dr. Edward F. X. Hughes of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., reported that the death rate was up to 10 percent higher in hospitals in states that stringently regulate care than in hospitals elsewhere. +But Dr. Gary Gaumer and colleagues at Abt Associates Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., used a different statistical method and reported in July that they had found no indication that cost-saving efforts in heavily regulated states were directly linked to death rates. +Nevertheless, the team found indications that the actual declines in death rates ''were not as large as those that would have occurred in the absence of'' government regulations. +There is much evidence that benefit programs can improve health care. In one study, Dr. Jack Hadley, co-director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at Georgetown University, reported in 1988 that the more Medicare spent for each beneficiary, the lower the death rates. The results, Dr. Hadley said, ''suggest that cost containment is not a costless policy.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graphs showing the average annual days in the hospital for Medicaid recipients in Hennepin County, Minn.; the mortality rates for all county residents 65 years or older (source: American Journal of Public Helath) (NYT) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +6 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 2, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Business and Health; +Time to Confront Health-Care Issue + +BYLINE: By Milt Freudenheim + +SECTION: Section D; Page 2, Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 782 words + +ADMINISTRATION officials, members of Congress and executives who buy or provide health care are girding for a broad debate on the future of the troubled medical system. +The problems include access to care for the 37 million Americans not covered by health insurance, long-term care for the elderly and spending that is expected to exceed $600 billion, about 12 percent of the gross national product in 1990. +Insurers are feeling pressure to loosen restrictions that are blamed for increasing the numbers of the uninsured, but there is widespread reluctance to spend even more money for change. +''I expect a national debate, vigorous discussion on the issues of long-term care, providing for the medically uninsured and other problems,'' said Louis W. Sullivan, the Secretary of Health and Human Services. +Employers and Government officials say rising health costs threaten competitiveness and the efforts to reduce budget deficits. But some say the cost and access issues cannot be separated. +Two-thirds of the uninsured have full-time jobs, often at businesses with fewer than 25 employees, regarded as expensive to insure. Many small employers have dropped insurance. And people who have had expensive illnesses are often denied coverage. +Insurers have met with members of Congress and physicians' groups to discuss limiting rate increases and restrictions on coverage. ''I have a feeling that the insurance industry knows that there will have to be changes,'' said Senator John D. Rockefeller 4th, Democrat of West Virginia. +Bernard R. Tresnowski, president of the national Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association commented: ''The answer may be to permit insurance carriers to operate in that market under certain standards of behavior.'' +A Government commission is scheduled to present a health-care plan to President Bush in March. Senator Rockefeller, the group's chairman, has suggested that employers be required to provide health insurance for their employees or to pay a tax to a fund to protect uninsured people. +Mr. Rockefeller said the Administration would face a fight in Congress if Mr. Bush proceeds with a reported plan to cut $8.5 billion from the Medicare and Medicaid budgets next year. +Mr. Rockefeller's group has not said how much the Senator's suggestion would cost. But Deborah Steelman, a Bush Presidential campaign adviser and chairwoman of an advisory council on Social Security, said the annual cost of comprehensive improvements might be $30 billion to $50 billion. +Although such costly changes are unlikely in 1990, Ms. Steelman said, a first step could be to expand the Federal-state Medicaid program. ''To bring in everyone who is under the poverty line, including single men and kids up to 18, as well as pregnant women and people with traumatic illnesses might cost $10 billion,'' she said. +Representative Bill Gradison, Republican of Ohio and a vice chairman of the Congressional commission, would go further. He said he wants to ''break the tie between Medicaid and poverty, so people above the poverty line can participate.'' +Mr. Gradison noted that Congress has started in that direction by extending Medicaid eligibility for pregnant mothers and young children. ''But nothing comprehensive can be done without some new source of revenue,'' he said. ''We are moving closer to the kind of crisis that might force action to be taken. An increasing number of hospitals are eliminating whole services such as emergency rooms or trauma centers, or just closing their doors completely.'' +Robert N. Beck, an executive vice president at the Bank of America, said that in Los Angeles, ''three hospitals have closed their emergency rooms, which puts more pressure on the county hospital.'' +Establishing standards of proper medical care is a priority for many physicians. ''We see 1990 as the beginning of the era of accountability in the medical profession,'' said Dr. James S. Todd of the American Medical Association. He cited a new law that would revise Medicare payments, based on such criteria as the doctor' time, training, overhead expenses and intensity of effort. +Recommendations will come from several influential quarters. In addition to the reports due from the Congressional commission and Ms. Steelman's council, employers in the Washington Business Group and the National Association of Manufacturers are also drafting policy proposals. ''Employers, unions, medical groups, everybody is coming up with their own solutions,'' Mr. Wardrop said. ''But if we don't reach some consensus, the number of Americans without access will go to 40 million, costs will rise to 15 percent of the G.N.P., and the quality won't get any better.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +7 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 3, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +New Chief to Be Named at Federal Health Agency + +BYLINE: By PHILIP J. HILTS, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16, Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 454 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 + +Dr. William Roper, the top health adviser at the White House, will be named head of the Federal Centers for Disease Control, Federal officials said today. +Dr. Roper, 41 years old, is an architect of a new policy for paying physicians under the Medicare health insurance program for the elderly. Under the old system, physicians were reimbursed based on the determination of what is considered reasonable and customary. The new system bases payments on the value of the services doctors render, as weighed by many factors. +Dr. Roper has also been known for his efforts to improve measurements of the quality of health care services that are paid for under Medicare, as well as for establishing a new group to test the effectiveness of some medical treatments. + +Headed Medicare Agency +Dr. Roper, a pediatrician, left his job as chief health officer in Birmingham, Ala., to become a White House fellow and then President Ronald Reagan's special assistant for health policy. In 1986, he became the administrator of the Health Care Financing Administration, which is responsibility for Medicare. It is one of the largest Government agencies, with an annual budget of $110 billion. Dr. Roper returned to the White House as the top health adviser early in 1989. +The Centers for Disease Control is one of the most visible arms of the Department of Health and Human Services, with 5,000 employees, a $1 billion annual budget and a mission to prevent premature death and disease. +It monitors the occurence of infectious diseases, like AIDS and measles, and has an emergency medical detective force to spot new epidemics and uncover their causes. + +Health Posts Remain Unfilled +The job as head of C.D.C. has been one of several important health posts that has remained unfilled since President Bush took office. Others include the director of the National Institutes of Health, the administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration, and the more recently vacated job of Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. +Dr. James O. Mason, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control, left the job at the beginning of 1989 to move up two ranks, becoming the Assistant Secretary for Health. +Dr. Roper's decision to take the job was first reported in a Washington newsletter, Medicine and Health, on Friday, and officials at the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House today confirmed that Dr. Roper is expected to be named head of the C.D.C. +From 1977 to 1983, Dr. Roper was the chief health officer in Birmingham and an assistant Alabama health officer. He also was on the faculty of the University of Alabama School of Public Health and the Department of Pediatrics. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +8 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 3, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +About New York; +Hey, Come On In, The Polar Bears Are Just Fiii-ine! + +BYLINE: By DOUGLAS MARTIN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 771 words + +Approaching a wintry Coney Island by elevated subway, you are struck by a motionless Wonder Wheel, a lifeless Cyclone roller coaster. Alighting, you see boarded-up arcades, kiddie rides guarded by razor ribbon, frozen hints of faraway summer. It's 30 degrees and a bitter wind chews at the cheeks. What to do but go swimming? The Coney Island Polar Bear Club assembles this time of year for dips in the icy Atlantic. We had joined them for reasons ever more elusive as the moment of our plunge approached. We glanced tremulously around at the sundry folks with whom we had chosen to contract hypothermia. +There was a tugboat captain, a rabbi, an elderly woman with a red bow on the back of her swimsuit, a bodybuilder who models for Playgirl, a postal clerk, a stockbroker who once ran up Pike's Peak, three Catholic priests, assorted fraternity brothers, a cadre of Russian emigres and a retired accountant who believes his polar bear experience was the key to survival when he was wounded in the Italian Alps during World War II. +Perhaps 100 in all, each with a story to tell -none of them short. We couldn't escape a man from Belgium determined to display a picture of him and three fun-loving friends playing cards in a hole they had cut through the ice. Or a Japanese chap who kept saying that sunrise might have been an even jollier time to assemble. +Health seemed a big drawing card. We were informed that polar bears (ursine presumably, human certainly) never get colds. They never need sleeping pills. They claim the strength of, well, bears. ''You feel like you can pick up a car,'' said Al Mottola, the 75-year-old president. +So it has been since the organization was founded in 1903 by a man called Mr. Body, whose business was publishing a magazine called Sexology. +But even Mr. Body might have been startled by a Connecticut teacher's remark that cold-water swims are a nice substitute for sex. ''Take what you can get,'' he advised. +As more people stripped down for the swim, at least one participant's nerves were jangling badly. But a fully dressed woman smiled serenely. She turned out to be there to observe her husband, an airline pilot. His considerable life insurance was indeed paid up, thank you very much. +''Keep moving,'' was the kind advice of Bonnie Hartes, who likes to give her minute bikinis names like Shark Bait, Jungle Fever or Pink Ice, today's shimmering model. ''You don't enjoy it as much if your fingers and toes freeze up,'' she said. +''You just have to run until you fall - that's the only way,'' said Diane Lord, who used to work in the Bronx Zoo until she caught something from the monkeys. +Suddenly it was 1 P.M., and we were part of a thundering herd screaming like banshees and tumbling off the boardwalk stairs onto the beach, heading straight for the ocean. D-Day in reverse! As our toes touched water, we recalled hearing that the ankles are toughest. Decidedly wrong. Suffice it to say that our foreheads felt a degree of constriction and pure pain unknown since Torquemada's reign. +So we joined hands and bounced about in a circle and laughed and shouted and in no time at all - maybe 1,000 years, give or take a century - it was all over. +There is a kind of cold that cuts to the marrow, persisting well after you have found a place of greater warmth. So imagine our delight that the first person greeting us on our hasty retreat was a vendor of hot knishes. With mustard, please. +But a nearby polar bear was on the prowl for a glass of ice water. Really. It was clearly time to make a beeline to Coney Island's coziest corner, the little dining room in the back of Nathan's original hot dog stand at Surf and Stillwell Avenues. Swinging doors, porthole windows, 10 little tables. We downed a chili dog and cheese fries, absorbed the warmth and began to entertain the thought of remaining alive. ''You feel like at home, huh?'' a waiter said. +The truth is that we still felt cold. The ''N'' train took us to the ''L,'' which took us a few blocks from the Russian and Turkish Baths at 268 East 10th Street. We headed straight for the radiant heat room where the temperature never drops below 270 degrees. Cold-water faucets endlessly fill buckets that once contained pickled herring. Pink, panting, perspiring palpitating people toss the water over well-seared heads. +''I like it hot,'' purred a woman being not too gently scrubbed with a broom made of oak leaves. She must. We discovered that in the hands of an expert (sadist?) each leaf stings like a blazing ember. +Thankfully, there is a swimming pool of frigid water outside the fiery chamber's door. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +9 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 3, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +A Deficit of $65 Million Is Seen in Connecticut + +BYLINE: By KIRK JOHNSON, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 2, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 732 words + +DATELINE: HARTFORD, Jan. 2 + +Budget officials said today that falling sales-tax revenues and rising welfare costs will leave Connecticut with a budget deficit of $65 million for the fiscal year ending June 30. +The announcement, coming six months after the state enacted the largest tax increase in its history to solve last year's problems, erased the hopes of state officials who had hoped to avoid budget pain in an election year. +Gov. William A. O'Neill, flanked at a news conference by dozens of commissioners and department heads called to the Capitol for a budget briefing, said that in response to the projections, he had ordered an immediate 2 percent cut in appropriations for most agencies, a reduction of 2,000 state jobs over the next 18 months, and curtailment of overtime, travel expenses and consulting contracts. +Mr. O'Neill said the appropriation cuts would save about $20 million over the next six months, while the job cutback would save perhaps $80 million a year once it was fully in effect in 1991. But he said that with continued weakness in consumer spending, sales-tax revenues - which contribute two-thirds of the state budget - could fall further still. + +'Everything Is on the Table' +''If the income isn't there, the outgo can't be there, either,'' Mr. O'Neill said. +Mr. O'Neill said that ''as of this moment'' he did not intend to ask for further tax increases when he presents his budget to the General Assembly next month. But he stressed repeatedly that ''everything is on the table'' as the budget situation unfolds. +Budget officials said the numbers have spiraled downward in just the last few months. The last projection, for example, a month ago, called for a $3.2 million surplus for the fiscal year ending June 30. Three months ago, the projected surplus was $92.9 million. +The General Assembly's Office of Fiscal Analysis has projected a deficit of $51.5 million in the current fiscal year and a shortfall of $417 million in the next. + +Long-Term Care for Elderly +The state's Secretary of Policy and Management, Anthony V. Milano, said the projected $65 million deficit reflects nearly $55 million in higher-than-expected Medicaid payments, particularly for long-term care for the elderly. +He said that $25 million more in housing and energy costs have resulted from a recent court order requiring the state to provide long-term shelter to homeless families, who were previously put up in motels for a maximum of 100 days. +And the sales tax, raised to 8 percent from 7.5 percent on July 1 and the highest state sales-tax rate in the nation, has brought in $27 million less than expected. Corporate income taxes have brought $25 million less. Connecticut has a tax on dividends and interest but no broad-based income tax. +Mr. Milano said that the effects of cutting 2,000 state jobs will not be felt immediately, and will also be partially obscured by an early-retirement package that induced about 3,000 workers to leave their jobs over the last six months. + +Jobs Will Be Eliminated +About 1,000 of the new job cuts, for example, will be applied to jobs that are now unfilled because of the retirement plan, he said. The remaining 1,000 will be eliminated as they open up because of future retirements, transfers and deaths, he added. +Mr. O'Neill said he hoped residents would not be hurt by the employment cuts, but they probably would be inconvenienced, if only by longer lines for things like driver-license renewals. Emergency services, he stressed, will be maintained. +Mr. O'Neill, whose popularity dropped last year after he signed into law almost $900 million in higher taxes, has vowed to run for re-election to a third four-year term this fall if his health permits. Asked whether the new numbers and the likelihood of another difficult legislative session gave him any reason to reconsider his decision, Mr. O'Neill responded that he was more determined than ever. +Mr. O'Neill's Republican challengers, who already are using last year's tax increases as a main element of their attacks, also seemed determined to use the new budget figures for all they're worth politically. +United States Representative John G. Rowland, for example, generally said to be the Republican front-runner, said in a statement that he thought the budget news had ''dashed the optimism and hope that Connecticut residents brought to the start of this new decade.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +10 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 3, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Fare Rises But Riders Keep Cool + +BYLINE: By FRANK J. PRIAL + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 516 words + +On the first working day of the new year yesterday, most New Yorkers appeared to greet the transit fare increase with resignation, indifference and pockets filled with tokens bought at the old price. +The fare went to $1.15, from $1, at midnight on Sunday. +Long lines expected at token booths and bus stops yesterday morning did not materialized in most cases. Most regular riders apparently took the Transit Authority's advice and stocked up on tokens before the fare changed. +''I bought 300 over the last couple of days,'' said one traveler at the Union Square BMT stop who declined to give his name. ''I saved $45 but I felt guilty, so I gave it all to the Salvation Army.'' + +Millions of Tokens Hoarded +On Monday the Transit Authority said the public had bought 55 million tokens as of Thursday and many millions more over the weekend. Normally about 25 million tokens are in circulation, the authority said. +''What can you do?'' asked Inez Serrano of Brooklyn, an office cleaner. ''You have to pay it. You have to get to work somehow. What are people going to do, drive into Manhattan? That's crazy.'' +Two groups of riders were less apathetic: those who can no longer transfer without charge from a bus to the subway and must now pay a double fare, and elderly people, who can no longer use a token bought in advance to obtain a free return-trip ticket. +''I think it stinks,'' said David Garcia, 25 years old, of Brooklyn, a United Parcel Service employee, ''especially the bus transfer deal. I'd like to see more bus transfers, not less, and speedier service. I take the bus to the train every day. Now my commuting costs are doubled.'' +Doubled, plus 15 percent. Mr. Garcia paid $2 for a round trip last week; now he must pay $4.60. +Riders over 65 who are entitled to travel for half fare, discovered yesterday that the tokens they had purchased in advance were not honored when they asked for a return-trip ticket. They were told they would have to buy a token at the booth to get the return-trip voucher. + +Closing 'All the Loopholes' +''That's always been the rule,'' said Bob Slovak, a Transit Authority spokesman, ''but everyone let it slip in recent years. The idea is to close up all the loopholes in fare cheating, even the smallest.'' +Mr. Slovak explained that some riders over 65, a very small number, were using one token to collect return-fare tickets at several booths. The return tickets are good for 90 days. +''So what am I supposed to do with the tokens I bought, if they won't take them at the booth?'' asked one elderly rider who asked that his name not be used. +Mr. Slovak said transit officials planned to meet today to discuss the senior-citizen fare. +One group of entrepreneurs - panhandlers - had already begun to profit from the new fare yesterday. One man stood next to the change booth at the Port Authority Bus Terminal subway stop at 40th Street and Eighth Avenue. +''Any loose change?'' he asked each token buyer. About one in five people gave him change, something rarely seen in the subway system since the 90-cent fare ended in 1985. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Commuters seemed to greet the transit fare increase with resignation yesterday. At the IRT Borough Hall station in Brooklyn, a rider bought a 10-pack of tokens at the new price of $1.15 each. (NYT/John Sotomayor) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +11 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 3, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +Rise in Health Insurance Rates Levels Off + +BYLINE: By MILT FREUDENHEIM + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1, Column 3; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 962 words + +After several years of climbing steeply, increases in health insurance rates are leveling off in many parts of the country, according to executives of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, the nation's largest health insurer. +The trend in premium rates reflects a dramatic turnaround at the network of Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans, which provide benefits for 75 million people. +''It appears we are going to end 1989 with a $1 billion gain,'' said Bernard R. Tresnowski, president of the association, which is based in Chicago. The association's 74 health plans lost $1 billion in 1988 and $2 billion in 1987. +While rates vary across the country and even among groups of different sizes and ages in the same city, the most severe increases seem to be moderating, as insurers played catch-up in a cycle of health-care costs that are still mounting. +In Michigan, for example, insurance rates will rise less than 9 percent on average for groups whose policies come up for annual renewal this month. This contrasts with increases of 18 percent to 25 percent on such policies in the first half of 1989, said Rudolph Di Fasio, a spokesman for Michigan Blue Cross. +Albert A. Cardone, chairman of Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the New York State insurer, said his company was asking regulators for increases averaging 11.6 percent. But he added that costs for the Blue Cross ''supplementary'' insurance, which augments Federal Medicare coverage for the elderly, would rise 27 percent, largely because of the recent Congressional repeal of the Medicare catastrophic coverage. +Mr. Tresnowski said health insurers had just completed a cycle of three years of losses, which would probably be followed by three years of gains - the excess of income over costs. +''The cycle was triggered by unforeseen costs, as care was moved outside of hospitals to ambulatory settings such as doctors' offices, and benefits were expanded in areas such as alcohol and substance abuse,'' Mr. Tresnowski said. ''It took us a while to recognize the trend and then to raise our prices accordingly.'' +Frederick F. Cue, a senior vice president of the Blue Cross Association, said that while insurance claims by doctors and hospitals were still growing, the increases were not any larger in 1989 than in 1988. +He said the turnaround in Blue Cross financial results was helped by cost-cutting, including staff layoffs, as well as by the 1989 rate increases, particularly at health maintenance organizations. +''Nationally, we went from a $200 million loss in H.M.O.'s in 1988 to a slight profit in 1989,'' he said. Mr. Cue said 56 of the 74 Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans would report gains for 1989. + +Income From Investments +Mr. Cardone at Empire, which has 10.5 million subscribers, said the insurer expected to show a surplus of about $40 million in 1989, down from $53 million in 1988. It lost $56 million in 1987. He said Empire had ''a slight loss'' in its 1989 insurance business, which it made up with income from investments. +The separate Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies in California also said they did well in 1989. ''We had a gain of about $42 million through Oct. 31, compared with losses of $9 million in 1988 and $56 million in 1987,'' said Leonard D. Schaeffer, chairman of Blue Cross of California. Blue Shield of California reported a net gain of $31 million for the first 10 months of 1989, compared with a $6 million gain in 1988 and a $36.5 million loss in 1987. +New Jersey's Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan, which lost $278 million in 1987 and 1988, also made a comeback. It will end up about $60 million ahead for 1989, said Joan Boyle, the plan's executive vice president. She said her company had requested rate increases averaging about 20 percent for groups and 32 percent for individuals in 1990. + +Accumulated Deficit +Even with the ''significant improvement'' in 1989, she said, New Jersey Blue Cross will still have an accumulated deficit of $228 million, which it hopes to wipe out by the end of 1991. +In other turnarounds, Eugene J. Ott, chief operating officer of Independence Blue Cross in Philadelphia, said net income after Federal taxes would exceed $60 million in 1989, compared with $8 million in 1988 and $38 million in 1987. +Patrick M. Sheridan, executive vice president of the Associated Insurance Companies, which operates as Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Indiana, said profit would be about $20 million in 1989, after a $69 million loss in 1988. +In Washington D.C., Blue Cross and Blue Shield of the National Capital, has ''made a small gain, a couple of million dollars, in 1989,'' said Raymond D. Freson, a spokesman for the plan. He said the company lost $42 million in 1988. + +Dramatic Results +Perhaps the most dramatic results were in Michigan, where Blue Cross has 4.4 million subscribers, about half the state's population. ''We added $186 million to reserves through the end of October,'' said Robert H. Naftaly, a senior vice president and chief financial officer of the Michigan association. He said the total gain for 1989 would be $200 million, in contrast to losses of $66 million in 1988 and $300 million in 1987. +Mr. Naftaly said his compoany had reduced its annual operating expenses by $100 million and received approval from state officials for ''self-sustaining rates in all our lines,'' including its formerly money-losing health maintenance organization. He said it negotiated contracts with 196 hospitals that provide monetary ''incentives'' for institutions that discharge patients promptly. +But Mr. Tresnowski at the Blue Cross Association in Chicago said the cycle of surpluses would last only through this year and 1991. ''Then we will look for another down period in 1992,'' he said. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: January 4, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + + CORRECTION: +An article in Business Day yesterday about a turnaround in the health insurance business of Blue Cross and Blue Shield associations misstated 1987 financial results for the Independence Blue Cross Association in Philadelphia. It had a loss of $38 million. + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +12 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 4, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Subway Voucher Policy Rescinded by T.A. + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 148 words + +The Transit Authority reversed itself yesterday and rescinded an order that stopped riders over 65 years old from using subway tokens bought before Jan. 1 to obtain a free return-trip voucher, a transit spokesman said. +When the subway fare went to $1.15 from $1 on Jan. 1, many elderly riders had tokens bought at the old fare, which subway clerks would not honor when they asked for a free voucher. Under new transit rules, the clerks would issue the vouchers only for tokens purchased at the higher fare. +''We did not mean to single out senior citizens,'' the spokesman, Bob Slovak, said. ''It's not fair that they got stuck, so we reversed ourselves.'' +Mr. Slovak said Transit Authority policy had been to provide free return-trip vouchers to the elderly when they showed a token. Now, he said, they will not only have to show the token, but surrender it to get the voucher. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +13 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 5, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +New Jersey Blue Cross Wins Overall 24.6% Rise in Rates + +BYLINE: By JOSEPH F. SULLIVAN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 2, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 696 words + +DATELINE: NEWARK, Jan. 4 + +New Jersey Blue Cross and Blue Shield today was granted an overall increase in rates of 24.6 percent, effective Feb. 15, for 605,000 subscribers. The insurer had sought a 33 percent increase. +The increase approved by the State Insurance Commissioner, Kenneth D. Merin, translates into an average of 26.4 percent for 350,000 individual medical and hospital subscribers and 21.3 percent for 255,000 elderly people whose policies cover costs not paid by Medicare. +Because Blue Cross is permitted to adjust rates based on the subscriber's age, sex and place of residence, some could see their premiums increase by up to 60 percent. + +Insured Groups Not Affected +About 3.4 million Blue Cross subscribers who are members of large insured groups are not affected by the increases. Rates for these groups are adjusted periodically by Blue Cross, depending on the cost of their claims. +A coalition of public-interest organizations had opposed any increase, saying it would fall most heavily on the elderly and the poor. However, Commissioner Merin said a review by his staff and the New Jersey Public Advocate of data submitted by Blue Cross showed that some increase was justified. +Joan Boyle, executive vice president of Blue Cross, said the corporation remained convinced that its request for a 33 percent increase for individual subscribers and 28 percent for those with Medicare supplemental policies was justified. +Blue Cross ended 1989 with a deficit of about $220 million; it had expected to reduce that to $125 million by the end of this year if it received its full request. Under the increase approved by Mr. Merin, the nonprofit corporation projected a deficit of $152 million. +The Insurance Commissioner said the approved rise would generate $97 million in additional revenue. +For the last two years, Blue Cross has been allowed to vary the rates according to age, sex and place of residence, so that those making greatest use of health care pay higher premiums. Mr. Merin said he found some ''overall inconsistencies'' in the demographics being applied by Blue Cross and ordered adjustments. + +Rates for a Typical Family +The Insurance Commissioner said that because of this recalculation, the impact of the new rates on individual premiums was not immediately available. Applying the new rates to a typical family policy, however, would increase the premium to $4,221 annually from $3,416, and would increase the Medicare supplemental premium to $552 from $460. +The use of demographic factors has been attacked as unfair by the coalition, which includes the New Jersey Public Health Association, the National Organization of Women of New Jersey, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Inc., the American Association of Retired Persons and the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey. +Mr. Merin defended the use of factors like residence, saying they were used by most Blue Cross organizations in other states. Health care, for example, is more costly in northern New Jersey than in the southern counties, he said. +Treatment for heart failure and shock in Essex County costs $3,323 on the average, according to the New Jersey Health Department, while the same procedure costs $3,118 in Middlesex County in the central part of the state and $2,580 in Gloucester County in the south. + +Future Increases Expected +''Demographic areas are not based on urban versus suburban, or rich versus poor, but rather on the cost of medical care in a particular area and the likelihood that a particular group will seek medical care,'' Mr. Merin said. Women of child-bearing age are one of the groups charged higher premiums. +The Commissioner said Blue Cross would need further rate increases in the future because medical costs continue to rise. He said the increases would continue until Congress or the New Jersey Legislature changed the way the health industry was paid. +He said a legislative study commission had recommended a number of reforms, including the creation of a high-risk pool to cover people with health problems who have have been denied coverage by private insurers. The Legislature has yet to act on the recommendation, the Commissioner said. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +14 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 7, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Bank's New Name Irks Brooklynites + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 28, Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 613 words + +It's happening again. Brooklyn is losing another piece of its identity. +To many Brooklynites, it was bad enough when Brooklyn's daily newspaper, The Daily Eagle, folded in 1955 and when the Dodgers left Ebbets Field in 1957. +And in several months, another institution, the Williamsburgh Savings Bank in downtown Brooklyn - housed in the tallest building in the borough of 2.2 million - will change its name to the Manhattan Savings Bank after its merger with that bank. The merger is expected to be approved by the regulatory authorities sometime in May or June, said J. Phillip Burgess, a spokesman for the Republic New York Corporation, a bank holding company that acquired the two banks. It is the parent company of the Republic National Bank of New York. +The building will still be called the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Building, Mr. Burgess said. But he said that Manhattan Savings Bank officials wanted to retain the name of their bank. + +Some Brooklynites Are Rankled +''Our position is that people don't bank with a name but with an account officer,'' he said. ''People are more concerned with their money being in a safe place than what the name is.'' +The change in the bank's name rankles some proud Brooklynites who are tired of living in the shadow of their more glittering cousin on the opposite shore of the East River. +''Manhattan of all names,'' said Berkeley Chandler, who has been a customer at the bank for 14 years. ''Manhattan's got enough.'' Judith Johnson, a customer representative at the bank, who has lived in Brooklyn for 19 years, said of the change, ''I don't agree with it.'' + +Wary of Name Change +She predicted that many elderly customers who have been coming to the bank since they were children would be wary of coming to a bank with an unfamiliar name. +''The name change will affect depositors,'' she said. ''I think they will take their money out.'' +But to some Brooklynites, it is only the bank's presence that is important. +''I wouldn't care what they call it as long as I come in here,'' said Lenwood Poindexter, 66 years old, who has been a customer for about 13 years. +Emma Foster, who has lived in Brooklyn for 41 years, agreed. ''It doesn't matter to me,'' she said. ''A bank is a bank.'' + +Will Double Its Assets +The merger will double Williamsburgh's assets, to about $6 billion, and for some customers the bank's financial status is all that matters. +''Why not?'' asked Ida Zanders, who has lived in Brooklyn for 30 years and been a bank customer for 20. ''What's wrong with the name? It sounds nice. As long as I get my money.'' But some of Brooklyn's leaders viewed the name change as a another way that New York City's most populated borough was losing its identity. +''It's disappointing to lose that name,'' said Robert Bailey, president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. ''It's like losing a piece of history.'' +Mr. Bailey added that Brooklyn is ''too often seen as the orphan child of Manhattan.'' +Even Howard Golden, Brooklyn's Borough President, is displeased. He wrote a letter last month to the chairmen of the Republic National Bank and the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, asking them not to change the name. +''Preserving the name of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank means preserving a piece of Brooklyn's history that began and lives in the hearts of all Brooklynites,'' Mr. Golden wrote. A spokesman for the Borough President said there had been no response. +Founded in 1851, the bank opened its headquarters at One Hanson Place in 1929. The 512-foot building, with a four-faced clock tower, is the tallest building in Brooklyn. +The building was designated a landmark on Nov. 15, 1977. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The Williamsburgh Savings Bank towering over downtown Brooklyn. Later this year, the institution will change its name to the Manhattan Savings Bank. (NYT/Jim Wilson) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +15 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 7, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WHAT'S NEW IN SILVER; +In Marketing, It's Bracketing Brides and the Over-45 Set + +BYLINE: By FROMA HARROP; Froma Harrop is a staff writer for the Providence Journal-Bulletin in Rhode Island. She frequently covers the silver industry. + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 17, Column 5; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 587 words + +The manufacture of sterling flatware is among the oldest industries in the nation. None of the leading silversmiths is less than a century old, and some trace their origins to before the American Revolution. From one generation to the next, these companies had always considered their market to be forever green. In their view, silver virtually sells itself. +Only recently has it occurred to them that Americans might spend more of their discretionary income on sterling if it were advertised more heavily. Silversmiths have long advertised in bridal magazines to reach newlyweds, their primary market, who account for 46 percent of all sterling flatware sales and about 30 percent of all sales of holloware - serving pieces like tea sets, pitchers and bowls. But to stir interest among other customers, the Silversmiths Guild and the Silver Trust International, a group of mining companies, recently embarked on a $500,000 advertising campaign. +In October, the groups began placing advertisements in Vanity Fair, Metropolitan Home, Bon Appetit, Gourmet, House & Garden and Southern Accents. (''The South has always been very strong for sterling,'' according to Mr. Johnston of the guild.) The advertisements show tables attractively laden with silver flatware, bowls, trays and other items, proclaiming sterling as ''The Eternal Element of Style.'' +One target is people over the age of 45. ''The older people have more discretionary income than any group, including baby boomers, and they are the fastest-growing segment,'' said William Weydemeyer, president of the National Tabletop Association and chairman of Taunton Silversmiths, which makes silverplated products. ''These are the people who grew up with our product.'' +By contrast, the children of the baby boom are considered a lost generation for sterling. Having grown up in the politically radical 60's and 70's, this huge post-World War II cohort got married late and without traditional fanfare. ''During the hippie era, big weddings were out,'' Mr. Johnston noted. ''People were getting married in the pasture with a guitar and no one was giving silver presents.'' +But the industry believes that with a little prodding the group could return to a more elegant table. Their ''psychographics'' may augur well for silver sales. Having paired up and formed households based on dual incomes, these baby boomers are now tiring of fast-paced living and eating on the run. They are raising families and ''want to look back to the home,'' Mr. Johnston said. +That has fueled sales of practical things like kitchen tools and housewares, agrees Lawrence H. Wortzel, professor of marketing at Boston University, but he says that to ''project that to silver, we are on a little more tenuous ground.'' Still, he adds, ''my viscera tell me that if crystal, china and silver manufacturers do some intelligently creative promotion, they could really increase their sales in the 90's.'' +Silversmiths have attempted to modernize their images to reflect contemporary lifestyles. Towle, for example, runs advertisements showing a silver fork sticking into a carton of Chinese takeout. The overall message is that sterling is for everyday eating, that the utensils can be tossed into a dishwasher. And, it is emphasized, the more sterling is used, the less it must be polished. Most silver makers have even introduced more modern designs, though they note that the best-selling patterns these days, like Wallace's French Regency, are updated versions of traditionals. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +16 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 7, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Togetherness After the Age of Reason + +BYLINE: By JANE ADAMS; JANE ADAMS's latest book, ''Wake Up Sleeping Beauty,'' will be published by Morrow in June. She lives in Seattle. + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 41, Column 1; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 1204 words + +WHEN my children were young, we took separate vacations. Each June I packed them off to their grandparents, a continent away, and when they returned, we were all glad to see each other again. I'd had a respite from single parenthood, and they'd had a month of unqualified approval and unlimited indulgence. Thus restored and renewed, we managed to negotiate the shoals of togetherness for another year. +Once they'd reached the age of reason - somewhere between training pants and training bras - we took our first family vacation. We went to Disneyland, where he had tantrums because he was too small to ride the Matterhorn alone and I was too chicken to accompany him, and she had nightmares inspired by the Mad Hatter, who had never scared her when he was just a drawing in her favorite book. +That was it for vacations en famille until a few years ago, when I realized that they were adults; young adults, but adults nonetheless. They would soon be entrenched in their own lives, careers and families. But until then, the world beckoned. Unlike many of my friends who waited to have children until they had done everything else, I waited to do everything else - especially travel - until after I had children. Although I might be too old to hitchhike through Europe, I wasn't ready for senior citizen cruises, either. +''Are we having a princess attack?'' asked my son. It was dawn on the Dark Continent. As I struggled out of my sleeping bag, slapping at mosquitoes, I felt every muscle protest the previous day's long, jouncing journey in the Land Rover and that night's restless sleep with only a few inches of foam rubber separating my body from the Serengeti's unforgiving contours. Adventure travel, they call it, but as I sipped the tea he'd brought me, without even being asked, I reflected that this was the real adventure - not discovering Africa, but discovering him. +At 21, he'd come into his own. Or perhaps I had just noticed. I was awed by his confident competence in a wild and rugged environment; although I'd dutifully praised the outdoor leadership award he earned in high school I never realized how much more useful than an A in algebra it would be on a trip like this. Not only that, but he had done his homework - I learned as much from him about the geology of the Rift Valley, the prehistory of the Olduvai Gorge, the rituals of Masai warriors, the migratory practices of wildebeests and the mating habits of crown crested cranes, as I did from our guide. +And through him I met a younger generation of East Africans than would likely have been as responsive to my interest in their lives, their traditions and their dreams if I'd been part of one of those pricey, predictable tours that go from one expensive lodge to the next. There were the children who dogged his steps in the village near our camp in Zanzibar, the young Mombasans on the ferry to Prison Island, and the students from all over the globe who sang ''We Are the World'' in the accents of a dozen different countries instead of ''Auld Lang Syne'' on New Year's Eve in Lake Manyara. And at the center was this surprisingly gregarious, interesting and capable person - my grown son, whom I saw that way for the first time. +The next year I went traveling with my daughter, who had spent her junior year in college studying weaving in Central America. We went to Spain, because she's fluent in Spanish and is interested in developing what she calls her Latin aesthetic. +To have a daughter with such an aspiration is, at the very least, testament that at least 50 percent of the effort I put in all those years doggedly trying to expose them to culture wasn't wasted. For he is allergic to what is known in our family as the C word. For him, museums, galleries, concerts, temples and churches inspire only uncontrollable yawning. But for weeks before we left, she sent me pages of notes about must-see exhibitions, galleries, artisans, designers, even an obscure little robot museum in Barcelona she'd heard of. In Granada, after driving for hours through the mountains she was still eager to stay up until midnight to hear a concert in the Alhambra gardens we had seen advertised on a poster in town. In Madrid, she translated for me at the theater. +I remember the first time she came home from school - kindergarten it must have been - with knowledge she didn't get from me. I was shocked and a little sad when I realized that a larger world had already begun to claim her. I feel those same mixed emotions now when we travel together - equal parts pride and nostalgia, as well as the anticipation of realizing how much she has to teach me and how eager I am to learn. Meanwhile, we linger for hours at sidewalk cafes, where the expresso grows cold in the cup as she reads her book while I read mine. +My son would say that's rude, which is what I used to say when I had to set a good example. Reading at the table was one of my private pleasures; happily now it's one of hers, too. Unlike, say, scuba diving, which appeals to her about as much as the C word does to him. But he'll lug my scuba gear and his own wherever I take him in my endless search for the perfect coral reef. He started diving with me a few years ago and although I have more experience, his reflexes, stamina and technical knowledge surpass mine. I like that - I feel totally safe with him as my dive buddy. What he used to like best about diving with me, he recently told me, is that when we were underwater, I couldn't ask him to share his feelings. But he laughed when he said it, and since at the time we were sharing a tiny cabin and a big ocean on a live-aboard dive boat in the Caribbean, I didn't have to. It was clear that he was totally content, exactly as I was. +THE daughter doesn't dive, but she shops. Oh, how she shops. Who else would I take to a souk in Morocco, a batik stall in Bali, a market in Mexico? He doesn't understand that you can spend a whole day shopping, not buy a thing and have a wonderful time. But that's O.K., because she does. +We travel by twos whenever we can - when I have the money and one of them has the time. But at Christmas we're all together in some place we've chosen because we've never been there before, may never get there again, and it offers something for everyone. +Bali's been the best of the holiday trips so far - he surfed and dived and hiked up on the volcanoes, and she spent her time in the artisan's villages with woodcarvers, weavers, silversmiths and painters. I went on some jaunts with her and others with him, and once in a while I followed my own inclinations, lazed on the beach with a trashy book and a tall drink. +At sunset we convened back at our bungalow, mixed up a pitcher of mango punch and shared the details of our day. And I thought, as I always do, about what an opportunity this had been to strengthen the connections between us even as distance, autonomy and differing priorities tug at the ties that bind. And how in the maps of memory as well as the atlas on the coffee table I would someday retrace the steps of this journey, which has been so much more than simply the sum of the miles we've traveled together. And how later, after I'm gone, they will, too. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +17 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 7, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +BLACKBOARD; +Portrait Of the Artist As Elderly + +BYLINE: By Marialisa Calta + +SECTION: Section 4A; Page 11, Column 4; Education Life + +LENGTH: 602 words + +AN 87-year-old woman once told Nola Denslow: ''They try to keep us alive so long, and then they don't know what to do with us when they succeed.'' +But Ms. Denslow knows. As the force behind a program called ''Out and About,'' she provides elderly Vermonters from all over Lamoille County with professional-level training in music, dance, visual arts, poetry and prose. Her clients have won prizes, sold artwork, been published. More important, said Ms. Denslow, ''They have transcended their physical limitations and confinement. They have stretched their horizons - and ours - far and wide.'' +Ms. Denslow, an artist and former teacher, transformed a traditional day-care center for the elderly in Morrisville into a nontraditional arts-education program three years ago, when she became executive director. She has been busy since then digging up grants and donations to run the nonprofit program. It serves 45 clients at a cost of about $148,000 a year, half of it coming from the state. +Representative Peter Smith, Republican of Vermont, sees ''Out and About'' as a national model. Mr. Smith, whose Congressional offices in Vermont and Washington, D.C., are decorated with paintings by the elderly artists, said he also hoped to sponsor legislation that would make such programs eligible for Medicare financing. +''Out and About'' is housed in a small clapboard building next to Morrisville's hospital. Inside, a group of retirees who once held positions as diverse as housewife, nurse, electrician, farmer, teacher and Fulbright scholar - all ranging in age from 69 to 97 - create paintings and sculpture under the guidance of seven artists-in-residence. To be eligible, these adults must meet the state's legal definition of frailty, which covers a range of disabilities. Some workshop participants suffer from Alzheimer's disease, others from brain tumors, lung cancer, and arthritis. +''It's been sort of like coming back out into the open, back into life, really being part of things again,'' said Alice Barmann, who at age 86, and with a severe heart condition, has become an avid writer and painter. +Without ''Out and About,'' Orison Shedd, 71, a retired farmer, says he might never have created the intricate line drawings he has sold around the state. Nina Hooper, 87, a retired teacher with glaucoma and cataracts, says she might not have resumed watercolor painting and could never have won a spot on the ''Very Special Arts'' 1990 calendar published by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. +Dr. Herbert M. Gale, a retired theology professor from Wellesley College, might not have been able to work on the sequel to his book, ''The Use of Analogy in the Letters of Paul.'' Dr. Gale, who is 82, said writing had become difficult since he developed Parkinson's disease three years ago. The personal computer that he is learning to use through the program eases the writing task. +''Out and About'' runs from 10 A.M to 3 P.M. weekdays, and provides transportation, breakfast and lunch and some basic medical care such as nutrition counseling and blood-pressure screening. It also offers field trips to museums, art shows, concerts and theater. Most clients - some who live with family, some in nursing homes and some alone - attend three times a week; Ms. Denslow said most donated about $3 each day for the services. +Maude Holman, a watercolorist and writer, said the program had reinforced one of her basic tenets. ''To put it succinctly,'' said the 93-year-old Mrs. Holman, in tones accented by years spent in Boston society, ''I don't believe in age.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo of elderly woman at the piano (The New York Times/Paul Boisvert) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +18 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 10, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +London Journal; +At the Secular Funeral, a Tango May Be Tasteful + +BYLINE: By SHEILA RULE, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 4, Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 956 words + +DATELINE: LONDON, Jan. 8 + +The mourners listened solemnly to the song of praise for the deceased, a man who loved to dance. Then, in their own creative tribute, they did a sedate tango out the door. +The ceremony was one of what clergymen and others say is a growing number of nonreligious funerals in Britain. The British Humanist Association, a national charity that represents the viewpoints and rights of nonreligious people and offers secular services for funerals, weddings and other occasions, says it gets about 200 inquiries a week about such funerals. +''For so long there have only been religious ceremonies available to people in Britain,'' said Meredith MacArdle, the association's director of public relations. ''The church has had a stranglehold on social ceremonies. But Britain is now essentially a secular country, so we are filling a gap.'' +Demand for secular funerals is reportedly coming not only from people who are not religious but also from those who want to avoid routine, cliche-ridden services conducted by clergymen who know nothing about the deceased. + +'Every Life Is Singular' +The vast majority of friends and relatives do not seek anything as dramatic as the tango-flavored ceremony, association officials say, but all want a personalized service that includes words, music or activities that help to celebrate the memory of the individual. +''We all die, but every life is singular,'' said Maeve Denby, national coordinator for the association. She has personally conducted more than 760 funerals over the last four years, including the one in which mourners danced and another in which the sons of a former circus worker performed a solemn juggling routine in front of his coffin. +''Increasingly, families are getting fed up with vicars who say the same generalized earth-to-earth and dust-to-dust words for everyone, words that have nothing to do with the person who died. And people have grown up. They don't believe we are all going to fly off with little wings on our shoulders when we die.'' +How many of the 650,000 Britons who die each year are given nonreligious funeral services is unclear. But the association says that the number of ceremonies it conducts has quadrupled in the last couple of years to several hundred a week around the country. In addition, its do-it-yourself handbook, ''Funerals Without God: A Practical Guide to Nonreligious Funerals,'' is selling briskly. + +Personalized Services +The association's volunteer officiants, who get a minister's standard fee of about $40 for conducting a ceremony, have almost doubled in number to 160 over the last six months. Ms. Denby says that volunteers, often elderly people who have experienced the grief associated with death, spend several hours talking with family members to gather information that will personalize the funeral services. Volunteers are trained to allow the families to take part as much as possible. +''A ceremony is a human need to comfort and help the living,'' Ms. MacArdle said. ''That's where religion makes a mistake. It concentrates on the dead and takes out of the family's hands the responsibility for saying goodbye. We believe part of the process of overcoming grief involves having the family take part in the process, the ceremony. Perhaps that is another reason we are becoming more popular.'' +Bishop Michael Henshall, who is chairman of a Church of England committee on funerals, said he believes that nonreligious funerals are growing primarily among a ''sophisticated minority'' in London. A vast majority of Britons are still ''residually Christian,'' Bishop Henshall said, a belief supported by an opinion poll published last month in The Sunday Times. +Nearly three-quarters of those polled said that they believed in God but that the religious service and sermon had become irrelevant to everyday life. A little over half go to a religious service at some time during the year, but only 15 percent go to church at least once a week. #7 Funerals in a Day ''Being residually Christian doesn't mean they go to church in big numbers,'' Bishop Henshall said, ''but underneath the surface their residual faith makes them want to turn to an authorized God man at points of bereavement. What is true is that because we have a reduced number of clergy and because there are many, many funerals, it is almost impossible for a busy parish priest to give detailed pastoral care. +''I was speaking to a priest today who has seven funerals to conduct tomorrow and he is not going to be able to visit or prepare a sermon in a way he would like. The institutional church, for a variety of reasons, has come to lack a certain credibility in this country at the moment and is regarded as stuffy, a bit dull and not always sparkling. +''There is probably a tendency for the nonreligious funeral to grow once the bandwagon starts and others start to jump on it. But I can't see it becoming as yet a major thing in this country because Britain is still basically residually Christian and would resist it, although who could say in the next decade.'' +The British Humanist Association urges its volunteers to get to know as much as possible about the deceased in order to talk freely and knowledgeably about the person at the funeral service. The biggest compliment, Ms. Denby said, is when mourners say to officiants, ''You must have known him.'' But how freely do you talk when the deceased was an unsavory character? +''I had one three months ago,'' Ms. Denby said. ''He was not only a jerk but potty as well; went around stealing things. There was no way to say he was a marvelous person; I had to relate his real nature. So I said he was like this but that maybe that helps us to understand the variety of human nature.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The British Humanist Association, which represents the viewpoints and rights of nonreligious people, says it gets about 200 inquiries each week about secular funerals. ''Britain is now essentially a secular country, so we are filling a gap,'' said Meredith MacArdle, seated, association's public relations director. With her is Maeve Denby, national coordinator. (Network and Contact/Laurie Sparham for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +19 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 10, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +A Nursing Aide Admits Killing Elderly Patient + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 24, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 168 words + +DATELINE: PALATKA, Fla., Jan. 9 + +A former nursing assistant with AIDS who confessed killing seven elderly patients, then said the confessions were untrue, pleaded guilty today to murdering one of those patients and was sentenced to life in prison. +Jeffrey Feltner, 27 years old, who has said he gave bogus confessions to draw attention to poor conditions in nursing homes, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the death of a 75-year-old woman after prosecutors played recordings of his previous statements about the deaths. +''Feltner heard his taped confessions and after hearing the evidence entered a plea of guilty,'' said an assistant state attorney, David Damore. A jury had been seated for his trial. +Mr. Feltner confessed numerous times in a year-long investigation of the seven suspicious retirement home deaths, the police said, adding that the victims had been smothered. +Mr. Feltner was sentenced to life with a mandatory minimum of 25 years. He could have faced the death penalty if convicted of first-degree murder. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +20 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 10, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Nursing Homes To Increase Beds For AIDS Cases + +BYLINE: By BRUCE LAMBERT + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 510 words + +New York State and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, which operates the only AIDS nursing home in New York City, announced plans yesterday to increase by nearly five-fold the number of AIDS beds there and in nursing homes elsewhere. +The plan calls for the number of such beds for AIDS patients to rise to over 200, from the current 44, by the end of this year. State health officials have authorized construction loans for some of the expansion, and state approval of other construction loans is pending. +The archdiocese has also proposed another 266 beds for later construction, subject to state approval. +AIDS and health-care experts say the city needs hundreds of nursing-home beds for AIDS patients who are ready to be transferred from hospitals but have no place to go. They say that nursing homes are cheaper to operate than hospitals, provide a more comfortable setting for patients and would help relieve the critical overcrowding that public and private hospitals in the city have been experiencing for the last two years. + +Praise and Demonstration +Contributing to the need for AIDS nursing homes is the fact that conventional nursing homes for the elderly are already full. In addition, some homes have been accused of turning away AIDS patients for discriminatory reasons. +The announcement of the new beds was made at a joint news conference by John Cardinal O'Connor and Gov. Mario M. Cuomo after they toured the existing 44-bed AIDS section of the archdiocese's Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center on Fifth Avenue at 105th Street in Manhattan. +The plan of the archdiocese calls for adding 106 beds at the Cooke Center, for opening 42 beds at its Little Flower Park Avenue Residence at 106th Street in East Harlem and 16 beds at the former Northern Dispensary dental clinic at 165 Waverly Place in Greenwich Village. The 266 beds to be constructed after this year are proposed for three sites in Manhattan that have yet to be determined, the archdiocese said. +At the news conference, Mr. Cuomo praised Cardinal O'Connor and the archdiocese for leadership in providing AIDS services. + +Issue of Condoms +But outside the building, demonstrators from the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power picketed against the Cardinal. They criticized him and the Catholic Church for refusing to promote condoms as an AIDS preventive and for not offering more education about AIDS. +Inside, the Cardinal said that condoms are not 100 percent effective and that their use should not be encouraged. +Two other organizations have announced plans to open AIDS nursing homes in the city this year. Bronx Lebanon Hospital is building a home with 120 beds, and two private agencies, HELP and Project Samaritan, are teaming up to build a Bronx nursing home that will have 66 beds. +New York City's Health and Hospitals Corporation provides 86 long-term care beds for AIDS patients at its Bird S. Coler Memorial Hospital and Home and Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island, but they are not technically classified as nursing homes. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: photo: New York State and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York announced plans to increase nursing home beds for AIDS patients to 208, from the current 44. With Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and John Cardinal O'Connor after a tour of the AIDS unit at Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center in Manhattan was Dr. David Axelrod, center, the state's Health Commissioner. (NYT/Vic DeLucia) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +21 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 11, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Police Say Man's Family Cut Respirator + +BYLINE: JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1, Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 872 words + +After disconnecting the respirator that was keeping an elderly Brooklyn man alive, three of his children physically held doctors back from reconnecting the life-support equipment, the police and officials at Kings County Hospital said yesterday. +Prosecutors in the Brooklyn District Attorney's office said they were considering whether to press homicide charges against the children of Leon Myskza, 78 years old, a retired tailor from the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. +The New York City Medical Examiner has ruled the death a homicide, and if the charges are filed, it would be the first such homicide case in New York State, law experts said. +Mr. Myskza had been taken to the hospital late Saturday after falling at his home. He suffered life-threatening head injuries, the police and hospital officials said. There is no indication that foul play was involved in the fall, the police said. + +Patient Underwent Brain Surgery +Early Sunday, staff surgeons operated on Mr. Myskza's brain, hospital officials said. After the operation, Mr. Myskza was placed on a respirator in the intensive-care unit, a common procedure for elderly people who have been under a heavy anesthetic. +Later that day doctors told Mr. Myskza's children and other relatives that he had no chance of surviving, said a hospital official who asked not to be identified. The family asked the doctors to issue a do-not-resuscitate order, which bars doctors from reviving a patient whose heart or brain has stopped functioning, a hospital official said. +At about 10 A.M. the following day Mr. Myskza's daughters Elizabeth Kalash and Mary Myskza, and a son, Edward, entered his cubicle and turned off the respirator, police investigators said. +At 11:30 A.M. an alarm warned nurses that Mr. Myskza's heart had stopped beating. +When doctors and nurses tried to reach the patient and reconnect the respirator, the children blocked their path, and a loud argument erupted between the family and the doctors. Mr. Myskza was pronounced dead a short while later, and hospital officials immediately summoned the police. +No one has been arrested in the death pending the District Attorney's decision and a grand jury review of the evidence, Chief Joseph DeMartino, commander of Brooklyn detectives, said yesterday. + +'You Can't Kill Him' +''The question in my mind is was this person alive when they pulled the plug,'' Chief DeMartino said. ''Even though you know somebody's dying, you can't kill him.'' +The Medical Examiner's autopsy report, released Tuesday, said Mr. Myszka had died from ''the disconnection of life support following an operation for blunt impact head injury.'' A spokeswoman for the office, Ellen Borakove, said yesterday that at the moment the respirator was turned off, Mr. Myska's lower brain was still functioning and that he was not legally brain dead. +Experts on such cases said yesterday that the Medical Examiner's interpretation of the death as a homicide posed difficult questions about the state's relatively strict laws governing when doctors, at the request of a family, can legally remove life-sustaining machines from an unconscious person who they believe has no chance to survive. + +'Convincing Evidence' Needed +Fenella Rouse, executive director of the Manhattan chapter of the Society for the Right to Die, said yesterday that under New York State law, no one could remove a life-support system from an incapacitated or unconscious patient deemed without chance of survival unless there was ''clear and convincing evidence'' that the person would prefer to die. +Doran Weber, an analyst with the society, said: ''All right-to-die cases deal with people who are not technically dead. We feel it shows that the New York law is pretty conservative on this issue.'' +Family members reached by telephone yesterday declined to be interviewed, and several critical questions about their motives and their culpability under the law remain unanswered, Ms. Rouse and other experts said. +Among the questions, they said, are whether doctors told the family that there were legal ways to disconnect the respirator without resorting to force and whether the family was under the mistaken impression that a do-not-resuscitate order meant that the respirator could be legally removed, Legal Removal at Issue Ms. Rouse said one crucial question before the District Attorney was whether doctors had misled the family and had not told them they could legally remove the respirator if they could prove that Mr. Myskza had expressed that desire in the past. +But the New York requirement to demonstrate that the patient has clearly said or written that he would prefer to be disconnected from life support is one of the most stringent in the country, experts said. +''Here is another family driven to despair by a public policy that is contrary to the best interests of the patient,'' said the Rev. John Paris, a scholar with the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago. ''In any state but New York, if the family were told that prognosis and clearly communicated to the physician that the patient would not want to be maintained that way, there would be no hesitation in shutting off the respirator.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +22 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 12, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Review/Film; +At Long Last, The Story of A Gangster's Redemption + +BYLINE: ''The Plot Against Harry'' was shown as part of last year's New York Film Festival. Following are excerpts from Janet Maslin's review, which appeared in The New York Times on Sept. 23, 1989. It opens today at Cinema Studio, Broadway and 66th Street. + +SECTION: Section C; Page 13, Column 1; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 606 words + +Harry Plotnik has been kept under wraps for 20 years, but he is none the worse for wear. Harry is the glum Jewish gangster at the center of ''The Plot Against Harry,'' a funny, sharply drawn and appealingly modest film that very nearly missed seeing the light of day. +Michael Roemer, who directed this beautifully crisp black-and-white film in 1969 (with Robert Young as cinematographer), only recently found the wherewithal to assemble it into a finished version. But the time lag is an unexpected boon. The mid-60's types who populate the film, from street hoods and call girls to lacquer-haired, comically dolled-up suburbanites, have been made that much more colorful by two intervening decades. +Although ''The Plot Against Harry'' is nominally about how Harry evolves from hardened tough guy into a warm-hearted, noncriminal family man, its real focus is on the subordinate characters and the settings in which they appear. The film captures the pre-psychedelic mid-60's with festive documentarylike scenes depicting, among other things, a party held in a subway car; a laughably genteel trade fashion show for buyers of women's lingerie; a dog training class; a hush-hush induction ceremony for a fraternal lodge, and various weddings and bar mitzvahs, one of which involves a candlelight parade of elderly relatives. It captures the details of these things humorously and perfectly, right down to the chopped-liver chicken at the last of these affairs. +Mr. Roemer never lets these settings run away from him. Though the film's narrative is relatively loose, the viewer's attention is guided very carefully. The film's opening scene, for instance, shows what looks like some sort of restaurant kitchen, and gradually reveals - through overheard dialogue, an institutional atmosphere and a glimpse of metal dishes - that the setting is in fact a prison. From this, it moves to Harry (Martin Priest), who is being released from his cell for what turns out to be the last time. Even on this more or less auspicious occasion, Harry retains the look of faint disgust that is his habitual expression. +Back on the street, immediately in control of the various small-time hoods who know him as Mr. P., Harry appears not much better off than he was in jail. He is a gloomy guy, whether lounging in a silk dressing gown as various employees pay court, or visiting his elderly sister Mae (Ellen Herbert), who isn't sure what Harry does for a living but knows he treats her like a prince. +But during the course of the film, Harry discovers it is time for a change. Fate arrives in the form of Harry's former wife, Kay (Maxine Woods), and his grown-up daughters, who haven't seen him in about 20 years and haven't missed him much, either. Harry quite literally runs into his former family and, since their car is wrecked, invites them to ride in his limousine, where they marvel at the various telephones. But they remain understandably wary of Harry himself until, having been told by a doctor that he has a dangerously enlarged heart, he embarks upon a campaign to go straight. +Aside from the admirably unflappable Mr. Priest, who had a small role in ''Nothing but a Man'' - Mr. Roemer's highly praised, very-low-budget 1964 film about the troubles faced by a black laborer in the South - most of the actors here are amateurs. And Mr. Roemer knows exactly how to use them. The performances in ''The Plot Against Harry'' have an engagingly natural quality that never slackens into vagueness; the players are made to seem real, but they are not encouraged to ramble. Behind the film's easygoing mood there is firm directorial control. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: photo: Martin Priest + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +23 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 13, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +After Fatal Purse-Theft, A 'Safe' Area Is Edgy + +BYLINE: By DONATELLA LORCH + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 31, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 858 words + +Park Avenue at 92d Street is in a neighborhood that residents call peaceful and beautiful. When the Brick Church preschool lets out, mothers, nannies and children crowd the sidewalk. Doormen help tenants with grocery bags. Elderly women stroll ''the Avenue.'' +But three days ago a 59-year-old woman crossing Park Avenue at 92d Street was killed in a purse-snatching, and suddenly the residents' long-held assumptions that their neighborhood is safe are being challenged. Confronted with the woman's death, many people there are stunned, afraid and improvising new ways to protect themselves. +''This isn't supposed to happen here,'' said a 78-year-old woman, hugging her purse to her chest yesterday on 92d Street. +It is not that the neighborhood has been immune to crime. Known as Carnegie Hill and covering the lower East 90's from roughly Fifth to Lexington Avenues, the area has known frequent car break-ins and occasional muggings, and in the last several months it has been part of a larger area struck by a pattern mugger who rides a bicycle and has attacked six elderly women. But the police say that these incidents are unrelated to the death of the purse-snatching victim, Kim Stapleton. + +In Broad Daylight +What shocked people more than anything else about Mrs. Stapleton's death was the fact that it took place in the middle of the day - shortly after noon - and only a few hundred feet from where the Brick Church children were coming out of school. +''This is a peaceful, lovely, beautiful neighborhood,'' said Nancy Wright, a silver-haired resident of 1160 Park Avenue. ''You don't realize it can happen here, too.'' +Mrs. Stapleton, of 61 East 92d Street, was on the way to lunch with her sister when a passenger in a van opened the door, reached out and grabbed her by the head and shoulders to get at her pocketbook, which was strapped across her chest. She was dragged along the pavement and run over by the van, dying instantly, the police said. +Hours later, in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn, a 74-year-old woman was seriously hurt in a similar purse-snatching. The woman, Marie Paolillo, of 1990 East 23d Street in Gravesend, suffered multiple trauma, a right hip fracture and a broken rib as she was dragged 70 feet along East 28th Street between Avenues U and V at 4:35 P.M. In the attack, she had struggled with a man who had stopped the van, brandished a knife and grabbed her shoulder purse by the strap. She is recovering in Coney Island Hospital. + +New Jersey Plates +The van in this case was black, and the police believe it had New Jersey plates. But they said they believed that the two incidents were not related. +And last night, the police said a similar attack had occurred on Monday in Forest Hills, Queens. A man in a van attacked an unidentified woman in front of 103-25 68th Avenue and stole her purse, the police said. She suffered a cut on her hand when her purse strap was cut with a knife. +The police said the Queens attack did not appear to be connected to either of the other incidents. +In each case the police have no suspects. Witnesses to the Park Avenue attack described the van as blue or gray with New York license plates, and they said the plates ended with the digits 229. The police said they have only been able to narrow the search to 17,000 car registrations. +The police are looking for other witnesses, including the driver of a yellow medallion cab who was behind the van on Park Avenue and left the scene after calling the police. They have also set up a hot line, (212) 598-0071, for information on either incident. + +Wearing the Purse Under the Coat +Along Park Avenue and its sidestreets, many women said they are now taking precautions, like paying attention to people around them and waiting to cross streets away from the curb. House keys are being kept in coat pockets. Valuables are being left at home. And doormen are being asked to keep an eye on elderly tenants. +Many of the residents have lived there for more than 20 years, shop at the same grocery stores, walk their dogs together and stop to chat on the corners. +''People are really afraid,'' said Fiore Perri, who has been the doorman at 1150 Park Avenue for 39 years. ''People get mugged here but not killed.'' Mr. Perri said that his building held a security meeting last night and that many tenants were asking him to watch out for them when they crossed the street. + +At Church, Self-Defense Course +Leslie Merlin, a pastor at the Brick Presbyterian Church, on Park Avenue at 91st Street, is helping organize a workshop on self-defense. She is preparing talks on how to avoid being victimized. +''Whenever I can, I don't carry a bag,'' she said. +In Gravesend, a quiet neighborhood of private homes, Mrs. Paolillo's neighbors are also frightened. The police said that there is little crime around East 28th Street, where Mrs. Paolillo was robbed. +''We were pretty cautious before this,'' said Candy Ginsberg, 33, who lives on East 28th Street. ''People go out at night, they get fruit, they get fish at the new store. I just don't know what people can do to keep the neighborhood safe.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + + +GRAPHIC: ''You don't realize it can happen here too'' (NYT/Eddie Hausner); Fiore Perri, doorman at 1150 Park Avenue, said tenants were asking him to keep an eye on them crossing streets. (NYT) +Photo: ''This is a peaceful, lovely, beautiful neighborhood,'' said Nancy Wright, left, who has lived on Park Avenue and 92d Street for 40 years. + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +24 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 14, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +After Rumania, Chinese Reproach Themselves + +BYLINE: By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 10, Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 814 words + +DATELINE: BEIJING, Jan. 13 + +The success of the popular rebellion in Rumania seems to have accentuated the mood of self-reproach in the capital. Young Chinese intellectuals wonder aloud why the Rumanians persevered, even in the face of gunfire, to overthrow the Government, while last June the Chinese protesters eventually retreated after being bloodily put down. +''Some people are saying that Chinese just aren't made of the same stuff as the Rumanians,'' a university professor commented bleakly the other day. +A Government official added, in the same despairing tone: ''Chinese aren't like the Rumanians. We aren't willing to fight for an ideal.'' +Such attitudes, which ignore the courage in the face of gunfire that many Chinese showed in June, and the risk of jail and disgrace that they braved, are the latest manifestation of the self-reproach that has periodically swept Chinese intellectual circles in the last 100 years. +The gloom has been fostered in recent years by such books as ''The Ugly Chinaman'' and the television series ''River Elegy,'' both of which mock the history and traditions that most Chinese have been taught to revere. In an unlikely show of support for the feudalist past, the Communist Party has vigorously denounced this pessimism and has hailed the glories of Chinese civilization. + +Love of 'Airplane Tickets' + One consequence of this despair has been a fervent search by young Chinese for a way to go abroad. In the early 1950's, many young intellectuals gave up jobs in the United States to return and build a ''new China.'' Now, especially among university-educated Chinese, the talk frequently is of how to emigrate. +Some private business people are asking about emigrating to countries like Belize and Panama in the hope that they can later move to the United States or Canada. Others are hoping to marry an American. +''Do you know anyone who is looking for a Chinese wife?'' one woman asked an American friend. +And students at Beijing's universities have a new slang description for an American boyfriend or girlfriend: ''airplane tickets.'' + +Watching the Old Men + When knowledgeable Chinese or foreign diplomats are asked to name the most powerful people in China, three names usually come up: Deng Xiaoping, Yang Shangkun and Chen Yun. +Mr. Deng, who is 85 years old, has officially retired but unofficially remains the paramount leader. Mr. Yang, who is 82, holds the ceremonial post of President but derives power from his hold over the army. Mr. Chen, who is 84, is China's economic mastermind and patron of the nation's central planners. +Their continued domination of China is embarrassing for the party in two respects. First, after a decade in which transition to younger leaders was a constant theme, the nation remains ruled by a triumvirate whose average age exceeds that of Mao Zedong at the time of his death - 82. Second, the party has stressed the need for rule by law and institutions, yet none of the three relies for power on any formal position. Indeed, these days none is even a member of the Communist Party Central Committee. +''It's just like the end of the Qing Dynasty, when Empress Dowager Ci Xi ruled from behind the screen,'' a university professor complained. Ci Xi, who is widely reviled, monopolized power and even imprisoned the Emperor in 1898 when he ordered a series of sweeping changes in the Chinese Government. +Mr. Deng, Mr. Yang and Mr. Chen face daunting challenges: widespread popular opposition, passive resistance within the party, a troubled economy and hostility abroad. But perhaps the most difficult challenge comes from the actuarial tables, and it is this knowledge of their age and mortality that is a wellspring of hope among young dissidents. +Indeed, because there are different views among these three men, a pivotal question being asked these days is not ''When will they die?'' but ''In what order will they die?'' +Some foreign diplomats believe that the order in which they die will be crucial to future policy, because as each dies his proteges will lose influence. The longest-lived will be the victor, according to this scenario. +Mr. Chen, who has appeared in public only once in the last two years, is said to be quite feeble but mentally alert. Mr. Deng is said to have prostate problems, but it is not clear how severe they are. Mr. Yang appears entirely healthy and looks much younger than his age. Thus most forecasts are that Mr. Chen will die first, then Mr. Deng and last Mr. Yang. +Mr. Chen's death is widely expected to hurt Prime Minister Li Peng and the cause of central planning generally. The impact of Mr. Deng's death, if it came after Mr. Chen's, would depend on the policies taken by Mr. Yang. There is little indication what these would be, for Mr. Yang has rarely taken the initiative in economic or foreign policy and so his ideas remain something of a mystery. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +25 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 14, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Campus Life: Evergreen State; +School Seeks Minority Voices In Its Classrooms + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2, Page 33, Column 2; Style Desk + +LENGTH: 525 words + +DATELINE: OLYMPIA, Wash. + +Evergreen State College has announced a new admissions policy that it hopes will increase the number of minority and handicapped students at the school, as well as add more diversity to its classrooms. +The policy, school officials said, will give preference to minority and handicapped applicants, as well as veterans, older people and those whose parents never attended college. The policy, which goes into effect this fall, replaces one in which students ranked in the top 50 percent of their class were admitted on a first come, first served basis. +''Basically, we are saying our society is made up of various and diverse populations and our student body ought to reflect the population at large,'' said Arnaldo Rodriquez, the college's dean of enrollment services. He said the college's minority population has averaged about 10 percent of its 6,000 students. +Mr. Rodriquez said he hopes the new policy would double the minority population over the next 5 to 10 years. + +Diversity of Expression +The policy drew strong support from students who helped form the college's new student government. +Brendan Williams, a sophomore from Iowa City and a co-founder of the student government, said the college has lacked a real diversity of expression. ''You don't want to go into a seminar with 20 clones of yourself,'' he said, adding that the new admissions policy ''will create a more tolerant atmosphere.'' +Mary Lou O'Neil, a senior from Seattle, said she thought the new admissions policy was wonderful. +''It will change Evergreen for the better,'' she said. She predicted that in 10 years the college would be a true example of a multi-cultural living environment. ''It is much better to live it than just be taught it,'' she said. + +New Minimum Standards +While the student leaders strongly endorsed the new policy, they conceded most students probably knew little about it. +Mr. Rodriquez said the change was spurred in part by a directive from the state's Higher Education Coordinating Board, which supervises all state colleges and universities. +The directive set new minimum standards for admission that are based on scores produced by a combination of high school grade point averages and standardized exams, like the Scholastic Aptitude Test. +Mr. Rodriquez said Evergreen will also continue to require applicants to be in the top 50 percent of their classes. Additional points will be awarded to people over 25 years old, Vietnam veterans, members of minority groups and applicants whose parents did not attend college. + +Other States Do It +College officials believe the new policy will gradually change the student body, which averages 24 years old. Mr. Rodriquez said that while the policy is new to Washington, some states, like California, already have a similar policy. +Evergreen State College, which was founded in 1967, was the first in the nation to create a curriculum around interdisciplinary seminars, like ''Intelligence, Society and the Computer'' or ''Political Ecology.'' +Evergreen students do not take written tests. There are no grades, no required courses and no traditional academic departments. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +26 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 14, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE REGION; +Inside the Department of Pain and Suffering + +BYLINE: By JOSH BARBANEL + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 5, Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 2085 words + +ALMOST from the day it was set up in 1966 as New York City's main weapon in the war on poverty, the huge Human Resources Administration has itself been under attack. Mayor David N. Dinkins has called running it ''the toughest job in the City of New York,'' even tougher than being Mayor. James Dumpson, a former administrator who heads the Mayor's committee to find a new executive, has called the agency ''an administrative monstrosity'' that should be dismembered. +Despite the complaints, the agency, with a $5.5 billion budget and 32,000 employees, continues to serve more than 1.25 million poor people, sluggishly adapting to a perpetual if shifting set of emergencies with limited resources and limited political support, complex Federal and state requirements, a low-paid staff, litigious advocacy groups and a public that is unforgiving of its failures. +''As long as there are poor people there will be an H.R.A.,'' said William J. Grinker, the last of the five commissioners in the 12-year tenure of Mayor Edward I. Koch. +The behemoth provides hundreds of millions of dollars in welfare, food stamp and Medicaid benefits each month. It investigates child abuse and runs a growing and overloaded foster care system. It provides rooms for 3,800 families in hotels and shelters, and beds for 9,000 single men and women, sometimes on armory floors. It helps collect child support payments from absent parents, provides day care for 41,000 children and Head Start and city preschool programs for 12,000. It runs or oversees 181 centers for the elderly, offers services for people with AIDS, provides home care workers for 46,000 people who need help managing for themselves, and looks after the affairs of 2,700 people who can no longer get by on their own. It carries out its mission at more than 700 sites across the city. + +Changing Missions +Though this bureaucracy appears awesomely immutable, it has slowly but constantly changed and reorganized in response to changing circumstances. Ten years ago, drug use appeared on the wane, homelessness was a problem largely confined to Bowery flophouses, and the number of children in foster care was in the midst of a sharp decline. +Now the agency is coping with a steady rise in complaints of abuse and neglect of children, and serving the homeless has become a priority. And as it struggles, and on occasion stumbles, the agency has faced intensive criticism. +''It is the whipping boy for problems that have suddenly overwhelmed the city,'' said Mitchell Sviridoff, who designed the agency and served as its first commissioner under former Mayor John V. Lindsay. ''All cities have been overrun by the combination of crack and AIDS. Whoever runs H.R.A. will be blamed for unsolved problems, for not being totally effective.'' +And as crack undermines the stability of many already fragile families - often concentrated in the poorest neighborhoods - planners are looking to change the agency once again. There is a broad consensus that old-fashioned social work in new friendly neighborhood centers is needed to help families who might have difficulty finding help from the complicated bureaucracy. In the last few years, H.R.A. officials have made some strides in management of some of the agency's biggest problems. Welfare checks have been replaced with an electronic payment system that cut waste and check-cashing charges to clients, while reducing overpayments and inappropriate case closings. Fewer families are homeless, as some notorious welfare hotels have been shut down and families placed in city apartments. +Despite continuing skepticism and complaints about the way some children are treated, the Child Welfare Administration has reported improved training and accountability and reduced the caseloads of child-care workers even as complaints of abuse and neglect are rising. +''We have now pretty much begun to deal with the front-end emergencies,'' said Gordon Berlin, executive deputy administrator of the H.R.A. ''We now have to look at exits - how to help families move closer to independence.'' The Human Resources Administration was set up in the heyday of the war on poverty. The idea at the time was to combine several independent and often-warring anti-poverty agencies with the existing welfare and youth offices and a new employment and training program to achieve ''a more unified and systematic attack on poverty.'' +Mr. Sviridoff said he thought that putting services in one agency could quickly lead to better coordination. But the idea failed, he said, because of turf battles, legislative requirements and bureaucratic inertia. +Nevertheless, while other ''super agencies'' set up during the Lindsay era were later eliminated, the H.R.A. remained, although youth and employment programs were weaned away during the Koch administration. There was some logic in that. H.R.A.'s programs operated under related provisions of Federal and state laws, and whether a service was intended for a child or a parent, it often served the same household. ''The major reason it hasn't disappeared even though the world has changed is that nobody can come up with a better idea,'' said Stanley Brezenoff, a former H.R.A. administrator and First Deputy Mayor in the Koch administration. +But the logic was the logic of the bureaucracy, rather than of people seeking help. There was typically one office for welfare benefits, and another for day-care services, still another for child welfare. +A series of reports recommended that various services be relocated to neighborhood sites. The most recent was a reorganization plan a commission prepared for Mayor Koch in 1985, which led to three limited ''multi-service'' centers. They combined offices for several different city programs in the same building, and welfare clerks were encouraged to recommend other services to clients. +''Every H.R.A. administrator has been for decentralizing service delivery,'' Mr. Brezenoff said. He said the major impediments were costs - usually the reorganization called for more services - and the lack of a plan that could achieve clear results. But with more families in trouble, policymakers have stepped up the search for ways to improve services. + +Caseworkers to Clerks +Up until the late 1960's caseworkers were assigned to all families on welfare. They visited homes, kept track of family problems, offered help. Then, largely in response to the notion that welfare was a right, not a gift, the caseworkers were replaced by clerks, who processed applications and determined eligibility. The welfare system was transformed into a banking operation. +Many planners in New York now say this was a mistake. In August, a few months before he left office, Mr. Grinker called for the establishment of family service centers, small, attractive offices in which groups of five welfare eligibility workers would be teamed with two caseworkers. The caseworkers would keep track of families and help them obtain the help they needed. +In a separate effort, a coalition of a hundred social-service advocates, known as the Agenda for Children Tomorrow Project, is drafting a proposal to establish community offices where a wide selection of city, state and private assistance, from welfare to mental health to law enforcement, would be available. The proposal is to be sent to Mayor Dinkins. +Eric Brettschneider, a former H.R.A. official who is coordinating the project, said that until recently the notion that the H.R.A. brought services together was a fiction. +''In fact, H.R.A.'s components didn't work in harmony,'' he said. ''They worked more often at odds with one another with occasional instances of cooperation.'' +Michael J. Dowling, the state's deputy secretary for human services, said the state was also exploring new approaches, and that most of these plans harked back to the help provided by settlement houses to generations of New Yorkers. +Meanwhile, Mayor Dinkins will have to sift through these plans while the city is under intensive pressure to cut costs. Mr. Dinkins said that no agency will be spared, but Norman Steisel, the First Deputy Mayor, said proposals for neighborhood centers were, at least, ''interesting,'' despite the possible cost. +''The mayor's interest is in having a greater neighborhood focus and integration of services,'' he said. + +THE MANY MANDATES OF HUMAN RESOURCES +Child Welfare Administration: Investigates allegations of abuse and neglect, provides preventive services to help families stay together, places children in foster care and arranges adoptions. +Agency for Child Development: Offers child-care services through day-care and preschool programs like Head Start to prepare children from low-income families for kindergarten. +Office of Family Services: Helps families facing homelessness by providing counseling and aid in applying for public assistance, food stamps and Medicaid. +Crisis Intervention Services: Finds temporary shelter for homeless families and helps move them into permanent housing. +Special Services for Adults: Operates homeless shelters, helps find permanent housing, runs home care for the elderly and senior citizen centers, and coordinates social services for people with AIDS. +Income Maintenance: Provides assistance like Aid to Families with Dependent Children and food stamps, helps prevent eviction. +Medicaid Eligibility: Determines who is eligible for the state-run Medicaid program. +Home Care Services: Offers housekeeping and health services to the disabled, allowing them to remain in their own homes. +Office of Employment Services: Provides job placement and training to employable welfare recipients. +Office of Child Support Enforcement: Collects child-support payments and locates legally responsible parents. + +ONE FAMILY'S JOURNEY THROUGH THE MAZE +Most of the 250,000 families receiving welfare in New York City can obtain benefits - up to $539 a month for a mother and two children - without much trouble. +But for families unfamiliar with the system, or those struggling with other problems, like drug abuse or homelessness, finding the way through the complex and often disorganized poverty bureaucracy can be a daunting and disheartening experience. +The increase in these troubled families has led to calls for family centers in neighborhoods where trained workers can help a family find assistance for many different kinds of problems. +Eric Brettschneider, a former official of the Human Resources Administration who, with a citizens group, is drafting a proposal for ''user friendly'' neighborhood centers, said he once came across a family that was being assisted by 58 different workers in 28 city and state agencies. +''The system reveals how it breaks down through these multiple-problem families,'' he said. ''Crack kids were once abused kids, delinquents were once victims of abuse and neglect, kids once in foster care are now homeless families.'' +Workers at the Children's Aid Society, a private agency under contract with the city, told the story of Andrea J., a single woman in her 30's with three children. She was receiving aid under a society program, financed by the H.R.A., that was intended to prevent the need for foster care. +Miss J. lived in a housing project in Harlem with her three children, ages 14, 8 and 2. She became a crack addict, and city workers took two of her children away and gave temporary custody to the children's grandmother, Miss J.'s mother. +Later, after the children had been returned to her, Miss J. got in a fight outside her building and said her life had been threatened. The family temporarily moved out of the apartment and into a city homeless shelter. +If the caseworker for the Children's Aid Society had not intervened, the H.R.A. would likely have stopped paying the rent on the Harlem apartment and the family would have been evicted. +The caseworker also worked with Housing Authority officials and persuaded them to find the family an apartment in a different neighborhood. +But the caseworker was only one of a handful of professionals working, with little coordination, to keep the family together. At various times a drug counselor, a caseworker from the city's Victims Services Agency and a worker from the city's Child Welfare Administration were also involved. +Even so, Miss J's 8-year-old son tried to strangle himself after a family argument, and was placed in an upstate residential treatment program where he is being treated for depression. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: A shelter for homeless men at the Atlantic Avenue Armory in Brooklyn. Sheltering the homeless is a major function of the Human Resources Administration (Impact Visuals/George Cohen); Woman and her child seeking help at a welfare office in the Bronx (The New York Times/Vic DeLucia); graphs showing number of reports of child abuse and neglect and number of children in foster care, 1982-89 (Source: Human Resources Administration) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +27 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 14, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +CONNECTICUT GUIDE + +SECTION: Section 12CN; Page 13, Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1084 words + + + +CHARLES IVES +Charles Ives, the Danbury-born composer who died in 1954 at the age of 80, is considered by many music authorities to have been America's most original composer, responsible for innovations often attributed to Stravinsky and Hindemith. The son of a band master, his early compositions incorporating fragments of jazz, ragtime, revival hymns and patriotic tunes were ridiculed so mercilessly that he took up a career in insurance to support his family, composing evenings and on weekends. +When recognition came, he maintained an attitude of rugged individualism, even giving away the money from a Pulitzer Prize he received in 1947 for his Third Symphony. +His music and spirit are captured in a recital called ''Charles Ives: A Musical-Dramatic Portrait'' with David Majoras, a baritone who incorporates several costume and makeup changes, and monologues taken from Ives's own writings, into a one-man program of Ives's songs. The performance begins at 8 P.M. Friday in Sprague Hall on the Yale campus in New Haven, where Ives was a student. +Mr. Majoras made his debut with the Arizona Opera in 1979 and has since appeared with the Wolf Trap Opera, Boise Opera and the San Francisco Opera. Admission is free. Call 432-4158 for more information. + +YOUNGER ARCHITECTS +''10/10 & Under,'' the title of a traveling exhibition organized by the Connecticut Society of Architects in New Haven, refers to architectural firms that have been in business 10 years or less and have 10 or fewer employees. ''We want to promote newer, younger firms,'' said Linda Griffith, administrative assistant at the society. ''Young architects have a hard time branching out on their own after working for established firms.'' +The 10 winners were chosen out of about 30 entries. Four hundred firms throughout the state are members of the society. +One house in the show, designed by J. P. Franzen Associates of Southport, is based on Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. An addition to the Darien Library was designed by Neil Hauck Architects of Darien. A pool and bathhouse facility at the Towers at Park Place, a condominium complex in Hartford, is the work of Goldberg and Lenane Architects of Hartford, and Straus-Edwards Associates of Woodbury designed a large addition and renovation at Southmayd, a home for the elderly in Waterbury. +Each project is represented by a yard-square storyboard with drawings, photographs and text showing how the design was conceived and executed. ''We hope it will better acquaint the public with the process of architecture and with some of the younger, innovative practitioners,'' said Ms. Griffith. +The exhibition may be seen at the Oliver Wolcott Library in Litchfield to Feb. 2. Hours are 10 A.M. to 9 P.M. Tuesday to Thursday, and 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Friday and Saturday. The show will be seen at various sites throughout the state until April; call the society at 865-2195 for further information. + +STUDENT ART +Tim Rollins, a special education teacher for learning and emotionally disabled students at a South Bronx school in New York, has created an unusual afterschool project called Art and Knowledge Workshop. One painting that emerged from the program, titled ''Metamorphosis'' and completed in 1989, was acquired by the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, where an exhibition of student art executed under Mr. Rollins's supervision opens today and remains on view to April 22. +The works in ''Tim Rollins + K.O.S.'' (for ''Kids of Survival'') evolved out of free-expression drawings done by students, 14 to 19 years old, while Mr. Rollins read to them from classics of world literature. Daniel Defoe's ''Journal of the Plague Year,'' about the 17th-century plague in Europe, was interpreted as the AIDS crisis in the South Bronx. Ray Bradbury's ''Farenheit 451'' inspired a series of works on censorship. Other pieces were generated by Nathaniel Hawthorne's ''Scarlet Letter,'' Malcolm X's autobiography, ''By Any Means Necessary,'' and by listening to Schubert's score for ''Winterreise.'' +An informal lecture about their work will be given by Mr. Rollins and some of the students at 2 P.M. today in the Courant Room of the museum. Exhibition hours are from 11 A.M. to 5 P.M. Tuesday to Sunday. Admission is $3, $1.50 for students and the elderly. No admission is charged on Thursdays and from 11 A.M. to 1 P.M. Saturdays. Call 278-2670 for more information. + +GEORGE BALANCHINE +The 40 years of George Balanchine's reign at American Ballet Theater are covered in a feature-length film to be shown at the Yale Art Gallery, 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, at 3 P.M. today. ''Dancing for Mr. B.: Six Balanchine Ballerinas'' had its premiere at the New York Film Festival in October. +The film begins in the early 1940's and documents the relationships between the choreographer and the dancers Mary Ellen Moylan, Maria Tallchief, Melissa Hayden, Allegra Kent, Merrill Ashley and Darci Kistler. +Archival footage coupled with contemporary scenes of the older dancers as teachers, interviews with the ballerinas on the subject of their mentor, and excerpts from performances are included in the film. It will be introduced by Deborah Dickson, co-director with Anne Belle and an Academy Award nominee. Admission is free. + +PLAYS IN PROGRESS +It's Winterfest time again at Yale, when the university's acclaimed Repertory Theater presents its 10th annual series of plays in progress Monday to Feb. 10. Four plays will be seen in rotation in two theaters. At the University Theater, 222 York Street, the offerings are ''Daylight in Exile'' by James D'Entremont, set in 1967 in Tunisia and dealing with the struggles of a troupe of Peace Corps volunteers, and Sam Kelley's ''Pill Hill,'' about African-American men seeking the American dream in Chicago's steel mills. +Scheduled at the Yale Repertory Theater, York and Chapel Streets, are ''Rust and Ruin'' by William Snowden and ''Dinosaurs'' by Doug Wright. The first takes place in a decrepit trailer in Georgia, where the children of an alcoholic farmer have returned for a joyless birthday celebration. ''Dinosaurs'' explores the odd goings on among the proprietor of a Dinosaur Park, a roving evangelist, a country music queen and an 8-year-old girl. +A Winterpass entitles the purchaser to see all four plays for $50. Single tickets are $18 and $25. Performances are at 8 P.M. weeknights, 2 and 8:30 P.M. Saturdays. Call 432-1234 for reservations and more information. $90ELEANOR CHARLES + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +28 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 14, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ABOUT LONG ISLAND; +Have Cast, Will Travel: Performing for the Love of It + +BYLINE: By FRED McMORROW + +SECTION: Section 12LI; Page 2, Column 1; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1045 words + +THE reason you sit down to the piano even if they all laugh is something that Bob Gemson, Dr. Stuart Rappaport, Hayley Kobilinsky and Barbara Brand know only too well. +Dr. Rappaport put it this way: ''If I have a talent, a gift, I want to share it with the world.'' +Dr. Rappaport, a heroic baritone, is an optometrist in Cedarhurst. At the age of 12, Miss Kobilinsky of Oceanside, a soprano, is a member of two opera companies in Brooklyn and in Queens. Ms. Brand is a deeper-ranging singer, a pianist and a choral director in the New York City schools. +They and Mr. Gemson, who retired from teaching at East Meadow High School 10 years ago, all share the same talent. They are most musical and they love to perform. +They and about 11 other people of various ages form Have Cast, Will Travel, a troupe of itinerant players directed by Mr. Gemson from his home in Valley Stream. Miss Kobilinsky is the youngest. Josephine Sarnoff, 80, of Merrick, is the eldest. She's a tap dancer. +Mr. Gemson also performs. He is a fine stand-up comic. Only for friends will he show that he really knows how to play the violin, his practical clown- prop. He is in the tradition of Jack Benny and Henny Youngman. He is also an accomplished pianist. Most of all, he says, he is an organizer. +The Manhattan-born Mr. Gemson had performed in and learned to manage variety revues at Catskills camps since he was in his teens. Later he did so in World War II with the Army. +He had a Fordham law degree but, like a lot of veterans, what he'd thought he'd like to be when he entered the service wasn't what he wanted to be and do when he got out. It wasn't the law. At East Meadow High, he taught courses related to the law. +Mr. Gemson told a nonperforming visitor all about this one recent night in his home as his volunteer charges were rehearsing in his living room. +Through the coming year, they will have as their stage the ballrooms or auditoriums of residences for the elderly, recreation centers or the auditoriums of places of worship. In fact, they have a date to entertain the elderly at 1:30 P.M. Tuesday, Feb. 20, at Blessed Sacrament Roman Catholic Church in Valley Stream. +When the time came, 10 years ago, whatever he thought he might like to do in retirement, Mr. Gemson just kept on creating, producing, sometimes writing, directing and performing in community variety shows. +His shows are not slapdash, anything-goes productions. Anything does not go: new volunteers are put through auditions, and Mr. Gemson has the rare extra talent of knowing when, and how, to say no. +The auditions and most of the rehearsals are held in the living room of the sprawling, early-baby-boom house that Bob and Miriam Gemson have shared since television was Milton Berle. Mrs. Gemson, a former teacher who retired last June, stays out of the act. +''When that gang comes in here, my stage is the kitchen,'' she said. ''Iced tea, hot coffee, cookies.'' Hungry. Like real actors. Also like real actors, the company is complete with a stage mother. Miss Kobilinsky came to the rehearsal with her mother, Estelle, who sat quietly while adoring Hayley's ''Getting to Know You'' and ''Matchmaker, Matchmaker'' to the piano accompaniment of Ms. Brand and, later, Mike Epstein of Cedarhurst, a mathematician and piano teacher. +There are two pianists, Mr. Gemson said, so that Ms. Brand can be spelled at the keys and get up and sing. +At one point, sitting at the piano to illustrate a point to someone who had never heard the tune, Ms. Brand played and vamped ''Ten Cents a Dance.'' It was suggested to her by older parties, Ms. Brand being so young that Rodgers and Hart's tribute to Roseland does not want rhythm. It's a dirge. Up for audition that recent night was Elisa Karnis of Merrick, who introduced herself shyly as ''an aspiring singer.'' Now, a Long Island living room is hardly the work stage of the Shubert Theater, but this was not a tin-eared audience. +Her singing of ''On My Own'' from ''Les Miserables'' told her listeners she could stop the guessing and aspiring; she was there. +Mr. Epstein played for Ms. Brand's enormous-voiced singing of ''Someone to Watch Over Me,'' in which she approached the final bar from a high E. He is a most musicianly player. The sheet music to the Gershwin ballad had been misplaced; he faked it, playing impeccably from memory. +Michelle Colwill of North Merrick turned into a percolating ''Honey Bun'' from ''South Pacific,'' and for a more modern encore, ''Little Girls'' from ''Annie.'' +The company's song-and-dance man is Morty Bishop of Valley Stream, a salesman of costume jewelry. His performing style is apparently based on two models, the Great George M. and the Great Durante. +Mr. Bishop gave his regards to Broadway, he saluted the grand old flag and he memorialized ''Harrigan, That's Me.'' ''He's got real stage presence, that one,'' Mr. Gemson said. Mr. Gemson himself brought out his violin. At the piano, Ms. Brand started the beat-beat-beat of the tom-tom of ''Night and Day.'' Mr. Gemson looked marvelously angry at the long introduction. Then he played marvelously off key. +He announced that he would eat his violin. He placed the wide end in his jaws and began to saw at the strings, producing sounds out of a bad dream. His players begged him to do more, but Mr. Gemson reminded them that they, not he, were there to rehearse. +Frank Venezia of Woodside, a stockbroker, sang ''Where or When'' and other gentle old tunes of the Crosby era (the one before the Sinatra era). They were standards that have lived past those long-gone days, but most of the younger performers did not recognize them. +At that, the visitor asked Mr. Gemson: How would an audience of grandfathers and grandmothers react to these youngsters? How could they identify? +It is because they were grandfathers and grandmothers of younger people that they identify, he said. +''You know, 'Oh, my daughter likes that number,' 'Oh, my grandson likes that number,' '' Mr. Gemson said. +Straw hat or top hat, amateur or professional, all variety companies have their favorite places to perform in. The Gemson company will present its major production in May at the East Meadow Public Library. For Have Cast, that's like playing the Palace. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo; Bob Gemson, Barbara Brand and Dr. Stuart Rappaport (NYT/Michael Shavel) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +29 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 15, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Puberty Rite for Girls Is Bitter Issue Across Africa + +BYLINE: By JANE PERLEZ, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 6, Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1404 words + +DATELINE: NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan. 11 + +In the sprawling cattle country of southwestern Kenya, a 12-year-old girl walked bravely along a dirt track, swathed in a brightly colored cloth and carrying an open black umbrella. Shilling notes dangled from her headgear, framing her face, as village people dressed in tree branches clapped and sang to her. +The girl had just been circumcised in a ceremonial rite of passage of the Kuria tribe. A local woman was paid about $6 to perform the procedure, in which the girl's clitoris was cut with a knife or razor. There was no anesthetic. +The circumcision of women, traditionally a means of guarding virginity or discouraging sexual intercourse outside marriage, is common in more than 20 African countries. In some societies, the operation involves slitting the hood of the clitoris; in others, the clitoris is completely excised and the sides of the vulva are stitched together, a process known as infibulation. +Reports from the United Nations suggest that the practice affects 20 million to 70 million women. Statistics are unreliable because the procedure is often performed clandestinely, usually by a local woman with no formal training. + +Infection, Perhaps Death +The operation can have severe consequences. It limits a woman's ability to enjoy sex and can result in bleeding and lead to tetanus and other infections, including damage to the fallopian tubes, which can cause infertility. Deaths are not uncommon. Practiced among Muslims, Christians and animists, the tradition of circumcising women dates to the Phoenicians in the fifth century. +For 10 years now, groups of African and European women, often under the banner of the United Nations, have been campaigning to end the ritual. To advance their cause, they have emphasized the medical hazards rather than the moral issues. But progress toward ending the practice has been slow. +In the Sudan, for example, the procedure remains common. Last year, a woman in her mid-20's from an educated family told a Western friend that she would undergo the operation on her own, even though her family had decided against having her circumcised. She said she felt that her fiance wished her to undergo the procedure. In Somalia, the circumcision of women is widely practiced outside the cities. Educated women, including the elite who have attended universities abroad, still feel pressure to have their daughters circumcised, not so much from men as from their mothers and grandmothers. + +Pressure From Older Women +''The older women still feel young girls are never going to get married unless they are circumcised,'' said Raakiya Omaar, a Somali who heads Africa Watch, a London-based human-rights organization. ''It's very much the wife having to fight her mother or his mother not to have it done.'' +The recent ceremony of the Kuria tribe, in which a number of girls were circumcised, prompted President Daniel arap Moi of Kenya to reiterate his opposition to the practice. His predecessor, Jomo Kenyatta, had endorsed circumcision of women as a form of nationalist resistance to colonial interference. +Mr. Moi is one of the few African heads of state to oppose the practice publicly, a stand he repeated in early January. Apparently feeling secure enough to withstand a traditionalist backlash, he outlawed the circumcision of women soon after he came to power in 1982. +Other leaders who have spoken against the practice are Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, who was deposed and executed in October, and Abdou Diouf of Senegal. + +Laws Accomplish Little +But laws against circumcising women have had little effect on long-held customs. ''It is one of the practices that will die, but it will take time,'' said Joyce Naisho, a nurse with the African Medical and Research Foundation. The influence of Christianity and wider education has helped curb the practice in Kenya, she said. +Yet the Masai, the tribe to which Mrs. Naisho belongs, and the Kalenjin, the people of President Moi, are among the groups that still practice the removal of the clitoris, she said. +Among the Masai, circumcision marks a girl's passage to adulthood. ''Once a girl starts menstruating, they consider circumcision,'' Mrs. Naisho said. +Usually, she said, a midwife or a woman who specializes in circumcising women takes the girl to the nearest river very early in the morning, when the water is at its coldest. The cold water helps to arrest the bleeding. A homemade razor blade is used to cut the clitoris. +For two or three years after the procedure, the Masai girls abstain from sexual intercourse, Mrs. Naisho said. Then they are ''shaved, cleansed and given away to marriage.'' + +'Ready for Marriage' +The social pressure to be circumcised is often overwhelming. Nelson Monanka, a 44-year-old farmer of the Kuria tribe, had his three daughters circumcised several weeks ago. ''Customs demand that they be circumcised at this stage to fit in the community,'' he said. ''They are also happy to be among the well-respected women here. +''There is no way girls can command respect here if they are not circumcised and ready for marriage,'' he said. Mr. Monanka's house was one of many flying flags to show that a member of the family had been circumcised. +The number of deaths from the procedure is not known in Kenya because the practice is largely covert. Mr. Moi banned the procedure after learning that 14 girls died and 9 others were taken to hospitals in critical condition after being circumcised. + +Many Painful Operations +The more extreme form of circumcision, infibulation, which is also called Pharaonic circumcision, is practiced in the Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria. It is usually performed on younger girls, from age 3 to about ages 6 or 7, and has far more serious effects. +Many women undergo a painful series of de-circumcisions and re-circumcisions after each childbirth. Scars from circumcisions are cut open before delivery and stitched together afterward. This causes severe hemorrhaging, prolongs delivery and increases the risk of fetal brain damage. +Girls are subjected to the more extreme procedure at a young age so that they will be unable to have sexual intercourse before marriage, said Awa Thiam, a researcher at the Department of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Dakar in Senegal. +''The girl who has been infibulated cannot have relations with a man before her de-infibulation, which in principle takes place only on the day the marriage is consummated and which is terribly painful,'' Dr. Thiam wrote in a paper for the United Nations Scientific and Educational Organization. +In the Sudan, this extreme form of circumcision is viewed as a way of preserving a girl's virginity and discouraging immorality. Excising the sensitive parts of the genitalia decreases sexual sensation, and the smaller vaginal opening makes penetration painful, leaving the girl fearful of sexual intercourse. +Many women in the Sudan and in other African societies accept circumcision because they are taught to believe that sexual pleasure is the exclusive right of men. + +A Quandary for Doctors +Such wide acceptance of the procedure poses an ethical quandary for qualified doctors working in hospitals. In Nairobi and in rural Kenyan centers with small hospitals, parents approach doctors and ask them to perform hygienic circumcisions. The parents say they will take their daughters to local midwives if the doctors refuse. +''It is completely against medical ethics and I have refused to do it,'' said Dr. Zolia Lyco, an obstetrician who has worked in Nigeria and Kenya. ''At some mission hospitals where they see a lot of damage done by local people, I think they'd do it.'' +Like many African women, Grace Ogot, Assistant Minister for Culture and Social Services in Kenya, wants to see an end to circumcision of women. She joined President Moi last week in condemning the practice, saying that it leaves ''permanent mental and physical trauma which at a later date in adulthood results in injurious childbirth to both mother and child.'' +But arguments that the circumcision of women is a means of gratifying men and denying women pleasure are often detrimental here, many say. +''It is such a long, embedded social tradition that if Western people say, 'this is barbaric,' it backfires,'' said Miss Omaar, the Somali who heads Africa Watch. ''Emphasis must be put on the medical aspects, not on the sexual issues.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: photo: A girl from the Kuria tribe in Kenya, center, after being circumcised in a ritual used to discourage women from having unsanctioned sexual intercourse. The practice is common in 20 African countries and affects 20 million to 70 million women, the United Nations estimates. (NYT/Waigwa Kiboi) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +30 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 15, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Washington Talk; +Scoring Political Points On Social Security Tax + +BYLINE: By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 12, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 737 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Jan. 14 + +Despite Republican claims, Federal taxes over all were not cut in the Reagan-Bush years. But Democrats have failed to persuade voters of that, or to call attention to the way the mix of taxes has changed. +That is mostly what is behind Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's proposal to cut the Social Security payroll tax. +The New York Democrat has already succeeded in scoring political points by embarrassing President Bush, forcing the White House to express disapproval of a plan that would cut workers' taxes by more than $60 billion in the next two years. That, from a President who has made opposition to higher taxes the cornerstone of his political philosophy. +And Senator Moynihan, who offered his plan just before New Year's Day and then left for Africa on a trip for the Foreign Relations Committee, has also managed to generate an unusual amount of debate on two points that he and some other Democrats have been harping on without much notice for years. +The first is that in the last decade lower income taxes were offset by higher Social Security taxes. The proportion of Federal taxes paid now is just under 20 percent of the gross national product, the same as at the beginning of the last decade. +Income taxes were sharply reduced. The top rate in the 1980's fell to 28 percent from 70 percent, providing a boon to the wealthy and some tax relief for the middle class and the working poor. +But at the same time, payroll taxes went way up. As of Jan. 1, workers and their employers are each paying 7.65 percent, 6.2 percent for retirement under Social Security and 1.45 percent for Medicare, the health insurance program for the elderly and disabled. The tax is paid on the first $51,300 earned. At the beginning of the decade, the payroll rate was 6.13 percent on the first $29,700 of income. +Nearly three-quarters of all Americans now pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes. In the view of many Democrats, that is an abomination. Income taxes increase the more a taxpayer earns. Social Security taxes, on the other hand, are paid at the same rate by all workers, and those making $500,000 a year pay no more than those making $51,300. This year, the maximum payroll tax will total $3,924.45. +Senator Moynihan's other point is that the growing surplus of Social Security revenue, which will exceed $250 billion by the year 2000, is being used to mask the deficit in the Government's operating budget rather than to guarantee pension benefits for today's workers when they retire. +In the current fiscal year, the Government is taking in $65 billion more in Social Security taxes than it is paying out in benefits. If it were not for the Social Security surplus, the deficit, by the Bush Administration's accounting, would be more than half again what it says it is, about $165 billion instead of $100 billion. The main reason the overall deficit has fallen in recent years is not so much that spending has been cut, but that Social Security taxes have been increased. +Using Social Security revenue in effect for day-to-day government expenses, Mr. Moynihan says, is a perversion of the reason a schedule of rising payroll taxes was set in 1983. The Senator was a key member of a Presidential commission that established the new rates. +The theory behind the new rates, he says, was to allow money to be invested in productive ventures, thus promoting economic growth and producing the revenue needed for retirement benefits in the next century. +Mr. Moynihan says that since that is not being done, the only reasonable action is to cut the Social Security tax rate. He would reduce it this year to 6.06 percent (7.51 percent with Medicare), where it was in 1989, and reduce it further in 1991 to 5.1 percent (6.55 percent with Medicare). So far, only a few conservative Republicans and no Democrats have embraced the proposal. But tax cuts are so popular that lawmakers may feel compelled to vote for the plan if Mr. Moynihan presses his case. +Democratic leaders are hoping he will not do so. They are glorying in the political mileage the Senator is getting, but deep down they think the last thing the country needs is a tax cut of any kind. +''The Moynihan proposal reflects our frustration,'' said Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the House majority leader. But like the other leaders in the House and the Senate, he said he was unwilling to make a commitment. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +31 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 16, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Men at 65: New Findings On Well-Being + +BYLINE: By DANIEL GOLEMAN + +SECTION: Section C; Page 1, Column 1; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 1309 words + +THE secret of emotional health among older men is not a successful career, a happy marriage or a stable childhood, new findings suggest. It lies instead in an ability to handle life's blows without passivity, blame or bitterness. +The findings, which contradict widely held theories about the importance of early life for emotional well-being in adulthood, are among recent conclusions of a study of 173 men who have been scrutinized at five-year intervals since they graduated from Harvard in the early 1940's. +The project, known as the Grant study after the W. T. Grant Foundation, which initially supported it, is one of a handful that have intensively assessed people at regular intervals through their adult years. Such studies are particularly valuable for the understanding of psychological development because they allow researchers to see what factors matter, for better or worse, later in life. +The researchers defined emotional health at 65 as the ''clear ability to play and to work and to love,'' and a feeling of satisfaction with life. +These were among their findings: +* Pragmatism and dependability are particularly important. +* Many factors in early life, even devastating problems in childhood, had virtually no effect on well-being at 65. +* Being close to one's siblings at college age was strongly linked to emotional health at 65. +* Severe depression earlier in life caused problems that persisted. +* Traits that were important at college age, like the ability to make friends easily, were unimportant later in life. +The latest data were collected by George E. Vaillant, a psychiatrist at Dartmouth Medical School. He and his wife, Caroline O. Vaillant, a social worker, reported the findings in an article in the January issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry. In 1977 Dr. Vaillant published a book, ''Adaptation to Life'' (Little, Brown), based on findings of how the men fared at the age of 47. +The men hardly represent a cross-section of Americans. All were Harvard undergraduates, white, and in good mental and physical health when selected. The researchers say that by avoiding complicating factors like sex, economic status and race, they were able to focus on more subtle forces that propel one person forward while another lags. +One of the most surprising results, Dr. Vaillant said, was that having been close to one's brothers and sisters at college age strongly predicted emotional well-being in adulthood - far more strongly, for example, than having had a good marriage or successful career. Those who were only children or who said they were distant from their siblings at college age fared poorly at 65 compared with those who had at least one close brother or sister. +Before age 50, the most powerful predictors of adult mental health were an emotionally close home life as a child and parents who encouraged trust and initiative. But by 65 those factors faded in significance, and closeness to siblings in childhood ''became as powerful a predictor of later-life adjustment'' as three other factors taken together: family closeness, good relations with parents and the absence of emotional problems in childhood. Dr. Vaillant said researchers could only guess at the reasons. ''It's intriguing, a sleeper variable that didn't show up as important until the men reached 65,'' said Dr. Vaillant. ''I would guess that those who were close early in life had the seeds of a good relationship late in life.'' +At the age of 47, the quality of relationships with siblings was not an important factor; having a good marriage and enjoyable job were more strongly related with life satisfaction and emotional health. But in the decade before retirement age, neither mattered as much as did having been close to a sibling earlier in life. + +'Lots of Surprises' +By and large, those most satisfied at 47 were still happy at 65. But ''there were lots of surprises,'' said Dr. Vaillant. Poor health or alcoholism in that 18-year span set some men back; those with ''strong stoicism'' at 47 were doing well at 65. +The researchers found little evidence that several factors long assumed to be important in lifelong psychological development had much effect on well-being at 65. They included being poor or orphaned in childhood, having parents who divorced (or who were happily married) and having emotional problems in childhood or college. +For instance, of the 204 men in the original group, 13 felt troubled enough during college to have seen a psychiatrist. But by the age of 65 these men fared no worse than the rest of the group. +''In the long run, people are extraordinarily adaptable,'' Dr. Vaillant said. ''Given enough time, people recover and change; a half-century perspective shows that time heals.'' +One of the most devastating experiences over the course of life was a severe depression, Dr. Vaillant found. Of the 204 men, 21 had such a depression at some point between the ages of 21 and 50. In the latest study, 15 of the 21 were chronically ill or had died. +''I expected that the men in the study would be better-adapted and protected than most,'' Dr. Vaillant said. ''If they got depressed, it would pass with little lasting effect. But depression led to a greater global disruption of life than any other single factor.'' + +Buffers Against Depression +Having close family relations may have been a buffer against depression, since the researchers found that having had a ''bleak childhood'' predicted depression later in life. But not all of those who had a difficult childhood became depressed. And for those who escaped depression, bad times in childhood seemed to have little long-term effect. +Only 7 percent of those who did well at 65 had not been close to a brother or sister, Dr. Vaillant said. Of the 21 men who became seriously depressed at some point in their lives, 12 were only children or said they were estranged from their siblings by college age. +Whether they were only children or were distant from brothers and sisters, he said, ''the effects of the isolation seem to be the same in later life.'' Psychoanalytic theories of depression hold that emotional warmth early in life, whether with parents or siblings, can be a buffer against depression later. +One of the most potent predictors of well-being at 65 was the ability to handle emotional crisis maturely. Immature reactions included becoming bitter or prejudiced, collecting injustices, feigning cheerfulness and chronically complaining without allowing anyone to help. +The best way to handle emotional crisis, the study found, is to control the first impulse and give a more measured response. ''It's having the capacity to hold a conflict or impulse in consciousness without acting on it,'' Dr. Vaillant said. ''You can acknowledge the clouds, but also see the silver lining.'' +Two lifelong traits, pragmatism and dependability, also emerged as particularly important to emotional health at 65 - more so than being clever in analytic work or having a creative flair. +Those who in college had been seen as being good at practical organization in their course work, rather than as having a theoretical, speculative or scholarly bent, were among the healthiest in mind at retirement age, the study found. So were those who as college sophomores were rated by a psychiatrist as ''steady, stable, dependable, thorough, sincere and trustworthy.'' +On the other hand, traits that seemed important for psychological adjustment in college mattered less and less over the years. Among these were spontaneity and the ability to make friends easily. +By 65, being pragmatic and well-organized was the trait that most strongly predicted well-being. ''It's another way of measuring perseverance,'' Dr. Vaillant said. ''At this age, perseverance is more important than whether you can run the bases fast.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +32 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 16, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Streptococcal Infections Are Rising in U.S. + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section C; Page 8, Column 4; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 427 words + +DATELINE: ATLANTA, Jan. 15 + +Serious streptococcal infections, including strep throat and rheumatic fever, are on the rise and have re-emerged as a public health problem, Federal health officials say. +In its weekly report on Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control said Group A streptococcus bacteria, which cause rheumatic fever, strep throat and impetigo, have caused several outbreaks of disease. +In the first eight months of 1989, for example, one hospital in Colorado reported 19 cases of streptococcal bacteremia, a serious feverish infection that pervades the bloodstream. The number was up from 8 in all of 1988 and 3 in 1987. The infection occurs most often among the elderly, including nursing home residents. + +Need for Early Treatment +Some cases might have been prevented if doctors had better treated the original infection before it reached the bloodstream, said Dr. Ben Schwartz of the Centers for Disease Control. +''Many of these patients had respiratory infections; others had skin infections,'' he said. ''It's conceivable that if they had been treated early, it may not have spread to the severe bacteremia that occurred.'' +That outbreak followed reports of an outbreak of infections resembling toxic shock in 1987 and clusters of rheumatic fever in 1985 and 1986. +The centers also reported an outbreak of strep throat among 186 trainees at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas in December 1988 and January 1989. The outbreak resulted in precautionary penicillin treatments for more than 6,000 trainees, the first such program at the base in more than 15 years. +The agency said the outbreak showed that streptococcus diseases, which struck many recruits in World Wars I and II, still pose a risk at military training centers. + +Outbreaks Abroad +''A number of different, severe strep infections do seem to be increasing in certain areas,'' Dr. Schwartz said. ''We need to gather similar information from other areas and see if this is a localized problem or a problem that's more widespread.'' +The agency has also received reports of streptococcal bacteremia outbreaks in England and Scandinavia, suggesting ''widespread changes'' in the pattern of this disease. +Most streptococcus infections are mild, like a typical case of strep throat, and most cases can be cleared up with antibiotics like penicillin. ''Very rarely does it spread to cause an infection in the blood,'' Dr. Schwartz said. +Severe infections like bacteremia and scarlet fever were once much more common than they are today. One reason for the decline is the use of modern antibiotics. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +33 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 17, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Laws Aim to Turn Off Ear-Splitting 'Boom' Cars + +BYLINE: By KATHERINE BISHOP, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16, Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1095 words + +DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 16 + +Acting on citizens' complaints, states are beginning to take action against the latest violation of the social contract: the boom car. +Cities in California, Florida and New Jersey have already passed local legislation to force drivers with loud car stereos to turn down the volume, and public outrage is persuading legislators to take statewide action in some areas to help restore public tranquillity. +''Everybody's cars are booming,'' said Jesse (Chuy) Varela, the host of a radio program for cruising teen-agers that is heard all over the San Francisco Bay Area from KPFA radio in Berkeley. ''It's the whole rebel spirit that every teen-age generation has, but with the new technology, it's kind of getting out of hand.'' +Young people are converting cars into rolling radio stations by stuffing them with dozens of speakers, compact disk ''jukeboxes'' and amplifiers capable of booming rock and rap music at decibel levels powerful enough to rattle neighbors' windows, ruin their own hearing and assault their captive audience on the street. They are being spurred on by technological advances in automobile sound and by national competitions with names like ''Sound Quake'' and ''Thunder on Wheels.'' The equipment is being installed by shops with slogans like ''We Build Ground Pounders.'' + +California and Hawaii Act +California, where the boom car phenomenon began before spreading to the South and Midwest, became the first state to pass legislation aimed at controlling the noise. The law, which took effect Jan. 1, makes it illegal to operate a car sound system that can be heard 50 feet away. Offenders are subject to a $50 fine for the first offense, with fines increasing for subsequent violations. +The Hawaii State Legislature plans to consider a measure this month that would impose fines and even provide for confiscation of such sound systems when motorists are convicted of the petty misdemeanor of noise pollution. +While California and Hawaii are the only states to take action so far, other states may soon follow. Cheryl Hollins, executive vice president of the Car Audio Specialists Association, which represents the mobile stereo industry, said, ''We expect more legislation if users don't curb the way they use the equipment.'' +Renay Montane, a legislative aide to State Senator Cecil Green, a Democrat who sponsored the California law, said hundreds of local governments have passed similar legislation. Among them are Jersey City, Camden, N.J., Long Beach, Calif., and dozens of suburbs of Los Angeles. +John Andsell, the Mayor of Bellflower near Los Angeles, testified in favor of the statewide California legislation. He cited problems ranging from captive audiences in cars stuck in traffic next to boom cars to concerns that the drivers of those cars cannot hear sirens of emergency vehicles to complaints from elderly people with hearing aids who are ''thrown off kilter'' by the further amplification of the already-blasting sound. + +Little Room for Passengers +Those who compete in sound competitions say the thump of a high-decibel stereo is addictive. ''You ask yourself, 'If 200 watts sound good, what will 400 watts sound like?' '' said Pat Brister, the manager of Sound Experience in Arlington Heights, a suburb of Chicago. Mr. Brister won honors two years in a row in the power category at the ''Thunder on Wheels'' competition in New Orleans. His 15-speaker system packing 890 watts was installed in a 1987 Thunderbird, leaving enough space for ''a passenger and maybe a folding toothbrush,'' he said. +Other competitors report even more powerful motivations. ''I like attention,'' said Scott Starr of Canfield, Ohio, a suburb of Youngstown. Mr. Starr, who is 20 years old, says his $35,000 sound system, installed in a mini-van that includes 25 speakers, allows his mother to hear him coming home ''from three miles away.'' +Mr. Starr was the winner in the amateur class at the First International Auto Sound Invitational Challenge held last November in Tempe, Ariz. The 149 decibels the system is capable of producing - equivalent to the sound of a jet taking off as heard from the deck of an aircraft carrier - is an attention grabber. He said young adults loved to crowd around the van at shopping malls to appreciate its sheer ''awesomeness.'' +Describing the complaints he gets from older drivers ''when I pull up beside people and their car starts rattling,'' he boasted, ''I can vibrate them from two car lengths away.'' + +'I'm Young and Stupid' +Asked whether he was worried that he might be harming his hearing, Mr. Starr said: ''They tell me it will hurt me down the line, but I don't care. I'm young and stupid, I guess.'' +Joanne M. Rooney, the executive director of the International Auto Sound Challenge Association of Riverside, Calif., which sponsors the competition, denied that her organization fostered boom cars. +''We want to recreate the quality of a live performance whether it's Beethoven or Pink Floyd,'' Mrs. Rooney said. Her organization, which was the only one that formally opposed the California legislation, argues that sound competitions provide an outlet for showing off sound systems ''without annoying the neighbors.'' +She said drivers who go booming ''are like peacocks strutting their stuff around a female,'' adding, ''They want to be noticed.'' +Experts say the cumulative effect of close exposure to these noise levels can cause permanent hearing loss. +Karen L. Jackson, the information co-ordinator for the National Institute on Deafness at the National Institutes of Health, said damage to hearing from prolonged exposure to high-volume music would be among the topics at a three-day conference on noise and hearing loss to begin Monday in Bethesda, Md. +While industry experts object to characterizations of the loudness of boom systems as misleading and even ''ludicrous,'' hearing specialists have likened the levels of sound produced by a boom car to a chorus of pneumatic drills. Amplified rock music, which can reach 140 decibels, is rated dangerous by experts. +Sitting in the back seat of a car whose trunk is loaded with woofers that are each capable of handling 600 watts certainly produces a kidney-pounding experience. ''The sensation of the sound pressure is a thrill,'' said Tony Alvarez of Peter's Auto Radio in San Francisco. +While booming is generally associated with rock and rap music, some devotees prefer to boom the classics. +''They play the 1812 Overture,'' Mrs. Rooney said, ''and when it hits that cannon, you're going to hit the peak.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +34 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 19, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Fight Over Tax Cut Heats Up As Bush and Moynihan Dig In + +BYLINE: By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1070 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Jan. 18 + +An emerging battle over whether to cut Social Security taxes heated up today with President Bush sharply criticizing the proposed cut while the author of the proposal, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, said he would not budge. +Their statements indicated that Mr. Moynihan's proposal could trigger a fierce political and legislative battle over a sensitive issue. +Mr. Bush called the Senator's proposal to cut Social Security taxes a ''charade'' that would lead to a tax increase or lower retirement benefits. Mr. Moynihan, in his first interview on the subject since he made the proposal three weeks ago, insisted that he intended neither a political trap nor a gambit to force other taxes to be raised. He also strongly rejected the suggestion that he wanted to lower retirement payments. +Mr. Moynihan, a New York Democrat, last month proposed repealing the Jan. 1 increase in the Social Security payroll tax, calling it regressive and unfair. He also assailed the Bush Administration for using the $52 billion surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund to finance the Federal deficit. + +Quayle Exhorts Party on Issue +At the White House today, President Bush repeated the charges his aides have been making for days. ''It's an effort to get me to raise taxes on the American people by the charade of cutting them, or cut benefits,'' the President said of the Moynihan proposal, ''and I'm not going to do it to the older people of the country.'' +With both sides jockeying for political advantage, Vice President Quayle also weighed in on what has become one of the hottest topics of an especially slow period in Washington. +In an interview with The Associated Press, the Vice President said: ''Let me tell you something. Cut these taxes the way Moynihan is talking about, you have to cut benefits at some time, and the President and the Republican Party now have an opportunity to show the American people, once and for all, that the Republicans are as committed to the integrity of this Social Security trust fund as anybody.'' + +Moynihan Sees No Budget Link +Senator Moynihan was interviewed by in a telephone call to Jerusalem, where he is winding up a trip for the Foreign Relations Committee to Africa and the Middle East. +''No, no, no,'' the Senator said when asked whether his proposal was a trap to force an increase in the income tax or some other tax. ''It is not fair to say I want to raise taxes to offset the Social Security tax cut.'' +The Social Security system, he continued, ''edges on the sacred, and to see its revenues debauched this way is an independent question that stands apart from the budget deficit, a tax increase or any other question.'' + +How It's Being Paid +As of Jan. 1, workers and their employers are each paying a 7.65 percent payroll tax, 6.2 percent for retirement under Social Security and 1.45 percent for Medicare, the health insurance program for the elderly and disabled. The Social Security rate rose from 6.06 percent last year and the overall rate from 7.51 percent. +The tax is paid on the first $51,300 of wages. The maximum tax this year is $3,924.45. +Mr. Moynihan would repeal this year's increase and reduce the Social Security portion of the tax to 5.1 percent next year, saving workers and their employers as much as $560 apiece. + +Social Security and Income Tax +He argued that in the Reagan and Bush years the Social Security tax had been increased to balance a cut in income taxes. That is ''inequitable,'' he said, because the poor and the middle class are affected more by the Social Security tax and less by the income tax. +Income tax rates increase the more a taxpayer earns from all sources. Social Security taxes are paid at the same rate by all workers, they are assessed only on wages and not on interest, dividends or capital gains, and they are not paid at all on wages above $51,300. +''We now have the most regressive tax system in the Western world,'' Mr. Moynihan said. +Congress has been in recess since Mr. Moynihan offered his proposal just before New Year's Day. Democrats have reveled in the political discomfort it has caused President Bush and his Republican allies, but no Democrat has yet endorsed the Moynihan plan. The only support Mr. Moynihan has gained has come from a few conservative Republican lawmakers. +The view of most Democrats is that Mr. Moynihan should be applauded for underscoring the inequities of the tax system and the extent to which Social Security revenue is being used to mask the size of the Government's budget deficit. But the Democrats, and most moderate Republicans, also believe that the country cannot afford a tax cut of any kind. + +Schumer Sees Economic Danger +Reflecting that conviction, Representative Charles E. Schumer, a Brooklyn Democrat who is on the Banking and Budget committees, said a tax cut would drive up the deficit, cause more Government borrowing, soak up private savings and damage long-term economic growth. +Senator Moynihan said he hoped that the President and Congress could get together and agree on ways to reduce the budget deficit, by cutting spending or increasing some other tax. But even without that, he said, the Social Security tax should be lowered. ''If the deficit is increased, that would be bad,'' he said. ''But if we have to go through a small crisis to straighten things out, fine, let's do it.'' +Mr. Moynihan observed that he had long supported an increased gasoline tax, but he said he would not stick his neck out and suggest any tax increase now unless Mr. Bush did likewise. +The issue is being driven by partisan politics. Senator Moynihan has embarrassed Republicans by proposing a tax cut. It is the same kind of proposal that helped Republicans win the last three Presidential elections. + +Help to All Workers Seen +Mr. Moynihan said that a reduction in the Social Security tax would help all workers, while the Bush plan to lower the capital gains tax rate would largely help the wealthy. +The rejoinder today from Mr. Bush and Mr. Quayle - that Mr. Moynihan's plan would lead to a cut in Social Security benefits - was similarly a move to capture a Democratic stronghold, the party's long-time advocacy of higher retirement payments. +Mr. Moynihan maintains that the money raised today through Social Security taxes affects future benefits only indirectly. He said he planned nothing that would lower those benefits. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +35 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 19, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +High Cholesterol Poses Heart Risk in Older Men, Study Says + +BYLINE: By JANE E. BRODY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 19, Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 514 words + +Older men whose cholesterol levels are above normal face an increased risk of developing coronary heart disease, according to new findings from a large, ongoing study. +The findings contradict the prevailing medical view that high cholesterol levels are less important in the elderly than in younger people. The study, involving 1,480 men over 65 years of age, showed that, as with the middle-aged, those with higher blood levels of cholesterol on average face a 60 to 70 percent greater risk of suffering a heart attack than similar men with lower cholesterol levels. +In fact, those in the study whose cholesterol levels were 250 milligrams per 100 milliliters of blood serum or higher were more than twice as likely to develop heart disease as men with cholesterol levels of 200 milligrams or lower. +The results are described in today's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association by Dr. Richard Benfante and Dr. Dwayne Reed of the Kuakini Medical Center in Honolulu. + +Earlier Study Cited +The study's subjects are among more than 8,000 men in Honolulu who have been followed since the mid-1960's to determine what influences their chances of developing heart disease. Before this study, few large studies had examined the fate of older people with respect to coronary risk factors. +But the first hint that a raised cholesterol level was an important risk factor for heart disease in older people came three years ago in results from the Framingham, Mass., Heart Study, which included both men and women. +These findings are important because a national program now seeks to measure cholesterol levels in all adult Americans and encourages dietary and other treatments for those found to have high cholesterol levels that may set the stage for clinical heart disease. Without abundant, clear-cut evidence that high blood cholesterol is dangerous for the elderly, physicians have been reluctant to press treatment on older people, many of whom are already obliged to follow special diets and take multiple medications for other ailments. + +Other Known Risk Factors +Both in Honolulu and in Framingham, raised cholesterol levels in older people were shown to increase their coronary risk independent of other known risk factors, such as high blood pressure, cigarette smoking, diabetes, age and obesity. Both studies showed that as cholesterol levels rose, so did the men's chances of suffering a heart attack. +The Honolulu researchers concluded that when older men are found to have elevated cholesterol levels they should be treated in the same way that younger men with high cholesterol are treated. A more detailed analysis of the fats in their blood should be made and they should be placed on a cholesterol-lowering diet. Only if diet fails to correct the problem is drug treatment advised. +According to the national guidelines, people should be urged to take steps to lower their cholesterol level if it is at or above 240 milligrams per 100 milliliters of blood serum. The overall goal is to reduce blood cholesterol to 200 milligrams or less. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +36 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 21, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Cranston Decides to Fight in Effort to Overcome Image in Savings and Loan Failure + +BYLINE: By KATHERINE BISHOP, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 24, Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 702 words + +DATELINE: LOS ANGELES, Jan. 19 + +Declaring himself ''bloodied but unbowed,'' Senator Alan Cranston has abandoned his tactic of lying low in the Lincoln Savings and Loan failure and come out swinging in a fight to save his political life. +In a two-day blitz of California's major cities, Senator Cranston, a Democrat, assailed his chief accuser, Edwin J. Gray, formerly the Reagan Administration's chief regulator of savings and loan institutions, as a ''political hack.'' Mr. Cranston said he was aiming his attack at Mr. Gray because the nation's most expensive savings and loan failure ''happened on his watch.'' +At a news conference here today, Mr. Cranston accused Mr. Gray, the former chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, of treating the regulatory board as a personal ''good ship Lollipop'' by benefiting from junkets and lavish expense-account living. ''When it turned into the Titanic, he began looking for scapegoats,'' Mr. Cranston said. + +Vows to Seeks Fifth Term +One of the Senate's most powerful members as Democratic whip, Mr. Cranston is now facing a re-election battle for his fifth term in 1992 in a state whose voters are increasingly Republican. And a poll conducted last month by the Mervin Field Institute found that nearly two in every three voters surveyed said they were not inclined to vote for Mr. Cranston. +Despite these findings and public statements from other Democratic officeholders here urging him to rethink his candidacy, Mr. Cranston said this week that he will seek re-election. +He said he would carry out his promise to find a way to help the approximately 23,000 Californians who bought millions of dollars in uninsured bonds from Lincoln's parent company, the American Continental Corporation. +''These bonds are now worthless,'' Mr. Cranston said, ''and many widows and elderly people have lost their life savings. I've talked to some of them and I know how tragic the situation is. It is Edwin Gray who bears the responsibility, and he cannot escape that truth.'' +Many investors have said they thought the bonds were insured by the Government because they were sold at branches of Lincoln Savings. + +Senator Is Accused of Pressure +Mr. Cranston, who with four other Senators met with Mr. Gray in April 1987, has been accused of pressuring the regulators to quickly end their audit of Lincoln Savings. The meetings are the subject of an investigation by the Senate ethics committee. Mr. Cranston accepted nearly $900,000 in donations for his party or for groups he controlled or founded from the former chairman of American Continental, Charles B. Keating Jr. of Phoenix. +The Government took control of Lincoln in April 1989, and the company's failure may cost taxpayers more than $2 billion in bailout money. +Mr. Cranston said today that he had no knowledge of the sale of American Continental bonds at Lincoln branches at the time he met with Mr. Gray. But he acknowledged here and at earlier news conferences in Sacramento that Mr. Keating was seeking a rapid conclusion to the audit as well. + +Cranston Releases Evidence +Mr. Cranston released copies of documents today that were gathered by the General Accounting Office at his request. He said the documents showed that the Federal Government was negligent in letting the bond sales continue after agents working for Mr. Gray raised questions about the financial state of American Continental and Lincoln Savings, and because regulators failed to make on-site inspections of bond sales at the Lincoln offices. +But in releasing the documents, Mr. Cranston may have hurt his own case. Summaries of regulatory oversight on both a Federal and state level point to a complex system of jurisdictions that resulted in the failure to detect Lincoln's financial difficulties, rather than pinpointing Mr. Gray's agency. +Mr. Cranston said he would sponsor legislation that would allow holders of the worthless bonds to pursue civil law suits against the Federal Government if suits currently filed against American Continental and Mr. Keating failed to repay them. +Mr. Cranston conceded that legal proceedings in the case would take years and would not be resolved before the 1992 election, but he said he would still win. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Senator Alan Cranston of California, who is trying to save his political life in the wake of the failure of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. (Agence France-Presse) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +37 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 21, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Cordelia T. Pitman, Student, to Marry + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2, Page 47, Column 5; Society Desk + +LENGTH: 173 words + +Cordelia Taylor Pitman and Winslow James Furber plan to marry in June, her parents, Virginia Bradley Pitman of New York and Bay Head, N.J., and Dr. Walter Clarkson Pitman 3d of New York, have announced. The prospective bridegroom is a son of Mr. and Mrs. Edward B. Furber of Bow, N.H. +Miss Pitman, 26 years old, expects to receive a master's degree in architecture from Columbia University in May. She is a graduate of the Church of the Heavenly Rest Day School in New York, the Spence School and Middlebury College. Her father is a geophysicist and a senior research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University in Palisades, N.Y. Her mother is the director in New York of Meals-on-Wheels America, which assists programs that deliver food to elderly people at home. +Mr. Furber, 26, a graduate of Middlebury, owns the Winslow J. Furber Marine Sculptor Studio and Gallery in York Harbor, Me. His father is a senior vice president of Amoskeag Bank Shares, a bank holding company in Manchester, N.H. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Cordelia Pitman (Bachrach) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +38 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 21, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Cold, in the Winter Years + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 20, Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 256 words + +The golden years. Senior citizenship. These aren't necessarily euphemisms for age and infirmity. Many Americans age gracefully, in good health, with sound finances and close to children and grandchildren. A half-century of advances in medicine and Social Security has made retirement something to look forward to. For many. For many others, the winter of life is not warmed by any such golden glow. What they are closest to is pain, poverty, loneliness and despair. They may lack a permanent home or -look at the streets - any home at all. That is why The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund pays special attention to older adults. The fund tries to bring warmth and comfort to shivering bodies and desolate minds. It helps many to retain their independence and to avoid institutionalization. For instance, many can remain in their own homes if given assistance, like regular visits by trained and caring aides who can help them shop and cook and provide occasional companionship. +That's wiser and warmer than sending people to nursing homes, and it's also much cheaper. But it's not free. +The eight social service agencies that share in the fund's proceeds focus on such crucial support, while also dealing with the entire range of needs starting in childhood. +The holiday season is past but the appeal continues, now and through the year. All who care are asked to help. +Tax-deductible contributions should be sent to The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, Post Office Box 5193, General Post Office, New York, N.Y. 10087. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo of elderly man (Paul Fusco/Magnum) + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +39 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 21, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +PUBLIC & PRIVATE; +Rooms Of Their Own + +BYLINE: By Anna Quindlen + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 21, Column 6; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 786 words + +When Ellen Baxter was working on a report about the homeless people of New York City, she went into shelters and subway stations and parks to talk to them about their lives. The problem was enormous but her conclusion was simple. ''It was so obvious to me that what they wanted was a place to live,'' she says. ''They wanted a key and a room where they could lock the door.'' +That was 10 years ago, and in that time the number of homeless people has multiplied and the patience of the public has worn thin. It seems the homeless have always been with us, and it's begun to occur to us that lots of them are people we don't like very much. +Ten years ago some of the homeless were older people, disenfranchised by misfortune or fire or expensive building rehabilitations. Some were former mental patients sent to the streets by government policy that said large institutions were an affront to humanity but provided few small ones in their place. ''Lady, could you spare a quarter,'' said the men, their faces vermilion from years of Thunderbird. If a wild woman zoomed by, shouting imprecations at President Kennedy and the Pope, you looked twice. +Today no one looks twice. The old homeless are still on the streets, but the holes in the societal safety net have spit out new companions. Young men roving the bus terminal, just out of jail, some of them, and seemingly looking for a way back in. Young women pushing strollers in midtown at midnight, tired of the four walls of the welfare hotel and three kids under the age of 4. In one subway station a homeless man lies on the floor at the foot of the stairs and orders passers-by, ''Put the money in the cup.'' +This has made people angry, and no wonder. Problem is, some of them get angry at the homeless. ''Not in my neighborhood,'' we say about shelters, but it's already too late. If they're not in your neighborhood yet, sleeping in the doorways, looking through the dumpsters for dinner, they will be soon. To explain our antipathy we say that the problem is too big and intractable to solve. +While we've been saying that, people like Ellen Baxter have been quietly trying to solve it. In 1986, Ms. Baxter opened The Heights in a stolid gray apartment building with a panoramic view of the feed to the George Washington Bridge. The building is furnished with vanilla-and-gilt French provincial furniture, a donation from the Pierre Hotel. +There are 55 permanent tenants, veterans of such diverse venues as the 181st Street subway station, High Bridge Park and the Fort Washington Armory, where 800 beds may be lined up across the floor on any given night to welcome those who have no place to go. Visualizing it in the mind's eye makes it easy to understand why homeless people do not like shelters. +The people who live in The Heights, and the three other buildings Ms. Baxter now oversees, are people with problems. They are people, some of them, who have smoked crack and passed out drunk and spent time in psychiatric wards, and who may do so in the future. +But they once were homeless and now are living with leases, with keys, some with jobs, all with dignity. Their subsidized rent comes out of a welter of entitlement programs and, in some cases, their own wages. They still may not be people we like very much. That shouldn't matter, but it does. We like to like the people we help, to have a poster child. It is time to grow up about this. Public policy cannot be determined by our collective warm fuzzies. +We may have one of two motives in this matter, vastly different but leading us to the same place. We can demand that government finance more small permanent residences like The Heights because that is the right thing to do, because we have looked into the faces of homeless men and women and occasionally recognized ourselves. That probably requires more than most of us can find within ourselves at this point, after explaining to our children why the man is swearing at the fire hydrant, after having someone urinate in our doorway. +So there is another reason to demand that government support those groups that have found humane and permanent solutions. The Heights costs about $15 per person per day, including the cost of its staff of social workers and counselors. The armory, that vast expanse of temporary beds, costs at least twice that. +Look at it from a purely selfish point of view as well. You want the sidewalks and the parks to be clear again. You want to be left alone and not importuned for a dollar a dozen times a day. And up in Washington Heights, and in other quietly compassionate places all over this city, there are people who can help make that happen in a way that will not shame us as human beings. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-ed + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +40 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 21, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WE HAVE MET THE ELDERLY AND THEY ARE US + +BYLINE: By HAROLD L. SHEPPARD; Harold L. Sheppard is the director of the International Exchange Center on Gerontology at the University of South Florida, Tampa. + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 36, Column 1; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 959 words + + +RISKING OLD AGE IN AMERICA +By Richard J. Margolis. +202 pp. Boulder, Colo.: +Westview Press. +Cloth, $36.50. Paper, $14.95. +This book is a product of a grant from the Families United for Senior Action Foundation, an advocacy group for the elderly poor. It is intended as an antidote to the negative image of the greedy, overly affluent elderly, an image frequently found on the Op-Ed pages even of respectable publications. +''Risking Old Age in America'' may achieve its purpose (though, for some, the detailed descriptions of the plight of specific individuals, rather than evoking chords of sympathy, will no doubt elicit charges of sob-sister pathos). Underlying the book's statistical and anecdotal material is the haunting reminder that, as I. M. Rubinow, the pioneer spokesman for social insurance, explained 60 years ago, ''the aged are not a class. They are a stage of our own lives.'' The phenomena of aging and of being old cannot be adequately dealt with by equating them with race or gender. Discussions of the elderly are not about ''them,'' but about our present or future selves. +Richard J. Margolis, a freelance journalist and columnist for The New Leader, walks us through the flaws in the assistance we provide for the elderly - income maintenance, housing, health care, home care and nursing-home care - using statistics and heart-rending accounts to remind us of the downside in the never-ending debate about how well off America's senior citizens really are. Yet paradoxically, in his biting chapter on the country's most important program for the elderly, Social Security, he seems at times to side with his opponents in the debate, the right-wing enemies of the program. (Obviously, Social Security is no longer a sacred cow, no matter what one's political disposition.) For Mr. Margolis, Social Security's greatest defect is that the system is not designed to beget egalitarianism in our old age, since it does not compensate those who were victims of various forms of discrimination during their preretirement years - for instance, wives who were not paid for housework. But it is not clear if Mr. Margolis would prefer a flat-rate pension system, which, when used in Europe, eventually meant measly benefits, and therefore led to programs similar to our wage-related system. And while, in one breath, he attacks the regressive taxation rate through which people contribute to Social Security, in the next he acknowledges the system's progressive payout formula. He also claims that most Americans believe the program collects payroll taxes and puts the money into trust-fund accounts with individual names on each account. But as far back as 1981, a Harris poll found that nearly 80 percent knew that their payroll taxes are, in effect, transfer payments for the currently retired. +Mr. Margolis does stress that Social Security is a compact between generations, ''whereby younger workers help to support retired workers in exchange for their own future protection.'' He might have added that it is also a program for workers today: it provides income for their families in the event of a wage-earner's death before retirement, and it assures income in case a worker becomes disabled. At present, there are at least three million children receiving checks as a right, due to the death or disability of their young working parents. +The book's final chapter, about nursing homes - aptly entitled ''Exile: The Perils of Institutionalization'' - may be the best demonstration of the principle that the aged represent one stage of life. It is not widely enough known that only a single year, or sometimes less, of nursing home expenses is sufficient to impoverish most families. In this connection, one of the book's weaknesses is that it does not adequately make the point that many of the risks of growing old are not intrinsic to the aging process, but depend on how a society chooses to provide for its elderly. That weakness could have been avoided by pointing to Canada and most of Western Europe, where the phenomenon of families impoverishing themselves to care for aged parents is extremely rare or nonexistent. +Perhaps Mr. Margolis feels he has treated this issue through his references to the historical uniqueness of the United States, specifically its roots in a deeply established Puritanism that can be seen as one of the root causes of our disdain for the welfare state. Mr. Margolis quotes the Mayflower Compact, with its insistence that ''willful poverty should find no lodgment,'' and he reminds us of the 18th- and 19th-century practice of auctioning off paupers (many of them aged) as laborers to the persons or families who would provide for them at the least cost. Later, this pattern changed into one in which a town would contract out the care of its poor to someone who would house them under one roof - what the historian Robert Kelso refers to as ''a privately operated almshouse where the profit to the keeper was the object sought.'' Mr. Margolis likens this to today's profit-oriented nursing homes. +Overall, the author paints a portrait of a society that is too profit-oriented to develop humane programs to meet the challenges of income, housing and health for the elderly. Yet in his well-intentioned attempt to counteract the smug image of the affluent elderly, he may have painted himself into a corner. At one point in his epilogue, he gloomily claims that ''widespread fatalism may be considered the hex of the Great Deficit,'' perhaps the most notable domestic heritage of the Reagan regnum. But his final statement is an expression of hope that the public will force a change in our current policies, that somehow the fatalism he perceives will not, after all, prove fatal. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +41 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 22, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Congressional Leaders Take Issue With Moynihan Plan to Cut Taxes + +BYLINE: By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 888 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 + +Congressional leaders of both parties took issue today with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's proposal to cut Social Security taxes, and President Bush's budget director, Richard G. Darman, called the plan ''the most irresponsible idea of the '90's.'' +But Senator Moynihan, a New York Democrat, said, ''If we can't get behind an issue like this, a principle, I'm not sure who needs the Democratic Party.'' +The three television networks devoted their Sunday interview programs to the issue, underscoring, on the weekend before Congress reconvenes, the degree to which the Moynihan proposal has struck a nerve in the body politic. +Mr. Darman and the lawmakers broke no new ground substantively, but each time they speak out on the matter they seem to sharpen their words and raise the political stakes. + +The Moynihan Proposal +Just before New Year's Day, Senator Moynihan proposed rescinding the Social Security tax increase that went into effect this year and reducing the payroll levy still further next year. +Workers and their employers now pay 7.65 percent - 6.2 percent for retirement under Social Security and 1.45 percent for Medicare, the medical insurance program for the elderly and the disabled. The Social Security part is up from 6.06 percent last year. Mr. Moynihan would cut it to 5.1 percent in 1991. The tax is paid on the first $51,300 of wages. +In the last decade, the portion of the Government's day-to-day expenses paid for by Social Security taxes has risen dramatically. Mr. Moynihan maintains that it is unfair to finance an increasing share of the Government's operating budget with a tax that falls most heavily on the poor and the middle class, and that it is deceptive to disguise the true size of the budget deficit. +''We are abusing a trust,'' the Senator said today. ''We are taking moneys given for retirement benefits, for widows and orphans and for the disabled, and we're using it as if it were general revenue.'' + +Deficit Fears Cited +The Democratic leaders praised Mr. Moynihan for calling attention to inequities in the tax and budget systems, but they did not support his plan. They said they needed time to study the matter, but worried that cutting taxes by more than $60 billion over the next two years would seriously worsen the overall budget deficit. +''If I had to make a decision today to do it or not to do it, I'd probably say, 'Don't do it,''' said the Speaker of the House, Thomas S. Foley of Washington. +The Senate majority leader, George J. Mitchell of Maine, was careful not to say specifically whether he supported or opposed the Moynihan proposal, but he kept returning to this point: ''We have to be responsible with respect to the deficit.'' +Republican Congressional leaders left no doubt where they stood. Bob Dole of Kansas, the Senate minority leader, and Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the House Republican whip, said cutting the Social Security tax would force an increase in other taxes or a reduction in retirement benefits. + +Dole and Mitchell Disagree +Mr. Moynihan was interviewed on the CBS News program ''Face the Nation,'' and Mr. Foley on the NBC News program ''Meet the Press.'' The other lawmakers and Mr. Darman were interviewed on the ABC News program ''This Week with David Brinkley.'' +Speaking of the proposed tax cut, Mr. Dole asserted: ''It's not going to pass. I'd be willing to bet.'' Mr. Mitchell disagreed, saying, ''There's a very real possibility that it might pass.'' +Whatever the outlook for passage, Mr. Darman said the proposal had complicated the political scene. ''Senator Moynihan has, in effect, thrown a grenade into the middle of the House and the Senate,'' the budget director said. ''We're going to have a lot of shrapnel in the air, and what he's hoping is that somehow they're all going to make it into a beautiful face. I think this is a risky strategy.'' +Outside the studio, Mr. Darman said it was not likely that the President would sign the proposal if Congress passed it. Last week Mr. Bush said the plan would lead to a tax increase or lower retirement benefits. + +Rise in Other Taxes Favored +Senator Moynihan and most of the other Democrats interviewed today indicated that they would favor raising other taxes to offset a cut in the Social Security tax, but they said they would not make such a proposal unless Mr. Bush took the lead. +''Everyone in Washington knows we can't have any change in the revenue system of the country without the President's approval,'' Mr. Foley said. +Despite their wariness about the Moynihan plan, the Democratic leaders were quick to take advantage of the political discomfort it has caused Mr. Bush, who has made low taxes the cornerstone of his political philosophy. Mr. Foley and Mr. Mitchell emphasized that the plan would mostly benefit low- and middle-income workers, while the President's proposal for a capital gains tax cut would, in Mr. Foley's words, give ''a windfall to the richest, most affluent people in the country.'' +But the Democrats themselves seemed a bit uncomfortable, torn by a tax cut proposal that they view as poor public policy however attractive it is politically in an election year. +Senator Mitchell said the Democrats were in the position of trying to ''be responsible so that the President can continue to be irresponsible.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (AP) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +42 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 24, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +EXTRADITION SET FOR ACCUSED NAZI + +BYLINE: By SETH MYDANS, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14, Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 659 words + +DATELINE: LOS ANGELES, Jan. 23 + +A Federal judge today ordered the extradition of a retired grocery clerk to West Germany to face charges that he killed three prisoners while serving as a Nazi concentration camp guard in World War II. +The Justice Department said the action against the man, Bruno Karl Blach, was only the fourth time the United States had extradited a person accused of Nazi war crimes. +The director of the department's Office of Special Investigations, Neal M. Sher, said his office had tracked Mr. Blach through documents over the last six or seven years while he lived a quiet life in La Habra, Calif. ''This is what Nazi hunting is all about in the United States,'' Mr. Sher said. +At a brief appearance today before the United States Magistrate, Ralph Gessen, the white-haired Mr. Blach, 69 years old, waived his right to an extradition hearing. The judge ordered him to be turned over immediately to the West German authorities at Los Angeles International Airport. + +'Tired of Fighting This' +''He was tired of fighting this,'' said Mr. Blach's lawyer, Ron Parker. ''It's a cloud that would not go away. He will go back to Germany to see if they have anything or not.'' +Mr. Blach, who had lived in the United States as a legal resident since 1956 but never became a citizen, is accused of killing three prisoners in a 200-kilometer forced march in April 1945 from the Wiener Neudorf concentration camp to the Mauthausen camp. +One of these prisoners, an elderly and disabled Polish Jew, was shot when he was too weak to keep up in the forced march, said Murray Stein, the senior counsel for the Justice Department in the case. +In April 1987 a United States Immigration Court ordered Mr. Blach's deportation after determining that he had served as an SS guard and dog handler at the Nazi concentration camps of Dachau and Wiener Neudorf from 1940 to 1945. Mr. Blach was appealing the order. +He has in the past admitted through his lawyer to being a camp guard and being present at the march, but has denied the accusations of killings. +He did not speak to reporters today but in 1985 he told The Los Angeles Times that he had been forced to follow orders. ''When you are drafted, what do you do?'' he said. ''I didn't have any choice. I had to do what they told me.'' + +Request for Extradition +Last June a West German court issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Blach charging him with three killings. West Germany requested his extradition under its 1978 extradition treaty with the United States. +Mr. Blach was arrested and has been held without bail since last October. +Previously the United States officials investigating Nazi war crimes have extradited one person to West Germany, one to Yugoslavia and one to Israel. +In 1973 Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan of Queens, N.Y., was extradited to West Germany. She was sentenced in 1989 and is still serving a life sentence on multiple charges of murder. +In 1986 Andrija Artukovic of Surfside, Calif., the former interior minister of Croatia, was extradited to Yugoslavia and sentenced to death in 1986 after being convicted of mass murder. He died in prison in 1988 pending a decision on his appeal for clemency. +Also in 1986, John Demjanjuk of Cleveland was extradited to Israel, where he was convicted in 1988 of mass murder at the gas chambers of the Treblinka death camp in Poland. He was sentenced to death and his appeal is now before the Israeli Supreme Court. +Mr. Sher said his office, which was created in 1979 to track former Nazis in the United States, is currently pursuing 600 other cases, 25 of which are now at various stages of court proceedings. +''The Blach case is an excellent example of how we investigate these cases,'' he said, ''and how at this late date after the war we are able to find these people.'' +He said his office, which includes lawyers, historians, investigators and translators, engages for the most part in slow, painstaking searches of records and documents. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Bruno Karl Blach (AP) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +43 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 26, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Not Too Late for Flu Shots + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 261 words + +Experts on influenza say it is not too late to obtain immunization against the disease in the face of a nationwide epidemic declared yesterday by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. +Ideally, doctors say, it would be better to have had flu shots in November. But shots given now would take effect in about two weeks and protect anyone exposed to the disease after that. Epidemiologists at the centers in Atlanta say they do not know when the epidemic will reach its peak. +The epidemiologists in Atlanta recommend that all persons over the age of 65 be immunized, as well as anyone in chronically ill health, particularly those with heart and respiratory problems, diabetes mellitus and asthma. These groups are most vulnerable to pneumonia, the main complication of the flu, and to kidney failure and heart attacks that can also be brought on by the disease. +Those who are allergic to eggs should not take the vaccine, doctors say, because it is grown in eggs. They also warn that children and teen-agers who get the flu should not be given aspirin, which has been linked to Reye's syndrome, a rare disease that can be fatal. +Flu shots are generally available in doctor's offices and through local health departments, which provide free immunization to senior citizens and the chronically ill in most communities. In New York City, the Bureau of Immunization customarily offers free shots at immunization clinics and senior centers throughout the city. For further information on the New York City program, call (212) 349-2664, from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +44 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 26, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +Anna Hedgeman Is Dead at 90; Aide to Mayor Wagner in 1950's + +BYLINE: By JOAN COOK + +SECTION: Section D; Page 18, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 438 words + +Anna Arnold Hedgeman, an educator, civil rights advocate and the first black woman to be a member of a mayoral cabinet in New York City, died Jan. 17 in Harlem Hospital. She was 90 years old and had lived in Harlem for many years. +Mrs. Hedgeman was an assistant to Mayor Robert F. Wagner from 1954 to 1958. Earlier she had been executive director of the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission and assistant to Oscar R. Ewing, Administrator of the Federal Security Agency, now part of the Department of Health and Human Services. +As an executive of the Young Women's Christian Association for 12 years, she helped to develop a variety of international programs in education. +In 1963 Mrs. Hedgeman joined the staff of the Commission on Religion and Race of the National Council of Churches. The commission was intended to mobilize the resources of Protestant and Orthodox churches to work against racial injustice in American life. Mrs. Hedgeman retired at the end of 1967. + +Ran for Council President +Before joining the commission, Mrs. Hedgeman was a consultant to the American Missionary Association of the United Church of Christ. +A Democrat, she ran for Congress in 1960 as an insurgent from the East Bronx and lost. In 1965 she was an unsuccessful candidate for City Council President on the Reform Democratic ticket with Representative William Fitz Ryan. +In 1953, at the request of Chester Bowles, the United States Ambassador to India, Mrs. Hedgeman spent three months in India as an exchange leader for the State Department. She was also the keynote speaker at the first Conference of the Women of Africa and African Descent at Accra, Ghana, in 1960. +Mrs. Hedgeman was honored for her work in race relations by, among others, the National Urban League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature, the National Council of Negro Women and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. In 1983 she received a ''pioneer woman'' award from the New York State Conference on Midlife and Older Women. +She was born in Marshalltown, Iowa, grew up in Anoka, Minn., and graduated from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn. After graduation, she moved to Holly Springs, Miss., to teach at Rust College. She moved north and, after she married, settled in Brooklyn. +She was the author of ''The Trumpet Sounds'' (Holt, Rinehart & Company, 1964) and ''The Gift of Chaos'' (Oxford University Press, 1977). +She was married for 54 years to the late Merritt A. Hedgeman, an interpreter of black folk music and opera. +There are no immediate survivors. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: February 8, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + + CORRECTION: +An obituary on Jan. 26 about Anna Arnold Hedgeman, a civil rights advocate and former mayoral aide, misidentified the New York City mayoral candidate on whose ticket she ran in 1965. He was Representative William Fitts Ryan. + +GRAPHIC: photo: Anna Arnold Hedgeman (NYT) + +TYPE: Obituary + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +45 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 27, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Weighing Health: Big Derriere vs. Fat Belly + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 28, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 625 words + +DATELINE: BOSTON, Jan. 26 + +It is healthier to be shaped like a pear than an apple, and now experts believe they know why: cholesterol levels are closely linked with where people carry their fat. +Researchers have long noticed that people with fat posteriors tend to have healthier hearts than those with big bellies, but the reason for this was unclear. +A new study offers a possible explanation. It shows that people with beefy hips and trim waists have higher levels of high-density lipoprotein, a protective form of cholesterol, than do those with potbellies and small derrieres. +''When patients come in, we advise them to lose weight,'' Dr. Richard E. Ostlund Jr. said. ''This paper suggests that more important than that is how the fat is distributed.'' + +Smoking Also Addressed +Dr. Ostlund's study, conducted at the Washington University School of Medicine, was published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine. +In a separate study in the journal, doctors from the Boston University School of Medicine addressed another aspect of heart health. The researchers found that women who smoke face nearly four times the usual risk of heart attacks before the age of 65, but the danger quickly eases when they quit the habit. +Earlier research had shown that the high risk of heart attacks in male smokers goes away within a few years of stopping. The new work is the first to show that this happens in women, too. + +Differences in Aging +Dr. Ostlund's cholesterol study, conducted with healthy elderly people, found that body shape alone could account for a large portion of the differences in high-density lipoprotein, or HDL, cholesterol levels. +Doctors have found that the more HDL people have in the blood, the lower the chances of heart attacks. Women typically have higher HDL levels than men. As they age, women also tend to put on weight around the hips, while men are more prone to larger bellies. +Experts have long suspected that differences in sex hormones might explain the HDL disparity between men and women. But the new study suggests that body shape, not sex, could be the key. It found that pear-shaped men tend to have high HDL, while apple-shaped women have lower HDL. +''The fat around your hips, the good fat that women have, is predominantly subcutaneous fat,'' or just underneath the skin, Dr. Ostlund said. ''But the fat you have in your belly is intra-abdominal fat. The difference is where the blood supply of those two areas drains.'' +Abdominal fat surrounds the intestines, and its blood supply drains directly to the liver. ''The liver is sensitive to things that fat cells put out,'' he said. ''The metabolism of the liver may be changed because of the intra-abdominal fat,'' including the liver's production of HDL. + +Not Easy to Change +The blood from hip fat does not drain directly to the liver and so has less impact on the way it works, Dr. Ostlund said. +But he acknowledged: ''It's very hard to change your waist-to-hip ratio. You can do it if you lose a massive amount of weight, but losing 10 to 20 pounds doesn't change it very much.'' +In the study of smoking, the researchers found that the risk of suffering a first heart attack in women who smoke was 3.6 times that of those who had never smoked. But within three years of giving up smoking, the risk had dropped to the point where it was no higher than that of the non-smokers. +The analysis was conducted by Dr. Lynn Rosenberg and colleagues from the Sloan Epidemiology Unit at Boston University. +The work was based on 910 women who were admitted for heart attacks at 71 hospitals in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. Their smoking habits were compared with those of 2,375 women who were in the hospitals for other reasons. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +46 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 28, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +For Work Force, 2 Million Who'd Quit Retirement + +BYLINE: By TAMAR LEWIN + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 18, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 663 words + +Nearly two million nonworking Americans 50 to 64 years old are ready and able to work, a new survey shows. +''The excitement of this study is that the pool of qualified older workers is so much larger than anyone knew, and with everyone worrying about the labor shortages forecast for early next century, that's very important,'' said Thomas W. Moloney, senior vice president of the Commonwealth Fund, the New-York based philanthropy that commissioned the study. +''This study,'' he went on, ''disproves the conventional wisdom that there are not many people in this age range ready and able to work, that they aren't healthy enough to work, or aren't prepared to take the jobs that there is a demand for.'' +Since there are only about two million new people entering the labor force each year, he said, it is significant that the survey produced an estimate that there is a pool of another two million qualified older workers. + +The Numbers Game +That estimate, based on a survey by Louis Harris & Associates, is more than three times the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate of 630,000. Bruce Klein, a bureau economist, says both estimates may be right since the Government number does not include workers not seeking jobs. +The survey, conducted by telephone last March through last September, covered 3,509 older Americans - 1,751 men 55 to 64 years old and 1,758 women 50 to 59. The women were younger because women leave the work force earlier than men; the survey tried to focus on the years when workers typically leave the work force. +In portions of the survey not yet analyzed, those surveyed were also asked when and why they left work and how they fared outside the work force. +From the participants' responses the researchers inferred results applicable to the 21.5 million Americans in those age brackets. Of that group, 13.3 million are working, 4.7 million do not want to work, and 1.6 million are unable to work, mostly for health reasons. The remaining workers, nearly 2 million, are ready and able. #1.1 Million Pass All Tests The projections of the data were done by Harris and I.C.F., a District of Columbia consulting company. +About 800,000 of the estimated 2 million people were not prime candidates for new jobs. the researchers said, but more than 1.1 million would be highly qualified and motivated since they have reasonable wage expectations, would accept difficult working conditions, and have interest in available jobs: managerial, computer, sales, home day care, teacher's aide. +The survey has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus seven percentage points. The participants were asked how far they would be willing to commute, what jobs and job conditions they would accept and for what pay. The reasons that these people are not working include employer discrimination against older workers and the workers' perceptions of the employers' attitudes. + +Comparison of Incomes +''As ready and willing and capable as these people are, 60 percent are discouraged from seeking employment, and the most frequently given reason is that they don't think people want to hire them,'' said Mr. Moloney. +The study found that only 6 percent of the qualified older people had incomes of $50,000 or above, as against 25 percent of employed older people. +Two-thirds of the qualified older workers would work full time, and 86 percent said they would work part time. The researchers reported that three-quarters of the qualified older workers were high school or college graduates, as against 85 percent of the working older people. Sixty-four percent of the available workers had five or more years of experience on the last job, against 77 percent of older people now employed. +''There's a skill bust coming because the education and skills of the workers coming up are not up to the levels of the current work force,'' Mr. Moloney said, ''so it is very good news to find that there are so many capable committed older workers available.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +47 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 28, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +BUDGET OUTLOOK; +Numbers Tomorrow, To Be Followed By Heavy Politics + +BYLINE: By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 1, Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1016 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + +Gradually over the last several weeks, the basic elements of the budget President Bush will send Congress tomorrow have seeped out. +He will propose spending $1.2 trillion in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, leaving a deficit of $63.1 billion. He will ask Congress to approve $295 billion for the Pentagon, $4 billion more than this year but about $6 billion, or 2 percent, less than what would be needed for the Pentagon to keep pace with inflation. +He will suggest a large spending increase for drug control and a small one for education programs. He will ask for a cut in the capital gains tax and a new kind of savings account to encourage Americans to put money aside. Invoking the theme of ''America the Beautiful,'' he will recommend modest new programs to protect the environment. And he will advocate changing the Medicare law, so the medical insurance program for the elderly and disabled would cost the Government billions of dollars less. +Of course, he will seek no new taxes. +The prospects are dim that the new budget will be taken more seriously than those in the past few years. The debate over military spending, for instance, will not be over whether to cut President Bush's request but over how much to cut it by and whether to trim spending on personnel or weapons systems. The new savings account Mr. Bush is proposing will have no more standing than competing proposals by several lawmakers. +As soon as they see Mr. Bush's budget, the Democrats will begin demanding more money for drug control, education and other areas popular with their constituents. Mr. Bush is certain to oppose and even veto measures throughout the year on the ground that they exceed his budget levels. So the budget will serve one essential function. It will be the main battleground for the election year's political wars. +In terms of money, the Federal budget is larger than all other countries' entire economies except those of the Soviet Union and Japan. The book with all the numbers is larger than the Manhattan telephone directory. But despite the months of work that went into putting the documents together, they will probably gather dust once they are delivered to Congress. +Until relatively recently, Presidents' budgets were a blueprint for all Government activities. Working from the master plan, Congress made minor changes, taking small amounts from some areas and putting the money in others. But as is the case in parliamentary democracies, the Government ran mostly according to the initial proposals of its chief executive. +But in the last decade, Presidents' budgets have become, in the words of Stanley E. Collender, a budget specialist at Price Waterhouse, the accounting firm, ''more of a wish list than a series of proposals that can be adopted.'' +There are two main reasons for the declining importance of Presidential budgets. +First, Congressional budget procedures put in place in the mid-1970's gave Congress the structure and expertise to challenge Presidential priorities. Until then, the executive branch had all the computers and analysts, and Congress had no choice but to accept their judgments. In addition, rivalry among Congressional committees prevented a unified assessment of spending and taxes. But the establishment of budget committees in the House and Senate and the creation of the Congressional Budget Office with its staff of more than 200 economists and other professionals put Congress, to whom the Constitution gives the power of the purse, on an equal footing. +Second, and probably more important, the Reagan and Bush Administrations turned their budgets into openly political documents that they knew stood no chance of adoption. Every year since 1985, for example, the Presidents have proposed large increases in military spending; Congress has reduced the President's Pentagon budget request by an average of 2 percent a year. Year after year, the Presidents proposed abolishing or trimming the same domestic programs, including mass transit subsidies, the Legal Services Agency and the Economic Development Administration; each year Congress continued the appropriations. Last year, President Bush made modest education proposals like rewarding successful schools and recognizing superior teachers; Congress never paid them a glance. +''We've been led down the primrose path so often that their budgets are just dead on arrival,'' said Senator Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who heads the Appropriations Committee. Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, the top Republican on the Budget Committee, said Mr. Reagan's ideological approach to the budget made the document ''less relevant and far more cantankerous.'' +The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law, which sets mandatory deficit ceilings each year, has further reduced the significance of Presidents' budgets. ''Gramm-Rudman sets a total no one can possibly hit with serious policy proposals,'' said Joseph White, a budget expert at the Brookings Institution. As a result, Presidents and lawmakers resort to accounting tricks like moving paydays from one year to another and leaving out of the budget much of the money being spent to rescue savings and loan institutions. +''Presidents' budgets crossed the line into total unacceptability when they had to deal with deficits,'' said Edwin L. Dale Jr., a top aide to Richard G. Darman, the budget director. He emphasized that he was talking about previous budgets and not the one that will go to Congress this week. +Many economists are skeptical of Mr. Darman's contention that continued economic growth can be counted on to whittle away significantly at the budget deficit. The Administration's economic assumptions are somewhat more optimistic than the consensus of private economists for this year, and they are much more optimistic in the years ahead. +In an unusual essay that Mr. Darman wrote to introduce the new budget, he maintained that the Administration's economic forecasts were not ''outside the credible range.'' This budget, he wrote, will be ''seriously presented'' and should be ''treated seriously.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: January 29, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + + CORRECTION: +A front-page article in some copies yesterday about the Bush Administration's proposed budget for 1991 misstated the Administration's estimate of the deficit for the fiscal year 1990, which ends Sept. 30. The estimate is $123.8 billion. + +GRAPHIC: Drawing; graph of projected Federal expenditures for fiscal 1990 (Source: Congressional Budget Office) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +48 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 30, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +In Shanghai, the Mystery of the Midnight Fire + +BYLINE: By SHERYL WuDUNN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 8, Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 467 words + +DATELINE: SHANGHAI, Jan. 25 + +When a guest house for senior officials burned down last week, it stirred talk about arson and the injury and possible death of an elderly party leader. +It had all the signs of a mystery. A senior official apparently was staying in a grand old mansion; fire broke out in the middle of the night; other mansions in the courtyard were untouched; the next morning, 100 investigators and security guards photographed and combed the area, and newspapers carried no accounts of the fire. +The elderly leader who was thought to be inside was Song Renqiong, an 81-year-old friend of Deng Xiaoping and a former member of the Communist Party Politburo. Since 1985, Mr. Song has been vice chairman of the influential Central Advisory Commission. + +Speculation Is Dismissed +Some people say Mr. Song was killed in the fire, along with three other people. Asked about that, the Foreign Ministry said that such speculation was groundless. A Shanghai official denied that Mr. Song had been killed in the fire, nor would he confirm that the fire took place. [The New China News Agency said Sunday night that Mr. Song was among a number of elderly leaders who wrote slogans for children during the Chinese Lunar New Year festivities. The report seemed to confirm that he is alive, and it may have been intended to rebut rumors about his death.] Two other Chinese with access to information about the incident said that Mr. Song was indeed in the guest house that burned, but that he was not killed. One said that Mr. Song was critically injured, but was taken off the critical list on Thursday, a week after the incident. He added that Mr. Song's doctor, who was with him, was killed. + +Rumors Spreading +Already, rumors are spreading of an assassination plot against Mr. Song. But assassination is rare in China, as is murder itself, and it is hard to imagine a motive for murdering a man in his 80's and outside the highest circle of power. On the other hand, since the violent crackdown in June, China's leaders have taken greater precautions against the possibility of attack. Prime Minister Li Peng, for example, once arrived at a Soviet diplomatic function in an armor-plated limousine. +The fire broke out the night of Jan. 18, burning out an old mansion in the Xingguo Guest House, which is for high officials. By morning, 100 policemen and investigators were combing the courtyard, sealing off the compound to regular traffic, according to a foreigner who works in a next-door mansion in the same courtyard. +The intrigue about the fire has been bolstered by the sudden arrival in Shanghai of President Yang Shangkun and Mr. Deng himself. Prime Minister Li also turned up in neighboring Jiangsu Province, although he seemed to have had a full schedule and so his visit may not have been related. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +49 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 31, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +A Panel Hears Tales of Fears and 'Wilding' + +BYLINE: By LEONARD BUDER + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 522 words + +In a voice choked with emotion, a Brooklyn mother told a City Hall hearing yesterday that when she sends her children to school by public transportation each morning, she worries she will not see them alive again because of marauding groups of violent youths. +''We wish them a good day, pay attention in school, be good, but we don't say what's in our hearts: ''Come back alive, come back to me this afternoon,' '' said the mother, Elba Haggerty, who has two children in Abraham Lincoln High School, where she is president of the parents' association, and another child in Brooklyn Technical High School. +''I might have to bury my child. No, I don't want that. I want my children to bury me,'' she said before a hushed audience at a hearing on the perils children encounter on the way to school -youth violence and ''wilding.'' +Another parent described how one of her sons was attacked and injured by a gang of 20 youths on a subway on his way home from school in October and how another was stopped, harassed and searched on a street by six youths. + +Hostile Looks End in Death +''Sending your child to school is the most dangerous thing you can ask him to do,'' said the parent, Mary Lou Guillen Fuller. +The hearing was held by City Council President Andrew J. Stein, and Family Court judges, probation officials and police officers also spoke. Mr. Stein said he wanted to focus attention on youth violence and wilding and to send the message that ''if you hurt other people, you are going to be punished.'' +''Children can't ride to school on the subway without fear of being attacked,'' Mr. Stein said. ''Senior citizens can't walk to centers without fearing groups of marauding youths. The time has come for society to show some backbone or we are going to descend into chaos.'' +Two Abraham Lincoln High School students, Erin Brown, 17 years old, and Lee Ann Witsell, 16, said at the hearing that they saw their friend and classmate, Larry Ashby, 18, fatally stabbed in the subway in December as the result of a dispute that had started with two students simply giving each other hostile looks. +''I'm scared now every time I go on a train,'' Ms. Brown said. + +Problem Called Citywide +Accompanied by a group of his students, Dr. Jack M. Pollock, the principal of Abraham Lincoln High School in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, said the problem was citywide, and that he and other educators had created ''Principals for Safe Passage'' to try to do something about it. +Susan D. Alter, a City Councilwoman from Brooklyn, said that wilding was growing, and that Flatbush, Midwood and Canarsie had become targets of gangs on the subway. +She said that ''the Transit Authority has reported that over 50 percent of the crimes occurring in subways in New York City are the result of this wilding behavior of young people between the ages of 12 and 15.'' +But Albert O'Leary, a spokesman for the transit police, said by telephone later that the department kept no figures for crimes committed by groups of youths. He noted, however, that half of those who were arrested last year for robbery were 17 or under. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Lee Ann Witsell, 16 years old, told of seeing a classmate stabbed to death in the subway. (NYT/Jack Manning) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +50 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 1, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +HEALTH; +PERSONAL HEALTH + +BYLINE: By Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section B; Page 10, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1386 words + +The aromas of freshly baked bread, the air after a spring rain or a rose by any other name are lost to millions of Americans who have a muted or absent sense of smell. +Nearly everyone in the throes of a bad cold has temporarily been unable to smell a thing. Just imagine that loss persisting for the rest of your life. +Though not as disruptive as lost vision or hearing, the inability to detect or identify odors can seriously diminish a person's quality of life, sometimes resulting in malnutrition or persistent depression. Without an ability to smell, foods taste bland and unappetizing and life is missing a dimension that is rarely appreciated until it is gone. +An impaired sense of smell can also prevent recognition of warning signals of potentially fatal hazards, like a gas leak, spoiled food or smoke from a fire. Experts believe that many elderly people who succumb in house fires or to otherwise nonfatal ailments complicated by malnutrition are really the victims of an inability to smell. +Tests of hundreds of thousands of workers revealed that about 1 percent have major problems with the sense of smell, said Dr. Richard L. Doty, director of the Smell and Taste Center at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. +The problem is far worse among older people. More than half of Americans from the age of 65 to 80 and three-fourths of those over 80 have serious problems in detecting odors, Dr. Doty's studies have shown. Among nearly 2,000 people tested, a quarter of those 65 to 80 and half the people over 80 were unable to smell anything. +Dr. Doty and his colleagues developed a scratch-and-sniff test that has greatly simplified the diagnosis of smell deficits. The test is now widely used throughout the world. The center he directs is one of six federally financed units that study the underappreciated senses of smell and taste, and offer diagnostic and treatment services to those whose chemical senses, as they are called, are impaired. +In addition to these centers, about 2,000 physicians or medical groups throughout the country know how to detect and treat chemosensory loss. The physicians who treat this problem are usually ear, nose and throat specialists; psychologists, nutritionists and neurologists are also involved. +Still, problems with these senses are often overlooked or considered trivial by physicians, said Dr. Terence M. Davidson, chief of head and neck surgery at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Diego. Many physicians and people who are afflicted assume nothing can be done to correct or circumvent the disability, the surgeon said. +Dr. Davidson urges a full medical evaluation of all smell disorders to determine their cause and, if possible, correct the problem and restore the lost olfactory sense. In addition to an assessment of the degree of lost sensitivity, a complete examination might include measurements of air pressure in the nasal cavities, a microscopic look at the cells lining the nasal cavities, allergy tests and a CT scan (computerized X-ray) of the head to check for sinus inflammation, tumors or anatomical defects. + +Sense of Smell +Odors are carried by airborne molecules that impinge on a tiny patch of cells on the roof of the uppermost nasal cavity. These olfactory cells bear receptors that unite with odor molecules. Nerve endings in the region pick up the odor signals and transfer them directly to the brain's olfactory bulb, which records the nature of the odor. +You will be unable to smell if odor molecules cannot reach the receptor cells in the nose, if these receptor cells are damaged or destroyed, if the nerve pathway to the brain is disrupted or if the olfactory region of the brain is itself destroyed. +Food tastes bland when you cannot smell because most of what people call taste or flavor is really odor. When you chew or swallow, odor-bearing molecules from the food travel through the back of the mouth and into the upper nasal cavity, where they stimulate the olfactory cells. +The taste buds in the tongue detect sweetness, sourness, bitterness and salt. Other chemosensors in the oral and nasal cavities - endings from the trigeminal nerve, which extends from the brain to three parts of the face - detect irritants like the hotness of chili peppers and the coolness of menthol. The sense of smell adds critical flavor nuances that enable you to distinguish between potato and carrot, steak and shrimp, apple and chocolate. You can simulate the problem by holding your nose as you eat. Try a piece of chocolate, for instance; you may taste something sweet, but the special flavor of chocolate will be missing until you release the pressure on your nose. + +Causes of Damage +Dr. Doty's studies of people who are 5 to 99 years old showed that on average, the sense of smell is most acute between 20 and 40 and that throughout life, girls and women are better able to detect and identify odors than boys and men are. As people age, odor-sensitive cells in the nasal cavity are gradually replaced by ordinary respiratory-tract lining cells that have no special ability to detect odor molecules. +While some people are born without an ability to smell and many others lose olfactory cells with age, an accident or illness of some sort is responsible in most cases for the lost sense of smell in young and middle-aged people. Among 750 people with persistent olfactory loss who were examined at the University of Pennsylvania clinic, 28 different causes were identified. Dr. Doty attributed more than 60 percent of the cases to sinus disease, upper respiratory viral infections like influenza, and head injuries. +Of these, most losses are permanent. Viral infections, for example, can destroy the odor-sensitive olfactory cells, and head injuries can disrupt nerve connections to the brain. But Dr. Doty estimated that one in five problems is correctable. For example, in many cases of chronic sinus disease, treatment of the underlying problem can restore the sense of smell. Nasal sinus congestion caused by allergies and blockage of air flow caused by nasal polyps are also often correctable. +Dr. Doty noted that since the passageway through which odoriferous molecules must travel is only about 1 millimeter wide, it can easily be blocked by even minor inflammation. This is why the congestion that accompanies a common cold so often impairs taste and smell. +Prolonged exposure to toxic substances, including air pollutants, industrial chemicals, tobacco smoke and certain drugs, can diminish and sometimes permanently destroy the sensitivity of olfactory cells. But the sense of smell generally improves when a smoker quits or when a toxic medication is stopped. +Dr. Doty said a loss in smell acuity may also be the first sign of neurological diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. In addition, radiation therapy for cancer in the head and neck can result in permanent loss of the sense of smell. + +What to Do +The first step is to realize that there is a problem in odor perception, particularly for older people, who may not recognize a gradual loss. As foods begin to taste flavorless, people may add salt or sweeteners to the point of creating a health hazard. Instead, flavor concentrates and extracts might be used to enhance natural flavors and more pungent seasonings could be added, like those common to Mexican and Indian cuisine. People can also be taught to pay more attention to the appearance, texture and temperature of foods to enhance their appeal when taste is limited. +To reduce the risk of accidents, smoke detectors should be installed in the kitchen and all living areas where the person is likely to fall asleep. Industrial-grade gas detectors should also be installed, near the ceiling for natural gas, which is lighter than air, and near the floor for propane and gasoline, which are heavier than air. +To avoid food poisoning, all perishable foods should be kept frozen or refrigerated until it is time to prepare them. All leftovers and other prepared foods should be dated with the day of preparation or purchase and promptly chilled. If there is no one available to check foods for freshness, a person who cannot smell should maintain a strict schedule for discarding leftovers to reduce the risk of consuming spoiled foods. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: diagram + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +51 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 2, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +New Player in Debate Over National Health Insurance: Bush + +BYLINE: By PHILIP J. HILTS, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 19, Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 627 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 + +By calling for a review of the nation's health care system, President Bush has brought the White House into the the debate over national health insurance and raised the possibility that he might offer his own proposal, Administration and Congressional officials said today. +In his State of the Union address Wednesday, the President called for ''careful consideration'' of the recommendations of several health care studies now under way. He assigned Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, to lead a review of ''recommendations on the quality, accessibility and cost'' of health care in the United States. +Until now, the Administration has considered such broad questions only at lower levels in the Department of Health and Human Services. The Domestic Policy Council, where this new review will take place, is a White House advisory group that is critical to forming Administration policy. + +Report Expected by Fall +A Congressional staff aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: ''The significance of his statement is that universal health care has been elevated to a Presidential matter. He has put himself out there for the first time, saying that he wants an Administration position on the issue, one that will come from the White House directly.'' +In an interview today, Dr. Sullivan said the President intended to give him ''the public and official responsibility and leadership for pulling together all the recommendations and options.'' He said his review would deal not just with cutting medical costs but also with quality of care and access to care, as well as the needs of people who have no health insurance. +Dr. Sullivan said that he was not sure what form his final recommendations would take but that they would be ''intended for specific actions.'' +''What we are coming up with is an overview of the entire system,'' he said. ''My position will be to develop real improvements in the health care system and to control costs.'' +Several commissions are already studying the issues. The Bipartisan Commission on Health Care, led by Senator John D. Rockefeller 4th, Democrat of West Virginia, is expected to issue a report in March. The Advisory Committee on Social Security is expected to report in July. A task force on the health care system led by Constance Horner, Under Secretary of Health and Human Services, is expected to report in October. #37 Million Without Insurance These panels have focused on two issues: the 37 million Americans, most of them employed, who have no medical insurance; and long-term care for the elderly. At least some of the panels' reports are expected to suggest some way of assuring that Americans can get health insurance through their employers. +In Congress, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, are developing a proposal that employers be required to offer health insurance and to pay for a substantial part of it. A public program would cover the unemployed. +Senator Rockefeller said Mr. Bush's comments were encouraging but added, ''I only hope the President agrees that it's time to provide leaderhsip aimed at results and real solutions to our health care problems, instead of spending too much more time studying those problems.'' +The United States' health care system is the most expensive in the world. But health care experts say it offers services to far fewer people, in proportion to the population, than do those in most Western countries. +Humphrey Taylor, president of the polling concern Louis Harris & Associates, said that while Americans were satisfied with specific health services, their dissatisfaction with the system was also the highest in the world. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +52 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 4, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Using Proteges as Pawns, China's Aging Masters Vie to Plot Policy + +BYLINE: By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 26, Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 872 words + +DATELINE: BEIJING, Feb. 3 + +China's aging rulers are engaged in intense jockeying over national policy and a possible shuffling of Communist Party and Government posts, Chinese officials say. +The bargaining may result in changes in the leadership that will take over from the old-line rulers, the officials say, and determine what political and economic directions China will take in the aftermath of the violent crackdown on dissent last June. +The two main protagonists facing what may be their last contest are Deng Xiaoping, the 85-year-old senior leader, who favors continued economic liberalization, and Chen Yun, 84, the mastermind of central planning. +Mr. Chen is little known in the West, and he has appeared in public only once in the last two years. By the time he retired just over two years ago, he had served on the Communist Party Central Committee for 56 years and on the Politburo for more than four decades, in both cases longer than Mr. Deng. +He is backed by leaders like Peng Zhen, a former leader of the legislature, and Deng Yingchao, the widow of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, making up in part for what he lacks in prestige compared with Mr. Deng. #2 Rivals Who Cooperate For all the complex jockeying taking place, Mr. Deng and Mr. Chen are not feuding. They are friends and colleagues as well as rivals, and their intertwined cooperation and competition has lasted for many years. +Mr. Chen, who is ailing, lives in the leadership compound known as Zhongnanhai. Mr. Deng, who is also somewhat frail, lives just north of Zhongnanhai. They were able to agree in May on the selection of Jiang Zemin as party leader, and it is assumed that they will continue to bargain with each other and maintain official harmony despite their disagreements on policy. +That the main competition is among the retired patrons rather than the proteges whose careers are at stake is characteristic of China. +The jockeying was described by several Chinese officials with independent access to high-level information. So far, it is not clear whether firm decisions have been made, and some officials are skeptical that an agreement can be reached in the coming months on any major shift in Government and party posts. +A resolution is likely to involve compromise by both sides so that a consensus can be maintained in the circle of about a dozen octogenarians who hold ultimate power in China. + +Deputy Premier's Fate +The only change that several officials said was already largely settled was the resignation of 72-year-old Yao Yilin as Deputy Prime Minister, which they said would take place at the close of the National People's Congress in April. +One official said that President Yang Shangkun, 82, would retire at the same time, and others said that there was pressure on Prime Minister Li Peng to accept a shift to the less powerful post of President or head of the Congress. Other officials predicted that Mr. Yang and Mr. Li would retain their positions, mainly because of a need to maintain continuity. +''It's very tense now in the leadership because of the personnel decisions,'' said a Chinese with high connections. ''It'll be tense until things are decided before the National People's Congress.'' +Each side has different aims involving personnel changes and policies. Mr. Deng, for example, is said to favor the removal of Deputy Prime Minister Yao and Prime Minister Li from their posts, and a renewed emphasis on economic restructuring and improved relations with the West. +Mr. Chen is a patron of Mr. Yao and Mr. Li and opposes the transfer at least of Mr. Li. But he might be willing to sacrifice both if they were given other posts, like the presidency or head of the congress, and if he gained some valuable bargaining chips. Mr. Chen is believed to favor the promotion of Zou Jiahua, the recently appointed head of the Planning Commission, to an even higher post. One official said the central planners also want the right to criticize the ousted party leader, Zhao Ziyang, and his market-oriented economic policies, A Sense Deng Has an Edge The most common, though not universal, view seems to be that Mr. Deng has the upper hand, although nobody knows if he will press harder for policies or for personnel changes. +''Deng is clearly ahead now,'' said a Chinese official who has been reliable in the past. The official said that Mr. Deng had succeeded in moderating hard-line economic policies. +One of the puzzles in Beijing these days is the letter of resignation that apparently was submitted recently by Tian Jiyun, a Deputy Prime Minister associated with the disgraced Mr. Zhao. The resignation, which was reported by the South China Morning Post of Hong Kong and confirmed by two other people familiar with the incident, was not accepted by the leadership. +Mr. Tian, who is about 60, reportedly has found his influence slipping since Mr. Zhao's fall from power, and particularly since he openly attacked the economic policies of Prime Minister Li at the Central Committee's fifth plenum in November. +The letter of resignation could signal that he is in political trouble and has nothing more to lose, or alternatively that he now feels more secure and is using the threat to put pressure on Prime Minister Li. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: China's top rulers are jockeying to set the nation's course. The protagonists are Deng Xiaoping, left (AP), the senior Chinese leader, and Chen Yun, the mastermind of central planning. (Camera Press) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +53 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 4, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +FORUM; +Mr. Bush, You Must Raise Taxes + +BYLINE: by LEE H. HAMILTON; Representative Lee H. Hamilton is a Democrat from Indiana. + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 13, Column 2; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 969 words + +At the end of 1989, as chairman of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, I issued a report that concluded our top economic policy priority in 1990 should be eliminating the Federal budget deficit. Unfortunately, the budget proposed by President Bush last week breaks no new ground in dealing with the deficit. +The Office of Management and Budget director Richard G. Darman makes a compelling case against the deficit and its attendant erosion of our economic future. But the Administration proposes only a tired list of tried-and-failed tax ''incentives'' that give away more than they get; tried-and-rejected spending cuts that have failed to garner a majority of votes from even the President's party in Congress; and $13.9 billion of ''revenue enhancements.'' +The letters I received after the report was issued indicate that most Americans are seriously concerned about the deficit. They have an intuitive understanding of how the deficit has soaked up savings and eroded our economy over the long term by pre-empting domestically financed investment. However, the same Americans question the need for any kind of tax increase. +Why must a tax increase be part of a workable deficit reduction plan? In part, this conclusion is an economic judgment - we cannot grow our way out of the deficit. It is also a political judgment - other approaches to reducing the deficit, including relying on spending cuts alone, have not worked in the past and will not work in the future. +The deficit has been stuck at over $150 billion for the last three years, despite forecasts that were far lower. In fact, Congress and the Administration claimed to meet the Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction targets in each of those three years, but the actual deficits turned out to be far higher. The deficit has not faded away, contrary to the forecasts, because economic growth has been slower than predicted and interest rates have been higher, which reduces the Government's revenues and increases its interest costs. Future growth is unlikely to match the Administration's rosy forecast, in part because the Federal Reserve has clearly signaled its resolve to hold growth at about its current level to control inflation. +We have not reduced the deficit through spending cuts, despite the determination of the Reagan Administration. That is because there are not sufficient opportunities to cut spending without harming important national interests. Interest on the national debt - which is the fastest growing single item in the budget and cannot be cut - along with Social Security, Medicare for the elderly and defense spending, accounts for approximately 70 percent of total spending. This leaves little else to cut. And because these four programs are so large and have grown so fast over the last decade, the rest of the budget has been squeezed. +Many of the programs often thought of as targets to balance the budget are in fact quite small. Our deficit in 1989 was $152 billion. Against that figure, total American foreign aid was less than $7 billion, and much of that assistance comes back to the United States as expenditures for American farm products and manufactured goods. The total Congressional budget (which includes maintenance of the buildings and grounds, the Capitol Police, the Library of Congress and other activities that are often forgotten) was less than $2 billion. No cuts in these small programs, however desirable, could possibly eliminate the deficit. +The ''peace dividend'' that is expected to follow from reduced tensions in Eastern Europe is welcome, but it will be years in coming. +There were many good ideas about cutting the deficit in the 1984 Grace Commission report to the Reagan Administration, and most of them have been adopted. However, although the Commission claimed to have found enormous potential savings in the budget, a review revealed that the savings would be only one-third of what was originally claimed and that 16 percent of those savings would come as a result of higher taxes rather than spending cuts. In addition, much of the rest of the savings would come not from eliminating inefficiency or waste, but from cutting actual services delivered. +Likewise, procedural tools proposed to reduce the deficit - budget-process reforms and balanced budget amendments - would have limited effect. You cannot solve a substantive problem with a procedure; hard decisions must still be made, and in the absence of the will to make them, a way will be found to circumvent the procedure. Our experience with Gramm-Rudman proves this. A line-item veto would apply only to a small fraction of spending; it could not reduce Social Security benefits, Medicare payments, the interest on the debt, or defense or other costs involving long-term contractual obligations. Further, a President with a line-item veto would be likely to bargain for spending for a program he wants,like Star Wars, by offering not to veto a program that a member of Congress wants, like a new dam or Federal building in his or her state or district. The result would be more spending. +My best political judgment, on the basis of the experience of the last decade, is that we are unlikely to eliminate the deficit either through spending cuts or tax increases alone. Neither course is politically acceptable. Therefore, the only realistic solution is a package deal that includes both spending cuts and a moderate tax increase. There are many options for such a moderate tax increase that would not involve increases in income tax rates. +The deficit is so large that everyone will be unhappy with at least some elements of any program to eliminate it. We will never break the political gridlock unless we all agree to accept some changes that we do not like, in order to improve our economic future. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Lee H. Hamilton (NYT/George Tames); drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +54 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 4, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Not All the Drama Is on the Stage + +BYLINE: By JENNIFER DUNNING; JENNIFER DUNNING writes about dance for The New York Times. + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 8, Column 1; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 2185 words + +BARCELONA is a city of innate theatricality. It is a theatricality that springs, in large part, from the vivid contrasts that make Barcelona so engaging. Laundry hangs from lines draped across apartment houses on some of the most cosmospolitan of streets. A city plaza that bursts with Saturday night street-fair festivities, complete with the skulking ladrones and murmuring gitanos - petty thieves and gypsies - that tourists are warned about, is taken over by elderly men selling stamps and antique postcards on the sunny Sunday morning that follows. A stroll down the Ramblas or a quiet beer at a sidewalk cafe along that bustling pedestrian thoroughfare is likely to yield one human drama after another a few moments. ''More, perhaps, than any city in the world,'' Rose MacCauley wrote of Barcelona, ''it gives an impression of tempestuous, surging, irrepressible life and brio.'' +But Barcelona is also a city with a deeply ingrained theatrical tradition that reflects both its turbulent history as the capital of Catalonia and its status as the longtime center of the arts in Spain. A glorious landmark of that tradition - and a good start for a theater tour of Barcelona - is the Palau de la Musica Catalana on Carrer Amadeu Vives. +It is not possible to step back into these narrow old streets for a full look at the Palau, one of the most colorfully exotic buildings in a city filled with architectural fantasies. But even if it were, the riot of columns, domes, rounded balconies and busts of great composers, carried out in soft-colored ceramics and mosaics and red brick, would be almost too much for the eye. +Symphonic and choral music are presented at the Palau, which was built by the Orfeo Catala, a choral group that has played an important part in the musical history of Barcelona. Opened in 1908, the Palau is considered the city's best concert hall and one of the masterpieces of the modernista architectural movement in Barcelona. Lluis Domenech i Montaner, its architect and a leader, with Antonio Gaudi, of the movement, seems to have poured all his ideas about the new architecture into this building, in which are joined the influences of the English Arts and Crafts Movement and Art Nouveau, and a newly revived pride in Catalan crafts and materials. The recently rehabilitated interior is as eye-filling - a rich mix of stained glass and ceramics, of ornate lamps and graceful statuary that are perfectly at home amid the curving lines of the auditorium. +Red velvet and gold predominate in the Gran Teatre del Liceu, about halfway down the Ramblas. From the outside, the Liceu looks like a modest wren in comparison to the Bird of Paradise that is the Palau. But the interior is a model of grandeur and elegance, and yet remarkably jewel-like and intimate. +THE Liceu was the idea of young militiamen who formed a musical society and produced an opera in 1838. The new opera house they envisioned was opened nine years later on the site of a monastery, paid for in large part by shareholders in the company the soldiers had formed. Those who invested were owners not only of the house but of their seats. And a third of the seats in today's Liceu have been inherited by descendants of those original shareholders. +Built at a time of expansion in Barcelona, with the rise of a powerful bourgeoisie, the 2,700-seat Liceu was one of many erected in cities throughout Europe in the mid-18th century. But Josep Oriol Mestres, the Catalan architect who designed the Liceu, did Barcelona proud, for the theater is considered today to be one of Europe's leading opera houses. +The house that began life as the city's most adventurous music theater is now a bastion of tradition. But the Liceu is distinguished by that very Spanish blend of elegance and piquant detail. No visit to the Liceu is complete, for example, without at least a quick glance through one or another of the doors leading to the proscenium boxes on the second floor into large anterooms decorated by the box owners. Some have the look of neglected finery common to old European railway cars. Others look like miniature Liceus, resplendent with murals and mirrors, brocades and velvets, fake mantelpieces and swathes of heavy curtaining. +The Liceu has long been a focus of social protest. Idealism of a different sort pervades the airy, gracefully functional Teatre Lliure, or Free Theater, on Carrer Leopold Alas. The leading Catalan-language theater in the city by virtue of productions whose brilliantly theatrical innovation bridges any language barrier, the Lliure has never lost its ties to the community it sprang from, in an area that remained a small-scaled working class neighborhood as Barcelona expanded around it. The Lliure building was once a workers' cooperative that housed an amateur theater. And something of that proletarian aura lingers about the theater and its handsome little bar and restaurant, which are open independent of the theater's schedule. +The Lliure was founded in 1976 by a 14-member theater cooperative that included young actors, directors, set designers and administrative and technical staff. Led today by a charter member of the group, the charismatic Fabia Puigserver, the Lliure presents works by such authors as Brecht, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Moliere and Genet as well as leading Catalan playwrights and new drama and music in a tiny black box-style theater whose changes in stage shape are themselves a subject of much audience anticipation. Theatrical productions in the house, which can seat from 200 to 350 people, tend to run for three months. +Barcelona's other major Catalan theater is the Companyia Flotats, in the Teatre Poliorama on the Ramblas, an extremely comfortable house whose lobby is notable for its ticket booth, which looks like a giant, ornate old armoire. Led by Josep Maria Flotats, an actor-director who worked extensively with the Comedie Francaise and other French theaters, the company is known for somewhat lighter theater fare than the Lliure, though theater that often touches on social issues. Typical is Copi's ''Una Visita Inoportuna,'' the winter season's production, an absurdist black comedy about a man who entertains a succession of friends, including the inopportune visitor Death, in a hospital room on the second anniversary of his being stricken with AIDS. +The Mercat de los Flors, housed in handsome buildings erected for Barcelona's 1929 International Exhibition on Montjuic mountain, is another important stop on any theater tour of the city. Just up the hill, too, is the Teatre Grec, an open-air amphitheater carved out of the mountain and its forests and gardens, that may be seen year round but presents performances only in summer. +The main house of the Mercat de los Flors was first used as a theater by Peter Brook, who had been searching for protean theater space in 1983 for ''Carmen.'' A huge auditorium with an outstandingly pretty lobby and a bar and restaurant overlooking the rooftops of Barcelona, the 999-seat theater today presents leading drama, dance and music experimentalists. Its visionary young director, Andreu Morte i Teres, has also claimed an adjoining building for less established experimentalist work. Once a flower market, Espai B is an immense space of an indoor theater that can accommodate up to 4,000. +A good deal of dance is presented in Espai B, and Barcelona boasts an even more adventurous dance theater in La Fabrica, a former textile factory on Carrer Perill. Founded in 1980 by Norma Axenfeld-Pereira and Maria Antonia Gelabert, La Fabrica is a dance studio by day and a rough-hewn little theater by night, with stadium seating for 230 and presentations of the newest in modern dance, particularly by Spanish choreographers. +Similarly unusual theater, dance, music and poetry readings are offered by Barcelona's noted Institut del Teatre on Sant Pere mes Baix, under the direction of Jordi Coca, the Catalan theater scholar, and Miguel Montes and Joan Abellan, the heads of the dance and drama departments. The institute boasts two small theaters. +The professional theater presented in La Sala Gran, which seats 300, tends to be first plays and drama that tends not to be produced by other theaters, often directed by new directors. The cozy little La Cuina, which is on the site of a former cooking school, seats 142 and exists to offer ''a cultural context,'' as Mr. Coca puts it, in the form of debates, videos, discussions and readings that have to do with the work presented in the larger theater. +AND finally, to end a Barcelona theater tour on a colorfully indigenous note, visits are in order to Bodega Bohemia and Bar Pastis, where the patrons and settings are theater in themselves. The Bohemia, said to be a favorite hangout of Pina Bausch, the dark expressionist of German contemporary dance, opened its doors in 1893 and the paper streamers and tinfoil shrine look as if they haven't been touched since. +At the Bohemia, a bar on Carrer Lancaster, elderly cabaret singers mount a tiny stage and sing songs from other times to music pounded out on an battered upright piano by an equally ancient pianist. One recent visit yielded a performance in Catalan of the title song from ''Cabaret'' and several songs in a wandering old soprano voice by a red-wigged ''newly arrived star from Paris.'' Patrons occasionally get up to belt out impassioned original tributes to Catalonia. But it is the singers who are the draw, and they perform with bracing dignity. +The later it gets, the livelier the human drama at the Pastis, a tiny bar on Carrer Santa Monica just off the Ramblas. One or two of the dusty bottles over the bar do contain the liqueur pastis. But it is atmosphere that draws many to the place. Opened in 1947 by Quime Ballester and Carme Pericas, Valencians just back from a visit to Marseilles and eager to re-create a little of that city, the Pastis has become known as a shrine to Edith Piaf. Piaf's songs are still played on a phonograph behind the bar, and the singer is commemorated in dusty art scattered about the two-table room. But the Pastis is even more inhabited by the spirits of Quime, whose dark, drunken paintings adorn the grimy walls, and Carme, who took to playing two Piaf records almost obsessively after Quime's death, and who greeted old, familiar faces with ''How long you've been away!'' +Transvestite prostitutes stroll by the windows, and from time to time a prospective customer peers in, then darts away, quickly realizing his mistake. The Pastis has been home over the years - to lovers and bohemians, young political activists and women-friends meeting for a drink together after a long day. It is also Barcelona at its most inherently and casually theatrical. + +THE BARCELONA BEAT + +Drama and Music +Gran Teatre del Liceu (61 Rambla de Caputxins; telephone 318-9277). ''Cosi Fan Tutti,'' through Feb. 20; ''I Puritani,'' March 2 through March 13; ''Boris Godunov,'' March 24 to April 7. Tickets from $44 to $72. +Palau de la Musica Catalana (Carrer Amadeu Vives; 301-1104). Performances in February and March by the Orquestra Ciutat de Barcelona, Concept de Ibercamera, Orquestra Solistes de Catalunya, Euroconcert de Budapest, Coro Madrigal, Orquestra les Cordes de Budapest and Ibercamera Orquestra de Cadaques. Tickets $4.50 to $36. +Mercat de los Flors (59 Carrer Lleida; 426-1875). Modern dance companies from France and Italy, February; festival of Italian modern dance, March 2 and 3; Catalan theater companies in plays by Tirso de Molina, Samuel Beckett and Heinrich Muller, March 7 to 18 and March 22 to April 1; Companya Danca Metros, March 22 to April 1. Tickets $7.20 to $9. Teatre Lliure (2 Carrer Leopold Alas; 218-9251). In February, Luigi Pirandello's ''The Giants of the Mountain,'' performed by the Companiya Teatre Lliure; ''La Musica i el Cine: Novi Vavilon,'' the Chamber Orchestra of the Teatre Lliure, and a poetry reading. In March, ''The Giants of the Mountain'' continues; music by Ravel, Berio, Montsalvatge and Hindemith, Chamber Orchestra; Benjamin Britten's ''Noyes Fludde,'' Chamber Orchestra; poetry reading. Tickets $5.80 to $9; there are also half-price days each week. Companyia Flotats (Teatre Poliorama, 115 Rambla Estudis; 317-7599). Copi's ''Visita Inoportuna,'' through March 4; Chekhov's ''Three Sisters'' opens April 3. Tickets $5.90 to $11.70. Teatres de l'Institut (7 Sant Pere mes Baix; 317-2078). Theater workshops, through March 11; dance season, April 17 to 29. Tickets $9. La Fabrica (10 Carrer Perill; 257-4417. L'irregular Danza, Feb. 24 and 25; Timanfaya, March 9 and 10; Danza al Teatre Obert, Centre Dramatic Generalitat de Catalunya, March 29, 30 and 31, and April 1, April 5, 6 and 7. Tickets $5.40 and $9. + +Night Life +Bodega Bohemia (2 Carrer Lancaster; 302-5061). Open every day from 10:30 P.M. to 3 A.M. No cover charge. Bar Pastis (4 Carrer Santa Monica; 318-7980). Open Monday through Thursday, 7:30 P.M. to 2 A.M., Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30 P.M. to 3 A.M. Sundays, 6:30 P.M. to 1:30 A.M. Best time to go is after 11:30 P.M. - J. D. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: The box office at the Poliorama, home of Companyia Flotats, looks like an armoire; The Palau de la Musica, a hall designed by Domenech in 1908; The elegant boxes in the Liceu Theater, a leading opera house (pg. 8); Children playing in the Teatre Grec, an open-air amphitheater carved into Montjuic Mountain; Looking from behind the scenes at the Lliure Theater, once a workers' cooperative (pg. 9) (Amilcar de Leon); map of Barcelona (pg. 8) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +55 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 7, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Washington Talk; +Are Incumbents Playing With a Stacked Deck? + +BYLINE: By ROBIN TONER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 18, Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 688 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 + +By any measure, Representative Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, had a tumultuous year in 1989. +The Chicago Democrat was in the thick of the fight over tax policy. He clashed bitterly with many elderly people over the Medicare program to protect the aged from the cost of extended illnesses. It was the kind of year that might have made enemies. But when the filing deadline passed not long ago, not a single person, Democrat or Republican, had filed to run against Mr. Rostenkowski in 1990. +He is perhaps the ultimate safe incumbent, with a heavily Democratic district, a still powerful party organization and a campaign war chest of more than $1 million, enough to daunt the most optimistic challenger. +His ward-based political strength harks back to an earlier era. But in other respects, his circumstance underscores the nature of House elections in the late 1980's. They were very, very good to incumbents. +In 1986 and 1988, 98 percent of House members who sought re-election were returned to office. Most had some competition on the ballot, but still won comfortably. More than 85 percent were elected with at least 60 percent of the vote. Many people in both parties predict that the House elections of 1990 will run about the same, with only the slightest of shifts. +These statistics are at the heart of many political debates in Washington these days, from the effort to rewrite laws governing campaign finance to the first jousting over Congressional redistricting that will occur in 1991. +To some, the basic question is: Has the political system stifled competition and stacked the deck in favor of incumbents? Those who raise that question cite factors ranging from the laws on fund raising to the perquisites that come with Congressional office to the way Congressional district lines are drawn. +''The issue is whether we have any kind of real, competitive electoral process, particularly in the House of Representatives,'' said Fred Wertheimer, head of Common Cause, the Washington advocacy group. +Republicans, who last held a majority in the House in 1954, have argued that the current system has created a permanent Congress, and by extension a well-nigh permanent Democratic majority. Democrats counter that incumbents have always had high re-election rates. Thomas S. Foley, the House Speaker, has noted that all 45 incumbents seeking re-election in 1792 were successful. +Thomas Mann, director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington research group, says the last few election cycles have been unusually comfortable for incumbents. The re-election rates for 1980 and 1982 were about 90 percent, considerably lower than in recent years. But Mr. Mann argues that the rise in re-election rates largely reflects the temper of the late 1980's. ''The national times were good and there was little sentiment for throw the rascals out,'' he said. +Still, many advocates of new campaign financing laws argue that the current fund-raising system gives unfair advantage to incumbents. +''You've got incumbents sloshing around in huge amounts of money, most of which they don't need, while challengers are starving,'' Mr. Wertheimer said. For example, Common Cause said, political action committees gave $82 million to incumbents and $9 million to challengers in the 1988 House races. +The threat of a permanent Congress has become a rallying cry for many Republicans this year as they take to the political trenches, hoping to expand their power in governors' offices and state legislatures, which will help draw the lines in the 1991 redistricting. +''Ninety-eight percent!'' Lee Atwater, the national Republican chairman, declared not long ago, referring to the re-election rates. ''For the Democrats, those odds aren't good enough. They want to draw district boundaries even tighter to protect themselves.'' +In the meantime, a drive to limit terms in Congress is making some noise. A fund-raising solicitation for one such effort was recently mailed to LaVerne Rostenkowski, the wife of the Ways and Means chairman who came to Congress in 1958. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +56 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 8, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +HEALTH; +Personal Health + +BYLINE: By Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section B; Page 13, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1459 words + +An 80-year-old Nevada woman whose health problems dictate a salt-free, sugar-free, low-fat diet complains that ''nothing tastes good anymore.'' +An 88-year-old widower in rural Minnesota with limited kitchen skills lives on a very narrow menu except for the five dinners a week delivered to him by Meals-on-Wheels volunteers. +A 78-year-old Brooklyn woman with a chronic disorder that impairs chewing and swallowing struggles each day to consume enough nutritionally balanced food to maintain her weight and well-being. +These elderly people are more typical than not. Experts say the health and longevity of millions of older Americans are being undermined because they are not following wholesome diets. +As people age, the obstacles to good nutrition multiply even while eating properly becomes increasingly important to optimal health. Even temporary nutritional failings that are readily tolerated by young, healthy people can adversely affect the health of older people, especially if they are ill to begin with. +The problem is likely to worsen as growing millions of Americans live into their 70's, 80's and beyond without the knowledge and social support needed to assure healthful eating habits. Elderly men living alone are especially at risk, a recent study showed, because many are unaccustomed to planning, shopping and preparing for meals. +But solutions, some of them simple, are available if the elderly and their family and friends are aware of the difficulties. The first step may be to persuade older people that whatever their current age and state of health, it is not too late to make health-promoting dietary changes. +In the absence of scientifically established nutritional goals for older people, some take a nihilistic attitude, contending one can never really know what is best. But the all-too-common notion that ''I've eaten this way all my life and I see no reason to change now'' can eventually result in illness that might have been prevented or postponed by changes in diet and exercise habits. +On the other hand, some older people overreact to sound nutritional advice or to nutritional quackery, becoming fanatical about sticking to diets prescribed by physicians, friends or faddists. Out of fear or ignorance they may restrict their diets to the point of inducing nutritional inadequacies. + +The Problems +Leading the long list is a basic lack of knowledge about how the nutritional needs of older people may differ from those of younger adults. Studies are just now getting under way to determine if there are special nutrient requirements for people over 50 and whether further changes occur when people reach 75 or 80. +As people age, changing physical factors can affect nutrient needs. These include a gradual loss of muscle and bone tissue, an increase in body fat and a shift of body fat to the abdomen. Along with a gradual decline in physical activity, these changes in body composition mean that older people need fewer calories to maintain a normal body weight. +But the need for essential nutrients - protein, vitamins and minerals -is believed to be at least as great as for younger adults. This means there is less room in an older person's diet for high-calorie but low-nutrient foods like sweets, snacks, alcohol and fats. More attention, not less, must be paid to the nutritional value of foods consumed as people age. +Many older people live alone and have no one to eat with regularly, a situation that does not invite thoughtful meal planning and preparation. A recent study sponsored by the National Institute on Aging showed that nutritionally poor diets are regularly consumed by 16 percent of people over 65 who live alone. +The problem is not money, according to the study by Dr. Maradee Davis and colleagues at the University of California at San Francisco. Rather, inexperience and lack of motivation are often obstacles to preparing wholesome meals. Older men who become widowed and do not know how to cook may end up relying on packaged meals and take-out foods that may be nutritionally inappropriate. Dr. Davis's study showed that 16 percent of men 55 to 64 years old and 25 percent of those over 75 who live alone had poor diets. +Gradual mental deterioration or persistent emotional depression are other common impediments to a wholesome diet among older people. An estimated 12 to 14 percent of elderly Americans are chronically depressed and often suffer progressive weight loss as a result. +Other contributing factors include physical impairments that limit mobility, and a loss of appetite that may stem from the inevitable decline in taste buds and odor receptors that accompanies aging. Those without natural teeth or with advanced gum disease may be restricted to a diet of soft foods that are low in fiber and essential nutrients. +In addition, nutritional status can be undermined by various chronic ailments that necessitate bland or highly restricted diets or by medications and diseases that impair absorption through the digestive tract or increase the need for certain nutrients. These problems are often exaggerated for the elderly who live in nursing homes or other institutional settings where they may be dependent on others to feed them and where they have no choice about the timing and kinds of foods they are given. + +Possible Solutions +Educating older people about nutritional needs and how to overcome common obstacles to a good diet is crucial to improving their nutritional well-being. Toward that end, the American Institute for Cancer Research (1759 R Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009) has prepared an excellent pamphlet, ''Be Your Best: Nutrition After Fifty,'' that outlines dietary needs and how to meet them. +Among the ''helpful hints'' suggested in this pamphlet and by other experts on nutrition for the elderly are these: +* If you dine alone, make eating more exciting by trying new foods or recipes frequently, by eating near a window or by treating yourself like a special guest. Whenever possible, try to eat with other people, perhaps in community meal programs or by reciprocal invitations with others who live alone. +* Anticipate your reluctance to cook for yourself and prepare larger recipes when you do cook. Then freeze the leftovers in individual portions (be sure to label the containers) for later use. A microwave oven for quick defrosting or easy reheating is an ideal kitchen tool for older people. +* To cope with a sluggish appetite, increase your use of ''safe'' seasonings like herbs, spices, lemon juice, peppers, garlic and vinegar. This is especially helpful for those who must restrict their use of salt. +* If your meal capacity is reduced, eat small amounts at a time but eat more often than three times a day. For example, the Brooklyn woman who has trouble chewing and swallowing eats six small meals a day instead of three big ones. +* Strive to get more nutritive value for your food dollar. Check unit prices for best buys. For example, light tuna packed in water is less expensive than albacore or chunk types, powdered skim milk costs less than liquid milk, and hot cereals and rice you cook yourself cost less and are more nourishing than instant varieties. +* Take advantage of store specials, even if it means buying more than you can eat at one time. For example, when turkey is on sale, buy a whole one, roast it whole and freeze the leftovers in several portions, or have the butcher cut it up so that you can prepare small amounts at a time. +* Ask your physician to refer you to a consulting dietitian for advice on nutrition and meal planning. Or check the yellow pages for listings of registered dietitians. This is especially important for people who must live on special diets. In many communities the county office for the aging, the health department or the Cooperative Extension Service offer free counseling by a registered dietitian. +* Take advantage of community meal programs for the elderly. +* Resist nutritional quackery and faddism. Elderly Americans take more vitamin and mineral supplements than any other age group. In the process, many waste limited financial resources and some compromise their health by taking large doses of one or more nutrients. +Misconceptions about the role and value of supplements are common among the elderly. For example, more than 40 percent of people over 65 recently surveyed in Eugene, Ore., incorrectly believed that vitamin pills provided energy. +This survey also showed that more than half of older people rely on their physicians for nutritional advice. Since few doctors are schooled in nutrition, the researchers suggested that physicians make more use of dietitians to provide nutritional services for their patients. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Table showing various nutrients and the sources from which they come (source: American Institute for Cancer Research) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +57 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 9, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Experts on Homeless Push for an Old Idea: S.R.O.'s in New York + +BYLINE: By ALAN FINDER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 2012 words + +A consensus is emerging among experts on homelessness and housing in New York that if government wants to move tens of thousands of homeless people off the streets and out of shelters, it will have to reinvent an old idea: the single-room-occupancy hotel. +The city financed the building of about 1,000 rooms for single adults last year and has promised to build a total of 5,000 rooms by 1992. But experts say the city will have to build many times that number to mount a serious attack on homelessness. +For decades, single-room-occupancy hotels, or S.R.O.'s, were unappreciated, if not feared by New Yorkers. They were often viewed as cheap, shabby housing, havens for drug traffickers and other criminals. +But the private hotels were also inexpensive housing of last resort for many single men and women who could not afford real apartments. Among those who found a welcome home in the hotels - where people generally live alone in small rooms, sharing bathrooms and kitchens - were the working poor, elderly pensioners, and the destitute, the disabled and the infirm. +The hotels' importance to some of New York's most vulnerable groups did not become clear until the late 1970's and 80's, when tens of thousands of S.R.O. rooms, most of them in Manhattan, were converted or demolished to make way for upper-income housing or commercial space. The number of people living on the city's streets, in its subways and in bus and rail terminals soared. +To find permanent housing now for these people, the city should revert to the model of the single-room hotels, dozens of experts on low-income housing, advocates for the homeless, elected officials and even some developers said in interviews. +Market forces and some government policies, including tax abatements, made it attractive for private owners in Manhattan to convert their hotels to more profitable luxury apartments and office space, the experts said. To reinvent the S.R.O. hotel as a cure for homelessness, they said, the government should provide the financing and nonprofit groups should manage the hotels. Some people also suggested that private companies be encouraged to build and operate small residential hotels, particularly outside Manhattan. +In essence, the experts want the city to modify its $5.1 billion 12-year housing plan - which centers on building affordable apartments for families -by creating thousands of new rooms for single adults in renovated hotels or new buildings. +More than 3,000 apartments have been created for families in the last three years in the poorest neighborhoods, nearly all of them in formerly abandoned buildings. An additional 13,000 are under construction, and work is to begin soon on 20,000 more. +Many proponents said they were hopeful that they could persuade the administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins to expand the housing plan to include perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 new residential-hotel rooms in the next few years. The Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning, Barbara J. Fife, said the administration understood that there was ''a real housing crisis'' for single adults and that she hoped a strategy could be developed soon. + +Court Ruling Creates New Sense of Urgency +The need to expand the hotel stock has taken on more urgency in the last two months, since the courts struck down one of New York's foremost weapons to prevent the spread of homelessness - a law protecting S.R.O. hotels from alteration or demolition. +In 1985, the city tried to halt the loss of thousands of residential hotel rooms - the estimates range from 35,000 to 100,000 - by imposing the moratorium on their alteration or demolition. The ban was ruled unconstitutional last July by New York State's highest court, the Court of Appeals. +The court said the law deprived owners of the right to determine how their properties would be used. The United States Supreme Court decided in November not to consider the city's appeal, thereby dooming the moratorium. +Housing experts have been debating since then what the city and state should do to preserve and expand the critical housing resource. +Although the city is facing serious fiscal problems, it is likely to continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year for new housing. The effort, which is part of the capital budget, is financed by issuing bonds that are paid back over many years. +Experts on the homeless want the Dinkins administration to expand significantly on the 5,000 new S.R.O. rooms promised by the Koch administration. +The Coalition for the Homeless has proposed creating an additional 15,000 S.R.O. rooms in the next three years. +''You want people off the streets?'' the chairman of the group, Robert M. Hayes, asked. ''Give them somewhere to go.'' +Mr. Hayes said it would cost $500 million to build the additional units, and he argued that they could be financed with money earmarked for related purposes. He said the effort could be backed by nearly $300 million in capital money previously set aside for new shelters for the homeless and from money in existing state programs. +''It's a linchpin to getting people off the streets,'' Mr. Hayes said. ''Would it satisfy the total need? No. But would every New Yorker see a difference? Absolutely.'' More than 9,000 homeless single adults have sought refuge in municipal shelters on recent nights. Tens of thousands of other homeless men and women are living on the streets. + +Safeguarding the 40,000 Now Living in the Hotels +In addition to creating residential hotels, the city has to devise a strategy to help preserve the low-cost rooms of the estimated 40,000 to 45,000 people still living in S.R.O. hotels, said lawyers who represent the tenants. That includes strict enforcement of state rent laws that protect hotel tenants, even in the absence of the city's moratorium. +The lawyers have presented their own proposals to the Dinkins adminstration. Among them is a request that the city buy or seize through eminent domain some of the largest residential hotels in Manhattan before they are emptied and altered or demolished. +''This is the perfect opportunity for the new Mayor to demonstrate what he wants to do about low-income housing for single adults,'' said Saralee E. Evans, director of the West Side S.R.O. Law Project, which represents hotel tenants. +The city has purchased more than a half-dozen S.R.O. hotels in recent years, many of them on the Upper West Side. The city paid for renovations and turned the hotels over to nonprofit groups to manage. The S.R.O. Law Project lawyers want the city to step up that effort dramatically. +Ms. Evans said the city should start with the largest S.R.O. hotel, the Times Square Hotel at Eighth Avenue and 43d Street. The city took over the daily operation of the hotel last month. Its corporate owner has declared bankruptcy, and there were many complaints about the way a caretaker was running the hotel. +Ms. Evans and other tenants' lawyers said they were heartened by the quick response from the Dinkins administration. They would now like to see the city buy the hotel and turn it over to a nonprofit group. Deputy Mayor Fife said discussions were under way on the future of the 735-room hotel, which has about 200 long-term S.R.O. tenants. +''If the city can save this hotel for low-income people, it would be a symbol,'' Ms. Evans said. ''It would send a message that we care about these people.'' + +Issue of Independence: How Many Services? +Many experts said that a substantial portion of the homeless adult population, along with many S.R.O. residents, have physical or emotional disabilities and other problems, including drug or alcohol abuse, that require them to live under supervised conditions. The need for social services adds greatly to the cost of operating the new S.R.O. hotels being created by the city and nonprofit agencies. +A significant number of the homeless and S.R.O. tenants, perhaps a third or more, are employable and able to live on their own in unsupervised residential hotels, many experts said. +Some experts even argue that private companies should be encouraged to build and operate, for a profit, new residential hotels. +That would require the city and state to change zoning regulations, building codes and other laws. Only nonprofit institutions like universities and social-service agencies are now allowed to build dormitories and other single-room housing. + +Encouraging Developers To Build S.R.O. Hotels +George McDonald, the president of the Doe Fund, a foundation that works on behalf of the homeless, contended that private companies could build small residential hotels, perhaps two or three stories tall and with about 100 rooms, for $18,000 a room. By renting the rooms for $75 or $80 a week to working single people, the companies could make profits, Mr. McDonald said. +He added that he had spoken to developers and bankers who were interested in the concept. He also cited a program in San Diego that has resulted in the production of more than 1,000 S.R.O. rooms in the last three years. +''You can build new housing for single poor people,'' Mr. McDonald said. ''All the city has to do is to get out of the way.'' +Kevin B. McGrath, a lawyer who represents developers and who proposed a similar idea to the City Council three years ago, said he was ''absolutely convinced'' that some companies would find the concept appealing. +But several developers, along with the State Housing and Community Renewal Commissioner, Richard L. Higgins, and Abraham Biderman, who resigned last month as the City Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner, said building S.R.O. hotels in New York would cost more than twice Mr. McDonald's estimate. + +Why Costs Are Higher In New York City +The developers said companies could not make profits building and operating residential hotels without large subsidies. Mr. Biderman said the cost was so great that only the government, working with managers of nonprofit housing, could be expected to produce residential hotels. +''We found that the San Diego model is just not directly transferable here,'' Mr. Higgins said. New York building codes are more stringent, he said, and labor and construction materials are much more expensive. +Mr. Higgins said S.R.O. hotels could not be built in New York for anything approaching the costs in San Diego, which range from $21,000 to $31,000 a room, according to California housing and planning officials. +Mr. Biderman said the rebuilding of abandoned residential hotels in New York had cost an average of $40,000 a room. New construction would cost more, he said, and would likely face an additional problem, community opposition. ''I don't believe it will ever be financially attractive to the private sector,'' he said. +Borough President Ruth W. Messinger of Manhattan said she thought it was more appropriate for nonprofit agencies to manage the vulnerable people who live in residential hotels. +Mr. Biderman said the current strategy, which combines city resources in financing and development with nonprofit managers, should be expanded and refined, particularly through the purchase of more S.R.O. hotels and the rebuilding of abandoned ones. +''But there are not enough nonprofits, and there are not enough buildings, and there is not enough money to solve the problem in the foreseeable future,'' Mr. Biderman said. Many advocates for the homeless said, however, that unless the city acts decisively, the homeless will continue to crowd the sidewalks and overwhelm the parks and subways. +''The political propulsion to create 20,000 new S.R.O. units is the abiding frustration of corpses on the streets,'' Mr. Hayes of the Coalition for the Homeless said. ''Many people think homelessness is ruining the city. I'm not sure there is a tremendous groundswell of humanitarian compassion for homeless adults on the streets, but I'm absolutely convinced that the only way to end the frustration, for whatever reason, is to house these people.'' 'You want people off the streets? Give them somewhere to go.' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: George McDonald, President of the Doe Fund (The New York Times); Richard L. Higgins, State Housing Commissioner (The New York Times/Jim Estrin) (pg. B4) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +58 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 10, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Drug-Shooting Casualty Inspires a City to Resist + +BYLINE: By JANE GROSS, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 9, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1010 words + +DATELINE: EAST PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 5 + +Last weekend, volunteers from a local drug rehabilitation program patched and painted the 35 bullet holes in a pink and white stucco bungalow on Westminister Avenue here, where 60-year-old C. W. Roddy was wounded slightly by gunfire on New Year's Eve. +While the painters worked at Mrs. Roddy's house, two deputies and a sergeant on loan from the county sheriff's department helped patrol this crime-ridden city, which cannot afford enough police officers to contain the spread of drugs on its streets. +Meanwhile, county and city officials set aside their jurisdictional squabbles and carried a $5.1 million grant proposal to Washington, seeking money for law enforcement, drug rehabilitation and educational programs for this largely black community of 18,500 residents, 40 miles south of San Francisco, where one in five are unemployed and one in 10 are in prison. +In these and other ways, things have changed in East Palo Alto since Mrs. Roddy's shooting, presumed by the police to be a result of her hectoring the drug dealers on her block. The attack on her home and her refusal to be bullied into silence have outraged and inspired the community as never before, and sparked new government action. + +Sense of Optimism Voiced +''I've seen so much negativism in this city,'' said Mrs. Roddy, a retired telephone company service representative. ''Maybe what happened to me has given people the strength to speak out. I know God spared me for some reason and maybe it's to bring unity to East Palo Alto.'' +Only by the loosest definition is Mrs. Roddy a ''drug crusader,'' as she has been called in local news accounts of the shooting. Like many of the older people who have lived in East Palo Alto for decades, she has seen her community deteriorate. Angry and frustrated, she harangued the dealers, noted the license numbers of cars cruising the street to buy or sell drugs and begged city officials for more police protection. +''She wanted something simple and basic,'' said Sgt. Ron Sibley of the East Palo Alto police department, which handles more complaints per officer than any force in the Bay Area. ''She wanted to come in and out of her driveway without being harassed. She wanted to sleep at night without hearing gunfire.'' +Perhaps it is Mrs. Roddy's very ordinariness that has prompted all the attention. ''Here's an average citizen, in her own home, within inches of being killed,'' said Tom Nolan of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors. ''People have the sense that things are totally out of control if this can happen.'' + +City Drive for Outside Help +Mr. Nolan is a leader in the recent effort to bring outside assistance to this troubled city. The city voted to incorporate in 1983, despite warnings that the paltry tax base would not support services. That bitterly contested incorporation vote was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1987, but the long legal battle cost the city money it could ill afford. +Just as the city was going broke, crack exploded on its grimy streets, just a few blocks from the million-dollar mansions of Palo Alto and the lush campus of Stanford University. More than half the city's $5 million budget now goes for police services, but it is not nearly enough. In 1989, there were 17 homicides, for a rate of 101 per 100,000 people, more than 10 times the national rate. +Among the homicides in 1988 was the slaying of a 26-year-old police officer, just six weeks out of the academy. In the wake of that slaying, several nearby cities and the California Highway Patrol lent officers to East Palo Alto for a few months. The results were impressive, with police calls down 50 percent and no homicides or shootings. But the cities of Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Redwood City, whose residents come here to buy drugs, could not send their officers here indefinitely. +The county, on the other hand, had resources to spare, but was at loggerheads with the city of East Palo Alto, which was wary of outsiders who might challenge the newfound autonomy. ''When you're trying to become an independent entity, it's difficult to accept help because it feels like failure,'' said State Senator Rebecca Morgan, a Republican from nearby Los Altos Hills. $500,000 From the County Senator Morgan was instrumental in bringing the two governments together. As a result, San Mateo County will give the city $500,000, which must be used for five more officers in East Palo Alto over the next two years. While the new officers are being recruited and trained, the county has lent the city several deputy sheriffs and sergeants, three each shift, nearly doubling the uniformed presence. +There is also a new neighborhood organization on Mrs. Roddy's block, Citizens United Against Drugs. The group's president, Jody Lee, is the mother of two dealers, among those at odds with Mrs. Roddy. Mrs. Lee said she hopes her sons ''will see me doing this and try to get their lives together.'' +Mrs. Roddy seems particularly moved by Mrs. Lee's militancy. ''The day she came over to our side was a joyous day for me,'' Mrs. Roddy said. ''It's the beginning of unity.'' The outside of Mrs. Roddy's house no longer bears the scars of the shooting, but other marks endure, like the gash in a wooden coffee table in the living room and a shattered quilting frame in the garage. Her 1970 Pontiac is still in the shop, rammed while parked on the driveway in a separate attack on Jan. 10. In a third attack on Jan. 11, two makeshift Molotov cocktails were hurled at the house, but did not explode. +Mrs. Roddy's 37-year-old son, Darnell, remains jumpy, rushing every few minutes to look out the picture window, with its new glass panes. +''Darnell, what is the matter?'' Mrs. Roddy asked, blandly. +''It's too noisy out there,'' he snapped. +Mrs. Roddy maintains she is not nervous. ''I've never really been frightened,'' she said. ''I've been angry, livid, upset with the apathy of the people of East Palo Alto. But, I'm not afraid to die. I try to live my life daily like it was my last. When it's time to go, it's time to go.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: C. W. Roddy, whose refusal to be bullied by drug dealers in East Palo Alto, Calif., has inspired the city and led to government action. (The New York Times/Terrence McCarthy) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +59 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 11, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Wine Maker Fails to Thwart Street Alcoholics + +BYLINE: By FRANK J. PRIAL, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 37, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 623 words + +DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO + +Cheap, fortified wine, street alcoholics' staple drink, is harder to find in some cities these days because of citizens' groups, government agencies and some companies that make it. +At the same time, there is little indication of any decrease in consumption of alcohol or in the number of street alcoholics. +Last June the E.&J. Gallo Winery voluntarily removed its Thunderbird and Night Train Express brands from retailers' shelves in the rundown Tenderloin district of San Francisco, in a test: Would it cut street drinking? +In September the company expanded the ban to all its markets. +''You can't get it in one store, you get it in another,'' said Tommy Macauley, who calls himself a street person. ''Or you just drink something else.'' +The Gallo company said, ''We believe, and the evidence tends to support, that if alcoholics are deprived of one source, be it beer, wine or cheap distilled spirits, they will find another regardless of difficulty or cost.'' +Nancy Russell of the North of Market Planning Coalition, a grouping of Tenderloin social agencies, said: ''Gallo has done everything they said they would, but it's true that the ban hasn't done much to stop drinking.'' + +'This Stuff Is Bad for You' +Phillip Faight, owner of The Ram's Head, a Tenderloin tavern, said, ''The important thing is to get across the idea that this stuff is bad for you.'' He is also chairman of the Safe and Sober Streets Committee. +In Boedekker Park, a mecca for Tenderloin street drinkers and the only playground for 5,000 children in the area, drunks engage in noisy fights and sleep it off on benches. At the Downtown Grocery, a clerk said as he wrapped a pint of Thunderbird, ''We stocked up before the ban.'' +Some Tenderloin groceries reportedly buy the wine from retailers outside the proscribed area. +Richard's Wild Irish Rose, made by the Canandaigua Wine Company in upstate New York, is a popular alternative. Last summer Canandaigua said it would pull Wild Irish Rose out of the Tenderloin, but it stayed on the shelves, and the company said it was up to the local distributors to sell or not sell it. +Tenderloin alcoholics turned to malt liquor, a high-alcohol beer - particularly Olde Englishe 800 - and cheap vodka. A pint of Thunderbird is about $1, a half-pint of vodka $1.50 and a quart of malt liquor $1.40. +A Gallo spokesman, Dan Solomon, said most Thunderbird is drunk not by street alcoholics but by older people scrimping on pensions. +The trade journal Market Watch estimates that in 1988, Thunderbird accounted for 4.5 million cases of Gallo's total volume of almost 60 million cases, and Night Train for 500,000 cases. The volume of Richard's Wild Irish Rose in 1988 was 6 million cases, or close to 62 percent of Canandaigua's annual sales. + +Discount Stores Sell the Wines +An informal survey of a dozen wine and liquor shops in middle-class neighborhoods in New York City and New Jersey turned up only one that stocked either of the top two screwtop wines. Mr. Solomon said discount stores like K Mart were important suppliers of Thunderbird. +Most cities ban public drinking and selling liquor to people who appear drunk. Los Angeles, Seattle and San Diego have asked stores in the poorest neighborhoods to stop selling the cheap wines. In Salt Lake City, these wines were banned for a year in seven state liquor stores. Kenneth Wynn, the Utah Alcohol Beverage Control Director, said curbside drinking seemed down, but sales of substitutes were up. +The Oregon Liquor Control Commission made 10 stores in the Old Town district of Portland stop selling the wines. Steven Brinkerhoff, a commission supervisor, said: ''They still drink on the sidewalks. They're just drinking other products.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +60 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 11, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Old Pro, Young Idol Team Up for 'Revenge' + +BYLINE: By LARRY ROHTER + +SECTION: Section 2; Page 20, Column 1; Arts and Leisure Desk + +LENGTH: 1804 words + +DATELINE: TOLUCA, Mexico + +On a cool, damp and somewhat misty December afternoon, two men walk across a meadow, rifles in hand and hunting dogs baying as they advance toward a cluster of pine trees in pursuit of their prey. The age difference between them is such that they could be father and son, and the easy familiarity they display toward each other suggests just that. Kevin Costner and Anthony Quinn are busy at work, but as the cameras roll, it is difficult to tell where their roles end and reality begins, so comfortable do they seem in each other's company. +Mr. Costner and Mr. Quinn are the central figures of ''Revenge,'' a torrid and sometimes brutal tale of lust, betrayal and retribution played out against a Mexican backdrop. But perhaps even more intriguing than the story itself is the pairing of one of Hollywood's most bankable young stars, whose intense but understated performances in movies such as ''No Way Out'' and ''Field of Dreams'' have led some to call him ''the new Gary Cooper,'' with one of the foremost leading men of the last 40 years, an exuberant personality who exudes machismo from every pore. +''Yeah, they certainly are different,'' said the director, Tony Scott. ''They are such opposites as actors. But there was a camaraderie between them from the first time I saw them sitting down together. You got a sense that whether they did this film or not, these two guys would always spend time together, and that's exactly what I was looking for.'' +In ''Revenge,'' which opens in New York on Friday, Mr. Costner plays Cochran, an Indiana farm boy turned Navy pilot who finds himself at loose ends after retiring from the military. Mr. Quinn is cast as ''Tiburon'' (''Shark'') Mendez, a Mexican millionaire and political kingmaker who also dabbles in the drug trade. The men transform a casual friendship as tennis partners and fishing buddies into something deeper and more satisfying to both of them, try to kill each other after Cochran falls in love and into bed with Miryea, the young and alluring wife of the older man, but eventually reach a sort of reconciliation. +A triangle, in other words, but one in which the woman at the apex, played by Madeleine Stowe, matters less to the story than do the two men at the base. ''He doesn't know that my love for him is because he is my surrogate son,'' Mr. Quinn, sitting in a director's chair during a break in the filming, said of the relationship between the two male characters. ''Sometimes we older men love a young man and see in him qualities that we had or hoped to have. For my character, there's great pain in losing the wife, but that pain is not as great as losing the friend.'' +''The truth is that he can trust me, except for that one moment,'' Mr. Costner added. ''The Cochran character resists the temptation three or four times, but then succumbs. The Tiburon character, being cuckolded, he wants to forgive, he wants to let it go by. But finally he can't hold the thing in, and it explodes; it takes over.'' +''Revenge'' first surfaced a decade ago as a 99-page novella written by Jim Harrison, a practitioner of tough-guy prose in the Hemingway mold, and when Mr. Costner came upon it around 1985, he felt an instant attraction. One sentence in particular, he recalled, stayed with him: ''There is an impulse for vengeance among certain men south of the border that leaves even the sturdiest Sicilian gasping for fresh air.'' The 35-year-old actor's big commercial successes in ''The Untouchables'' and ''Bull Durham'' were at that point still to come, but he made an effort to acquire the rights to the work. +''It seemed to me something I wanted to do myself,'' Mr. Costner said. ''I contemplated directing it, because it seemed like a small movie. The story was manageable, but the themes were big and universal, and the writing was tough and it was honest and it was original. There was poignance in the story, but it read like a movie to me.'' +In the end, the book ended up in the hands of the producer Ray Stark, but Mr. Costner's continuing interest in the story and what he called ''my history'' of box-office success helped get the project off the ground. ''To me, it's like picking a football team,'' Mr. Costner said. ''The story made sense, to play the game made sense, and it was obvious that I should play quarterback or end. I mean, Cochran is a role that I should play.'' +Casting the role of Tiburon, also known as Tibey, was more of a challenge. ''This movie needed Anthony Quinn more than it needed me,'' Mr. Costner said. ''I mean, there are probably five or six guys who could play Cochran's role, but who else is there who could play the role of Tibey?'' +''The Tiburon character has to be really charming, and Anthony has that in spades,'' Mr. Costner added. ''He has to have danger and he has to have presence. Anthony has that because he's been a leading man all his life. And he has to be that age. The age is the key, so it's a perfect role for him.'' +Mr. Quinn, who will turn 75 in April, agreed, explaining that he found the role to be a close fit, uncomfortably so at times. ''I think the man is of another time and his values are of another time,'' he said. ''It's the old country mentality, which also happens to be mine. I think sexual liberation is a lot of garbage. I mean, there's no code, there's no honor. It was a question of morality that Tiburon takes the action he does. So that's why I did the picture, that and the fact it's a classic, old-fashioned story that could have been done by John Wayne or Gary Cooper.'' +''I'm aware that a lot of American women will not understand my behavior, will find it as twisted as all hell,'' he continued. ''They'll say: 'Well, that terrible man, he slices up the girl's face and then almost kills his friend.' I'm saying that the man can't help it; he was born with that morality. I mean, a hunting dog can't help that he bites.'' +But Mr. Scott, whose director credits include what was perhaps the ultimate buddy film of the 80's, ''Top Gun,'' as well as ''Beverly Hills Cop II'' and ''The Hunger,'' believes that ''Revenge'' is also ''very much a woman's film, especially in the first half.'' As ''a powerful, obsessive story about forbidden love, it's what every woman dreams of, of being swept off her feet by someone who comes along.'' And in the match-up of Mr. Costner and Ms. Stowe, who first came to notice in ''Stakeout,'' ''you can smell the energy; you can smell the vibrations between the two of them,'' he said. +Mr. Quinn said the dark sexual tension that percolates constantly throughout ''Revenge'' and is essential to the story made him wonder at first if he was right for the role of ''Shark'' Mendez. ''I had my doubts,'' he acknowledged. ''Obviously you know how old I am, and I didn't know if people would accept that I had such a young wife. I thought I should be 15 or 20 years younger. But I'm still a very physical man, even now. I play an hour or two of tennis every day. I go walking. I exercise in the morning. I swim an awful lot. And I do see young girls looking at me, so I thought, what the hell. +''I'm very happy to be in this picture,'' he said, guffawing, ''because it is probably the last picture I'll ever do where I get to have a young wife.'' +Shooting ''Revenge'' on locations ranging from Durango and Puerto Vallarta to Mexico City also represented something of a homecoming for Mr. Quinn, who was born in Chihuahua at the height of the Mexican Revolution but moved to Los Angeles while still an infant. + +'' +Though, as Mr. Quinn noted, he has more often been cast more in roles as an Italian, Greek, Arab or Slav, he won an Oscar for best supporting actor in 1952 playing a Mexican in ''Viva Zapata,'' came back for another try in ''The Children of Sanchez'' and is glad to be getting another opportunity at a meaty Latino part. ''It's very natural to me,'' he said. ''I haven't done it in many years, but I'm playing someone I know quite well.'' +Mr. Costner, in contrast, found himself assuming unfamiliar duty as executive producer of ''Revenge'' as well as its star. The title is a nebulous one, but Mr. Costner, who worked as a stagehand early in his career and has often said his ultimate goal is to ''involve myself in every aspect of the movies,'' made an effort to give it substance. +''I'm not directing the movie,'' he said emphatically. ''What I try to do is keep the movie on track, meaning that if the movie starts to slip away dramatically, there are certain things I can't control'' even as executive producer.Movies, he added ''always threaten to go somewhere else, not because someone is trying to do it on purpose, but because they are fragmented, that's the way they are shot. So you just become another eye looking out for the movie.'' +One of the matters in which Mr. Costner took an intense interest was the script. Mr. Harrison did an initial draft, and John Huston and his son Tony were among the others who also took a crack at the story, but eventually, Mr. Scott said, ''Kevin became a great force in terms of the script and in terms of the character of the piece.'' +''The fact is that it's such a rich story that every writer was able to derive things out of it,'' Mr. Costner said. ''As it was rewritten, it got farther away from what the book was. In the final analysis, what I tried to do was bring it back to what had attracted everyone to the book, which was that it's a story, a 99-page story.'' +The final script, credited to Mr. Harrison and Jeffrey Fiskin, was, said Mr. Costner, very much in his style and to his liking. ''I'm a real lean, linear kind of actor. I try to have forward motion in everything, where basically you just stand there and do your lines, you know what I mean? The lines will decide what is important.'' +Mr. Scott said he also favored that approach, which he acknowledged was something of a departure for him. ''I pushed them to give me this piece,'' Mr. Scott said. ''Because I think I have a reputation for being a visual director and glitzy and rock-and-roll, not everybody was convinced in terms of giving me this material. It's different from what I have done. I suppose I loved it because it has a whole range of emotional buttons to push. It has passion, violence, and it's set in the strange world of Mexico, with those overwhelming locations, those beautiful landscapes.'' +''Revenge,'' Mr. Scott and the rest of the team agreed, will be judged a success only if it convinces moviegoers that the film's creators are artists who know how to tell a story. ''I know that guys in the audience are going to be going, 'Cochran, oh, Jeez, oh, no, man, don't do it,' +* '' Mr. Costner said. ''That's where you like people to be during a movie. So you stay and watch, but you're going, 'Oh, no.' Hey, it's the movies, and stuff happens.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Madeleine Stowe and Mr. Costner in the film opening on Friday. + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +61 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 14, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Families Join in Deciding to Contribute to the Neediest + +BYLINE: By NADINE BROZAN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4, Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 398 words + +For many families, making a donation to The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund is a cooperative enterprise, with parents and children deciding together that they must help those less fortunate. +A typical letter, which came from Larchmont, N.Y., began, ''Enclosed please find a check from the Kirklin family - John, Judy, Christopher (8 years old) and Katherine (4 years old) - to be used to help needy persons.'' +''Katherine wished that the money be used to help needy children, old persons and grown-ups,'' it continued. ''Chrstopher wished that elderly persons be helped. We all hope that this money will help to ease the suffering of some needy persons.'' Their gift was $50. +A note signed the William Siegles said: ''There are five in the Siegle family. Each member from the 9-year-old baby sitter to Mom and Dad and college freshman - have given what we could. Wish it were more.'' The Siegles, who live in South Salem, N.Y., sent $26. +Elizabeth W. Kearns of Darien, Conn., sent $250 with a note explaining: ''There are five of us in the Kearns family and we live and work in New York. It's a wonderful but very hard city, and we'd like to share this with those for whom it is particularly hard.'' + +A 'Generous' Sister +Sometimes people who are related give because of one another - but at different times. Last month, Kenneth M. Obel, a junior at Yale University, wrote that he was contributing $20 as a gift for his sister, Karen Obel, a recent graduate of Cornell. He described her as ''the most loving, generous sister that a brother could have.'' +''Our parents taught us to think of the well-being of others, not just our own,'' he wrote. ''Karen is acutely aware of the swelling number of hungry and homeless people living on our city streets. She sometimes brings sandwiches from home to give to these unfortunate individuals. I hope that members of our generation will always remember that the well-being of all the members of our society is a collective responsibility.'' +This week a letter from Susan B. Obel of the Bronx arrived, which said: ''Enclosed is my check to help mothers with children in need, please. I am very proud that my child, Kenneth Obel, made this first gift to the fund this year in honor of his sister, Karen.'' She sent $100. + +Previously recorded ... $4,162,196.20 +Recorded yesterday ... 22,204.76 + +Total ... $4,184,400.96 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +62 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 15, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Susceptibility to Tuberculosis Found in Blacks + +BYLINE: By WARREN E. LEARY, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 29, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 644 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 + +A statistical study indicates blacks may be more susceptible than whites to infection with tuberculosis. +The study of more than 25,000 residents of 165 racially integrated nursing homes in Arkansas found that blacks were twice as likely to be infected with the tuberculosis bacterium when living in the same exposure conditions as whites. +While the exact reason for this difference is unknown, the researchers theorize that it could stem from genetic differences that affect the ability of defensive cells in the lungs to knock out tuberculosis bacilli. But no difference between races was found in the percentage of the residents who became infected and later developed clinical tuberculosis symptoms. +In a paper being published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from the tuberculosis program of the Arkansas Department of Health said the higher rate of tuberculosis long seen in blacks had previously been attributed to environmental factors like poverty, overcrowding and poor nutrition. +''We happen to have stumbled on a new biological phenomenon no one has seen before,'' Dr. William W. Stead, the principal author of the study, said in a telephone interview. ''These data show that people are not equally infected when exposed to the same pathogen in the same way. +''Under the same living conditions, whites seem to be more able to fend off the tuberculosis organism before it can establish an infection than blacks,'' Dr. Stead continued. +The study reviewed the cases of 25,398 elderly people who were free of tuberculosis infection when they were admitted to integrated nursing homes in Arkansas. When they were retested several months later, 13.8 percent of the blacks and 7.2 percent of the whites showed evidence of infection. + +Difficult to Separate Causes +Dr. Robert S. Baltimore, an expert on infectious disease at the School of Medicine of Yale University, said the question of an apparent predisposition to tuberculosis among blacks had intrigued scientists for years. +''This is a very interesting study by well-recognized researchers in the field, and the conclusions could be important if verified,'' Dr. Baltimore said. ''Epidemiology has suggested a higher susceptibility among blacks, but it's incredibly difficult to separate out environmental causes that could account for apparent racial differences.'' +Dr. Stead, the principal author of the study, said that in nursing homes, all residents live under the same conditions, eat the same food, are exposed to the same air and have about the same amount of outside activity. But he said that the researchers could not control for things like prior nutritional status, vitamin D deficiency or smoking history, all of them factors suspected of affecting susceptibility to tuberculosis. + +Little Change in Federal Policy +Dr. Richard O'Brien of the Tuberculosis Control Division of the Federal Centers for Disease Control said the new findings, if confirmed, would probably not have a major effect on Government efforts to control the disease. +For more than 30 years, Dr. O'Brien said, tuberculosis rates have plummeted in the United States because of intensive screening and intervention efforts for high-risk groups. Blacks, he said, already are a special focus of tuberculosis prevention because a high proportion are included in these groups, like those who live in poverty, are undernourished or reside in overcrowded conditions or institutions. +About 22,000 cases of active tuberculosis, which is treatable with antibiotics, are reported in the United States each year, resulting in 1,700 deaths. It is believed that 10 million Americans are infected with the tuberculosis bacterium but do not develop the disease. +A recent resurgence of the disease in some cities has been associated with people infected by the virus that causes AIDS. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +63 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 17, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Your Money; +Advice for Elderly On Health Policies + +BYLINE: By Jan M. Rosen + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 36, Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 862 words + +Older taxpayers may be taken aback when they start to fill out their 1989 income tax forms. Many thought they had won a major victory in December when Congress repealed the surtax for catastrophic medical care that could have run as high as $800 per person or $1,600 per couple. But there it is on the forms, line 54 of the Form 1040 and line 23 of the 1040A. +''Ignore it,'' said Hal M. Cohen of Deloitte & Touche. ''Don't use it. The forms had already been printed when the surtax was repealed.'' Those who included that liability when making estimated tax payments last year ''will get it back as a refund,'' he added. +Mr. Cohen, who is based in Morristown, N.J., is a member of the accounting firm's executive financial planning group. So he has a suggestion for how to use the funds that would have paid the surtax: buy supplemental medical insurance. +''The emotional and financial expenses of a long-term illness can deplete the assets and income of two generations,'' he said, if a family must pay for the uninsured portion of doctor and hospital bills or for custodial or nursing-home care not covered under Medicare that can cost $20,000 a year or more. +Consequently, Mr. Cohen is advising all his older clients, as well as those who may be responsible for elderly parents, to be sure they have adequate health-care insurance ''in order to avoid financial disaster or substandard medical care.'' +Once a person reaches age 65, he or she is eligible for Medicare. It becomes the primary carrier for those who are retired, and supplemental ''medigap'' insurance is available through private carriers. Medicare pays 80 percent of allowable charges, but medical costs often exceed Medicare's allowable limits. +Medicare and the medigap policies will pay for nursing-home stays in approved facilities with medical staffs after hospitalization. Unlike Medicaid, which is the medical-welfare program for the indigent, Medicare will not pay for long-term custodial care for people who have not been hospitalized, like those suffering from Alzheimer's disease. So middle-class people are likely to need private insurance for this. +''Shop around,'' Mr. Cohen said. ''There can be tremendous differences among policies,'' both in terms of the cost and of the coverage provided. He suggested starting with the American Association of Retired Persons, which markets a Prudential medigap plan, or by consulting an independent insurance agent. +Insurance is regulated by state insurance commissions, so what is available in one state may not be available in another. +Tamara G. Telesko, vice president of Chase U.S. Private Banking, part of the Chase Manhattan Bank, said that with the frequent need for custodial care among the elderly, more people are becoming aware of the need for private insurance to supplement Medicare. However, she cautioned, this is a relatively new product, and actuarial data are still being developed. With rising health-care costs, premiums may rise. +Deloitte & Touche has advised its clients to look for policies that provide a waiver of premium in the event of disability, a maximum benefit period for one nursing-home stay of at least four years and a daily nursing-home benefit of about $80, with inflation protection written into the policy. Inflation protection can increase the premium cost by as much as one-third. +It is also important to make sure that the company issuing the policy is financially sound. One way to do this is to check the rating issued by A.M. Best & Company. Ratings range from A+ (superior) to C (poor). +Among the features Deloitte & Touche recommends in considering policies are these: +* Guaranteed Renewability. The policy should be guaranteed renewable for life, except for nonpayment of premium, so that the insurer cannot cancel the policy when the individual is making use of its coverage. +* Deductible Period. This is the period, generally 21 to 365 days, that must pass before the insurer begins to pay benefits. Although the shorter period is preferable, the longer period may reduce the premium. +* Grace Period. This is the time, generally seven to 31 days, after the premium due date, before which the insurer may cancel the policy. It gives the policyholder some protection, should he or she forget to pay the premium on time. +* Care Coverage. The policy should say clearly whether it covers skilled, intermediate and custodial care without a pre-hospitalization requirement. Also, some policies provide long-term home care only as a rider for an extra charge. +Alzheimer's disease is generally described in policy language as ''organically based mental conditions,'' and if such coverage is not specifically mentioned, Alzheimer's is probably not included. +In deciding on coverage, people need to do a cash-flow analysis to help determine how long they are able and willing to pay for their own medical costs before they would need insurance. And they need to determine whether they have any retiree health-care benefits. +Two groups are more likely than most to have these benefits, Mr. Cohen said - executives whose compensation package included them and union members. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +64 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 18, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Managing the Care of Elderly Relatives + +BYLINE: By PENNY SINGER + +SECTION: Section 12WC; Page 14, Column 3; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1380 words + +THERE were 1,500 miles separating Joan K. Pompadur in Hartsdale from her grandmother and aunt in Florida. For years the Florida household had operated fairly smoothly, said Ms. Pompadur, who made periodic trips to Florida to check on her family. +''But when age and illness began to take its toll, the time came when they needed more help than a cleaning woman and I was at a loss as to where to find that help,'' Ms. Pompadur recalled. ''My grandmother, who was in her 90's, and my aunt, a semi-invalid in her 60's, were becoming increasingly fragile, and yet I couldn't leave my own household and children for any length of time to oversee their well-being.'' +Ms. Pompadur was put in touch with Dr. Lenise Dolen, a psychologist and gerontologist who heads Dolen Consulting Systems in Chappaqua. Dr. Dolen, ''a private-care manager,'' specializes in helping clients find health and social services for elderly relatives living at a distance. +Dr. Dolen ''found us a geriatric-care consultant in Florida who took over the supervision of the care of my grandmother and aunt,'' Ms. Pompadur said. ''She was available to them at all times around the clock and saw them whenever it became necessary.'' + +A New Health Field +Consultants in private geriatric-care management are a new breed of health professional, said Dr. Dolen, who is vice president of the National Association of Private Geriatric-Care Managers. They provide for recruitment, screening, training and supervision of home-care personnel, and will also handle Medicare forms, assist with other financial-entitlement programs and help families find legal assistance. +The national association was formed in 1985 in Manhattan by a group of professionals who had private gerontological practices. ''Our members, who are in private practice, include certified and licensed registered nurses who have had geriatric training and other professionals, all holding graduate degrees in such fields as social work, psychology or gerontology,'' said Dr. Dolen, who earned her doctorate in developmental psychology from the City University of New York. +Geriatric or elder-care counseling has also become one of the fastest-growing employee benefits. It is estimated that one in four workers is now responsible for an elderly relative, one who often lives in a different state. +''Even the term 'elder care' didn't exist when I started my practice 20 years ago,'' Dr. Dolen said. ''There was no network of help available to the aging or their families. I became a pioneer in the field after my husband and I, who were still in our 30's, had to take most of the responsibility for overseeing the care of four sets of grandparents, all of them with various problems.'' + +Caught in the Middle +This experience led her to establish a counseling practice that focused on care of the elderly and related areas like retirement and life-planning counseling. +''Ms. Pompadur and I both belong to the 'sandwich generation,' adults in their 30's through 60's who are caught in the middle trying to balance the needs of their aging parents and their growing children - and wearing themselves out in the process,'' she said. +The sandwich generation comes under a great deal of stress, she emphasized. ''Guilt, anxiety, love, hate, fear. All the emotions come in to play when an adult child is trying to care for an aging parent,'' she said. ''On the other hand, adult children need emotional support and preparation for their own aging.'' +Ms. Pompadur recalled how counseling helped her deal with this aspect of her responsibilities. ''Dr. Dolen helped me cope by showing me how to deal with my feelings and problems, especially when I became divorced and felt very much alone,'' she recalled. ''I was grateful for her support. And when the time came when it became too difficult for my grandmother and aunt to stay in their own home, Dr. Dolen went to Florida with me to evaluate the situation.'' + +Choosing the Home +When the decision was made to place Ms. Pompadur's relatives in a nursing home, it was Dr. Dolen who helped her make an assessment of available homes in Florida and New York. +''We decided that bringing them both back to be near me would be the easiest thing to do,'' Ms. Pompadur said. ''We finally chose a nursing home in nearby Greenwich. My grandmother is almost 100 years old now, although some family records show her to be even older. But she is still a major figure in my life. She brought me up, and she is very important to me.'' + +A Continuing Relationship +Even though her relatives are in a nursing home, Ms. Pompadur said she still uses Dr. Dolen's services. +''I work,'' she explained, ''so I can't always be at the nursing home at a moment's notice when a crisis develops. But Dr. Dolen is always on call and knowing that she is overseeing my grandmother's welfare is very important to me and worth everything.'' +The fees for such service range from a low of $50 an hour in parts of the South to $125 an hour in the Northeast and on the West Coast, unless provided as an employee benefit. This limits potential clients to those families with sufficient personal income to afford such help, as insurance would not generally provide reimbursement for these services. + +Rising Demand for Managers +As life spans lengthen, private geriatric-care managers are thought to be one of the fastest-growing groups of health-care professionals, Dr. Dolen said. Health-care experts predict that advances in medical technology will enable adults to live to the age of 115 by the 21st century. There are more than 25 million Americans older than 65 and 2.6 million older than 85. +''Private geriatric-care managers become family surrogates, especially for those families who live at a distance from one another,'' Dr. Dolen said, adding that as private practitioners, they are available to clients at all times. +''We're on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week,'' she said. ''We have to be. For instance, last Sunday I received a call at 11 o'clock in the morning from a distraught woman who had just spoken with her 82-year-old mother in Massachusetts and realized she was hallucinating. The daughter was afraid she might injure herself, and her mother lived four hours away so she didn't know what to do.'' + +A Nationwide Network +Dr. Dolen said that she got in touch with a neighbor of the mother and then a care manager in the Massachusetts city. ''The care manager and I and the neighbor were able to make an assessment over the phone and decided that the woman was not in immediate danger,'' she said. ''Had she been, the care manager would have seen that she received medical attention immediately, even if it meant taking her to the emergency room.'' +Clients are matched up with care managers through a network of professionals operating in 35 states, Dr. Dolen said. +''Geographically, we are very mobile and flexible in the type of services we can offer,'' she said. ''But perhaps the most wanted service in all parts of the country is finding home-care workers. Care managers have more resources than the average person to draw upon. They know the better agencies, they know how to fill out the necessary forms; and things like where to find a beautician who makes house calls.'' +The main purpose of a private health-care manager, she said, is to see that services older people need are supplied to them, to allow them to live as comfortably and pleasantly as possible. + +Planning for Old Age +In acknowledging that not every family can afford to pay for the service, Ms. Dolen noted that part of her practice was devoted to helping clients plan ahead for old age. +''I show people how to prepare for the third and fourth quarters of their lives,'' she said. ''I hold retirement workshops for employees at major corporations. I tell them to start gathering information on estate planning, catastrophic insurance and geriatric case management; everything to make old age more agreeable. Quality elder care is like child care, it can't be haphazard, it has to be planned for.'' +For those who wish to contact the National Association of Geriatric Care Managers, which makes referrals to all parts of the country, the number of the New York chapter is (212) 222-9163. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo of Dr. Lenise Dolan, psychologist and gerontologist, with Joan K. Pompadur of Hartsdale (NYT/Joyce Dopkeen) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +65 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 18, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +YOU'RE ONLY AS OLD AS WE SAY YOU ARE + +BYLINE: By ROBERT H. BINSTOCK; Robert H. Binstock is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Aging, Health and Society at Case Western Reserve University. + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 36, Column 1; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 718 words + + +HOW OLD ARE YOU? +Age Consciousness in American Culture. +By Howard P. Chudacoff. +Illustrated. 232 pp. Princeton, N.J.: +Princeton University Press. $19.95. +Throughout our lifetimes American society has been age conscious. But this has not always been the case. Until the mid-19th century, Americans showed little concern with age. The one-room schoolhouse was filled with students of varied ages, and children worked alongside adults. +In ''How Old Are You?'' Howard P. Chudacoff, a professor of history at Brown University and the author of ''The Evolution of American Urban Society,'' suggests that age consciousness in the United States began in the late 19th century, when schools began to set age limits and pediatrics was established as a medical specialty. At the same time, old age began to be identified as a separate stage of life, marked by specific age boundaries. Older people were set apart from the rest of society, because it was assumed that they could not keep up with the demands of an increasingly scientific and economically rationalized world. +Mr. Chudacoff offers a lively picture of the development of age consciousness in urban middle-class culture. We learn that age norms were expressed in popular magazines and songs for the first time in the late 1800's, and that ''the rise of the birthday celebration as a commercial enterprise'' began around the turn of the century with the arrival of the first birthday cards. In the early decades of the 20th century age norms intensified, especially for the young, as child psychology, organized sports, age-peer organizations such as the Girl Scouts, street gangs and legislation regulating child labor and the age of sexual consent were established. Even though youth and old age were recognized as distinct life stages by the turn of the century, middle age was not ''discovered'' until after World War I. Mr. Chudacoff traces the evolution of age norms through the latter part of the 20th century briefly, but accurately. He focuses particularly on the changes that affected the elderly - the development of old-age peer groups and the enactment of Federal programs that use age as a criterion for regulating and distributing benefits. For instance, he notes that pensions for older people were instituted publicly through the Social Security Act of 1935, which designated age 65 as an eligibility requirement for retirement benefits. +Has the ascendance of age norms been good or bad? Mr. Chudacoff believes that there are certain advantages to living in an age-conscious society. Individuals can derive a sense of belonging and a sense of self from their age-based peer group. And policy makers are better able to identify ''problem groups'' - infants, teen-agers, middle-agers, the old and the ''old old'' - who need specific kinds of government help. +The major drawback of such a society is ageism - the attribution certain characteristics to all persons in an age category. Mr. Chudacoff notes the differences among age norms and the realities of age-group behavior, and he is sensitive to discrimination. ''Like gender and race,'' he writes, ''age cannot be changed. To disadvantage individuals merely because they possess a particular characteristic, one for which they cannot be held morally responsible, offends traditional American sensibilities of fairness.'' As a particularly apt example, Mr. Chudacoff points to the recent proposal, by the biomedical ethicist Daniel Callahan, that life-saving care be categorically and officially denied to old people, regardless of their clinical conditions. +Although Mr. Chudacoff notes that age consciousness may have already peaked, he does not analyze whether age norms have changed in recent years, or why Americans are beginning to ignore such norms in increasing numbers. As the social psychologist Bernice Neugarten has observed, we are now becoming an increasingly ''age irrelevant society.'' The ages at which we are marrying, giving birth, entering the labor force, holding political office and engaging in a variety of other activities and roles conform less and less with age norms. The implications of these changes for our culture and social structure may be profound. Perhaps we can look forward to Mr. Chudacoff's next book for an analysis of them. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +66 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 19, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Metro Matters; +A Commissioner For Consumers Has High Hopes + +BYLINE: By SAM ROBERTS + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 755 words + +Twenty years ago this month, New York City imposed its paradigmatic consumer protection law. Bess Myerson was consumer affairs commissioner then, followed briefly by Betty Furness. Those were the golden days of the consumer movement. +Tomorrow, though, may herald the resurgence of an agency with the rare ability to collect more money than it spends while also enhancing the reputations of its commissioner and the mayor. Mayor David N. Dinkins is to swear in Mark Green as the city's Consumer Affairs Commissioner. +For Mr. Dinkins, the appointment of Mr. Green represents an opportunity to convey the image of an administration vigorously protecting the salaries of the middle class and the dwindling resources of even more vulnerable New Yorkers - the young, the elderly, the poor and the disabled - when budget constraints are forcing the Mayor to curtail city services. +For the glib but cerebral Mr. Green, who sometimes speaks in slogans, the position offers public exposure and an opportunity, after 20 years as an independent consumer advocate, to put the city's money and legal might where his mouth is. +''While the department has been a competent licenser, it has been a relatively quiet advocate,'' Mr. Green said. ''There's a lot of room to raise the agency's voice and revenue.'' +The job marks a major adjustment for the 44-year-old Mr. Green, an energetic Ralph Nader protege who has spent the last decade - with a detour in 1986 to run unsuccessfully against Alfonse M. D'Amato, the Republican United States Senator - lobbying for a liberal agenda through his nonprofit Democracy Project. +''This is the first job in which I haven't had to help raise money for my own salary,'' Mr. Green said of the $97,000-a-year commissionership. +''In fact, I may be the only commissioner whose salary went up when he joined city government. My sacrifice is not financial, but mobility.'' +In 1979, Mr. Green rejected the job of consumer adviser to President Jimmy Carter -largely, he said, because of philosophical disagreements about energy deregulation and other issues. +After Mr. Dinkins was elected last November, Mr. Green stepped aside as co-chairman of a panel searching for a consumer affairs commissioner once he was persuaded that he need only look in a mirror to find the perfect candidate. +Mr. Green hopes to transform the Consumer Affairs Department from a monitor of weights and measures and collector of license fees and fines (it took in $11.9 million last year and spent $10.4 million) into a more vocal advocate and law-enforcement office. The fact that his most recent predecessors (identify one if you can) are not household names is a reflection of their styles, if not their records. +''Let's ask why Bess Myerson succeeded 20 years ago,'' Mr. Green said. ''Because Bess exploited a prior prominence, hired a great staff and had a supportive mayor. I'm no Miss America, but several of those elements exist for my tenure, too.'' +Mr. Green seeks to elevates concerns of consumers, and, therefore, their champion, to a higher plane than ''housewife issues.'' +''Tell it to a family of four earning $20,000 that is overpaying $1,000 for an old refrigerator sold as new,'' he said, cautioning that cumulative abuses erode not only the economic health of families on the margin but also their faith in government. +Might not aggressive consumer advocacy sometimes clash with Mayor Dinkins's eagerness to cast his administration as receptive to business? +''I will be resolutely anti-business-abuse, which is pro-business,'' Mr. Green declared. ''The scale of consumer justice is tilted against consumers - business has the resources, lawyers, contacts. My assignment and history are to lend my weight and voice to the consumer side of the scale so there will be a better balance.'' +Will public office still his partisan voice? Mr. Green said he is satisfied for now that he has persuaded the Senate to investigate conflict-of-interest allegations against Mr. D'Amato. ''My private opinion of Al D'Amato has not altered, but I won't spend time prosecuting the case,'' Mr. Green said. Will he run again for the Senate in 1992? Less likely now than before his appointment, Mr. Green said. The only Sherman-like statement he would issue is a pledge to enforce the antitrust law of the same name. +''It is wrong to precondition appointive office on not seeking elective office,'' Mr. Green said, slyly recalling the appointed City Clerk who ran three times for Manhattan Borough President, David Dinkins. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Mark Green + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +67 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 20, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Many With Arthritis Do Not Seek Care + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section C; Page 7, Column 3; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 373 words + +DATELINE: ATLANTA, Feb. 19 + +Thirty-five million Americans report suffering from arthritis, but 6 million of them say they have not seen a doctor about it, Federal health officials say. +More than 3,000 people were asked in 1987 if they had experienced various arthritic conditions in the last year, if they had consulted a physician about the condition and if their arthritis was limiting their work or their household lives, the Federal Centers for Disease Control said last week. +Nationwide, the survey found, 14.6 percent of the population reported arthritis and 12.1 percent had consulted a doctor about it, leaving 2.5 percent, or about about 6 million people, who had not. +''This confirms our suspicions that people are seeing ads on TV and treating their arthritis themselves, and very possibly doing damage to themselves,'' said Steve Erickson, spokesman for the Arthritis Foundation, based in Atlanta. +These findings indicate the need ''to determine why these persons have not sought medical care, and to identify approaches for overcoming barriers to care,'' the centers said. + +High Rate in Florida +The highest incidence of arthritis was in Florida, at 18 percent, while the lowest was in Alaska, at 9 percent. +The high rate in Florida ''is due to its relatively large population of elderly persons,'' the C.D.C. said. Alaska's low rate can be attributed in part to its high populations of native Americans and Pacific Islanders, ''among whom the prevalence of arthritic conditions is low,'' the report said. +Women reported arthritis at a higher rate than men, 18 percent as against 11 percent. Women were also more likely to have seen a doctor about their arthritis, 15 percent as against 9 percent, and were more likely to report limits in their activity, 4 percent as against 2 percent. +Over all, 3 percent of those in the study said arthritis was limiting their activities. +There was little racial difference in reports of arthritis: 15 percent for whites and 14 percent for blacks. +Arthritis rates increased with age. Eleven percent of respondents 35 to 44 years old reported arthritis, compared with 23 percent of those 45 to 54; by the 75-and-over group, the rate was 53 percent, as against just 3 percent in the under-35 group. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +68 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 21, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +About New York; +To Stay Young: Walk, Feed Birds, Help Old People + +BYLINE: By DOUGLAS MARTIN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 770 words + +Margaret Grossman, more than 87 years into this odd adventure called living, knows many things. ''I will die with a smile on my face,'' is one of them. +At 10 A.M., right after the Joan Rivers television show, Margaret begins her walk of more than two miles to her volunteer position at the Parker Jewish Geriatric Institute in New Hyde Park, Queens. Walking briskly through a cold drizzle, she looks like a tiny bird inside her huge down coat. After spending the day helping elderly people - many of them rather sad cases, many younger than she - she will walk home. She does this four times a week. +Margaret is a determined, ambitious and, yes, a stubborn woman. ''I tell everyone to move,'' she says in her Viennese accent. ''Move! It's so important. If I didn't walk, I'd be finished.'' +In 1986, Congress gave Margaret an award for her voluntary service. Her daughter, Susan, with whom she lives in a house just across the Long Island line but in a separate apartment, had minutes earlier tried to show off this and other plaques. +Margaret's sweet response? ''You get on my nerves so much! You make me sick!'' +Susan only laughed. She is used to this fiercely independent spirit. Used to the fact that her mother cooks for herself, saying she can't stand her daughter's cooking. So used to Margaret's turning down rides that she no longer even slows down, just waves as she drives past. +A few blocks from her home, the old woman's face brightens. ''See, they're waiting for me,'' she chirps, pointing to ducks, geese and gulls. She hurries to throw out pieces of the bread she collects from the geriatric home's dirty plates. A companion points out a sign saying not to feed the birds. Margaret peers at him as if he were crazy. +''Don't you see they are hungry?'' +Step by step, the picture emerges of a hugely generous woman. She spends most of her spare time knitting shawls for the homeless. She also knits hats for Israeli soldiers. She gives most of her pension to a wide range of charities. She loathes the idea of spending a dime in a restaurant. ''People are hungry and I should stuff myself?'' Margaret demands. ''No!'' The details of her history are not easily forthcoming. ''Please, I don't want to remember the past,'' she says. +The past includes growing up in Vienna, then fleeing Hitler to France with her husband and two young children. Living there in a cellar with rats for two years. Eating grass because there was nothing else. A French woman, a Christian, who took her children for two years while she and her husband were in hiding. +''I ask myself if I would have done what this woman did for us? This woman and her whole family were in such danger.'' +Other stops included Montreal, where she worked as business equipment supervisor for a paper company, and Israel, where she began to volunteer in hospitals. Dates and details seem to have long ago fallen by the roadside. ''I don't count any more years,'' Margaret says flatly. +Indeed, the time has come when past and present sometimes seem equally real. Each night, just before falling asleep, she conjures up the faces of 65 or 70 deceased loved ones, clear as life. It is a pleasant few moments. Perhaps consequently, the effects of the Alzheimer's disease she sees so much of aren't terrifying. +''You come to a point where perhaps it's better you don't know anymore what's going on,'' Margaret says. The volunteer arrives exactly an hour after she left home - not a second late despite stopping to pick up two bags of hard candy at a drugstore. She brings some residents water, gives others candy and fruit, spoons food into the mouths of still others. +''Sometimes I run out of steam,'' says Rosemarie Martin, a resident of the home who is 62. Her face sparkles when Margaret enters her room. ''She always seems to be in the right place at the right time to give me a push.'' +Much of what she sees is very sad. Some residents stare at the walls for hours. Some sit and sob. Many lack a leg or two. Not a few complain bitterly, since life in its final meanness has given them little else to do. ''I pray to God not to end up here,'' she says quietly. +Then she smiles, holding up a candy. ''This goes to my boyfriend.'' +''Hi sweetheart!'' Margaret says. Only too late does she remember that the man, a diabetic amputee, can't eat candy. He continues to stare out a window, mumbling. ''Such a nice person,'' Margaret says. ''My heart bleeds.'' +But she refuses to slow down, though she took a bad fall walking to work in a December snowstorm. ''My whole life I've searched for peace,'' she says firmly. ''Now I have it.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +69 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 25, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +An Alzheimer's Group for Minority Families + +BYLINE: By MARVINE HOWE + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 35, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 667 words + +Every other Friday evening, Jeanette Payne meets with her ''extended family'' in the community room of Concourse Village in the Bronx to share experiences and talk over coping strategies. +It is a small group, only six regulars, though at times there are as many as 15 in the circle, brought together because of loved ones suffering from Alzheimer's disease. +''In the black community, most of us still think we can manage on our own and aren't geared to airing personal problems,'' Ms. Payne, the manager of professional programs at Baruch College, said the other day. She has put up notices in apartment buildings, passed out fliers in churches and synagogues and lectured at different organizations for the elderly but has gotten little response so far. + +Trying to Reach Out +Ms. Payne is the leader of the first support group for minority families of Alzheimer's in New York City. Fifty groups have been established in the city in the last five years. This network aims to get families of Alzheimer's patients to exchange information and provide emotional support for one another. +''We're trying to reach out to minorities because they are just as much victims as anybody else,'' says Jean Marks, associate director of the New York City Alzheimer's Chapter. She noted that in the New York region, some 200,000 men and women are afflicted with Alzheimer's and about 20 percent of them are members of minority groups. +Discussing the difficulties of communicating with minority groups about Alzheimer's, Ms. Marks said that part of their resistance to seeking help was ''the dismal track record our institutions have in being sensitive to minority and especially, immigrant needs.'' The disease, the most common form of dementia, was first identified in 1907 by Alois Alzheimer, a German psychiatrist. Although in recent years, scientists have stepped up investigations into the illness, its cause and cure are still not known. + +A Period of Confusion +''When my mother began forgetting a lot of little things, I was at a loss and didn't know what to do,'' Ms. Payne recalled. That was 10 years ago, when most people knew nothing about Alzheimer's or thought it was just another kind of senility. +''What's so terrible is to see the disintegration of a beautiful mind,'' Mrs. Payne said, recalling the painful phases of the disease. At first, there were spells of forgetfulness; her mother could not remember a doctor's appointment or what day it was. +Then came a period of confusion, Mrs. Payne said, followed by months of agitation. +Later, when her mother had difficulties functioning, the family put up signs saying 'this is the bathroom,' and labels to show the contents of drawers. And when she could no longer read, they put up pictures. +''Now, I'm not sure she recognizes me,'' Mrs. Payne said. ''She is out of it, like a 2-year-old.'' +Still, Mrs. Payne considers herself ''very fortunate,'' with an understanding husband, two grown children, a large apartment and a very good home attendant to help care for her mother. +She also found the right assistance when she needed it, first from a number of social workers who then introduced her to the Alzheimer's Association. She joined a support group in Yorkville and ''felt less isolated,'' and later, became a member of the Alzheimer's Education Group. +''But after while, I looked around and saw there wasn't any group in my community, where people could be comfortable talking over their concerns,'' Mrs. Payne said. And so, in 1987, the Bronx Support Group was born. +It has not been easy. One problem is the feeling that family problems are nobody else's business, Mrs. Payne noted. She told of a woman who was ''worn to a frazzle'' between caring for her sister with Alzheimer's and her retired husband. ''Yet she won't come out to the support group because she thinks it's a family matter,'' Mrs. Payne said. +''I will get to these people somehow,'' she said with determination. ''It just takes time and persistence.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +70 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 25, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Social Events + +BYLINE: By Robert E. Tomasson + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2, Page 54, Column 1; Society Desk + +LENGTH: 962 words + + +Weekend Meals +Feb. 26 - Every weekday, the New York City Department for the Aging delivers hot meals to thousands of elderly people. As welcome as the assistance is, it still leaves a gap on weekends and holidays that the private, volunteer Citymeals-on-Wheels seeks to fill. The city's fashion industry is saluting the public-private charitable partnership with a benefit cocktail party and buffet from 5:30 to 8:30 P.M. at Restaurant Sofi, 102 Fifth Avenue (15th Street). Tickets, $125, from 212-577-1758. + +A Guiding Hand +Feb. 26 - Big Brothers/Big Sisters of New York City has provided thousands of poor youngsters with a compassionate role model in the person of an adult who gives a few hours of companionship a week. A benefit for the organization at the Waldorf-Astoria will honor, among others, Gen. Colin L. Powell, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Reuben Mark, the president and chief executive of Colgate-Palmolive. Cocktails at 6:30 P.M. will be followed by dinner, the awards and entertainment by the Boys Choir of Harlem. Tickets, $350, from 212-580-5511. + +Briefly Noted: +Feb. 27 - To raise funds for the first venture outside their Savoyard tradition, a production of ''Of Thee I Sing'' by George and Ira Gershwin, the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players are planning an 8 P.M. champagne dessert party and cabaret at the Park Avenue Christian Church, at Park and 85th Street. Tickets, $35, or $60 a couple, from 212-769-1000. +Feb. 27 - The Lar Lubovitch Dance Company will open its 22d season at the City Center with a black-tie benefit starting with the company's 7:30 P.M. performance, followed by a champagne buffet and dancing at the Goodwin Mansion, 9-11 West 54th Street. Tickets, $225, from 212-242-0633. +Feb. 27 - Mike Nichols will be lauded by a score of show-business people at a black-tie benefit at the Waldorf-Astoria for the American Museum of the Moving Image. Cocktails at 7 P.M. Tickets, $350, from 212-245-6570. +Feb. 28 - The concert series Great Performers at Lincoln Center will benefit from a concert by Luciano Pavarotti, with Harolyn Blackwell, Leona Mitchell, Carol Vaness and Leo Nucci. Cocktails at 6:30 P.M., dinner at 7:15, performance at 9 at Avery Fisher Hall. Black tie. Tickets, $1,000, from 212-371-0606. +Feb. 28 - An opening-night benefit for Feld Ballets NY at the Joyce Theater, with the premieres of three works, starts at 7. Champagne at intermission; after the show buses will take guests to dinner at Tavern on the Green. Tickets, $250, from 212-777-7710. +March 1 - The American premiere of ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' with Faye Dunaway, Elizabeth McGovern and Robert Duvall, will take place at the Plaza Theater, on 58th Street between Park and Madison Avenues, to benefit the Center for Constitutional Rights. The cast and film makers are expected at a reception at Regine's, Park Avenue at 59th Street, following the 7:30 P.M. screening. Tickets, $100, from 212-260-5000. +March 1 - A preview of that harbinger of spring the New York Flower Show will be held at Pier 92, on the Hudson River at 51st Street, from 5:30 to 9 P.M. The Garden Party preview of the show, which will run March 2 through 11, will include dancing and a light buffet. A dinner at Doubles follows. Tickets, $150 for preview party and $75 more for dinner, from 212-874-4098. +March 1 - The American Museum of Natural History is holding a Night in Rio supper and dance party to benefit the museum's Inner City Science Education Program. The festivities start at 9 P.M. Guests are directed to the museum's carriage entrance on Central Park West at 79th Street. Tickets, $115, from 212-769-5166. +March 2 - Hunter College Elementary School, a public school for gifted students, will benefit from a concert by the Broadway musical star Mandy Patinkin at the Hunter College Auditorium, 69th Street and Park Avenue. The 8 P.M. concert will be preceded by cocktails at 6 at Roosevelt House, 47-49 East 65th Street. Tickets, $100, or for the performance alone $25, $40 or $50, from 212-307-7171. + +Take a Chance +March 2 - ''Chance, Dance and Romance'' is the theme of a party from 8 P.M. to 1 A.M. at the Manhattan Center Studios, 311 West 34th Street. The black-tie evening, benefiting the New York City chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, is intended for the younger professional set. There will be an open bar and hors d'oeuvres along with games of chance offering a trip to London, New York dinners, gift baskets and other prizes. Tickets, $75, from 212-463-7787, or $90 at the door. + +Tibetan Celebration +March 3 - The Tibetan New Year will be celebrated at St. Illuminator's Armenian Apostolic Cathedral, 221 East 27th Street. Sponsored by the Tibetan Association of New York and New Jersey, the evening starts at 6 with New Year's prayers chanted by Tibetan monks followed by tea and traditional delicacies including the decorated sweet rice served only at religious occasions. Dinner and Tibetan dances follow. There is no admission charge for the prayers and tea. Tickets for the dinner and dances, $15 at the door. Information: 201-652-6019 (evenings). + +Ottoman Purim +March 5 - The fourth annual Purim ball benefiting the Jewish Museum will be a masked ball inspired by the atmosphere and foods of the Ottoman Empire. The ball at the Waldorf-Astoria, with black tie or costume, will set the tone for the museum's exhibition ''In the Court of the Sultan: Sephardi Jews of the Ottoman Empire,'' opening April 1. Cocktails at 6:30 P.M. will be followed by dinner, dancing, a raffle and entertainment with Tovah Feldshuh as the mistress of ceremonies. Tickets, $500, or $75 for those 35 and under for supper and dancing starting at 9 P.M., from 212-580-5511. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +71 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 25, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Pastimes; +Stamps + +BYLINE: By Barth Healey + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2, Page 58, Column 1; Style Desk + +LENGTH: 644 words + +There is one mail fraud that seems to persist despite a year-long effort by the United States Postal Service to halt it. +The perpetrators of the fraud send solicitations in envelopes marked first class but bearing only 6 cents postage, not 25 cents. They typically offer a ''secret'' way to mail all first-class letters for just pennies, in return for a $10 or $20 check. +And as proof that their method works, the perpetrators ask the recipient to examine the envelope with the solicitation: It was received in good order, wasn't it? No postage due? +What you get for your $10 is a copy of a 1960 postal circular setting the first-class letter rate at 6 cents. Ah, those were the days! The rate went to 8 cents in May 1971. +Mailing a letter today for 6 cents will almost always lead to its being returned for more postage. The important word is ''almost.'' With hundreds of millions of items passing through the mail system daily, some short-paid letters are bound to escape detection. +But when a short-paid letter bearing the fraudulent solicitation gets through, it reaches a potential victim. Anyone receiving such a letter should take it to the local postmaster. + +'Fright Mail' +The Postal Service also asks recipients to report any mail that seems to come from a Government agency but in fact is a solicitation of some sort. +Typically, such mail comes in buff envelopes and bears a return address that is almost the name of a Government agency. Again, the important word is ''almost.'' Some key words: social security, revenue, pension. +The mail is frequently sent to the elderly, and often seeks payment for services that are free or much less costly when obtained directly from the Government. +Current Federal law prohibits such postal masquerades, which are known as fright mail. But the law is vague on how close mailers can come to appearing official without being prosecuted. +The Postal Service asks that any recipient of fright mail return it to the post office and file a complaint. + +Revisiting Romania +The Jan. 7 Stamps column described several Romanian issues honoring the army that were banned by the Soviet-influenced Government after World War II. A collector in New York City, Victor Feigelman, has written a thoughtful and persuasive letter arguing that the ban was appropriate. +''The Romanian Government was firmly allied with Hitler's Germany from 1941 to 1944,'' he writes. ''Elements of the Iron Guard in the Romanian army enthusiastically helped the German SS and the Einsatzgruppen in murdering thousands of civilians - Jews and others.'' +On the other hand, Mr. Feigelman adds, stamps ''are a valuable and enduring record of the strange vicissitudes of history and politics.'' +''No government, even fascist or Communist,'' he concludes, ''can rewrite history, or really make stamps disappear.'' +Two targets of the Soviet ban were Ion Antonescu, Romania's prime minister during the war, and King Michael, who became monarch when Antonescu forced the abdication of Michael's father, King Carol. +When Soviet armies penetrated deep into Romania in 1944, Michael arrested Antonescu, who was as rabidly anti-Russian as he was pro- Nazi. Antonescu was tried by the Russians for treason and executed in 1946. +Michael, who lives in exile in Switzerland, said in an interview last month with The New York Times that he was ready to return to Romania to help form a constitutional monarchy. + +Literature Fair +The Cardinal Spellman Philatelic Museum plans a two-day exhibit of philatelic literature March 24-25. The museum is named for the late cardinal of the New York diocese, who was an enthusiastic collector. There will also be an auction of philatelic literature on March 24. Further information is available from the musuem, which is at 235 Wellesley Street, Weston, Mass. 02193, on the grounds of Regis College. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +72 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 25, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +For Some Studios, Oscar Is Golden + +BYLINE: By ALJEAN HARMETZ + +SECTION: Section 2; Page 21, Column 1; Arts and Leisure Desk + +LENGTH: 726 words + +DATELINE: HOLLYWOOD + +When ''Driving Miss Daisy'' led the list of Academy Award nominations, executives at Warner Brothers got a double dose of pleasure. The movie's nine nominations mean money and ego satisfaction. +''Driving Miss Daisy'' is in a position to make more money from its nominations than any movie since ''Chariots of Fire'' in 1981. ''Daisy,'' which already has had a surprising box-office success for a movie about two elderly people, was in relatively few theaters until Feb. 9. Then Warners widened distribution of the film to 1,302 theaters in anticipation of major nominations. Two of ''Daisy's'' rivals for best picture - ''Field of Dreams'' and ''Dead Poets Society'' - were played out last summer. A third, ''Born on the Fourth of July,'' has been in 1,300 theaters for six weeks. +''We're at $34 million in ticket sales,'' Barry Reardon, president of domestic distribution at Warner Brothers, said of ''Driving Miss Daisy.'' ''If we hadn't got nominated, the picture would have tailed off dramatically and ended up in the low- to mid-40's. With the nominations, the box-office will be in the high 60's. Those nominations will mean $20 million.'' +By contrast, Tri-Star's ''Glory'' and 20th Century Fox's ''Enemies, a Love Story'' - two other dramas that were treading water while awaiting Academy confirmation - have been swept away by the tides. ''Glory,'' which expanded from 377 theaters to 801 the weekend after the nominations were announced, earned four minor nominations and a supporting-actor nomination for Denzel Washington. ''Enemies'' won supporting actress nominations for Anjelica Huston and Lena Olin. But it is a cluster of major nominations and, most particularly, best picture that mean something at the box office. +In addition to Warner Brothers, the winners among the studios were Universal and Disney. With ''Born on the Fourth of July'' and ''Field of Dreams,'' Universal, which led the studios with 17 nominations, was the only studio to get two nominations for best picture. In addition, Universal showed depth, with its nominations spread over six movies. Warner Brothers, in second place with 11 nominations, got almost all of those from ''Daisy.'' Twentieth Century Fox tied for second place, but its nominations were mostly in the technical craft categories. +Tri-Star had nine nominations; Paramount and Disney, eight. But Disney got all-important best picture, best director and best actor (Robin Williams) nominations for ''Dead Poets Society.'' The last time - and only time - Disney got nominations for picture and director was in 1964 with ''Mary Poppins.'' +No matter how specialized the movie, Academy nominees are usually films that have been picked up for distribution by a major studio. This year - in a throwback to the peak of the independent film movement in 1985 and 1986 - the Irish movie ''My Left Foot,'' a nominee for best picture, best actor (Daniel Day-Lewis) best director and two other awards, was distributed by Miramax. +Miramax also captured an original screenplay nomination for ''Sex, Lies and Videotape.'' ''Henry V,'' which earned an actor and director nomination for Kenneth Branagh, was released by the Samuel Goldwyn Company. And the French film ''Camille Claudel,'' which brought Isabelle Adjani a nomination for best actress, was distributed by the Orion Classics division of Orion. +When the nominations were announced Feb. 14, ''My Left Foot'' was in only 50 theaters and had sold $2.6 million worth of tickets. ''Our goal now is to be on 400 or 500 screens in 200 cities by early March,'' said Russell Schwartz, executive vice president of Miramax. ''We were hoping the film would make $7 million. Now we think it will exceed $13 million.'' +Mr. Schwartz, who had calculated that ''My Left Foot'' was probably eighth on the list of potential best-picture nominees, headed Island Films when Island won best actor (William Hurt in ''Kiss of the Spider Woman'') and best actress (Geraldine Page in ''A Trip to Bountiful'') awards in 1985. +''Independents are always in a buying battle with the studios,'' he said. ''It's worse now that the studios are accelerating their release schedules. But these nominations show that independents can survive. We just have to be swift enough to get involved with a movie early in the production phase. We have to be there at the first strike.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +73 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 25, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Board Moving Swiftly On Westhelp Proposal + +BYLINE: By TESSA MELVIN + +SECTION: Section 12WC; Page 6, Column 5; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1039 words + +DATELINE: WHITE PLAINS + +THE proposal for housing homeless families in Greenburgh, which prompted major changes on the Board of Legislators after the last election, is now facing a leadership that seems determined to move swiftly on the issue. +The proposal by the nonprofit organization Westhelp received a speedy review last Tuesday by the Budget and Appropriations Committee. After appearances by County Executive Andrew P. O'Rourke and the county's director of intergovernmental relations, Philippe Gille, the committee sent the plan to the full Board. At its meeting tomorrow, the Board is expected to schedule a new public hearing on the issue. +''Westhelp is going to happen,'' said the budget committee's new chairman, Katherine S. Carsky, a Yonkers Republican. ''For two and a half years, we have been at this thing, even though its approval has been requested both by the County Executive and by the Town Supervisor. A disproportionate share of homeless housing is being handled by our cities, and we'd like to see other communities do their share.'' + +Changes Since Last Vote +Westhelp's proposal to build 108 units of housing on 33 acres of county-owned land near Westchester Community College failed by one vote when it was presented to the Board of Legislators in December. The deciding vote was cast by an outgoing legislator, John W. DeMarco of White Plains. Mr. DeMarco, a Democrat, was considered an ally of Edward J. Brady, the Republican who has since lost the Board chairmanship and who opposed the housing plan. +The revised Westhelp proposal now envisions using only six acres of county land and would ''freeze'' the county's right to develop the adjoining acreage for 10 years. After that time, the entire property would be leased to the Town of Greenburgh for 30 years and the housing would be used for senior citizens or municipal employees. Town officials plan to reconfigure the housing units to create 54 permanent apartments. +The acreage was reduced to meet the objections of legislators who feared losing too much land from the county's tax rolls. Both Mr. O'Rourke and Supervisor Anthony F. Veteran of Greenburgh said the change would not affect the size or substance of the proposal. At least one former opponent, Legislator Timothy S. Carey, Republican of Montrose, said he would now support the project. + +An Alternative Plan Is Pressed +Local opponents of the plan, who include residents of the Mayfair and Knollwood sections of Greenburgh, have proposed an alternative plan. It calls for smaller residential groups of apartments scattered over a wider area of the county. Their group, the Coalition of United Peoples, presented its plan to the Board's Committee on Housing and Community Affairs last Wednesday. +The group's petition to incorporate as a separate village was rejected by Mr. Veteran in l988, who said the proposed village boundries were drawn to exclude blacks. The Coalition of United Peoples has taken its case to court, and is awaiting a decision by Judge Gerard L. Goettel of Federal District Court The Westhelp proposal has received strong support from Mr. Veteran, who last week told the budget committee: ''We have been going through this hassle over and over again. It's time to make a decision.'' + +The Role Brady Played +Mr. Brady's vehement opposition to the project led to complaints about his treatment of legislators who disagreed with him, and eventually ended in his ouster as Board chairman. Children living in the Westhelp housing would attend school in Mr. Brady's district, and he argues that the Valhalla school district cannot absorb or afford the additional students. +In the November elections, the Republicans maintained their 10-to-7 majority on the Board. But continuing dissatisfaction among the Republican members led the County Republican Chairman, Anthony Colavita, to call a caucus. It named John E. Hand of Yorktown Heights as chairmen and Diane A. Keane of Rye as majority leader. +Mr. Brady's opposition to the Westhelp project has not diminished. At the Board's last meeting two weeks ago, he was able to delay consideration of the proposal by the budget committee until the Board's next meeting, tomorrow. But then the new chairman, Mr. Hand, called a special legislative meeting to adopt amendments to the l990 budget, setting an agenda that included consideration of the Westhelp proposal. + +Testimony Before the Committee +Mr. O'Rourke and Mr. Gille appeared before the budget committee last Tuesday to answer questions submitted to the County Executive's office by the committee, questions that Mrs. Carsky said were composed by Mr. Brady but ''kind of summarized the views of the committee.'' +Mr. O'Rourke told the legislators he considered the request for 108 units ''reasonable,'' if only a partial answer to the county's growing number of homeless families. ''We have been through hell's fire over the siting,'' Mr. O'Rourke said, ''and I wish the Board would approve it.'' +If the number of units is reduced, as Mr. Brady and some other legislators have suggested, ''we will just have to find other places for more people,'' Mr. O'Rourke said. ''For every unit we lose there, we will have to pick up one somewhere else. And that is getting to be more and more an impossible task.'' +The County Executive plans to meet soon with his new Housing Implementation Commission, made up of private builders, developers, union officers and elected officials. He has asked the commission to develop a plan for 1,000 units of family shelter by the end of the year, a goal that includes the Westhelp project in Greenburgh. + +Other Westhelp Projects +The Greenburgh site is one of several Westhelp projects planned or under way in three Westchester municipalities. The nonprofit corporation is headed by Andrew Cuomo, the Governor's son. +A 46-unit complex in Mount Vernon was completed in December. Two others are in the final planning stages in White Plains: a 36-apartment complex on Mamaroneck Avenue and 120 units in a proposed renovation of the Coachman hotel. Westhelp's financial plan for the Coachman, which calls for the county to purchase the hotel through condemnation, is expected to be ready for the Board's consideration soon. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +74 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 25, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +More Than Counting Heads + +BYLINE: By TESSA MELVIN + +SECTION: Section 12WC; Page 16, Column 4; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1034 words + +DATELINE: WHITE PLAINS + +IT still asks homeowners if they have indoor plumbing, and there are 232 communities in Mississippi that currently do not. It asks if the kitchen has a sink, range and refrigerator, and there are thousands of illegal apartments, including hundreds in Westchester, that do not. +Next month, the 21st United States Census form will be mailed to 250,000 Westchester addresses in a $2.2 billion national effort - and a $3 million county effort - that will determine voter representation in Congress, redraw local political boundries and allocate Federal, regional and local financing into the next century. +This year's count is the largest and most complex survey yet undertaken by the Census Bureau, as it sets about describing the education, training and domestic life of 250 million people. Each of the nation's estimated 106 million housing units will receive a questionnaire, mostly by mail. Census staff members will personally visit residents of remote villages from Alaska to upstate New York, elderly residents of nursing homes, college students in dormitories and the homeless in shelters and on street corners. + +The Challenge in the County +Each region of the country offers its own set of challenges, but census officials covering Westchester are particularly concerned about recruiting the estimated 1,700 full- and part-time workers needed to complete the mammoth survey in a county where unemployment last month stood at 3.3 percent. +''Unemployment is so low, we are concentrating on full-time employees who may want to earn extra income in the evening,'' said Donald R. Byrnes, manager of the Census office in White Plains. High school and college students and the elderly are also being targeted for the survey work, which pays an average $7.50 per hour. +Counting Westchester households will provide a different kind of challenge because so many residences are ''hidden'' and want to remain that way, Mr. Byrnes said. Homeowners with illegal apartments may decide to omit mention of their tenants when filling out the census forms, Mr. Byrne said, fearing that the tenants will be evicted or that their property will be reassessed. + +Confidential for 72 Years +The information is confidential, protected by Federal laws that prohibit any institution, including welfare agencies, immigration, military and tax authorities from gaining access to census material. Information from the 1990 Census will be kept confidential for 72 years, Mr. Byrnes said, until the year 2062. +Census Bureau officials estimate that each respondent represents $200 worth of services in a given community, funds that will be lost if the individual fails to respond. +''A lot of people think it is just a head count, but the census is far more than that,'' Mr. Byrnes said. ''A small shortfall can really afect a community. Just missing 10 people in a small town can equal $2,000 in one year, money that could help pay for an additional police cruiser, for example.'' + +The Effect in Yonkers +In Yonkers, where ''lots of people don't want to be counted,'' Mr. Byrnes said, ''the effect can be pretty harsh.'' Yonkers, like most urban centers in the county, has significant numbers of people living illegally in public housing, Mr. Byrne said, a population that depends on Federal help. +Census facts have helped communities address a number of specific problems, said the Department of Commerce, which administers the Census Bureau. The high number of working mothers the census identified in one community helped speed approval for a day-care center; the large number of older people in another helped that community gain approval for a community center. +Census officials are also concerned about the growing cynicism with which a society flooded with ''junk mail'' may greet another piece of mail addressed to ''occupant.'' +The envelope is marked ''official business'' and has ''U.S. Census'' clearly marked on the outside. But ''lots of junk mail looks official these days,'' Mr. Byrnes said. ''Besides, the return address says Jefferson Valley, Ind.'' + +'A Law With No Teeth' +Responding to the census is required by Federal law, but Mr. Byrnes said: ''It's a law with no teeth. There are no penalties other than to yourself and to your community.'' +Between March 23, when the long and short forms are mailed out in Westchester, and April 1, the deadline for mailing them back, one member of every household is expected to answer 14 basic questions about the race, ethnic origin, age and marital status of each member of the household. +One out of every six households will receive the ''long form,' which asks 45 additional questions about ancestry, employment, education, income, type of housing and utilities. From April 23 to June 6, hundreds of field workers will be deployed to follow up on those who don't respond. +Although census officials in the county expect close to a 75 percent response by the end of April, ''that still leaves 75,000 households to visit,'' Mr. Byrnes said. + +Counting the Homeless +On March 20, a few days before the census forms are mailed, Westchester census workers will conduct a special 12-hour count of the county's homeless population. Beginning at 6 P.M., they will visit shelters and certain street locations that the police have identified as popular spots for the homeless to gather. +A number of other steps have been taken to assure an accurate census count in the county. Fliers with the slogan ''If you're not counted, you don't count'' have been mailed to schools, churches and community centers. In early January, a special municipal review was completed, identifying 17,700 of an estimated l9,000 housing units that local officials said census planners did not know existed. +A Westchester County 1990 Census Complete Count Committee has been formed to promote public awareness of the census and to encourage public cooperation with it. The committee's co-chairmen are Peter Q. Eschweiler, the county's Commissioner of Planning, and Mayor Richard E. Jackson Jr. of Peekskill. +Those interested in working for the Census Bureau must be 18 and pass a simple comprehension and math test. For more information, call 694-1932. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos; Census forms will be mailed out in Westchester March 23., an Darren Allen loading census forms at White Plains office. (NYT/Suzanne DeChillo) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +75 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 27, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Changsha Journal; +He's the Very Model of a Legendary Communist + +BYLINE: By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 4, Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 876 words + +DATELINE: CHANGSHA, China + +Lei Feng was not just a regular nice guy, he was excruciatingly nice: the kind of fellow who secretly washed his comrades' laundry and dreamed not of beautiful women but of Mao. +While others frittered away their time enjoying themselves, Lei Feng devoted his leisure to laboring on construction projects and giving away his savings to destitute peasants. When he took train rides, he not only gave up his seat to others, but also spent the journey washing the windows and sweeping the floors. +Lei Feng died at the age of 21 in 1962, when a truck knocked a pole on his head, but since then he has achieved the ultimate honor for an atheist: sainthood. +Mao Zedong himself started the Learn from Lei Feng movement in 1963, and since then there have been periodic campaigns to study the Communist hero. In the secular China of the last decade, Lei Feng was in eclipse, but since the rise of the hard-liners last year he has returned with a vengeance as the symbol of Communist righteousness. + +Television Series Due +The newspapers are again full of articles about the need to learn the Lei Feng spirit. A television series on Lei Feng's life will be released soon. Half a million copies of his diary have been freshly published and distributed throughout the nation. A newly distributed videotape advises local ''work units'' how to arrange Lei Feng programs. And the Communist Youth League is planning Learn From Lei Feng Day. +Here in the southern Chinese city of Changsha, where Lei Feng was born and raised, Lei Mengxuan is almost beside himself with glee at the new turn of events. +Mr. Lei, a distant relative of the hero and the director of the Lei Feng Memorial Museum here, saw a 60 percent increase in the number of visitors to his museum last year, to 80,000. This year, he expects groups from schools, army units and companies to exceed 200,000 visitors, the highest total in more than a dozen years. +''In the past some people said that Lei Feng's spirit was outdated and even useless,'' Mr. Lei said, shaking his head at such heresy. ''When Lei Feng's spirit wasn't emphasized, people stopped doing good deeds. Even when someone was drowning in the river, no one would come to help unless they were offered money.'' + +The Rise of Rapacity +Many middle-aged and elderly Chinese share Mr. Lei's concern that the rapid change of the last dozen years tore at the nation's moral fabric, and substituted rapacity and materialism for traditional values. Thus the campaign aims to make people not only better Communists, but also more likely to give up their seat in the bus to the elderly. +There is another reason for the vigor of the latest Lei Feng campaign: power politics. Lei Feng was a soldier, and so acclaim for him tends to rub off on the People's Liberation Army. The present campaign is being orchestrated by the army - some say by the chief political commissar, Yang Baibing - and it may be intended to increase the military's prestige and influence in national affairs. +The Guangzhou Military Region has been the most energetic in pushing the campaign, and has backed an effort to manufacture and distribute 500,000 cassette tapes with 1960's songs like ''We Want to Be Lei Feng Kind of Kids'' and others hailing ''Uncle Lei Feng.'' The words from ''Lei Feng, Our Comrade in Arms,'' are typical: +In learning from Lei Feng, Our red hearts are the party's In learning from Lei Feng. + +Raise the banner of Mao Zedong +March on! March on! Strive on for Communism! In the United States, one suspects, naughty schoolchildren would promptly rewrite the lyrics to make fun of Lei Feng. In China, some regard him as a revolutionary relic, but few disparage him. +''I agree with the idea of trying to make people more courteous,'' said a Chinese woman in her late 30's, ''but I'm not sure if it's going to work to use Lei Feng. I doubt that the methods of the 60's will work in the 90's.'' + +A Chinese Tradition +The Lei Feng campaign may have the ring of Communist propaganda to it, but it also emerges from a Chinese tradition since ancient times of using individual models to teach ethics. +In Taiwan as well, teachers use heroic models to teach ethics in the classroom. But the heroes used in Taiwan are drawn from ancient China, while Lei Feng was a child of the Communist revolution. An impoverished 8-year-old orphan at the time of the 1949 revolution, he became fiercely loyal to the regime that gave him new opportunities for schooling and a career. +Some Western skeptics have doubted that Lei Feng ever existed, and in particular have wondered aloud how it is that there are so many photos of him performing good deeds. Mr. Lei, whose museum abounds with such photos, admits that many of the photos were posed. He says that Lei Feng was selected as a model soldier by the local military region even before he died, and that some of the photos were taken for an exhibition in 1962. +Mr. Lei acknowledges that his relative was flesh and blood, and occasionally was naughty as a boy. +''One day he dug a hole in the ground, and then covered it with leaves and twigs,'' Mr. Lei recalled, when pressed for an example of the hero's misconduct. ''As he had intended, someone walked along and -plunk - fell into the hole.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The life of Lei Feng, a hero of Maoist China who died 28 years ago, is being hailed again as a symbol of Communist righteousness. The campaign is led by the army, which has made cassette tapes featuring songs like ''We Want to Be Lei Feng Kind of Kids.'' A museum dedicated to his memory displays many photos of Mr. Lei doing good deeds and teaching children about Communism.; map of china showing location of Changsha (The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +76 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 27, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Widespread Abuses Reported in Insurance for Nursing Home Care + +BYLINE: By TAMAR LEWIN + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1210 words + +Reka Hinderks, a widow hospitalized with osteoporosis at the age of 77 last year, was so concerned about her future care that she decided to buy a $2,400-a-year insurance policy to cover nursing home costs. The agent visited her in the hospital to collect the first premium. +Mrs. Hinderks, who lives in Renville, Minn., was discharged from the hospital after a month. Two months later she entered Ren-Villa Nursing Home, where the agent came to collect her second premium. But when she filed a claim, the insurance company denied it and canceled the policy, saying it did not cover patients who were hospitalized when they purchased coverage. +Insurance to cover the high costs of nursing care has caught on rapidly in the last five years. But a report released yesterday by Families USA, a Washington advocacy group for the elderly, said that many elderly policyholders, like Mrs. Hinderks, have found their long-term-care insurance useless. + +'Grotesque Abuses' +''There appears to be a pattern of widespread insurance industry abuse, in terms of deception about what is covered and the experience people have when they file claims,'' said Ronald Pollack, executive director of Families USA. ''It's not just a few fly-by-night companies. We have documented grotesque abuses by some of the most stable, A-plus-rated companies.'' +He said that agents aggressively oversell the policies, that companies arbitrarily deny benefits and that policyholders often face long delays in collecting benefits or refunds. +''We need a thorough investigation by Congress and the Federal Trade Commission, and we probably need more regulation to protect frail elderly people,'' Mr. Pollack said. +The House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has the power to direct the trade commission to investigate the industry, plans hearings on the issue. +The industry defended its record yesterday and said it would welcome such an inquiry. ''I think the private market is trying to do a very good job of helping people,'' said Susan Van Gelder of the Health Insurance Association of America, a Washington group representing the leading long-term-care insurers. +''These are heart-wrenching stories,'' she went on, ''and if there are bad apples, let's get rid of them. But let's not discredit the whole private market, because this is a product people need.'' +Earl Pomeroy, president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, also took issue with the Families USA report, saying the group was predisposed to find fault with private long-term-care insurance. ''Some groups that want to see a Government long-term-care program believe the development of private long-term-care insurance will get in the way of that,'' said Mr. Pomeroy, whose group represents the state commissioners who regulate the industry. + +Coverage Is Spotty +With people over 85 the fastest-growing segment of the population, the long-term-care problem has become an explosive public issue. Nursing home care costs an average of $30,000 a year, and in some places the cost can top $80,000 a year. The Government has estimated that the total cost of nursing home care will be $47.7 billion in 1990, with patients and their families paying about half the bill and the Federal and state governments most of the rest. +Medicare does not cover routine long-term care, and while the requirements vary substantially from state to state, Medicaid is intended to cover nursing care only for the poor, including those whose care has used up their assets. And though the Medigap policies available on the private market pay some costs not covered by Medicare, they do not cover most nursing home stays. +So elderly consumers have been eager to buy private long-term-care insurance. The Health Insurance Association of America estimates that as of mid-1989, 1.3 million policies had been sold nationwide. According to Families USA, the average policy covering two years of care, after a 100-day waiting period, costs $307 a month for a couple in which the husband is 72 and the wife 69. +''That's Chevrolet coverage, not Cadillac coverage,'' Mr. Pollack said, ''and still 84 percent of today's seniors cannot afford to buy it.'' +What the policies actually cover varies enormously. Some exclude the first 20 days in the nursing home; others require a wait of 100 days. Some provide coverage for one year, others for longer. Because of all the limitations on coverage, some policyholders have found their claims denied, or their policies canceled, when they actually need care. + +'I Think It Stinks' +Joseph and Beverly Wiley of Ossipee, N.H., paid $1,176 a year for a policy that would pay $70 a day, after a 100-day waiting period, for up to three years of nursing home care, if the stay began within 30 days of a hospital stay that lasted at least 3 days. +Last spring, Mrs. Wiley, a 70-year old with severe Parkinson's disease, went into the hospital, weighing 68 pounds and suffering from a lung infection. She was in the hospital for 10 weeks before being discharged to a nursing home. +But in August, when Mr. Wiley filed a claim, the Bankers Life and Casualty Insurance Company denied it, saying Mrs. Wiley had not been in the acute-care unit of the hospital, as the policy required. Although the hospital and the State Insurance Department have sent letters saying Mrs. Wiley was treated as an acute care patient, the company continues to deny the claim. +''She did not meet the terms of the policy,'' said Gerald Robinson, of the company's claim review department. ''We do offer policies without the three-day hospital requirement, but they cost more and that's not what she bought.'' +So Mr. Wiley pays the $82-a-day charges. ''I think it stinks, to put it bluntly,'' he said. ''I knew nothing about one unit or another; I just knew she was in the hospital. Our insurance agent is the local minister, and I'm sure he didn't know either, or he would have told me to move her.'' + +New Guidelines Taking Effect +In 1988, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners recommended that states prohibit the sale of policies with restrictions based on prior hospitalization or level of care, and last year the group recommended that insurers be required to offer policies with inflation adjustments. At least 35 states have adopted those guidelines, but they cover only new policies, not those already in effect. +''Because it's a new and evolving product, our regulatory standards are changing,'' said Mr. Pomeroy, the president of the association. ''Long-term-care insurance is complex, expensive and sold primarily to the market most susceptible to abusive marketing practices, namely the elderly. So it requires very strict regulation.'' +Later this week, the Bipartisan Commission on Comprehensive Health Care, established by Congress in 1988, is likely to issue recommendations on financing long-term care. +''Our mandate is to come up with a solution to the long-term care problem, and the health problem, and develop a blueprint for a national health care policy,'' said Philip Shandler, a spokesman for the commission. ''There has been a growing clamor about long-term care, and there is definitely a consensus that we have problems with long-term care insurance.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +77 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 28, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +About New York; +Old 'Contenders' Look for Help On Final Count + +BYLINE: By DOUGLAS MARTIN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +Here is the heavyweight Doug Jones who fought Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay, in a 10-rounder at Madison Square Garden on March 10, 1963, and believes that judges robbed him of an earned victory. +There is Billy Graham, who lost a controversial call in a welterweight title bout in Havana to Kid Gavilan, a Cuban, in 1952. He said Ernest Hemingway told him that he had clearly won but that he was luckier to have lost since most spectators carried guns. +In one corner - by the coffee urn - was Allie Stolz, who lost a lightweight title shot against Sammy Angott, a fight that the septuagenarian growls he won. Toward center ring was Roger Donoghue, a promising middleweight in the 1950's, until he killed a man with his fists and never bounced back. +The men are members of an organization called Veteran Boxers Ring No. 8. It is one of a number of similar ''rings'' around the country dedicated to the health needs of those who fought for a tiny fraction of what professionals make today. It gathers contributions to provide free dental care, eyeglasses and periodic medical exams. When a boxing brother is in trouble - say in an emergency room with no health insurance -members come to help. +They want to do far more. One idea is to persuade promoters to dedicate a tiny percentage of revenues to the care of retired boxers in the manner that the Screen Actors Guild takes care of elderly actors. Some favor Federal legislation to force this. +''What happens when a guy comes from the Dominican Republic and he's an old boxer and he gets hit by a truck?'' asked Charley Gellman, first vice president of the group. ''They don't give a damn about the old-timers.'' +The special attraction the other night was a talk by Irving Rudd, a veteran boxing publicist. ''I feel strange and touched and funny at the same time,'' Mr. Rudd began. +In an accent reflecting New York City's streets, he told a little about his life. ''I didn't graduate from high school, by the way,'' he said. ''I was acquitted.'' +In no time at all he was working for the old Rockland Palace in Harlem. He recalled working on an encounter between Jersey Joe Walcott and Tiger Joe Fox, as well as uncountable bouts with a combined purse of ''about $90.'' In more recent years, he has worked with the likes of Ali, Norton, Leonard and Tyson - and has the stories to prove it. +Mr. Rudd spoke of a changed pugilistic landscape. ''All the fight clubs have become parking lots,'' he said. ''The whole thing has shifted now. It isn't like you and I remember.'' +He wasn't hopeful about the prospect of big-time promoters coughing up money to benefit old boxers. ''There's no authority,'' he explained. ''There's nobody to put the wood to any of them.'' +Mr. Gellman then took the podium. He said he grew up so poor he had to steal to eat. He fought 66 light-heavyweight bouts, winning most. ''I fought a main bout in the Garden,'' he said. ''I fought one of the other contenders. I knocked him out.'' +What separates Mr. Gellman from so many boxers is that he saved his small purses to use for an education. He went on from the fight game to administer two hospitals. His speech was long on the virtues of self-help. +''You're not going to get anything from anybody, because nobody's going to give you anything,'' he said. In a machine-gun delivery, he reported a growing health crisis among aging fighters - a crisis that nobody seems eager to address. ''I've found the biggest guys in the world, when a crisis comes, they run like thieves,'' he said. +''What about the guys from 50 years ago -60 years ago - who right now need help and need help badly?'' he asked. ''These guys weren't champs. They were club fighters, four-round fighters, six-round fighters.'' +After the speeches - and after members approved a donation of $50 to the Friends of Sugar Ray Robinson - these tough guys grown old milled around. They appeared reluctant to let one another go. +''Fighters dish out punishment,'' Mr. Stolz said. ''But they have soft hearts.'' +They hope they aren't alone. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +78 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 3, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Panel Says Broad Health Care Would Cost $86 Billion a Year + +BYLINE: By MARTIN TOLCHIN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1175 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 2 + +A sharply divided bipartisan commission today recommended an $86.2-billion-a-year program to provide health insurance and long-term nursing care to every American who needs them. But the panel could not recommend specific ways to raise the money. +Some members of the panel, the Bipartisan Commission on Comprehensive Health Care, said the program stood little chance of being enacted without a way to finance it. +''We are not dealing with the world's easiest problem,'' said Senator John D. Rockefeller 4th, Democrat of West Virginia, who is chairman of the 15-member Bipartisan Commission on Comprehensive Health Care, created by Congress in 1988 to recommend legislation on health issues. ''We can't offer easy answers, but we can offer a challenge to this country.'' +The Bush Administration had asked Republicans on the commission to hold out against any recommendations for tax increases. That, along with a general nervousness among Republicans about significant new health care initiatives, accounted for the narrow 8-to-7 vote by which the panel approved the ambitious plan unveiled today. +Representative Fortney H. Stark, a California Democrat who joined the Republicans in voting against the plan, took note of its bleak legislative outlook. Mr. Stark, chairman of the health subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee, said the split vote indicated ''that it's hopeless to get a comprehensive plan passed in the U.S., with politics being what it is.'' +''Without a way to pay for it, it is a non-starter,'' Mr. Stark added. ''It is legislatively dead.'' In forming the panel, Congress had directed it to recommend ''the sources of those funds.'' +Although the legislative prospects were described as ''nil'' by one member, the program does provide an accounting of how much major improvements in health care would cost the nation. +The commission put the total Federal share of the programs covering health insurance and nursing homes at $66.2 billion a year. Of this, $42.8 billion would pay for expanded nursing home care for elderly people with low and moderate incomes and for others with severe disabilities. +The remaining $23.4 billion in Federal money would provide health insurance for those who do not already have it. The total cost of the health insurance program would be $43.4 billion, with the remaining $20 billion paid through private employers. The employers would pay 80 percent of that cost and the employees 20 percent. + +Broad Agreement on Nursing Care +The health insurance section of the plan was adopted by 8 to 7, with some members saying they opposed any additional charges for private employers. On the nursing care proposal, the vote was 11 to 4 in favor. +Under the plan, nursing home coverage would be greatly expanded. The ''severely disabled'' of all ages would receive three months of free care. And the Government would pay the nursing home costs of individuals with assets of $30,000 or less or couples with assets of $60,000 or less. +Under current law, only the elderly receive nursing home coverage, and only for the first 100 days after hospitalization for each spell of illness. To get more Government coverage, they must then divest their assets. They can qualify for Medicaid, the Federal-state program of health care for the poor, if their assets are an average of $2,000 or less. +The plan approved by the panel, named the Pepper Commission after its first chairman, the late Representative Claude Pepper of Florida, does not require such divestiture. +''This gets us out of povertizing people because they're disabled,'' said Senator Dave Durenberger, Republican of Minnesota, a commission member who voted for the nursing care program but joined the three other Republican members in opposing the health insurance program. + +'No Consensus,' Sullivan Says +The panel was appointed in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan, the Senate and the House. It has eight Democrats, four Republicans and three members who were not appointed on the basis of party membership, including a past president of the American Medical Association. +Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, called the report ''a sincere and commendable effort.'' +''However, it is important to note the wide divergence of views within the commission itself,'' Dr. Sullivan continued. ''This divergence reflects the simple fact that there is no consensus in this country today on how to achieve the kind of health care system we want, or how the cost of improvements in our system should be borne.'' +Senator Rockefeller was more optimistic. He said there was growing recognition that ''the American health care system is in total crisis.'' +''We're plunging ahead in this country toward a health care catastrophe,'' he added. +The commission proposal differs in many respects from the short-lived Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act, repealed last year, which covered the costs of hospitals and doctors for the elderly, but not long-term nursing care, which many older Americans sought and indeed thought the act had provided. +The proposal also calls for ''reforms'' in the health insurance industry. It would require insurers to base their premiums on the health experience of a community, and prohibit insurers from refusing to sell policies to people with health problems. +''We would pre-empt state health insurance laws,'' Mr. Rockefeller said. +The commission report received mixed notices. The American Medical Association hailed it. ''The American people were the real winners,'' said Dr. James E. Davis, the former A.M.A. president who was a member of the panel. +Ron Pollack, president of Families United for Senior Action, an advocacy group for the elderly, said that the report ''calls to mind President John F. Kennedy's proposal of Medicare 30 years ago.'' + +'A Mixed Bag' +But the United States Chamber of Commerce called the recommendations ''a mixed bag,'' and said, ''We are disappointed by the emphasis on mandated benefits as a solution to the access problem.'' +Similarly, the Health Insurance Association of America called the report ''a blueprint for economic disaster.'' The organization warned that the requirement that employers provide health insurance for their employees ''could result in increased unemployment and an additional burden on the publicly funded programs.'' +Besides Senators Rockefeller and Durenberger, Mr. Stark and Dr. Davis, these are the members of the commission: James Balog, chairman of the Lambert Brussels Capital Corporation. + +Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of +Montana. John Cogan, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Representative Bill Gradison, Republican of Ohio. + +Senator John Heinz, Republican of +Pennsylvania. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachussets. Representative Mary Rose Oakar, Democrat of Ohio. Senator David Pryor, Democrat of Arkansas. Representative Louis Stokes, Democrat of Ohio. Representative Tom Tauke, Republican of Iowa. Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Senator John D. Rockefeller 4th, who is chairman of the bipartisan health care commision that recommended an 86.2-billion-a-year health insurance plan. (Teresa Zabala)(pg9) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +79 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 3, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +California Accuses Lincoln Of Misleading Bond Buyers + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL LEV, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 35, Column 5; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 487 words + +DATELINE: LOS ANGELES, March 2 + +A California agency said today that it had filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Charles H. Keating Jr. and the American Continental Corporation, contending that the company put pressure on unsophisticated investors to buy its ''junk bonds'' by saying they were insured by the Government and were free of risk. +The California Department of Corporations charged in the lawsuit, filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, that American Continental and its top executives, including Mr. Keating, had lied to the state in disclosure forms and misled investors who bought the bonds from branches of Lincoln Savings and Loan, a subsidiary of the company. +The department said it had conducted an eight-month investigation and interviewed more than 100 holders of the now-worthless bonds and a dozen present and former employees. Many investors - a large number of them elderly people - lost their life savings. + +Vital Information +The suit contends that American Continental withheld vital information from investors and never disclosed that its bonds were uninsured. +Christine Bender, the Department of Corporations commissioner, said she had forwarded the charges to law enforcement officials for possible criminal prosecution. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office said today that it had asked for a special grand jury for Lincoln. +While the department's lawsuit seeks the restitution of $200 million invested by California bondholders, and penalties that could add millions more, the agency conceded that it might be difficult to recover the money. American Continental sought bankruptcy court protection from creditors last year. The Government seized Lincoln Savings last spring. + +Series of Lawsuits +The lawsuit is the latest in a series of actions against Mr. Keating and his companies. One of the suits by the holders also charges the state agency with failing to identify the problem. Ms. Bender is scheduled to give a deposition in that suit within two weeks. +Lawyers for both Mr. Keating and the bondholders said the lawsuit was politically motivated. Several officials involved in investigations of Mr. Keating and his companies are running for political office this year. A spokesman for American Continental, Brad Boland, said Mr. Keating was not available to comment. He said the company strongly denied that it had ever misled bond buyers. +''We have not seen the filing, but I find it very perplexing that the same agency that over the years gave us numerous approvals to sell bonds turns around and sues us,'' he said. +James Ham, an attorney for Mr. Keating, said: ''The bond salesmen were scrupulous in advising people that these were subordinated debentures and were not insured by the Federal Government. There always may be a small group who honestly felt they were misled, but as to the vast majority I think it's a case of conveniently selective memory.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +80 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 4, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +House Moves to Restore Health Benefits for Elderly + +BYLINE: By MARTIN TOLCHIN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 23, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 653 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 3 + +A bipartisan group of four House leaders has moved to restore several health benefits for older Americans that were included in the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act that Congress repealed last year. +The benefits, which had been sought by health groups and the elderly, include breast cancer screening, respite care for those staying with the elderly and expanded hospice and home health care. They would be financed by an 80-cent increase in monthly Medicare premiums. ''While we are all aware of the controversy that led to the demise of the Medicare catastrophic coverage program, there was little controversy over the four benefits included in the proposed bill,'' said Representative Pete Stark, a California Democrat who is chairman of the Ways and Means subcommittee on health. +The original legislation, intended to protect older Americans against the high cost of major illness, was repealed after the protests of thousands of better-off older American over a surtax they paid to help finance it. +The American Association of Retired Persons said it viewed the proposed increased premium in the new proposal as ''an extraordinary step that is acceptable only because the premium increase in this case is so small.'' +Lovola Burgess, vice president of the A.A.R.P., applauded the bill. #99 Co-sponsors of Legislation Representative Stark was joined in sponsoring the measure by Representative Bill Gradison of Ohio, the ranking Republican on the subcommittee; Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health, and Edward Madigan of Illinois, the ranking Republican on the subcommittee. The bill has 99 co-sponsors. +The proposed measure, the Medicare Benefit Improvements Act, would raise the Part B Medicare monthly premium to $29.40 from $28.60. +Although the bill has the broad support of health groups and groups representing the elderly, some members of Congress say they oppose a piecemeal restoration of the defunct major-care bill. They say they favor a more deliberative examination of the problems of health care for the elderly. +Representative Brian J. Donnelly, Democrat of Massachusetts, who led the effort to repeal the coverage for major illness, objected to the mandatory increase in the Part B premium for fear it would touch off protests. +Breast cancer screening is not currently provided under Medicare, which already benefits some disabled younger people. The proposed bill would cover a first screening for women 35 to 39 years old and screenings every two years for those 40 to 49, except for women determined to be at high risk, who would receive annual screenings. Annual screenings would also be covered for women 50 to 64. + +Cost a Factor in Frequency +Although the incidence of breast cancer increases with a women's age, the bill would provide screenings only every two years for women 65 and older. An aide to Mr. Stark said the decision was based on cost. +The proposed law would remove the ceiling on hospice care for the terminally ill, permitting such care beyond the current limit of 210 days. It would also cover home health care seven days a week for up to 38 days, as against the current maximum of five days a week for up to three consecutive weeks. +The Medicare program does not currently provide coverage for respite care, in which homemakers, home health aides or others relieve those who care for sick patients in their own homes. The proposed measure would provide up to 80 hours of respite care a year to those dependent on a voluntary caregiver and who had annual out-of-pocket expenses exceeding $1,780. +Dr. Gerald D. Dodd, president-elect of the American Cancer Society, told a subcommittee hearing that while incidence rates of breast cancer are increasing early detection and improved treatment had kept mortality rates for the disease fairly stable over the past 50 years. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +81 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 4, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +YOUR TAXES; +Tax Books, a Winning Investment + +BYLINE: By JAN M. ROSEN + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 20, Column 1; Financial Planning Guide: Your Taxes + +LENGTH: 711 words + +Few investments offer the low-risk, high-reward potential of a good book on income taxes. Almost anyone who spends a few dollars for a book and takes some time to study it is sure to realize tax savings far greater than the cost of the book. +Some books can help people develop long-term financial strategies and the necessary understanding of tax laws, while other books can guide do-it-yourselfers through the maze of preparing a return. +Those who have their returns prepared professionally can also benefit, by learning which records they need and how to organize them. Paying an accountant to sift through records, after all, can be expensive. +One of the best books is Julian Block's Year-Round Tax Strategies for the $40,000-Plus Household (234 pages, $10.95, Prima Publishing & Communications). Mr. Block, a Larchmont, N.Y., tax lawyer, has a clear, personable writing style devoid of legalese or I.R.S jargon. ''Is your withholding out of whack?'' he asks, rather than, ''Are you underwithheld or overwithheld?'' And he offers numerous short money-saving tips, as well as sophisticated strategies. +For return preparation it is hard to match the Arthur Young Tax Guide 1990 from Ernst & Young (687 pages, $11.95, Ballantine Books). The book has complete and up-to-date tax forms that the user can cut out or photocopy - unlike many other books, which use preliminary I.R.S. proofs. And it includes the I.R.S. Publication 17, Your Income Tax, as well as the accounting firm's own explanations, strategies, examples and money-saving tips. +The Arthur Young book is almost encyclopedic in scope and is well indexed. The table of contents appears twice, first by chapter, and second as tax guides for various groups - like homeowners, investors and senior citizens. And it is the most up-to-date of the current crop of tax books. For example, it records the death of the surtax for catastrophic care. +The granddaddy of tax books - and sharper than ever - is J.K. Lasser's Your 1990 Income Tax (499 pages, $11.95, Simon & Schuster). It has a handy tax organizer to help people figure out what records to get together and which forms they will need, as well as numerous worksheets for such purposes as interest income, capital gains and losses, medical and dental expenses and charitable contributions. +The tax forms are reduced-size versions of advance I.R.S. proofs. However, readers can send in a postcard for an update that includes later copies of forms. Lasser also has a telephone hotline. The book is a comprehensive reference and is well indexed. +This year Lasser also offers something for those who want speed and simplicity, not every detail of tax law. Your 60-Minute Tax Return 1990 (352 pages, $8.95, Simon & Schuster) begins with a questionnaire - similar to questions an accountant asks. Then, using symbols as easy-to-follow visual aids, it leads taxpayers through the forms. +The H & R Block 1990 Income Tax Guide (512 pages, $9.95, Collier Books, Macmillan) has a little coupon so those who go to Block for income-tax preparation can get the book price refunded. But taking advantqage of that offer may not be necessary, because the book is so clearly written and addresses so many family situations.. +Guide to Income Tax Preparation (602 pages, $12.95, Consumer Reports Books), written by four tax lawyers, has a good section on estate planning and fairly thorough discussions of deductions, real estate, depreciation and retirement plans. It includes a coupon buyers may send in for late tax news and a postcard they can send to the I.R.S. to request forms. +Finally, since each of these books could make a briefcase bulge, here are two slender volumes for commuters. +The Ernst & Young Tax Digest and Planner 1990 (215 pages, $4.95, Random House) will fit in a vest pocket and will answer most of the questions people have about how to treat income and deductions. It also has sections on gift and estate taxes, Social Security and helpful tables. +The Price Waterhouse Personal Tax Adviser (364 pages, $5.50, Pocket Books) goes logically through the tax form with commentary, tips and cautions so people can handle this year's return and plan ahead. It has helpful sections on retirement plans and financing children's education. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +82 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 4, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WESTCHESTER GUIDE + +BYLINE: By Roland Foster Miller + +SECTION: Section 12WC; Page 24, Column 3; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 843 words + + + +A LOOK AT THE TITANIC +Two hours and 40 minutes out to sea on its maiden voyage in 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank to the icy depths of the North Atlantic. About 2,000 people drowned aboard the ship, whose wreck was discovered in 1985. Because of the tragedy at sea, more stringent safety standards were established for oceangoing vessels. +Todd J. Kurzbard, who has researched Titanic lore for 10 years and written several articles about the vessel, will present a talk and show a 30-minute videocassette on the subject at the Greenburgh Public Library at 7:30 P.M. Wednesday. +In addition, there will be a display of Titanic memorabilia, including models of the ship Mr. Kurzbard built himself. For further information, call the library at 993-1602. + +BOAT SHOW +Landlubbers, ahoy! Put on your blue blazer, white ducks and sea legs, because next Friday and extending through Sunday at the County Center in White Plains the third annual Westchester Boat Show is full steam ahead. +More than 100 boats from 40 different manufacturers will be featured. Twenty-five dealers are showing craft for fishing, cruising, skiing and powerboat racing. Also on exhibition will be jet-propulsion miniboats, inflatables, sailboards, day sailers and dinghies. +The hours are Friday from 4 to 10 P.M., Saturday from 11 A.M. to 10 P.M. and Sunday from 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. Admission is $6 for adults, $2 for children 6 through 12 and children younger than 6 are free. + +JIM JENSEN ON ADDICTION +Jim Jensen of WCBS-TV will tell his personal story of drugs and depression today at 10 A.M. at St. Barnabas Church in Irvington-on-Hudson. +Mr. Jensen, who was an anchor for the television station, entered a drug clinic last summer to overcome an addiction to Valium and cocaine. Alcoholics Anonymous helped him kick both addictions but then he fell into a depression. He said he hoped to offer a high-profile example to other drug and alcohol abusers and their families by speaking at St. Barnabas. +The speech is free. For more information, call 591-8194. + +FREE TAX AID FOR ELDERLY +Free tax assistance for those 60 and older is available this Saturday and each following Saturday through April 14 at the New Rochelle Public Library. +Trained volunteers from Tax Counseling for the Elderly of Iona College offer the service free to those who need help in preparing their income-tax returns. + +IRISH MUSICAL EVENING +For a St. Patrick's Day warm-up, the Irish and those who simply like to wear the green can participate in authentic folk music, dance and song at a free ''Evening of Traditional Irish Music'' next Friday at 7:30 P.M. at the Grinton I. Will Library auditorium in Yonkers. +The Irish musical evening is presented by the Yonkers Department of Parks, Recreation and Conservation and the Westchester Arts Fund of the Council for the Arts in Westchester. +The concert of songs brought to America from Ireland features the button accordionist James Keane, the fiddler Brian Conway, the cittern and guitar player and singer Pat Kilbride and the uillean piper Jerry O'Sullivan. +The Irish evening is the first performance in the yearly Untermyer Ethnic Folk Music Series. The second performance, on March 30, will featuture i Giullari di Piazza, with Italian folk music. For additional information, call the Yonkers Parks Department at 964-3502. + +ANCIENT JAPANESE ART +The Shosoin Storehouse, an eighth-century repository of art and other fragile cultural objects from the distant past, is the subject of a program tonight at 7:30 in the Scarsdale Public Library. The event is sponsored by the Westchester Society of the Archeological Institute of America. +Dr. Laura S. Kaufman, an art history professor and chairwoman of the Asian studies department at Manhattanville College in Purchase, will present a slide show and lecture on the historically important collection of rare objects that has been continuously cared for for more than 1,000 years. +The collection of luxury items - musical instruments, mirrors, game boards, rugs, paintings and pottery - are testimony to Asian trade routes of the seventh and eighth century that stretched all the way to India. Each November the public is allowed to glimpse a small part of the storehouse in Nara, Japan. +Dr. Kaufman, a specialist in Japnese art and literature, is a frequent lecturer at the Asia Society, the China Institute in America, the Neuberger Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. +Refreshments will be served after the lecture, which is free to members of the society and $3 for other adults. + +IT'S IN THE CARDS +While the owners and players may still be striking out, baseball enthusiasts can turn today at 2 o'clock to a lecture, ''The Art of the Baseball Card,'' at the Museum of Cartoon Art in Rye Brook. +Murray Tinkelman, an illustrator and art professor at Syracuse University and a lifelong baseball fan, will discuss the subject. More than 50 artists nationwide have contributed to this project. For further information, call 939-0234. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +83 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 4, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WESTCHESTER OPINION; +Recognizing Old Age When It Rounds the Corner + +BYLINE: By Maria H. O'Connell; Maria H. O'Connell, a resident of the Andrus Memorial Home in Hastings-on-Hudson, is a retired social worker and former faculty member of the Columbia University Graduate School of Social Work. + +SECTION: Section 12WC; Page 30, Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 887 words + +AT the age of 79, I was facing the fact that the lease on my Scarsdale home was about to expire. To renew would mean a big rent increase, since the apartment was not covered under the Emergency Tenants Protection Act. +I was also facing the fact that climbing three flights of stairs with bags of groceries was becoming an increasingly difficult task. +Clearly, it was time to put on a new thinking cap. As the oldest and only survivor of a family of four, I knew that decisions regarding my life had to be mine alone. +I thought about moving into an apartment on the first floor or into a building with an elevator. But neither idea appeared to be a logical long-term solution. Because as I see it, the aging process does not go away. It comes on in different ways and at different times, and the rate of acceleration is often unpredictable. But the inevitable thing is: It comes. +So I thought to myself, ''Get going while you can, while your health is good, and while you can do it, rather than having it done to you!'' I had just made Decision No. 1. My internal conversation continued. I said to myself, ''It's important to stay near the family roots, so relatives and friends can come to see you once in a while - and maybe you can go to see them on occasion.'' Decision No. 2: I would stay in Westchester. But where? From my years as a young social worker back in the 1930's, I knew of the Julia Dyckman Andrus Memorial for Children in Yonkers, founded by the philanthropist John E. Andrus. I recalled it was considered a superior child-care institution, and while its service program has changed, it still helps children in need of service. +I knew, too, that Mr. Andrus's youngest daughter, Helen Benedict, established the nonprofit John E. Andrus Memorial Home to serve ''genteel'' older men and women. I never quite understood what that meant. +Through the years, I occasionally touched base with the home, attending bazaars and bridge parties. In my then ''listening position,'' I heard Andrus described in superlatives by residents and through the community grapevine. More recently, I heard it referred to as the Andrus Retirement Community, which appealed to me. +Decision No. 3 was to submit an application and request an interview at Andrus. At the same time, I resolved not to tell a soul about my plans until everything was final. Although I told myself that was because I was afraid friends would try to talk me out of it, I'm sure it was really because I wanted to spare myself embarrassment if I was not accepted. +I was accepted at Andrus. I was also right about my friends. They did try to talk me out of it, suggesting options I had already rejected away in other states that they had only heard about. Listening to them, the social worker in me came out. I suspect these friends were denying that they too should make some decisions for change. +I was happy to be moving to Andrus, and yet as I prepared for the move, I felt so angry! I think I was angry at myself for growing old and because moving to Andrus seemed a kind of surrender to the aging process. Was I giving up without a fight? No, I'd waited long enough! But some of the hardest parts were still to come. Although I was permitted - indeed, encouraged - to bring to Andrus some of my own furniture, my first inclination was to get rid of everything and move into a furnished room. I now attribute that to my confusion at having to dispose of so many possessions that held fond memories for me. +But sound logic helped me again. Possessions are only things. Time permitted me to give them away tenderly, in a happy way, to friends and relatives. And I did bring my favorite pieces with me, along with pictures and momentos collected on my travels abroad in younger days. +I moved to Andrus on April 14, 1988. With mixed feelings? No, I knew it was right for me. While my adjustment to a new way of life has not always been easy, I have discovered that relieved of the stresses of life on my own, I have truly found myself. And I have found my way in a new setting. +Residents at Andrus, like residents of other places where I have lived, come from different backgrounds, have different life experiences. Those with common interests find each other and form new friendships. We choose from a wide variety of activities and programs offered here. But we are not cut off from the world. Many of us pursue activities and entertainment ''outside the house,'' and volunteer in the community, where we are needed and welcomed. +When I look out of my window in the morning, I see the Hudson River and the rock-cliffed Palisades. I enjoy the glory of the Tappan Zee Bridge to the north and the double-decked George Washington Bridge to the south. In preparation for nightfall, they are both jeweled with chains of light, sometimes against the background of a sunset and its sparkling afterglow. +As I witness these familiar sights, I am convinced that all of the decisions I made were right for me at this time of my life. Here, surrounded by caring, dedicated people who understand the joys and frustrations of aging, I have found both independence and security. This is my home. One does not have to fight old age. But one does have to recognize when it is around the corner - and to face it with strength, courage and with planfulness. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +84 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 4, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +More Students in County Choosing Social Work as a Career + +BYLINE: By ROBERTA HERSHENSON + +SECTION: Section 12WC; Page 31, Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1114 words + +DATELINE: HARTSDALE + +SOCIAL WORK has become the career of choice for a growing number of students in the county. The deans of two graduate schools recent undergraduates but also by adults changing fields. +Besides its on-campus site in Manhattan, the Columbia University School of Social Work operates a division serving 250 students on the campus of the State University of New York at Purchase. The Graduate School of Social Service of Fordham University has divisions both at the university's main campus at Lincoln Center in Manhattan and in Tarrytown, where 400 students attend classes on the campus of Marymount College. The faculties of both schools divide their time between the Manhattan and Westchester sites. + +A Varied Student Body +Naomi Gitterman, assistant dean of the Columbia branch at Purchase, and Marc Miringoff, dean of Fordham's division in Tarrytown, say that students engaged in full-time master's degree programs in social work include former lawyers, teachers, dance therapists, nurses, firemen and police detectives. Many students also attend the schools part time. +Women still predominate in this traditionally female field - including those beginning careers after raising children - but there is a growing number of men, according to the deans. Many men and women having left business fields say they no longer identify with corporate values, said Amy Miller, a certified social worker and the assistant to Dr. Miringoff. +The students are preparing for the wide range of jobs that social work is known for: providing services to the elderly, the mentally and physically ill, the emotionally troubled and the disadvantaged. In addition, graduates may find work in policy-making positions on community or organizational levels. + +Learning While Earning +Roni Bernstein, a Columbia student in Purchase who had pursued a doctoral degree in psychology, said she was ''much happier'' studying social work. Because of the opportunity to work in the field while studying, she said, she is picking up valuable ''practical hints'' - while earning money. +''The best experience is being out there doing it and working with the supervisor,'' said the North White Plains resident, who said she would focus on psychotherapy when she graduated. +Social-work programs generally require extensive fieldwork experience as well as academic course work. One private agency popular with students for fieldwork placement is Westchester Jewish Community Services, a nonsectarian organization based here that offers a wide range of services at 23 locations in the county. + +How an Internship Works +Interns are placed with the agency for the school year. The students then work under personal supervision two to three days a week, providing psychotherapy to children, adults and families or aiding geriatric or disabled clients in a variety of settings. +Besides meeting weekly with their own supervisors, interns attend weekly staff meetings at the agency with psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers and participate in the staff training sessions that are held four times a year. The students also are invited to take field courses offered by the agency. +Mrs. Bernstein is serving as an intern at the community services agency, as is Ginny Einhorn, also a Columbia student, who travels to the county each day from her home in New Haven. Mrs. Einhorn said that she had always wanted to work with the elderly and that now that two of her three children were teen-agers, she was pursuing the ''chance to be helpful and feel good about it.'' +One thing social-work students learn, however, is that wanting to help does not automatically make someone helpful. Marilyn Krantz, a clinical social worker with Westchester Jewish Community Services and the agency's coordinator of student social workers, said ''You empower people,'' as a social worker, said Marjorie Miller, also a clinical social worker with the agency, who supervises a group of student interns. Because social workers provide many kinds of services to clients, from getting the heat turned on to psychological counseling, Mrs. Miller called them ''project directors.'' +Mrs. Miller also runs a support group for recently separated and divorced women at the agency's Hartsdale headquarters. She previously worked in special education and ran a nursery school, switching to social work in the mid-1980's when she realized that her students' families ''always needed to be worked with, needed more skills.'' + +A Weekly Exchange +A group of interns meets with Mrs. Miller once a week to discuss their concerns. Because she supervises none of them personally, the meetings enable the students to vent their feelings in a nonjudgmental atmosphere. +Her current group - six Fordham and Columbia students (another group meets with a different supervisor) - is made up of women spanning several decades in age. Issues at a recent meeting ranged from handling conflicts with the parents of children in therapy to getting group discussions going among reluctant clients. +Mrs. Einhorn, who works at the agency's Renee Pollack Home Care and Geriatric Center in White Plains, said that the group of elderly women she met with regularly didn't want to talk about ''any heavy topics.'' +At the same time, Mrs. Einhorn said, the women wanted to cooperate with her since they knew she was a student. How could she respect their wishes yet help these elderly people - who were living apart from their families - deal with the painful issues confronting them? +With Mrs. Miller's guidance, the students explored the nature of the elderly group's resistance and the dynamics of group interaction. The supervisor noted that by listening carefully and making use of clients' questions a therapist could lead a group beneficially into deeper waters. + +Relying on Colleagues +The give-and-take continued for an hour and a half, as the interns gave each other practical suggestions as well as moral support. One of the purposes of these meetings, Mrs. Miller explained afterward, was to teach the students ''how to rely on their colleagues when they are out of school.'' +Dr. Miringoff said social-work graduates had no trouble finding work in the field. ''I have not heard of one person out of about 100 who graduated from Fordham at Tarrytown last year who did not find a professional job in social work,'' the dean noted. He added that about half those jobs were in Westchester. +The entry-level salary for a social worker with a master's degree is Miringoff said. ''The private agencies offering clinical services here are probably more developed than in any place'' in the New York, Connecticut and New Jersey area. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo; Marjorie Miller, a clinical social worker with the Westchester Jewish Community Services, supervising a meeting of graduate social work students who are interns at the agency and, left, with Lisa Seethaler, one of the graduate students who is working as an intern there (Roberta Hershenson) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +85 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 5, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Corrections + +SECTION: Section A; Page 3, Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 96 words + +An article on Feb. 19 about regulation of doctors in Massachusetts misstated two provisions of state law. +One limits the fees that Massachusetts doctors can charge elderly patients to the amount permitted under the Medicare program, but the doctors are indeed permitted to bill patients - for 20 percent of the total. +Other provisions require that physicians who treat one Medicare patient must thereafter accept all Medicare patients and Medicare's fee schedule. +But the law does let doctors refuse to participate in Medicare entirely, by not seeing elderly patients. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Correction + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +86 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 6, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Review/Television; +Where Men Faced Death, With Fear and Bravery + +BYLINE: By WALTER GOODMAN + +SECTION: Section C; Page 22, Column 3; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 588 words + +They look pretty much like the sort of American tourists who are often kidded by more elegant travelers: a big busload of elderly people, snapping pictures, buying postcards. Their red, white and blue Victory Tours bus seems like a parody. But their itinerary is offbeat: the roads through France and Germany that became the final European battleground of World War II. And they are accompanied by Bill Moyers. +''From D-Day to the Rhine,'' tonight at 9 on Channel 13 and at 8 on Channel 49, accompanies a group of veterans and a few family members back to 1944 and 1945, when these men fought their way across Europe. Newsreels remind viewers of the hardship and cost of the months that began with the Allied landing in June 1944 on Normandy beaches where youngsters are now seen splashing. For tens of thousands of Americans, the war ended in a German prison camp, a hospital or, if enough of their bodies could be found to bury, a grave. +This time out, gratifyingly, Mr. Moyers is not in search of profundities. In chats along the way, he extracts accounts of heroic acts, related without any pretensions to Ramboism. Jose Lopez tells of using his machine gun to hold off a German attack and enable his company to regroup. The citation for his Congressional Medal of Honor says he killed more than 100 enemy soldiers. +For viewers whose memories of World War II are dim or subject to revisionist influences, that accomplishment may seem dubious, but this program recalls how things seemed at the time. The scenes of rejoicing as the American soldiers entered Paris remain stirring testimony to the feelings of people who had endured Nazi occupation. And the welcome to the elderly Americans from elderly Frenchmen, apparently members of the Resistance, who embrace them with the words ''Thank you for coming home,'' confirms that some remember. +Most of the 10 men on the tour were officers. One received a Bronze Star for risking death to rescue another soldier. One tells of leading his patrol across a snow-covered field on a mine-hunting expedition, without mine detectors; their testing technique was to trample down the snow with their boots. A former lieutenant, who fought on after being wounded by mortar fire, almost had to have his foot amputated. Others recall shivering with cold and fear under German artillery barrages during the Battle of the Bulge. Two ended their military careers as prisoners of war. +Several of these tourists, now around 70 years old, remember their ''good buddies'' who never made it out of their 20's, and lie under the crosses and stars in the American cemeteries in France where the group pauses to pay homage. +It is an unusually patriotic program for public television, but David Grubin's production carries no hint of jingoism. Even the scene of the old fellows saluting the flag doesn't seem like flag waving. The most affecting aspect of these 90 minutes lies less in the recollections of bravery or fear than in the 45-year-old photographs of smiling young soldiers who faced death without quite believing in it, juxtaposed to the sight of elderly men returning, probably for the last time, to experiences that transformed their youthful years and those of a generation. + +VISITING THE PAST - FROM D-DAY TO THE RHINE, a documentary produced and directed by David Grubin; Bill Moyers, correspondent; produced by Public Television Inc. in association with David Grubin Productions Inc.; Judith Davidson Moyers and Mr. Moyers, executive producers. At 8 and 9 P.M. on PBS. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: photo: American soldiers in France during World War II. A group of veterans returns to the scenes of battle in ''From D-Day to the Rhine.'' (The National Archives) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +87 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 7, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Upheaval in the East; +Where Nazis Took Fierce Revenge, French Hatred for Germans Recedes + +BYLINE: By ALAN RIDING, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 12, Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1235 words + +DATELINE: TULLE, France, March 1 + +Anyone native to this southwestern French town can identify the lampposts and metal terraces near the railroad station where 99 local men were hanged by Nazi stormtroopers on June 9, 1944, in reprisal for the killings of 40 Germans by Resistance fighters. +Outside the station, a small plaque also names the 18 men ''shot savagely by the Germans'' two days earlier. Nearby, there is a memorial to the 101 local citizens who ''never returned'' after they were deported to Dachau concentration camp as further punishment for the Resistance attack. +Yet, perhaps surprisingly, with talk of German reunification now stirring bitter memories of World War II throughout Europe, the story of Tulle is not that of a town where the wounds of the Nazi occupation remain open, where anti-German feelings have festered on for almost half a century. +Rather, Tulle illustrates how time and a concerted effort to build a new relationship have transformed the way many French men and women view Germany. Today, even in a community of 20,000 inhabitants with ample reason for resentment, past animosity has largely given way to good will, particularly among young people. + +'No Hate for the Germans' +This town 310 miles south of Paris also helps explain the paradox that, while government, intellectual and newspaper circles in the capital publicly support and privately fret over the idea of a united Germany, opinion polls indicate that two of three French citizens favor it. Not for the first time, Paris and the provinces see things differently. +To be sure, Tulle has not abandoned its postwar pledge never to forget the atrocities of 1944. Each June 9, a procession leads hundreds of people from the station, past flower-covered terraces, to the monument built at the site a mile away where the 99 hanging victims were first buried and the 101 deportees are remembered. +''But I think that by now we can handle things emotionally,'' said Jean Combasteil, the 54-year-old Mayor of Tulle. ''We're now capable of talking to Germans about the events of June 1944 calmly, not from the point of view of hate or revenge.'' +Understandably, older people - the families of victims as well as war veterans - are most anxious not to forget. ''We have nothing against the people of Germany,'' said Louis Vaux, a 67-year-old former Resistance fighter. ''We have no hate for the Germans. We just want to remind people of what happened to make sure it never happens again.'' + +New Attitude Among the Young +Yet while distrust for Germany lingers on among those who remember the war, even many middle-aged local people, like Pierre Diederichs, whose father died at Dachau, prefer to look forward. ''For my mother, it is still very painful,'' the 50-year-old schoolteacher said. ''But for my generation, I don't think there is much hostility towards the idea of German reunification.'' +A new attitude toward Germany is still clearer among younger people here. ''We should not forget what happened,'' an 18-year-old girl at the Edmond Perrier Lycee here said. ''But we have no reason to fear Germany. The war was provoked by the Nazis and the people of Germany have no responsibility.'' +In a class of 40, of which only two students had ever joined the annual procession June 9, her colleagues agreed. ''I feel close to German young people,'' another girl said. ''They're the same as we are. We wear the same clothes, we like the same music, we have the same sense of humor.'' +At the Victor Hugo College, a history teacher, Gilbert Beaubatie, asked two classes of teen-agers to answer a brief questionnaire about attitudes toward Germany. Of 50 students who replied, only two expressed concern about German reunification. A typical response was that of the 16-year-old girl who wrote: ''Many Germans must be happy to be reunited. I am happy for them.'' + +A Useful Education +Here, as in many French communities, the healing process began in earnest in the mid-1960's, when Tulle was twinned with a West German town, in this case, Schorndorf near Stuttgart. Since then, not only local authorities, but also students and war veterans from the two towns have frequently visited each other. +''I must have visited Schorndorf a dozen times since I became Mayor in 1977,'' Mr. Combasteil said. ''People don't pretend things didn't happen here, but our motto is, 'we neither hate nor forget.' We have a Schorndorf Square and they have a Tulle Square, and every June 9 they place flowers there in memory of the past.'' +Mr. Diederichs, who went to West Germany as an exchange student in 1954, recalled that at first many Tulle residents rejected the idea of association with Schorndorf. ''But by now hundreds of our youths have been there and hundreds of German youths have lodged in homes here,'' he said. ''And that has made a big difference.'' +Many local residents even think visits by German youths here have provided them with useful education. ''They're anxious to deal with the past,'' one student at the Edmond Perrier Lycee said. ''They ask questions and we tell them. I remember one who asked to attend the June 9 procession. But it's very different with their parents. They don't like to talk about the war.'' + +Veterans' Political Prism +In Tulle, a generational gap in attitudes is also often apparent. Madeleine Vergne, a 52-year-old librarian whose brothers fought in the Resistance, admitted that she still felt strongly anti-German. ''When I see a car with German license plates, my stomach tightens,'' she said. ''But my daughter doesn't see things as I do. We're very divided on this subject.'' +The response of many war veterans to the prospect of German reunification, on the other hand, is less emotional. During the war, the Department of Correze around Tulle was a stronghold of the Communist Resistance movement. Today, the old combatants still view events through a political prism. +At the small Museum of the Resistance, where wartime flags, weapons and documents are on display, several veterans insisted that they were delighted that the division of Europe was ending. ''If these countries adopt the same democracy as France, we have nothing to worry about,'' said Jean Mazaleyrat, 69, who flew as a navigator in the Royal Air Force. +But he and his friends did not hide their concerns. ''We can only hope that the lessons of history have been learned,'' said Charles Montagnac, a 71-year-old veteran, noting that he was troubled by the problem of Germany's borders with Poland, by the prospect of Germany re-emerging as a military power and by the dangers of a resurgence of German nationalism. + +Fear of German Nationalism +The Rev. Jean Espinasse, an 84-year-old Catholic priest who witnessed the hangings here in 1944 and persuaded a German officer to reduce the number of victims from 120 to 99, said he too was worried about German nationalism. +But, recalling the Resistance's attack on a Gestapo garrison here that provoked the reprisals of June 9, he said the past was not a simple fight between good and evil. ''I think we should remember that not only the Germans were responsible,'' he said. ''The French also did things they should not have done.'' +He paused and, looking out of his apartment window toward the spire of the 14th-century cathedral and the slate rooftops of this medieval town, he said softly, ''But I'm perhaps the only person here who holds that view.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Frenchmen who fought in World War II visiting the Museum of the Resistance in Tulle, France. From the left were Jean Mazaleyrat, who flew as a navigator in the Royal Air Force, Charles Montagnac and Jean Roche. On the subject of political changes in Eastern Europe, Mr. Mazaleyrat said, ''If these countries adopt the same democracy as France, we have nothing to worry about.'' (Agence France-Press); map of France showing location of Tulle (The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +88 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 7, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Conservative Wins Senate Confirmation As an Appeals Judge + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 19, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 242 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 6 + +The Senate today confirmed Clarence Thomas, a conservative civil rights official, to be a Federal appeals judge, brushing aside complaints about his record from some groups representing liberals and the elderly. +The Senate had planned a roll call on the nomination but changed course at the last minute and on a voice vote confirmed Mr. Thomas as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. +As chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for eight years, Mr. Thomas has been one of the most visible black officials in the administrations of both Ronald Reagan and President Bush. +Mr. Thomas, 41 years old, has been critical of quotas and affirmative action plans as methods to fight discrimination in hiring and has been praised by conservatives for those views. +Among his opponents was Senator David Pryor, the Arkansas Democrat who is chairman of the Special Committee on Aging. He complained that while Mr. Thomas was in charge of the commission the statute of limitations expired on 15,000 age-discrimination cases without action being taken. ''It's too much to overlook,'' Mr. Pryor said. +Senator Alan Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, dismissed complaints that Mr. Thomas had failed to cooperate with an investigation by the Aging Committee several years ago and charged that the panel's inquiry was flawed to begin with. ''They wasted a lot of time trying to nail Clarence Thomas,'' he said. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +89 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 9, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Events in Celebration of Women's History Month + +SECTION: Section C; Page 25, Column 3; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 739 words + + +WINIFRED BORG, Gallery Art 54, 54 Greene Street (226-1605). Paintings and assemblage. Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M., through March 18. Free. +FEMMES VITALES, New York Marxist School, 79 Leonard Street (941-0332). Paintings and sculpture by women. Mondays through Fridays, noon to 5 P.M., through March 23. Free. +MARY KELLY'S INTERIM, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 583 Broadway, near Houston Street (219-1355). A large-scale work that explores the representation of women and aging. Fridays and Saturdays, noon to 8 P.M.; Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, noon to 6 P.M.; through April 8. Suggested donation: $3.50. All-day symposium on major developments in feminist art and critical practice since the 1970's. Tomorrow, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. Tickets: $15; $10 for members and students. +SANDRA LERNER, June Kelly Gallery, 591 Broadway, near Houston Street (226-1660). Paintings. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M., through April 7. Free. +''MEMORY/REALITY,'' Ceres Gallery, 91 Franklin Street (226-4725; 219-9590). Paintings and sculpture by contemporary artists who immigrated to the United States from Asia and Eastern Europe; curated by Kit-Yin Snyder. Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 6 P.M., through March 24. Free. +DEBORAH HAY, Warren Street Performance Loft, 46 Warren Street (732-3149). Dance by a noted female choreographer, with music by Ellen Fullman. Tonight, tomorrow and next Thursday through Saturday, 8 P.M. Tickets: $8; Theater Development Fund vouchers accepted. +ELIZABETH STREB RINGSIDE, Streb Studio, 309 Canal Street (924-0077). A program of athletic dance, called ''Airwork, Groundwork, Wallwork.'' Today through Sunday and next Wednesday through Monday, 8 P.M. Tickets: $12; Theater Development Fund vouchers accepted. + +TOMORROW + +''ANTONIA: PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN,'' College of Staten Island, 715 Ocean Terrace, Building A, Room 207, Sunnyside (718-390-7951). Judy Collins's documentary about Antonia Brico, the orchestra conductor. Tomorrow, 10 A.M. Free. +WORKSHOP IN PRINTMAKING, New York Feminist Art Institute, 91 Franklin Street (219-9590). Led by Deborah Pearlman, workshop includes slide presentations and critiques. Tomorrow, 1 to 4 P.M. Admission: $15, including materials. +''QUILTS IN WOMEN'S LIVES,'' Metropolitan Museum, Uris Center Auditorium (570-3930). Film. Tomorrow, 3 P.M. Free with museum admission, which is $5; $2.50 for students and the elderly; free for children under 12. +THE WASHINGTON SQUARES, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Veterans Memorial Hall, Snug Harbor, 1000 Richmond Terrace, Livingston (718-448-2500). Rock-folk music. Tomorrow, 7 and 9:30 P.M. Tickets: $12; $10 for museum members. + +SUNDAY + +FIRST ANNIVERSARY PARTY, Judith's Room, 681 Washington Street, between 10th and Charles Streets (727-7330). A reception honoring New York City's only women's bookstore. Sunday, 2 to 6 P.M. Free. +PATCHWORK: VOICES OF 19TH-CENTURY WOMEN, Fraunces Tavern Museum, 54 Pearl Street (425-1778). A dramatic presentation by Linda Russell, actor and ballad singer, of diaries, letters and songs written by rural North American women. Sunday, 2 P.M. Free with admission to the museum, which is $2.50; $1, children, students and the elderly. +''THE FEMINIST 'I,' '' Brooklyn Museum, Education Division, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Washington Avenue, Crown Heights section (925-0606; 718-638-5000, extension 234). A series of videos by women, presented by the museum and by Women Make Movies, through April 1. This week's program features work by Joan Braderman, Pratibha Parmar, Margie Strosser and Cecelia Condit. Sunday, 2:30 P.M. Screenings are free with museum admission, which is $3; $1.50 for students; $1 for the elderly; free to children and museum members. +AN EVENING WITH FRAN LEIBOWITZ, 92d Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue (996-1100). Sunday, 7:30 P.M. Tickets: $13. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Schedule + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +90 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 10, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Quotation of the Day + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 2, Column 6; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 39 words + +''There are risks involved in engaging two vulnerable populations and no certainty of success. But they are nice risks.'' - Arnold Hiatt, chairman of Stride Rite, on workplace day care for children and the elderly. [8:4.] + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +91 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 10, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +About New York; +How to Preserve A Strong Mind: Flex It Regularly + +BYLINE: By DOUGLAS MARTIN + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 27, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 752 words + +John Hough thinks it's high time to study computers. ''Youngsters are learning how to use them, but us oldsters know nothing,'' he says. +Inez Robbins again pushes for a French course. Dr. Milton Bonart speaks passionately for a seminar on repealing the Federal income tax. Murray Zackin, a tall gentleman in a Stetson, says he wants to know more about the experience of newly freed slaves during the Reconstruction Era. Marion Kuhn suggests a course in government corruption beginning with the Harding Administration. +Welcome to this semester's debate over which courses will be offered to residents of the Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged at 120 West 106th Street. The 33 people in attendance sit in a semicircle. More than half are in wheelchairs. Some have hugely swollen feet, some pencil-thin legs. The average age is over 86. +Not a few embody amazing stories. One takes singing lessons. Another is writing a first novel. Another's paintings are being exhibited away from the home. A woman who fled czarist Russia has begun studying the Jewish religion and is excitedly planning the bat mitzvah she never had. +These are people trying to walk quietly into the sunset with earned dignity. They have begun and finished careers, raised families, nurtured grandchildren and for some inexplicable reason are pressing on at a time so many are gone. None can imagine growing too old to learn. +''They keep us thinking, and they keep themselves thinking,'' says Helene Meyers, administrator of the home. +''I was very unhappy to come into a nursing home, and the thing that has kept me here is the college courses,'' Beatrice Danziger says. ''It kept my brain alive.'' The courses are taught by instructors from the City University of New York's Institute of Study for Older Adults, which offers the same service in other homes. No college credits are given, just attendance certificates. For some, particularly those with scant formal education, the certificates are as treasured as Phi Beta Kappa keys. +What makes the Jewish home unusual is that residents choose topics, rather than selecting courses from a catalogue. ''Our people will simply not be pressed into molds,'' declares Dr. Paula Gray, director of therapeutic recreation. +The process begins with residents tossing around ideas. Sophia Solomon, whose views are a bit to the right of this pack of generally liberal Democrats, suggests examining immigration law. ''Our population is increasing by the millions and we can't take care of the ones we have,'' she says. ''I know the Statue of Liberty says give us your hungry and poor, but it doesn't say give us your criminals.'' +Margot Furber completely changes the subject. She suggests a course on bringing up children. ''How strict should you be?'' she asks. ''What's better for the future?'' Dr. Gray applauds this idea, as it might allow students to discuss their own experiences. +Elizabeth Henderson then lets out one enigmatic word: obscenity. Everyone but Bertha Reider seems at a loss as to how to respond. ''With illustrations?'' she asks drolly. Dr. Gray picks up the cue. ''That would be the most popular course of the season,'' she says. +The suggestions continue. Mythology, though its sponsor seems torn between Greek and Scandinavian. The biographies of New York Mayors. The part railroads played in American history. Who's who in the world of art. +A proposed bridge-playing seminar is thrown out as unworthy of college. Two topics in the news - homelessness and changes in Eastern Europe - spark vigorous discussion. +Dr. Gray calls for order. The time has come to vote. ''Now, everybody wake up!'' she barks. ''Those of you who are sleeping, get ready to put your hands up.'' +Some suggestions receive no support, not even from their sponsors. ''Mrs. Schapiro,'' Dr. Gray says with cheerfully exaggerated exasperation, ''you better put your hand up, since you suggested it.'' +The first round ends with six course possibilities still in the running. The final selection of two courses is to be made by secret ballot. Staff members canvass each resident to insure everyone votes. +They aren't completely successful. ''I'm not interested in anything on that list,'' one woman growls, pushing the piece of paper away. +The envelope, please. One winner is Eastern European politics, hardly surprising given most residents' heritage. The other is homelessness. +''It reflects your concern for humanity,'' Dr. Gray proclaims. ''This is the kind of course you always choose.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +92 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 10, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +POLICE MOURN DEATH OF ONE OF THEIR OWN + +BYLINE: By ROBERT HANLEY, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 29, Column 6; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 618 words + +DATELINE: PORT JERVIS, N.Y., March 9 + +State Police Sgt. Joseph Aversa, killed on Monday in an undercover drug operation gone awry on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, was honored and mourned here today in a Mass of police brotherhood. +About 6,000 uniformed officers came to St. Mary's Church, far from the turbulent scene of Sergeant Aversa's death, for a 75-minute Mass and then a half-mile funeral procession that transfixed this old railroading town. +Hundreds of residents gathered on the curbs and front porches of Ball Street and watched the procession in silence, reflecting the solemnity of the passing state troopers and detectives. +There were high school football players in red team jackets and elderly women huddled under blankets. There were middle-aged men, some smoking cigars; young mothers with infants in carriages, and toddlers holding little American flags. + +'She's Too Young to Understand' +Pat Gessner, of Franklin Street, was on one knee, talking gently to her 2-year-old daughter, Kate, as the troopers marched toward Sergeant Aversa's grave site in St. Mary's Cemetery. +''She wanted to know why they were all so sad,'' Mrs. Gessner said. ''She wanted to know why it wasn't happy, like a parade. I said they lost a very good friend trying to protect us and our families from drugs. But she's too young to understand.'' +Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and Mayor David N. Dinkins attended the Mass and appeared shaken as they left it. +''It's a terrible tragedy,'' the Governor said. ''He represented the ultimate in public service.'' +Mayor Dinkins said, ''All of our police officers are special, and he was more so.'' + +A Piper Played 'Amazing Grace' +Sergeant Aversa, 31, had been promoted to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation in New York City last October. He was an undercover narcotics investigator with a unit of Federal, state and New York City agents. +His mourners came from throughout the eastern United States. In some places their ranks were 6 deep, in others, 8 or 10. All were at attention, saluting as his hearse drove by. +As a lone bagpiper played ''Amazing Grace,'' Sergeant Aversa's coffin was carried into the church by eight troopers. Ahead of them walked one trooper with a crucifix and two others with lighted candles. Behind were Sergeant Aversa's widow, Eileen, clutching his trooper's Stetson, and his parents, Doris and Vincent. +Flanking them was a police honor guard in dress uniform colors as varied as their origins. There was the green and gray of New Hampshire; the cardinal of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; the grays of Connecticut, Alabama and Pennsylvania, and the blues of New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan and Indiana. +The Rev. Samuel Taylor, chaplain of State Police Troop F in Middletown, delivered the eulogy. He noted the 25 commendations Sergeant Aversa had received since joining the State Police in 1984. +''Joey touched all our lives,'' Father Taylor said. ''The Book of Wisdom tells us a just man, though he dies early, shall be at peace. Jesus said blessed is the man who lays down his life for a friend. Joey laid down his life so each of us would have a better neighborhood, a better place to live.'' +Sergeant Aversa's widow left the church still holding her husband's hat against her chest. Through sobs, she said: ''He was so proud. He was so proud.'' +The New York Police Department's Emerald Society pipe-and-drum band led the procession to the cemetery. Then came the hearse and the long lines of marching state troopers and plainclothes detectives, their gold shields covered by bands of black. +Along the entire route, Sergeant Aversa's father, a retired New York City mounted police officer, walked beside the hearse, his hand resting against it. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Sgt. Joseph Aversa's widow, Eileen, clutching her husband's hat, at his grave site yesterday in Port Jervis, N.Y. (The New York Times/William E. Sauro) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +93 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 11, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +CONNECTICUT GUIDE + +SECTION: Section 12CN; Page 13, Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1064 words + + + +EQUINE SCIENCE +Horse enthusiasts may sign up for a Horse Science Symposium running Friday morning to Sunday evening at the University of Connecticut in Storrs for $110 (including lunch and dinner but not overnight accommodations). Or they may opt for single-day admissions with lunch and dinner for $65. The event, held mostly at the Bishop Center for Continuing Education, is sponsored by UConn's department of animal sciences and the Connecticut Horse Council, an organization of professional horse breeders, trainers and riding instructors. +From 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Friday and Saturday there will be lectures by veterinarians, faculty members from schools of veterinary medicine, and specialists in such related fields as insurance for horses. Among the lecture subjects are the Connecticut horse industry, animal welfare issues, the effect of riders and other load weights on horses' anatomies, how horses learn, Lyme disease in horses, nutritional requirements for performance horses, and getting your money's worth from barn employees. +Sunday admission is $5, with no meals. Events will be held at the Ratcliffe Hicks Arena on campus, and they include demonstrations of Arabian horsemanship by the Arabian Club of Connecticut, a UConn drill team equitation display, a hitch of Percheron draft horses, a Connecticut Reining Horse Association demonstration of single and multiple reining, and a polo match between the UConn faculty team and members of the Connecticut Horse Council. For more information call 486-2636. + +ANTIQUE PAPER +The Ephemera Society of America, holding its 10th annual fair in Greenwich from 11 A.M. to 5 P.M. today, attests by its mere existence the zooming popularity of antique and historic paper. Named for the ephemerid, or mayfly, which lives for only a day, the society may be a misnomer, considering the longevity of the aged broadsides, sheet music, playing cards, valentines, pamphlets, tickets, political campaign material, manuscripts, trade cards, invitations, photographs, letterheads and other items it has collected for sale. +The Hyatt Regency, at 1800 East Putnam Avenue (Boston Post Road) near the Stamford border, will accommodate 75 dealers and their fragile wares. Admission is $5 and visitors may expect to spend from $10 to $100 for most items. A special exhibition of paper toys includes early paper dolls, optical toys, games and movable books. + +JOHN RUTTER +John Rutter, the eminent British composer and conductor, begins his first American tour this week, accompanied by the Cambridge Singers, a mixed choir of 28 voices, many of them from Clare College, Cambridge, where Mr. Rutter was director of music in the 1970's. +Their program at 8 P.M. Friday in the Central Baptist Church, 457 Main Street, Hartford, includes works by Bach, Benjamin Britten and Rutter as well as a selection of English church and folk music. Tickets are $10, or $8 for students and the elderly. +Since the concert is expected to be sold out, Mr. Rutter will hold an open rehearsal at 7:30 P.M. Thursday in the South Congregational-First Baptist Church, 90 Main Street, New Britain, previewing the Hartford performance and including some American works by Aaron Copland. Substituting for the Cambridge Singers will be Concora, Connecticut Choral Artists. Admission is $5. Call 223-3691 for reservations. +Mr. Rutter and the Cambridge Singers will appear in Princeton, N.J., Washington, several Midwestern and Western cities, and wind up the tour at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. + +TRACKING THE STORM +The Peabody Museum at Yale and scientists in the department of geology are seeking help from the public in their efforts to track the storm that hit western Connecticut last July 10. Some 4,000 measurements have been made so far by plotting tree-fall patterns, but eyewitness accounts are still needed to identify the nature of the storm. Anyone who saw a triangular, vertical or funnel-shaped cloud, or has barograph records, may call 432-3178 day or night, leaving their name, address and phone number, or mail the information to Copeland MacClintock, Peabody Museum, Yale University, Post. Office Box 6666, New Haven, Conn. 06511. + +THE NEXT CENTURY +How Connecticut, New England and the United States will face the next century's environmental problems will be discussed by scholars, scientists and public administrators during a symposium at Trinity College in Hartford. Titled ''Environmental Policy in the 90's and Beyond: Science, Human Values and Political Choices,'' the event is scheduled from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Friday in Mather Hall. +Steven Kelman of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard will open the session with a talk on the state of environmental policy in terms of methods, values and priorities. Two panel discussions will follow focused on environmental risk and Federal regulatory policies, and environmental risk as a state and local problem. +Participants include R. Talbot Page, Environmental Studies Program, Brown University, Glen Cross, senior counsel to the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority, Barry Rabe, School of Public Health at the University of Michigan, and Douglas MacLean, Department of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. All speakers will join in a roundtable discussion beginning at 3 P.M., focusing on Connecticut as a case study for environmental risk and recycling. Free reservations and more information may be obtained by calling 297-2472. + +CLASSICAL GUITAR +Sharon Isbin will give the final concert in a Connecticut Classical Guitar Society series at 8 P.M. Saturday in the headquarters of the Connecticut Historical Society, 1 Elizabeth Street, Hartford. +In addition to winning guitar competitions in Toronto and Madrid, and being the first guitarist to win the Munich International Competition, she has recorded Bach's complete lute suites for Virgin Classics, as well as several other recordings on other labels. She was the director of Carnegie Hall's Guitarstream International Festival and American Public Radio's Guitarjam series last year, and she currently heads the Juilliard School's first guitar department, founded in 1989. +Her program will consist of works by Bach, Gershwin, Britten, Savio, Brower, Lauro and Barrios. Tickets are $10 and include a post-performance reception. Call 249-7041 for reservations. $90ELEANOR CHARLES + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +94 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 12, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Lockout Could Make or Break Carter + +BYLINE: By JOSEPH DURSO, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section C; Page 3, Column 3; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 787 words + +DATELINE: PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla., March 11 + +Except for the fan who waited all winter, who is the biggest loser in baseball's short spring? +Many people think it's the rookie straining to win a job in the big leagues. To him, the short spring may be a lost spring. He has almost no time left to show his stuff, and he may have to get on line again until the next round of auditions in 1991. +But the biggest loser may turn out to be a man who was a rookie 15 years ago: one of the game's distinguished senior citizens, Gary Carter. Dropped by the Mets, signed by the San Francisco Giants, he turns 36 next month with battered knees and tender hopes. +He knows this spring training may be his final audition, and he has to make the team. If he doesn't, his career ends and he loses the chance to earn nearly $1 million in performance bonuses. + +'A New Challenge' +''I need to prove myself,'' Carter said. ''I'm waiting. It's a new challenge, a new team, a new everything.'' +Carter needs to prove himself because the short spring finds him in the autumn of a long career with time running out. The numbers are classic: 304 home runs, 11 times an All-Star, more than 1,800 games as one of the premier catchers of his generation. The numbers on his contract were classic, too, $2 million a year. They were more classic than the numbers on his record last season: only 50 games played, only two home runs hit, only .183 at bat. So, the Mets decided not to keep him on their exploding list of $2 million-a-year younger stars. +They made the same decision about Keith Hernandez, their All-Star first baseman. So, in one touching ceremony last October, they gave honorable discharges to both of their wounded old heroes and co-captains. Hernandez signed in December with the Cleveland Indians for $3.5 million for two years, guaranteed. Carter signed in January with the Giants for $250,000, and there's the rub: nothing else is guaranteed. $250,000 to $1.2 Million ''The contract says I get a base of 250,'' Carter said by telephone from his home in West Palm Beach. ''If I make the ball club, I get another 250 and that becomes the base. Then I get more for every 10 games I play over 50 games. It goes up in stages. If I play in 110 games, I could make $1.2 million.'' +''But,'' he added, ''first, I've got to make the team.'' +His chances are pretty good even though the Giants won the National League pennant without him. Terry Kennedy, a left-handed hitter, was the regular catcher. Kurt Manwaring, a right-handed hitter, was the reserve. Manwaring can throw but he can't hit yet (.210 with no home runs). So, Carter has a shot at the job, if he makes the team in baseball's short spring. + +Neighborly Workouts +''It could be in my favor, actually,'' he said. ''They may not have time to check out Manwaring, either, and then they may go with the person who has proven himself. It could go either way.'' +To position himself for the audition, Carter has been working out every day with two neighbors, Tim Burke of the Montreal Expos and Robby Thompson of the Giants. Notice that he has a pitcher and a second baseman, just the people a catcher needs for practicing the long throw to the bag. They also take turns pitching and hitting, and waiting for the call to head for camp in Arizona. +''I've been working hard,'' Carter said. ''I'll be able to show them I can run and hit and throw. We work out at a local park. Nobody's around, and I get 120 cuts a day. Thompson throws to me, I throw to him. +''The union has suggested that we don't do anything during the labor dispute. But I have to go. I can't afford to walk away. I need to prove myself.'' + +'No Ill Feelings' +Is he bitter because the Mets put him into this sticky situation? +''No ill feelings,'' he said. ''I am disappointed. I wanted to finish my career in New York. And I wasn't happy with Davey Johnson when I came back from two and a half months on the disabled list and got only 74 at-bats in the last 66 games. Even when I got into the lineup and got seven hits in a row, I was back on the bench the next day. +''I can understand it from the Mets' point of view. Economics. They have six starting pitchers all making $1.3 million a year and above. You throw in John Franco at $2 million in the bullpen, and Howard Johnson and Kevin McReynolds in the lineup. And they need to lock Darryl Strawberry into a multiyear contract or he'll walk. It's economics.'' +The Kid considered his long career and his short spring and said: ''Al Rosen said Manwaring needed another year at Triple A. But if they don't have time to get a good look at guys in spring training, will the Giants go with the guys they have, in the time they have? I don't know. But I do know I've got to prove myself again.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +95 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 13, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Fighting the Deficit Too Bravely + +SECTION: Section A; Page 28, Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 514 words + +''I've participated in the binge of irresponsibility,'' says Representative Dan Rostenkowski. ''But, no more,'' vows the blunt chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Writing in The Washington Post, Mr. Rostenkowski outlines a bold plan to attack the Federal budget deficit with a combination of new taxes and spending cuts. +The plan, which includes unpopular measures like suspending next year's Social Security raise, deserves high marks for honesty and courage. He has even prompted a glimmer of interest from the White House. The chairman is right to offer a responsible attack on the deficit, especially with two irresponsible tax cut plans hurtling down the Congressional railroad track. +But in execution, the Rostenkowski plan risks causing more pain than it would relieve. It contains good ideas, but also bad and unnecessary ones. +Huge Federal deficits siphon money out of private capital markets. The threat is a long-term erosion of the nation's capital stock. The solution is for Congress to stop spending more than it collects in taxes. Resolving this imbalance requires permanent changes, not merely one-shot tax hikes and spending cuts. Mr. Rostenkowski's plan turns on some of both: +The Good: The proposed permanent tax hikes on gasoline, alcohol and tobacco are sound. These would raise tens of billions each year while helping to clean up the environment and lower health-care costs. These changes should be part of any long-term budget plan. The Bad: The core of the Rostenkowski plan is a package of one-year fixes. He proposes, for instance, to freeze spending that is not targeted on the poor and to suspend indexation of the tax code. These changes will cause pain, despite his commendable proposal to expand the earned income tax credit that benefits the working poor. The elderly would lose some Social Security benefits; low-income families would pay more tax. +And Mr. Rostenkowski's plan would renege on commitments made during reform of the tax code and Social Security. Breaking commitments could be justified in times of severe crisis. But the deficit presents no such short-term threat. +Mr. Rostenkowski recommends repeal of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit targets because, he argues, they would be superfluous under his plan. Not true. Without those targets, Congress would be free to offset his measures with a new round of tax cuts and spending hikes. Gramm-Rudman remains a regrettable but useful straitjacket. +The Unnecessary: Deficit reduction is one, but only one, way to promote economic growth. Investment in the nation's disadvantaged children and dilapidated infrastructure is at least as important. The deficit needs to be reduced substantially, but how much should depend on case-by-case evaluation of public investments. +Mr. Rostenkowski challenges his colleagues to adopt his plan or improve on it. It's a welcome challenge to those attracted by reckless reductions in the Social Security tax or in the capital gains tax rate. The test now is whether Washington can turn his one-shot fixes into permanent remedies. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: EDITORIAL + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +96 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 13, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Heart Tests To Focus On Women + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section C; Page 7, Column 3; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 394 words + +DATELINE: BALTIMORE, March 12 + +The first large study of women and heart disease is being undertaken by the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and six other medical centers after decades of research devoted solely to heart disease in men. +The $10 million, four-year study is designed to determine whether three different hormones can help reduce heart disease in post-menopausal women. +In the study, 840 women will be assigned at random to receive one of the three medications - estrogen and two types of progesterone - or a placebo. Estrogen and progesterone are female sex hormones. Cholesterol levels, blood pressure and levels of a blood-clotting factor will be studied. +The new study, called Post-Menopausal Estrogen and Progestin Intervention, reflects a belief that women have been denied equal time in health studies, as well as a growing emphasis on the health of older people. + +Menopause and Heart Attack + Estrogen, a hormone needed for normal female sexual development, is believed to protect younger women against heart disease. Researchers also suspect that the threat of a heart attack increases during menopause, when estrogen production drops off. +The study will try to determine whether hormone drugs take the place of natural estrogen in protecting the hearts of older women. +The study will answer the question of whether estrogen protects against heart disease only indirectly because it will not continue long enough to look for differences in heart attacksand heart disease deaths in those taking hormones compared with those who do not. +But the results could prompt doctors to prescribe hormone therapy for post-menopausal women, said Dr. Trudy Bush, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. +''In my opinion, there is good evidence at this time that women who use estrogens probably have about half the risk of heart disease compared to women who don't,'' she said. Estrogen hormones will be part of the study. Dr. Bush is leading the study at Hopkins along with Dr. David Foster and Dr. Howard Zacur. +Heart disease kills more Americans than any other disease. In the past, major studies of heart disease in the United States have involved men because the ailment tends to strike men at a younger age than women, and younger people are less likely to suffer from additional health problems that could complicate a study. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +97 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 13, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Business and Health; +Research Outlays To Aid the Aging + +BYLINE: By Milt Freudenheim + +SECTION: Section D; Page 2, Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 789 words + +MEDICAL experts and their supporters in the business community are putting pressure on Congress to spend more for basic research on a number of illnesses that make life miserable and expensive for millions of elderly Americans. +They argue that in the long run the best way to slow spiraling health-care costs is by devising better treatments for Alzheimer's disease, osteoporosis, incontinence and other conditions that force millions of the elderly into nursing homes. +Advancing their case, the Pepper Commission, a bipartisan Congressional advisory group named for the late Representative Claude Pepper, Democrat of Florida, recently recommended that annual Congressional appropriations for research into diseases of the elderly be gradually raised to $1 billion from the $380 million appropriated last year. +The $380 million includes spending by the National Institute on Aging and the other institutes studying heart, cancer and neurological diseases, said Daniel Perry, executive director of the Alliance for Aging Research, an advocacy group supported by foundations and businesses. In all, basic health research got $7.6 billion. +The research outlay is minor compared with the cost of care for people aged 65 and over, which absorbed $180 billion of the nation's health-care spending last year. The amount is expected to grow rapidly as the population ages. The number of Amerians over 85, those most likely to enter nursing homes, may quadruple by the year 2030. +''If we don't make the investment in research, we will pay dearly later on,'' said Dr. Robert N. Butler, chairman of geriatrics at the Mount Sinai Medical Center's School of Medicine in New York. He said promising studies already under way could save enormous amounts in medical costs. For example, studies of hormonal treatments for enlarged prostates in older men may produce a far less costly alternative to the 400,000 prostate operations done each year. +Dr. T. Franklin Williams, director of the National Institute on Aging, said a simple skin biopsy to diagnose Alzheimer's, the memory-loss disease, might ''save $1 billion right up front in diagnostic tests,'' which are largely paid for by Medicare. +Dr. Alan M. Garber, an economist and assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University, said such medical advances would mean longer and better lives - ''80 good years instead of 70'' for many people. But he questioned whether overall health care costs would be reduced. ''More people will survive longer, which may even increase their costs,'' a Congressional aide said. +The major drug companies are spending $3.6 billion this year to find new treatments for the elderly. Merck & Company, for example, said it is spending ''a very substantial part'' of the $855 million it has allotted to research and development on illnesses that are common in older people. A growing share of industry research budgets is going to basic research in laboratories. ''But the National Institute on Aging helps to set priorities and to publicize those priorities,'' said Dr. John F. Beary 3d, a senior vice president with the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, an industry group. +Some financial service companies are also supporting Federal research to help the aging. The nation will have to try to reduce the number of elderly who lose their independence ''or the 11 percent of gross national product going to health care will inevitably go up,'' said F. Peter Libassi, a senior vice president with the Travelers Corporation, which manages health benefits and sells long-term-care insurance. +John L. Steffens, president of Merrill Lynch Consumer Markets and chairman of the Alliance for Aging Research, said business people had several concerns. They include paying the health costs of their retirees, the level of Government spending, and the financial implications for individuals who will face ''25 to 30 percent of their lives in retirement'' as life expectancy lengthens. ''If we begin to plan for some of these eventualities of changing demographics now, we can solve these problems,'' he said. ''I don't think we're going to ration health care.'' +The Bush Administration's budget calls for a 4.7 percent increase in the budget for the National Institutes of Health, to $7.9 billion, next year. Congress usually adds a few percentage points to Administration requests for health research, Congressional aides said. Alzheimer's research, which has been gaining national support, is likely to get some added money, they said. +Representative Mary Rose Oakar, Democrat of Ohio, said she would urge the House Appropriations Committee to increase spending for research to help the aging. ''We are very pennywise and pound foolish,'' she said. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +98 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 14, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +London Journal; +In Highgate Cemetery, Marx Is Safe on a Pedestal + +BYLINE: By TOM KUNTZ, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 4, Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1047 words + +DATELINE: LONDON, March 8 + +At the grave of Karl Marx, they come not to mourn Marxism but to ponder the flawed realities that sprang from its ideals, or to keep the faith, or perhaps even to bask in its new and somewhat paradoxical vogue. +Even as Communist statues are being removed across Eastern Europe, tourists and pilgrims of the left are flocking in greater numbers to the Marx gravesite in Highgate Cemetery here to view perhaps the best-known socialist icon in the West - the large bust of the German-born social philosopher atop a large block of Cornish granite bearing the inscription, ''Workers of all lands unite.'' +''If anything, it's stirred up more interest in Marx,'' said Ronald Cavaye, a volunteer at the cemetery, referring to the upheaval in Eastern Europe. ''There's more interest in Marx because Marx is in the news.'' +Alan Gemmil, who said he and his group of Scottish companions came to the gravesite ''because we're Communists,'' asserted that faith in Marx endures ''because the basics of his economic argument were right.'' +''You could ask a Christian why he still likes Christ after the Spanish Inquisition,'' he said. + +Where 'Kapital' Was Written +Marx spent most of his life in London, coming here from Paris in 1849 at the age of 31 as a conservative tide swept the Continent. He spent the last 34 years of his life in the city, studying England's growing industrial economy to perfect his theories, and writing his monumental work, ''Das Kapital.'' The London years also left Marx embittered by poverty, ill health and the death of several of his children. +Noting a modest increase in the number of visitors to the Marx grave in recent months, Jean Pateman, the chairman of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery, the charity that operates London's most famous burial ground, said the site had always been popular with delegations from Communist lands. +Presumably there will be fewer official visitors from Eastern Europe for this year's March 14 anniversary of Marx's death in 1883, but Mrs. Pateman said ''vast numbers'' of Chinese continue to pay homage. +Even before the upheaval in Eastern Europe, she said, on one Sunday she counted 18 nationalities among visitors to the cemetery, where noteworthies like the novelist George Eliot, the inventor Michael Faraday and the actor Sir Ralph Richardson are also buried. +But Marx is by far the cemetery's biggest draw among its estimated 100,000 visitors annually, a fact that stirs decidedly mixed emotions among the hardly revolutionary Friends of Highgate Cemetery. + +A Question of Decorum +The charity, founded in the mid-1970's and described forthrightly by Mrs. Pateman as ''three elderly women and a group of volunteers,'' would prefer to focus attention on its considerable efforts to reclaim an exemplary Victorian necropolis from years of decay, overgrowth and neglect. While the Marx grave helps to keep interest in the cemetery high, its popularity prompts continuing concern about decorum. +''It's a difficult line to walk between being a burial ground and a place for tourists,'' said a member of the Friends, who noted that Highgate was still a working cemetery, holding on average a funeral a week. +''I hope most people who come come with a sense of reverence,'' Mrs. Pateman said. By and large it appears that they do, although Mrs. Pateman declined to comment on whether there had been any untoward incidents regarding the Marx grave. + +An Assortment of Visitors +Typically, unlikely groupings of camera-toting tourists, unconventionally coiffed punkers, professorial types and ordinary strollers from the hilltop community of Highgate gather in groups in front of the grave at a bend in a well-beaten path in the eastern section of the cemetery, which unlike the western side is open to unescorted visits. +There is a brief pause of respect, even awe, at the gravesite before some visitors move on, perhaps to the graves of leftists buried nearby in the years since Marxists in the 1950's commissioned the building of the monument and had the Marx remains moved from a far corner of the cemetery to their present, more prominent location. +Occasionally the mood at the Marx grave is broken as someone attempts jocularity (''Gee, wonder if he's any relation to Groucho''). Not uncommonly, people place flowers on the gravesite or step onto it to be photgraphed next to the monument, although Mrs. Patemen said this needs special permission. +Still, as fascination with the Communist world rages in the West, even the Friends have been unable to resist the demand for Marxiana completely. They recently allowed fashion photographs at the grave for a new line of Cyrillic-lettered sportswear made in Italy. (Mrs. Pateman said the permission resulted in a sizable donation to the charity.) And at the cemetery chapel sales of Karl Marx coffee mugs, postcards and paperbacks - along with slower-moving mementos of the cemetery's lesser lights - help in a small way to meet a budget estimated by Mrs. Pateman at £275,000, or $443,000, this year. + +A Cat Called Engels +Such is the cemetery's identification with Marx that the graveyard pet is a cat of greater-than-proletarian girth named Engels, after the German-born Manchester industrialist who was Marx's collaborator and benefactor. +Volunteers at the cemetery speculate that the rise in visits to the Marx grave may be a passing trend, reflecting no more depth of interest in Marx's ideas than the demand for chunks of the Berlin wall. But others detect more profound currents, particularly in Britain. +''There is definitely a left left in this country,'' said Julie Healer, one of the visitors from Scotland. +She said that the British left was in the ascendancy and that its disparate elements were finally coalescing against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher because of the ''poll tax,'' a new head tax for local services that replaces property assessments and will burden many poor people who don't own homes. The introduction of the tax has led to violent protests across the country in recent days. +''We come here for hope,'' Miss Healer said. ''We come here for inspiration.'' +''It's right there in gold letters,'' she added, gesturing to the monument's inscription, a clarion call that has echoed fatefully throughout modern times. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Events in Eastern Europe over the last few months have focused attention on Marx's gravesite, at Highgate Cemetery in London. The gravesite recently served as a backdrop for photographs of a new line of Cyrillic-lettered sportswear made in Italy. (The Sunday Times/Denzil McNeelance) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +99 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 15, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Hope For the Working Parent + +BYLINE: By CAROL LAWSON + +SECTION: Section C; Page 1, Column 1; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 984 words + +FOR the nation's working parents, the news is mixed. +The good news is that a growing number of American corporations are offering child care assistance, flexible work schedules, extended leaves of absence and other innovative programs to help employees cope with pressing family demands. +The bad news is that this change is seeping through corporate America at a glacial pace, leaving most workers on their own to piece together solutions that are often emotionally and financially exhausting. +''The corporate culture takes a long time to change - longer than you would think - and you have to keep hammering away at this issue,'' said Reuben Mark, chairman and president of the Colgate-Palmolive Company. Mr. Mark, whose company is a leader in family policies for employees, was among the speakers earlier this week at a conference on work and family policies in New York City. +In the 1990's, Mr. Mark predicted, the combination of a growing number of women in the work force and a labor shortage resulting from the declining birth rate will make family policies ''a matter of great importance'' for American businesses. +The meeting, sponsored by the Conference Board, a nonprofit, business-sponsored research organization, attracted a capacity audience of 400 people, primarily human resources officials from about 250 corporations, to the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Some came from companies with well-established family policies. Others were from concerns that are just beginning to look into the matter. For two days they listened to discussions of why and how some of the country's most progressive companies, like International Business Machines Corporation, Time-Warner Inc., Levi Strauss & Company, American Express Company, Du Pont and Honeywell Inc., are assisting families. Dr. Dana E. Friedman, co-president of the Families and Work Institute in New York, recalled that at the Conference Board's previous meeting on the subject in 1986, two-thirds of those present were women. +This year two-thirds of those attending were again women, Dr. Friedman observed, ''but on a more senior level.'' +Dr. Friedman reported that the number of companies offering some form of child care assistance has grown to 5,400 now from 2,500 in 1986. She also said that care programs for elderly people, to help workers who are responsible for the care of aging relatives, were ''a footnote'' at the previous conference, but that such programs number more than 300 today. +Mr. Mark said Colgate-Palmolive created family policies as a result of a plan that began eight years ago ''to revitalize the company.'' +''It is the job of the chief executive officer to set the vision, get the people and motivate them,'' Mr. Mark said. ''If employees are motivated, productivity will increase. This is one mechanism to motivate.'' +Mr. Mark said social consciousness also played a part in his decision to put in place policies like an emergency child care program and a three-month unpaid leave of absence to care for a sick relative. +''It is the right thing to do,'' he said. ''It must be done from a social and moral point of view.'' +William S. Lee, chairman and president of the Duke Power Company of Charlotte, N.C., disagreed. Mr. Lee, who shared the stage with Mr. Mark at the opening session, said that while he supported family policies, he did so strictly from a business point of view. +''My concern is motivated by the bottom line,'' said Mr. Lee, whose company's policies include job sharing and a two-year unpaid parental leave. ''It is the role of management to make employees excited about their contribution to the workplace. But if you are worried about a sick child at home, you can't be excited about your work.'' +Mr. Lee said his company is trying to administer family policies with ''a new flexibility.'' He said employees have ''more and more freedom'' to work out their own solutions to family problems with their supervisors. ''In the last year we have thown away half of our employee manual,'' he said. +Noting that ''the baby bust is upon us,'' Mr. Lee said he agreed with Mr. Mark that changing demographics would impel companies ''to do more for families in the workplace.'' +The audience heard from employees as well as their bosses. At a panel discussion moderated by Judy Woodruff of the ''MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour,'' a diverse group of workers described their experiences trying to juggle jobs and family responsibilities, both with and without help from their employers. +Ms. Woodruff, the mother of three young children, began with an observation of her own. She and her husband, Albert Hunt, Washington bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, employ two nannies. +''We are not the typical American family,'' Ms. Woodruff said. ''We have the resources to afford good child care. At the 'MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour,' some young women have had such a tough time finding affordable child care that they have had to leave the job.'' +David S. Machlowitz, associate general counsel for the General Instrument Corporation in New York, said he gave up private law practice for the less hectic corporate world because he wanted to be home at night with his wife, who also works, and his 2-year-old daughter. He described his supervisor as a man who ''understands if I want to leave work early to go to the pediatrician, trusting that I will make up the time.'' +Still, it is not easy. ''It takes an extraordinary amount of after-tax income to pay the baby sitter,'' Mr. Machlowitz said. +But for most blue-collar and low-level clerical workers, the necessary finances, to say nothing of the freedom to be flexible, is nonexistent, said Claire Lifshitz, office manager for Local 8149 of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union. +''When you punch a time clock,'' she said, ''your children don't count. If you want to get paid, you can't say, 'I have to go home. My child broke his hand.' '' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Reuben Mark, left, chairman and president of Colgate-Palmolive, and William Lee, chairman and president of Duke Power, spoke at the Work and Family Policies Conference. (The New York Times/John Sotomayor) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +100 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 18, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +New York Area's Population Growing, but Graying Faster + +BYLINE: By RICHARD LEVINE + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 1, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1436 words + +The population of the New York region will increase only moderately but grow significantly older during the next three decades, according to new projections. +These long-term demographic trends could constrain economic growth in a metropolitan area already confronting labor shortages in some suburbs, push wages up and increase crowding on highways. +The trends also seem likely to lead to an increase in the number of elderly people dependent on health care and other expensive services and a decrease in the number of younger workers, who would bear much of the costs. Unexpected Tax Revenues? But Rosemary Scanlon, chief economist of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which conducted one of the studies, said that a surge of people - the aging baby boomers - moving through middle age in the 1990's might also generate unexpected tax revenues at a time when governments are facing huge budget deficits and perplexing problems like drug abuse and AIDS. +Ms. Scanlon said she believed that the demographic outlook for the region was essentially optimistic, since it pointed to stronger pressures to increase the number of people in the labor force. Even after the prosperity of the 1980's, perhaps half a million people in New York City are still not in the work force. But Ms. Scanlon said in an interview last week that the demographic forces in the coming decades suggest ''a better use of all people, of everybody being more important, especially the disadvantaged.'' +In a region of about 16 million people, the Port Authority projects that between 1990 and 2005 the number of people in their 20's will decline by about 900,000. After 2000, the agency believes, the 65-and-older group will increase by almost 700,000. +The labor force will continue to grow, but at a slower rate because of a decline in the number of young workers entering the labor pool. Tight labor markets could develop and deepen, with potentially diverse and sometimes surprising consequences. Wages in the region, already high, could go still higher as employers compete for labor. This could attract more workers from outside the region, compounding traffic and transit problems. Attitudes about retirement could also change. +''Where you saw young people working in fast-food places, now increasingly you see old people,'' said Richard T. Anderson, president of the Regional Plan Association, a Manhattan-based research group. + +A Dip in the Median Age +Mr. Anderson's organization also believes that the area's population will age. In its forecast, it projects that in 2015 there may be 4.25 million more people over 35 years of age and 1.5 million fewer people under 35 than there were in 1985. The number of people over 85 could increase by nearly 400,000. +A particularly intriguing aspect of the Port Authority study is its projection for the region's median age. At 33.5, it is now estimated to be a half year higher than that of the nation as a whole. But in 10 years it would drop below the national figure, the study predicts. Ms. Scanlon attributes that to the expectation of a continuing surge of immigrants, who are mostly young. +The aging of the region and the nation can be traced to a sequence in which the baby boom, that surge of births from the late 1940's to the early 1960's, was followed by a baby bust in the late 1960's and 1970's, and then by an echo of the baby boom in the 1980's. + +Middle Aged and Affluent +While the national fertility rate declined to about 1.8 births per woman in the 1970's and 1980's, the rate in the New York region dropped to 1.6, a figure Ms. Scanlon expects to remain fairly stable in the coming decades. +The Port Authority projects that in the next 15 years the number of people in the region entering the peak earning years of 40 to 64 will increase by about 1.5 million. That could result in more tax revenue for local governments now struggling to fill budget gaps. +This new wealth, Ms. Scanlon said, might also help revive New York City's financial services industry, which has lost about 25,000 jobs since the October 1987 stock market collapse. +But as these people move through their 60's, they will leave behind a smaller group of middle-aged people. That could lead to what Ms. Scanlon called a ''real dependency problem.'' + +An Older Suburbia +The aging will be more pronounced in suburbs, Ms. Scanlon and others believe, in part because most foreign immigrants, most of whom are young, settle in New York City. The city attracted more than 100,000 immigrants a year during the 1980's, and they helped it grow faster than its suburbs for the first time since the 1920's. +Immigrants will continue to help the city attract and fill jobs, Ms. Scanlon believes, giving it an edge over the suburbs in the coming decades. +George Sternlieb, University Professor of Urban Studies at Rutgers University, termed the coming decades a ''marvelous demographic window of opportunity,'' but he was pessimistic about the prospects for those who have so far been left out of the work force, including vast numbers of high school dropouts and single parents in urban areas. +''We've had unique job growth,'' he said. ''It certainly has been helpful, but it has not hit the hard core.'' +The Port Authority analysis, which updates a 10-year demographic projection released in 1986, is to be published in April or May. Stephen Berger, the agency's executive director, said the new projections would guide the authority on a host of issues, from making the Path system more accessible to an increasingly elderly population to redesigning airports to suit changing passenger and freight needs. + +Values of Studies Questioned +Some economists, however, cautioned against concluding too much from such projections, especially over the long term. They noted that the forecasts were in essence assumptions about the future based on forces and behavior of the present and past, some of which were likely to change. +For example, Samuel M. Ehrenhalt, regional commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, said he believed that workers who will be reaching retirement age in the coming decades are better educated and generally have more interesting jobs, and that they were likely to have a different attitude about leaving them. ''Can we assume that they are going to behave as the present oldsters do and get out as early as possible?'' he said. +Thirty years is also an unusually long period for a demographic projection, some economists said. Ms. Scanlon agreed. She said the Port Authority study was subject to several uncertainties, including whether those born in the baby boom will move from the city to the suburbs as many of their parents did. + +Assuming There's No War +In arriving at its projections, the Port Authority assumed there will be at least two recessions in the 1990's but no wars involving the United States. While one team analyzed mortality and fertility rates and migration patterns, Ms. Scanlon said, another focused on employment growth and general economic conditions. +''You go back and forth,'' she said. ''The economists learn from the demographers, and vice versa.'' +A comparision of population estimates by the Port Authority and the Regional Plan Association, however, demonstrates the uncertainty of such projections. +The Port Authority expects the combined population of New York City and 12 suburban counties to grow by 5 percent in 30 years, from an estimated 15.7 million in 1990 to 16.5 million. That would be a significant shift from the 1970's, when the region's population declined, but a slower rate of growth than in the 1980's, when the region experienced its greatest economic boom since World War II. +The Regional Plan Association, which focused on the city and 26 surrounding counties, believes the region will grow by 12.5 percent by 2015, from 19.9 million in 1988 to 22.4 million. +For New York City alone, the association projects a gain of 650,000 people by 2015, from 7.4 million to 8 million. But the Port Authority believes the city population will increase by only 150,000 by 2020. +The disparity seems in part a consequence of the association's projection that the region's economy will generate more jobs and that, as its president, Mr. Anderson, said, ''people follow jobs.'' +''The city has already picked up close to 300,000 people since the 1980 census,'' added Regina Armstrong, an economic consultant to the association, referring to the surge of immigrants. Given their high fertility rate and continuing flow into the region, she went on, ''you end up with 8 million people.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graphs: median age of the population for U.S. and for New York and New Jersey metropolitan area, 1980-2020 (Source: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey); actual and projected percent of the population over age 65 in New York and New Jersey metropolitan area, 1980-2020, (Source: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) (pg. 30) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +101 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 18, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Miss Salzhauer To Wed in June + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2, Page 54, Column 5; Society Desk + +LENGTH: 224 words + +Mr. and Mrs. Henry Salzhauer of Sands Point, L.I., have announced the engagement of their daughter Elisabeth Anne Salzhauer to Blair Axel, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Kermit Axel of New York. A June wedding is planned. +Miss Salzhauer, 24 years old, graduated from the Friends Academy in Locust Valley, L.I., and cum laude from Tufts University, and she studied art history at Harvard University. She is the founder and executive director of Art Education for the Blind, a nonprofit research and teaching organization in New York, and a lecturer at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her father is a principal of Benjamin Electrical Engineering and a director of the American Savings Bank of New York. +Mr. Axel, 35, graduated from the Fieldston School and magna cum laude from Harvard. He received a law degree from Columbia University, where he was the administrative editor of The Journal of Law and Social Problems. He is counsel to the New York law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler and a director of Dorot, a social-service agency for the elderly in Manhattan. +The prospective bridegroom's father retired as a principal of 21 Brands, a wine and spirits importer in New York, and is a vice president of the National Executive Service Corps, a nonprofit management consultant to cultural, charitable and health-care institutions. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Elisabeth Salzhauer (Sarah Merians Photography) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +102 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 18, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +TALKING: Rent Rules; +Tenant Rights In Flux + +BYLINE: By ANDREE BROOKS + +SECTION: Section 10; Page 7, Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 897 words + +TENANT rights, especially in a highly regulated environment like New York City's, are in a constant state of flux. Court decisions, administrative rulings and legislative amendments make it hard for tenants and landlords to keep up with their rights and responsibilities. This is particularly true for the narrowly focused changes that do not make headlines when they are announced. +Several such modifications were made in rent-regulation rules during the last year that may have escaped notice, these among them: +* Landlords have won the right to permanent increases in rent after they complete major capital improvements. +* A new fraud task force has been established in the state's Division of Housing and Community Renewal to investigate the filing of fraudulent information by landlords with the division's Office of Rent Administration. +* The right of an elderly person to break a lease to enter a nursing home has been established in law. +There also has been a decision affirming the right of a tenant to make certain improvements in an apartment. +The decision concerning major capital improvements came in November in Ansonia Residents Association v. New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal. +The State Court of Appeals turned down a challenge from the tenants in the 500-unit building at 2109 Broadway, near 74th Street, who had maintained that any rent increase for large-scale improvements - in this case new storm windows - had to be limited to the recoupment period rather than go on indefinitely. +The tenants had argued that once an owner had recovered his costs, the rent increases should be nullified. +A lower court had agreed with the tenants. But the housing agency and the landlord appealed, resulting in a reversal by the state's highest court. +Nevertheless, if tenants have reason to believe that their rent was raised without the capital improvement's having been made, or that a new and higher rent has been established through other fraudulent means, they may write to the new fraud task force created by the state housing agency (Office of Deputy Commissioner, Office of Rent Administration, D.H.C.R., 9231 Union Hall Street, Jamaica, N.Y. 11433). +Further, as a result of a decision in Versailles Realty Corp. v. D.H.C.R., upheld in the Appellate Division, Second Department, several months ago, regulated tenants in co-op buildings can no longer be charged a higher rent for a major capital improvement if it was paid for by the co-op corporation's reserve fund. +Under two laws that became effective late last year, the elderly all over New York State now have the right to break a lease without incurring penalties. Both are designed to protect an elderly tenant who wants to move into housing for the elderly or a nursing home during the term of a lease. +If the tenant is entering a publicly funded nursing home or nonprofit housing unit, the minimum age for qualification is 62 years; if the new accommodations are in the private sector - say, an age-restricted condominium - the minimum eligibility age rises to 65. +Thirty to 60 days' notice, depending on circumstances, must be given in both instances. Some leases signed before 1989, or in the early part of the year, may not qualify. +Lawyers note that such legislation is likely to become increasingly important to older tenants in expensive apartments now that the market for high-rent accommodations is soft. With fewer tenants seeking such apartments, landlords are less likely to be forgiving when an elderly tenant wants to break a lease. +Without the new protection, the accumulated sum due over the remainder of the lease could cost a tenant thousands of dollars. +LAST October, a decision was handed down that could deter landlords from initiating capricious eviction actions. Garay v. Devine involved a tenant in a Manhattan apartment who had installed new kitchen appliances without the landlord's consent. Reversing a lower-court decision, the Appellate Term, First Department, ruled that the landlord could not evict the tenant because the change did not materially damage the unit or its value. +According to Deborah Davis, a New York City lawyer who handles many landlord-tenant cases, this decision should deter landlords from starting eviction actions based on paltry violations of lease terms. +''But it still means that you cannot go ahead and make structural changes without permission,'' she warned. +Warren Estes, a New York City lawyer with expertise in landlord-tenant matters, warns tenants that owners are becoming more aggressive in seeking the rents due them. +''In today's economy, and with higher amounts outstanding,'' Mr. Estes said, ''most landlords are watching their delinquencies more closely.'' +He has noticed that landlords are demanding the full rent due on a lease while tenant complaints are being adjudicated, and the courts are supporting their demands. +In part, many lawyers say, owners are reacting to the long delays, sometimes as long as two years, in getting decisions from the state rent agency on tenant allegations of rent overcharges. In such cases, tenants had been withholding rents. Now owners are seeking evictions for the rent delinquencies. +In many of these cases, the courts are now directing tenants to pay the disputed amount into escrow accounts until their complaints are resolved. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +103 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 18, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +CONNECTICUT GUIDE + +SECTION: Section 12CN; Page 13, Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1108 words + + + +9TH-CENTURY MASTERS +Works of two 19th-century New England masters may be seen in a dual exhibition opening today at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. ''John Twachtman: Connecticut Landcapes'' contains 25 paintings made by the American Impressionist between 1889 and 1901 at his 17-acre farm in Greenwich and in nearby Cos Cob. ''Winslow Homer in the 1870's: Selections from the Valentine-Pulsifer Collection'' features 11 watercolors and oils including the well-known ''Berry Pickers.'' Acquired directly from the artist in the 19th century, they have remained in the private collection of one family. +The Twachtman show was organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It covers a period in Twachtman's career when he had departed from his earlier Barbizon-inspired work and had not yet begun his more broadly executed later paintings. +An admission of $2, $1 for students and the elderly, will be charged for the pair of exhibitions. They are accompanied by four lectures, scheduled Tuesday evenings to April 10, and three film screenings, at noon Thursday, 2 P.M. Saturday and next Sunday. Admission to the lectures is $7, or $25 for the series. The first, ''Winslow Homer and Houghton Farm,'' begins at 5:30 P.M. Tuesday, with Linda Ayres, the museum's associate director for exhibitions. The films are free with an exhibition ticket. Hours are 11 A.M. to 5 P.M. Tuesday to Sunday. For a recorded weekly listing of events, call 247-9111. +Residents of Fairfield County may want to take advantage of a trip to the Wadsworth Atheneum on Tuesday; it is being organized by the Westport Arts Center and covers the Twachtman and Homer shows as well as a third exhibition, ''Master Drawings'' by Tiepolo, Daumier, Courbet, Degas, Dali, Picasso, Delacroix, Moore, Miro and others from the museum's permanent collection. +The group will depart by bus from the parking lot at Jogues Hall, Fairfield University, at 9 A.M.; an additional pickup will be made at the Westport Arts Center, 17 Morningside Drive South at 9:30 A.M. The group is expected to return in late afternoon. A fee of $38 includes transportation, museum entrance and refreshments. Call 254-4110 to register. + +BRIEF EXPEDITIONS +The brief expeditions into the outside world taken by a woman and her Alzheimer's disease-afflicted mother and grandmother provide the title for Jo Carson's play ''Day Trips,'' winner of the $10,000 Joseph Kesselring Award following its premiere last fall at the Los Angeles Theater Center. The prize is given annually to promising playwrights who have not yet had national attention. Ms. Carson wrote the work from personal experience. +A series of previews begins Saturday to March 29, with a formal opening on March 30. The play runs to April 28 at the Hartford Stage Company, 50 Church Street, Hartford. The director is Michael Engler, who directed ''Eastern Standard'' for Seattle Rep and the Manhattan Theater Club and Larry Gelbart's ''Mastergate'' for the American Repertory Theater and a subsequent run on Broadway. +Performances are at 7:30 P.M. Tuesday to Thursday, 8 P.M. Friday and Saturday, 2:30 and 7:30 P.M. Sunday and 2 P.M. Wednesday. Tickets at $20 and $25, and preview tickets at $13 may be reserved by calling 527-5151. + +ALICE WASHBURN +In 1919, a year before American women had the right to vote, 50-year-old Alice Trythall Washburn filed her first building permit. She was the architect for 80 houses built during the next 10 years in Hamden, Cheshire and New Haven. +''A Washburn Celebration'' at the Eli Whitney Museum in Hamden, composed of photographs and artifacts detailing her work, is the result of an investigation by a student of art history, Martha Yellig, who had heard that several houses in the area had been designed by a woman architect. The homes, for which Mrs. Washburn provided garages, were precursors of the suburban explosion of the 1930's and 40's. +The stock market crash of 1929 destroyed Mrs. Washburn's career and she retired; her death certificate listed her occupation as housewife. +The exhibition was mounted in cooperation with the museum by the Hamden Historical Society, the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, the New Haven Preservation Trust and several civic and cultural organizations. A series of related lectures, demonstrations and tours of the homes is scheduled through the month of May. The museum, at 915 Whitney Avenue, is open from 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Wednesday, 10 A.M. to 3 P.M. Thursday to Saturday and noon to 5 P.M. Sunday. Admission is free. Call 777-1833 for more information. + +THE USES OF LAND +The agenda of a Fairfield 2000 seminar called ''Land Use Management for Southwestern Connecticut - Ideas for the 90's'' includes placement of the area in context with other parts of the country, understanding the relationship between economic growth and open-space conservation, attracting business and industry to appropriate sites, an overview of transportation on the Route 7 corridor, affordable housing and a lack of consistency in state, regional and local planning. +The seminar, scheduled from 8:30 A.M. to 4 P.M. Thursday at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, is sponsored by the Regional Plan Association and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. +Speakers include Robert Yaro, senior vice president of the Regional Plan Association; John Mullin, head of the department of landscape architecture and regional planning at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Alan Altshuler, director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard; Susan Podsibeh, specialist in affordable-housing dispute mediation at the University of Massachusetts, Boston; Ben Chinitz, former senior researcher for the New York Metropolitan Region Study; and Michael Cacace, Stamford lawyer and executive committee member of the planning and zoning section of the Connecticut Bar Association. +A fee of $50 covers the seminar, materials and lunch. Call 356-0390 to register or obtain more information. + +W.P.A. MURALS +Norwalk is believed to have one of the largest collection of Works Progress Administration murals in the country, documenting the effects of the Great Depression on local life. Two of the paintings by Alexander Rummler - ''Oyster Shuckers'' (1937) and ''Days End'' (1940) - were recently donated to the Norwalk Maritime Center by the city, and they will be the subject of a talk by Ralph Bloom, a city historian, at 7 P.M. Wednesday in the Maritime Center on Water Street. Admission is $7. Call 852-0700, extension 206 for reservations. $90ELEANOR CHARLES + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +104 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 19, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Thousands Gather In Taiwan to Press Democratic Cause + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 8, Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 269 words + +DATELINE: TAIPEI, Taiwan, March 18 + +Thousands of protesters rallied in a downtown park today to demand swifter democratic change and to denounce elderly members of the electoral college that will choose Taiwan's President this week. +The protest was the largest in Taiwan since martial law was lifted in 1987. The police said there were about 10,000 protesters, but reporters estimated the crowd at more than 20,000. Many were onlookers. Leaders of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party, which organized the demonstration, urged President Lee Teng-hui to dissolve the electoral college, known as the National Assembly, and allow general presidential elections. +The National Assembly will elect the President on Wednesday, and Mr. Lee is the only candidate. +About 500 college students also continued a sit-in they began on Friday in front of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Park to protest the elderly assemblymen. Members of the Democratic Progressive Party urged the crowd to support the protest by staying in the park overnight and delaying the filing of income tax. +The rallies highlighted growing anger with a political system dominated by elderly members of the Nationalist Party, which was born in mainland China. +There are 668 deputies in the 752-seat National Assembly who were elected on the Chinese mainland before 1949. In 1949, they fled to Taiwan with the rest of the Nationalist government after losing a civil war to Communist forces. +Mr. Lee, 67 years old, is a native of Taiwan. Many elderly assemblymen distrust him because they say he is not committed to their dream of returning victoriously to the Chinese mainland. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +105 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 21, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Taiwan Seeks Talks With Protesters + +BYLINE: By SHERYL WuDUNN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 3, Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 594 words + +DATELINE: TAIPEI, Taiwan, March 20 + +More than 6,000 students and thousands of onlookers gathered in a city park today to demand greater democracy, and there were reports that the President would convene a national conference to discuss the pace of political change on the island. +The rally was the first large-scale political demonstration begun by university students in 40 years of Nationalist rule on the island, and it was a direct challenge to President Lee Teng-hui, who is to be re-elected on Wednesday. +Mr. Lee, the only candidate, needs only a majority of the 752-member National Assembly, Taiwan's electoral college. The Assembly is dominated by 668 elderly delegates, members of the ruling Kuomintang who have retained office since they fled the mainland with Chiang Kai-shek, Taiwan's longtime leader, in 1949. +Drawing a $4,000 monthly salary, plus $8,000 more when the Assembly is in session once every six years, these delegates are widely resented, especially among the university students who have gathered in the park around the Chiang Kai-shek memorial since Sunday. +''They are just greedy old men who don't represent the people,'' said Yu Bo-hong, a student at Taiwan Theological Institute in Taipei. ''Each person should have the right to choose, the right to vote.'' + +Moves Toward Negotiations +In the last few years, the authorities have taken major steps toward democracy, including holding multi-party elections for legislators in December. But the President is still selected by the Assembly. +The student demonstrators have strewn banners expressing their demands across the grand steps of the main building in the park. The students want the National Assembly dissolved and the Government's special emergency powers abolished. They are also demanding a timetable from the President for the island's political restructuring and a national conference to discuss these and other issues. +Taiwan's English-language daily, The China News, reported today that Mr. Lee invited membes of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party members on Monday night to take part in a national convention to discuss major issues facing the island. The Government spokesman, Chou Yu-ming, said the offer was not yet official, but said it would probably become so. +''The demands made by the students still gathering in Chiang Kai-shek Memorial summarize the demands of many people,'' Mr. Chou said. ''All in all, people are asking for greater reform at a faster pace. They want more democracy, more decision-making power in affairs of state.'' + +No Opposition Coalition +The local China Times Evening News reported that younger, recently elected members of the National Assembly have proposed that the elderly representatives retire by the end of 1992. The report said that the Kuomintang had already planned to have the aged members retire in three years. +It was not clear whether the proposal or Mr. Lee's invitation was a direct response to the student demands. The Democratic Progressives have also pressed for multi-party elections in the National Assembly, and some opposition members plan to demonstrate on Wednesday in front of the National Assembly building where delegates will cast their votes. +Today, the Democratic Progressives occupied the front steps of a building across from where the students had organized, but the students have declined to ally themselves with the opposition party. It is the students who seem to have captured the support of many workers and professionals here. +''These students are endorsed by the middle class,'' a businessman said. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: More than 6,000 students held a sit-in yesterday at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial park in Taipei to demand greater democracy. It was the first large-scale political demonstration begun by university students in 40 years of Nationalist rule in Taiwan, and was a direct challenge to President Lee Teng-hui, who will be the only Presidential candidate when he runs for re-election today. (Agence France-Presse) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +106 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 21, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +The Shape of Cabs to Come + +BYLINE: By DORON P. LEVIN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1, Column 3; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 674 words + +DATELINE: WILLOW RUN, Mich., March 20 + +The Chevrolet Caprice, the boxy foot soldier for the New York City taxicab fleet and the nation's police departments, is getting a makeover. The 1991 model, which is now on sale and will roll into fleet service this fall, is styled with aerodynamic curves more in keeping with the latest automotive fashion. +But in other ways the General Motors Corporation car will retain the character that makes it an increasingly unusual relic of Detroit's glory days, when large cars were the order and fuel efficiency was not a primary concern. It also recalls a manufacturing process that is growing more rare each year. +G.M. said yesterday that it had begun to accelerate production of the restyled Caprice at a newly renovated assembly plant here, about 30 miles west of Detroit. The current Caprice model is built at a G.M. assembly plant in Lakewood, Ga., that is to be shut down and at an assembly plant in Arlington, Tex., that will build a new model. + +Seeking Younger Buyers +The Caprice is among the last rear-wheel-drive, V-8-powered, six-passenger models produced by the American automobile industry. Its design, little changed since 1977, has been favored by older people with traditional tastes as well as law-enforcement agencies and taxicab companies. +In an effort to attract younger buyers, G.M. decided to switch to the rounder, more aerodynamic styling made popular in the mid-1980's by the Ford Motor Company's Taurus and Sable models. The Ford model most comparable to the Caprice, the Crown Victoria, is also undergoing a face lift. +The new Caprice could be a tough sell. Stephen McAvoy, marketing manager for G.M.'s Chevrolet division, said the median age of a Caprice buyer is over 60, ''but we'd like to get that down to the late 40's and 50's.'' The problem will be that younger buyers have increasingly been choosing smaller, more fuel-efficient and more contemporary automotive designs with a driving feel closer to that of a sports car. +The Caprice weighs just less than 4,000 pounds. By contrast, the Taurus, which is classified as a midsize car, weighs 2,956 pounds. +''We're giving Caprice owners what they enjoy the most: the softer ride and handling, the additional room, the trunk space for four golf bags,'' Mr. McAvoy said. +The car, which will sell for $16,000 and up, includes anti-lock brakes, which can inhibit skidding on slippery roads. G.M. was able to improve the 1991 Caprice's gas mileage rating to 17 miles per gallon in city driving, and 26 on the highway, from 16 and 25, respectively, for the 1990 model. + +A Manufacturing Throwback +The manufacturing technique G.M. uses at its Willow Run plant is as much a holdover from the past as the large, heavy sedan itself. In most cars today, the chassis and body are constructed as a single unit. But the Caprice has a chassis and frame that are built separately from the passenger compartment; the ''mating'' occurs during the assembly process. +James Perkins, a G.M. vice president and general manager of the Chevrolet division, says he expects 6,000 or more Caprices to be sold to New York taxi companies this year. G.M. also forecast sales of 35,000 to 40,000 cars to police departments. +But the key to success for the nation's largest auto maker will still be the retail customer, a G.M. spokesman said. Production could reach 160,000 cars in 1990, G.M. said, and 200,000 the following year. + +Little Japanese Competition +''I think G.M. will find enough volume to warrant the investment, because the large-family-sedan market is one the Japanese have not yet entered,'' said Christopher Cedergren, an analyst with J. D. Power & Associates, an automotive marketing consulting firm in Agoura Hills, Calif. +A G.M. spokesman said the cost of retooling and renovating the Willow Run plant for Caprice production was about $100 million. +The automotive trade press is rife with rumors that next year G.M's Buick division will revive its Roadmaster model designation - not used since 1958 - on a car based on the Caprice's body and chassis. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The Chevrolet Caprice, top, long the workhorse of the New York City taxicab fleet, is getting a makeover. The 1991 Caprice Classic, bottom, remains large and heavy, but features fashionably aerodynamic styling (The New York Times/Neal Boenzi; General Motors Corporation) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +107 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 22, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Doubt Raised on Bone Disease Treatment + +SECTION: Section B; Page 15, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 711 words + +A widely used treatment for osteoporosis, a debilitating bone disease that afflicts millions of people, does not prevent the tiny fractures that cause the spine to collapse, a new study has found. +The treatment, sodium fluoride, increases bone mass, but a four-year clinical study found that the new bone was too weak to prevent the fractures that occur in the vertebrae and cause the back to curve. +The study, conducted by Dr. B. Lawrence Riggs and colleagues at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., is being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine. The findings appear to contradict the results of an earlier study, using different dosages and methods, that found that treatment with sodium fluoride appeared to reduce the fractures. +About 24 million Americans, primarily elderly women, suffer from all forms of osteoporosis, which commonly causes fractures in the spine, hip and wrist. Spinal osteoporosis afflicts about 5 million Americans, and 500,000 suffer spinal fracturing each year. The condition mainly affects women after menopause when their estrogen levels decline. + +Three Approved Therapies +Wrist and hip fractures can often be treated by orthopedic surgery, but no surgical procedures can correct the tiny spinal fractures. Doctors have considered fluoride a promising preventive treatment for spinal fractures. Calcium, estrogen and calcitonin are approved therapies that can slow the disease's progress but do not significantly build bone mass. +''This is the most comprehensive and most carefully controlled study of fluoride treatment carried out to my knowledge,'' said William A. Peck, president of the National Osteoporosis Foundation. +''The results are disappointing, but they do not preclude the possibility that some other fluoride preparation or a lower dose that is more slowly absorbed could be effective,'' said Dr. Peck, vice chancellor and dean at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. ''But there are no data that prove this to be the case. At present time we can't recommend sodium fluoride at any dose or any preparation for treatment of osteoporosis.'' +Dr. Riggs said sodium fluoride was the most commonly used drug in the world for treating spinal osteoporosis. The Food and Drug Administration has not approved fluoride for the treatment of the disease, but Dr. Riggs said 100,000 to 200,000 Americans were being treated with fluoride preparations marketed as nutritional supplements or formulated by pharmacies. Regulatory agencies in eight European countries have approved the use of fluoride. #202 Women in Study The Mayo Clinic study involved 202 women with osteoporosis who were 50 to 75 years old. Half received sodium fluoride and the other half, used for comparison purposes, received an inactive dummy medication. All received a calcium supplement. +The researchers found that the fluoride treatment did not decrease the occurence of vertebral fractures and actually resulted in an increase in hip fractures. The trial also found a high incidence of side effects, including nausea and back pain. +Dr. Riggs said in a telephone interview: ''The ideal therapy for osteoporosis should increase bone mass substantially, thereby decreasing the occurrence of new fractures. We found a 35 percent increase in bone density in the vertebrae, but no significant decrease in fractures. This suggests that newly formed bone did not have normal strength.'' He said that based on the results, fluoride should not be used to treat osteoporosis. +For years doctors have placed a great deal of hope in fluoride's bone generating effects, and last year researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas reported results suggesting that fluoride treatment could halt the progress of the spinal disease and that it appeared to inhibit further spinal fractures. But other experts noted that the Texas study did not include a comparison group. +The Texas study used lower doses of fluoride in slower release capsules than those used at the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Charles Y. C. Pak, the principal researcher in the Dallas study, said: ''The main drawback is that our randomized controlled trials are not complete. We don't yet know if the treatment reduces fracture rates.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +108 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 23, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Washington Talk; +Reagan Tape: The Star Flickers, but Just Dimly + +BYLINE: By R. W. APPLE Jr., Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 12, Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 743 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 22 + +Ronald Reagan always seemed like a regular guy, on the silver screen or in the White House. It was one of his strengths. +But in the videotaped testimony that was played Wednesday and today in the Washington courtroom where John M. Poindexter is on trial, he seemed ordinary. Stripped of his 3-by-5 note cards and his corps of advisers, far from the Marine Band and Air Force One, the former President looked smaller, older, less sure of himself. His energy level seemed lower than ever. +The old charm flickered from the television screen from time to time, and he was his old amiable self when asked to spell out his name. (His almost too amiable gesture to Mr. Poindexter upon entering the courtroom, an exaggerated stage wink that seemed to suggest that his testimony would be less than impartial, was not shown to the jury.) His winsome trademark habit of tucking his chin into his chest as he answered served him well, as always. But his smile, that boyish look that seemed to take everyone into his confidence, wasn't much in evidence. +In the flat illumination of the courtroom, instead of the special lighting that was provided for Presidential broadcasts, leaning forward in his chair instead of sitting bolt upright as he always did in the Oval Office, the 79-year-old Mr. Reagan seemed more like a retired real estate salesman or a small-town druggist than a retired President. +What he really lacked most of all was the star quality that had so seldom failed him in his long career. +His brow furrowed, his eyes moving from side to side, he seemed puzzled and sometimes more than a little lost. At one point he protested poignantly, ''There were so many meetings.'' At another, he told one of the lawyers, ''You tempt me beyond my strength.'' +The lawyers were polite enough, addressing him most of the time as ''Mr. President,'' but there was something indecorous, all the same, about such pushy, pressing, probing questions asked of this elderly man by mere lawyers: the youthful-looking Dan K. Webb for the independent prosecutor's office, and the stern, baldish Richard W. Beckler, defending Mr. Poindexter. +''Listen to my question, Mr. President,'' one of them said. The words carried the undertone of ''pay attention,'' or ''try to concentrate.'' +That seemed to exasperate him, but he uttered not a syllable of complaint. +Mr. Reagan's inability to recall major points of policy, which he sometimes referred to as ''details,'' had been thoroughly documented in the transcript of the testimony, released shortly after the former President's courtroom appearances on Feb. 16 and 17. +But actually seeing him and hearing him in 150 variations on a single theme - ''I can't remember'' -made a much stronger impression. He couldn't remember who the senior military officer in his Administration was, he couldn't recognize one of the main contra leaders, he somehow didn't recall that Robert C. McFarlane, one of his closest advisers, a man he saw every day for months on end, pleaded guilty in 1988 to withholding information from Congress. +Almost unbelievably, Mr. Reagan said wonderingly about the main conclusion of the Tower Commission report, the politically explosive report on the most damaging episode of his eight years in the White House, ''This is the first time I have ever seen that.'' +Did he really mean that he had never read the report? Not even highlights? A report that had the capacity, at least, to undo his whole Presidency? +There was an occasional sign that Mr. Reagan might know more than he was letting on in the courtroom. +Questioned about an arms delivery, he replied, ''As I say, I heard of France being connected with such a thing.'' His questioner said, ''Mr. President, I think you mentioned France.'' And Mr. Reagan answered: ''If I did, that was a slip of the tongue. I don't know how that sneaked in.'' Although no one can be absolutely sure yet how Mr. Reagan's testimony will affect the trial of Mr. Poindexter, his former national security adviser, Mr. Reagan never even hinted that he had ordered Mr. Poindexter to deceive Congress. That cannot help the defense much in rebutting charges of obstructing a Congressional investigation and making false statements to Congress. +And except for its implications for the trial, the former President's rambling, inconsistent account lacked all drama. It seemed a mere footnote, an afterthought too old for today's politics, too new for tomorrow's history. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +109 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 25, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE GUIDE + +SECTION: Section 12WC; Page 22, Column 6; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1113 words + + + +VINTAGE QUILTS +Thirty quilts of various vintages will be displayed next weekend at the White Plains Historical Society, assembled from private collections by the Textile Study Group, made up of a dozen or so friends with a common interest in the subject. +Some of the more unusual examples include a quilt from Andy Warhol's collection; a Lone Star pattern executed in pastel colors in the 1930's; a stylized tulip pattern from the 1840's, stipple-quilted with alternate blocks of trapunto; and a full-size Flying Geese pattern with matching crib quilt. +A quilt called the New York Beauty was made during a two-year period beginning in 1986 by 19 women who donated it to the restored Jacob Purdy House, home of the Historical Society. The quilt commemorates the 200th birthday of the Statue of Liberty with its name; its red, white and blue color scheme, and a representation of the statue's crown incorporated into the design. +The White Plains Historical Society at 60 Park Avenue will be open to visitors from 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. Saturday and from 1 to 4 P.M. next Sunday, free of charge. Members of the Textile Study Group will demonstrate piecing and quilting. Call 328-1776 for more information. + +MOTHERLY VIGNETTES +Mothers, as interpreted by Euripides, Bertolt Brecht, Tennessee Williams and other dramatists, are the theme of seven vignettes to be performed Thursday by Elaine Sulka in the Romita Auditorium of the College of New Rochelle. Ms. Sulka is the artistic director and co-founder of the National Shakespeare Company in Manhattan. +Running the gamut from comedy to tragedy, the pieces explore the roles mothers play in relation to their children and their society. They include excerpts from Williams's ''The Glass Menagerie,'' Thornton Wilder's ''Our Town,'' ''The Freak Mother'' by Franca Rame and Dario Fo, ''In County Kerry'' by Ruth Draper,'' Brecht's ''The Caucasian Chalk Circle'' and Ms. Sulka's ''As It Was in the Beginning.'' +The performance begins at 7:30 P.M. Thursday. There is no admission charge but reservations are required. Call 654-5307. + +OPPORTUNITIES KNOCK +Business opportunities for older people will be examined in a seminar Saturday morning at Manhattanville College's Entrepreneurial Center in Purchase. ''The Age of Aging: Business Trends/Opportunities in the Senior Marketplace'' focuses on a growing number of older people who want to start and manage a small business. +Dr. Denise Dolen - president of Dolen Consulting Systems in Chappaqua, specialists in providing management techniques to the elderly and their families - will identify business areas available to the elderly. She will be followed by members of Westchester 2000, a nonprofit private planning organization, who will provide statistics on demographics and trends through this decade. +The seminar will run from 8:30 A.M. to 12:30 P.M. and costs $45. Call 694-4947 to register or obtain more information. + +A BENEFIT AUCTION +A black tie benefit will be held Saturday for the Pelham Art Center's gallery and educational programs. The 7 P.M. event includes dinner, dancing and a wide variety of goods and services to be auctioned off. It takes place at the Pelham Country Club and costs $200 a couple. +Among the auction items are box seats at Shea Statium for a Mets game; a limousine trip to a Metropolitan Museum members' lecture followed by lunch at the Metropolitan Club; vintage wines; furs; jewelry; dinners for four at local restaurants; a week at a Key West condominium; a day of yachting on Long Island Sound with drinks and lunch for 8 couples; consultation with a noted interior designer; and a monotype by Alexander Rutsch. +Call 738-2525 for reservations or more information. + +TIPS FOR BUYERS +The Home Buyer's Class presented periodically by the nonprofit housing organization, Westchester Residential Opportunities, takes on added significance in this buyer's market. A free session will be held from 10 A.M. to 2:30 P.M. Saturday at the White Plains Public Library, 100 Martine Avenue. +Elizabeth Schatz, a realtor, will speak about the role of the broker and the current debate over whom the broker represents. Legal questions in buying a home will be addressed by Vincent D'Andrea, a Westchester lawyer. Other specialists will explain the ins and outs of inspecting property, energy conservation, financing the purchase of a home, how to take advantage of a soft market, and the affordable housing program offered by the State of New York's Mortgage Agency. +The discussions will include single family homes, cooperatives and condominiums. +The class is sponsored by the library, the Westchester County Urban Program and the Westchster Office for the Aging. Those attending are invited to bring lunch; coffee and tea will be provided. For more information call 428-4507. + +LIBRARY RALLY +New York's 22 library systems have not had an increase in state financing since 1986, say the organizers of the first Westchester Library Rally. The rally is scheduledfrom 12:30 to 2 P.M. on Saturday, at the Little Theater of the County Center in White Plains. +Westchester's 38 libraries have been mobilizing their patrons to attend the rally, warning that a 19 percent increase in costs threatens to reduce services unless more state funds are appropriated. +Speaking at the rally will be Maurice J. Freedman, director of the Westchester Library System in Elmsford. Expected to attend as supportive county residents are the actress Mary Beth Hurt; the sports writers Maury Allen and Roger Kahn; John Berry 3d, editor-in-chief of the Library Journal, a prominent trade publication; and Aranka Siegel, author of ''Upon the Head of a Goat,'' a Newbery Prize-winner. +Call 592-8214 for more information. + +DANCEWORKS DECADE +DanceWorks, the resident dance company of Westchester Community College in Valhalla, is celebrating its 10th anniversary with concerts in the Academic Arts Theater at 3 P.M. today and next Sunday, and at 8:30 P.M. Friday and Saturday. +All the works to be performed are from the repertoire choreographed by Mollyann Franzbau, the company's director. They include ''Wild Things'' with music by Jean Michelle Jarre; ''Just Keep Going'' to music by Dave Brubeck; and ''Out of the Running'' to the music of Tangerine Dream. Additional works are set to the music of Ory's Sunshine Band, Kraftwerk, Hector Villa-Lobos and Albert Ginastera. +The company, composed of undergraduates and alumni, performs in libraries, theaters, schools, museums and hospitals in the county. Admission to each concert is $5, or $3 for students and the elderly. For more information call 285-6000. $90ELEANOR CHARLES + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +110 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 27, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +An Aging Nation Grapples With Care for Old and Ill + +BYLINE: By ERIK ECKHOLM + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 2833 words + +Care of the frail and chronically ill elderly, long a private burden of families, is fast becoming a public obsession and a volatile political issue as the older population increases and members of the baby boom generation face the aging of their own parents. +The nation's current system of long-term care leaves many elderly people in fear and some destitute and demoralized, in the view of many experts and families who have struggled with the problem. +A shortage of affordable community programs - a visiting aide to watch a wandering Alzheimer's patient or a day center to provide meals and society to the frail and isolated - forces some people into nursing homes unnecessarily. It also means there is too little relief for the millions of relatives, usually wives or daughters, who care for the disabled at home, often at the expense of their own lives. +And haunting most of the elderly is the specter of financial ruin. Accounts abound of people who watched in despair as nursing home bills consumed the savings of a lifetime. Many who need chronic care must spend their assets until they qualify for Medicaid, the Federal-state welfare program for the poor - a process of ''spending down'' that people describe as terrifying and humiliating. + +The Spending 'Kills People' +''Spending down is horrendous,'' said Nancy Lombardo, a director of the Alzheimer's Association, who has talked with hundreds of families with a member affected by the irreversible brain disease. ''It kills people.'' +The political passions surrounding the health concerns of the aged became abundantly clear last year, as Congress was forced to repeal a major program to cover the medical costs of catastrophic illnesses after adopting it with fanfare the year before. An unexpected outcry about the way of paying for the program incited the opposition that led to the reversal. But the debate also threw a spotlight on what many older people said was their greater worry, long-term care. +So far, there is no agreement on where private responsibility ends and public responsibility begins, on how much money Government should, or could, spend to ease the burdens. +In Washington and in state capitals, well-organized groups are demanding more government support. ''We have insurance for retirement, and we have insurance for acute medical care,'' said John Rother, the chief lobbyist for the American Association of Retired Persons, referring to the Social Security and Medicare programs. ''It doesn't seem logical to leave out the thing that can wipe families out, long-term care.'' +Politicians are taking up the cry, but even the most sympathetic shudder at the thought of a major new Government obligation, one for which the cost is certain to rise dramatically in the decades ahead. Officials are only too aware of the strains that programs like Medicare are already placing on the Federal budget. +The numbers are daunting. Those 85 and older, who are most apt to need assistance, are increasing more than three times as fast as the population as a whole. A 1987 Federal study projected that the total number of elderly Americans needing some type of help, then about six and a half million, would climb to 19 million by 2040. +Yet the number of family members able to aid the disabled at home - still the mainstay of the nation's care system - is expected to decline, not only because of the changing demographic structure but also because more women, who have traditionally handled such care, hold jobs and more families are smaller or scattered. Both are especially true of the baby boom generation, whose parents are now reaching old age. + +Facing Poverty +Surviving Spouses Left With Little +Only a minority of the elderly ever face huge bills for chronic care. People 65 years old have a 44 percent chance of entering a nursing home at some point in their remaining years. Only 13 percent, or about one in seven, can expect to spend a year or more in a nursing home, according to a study by LifePlans, a private consulting group on long-term care in Waltham, Mass. +But a prolonged stay in a nursing home or extensive paid assistance at home often means financial disaster. Nursing homes cost an average of close to $30,000 a year, and the cost is more in some regions like New York. A 1987 study by the House Select Committee on Aging found that two-thirds of single elderly people would have their incomes and assets depleted to the Federal poverty level if they paid for one year in a nursing home. Half of elderly couples would be similarly impoverished in a year. +One who knows what nursing home bills can do is Mabel Crim, a 92-year-old widow in Margate, Fla. She and her husband, Russell, a former plant manager for Standard Oil, had felt secure on their retirement in Florida, given his pension, Social Security benefits and the $35,000 they had saved ''to take care of us when we got old,'' as she put it in a recent interview. +Then, at age 88, Mr. Crim had a heart attack and a series of strokes that left him seriously incapacitated, and he spent his last two years in a nursing home. +''The nursing home took all my savings,'' Mrs. Crim said. ''I was glad I had it and could pay it, but it left me high and dry.'' Once her funds were exhausted, the state's Medicaid program took over. +Now, her husband gone, she maintains herself and her one-bedroom apartment with Social Security benefits and financial help from her daughters. ''I get along,'' she says without bitterness. +But one daughter, Iona Gilbert, is angrier. ''My mother is turning 92 this month, and they left her without a cent,'' she said. +''She had daughters to help her, or she'd be out in the street,'' said Mrs. Gilbert. ''I don't know what happens to those little old ladies down there with nobody.'' + +Facing Distress +Using Welfare Torments Many +While Medicare and private health insurance will usually pay for medical treatment, neither covers custodial care of the type needed by those with chronic physical or mental disorders. Increasingly, private insurance is offered for long-term care, but only a small number of people have bought it so far, and policies, usually costing $100 a month or more, are beyond the financial reach of most elderly people, experts say. +Instead, except for the poor, chronic-care bills must be paid out of pocket. Middle-income people often pay until their assets are so depleted they can qualify for Medicaid. +The Medicaid spend-down has achieved a fearful notoriety among the elderly; spouses of the disabled have sometimes even resorted to divorce so they could preserve their standard of living. For a widowed or single person too, the quick loss of a lifetime's savings and of any chance of passing assets on to children is a wrenching blow. +Recent changes in the law have increased the amount that spouses, like Mabel Crim, can keep before getting Medicaid help. The rules differ by state, but Federal guidelines allow spouses to keep the couple's house and, this year, at least $856 a month in income and at least $12,516 in assets. States may allow as much as $1,565 in income and $62,580 in assets, though most have chosen the lower limits. +While advocates of the elderly cheer these changes, they say the limits still force a real decline in living standards and security on some surviving spouses. And single people are still left with virtually nothing: they can usually keep a small spending allowance and little more than $2,000 in assets. Those who are able to return home after spending time in an institution are often left with little. +The critics also argue that reliance on a welfare program, Medicaid, to meet a basic, predictable need of millions of middle-class Americans is a distortion of that program and a source of humiliation. +''Here's a man who always paid his taxes, who raised four daughters, a World War I veteran, and he ends up on charity,'' Mrs. Gilbert said of her father. ''That's the part that really hurt.'' +''Knowing that the only way to get help is to give up your funds and go on welfare only adds to the distress,'' said Mrs. Lombardo of the Alzheimer's Association. ''People are tormented by this.'' +Protecting assets has become a fixation for many older people who figure that if they should be incapacitated, they will need to rely on Medicaid but want to preserve their spouse's standard of living or their children's inheritance. The recent improvement in the law should reduce the number of divorces, but still, more than a few widowed older people are avoiding remarriage to avoid putting their assets in jeopardy, said Fernando Torres-Gil, an associate professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California. +Although the Government says it violates the spirit of the law, many people find legal ways to transfer assets to relatives or to use trusts or other devices to shelter funds. +''Financially sophisticated people who are accustomed to dealing with attorneys, accountants, and financial planners can find ways to protect their assets and still qualify for Medicaid,'' writes Stephen A. Moses, a former official the Department of Health and Human Services, in the February issue of The Gerontologist. ''Others, with less financial savvy, often lose what little they have before they learn how the system works.'' +This means that fewer families of nursing home patients are bankrupted than would be suggested by income data alone. But it also means that the burdens of care and the benefits of public aid are being apportioned inequitably. + +Seeking Help +Providing Care Fills the Day +At least Medicaid pays for nursing homes once people have used most of their own money or if they were poor to start. But for everyone, nursing homes are the answer of last resort. A much larger problem is the lack of home services and aid for the family and friends who care for the disabled elderly. +The stereotype of callous children notwithstanding, most of the country's disabled are cared for in their own homes or those of their children. +With the aging of the population, ''increasingly the caregivers are old too,'' notes Stephen McConnell, the director of public affairs with the Alzheimer's Association. ''More and more, it's the 65-year-old woman taking care of 85-year-old parents.'' +Relatives often go to extraordinary lengths before they send a loved one to an institution. Social workers say they know of too many daughters working themselves to exhaustion trying to attend to an infirm parent while raising families of their own and too many devoted wives and husbands, frail themselves, struggling for years to provide grueling 24-hour aid to a chronically ill spouse. +Uldene Ditter, 72, of Ferndale, Mich., considers herself among the more fortunate of those caring for a disabled spouse, but her daily strains and especially her financial insecurity have led her to become an outspoken advocate of change. +Her husband of half a century has been in bed for the last five years with advancing Alzheimer's disease. She is determined to keep him out of a nursing home. ''He doesn't have a bedsore,'' she said proudly in an interview. ''I feel like I'm doing the right thing.'' +Mrs. Ditter's job is an unpaid one almost without end. She gets away for 4 hours on Tuesdays when a volunteer comes, and another 4 hours on Wednesdays when a hired women comes, but apart from that, she said, ''I'm here, 24 hours a day.'' These brief hours of respite are crucial. ''It just lifts me up to get out,'' she said. ''Sometimes I get real down.'' She also gets help from a nurse who comes three times a week to bathe her husband. +But money, and thus her own future, are constant concerns. ''Just bed pads and diapers cost me $135 a month,'' she said. ''I'm getting into my savings.'' +''You think you're doing well, then something falls apart in the house,'' she said. ''And of course, with him here I have to keep the furnace up a little higher.'' +Of $15 billion in Federal Medicaid funds to be devoted to long-term care in the 1990 fiscal year, less than 3 percent will pay for home services. Many states and localities are now experimenting with a host of promising programs designed to help disabled people stay in the community. But overall, ''there are very few services available to people caring for older relatives and friends,'' said Bette Mullen, the director of the women's initiative program of the A.A.R.P. ''And there's a lack of knowledge of the services that do exist.'' + +Daunting Prospects +More Will Need Extensive Care +Demographic and social change portend an enormous rise in the need for expensive care. The problem is not just the aging of the population, but also ''the aging of the elderly population,'' observes Kenneth G. Manton, a demographer at Duke University. Those over 85 are rapidly increasing in number. +At the same time, Dr. Manton said, there will be relatively fewer relatives available to provide care at home. And this, he warns, almost inevitably means ''a shift from voluntary, family sources of care to paid care'' like professional home services and nursing homes. +Now, on any given day, about 5 percent of the elderly are in a nursing home, or a total of 1.4 million in 1987, according to Federal data. +Three-fourths of the nursing home residents are women, mostly widows, reflecting the tendency for women to outlive men and the related consequence that they are less likely to have a surviving spouse to care for them at home. +But these numbers mask the enormous differences in the conditions of the younger and older ones among the elderly. Of those age 65 to 74, only about 2 percent are in nursing homes and of those 75 to 84, 6 percent. +But in the 85-plus age group, 23 percent, or more than one in five, are in nursing homes, according to Federal surveys. +Simply because so many more of them suffer severe dementia or physical infirmities, the rapid growth of the group over 85 means that a rising share of the elderly will require nursing homes or other close, expensive care. It also means there will be relatively more infirm elderly people relative to healthy elderly people who could assist them, Dr. Manton said. +At the same time, the tendency of more women to hold jobs and other changes in the family mean that relatively fewer children are likely be available to help. Without a corresponding increase in professional home-care services, there could be ''a deterioration in the ability of the disabled to stay in the community,'' Dr. Manton warned. +For a variety of economic and cultural reasons, blacks, Hispanic people and other minority groups are dramatically under-represented in nursing homes relative to the proportion of the population they make up. Many Hispanic people and Asians, for example, still see nursing homes as ''a strange and unnatural system,'' said Dr. Torres-Gil, and a tradition of extended family ties and care in the home, as well as financial concerns, has meant that the disabled from minority groups were especially likely to be kept in the community. +But now the elderly from minority groups, too, are increasing rapidly, and traditional family ties are often breaking down. This, he asserted, only underscores the desperate need for home-care services and other alternatives tailored especially to minority communities. + +Planning Ahead +Future Poses A Social Choice +One reason nursing home costs come as such a shock to so many people is simply that they have not planned for them. Saving for retirement is part of the American way, but Americans have not traditionally thought of saving or buying insurance to cover the expenses of long-term care. Yet Government policy explicitly requires people to devote nearly all available resources on such care before receiving aid. Given these clashing assumptions it is not surprising that those who encounter the large expenses of such care feel bitter and betrayed. +''We do not expect people to exhaust their resources or sell their homes when they suffer a heart attack, but we do so for long-term care,'' said the report issued this month by a bipartisan commission on health care known as the Pepper Commission, after the late Representative Claude Pepper. ''There is no intrinsic reason why this is so; it is a matter of social choice.'' +Broader government support of long-term care costs could take the form of universal coverage without considering recipients' resources, like Medicare, or remain linked to recipients' ability to pay. Any new program is apt to encourage wider use of private insurance by the more affluent among the elderly. Even the most sympathetic politicians warn, though, that any new Federal aid is unlikely to be generous, given concerns over the budget deficit and competing social needs. +More and more, experts say, planning ahead for the possible expense of chronic care will have to be a customary rite of aging. +Tomorrow: The increasing choices for care in the community. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +SERIES: Care of the Elderly; Private Burdens, Public Choices - First of four articles. + +GRAPHIC: Graph showing the projection for the population 65 and older in nursing homes, disabled and still at home, no serious disability (source: Kenneth G. Manton, Duke University) (pg. A1); photo: most of the disabled are cared for at home, and relatives often go to extraordinary lengths to keep a loved one from an institution. Uldene Ditter of Ferndale, Mich., cares for her husband, John, who has been in bed for the last five years with Alzheimer's disease. (The New York Times/Peter Yates); graphs showing the various problems the elderly face; the age, closest living relative and mental disorders of nursing home patients; who pays for nursing home care; the private health expenditures of the elderly in '87 (sources: Agency for Health Care Policy and Research; Health Care Financing Administ + +TYPE: Series + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +111 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 27, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Studies Offer Fresh Clues To Memory + +BYLINE: By DANIEL GOLEMAN + +SECTION: Section C; Page 1, Column 1; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 1347 words + +FORGET the old maxim that memory deteriorates with age. The new wisdom, emerging from recent studies, is that there are several kinds of memory, only one of which worsens in old age. +Though psychologists still dispute precisely how many kinds of memory there are, most agree that there are at least three major kinds: ''episodic,'' for specific events; ''semantic,'' for knowledge and facts; and ''implicit,'' for skills one exercises automatically, like speaking grammatically or hitting a golf ball. Semantic and implicit memory do not decline with age, the new studies show. And declines in episodic memory may be due to factors like retirement rather than aging itself and may be reversible, psychologists say. +These encouraging findings, and the framework they support, are gaining wide acceptance among memory researchers. For scientists trying to understand the workings of memory, the findings offer important clues to fresh avenues of research and to new models of how the mind stores and retrieves information. +For example, it has long been known that elderly people who forget recent events can still recall memories from the distant past. But the new findings suggest that even this memory loss is not inevitable except in those with an illness that affects the brain. +''The idea that memory inevitably deteriorates as you age came from studies that only tested one kind of memory,'' said David Mitchell, a psychologist at Southern Methodist University. ''Now we see that there are multiple memory systems, and they each hold up differently as you age.'' +The type of memory that declines substantially in old age is ''episodic'' memory, which deals with specific events like what happened at yesterday's meeting, the name of someone you have just met or where the keys to the car were left. +Peter Graf, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, said: ''The scientific literature shows that episodic memory is stable through the mid-60's, with a slight drop but no real problems for most people. But there is a pronounced drop in the 70's for most people. The drop may be largely due to retirement, and the way that changes how you use your memory; people usually don't exercise their mental faculties as much after work demands stop.'' +Memory researchers point out that many people develop strategies that compensate for the decline, like writing notes to themselves. Mulling events over or talking or thinking about them later also seems to help store the memory in the ''semantic memory,'' the overall store of information and experience people accumulate over a lifetime. +''Semantic memory does not decline with age,'' Dr. Mitchell said. ''It grows.'' Data suggesting that people continue to accumulate information comes from older studies reported by Dr. Robert Katzman, chairman of the department of neurosciences at the University of California Medical School at San Diego. A group of men and women in their 60's were tested on the same vocabulary list that Dr. Mitchell used, and then tested again 10 years later. + +In Some Cases, Memory Improved +During the intervening decade of life, the men and women improved their scores by an average of six or seven words, which Dr. Mitchell called a substantial increase. The studies, done at the National Institute of Mental Health in 1956 and 1967, were first published in the 1970's but were largely overlooked by memory researchers. Only when they were republished in 1983 in a book on the neurology of aging did they catch the attention of researchers, Dr. Mitchell said. +The data were particularly important, he said, because almost all research on memory and aging involves comparing a younger group with an older group. Longitudinal data, in which the same people are tested years later, are able to establish more strongly that any differences seen are a result of aging itself. +The findings make sense of the long-observed fact that the elderly seem better able to retrieve memories from the distant past than from last week or the last hour. It is only within the past five years that data on memory in the elderly showed clearly ''that it was semantic memory that the elderly rely on for distant memories, while it is a failing episodic memory that interferes with remembering recent events,'' said Dr. Mitchell. +''The memories from long ago are for stories or emotional moments that people have thought about over and over, storing them in semantic memory. Recent memory lapses that plague the elderly are for more everyday events, such as where you put your glasses. Those are part of episodic memory.'' + +Robust Forms of Memory +The findings about other kinds of memory are also positive. In a paper to be published this spring in The Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, Dr. Graf shows that although most people experience a strong drop in episodic memory in their 70's, other kinds of memory remain robust. +For example, researchers say that among healthy adults there is generally minimal decline with age in ''implicit memory,'' which deals with the large variety of mental activities that occur spontaneously, without having to make an intentional effort, like driving a car. +The recognition that implicit memory is distinct from other kinds of remembering came in large part from observations of people with amnesia. In a paper published in 1983, Dr. Daniel Schacter, a psychologist at the University of Arizona, described a golf game with an amnesiac patient who had been an avid golfer before suffering a brain lesion that led to his memory problem. During the game, the patient forgot having played each hole or making each stroke within minutes of having done so. +Even so, he played the game as though he knew exactly what had just happened; for example, he reached for the right club for his next stroke. And over a series of days, his game improved steadily from practice, even though he did not recall having played the day before. + +Facts and Amnesiacs +In later studies Dr. Schacter found that if he taught amnesiac patients made-up facts, such as that ''Jane Fonda's favorite food is oatmeal,'' they would later answer the question ''what food does Jane Fonda love?'' about as well as people with intact memory. But if he asked where they had learned that fact, the amnesia patients would have no idea, a phenomenon called source amnesia. +Dr. Schacter observed the same split in memory in studies with the elderly. Like the amnesiacs, people in their 60's and 70's were able to answer the questions as well as young people, but they were worse at remembering exactly when and where the new knowledge came from. +One implication is that the elderly can learn from experience just as younger people can, but may not remember exactly when and where the new knowledge or skill came from. +Problems in the Frontal Lobes Brain studies of memory suggest that the decline in episodic memory, such as for the list of words, is related to a degeneration of the frontal lobes. Using a blood flow measure, Endel Tulvig, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, found that while people were engaged in episodic memory tasks like remembering words they had just memorized, the frontal lobes were more active. +Other data also point to the frontal lobes as the source of memory problems in the elderly. Larry Squire, a neuropsychologist at the University of California Medical School at San Diego, found that the greater the damage to the frontal lobes in amnesia patients, the greater was the loss of episodic memory. +''The frontal lobes decay more quickly in aging than do other parts of the brain,'' Dr. Craik said. +But Dr. Schacter has recent evidence that there are strategies older people can use to compensate for their memory deterioration in some situations. +''Part of the problem in the elderly may be in switching attention,'' he said. ''If things come too quickly or in a confusing fashion, it may not register as well. But if older people are able to focus on what is happening without distractions, their memory may be just as good as ever.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +112 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 28, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Strategies to Let Elderly Keep Some Control + +BYLINE: By TAMAR LEWIN + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 2682 words + +Home care services, adult day care and a host of other programs to aid the disabled elderly are proliferating as more people search for alternatives to traditional nursing homes. +Over the last decade, public and private agencies have begun to respond to the near-universal desire of frail or chronically ill people to remain in familiar surroundings, with control over their lives, whenever possible. +Innovative programs are providing help with daily activities to frail or chronically ill people who do not want, or need to live in a nursing home. The new approaches include home-repair services, day centers, foster homes for the elderly and apartment buildings where residents can get more care as they need it. + +Need for New Services +Nonetheless, experts say, the need for new services is far from met. Most of the disabled elderly are still cared for by relatives at home. But many elderly people are placed in nursing homes simply because they lack help with dressing and bathing. And many wives, husbands and children still strain to care for the disabled at home without any assistance or relief. +''There's no question that the experiments and alternatives are out there, but they're serving only a small proportion of those who need them,'' said Dr. Carroll Estes, director of the Institute for Health and Aging at the University of California at San Francisco. +For elderly people who want to stay in the community, she said, the biggest need is in-home help with bathing, dressing and homemaking. + +States Try New Strategies +''While there are a lot more of those programs than there were 10 years ago, very few deal with large numbers of people,'' she said. +To be sure, nursing homes may be the best alternative for the frailest people, the most disabled, the severely demented or violent, those with complex medical needs and those with no family or friends to lend a hand. +But states are trying out many new strategies as they face ever-higher nursing home costs, and growing concern about the sense of confinement and lack of personal control that so many nursing home residents feel. +''Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington State and Illinois have been among the leaders,'' said Diane Justice, deputy director of the National Association of State Units on Aging. ''And where programs aren't being developed, it's usually due to a lack of state dollars, not a lack of interest.'' +In Wisconsin, the $35 million annual Community Options Program assists 7,700 people needing long-term care, half of them elderly and half younger disabled people. The program will arrange almost any service needed to keep a resident at home, whether it is paying the next-door neighbor to cook dinner twice a week or finding a nurse to come every day. The services are provided free to the poor and on a sliding scale to others. +Oregon is trying a different approach, creating a network of foster homes for the elderly. The state is also encouraging developers to build ''assisted living'' apartments, where residents can get the same level of nursing care available in a nursing home, along with housekeeping services and meals in a group dining room, without forfeiting the chance to live in a private apartment with their own furnishings, carpeted floors and a door that can lock. New Approaches Sorting Out What Works Many community programs, some public, some private, have developed across the country. There are now about 2,200 day centers for the elderly, compared with a dozen 20 years ago. Hundreds of new respite programs provide a companion or nurse to look after an elderly person while the person who usually provides the care takes a break. +There are also telephone reassurance programs, in which frail people get daily calls to make sure they are well. Technology can also play a part. Some elderly people get a sense of security by wearing an electronic alarm they can set off if they fall or need help. +Many cities also have housekeeping, gardening or home repair programs for the elderly, to help prevent people from retreating to a nursing home simply because they cannot manage the chores of daily life. + +New Role: Care Manager +The proliferation of programs has spawned a new profession: the private care manager, who coordinates and monitors an elderly person's care, signing up for the meal programs, checking the performance of the home health aide, scheduling doctor's visits and arranging transportation. +Such services are appealing to the growing population of adult children whose aging parents live far away. Rather than making weekly trips to check on a parent, many choose to hire a local care manager, at $50 to $120 an hour. Some care managers work with their own nurses and aides, while others contract out the work. And while one client may need only a monthly check-in call, another may require daily visits. The National Association of Private Geriatric Care Managers, in Dayton, Ohio, is creating a national referral network. +Many public and nonprofit agencies use case managers to screen clients and help them find their way to the most appropriate programs available locally. +Some nursing homes have created their own services for elderly people in the community. + +An Array of Services +Since 1980, for example, the Jewish Home and Hospital for Aged in New York City has started a ''nursing home without walls'' home care program; two day centers, one of them for the blind and visually impaired; an in-home Alzheimer's emergency respite program; outpatient rehabilitation that offers therapy, nursing and counseling, and an at-home recovery program, which cares for patients newly released from the hospital and helps train the family to take over. The Jewish Home has also started a telephone Guideline, (212) 663-4663, to help clients decide which services they need and qualify for. +''Most of the things that are likely to help solve the long-term care problem are being tried in some pilot project somewhere, but we're really still at the very beginning,'' said Dr. Burton Reifler of the Bowman Gray School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., who directs a pilot program that finances several day centers. ''It's going to take 15 or 20 years to sort out what works, what people want, what they will pay for, what the government will pay for, and then to see that the services we need are widely available.'' Home Living Someone to Take Care of Things Most health policy experts agree that too many people live in nursing homes not because they need much medical attention but because that is the most widely available option. Also, for those who have used up their resources, it is the one that Medicaid, the joint Federal-state health program for the poor, is most likely to pay for. +The National Center for Health Statistics reports that 5 percent of Americans over 65 now live in nursing homes, more than double the percentage of the early 1960's. Most of the increase came shortly after the 1965 creation of Medicare and Medicaid, which helped nudge long-term care into a medical model, with the disabled and elderly seen as patients, rather than a social model, with programs designed around daily living needs, and medical services added as needed. +''The field of long-term care has been too medicalized, because programs are driven so much by the funding mechanisms available to pay for them,'' said Jeffrey Mitchell of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which supports many experimental long-term care programs. ''We did some research to find out what the elderly want, and we found that services like home repair, shopping and housecleaning may contribute more to the elderly's being able to stay in the community than traditional medical services.'' + +Help With Home Repairs +One such program is the home repair service that the New York Foundation for Senior Citizens operates for elderly people with limited incomes. It has helped Rose and Michael Katz stay in the Brooklyn home they have owned since the 1950's. +''We thought about leaving because we weren't sure we would be able to manage the upkeep,'' said Mrs. Katz, 76 years old. ''They've probably come 30 times and fixed the locks on our doors, the washers on the faucets, taken care of the washing machine and cleared the drains. The house would have fallen apart without them.'' +In Dallas, the Visiting Nurse Association offers a program called Independence Plus, which arranges $10-an-hour housekeeping, and yard maintenance for the elderly. +''We get a lot of widows who can't take care of the yard, or need help with shopping, and a lot of men who don't know how to take care of the house and need heavy cleaning, shopping and meal preparation,'' said Sue Seifert, the director of the program. + +Nine Visits a Week +With more than 10,000 public and private home health agencies nationwide, even people who need a great deal of nursing care can often remain in their homes. +Margaret Pawley, 78, of Brookside, Del., has had several disabling strokes and a colostomy. She is bedridden, diabetic and catheterized, with a bedsore and a surgical incision that still need dressing. She gets three visits a week from a nurse who checks her blood and her dressings, three visits from a physical therapist who helps her with upper-arm exercises and three visits from an aide, who changes her bed and bathes her. +''It's hard and I did think about a nursing home,'' said Mrs. Pawley's daughter, Mary Lucille Walstrum. ''But when Mom was in the hospital, she only said two things to me: ''I love you' and 'When am I going home?' So I thought I would try it,'' Mrs. Walstrum has moved her family into her mother's house and hired her husband's sister to care for her mother while Mrs. Walstrum is at work. Assisted Living Varied Strategies Succeed in Oregon Richard Ladd, the administrator of Oregon's Senior and Disabled Services Division, estimates that only about 5 percent of the state's 20,000 Medicaid recipients receiving long-term care have complex medical needs. +''Most of them just can't do what they need to do, whether it's getting dressed or taking their medicine,'' he said. ''Long-term care is not a medical problem, but too often we put them in nursing homes where they have less control over their lives and less freedom than the average prison inmate.'' +One of Mr. Ladd's alternatives to nursing homes is a network of foster homes, each caring for up to five elderly people. +''I've got a lady who's 95, three in their 80's and a 67-year-old Alzheimer's patient, and they're all confused in their minds,'' said Geraldine Maurig, 62, who runs a foster home near Portland. ''It's no different than having five children at home to look after. You become their mother, the one they turn to. I cook and do their hair, and take care of their whiskers, and even when I have incontinent people you don't smell anything when you walk in my door.'' +Mrs. Maurig, who trained her granddaughter to open a foster home of her own, charges $1,000 to $1,400 a month, depending on the level of care. The state pays an average of $1,700 a month for nursing home care. +Oregon also emphasises assisted-living apartments, in which the elderly and disabled live in a building where meals and housekeeping are provided, with other services, like nursing, added as needed. Mr. Ladd estimates that half the state's nursing home residents could be cared for in such apartments. + +A Couple Stays Together +Gladys and John Chaffin moved from California to the Regency Park assisted-living complex in Portland two years ago, when Mr. Chaffin began needing care for Alzheimer's disease. +''We had looked at a lot of nursing homes,'' said Mrs. Chaffin, who is 81, ''but to tell the truth, I wouldn't have moved into a nursing home with him, and when you've been married 60 years, it seems sad to be separated.'' She said the assisted-living arrangement ''is wonderful for us because I can go and play bridge twice a week and there's someone to take care of him.'' In the future, she added, ''when he starts needing more care, they'll be able to handle that, too.'' +Assisted-living often becomes sensible when home care proves too difficult, and many profit-making companies, including hotel chains like the Marriott Corporation and the Hyatt Corporation, are entering the field, expecting that, as the population ages, there will be a large market for care. +''It's not always practical to keep people at home,'' said Keren Brown Wilson, a consultant who helped develop Regency Park.''It's very expensive and very tough to manage home care for someone who needs care round the clock, or needslike someone to help whenever they have to use the bathroom. If you design it carefully, assisted living gives you the economies of scale and a lot of the feeling of a home.'' +Regency Park, with costs starting at $1,500 a month for a studio apartment, has about 20 residents receiving state assistance, but most of the residents pay privately. + +Expected Savings Not Realized +Rosalie A. Kane, an expert on long-term care at the University of Minnesota, is optimistic about assisted living. ''I think the most promising model for people with heavy long-term care needs is housing where lots of different services can be added on,'' she said. ''If you can separate the idea of housing from the idea of care, you can break through the rigidity of nursing home life.'' +Dr. Kane and others said that most of the alternatives to nursing homes were started with idea of saving money. But often, the cost savings are illusory: indeed, round-the-clock home care is apt to be more expensive than care in a nursing home, because it requires a caretaker for each patient. +''For the most part, the initial glowing reports about how much money these programs save, and how long they delay nursing home admission, have not panned out,'' she said. ''Cost aside, most people do not want to enter a nursing home. Quality of life can be just as important a factor as cost.'' Helping the Helpers Day Centers Give Needed Relief Much of America's long-term care is still provided informally, most often by wives, daughters, daughters-in-law and neighbors. And increasingly, policy makers are trying to find ways to support them. +Day centers and respite programs, which can help those caring for disabled people as much as the disabled, are mushrooming, and becoming increasingly specialized, with programs especially for Alzheimer's patients, the visually impaired, AIDS patients and other groups. +''It's a godsend to be able to take my husband to the day center every morning,'' said Gloria Lowe, whose husband, Martin, 80, has had Alzheimer's disease for 17 years and now attends an Alzheimer's center in Delaware. ''When he's home, he needs constant attention, so this is my only chance to catch up on shopping and cleaning. I would have run out of money if he had been in a nursing home all this time and this is better for him.'' +Alzheimer's patients, who make up about half the population of nursing homes nationally, pose the most troubling long-term care problems as their dementia progresses. + +Benefits of Music +Some programs are finding new ways to engage them and lessen their distress. The Sunshine Terrace day center in Logan, Utah, uses extensive music therapy, having found that it helps to soothe demented older people. +''We have patients who can no longer say five words, but who can still sing the lyrics to 20 or 30 songs from their childhood,'' said Bonnie Smith, the program director. ''We sing a lot of 'Let Me Call You Sweetheart' and 'Springtime in the Rockies.' '' +The center even has a choral group, whose conductor, Viola Israelsen, an 84-year-old Alzheimer's patient who lives with her son, has a wandering problem and can no longer quite remember her age or how many children she has. But singing is second nature to her, and she sound utterly lucid at rehearsal. +''I was trained by mother and dad to like and originate music, to make it sing in my heart,'' she said. +NEXT: The politics of long-term care, and the policy choices. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +SERIES: CARE OF THE ELDERLY; PRIVATE BURDENS, PUBLIC CHOICES - SECOND OF FOUR ARTICLES. + +GRAPHIC: photos: At the Sunshine Terrace Day Center in Logan, Utah, extensive music therapy is used to help patients, especially those with Alzheimer's disease. Lisa Almond, a therapist, led patients in a song. (The New York Times/Don Grayston) (pg. A1); In response to a desire to keep frail or chronically ill people in familiar locations and away from traditional nursing homes, innovative programs have been developed, like adult day centers. At a center in Logan, Utah, patients played a hockey game. (The New York Times/Don Grayston); Gladys and John Chaffin moved to an assisted-living complex in Portland when Mr. Chaffin began needing care.; Adele Heller in her apartment next to the Jewish Home and Hospital for Aged in New York City where her husband is a patient. She is in a program that hel + +TYPE: Series + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +113 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 29, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Paying for Long-Term Care: The Struggle for Lawmakers + +BYLINE: By MARTIN TOLCHIN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 2613 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 28 + +Senator Max Baucus fed Gladys Foote, a 97-year-old stroke victim in Helena, Mont., who was his kindergarten teacher. Senator John D. Rockefeller 4th assisted an 82-year-old Alzheimer's victim in South Charleston, W.Va., while Representative Charles E. Bennett held a 4-year-old mentally disabled child on his lap at a center in Jacksonville, Fla. +They were among 75 lawmakers who spent a day feeding, dressing and caring for the severely disabled last year in a program sponsored by the Long Term Care Campaign, a coalition of 138 organizations including groups of the elderly, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the United Way. The coalition is pressing for more Government assistance for long-term care of the frail and the disabled, whether they are in nursing homes or being cared for at home. And increasingly, the nation's lawmakers are listening. +After a decade in the legislative shadows, the national debate over long-term care is moving toward center stage, propelled by the rising costs faced by growing numbers of disabled elderly Americans. +It is an emotional debate involving morality and politics, fueled by different visions of what is right and what is feasible. It is a debate about government responsibility and family obligations, the roles of the public and private sectors, and whether the disabled elderly have as strong a claim on limited Federal resources as other groups like children and the poor. +''Sometime in the not-too-distant future we will get a major national program protecting families against the cost of long-term care,'' Robert M. Ball predicted in a recent interview. Mr. Ball was Commissioner of Social Security in the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon Administrations and is now chairman of the National Academy of Social Insurance, a nonprofit research organization in Washington. He went on: ''I expect it to come, not primarily because of the political power of the elderly - although this is important - but because of pressure from those of middle age, the sons and daughters of the elderly. They are the ones most at risk.'' +But few expect such legislation in the next two or three years. ''The public isn't willing to pay more taxes,'' said Representative Pete Stark, the California Democrat who is chairman of the Subcommittee on Health of the Ways and Means Committee. ''Unless the President is willing to spend some of his popularity, we'll never have it.'' + +The Issues +Who Benefits? Who Will Pay? +The debate over a new national policy turns on basic issues of philosophy and practicality: +* To what extent should middle-class people be expected to save funds for possible long-term care, or buy private insurance? +* Should Government programs be universal, like Social Security, with everyone paying and everyone getting a benefit? Or should they be aimed only at the needy, as programs like Medicaid are now? +* If eligibility for benefits is based on need, how poor should people be before getting aid? Should spouses of the disabled be able to maintain their former standard of living? Do people have a right to keep assets to pass on to their children? +* How much support should the Government give to care in the home, which many say is the greatest need but others fear could be an endless drain on the Treasury? +* How should any new program be financed? Through payroll taxes, personal or corporate income taxes, estate taxes or others? +Some people cast the debate as an intergenerational conflict, contending that the major beneficiaries will be the elderly, who are already benefiting from immenseGovernment programs like Social Security and Medicare. But others, like Mr. Ball, say aid to the elderly helps an entire family, especially the middle-aged, who he said face ''the poignant choice of spending time and money on their parents at the sacrifice of their own children.'' + +The Politics +Nightmare, Now or Later? +The debate is complicated by a national ambivalence. Public opinion polls show overwhelming support for Government protection against the financial nightmare so many families fear. But many politicians doubt that the public would support the new taxes needed to pay for these benefits. +Still, with the elderly growing in number and more families confronting the problems of the soaring costs of long-term care, there is a widespread feeling that something needs to be done. ''This could be a campaign issue in 1990 and 1992,'' said Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who is chairman of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health and the Environment. He added that ''there is very strong public support'' for more Government aid for long-term care. +The Democrats, who championed Social Security and Medicare, have sought to portray themselves as protectors of the aged, and are the strongest supporters of such coverage. Republicans have taken the major role in questioning whether the middle-class elderly and their families, who would be the major beneficiaries of a new Federal benefit program, should receive more Federal money from tight budgets at a time when more than 31 million people lack health insurance and poor pregnant women and children need better health care. Republicans also tend to give more stress to the potential for private insurance to meet the care needs of many. + +The Budget Squeeze +Representative Bill Gradison of Ohio, ranking Republican on the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, said, ''If we assume that there's some limit on how much taxes people are willing to pay, a major new middle-class program means that other parts of the budget are going to get squeezed.'' +Nor is long-term-care legislation expected to become law without the support of the Bush Administration, which has resisted major new social programs, especially those that provide benefits to the middle class. +The poor already receive coverage for nursing homes, and occasionally home care, under Medicaid, the Federal-state health program for the poor. Many middle-class people rely on Medicaid to cover their expenses in nursing homes, but can do so only after spending most of their assets, a process many call humiliating and unfair. Others find legal ways to shelter assets and obtain Medicaid. +Medicare, the Federal health program for the elderly and the disabled, covers acute rather than chronic illness, so it provides relatively little support for nursing homes or home care. +The policy debate accelerated earlier this month because of the recommendations of the United States Bipartisan Commission on Comprehensive Health Care, called the Pepper commission for the late Representative Claude Pepper, a Florida Democrat who championed long-term coverage. The commission, created by Congress, is composed of 12 members of Congress and three private experts appointed by President Ronald Reagan. By a vote of 11 to 4, it called for a $42.8-billion-a-year plan for long-term care, with a majority of the money going to home health care, despite objections by the Bush Administration. +''The White House message was, 'Don't let the Democrats have an issue,' '' said Senator Rockefeller, who is chairman of the commission. ''The White House said, 'Don't do anything until after the November elections.' '' +But Republicans have insisted that their opposition was based on substance, not politics, including the commission's failure to fulfill one task assigned by Congress: proposing a way to finance the program. The $42.8 billion would be in addition to the $19.4 billion projected in the fiscal year 1990 for long-term care under Medicare and Medicaid, of which only $424 million is projected for home health care and the remainder for nursing homes. +''Before the Pepper commission, long-term care was a concept,'' said Ronald F. Pollack, executive director of the Families USA Foundation, which promotes the concerns of the elderly poor. ''Now, it's a concrete package.'' + +Wary of Another Debacle +But Deborah Steelman, who was George Bush's health policy expert in the 1988 Presidential campaign and now heads an independent Government commission studying health and social policy, balked at the Pepper commission's price tag. ''Why do we stick to ideas that are bigger than we have any reasonable expectation of paying for?'' she asked. +The Pepper commission sought to defuse the intergenerational debate by recommending long-term care for the severely disabled of all ages. About 40 percent of the severely disabled are under the age of 65. Of this younger group, a vast majority are cared for at home. +Under the Pepper plan, the Government would pay for the first three months of care in both skilled nursing homes and intermediate care centers. Thereafter, additional coverage would be provided to individuals with assets of $30,000 or less (not counting a home and some other essentials), and to couples with assets of $60,000 or less. The commission estimated that such institutional care would cost $18.8 billion, in addition to the $15 billion that Medicaid now pays for nursing homes. +Under the Pepper plan, the Government would also pay 80 percent of the costs of home and community-based care for up to 400 hours a year. The commission projected that this and other home health care benefits would cost $24 billion. +But members of Congress appear reluctant to endorse any new benefits package since last year's demise of the year-old Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act, which was repealed after vociferous objections to a new surtax paid by elderly people with higher incomes. Lawmakers appear to have learned several painful lessons from the episode: People do not like to be singled out for special taxes; health legislation is complicated and costly, and complicated legislation is hard to explain and justify to angry taxpayers. ''There are some real hangover feelings from the catastrophic coverage experience,'' Senator Rockefeller said. Instead of recommending specific financing measures, the Pepper commission offered a list of possible ways to meet the $42.8 billion cost. For instance, this amount could be raised by making all wages subject to the Social Security tax, rather than just the first $51,300, or it could be raised by increasing income tax rates 1 or 2 percent and taxing the highest incomes at a rate of 33 percent. + +The Outlook +Responsibility And Coverage +A major issue in the debate involves whether the middle class as well as the poor should receive Government coverage for long-term care. +''I think we need some form of social insurance approach,'' said Alice Rivlin, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. ''You get better programs if everybody pays and everybody benefits, as they do in Social Security and Medicare, instead of programs financed out of general revenues and specifically targeted at the poor, as in Medicaid.'' +But others ask why the Government should provide coverage for the David Rockefellers and Donald Trumps. +''The question is, Can we afford to expand Government coverage on an entitlement basis, with benefits regardless of income?'' asked Gail Wilensky, administrator of the Health Care Financing Administration, which administers Medicare and Medicaid. +Another issue involves the role of private insurance. Mr. Ball, the former Social Security Commissioner, says only 20 percent of elderly couples could afford private insurance, those with incomes of $40,000 a year or more. ''Private insurance is for people who are relatively well off, and have some assets to protect,'' Mr. Ball said. +But Carl J. Schramm, president of the Health Insurance Association of America, says 40 percent of the elderly have enough income or assets to pay an average premium of $1,100 to $1,400 a year, at the age of 65, for private long-term-care insurance, or to pay directly for their care needs. Is Insurance the Answer? Representative Gradison said that although only about one and a half million million people have private long-term-care insurance, these policies were first offered only five years ago. +''It's way too early to throw up our hands and say the insurance industry can't do the job,'' Mr. Gradison said. ''They're just getting started.'' Thirty-two million Americans are 65 or older. +Health experts disagree on whether a Government program should pay at the outset of long-term care, or after a period of months or years. The two approaches help different groups. +The Pepper commission would have the Government pay for the first three months, and then provide coverage for those whose assets fall below $30,000 ($60,000 for couples). But Paul Willging, executive vice president of the American Health Care Association, which represents 10,000 nursing homes, said that when it comes to his own elderly parents, ''I can handle the first three months, at an average cost of $2,000 a month, but not the five to seven years of late-stage Alzheimer's.'' +George J. Mitchell, Democrat of Maine, the Senate majority leader, has proposed providing Government coverage only after two years in a nursing home, as well as home health services and respite care. His program would cost $25 billion a year. +But critics say the Mitchell approach favors the more affluent, those who still have assets after two years. +Mr. Ball said people who return to the community after nursing home stays ''will need their resources.'' +Judith Feder, a health economist and the Pepper commission's staff director, said, ''The fundamental premise of our plan is that the program should focus on those at home and those likely to return home.'' Half of those in nursing homes for three months return home, Dr. Feder said, and two-thirds of all those who ultimately return home do so in three months. + +'Flexibility Is the Key' +Another plan, developed by the staff of Ms. Steelman's commission, would give Medicare beneficiaries the option of paying a substantial deductible, ranging perhaps from $20,000 to $40,000, and then having the Government pay all the costs for long-term care, as well as all the costs of prescription drugs, hospitals and doctors. The commission is expected to make its recommendations early next year. +''Flexibility is the key,'' Ms. Steelman said. ''The question is whether we can modify Medicare to provide long-term care benefits.'' +Home health care poses a policy problem. It is both more prevalent and usually less expensive than nursing home care. But some question whether the Government should pay for services that are now often provided without charge by relatives and friends. In addition, they say, home care coverage could easily be overused. +Dr. Warren Greenberg, professor of health services administration at George Washington University, said: ''Most elderly people can use such care as assistance in dressing, eating, shopping and other aspects of daily living. Once you pay this up, and say that we will pay for this as a nation, many people would qualify, and there would be no end to it.'' +But others emphasize that many families badly need outside aid to keep providing the care they want to give and that home services can sometimes keep people out of nursing homes. +Whatever the form, Government aid for long-term care will be a major issue in this year's Congressional elections and in the 1992 Presidential election, if its supporters have their way. +''The '92 election is our friend,'' Senator Rockefeller said. ''The political pressure for long-term care is very substantial. The problem is mobilizing the will that exists out there, and getting the President to take the lead.'' +NEXT: How to plan for long-term care needs. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +SERIES: Care of the Elderly; Private Burdens, Public Choices - Third of four articles. + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Robert M. Ball: Commissioner of Social Security in the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon Administrations. ''Sometime in the not-too-distant future we will get a major national program protecting families against the cost of long-term care.''; Senator John D. Rockefeller: Chairman of the Bipartisan Commission on Comprehensive Health Care. ''The White House message was, 'Don't let the Democrats have an issue.' The White House said, 'Don't do anything until after the November elections.' ''; Representative Pete Stark: Chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health. ''Unless the President is willing to spend some of his popularity, we'll never have it.''; Representative Bill Gradison: Ranking Republican on the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health. ''If we assume that there's some + +TYPE: Series + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +114 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 29, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Study Finds High Risk to Overweight Women + +BYLINE: By GINA KOLATA + +SECTION: Section A; Page 17, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 686 words + +A large study of middle-aged and younger women has shown that being overweight by virtually any degree increases the risk of heart disease. +By following nearly 116,000 nurses, ages 30 to 55, for eight years, investigators determined that all but the thinnest women were at an increased risk of heart attacks and chest pains. The risk for the mild to moderately obese women was 80 percent higher than the risk for the thinnest women. And 70 percent of the heart disease in obese women and 40 percent in women over all was directly attributable to excess weight, the researchers concluded. +Previous studies of men have indicated that being moderately overweight increased the risk of heart disease. But this is the first time that the risks of being even mildly overweight have been documented in middle-aged women, said Dr. Charles H. Hennekens, an epidemiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and an author of the study. +The results show ''obesity is right up there with cigarette smoking and heavy alcohol consumption as a major cause of excess morbidity and mortality in the United States,'' he said. +The study is being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine. The findings are ''a bit of a shocker,'' said Dr. Theodore B. VanItallie, an obesity researcher at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York, who wrote an accompanying editorial. +The overall risk of heart disease in women of this age is low; only 605 in the study had heart attacks or chest pains from heart disease. But the women were all working and at ages ''when the most potential life is lost in heart attacks,'' said Dr. JoAnn E. Manson, an author of the study who is an endocrinologist at the Boston hospital. +Dr. VanItallie added that the risk of obesity would almost certainly be much greater in older women who had been obese for longer periods. He said that other studies, in men and women, have shown that ''there is a long latent period before effects of obesity on health become evident,'' adding, ''What that means to me is that once you identify these women as being overweight, the ones who haven't had a heart attack yet are more likely to do so as time goes by.'' + +A Leading Cause of Death +By the age of 60, heart attacks become the leading cause of death in women. They are the leading cause of death in men starting at the age of 40. +Dr. Claude Lenfant, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md., said he could not comment directly on the new study because he has not seen it. But he said the institute ''views obesity as a risk factor'' for heart disease in men and women. He said obesity could increase the risk by causing high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol levels. Weight loss tends to decrease or eliminate these factors. +Two studies have linked obesity to heart disease, but no one had established the ill effects of being even mildly overweight for women, Dr. Hennekens said. +Dr. Manson said, ''It was surprising to us that there's an increased risk of heart disease even at recommended weights according to the tables'' of average heights and weights issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Women who were of average weight according to these tables, for example, a woman who is 5 feet 4 1/2 inches and weighs 137 to 148 pounds, had a 30 percent increased risk compared with a woman the same height weighing less than 125 pounds. In those weighing less than 125 pounds, the thinnest group, the rate of heart attacks was 0.32 out of 1,000 women per year, after adjustment for smoking and age; for those weighing 137 to 148 pounds, the rate was 0.416 per thousand. +The risk for the moderately overweight - for example, a woman who is 5 feet 4 1/2 inches and weighs 149 to 171 pounds - was 80 percent higher than for the thinnest. And women of that height weighing 193 pounds had three times the risk of the thinnest, or 1.06 heart attacks per 1,000 women per year. +Smoking raises the risk, the study found. Obese women who smoke are five times as likely to have heart disease as obese women who do not, it said. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +115 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 29, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Other Countries Do Much More for Disabled + +BYLINE: By MARTIN TOLCHIN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 540 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 28 + +Several industrialized nations, including Canada, Britain and the Scandinavian countries, do much more than the United States to support long-term care for the severely disabled. +''All of these countries have in common a very different role for the government than we have in this country,'' said Dr. Robert Kane, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota. +He noted that the American tradition of individualism contrasts with that of nations that stress cooperation and tranquillity. ''Our Declaration of Independence promises life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,'' Dr. Kane said. ''Canada, for example, promises peace, order and good government. That tells you a lot about contrasting philosophies.'' + +Not a Welfare System +In Canada, 8 of the 10 provinces now provide some form of long-term care coverage for all citizens. ''This is not a welfare system,'' Dr. Kane said. ''The whole basis of the Canadian health care system is universal entitlement.'' +The programs are run and paid for by the provinces. The benefits are available to people of all ages, on the basis of the services they need, whether they require home care or a nursing home. The exceptions are the provinces of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, in which aid is given only to the poor. + +In Scandinavia, No Private Agencies +The Scandinavian nations also provide universal services for the disabled. Norway, Sweden and Denmark provide long-term care primarily through government units called communes, which are a cross between a county and a city. The funds are provided jointly by the national and local governments, and the services are offered by public or nonprofit agencies. There are no private agencies. Recipients of long-term care make small payments and pay deductibles. +In Britain, homes for the elderly are operated by social agencies and overseen by local governments. +The accommodations are similar to American homes for the aged and may provide nursing services, but Dr. Kane said, ''Basically, it's what we would think of as sheltered living.'' Individuals pay nothing. +The homes are used mainly by the poor, Dr. Kane said. The more affluent may enter private centers, and both rich and poor have access to medical care through universal health services. +The West German system is more like the American, primarily a welfare system, with the Government paying for the poor and most of the remainder privately paid. +The Netherlands provides long-term nursing home care for the entire population. But Dr. Warren Greenberg, a professor of health services administration at George Washington University, said the Dutch provide little coverage for home health care, out of fear of the potential costs. + +In Japan, Two Kinds of Care +Japan offers two kinds of long-term care. There are geriatric hospitals that resemble American nursing homes, for those who need skilled medical care, and for which the Government pays the entire bill for those 70 years old and above. +In addition, there are a few homes for elderly people who are well or partly debilitated, sponsored by unions and churches. The family is expected to provide some of the funds. Residents who get sick go to geriatric hospitals. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +116 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 30, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +For a Comfortable Old Age, Plan for Care, Experts Advise + +BYLINE: By LISA W. FODERARO + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 2807 words + +As the average cost of a nursing-home stay climbs to nearly $30,000 a year, experts agree on one main piece of advice for those concerned about preparing for their old age: plan early for long-term care. +The experts say people should not rely solely on their physicians for advice because doctors are often not familiar with the alternatives to nursing homes that are springing up and with the sometimes complicated financial planning that is necessary for a comfortable old age. +In general, the experts say, even people now middle-aged should begin to familiarize themselves with Government and private programs, like those providing at-home care for the elderly, and begin reading the consumer guides on long-term care that are increasingly available. + +'Make Decisions Early' +''Often, people don't have access to enough information to make intelligent decisions about long-term care,'' said Monika White, associate director of the Senior Care Network of Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, Calif. The key, she said, ''is to make decisions early, before a crisis hits.'' +Specialists in the field of long-term care say advice and guidance are widely available on the major points, from purchasing private long-term care insurance and determining Medicaid eligibility to coordinating care in the home. The problem is where to obtain the information. +More than a fifth of all elderly people require some form of long-term care at any given time, whether it is skilled attention in a nursing home or help at home with bathing and meals. Many receive assistance from their family members or friends but many need to rely on volunteers, community programs or paid help. + +Savings Can Be Jeopardized +Only about one in seven 65-year-olds will ever spend a year or more in a nursing home, but lifetime savings can quickly disappear with the rising cost of those stays as well as the cost of professional care at home. +Typically, the elderly individual is forced to turn to Medicaid, the Federal-state health program for the poor and the only Government program covering long-term care. ''The common expression is that you almost have to go broke to get long-term care in this country,'' said Michio Suzuki, the Acting Deputy Commissioner of the Federal Administration on Aging. +Being caught by the Medicaid safety net is usually a last resort, but gaining an understanding of the complex eligibility requirements can help impart a sense of control, social workers say. And that knowledge could aid in important decisions, like whether to buy private long-term care insurance or whether to pay off a mortgage early. +''There's a lot of planning a person can do, rich or poor,'' Dr. White said. ''There are programs and people you can turn to in most communities to help you make decisions for the future.'' +That is not to say the choices are simple or easy. ''My friends always ask me what they should be doing,'' Mr. Suzuki said, ''and, frankly, it's a very hard question to answer.'' The Search Tenacity Pays Off In many parts of the country, support for the struggling elderly person living at home is just beyond the front door. Tenacity is the key to tracking it down. +''There's more to long-term care than stowing away money,'' said Jane A. Tilly, a senior analyst with the American Association of Retired Persons' Public Policy Institute in Washington. ''Are there volunteers out there? Are there public programs?'' +This year, more than $1 billion allotted by Congress under the Older Americans Act will trickle down through state governments to the nation's 660 Area Agencies on Aging and, finally, to more than 10,000 centers for the elderly. Both the agencies, financed primarily by Federal funds, and the centers can be vital sources of information and aid. +Established in the early 1970's, the Area Agencies on Aging are charged with administering an array of non-medical services: home-delivered meals, health programs, adult day care, free transportation to doctors' offices, weekly trips to the supermarket and social activities. +The agencies use the ubiquitous senior center to reach the elderly in many towns and cities. Most services are free, but not necessarily widely offered because of constraints on staffing and local financing. ''Our primary goal is keeping the older person in the home and in the community for as long as possible,'' said Jonathan D. Linkous, the executive director of the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging. + +Specific Individual Plans +To coordinate the range of available health and support services, as well as helping individuals devise a way to pay for them, many agencies and organizations dealing with the elderly offer what they call case management, or service coordination. More than a third of the Area Agencies on Aging offer this service, as do many private home-care agencies, hospitals, insurance companies, senior centers and state and county offices, either free of charge or for a fee. +The Area Agencies on Aging can also steer an elderly person to companies that provide professional home care, with the cost usually ranging from $20 to $50 a day, depending on the number of hours the help is needed and the nature of the help. +One new source of money is available in some areas for the elderly who have significant equity in their homes. Some lenders are marketing what is known in the business as ''reverse mortgages'' in which the lender pays the homeowner. Under the terms of these mortgages, the homeowner is guaranteed monthly payments based on the equity they have in their homes until the day they die or move. When the house is sold, the lender is repaid through the proceeds. Government Help Sorting Out The Benefits Confusion abounds over the two major Government health care programs, Medicaid and Medicare, the Federal health insurance for the elderly, and their provisions for nursing home care. +Medicare pays for very limited long-term care. The plan pays for up to 100 days of skilled care in a nursing home after discharge from a hospital where the stay was at least three days, and in some cases it pays for skilled nursing care in the home for up to 38 days. +Medicaid covers long-term care, but only for those with relatively low assets or income. In many states it provides little support for home care. New York, a notable exception, will spend about $1.6 billion in state, Federal and local Medicaid funds this year to support about 80,000 people in their own homes. In addition, the state will spend $3.3 billion in Medicaid money to support an equal amount of patients in nursing homes. +By the Government's own admission, the system of requirements for Medicaid eligibility is bewildering. An outline of the requirements prepared by the Federal Health Care Financing Administration, the agency overseeing Medicaid, called it ''among the most complicated of any program administered by the Federal Government.'' +One problem is that eligibility requirements vary greatly from state to state. Essentially, Medicaid requires that assets not exceed a certain level, usually about $2,000, for an individual, and that income be low or squeezed by medical bills. For elderly people with savings who are facing long-term care in an institution, this means they must spend nearly all of it on that care before they can qualify for Medicaid. +Once on Medicaid, the person must use all income on the nursing home costs, except for a monthly personal allowance, ranging from $30 to $50. Medicaid covers the remaining costs of care. The nursing home must be willing to accept Medicaid's relatively low rates, a requirement that serves to exclude the more expensive institutions. + +Welcome Asset Change +A widely welcomed change in Medicaid came in 1988 with the passage of the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act. Although Congress repealed most parts of that act last December, provisions protecting the spouse of a Medicaid patient in a nursing home from impoverishment were kept. +Before passage of the new provisions, the spouse at home in some states could keep no more than $2,250 in assets and monthly income of only a few hundred dollars a month. In other states, the spouse living outside the nursing home could keep whatever assets and income were in their names, a situation that was usually a boon to the husband but a burden to the wife. +Now, the wife or husband whose spouse enters a nursing home on Medicaid is allowed to keep at least $12,516 in assets or half of their combined assets, whichever is greater, as long as her half does not exceed $62,580. Some states have simply allowed the elderly to keep up to $62,580, eliminating the formula. In addition, states must allow the wife to retain a minimum monthly income of $856; states can raise that limit to $1,565. + +Home and Auto Exempt +Because a home is often a person's largest investment, its fate is of particular interest to Medicaid recipients. The home is considered an exempt asset, along with automobile, furnishings and personal belongings, and the elderly person does not have to sell it and ''spend down'' the proceeds to qualify for Medicaid. +If the house was owned jointly and it is clear that the nursing home patient will never return home, most states will end the nursing home patient's Medicaid benefits once the spouse in the community dies. The patient would then have to sell the house and spend the proceeds on nursing home care until the assets were again below the eligibility ceiling. +But if the nursing home patient dies first or if the spouse in the community dies first, and the house had been tranferred to that spouse's name, the house is off-limits for calculating Medicaid benefits. +Out of pride or civic responsibility, some people would prefer to spend all of their own money on their care before going on Medicaid. Others want to protect as much of their assets and savings as possible and try to gain eligibility at the earliest moment. + +Finding Loopholes in Law +That approach is a subject of controversy. The concern is that the middle-class are finding loopholes in the law, often with the help of lawyers specializing in laws affecting the elderly, and are able to get on Medicaid while retaining their money. +''In the extreme,'' said Nancy M. Coleman, the director of the American Bar Association's Commission on Legal Problems of the Elderly, the question is, ''Why should people who have millions of dollars be able to give it away, go on the public dole, and have you and I pay for it?'' +Lawyers specializing in the field maintain that their counsel is aboveboard. 'It's no different than a tax attorney suggesting to invest in tax-free municipal bonds,'' said Daniel G. Fish, a partner in the Manhattan law firm of Freedman & Fish. ''What's unfair is that Medicare doesn't cover custodial care.'' +The law was toughened in response to the practice of giving assets to heirs before applying for Medicaid. All states are now required to look at a Medicaid applicant's financial transactions over the past 30 months, and if money was given away or assets were tranferred at less than fair-market value, then eligibility is delayed until the individual has paid the nursing home roughly the same amount that had been given away. It is still legal, though, to pay off a home mortgage any time before applying for Medicaid. Also, a house may be transferred to the spouse and in some cases to a child or sibling any time before applying for Medicaid. +Many experts in long-term care caution that it is usually preferable to be a nursing home resident who pays privately than a resident on Medicaid. +''There is a grand illusion that if you get poor, you don't have to worry, that the Government will take care of you,'' said Lynn Goldis, the assistant director of the Senior Care Network in Pasadena. ''But what being on Medicaid means is that you have virtually no choices. You can't shop around, and Medicaid patients are placed in semiprivate rooms.'' Private Insurance Tips for Buying Protection In the mid-1980's, the insurance industry began offering policies to protect people from the potentially devastating financial impact of long-term care. These have been controversial, both because they are expensive and because many of them have provided very incomplete coverage. +Considering whether to buy a private policy ought to begin in people are in their 50's, the experts said. The younger the person, the less costly the premiums, and many companies will reject an applicant in ill health. +Consumer advocates have written reams about the practice in which an insurance agent fails to explore an applicant's medical history thoroughly, only to deny a later claim for nursing home coverage because of a ''newly discovered'' condition that existed at the time the policy was purchased, like heart disease or diabetes. + +'Very Much Buyer Beware' +But the policies have improved, and some people who work with the elderly say that as long as there is no public insurance, private insurance is the best shield for assets for those who enter long-term care. ''It's very much buyer beware,'' said Mr. Linkous of the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging, ''but it's the only option until this country gets its act together.'' +Other experts are opposed to private insurance for long-term care. Robert M. Ball, 75 years old, who was Social Security Commissioner under Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, said he would rather rely on his own resources. ''The risk is slight enough and the premiums are high,'' he said. ''If anything happened, I could sell my house.'' +The policies are recommended primarily for those people who have a lot to protect. ''It's more for the person with some significant assets and an income of at least $20,000 a year,'' said Gary Claxton, a senior analyst with the American Association of Retired Persons. + +'A Very Personal Choice' +Even the industry's representatives agree. ''It's a very personal choice,'' said Susan Van Gelder, the associate director for policy development and research at the Health Insurance Association of America, a trade organization. +''Married couples may feel they don't need it now that the spouse in the community can retain a much higher asset level,'' she said. ''Likewise, if Medicaid is within someone's reach, we wouldn't want that person wasting money on private insurance.'' +To date, 1.5 million policies for long-term care have been sold, a vast majority of them to people over 65. About 120 companies now offer the policies. While institutional care is stressed, coverage of home care is increasingly available as well. In addition, a few companies are making long-term care insurance available to employees, usually through payroll deductions. + +Insurers Want an Investigation +But only about 4 percent of elderly Americans now carry private insurance for long-term care. Insurance industry officials believe that far more elderly people would buy it if it were not for the bad publicity. In fact, the Health Insurance Association of America has joined consumer watchdog groups that have documented abuses of policy sellers in calling for a Federal investigation. ''We don't want this market ruined by a few bad apples,'' Ms. Van Gelder said. +The Health Insurance Association of America said a policy offering four years of coverage with a daily benefit of $80 for nursing home care, a 20-day deductible and no protection against inflation, has an average annual premium of $483, if purchased at the age of 50; $1,135 at 65 and $3,800 at 79. +The association said the same policy, but with inflation protection, has an average annual premium of $658 if purchased at 50; $1,400 at 65 and $4,200 at 79. ''Generally, the rate you come in on is the rate you pay for the rest of your life,'' Ms. Van Gelder said. + +What Policies Should Include +Consumer experts say the best policies do not require prior hospitalization before covering nursing home care; cover both skilled and non-skilled nursing care; provide at least three to five years of coverage; pay for home care; guarantee protection against inflation, and include patients with Alzheimer's disease and other degenerative or dementing illnesses. +The answers on the application should be as detailed as possible to guard against later charges that a debilitating condition predated the signing of the policy. +''It's not for everyone,'' said Alan D. Bogutz, a partner in the law firm of Bogutz & Gordon in Tucson, Ariz., and the founder of the 650-member National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys. ''The very poor are going to qualify for Medicaid and the very rich will foot their own long-term care bills. It's the people in the nebulous middle who need to protect what they have who should consider it.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +SERIES: CARE OF THE ELDERLY: PRIVATE BURDENS, PUBLIC CHOICES - LAST OF FOUR ARTICLES. + +GRAPHIC: photos: One in five elderly people may need some long-term care and experts say this requires early planning. Denise Levine of the Eastchester (N.Y.) Office for the Aging counseled Dolores Malahan, 80 years old. (The New York Times/William E. Sauro) (pg. A1); Advice for those planning for old age is available, but not always readily. Lynn Goldis of the Senior Care Network of Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, Calif., counseled Olga Polovina on long-term-care options. (The New York Times/Michael Tweed) (pg. A16) + +TYPE: Series + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +117 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 30, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Getting the Facts on Long-Term Care + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 405 words + +Here is a list of organizations, books and consumer guides that provide information on long-term care: +''Thinking About a Nursing Home: A Consumer's Guide to Long-Term Care,'' a free pamphlet published by the American Health Care Association. Send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to the association, 1201 L Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005. +''Guide to Housing Alternatives for Older Citizens,'' by Margaret Gold, published by Consumer Reports Books, a 170-page paperback outlining numerous living arrangements and financing options. Send check for $12.95 ($9.95 for the book and $3 for postage and handling), listing ordering code 2263P, to Consumer Reports Books, 9180 LeSaint Drive, Fairfield, Ohio 54014. +''Who Can Afford a Nursing Home?'' and ''Communities for the Elderly, '' reprints from the May 1988 and February 1990 Consumer Reports magazine. Send $3 for each reprint to C/U Reader Service, 256 Washington Street, Mount Vernon, N.Y. 10553. ''Update: Paying for a Nursing Home,'' published last October, can be obtained by sending $5 for the entire October issue to the same address. Back issues are also usually available at public libraries. +''A Financial Guide to Reverse Mortgages,'' a list of the lenders nationwide offering mortgages that guarantee the elderly monthly payments for equity in their homes, published by the National Center for Home Equity Conversion. The guide is free. Also available, for $35, is an 83-page analysis. To obtain either, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to N.C.H.E.C., Suite 300, 1210 East Collage, Marshall, Minn. 56258. +''A Consumer's Guide to Long-Term Care Insurance,'' a free pamphlet published by the Health Insurance Association of America, with a list of companies that sell the insurance. Write to H.I.A.A., P.O. Box 41455, Washington, D.C. 20018. The American Association of Retired Persons. The group offers free guides, including ''Making Wise Decisions for Long-term Care'' (stock number: D12435); ''A Path for Caregivers'' (D12957); ''Nursing Home Life: A Guide for Residents and Families (D13063); ''Before You Buy: A Guide to Long-Term Care Insurance'' (D12893). Send a written request, noting the stock number, to A.A.R.P. Fulfillment, 1909 K Street, NW, Washington D.C. 20049. +Area Agency on Aging. To learn agency sites, write to the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging, 600 Maryland Avenue SW, Suite 208W, Washington, D.C. 20024. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +118 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 30, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Right Questions About Long-Term Care + +SECTION: Section A; Page 30, Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 438 words + +''Most of the things that are likely to help solve the long-term care problem are being tried in some pilot project somewhere, but we're really still at the very beginning.'' So said Dr. Burton Reifler of Winston-Salem, N.C., the operator of a pilot project, in the four-part New York Times series on long-term care that concludes today. +Dr. Reifler is half right. Much is being tried. But the nation is not really at the beginning. For better or worse, America already possesses a publicly funded system of long-term care called Medicaid. But it is a deeply flawed system. The challenge is to replace it with something more efficient and humane. +The long-term care problem, already daunting, will become more so as the elderly population increases. The number of elderly Americans needing some type of help is projected to grow from 6.5 million in 1987 to 19 million in 2040. +By far the preferred type of help is home care. Most elderly people want to stay in their own homes and communities, among family and friends. There is a growing need for publicly funded assistance to provide, for instance, home-care attendants and respite care to give family care-givers time off. Yet Medicaid tilts heavily toward skilled nursing care. Less than 3 percent of the $15 billion in Federal Medicaid expenditures this year will go to home care. The reason is that long-term care has been mistakenly conceived as a medical, rather than a social problem. +At the same time, Medicaid, the health insurance program administered jointly by Washington and the states, is available only to the poor. Middle-class patients must first ''spend down'' most of their assets. This forced poverty is the source of wide, understandable anguish. +A Federal commission named for the late Representative Claude Pepper recently offered proposals for reform. These carry a daunting $43 billion price tag and neglect the crucial issue of cost controls. But they would right the balance in favor of home care. In addition, the Pepper commission called for a social insurance guarantee to cover the first three months of nursing home care and fully protect income and assets. Those who recover -and at least half do so - could easily return home. +A third proposal covers long-term nursing home care. Those who use this benefit would have to begin spending down, but the allowances would be far more generous than Medicaid now sets. +As the Times series made clear, the long-term care debate will engage difficult issues of fairness, equity and political feasibility. While answers remain to be found, at least the questions are starting to reverberate. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +119 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 31, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +YOUR MONEY; +Who Must Pay Taxes Quarterly + +BYLINE: By Barnaby J. Feder + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 32, Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 844 words + +For most taxpayers, the moment for settling accounts with the Internal Revenue Service comes just once a year. But for the 10 percent required to estimate and pay taxes during the current year, April 16 is merely one of four deadlines - the others are the 15th of June, September and January. And with changes in the tax code brought about by the Tax Reform Act of 1986, and a growing elderly population, the number of people who pay quarterly is likely to grow. +Who are they? The Internal Revenue Service says it has no reliable profile, but tax experts agree that three groups account for the vast majority of quarterly returns: elderly people living largely on pensions; the self-employed, whose income is not subject to withholding, and people whose income comes primarily from investments. +The I.R.S. requires anyone who ends the year owing the Government $500 or more to estimate his or her total liability and make quarterly payments, unless a ''safe harbor'' requirement is met. The first safe harbor is that total tax payments have exceeded 90 percent of the final liability or have been equivalent to what was due the previous year. The agency assesses a quarterly underpayment penalty for those who fail to meet these requirements. +Thus, taxpayers who find they are liable for underpayment penalties with their 1989 returns, should consider making estimated payments in 1990 to avoid future trouble. Individuals estimating their Federal income taxes for the first time this year and who believe their taxes will come to $10,000 must pay at least $2,250 by each of the deadlines, for a total of $9,000, if the previous year's tax exceeded $10,000. If it was $8,000, the taxpayer could pay just $2,000 per quarter without penalty. +''It's normally pretty simple for individuals because you don't have to pay more than your total tax from the year before,'' said Bob Brown, a partner at KPMG Peat Marwick in Washington. ''Even if you win the lottery, you don't have to increase the quarterly payment beyond one-fourth of the previous year.'' +Many taxpayers must also pay state and local income taxes this way, although not necessarily on the same dates set by the I.R.S. for Federal returns, or by the same rules. +''You have to look at each state differently to see if there is liability for quarterly payments and what it is,'' said Steven Woolf, tax manager in the Washington office of Coopers & Lybrand. ''The taxpayer might have income from bonds that are exempt from the Federal calculations and not the state, or vice versa.'' +For one reason or another, many taxpayers get it wrong: For the 1988 tax year, 4.2 million were assessed $667.9 million in penalties, the I.R.S. said. About 151,000 taxpayers who appealed won a rollback of a total of $70 million in penalties. The penalty rates vary for each quarter and are pegged to the rates the Federal Government has to pay to borrow money during those quarters. +Retirees paying quarterly taxes tend to have the least trouble because most of their income typically comes from pensions and is fairly steady, tax experts say. Once a taxpayer has made quarterly payments, state and Federal tax authorities routinely include four addressed envelopes and vouchers with names attached in their annual mailings. +''All you have to do is attach the check,'' said Wilmer K. Benson of Gaithersburg, Md., a trainer in a program sponsored by the American Association of Retired Persons that offers free tax filing assistance to members. ''The biggest problem is getting people to mail them on time.'' One twist that may trip up the inattentive is that the April-to-June ''quarter'' covers just two months while the September-to-January ''quarter'' is four months. +Those who pay quarterly because of investment income now include some children younger than 14 years who, since 1987, have been required to pay the ''kiddie tax,'' which in essence requires that children's unearned income above $1,000 be taxed at their parents' tax rate. +The rules governing when such children's income can be included on their parents' return are complicated, but tax advisers warn that inclusion is barred when quarterly payments have been made on a child's behalf. +The principle behind the rules requiring quarterly payments is a simple one: the Government has a right to taxes as soon as income is earned. It exercises that right in most cases by requiring employers to withhold taxes from paychecks. In practice, many wage earners have more money withheld than they will owe from salary and other income as well, which allows them to claim a refund when they file their return. +Quarterly payments become necessary when there is no withholding, or where withholding is insufficient. Payments must be made in the quarter in which the income was made; taxpayers cannot make up for early low estimates with a big fourth-quarter payment. The amounts are reported on Form 2210. But taxpayers can arrange for extra withholding late in the year, for the I.R.S. treats withholding as though it had occurred evenly all year. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +120 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 3, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Seltz Journal; +Alsace: Its French-German Nerves Are Showing + +BYLINE: By ALAN RIDING, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 4, Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 912 words + +DATELINE: SELTZ, France + +The villages along this side of the Rhine all have German names, the architecture is pure Hansel-and-Gretel and, to the uninitiated at least, the local language sounds little different from that spoken in Berlin. Today, though, the population is as proudly French as it is Alsatian. +But from the time of Charlemagne 1,200 years ago, whenever central Europe has stirred, Alsace and neighboring Lorraine have had reason to worry. In wars, they were invariably caught in the crossfire. And in peace negotiations, they were always being annexed or bargained away. +Now, with sudden change sweeping Germany toward reunification, nerves are once again on edge here. Not that the region fears a new hostile takeover by a neighbor that last claimed this territory in World War II. It is simply that, as in the past, any convulsion in Germany is bound to shake Alsace and Lorraine. +Older people, not least men pressed into the German Army in 1940, are openly apprehensive about a resurgence of German power. ''I fear that in 20 or 30 years another crazy Hitler will appear and march again,'' said Charles Spangenberger, a 67-year-old retiree who fought in German uniform and then, after capture, was allowed to join the allied forces. + +Concern Over Money +More typically, in this medieval village of just 2,700 inhabitants economic uncertainty is of greater concern. Seltz is barely one mile from the Rhine, which marks much of the French-German border, and many of its adults work in German-owned factories on both sides of the river, while its shops and restaurants prosper thanks to German customers. This is no less true for dozens of other border towns and villages stretching northward from Strasbourg, the Alsatian capital. In the 14 communes that make up the canton of Seltz, for instance, 42 percent of the 19,500-member labor force work in Germany. +''If East Germans begin taking the jobs of Frenchmen, if the Deutsche mark weakens, if investment starts going to East Germany, all this could hurt us,'' said Hugo Kraemer, a schoolteacher and Deputy Mayor of Seltz. +This economic dependence on Germany has spawned conflicting attitudes toward Germans. ''We want their money, but we don't them to come over and buy up everything,'' said Laurent Timmel, 29 years old, who is involved in development projects in Seltz. ''We want to be French, but we secretly fear they are superior to us.'' +Having long been ruled by a succession of German princes, Alsace and part of Lorraine were acquired by France under the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. In 1870, it was absorbed anew by Germany. +The memory of what followed -the region was recovered by France after World War I, seized again by German troops in 1940 and liberated in 1945 - is still very much alive here. Many middle-aged Alsatians, for example, have or remember parents who were born and educated as Germans and never learned French. +''My mother, who is 89 years old, was a subject of the Kaiser,'' recalled Hubert Deiss, who was forced to join the German Army at the age of 14 and now owns a pharmacy in Seltz. ''She tells me, 'We have to watch the Germans carefully.' She does so in Alsatian, of course. She doesn't speak much French.'' + +Language Banned Again +During World War II, when Alsace was annexed rather than simply occupied like the rest of France, the French language was again banned here. Mr. Kraemer, who was born in 1941, said his parents were forced to register him as Hugo, rather than Hugues, because French names were forbidden. +But after the war, things were not much easier because the French authorities for many years banned not only German but also Alsatian, which is a German dialect and was viewed as a threat to Alsace's French identity. Today, German is taught from primary school and Alsatian is the lingua franca throughout the region. +More significantly, the area around Seltz, some 40 miles north of Strasbourg, is isolated between a forest and the Rhine and it attracted little French investment. Only after the German economy began to boom in the 1960's did affluence began to spill over into Alsace. ''About half our customers are Germans,'' said Rene Werlen, whose family owns the Auberge de la Foret restaurant here. ''For the same quality food, they'd have to pay twice as much in Germany. But this isn't all good. They also come over and buy up homes here and that pushes up prices for us.'' + +Some Are in Awe +Suzanne Knobloch, the 59-year-old owner of a gas station here, said, ''Many Germans now have a European point of view, but some Germans are still Germans. They are always proclaiming in a loud voice that they're the best.'' +But other local residents are clearly in awe of their neighbors. ''It's not that they work harder than us,'' Guy Callegher, the Mayor of Kesseldorf, said. ''It's just that they're more organized and determined.'' +As the European Community prepares to eliminate all borders after 1992, the asymmetry of economic power in this region will become more apparent. +''In a sense, we're like a developing country, providing raw materials, labor and entertainment to Germany,'' Mr. Timmel said of Alsace. +But if Alsatians have learned to live with this, recent political developments in Germany have also served to remind them of their geographical vulnerability. And lest anyone should forget, the crumbling concrete bunkers of the Maginot Line still stand nearby as mute testimony to the last time that Alsace changed hands. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: photo: History has shown that any convulsion in Germany is bound to affect Alsace. Near Seltz, a World War II tank sits on a bunker of the Maginot Line as a reminder of the last time Alsace changed hands. (The New York Times/Alan Riding); map of Seltz, France + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +121 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 4, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Twin Sisters Accused of Bilking Elderly Blind Man + +BYLINE: By NADINE BROZAN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3, Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 556 words + +Identical 25-year-old twin sisters endeared themselves to an elderly blind Brooklyn man and then bilked him out of his life savings, the police have charged. +In what they termed ''a classic example of the con games used against the elderly,'' the police said the twins, Martha and Mirna Villanueva of the Bronx, won the trust of the man by caring for him for three months, cooking and cleaning for him. +The Villanuevas were arrested Monday on charges of grand larceny and forgery and were arraigned yesterday in Criminal Court in Brooklyn. If convicted of the most serious charge, second-degree grand larceny, they could be sentenced to 5 to 15 years in prison. +They won the trust of the 84-year-old man, Rudolph Martin of the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, after a chance encounter on the street last December, the police said. The women ended up defrauding the man, who is legally blind, of $30,000 in savings and Social Security checks, and they stole his stamp and coin collections, which are said to be worth $20,000, the police said. + +A Ballroom Dancer +Mr. Martin said at a news conference yesterday at the 83d Precinct station house that he had been a professional dancer and had won many Harvest Moon ballroom dancing contests around the country, Asked about the women's duplicity, he said: ''What if you had guys taking very, very, very good care of you? They always had explainable answers for everything.'' +But neighbors and acquaintances became suspicious of the women and brought the situation to the attention of Detectives Robert A. Hopes and Dan O'Hagan of the precinct's Crimes Against Senior Citizens Squad. +When the detectives first approached Mr. Martin, he refused to concede that anything had gone wrong, even though he knew his bank accounts had been depleted, police officials said. The detectives persisted, and ''finally he blurted it all out and cried,'' Deputy Inspector Thomas Coyne said. ''Quite simply, they bled him dry,'' he said. + +'Spent All His Money' +The inspector said that the women persuaded Mr. Martin to give them some checks and that they stole and forged others. ''He gave them money to go to Florida to check on some real-estate deal he had there,'' he said. ''They never went but spent all his money on clothes and a car.'' +Although there have been reports that the women used crack and heroin, Inspector Coyne said yesterday that those reports could not be verified. +Mirna Villanueva lives at 1205 Southern Boulevard, while her sister Martha lives at 1147 Avenue St. John in the South Bronx. +Mr. Martin, a feisty man with a gift for cracking jokes, described how he had met the women. ''They saw me on the street, poking around with my stick,'' he said. ''A girl came up to me, helped me and said, 'Can you loan me $5 for car fare?' I said, 'If you're hungry, come to my apartment for bread and peanut butter.' Then they saw my 200 dance trophies, my books, my stamp albums, and they began to wonder who I was. We became friendly. I was going to marry one of them and take her to Europe.'' +One bank account still has $8,000 that cannot be drawn on until December, but everything else is gone. +Asked whether he was embittered, Mr. Martin shrugged. ''I feel very bad because now I'm all alone once again,'' he said. ''The walls don't answer back when I talk.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: photo: Rudolph Martin, left, arriving yesterday for a news conference at the 83d Precinct station house in Brooklyn with Detective Robert A. Hopes. Identical 25-year-old twin sisters endeared themselves to the 84-year-old man, who is legally blind, then bilked him out of his life savings, the police charged. (The New York Times/Steve Hart) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +122 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 6, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Books of The Times; +Suffocating in Society And Unable to Escape + +BYLINE: By Michiko Kakutani + +SECTION: Section C; Page 36, Column 1; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 1005 words + + +The Stories of Edith Wharton +Selected and Introduced by Anita Brookner +310 pages. Carroll & Graf. $18.95. +''What do you suppose such words as you've been using - 'society,' 'tradition,' and the rest - mean to all the life out there?'' a prospective suitor asks one of Edith Wharton's heroines. +She goes and stands by him at the window, and replies: ''Less than nothing, of course. But you and I are not out there. We're shut up in a little tight round of habit and association, just as we're shut up in this room. Remember, I thought I'd got out of it once; but what really happened was that the other people went out, and left me in the same little room. The only difference was that I was there alone. Oh, I've made it habitable now, I'm used to it; but I've lost any illusions I may have had as to an angel's opening the door.'' +This exchange from the devastating little tale ''Autres Temps'' succinctly sums up the theme that would preoccupy Edith Wharton throughout her life, namely, the idea of society, and its power to shape (and destroy) individual lives. As the survivor of a stifling, upper-class childhood, and a socially correct but emotionally and sexually barren marriage, Wharton was familiar firsthand with the suffocating wages of convention. And in the course of an exceptionally long and productive career, she would succeed in turning this painfully acquired knowledge into enduring fiction. +Like her two masterworks, ''The Age of Innocence'' and ''The House of Mirth,'' the strongest stories in this new collection deal directly - and often quite bluntly - with societal rules and their effect on the relationships between men and women. In ''Autres Temps,'' an aging woman named Mrs. Lidcote, whose divorce has made her the object of scandal, returns to America after some 20 years abroad. She discovers that changing times and mores have made it possible for her own daughter to survive a divorce and remarriage without the slightest social embarrassment; her own case, however, does not benefit from this revision in the rules. +''They only remembered that I'd done something which, at the time I did it, was condemned by society,'' she observes. ''My case had been passed on and classified: I'm the woman who has been cut for nearly 20 years. The older people have half-forgotten why, and the younger ones have never really known: it's simply become a tradition to cut me. And traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.'' Because she knows she is still a social pariah, Mrs. Lidcote renounces the possibility of beginning a new life with a man she's always liked, and instead makes plans to return to Europe alone. +Domestic or romantic happiness similarly eludes the other heroines in this volume. All too often, Wharton's women find themselves locked in loveless marriages that deprive them of emotional sustenance, or stuck in obsessive relationships with men who scorn their affection. In ''The Reckoning,'' a woman named Julia walks out on her suffocating first marriage, announcing that she believes in a ''religion of personal independence''; years later, she is shocked to hear her beloved second husband utter similar words, when he leaves her for a younger woman. +In ''Atrophy,'' an unhappily married matron named Nora hears that her onetime lover, Christopher, is severely ill; she risks her reputation by going to visit him, but is turned away by his sanctimonious sister. And in ''The Letters,'' a woman named Lizzie learns that her husband married her for her inheritance, but decides not to leave him: ''He was not the hero of her dreams, but he was the man she loved, and who had loved her. For she saw now, in this last wide flash of pity and initiation, that, as a comely marble may be made out of worthless scraps of mortar, glass and pebbles, so out of mean mixed substances may be fashioned a love that will bear the stress of life.'' +As usual, Wharton writes with knowing sympathy about women in turn-of-the-century America, who, like herself, were judged by their family standing, their marriages, their ability to oversee several households of servants. Her stories are flecked with telling details that reveal the snobberies and tastes of her characters (the Sevres candelabra, the Rose Dubarry porcelain, the orchids sent from High Lawn every morning), and bits of dialogue that instantly conjure up the vanished splendor of their lives. ''You won't know Leila,'' says one character with typical aplomb. ''She's had her pearls reset. Sargent's to paint her. Oh, and I was to tell you that she hopes you won't mind being the least bit squeezed over Sunday. The house was built by Wilbour's father, you know, and it's rather old fashioned - only 10 spare bedrooms.'' +Yet if Wharton's stories are minutely grounded in social observation, they owe their enduring power to her ability to portray the emotional consequences of life in this rarefied world: the difficulties of penetrating past the superficialities of dinner-party chit-chat, the difficulties of balancing passion and responsibility, freedom and decorum, independence and feminine solicitude. +When Wharton turns away from these themes and tries to write highly plotted entertainments, the results are more disappointing. ''All Souls''' - a ghost story about a woman who finds herself alone in an abandoned house with a broken ankle - is a heavy-handed and pointless exercise in suspense. And ''After Holbein'' - a ponderous portrait of two aging people whose senile fantasies coincide -seems peculiarly dated, like a second-rate O. Henry story; its ironic ending is both predictable and pat. +All in all, though, the British novelist Anita Brookner has done an admirable job of giving the contemporary reader a representative collection of Wharton's best short fiction. Though none of the tales have the subtlety and cumulative power of her great novels, the finest ones remain a tribute to her powers of psychological observation, her authority as a social witness. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: photo: Edith Wharton + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +123 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 7, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +3 Elderly People Die And 21 Are Injured In Miami Beach Fire + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 8, Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 349 words + +DATELINE: MIAMI BEACH, April 6 + +At least 3 people were killed and 21 injured early today as a fire destroyed a residential hotel filled largely with elderly retired people. +Nine residents of the building, the Fontana Hotel on Collins Avenue north of Miami Beach's Art Deco district, were still unaccounted for late this afternoon. +The authorities said that they had no evidence the nine were trapped inside and that they might simply have taken up lodging elsewhere after fleeing. +But Assistant Fire Chief John Reed said ''there's reason to believe the number of dead may grow,'' since many of the missing lived in the most heavily damaged section of the hotel. + +Evidence of Arson Sought +Fire Chief Branaird Dorris said his crews had entered the building six or eight times by this afternoon but that about 30 percent of the building had collapsed and those areas had not yet been searched. +Mayor Alex Daoud said the intensity of the fire, which broke out at 3 A.M., led investigators to suspect arson. Detective Jim Hyde said later that no evidence of arson had been found in the early stages of the inquiry, and Chief Dorris said residents had reported a water leak, raising the possibility of an electrical short-circuit. +The three-story, 102-room white stucco hotel had smoke alarms but no sprinklers, which will not be required under state law until October 1991. Fontana residents said the fire started near an elevator shaft at the front of the building. The authorities said two of the bodies were found in the lobby. + +Some Trouble With Alarms +The Fontana was built in 1951. The only major violation in its most recent city fire inspection, last September, involved the battery-powered alarms, which were replaced, officials said. +After the fire broke out, members of a Romanian immigrant family that has owned the hotel since May knocked on doors to give the alarm. +''I felt I was choking,'' said Rose Waller, who made her way out with three neighbors, but lost her daily medication. ''I couldn't see because already the smoke came into my room. I really couldn't see anything. It was blurred.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: At least three people were killed as fire swept the Fontana Hotel yesterday in Miami Beach. The intensity of the fire caused investigators to suspect arson. Twenty-one people were injured in the pre-dawn blaze. (Associated Press) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +124 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 7, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Creaky I.R.S. Is at a Crossroads + +BYLINE: By ROBERT D. HERSHEY Jr., Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 33, Column 3; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1144 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 6 + +The Internal Revenue Service is enjoying what it calls a ''highly successful'' filing season, with taxpayers filing earlier and their returns containing fewer mistakes than in the past. +But the improvement looks puny against a backdrop of longer-range fundamental problems. Indeed, the problems put the nation's tax system at considerable risk of breakdown. +''Our income-tax system as we know it is at the crossroads,'' Fred T. Goldberg Jr., the agency's Commissioner, told Congress in late March. ''Our laws, regulations and administrative procedures, coupled with our aging information systems, are placing an intolerable burden on the American public. + +Biggest Challenge Ahead + ''Without question, the greatest challenge of the coming decade is to make the system more workable for the tens of millions of taxpayers who are willing to pay what they owe, but cannot abide the complexity, uncertainty and administrative hassles they face in complying with the law and in dealing with the I.R.S.'' +The season is proceeding smoothly this year in part because taxpayers are filing earlier than they did in 1989. The I.R.S. is processing returns 7.3 percent faster, and the agency says it has raised its rate of accurate responses to telephone queries to 76 percent from 61 percent. +Moreover, the error rate involving taxpayers' math and I.R.S. transcription mistakes on paper returns has fallen to 14.6 percent this year, Mr. Goldberg said. He called that a significant improvement from recent years. Also, 3.8 million people as of March 30 have filed through the less error-prone electronic system. +The only setback seems to be that taxpayers seeking telephone assistance are increasingly hearing a busy signal. Mr. Goldberg said it was a conscious decision not to tackle that problem this year because of a budget shortfall. +Despite the telephone problem, officials are optimistic at the I.R.S., a 120,000-person bureaucracy that is responsible for collecting more than 90 percent of the revenues in the Government's trillion-dollar budget. +The big reason for this year's improvement may simply be good luck, said Mr. Goldberg, 42 years old, who took office last summer. Except for the repeal of the surtax on the elderly for catastrophic health care, there was no last-minute legislative tinkering with the tax code, he said. +But Mr. Goldberg said the future of the tax-processing system hinged on modernizing the agency's antiquated technology, an effort that has already suffered repeated false starts. Failure to do so would mean facing very serious shortages in computer capacity as early as the mid-1990's, he said. +According to Howard G. Rhile, a specialist at the General Accounting Office, ''I.R.S. still processes tax returns using design concepts from the 1950's, such as batch processing and magnetic tape storage on reels,'' a system relying heavily on labor-intensive paper processes and the use of planes and trucks to move information around the country, rather than a modern telecommunications system. +Former Commissioner Lawrence B. Gibbs has described I.R.S. technology as ''Ice Age.'' The agency has already spent $120 million toward modernization, but needs to spend several billion more. The agency's total budget this fiscal year is $5.5 billion. +The extent of taxpayer disenchantment cannot be measured precisely, but compliance with the law has clearly eroded. The I.R.S. estimates the so-called tax gap - the difference between what it should receive each year and what it actually receives -at $80 billion to $100 billion. The tax gap includes revenue lost from those who do not file returns and those who underreport their income and overstate their deductions. It does not include tax evasion from profits on selling drugs and from other illegal activity. +A contributing factor is the persistent decline in audits, which have now slipped below 1 percent for individual returns, a level so low that there is some talk in Congress of imposing a statutory minimum. But the I.R.S. contends that new methods used to determine who should be audited have made it more effective and worthwhile to go after a smaller percentage of taxpayers. + +Uncollected Funds Climbing + The I.R.S. also has an $87 billion inventory of receivables, money taxpayers admit they owe, but which remains unpaid. About $25 billion of this has for all practical purposes been written off. Representative J. J. Pickle, the Texas Democrat who heads the Ways and Means subcommittee that oversees the I.R.S., complained at a hearing last month that this backlog was up from about $5 billion in 1973 and only $18 billion as recently as 1981. +At the same time, the I.R.S. is collecting substantial amounts that the Government is not entitled to because many of its letters demanding additional taxes are erroneous. Money magazine, in its current issue, estimated that about half the 36 million notices mailed last year had such errors, but produced at least $7 billion of extra revenue from taxpayers who were too uninformed, intimidated or otherwise unwilling to mount a challenge. +An I.R.S. spokesman admitted such errors existed, but said some of them were in the taxpayers' favor and that the magazine's estimate was far too high. +It is widely agreed, however, that the I.R.S. makes many mistakes. Some are introduced into a taxpayer's return by clerical employees who transcribe data from returns filed on paper into the I.R.S. computer system. The agency's lower-echelon employees are poorly paid and often ill trained, and for the last 15 months, the I.R.S. has limited or frozen hiring in most activities. +The agency has had an $825 million shortfall over the last two years, meaning it has less money for enforcement programs. Jennie S. Stathis of the General Accounting Office observed that new enforcement money in 1991 will do no more than fill slots that have remained empty because of the hiring freeze. + +Piecemeal Modernization + And a General Accounting Office report in February on modernization of the tax system offers only modest encouragement that the I.R.S. is finally addressing its No. 1 challenge. +''Although the program has made significant progress since 1986, the extent of this progress is difficult to measure because the nature and scope of the program has not been clearly articulated,'' wrote Ralph V. Carlone, Assistant Comptroller General. +''At present, the program is a collection of independent modernization projects, most of which are intended to upgrade existing systems or provide additional computer capacity to meet near-term requirements. While many of these projects should yield badly needed improvement to I.R.S.'s tax-processing capability, the service needs to clarify how they will fit together into an integrated system that will meet the agency's needs into the next century.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: The I.R.S. is processing tax returns faster this year than in 1989. At the agency's processing center in Holtsville, L.I., clerical workers are handling incoming tax return forms (The New York Times/Michael Shavel) (pg. 33); Fred T. Goldberg Jr., the Commissioner of the I.R.S. (The New York Times/Michael Geissinger); Graph: individual tax returns examined each year by the IRS as a percentage of individual returns filed in that period, 1980-1989 (Source: Internal Revenue Service) (pg. 34) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +125 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 7, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +CONSUMER'S WORLD: Guidepost; +Banks and the Elderly + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 32, Column 5; Style Desk + +LENGTH: 215 words + + +Many banks are trying to lure older Americans' deposits by offering a variety of benefits that are not available to the other customers. Such depositors are viewed as a source of stable funds and a ready market for estate planning services. Some banks require fairly large balances for these accounts; others set no minimum, but depositors have to pay monthly fees. And some banks may require depositors to sign up for direct deposit of Social Security, payroll or pension checks. There is no national listing of banks that offer these special accounts; the American Association of Retired Perosns generally recommends using banks that are close to home and suggests phoning them for information. Here are some of the requirements, charges and services to consider in deciding on one of these accounts: + +Minimun Age: Most banks have lowered it to 50 years, from 65. + +Benefits and Serivces: Free checking; bonus rates on certificates of deposits, sometimes as much as a quarter of a percentage point higher; free credit cards and discounts on retail purchases and travel. + +Minimum Balances or Fees: Some banks require account balances ranging from $2,000 to $5,000. Others charge monthly fees of $7 to $10. + + + +Source: Bank Rate Monitor, North Palm Beach, Fla. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +126 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 8, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Marilyn Sternlieb Weds J. A. Stern + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2, Page 54, Column 4; Society Desk + +LENGTH: 183 words + +Temple Israel in Great Neck, L.I., was the setting last evening for the marriage of Marilyn Susan Sternlieb, a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Alan M. Sternlieb of Lake Success, L.I., to Jeffrey Alan Stern, a son of Mrs. Alfred Stern of Los Angeles and the late Mr. Stern. Rabbi Mordecai Waxman, Rabbi Hillel Silverman and Cantor Benjamin Siegel officiated. +Mrs. Stern, 29 years old, graduated summa cum laude from Connecticut College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and received an M.B.A. from New York University. Until recently, she was an accountant at Ernst & Young in New York. Her father, who recently retired as a managing director of Shearson Lehman Hutton in New York, is now a consultant to the firm. Her mother, Beverly Sternlieb, is an artist. +The bridegroom, 34, is a graduate of Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles. He is the president of the Stern Investment Company, a developer of industrial real estate and housing for the elderly in Los Angeles. His father was the chairman of the Alwin Management Company, also a developer of industrial real estate in Los Angeles. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Marilyn Stern (Fred Marcus) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +127 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 8, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +POSTING: Rising in Southampton; +Medical Offices + +BYLINE: By RICHARD D. LYONS + +SECTION: Section 10; Page 1, Column 2; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 200 words + +Construction has started on a $4 million medical office building next to the Southampton Hospital in Suffolk County, L.I. The 21,000-square-foot structure will be the fifth component in the Old Town Medical Village complex at the corner of Old Town Road and Meeting House Lane in Southampton. +The two-story building on a six-acre site was designed by Bob Cane of Buck/Cane Architects of Manhattan. The building under construction and the existing buildings in the complex are projects of Southampton Medical Properties in association with the DM Development Group, both of Huntington, L.I., which is headed by Mark Mashburn and Daniel P. Barbiero. +Offices in the new building range in size from 1,000 to 7,000 square feet and will rent for about $22 to $25 a square foot. Suites are also for sale at prices to be negotiated. The building is to be finished in August. +Later this spring the development group will begin construction of an $8 million apartment complex for elderly people who need some degree of assistance, such as having meals prepared for them. +This so-called congregate-care center will complement the existing Southampton Nursing Home. The center will have 46 apartments. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Rendering of the medical office building on six acres in Southampton, L.I. + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +128 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 8, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE SPRING REPORT; +Charity Begins At Home + +BYLINE: By Matthew L. Wald + +SECTION: Section 4A; Page 42, Column 2; Education Life + +LENGTH: 1655 words + +''PLANNED GIVING'' used to be a euphemism used by college fund-raisers when they asked elderly alumni to name the beloved alma mater in their wills. Then endowment managers waited a few years for nature to take its course. +No more. In the last few years planned giving has expanded into something much more sophisticated: a cluster of strategies that can increase the cash income of an elderly person, help finance the college education of children or grandchildren, and even take the place of an Individual Retirement Account for a middle-age person of high income, all while building the endowment of a college or other tax-exempt charity. +Planned giving, sometimes called ''deferred giving,'' does not compete with other forms of donation: ordinary cash donations still predominate both in number of donors and in total amounts given, followed by bequests in wills, experts say. But ''planned giving has taken off,'' according to Nathan Webber of the American Association of Fund-Raising Counsel, the trade association of professional fund-raisers. With the Tax Reform Act of 1986, fund-raisers say, planned giving is one of the few shelters remaining. In addition, because it gives the donor continued use of the money, it allows people with ordinary incomes to donate tens of thousands of dollars relatively easily. +The strategy can work many ways. Here's a typical example: +A member of the class of 1928 would like to help his college, preferably while he is still around to see his money at work. But he needs his savings to generate income in his later years. He faces another problem: much of his money is tied up in stock that has shown huge appreciation over the years, and on which a punitive capital-gains tax would be due if he sold. He can avoid the tax by living off the stock dividends, but dividend payments are typically 4 percent or less, while money funds or other investments pay 8 percent or more. +How to make a donation, and free the investment without paying the capital-gains tax? Enter the college development officer with a planned giving program. Rather than sell the stock, the alumnus is encouraged to donate the stock to the college, which in turn promises to pay him a regular dividend of, say, 8 percent on the market value of the stock. The college sells the stock and avoids the capital-gains tax, because the college is tax-exempt, and its professional money managers invest the money for profit. The alumnus takes a tax deduction based largely on the value of the donation, thus cutting his tax bill and freeing more cash. +''It's the only way I know of to double-dip the Government,'' said Jeffrey E. Reichel, director of development at Carleton College, referring to the avoidance of capital-gains taxes, the use of a tax deduction and, if the money is paid to someone in a younger generation, the avoidance of inheritance and gift taxes. + +Dozens of Variations +Colleges have devised dozens of variations. The return can be for the donor's lifetime or, as with a pension, can be structured to flow to a spouse or sibling after the donor dies. The money can be paid to a child or grandchild of college age to help with tuition, and will be taxed at the child's rate, which is low if the child is 14 or older. +The planned giving can also take a form similar to an I.R.A. The donor may be middle-aged and not need the income, and can specify instead that the money should be allowed to grow until the donor is ready to retire, when he or she will begin taking a return. +Like I.R.A.'s before the 1986 tax reform act, the donation is tax-deductible regardless of the donor's income. And like an I.R.A., the principal grows without taxes on the annual interest. Better than an I.R.A., there is no limit on the size of the annual contribution. In nearly all such cases, the principal eventually goes to the college. +''For a lot of these things you could go to an insurance company and buy an annuity,'' said John G. Lewis, the director of planned giving at Brown University. ''But you wouldn't be getting the tax deduction, and it wouldn't make you feel warm and fuzzy.'' +Insurance companies, however, would probably offer a better deal, say fund-raisers. Richard T. Jenkins, who developed the planned-giving program at Grinnell College in Iowa, a leader in the field, said that although there are benefits to the donor, using planned giving is a charitable act and therefore not the way to make the largest possible profit on an investment. +''One of my cardinal points,'' he said, ''is that when you're giving to a charitable cause, you don't come out whole.'' No matter what the return, he said, it is lower than what a commercial investment would offer. +Grinnell, like most colleges, logs gifts as the donors die. It takes in between $1 million and $1.5 million a year that way, roughly one-quarter of its total gift income. Often donations are in the form of farmland, which alumni without heirs have already stopped working. Giving it to Grinnell relieves them of management problems. +Brown University does not get offers of farms, but owns houses everywhere from Scottsdale, Ariz., to Vermont. The deeds are signed over in an arrangement that gives the alumnus the use of the house and a charitable deduction. +Brown takes in about $2 million a year, comprising 50 to 70 gifts, said Mr. Lewis; when he arrived at the campus 13 years ago, the annual take was about $200,000 from 10 or 15 gifts. If Brown undertakes a major fund-raising campaign in the next few years, he said, 30 percent of the money could come from planned giving. +Colleges still like unrestricted cash gifts, of course, but according to John B. Cummings, a consultant on fund-raising, ''if we have a prospect with a $100,000 capability, sometimes when we bring to the table the alternative of making a deferred gift, we start talking about the possibility of $500,000 or $1 million.'' This is because the donation does not cut income; indeed, it often increases it, because the college uses professional money managers, and because the donor gets a tax deduction, which effectively shelters other income. +The size of the deduction is based on the anticipated rate of return and the donor's life expectancy, as determined by the Internal Revenue Service; college development officers use computer programs to calculate the deduction allowed. Almost all colleges have specialists in-house or quickly available to work with potential donors, but most also stress that donors should review their plans with their own lawyer, accountant or other adviser. + +Unusual Benefits +''We want to make sure people understand the situation,'' said Thomas K. Marshall, vice president for development at Grinnell. ''We will not write it if we think there are better financial arrangements for them.'' +Occasionally, fund-raisers say, elderly alumni may pledge every last penny, and while traditional bequests can be rescinded at any time before death, most planned-giving programs are irrevocable. But they can also offer unusual benefits. Dr. M. Boris Rotman, for example, invented a test for cancer patients that determines which chemotherapy would be most effective, and wound up with a quarter of the stock of a company that is seeking to commercialize the process. But Dr. Rotman, a faculty immunologist at Brown for the last 25 years, was displeased. +Other scientists, he reasoned, would doubt his objectivity in the laboratory, now that he had $500,000 worth of stock whose value depended on how well his test was accepted. He was also being pressed by the company to make a variety of financial decisions. Because the company was a start-up, its shares are not publicly traded and cannot be sold until 1992, and even if he could sell, since his cost basis was zero, the entire sale proceeds would be subject to tax as a capital gain. +''I have never done anything except buy Treasury bills,'' said Dr. Rotman, 65 years old, who complained that the financial affairs were keeping him out of the lab. So he gave it all to Brown. Dr. Rotman received an immediate tax deduction. When Brown sells the stock, he will receive a regular dividend check. The university hopes the idea will appeal to other faculty members. + +EXTRA CREDIT + +An Advanced Example of Planned Giving +Problem: Kevin and Shelly Sweeney, with one daughter entering Carleton College and the other beginning her senior year of high school, faced $105,000 in tuition bills in the next five years. Mr. Sweeney, who works in the Hennepin County, Minn., recycling plant, and Mrs. Sweeney, who teaches Spanish, had acquired a two-story building in St. Paul several years earlier with two apartments in it, which they planned to sell to pay for their daughters' education. They also owned 100 shares of stock in the International Business Machines Corporation, as a ''rainy day fund.'' The combined value was nearly $89,000. But selling those assets would lose them $16,000 in capital gains tax. They could have held onto the stock and real estate, but the annual return was only $3,600. +Solution: A charitable remainder term unitrust, a form of planned giving. A unitrust pays each year a fixed percentage of the trust's fair market value. ''Term'' means for a specified period. ''Charitable remainder'' means that in the end, Carleton keeps the principal. +* The Sweeneys gave the assets to Carleton, which paid the children (whose tax bracket was lower than their parents') $74,000 over five years. The donation gave the parents a tax deduction of $28,700, which saved them $11,500 in cash. Avoiding the capital gains tax saved them $6,500 in cash. Investing the cash that was saved in a 7 percent tax-free municipal bond will raise an additional $17,300 over 10 years. +The total benefit, a combination of cash savings and income, was $109,600, according to Carleton, enough to send the junior Sweeneys through school. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +129 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 9, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Money Isn't Everything in Greyhound Strike + +BYLINE: By PETER T. KILBORN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1610 words + +DATELINE: CHICAGO, April 8 + +With almost daily episodes of sniper fire, windshield smashing or threats to the substitute drivers, the Greyhound strike is about as nasty as strikes get these days, and it does not seem that it should be. +The 6,300 striking drivers want more money. But those at Greyhound's Midwestern hub here, as in many other cities, readily find temporary and part-time work driving trucks and other companies' buses, so complaints of mortgages going unpaid and children unfed are rare. +Nor do many strikers complain about Greyhound's health benefits or pensions, concerns that have led other workers to join picket lines. + +A Threatened Way of Life +Something else is at work here: pride and a way of life. Greyhound was the king of the highway, assuring low-budget travelers a safe trip home for funerals and holidays. Drivers counted themselves among the aristocrats of organized labor - captains of aluminum-sheathed behemoths who kept peace on board, mastered the secrets of urban and rural streets and gave old people a hand. +''You're the boss,'' said John Noha, a 44-year-old driver who has been with Greyhound for nine years, resting in the Chicago strike headquarters from picketing. +''Passengers recognize that uniform as a person they can trust,'' said Bill Coker, 44, a driver for three years. ''They don't go to management. They don't go to the supervisor in the terminal. They come to us. It gets in your blood.'' +So Greyhound's effort to hold down the drivers' wages strikes not only at their paychecks, but also at their pride, a pride that is further wounded by the company's paying top rates to substitute drivers with just a few weeks' training. Furthermore, management has promised the substitutes that their jobs are permanent, threatening the strikers with not just lower pay, but no pay at all. +Over the weekend, rumors circulated that the drivers were mounting an effort to save their jobs through an employee takeover of the company. ''We've been informed that there's a buyout going on and that there might be an announcement on Tuesday,'' said a labor leader here who asked not to be named. +Jeff Nelson, a spokesman for the Amalgamated Transit Union in Washington, said, ''We may be having an announcement Tuesday.'' But he said he did not know the subject of it. +Fred G. Currey, the chairman of Greyhound, said he had not heard the reports but added, ''This business is not for sale.'' +The company's goal in the labor dispute is to keep down its costs, especially wages. It faces acute competition for passengers from railroads and airlines, and very thin profits. +But pay is a complex concern in this industry. A decade ago, veteran drivers' incomes exceeded $30,000 a year, putting them comfortably in the middle class, and the pay made the jobs something that other drivers aspired to. Now for the first time drivers realize they may never see that kind of pay again. +Moreover, management has humiliated the men and women on the picket line in showing that it can readily find substitute drivers who, after three or four weeks' training, have shown that they can deliver their passengers, less expertly, but deliver them nevertheless. And management is paying the top wages to substitute drivers, rather than requiring that they spend a decade working up to it, and it has unequivocally assured them that their jobs are permanent. The more drivers Greyhound hires as the strike, now in its fifth week, persists, the fewer union drivers will be able to rejoin Greyhound. +The company is telling the strikers, ''You're nothing but a bunch of dumb bus drivers,'' said Lenase Brown, 45, a driver for 10 years. ''I'm more hurt than mad.'' +Ronald J. Peters, a professor of labor and industrial relations at the University of Illinois, said, ''There's a feeling of a loss of status, a loss of input, among people who have given the best years of their lives to the company.'' + +Powerful Forces at Work +Drivers for Greyhound, like airline pilots and skilled industrial workers, and their employers as well, have become victims of forces much larger than they. They have been caught in the maw of economic transitions, from a more benign time when unions would win higher wages and benefits, and employers would raise prices and fares to pay for them. In transportation, Federal deregulation broke the process by creating greater competition in fares, and in industry foreign competition had much the same effect. +The Greyhound strike is also a reminder, if one is needed, of something else: that labor unions have lost much of their membership and power in recent years, that crossing a picket line to fill a striker's job is not automatically regarded as an unspeakable act. +The changes in business and industry have been especially harsh on Greyhound. Passengers rode Greyhound 10 million miles a year a decade ago, but with deregulation-provoked cuts in airline fares, traffic had dropped to nine million pasenger miles in 1983. To help arrest the decline, the drivers accepted a 25 percent cut in their basic wage, from 40 cents per mile they drove to 30 cents. But the decline persisted, to six million passenger miles in 1986. +Three years ago, Mr. Currey, the current chairman, and other investors bought the ailing line, and the drivers agreed to live with the 30-cent wage another three years in return for bonuses for safe driving, gains in passenger traffic and Mr. Currey's assurances that they would eventually regain their status of the nation's best-paid drivers as the company grew. But the bonuses and gains in ridership have been small. Passenger miles had climbed to 7.5 million last year, and after two years of huge losses, the company recorded a minuscule $730,000 profit last year. +When contract talks that are now on hold began late last year, the drivers expected the 40-cent wage to be restored. Instead the company offered more performance-related incentives and later, in an effort to avert the strike, it offered a three-cent raise. The drivers now contend that they were deceived by the man they call ''Drop Dead Fred'' on their picket line buttons and signs. +''He made promises,'' said Mr. Coker. ''He said, 'If you help me bring this company back to where it's making money, I'm going to pass on the money to you.' It was a boldfaced lie.'' +Edward M. Strait, president of the Amalgamated Council of Greyhound Local Unions in Phoenix, said: ''He promised these people he would take care of them come the contract. Boy, he sure did.'' +Mr. Currey answers that what is happening to the drivers' wages in today's economy ''is a shame.'' But he said, ''The union has formally stated time and time again that what the company can afford to pay is irrelevant, that the fact that Greyhound wages are higher than all but a handful of over-the-road operators is irrelevant.'' + +Shots Fired at Buses +The tensions of the strike are being played out across the company's route system, with at least 20 shootings, four involving buses based in Chicago; shots at terminals, including one in Chicago, and numerous other incidents, many of which never appear on a police department log. +Here as in many other cities, the courts have enjoined strikers from harassing the substitute drivers, and their passengers. But intimidation is constant. The other day here, a picketer stood outside the terminal with a video camera on his shoulder filming drivers coming and going. +''I left here headed for Indianapolis,'' said a replacement driver. ''I heard a noise,'' she said. ''I thought the toilet lid in the back had dropped. I got to Indianapolis, and they discovered that the bus had been shot in the bathroom window.'' +One replacement, a tall, muscular former truck driver, said he was getting ready to retaliate. ''I'm not going to run,'' he said. ''I'm tired of those clowns.'' +Union people, who insist that they do not condone the violence, say they are skeptical that their members have anything to do with such incidents. ''It could be the company hiring goons,'' said Bill Pearsall, a driver and Chicago business agent for the Amalgamated Transit Union. He said the replacement drivers could be doing it, too. +But the only person arrested and charged so far in a shooting incident, a man in Connecticut, is a striking driver, and Mr. Pearsall acknowledged that some drivers are angry enough to retaliate. +In one of the latest incidents, a replacement driver was charged yesterday in Washington with carrying a dangerous weapon. Officials said the suspect, Charles E. King, 45, brandished a rifle Saturday during a confrontation with strikers at the Greyhound terminal after discovering that his car had been vandalized. +The recruits say they intend to stay with Greyhound. ''I was driving a truck for a steel outfit,'' said Bob K., 58. ''I was making about $500 gross every two weeks. This is about $1,200 gross. This is the best paying job I've ever had.'' +They also say they believe their jobs are secure. In 1983, the previous owners of Greyhound hired replacement drivers during a strike and assured them they could stay, but after the strike ended they were let go. +Edward A. said that he left a machinist job for Greyhound and that he had ordered from Greyhound $301 worth of uniforms. Other drivers interviewed said they had ordered uniforms, too. +Greyhound now makes about half as many trips as usual from Chicago. Passengers interviewed said they did not often encounter more than jeering as they pulled in and out of terminals. The bus is still the cheapest way to go, so they put up with the jeering, Greyhound's truncated schedule and with the new drivers' inexperience. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: photos: A striking driver picketing outside a Greyhound station in Chicago. (pg. A1); Greyhound drivers say they have lost more than their salaries in the strike; they have lost the pride they took in their jobs. In Chicago, strikers set up an office in a school bus outside the Greyhound terminal. (The New York Times/Jonathan Kirn) (pg. A14) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +130 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 11, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Study Finds the Will to Live Can Work + +BYLINE: Reuters + +SECTION: Section A; Page 19, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 337 words + +DATELINE: CHICAGO, April 10 + +Willpower can delay death briefly when people want to go on living to celebrate major events in their lives, researchers say. +A study of elderly Chinese women in California found abnormally low death rates in the week before a major family festival, followed by an equally abnormal rise in natural deaths once the event had passed. +Researchers at the University of California at San Diego said the finding appeared to verify an earlier study, which found that some Jews were able to delay their deaths until after Passover observances were finished. + +Why Chinese Were Chosen +''Indeed, there is some preliminary evidence indicating that there is also a dip/peak around the observance of an individual's birthday or other personally meaningful occasion,'' the researchers said in a report being published Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association. +The California study, by Dr. David P. Phillips and Daniel G. Smith, involved the deaths of Chinese women 75 and older during the time of the Harvest Moon Festival, an important celebration in which the oldest woman in the family directs younger women and serves as the focal point for a holiday meal. +The Chinese festival was chosen, the researchers said, because it occurs on different dates each year, runs for a set time and provides an easy comparison with deaths among non-Chinese in the period. +The study found that in the week before the festival there were 35.1 percent fewer deaths among the Chinese women than among non-Chinese in the same age group. In the week after the festival ended, they said, the death rate among the Chinese women was 34.6 perent higher than would normally be expected. +While it is possible that something relating to the event itself, like overeating or stress, contributed to the post-holiday deaths, the dip in fatalities before the event cannot be so explained, they said. +''The current study suggests that positive psychological processes have beneficial effects on mortality,'' the researchers said. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +131 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 11, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +A New Generation Begins Computing + +BYLINE: By ANDREW POLLACK + +SECTION: Section C; Page 1, Column 1; Living Desk + +LENGTH: 1356 words + +DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO, April 10 + +Hugh Bell decided he was behind the times when he saw his great-grandson, who is in elementary school, using a computer. ''I watched that little guy last Christmas and he was making Christmas cards,'' said Mr. Bell, an 83-year-old retired marine engineer. ''I looked and I thought to myself, 'You should learn this too.' '' +So Mr. Bell enrolled in a computer class. He is one of thousands of older Americans learning to use a machine that is usually associated with teen-age whiz kids. +Leading the effort to train older adults is Seniornet, a nonprofit organization at the University of San Francisco that runs 28 computer centers around the nation and in Canada for people 55 and older. Seniornet also runs a telecommunications network; participants anywhere in the nation can send messages to one another using personal computers hooked to the telephone system. +Since it was founded in 1986, Seniornet has trained 4,000 elderly people to use computers and 700 people have signed up for the telecommunications network, also called Seniornet. +The John and Mary R. Markle Foundation in New York, which is devoted to the use of communications technology to promote democracy, is the chief financial supporter of Seniornet. +Lloyd N. Morrisett, president of the foundation, said: ''It's important to keep senior citizens in touch with the rest of society, and to do that they need modern forms of communication. Computers allow them the chance to communicate broadly and do it at their own pace.'' +Mary S. Furlong, executive director of Seniornet, said old people ''have kind of been left out of the computer revolution,'' and added, ''They have a lot to say, and the tool is a powerful way for them to communicate.'' +Ms. Furlong, an associate professor of education at the University of San Francisco, said older adults are ideal candidates to be computer users because they often have lots of time, and minds that are more active than their bodies can be. She started Seniornet after writing, with Greg Kearsley, a book called ''Computers for Kids Over 60.'' +Few elderly people use computers now. A survey commissioned by the Markle Foundation found that only 9 percent of adults 60 to 69 years old own computers, and only 3 percent of those over 70. By contrast, about 20 percent of all American households have computers. +There is a $25 membership fee for Seniornet, but classes are free to members. The computer centers, which are usually paid for by local sponsors, are in community centers, nursing homes, schools and eye-care centers. In the New York metropolitan area, the only site is at Stahl Eye Associates in Garden City, L.I. +Seniornet officials say the classes are very popular. When a Seniornet center opened at Honolulu Community College in Hawaii, ''They thought they would have maybe 30 people, and about 400 showed up,'' said Mabel McConnell, president of the Kokua Council of Senior Citizens Education Fund, which helped organize the center. +Those who learn to use computers say they write letters, keep their household records, catalogue collections and track investment portfolios on them. A retired nurse in Honolulu got an office job based on her ability to use the computer. Another Seniornet graduate there is publishing a newsletter about beekeeping. +In Syracuse, Seniornet members are volunteering at an elementary school, teaching second and third graders to use computers. Another man in Syracuse used his computer to make inspirational greeting cards. Until his death recently he sent the cards to people in hospital. ''They'd all be different,'' said Howard Hamm, 82, a retired engineer who is active in the Seniornet center at Syracuse University. +For some people, mastering the machine is more important than what they do with it. ''The easiest way to keep a young mind is to keep the darn thing active,'' said E. B. (Jiggs) Clark, 72, a semiretired investment adviser in Seattle. +Like Mr. Bell in San Francisco, Mr. Clark also took up the challenge when he saw a child operating a computer and asked him how it worked. ''He looked up at me, only 6 or 7 years old, and asked me, 'What are you, some kind of a dummy?' '' Mr. Clark recalled. +Provoked, Mr. Clark, who had read an article about it, wrote to Seniornet. A few weeks later a box containing a computer that had been donated to Seniornet arrived at his door. Seniornet gave him the computer as part of an experiment sponsored by Apple Computer Inc. With almost no information to go on, Mr. Clark set up the machine and became so enthusiastic that he helped organize a center in Seattle. ''Now I'm even teaching computering,'' he said. He advises new students, ''Jump in the water and just start to swim.'' +Others use the Seniornet network, which allows them to send and receive electronic mail. There are also public forums, in which members write comments on public issues or personal experiences to be read by everyone else on the network. Recent discussions have ranged from computer software to health-care legislation. The network was once even used for grief counseling, with the electronic equivalent of Dear Abby helping others cope with the loss of a loved one. Now the network is starting a personal counseling service. +When Seniornet began, Ms. Furlong said, there was some fear that use of computers would increase the isolation of the elderly. The image that came to mind was of the teen-ager locked in his room with a computer, shunning human contact. But for the elderly, who often cannot leave home easily, computers can increase contact, she and others said. +''By the time you get to be my age, there isn't much family left and friends begin to drop by the way,'' said Joan Elswit, 66, of Oakton, Va., a Seniornet user. ''There are all the contacts you want on the network.'' +Computer use can be the ''basis for forging a lot of friendship ties,'' said Tora K. Bikson, a researcher at the Rand Corporation who did a yearlong study of two groups of employees of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power were asked to devise a company retirement plan. One group used computers and the other held meetings or telephone discussions. The group that could exchange messages on a computer network worked together more closely and became better friends than the group that could only meet in person or talk on the phone, Dr. Bikson said. +Still, not all old people find computers enticing or unintimidating. On the Seniornet telecommunications hookup the discussions are dominated by a handful of active users. Ms. Furlong attributes this to shyness, saying many people are afraid to type comments that can be seen by everyone. +Others say cost is a problem for old people on limited budgets. It costs $15 to join the network, plus telephone charges of $6.90 an hour evenings and weekends, or $16.70 on weekdays. Even more significant is the cost of a computer, which many people might not be able to justify. +''It's not necessarily that they're afraid,''said Robert Harootyan, an executive at the American Association of Retired Persons. ''It's just that a lot of people don't see any reason to have one.'' Many people have home computers for their jobs or for their children's school work. For most elderly people those reasons do not exist. +Mr. Morrisett of the Markle Foundation said there is a lack of software tailored to the elderly, like tax preparation programs that deal specifically with pensions. Another important use could be to provide health-care information by letting older people communicate electronically with their doctors, said Dr. Gari Lesnoff-Caravaglia, executive director of the University Center on Aging at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester. +Back at the San Francisco computer class, Hugh Bell and a classmate sat in front of an Apple computer, struggling to put Mr. Bell's resume into the computer. ''Between the two of us, we're finally getting something on the board,'' said Mr. Bell. ''By the end of six weeks, I'll be able to punch out something.'' +Seniornet headquarters are at 399 Arguello Boulevard, San Francisco, Calif. 94118; 415-750-5030. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: photo: Rosemary Brandon, left, conducting a computer class for the elderly at the University of San Francisco (The New York Times/Terrence McCarthy) (pg. C4) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +132 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 13, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +SPORTS OF THE TIMES; +For Polonia, A New Leaf And Season + +BYLINE: By George Vecsey + +SECTION: Section A; Page 23, Column 1; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 776 words + +The Milwaukee County House of Corrections wasn't that bad, Luis Polonia said: ''Never a jail, never behind bars. It was like a medical center.'' +But his 27 days of community service and 27 nights of supervision last fall were enough to convince him that he could handle anything that came up around a baseball stadium. +Pinch-hitting? That would be all right, too. Waiting around a dugout was preferable to the private hell when he wondered if the Yankees or anybody else would want him. +''I went through a lot of bad things; I don't think anything can hurt me,'' Polonia said yesterday, after he came off the bench in the eighth inning to stroke a single to put the Yankees ahead in their 6-4 opening-day victory over Cleveland. +He never expected the public to have a great deal of sympathy for him, after his conviction on a morals charge involving a 15-year-old girl, following evidence that he was warned the girl was under age. +He used to say he was set up, but yesterday he merely said: ''I know who can cause you trouble. I get ready to go to the ball park. I get ready for the street. I know what can happen to you at the bars and at the ball park. I try to stay out of trouble.'' +He is 25, and a ball player, and at one point he hadn't known if he would ever get back in uniform, on anybody's bench. +''Just happy to be here,'' he said, making the cliche sound fresh. +The fans and the sports pages and the air waves all love a comeback story. Polonia didn't expect he would get a cereal endorsement or the lucrative speaking engagements, but then again, he had never gotten them before. +He was Luis Polonia, and he had always hit wherever he played, including Oakland and the Yankees. But then he was painting and fumigating the homes of elderly people as part of his sentence, and wondering if George M. Steinbrenner 3d would want him back. +There are all kinds of double and triple standards with the Yankees. There was a tribute to Billy Martin yesterday, with a hushed crowd of 50,114, solemn music, both teams lined up on the baselines, hats in hand, and on the scoreboard, film highlights of the late manager, including clips of Martin kicking dirt at the umpires. +With all the mixed messages, what would be the future of a somewhat marginal player who had been convicted of a crime, who had been publicly criticized as an athlete who should have known better? +''I didn't expect anything after the season,'' Polonia said yesterday. ''I know how it goes.'' He sounded almost surprised that in the sequence of his serving his sentence, of his early release to the Dominican Republic when his visa ran out, of his arthroscopic surgery in New York, the Yankees never called him in. +''Nobody ever said nothing,'' he said. ''My thinking was, I was gonna be out of here. I wanted to stay here so bad. It was a hard time.'' +The Yankees never scuttled him, and then he was back in spring training, where not even the sight of Dave Winfield, back from his year's absence with back surgery, could ruin Polonia's joy at being back with the Yankees. +''I know I can be starting,'' the outfielder said. ''But I understand. It is a long season. I have to prepare myself.'' +He heard a lot of things from the stands late last season, after being charged with the offense. Somehow he had batted .326 in the last month of the season, and may have discovered a reservoir of toughness he never knew was there. +The fans were fine in the abbreviated spring training. If he heard anything unpleasant yesterday, he did not share it with the media. He is too young, with a .293 batting average, to be satisfied with the bench. But yesterday the bench looked fine. +''Since they said, 'Play ball,' I had my bat in my hand,'' Polonia said. ''It's the best way to stay ready. Once in a while, I come inside and stretch and swing a bat, just to stay ready.'' +When the Yankees batted in the eighth, Polonia twisted and turned on the bench. With runners on first and third, Bucky Dent sent him up to pinch-hit against the new relief pitcher, Doug Jones. +''I know this guy,'' Polonia said. ''His best pitch is the changeup. I try to stay back and swing at the first pitch. I said to myself, 'You cannot fail. You don't want to let Bucky down.' '' The first pitch was the change-up, and Polonia stroked it sharply into center field for a run, and when he hit the base, he turned 90 degrees and permitted himself just the slightest bit of a pump with his right hand. +He wouldn't call himself the hero yesterday, or a hero in general. He was just a hitter who had been ready to come up hacking. And on opening day for Luis Polonia, that was quite enough. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: photo: Luis Polonia (The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +133 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 13, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Review/Theater; +50's 'Fanny' Is Revived With All Due Sentiment + +BYLINE: By STEPHEN HOLDEN + +SECTION: Section C; Page 3, Column 5; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 716 words + +''Fanny,'' Harold Rome's musical adaptation of Marcel Pagnol's dramatic trilogy, ''Marius,'' ''Fanny,'' and ''Cesar,'' is a quintessential 1950's musical of the more solemnly romantic sort. +Set in the old port of Marseilles, it tells a sentimental story of star-crossed young lovers, Marius and Fanny, their illegitimate child, and the crusty old men who guard their secret and remain their benefactors during the years Marius is off at sea. The show's pace is leisurely, its plot thick, its moral climate of delayed erotic gratification and self-sacrifice very much of its time. +When the show opened on Broadway in 1954, the roles of Panisse, the rich, elderly sailmaker who marries Fanny to give her unborn child a father after Marius has left, and his best friend, Cesar, who is also Marius's father, were portrayed by Walter Slezak and Ezio Pinza. In the Paper Mill Playhouse's revival of the show, they are played with charm and gusto by two distinguished theater veterans, George S. Irving and Jose Ferrer. +With its large cast, exotic French setting and semi-operatic score, ''Fanny'' is a show that requires a fair amount of grandeur. The Paper Mill Playhouse revival, directed by Robert Johanson, is unstintingly luxurious. Elaborate sets designed by Michael Anania evoke the architecture and narrow streets and courtyards of the French port city. The interior settings also offer a richly atmospheric sense of life in different strata of French society. +In the second-act birthday party scene, a colorful circus of jugglers, tumblers and clowns surges onto the stage, and acrobats descend from the stage into the aisles to twirl on ropes unfurled above the heads of the audience. In its pomp and pageantry, the show's physical production is of old-time Broadway quality. +The visual opulence is matched in scale by the expansive, open-hearted performance of Mr. Irving as Panisse, the wealthy sailmaker who so yearns for a son that he is happy to bring up the boy, Cesario, so long as no one finds out the truth of his paternity. The portly actor gives a full and moving portrait of a man whose misplaced vanity doesn't preclude an enormous generosity of spirit. And the show's dramatic high point is his enthusiastic and touching rendition of ''Panisse and Son,'' in which he celebrates the realization of his dream of having a male heir. +Mr. Ferrer's portrayal of Cesar, though likable, doesn't quite capture the bonhomie of a character whose signature song, ''Welcome Home,'' extols the comforting familiarity of household furniture. And his small, craggy bass-baritone is not on a level with the rest of the voices in the cast. +Mr. Rome's sweepingly romantic score for the show includes four big ballads - ''Fanny,'' ''I Have to Tell You,'' ''Restless Heart'' and ''Welcome Home'' - that nearly match in eloquence Rodgers and Hammerstein songs from the same era. Although John Leone and Teri Bibb, the attractive young singers portraying Marius and Fanny, sing the love songs competently, their performances lack the extra fillip of ardor that might have heated up the love story to a sizzle. +Ultimately, however, the flaws of this revival are minor. Under Mr. Johanson's sure-handed direction, the production maintains an energetic flow that is enlivened by a strong ensemble, choral singing and smooth choreography by Sharon Halley. One senses the tug of the sea and the slow passing of time in a city that is deeply set in its ways. + +Love Quadrangle + +FANNY, by S. N. Behrman and Joshua Logan, based on the trilogy of Marcel Pagnol; music and lyrics by Harold Rome; directed by Robert Johanson; scenic design, Michael Anania; costumes, Gregg Barnes; lighting, Mark Stanley; sound, David R. Paterson; hair, Paul Germano; assistant to the director, Larry Grey; production stage manager, Peggy Imbrie; musical director, Jim Coleman; choreographer, Sharon Halley. Presented by the Paper Mill Playhouse, Angelo Del Rossi, executive producer; Mr. Johanson, artistic director. At Millburn, N.J. + +Cesar . . . Jose Ferrer +Panisse . . . George S. Irving +Fanny . . . Teri Bibb +Marius . . . John Leone +Honorine . . . Karen Shallo +Cesario . . . Jonathan Gold +M. Brun . . . Mitchell Greenberg +The Admiral . . . Paul Kandel +Escartifique . . . K. C. Wilson + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +134 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 14, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Medicaid Tail, Hospital Dog + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 22, Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 382 words + +New York City hospitals have good reason to complain about Albany's efforts to limit payments under Medicaid, the Federal-state health insurance for the poor. Medicaid payments are part of a broader hospital reimbursement policy best considered apart from the artificial forces of pressing budget deadlines. +Washington sets guidelines for Medicaid eligibility but the states, which share in the cost, have much discretion over reimbursement schedules. With New York's share of Medicaid hospital costs now exceeding $1 billion annually, state budget cutters proposed new limits that would save about $45 million. +Hospital administrators are particularly upset about $17 million in reductions for debt service on capital projects. State officials respond that hospitals need to share in the budget pain, and that the proposed limits are more than fair. +The merits of that argument are less important than its timing. Sizable as they are, Medicaid payments account for only 17 percent of all hospital bills statewide. About 43 percent are paid by private health insurance plans or workers' compensation. Medicare, the totally Federal health insurance for the elderly, supplies the remaining 40 percent. +Albany wields enormous power over the 43 percent paid by non-Medicare insurers, along with the 17 percent paid by Medicaid. For years the State Health Department has engaged in a running dispute with New York City hospitals about the adequacy of rates. A new debate on the issue is set to begin once the budget is approved. +That background adds to the hospitals' concern: to enact the new limits on Medicaid now would strengthen the claim of the other insurers to the same relief when the new reimbursement bill comes up. That would magnify a hospital loss of $17 million into one of more than $200 million, the hospitals say, and with no further effect on the state budget. +As it creates or destroys incentives, hospital reimbursement determines the shape and quality of medicine as well as its cost. Such policy ought not to be enacted piecemeal - and especially not in the panicked context of a budget crisis. The bulk of hospital reimbursements have nothing to do with the state budget. Acting prematurely on Medicaid would make a small tail wag a difficult and formidable dog. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +135 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 14, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +About New York; +Together Again, These Sly Foes Of Nazi Resolve + +BYLINE: By DOUGLAS MARTIN + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 25, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 773 words + +They came as old men, shoulders stooped, smiling through wrinkles. They exchanged hugs, sipped drinks and recalled that ancient and glorious time when they were brash young comrades-in-arms. +Their arms were a perfect fluency in German, a devilish knack for dirty tricks and a fervent hatred of Hitler. They were veterans of the United States Army's psychological warfare unit, specifically those who landed at Normandy and fought right on through to the Elbe. +In leaflets and over loudspeakers, the propagandists' job was to proclaim that the Germans were ''eingekesselt'' (surrounded). If they knew what was good for them, the message went, they would surrender. +The fact, one of the self-described ''psych boys'' confessed at their reunion last Saturday, was this: ''Very often, we were 'eingekesselt' instead.'' +That this was no ordinary gathering was apparent from the moment guests arrived at Harvey's Chelsea Restaurant at 108 West 18th Street, burst through the front door and demanded in German accents to know where the party was. In a seemly conspiratorial tone, a bartender answered: ''Go outside. Go to the first door on the left. Press the button. Someone will come down on the elevator to get you.'' +On reaching the disappointingly unmysterious banquet room, these masters of manipulation - most of them Jews born in Germany -encountered a cash bar and two enormous photographs. +One showed their revered leader, the late Hans Habe. The immaculately attired Mr. Habe had flaming red hair, which everyone assumed was dyed, and a red-hot temper when it came to wandering prose. ''I want to see the red thread!'' he would scream in English or German if a propaganda script lacked organization. +The other was of the late Benno Frank, who as an enlisted man never called an officer by anything but his first name. +This patron saint of psych warriors was shown sprawled on an overstuffed couch, perchance dreaming in one of five languages - all said to sound remarkably the same when he spoke them. +''He's on duty, but not in the conventional Army way,'' said Peter Wyden, an author who organized the reunion partly in whimsical elegy to his own youth. Pointing to a young man in a photo, he said, ''I was 19 going on 16.'' +This was a most peculiar outfit, so obscure that many thought its members were medics. Its 800 or so members were officially known as Mobile Radio Broadcasting Companies, and members brought communication skills honed in academia, entertainment and the media. Mr. Habe, for instance, had broken the story that Hitler's original name was Schicklgruber. +''Ours wasn't the right way, the wrong way and certainly not the Army way,'' Mr. Wyler said. ''Ours was the psychological warfare way.'' +''Our motto was be unprepared,'' declared Arthur Jaffe, commander of the Second Mobile Radio Broadcasting Company, the unit of most of the 35 veterans in attendance. +The group included Eugene Fodor, the travel expert; David Berger, famed for his ''Music from Germany'' show on radio, and Glenn Birnbaum, owner of Mortimer's restaurant. Another member was William S. Paley, the retired CBS chairman. He sent regrets. +Grand stories were told. How Mr. Frank in a memorably mellow broadcast persuaded all 30,000 Germans in a submarine base to come over. How one of the first psych boys to land after D-Day interrogated a German prisoner he had known as a school boy. How another arrived on Omaha Beach laden with leaflets written in German only to discover that the forces threatening his beachhead spoke Polish. +There were tales of taking loudspeakers behind enemy lines, so-called ''hog-calling missions.'' Scenes were shown from a documentary being prepared by German television -including a delicious segment in which a bigwig testifies that F.D.R. had no idea what psychological warfare was and cared less. +One aging Bronxite sought to unload his copy of a very rare edition of Mein Kampf. A man told of carrying the news to a Hollywood starlet that her beloved Otto had found greener pastures, only to find she was delighted. +A sense of mortality hung in the air. In recent years, many have died. ''We all see the end of the road,'' said Mr. Wyden, who fears this reunion, the group's third, will be its last. +A toast came from Stefan Heym, remembered by all for his daring propaganda schemes and derided by a few for returning his medals to President Truman before defecting to East Germany in the early 1950's. Mr. Heym, who came back from Berlin for the reunion, spoke of soldiers fading away. +He raised his glass high. ''To the memory of those who have done their fading already,'' he said. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +136 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 16, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Health Insurers Increase Rates For the Elderly + +BYLINE: By MILT FREUDENHEIM + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 5; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1444 words + +The cost of private health insurance for the elderly is rising sharply, straining the budgets of millions of people who live on Social Security checks and fueling demands in Congress and the states for tighter regulation of this insurance. +The monthly cost rose at least 20 percent this year for many types of insurance intended to cover the gap between what the Federal Medicare program pays for medical services and what doctors and hospitals actually charge. Some premiums for such ''medigap'' insurance increased more than 50 percent, according to industry surveys and the General Accounting Office. +Critics of the insurance industry in Congress and spokesmen for consumer advocacy groups say many of the increases in medigap rates were exorbitant. But private insurers say they had to raise the rates, in part to pay for catastrophic illnesses that would have been covered under a 1988 law that was repealed in December. + +Surge in Spending +The increased costs are also a result of the continuing surge in spending on health care, and in some cases, the failure of insurers to raise rates enough in 1989 to cover higher medical costs, industry spokesmen say. +But many of the elderly, a majority of whom depend primarily on Social Security, say they are hard pressed to pay the extra costs. +''It's outrageous,'' said Mary Enos, a 79-year-old widow in New Bedford, Mass., who lives on ''a little over $500 a month.'' Her Blue Cross premium increased 84 percent to $71.30 a month, from $38.83. The $32.47 medigap increase buried the $18 cost-of-living increase in her Social Security check. +Medigap insurance is currently purchased by about 22 million of the 29 million Americans aged 65 or older. +Among the costs that medigap covers and Medicare does not are the first day in a hospital and all or part of the ''deductible'' that patients pay to doctors before Medicare insurance begins paying. Some medigap policies also cover prescription drugs, added charges by doctors and the cost of a hospital stay that extends beyond the Medicare limit. + +People Without Coverage +Of the seven million elderly people who do not have medigap insurance, about 3.2 million of them with low incomes are eligible for state Medicaid benefits, but nearly four million rely on Medicare alone. +Because the 1988 law covering catastrophic illnesses was repealed, at least 17 million elderly ''will be doing worse,'' said Thomas Rice, a health economist at the University of North Carolina. They will have to pay higher premiums for medigap insurance, if they can afford it, or go without coverage for catastrophic illnesses and prescription drugs. +On the other hand, about 1.7 million elderly Americans with incomes of $37,000 or more, who would have had to pay an extra $800 each with their Federal taxes under the catastrophic-care law, are faring better now that the law has been repealed. Many of them are fully covered for such illnesses by former employers and do not need such coverage; others among them were reluctant to drop their own insurance when the law took effect, and were essentially paying twice for the same benefits. + +Increasing Costs +But even people with medigap policies must often pay part of their doctor, hospital and prescription-drug charges, which have been increasing faster than the overall inflation rate. +The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, a group of 70 mainly nonprofit plans with 8.5 million medigap policyholders, said premiums were up 24 percent on average for 1990 after increasing 8 percent in 1989. The Prudential Insurance Company of America, which sells medigap insurance to three million members of the American Association of Retired Persons, raised its medigap rates by 40 percent on average in 1989 and plans a 17 percent increase in July. Blue Cross-Blue Shield and Prudential are by far the largest medigap insurers. +The General Accounting Office, a research arm of Congress, said the average monthly cost to elderly policyholders is now $69.96, or about $840 a year, compared with $58.52, or $702, in 1989, an increase of 20 percent. +One of the steepest increases was in Massachusetts, where Blue Cross-Blue Shield raised monthly premiums 67 percent to $85.87 for its most widely purchased medigap policy. (Mrs. Enos's $71.30 policy provides fewer benefits.) 'I Was Very Shocked' +In Wisconsin, Frances Hels, 74, a retired executive secretary in Waterford, is also struggling with a medigap increase. ''I was very shocked at the first of the year to get a raise of about $20 a month to $90.33,'' she said. Mrs. Hels, a widow, lives on ''a very small pension and mainly Social Security.'' +The G.A.O. said about half the added medigap charges could be attributed to the repeal of the catastrophic-care law. +In Massachusetts, Blue Cross attributed 38 to 41 percent of its increases to the Medicare pullback. Thirty-two percent was for higher health-care costs, especially for prescription drugs, and increased use of health services, said Susan M. Leahy, a Blue Cross spokeswoman. The insurer said it also had to make up for medigap losses in 1989. +In New York, Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield has just raised monthly medigap rates 29 percent, to $45.15, after two years at $35. John Kelly, a spokesman for Empire Blue Cross, said two-thirds of the increase was to replace benefits in the repealed law. + +Increases Criticized +Advocates for the elderly and consumers and their supporters in Congress criticized the increases. +''In many instances the increases are far in excess of what can be justified,'' said Representive Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. +Gail Shearer, manager of policy analysis for Consumers Union, a group that advocates more Federal regulation, said: ''Medigap prices seem to go up whether Medicare benefits expand or contract. Consumers are confused.'' +Most states are already revising laws and procedures regulating medigap insurance. Congress is expected to take up several bills this session that would increase Federal supervision of medigap insurance, a $16 billion business. Most states require that insurers must pay out 60 percent of medical-insurance premiums for individual medigap policyholders and 75 percent of the premiums for group medigap policyholders. The remainder may go to marketing and administrative costs, profits and to make up for past losses, commercial insurers say. +Among the bills being prepared or already introduced in Congress are ones that would require public hearings and a review before states approve medigap increases. The bills would also raise the percentages of revenues that must be paid out in benefits and standardize descriptions of competing medigap policies so purchasers can better compare them. + +Insurance Counseling +A bill sponsored by Senator David Pryor, Democrat of Arkansas, would help states to establish insurance counseling for the elderly in programs like those operating in California and North Carolina. Other proposals would prohibit selling medigap policies that duplicate each other or overlap. Insurers could be punished if their agents did not check on the existing coverage of elderly consumers and sold them unneeded policies. +''Our feeling is that Congress is going to do something this year,'' said Alan K. Richards, a Washington lawyer with the Health Insurance Association of America, an insurer group, which wants the states to remain in control of insurance regulation. +A stronger Federal regulatory role is supported by both the American Association of Retired Persons, which fought unsuccessfully to preserve the catastrophic-care law last year, and the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, which helped defeat it. + +State Requirements +Only a handful of states review requests for medigap rate increases; most rely on the standard requirements governing how much of the premiums must be eventually paid out for medical care. Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California, said the payout minimums should be raised to 70 percent and 85 percent. +But Alan P. Spielman, a government-relations director with Blue Cross, said many plans were already paying out 90 percent of medigap premiums. +Earl R. Pomeroy, president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, said his group would meet Tuesday to consider changes to make it easier to compare competing medigap policies. Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Minnesota already require standard language and formats. +Seven states have adopted other consumer protection recommendations approved last year by the state commissioners group. Similar rules are under consideration in 30 states. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +137 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 16, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +NEWS SUMMARY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 2, Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1361 words + + +International A2-9 + + +Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney has rebuffed a suggestion by the Soviet Union that the Bush Administration's new strategic arms proposal be broadened to include constraints on sea-based missiles. Page A1 + + +The Army is proposing increased cuts in troops + A14 + + +The K.G.B. headquarters in Yerevan, the capital of the Armenian republic, was attacked by about 1,000 protesters late Saturday, the official Soviet press agency said. One man was killed in the violence. A8 + + +Poles celebrated their first Easter under democracy after 45 years of Communist rule, and the mood seemed more a celebration than a protest. A1 + + +Pope John Paul says a prayer for Lithuania's success + A8 + + +In Old Jerusalem, Christians and Muslims protest A3 + + +The plan to remove internal borders in the European Community after 1992, long viewed as the most important symbol of new European unity, is being threatened by disagreements over how to deal with migration, asylum, drugs and terrorism. A9 + + +Economic discontent in China is serving as a subtle, subversive political force. Diplomats and economic analysts doubt this will propel the Chinese masses onto the streets soon, but the authorities seem nervous. A1 + +Beijing has been excluded by the U.S. from an international conference on air pollution and climatic change, even though the Chinese burn more industrial coal than any other country, officials said. B7 + + +A U.N. panel of scientists sees substantial warming of Earth + B7 + + +The Nepal Parliament was dissolved by King Birendra after a weekend of increasingly angry protests over the pace of democratic change. A1 + + +Bomb near Hindu temple kills 5 in Northern India + A6 + + +Peru's novelist turned politician, Maria Vargas Llosa, will announce today whether he will stay in the presidential race. His candidacy has been crippled by a lack of support from millions of slumdwellers. A3 + + +Physician from Mexico arrested in drug agent slaying + A2 + + +National A10-15, B7-8 + + +Many senators seeking re-election this year are financing their campaigns largely with donations from outside their home states. That is a profound change from the traditional practice of relying on contributions from constituents. A1 + + +The cost of private health insurance for the elderly is rising sharply, straining the budgets of millions of people who live on Social Security checks and fueling demands for tighter regulation of this insurance. + A1 + + +U.S. to study ways to combat frailty among the elderly + A15 + + +A major extension of antitrust laws is being considered by the Administration. The extension would strike at American subsidiaries of foreign companies that are found to engage in price-fixing and other anticompetitive practices in their home markets. D1 + + +The poverty rate for young children is rising in the United States, an analysis of Federal population figures shows. Nearly one of every four children under 6 in the nation is poor, the study found. A10 + + +The plentiful and cheap water that made the American West and Southwest rich, powerful and populous has now turned scarce and costly to find. A fourth straight year of drought has now descended on the region. B8 + +Veteran of Earth Day 1970 looks to a new world + B8 + + +Fuel leak at shelters is reported + B7 + + +The sexually oriented businesses that are banned in Cincinnati can be found across the river in Newport, Ky., and other towns in a region of Kentucky that once was known as ''Cincinnati's playground.'' A12 + + +Profits for Mapplethorpe estate + C13 + + +A tiny newspaper in North Carolina, The Washington Daily News, owes its Pulitzer Prize for distinguished public service to its editor's curiosity, combined with relentless digging by two of his reporters. A10 + + +Aliens who want to stay in the U.S. but do not have the appropriate papers are trying to take advantage of openings in the legalization program that resulted from court rulings. The issue has led to allegations of fraud. A13 + + +Women who undergo bypass surgery for heart disease are much sicker and slightly older than men who do, a study says. The finding might explain why those women were more likely to die as a result. A15 + + +Kidney peril found in the pain reliever Ibuprofen + A11 + + +Special schools for teaching are proposed + A12 + + +Indiana journal: In a court for youth, judgment by peers + A10 + + +Regional B1-6 + + +The busiest precinct for homicide in New York is the 34th, at Broadway and 183d Street, which last year had 99 of the record total of 1,905 killings in the city. This year the Police Department's statistics for the precinct are running well ahead of that. B1 + + +A livery cab driver was shot to death Saturday night in the Fordham section of the Bronx. Investigators said the killing, the fifth of a livery cab driver in five weeks, was not connected to the previous incidents. B1 + + +Livery car companies grew where there were few cabs + B4 + + +The Bensonhurst murder trial begins today. Difficulties with witnesses and other frustrations have left the prosecution with a weakened case and a broad swath of unanswered questions that are certain to be exploited by the defense. B1 + + +Religious leaders in Teaneck, N.J., grappled with how to reconcile the celebration and ritual surrounding Easter and Passover with the anguish and confusion their parishioners have experienced in the aftermath of the fatal shooting there. B1 + + +Renovators running out of abandoned buildings + B5 + + +Falling revenues force counties to trim services + B2 + + +Weather Service runs into opposition to L.I. radar plan + B3 + + +Business Digest D1 + + +SportsMonday + + +Baseball: Yankee bullpen does it all C3 + + +Expos top Mets C4 + + +Reds go to 5-0 C4 + + +Column: Berkow on baseball + C4 + + +Basketball: Celtics defeat Knicks C11 + + +Boxing: Unshowy style carries Nunn C2 + + +Football: How free are free agents? C1 + + +Golf: Player wins PGA Seniors Championship C5 + + +Hockey: Capitals eliminate Devils C1 + + +Patrick fills Leetch's skates C11 + + +Features: SportsWorld Specials + C2 + + +Question Box C4 + + +Marathon: Olympic champion taking on Boston C8 + + +Racing: Closing in on D-Day C7 + + +Tennis: Graf captures title C5 + + +Arts/Entertainment + + +Running the other endowment C13 + + +A Soviet play in America C13 + + +Theater: ''Day Trips'' C15 + + +Music: ''Siegfried'' at the Met C14 + + +Joe Arroyo at the Palladium C15 + + +Word and Image + +The Westies' rise and fall + C17 + + +TV and the world's strife + C16 + + +''Shannon's Deal,'' NBC C18 + + +Obituaries D10-11 + + +Greta Garbo died in New York City. The enigmatic and elusive star of some of Hollywood's most memorable romantic movies of the 1930's and a 50-year focus of curiosity and myth, Miss Garbo was 84 years old. A1 + + +Spark M. Matsunaga, Senator of Hawaii + D10 + + +Sabicas, guitarist + D10 + + +Harold T. Fuerst, led preventable disease bureau + D10 + + +Editorials/Letters/Op-Ed + + +Editorials A18 + + +Europe's new home + +The New York debt, unrolled + +Killing the messenger + +Topics: Truth in budgeting + +Letters A18 + + +Tom Wicker: Bush and the blacks A19 + + +William Safire: Earth Day's ''planetism'' A19 + + +Howard Husock: Housing the poor - without subsidies A19 + + +Alan Tonelson: Foreign policy by referendum A19 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +138 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 16, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +U.S. to Study Ways To Combat Frailty Among the Elderly + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 15, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 247 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 15 + +The Government will sponsor a three-year, $2.9 million research project intended to reduce or prevent frailty in the elderly, two Federal agencies announced today. +The agencies, the National Institute on Aging and the National Center for Nursing Research, said sites in eight states would be used for the project. +More than 1,500 volunteers will participate in the program, which will include exercises ranging from the Oriental practice of tai chi to aerobic dance, education to make older people aware of accident risks and rehabilitation to improve physical conditioning. +''The new trials highlight the fact that frailty and injuries are not the inevitable outcome of aging,'' said Dr. T. Franklin Williams of the aging institute. ''Instead they are problems for which we have now found some very viable solutions.'' +Among people over age 75, more than 32 percent are unable to climb stairs, 40 percent are unable to walk two blocks, 7 percent cannot walk across a small room and 22 percent cannot lift 10 pounds, the institute said. Forty-two percent of nursing home residents cannot get out of a chair without help, it said. +Dr. Ada Sue Hinshaw, director of the National Center for Nursing Research, said the project may help identify frail people who have treatable or preventable disabilities. +The project's research teams are based in universities or hospitals in Atlanta, Boston, New Haven, San Antonio, Seattle, Portland, Ore., Iowa City, and Farmington, Conn. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +139 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 16, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Review/Theater; +Bearing the Tragedies of Old Age + +BYLINE: By MEL GUSSOW, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section C; Page 15, Column 1; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 773 words + +DATELINE: HARTFORD, April 12 + +Jo Carson's ''Day Trips'' is personal rather than issue oriented, but it raises troubling questions about family responsibility and about the prolongation of life by artificial means. Ms. Carson, a Texan storyteller and author, approaches her sensitive subject without sentimentality or its opposite, cynicism. +The play, which is having its East Coast premiere at the Hartford Stage, is evidently heartfelt, but it does have certain limitations. Small in scale if not in resonance, ''Day Trips'' is a mosaic of failing memory rather than a full-fledged dramatization. It lacks the poetic intensity of a play like Arthur Kopit's ''Wings,'' and it has an indefinite destination. After the last word, the audience waits for a conclusion or a coda, which, it is suggested, can only come in life. +By not reaching for a statement, ''Day Trips'' distinguishes itself from case history or docudrama. The play should speak to many families, in particular to people who are forced to assume parental control of their aging parents when serious infirmity strikes and death seems to be a hovering but distant presence. +Detailing a woman's concern for her mother who has Alzheimer's disease and for her grandmother who suffers from her own delusions, the play moves from present to past, from reality to recurrent dreams. In performance, a potentially fragmented play achieves fluidity. +Michael Engler, the director, and four talented actresses help to clarify the sometimes confusing time span. The scenery by Loy Arcenas removes the play from rigid domestic confines, creating an impressionistic indoor-outdoor setting in which a bedroom door leads directly to a pastoral landscape. +The granddaughter is portrayed by two actresses, Susan Pellegrino as the character in the play, Suzanna Hay as storyteller. In Ms. Carson's hands this method is made to seem organic, as two voices for a single character alternate in acting out a tale of prolonged devotion. +The mother (Isa Thomas) shows all signs of advancing Alzheimer's. Her memory is devastated and her reactions range from the most withdrawn to sudden, willful outbursts of anger. To add to the granddaughter's predicament, the grandmother (Helen Stenborg) combines stubbornness with a selective forgetfulness. +She insists on living alone, barricading herself behind a wall of suspicion (with three locks on every door) while making excessive demands on her relatives. Her granddaughter is forced to become, in the author's words, a double ''care keeper.'' Shuttling (on day trips) from one matriarch to the other, Ms. Pellegrino scarcely has time to assert her own identity. Neither older woman is remotely helpful. While they are severely lacking in compassion, the granddaughter is unable to be less than dutiful. +If anything, the grandmother, who still has areas of lucidity, is more of a hindrance than her more disabled daughter. In the play's most moving performance Ms. Stenborg enhances her character by finding a humor beneath the feistiness, as in her grudging acceptance of a favorite cake. ''I guess we have to eat some of it,'' she says tersely while conveying that the cake is one of the rare delights of her declining years. +In one of the play's amusing though anxious interludes, Ms. Pellegrino chauffeurs Ms. Stenborg from drugstore to drugstore, searching for the pharmacist who last filled her prescription. Though the younger woman is increasingly frustrated by the experience, she realizes that the repetition of remembered ways is what keeps her grandmother sane. +The need to maintain the status quo, which is, of course, an impossible status to bear, reaches a crisis when the grandmother is hospitalized and the doctors refuse to consider her as a terminal patient. The old woman wants to die; they insist on preserving her life. Agonizingly, the granddaughter wonders, ''Can death be a gift?'' +One mark of the play's acuity is that such a question seems selfless. It is not the granddaughter who wants to free herself from a burden, but a parent who, in Samuel Beckett's phrase, simply wants to embrace ''the close of a long day.'' + +AT JOURNEY'S END - DAY TRIPS, by Jo Carson; directed by Michael Engler; set design, Loy Arcenas; costume design, Catherine Zuber; lighting design, Pat Collins; sound design, David Budries; dramaturge, Greg Leaming; production stage manager, Barbara Reo; assistant stage manager, Ruth E. Sternberg. Presented by Hartford Stage, Mark Lamos, artistic director; David Hawkanson, managing director. At Hartford. + +Pat...Susan Pellegrino +Storyteller...Suzanna Hay +Ree and Irene...Isa Thomas +Rose...Helen Stenborg + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: photo: Susan Pellegrino in ''Day Trips.'' (T. Charles Erickson) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +140 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 16, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +BUSINESS DIGEST + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1, Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 642 words + + +THE ECONOMY + +The cost of health insurance for the elderly is rising sharply, straining the budgets of millions of people who live on Social Security checks and fueling demands for tighter regulation of this insurance. The monthly cost of many types of ''medigap'' insurance, which helps the elderly and disabled to pay medical bills not covered by Medicare, rose at least 20 percent this year. Some medigap premiums increased more than 50 percent. [Page A1.] + +The Administration may extend antitrust laws to strike at American subsidiaries of foreign companies that are found to engage in price-fixing, the carving up of markets and other anti-competitive practices in their home markets. Under the plan, the Government could file antitrust lawsuits against the foreign-owned companies for damage their collusion might cause to American concerns operating abroad. [D1.] + +The bond market has been ignoring the decline in oil prices. Analysts say the market's caution is justified, with prices unlikely to remain low over the long term. Consequently, any drop in inflation resulting from the weakness in oil is likely to be short-lived and is unlikely to have much effect on interest rates. [D1.] + +INTERNATIONAL + +The trade agreement between Canada and the United States, intended to eliminate virtually all tariffs and duties by 1999, is already having some unexpected grass-roots side effects, promoting a wide array of bilateral business and civic partnerships. Provincial and state governments are pursuing several new joint economic-development programs. [D1.] + +Communism has experienced a success in rural Czechoslovakia. Over the last 20 years, the yield of Czechoslovak farms has doubled to reach Western levels. [D4.] + +The war against apartheid is proving to be good business for manufacturers of the politically relevant T-shirt. [D4.] + +COMPANIES + +There were a number of factors behind H. J. Heinz's decision not to buy tuna trapped in nets that could kill dolphins. The company was extensively lobbied by environmental groups. In addition, there was an internal corporate debate that was ''almost theological in tone,'' the company's chairman said. [D1.] + +THE MEDIA BUSINESS + +The decision to cancel the publication of a book that addresses subjects of acute sensitivity to Time Warner has set off a bitter dispute about who killed the book and why. [D1.] + +A French advertising conglomerate has made a striking move to establish itself as an international marketer. The BDDP Group of Paris is buying a 40 percent stake in Wells, Rich, Greene for an undisclosed sum. Randall Rothenberg: Advertising. [D1.] + +There is a newspaper explosion in Poland. More than 500 daily, weekly and monthly newspapers have been started since the Solidarity movement came to power last year. The papers are trying to defy the conventional wisdom that most new publications are unlikely to survive. [D8.] + +The Deutsch ad agency has taken on the toughest client it has ever had - itself. Deutsch is beginning an unusual campaign to sell its brain power to prospective clients. Ad Scene. [D8.] + +ABC has made a serious move toward prime-time leadership next fall with the unexpected success of ''Twin Peaks.'' [D8.] + +TODAY'S COLUMNS + +Senator Joseph R. Biden is involved in a bitter confrontation with the nation's leading Federal judges over his plan to make the judiciary more accountable for keeping the court system efficient. Stephen Labaton: Business and the Law. [D2.] + +Why does UAL stock continue to trade around $160 a share, even though the company and its unions value their latest buyout agreement at $201 a share? Traders say ''too many people got burned'' when the previous deal for the airline company collapsed. Market Place. [D6.] + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +141 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 19, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +San Francisco Journal; +And Yet Again, the Earth Trembles For a Tiny Band of 1906 Survivors + +BYLINE: By JANE GROSS, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14, Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 967 words + +DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO, April 18 + +In the gloom before dawn, while most of the city slept on, undisturbed by memory or geology, a dwindling band of survivors of the 1906 earthquake assembled today to commemorate the day the earth shook and the sky burned. +Their 5:12 A.M. sojourn at Lotta's Fountain, a turn-of-the-century gathering spot in downtown San Francisco, is an annual event here, the first in a daylong series of festivities. But this year it was celebrated with particular fervor. +It followed by 12 hours the six-month anniversary of October's temblor, a mere 7.1 on the Richter scale of ground motion, as compared with the ruinous 8.3 shudder 84 years ago. +And it came on a day when the Bay Area was rocked by a swarm of moderate earthquakes on the San Andreas Fault. The series of dozens of quakes, the strongest of them a 5.4 on the Richter scale, began at 6:37 this morning and rattled cupboard doors and nerves throughout the day. +Today's earthquakes, like October's jolt, centered near Watsonville, caused rockslides, scattered power interruptions and cracked chimneys in Santa Cruz and Santa Clara Counties. In San Francisco and Alameda Counties, the ground shuddered, the skyscrapers swayed and the mental-health telephone lines reported a surge of callers. +But for the elderly survivors, today's quakes barely deserved notice. When the hardest of them hit, at 6:54 A.M., the old-timers were at 20th and Church Streets in the Mission District here, spraying a ceremonial coat of gold paint on a fire hydrant that is said to have gushed water in 1906 when most of the city's hydrants gave nothing but a muddy trickle. +None of the survivors batted an eyelash, continuing to sip Bloody Marys and reminisce about the '06 blaze that leveled 490 blocks, destroyed 250,000 homes and blackened the sky at noon while making it bright as day at midnight. +''Had a quake, did we?'' said Jim Downey, 88 years old, when he was told that Mother Nature had joined the party, unbeknownst to him. ''What time was it? How big?'' Mr. Downey and his 84-year-old brother, Jack, were the spring chickens at today's events, which included survivors as old as 104, many of them straining against hearing aids or leaning on canes. Some were accompanied by children, grandchilden and great-grandchildren, all reared on stories of The Big One. +The survivors came dressed with the formality of another age, the men in black bowlers and stiff suits, the women in white cotton gloves and coats with fur collars. They laid a wreath to honor the dead and sang a tremulous version of ''San Francisco, Open Your Golden Gate,'' none of them needing the lyric sheets that were passed out to the Candlestick Park crowd last fall when the World Series resumed after the earthquake. +Most of the survivors were small children in 1906 and remember the day more as a carnival of exciting and unexpected events than as a tragedy. But Cora Luchetti, who is 90, mourns anew each April 18 for her father, who was crushed to death beneath a falling telephone pole while driving his horse and wagon to market to stock the family's fruit store. +Sidney P. Amber, spry at 104, lives with his 95-year-old wife, Ruth, in the Broadmoor retirement home here, where the Pretty Big One, as October's quake is known, rocked the dining room at supper time. Mr. Amber found himself stupefied, as he had been in 1906 and as many Bay Area residents were today when the swarm of mild quakes stirred old anxieties. +''You're absolutely numb, petrified,'' Mr. Amber said, describing the feelings that immediately follow a temblor. ''For those seconds, you can't move. They say on TV what you should do - go under a door frame or a table. But you can't stand. You can't think. You can't talk. You're helpless.'' +Because of the events of 1906, April is Earthquake Awareness Month in California. As a rule, the duck-and-cover drills and other programs are sparsely attended, but this year has been different because of those 15 terrifying seconds in October. +At noontime on Tuesday, for instance, workers in the financial district flocked to a preparedness rally in the shadow of the quake-damaged Embarcadero Freeway, scooping up survival guides offered by local utilities and telephone companies, the police and fire departments and various relief agencies. The most popular booth at the rally belonged to the United States Geological Survey, the nation's largest earth science agency, which has tallied about 6,000 shocks and aftershocks in the Bay Area since the Oct. 17 quake, with the highest concentration of seismic activity in the last few weeks. +Lines of people at the survey's booth watched a computerized animation of all that jiggling, examined a block-by-block map of the Hayward Fault in the East Bay, which is said to be overdue for a Big One, and asked the geologist on duty lots of questions. After today's shudders, the strongest since October, the survey expects longer lines and more nervous queries at its booth at Sunday's Earth Day celebration here. +As time passes, there are fewer and fewer '06 survivors at the ceremonies here, a dozen this year at the predawn events, with about 100 more accepting invitations for a midday ferry ride on the San Francisco Bay. +Among those who died this year was John James McDonald, 90, who was left an orphan by the 1906 earthquake. In last fall's temblor, Mr. McDonald fell in the bathroom and suffered head injuries, forcing him to quit his bachelor apartment for a convalescent home in Monterey. +The oldtimers bring to the jolts and jiggles of recent months a welcome equanimity, a balm for Bay Area residents who have less historical perspective and more frazzled nerves. +''You'll have quakes here, you can expect 'em,'' Mr. Amber said. ''But I won't be around much longer to see 'em or feel 'em.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: photo: ''Had a quake, did we?'' said Jim Downey, right, 88 years old, when he was told that the Bay Area had moderate earthquakes yesterday. Mr. Downey and his 84-year-old brother, Jack, center, survivors of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, took part in a ceremony commemorating the event. + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +142 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 19, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +HEALTH; +Hurdle for Preventive Medicine: Insurance + +BYLINE: By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL + +SECTION: Section B; Page 10, Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1441 words + +At a time when physicians are increasingly likely to recommend preventive health measures from mammograms to cholesterol checks, patients are often faced with the discovery that insurers will not pay the bills. +Although the effectiveness of screening and counseling has now been proved in many areas, the insurance industry is still taking its first tentative steps in the field. +''One of the major dilemmas of a doctor trying to incorporate preventive services into practice is the payment issue,'' said Dr. Robert Lawrence, chairman of the Division of Primary Care at the Harvard Medical School. ''It costs nothing for a physician to order a mammogram, but if the patient is stuck with a large out-of-pocket expense, she won't come back for the next one.'' +Private health insurers generally do not cover preventive medical services: immunizations, counseling about smoking and weight loss, and screening tests like mammography to detect silent disease. The chief reasons private insurance companies give are the difficulty of pricing services like counseling; the fact that insurers see their role as covering costs of disease, not routine health care, and the rising cost of insurance to consumers as more patients seek screening tests. + +'A Ludicrous Conspiracy' +Medicare, the Government insurance program for the elderly and disabled, is prohibited by law from paying for preventive measures other than those specifically mentioned in the Medicare Act. The only one currently covered for all elderly is the vaccine against pneumococcal pneumonia; PAP smears to screen for cervical and uterine cancer will be added on July 1. +With such erratic coverage, experts say most preventive care in this country is financed by what one called ''a ludicrous conspiracy'' between doctors and patients. ''On the requisition the physician puts down 'breast lump' or 'rule out cancer,' and then the onus is on the third-party payer,'' Dr. Lawrence said. ''You have to perjure your record routinely to do right for your patient.'' +Insurers defend their circumspection, saying that reimbursing a patient for a mammogram is akin to paying a car owner for an oil check. ''The traditional nature of insurance - car insurance, homeowner's insurance - is to pay for unpredicted events,'' said Stan Carson, director of the Center for Corporate Public Involvement, a branch of the Health Insurance Association of America and the American Council of Life Insurance. ''Prevention is not that. Traditionalists still say we shouldn't cover it.'' +But now, driven by consumer pressures and legislative arm-twisting, many insurers are rethinking that position. + +Uncertainty Over Economics +To attract health-conscious customers, a very few insurance companies now offer modified plans that will cover screening tests for a slightly higher premium. ''Any time we provide new services, that raises the cost,'' said Mr. Carson, who thinks insurers should move into the prevention field. ''We're still trying to figure out the economics.'' +In the last two years more than half the states have enacted legislation requiring insurers to reimburse patients for routine mammograms, which generally cost more than $100, as part of new or renewed policies. Several bills pending in Congress would add the test to Medicare as well. +One in 10 American women will get breast cancer, and early detection through mammography and physician examinations dramatically enhances the chance of a cure. +The current pressure on insurers springs in large part from a new legitimacy enjoyed by preventive medicine. In 1984 the Federal Government recruited dozens of health experts to form the United States Preventive Services Task Force and charged it with surveying the rapidly accumulating literature on hundreds of preventive measures. +The panel's final report, issued last summer, endorsed a complex schedule of periodic PAP smears and mammograms, regular blood pressure and cholesterol checks, vaccinations for the elderly and counseling. +''The task force report was a significant milestone for preventive medicine,'' said Dr. Gordon De Friese, director of the Health Services Research Center at the University of North Carolina, a member of the panel. +But traditional health insurance provides little for outwardly healthy adults and critics say this focus allows avoidable conditions to flourish and kill. + +'A Terrible Shame' +''It's a terrible shame that the two big guns of cancer screening, mammography and sigmoidoscopy, are often not covered,'' said Dr. Daniel Miller, director of the Strang Clinic in New York, who has tried to interest insurers in early cancer detection for a decade. For example, sigmoidoscopy, inspection of the lower colon with a lighted tube, can find precancerous lesions or early cancer when no symptoms are apparent. +Representative Mary Rose Oakar, an Ohio Democrat who has championed the cause of mammography, complains that insurance pays for strokes caused by high blood pressure but not for routine blood pressure checks; for cocaine addicted babies, but not drug treatment for pregnant women. ''Our national strategy is painfully remiss,'' she said. ''We do it all backwards.'' +Experts say health maintenance organizations (H.M.O.'s), which market full service care under one roof for a set fee, are the only places where patients regularly obtain preventive services as part of normal coverage. A growing number of preferred provider organizations, in which patients obtain discounted care by visiting only the group's pool of doctors, are also marketing prevention. But many consumers avoid these ''pre-paid'' plans because of the restrictions they impose. +For traditional insurers, who reimburse by ascribing a dollar value to each service, prevention poses thorny problems. ''Insurers have a hard time figuring out how to pay for the fuzzy things we feel are so important, like counseling,'' Dr. De Friese said. ''They're much more enthusiastic about immunizations, which have a beginning and an end.'' The Preventive Services Task Force report recommends that doctors periodically advise patients on numerous subjects, from seat belts to exercise to smoking cessation. + +Using Business Judgment +Another source of reluctance is cost. ''Insurance companies have to be actuarially responsible and when they do estimates, it is not always clear that this is a good business proposition,'' Dr. De Friese said. +Although preventive efforts avert serious diseases and their costly consequences, the saving is often offset by dramatic rises in use of those services. More patients visit the doctor and, thanks to a heightened level of awareness, there is more diligent following up on problems that are unearthed. ''Prevention may still be a sensible investment, but what it offers is lives, not a solution to the medical cost problem,'' said Dr. Louise Russell, an economist at Rutgers University and an expert in the field. +Both private and governmental insurers are making fledgling efforts to pay, but coverage is often patchy. Since state legislatures moved in to force the issue two years ago, many insurers now cover mammograms. +In 1988, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association of America issued guidelines for covering preventive services to its 74 member organizations. To date, less than a quarter of the plans are known to offer preventive coverage, almost always by hooking clients into affiliated prepaid plans. + +Mammograms for Under $50 +In the public sector, the short-lived Medicare Catastrophic Health Care Act, which was repealed last year, included coverage of periodic mammograms for up to $50. Congress is now scrutinizing several bills to allow some payment for the test. A small number of radiologists offer screening mammograms for under $50, since they are simpler than those done to evaluate suspected cancers. +For the poor, the biggest share of prevention dollars disbursed through Medicaid are reserved for children. Even cholesterol and blood pressure testing are not covered for healthy adults. +Both government and private insurers have pilot projects under way to determine the effectiveness and costs of covering prevention. +Insurance professionals seem startled by the push to take on the new preventive role. And if there is blame to be laid for their initially sluggish response, they say it must be shared with the companies that buy insurance for employees. ''It's not as if the insurance industry is standing with its arms folded saying 'no!' '' Mr. Carson said. ''We respond to the market and if employers tell us they want preventive coverage, it'll be there.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: April 20, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + + CORRECTION: +A chart on the Health page yesterday about preventive health procedures misstated the recommended frequency of mammograms to detect breast cancer for women over 50. It is one to two years, not every two years. + +GRAPHIC: Table showing who covers preventive procedures + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +143 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 20, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +WEEKENDER GUIDE + +BYLINE: By Andrew L. Yarrow + +SECTION: Section C; Page 1, Column 4; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 692 words + + +FRIDAY + +FILMS FROM HUNGARY +A cinematic look at Communist and pre-Communist Hungary will be offered in a film series opening tonight at the Hungarian House, 213 East 82d Street. It will begin with ''Sinbad'' (1970), Zoltan Huszaruk's portrait of love and life in turn-of-the-century Budapest, and continue on April 27 with ''My Way Home'' (1964), Miklos Jancso's film about a schoolboy captured shortly after the Soviets occupied the country in 1945. The last two films will be ''Confidence'' (1979), Istvan Szabo's tale of assumed identity, love and mistrust during World War I, on May 4, and Peter Gothar's ''Time Stands Still'' (1982), a story of two boys who idealize America in post-1956 Budapest, on May 11. Screenings are at 7:30 P.M. Tickets are $6; $5 for students and the elderly. Information: 861-7362 or 879-8893. + +RHYTHMIC VARIETY +During a half-century of tap dancing, James (Buster) Brown has played the vaudeville circuit, appeared on stage and screen, and performed with the likes of Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie. Now a member of the Copasetics, Mr. Brown will join the Peggy Spina Tap Company, a nine-year-old ensemble noted for its rhythmic variety, for three performances this weekend at the Dance S. Studio, 115 Prince Street in SoHo. The program, ''Foot Fetishes II,'' will include four solos by Mr. Brown. Ms. Spina's company will present eight other works, including three premieres that she described as a ''duet for African Talking Drum and dancer'' choreographed by Theresa McCleary, and two compositions by Joel Forrester, a ''Baroque jazz fantasy'' and a ''funk groove piece.'' Performances are tonight and tomorrow at 8 and Sunday at 7 P.M. Tickets are $10. Reservations: 674-8885. + +THE FACES OF POVERTY +The faces and circumstances of poverty in the United States are all too many and varied; one in seven Americans and one in four children live below the officially defined poverty line. This vast swath of America -including urban youths, homeless veterans, Midwestern farmers, unemployed Appala-chian coal miners and Mexican-Americans living in Texas border towns - is the subject of a photographic exhibition that opened yesterday at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, near 77th Street. The show, ''Below the Line: Living Poor in America,'' includes about 60 black-and-white images by Eugene Richards, a photographer who was commissioned in 1986 by Consumers Union to capture the experiences of the country's poorest citizens for a book. The exhibition will be on view Tuesdays through Sundays from 10 A.M. to 5 P.M., through June 29. Admission is $3; $2 for the elderly, and $1 for children. Information: 873-3400. + +SATURDAY + +RUNNING IN TANDEM +For couples who run together, the Trevira Twosome in Central Park is the ideal event. The 10-mile race for male-female partners will begin at 10:30 A.M. at Tavern on the Green, near West 67th Street, and the front-runners are expected to reach the finish line - also at the restaurant - between 11:15 and 11:30 A.M. The event, which is expected to attract 4,000 runners, was the first couples' race when it was started in 1979. A Trevira two-mile race will begin at 10:32 A.M. Registration is closed, but spectators may watch the race at locations throughout the park. Information: 860-4455. + +SUNDAY + +SONTAG ON CULTURE +''Culture watching'' is what the Neuberger Museum at the State University College at Purchase is calling its three-part lecture series that begins on Sunday with the writer and critic Susan Sontag. Ms. Sontag's talk, ''Traditions of the New,'' examines ''modern'' ways of looking at the world. The series of Yaseen Lectures on Culture Watching, now in its eighth year, will continue on April 29 with the painter Eric Fischl and on May 6 with the novelist and poet Maya Angelou. Each talk will be at 4 P.M. in the university's Performing Arts Center and will be followed by a reception at the museum. Tickets are $14, or $36 for the series. The university is near Exit 28 (Lincoln Avenue) of the Hutchinson River Parkway. Information: (914) 251-6200. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +144 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 22, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +When or Whether to Retire: New Ways to Handle Strain + +BYLINE: By TAMAR LEWIN + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 1, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1763 words + +It has been three years since Steven August, now 61 years old, lost his job as associate creative director at a New York advertising agency, and although he has patched together some freelance work and teaches two continuing education courses, a terrible sense of displacement is still with him. +''I love what I used to do and I hate being tossed on the scrapheap,'' Mr. August said recently. ''There are times when I feel like I'm not worth anything anymore, when I'll be walking down the street and I'll pick somebody out and think, How can that guy have a job when I don't.'' + +Golden Picture Is Blurred +Statistics showing the average age of retirement dropping every decade suggest a golden picture: people leaving jobs in favor of leisure, a welcome reward after years of labor. But as Mr. August and thousands of others have discovered, the reality can be quite different. A recent study by a philanthropy concerned with the elderly found a surprisingly large number of older people who say they would like to be back at work. +''Of the older people who are out of the work force, half are satisfied, a quarter can't work because of their health or family situations, and the other quarter are very unhappy about the situation they're in,'' said Thomas W. Moloney, senior vice president of the philanthropy, the Commonwealth Fund. ''That quarter represents about two million people, so it's worth worrying about, especially since we are about to face widespread labor shortages and business will need the contribution these people could be making.'' + +A Boon to Some Employers +The leisure that troubles many older people may become a boon to employers facing an ever-shrinking number of qualified workers as the children born in the baby boom after World War II grow old. +Around the country, a number of companies have started programs to hire retirees for part-time work, to delay retirement by making it possible to move to less demanding jobs, or t allow employees a brief period to try out retirement with the option of returning to work if they do not like it. Others are experimenting with transition programs that help prepare workers for retirement or that train them for volunteer work or second careers. The efforts include these: +* Xerox, in Rochester, has a program that allows older production workers to move into less strenuous jobs. Under a union contract there, people who are 55 or over and have been with the company at least 15 years can move to less demanding jobs that do not involve rotating shifts. About 100 people are in the program, earning an hourly rate between their old pay and the company's normal rate for the less-arduous job. +* Polaroid, in Cambridge, Mass., offers what it calls ''rehearsal retirement'' - one man lasted only three days before returning to work - as well as an unusual program that pays a year's salary and tuition at either Harvard or Lesley College for workers who have been with the company at least 10 years and want to take up new careers teaching elementary or secondary school. +* The Travelers, in Hartford, started what it called a job bank for its retirees in 1981, from which it hires people for temporary jobs. By 1985, the insurance concern's demand for the retirees was so great that the Travelers began recruiting retirees from other companies. But several other local insurance companies have also started hiring retirees, so on a typical day the Travelers has about 120 of its own retirees working but only about 60 from other companies. +Most American men now leave the work force before they turn 63, and with life expectancy increasing, retirement is becoming a longer phase of life for almost everyone. +In 1930, two of every three men 60 and over were in the work force. In 1950, half worked, and by 1980 the figure had dropped to one in three. Even though the average retirement age has stabilized recently, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that by the year 2000 only one in four men 60 and over will be working. And although there has been a surge of women into the work force, most women still leave the work force before they turn 60. + +Misleading Retirement Answers +To be sure, many early retirees are happier not working, and in several polls and surveys most say they retired voluntarily. But those who study retirement say that may be misleading. +''It's a mistake to talk about voluntary versus involuntary retirement,'' said Joseph F. Quinn, an economics professor at Boston College. ''What do you call it when circumstances change, the pension plan doesn't reward further work and there's a general feeling that you're not valued, so you leave. That would be considered voluntary, but it's not what the person really wanted.'' +Surveys by the American Association of Retired Persons have found that from a quarter to a half of older workers and retirees would delay retirement if they could work fewer hours. +''It's clear that it doesn't make sense to set up a system where people go from working all the time to working not at all,'' said Professor Quinn. ''And yet that's how the workplace has been structured. One week you're working 40 hours and the next week you retire and you have no work.'' +Part-time jobs are attractive to older workers not just because of waning energies but because, by keeping their earnings low, they can still collect full Social Security benefits. Retirees under 65 receive reduced benefits if they earn more than $6,840 a year. From 65 to 69 the threshold for reduced benefits is $9,360 a year. After 70 there is no earnings test. +Mr. Moloney of the Commonwealth Fund said about 10 million people in manufacturing companies lost their jobs in the 1980's and many never found new work. And he said older workers at large companies were still being offered inducements to leave early because so many younger workers were trying to make their way up the ladder. +''The average male retirement age at firms with over 1,000 employees, places like I.B.M., is down to 59,'' Mr. Moloney said. ''What I tell older workers is to look at the smaller companies.'' + +Potential in Older Workers +Even some large employers see new potential in older workers, given the severe labor shortages in some parts of the country, particularly in the Boston-Washington corridor. There is also increasing concern that with the baby boom generation in the work force, the baby bust generation that followed will not meet the nation's labor demands. +''At our 'Ability Is Ageless' job fair last fall we had 130 employers, up from 100 the year before,''' said Sharon Perkins, director of the New York City Department for the Aging's senior employment division. ''And we would have had more, but there wasn't room. With the traditional labor market shrinking, employers are becoming much more receptive to older people, who often have just the kind of problem-solving skills that are needed in a service economy.'' + +Different Positions Attract +Many older workers take jobs quite different from their career work. Through Travelers' job bank, Dayson DeCourcy, who spent 30 years at the company, first as an insurance agent and later as a public affairs executive, now works 28 hours a week in its litigation department. He reads files and puts stick-on notes on those items he thinks will be important to the case to flag the lawyer's attention. +''I have a purple passion for it,'' said Mr. DeCourcy, 69. ''I like the people, the job is magnificently exciting, I deal with multimillion dollar cases and I'm learning where the bodies are buried.'' +While Mr. DeCourcy would not say how much he is paid, he said he earned more an hour than he did just before he retired. +But it is not only money that attracts retirees back to Travelers. Anna Martino, 74, who retired from her job as an accounting supervisor in 1978, came back part time to the personnel department in 1986 after finding that her hobbies, crafts and travel did not keep her busy enough. +''When you're working, you get up, you get dressed, you meet new people,'' she said. ''I have friends who are just home all the time and it seems they're they've gotten into a rut and don't know how to get out.'' + +Jobs With Less Prestige +Many retirees are willing to take jobs with far less prestige than their career work. +''I used to be a purchasing manager for a bank, and then I retired and in six months I'd done everything I'd been planning for the last 30 years, so I wanted to work again,'' said Bill Kramlinger, 67, a courier at the Minnesota Title Company in Minneapolis, where the courier department is staffed entirely with retirees working in pairs. ''I work half the month and I look forward to a few weeks off while my partner works. Then when I'm getting bored, it's time to come back.'' +Still, many older workers share a deep certainty that no one is interested in hiring them. Mr. August, the former advertising executive, said there were many subtle ways in which older workers were discouraged from applying for a job. +''You know what they're telling you when someone says the creative director at a certain agency is only 40, and they don't know how he'll feel about talking to you,'' he said. ''Or they'll say it must have been great to be in advertising back when it was fun.'' +When Michael A. Leven, the president of Days Inn, began trying to hire retirees as reservation agents, he got no response to newspaper advertisements aimed at older citizens. The reason: Many had been rejected so often that they did not believe the ad. + +Cutting the Absentee Rate +Mr. Leven was desperate, since his reservation agents at the time had a 30 percent absentee rate and a 180 percent turnover rate. ''I knew they were out there, so we sat down and thought about where seniors gathered and sent people out to put up notices at senior centers,'' Mr. Leven said. ''Then they began to believe that we wanted them.'' +About 130 of Days Inn's 600 reservations agents are over 60, absenteeism is down to 3 percent and the average time on the job is up to three years. But some older people remain skeptical. +Mr. Leven said he recently had a call from a woman who had seen an ad but had not believed the company hired older citizens. She said she had called the toll-free reservations number and asked to talk to an older worker. The woman who took the call said she was 78. Still unconvinced, the caller then asked to talk to the supervisor, who told her he was 73. +''She was calling my office,'' Mr. Leven said, ''to say she finally believed us.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: ''I love what I used to do and I hate being tossed on the scrapheap,'' said Steven August, a 61-year-old who lost his job as associate creative director at a New York advertising agency three years ago (The New York Times/Michelle V. Agins); Bill Kramlinger, 67, who retired as a purchasing manager for a bank, works as a messenger at the Minnesota Title Company in Minneapolis, where the courier department is staffed entirely with retirees. (The New York Times/Steve Woit); graph: percentage of men in each agegroup in the work force, 1964-1989 (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics) (pg. 26) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +145 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 22, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +New York Is Ordered to Pay for Acupuncture + +BYLINE: By RONALD SULLIVAN + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 38, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 526 words + +New York Medicaid authorities were ordered by a New York State judge last week to pay the cost of acupuncture treatment for poor people, even when it is not performed by a physician. +The judge, Acting Justice Phyllis Gangel-Jacob of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, ruled that since medical authorities have found acupuncture to be a valid therapeutic treatment, Federal Medicaid regulations required that state Medicaid programs pay for it under appropriate circumstances. +To deny payment would be irrational and inhumane, she said. +Under the current policy, Medicaid pays the cost of acupuncture only if it is performed by a physician who is certified by the Department of Education to perform acupuncture and if the treatment is part of an overall medical or hospital treatment plan. + +Treatments for Arthritis +The ruling was a victory for Michael Gabai, a poor Soviet emigre from the Flatbush section of Brooklyn who was advised by his physician to seek acupuncture treatments for a painful arthritic condition that had confined him to a wheelchair. +While the treatments were successful and enabled Mr. Gabai, 62 years old, to walk again with much less pain, he was forced to discontinue them because he could not afford them and because Medicaid refused to pay on the ground that they were performed by an acupuncturist who was not a physician. +All payment was denied even though the acupuncturist was licensed by the State Department of Education. +Under its current policy, Medicaid, a state program that pays the cost of health care for the poor, has reimbused New York City hospitals and doctors for the acupuncture treatment of more than 3,000 drug addicts. Acupuncture has been found to reduce the addicts' craving for drugs. The treatment is also receiving growing medical acceptance as a way to alleviate chronic pain. In China, where the first textbook on acupuncture was written more than 2,000 years ago, the therapy, which involves inserting needles into specific areas of the body, is widely accepted for treating a variety of ailments and diseases. + +Private Insurer's Policy +Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the state's largest private health insurer, follows the same State Health Department policy and pays for acupuncture only when it is performed by a physician certified to practice it. +Medicare, the Federal health program for the elderly, does not pay for acupuncture treatment. +In the decision, Justice Gangel-Jacob said arguments by the state and New York City social services officials that Mr. Gabai did not qualify for Medicaid payments were neither ''rational'' nor ''humane.'' +''Social legislation must be interpreted and enforced in a reasonable and humane manner,'' she said. +Roberta Certner, a licensed acupuncturist and head of the New York State Association for Practicing Acupuncturists, said she was pleased with the ruling. +She said there were 163 licensed practitioners in the state who are required to have at least 10 years of experience before being eligible for a Department of Education license. Physicians are required to have only 300 hours of instruction before being certified. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +146 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 22, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +EDUCATORS CHEER ENROLLMENT GAINS + +BYLINE: By DENNIS HEVESI + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 31, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 932 words + +Education experts say they are heartened by Census Bureau statistics indicating that the percentage of high school graduates who go on to college jumped almost 10 points in the past decade. +While some experts said the data collected in a survey late last year show that recent education reform efforts are taking hold, several raised questions about precisely what the numbers mean and what segment of the population they represent. To a large extent, the increase may be attributable to students over the usual college age. +''I do think it's an encouraging figure,'' said Nan Keohane, president of Wellesley College. ''It must mean that some of these people are turned on to education, are excited about what it's doing for them and that they don't want to stop.'' +''That, of course, is the best news in the world for us,'' Dr. Keohane added. + +Goals Identified +The Secretary of Education, Lauro F. Cavazos, said he was encouraged by the Census Bureau numbers. ''Our own Department of Education figures confirm that many more high school graduates have identified career goals that can only be realized through college studies,'' he said. +Paul Siegel, chief of the education branch of the United States Census Bureau, said 58.9 percent of 16- to 34-year-olds who said they obtained a high school diploma in 1988 reported that they enrolled in a two-year or a four-year college. In 1978, the figure was 49.6 percent. ''There's this undeniable trend,'' Mr. Siegel said. +While the number of high school graduates has dropped in the last 10 years, a higher percentage are going on to college. Mr. Siegel noted that 58.9 percent represented about 1,575,000 of the 2,673,000 students who received a diploma in 1988, the latest year for which statistics have been tabulated. In 1978, 1.6 million of the nation's 3.2 million graduates enrolled in college. +The jump in enrollment is part of a trend in which comparatively untapped segments of the population -divorced women, veterans, older people and members of minority groups -are returning to school. That return has countered the effects on enrollment of the end of the baby boom. + +Large Group of Dropouts +''There is a very large group of students who drop out and then, through one means or another, have opportunities to return,'' said John I. Goodlad, director of the Center for Education Renewal at the University of Washington. Of the students now entering college, 10 to 12 percent are beyond the usual age of high school graduates, he said. Total enrollment in American colleges increased to 13 million in 1988, from 12 million in 1980. +Craig Sautter of Evanston, Ill., who publishes College Bound, a newsletter for admissions officers and guidance counselors, said the new statistics indicated that ''the school reform movement of the last decade is making an impact on kids' minds.'' He added, ''They realize that the real economic world now requires something after high school.'' +Dr. Keohane concurred. ''It is becoming clearer that our educational system is predicated on people having some training past high school to be able to take up the complicated jobs which are increasingly central to our economy,'' she said. Who Are These People? While conceding that the numbers ''probably make sense,'' Robin Etter Zuniga, senior staff associate at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, said: ''Some of those census figures are so aggregated that it's hard to understand what they mean. The number intrigues me because I don't know who these people are.'' +Ms. Zuniga questioned how many were traditional high school graduates and how many hold graduate equivalency diplomas. ''I'd want to know how many of them are going to two-year junior colleges and how many are at four-year institutions,'' she said. The census survey did not give such breakdowns. +Frank Burtnett, director of the National Association of College Admissions Officers, said he was not surprised by the increase because it relates in part to a rise in the percentage of students earning high school diplomas. In 1979, 71.4 percent of people aged 17 in the country graduated from high school - a national low. Since then, Mr. Burtnett said, the figure has risen to about 74 percent. +Mr. Burtnett raised another question about the census figures, pointing out that the respondents were merely asked whether they had enrolled in college. ''That could mean that they've signed up for just one class,'' he said. +Even so, Mr. Burtnett added, ''any experience that the individual has on a college campus is like a magnet.'' + +Most Applications Ever +The record levels of college applications in recent years, despite the end of the baby boom, has surprised college admissions officers, Mr. Sautter said. +Besides the increase in college-bound graduates, he said, intense marketing by the nation's universities and colleges - with some institutions spending as much as $2,000 on recruiting for every enrolled student - prompted the rise of what he called ''multiple applications.'' +''Students knew it was a buyer's market and were out there with 10, 15 applications,'' Mr. Sautter said. ''You get a letter from DePaul inviting you to apply. Why not apply? In the past, a person would apply to five or six schools.'' +The multiple-application phenomenon seems to be abating, Mr. Sautter said. Many colleges complained that they could no longer forecast how many of the applicants accepted would enroll, he said, and high school guidance counselors, sensitive to those complaints, began advising students against the practice. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +147 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 23, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +After Struggle, Musical on Dr. King Is Opening + +BYLINE: By SUZANNE CASSIDY, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section C; Page 11, Column 1; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 1083 words + +DATELINE: LONDON, April 22 + +Last Thursday, just four nights before the opening here of ''King,'' a new musical about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the show's producers were trying to put a bright face on all the adversity they had experienced in bringing their musical to the London stage. +''In a crazy way, I'm happy we've had all of these problems,'' said one of the producers, Peter Hargitay, head of a Zurich-based public relations concern that specializes in crisis management. ''Without suffering, this musical would not be what it is.'' +His co-producer, Hans Flury, a Swiss entertainment executive, shook his head ruefully. ''There could have sometimes been, perhaps, a little less suffering,'' he said. +Mr. Flury could be forgiven for yearning for an easier ride. The incubation of the $5.4 million musical, which stars the American opera singer Simon Estes, a bass-baritone, has been exceptionally troubled. Now, after three postponements, ''King'' is to open Monday at the Piccadilly Theater in the West End despite a daunting series of setbacks that at one point included opposition from the King family. + +A Series of Writers +The musical's troubles started early in the game. John Briley, an American screenwriter living in London, whose credits include ''Gandhi,'' was the original writer of ''King'' and one of its original producers. Mr. Briley left the project in February 1989 because, Mr. Hargitay said, ''contract negotiations broke down.'' He was replaced in June 1989 by another American writer, Ron Milner, whose book was discarded because, Mr. Hargitay said, it was ''too much like a documentary.'' Mr. Milner's successor last January was the American playwright Richard Nelson, author of the acclaimed ''Some Americans Abroad.'' +Gotz Friedrich, head of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, was supposed to direct the show but had to withdraw last December, even before rehearsals began, for health reasons. The English director Graham Vick took over. +In March, the poet Maya Angelou, the show's lyricist, disassociated herself from the production because of the dearth of black Americans on its creative team. Then the King family withdrew its support because, family members said in a statement, it believed that ''the musical falls short of historical authenticity and that it trivializes Dr. King's legacy.'' +The actions by Ms. Angelou and the King family prompted Mr. Vick and Mr. Nelson to resign. Ms. Angelou was replaced by the Scottish lyricist Alistair Beaton. Clarke Peters, an American member of the cast, was appointed to replace Mr. Vick. Lonne Elder 3d, another American writer (''Ceremonies in Dark Old Men''), was brought in to work on the book. The show's English composer, Richard Blackford, said Mr. Elder had been asked to inject ''a degree of authenticity that perhaps had not been there before.'' +The numerous personnel changes may have bred some confusion among the cast members, but the objections of Ms. Angelou and the King family bred real doubt, Mr. Blackford said the other day. Cast members began to wonder, he said, if ''perhaps there was something wrong with the way in which we were going about the musical.'' + +'Everything Went Wrong' +Losing the support of Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, whom he had drawn into the project nearly seven years ago, was an especially hard blow, Mr. Blackford said. The composer said he had been under the impression that negotiations for the support of the King estate were on track. +But, in March ''everything went wrong,'' he said. Shortly after the Kings' initial statement, in which the family said it would not endorse the musical, Archer D. Smith 3d, a lawyer for the King estate, also announced that the Kings were considering pursuing an injunction or some other form of legal action against the musical. +Meanwhile, Mr. Briley was seeking an injunction of his own in Federal District Court in Manhattan, alleging, according to The New York Law Journal, that while he was a producer associated with Mr. Blackford, he had paid the King estate more than $200,000 for the rights to produce a musical about Dr. King. A Federal judge said it was ''unlikely'' that Mr. Briley could prove his allegation and denied his request for a preliminary injunction. +Attempts to reach Mr. Briley through his London literary agent and his New York lawyer were unsuccessful. +While legal troubles were at full boil, Mr. Hargitay and Mr. Flury also fell out with Albert L. Nellum, a Washington businessman who had joined ''King'' as a co-producer in June 1989. Mr. Hargitay said Mr. Nellum had been responsible for generating financing for the show from black Americans and for serving as liaison with the King estate. But Mr. Hargitay said Mr. Nellum did not deliver on either account and left the production in March. Reached by telephone, Mr. Nellum said he had ''no comment at this time.'' + +Making Peace at Last +In early April, in an attempt to make peace with the Kings, Mr. Hargitay wrote a letter to Mrs. King asking for a meeting, and his request was granted, he said, ''within 24 hours.'' On April 6, in a turnaround, Mrs. King said in a statement that ''the estate has reconciled its differences with the producers of the musical, 'King,' in a meeting in Atlanta and telephone conference calls between Atlanta and London.'' +''Given the present spirit surrounding the musical,'' the statement continued, ''I anticipate that 'King' will appropriately address the legacy of my husband.'' +Though her schedule precludes her attendance at Monday's opening, Mrs. King said in the statement, her daughter, Yolanda King, is expected to represent the family there. Mrs. King and other family members plan to attend a benefit performance on May 23. +And what of the show itself? Mr. Hargitay said ''King'' has ''massively changed'' over the past two weeks. John Caird, who won a Tony Award for directing the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of ''Les Miserables,'' has been working full time as an adviser on ''King'' and, Mr. Blackford said, has wrought ''radical change.'' +Although the 37 cast members have been subjected to upheavals that, in Mr. Hargitay's words, ''would have killed several armies,'' the cast remains largely intact. At least two of them, Mr. Estes and Cynthia Haymon, an American soprano, who is playing Mrs. King, have options in their contracts to transfer to Broadway should ''King'' succeed, Mr. Hargitay said. +''I will know Tuesday,'' he said, ''if Broadway is in our near future.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Simon Estes and Cynthia Haymon in a scene from ''King.'' (The New York Times/Catherine Ashmore) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +148 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 24, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Evolution in Europe; +Polish Free-Market Planner Comes Under Solidarity Fire + +BYLINE: By STEPHEN ENGELBERG, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 15, Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 691 words + +DATELINE: GDANSK, Poland, April 23 + +The chief architect of Poland's transition to a free-market economy was questioned sharply today by a skeptical audience of Solidarity members, and he emphatically rejected calls for Government intervention to ease the hardships caused by his plan. +The official, Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz, stood firm as delegates at the Solidarity convention pelted him with questions and qualms for more than an hour about the Government's program of ''shock therapy'' for the economy. +''After 45 years of Communism, it was very difficult to find a program for the short term that would not lower living standards,'' Mr. Balcerowicz said. ''I know people are suffering a lot, sometimes approaching the limit of patience.'' +But Mr. Balcerowicz appealed to the delegates for more time, and said he could not take any steps that would risk a return of high inflation. + +In a Crucial Phase +He preached the Government's new gospel, saying the program had entered a crucial new phase in which the nation's economic rebirth would depend on the efforts of individual entrepreneurs. +The delegates - workers, doctors, lawyers and union activists from every region of Poland - said they saw scant evidence that capitalism was taking root to lessen the disruptions prompted by the first few months of the economic plan. They said factories remain largely state-owned and banks are still virtually nonexistent and they questioned whether more than a few Poles had enough money to become investors. +''How can you be sure the program will not end in social upheaval?'' one delegate asked. ''Do you realize that you are being criticized by old-age pensioners, farmers, single mothers, jobless? You speak of change. Can you tell me when people will feel things are getting better?'' +The questioning of the Finance Minister came a day after Jacek Kuron, the Labor Minister, acknowledged to the delegates that Poland had not yet developed a social safety net for those dislocated by the economic changes. + +A Calculated Risk +Mr. Balcerowicz has the reputation of being a financial technocrat without political ambitions. He gives few speeches and his appearance today at the convention was a calculated risk, an effort to quiet a rising chorus of dissatisfaction over economic issues within the ranks of Solidarity. Polls show that the Solidarity-led Government enjoys significant, but declining, support for the economic plan. +After Mr. Balcerowicz left the convention rostrum, the delegates applauded politely. Some said in later interviews that they found his defense of the program persuasive, while others criticized him for failing to offer more concrete proposals. +Since Jan. 1, Poland has been in the midst of the most ambitious restructuring ever of a centrally planned, formerly Communist economy. While other nations in Eastern Europe have chosen less drastic measures, Poland has tried to wipe out almost overnight the system of subsidies and central control that characterized 45 years of Communist rule. +The initial results of the program's imposition on Jan. 1 was a sharp rise in prices and what the somewhat unreliable Government statistics indicated was a 30 percent drop in industrial output. Unemployment has also risen from zero to more than 2 percent, representing more than 250,000 workers. +Mr. Balcerowicz did not sugar-coat his message today. He said unemployment would continue to rise this year, although he predicted it would be below the 8 to 10 percent rate in most of the nations of Western Europe. + +Learning to Adapt +He predicted that there would be modest stirrings in the economy in the second half of 1990, but set no specific date for when the transformation of the economy would be complete. +''The change has caused a shock to the culture and business,'' he said. ''Everybody is learning to adapt to new conditions.'' +''We are now at a very critical point as regards the activities of the entrepreneurs themselves,'' Mr. Balcerowicz said. He rejected any idea of injecting large sums of new capital into the economy, saying, ''The Government cannot substitute for the activities of the entrepreneurs.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +149 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 24, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +PATTERNS; +It's Denim, not Cute + +BYLINE: By Woody Hochswender + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7, Column 1; Style Desk + +LENGTH: 932 words + +DATELINE: TOKYO, April 20 + +Like the luminous paper fans sold everywhere here, the streets unfold a shifting panorama of fashion. +Beautiful silk kimonos on elderly men and women recall a more graceful past. Military dress jackets on schoolboys hark back to the 19th-century emperors and their admiration for the British Navy. And contemporary fashions indicate a people growing sophisticated about style and willing to pay for it. +Much of this, retail executives here said, can be attributed to a new generation of affluent young people who live at home after college and have larger disposable incomes than their counterparts in most other countries. For them, the trend of the moment is Shibuya casual, a name coined by the Japanese fashion magazine Popeye, after the Shibuya shopping area of Tokyo. Shibu-cash, to use the slang, means denim: skirts, jeans and jackets, worn with fitness shoes. +And it reflects a step up in fashion maturity from what is known as kawai-i, the Japanese word for cute, which is said to make up about 50 percent of the vocabulary of Tokyo high school girls. The fashion points of kawai-i: soft pastels, long skirts, fuzzy sweaters and pearls. +''Shibu-cash has spread all over Tokyo,'' said Chiharu Nakasu, who works in the international department of Taka-Q, the Japanese retailer that opened a Charivari store in Tokyo. She was wearing a Chanel-type suit made of blue denim. + +Don't Look Down +On the Tokyo subway at rush hour, there is a sea of blue and gray suits, in nice worsted wool blends, conservatively cut. These suggest the continuing existence of decent department-store suits, as well as the prevalence of companies like Brooks Brothers and J. Press (now owned by a Japanese company, Kashiyama). But beneath it all is an anomaly: the shoes. +The prevailing style is the soft leather loafer, and mostly these are scuffed and badly worn. More often than not, the soles are of rubber. +The fashion mystery ends, of course, at the doorstep, where the shoes are left. Shoes, a fetish for some in America, are in Japan just something to take off. + +David, Goliath and Trade +Fashion is one of the few categories of trade in which the container ships arriving in Yokohama bring more merchandise in than they carry out. +One long-term obstacle, however, has been what is known here as the large retail store law. Under it, small groups of retailers in a given region can block the invasion of Japan's huge store chains like Seibu, Mitsukoshi and Isetan. The big chains, with their licensed designer boutiques, have been a means for American apparel companies to crack the Japanese market. +When American trade negotiators demanded relaxation of the law in the recent ''structural impediment'' talks, Japanese politicians and editorialists accused the United States of interfering in Japan's domestic affairs. In an article in the English-language newspaper The Japan Times, Toru Yano, a professor at Kyoto University, declared, ''When you travel to a small town somewhere in Japan, it would be nice to see a quaint Japanese candy or noodle shop or two dotting the landscape.'' +In the round of talks that ended this month, the negotiators reached a compromise on the store-law issue, Japanese executives said last week. Details have yet to be disclosed. Ideally, it will include both noodle shops and Calvin Klein. Shogun Armani? Giorgio Armani's retail shogunate was increased today with the opening of the 27th Emporio Armani shop in Japan. Sales of Emporio Armani clothing and accessories in Japan totaled $14 million in the fiscal year that ended in July 1989, said a Tokyo-based executive of his company. Sales for the year ending this July are expected to top $40 million. + +Slumps but No Sales +While many large American stores have become a hodge-podge of styles, promotions and confusing sales, big Japanense retailers are islands of calm and efficiency. Uniformed sales clerks bow to customers as they enter. They do not spray anybody with perfume. +As a rule, these stores don't hold many sales, either, cutting prices twice a year, at the end of their spring and fall seasons. +Japanese retailers have experienced a recent slowdown. The Japan Department Stores Association said last week that sales for 26 Tokyo department stores in March were about $1.7 billion, down 9.9 percent from March 1989. It was the largest year-to-year decline since the association began making its monthly survey in 1959, although it was somewhat skewed: in March 1989, Tokyo retailers enjoyed a 41.4 percent increase, as consumers rushed to buy goods before the introduction of a 3 percent consumption tax. +To dispose of excess merchandise at times like these, Japanese department stores hold folksy bazaars, discreetly carting their goods away to the banquet rooms and corridors of large Tokyo hotels. +Last week Mitsukoshi, a prestigious Japanese retail chain, held a Deluxe Bazaar at the Imperial Hotel in the Ginza district of Tokyo. Shoppers packed the makeshift aisles, picking and comparing with all the frenzied energy of Filene's basement. There were Oscar de la Renta handbags, regularly about $250, for about $160; racks and racks of uninspiring dresses and tops with no regular prices marked; piles of fresh produce and tons of electronic gadgets and toys. +''It's not really a fashionable place to shop,'' said a woman who was receiving an electric foot massage at a demonstration counter. ''It's so hard to tell what the good bargains are.'' Big fat Sunkist oranges were going for 1,000 yen - or about $7 each. Better not to know what the full price was. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +150 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 24, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Business and Health; +Pressure Builds To Curb Medigap + +BYLINE: By Milt Freudenheim + +SECTION: Section D; Page 2, Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 791 words + +PRODDED by advocates for consumers and the elderly, state regulators are scrambling to tighten controls on private ''medigap'' insurance. They hope to stave off proposals in Congress that would increase Federal supervision of $16 billion in annual medigap premiums. +At least 22 million of the 29 million Americans over age 65 buy medigap insurance, which pays hospital and doctor bills not covered by the Federal Medicare program. +Many state officials and insurers fear that growing anger over sharply rising health insurance rates will bring on Federal laws that could pre-empt state regulation of the industry and lead to centralized Federal control of the entire $183 billion health insurance industry. +State insurance commissioners from around the country discussed potential changes in state laws and regulations last week in Minneapolis with insurers and consumer groups. +For one thing, the states hope to head off a proposal by Representative Fortney (Pete) Stark, a California Democrat who is chairman of the health subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee. Mr. Stark wants insurers to increase, to 70 percent, the portion of the revenues from individual policies that they actually pay out to cover individuals' medical costs. Many states rely on such percentages, known as loss-ratios, to see that medigap policyholders get their money's worth. Most states require that 60 percent of the revenues be paid out. +Because expenses are usually lower for group policies, like those sold to 3.5 million members of the American Association of Retired Persons by the Prudential Insurance Company, Mr. Stark wants insurers to pay out at least 85 percent of their group-policy revenue. +''The Federal Government has never regulated insurance companies,'' Mr. Stark said. ''The insurance companies are afraid of this.'' +But state officials said steep increases in loss-ratios would hurt competition by driving smaller companies out of business. The smaller companies compete with the dominant providers, mainly Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans and Prudential, largely by offering extra services like help in filling out claims. +''We are opposing further Federal involvement,'' said Earl R. Pomeroy, the North Dakota insurance commissioner who heads the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, a group of state regulatory officials. +Mr. Pomeroy said his association would probably call on state legislators and regulators to raise medigap loss-ratios on individual policies to 65 percent, the level already in effect in New York, Minnesota, Washington and Florida. +The group may also recommend standardizing medigap policies ''to eliminate the clutter from the market,'' he said. Minimum standards are already in effect but there are ''an infinite number of variations, which result in a very confusing situation for the senior citizens,'' he added. +The Bush Administration says insurance regulation should remain primarily a state responsibility. ''Medigap is just a very small piece of the insurance market,'' said Gail Wilensky, the head Federal administrator for Medicare. ''To try to move medigap out of the states, when the states will continue to be responsible for other insurance regulation, is not appropriate.'' +But Robert Hunter, president of the National Insurance Consumer Organization, a group that favors national health insurance, said Mr. Pomeroy's group of state officials ''is essentially not effective.'' He argues that the commissioners' group can only recommend model bills and model rules, which not all states adopt. +''Insurers usually can water down the recommendations,'' he added. ''They are pretty effective in controlling the small rural states.'' +But most insurers, state officials and some consumer advocates insist that the states can regulate insurance more effectively than a Federal agency because states already have expertise and enforcement machinery. +Both Blue Cross and the American Association of Retired Persons say they would accept Federal supervision of state enforcement. But both oppose proposals for a standard Federal benefit package, arguing that innovation and consumers' choices would be restricted. +Medigap has become an increasingly disputed issue in the last two years as most insurers sharply raised their rates. Many older Americans became concerned about medigap during the political furor last year that led to the repeal of Federal coverage for catastrophic illnesses. +''It all seems to be coming together,'' said Gail Shearer, manager of policy analysis for Consumers Union, an advocacy group. ''There is a lot of interest in Congress and among the leadership of the state commissioners in simplifying this market and toughening up enforcement.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +151 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 24, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Careers; +Veterinary Technicians In Demand + +BYLINE: By Elizabeth M. Fowler + +SECTION: Section D; Page 22, Column 3; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 735 words + +''VET TECHS'' - trained assistants for veterinarians - are in short supply. Dr. Franklin M. Loew, dean of the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, thinks older people living on retirement income, especially those with a science background, may help to fill the gap. +''I think it is a great idea for older people,'' he said last week. +Dr. Roger L. Lukens, director of the veterinary technology program at Purdue University's School of Veterinary Medicine, agrees that this can be a fine second career for older people. He urges those who are interested to spend a short time volunteering for a local veterinarian before signing up for training. ''This is a group that we need to seek out,'' he said. +Dr. Loew said that physical strength was not particularly important in handling dogs, cats and other small animals, making the field one that might appeal to both men and women. +Admittedly, the pay is low, which is the main reason for the extreme shortage of technicians. Those who work in metropolitan areas and have college training receive a starting pay of $16,000 or so, but the national average is closer to $12,500. Such salaries lag behind the pay of other health technicians like dental hygienists, but Dr. Loew thinks that the need for veterinary technicians will result in higher salaries. +''We have been seeing frequent turnovers of young people in the field,'' he said. ''They only stay as technicians four or five years because of the income ceiling.'' +Some of these technicians do complete college and go to veterinary school, but many become discouraged and move into other fields. He likens the situation to that of dentistry 20 and more years ago, when dentists were beginning to hire hygienists for their practices. +''Today we talk of four-handed dentistry, meaning the dentist and his assistant working together,'' Dr. Loew said. ''I think we will see the equivalent in the veterinary field.'' +The shortage of technicians is growing worse, experts say. Dr. Lukens reported that about 2,300 people graduate each year as doctors of veterinary medicine from 27 veterinary schools, but only 1,200 students complete training at the 66 accredited technology programs, which takes about two years of training beyond high school. Applicants for veterinary technician programs decreased each year between 1984 and 1989 at a rate of about 7.5 percent a year, Dr. Lukens said. +''There should be one veterinary technician for each veterinarian,'' he added. ''But at this rate we will never catch up.'' +Despite the low salaries, it is a field that appeals to animal lovers. But the work is not necessarily easy. +Technicians do laboratory testing and handle X-ray equipment; they administer anesthesia and assist in surgery. They tend sick animals, which sometimes means spending a night on a couch in the animal hospital, nursing an animal in intensive care. They may also handle record-keeping and billing. +Veterinary technicians work for the 40,000 or so veterinarians in private practice, as well as for the Federal Government, diagnostic laboratories, pharmaceutical companies, pet-food makers, pet-equipment suppliers, pet stores and animal shelters, race tracks, zoos and aquariums. +Dr. Lukens deplores the lack of public awareness of the field among high school students and their counselors as well as among older people. ''It can be a very satisfying career,'' he said. +In most states training is available at community colleges and universities. +Unlike Purdue, in West Lafayette, Ind., which trains veterinary doctors and technicians, Tufts, in North Grafton, Mass., trains doctors but not technicians. But Tufts does have a joint technician program with Mount Ida College, in Newton Center, Mass. +Dr. Loew said more and more older people had signed up for the Tufts veterinary school. ''In my classes I have some aged 40 and over,'' he added. ''Some held animal-related jobs previously, but I even have ex-stockbrokers.'' He said he hoped the trend would expand into technician training programs. +Dr. Lukens has already spotted the trend in his technician classes. ''I had a student recently with a Ph.D in English who raised dogs and horses as a hobby,'' he said. ''She took early retirement from a company, did volunteer work with a vet and then went through our program.'' This summer she is to return as a member of Purdue's veterinary technician staff. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +152 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 27, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +A Talk on Design + +SECTION: Section C; Page 26, Column 6; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 69 words + +Maya Ying Lin, the sculptor who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala., will give a slide lecture, ''Design Processes: Recent Work,'' on Sunday at 3 P.M. in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The talk is free with museum admission of $5; $2.50 for students and the elderly. Information: 879-5500, extension 3792. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +153 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 28, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Mohawks Ask Cuomo to Join A Peace Effort + +BYLINE: By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 27, Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 915 words + +DATELINE: ALBANY, April 27 + +Gov. Mario M. Cuomo faced growing calls from Mohawk leaders today to intervene at the troubled St. Regis Indian Reservation, where heavily armed rival Mohawk factions are fighting over the issue of allowing casino gambling. +No one has been reported killed in this week's feuding at the 14,000-acre reservation, which straddles the Canadian border near Massena. But one man was seriously injured in a grenade explosion, and an Indian observer called in to monitor the situation is missing, according to leaders at the reservation and reports from the local and state police. +Hundreds of rounds of ammunition have been discharged, and the burned shells of at least 20 cars line the main road of the reservation, these officials said. Most of the reservation was sealed off today to non-Indians. +Many women, children and elderly people living on the reservation were evacuated this morning to a civic complex in nearby Cornwall, Ontario. The Associated Press quoted the chief of the council for the Canadian side of the reservation, Lloyd Benedict, saying ''it has become a very tense situation and we can no longer guarantee safety for our people.'' + +Roadblocks by Troopers +Pro-gambling Mohawks armed with assault rifles took control of the reservation earlier this week after overrunning a series of roadblocks that other Mohawks had set up in an effort to close six casinos on the reservation. The casinos, which draw thousands of non-Indian visitors from as far as Montreal and Syracuse and make millions of dollars in profits, have been declared illegal by the Federal Government. All of them are on the United States side of the reservation. +''It's been horrendous, just horrendous,'' said Lois Terrence, a Mohawk who is program director of a drug- and alcohol-treatment program at the reservation. ''The fact that no one has been shot to death is a miracle beyond belief,'' she said. +Mr. Cuomo said the situation was being constantly monitored by the state police at the scene, who have set up their own roadblocks to deter all but residents from entering the reservation. But at a news conference today the Governor appeared to dismiss suggestions that the state take a stronger role in the matter right now. +The outbreak presents a vexing challenge to Mr. Cuomo because many Indians on the reservation insist on sovereignty over their own affairs and say intervention by the state or Federal governments would be an unwarranted intrusion into the internal affairs of the reservation. +But several Indian tribal leaders, including the head chief of the tribal council, Harold Tarbell, have asked the Governor to send in the National Guard to separate the battling factions, and he also received an unusual plea for greater assistance this week from United States Senator Daniel K. Inouye, the Hawaii Democrat who is chairman of the Senate's Select Committee on Indian Affairs. + +Reports of Gunfire +Mr. Inouye wrote in a letter to the Governor that many Indian leaders believed that residents of the community were living with ''clear threats of deadly violence'' and that this presented a situation ''that would not be tolerated by the state or Federal government in any other community or under any other circumstances.'' +In addition, the Senator said, his staff had received reports from anti-gambling Mohawks that their homes had been surrounded by pro-gambling forces who had been ''observed drinking heavily'' and had been firing in the direction of their homes. +''Obviously if these reports are accurate it is only a matter of time until members of the community are injured and perhaps killed by gunfire attacks,'' Mr. Inouye said. + +'I Want This Resolved' +But confusion lingered today over just what role the state was being asked to take. ''Nobody has said, 'Here's what you should do: paratroop in point men,' '' the Governor said at a news conference in the Capitol today. ''Everyone is saying the same thing: 'We want this situation resolved.' That's true. People want the Middle East resolved. And I want this resolved, and we're working very hard to figure out how to do it.'' +Dozens of state police troopers remained massed on Route 37 at the fringes of the reservation. But Maj. Robert B. Leu, commander of Troop B of the state police, said they would make no attempt to move on the armed factions. +''It's simply because of the amount of firepower they have,'' Major Leu said in a telephone interview. ''We're not a military operation.'' +Major Leu also said that despite the hailstorms of gunfire on the reservation, he did not believe the Indians were likely to kill each other. But if outside forces entered, he said, there could be bloodshed. +''I'll give you an analogy,'' Major Leu said. ''It's like a great big family wedding. It's a hot August night. Fifty from the groom side, 50 from the bride. They get into a fight. But they're really all still family. And if all the cops came in, they would all turn against the cops.'' +The gambling issue has divided the Mohawk reservation for years. On one side are Mohawks who advocate the gambling parlors as a way to generate large amounts of revenue, and on the other are forces who say the gambling is a corrupting influence that is out of place with traditional Indian values. +The casinos, with names like Tony's Vegas International and the Golden Nugget, are illegal under New York statutes. But their owners maintain that they are under no obligation to heed the New York law. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Fighting between Mohawk factions on the St. Regis Indian Reservation on the Canadian border near Massena, N.Y., has led to calls for the state government to intervene. A guard stood watch yesterday outside the Akwesasne Mohawk Police headquarters on the Canadian side of the reservation (The New York Times/Michael J. Okoniewski); map: Albany indicating St. Regis Indian Reservation (The New York Times/April 28, 1990) (pg. 28) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +154 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 29, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Is America Abandoning Sick Patients? + +BYLINE: By Susan Gilbert; Susan Gilbert is a freelance journalist and an editor of The Good Health Magazine. + +SECTION: Section 6; Part 2, Page 22, Column 1; The Good Health Magazine + +LENGTH: 3224 words + +WHEN 79-YEAR-OLD Ernesta Springer entered Doctors Hospital in New York for surgery on her right leg, she was in excruciating pain but she was able to walk. A month later, she was still in great pain. And now she could not get out of bed on her own. But because the treatment was completed for the particular ailments for which she had been admitted - a blocked artery as well as gangrene, both associated with diabetes - the hospital sent her home. +A week later she was back for more surgery on the gangrenous wound. Again she was discharged, still in pain and unable to walk. This time the hospital arranged for a nurse to visit her daily to change the dressing on the wound and monitor her condition. The nurse, Madalyn Benjamin, felt that Ernesta Springer should not have been at home: ''The wound was huge. The pain was huge. She was given no medication except Tylenol. The wound wasn't going to heal.'' Benjamin telephoned the patient's doctors, and she was admitted to the hospital yet a third time for surgery. +Cases like this one, in which a patient is released from a hospital in unstable condition only to return days or weeks later for further treatment, are becoming more and more common, according to many medical professionals. And there is evidence that such cases are directly related to a cost-cutting measure instituted by the Federal Government known as diagnostic-related groups, or DRG's. +Virtually everyone involved in health care - physicians, hospital administrators, Government officials and insurers - agrees that DRG's have brought about profound change in the practice of medicine in the United States. Instead of allowing hospitals to set their own fees for in-patient care for Medicare recipients, the DRG system sets them. In doing so, it has given hospitals a powerful incentive to look for ways to save money, whether this means ordering fewer diagnostic tests or denying patients certain treatments. But the crucial question is this: has the incentive to save money led to more efficient medical care, or has it caused a general decline in the quality of medicine? +Today this question primarily involves care for the elderly, but it is becoming increasingly relevant to the medical treatment everyone receives. DRG's initially applied only to Medicare patients, most of whom are over the age of 65. But several states have adopted DRG's for administering Medicaid, the joint Federal and state health care program for poor people. And such private health insurance companies as The Travelers and Aetna Life & Casualty have recently begun using a reimbursement system similar to DRG's. +Some health professionals express strong convictions that the system is diminishing the quality of medical attention elderly patients receive. Doctors, nurses and social workers recount stories of patients being denied admission to hospitals, being told they cannot get certain kinds of treatment when they are admitted and being released while they are still sick. ''The fallout is that patients don't get as good care,'' says Dr. Thomas H. Dailey, a surgeon who is also president of the medical board at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York. +Many doctors, whether speaking on the record or not, say that DRG's have caused hospitals to cut back on costly services, such as intensive care and the use of state-of-the-art technology. Therefore, these services may go only to the sickest patients or to those who have private insurance or are wealthy enough to pay for treatment out of their own pockets. ''Most people don't realize there's rationing taking place,'' says Dr. Roger C. Bone, chief of pulmonary and critical-care medicine at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago. ''I see a trend developing in which some patients receive less and less medical care.'' +MEDICARE WAS INSTITUTED IN 1965 AFTER Congress passed a law mandating that the Federal Government provide health insurance to all Americans age 65 and over, as well as younger people who are disabled. Approximately 33 million people are now enrolled in Medicare, all but three million of whom are elderly. (This figure includes people who are still employed and covered by private health insurance.) By the early 1980's, when medical costs were rising faster than the rate of inflation, the Reagan Administration had come to look upon Medicare as a gravy train for hospitals, because they could bill for an unlimited number of tests, surgical procedures and days a patient occupied a bed. The Congressional Budget Office projected that Medicare would run out of money by 1988, leaving millions of the sickest Americans without any medical insurance. In response, Congress passed legislation in 1982 requiring the Department of Health and Human Services to find a way to curb reimbursements. +The department turned to a novel system designed by two Yale professors that placed thousands of illnesses in about 500 categories called diagnostic-related groups. Each category was then assigned a fixed fee. There were regional variations in the fees for each DRG, and hospitals in large cities were paid more than rural hospitals, because their costs were presumably higher. In 1983 the department began implementing the system for all in-hospital services provided to Medicare recipients. Outpatient care and doctor visits, which cost less than hospitalization, are still paid for on the conventional fee-for-service basis. But the department is considering extending DRG's to them, too. +The DRG system has achieved its goal. The rate of increase of Medicare reimbursements for in-patient care declined dramatically, from nearly 19 percent from 1981 to 1982 to just 4 percent from 1987 to 1988. The incentive to cut costs has in some instances forced hospitals to operate more efficiently. Before DRG's, for example, it was not uncommon for patients to sit around the hospital for a day or so before receiving any treatment. Now, hospitals do not admit patients until the day medical procedures begin. There is also less superfluous testing. ''In the old days,'' Dr. Bone says, ''expensive tests were repeated, like putting catheters into the heart to test for heart failure.'' Not only is there less repetition of such tests today, but hospitals think twice before doing them at all. +THE DRG SYSTEM HAS ALSO had some troubling side effects, in addition to encouraging the premature discharge of patients like Ernesta Springer. For one thing, it's hard for patients to get admitted to a hospital unless their symptoms fit squarely into a DRG. ''If you have an old woman with swelling in her legs and shortness of breath who's too sick to get out of bed, you used to be able to bring her into the hospital for a cardiogram,'' says Dr. Dailey. ''Now, she has to sit at home until she has pulmonary edema and then be admitted through the emergency room.'' The first sign of pulmonary edema, or fluid in the lungs, is sometimes swelling of the legs, and early detection can help prevent respiratory failure - and save lives. +Some Medicare patients are denied services for which the Government reimbursement is so low that hospitals lose money. For example, a report in The New England Journal of Medicine last fall found that many hospitals won't give Medicare recipients a relatively new operation for deafness - the cochlear implant, widely regarded as the only treatment for severe deafness - because of the financial loss involved. The average cost for such an implant is $14,000, whereas the average Medicare payment for ear surgery is $10,000. +The reason hospitals are discharging patients earlier than they did before DRG's went into effect is that they can no longer bill Medicare for each day a patient stays. Under the old system, even after patients no longer needed daily care, they could spend a few extra days in the hospital just to rest. No more. Now, they are sometimes released even if they are still weak and in considerable pain from surgery. +''There might be someone who has just had a heart attack and is still paralyzed, and I'd have to talk to the family about discharge,'' says Elizabeth B. Dakin, a social worker who until recently helped coordinate discharge planning for St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York. ''I'd get pleas from families that weren't ready to take an invalid home. I'd explain to them that hospitals operate differently today.'' +According to a report to be published this year by the Rand Corporation - the largest to date on the effects of DRG's - greater numbers of elderly people are being released from hospitals in unstable condition, with such medical problems as chest pain, rapid heartbeat and confusion. The researchers studied the records of 16,762 Medicare patients age 65 and over who had been admitted to 297 hospitals across the country. They found that the death rate for patients discharged in unstable condition was significantly higher than for those who had remained in the hospital until they had recovered. For example, 17 percent of the patients admitted with congestive heart failure who were discharged with three or more instabilities died within a month of the day they had entered the hospital, compared with just 5 percent of those released with no medical complications. +There is also evidence that recovery takes longer when patients are released from the hospital too early. A 1988 study in The New England Journal of Medicine looked at the records of 586 elderly patients treated for hip fractures at an unnamed Midwestern hospital before and after DRG's went into effect. Under the DRG system, patients were released about nine days earlier than before, and the percentage of those still recuperating in nursing homes a year after leaving the hospital had nearly quadrupled, from 9 to 33 percent. +IN THEIR DEFENSE, HOSPITALS contend that they have been forced to change their policies because they are losing money under the DRG system. Hospitals across the country are losing, on average, 8 cents on every dollar they spend caring for Medicare patients, according to the American Hospital Association. This adds up, because Medicare patients typically make up about 40 percent of a hospital's admissions. The financial burden is so great that since DRG's went into effect, record numbers of hospitals have shut their doors. Many have managed to stay in business only by eliminating or cutting back on certain costly services. These cutbacks are felt not only by the elderly, but by everyone. +In no area of medicine have cutbacks been more drastic than in intensive care. Although there are few figures available, doctors and hospital administrators say that some hospitals have either eliminated their intensive-care units or reduced their intensive-care services, because the financial loss can run into tens of thousands of dollars for each Medicare patient. In Chicago, for example, there is now just one respirator for every 50 chronically ill patients who need it, according to Dr. Bone. ''The patient who can benefit the most from it -and who can pay for it - gets it, and the rest have to wait,'' he says. ''They're sitting and waiting in emergency rooms, sometimes for days.'' Not everyone in the health care field agrees that the overall quality of medical treatment in America has suffered - yet. ''Appropriate high-quality health care is still in place,'' says Larry D. Krupala, chief executive officer of Cuero Community Hospital in rural Texas. ''But we're all fighting against a system that is dislodging that quality.'' Unless Medicare makes more money available to hospitals, he warns, ''quality will slip or access to medical care will slip. There will be a two-tiered system in which Medicare patients are denied intensive care and patients with money will get it.'' +The Government maintains that health care has not deteriorated as a result of DRG's, and discounts the fear that this will happen in the future. ''Our responsibility is to assure access to quality medical care and to pay our fair share, and we're doing a perfectly adequate job,'' says Louis B. Hays, an administrator for the Health Care Financing Administration, the office within the Department of Health and Human Services that oversees Medicare. Hays also believes that hospitals overstate the financial strain that DRG's have placed on them. ''Medicare is not designed to assure the financial viability of hospitals,'' he says coolly. ''It is supposed to pay for the cost of treating patients and, on average, it does that. That doesn't mean that every case admitted does well under the system and that all hospitals do well.'' +CRITICS OF DRG'S ARGUE that they have not really saved any money at all, but merely redistributed costs from the Government to individuals - closer to the way things were before Medicare. Elderly people who can afford it can buy extra hospital time or treatment either by paying for it themselves or by taking out supplemental insurance. The premiums for these so-called Medigap policies, like all private insurance, have risen dramatically in recent years, in part because increasing numbers of elderly people are filing claims to cover what Medicare doesn't. Those who can't afford to pay for hospital services beyond what Medicare provides may end up paying in other ways. If they leave the hospital in unstable condition, they will certainly need further care, either in a nursing home or from a visiting nurse or home-health aide in their own home. Indeed, many will require 24-hour monitoring. But Medicare pays for only 100 days in a nursing home and eight hours a day of home-nursing care for three weeks, and it does not cover the cost of a visiting home-health aide. +Whether or not patients who need 24-hour monitoring actually get it depends, again, on how much money they have. Those with enough money can pay for extra care, either through a Medigap policy or on their own. In some parts of the country, round-the-clock home-health care for a year can easily run $40,000. Patients with low incomes, and the figure varies from state to state - $459 per month for a single person in New York, for example, and $600 in California - can rely on Medicaid to pay for home-health care. But the vast numbers of elderly people in the middle class get stuck. +They have two options, neither of them appealing. One is to do without professional health care and rely on relatives and friends. ''Sometimes we must teach a significant other what to do,'' says Judith H. Levy, director of patient services at Home Health Services of Westchester Jewish Community Services, in White Plains. Even such complex procedures as using a suctioning device to draw excess fluid from the lungs may fall to a relative or friend. The patient's other option is to spend so much of his income and savings on home care that he becomes poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. This is what people in the home-care industry refer to as ''spending down.'' To avoid having to spend down, and to be eligible for Medicaid from the start of their illness, some elderly people have become adept at seeming poorer than they really are - for example, by transferring their assets to their children or other relatives. +The Government's savings under DRG's have also forced younger, privately insured patients to pay more. Hospitals acknowledge that they count on insurance companies to pay more for treatment than the Government. ''That's a fact of life,'' says Larry Krupala, of Cuero Community Hospital. By way of example, he says, if Medicare pays $3,500 for a particular operation, a hospital might charge a privately insured person $5,000 for the same procedure in an effort to recoup its loss. +''There always was a differential between Medicare reimbursement and private reimbursement,'' says Elliot Wicks, an associate director at the Health Insurance Association of America, in Washington. ''But our tentative research shows that private insurance companies have been paying even higher prices as a result of DRG's.'' This is one reason why premiums for some individual and group health insurance policies have jumped by 100 percent or more in the last year. It is also one reason why some private health insurers are attempting to trim their reimbursements by turning to systems modeled on DRG's. As more insurance companies follow suit, hospitals will have a more difficult time shifting their costs, and many more will probably have to close their doors. +IT WOULD SEEM THAT THE solution is largely a matter of money. But the United States already spends a greater portion of its gross national product on health care than any other country in the world - and 20 percent flows to administrative costs alone. So, rather than spend even more, the solution is likely to be to spend money more intelligently. +Many doctors and policy makers have come to the opinion that the only way to insure quality care at an affordable price is to revamp the entire system of health care delivery. Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, Secretary of Health and Human Services, has identified reform of the health care system as a major national issue, and proposals for several alternatives are being hammered out in the Government as well as by private researchers. A group of doctors based in Cambridge, Mass., have formally proposed the unthinkable: national health insurance. Under this proposal all hospital and medical care for every citizen would be paid for by the Federal Government; there would be no private insurance, no insurance premiums and no deductibles. The doctors allow that some sort of tax increase would be needed to finance their plan, but they estimate that the increased taxes would be no greater than what individuals now pay in premiums, deductibles and out-of-pocket medical expenses. +There's no guarantee that a new health insurance system would be any more successful than the present one at delivering high-quality medical care to all unless health experts come to an agreement on just what high-quality care is. Few people would argue that when a person dies because he or she has been discharged from a hospital too soon, the quality of care is less than it should be. But beyond that there is considerable debate. The Rand Corporation and other research institutions are studying a wide range of medical procedures in an effort to determine which ones work for particular patients and which ones do not. Only when this is clearly understood will insurers be able to make their cuts with surgical precision and will patients no longer have to settle for second best. + +THE PRICE TAG ON BODY PARTS + +HIP REPLACEMENT + Hospital Cost: $8,100* + Medicare Payment: $7,900* + +TOTAL MASTECTOMY + Hospital Cost: $3,300 + Medicare Payment: $3,100 + +HEART VALVE SURGERY + Hospital Cost: $27,600 + Medicare Payment: $31,200 + +ORTHOPEDIC SURGERY + Hospital Cost: $14,091** + Medicare Payment: $11,521** + +REHABILITATION-SUBSTANCE ABUSE + Hospital Cost: $4,500 + Medicare Payment: $3,200 + +MAJOR EAR SURGERY + Hospital Cost: $14,000*** + Medicare Payment: $10,000 + +(Source: Prospective Payment Assessment Commission, 1988 Figures. +* 1987 Figures; **1986 Figures; ***State-of-the-art surgical implant for deafness) + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graphic: The Price Tag on Body Parts (attached) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +155 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 29, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Trick Of Growing Older + +BYLINE: By William Stockton; William Stockton, editor of the Sunday Business section of The Times, frequently writes about fitness. + +SECTION: Section 6; Part 2, Page 55, Column 1; The Good Health Magazine + +LENGTH: 2157 words + +NOT LONG AGO, A MIDDLE-AGED friend with a bit of a bohemian streak stopped sleeping on a mattress on the floor and bought a regular bed. The reason: when he woke up in the morning his stiff and creaky joints had begun to make it difficult for him to get up off the floor. Now sleeping in a normal bed gave him a 20-inch head start. Another friend is fond of quoting a middle-aged priest with an interest in fitness who puts the matter in perspective this way: ''If you are over 40 and you don't hurt when you get up in the morning, you should get back into bed because it probably means you are dead.'' +John B. Reardon Jr., a Darien, Conn., lawyer who plays in the fiercely competitive Lawyers Basketball League in New York, has watched the condition of his knees steadily worsen over the years. At age 47 he is one of the league's old men. Too often after a game now his knees are puffy with fluid and they hurt. ''I probably need to say it is over, over competitively,'' he said last winter as the season was moving into high gear. His wistful tone quickly shifted to one of determination. ''But I will still go to the gym and work out with a basketball. I can control that, and take care of my knees there. I'm not giving up basketball.'' O.K., it's true. The baby boomers are growing older. Many spent the last decade getting into shape. They drank less, stopped smoking, lost weight, switched to low-fat, sensible diets and became dinner party bores about health clubs, tennis games, waistline battles and workout routines. Now they will spend the next decade coming to terms with the steady and inevitable deterioration of their physical abilities. Some will drop by the wayside when the first infirmities appear, and then watch their waistlines expand and muscle tone disappear. They will simply accept gasping for breath after climbing a flight of stairs. Others will resist fiercely, and injure themselves, perhaps severely, before finally giving in to the advancing years and learning moderation. The third group - which we should all aspire to join with grace and humor - will acknowledge brittle cartilage, diminished reflexes, lessened visual acuity and even the possibility of arthritis and heart attack, and reach an accommodation that permits the pleasure and benefits of continued activity without the danger of permanent disability. ''You shouldn't worry a hell of a lot about the fact that the body is deteriorating, that this is an inexorable process,'' Reardon says. ''You try to do what you can with what you have.'' +Of course, not everyone spent the last decade striving for his or her personal best. If you're in middle age or fast approaching it, and you haven't been physically active for years, you may be able to improve your condition considerably before reaching the limits imposed by aging. It may be too late for slam dunking or six-minute miles, but perhaps not for friendly games of hoops or loops around the park. In fact, improvement is possible at any age. +Consider the case histories cited by Dr. Lenore R. Zohman, a professor of cardiology and rehabilitation medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx: a woman who started jogging in her early 80's and saw her angina disappear, after suffering from the symptoms for more than 10 years; a man, now 90, who runs in the 26.2-mile New York City marathon. When he was in his 50's, doctors told him to limit his activity because of a heart problem. But after watching his wife wither and die from cancer, he began walking, then running, and finally built up to marathons. His running has kept him more vital than he would otherwise be. ''We studied him and found that his maximum oxygen-intake ability'' - a measure of aerobic fitness - ''hasn't decreased as much as in people far younger than he is,'' Dr. Zohman says. +And then there is Claire Willi. Even Dr. Zohman, who has seen her share of elderly athletes, might be impressed. Willi took up dancing at age 70. Now, more than a quarter of a century later, she is still at it. +''I do think that to some extent people can forestall physiological aging by maintaining a high level of fitness,'' says Dr. Zohman. ''And it's never too late to begin, even at 70 or 75.'' +IN AN EARLIER ERA, WHEN Americans were less health conscious and there was less pressure on the aging person to continue physical activity, the rocking chair was all right. Exercise was often discouraged, particularly if there was some underlying medical problem. But the benefits of exercise are now firmly established. Many studies have shown that women should put mild tension on their bones and muscles with regular exercise before the age of 30 in order to avoid the wasting away of bone caused by osteoporosis. Exercise is now routinely prescribed for arthritis sufferers, asthmatics and people with high blood pressure. Even heart attack victims are encouraged, indeed ordered, to work out. For many doctors, physiologists and physical therapists, the orthodoxy for quality of life in the advancing years is: use it or lose it. +Some of the truest believers are the medical experts themselves. Ethan R. Nadel, a physiologist at the John B. Pierce Foundation Laboratory at Yale University, has long been a dedicated runner. ''I don't care about living longer - and I'm not certain about the research showing you will live longer - as much as I care about maintaining the quality of life as long as possible,'' he says. ''I want to be able to run up the stairs if I choose to rather than having to stop and huff and puff.'' +Nadel, who is now 48, once ran about 70 miles a week, and he has participated in 25 marathons. Last December he underwent surgery for torn cartilage in his knee. As a result, he has had to map out a new fitness routine. He now runs three miles or so a day, three or four times a week, at a leisurely pace, as opposed to his earlier 10-mile run at maximum speed. ''You don't have to do as much as I was doing to be in really good physical condition,'' he says. ''Now my goals are different: trying to maintain a modest level of activity to keep my pulmonary, cardiovascular and musculoskeletal systems at their peak.'' +Dr. Paul D. Thompson, a cardiologist at the Miriam Hospital in Providence, R. I., is a veteran of 16 Boston marathons, his best performance a 16th place in 1976 with a time of 2 hours 28 minutes 5 seconds. But a few years ago, when he was in his mid-30's, he began to confront a painful truth: his body was starting to age, to slow down. He developed a painful heel spur and other foot problems. Eventually, he decided to end competitive running. Although this decision left him feeling a significant loss, it was also liberating. He has much more time to spend with his family, and he says that being an aging athlete has dramatized for him that success in life depends on learning to cope with limitations. Dr. Thompson illustrated this belief last year when he ran in the Boston marathon again, this time at an unaccustomed spot in the back of the pack, just for the fun of it. His time was a leisurely 3:11. ''I had as much fun, in fact more fun, with that 3:11 than when I did my 2:28,'' he says. +As a cardiologist, Dr. Thompson often finds himself using his personal perspective on physical limitations to help patients who have had a heart attack. Like most cardiologists, he encourages physical activity, after a period of recovery. ''I want them to do as much as they can do,'' he says. ''A lot of patients live under a cloud of fear, and you want them to come out from under that cloud.'' His patients take exercise classes, play tennis, swim and cycle. Some take up walking, and may even progress to running. Patients who have never been physically active are motivated by the knowledge that exercise will help them get better and perhaps prevent another heart attack. Those who previously worked out may have to learn to cope with limitations on the intensity they can bring to exercise. But Dr. Thompson can tell them from his own experience that lower intensity doesn't necessarily mean less pleasure and fewer rewards. +This altered attitude about rehabilitating heart attack victims is one of the most dramatic changes in medical thinking about age and exercise. A friend tells the story of his father, an avid tennis player, who suffered a heart attack 30 years ago and was told he must stop playing tennis. Though he lived to 92, the man never played again. Today, a man in his 50's who suffered a heart attack would likely be back on the court within months. True, his pace would be subdued, at least at first. He might play doubles instead of singles, and he might forego drop shots and racing to save particularly difficult shots. But a life that included tennis would almost certainly be possible. +THE SIGNS OF PHYSICAL DETERIORATION at middle age are familiar, and as old as man himself: diminished eyesight, brittle bones, slowed reflexes, tendons that lack resilience. To a large extent, the pace of this deterioration is dictated by traits inherited from our ancestors. But these changes can also be related to childhood injuries or those suffered in high school and college athletics. It is tempting to try to cheat nature's inevitable wearing away of our bodies. But the reality of doing this is a brutal one: pain, and then more pain. Moving from a mattress on the floor to a regular bed is one thing. Exercising in the face of the grinding pain of arthritis, for example, requires real determination. Even when there is no arthritis, no heart disease, no significant health problem, there will still be the pain of joints that are wearing down, of the ankle that acts up in cold, damp weather, of debilitating muscle spasms. +And as we exercise and endure the pain, medicine has no magic bullets, only palliatives. There are drugs, particularly nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medicines, that can bring relief and have no serious side effects. There are also steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, which must be used only sparingly and under a doctor's supervision. And then there is that miracle drug, aspirin. +There are also steps that aging athletes can take to lessen the chance that they will be injured. Older ligaments are more brittle, so warm-ups and stretching routines are essential, not optional. ''If you have a set amount of time in your busy schedule to jog or play basketball or racquetball, your inclination is not to waste any of it warming up,'' says Paul D. Ribera, a physical therapist at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. ''But as you age, you have to be more disciplined.'' Thus, to climb out of bed and take to the streets at a fast pace without jogging slowly to warm up is a young person's game that courts disaster for those in a different age bracket. An orthopedic brace, like a knee brace, is likely to become standard apparel. ''We've gotten really sophisticated with braces,'' Ribera says. ''You can do almost any activity today with a brace.'' If we aging baby boomers who are determined to stay active want a role model, we need look no farther than William Tully, a tennis player in Pelham, N.Y., who turned 64 last December. Tully has played tennis all his life and in his youth was ranked 35th nationally. While most people beyond a certain age harbor a studied distaste for birthdays, Tully couldn't wait to hit 64. It meant that under the rules of amateur tennis, after the new year he would be able to compete in the 65-to-70-year-old age bracket. So for most of 1990 he will be among the youngest players in his age group. And this will give him an edge, an opportunity to dominate, perhaps even achieve a No. 1 ranking - until some other youngster, turning 64 late in 1990, will most likely displace him. He did the same thing five years ago when he hit 59. As the youngest in the 60-65 group, he worked his way to No. 1 in the first year, before falling to fourth and then sixth. But none of this was achieved without pain. ''As you become an older senior, you don't play unless you play when you hurt,'' he says. He wears elastic support bands for the arthritis in his knees. He has orthotics in his tennis shoes. ''I know how to combat injuries now,'' he says. ''If I hurt my calf, I put an elastic support around it. Then I can play on.'' +But he admits that his thoughts have turned to how long he can keep this up. ''I have a sense that I am nearing the end of the road. I hope I can last another 10 years,'' he says. As he slows down further, how will he cope? His answer will be to play weaker players. If his arthritis gets worse, he won't retrieve so many balls. He won't go for the drop shots. There will come a day when he plays doubles instead of singles. +But that's down the road. Cleaning up in the 65-70 age group is his first priority right now. ''I'm counting on whipping those old guys, with a little luck,'' he says. He makes no attempt to disguise his glee. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: William Tully, 64, who was once ranked 35th in the nation in men's tennis, was more recently number one in the 60-to-65 age group. He still relishes every win (Susan Greenwood); Claire Willi, 98, takes center stage at the Milton Feher School of Dance and Relaxation in New York, showing that growing older can be done with energy and grace (Theo Westenberger) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +156 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 29, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +LONG ISLAND OPINION; +Freedom From Welfare: The Best Hope Yet + +BYLINE: By Dr. Ruth Brandwein; Dr. Ruth A. Brandwein is commissioner of the Suffolk County Department of Social Services. + +SECTION: Section 12LI; Page 20, Column 4; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1369 words + +WHEN the Social Security Act passed Congress in 1935, one section provided for public assistance for the blind, the disabled, the elderly and dependent children. Public assistance was seen as a temporary measure, until those groups would become covered under Social Security. As we now know, Aid to Dependent Children, or welfare, as it became known, did not wither away but instead expanded more than anyone had anticipated. +Over the years the program has been criticized by both conservatives and liberals. Calls for an overhaul of the system escalated in the mid-80's, culminating with passage of the Family Support Act of 1988. +The Family Support Act, or welfare reform, is a complex bill with many components. Most important is the jobs program. Unlike current requirements that mothers with school-age children must seek employment or enroll for training, this bill would extend the requirements to mothers with children as young as 3. +The problem is that most of the mothers on public assistance are unable to work at jobs capable of supporting their families. Both nationally and in Suffolk County, about half of the women on this program do not even have high school diplomas. Those who are functionally illiterate is estimated at 30 to 60 percent. Many are teen-age mothers who have never held a job. Others have been on public assistance for many years and have lost whatever motivation they may have had. +Through the jobs program, public assistance recipients are being offered an array of services, including basic education, English as a second language, job clubs (which help in writing resumes, interviewing skills and preparing the inexperienced in appropriate workplace behaviors), skills training, on-the-job training and job search. It mandates that training be provided in areas where there is a demand for workers. +For those women who may be job-ready, lack of child care is frequently an obstacle to getting and keeping a job. Under the act, the government is responsible for assuring the availability of child care. If child care is not available, the mother cannot be compelled to work or attend mandatory educational or job training programs. +For many women, child care is so expensive that it is more economical for them to remain on welfare. Under the new bill the cost of child care can be reimbursed, on a sliding scale, for up to one year after the family is no longer eligible for public assistance. +The lack of health care presents similar obstacles. Many mothers are afraid to leave public assistance because their children will have no health insurance. Most of the jobs they might get do not provide health insurance, and leaving welfare makes them ineligible for Medicaid. Under the jobs program, these families can retain their Medicaid benefits for up to one year. +Most important is the philosophy behind this new law. It assumes a contractual responsibility between parents and the government. Parents are assumed to have primary responsibility for providing for their own children. But the government, too, has its responsibilities. It can only require people to work instead of remaining on public assistance if it provides for child care, health care, transportation and the education and training programs that will enable parents to gain meaningful employment. +In Suffolk County alone, more than 9,400 families receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children and almost 20,000 families live below the poverty level. In 1989, the poverty level was just over $12,000 for a family of four. In a high-income area like Long Island, where the median family income is above $40,000, and the average rental for a two-bedroom apartment is almost $800 per month, it is difficult to imagine the hardship of living in poverty, and welfare families receive only about two-thirds of the poverty level income. +Poverty on Long Island is hidden. It is considered shameful, and it is even more painful than in a poorer community because of the constant reminders of an affluent society. While there are minimum-wage jobs available, such jobs are inadequate to put both a roof over a family's head and food on the table. +There is a difference between getting families off public assistance and getting them out of poverty. Yet the two are entwined. If mothers cannot earn enough to support their families, getting them into a job simply won't work. They will return to public assistance sooner or later. +After remaining at $3.35 for eight years, the Federal minimum wage will soon be increased to $3.80. At that wage, working full time, a full year, a woman would earn only $7,600 per year. Even at $5 per hour she would earn only $10,000. With child care and Medicaid provided for the first year, that would be a start, but after a year, unless her earnings increased substantially, it would be difficult for her to make it. +Welfare reform is the first step but it alone is not enough. That is why Representative Thomas J. Downey has proposed companion legislation this year to aid the working poor by enhancing earned income tax credits for the working poor, as well as tax credits for child care expenses. +The Child Care Councils in Suffolk and Nassau Counties are working diligently to expand day care. But even if it were adequate, transportation poses an obstacle for Long Islanders, and particularly for Suffolk County residents. Public transportation is inadequate, and it is questionable whether mass transit can be the solution for a county covering almost 1,000 square miles. +More than half of public assistance clients do not own cars. In fact, public assistance is not available to anyone owning a car with a net worth of more than $1,500. Where public transportation is available, up to four hours per day can be spent traveling back and forth between home, baby-sitter and work! +Now there is an even more compelling problem. At the same time this new act is about to be implemented, all levels of government - federal, state and county - are experiencing budget crises. Passing a bill like the Family Support Act is but the first step. Implementing it by providing sufficient funding so that it will work is the real challenge. The key to the success of the Jobs Program is case management. Only by individualizing the program - working with each mother to determine what her training and education needs are, how her child care and transportation problems will be resolved, guiding her with successful employment situations, and being there to support her through the rough times and to help her build her self-esteem - will welfare reform work. Yet the Federal law does not provide any additional funds for case management. The state this year capped its contribution for staff costs at last year's levels. The county is currently estimating a budget deficit of many millions of dollars this year, and may be laying off employees. +We have evidence that case management, properly staffed, can work. The county is involved in two experimental programs: CEOSC (Comprehensive Employment Opportunity Support Center) and CAP (Child Assistance Program). CEOSC is a prototype for the Jobs Program and has already proven itself successful in meeting its training and job placement goals. But it is operating with a caseload of 100 clients per case manager and, with the most motivated, voluntary clients. In contrast the current ratio of public assistance cases to workers in Suffolk County is 265 to 1. +The new experimental Children's Assistance Program (CAP) provides an alternative to welfare for mothers with a court order for child support and a job. However, it too has a small caseload, and adequate time was provided for training caseworkers who volunteered for the assignment and were carefully selected. The enthusiasm of both clients and workers for these programs bodes well for their success. The jobs program needs similar small caseloads, and that means more workers. +The Family Support Act provides the best hope in 50 years that many mothers with small children can become self-sufficient. If it can succeed anywhere, it should be able to succeed on affluent Long Island. However, without adequate support, the act will be a hollow victory. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +157 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 2, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Suicides of Four Teen-Agers Stun School in Small Arkansas Town + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 22, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 474 words + +DATELINE: SHERIDAN, Ark., May 1 + +A 17-year-old boy died of a gunshot wound to the head today, becoming the third student at the high school here to commit suicide in the last two days and the fourth in the last month. +The youth, Jerry Paul McCool, a sophomore at Sheridan High School, killed himself at his home in the nearby community of East End, a day after two of his classmates had taken their own lives. His body was discovered by his father, who found no suicide note or any other clue as to why he would have shot himself, the police said. +One of the suicides Monday occurred in front of a history class. Thomas Smith, a 17-year-old junior, asked for permission to address the class, then walked to the front of the room, told a girl seated in front of him, ''I love you,'' and shot himself with a small-caliber revolver that had been hidden under his shirt. +Rhonda Damron, 17, said she was the girl Mr. Smith was talking about. +She said they had been classmates since the sixth grade and became ''very, very close friends'' last year. +''We would tell each other everything,'' she said. ''That was all it was.'' + +'I Can't Go On' +Monday night, Thomas M. Chidester, a 19-year-old senior, shot himself to death at the home of his grandmother, Annie Mae Funderburg, with whom he lived. He left a note saying, ''I can't go on any longer,'' said the Grant County Sheriff, Cary Clark. +The police said Mr. Chidester might have been overcome by grief at the death of Mr. Smith. Steve Brown, an assistant school superintendent, said the two teen-agers had been friends. +Sheriff Clark said Mrs. Funderburg told him she awoke early in the morning and noticed that the lights were still on. She said she got up and found her grandson sprawled across his bed at an odd angle. She said she tried to wake him and noticed blood around his head. +Sheriff Clark said Coroner Mike Angelo determined that Mr. Chidester died between 10 and 11 P.M. Monday. Junior R.O.T.C. Members Mr. Chidester and Mr. Smith were members of the school's junior Reserve Officers Trainer Corps, the sheriff said. Mr. Chidester had left school ''for a while'' to attend National Guard training, he said, but returned to school in September and planned to enter the military after graduation. +In addition to the three deaths this week, another 17-year-old student at Sheridan High, Dale Wilkerson, committed suicide a month ago. Three older people have committed suicide in Grant County in the last six weeks. +Professional counselors were at the school in Sheridan, a town of about 3,000 people 25 miles south of Little Rock, to offer help to students trying to cope with the effects of Monday's suicides when word came this afternoon that Jerry McCool had killed himself. +Superintendent David Robinson said classes would go on because routine was important ''when things begin to crumble.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +158 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 2, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Maybe the Key To Long-Term Care + +BYLINE: By William A. O'Neill; William A. O'Neill is Governor of Connecticut. + +SECTION: Section A; Page 27, Column 4; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 694 words + +DATELINE: HARTFORD + +Solving the problem of financing long-term health care for the elderly is a pressing national priority. Connecticut has taken steps to address that problem, and is awaiting action by Congress that would help put its plan into action. +In 1986, I appointed a special commission to examine private and public responsibilities for financing long-term health care for the elderly. +In 1987, the commission reported that Connecticut was spending $274 million for that purpose. But, it said, with the growth in the elderly population and the projected rate of inflation of health care costs, that sum would grow to $1.4 billion by the year 2000 unless the state did something different. What could be done? There was substantial evidence that the private sector alone could not pay for long-term care. We realized that a publicly financed social-insurance program was equally unlikely, given America's national budget deficit and competing demands for Federal dollars. +At this point, Connecticut realized that a public-and-private partnership offered the most promising alternative. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation then gave the state a two-year $350,000 grant to develop such a partnership. +The projected plan, called the Connecticut Partnership for Long-Term Care, was worked out in 1988 and 1980 by the state's executive branch, legislators, insurers, consumers, health-care providers and employers. +It would provide individuals with a way to plan ahead to meet long-term needs for care while also constraining the growth of Federal and state Medicaid expenditures. +The state's primary goal is to enable individuals to receive necessary care without having to impoverish themselves. Under the plan, individuals are offered an incentive of guaranteed protection of assets to purchase private insurance for long-term care in amounts they can afford. +If individuals need such care in a nursing home or at home, they will first receive benefits under their private insurance policy. When that coverage runs out, they can apply for Medicaid and protect one dollar of their assets for every dollar their private policy has paid out in state-approved benefits. +These protected assets can spell the difference between dependence and independence. No longer will people need to go broke to get Medicaid. +Simply put, the partnership would do the following things: +First, it would allow individuals to protect assets equal to the sum their insurance has paid out in approved benefits. Second, it would establish stringent standards for private insurance policies that can offer such protection. Third, it would create a public consumer-information service to help individuals choose appropriate coverage. +Fourth, it would lead to much more affordable policies by encouraging insurers to develop a variety of policies for a wide market, including the poor as well as the affluent. Fifth, it would save state and Federal dollars by delaying enrollment in Medicaid. +By testing this approach, we can demonstrate how far private insurance can go in financing long-term care. It will then be possible to design public benefits that are feasible and cost-effective. +In June 1989, the General Assembly unanimously authorized the demonstration. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation awarded the state $1.8 million to finance the first three years of a six-year demonstration. +However, since Medicaid is a joint Federal-state program, Federal legislation is needed for the demonstration to go forward. This legislation would waive the requirement that individuals can retain only a bare minimum of their assets before qualifying for Medicaid assistance. Such a measure unanimously passed the Senate last November but still awaits action in the House Energy and Commerce Committee. +We hope that the committee appreciates that the Connecticut partnership is a socially conscious, fiscally sound response to one of the most critical issues facing every state and the nation as a whole. +It offers a middle ground that is feasible, that will provide incentives to individuals to plan ahead and that will provide valuable information to guide a reasoned national solution. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +159 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 3, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +NEWS SUMMARY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 2, Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1318 words + + +International A3-17 + + +The Government of South Africa opended its first formal talks with the African National Congress, which has been struggling since 1912 to rid the country of white minority domination. Page A1 + + +A new solution to the Afghan conflict is being explored by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Moscow would accept elections for a new government and Washington would let the current leader, Najibullah, run for President if he first surrendered power. A1 + + +A relaxation of export restrictions on advanced technological products for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, including computers, precision machine tools and telecommunications equipment, was proposed by the Bush Administration. A1 + + +Soviet Jews have been anxious for months about rumors of a pogrom, but the Jews of Odessa are debating a different fear: just how thorough and heartbreaking their exodus from the city will prove to be. A16 + + +Lithuania asks Paris and Bonn to mediate with the Soviets + A16 + + +Top Hungarian parties agree to elect dissident to Presidency + A17 + + +East and West Germany agreed on the main points of monetary union, settling on a compromise formula giving East Germans aged 60 and older more favorable financial terms when the Deutsche mark becomes legal tender in both countries. A16 + + +The 12 European Community nations have set themselves the task of achieving still greater economic and political unity by Jan. 1, 1993, now that plans to create a single trading market are well advanced. A16 + +Legislators call for environmental ''Marshall Plan'' A9 + + +Allies to get Bush arms proposal A17 + + +The freed hostage, Frank Reed, said he was held for months at a time with four other Westerners, including two Americans, and that he is angry that they have not been let go. A3 + + +Mexico says it will continue anti-drug efforts with U.S. A3 + + +Brazil blows up miners' airstrip to save Indians A12 + + +Jamaica's prime minister will see President Bush today A13 + + +New security plan in New Delhi A10 + + +Burmese rights abuses are said to continue A5 + + +Guilin journal: China welcomes tourists from Taiwan A4 + + +National A18-24, B10-12 + + +Oregon officials announced a plan that would limit medical services for people whose health care is paid for by the government. They said they can no longer afford the costly miracles of modern medicine. A1 + + +States are criticized over insurance for the elderly A23 + + +A former Federal housing official testified that staff aides to Vice President George Bush used political influence with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to win a $500,000 grant for a Kansas City developer in 1985. A1 + + +Republicans are in a good position in Senate races around the country, officials in both parties say. Republicans could gain several seats this fall and narrow the gap with Democrats, who hold a 55-to-45 advantage. A1 + + +The House ethics committee abruptly adjourned after its members apparently were unable to break an impasse over action in the case of Representative Barney Frank. A18 + +Senate panel asks deeper Pentagon cuts than Bush sought A21 + + +Washington Talk: Bailout chief's future stirs debate A18 + + +The Mormon Church is changing. It recently altered some of its most sacred rituals, eliminating part of the largely secret ceremonies that have been viewed as offensive to women and to members of other faiths. A1 + + +A form of therapy using bright lights can reset the body rhythms of people who work at night, researchers have demonstrated. The therapy offers hope for millions of Americans. A18 + + +Scientist who shocked the world on atomic workers' health A20 + + +Two urban AIDS troublespots found B10 + + +Protein from AIDS virus promotes cancer growth + B10 + + +F.D.A. approves test to screen blood supply for hepatitis + B12 + + +Survival theory linked to fossils + B12 + + +New treatment is found to reduce bone fractures + B12 + + +Los Angeles mayor calls for water rationing + A19 + + +Regional B1-8 + + +The New York Schools Chancellor, Joseph A. Fernandez, announced that the policy of automatically holding back lagging students after the fourth and seventh grades will end. A1 + + +Albany budget talks mired in school aid battle + B2 + + +Hartford shifts revenue in move to adopt budget + B2 + + +Thefts from the Transit Authority now exceed $2 million a year, with power tools, bus engines and even a new tractor-trailer cab disappearing from warehouses, New York City transit authorities said. B1 + + +The president of Baruch College has acknowledged that not enough has been done to hire members of minorities for teaching and administrative jobs or to provide enough support to minority students. B1 + + +St. John's head defends handling of sex case + B3 + + +A sophomore is suing her university for requiring her to watch the dissection of a frog. Several students across the country have successfully sued high schools to avoid participating in dissection, but this may be the first time a university has been sued. B1 + + +Violence at the Mohawk reservation in upstate New York prompted hundreds of New York and Canadian police officers to seal off the area. Two Mohawks were killed and thousands of others barricaded themselves in their homes or fled. B1 + + +Man charged with killing gypsy-cab driver in the Bronx + B3 + + +Wild car in Manhattan hits five people, killing girl B3 + + +Auction is a singular sensation B4 + + +Proposal to raze Audubon Ballroom is debated + B4 + + +Dentist draws prison in burglaries + B8 + + +Business Digest D1 + + +The Home Section + + +The dawning of the age of ''astrodecor'' C1 + + +Fourth-grade lament: ''Everyone's dating'' C1 + + +Gardening C1 + + +Close to Home C2 + + +Currents C3 + + +Furniture designed by and for children + C5 + + +Parent & Child C8 + + +Arts/Entertainment + + +James Brown, social worker C17 + + +Gerald Arpino resigns from the Joffrey Ballet C17 + + +Theater: ''Some Americans Abroad'' C17 + + +''Rain. Some Fish. No Elephants.'' C20 + + +Dance: Paul Taylor troupe C16 + + +''Coppelia'' C20 + + +Word and Image: ''Eichmann in My Hands'' C21 + + +''Encyclopedia of the Holocaust'' C21 + +Television: ''Wings'' C22 + + +Sports + + +Baseball: Mets beat Reds, 5-0 D23 + + +Athletics sweep Yankees D25 + + +Basketball: Knicks win D23 + + +Column: Anderson on Bianchi D23 + + +Cycling: Soviet racer favored D23 + + +Horse Racing: Summer Squall D24 + + +Olympics: Joint German team nearing D27 + + +Health B14 + + +Personal Health: Taking proper action when bursitis strikes + +Obituaries B13 + + +Lewis Leary, a specialist in American literature + +Sergio Franchi, a singer + +Editorials/Letters/Op-Ed + + +Editorials A26 + +Who will rescue runaways? + +Timid, destructive in Albany + +''Twin Peaks'' freaks + +Topics: Locker room lock + +Letters A26 + + +A. M. Rosenthal: Elzbieta and Auschwitz A27 + + +Tom Wicker: Six, the magic number A27 + + +Holly Burkhalter: A way to pressure Beijing A27 + + +Leonard Kriegel: Academic freedom and racial theories A27 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +160 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 3, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Evolution in Europe; +For Odessa's Jews, a Time of Anxiety + +BYLINE: By FRANCIS X. CLINES, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16, Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1454 words + +DATELINE: ODESSA, U.S.S.R., May 2 + +Soviet Jews have been anxious for months about rumors of a pogrom, but the Jews of Odessa are debating another fear: just how thorough and heartbreaking their exodus from this effervescent crossroads city will prove to be. +''The critical mass of Jews has already left the city,'' concedes Boris G. Khersovsky, a Jew who is staying because he is an Odessite, a special breed of individualist who cherishes the mix of urban strength and seaside charm as elements of a spiritual place apart, even from the varied anxieties of Communism. +But many of his kith and kin no longer agree with him and feel threatened as much by the Soviet economic failure as by chronic anti-Semitism. Mr. Khersovsky, a physician, is understanding as he sees these people unable to resist a lifetime chance to get permission for emigration to Israel from this depressed nation. + +An Accelerated Passage +Jews are thronging to take advantage of an accelerated passage that makes them the envy of their fellow sufferers, their non-Jewish neighbors. As Soviet Jews, they can get permanent exit visas. And so they are leaving the historic Ukrainian ghetto of the czars, the Pale of Settlement and its rich courtyard culture, which Sholom Aleichem mined in his stories of proud, mundanely hobbled Jews surviving by wit and hope until tomorrow. +Tomorrow now beckons like Sholom Aleichem's Fiddler, and many young families are taking one of the few boons ever to come of having ''Jew'' stamped in their Soviet identity papers. Lately there are even tales of non-Jews seeking fake Jewish I.D. papers in this city's cornucopia of a black market. +Estimates vary, but at the present rate of exodus as many as two-thirds of the city 70,000 Jews could be gone in the next five years, say some of those engaged daily in fighting the Soviet bureaucracy that handles the outflow. + +Families Are Divided +In this rush to migrate, families are often riven, with the elderly choosing to stay fearfully by their roots while the younger generations make their melancholy exits. +''This is very difficult for the soul,'' said Boris Dobrivker, a 35-year-old photographer, watching his friend, Pyotr Bovar, get on a train bound for Budapest to catch a plane to Israel. +''I am going to the homeland: where I was born no longer matters,'' Mr. Bovar said slowly at the center of a bittersweet crowd of family and friends bidding him farewell, a tableau to be seen daily in this city. +''I can't get used to things like this,'' said the watching Mr. Dobrivker, who would also like to leave but must stay because he cannot abandon his grandparents. In staying, he is a leader of a Jewish group known as the informals who track cases of neighborhood anti-Semitism and map the maze of the Soviet emigration bureaucracy. + +Odessa Jews Nonreligious +''Many of them only remember they are Jewish when the question of emigration arises,'' he said, referring to the fact that Odessite Jews are nonreligious and scattered across a busy port city that has no Jewish quarter. This assimilation factor makes Odessa one of the less-threatening places for Jews to reside in the Soviet Union, residents say, even if they are more anxious lately about the pogrom rumors heard as well in Leningrad and Moscow. +Jews differ about the level of anti-Semitism, a subject of anxiety rooted in such historic events here as the pogrom of 1905 and the Nazi genocide. Many Soviet Jews are concerned that the nation's budding nationalist movements might easily veer into anti-Semitism, although they stress that, so far, Rukh, the Ukrainian nationalist movement, has firmly denounced anti-Semitism and encouraged better relations. +Jews agree that mass official antiSemitism has ended. But they disagree over whether recent Communist Party denunciations of anti-Semitism mute bigotry or feed it. Some Jews even accuse other Jews of feeding the current pogrom rumors to justify the exodus. +''They understand they'll only receive Western help this way as long as they are part of the underground,'' says Feliks I. Millshtein, director of the Society of Jewish culture, a year-old educational and social program that other Jews like Mr. Dobrivker contend is too beholden to the Communist Party apparatus to deserve credibility. + +Reviving the Traditions +Mr. Millshtein denies this, stressing that the center is trying to revive the city's Jewish traditions that last blossomed eight decades ago, before the Communist revolution, when there were 52 synagogues and prayer houses in the city, compared with the one that is now active. +''I do not expect a pogrom on May 5 and I do not think anything like that will happen anywhere in the country,'' Mr. Millshtein says. Yet he contends that ''fear,'' not the failed economy, is mainly driving the exodus. +Mr. Dobrivker also tends to doubt the rumors of a pogrom. But he says individual incidents of anti-Semitic threats and suspicious crimes occur often enough to hint at the depth of latent bigotry that, he fears, the Communist apparatus tries at times to exploit. +For some Jews, the emigration process is one of self-discovery as much as finding a new land. + +Plans for New Jersey +Waving goodbye on the train platform to Mr. Bovar, the latest emigre, Alla Klazova told of her own plans to move to relatives already living in Fair Lawn, N.J. +''We visited,'' she said. ''And I remember my daughter there asking my nephew, 'Why are you wearing a Star of David?'' and he replied calmly: 'I'm a Jew.' '' +Mrs. Klazova smiled at the memory. ''I'm emigrating because my daughter is afraid to say that,'' she said. ''I want my children to live in a free country where they can calmly say, 'I'm a Jew.' '' +''They are choosing another fate,'' says Mr. Khersovsky of the hundreds of families applying to leave each week. He is almost casual about the difficulty he experienced in becoming a doctor despite the nation's web of official and social anti-Semitism. ''It is in the air we breathe.'' + +'Not an Easy Fate +''We will stay here, even though it is not an easy fate,'' he says. ''I can't advise my friends not to go. All my life I've been fighting, always knowing I could not do this or that because I was a Jew.'' +The poignancy for Odessa Jews is that just as the exodus booms, some of their own, like the doctor, are finally able to take advantage of liberalized Soviet life. He has just been elected to the City Council. And, with his friend, Leopold N. Mendelson, another Jewish physician, he has revived nondenominational charity health care for the needy, a proud Jewish tradition of this city that was snuffed out with the Communist revolution. +''We saw in the past two years how we could begin to make a difference,'' said Mr. Mendelson, who also has been elected to the City Council. The two doctors' charity, the Haas Society Fund, has been designed to take advantage of a new law that lets the city's business cooperative entrepreneurs make charity donations in lieu of local taxes. They talk of their duty to a city they love, and they project a hope ever qualifed by concern about the stability of this nation. +The talk of pogrom is never an easy subject to fathom in the Soviet Union, particularly in light of the history of violent, destructive rampages against Jews in Imperial Russia. While in English ''pogrom'' generally refers to those attacks, the word in modern Russian has broader use, referring as well to any kind of destructive rampage against any ethnic group. + +Anxieties and Rumors +The current high level of anxieties and rumors only feeds the talk of such rampages against the Jews. ''I absolutely know there will be a pogrom within the next two years,'' said one Odessa Jew actively involved in community organizations who, it turns out, has decided himself to emigrate. +Asked how he is so sure of a pogrom, he replies that an outsider can never understand this topic. He cites various anecdotal stories of bigotry - of Jewish victims in a robbery and a killing that the authorities assert were not motivated primarily by anti-Semitism. +The man adds cryptically that calmness itself is further cause for suspicion. Jews, he notes, have been entirely spared in recent ethnic violence in Azerbaijan and Armenia. ''Very interesting riddle,'' he says. +After some more conversation, the man finally reveals his strongest motive, shared in common with so many others: the fear that their children are doomed to despair under the Soviet system, despite the exhortations of President Mikail S. Gorbachev. +''I would sell my soul for the future of my child,'' the man says, finally putting the pogrom talk aside and telling of his need to finally join all the Odessa Jews who are leaving. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Soviet Jews in Odessa are thronging to take advantage of the availability of permanent exit visas. ''I am going to the homeland,'' said Pyotr Bovar, center, as he prepared to board a train to begin his journey to Israel. (Francis X. Clines/The New York Times); map of the Soviet Union showing location of Odessa (The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +161 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 3, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +States Are Criticized Over Insurance for the Elderly + +BYLINE: By MARTIN TOLCHIN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 23, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 555 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 2 + +In a dispute over what he called ''outrageous practices'' involving the sale of long-term-care insurance to the elderly, a Congressional chairman contended today that most state insurance commissioners were ineffective because they were ''understaffed and under-informed.'' +''The majority appear to know little about what is going on in their states,'' said Representative John D. Dingell, chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. +His comments were disputed by Earl R. Pomeroy, who is Insurance Commissioner of North Dakota and president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. ''Over all, I believe that state regulators have responded thoughtfully and aggressively to the actual and potential problems that have been identified in this market,'' Mr. Pomeroy said. +''No regulatory system can foresee every problem or foreclose all avenues for fraudulent behavior, and unfortunately, there have been instances of consumer abuse in this market,'' Mr. Pomeroy said. ''In most instances, I believe that a consumer considering the purchase of a long-term-care insurance product today can be assured that it will provide substantial benefits.'' +The dispute erupted at a hearing by Mr. Dingell's committee on the relatively new type of insurance for older Americans who require long-term care in nursing homes or at home. There are 1.5 million policyholders among more than 32 million older Americans. +The committee heard witnesses describe deceptive sales practices, restrictive policies that disguised the limitations in legal language and insurance companies that failed to provide the protection that was purchased. State commissioners usually relayed the complaints to the offending companies, sometimes with a notification that the companies may be guilty of minor violations of the state laws and regulations, the witnesses said. +Examples of abuses have been cited at hearings held by several Congressional committees, but Mr. Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, today linked them to what he described as lax local enforcement. He said most state insurance departments were unable to provide information on complaints received from dissatisfied policyholders. Case of Limited Abilities? ''Though they rely heavily on complaints, few have organized complaint-gathering systems,'' Mr. Dingell said. ''Regulators lack clear actuarial standards and centralized data on bad companies and agents. They are understaffed and under-informed. And their ability to resolve problems and willingness to reach out-of-state offenders is limited.'' +But Mr. Pomeroy insisted, ''We don't believe that the product is abused as a norm.'' +Representative Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said most states had failed to adopt a recommendation by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners that would bar the widespread practice requiring that elderly persons be hospitalized before qualifying for benefits on long-term care. This qualification would bar the benefits of more than 50 percent of those in long-term-care centers. +Mr. Wyden asked Mr. Pomeroy if he would agree with the notion that many of the states with the most complaints had the most modest consumer protection programs. +Mr. Pomeroy said regulation was ''primarily reactive'' and noted that long-term-care insurance was ''a brand new product.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +162 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 3, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +New Treatment Found to Reduce Bone Fractures From Osteoporosis + +BYLINE: By GINA KOLATA + +SECTION: Section B; Page 12, Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 432 words + +A new treatment regimen for the bone disease osteoporosis can significantly reduce the incidence of bone fractures, researchers have found. +In a paper being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Tommy Storm, of Sundby Hospital in Copenhagen, and his colleagues reported that women who were treated with etidronate disodium and calcium for three years had far fewer fractures of the spine than women who took a dummy drug and calcium for comparison. +''I think it is an important study,'' said Dr. B. Lawrence Riggs, an osteoporosis researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. +Although two other treatments, estrogen and the bone-modeling hormone calcitonin, also significantly decrease the fracture rate, the new study ''gives another option,'' Dr. Riggs said. + +F.D.A. Approval to Be Sought +Etidronate, made by Norwich Eaton Pharmaceuticals, a division of Procter & Gamble, prevents calcium from being lost from bone. +Susan Dietrich, a spokeswoman for Norwich Eaton, said the company would soon apply to the Food and Drug Administration for approval to market the drug to treat osteoporosis. +Its effectiveness is being examined in a study involving more than 400 patients at a number of medical centers in the United States. +Osteoporosis, the most common bone disease, strikes many elderly men and women. In women, bone loss accelerates after menopause, often leading to a severe decline in bone mass. Weakened bones in the spine may collapse, causing back pain and a loss of height. Brittle bones in the hip may fracture, often requiring nursing home care. +The new study involved 66 women 56 to 75 years of age who were randomly assigned to receive etidronate or a dummy pill. When etidronate was used previously, it prevented new bone from being formed to the same degree as it had stopped bone from being lost, leading to no net effect. #13-Week Rest Periods To avoid this difficulty, the Danish researchers instructed the women to take the medication in two-week cycles, followed each time by 13-week periods when they took no drugs. The rest period was intended to allow bone to build up again. +The researchers report that the women who used etidronate had an average of six fractures per 100 patient years, while those taking the dummy pills had 54 fractures per 100 patient years. But neither group gained enough bone to make their bone mass normal. +None of the three treatments for osteoporosis restores bone mass to normal, Dr. Riggs said. And the only way to know which is most effective would be to compare them in a clinical trial. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +163 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 5, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +CONSUMER'S WORLD; +The Slow but Steady Progress In Stopping Tap-Water Burns + +BYLINE: By BARRY MEIER + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 50, Column 4; Style Desk + +LENGTH: 1103 words + +Every day, safety experts say, about 300 young children are taken to emergency rooms around the country suffering from burns caused by household water that is too hot. And annually, about 3,000 children are injured seriously enough in such accidents to require hospitalization. +Over the past decade, a scattered band of children's advocates have been prodding the plumbing and appliance industries, utility companies and even the Federal Government to take action to reduce such injuries. Now, the maker of a new device that automatically shuts off the flow of hot tap water says it can prevent such accidents. +On May 14, the Children's Hospital National Medical Center in Washington will open its third annual Safe Kids campaign to reduce accidents of all kinds, the leading cause of childhood deaths. This year, the weeklong program, sponsored by the National Safety Council and Johnson & Johnson, will focus on burns from household tap water. + +Dangers for the Elderly + The dangers posed by extremely hot water are not limited to children. The elderly and those who suffer from diabetes and other diseases that reduce the ability to sense temperature changes are also prone to being burned. And many apartment dwellers are particulary vulnerable because they cannot easily control water-heater temperatures. +But young children, largely those under the age of 2, account for many of those badly burned by tap water, said Dr. Murray L. Katcher, the director of the maternal and child-health program of the Wisconsin Department of Health and Social Services. About half of those incidents occur when parents put children into water that is too hot. Among the other causes: children who accidentially turn on water faucets, fall into tubs or are abused by parents. +Water heaters have long been viewed as a major culprit in water-caused burns. In the late 1970's, for example, electric water heaters left the factory set at 150 degrees, while gas heaters were set at 140 degrees, said Dr. Kenneth Feldman, the medical director of the Odessa Brown Children's Clinic in Seattle. + +Burns in Seconds + At those temperatures, water can cause third-degree burns in about 2 seconds at 150 degrees and in about 5 seconds at 140 degrees. ''Children can be burned twice as quickly,'' Dr. Feldman said, because their skin is more tender. +In 1978, Dr. Feldman and other concerned physicians petitioned the Federal Consumer Product Safety Commission, asking it to limit factory settings on water heaters to 130 degrees. But in 1981, the commission rejected the request, contending that a mandatory standard was not necessary because the industry was starting to reduce heater settings. +Others believed the industry needed to be prodded further. In 1980, the Florida adopted a law restricting factory heater settings to 125 degrees. Heartened by that development, Dr. Feldman and others succeeded in 1982 in getting Washington State to adopt a similar law despite opposition from, among others, utilities, which saw the move as a threat to sales. In 1988, Wisconsin also passed a law limiting factory settings on heaters. +The Washington law required warning labels on water heaters as well utility-supported public-awareness campaigns. ''It was designed to give people a safe heater and knowledge of the risks and benefits,'' Dr. Feldman said. +Devices aimed at preventing scalding have existed for several decades. They use either pressure- or temperature-sensitive controls, but they can be improperly installed and may have a slow response time, said Matthew Maley, the director of risk management at the Shriner's Burns Institute in Cincinnati. + +Cut-Off Devices + Meanwhile, attention was also being increasingly focused on another aspect of the scalding-water problem: devices to cut off extremely hot water right at the faucet. + In the mid-1980's, a scalding accident and a new technology crossed paths. The accident involved an elderly relative of an engineer at the Memry Corporation in Norwalk, Conn. And by coincidence, the company was working with a metallurgical technology called ''shape memory,'' in which alloys can be made to change shape based on temperature. +As a result of the scalding episode, Memry developed an easily installed anti-scalding device that automatically shuts off the water flow in a faucet or shower head before the temperature reaches 120 degrees. Stephen Fisher, Memry's president, said a 1986 investigation by the Federal Securities and Exchange Commission into Memry's public statements about its technology and business plans derailed the new company, then called Memory Metals Inc., and delayed production of the device. +The S.E.C. problem was resolved in 1988, and the company, operating under new management, began producing the anti-scalding device. Mr. Maley said it has been used successfully at the Shriner's Institute in showers at a home for parents of children being treated at the hospital. One drawback, Mr. Maley said, is that it can take several seconds for the device to reset itself so water flow can resume. +Memry now markets anti-scalding devices for the shower, tub and sink. They not yet widely sold, but information about where to buy them is available from the company at 83 Keeler Avenue, Norwalk, Conn. 06854; 800-782-7840 (except in Connecticut, 203-853-9777). Prices range from about $14 to $40. +Along with lobbying for plumbing-code changes to require anti-scalding devices, Safe Kids is putting Memry units in low-income dwellings in several areas, including Washington and Louisville, Ky. The group received a $15,000 pledge from Memry to develop a slide show dealing with tap-water scalds. Though literature from the Safe Kids program promotes the Memry valve, the group is not yet formally endorsing it. + +Voluntary Guidelines + Facing the prospect of further state action, the heater industry is developing voluntary guidelines, mandating a 120-degree setting for both electric and gas heaters, said Frank Stanonik, the assistant director of technical services for the Gas Appliance Manufacturers' Association in Arlington, Va. ''In many cases, companies have already instituted the change,'' Mr. Stanonik said. +Where laws have forced change, there have been appreciable results. The number of children brought to Seattle area clinics with tap-water burns fell by half in the past decade, Dr. Feldman said. While there is no scientific proof that the state law was responsible, the feeling is that it played a significant role, he said. +''We are really encouraged to see the data drop,'' he said. ''It is very hopeful.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Diagram: Two of the Memry Corporation's products, one for a bathtub, the other for a shower. Both use the company's anti-scalding device based on a ''shape memory'' alloy that expands when it gets hot. (Memry Corporation) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +164 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 5, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Dr. Morris Stroud, 76, Specialist in Geriatrics + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 30, Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 164 words + +DATELINE: WEST CHESTER, Pa., May 4 + +Dr. Morris Wistar Stroud 3d, a physician who developed new ways to help elderly patients recover from illness, died of cancer on Monday at his home. He was 76 years old. In the 1940's Dr. Stroud was among the first physicians to form teams of professionals, including counselors, to work with the family to improve a patient's life. +Last year, he, Dr. Sidney Katz and Dr. Barry Gurland established the Morris W. Stroud 3d Center for Scientific Approaches to the Quality of Life in Health Care and Aging at Columbia University. +He was co-author in 1985, with Dr. Katz and Sister Barbara Ann Gooding, of ''Rehabilitation of the Elderly: A Tale of Two Hospitals.'' +Dr. Stroud was a graduate of Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He served in the South Pacific in World War II. +Dr. Stroud's first wife, Marion S. Rosengarten, died in 1988. He is survived by his wife, Patricia; a daughter, Marion Boulton Stroud, a brother and three sisters. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: OBITUARY + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +165 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 6, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In South Africa, Foes Are Humanized + +BYLINE: By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 3, Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 913 words + +DATELINE: CAPE TOWN, May 5 + +An elderly black woman stood outside the airport terminal this morning, awaiting the arrival of Albie Sachs, a veteran of the African National Congress who was returning home after 24 years in exile. +''This is really a funny day,'' the woman said with a smile. ''Communists and terrorists have turned into people.'' +Her comment was prompted not just by the homecoming of Mr. Sachs, a white lawyer who lost his right arm when his car was bombed in Maputo, Mozambique, several years ago, but also by euphoria over the successful talks between the Government and the African National Congress, which announced jointly on Friday that they had made real progress toward eliminating obstacles to more formal negotiations. +The surprise was not that the two delegations got along but that they got along so well, raising hopes that the sudden trust and cordiality between old enemies could hasten an orderly demise of apartheid. + +'To See the Common Ground' +''The important thing is that both delegations went into these talks with a spirit of letting bygones be bygones,'' Nelson Mandela, who headed the African National Congress delegation, told reporters after the talks. +''We were therefore able to conduct these discussions without any bitterness. We were able to see the common ground between us, and it is on this that we concentrated,'' Mr. Mandela said. +President F. W. de Klerk, appearing with Mr. Mandela, said that ''the interaction and the talks had the additional advantage of allowing people sitting around the table to get to know each other, to really form an impression as to the sincerity of people, as to what make their minds tick, as to what motivates them.'' +The negotiators had little in common beyond being South Africans. The Government side consisted of Government ministers and officials who were all white, male, Afrikaner and mostly in their 50's and 60's. For them, the African National Congress had long been synonymous with subversion and terrorism. + +A Lack of Bitterness +The team sent by the African National Congress was more diverse, with whites and women as well as black men. But its members arrived with strong views about members of a party that devised apartheid and inflicted repression to enforce it. Several delegates of the African National Congress, like Mr. Mandela and Walter Sisulu, had served long prison terms. Others had been driven into exile. +During the discussions, Mr. Sisulu recalled today, a Government minister remarked that he found it amazing that those sitting across from him were not bitter. +''Both sides were quite frank about their perceptions and that frankness helped,'' said Mr. Sisulu. +He said he and his colleagues had reservations about the participation of the Minister of Law and Order Adriaan Vlok, whose police force waged an often ruthless war against the African National Congress and its supporters until Mr. de Klerk legalized the organization on Feb. 2. + +'Very Nice People' +''When I thought of him, I was worried,'' Mr. Sisulu said today. But Mr. Vlok turned out to be pleasant man, he said. Mr. Vlok seemed to draw the same conclusion about the visitors from the African National Congress. +''They were very nice people,'' Mr. Vlok was overheard to say after Friday's news conference. +The African National Congress's delegation included Joe Slovo, whose leadership of the South African Communist Party made him the man his fellow whites in South Africa love to hate. Mr. Mandela disclosed last Sunday that a Government minister wanted Mr. Slovo omitted from the team. +But Mr. Slovo has a jovial charm and before long, Mr. Sisulu recalled, Government ministers was exchanging jokes with South Africa's paramount Communist. +Thabo Mbeki, the Congress's secretary for foreign affairs, told reporters that he jokingly referred to South Africa's Foreign Minister, Roelof F. Botha, as ''my deputy.'' Mr. Mbeki was not sure that Mr. Botha was pleased about the remark. Who's Coming to Dinner? Mr. Sisulu, who is unfailingly courteous, was asked by a reporter today if any Government representatives had invited him home to dinner. +''There was no specific invitation of that kind,'' he said. +And was he inviting any of them home?''No, too early,'' Mr. Sisulu said with the trace of a smile. +Strini Moodley, the spokesman for the Azanian People's Organization, a militant black-consciousness movement, was quoted today by the South African Press Association as accusing the African National Congress of forging an alliance with the governing National Party. The white right-wing Conservative Party, in turn, has attacked the Government for talking to the African National Congress. +When Mr. Sachs arrived today, he insisted upon pushing his own luggage cart with his one arm, fending off repeated efforts by black admirers to do it for him. He said he and the other exiles had been convinced that eventually they would return, but when it happened, he said, ''it came as a surprise.'' +Mr. Sachs, who watched Mr. de Klerk and Mr. Mandela appear together on television, said he was not surprised to learn of the atmosphere at the talks. ''There's never been any problem from our side. The problem has always been from the other side,'' he said. +But Mr. Sachs cautioned against getting swept up in euphoria when so much more had to be done to eliminate apartheid. +''I think we have to be careful,'' he said. ''We have to make it a solid optimism and not a fantasy optimism.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +166 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 6, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +SERVICE HELPS SOLVE INSURANCE PUZZLES + +BYLINE: By PENNY SINGER + +SECTION: Section 12WC; Page 16, Column 5; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1328 words + +''We're getting more inquiries than ever before from patients who don't understand their bills,'' said Maureen Nemeth, the coordinator of credit and collection for inpatient accounts at Northern Westchester Hospital Center in Mount Kisco. ''Filing medical insurance claims has become very confusing for the public, especially as benefits keep changing.'' +Dr. George Vogel, a 72-year-old retired physician who lives at Heritage Hills in Somers, said that one of the greatest sources of stress among older people in his community was health insurance. ''It's getting very difficult to know how to buy the right policy,'' he said, ''and it's also hard to deal with all the medical and insurance forms required today.'' +Dr. Vogel, who practiced medicine for 50 years, commented that his patients never had to fill out insurance forms. ''I had an assistant who did it for them because I believed it was part of an ethical medical practice to do so,'' he said. +''However, at this point, with the repeal of the law providing benefits for catastrophic illness, I find that the new regulations concerning medical insurance are so confusing and the information you get from the insurance companies so unreadable, that I just got fed up and hired a consultant to review all my policies and give me advice. But I shouldn't have to pay for assistance. Enough money is being made by insurance companies to give the public a fair shake and not rip them off.'' +Dr. Vogel went to David A. Testone, who runs a medical-insurance benefit-recovery service, Testone Associates of Brewster. + +Overlapping Policies +''Dr. Vogel had five different insurance policies, and when I reviewed his benefits I found he had overlapping policies,'' Mr. Testone said. ''For instance, his hospital benefits were duplicated, and he didn't need three of the policies.'' +The point is, Mr. Testone pointed out, that even Dr. Vogel, a professional who is more familiar with medical coverage and forms than the average consumer, found buying supplemental health insurance confusing. +''The repeal of the catastrophic law has opened the doors for a lot of insurance salesmen, who are making a killing selling duplicate Medigap policies,'' Mr. Testone said, referring to the private policies that cover what Medicare doesn't pay. ''There are a lot of abuses out there. Many older people are insurance-poor because they're paying for policies they don't need.'' +Mr. Testone, a former teacher who spent 10 years as chairman of the foreign language department at a boarding school in Ohio, said he was looking for a change of pace when he went into the insurance business as a district claims representative for one of the nation's largest health-insurance companies six years ago. + +On Settling Claims +''But it turned out what I really was was a hatchet man,'' he said. ''My job required me to travel from coast to coast, settling claims and rescinding insurance policies, working in the company's best interests. Keeping an eye on corporate profit was my first responsibility, the policyholder ran a poor second.'' +When anyone had a claim in excess of $10,000, Mr. Testone said, ''all hell broke loose.'' +''One automobile accident victim, for instance, had a soft-tissue injury - which doesn't show up on X-rays - certified by his doctor,'' Mr. Testone continued. ''In such cases, our insurance company had the patient examined by 'an outside impartial medical examiner,' whose fees were paid by the insurance company. +''His findings differed from those of the victim's own doctor, and then the policyholder was advised to settle for a compromise sum or else we would rescind his policy. In essence, that meant it would be almost impossible for him to get other insurance, so people would take a compromise sum. In one memorable week, I saved the company more money than I was paid in five years.'' +What triggered Mr. Testone's final disenchantment with his job was a case concerning an elderly woman in Tampa, Fla. +''She was an 85-year-old widow who had paid a claims consultant $1,000 to handle her bills for her. But because he didn't file the paperwork in her Medigap policy properly, the insurance company didn't have all the information. We found a loophole and were able to take advantage of her and didn't pay her what she deserved.'' + +New Business Grew +After four years of settling claims in ''the shortest time at the least expense to the company,'' Mr. Testone said, ''I had more than enough.'' +Turning his knowledge of the inner workings of insurance companies into a service business, Mr. Testone started his company 18 months ago, acting as intermediary between insurance company and client. +''Business was slow at first, but gradually, spurred largely by word-of-mouth referrals, my client list has grown,'' he said. He estimated that more than 25 percent of medical claims his older clients submit were returned for errors and omissions, and many claims were never resubmitted. +Annual fees for Mr. Testone's service - which includes accounting of all medical expenses, filing all medical-insurance forms and claims and analysis of a client's present medical policies - are $150 for those older than 55 and $99 for those younger than 55, plus 10 percent of all money recovered and claimed yearly. Members of Northern Westchester Hospital's health-access program pay $35 and 5 percent recovery. + +Shopping Bags of Bills +''Clients literally bring in shopping bags containing bills,'' he said. ''One couple, who were both struck by major illnesses last year -the husband had a heart attack, the wife a stroke - were overwhelmed by the bills coming in from doctors, hospitals and collection agencies.'' The first step, he said, was to put the bills in working order. ''They had a group policy through the husband's employer and in an individual policy as well. Working with the legal department of both insurance agencies, we found that the hospital had been paid twice. Eventually the clients got the benefits they were entitled to through both major policies.'' +Alan J. Benet, who has been an independent insurance broker in Mamaroneck for 25 years, observed that a service such as Mr. Testone's was a ''reasonable one.'' He added: ''People who are hospitalized have a lot to deal with. Very few people are accustomed to keeping the concise records that are needed today.'' +As for buying insurance policies, Mr. Benet said, too many elderly people buy three or four policies. ''They don't realize that each policy will only pay a share of benefits. For example, if the total benefits amount to 80 percent of the claim, coordinating benefits means that each policy will only pay 40 percent while the policyholder is paying two sets of premiums, he only gets the benefit of one.'' + +Companies and Consultants +However, insurance companies, Mr. Benet stressed, are not all alike. ''Some are better than others. When the profit motive is taken out of the picture, the policyholder is usually better off. In other words, if he buys a contract from a consultant or independent broker, he gets a more impartial view than he would from an insurance company representative.'' +''If someone is 65 years old or older, one Medicare supplement product is advisable,'' said John F. Kelly, manager of public relations for Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the state's largest health insurer. ''People should read their policies and know their benefits. No one should purchase multiple Medigap insurance policies.'' But, Mr. Kelly stressed, ''There is no need for any one of our policyholders to have to pay an outside service to collect their benefits for them. Our offices are accessible by phone and with customer representatives who will help all our clients. +''We have a customer-service office in White Plains and one in Manhattan for anyone with problems. Our claim forms are simple one-page affairs that shouldn't take anyone more than 15 or 20 minutes to complete.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: David A. Testone, left, of Testone Associates of Brewster, a medical-insurance benefit-recovery service, reviewing insurance policies with Dr. George Vogel, a retired physician. (Alan Zale for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +167 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 7, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO DATELINES; +State Urged to Help Elderly Pedestrians + +SECTION: Section B; Page 8, Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 188 words + +DATELINE: ALBANY + +More than a third of all pedestrian deaths in New York State in 1988 involved people who were 65 years old or older, the Legislature's Commission on Critical Transportation Choices reported yesterday. +Calling the state's 575 pedestrian deaths in 1988 a ''hidden killer,'' the commission recommended that a survey be made to determine where elderly people live, where they walk and where they are being killed as pedestrians. Based on the results, the commission said, the state should consider building safety-island medians that would allow the elderly more time to cross busy streets. Traffic signals should also be set to give such pedestrians longer crossing times in high-use areas, the commission said. +State Senator Norman Levy, the chairman of the commission, said he would seek a change in state law that would require motorists to yield the right of way to pedestrians as soon as they enter any portion of a crosswalk. At present motorists must yield only when the pedestrian is in their traffic lane of the crosswalk. +The commission said that of the 575 deaths in 1988, 197 involved people 65 or older. (AP) + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +168 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 10, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Change in Social Security for Women Is Urged + +BYLINE: By TAMAR LEWIN + +SECTION: Section A; Page 27, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 656 words + +The Older Women's League called on Congress yesterday to give some form of Social Security credit to women who stay home to care for children or disabled family members. +The advocacy group, based in Washington, said in a report that the retirement system unfairly penalizes women, who are far more likely than men to spend time outside the work force caring for family members. +It said biases in Social Security and private pensions would leave young working women no better off in their old age than their mothers who never earned wages. +''Our retirement programs continue to reward male work patterns while penalizing two-earner families, care giving, divorce, early retirement and long life,'' said Lou Glasse, the president of the league. ''Unless we enact reforms now, these biases will perpetuate poverty among older women well into the next century.'' +Although more and more women are in the work force, working women's retirement benefits, like their wages, still lag far behind those of working men. +In some areas, the gap is increasing. The average private pension received by women in 1974 was 73 percent of the average man's, the report said, but by 1987 it had dropped to 58 percent. +Representative William J. Hughes, the New Jersey Democrat who is chairman of the Subcommittee on Retirement Income and Employment of the House Select Committee on Aging, announced he would hold hearings on May 22 to consider how Congress might remedy the situation outlined in the league report. +''One of the easily correctable components of this problem,'' Mr. Hughes said, ''is that while women assume the majority of care-giving responsibilities, the Social Security program does not recognize these care-giving years. We must develop proposals that do not penalize women for their care-giving years.'' +Social Security benefits for today's workers will be computed on the basis of average earnings over 35 years. Those who work fewer than 35 years have zeroes averaged into their earnings, a policy that cuts deeply into benefits for the vast majority of women, who take years out of their career to care for children or aging parents. +Women average 11.5 years out of the work force, as against 1.3 years for men, the report said, adding that even by 2030 most women aged 62 to 69 will not have spent at least 35 years in the work force. +''Since society depends on family care giving, and that means women,'' Ms. Glasse said, ''we propose that those years taken out for care giving not be counted.'' +The other approach, she said, would be to provide a Social Security credit for the care-giving years. + +Two Methods of Payment +The league report said a woman's wages drop an average of $3,000 the year she has a child and $5,000 to $6,000 each of the next two years. +Social Security benefits for women are based either on their own work records or their husbands', whichever pays more. If a woman gets Social Security through her husband, the amount is equal to 50 percent of his. +From 1960 to 1988, the report said, the number of American women entitled to Social Security on both their own work records and their spouses' more than quadrupled, to 22 percent from 5 percent. But at the same time the percentage of women drawing benefits through their husbands remained constant, because for millions of employed women a monthly Social Security payment that is half of their husband's is still more than they would receive based on their own employment record. These women get no benefit for their years of contributing to Social Security. +The report said private pensions are also biased against women. Because of family obligations, it said, many women do not spend enough years working full-time for one employer to become entitled to that employer's pension. The league proposed that private pensions be made portable, so people who change jobs can take retirement contributions with them to their new jobs. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +169 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 11, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +LAW; +Grandparent Visitation Rights at a New Level + +BYLINE: By LAWRENCE I. SHULRUFF, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7, Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 765 words + +DATELINE: CHICAGO, May 10 + +When parents divorce, laws in all 50 states allow the grandparents to petition the courts to keep seeing their grandchildren. But Illinois has gone one step further: It allows that same right to grandparents when the child's parents are still married. +Legal experts say the Illinois law spells out grandparent visitation rights more explicitly than any statute in the country. And while some organizations representing older Americans say they are pleased, other lawyers in family practice say there are often good reasons that married couples might want to keep their parents away from their children. +Both sides agree that the Illinois law, enacted last September, raises important issues, including how a family is defined and who should make decisions regarding a child's upbringing. +''It is an amazing bill,'' said James L. Rubens, a Chicago lawyer involved in one of the few cases that have arisen so far. ''It puts grandparents right in the middle of the lives of parents who are living happily together.'' Does Statute Go Too Far? He added, ''I do believe that grandparents have rights, but I have to ask if this statute goes too far.'' +Mr. Rubens was appointed by the court to represent 6-year-old Christopher Brooks, who lives with his parents in Milwaukee. The child's grandmother, who lives outside Chicago, has gone to Circuit Court of Cook County to seek visitation rights. +The grandmother, Dorothy Dillon, said she took the action because her daughter, from whom she is estranged, allowed her to visit her grandson only three or four times a year and restricted telephone conversations. The grandmother wants to visit the child once a month. +''This is no way to treat a mother, no way to treat a grandmother,'' said Ms. Dillon, who is a secretary. ''All I want is to see my grandson.'' She has already spent about $5,750 on legal fees, she said. +Christopher's mother, Karyn Brooks, said she had never denied her mother a chance to visit the boy. ''But we want to make the decision when she will see our son,'' Mrs. Brooks said. ''The court doesn't belong here. This is a family matter.'' Defense of New Statute Groups that represent the interests of grandparents disagree. Ruth Etheridge, who founded Grandchildren's Rights to Grandparents, an organization based in LaGrange, a Chicago suburb, argues that the new law does not restrict parents' rights. While the law allows grandparents to petition a court for visitation rights, it does not guarantee such a right. After a petition is filed, the court determines if it is in the best interest of the child to allow the grandparents to visit. +Ms. Etheridge said the law helped grandparents detect and report child abuse. ''The only reason I can see why a grandparent should be refused visitation is that the grandparent is abusive,'' said Ms. Etheridge, whose own daughter has refused her visitation rights. ''That is very rare.'' +Most state laws allow grandparents to seek to visit their grandchildren in cases in which the parents have divorced or separated or if the parent to whom the grandparents are related has died, said Jeff Atkinson, a professor of family law at Loyola University in Chicago and co-chairman of the American Bar Association's Child Custody committee. +Professor Atkinson noted that 21 states have so-called general-visitation statutes. These laws do not specifically limit visitation to cases of parental divorce or death, although courts in some of those states, like California, have done so. In some states, visits may be sought by more distant relatives and, in rare cases, even nonrelatives who have a significant interest in the child. + +How Illinois Law Works +The Illinois law does not specify how many visits a grandparent may expect, or the length of each visit. +The sponsor of the new Illinois law, State Representative James R. Stange, a Republican from the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook, acknowledged that the statute placed some parental authority in the hands of the court. He said, however, that the provision had been drafted to deal with ''extreme circumstances,'' such as when a couple refuses to let a grandparent visit at all. +Mr. Stange said he did not expect the law to come into play often. He said he knew of two other Illinois cases in which grandparents had filed petitions to visit grandchildren whose parents are married. +''The threat of court is going to force parents and grandparents to confront their problems and resolve their differences,'' he said. ''If they can't resolve them, the only option is going to court. Then the judge will decide.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +170 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 13, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE SHEER NECESSITY FOR POETRY + +BYLINE: By JOHN BAYLEY; John Bayley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English at the University of Oxford. His books include ''Tolstoy and the Novel.'' + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 9, Column 1; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 2050 words + + +THE COMPLETE POEMS OF ANNA AKHMATOVA +Edited by Roberta Reeder. +Translated by Judith Hemschemeyer. +Illustrated. Volume One, 650 pp. Volume Two, 871 pp. +Somerville, Mass.: Zephyr Press. $85. +It will be interesting to see how the coming of glasnost affects Russian poets and their poetry. Already so brilliant and talented a poet as Joseph Brodsky has become as much a cosmopolitan as a Russian poet, often writing in English, and acclimated to the indifference of an open society where poetry is the preserve of academics and a few other enthusiasts. Nothing feels more separated from this than the poetry and personality of Anna Akhmatova, who in her old age was kind to Mr. Brodsky when he was young and befriended him before he had to leave the Soviet Union. +For most Soviet poets she preserved a steady if good-natured contempt. She was the high priestess of a Russian poetry that was almost an extension of the Russian Church - hieratic, gravely melodious, attracting a vast audience of devotees who knew much of the nation's poetry by heart in the same sense that they knew the Orthodox ritual. Her friend, the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died during the Stalinist purges in a distant eastern gulag, once remarked that poetry was taken so seriously in Russia that a poet could be killed for writing it. Pushkin would have understood that, and Mandelstam's satirical verse about Stalin signed his own death warrant. Akhmatova too was persecuted by the Soviet state: her former husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot in 1921, and their son was twice imprisoned for long periods for the crime of bearing his father's name. +But Russian poets, like martyrs of the church, have thrived on such treatment and on the holy status it gave their work. Akhmatova herself was very conscious of this status. In 1962, four years before Akhmatova died at the age of 76, Robert Frost visited the Soviet Union and paid a call on her at the dacha lent her for the occasion at the writers' colony near Leningrad. The two distinguished old poets sat side by side in wicker chairs and talked quietly. ''And I kept thinking,'' Akhmatova wrote afterward, ''here are you, my dear, a national poet. Every year your books are published. . . . They praise you in all the newspapers and journals, they teach you in the schools, the President receives you as an honored guest. And all they've done is slander me! . . . I've had everything - poverty, prison lines, fear, poems remembered only by heart, and burnt poems. And humiliation and grief. And you don't know anything about this and wouldn't be able to understand it if I told you. . . . But now let's sit together, two old people, in wicker chairs. A single end awaits us. And perhaps the real difference is not actually so great?'' +But she knew it was. Great not so much in terms of suffering - bitter and prolonged as that had been - but in terms of the sheer necessity for poetry in such times, for the Russian poet and for his audience. In a happier country it is one of the amenities, not the needs. The culture that is optional and varied in a civilized society was for many in Stalin's country the only way to stay living and sane. +For this reason the poet must never forget, or allow the new barbarism to blot out the past. Akhmatova saw her poetic role as one of remembering and bearing witness. As Roberta Reeder points out in her admirable introduction to ''The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova,'' +''for Akhmatova, to forget was to commit a mortal sin. Memory had become a moral category: one remembers one's misdeeds, atones, and achieves redemption.'' And in those miserable years in which Soviet culture sought to impose a Communist stereotype on every aspect of society, the poet's personal memories were as communally precious as statements bearing witness to public events and universal suffering. Akhmatova'a two great poems, ''Requiem'' and ''Poem Without a Hero,'' record, respectively, the time of terror and the purges and a more timeless vision of the past in which the dead and the living meet and change roles, and key events in the poet's own life become part of a public nightmare. +The central event of ''Poem Without a Hero'' is the suicide of a young friend, a cadet officer who had fallen in love with Olga Sudeikina, an actress who was a close friend of Akhmatova's. (There are excellent photographs in this collection of Akhmatova herself and of people in her life.) Sudeikina took parts in the decadent dramas put on in the group theaters and by St. Petersburg cabarets like the Stray Dog. She was also for a time the lover of the poet Aleksandr Blok, another close friend of Akhmatova's, and it was jealousy for this rival that caused the young soldier-poet Vsevolod Knyazev to shoot himself. Although this suicide occurred a year before World War I, it was for Akhmatova a symbol and foretaste of all the horrors to come. The figure of Knyazev mutates in the poem into that of the poet Mandelstam himself, who had said to Akhmatova shortly before his arrest: ''I am ready to die.'' And in the carnival of the threatening 20th century (''The real - not the calendar - / Twentieth Century''), both merge with a ''guest from the future,'' the Oxford professor Isaiah Berlin, who came to call on Akhmatova in 1945, when he was working in Moscow for the British Foreign Office. +Delighted as she was to see this admirer from the West, with whom she conversed for a whole night in her cramped garret near the Moika Canal, Akhmatova was always convinced that she owed to that visit her subsequent persecution by Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's minister for culture, a pursuit that lasted till the tyrant's death and recalled some of her worst times during the purges before the war. In those days she had planned and begun to write ''Requiem,'' a great poem like a dirge or chant in Orthodox ritual, which was inspired by a woman who spoke to her as they waited in line outside the prison where their sons were held, saying, ''Can you put this into your poetry?'' Akhmatova replied that she could. ''Requiem'' wonderfully commemorates the horror of the time and without a trace of self-consciousness asks that if a statue of herself, the poet, is ever erected by her fellow countrymen it should stand here outside the prison wall by the Neva River, with the melted snow running from its bronze face like tears. +That section of the poem shows with what reverence, solemnity even, Akhmatova regarded her poetic calling, a dignity that makes the public posturing of such a poet in the West as W. B. Yeats seem tawdry by contrast. One of Akhmatova's most moving as well as most stately poems commemorates the death of Lot's wife, turned into a pillar of salt for the last glance she could not resist taking of her native town: + + + + And the righteous man followed the envoy of God, + Huge and bright, over the black mountain. + But anguish spoke loudly to his wife: + It is not too late, you can still gaze + + At the red towers of your native Sodom, + At the square where you sang, at the courtyard where you spun, + At the empty windows of the tall house + Where you bore children to your beloved husband. . . . + + Who will weep for this woman? + Isn't her death the least significant? + But my heart will never forget the one + Who gave her life for a single glance. + + + +Sonorous, calm, deliberate in movement, the Russian words can be transformed into no English equivalent; but in this admirably restrained and accurate translation by Judith Hemschemeyer, the sense and the message strike with all the weight of the original. To have rendered the whole corpus of such a poet into plain, proportioned, forceful English is a remarkable achievement; and Amanda Haight, the doyenne of Akhmatova studies, who died a year ago and to whom the volumes are dedicated, must have been proud of the project - the first complete collection of Akhmatova and, since it is printed here in both languages, also the first complete Russian edition - and she must have given it her blessing. +Just as one of Pushkin's finest long poems, ''The Bronze Horseman,'' may have been conceived as a reply to his Polish friend Adam Mickiewicz, who had produced an anti-Petersburg poem in ''Forefathers' Eve,'' so ''Poem Without a Hero'' may have been intended in one sense as Akhmatova's reproach to the poet Mikhail Kuzmin, who had been the lover of Knyazev and alluded to his suicide in his own poem published in 1929 called ''The Trout Breaks the Ice.'' Ms. Reeder suggests that Kuzmin's malice and frivolity, and his wish to obliterate Knyazev's suicide from memory, seemed irresponsible to Akhmatova, and a symptom of the decline that had led to the Revolution. Certainly there is an air of almost religious expiation about Akhmatova's great poem, some of whose rhythms echo those of Kuzmin's much slighter work. There is also a very definite relationship with T. S. Eliot's ''Four Quartets,'' with their blending of public and private images and their meditation on time future in time past. Like Eliot, Akhmatova used as a source of inspiration the motto of Mary, Queen of Scots: ''In my end is my beginning.'' +Conscience, repentance, suffering, bearing witness - all these spiritual attributes have an effortless place in Akhmatova's poetry, and testify to the kinds of purgation the poet underwent in her work. Some of her gravest and most emphatic poems repeat her claim to have stood fast, accepted persecution, remained with her people, not sheltered ''under a foreign wing.'' The philistine Zhdanov, and even Trotsky himself, sneered at her work as that of a hysterical female immersed in frivolous love affairs, who regarded God as a sort of benevolent gynecologist. Akhmatova was not in any modern sense a feminist, but she was proud to be a woman, and a woman speaking with authority in a world of men. One of her epigrams observes sardonically that she has given a voice to women and their feelings, and they have followed her lead all too well: ''God grant that I could make them silent again.'' +Certainly she was herself fully and unapologetically open to the emotions and impulses of love. As well as poet and priestess it was natural for her to be wife, mother and lover. In more than one charming poem she expressed her amusement at her husband Gumilyov's lack of domestic instinct, his desire for escape to Africa or into some foreign romance. Their relationship was far from easy, and neither was faithful, but he was her spouse although in the end she had to leave and to divorce him. After he was shot by the Bolsheviks she was married to or lived with two other men, Petersburg intellectuals, from whom she was parted not only by personal problems but by the hazards of the Great Terror and the convulsions of World War II, during which she was evacuated to Tashkent in central Asia. Vladimir Garshin, a medical professor and nephew of a celebrated 19th-century writer, had proposed marriage, but when she returned from exile after the war he abandoned her, his wits probably deranged by what had been gone through. In old age she remained a dignified and benevolent presence, her aquiline features molded into a more placid cast, but her powers were undiminished, and her poems as strong, shapely and well made as ever. + + + +'Who Is Wandering?' + + My treasures of last year + Will, unfortunately, last a long time. + You know yourself, malicious memory + Cannot spend half of them: + The crooked, ramshackle cupola, + The caw of the crows and the steam engine's wail, + And the birch tree limping across the field + As if it were serving time, + And the secret, midnight gathering + Of gigantic, Biblical oaks, + And floating from somebody's dream, + The almost sunken boat . . . + There the beginning of winter meandered, + Just grazing the fields with white, + Inadvertently turning the distance + Into impenetrable haze. + And it seemed that after the end + Nothing ever happens anymore . . . + Who is wandering near the porch again + And calling us by name? + Who is pressed against the icy windowpane, + Waving with a branch-like hand? . . . + And in answer a sunbeam dances from the mirror + To the cobweb in the corner. + +''March Elegy.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Anna Akhmatova in a 1924 portrait by Moses Nappelbaum. (Form ''The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova'') + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +171 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 16, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +About New York; +Two Who Look For the Elderly Few Others See + +BYLINE: By DOUGLAS MARTIN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 767 words + +There are unlikely jobs in New York City. This column is about one of them. It is about two mental-health workers who troll high-rise apartments, cheap hotels and park benches to find sick old people and get them to a doctor at the Bellevue Hospital Center. +There are unlikely ways to perform unlikely jobs. On any weekday you might see Loretta R. Singleton, 63 years old, and Ronald V. Costello, 54, roaring down a Manhattan street on a seriously large motorcycle, Ron gunning the engine and Loretta's gray hair blowing wildly. ''People call us the vaudeville team,'' she said. People also call them dedicated, persistent, courageous and professionals of a very high order - almost always on the first-name basis they prefer. +These wizards of human retrieval have helped people who had been eating out of garbage cans; a deranged actress living on Park Avenue; an octogenarian supporting a heroin habit by selling her body, and a rich woman subsisting on cornflakes and Sucrets. +''They are our front line of intake,'' said Dr. Michael L. Freedman, director of the Ambulatory Care Program run by Bellevue and New York University. ''They reach people no one else could.'' +Under the program, more than 5,000 people make over 20,000 outpatient visits to Bellevue annually. Most are not charged. +Both Ron, who lives in New Jersey, and Loretta, who lives in Harlem, began at Bellevue 36 years ago. They were psychiatric nurse's aides in the time of straitjackets and shock treatments. ''The job was muscles and guts,'' Ron said. In 1974, Bellevue and N.Y.U. teamed up to find and help those termed ''the invisible elderly'' -waves of old people dismissed from institutions in the late 1960's. The shock troops were Ron and Loretta, both of whom had used their free time to earn degrees in behavioral science from Hunter College. ''The job was so new we had to write the job description,'' he said. +So they passed out countless cigarettes and coffees to win over hotel managers. They camped out in centers for the elderly, housing projects and church basements. They curried informers, from chambermaids to storeowners to mail carriers. They provided flu vaccinations, performed blood-pressure tests and threw huge Christmas dinners. People on benches were given cards, some eliciting responses a decade later. +''We will go anywhere there's a captive audience of old people,'' Loretta said. +Their ''catchment area'' includes all of Manhattan below 42d Street and that part of it east of Fifth Avenue from 42d to 64th Streets. In this area, these two blacks found that they served mainly whites. ''We not only had to sell ourselves but sell black,'' Ron said. +That is still a tough sell sometimes. A cleaning woman recently called the police when she saw the two knocking on a door. She assumed they were breaking in. +The other day, Loretta and Ron began their visit to the Kenmore Hall Hotel at 145 East 23d Street by chatting with the loquacious manager. She introduced herself as ''Velma Judith Caroline 3 O'Clock in the Morning Lucchi'' and presented a list of some 100 old people for the pair to visit. +Too many for one day, but they promised to see everyone eventually. They first went to Mr. Williams's room, into which a wiry man had just scurried. No one came to the door. ''We will visit you very soon,'' said their note. Next, Mrs. McKenzie refused to talk. A woman known as Fanny wasn't home. +George A. Ainsworth, born on Sept. 21, 1909, was definitely in. After profusely introducing his parakeet, Blue, he was eager to discourse on pretty much anything, including his seven or eight rectal operations. His interest was piqued by a Bellevue program using computers to improve memory. +''I stop in the middle of a sentence and I can't think of the word I want to get to,'' Mr. Ainsworth said. ''An ordinary word.'' +Max in Room 402 was next. The 77-year-old's room reeked of incontinence. He had a bloody growth on his bald head. He said he was hungry but couldn't eat until his Social Security check came. +Ron and Loretta referred Max to a soup kitchen and promised to make a doctor's appointment. ''He's a cutie,'' she said afterward. ''He looked like a genteel man,'' he observed. These warriors of mercy have many stories. There's one about a 106-year-old Russian with wooden teeth. Another about a woman whose black toenails poked through her sneakers like daggers. Every tale is different. To Ron and Loretta, each old person remains as special as the revered elders of the upper Manhattan neighborhoods of their youths. +''We never hardened; we just got smarter,'' Ron said. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: photo: Ronald Costello and Loretta Singleton. + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +172 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 16, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Reviews/Theater; +3 Widows With Unseemly Behavior + +BYLINE: By FRANK RICH + +SECTION: Section C; Page 14, Column 4; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 753 words + +If you believe that one good reason for going to the theater is to escape television sitcoms, you may not be tickled to end up at ''The Cemetery Club,'' the new attraction at the Brooks Atkinson. From its peppy canned theme music to its final-scene sermonizing, this comedy about three Jewish widows in Forest Hills, Queens, is ''Golden Girls'' at four times the length but with at most one-fourth the star wattage. Moving at the leisurely pace of a contentious canasta hand, ''The Cemetery Club'' could be one of the best arguments yet advanced for cremation. +The author, Ivan Menchell, follows the time-honored rules of his chosen genre: he gives his middle-class senior citizens as many toilet, sexual and anatomical one-liners as he can. Lucille (Eileen Heckart), the randiest of the ladies, sets the evening's tone with her early declaration that ''You don't buy a mink because you need it; you buy support hose because you need it.'' Doris (Doris Belack), the pill of the group, issues loud periodic bulletins like ''I'm going to the bathroom!'' and ''Oy, am I going to have gas!'' The good-hearted Ida (Elizabeth Franz), suffering from a hangover, opens one scene by rushing offstage to vomit. +To stitch these merry episodes together, Mr. Menchell has concocted a story in which the women's so-called cemetery club, a chatty monthly reunion at their beloved husbands' graves, is disrupted by the intrusion of Sam (Lee Wallace), a widower with an eye for Ida. A few misunderstandings, jealous spats, drunken confessions and yahrzeit candles later, order is restored. By then, Ida has delivered the inevitable bit of sentimental boilerplate, ''For the first time since Murray died, I felt alive!'' and everyone has gotten to dance the cha-cha and eat a little chopped liver. +What's objectionable, as opposed to merely tedious, about Mr. Menchell's writing is the sanctimony in which it cloaks its vulgarity. Not unlike Robert Harling's ''Steel Magnolias'' -with which it shares its director, Pamela Berlin - ''The Cemetery Club'' purports to be championing its women's independence even as it alternately patronizes and humiliates them. The play's climax involves the removal of a wig (a stunt also used in the much higher camp of ''Lettice and Lovage'') and a drink-tossing cat fight. When Mr. Menchell, again echoing ''Steel Magnolias,'' tries to retrieve his seriousness of purpose in Act II by sending a fresh corpse to the grave, the tear-jerking announcement of this untimely passing rings so false that it draws nearly as many titters as the wisecracks about unveilings, perpetual gravesite care and going into remission. +The staging is sluggish, with Ms. Belack's yenta, Ms. Franz's sugary born-again coquette and Mr. Wallace's blandly affable suitor doing nothing to erase one's fond memories of such archetypes as Molly Picon, Gertrude Berg and Sam Levene. The sterling Ms. Heckart has been given especially unflattering (and, for some reason, Day-Glo-hued) costumes by the designer Lindsay W. Davis and must at one point wear a blond wig and florid makeup befitting a Carol Channing impersonator. But such handicaps, let alone the stalled zingers in the script, cannot derail this comedienne's withering sarcasm and impeccable timing. She also is free to smoke in every scene - Ms. Heckart's gravelly voice is no put-on -and at one point she gets to stub out a butt on a tomb. +Such other laughs as there are come from the truly hideous scenery provided by the gifted John Lee Beatty, who seems to be having a giggle at the production's expense. Not only has he given Ida a vast living room of surpassingly realistic drabness, from the ersatz Chagall lithographs on the wall to a towering breakfront crammed with china, but he has also provided a cemetery whose backdrop pictures the cheerless ruins of the Flushing World's Fair as seen through a smoggy haze. During the set changes, the tombstones make such a commotion marching on and off stage that not even the audience is permitted to rest in peace. + +The Cemetery Club + +By Ivan Menchell; directed by Pamela Berlin; scenery by John Lee Beatty; costumes by Lindsay W. Davis; lighting by Natasha Katz; sound design by Scott T. Anderson; music by Robert Dennis. Presented by Howard Hurst, Philip Rose, David Brown and Sophie Hurst. At the Brooks Atkinson Theater, 256 West 47th Street. + +Ida . . . Elizabeth Franz +Lucille . . . Eileen Heckart +Doris . . . Doris Belack +Sam . . . Lee Wallace +Mildred . . . Judith Granite + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Eileen Heckart in a scene from ''The Cemetery Club.'' (Lisa Berg for The New York Times) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +173 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 17, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +CURRENTS; +U.S.-Soviet Comparison + +BYLINE: By Patricia Leigh Brown + +SECTION: Section C; Page 3, Column 5; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 208 words + +THE first exhibition comparing American and Soviet architectural approaches to housing, the workplace and public spaces has opened at the Knoll Design Center in SoHo. +The drawings and photographs were chosen by a joint jury. The exhibition was the brainchild of an American group, Architects Designers Planners for Social Reponsibility, and the Union of Architects in the Soviet Union. ''We were surprised by the similarities,'' the architect Tician Papachristou said. +The jury, which included Kenneth Frampton, Mildred Schmertz and Michael Rotundi, met in New York and Moscow, choosing 31 examples from the 1980's in each country. Among the most interesting are glasnost-inspired projects, as yet unbuilt, that point to new Soviet architectural trends. +''The style is freer,'' Mr. Papachristou said. ''They're bringing back materials that were important for centuries and that were abandoned - including brick and wood.'' +Shown above is a Soviet housing complex; at right, the Roosevelt Senior Citizens Housing on Long Island, designed by Kalbaugh and Lee. +The exhibition is open 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Monday to Friday, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. Saturday and Sunday at the Knoll Design Center, 105 Wooster Street (near Prince Street), through May 25. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +174 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 18, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Evolution in Europe; +RUSSIAN COUNTRY TOURED BY BAKER + +BYLINE: By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 6, Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 631 words + +DATELINE: MOSCOW, May 17 + +Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d and Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze of the Soviet Union took time out from their talks today for a drive in the countryside north of Moscow. +Mr. Baker, who rarely stops to do any touring on his trips, has made a point on this visit to see something of the Soviet Union beside his hotel room and the meeting hall. Tuesday night he took a stroll in central Moscow, visiting a pharmacy, a men's clothing store, a butcher shop and the McDonald's restaurant in Pushkin Square. +Today, after talks with Mr. Shevardnadze on conventional arms, strategic nuclear arms and chemical arms, Mr. Baker toured the Trinity Monastery of St. Sergius in Zagorsk, about 80 miles north of Moscow, a tourist site the Soviets often use to demonstrate that they tolerate religious freedom. Then Mr. Baker asked Mr. Shevardnadze to show him a Soviet village. His motorcade of Zil limousines and security cars pulled off the main road about halfway between Zagorsk and Moscow and screeched to a halt in the village of Radonezh. + +A Hamlet of 20 Houses +Home to about 50 pensioners, Radonezh is a tiny hamlet of 20 or so houses built from logs and shingles in the old Russian style, with small garden plots attached. From the main street, Mr. Baker could see a large cluster of more modern houses and dachas for the Moscow elite resting atop a hillside just across a meadow. Although a lone Soviet militia car was parked in the village when the motorcade drove in, the visit did not appear to be choreographed. +After the motorcade came to a halt at the head of the only paved street, Mr. Baker and Mr. Shevardnadze walked down to a cemetery adjacent to an onion-domed Russian Orthodox Church that dominates the village. As Mr. Baker and Mr. Shevardnadze were being shown the church cemetery, Mr. Baker called out to Robert M. Gates, the deputy national security adviser who was accompanying him, ''Bob, do you know who is buried in that cemetery?'' +A confused look crossed the face of Mr. Gates, a Soviet expert and former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. ''Dead people,'' Mr. Baker said. Complaints About Closed Church Outside the church the visiting entourage encountered an elderly Soviet woman wearing a brown shawl. She began complaining bitterly about the fact that the church was not open for worship. Mr. Baker asked through a translator how long it had been closed, and she answered, ''Since the war.'' The church, she complained, was now a museum rather than a house of worship. +''Over there,'' she said, pointing beyond the village, ''they opened the church, but ours is still closed.'' +Seeing an opportunity to get everything off her chest, the woman went on to tell Mr. Baker that the pension that she and her husband, a retired railroad worker, have to live on ''is not enough.'' +Someone then asked if Mr. Baker could see her house, and she immediately led the entourage down the main street. +''I didn't know you were coming or I would have brought a samovar out to the front yard,'' she told the Secretary of State. Her green-shingled house had a pile of lumber in the front yard, alongside a garden plot with blooming tulips and several yelping dogs in a pen. + +Promise of a Raise +During the visit to the house Mr. Shevardnadze promised that the woman's pension would ''be increased'' soon. As they were leaving, another elderly woman approached Mr. Baker to say, ''We have no place to pray.'' The villagers had repeatedly petitioned the authorities to reopen the church, she said, but were rebuffed. +Mr. Shevardnadze seem unfazed by the impromptu protests and declared in a loud voice, ''Let's agree that the Governments of the Soviet Union and the United States promise and pledge that the church will reopen.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d, right, discussed new proposals on stalled arms negotiations with Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the Soviet Foreign Minister. During a break in their talks yesterday, they spoke with a woman on a tour of the village of Radonezh, about 40 miles from Moscow. (Associated Press) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +175 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 18, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Louisiana Man Is Put to Death In 1977 Killing of a State Trooper + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 17, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 503 words + +DATELINE: ANGOLA, La., May 18 + +A two-time killer who shot a Louisiana state trooper to death was executed early this morning despite international outcries that he was almost mentally retarded. +Dalton Prejean, who had won 10 previous delays of scheduled executions, was pronounced dead in the electric chair at the state prison here at 1:21 A.M. Eastern daylight time. +The United States Supreme Court had voted 7 to 2 just a few hours earlier to deny a stay of execution for Mr. Prejean. +Warden John Whitley said he did not know how Mr. Prejean had reacted to the news that the High Court had refused to stop the execution. But he said Mr. Prejean had been ''relatively calm'' throughout the day. #3d Execution in 24 Hours Prejean's execution was the nation's third in 24 hours. Texas and Missouri each executed killers early Thursday. His death was the 128th in the nation, and the 19th in Louisiana, since capital punishment resumed in 1977. +Earlier, Gov. Buddy Roemer said he would not stop the execution. Twice in the past year Mr. Roemer rejected recommendations by the Pardon Board that he commute the sentence to life in prison. +''I'm never happy with these things but I do not, as a representative of the people, have a choice,'' said Roemer. +Mr. Prejean, 30, acknowledged he shot the trooper but said it would not serve justice to execute him. + +Missouri and Texas Execute 2 +The execution in Louisiana came 24 hours after a man convicted of killing four people was executed in Missouri and a Texas inmate was put to death for murdering his brother-in-law. +Both men died by injection shortly after 1 A.M. Thursday. +In Missouri, Leonard Laws, who was 40 years old, was executed for the robbery and shotgun slayings of an elderly couple. He had also been convicted in the killings of two other elderly people, crimes for which he had received a life sentence. +In Texas, Johnny Ray Anderson, 30, was executed for a 1981 slaying that was part of a scheme to collect $67,000 in insurance money. On Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court denied a stay of his execution. +The last time there were two executions on the same day was March 15, 1988, in Louisiana and Florida. +In the Texas case, Mr. Anderson, a sixth-grade dropout who attributed his I.Q. of 70 to sniffing gasoline and glue from the age of 5, was executed for fatally shooting Ronald Gene Goode, a 22-year-old soft-drink salesman, in the insurance scheme. +Also convicted in the murder were Mr. Goode's wife, Laura Anderson Goode, who is also Mr. Anderson's sister, as well as Delvin Johnson. They were sentenced to life in prison and paroled last year. Mr. Anderson's mother, Rowena, was acquitted of capital murder in the case. +The condemned man issued a final statement insisting that he was not responsible for the killing. In the statement, which was typed by a fellow death row inmate and had many misspellings, Mr. Anderson criticized the justice system as unfair and inconsiderate of ''the victum's family.'' He called himself ''the excape goat.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +176 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 19, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Liberian Urges Citizens to Battle Rebels + +BYLINE: By KENNETH B. NOBLE, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 6, Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 635 words + +DATELINE: ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, May 18 + +Gen. Samuel K. Doe of Liberia called on the entire population today to take up arms and join the fight against rebels who are trying to overthrow his Government. +In a speech monitored here, General Doe said that all retired officers and enlisted men should rejoin the army, and that students and the elderly should ''get their cutlasses and single-barrel guns and get in the bush'' against the rebels. +''If you are a loyal citizen then go out and defend your country,'' he told a meeting of tribal and political leaders at the executive mansion in Monrovia, the capital of the West African nation. +His plea contrasts with earlier assertions by General Doe dismissing the revolt as a series of remote and minor skirmishes exaggerated by foreign news accounts. The appeal was a response to the series of military successes the rebel group, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, has scored since the fighting began five months ago. + +Assertions of Qaddafi Role +The warfare started when some 150 guerrillas invaded a half-dozen hamlets in northeastern Liberia. The Liberian Government then sent troops and provincial policemen to oust them. +Since then, the rebels, their numbers increased to at least a thousand, have pushed the army out of virtually all of Nimba County, Liberia's primary agricultural, mining and logging region. They now assert that they have surrounded Buchanan, the port about 45 miles east of Monrovia, the capital. +General Doe also repeated accusations today that the Libyan leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, had trained and financed the rebels. In recent briefings with reporters, State Department officials have also said there was evidence that Libya had helped finance the rebels. +In an interview at his headquarters in Northern Liberia earlier this week, Charles Taylor, the rebel leader, strenuously denied that he received assistance from Libya or other sympathetic African or Arab nations, saying that if he had done so, ''by now this war would be over.'' +He said his forces were whollly armed with weapons confiscated from Government soldiers who were either killed or dropped them and fled. The rebel soldiers could be seen carrying weapons of Western and Eastern-bloc origin, which by itself proves very little since the Liberian Government had acquired arms from the United States and Romania. + +'I Will Make Them Surrender' +Rebel leaders also said they were starting to finance their effort by selling timber and would in the future do so with captured mining operations. +On Thursday, the rebels reportedly launched a new offensive near the town of Gbarnga.the third-largest town in Liberia and the most important Government-held town in the northern part of the country. The atmosphere in Gbarnga was described by a Western diplomat as ''extremely tense.'' +Nonetheless, General Doe vowed today that he would soon crush the guerrillas. ''If the rebels will not surrender, I will make them surrender,'' he said. +Earlier this week Mr. Taylor, a former minister dismissed by General Doe, urged civilians in Monrovia, which has a population of about 500,000, to evacuate before the fighting intensifies. He said his forces were in striking distance of the capital. +''If we have to attack the city, Doe is going to try to predict our position and as usual he has always used heavy shells,'' Mr. Taylor said. ''So we have to respond with materials that we have. And we have 106-millimeter howitzers captured from Doe.'' +Late last month, the United States suspended the Peace Corps program in Liberia and told American diplomats that they and their families could chose to leave the country. So far, virtually all of the 700 Americans estimated to have once lived in Nimba County have fled, as well as about 500 of the 650 Americans affiliated with the embassy. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Rebels who are trying to overthrow the Government of President Samuel K. Doe of Liberia marching toward the capital this week. (Agence France-Presse); Map of Liberia showing location of Gbarng. + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +177 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 22, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Site of Officer's Slaying Will Be a Center of Hope + +BYLINE: By JOSEPH P. FRIED + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 418 words + +A house in Queens that became a symbol of the murderous world of drug dealers will soon become a center of hope and help for its troubled community. +The house, in South Jamaica, was being guarded by a rookie police officer, Edward Byrne, when he was shot to death in February 1988 by drug dealers who were seeking revenge for the arrest of their leader. +Officer Byrne was guarding the house because it had been firebombed after its owner had complained about drug dealers on his block in the crack-ravaged area of poor and working-class families. +The two-story house has been vacant and under police guard since the owner fled with his family to a Government witness-protection program. Now the city, which bought the house from the family, is working with a group on plans to transform it into an after-school tutoring center and a Sunday gathering center for the elderly. + +'Positive for the Community' +Yesterday, under a light drizzle at the house at 107-05 Inwood Street, officers from the 103d Precinct gave the key to Winnie McCarthy, co-director of Star of the Sea, the group that the city has asked to run the project. The precinct, from whose ranks the 22-year-old Officer Byrne had come, had been guarding the house. +''Everybody in the precinct is ecstatic that something will be done that's positive for the community,'' the delegate of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, Officer George Reynolds, said. Two other precinct officers, Lieut. Joseph McGrann and Officer Charles Davis, accompanied him. +''We are trying to give the house back to a community that's already suffered because of the drugs,'' said Ms. McCarthy, a Roman Catholic lay missionary whose 11-year-old organization operates a shelter for homeless women. Star of the Sea has also transformed three abandoned houses into permanent housing for formerly homeless people. +The group operates a program for children that provides tutoring and recreational activities. The house on Inwood Street is to be staffed and secured by three homeless veterans, now living in a veterans' shelter in Long Island City, Queens, who will live on the second floor, said Russell T. Hicks, executive director of the Veterans Service Corps. +The former owner of the house, a Guyanese immigrant who uses the single name Arjune, is at an undisclosed location. Four drug dealers were convicted of murdering Officer Byrne. The leader of the ring, Howard (Pappy) Mason, has been convicted of Federal charges of having ordered the killing. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: photo: A South Jamaica, Queens, house once firebombed by drug dealers will become a center for children and the elderly. Winnie McCarthy, co-director of the group that will run the project, received the keys from police officers, from left, Charles Davis, George Reynolds and Lieut. Joseph McGrann. With Ms. McCarthy was Russell T. Hicks, the executive director of the Veterans Service Corps. (Vic DeLucia/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +178 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 27, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Lifestyle: Sunday Outing; +In Flushing Meadows-Corona Park + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2, Page 46, Column 1; Style Desk + +LENGTH: 992 words + +The traffic-ridden expressways may be a few hundred yards away, but within the green expanse of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park you'd never know it. +Though Shea Stadium anchors the park's northern tip, a crumbling Taystee Bread sign overlooking the volleyball and soccer fields heightens the impression that time may have skipped a few decades. The concessionaires sell snow cones and chocolate bombs rather than Dove Bars. The local attractions hark back to a time when the modern age meant your kitchen had a blender. +New Yorkers eager to escape the tumult of the city can find respite in this flat, tree-lined, 1,255-acre urban park, the second largest in the city after Brooklyn's Prospect Park and the site of the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs. The park breathes its own culture, evoking the aura of the two fairs. Though the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation has plans to renovate the park, improvements are intended to make it more accessible to visitors without changing its personality. + +Large, Open Fields +''The park's old world nature is part of its history,'' said Joan Firestone, executive director of the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park Corporation, a not-for-profit entity that works to improve the park. +''A lot of people who came to work at the World Fairs stayed in Queens, and we're trying to build on that history,'' she said. +The park's large, open fields are ideal for children. Its sports attractions and museums cater to athletes and cultural explorers alike. +The Queens Museum, with its original 1939 Art Deco facade, houses memorabilia from both fairs. Its grand attraction is the Panorama of the City of New York, a scale model of the city that fits into one city block. Built for the 1964 World's Fair at the urging of Robert Moses, the former Parks Commissioner, the model has more than 865,000 plastic and wooden buildings. The Empire State Building is a mere 15 inches tall. +The museum's current exhibit on the 1964 World's Fair showcases trinkets like ticket stubs, buttons and T-shirts. One of the fair's most popular exhibits was a recreation of a modern kitchen, circa 1964; it still attracts many visitors. The museum is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. and weekends from noon to 5:30 P.M. Admission is $2, $1 for students and senior citizens. Long Walks The New York Hall of Science, termed a hands-on museum, has exhibits designed to trick the eye and vex the mind. Visiters can discover a crowded, microscopic world living in a single drop of water, view a three-dimensional model of a hydrogen atom and visit the Great Hall, an exhibit room composed of cement blocks embedded in cobalt blue stained glass. The Hall is open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 A.M to 5 P.M. Admission is $3.50 for adults and $2.50 for children under 17 and for senior citizens. +Navigating the park can be both tiring and frustrating since there is no central information booth open on weekends. Come prepared for long walks between attractions. Flushing Meadows-Corona Park is the place to be if building calf muscles is part of your agenda. +Be sure to ask for directions to your next destination before leaving the previous one since signs do not exist unless you're behind the wheel of a car (Parking is available at each attraction). Instead of hiking to various destinations, visitors might consider renting a bicycle at one of the concession stands sprinkled throughout the park. +The one stucture that anchors the park by its sheer size is the 140-foot Unisphere, a steel globe built for the 1964 fair that has come to symbolize the park. A short walk away (by the park's standards) is a renovated 1910 carousel, a bargain at 50 cents a ride. +Though the 1939 and 1964 events envisioned a better future, the park that laid their foundation is sprinkled with dilapidated buildings that are left over from the fairs such as the 226-feet-high New York State Pavilion Towers and the 10,000-seat Gertrude Ederle Amphitheater and pool. +But the 8 million visitors a year don't seem to give these buildings a second glance. They barbecue, roller-skate and wander around the Queens Botanical Garden, 30 acres of flowers and shrubs, with the largest rose garden in the Northeast, as jets take off from nearby LaGuardia Airport. +Most people come to play tennis or golf, enjoying the park's first-rate offerings. The United States Tennis Association National Tennis Center, which hosts the U.S. Open annually - this year from Aug. 27 through Sept. 9 - is open to the public. The center has nine indoor and 23 outdoor courts. For information on rentals call (718-592-8000). Weekend rates are $16.50 (outdoor) or $24 (indoor) an hour from 8 A.M. to 4 P.M. and $11 (outdoor) or $18 (indoor) from 4 P.M. to 11 P.M. +Nearby is the park's 18-hole Pitch and Putt Golf Course, which is open every day. Green fees cost $4.50 on weekdays and $5 Saturday and Sunday. The cost for senior citizens is $3.50. Golf club rentals are available. +Ice skating is also possible at the park's enclosed rink, which is open from Nov. 1 to April 31. +A sturdy bicycle slightly beyond rust's grasp can be had for $5 an hour. Bicycle rentals are available from 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. +Rowboats and paddleboats can also be rented at the Boathouse shed on Meadow Lake, about a mile from the Shea Stadium entrance, for $6 an hour plus a $20 deposit. Sailing lessons are also available. (516-333-0851.) There are plans to build a boat launching site and a boat-house restaurant, Ms. Firestone said. +Two of the park's attractions are closed for renovation and are scheduled to be re-opened next year: the Queens Zoo and Children's Farm and the Queens Theatre in the Park. Getting There To reach Flushing Meadows-Corona Park by subway from Manhattan, take the No. 7 Flushing line to the Willets Point-Shea Stadium station. By car, follow the routes to Shea Stadium on the Grand Central Parkway, then follow the signs into the park. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: The renovated 1910 carousel in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park offers rides for 50 cents; Unisphere, built for 1964 World's Fair, has come to symbolize the park. (Vic DeLucia/The New York Times); Map of Queens showing location of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +179 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 27, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Community Hospitals Adapt to Changes + +BYLINE: By JUDY GLASS + +SECTION: Section 12LI; Page 1, Column 1; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 2358 words + +ON a stroll through the corridors of any one of Long Island's community hospitals 30 years ago, a visitor might have seen heart attack victims in their third week of recuperation, a new mother taking her first halting steps days after her baby's birth and a few affluent members of the community on a kind of rest and rehabilitation program, compliments of good insurance coverage. +As for the most advanced technology, it might well have been the X-ray equipment. +Not so today. Heart-attack victims usually spend 8 to 10 days in a hospital, mothers and babies about three days, hospital beds have few ''exhausted'' patients and community hospitals own or have ready access to CAT scanners and nuclear-magnetic imaging machines and other advanced equipment. +The changes in Long Island's community hospitals reflect not only the growth and changes in the population, but also the demand for expensive technology and a shift to shorter stays, mandated by state regulations, medical advances and reimbursement policies. + +Two Major Impacts +Ambulatory care - one-day outpatient treatment - is often completed in less time than it takes to visit the local beauty salon. It is faster and easier for a wide variety of simple surgeries and outpatient procedures. Pre-admission workups, once done as part of the entire overnight admission, are now done on an outpatient basis as well. +However, hospitals lose the revenue from the ''hotel'' portion of the cost, the room and ancillary services that these patients would have needed in the past, and this puts a strain on the community hospital budgets. +Community hospitals, which years ago cared for almost everyone in the neighborhood, now compete for patients with free-standing clinics, clinics in doctors' offices and teaching hospitals with the most sophisticated care. +Emergency rooms, which are seeing far more gunshot wounds, drug overdoses and traumatic injuries from accidents and violence than a generation ago, often admit patients to beds that were scheduled for elective surgery. +Patients who do not have a physician of their own also use the emergency room for ailments like a virus, a stomach ache or a minor injury. And rather than put off a long-awaited elective procedure, doctors often have their insured patients admitted through the emergency room, one hospital administrator said. +Two other factors - an increase in the number of elderly people and the AIDS epidemic - have also had a major impact on how community hospitals provide care and handle priorities. + +New Services Introduced +Long Island has the fastest-growing number of aged people in New York State and more people with AIDS than any other suburban area in the country, according to the Nassau-Suffolk Hospital Council, an advocacy and purchasing group for the island's 22 nonprofit hospitals. +On the other hand, to be economically viable and provide modern care, community hospitals have introduced a variety of new services. South Side Hospital now offers an out-patient procedure called Easy Street, a physical rehabilitation center; diet centers, pre-natal clinics and psychological counseling care. +Easy Street is a physical rehabilitation center that trains people to lift and carry properly, and helps people learn how to readjust to the physical demands of everyday living following surgery. +It contains simulated settings of a Waldbaum's supermarket, one of the sponsors, and a bank, as well as an automobile and a separate room of exercise equipment. +''A community hospital is a not-for-profit, voluntary hospital governed by a volunteer board of directors,'' said Ann Marie Brown, vice president of the Hospital Council. +Collectively, she said, Long Island's community hospitals serve 2.7 million people with 6,500 beds. +Community hospitals come in many sizes and architectural designs, and some operate nursing homes as part of their complexes. They include Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip, Central Suffolk Hospital in Riverhead, Franklin Hospital Medical Center in Valley Stream, Long Beach Memorial in Long Beach and North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset. +''Demographics make a big difference in a hospital's ability to operate successfully,'' said Theodore A. Jospe, president of South Side Hospital in Bay Shore, which serves Bay Shore, Brentwood, Central Islip, Brightwaters, Sayville and Oakdale. +This is a catchment area of about 10 miles with some of the ''toughest problems facing hospitals,'' said Ms. Brown. These include an overburdened emergency room, a high number of uninsured patients, and competition from other institutions. + +Payer Determines Price +''We're expected to operate a hospital like a business,'' Mr. Jospe said, ''but in no other business does the payer determine the price rather than the provider. Prices should reflect cost, just as they do in the automobile business. +''The difference is that if you can't afford increased prices, you can buy a used car, but you can't buy used health care. The cost of doing business in hospitals these days far outstrips revenues.'' +He indicated that the hospital stays of the seriously ill, the comatose and premature babies can be prolonged with the use of new but often expensive technology. Hospitals have little control over the use of high-priced drugs and devices, if their doctors want them, he noted. + +Nursing Home Beds Needed +The elderly often occupy hospital beds when the care they require is custodial, which can be provided in nursing homes. Long Island currently has a shortage of 3,000 nursing home beds, according to the Nassau-Suffolk Health Systems Agency Inc., which approves plans for the Island's hospitals, nursing homes, substance-abuse centers and other health-care facilities. +In years past, patients with insurance subsidized patients with no insurance, Ms. Brown said. Virtually all treatment was delivered to inpatients, and the length of the patient's stay was determined solely by the doctor in charge. +In 1986, largely to combat rising medical costs, the state began using the Diagnostic Related Group method to pay hospitals. +Payment is based on a complicated formula that takes into account the type of procedure, the expected time for recovery, the region in which the care is delivered and a hospital's past financial record. + +Intent of the System +The system was designed to save money, but there are many costs other than patient care - like malpractice insurance - that community hospitals must meet whether beds are empty or full, Mr. Jospe said. +Eastern Long Island Hospital on the North Fork and Southampton Hospital on the South Fork, for example, may fill up in the summer months. But they accommodate far fewer patients in the winter, and remain costly to run, Ms. Brown said. +In general, Long Island hospitals are more in demand than hospitals in other parts of the state, running about 85 to 90 percent occupancy, with some units unable to handle the demand, said Marvin H. Burton, executive director of the Health Systems Agency. +Occupied beds, however, do not always produce revenue. More than 250,000 Long Islanders have no insurance or are under-insured and too poor to pay medical bills, Mr. Burton said. +There is a medical consensus that people lacking adequate medical insurance do not go to the doctor as frequently as they should; when they are first admitted to the hospital, usually through the emergency room, they are often sicker than they would have been had they received earlier care, Mr. Jospe said. +Paradoxically, the cost of services that a hospital bills an uninsured patient is higher than what it receives for the same service from third-party payers like Blue Cross, which pays according to the Diagnostic Related Group method, Mr. Jospe said. +It takes more employees to run a hospital today, said J. Ronald Gaudreault, president of Huntington Hospital, who has hired 189 people in the last two years. He is not filling positions that are vacated because his budget, which showed a surplus of close to $1 million in 1988, is $2.5 million in the red this year. He cited too many regulations and not enough reimbursements as the cause of the deficit. +As a community hospital, Huntington Hospital has been in the same residential neighborhood since it was established in 1914. It has deep ties to its community and its activities are watched closely by neighbors, some of whom have opposed the hospital's expansion in the past. + +Volunteers' Group Has Decreased +The hospital relies on Auxilians, a volunteers' group and candy-stripers for assistance but the number of Auxilians has declined from more than 1,000 members a few years ago to 450, as women have opted for paid jobs. However, the Auxilians continue to provide thousands of hours of service and have donated $170,000 from its annual geranium sale and other fund-raisers. +Similar volunteer organizations exist in a number of community hospitals. +In recent years, however, larger, more-sophisticated public relations and fund-raising campaigns have become part of the agendas and budgets of most community hospitals. +For example, donations of $1 million to Huntington's capital campaign last year enabled the hospital to establish not only a 12-bed intensive-care unit but also a separate oncology unit so that cancer patients will not be scattered throughout the hospital. +The hospital, which had 300 beds and 1,000 employees when Mr. Gaudreault joined its administrative staff 25 years ago, now has 398 beds and 1,700 full-time employees. +In 1963, the hospital treated 32,000 patients, compared with 113,000, many of them ambulatory patients, out-patients or emergency room walk-ins, last year. ''But remember,'' Mr. Gaudreault said, ''the population of Huntington has increased from 160,000 to 210,000.'' +To save money, hospitals like St. Charles and Mather Memorial, which are a mile apart in Port Jefferson, are sharing some services and keeping only one emergency room open, the one at Mather. Other hospitals have closed their pediatric units, which were once filled with children suffering from communicable diseases now controlled by antibiotics and immunization. + +AIDS CASES INCREASING +''ALL of Long Island's community hospitals are going to have to become more involved with the AIDS epidemic if projections are correct,'' says Patricia Campagna, social services and housing coordinator for the Long Island Association for AIDS Care, which operates a hot line (516-AIDS) and offers the most-comprehensive agenda of services on the Island. +All of the Island's hospitals are currently handling some AIDS patients, but often with great reluctance, studies show. Whenever possible, some of the hospitals refer the patients to the three designated AIDS centers at Nassau County Medical Center in East Meadow, North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset and University Hospital in Stony Brook. +These centers have special sections for the care of AIDS patients, particularly those in the latter stages of the disease. So far, however, these centers have not been overwhelmed, Ms. Campagna said. +At present, there are believed to be 1,300 cases of fully identified AIDS cases on Long Island and at least 20,000 to 25,000 Long Islanders infected with the virus. It is projected that there will be at least 2,700 AIDS cases on the Island by next year. +According to the Federal Centers for Disease Control, Long Island not only has the largest number of AIDS patients of any suburban area in the country, but also the most people with the HIV infection. Nassau County is fifth in the nation in intravenous drug use, ''a prime way for people to get AIDS,'' Ms. Campagna said. +According to Carol Lindquist, a spokeswoman for the AIDS Care Association, ''Shooting steroids and sharing needles, a good-buddy, jock activity among body builders all over Long Island, can lead to AIDS among affluent young men and their female sex partners.'' +Many AIDS cases may be unreported, specialists say, sometimes with the cooperation of a family physician, because of the stigma attached to the disease. +In some cases, patients who go to the hospital with AIDS-related illnesses are not aware that they are carrying the virus. In others, a doctor may treat the same patient a number of times without suspecting AIDS, and the patient is finally diagnosed elsewhere. +According to the AIDS Care Association, 70 percent of AIDS patients nationally are gay. On Long Island, it is 35 percent. Of the other 65 percent, 40 percent in each county are intravenous drug users and 2 percent in Nassau County and 4 percent in Suffolk County are children. Heterosexuals constitute 8 percent of the AIDS population in Nassau and 4 percent in Suffolk. +''The designated AIDS centers at present are better prepared to handle AIDS patients,'' Ms. Campagna said. +With extra reimbursement from the state, she said, they have been better able to train their staffs and equip their units. +With better medication and health management, Ms. Campagna said, AIDS patients are living longer and do not require as much hospitalization as they did in the early stages of the epidemic. However, the Nassau-Suffolk Health Systems Agency Inc. estimates that the average AIDS patient will spend 76 days in a hospital and will be admitted 3.4 times. +''Until our attitudes toward the disease become less prejudicial, community hospitals will probably set up separate units, as one has already done,'' Ms. Campagna said. ''But not every community hospital has enough AIDS patients to warrant a unit.'' +The results of a study by the State Department of Health are expected to give Long Island hospitals and planners up-to-date information on how many AIDS patients are now in community hospitals. +''Community hospitals don't need special physicians or staffs, but there's a tremendous need to educate,'' said Renee Pekmezaris, Ph.D., Director of Health Care Research and Information Systems for the Nassau-Suffolk Health Systems Agency. +''Staff at the AIDS-designated centers were afraid until they were educated, but there's been a significant change.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos; At Huntington Hospital's intensive care unit, Dr. Charles Hennings, chief of staff, conferred with Dr. Ezri Sokol, chief of surgery. At South Side Hospital, John O'Sullivan, physical therapist, worked with Barbara Kjeldsen in simulated market (NYT/Michael Shavel) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +180 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 28, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +SOCCER; +Tiny Village Welcomes U.S. + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL JANOFSKY, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 34, Column 4; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 861 words + +DATELINE: BAD RAGAZ, Switzerland, May 27 + +To say that it is quiet around here almost disturbs the calm. Church bells ring at the appropriate times. Horses pulling wagons of tourists neigh now and again. Somewhere off in the distance, a dog barks and a rooster crows. +But that's about it. A village of 4,500 doesn't make much noise, or anything else, for that matter. While the principal industry here is tourism, the majority of visitors, as many as 6,000 during the peak summer months, barely add to whatever commotion there is. +The tourists come to Bad Ragaz for one reason only: to soak in thermal baths, reputed to work wonders for rheumatism, arthritis and other ailments common to older people. +Indeed, the average age of a tourist is around 60, according to Robert Staub, the 45-year-old Mayor. Younger faces are so rare they provoke staring. ''Sometimes I think I'm working in an old-age home,'' said a woman behind the reception desk of a local hotel. ''When I see a couple in their 50's, I think, 'Oh, young people.' '' +The demographics hardly bother the Mayor, inasmuch as the 105-degree waters, piped down from springs in the nearby central Alps, have been warming villagers and visitors for almost 150 years. + +Well-Known Soakers + In his office, the Mayor keeps a book that lists some of the well-known people who have soaked there. They include Victor Hugo, Hans Christian Andersen, James Fenimore Cooper, Freidrich Nietzche, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and Johanna Spyri, whose story, Heidi, was written here and based on the life of a girl who lived in the next village, Maienfeld. +For all the visitors to Bad Ragaz over the years, famous and otherwise, none would seem so unlikely as the group of Americans who arrived today. For one thing, the members of the United States national soccer team have an average age of 23. For another, they may have little time for therapeutic baths, however badly they might need them. +Bound for the World Cup finals next month in Italy, the team has arranged to stay here for a week to take advantage of the quiet setting and first-rate training facilities offered free by the Bad Ragaz Football Club, which has, among its 300 members, a handful of players good enough to hold down third place in a third division league. +The Americans will train daily and play two games, one Wednesday night in Eschen, Liechtenstein, against Liechtenstein's national team; the other Saturday in St. Gallen, against the Swiss national team. + +To the Mayor's Delight + Then, the United States team plans to leave by bus for Tirrenia, a small town on Italy's west coast, which will serve as its base for the three games of the first round of the World Cup finals. It would be somewhat redundant to say that Staub is delighted to have the Americans in his midst, even if he had nothing to do with getting them here. +Before he was first elected in 1981, he served as the director of tourism for the canton, or state, in which Bad Ragaz is situated. Before that, he was a banker in London. With the village immersed for some time in a campaign to attract more younger people, he recognizes the public relations value of the team training here. +''We are now trying to make people know that we have more than the baths,'' he said in an interview. ''This is why it is very good to have the soccer team here. We can say that we are not just for old people.'' +The idea to bring a World Cup team, any World Cup team, to Bad Ragaz originated with neither the Mayor nor any of the village leaders. In fact, they credit the chef at the Quenellehof Hotel, a five-star establishment adjacent to the famous baths. He had suggested to a friend at the Swiss national soccer federation that the tranquillity of the area and its proximity to Italy would make it ideally suited for a team bound for the World Cup. +Several other Swiss cities had the same idea, including Lausanne, Lugano and Locarno, so the Swiss soccer federation let it be known to World Cup participants that training sites were available. In February, American team officials toured some of them and chose Bad Ragaz over Locarno for its facilities and convenience. The training center is little more than a walk from the four-star Bristol Hotel, which agreed to exclude all other guests during the team's stay. + +Five Police Officers + Staub admitted he had no idea what economic benefits, if any, his village might derive from the American team. Little seems to matter but the baths, which cost 11 francs, about $8, for 20 minutes, the recommended soaking time. In the last 10 years, the village population has grown by just 500; three municipal buses and a police department of five is more than adequate. +Yet some villages wonder if more could not be done to improve business. Manfred Bereiter, the manager of the Bristol, used Heidi as the perfect example. While the book brought some attention to the area after it was published in the 19th century, as have several film versions of the novel, nothing has been done since. +''No one has taken advantage of it,'' he said, sitting with the Mayor at an outdoor table at the hotel. ''If this were America, there would already be a Heidiland.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Map: Switzerland indicatin Bad Ragaz (The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +181 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 28, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +Jails Face New Crises As Inmates Grow Old By ANTHONY DePALMA + +BYLINE: Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 23, Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1266 words + +DATELINE: TRENTON, May 24 + +When he passed through the dark walls of the New Jersey state prison here recently, John E. List joined the swelling ranks of inmates who are growing old behind bars and need medical care and compassion from those charged with punishing and rehabilitating them. +Serving five consecutive life terms for murdering his mother, wife and three children, the 62-year-old Mr. List is almost guaranteed to spend the rest of his life in prison. He entered the state's toughest maximum-security jail on May 18 and was placed in protective custody at his own request, away from most other prisoners. +The authorities said Mr. List, who is frail and diabetic, would have specially prepared meals in his cell but otherwise would receive the same treatment as any other elderly convict. + +Increases Across Country +Aging inmates are among the fastest growing segments of the prison population across the country, having increased almost 20 percent in the last three years to 16,000, according to the American Correctional Association, a national organization of correction officials. +''It's an explosion,'' said C. Eamon Walsh, an assistant professor of law and justice at Trenton State College and a former official of the Department of Corrections. +Most of the increase does not stem from any rise in crimes by elderly people. Rather it is because many states, frustrated by rising rates of crime, are imposing longer sentences with mandatory minimums that keep prisoners behind bars until they are old. + +Longer Waits for Parole +About 400 of the more than 14,000 inmates in New Jersey prisons are older than 55, with the oldest 95. But almost 700 others are serving long sentences and will not be eligible for parole until they are over 55. +According to a recent study by Mr. Walsh, the number of older New Jersey inmates could double by the year 2000, and more than 1,300 prisoners will be over 55 by the time they are eligible for parole. +In New York, the number of inmates who are older than 55 has doubled since 1980 and now totals 792. Connecticut's population of older prisoners is about 115, and 210 will be 55 when they become eligible for release. While 55 may not seem old, correction officials tend to view that age as elderly, compared with the average age of inmates, which is in the 20's. +Research by Mr. Walsh and others indicates that prison systems are ill-prepared to handle older convicts. Most prisons were designed for the young who, statistics show, commit most crimes. Everything from the multi-floor layout of cell blocks to the range of recreation programs, like weight lifting and basketball, can be unsuitable for aging inmates. +Increasingly the older convicts need more expensive medical care, special diets and physical and social therapies more suited to their age. But taxpayers have resisted such expenditures, experts say, as they have the construction of most new prisons. +The prison in Trenton is the state's largest. It also has the highest percentage of older inmates, 5.9 percent, including a 95-year-old Russian emigre convicted of killing his landlady. +The prison's superintendent, Howard L. Beyer, said the increase in aging convicts had made the job of control and care harder in the prison. Several trailers have been set up in the yard as air-conditioned cells for the older men, and Mr. Beyer said he had tried to set up a special recreation yard for them. But the recreation idea did not work because the men objected to being stereotyped as old. + +Room for Wheelchairs +A newer section of the prison, completed in 1982, is equipped with elevators and hallways wide enough for wheelchairs. An infirmary with 17 beds is on the ground floor. +A number of older inmates have been meeting regularly with Mr. Walsh to discuss getting old in prison. At one recent session, 11 convicts met in a glass-walled classroom with orange, blue and green seats. Mr. Walsh talked to them about Social Security and disability payments that they could be eligible for if, and when, they leave prison. +''While you're in here, there are no benefits,'' Mr. Walsh said. ''But when you get out, you can earn credits from before, when you were on the street.'' +For some inmates, such talk is only academic, because they have no expectation of being released. Nicola DiPrima, 61, said he knew in his heart that he would die in prison. He is serving three life terms for the murder of his family in Bayonne 13 years ago. +A tall man with thick glasses and arms full of tattoos, Mr. DiPrima said his only concerns now were making sure he got the insulin and low-fat foods he needed to keep his diabetes under control. ''Whatever is going to happen to me will happen,'' he said. +But other inmates doing ''big time'' hold onto the hope that they will be free again, either through escape, a change in the law or parole. They often complain about the lack of proper medical care or other prison conditions. +They tell of inmates being refused medical attention or suffering heart attacks and dying while climbing two and three flights of stairs. Elijah Traymon, 73, walks with a cane and said he had lost the sight of his right eye because it had taken six months to get to see an eye doctor after he first complained about problems. +''If you lock a man up and put him in jail, you owe him medical care,'' said Mr. Traymon, who has served 11 years on a murder conviction. +Mr. Beyer said he was obliged by law to provide adequate medical care for inmates. But as prisons swell with new convicts and costs rise, it becomes more difficult to determine exactly what level of care is necessary and how to pay for it, experts said. Heart bypass operations, CAT scans, dental surgery and other expensive medical procedures all become sticking points. How much does society owe the inmates? + +Grade A Care Doubted +''As a citizen and a taxpayer,'' said Mr. Walsh, ''I think they're due the basic care that keeps them out of harm's way. But I don't think they deserve Grade A medical care or care that many people on the outside can't get.'' +Julia G. Hall, a social psychologist at Drexel University who runs a weekly advisory session for elderly inmates at Graterford Prison in Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, said society might have to consider building special prisons to handle the growing number of elderly prisoners. Special hospitals may be needed, she said, for prisoners with chronic diseases, and perhaps settings that would be more like retirement communities, in which older convicts could get the health and social programs they need. +Another issue: Should older prisoners, well beyond the age at which statistics show they are most likely to commit crimes, be released to make room for younger, more dangerous criminals? Dr. Hall said releasing older inmates was a good idea as long as it was done in a systematic, planned way. ''You don't just say everyone over 65 is being let out,'' she said. +For convicts, the dream of life outside, no matter how old they will be when they get there, is the spiritual touchstone that keeps them going. ''I'm going to go and get a place, maybe with a kitchenette,'' said Mr. Traymon. He figures he will not be paroled for four more years. By then he will be 77, having spent the last 15 years in prison. +He knows that an efficiency apartment could cost $400 a month and that getting about with a cane will be hard. But there are so many other unfamiliar aspects of life outside prison that freedom sometimes seems bewildering. +''I don't know what it will be like,'' he said, shaking his head. ''I don't know.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: May 30, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + + CORRECTION: +An article on Monday about the growing number of old inmates in prisons referred incompletely in some copies to Dr. Julia G. Hall, who counsels elderly inmates at Graterford Prison in Pennsylvania. She is an associate professor of sociology at Drexel University. + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +182 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 29, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +As Wars Grow Distant, Holiday Turns Gray + +BYLINE: By WILLIAM ROBBINS, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 816 words + +DATELINE: PLATTSBURG, Mo., May 28 + +The sentiments here were as strong as ever, and Delmas E. Green voiced them in words that were surely echoed 10,000 times as Americans paid tribute to fallen heroes of all the nation's wars on this Memorial Day. +Under flags bright in a strong sun and rippling in a soft breeze, two Boy Scouts, Bryan Davidson and Charles Martin, bugled taps in tones as clear and poignant as ever. +But too many legs had weakened. Today, Plattsburg's veterans and their friends and families, who in years past had marched briskly, allowed themselves to be driven to Green Lawn Cemetery for a ceremony that some social historians say is losing its immediacy for many Americans. +''Not everything in our country is perfect, but it is still the best place on the face of this earth,'' said Mr. Green. ''And now let us live so that those who made the supreme sacrifice will not have made it in vain.'' +When Memorial Day is thought of as ''increasingly the property of older Americans,'' as Gerald F. Linderman, a social historian at the University of Michigan, put it the other day, the support for such assertions consists as much of impressions as of documentation. +''As we move further and further from our last war, we have smaller and smaller percentages of Americans who actually fought,'' Mr. Linderman said. ''Memories recede, and fewer and fewer of us now have relatives who died in wars.'' +This was demonstrably the case at the ceremony today in this town of 2,100 people about 50 miles north of Kansas City. At 82, Mr. Green was the oldest of the 100 or so participants. Others, predominantly World War II veterans and their wives but also veterans of the Korean and Vietnam wars, ranged downward in age to the Boy Scouts who played taps, Bryan, 12, and Charles, 13. +This was the 45th Memorial Day ceremony in a series that began in Plattsburg after World War II, said Charles Hoskins, the 76-year-old master of ceremonies. In the early years, said Skip Tinnen, publisher of the weekly Plattsburg Leader, the veterans, friends and families marched a mile and a half down an avenue of flags to the cemetery. +Later, they shortened the route to the half-mile between the American Legion Post and Green Lawn. Only recently, they began simply to drive or be driven. Advancing ages are one reason, said Mr. Hoskins. Then, too, the marchers had failed in recent years to get the accompaniment of a high school band. +The principal speaker, Mr. Green, is clearly one of this town's favorite people. A black man in a town that is 80 percent white, he is a former chief deputy sheriff here in Clinton County, a former police chief of Plattsburg and surely one of the few black people ever to hold those posts in a predominantly white town in Missouri. + +Memories of Normandy +He survived ''158 days of hell,'' as he puts it, as a member of a port battalion that unloaded supplies from freighters and landing craft after the Normandy invasion, often under fire and aerial bombardments. It was that distinction that gave him his role in the spotlight today. +His speech was bracketed by the words of the Rev. Ed McCurley of the First Christian Church, who gave both the invocation and the benediction, including this thought: ''May we also remember the suffering at war of those who returned to us.'' +Another Scout, Scott Peery, 14, saluted as the strains of taps wafted through the clear air. In freshly pressed uniforms, E. W. Dixon, a 63-year-old veteran of World War II; Wayne Ford, a Vietnam veteran who is 40, and other members of a seven-man rifle team from American Legion Post 97 raised their weapons and fired three times for a 21-gun salute. +Mary Fern Davis, widow of another World War II veteran, placed a wreath on a brick memorial wall beneath an American flag that flew at half-staff and the banners of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. Standing at attention were the rifle team; Mr. Hoskins, and Mark Goosey, a 75-year-old veteran of 22 bombing raids over Japan who was a member of the color guard. + +Flowers on the Graves +Memorial Day, originally named Decoration Day, grew out of a practice among Confederate women of decorating the graves of fallen soldiers. May 30 was first designated as a day for putting flowers on those graves in the North in 1868, but other days - April 26, May 10, and June 3 -are celebrated in various Southern states. +''The forces that keep the observance viable are veterans' interests,'' said Mr. Linderman. ''And we can thank God that we may have no new wars to feed that interest.'' +Robert L. Daniel, a historian at Ohio University, noted that most students in college today have no memories of any war, including Vietnam. +And he says observances of the holiday have been weakened even more by the practice of moving Memorial Day from May 30 to the closest Monday in the last May weekend. ''It's secularizing the day,'' he said. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: photo: Although social historians are describing Memorial Day as increasingly becoming the property of older Americans, a Boy Scout, Charles Martin, played taps while a fellow Scout, Scott Peery, saluted during the closing of the service yesterday at Green Lawn Cemetery in Plattsburg, Mo. (Lauren Chapin for The New York Times); map of Plattsburg, Mo. (pg. A14) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +183 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 3, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +China's Future on Hold With a 'Gang of Elders' + +BYLINE: By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 20, Column 5; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1337 words + +DATELINE: BEIJING, June 2 + +In the middle of the crackdown against the democracy movement a year ago, Deng Xiaoping summoned the Government's leaders for a lecture that has turned out to be prophetic. +''We cannot allow factions to exist,'' Mr. Deng told his visitors, according to a confidential transcript that was circulated later to Communist Party officials. He added, ''Please don't look down on each other and waste energy fighting among yourselves.'' +But despite Mr. Deng's unusual appeal for cooperation and unity, the Chinese political system is widely regarded today as in a deadlock. It is now a year since a small group of octogenarians emerged from retirement to order the suppression on June 4 of the democracy movement, but there is still no clear sign of China's directions. Each day brings a new fireworks show of mixed signals, but so far the rival factions have only succeeded in blocking each other instead of implementing new policies. + +Decisions Not Made +What is most striking about China today, many Chinese officials and foreign diplomats say, is not the decisions that are made but those that are postponed or avoided. Vacancies on the Politburo, for example, have not been filled in more than a year, and there still has been no decision on the fundamental question of what to do with the ousted Communist Party leader, Zhao Ziyang. +From afar, it may seem that the hard-liners have scored a clear victory and are completely in charge, but many experts doubt this. It is true that hard-liners have wrested control of the news organizations, so that People's Daily and other major publications now resonate with Maoist themes, including the cult of Lei Feng, a soldier who after his death in 1962 was declared the model for China's youth. The conservatives also have dramatically tightened political repression, curtailed who can study abroad, required college graduates to work at the ''grass roots'' before taking certain white-collar jobs, and beefed up ''political study'' classes in the workplace. + +Passive Resistance +Yet Chinese officials and foreign diplomats say that beneath the blizzard of propaganda, the hard-liners have not been able to force their will on the country, at least to the degree that had been expected. Passive resistance from a sullen population has obstructed some policies, while the conservatives have been unable to force a major purge of those Central Committee members or provincial leaders who were loyal to Mr. Zhao. And advocates of change are again calling openly, if delicately, for price liberalization, stock markets, housing privatization, property auctions and other measures to restructure the economy. +''I think people overstate control by the conservatives now, just as they overstated control by the reformers last year,'' said a Western diplomat with long experience in China. +''In terms of politics, the economy and social policy, not all that much has changed,'' the diplomat said. ''This is a quagmire. The political mechanisms are blocked so that there is no decision and no way to make a decision.'' Who's in Charge? Anyone? While the hard-liners clearly still are in control of the airwaves, many of their initiatives appear to be running out of steam. The scheme to assign college graduates to ''grass roots'' jobs is widely ignored and evaded, the crackdown on private and collective enterprises has foundered and the effort to expel dissident party members has been subverted so that the vast majority of party members are being ''re-registered'' even if they were involved in the democracy movement. +The result of this mixed picture is that many people here, Chinese and foreigners, today are asking not so much who is in control, but whether anyone is in firm control. +''I think China is operating by remote control,'' said another Western diplomat. +Ultimate decision-making power is in the hands of about a dozen octogenarians led by Mr. Deng, but they are divided and distracted by their own infirmities. Most hold no formal post, are seen in public only very rarely, and can barely walk. +''We're waiting for the 'gang of elders' to die,'' explained an intellectual in Beijing. The term ''gang of elders,'' a play on the Gang of Four in power at the end of the Cultural Revolution, is now commonly used to refer to the group of retired leaders who hold ultimate power. + +Deng vs. Chen +The leadership itself is widely believed to be more divided than at any time in a dozen years. Mr. Deng is still the standard bearer for those who favor continued economic liberalization, while his principal antagonist is Chen Yun, the architect of central planning and the chairman of the Central Advisory Commission. Mr. Chen, who celebrates his 85th birthday on Sunday, is ailing and has not been seen in public in eight months, but he remains the rallying point for those who worry about the consequences of too rapid change. +To be sure, those assessments are based more on hints and deductions than on provable fact, and there is considerable confusion and disagreement among diplomats about Chinese politics. Some believe that the conservatives are daily gaining new power and that Mr. Deng is already in partial eclipse; others believe that the hard-liners are in retreat and that China is already returning to the path of liberalization from which it was diverted a year ago. +''Confusion is the key word here,'' said a Western diplomat who admits to little idea of who is in charge. +Still, there is fairly wide agreement about some of the factors that will shape China's course. One of these is simply the order in which leaders die. Many diplomats say that if Mr. Deng were to die first, the hard-liners would be able to go further with their purges and with their return to greater central planning. On the other hand, if Mr. Chen were to die first, economic liberalization might get a boost. + +Wild Card: President Yang +The wild card, most analysts say, is President Yang Shangkun. Mr. Yang is said by well-connected Chinese to be backing Mr. Deng, but to have ambitions to become paramount leader after Mr. Deng dies. Mr. Yang is 83 years old but radiates good health, and he has engineered a rapid rise for his younger half-brother, Yang Baibing, to senior posts in the army and the Communist Party. +A generation below Mr. Deng and Mr. Chen, China's titular leaders are also competing to inherit the mantle of senior leader. In the conservatives' corner is Prime Minister Li Peng, 61. The Prime Minister's chief rival is thought to be Li Ruihuan, a 55-year-old former carpenter who is now the Politburo member in charge of propaganda. +Early this year, reports wafted through Zhongnanhai, the compound where China's leaders live and work, that a wave of personnel changes were in the works, possibly including the sidelining of Prime Minister Li. Mr. Deng and Mr. Chen were said to be jousting over the changes, but in the end the Central Committee and the National People's Congress both met in an atmosphere of abnormal quiet in which there were virtually no personnel changes at all. + +Postponing Changes +All changes were postponed, apparently partly because the leaders feared that any shuffles might suggest that the Government was unstable. But the postponement was also taken as a sign of the standoff in the leadership and the elders' inability to agree on almost anything. +One of the clearest signs of this impasse is that the hard-liners have so been unable to mount a successful purge of their rivals. Even the ousted party leader, Mr. Zhao, remains a party member and continues to draw his salary even though he is confined to a large and comfortable house in the center of the capital. Virtually everyone at the level of Government minister, or at the Central Committee level in the Communist Party, has been retained, even though many of them were obviously loyal to the policies of liberalization that prevailed until a year ago. The faces in the chorus are unchanged, even though the oratory is different. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +184 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 3, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Elderly Pair Arrested in Harlem Crack Case + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 34, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 178 words + +A 73-year-old woman and a 68-year-old man were arrested yesterday after narcotics officers found crack, money and guns in their apartment in Harlem, the police said. +The woman, Marguerite Baily, and the man, Abraham Wilson, were among five people arrested in their first-floor apartment at 2017 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, Sgt. Mary Wrensen, a police spokeswoman said. +Officers from the Manhattan North Precinct narcotics squad, executing a search warrant, found 103 crack vials and $2,000 in cash hidden in the apartment, Sergeant Wrensen said. They also found two loaded handguns in a laundry basket near the door, she said. +Also arrested were Salomon Moore, 48, who also lived in the apartment, and two Bronx men, Philip Lavis, 30, and Edwin Simmons, 31. All five people were charged with possession of a controlled substance with intent to sell and with possession of a deadly weapon. +Neighbors in the dingy, four-story apartment building said they knew the elderly woman but would not comment yesterday, saying they did not want to get involved. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +185 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 3, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +LIFE STYLE: Sunday Outing; +In Kingston, the Waterfront Lives On + +BYLINE: By HAROLD FABER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2, Page 52, Column 4; Style Desk + +LENGTH: 909 words + +DATELINE: KINGSTON, N.Y. + +The Rondout Creek waterfront is a gateway to the Hudson River, just as it was back in the early 1800's, when Kingston was the home port of a thriving barge industry transporting coal, cement and bricks to New York City. A few old buildings remain as reminders of Kingston's industrial past, but today the waterfront area, at the confluence of the Rondout and the Hudson, reflects its attraction today for tourists, with marinas, river cruises, antique shops, galleries and restaurants. +In the center of a small waterfront park stands the Mathilda, a steam tugboat some 72 feet long and a symbol of Kingston's heritage. +Around the tug, which was retired in 1969, are reminders of the city's glory days as a river port: winches, bells and a tall buoy. +''The rivermen pronounce that boy, not boo-ey,'' said Katherine Gray, director of the nearby Hudson River Maritime Museum. +Housed in a two-story red-brick building directly on the Rondout, the museum displays photographs, paintings and models of riverboats, including the Mary Powell, the queen of the Hudson River steamers in her day. The museum is open weekdays, except Tuesday, from 11 A.M. to 5 P.M., and on Saturday and Sunday from 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Admission: $2.50, $2 for the elderly and $1 for children between ages 6 and 12. + +Cruises to West Point +On the creek front behind the museum are a number of boats offering river cruises on weekends in June and daily in the summer. Among them are: The Rip Van Winkle, with a two-hour narrated cruise, leaving at 11:30 A.M. on Saturday and Sunday; no reservations. Fare: $12, $11 for the elderly, $5 for children under 12. There will be an all-day cruise to West Point on June 10, leaving at 9:30 A.M., and some rock-and-roll and lunch cruises. Call 914-255-6515. +The Rondout Belle has a two-hour cruise leaving at 12:30 P.M. and 2:30 P.M. on Saturday and 2:30 P.M. on Sunday with a stop at the Rondout II Lighthouse, where the creek enters the Hudson River. Fare: $12, $10 for the elderly and $6 for children between 6 and 12. There are also clambake and brunch cruises. Call 914-338-6280. +A new cruise boat, the Sea Explorer, offers a three-hour cruise north on the Hudson with a stop at the Saugerties Lighthouse, leaving at 11 A.M. on weekends. Fare: $12, $8 for children. Sea Explorer also goes out on sunset cruises at 7 P.M. Call 914-679-8205. +Another new boat, the Packett 2, is based at the Eddyville Marina, about 2.5 miles west of the museum on Abeel Street. On Saturday and Sunday there are two-hour cruises leaving at 10 A.M., 1 and 4 P.M. Fare: $12. Call 914-339-5383. + +Learning to Sail +The Eddyville Marina, which has a restaurant on the premises, is also the home of the Driftwood Floating Showboat, which opens its season with performances of ''The Wondrous Adventures of the Mississippi Mademoiselle'' on June 15 and 16 at 8 P.M. There is a Sunday matinee on June 17 at 2:30 P.M. All seats $5. Call 914-331-0400. +Two other cruise operations based along the Rondout offer sailboat rides as well as instruction in sailing: the Great Hudson Sailing Center (914-338-7313) and Sails Only (914-331-3722). +For those who just want to sit and watch the boats go by, there are two routes to the Hudson River, one by auto and the other by trolley car. By auto, starting at the Maritime Museum, follow East Strand Avenue for 1.1 miles, turning right at the traffic light on Delaware Avenue for 0.2 miles to Kingston Point Park, which has a children's playground, a beach, a picnic area and beautiful views of the river. + +Traveling by Trolley +A more nostalgic way is to visit the Trolley Car Museum, directly across the street from the Maritime Museum, and board a gasoline-propelled car for a 1.5-mile ride to the old Hudson River Day Line dock. In the old days of the Day Line, boats would come up from New York City to Kingston Point, where trains picked up vacationers bound for Catskill Mountain resorts. The trolley leaves every 30 minutes between noon and 5 P.M. on weekends, with a fare of $1.50, $1 for children. +Kingston's history dates further back than the Day Liners, of course. Only seven years after Henry Hudson sailed up the river in 1609, the first Dutch settlers set up a trading post on the Rondout Creek, seeking beaver and other furs from the Indians. +During the American Revolution, Kingston became the capital of New York State when the new state government fled there as the British advanced up the Hudson. In 1777, the state's first constitution was adopted in Kingston and the State Senate held its first meeting in Abraham Van Gasbeek's home there. +Today that stone home, called the Senate House, and an adjacent museum are a state historic site, open to the public from 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Wednesday through Saturday and from 1 to 5 P.M. on Sunday, with guided tours every half-hour. + +Getting There +From Manhattan, a drive to Kingston takes about two hours. Take the Gov. Thomas E. Dewey Thruway north to Exit 19 in Kingston, go around the traffic circle and take Interstate 587 for 1.2 miles, turning left on Broadway. Follow Broadway through the center of Kingston for 1.5 miles to a traffic light, turning right and downhill 0.4 miles to the waterfront. +To get to the Senate House from the Rondout Creek, go back on Broadway 1.8 miles, turning left at a light on Albany Avenue for 0.3 miles to Clinton Avenue, turning right there. Follow the brown signs to the Senate House. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The tugboat Mathilda, now a landlubber, is a reminder of the past (Mark Antman for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +186 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 3, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +J. T. Phillips Wed To Ms. Southgate + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2, Page 61, Column 1; Society Desk + +LENGTH: 139 words + +Martha E. Southgate, a daughter of Joan E. Southgate of Cleveland and the late Robert L. Southgate, was married yesterday to Jeffrey T. Phillips, a son of Mr. and Mrs. George W. Phillips of Gloucester, Mass. The Rev. John F. Keane, a Roman Catholic priest, officiated at St. Joseph's Chapel in Magnolia, Mass. +The bride, 29 years old, will keep her name. A Smith College alumna, she is an entertainment reporter for The Daily News in New York. Her father was a librarian in the Cleveland public school system. Her mother retired as the director of the Senior Citizens Coalition in Cleveland.The bridegroom, 27, a graduate of University of Notre Dame, is a product manager for Penguin Books in New York. His father recently retired as the chairman and chief executive of the Boston Company, a financial-services concern in Boston. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +187 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 4, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +In Florio's Old Stumping Grounds + +BYLINE: By WAYNE KING, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4, Column 4; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 903 words + +DATELINE: CAMDEN, N.J., June 2 + +Until an intense young New Jersey Assemblyman named Jim Florio won New Jersey's First District Congressional seat in 1974, no Democrat had held it since before the turn of the century. +Mr. Florio held the seat for 16 years before he resigned to become Governor in January, and in that time the district became increasingly Democratic -even though Democratic Presidential candidates fared little better here than nationally. +So entrenched did the Democrats become at the Congressional level that four candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination this year while the lone Republican, Daniel J. Mangini, agreed to run only if he were unopposed in the primary. +Robert Andrews, a 32-year-old lawyer and director of the Camden County Board of Chosen Freeholders, is the Democratic organization's candidate and the acknowledged front-runner. + +Aggressive Challengers +But he is being aggressively challenged by two other Democrats. Linda Bowker, 41, New Jersey president of the National Organization for Women, is basing her campaign in part on her support for abortion rights and family planning. But she is also calling for strong controls on pollution, universal health insurance, more money for low- and moderate-income housing and greater workplace protections. +John A. Dramesi, 57, a retired Air Force colonel who was a prisoner of war in Hanoi for seven years and who wrote a well-received book titled ''Code of Honor'' on his torture, escape, recapture and ultimate release, is basing his campaign largely on the rights of veterans and the elderly. He is also appealing to opponents of gun control and calling for strong measures against crime and drugs. +A fourth Democratic candidate, Joel Farley, 35, a New York lawyer who established residence in Collingswood last year, has curtailed campaigning because of a family illness and is not considered a significant contender. +The district itself is a pastiche of 526,000 residents stretching from the gritty depressed inner city of Camden, the district's largest city, to the semirural areas of Winslow Township 20-odd miles to the east, where orchards and tomato fields are being fast transformed into green-lawned suburbs. +Candidates are thus compelled to deal with issues as disparate as a welfare mother's quest for a job to an outdoorsman's demand for access to guns. +As the Democratic organization candidate, Mr. Andrews claims Governor Florio's support. Mr. Florio has declared neutrality in the primary, but even so, he is himself an issue, standing as he does as something of a symbol of higher taxes and tighter gun control. +As Governor, he has proposed new and increased taxes and sharp cuts in services in the face of a critical budget deficit. He has also forced though the Legislature a ban on the sale of military-style assault weapons. +It can make for tough campaigning. When retired Colonel Dramesi, dressed in military-style khakis and bearing his book, walked into the Little Sportsman's Shop, an outdoorsman's supply in Glassboro last Friday, to talk about his opposition to gun control, he walked past a bulletin board dominated by a sticker urging, ''Impeach Florio.'' +And before he could present his views, he was embroiled in a shouting match with the store owner, Bob Viden, 48, who, flanked by a half dozen men in baseball hats and hunting garb, promptly told him Democrats were not to be trusted on gun issues. +''Democrats have stuck it to the sportsmen in this state forever,'' Mr. Viden said. +Mr. Dramesi shot back: ''You're insulting me and questioning my integrity! I put my life on the line for what I believe!'' +''Don't give us a speech,'' said one man. ''Tell us what you think about the ban on assault rifles.'' +''I'm opposed to it,'' Mr. Dramesi said. +The meeting ended amicably, although it was unclear what support, if any, Mr. Dramesi had picked up. + +'You Can't Believe Them, Liars' +A few miles away, campaigning door to door in the sprawling subdivision of Elmtown in Winslow Township, Mr. Andrews also encountered skepticism. +''I'm not much of a believer in politicians,'' Walter Simon, a retired meat cutter, said after a visit from Mr. Andrews. ''You can't believe them, liars, you might say.'' He laughed. +Mr. Andrews got a warmer reception in Camden, helping to open a drop-in child-care center, which, as Freehold Director, he was instrumental in creating. The center provides day care for children of welfare mothers while they seek jobs or get job counseling. +Job training is the top priority in Camden, one of the poorest cities in the country. ''People here don't want to hear about school prayer and abortion,'' Mr. Andrews said. ''They worry about whether they're going to have a job or not.'' + +'I'm for Freedom of Choice' +In Winston Township, Ms. Bowker was campaigning at a shopping center when she encountered a woman with silver hair pushing a shopping cart. +''How do you stand on abortion?'' the woman asked politely. +''I'm for freedom of choice,'' replied the candidate. +''Well, I'm definitely against it,'' said the woman, who smiled but took herself and her cart firmly away. +But Frank Falance, 48, a Gloucester County Highway Department employee accompanying Ms. Bowker, said abortion was not the primary issue. +''She's not a one-issue candidate,'' he said. ''I've got a 13-year-old daughter and I want her to have a Representative in Congress like Linda Bowker. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +188 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 6, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Gains Seen in Diagnostic Test for Alzheimer's + +BYLINE: By NATALIE ANGIER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 24, Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 684 words + +Scientists have devised an experimental test for diagnosing Alzheimer's disease that seems to be significantly more reliable than any other diagnostic method now available. +The test, which has so far been studied solely in tissues from autopsies, detects a still-puzzling protein that appears to be confined almost exclusively to the brains of Alzheimer's patients. In Alzheimer's disease, the steady death of brain cells leads to extreme forgetfulness, personality changes and a loss of control over body functions. +Other proteins and neural defects that have been identified as hallmarks of the degenerative illness are also found, to a much lesser degree, in the brains of elderly people who do not have Alzheimer's, and in patients with other neurological diseases. But scientists say this protein shows up only in the brains of those who have been determined through a complex combination of existing methods as almost surely suffering from Alzheimer's. +The researchers, who are reporting the new results today in The Journal of the American Medical Association, say the test for the protein, called Alzheimer's disease-associated protein, could be used soon to distinguish unequivocally between patients who have Alzheimer's and the 20 to 30 percent of those in whom the disorder is mistakenly diagnosed. + +Much Research Remains +''These people have other kinds of dementia that often are treatable,'' said Dr. Hossein A. Ghanbari, a biochemist with Abbott Laboratories in Illinois, the company that developed the test. ''If you can find out that they don't have Alzheimer's, you can help them get the right treatment.'' +Although there is no cure yet for Alzheimer's, doctors hope they may eventually be able to treat the disease by interfering with the activity of the protein itself. But they say much research remains to be done to determine how the protein works. +In one theory, the protein helps kill brain cells prematurely, leading to a chain reaction that includes the aggregation of tough, abnormal protein pieces called beta-amyloid fragments into damaging plaques throughout the brain. +''Studying protein function is one of the most difficult challenges of all,'' said Dr. Peter Davies, Resnick Professor of Alzheimer's disease research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, who discovered the protein. ''We've really just begun to understand the role of this protein in the pathology of Alzheimer's.'' + +Specific Protein Isolated +Dr. Davies and his colleagues found the protein by injecting pulverized tissue samples from the brains of both normal people and those with Alzheimer's into mice. The researchers then sought evidence of antibodies in the rodents' blood that would attack proteins in the Alzheimer's sample but that would find no corresponding targets in the normal tissue. Through that method, they isolated only one protein specific to Alzheimer's tissue. +Since then, Dr. Davies and his co-workers have fashioned a probe to detect the protein and have applied the probe to the autopsied brains of 111 people. About half the people had suffered from Alzheimer's and the other half either had no disease or a brain disorder like Parkinson's. The probe reacted with about 86 percent of the Alzheimer's samples, but not with any of the control brains. +The researchers are now trying to perfect the test to detect the protein in the cerebrospinal fluid, which would allow the method to be used on living patients. +''It's a worthy goal for them to get a better diagnostic test for Alzheimer's,'' said Dr. Kenneth S. Kosik, an associate professor of neurology at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. ''Nothing else that we know of is absolutely specific to the disease.'' +In new studies that have yet to be published, the researchers have tracked the distribution of the mysterious protein throughout the brains of people with Alzheimer's. They have learned that the protein is most highly concentrated in the cortex covering the front and side sections of the brain and all these regions, the scientists said, are involved in memory. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +189 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 7, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Easier Living for the Aged or Disabled + +BYLINE: By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN + +SECTION: Section C; Page 10, Column 3; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 1179 words + +DATELINE: BOWIE, Md. + +THE two-story, three-bedroom house in this Prince Georges County suburb of Washington is notable for not being conspicuous. It seems inspired by ''Ozzie and Harriet,'' but it is perhaps the best mainstream example of ''adaptable housing,'' designed to meet the needs not only of the general population but also of the disabled and the elderly. +''The premise is that persons with disabilities ought to be able to live anywhere,'' said Liza Bowles, a vice president of the National Association of Home Builders National Research Center, the not-for-profit organization that built the house in the N.A.H.B. Research Park in Bowie, Md., 15 miles northeast of Washington. ''Builders need to become sensitive to a variety of needs and choices,'' Ms. Bowles said. +The house, a demonstration model, is open to visitors by appointment. Its purpose is to show builders, who tend to be conservative, what can be done to provide comfortable living throughout a life span, which is one goal of adaptable housing. +''Builders need to see more of it,'' said Ron Mace, president of Barrier Free Environments in Raleigh, N.C. ''Adaptable housing will be driven by market demand.'' He is a director of the Center for Accessible Housing at North Carolina State University, also in Raleigh. +Over the last decade, more and more attention has been paid to making physical appurtenances accessible to anyone, and some laws have been enacted as a result. The Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988 which became law last year,requires builders of multi-family apartment dwellings to adhere to certain design guidelines, like placing light switches and electrical outlets where they can be reached easily from wheelchairs. But in single-family houses, the addition of adaptable features is far from a standard practice. +The house in Bowie offers 2,300 square feet of floor space and has a ground-floor suite that can be converted into an apartment for a disabled or elderly person, perhaps an elderly parent. +The house, which is factory built, can be constructed for about $150,000, minus its specially designed elevator and other electronic gadgets. It has been endorsed by the United States Fire Administration, the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board and the Home Builders Association. The builder is Nanticoke Homes, a modular home manufacturer in Greenwood, Del., near Dover. +Ms. Bowles said the choice of a factory-built house that can be mass-produced had been intentional. ''We thought if we could design adaptable features in the most rigid situation, it could certainly be done in houses that are built on site,'' she said. +The architectural virtues of the house are subtle, and that is part of the general idea. The garage door is two feet higher than the usual height, so it possible to admit a specialized van. The carpeting is low pile, making it comfortable to move around with a walker or wheelchair. +A sidewalk ramp, not noticeable from the street, is tucked behind the railing of the quaint front porch. +One of the three bedrooms is on the first floor, the others on the second. The house, three years in the making, was deliberately held to two stories. ''It had to have curbside appeal,'' Ms. Bowles said. ''We didn't want it to stand out in a housing development.'' +Jane Willeboordse, the architect, said most of the ideas demonstrated in the Bowie house are ''very simple,'' but require forethought. What usually makes an adaptable house expensive, she said, is having to do new construction - widening doorways for wheelchairs, for example. But if adaptable features are planned from the start, they they should not add significantly to the cost, she said. +Ms. Willeboordse planned the interiors around a series of first- and second-floor closets, in line, and the space could be put to a different use later. ''The design allows for the possibility of an elevator in the future,'' she said. ''That's a very simple thing you can plan for early on.'' +The interiors are full of tiny details - though, as Ms. Willeboordse said, ''we didn't want an institutional look.'' Light switches and other controls are four inches lower than the norm. Bathroom walls have been reinforced, should the occupant want to install grab bars in the future. Casement windows throughout the house are placed about six inches lower than standard and are opened with a crank mechanism - rather than a heave. +The entrance hall is spacious (to make room for wheelchairs). Doors come with either lever handles or push-button locksets rather than doorknobs, which can pose problems for people with arthritis. +In the living room there is a soapstone wood stove made by the Alberene Stone Company of Schuyler, Va. In contrast to a regular fireplace, this stand-up hearth, which costs roughly $7,000, is easy to operate from a wheelchair. The heating box is raised, and, unlike typical metal fireplace surroundings, the soapstone doesn't get hot. +Ms. Willeboordse graded the house's site to accommodate an outdoor deck accessible through sliding dining room doors with a low threshold. +David R. Williamson, senior program adviser of the Housing and Urban Development Department, uses a wheelchair and was an adviser on the project. Recently, in Bowie, he explained some of the house's advantages to a visitor. One of the things he particularly likes, he said, is that the place is designed for ''family living'' - often, just one person in the family who has a disabiliity. +The deck, for example, might incorporate raised flower boxes as an adaptable feature for someone in a wheelchair. The deck's planking's happy result is ''no mud tracks from wheelchair wheels.'' But mostly it is a place for family activities, for ''watching the kids play, and barbecues,'' he said. +Bathrooms have accessible tubs and roll-in showers that are carried by leading manufacturers, as well as sinks that have porcelain cladding on pipes to prevent burns. But the house's biggest strength may be the kitchen. In an offering that would be appreciated by short cooks as well as people in wheelchairs and those with mobility problems, cabinets come with notches on the backs and their height is adjustable. +The design also incorporates state-of-the-art fire safety features, in an acknowledgement that the elderly and the disabled are often at greater risk. The smoke-detection system is hooked up to specialized devices including high-intensity strobe lights, fans or vibrating bed mechanisms that can be smoke alarms for people with impaired hearing or vision. There is also a potentially revolutionary contribution to home design: a series of good-looking sprinkler heads that are flush with the ceiling. +The downstairs bedroom and family room can be used as a private ground-floor apartment, perhaps by elderly parents, or by aging homeowners who might not want to cope with the stairs. +Mr. Williamson seemed ambivalent about at least one of the houses' features - a built-in ironing board at wheelchair height. +''I don't want one. I don't want to have to do ironing,'' he said. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: David R. Williamson was a consultant during the building of an adaptable house for elderly and disabled people. It has an elevator, adjustable kitchen cabinets, easy-to-reach stove controls and a built-in ironing board at wheelchair height.; The architect of the two-story, factory-built house, Jane Willeboordse, right, wanted accessibility and ''curbside appeal.''; The bathroom has grab bars and an accessible whirlpool tub with a door. Roll-in showers are also available.; A wood stove with a raised heating box and soapstone surfaces that remain cool.; A crank mechanism to open windows and a push-button lock for doors. (Photographs by Marty Katz for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +190 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 9, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Patents; +Lasers Used In Reversing Gum Disease + +BYLINE: By Edmund L. Andrews + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 32, Column 5; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 302 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + +An ophthalmic surgeon in New York City who is a leading authority on the use of lasers in eye surgery, obtained a patent this week on a method for using low-powered lasers to reverse gum disease. +The surgeon, Francis A. L'Esperance, said that in preliminary tests on dental patients the lasers appeared to stimulate the growth of fresh gum tissue. If the method proves to be safe and effective, it could fight receding gums, one of the most common dental problems among middle-aged and elderly people. The surgeon, a professor of clinical ophthalmology at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, said the method might also help speed certain kinds of wound healing. +In tests, about a dozen patients were treated three times a day for two weeks. One-half of each patient's mouth was exposed to beams of laser pulses from a pair of low-powered diodes, similar to those used in compact disk players. Photographs taken before and after the tests indicated that the gums exposed to the beams grew fresh tissue, while those not exposed did not. +Dr. L'Esperance said the effect appeared to result from a photochemical reaction stimulated by the inherent properties of laser light. ''We're not sure what the exact property is,'' he added, ''but it seems to be real.'' Previous researchers, he said, had frequently noted that lasers appeared to stimulate fiber cells and some European doctors used them to fight conjunctivitis, or pinkeye. +The new patent describes a method of exposing tissue to two beams, each powered by only a few millionths of a watt. The surgeon said tissue growth appeared to result from the interaction between pulses from the two beams, which are transmitted at either different angles or with different timing from each other. +Dr. L'Esperance received patent 4,931,053. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +191 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 9, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Florio's Puzzling 'Vision' for New Jersey + +BYLINE: By Chuck Hardwick; Chuck Hardwick, Republican of Union County, is a member of the New Jersey State Assembly. + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 23, Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 687 words + +DATELINE: TRENTON + +When you put together a puzzle, no one piece gives you the whole picture. But piece by piece the puzzle becomes clearer, until the picture is complete. +Gov. Jim Florio says he has a vision for New Jersey; piece by piece he is assembling it, and the picture of his vision for the state is becoming clearer. As a state legislator for 13 years and former Assembly speaker, I can see a distinct pattern - and I believe that the future of New Jersey's middle class is in jeopardy. +The first piece of the puzzle is the so-called auto insurance reform bill. The Governor calls the bill ''The Fair Automobile Insurance Reform Act.'' But the act isn't reform and it certainly isn't fair. +It only shifts costs and adopts a new criterion for rating the risks of drivers. But that criterion will result in low-risk drivers (senior citizens, married couples, women, suburbanites) subsidizing high-risk drivers (young, single males, particularly those in the inner cities). +The Florio administration already admits that insurance companies, after onerous state surcharges are eliminated, may raise rates to make up any losses. So the $212 per car surcharge will be gone, but the companies will raise basic rates the same amount to make up the difference. +The second piece of the puzzle, the Governor's tax package, hits the middle class especially hard. It will make New Jersey's income tax the second-highest in the country and bring a 17 percent hike in the sales tax to consumers. +It will also eliminate homestead rebates and property tax reductions. These will add substantially to the total tax burden of all New Jerseyans, but especially working families and singles. +The Governor says with pride that his is a progressive tax proposal, that the bulk of the added taxes will be paid by the ''wealthy.'' The trouble is that he is having a tough time defining what he means by ''wealthy.'' +First he told us that families with an income over $55,000 were among New Jersey's richest. But the 300,000 New Jerseyans who work in New York, pay taxes there and will pay the new, higher New Jersey Transit fares proposed by the Governor know that $55,000 in family income does not make them rich by any means. +Then Governor Florio defined ''wealthy'' as a single person earning $35,000 or more - with no regard for whether the person was a parent. +The final piece of the puzzle came last week: the distribution formula for aid to education. The Governor plans to cut aid to suburban communities - so-called high-income communities. Bergen County, for example, will lose more than $100 million in school aid. The Governor's goal is to direct more aid to cities such as Camden, which would receive an additional $45 million in school aid. The plan is partly based on the belief that all residents in ''high-income'' communities have high incomes. +Unfortunately, that's simply not true. The selective aid cut will result in an increase in taxes and a reduction in municipal services for property owners regardless of income. The Governor's plan will have exactly the opposite impact that he desires: Lower-and middle-income families will no longer be able to afford to live in suburban communities. +The cumulative effect of higher transportation costs and taxes and reduced aid will result in a massive redistribution of wealth. That's a philosophy that failed and was discredited in Massachusetts and New York a decade ago and has been discarded by the Eastern Bloc countries. +Wealth-redistribution schemes stifle economic growth. The plan proposed by Governor Florio will hurt the people of New Jersey in the decade ahead. Why would a start-up business want to locate in a non-competitive environment? It wouldn't. +What New Jersey needs are policies that attract economic activity and build a bigger economic pie so that all can benefit. Our state urgently needs policies that encourage growth through low taxes and a favorable climate for new jobs. +Of course, the missing piece of the puzzle is the voice of the taxpayers. In the weeks ahead, they could very well overturn the Governor's puzzling vision for New Jersey. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +TYPE: Op-ed + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +192 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 10, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In AIDS-Stricken Uganda Area, The Orphans Struggle to Survive + +BYLINE: By JANE PERLEZ, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 1, Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 2088 words + +DATELINE: MUTIKULA SOUTH, Uganda + +Josephine Senyonga, a diminutive woman with decades of hard farm labor etched into her face, sat on the floor of her one-room house, surrounded by 12 grandchildren. +What in normal circumstances should have been a tableau of warmth was one of tragedy, repeated in thousands of houses and huts in a 30-mile swath from this village in Rakai County to Lake Victoria. +Mrs. Senyonga's three sons and three daughters-in-law died of AIDS last year and left her, a struggling 69-year-old widow, to care for their children. +In a grove of banana trees in her backyard, heaps of red pebbles, dappled with sunlight, mark the graves. +In another village closer to the lake, 70-year-old Salongo Mawawu looks after his 12 orphaned grandchildren. Six graves, five of them freshly dug, are at the side of his house, reminders to his grandchildren that their parents - teachers and traders - had died of AIDS. His last daughter, who is also a mother, is expected to die soon. + +A Disease Crueler Than War +The AIDS epidemic here is perhaps more haunting, more depressing than Africa's hard-case wars and famines. In war, the women and children are often spared. In famine, only segments of the population, the very young and the elderly, seem vulnerable. +In Rakai, a county of about 300,000, AIDS kills the breadwinners and leaves behind the most helpless: children. +From all the thousands of AIDS deaths of mothers and fathers, up to 40,000 children in the county have been are orphaned by a disease they understand to mean continual and uncurable sickness, uninterrupted mourning, daily funerals and impoverishment. +In many villages of Rakai, rows of houses stand silent, shuttered and abandoned, the parents dead and the children taken to usually less prosperous and aging grandparents. +''We are losing everyone,'' Mr. Mawawu said., after showing a visitor the graves in his garden. +Doctors here say that the transmission rate of AIDS from infected mother to baby - during pregnancy or while giving birth - is 30 to 50 percent, about the same as in the United States. +But since they have no measure of when mothers died or how old their children were when they died they cannot estimate, they say, how many of the surviving children in Rakai are infected with the virus. +The people of Rakai have always thought that AIDS, commonly known as ''Slims Disease,'' was different from malaria. For a long time they believed that AIDS afflicted those who stole or were ''bewitched'' by relatives. + +Now They Know the Cause +Many now say they know it is caused by heterosexual transmission but seem unprepared to accept it. Elizabeth Nakabago, whose 52-year-old husband died of AIDS last year, appeared very thin. She felt well, she insisted. But a visitor from Kampala, the capital, said he had watched her deteriorate. +Scientists are studying why heterosexual transmission of the virus is such an important factor in Africa but have not yet reached any conclusions. +AIDS testing is virtually impossible for men and women deep in the villages. And as one man argued: ''Why should we have tests if you have no medicines to cure us.'' +A member of Parliament from Rakai, Manuel Pinto, who organized a house-to-house survey recently, says there are about 40,000 children in Rakai who have lost one or both parents through AIDS. +An American statistician with the United Nations Children's Fund, Susan Hunter, reports 25,000 such children as of last fall but cautions that her figure was conservative even at the time. +In Uganda, an orphan is defined as a child who has lost one or both parents. In families where one parent has died, the grandparents commonly take charge of the children, particularly when the remaining parent moves away to try to remarry. +It is the question of how to lift the morale of these orphans in a country bereft of social services that Mr. Pinto and others are trying to grapple with. + +The Background + +War's Ravages And Now Disease's + The Rakai district, an area of greenery and red soil, ravaged in the 1970's and early 1980's during the civil war, was the first place in Uganda to report cases of AIDS. Once a flourishing region of the Baganda Kingdom, railroads used to run to the lake shore. Crumbled milestones poking out of papyrus reeds attest to a road, now a potholed track barely suitable for bicycles, that once was alive with buses. +The area was neglected after independence from Britain. But during the 20-year civil war, the traders of Rakai prospered, buying soap, tires and beer from across the water in Tanzania and selling them to the capital, Kampala. +It was those who profited and led a high life who became the AIDS carriers and casualties, says Juvenalis W. Kibira, the deputy chairman of the orphans' organization of Rakai, which was founded last year by Mr. Pinto. + +AIDS Spread From Area +After the first AIDS cases were reported in 1982 around Kasensero - the first known concentration of AIDS in Africa - the disease moved through Rakai county and then spread north to the entire country. +In Uganda as a whole, the figures are dramatic. Last December, the Minister of Health, Zak Kaheru, reported that 790,522 Ugandans had tested positive for the HIV virus and of these, at least 10,000 had developed the disease. The figures compiled for 1988 showed that, discounting children, about 1 in 8 Ugandans was infected. +In Kampala, the Health Ministry reported that 1 in 4 was infected. And in Rakai, new figures from a survey by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta show that half the women at the trading posts are HIV positive. +The infection rate compares to a rate of 1 in 200 in the United States and 1 in 500 to a thousand in Britain, said Martin Foreman, director of the AIDS unit of the Panos Institute, a London-based group specializing in development issues. +Rakai remains the region in Uganda most affected by AIDS, with the death toll steadily rising after 1986. While the total number of deaths apparently leveled off last year, deaths among women are inexplicably increasing, according to Miss Hunter's figures. There are no precise figures on the total number of AIDS deaths. + +The Despair + +Parentless Children Survive on Own + The despair in Rakai is evident in the almost universally sullen expressions of children almost uniformly dressed in ragged clothing. In some cases there are no guardians and they must fend for themselves. In one case, Mr. Pinto's group found five sisters and brothers cared for by the eldest, a 17-year-old. They cooked in an old paint can. Even in Rakai households where one parent has survived, there is no escape from the disease. In Kimote, a village along the road that rises from Lake Victoria, the chief, Leo Muddu, died of AIDS just before Easter. +On a recent Saturday afternoon, a visitor found one of the chief's sons, Munyumya, a vigorous boy of 14, at home. A 26-year-old sister died of AIDS two years ago. His mother and four brothers were away at an AIDS burial. +In a side room of the house lay his dying 26-year-old brother. When a European face appeared in the doorway, the young man, Tofa, pleaded in a scratchy voice for medicine. His left leg had a large sore, he was suffering from diarrhea and he had been unable to walk for a month. ''We are all dying. We are all dying,'' he whispered. ''I bring him water and juice,'' explained Munyumya. + +Widow Cares for 9 Children +Up the track, Elizabeth Nakabago, a 49-year-old widow, was walking home from the burial rites of a girl of 17 who had died in childbirth, probably of complications arising from AIDS.Mrs. Nakabago's 52-year-old husband, part-owner of a bus in Kampala, came home to die last year, leaving her seven children aged 5 to 17. She also cares for two grandchildren left her by three of four grown sons and daughters who died of AIDS. +As in many homes, the inside of Mrs. Nakabago's one room showed remnants of a better past. A faded photograph of a fancy wedding, probably in the 1940's, hung on one wall. But now Mrs. Nakabago can only afford the $3 yearly school fees for two of the seven children. The rest stay home. + +Medical Help + +Basic Dispensary Almost Inaccessible + Rakai County's medical services consist of a derelict dispensary and an overworked medical center on the most northern edge and thus inaccessible to most. The only two doctors in the county are posted there. +During an inspection of the dispensary one night, Mr. Pinto found the place in darkness because there were not even candles. Patients, women with young babies, sat on the veranda and three unattended babies slept inside. The senior officer, known as a medical assistant, who is trained in hygiene and no more, had left for home three days earlier. +The dispensary is supposed to receive four cartons of essential drugs a month from a Danish medical program but receives two - the contents of which are usually sold for profit by the staff, Mr. Pinto said. + +Burdens of Debt and War +AIDS has hit Rakai and the rest of Uganda at a time when the Government of President Yoweri Museveni, trying to recover from 20 years of war, is strapped for cash. About 50 percent of the national budget is spent to fight rebels in the north. Most of the meager revenues that come from coffee are spent on repaying debts. +A tight economic reform program from the World Bank allows no room for social services: $1 a year per person is a generous estimate of the amount spent on medical services, some economists say. +Inadequate medical services and traditional inclinations not to trust them anyway, makes many AIDS sufferers in Rakai seek other means of treatment. Last year, thousands of AIDS patients flocked to a woman in neighboring Masaka County after she asserted that soil from a certain place, drunk with water, would cure AIDS. The government put an end to her practices but not before vast quantities of soil had been consumed. +More enduring is Brother Anatoli Wasswa, a Roman Catholic priest of Kyotera in Rakai who dispenses herbal medicine - bark, roots and leaves - to AIDS patients. On a recent day, a 24-year-old woman who had been diagnosed as being HIV positive a year ago, arrived for her first treatment. +''We treat each symptom differently, so you can give a person up to five different herbs,'' he said. He doesn't promise cure. ''But a person can live longer, to six months longer,'' he said. + +The Future + +Surveys Conducted But Not Much Else + The future of the children in Rakai has caught the attention of various international aid groups. But so far, little other than surveys of the numbers of orphans has been accomplished. +This irritates the energetic Mr. Pinto who, like his wife, Marie, was born in Baloole, a village not far from the lake. A former manager of the Esso Oil Company, before he fled from Idi Amin into exile in Kenya for 10 years, he has founded the association to help the orphans, as well as the Rakai Development Association. The main challenge, says Mr. Pinto, is to show people hope. +''We have to persuade people to do something for themselves,'' he says. He believes it is paramount that the children stay in the area with relatives and not be transplanted to orphanages, as has been proposed by some groups. +In Ugandan culture, all adult members of a clan are responsible for the clan's children. ''Everyone in your clan is a mother or father,'' said Mr. Kibira. ''That's why we believe the orphans can be looked after in our homes. If you don't take an orphan then the spirit of a dead mother or dead father will come and curse. This strong force will make sure orphans are taken in.'' +Already Mr. Pinto's association is paying the school fees - compulsory for Government schools in Uganda -of orphans who are doing well in school but whose guardians cannot afford the outlay. New classrooms have been added to Lugonza Primary School in the district; one day-care center for 30 children has been started. +Mr. Pinto plans to turn an overgrown plantation into plots for the unemployed young men who remain idle and set a depressing tone for the children. A clay brick-making factory to be run by women is also in the works. +And he is going to ask the multinational corportions that have remained in Uganda to pitch in. It would cost about $125,000 for 40,000 orphans to go to school for a year, he said. +''We need help now because a child of 8 will be 12 in four years time and a real social outcast if he hasn't been to school,'' Mr. Pinto said. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: In Mutikula South, Uganda, Josephine Senyonga cares for her 12 grandchildren orphaned by AIDS (Jane Perlez/The New York Times); Kasensero, a trading post on the shore of Lake Victoria where the first AIDS cases in Uganda were reported during the civil war in 1982 (Jane Perlez/The New York Times); map: Uganda indicating Rakai (The New York Times) (pg. 14) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +193 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 10, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE MERRY SOUL AT 82 + +BYLINE: By BETH LEVINE; Beth Levine is a New York City editor who frequently reviews books for various publications. + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 46, Column 2; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 267 words + + +THE PLEASURES OF AGE +By Robert Morley. +Illustrated. 159 pp. +San Francisco: +Mercury House. $15.95. +As a delightful comic actor of film, stage and television, Robert Morley rarely fails to engage us with his wonderfully British sense of the absurd. He has also carved out a successful career for himself in the literary world as playwright and author. +In his latest opus, ''The Pleasures of Age,'' Mr. Morley, who is 82 years old, has written a paean to the joys of growing older. Unfortunately, this slim book fails to deliver the acerbic insights one expects from the author. Far from a serious study, it is an excuse for Mr. Morley to randomly string together insubstantial anecdotes that illustrate his current enjoyments, quotations on aging and examples of people who achieved greatness in their later years. +Although his message - that we should eat, drink (if you can) and be merry - is hardly original, it could have been inspiring if Mr. Morley did not flit from one subject to another so abruptly that even when a story captures the reader's interest, it ends much too soon. Mr. Morley is admirable in his zest to live life to its fullest, but most of his stories and suggestions read like the offhand observations, comments or asides one would expect to hear in superficial conversation: how he hates baths but loves the races, how the elderly should travel more, how he enjoys sleeping. +This slight volume is not without its own pleasures - there are some amusing moments, and Mr. Morley does have a breezy, light style - but the total effect is of an overlong talk show. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Robert Morley in a scene from the 1978 movie ''Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?'' (Warner Brothers) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +194 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 10, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WestHELP Wins Approval For Sites in White Plains + +BYLINE: By JAMES FERON + +SECTION: Section 12WC; Page 1, Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1919 words + +DATELINE: WHITE PLAINS + +THE Board of Legislators reached a milestone last week as it approved the last of the three Westhelp housing projects that County Executive Andrew P. O'Rourke had hoped would serve as a catalyst for community assistance to the homeless. +Only three municipalities - Mount Vernon, White Plains and the town of Greenburgh - participated in the program, which was conceived by Andrew M. Cuomo to help homeless families rejoin society while providing shelter for them. But neither proponent saw the Westhelp effort as anything but an unqualified success. +''What we sought to do with Westhelp was establish a model and to dispel the myth that local communities wouldn't cooperate,'' said Mr. Cuomo, the son of Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. ''We challenged the conventional wisdom that no government would come forward because nobody wanted housing in their communities. We found there are local officials who will accept the homeless if they are presented with an intelligent and workable plan.'' + +Long-Term Benefits Praised +Mr. O'Rourke said that as the Westhelp units ''come on line, they will be seen by local officials as replacing other types of housing that used to be available'' through Federal programs. He added that these new apartments ''will help improve long-term housing stock because the Westhelp units revert to the communities.'' +One of Westhelp's selling points is that the host community pays nothing for construction of the U-shaped complex of two-story garden apartments, although the land may be municipally owned. Then after 15 years, the complexes are turned over to the municipality for use by elderly residents or city employees, who often cannot afford typical rents in Westchester. +Even as the spotlight began to shift from Westhelp's two-year struggle to provide interim relief for the county's homeless, the stage began to fill with other proposed solutions, moving from the transitional housing model to the more persistent problem of permanent affordable housing. + +New Ideas Are Proposed +The new ideas are diverse, from an experimental program that places the homeless in permanent housing under closely monitored circumstances, to the county's filing a lawsuit against the state for failing to establish reasonable allowances for shelter. +Perhaps the most ambitious plan to help solve the homeless problem will be unveiled this week, when Mr. O'Rourke announces the makeup of a Housing Implementation Commission, a 15-member group of experts with experience in building. Mr. O'Rourke will also outline the tasks he wants them to fulfill, including the consturuction of 1,000 transitional units and 5,000 additional units of permanent affordable housing, not necessarily limited to the homeless. +''The new thrust is action, implementing what the Homeless Commission came up with in its studies,'' Mr. O'Rourke said. The disbanded commission cited faults in county government, including an unwillingness at several levels to deal with homelessness. ''There will be some rehab, some new construction, and we will be designating county land for some of the housing. The fact that Westchester is producing 300 units under the Westhelp program is a remarkable accomplishment.'' +Westhelp's first completed venture, a 46-apartment complex on a quiet street in Mount Vernon, opened last December and has placed 16 families in permanent housing so far. The second complex, for 108 apartments in a wooded area of Greenburgh, has been approved by the Board of Legislators and construction is under way. +The final project, approved last Monday, is the most elaborate in the program, consisting of two structures. One is the purchase and renovation of the Coachman Hotel in downtown White Plains to accommodate 110 homeless families, according to Mr. O'Rourke. + +36 Families on Mamaroneck Avenue +The other is the construction of a more typical Westhelp complex, this one for 36 families, on busy Mamaroneck Avenue, also in White Plains. The Coachman, a once-stylish hotel on the Post Road, one block from Mamaroneck Avenue, already serves as a homeless shelter. +The debate that led to final passage of the White Plains proposals extended over a period of weeks and underlined the frustration that both supporters and opponents of housing plans for the homeless have come to express in dealing with the problem. + +4,500 Homeless in County +Westchester's homeless population is estimated to be 900 families, including 1,800 children, or a total of 4,500 individuals, many of them simply unable to pay prevailing rents, according to social service officials. The opposition of Legislator Edward J. Brady, the Thornwood Republican, to the Greenburgh Westhelp project led to an internal struggle that ended in his ouster as chairman of the Board. In the debate over the Coachman proposal, he said he had voted for the White Plains project last year ''when Mr. Cuomo said we could buy it for $4 million or $5 million.'' +''Now we're told it will cost $24 million,'' Mr. Brady said. ''England had its Great Train Robbery, the Federal Government has its savings and loan scandal and Westchester has its Coachman affair. Are we going to buy a hotel that an entrepreneur bought not many years ago for $800,000, and put only $80,000 down?'' +''And what are we going to do with this choice piece of real estate?'' Mr. Brady asked. ''We're going to give it to the city of White Plains in 15 years. At the same time we're looking for space for this expanding government.'' Why not use the Coachman as a county government building? he asked. + +How the Money Breaks Down +Payments to Universal Hotels, owner of the Coachman, begin with $1.1 million the first year and increase by 5 percent each year for 15 years, making a total of $23.9 million, according to a chart provided by the staff of the Board of Legislators. +''The total purchase price for the hotel, in present dollars, is about $10 million,'' Mr. Cuomo said. ''You have to do the valuation in terms of the present value of the money, taking into account the cost of inflation and the value of money in the 15th year. +''If somebody offered you a contract giving you $50,000 this year and $50,000 in year 15, you'd say, 'Hold it; $50,000 in year 15 won't be worth what it's worth today. You'd have to pay me, say, $250,000 in year 15 to make it worth what it's worth today.''' +''So you do what's called the present value of the money,'' Mr. Cuomo said. ''The present value of the lease of the Coachman is $10 million, and the county currently spends $5 million a year to rent it; they've done so for five or six years.'' + +Renovations and Services +Westhelp will make $1.9 million worth of renovations, including the installation of a kitchen in each apartment, and the county will pay Westhelp $1.7 million a year for such services as job training, day care and assistance in finding permanent housing, none of which is available now to the homeless families staying at the hotel. +Mr. Cuomo said the yearly cost of operating the Coachman ''would be about $30,000 a year,'' per family ''compared to $39,000 for welfare hotels.'' +The hotel, Mr. Cuomo said, is the ''worst illustration of homeless care in Westchester County.'' +''It's unsafe, unsanitary, debilitating and absurdly expensive,'' he continued. Those sentiments and worse were expressed by some legislators before they approved the proposal by a wide margin. +Herman Keith, a Yonkers Democrat, saw some unsettling images in the security arrangements for Westhelp projects, which bar visits by outsiders to apartments and permit socialization only in common rooms. ''Are we building units where people can live, or are we building concentration camps?'' Mr. Keith asked. + +Comparison With South Africa +''Four years ago, Ernie Davis and I held a press conference,'' he said, referring to a fellow legislator, Ernest D. Davis, a Mount Vernon Democrat. ''We know the majority of homeless came from Mount Vernon and Yonkers; we also know the majority are people of color.'' +''We're asking the homeless to submit quietly to what I consider to be a South African type Bantustan - a homeless homeland. It's better than what they have, yes, but it's not the best we can do. We need housing for people who can't afford housing,'' he said. ''The Coachman is a project of dubious distinction.'' +Mr. Davis, who joined Mr. Keith and Mr. Brady in opposing the White Plains plan, said that ''transitional housing is not transitional at all.'' +''It presumes there is permanent affordable housing,'' he said, ''but if there is, why is it necessary for us to have transitional housing?'' +He saw an irony in the county filling the Coachman with the homeless, and thereby creating its value: ''The Coachman has very little value if you use it as a hotel. That's why it's been used for the homeless. The county should pull the homeless out, then see how much it would cost.'' + +'No Other Option' +Timothy S. Carey, a Republican from Montrose, described the Coachman purchase as ''stupid'' and ''insane,'' and laid the blame for Westchester's homeless at Governor Cuomo's door in Albany. +''His son is helping to solve the problem his father helped to create,'' Mr. Carey said, noting that the present state government ''has not built one unit of housing in Westchester County in eight years. +Nevertheless, he said, ''Right now this Board can do but one thing: vote for this project, because as Mr. Delfino said, we've got no other legitimate option.'' Joseph M. Delfino, a Republican Legislator, is a former White Plains Common Council member. +The effort by Westchester to force the state to increase shelter allowances is based on a recent Court of Appeals opinion that a suit can be brought against the state if the cost of housing bears ''no reasonable relation'' to the shelter amount set by the State Commissioner of Social Services, Cesar Perales. +Michael D. Hampden, executive director of Westchester Legal Services, which brought a class-action suit on behalf of two homeless Westchester residents, said ''60 percent of Westchester's 4,500 homeless residents became homeless because of evictions.'' + +Working With the Landlord +Meanwhile, Westchester Residential Opportunities Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to finding housing for members of minority groups and people with low incomes, reported last week that it had completed the first year of a Housing Demonstration Program in which permanent housing is financed for homeless families. +Stanley Schear said he ''solicits landlords'' to participate in the program. ''We've placed 145 homeless persons in 35 units of permanent housing,'' he said, ''and have commitments from 22 other landlords for 75 homeless persons.'' +He suggested that his group's success was based on ''our close monitoring'' of the tenants and ''bonuses of $1,500 to $7,000 to landlords to help fix the place up.'' +''We tell the landlord that the client,'' or homeless family, ''is our total responsibility,'' Mr. Schear said. ''We pay the rent, make sure the property is in good repair and that the tenant is acting appropriately. After six months, if everyone is satisfied, we sign a Section 8 lease'' - the Federal subsidy program for low-income tenants. +The demonstration program costs $12,640 a year per family to operate, according to its sponsors, who estimate the costs of comparable options to be $18,250 for an emergency apartment, $30,000 for a Westhelp unit and $36,000 for motels and hotels. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos; The Coachman Hotel in downtown White Plains would be purchased and renovated to accomodate 110 homeless families as part of a WestHELP housing program approved last week by the Board of Legislators (NYT/Joyce Dopkeen) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +195 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 13, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Stray Bullet Leaves a Harlem Oasis Feeling Vulnerable, and Angry + +BYLINE: By DONATELLA LORCH + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1, Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1171 words + +The doormen dress in spiffy blue uniforms and work around the clock. The private parking lot has trees and benches and glistening cars. And the long tenant list includes a roster of leading New York politicians, executives, lawyers and doctors. +But residents of Lenox Terrace - a high-rise luxury oasis in the heart of Harlem -say the outward appearance of the six-building complex is little more than a mirage. Drug dealers have moved into apartments and transformed them into crack dens. Few people can boast of an unvandalized car in the parking lot, where crack addicts hide and rob passers-by. Even the doormen have been mugged. + +Lawyers, Doctors, Drug Dealers +''This used to be a luxury building,'' said Catherine Gorham, whose car has been broken into twice. ''Now we have just as many undesirables as politicians.'' +The complex of 17-story buildings, built in the late 1950's, is home to people as well-known as Basil Paterson and his son, State Senator David A. Paterson, Representative Charles Rangel, Deputy Mayor Bill Lynch, Assemblywoman Geraldine L. Daniels and Percy Sutton. In the rent-stabilized apartments are lawyers, doctors and actors who earn high salaries and senior citizens who have lived there for 30 years on little. And now, the police say, there are also drug dealers. +Although it is a middle-class complex, Lenox Terrace is surrounded by impoverished housing projects, ghostly abandoned buildings and street-corner drug markets, and has found itself beseiged by the crack epidemic. Tenants have long complained that there is too little security and too much management indifference. +But when a 60-year-old doctor was shot and killed 10 days ago by a stray bullet that tore through his kitchen window and hit him in the chest as he walked out of his bathroom, the tenants took to the streets. +Every morning last week, protesters blocked traffic on Fifth Avenue and 135th Street for several hours. They held evening meetings, called on the police to help and brought their better-known tenants into the fray. +''This is the first time I have seen a luxury development finally getting involved and saying 'Enough is enough,' '' Allison Lewis-Smith, a lawyer who lives in one of the buildings, told about 200 tenants sandwiched into a lobby. ''This is monumental.'' +On Monday, in a meeting with the owners of the complex, the tenants won their first victory: promises of security guards and better lighting. But, organizers said, until the promises are fulfilled, the tenants will continue their early-morning protests. +The catalyst to the uprising was the shooting of the doctor, Jolaolu Mojola, a Nigerian-born gynecologist who had lived for more than 20 years in 2186 Fifth Avenue - one of six buildings in the complex bounded by Lenox and Fifth Avenues between 132d and 135th Streets. Dr. Mojola was killed by a random spray of automatic gunfire from the parking lot about 1 A.M. on June 1. Bullets entered two other apartments in the building. +The next day, residents organized Citizens for Direct Action and began their own battle. +Though shocked by the death, the residents said they were not surprised. The dry pop of gunfire is a nightly occurrence. Teen-agers often use the parking lot for target practice at squirrels and pigeons or to shoot for the fun of it. Nor were the residents amazed when the police arrested another resident of 2186, 20-year-old Anton Abdala, who lives on the 17th floor, and charged him and a friend, Andre Crump, 20, of 410 St. Nicholas Avenue, with second-degree murder. +The buildings, across the street from the Lincoln Houses project and a block from Harlem Hospital, were built as luxury apartments with curving driveways where caped doormen once rushed to open car doors and ring elevators. Because the complex is rent-stabilized, what renters pay varies widely, the management said, but rents probably average about $500 for a one-bedroom apartment. + +Crunching Crack Vials +But what was once a quiet and chic haven from the chaos of the streets has become a prison, especially for the many senior citizens and children there. +At a recent tenants meeting in the lobby of 2186, police officers showed photographs of apartments used by crack addicts and said some doormen and porters allowed dealers in and out. Anonymous voices told of crunching crack vials underfoot in hallways, of being terrified of going to the laundry room after 7 P.M., of young men intimidating elderly women into giving them money. +''The attitude 15 years ago was that things like this didn't happen to people who lived in the Terrace,'' said Senator Paterson, who has lived in the complex since 1974. ''It was an oasis from crime. It was a substitute for moving to the suburbs.'' +At the meeting, the mood was far from subdued. On lawn chairs, leaning on canes, sitting on the cold marble floor, the residents listed their demands: better lighting, security, management responsibility. They talked of holding a rent strike, candlelight vigils and picketing. The attacks were all against the managers, who they say have been unresponsive and disrespectful to the tenants' complaints. The building is owned by the Lenox Terrace Development Association of Manhattan, a partnership, of which most is held by the Robert S. Olnick family. #8-Year-Old Stays Inside In an interview on Monday, Herbert Turner, vice president of the Olnick Organization, would say only that the meeting that day had gone well and that management would respond to the demands of the tenants. +The residents of Lenox Terrace say they are stubbornly hanging on to their community and to their neighborhood. Even though, for some, it is like a prison, they stay for financial reasons and because of pride in their homes. +Nadine Johnson said she lived there because she could not find as nice an apartment at the price. Like many other mothers there, she will not allow her 8-year-old son to play on the street or to go alone to the grocery store. When he wants to play, Ms. Johnson said, she takes him to Central Park or to a friend's house. Her son - like many other children in the Terrace -goes to a private school. At the Dalton School she hopes he will receive a good education. But few of his friends come to visit because their parents are afraid of the neighborhood, Ms. Johnson said. +''We live here because I want him to grow up with a sense of himself,'' Ms. Johnson said. ''Here he sees black lawyers and black doctors and black professionals. He's not going to get that downtown.'' +Mrs. Lewis-Smith, a lawyer and a mother, refuses to move because she grew up in the neighborhood. But she says she will not even let her 8-year-old son ride alone in the elevators. ''There is no place for my son to play,'' she said. ''It gives an unhealthy fear to the children.'' +As one of the most active tenant association members, she says she will not be cowed by management or by the area. ''Saying we won't take it anymore is just the beginning of turning the neighborhood around.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Residents of Lenox Terrace, a complex of six luxury high-rise buildings in Harlem, have taken their security problems to the police and their protest to the streets. They claim the complex has been infiltrated by drug dealers and has fallen prey to crime. (Bill Swersey for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +196 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 13, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Edna McRae, 88, A Teacher of Ballet And Choreographer + +SECTION: Section B; Page 20, Column 1; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 212 words + +Edna McRae, a Chicago ballet teacher who received national recognition as a trainer of young dancers, died Thursday in a residence for the elderly in Evanston, Ill. She was 88 years old. +Miss McRae was one of several teachers and choreographers who, from the 1920's to the early 1960's, helped make Chicago a major ballet center, one that, in the 20's and 30's, occasionally rivaled New York City in importance. +Miss McRae was much admired as a teacher by Robert Joffrey, who placed her in charge of his company's West Coast scholarship courses and invited her to be guest teacher at his New York school. + +Was Trained in Many Forms +She was born in Chicago and attended the Chicago Normal School of Physical Education. She studied ballet with, and danced in the companies of, such prominent Chicago teachers as Andreas Pavley, Serge Oukrainsky and Adolph Bolm. +She also studied ballet in New York, Paris and London and, like many dancers and teachers of her time, was trained in such varied forms as Spanish and tap dance. She opened her own Chicago school in 1925. Until Miss McRae retired from regular teaching in 1964, her school was one of the places where touring dancers would take class when they were appearing in Chicago. +She is survived by a niece. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Obituary + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +197 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 14, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +HEALTH; +Personal Health + +BYLINE: By Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section B; Page 12, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1135 words + +A young man was given medication to relieve depression that was causing debilitating fatigue. After three days he developed hallucinations and delusions, complaining, among other things, that his energy was being sapped by radioactive rays from his neighbor's house. +When his medication was changed, the hallucinations disappeared and his depression lifted. +An elderly woman who wore a hearing aid became confused and restless at night. She was given a tranquilizer to help her sleep. Instead, the drug made her even more agitated and frightened. She hid under her bed all night and tried to bite anyone who sought to help to her. +Luckily, her doctor soon realized what was wrong: the woman could no longer change the batteries on her hearing aid and had been suffering from a paranoia that results from isolation. She had largely suppressed her paranoid delusions, but the tranquilizer so undermined her cerebral control and inhibitions that she began to act out the delusions in her mind. New hearing-aid batteries and a different medication relieved her paranoia and nighttime restlessness. +But not every ending is so happy. The relationship between a prescribed drug and behavior abnormalities, memory loss or intellectual deterioration often goes undetected, and the problem is diagnosed as mental illness or senility. More medications may be prescribed, often making matters worse. +The problem is especially common in the elderly, who may metabolize and eliminate drugs more slowly and can suffer toxic reactions to doses that are harmless to younger people. And since older people are often expected to show signs of emotional or intellectual impairment, such symptoms may not be linked to the medication. But it is common in younger people as well, even infants. +Dr. S. Clifford Rogers, a British physician, has noted that the young can suffer devastating psychiatric reactions that may not be recognized by either patient or physician. For example, when Valium and related drugs are given to mothers suffering from postpartum depression and delusions, they can lose control of their aggressive feelings; a result can be battered babies. Similarly, aggressive reactions can occur when these drugs are prescribed for people with schizophrenia or epilepsy. +Previous studies showed that even a single dose of these drugs, called benzodiazepines, could impair learning and psychomotor function. + +Many Drugs Involved +Psychoactive drugs are hardly the only problem. Psychiatric symptoms may result from scores of medications, from antibiotics and antihistamines to heart stimulants and painkillers. In some cases, toxic brain effects are incidental to the drug's primary purpose. +For example, a host of cognitive side effects have been linked to methyldopa (Aldomet) and the beta-blocker propranolol hydrochloride (Inderal), medications that are commonly used to treat high blood pressure and that work, in part, through the brain. Among the reported effects are fatigue, sedation, nightmares, insomnia, visual or auditory hallucinations, depression, psychoses and a decline in mental acuity. +Psychiatrists from the Long Island Jewish-Hillside Medical Center in New Hyde Park showed in a study that these antihypertensive drugs could significantly impair verbal memory in some patients. Many of the patients studied were unaware of their memory impairment, but others often noticed. One woman said that after her husband started taking propranolol and methyldopa for high blood pressure, he began making extensive lists to help remind himself of his daily tasks. +In other cases, the patients knew they were having memory problems but had no idea they were related to drugs. These patients ''experienced a great sense of emotional relief when told that their problem was linked to the medication,'' the physicians reported. +Other cardiovascular drugs can also cause toxic effects on the brain. The heart stimulant digitalis can produce disorientation, irritability, agitation, delusions and hallucinations. Lidocaine, commonly used to regulate erratic heart rhythms, can result in excitement, agitation, restlessness, apprehension and depression. +Recognition of a drug-induced emotional disorder can be confused or delayed because similar symptoms may be associated with the disease being treated. For example, systemic lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disorder can cause emotional problems; but so can the corticosteroids usually prescribed to control it. +When steroids are used to tame an aberrant immune system for months or years, they can bring on depression or mania, even in people with no previous history of emotional disorders. Aggression, mania, depression and psychosis have occurred in otherwise normal body-builders who use anabolic steroids for muscle development. +Two revolutionary medications, the anti-tuberculosis drug isoniazid and L-dopa, for Parkinson's disease, are often associated with disturbing psychiatric symptoms. Several very useful preventives, including cimetidine (Tagamet), used to prevent flare-ups of peptic ulcer, and chloroquine (Aralen), used to prevent malaria, can set off psychiatric reactions in some people. +Another common problem involves combinations of drugs. One drug used alone may be no problem, but adding another may set off the toxicity of the first. Dr. Rogers cited the case of a man with Parkinson's disease who had functioned well on Artane (trihexyphenidyl) until a severe depression after his wife's sudden death prompted a physician to prescribe Tofranil (imipramine). The combination of these chemically related drugs resulted in an acute toxic psychosis marked by hallucinations, terror and restless agitation. + +Prevention and Detection +To reduce the risk or speed recognition of psychiatric reactions to prescribed medications, three measures are critical. First, you must provide every physician who gives you medication with a complete list of all drugs you are now taking, both prescription and over-the-counter. If you do not know their names, bring the vials so the doctor can look them up. +Second, if you or your family notices any emotional or behavioral symptoms - from irritability and memory lapses to depression and hostility - they should be reported to the prescribing physician at once. +Finally, do not assume that the symptom is unrelated to the medication because you once took the drug with no adverse effects or you have been taking the drug for weeks or months before the symptom showed up. Toxicities can build with long-term use, and sensitivities to medication can change with age and medical condition. +Even if the doctor is doubtful that the medication is the cause of your symptoms, suggest a trial of a different drug or a temporary drug-free period to see if the problem clears up. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +198 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 16, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Law Firm for Lincoln To Pay to Settle Suits + +BYLINE: By STEPHEN LABATON, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 31, Column 5; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 426 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 15 + +The main law firm representing the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association agreed today to pay $20 million to settle two securities-fraud and racketeering lawsuits brought by investors. +The suits were filed against the New York law firm of Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Handler & Hayes and a senior partner, Peter Fishbein. The firm acted as the main adviser throughout the 1980's to Charles H. Keating Jr., former owner of Lincoln. +A growing number of lawyers and accountants for failed institutions are facing suits from Federal regulators and from investors who bought the securities of those institutions. + +Bonds Are Now Worthless +The Kaye, Scholer lawsuits were brought by holders of bonds issued by Lincoln's parent company, the American Continental Corporation. The bonds are now worthless. Many of the bonds were bought by elderly people who were depositors at Lincoln. +Lincoln Savings was taken over by the Government last year and could become the most costly of the hundreds of savings and loan failures. The cost of rescuing Lincoln has been estimated at more than $2.5 billion. +Mr. Keating, who is under investigation by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, has sued the Government, asserting that it acted improperly in seizing Lincoln. +''The firm is glad this entire matter is behind us,'' said Kenneth R. Feinberg, a Kaye, Scholer partner. ''We continue to believe we did nothing wrong. But the uncertainty of going forward and the fact of a protracted trial meant that a settlement was a better course of action.'' He said that under the agreement, all of the $20 million would be paid by the firm's insurance companies. + +Other Defendants +Defendants who have not settled in the case include Mr. Keating; Michael R. Milken, the former executive at Drexel Burnham Lambert who sold junk bonds to Lincoln Savings; the Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin, and the accounting firms of Ernst & Young, Arthur Andersen and Deloitte & Touche. +The lawsuits contended that Kaye, Scholer played a crucial role in keeping regulators at bay for more than 18 months while Mr. Keating continued to run the institution and was under investigation. The suits accused the lawyers of knowingly assisting Lincoln in filing false information with bank regulators. +The settlement is one of the largest in such actions, but is considerably less than the $50 million that a Philadelphia firm, Blank, Rome, Comisky & McCauley, agreed to pay to end litigation involving its role as adviser to Centrust Savings of Florida. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +199 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 16, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +CONSUMER'S WORLD: Coping; +With Selecting a Nursing Home + +BYLINE: By LEONARD SLOANE + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 46, Column 2; Style Desk + +LENGTH: 781 words + +If you are seeking a nursing home for yourself or a family member, or anticipating such a decision, a new Government publication can be another helpful tool. It answers a good many questions about the population and performance of homes throughout the country. +The report, second in an annual series called ''Medicare/Medicaid Nursing Home Information,'' is published in 93 volumes, with at least one volume for each state. In addition to general information about choosing a nursing home and addresses and telephone numbers of Federal and state agencies, it includes a four-page profile on each one of the approximately 16,000 nursing homes that participate in Medicare, Federal health-care aid for the elderly, or Medicaid, the Federal-state medical program for the poor. Thirty-two performance factors are examined. +You can learn whether a home met Federal requirements when it was inspected, which may have been more than a year ago, and get information about medical supervision, nursing care, cleanliness and residents' rights. Also listed for every nursing home are descriptions of deficiencies that affect care, ranging from mental and physical abuse to the lack of emergency service. +This is a publication generally not intended for purchase by the public - it has 74,378 pages and weighs 343 pounds. But if people want to buy individual volumes they can do so from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402 (202-783-3238) for $4.75 to $34, depending on the state. In most cases, it makes more sense to consult the report at state health departments and Medicaid offices, local Social Security offices or the 10 regional offices of the American Association of Retired Persons. +Gail R. Wilensky, administrator of the Health Care Financing Administration, the unit of the Department of Health and Human Services that compiled the data, said, ''We try to indicate the kinds of people available in each of the states for individuals to speak to, like agencies for the aging and ombudsmen.'' +The report, issued last month, gauges each home's record on the performance factors against the percentage of homes that were in compliance with the requirements in its state and in the entire United States. +For example, only about 64 percent of the homes nationally had food stored and served in sanitary conditions, while all of the homes in New York State were in compliance. On the other hand, there were just a handful of homes in the nation and none in the state that did not allow residents to communicate and associate with anyone they desired. +The report ''shows a snapshot of a nursing home on one day of the year,'' said Dorothy K. Howe of the American Association of Retired Persons. ''One of several things we encourage people to do is visiting the nursing home and talking to the administration.'' +Dr. Mary Jane Koren, director of the Bureau of Long Term Care Services of the New York State Department of Health, said the report ''may show somebody the strengths or weaknesses of a given facility.'' She said it ''lets families know what things to look at, what things to ask about, what things to notice; it can be an educative device above and beyond what the actual numbers show.'' +But the report has its detractors. Some consumer and industry groups have criticized it sharply. The National Citizens' Coalition for Nursing Home Reform cited what it viewed as serious shortcomings. +''The first year's report was misleading to the consumer,'' said Janet Wells, the coalition's director of publications, ''This year's report is also an extremely incomplete picture.'' +Sheldon L. Goldberg, president of the American Association of Homes for the Aging, which represents nonprofit nursing homes, also criticized what he said were flaws in the report. ''Don't make a decision to go to a nursing home based on the report,'' he said. ''Two nursing homes can look very similar on paper, yet actually be quite different in their quality of care.'' +Consumers, therefore, should use the new Federal report as just one element in the nursing home selection process. The steps long suggested by experts for evaluating a home still ought to be followed: obtain recommendations from relatives or friends, request guidance from physicians and carefully inspect a few local homes. In addition, make sure that both the institution and the administrator are licensed by the state. +''Then ask the administrator of the home to show you the most recent survey,'' said Paul Willging, executive vice president of the American Home Care Association, another nursing home group. ''That should be the last step, not the first step.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +200 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 19, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Jaunty Cuomo Hits the (Campaign?) Trail + +BYLINE: By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4, Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 373 words + +DATELINE: NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y., June 18 + +Items today from the official schedule of Gov. Mario M. Cuomo: +* Planted a tree at a center for the elderly here, where he told one beaming resident: ''Oh, you're not 68. You're lying about your age to collect Social Security.'' +* Visited a plastics products company, also in Niagara Falls, where he announced a $5 million low-interest loan program for businesses in Niagara County. +* Put a down payment on a major league season ticket at Buffalo's Pilot Field, the downtown baseball stadium, which city officials hope will become the home of an expansion team in the National League. Buffalo is ''a sure-fire winner,'' the Governor said as he mingled with residents in line at the stadium's ticket window. +Relying on the rewards of incumbency but insisting that ''I am doing nothing different today than I have done during all the noncampaign years of my life,'' the Governor barnstormed western New York today in what appeared to be a model for mixing state business with a veiled pitch for votes this fall. +Mr. Cuomo, who will be on the ballot for a third term as Governor, had an almost perpetual grin throughout and had only good news for local residents, but seemed to suggest that it might not be possible for him to separate his responsibilities as chief executive from his role as a campaigner. +''I believe that the best politics is good government,'' he told reporters who accompanied him aboard a state plane from Albany. +But his Republican opponents wasted no time in condemning the strategy. +''Anything an elected official does in an election year can be construed as political,'' said Assemblyman John J. Faso, campaign manager for the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Pierre A. Rinfret. +While Mr. Cuomo made no formal appeal for votes on his trip today, he could not have been more solicitous, whether he was asking a plant manager here about the process for making battery covers out of recycled plastics or pledging to come back sometime and actually watch a baseball game. +Perhaps to demonstrate solidarity with the daily aggravations of local people, the Governor even endured a 45-minute traffic jam to get over the construction-plagued Grand Island Bridge, which links Niagara Falls and Buffalo. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, who is seeking election to a third term, playing an Italian numbers-guessing game with Lawrence Gasbarre on a visit to a center for the elderly in Niagara Falls, N.Y. (Joe Traver for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +201 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 20, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Fed Up, L.I.'s Young Are Thinking Florida + +BYLINE: By SARAH LYALL + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1, Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1395 words + +DATELINE: MERRICK, L.I. + +Like many young couples on Long Island, Kenneth and Sharon Jaeger both work, he during the day and she at night. Whoever is home looks after the baby. +''As I'm walking in the door, she's walking out,'' Mr. Jaeger said. ''We have to do it to make ends meet.'' +The Jaegers are sick of it. They are tired of scraping by to pay taxes and the mortgage when together they earn more than $42,000. They are tired of the traffic and tired of the house they bought three years ago as a fixer-upper and are still trying to fix up. +Like many young couples on Long Island, the Jaegers want to move. And that is why Mr. Jaeger spent a recent afternoon at the Florida Development Corporation here listening to a talk on life in Florida. +Florida real-estate promoters, pursuing their decades-old quest for Northerners tired of the cold and familiar, are finding a growing market in people like the Jaegers. Increasingly, through seminars and real-estate showcases, they are introducing the young families of Long Island to the opportunities of Florida. +In the past, most of the Long Island immigrants to Florida were older people hoping to cash in their Long Island dream and retire. But people moving there today are almost as likely to be young families who never found the dream in the first place. +''In the past two years, we have found a real change in the market,'' said Ann Levitt, the associate director of marketing for Florida Development, which acts as a broker for various Florida developers. ''Fifty percent or so of the families are young working people. They say they can't afford to buy a home or are getting taxed out of their houses.'' + +Search for the Good Life +Long Island used to be a land of opportunity for the young, with good jobs, clean air and a way of life that was easier and friendlier than New York City's. But many Long Islanders say the good life is no longer within reach here, and they are looking elsewhere. Florida, they believe, is what Long Island once was, only with better weather. +Among the most popular forums that bring together people who want to move out have been the Florida Real Estate Showcases. When the first was held as an annual event eight years in the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, 3,500 people attended, said John Erisman, vice president of United Show Management Inc., which sponsors the get-togethers. +The company has added two shows, one in the spring, most recently on June 9, and the other in November. The show in January, Mr. Erisman said, drew almost 30,000 people. +''I see the crowd getting gradually younger,'' he said. ''There's still the retiree, the empty nester who's alone and the second-home buyer. But you do see more young people. They want to cash in and get out of Long Island.'' Jim Bogen could not agree more. ''It's a sick place; I'm burning myself out,'' said Mr. Bogen, 24 years old, a construction worker attending the Florida Development Corporation's seminar here. Mr. Bogen, who is married, lives in an apartment on the top floor of someone else's house. Even though he works overtime to bring in $30,000 a year, he said, he cannot afford to buy a home on Long Island. ''For what I could afford, it would have to be a garage in Wyandanch,'' he said. + +Moving to Areas of Growth +''It breaks my heart,'' he said. ''I've got my family and my friends here. But now I have my own family to look after.'' +Another concern is jobs. After a long period of expansion, job growth has slowed considerably in the metropolitan region in the last two years, and important industries on Long Island, including defense and construction, are suffering. +''My husband's in the building business, and you can't build here,'' said Helen Folkers, who lives in Ridge and who was at the most recent Real Estate Showcase, held at the Radisson Plaza Hotel in Melville. +''Young people move for economic advantage,'' said Samuel M. Ehrenhalt, regional director of the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the last two years, he said, job growth has slowed considerably on Long Island and in New York City as it has been increasing in Florida. He said: ''People are looking around, and saying, 'Where are the prospects brighter?' And they're moving into areas of growth.'' + +Study by University +Mr. Ehrenhalt said the number of jobs in New York State grew in 1988 and 1989 by 1.9 percent, the sixth-worst record of any state. In that period, Florida added 400,000 jobs, for 8.4 percent growth, the seventh-highest in the country. +It is hard to say just how many Florida residents once lived on Long Island. But Florida consistently gains more people from New York than from any other state. +A study last year showed that 13.9 percent of all people settling in Florida in the last five years were from New York, said Stan Smith, director of the population program in the bureau of economic and social research at the University of Florida in Gainesville. +Florida is not the only place that Long Islanders move to, of course. Virginia and the Carolinas are popular, too. But Florida has gained a sort of mythical reputation here as a land of opportunity, with cheaper housing, a balmier climate and a calmer style of living. + +'Love the Warm Weather' +''It's clean, it's affordable, there's no rat race, the people are nicer, and I love the warm weather,'' said Joseph Pagliaro, 34, a computer programmer who joined hundreds of people, young and old, at the show in Melville. +With his two friends, Mr. Pagliaro cruised through the rows of booths, where developers distributed brochures, displayed videotapes of palm-tree laden landscapes and spacious houses, and offered deals like special fly-and-buy trips, where potential customers are flown to developments in Florida free of charge, no purchase necessary. +With glossy pamphlets that advertised three-bedroom houses starting at $81,000, far lower than a comparable Long Island house, the booth for Artistic Homes, a builder in Spring Hills, Fla., on the Gulf of Mexico west of Orlando, drew a brisk crowd. ''Seventy percent of the people who come to our homes come from the Northeast, and Long Island is our main pool of people,'' said Harry Paul, a sales manager. +Many visitors to the showcase said that if the real-estate market on Long Island were not so sluggish, more people would move right away. They spoke of houses on their streets that had been on the market for months and even years, and they said they worried about what would happen when they put their houses up for sale. + +Fear of Popularity +''Nobody can afford to leave until they sell their own house,'' said Jean Dunn, 38, whose house in Holtsville has been on the market for six months. +According to the Long Island Board of Realtors, 23,502 houses were listed for sale on Long Island in April; 799 were sold that month. +As much as people want to leave, some said they worried that the popularity of Florida would make the areas they want to move to no better than Long Island in a few years. +Houses in Florida cost $50,000 to $100,000 less than comparable houses up north. Developers say prices are rising as much as $10,000 a year. +Jobs are plentiful in some expanding parts of the state, particularly around Orlando in the center, Melbourne on the Atlantic coast and Fort Myers on the Gulf. Representatives of the Florida developers said salaries are about half what they are on Long Island. Prices of most commodities are similar to those in Long Island, the developers added, but there is no state income tax in Florida. +Florida is growing, though the rate has tapered off and counties are beginning to adopt plans to manage growth, said Ken Dalecki, editor of the Kiplinger Florida Newsletter, which tracks trends in the state. Where 1,000 people a day used to move to Florida, he said, now 800 do. By the year 2000, Mr. Dalecki said, two million to three million people will move to Florida, putting the population at 16 million. +Worries about Florida's growing out of control or becoming a Long Island away from Long Island are not stopping Chris Cerullo, 35. He wants out, and he wants out now. He has put down money on a $95,000 house in Kissimmee, near Orlando. A house he was looking at here, in Far Rockaway, was selling for $165,000. +''I grew up here and I'm going to miss it,'' Mr. Cerullo said. ''But I have no choice.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Florida real-estate promoters are finding a growing market on Long Island. Ann Levitt, the associate director of marketing for Florida Development, which acts as a broker for Florida developers, selling the benefits of the state to a group in Long Island. (Vic DeLucia/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +202 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 21, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Sarah Wiener, 80, Advocate for Elderly + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7, Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 171 words + +Sarah Wiener, a retired teacher who became an advocate for retired people, died on Monday at her daughter's home in Teaneck, N.J. She was 80 years old and lived in Brooklyn. Mrs. Wiener died of lung cancer, her husband, Abraham, said. Mrs. Wiener taught in New York high schools for more than 30 years. After retiring in the late 1960's she became active in a retired teachers' group, working on a supplementary self-insured health program for retirees. That led Albert Shanker to ask her to form a similar organization for the national union, the American Federation of Teachers. +She was appointed by Gov. Hugh L. Carey and again by Gov. Mario M. Cuomo to the state's legislative advisory committee on the Older Americans Act of 1964. She was on the executive board of the National Council of Senior Citizens. +Mrs. Wiener was born in the Bronx. She graduated from New York University and received a master's from Columbia University. +Also surviving are her daughter, Norma Goetz of Teaneck, and two granddaughters. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Obituary + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +203 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 22, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Bombing at London Air Base + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 10, Column 4; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 78 words + +DATELINE: LONDON, June 21 + +A bomb exploded at the Royal Air Force's administrative base at Stanmore Park northwest of London today, but a guard had spotted a suspicious-looking rucksack and the base and a nearby senior citizens' home were evacuated before the blast, the police said. No casualties were reported. The police said the Irish Republican Army was the main suspect. Two men were questioned about the blast, a Scotland Yard spokesman said. They were later released without charge. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +204 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 24, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +LONG ISLAND GUIDE + +SECTION: Section 12LI; Page 11, Column 1; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1235 words + + + +'BACHANALIA' +After holding forth for two weeks at the State University at Stony Brook, the Bach Aria Festival is taking everything it has been doing over that span and, compressing it all into one day's musical marathon, travels to Chelsea Center in Muttontown today. +The proceedings begin at 11:30 A.M. with a pre-concert lecture on ''Bach Feasts'' and then, moving right along, include a chamber music concert at 1 P.M. and orchesteral music and concertos at 2:15. +Featuring a fully staged version of ''The Appeasement of Aeolus,'' the cantata with a new English libretto by Sheldon Harnick, music for large ensembles begins at 3:30 P.M. Finally, to celebrate the festival's 10th anniversary there's a buffet supper at 5:15. +Reservations: 632-7239. + +CHILDREN'S THEATER +Parks are not just for playing or swimming. For example, those affiliated with the Long Island State Park Region branch out a bit when it comes to family togetherness. +At Sunken Meadow State Park in Kings Park today, the Children's Summer Theater begins its annual hop, skip and jump through the area's state parks. +Always on Sundays somewhere - and also sprinkled during the week - the series gets under way at 3 P.M. with a magic show featuring the illusionist Mark Schussman. Throughout the summer, he will also perform at other parks, sharing the spotlight with, among others, the Arena Players Children 's Theater, the Kaleidoscope Dancers and Puppet Projects. The performances are free, but there are park admission charges. Information: 669-1000, Ext. 247. + +SUMMER ARTS FESTIVAL +Can it be that the Huntington Arts Council's Summer Arts Festival is 25 years old? It is, and this granddaddy of all free Long Island outdoor concert series begins its silver anniversary year, ''Summerscape '90,'' tomorrow at the Chapin Rainbow Stage in Heckscher Park. +Opening-night honors go to the Clem De Rosa Orchestra in a concert paying homage to ''Big Band Jazz.'' +Before the week is out, the Community Band appears Wednesday, the Huntington Men's Chorus Thursday and the Senior Citizens Pops Orchestra of Long Island on Friday. +On Saturday, in the first of the festival's ''Star'' sessions - Nikolais & Louis Dance, an acclaimed modern-dance company - offers ''Mechanical Organ,'' ''Liturgies'' and ''Hoopla.'' Next Sunday, the attraxction is Paul Zaloom, the political satirist. +All the programs begin at 8:30 P.M., and one should bring his own seating. +Information and schedule: 271-8442. + +DO-SI-DO +There is nothing square about square dancing, and this hot weather tradition is in full swing this week. +For example, Primo Fiore begins his Monday series tomorrow at Phelps Lane Park in North Babylon. It will continue through Aug. 27. +Mr. Fiore will also be at Jones Beach State Park on Tuesdays and Thursdays through Aug. 30, Heckscher State Park in East Islip on Wednesdays through Aug. 29 and Wildwood State Park in Wading River on Fridays through Aug. 31. +Meanwhile, at Hither Hills State Park in Montauk, Frank DeYong will keep things moving on Mondays and Thursdays through Aug. 23. +All the sessions are at 8 P.M. and are free. + +NASHVILLE IN WESTBURY +The suburban interest in country music has reached the ears of the promoters of TNN, The Nashville Network. And so on Wednesday, TNN begins sponsoring a series of country music concerts at the Westbury Music Fair. +Tanya Tucker, joined by Exile and Travis Tritt, head the first program. Eventually, the series will present Willie Nelson, July 13-14; Conway Twitty, July 25; Loretta Lynn, Aug. 9; Reba McEntire, Sept. 9, and Ronnie Milsap, Oct. 4. +Tickets: 334-0800. + +BALD HILL POP +Big-time pop music - the kind that usually keeps Nassau Coliseum, the Jones Beach State Theater and the Westbury Music Fair hopping - comes to Suffolk County Thursday. That is when a concert series makes its debut at the newly completed amphitheater at Bald Hill Cultural Park in Farmingville. +The site accommodates 18,000 music lovers (half on provided chairs and half on a bring-your-own seating lawn). +The opening night attraction is Wayne Newton, who has not performed in the New York area for six years, but is leaving Las Vegas for one night (Thursday) in Farmingville. +So far, the acts booked for this inaugural season include Spyro Gyra (and Grucci fireworks), July 4; Waylon Jennings, July 14; Bad Company and Damn Yankees, July 21, and Blood, Sweat and Tears, Gary Lewis and the Playboys and Paul Revere and the Raiders, Aug. 5. +Tickets: 888-9000. + +HAS WOLF, DOES TRAVEL +Although Keith Nyitray now lives in Alaska, he was reared in Smithtown, and this year, when he came home to visit family, he had a tale to tell that goes beyond the norm. +Mr. Nyitray recently returned from a 10-month trek through the Canadian Northwest territory: a 1,460-mile journey across the entire length of the Brooks Range, from Fort McPherson in Canada to Alaska's Bering Sea coast. +And except for his wolf-hybrid Smoke, he made the precedent-setting trip alone. +On Thursday, with the help of slides - and Smoke, of course - Mr. Nyitray will be at the South Country Library, 22 Station Road, Bellport, to tell of his adventure. The program is at 7 P.M. and is free. + +U.F.O.'s? +According to Tom Affatigato, an astronomer-producer at the Vanderbilt Planetarium, interest in Unidentified Flying Objects seems to be cyclical. With the cycle having reached these shores, the planetarium thought it would be a good idea to take on the subject, but, Mr. Affatigato said, ''In a fair way, exploring the pros and cons.'' +And so on Friday, the Vanderbilt introduces ''UFO!,'' a sky show that will include all sides of the controversial subject. Verbal theories will be illustrated by pictorial effects flashed across the planetarium's Sky Dome. +The show will run through the fall and be accompanied by a series of lectures. The first is ''U.F.O.'s - Do They Exist?'' on July 11. +Information: 262-7800. + +VINTAGE BOATS +Like most hobbyists, the 130 members of the Long Island chapter of the Antique and Classic Boat Society like to show and tell. But to do this, they need a place to rendezvous, a place to anchor their prides and joys. +Come Saturday, when the society will hold its ninth annual Vintage Boat Show, that place will be the Suffolk Marine Museum in West Sayville. +From 10 A.M. to 4 P.M., more than 35 vessels - from 19th-century sailing ships and electric- and gas-operated boats to spiffy mahogany runabouts and sparkling cruisers - will be on display. Some will come all the way from Canada, brought down the Hudson River by Canadian enthusiasts. On land will be a display of classic cars and nautical exhibits. The museum is off Montauk Highway, and admission, including the show and the museum, is $2. + +RIVERHEAD JAZZ +From 3 to 9:30 P.M. Saturday, the banks of the Peconic River will be alive with the sound of jazz. That is when the East End Arts Council holds its first ''Riverhead Jazz Festival.'' +The nonstop concert includes performances by the Duke Ellington Orchestra, directed by Mercer Ellington; the Mose Allison Trio; the Armstrong Legacy, featuring Arvell Shaw, and Steppin' Out, with Mark Gatz. +To punctuate it all, there will be concluding fireworks: a ''world-class, top-shelf'' 25-minute display by Grucci choreograped to musc broadcast on WALK-FM. +Tickets: 727-0900. < $90BARBARA DELATINER + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: June 26, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + + CORRECTION: +An article in the Long Island Weekly on Sunday misstated the date of a concert Wayne Newton is giving at the Bald Hill Cultural Park in Farmingville, L.I. It will be tonight at 8 P.M. + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +205 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 27, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Senior Open Is for Shot-Makers and Par-Breakers + +BYLINE: By JAIME DIAZ, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 19, Column 2; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 1050 words + +DATELINE: PARAMUS, N.J., June 26 + +Now that Hale Irwin has proved that a 45-year-old can win the United States Open, then turn around and beat most of the same youngsters again the very next week, perhaps the feats of those 50 and older should be better appreciated. +When Jack Nicklaus can shoot 27 under par and Lee Trevino can win 5 out of 10 tournaments, and when Gary Player can beat both of them at the age of 54, it makes a strong case that golf's elders are getting more youthful all the time. +Regardless of your view of golf gerontology, the 11th United States Senior Open at the Ridgewood Country Club here promises to produce the finest shot-making in the history of the event. The presence of Nicklaus and Trevino alone makes the field the championship's strongest ever. +But along with the top two, several other players have come to Ridgewood with an edge. Player is looking for an unprecedented third championship and always carries extra motivation in tournaments he considers majors. Chi Chi Rodriguez has been revitalized, with a victory and four other top-five finishes in his last eight events. Bob Charles, last week's winner at Boston, seems to have his legendary putting stroke back. And the defending champion, Orville Moody, although only 18th on the money list, doesn't want to give up the Francis D. Ouimet Memorial Trophy. + +Low Scores Expected +''I think there will be a lot of guys who can play this golf course well,'' said Moody, who won last year at Laurel Valley Golf Club in Ligonier, Pa. ''It's a course that requires a lot of finesse. You have to feel your way around, cut it a little here, draw it a little there. You can't overpower it.'' +Moody thinks the winning score over Ridgewood's 6,697-yard par-72 course may go as low as 14 under, with the accessibility to birdies bringing more potential winners into the picture. +''This is a lot easier course than the other Senior Opens I've played in,'' said Moody, who has played in the championship since 1984. ''If the greens don't get hard and crusty, I think somebody will shoot low.'' +Of course, Moody admits that no matter what the conditions, the favorites, and the main attractions, are Nicklaus and Trevino. + +Nicklaus Rolling Along +So far, Nicklaus has gotten the better of the reborn rivalry. In his senior debut at the Tradition in April, he won easily while Trevino finished in the middle of the pack. At the P.G.A. Seniors Championship two weeks later, he and Trevino tied for third after Player and Rodriguez outplayed them both. +At the Mazda Senior T.P.C. three weeks ago, Trevino shot 21 under, his best four-round total on the Senior Tour. But he was blown away by Nicklaus's astonishing 27-under total of 261, which broke Moody's 72-hole Senior Tour record of 25 under and tied the 72-hole record for most under par in a PGA Tour event. +With Nicklaus not committed to playing any more senior events after Ridgewood, the Senior Open could be the last time this year the two men clash on the over-50 circuit. And by winning the seniors' most prestigious title, Trevino could come close to evening the score with his good friend. + +Trevino May Have Edge +Moody, for one, thinks Ridgewood's doglegs, small greens and long, mostly unreachable par 5's - the shortest is 522 yards - give Trevino an edge over Nicklaus. +''I think Lee might have an advantage because this is not a power hitter's golf course,'' Moody said. ''On most of the holes, you have to place the ball in an area about 260 yards out, and that takes about 30 yards away from Jack. +''I know I can't reach any of the par 5's, and it helps us all if Jack can't reach them in two. Even if he's close to the green in two, as long as he's not putting for an eagle, it evens up the game a lot more.'' +Indeed, it is the equanimity of Ridgewood that has drawn praise from the seniors who have played it in practice rounds. +It was designed and built in 1929 by the brilliant, flamboyant A. W. Tillinghast, the creator of among others Winged Foot, Baltusrol, San Francisco Golf Club. It is ranked 76th among Golf Digest's best 100 courses. Contoured Greens Tillinghast's genius was in the contouring of greens to make holes difficult without abundant length, narrow fairways, or hazards. He had a special fondness for Ridgewood, perhaps because he lived in nearby Harrington Park. He pronounced it his greatest work. +''Anything other than a truly great course would have been impossible under the conditions for I have loved it from the beginning and will ever love it to the end,'' Tillinghast wrote in a letter to the Ridgewood membership. +But Ridgewood never enjoyed the high profile of Winged Foot or Baltusrol, primarily because it doesn't have the space to host a United States Open and is slightly shorter in length than those courses. +Ridgewood was also where Byron Nelson built the game that would make him one of golf's greatest players. Nelson, a native of Fort Worth, Tex., was hired in 1935 as a 23-year-old assistant to head professional George Jacobus at a salary of $80 a month. For the better part of the next two years, he played in only a few competitions, concentrating instead on building the upright swing with powerful lower body action that would become the model for the modern golf professional. + +Moment to Remember +''That period of time I spent working with George Jacobus was the most important of my career,'' said Nelson, who is the honorary chairman of this year's event. ''It wasn't long before I became more steady, more confident that I really knew what I was doing, and after I came out of there in 1936, I really never had a problem.'' +Shortly after leaving Ridgewood to play in tournaments full time, Nelson won the 1936 Metropolitan Open, the first of his 54 official tour victories. +Nelson's most remembered moment at Ridgewood came the day a group of members goaded him into showing his prowess with his 1-iron. They motioned to a flagpole in the distance and dared Nelson to try to hit it. +''I dropped a ball, took out the 1-iron and hit the flagpole dead solid,'' Nelson remembered. ''I just put the club away and walked off. No way I was going to try another. I still get letters on that, even in the last few years.'' +The golf that will be produced this week at Ridgewood should also be memorable. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Map of Paramus showing location of the Ridgewood Country Club. (pg. A20) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +206 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 27, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Economic Scene; +Broader Medicaid: Who Would Pay? + +BYLINE: By Milt Freudenheim + +SECTION: Section D; Page 2, Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 872 words + +A RECENT Supreme Court decision is expected to add to growing pressure for changes in Medicaid. The Court ruled on June 14 that hospitals and nursing homes can file lawsuits to demand ''reasonable and adequate reimbursement'' for their services to Medicaid patients. +Medicaid, the Federal-state program for low-income people, is already straining budgets in most states, and the financially pressed programs have not kept pace with sharp increases in hospital and other medical costs. +Any increases in Medicaid spending would inevitably collide with Federal and state budget limitations, and the Bush Administration seems far from ready for such increases, at least this year. Indeed, in budget talks last week with Congressional leaders, Administration officials proposed $800 million in Medicaid cuts in 1991. Medicaid spends about $60 billion a year, of which about $26 billion comes from states and localities and $34 billion is Federal money. +But a White House working group is looking hard at Medicaid as part of a review of the quality, accessibility and cost of the health-care system. President Bush announced the review in his State of the Union address in January. +''Everyone believes that we need to look at the design of Medicaid, who it covers and does not cover, and how it is paid for,'' said Constance J. Horner, the Under Secretary of Health and Human Services, who heads the group. ''Medicaid does not cover everyone who is poor.'' The group will make recommendations to the President's Domestic Policy Council at the end of the year. +Most experts say that expanding Medicaid would be the quickest way to assure medical care for many of the 35 million Americans who do not have health insurance. But before adding to the costs of such a big-ticket program, the President and Congress would obviously have to make important decisions about spending priorities and taxes. +Indeed, a recent study by the Urban Institute, a private research group in Washington, estimated that about $10 billion more would be needed each year to cover the poor fully, including those who work but are not insured. +This would be the case, the study found, even under Medicaid ceilings that would restrict eligibility to those earning less than 75 percent of the $10,560 for a family of three that the Federal Government considers the poverty threshhold. To go further and bring in everyone below the poverty line would cost about $14 billion, John F. Holahan and Sheila R. Zedlewski estimated in the study. +Congress recently relaxed the income restrictions to make it easier for pregnant mothers, children up to 6, and the elderly and disabled to get Medicaid. But the extra costs of allowing still more people to become eligible could more than absorb the hoped-for peace dividends from cutbacks in military spending. And the added costs would be even higher if Medicaid payments to doctors and hospitals were raised to the higher levels of the Federal Medicare program for the elderly and disabled, as is also being discussed. +Connecticut has gone somewhat further in easing Medicaid requirements by adopting a package that would also make private insurance more affordable to small businesses with 25 or fewer employees. The many insurance companies based in Hartford hope that the Connecticut plan will be a precedent. They are fighting proposals in California and other states that would turn much of their business over to a government-controlled system like that of Canada. +But Connecticut is hardly typical. ''Connecticut is essentially a very wealthy state with a reasonably good Medicaid program, fewer unemployed, more large employers who provide health coverage, and very responsible insurance leaders,'' said Lawrence S. Lewin, president of Lewin/ICF, a Washington consulting firm. +He likes a proposal by Paul H. O'Neill, chairman of the Aluminum Company of America, which would eliminate employer-paid health benefits and raise wages instead. Under the plan, which Mr. O'Neill recently sketched to the Federal Advisory Council on Social Security and Health Care, employees would have to buy their own health insurance with help, initially, from a tax break. +Ann Labelle, executive director of the advisory council, said Mr. O'Neill's ideas, which are still being developed, would be studied along with a number of other proposals, such as ''nationalizing'' the Connecticut approach, making Medicare a universal benefit, and establishing a Federal reinsurance pool for catastrophic illnesses so private insurance rates could be lowered. +The council is also reviewing a proposal by the Pepper Commission, a bipartisan group headed by Senator John D. Rockefeller 4th, Democrat of West Virginia, to replace Medicaid with a new Federal program. Under the Pepper plan, employers would be required to provide health benefits for their workers or pay into state and regional pools to cover the uninsured. +The Pepper proposals would cost $23.4 billion in added Government spending, plus $20 billion from employers. But expanding Medicaid without a plan to make employers pay would cost ''about 50 percent more and cover only about half of the uninsured,'' said Judith Feder, staff director of the Pepper group. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +207 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 28, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Health; +Court Rejects Disability Pay Policy + +BYLINE: By THOMAS MORGAN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 11, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1053 words + +A Federal appeals court in Manhattan ruled yesterday that the Government should not have denied disability payments to hundreds of thousands of people in New York State who are suffering from a form of heart disease called ischemia. +The case is the first class-action lawsuit to successfully challenge and invalidate the Social Security Administration's policy to determine disablity based on ischemic heart disease, or narrowing of the arteries. While the ruling pertains only to disability claims filed in New York, it has implications nationwide. +''This would be a big leg up for other states to challenge the department,'' said Evelyn M. Tenenbaum, the assistant New York State attorney general who argued the plantiffs' case with David S. Udell of Legal Services for the Elderly in New York. +The ruling, in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, affirmed a lower court decision in 1989 by Judge Robert L. Carter of Federal District Court in Manhattan. If the Federal Government does not appeal the case or loses it before the United States Supreme Court, New York State stands to gain about $8.5 million a year for 10 years in payments it made to those denied disability by the Social Security Administration. + +No Decision Yet on Appeal +An assistant United States Attorney, Diogenes P. Kekatos, who argued the case before the appeals court, said the Government has not decided whether to appeal. +State agencies, under an agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for the Social Security Administration, determine eligibility for Federal disability claims based on policies decided by the Federal Government. +Until 1980, a number of different tests were used to determine eligibility for disability benefits, state and Federal officials said. But in 1980, the Federal Government, as part of a general Reagan Administration policy to tighten welfare and disability benefit regulations, changed its policy to weigh treadmill stress tests more heavily than other diagnostic tests for heart ailments. +In treadmill tests, electrocardiogram responses show oxygen intake while people walk. +According to medical testimony in court documents, other widely used tests are more reliable than the treadmill test in measuring the severity of ischemic heart disease. +The suit was filed as a class action by the New York State Attorney General's Office, New York City and Suffolk County. In addition, four legal- services agencies joined as plaintiffs. +The governments and legal-services agencies began litigation in 1985, saying that a variety of tests were needed to determine disability. In addition, court documents said that treadmill tests fail to adequately diagnose ischemia in as many as 38 percent of the cases examined. +The opinion yesterday, written by Judge Irving R. Kaufman and concurred with by Judges Amalya L. Kearse and Roger J. Miner, requires the Federal Government to re-examine disability claims for ischemic heart disease as far back as June 1, 1980, Federal officials said. #150,000 Denied Benefits A spokesman for the State Attorney General's office said yesterday that as many as 150,000 New Yorkers may have been denied benefits or assessments since since the state started keeping track of people denied disability benefits for ischemia. They will have to be notified that they are eligible for re-evaluation. +''This court decision will not only correct an injustice, but will save New York State millions of dollars in retroactive and future benefits that will instead be paid by the Federal Government,'' said Robert Abrams, the State Attorney General. +''The Federal Government will no longer be able to cruelly deny justly deserved benefits to thousands of vulnerable people. This Federal policy was just another example of the Reagan Administration's efforts to balance the budget on the backs of the weakest in our society,'' he said. +According to court documents, ischemic heart disease is an affliction usually due to coronary atherosclerosis, a process in which deposits of cholesterol in the blood narrow or obstruct the artery walls of the heart. + +Chest Pains During Exercise +People who suffer from the disease typically have chest pains when they are involved in physical activity, like walking on a treadmill. +In his opinion, Judge Kaufman wrote that heart disease cannot be diagnosed by simple meaures ''nor cured by panacea.'' He also criticized the failure of the Secretary of Health and Human Services to adequately publicize changes in the department's cardiac impairment disability policy. +''The Secretary does not serve Congressional intent or the public by closing out light in diagnosing or treating this illness,'' Judge Kaufman wrote. +''While we recognize that our decision today adds to the Secretary's already heavy burden of complying with the act, Congress, by requiring individualized disability assessments, has dictated the result: The Secretary should consider all available relevant evidence when evaluating claims of ischemic heart disease.'' +Dr. Richard Stein, chief of cardiology at the State University Health Science Center in Brooklyn, who filed an affidavit in support of the class-action suit, said, ''There is nothing wrong per se with using the treadmill test as one of the factors that go into determining whether or not a patient is able to do work sufficient to be gainfully employed.'' . + +'Only One Part of the Picture' +''A treadmill test is but one way of determing how much exercise a person can perform,'' he said. ''The problem is, it's only one part of the picture, and to a large extent, a very motivated patient can perform a fair amount of activity but still do it with a fair amount of ischemia or discomfort. +Other tests for ischemia include the exercise-thallium test, the equilibrium radionuclide angiogram and angiography. +The exercise-thallium test produces an image of the heart muscle after a small amount of a radioactive substance is injected into the blood. The equilibrium radionuclide angiogram creates a computer-synthesized image of the heart when a radioisotope is injected into the body. Angiography tests are X-ray pictures that are taken after a catheter is inserted into a coronary artery and a dye is injected into the heart. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +208 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 28, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +BASEBALL; +Anniversary With Little to Celebrate + +BYLINE: By PETER APPLEBOME, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section D; Page 24, Column 3; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 1034 words + +DATELINE: ATLANTA, June 27 + +Ed Walker doesn't get out to an Atlanta Braves game very often, but when he does, he invariably leaves with a sense of deja vu. +''The Braves are like history,'' he said before watching the club lose to the Dodgers, 5-2, Monday night. ''It keeps repeating itself, and they always have the same old losing team.'' +When the Braves dismissed their manager, Russ Nixon, and replaced him with Bobby Cox, the general manager, last Friday, it added yet another familiar ring to the 25th anniversary season for what may be baseball's most troubled franchise. +This season was billed as a turnaround year for a franchise that has finished last in the National League West in three of the last four years and that has not won a playoff game since coming to Atlanta. +Instead, the Braves limped out to a 2-13 start, have a 28-42 record, and seem headed to a third straight year as the team with the weakest attendance in baseball. +''I think we're as good as anyone we play,'' said Ron Gant, the center fielder, who has been the Braves' best player this year. ''We just have to get rid of the dark cloud that's over us.'' + +String of Injuries +Indeed, the Braves' season has had a distinct doomsday air to it. Their key off-season acquisition, Nick Esasky, has spent almost all season on the disabled list - instead of at first base -with what has been diagnosed as vertigo. A newly acquired catcher, Ernie Whitt, and the bullpen closer, Jeff Stanton, have also spent most of the year on the disabled list. +The Braves even lost their most loyal fan. Up until this year, their one constant was Pearl Sandow, an elderly woman who came out to watch every one of the 1,889 home games the team played in its first 24 seasons in Atlanta. She fell and broke both shoulders in February and doesn't expect to be able to get to a game all year. +But, then again, no one is ascribing the Braves' troubles solely to injuries. Billed as a team built around pitching, the Braves have a 5.30 earned run average and rank last in the National League in both pitching and fielding. +''There's no hope for the Braves,'' said Mike Mitchell, a college soccer and tennis coach, as he watched the team lose Monday. ''I think back on the last season when they won their division, and it seems like a hoax.'' + +Great Names Limited to the Fence +There are still reminders that this was once one of baseball's great franchises. The park displays the retired numbers of the former Braves greats Warren Spahn, Eddie Mathews, Hank Aaron and Phil Niekro, although most of their highlights came when the team was in Milwaukee. There's a large marker in left field pinpointing the spot where Aaron hit his 715th, home run, breaking Babe Ruth's record, on April 8, 1974. +And Aaron is still a very visible link with the past as senior vice president and assistant to the Braves' president, Stan Kasten. +''It's been very frustrating for me,'' he said. ''We're never truly won the fans over, but it's not the fans' fault, it's the organization's fault. We haven't put a winner on the field.'' There have been few high points during the Braves' 24 seasons in Atlanta, only seven of them winning ones. The team managed divisional championships in 1969 and 1982 but was swept in three games each time in the league playoffs. The Braves drew 2.1 million fans for a second-place finish in 1983, but have drawn under a million for 11 of the last 18 seasons. And the efforts to market the Braves as America's Team on the clubowner Ted Turner's Super Station WTBS have wilted in the face of the team's dismal performance and the more attractive package of televised baseball on ESPN. +This year, the most spirited topic of discussion about the Braves is whether the team stooped to humbling self-parody by choosing the goofball television pitchman and aspiring movie star Ernest P. Worrell (''Know what I mean, Verne?'') as its advertising spokesman for the year. + +Cox Is Hopeful +Still, there are people both inside and outside the organization who think the Braves are on the right track. The team's young pitching staff is still regarded as one of the most promising in baseball, and Cox said the Braves are much better than their record indicates. +''We have more hitting than we've had since 1982, the defense is O.K., and the starting rotation, although the e.r.a. isn't good, should be a great starting rotation to work with,'' said Cox. ''We just have to get it going. We need to finish ahead of somebody.'' +But, in typical Braves fashion, the pitching remains all potential and little reality. Of the four young starters who began the year, Derek Lilliquist is back in the minors, and Pete Smith, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz have e.r.a.'s of 4.79, 4.09 and 5.44, respectively. The bullpen, anchored by Joe Boever, Charlie Kerfeld and Joe Hesketh, has been so bad one local sportswriter has dubbed them the Ghastly Boys. +''Things have been so negative around here for the last three or four years, it's hard for this team to keep a positive attitude,'' said Whitt, who was acquired from the Toronto Blue Jays last winter. ''No offense to the newspapers, but I tell our guys they'd be better off not reading them. You read it, and you believe it. You get into the sixth or seventh inning and instead of saying, ''Guys, we're gonna win this game,' you think, ''How are we gonna lose it?' '' + +Theories for Failure +There are diverse theories, some more fanciful than others, for the Braves' woes. They include the dismissal of their former mascot, Chief Noc-A-Homa, in 1983; the general malaise shrouding Atlanta's professonal teams, and a history of awful trades. +Once a ball-park regular, Turner is seldom seen at the Braves' games, but officials say he is very interested in the future of the franchise and has no interest in selling it. +Not everyone is upset, however, with the current problems. +''To tell you the truth, I hate a crowded ball park,'' said John Goddard, a 33-year-old musician. ''I like to be able to come out and relax and not have to worry about getting a place to park or stand in line. As long as the Braves lose, I don't have to worry. Atlanta is the last town in the world to support a bad team.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Empty seats at a recent Atlanta Braves game. The Braves have struggled for most of their time in Atlanta. (Jim Schultz for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +209 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 29, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Albany Leaders Agree on Hospital Aid Increase + +BYLINE: By KEVIN SACK, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1, Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1154 words + +DATELINE: ALBANY, June 28 + +Legislative leaders agreed tonight on a major revision of the state's system of health-care financing that would bail out distressed hospitals. The pact would also provide substantial incentives for expanding the availability of primary care, although not by as much as Gov. Mario M. Cuomo had requested. +The accord between the Assembly and the Senate will pump $420 million into New York's health-care system. The state will provide $52 million through increased Medicaid payments, a move that will set off an automatic increase in contributions from the Federal government, local governments and private insurers, who will pay the rest. Some business leaders fear that health insurance premiums paid by private businesses could jump as much as 20 percent because of the accord. +The agreement was seen as a major victory for the state's hospitals, which would receive far more than had been recommended by Mr. Cuomo and his Health Commissioner, Dr. David Axelrod. The money will help hospitals cope with a debilitating nursing shortage and crowded emergency rooms and compensate them for rapidly increasing labor costs and the high price of treating patients with AIDS and drug-related conditions. ''It appears that the Legislature has attempted to come to terms with every major problem the hospital system faces,'' said Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association. + +No Veto Expected +Mr. Cuomo, whose aides were not involved in the hospital reimbursement negotiations, had not signed off on the agreement by late this afternoon. But legislative leaders believe their bill gives the Governor enough of what he wants to forestall a veto. +The risk of a veto was not the only political obstacle facing the legislation today. After a day of bizarre election-year maneuvering, the reimbursement bill remained the political captive of two other pieces of important health-care legislation. +When the discussions on hospital reimbursement concluded tonight, the Democratic negotiators representing the Assembly majority believed they had reached an agreement with their Republican colleagues from the Senate on an innovative, but potentially expensive, plan to provide state-subsidized health insurance for poor children. +Senate officials said today that there was a basic understanding on the framework for such a plan. But they said that they would not pass a children's health insurance plan unless the Assembly and Mr. Cuomo accepted legislation to cap the fees doctors can charge senior citizens. +Senator Michael J. Tully, the chairman of the Health Committee, said the Senate Republicans were very concerned about the potential cost of the children's health insurance plan. But he and other Senate leaders suggested that the bill would be easier to swallow if passed in conjunction with the legislation limiting doctors' fees, which is known as mandatory Medicare assignment. +''They want to hold the kids hostage for the seniors,'' said Eve E. Brooks, executive director of Statewide Youth Advocacy and a leading lobbyist for the children's health insurance package. +The political wrangling over the health bills, all of it conducted behind closed doors with the Legislature seemingly close to adjournment, was largely about how the measures might affect this fall's elections. The Republicans hold a 34-to-26 margin in the 61-member Senate, but the Democrats have threatened a strong campaign to reverse that majority. One seat is vacant. +Mr. Cuomo and Assembly Speaker Mel Miller, both Democrats, have made a children's health insurance plan an important part of their legislative agenda for the year. The law would provide free or low-cost insurance for almost half of the 260,000 children in New York State who are currently without medical coverage, a program with great appeal to traditional Democratic constituent groups. + +New Formula Needed +The Senate Republicans, meanwhile, hope to appeal to the state's influential senior citizens lobby by portraying themselves as the defenders of Medicare benefits. +The Senate's proposal for to limit doctors' fees is actually less generous to senior citizens than one favored by the Assembly. But by insisting that the bill be linked to hospital reimbursement, campaigning Republicans would be able to argue that they forced action on an issue that might otherwise have died this session. +The Legislature has no choice about approving a new hospital reimbursement formula this year. The current three-year formula, which determines the amount hospitals are paid by Medicaid, Blue Cross/Blue Shield and private insurers, expires on Dec. 31. +The state's hospitals have run up operating losses estimated at more than $1 billion in each of the last two years. +The state's budget, which was approved last month, included almost $500 million for a normal inflationary adjustment for hospitals. It also included $13 million to pay for the changes the Legislature would later make in the reimbursement formula. + +Dividing the Aid +That $13 million covers the state's share of Medicaid payments, the government's health insurance program for the poor, in the last quarter of this fiscal year. Because it also dictates the share of Medicaid payments that must be made by the Federal and local governments, as well as the reimbursements required of private insurers, the state's $13 million, which will grow into $52 million on an annual basis, will bring hospitals an estimated total of $420 million. +Mr. Cuomo and Dr. Axelrod had hoped that the $13 million would be divided by providing approximately $7 million for hospital inpatient services and $6 million for outpatient services. By giving such a large proportion to outpatient services, they reasoned that hospitals would be prodded into opening and expanding family and community clinics, a move that would relieve crowding in emergency rooms. + +Bonus for Rural Hospitals +The formula announced today, however, would give between $9 million and $10 million to inpatient services and the rest to outpatient programs. +The largest chunk would give hospitals money to increase the salaries and benefits needed to attract registered nurses and other health care professionals. Money also was provided for the acquisition of new medical technology, unexpected capital expenses like asbestos removal and the cost of inpatient admissions from emergency rooms. +Rural hospitals that have difficulty retaining personnel were given a bonus, as were hospitals with high proportions of complicated cases, like AIDS. +Although the money for outpatient services is not as much as Mr. Cuomo wanted, that area did receive a financial boost. Among other measures, the cap on Medicaid payments for visits to outpatient clinics would be raised to $70 from $60 and the maximum payment to hospitals for outpatient services provided in emergency rooms would rise to $97.50 from $90. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +210 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 29, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Dinkins Nears Pact to Raise Property Taxes + +BYLINE: By DON TERRY + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1, Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 797 words + +To narrow the city's budget gap, the Dinkins administration and the City Council appeared close to an agreement late yesterday that would result in $260 million in higher property taxes, officials said. +The added taxes would represent $80 million more than Mayor David N. Dinkins had originally proposed and would reflect a last-minute resolution between the Council and the administration on the proposed $28 billion budget for the fiscal year that starts on Sunday. The administration and the Council raced to finish closing an overall gap of $1.83 billion. +The accord would include $40 million to restore cuts in services like police protection, garbage collection and cultural groups in the Mayor's original proposal and $30 million in alternative reductions, said officials who did not want to be identified. + +When Legislators Balked +Last Friday, the Council offered a menu of cuts that it said could amount to more than $85 million and this week sought at least that amount in restorations. +When he presented the budget last month, Mr. Dinkins proposed $859 million in new taxes, including $180 million in property taxes, and more than $200 million in spending cuts. About $540 million of the taxes hinged on approval by the Legislature. +But the Mayor and the City Council were forced to seek even higher property taxes when legislators in Albany balked at approving several taxes and the Council refused to consider the Mayor's plan to raise $12 million through a tax on dry-cleaning, leaving the city at least $126 million short. +Yesterday, the Assembly approved $427 million in higher city taxes. The Senate had not acted. The details of the broad agreement between the Mayor and Council were sketchy last night, but they included adding 500 police officers, restoring the hand-sweeping street cleaners, and restoring three Fire Department units. . Negotiators said they expected to be working on the accord into this morning. +''I brought another shirt, a tie, a hairbrush and a razor,'' Councilman Robert J. Dryfoos, Democrat of Manhattan, said. ''It's going to be a long, long night.'' +An additional property-tax increase was widely expected by Council members, other officials and civic groups. Few, however, were happy. ''Their view is going to be very negative,'' Councilman Sheldon S. Leffler, Democrat of Queens, said, referring to homeowners in his district. ''You don't even have to call them. They're going to be very upset. The feeling in my district is that this government is being run for the employees and the managers, rather than the public at large.'' +Patricia Dolan, president of the Queens Valley Homeowners Association, one of the largest homeowners' groups in the borough, said the higher property taxes would hit hardest at the elderly people living on fixed incomes. +''We had hoped,'' she added, ''that the Council and the Mayor could have found another way. But I don't blame either side. The problem lies with the fiscal crisis the city finds itself in. These are very bad times.'' $48 Instead of $33 Under the Mayor's original proposal to raise property taxes by $180 million, the average homeowner would have had to pay an additional $33 a year. Under the new plan, that increase would be $48. +The agreement was reached after almost a week of negotiations as the Council tried to flex its expanded powers under the new City Charter. In past years, the City Council had approved the budget in conjunction with the Board of Estimate. This year it has sole authority to pass the final budget, and its leadership was especially eager to make a strong impact. +Mr. Dinkins was also eager to consolidate his power and imprint his stamp on the spending priorities despite tight fiscal times. He included a few modest increases in social welfare, AIDS programs, prenatal care, mental health and services for the homeless. +Mr. Dryfoos, a member of the Council's negotiating team, said that because of the Council's new powers, ''we get much more respect from the Mayor now.'' +''There's a sense of power and responsibility,'' he said. +Shortly before Mr. Dinkins and Council Speaker Peter F. Vallone were scheduled to meet at 10 o'clock last night, two mayoral aides arrived carrying plastic bags of food. Lobbyists waited on the limestone steps of City Hall sipping coffee and whispering urgent pleas into Council members' ears. +Mr. Leffler did not appear impressed with the budget process. He said both the Council and the Mayor could have done more to cut waste from the sprawling budget. He said the two sides should have followed his father's example. +''My father was a small-business man,'' Mr. Leffler said. ''Some years business wasn't as good. Did he go out and borrow? No. He couldn't always do that. He worked harder.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +211 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 29, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Jazz Festival; +Pearl Bailey's Pop and the Blues of Wynton Marsalis + +BYLINE: By JON PARELES + +SECTION: Section C; Page 18, Column 4; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 484 words + +Seriousness and shtick shared the stage of Avery Fisher Hall on Wednesday night in one of those peculiar jazz festival double bills: the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis opening for the singer Pearl Bailey. For her adoring audience, the 72-year-old Miss Bailey did a slightly elevated lounge act, with pop songs, standards and selections from ''Hello, Dolly!'' amid jokes about Social Security and senior citizens' discounts. The 28-year-old Mr. Marsalis, meanwhile, led a septet in extended suites that mixed advanced dissonance and down-home blues. +Miss Bailey still has a good part of the contralto voice that made her a star in the 1940's. For the most part, she used it glancingly, tossing off lines between stretches of glad-handing audience members or hitching up her gown and strutting across the stage; her voice can go deep, but she always wields it lightly, swinging a song like ''Bill Bailey'' or rising to a melting last phrase in ''Once in a While.'' Her quartet, including two longtime Ella Fitzgerald sidemen (Paul Smith on piano and Keter Betts on bass), provided graceful support, except for Louis Bellson's ostentatious drumming; even with brushes, he managed to be obtrusive. +Miss Bailey's pitch wasn't always secure when she was involved in stage business, but for a few songs she focused on music rather than personality. And her encore, ''The Battle Hymn of the Republic,'' was a perfect blend of devoutness and blues; Mr. Marsalis, who joined her, was no more serious than she was. +The Wynton Marsalis Jazz Band played just two selections in a hour of music. ''The Uptown Ruler Suite,'' as Mr. Marsalis explained, included one theme derived from a late Beethoven string quartet and another with a 12-tone row in the bass line; the second, ''Blue Interlude,'' revolved around two motifs, nominally male and female. What he didn't say was that each piece kept circling back to the blues after moving into more abstract realms. +''The Uptown Ruler Suite'' was a succession of pieces (including one by the band's tenor saxophonist, Todd Williams), usually with theme-solos-theme structures. The themes were from the advanced hard-bop school of the late 1960's, akin to the music of Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter; they pitted saxophones (Mr. Williams on tenor or soprano, Wessell Anderson on alto) against brass (Mr. Marsalis and Wycliffe Gordon on trombone) or set the horns hopping above swinging rhythms (from Eric Reid on piano, Reginald Veal on bass and Herlin Riley on drums); solos often returned to the blues, whether sultry or swaggering. +''Blue Interlude'' was more intricate - a virtual montage of themes and solos, full of tempo and style changes, with solos that demanded concision. In both pieces, for all their complexity, the septet was utterly secure, turning Mr. Marsalis's daring structural experiments into music full of insight, humor and thoughtful invention. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Pearl Bailey blended songs and shtick at Avery Fisher Hall. (Jack Manning/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +212 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 30, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Brooklyn's Exceptional Preacher + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 22, Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 322 words + +Since 1863, the Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn has had only four pastors, an average tenure of nearly 32 years. The most recent, the Rev. Dr. Gardner Taylor, retires today after 42 years in the pulpit of one of the largest black congregations in New York. That Dr. Taylor surpasses this average, or any other, hardly surprises those who know him as an exceptional man. +A native of Baton Rouge, La., Dr. Taylor came to Concord in 1948 and gained a reputation as an activist and a mentor to younger preachers. ''Guest appearances in Taylor's pulpit were hotly coveted by Negro preachers,'' Taylor Branch recalls in ''Parting the Waters,'' his history of the civil rights movement. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of those guest preachers at Concord Baptist, and Dr. Taylor would become one of his lifelong friends and advisers. +The Brooklyn minister has also been a force in the National Baptist Convention, once the largest association of blacks in the world. In 1979, Time magazine called him the dean of the nation's black preachers. +Dr. Taylor has augmented his ministry with political activism. In the 1960's, he was one of the leading clergymen who protested discrimination in New York's building trades. He served on the New York City Board of Education, as the first black and first Baptist president of the New York City Council of Churches and on the transition committee of Mayor David Dinkins. +Meanwhile, he has nurtured his congregation, started by Brooklyn parishioners who found it too difficult to travel to Manhattan's Abyssinian Baptist Church. With about 5,000 active members, Concord Baptist operates a credit union worth $1.8 million, a 121-bed nursing home, a senior citizens' residence, an elementary school and a clothing exchange. +''I never wanted to stay too long,'' Dr. Taylor observes upon his retirement. There are countless New Yorkers who wish he could stay longer. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +213 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 1, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Albany Lurches Toward Adjournment + +BYLINE: By KEVIN SACK, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 30, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1102 words + +DATELINE: ALBANY, June 30 + +Like a jalopy in need of a tune-up, the State Legislature lurched toward adjournment today, resolving some major issues and leaving others mired in partisan politics and confusion. +In one advance, lawmakers from the Senate and the Assembly said this evening that they had agreed on a measure allowing houses and apartment buildings used for drug dealing to be seized by the courts. Current law excludes such property from the assets that can be seized. +Legislative leaders said the drug forfeiture bill they had agreed on would bring New York law into line with some of the toughest forfeiture laws in the country. The proceeds from the seized property would be divided among the state's drug abuse agency and the prosecutors and police in the municipality where the seizure was made. +The Senate tonight approved New York City's $427 million tax package, which authorizes the city to increase income taxes, hotel taxes and mortgage recording taxes. The package, which had already been approved by the Assembly, is crucial to balancing the city budget, which was expected to be approved by the City Council tonight. +But the settlement of several other major issues seemed to be awaiting the final hours of the session, when matters that have been held captive by one side or the other are traditionally traded in one tremendous hostage swap. A large number of critical issues were still being negotiated while the Senate and Assembly dealt with procedural matters, judicial confirmations and minor bills on the floor. + +Health, Housing and Taxes +Among the outstanding issues were proposals to create state-subsidized health insurance for poor children; to cap doctors' fees for elderly patients; to increase workers' compensation benefits; to impose a moratorium on the conversion of Mitchell-Lama apartments into market-rate rentals and condominiums; and to approve New York City's tax plan. +In virtually all of those issues, a major consideration was how their solutions could be politically marketed by each party in this year's elections. All 211 seats in the Legislature, as well as those held by Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and other statewide officials, come open this year. +While the elections are expected to have little impact on control of the Assembly, where the Democrats enjoy a sizable majority, they could potentially reverse the Republicans' 34-to-26 majority in the Senate. One Senate seat is vacant. +The fact that so much legislation remained alive, with the Legislature hoping to adjourn this weekend, kept the sandstone halls and gilded lobbies of the Capitol packed with lobbyists, legislators and aides. + +Death Penalty Is Dead +Not normally accustomed to working on weekends, many lawmakers brought their children along, adding to the sense of disorder. Assemblyman John J. Faso, Republican of Kinderhook, stood debating a bill on election reform while his 5-year-old son, Nicholas, sat next to him pulling apart an Incredible Hulk doll. +Some legislators appeared less than intent on their work. A televised World Cup soccer match between Italy and Ireland drew many Assembly members away for parts of the afternoon. +Although a number of issues remained the subject of furious negotiation, several high-profile bills were formally declared dead. +The chief sponsor of the bill to reinstate the death penalty, for example, acknowledged this morning that he did not have enough votes to override Governor Cuomo's eighth annual veto. +The sponsor, Senator Dale M. Volker, Republican of Depew, conceded that for the second year in a row he would not even seek to override the veto. +Historically, it has been the Democratic-led Assembly that has not been able to muster enough votes to override Mr. Cuomo's veto, while the Republican-controlled Senate has overridden the Governor's veto several times. + +Bias Bill Is Tabled +This year, the Assembly seemed to have the 100 votes needed to override the Governor. But the illness of a longtime death-penalty supporter in the Senate, James H. Donovan, Republican of Chadwicks, left that house a vote short of the 41 needed. +For the fourth year in a row, a measure that would have stiffened penalties for bias-related violence also appeared to be tabled today because of Senate objections to provisions of the bill aimed at protecting homosexuals. +On Friday, the Senate approved its own version of the bias bill, which would have increased penalties for all assault crimes. But Assembly leaders have said they will not consider the Senate version. +Perhaps the most important, and most politically contentious, legislation being considered was several health-care measures that have become the subject of high-stakes horse trading. +Earlier this week, Assembly and Senate leaders reached agreement on a new hospital reimbursement formula that would pump $420 million in public and private funds into the health-care system. But in the last two days, passage of that plan has come to depend on the resolution of two other issues - the children's health insurance package and the bill capping doctors' fees for elderly patients, known as mandatory Medicare assignment. + +Elderly Lobby for Medicare Bill +The Assembly unanimously passed a bill this evening that included the hospital reimbursement legislation and a children's health insurance package that would make nearly half of the state's 260,000 uninsured children eligible for state-subsidized coverage. It later passed a manadatory Medicare assignment bill by a vote of 121-20. +In passing those bills, the Democrats in the Assembly laid down a challenge to the Republicans in the Senate. The Senate is concerned that the children's health insurance bill will be too expensive for business and it favors a mandatory Medicare assignment bill that is less generous for senior citizens. +But by not passing those bills, the Republicans risk being portrayed as the party that blocked health-care for children and the elderly, an uncomfortable position in a campaign year. +''Everybody's playing chicken here,'' said Gary G. Fryer, the Governor's press secretary. +On the workers' compensation bill, negotiators met until 2 A.M. today and again this afternoon in a bid to agree on raising benefits, which have been frozen since 1985 and are among the lowest in the nation. +While there is general agreement in the Capitol that the effective rates are scandalously low, the two houses have long been unable to resolve the issue. By some estimates, an equitable package could raise the bill on businesses that pay for workers' compensation insurance by $700 million a year. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: As the Senate moved slowly toward adjournment, Senators Dean G. Skelos, left, and Nicholas A. Spano stopped Ralph J. Marino, right, the majority leader, to ask him a question as he headed to his office. Seated in foreground are Senators Joseph L. Bruno, left, and Hugh T. Farley. (David Jennings for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +214 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 1, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Federal Cash for Homeless: It's There but Tough to Get + +BYLINE: By JASON DePARLE, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 14, Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 950 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 30 + +Mary Rose Gerdes, lithe and lovely at the age of 63, smiles nervously and says in a fragile voice that this is how she used to be: ''a bag of bones'' and a recovering alcoholic living in a ''perpetual rage cage.'' Other words creep in, like pancreatitis and severe depression, to describe the conditions that caused her to lose her job and then her home. +The technical term is ''disabled.'' But the trouble was proving it. Eventually Ms. Gerdes did, and as a result she now receives $420 a month in Federal benefits, which have helped her leave a homeless shelter and find a room of her own. But it took her three years, three applications and two determined social workers to do it. +The Bush Administration has pledged to make the program for indigent people who are elderly or disabled, Supplemental Security Income, more accessible to homeless people like Ms. Gerdes. Legislation is pending in Congress that would back that pledge with law. +By most estimates there are hundreds of thousands of homeless people who qualify for the benefits but do not receive them. For many, the modest monthly check could spell the difference between shelter and the streets. But they are either unaware of the program or unable to meet its formidable bureaucratic demands. + +Overlooked Helping Hand +''It's a Catch-22,'' said Maria Foscarinis, director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. ''You don't qualify unless you're disabled or elderly, but if you're disabled or elderly you're least able to negotiate your way through the system.'' +Ms. Foscarinis and others say changes in the disability system may be part of the solution to homelessness. While there is much disagreement about new programs for the homeless, she said, ''here's a solution that's at hand and that's not being used.'' +Among those pledging to do something about the problem is Gwendolyn King, the Social Security Commissioner, whose agency administers the program. Mrs. King has directed employees in 1,300 field offices to do more to find the disabled homeless and to guide them through an application process that she herself, in a recent interview, called ''mind-boggling.'' + +Pushing to Aid Homeless +Earlier this year, she joined a member of her staff in visiting soup kitchens and shelters. While crediting Mrs. King's efforts, Senator Donald W. Riegle Jr., a Michigan Democrat, wants to go further. He has introduced a bill that would make such visits a regular and required part of the Social Security Administration's work. +The Supplemental Security Income program was established in 1974 and it serves essentially two groups of indigent people: those who are elderly, and those who are not elderly but blind or disabled. +While about 4.6 million people now receive such benefits, Social Security officials estimate that this group represents only 50 to 65 percent of those who could qualify. Many never apply because they are unaware of the program. Others are daunted by the need to produce extensive medical records to document their disabilities. +The homeless, many of whom are mentally ill, may be the most daunted. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that about 35 percent of the homeless may qualify for S.S.I. benefits, but that only about 4 percent receive them. +Social Security officials said about 37 of every 100 S.S.I. disability applications are initially approved and 15 more are approved on appeal. But Ms. Foscarinis said many eligible people become discouraged and do not appeal. $3 Million Outreach Program In 1987, Congress authorized the agency to spend $4 million in grants to states to help enroll more homeless people in the program. The agency argued that the effort was not needed and did not spend the money. +But Mrs. King has seized on the grant idea as a strategy for enlisting more S.S.I. recipients. She has allocated $3 million in grants to groups conducting programs to reach homeless people. +But in trying to instill new urgency, Mrs. King may face resistance. Earlier this year, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, polled 146 Social Security district managers and found that 70 percent said the agency was doing enough to meet the needs of the homeless. +The case of Ms. Gerdes is instructive of the kind of difficulties that homeless people often find with the system. + +Path to Homelessness +After age and illness forced her from her work as a cocktail waitress and dancer, she said, she moved in with an alcoholic man who resented her attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Fearful that their fights might lead her back to drinking, she left for the shelter. +Ms. Gerdes is often hazy about the dates and details of her life, a quality not particularly helpful in filling out an application for Supplemental Security Income. While the form is meant to be filled out with the help of a Social Security employee, it did not work out that way in Ms. Gerdes's case. She said a social worker simply had it sent to her and she filled it out as best she could. The application was denied. +In early 1986, Ms. Gerdes said she met another social worker, who took an interest in her case. He helped her enroll in a mental health clinic and prepared a second application. It was denied, as was an appeal. +Ms. Gerdes went from living in a group home for the mentally ill back to the shelter, then back again to the group home. +In 1987, a third social worker took up her case, tracking down extensive medical records. After another denial, she finally won her benefits in 1989 on appeal. +Ms. Gerdes used her award to get a room of her own at a new project for the homeless. +''Oohhh,'' she said. ''I like the privacy.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Mary Rose Gerdes, who waited three years and submitted three applications before finally receiving Federal aid that enabled her to leave a homeless shelter. (Bruce Young for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +215 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 1, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +All About/Yellow Pages; +Changing Shopping Habits Keep Those Fingers Walking + +BYLINE: By EDMUND L. ANDREWS + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 4, Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1534 words + +Yellow Pages publishers are learning to behave less like utility companies and more like their advertising brethren on Madison Avenue. In the six years since the breakup of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Yellow Pages have gone from dowdy and predicatable - almost like the white pages - to venturesome and competitive. ''The Yellow Pages have always been perceived as a stagnant and stodgy medium,'' said Larry Small, a vice president of the Yellow Page Publishers Association, an American trade group. ''But people's shopping habits are changing. There is more catalogue shopping, more home TV shopping. If we spend all our time protecting our turf and none of our time exploring new terrain, that's short-sighted.'' The new era brought plenty of challenges, and some quick responses. Newly independent regional telephone companies began invading one another's territories, cloning local directories. Specialty Yellow Pages proliferated, aimed at Hispanics, the elderly, gay people, even weekend boaters. New gimmicks multipled, from tear-out coupons to ''audio text'' numbers that offered recorded messages with anything from sports scores to soap opera updates. Today, many publishers have retrenched, scrapping specialty directories. Yellow Pages titles in the United States, which surged from 5,800 in 1983 to 6,700 in 1986, have declined to 6,300. The most ambitious flop was the Southwestern Bell's ''Silver Pages,'' a directory for senior citizens offered in 90 cities that was dropped in 1988 after three years. The elderly, it seemed, didn't like being singled out. +Despite the setbacks, Yellow Pages revenues have climbed 8 percent a year since 1985, a slightly faster rate than for other advertising, and accounted for an estimated $8.3 billion of the $123 billion advertisers spent in 1989. ''I've been in this business for 25 years, but it's only gotten really interesting in the last few years,'' said Mary MacDonald, head of the Yellow Pages division of the D'Arcy Masius Benton and Bowles advertising agency. + +Market Truths +The Symbols Live, Sans Trademark +Legend has it that the Yellow Pages are yellow because, in 1883, a printer in Cheyenne, Wyo., simply ran out of white paper. A.T.&T. chose not to trademark the name or the walking fingers logo, better to promote the idea of the Yellow Pages as an advertising medium so universal that any business would pay for a listing. Although competitors have freely published other directories for decades, most Yellow Pages markets were dominated by their local telephone companies. +The 1984 breakup of A.T.&T. disrupted this placid arrangement. New regional telephone companies were eager to expand and they all knew the Yellow Pages business. Led by Southwestern Bell, they began moving outside their service areas to create rival directories, luring advertisers with huge discounts. But consumers were confused by the blitz of seemingly identical directories, and advertisers were angry about having to buy space in more than one book. Today, most of the regionals have back in their own territories. Southwestern Bell no longer publishes directories in Manhattan, Chicago and St. Petersburg, Fla., though it still has a stake in Pennsylvania and the Washington-Baltimore area. +Some smaller publishers that are not affiliated with phone companies have succeeded by stuffing directories with more features and defining local markets more sharply. White Directory Publishers Inc., which for decades has published a directory in Buffalo, N.Y., has since 1984 issued guides for five other markets from Rochester and Niagara Falls to Erie, Pa. ''We've made a profit on virtually every book in the first year,'' said Richard Lewis, chief executive. Like Southwestern Bell, Mr. Lewis offers a big discount from local telephone charges. In Buffalo, he said, White charges $17,000 for a full-page ad; the Nynex Corporation, $54,000. +Mr. Lewis and others also use what they call ''geographic scoping,'' matching their directories to local marketing areas. On Long Island, for example, Multi-Local Media has successfully competed with Nynex's broader directories by publishing ''little yellow books'' that serve Long Island's individual communities. White Publishing has done the opposite, combining directories for Niagara Falls and nearby North Tonawanda. + +New Directions +Glossy Pages, Audio And Competition +Anyone can call a directory the Yellow Pages. To distinguish themselves, publishers are seizing on new services. Where consumers once found little more than the numbers for police and fire, they now can often find dozens of glossy pages with tourist sights, maps, sports schedules and even seating charts for concert halls and stadiums. Some publishers have expanded into audio text services, the so-called ''talking Yellow Pages.'' Their directories offer phone numbers that allow customers to select from broad menus of messages. +Still in their infancy, audio services come in ''front of the book'' and ''back of the book'' formats. Front-of-the-book numbers, the most successful so far, are published before the alphabetical listings and offer recorded information on general topics. News and weather, high school sports scores, astrological fortunes, stock quotes, fishing reports, lists of chiropracators and even tips on buying insurance might be among the choices. The front-of-the-book format entices consumers to open the Yellow Pages and carries advertising of its own, played between messages the listener has requested by punching telephone keys. +Back-of-the-book services, not yet as successful, are audio text numbers published in conventional Yellow Pages advertisements. A pizza parlor can play a recording with its latest specials, then connect callers with people to take their orders. Publishers say that advertisers can update their recordings as often as they want, solving a major limitation of Yellow Pages advertising. +But customers often resist audio text; they simply prefer humans. As a result, audio text remains a tiny, although growing, advertising niche. Advertising revenues last year totaled $140 million and are expected to hit $200 million this year, said John F. Kelsey 3d, president of the Audio Tex Group, a consulting firm in Princeton, N.J. About 500 local areas have some form of audio text services, half of them new in the last year. +Since the regional telephone companies are forbidden to offer information services, independent publishers are the most optimistic about the growth of audio text. ''I can see the day in the not-too-distant future when Coca-Cola will buy advertising on every sports line in the country,'' predicted Mr. Lewis of White Directory Publishing. + +The National Market +Breaking Out of the 'Local' Stigma +Publishers of Yellow Pages are also trying to steal customers from other media. Until recently, most Yellow Pages display advertising was limited to local markets. But for the last several years, the spread of national, toll-free numbers has encouraged national advertisers - including airlines, car-rental companies and other service providers - to buy space in directories around the country. +Now, Yellow Pages publishers are trying to win national product advertisers, who have traditionally shunned the Yellow Pages because the directories do not generally inspire people to buy. Few consumers browse through the directories; instead, they use them to find where they can buy a specific product or service they have already decided they need. +This summer, the Yellow Page Publishers Association plans to introduce a program called ''Brand Sell,'' which will link services with products. A manufacturer of air conditioners, for example, will be offered exclusive display space in the directory listings for vendors and installers of this equipment. +But national advertisers remain unconvinced of the benefits of advertisementsThe Yellow Pages industry is only beginning to develop ways to measure consumer response (box, above). Ms. McDonald of D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, for one, said she has difficulty justifying the money already being spent on the Yellow Pages advertising. However, she added, ''Once we get usage research, it will be an easier product to sell.'' + +TRACKING THE RESPONSE +Advertisers have long complained that they can't verify the amount of business a Yellow Pages advertisement attracts. Now Nynex and Donnelly Directory, owned by Dunn & Bradstreet, are testing programs that track customer responses. +A few advertisers have been assigned special, metered telephone lines whose numbers are listed only in the Yellow Pages. If the number of calls in a year falls well below what Nynex has guaranteed, Nynex gives the advertiser refunds of 40 percent to 100 percent. The Donnelly program promises that advertisers who are unhappy for any reason during the first six months of the directory's life will not be charged for the second six months. +The approach is so new that some executives sound uncertain. ''We'll see how it goes,'' said Bernard Bloomfield, vice president of marketing at Nynex Information Resources. ''It may be the wave of the future - but it may not.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Larry Small of the Yellow Page Publishers Association with a few samples of U.S. and overseas directories. (Peter Yates for The New York Times); graphs: total U.S. editins of Yellow Pages, 1983-1989; Yellow Pages American advertising revenues, 1983-1989 (Source: Yellow Pages Publishers Association) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +216 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 1, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +LONG ISLAND GUIDE + +SECTION: Section 12LI; Page 11, Column 1; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1249 words + + + +MUSIC MOVES OUTDOORS +Never mind those stuffy concert halls; it's summertime and the music moves outdoors. Today, for example, the free bring-your-own-seating circuit offers such varied delights as: +* An ''Americana'' program, courtesy of the Senior Citizens Pops Orchestra, 2:30 P.M., Gillette Park, Sayville. +* Rock 'n roll songs by Shirley Alston Reeves, who at 7:30 P.M. opens the Town of Hempstead's ''Summer Concert by the Beautiful Sea'' series at the town park in Point Lookout. Fireworks by Grucci will follow. +* Traditional tunes provided by the American Concert Band, 8:15 P.M., Morgan Park, Glen Cove. The different beats continue Tuesday in Great Neck and Long Beach. At Grace Avenue Park in Great Neck at 8 P.M., the soprano Elaine Malbin and an ensemble from the Tarumi Violin Program are the attractions; at the beach and New York Avenue in Long Beach, Martin Flynn heads an ''Irish Night'' bill that also starts at 8. +On Thursday, the Suns of Jubal will perform at 7:30 P.M. on the Village Green in Westhampton Beach, while at the Port Jefferson Harbor Friday at 8 P.M., the Brad Terry Quartet will give a jazz concert. +Come Saturday, and the schedule includes the Spinners at 8 P.M. at Eisenhower Park's Harry Chapin Lakeside Theater in East Meadow and the Isotope Stompers Dixieland Band at 7 P.M. at Marine Park in Sag Harbor. + +SHOOT THE WORKS +With Independence Day falling in midweek this year, fireworks are all over the calendar - and the map. +Today, in addition to the Point Lookout show, Grucci is presenting a major ''Summer in Suffolk'' display at the Smithaven Mall. Then on Tuesday, there is what the company calls a ''World Class'' show at Mitchel Field in Uniondale. +On the holiday itself, the Grucci action moves to Noyac Road in the North Sea area of Southampton. Finally, the holiday festivities go out with a bang Saturday with two additional displays on the South Fork: +* More Grucci efforts in an ''American Picnic With Fireworks,'' a benefit for the Southampton Fresh Air Home for Crippled Children. This will take place at 7 P.M. at an oceanfront home off Meadow Lane (reservations: 283-5847). +* The Devon Yacht Club's presentation, which lights up the sky over Gardiner's Bay in Amagansett. + +FOURTH OF JULY +There is more to celebrating Independence Day than fireworks and barbecues. How about a traditional parade? +The village of Southampton has one, starting at 10 A.M. along Main Street. Going back in time, there are two mid-19th-century events on tap Wednesday: +* ''A Victorian Fourth of July Celebration,'' complete with period games and tours of the Colonial-Victorian premises, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M., Raynham Hall Museum, 20 West Main Street, Oyster Bay (922-6808). +* ''Old-Fashioned Independence Day Festivities,'' with parades, patriotic speeches, militia drills, music, children's games and a Temperance Society picnic, 12:30 to 4 P.M., Old Bethpage Village Restoration (420-5280). +Coming back to the present, at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow, a free family-oriented program from 9 A.M. to 10 P.M. includes puppet shows, lawn bowling and cricket matches, baseball and softball games and a strolling oompah band, and at the park's Lakeside Theater at 8 P.M., a concert by the Seuffert Band. +In the slightly off-beat department, Station WNYG will spin an ''Oldies Music Festival'' from noon to 4 P.M. on the Town of Babylon's Cedar Beach boardwalk, and the Oysterponds Historical Society will present a bluegrass concert by Back Roads at its ''Fourth of July Picnic'' in Poquatuck Park, Orient (323-3501). +Or why not a ''Butterfly Excursion''? The South Fork-Shelter Island chapter of the Nature Conservancy will lead a hunt for rare butterflies through Montauk State Park (324-1330). +Finally, go way back again with the New Community Cinema in Huntington, which will screen D.W. Griffith's ''America'' at 8 P.M. The classic 1924 silent film about the Revolutionary War will be accompanied by Harry Weiss at the piano. +Information: 423-7610. + +COLE PORTER CONCERT +A little Cole Porter can go a long way toward entertaining the world-weary; a lot could do wonders. At least, that is a theory to which Steve Ross, the cabaret performer, subscribes. +And so on Thursday night, Mr. Ross - critics say he personifies the style and wit of Fred Astaire and Noel Coward - brings ''Ridin' High: The Cole Porter Concert'' to the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall in East Hampton. +The revue, in which Mr. Ross is backed by an instrumental ensemble, runs through next Sunday. +Tickets: 324-4050. + +MEET THE AUTHORS +Trading on Bridgehampton's reputation as ''The Literary Hampton,'' the hamlet's Hampton Library once more is asking local scribes to do their bit for books. +''Fridays at Five,'' the library's series of fund-raising talks by writers, starts this Friday at 5 P.M. +To the novelist Susan Isaacs goes the honor of opening the proceedings. She will be followed by Peter Matthiessen, July 27; Judith Rossner, Aug. 3; Michael Thomas, Aug. 24, and Lanford Wilson, Aug. 31. The library is on Main Street. Schedule and ticket information: 537-0015. + +PICNIC CONCERTS +Although it usually closes at 5 P.M., the Old Bethpage Village Restoration is staying open a bit later this Saturday so that visitors to this mid-19th-century living museum can picnic. What's more, the management is providing entertainment to make those picnic suppers even tastier. +The Hutchinson Family Singers will perform 19th-century music from 5 to 9 P.M. and some of the buildings will remain open. Rumor has it that there will also be some fireworks by Grucci. +Information: 420-5280. + +AT SUNY/STONY BROOK +To complement its International Theater Festival, which this week has Chinese acrobats and next week a Fine Young Cannibal playing Romeo, the Staller Center at the State University in Stony Brook has called upon Kit-Yin Snyder, a site-specific experimental sculptor, to do her thing at the school's Art Gallery. +This time out, that ''thing'' is ''Kit-Yin Snyder: Enrico IV,'' a large-scale artificial garden and theatrical stage set. +Inspired by Luigi Pirandello's ''Enrico IV,'' the one-person exhibition has wire-mesh architectural sculptures in a stylized garden. It comes complete with voice-over narration adapted from the play by Kim Snyder, the artist's daughter, and spoken by Anthony Korner. +This exhibition - a play without visible actors, garden without grass and fountain without water - opens with a reception from 2:30 to 4 P.M. Saturday. It can be seen from noon to 4 P.M., Tuesdays through Saturdays, and from 7 to 8 P.M. on Staller Center performance nights through Sept. 8. + +MOON WALKS +A moon is a moon is a moon, and every 28 days it's a full moon. This time of year, the Farmer's Almanac calls it a ''Buck Moon,'' and that is the name the Long Island Greenbelt Trail Conference is using for an excursion at Heckscher State Park in East Islip Saturday. +The ''Buck Moon Beach Walk'' is designed to catch both sunset and moonrise over the water. Hikers - and this is an easy stroll across flat terrain - are to meet at 7 P.M. at the east end of Parking Field 8. Information: 589-5467. Meanwhile, next Sunday - and still under that same moon - there's a ''Full Moon Walk in the Walking Dunes.'' This is through Hither Hills State Park in Montauk, and walkers are to meet at 8:30 P.M. at the campground entrance. +Information: 537-3387. $90BARBARA DELATINER + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Among the Independence Day celebratons will be a parade, militia drills, music, games and a picnic at the Old Bethpage Village Restoration. + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +217 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 1, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEW JERSEY OPINION; +We Left the City, Didn't We? + +BYLINE: By ANITA DENNIS + +SECTION: Section 12NJ; Page 20, Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 490 words + +WHEN I was growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, it was a residential backwater where the windows of aging apartment buildings gave off row after row of soft yellow light on winter evenings. My neighbors were mostly elderly people with theatrical pasts or divorced women raising three children in two-bedroom apartments. +I was always surprised when concerned relatives and their frighteningly athletic offspring asked if I was afraid to live there; as a child I felt safe only when I heard voices rising from the street on a summer night or saw layers of skyscrapers cradling the uncomfortably vast expanse of Central Park. +As an adult, I frequently found myself cornered at parties by people just in from some far-off, unrelentingly clean place who felt compelled to talk to me about New York. It was unique - so energizing, so fascinating, so awe-inspiring! There was always something wonderful to do, and most of the time it was free! It was the most decadent city in the world, but the excitement was well worth the danger! +In their eyes, the city was something scandalous and revolutionary. I began to feel less like a native and more like a stranger in an art museum. +I also noticed that the quiet, slightly shabby neighborhood of my childhood had changed. It had been invaded by people always dressed as if coming from a job interview; people willing to stand in line to enter well-designed spaces that had once been dowdy storefronts. ''Go home,'' I found myself shouting from my window. ''There's a holdup on every street corner - go home!'' +I began to think about the people who spend their entire lives in small towns, passing their middle and old age grousing about how the town went downhill once they tore down the grain elevator or started up bus service to Springfield. I wondered if I wasn't becoming their urban equivalent. +And so last year my husband and I bought a house in the once dreaded suburbs of New Jersey. It is a solid old house, last owned by people who moved in in 1929. No one we have met has lived here in Maplewood less than 20 years; the town is like a 1940's movie set invaded by late-model cars. +When spring came, we watched neighbors mowing their lawns, noting anxiously how it was done. We crawled around the yard, peering at plants and bushes, wondering desperately what they were. We ventured warily into home-improvement stores, determined not to be taken for suckers just in from the city. +On Saturday mornings we have breakfast downtown at the coffee shop, absorbing local gossip. +Some days, we head up to nearby parkland that stretches across and over a mountain. On very clear days we drive to the top and can make out the outlines of Manhattan's towers in the distance. +From here, it looks like a wildly exciting place, full of energy and life. As I look out and try to identify landmarks and neighborhoods, I find myself imagining what an interesting city it must be. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +218 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 1, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Dogs and the Elderly: A Benefit for Both + +BYLINE: By Roberta Hershenson + +SECTION: Section 12WC; Page 27, Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 574 words + +DATELINE: TARRYTOWN + +AMONG the many losses nursing-home residents suffer is contact with pets. That might explain why one 90-year-old woman recently burst into tears when a gentle bull mastiff entered her room. +''She had thought she'd never see a dog again,'' said Mimi Einstein, the president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals of Westchester County. Since January, Mrs. Einstein has brought her own dog, a bull mastiff named Doris Day, to the Tarrytown Hall nursing home here for weekly visits with the residents. +As she and the large, husky animal walk down the hall, they are greeted by men and women in wheelchairs who stop to pet Doris Day or to put their arms around the dog's solid neck. A woman who by choice never leaves her room is content when the animal lies quietly at her feet. + +How the Dog Will React +Mrs. Einstein brings only dogs she knows well to this outreach program. When the 4 1/2-year-old Doris Day was three weeks away from delivering her fourth litter, Mrs. Einstein substituted dogs from the society's shelter, based in Briarcliff Manor, when she visited the nursing home. The dogs had been at the shelter for a year or two, long enough for the staff to learn their ways. +''The most important thing is knowing how a dog will react'' in a new situation, Mrs. Einstein said, such as when a wheelchair suddenly turns or a person puts his face close to the dog's face. Before she takes them visiting, Mrs. Einstein ''socializes'' the animals by walking them on the street and encouraging the people to come up and say hello. +The benefits of the program extend two ways. ''We have a shelter filled with lonely animals who need companionship and a nursing home filled with lonely people,'' Mrs. Einstein said. ''It's a perfect match and wonderful for the animals - they get to spend a day out of the shelter.'' +The Katonah resident, who breeds bull mastiffs and has 15 of her own at home, said the ''basic ingredient'' in a visiting dog is natural friendliness. Yet, she noted, changes occur in dogs who are patted and hugged often by people happy to see them. +''The dogs grow more comfortable each time they go,'' Mrs. Einstein said. ''This program is also making them more adoptable.'' +Ronalie Zackman, the activities director of Tarrytown Hall, said that ''one of the values of the program is the reminiscing'' that a dog's presence stimulates. An elderly resident may begin to speak about past family time, restoring his or her sense of identity. +At first, Mrs. Einstein said, the more withdrawn residents may relate only to the dog. ''Then they begin to realize there's a human being attached to the leash,'' and the personal relationship ensues. She told of a woman who came out of a prolonged motionless silence to pat Doris Day and say the dog's her name. +''Now when she sees me coming, she waves at me and smiles,'' Mrs. Einstein said. ''And Doris makes a beeline to her.'' +The Bethel Nursing Home and the Victoria Home for retired men and women, both in Ossining, are also part of the outreach program. Mrs. Einstein would like to expand the number of visits, but needs more volunteers - people ''who have a desire to do this kind of work and who also understand dogs,'' Mrs. Einstein said. +''We've kept the program small so we won't let anyone down,'' she explained. ''The residents of these places really look forward to our visits. There are people who literally count off the days.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos; Doris Day, a bull mastiff, during visits with residents at Tarrytown Hall nursing home; a dog being introduced to a resident by Mimi Einstein, left, dog's owner, and Ronalie Zackman, activities director (Photographs by Roberta Hershenson) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +219 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 3, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +3 Health-Care Bills Approved in Albany + +BYLINE: By KEVIN SACK, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 2, Column 4; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1186 words + +DATELINE: ALBANY, July 2 + +Concluding a session marred by contention and delay, state lawmakers finished a 23-hour legislative marathon this morning by passing three major health care bills, including one that would establish an innovative state-subsidized health insurance plan for poor children. +The State Senate's approval of a huge hospital reimbursement bill, which includes the children's health insurance package, ended a tortuous game of political poker. The Legislature also passed measures to cap doctors' fees for elderly patients and to simplify and expand the state's troubled prescription drug subsidy program for the elderly. +The bleary-eyed senators, who passed 160 bills on their last day, finally recessed at 11:38 A.M. after working through the night and eating a breakfast of bagels and orange juice. The Assembly finished its business at 2:29 A.M. after passing 142 bills. + +A Session Is Salvaged +For many in the Capitol, the flurry of last-minute activity salvaged a session that had been poisoned by a seven-week-late budget that was heavy with new taxes. ''What could have been, and looked like it would be, a disappointing session turned out to be an extraordinarily fruitful one,'' said Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. +Mr. Cuomo said the driving force behind the sudden spurt of productivity was the reapportionment politics of this election year. Elections in November will fill all 211 seats in the Legislature, and the victors will draw new legislative and Congressional district lines in 1991. +The Democrats have a secure grip on the Assembly, but the Republicans hold a thin 34-to-26 margin in the Senate. One seat is vacant in southern Queens, a heavily Democratic district. +As the clock wound down, lawmakers shattered logjams to appease politically influential constituent groups. By accepting a number of Democratic initiatives, the Senate Republicans risked alienating their traditional support from businesses in order to neutralize the active opposition of several powerful lobbies. +By relinquishing its opposition to the Assembly's bill on doctors' fees, for instance, the Senate offered an olive branch to senior-citizen groups that had waged a high-pressure lobbying campaign. The Senate had its own bill on the issue, but it was less generous to the elderly than the Assembly bill. + +Workers' Compensation +Also in the wee hours, the Senate passed legislation to grant the first increase in workers' compensation benefits in five years, an item high on the agenda of the state's labor unions. The Republicans abandoned a long-held insistence that the increases be tied to other measures that could reduce the cost to business. +But the crowning achievement of the Legislature's last days was passage of the children's health insurance program. Although a few other states, most notably Minnesota, have similar programs, New York would become the first heavily industrialized state with large pockets of poverty to underwrite medical coverage for its uninsured children. +The $20 million plan is viewed as a forerunner of universal health insurance proposals that have gained increasing political support in New York and around the country. +''New York's adoption of this subsidized insurance plan is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of children that will be assisted,'' said Sara Rosenbaum, director of programs and policy for the Children's Defense Fund. +Under the plan's eligibility restrictions, free or low-cost insurance for primary and preventive care would be available to poor children under age 13 who fall through the gaps in the state's Medicaid coverage. +About 125,000 of the state's 260,000 uninsured children would be eligible, said Jay E. Adolf, executive counsel to Assembly Speaker Mel Miller. Some lobbyists for the bill believe the eligible population may be much larger. + +A Pool of Funds +The annual cost of the program to the state is about $2 million, which, through a complex formula, acts as leverage to generate $20 million from the Federal Government, local governments and private insurers. That money will fatten a $600 million pool of funds currently used to offset hospital losses from the treatment of uninsured patients, and that pool will now support the insurance program. +Even as the legislation was being passed, problems in the bill were troubling Mr. Cuomo and his staff. The Governor and the State Health Commissioner, Dr. David Axelrod, believe the $420 million reimbursement bill gives too much money to hospitals and they have expressed disappointment that the children's health insurance component does not cover hospitalization. +In addition, the health experts on Mr. Cuomo's staff fear that the Federal Government, which pays 50 percent of all Medicaid costs for inpatient care, may not be willing to pay that share for the outpatient services covered in the bill. That could leave the financially strapped state to fill a hole that could grow to tens of millions of dollars. +Mr. Cuomo said he needed to consult with Dr. Axelrod and study the bill before deciding to sign it. Dr. Axelrod is ''still seriously considering a veto recommendation,'' said Peter Slocum, the Commissioner's spokesman. +The legislation to cap doctors' fees for the elderly, which is known as mandatory Medicare assignment, was the subject of a pitched lobbying battle between senior-citizen groups and the New York State Medical Society. +Physicians can currently charge elderly patients rates above the levels of reimbursement set by Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for the elderly. That leaves the elderly who have no other health insurance to pay the difference out of their pockets. Last year there were Medicare overcharges of $220 million in New York State. +A Federal law that takes effect next year would limit the amount doctors can charge to 125 percent of the Medicare reimbursement rates in 1991, 120 percent in 1992 and 115 percent in 1993. + +To Accelerate Schedule +The bill passed by the Legislature would accelerate that schedule for major medical procedures by capping doctors' fees at 115 percent of the Medicare reimbursement rate in the first two years and at 110 percent in the third year. The Federal schedule would still apply for simple office visits. +The last deal forged Sunday night between the two legislative houses and the Governor's office created a bill to simplify the state's prescription insurance program for the elderly. +Because of complex requirements governing eligibility and cost, the program has failed to attract the heavy participation that was anticipated. The changes made today - the agreement was reached near midnight and the bills were printed and approved within hours - would lower the cost and expand eligibility. The changes would cost the state an additional $24 million. +At least one tenuous agreement on a major piece of legislation collapsed early today. A proposal to declare a moratorium on the conversion of Mitchell-Lama subsidized apartments into condominiums and market-rate rental units fell apart in a dispute over proposed exemptions for some apartment complexes. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +220 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 5, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Human Growth Hormone Reverses Effects of Aging + +BYLINE: By NATALIE ANGIER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1417 words + +Treatment with human growth hormone can significantly reverse many effects of aging on the body, a new study has found. +In a clinical trial of 21 healthy men ranging in age from 61 to 81, researchers found that after six months of injections of a genetically engineered version of the natural body hormone, the men emerged with bodies that by many measures were almost 20 years younger than the ones they started with. +But researchers cautioned that the results were highly preliminary and that the long-term side effects of growth hormone remain unknown. +''This is not a fountain of youth,'' said Dr. Daniel Rudman of the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, the leading author of the paper, which appears today in The New England Journal of Medicine. ''We need to emphasize that the aging process is very complicated and has many aspects.'' +The benefits of human growth hormone observed in his new study, he said, address only one aspect of how the body ages. +Nevertheless, endocrinologists and gerontologists hailed the new study as very promising. +''In my view this is an extremely exciting and positive finding,'' said Dr. John D. Baxter, director of the metabolic research unit at the University of California at San Francisco and a member of the first group to isolate and produce the recombinant version of human growth hormone. ''It's a suggestion that growth hormone can be used much more extensively in old people to promote muscle mass and help get rid of obesity. The net effect of a guarded use of the hormone might be very healthy.'' +In the trial, hormonal treatment had its biggest effect on body composition. Although the weight of the men remained the same, they shed nearly 15 percent of body fat and gained almost 9 percent in lean body mass. Diet and exercise were kept constant for those tested. Part of that added bulk occurred in the muscles, while the rest is thought to have helped rebuild vital organs like the heart, kidneys and the gastrointestinal tract, which often shrink with age. +The men's skin regained a youthful thickness, and the level of an important growth-stimulating hormone in the blood returned to that of those under the age of 40. The bones of the spine also gained in mass, although other parts of the skeleton did not. + +'Their Physique Changed' +''Their physique changed,'' Dr. Rudman said. ''They had the appearance of being more fit and in better condition.'' +The results strongly suggest that a decline in human growth hormone production is one critical factor that causes fat to gather, muscles to wither and organs to atrophy as the body ages. +Dr. Rudman said that while his study involved only men, growth hormone applications were likely to have the same impact on women. But he warned that he and his colleagues still did not know whether the changes in body composition and organ size induced by growth hormone treatment translated into improvements in organ function or even better overall health. +Dr. Rudman and other experts also cautioned that the men in the study were inoculated for only six months, and that long-term or wanton administration of the hormone could have severe side effects. +''Too much growth hormone can cause arthritis, diabetes, enlargement of the face and hands, even heart failure,'' said Dr. Mary Lee Vance, an endocrinologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who wrote an editorial that accompanies the report. ''This hormone is a double-edged sword.'' + +Hopes for Helping Elderly +Researchers say that judicious administration of human growth hormone could prove of vast benefit for those elderly people whose muscles are wasting away or who need greater strength to help them recover from a hip fracture, stroke or other debilitating illness. +''The decline in muscle function is a significant thing in aging,'' said Dr. Michael L. Freedman, director of geriatrics at New York University Medical Center. ''Giving the hormone to elderly people may prevent a lot of complications.'' +And researchers said that while initial therapeutic use of the growth hormone would probably be confined to frail elderly people, it could eventually be employed more widely to help prevent body changes in the 25 million elderly Americans whose bodies have stopped producing useful amounts of human growth hormone. +Studies of the effects of human growth hormone on the body are relatively new because researchers have only recently had adequate supplies of the substance to perform experiments. Normally the hormone is secreted in very tiny amounts by the pea-sized pituitary gland at the base of the brain. + +How Growth Hormone Works +The hormone circulates through the body and stimulates the production of another compound called insulin-like growth factor-1, a powerful protein that spurs tissue growth and helps maintain organ health. In most people, the production of human growth hormone by the brain begins declining at age 30, and after the age of 60 is only a fifth or so of its youthful high. +Children born with a deficiency of human growth hormone never grow much taller than three or four feet unless given hormone injections. Until recently the minute amounts of the hormone that were isolated from the pituitaries of human cadavers were reserved to treat that form of hereditary dwarfism. +But within the last few years genetic engineers have perfected a method for mass-producing a recombinant form of the hormone, allowing researchers to begin experimenting with the hormone for disorders beyond childhood dwarfism. +In two other recent studies, doctors examined the effects of growth hormone on young adults who had diseases that entirely suppressed hormonal secretion by the pituitary. The results of those studies hinted that growth hormone can influence the relative composition of fat and muscle in the body. +The new study is the first investigation of the effects of growth hormone treatment on healthy older people who had small but still measurable levels of the growth hormone. And the findings ''are the most dramatic we've seen so far,'' Dr. Freedman said. +Twelve of the men chosen for the study were given injections of the synthetic hormone three times a week, at a dose calibrated to equal the hormone output of a young man. Nine men in the study who served as controls received no treatment. All were assigned a similar diet of protein, carbohydrates and fats. +After six months, all the men receiving the hormone had dropped body fat while gaining muscle mass and skin thickness. They also exhibited blood levels of insulin-like growth factor-1 equal to that of far younger men. Through X-ray analysis the researchers determined that the muscles and organs had grown, although they have not yet learned exactly how much any organ may have increased. +Dr. Rudman said the changes were extremely significant. He pointed out that after the age of 40 or so, most people start losing lean muscle mass at a rate of about 5 percent a decade, and gaining body fat at more or less the same rate. +When compared with the 9 percent gain in lean body mass seen in the new study, he said, the results mean that six months of hormone treatment essentially cut almost two decades of age-induced changes off the subjects' bodies. Although the researchers are not yet certain how long the beneficial effects of hormone injections last, they suspect that once treatment is discontinued, the body composition will gradually revert to its former state. + +Many Unanswered Questions +The scientists must further determine whether the bigger organs and muscles work any better or more youthfully than they did before. +''They don't know if organ function has improved, if the body is better able to metabolize food and handle nutrients, if the overall well-being of the person has benefited,'' Dr. Vance said. ''This is an important first study, but many questions remain to be answered.'' +Dr. Rudman agreed that the findings were preliminary. He said that although the participants in the study suffered only mild side effects from the treatment, including a slight rise in blood pressure, the long-term consequences of growth hormone treatment are still in question. +''We have no idea what will happen if we start treating a lot of people with this stuff,'' Dr. Freedman said. ''Even it if makes you have more muscle or makes your skin better, if it ends up increasing something in the kidneys or gastrointestinal tract that leads to cancer, that's no good.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +221 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 5, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Talks in Taiwan Urge a Popular Presidential Vote + +BYLINE: By SHERYL WuDUNN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 7, Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 660 words + +DATELINE: TAIPEI, Taiwan, July 4 + +After five days of strenuous national debate, a national conference on this island's future concluded today with a call for popular presidential elections. +The endorsement of popular elections by the 150 delegates seemed to give a considerable lift to proposals that would restructure Taiwan's political system along much more democratic lines in coming years. President Lee Teng-hui had chosen all the delegates and given them a mandate to grapple with the intensely emotional question of Taiwan's future. +It was the first time that the Government and its opponents had openly discussed on a public stage some critical questions about Taiwan's future. They included: Should the nation revise its Constitution or draw up a completely new one? Should the Government adopt a presidential or parliamentary system? How should the 20 million people on Taiwan build economic links with 1.1 billion Chinese on the mainland? +''This is a fantastic thing,'' said Kang Ning-hsiang, a prominent member of the Democratic Progressive Party, the opposition group. ''To bring all these people together to talk about our future is the greatest political event.'' +With bells ringing every so often to signal the end of a speaker's floor time, delegates stood up one by one on podiums to state their views on various issues. The conference delegates included a student, a Mongolian, a Tibetan, a handful of previously jailed dissidents, and Chinese scholars from the United States. +The conference has no legal authority, and so it is not clear how their conclusions will be carried out. +''Everyone feels a little funny,'' said Jaw Shau-kong, a legislator from the governing Nationalist Party and a delegate to the conference. ''This is outside the legal system.'' +The agreement on popular presidential elections was the most important decision at the conference. Currently, the President is elected through the National Assembly, an electoral college that is made up mostly of elderly men, who purport to represent constituencies on mainland China. + +Charter Revision Proposed +While they agreed on presidential elections, delegates were divided on whether citizens should elect the President through an electoral college or bypass that step and hold direct elections. +The delegates also debated ways to restructure the island's legislature, which has passed only one minor law in its current session, which ends in a few weeks. President Lee and other Nationalist leaders have indicated that Taiwan needs a constitutional overhaul, but that that may not be easy to achieve. +In one move that will make Parliament more democratic, Taiwan's highest court ruled recently that those aging legislators - unelected in decades - must resign by the end of next year. Opposition members want an earlier deadline. +President Lee said in March that he would revoke within about a year the Government's 40-year-old declaration of ''Communist rebellion'' on mainland China. Changing that condition, which vests the President with special powers, would require altering Taiwan's Constitution, and there was no consensus on how to revise it. +The opposition party is demanding that the Government scrap the Constitution and write a new one. And while the party's voice has been more influential than its 30,000 membership would suggest, it is not clear that it has much support on this issue. +Still, delegates agreed that constitutional changes are inevitable and some hoped the conference would deepen the sense of urgency. +''We can keep the momentum of reform, and not just of the Constitution,'' said Ma Ying-jeou, a Nationalist Party delegate and Cabinet-level official. ''The party structure has to be democratized to cope with new constitutional democracy.'' +Probably the most delicate and emotional issue of the conference focused on Taiwan's policy toward mainland China. During the last couple of years, relations between China and Taiwan have warmed dramatically. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +222 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 5, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +HEALTH; +Personal Health + +BYLINE: By Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7, Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1449 words + +Sweltering summer days and school vacations prompt millions of Americans to head for the country or the shore, move to a cabin in the woods or take in the sights in different parts of the country. Most travel by car. +But some will not make it to their destinations and return safely. While there are many causes of accidents on the road, and alcohol figures prominently in half of them, public health experts are calling attention to a seriously underappreciated factor: sleepy drivers. +According to current estimates, more than one driver in five has fallen asleep at the wheel at least once, and sleeping at the wheel is a central factor in 200,000 to 400,000 traffic accidents each year. +The circumstances vary widely, as these incidents show: +* After lunch on a hot, sunny afternoon, a 40-year-old woman found herself driving on the median of an Interstate highway, having somehow missed hitting a road repair truck she had not seen before falling asleep. +* At 11 P.M., a 60-year-old woman driving home after a long day at work and a late dinner with friends struck the rear end of a car that had stopped at a red light she never saw because she had dozed off half a block away. +* A young man who had taken medication to relieve some allergies was on his way to an afternoon picnic when he awoke suddenly to find his car rolling over in a ditch. +These drivers were lucky. No one was injured and only one car was damaged. Sleepy drivers are not always so lucky. For example, a 25-year-old New York State trooper just finishing his night shift at 3 A.M. died when his car flipped over after he fell asleep at the wheel. +Countless other sleepy drivers injure or kill not only themselves but also the occupants of other vehicles. Truck drivers are a particular risk. Sleep experts say that one-third of the one million truck drivers on the nation's highways may be too tired to stay awake while driving or to respond quickly enough to avert an accident. +People suffering from sleep apnea are also at high risk. The disorder involves periodic interruptions in breathing during sleep, with each interruption followed by a snorting snore as breathing resumes. Sleep apnea results in inordinate daytime fatigue, and people with this disorder are more likely than others to fall asleep at the wheel. They have five times more motor vehicle accidents than other people do, and are more likely to be at fault. +All other things being equal, elderly people are also more likely than others to doze off while driving, perhaps because their sleep habits tend to be more erratic and night sleep is often marred by insomnia. + +Risky Conditions +To reduce the chances of becoming a highway statistic, you should know why drivers fall asleep and take appropriate precautions. Among the many factors experts have identified are these. +Insufficient sleep - Millions of Americans do not get enough sleep. The many demands and diversions of everyday life prompt millions to deliberately cut their nights short, said Dr. William C. Dement, director of the Sleep Disorders Clinic at Stanford University School of Medicine. They stay up late to socialize or watch television, and they rouse themselves with alarm clocks often hours before they would normally awaken. Then they use artificial stimulants, like caffeine, to mask their sleepiness during the day. +This chronic sleep debt acts as an internal sleeping pill, causing them to lose alertness or become sleepy soon after they get on the road. Motion is a notorious soporific (highly effective for inducing sleep from infancy onward) and modern highways can be hypnotic. +Shift work - The body's naturally sleepy times are from midnight to 7 A.M. and from 1 P.M. to 4 P.M. The afternoon period coincides with siesta time in many countries. Thus, late-shift workers usually suffer from sleep loss or fragmented sleep. +For truck drivers, the federally mandated four-hour sleep shifts for every eight hours of driving forces them to sleep and wake up at times that are not synchronized with their bodies' natural cycles. Thus, they can be sleepy when driving even if they have got enough hours of sleep in each 24-hour period. +Police officers, firefighters, emergency medical workers and others who work variable shifts are also highly vulnerable. In a survey of police officers, 80 percent said they had fallen asleep once a week while on the night shift. And shift workers have been found to have twice as many motor vehicle accidents as those who work a more natural 9-to-5 shift. +Food and drink - The soporific effects of a big meal or alcoholic beverages are well known. Yet millions get on the road after eating or drinking too much. And for those who start out sleep-deprived, even a small meal or one drink can induce sleep. +Carbohydrates - starches as well as sweet foods and drinks - are more likely than protein-rich foods to provoke sleepiness. Many people report that hot drinks are more sleep-inducing than the same beverages consumed cold. And milk and milk-based foods and drinks, which are rich in the sleep-inducing amino acid tryptophan, are well known for their relaxing effect. +Medications - Many common medications, particularly those often used in summer, can induce drowsiness or reduce alertness, coordination, motor skills and judgment. Among them are antihistamines (found in remedies for motion sickness and colds, as well as in allergy suppressants), sedatives, tranquilizers and antidepressants. Anti-anxiety drugs like Valium are often taken without realization of their sleep-inducing potential. Even some antibiotics occasionally induce drowsiness or fatigue. +The sedating effects of drugs are highly unpredictable. They can vary from person to person and even in the same person at different times. The amount of the dose, of course, plays a big role: the more of the drug that is taken, the greater the risk of drowsiness. +Also, certain drugs can adversely affect the alertness needed for safe driving without the users' realizing it because they do not feel sleepy. Even stimulant drugs can be a problem; while they do not make the driver sleepy, their euphoric effect can impair a driver's judgment. +Environment - Nearly every driver is aware of the hypnotic effects of Interstate highways, especially at night. But daytime driving on such roads can also be hypnotic, especially if it is hot or stuffy in the car. +Even the clothes a driver is wearing can have an adverse effect. A tight waistband or belt, for example, can result in shallow breathing and sleepiness. + +What You Can Do +Before starting out on any drive, be sure you get enough sleep - not just the night before, but for several nights before departing. +Avoid eating big meals before or on a trip. While driving, snack on high-protein foods, just enough to stave off hunger. From time to time, drink a beverage that contains caffeine, but preferably not one that is sweet. The stimulant effects of one cup of coffee last for three hours or more. +Do not drink alcohol within three hours of driving. Some experts urge abstaining from alcohol the day before as well, since it can have long-lasting effects on alertness and judgment. +Create an environment that fosters alertness. Try not to drive between midnight and 7 A.M., or whenever you are normally asleep. Wear loose-fitting, comfortable clothing. Avoid tight-fitting underwear or hose that impairs circulation. Use sunglasses when driving in bright daylight. Keep the car as cool as possible; air-conditioning, though expensive, can be life-saving for summertime drivers. Play interesting tapes or tune into a radio program that captures your attention. If someone is in the car with you, engage in conversation. +Stop often - experts say once an hour - to stretch and walk around for a few minutes. If you feel the least bit sleepy, pull over and take a nap. Even 20 minutes of sleep can be refreshing. While driving, move your eyes around and wriggle your body from time to time. +Recognize and respond appropriately to the telltale signs of impending sleep. Have your eyes assumed a fixed stare or begun to close? Can you remember the last few miles of driving? Do you seem to be reacting slowly to changes in road conditions? Does your car drift toward one side of the road? This is the time to turn the wheel over to another driver or stop the car and nap. +Consider using a ''sleep alert'' device. It fits behind one ear and buzzes when your head tilts, as it probably would if you began to doze off. +Finally, set reasonable driving goals. As one Minnesota highway sign says, ''On the road as in baseball, what counts is how many times you make it home safely.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +223 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 6, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Growth Hormone and the Drive for a More Youthful State + +BYLINE: By NATALIE ANGIER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 9, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1119 words + +For the last 18 months or so Frederick McCullough has been like Popeye, or Tony the Tiger, or some other cartoon character with hyperbolic energy: shinnying up to the roof to put new concrete around the chimney, washing the aluminum siding around the house, and mowing and re-mowing the lawn. +At one point his wife, Rita, peered at her 65-year-old husband and told him his gray hair was turning black again. +''He does appear to have abnormal energy for a man his age,'' she said. ''He never complains of being sick. Every day he feels fine.'' +Mrs. McCullough, who is 15 years his junior, added: ''I'm a lot younger, but I don't feel fine every day. I get up dragging sometimes, but he never does anymore.'' + +Some Indisputable Improvements +Mr. McCullough's hair color has probably not changed, and some of his vigor may be as much psychological as real, say researchers who are studying the effects of human growth hormone on aging. But what is indisputable are the improvements that have taken place in his muscle size, body fat, skin texture and other easily measured traits, all as a result of thrice-weekly injections of human growth hormone. +Mr. McCullough is one of 21 healthy men ranging in age from 61 to 81 who recently took part in a clinical trial examining the effects of growth hormone on older men. +Researchers said in a report published yesterday in The New England Journal of Medicine that six months of treatment with a genetically engineered version of the hormone reversed many of the changes in the body that are wrought by aging. +The men who received growth hormone gained almost 9 percent in lean body mass, dropped nearly 15 percent in body fat, regained a youthful thickness to their skin and had a spurt in important growth-promoting hormone in their blood. In many respects, the treatment cut almost 20 years from their bodies. +''The results are quite amazing,'' said Dr. Lester Cohn of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in North Chicago, one of the investigators in the study. ''We're dealing with people with an average age of 70, who for 40 years had been losing muscle mass and mass in internal organs. Within a short period of time, through growth hormone replacement, we've moved their bodies backward,'' toward a more youthful state. +But researchers warned anybody who might be on the verge of storming a doctor's office in quest of human growth hormone that the hormone would probably be good primarily for those elderly people who are deficient in the compound, which is produced naturally by the pituitary gland at the base of the brain. + +Low Output of Growth Hormone +They say that only a third of those over 65 have almost worthlessly low levels of human growth hormone; the men chosen for the study fall into that category. The other two-thirds have levels of the hormone that range from somewhat low to, in a few cases, surprisingly high. +As a general rule, growth hormone output begins to drop when people reach the age of about 30. +''Some elderly people continue to produce youthful amounts of growth hormone well into old age,'' said Dr. Daniel Rudman of the Medical College of Wisconsin and Veterans Affairs Medical Center of Milwaukee, the leading author on the report. ''For them, the risks of growth hormone treatment could outweigh the benefits.'' +Researchers are not yet sure of all the long-term side effects of growth hormones, but they say an excess of growth hormone may lead to diabetes, high blood pressure, enlargment of the face and hands, heart problems and even cancer. + +High Leukemia Rate in Children +In some studies, children with a hereditary form of growth hormone deficiency who have been given hormone replacement to help them grow seem to suffer a higher than normal rate of leukemia as a result of growth hormone injections, although researchers say that the statistics are equivocal. +Nevertheless, endocrinologists and gerontologists say the new results are dramatic and promising. The growth hormorne could prove of great benefit for frail, elderly people who need added muscle strength or help in recovering from an operation, experts say. +That was true for Robert Bensing, 72, another participant in the new study. A couple of years ago, before receiving growth hormone injections, he had cataract surgery and needed more than three weeks to recuperate. +Recently, while participating in the hormone experiment, he needed a second cataract operation, and was back up and driving his car again only a week after the operation. + +Smoother Skin and Stronger Hands +He also says the skin on his face and hands is smoother, more pliant and less wrinkled than it was before, that he can open jars that once would have stymied him, and that he can work in his garden for several hours longer than in his pre-treatment days. +And, despite being only 4 feet 11 inches tall, he says he now walks quickly enough to cover ground more rapidly than younger and taller people. ''I get irritated when I'm walking behind somebody who is slow,'' he said. +His wife, Alice, who is 57, said: ''He's got more spree in his step. He's been looking fitter and trimmer, too.'' +Researchers are now studying whether the gain in lean body mass that added bulk to both the muscles and vital organs like the liver, spleen and kidneys translates into real improvement in organ function. They also must determine whether the loss of fat tissue will help to stem or prevent heart disease, stroke and other diseases associated with obesity. +Nor do they know how long the body changes will last after growth hormone injections have been stopped. Treatment ended a year ago for the men in the new study but, while researchers are still compiling data on the follow-up studies, many of the improvements seem to be lingering. + +Other Trials Are Under Way +Other trials of the effects of growth hormone on the elderly are under way at three other medical centers in the United States. Beyond experimental use, the recombinant drug is approved solely for the treatment of growth hormone deficiency in children. +''It's not the sort of thing that you can fill out at your local pharmacy,'' said Edward West, a spokesman for Eli Lilly and Company, a manufacturer of the drug. ''We've tried to restrict its use because we're worried that it may be misused.'' +The medication is very expensive, costing about $14,000 a year, although Dr. Rudman and others predict that the price will come down if it proves useful on a broad scale for older people. +''Would I take the drug?'' said Dr. Cohn, the V.A. doctor in North Chicago. ''Well, I'm 67, so I guess I'm the right age. But I'm going to wait a bit longer to see what the studies show.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +224 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 6, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Preserving Old Values In an Africa That's New + +BYLINE: By RICHARD F. SHEPARD + +SECTION: Section C; Page 10, Column 6; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 269 words + +Among the modern arts of Africa is film, and eight examples of modern African cinematography will be shown - one film at 4 P.M. and again at 6:30 every Saturday through Aug. 25 - at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue and 82d Street. +The series, ''Focus on Africa,'' is being screened in conjunction with the exhibition ''The Art of Central Africa: Masterpieces from the Berlin Museum fur Volkerkunde,'' which is on view in the Rockefeller Wing through Nov. 4. +The motion pictures from five African countries testify not only to the state of film in those nations but also to the current condition of their people. Among the themes considered are family and village life, the preservation of traditional values as city life threatens to extinguish them, stories out of history and romantic comedies. +The first of the films (Saturday) is a 1988 production from Burkina Faso, ''Yaaba,'' a story about an outcast old woman befriended by children in a desert village. Two other movies from Burkina Faso are scheduled: ''Zan Boko''(1988), on July 14, and ''Wend Kuuni'' (1982), on Aug. 11. Screenings from Senegal include ''Ceddo'' (1977), on July 21, and ''Jom'' (1981), on Aug. 25. +Others in the series are ''La Vie Est Belle'' (Zaire, 1987), on July 28; ''Yeelen'' (Mali, 1987) on Aug. 4, and the South African ''Mapantsula,'' on Aug. 18. +There is no extra charge for admission to the films, although tickets are required and may be obtained at the Uris Center Information Desk, near the 81st Street entrance. +Suggested museum admission: $6; students and the elderly, $3. Information: 879-5500. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +225 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 10, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Study Links Alzheimer's and Heart Attacks + +BYLINE: By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN + +SECTION: Section C; Page 3, Column 1; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 414 words + +IN a surprising finding from a study in the Bronx, two of the most common ailments of the elderly, heart attacks and Alzheimer's disease, have been linked for the first time. +The study found that elderly women who had had heart attacks were five times as likely to develop Alzheimer's disease or other dementias as other women of the same age. A similar connection was not seen among men. +The decade-long study of 442 men and women was conducted by researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. Their report, in the July issue of the journal Neurology, found that dementia was the most important serious illness that developed in men and women after the age of 75, ahead of heart attacks, strokes and cancer. +Alzheimer's is the leading type of dementia, and all dementias were three times as common among elderly women as among elderly men in the study. +The authors urged an aggressive research effort to seek biological explanations for the seeming link between Alzheimer's disease and heart attacks and for the greater susceptibility to dementia among women. +Dr. Miriam K. Aronson, a social gerontologist who headed the research team, said that if the findings were confirmed, dietary, anti-smoking and other steps to prevent heart attacks might have an added benefit: averting dementia. +She and other researchers said they could only speculate whether heart attacks led to the release of some unidentified substance that in turn damaged the brain. +The Einstein researchers found no evidence that a history of head injury or thyroid disease played a role in Alzheimer's disease, as other research has suggested. +The study was begun in 1980 to identify factors that might increase the risk of dementia. The Einstein researchers recruited volunteers who lived alone or with other family members in the northeastern Bronx. +People with neurological problems and chronic diseases were excluded. Only those who had good hearing and eyesight were selected so they could undergo repeated psychological and medical testing. +The findings were based on evaluations of 285 women and 157 men, a proportion reflecting the population of elderly people in the area. There were 75 cases of dementia in the group: 54 among women, 21 among men. Of the 35 who developed Alzheimer's, 29 were women and 6 were men. The relative risks of factors linked to dementia were based on statistical analyses and were reported in that way rather than in raw numbers. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +226 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 11, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +As Families Emigrate, Hong Kong's Elderly and Afflicted Are Left Stranded + +BYLINE: By BARBARA BASLER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 6, Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1266 words + +DATELINE: HONG KONG, + +When Fung's family moved away from Hong Kong recently, they left her behind in a bleak, crowded Government home because Canada, their new country, would not accept the mentally retarded young woman. +Now Fung, who is 25 years old, has only one relative here, an aunt. ''Whenever the aunt comes to pay the bills, Fung cries and tries to hold her hand,'' said a worker in the Lai Yiu home. +As thousands of Hong Kong residents emigrate to escape the Chinese takeover of the colony in 1997, they are breaking with some of their most treasured traditions and beliefs. People brought up to cherish their young and honor their old are leaving behind not only their retarded children but their aging parents, who are now Hong Kong's ''elderly orphans.'' + +Desperation to Leave +The emigrating families are leaving behind family pets as well, the local humane society says. Emigration has disturbed even the dead, who are being dug up and moved to new family plots in faraway lands. The retarded, unwelcome in many countries, are left behind by parents worried about the fate of their other children and desperate to leave before the Communists come. +''To choose between children, that is no choice,'' said the mother of a 9-year-old retarded boy. ''It is the worst fate of all.'' +The elderly, too, are left. With more than 1,000 people a week moving to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, Hong Kong has seen a growing number of what social workers call ''elderly orphans,'' old people left alone when their families emigrate. +Joyce Yip, a spokeswoman for the Government's Social Welfare Department, said that when old people apply to live in Government centers, a social worker must fill out forms stating why their families are not taking care of them. ''The form gives categories to check such as 'All the children are working' or 'Bad arguments with family,' '' she said. In recent months, the Government added a new category to the form - ''Family has emigrated.'' +In most cases, experts said, leaving the helpless and the old is a wrenching, heartbreaking decision, not a careless abandonment. +''People do not want to leave their old relatives,'' said Dr. Lee Jik-joen, a lecturer in social work at Chinese University. ''This is not the Chinese way. But the old ones say they do not want to start life all over again at age 65 or 70. The old ones are afraid to leave, and the younger ones are afraid to stay and so the family breaks apart.'' + +'She Missed Her Family' +''I know an old woman who stayed here when her family left and she died within a year,'' said Dr. Lee. ''She died because she missed her family. She was depressed and there was no one here to take care of her.'' +The Social Services Department says more than 12,000 old people are awaiting places in Government homes. ''The Government still assumes that families will take care of the old, and now they also assume that if families emigrate, they will continue to send money to their elderly relatives,'' Dr. Lee said. ''That is fine if the relative has his own home and can care for himself. But over the years, these people will need more and more care. What happens then?'' +Ms. Yip said there were no figures on the number of old or retarded people left by emigrating families. +Dr. Lee said the colony was ill-prepared to take care of those people. ''That's because this is basically a lame-duck Government,'' she said. ''In seven more years, these people will be the problem of Beijing.'' +For the mentally retarded who must remain here, the choices are just as bleak. ''We have a hotline where families can call about services for the mentally handicapped, and more and more families call begging for help because they are emigrating and cannot take their relative with them,'' said Andrew Kung, an administrator at the home where Fung lives. ''This is very, very hard for a Chinese family, because they are very close.'' + +Canada's Tight Restrictions +Canada, the top choice for Hong Kong Chinese emigrants, has tight laws barring anyone who might become a burden to the state because of health. The retarded are routinely rejected as ''medically inadmissible.'' +Generally, Canada will deny an entire family entrance if one member is mentally handicapped. ''We do not divide families,'' a Canadian spokesman said, a sentiment echoed by an Australian Consulate official here. But in very rare cases, Canada permits such a family to immigrate for ''compelling humanitarian reasons.'' +The United States Consulate here said that the health of one member would not be sufficient cause for rejecting an entire family and that rules against admitting a mentally handicapped person could be waived in the interest of family unity. Still, parents here are fearful and skeptical. So some simply lie and omit the fact that they have a retarded relative in the family. +''I know so many families in my son's school who want to emigrate but who are having problems because of their children,'' said Julie Lee, who is the mother of two boys, one of whom, 9-year-old Yuen-chung, has Down Syndrome. Mrs. Lee and her husband, a civil servant, have applied, as a family, to the United States, Singapore and England. +''We will never leave Yuen-chung,'' she said. ''If nothing works out and we are still here after 1997, we will send our other son away to live with relatives in the United States. But we will not leave Yuen-chung.'' + +Children in Homes for Aged +Mr. Kung said that in the 10 homes run by his agency with Government support, there were at least a dozen mentally retarded young people who had been left by families who had emigrated. And they are the lucky ones, because they are in special homes. +He said some families were forced to put their children in private homes for the elderly, places where ''someone lines up beds in a room.'' +Jonathan Chamberlain, chairman of the Down Syndrome Association of Hong Kong, said some families faced with such choices ''have taken their child back to their ancestral village in China to live with relatives.'' +''They will emigrate, but pay the relatives to care for the child,'' he said. +Yan Yan, another resident of the Lai Yiu center, waits by the front gate of the home every Friday, the day when families come to visit. Yan Yan's parents emigrated to Australia in May, but before they could go they had to sign a paper pledging they would not try to bring her with them. +Now, Yan Yan's sister comes to visit when she can, Mr. Kung said. ''If the sister cannot come, Yan Yan still waits,'' he said. ''She stands by the gate, and when we take her inside she stands in the corridor. She will not eat that day or that night, and sometimes not even the next day.'' Mr. Kung said he worried because soon Yan Yan's sister would emigrate too, and no one would visit. + +'Export' of Coffins +If some emigrants are leaving the living behind, others are taking their dead with them. One funeral director said that in past years he exported two or three coffins or burial urns a month, but now routinely sends 10 a month. +The Government said there were 1,647 applications to remove bodies from Hong Kong last year, an increase of 51 percent over the year before. Relatives, some buried for 60 years, are cremated here and flown to the emigrant home, or exhumed and transported in coffins for reburial. +The reasons for disturbing the dead vary. Some emigrants say they do not want their relatives buried in land ruled by Chinese Communists. Others want to be able to honor their dead properly, cleaning their graves and taking offerings. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Many Hong Kong residents hurrying to leave the colony before it is turned over to the Chinese are taking the remains of dead relatives with them. Funeral directors like Robert Leung ship the exhumed remains overseas, often in traditional Chinese coffins, background. (Marc Fallander for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +227 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 11, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +OBSERVER; +Backward Flow The Years + +BYLINE: By Russell Baker + +SECTION: Section A; Page 19, Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 744 words + +At last it seems possible to get younger. Growth-hormone injections have done the trick for a test group of men aged 61 to 81, according to last week's science news. Practically all of them perked up noticeably, regaining scientifically measurable amounts of the mustard commonly associated with younger men. +The press, always ill equipped to cope with good news, made very little fuss over the announcement. There were the inevitable references to ''the fountain of youth'' and the usual reminders that it would take a lot of data before anybody could be sure the injections don't have evil side effects. +Their cost was also heavily emphasized. Something around $20,000 per year was the figure I saw most often. Why this should seem an exorbitant price for rolling back old age was never explained. +Sure, aspirin is a lot cheaper, but it can't stop you from growing hair in your ears either, can it? I know New Yorkers who pay more than $20,000 a year to live in apartments hardly bigger than dog houses. +I heard an absurd commentary to the effect that well-adjusted people would surely rather ''grow old gracefully'' than take the chemical route back to vigor. I forget the name of the young woman who uncorked this thigh-slapper; what I remember is that she was a young woman. +What other kind could philosophize so glibly about growing old ''gracefully''? I have seen people grow old and have done a little of it myself. It is an extremely hard thing to do ''gracefully.'' +Never mind June Allyson's insouciance in those TV commercials about splendid new diapers American ingenuity has created for senior citizens; it must be extremely hard to be incontinent ''gracefully.'' (Incidentally, it must also be very hard to be patronized by twerps, twits and politicians as ''senior citizens.'') It takes very young people with their profound ignorance of the experience to believe in the pleasures of ''growing old gracefully,'' just as it takes very young people to write the best stories about dying beautifully. (See Ernest Hemingway's early books.) Youth's inexperience of life predisposes it to this kind of romantic nonsense when it strains for philosophy. +Let us not, however, overlook the obvious fact that the press people conveying the growth-hormone news must have been appalled by it. They are in a very competitive business. They have hopes that nature will do its worst, thus enabling them someday to replace the old people at the top - columnists, boss editors, TV anchors. +It must have distressed them to learn that growth hormones can now keep these old birds going on and on. No wonder the stories so far have emphasized the possibly deadly side effects and the price, which these young poorly paid news people think is outrageous. +Outrageous? Does anybody in the network news departments really think Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings or Dan Rather is going to turn down eternal youth because it costs $20,000 a year? They probably pay their barbers more. +Of course I don't want to speak for Tom, Peter and Dan, but if any youngsters around a certain Times Square printing plant are composing letters urging me to discover the delights of growing old gracefully, you are hereby urged to forget it, kids. +My own naturally selfish disposition to start getting younger every day foretells, I fear, a possibly nasty new political problem. If a fine, decent, loving person refuses to ''grow old gracefully'' so the next generation can have its day, what of the mean-spirited and selfish multitudes now holding power in America? +I can foresee them clamoring so desperately for age-reversal shots that they drive the price beyond the reach of the next generation. Even worse, beyond my reach. +I can foresee an era when these swinish men have driven the price to $200,000 a year. By that time, having taken the shots for years, I will probably be desperate enough to pay any price, though it means sticking up all-night convenience stores. +At such prices, however, I will no longer be able to afford the injections needed for my dear little grandchildren. And of course I will want to keep them from aging. It would be ludicrous for me to look and feel 27 if my grandchildren were stooped, creaky and wearing June Allyson's wonderful diapers. +In the long run I suppose the Germans and Japanese would probably be the only people rich enough to afford to get younger. Of course, come to think of it, it's been like that for several years now. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +228 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 11, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Residents Worry As Suspect, 95, Returns Home + +BYLINE: By DONATELLA LORCH + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 773 words + +Last month, the police say, a 95-year-old Navy veteran entered an elderly neighbor's apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and bludgeoned her to death - thus becoming one of the oldest murder suspects in the city's history. +Now, the man, Oliver Barre, has returned to his apartment, charged with murder but free without bail pending a grand jury decision. His return has unleashed a torrent of emotion in his building at 235 West 102d Street. +Many tenants in the stylish co-op building are worried that a murderer is stalking their halls and want Mr. Barre put in some sort of custody. More than 100 have signed a petition to that effect, court records show. +But many also say they would feel guilty about having what they describe as ''an old-style gentleman'' kicked out of the building where he has lived for nearly 30 years. The former World War I torpedoman appears to have no family, they say. + +'Such a Gentleman' +''He was always such a gentleman,'' Maria Mesa, a neighbor said. ''We exchanged Christmas cards and he always talked to you as if he was a normal person. But where is the law? Where is the justice?'' The police said Mr. Barre killed Norma Marks, an 88-year-old widow and a friend of his, on June 16 in her apartment. But Mr. Barre's lawyer, John Lewis, said he was acting in self-defense. +Mr. Lewis said Mr. Barre, whom he described as legally blind, was attacked by Mrs. Marks after she invited him into her apartment. He was forced by the narrow entranceway to leave his wheel chair in the hallway and followed her inside, feeling his way along the wall, Mr. Lewis said. +Mrs. Marks then suddenly tried to strangle him and they both fell to the ground thrashing at each other, Mr. Lewis said. Mr. Barre hit her with a therapy bar that he carried to exercise a recently broken wrist, he said. + +Orders From Husband's Ashes +Neighbors said Mrs. Marks, who lost her husband two years ago, was unsteady on her feet, slightly stooped and had had operations on both hips. She lived two floors above Mr. Barre, who shared an apartment with an 88-year-old woman. +Police have a different version of what led to the killing. They said Mr. Barre claimed that Mrs. Marks had attacked him on orders from the ashes of her deceased husband, which had told her to kill his roommate. +Lieut. Raymond O'Donnell, a police spokesman, said that on the day of the killing, Mr. Barre confronted Mrs. Marks, accusing her of poisoning more than 15 senior citizens in the building, and of hexing his roommate and practicing voodoo. He then hit her with the therapy bar, which an officer described as ''more like a lead pipe.'' +Neighbors on his floor described Mr. Barre as sweet and quiet. Scoffing at police reports from other neighbors that he fondled elderly women in the building, they said he only touched them to help them up stairs or through doorways. + +Hiding Agents in Room +However, some said he had delusions. A woman in an apartment on the floor said he had once accused her of hiding Federal agents in her living room to spy on him. +At his arraignment on June 17 in Criminal Court in Manhattan, Judge Laura Drager overruled the prosecutor's request that Mr. Barre undergo psychiatric evaluation and released him without bail. Mr. Barre has testified before a grand jury, Mr. Lewis said. +The tenants of the marble-lobbied doorman building were so upset at his release that a guard was stationed outside his apartment. On July 2 a State Supreme Court judge, George F. Roberts, ordered a 24-hour-a-day health care attendant for Mr. Barre. +Crimes by people of Mr. Barre's age are so uncommon that police and corrections office do not have statistics for criminals over the age of 65. If he is convicted of murder, the minimum sentence is 15 years to life. + +'He's a Minus Two' +William McCarthy, the associate director of the Criminal Justice Center, said the judge did the right thing in releasing Mr. Barre. +''In connection with all the things threatening society, on a scale of one to ten, this guy is so pathetic, he's a minus two,'' he said. +It is unclear what Mr Barre did after he left the Navy, where he served as a torpedo man during World War I. Mr. Lewis called him the the oldest living submariner in the United States, and said he had been a goodwill ambassador for the State Department to Middle Eastern countries. In his living room are photos and letters signed by Winston Churchill and Saudi Arabia's King Faisal, among others. +''This is for him the most appalling tragedy,'' Mr. Lewis said. ''He knows someone is dead. But these are things that he did in self-defense.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Oliver Barre, 95 years old, charged with murder, in the hallway at his West 102d Street apartment. His release without bail has unleashed a torrent of emotion in the building. The woman at left was unidentified. (Neal Boenzi/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +229 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 11, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Bidder for Hotel On W. 42d St. To Be Examined + +BYLINE: By DENNIS HEVESI + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4, Column 6; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 403 words + +New York City officials said yesterday that they would investigate allegations that a group that has bid to run a former welfare hotel on West 42d Street had collected rent at two buildings in Brooklyn even after it had been ordered to relinquish control because of poor maintenance. +''If those allegations are true,'' said Jeffrey L. Carples, deputy commissioner for adult services in the Human Resources Administration, ''we would certainly reconsider'' awarding the $1.5 million-a-year contract on the Holland Hotel to the bidder, the Central Brooklyn Urban Development Corporation. +The corporation, headed by Sylvester Leaks, was the lone private agency to propose to run the city-owned 320-room building between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. The chairman of Community Planning Board 4, Peter Obletz, said no other group had submitted a proposal because of the difficulties in managing a hotel of the Holland's size. +In 1983, an article in The Daily News said yesterday, officials ordered Mr. Leaks to relinquish the management of two federally subsidized buildings in Brooklyn, the Prospect Arms and the President Arms, after an audit had found major maintenance problems like vermin and malfunctioning elevators. In 1986, a report by the city's Housing Development Corporation said Mr. Leaks and his organization had continued to collect rents despite the order. +''That's not true,'' Mr. Leaks said last night. ''I am still the manager of the buildings, as well as the owner. I, myself, decided that I could not handle the paperwork and hired another agent to handle the rent.'' +The general counsel for the Housing Development Corporation, Martin Siroka, said, ''The company Mr. Leaks headed was switched as the managing agent.'' He added that complete records could not immediately be retrieved and that he could not say precisely why the switch had been ordered. ''There were clearly complaints,'' he said. +Mr. Leaks said the allegations were from civic groups and a faction on Community Planning Board 4 that did not want ''300 black and Hispanic males in the Holland Hotel.'' +''And they are using me, false allegations, out and out lies, to divert attention from their real goal,'' he said. ''They want the city to make it a senior citizens' hotel.'' +''We are exploring some percentage of the beds to be used by other clients,'' Mr. Carples said. ''But the majority would be for the frail elderly.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +230 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 11, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Court in Illinois Allows Cutoff of Man's Food + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6, Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 229 words + +DATELINE: SPRINGFIELD, Ill., July 10 + +The Illinois Supreme Court cleared the way today for a stroke victim's guardian to seek withdrawal of the food and water that is keeping the patient alive. +The state's highest court, by a vote of 4 to 2, overturned a Cook County circuit court ruling that blocked attempts to withdraw food and water from the stroke victim, Sidney Greenspan, 82 years old. It ordered the lower court to hold further hearings on the matter. +Mr. Greenspan suffered a stroke in 1984 that left him unconscious and dependent on a feeding tube inserted in his stomach for water and nutrition. The Chicago man also has Alzheimer's disease, which is progressively causing further damage to his brain, according to briefs filed with the court. +The Cook County Public Guardian, Patrick Murphy, went to court in October 1988 to ask that the feeding tube be withdrawn. Mr. Murphy, a county official who acts as an advocate for the elderly, the indigent and others, argued that Mr. Greenspan had no chance of recovery and would not have wanted to be kept alive in a vegetative state. +A circuit judge refused the request, holding that food and water could not be withdrawn if death would result from starvation and dehydration alone. But the Supreme Court said life-sustaining treatment may be withdrawn if, among other things, the patient's death would be imminent in the absence of such treatment. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +231 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 12, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Jury Finds Nursing Home Liable for Routine Neglect + +BYLINE: By TAMAR LEWIN + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1518 words + +A Federal jury in Mississippi has awarded damage verdicts to families of nursing home patients whose last years were blighted by neglect at a home run by the nation's largest nursing home chain. +Although a few nursing homes have been made to pay multimillion-dollar damages for deaths caused by isolated acts of gross negligence, lawyers say the Mississippi cases are a breakthrough, because they involve the kind of routine neglect and abuse that do not kill but cause great suffering for thousands of nursing home patients every day. + +Modest Sums, Large Issues +''They got damages for what happens to residents in maybe 60 percent of the nation's nursing homes,'' said Trish Nemore of the National Senior Citizens Law Center, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington. ''It's a very important case, because it doesn't involve spectacular outrages, but the much more commonplace things older people are subjected to as part of daily life in a nursing home, like not having your call bell answered or not getting cleaned up after an accident. They've succeeded in making a case on poor quality of life.'' +The cases, decided in March and now on appeal, involve Beverly Enterprises, which operates more than 800 nursing homes across the country. The jury, in Jackson, Miss., found that Beverly had not provided adequate care to two former residents of Southwest Extended Care in McComb, Miss., in the mid-80's. It ordered the company to pay $250,000 to each family. +The sums awarded to the families of the residents, Margie Berryhill and Frederick Bolian, both deceased, are not enormous. But advocates for the elderly say the Mississippi verdicts are a legal breakthrough that, if upheld and imitated, could lead to vast improvement in nursing home care. +The jury in Mississippi, finding that the nursing home had ''failed to provide reasonable care'' to the two patients, assigned dollar amounts to the different kinds of neglect they had endured: $50,000 for leaving Mrs. Berryhill in her own excrement, $25,000 for verbal abuse of her by the staff, $15,000 for not bathing Mr. Bolian, $15,000 for keeping him in a smelly room, $60,000 for failing to give him the physical therapy he needed and so on, coming to a total of $125,000 each. +The jury further found that Beverly Enterprises' failure to provide good care was so ''willful, wanton, malicious or callous'' as to merit another $125,000 in punitive damages to each claimant. +Beverly Enterprises has asked Federal District Judge Henry Wingate to overturn the verdicts or hold a new trial. Oral arguments on that motion are to be next week. +''We don't accept the jury findings,'' said William J. Ihle, a spokesman for Beverly Enterprises. ''We feel the quality of care was good in the home. These are very unfortunate cases, very emotional and also subjective. We felt very strongly that the evidence did not support the verdict, and quite frankly we expected to win.'' +Mr. Ihle said Beverly had introduced a program to assure good care since the Mississippi cases were brought, and added that in the first nine months of last year the Federal Health Care Financing Administration, which regulates the industry, had issued only half as many citations to Beverly Enterprises' homes as to other nursing homes, on average. +Advocates for the patients at the nursing home in McComb acknowledge that it is far from the worst in the country. Even nursing homes struggling to provide consistently good care face a daunting task, given high staff turnover and the condition of residents, who are often incontinent and demented. And that, the advocates say, is precisely the problem. + +Much Stress, Little Training +''I know that this was not a particularly terrible nursing home,'' said Jack Harang, the lawyer who brought the cases against Beverly. ''These things happen at lots of nursing homes where you put minimum-wage employees to work under maximum stress conditions with minimal training.'' +Mr. Harang, a maritime and personal injury lawyer in Metairie, La., had never handled a nursing home case before a lawyer friend, Mack Brabham of McComb, consulted him about the complaints of Alice Johnson, whose mother was a patient at Southwest Extended Care. +Mr. Harang said Mrs. Johnson complained that her mother ''had been beaten, oversedated, sprayed down with water, restrained unnecessarily and had her food put where she couldn't reach it.'' +He added, ''My first reaction, truthfully, was to wonder if these things could really be going on.'' +And although Mrs. Johnson's stories, and worse ones involving other residents, were corroborated by a former nurse's aide at the home, Mr. Harang said, the lawyers at first had little idea how to proceed with the case because there was so little legal grounding for claims based on quality of life. +Ruben Krisztal, a Kansas lawyer who handles litigation against nursing homes, said such lawsuits were usually brought only in cases of wrongful death. ''And a lot of lawyers even avoid them,'' he went on, ''because damages are based on age, life expectancy and lost earnings. And with a 94-year-old woman who died of bedsores caused by neglect, that won't work very well unless you can get punitive damages.'' + +Months Poring Over Charts +But Mr. Harang's wife, Suzanne, had a special reason for urging her husband and Mr. Brabham to take Mrs. Johnson's case: She is a former director of nurses at a Louisiana nursing home who quit her job in 1979 after complaining about the abuse of patients and being told that abuse was a fact of life in nursing homes. +Mrs. Harang became an active participant in the case, spending months poring over charts and records from the home, and helping her husband and Mr. Brabham prepare a lawsuit against Beverly Enterprises. +''No one's going to write in a chart that someone was beaten,'' she said. ''But if you look closely you can tell that there was a broken ankle that wasn't treated for a week, or overmedication, or too much weight loss, and you can put together a picture of what might be going on. +''And in most places where the care is bad, there's someone on the staff who isn't too happy about it, and might come forward.'' +In the investigation of Southwest, Mrs. Harang heard ever more gruesome stories, later detailed in the legal papers, about residents allowed to eat their own feces, or tied down so tightly their hands turned blue. She had made only a few visits to the nursing home before Beverly Enterprises got a protective order barring her from the premises, along with anyone else working on the case. +Since Beverly is a nationwide corporation. Mr. Harang and Mr. Brabham filed their case in Federal court. At first they sued on behalf of all residents of Southwest, but in 1986 the court refused to hear the case as a class action, saying the complaints were too dissimilar. That left the lawyers with 18 individual cases against Beverly Enterprises. Two have been settled in the range of $6,000 to $15,000, Mr. Harang said. Three have been tried: before the two $250,000 verdicts, there was a $15,000 verdict. And 13 remain to be heard. + +'A Lot of Poor Care Out There' +The verdicts have not gone unnoticed. Mrs. Harang is consulting with several lawyers filing similar suits in different states, and Mr. Harang is involved in suits against about 10 other nursing homes. +''We haven't been able to get the kind of enforcement we need out of the regulatory process, and we're hopeful that this kind of litigation will help,'' said Elma Holder, executive director of the National Citizens' Coalition for Nursing Home Reform, in Washington. ''We know there's a lot of poor care out there, and it's a big step forward to establish that if you neglect people over a long period of time, it amounts to abuse and you can collect damages.'' +No one knows exactly much neglect and abuse takes place in nursing homes. But a study published last year in The Gerontologist, a journal on issues of aging, said it was distressingly pervasive. +The study, by Karl Pillemer of the University of New Hampshire, reported that 36 percent of 577 nursing home aides and nurses interviewed had seen at least one incident of physical abuse in the last year. Six percent said they had themselves used excessive restraints on a patient, and 2 percent reported hitting a patient with an object or trying to do so. Eighty-one percent said they had seen at least one incident of psychological abuse, like threatening to hit a patient or denying food or privileges. +''A lot of families are scared to come forward and complain, because they're afraid of retaliation,'' said Mrs. Harang. ''They may not take their family member out, because moving is traumatic, they may not have found any nursing home that's better, or they may feel the devil they know is better than the one they don't know. +''Some of the people calling me now just need to hear that good care is possible and it's not crazy to fight for it. The nursing home may say their mother bruises easily and there's nothing they can do. I say they can handle her more gently.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: A nursing home neglect case hailed as a legal landmark was argued by Jack Harang. His wife, Suzanne, a former director of nurses at a nursing home, examined patients' charts and records to help him prepare. (Matt Anderson for The New York Times) (pg. A18) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +232 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 12, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +New Therapy Shown to Fight Bone Loss in Elderly + +BYLINE: By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1057 words + +The largest study ever conducted on osteoporosis has confirmed that a new treatment can strengthen elderly women's brittle bones and greatly reduce the risk of painful and deforming spinal fractures. +While the new therapy has not been directly compared with existing treatments, which are hormones, it appears to offer substantial advantages over them. It can apparently increase bone mass more than the hormones, and reduce fractures more than an experimental treatment, sodium fluoride. +The treatment involves a drug, etidronate, taken for 14 days; patients then take calcium for 76 days either in the diet or as a supplement. + +Bone Loss Is Reversed +In a study of more than 400 postmenopausal women, the regimen reversed the gradual loss of bone that characterizes osteoporosis. Women taking the treatment had half the number of spinal fractures of patients who did not receive the drug. Etidronate (pronounced eh-TID-ro-nate) halted the bone loss by slowing the natural process of bone removal; the calcium helped build bone mass. No significant adverse effects of the treatment were found. +But the study did not find evidence that the regimen prevented broken hips, which are a less frequent but more serious hazard of osteoporosis, which afflicts an estimated 15 million Americans, mostly women. +The research is being reported today in The New England Journal of Medicine. +The etidronate-calcium regimen would presumably also benefit men with osteoporosis, Dr. Nelson B. Watts of Emory University, who headed the team from seven medical centers that did the study, said in an interview. +In an editorial in the same issue of the journal, Dr. B. Lawrence Riggs of the Mayo Clinic and Foundation in Rochester, Minn., said etidronate was ''a welcome new option'' for treatment of osteoporosis. ''In contrast to the pessimistic view held by many only a few years ago, it is now clear that postmenopausal osteoporosis can be treated effectively,'' he said. + +Licensed for Another Use +Etidronate has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating osteoporosis. But the drug has been marketed for several years for treating another bone condition, Paget's disease. The drug's maker is Norwich Eaton Pharmaceuticals Inc., a Procter & Gamble division. Norwich Eaton has said it plans to apply to the F.D.A. for approval to market etidronate for osteoporosis. +Doctors are free to prescribe a licensed drug for a new use, and it is expected that many will prescribe etidronate for osteoporosis in the wake of the new report. +Dr. Watts said he expected etidronate, if licensed for osteoporosis, to become the treatment of choice for the bone disease because of its safety, effectiveness and ease of administration. +Dr. Riggs said that while etidronate was ''a major new advance'' that would be widely used, it would be premature to say it would be the leading treatment. He said he expected many doctors and patients to continue to use estrogen and calcitonin in fashioning treatment according to each patient's needs. + +Two Other Therapies +The Federal drug agency has licensed two other therapies for osteoporosis, the hormones estrogen and calcitonin. The hormones are used to prevent bone loss; by contrast, the new treatment appears to strengthen weakened bone, the researchers said. +Two other experimental therapies are also being studied: sodium fluoride and an intranasal form of calcitonin. Sodium fluoride has been shown to build bone mass, but the bone that results is structurally flawed and weaker than normal. +Other experts and the National Osteoporosis Foundation in Washington urged comparative studies of the drugs to determine which was most effective. +Dr. Watts said the etidronate regimen would cost about $300 a year, versus about $2,500 a year for the regimen with injected calcitonin. + +Cause of Disease Unknown +The researchers called etidronate the first regimen to reduce fractures from osteoporosis by building bone mass. +Osteoporosis results from an imbalance of the complex process of breaking down old bone and rebuilding new bone; the cause of the imbalance is not known. With age, particularly after menopause, the breakdown can exceed formation, leading to brittle bones that are susceptible to painful fractures. +Usually the disease produces no symptoms until weakened bones break. The spinal vertebrae may collapse and cause a deformity known as ''dowager's hump.'' When someone takes a step, the brittle hip may break. Complications from broken hips are a major cause of illness and death in older women. +Normally cells known as osteoclasts remove old bone, leaving pitlike depressions that are filled with new bone formed by cells called osteoblasts. The process takes about 90 days, and that is why the researchers designed the etidronate-calcium regimen for that length of time. +With etidronate, osteoclasts leave shallower pits, allowing osteoblasts to increase bone mass, the researchers said. +Dr. Watts's team undertook the new study lasting two years to clarify conflicting results from earlier studies of etidronate that lasted less than a year. His team said the lack of benefit found in some earlier studies of etidronate might have reflected the way the drug was taken. Because etidronate is poorly absorbed in the intestine, the drug must be taken on an empty stomach an hour before meals or two hours after them. + +Thinnest Bones Benefit +The new study involved 423 postmenopausal women who had suffered one to four fractures of the spine. +The regimen's most dramatic effect was among women who had the thinnest bones at the time the study began. In this group, the rates of crushed vertebrae were reduced by two-thirds, to 42.3 per 1,000 patient years from 132.7. +In the overall group, the number of new fractures was reduced to 29.5 per 1,000 patient years from 62.9. +The response to treatment was not uniform. For reasons that are not clear, improvement in the bone mass of the hip and wrist did not mirror that in the vertebrae, the researchers said. +The researchers said they were continuing the study to determine whether other regimens would be more effective and whether benefits would persist longer than two years. Another concern is whether the drug will produce adverse effects that show up only after use for many years. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +233 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 12, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Rapes of 3 Elderly Harlem Women Linked + +SECTION: Section B; Page 2, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 119 words + +The rapes of three elderly women in Harlem have been linked to the same attacker, the police said yesterday. +The police said the man has been linked to four rapes, with three of the victims over the age of 70. +In the last attack, on July 8, he raped a 78-year-old woman and her 35-year-old mentally disabled daughter, the police said. +All the rapes occurred between 4 and 6:30 in the morning in the homes of the victims. The rapist entered the apartments by climbing through open windows, the police said. +'''He doesn't take anything,'' a police spokesman said. ''He doesn't say anything and he isn't armed. He doesn't beat them up.'' +None of the women have been able to give a description of the man. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +234 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 14, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +CONSUMER'S WORLD; +Concerns Grow About Marketing of Medical Alert Systems + +BYLINE: By BARRY MEIER + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 46, Column 1; Style Desk + +LENGTH: 1424 words + +The growing use of personal emergency-alert systems, devices of potential benefit to millions of older people, is giving unscrupulous businesses a chance to prey on some of the nation's most vulnerable consumers. +The systems - which consist of a push-button device, typically worn around the neck, that transmits a telephone alert to a monitoring station - can summon help in a health emergency like a fall or heart attack when the user can't make a telephone call. +About 350,000 people use such systems, and growth is projected at 15 percent annually in coming years, according to Lifeline Systems, which says it is the nation's largest supplier. +As sales increase, concerns are growing. Recently, hundreds of people in Baltimore were sold systems, some of which were useless because the supplier did not pay service charges to the monitoring station that received the signals. Elsewhere, some marketers are using scare tactics to sell devices at high prices, several law-enforcement officials said. Though most systems appear reliable, they may not work well under some conditions. + +'Not a Problem Industry' + ''This is not a problem industry in that the units usually work well,'' said John Nethercut, an Assistant Attorney General in Maryland. ''But it is a dangerous industry, because the consumers tend to be old and scared and vulnerable.'' +The alert systems are a product for the times. As the average age of the population rises, more older Americans are living at home, often alone and in need of a reassuring link to the outside world. And with the growing emphasis on home health care, hospitals are also turning to alert systems for patients to use after they have been discharged. +''These systems give confidence to older people and confidence to their middle-aged children,'' said Lee Norrgard, an investigative analyst for the American Association of Retired Persons in Washington. The association encourages the use of alert systems but does not recommend a particular one, he said. +The features of competing systems vary, but they typically rely on a small radio transmitter, a computer chip and a monitoring station. When activated, the transmitter sends a radio signal to the chip, which is in a console by a telephone. The chip dials a monitoring station, where an operator summons emergency assistance. Some companies also provide two-way radio communication between subscribers and a monitoring station. + +Concern About Marketing + Some industry executives acknowledged in interviews that there are problems in the way some companies advertise and market their services. + ''There are a few companies out there that are preying on people's fears,'' said Steven Garson, a marketing manager for Lifeline Systems, whose headquarters are in Watertown, Mass. + Lifeline and some other companies offer their products through hospitals at monthly rental fees of $25 to $50. But some companies promote their products in television commercials depicting old people in life-threatening emergencies. +Two systems promoted on television are those of Lifecall Systems of Camden, N.J., and Life Alert Emergency Response of Chatsworth, Calif. Lifecall's system can be purchased for $1,200 to $2,000, depending on the length of the monitoring contract, while Life Alert's costs $2,000 to $4,000, with monitoring extra, officials of the companies said. +Some companies have sold the units through ''boiler room'' operations. Last year, a company known as Emergency Alert Center went to mailing-list brokers to get the names of hundreds of older women who lived alone in the Baltimore area, said Mr. Nethercut, of the Attorney General's office. The company quickly sold more than 200 units for $1,295 each, including monitoring service for three years. +''The salesmen basically told people that if they had an emergency and didn't have the system, they'd be dead,'' Mr. Nethercut said. +Those who did buy the system quickly found out through disconnect notices that Emergency Alert was not paying the monitoring company. And when the company sent out new computer chips to connect the users with a different monitoring service, many clients could not determine how to install them. Nearly a year later, some Baltimore residents who purchased the units still have no connection to any monitoring service. +''They are out to make suckers and paupers out of us,'' said Helen Talbott, 69 years old, a purchaser. +Officials of Emergency Alert and a successor company, Health Watch Systems, agreed in April to stop doing business in Maryland and said they would pay $107,000 in fines, largely for refunds to people who bought the system, Mr. Nethercut said. +Lifecall Systems, whose system is promoted on television, was investigated by the Federal Trade Commission after dozens of its franchised distributors accused the company of making fraudulent claims about their earnings prospects. +Lifecall filed for bankruptcy-court protection in October 1987. Records in Federal Bankruptcy Court in Camden, N.J., show that the company earned about $18 million between 1985 and 1987 through the nationwide sale of more than 4,700 Lifecall franchises. +To settle F.T.C. charges of misrepresentation in franchise sales, Lifecall, without acknowledging any wrongdoing, agreed to refrain from such practices in the future, the court records show. Morris B. Levin, a former president of the company, also agreed to pay the F.T.C. a fine of $150,000, the records show. The agreement is still subject to approval by the Justice Department. + +Some Complaints From Sellers + This year the company reorganized, with many of its activities assumed by its largest franchisee, Emergency Response People Inc. Both companies have headquarters in Camden. Mr. Levin is a consultant to Emergency Response, with an annual salary of $150,000, bankruptcy records show. +The records also show that several franchise operators complained about the system's effectiveness. One, Melvin Jones, a mail carrier in Jacksonville, Ill., said in an interview that he was unable get several units to work in 1987 when demonstrating them for a potential buyer. +''If it doesn't work one time it's a problem, because people may only need to use it once,'' said Mr. Jones, who said he no longer sold the system. +Richard M. Brooks, Lifecall's president, said the system works well, although he said franchisees have sometimes had problems installing it properly. ''The product saves lives every day of the week,'' he said. +Another television marketer, Life Alert Emergency Response, has also drawn complaints, about both the operation of its system and its sales techniques, according to Daryl Roberts, a deputy district attorney in Napa County, Calif. He said his office was investigating the complaints. Mark Turenshine, the company's general manager, said the system worked well and noted that, by law, customers had the right to cancel the sale within three days and get their money back. +Some industry executives acknowledged that certain conditions - like the thickness of apartment walls or the materials used in a building's construction - might limit a transmitter's range, which is typically about 200 feet. +''There is no way of predicting how a unit will work until a consumer tests it in their environment,'' said Mr. Garson of Lifeline. +So far, little is known about the comparative abilities of competing emergency-alert systems. But Mr. Norrgard of the American Association of Retired Persons said his group planned to test the devices next year. + +PLANNING BEFORE A CRISIS + For those who want a personal emergency-alert system, experts have these suggestions: +* Consider renting rather than buying. Rentals are often available through hospitals at $25 to $50 a month, including monitoring fees, while some commercial systems can cost thousands to purchase, with monitoring extra. +* Ignore any commercial solicitation from a company that declines to quote a price over the telephone. Some companies do this in an effort to persuade consumers to agree to a visit from a seller, who may apply great pressure. +* Test any device throughout your home or apartment, because some construction materials may hamper transmissions. And test it at different times of the day to be sure the monitoring station is listening. +A pamphlet about alert systems is free from the American Association of Retired Persons. To receive it, write A.A.R.P. Fulfillment, 1909 K Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20049; request Publication ADN D12905. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Helen Talbott of Baltimore bought a $1,295 alert system. The price was supposed to cover monitoring service, but it did not. (Marty Katz for The New York Times); diagram: how a medic alert system is supposed to work (Source: Lifeline Systems Inc.) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +235 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 15, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Black Children Living With One Parent Put at 55% + +BYLINE: By TAMAR LEWIN + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 17, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 542 words + +More than half the nation's 9.8 million black children under 18 years old and nearly a third of the seven million Hispanic children lived with only one parent in 1989, according to a Census Bureau report. +Among the 51.1 million white children, however, four out of five lived with both parents. +Since 1970, the proportion of black children living with both parents has declined to 38 percent from 58.5 percent and 54.5 percent now live with one parent, according to the report released Thursday. For Hispanic children, the number living with both parents dropped to 67 percent from 77.7 percent. +''The fastest increase in the number of single-parent families came in the 1970's,'' said Arlene Saluter, the author of the report, an analysis on marital status and living arrangements that the bureau issues annually. ''In the 80's, while the numbers are still going up, the increase is slowing, especially among black families.'' + +Many Live With Grandparents +Among white children, 79.6 percent lived both parents in 1989, as against with 89.5 in 1970, the report said. +The study also found that 13 percent of black children under 18 lived in the home of grandparents, as against 5 percent of the Hispanic children and 3 percent of the white children. +The mother was present as well for about half the black children living with grandparents, the report said; 38 percent had neither of their parents present. Four percent of the black children living with grandparents had both parents present as well and 3 percent had the father but not the mother in the home. +Most children in single-parent families live with the mother. That was the case for 94 percent of the black children living with one parent, 91 percent of the Hispanic children and 85 percent of the white children, the report said. +The study also found that the median age of first marriage has risen to a new high, 23.8 years for women and 26.2 years for men. Marriage ages dropped from 1890, when the data were first gathered, until the mid-1950's, when the median ages were 20.2 for women and 22.6 for men. Since then, the median age of the first marriage has been rising steadily. + +More Unmarried Couples +The number of unmarried-couple households grew to 2,764,000 last year from 523,000 in 1970. In 6 of 10 such households, both partners were younger than 35. About 7 in 10 such households had no children present. +''We don't ask what the relationship is, but these tend to be younger, never-married people, so that implies that they are cohabiting,'' said Ms. Saluter. +Among the elderly, living arrangements varied dramatically by age. Of those 65 to 74 years old, 63 percent lived with their spouses, 25 percent lived alone and 10 percent lived with other relatives. Of those 85 or older, however, most had been widowed, so 47 percent lived alone, 28 percent with other relatives and only 4 percent with their spouses. +More than half of all young adults 18 to 24 years old lived with their parents in 1989, as did 11 percent of those 25 to 34. Among those 25 to 34, sons were almost twice as likely as daughters to be living with their parents. Nearly 3 of 10 women 25 to 34 years old who lived with their parents had children of their own present in the home. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +236 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 16, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Hormone Therapy Seen to Cut Risk of Broken Hip + +BYLINE: By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL + +SECTION: Section A; Page 9, Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 874 words + +Women who begin hormone replacement therapy at or near menopause can sharply decrease their risk of having a broken hip in the next decade, a new study of 23,000 women has shown. +In the first large study to examine the effect of hormone therapy on older women, Dr. Tord Naessen and his colleagues at the University Hospital in Uppsala, Sweden, found that the treatments produced a 60 percent reduction in the risk of hip fracture whether the women took estrogen alone or a combination of estrogen and progestogen. +The combination is now recommended because progestogens counteract estrogen's carcinogenic effects on the uterus. But until now it was not known for certain whether the addition of progestogens would also protect against broken hips. +The new study suggests that it does. But the protective effect seems to be far more powerful when supplements were immediately started at menopause and to diminish when hormones were begun too long after menopause, particularly over the age of 60. The hormones prevent osteoporosis, a debilitating condition characterized by thinning of the bones that generally afflicts older women. +Although many studies had demonstrated that estrogen alone prevented hip fracture, the new study, published today in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, is the first to show convincingly that the combined treatment would have the same effect. + +Results Were Predicted +''Those are pieces of data we really needed in determining the proper treatment of osteoporosis,'' said Dr. Robert Lindsay, a professor of medicine at Columbia University who is an expert in osteoporosis. ''This is a paper I was waiting for.'' +Endocrinologists had predicted such results on the basis of studies of bone density and calcium metabolism involving women taking supplements. Dr. S. Mitchell Harman, section chief of endocrinology at the National Institute on Aging, said, ''It's an interesting addition to a growing body of literature, all of which points in the same direction: that if you start treating women with hormones at menopause, you could avoid a lot of osteoporosis and get rid of 60 percent of their hip fracture.'' +About 300,000 Americans fall and break their hips each year, and more than 70 percent are postmenopausal women, said Dr. Joseph Zuckerman, director of the geriatric hip fracture program at the Hospital for Joint Diseases Orthopaedic Institute in New York. +The idea that hormone therapy can prevent the progression of osteoporosis, coupled with the recent discovery that certain medications seem to reverse bone thinning once it has occurred, holds new hope that postmenopausal women may avoid the fractures that plague them as they age. Risk factors for osteoporosis include the onset of menopause before the age of 48, surgical removal of the ovaries before menopause, high alcohol intake and a family history of the disease. + +Risk of Breast Cancer +The study's findings add a new element to the debate about whether postmenopausal women should take hormone replacements and who may benefit from them. While evidence suggests that such therapy markedly decreases the risk of osteoporosis and heart disease, it also appears to increase a woman's risk of breast cancer. ''To recommend therapy just to prevent hip fracture for all women is premature,'' Dr. Naessen said in a telephone interview. +But many endocrinologists believe that it is not premature for women at high risk. A woman with average bone mass at menopause has a 15 percent chance of suffering a hip fracture in her life. But some women have very low bone mass, which leaves them vulnerable to serious osteoporosis, and 40 precent of women in that group can expect to break a hip after menopause. Dr. Lindsay estimates that 20 percent to 25 percent of women in the United States are in that category. ''For this group, there's only one more likely event in their life: that's death,'' Dr. Lindsay said. ''We should target this population for treatment.'' +Hip fractures can have disastrous implications. Twenty percent to 25 percent of patients will die within a year after a hip fracture from any of a variety of complications, including pneumonia, blood clots in the lungs and heart failure. Even with the best medical care and rehabilitation, only 40 percent of of patients will be able to return to their former level of activity. +For reasons that were not entirely clear, the Swedish study found that women who started taking hormone therapy after the age of 60 appeared to have the same rate of hip fracture as women who took no therapy at all. Dr. Naessen suspects there were not enough older women in his study to detect the more subtle protective effects that might be expected in this group. +Endocrinologists have long known that hormone therapy works best if started early. But previous studies of bone density in postmenopausal women have suggested that the hormone treatment prevents further bone loss at any age and may even solidify bone to a small extent. +''You wouldn't want an elderly woman throwing up her hands and saying 'It's too late' based on this study, because it's not,'' said Dr. Harman of the National Institute on Aging. ''The earlier the better, but hormones will still help.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +237 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 17, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Hawkinge Journal; +Where the Few Triumphed, Ghosts Haunt Skies + +BYLINE: By MALCOLM W. BROWNE, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 4, Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 948 words + +DATELINE: HAWKINGE, England + +The ghosts of 1940 still haunt The Cat and Custard pub a half century after the Battle of Britain. +People at the pub talk about the unpopular new poll tax and the tunnel being dug from nearby Folkestone under the English Channel to France. But there are reminders everywhere in Britain this summer that 50 years have passed since the epochal 14-week air battle that saved the nation from Nazi invasion. The pub's pictures of Spitfires and Hurricanes are well dusted, and battle veterans still wander in from time to time - old men who drank here when they were teen-agers after a day's work battling Messerschmitts. +The Battle of Britain, so named by Prime Minister Churchill, took the lives of fewer than 5,000 British and German combatants combined - a paltry number by World War II standards. But it was a turning point in the war, for it foiled Operation Sea Lion, Hitler's plan for the invasion of Britain. +The German strategy was to destroy the Royal Air Force's fighter planes in the air and on the ground before the storms of autumn began sweeping the English Channel, preventing an amphibious landing. Once the Luftwaffe had achieved control over England's airspace, Hitler believed, the success of the invasion was assured. + +Invasion Is Canceled +German bombers, escorted by fighter planes, began large-scale raids on England in July 1940. By September, so many R.A.F. pilots had been killed or wounded that no reserves remained. But German airmen were dying at an even greater rate, and British tenacity finally forced Hitler to cancel the invasion. +Observances of the battle's anniversary all over England include innumerable ceremonies, reunions, dinners and toasts. At airshows, refurbished Royal Air Force and Luftwaffe fighters stage mock dogfights, and the snarl of vintage Merlin engines is rattling windows and making old hearts race. +Souvenir stores hawk teddy bears wearing Fighter Command goggles and helmets, and the recorded voice of Dame Vera Lynn is heard again, singing ''There'll Be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover.'' +But the anniversary has sounded a special chord at Hawkinge, the site of the fighter airfield that was closest to German-occupied France. During the battle several hundred planes were shot down near here over the rolling green fields of Kent, and wreckage, ammunition and the keepsakes of airmen slain in the battle are still being turned up by local farmers. + +'It's a Desecration' +Hawkinge no longer has an airfield; in fact, it seems likely that most of the abandoned R.A.F. aerodrome here will be taken over for a new sewage treatment plant. But Michael Llewellyn and a band of volunteers are fighting to stave off the conversion. Mr. Llewellyn bought the surviving airbase buildings and three acres of land seven years ago to establish a Battle of Britain museum, which is now supported by the National Trust. +''The museum will stay even if they build that sewage farm, but it's a desecration,'' Mr. Llewellyn said. +Mr. Llewellyn's Kent Battle of Britain Museum is the repository of wreckage from more than 300 aircraft downed in the vicinity. +A recent visitor from Germany, Ulrich Steinhilfer, looked long and hard at the mangled fuselage of a Messerschmitt 109. The discovery of an aircraft factory serial number had identified the wreck as the fighter Mr. Steinhilfer had been piloting in October 1940 when the R.A.F. shot him down over Kent and sent him to a Canadian prison camp. + +An Unforgiving Foe +Although many Allied and German airmen became friends over the years, some veterans of the Battle of Britain never forgave their former foes. +''One of the least forgiving was Doug Bader, my old wing commander,'' said James A. Goodson, now a resident of nearby Canterbury and one of the few American volunteers who fought in the R.A.F. before the United States entered World War II. +Sir Douglas Bader, the most famous of all the Battle of Britain aces, lost both his legs in a training crash before World War II, but rejoined the R.A.F.'s Fighter Command after proving that he could still fly using prosthetic limbs. +He was shot down over France in 1941, and in the crash lost one of his artificial legs. But the German ace Adolf Galland met his captured foe and arranged to send word through the Swedish Red Cross to the R.A.F., which dropped a replacement leg over a German airbase. +''Back in the 1960's,'' Mr. Goodson recalled, ''Galland organized a Luftwaffe fighter pilots' reunion at the Hofbrauhaus in Munich, and he invited a bunch of us R.A.F. veterans as guests. Bader refused, so Galland asked me to try to persuade him. I reminded Doug that Galland, after all, had tried to help him as a prisoner and arranged to get him a new leg. So Doug finally relented. +''When we got to the beer hall, Doug waddled in on those metal legs of his, looked down at this crowd of maybe 1,000 Germans, and said: 'Who are all these guys? How could we have left so many of the bastards alive?' +''Galland tactfully replied: 'These were mainly pilots on the Eastern front. In the West you didn't leave many of us bastards alive.' '' +Older Britons remember that Sunday, Sept. 15, 1940, was a sunny, hot day. During that day the Germans launched more than 1,000 bombers against London and its defending airfields. The effects were devastating, but the R.A.F. still managed to shoot down 56 German planes and repel several large bomber groups. +On Sept. 17, the official German war diary recorded: ''The enemy air force is still by no means defeated; on the contrary, it shows increasing activity. We cannot expect the weather to hold. The Fuhrer has therefore decided to postpone Sea Lion indefinitely.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Visitors to the Battle of Britain museum in Hawkinge, England, on the site of the R.A.F. airfield that was closest to German-occupied France. The hanging plane is a Messerschmitt 109. A proposal to use most of the abandoned base for a sewage treatment plan has brought protests. (Jonathan Player for The New York Times); map of England showing location of Hawkinge. + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +238 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 17, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Business and Health; +Programs to Keep Retirees Healthy + +BYLINE: By Milt Freudenheim + +SECTION: Section D; Page 2, Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 783 words + +AT the Campbell Soup Company's fitness center in Camden, N.J., Bill Brown, a 79-year-old retiree, leads an exercise class called flexibility. +A growing number of employers like Campbell Soup are making special efforts to help retirees stay healthy. They say retirees feel good about the programs. So do active employees, especially those nearing retirement. ''It's great for our employees, who can see that these retirees have such a wonderful attitude about life,'' said John R. Thompson, Campbell's employee health services manager. +And benefits managers reckon that fewer visits to doctors and hospitals will mean savings for the company health plan. +Studies indicate that wellness programs for older adults can reduce the risk of cancer and improve cardiovascular health, muscle strength and motor capacity, said Robert Levin, director of the Institute on Aging with the Washington Business Group on Health, an employers' association. +''It used to be thought that anything you did in health promotion for seniors would be too little and too late, but two new lines of thinking are changing this,'' said Dr. James F. Fries of the Stanford University School of Medicine. ''First, the likelihood of an illness is many times greater for seniors than for younger people, so you are intervening at the right time. And second, health-care expenses are so much greater for seniors that even a small percentage change will yield relatively large dividends.'' +Dr. Fries recently reported on a 12-month study of 6,000 retired employees of the Bank of America. Some of the bank's retiree clubs took part in a wellness program, which included exercising, changing diets and quitting smoking. The club members' medical costs declined 16 percent while the dollar claims by retirees in clubs that did not participate rose 3 percent. +In another study, Dr. Fries and J. Paul Leigh, an economist at San Jose State University, looked at the bank's retirees whose health was thought to be at risk. They were overweight, did not exercise vigorously, consumed at least one pack of cigarettes and two alcoholic drinks each day, and usually did not buckle their auto seat belts. +''The worst-case difference in annual hospital and doctor costs between a person with good habits and one with bad habits was $4,588,'' said Clark E. Kerr, a Bank of America vice president in San Francisco. ''We concluded that health habits can make a big difference on the bottom line of actual claims dollars.'' +The bank has expanded the health promotion program, now in its third year. ''The retiree clubs that participated were very happy,'' Mr. Kerr said. ''The control groups all wanted in. This is one of the few things the company can do to save money that also makes the employees happy.'' +In a similar approach, Texas Instruments has started retiree clubs at 4 of its 13 fitness centers and is organizing more. Retirees get free lifetime memberships in the centers. ''We ask them to donate 10 to 15 hours of voluntary time a year, to help with mailings and organizing special events,'' said Jenny L. Brock, director of corporate health promotion at Texas Instruments, which has 50,000 active employees and 7,000 retirees. She recently started two-month ''Fit to be 50'' classes, which encourage retirees and older employees to keep active and provide advice on nutrition and dealing with stress. +The Adolph Coors Company in Golden, Colo., regularly invites retirees to take part in free exercise and other health-promotion classes. +Some companies encourage retirees to use community facilities like Y.M.C.A. swimming pools. Others keep in touch through retiree health newsletters. The Reader's Digest, for example, sends them Prime Time, a newsletter published by Kelly Communications in Charlottesville, Va. +''Retirees are a tremendous health-cost liability,'' Mr. Kerr at Bank of America said. The cost of health benefits for retirees under age 65, when Medicare kicks in, rose 14 to 16 percent on average this year at 123 corporations surveyed by the TPF&C unit of Towers Perrin, a consulting firm. The average cost for a retiree with family coverage was $4,764. But even this may be a low estimate, TFP&C said, because many employers do not break out their retiree costs. +''Our analysis for specific clients showed costs for retirees under 65 were 150 to 200 percent of the average cost for the active employees,'' said Richard Ostuw, a TPF&C vice president in Cleveland. +Mr. Kerr listed three choices for reducing such costs: ''cut benefits, shift costs to retirees or help retirees get healthier, which is the one everyone likes.'' He added, ''This is something that more and more companies will be doing.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +239 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 17, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Careers; +Unusual Ways Used In Filling Jobs + +BYLINE: By Elizabeth M. Fowler + +SECTION: Section D; Page 13, Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 831 words + +LAST year, Travelers Mortgage Services of Cherry Hill, N.J., a unit of the Travelers Corporation, the insurance giant, increased its staff about 30 percent nationwide, to 1,800 people. +A large number of those hired were found through unusual techniques. They were reached through prerecorded phone tapes and answering equipment, a special fax machine for resumes, radio advertisements during commuting hours when people drive and listen, and saturation of an area with help-wanted fliers outlining job benefits. The hirings cost an average of $3,200 an employee. +In mortgage servicing, a company receives monthly mortgage payments from homeowners and businesses, passes them on to whatever institution holds the mortgage, and makes the payments of taxes and insurance premiums out of escrow money as required. When the monthly mortgage payments are not received on time, customers are usually reminded by telephone or letter. +The business requires customer service representatives and loan counselors who have good communication skills. Travelers Mortgage Services often tries to lure experienced employees away from competitors - a sign of a labor shortage for the type of employees it wants. It calls many of them ''passive job seekers,'' those who are comfortable in their jobs but interested in a better opportunity if they can be made aware of one. +Unusual approaches help. For example, some months ago the company used direct-mail recruitment fliers sent to 80,000 households within a five-mile radius of its Chicago-area branch office. It invited students, elderly people and others to apply for jobs. +Jo Ann Battagliese, vice president of human resources for Travelers Mortgage Services, said last week that the use of tape recorders for initial contact by telephone allowed human resources personnel to choose from among applicants those that were wanted for a face-to-face interview. +She described how she listened to a middle-aged women describing her accomplishments on the tape recorder. Intrigued by the enthusiasm in the woman's voice, she invited her to an interview. ''We hired her immediately, and recently she was named a supervisor,'' Miss Battagliese said. +Informal open houses for job applicants in the evenings and on weekends have also proved successful, she said. As an incentive, those attending receive dinner certificates for two at area restaurants. +Currently, however, she acknowledges that there is one drawback typical of today's corporate environment - a takeover in process. Most of Travelers Mortgage Services is being acquired by the GE Capital Mortgage Insurance Company, a unit of the GE Capital Corporation of Stamford, Conn., which in turn is a subsidiary of the General Electric Company. +''The deal will not be completed until August, and it is premature to talk about numbers of employees, change of name or change of headquarters,'' said Lisa Van Orden, manager of public relations for GE Capital. She added that mortgage servicing would add a new dimension to the company's mortgage insurance unit. +Robyn R. Frenze, a spokesman for Travelers Mortgage Services, said that ''it is probably cheaper to buy a mortgage servicing company than to set up a new one or expand in an area.'' The Travelers unit has been among the 10 largest mortgage service companies in the nation, she added. +Other major financial institutions have been moving or expanding into mortgage servicing. One is the Chase Manhattan Corporation, whose Chase Mortgage Services now services some mortgages originated by Anchor Mortgage Services, a unit of the Anchor Savings Bank. ''It appears to be a 'hot ticket' area,'' Miss Frenze commented. +Obviously, Travelers employees who face some chance of losing their jobs feel insecure. ''There is a certain amount of apprehension throughout the organization, '' Miss Battagliese said. +In fact, job security - or insecurity - is only one factor in employee attitudes after the first year or so. ''People enter new jobs with high levels of enthusiasm, but the novelty soon wears off,'' said John Parkington of the Wyatt Company in Boston, a consulting company in the human recources area. ''As the saying goes, 'the honeymoon is over.' '' +Wyatt found as a result of a survey that only 43 percent of first-year employees say they are highly committed to their companies. By the end of four years the commitment falls quite sharply, with only 34 percent expressing contentment. The sentiment also reaches into management ranks, where ''only 46 percent of managers express high levels of commitment'' after a few years on the job. +Companies can be blamed for much of this decline in enthusiasm, he said. ''Employees want to commit themselves to companies that are committed to their prosperity.'' +He urges counseling to teach managers how to encourage ''a positive working environment,'' along with reward systems for all employees, like the sharing of gains, pay for performance and involvement in decision-making. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +240 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 18, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +21 Held in $1 Million Theft Of Food Headed for Needy + +BYLINE: By SARAH LYALL, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 2, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 545 words + +DATELINE: UNIONDALE, L.I., July 17 + +Twenty-one people and 6 companies on Long Island were accused today of systematically stealing more than $1 million worth of Government-subsidized food destined for schoolchildren, the elderly and the homeless. +Twelve of the 21 people named in the Federal complaint filed by Andrew J. Maloney, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, are current or past employees of Cold Storage of Nassau of Westbury. The company stores and distributes Federally donated food to more than 250 school districts, centers for the aged, soup kitchens and homeless programs in Nassau and Suffolk Counties and in Queens and Brooklyn. +According to the complaint, the workers stole about 10 percent of each shipment of food and sold it, at about a third of its market value, to various restaurants and vendors. +The foods included milk, peanut butter, chicken, turkey, cheese, butter and tuna. +Among the people named in the complaint are the manager of the warehouse, Martin Moore, and more than a dozen warehouse drivers and workers. #18 Plead Not Guilty The six companies named are Cold Storage, which is under contract with the State of New York and the United States Agriculture Department's Food and Nutrition Service to distribute and store Federally donated food; and two pizza parlors, a bar, a luncheonette and a caterer, which are charged with buying the stolen food from the company employees. +Eighteen of those named were arrested this morning, and all pleaded not guilty in Federal District Court this afternoon. They were released on bails that ranged from $25,000 to $250,000. +An employee at Cold Storage in Westbury said that no one from the company would comment on the arrests. + +False Vouchers Filed +Mr. Maloney said in a news conference that the Cold Storage scheme was the largest to be prosecuted so far involving the theft of food donated from the Agriculture Department. +''They were able to cover up their operation by filing phony vouchers with the U.S.D.A.,'' Mr. Maloney said. He explained that upon receiving three cases of food, for example, the workers would deliver two cases to a school district and then sell the third. Then they would prepare a voucher for the Government claiming to have delivered three cases; the school district, glad to have the food and not promised a set amount, would not notice the discrepancy. +Mr. Maloney said the complaint was the result of a three-year undercover operation in which special agents from the Agriculture Department, posing as truck drivers, day care workers and school employees, purchased the food from the Cold Storage employees. +The complaint charges that Mr. Moore, as the manager of the warehouse, opened it early in the morning on weekends several times and loaded the van of an undercover agent with stolen food. Mr. Moore also boasted to an undercover agent, the complaint says, that he and other Cold Storage employees sold more than 10,000 cases of food a year to delicatessans, restaurants and other businesses on Long Island. +Cold Storage, the sole distributor of Agriculture Department food for Long Island, will remain closed for the next several days while Federal agents take an inventory of the stock, Mr. Maloney said. He said more arrests were expected. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +241 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 18, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +New Vim and Vigor For the Y.M.C.A. + +BYLINE: By WILLIAM G. SCHMIDT + +SECTION: Section C; Page 1, Column 4; Living Desk + +LENGTH: 1507 words + +DATELINE: GREENFIELD, Wis. + +IT'S a typical morning at the branch of the Milwaukee Y.M.C.A. in this suburb. All through the building, there is a constant coming and going of men and women, mostly in running shoes and T-shirts, on their way to exercise class or weight training or a session on the running track that is suspended above the basketball courts. +But there's something more. In the shallow end of the swimming pool, a group of about 30 elderly people are bobbing in the water, moving in time to an aerobics instructor. Across the hall, a dozen people with cerebral palsy lean back in their wheelchairs, straining while instructors help them lift weights attached to machines. A wave of parents arrive with children in tow, depositing them in the crowded full-day preschool program. +For decades, the Y.M.C.A. has been one of America's most enduring community institutions. Its residence rooms once provided a refuge for farmboys first come to the city, looking for cheap, clean quarters, and its pools were the place where millions of American boys learned to swim, wearing nothing but a self-conscious grin. But the old Main Street Y has changed. +After years of stuttering progress and periods of financial hardship, the association developed over the last decade an image as one of America's fastest-growing and eclectic nonprofit groups. It successfully rode the crest of the national health and fitness wave, drawing tens of thousands of new dues-paying members, especially in affluent suburban areas and the booming cities of the South and Southwest. It now serves about 13.5 million people, more than half of whom are women. +More surprisingly, the Y.M.C.A.'s traditional focus as a refuge for youth and family has placed the organization at the cusp of the nation's growing demand for child care. According to various surveys, the national network of 959 Y's and their 1,101 branches operate the country's largest child-care program, including both full-day and after-school programs that serve working families and single, inner-city parents on public aid. The Y.W.C.A., a separate organization with 425 centers, also offers child care and fitness programs and serves about two million people, most of them women. But it has not enjoyed the same level of growth as the Y.M.C.A. +Harold Davis, the executive director of the Oakland Housing Authority in California, and chairman of the organization's national board, said the explosion in child care underscores how such programs have expanded in the face of declining Federal investment in cities. +''We like to think of the Y.M.C.A. now as the perfect example of the kinds of public-private partnerships that must increasingly shoulder the burden,'' he said. ''We find ourselves doing more and more things that we used to think of as being within the province of the Government.'' He cited programs in which the Y.M.C.A. runs health and exercise programs for students in state schools for handicapped children, or develops therapy programs to serve elderly patients with circulatory or cardiovascular problems. +Bruce Newman, executive director of the Chicago Community Trust, which helps finance Y activities in Chicago, said that with fewer Federal dollars available to run social service programs, Y.M.C.A.'s have become more innovative. +''There are few other community organizations with their expertise and history in working on the streets with groups of young people,'' Mr. Newman said. ''Strategically, the Y now finds itself in the perfect place.'' +The growth in the last decade alone has been phenomenal. Since 1981, the number of people using Y's has increased an estimated 24 percent, according to the organization. At the same time, a study by the magazine The NonProfit Times showed the Y's and their branches together generated more than $1.3 billion in revenue in 1989, making it the nation's largest charity, topping the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army and Catholic Charities. Of that total, about 77 percent was earned income from membership dues and program and child-care fees. About 15 percent came from foundations, donations and fund-raising. The remainder came from public grants, investment and other income. +In some places, so many people have been drawn to the slick new gyms and exercise rooms at Y's that private health clubs have accused the group of unfair competition and pressed lawsuits, with mixed success, to strip the Y.M.C.A. of its status as a nonprofit organization. +In Portland, Ore., for example, a local Y became the first in the country to be assessed property taxes, after the Oregon Supreme Court last December affirmed a decision by a state taxing body concluding that the association was not offering enough ''donative services.'' +The court concluded that the Portland Y was using barely 4 percent of its budget to provide such things as scholarships, financial aid and discounts for older people. The Y.M.C.A. is appealing the decision, arguing that it has substantially shifted its program and is spending more than 50 percent of its current budget on such activities. +In Pennsylvania, a similar case is pending against the downtown Pittsburgh Y.M.C.A. But in Oakland, Calif., a local tax board rejected the arguments of a group of local health clubs that had sought to strip the association there of its nonprofit status. And in both Kansas and Illinois, lobbyists helped persuade state lawmakers to pass new statutes affirming the tax-exempt status of the organization to ward off possible lawsuits. +Solon B. Cousins, who for the last decade ran the association at its national headquarters in Chicago and oversaw its growth and expansion, said the challenges from private businesses have forced the organization to come to terms with its mission and its identity. +''Our success has made us more vulnerable,'' said Mr. Cousins, who retired in May as national executive director. ''But it also forced us to confront our own values, and to reaffirm our larger mission.'' +As a defense against those who accuse the Y.M.C.A. as unfairly profiting at the expense of private businesses, Mr. Cousins and other officials have been placing increasing emphasis on the Christian values they say are at the core of the Y's ambitions - trust, love, caring and a sense of selflessness. +''There is more to what we do than just get people in shape for their high school reunions,'' he said. ''Greed is not our controlling force. The point is, the Y has been and will always be a force for good in the life of the community.'' +The success of the Y.M.C.A. in generating new revenue has also enabled many local groups to embark on rebuilding and remodeling facilities, many of which were origially constructed near the turn of the century. +In the last decade, Y's across the country have put up $1 billion worth of new buildings, especially in the fast-growing cities and suburbs of the South and West, and another $500 million in new construction and renovation is on the drawing boards. +Not all Y.M.C.A.'s have experienced the boom of the last decade. In New York and Chicago and other older cities, where many of the facilities are in aging buildings and where the service areas include large numbers of poor people, there has been a continuing struggle to meet expenses. +''There is a lot of pressure on us to provide more and more social programs,'' said John W. Casey, who is the executive director of the Y.M.C.A. of Metropolitan Chicago. +In addition to the Y's traditional recreational programs, for example, the Chicago organization has embarked on an ambitious social mission that, among other things, includes a juvenile justice program, in which volunteers and specialists work with young people who have got in trouble with the law; a literacy program aimed at preschoolers, and a homemaker service that provides shopping and transportation assistance to elderly shut-ins. +On the city's North Side, it runs a job-training program for residents of a public housing complex. And there is an effort under way to revitalize the Y.M.C.A.'s housing programs. +Just after World War II, the association operated more than 75,000 residential rooms across the country, most of them in the Midwest and Northeast. Although there are fewer than 25,000 of those rooms remaining, many of them are being refurbished as units for the homeless. +At the Y branch here southwest of Milwaukee, there has been a deliberate effort to reach those not served in private clubs. There is, for example, a wide range of closely supervised athletic and exercise programs for the blind and the physically impaired, including a weekly wheelchair basketball league. +One of the regular users of the Nautilus and other exercise machines in the building's $75,000 workout room is Don Streich, a 52-year-old blind diabetic who was turned away from several private fitness clubs. ''The people at the Y just took me and gave me someone to work with,'' said Mr. Streich, whose exercise regimen is supervised by a volunteer. ''This isn't just the Y. This is my home.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: The Greenfield branch of the Milwaukee Y.M.C.A. has activities ranging from child-care programs to athletics for the elderly. (Tom Capp for The New York Times) (pg. C10) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +242 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 20, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +A Hudson Retreat Is Split by a Fight Over Development + +BYLINE: By ANTHONY DePALMA, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1, Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 965 words + +DATELINE: EDGEWATER, N.J. + +Joan Lawlor Reilly remembers taking the 125th Street Ferry across the Hudson River to this sliver of a waterfront town where her parents rented a shack and some sweet shade from a Dutchman named Goethius. +That was more than 50 years ago, and Ms. Lawlor Reilly, now 62, still lives here, although with additions and improvements over the years the shack is now a small house. But the land, incorporated in 1948 as a cooperative known as the Edgewater Colony, has gone through major changes. +There are still no sidewalks, no sewers and hardly any fences. All the land is owned by the 116 shareholders of the colony. But instead of the carefree rustic retreat it once was, the colony is contentious and divided. At the heart of the matter is a question any New York City co-op owner would recognize. Is the colony an investment or a home? +The conflict started with a rumor that someone wanted to buy the colony. +''That's the whole thing that makes it so crazy,'' said Lucien A. Fontaine, the harness driver and a resident since 1984. ''There's no offer. But perhaps it's for the best, because the community is going to be stronger for it.'' +Tucked into a jagged hillside in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge between River Road and the Hudson, the colony is one of the most unusual communities in the state. The entire 26 acres is owned cooperatively, and all but 30 shareholders live here. +Shareholders pay monthly maintenance fees for the land and equal portions of the property tax on the land. They own their houses and pay separately assessed property taxes on them. +The three roads in the community meander under tall densely canopied trees, sometimes turning back on themselves or leaving just barely enough room for an automobile to pass. +The homes make up an eccentric group. The tents that Ms. Lawlor Reilly remembers are gone, replaced by tar-paper shacks, expanded bungalows and California contemporaries costing more than $400,000 perched on rocky ledges with sweeping views of the river and Washington Heights. +In the late 1980's, when development swept much of the Hudson waterfront from the bridge to Jersey City, expensive houses were built in the colony, and many existing houses were modernized and expanded. +Over the last year a rumor, of which there are several versions, about an offer to buy the colony for $30 million or $58 million set residents chattering. There were also controversies brewing over how some people were spending too much or too little on their houses. +Mr. Fontaine and a group of shareholders, many relative newcomers, hired lawyers from big firms and spent more than $150,000 seeking a way to block a sale of the land to a developer. +Another group, which included many old-timers and elderly residents, insisted they had the right to sell, take the proceeds and move. +Older residents tended to favor a sale because they stood for the most part to make out very well. Because of the co-op status, the money would have been divided among the 116 shareholders. Those with big houses on the river would have received less than their houses were worth on the market, and those who owned shacks would have received substantially more. +Mr. Fontaine said he became involved because shareholders who did not live here were being allowed to vote in elections for the co-op board and would presumably be allowed to vote on a sales proposal, which he felt made it more likely that the land would change hands. +In May, Judge Arthur L. Lesemann of Superior Court ruled that nonresident stockholders could not be denied the right to vote. He did say that in the future the board could limit nonresidents' rights to own stock. + +Split in Elections +Some tensions lingered. After decades of complacency, some residents were reluctant to say hello if they passed one another on the street. Unsigned letters of criticism were dropped in mailboxes. +A month after the ruling, an election was held to fill five of the 10 seats on the board. Both sides put up full slates and campaigned fiercely. Three candidates favoring a sale and two who opposed a sale had the highest vote totals and won. Over all the votes were split almost evenly between the two slates. +Some residents saw that balanced turnout as representative of the community's true feelings about a sale. Under the bylaws, a sale would have to be approved by two-thirds of the shareholders. +''I feel the people have spoken,'' said Jack Ennis, a resident for more than 20 years and one of the 10 who joined Mr. Fontaine. ''They want the colony to stay as a single community.'' + +Letter From Broker +''Now that the litigation is over,'' Ms. Lawlor Reilly said, ''we're hoping sincerely that everybody gets back together so we can be the community we once were.'' +But there is evidence that might not be possible. Recently a shareholder who was not involved in the election, Michael J. Ignatieff, wrote an open letter to residents saying he was not for or against a sale, despite rumors that he had once tried to interest developers in the land. He is a real-estate broker. +''What I said was that if an offer should be presented, we should run it past an accountant, and if it holds water then it ought to be put to the shareholders for a vote,'' Mr. Ignatieff said. ''I told them, 'Love thy neighbor as thyself.' '' +Nothing that has occurred in the last few months would prevent a sale, but some residents said they believed that with the economy slowing, it was unlikely anyone would make a serious offer. +Mr. Ennis said he did not think that the legal battle proved that the colony's days were numbered or that the co-op form was no longer workable. ''Look, having 116 shareholders is like being in 116 marriages,'' he said. ''You've got to settle things yourself.'' + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Map of Hudson river area showin loacation of Edgewater Colony. (pg. B5) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +243 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 20, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Slain Woman 'Loved Her TV' and Baseball + +BYLINE: By GEORGE JAMES + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3, Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 674 words + +At 91 years of age, Susie White still did her own shopping, attended church on most Sundays, and enjoyed going on trips with the Senior Citizens Center of the James Monroe Houses in the Soundview section of the Bronx. +Late Monday evening she answered a knock at her third-floor apartment and faced a young woman who asked her for $5, the authorities said. +When Mrs. White refused, she was pushed back into her apartment, hit repeatedly over the head with her aluminum cane and fatally stabbed in the body and head with one or two knives from her kitchen, the authorities added. +The attacker took a ring, gold necklace and the 20-inch television set that Mrs. White had used to watch ball games. +''It's a vicious and brutal assault,'' said the chief of detectives for the housing police, Deputy Chief Vincent Pizzo. ''I've been on the job 28 years and I've seen a lot of horrible scenes, and I would have to say this is one of the worst. For $5, for an elderly woman to suffer through such an incident, it's really a tragedy.'' + +Guilty in Robbery Case +Early yesterday, a 21-year-old neighbor in Mrs. White's building, 1770 Story Avenue, was arrested and charged in the death. The suspect, Denise Solla, had been arrested twice before by the housing police on charges of robbery, said Deputy Chief Pizzo. A neighbor said Miss Solla had often gone around knocking on doors and asking for money. +She was arrested in November, received a six-month jail sentence that was suspended and was placed on probation, Deputy Chief Pizzo said. In May she was arrested again; that case is pending. +Housing detectives and investigators of the 43d Precinct squad said they believed that Mrs. White was killed at 8 or 8:30 P.M. on Monday. The body was found on Wednesday about 3 P.M. +A granddaughter became concerned when Mrs. White did not answer repeated telephone calls. +''She knocked on the door but received no answer,'' Deputy Chief Pizzo said. The granddaughter opened the door partway. ''Then she saw the blood and went to the management office, where 911 was called,'' the officer said. + +Cane and Knives Recovered +When the police arrived they saw Mrs. White on the living-room floor. The bedroom and kitchen had been ransacked. +A relative of Mrs. White, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity, said that she did not know the worth of the jewelry, but that the television set had been of prime importance in Mrs. White's life. +''It was her world,'' the relative said. ''She loved her TV. She loved her TV. I mean it was the only company she had. She loved baseball. She was a big baseball fan.'' +The television set and the necklace were recovered, but the ring was not, said Deputy Chief Pizzo. The police also recovered two knives that had been dropped down a hallway garbage chute into a compactor and Mrs. White's cane, which had been picked up by a sanitation truck with the garbage. + +'Canvassing the Tenants' +''How we come up with the perpetrator, as most cases are solved, is through canvassing the tenants, and the suspect's name came up as possibly having information on the case,'' he said. +The police picked up Miss Solla for questioning on Wednesday at 8 P.M. and arrested her at 4 A.M. yesterday on charges of second-degree murder, robbery, burglary and criminal possession of a deadly weapon. +Dorothy Kearney, who said she lived next door to Miss Solla, said that the woman had repeatedly been in trouble for three or four years and that her problems had grown this year after her mother died. +Mrs. Kearney, who said she had known Miss Solla since she was 5, added, ''She had been going around the building for most of the year, knocking on doors and begging small amounts of money.'' +Mrs. Kearney said she once gave Miss Solla $5 because the woman said she needed it to go to a welfare office. +Mrs. White's relative, a woman who was still in shock yesterday, said of the suspect: ''How could she do that? You're going to ask for $5 and not get it, so you kill her?'' +She could find no answer. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +244 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 22, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +28 Hurt as Bus Hits Girder On the Williamsburg Bridge + +BYLINE: By GEORGE JAMES + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1, Page 24, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 509 words + +Twenty-eight people were injured yesterday when a city bus skidded out of control on a rain-slicked roadway and slammed into an elevated train stanchion as the bus was exiting the Williamsburg Bridge, the authorities said. +Witnesses said the driver was trying to merge into another lane and skidded to avoid sideswiping another vehicle. The police said at least two bus passengers were in critical condition after the crash, which occurred at 4:55 P.M. +''I could hear the screaming of the women and children from across the divider,'' said Lieut. Gerard Owens, a firefighter who was driving to work at Engine Company 5 on the lower East Side of Manhattan when he heard ''a tremendous crash.'' +Lieutenant Owens said he pulled his car over and ran through the pouring rain to the bus, whose front was ''rolled up around the pillar'' of the J and M line. The front door was smashed and the side door was jammed, so he forced one of the emergency windows to get inside, he said. + +Crying and Moaning +Lieutenant Owens said there were about 35 people aboard the General Motors bus, which seats 40. Most were women, children and senior citizens. Some were unconcious, many were bleeding and Lieutenant Owens said he heard crying and moaning. Firefighter Philip Kelly of Ladder Company 154 in Queens, who was off duty, was already inside the bus, giving first aid and trying to remove the injured. +The driver, who was conscious, was trapped in the mangled front of the bus. He was later freed and taken to Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan with a fractured ankle, said a police spokeswoman, Sgt. Mary Wrensen. He was not identified by the police. +At Bellevue, the administrator on duty, Peter Schechtman, said four men and four women from the accident were being treated. Six were in fair and stable condition. One was a 9-year-old girl. +He said two people were in critical but stable condition, one a woman in her early 60's with head injuries, another a woman with possible internal injuries and a leg injury. +In addition to Bellevue, the injured were taken to St. Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center in Manhattan, to Woodhull Hospital and Kings County Medical Center in Brooklyn and to the City Hospital Center in Elmhurst, Queens, Sergeant Wrensen said. +The cause of the crash was under investigation, said a spokesman for the Transit Authority, Robert E. Slovak. +The B-39 bus, which makes the trip between Allen Street on the lower East Side of Manhattan to Washington Plaza in Williamsburg, was approaching the last stop on its route on the Brooklyn side of the bridge when the accident occurred, said Sergeant Wrensen. +One witness, Nelson Mason, of Queens Village, said, ''As he was merging, a mini-van came toward him from the side and he skidded into the pillar.'' +Hours later, the bus remained on the bridge in a grisly tableau: its front end mangled, its windshield blown out, transfer slips and a newspaper hanging from where the windshield used to be and a white baseball cap covered with blood lying on the road outside. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +245 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 22, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE NATION; +A Windfall Nears In Inheritances From The Richest Generation + +BYLINE: By NICK RAVO + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 4, Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1020 words + +WITH the wealthiest generation of elderly people in the country's history reaching the end of their lives, economists are trying to predict what will happen to their money. +The assumption is that a wave of inheritances will provide their children, the baby boom generation, with a windfall. But the Federal Government is also expected to keep its eyes on the money, and some economists predict a push for higher inheritance taxes to help solve the budget crisis. +''There has been a great run-up of wealth among the elderly,'' said Robert B. Avery, an assistant professor of economics at Cornell University. Much of this accumulation was built between the late 1940's and the late 1960's, when real wages and savings rates were higher and housing costs were lower. For the middle class, the most significant factor may be the escalation of real estate prices over the last 20 years. +''It's a substantial amount of wealth,'' said Frederick A. Elkind, vice president and director of the TrendSights division of the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency, which forecasts buying and spending habits. ''And there is a potential for a substantial amount of money and assets to be released or transferred to the baby boomers.'' +Not everyone believes there will be an inheritance boom. Cheryl Russell, the editor in chief of American Demographics magazine and the author of ''100 Predictions for the Baby Boom Generation,'' acknowledged the unprecedented wealth of today's older people, but she argued that the size of the baby boom generation has grown faster than the size of the parents' estates. ''Most people will inherit only a middling amount of money,'' she said. +Ms. Russell also maintained that a variety of variables, particularly health care costs, may reduce the size of many estates. ''It's counting chickens before they hatch,'' she said. +But many economists say that even when rising medical costs and other factors are taken into account, inherited wealth is expected to become a significant economic force. +According to Cornell's Department of Economics and Housing, the total worth of estates at death is expected to rise from $924.1 billion between 1987 and 1991 to $2.1 trillion between 2007 and 2011. The estimates are in 1990 dollars. +''Inheritances as a proportion of total wealth have been increasing over the last 20 to 25 years and will certainly continue increasing in the future,'' said Edward N. Wolff, a professor of economics at New York University. + +'The Rich Beget Rich' +In all, the 64 million baby boomers stand to inherit an estimated $6.8 trillion between 1987 and 2011. Of course not everyone will benefit equally. According to the Cornell study, the richest 1 percent of the population will divide one-third of the worth of the estates, each receiving an average inheritance of $3.6 million; the next richest 9 percent will divide another third for an average inheritance of about $396,000; the remaining 90 percent will share the rest. That means an average inheritance of only about $40,000 for this group. ''The rich beget rich,'' Mr. Avery said. Mr. Elkind predicted that much of the wealth may be passed on as property that, depending on market conditions, may be sold or used as second homes. He said that the prospect of inheritances will help many baby boomers maintain highly leveraged, spendthrift lives. But he also predicted that many inheritances will be used to make gifts to charity or to help meet tuition costs for members of the so-called boomlet generation. ''It wouldn't surprise me if we started seeing more people put their kids in private schools, especially with the baby boomers having fewer kids,'' he said. +Predictions of an inheritance boom may also lead to efforts to raise inheritance taxes, close loopholes or lower the tax exemption levels. The Federal estate tax now ranges from 37 to 55 percent of the value of an estate exceeding $600,000, or, in some cases, $1.2 million if the money is left by a couple. +''The dead don't vote,'' said Thomas J. Drew, an estate lawyer in New York City and Westport, Conn. ''And with legislators groping to reduce the deficit, it's a more politically palatable target than income taxes.'' +The argument for increased inheritance taxes has won favor among some people who oppose most taxes. The philosopher Robert Nozick, known for his libertarian views, recommends that the Government lay claim to estates after they pass beyond one generation. +''It sticks out as a special kind of unearned benefit that produces unequal opportunities,'' Mr. Nozick said. + +'Wooing Retirees' +Some conservatives, however, have argued that inheritance taxes are unfair because they represent double taxation or are ''anti-family.'' And, so far, many state governments seem more interested in reducing their inheritance taxes. In the last two years, for example, Idaho repealed its tax, and Wisconsin is phasing out its tax. +''It brings in a relatively low amount, and it makes states non-competitive for attracting retirees,'' said Corina Eckl, a senior policy analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver. +Furthermore, many people avoid inheritance taxes by giving away some of their money before they die. Others, worried about paying for long-term health care, give away estates so they can qualify for Medicaid. +Looking further into the future, some economists predict that the wealth of today's elderly may have particularly striking effects not on their children but on their grandchildren. +This may be especially true considering that baby boomers are having smaller families than their parents had and are often supporting themselves with two incomes. +''The potential for boomer wealth, in theory, should be even greater than for their parents, because they have been accumulating their own wealth with their parents' wealth,'' Mr. Elkind said. ''It could reach a critical mass and be a tremendous windfall for their children.'' +Then again, he added, baby boomers will likely live longer than their parents did. ''Their kids may have to wait a long time to benefit fully,'' he said. + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +246 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 22, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +Poland's Black Madonna + +BYLINE: By Drusilla Menaker; Drusilla Menaker is a journalist living in Warsaw. +It is more than two months until publication, but "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis continues to be the subject of rumors and speculation. The novel, the catalogue says, is about a young, handsome and successful Wall Street worker who "can't stop killing people -- women, men, children -- in ever more gruesome ways.". +Mr. Ellis's agent, Amanda Urban, said that when the manuscript was delivered to Simon & Schuster, "there was some feeling of revulsion on the part of some of the younger women there." But their revulsion eventually dissolved, she said, as had some of the initial revulsion to Mr. Ellis's 1985 novel, "Less Than Zero," about drugs and bisexuality on a college campus. +If some wonder why a house would publish a book that made some of its own staffers queasy, the answer is that Simon & Schuster, like many other publishers, contends that a book represents the author's expression. Moreover, Mr. Ellis's book about drugs and bisexuality was a best seller. +"It probably will upset some readers, because of its quite graphic depiction of sex and violence," said Robert Asahina, the editor of "American Psycho." +A sampling of bookstores did not turn up any that had refused to order the book. Barbara Morrow, co-owner of the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vt., said Mr. Ellis, who graduated from Bennington College in 1986, had a following in that area. +"But I'm not going to advertise the book," she said, "or put it in the window, but I'll carry it. I don't think we could ever take the position that we wouldn't buy a book by a well-known author, regardless of subject matter, but we're taking a very low profile on 'American Psycho.' " + +LOAD-DATE: October 24, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +358 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 25, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +MIDEAST TENSIONS; +A Freed British Hostage Tells of 'Sadistic Guards' + +BYLINE: By SHEILA RULE, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 12; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 599 words + +DATELINE: LONDON, Oct. 24 + +A British hostage who was freed by Iraq returned home to England today after asserting that Westerners held at an armaments factory outside Baghdad rioted over mistreatment by what he called "sadistic guards." +The hostage, Jim Thomson, was among 32 sick and elderly Britons who were allowed to leave Iraq on Tuesday. Their release came after former Prime Minister Edward Heath met with the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, on Sunday and negotiated their freedom with Baghdad officials. + Shortly before leaving Baghdad, Mr. Thomson gave reporters an account of captivity that was the first to allege Iraqi mistreatment of foreigners since Baghdad moved about 700 American, British, French, German and Japanese detainees to strategic sites to deter attack by foreign forces in the Persian Gulf. +The Times of London quoted Mr. Thomson as having said that he was initially taken to a chemical weapons factory about 35 miles southwest of Baghdad, where hostages were generally well treated and received good accommodation. But on Sept. 23, he said, he was moved to "an armaments factory about the same distance from the capital which was disgusting." + +'Down, Down Saddam!' + "There were no toilets," said Mr. Thomson, 50 years old, who was freed because of a heart condition. "The food consisted of rice and tomato water, which we discovered we were supposed to use to help soften the stale bread we were fed. We had sadistic guards who would punch the hostages just for the sake of it, although I was never hit myself. +"Some of the Britons we referred to as sheep because they accepted this treatment, but about 15 of us -- Japanese, German, American and British -- rioted on Sept. 29, smashing all the windows, pulling down doors and a fence and chanting, 'Down, down Saddam!' " +Press reports quoted Mr. Thomson as having said the detainees who took part in the protest were forced into their rooms at gunpoint by guards. He said a French protester was put in solitary confinement after using abusive language when an Iraqi Army major asked the men why they had rioted. +"They came for me and the other ring leaders on Oct. 1," Mr. Thomson told The Times. He worked in Kuwait as general manager of a British engineering company until the Iraqi invasion on Aug. 2 and was taken to Baghdad by Iraqi forces later that month. +"But I was fortunate and instead of punishment they moved me to an atomic center where we had good food and good treatment," he said. + +Hostages 'Want Some Action' + Mr. Thomson told reporters that most Westerners held at installations believed that military action had to be taken against Iraq. +"They are not frightened, they just want some action," he said. "In general, the opinion of the hostages is, 'Let it happen.' " +Another hostage freed on Tuesday warned of mounting health problems among those still trapped in Iraq. The hostage, Dr. Ronald Eccles, director of the Common Cold and Nasal Research Center at the University College of Wales in Cardiff, said that strain and uncertainty were taking their toll on other captives. +Dr. Eccles, who was on a monthlong lecture tour in Iraq before being detained in August, suffers from severe arthritis. He said that stress had caused his joints to swell and that he was having difficulty walking. +"There are a lot of stress-related diseases coming out," Dr. Eccles told The Press Association, Britain's domestic news agency. "People have been developing heart trouble and diabetes. If they had any medical problems in the past, they are flaring up and are made much worse by the ordeal." + +LOAD-DATE: October 25, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Mark Ward, a Marine sergeant who was among the hostages released by Iraq, drinking champagne with friends and family members after arriving last night at Kennedy International Airport in New York. (Steve Berman for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +359 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 25, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Menopause Is Found No Bar to Pregnancy + +BYLINE: By GINA KOLATA + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1251 words + +In a remarkable advance, researchers have shown that older women who have gone through menopause can easily become pregnant using donated eggs. +The results, being published today, give women who have been considered hopelessly infertile an unexpected second chance, the researchers said. "It turned their lives around," said Dr. Mark V. Sauer of the University of Southern California, who led the group that conducted the study. + Dr. Sauer and his colleagues at the university reported in The New England Journal of Medicine that four of seven post-menopausal women 40 to 44 years old became pregnant and gave birth to healthy babies. One of the women gave birth to twins. +Of the three remaining women, one had a stillborn baby and is trying again, another had a miscarriage and the third, whose husband's sperm were defective, did not become pregnant, researchers said. +This is the sort of pregnancy outcome that would normally be expected in younger women with no fertility problems, Dr. Sauer said. +The eggs for the older women were donated by younger women and fertilized with sperm from the older women's husbands in the laboratory, then implanted in their wombs. +"So long as the woman is in good health, there is no reason why she shouldn't be able to do this," Dr. Sauer said. "There may be 50-year-old women who should be able to do this." +The women had gone through menopause at least two years before entering the study. There have been no detailed studies indicating how long after menopause a woman would be able to bear a child. +Doctors used donated eggs in recent years to help women in their 30's or younger who had gone through menopause prematurely. But most researchers had been reluctant to try this fertilization method in older women because they thought that after the age of 40, a woman's uterus was not as capable of sustaining a pregnancy. +Women in their 40's miscarry half of their pregnancies, Dr. Sauer said, while those in their early 30's miscarry 15 percent. +Dr. Marcia Angell, an editor at the medical journal, wrote in an accompanying editorial, "The limits on childbearing years are now anyone's guess; perhaps they will have more to do with the stamina required for labor and 2 A.M. feedings than with reproductive function." +Dr. Joseph Schulman, director of the Genetics and IVF Institute in Fairfax, Va., and a pioneer in laboratory fertilization, said the upper age limit for pregnancy was "in the 50's, certainly." + +Latest in Series of Advances + The findings were the latest in a series of technical advances in the last 12 years that have enabled doctors to help women have babies, +In the new study, the researchers found egg donors through word of mouth and by paying them $1,500. The donors had their ovaries stimulated with hormones so that they would produce as many eggs as possible. At the same time, the infertile women took hormones to simulate a menstrual cycle that was synchronized with the cycle of the donor. After the eggs were fertilized and implanted in the uteruses of the infertile women, the doctors gave them hormones for the first 100 days of the pregnancy to make up for hormones that their ovaries would have produced if they had not gone through menopause. + +Eggs, Not Uteruses, Are Suspect + To the investigators' surprise, they learned that the main reason older women have a harder time having babies is that their eggs are deteriorating, not, as had previously been assumed, that their uteruses are less capable of sustaining a pregnancy. This means, infertility experts said, that women who are in their early 40's and who are still ovulating yet who are having great difficulty getting pregnant might do better if they used eggs donated by a younger woman. +"Our feeling is that the biggest interest in these results will not be menopausal women but will be women over 40 who have failed to get pregnant with other technologies," Dr. Sauer said. +He said that without donated eggs women in their 40's have only about a 5 percent chance of becoming pregnant and maintaining the pregnancy to term, no matter what method of fertility enhancement they use. +"These women have almost a zero percent chance of having a baby," Dr. Sauer said. "They go from a zero percent chance to a chance as good as a younger woman." + +Other Doctors Use Method + A few other doctors, including Dr. Schulman, have quietly begun using donated eggs to help older women become pregnant, with stunning success, but have not always published their results. +Dr. David Meldrum, a clinical professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, who is past president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, said that in his experience women whose only problem was that they had gone through menopause were more likely to become pregnant through the laboratory fertilization method than were younger infertile women who might have had subtle hormonal or physical problems. Dr. Sauer added that there probably is an age at which a woman's uterus is too old to sustain a pregnancy, but until researchers have much more experience with menopausal women having babies, they will not know what that age is. +But Dr. Zef Rosenwacks, who directs Cornell University's fertilization program, said that although he has used donated eggs to produce pregnancies in a few women in their 40's who have been through menopause, he would not routinely recommend the procedure. +"One has to weigh the obstetrical risk along with the technical ability to do something," Dr. Rosenwacks said. "Just because we can get a woman pregnant at almost any age does not mean that she should assume the risks. The older a woman gets, the more likely she is to have a medical problem that might interfere with a normal pregnancy." For example, she could have diabetes or heart disease. + +Laboratory Success Rate Low + Dr. Meldrum said that national data indicate that a woman under 40 has a 12 percent chance of having a baby when her own eggs are fertilized in the laboratory and returned to her womb while the rate drops to 4 percent after the age of 40. He said that one hypothesis is that a woman's best eggs are gone by the time she reaches that age. +"At puberty, there are 400,000 eggs in the ovary,"Dr. Meldrum said. "By age 40, there are just a few thousand left." These eggs are thought to be the worst of the group. He said that in each menstrual cycle about 1,000 eggs begin to ripen but only one matures fully and the rest die. +"It is presumed that the most sensitive and normal eggs are the ones that ripen," Dr. Meldrum said. "Gradually, the ones that are least sensitive are the ones that are left." +Dr. Sauer said that most fertilization centers had shunned older women because they might lower the clinics' success rates and make them less competitive with other centers. +Dr. Sauer said his group also focused on younger women at first to demonstrate that it could compete with other centers by publishing a high success rate. But after establishing themselves, Dr. Sauer said the researchers decided to heed the pleas of the older women, some of whom had gone through menopause while trying to have a baby. +"We said, 'Let's just do the older women. The worst that can happen is that they won't do as well,' " Dr. Sauer said. But when he offered fertilization in the laboratory with donated eggs to women who had gone through menopause, "lo and behold, they did just as well as the younger women," he said. + +LOAD-DATE: October 25, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +360 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 26, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +BUSINESS DIGEST + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 547 words + + +THE BUDGET MARATHON + Budget negotiators said they had agreed on a way to shield the elderly from a heavy burden of Medicare cost-sharing. [Page A1.] + With the end of the ordeal in sight, bleary-eyed lawmakers tied the last knots in the package in preparation for votes today. [A20.] + Tax specialists said the plan's purported burden on the rich is a misrepresentation. [A21.] + The agreement might make the hard times engulfing the U.S. economy slightly harder next year, economists say. [A21.] + +THE ECONOMY + Airlines have begun cracking down on bargain hunters who bend rules stated on the ticket. [A1.] + The former owner of a Texas savings institution was indicted on 37 charges involving bank fraud, misapplication of funds and conspiracy to defraud regulators. [D1.] + A former Federal savings examiner recounted how she was harassed by superiors and ultimately dismissed for raising questions about the condition of a large S.& L. [D1.] + The Senate Ethics Committee ordered an inquiry into the release of documents related to the Senators linked to Keating. [A24.] + A former Drexel salesman testified that Michael Milken once told him that securities owned by the firm were sometimes secretly held by Columbia Savings. [D1.] + +COMPANIES + The nation's fourth-largest credit-card business was put up for sale. Its owner, MNC Financial, has heavy real estate losses. [D1.] + Unisys reported a loss of $356.8 million and said it would eliminate 5,000 jobs. [D3.] + American's chairman said he would have paid more than United to get Pan Am's routes between the U.S. and London. [D5.] +USAir and Delta reported large third-quarter losses, but UAL posted a healthy profit. [D6.] + Laventhol & Horwath told its nearly 3,500 employees that they would have to take a 10 percent pay cut for three months. [D6.] + An ad in The New York Review of Books has strained relations between Random House and Farrar, Straus. [D20.] + The newspaper deliverers' union struck The Daily News last night, setting off a climactic labor confrontation with the management of the financially ailing paper, Other unions said they would honor the picket lines. [A1.] + Philips said it would slash 35,000 to 45,000 jobs to bolster profits and improve competitiveness. [D3.] + +INTERNATIONAL + The U.S. has proposed a relaxation of export controls on high-performance computers. [D2.] + +MARKETS + Oil was up sharply for the second day, continuing on an erratic path. Crude closed at $34.25, up $3.17. [D1.] + Stocks slid in the wake of rising oil prices and renewed war jitters, with the Dow off 20.05, to 2,484.16. [D8.] + Treasury securities prices rose slightly, and long-term interest rates dipped. [D16.] + The dollar rebounded on world currency markets. [D17.] Gold prices continued to climb. [D17.] + +TODAY'S COLUMNS + Legislators who vote for the budget legislation will do so holding their noses. Leonard Silk: Economic Scene. [D2.] + Fidelity Investments will refuse buy orders if it believes the buyers are following a market-timing service. Floyd Norris: Market Place. [D8.] + Some of the biggest black-owned ad agencies and media companies have formed a trade organization. Advertising. [D20.] + +LOAD-DATE: October 26, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +361 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 26, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +THE STRUGGLE IN CONGRESS; +Crossing the 'T' in Taxes, Lawmakers Turn Eyes to Votes on Deficit Deal + +BYLINE: By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1125 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 + +With the end of the budget ordeal in sight, bleary-eyed lawmakers throughout the Capitol tied the last knots in a compromise tax and spending package today in preparation for votes Friday on the biggest deficit-reduction measure in history. +The White House gave the compromise a backhanded endorsement. Marlin Fitzwater, Mr. Bush's press secretary, said the President was satisfied with the overall measure, which is supposed to cut the deficit by $40 billion this year and $500 billion over five years. + But a senior White House official trying to regain the political offensive 12 days before the Congressional elections, called reporters into the Roosevelt Room to issue a broadside against Democrats for having forced the President to raise taxes. The official spoke on the condition that he not be identified. + +Working on the Numbers + In the Capitol, Representative Dan Rostenkowski, the Illinois Democrat who heads the Ways and Means Committee, and Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, the chairman of the Finance Committeee, worked into the night to put actual numbers on the tax provisions -- how much money would have to be earned, for instance, before deductions and exemptions were reduced and what would be the precise size of the gasoline tax increase. +These last-minute adjustments are typical of major legislation and do not mean the package is in jeopardy. +Down the hall, legislators settled on Medicare benefits far more generous to the elderly than what had emerged last month from negotiations between the White House and Congressional leaders, although benefits would be reduced below the current level. +In another room, more legislators wrapped up the final aspects of child-care legislation, and elsewhere, still others worked on procedures to make it difficult to raise spending or cut taxes in the years ahead. + +A Top Tax Rate of 31% + The big-ticket items were basically locked up Wednesday, including these: +*A top tax rate of 31 percent, up from 28 percent now, on taxable income above about $80,000 for couples. +*Two provisions to push the tax rate of the wealthy above 31 percent on a portion of their income, even though no taxpayers will pay more than 31 percent of their total income in taxes. Itemized deductions would be lowered on incomes above about $100,000. Personal exemptions would be phased out for individuals with taxable income above $100,000 and for couples with incomes above $150,000. In addition, the alternative minimum tax would be raised to 23 percent from 21 percent for affluent taxpayers with many deductions. +*Capital gains would be taxed at a top rate of 28 percent, even for well-off taxpayers who would be paying more than 31 percent on a portion of their income. +*The gasoline tax would rise by at least 5 or 6 cents a gallon above the current 9 cents. +*The wages on which the 1.45 percent Medicare tax would be applied would rise to at least $125,000 from $51,300 now. +*New luxury taxes would be levied on expensive cars, boats, planes, furs and jewelry, and the taxes on tobacco products and alcoholic beverages would be increased substantially. +But the details were still being negotiated tonight. +The House favors a flat increase in the gasoline tax. The Senate wants an even higher tax in years to come if fuel prices fall below their current level. + +Differences on Deductions + The House wants to cut itemized deductions by 3 percent of total income above $100,000, or by $300 for every $10,000 of income over $100,000. The Senate would reduce deductions by 4 percent of income above $125,000. +The House would phase out personal exemptions at a rate of 2 percent for each $2,500 of income above $100,000 for single taxpayers and $150,000 for couples filing jointly. The Senate would phase them out at a 1 percent rate, meaning that the exemptions would not be completely phased out until a couple's income reached $400,000. +These disagreements did not seem likely to derail the agreement. Asked if he saw important deals coming unstuck, Representative William H. Gray 3d of Pennsylvania, the Democratic whip, said, "No snags." + +Fragile Aspects of Accord + Even before they were enacted, some of the basic aspects of the compromise seemed fragile. +For example, the senior White House official who offered views to reporters today said that one of the first pieces of legislation the President would offer next year would be one to cut the capital gains tax rate. +And Democrats promised that H.R. 1, the number assigned to the first bill introduced in each Congress, would be given in January to a bill to place a stiff surtax on millionaires. They were forced to drop the surtax idea this year as the price of support from President Bush and Senate Republicans. +Amid these developments, party whips and the White House were working to round up votes for the compromise. +While they would not disclose their tallies, the smiles on the faces of Democratic whips in the House and those of both parties in the Senate indicated that enough votes were available to enact the package. +President Bush had several Republicans to the White House today and, this afternoon, dispatched John H. Sununu, the White House chief of staff, and Richard G. Darman, the budget director, to Capitol Hill to meet with an assembly of all House Republicans. + +'Backed Us in a Corner' + Sherwood L. Boehlert, a Republican from upstate New York, said: "Darman and Sununu told us we have a basic agreement. They said it's not the best possible agreement, but the Democrats have backed us in a corner. They said we have to govern." +John R. Kasich, an Ohio Republican, said the lawmakers had also been told, however, that if they could not vote for the package, there would be "no hard feelings." +Despite the pleas from the White House, senior Republicans said they would be surprised if more than 50 of the 176 Republican representatives voted for the measure. +If there are 50 Republican votes, the votes of 167 of the 257 Democrats will be needed for passage. The House has two vacant seats. +At a meeting of the New York delegation this morning, several members, headed by Charles B. Rangel, a Democrat from Manhattan, expressed their opposition to the measure, some on the ground that it was not tough enough on the wealthy and others on the ground that they opposed all tax increases. But a solid majority of the delegation seemed likely to support the bill. +The outlook i the Senate was less clear. But the top party leaders, George J. Mitchell, Democrat of Maine, and Bob Dole, Republican of Kansas, are squarely behind the legislation. +Unlike the House, the Senate almost never rejects legislation that has the support of the bipartisan leadership. + +LOAD-DATE: October 26, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Lawmakers yesterday went about the business of tying up the loose ends in the new compromise package for the budget. At one of the meetings yesterday were, from, left, Senators Bob Packwood; George J. Mitchell, majority leader; Bob Dole, minority leader, and Lloyd Bentsen. (Andrea Mohin/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +362 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 26, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +THE STRUGGLE IN CONGRESS; +ELDERLY SHIELDED FROM BIG INCREASE IN MEDICARE COSTS + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1392 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 + +House and Senate budget negotiators said today they had agreed on how to shield the elderly from any large increase in Medicare costs, one of the last outstanding issues in the deficit-reduction package Congress and the White House have been laboring on for nearly two months. +The agreement involves only a modest increase in Medicare costs for the elderly but substantial cuts in Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals. + The negotiators also agreed on a significant expansion of Medicaid to cover all poor children through the age of 18 by the year 2001. Many governors have opposed Federal requirements for Medicaid expansion, fearing they would saddle the states with enormous new costs, but Congress concluded that poor children are entitled to health insurance coverage even in a time of austerity. + +Compromise Nears Completion + The agreements on Medicare and Medicaid came as Congressional leaders neared completion of a compromise tax-and-spending package in preparation for votes Friday on the largest deficit-reduction plan in history. [Page A20.] +At the White House, Marlin Fitzwater, the press secretary, said President Bush was satisfied with the overall measure, which is supposed to cut the deficit by $40 billion this year and $500 billion over five years. But a senior Administration official attacked the Democrats, asserting they had forced the President to raise taxes. And the White House objected unsuccessfully to "the mandatory expansion of Medicaid" to cover additional poor children. +The relatively favorable terms toward beneficiaries, particularly the elderly, in the agreements on Medicare and Medicaid were essential to win political support among Democrats, the Speaker of the House, Thomas S. Foley, said. + +Higher Payroll Taxes + Over all, the changes in the Medicare program would save roughly $43 billion over five years, substantially less than the $60 billion target in the budget summit agreement negotiated by White House officials and Congressional leaders at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. But much of the extra cost would be offset by new revenues, resulting from a dramatic increase in the amount of earnings subject to the Medicare payroll tax. +Mr. Foley said the agreement would include provisions of the House-passed budget bill intended to "reduce the burden on Medicare beneficiaries." The summit agreement and a budget bill passed last week by the Senate would have required the 33 million Medicare beneficiaries to share more of the program's costs. Democrats, who often campaign as protectors of the elderly, demanded a reduction in that burden as a condition for supporting the deficit-reduction plan. +Ronald F. Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a lobby for the elderly, said, "The compromise on Medicare is beginning to look much more like the House package than the Senate package, and that is good news for Medicare beneficiaries of moderate income." +Under the tentative agreement, the monthly Medicare premium for insurance covering doctors' bills, now $28.60, would rise gradually over five years to $46.20, as provided in the House bill. The $75 Medicare deductible, which is paid once a year by users of physician services, would rise to $100 in 1991 and would stay at that level in later years. The summit plan called for further increases in the deductible, to $125 in 1992 and $150 in 1993. + +Doctors to Get Less + While the elderly would pay less than envisioned in the summit plan, doctors and hospitals would pay more. The new agreement would save $32 billion to $33 billion over five years by paring Medicare payments to such health-care providers, as against $30 billion envisioned in the budget summit accord. +Lawmakers and lobbyists are still fighting over details of payments to doctors and hospitals. But they said it was clear that the final bill would trim reimbursements to them in myriad ways: reducing the inflation adjustment in hospital payments, reducing the allowance for the cost of hospital equipment and construction, cutting payments to doctors for "overpriced procedures" and freezing payments for physician services other than primary care. +Authoritative studies done for the Government concluded that Medicare payments for primary care, such as routine office visits, were inexplicably low when compared with national norms for all physician services. +As an example of the payment cuts to doctors under the compromise emerging from Congress, reimbursements to radiologists would be cut 6 percent to 7 percent below the amounts they would otherwise receive for treating Medicare patients in the current fiscal year. + +Power of the Elderly + Gary W. Price, director of government relations at the American College of Radiology, said, "When members of Congress decided it was impossible to raise Medicare beneficiary premiums much, they looked to health-care providers for additional savings." +"Our group, with slightly more than 20,000 members, and other health-care providers do not have nearly as much influence as a group like the American Association of Retired Persons, with more than 30 million members," Mr. Price said. +House and Senate negotiators have tentatively agreed to mandate Medicaid coverage of poor children through age 18. Current law requires coverage of poor children through age 5. Starting in 1991, state Medicaid programs would have to cover poor children 8 years old and under. The pool of eligible youngsters would expand gradually over the next decade until it includes all poor children through age 18. + +An Extraordinary Coalition + Federal and state governments share Medicaid costs, with states paying an average of 44 percent of the total. The National Governors Association has argued against mandatory expansion of Medicaid. But an extraordinary coalition of doctors, hospitals, insurers, business groups and children's advocates lobbied for it. +"This is exciting, more than we could have hoped for, and we are very pleased," said Kay Johnson, director of health issues at the Children's Defense Fund, a private group that lobbies for assistance to children. +The House-Senate compromise on Medicaid would also permit states to cover children through the age of 5 in families that are not poor but have incomes no more than 85 percent above the official poverty level. That would permit coverage of a family of three with income up to $18,287 this year. (A family of three earning less than $9,885 in 1989 was classified as living in poverty.) + +Fast-Growing Program + Even with the proposed cutbacks, Medicare would remain one of the fastest-growing programs in the Federal budget for several reasons: The elderly population is growing, health care costs are rising faster than the Consumer Price Index and the volume of physician services is growing even as the Government controls prices by limiting Medicare fees to doctors. +The new budget agreement continues the trend of the last eight years toward mind-boggling complexity in the formulas used to calculate Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals. House and Senate negotiators have tentatively agreed to reduce the inflation adjustment in payments to hospitals for in-patient care by 2 percentage points this year, 1.5 points next year and 1.4 points in 1993. At the same time, they would pay hospitals only 95 percent of the recognized costs of out-patient services. +A volatile political issue, still unresolved, is how to compensate inner-city hospitals and isolated rural hospitals that have exceptionally high costs. House negotiators are fighting for $2.5 billion in extra Medicare payments to urban hospitals, while Senate negotiators want to distribute $1.4 billion to rural hospitals. +Members of Congress said they had made progress in settling disagreements between the House and the Senate over a proposd child-care program, which would provide $2.5 billion in Federal grants to the states over three years. Negotiators have agreed on who will be eligible for the program, meant to help low-income families. But they have yet to work out such details as how to expand the Federal income tax credit for low-income working families with children. +Many Democrats contend that an increase in the tax credit is essential to make the overall deficit-reduction package more progressive. + +LOAD-DATE: October 26, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +363 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 26, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +MIDEAST TENSIONS; +Heath Says Iraq Would Use Chemical Arsenal If Attacked + +BYLINE: REUTERS + +SECTION: Section A; Page 10; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 96 words + +DATELINE: LONDON, Oct. 25 + +Edward Heath, the former British Prime Minister, has told colleagues that President Saddam Hussein of Iraq warned that he was prepared to use chemical weapons and mistreat hostages if attacked, Britain's national news agency reported today. + The Press Association said Mr. Heath made the remarks while briefing members of the ruling Conservative Party on his three-hour meeting with President Hussein in Baghdad on Sunday, when he negotiated the release of sick and elderly Britons held in Iraq. +Mr. Heath was not immediately available for comment on the report. + +LOAD-DATE: November 6, 1991 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +364 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 27, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +NEWS SUMMARY + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1196 words + + +International 2-5 +Israel's report on the shooting deaths of 21 Palestinians in Jerusalem criticized senior Israeli police commanders for being unprepared but concluded that the police who fired the shots were blameless. Page 1 +Excerpts from the Israeli commission's report 5 +Saudi Arabia remains committed against Iraq, King Fahd said, ordering an end to further conciliatory-sounding remarks to Iraq like those made earlier this week by his brother, the Defense Minister. 4 +Secretary of State James Baker will go to Saudi Arabia soon to counter Saddam Hussein's efforts to split the coalition confronting Iraq and to coordinate with the Saudis the next steps in resolving the crisis. 4 +A warning of a terrorist attack against a passenger ship in the eastern Mediterranean was issued by the State Department. The warning was unusually explicit. 4 + A new Security Council resolution declaring Iraq responsible for financial losses caused by the invasion and ordering governments to present evidence of war crimes moved close to approval. 5 +Pamphlet tells American soldiers what to say and not say 4 +Pakistan's election was mostly fair, and any irregularities that did occur did not significantly affect the outcome, an international observer delegation said. 3 +East German Communist officials illegally transferred $70 million to Moscow, former party leaders admitted. Two officials were arrested in connection with the incident. 3 +President Gorbachev visited Spain on the first of a series of trips abroad aimed at drumming up Western support for his program of economic and political change. 3 +Konin Journal: Poland's uncharted campaign trail 2 + + National 6-10, 24 +New standards for health insurance purchased by 23 million elderly Americans to supplement coverage provided through Medicare were established by House and Senate negotiators. 1 +News analysis: The tax compromise seems at first glance to revive the comatose tax shelter industry, but experts say it will make it more difficult to exploit tax gimmicks. 1 +The budget deal fell short of its goal of reducing the Federal deficit by $500 billion over five years. As votes on the plan neared, lawmakers found the deal would cut $490 billion. 8 +The budget deficit was $220.4 billion for 1990, just under the record of $221.2 billion in 1986, the Treasury Department announced. The deficit was 45 percent higher than in 1989. 8 +Now President Bush hits the trail "Harry Truman-style" 9 +A tentative child care measure was approved by House and Senate negotiators. The plan would provide grants to states to subsidize care programs and extend tax credits for low-income families with children. 10 +The 101st Congress lurches toward adjourment -- in a hurry 9 +Major legislation moves ahead in both houses of Congress 9 +An agreement on aviation legislation was reached by White House and Congressional negotiators that would eliminate most of the airlines' noisier passenger jets from the skies by the turn of the century. 1 + Pilots who flew jet while intoxicated are sentenced to prison 6 +Mayor Marion Barry was sentenced by a Federal judge to six months in prison and a year on probation for his conviction on a misdemeanor charge of possessing cocaine. 1 +The Minnesota gubernatorial race took a strange twist when the Republican candidate, Jon Grunseth, called a news conference to announce his withdrawal amid charges of sexual misdeeds, then changed his mind. 6 +A repair job on the Hubble telescope by space shuttle astronauts is being considered by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which faces pressure from astronomers to fix the $1.5 billion telescope. 7 +Scientists say they have grown hair in a test tube 24 + +Regional 25-28 +The Daily News struggled to publish as it began dismissing the members of nine unions that decided to strike. An army of nonunion writers, editors, pressmen and drivers was flown in from across the country. 1 +News analysis: The Daily News had been hoping for and perhaps even trying to provoke a strike that the paper's labor leaders had sought desparately to avoid. 1 +Daily News reporters caught between labor and management 26 +Layoffs of up to 35,000 workers could be needed if the city keeps its commitment for a 5.5 percent raise for teachers and gives anything comparable to other workers, the Dinkins administration warned. 1 +The Board of Education agreed to cut the full $94 million from its budget, as requested by Mayor Dinkins. School officials have said the cuts could mean hundreds of layoffs and reductions of some programs. 25 +After spending $1 million, Governor Cuomo still has $5 million 27 The Dime Savings Bank reports loss and suspends dividends 31 +A dress code at a Brooklyn school received a hearty endorsement from the people it affects the most: the students. Frank Mickens, the principal at Boys and Girls High School, wants all boys to wear ties. 25 +C. Vernon Mason's request to be defendant's lawyer is rejected 27 +Hempstead High School was closed because of a botched asbestos-removal program. Students in the Long Island school district have been forced to attend split sessions in the district's middle school. 25 +The race for Jim Florio's old seat in New Jersey's First Congressional District ought to belong to Bob Andrews, the Democrat, but his opponent, Dan Mangini, is gaining ground by running against Mr. Florio. 25 +Census workers to revisit homes falsely counted in New Jersey 27 +Karpov has advantage as seventh game of match adjourns 28 + +Business Digest 31 + +Arts/Entertainment +"Godfather III" produces unrest 11 +Jersey Symphony trims season 11 +Theater: "Polygraph" 12 +Film: "Graveyard Shift" 12 +Music: "Un Ballo in Maschera" 11 +An anniversary for de Larrocha 13 +Italian contemporary festival 15 +Clurman's New York Concert Singers 15 +10,000 Maniacs retrospective 17 +Roy Hargrove, jazz trumpeter 17 +Dance: Rebecca Kelly troupe 14 +JoAnn Fregalette Jansen 14 +Books: Poetry by William Jay Smith and James Dickey 16 + +Consumer's World 48 +How to pay the bills when you can't +The storm over check printing +Coping with lighting for safety + +Obituaries +William S. Paley, ex-chairman of CBS Inc. 1 +Major (Mule) Holley, bassist 28 +Joseph Johnson, headed endowment for peace research 28 + +Sports +Basketball: Coleman passes physical 45 +Knicks need consistency from Wilkins 45 +Boxing: "Other guy" now champion 43 +Column: Anderson on the fight 43 +Football: Castoffs find home with Giants 43 +Hofstra a Division III terror 45 +Hockey: Gretzky gets 2,000th point 43 +Horse Racing: Gorgeous scratched 43 + +Editorials/Letters/Op-Ed +Editorials 22 +Escalation, 1990 style +Cleaner air, at last +AIDS, abortion and fairness +N.Y. elections bury democracy +Letters 22 +Russell Baker: Ethicizationism 23 +Flora Lewis: Two big cities 23 +Beatriz Manz: In Guatemala, no one is safe 23 +Josh Zinner: Not even Guatemala's children are safe 23 +Peter D. Salins: New York City will rise again 23 + +LOAD-DATE: October 27, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +365 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 27, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Business Digest + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 31; Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 586 words + + +The Budget Marathon +Budget negotiators agreed to set tough new standards for private health insurance policies purchased by 23 million elderly Americans to supplement Medicare coverage. [Page 1.] + On first glance, the budget package's tax changes might seem a throwback to the days of tax shelters and abuses. But experts say the spirit of the 1986 tax overhaul is intact. News Analysis. [1.] + As they approached final votes on a huge tax and spending plan that would affect the pocketbooks of nearly all Americans, lawmakers found themselves $10 billion short of their goal. [8.] + The Treasury Department made it official: the budget deficit surged to a near-record $220.4 billion. [8.] + + The Economy + Banking companies continue to be mauled in the financial markets as investors worry about rising losses on real estate. [33.] + Legislation to eliminate most of the noisier passenger jets from the nation's skies by the turn of the century was agreed to by Congressional leaders and the Administration. [1.] + The presentation of evidence in the Milken hearing apparently neared a close, with defense lawyers filing their last affidavit. [33.] + + Companies + Aetna Life said it would eliminate 2,600 jobs as part of a program of broad changes. The announcement is a sign of continuing problems in the industry. [31.] + Dime Savings Bank posted a loss and suspended dividends on its common stock. It said rising losses on residential real estate loans had led to a loss of $153.6 million in the quarter. [31.] + Cummins Engine reported a loss of $33.7 million, citing a decline in demand for truck engines. [31.] + Macy told its investors it might sell a bigger stake in the debt-laden company than it had previously sold to other investors. [31.] + Slap bracelets, like other fads, are almost certainly doomed to a short life. But Main Street Toy is riding the rocket. [31.] + Officers of Coated Sales, a New Jersey textile company, were charged with bilking lenders and shareholders. [33.] + Chevron said its profit fell 3.4 percent, citing higher crude prices and one-time charges for environmental programs. [32.] + The Daily News began dismissing most of its 2,400 unionized workers and then struggled to publish without them. [1.] + Two former Northwest Air pilots were sentenced to prison for flying a passenger jet while intoxicated. [6.] + Henley Group said it might sell its entire 4.2 percent stake in Wheelabrator. [33.] + + Markets +Stocks dropped sharply, with traders citing growing concerns about banks. The Dow slid 48.02, to 2,436.14. [31.] + Oil prices seesawed, closing $1.24 a barrel lower, at $33.01, after a rally based on war fears ran out of steam. [32.] + The Treasury's delayed auction of one-year bills was greeted with strong demand, which caused the average discount rate on the $10.13 billion issue to drop to its lowest level in 2 1/2 years. [34.] + The dollar ended mixed in quiet trading. Gold prices slipped overseas, and the decline accelerated in U.S. trading. [39.] + In a late selloff, soybean futures prices tumbled below $6 a bushel to a two-and-a-half-month low. [39.] + + Today's Columns + The complexity of the tax package could force many well-off taxpayers to scrutinize almost every facet of their finances for possible savings. Your Money. [32.] + A U.S. chemical company wants to export a food idea: a cheaper way to produce a popular Oriental noodle. Patents. [32.] + +LOAD-DATE: October 27, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +366 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 27, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +THE STRUGGLE IN CONGRESS; +HEALTH INSURERS FACE TIGHT RULES IN COVERING AGED + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1220 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Oct. 26 + +As they worked toward a final compromise on the 1991 budget, House and Senate negotiators agreed today to set tough new Federal standards for private health insurance policies purchased by 23 million elderly Americans to supplement coverage provided by the Government through Medicare. +The legislation, long sought by large numbers of the nation's elderly, would add another strand to the network of Federal programs for the aged by protecting them from buying unnecessary coverage. + Under the bill, either the Federal Government or the national organization of state insurance commissioners would develop 10 model private health insurance policies offering "a core group of basic benefits." + +10 Models Would Be Offered + These 10 policies would replace the thousands now sold to elderly people in the private market. A private insurer offering coverage to supplement Medicare would have to use one of the 10 models. +The Bush Administration has opposed such direct Federal regulation of these supplemental policies, which are commonly referred to as Medigap. +But the measure's chief proponents, Representative Ron Wyden of Oregon and Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, both Democrats, have succeeded in getting it attached to the budget bill that is only now emerging from Congress after months of arduous negotiation. As a result, the President's approval is virtually assured. +As another part of the budget bill, the negotiators also agreed today to require prescription drug manufacturers to give discounts to states that buy drugs for poor people on Medicaid. + +'Best Price' Provision + Under this provision, estimated to save the Government $1.9 billion over five years, drug makers would eventually have to give Medicaid the "best price" they offer to private purchasers like hospitals, pharmacies and group health plans. The bill, which the Administration supports, specifies minimum discounts of 12.5 percent. +The actions came as the budget negotiators, working on a package intended to save $500 billion over five years, found that they were $10 billion short of that goal. But they pressed ahead, in an atmosphere that was largely partisan. [Page 8.] +The new protection that would be extended to the elderly is intended to spare them from paying for duplicative health insurance. At present, many of the aged often buy more than one policy. Congressional investigators have found cases in which an elderly person bought more than 15 policies in three years. +"More than 20 million seniors spend more than $15 billion a year on Medigap insurance policies," Mr. Wyden, the bill's chief supporter in the House, said in an interview. "Many have been ripped off, and many are being cheated out of their limited, fixed incomes. The new Federal standards should bring about a dramatic change in private health insurance, reducing confusion among the elderly and increasing price competition among insurers." +The bill is particularly needed, Mr. Wyden said, because the Government's plans for cost-cutting changes in Medicare will increase confusion about the scope of its benefits. + +Administration's Stance + The Bush Administration has opposed direct Federal regulation of individual Medigap policies, and the insurance industry has expressed concern that such standards might unduly restrict consumers' "freedom of choice." +Gail R. Wilensky, head of the Federal Health Care Financing Administration, which administers Medicare, acknowledged today that private policies were often confusing but said that for the Federal Government to designate a small number of policies that could be sold would be "condescending and paternalistic." +"There is a less coercive way to fix the problem," by requiring insurers to disclose clearly all information related to a policy's benefits, Dr. Wilensky said. Only if that approach did not work should the Government consider requiring a standard package of benefits, she said. + +Reaction of Insurers + The insurance industry itself, however, has grown less resistant to the idea in recent months as it became increasingly apparent that Congress would impose it. +Indeed, after the negotiators reached their decision today, Linda S. Jenckes, vice president of the Health Insurance Association of America, said that the use of standard language in Medigap policies would benefit consumers and that the industry welcomed efforts to eliminate the sale of duplicate policies. +But Mrs. Jenckes said that many insurers objected to another provision in the bill, a requirement that insurers pay Medigap benefits equal to at least 65 cents of every dollar they receive in premiums from the holders of such policies. Mrs. Jenckes said it would be more appropriate for the states, which have historically had a stronger role in regulating the insurance industry, to set such "loss ratios." + +Role for the States + Under the measure, insurance agents would generally be forbidden to sell a Medigap policy to a person who already had one, unless the person certified in writing that he or she would drop the initial policy. +Anyone who issued or sold a Medigap policy in violation of the Federal standards could be fined $25,000 or imprisoned for five years. +The bill would invite the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, an organization of state officials, to identify the 10 standard packages of benefits. If the association failed to act within nine months, the Federal Government would establish the 10 packages. +Congressional aides said the bare-bones model policies would cover the deductible paid by beneficiaries for in-patient hospital care, now $592; the beneficiaries' 20 percent share of doctors' bills, and the charges for a skilled nursing home, now $74 a day after the first 20 days. +The National Association of Insurance Commissioners or the Federal Government would also prescribe "uniform language and definitions" for benefits and a "uniform format" to be used in policies. The standard format would make it easier for elderly people and their relatives to compare policies, prices and benefits. +The provision for 10 model policies, instead of just one, is intended to allow some tailoring to individual needs among the millions of Medicare beneficiaries. + +The Discount-Drug Bill + As for the measure on discount drugs, it would require drug makers to eventually give Medicaid the "best price" they offer to private purchasers like hospitals, pharmacies and group health plans. The bill specifies minimum discounts of 12.5 percent in each of the next two years and 15 percent in later years. +At present, drug companies are not required to give such discounts. +Medicaid accounts for about 13 percent of drug purchases in the domestic pharmaceutical market. +Gerald J. Mossinghaff, president of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, reacted to the drug-discount bill by saying, "The industry favors a free market system and has not supported Government-imposed rebates and discounts." +Jeffrey L. Trewhitt, a spokesman for the association, said that drug prices "reflect the very high cost of research and development." Moreover, he said, Medicaid beneficiaries have derived immense therapeutic benefits from such drugs, reducing the need for hospitalization and surgery. + +LOAD-DATE: October 27, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Senator Tom Daschle is a sponsor of the insurance legislation. (Paul Conklin); (pg. 1); Representative Newt Gingrich, left, House minority whip, and an aide, Ray LaHood, as they walked to a Republican tax strategy meeting. (Andrea Mohin/The New York Times); "Many have been ripped off," Representative Ron Wyden said of the elderly who buy Medigap insurance. He is the sponsor of the bill in the House. (The New York Times) + +Graphic: "How Social Security Could Change" shows deductions for selected years under existing law, and how deductions would change under a provision of the emerging budget package. (Source: House Ways and Means Committee) (pg. 9) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +367 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 28, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +When the Retarded Grow Old -- A special report. +As the Retarded Live Longer, Anxiety Grips Aging Parents + +BYLINE: By TAMAR LEWIN + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1; Page 1; Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 2908 words + +Every afternoon at 3, Marie Covello waits for the van that brings her severely retarded 31-year-old son home from his day program. She takes John's hand to help him up the stairs of their Verona, N.J., house, pats his red hair into place, gives him a glass of water, reminds him to go to the bathroom and settles him in front of the television. +And in the back of her mind, as in those of thousands of other aging parents of retarded children, Mrs. Covello, who is 73, wonders how long she and her 75-year-old husband, Vince, will be able to take care of Johnny -- and what will happen to him when they cannot. + "Sometimes when I'm bathing Johnny and he gets ornery I think, 'God, give me the strength,' because it's hard now that I'm older, and my patience sometimes runs out," said Mrs. Covello. "I don't want to leave the problem for my other children, so we began trying to find a group home for Johnny about six years ago, but we're still on the waiting list. I worry about getting Johnny settled somewhere before something happens to me." + +Their Own Old Age + Many parents of retarded children never expected to face that worry. But unlike most retarded people born only a generation earlier, Johnny Covello and others of his age will probably outlive their parents. In many cases, because of improved living conditions and medical advance, they will reach their own old age. +As a result, their parents are now facing wrenching decisions about whether to place their offspring in group homes, ask other sons or daughters to take responsibility for the retarded siblings -- or simply hold on and hope that when an emergency arises, the retarded offspring will not be shunted into a large state institution for want of a better opening. +Experts in the field say there are now at least 200,000 retarded people over 60 in the United States. +While there have always been some elderly retarded people, tucked away in state hospitals or living with families, this generation of retarded adults poses a host of new policy challenges, both because of their increased longevity and because they are far more likely to be living in the community. +Social service agencies around the country are rethinking their programs with an eye to meeting the special needs of people who are not only retarded but also elderly. And policy makers say the agencies have to start planning for the huge influx of retarded baby-boomers living with aging parents. + +Better Medical Care + The advances in longevity have been especially dramatic for those with Down syndrome, the leading known cause of retardation. In the 1940's, Down syndrome babies had a life expectancy of only 12 years. But now, most are living well into their 50's, as a result of better living conditions and better medical care. +In 1953, when Roma Dale Allen's fourth child, Jane, was born with Down syndrome, her doctor in Magee, Miss., told her to expect Jane to die in early childhood. +"The pediatrician told me to take her home and love her, because she wouldn't live long," said Mrs. Allen, now 72. "She had two attacks of pneumonia when she was little, and I didn't think she'd make it. I certainly didn't think Jane would ever be 37 years old." +But she is alive and well, and although people with Down syndrome still age and die prematurely, often developing Alzheimer's disease in their late 40's, Mrs. Allen expects Jane to outlive her. + +Changes in a Generation + "I feel like I have 10 good years left, but I guess she'll probably live longer," said Mrs. Allen. "I don't know if that's a blessing or not. She took it hard when her daddy died, and I don't know what she'd do if anything happened to me." +Most people with other forms of retardation, except those so profoundly retarded that they cannot walk or feed themselves, now live close to normal life spans. +"With most retarded people, it's not any major medical advance that's leading to their living longer, just the same kinds of changes that have led to longer life spans for the general population," said Marsha Seltzer, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies aging and retardation. Dr. Seltzer was formerly with the School of Social Work at Boston University. +For some, improved living conditions have made the difference: "A generation ago, a lot of retarded people were thrown into institutions where they may have had their teeth pulled and not been fed properly, so they did not have a long life expectancy," she said. +Today, the ranks of retarded people over 60 are growing rapidly. + +'At the Vanguard' + Matthew Janicki of the New York State Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disability, said: "For every one developmentally disabled person that we know of who is older and getting services, there will be three or four needing those services in 15 years. We're just at the vanguard of figuring out how to serve aging people with retardation." +Over the last two decades, thousands of retarded people have been moved out of large state institutions and into small group homes -- or in some cases foster homes or supervised apartments -- where their lives are closer to normal. While no one knows how many people are on waiting lists nationwide or in what regions the lists are longer, there is a clear consensus that the waiting lists for group homes are growing far faster than the number of new beds. +Most group homes have only small staffs during the day, since the residents either go to sheltered workshops, where they perform routine work for low pay, or, if they are more severely retarded, spend much of their time at day centers. +As these people age, many new questions are arising: Should sheltered workshops provide for retirement, and pay pensions? Should group homes have more daytime staff so that older residents who want to stop working can stay home? Can retarded older people be integrated into existing programs for senior citizens? +And most pressing for families like the Covellos, will enough group homes be built -- given budget constraints and the not-in-my-backyard syndrome that greets many proposals -- to accommodate the thousands of retarded adults now living with aging parents? + +Planning +Looking Ahead Can Be Draining + For many families, planning for permanent care of a retarded adult is emotionally draining, forcing them to confront their own mortality and the family strains inherent in leaving their other children responsibility for the retarded sibling. +"Most of them don't begin to plan the care for their child after their death until they are in their 60's or 70's, and even then they may be reluctant to put the plan into operation," said Timothy Brubaker, director of the Family and Child Studies Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. "A lot of the mothers who have cared for their children at home feel that no one else will care as well." +A look of pain crosses Mrs. Covello's face when she describes how the neighborhood children fear John and go across the street to avoid him. Still, she says, giving up his care will be hard. +"My other kids have gone off, but because of John I've never had that empty-house feeling," she said. "Johnny sets the table for us, and he's good company. We never wanted to put him in an institution. Even at a good place, you don't know if they'll notice when someone is thirsty, and give him a glass of water. But I know it's time to be planning for his future." + +On the Waiting List + She also knows that it may be many more years on a waiting list before a place at a good group home opens up. +"We're adding more than a hundred people a year to the waiting list even though we've doubled the number of people we serve in the last three years," said Terry Allen Pearl, executive director of the Chimes Inc., a Maryland agency that provides services for the retarded. The agency, which opened only 12 new beds last year, gets 13 applications a month. "We're seeing a lot more two-generation geriatric families, with a very old parent and a retarded child who is old himself," Mr. Pearl said. +Jerry Maurer, director of residential services at the Association for the Help of Retarded Children in New York City, says he has families who have been on a waiting list for more than 10 years. +"We're adding hundreds of new names a year," he said. "And the list doesn't move much, because we're only opening about 20 new beds a year, and of the 240 beds we have, the attrition is only one or two a year." + +Some Become Emergencies + Furthermore, the few new beds tend to go to retarded adults who have been institutionalized for most of their lives or who get emergency priority when their parents become ill or die. +"Most states are building community residences only at a rate to accommodate the retarded people being deinstitutionalized, and many are under court order to do so," said Robert Bruininks, a professor at the University of Minnesota who is president of the American Association on Mental Retardation. "So there's a tension, almost everywhere, between the people in institutions and the parents caring for retarded children at home." +Although there are a few homes for the retarded that charge $30,000 a year or more, the vast majority of group homes do not charge the families. Instead, they depend on a combination of state and Federal support, including the basic $386-a-month Federal Supplemental Security Income that most retarded people receive and, in most states, an extra allowance. +For families like the Covellos, who kept their retarded babies at home in an era when most doctors said they should be in institutions, it seems a cruel irony that their children might have a better chance of placement in a group home if they had been institutionalized all along. + +A Harsh Reward + "We saved the state a lot of money by keeping Johnny home all these years, and it doesn't seem right that the families who put their children in institutions have priority," she said. "Between my four kids, I've been taking care of children for 48 years, and the most time I've had off was one week. Now I'm being penalized, instead of rewarded, for all that work." +Mrs. Covello says her worst fear is that she may die or become incapacitated before the family finds John another place to live. That specter took on new immediacy this month after she passed out briefly in the bathroom and her husband went to pieces. +"He panics too easily," she said. "I'm not sure he could handle Johnny without me." +Mrs. Covello says she does not want to saddle her three older children with John's lifelong care. "Johnny is my problem, and you never really know how your daughter's husband or your son's wife would feel about taking care of him," she said. "They'd do it if they had to. But they have their own kids, and they're so busy with the soccer and the baseball . . . A permanent thing wouldn't be fair to them." + +Coping +Some Siblings Shoulder Burdens + According to a study of 450 families by Dr. Seltzer of the University of Wisconsin and the study's co-author, Dr. Marty Krauss of the Heller School at Brandeis University, 80 percent of the retarded adults who have siblings get at least some help from them. About 60 percent of the families said that a sibling would supervise the retarded person's care if the parents could no longer provide it. +Hugh Carl McLellan of Durant, Miss., has been responsible for his 67-year old sister, Mary Elizabeth, for more than 20 years. Mary Elizabeth was born with normal intelligence, but when she was 3 she got colitis, accompanied by a 106-degree fever that raged for several days, causing permanent brain damage. Their brother, the third child in the family, was paralyzed at birth. +"I was the only one who turned out halfway able to take care of myself, so I think, Lord, you have been good to me," said Mr. McLellan, who is 58. "For years after my parents died, it was like having two families. I'd stop in twice a day to see Mary Elizabeth and my brother. After he died, she wasn't safe there by herself." +Mary Elizabeth lived with Mr. McLellan's family briefly, but it did not work out, because no one was home in the day to look after her. Mr. McLellan's wife, a social worker, ultimately found a residential program for Mary Elizabeth. +"We go visit, and I feel so relieved that there is someone looking after her and making her life enjoyable," he said. + +Burdens Are Expected + Some siblings of retarded adults say they always expected the responsibility. +"It's been understood for 15 years that I would be the one to take on my sister when my parents can't, because my brother would never take her on," said a 48-year-old Southern California professor, who asked not to be identified."My wife understands, and I'm going to do it, whatever it takes, but I'm hoping it will be a couple years off, since I have two teen-age children, and they're very embarrassed about their aunt." +Most parents of retarded adults say they do not want or expect their other children to take full charge of the retarded sibling. +"We have never, ever wanted to involve our other kids in this," said Florence Whalen, the Mayor of Oconomowoc, Wis. She is the mother of four grown sons, including Patrick, a severely retarded 35-year old who lives with Mrs. Whalen and her husband, Richard. "Patrick is very close with his brother Michael, who is 14 months younger, and while we have never discussed it, I'm sure that in an emergency Michael would take Patrick in. But Patrick is ours, and it is not our desire that he be foisted on the others." + +Changing +Policies Evolve As Ranks Grow + +The needs of aging residents are already forcing changes at some of the earliest group homes, like Fineson House on East 16th Street in Manhattan, which opened in 1970 for 21 retarded adults, mostly in their 30's and 40's. All but three of the original residents are still there. This month, the two oldest turned 72. +Ilka Hall, the manager, said that, with older residents, she has had to keep the house warmer, make the lighting brighter and expand the schedule of nurse visits from one day a week to three. +Most group homes around the country are on the threshold of similar changes: "Of the people in our metropolitan Baltimore residences, we already have 20 percent who are 55 or over, and in five years it will be more than 50 percent," said Mr. Pearl. +One big issue yet to be resolved is whether, and how, older retarded people working in sheltered workshops will be able to retire. Katie Greenblatt, one of the 72-year olds at Fineson House, has been working in one sheltered workshop or another for 33 years, putting together lipstick assortments one month and Halloween kits the next, earning about $25 a week. Like virtually every other sheltered workshop employee in the nation, she has neither a pension nor a retirement plan. + +Will Keep Working + "I'm going to keep working, because you don't get paid if you don't work," said Ms. Greenblatt. "If someone paid me $25 a week to go to a senior center, that sounds like fun. I could draw. I could play bingo. I could do anything. But it won't happen. You don't get money for nothing." +Several advocacy groups are trying to address that problem, by creating a modest retirement allowance that would replace the workshop paycheck. +The new concern about retirement marks the maturation of a movement that began 40 years ago with the founding of the Association for Retarded Children, by a group of parents seeking appropriate schooling for their retarded children. As those children grew up, the group's advocacy extended to employment opportunities. And now, as the Association for Retarded Citizens, it runs the gamut from childhood to old age. +"The whole issue of aging has just come up, because there are so many more people with retardation living in the community, employed in these sheltered programs," said Sharon Davis, director of research at the association. "We're all thinking, don't they get to retire like everybody else?" + +Nothing Is Simple + But providing for retirement is not simple. For one thing, most retarded people depend on their Supplemental Security Income, which they would lose, under current law, if they accumulated more than $2,000 in a pension account. And most existing programs for the elderly have not traditionally welcomed retarded older people. +Until an agreement last year between the Administration on Aging and the Administration on Developmental Disabilities -- both part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services -- it was not even clear that older people with retardation were entitled to the same government services as other older Americans. Many states are now beginning to coordinate their services for the aging with their services for the retarded, so that an elderly retarded person with special needs may be able to get a double schedule of caseworker visits, half paid for by each agency. +A few senior centers have opened their doors to people with retardation, among them, the Prescott Adult Day Health Center in Prescott, Ariz., where five of the 25 participants each day are people with retardation. +"It's been easier than I expected," said Susan Rheem, the director of the center. "It seems that when you have people struggling with Alzheimer's disease and strokes, being retarded doesn't look so different anymore." + +LOAD-DATE: October 28, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Roma Dale Allen, 72 years old, putting a newly-bought comb in her 37- year-old daughter Jane's hair at a crafts fair in Magee, Miss. (Hubert Worley Jr. for The New York Times) (pg. 1); Vince and Marie Covello, both in their 70's, playing a game with their severely retarded son, John, 31 years old. "I worry about getting Johnny settled somewhere before something happens to me," Mrs. Covello said. (Frank C. Dougherty for The New York Times) (pg. 32) + +TYPE: A Special Report + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +368 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 28, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE STRUGGLE IN CONGRESS; +Most in U.S. Will Feel Effect Of Shift in Spending Priorities + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1; Page 1; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1692 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 + +The deficit-reduction bill passed today by Congress will touch almost everyone in the United States, from young children to frail elderly people, as well as farmers, bankers, college students, war veterans and foreign tourists visiting this country. +The bill has been promoted as a way to help save nearly $500 billion over five years, but it is also a grand statement of social policy and political priorities. [Chart of provisions, page 26.] + The measure, which includes higher taxes and spending cuts, is notable for its relative generosity to poor children, who will benefit from $18 billion in new tax credits for low-income families over the next five years and from an expansion in health insurance coverage for such families under Medicaid. + +Better News for the Elderly + Elderly people also fared much better than they might have expected, based on proposals that emerged from negotiations between Congressional leaders and Bush Administration officials just four weeks ago. +Cutbacks in Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for the elderly and disabled, would save $42.5 billion over five years under the final compromise. This is much less than the $60 billion envisioned in the budget agreement reached at the earlier negotiations, at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. +The bill would provide a tax credit to help small businesses pay for elevators or other structural changes needed to comply with a new law that bans discrimination against people with disabilities. It also permits states to cover home care for low-income elderly disabled people under Medicaid, on the assumption that such care will cost less than nursing home care. +At the same time, Congress is imposing a new "luxury tax" on expensive cars, airplanes, yachts and furs. In addition, after 10 years of lobbying by the Reagan and Bush Administrations, Congress agreed to impose a fee on owners of recreational boats, on the theory that they benefit from Coast Guard services and thus should bear some of the costs. +Michael G. Sciulla, vice president of the Boat Owners Association of the United States, who has fought such fees for a decade, said today: "Congress was hungry for revenues of any kind, without regard for the merits of the issue. This fee will hit as many as 3 million Americans who own modest-size boats, 16 to 20 feet in length, and that certainly is no yacht." + +Votes End Lengthy Sessions + The House approved the bill, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, at 6:58 A.M. The Senate passed the measure this evening. +Despite the effort to trim the deficit, Estimates by the Office of Management and Budget suggest that Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, was right in his prediction today in the House that it would be higher in this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, than in the year just ended, when it was $220.4 billion. The cost of the savings and loan debacle is responsible for much of the rise. +Here is a summary of changes that would be made under the legislation. In Congressional parlance, savings represent reductions from the amounts theoretically needed to continue Federal programs at current levels. Outlays for a particular program often increase even though lawmakers say they have saved money by trimming benefits or charging higher fees. +AGRICULTURE. Farm programs, long resistant to the budget-cutters' scalpel, would be trimmed sharply. The Government would pay lower crop subsidies to growers of wheat, feed grains, cotton and rice, and it would charge a "service fee" to dairy farmers for the dairy price-support program. The Government would also charge small fees when making payments to support commodity prices. +Two Federal lending agencies, the Farmers Home Administration and the Rural Electrification Administration, would reduce their direct loans and increase the use of loan guarantees. Such guarantees are less expensive because the Treasury pays out money only when borrowers default. +The savings would total $1.6 billion in the current fiscal year and $14.9 billion over five years. +VETERANS. Congress has adamantly opposed White House efforts to cut + veterans' benefits, but fiscal realities caught up with it this year, and lawmakers began to snip away at programs that benefit veterans. +The bill eliminates the presumption that veterans who served in wartime are totally disabled, and therefore eligible for veterans' pensions, at the age of 65. The Government will increase fees for home mortgages made or insured by the Department of Veterans Affairs and will charge a $2 fee on prescription drugs for certain outpatients at veterans' hospitals. +Overall, changes in veterans' programs save $621 million this year and $3.7 billion over five years. + CHILD CARE. The Government has earmarked $732 million this year and> + slightly larger amounts in later years for grants to the states to help pay for child care. The formula for distributing the money takes account of the number of children under the age of 5 and the number receiving assistance through the school lunch program. +Potentially more significant is Congress's decision to expand the existing Federal tax credit for low-income working families with children. The maximum credit will be increased, and families with more children can get larger credits. Expansion of this tax break would cost the Government $12 billion over five years. +Congress also decided to establish a tax credit for the costs of premiums on private health insurance that covers children in low-income families. Preliminary estimates suggested this provision could cost $5 billion over five years. + BANKS. Lawmakers found they could reduce the deficit while shoring up the Federal fund that insures bank deposits. Federal regulators will be able to increase premiums paid by banks and savings and loan associations for deposit insurance. Premiums for commercial banks, now 12 cents for each $100 of deposits, would rise to 19.5 cents in January 1991 and 23 cents in January 1992. This is expected to save $1.1 billion this year and $9 billion over five years. + HOUSING. The Government would charge higher premiums for mortgage insurance offered by the Federal Housing Administration. It would also increase the maximum amount eligible for such insurance, to $124,875, so the Government would insure more loans and collect more premiums. It is estimated that these and other changes in the agency will save $609 million this year and $3.6 billion over five years. +The Federal Emergency Management Agency could also raise flood insurance premiums to bring in an additional $224 million over five years. + EDUCATION. The Government would no longer guarantee loans to students attending certain colleges or trade schools with high default rates -- in excess of 35 percent in 1991 or 1992 and 30 percent in later years. +The restriction could affect 1,000 of the 7,000 schools in which students receive guaranteed loans. Most would be trade schools, which teach auto repair, truck driving and other such skills. +There would be a 30-day delay in disbursement of guaranteed loans to those entering colleges and trade schools next year. +Savings are not expected in the current fiscal year, but would total $1.7 billion over five years. + LABOR. The maximum civil penalty that could be imposed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for a willful violation of Federal law would rise to $70,000 from $10,000. +The maximum that can be imposed by the Federal Mine Safety and Health Administration would rise to $50,000 from $10,000. +The flat premium paid by employers for Federal insurance of pension benefits would rise to $19 for each participant in a pension plan from $16. +The increases are expected to generate $232 million this year and $1.8 billion over five years. +HEALTH. Elderly people won their battle against a large increase in what they pay for health insurance under Medicare. The premium for insurance covering doctors' bills, now $28.60 a month, would rise gradually over five years to $46.20. The $75 Medicare deductible, paid once a year by users of physician services, would rise to $100 next year and would stay at that level. +Workers help finance hospital care for Medicare beneficiaries through their payroll taxes. The Government expects to collect $26.9 billion in additional revenue over five years as a result of increasing the amount of earnings subject to the Medicare payroll tax. The first $51,300 of a worker's earnings is now subject to such tax. The amount will increase next year to $125,000. +Medicare beneficiaries would contribute $10.1 billion to deficit reduction over five years. But doctors, hospitals and other health-care providers would contribute $32.4 billion. The Government will change its reimbursement formulas to insure that hospitals are paid slightly less than they would otherwise get for treating Medicare patients, buying medical equipment and educating medical students. It will also cut payments to doctors for "overpriced procedures." +Medicaid will be expanded to cover all poor children through the age of 18 by the year 2001. State Medicaid programs will have to pay monthly Medicare premiums for poor elderly people. In 1993 and 1994, they will also have to pay premiums for elderly people who are not poor, but are within 10 percent of the official poverty level. An elderly couple with income less than $7,501 was classified as poor last year. +To help pay for the expansion of benefits to poor people, Medicaid will pay less for prescription drugs and will require drug makers to offer discounts. + FEES. The Government will create a fee of $1 for each passenger on foreign airlines and cruise ships arriving in the United States. Such fees would generate $78 million over five years to pay for the United States Travel and Tourism Administration, a part of the Commerce Department. +The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Railroad Administration, which enforces rail safety rules, will create user fees. These are expected to bring in $1.9 billion over five years. + +LOAD-DATE: October 28, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +369 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 28, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 823 words + + +International 3-19 + A new initiative toward peace and a settlement of the Persian Gulf crisis is being undertaken by the Soviet Union. A ranking Soviet official went to Baghdad at the invitation of President Saddam Hussein. Page 1 +Iraq's plan to ration gasoline was a maneuver to persuade Baghdad's enemies to postpone any attack on Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait, several oil industry officials and military affairs experts said. 10 +Gorbachev hints Iraq may be reconsidering its position 10 +U.S. says it sent no signals to expel Lebanese general 12 +The epidemic of AIDS in Africa is raising new questions about women's roles and rights before the law and in their families. Social workers say the disease has in many ways had a disproportionate impact on Africa's already disadvantaged women. 16 +Liberia guerrillas refuse to sign accord at talks 17 +Ivory Coast faces first free elections today 18 +Four nations to send truce force to Rwanda 11 +Hundreds of dead and dying dolphins are washing ashore in Spain, Franceand Italy, victims of a virus that some scientists believe is linked to the heavy pollution of the western Mediterranean. 3 +Vatican synod reaffirms celibacy for priests 19 +Rise in cost of gasoline sets off protests in Hungary 14 +Soviet woman fights for a home for those labeled defective 14 +Soviet coal miners set up independent union 14 +Secret-police scandals outlive East Germany 14 +Women's group seeks environmental role 16 +Delay in trial of war crimes suspect has French astir 16 +A U.S. Special Service officer in El Salvador has told the F.B.I. he knew in advance of plans to kill six Jesuit priests, although he has since retracted that testimony. 9 +Peru's leader proposes a market to fight coca 12 +After six years, Labor is voted out in New Zealand 18 +Bhutto looks to provincial elections 5 +Beijing condemns pornography as subversive 6 + + National 22-32 +Congress approved the budget bill, the biggest deficit reduction legislation in history, and prepared to adjourn, just 10 days before the mid-term election. President Bush is expected to sign the measure. 1 +The new deficit reduction bill will touch almost everyone in the nation, from children to the elderly as well as farmers, bankers, college students, war veterans and foreign tourists. 1 +Most incumbents will be re-elected in the Nov. 6 balloting across the nation, despite all the signs of anger among voters. They will win either because they are unopposed or because they face opponents so underfinanced as to be out of contention. 1 +14 of 15 Jersey lawmakers reject budget plan26 +Lawmakers agree to curb exploration for offshore oil 28 +Ambitious air pollution bill sent to White House 28 +Market forces seen as backbone of new Bush energy policy 28 +Retarded people are living longer as a result of medical advances. But the new generation of people who are both retarded and elderly is posing a host of policy challenges and adding more worry to their aging parents. 1 +The Scholastic Aptitude Test, a collage entrance exam that is a rite ofpassage for many high school students, faces potentially major revision in the wake of criticism about its validity and perceptions of ethnic and sex bias. 22 +For police, a delicate job of reordering priorities 22 +A.C.L.U. says violations pervading foster care system 22 +Hatteras Island to rely on ferries up to six months 22 +The threat of a strike rises at Chrysler 23 + + Regional 33-36 +Some strikers at The Daily News will be permitted to reclaim their jobs if they cross picket lines tomorrow, management officials announced. The offer came on the second full day of the bitter strike. 1 +The strike underscores new realities for labor and management in New York City, which has long been considered one of the nation's last big union towns, labor experts say. 33 +The stalled New York City labor talks are being heightened by the union leaders' growing mistrust in the claims being made about the city's financial plight. 33 +Government computer files open to public, court rules 37 +A major spill in the Hudson River was caused by a large barge that struck a reef and spewed 163,800 gallons of kerosene into the water 15 miles south of Poughkeepsie. 34 +New York Lieut. Gov. Stan Lundine is running hard, with his eyes more on the election of 1994 than the one in two weeks. This is his best chance to become better known before a possible race to succeed Mario Cuomo. 35 D'Amato explains shift on bias bill 34 +Defeat certain, Kasparov resigns the seventh game 36 + +Obituaries +William S. Paley, ex-chairman of CBS Inc. 39 +Elliott Roosevelt, World War II general and an author 38 +Xavier Cugat, bandleader 38 + +Arts/Reviews 60, 62 + + Campus Life 45-49 + +Fashion 54-55 + + Life Style 50 + + Pastimes 61-63 + + Weddings 56-60 + +LOAD-DATE: October 28, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +370 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 28, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +IDEAS & TRENDS; +Giving Older Women A Shot at Motherhood + +BYLINE: By GINA KOLATA + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 4; Column 1; Week In Review Desk + +LENGTH: 816 words + +EVERY infertility clinic routinely comes across desperate couples who spend years and their last dollars trying to have a baby. But with the publication of a paper last week saying that the seemingly natural termination of the baby chase -- menopause -- is no longer a barrier, doctors and women have to ask when, if ever, they should give up. +Doctors have found that women who have gone through menopause and are willing to accept egg donations from younger women can easily become pregnant. For some couples, the decision on when to stop trying to have a baby will depend only on their willingness to put up with the emotional and physical trauma and the onerous expense of infertility treatments. + "A lot of these women don't know when to quit," said Dr. Mark V. Sauer, an infertility expert at the University of Southern California who published the findings on pregnancy after menopause in The New England Journal of Medicine. He said that he fears his report "will be, for a lot of people, another alternative to exploit and lose money on." +Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, said: "Each individual woman is going to have to say, as men already have to say, 'I know what I could do, but I'm not going to do it anymore.' +"It does not make sense to say that there is some natural point beyond which it is too late or immoral to become a parent. Men have become parents in their 70's and no one has blinked an eye at that. I see no ethical reason for taking a different attitude toward women." +Dr. Sauer said it costs about $10,000 for each attempt to have a baby after menopause. The cost includes $1,500 paid to the egg donor as well as the normal costs of in vitro fertilization, the process in which eggs are fertilized in the laboratory with the husband's sperm, then inserted into the woman's uterus. The menopausal women also had to take hormones to prepare their uteruses for the reception of the embryo and to help sustain it for the first 100 days of pregnancy. +One woman in Dr. Sauer's study had tried to become pregnant for a decade. "She went all over the country," he said, and finally, to her dismay, passed through menopause. When Dr. Sauer offered her eggs donated by a younger woman, she readily agreed and became pregnant. The baby was born dead, for no apparent reason, but now at the age of 43 she is trying again. +"I think there are people who will literally go through their life span or literally go through their bank account in order to have their desire for a pregnancy fulfilled," Dr. Caplan, the bioethicist, said. "We see it all the time at our in vitro fertilization program here." +Dr. Joseph Schulman, director of the Genetics and IVF Institute in Fairfax, Va., said he suspects that with the publicity over pregnancy after menopause, many women who had given up on their baby quest when they stopped ovulating will now appear at fertility centers asking for help. He said no one knows how long women now have after the start of menopause to try to become pregnant. +"You have to worry about the stresses on a woman who is, let's say, 60 years old," he said. "She is likely to have major medical concerns going through pregnancy and labor, quite apart from the social issue of having a 60-year-old woman giving birth." So far, doctors have had little experience with such problems since only a handful of women have actually had babies after menopause. +Dr. Schulman also cautioned that many menopausal women will find that it is not easy to find eggs. "They will discover that there are only a limited number of donors," he said. +But Dr. Sauer said he has had surprising luck finding donors. Some, he said, were nurses or technicians who work with him and were touched by the plight of infertile couples. +Although infertility experts say there eventually comes a time when it may be best to call it quits, every doctor seems to know of a case when, to the surprise of everyone concerned, even a seemingly hopeless quest had a happy ending. +Jackie Wolfe, who lives in Hillsborough, N.C., had one of the most dismal histories of trying to become pregnant that her doctors had ever heard. She began trying when she was 21, had surgery 12 times for endometriosis, a condition in which pieces of the uterus lining migrate outside of the uterus, sometimes clogging the fallopian tubes. When in vitro fertilization began to be offered at Duke University, she jumped at the chance. +Ms. Wolfe's attempts went on for 19 years. Asked how she could continue with the expensive, emotionally draining effort, she replied, "You get hooked on it after a while." Finally, her doctor at Duke suggested that her eggs might be defective and that she might find another woman to donate eggs. An acquaintance agreed and at last Ms. Wolfe became pregnant. Last year, she gave birth to twins, at age 40. + +LOAD-DATE: October 28, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +371 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 28, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Russian Character + +BYLINE: By Hedrick Smith; Hedrick Smith has been both Moscow and Washington bureau chief for The New York Times. This article is adapted from "The New Russians," to be published by Random House in December. + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 31; Column 3; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 4906 words + +One Saturday evening, when I was working late, alone, in a Moscow office, I heard a knock at the door. I couldn't imagine who it might be. +It was after 10, and even when I had come in at around 6 the building had been so deserted that I could hear my footsteps echoing in the corridor. The dezhurnaya, an elderly Russian woman working as the 24-hour watchman, had had to unlock the front door for me. She had emerged from the dezhurnaya's room, no bigger than a closet, in which was crammed a cot, small desk, clothes hooks, a hot plate. Each day, a different dezhurnaya was on duty; I'd never seen this one before. + In Moscow, unexpected knocks at the door can bear ill tidings. I wondered who would be interrupting me at that hour in a locked office in a locked building. +When I opened the door, there stood the dezhurnaya, a rather tall woman in her 60's, erect and businesslike. I asked if there were some problem. +"No problem," she said and paused. "You've been working hard for a long time. You must be hungry. Would you like me to fix you a cup of tea?" +I was startled, not only because she and I were total strangers, but also because I have encountered many a dezhurnaya, and most have the mentality of a sentry -- gruff, suspicious of aliens, protective of turf and accustomed to reducing human commerce to the inspection of a permit. I mumbled something like: "It's really not necessary. I hadn't realized it had gotten so late. I'll be leaving soon." +I was deep into my work again and had almost forgotten her when she returned, not just with a cup of tea but with a whole tray of things: a large mug of tea, four small open-faced sandwiches, bologna topped by a slice of cucumber, a packet of tasty Polish biscuits. She said in clear but unpracticed English: "I put some strawberry preserves in your tea. We do it that way. Is that right? Is that how you say it, 'strawberry preserves'?" +Understanding that she must have sacrificed part of her own nighttime rations, I thanked her, invited her to sit down and said her English was quite correct. Not wanting to intrude, she stood by the doorway of our inner office as we talked. +I learned that she was a retired teacher, supplementing her tiny pension. When I told her my name and asked hers, she said, "My name is Anna Ivanovna." Only then did we shake hands, as properly acquainted. In return for her generosity, I gave her a book and some magazines to practice her English, and after that, when I saw her, we would swap stories, comments, little gifts. +That first late-night encounter illustrates an endearing quality of Russians: their extraordinarily warm hospitality, their love of bestowing gifts on each other and on people whom they choose to befriend. To American travelers who have found Russians on the street to be brusque and impersonal, who have found Soviet officials to be cold and rigid and Soviet waiters exasperating in their imperious and surly indifference, this generous side of the Russian character often comes as a surprise. +But the Russian character is made up of both coldness and warmth. And it is the complexity of this character that complicates President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's drive to set up a law-governed state and plays havoc with even the most basic -- and often faltering -- steps that he is taking to raise the Soviet economy out of its morass. So, Gorbachev may have won the Nobel Peace Prize for his foreign policy, but at home his most fundamental problem is motivating his own people. + +While the kind-hearted impulses of Russians and most other Soviet nationalities make private life tolerable, other less charitable qualities in the Russian character tend to make public life intractable and pose formidable obstacles to reform: their escapism, their impracticality, their lackadaisical attitude toward work and their vicious envy of people who try to get ahead. +Westerners know, because Gorbachev has made it an issue, that an entrenched bureaucracy of party and Government officials -- 18 million strong by Gorbachev's count -- has been blocking and sabotaging many reforms, clinging to power and privilege. What is far less understood in the West is that the mind-set of ordinary people is an equally forbidding obstacle to reform. +For the flip side of Russian generosity and sentimentality is Russian irresponsibility and impracticality. +"Russian mentality is not based on common sense," said the writer Tatyana Tolstaya. "It has nothing to do with common sense. Our thinking is not orderly, logical. In Western culture, European culture maybe, emotion is considered to be on a lower level than reason. But in Russia, no. It is bad to be rational, to be smart, clever, intelligent and so on. And to be emotional, warm, lovable, maybe spiritual, in the full meaning of that word -- that is good." +"It is the Russian soul," the poet Andrei Voznesensky said one afternoon as we sat on a park bench. "In Russia, I think we have a love of literature, a so-called spiritual life. We can talk all day and all night long about all kinds of questions, immortal questions. That is the Russian style of thinking. +"I want our economy to be the same as in the West. I want our people to have a good quality of life, a good level, the same as in America, and technology as in Japan and America. But I am afraid to lose this Russian part of our soul, to lose our love of literature and . . . how to put it . . . our impractical character. Maybe too lazy, it is a minus, but it is a plus, too." +In this view, Russians are prone to escapism, whether it be the "lazy, dreamy" philosophizing of the intelligentsia, as Tolstaya put it, or the brutal, often self-destructive mass alcoholism of workers and peasants. + +The system itself not only encourages, but nourishes, such behavior. The grim shortage of goods sends Russians seeking instant gratification. Why, if the future offers little hope, plan for the long term? Why not blow a month's salary on a birthday party? +Over the decades, the Soviet system has turned out regiments of result-oriented engineers, who now fill echelons of the Soviet Government and Communist Party, running city councils and party organizations at all levels. Yet even allowing for this group, who could roughly be compared to Western businessmen, Russians are not a career-driven people; their primary touchstones are not success, getting ahead, making deals, accumulating material possessions. +It is paradoxical that this should be so, given the relentless Soviet propaganda urging work and discipline as national values. But industriousness, discipline, efficiency do not rank high with most citizens. +Years ago, I remember a Government economist describing where work stands on the Russian scale of values. "A man can be a good worker, but work is just a thing," he told me. "What really matters is his spirit, his relationship to others. If he is too scrupulous, too cold, people will dislike him. We have a word for that, it's sukhovaty -- dryish -- but sukhoi -- dry -- is even worse. And finally sukhar -- dry like a bread crust, no human touch at all -- that is the worst." +Such admiration for human warmth is appealing, but Russians tend to slip over the line, turning commendable traits into a justification for avoiding responsibility and initiative, for a slack attitude toward work. If America is dominated by workaholic "Type A's," the Soviet Union is mired in hard-to-motivate "Type B's." +Economists and political thinkers blame the Stalinist command economy and rigid central control for molding an obedient, passive labor force that is plagued by heavy absenteeism, idleness on the job, poor-quality work, low morale and serious alcoholism. +"Apathy, indifference, pilfering and a lack of respect for honest work have become rampant," said the reform economist Nikolai P. Shmel yov, "as has aggressive envy of those who earn a lot, even if they earn it honestly." +Gorbachev and his predecessor, Yuri V. Andropov, both recognized the slack Soviet work ethic as a national Achilles' heel, and they attacked it the moment they took office. Each began his tenure with a loudly trumpeted campaign to tighten work discipline, as well as to fight the indolent torpor of the Soviet working class and its companion disease, mass alcoholism. Andropov, the former K.G.B. chief, closed down liquor stores during working hours and even had his police agents chase workers out of the banyas, the communal Russian baths, notorious hideouts for workers playing hooky. In the banyas, people not only bathe, they also drink beer and eat salted fish and play cards or just while away the hours talking. +Soviet workers themselves have a saying that expresses their open cynicism: "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work." Russians often make up for poor pay by stealing from the state. The common saying is "What belongs to everyone, belongs to no one, so why shouldn't it be mine?" +Pilfering is on a grand scale. Underground industries have operated on millions of rubles of pirated textile goods, entire warehouses of construction materials and equipment, fresh fruits and vegetables, lockers of meat. +People love to swap jokes about such shenanigans. One of my favorite anecdotes is about a worker who leaves his factory one afternoon with a wheelbarrow, covered with a piece of cloth. The guard at the gate, checking against thievery, lifts the cloth, looks underneath it and, finding the wheelbarrow empty, waves the worker on. The next day, the worker shows up again with a wheelbarrow covered with a cloth. Again the guard checks. Nothing underneath the cloth, so he lets the worker pass. A third day, it happens again -- the wheelbarrow is still empty. +Finally, the guard bursts out, in utter frustration: "Look, comrade, you must be stealing something. What is it?" +"Wheelbarrows," the worker replies. + +Cynicism -- and sheer fakery -- pervade the system. Industrial managers and local party officials constantly deceive higher-ups about levels of output. When Gorbachev came into power, it was clear that practically everyone from the bottom up was cooking the books. In Uzbekistan, for example, investigators found that every year the entire republic had reported to Moscow one million tons of phantom cotton harvest; they covered the lie up with considerable bribery to keep officials quiet. +Perestroika, the restructuring of the nation, often gets lip service and a wry laugh. In one current joke, a man is demonstrating to another the meaning of perestroika. The first man has two pails. One pail is empty and the other is full of potatoes. He pours the potatoes from one pail into the other, very satisfied with what he is doing. +"But nothing has changed," objects the second man. +"Ah, yes," agrees the first, "but think what a noise it creates." + +"People are looking for some external transformation to take place under perestroika, but perestroika is first of all internal," my friend Vladimir Pozner, the television commentator, remarked to me. "Perestroika has to happen in the mind. For it to work, people's outlooks have to change, and that happens as society changes. It's a push-pull, gradual process. It cannot be decreed." +Old habits die hard, even among supposedly reform-minded intellectuals. One morning I visited Vladimir Yadov, director of the Institute of Sociology in Moscow. The place was almost deserted, and as I sat down to talk with Yadov, I commented on the absence of people on a normal workday. +"This is what my driver calls 'bath day.' " He grinned, assuming I knew that people hid from work in the baths. "No one is around our institute except the director and a few of my assistants. Everyone else is away. No one is at work. Theoretically, this is library day, when they are all supposed to be at the library." He shrugged, assuming I understood that this was fiction. "Do you remember what Maxim Gorky told Lenin when Lenin asked Gorky why he did not want to come back from living abroad to work in Russia? Gorky told Lenin, 'You know, Vladimir Ilyich, at home in Russia they all go around and shake each other's hands and talk all the time and swap anecdotes. No one really works.' Well, that's how it is here on 'bath day.' They all go around and shake each others' hands and swap anecdotes." + +OCCASIONALLY, I RAN into middle-aged officials and intellectuals who had begun to think that the casual Soviet attitude toward work took root during their youth, especially among the educated middle class, which allowed its children to develop an easy dependence on their parents. +Russians are soft on their children, spoiling them, trying to protect them from hardship; they keep them living at home after university and often support them financially during those years. The contrast with American young people is so striking that Soviet writers and journalists, reporting on travels across America, have been moved to send home detailed descriptions of the summer jobs taken by American college students. +Soviet parents are both horrified and impressed to read about how middle-class American young people take jobs waiting on table, pumping gasoline, baby-sitting, digging ditches, serving fast food. They are horrified that well-heeled American parents coldly force their children to work to make money. To many Russians, that smacks of exploiting child labor. But they are impressed that American teen-agers show so much initiative and self-reliance. +On an all-day car trip through the farming regions of Yaroslavl province, a senior provincial party official named Igor Beshev fired questions at me about the jobs my children had taken and how I had persuaded them to go out and work. +His 20-year-old son was a university student, but he had never had a job. Like other Soviet young people, he had taken part in various work projects organized by the Komsomol, the youth wing of the Communist Party. Those activities, however, were not a step toward financial self-sufficiency. +"He's dependent on me," Beshev said. "He never earns any money. Of course, I expect he will have a good career when he finishes university. But I do not think he knows how to take care of himself. I'm trying to get him to find some job. But that's a big change, and it's very hard for him, for all of us." +Dependence on parents is a prelude to dependence on the state, which the Soviet system encourages. After graduation, university students are assigned jobs under raspradeleniye -- literally, the "distribution" -- which they must accept as a way of paying back the state for their education. Often, out of inertia or limited possibilities, they stick with those assigned jobs for many years, sometimes for the rest of their lives. In the countryside, villages are like old-fashioned company towns, dominated by the local state or collective farm. The individual fits into the local hierarchy, which both supports him and checks his initiative. +Dependence is also nurtured by subsidies for the essentials of living -- housing, food, health care, education. Soviet apartments are spartan and dreary by Western standards, but they are cheap. The rent for a one-room apartment can be as little as 15 rubles a month. Even a good-sized apartment of three rooms may be no more than 25 or 30 rubles a month, two or three days' pay. Health care is poor, but it's free -- except for the bribes that people have to pay to get service. Education, even at the university level, is free. The staples of the diet -- bread, milk, potatoes, cheese -- are all subsidized, this year at a cost of about 96 billion rubles, about $155 billion. +The majority of Soviet workers clamor for greater efficiency, for more consumer goods, but they react violently to any proposal that could mean floating prices and an end to subsidies on consumer essentials. That is a potent deterrent to Gorbachev as he struggles with decisions on a free market; each time, he has backed off or watered down his plans as public complaints grew. His caution is in dramatic contrast to the boldness of the new Polish leaders, who have plunged headlong into free-market reforms, allowing price inflation. +"The Poles prefer high prices to empty counters," commented Nikolai Petrakov, Gorbachev's personal economic adviser. "In this country, all the opinion polls show quite the opposite. People accept rationing coupons and standing in line -- especially during work time -- but not price increases." +"We all shout in unison -- including those who otherwise favor the market: 'Do not touch prices!' " observed a reform-minded economist, Otto Latsis. "This is the kind of 'market' we have imagined. Like a rose without thorns." + +SOVIETS ALSO HAVE a widespread aversion to risk-taking. As a people, they are cautious and conservative. The specter of unemployment is terrifying, and Soviet society has little experience or infrastructure for dealing with it. By Government estimates, roughly three million people were thrown out of work from 1985 to 1989, and about 15 million more jobs will be eliminated by the end of the century. New jobs are developing in other sectors, including private enterprise hiding behind the euphemistic title of "cooperatives" -- that is, group-owned businesses. The more daring workers, especially younger people, are giving this sector a try. +But most Soviet workers are reluctant to take the plunge. They would rather settle for a meager wage and miserable living standards -- and continue to complain about these shortcomings -- than quit their jobs and take the chance of shifting to a cooperative with an uncertain future. +"The masses expect change to come from the top," my friend Andrei Smirnov, the film maker, remarked over dinner one night. "They do not understand that real democracy, or real changes in the economy, must come from below. They resist the idea that we must change ourselves." +The habit of dependence on the state exists at all levels of Soviet society. Smirnov, head of the film makers' union for two critical years of adjustment in the late 1980's, described his union as a microcosm of Soviet responses to greater economic freedom. +"Everyone was enthusiastic about overthrowing the old dictatorial system," Smirnov said, "but our directors and producers are fearful of the new system of competition. If we have a choice between the free market and a guaranteed salary, the majority will pick a guaranteed salary. Those who can't compete on the market are unhappy at the prospect of being unemployed. Others who are more talented are unhappy because they think that studio directors will pick friends and favorites to make films, not the qualified people. They want the union to protect them and to go after the studio directors. The really good ones, who can work well in any situation, are unhappy with our poor technology and the bad system of financing in the country." +Rair Simonyan, head of industrial management at Moscow's prestigious Institute of International Relations and World Economics, reported similar reactions among industrial managers and even among his own efficiency experts. +"Everybody can tell you about the necessity for change, but when it relates to them, it's different," he told me. "I had trouble with my own people. Everybody said we need radical reforms. The first thing I tried to do was to cut our staff -- 60 researchers is too many. But people were upset. They told me, 'You can't arrange these jobs purely on the basis of efficiency. You have to balance efficiency and social security. You cannot fire a man in his 50's with no job prospects or a woman with two children.' Even our industrial managers -- to whom we are trying to give more autonomy from the state to decide their own production -- they want the old system of being guaranteed their supplies. Often they will tell us, 'We need 100 percent state orders, so we will have no problem with material supplies.' " + +ALEKSANDR N. YAKOVLEV, who has long been Gorbachev's closest ally in the leadership, is an even more radical proponent of reform than Gorbachev. For him, psychological dependence on state paternalism leads to mass inertia, a Soviet habit of mind he calls the "most debilitating obstacle" to reform. +"Society is accustomed to freeloading, and not only in the material sense," Yakovlev explained during a long conversation one afternoon. "A person wants to be sure he'll get paid, even if he doesn't work. But also in politics, he wants to be sure that he'll be given instructions, orders, that people will explain, will show him what to do. In every sphere, this is a society of freeloading, of freeloading socialism. +"If we don't break through that, if a person doesn't accept some inner freedom and initiative and responsibility, if there is no self-governance in society in outlying districts, then nothing will happen." +"That means people taking real responsibility themselves," I interjected. +"And people don't feel like taking responsibility," he shot back. "Let someone else answer, but not me. That's also freeloading. And it has eaten into our pores and our life." +For the great mass of Soviet people, the years of unrelieved struggle against shortages of the most elementary of human needs have bred habits and attitudes that go against the grain of reform. Illicit profiteering is as pervasive as crab grass in a summer lawn; it's an almost universal defense mechanism that has been operating sub rosa for many years. Think of the worker stealing wheelbarrows and multiply him by a million. The pilfering causes many, even though they regularly benefit from underhanded dealings, to look on anyone who makes a profit as an illicit operator. +Beyond that, the competitive combat of daily shopping has fed a mean-spirited streak in the Soviet soul. For if Russians are justly known for their warmth within a trusted circle, and for their hospitality toward guests, they often show a churlish spite toward people outside their circle. The natural breeding ground for this attitude is the floating anger engendered by wretched circumstances. Russians are long-suffering people who can bear misery, so long as they see that others are sharing it. But let someone become better off -- even if it is through his own honest labor -- and the collective jealousy can be fierce. +Traveling around the country, I came to see the great mass of Soviet people as protagonists in what I call the culture of envy -- corrosive animosity that took root under the czars in the deep-seated collectivism in Russian life and then was accentuated by Leninist ideology. Now, it has turned rancid under the misery of everyday living. +The Soviet ruling class, with cushy cars, clinics and country homes, is a natural enough target for the wrath of the little people. But what is ominous for Gorbachev's reforms is that this free-floating anger of the rank and file often settles on anyone who rises above the crowd. This hostility is a serious danger to the new entrepreneurs Gorbachev is trying to nurture. It is a deterrent to modest initiative among ordinary people in factories or on farms. It freezes the vast majority into the immobility of conforming to group attitudes. +From Valentin Bereshkov, a former Soviet diplomat, I heard of a farmer outside of Moscow whose horse and few cows were set free and whose barn was set afire by neighboring farm workers jealous of his modest prosperity. The Soviet press is full of stories about attacks on privately owned cooperative restaurants and other small service shops by people who resent seeing others do well. In debates at the Supreme Soviet, the most passionate arguments involve accusations that the free market will enable speculators to get rich by exploiting the working class. +Such antagonisms, of course, bear witness to the powerful influence of decades of Leninist indoctrination. For great masses of Soviet people, capitalism is still a dirty word; the fact that someone earns more, gets more is a violation of the egalitarian ideal of socialism. Tens of millions of citizens deeply mistrust the market, fearing they will be cheated and outsmarted. They see the profit motive as immoral. After all, in 1918 Lenin wrote: "We consider the land to be common property. But if I take a piece . . . for myself, cultivate twice as much grain as I need and sell the excess at a profit . . . am I really behaving like a Communist? No. I am behaving like an exploiter, like a proprietor." +But there is more than ideology at work here. There are class and collective instincts, born in the countryside of prerevolutionary Russia, embedded in the peasant psyche and often carried from the farm to the factory when peasants have migrated to the cities. This hostility toward those who rise above the herd reflects the collective ethic of the obshchina, the commune of villagers who in czarist times lived in a small huddle of homes, close by each other, not, as in the United States, in single homesteads dotted independently across the open plains. After serfdom was abolished in 1861, the peasantry banded together, working the land together. The peasant commune apportioned to each family strips of land to work, in different fields, some near the village, some off by the forest, distributed so that each family was assigned some good land and some not-so-good land. The obshchina decided when they would all plant, when they would all harvest and often how they would all work the fields. The villagers shared the bad weather. They planted the same crops. They grew accustomed to a common fate. And they reacted warily against anyone who tried to advance beyond his peers. + +IN MY TRAVELS, VILLAGERS often told me: Remember, the tallest blade of grass is the first to be cut down by the scythe. Lesson: Do not try to stand above the crowd, the collective. +Felicity Barringer, a former New York Times correspondent in Moscow, made the shrewd observation that "in America, it's a sin to be a loser, but if there's one sin in Soviet society, it's being a winner." +Dmitri Zakharov, anchor of the Friday night television show "Vzglyad," said: "In the West, if an American sees someone on TV with a shiny new car, he will think, 'Oh, maybe I can get that someday for myself.' But if a Russian sees that, he will think, 'This bastard with his car. I would like to kill him for living better than I do.' When Russians see a cooperative where people make a lot of money, they ask angrily, 'Why do those people make so much money?' Instead of making an effort to raise their own incomes, they want to close down the cooperative." +Anatoly A. Sobchak, the Mayor of Leningrad, told me: "Our people cannot endure seeing someone else earn more than they do. Our people want equal distribution of money, whether that means wealth or poverty. They are so jealous of other people that they want others to be worse off, if need be, to keep things equal. We have a story: God comes to a lucky Russian peasant one day and offers him any wish in the world. The peasant is excited and starts dreaming his fantasies. 'Just remember,' God says, 'whatever you choose, I will do twice as much for your neighbor as I do for you.' The peasant is stumped because he cannot bear to think of his neighbor being so much better off than he is, no matter how well off he becomes. Finally, he gets an idea and he tells God, 'Strike out one of my eyes and take out both eyes of my neighbor.' +"Changing that psychology is the hardest part of our economic reform. That psychology of intolerance toward others who make more money, no matter why, no matter whether they work harder, longer or better -- that psychology is blocking economic reform." +Commenting on this problem, Vlad Pozner put a new twist on something I had noticed among Russians: the built-in caution of their daily greeting. "When two Americans meet, they ask each other, 'How are things?' and they tell each other, 'Fine,' " Pozner said. "An American will say 'fine' even if his mother died yesterday. +"By contrast, when two Soviets meet and ask each other how they are, they will say, 'Normal,' or 'So-so.' Even if things are good -- especially if things are good! You don't want to tempt the devil. You don't want people to think things are great. Because they might be envious. And if they're envious, there's no telling what they might do." +This urge for leveling the fate of all, for sharing misfortune and spreading misery is what Nikolai Shmelyov, the radical economic reformer, has called the syndrome of "equal poverty for all." +"The blind, burning envy of your neighbor's success has become the most powerful brake on the ideas and practice of perestroika," Shmelyov told the Congress of People's Deputies in March. "Until we at least damp down this envy, the success of perestroika will always be in jeopardy." +Gorbachev himself has picked up this theme. Last April, he upbraided Soviet workers for lacking "a sense of responsibility" and for resisting wage reforms that would reward good work. Specifically, he warned that the culture of envy would snuff out any spark of initiative and daring and would cripple hopes of real economic progress. +"If we do not break out of this foolish system of wage leveling," he declared, "we will ruin everything that's alive in our people. We shall suffocate." + +LOAD-DATE: October 28, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Cover photo: A pro-democracy rally in Moscow. (Alexandra Avakian/Woodfin Camp); Photos: After the parts run out and the assembly line shuts down, it's break time at an auto factory. (Robert Wallis/Sipa); Long lines, surly service and short supplies can turn daily shopping into competitive combat. (Victor Laski/Sipa); All smiles at a party, owners of cooperatives in Ulyanovsk, Lenin's birthplace, have formed a support group to help others start similar ventures. (Peter Marlow/Magnum); Lenin's legacy of subsidies is hard for the Soviet people to overcome. It is far easier to take down a banner. Waiting to buy their own television sets, customers give the once-over to someone who already has. (Christopher Morris/Black Star); Subsidies make Soviet housing cheap, though it is overcrowded and dreary by Western standards. (Nikolai Ignatiev/Network) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +372 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 28, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Castro Was a Hothead + +BYLINE: By Adam B. Ulam; Adam B. Ulam is the director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University. + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 13; Column 1; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1197 words + + +KHRUSHCHEV REMEMBERS +The Glasnost Tapes. +Edited and translated by Jerrold L. Schecter +with Vyacheslav V. Luchkov. +Foreword by Strobe Talbott. +Illustrated. 219 pp. Boston: +Little, Brown & Company. $19.95. + HE had dominated the Soviet Union for more than 10 years, and the world scene reverberated to his ebullient and impetuous personality. At times he seemed to be initiating a far-reaching detente with the West, but his occasional bluff and bluster would evoke the specter of a nuclear war. And then on Oct. 14, 1964, came a communique: the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union "acceded to the plea of N. S. Khrushchev" that he be released as First Secretary and Prime Minister. The man who had shaken the world with his threats and designs became overnight an obscure emeritus. +We now know he had been the victim of a palace coup: his Politburo (then called Presidium) colleagues, exasperated by his constant improvisations and his garrulity about Stalin's crimes, had plotted for a long time to get rid of him. With Nikita Khrushchev gone, the Soviet system lapsed for 20 years into an oligarchic bureaucracy, only to experience with the coming of perestroika a much more severe shock. +In his retirement, under virtual house arrest, Khrushchev busied himself with recording his recollections and reflections. Smuggled abroad, portions of "Khrushchev Remembers" appeared in the West in 1970 and 1974; "The Glasnost Tapes," the third installment, contains those fragments that the deceased leader's family had felt could not be published -- until the coming of glasnost. (The current volume has been lucidly translated by Jerrold L. Schecter, the former Moscow bureau chief of Time magazine, and Vyache slav V. Luchkov, an independent scholar.) +Quite often a note of deep depression steals into the reminiscences. Khrushchev survived his fall by seven years, and what he saw of the Brezhnev times -- now quite justifiably dubbed "stagnation" -- he did not like. "What kind of socialism is that," he writes, "when you have to keep people in chains?" And there is an underlying feeling of bitterness, passing occasionally into despair, of a man whose entire life had been politics and the exercise of power. "I want to die. It is so dull . . . for me to live in my situation." +A mood like that is not very conducive to accuracy and objectivity. Unlike other retired politicians, Khrushchev did not have at his disposal a staff of secretaries and research assistants -- only the devoted help of his son, Sergei. And, of course, he had no access to official documents and archives. So it is no wonder that occasionally the memory of the septuagenarian retiree falters. For example, in describing a state dinner in Moscow in 1945, he confuses the Labor Party politician Aneurin Bevan with Britain's then Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin. +All the more troublesome, since it touches on Communist affairs during his ascendancy, is his reference to the Communist Parties' conference in 1957 in Moscow. On that occasion the assembled delegates of all the ruling parties, except for that of Yugoslavia, subscribed to a declaration of principles. As Khrushchev tells it, the Chinese (their delegation was headed by Mao Zedong himself), already in an anti-Moscow mood, encouraged the Yugoslavs not to sign. In fact, the picture was quite different. Marshal Tito and his party, for Mao, were at the time beyond the pale; the Chinese would not hold confidential talks with those they considered "revisionists," or renegades. +And so one cannot accept uncritically even Khrushchev's version of an event so central to his period of leadership as the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Essentially, he repeats the official Soviet explanation of an affair that probably brought the United States and Russia closer than ever to a nuclear confrontation: the Kremlin planned to place medium- and intermediate-range nuclear rockets in Cuba to defend the island from an anticipated American invasion. The only new detail in the memoir is an allegation that after Washington discovered the installation and President John F. Kennedy imposed a blockade, Fidel Castro demanded that "we should launch a preemptive strike against the United States." +One cannot help wondering whether Khrushchev remembers correctly the whole involved business. Was the Castro regime in itself of such value to the Kremlin that for its sake Khrushchev would have been ready to risk a nuclear holocaust? Or were the missiles meant to be a bargaining chip to secure much more vital interests of the Soviet Union, such as the settlement of the German problem? Would Castro, even if he was a "hotheaded man," as Khrushchev describes him, have suggested a step that would have brought American retaliation -- the obliteration not only of his regime but of most of the population of the island? +Speaking of revelations and nuclear weapons, there is a curious passage in the book where the author refers to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in this country in 1953 for espionage. "I heard from both Stalin and Molotov," Khrushchev writes, "that the Rosenbergs provided very significant help in accelerating the production of our atomic bomb." This is rather surprising, since the consensus in the Western scientific community has been that, contrasted with the information supplied by Klaus Fuchs, the data passed on by the Rosenbergs had not been of crucial importance in speeding up the Soviet nuclear arms program. +The main motif in this new book, as in the two preceding volumes, is Khrushchev's struggle -- alas, at times inconsistent and self-defeating -- to reform Soviet domestic and foreign policies in the direction of greater liberalism at home and detente with the West abroad. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lamented, "He never carried anything to its conclusion -- least of all the fight for freedom." +Still, the man who first, though gingerly and incompletely, revealed to the Soviet people the story of Stalin's crimes and who genuinely wanted to reform his sorely tried society deserves not only sympathy but more attention. To a man of his generation, that of the Bolshevik Revolution, it would have been inconceivable and impermissible to go as far as Mikhail Gorbachev has -- to the point where ideology has eroded and the Communist Party has become a shambles. But in many ways Khrushchev had prepared the ground for perestroika. His successors were never able to suppress completely the dissent that, after a long winter, flowered into glasnost. +It is natural that much of the book is devoted to Stalin, and while it throws little new light on that horrifying personality, it helps explain the hypnotic power he exercised over his entourage and, in a way, over the whole society. In a sense it was the ghost of Stalin that helped defeat the living politician in 1964. It is only in the last few years that what might be called the revolution of common sense has eliminated Stalinism from the Soviet body politic. And for all his sins of omission and commission, Nikita Khrushchev has the historical merit of having been the pioneer of that revolution. + +NAME: Nikita S. Krushchev + +LOAD-DATE: October 28, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing: Nikita S. Krushchev (Darren Ching) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +373 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 29, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +CONGRESS ADJOURNS; +Elderly Would Benefit From Curbs on Sale of Overlapping Health Insurance + +BYLINE: By MILT FREUDENHEIM + +SECTION: Section B; Page 9; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 839 words + +The tough new Federal standards for private health insurance that Congress approved Friday would prohibit the sale of overlapping health insurance to people like Grace and John Kossow, an elderly California couple who were persuaded to buy 29 policies in a 30-month period and billed for $22,011 in first-year premiums, or more than twice the couple's annual income. +"We told Jerry Brecht, the salesman, that we were not interested," Mrs. Kossow, who is 86 years old, said in a telephone interview from her home in Watsonville, near Santa Cruz. "But before he left, we had five policies. He kept coming back, and he could always explain why we could take more." Mrs. Kossow said they have let all the policies lapse. + The new Federal standards were added to the 1991 budget bill, which President Bush has said he would sign. They are intended to protect 23 million elderly and disabled Americans, who spent $15 billion last year for insurance known as Medigap policies. Medigap helps with costs not covered by Federal Medicare like the first day of hospital charges and prescription drugs. +The law would prohibit the sale of more than one Medigap policy to an individual. Consumer advocates and insurance industry spokesmen say a single Medigap policy is adequate for most people. The new law would also prohibit selling Medigap policies to the three million low-income elderly people covered by Medicaid. + +Surge in Sales + Sales of Medigap policies surged after Congress repealed a law last November that would have expanded Medicare coverage for high-cost catastrophic illnesses. +The new Federal law would extend to all states the insurance standards that are already enforced, in varying degrees, in a few states like California, Minnesota, Wisconsin and New York. +In one recent civil case, the Standard Life and Accident Insurance Company of Oklahoma City was fined $150,000 earlier this month in the California Superior Court in Santa Cruz. Don Gartner, an assistant district attorney in Santa Cruz, said the company, a unit of the American National Insurance Company of Galveston, Tex., had encouraged its agents to "conceal a form of life insurance in the Medigap policies it was selling." He said that the life insurance was not subject to profit ceilings, which most states have required for Medigap. +A study for Congress by the General Accounting Office listed deficiencies in some existing Medigap policies: "They provide narrow coverage, pay fixed dollar benefit levels without protection against inflation, are conditioned on confinement in a hospital or contracting the specified disease." + +A 92-Year-Old Woman's Case + The Senate Committee on aging cited the case of a 92-year-old Riverside, Calif., woman as an example of misleading sales pitches. The committee said an agent had persuaded the woman, whom it did identify, to buy eight policies, including three from Standard Life. But when she needed assistance with walking and other care at home, the committee said the insurance agent told her that the policy would not pay for the kind of help she needed. "I can't understand why he didn't know that when he sold me the policy," she told the committee. +Under the new law, the 50 state insurance Commissioners would have nine months to draft 10 model Medigap policies. "Every insurer would have to offer a core package of standardized benefits," said Representative Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and a sponsor of the legislation. +The bill would also authorize $10 million to encourage states to establish networks of elderly volunteers to provide free counseling on Medicare issues. Bonnie Burns, a Medicare specialist with California's Health Insurance and Advocacy Program, HICAP, said counselors had helped to assemble the facts in civil damage lawsuits against Medigap insurance salespeople. She said that in one case the Bedrossian Insurance Agency Inc., based in San Jose, agreed last year to pay $200,000 in damages and court costs. + +Review Is Scheduled + Carole Olson Gates, a staff lawyer with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, said state officials and private insurers would review the new regulations on Tuesday in Chicago. She said that the associaiton had been discussing Medigap standards since March. +Carl Schramm, president of the Health Insurance Association of America, an insurers group in Washington, said the bill was "a good compromise" because it would would give the initial responsibility to the states, "with Federal regulation down the road, if they do not act." +Consumer advocates welcomed the Congressional action. Gail Shearer, a Washington policy analyst with Consumers Union, an advocacy group, said the law would "help people who turn 65 and are faced with very confusing choices among hundreds of Medigap policies." +James P. Firman, president of the United Seniors Health Cooperative, an advocacy group in Washington, said insurers would have to ask prospective customers whether they already had Medigap policies. + +LOAD-DATE: October 29, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: October 30, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + + CORRECTION: +Because of an editing error, an article yesterday about new Federal standards for health insurance for the elderly referred incorrectly in some editions to the timing of Congress's repeal of the law that expanded Medicare coverage for catastrophic illnesses. It was repealed in November 1989, not this year. + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +374 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 30, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Experts Disagree on Effects of Medicare Reduction + +BYLINE: By MILT FREUDENHEIM + +SECTION: Section A; Page 22; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 581 words + +Hospital executives said yesterday that the cuts in Medicare payments to hospitals and doctors in the 1991 budget bill may lower the quality of medical care for patients. But Bush Administration officials said the $34 billion in savings would be achieved mainly by eliminating wasteful practices by hospitals and cutting payments for hundreds of medical procedures that they say are overpriced. +Payments to hospitals would be reduced by $16.8 billion over five years under the terms of the bill, which President Bush has said he will sign. Physicians would lose $9.5 billion. About $6 billion would come from requiring private employers to pick up more of the costs of elderly and disabled employees and retirees eligible for Medicare. Reductions in other areas, like payments to clinical laboratories and for dialysis treatment, account for the rest. + The people who benefit from Medicare will have to pay $10 billion more in monthly premiums for physicians and deductible payments, for a total savings of $44 billion in spending. + +Some Hospitals Fare Better + But the budget softens the cuts for "teaching hospitals" that educate doctors, as well as for those that care for large numbers of poor people and those in rural areas. +The cuts will hit hardest at city and suburban hospitals that serve middle-class patients, said Michael D. Bromberg, a spokesman for investor-owned chains. "The people who suffer will be the patients," said Mr. Bromberg, the executive director of the Federation of American Health Systems. "There will be less money for new technology and staff. Hospitals may have to reduce some services." +But Gail R. Wilensky, who heads the Administration's Medicare program, said the cuts "should not be regarded as drastic." +Congressional aides said $11.3 billion, the largest part of the savings on hospitals, would come by reducing annual increases in payments so they do not keep up with inflation. +The bill would also reduce by $4 billion the Medicare payments to hospitals for capital spending, such as for new equipment and buildings. +But Congress left $1 billion extra to ease the cuts for 1,537 hospitals that have more than their share of uninsured patients unable to pay for their care. Hundreds of rural hospitals would also get a $1 billion break over the five years. And teaching hospitals would not be charged $485 million in assessments for earlier overpayments. +Doctors would lose $3 billion in annual increases tied to inflation; $2.5 billion in reduced payments on 1,400 procedures like cataract operations that are considered overpriced; $1.5 billion in reduced payments to radiologists, anesthesiologists and pathologists; $880 million in reduced payments to new doctors and for surgical assistants, and $725 million in payments made for interpreting simple electrocardiogram tests. +Some private employers were concerned that hospitals and doctors would try to make up their losses by raising fees to private insurers. +Donald Young, executive director of a Congressional advisory committee on hospital payments, said patient care may suffer from the budget cuts. But he said hospitals had been raising their Medicare charges by 4 percent to 5 percent beyond inflation, mainly by charging for "more tests, more surgery, more procedures per patient." He said savings may come by doing fewer tests on a patient who may be routinely checked with blood tests, X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging and computerized scans. + +LOAD-DATE: October 30, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +375 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 30, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Experts Vary on Impact Of Plan to Trim Deficit + +BYLINE: Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 23; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 670 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 + +Will the five-year deficit-reducing package of nearly $500 billion of spending cuts and tax increases voted by Congress on Sauturday help or hurt the economy? + +Robert M. Solow, Nobel laureate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: +The short-run impact of this package is almost certainly contractionary. It almost certainly adds to the 1989 impulse toward recession in the economy. It is very unlikely that the Fed will act fully and quickly enough to offset the contraction. I would not be able in five years to point to anything good from the agreement, the one exception being unless the package should induce the Fed and the world to allow substantially lower real interest rates. The longer-run impact over five to 10 years is probably favorable because then we could get more long-run growth, more investment in social infrastructure, more plant and equipment spending, more spending on research and development and a more skilled labor force. + +Isabel V. Sawhill, senior fellow at the Urban Institute: +It will be good for the economy because it will untie Alan Greenspan's hands at the Fed to lower interest rates, and will have positive effects on the financial markets, and long-term rates hopefully will come down. The package buries "voodoo economics." Instead of assuming that we have to have low tax rates as a sure-fire tonic for the economy, it recognizes that big deficits are a greater threat than higher taxes. But it doesn't do much to control the growth in spending on the elderly, one of largest and fastest growting components of the budget. Social Security benefits weren't touched. Medicare benefits were only nicked. Medicare and Social Security represent 46 percent of domestic spending and slated to grow to 54 percent by the year 2000. There's also no effort to address the social deficit. + +Sar Levitan, director of the Center for Social Policy at George Washington University: +For the short run, I don't think it will have much of an impact, particularly if the Fed follows it up with a mild reduction in interest rates. For the five-year period, it is more fiction than reality, because we can't project for five years from now, particularly since a recession may be looming on the horizon. To a large extent it is just a hope that we will reduce the budget deficit by $490 billion. Also, the projected deficits for the next five years will far exceed the $500 billion reduction that Congress has just voted. In case of recession or economic downturn, every 1 percent increase in unemployment will raise the deficit by another $40 billion. The average increase in each postwar recession was a 2 1/2 percent rise in unemployment. That would mean that if we have an average recession, the Fed budget deficit might actually increase by $100 billion. We don't know yet what will happen to the financial system in a recession. + +John H. Makin, director of fiscal policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute: +The economy is weak and getting weaker. It is a modest package of deficit reduction. Everybody is celebrating because we're taking what we can get in these things. The previous largest was $25 billion after the 1987 stock market crash. This is of comparable scale. We are already so close to a recession that it's not worth arguing about. This is a very gentle tap further into a recession. + +Alice M. Rivlin, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution: +The good things are: one, that it happened; two, that it's a five-year agreement, and three, that it is real. It is not smoke and mirrors. I also think it's about the right size for now. It's as big as they should have done, given the state of economy, though not enough for the long run. I don't think there will be any impetus for doing more next year, in what looks to be a fairly weak economy. Maybe in two or three years we will have courage to come back and say we have to do more. Forty billion dollars in the first year is in the small change of a $5 trillion economy. + +LOAD-DATE: October 30, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + + +GRAPHIC: +Photos: Robert M. Solow, Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Nobel laureate. - Said the Fed was unlikely to act "fully and quickly enought" to offset the forces of contraction.; Alice M. Rivlin, A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a policy organization - "Maybe in two or three years we will have the courage to come back and say we have to do more." (Photographs by The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +376 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 30, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Corrections + +SECTION: Section A; Page 3; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 52 words + +Because of an editing error, an article yesterday about new Federal standards for health insurance for the elderly referred incorrectly in some editions to the timing of Congress's repeal of the law that expanded Medicare coverage for catastrophic illnesses. It was repealed in November 1989, not this year. + +LOAD-DATE: October 30, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Correction + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +377 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 30, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +China Puzzle: Why a Panel Doesn't Meet + +BYLINE: By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 7; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 899 words + +DATELINE: BEIJING, Oct. 29 + +In a famous Sherlock Holmes case, the key clue was a dog that did not bark. These days, sleuths who follow China are focusing on a similar indication that something is amiss: the clue this time is the Central Committee that does not meet. +The evidence is mostly circumstantial, but it points to significant disputes among China's top leaders. The jostling seems to be about power, succession and the political and economic directions the nation will take in the 1990's. + The hardest of the hard-liners in the Government seem to have gained influence in the last few months, but are unable to win a consensus for the changes they want in personnel and policies, Chinese officials and foreign diplomats say. +Thus the stalemate continues at the pinnacle of the leadership, and the Communist Party Central Committee is unable to meet and ratify the changes or the five-year plan that is to begin in January. +The Central Committee meeting was expected to convene in September or October, but a Politburo member recently told a Japanese visitor that it would not meet even in November. Prime Minister Li Peng said today that the committee would meet before the end of the year, so December seems to be the current target. + +'Fighting Among Themselves' + "During the Asian Games, the leaders concentrated on the games and there was some cooperation and unity," said a Chinese with close ties to senior officials. The Asian Games, a miniature Olympics, ended on Oct. 7. +"But now they're fighting among themselves to get their way on a whole range of issues, and until they reach some agreement, the Central Committee can't meet." +A Western diplomat was blunter, saying, "We think it's a battle." +The traditionalists have been able to score some gains because the pivot of the political system, Deng Xiaoping, appears to have withdrawn from daily involvement in political affairs. Mr. Deng appears to be staying at home and enjoying an apolitical life as patriarch of a family of 16 living together in one courtyard. +Mr. Deng, who is 86 years old, has not been seen in public since July -- a gap that normally results in rumors that he is seriously ill. But these days, Mr. Deng is said to be in satisfactory condition, and his youngest son, Deng Zhifang, is planning a trip to the United States, which also suggests that his father is getting along. +The octogenarian hard-liners -- whose patriarch is Chen Yun, an 85-year-old who has not been seen in public in more than a year -- are said to be pushing for a major promotion for Deng Liqun, 75, a retired head of the Communist Party Propaganda Department. + +Guidance to Journalists + Some party elders are also ignoring their lack of formal positions and are quietly issuing hard-line instructions on whatever catches their attention. Deng Liqun, for example, is believed to be meeting with newspaper editors and advising them on what to write. +Former President Li Xiannian, 81, was recently outraged to read in a news summary that the city of Shenyang in northeastern China was planning to sell stakes in several dozen companies to foreigners. A Chinese with high-level associations said Mr. Li scrawled "reckless" on the report and issued instructions that the sale be halted. +The octogenarians have also curbed the influence of Li Ruihuan, who is a protege of Deng Xiaoping. Mr. Li appeared in July to win a turf battle with the traditionalists over control of the Culture Ministry. +Mr. Li's victory immediately rippled throughout the Government: At the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, hard-liners became much more friendly to the scholars, whom they were subjecting to grueling Communist Party study sessions. +But in August, the group of octogenarians began to complain that Mr. Li was making statements that went beyond the party line. Deng Xiaoping did not come to his defense, and Mr. Li's influence has diminished. + +Centralized Planning Continues + Another sign of hard-liner dominance is the five-year plan, drafts of which have circulated among senior officials. Economists and others who have seen it say that it includes general calls for further reform, but that as it stands, it is primarily a document of central planning. +But if the reformists are lying low these days, they have not given up the battle. At the end of last month, the leaders of China's provinces were summoned to Beijing to study and approve an outline of the five-year plan. Instead, the governors rebelled, a major embarrassment to Prime Minister Li, and refused to approve the plan. +According to accounts by knowledgeable Chinese, the governors complained that the draft transferred too much power and wealth from the provinces to the central Government. Some governors, including Ye Xuanping of Guangdong province, dared to interrupt Prime Minister Li, and the meeting reportedly ended in tumult. Now the draft is being re-examined and is expected to be modified after negotiations with the governors. +The one item on the Central Committee's agenda that has already been agreed upon, Chinese officials and diplomats say, is the fate of the ousted Communist Party leader, Zhao Ziyang. Mr. Zhao was formally dismissed from all his posts in June 1989 and has been under investigation since. But the leadership is now believed to have agreed to end the investigation and allowed him to remain in the party. + +LOAD-DATE: October 30, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +378 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 31, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +POOR FAMILIES GAIN UNDER TAX ACCORD + +BYLINE: By JASON DePARLE, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1001 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 + +The budget agreement produced after months of bitter dispute did not exactly rob from the rich, but it did give to the poor, through both tax cuts and program expansions. In fact, it made the poor the only income class in America predicted to have more money and services with the deficit-reduction package than they would have had without it. +But the plan does not treat all poor people alike. The biggest winners are working poor families with children, who will benefit from substantial increases in the cash rebates provided by various tax credits. + Beyond tax policy, the plan provides money for new child care programs and a major expansion of Medicaid, both of which will benefit the working poor the most. In addition, the plan provides some new health benefits to the elderly poor. And other pieces of recent legislation, like the expansion of the Head Start program, provide good news for all poor families with children. +The plan also increases taxes on alcohol, tobacco and gasoline, but the rebates to working poor families with children will usually more than compensate them for those increases. Other types of poor people, including welfare recipients who do not work, individuals without children, and the elderly, are likely to lose ground under the budget agreement, through higher excise taxes. + +Political Perspective + How significant is the package in terms of antipoverty policy? The answer varies widely with one's political perspective. +"Conservatives on the Hill think that this is the initiation of major new spending programs for the poor, whereas liberals see them as only modest gains in programs that are still underfunded," said Doug Besharov, an analyst with the American Enterprise Institute. "Personally, I think when the dust settles people will agree: This was a very good year for poor people." +Most analysts agree that the budget plan will do little to shorten the gap between rich and poor that grew increasingly large throughout the 1980's. That gap was largely the result of changes in pretax income in which the rich saw their income soar while the poor saw their's stagnate or drop. +But the new budget plan does partly reverse the tax policies that, by cutting taxes on the rich while increasing them on the poor, had further increased the gap. "At least the government is no longer a co-conspirator in producing greater inequality," said Isabel Sawhill, an economist at the Urban Institute. + +Significant Contributions + One of the most significant questions about the budget agreement is the extent to which it advances what has become a bipartisan goal: to make work a more rewarding option for poor people. +The early consensus is that the plan makes significant contributions in this area, in two ways. Expanded tax credits place more cash in the hands of the working poor, providing, in effect, an increased wage subsidy. And expanded child care and Medicaid programs will help reduce the additional expenses that poor people often incur when leaving welfare for the world of work. +The budget agreement will gradually expand Medicaid so that it will cover all children who fall below the poverty line. Current law provides the health insurance mostly to families on welfare, creating a incentive for many not to work. + +Big Gain for Working Poor + While for many working poor families, the changes will still not be enough to lift them above the poverty line, most analysts agree they are a major move in that direction. "The working poor were made better off by this agreement than by any other piece of legislation passed in the 1980's," said an economist with the House Ways and Means Committee. +The earned income tax credit, which now provides a 14-cent a dollar rebate on the first $6,810, will be expanded next year to 16.7 cents for families with one child and 17.3 cents for families with two or more children. +The rebate stays steady for families who earn from $6,810 to $10,730 and begins to decline after that, phasing out for families that earn more than $20,262. Those brackets are adjusted each year for inflation. +In other words, the maximum rebate, which is now $953, will rise to $1,137 for families with one child and $1,178 for families with two or more. By 1994, the rate will rise to 23 cents and 25 cents respectively, or an increase to $1,566 and $1,702. +In addition, the budget agreement provides two other tax credits, a 6-cent-a-dollar credit for the first $6,810 earned for families that buy health insurance and a 5-cent credit on the same amount for those with infants less than a year old. Taken together, these tax credits could provide an additional $749 a year. +All together, by 1994, the maximum tax credit provided to a family of working poor would rise to $2,451 from $953, an increase of 250 percent. But only a small proportion would receive the maximum. Most families receive their rebates when they file their tax returns. + +Some Gains to Be Lost + But some of this gain will be lost as the poor, like everyone else, pay more in taxes on alcohol, gasoline and tobacco. +"For some working families, the combined changes are significant," said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research and advocacy group. He said the changes reflect the "growing understanding that there is a large working poor population in America and we need to do more for them." +Under the budget plan, however, other poor families will not fare as well. The budget office estimates that the poorest one-fifth of American families, on the average, pay $60 a year more in taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and gasoline. For working families with children, that increase will be more than offset by an average gain of $171 in tax credits, but for them only. +Others will lose slightly. Families in the poorest one-fifth headed by an elderly person, for instance, are expected to wind up with $36 a year less in net income, according to the budget office. + +LOAD-DATE: October 31, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Chart: New tax accords impact on the working poor + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +379 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 1, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Japan Report On Affluence + +BYLINE: REUTERS + +SECTION: Section D; Page 8; Column 3; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 211 words + +DATELINE: TOKYO, Oct. 31 + +Technology has improved Japan's standard of living vastly since World War II, but most Japanese do not feel affluent, a Government agency said on Tuesday. +"Electrical appliances, clothing, brand-name products and food are abundant at home, but Japanese lack a feeling of affluence once they step outside the home," the Economic Planning Agency said in its annual report on Japan's standard of living. + Technological innovation since the end of World War II has brought economic success, higher productivity and wages, and increased consumer purchasing power, but Japan has pursued economic success without regard for the environment, housing conditions or the well-being of the average consumer, the report said. +"The real meaning of affluence is being questioned," the report said. "Elderly people are very much dissatisfied with the quality of welfare." +Most Japanese want improved roads, better welfare for the aged and more sites for sports and recreation, it said. It also criticized high land prices as an example of how economic growth had failed to benefit the average Japanese. +The paper said the Government should help companies develop technology to meet consumer needs and find ways to assess the impact of technology on the environment. + +LOAD-DATE: November 1, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +380 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 2, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Alzheimer's Disease Rate Up + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 17; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 308 words + +DATELINE: ATLANTA, Nov. 1 + +The rate of Americans dying from Alzheimer's disease increased tenfold in the 1980's, but heightened awareness may have led doctors to diagnose it more often than in the past, Federal health officials said today. +The Centers for Disease Control said in its weekly report that 11,311 people died from Alzheimer's disease in 1987. In 1979, the first year of a study by the health agency, 857 deaths were attributed to the disease. + For the entire 1979-87 period, Alzheimer's disease was listed as the underlying cause of death for 46,202 people in the United States. +Dr. Richard Sun, medical epidemiologist in the agency's Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, said there was no definitive study available on whether the incidence of Alzheimer's disease increased in that period. + +Increased Awareness Cited + Because the nation's population is getting older, he said, it is likely that the rate of Alzheimer's disease is rising. But he added that increased awareness probably played a role in the increased death rate. +"It's a little difficult to believe that the number of people with Alzheimer's disease could increase 950 percent in eight years," said Dr. Sun, whose office helped compile the report. "Our general feeling is heightened awareness was a little more important" in explaining the sharp rise in the death rate than such an increase in actual incidence. +He said that in some cases, doctors may have changed a diagnosis from senility to Alzheimer's. +Alzheimer's disease, which usually afflicts elderly people and is characterized by progressive mental deterioration, was first recognized in the early 1900's. But awareness of the disease was fairly limited until the 1970's, when doctors "realized that Alzheimer disease was a specific disease, and not a normal process of aging," Dr. Sun said. + +LOAD-DATE: November 2, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +381 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 2, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Our Towns; +Forgotten Homes For Mentally Ill: A Sister's Tale + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL WINERIP + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 781 words + +DATELINE: BRIDGEPORT, CONN. + +In the spring of 1988, Katina Zachmanoglou, a New York City actress, was helping her schizophrenic sister, Faye, look for a place to live. Faye was well enough to be out of a state hospital and in a community residence. The State Mental Health Department placed the sister in a family-care home, a boarding house licensed for up to six mentally ill people. +"We were told these homes provide a healthy family atmosphere," said Ms. Zachmanoglou. She soon got a far different view of the home, run by Vela Gaines. "Mrs. Gaines threw away Faye's entire library," said Ms. Zachmanoglou. Residents reported that Mrs. Gaines hit them and had them wash their toothbrushes in the toilet. + Later it would come out that Mrs. Gaines's license had been revoked in 1987, a year before the state placed Faye there. +Next, the state placed Faye in a home run by Mildred Jack. By then, her sister was making her own inspections. "On May 7 we personally witnessed the following," she wrote. "Senior citizens locked out of the house; a broken window; no food in the residents' refrigerator; knobs removed from the gas stove rendering it inoperable, no toilet paper or soap." +Later it would come out that complaints about Mrs. Jack's home dated to 1981. +Next, the state placed Faye in Barbara Hudson's home. The actress says she found the same "appalling slumlike conditions." Faye's room, she said, "had garbage in the drawers." Later it would come out that Mrs. Hudson had repeatedly refused to allow inspectors in; as early as 1981, a case worker had recommended revoking her license. +Three homes were all Faye could take. She was rehospitalized. And that began her sister's quest to change what she had seen. With her mother, Maria, she collected documents, badgered officials, spending thousands of dollars and hours. "I was somewhat skeptical at first," said State Senator A. Cynthia Matthews, co-chair woman of the Legis lature's Public Health Committee. "But they had the te nacity and stubbor ness to bring it to our attention." +Since the Zach manoglous began, the state has revoked one home's license and is seeking to close three others, including Mrs. Hudson's and Mrs. Jack's. Mrs. Hudson would not comment. Mrs. Jack's lawyer, Robert Lesser, called the charges "petty," saying she runs a good home and never abused anyone. Mrs. Gaines applied to be relicensed and was rejected. "They couldn't prove I was abusing patients," she said. "The state's reason was residents were not comfortable in my home." +Family-care homes were first opened in the 1970's as state mental hospitals were being emptied. Owners are not required to be professionally trained, and the state pays $682 a month for each resident. In the last decade these homes have generally been supplanted by group homes that have trained staff and cost about three times as much to run. +Of Connecticut's 1,700 community residence beds, 82 are family-care beds. "They were pretty much forgotten until the Zachmanoglous," said Senator Matthews, who is studying whether to eliminate the homes. +Often the poorest and elderly were referred to the homes. They were more likely to accept conditions a middle-class person like Ms. Zachmanoglou would not. +For anyone paying attention, there was plenty of warning. A governor's task force in 1983 pointed out that no agency took responsiblity for the homes. The Mental Health Department assigned patients there; the Department of Health inspected and licensed them. Even after Mrs. Gaines's license was removed by Health, Mental Health sent people. +A year-old report by the Auditor of Public Accounts noted that inspectors were often denied access. There was no penalty for this, the report said, just a violation letter. Inspections didn't seem to have much effect. "We noted the same violatons being cited year after year," the audit said. +Most troublesome, Ms. Zachmanoglou said, is that when she complained to people like Roger Adams, a director of the Greater Bridgeport Community Mental Health Center, she was treated like she was seeing things. "He never said, 'You're right.' His reaction made me feel no one had complained." (Later, through Freedom of Information requests, she would find a letter written by Mr. Adams in 1986 with the same complaints she'd made. Mr. Adams would not comment.) +Ms. Zachmanoglou said the turning point came in December, when 10 years' worth of inspection reports arrived by mail. "It was unbelievable what had been going on." Last week, she took them to Mrs. Jack's hearing. "Have a packet of interesting documents," she said, as she went from reporter to reporter. +Tuesday: A family-care home, close up. + +LOAD-DATE: November 2, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +382 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 3, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Encephalitis Death Toll Rises to 5 in Florida + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 26; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 236 words + +DATELINE: TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Nov. 2 + +Two more elderly people have died of St. Louis encephalitis, bringing to five the number of those killed by the disease in the three months since the beginning of an outbreak that has spread to 23 counties throughout Florida. +The latest fatalities were reported Thursday by the state's Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. The victims were identified as an 89-year-old woman in Lee County, who died Thursday, and a 78-year-old man in Sarasota, who died Wednesday. +In addition to the five confirmed encephalitis fatalities, a death in Martin County has been linked to the disease. Officials are awaiting final test results in that case. +St. Louis encephalitis, so called because it was as a result of a 1933 outbreak in St. Louis that scientists learned it was spread by the bite of mosquitoes, is a flu-like illness that can progress to fatal brain inflammation. +Outbreaks have occurred at various times throughout North America. In Florida, there are usually one to three cases a year, as against the 79 cases reported around the state in the current outbreak. +Since the virus for St. Louis encephalitis is carried by a mosquito species that bites at dusk, health officials are recommending that people stay inside from an hour before sunset to two or three hours afterward. If they have to go outside, they should wear long pants and sleeves and use insect repellant, the officials say. + +LOAD-DATE: November 3, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +383 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 4, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Getting Away From a Getaway + +BYLINE: By NICHOLAS FOX WEBER; NICHOLAS FOX WEBER is the author of "Eminent Moderns," to be published by Knopf next fall. + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 41; Column 1; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 1263 words + +IT was only hours after we reached nature camp in Maine that my college roommate, Sandy, and I realized we were in trouble. On paper, the camp had read like the ideal vacation, the perfect antidote to a grueling year of memorizing dates in darkened lecture rooms. But only hours after stepping on the barren island, we realized our mistake. +Our duffels were packed with two weeks worth of gear and we had paid the bill in advance, but we wondered how we would get through even the first night. We were seized by the sensation that overcomes most travelers at least once in a lifetime: We had to get out of there. + I maintain that the problem was the bird walk. We spent most of it not looking at birds but sitting on a rock, listening to two rather elderly women, neighbors from Garden City, L.I., arguing during a rest stop. Mrs. X claimed that by hanging bird feeders in her backyard Mrs. Y had fed the birds so well that they had stopped eating insects altogether; now the mosquitoes were destroying the X family's cookouts. The issue of bird feeders intrigued our instructor as well. So went the afternoon. +For Sandy, however, the crisis was dinner. He had imagined native greens out of the woods, fresh mussels pulled off the rocks, exotic berries. Nothing had prepared him for the unidentifiable fish fillets swimming in margarine and paprika, throwing off the same smell that once made him sick in a junior high school cafeteria in Great Neck. And, like me, he had pictured us surrounded mainly by our contemporaries, most of all by women resembling nymphs and mermaids. We had not gone into the wilds to spend time with people quite so much like our old scoutmasters. +We had to escape. But how? There was no telephone on the island. We knew there was a small office at the dock from which we had sailed to the island -- we had all been given the phone number to leave with our families in case of emergency -- but we had no excuse to go there. Once a day the supply boat would take our mail, but that was it. +We wrote a hasty letter to my sister. Would she telegraph the office with a message that gave us clear and just reason to leave, but -- on the outside chance that things had improved -- did not absolutely require us to do so? +For two days, we waited and evaluated. But the outlook was grim. During the mineral walk we again sat on the rocks for the entire outing, while our lecturer expounded on "minerals in the home"; there was a lot of talk about gold-plated faucets and silver service. The last straw may have been an electronic wildflower identification game that served as after-dinner entertainment: connecting the wires between the pictures and their correct names to make a little red light go on. Ten more days of this would make the college grind look good by comparison. +The next morning, a dour-faced director came up to me and told me about the cable. Uncle Bartleby was on his deathbed; Aunt Wilhelmina was asking for us. The supply boat rushed us back to the mainland and freedom. + I am not the first person to use the telegram technique for easing such a departure. My wife, Katharine's, grandmother tells a story about the time she employed the same device as a house guest on Long Island in the 1920's. Scheduled for a four-day stay, she and Katharine's grandfather had discovered on the day of their arrival that everyone else intended to play bridge -- morning, noon and night. The couple, however, did not even know what "trump" meant. Katharine's grandfather, claiming he was taking his constitutional, walked to town, phoned his office, and requested a telegram about a business crisis. But then her grandmother blew it. When the doorbell rang just as everyone was assembling for cocktails, she blurted, "That must be our telegram!" They didn't even wait for dinner before departing. +Often the best way to beat a hasty retreat is simply to be direct. How well Katharine and I remember our visit some 15 years ago to the Garden Hotel in the Italian resort of Sorrento. In the guidebook it had sounded like the romantic hideaway of our dreams, especially since our dreams only allowed a budget of $25 a day. When we checked in during the afternoon, the room was dark and damp, but surely it would be fine at night. + Then we went for a swim and quickly discovered that just off the hotel's small gravel beach raw sewage was being dumped into the Bay of Naples. We headed back to the room for a long shower. The floor of the shower, however, was contiguous with the floor of the bathroom and the bedroom; moreover, there was no drain. Both rooms flooded. +I asked at the desk that the room be mopped while we had dinner in the hotel restaurant. It was there that I knew that it was time to throw in the towel, and not just on the bedroom floor. As Katharine attempted to eat the only gluey spaghetti we have ever had in Italy, she gave me a look I have come to know well: "You can pretend everything is all right if you want, but I am miserable, and there's no more getting around it." +When we returned to the room, it hadn't been mopped. We packed and went to the desk, where we told the clerk we would pay for dinner, but not a lira more. By the time we had finished our litany of grievances, he didn't even argue. By midnight we were swimming in the pool at a resort near Positano; not only did we have to leave the hotel, but we also had to get out of town entirely. +When both members of a traveling couple feel the urge to leave, the rapport can help make up for the misery of a wasted trip. Such was the case with friends who hired an overnight babysitter for the very first time so that they could spend their anniversary in a Vermont inn known for its French chef and the scenic views from its rooms. It was funny when the duckling was stringy on the outside and still frozen at the bone, but the humor had worn off when the lemon mousse tasted like detergent. There was no way that they were going to spend the night in their room overlooking the village gas station. At 11 P.M. they started back to Connecticut, and although they didn't get home until 5 A.M. and gave the babysitter such a fright that she never worked for them again, they never doubted the wisdom of their decision. +Then again, sometimes you decide to stick it out when you should have beat it. Katharine and I once rented a house in Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands, that looked like something out of a glossy magazine. But elegant though the flowering hedges and stucco walls may have appeared in photographs, for a family with children aged eight months and two years, the reality was something else. With one child crawling and the other toddling, we were ill-advised to stay in a place with an unguarded 50-foot drop to the sea. Delicate antique wooden side chairs that looked elegant on a quarry tile floor, tended to skid and overturn under a toddler's weight. When Katharine told the housekeeper about the rat that had run up her arm from a bowl of mangoes, the woman only laughed and said she had been telling the house's owners about the rats for years. Then the teen-age babysitter we had brought along fell in love with the lifeguard at the local beach club; her attention span shrank to nonexistent. +On our third evening there, after the children were safely asleep six feet away from us, Katharine gave me her look. I asked what she wanted out of the holiday. "For all of us to survive," she answered. That we did, but just barely. Sometimes bailing out is the best policy. + +LOAD-DATE: November 4, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +384 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 4, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +New Designs Bring New Independence for Disabled People + +BYLINE: By CAROLYN BATTISTA + +SECTION: Section 12; Page 29; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 855 words + +SLEEK racing vehicles, contemporary flatware and colorful plastic forms are among the 45 objects in the current exhibit at Artspace in New Haven, "Designs For Independent Living." The display shows that items intended to aid disabled and elderly people can be highly attractive. +"This exhibit not only addresses the needs of the disabled but gives some beautiful answers and solutions to those needs," said the executive director of Artspace, Barbara Webster. + These artful solutions include racing wheelchairs with aircraft-steel tubing; a rocking knife designed for one-handed cutting; red, blue and yellow forms made to help disabled children gain balance, and a newspaper holder with graceful, spreading arms of laminated beechwood. +"What's great is the awareness that these things are needed, and they can also be beautiful," said Susan Daniel, chairwoman of Artspace's visual-arts committee, which helped to bring the exhibit from the Museum of Modern Art. +Cara McCarty, an associate curator at the Manhattan museum, said, "Good design is really important, because it helps to break down artificial distinctions that we have established." She prepared a catalogue for the exhibit that cites the contemporary emphasis on designing environments that help integrate disabled people into the community and enable them to live as independently as possible. + +'Focus on the Person' + The catalogue notes that clumsy, makeshift designs can make disabled people feel inadequate and can cause them to be seen as different and unapproachable. Well-designed products work efficiently and unobtrusively, said Ms. McCarty, adding, "They let others focus on the person, not the equipment." +The museum catalogue says that by the year 2030, one out of five Americans will be at least 65 years old, facing the diminished physical capacities that accompany aging. +The objects in the exhibition are the work of industrial designers in America and abroad. To develop these products, the designers collaborated with disabled people and medical professionals. "A lot of innovative people and careful observers" have helped such work, said Dr. Gary Friedlaender, who is chairman of the department of orthopedics and rehabilitation at the Yale School of Medicine. +Ms. Daniel said the designers' efforts also included the use of contemporary styling, interesting materials, pleasing colors and good craftsmanship. +Artspace, incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 1984, moved in July into new quarters on Audubon Street, including a brightly lighted gallery. Ms. Webster said she hopes the current exhibit will draw new visitors. +"We're really trying to enlarge our audience and to serve as many aspects of this community as there are," she said. She called the current exhibit a way to welcome disabled visitors, "to encourage them to come, to show them that we're accessible in every way, not just physically." + +'It's Delightful' + Noting that many people who attended the exhibit's opening celebration were in wheelchairs, Ms. Webster said she hopes they will return "to see fine art." +She said that visitors without disabilities have responded positively to the exhibit, in which many objects are displayed on wall-mounted platforms of bright yellow or floor platforms of rich orange. +"It's colorful, it's delightful," she said. "I could just tell that's how people perceived it." Ms. Webster and Ms. Daniel made their way around the gallery recently to point out the items, including those that could serve anybody. +"I could use that carton opener," said Ms. Daniel, pointing to a device of beechwood and steel. Many kitchen items displayed, including a Swedish cutting board with a clamp, resemble the merchandise of stylish kitchenware shops. +Ms. Daniel also noted a plate with a raised edge to give a person with use of only one hand a surface to push against. "My dad used a plate like that after he had a stroke," she said. "It's such a simple concept, yet it makes all the difference." +Also on view are easy-to-hold objects (like a thick-stemmed wine goblet, a pen with gentle ridges and handily shaped flatware), along with trim-looking tongs, fasteners, canes and crutches. +The wheelchairs on display feature light-weight tubing, clean lines and strong colors, like black, purple and red. Ms. Daniel pointed out the use of nylon and cotton -- "not horrible brown vinyl" -- for the chairs' seats and pockets. +Two of the chairs are racing models from Hall's Wheels of Cambridge, Mass. "We try to design very concise, very esthetically pleasing wheelchairs for sports," said Robert Hall, who runs the company. +His models for wheelchair athletes feature front ends and steering systems that allow high-level competition, he said. Sports wheelchairs, he said, have changed people's perception of ordinary wheelchairs, which are now seen less as chairs and more as "vehicles of motion." +"Designs for Independent Living" will be at Artspace, 70 Audubon Street, New Haven, through Nov. 21. Gallery hours are 11 A.M. to 5 P.M., Tuesday through Saturday. Admission is free. + +LOAD-DATE: November 4, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: A newspaper holder, left, a prosthesis, above, a Champion 3000 wheelchair, top right, and a pen: "Designs for Independent Living" exhibition, New Haven. + (Photographs from the Museum of Modern Art) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +385 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 6, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Business and Health; +Big Costs Imposed On Drug Makers + +BYLINE: By Milt Freudenheim + +SECTION: Section D; Page 2; Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 784 words + +CHANGES that Congress has voted in the Federal-state Medicaid programs for + the indigent are expected to cost pharmaceutical manufacturers at least $3.4 billion over five years in rebates on prescription drug prices. +The 1991 budget calls for $1.9 billion in Federal savings on Medicaid drugs and would lead to reductions of $1.5 billion in spending by the states for drugs. + Until recently Medicaid programs had to reimburse pharmacies on full list price for most prescription drugs under patent protection -- an estimated $4.7 billion this year. Last spring, however, Merck & Company, the largest pharmaceutical company, began offering price-cutting deals, and some companies followed. The companies hoped to head off restrictions proposed by Senator David Pryor, Democrat of Arkansas, who heads the Committee on Aging, and which were later taken up by White House budget cutters. +But most drug companies did not accept the idea, and the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, a trade group, protested again last week that legislating rebates is "inconsistent with free market principles." Nevertheless, in all-night negotiations of the Senate Finance Committee, the Aging Committee, the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Office of Management and Budget, the drug makers were hit even harder than the Bush Administration had intended. Congress stiffened the bill, partly to get money for new Medicaid programs for poor children and for elderly and disabled people. +The rebates would start slowly, costing only about $91 million in the first year, but surging to more than $1 billion a year in 1994 and 1995, theCongressional Budget Office estimates. +For makers of brand-name drugs who rebuffed all Medicaid demands for concessions, the law requires rebates of at least 12.5 percent of the average manufacturer's price in the first two years. Those companies that had granted deep discounts to veterans' hospitals and other high-volume customers would have to do the same for Medicaid, with a 25 percent limit at first. In October 1992, the minimum would become 15 percent, and the drug makers would have to give Medicaid the best price that they give to any customer, which in some cases would mean cuts of 40 percent or more. +Charles A. Sanders, chief executive of the American unit of Glaxo Holdings P.L.C., one of the largest drug makers, said some companies might be unfairly penalized. "Companies that have traditionally given discounts to charitable hospitals and the Veterans Administration will now have to pay greater discounts than companies that historically didn't give discounts," he said. He would not discuss Glaxo discounts. +The makers of lower-priced generic drugs, which do not have patent protection and have longmade discount deals with Medicaid, would have to give rebates of at least 10 percent for three years and 11 percent thereafter. +The drug makers would not be allowed to raise prices to Medicaid faster than the rise in the Consumer Price Index. "In the last 10 years, the price of prescription drugs has increased three times as fast as general inflation," Senator Pryor said. "I think this measure was long overdue." +The drug makers did get one concession: the restrictions that kept Medicaid patients in some states from getting the most expensive drugs were eased on the ground that the poor and the elderly should not be limited to "second-class medicine." +In the recent company deals, Medicaid programs had to make room for the excluded drugs. Merck, for example, offered 10 percent cuts if most Merck products were approved. John L. Zabriskie Jr., president of Merck Sharp & Dohme, a Merck unit, said that his company's program, which 38 states have accepted, was intended "to insure that Medicaid patients have the same access to important medicines as the general public." +The budget bill would prevent states from excluding a product outright. But states can still require advance approval for certain drugs. +Congressional aides said existing programs like Merck's would remain in effect until they are due for renewal. Then the companies would have to meet the minimum rebates in the bill, which securities analysts said could slow earnings growth. +Hemant K. Shah, an independent analyst in Warren, N.J., said companies like American Home Products, Eli Lilly, SmithKline Beecham and Upjohn have "above-average business with Medicaid and give above-average discounts to V.A. hospitals." He said that because the manufacturers' costs would not change, the rebates would come out of profits. "The most negative result is that the Federal Government is now directly involved in paying for pharmaceuticals," Mr. Shah said. + +LOAD-DATE: November 6, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +386 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 6, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +More Preventive Care Sought for Older People + +BYLINE: By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN + +SECTION: Section C; Page 10; Column 3; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 683 words + +INCREASED efforts to promote health and prevent disease should be aimed at people 50 and older, the National Academy of Sciences said in a report yesterday. +Most such efforts have been aimed at younger people, but an increasing body of scientific knowledge has shown that preventive programs also benefit those 50 and older, the academy's Institute of Medicine said. + The academy urged that the traditional goals of health be broadened beyond curing and preventing disease to include preventing the ill from becoming disabled and helping the disabled cope with and prevent further disability. +Misplaced pessimism about aging has led to a widespread belief that growing old means frailty, sickness and a loss of vitality, the report said. Contrary to a prevailing assumption that older people are a burden to the state, the report said, "many older individuals lead satisfying lives and maintain their health well beyond society's expectations." +People 65 years and older make up the fastest-growing segment of the American population. Although benefits of health promotion among the elderly have been documented, the academy urged further research because of the scarcity of data related specifically to avoiding disability in the elderly. + +13 Risk Factors + The authors of the report, headed by Dr. Robert L. Berg of Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester and Dr. Joseph S. Cassells of the Institute of Medicine, studied 13 risk factors such as misuse of medications, falls and social isolation that affect large numbers of elderly people and for which remedial interventions are available. Each risk factor may touch off a train of events leading to disability. +Misuse of prescription and over-the-counter drugs was called a major problem among the elderly, often leading to life-threatening and disabling complications. +The academy urged older people to learn more about the drugs they take, the dangers of taking more than one medication, and the early clues to a possible adverse reaction to a drug. +"Physicians are not as proficient as they might be in optimal prescribing for the elderly," the report said. To improve such care, the academy urged doctors to periodically review all drugs taken by elderly patients. In prescribing such drugs, the academy said doctors should consider lowering the amount according to the age of the patient and the body makeup. +Too often, the report said, the amount of drug prescribed for an elderly patient was inappropriately based on an extrapolation from studies in younger people. It called for more studies of the effects of drugs on the elderly. Among its other recommendations were these: +Infections. All people over the age of 50 should be immunized against influenza and pneumococcal pneumonia. +Osteoporosis. More than one million fractures each year are attributed to osteoporosis, a disease of unknown cause that leads to the loss of bone substance. Research is needed to improve fracture rehabilitation programs and to evaluate estrogen replacement therapy, calcium supplements and exercise in preventing bone loss from osteoporosis. +Falls. Falls are a major cause of death and disability among the elderly. A hip fracture is the most devastating hazard of a fall. About 50 percent of elderly people who were able to walk before suffering a hip fracture were unable to walk independently afterward. The report called for research to determine ways to prevent fractures and to develop energy-absorbing surfaces and protective clothing for elderly people who are at high risk of suffering fractures. +Nutrition. Doctors should periodically assess the diet and nutritional status of elderly patients. Research is also needed to assess the minimal daily nutrient and energy requirements of the elderly. +Depression. Despite the availability of new drugs to improve treatment of depression, only a small percentage of elderly people who are depressed are receiving adequate treatment. +Cancer screening. Studies show that screening for cancer is at least as effective in people 50 to 80 years old as it is in younger people. + +LOAD-DATE: November 6, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +387 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 7, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +The 1990 Elections: The Message - Vermont; +Socialist Ex-Mayor Elected to House + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 448 words + +DATELINE: BURLINGTON, Vt., Nov. 6 + +Bernard Sanders declared victory tonight in his race for the House of Representatives and put "the millionaires and the multinational corporations" on notice that he would be going to Washington. +Mr. Sanders, the first politically independent candidate to go to Congress in 40 years, claimed the victory, not for himself, he said, but for the people. A former Mayor of Burlington and a socialist, he campaigned on higher taxes for the wealthy and for large corporations. + "What we need is a mass movement of tens of millions of people prepared to say that we want national health care, that we want the millionaires and multinational corporations who are not paying their fair share to pay their fair share," he said. "We want money going to environmental and educational programs. We want no more Star Wars or Stealth bombers." + +'What an Effort' + With less than half the vote counted, Mr. Sanders's lead was so convincing that his opponent, the incumbent, Representative Peter Smith, a Republican, conceded the election just after 10 P.M. +"My God, what an effort you've put in," Mr. Smith said to his staff and to the volunteers who filled his campaign headquarters tonight in Montpelier. +The last legislator with no major party affiliation to serve in the House was Vito Marcantonio of New York, who was elected to six terms, from 1938 to 1950. +Mr. Sanders's contest with Mr. Smith was remarkably similar to the 1988 Congressional race, with one important exception. In that race, a Democratic candidate, Paul Poirier, won a large chunk of votes that might otherwise have gone to Mr. Sanders. +In this election, Dolores Sandoval, the Democratic candidate, was not supported by any of the state's major Democratic figures, including the Governor, Madeleine Kunin, and she did not make a dent in Mr. Sanders's tally. + +Strong Start for Incumbent + The Congressional campaign began in earnest after the primary in September, when Mr. Smith easily turned back a challenge from Timothy Philbin, a conservative Republican. +Mr. Smith's liberal voting record after two years in Congress and his endorsements by a number of national environmental and education groups were expected to stand him in good stead with many Vermont residents. Public polls gave him a clear lead in the race. +But his troubles apparently began last month with his vote in favor of the first deficit-reduction package that would have increased Medicare payments by patients and raised taxes on gasoline and home-heating oil. That gave Mr. Sanders the chance to portray Mr. Smith as insensitive to the working poor and the elderly, constituencies that Mr. Sanders has long claimed as his own. + +LOAD-DATE: November 8, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +388 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 10, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Law Seeks to Eliminate Abuses in Medigap Sales + +BYLINE: By LEONARD SLOANE + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 28; Column 1; Style Desk; CONSUMER'S WORLD + +LENGTH: 1116 words + +As part of last month's deficit-reduction agreement Congress took strong action to reform the laws governing Medigap insurance. As a result, elderly consumers receiving Medicare benefits will be assured of tougher standards and simplified rules when they buy this type of insurance. +Medigap is formally known as Medicare supplementary insurance, since its purpose is to plug the gaps in the Federal health-insurance program for people 65 years old or older. Medigap insurance, purchased by individuals, is intended to reimburse them for out-of-pocket medical and hospital expenses. Policies with premiums totaling more than $15 billion were sold in 1989 to 21.5 million people, almost four times the value sold just 12 years earlier. + +Elimination of Abuses Sought + Yet although insurance companies have long offered a variety of Medigap policies, many of these companies have been accused in Congressional hearings of abusive marketing. It is these abuses the new law is meant to eliminate. + The National Association of Insurance Commissioners is to develop 10 model policies offering varying benefits, and each Medigap insurer must offer one or more of these policies. Another change forbids insurance agents to sell a Medigap policy to anyone who already has one, unless the policy holder states in writing an intention to drop the first policy. +"This law signals that Congress is going to be much more hard-nosed about some of the questionable consumer practices," said Representative Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, a sponsor of the legislation. "It's finally going to be possible for people to make informed choices without being some kind of legal wizard." +Gail Shearer, the policy-analysis manager of Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, said: "This is very beneficial to senior citizens. It is going to lead to increased price competition, decreased confusion and greater access to information." +Like other forms of insurance, Medigap insurance is primarily regulated by the states. The Federal Government first entered this area in 1980, when a law commonly referred to as the Baucus Amendment set up Federal standards for benefits. But the standards were voluntary and many companies did not meet them. +In contrast, the new law sets mandatory standards, including these: +*Insurance companies must offer a core policy and up to nine other policies; because the formats will be the same or similiar from company to company, consumers will be able to make comparisons easily. The policies, which have not yet been drafted, will probably range from the basic policy covering the 20 percent of physicians' fees not paid by Medicare to a comprehensive policy covering prescription drugs, private-duty nursing, hospitalization in foreign countries or other more costly features. +*Counseling programs will be provided by local Social Security offices, offering an objective source of information on health insurance. The law authorized $10 million for establishing Medigap counseling services. +*Medigap policies cannot be sold to elderly people who receive Medicaid, which covers all health-care costs. +*Insurance companies will be required to increase the percentage of total premiums that they pay out in benefits, which is known in the industry as the loss ratio. Not only is that percentage to rise to 65 from 60 for policies sold to individuals, but an enforcement mechanism is also to be created to assure that companies obey the law. +*Medicare beneficiaries will have six months from the date of their 65th birthday to buy Medigap policies without passing a medical examination. In addition, those who buy policies during this "window" cannot be charged higher premiums just because of this provision. +"This gives the consumer a lot of choice, while giving the insurance company the flexibility to design different plans," said William F. Matusz, the vice president for underwriting of the Prudential Insurance Company of America. "Now we have to wait to see how the smoke clears." +While the Government's Medigap legislation provides many new protections, the United Seniors Health Cooperative, an advocacy group in Washington, believes that it still contains a number of flaws. +For example, even though counseling has been authorized, Congress has yet to appropriate the $10 million to pay for it. And although a duplication of policies has been prohibited, this provision is not retroactive, so people already holding more than one Medigap policy will not be able to ask for a refund. + +The General View Is Positive + In addition, said Peter J. Strauss, a New York lawyer who specializes in legal issues affecting the elderly: "There are some situations where the ban on duplication may have a slightly negative effect. Some people may want to buy a policy at a nominal cost and also have a second one just to cover private-duty nursing." +But most specialists in this field see the overall effect of the new law as positive for the average Medicare recipient. "It adds stability to the Medicare program," said Martha A. McSteen, the president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington. "But we'll be watching to make sure people understand their rights." + +READER'S GUIDE TO MEDIGAP POLICIES + In choosing Medigap coverage, consumers should read and compare carefully the policies offered by different insurance companies. +First, learn exactly what is covered by Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for the elderly, since Medigap insurance works in tandem with Medicare. Then, based on your individual medical history and expenses, decide what services you would like a private supplementary policy to pay for. +The model regulation on Medigap proposed this year by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners lists certain standards for all such policies. Here are some of them: +*An insurance company may not cancel or refuse to continue an individual policy for any reason other than nonpayment or misrepresentation. +*Policies should state specifically whether they cover many important items like nursing-home costs, home health-care visits beyond Medicare coverage, and dental care. +*When people consider changing Medigap policies, a statement has to be given them by the new insurance company or its agent saying that the new policy "materially improves" the existing coverage. This is meant to prevent high-pressure sales tactics that induce someone to switch coverage for no good reason. +The model would also require insurers to file rates and supporting documents annually with state insurance commissioners. + +LOAD-DATE: November 10, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graphic: "Rising Revenues" shows Medigap insurance sales -- premiums and number of insured, 1982-1990 (1990, projected) (Source: American Association of Retired Persons) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +389 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 10, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Doctors Urge Public to Heed Dangers of Flu + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 24; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 523 words + +DATELINE: CHICAGO, Nov. 9 + +Dismissing influenza as an inevitable risk of winter could be a fatal mistake, doctors say, warning that flu kills an average of 20,000 Americans a year. +"The reason people die from the flu is it hits the body so hard," Dr. John D. Nicolas, a clinical medicine instructor at Northwestern University and head of a seminar on prevention of colds and flu, said here Thursday. +Dr. Walter Gunn, an epidemiologist at the Federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, said that "the most common misconception" about flu is "it's not serious." +Most who succumb are the elderly or people with chronic health problems. They should be vaccinated now to be ready for the flu season, usually beginning in December, the doctors said. In some years flu claims twice the annual rate of 20,000. + +Holiday Increases Risk + "Because of people getting together for the Thanksgiving holiday, traveling from other places, spending a few days together inside the house, that's a perfect environment for spreading the virus around," said Mary Huck, spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Public Health. +Flu, or influenza, is spread by virus-infected droplets coughed or sneezed into the air. Victims develop fever, headache, muscle ache and fatigue. +The vaccine is effective in 70 percent to 90 percent of people under the age of 65 and about half the people over 65, Dr. Gunn said. It can protect 85 percent of the elderly from dying of flu or its complications because its symptoms will be milder even if they catch it after getting the vaccine, he added. +Only 30 percent to 40 percent of high-risk people get immunized, Dr. Gunn said. +The vaccine protects against the three strains of flu that the health authorities believe will be the most prevalent. It changes every year and the vaccine is good for one year. +This year's strains are A Shanghai, A Taiwan and B Yamagata, Dr. Gunn said. The names are the same as the strains covered by last year's vaccine, but this year's A Shanghai is a slightly different subtype, he said. + +Who Should Be Vaccinated + The Centers for Disease Control recommends flu vaccination for these groups of people: +*Everybody over 65. +*Anyone from 6 months to 65 years of age who has chronic heart or lung problems, all nursing home residents and people under regular medical care for diabetes, kidney ailments, compromised immunity (including infection with the virus that causes AIDS) or inherited blood disorders like sickle cell anemia. +*Children under 18 receiving long-term aspirin therapy for arthritis of similar conditions. This recommendation is based on the rare but known link in children between aspirin, influenza and the development of Reye's syndrome, which can be fatal or cause permanent brain damage. +*Doctors, nurses and others who deal with people in high-risk groups, employees in nursing homes and chronic health-care centers, providers of home care and household members of high-risk people. +The centers said those who should avoid the vaccination include anyone allergic to eggs, because the vaccine is grown in chicken eggs, and anyone with a fever, until it subsides. + +LOAD-DATE: November 10, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +390 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 11, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WESTCHESTER GUIDE + +BYLINE: Eleanor Charles + +SECTION: Section 12WC; Page 10; Column 5; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1190 words + + +TRACY IS ON HIS WAY + He was originally called "Plainclothes Tracy," but the fearless detective with the razor sharp profile and snap-brim fedora was renamed "Dick Tracy" when his creator, Chester Gould, sold the comic strip to the Chicago Tribune-Daily News Syndicate in 1931. The rest, as they say, is history, and it will be re-told in a comprehensive Dick Tracy Exhibition opening today through Feb. 24 at the Museum of Cartoon Art in Rye Brook. + On loan from Matt Masterson, a pre-eminent Dick Tracy collector and old friend of the late Mr. Gould, are more than 80 of the original strip drawings. In them are at least 100 of the familiar characters with grotesque faces and names to match. They include Flattop, Pruneface, Measles, Gargles and Itchy, among others. Their fame and influence as mirrors of the American crime scene became so pervasive that Gould was pressured by his editors to tone down his depictions of torture, murder and depravity during the decade preceding his retirement in 1977. + In addition to the artwork there will be a display of Dick Tracy toys, comic books, premiums, movie posters, dolls, figurines, games, puzzles, detective kits, trading cards and wrist radios -- all acquired by Larry Doucet and Bill Crouch, co-authors of a publication called "The Authorized Guide to Dick Tracy Collectibles." The two men will be guest speakers on Dec. 2 at 2 P.M. + The museum, on Comly Avenue, one mile south of the King Street Exit of the Hutchinson River Parkway, is open Tuesdays through Fridays from 10 A.M. to 4 P.M., and Sundays from 1 to 5 P.M. Admission is $3 for adults; $2 for students and the elderly; and $1 for children. For more information, call 939-0234. + +THE SCAPEGOAT + A book by Aranka Siegal for young people, "Upon the Head of the Goat: A Childhood in Hungary, 1939-1944," won the Newbery Honor Book Award in 1982. Its contents provide the basis for her talk, "Learning Not to Scapegoat," to be delivered at a luncheon meeting of the Scarsdale Congregational Church Guild at noon Tuesday. + In her book, published in Manhattan by Farrar, Straus, Giroux, Ms. Siegal recounted her experiences from the age of 13, when she was rounded up with her sister by the Nazis, separated permanently from the rest of her family and deported first to Auschwitz and then to Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. The two girls were rescued by the Swedish Red Cross and they emigrated to the United States in 1948. + A passion for literature that led to her career as a writer was instilled when Ms. Siegal was 12 years old and the Nazi-controlled Hungarian Government banned Jewish children from attending the public schools. She compensated as much as she could by reading every book her family owned or that she could get otherwise. + Now a Westchester mother of two grown children, she continues to write about children who must come to terms with their prejudices and understand the meaning of scapegoating. Admission to the luncheon is $3. Call 723-0430 or 723-2111 for reservations. + +INSULATING TIPS + Mildew, peeling paint, drafts and high heating and air-conditioning bills can all be signs of poor insulation and poor air circulation, which the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Westchester County can help eliminate. + In two seminars this week, James McCarty, housing specialist in the department of design and environmental analysis at Cornell University, will discuss the theoretical aspects of the problem, the development of various products to assist homeowners and proper installation techniques that will insure long-term solutions. + The first session is scheduled on Wednesday at 7:30 P.M. at 214 Central Avenue, White Plains. Call 682-3074 for reservations or more information. A second identical seminar will be held Thursday at 7:30 P.M. at Guideposts in Carmel. The phone number there is 628-0454. Admission to either program is $3. + +THE NEWEST MUSEUM + Can seven plugged-in television sets make a robot in the shape of a man? Yes, they can, and Nam June Paik made one this year. The piece is among more than 100 objects, paintings, sculptures, photographs, pieces of folk art and decorative art on display in "The Technological Muse," an exhibition opening today at 2 P.M. in the new Katonah Museum of Art. + This inaugural show at 22 Jay Street, marks the former Katonah Gallery's move from its quarters in the village library to its own building, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes. The 37-year-old institution will not keep a permanent collection, but will mount five major exhibitions a year. + A sampling of the extraordinary range of material in the new show, spanning 150 years in all media, includes photographs of the Civil War; "Arms Chair," an upholstered easy chair by Paul Ludick decorated with a fringe of revolvers; a four-foot cadmium-yellow icebag by Claes Oldenburg; paintings by Winslow Homer; a 1915 piece by Marcel Duchamp called "Large Glass or the Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even" in oils and wire on glass; and a 1906 "Little Nemo" newspaper cartoon strip by Winsor McCay. + Every Sunday at 3:30 P.M. one of the artists featured in the exhibition will give a talk. Joseph Maresca is today's speaker. The museum is open free of charge Tuesdays through Fridays from 1 to 5 P.M., Saturdays from 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. and Sundays from 1 to 5 P.M. Docent tours are conducted at 2:30 P.M. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Call 232-9555 for more information. + +TRADING WITH ISRAEL + "How to Succeed in Business With Israel" is the subject of a forum to be held from 8:30 A.M. to 2 P.M. Tuesday at the White Plains Hotel. Organized by the World Trade Club of Westchester, the Westchester County Office of Economic Development and the United States-Israel Economic Forum, the program will provide nuts and bolts advice from senior executives, government officials and legal experts on how to conduct trade with Israel. + Among the speakers and panelists are Edward J. Borrazzo, president of Loral International of Yonkers; Shimon Bartzill, first vice president of Bank Leumi Trust Company of New York; Meir Buber, Consul and Trade Commissioner to the United States Trade Center of Israel, and Joseph E. Schoonmaker, vice president of Chase Manhattan Bank. Cheri Laustaunau, director of the Israel Information Center of the United States Department of Commerce, will deliver the keynote address. + A $50 fee includes program materials, light breakfast and lunch. For reservations or more information, call 948-6444. + +TAX STRATEGIES + Julian Block will conduct a three-session course on "Saving Money: Tax Strategies for 1990" at the Center for Continuing Education in Mamaroneck High School, on Palmer Avenue from 8 to 10 P.M. Mondays beginning tomorrow. + Mr. Block is a tax expert and author of several books on tax preparation. He has taught tax planning at the university level and he manages to reduce complicated tax laws into understandable language. (He has no connection with the H&R Block tax-preparation company.) +Tuition is $45, or $24.50 for people older than 65. Call 698-9126 to register or get more information. + +LOAD-DATE: November 11, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: A segment of the "Dick Tracy" comic strip (Tribune Media Services Inc.) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +391 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 11, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +Social Events + +BYLINE: By Thomas W. Ennis + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2; Page 62; Column 3; Society Desk + +LENGTH: 1312 words + + +Writers Read From Works +Nov. 12 -- Maya Angelou, Laurie Colwin, Garrison Keillor, Calvin Trillin and Tom Wolfe are scheduled to read from their works starting at 8 P.M. at Symphony Space, Broadway at 95th Street. The benefit, sponsored by the Publishers Publicity Association, will help the Goddard-Riverside community center help the homeless. Tickets, $25; $75 for reserved seats and an invitation to a reception following the readings; $250 includes dinner with the writers before the readings, from (212) 873-6600. + + A Bachelors' Ball +Nov. 12 -- Fifty-two bachelors between the ages of 24 and 50, all successful in their professions, will be honored at a black-tie buffet dinner and dance at 8:30 P.M. in the Rainbow Room to raise funds for the National Glaucoma Trust. Tickets, $125, from (212) 757-7880. + + Famous Doodlers Auction +Nov. 12 -- The New Dramatists 1990-91 season of readings and workshops is to benefit from an auction of doodles by Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Lillian Gish, Helen Hayes, Beverly Sills and other notables at the Russian Tea Room starting at 6:30 P.M. The auction will start at 7:30. Cocktails from an open bar and Russian Tea Room specialties. Tickets, $65, from (212) 757-6960. + +Party for Citymeals + Nov. 13 -- The Citymeals Professional Alliance is holding a dance in the indoor courtyard of the World Financial Center for Citymeals on Wheels, which -- with the cooperation of the New York City Department for the Aging -- provides meals for homebound elderly people. Nine restaurants in the Financial Center will provide food for the party. Cocktails at 6:30 P.M. Tickets, $60, from (212) 577-7324. + +Briefly Noted: + Nov. 13 -- The National Urban League's 34th annual Equal Opportunity Day dinner, the league's major fund-raiser, at the New York Hilton and Towers, will honor August A. Busch 3d, chairman and president of the Anheuser-Busch Companies, and Earl G. Graves, publisher of Black Enterprise magazine. The party starts at 6 P.M. Tickets, $350, from (212) 310-9045. + Nov. 13 -- Phoenix House, a nonprofit drug abuse services agency, will honor Burt Tanksy, the president of Saks Fifth Avenue, in a "Salute to Fashion" dinner and dance benefit for Phoenix House that will also celebrate "lives renewed." Music by the Peter Duchin orchestra, songs by Barbara Cook. Dinner and dancing after a cocktail reception at 6:30 P.M. Black tie. Tickets, $500, from (212) 997-0100. + Nov. 14 -- Biomedical research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine will benefit from a dinner and dance at the Marriott Marquis at which Stephen B. Siegel, president of Chubb Realty, will receive the Einstein Humanitarian Award. Cocktails at 6 P.M., dinner at 7. Black tie. Tickets, $500, from (212) 430-4238. + Nov. 14 -- The junior committee of the Alzheimer's Association is holding its annual benefit with a cocktail party at 7 P.M. at the Grolier Club restaurant, 11 East 36th Street. Tickets, $55 in advance, $65 at the door, from (212) 983-0700. +Nov. 14 -- The Greater New York Chapter of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation is holding a "culinary gala" at the Rainbow Room at which Andre Rene, the Rainbow Room's executive chef and other New York chefs, will prepare dinner. Reception at 6 P.M., dinner at 7. There will be a live auction of vacation trips and a silent auction of restaurant dinners. Tickets, $500, from (212) 986-8783. +Nov. 14 -- The Partnership for the Homeless annual awards dinner at the Union League Club, Park Avenue at 37th Street, will honor Diandra Douglas, a film producer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Peter F. Vallone, the majority leader of the New York City Council. Cocktails at 7 P.M. will precede the dinner and dance. Black tie. Tickets, $500 and $1,000, from (212) 735-0744. + Nov. 14 -- About 30 community projects of the Junior League of New York will benefit from the Golden Tree Christmas shops at the league's headquarters, 130 East 80th Street. The shops, open from 11 A.M. to 4:30 P.M., will also be open Thursday. Admission, $5 during the days, $10 in the evenings, at the door. + Nov. 15 -- The opening night of the Limon Dance Company's three-night run of the Jose Limon ballet Missa Brevis at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Amsterdam Avenue and 112th Street, will benefit the Jose Limon Foundation. Tickets, $75, include a champagne reception after the 8 P.M. performance, from (212) 777-3353. + Nov. 15 -- Claire Bloom will present a dramatic adaptation of Henry James's ghost story "The Turn of the Screw" to help raise money for the renovation of the Hunter College Playhouse. The solo performance at the 92d Street Y, Lexington Avenue and 92d Street, will start at 8 P.M. Tickets, $25; $125 includes the performance followed by dessert and coffee, and $250 includes cocktails and a buffet before the performance and dessert and coffee after, from (212) 772-4085. +Nov. 15 -- The Citizen Exchange Council, which sponsors the exchange of high school and university students and people in the arts between the United States and the Soviet Union, is holding a benefit at the Waldorf-Astoria. Cocktails at 6:30 P.M., dinner at 7:30. Black tie. Tickets, $400, from (212) 643-1985. + Nov. 16 -- A concert of songs by Joan Baez, Cherish the Ladies, Geoff Muldaur, Maria Muldaur and James Taylor at 7:30 P.M. at the Beacon Theater, Broadway and 74th Street, is to raise money for the Yorkville Common Pantry, which provides meals for about 1,500 homeless and elderly people weekly. Tickets, $35, from (212) 947-5850 or (201) 343-4200; $250, includes the concert and a champagne reception next door at Roxy's restaurant, which the performers are to attend, from (212) 496-7070. +Nov. 16 -- The Paper Bag Players' sixth annual benefit at 6 P.M. at the Equitable Center, 787 Seventh Avenue at 51st Street, will help support the program of weekday performances the troupe will give at New York City Public Schools this winter. The troupe will present a preview of its new production, "When My Cousins Slept Over," at the benefit. There will also be music, food and gifts for children. Tickets, $75 for children; $150, $250 and $500 for adults, from (212) 362-0431. +Nov. 16 -- A dinner and dance for the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences, and its Museum of Staten Island in St. George, will be held at 7 P.M. at the Monte Bianco restaurant at 2131 Hylan Boulevard, near Midland Avenue, in Grant City. There will be a lottery prize of $5,000. Tickets, $125, from (718) 727-1135. + Nov. 17 -- Mandy Patinkin will entertain at the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation's 15th anniversary dance at the Plaza. Cocktails at 7 P.M., dinner at 8. Black tie. Tickets, $1,500 a couple, from (212) 369-2652. + Nov. 17 -- The Detective Keith L. Williams Scholarship Fund will benefit from a dinner and dance at 8 P.M. at Regency House, 175-02 Jamaica Avenue in Jamaica, Queens. The scholarship was established in memory of Mr. Williams, a resident of Jamaica, who was shot and killed while on duty a year ago. Joyce Dinkins will speak. Tickets, $40, from (718) 657-8247. + Nov. 17 -- The Doug Elkins Dance Company is giving a cocktail party, and another on Sunday, to raise money for the troupe at the Sutton Gym, 440 Lafayette Street, near Astor Place. The troupe will perform some of its new dances. The party starts at 7:30 P.M. Tickets, $19.90, from (718) 782-1627. + Nov. 18 -- The International Center of Photography's education and exhibition programs will benefit from a dinner and dance and a raffle of photographs by Chuck Close, Horst, Andre Kertesz, Bruce Weber, William Wegman and others, at the center's midtown exhibition space, 1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43d Street. A champagne reception starts at 6 P.M. Tickets, $75 for the raffle and dessert and dancing only; $350 includes the reception and buffet dinner, from (212) 860-1481. + +LOAD-DATE: November 11, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: November 13, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + + CORRECTION: +The Social Events column on Sunday gave an incorrect address for the annual benefit of the junior committee of the Alzheimer's Association, to be held tomorrow at 7 P.M. It will be at the Grolier Club, 29 East 32d Street. Information: (212) 983-0700. + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +392 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 11, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Editorial Notebook; +Dirty Political Ads, Reconsidered + +BYLINE: By BRENT STAPLES + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 16; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 532 words + +Filthy campaigning can be fatal to politicians who practice it. This notion has been more a prayer than an axiom. Then came Minnesota. +Senator Rudy Boschwitz, a Republican, began his race for a third term with a lead called "insurmountable" and $7 million to keep it that way. But on Election Day he surrendered his seat to Paul Wellstone, a jocular, frizzy-haired professor, who had a green-and-white campaign bus, but only a fraction of Mr. Boschwitz's bankroll and name recognition. + Mr. Boschwitz, judging from responses to poll questions, had seemed exempt from the anti-incumbent sentiment that narrowed some margins of victory elsewhere. Nor did he seem affected by the storm over the sexual misconduct of a Republican gubernatorial candidate. It is more plausible that Senator Boschwitz lost because of his own toxic political endgame. +Minnesota newspapers appropriately scourged the ads that Mr. Boschwitz ran late in the campaign. One spot fabricated a "Wellstone Budget" that supposedly would double the taxes of everyone who earned more than $20,000. Another ad meant to frighten the elderly falsely claimed that Mr. Wellstone, who favors national health insurance, would abolish Medicare. A radio broadcast to rural Minnesotans said he advocated abortions in the ninth month at taxpayer expense -- a potent lie borrowed from North Carolina, where Senator Jesse Helms applied it against Harvey Gantt. +The Boschwitz campaign's single most self-destructive move may have been its Nov. 1 appeal to "Our Friends in the Minnesota Jewish Community." Both Mr. Boschwitz and Mr. Wellstone are Jews. But a campaign letter from the Boschwitz campaign criticized Mr. Wellstone for raising his children as "non-Jews" and for having "no connection" with the Jewish community. It also charged that Mr. Wellstone was too close to Jesse Jackson, and, by fantastic extension, to the Rev. Louis Farrakhan and Yasir Arafat. The Star Tribune denounced this, on Election Day, as "The Lowest Political Blow of Them All." +Mr. Wellstone's campaign ads were clean, and funny, extraordinary political comedy. They stayed clear of personality, and focused on Mr. Boschwitz's record and on the issues, including his reputation as a prolific raiser of campaign funds. +In one of the best spots, "Fast-Paced Paul," Mr. Wellstone satirized Mr. Boschwitz's millions superbly. Warning the viewer that he has to move fast for lack of cash, Mr. Wellstone dashes through the state, pausing for a second or two with his family, then his house, then a farm, delivering breathless statements as he goes. In another, "Looking for Rudy," based on the film "Roger and Me," he searches Mr. Boschwitz's offices in vain, seeking a debate. On the screen, chagrined Boschwitz campaign workers stand by awkwardly as the little professor chats and smiles, and leaves his own campaign literature. He takes a Boschwitz pen because, he explains, the Wellstone campaign is about broke. Two other spots showed only Mr. Wellstone's portrait being splattered with mud. +Mr. Boschwitz's nine-point lead evaporated in the last few days. His loss offers a welcome cautionary tale for those who campaign in the sewer. + +LOAD-DATE: November 11, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +393 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 11, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Greenwich Village Honors a Model Officer + +BYLINE: By MARVINE HOWE + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1; Page 34; Column 4; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 585 words + +For 19 years, James R. Fleming was the kind of policeman that the Police Commissioner now wants to be the model for New York City patrol officers. +Patrolling the streets and parks of Greenwich Village, he came to know the people who lived there and to understand their concerns. And that brought him their respect and helped him in his work: making drug arrests, helping the homeless and ushering children across busy streets, residents and fellow officers say. +"He has the respect of everybody," said Meredith Boyce, who has worked in Greenwich Village civic groups. "He got the derelicts to clean up the parks and even saved animals, but he was also the tough cop." + On Friday night, senior police officials joined block association leaders, business owners, university representatives and ordinary citizens to pay tribute to Officer Fleming, who recently retired from the force at age 53 after suffering a stroke. The event was held at New York University Law School on Washington Square South, but the atmosphere was like that of a family get-together. + +'Dedicated Sevice' + It was the first time the community had paid such an honor to a police officer. +"Jimbo's life was community policing," said Richard Kaye, chairman of the Sixth Precinct Community Council, using the officer's nickname. On behalf of the council, Mr. Kaye presented Mr. Fleming a plaque for his "22 years of dedicated service to the New York Police Department and the Greenwich Village community." +Inspector Elson Gelfand, a former Sixth Precinct commander and now commander of the 11th Division in Brooklyn South, said, "Jimbo represents what Commissioner Lee Brown wants in his expanded Community Patrol Officer Program -- the traditional, likeable street cop." +Isabella Cunningham, 85, of Minetta Lane, said she had come to the party because "he's the cop who used to help little children and older people across the street." + +'I'm Not Going Anywhere' + Mr. Fleming was also given a State Assembly proclamation citing him as as an "outstanding citizen." Throughout the 90 minute-ceremony, the burly Mr. Fleming, wearing a jaunty white carnation, stood silent, shifting from one leg to the other. Finally, when asked to speak, he blurted out: "I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to join the Auxiliary Police and stay in the Village." +Later, in an interview, Mr. Fleming, a native of Staten Island, said he had had "a good, rounded career." Besides his work with the homeless, there were many rescues from the Hudson and fires and more than 1,000 arrests and 1,000 assists "from homicides to the disorderly." +Charles V. Campisi, current commander of the Sixth Precinct, said Mr. Fleming was extremely effective in community relations. "People would come to him with their problems and alert him to drug dealing and he would make good quality arrests," he said. +"Everybody on Horatio Street will miss you," Reggie FitzGerald told Mr. Fleming. "You kept the drugs out." +On behalf of faculty and staff of New York University, Tom Fluellen presented Mr.Fleming with a school T-shirt and thanks for "your efforts to keep Washington Square Park a safe place to visit." +Pat Dawson, founder of the Leroy Street Block Association and the Village Residents Against Drugs recounted how Officer Fleming used to take the homeless to shelters and buy them coffee and breakfast. But at the same time, she said, when the hard-core drug dealers saw him, they would say 'Good evening Mr. Fleming' and get out. + +NAME: James R. Fleming + +LOAD-DATE: November 11, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: James R. Fleming, who retired after 19 years as a police officer in the Greenwich Village area, was honored Friday at New York University Law School. (Jack Manning/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +394 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 13, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +THE DOCTOR'S WORLD; +Syphilis Fools a New Generation + +BYLINE: By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D. + +SECTION: Section C; Page 3; Column 4; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 1158 words + +SYPHILIS, which is known as the great imitator because it mimics so many other diseases, is making its strongest comeback in 40 years in the United States. And it is fooling a generation of doctors who have rarely, if ever, seen a case. +Many doctors are scurrying to textbooks and flocking to lectures to learn about the unusual ways the bacterial infection can damage organs at any age, from newborns to the elderly. + Specialists from pediatricians to pathologists have mistaken the sores of syphilis for cancers, abscesses, hemorrhoids, hernias and other conditions. Pediatricians have mistaken the sniffles than can result at birth from congenital syphilis for the flu. Other doctors have also mistaken different forms of syphilis for dizziness from Meniere's disease and multiple sclerosis. +Dr. William Schaffner 2d, who heads the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University, described a case that mystified several specialists in Nashville. +A young man with a painless sore on his penis went to a doctor who, believing the man had cancer, took a biopsy that he sent to a pathologist for identification under the microscope. The pathologist was stumped and he sent the biopsy to a colleague: he diagnosed syphilis. +Syphilis is caused by Treponema pallidum, a spiral-shaped bacterium known as a spirochete. The microbe is most commonly spread by sexual contact, and the disease appears in three stages. +The first stage is characterized by a painless sore, a primary chancre, that usually appears 21 days after exposure. The edges of the sore are hard, like cartilage, and can appear anywhere there has been sexual contact, such as the penis, vagina, cervix, tongue and anus. +Untreated syphilitic sores disappear after two to six weeks. From six to eight weeks later, the spirochete spreads silently through the blood to cause the second stage. It often appears as a rash that may be accompanied by swollen lymph nodes throughout the body, a sore throat, weight loss, malaise, headache and loss of hair. The second stage of syphilis can also damage the eye, liver, kidney and other organs. +If untreated, the second stage of syphilis heals within two to six weeks. Then years to decades later it can damage the heart, aorta, bones and cause paralysis and dementia. +The symptoms from syphilis not only are transient but can vary greatly, which explains its reputation as the great imitator. And if a doctor misses the early stages, Dr. Schaffner said, "the patient becomes a biological time bomb waiting to develop tertiary syphilis." +Syphilis can also harm newborn babies through transmission of the spirochete from the mother to the fetus in pregnancy. A baby born with syphilis often has a runny nose and can have a rash and other symptoms that resemble an adult's secondary stage. Congenital syphilis can cause deafness, anemia and permament damage to the bones, liver and teeth. +But prompt and adequate treatment of the syphilitic mother with antibiotics usually prevents damage to the unborn baby, and treatment of an infant with syphilis generally prevents permanent damage. +Dr. Harold Neu said the infectious disease team he heads at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York had recently found a number of mothers whose blood tests showed no evidence of syphilis yet who gave birth to babies with the disease. +The doctors found that the mothers had such a heavy infection that standard testing methods were unable to detect it. The problem was solved by modifying the laboratory technique, Dr. Neu said. +New cases of syphilis are at the highest level since 1949. +Dr. Willard Cates Jr., an expert at the Federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, said the centers expected about 50,000 cases to be reported in 1990, as against 41,942 in 1949. The reporting of syphilis is the most reliable of all the sexually transmitted diseases. +The surging number of cases reflects social and economic factors like changing sexual habits; drug abuse, particularly trading sex for crack; rising rates of pregnancy among teen-agers who do not use contraceptives to protect against infection and declining support for public health services, which has limited tracing some cases. +Some epidemics occur because a microbe develops resistance to antibiotics, but the spirochete that causes syphilis is still killed by penicillin, the drug that has been used to treat it since World War II. +In New York State, "a booming syphilis epidemic" is occurring, says Dr. David Axelrod, the Health Commissioner. Testing for syphilis of all patients 15 to 45 years old who are admitted to hospitals and treated in emergency rooms is the current standard of medical care, Dr. Axelrod said. This practice was dropped in the years when the number of syphilis cases reached record lows. No other state has adopted a similar measure, though pregnant women are often tested in other states. +The surge is primarily among black and Hispanic heterosexual men and women in cities. A primary factor is the trading of sex for drugs. Women who give birth to babies with syphilis are more likely to have used crack while pregnant and less likely to have received prenatal care. +Health officials are also deeply concerned about the links between syphilis and AIDS. The open sores of syphilis are belived to make it easier for the AIDS virus to enter the body. +A rule among public health workers in past years was to not let the sun set on an untreated case of syphilis. But that goal is now often impossible because budget cuts have strapped the public clinics where most syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases are diagnosed. +"What happens is that clinics become backed up at 11 A.M. when they used to take new patients until 4 P.M. and some clinics have to stop accepting new patients before noon because they cannot handle the load," said Dr. King K. Holmes of the University of Washington in Seattle, an expert on sexually transmitted diseases. +The delays translate into additional cases of syphilis because untreated patients pass the infection on to sex partners and babies. Health workers who trace sexual contacts of syphilis patients have found that about one of two people named as contacts are also infected. +Until the recent resurgence, syphilis was not a research priority, said Dr. Edward W. Hook 3d, an expert in sexually transmitted diseases at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "It was a hard organism to work with, time consuming, expensive, and people viewed it as a minor and declining problem," Dr. Hook said. "Now we find ourselves knowing so little about it." +Health workers cannot be blamed for ailments of patients who do not come for care, but Dr. Laurene Mascola of the Los Angeles County Health Department said that if she were a lawyer, she "would put society and health departments on trial for allowing the escalation of congenital syphilis cases in the era of penicillin." + +LOAD-DATE: November 13, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +395 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 14, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Credit Agency Urges Mayor To Ready More Budget Cuts + +BYLINE: By TODD S. PURDUM + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 784 words + +A major Wall Street credit rating agency warned yesterday that New York City may have to make deeper service cuts than envisioned in even the worst scenario Mayor David N. Dinkins outlined last week to keep its current budget balanced in the face of a soft economy. +In a statement on the Mayor's budget plan, the Standard & Poor's Corporation said plans to leave more than 5,000 jobs unfilled and to reduce programs in many agencies might not be enough to close a budget gap for the current fiscal year. Mr. Dinkins estimates the gap at $388 million, but the rating agency said it would probably grow. + Last week, Mr. Dinkins released not only his plans for closing the $388 million gap, but $40 million in additional cuts that might be needed if economic conditions worsen. +The contingency plan calls for closing six fire companies, in addition to the two already planned to close; reducing the number of garbage pickups in some neighborhoods; cutting financing for senior citizens' centers; delaying bridge inspections and repairs, and delaying maintenance at parks, playgrounds and beaches. + +A Shared Concern + But in his statement yesterday, Hyman C. Grossman, a managing director at Standard & Poor's, said even those plans might not be enough. Asked whether his comment was simply a statement of fact or a warning, Mr. Grossman said, "A little of both." +"I expect the revenue estimates to get worse over the coming months," he added. "I'm suggesting that when the city says the '91 gap has been closed, I think it's premature to say that. I mean, it's closed as of today, but I don't expect it to stay closed. They've prepared for, hopefully, most of the contingencies, but I'm saying they may need to do a little more." +A spokesman for Mr. Dinkins, Leland T. Jones, said, "The concern they're expressing is a concern that we share." He said that the Mayor had included the contingency plan because conditions might worsen, and that Mr. Dinkins was prepared to do whatever was necessary to keep the budget balanced, and close an estimated gap of more than $1.6 billion for the fiscal year that starts on July 1. +Mr. Grossman's statement praised the city's prudence in addressing its fiscal problems. Last month, in a sign of concern, the agency placed the city's bonds on a "credit watch," warning that it might lower the credit rating, and thus force the city to pay a higher interest rate on bonds. + +Are New Programs Worthwhile? + Since October, when the city disclosed its deteriorating fiscal situation, the prices of New York City's bonds have fallen, and yields, or return to investors, have risen significantly -- about seven-tenths of a percent more than the premium they already traded at over bonds of other agencies with similar credit ratings. On Monday, a typical long-term city bond was trading to yield 8.50 percent. +Though Standard & Poor's has rated New York City bonds at A- since 1987, traders say the bonds are trading as if they had been downgraded to BBB, the lowest investment-grade rating given by the agency. +Since Mr. Dinkins released his revised financial plan on Thursday, trading in New York City bonds has been light, and the yields had changed little. Analysts said that suggested that the market had already taken into account the bad news. +Also yesterday, the executive director of the State Financial Control Board, a watchdog agency, said that with such vital services as sanitation and education facing reductions, the city might want to reconsider a number of smaller agencies and programs that he called "sacred cows." +Among the agencies cited by the director, Allen J. Proctor, were the Campaign Finance Board, which provides partial matching public funds to candidates for city office who agree to abide by limits on contributions and spending; a new Independent Budget Office, created under the City Charter to provide elected officials and the public with information to challenge the official budget estimates, and new city planners to be hired under the charter. +Mr. Proctor said he was not proposing the elimination of such programs, which typically cost a few million dollars each, or telling the administration what to do, but only suggesting that there should be debate over whether the city could afford them now. +"All I am saying is we are now at a point where the budget director's instructions to agencies are going to lead to reductions in major agencies providing vital services," he said. "And when you look at where the growth is, it's in some of these charter-mandated programs. And while they seemed very worthwhile two years ago, are they as worthwhile as reductions in the other agencies." + +LOAD-DATE: November 14, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +396 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 14, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Maurice H. Berins, Executive, 82 + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section B; Page 9; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 131 words + +DATELINE: HARTFORD, Nov. 12 + +Maurice H. Berins, a retired department store executive who worked in behalf of Hartford's senior citizens and other charitable causes, died on Friday at Hartford Hospital. He was 82 years old and lived in West Hartford. +Mr. Berins retired in 1970 as a senior vice president at G. Fox & Company. He founded the Seniors Job Bank in 1974, was a co-founder of the Senior Renewal Club of Greater Hartford Community College and was founding executive director of the Greater Hartford Civic and Arts Festival. He was a former president of Mount Sinai Hospital and a director of the United Way. +He is survived by his wife, the former Esther Meyers; a daughter, Ruth Collier of Oakland, Calif.; two sisters, Ethel Heimov and Esther Cohen, both of West Hartford, and two grandchildren. + +LOAD-DATE: November 14, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +397 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 15, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Breast Cancer: New Trends On Age and Family History + +SECTION: Section B; Page 17; Column 2; National Desk; Health + +LENGTH: 467 words + +A history of breast cancer in a woman's immediate family increases her risk of developing the disease, but the extra risk diminishes with age and vanishes by the time she is 60 years old, three researchers say. +The researchers, Dr. David I. Roseman, Dr. Albert K. Straus and Dr. William Shorey of Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, compared the family medical histories of 9,000 women who had breast cancer, benign breast disease or no incidence of breast disease. + They found that the extra risk was highest for women who were 30 to 34 and whose mother, sister, grandmother or aunt had had breast cancer. These women were nearly four times as likely to get breast cancer as women of that age without a family history of the disease. +The risk declined slightly until the age of 45, then rose for women aged 45 to 54, who were more than twice as likely to get breast cancer as women of that age without a family history of the disease. After 60, the risk was nearly the same for all women, whether or not they had relatives who had breast cancer. + +Other Factors Come Into Play + According to the American Cancer Society, 1 woman in 10 will eventually contract the disease, the most common life-threatening cancer and the second leading cause of cancer deaths in American women, behind lung cancer. +The study was reported earlier this year in The Archives of Internal Medicine. The researchers said it was unclear why family history ceased affecting a woman's risk of contracting breast cancer after the age of 60. Perhaps, they suggested, the genetic mechanism behind breast disease comes into play early in life; by 60, factors like past childbearing (which diminishes the risk of breast cancer) and diet supersede any genetic predisposition. +Dr. Shorey, who works at Rush's comprehensive breast cancer center, cautioned against assuming "that women in their 70's and 80's can't develop cancer" just because the link to family history decreases with age. The American Cancer Society says 65-to-70-year-olds make up the largest group of new breast cancer cases being reported. +Dr. Shorey emphasized the importance of yearly mammograms for older women. Under current guidelines, women 40 to 49 years old are urged to have a mammogram every year or two, and women 50 and older are advised to have one a year. +But younger women with a family history of breast cancer should have regular breast examinations, including a mammogram if an abnormality is found, Dr. Shorey said. +Younger women have generally been advised to avoid mammograms because of the risk from radiation, but he said that danger was "pretty much limited to repetitive mammograms in women in their 20's and 30's." No matter what the woman's age, he went on, "a lump should not be dismissed." + +LOAD-DATE: November 15, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +398 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 17, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Darman Says Bush Is Exploring Shift in Benefits + +BYLINE: By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 12; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 855 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 + +Richard G. Darman, the budget director, said today that the Bush Administration was exploring ways to shift Government benefits from the wealthy and middle class and concentrate them more on the poor. +In his first public appearance since the end of this fall's budget ordeal, Mr. Darman said the new budget procedures gave the Administration and Congress a fresh opportunity to focus on principles and "basic policy analysis" rather than merely on "near-term cash flow." + Social Security, the Government's biggest benefit program, will be exempt from the examination of how programs affect people at various income levels, Mr. Darman said. But he suggested that Medicare and agriculture subsidies, among others, might be targets for benefit redistribution. + +Question of Politics in Plan + Democrats scored heavily in the battle over the budget by portraying President Bush and his fellow Republicans as patrons of the wealthy and themselves as the defenders of the more ordinary Americans. +The policy benefits aside, the Administration might see a chance to regain lost political ground by proposing to limit, for instance, Government expenditures on medical care for affluent retirees or crop-support payments to big farmers and to use the resources instead on health care for poor children in rural areas. +Democrats, who depend on political support from the elderly and farmers, could be expected to oppose such changes, and that would expose them, the theory goes, as guardians of special interests. But such a strategy could backfire. In the past, Republicans in Congress have fought changes in Medicare benefits every bit as vigorously as have Democrats. +Mr. Darman said that the matter was still being explored and that it would be weeks before the Administration's economic and budget policy for next year was developed. +Mr. Darman made these remarks in answer to questions after addressing the Council for Excellence in Government, a nonpartisan organization of former senior Government officials. + +Making Use of Word Flair + Unlike the didactic ones he has given occasionally during his years in the Bush and Ronald Reagan Administrations, the speech was notable mostly because Mr. Darman exercised his flair for metaphors and word-coinage. He entitled the address "Neo-neo-ism: Reflections on Hubble-ism, Rationalism and the Pursuit of Excellence (After the Fiscal Follies)." +"Neo-neo-ism" is the term he gave to politicians' search for a "bold new program" to meet every situation. "Hubble-ism," a reference to the orbiting space telescope that is malfunctioning because it was not properly tested, is the budget director's word for the political propensity to conclude that "if an idea is good enough for a few and large enough to label, it is ready to be launched at full scale." +Last year, in a widely publicized speech, Mr. Darman spoke against "now-now-ism," the tendency toward self-indulgence in the 1980's. And in an introduction to President Bush's budget this year, he played with words and metaphors again, describing the Federal budget as "the ultimate Cookie Monster," because it had the same huge appetite for consumption as the character on the children's television program "Sesame Street." +In those cases and others, Mr. Darman used his word games to take the hard edge off of serious and controversial points. Today's speech had no sharp corners to begin with. His main points were that the budget law he helped drive to enactment last month would lead to deficit reduction and that the new rules putting ceilings on spending and requiring pay-as-you-go provisions in new legislation would lead Congress and the President to focus more on how to use available resources. +He chided Democrats for standing for little more than "anti-millionaire-ism," a reference to Democratic support for legislation that would place a surtax on incomes of more than $1 million. + +Conservative Republicans Angry + And he raised the ire of some conservative Republicans by making light of "the new paradigm," the phrase that wing of the Republican Party uses to describe an approach to meeting social problems that emphasizes individual choice, such as giving parents the capacity to select which public schools their children go to. +"The effete might debate whether the new paradigm is, perhaps, enigmatically paradigmatic," Mr. Darman said. "At the same time, in the real world, others might simply dismiss it by picking up the refrain, 'Hey, brother, can you paradigm."' +Mr. Darman has become the scourge of the conservatives, who believe he was responsible for persuading President Bush to change his mind about raising taxes, and, however jesting Mr. Darman meant it, some took offense. +Burton Yale Pines, senior vice president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research institute based in Washington, said Mr. Darman had become a liability and should resign. +And James P. Pinkerton, deputy assistant to President Bush for policy planning, said sardonically, "After the success of the budget deal, it's good to see Dick returning to the dialogue of ideas." + +LOAD-DATE: November 17, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Richard G. Darman, the budget director, who spoke yesterday in Washington to the Council for Excellence in Government. (Jose R. Lopez/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +399 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 18, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Darmakusuma Ie, Ophthalmologist, Weds Ms. Greenberg, a Social Worker + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2; Page 73; Column 1; Society Desk + +LENGTH: 194 words + +Elizabeth Rachel Greenberg, a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Joshua F. Greenberg of Scarsdale, N.Y., was married yesterday in Tarrytown, N.Y., to Dr. Darmakusuma Ie, the son of Dr. and Mrs. Njoek San Ie of Plantation, Fla. Justice Martin H. Rettinger of State Supreme Court in Manhattan officiated at Abigail Kirsch at Tappan Hill. +Mrs. Ie is a psychiatric social worker at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York. A graduate of Simmons College, she has a master's degree in social work from New York University. Her father is a partner in the New York law firm of Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler. Her mother, Dr. Reva Greenberg, is the director of education at Mainstream, the Retirement Institute of Westchester Community College in Valhalla, N.Y., which develops education programs for elderly people. +The bridegroom is a resident in ophthalmology at Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat Hospital. A cum laude graduate of Harvard University, he has a medical degree from Tulane University. His father is an associate in the South Florida Pathologists Group in Plantation, and the director of laboratories at the Universal Medical Center in Sunrise, Fla. + +LOAD-DATE: November 20, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Elizabeth Ie (Lew Appel) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +400 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 18, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Gail Dratch Wed to David Michaels + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2; Page 69; Column 1; Society Desk + +LENGTH: 220 words + +Gail Deborah Dratch, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph B. Dratch of Chevy Chase, Md., was married last evening to Dr. David Morris Michaels, the son of Ruth Gruber of New York, and the late Philip H. Michaels. Rabbi Tzvi H. Porath performed the ceremony at Adas Israel Congregation in Washington. +The bride, 33 years old, is keeping her name. A graduate of Hampshire College, she is the director of political action for the National Council of Senior Citizens in Washington. Her parents own the Claire Dratch women's clothing stores in Washington and Bethesda, Md. +The bridegroom, 36, is an associate professor of community health and social medicine at the City University of New York Medical School. A cum laude graduate of City College, he has a master's degree in epidemiology and a Ph. D. in socio-medical sciences from Columbia University. Before recently joining the C.U.N.Y. faculty, he was the director of the division of public health in the department of epidemiology and social medicine at Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. His mother is an author and lecturer and was a correspondent in the Soviet Union and the Middle East for The New York Herald Tribune. His father was a lawyer and a vice president of Sachs Quality Stores, furniture retailers in New York. + +LOAD-DATE: November 20, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +401 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 18, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Whither China? Back to the Era of 'Comrade' + +BYLINE: By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1; Page 23; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 677 words + +DATELINE: BEIJING, Nov. 17 + +Fighting the linguistic fashion of the last decade, China's hard-line rulers are dusting off the revolutionary expression "comrade" and encouraging its use instead of more bourgeois salutations. +A few days ago, the national television news switched its opening from "viewers, hello," to "comrades, hello." That raised eyebrows and lowered spirits in a nation where such matters can be important hints of the prevailing political winds, and on Friday the greeting was adjusted to a compromise version, "viewers, comrades, hello." "This is not compulsory, but it is hoped that people will use 'comrade' as often as possible, not as in the past when 'comrade' was nearly forgotten as a greeting," said a spokeman for Beijing Television Station. + He said the television stations had recently received a directive "from above" on the use of comrade. In accordance with the directive, which was read aloud to the journalists, the salutation comrade will be used in broadcasts to the domestic audience, but not in programs that are directed primarily to foreigners or overseas Chinese. +The policy of encouraging comrade seems to reflect concern among the hard-liners that in the last 18 months they have succeeded in seizing the redoubts of Government but have been unable to restore Communist values to the society. Dissatisfied with merely controlling the ministries, they also wish to shape society and even the way people talk to each other. +" 'Comrade' is a greeting attained by the life and blood of the revolutionary martyrs," People's Daily declared two weeks ago, in calling for its return. "We must not foresake it for something else." +In another sign of the hard-liners' anxiety about Western influences on society, People's Daily lately has also inveighed against the proliferation of foreign words in the Chinese language. A commentator protested that direct translation of foreign phrases like "flea market" left people puzzled and was unnecessary when Chinese has perfectly good terms -- like "used goods market" -- that mean the same thing. +Many elderly Communists have been offended that their revolutonary traditions, like greeting people as comrade, are now looked down on as old-fashioned, while young people delight in wearing T-shirts with English lettering (some of it nonsensical) and in tossing occasional English words into their conversations. Conversations among young people, for example, often end with "bye, bye." +The word comrade -- "tongzhi" inChinese -- gained wide currency after the 1949 Communist revolution as an expression of China's ideal of a society in which everyone was on equal footing. Other salutations faded from use, and soon comrade was virtually the only way to hail a person on the street. +But in the 1980's, comrade gradually fell from use. Some older people still use it, because it feels comfortable to them, like the Mao jackets they wear in preference to Western clothing. +But younger people prefer traditional Chinese salutations, which to them have a cosmopolitan ring because they are used by the wealthy Hong Kong and Taiwan Chinese who come visiting. "Miss" is much more likely to elicit a smile from a woman than is "comrade," while for men, "shifu," approximately translatable as "master," is common. Older peopleare hailed with, "old Granny" or "old Grandpa." +"Most people don't like to use 'comrade,' for two reasons," said a Government researcher. "First, it's inappropriate for me to hail a stranger that way, because he isn't my comrade. Second, it has a political edge to it, and triggers leftist associations from the Cultural Revolution and before." +Television stations have been particularly vulnerable to political pressures lately. Indeed, the two most prominent news anchors at the time of the 1989 crackdown -- Xue Fei and Du Xian -- were both promptly removed from the air and have yet to reappear. Mr. Xue mumbled the lines glorifying the killings, making it obvious he disagreed with what was happening, while Ms. Du wore black as a sign of mourning for those killed. + +LOAD-DATE: November 20, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +402 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 18, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +CASSVILLE JOURNAL; +Despite Debt and Apathetic Youth, Little Russia Still Lives + +BYLINE: By BARBARA STURKEN + +SECTION: Section 12NJ; Page 2; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1233 words + +DATELINE: CASSVILLE + + AT Bab's Gift Shop, where a visitor can buy Soviet-made chocolates, amber necklaces and painted wooden eggs, the aging Russian emigres were talking of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his Nobel Peace Prize. +"We're seeing real freedom and democracy over there," said Rehim Babaoglu, the shopkeeper and an immigrant in 1951 from the Soviet Union. "In my time, people could not even dream about it." Because of Mr. Gorbachev's policies, he said, he was recently able to speak by phone to a relative in the Soviet Union whom he had not heard from since the 1950's. + Wasil Michalap, a Russian World War II veteran who now lives in East Brunswick, was less impressed by the Soviet President's accomplishments. "He will get $700,000, Mr. Gorbachev, but where is the meat, where is the bread?" Mr. Michalap said. +Aside from a few exchanges like these, the extraordinary events sweeping Eastern Europe have hardly made a ripple here in this ethnic enclave known as Little Russia. +Like the old Communist order in the motherland, this once proud community is on the wane. And as their native land gropes toward a free market, the shareholders of Russian descent who manage the Rova Farm Resort are suffering the headaches of a capitalist society: budget deficits, soaring insurance costs and an apathetic younger generation. + Fifty years ago, Rova was a thriving 1,400-acre retreat in the Pine Barrens for Russian immigrants who wanted to escape dingy urban dwellings and to preserve their language and cultural traditions. Many of their children and grandchildren, however, lost interest. Now, all that is left are about 40 acres and a Russian-style restaurant, a cluster of pastel cottages and a deserted lakeside pavilion, boarded up because it would cost too much to insure. + +Land Sold Off in Stages + The land was sold off in stages, starting in the 60's, and the last big 50-acre parcel went two years ago. The remaining active members are considering whether it is even worth staying open and incurring more debts. +Mr. Michalap, Rova's vice president, said he favored demolishing the pavilion, once the scene of much Russian dancing and singing, and selling off the motel-like group of cottages. Then the Rova resort would be just a restaurant and social club for elderly immigrants, some of whom live at the nearby Pushkin Memorial Home. +But enthusiasm for this solution is not shared by all. Another faction opposes any more land sales, believing they would destroy what remains of Rova. And there is now a move afoot to create a cultural center. +"We're a cultural anachronism," said Nick Zill, a former president of the Rova Farm corporation and a shareholder who lives in nearby Brick Town. "Now we just attract old people and a few curiosity seekers." +Sounding like any other businessman perusing a balance sheet, Mr. Zill said: "Basically we can't meet expenses. Our payroll is in excess of $1,000 a week; then we pay $40,000 a year in taxes, and the same amount for insurance. The basic nut is beyond our capacity to carry on the basis of current revenues. Rova Farm exists only because of shareholder interest, no matter how apathetically it is displayed." +If the dilapidated pavilion, its roof sagging and walls covered with graffiti, is a symbol of Rova's decline, the adjacent Russian Orthodox Church of St. Vladimir suggests better times. Built in 1938 on land given by the Rova organization, the church is not officially connected to Rova, but its presence seems to hold the place together. Its gold onion dome and colorful exterior mosaics inevitably cause passing motorists to slow down. Nearby are another church, St. Mary's, and a large cemetery, whose headstones bear distinctive Russian names. +Sunday services still bring worshipers to Rova, and Tuesdays also draw shoppers to a weekly flea market in the parking lot in front of the church. Vendors from neighboring towns hawk assorted wares, from cast-off clothes and furniture to fresh produce from local farms; the fees they pay to Rova have helped stem the flow of red ink. +Another source of income is the restaurant, which also acts as the center for what remains of Rova's cultural life. It is in a plain wooden hall surrounded by a wide veranda where Russians stand around talking in their native language. There is a modest dining room decorated by balalaikas, where patrons can consume $1.75 bowls of borscht or platters of chicken Kiev for $6.95. +Yuri Matyukhin, a young chef, presides over the cuisine at Rova. He came to the United States from the Soviet Union a little more than a year ago, a visa obtained through the help of his sister-in-law in Philadelphia. A former cook for the Soviet army, he lives with his wife in one of the little cabins across the street. +But they are exceptions. In a lament undoubtedly sounded at dozens of similar ethnic centers around the country, Mr. Michalap said, "The young people don't care about Rova." +Gus Koladko, a longtime Cassville resident who camed to Rova during his youth, sums up the lack of interest shown by the younger generation. "Why would they be interested?" he said. "There is nothing for young people to do here around here." +There was plenty to do here during Rova's heyday, when busloads of city dwellers arrived every weekend. Rova was founded in 1934 with a land grant from Chester Fedor, an immigrant who rose from turkey farmer to wealthy real-estate developer. Its location put it within easy reach of New Jersey's urban centers, Philadelphia and New York. +At its peak, the complex included a children's camp and school, a library, the lakeside pavilion and motels and cabins for rent. Russians flocking to the area settled down; some built houses or vacation cottages. There was also a park honoring the Russian poet Pushkin, whose statue still stands. +At one time the Russian-American population in Cassville and nearby Lakewood and Howell exceeded 20,000, and Rova alone had about 8,000. The current number of Russians living close to Rova is now estimated at 300, but the corporation has 5,000 shareholders spread out around the country, many of them descendants of the original Rova settlers. +"We had a thriving outdoor life," Mr. Zill said. "We had boating, and sailing, swimming." But sailing and swimming were banned years ago because of a lawsuit brought by an injured swimmer that could have wiped out the organization, Mr. Zill said. + +Opposed to Theme Park + "We don't have anyone to carry on the management of Rova Farm" is how Mr. Zill summed up the problem. He is opposed to bringing in a professional manager and turning Rova into a touristy Russian theme park. "That would just commercialize it," he said. + There are still some optimists at Rova. "Oh, they always say that it is going to go down the drain," said Vivian Butler, who has worked as a secretary for Rova for eight years. "But I don't think it will." In fact, Rova's demise has been predicted on several occasions, and in the late 70's things got so bad that a tax lien was put on the corporation. +But positive signs are there, too. In the last year or two the number of visitors from the Soviet Union has grown. And recently a Leningrad television crew arranged to come to Rova to film a segment about Russian immigrant life in the United States. "We might not be a success," Mr. Michalap said, "but we are still here." + +LOAD-DATE: November 20, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Avely Krivoff outside the Russian Orthodox Church of St. Vladimir in Cassville, where a once thriving 1,400-acre retreat for Russian immigrants is on the wane. (Eddie Hausner/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +403 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 19, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Charities Face Large Losses In Failed Bank + +BYLINE: By STEPHANIE STROM + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1011 words + +Charitable organizations that maintained more than one account in the failed Freedom National Bank stand to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars that they had thought was protected by Federal deposit insurance. +Officials of the community services organizations, which provide day care, programs for the elderly, foster care, housing and assistance to crime victims, had been under the impression that as long as each account was under the $100,000 limit for Federal insurance, they would be able to recover all their funds after the bank's failure. But last week they began to learn otherwise. +The Fort Greene Senior Citizens Council in Brooklyn, for example, had $350,000 in 24 checking accounts at the bank, which is based in Harlem. But the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation reimbursed it for only $100,000. +"That was not our understanding of the insurance program at all," said Sam Pinn, the council's chairman. "Obviously, we would not have left ourselves vulnerable." + +Appeal by Abrams + He added that the council also placed the money in separate accounts because of requirements from public and private agencies that finance some of its programs. +Although most of the charitable organizations maintained accounts less than the Federal Government's $100,000 insurance limit, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which is managing the reimbursement of depositors at the bank, considers the multiple accounts of a single depositor as a single account. +The New York State Attorney General, Robert Abrams, who learned of the situation late on Friday, has appealed to L. William Seidman, the F.D.I.C. chairman, for a more lenient interpretation of the deposit insurance regulations. +Mr. Seidman said in an interview yesterday that the deposit insurance applies to aggregate deposits, not individual ones, and that the agency would apply the regulations to Freedom's depositors. +"If all of the accounts were in one name and there was no indication that they belonged to other people and they were over $100,000 total, it applies the same to everyone," he said. But he added that a final decision would not be made until Mr. Abrams's letter had been reviewed. +In the largest bailout of an insolvent bank, the $4.5 billion Government takeover of Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company in 1984, the F.D.I.C. did insure all deposits. +Because of the size of Continental Illinois, its failure would have had such a severe impact on the financial system that it would have cost the Government much more than the $4.5 billion it spent to bail the bank out, Mr. Seidman said. "We have to use the least costly method of dealing with failures," he said. +If the F.D.I.C. had found a buyer for Freedom or had been able to establish a merger with another bank, no depositors would lose money because the new bank would take responsibility for the deposits. "It's a rare situation," he said of Freedom, "but it can happen under the present rules." +Many of the charitable groups had deposited in Freedom, a black-owned bank, as a way of supporting economic independence in the black community, but they had distributed their money in several accounts either to take advantage of the Federal insurance or because they were required to by their financing sources. +In a letter to Mr. Seidman, the Attorney General noted: "In many instances these not-for-profits have maintained multiple accounts because they are required by their governmental or private funding sources to segregate and hold these monies in trust for restricted charitable purposes." + +Losses May Exceed $1 Million + In an interview yesterday, Mr. Abrams said, "Based on the preliminary information, we could be talking about many hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even more than $1 million, and we're just talking about the Brooklyn area." +Mr. Pinn, of the Fort Greene Senior Citizens Council, said that because of the losses, the council would be unable to pay the teachers, social workers and vendors that supply services to its programs. Among the services the council provides are meals for almost 8,000 elderly people each day and day-care centers that care for more than 200 children from low-income families. +The council will have to shut down four programs before Thanksgiving if the Federal Government does not refund the money, he said. +Mr. Abrams said he did not know whether any churches, several of which held multiple accounts at the bank, were affected. +"At this point it's hard to say," he said. "The initial indications are that this could involve a very significant number of organizations." + +Interpreting the Rules + Mr. Abrams said he had heard that one community service organization in Brooklyn had lost more than $700,000. +In his letter to Mr. Seidman, Mr. Abrams asked the F.D.I.C. to consider community groups as trustees or agents for the various charities and community services they fund instead of as single depositors. +He said Federal regulations could be interpreted to make a distinction for a single trustee managing funds for several charities or community service programs. "We think they should look at the beneficiaries of the account as individual entities, not only the trustee or the name on the account," he said. +Alan Aviles, an aide to Mr. Abrams, said the regulations already distinguish between formal trusts and individual depositors. He said the F.D.I.C. considers the beneficiaries of a trust, not the trustee, when applying the deposit insurance limit. +The Fort Greene Senior Citizens Council has already submitted contracts to support the argument that it is merely a custodian for funds used by many different agencies. +The losses by charities at Freedom came to light during a hearing on Friday on issues affecting the elderly in minority communities, held by Assemblyman Arthur O. Eve, Democrat of Buffalo. Mr. Eve said several executives of nonprofit organizations that serve the elderly canceled their testimony because their programs were affected by the bank's failure. + +LOAD-DATE: November 19, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +404 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 20, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Orphans Return to a City They Left on Sad Trains + +BYLINE: By THOMAS MORGAN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 977 words + +When she remembers the Empire State Building, Alice Ayler, a 71-year-old psychologist from Oklahoma City, thinks about tears she shed 62 years ago. That was the day smiling, benevolent agents of the Children's Aid Society met her at the construction site of the skyscraper, and separated her from the three younger brothers she had been raising alone in New York. +Arthur Smith, 72, a Trenton businessman, wants to know who was the woman who left him unattended, but well-dressed, in a wicker basket in the women's wear department of the old Gimbels department store in Manhattan some 72 years ago. + Mr. Smith and Mrs. Ayler were among more than 100,000 orphaned or abandoned children from New York who were sent west by the Children's Aid Society and the New York Foundling Hospital as participants in a social experiment called the Orphan Train Movement, a forerunner of today's heavily burdened foster-care system. +Today, Mrs. Ayler, Mr. Smith and several hundred other Orphan Train children, all elderly, from Minnesota to Texas, will attend their first gathering in New York, a four-day meeting at the Penta Hotel in Manhattan, in an emotional search for their early roots. For many of them, the memories are bittersweet, and the assembly is a homecoming. + +'Please Don't Go Away' + "The separation from my brothers was probably the worst time of my life," said Mrs. Ayler, who was later reunited with her surviving siblings. "Toots was my nickname, and when the agents took them away, the twins, who were 3 years old, cried, " 'Toot-toot, please don't go away.' " +Memories, particular odors, trees, scraps of old photographs, even chunks of concrete -- this is the grist that survivors say they use in a relentless search for records or evidence that can give them a clue to who they are and where they began. +"I have mixed emotions about coming back," said Lorraine Williams of Temple Hills, Md., who left New York City on the orphan train bound for Kirksville, Mo., 66 years ago. She and her husband, a retired Air Force pilot, are coming to the reunion by train. +"I will look outside the train, at the roadside, and I think I will have flashbacks," Mrs. Williams said. "I'll remember myself as a little girl in the white dress with blue embroidery at the bottom and around the neck, headed for Kirksville with nothing but a change of underwear and a sandwich in a brown paper bag." + +A Discredited Policy + Mrs. Williams and many others consider themselves survivors of a policy that has been somewhat discredited. Dr. James Shenton, professor of history at Columbia University, said that social service experts now first try to help children find stable homes in their own environment rather than sending them away to a totally foreign one. +But during the time of the orphan trains, from 1853 to 1929, only orphanages or asylums offered care for children, and there were often too few of them. +During those 76 years, tens of thousands of New York City children roomed the streets uncared for, left to feed and clothe themselves. They became bootblacks and newspaper boys, streetwalkers and domestics. They were often illiterate, and they were often considered a menace to society. +New York City reeled unprepared from a rapid influx of European immigrants. The Irish, Germans, Italians, Jews and Slavs, among others, found new homes in overcrowded neighborhoods, particularly on the Lower East Side, and even newer dangers. +Sanitation was nonexistent and diseases like typhoid, cholera and influenza took thousands of lives. "Often, whole families were wiped out and the occasional kid left surviving was left pretty much on his own," Dr. Shenton said. + +Surviving on the Streets + Sometimes wearing rags and in poor health, the children of the streets slept in doorways, in hay barges, under stairways, anywhere they could, officials with the Children's Aid Society said. +"The immigrant groups had not established the kind of networks to pass children around in an extended family system," Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, an expert on urban issues, said in a interview. "People feared these new immigrants and their children. They feared they would rise up and vote, uneducated." +For Charles Loring Brace, a wealthy minister and a founder of the Children's Aid Society, the notion of putting children who had done no wrong into any institution was anathema. His solution was to send the children to America's farmlands. +The notion was to match them with good homes and foster parents, who often became adoptive parents, said Philip Coltoff, executive director of the society. Hard work for the children was a part of the bargain. As often as possible, siblings would be placed in homes near each other. +Lee Nailling, of Atlanta, Tex., remembers being in a group of children taken off the orphan train in Clarksville, Tex., and the anguish he felt at being separated from his brother. + +'Sort of Like Buying a Cow' + "We were lined up in an auditorium or church," Mr. Nailling remembers, "and people would stare at us, sort of like buying a cow." +"We were sent down to this part of the world as child labor because the farm people needed help in the fields," he said. "The people would come up and feel your muscles to see if you were healthy." +Amid the stories the survivors hope to tell this week at the reunion are lessons of survival and self-reliance they hope to pass on to children living in foster care today. +"I don't care how good the country was or how good people are, you want to know who you were and to find out that you were not so bad," said Mrs. Ayler, who talks to children's groups about her experiences. +"I cannot help what my mother or father did," she said. "What matters is what I do. I tell children you can survive if somebody gives you a reason to." + +LOAD-DATE: November 20, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: More than 100,000 orphaned or abandoned children from New York were sent west, like those above in 1900, by the Children's Aid Society and the New York Foundling Hospital in a social experiment called the Orphan Train Movement. Several hundred of them will reunite today. (Kansas State Historical Society via Associated Press); Chaperones from the Children's Aid Society with a group of children bound for the West in 1909. (The Lebanon (Mo.) Daily Record) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +405 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 21, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Bill Would Give Unwed Couples Equal Benefits + +BYLINE: By FELICIA R. LEE + +SECTION: Section B; Page 2; Column 6; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 438 words + +Unmarried domestic partners would be protected against discrimination and would be able to document their relationship officially under a bill that went before the New York City Council yesterday. +The proposed law would, for example, expand health benefits to the unmarried partners of city employees. It would also extend municipal hospital benefits and prison visitation rights to such couples and would apply to city-owned housing and shelters. Both heterosexual and homosexual couples would be covered. + Though some other cities have enlarged the concept of what constitutes a family, turning the bill into law in New York could be arduous. +The City Council insists that it has no jurisdiction in the matter. Although the bill went to the Council's General Welfare Committee yesterday, a Council spokeswoman said there would be no hearings because the proposed legislation was pre-empted by state laws governing marital rights. + +'Would Be Unconstitutional' + "The state has done so much legislation in this area," said the spokeswoman, Peg Breen. "It would be unconstitutional for us to consider it. We cannot change or modify state law." +But the bill's sponsor, Councilwoman Carolyn Maloney, said the Council had the power to enact it because it pertained only to city policies and city employees. She said she would request a hearing after the bill had been in committee for 30 days. +Groups saying they represented gay rights advocates and elderly and disabled people, among others, praised the bill. +"This bill is a universal one," Ms. Maloney said. "It benefits senior citizens, people with physical disabilities, unmarried heterosexual couples, gay men, lesbians and those who are economically disadvantaged. It's time we realized that these nontraditional families contribute just as much to our society as everybody else." + +Formidable Hurdles Remain + Under the bill, an unmarried domestic partnership could be established by giving a statement to a county clerk, who would file it and give the partners a certificate. Or a couple could have the statement notarized. To qualify, a couple would have to be unrelated, both unmarried, and at least 18 years old. +To become law, the bill must be approved by the Council committee, passed by the full Council and signed by Mayor David N. Dinkins. The Mayor supports the concept of unmarried domestic partnerships, a spokesman said yesterday, but he would have to study the bill before assessing its impact on city policies. +The cost of extending benefits under the measure are estimated to be between $30 million and $60 million a year. + +LOAD-DATE: November 21, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +406 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 21, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +The Honesty Gap on Medigap: Closed + +SECTION: Section A; Page 22; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 439 words + +More than 20 million elderly Americans buy medical insurance to pay bills that Medicare doesn't cover. "Medigap" it's called, and it's wise protection against catastrophic illness that can bankrupt even wealthy families. In fact, Medigap is such a good idea that many families are talked into buying two, three or more different policies. +What do they get from the extra policies? Absolutely nothing -- which is why Congress stepped in, as part of the budget bill, to clean up the mess. The reforms will provide welcome protection for retirees whose fear and misunderstanding make them easy marks for unethical insurance peddlers. + Elderly families on Medicare are liable for deductibles, coinsurance and the costs of catastrophic illness that exceed Medicare's tight limits on hospital and physician reimbursements. Medigap policies cover some of these costs. And the policies include a dizzying array of exclusions, limitations and conditions. The policies, not standardized, are hard to understand and virtually impossible to compare. +Fearful of financial ruin and ignorant of Medigap provisions, the elderly have acted desperately. Nearly a third, according to Consumers Union, have bought redundant coverage, spending hundreds and even thousands of dollars on policies they do not need and cannot use. Lacking proper counseling, these elderly people have fallen prey to unprincipled insurance agents. +At the instigation of Representative Ron Wyden of Oregon and Senator Thomas Daschle of South Dakota, Congress has now passed ambitious reform. The new law forbids the sale of a Medigap policy to anyone who already owns one, unless the policyholder signs an intention to drop the first policy. +The law calls for the creation of 10 standard policies to replace the thousands of alternatives now sold so that policyholders can more easily compare one with another. The bill also forbids the sale of Medigap to individuals on Medicaid, which covers all health-care costs of the poor. +The most important part of the legislation may be none of these new regulations. It authorizes $10 million for setting up counseling programs at local Social Security offices. Armed with information and impartial guidance, the elderly would no longer be easily exploited. +There is a danger that the new law will prove overly restrictive, stifling legitimate competition. Congress might have put more money into counseling and studied the results before resorting to new regulations. Even so, the new law is a triumph. For elderly Americans to spend meager incomes on redundant Medigap policies is an outrage about to disappear. + +LOAD-DATE: November 21, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +407 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 22, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Leaders of New Jersey Tax Rebellion Take Aim at Legislature + +BYLINE: By JOSEPH F. SULLIVAN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1423 words + +DATELINE: NEWARK, Nov. 21 + +Two weeks after New Jersey voters almost unseated Senator Bill Bradley and frightened several Democratic Congressmen in a flush of anti-tax fervor, the leaders of a citizen group that helped nurture that anger are savoring their success and planning their next campaign. +Widely expected to win comfortably, Mr. Bradley was nearly upset by a Republican newcomer, Christine Todd Whitman, who skillfully tapped the voters' anger. Now, the citizens' group, Hands Across New Jersey, believes it can turn that public mistrust of government into a major issue that the candidates for all 120 seats in the State Legislature will have to address in next year's elections. + "We were able to channel a political storm this year," said Janet Coates of Ewing Township, who, with her husband, Tom, was among the seven people who formed Hands Across New Jersey to battle Gov. Jim Florio's $2.8 billion program of higher sales and income taxes. "And all legislators who fail to heed the message we were bringing will be blown out next year by a hurricane." + +Recall Power Sought + Leaders of the organization, which now has coordinators in all 21 counties and a list of 2,000 volunteers, say they will work with other taxpayer and public-interest groups to try to force repeal of the taxes, even in the face of predictions of widening budget problems. And they plan to demand that candidates for the Legislature embrace proposals to allow the public to place binding questions on the ballot and to recall elected officials. +But there are signs that the anti-tax forces will not have the stage to themselves next year and that organized support for the Governor's tax and school aid programs is on the way. +Urban mayors who met during the State League of Municipalities convention in Atlantic City last week say they intend to begin educating their residents to the property tax relief benefits in the package, and this week leaders of several groups representing the elderly met to announce their support of the Governor. +"I deplore the political bashing of Governor Florio's efforts to improve the welfare of the people of New Jersey," said Peter Shields, founder of the New Jersey Leadership Council on Aging. + +The Imponderables Cited + Political experts say it is too soon to tell if the new anti-tax groups will play as important a role in next year's elections as they did this year. +"Whenever the public believes government is not paying attention to its pocketbook, groups such as Hands Across New Jersey tend to rise up in anger," said Richard Roper, director of the Council on New Jersey Affairs at Princeton University. +But, he added, in the months ahead "all kinds of things can happen, including a war in the Middle East, that will alter the political terrain here in New Jersey and in every other state." +"We'll just have to wait and see how things play out," he said. +A black organization rebuked Hands Across New Jersey for opposing a proposal on the Nov. 6 ballot that would have provided $135 million in loans and grants for affordable housing programs. The measure lost by 66,000 votes, while the voters approved two gambling proposals -- to allow horse racing on Sundays and to permit Atlantic City casinos to take bets on horse races. +The chairman of the New Jersey Black Issues Convention, Councilman Donald Tucker of Newark, called the defeat of the housing proposal a "misguided campaign" that helped to deny the homeless and minority residents needed housing assistance. +Leaders of Hands Across New Jersey said they were opposed to the financing mechanism in the housing plan because it could have led to higher property taxes. They said they would support a bill recently introduced in the Legislature to salvage the housing program. + +Better Organization Planned + John Budzash, a letter carrier from Howell Township, became the driving force behind the creation of Hands Across New Jersey when he called into a radio program that was encouraging people to air their feelings about Governor Florio's tax plan. Mr. Budzash got in touch with Pat Ralston, a title searcher from Belmar, who also had called the station. +Ms. Ralston, who said the group raised and spent about $20,000 this year, chiefly on telephone bills, said discussions were under way to form a political action committee to undertake a more sophisticated fund-raising effort and to devise more effective campaign techniques next year. +"Up to now we've received everything from 25-cent postage stamps to donations in all amounts up to $100," she said. +With Democrats controlling both houses of the Legislature, Republican Party leaders like Assemblyman Robert D. Franks of New Providence, the state chairman, say they stand to benefit next year from the campaigns by the new grass-roots organization and other special-interest groups that have been in the field for years. + +Republicans Cautioned + But leaders of the taxpayer groups say the Republicans will be making a mistake if they take their support for granted, and at least one Republican lawmaker believes it would be foolish to count the votes of angry taxpayers too soon. +"There is a lot of negative feeling out there, but that doesn't mean they want to anoint us," said Senator William L. Gormley of Margate. +"Republicans think they have backers now, but they're wrong," Mr. Budzash said. "What we want is accountability by all of our elected officials." +For this reason, Hands Across New Jersey and the United Taxpayers of New Jersey, formed in 1977 to protest enactment of the state income tax, are supporting a legislative agenda that calls for laws granting voters the right to place binding public questions on the ballot and the right to recall elected officials, including the governor and members of the Legislature. +They also want limits on terms of office for the Legislature, and this month a new organization that calls itself Revolt announced that it had been formed to push for such limits. Tom Blomquist of Brick Township, a retired captain in the Coast Guard and state coordinator of the new group, said it would join with the two taxpayer organizations and the New Jersey Conservative Caucus to insure that the issue plays an important role in next year's election. + +Bill Seeks Legislature Limits + The Assembly minority leader, Chuck Haytaian, Republican of Independence Township and one of the strongest critics of the Governor's new tax and school-aid plans, became the first lawmaker to endorse limits on terms in the Legislature. He introduced a bill on Monday to limit a State Assembly member to six consecutive two-year terms and a state senator to four consecutive terms. However, Mr. Haytaian had no co-sponsors and could not predict whether the bill wouild attract much support among his colleagues. +Samuel Perelli, president of the United Taxpayers of New Jersey, said: "We've been fighting for a voter initiative package for 15 years, and we needed a giant sledgehammer in the past to get people's attention. But now it is a demand that the lawmakers won't be able to ignore." +Mr. Perelli recalled that he thought an initiative and referendum law would pass in 1985, when it had the support of Gov. Thomas H. Kean and was part of the Republican Party platform. But he said some lawmakers who pledged their support backed down when the bill came up for a vote. +"They lied," he said,"but this time we're not taking anything for granted." + +Signature Campaign Continues + Mrs. Coates said that Hands Across New Jersey had collected 800,000 signatures supporting repeal of the Florio tax package and was collecting more. +Mr. Budzash said the organization was sticking to its demand for repeal, even in the face of reports by State Treasurer Douglas C. Berman and others in the Legislature that the state faced a $600 million revenue shortfall in this fiscal year and $800 million in fiscal 1992. +"It just shows that enacting new taxes doesn't help the economy," Mr. Budzash said. "It hurts it." +Hands Across New Jersey attracted the support of the Coalition of New Jersey Sportsmen, who were angered by Mr. Florio's success in enacting a law banning the sale or possession of semi-automatic rifles, and the tax group also received some advice on campaign strategy from Richard J. Feldman, a former lobbyist for the National Rifle Association. However, Mrs. Coates said the relationship of her organization with other groups and individuals "is one of mutual respect, but we design our own campaigns." + +LOAD-DATE: November 22, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +408 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 24, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Bluffton Journal; +Solitary Old Oystermen's Vanishing Way of Life + +BYLINE: By RONALD SMOTHERS, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 8; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1001 words + +DATELINE: BLUFFTON, S.C. + +Like a tired old man rising haltingly from his chair, the oystering season got off to a slow start in this Low Country town on the South Carolina coast. But that was all right for Nathaniel Brown, who at 80 years old still goes out picking oysters and who could use a little more time to get going himself. +The oystering business, like Mr. Brown, is showing signs of age and decline here. Each day, Mr. Brown goes to work with a group of oyster pickers for the Bluffton Oyster Company. The average age of the group is over 65. + It is a far cry from those days when the river work provided a way of life for the Gullah people, who were once slaves on the plantations that dotted the region's coastal barrier islands. After the Civil War, they were essentially left with just two choices, Mr. Brown said: farming the land or drawing sustenance from the teeming rivers and salt marshes along the coast. +But with development and other changes along the coast in the last two decades, new opportunities have opened for the Gullahs, who developed a distinct culture and dialect during nearly a century of isolation in remote coastal areas. They can now make a living in ways less arduous than the back-breaking and solitary work involved in hammering loose shellfish from the jagged oyster rakes that rise out of secluded mud flats at low tide, +It might seem that these should be excellent times for oystering here. The waters around Bluffton and off the South Carolina coast are exceptionally clean, and there is an abundance of shellfish just waiting to be picked. +But social forces are at work in the shrinking of the oyster industry. The elderly men who gather the shellfish are the products of a different age, when few opportunities were open to blacks. +"There was a time when there wasn't another thing I could do but oystering or farming," Mr. Brown said. +Today, while many of their elders continue to do the only kind of work they have ever known, younger members of the Gullah people are finding jobs associated with the growing tourist and construction industries in places like Hilton Head and Daufuskie Island. And many are going on to college and leaving the region. +Younger people, working in the constuction trade or in tourism can bring in up to $700 for a 40-hour week, almost twice as much as oystermen who must put in a 60-hour week and who are more at the mercy of the vagaries of nature. +Back in the 1930's, there were nearly 25 oyster-shucking houses and packing plants along the state's coastal plain. Now there are only three, and oystering is a $2 million-a-year business involving about 800 people. That compares with well over four times that number of workers 60 years ago. +"There wasn't nothing nice, or as you might say romantic, about oystering," Mr. Brown said recently as he unloaded a day's pickings at the dock of the Bluffton Oyster Company with a group of men all 60 or older. "But it was part of a way of life here. I doubt that you will see another generation of oystermen and I guess we are a disappearing breed. I don't have to do it. I do it because I want to, and it keeps me busy since I retired." +The oyster season here opened Oct. 1 as the weather cooled. But then heavy rains hit the region, dumping runoff into the marshy, coastal estuaries, and state health officials grew fearful of pollution. They closed the season on Oct. 12 and only reopened it at the end of October when they were sure the water had cleansed itself. +Michael Reeves, owner of the Bluffton Oyster Company complains that the closure was unnecessary and that it delayed the start of a seasonal business that was limping along anyway. Normally in late October, he said, his shucking room would be filled with two dozen women standing at the white tile tables shucking oysters. +Mr. Reeves, who bought the oyster company in 1985, said he had tried a number of measures to reattract local labor to the oyster-picking business. +For example, he will finance at low-interest rates any oyster picker to outfit himself with a flat-bottomed bateau and an engine, an investment of about $2,500. He has also increased the amount he pays to the shuckers, who are mostly women. They now receive $13 a gallon, almost twice as much as they received in the 1980's. A good shucker, he said, can now earn as much as $8 an hour. +Sam Bennett, who is 67, has been picking oysters all of his life. A shy man, Mr. Bennett said he likes the solitary life of oystering out on the mud flats with only the herons, cormorants, pelicans and an occasional snake for company. +"It's solitary all right, but as long as you work, you don't get too lonely," he said. +On a recent day, Mr. Bennett poled his boat in from a morning of working a mud flat up one of the hundreds of little creeks that meander off the May River. When the tide goes out, exposing the oyster-clotted mud flats along the creeks, Mr. Bennett sets about his work, carrying a hammer to dislodge the clumped shellfish. +"The picking was pretty good today," he said as he quit picking early to pole back to the docks of the Bluffton Oyster Company. "We didn't have such a good tide today, so I couldn't put in five or six hours out here. But I did all right." +Heading in, he spotted Mr. Brown. Coming in from another direction was another elderly black man, Joseph Young, who is 76 and has been oystering on the river as long as Mr. Bennett can remember. +At the dock Mr. Reeves winched the nets full of the men's pickings for the day onto the dock where they were hosed down and bagged in burlap bushel bags until they weighed about 55 pounds each. At $14 a bushel, Mr. Bennett's short day meant he had made $72. Mr. Young and Mr. Brown each made more than $100. +"I work when I want to work in this," Mr. Brown said. "I wouldn't want my grandson doing this. No, sir. That's why I'm helping support him while he's in college. This whole business is disappearing, but I'll be back out here tomorrow." + +LOAD-DATE: November 24, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: An oyster picker at work in Bluffton, S.C. Oystering, a way of life for the area's freed slaves, is being supplanted by more modern pursuits. (Paul Suszynski for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +409 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 25, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE VIEW FROM: WATERBURY; +Century-Old Store Wraps Its Wares In Lots of Tradition + +BYLINE: By CHARLOTTE LIBOV + +SECTION: Section 12CN; Page 2; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1221 words + +THE Christmas-shopping season is gathering steam at the Howland-Hughes department store, but no closed-circuit televisions blare the praises of the latest in jeans; no glittery, floor-to-ceiling displays of wrapped boxes crowd the floor, and no slinky saleswomen are positioned by the escalators to spritz shoppers with the season's designer fragrance. + In fact, Howland-Hughes has no escalators. But it has Alma Symmons, one of the elevator operators at the store in Waterbury. She greets each customer with a sing-song "Floor, please?" Then she pulls back the lever to shut the door and delivers the customers to their floors. + Henry Paine, 40 years old, the store's president and one of its owners, said he is aware that many shoppers who pack the malls may never have seen an elevator operator. But, to him, this is no reason to change things. The 100-year-old store, he said, lives by the motto "the new Howland-Hughes is the old Howland-Hughes." + Competition from sprawling shopping complexes has forced the closing of other downtown department stores, like the venerable Sage Allen in Hartford, which shut its doors in August. Just days after Sage Allen closed, Mr. Paine said, Howland-Hughes held "a little news conference, to assure people we weren't going out of business." + +Old Wooden Cases + At Howland-Hughes, old-fashioned lighting fixtures hang from the walls, which are painted a lackluster pale green. The walls are lined with old wooden display cases. Paintings of vintage Waterbury scenes, including horse-drawn trolleys and carousels, hang on the first floor. The paintings had been gathering dust in storage until Mr. Paine recently brought them downstairs for display. +"We're especially proud that we're a full-service department store," said Mr. Paine. "We have public restrooms, people pay their utility bills here, they come here for breakfast." +The store includes two restaurants, a beauty parlor and displays of clothing that ranges from $1 stockings to $450 leather coats. The prices are comparable to those at other department store's. Customers can buy Boy Scout and Girl Scout uniforms and hand-knit items made by Waterbury's elderly residents, who receive the profits. +But much of Howland-Hughes's stock is the hard-to-find item that customers have come to rely on the store for. Many of these are found in the third-floor housewares department. Along with trendy items like automatic breadmakers and pasta machines, the department stocks things like hand-cranked food mills, flour sifters, cork-bottom caps for soda bottles and the pressure-cooker gasket that Mr. Paine recently shipped to a former customer now living in Vermont. +Howland-Hughes originally opened as a dry-goods store during a March snowstorm in 1890. The owners, Adam Reid and George Hughes, started with 12 clerks and $50 in cash. In those days, men's shirts sold for 47 cents and infant dresses ranged from 25 cents to $4.50, according to an old newspaper advertisement. +A fire gutted the store in 1902, and it reopened a year later, this time as a full-service department store with 60 clerks. + +Hired Over Lemonade + Mr. Reid's interest in the store was eventually bought out by investors including John G. Howland, a former shoe salesman, +"It was at this time that my grandfather became involved," said Mr. Paine. His grandfather, Ralph H. Paine, was working part-time as a census taker in Vermont and visited Mr. Howland at his family's farm there. "After two or three glasses of lemonade, Mr. Howland offered my granddad a job." +Dedication to the store seems to come with the job. In the 1970's, Ralph Paine, then in his 80's, died shortly after he collapsed after helping a customer carry a chair out of the store. His son, R. Morris Paine, died of heart failure in June, at the age of 75, "after logging in the day's sales figures," said Henry Paine. +Mr. Paine came to work as a teen-ager in the store's toy department, he said, "and I've worked probably in every department except women's foundations." +Many of the store's 160 employees have decades of experience. Lee Donnarumna, the sportswear buyer, has logged a half-century in the retailing business. +Whenever he can, Mr. Paine said, he hires retirees, like Tracy Breen, who ran his own department store in Naugatuck. Howland-Hughes's hat and wig department is presided over by Hope Kukanskis, an elegantly dressed woman who is a retired nurse. She said she is especially concerned about helping fit chemotherapy patients with wigs to hide their hair loss, a problem she has experienced herself. +The staff's loyalty cannot be duplicated, said Mr. Paine. He said that that Leonard Gerardi, the store's longest-serving employee, with 47 years' service, recently called from his hospital room "to say he thinks he's sold a bedroom set." +Among the store's traditions is Church Day, the first Monday in November, when 10 percent of a sale is donated to the church of the customer's choice. The store annually fills its display windows with students' artwork, said Mr. Paine, who credits his father and grandfather for establishing the store's philosophy. +Last March, when the store celebrated its 100th anniversary, was a perfect example, he said. +"If you're a store, your 100th anniversary has to be the biggest opportunity to make money," Mr. Paine said. "We didn't do it on purpose. What Dad said last March is that, 'O.K., for a whole week, we'll give 10 percent off to the customer and an additional 10 percent off to the charity of your choice.' That in a word tells you what Howland-Hughes is all about." +And the customers say they love it. As Mr. Paine walks through the store, he is greeted by name. Customers often trail him, getting his assurance once again that he has no plans to close the store. +Anna Witkoski said she drives to shop and eat lunch at Howland-Hughes at least few times a month. +"I've been coming here 40 or 50 years," she said. "It's just a relaxed atmosphere. You can take your time and browse. And if you can't find something anywhere else, you'll find it here." + +'Part of the Furniture' + Another customer, Nancy Joska, said: "I love it here, because it's old fashioned. It's like part of New England. It's rustic, the employees are very courteous. I feel like I've become part of the furniture here." +Lorraine Richmond said her family has been shopping at Howland-Hughes for four generations. "I come down here every day," she said. "It's wonderful to see it hasn't changed." +Nancy Berube, 38, is one of store's younger shoppers, but she brings her friends from Torrington to see "an old-fashioned department store," she said. "I've been coming here since I was a little kid." +This Christmas, there will be some innovations at Howland-Hughes. Mr. Paine and some of his staff members are building an old-fashioned Santa's toyshop, complete with a talking reindeer named Donner. Mr. Paine said he will share the duty of staffing the reindeer's controls. "This is something my Dad always wanted to do," he said. +With the new Christmas display, Mr. Paine seems to be trying to let everyone know that Howland-Hughes is heading confidently into its second century. +"At the age of 100, you're almost become a legend," he said, "and momentum like that is hard to stop." + +LOAD-DATE: November 25, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Henry Paine, above, president and one of the owners of Howland-Hughes, left, in Waterbury. Below, customer trying on hats in store's hat and wig department. (Photographs by Steve Miller for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +410 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 25, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +GOVERNMENT AIMS AT A HEART TEST TO TRIM EXPENSES + +BYLINE: By MILT FREUDENHEIM + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1448 words + +Since the early 1900's, physicians have relied on a brief test called an electrocardiogram to measure the heart's impulses and alert them to signs of problems. And insurers and patients have usually paid whatever the doctor charged for the test. +Now the Government, trying to slow the growth of medical costs to help balance the Federal budget, has decided that physicians are charging too much for the electrocardiogram and 1,400 other procedures they perform on the elderly and disabled patients insured by the Federal Medicare program. + It plans to save $725 million over four years by trimming about 40 percent from payments for this heart test. Many heart specialists and spokesmen for other medical specialties are angry, and say they hope to persuade Congress to change the law before it goes into effect. + +Battle on Many Fronts + The battle is a prime example of many being fought between the people who pay for medical care and those who provide it. Medicare has already sharply reduced its payments to doctors for cataract surgery, reading X-rays and other diagnostic tests, and is planning further cuts in many other procedures. At issue in these cases is whether doctors have raised their fees too high, well aware that payment will come in most cases not from the patient but from the Government or a faceless private insurer with seemingly deep pockets. +In challenging the payments for electrocardiograms, the Government's rationale is simple, said Tom Scully, associate director of the Office of Management and Budget: "Should doctors get paid an additional $20 to $30 for reading an electrocardiogram, which normally takes an average of 30 seconds to 60 seconds to read, when they are already being paid" for doing the tests and for interpreting other tests in the price of an office visit? In an electrocardiogram, wires placed on the chest and limbs pick up patterns of electricity generated by the heart, which are recorded on a paper chart. + +'Potentially Harmful' + Physicians argue that reading an electrocardiogram can be important in life-and-death situations, requires specialized knowledge and should be paid for accordingly. They also say their charges for electrocardiograms partly compensate for inadequate Medicare payments for the office visit. +"The law is potentially harmful to the patient and unfair to the physician," said Dr. Adolph M. Hutter, a heart specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital and vice president of the American College of Cardiology. Reducing payments "will be a tremendous financial disincentive" for doctors to perform an electrocardiogram, which could mean that an important diagnosis might be missed, he said. +Medicare paid doctors $470 million for 29 million electrocardiograms that the Government classified as routine in 1988, the latest year for which statistics are available. The expenditure caught the attention of Congressional and White House negotiators last month as they searched for items to trim in the 1991 budget. Some negotiators -- it cannot be determined exactly who, since no one is now willing to accept responsibility -- suggested that savings could be realized by eliminating payments to doctors for interpreting the routine electrocardiograms. +Currently, Medicare pays an average of $20 for doing a routine electrocardiogram and an average of $12.50 more for interpreting the test. Some doctors may have been charging an additional amount to the patient. Medicare also pays $25 for the office visit during which the test was administered. (Electrocardiograms given to patients admitted to a hospital are paid for under different rules.) + +Assertions of Overpricing + "There is no doubt that the electrocardiogram tests were overpriced," said Dr. John M. Eisenberg, an internist and professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who is a member of a Congressional advisory commission on payments to physicians. "A modestly trained person can perform an electrocardiogram and provide it to the physician for interpretation. And the equipment is relatively inexpensive." The equipment typically costs $2,000 to $15,000, depending on how sophisticated it is. +Dr. Eisenberg said if a physician is uncertain about how to interpret a test, the results can be sent electronically to a hospital or specialist for a quick review. Specialists themselves can then bill Medicare. +William Hsiao, a medical economist at the Harvard School of Public Health who has directed Federally financed studies of Medicare payments, found that a typical office visit to an internist required four times as much time and six times as much mental effort, clinical judgment and technical skillas taking and interpreting a routine electrocardiogram. Yet Medicare currently pays an average of only $25 for the typical office visit, and $34 for a typical electrocardiogram. +Fearful of Budget Squeeze +Recognizing that problem, Medicare expects to pay about one-third more for each office visit under fee schedules that go into effect in 1992. But many physicians wonder whether they will ever see those increases, given the budget squeeze. +In the search for budget cuts last month, the House voted to eliminate the Medicare payment for interpreting routine electrocardiograms. But Senate Finance Committee staff members noted that there had been little chance to consult with doctors and health economists. So the reductions were put off at least until January 1992 to allow time for further study. +Under the budget agreement signed by President Bush, Medicare will still pay physicians for administering the routine electrocardiogram. And the program will still pay for the interpretations of tests classified as more complex, like electrocardiograms during exercise on a treadmill. +"The fight will be over which electrocardiograms are, by definition, non-routine," said Gail R. Wilensky, who heads the Government agency that operates Medicare. +What Is Routine? +Indeed, some doctors argue that hardly any electrocardiogram for a Medicare patient should be classified as routine. "Very few electrocardiograms are done as a routine," said Dr. Glen F. Auckerman, the president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. He said his patients in rural Jackson Center, Ohio, are often people "who come in complaining of chest pains and passing-out spells, or emergency rescue squad patients." +Budget negotiators estimated that the cuts in payments for electrocardiograms would yield only half the potential savings because some doctors would compensate by increasing other charges. "Physicians have become very sophisicated in figuring out how to get paid," said Representative Pete Stark, a California Democrat who is chairman of the Ways and Means subcommittee on health. "It is always a close call: 'Is this a routine or complex procedure?' " +The agreed-upon savings on electrocardiograms of $725 million over four years would be part of $9 billion to be subtracted from Medicare payments to doctors in the budget law. All told, Medicare payments are to be cut by $34 billion over five years, with most of the rest coming from payments to hospitals. The program will get $10 billion more from increases in premiums and deductions paid by people receiving Medicare. (Working people will pay $26 billion in added payroll taxes.) + +Doctors Are Critical + Spokesmen for doctors criticized the cuts. "Every time you take more money out of the system it means you can provide less services," said Dr. James S. Todd, executive vice president of the American Medical Association. +While Medicare paid for 29 million routine electrocardiograms and 3 million classified as complex, about 136 million more were given to patients covered by other insurance programs or paying out of their own pockets. While doctors often try to make up for Medicare cuts by charging their other patients more, private insurers often fight back by following Medicare's example in how much they will pay. As a result, many private insurers will probably lower their payments for electrocardiograms, adding to the financial pressure on the doctor. +The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, for example, pays separately for electrocardiogram interpretations, but some insurers like Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas already do not allow such charges. +No one seems ready to take responsibility for the electrocardiogram cuts. Mr. Scully, the White House budget negotiator, said the idea had come from the House Ways and Means Committee. Committee members said that was not so. +"This proposal did not come from Congress," Representative Stark said. "It came from the Administration." + +LOAD-DATE: November 25, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Chart: Amount Medicare currently pays for electrocardiograms and office visits (Source: Harvard University study for Federal Health Care Financing Administration) (pg. 32) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +411 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 26, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Less Visible but Heavier Burdens As AIDS Attacks People Over 50 + +BYLINE: By NADINE BROZAN + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1914 words + +Hidden for years by secrecy, shame and in some cases the assumption that their symptoms were simply those of aging, a growing number of older people are emerging as victims of AIDS. +AIDS now occurs far more frequently in people over the age of 50 -- classified as older by those who treat and study AIDS -- than among children under the age of 13. + According to the most recent data from the Federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, there have been 15,696 cases reported in people over 50 as against 2,686 in children under 13. Older people account for 10 percent of the more than 150,000 AIDS cases reported to the Government. + +Realization of Danger + "This topic is one that a year ago no one was talking about, and now it has come of age," said Len McNally, program officer for the New York Community Trust, which finances AIDS programs, and former director of the Village Nursing Home AIDS program in Greenwich Village. + Although Federal statistics show that the majority of people over 50 who have AIDS are homosexual or bisexual men who contracted the disease through sexual intercourse, about 17 percent of the victims came in contact with the virus through tainted blood transfusions before routine screening began in 1985. Because older people are more likely to undergo surgery, they were more susceptible than younger people to AIDS transmission through blood transfusions. +Although little research has been done on AIDS among older people, experts say the prevalence of the disease among them raises a number of challenges, medically and socially. From a medical standpoint there are signs that the disease progresses through an older body faster, and that it causes more severe afflictions. There is also the risk of delayed diagnosis because many of the initial symptoms of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, like muscle weakness or forgetfulness, are hallmarks of aging. +"Every ache, I wonder if it's AIDS or aging," said Patrick Moriarty, a 58-year-old social worker in Manhattan, who was diagnosed with AIDS-related complex in 1987. +Socially, AIDS is an added burden among people who came of age before the sexual permissiveness of the 1960's. "If the stigma is hard for the young to bear, it is 10 times worse for the elderly," said Richenda Kramer, a caseworker with the Community Agency for Senior Citizens on Staten Island. "So they sometimes tell their neighbors and friends they have something else, cancer or an operation." + +'A Far Wider Problem' + Ms. Kramer and other social workers who regularly come into contact with older people said the numbers given by the Federal Government probably understate the extent of those with AIDS. During routine evaluations, she recently identified eight older people with AIDS. "If I picked up eight people on Staten Island through casual conversations about medications or symptoms, then I decided this must be a far wider problem than we know," she said. +Ms. Kramer, who brings meals to homebound AIDS patients for an organzation called God's Love We Deliver and who is a volunteer with the Gay Men's Health Crisis, was a speaker at a conference held last month by the New York City Department for the Aging. +The conference was entitled "Older People and HIV/AIDS Issues: How Can We Help?" and drew an overflow crowd. It was viewed as an indicationof the new attention being given to older people with AIDS. There are other signals too, like a new effort at sex education in senior citizens centers around New York City, discussion groups for older AIDS patients, and a proliferation of articles in geriatrics publications. +But such efforts tend to be concentrated in New York and remain the exception. In most parts of the country, there seem to be few attempts to reach older people with AIDS. In particular, there has been little medical research to determine if the virus runs its course differently in an older body than in a younger one and how it interacts with the normal infirmities of age. + +Some Dates Can Be Pinpointed + Some experts say the disease progresses more rapidly in older people, and that for them its symptoms may be more severe. Dr. William Adler, chief of the National Institute on Aging's clinical immunology section, said, "The development of AIDS in older people who contracted it through blood transfusions seems to occur almost twice as fast as it does in children getting transfusions." +It is impossible, he said, to compare how long different age groups survive when the disease was acquired through sexual contact or intravenous drug use, but in cases involving transfusions, the date of exposure can be pinpointed, "and when we compare children with older people, the older people developed infections that moved more swiftly and were more severe. Patients who are over 60 tend to survive less than two years from the time they are infected, whereas children who contract it in utero survive about five years, and those who get it from blood products, from five to seven years." +Once older people develop the illness, they are less able to fight off the opportunistic infections that come with loss of immunity. "In the normal aging process, people develop a defective T-cell function," Dr. Adler said, referring to the cells of the immune system that are the primary defense against virus infections, "and that is exactly what happens in AIDS. So in the older people you have two things occurring, a natural age-related loss of T-cell function plus the loss through AIDS. It's like throwing gasoline on a fire. As a result, the system breaks down faster." + +Drug Interaction a Problem + Dr. Adler has been studying the progression of the disease in people over 60 at the Johns Hopkins Clinic for HIV Infected Individuals, which has treated 45 patients 60 or older in the last three years. Among other things, he and his colleagues have found that it is more difficult to treat older patients because of the likelihood that they were already taking other medications. +"So you have the problem of powerful drugs with powerful side effects," he said, "which may interact with what they are already taking, and which may adversely affect the conditions for which they were taking those other drugs." +But Dr. Adler's work is being replicated in few places, and doctors and social service providers say more intensive research on AIDS among older people is needed. They note, for instance, that with the help of life-extending drugs like AZT, more and more people are expected to survive into later years. +As Dr. David Rose, director of the Mount Sinai AIDS Center in Manhattan, put it, "I have lots of patients in the 40- to 50-year age range, and I intend to keep them alive." +Questions about the social and emotional problems of older AIDS patients remain unanswered as well. "We have little pieces of information, but the picture that we get is extremely fragmented," said Dr. Joseph Catania, senior scientist with the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California at San Francisco. "For example, no one has ever done a study taking a representative sample of older people to determine what the sexual behavior has been." + +Older Women Vulnerable + In some cases, patients who contracted AIDS through transfusions unknowingly pass it on to spouses through sexual intercourse. +Older women may be more susceptible than their younger counterparts, Dr. Catania said. "There is a tiny bit of evidence that shows that sexual transmission is more efficient in older people," she said. "Older women experience vaginal changes postmenopausally, some developing fissures in the vaginal wall that may become sites for infection." +Mr. McNally of the New York Community Trust said: "We would like to think that grandmother, 70 years old, is home free, but that may not necessarily be so. If a couple is monogamous and still sexually active, and one member had a blood transfusion six years ago, they would still be at risk." +But efforts to educate the elderly about precautions are rare. "We talk about safe sex in the schools but not amoung our seniors, and that is baced on erroneous assumptions," said Arlene Kochman, program director of Senior Action in a Gay Environment, which is commonly known as SAGE. +Since September, her organization has been under contract to the New York City Human Resources Administration to conduct weekly training sessions in 28 senior citizens centers. "I give them a small lecture on AIDS, and we talk about sexual activity and transmission," Ms. Kochman said. "I always take along a supply of condoms, and I have yet to bring any home." + +Mistaken for Alzheimer's + Older people with AIDS face a daunting series of obstacles, starting with the presumption that they are not sexually active, that keeps doctors from suspecting AIDS. Because many of the symptoms -- fatigue, muscle weakness, rashes, coughs, forgetfulness and dementia -- resemble classic markers of aging, doctors tends to dismiss complaints. Frequently, AIDS or its precursor is diagnosed as Alzheimer's disease. +"Symptoms that jump out at you in the young, a very high fever, a terrible cough, do not do so in the aged," said Dr. Wayne C. McCormick, an internist and geriatrician who runs a longterm care unit at Harborview Medicial Center in Seattle. Dr. McCormick said he had cared for at least two dozen older AIDS patients in the last few years. +Once AIDS is diagnosed, there are the social and emotional problems facing older patients. +Karen Solomon, director of support services for Body Positive, a self-help organization in New York City, remembers how her mother felt after she contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion during cancer surgery. +"Let's tell people I have cancer," her mother would say. "If they think I have cancer, they will feel sorry for me and be there. If they know it's AIDS, they won't want to do their laundry next to me." Ms. Solomon's mother died of AIDS in 1987 at the age of 63. + +Captives of Their Times + No generation feels the stigma of AIDS more deeply than the one raised to consider homosexuality immoral and unnatural. "We were very repressed sexually," Mr. Moriarty said. "The church saw us as sinners, the legal system as criminals, the medical profession as sick. Some of that has changed, some barriers are still up there, but we still feel self-hatred, self-imposed homophobia." +Sidney Morris, a playwright who is HIV positive, said, "We came of age in the 1940's and 1950's, when gay men could go to jail for years for making an approach to the wrong person." Explaining that his speech at the conference was the first time he had publicly spoken about "what it means to be an elderly HIV person," he said: "I am confused by what has happened to my body. I am embarrassed about it. My disease annnounces to everyone that I engaged in anal intercourse. Maybe at 61 I should just lie down and quit complaining." +He said he had considered suicide when he learned four months ago that he would have to take AZT but rejected the idea. "I have written a musical called 'We've Got Today,' which opens Dec. 11 at the Wings Theater, 154 Christopher Street, so how can I end my life now?" he said, adding that the medication has improved his condition. +"When you see that patient with a disfigured face, remember that he may have been a model or an actor. Inside the elderly like me might be a little boy who is absolutley terrified." + +LOAD-DATE: November 26, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: "Every ache, I wonder if it's AIDS or aging," said Patrick Moriarty, a 58-year-old social worker, who has AIDS-related complex. (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times); Graph: Total number of AIDS cases diagnosed in the U.S. by age at time of diagnosis (Source: Centers for Disease Control) (pg. A16) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +412 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 27, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +1918 Gift Yields Home for Elderly Retarded + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 148 words + +DATELINE: PITTSBURGH, Nov. 26 + +A $2,200 gift by a poet 72 years ago has swelled nearly a hundredfold and will be used to establish a group home for elderly retarded people. +Henry C. Burns, who was a childless widower when he died in 1918, left $2,207.21 in trust along with a collection of his poetry and prose. He directed that the trust be used to pay for housing for the elderly retarded once it reached $175,000. +The account, held at Pittsburgh National Bank, now stands at almost $215,000, bank officials said. +The money will go to Allegheny County, which began searching for a site this month. +Mr. Burns's will instructed that copies of a collection of his poems and prose writings be kept at the home "for general use and reading." +But residents of the home will not be able to read the books. Bank officials do not know what happened to the volumes, which were last referred to in records in March 1924. + +LOAD-DATE: November 27, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +413 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 28, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +Study Links Estrogen to Cancer, but Risk Is Slight + +BYLINE: By GINA KOLATA + +SECTION: Section A; Page 18; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 820 words + +The largest study of its kind ever conducted has found that women who take estrogen after menopause run an increased risk of developing breast cancer. +But experts said the findings did not mean that post-menopausal women should stop taking estrogen. The benefits of the drug are great, they said, and the increased risk of breast cancer is relatively small. + The researchers, led by Dr. Graham A. Colditz of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, also found that a year after women stop taking the female sex hormones, the eadditional risk of breast cancer subsides. +Epidemiologists and experts on breast cancer said the new study was notable because of its size and design. "This is a very important study," said Dr. Malcolm Pike, an epidemiologist at the University of Southern California who has studied the link between estrogen and breast cancer. + +Some Benefits and Risks + Cancer researchers have spent years trying to clarify the risks women may face when they take estrogen after menopause. The hormone can prevent a dangerous loss of calcium from bones that occurs when the body's estrogen production falls at menopause. Estrogen may also prevent heart disease, the leading killer of older women. +Studies have shown that estrogen can cause cancer of the uterus, a relatively rare and much less dangerous cancer. Far more troubling were studies suggesting that taking estrogen might also contribute to breast cancer, a major cause of death in women. +The researchers followed 121,700 female nurses for 10 years, recording whether the women took estrogen after menopause and, if so, for how long. +They found that women taking estrogen were 30 to 40 percent more likely to develop breast cancer than those who did not take the hormone. But this risk is considered small; it is only about half the risk a woman faces if her mother had breast cancer. + +Reducing Heart Disease + Although women should know about the effects of estrogen, "the benefits almost certainly outweigh the cost in terms of risk," said Dr. I. Bruce Henderson, a cancer researcher at Harvard Medical School. +For example, he said, if a woman has osteoporosis, a bone disease associated with a loss of calcium, she should be given estrogen. And it "unequivocally" helps women who suffer hot flashes with menopause, he said. +While it has not been fully established how much estrogen helps to reduce heart disease, Dr. Henderson said, "the evidence is growing steadily" that the hormone is beneficial. +Dr. Henderson analyzed 24 previous studies that sought to determine whether the use of estrogen increased the risk of breast cancer. The results have been mixed and most studies have had some drawbacks, he said. Most questioned women after they had been diagnosed with breast cancer and compared their answers to those of women who did not have breast cancer. Such studies are often criticized because the women with cancer may be more likely to recall taking estrogen as they seek to determine why they got the disease. + +Growth of Breast Tissue + But many researchers are highly suspicious of estrogen because the idea that it causes cancer fits into their notion of how breast cancers grow. +Epidemiologists have noted that almost anything that increases a woman's exposure to estrogen increases her chances of getting breast cancer. The younger a girl is when she starts to menstruate, the greater her chances of developing breast cancer when she is older. The older a woman is when she stops menstruating, the greater her likelihood of developing breast cancer. +In addition, biologists have found that estrogen stimulates the growth of breast tissue. Many breast cancer cells are actually fueled by estrogen. The cancer cells have proteins protruding from them that latch onto estrogen and use the hormone to stimulate their growth. + +Effects Last for a Year + Dr. Colditz said the only surprising finding in his study is that the effects of estrogen go away a year after a woman stops taking the hormone. Previous studies may have failed to notice this, he said, because they did not specifically assess how much time had elapsed between the use of estrogen and the development of the cancer. +"What we can say pretty confidently is that the effects of estrogen on inducing breast cancer are almost certainly real and they are almost certainly small," Dr. Henderson said. +Dr. Pike said women would have to weigh the evidence themselves, but noted that studies in Los Angeles showed that, on the whole, "women on long-term estrogen therapy live four years longer than women who don't take estrogen." +Dr. Louise Brinton, who is chief of environmental studies at the National Cancer Institue in Bethesda, Md., said, "It is clear the benefits of estrogen outweigh the risks." +But, he added, "It's kind of hard to juggle these things, particularly for a woman who has a major fear of breast cancer." + +LOAD-DATE: November 29, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: November 29, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + + CORRECTION: +An article yesterday about a study of estrogen and breast cancer omitted the name of the medical journal that reported the research. It is The Journal of the American Medical Association. The article also misidentified a cancer researcher at Harvard Medical School. He is Dr. I. Craig Henderson. Because of an editing error, the article referred incorrectly to an epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute. The epidemiologist is a woman, Dr. Louise Brinton. + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +414 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 29, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Personal Health + +BYLINE: By Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section B; Page 17; Column 1; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1139 words + +While city streets are rife with hazards for the elderly -- from uneven sidewalks to drivers who race through intersections and muggers who prey on the frail and weak -- most older people eel safe in their own homes. +But accident statistics belie this sense of security. Fully 40 percent of deaths because of injuries to people 65 years old and over occur from accidents at home. + +The Problem +As people age, changes in sensory and physical functions increase their vulnerability to accidental injury. Typical changes may include diminished visual acuity, depth perception, hearing and odor perception; a faltering sense of balance and increased susceptibility to dizziness; decreased agility and strength, and slower movements and reflexes. +Together with more fragile bones, vulnerable joints and impairments caused by medications and chronic ailments, these changes mean older people are more likely to suffer serious disability and even death from accidents. +With winter approaching, the hazards in the home often multiply. People spend more time indoors, and there are fewer hours of daylight as well as an increase in the use of heating devices. +There is no better time than now to do a home-safety check and make changes in living areas occupied by older people. +The Hartford Insurance Group, a subsidiary of the ITT Corporation, recently built a model home with safety improvements, most of which cost well under $100. The company also produced a booklet including 120 suggested safety measures, listing their approximate costs and offering one or more sources that sell recommended items. The booklet, "How to Modify a Home to Accommodate the Needs of an Older Adult," is available from the Hartford Insurance Group, Hartford Plaza, Hartford, Conn. 06115. + +Steps to a Safer Home +One way to help safeguard the home for the elderly is to make it easier to see and hear. An 80-year-old needs two to three times more illumination than a teen-ager. Place lamps and overhead lights to eliminate shadows. Overhead lighting, operated by switches at top and bottom, is especially important in stairways. +Bulbs of 100 to 200 watts should be used for close work and taking medication. Install fluorescent lights in the kitchen over the sink, stove and work counters. +Night lights should be strategically placed to insure safe trips to the bathroom and kitchen in the night. Also helpful is an entryway light that turns itself on when it starts to get dark, and an emergency light that goes on automatically if electrical power is lost. +Avoid carpets with complex patterns. Use light-colored dishes on darker table coverings or placemats and choose countertop and furniture colors that contrast with the flooring. If floor heights change between rooms, use contrasting floor colors. Secure textured tape in a contrasting color to the edge of each step. +To counter hearing losses, reduce echoes and noise with carpeting, window fabrics, upholstered furniture and acoustical tiles on walls and ceilings. Install a volume adjuster or amplifier on the telephone and provide a cordless headset for watching television. +Another way for the elderly to make the home safer is to counter their lost agility and strength. Replace cylindrical glasses and delicate cups with large-handled mugs. Install handrails from top to bottom on both sides of stairwells, and curve the railings away from the stairs at the bottom to provide a tactile clue to the last step. +Install lever-type handles on kitchen and bathroom faucets and C-shaped pulls on drawers and cabinets. Place cabinets so that the top shelf is easily reached without climbing. In closets, use multilevel shelves and hanging bars to make clothing items more accessible. +The elderly should also take precautions to prevent fires and burns. Appliances that heat up, like irons, space heaters and toasters, should be equipped with an automatic shutoff. (One can be installed if the appliance lacks it.) Use heat-sensitive decals on appliances that say "Stop Hot" when the item is on and use a bathtub thermometer that warns if the water is too hot. +A stove top with staggered burners eliminates the need to reach over hot pots and burners. A stock pot with a deep strainer basket (spaghetti cooker) eliminates the need to empty large pots of boiling water. +A small fire extinguisher should hang in the kitchen, and all occupants should know how to use it without having to stop to read the instructions. And, of course, there should be at least one operating smoke detector on every floor, especially in or near the bedrooms. +Never work around the stove or fireplace in loose-fitting clothing that could accidentally ignite. If a room's electrical outlet capacity has to be increased, use a UL-listed outlet extender that has a circuit breaker. +If an older person sleeps on an upper floor, install a fire escape. +Set the water heater to a nonscalding temperature (120 degrees or lower). Install an adapter under the sink that automatically mixes hot and cold water to a pre-set temperature that prevents scalding. An anti-scald safety valve that reduces the flow of water if it gets too hot can be installed on shower heads and faucets. +The elderly should also make an extra effort to prevent falls. It does not take much to break the bones of most older people, so avoiding falls is of utmost importance. In addition to the stairway safety measures discussed earlier, never leave objects on the steps or the landings. +Avoid placing low-lying furniture like coffee tables, hassocks and stools where the pieces might be tripped over. And if furniture is rearranged, make sure the older person is made familiar with the new setting. Place furniture to steer people around structural hazards like low ceilings or open stairwells. +It is best to cover wood and tile floors with wall-to-wall carpeting with a low pile, or use rubberized tiles that are not waxed. If rugs are used their edges should be fixed to the floor with double-sided rug tape. Do not use scatter rugs. Be sure that all electric cords are placed behind furniture or along the bottom of the wall where they cannot be tripped over. +Use nonskid stick-on decals in the tub and shower or a good rubber mat with strong suction cups. +Mount grab bars in the bathroom, especially next to the toilet and around the tub or shower. Place a shower stool in the tub and attach a hand-held shower hose for sit-down bathing. +If you are taking medication that can cause dizziness, be especially careful when you stand up, particularly when arising from sleep, after eating or getting out of the tub. +In addition to the Hartford booklet, literature on home safety is available from the American Association of Retired Persons, Fulfillment, 1909 K Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20049. + +LOAD-DATE: November 29, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +415 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 29, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +When the Need to Help Won't Take Early Retirement + +BYLINE: By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN + +SECTION: Section C; Page 1; Column 5; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 1471 words + +DATELINE: ASHEVILLE, N.C. + +GEORGE KREIDLER, 71 years old, drives a Chevy Cavalier with "A Touch of Class" on his license plate. "You have to have verve," he said. +A former linebacker for the Green Bay Packers with the shoulders to prove it, Mr. Kreidler retired six years ago after 31 years supervising the construction of oil refineries and chemical and nuclear-power plants for the Bechtel Corporation. + At age 65, after living all over the country and raising "five girls, one boy and a dog," he settled in Asheville. He now plays a lot of golf and bridge, but his daily routine also includes supervising house construction for the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity, singing with a group of troubadours composed of "16 men and one lovely lady," and taking part in a program at the North Carolina Center for Creative Retirement, in which he is the mentor to a young university athlete. +Founded in 1987, the center, which is on the campus of the University of North Carolina in the gentle furrows of the Blue Ridge mountains, represents the "institutionalizing of an informal trend," said its director, Ronald J. Manheimer. In contrast to a more hedonistic, leisure-oriented view of retirement, the center, which is part of the university, is combining volunteerism and community service with the national movement toward retirement-age learning. +"We're looking at new roles older people are playing and new norms of what it means to be an older person," said the 47-year-old Dr. Manheimer, a philosophy professor by training whose unglamorous campus office is down the hall from the wildlife parasitology laboratory. +Many who have flocked to Asheville represent a new breed of active, independent retiree, for whom a need to help society at large is as important as personal enrichment. " 'Creative retirement' is obviously a catchy phrase," said 61-year-old Charles E. Lilien, a retired foreign service officer and former managing director of First Boston International, now active with the center. +But he added, "As a concept it's useful, because through the center we have an institutional home, an entity that serves as an armature, like a sculptor uses." +While some of its concepts might not be new, the center's comprehensive approach has attracted the attention of many educators and gerontologists. Participants, who number around 2,000 a year and find out about the center mostly by word of mouth, take part in activities that include a College for Seniors; programs that provide mentors for young people; a "leadership for seniors" program that enlists retirees to tutor elementary and high school students; off-campus reading discussion groups, and an annual Senior Wellness Day offering everything from health screening to mall-walking. +Participants share a commitment to social responsibility and the idea that older students "can also be leaders," Dr. Manheimer said. Most of the current crop moved to the region before the center's founding. Although many had audited courses and had volunteered for civic causes, "finding the paths to these roles isn't always easy," he said. +Mr. Kreidler, for example, said the opportunity to counsel a young college athlete about his academic performance and career direction "just tickled me." +"If I've helped some young fellow get associated in life," he said, "I've made my life more full." +"We knew about beer and women," he added, referring to his own college days. "There were many times if someone had squared me up I would have gotten more out of college." +The center's existence reflects broad social and demographic trends, said Harry Moody, the deputy director of the Brookdale Center on Aging at Hunter College in New York. "The notion of creative retirement is bubbling up from the grass roots," he said. "Many options held out to older people view life as a big playpen, but the unfortunate truth is they don't necessarily inspire a purpose in life." +Cathy Ventura-Merkel, a senior education specialist for the American Association of Retired Persons, said older people are increasingly interested in "sharing their wisdom, not retiring from life." +There are more retirees nowadays, and they are better educated: the older population is healthier, the number of people taking early retirement is rising, and their median educational level is going up -- to 12.1 years in 1988, as against 8.7 years in 1970. In 1989, people reaching age 65 could expect to live an average of 17 years longer. The numbers will reach an apex between the years 2010 and 2030, when members of the baby-boom generation turn 65, Ms. Ventura-Merkel said. +Until fairly recently in history, retirement was considered a "brief period of life that only a fraction of the population would experience," said Ken Dychtwald, the chairman and chief executive of Agewave Inc., a market research and consulting concern in Emeryville, Calif. But now, older Americans can expect to spend 20 to 25 percent of their lives retired. +Among the first generation of long-lived retirees, this period was symbolized by leisure, by verdant freshly mowed communities that suggested, Mr. Dychtwald said, "recreationland instead of Disneyland." But values are being reappraised, he said: "The new vision of retirement intermingles work, play, learning and service." +That intermingling was on display in Asheville during a cookie and decaffeinated-coffee break in a bioethics class at the College for Seniors in Owen Hall, when the students -- among them an auto dealer, a nurse, a chemist, an English teacher, three physicists, two doctors, an insurance executive and two clergymen, all retired -- began a noisy debate over whether there should be a market in human body parts. +College classes are taught and attended by the retirees, who pay a fee of $80 a semester. The College for Seniors is one of the center's approaches to what Dr. Manheimer called "imaginative pathfinding." There are more than 130 such institutes for retirement-age students across the country. +The morning also saw 19-year-old Paige McKenzie -- a Phil Collins fan and physics major -- huddled over a spectrometer with her 66-year-old mentor, Edward Schurtz, who has a predilection for baggy sweatshirts, bridge games and classical music. +Miss McKenzie was not sure at first what to make of her older tutor, a retired Du Pont chemical engineer with a Ph.D. degree. And he was not sure what to make of her, since "when I went to school you didn't find young women majoring in physics." +But this "intergenerational research team," as the school calls it, has a dual mission. Mr. Schurtz is getting back into scientific research, while Miss McKenzie gets the benefit of his years at Du Pont and the message, he said, that "she's not alone." +The center operates on a yearly budget of $300,000 to $400,000, about a third of it from the state and the rest from grants and membership fees. Currently it is wrestling with several problems, like how to keep the retirees involved in the program as they age and lose some mobility. There is also the question of how to reach out to the region's rural, less-affluent and less-educated population. This year the center sponsored a conference about how similar programs might be set up elsewhere. +The center's founding was an acknowledgement of the significant economic and social contributions of the region's relatively privileged retired "amenity migrants," who have long been drawn to western North Carolina's climate, mountains and cultural milieu. The new immigrants are well educated and affluent, spending an average of $16,791 a year in routine purchases and doing volunteer work for an average of 7.4 hours a week, according to a recent study by the center financed by the Appalachian Regional Commission, an economic-development agency. +The volunteerism is not solely altruistic. Evelyn Smith, 64, taught kindergarten and nursery school in private schools in Montgomery County in Maryland for 20 years. She said that when she was approached by center volunteers about tutoring at a public school in Asheville, William Randolph Elementary, she was prompted to do it "because I'm concerned about inequality in our schools." +But there were other motivations. "It makes me feel youthful," she said of helping 7-year-old Kita Banner with her reading. "I'm not doing it to be goody two-shoes." +"Teaching is something I know I can do," she added. "It's nice to be able to do the thing you're good at." +Long on life experience, center participants like Mrs. Smith seem attuned to what makes their generation special. When asked his qualifications for tutoring grade-school students, Marcus D. Beck, who taught school for 21 years after working as a locomotive engineer, listed his job experience on the application. Then he added a P.S.: +"I have my act together." + +LOAD-DATE: November 29, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: December 4, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + + CORRECTION: +An article in The Home Section on Thursday about the North Carolina Center for Creative Retirement referred incorrectly to a participant, George Kreidler. He was a blocking back for the Green Bay Packers in the 1940 exhibition season, and later played with the team's farm club. He was not a linebacker. + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Evelyn Smith, a volunteer with the North Carolina Center for Creative Retirement, working with Kita Banner at the William Randolph Elementary School in Asheville. (pg. C1); Edward Schurtz with Paige McKenzie, a college sophomore, at a spectrometer.; Dr. Ronald J. Manheimer, director of the Center for Creative Retirement.; Dr. Melvin Hetland tutoring Michael Wilcox at William Randolph Elementary. (pg. C12) (Photographs by Benjamin Porter for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +416 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 1, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +F.D.A. Seeks Labeling That Would List Effects Of Drugs on the Elderly + +BYLINE: By LEONARD SLOANE + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 50; Column 1; Style Desk; Consumer's World Page + +LENGTH: 723 words + +The elderly often react differently to medication than younger people, but drug companies are not required to spell out these differences. If a new proposal by the Food and Drug Administration is approved, however, the dangers will be made known to doctors and pharmacists. +The agency, which approves the sale and use of all prescription drugs in the United States, issued a guideline last March strongly encouraging drug manufacturers to evaluate the effects of new drugs on people over 65. Under the new proposal, such information would also appear on the package insert that must accompany pharmaceuticals and usually is printed in the Physicians Desk Reference. In addition, if no information is available on how a drug affects the elderly, that would have to be stated. + The package insert already includes information on precautions and adverse reactions to the general population. But adding the information on geriatric use would not be of much use to older consumers unless it is available in a way that they can understand, experts say. + +Little Data Is Clear + Ninety-seven percent of all materials on drugs written for patients cannot be understood by the average consumer, according to Dorothy L. Smith, president of the Consumer Health Information Corporation, a company in McLean, Va., that specializes in patient education. +"My concern is that there is more than just handing out a list of tips to patients," she said. "I think that elderly persons need practical and concise instructions in language they can understand." +Daniel Thursz, president of the National Council on the Aging, said that although the F.D.A. proposal was useful, it did not go far enough. "If the information is in 4-point type on a leaflet nobody can read packed into the container, that's not going to be very effective," he said. +Among the actions Mr. Thursz said were necessary but not part of the F.D.A. proposal was making labels on drug bottles easier to read. "Most older people have vision problems and can get confused about their various prescription drugs," he said. +People over 65 make up only about 12 percent of the United States population, but they consume more than 30 percent of prescription drugs and 40 percent of nonprescription medicine. About 95 percent of older adults take medicine without supervision and 86 percent of this age group have one or more chronic disorders. +"There are many, many examples in which age itself should influence how you use a particular drug," said Dr. Robert Temple, a director of drug evaluation at the F.D.A. "With old people, start low and go slow is not bad advice unless you have other information." +Drugs for the kidneys or the liver are among those that usually are prescribed with lower dosages for the elderly because the organs lose of their function with age. +"The reality is that there is a large number of drugs on which we need information on geriatric dosage," said Philip P. Gerbino, president of the American Pharmaceutical Association, the national professional association of pharmacists. "We're still not there yet." +When improper drug use is minimized, expensive treatment and hospital-care costs can sometimes be avoided. For example, taking warfarin, a blood thinner, at the same time as aspirin can cause life-threatening bleeding in the elderly, said Dr. Smith of the Consumer Health Information Corporation. +So, physicians and pharmacists generally support the idea of providing the elderly with more information on the drugs they use. Dr. Raymond Scalettar, a Washington internist who is a trustee of the American Medical Association, said the information the F.D.A. proposal would provide "will serve as a flag and a warning to check the specific information when prescribing medication." +Dr. John F. Beary 3d, a senior vice president of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, said, "The more you can do to make the explosion of knowledge about drugs and the elderly useful, the better doctors are going to be able to treat their patients." +Comments on the new proposal may be sent until Dec. 31 to the Food and Drug Administration, Room 4-62, 5600 Fishers Lane, Rockville, Md. 20857. After the agency issues its final ruling, drug producers will have a year to comply by updating the labels of their prescription products. + +LOAD-DATE: December 1, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Many elderly people take multiple medications, and booklets like this allow them and their doctors and pharmacists to keep track. + +Graphic: Warning for the Elderly + +Here are some commonlty used prescription drugs that can have side effects that afflict the elderly, according to Dr. Lawrence Scharer, chairman of the Committee on Retired Persons and the Aging of the New York State Soceity of Internal Medicine. + + + +PURPOSE DRUG TYPE BRAND NAMES + +Tranquilizer Benzodiazepines Valium +Heart regulator Digitalis Lanoxin +Thyroid regulator Thyroxine Synthroid +Sleeping pill Barbituates Seconal +Diuretic Thiasides Hydrodiuril + + +Some Questions to Ask + +The elderly often suffer from a variety of ailments, and commonly used drugs can interact badly, with severe side effects. While all patients who take prescription drugs should be wary, it is especially important for the elderly to ask specific questions. Here are some recommended by the National Council on the Aging and the National Council on Patient information and Education. + +For the Doctor: + +What foods, drinks and other medications or activites should I avoid? +What are the side effects and what do I do if they occur? + +For the Pharmacist: + +Is there anything in my medication history that could cause problems if I take this? + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +417 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 2, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Talking: Age Limits; +Condos Face Loss Of Control + +BYLINE: By ANDREE BROOKS + +SECTION: Section 10; Page 5; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1121 words + +THE combined impact of the Federal Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988 and the fluid patterns of contemporary family life are eroding the ability of dozens of the country's 26,000 age-restricted condominiums to maintain those restrictions. +The act, intended to protect young families with children and others from housing discrimination, has provisions permitting exemptions for age-restricted communities. But gaining an exemption is proving too tough for most. + "Its a mess," said Michael J. Brudny, a lawyer in Tampa, Fla., who has written on the topic and is lobbying to help save these associations from the effect of the growing numbers of legal and regulatory challenges. + In the meantime, many are being advised by their lawyers to remove any mention of age restrictions from their documents or face costly suits. Even those that choose to hold onto an age-restricted status by carefully complying with all the new Federal requirements may find it hard to do. + In an age-restricted condominium, a buyer must reach a certain age -- say, 45 years -- before being allowed to purchase a unit. Such communities have flourished in New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, California and Arizona. Virtually all exclude children, the intent being to let older adults live in tranquility, although children can normally stay over as guests for a few weeks or so. + Until recently, courts have tended to uphold these restrictions on residency. However, the passage of the Fair Housing Amendments Act, which tightened the rules that allow age-restricted condominiums to remain exempt from discrimination charges, has been changing that. "We find that less than 25 percent of these associations qualify for exemption," said Gary Poliakoff, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., lawyer specializing in condominiums. + To qualify, a condominium must pass a triple test: 80 percent of its occupants (and at least one per unit) must be 55 or older; it must provide facilities or services specifically designed for older people, and it must publish and adhere to policies that show a clear intent to provide housing for people over 55. + The Department of Housing and Urban Development, which administers the act, is having difficulty granting any age-restricted condominium permanent exemption status, since the prevailing age of the residents and the nature of the programs are in constant flux, making them eligible one year and perhaps ineligible the next. + In just the last few months, Mr. Brudny noted, suits have been filed in Orlando, Fla., by a local real estate agency and residents of the seven single-family retirement subdivisions in Williamsburg, just south of Orlando, with a total of more than 2,500 homes. The agency and the residents insist that the right to rent or sell their units is being unfairly curtailed because the communities, fearful of losing their age-restricted status, adopted new restrictions. +"There's a big rental market out here that comes from the workers at Sea World," Mr. Brudny said, "and the residents don't want to lose out." Early in November, H.U.D. denied the subdivisions their age-restricted status. +Some 50 board members of the seven homeowner associations have been personally sued for damages, noted Mr. Brudny, and this could result in a signficant personal financial loss since some associations did not cover their boards for this type of liability. + Elsewhere, associations intent upon safeguarding their age-restricted status are finding that the wording in their documents spelling out the specifics of the age restrictions may be inadequate. Unless that wording is modified -- which is not easy, since this normally needs the approval two-thirds of the unit owners -- lawyers are warning that the demographic make-up of the complex could tilt to a point where it would not qualify for exemption under the new Federal law. + Life-style changes include the increasing number of older residents who choose to live with younger partners to whom they are not married and the growing practice of having a child live part of the week with one parent and part with another, thus being neither a guest nor a permanent resident of either household. +SADOW LAKE VILLAGE, a 952-unit age-restricted condominium in Middletown, N.J., was recently embroiled in this sort of dispute. It involved Phillip Zampella, a 56-year-old unit owner, and Pamela King, his 46-year-old companion. When Ms. King moved in, she brought along her 12-year-old daughter, who lived in the unit part of each week. + Arguments hinged on what constituted an eligible under-age live-in companion as defined by the documents (the association insisted it was limited to someone like a nurse or a domestic). Also, what type of living arrangements separated a bona fide guest from a permanent resident. The association lost, and both Ms. King and her daughter were permitted to remain. + George Nowack Jr., an Atlanta lawyer specializing in condominiums, warns associations that before threatening to sue any resident for violating an age-restricted convenant, the board should have its lawyer determine whether the association can meet the three-part test. "Otherwise you could get cited by H.U.D. for discrimination and face a fine up to $100,000," he said. The association may also need to clarify the way it defines its age restrictions. + Any unit owner who is asked to remove an under-age violator, said Mr. Nowack, may file a discrimination complaint with the local H.U.D. office rather than go to court. There is no charge and H.U.D. officials say they have processed more than 300 such complaints since the law was passed. Most were settled before they came up for official review, said Frank Keating, H.U.D.'s general counsel. + An association may also decide not to pursue the fight, especially if it might fail the exemption test. Instead, it could vote to lift all age restrictions, as happened at Heritage Cove, a 104-unit condominium in Essex, Conn., when such a fight seemed imminent last year. "It would have cost a fortune to comply," said Bob Stannard, on-site manager. + The move may not radically change the composition of the complex. Managers note that younger families usually prefer to live nearpeople like themselves. Moreover, some communities and their facilities are not suitable for young families. + If the two-thirds-majority vote needed to overturn the age-restriction cannot be obtained and the condominium cannot pass the three-part test, lawyers recommend that the board approve a motion stating that the restrictions will not be enforced. Then the motion should be filed with the land records. "Otherwise," warned Mr. Nowack, "the association could still be vulnerable to fines." + +LOAD-DATE: December 3, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +418 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 2, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Tenafly Journal; +Raising Money Themselves, the Elderly Expand Their Center + +BYLINE: By JAY ROMANO + +SECTION: Section 12NJ; Page 2; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1176 words + +DATELINE: TENAFLY + +ARRIVING with pitchers of punch and cartons of chocolate chip cookies, more than 250 elderly residents of Tenafly gathered recently for an afternoon of songs, speeches and a liberal amount of well-deserved mutual appreciation. +Filling every available seat and lining the side and rear walls of the Tenafly Senior Center here, the crowd robustly applauded as organizers officially dedicated the center's 1,500-square-foot addition. + Though the fanfare might have seemed exaggerated for such a minor municipal improvement, this particular project was unusual in that the money used to build the addition was raised by the members of the center itself. +"They took the bull by the horns," said Mayor Richard K. Van Nostrand. "They needed more space, but when they came to the Council for the money, we just didn't have it to give to them. So they went out and raised it themselves." +Using a smorgasbord of techniques, the members of the center pooled their talents and their energies. Over three years they raised $120,000 in cash and then were awarded a $70,000 Federal Housing and Urban Development grant for a kicker. + +'A Grass-Roots Effort' + "This was a grass-roots effort," said Gay Schenck, director of the 14-year-old center. "You're always hearing so much negative news about people being short of money. Well, these senior citizens went out and raised $120,000 on their own. We think it's a major achievement." +When the group was originally formed, Ms. Schenck said, it held meetings and activities at the Tenafly Elks lodge in town. Then, as membership increased, the Tenafly Board of Education donated two portable classrooms that were bolted together to form offices and an activities room. A few years later, she said, a third classroom was added. +But even that was not enough to accommodate the growing number of the borough's elderly people who were using the center. +Alice M. McNeil, the center's full-time volunteer office manager, explained what it had been like. +"When you have a French class and a beading class side by side, neither can concentrate," said Mrs. McNeil, 75 years old. "And then when the tap-dancers come in, there's just too much confusion." +As a result, she said, the members decided that they were going to build a permanent addition to the three classrooms. All that remained was to figure out a way to raise the funds, Mrs. McNeil said. +The fund-raising committee, however, was not so naive as to think that it could just walk into Borough Hall and come out with a commitment for a new building. +"We knew they really weren't in a position to give any money to us," Mrs. McNeil said. "But they did give us their mailing list." +The list, it seems, became the crucial element of the fund-raising effort; the list contained the names and addresses of all the borough's property owners. +With that list, the group had what it needed to start a direct-mail campaign that could make many Madison Avenue advertising executives sit up and take notice. +"We sent out about 5,000 letters and we got donations back from almost 900 people," Mrs. McNeil said. +Among direct-mail solicitors, a 2 percent response rate is often considered a success; a 20 percent response is considered nothing less than a miracle. +"We put the money into C.D.'s so we would get a good rate of interest," Mrs. McNeil added. +At least part of the reason for the success of the mailing was a personal touch that the members had added on their own, said Toussia Pines, 73, a founder of the center. +As the mailing was being prepared, she said, members would go through the list looking for names they recognized. When they found one, they would add a handwritten note of their own saying how much the donation would mean to the residents of Tenafly and to the people who used the center. +"It was tremendously hard work," Mrs. Pines said. "But it was really very gratifying." +And successful. Some of the donations that came back were in the thousands of dollars. +"There were several significant donors," Mrs. Pines said, declining to be more specific. +But even a group of overachieving elderly residents couldn't raise all the money needed with just a direct-mail campaign. +"We had a big three-day bazaar," Mrs. McNeil said. "People had given us real good items, a lot of antiques." +Mrs. McNeil said that some of the antiques were so valuable, however, that they were later sold at auction rather than at the bazaar. +In addition to the bazaar, she said, the fund-raising committee also held a "Night of Stars" that attracted some well-known professional performers and included some lesser known but equally entertaining local acts. +<> <> "Our Mayor played the piano," Mrs. McNeil said. "He came dressed as Liberace, candelabra and all." +While the committee was hard at work soliciting donations, Ann Bucher, 61, was busy cajoling the Department of Housing and Urban Development to contribute its share as well. +"They were very cooperative," Mrs. Bucher said, referring to H.U.D. employees in the Hackensack office, where the group filed its application for a grant. +Mrs. Bucher did not seem particularly surprised that the group's application made its way through the oftencumbersome grant review process so quickly, or that the original request for $70,000 was approved. +"We filled out the application, it was signed by the Mayor and we sent it in," she said. +The payoff for the group's three years of hard work came just a few weeks ago when the center addition was officially dedicated. Hundreds of Tenafly's elderly turned out for the event, which was held in the center's activities room. Bright sunlight arched through the skylights of the new addition, making the room, and the spirits of those in attendance, almost luminous. +Organizers spoke of the hard work and dedication of the fund-raising committee and all the members who were involved in the drive. Plaques were presented, gifts were given and an inspirational invocation was delivered by the Rev. Robert W. Wolfe of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church. + +Melodies, Cookies and Punch + After the official portion of the dedication ceremony, the Tenafly Tenetones, a group of 15 of the borough's most melodious elderly residents, entertained the gathering with a spirited performance. Cookies and punch immediately followed. +"It's beautiful, isn't it?" said Iafet Roveta, 78, a Tenafly resident since 1935. "I never came here too often, but I think that now I will." +Mr. Roveta's wife, Rose, said she participated in the fund-raising effort by baking cakes for the three-day bazaar. "We all wanted it so badly," Mrs. Roveta said of the new addition. +The couple were soon approached by a beaming Tenafly Tenetone, Norma Tobin. +"I used to baby-sit for her," the 91-year-old Mrs. Tobin said of the 79-year-old Mrs. Roveta. Unlike Mrs. Roveta, however, Mrs. Tobin is not a native of Tenafly. +"I only came here in 1902," she said, as she continued her tour of the new center. +"This is wonderful," she said, disappearing into the crowd. + +LOAD-DATE: December 3, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: David Eifleor, foreground, and Larry Wertheimer during an art class at the Tenafly Senior Center. Helping the two was Ruth Rieber, an instructor. Last month the center dedicated a 1,500-square-foot addition. (John Sotomayor/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +419 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 2, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +A Tradition of Generosity: Remember the Neediest Cases Fund; +Soup Kitchen Dishes Out Survival + +BYLINE: By JONATHAN RABINOVITZ + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2; Page 85; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1037 words + +In many respects, it is just another cafeteria, like the thousands in elementary schools and colleges across the country that serve Mediterranean split pea casserole, chili macaroni and stewed prunes. +But in this one the diners leave old suitcases, backpacks and garbage bags full of belongings in a small pile by the entrance. They walk by a police officer who checks the line for crack dealers and known troublemakers. And once inside, they seldom take off their coats, scarves and hats, preferring to wolf down the food and leave quickly so that others can take their chairs. + On a typical winter day, 950 of them will pass through the doors of the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen and be fed a hot meal. It is known variously as the four-star restaurant of the streets, the McDonald's of the homeless or simply the best free lunch in town. +Every weekday, starting at about 10:30 A.M., hundreds of men and a few women -- the homeless, the elderly, the mentally ill and the hustlers -- join a line that stretches around the corner of West 28th Street and Ninth Avenue. Many have not eaten since lunch at the kitchen the day before. +All are welcomed. + +'We Don't Discriminate' + "We don't serve soup, despite the name," said James T. Novack, the volunteer coordinator and a member of the Retired Senior Volunteer Program. "We try to make a first-class meal, and it's open to anyone who's willing to stand in line for an hour. We don't discriminate." +In his eight years at the kitchen, he has seen the clientele get younger and has seen more women come in. He has noticed that the diners are more angry, frustrated and psychologically ill. +"Some of them curse me," he said, but he added that others, who had survived with his help, had hugged him and blessed him. +Mr. Novack is one of dozens of volunteers who keep the soup kitchen operating. About half the food is provided free by government programs, the remainder is purchased with the help of private donations from parihioners and others. + +Relying on Volunteers + It is perhaps the biggest soup kitchen in the city, with a $1 million budget and an eight-person staff. But it relies on the volunteers to dish out the meals, monitor the lines, make the coffee and clean the trays. +According to Mr. Novack, more than 4,000 hours of this work are provided by the Retired Senior Volunteer Program, a branch of the Community Service Society of New York. "It could not run without that help," he said. +The Community Service Society's volunteer program, which received $506,390 from The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund this year, has 10,000 people working at projects throughout the city, whether it be delivering meals to elderly shut-ins or playing with underprivileged children at day-care centers. +On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Novack carried a tray for 73-year-old Cyrene Taylor, who cannot walk without crutches. She was in the hospital earlier this year with blood clots in both her legs, and now she also suffers from arthritis. She comes to the soup kitchen five days a week, and Mr. Novack and the others always help her to a chair. +"He's such a gentleman, isn't he?" she said, after he had seated her. "These people have nursed me back to health." + +Conversation With a Pear + Although she had been an art teacher for most of her life, she said that it was now impossible to cook for herself, let alone stand for more than a half-hour. +At the other end of the table, Ramon Garcia, 33, was talking with his pear. "He's my new friend, he's my new friend," he sang quietly to himself, and patted the piece of fruit as if it was his baby. +Another diner, Juan Velazquez, a 44-year-old who has struggled with heroin addiction, watched all the activity around him at the table and shook his head. "I'm getting old, and I'm tired of this," he said. "It used to be only bums in here. Now it's all these crazy people." +Another man, who did not want to give his name, disagreed. "Some of the guys here have lost their jobs," he said. He had been a cook in an Italian restaurant, and he had been laid off three months ago. His unemployment checks had stopped recently, leaving him without any welfare benefits and without any food. +The soup kitchen has 69 seats, and for two hours on Wednesday, there was rarely a vacancy. When a person stood up to leave, one of the six people who were standing in the aisles quickly grabbed the free chair. +Volunteers made their way through the chaos and gridlock to deliver refills of coffee and to bring more sugar, refilling empty containers every five minutes. +Meanwhile, the assembly line of volunteer servers kept slapping down more pieces of turkey bologna with poultry gravy, baked potatoes, green beans, bread and pears. +At the 10 tables, the homeless diners made sure that no tray left the table with any food on it. +"Hey, you going to eat that apple?" someone called out. +"No, I don't have any teeth. Take it," was the reply. +At one table sat Robert Gideon, a 36-year-old homeless man, slight and frail. His gray and red argyle sweater was worn and tattered, his sneakers had holes, and his right hand had an open two-inch gash -- a knife wound, he said. The night before, muggers had taken his winter jacket and had sliced him when he tried to resist, he said. +Mr. Gideon trembled as he spoke about how he had become homeless four years ago. The problem was alcohol, he said, and "it was destined to happen." +He talked about his world falling apart when some teen-agers poured gasoline on his 8-year-old son and set the boy on fire. There was a 24-day "visit" to the psychiatric ward at Harlem Hospital as well as stays at other mental institutions. The diagnosis was alcoholism and "maniac" depression, he said. +"I'm not blaming anyone but myself, but it's difficult," he said. +Across from Mr. Gideon was Susan A., a 33-year-old woman with platinum blond hair, a black miniskirt, a black vinyl jacket and black-and-blue marks on her neck. She cheerfully said that she and her husband had just come from their methadone treatment program and that they relied on the kitchen for their daily meal. +"Eat this once a day, and you know you're not going to die," she said. + +LOAD-DATE: December 3, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +420 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 2, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +A Tradition of Generosity: Remember the Neediest Cases Fund; +Jewish Agency Strives to Aid Elderly at Home + +BYLINE: By CLIFFORD J. LEVY + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2; Page 85; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 643 words + +For almost 50 years, 93-year-old Frieda Roos has lived in a small apartment on a tree-lined street in Forest Hills, Queens. +Her health has deteriorated in recent years, and she has no relatives to whom she can turn for help. But she draws solace from the memories evoked by her apartment, where the furnishings have changed little since she and her husband arrived in the United States as Holocaust survivors. + "I would die if I had to leave," she said recently as she sat in her living room, her hand resting on a small table that displayed a photograph of her husband, Frederick, who died 18 years ago. "This is my home. This is everything to me." +Mrs. Roos has been able to remain in her apartment because she receives 24-hour care from an aide provided by Selfhelp, an agency sponsored by the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, one of the chrities assisted by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. + +Preventing Suffering + The alternative for Mrs. Roos, who suffers from poor hearing and has trouble walking, would be to enter a nursing home, a move she said she could not bear. +"Selfhelp ends up being the relative Mrs. Roos doesn't have, the support system that she doesn't have," said Janet King, who heads the agency's home-care program. +Home care is just one of the services offered by the agency to people who otherwise would face confinement to hospitals or nursing homes, said Stephen D. Solender, executive vice president of the UJA-Federation. +Selfhelp also builds housing for the elderly and people with AIDS, finds apartments for others it cannot house and sends psychological counselors -- some of whom specialize in helping Holocaust survivors -- to homes. +Mr. Solender said that government and social service organizations now know they cannot ignore preventive services. +"We're seeing very much the impact of a decade, the 1980's, that did not give enough attention to prevention," he said, pointing to the homeless population as an example. +If charities can intervene before a situation becomes desperate, he said, they can prevent suffering and save money as well. +"The difference is financial, because it will cost more for her to be institutionalized 24 hours a day," he said of Mrs. Roos. "And it will cause psychological damage, because she'll feel very confined and less adequate, and she'll be cut off from society." + +'We're Doing Triage' + Mr. Solender said that the United Jewish Appeal-Federation, which serves more than two million people in the New York metropolitan region through its 130 agencies, would like to expand its preventive programs. +But, he said, as the economy has declined, it has had to devote more resources to helping people already in serious trouble. +"It's one of the most unfortunate aspects of the current situation," he said. "People are so short of funds that we're spending all of our money on treatment -- we're doing triage." +Mr. Solender said he feared that the United Jewish Appeal-Federation, which received about $850,000 from The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund last year, will see a drop in contributions this year. +"I'm worried that passion fatigue is developing in New York -- that we're just tired and we're becoming immune and isolated emotionally from the suffering of the people on the streets," he said. +For Frieda Roos, the United Jewish Appeal-Federation has filled a void that developed after her husband died. +Mrs. Roos calls Zuline Alston, 63, the aide who lives with her, her "companion," and the two enjoy their time together: taking walks, watching television, visiting neighbors. +"This way, she won't be alone," Ms. Alston said. "She's seems a little frightened to be alone. For me, she's like my own family." +"We work together," Mrs. Roos said. "She is wonderful to me, like a daughter." + +LOAD-DATE: December 3, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +421 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 2, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +How Needs, and Market, For Care Have Changed + +BYLINE: By TAMAR LEWIN + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1; Page 36; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 485 words + +When continuing-care complexes first became popular 20 years ago, most were run by nonprofit groups, and required that residents pay a large entrance fee, ranging from $30,000 to $100,000 or more, plus a flat monthly fee, in return for guaranteed lifetime nursing care. +Nationwide, there are now more than 700 such communities, with 210,000 residents, according to the American Association of Homes for the Aged, a Washington-based trade group for the nonprofit communities. + But over the last five years, as developers have grown interested in the growing population of wealthy elderly people, most of the new complexes being built have been profit-making enterprises, charging no entrance fee but operating on a pay-as-you-go basis. Thus, people who require nursing care pay much higher monthly fees than those who need little assistance. + +Going After the Market + "There's a definite trend toward for-profit communities, but most developers are nervous about managing health-care costs, so their model is pay as you go," said Deborah Cloud, a spokeswoman for the American Assocation of Homes for the Aging. "And most of them are going after the upper-income end of the retirement market." +Many of the new profit-making communities under construction by hotel chains, nursing home operators and real estate developers are luxury rental complexes, some structured as condominiums, with residents owning their apartments. +In some big cities, similar services are available to poor, older people in a handful of government-subsidized housing complexes, designed to prevent the elderly from being shunted to nursing homes just because they can neither manage housekeeping on their own nor afford a housekeeper. +There are many variations on the continuing-care theme: some communities guarantee nursing care on the premises, while others say informally that residents will get priority for nursing home beds over outsiders. Still others have links with independent nursing homes nearby, or require residents to purchase long-term-care insurance to cover nursing costs. + +Spurred by Demographics + No one knows how many continuing-care complexes there are, how many are being built -- or even all the different models that are being tried. But real estate developers, gerontologists and social workers agree that such communities are growing rapidly. +"On the developers' side, what's pushing it is a combination of awareness of the demographics of an older society, and the fact that real estate people have been pushed out of so many other areas of development, like shopping centers, that are overbuilt," said Paul Gordon, a San Francisco lawyer who represents retirement communities. "And on the consumer side, you have more people who are realizing that this can be a desirable life style, that they can get the services they need without going to the dreaded old folks' home." + +LOAD-DATE: December 3, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +422 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 2, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +As Alertness Outlives Vigor, New Kinds of Care for the Old + +BYLINE: By TAMAR LEWIN + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1900 words + +The morning Peggy Scotch was to leave her daughter's house and move into the two-room suite where she plans to spend the rest of her life, she fumbled the battery from her hearing aid, dropped it on the floor and began to weep. +For the past week, Mrs. Scotch, who is 85, widowed and arthritic, had been determinedly upbeat about her move, declaring herself delighted with the decor and service at the New Jersey retirement complex she had chosen. + But the broken hearing aid was the last straw, crystalizing fears she had been trying to suppress. "I was far away from the people who fix my earphone," she said. "I thought I should have my head examined for making this move. I was scared in a way I've never been scared. It was such an unknown quantity, and I didn't know anyone there." +Such moves, and such fears, have become more common as older Americans, unable to manage housekeeping on their own, but not ready for a nursing home, turn increasingly to complexes offering a new way of life to the old and infirm, with private rooms or suites, three restaurant-style meals a day, activities, maid service and access to nursing care for those whose health declines. + +The Sadder Stage + While many of these continuing-care communities promote their elegant lobbies and good food, to people like Mrs. Scotch they represent a second, sadder stage of retirement after failing health prevents them from enjoying the active retirement life they chose when they first stopped working. +Mrs. Scotch and her husband, Maurice, who together practiced law in Union Township, N.J., retired 20 years ago to the poolside warmth of Florida. But when her husband died two years ago, Mrs. Scotch's children began pleading with her to move back north. This fall, after a broken leg left her dependent on a walker, Mrs. Scotch gave in to their wishes and decided to move to The Atrium in Allendale. +Also living there is Rose Edelman, who led a lively retirement in Puerto Rico until her husband, Hyman, suffered a stroke and needed nursing care. Mr. Edelman lives in the nursing home part of the complex, while Mrs. Edelman lives in a suite at the other end of the building. +"I haven't come to terms with living like this yet," said Mrs. Edelman, who has Parkinson's disease. "I hope I do. I'm more reconciled than I was, but I still do wake up in the middle of the night wondering what I'm doing here. Yet I can't think of a nicer place to end up. It's right for me now, because I have nowhere else to go, and I can be close to my husband here." + + Levels of Care Depend on Health + The Allendale complex, like most others, offers three levels of care. They are "independent living," where Mrs. Scotch and Mrs. Edelman live, which costs about $2,000 a month for a studio; "assisted living," for those who need help dressing or getting out of bed, which costs $2,400, and the nursing home, for those who become incontinent or demented or, like Mr. Edelman, need rehabilitation from a health crisis, which costs $3,000. +Continuing-care complexes attract the more elderly people; nationwide, the average age of new residents is 79. Most residents are women, most are widowed, and most have never before made a move without their spouses. And like Mrs. Scotch and Mrs. Edelman, most have adult children who worried about their parents' living arrangements, and helped select the new residence. +"After Dad died, it was really hard for us not to be close enough to be of any real help to Mom," said Mrs. Scotch's daughter, Barbara Schreiber, who wearied of traveling to Florida every few months. "So we mentioned, for the 48th time, or was it the 73d, that maybe she should think about moving back north." +Mrs. Schreiber and her brother, who lives in Vermont, left the decision to their mother. But in some cases, admissions directors at the complexes say, children become so upset about their parent's isolation or reclusiveness that they almost bully the parent into moving. +"The hardest transitions tend to be people who believe that families should always live together, that their children have dumped them here and they don't really belong," said Barbara McVeigh, who handles admissions at The Atrium. "Even in the best of circumstances, it usually takes a couple weeks before people begin to feel comfortable. Most of them eventually come to feel that this is the right place for them." +But even those who are happiest to move may have mixed feelings about living so closely with strangers, relinquishing responsibility, however onerous, for running a household and coming to terms with an old age in which they feel diminished by dependency. +"Sometimes I wonder what I'm doing here, surrounded by so many people who are old and sick, but then I remember that I'm not so young and I'm not so well, and I know of no viable alternative," said Mrs. Scotch. "I couldn't market and cook and clean by myself. The only possibility would be having a full-time housekeeper on top of me all day long in an apartment, and that would be very lonely and sad. I don't want to be a burden on my children." +Experts say continuing-care complexes will never attract the majority of older people. In a study by the American Association of Retired Persons, 86 percent of people 55 and over said they wanted to to stay in their own homes in old age. And even most people 85 and over -- a particularly fast-growing segment of the population -- still do live in their own homes, often getting intensive home care to cope with their frailty and health problems. + +Coming Back North, This Time to Stay + Mrs. Scotch came north in October to visit her daughter in New City, N.Y., and find a retirement home nearby. There were not many alternatives, since some institutions exclude people with walkers and others have long waiting lists. Mrs. Scotch's daughter and son-in-law had already visited The Atrium, and when Mrs. Scotch saw it, she decided immediately that it was what she wanted. +"It has a beauty parlor, and a bank branch and it is all in very good taste," she said."I decided on the spur of a spur of a moment. I didn't look at the nursing home part, and that was not part of my decision, but I guess in the back of my mind I thought it was a good thing to have there under the same roof." +Still, Mrs. Scotch awoke at 4 A.M. the day she was to move in, and calmed herself by doing crossword puzzles. Her daughter and son-in-law drove her to The Atrium at 10:30. All three were heartened when another resident, carrying a crossword puzzle book, greeted Mrs. Scotch, telling her she was going to love the place. +But the best surprise came a day later, when Mrs. Scotch walked into the dining room and saw Syd Zuckerman, a woman with whom she had been friendly in Florida 15 years earlier, when both still had their husbands. It was a great joy to both, especially since neither had found a soulmate at their assigned dining tables. After a few days, hey were able to arrange to sit together at meals. +"We could talk all day just catching up," said Mrs. Scotch, a tiny woman with the white curls and warm smiles of a storybook grandmother and a thoroughly modern intelligence. +Social contact at meals is a big draw of continuing-care complexes, especially for those with limited mobility. And even complexes where residents have their own kitchens usually require that some meals each day be taken in the communal dining room. +But unwanted social contact can be trying, forcing interaction with those who are slightly senile, overly talkative, querulous or simply incompatible. A tablemate who hums, curses or complains -- or repeatedly appears at the door uninvited -- can become almost unbearable. +"It's like an army barrack or college dormitory, where the constant interaction with people whom you did not select can be like a pressure sore," said Rose Dobrof, executive director of Hunter College's Brookdale Center on Aging. "Because of the constant proximity, some people are afraid to make close friendships, for fear that it won't work out, and they'll be stuck." +That worry has made Mrs. Scotch cautious: "I would love to find another kindred spirit, but I don't want to be impetuous," she said. "I don't want to start a friendship, make a mistake, and not be able to get out gracefully. So I'm trying to make haste slowly." + +New Friendships In a New World + Mrs. Scotch said she was looking forward to going on the daily outings but could not do so until her leg healed. But she does go to the word-game session. She singled out a candidate for friendship when there was talk of starting a book group, and she noticed that one of the women from the word games seemed interested. +Among the widows, there is surprisingly little conversation about husbands, a great deal about long-dead parents and even more about children: "Something happens, and all the children have all of a sudden become saints," said Mrs. Edelman, dryly. "I guess that's old age." +Each retirement community is a self-contained world, with some residents who build new friendships, some who rarely leave their rooms, and others who alienate everyone by constant boasting about their past. Most residents leave the premises only for rare visits to a relative's home or group outings to a shopping mall or museum. +Such outings can be a real relief for older people who were almost shut-ins on their own. Mrs. Scotch, for example, never drove, and her husband, who had heart disease, stopped driving two years before his death. Sometimes, she said, friends hesitated to invite her out because of the difficulty of the travel arrangements. +For many older residents, there is great relief in having a call bell in the bathroom, a nurse on the premises, a hot meal in the dining room and a maid. But there is also a bittersweet loss of control over basic daily chores. +"I was a good cook, and I still look at recipes, and then I think, what am I doing, I'm not going to be cooking any more," said Mrs. Scotch. + +Praying the Money Doesn't Die First + Rarely discussed, but often present, is a fear of outliving one's money, a fear that is likely to intensify as the industry switches increasingly to pay-as-you-go complexes like The Atrium, and away from nonprofit communities charging a large entry fee to cushion future costs. While all the complexes screen applicants' health and finances, it is unclear what will happen when their projections are wrong and residents live longer, and need more care, than their resources can cover. +At the family-owned Allendale complex, Ms. McVeigh said, the owners have absorbed the costs rather than turning a resident out, in the few cases where the question arose. But directors of most nonprofit complexes express skepticism that in difficult economic times, complexes run by large corporations for profit will make the same decision. +Even for the most affluent elderly, it is hard to adjust to a future less full than the past. +"I used to go walking at night in the first snow, and the stars would come out, and I would say to my husband that it's just like diamonds; I never thought I'd be left a widow," Mrs. Scotch said. "Sometimes you feel as if you're not whole, because you are so dependent on other people. But I'm not in a hovel, I'm not beholden to anybody, and I think I've made the right choice moving here." + +LOAD-DATE: December 3, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Peggy Scotch, center, as she was introduced to her new home, The Atrium in Allendale, N.J., by Michael D. Giancarlo, vice president of the community. With her were her daughter and son-in-law, Barbara and Jack Schreiber. At left was Dr. Hector Giancarlo, the owner. (Eddie Hausner/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +423 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 2, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEWS SUMMARY + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 826 words + + +International 3-29 +Iraq agreed to meet with the U.S. for talks aimed at averting war over Kuwait. The Iraqi statement came a day after President Bush offered to meet in Washington with the Iraqi Foreign Minister and to send Secretary of State Baker to Baghdad. Page 1 +President Bush's surprise offer was designed to convince Americans that he is doing everything possible to avert a war as well as to make one last effort to persuade Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. 1 +U.S. rejects Iraqi effort to include Palestinians 18 +Bush's overture is welcomed by Egypt and the P.LO. 18 +New Kuwait refugees tell of Iraqi killings and rapes 19 +President Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union has ordered the creation of worker vigilante committees with unusual powers to monitor the food industry and punish those involved in theft and speculation. 1 +Germans will once again cast ballots as a united nation, concluding an extraordinary passage that began over 12 months ago when the Berlin wall abruptly fell open. The elections are for a new Parliament that will include East Germans. 22 +Honecker's arrest sought on shoot-to-kill order 23 +Walesa and Tyminski clash in joint TV news conference 24 + A party beneath the English Channel was held when British and French construction workers met for the breakthrough of the 31-mile-long tunnel that now connects England to the European continent. 16 +Tunnel drilling, old as Babylon, becomes much safer 16 +Chinese grave's secret: a famed runner rests here 3 +Japan stands firm on ban of rice imports 9 +Did gangs benefit from papal visit? 4 +Karpov and Kasparov adjourn in 16th game 50 +Chad's President fled the country after a series of rebel victories, and guerrillas marched later into the capital, diplomats said. The President and other Government members sought refuge in Cameroon. 3 +A shantytown of 30,000 bulldozed in Nairobi 14 +Despite change, South Africa detentions remain 12 +Officials in Cuba seem to be on the defensive 25 + + National 30-43 +Federal unemployment insurance, the main Government program to ease the pain of recession, is less effective than it used to be, largely because of reluctance to raise the taxes that would have sustained it. 1 +Reporter's notebook: Five Senators have it all on paper 31 +More and more elderly Americans not ready for nursing homes are moving to complexes that offer private suites, maid service and nursing care for those who need it. But for many, the move represents a second, sadder stage of retirement. 1 +How needs, and market, for care have changed 36 +They live outdoors on cotton mats and hang their mail in the wind for days before opening it. The dozen families in a Texas town are among a growing number of people who find themselves extraordinarily sensitive to chemicals of all forms. 1 A fight to save the Chesapeake Bay from pollution and overfishing is showing signs of progress, environmentalists and government officials say. But they warn that unless new steps are taken soon, that fight could be lost. 30 +Illegal immigrants from El Salvador are being offered a hand of welcome, though an ambiguous one. A new law offers them safe haven if they report themselves to the Government, and at the end of 18 months, they return to their illegal status. 30 +New clues on Vermont's most famous citizen 37 +Convict in home custody is charged in a killing 41 +Drying lake yields a California town 43 +Shuttle to provide new look at the universe 40 +Philadelphia Journal: Amid bad news, an accent on the good 30 + + Regional 44-56 +The New York Post has rebounded from near failure, largely because nearly a quarter of a million additional readers have picked up The Post during the Daily News strike. Advertisers have followed them. 44 +Speedometers for subway trains? Transit officials plan to install them this spring in an effort to speed up trains. Operators, who now rely on instinct, would be able to drive closer to the maximum safe speed. 44 +Japanese see opportunities in U.S. sludge 51 +Would Japanese import save an oyster industry? 55 +"More brooms, more bags, more people" vs. litter 44 +Accord reached on curbing oil spills in harbor 56 +A murder trial airing on cable TV has both riveted and repulsed the city of Rochester, New York. Day by day, residents follow the proceedings against an accused serial killer who has claimed responsibility for the deaths of 10 women. 46 +Students' statements to be challenged in sex case 54 +A bank clerk is killed by armed robbers near a Queens bar 46 New York weighs more tennis space 45 +Obituaries +Norman Cousins, edited the Saturday Review 52 +David A. Morse, ex-acting Labor Secretary 52 +Vijay Lakshmi Pandit, politician and Nehru's sister 53 +Neediest Cases 85 +Arts/Reviews 82-83 +Campus Life 59-68 +Fashion 74, 76 +Life Style 70 +Pastimes 84, 86 +Weddings 77-82 + +LOAD-DATE: December 3, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +424 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 2, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Again, Age Beats Youth + +BYLINE: By Richard D. Lamm; Richard D. Lamm, former Governor of Colorado, is a professor of public policy at the University of Denver. + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 19; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 576 words + +DATELINE: DENVER + +Progressivity in taxation the idea that those who earn more should pay more of the costs of government -- is an old idea that has found new vigor. +The Congress, insistent on taxing the rich, has just passed a budget that gives approximately 60 percent of our Federal social spending to just 12 percent of our citizens: Americans over 65. Yet, the elderly have the highest disposable income and the lowest rates of poverty of any group in America. They own one-third of all household assets and 40 percent of all financial assets. + Poverty in America is more likely to wear diapers than a hearing aid. Nevertheless, Congress in 1987 spent $10,010 per capita on the elderly and only $854 per child. We may want to tax the rich, but we also distribute our Federal largesse not on the basis of who needs it but on who has the political power. There's little question that the elderly are the most politically powerful group in America. It's highly questionable whether they are the most deserving. +To be sure, there are many poor Americans over 65, and I'm very proud that my Democratic Party pioneered Social Security and Medicare, which were invaluable in lifting many of the elderly out of poverty. But today there are many retirees receiving overgenerous Federal transfer payments who just don't need them. For example, through Medicare we are paying the health costs of hundreds of thousands of elderly millionaires, while 20 percent of America's kids don't have all their vaccinations and 600,000 American women give birth every year without adequate or any prenatal care. We have recently amended Medicare to pay for heart transplants, yet 31 million Americans go without health insurance. We have a life expectancy rate of 80 years, the highest in the world, yet we rank 18th in infant mortality. +Even programs designed specifically for the poor are being slanted toward the elderly. Medicaid, a program aimed originally at poor women and children, today devotes 27.6 percent of its funds to long-term care for the elderly. While this money does go toward the poor elderly, it is nevertheless symbolic of how our limited resources are being taken away from the majority of the population. Public policy should transfer money from the rich to the poor, not from the young to the old. +We have created an excessive sense of entitlement in the elderly, and they are vociferous in defending and enlarging their benefits. Our political establishment, supposedly trained to meet new needs with new spending, finds it impossible to reallocate existing spending. But there is not enough new wealth being created to solve all our new challenges. New needs, to some degree, will have to come from reallocated resources. +In short, we cannot make fiscal sense of our future without eventually taking on entitlements for the elderly. Moreover, if we are to leave a sustainable nation for our children, we have to spend more money on the next generation and less money on the last one. It is not good public policy to transfer Federal monies to the millionaire elderly while less than 30 percent of our children in need have access to Headstart programs. +If we are going to initiate a luxury tax, why don't we further tax Social Security and Medicare for those seniors who are in the high income brackets? If we are going to tax the rich, we should at the very least have the backbone to look at "progressivity" on the spending side of government. + +LOAD-DATE: December 3, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +425 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 3, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +After Seeming So Nice, She's Indicted for Fraud + +BYLINE: By TIM GOLDEN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 933 words + +To her friends at St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church, Rose Penza was a model of modern-woman success in the Bronx: She worked as a certified public accountant at a Fifth Avenue concern, attended law school at night and went to Mass each morning on her way into the office. +So when Mrs. Penza offered to help invest her friends' savings in securities funds brokered by her company, prosecutors said that over more than 20 years her friends entrusted her with at least half a million dollars. No one suspected something might be wrong until two years ago, when Mrs. Penza and her husband were purportedly transferred by her company to West Palm Beach, Fla. + It turned out that Rose Penza was not a C.P.A. but the office secretary, had never gone to law school and had moved to Florida not for business but to retire. As for the money, the so-called investors are still waiting to learn what happened to it. + +'Frail Little Elderly Lady' + Mrs. Penza, 64 years old, was indicted by a Bronx grand jury Oct. 6 on charges of grand larceny and fraud. She was also charged with 110 counts of criminal possession of a forged instrument -- one for each of the checks she took in or wrote out as dividends, her old friends said, to keep the deal alive. +At a hearing on Friday in State Supreme Court, Mrs. Penza did not enter a plea and her arraignment was postponed. Her lawyer, Paul Victor, said she was not psychologicallycompetent to stand trial. +"She's a tiny frail little elderly lady, a regular little munchkin," Mr. Victor, one of the borough's more politically powerful lawyers, said in a interview. "I really don't think that she can participate in her defense." +"She was perfectly sane when she took the money," insisted Mary McCarney, a homebound widow of 77 who befriended Mrs. Penza more than 30 years ago and ultimately gave her about $29,000. +Mr. Victor declined to discuss the case, and Mrs. Penza insisted that the money would eventually be paid back. Reached by telephone yesterday in Florida, she chatted animatedly about her legal problems while her husband, Joseph, pleaded in the background for her to hang up. +As she has told her former friends for months, Mrs. Penza said that she was merely a go-between, that men she could not name at her old accounting concern were holding the money, and that they would probably give it back this week. +"My guys in New York, they promised me they'd get me out of this," she said. "Maybe this week. They promised. But they promised a lot of times." +Mrs. Penza, who is free on $75,000 bail, said that she felt bad about what had happened, and that the criminal proceedings had made her feel worse. +"It really knocked me for a loop," she said. "I just stay indoors and go to my three or four psychiatrists." Mrs. Penza added that she had re cently spent 18 days under psychiatric care at a local hospital. +Morris Z. Ottenstein, founder of the M. Z. Ottenstein accounting concern where Mrs. Penza worked, said from his home in Brooklyn that he had been unaware of her dealings. "She was no C.P.A.," he said. "We never made any investments for anybody." +Those who gave Mrs. Penza money say the weirdness of her homespun scheme was surpassed by its complexity. +Ronald Galdieri, who married Mrs. Penza's goddaughter and said he had uncovered the scheme, dated her first victim to 1960. That man's claims, like those of at least two people in Westchester County, are part of continuing investigations that prosecutors have said could raise their calculation of Mrs. Penza's receipts to $700,000. +As told by a half-dozen old friends, stories of Mrs. Penza always began with descriptions of what a nice person she had seemed. +"She was a personality, kid, put it that way," Mary Sturner, 76, said yesterday when reached at a church card party. "Everybody at St. Mary's was crazy about her." + +More Than $100,000 + She organized parishoners' trips to the Caribbean and Europe and did friends' income taxes free. After claiming to have passed the bar examination, she drafted a will for Mr. Galdieri's mother-in-law. +Mrs. McCarney, Mrs. Sturner and several others first heard about the so-called securities funds Mrs. Penza was selling after their husbands died. Emptying retirement accounts, some of them invested more than $100,000. +"She told me it would be secure," Mrs. Sturner said. "She said we could always get it back, but then when you asked, she could always fend you off." +Mrs. Penza described the funds as tax-free municipal bonds handled by M. Z. Ottenstein as an agent for the Bank of New York. She provided receipts and occasional statements on Ottenstein letterhead, and, when her friends needed money, cashier's checks from the Bank of New York. She sometimes took her friends to fancy lunches "on Mr. Ottenstein." + +'Can't Trust People Anymore' + But after Mr. Galdieri tired of delays last year in getting his money back, he found out that something was amiss: She no longer worked for Mr. Ottenstein, he was told, and had never handled securities in the first place. +Finally, Mr. Galdieri went to the authorities. They tracked Mrs. Penza -- who said she was on a business trip -- to Kennedy International Airport. She was arrested there, as she returned from a vacation in Italy. +"You save all your life for your retirement and all your sweat and tears go into it. I can't trust people anymore," said Anita Galdieri, Mr. Galdieri's mother, who said she gave Mrs. Penza her life savings. "There was no reason to disbelieve her in any shape, manner or form, because everyone knew her for so long." + +LOAD-DATE: December 3, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Rose Penza, with black bag, on vacation in Italy with some of the friends who say they gave her about half a million dollars to invest. She has been indicted on charges of grand larceny and fraud. + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +426 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 4, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Business and Health; +The Squeeze On Drugstores + +BYLINE: By Milt Freudenheim + +SECTION: Section D; Page 2; Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 772 words + +ALTHOUGH few doctors make house calls, many drugstores still deliver prescriptions to the homes of elderly customers. Scrambling to retain customer loyalty in the highly competitive retail pharmacy business, many drugstores specialize in advice and services. Eighty-five percent have also purchased computer systems that cost $10,000 and up, and some even have satellite links to keep supplies and insurers' payments flowing. +The McKesson Corporation's PCS pharmacy card unit, for example, operates a national electronic claims-processing network. An identification card with a magnetic stripe is passed like a credit card through a $200 device, which quickly tells the druggist what the customer's health plan pays for. The bill goes electronically to a data processing center in Scottsdale, Ariz., which pays the pharmacies every two weeks. + Prompt payment is vital to the nation's 55,000 pharmacies, for their pretax profit margins have fallen to 3 percent from 5.5 percent in the 1960's. Pharmacists are being squeezed by insurers, which increasingly insist on price discounts. Insurer guidelines on prescribing drugs are followed by about 22 percent of all office-based doctors, and the number is growing, said John Schaetzl, vice president of Scott-Levin Associates, a consulting firm in Newtown, Pa., that surveys physicians. +As retailing categories overlap and blur, retail druggists have had to compete with big discount chains like K Mart and Wal-Mart Stores, each with 1,000 or more pharmacies; mail-order pharmacy services, and supermarket chains, which are accustomed to even lower profit margins, based onmoving products off the shelf faster than drugstores do. And in the front of their stores, the druggists compete with the health and beauty aids sections of groceries, convenience stores, variety stores and specialty discount stores. +But the pharmacy business can also be difficult for such competitors. Joseph Thomas 3d, an economist at Purdue University, said the expenses in operating a pharmacy "are very different from operating a grocery." He added, "You need pharmacists, people with knowledge and time, willing to answer questions about over-the-counter products." A sign in the West Main Pharmacy, an independent store in Penns Grove, N.J., says, "Please ask our pharmacists questions before you purchase over-the-counter drugs." +"We foresee gross margins in the pharmacy business continuing to drop," said David D. Bernauer, vice president and treasurer of the Walgreen Company, which is based in Deerfield, Ill. "The bottom line to the whole thing is: Who can most efficiently distribute that prescription to the customer?" Walgreen stores, which deal with 800 insurance plans, are linked by satellite to a computer center in Mount Prospect, Ill. "In five seconds, we check the patient's eligibility and other parameters like which drugs are covered, the number of days' supply, whether generics are mandatory," he said. "The system greatly reduces the percentage of rejects and dishonored claims and the cost of shipping paperwork." Sales at Walgreen's 1,575 stores are growing by 20 percent annually, reflecting rising drug prices and the addition of 110 stores this year, Mr. Bernauer said. +To compete with the chains, independents like the West Main Pharmacy work on customer service. "We can't always match the dollar figure," said Louis A. Mitchell, the owner, who is in the store daily from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M. "My main concern is that the patient has to be satisfied that what they are doing is based on good sound advice." +Don Moore, an independent pharmacist who is president of the Moore Drugstore in Kokomo, Ind., maintains a staff nurse for consultations. +"All retail drugstores, whether they are independent or chains, are being squeezed much more today," said David Malmberg, vice president for strategic planning with McKesson's wholesale unit, the nation's largest drug wholesaler. +Insurers that pay most of the cost of drugs directly to the store may account for 75 percent of the prescription business by the end of the decade, said Robert J. Mandelbaum, a pharmacist who is a vice president of the 1,136-store Revco chain, based in Twinsburg, Ohio. Revco is adding patient counseling areas to its stores. +Some druggists are developing niche markets like joint ventures with hospitals to supply equipment for home health care. And Fay's, based in Liverpool, N.Y., which has 185 drugstores, is opening free-standing operations just to supply nursing homes. "They are a large growth end of our prescription business," said Henry A. Panasci, Fay's chairman. + +LOAD-DATE: December 4, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +427 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 4, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Business Digest + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 539 words + + +Airline in Trouble +Continental Airlines filed for bankruptcy protection after months of struggling with a financial squeeze from its huge debt and the soaring cost of jet fuel. [Page A1.] +The nation's fifth-largest airline is taking great pains to assure customers and travel agents that it will remain in the air. [D8.] +The combination of high fuel costs and low fares will severely damage other airlines if it persists through the winter. [D9.] + +Companies +NCR's stock jumped 43.6 percent as investors responded to the $90-a-share offer from A.T.& T. [D1.] +Bergdorf Goodman named a new vice chairman, Burton Tansky, the president of Saks Fifth Avenue. [D1.] +Sears, Roebuck & Company has a new headache: a big shareholder, a California state pension fund, is upset. [D3.] +Lockheed rejected a buyout proposal from Harold Simmons, the Dallas investor, because the plan involved too much debt. [D4.] +New publishers were named for Vogue, Vanity Fair and Conde Nast's Traveler. [D18.] + + The Economy +An economic index compiled by purchasing managers fell to its weakest level since November 1982. [D1.] +The Supreme Court gave employers a victory by ruling that lawsuits accusing companies of firing workers to evade pension obligations come under Federal, not state law. [D1.] +Record spending on public works lifted construction spending for the first time since July. [D5.] +Engineers at the Brookhaven National Laboratory are working to pack more circuits onto computer chips. They are hoping to take the initiative back from Japanese manufacturers. [C1.] + +International +Trade negotiators grew increasingly pessimistic about the global trade talks. [D1.] The United States is seeking to build regional cooperation in the Western hemisphere. [D7.] +Bush announced approval of the sale of a supercomputer to Brazil on his trip to Latin America, as officials worried about the attempted military coup in Argentina. [A14.] +Vietnam has come up with a plan to end decades of poverty, cut inflation and increase exports. [A7.] +A Sunday newspaper in Britain folded just 14 months after its debut in the market that many say is still too crowded. [D6.] + +Markets +Stock prices continued to advance, led by A.T.& T.'s bid for NCR. The Dow gained 5.94, to 2,565.59. [D10.] +Treasury securities rose, pushed higher by foreign buying in overnight trading. [D16.] +Oil finished 30 cents higher after traders felt that hopes for peace in the Persian Gulf were fading. [D2.] +The dollar rose sharply on reports of intervention to halt the currency's fall. [D17.] Soybeans rose to a five-week high. [D17.] + +Today's Columns +The retail pharmacy business is so competitive that many drugstores still deliver prescriptions to the homes of elderly customers. Milt Freudenheim: Business and Health. [D2.] +Western Union's offer to buy back bonds initially cheered investors, but many may not be able to get the full 50 cents for each dollar of their holdings. Market Place. [D10.] +L.A. Gear is expected to be ready to hire an advertising agency. To date, the nation's third-largest athletic shoe maker has created its own ads. Advertising. [D19.] + +LOAD-DATE: December 4, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +428 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 5, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Young Voices Give Lift to Concert at Center for the Elderly + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LOAD-DATE: December 5, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Students from Intermediate School 229 in the Bronx and residents of the Daughters of Jacob Geriatric Center at rehearsal at the center at 1160 Teller Avenue. Voices of young and old will join in a concert, "Show Tunes of Yesterday and Today," to be presented at the center and the school. (Jim Estrin for The New York Times) + +TYPE: Caption + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +429 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 6, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Wuhan Journal; +At 102, He's Back in School, With Many Like Him + +BYLINE: By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 4; Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 977 words + +DATELINE: WUHAN, China + +Qian Likun is a model university student, the kind of diligent scholar-athlete who joins in foot races, excels in his studies and is never distracted by a woman's short skirt. +Mr. Qian is also five times older than most university students. He is 102 years old, and while ordinary students study the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and the fall of the Ching Dynasty in 1911, Mr. Qian has no such problem: he remembers them. + The University for the Aged, where Mr. Qian studies, has 8,000 students here in Wuhan, a major city on the Yangtze River of central China. Founded five years ago, it is part of a network of more than 800 such institutions for the elderly in China, all founded in the last eight years. +China has traditionally revered the aged, and this nation's programs for the elderly are very impressive for a developing country. Some Chinese villages have a special "house for the aged," where senior citizens can live if they have no children to depend on, and most cities have a range of physical fitness, entertainment and educational programs for retired citizens. + +Questions for the U.S. + One question that Chinese often ask Americans is why families sometimes put their parents in institutions, why such a rich country cannot do more for its elderly. The questions include a hint of reproach, but mostly wonder at the breach of filial piety. +"We want to help the elderly help themselves, so that they can reduce their dependence on their families and on society," said Lu Jianye, the vice president of the Wuhan University for the Aged. "We also want to help them increase their contribution to society, and to develop hobbies such as art, calligraphy or even massage, so that they can enjoy their later years." +The university here, which charges tuition of less than $5 a term, offers courses in 123 subjects. These include painting, disco dancing, calligraphy, bridge, cooking, English, literature and health care for the elderly. + +Canes Beside the Chairs + Most people in Wuhan are literate, but the university also arranges classes in some neighborhoods to teach reading and writing to the elderly, mostly women who never went to school. +China, with a population of 1.1 billion, has some 115 million people over the retirement age, which is normally 60 for men and 55 for women. The proportion of the aged will rise sharply in coming decades as baby boom generations grow older and family planning policies reduce the number of young people. +On a recent visit, the classrooms of the Wuhan University for the Aged were full of animated students, some with canes beside their chairs, enthusiastically commenting on each other's paintings, reciting standard phrases of English and dissecting ancient poetry. +"We don't want to get senile," said Yan Bin, a 56-year-old woman who retired recently as a professional singer. She was sitting around a table with three partners, working on her skills at bridge, the card game favored by Deng Xiaoping and countless other elderly Chinese. +"I never studied bridge before," said Mu Youqing, a silver-haired woman of 64 years who is a retired doctor. "But it's very highbrow and cultured, and it has a long history in China." + +A Boost for the Brains + The baby of the foursome, 56-year-old Shao Kanfu, a lean, tall man who retired early, added, "I wanted to look after my health and give my brains a boost." +Most elderly people in China live with their children, and often they are responsible for caring for their grandchildren. So the University for the Aged holds classes in the midmorning and again in the early afternoon, when the students' children are at work and their grandchildren are at school. +In addition, because some of the old people cannot get around easily, the university has set up 13 branches around the city in residential areas. The university depends for money on tuition fees and also on generous grants from the city government. The faculty consists mostly of professors at nearby universities who are delighted to moonlight for a small fee. +"The teaching level isn't as high as at a regular university, and we don't go into as much depth as we would with younger students," said Zhou Wu, a junior high school instructor who teaches Chinese literature on the side at a branch campus of the University for the Aged. "But some of the older folks bring a good deal of enthusiasm as well as diverse experience to the classroom, so it's often more interesting to teach them than to teach my regular students." + +Along for the 'Fun Run' + One of Mr. Zhou's most diligent students is Mr. Qian, the 102-year-old. A retired agricultural researcher, Mr. Qian diligently prepares for each class session and offers some pointed views. +"This poem isn't very good by Tang Dynasty standards," he said the other day as Mr. Zhou dissected a poem on the blackboard. "But it's better than anything we have today." +Mr. Qian manages to walk to the class on his own, and he hears and sees well enough to follow the teacher most of the time. The first class he took was on health care for the elderly, and he says he found it very useful in looking after his wife, who died a few months ago at the age of 100, and his daughter, who is 81 years old and in fading health. +When the university held a "fun run" this spring, some 300 old people ran about 2.3 miles to complete the race. Mr. Qian was ong them, but the university staff acknowledges that his pace was more of a hobble than a jog. +A lover of traditional poetry, Mr. Qian scarcely paused when asked for a few lines of his favorite poem. The room fell silent as he recited from memory this ancient Chinese poem: + The clouds are wispy this morning, the breeze is light. + As I pass the pond, I see flowers and willow trees. + The passers-by don't know the joy in my heart. + I'm like a kid at play. + +LOAD-DATE: December 6, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Qian Likun, left, who is 102 years old, is a star student at the University for the Aged in Wuhan, a city on the Yangtze River in central China. (Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +430 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 6, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Court Extends 'Family' Rule To Rent-Stabilized Units + +BYLINE: By DENNIS HEVESI + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 617 words + +A landmark ruling that protects the remaining member of an unmarried couple from being evicted from a rent-controlled apartment if one partner dies or moves was extended by a New York State appeals court on Tuesday to cover all of the one million rent-stabilized apartments in the state. +"It's a huge victory for over one million rent-regulated tenants across the state," said Alan Hamerman, a spokesman for the State Commissioner of Housing and Community Renewal, Angelo J. Aponte. + The rules will insure, for the first time, Mr. Hamerman continued, that elderly people, gay couples and others sharing apartments "receive the full blanket of protection as set forth in the rent laws." + +'A More Realistic' View + The unanimous ruling by four judges in the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court -- First Department, which covers Manhattan and the Bronx, overturned an injunction issued by a court in Albany in November 1989. The lower court had barred the state housing agency from putting into effect new regulations extending what is known as the Braschi decision from rent-controlled to rent-stabilized apartments. The injunction had been sought by the Rent Stabilization Association, an organization representing landlords. +In the Braschi case -- brought by the surviving member of a gay couple in Manhattan -- the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals, said in July 1989: "We conclude that the term family," as used in laws governing the state's estimated 160,000 rent-controlled apartments, "should not be rigidly restricted to those people who have formalized their relationship by obtaining, for instance, a marriage certificate or an adoption order." +"In the context of eviction," the ruling added, "a more realistic, and certainly equally valid, view of a family includes two adult lifetime partners whose relationship is long term and characterized by an emotional and financial commitment and interdependence." Gay-rights advocates have hailed that decision as a step toward legalization of their relationships. + +An Appeal Is Planned + In its ruling on Tuesday, the Appellate Division said, "Since the new regulations incorporate the Braschi definition of 'family' into the existing scheme, they do not conflict with Real Property Law." +It also said, "By responding to the continuing shortage of low- and middle-income housing units available, the rise in instances of individuals 'doubling up' and tenants being forced into a homeless situation due to unaffordable rents, the regulations clearly comport with the broad mandate provided the Division of Housing and Community Renewal by the Legislature to 'protect tenants and the public interest.' " +William Rubenstein, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's lesbian and gay-rights project, which was a party to the case, said: "These state regulations are really the first we know of in the country in which a statewide authority has defined family in a such broad, meaningful and realistic manner, including the recognition of lesbian and gay families. The fact that these regulations have withstood judicial scrutiny is an important milestone." +The president of the Rent Stabilization Association, John Gilbert, said he was "disappointed but not surprised" by the ruling. +"We will appeal," Mr. Gilbert said. +But the state's highest court does not necessarily have to hear an appeal. Mr. Gilbert, however, said he thought it would. "The Court of Appeals has always held sacred the fact that a lease is a contract," he said. "In Braschi, it was a rent-controlled situation, and there was no lease. But this is a rent-stabilized situation, and you've got a lease between two people." + +LOAD-DATE: December 6, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +431 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 6, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Using a Saxophone Opera to Recount Black Culture + +BYLINE: By PETER WATROUS + +SECTION: Section C; Page 17; Column 2; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 1081 words + +When Julius Hemphill's "Long Tongues: A Saxophone Opera" hits the stage at the Apollo Theater tonight it will bring together dancers, singers, a saxophone choir, some rappers, a 14-piece orchestra, films and projected stills. It's also bringing to the stage an armful of ambition; the opera attempts to tell the story of the changes in black culture from the 1940's to the present by way of music. +The story is about an encounter between "the Professor," an aging street person played by Thomas Young, and two young hip-hop musicians. Through a series of flashbacks the Professor takes the two young men back into his own personal history as an emcee and custodian of the Crystal Caverns, once Washington's most prominent black club. Not only does the show delve into the relationship between black music and culture, but in the characters of the two hip-hop musicians, it also attempts to illustrate the alienation and lack of historical knowledge amoung young black people. And throughout, the opera investigates the status of the club as a magnet for cultural invention. In a way, the show starts where the Broadway hit "Black and Blue," which stops in the 1930's, leaves off. + "The Crystal Caverns was like most clubs of the time," Mr. Hemphill said during a telephone conversation this week, "in that it presented a wide variety of performances, and they had an interaction between music and dance and other forms of entertainment that have become compart mentalized today. The vitality that has influenced American music and culture was developed in these pockets of creativity, in local clubs like that. All the developments in the black community have come from places like that, from blues to be-bop to hip-hop." Mr. Hemphill, a saxophonist and founding member of the World Saxophone Quartet, wrote all the music for the show. + +Image Has Suffered + For the director, Judith Jackson, the piece has a larger importance. "It's very important that you keep track of your history, where elders tell their own version of where they came from to younger people," Ms. Jackson said this week by telephone. "The link in the black community was broken by welfare programs, integration, shattered families, and we've been getting a bad image of ourselves as blacks from the television and film industry. +"So in a way, we're trying to reach young black men, who are getting a picture of themselves recently as a lost cause," she said. "By linking hip- hoppers to be-boppers, we're trying to re-establish historical continuity. We want young kids to see that if they go out and bop some old woman over the head, that old woman is more than just an old woman, she's somebody's mother, grandmother, ultimately connected to them, and what she did in her past has affected our future." +"Long Tongues" comes out of Mr. Hemphill's collaboration with W. A. Brower and Malinke Robert Elliott, each a writer and actor. Mr. Hemp hill, a Texan and a founding member of the Black Artist Group in St. Louis during the 1960's, has always been involved in projects that go beyond the narrow confines of performed jazz. The show has been evolving; the writer and critic Greg Tate of The Village Voice and the writer Suzanne Miles helped write some of the libretto, and Ms. Jackson was brought in several months ago to pull all the loose ends together. + +A Reading of Society + "We started with a show called 'Ralph Ellison's Long Tongue,' " said Mr. Hemphill. "I developed that title because the material I used from 'The Invisible Man' gave a broad and penetrating reading of society. When I was a kid, I heard the phrase 'laying a tongue on somebody,' which meant that an elder had given an upstart a good dose of wisdom. I translated that idea into the versatility of the saxophone, and its endless ability to dispense wisdom." +The show is filled with music, dance and highly stylized narrative. In one combative scene between "Prof" and the hip-hop kids (played by Mark and Scott Batson, two young jazz musicians from Washington who also rap), the Professor rhymes in hipster slang while the two brothers chant hip-hop threats and insults back at him. The rhythm section, off-stage right, shifts from straight-ahead jazz for the be-bop talk to funk patterns for the rapping. +In other places, Mr. Hemphill's stunningly lush saxophone writing -- and extraordinary solos by the other saxophonists -- is shown off by the saxophone sextet, a group that includes Mr. Hemphill, his longtime associate Marty Ehrlich, Andrew White (who was in the house band at the real Crystal Caverns, which was renamed the Bohemian Caverns in the 1960's), Carl Grubbs, James Carter and Kenny Grubbs. +Other scenes feature dance routines (choreographed by Marilyn Worrell and Ajax Joe Drayton) that capture the liquid grace of big-band and rhythm-and-blues dancing from the 1940's through the early 1960's. The dancer C. Scoby Stroman performs, and expressionistic avant-garde jazz from the 1960's is played as a tribute to the giants of the period, including John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Eric Dolphy and others, who passed through the club. + +Sum of Many Parts + And all the while, photographs of musicians, politicians and other icons for blacks hover in the background, showing the change in time. The past and the present are linked, and the hip-hoppers, who had felt alienated from their own culture, come slowly to understand that they too are part of a tradition. +And that tradition included entertainment. Shake dancers appear, as do a big band and a tap dancer. The Prof emphasizes community over selfishness. Underscored is the idea that the club itself changes only superficially in its cultural role, even though the world outside is changing radically. The stills in the background change, and a film of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on Washington is projected, but the club remains a cultural center. +"We weren't trying to actually reproduce what went on literally," said Mr. Hemphill. "There isn't a floor-show episode. But we've tried to take elements of it all and make it larger. The march on Washington is part of it. We're just trying to show how entertainment and culture and politics are related, and how the saxophone has played a pivotal part in it all." +"Long Tongues: A Saxophone Opera" is playing tonight and tomorrow night at 8 o'clock at the Apollo Theater, 253 West 125th Street. Information: (212) 749-5838. Tickets are $25 and $18. + +LOAD-DATE: December 6, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Dancers, singers, rappers and a saxophone choir performing in "Long Tongues: A Saxophone Opera," which attempts to tell the story of the changes in black culture since the 1940's. (Rick Friedman for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +432 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 9, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +CONNECTICUT GUIDE + +BYLINE: By Eleanor Charles + +SECTION: Section 12CN; Page 30; Column 4; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1140 words + + +MODERN DANCE + Re-creations of some pioneering American choreography may be seen in two New Haven performances of "Homage to Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman" at 3 and 8 P.M. on Saturday in the Educational Center for the Arts, 55 Audubon Street. + Ernestine Stodelle, director of the Silo Concert Dancers of Connecticut and a former member of the Humphrey-Weidman Company, has reconstructed the Humphrey pieces, and Deborah Carr, head of the Deborah Carr Theater Dance Ensemble in Manhattan, is responsible for the Weidman works. + From 1928 to 1945, the Humphrey-Weidman team was a dominant force in the development of modern dance. Among the works to be presented on Saturday are Weidman's "Christmas Oratorio," and the Humphrey-Weidman duet "Patetico." + Tickets are $10 and $15, $7 and $10 for children and the elderly. Call 772-2377 for reservations. + +TROLLEY RIDES + Santa will be on hand to greet visitors and accompany them on half-hour electric trolley rides today, Saturday and next Sunday at the Shore Line Trolley Museum in East Haven. The first trip departs at 11 A.M. and the last at 5 P.M., meandering through a lighted strip of countryside in heated, antique trolley cars, decorated for the holidays, with a gift for every child aboard. + A sound and light show, "The Birth of the Trolley Era," is presented inside the trolley barn, along with a large Lionel train layout and refreshments. Tickets are $4, $3 for the elderly and $2 for children from 2 to 11. The museum is at 17 River Street. For more information call 467-6927. + +THREE-PART MESSIAH + The original three-part "Messiah" of Handel will be performed for the 17th consecutive year at 4 P.M. today in the Darien High School Auditorium under the direction of Keith Shawgo Jr. The work has become such an institution in the town that a Messiah Performance Foundation was formed to handle the administration of the 140-voice chorus, full orchestra and soloists, as new members join, and some retire, each year. + This season's soloists are Ellen Cody, soprano; Lucia Monahan, mezzo-soprano; Peter Cody, tenor, and Dennis Maxfield, bass. There is no charge for admission, but donations are welcomed. The high school is near Exit 10 of Interstate 95. Turn right off the eastbound exit, or left from the westbound side, and proceed to the end of the Noroton Avenue Extension. For more information, call 655-8162 or 655-8157. + +OLD-TIME CHRISTMAS + The Butler-McCook Homestead in Hartford will be open from noon to 4 P.M. today, displaying all the accouterments of an old-fashioned Christmas while the Hartford Chorale serenades visitors with a repertoire of carols. + Replicating the traditions of the family that once lived there, a plain paper-covered wooden box contains the tree, just like the box used by the McCooks from 1875 to 1927 -- a formidable example of New England thrift. Under the box, a sheet is spread to protect the carpet, and the tree is decorated with well-worn ornaments that the family preserved for years. + The display has evolved from notations in 19th-century diaries and from early photographs and includes Christmas stockings in graduated sizes, filled and laid out in the dining room. + Admission is $2, $1 for children. The house, one of eight historic homes owned and maintained by the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society, is at 396 Main Street. The phone number is 247-8996. + +GUATEMALAN EXCURSION + When Dr. Nicholas Sullivan participated in an expedition to the Alta Verapaz section of Guatemala, sponsored by the National Geographic Society, he and his colleagues were surprised to learn that the Quiche Indians, who live on a remote limestone plateau, still practice ancient rituals in caves that resemble early Mayan temples. + As president of the Explorers Club and a former president of the National Speleological Society, Dr. Sullivan has explored caves all over the world. He will give a slide talk about his adventures and discoveries on Thursday at 8 P.M. at the Greenwich Arts Center, 299 Greenwich Avenue. Admission will be $4 at the door. + The program is sponsored by the Archeological Associates of Greenwich. For more information call 661-4654. + +NEW LIFE, OLD BARN + Lots of people talk about leaving the urban rat race and making a new life in an old country barn, and some of them have done it, including Skitch and Ruth Henderson. Their home -- the Silo at 44 Upland Road in New Milford, a 200-acre former farm, where they live and work producing art and craft shows, managing a cooking school, entertaining in style and maintaining Mr. Henderson's music studio -- is a special delight at Christmas time. + A 23-foot decorated tree and a selection of gifts and edibles are for sale, as well as a new cookbook called "Ruth and Skitch Henderson's Seasons in the Country," which the proprietors wrote with with Judith Blahnik. It contains photographs by Lans Christensen and a foreword by one of the Silo's eminent cooking teachers, Jacques Pepin. + Mrs. Henderson will autograph copies of the book from 11 A.M. to 1 P.M. today, Saturday and next Sunday; from 5 to 9 P.M. on Tuesday; from 5 to 8 P.M. on Dec. 20 and 21, and from noon to 4 P.M. on Dec. 23. Call 355-0300 for more information. + +SEPHARDIC TRADITION + The Voice of the Turtle is a music ensemble that specializes in works from the Sephardic tradition, performing on a wide array of instruments from the Near and Middle East and from Medieval and Renaissance Europe. They will give a concert on Thursday at 8 P.M. in the Charter Oak Cultural Center at 21 Charter Oak Avenue, Hartford. + The works are sung in original Judeo-Spanish and Hebrew and other linguistic variations that evolved among Spanish Jews who migrated to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Italy and Turkey. Tickets are $14, $7 for students. Call 249-1207 for reservations. + +WINTER SOLSTICE + Back in the 1890's, it was not unusual for holiday travelers who were stranded by snowstorms at New Haven's railroad station to keep their spirits up with singing, dancing and storytelling. That happy spirit is the basis for "Take Joy!," a winter solstice revelry scheduled at 2 and 7 P.M. on Saturday and 5 P.M. next Sunday in Sprague Hall on the Yale Campus at College Street. + Among those participating in this interpretation of an impromptu turn-of-the-century entertainment are the New Haven Morris Dancers and Sword Team, the New Haven Country Dancers, the Elm City Vintage Dancers, a group of Sacred Harp singers, a troupe of mummers, and the Brass Ring Quintet. + Music by Stephen Foster, Charles Ives and other American composers will underscore the nostalgia, and the audience is expected to participate, as it does each year, in the dancing and singing. Tickets are $8, $5 for children and the elderly. Call 497-9052 for more information. + +LOAD-DATE: December 9, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +433 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 9, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +A Heritage of Giving: Remember the Neediest Cases Fund; +Proud but Suddenly Poor, Elderly Reach Out for Help + +BYLINE: By MARVINE HOWE + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2; Page 86; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 988 words + +Two months after Esther S., a former accountant and grade-school teacher, came to New York City from the Soviet Union last year, she found herself homeless and contemplating suicide. Lilian F., who lived a privileged life on the Upper East Side for many years, found herself penniless and almost homeless after the death of her husband. +Like countless other elderly men and women who face economic setbacks, failing health and family problems each year, Esther and Lilian reluctantly set aside their pride and turned to charities for assistance. + It was an emotionally wrenching step. +"I always used to have my own piece of bread," Esther said through an interpreter. "Here I am at 69, in a strange country with a strange language, where everything is different, abandoned by my daughter, and I still don't know why." +Lilian, describing how she felt about having to ask for help, said: "It was horrendous. It was like I wanted to jump out of the window." +In New York City today, an increasing number of elderly residents find themselves ineligible for government assistance but "still too poor to make it on their own," said Prema Mathai-Davis, the city's Commissioner for the Aging. For many of them, she added, the only option is a private social-service agency. + +Arguments About Money + When Esther arrived in this country from her native town in the western Ukraine, she moved in with her daughter and grandchildren in a two-bedroom apartment in Forest Hills. +"Everything was perfect for the first two months," Esther recalled. +She helped with the cleaning and other household chores, tutored her 13-year-old granddaughter in mathematics, and made embroidered items that she sold to supplement the family's income. But there were arguments, mostly about money. +Earlier this year she fell ill with digestive problems and was hospitalized for 10 days. +When she returned to her daughter's apartment, she said, the atmosphere was different. There were arguments that she said were initiated by her daughter's boyfriend over such questions as whether she ate too much of the family's food. +Finally, she said, her daughter kicked her out. + +A Place to Live + "It was a cold, rainy day, the end of March," Esther recalled. "For a moment there in the street I got the idea it would be good to be hit by a car." +But a 90-year-old Russian woman passing by convinced Esther to move in with her for a few days. Then Esther got a temporary job as a live-in babysitter on Long Island. +As that job was about to end last May, Esther contacted the Metropolitan New York Coordination Council on Jewish Poverty. The council, which maintains an emergency housing fund with Neediest Cases Fund contributions it receives from the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, got Esther a room in a private shelter and is paying her rent. +"Esther could have gone to a city shelter, but I don't think she would have survived," said Peter Fine, director of special projects for the council. + +Doing Things for Friends + At Respite House, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Esther is one of 14 residents, who are assisted by two full-time social workers. +A petite woman with white hair, dark, questioning eyes, and a strong, husky voice, Esther is the kind of person who needs to be doing things for others. These days she spends most of her time in her room doing needlework, embroidery or alterations for her new friends in the shelter. +At other times, Esther, who knows almost no English, can be found sitting in the smoking corner of the shelter's lounge, conversing in Yiddish with several other residents or in Romanian with a couple who live in the building. + +Losing Everything + Further uptown, Lilian lives near Beekman Place, surrounded by the bric-a-brac of better days: Thai prints, Italian Renaissance pottery, an onyx table and crystal figurines. +A native New Yorker, Lilian has youthful skin and a youthful figure that belie her 74 years. +She was married to the senior partner in a Wall Street brokerage and had everything: a 6 1/2-room apartment in a building on East 57th Street, two Cadillacs and yearly trips around the world. +Then, in 1973, her husband died and the bottom fell out of her world. Soon after his death, the firm went out of business. +Lilian lost her apartment and rented a one-bedroom apartment near Beekman Place for herself and her son, who is developmentally disabled. +"I sold the stocks, the antiques, the furniture, the silverware and most of my jewelry, one piece at a time," she recalled. + +Son Out of Work + She now lives on Social Security, no longer entertains or goes to the theater and has taken "little jobs," with the Board of Elections and the Census Bureau. But the rent has more than doubled in the last year and there is nothing more to sell, "just bric-a-brac," she said. +Her 54-year-old son has been out of work for more than two years, and their financial situation continued to deteriorate. So did their relationship: Her son refused to leave when she tried to evict him. So the two of them continued to argue. +"I just couldn't manage anymore and needed help," she said in an interview. + +Rebuilding Self-Esteem + Lilian turned to the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged, a social-service agency, which also receives Neediest Cases funds through the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. The agency is providing Lilian with a rent supplement until she can find permanent affordable housing. +"I'm trying to help Lilian cope with the terrible assault on her self-esteem," said Doris Solomon, the social worker who now meets regularly with Lilian and her son. +Ms. Solomon has also helped Lilian's son get into a state job training program. +"JASA has been a big help, helping with the rent and easing the tension with my son," Lilian said. "But life is not the way it used to be." + +LOAD-DATE: December 9, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +434 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 9, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Awaiting the Call of the Big Leagues, Young Socialites Party on Their Own + +BYLINE: By GEORGIA DULLEA + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2; Page 68; Column 1; Style Desk; Lifestyle Page + +LENGTH: 915 words + +On the charity circuit, they are the not-ready-for-prime-time players. They have the evening clothes, the social connections and the philanthropic impulses. But they are not old enough or rich enough for serious galas at $500 to $1,000 a ticket and so, increasingly, they are running benefits on their own, on the cheap. +The juniors, as they are called, have a certain style. No gilded hotel ballrooms for them -- clubs are less expensive, more lively venues. No sit-down dinners -- only old people need to sit down. No society orchestras -- a deejay will do. And forget the fancy decorations -- the crowd is decorative enough. + The top ticket price for a junior party is $150, with many events around $100. Guests are mostly in their 20's and 30's, although some powers behind the benefits are in their 40's and musing about moving into the big time. + +Reluctant Graduates + + + Alfred (Chappy) Morris, who at 40 still gets invitations to debutante parties and bachelor balls, recently graduated to the list for $1,000 benefits. "I guess that's one way to tell you're a senior," he said. +He and other leaders of the Lobby Gallery Associates of the Whitney Museum have been pondering their status. One of them, Christine Mortimer Biddle, said, "With the economy, a lot of juniors can't afford to be seniors and yet they still want to support the charities." +Invitations to junior parties sometimes list members of the younger generations of old society families like the Rockefellers and the Phippses. But the names of fashion models, designers and musicians also draw juniors. And they love titles, no matter how questionable the lineage. +"You'll find a lot of committees headed by His Royal Highness So-and-So or Princess Whoever," said Polly Onet, who handles junior benefits for Gustavus Ober Associates, a public relations concern. +For Ms. Onet and other juniors, charity parties have become the place "to make connections, professional and social," she said. "With everything that's happening -- crime, AIDS -- people are leery about going to night clubs and staying out till 2 in the morning. They want to dress up, go out at a civil hour and, for $75 or so, meet attractive people." + +Repaying Debts + + + Juniors without the time or space to entertain at home pay back social debts with benefit tickets. "They'll buy a $1,000 table, invite 12 friends and that's their entertainment for the year," Ms. Onet said. "It's for a good cause and it's tax deductible." +Anyone who has done time on the charity circuit can remember when juniors amounted to "window dressing," as Lewis Ufland put it. He and other charity-event planners would set aside junior tables for committee members' children because "older people love to look at young people." "In the past, juniors were not treated as grown-ups," Mr. Ufland said. "Now they're doing their own parties and they're being taken seriously." +Juniors emerged as a fund-raising force in the mid-1980's when charity balls blazed and waves of young people got rich on Wall Street. As the decade ended, virtually every cause from the New York Public Library to the Guardian Angels had a cadre of young supporters. + +'A Tough Year' + + + Like seniors, juniors are scrambling these days to attract corporate donors and underwriters while holding the line on ticket prices. As Tav Berry, head of the junior committee of the Girl Scouts Council of Greater New York, put it: "Everybody's having a tough year. Asking $300 a couple is not the easiest sell." +Juniors do not deliver the big bucks as seniors do. Juniors' benefits that raise $30,000 are considered blockbusters. Charities see junior committees not only as fund-raising groups but also as training grounds for the next generation of Pat Buckleys and Nan Kempners. +"They have to start somewhere, " said Joanne de Guardiola, chairwomen of the Associates of Memorial Sloan-Kettering. +Mark Gilbertson, chairman of the Winter Ball at the Museum of the City of New York, said his group was grooming "future leaders of the museum, trustees and donors." He added, "A lot of people are from old New York families." +People from new New York families are on the Boys Harbor junior committee, though. For example, a co-chairwoman is Odette Cabrera, whose parents were born in the Dominican Republic and who attended prep school on scholarship. +Her group raised $25,000 at a recent $40-a-ticket black-tie benefit. "We could have charged $100," Ms. Carera said. "But we kept it low so everyone could join in, not just the elite and the affluent." + +To Some, Older Is Better + + + Not all juniors stick to their own circuit. Christopher Mason, the songwriter who twits both generations at society parties, prefers going to senior parties and paying junior prices. +He was among a throng of young people who paid $125-a-ticket to dance at a recent Metropolitan Museum of Art benefit after the $900 crowd had had dinner. "Frankly I find it much more interesting to have a good mix of the ages," he said. "I always liked being around old people, anyway." +Junior parties may be "tiresome even though one's getting a deliciously cheaper ticket," he said, adding that one cannot very well social-climb among one's peers. +"All of the juniors at the museum were zeroing in on people like Ivana and Nan Kempner, " Mr. Mason said. "Pat Buckley was surrounded by adoring young men. It was a very funny sight seeing the juniors and the older group mix." + +LOAD-DATE: December 9, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: At Museum of City of New York party last week, Nina Tower, left, Betty Lindeman and Averell Mortimer; Christine Hearst and Bob Arnot were among the juniors at Thursday's party at the Union Club for the Girls Scouts. (Photographs by Bill Cunningham) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +435 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 9, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Sunday Outing; +A Town Tailor-Made For Holiday Shopping + +BYLINE: Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2; Page 70; Column 1; Style Desk; Lifestyle Page + +LENGTH: 815 words + +DATELINE: CHESTER, Conn. + +This snug town, which curves along Pattaconk Brook and the Connecticut River, resembles a typically timeless New England community in many respects. It has a village green, a white clapboard church and plenty of historical buildings. +But it also has a vigorous and savvy business community that has decided to market the town's charm to holiday shoppers weary of crowded suburban malls and big-city department stores. Twenty-five small shops are packed almost unobtrusively into a three-block area in Chester, about 120 miles north of Manhattan in southeastern Connecticut. + Christmas, it's fair to say, is a big deal here. +"There are a lot of things to value in small-town living," said Cynthia Keller, an owner of Restaurant du Village, one of six restaurants in the center of Chester. "We're just showing that a small town can offer a lot of variety and unique items that you aren't going to find in a mall." +The merchants of Chester, which was a thriving mill town in the 17th and 18th centuries, have always spruced up the town and their shops during the holiday season. Indeed, with its array of crafts and antiques shops, Chester seems tailor-made for holiday shopping if rustic, simple, old-fashioned goods will fill the bill. + +Demonstrations and Performances + But this year, the merchants went a step further and organized a four-day Christmas celebration, which ends today. Carolers and Santa Claus will be on hand, and a variety of displays, demonstrations and performances -- basket weaving, cooking, baking and storytelling among them -- will be taking place in the stores. But after this weekend, the seasonal celebration will continue in other ways. +Next weekend, for example, the touring National Theater of the Deaf, which is based in Chester, will stage performances of Dylan Thomas's "A Child's Christmas in Wales." The shows will be held on Wednesday through Saturday, Dec. 12-15, in the Chester Meeting House, a 197-year-old building on the village green. On Wednesday and Thursday, the play will be performed with a triple bill by the Perfect Puppet Company. All performances will be in sign language and spoken English. Admission is $3 on Wednesday and Thursday, and on Friday and Saturday, $9 for adults, $5 for children 11 years old and younger and for the elderly age 65 and older. For show times: (203) 526-4971; telecommunication device for the deaf: (203) 526-4974. +The shops will remain open, of course, throughout the holiday season. Typical Sunday hours are 10 A.M. to early evening during the holiday season. "We've got enough shops and restaurants to keep shoppers happy and well fed all day," Ms. Keller said. +When visitors tire of shopping, they can take a five-minute ferry ride across the Connecticut River to the even smaller community of Hadlyme, which is basically a boat landing with a couple of old houses nearby. The ferry has been operating continuously since 1769, and even in colder weather, the ride is pleasant, scenic and inexpensive ($1 per car and driver, plus 25 cents for each additional passenger). +The ferry, which has a two-car capacity, runs daily, if sporadically, from 7 A.M. to 6:45 P.M. +Just two miles from the ferry landing in Hadlyme is Gillette Castle State Park, which has hiking trails, picnic grounds and excellent vistas of the river and surrounding countryside. And, as the name suggests, it has a wood and granite castle, which was once owned by Charles Gillette, who became famous playing Sherlock Holmes on the stage in the early 1900's. Mr. Gillette lived in the castle from 1919 to 1937. +The park is open daily from dawn to dusk, with no admission charge. The castle is open only on weekends, from 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. Admission is $2 for adults and $1 for children ages 6 to 11. + +Through East Haddam + Rather than taking the ferry back to Chester, a short drive will lead visitors through another small town, East Haddam, which has fewer shops than Chester but is home to the well-known Goodspeed Opera House, a prime theater for Broadway tryouts and other productions. +The current offering is "Bells Are Ringing," with book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Jule Styne. It runs through Sunday, Dec. 16. Performances are at 2:30 P.M. and 8 P.M. Wednesday, 8 P.M. Thursday and Friday, 5 P.M. and 9 P.M. Saturday and 2 P.M. and 6 P.M. Sunday. Admission is $25.50 on Wednesday and Thursday and $26.50 the rest of the week. +The opera house, a Victorian building dating from 1876, overlooks the Connecticut River and a narrow drawbridge, which leads back to Chester. + + + +Getting There + From Manhattan, take Interstate 95, the New England Thruway, north through the Bronx, Westchester and Connecticut to Exit 69. Chester is about six miles north of this exit. Take Route 9 north to Exit 6, and then head eastward on Route 148 to the center of Chester. + +LOAD-DATE: December 9, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Jerry Beaumier hanging a red and gold bow at his specialty-food shop. Some of the stores along Chester's Main Street, known as a mecca for old-fashioned holiday shopping. (Photographs by Stephen Castagneto for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +436 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 9, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +If You're Thinking of Living in: Chelsea + +BYLINE: By TED KENNEY + +SECTION: Section 10; Page 7; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1514 words + +"CHELSEA is a patchwork quilt," Peter Obletz, chairman of Community Board 4, said recently about the eclectic West Side neighborhood. "On any block you may find a luxury condominium, a factory making belt buckles, an auto-repair shop, a lovely town house, or public housing." +While brokers dispute whether residential real estate prices in Chelsea have fallen more than in other parts of Manhattan, most agree that sales are in a slump. + Co-op prices at the Towers at London Terrace, part of a 14-building complex in a block bounded by West 23d and 24th Streets and Ninth and 10th Avenues, have dropped 25 percent in the last several months, said Patrisha Kay, its marketing director. Renovated studios now sell for $75,000, she said, and the sponsor offers financing. +Though some neighborhood residents are relieved that the clatter of construction and renovation has quieted, many said it would take more than a hot real estate market to seriously diminish the community's tolerance and spirit. +"It's a very stable, safe community that continues to look back on its roots and really has a sense of mission and philosophy," said Angelo Casillo, principal of Public School 11, at 320 West 21st Street. +Even when it was a tough maritime neighborhood, Chelsea had a reputation for working for the common good. The Hudson Guild, one of the city's oldest settlement houses, began in 1895 to provide education and health care for residents. Its offices now are in a New York City Housing Authority project on West 26th Street, one of three in the area with a total of more than 2,000 units. + Over the years, Chelsea absorbed Irish, Italian, black and Hispanic newcomers. It has long had a considerable gay population, said Mr. Obletz, the community board chairman, and the elderly, too, are a visible part of the population. Around three-quarters of the residents of the 2,820-unit Penn Station South, a moderate-income housing cooperative, are elderly, said David L. Smith, the co-op board's president. +But high-rise buildings are scarce. "Mostly, what is available in Chelsea, except along 23d Street, is smaller buildings -- brownstone apartments, scads of them," said Clark P. Halstead Jr., president of the Halstead Property Company. Town house co-ops in the Chelsea Historic District, noted, among other things, for its Greek Revival Cushman Row at 406-18 West 20th Street, cost about $225,000 for a one-bedroom and $350,000 for a two-bedroom. Most of the Greek Revival and Italianate houses were built between 1835 and 1860. +Town houses sell for $950,000 to $1.6 million, said Gloria Johnson, sales director at Wells & Gay-Stribling & Associates. Commercial lofts are also available as finished or raw space. +Brownstone rents average $1,100 for a one-bedroom and $2,500 for a two-bedroom, brokers said. At the new 12-story-plus-penthouses, 68-unit Crossroads, on West 23d Street between Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue, rents range from $990 for a studio, about $1,500 for the four one-bedroom penthouses and $2,000 for a two-bedroom. +Ms. Johnson said there are about 650 condominiums in the area in 15 buildings, among them the recently completed 157-unit Grand Chelsea on Eighth Avenue between 16th and 17th Street, where one-bedrooms are priced at about $170,000 to $190,000. +At the London Terrace complex, four corner towers containing 670 co-ops comprise the Towers at London Terrace, while the 1,000 rent-regulated apartments in the 10 middle buildings are called London Terrace Gardens. There are also some market-rate units, with one-bedrooms renting for about $1,700 a month, said Andrew Hoffman, general manager of Clarendon Management Corporation, the complex's managing agent. +Night life has flourished in Chelsea, which has a concentration of performance spaces, including the Joyce Theater on Eighth Avenue at 19th Street. Two cinemas on West 23d Street contain a total of 12 screens. +SOME residents are stunned that strips like Eighth Avenue south of 23d Street can support so many eating establishments. "Every place you go, there's a restaurant," said 76-year-old Fritzie Kort, who has lived in Chelsea for 47 years. +Among the restaurants that have survived for years south of 23d Street are the glitzy Empire Diner and Chelsea Commons and Chelsea Central, all on 10th Avenue; the Old Homestead Steak House, on Ninth Avenue (where a Kobe steak goes for $100), and Harvey's Chelsea, on West 18th Street. Among newer restaurants on Eighth Avenue are Twigs, Rogers & Barbero, Miss Ruby's and, for jazz, the Cajun. On Seventh Avenue, there are the Blue Hen and Claire. +Parents new to Chelsea are not sending their children to public schools in great numbers yet, Mr. Casillo said. At the k-6 P.S. 11, 49 percent of students scored at or above grade level on citywide reading tests in 1989. At P.S. 33, at 281 Ninth Avenue, 38.5 percent of pupils scored at or above grade level. +Mr. Casillo insists that "you can't judge a school by its test scores." He takes parents on tours of P.S. 11, stressing its program for gifted and talented students and its enrichment programs in computer skills and science and art. +The neighborhood is served by the Bayard Rustin High School for the Humanities, specializing in liberal arts, as well as the Fashion Industries High School, just a couple of blocks from the Fashion Institute of Technology, and Intermediate School 70. +The private Corlears School, at 324 West 15th Street, has 161 students in pre-kindergartenthrough fourth grade. The neighborhood has three Roman Catholic elementary schools -- St. Francis Xavier, Guardian Angel and St. Columbia -- and two high schools, St. Michael's for girls, at 425 West 25th Street, and Xavier for boys, at 30 West 16th Street. +A retired British military officer, Capt. Thomas Clarke, bestowed the name Chelsea on his estate in 1750, after the Thames-side village of Chelsea, now part of London. In the early 1800's, his grandson, Clement Clarke Moore, a theologian and author of "A Visit From St. Nicholas," reluctantly began subdividing the estate for housing. He donated the land for St. Peter's Episcopal Church and the General Theological Seminary. The seminary stands on a block bounded by Ninth and 10th Avenues and 20th and 21st Streets; the church is on 20th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. +Today Chelsea is far larger than Clarke's estate. North of 23d Street, it tends to be industrial and commercial, including the city's flower market around Avenue of the Americas and West 28th Street and the fur district along Seventh Avenue between 27th and 30th Streets. +Many Chelsea residents are pressing for adoption of a community board proposal to limit the height of new buildings near the historic district, said Mr. Obletz, the board chairman. But pressure for development is strong in the 34th Street corridor, where the developer Harry Macklowe plans a 550,000-square-foot office tower between West 33d and 34th Streets and Eighth and Ninth Avenues. +Community leaders also foresee changes on Avenue of the Americas from 24th to 30th Street because of a proposal by the Department of City Planning to allow residences along the strip, now zoned for high-density commercial and industrial use. +CHELSEA is starved for parks, but the State Department of Transportation's preliminary plans for rebuilding the West Side Highway call for a 37-foot-wide strip of walkway, bicycle path and grass on the west side of the highway, and for rebuilding Thomas Smith Park, at the foot of West 23d Street. +Grander plans have been put forth by the West Side Waterfront Panel, created by the city and state to study how to best develop the Hudson waterfront. The panel has proposed a $500 million esplanade with the Chelsea Waterfront Park, an eight-acre park with two recreation piers jutting into the river, as its centerpiece. If it is financed, the park would open to neighborhood residents a waterfront that is now "pretty dismal," said the panel's executive director, Betsy Haggerty. + +GAZETTEER + +Population: 52,000 (1990 estimate). + +Median household income: $25,000 (1990 estimate). + +Median price of a one-bedroom co-op: $185,000. + +Median price of a one-bedroom condominium: $199,500. + +Median one-bedroom rent:$1,000. + +Transportation: A, B, C, D, E, F, L, Q, R, 1, 2, 3 and 9 subway lines and buses on 34th, 23d and 14th Streets and on all avenues but 11th and 12th. + +Government: Councilwoman Carol Greitzer, Democrat. + +Arts Citadel: Over the years, artists and writers have made their home at the Chelsea Hotel, at 222 West 23d Street. Among them have been playwrights Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller; composers Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland; painters Jackson Pollack and Larry Rivers (who still maintains a suite there); and writers Samuel Clemens, Brendan Behan and Thomas Wolfe. Though the 106-year-old Chelsea became a hotel in 1905, most residents are permanent. Some 40 rooms available for shorter stays range in price from $75 a night for a single to $250 for a suite. + +LOAD-DATE: December 9, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Cushman Row houses on 20th Street in Chelsea Historic District. (Eddie Hausner/The New York Times) + +Map of Chelsea district in Manhattan + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +437 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 11, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Weicker Nominates 3 For Social-Service Jobs + +BYLINE: By KIRK JOHNSON, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 545 words + +DATELINE: HARTFORD, Dec. 10 + +Governor-elect Lowell P. Weicker Jr. announced three more nominations for his emerging independent administration today, including a Democrat to head the Department of Aging, a Republican to be in charge of economic development and a private businessman to oversee public housing. +The nominations, which must be approved by the Democrat-controlled General Assembly, are Mr. Weicker's first in the areas of social policy. The nominees gave little indication yesterday of their positions on major issues facing the state, and Mr. Weicker stressed even as the group was introduced at a State Capitol news conference that there would be little money in the deficit-ridden state budget for expensive new initiatives. + The nominees are State Representative Edith G. Prague as Commissioner of Aging, Joseph J. McGee as Commissioner of Economic Development and Henry S. Scherer Jr. as Commissioner of Housing. +Mr. Weicker, a former Republican, will take office next month as Connecticut's first independent governor since the 1850's. He has already nominated two Democrats to the top posts in his budget office and two Republicans to be his chiefs of staff. + +A Diverse Group + He said that all three nominees introduced today were longtime personal friends, but that they had little else common. "What stands out in this group is that it's very diverse," he said, adding that "since we don't have money, we need creativity and we need brains." +Mrs. Prague, a 65-year-old Democrat from Columbia, was among the first members of the General Assembly to endorse Mr. Weicker for governor earlier this year. +Mr. McGee, 44, is a Republican bank executive from Fairfield who briefly ran for governor himself earlier this year. He served as staff director in the 1970's for United States Representative Stewart B. McKinney, Republican of Fairfield. +Mr. Scherer, 59, is the chief executive of an East Hartford company that makes reinforced steel. He met Mr. Weicker in the early 1950's when they both attended Yale University. Of the three nominees, only Mr. Scherer, a registered Republican, said he would join A Connecticut Party, the party Mr. Weicker organized this spring around his candidacy. + +Problems Ahead + If approved by the General Assembly, the three commissioners will face daunting challenges, ranging from the state's slumping economy, which has battered cities like Bridgeport and Hartford, to the rising price of heating oil, which has affected thousands of elderly residents on fixed incomes. +Public housing, clustered in the state's poor cities, is also becoming a burden on local budgets in some communities. Hartford's City Manager, Eugene Shipman, suggested recently that the city's public housing projects be razed and new public housing distributed equally in rich and poor communities. +Asked about Mr. Shipman's proposal, Mr. Scherer said he needed to familiarize himself more with the issues. Mrs. Prague said she had avoided thinking about the grim realities she will face if appointed. +"I'm so excited today, I don't want to get depressed thinking about that," she said. +Mr. McGee said the focus of his agency would be "jobs, jobs, jobs," to help combat the recession that he said had already begun in Connecticut. + +LOAD-DATE: December 11, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +438 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 11, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Sharp Rise in Brain Cancer Rates Found Among Americans Under 45 + +BYLINE: By NATALIE ANGIER + +SECTION: Section C; Page 3; Column 1; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 749 words + +BRAIN cancer rates are climbing steeply in the United States among people under the age of 45, according to a new study. +Other recent reports have shown a sharp rise in brain tumor deaths among the elderly, particularly those over 70. But the new findings are the first to report a statistically significant increase in new cases of brain tumors among younger people. + The study, which will appear next week in The American Journal of Industrial Medicine, is an analysis of epidemiological data from tumor registry centers around the nation. It concludes that the number of new cases of brain tumors in younger people has been mounting at a rate of about 2 percent a year from 1973 to 1986, the last year for which data are available. +Although brain cancer remains quite rare, the incidence jumped from around 2.2 new cases for every 100,000 people in 1973, to 3.1 cases per 100,000 people 13 years later, the study reported. +But other researchers attribute much if not all of any apparent rise to improved diagnosis, rather than to a genuine surge in the number of cases. Since the 1970's, the introduction of CAT scans and other advanced imaging devices have made it far easier for physicians to detect brain tumors at the earliest stages. + +Debate Over Findings + "What is being proposed as a change in frequency is simply an improvement in diagnostic methods," said Dr. Leonard T. Kurland, an epidemiologist and neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. +But Dr. Devra Lee Davis, scholar in residence at the National Research Council in Washington and the lead author of the new report, insists that the rise is too great to be dismissed as the byproduct of improved diagnosis, although she said that she did not know why brain cancer was increasing among younger people. She noted that other researchers had implicated electromagnetic radiation as a possible cause of brain tumors, but the theory is fiercely disputed. +Dr. Davis said her immediate concern was to sound the alarm about the increase. The latest paper arrives on the heels of a new volume that Dr. Davis helped edit and that is being published this week by the New York Academy of Science, "Trends in Cancer Mortality in Industrial Countries." The book is a compilation of epidemiological studies of cancer rates throughout the industrialized world. The studies jointly conclude that the incidence of many cancers is mounting in this country, Europe and Japan, especially among people over 55. Spurring the upward trend, the book says, are rising rates of tumors of the brain, breast, kidney, bone marrow, skin and lymphatic system. +Many of the results from the new volume were announced last summer in the journal Lancet and elsewhere. But the book offers several new and provocative details about a few of the cancer trends, and some researchers praised it for its attempt to synthesize disparate threads of epidemiological data. +"Davis pulled together a lot of interesting work and very bright people to present a convincing mosaic," said Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, chairman of community medicine and director of environmental and occupational medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. "Now we have to get out there and do studies to figure out what's going on." +But other epidemiologists questioned the book's statistical methods. +Dr. Richard Peto, a renowned epidemiologist at Oxford University, said that beyond a spectacular rise in lung cancer deaths, there was no generalized increase in cancer mortality rates. "Some are going up and some are going down," he said. "The analysis as I see it in nonrespiratory cancer deaths is reassuring over all rather than alarming." +Among some of the new disclosures in the book is that far more men than women are dying from melanoma.The result is surprising because, at least in the United States, dermatologists worry that young women are at high risk of contracting the cancer as a result of excessive sunbathing. +Dr. Davis said that in all industrialized countries studied, the death rate for men was 40 percent greater than for women. She suggests that one explanation for the discrepancy is that men are more likely to be exposed to hazards in the work place. She specifically cited polychlorinated biphenyls, chemicals in electrical equipment that some scientists suspect may cause cancer. +But other researchers argue that the link between the chemical and melanoma -- or any other disease -- has not been proved. + +LOAD-DATE: December 11, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +439 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 11, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Topics of The Times; +A Seat on the Aisle + +SECTION: Section A; Page 26; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 209 words + +A New Yorker who has often compared living in this city to performing in an endless Hitchcock thriller boarded a downtown Manhattan bus one recent night. She took the window seat in the first row; the next passenger took the aisle seat beside her. +Directly behind them sat an elderly, simply dressed woman in an aisle seat. A young woman got on, said "Excuse me" to the elderly woman and tried to squeeze past into the empty window seat. The old woman wouldn't budge, and the young woman, who was pregnant, walked to the back of the bus. +"Why should I be nice to her?" the elderly woman said to herself, within earshot of those in the seat ahead. "Why shouldn't I just push her face in?" Her voice was low and her diction elegant, which made what she was saying all the more unnerving. +At the next stop, another woman got on. She, too, muttered a polite "Excuse me." Again the old woman didn't budge. "One more person tries to bother me," she said, "and I swear I'll take this city apart." +By now the bus was nearing 34th Street. "Why is it," the elderly woman said, "the devil had to take hold when I was only two blocks from my destination?" She stood up and got off. The two people in the first row exhaled. Satan's captive was out of sight. + +LOAD-DATE: December 11, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +440 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 12, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +The Old Soldiers of Moscow's Shopping Wars + +BYLINE: By FRANCIS X. CLINES, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 2; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 946 words + +DATELINE: MOSCOW, Dec. 11 + +The pushing and scouting and conniving and shouting art of being old in the Soviet Union is Raisa Glotova's second career, a time in her life more brassy than golden. +In the perverse Soviet economy, grandparents like Mrs. Glotova are the valued time brokers who come out of theoretical retirement each day to do the family's heavy waiting on the store lines and the occasional heavy lifting when there is something to buy at the end of the line. + Mrs. Glotova pulled into town at 5 A.M. after her usual two-hour commute and by lunchtime had two bags full, hitched across her shoulders like a yoke, to tote back to the city of Voskresensk to improve the lives of her children's children: Mitya, Maksim, Lyonya, Oksana and Ruslan. By her description, they waited like open-mouthed fledglings back in the three-generational apartment nest. +"I cannot manage adequately because I had a proper upbringing and never learned to curse," she said after caroming out of a milk store on Tverskaya Street, the recently renamed stretch of Gorky Street, where word of mouth about this week's rarity, butter, had attracted a full complement of Moscow's hunters and foragers. +"To be retired in other countries means using your money to go and rest," said Mrs. Glotova, her smile gritty under a wool cap and a charming fringe of bright, bottle-red hair. "Here we have another occupation." +Those who generalize about the lack of individual initiative in this country should get caught in more Moscow food lines and be cut off at the knees by some of the most clever old movers and shakers in the world. Crane about to find what is the source of that sudden sharp nudge and someone, often a veteran gray head, squirms a place or two ahead, ignoring the mass injustice of it all for the family's greater good. + +Cruelty, Respect, Pride + All about the city today, the elderly waited in flocks, flitting to where food was rumored to be, pushing in for their fair share. The scenes were often cruel, with the tiniest old babushkas nudged aside. But there was an occasional demand from someone younger to honor that old one there amid the crush. +In either case, there were glints of pride as the pensioners made their familiar rounds. +"As long as my legs hold out, I need to help my grandchildren," said Galya Rizvanova, a small woman scuttling about in search of a promising wait. +A gray-haired man who identified himself as Grandpa Aleksandr said as he braved the odd mix of clerks' ennui and shoppers' frenzy at Detsky Mir, the main children's department store, "It keeps us young." +"I'm 77 and my hands do not work so well now, and maybe I will not see better times in my life, but I have real values," he said, beaming that he had salvaged a few toys from the crush for his grandchildren. +"It is the simple experience of life," he explained, when asked where elderly Soviet citizens get their patience and cunning for their task as critical family providers. + +At the End, Desperation + Other old people were studies in gray desperation as they found they could not deliver this day. +"My grandaughter needs a little dress, but I could not find any," said Anna Istomina, who said she found it not at all unusual to take an all-night train ride from Siberia for her mission. "I will sleep tonight in the railway station and go home. You know, we pensioners are very good people, although we may not look so good." +Her eyes were deep with gloom amid a store crowd that was a tide of needs, quickly flooding about the few available goods, settling or not upon one mediocre bit of plenty, perhaps, then ebbing in retreat. +"What can I tell my grandaughter?" Mrs. Istomina asked. "I must tell her there was nothing." + +Hero? No, 'an Idiot' + Ivan Letyok, a war veteran whose worn army medals bobbed on his jacket lapel said as he slowly walked with his cane in search of a bicycle for his grandson: "I am no hero. I am an idiot." +"I have to have a small bike," he kept repeating, despairing that the old war veterans' privileges were being forgotten along with their war. "Everyone i know died in the 30's," he said, referring to the loss of personal contacts that any Soviet shopper needs to have a chance at obtaining scarce goods. +Mrs. Rizvanova, a retired 73-year-old garbage collector, said: "There is no special skill to this. You just stand in line and wait, and if they do not have it when it is your turn, you come back the next day. And you come back the day after that. Maybe you will find it." +Another old woman, a wizened optimist with two empty shopping bags at hand as she shouldered through another day of waiting, said, "We are the best at this." + +Thoughts of Abundance + Nostalgia is one good on hand for the older waiting shoppers. +"When I was a young girl we had everything, everything, all on display," Mrs. Rizanova said, squinting her eyes at this memory amid nearly empty stock cases. +The strategic-minded Mrs. Glotova hefted her two full bags securely as if they contained the very time itself that she must daily spend on the lines. She said, "People pretend to forget their place and move ahead of me and of course I shout." +"I shop seven days a week," she said, smiling in the street cold at the very question of somehow behaving otherwise. "They depend on me," she said tersely of her grandchildren and their working parents. +She conceded that brutish young men shouting for her to stand aside easily seize the vanguard in daily injustices on the lines. But that clearly was not the final point for her. +"I shout back at them," she said, smiling at her own liveliness. "I shout: 'I was here first!' " + +LOAD-DATE: December 12, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Soviet grandparents serve as families' foragers for scarce supplies. Raisa Glotova filled her sacks on a recent foray to Moscow shops. (Alessandra Scanziani for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +441 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 12, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Many Donate to the Neediest In Spite of Their Own Needs + +BYLINE: By JONATHAN RABINOVITZ + +SECTION: Section B; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 409 words + +The elderly, the sick and the poor not only benefit from The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, they also contribute to it. +These donors often send in checks of $5 or $10, mention the physical or economic difficulties that they face and then apologize that they cannnot give more. Many of them remember past travails and write about how they wish to help others through similar hard times. + "Soup for lunch was no fun, but I was more generous then," wrote one contributor, Leslie A. Abreo. "Now I dine modestly better but have become stingier. Your drive made me think again." She enclosed a check for $25. +Another letter was simply signed, "From a cancer patient." The donor said that she felt fortunate to be alive and wanted to share her good fortune through a $10 contribution. + +'A Little to Everybody' + One donor, Susan London, whose income dropped after two eye operations, sent $20. "I wish I could send more," she said. "But I think it's important to give something." +Attached to George Ginsberg's $3 contribution was a typewritten note, all in capital letters: "Sorry I can not send more. I only have my Social Security. I am 91 years old. I want to help. I must spread my contributions to help a little to everybody." +Mr. Ginsberg, a retired industrial photographer, said in a telephone interview that he lived in Newark on a monthly income of $625, his Social Security check. He explained that for years he had managed to find a "little extra" for the Neediest Cases. +"I don't need any luxuries," he said. "I can always find an extra dollar to give to somebody who can use it. I personally feel much more gratified when I've done a little something, though I can't do much, you understand." +Mr. Ginsberg, like dozens of other contributors to the Neediest Cases, said that he supported the fund because the money goes to a variety of people and groups, regardless of race, religion, sex or age. And he said that he could empathize with all of these people who receive aid, because they all are struggling with poverty. +The 79th annual appeal for the Neediest Cases began last month and has raised $1,499,536.05. The New York Times pays for the overhead of the campaign and the proceeds go to seven charities. All of the money is to be used for direct aid to the sick and the needy. + +Previously recorded .... $1,442,117.55 +Recorded yesterday ...........57,418.50 + +Total ................ $ 1,499,536.05 + +LOAD-DATE: December 12, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +442 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 12, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +NEWS SUMMARY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1204 words + + +INTERNATIONAL A3-19 +More hostages left Iraq and Kuwait but only one American emerged from hiding in Kuwait to board one of the three Boeing 707's sent there for what had been described as a final evacuation effort. Page A1 +News analysis: Bush was determined not to repeat mistakes A19 +Security Council will meet to put more pressure on Iraq A18 +France sends another 4,000 troops to the gulf A18 +Keeper of Baghdad's synagogue tells of Hussein's tolerance A19 +President Bush met Yitzhak Shamir to smooth over American-Israeli differences, but the meeting ended with signs of the same tensions that have recently irritated relations. A19 +Editor of Dead Sea Scrolls fired because of remarks on Jews A14 +Is Lebanon on its way to recovery? After 15 years of civil war that left 150,000 people dead, Beirut has shaken off the rule of various militias and reunited under a legitimate Government and national army. A1 +Elderly citizens in the Soviet Union have taken over a vital family task: waiting in store lines and hauling shopping bags when there is some- thing to buy. "We are the best at this," an old woman said. A1 +South Korea held talks with Moscow that Korean officials said could lead to several billion dollars in trade, investment and aid for the Soviet Union in the next five years. A3 + Baker urges the Soviet Union to speed up economic changes A9 +Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn rejects Russian literary prize A10 +The Communist Party of Albania, which has held uncontested power for 46 years, endorsed the creation of independent political parties and shook up its own top eschelon. A3 +Hamburg Journal: A countess braves the ghosts of Prussia A4 +Factional violence in Natal Province, overshadowed by a recent wave of clashes in black townships near Johannesburg, is continuing, and many people fear the strife, fueled by the new clashes, will worsen. A7 +Many Bangladeshis fear civil strife after the abrupt resignation of President H. M. Ershad last week. As politicians struggle to fill the vacuum, the country appears headed toward economic and political turmoil. A15 +Colombian troops reach guerrillas' base in the Andes A12 + +NATIONAL A20-24, B9-13 +President Bush will seek a limit on the term of members of Congress, John Sununu said. Passage of such an amendment is unlikely, but Mr. Bush has thrown his support behind an idea that is popular among voters. A1 +Washington at Work: A loyal and powerful White House counsel B12 +A meeting of Republican governors concluded with governors saying that the party, still bruised from November's elections, had to address core economic and tax issues to avoid bigger problems in 1992. B9 +Judge limits Government's infiltration of religious groups A24 +Shuttle lands in good shape, but NASA says puzzles remain B12 +Banks are incorrectly billing people who bought their homes with adjustable-rate mortgages because of errors in calculating interest rates, a report says. Some are paying too much; others too little. A1 +F.D.I.C. will probably lose $4 billion this year D1 + A banking aide to Senator Cranston testified that she did not warn him against dealing closely with Charles Keating and that she considered his demands no different from those of other constituents. B10 +Insurers for small employers indicted for fraud A20 +Doctors are given millions by drug companies B13 +I.B.M. will build child-care centers at five locations near its offices and plants around the country. It joins an increasing number of corporations frustrated by the shortage of good child care for their employees. A20 +The report of a rape struck fear on the George Washington University campus. But the day after the story appeared in a student newspaper, the source of information about the attack said she had made it up. A21 +Collision in dense fog kills 15 and injures 51 in Tennessee A20 +Four die as balloon crashes in downtown Columbus B12 +Navajo Nation Journal: A gulf prayer is nearly silenced A20 + +REGIONAL B1-8 +John Gotti was arrested again on Federal racketeering charges. Law-enforcement officials have three times tried and failed to convict Mr. Gotti, who they say is the reputed boss of the Gambino family. A1 + The jury in the second jogger trial convicted Kevin Richardson, 16, of attempted murder and rape but convicted Kharey Wise, 18, only of sexual abuse and assault. A1 +A juror says Kharey Wise's "remorse" helped him B6 +Mel Miller and an aide were indicted on fraud charges that involved the buying and selling of co-ops in New York City. Mr. Miller, the Speaker of the State Assembly, said he intended to remain in his post. B3 +New York City must cut more jobs to help close a $250 million budget gap in the current fiscal year, the Dinkins administration said. As many as 10,000 jobs would be lost. B1 +The Daily News will keep publishing as long as it shows progress in overcoming the seven-week-old strike, itspublisher, James Hoge, said after a meeting of the board of The News's parent, the Tribune Company. B1 Employee unions say Cuomo is exploiting Daily News strike B8 +The strike by sanitation workers is the latest shock wave from New York City's decision to more than double the price it charges private haulers to dump trash at the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island. B1 +Man in the news: N.Y.U.'s new president, L. Jay Oliva B2 +Trumps get their divorce; next question is who gets what B3 +New construction at Newark Airport has been proposed by the Florio Administration. The projects, which would cost $1.7 billion, include a rail connection between the airport and Newark. B1 +Ruling in New Jersey on evidence of intoxication B3 +Neediest Cases B2 + +BUSINESS DIGEST D1 + +Education Page B14 +The U.S. Department of Education has decided to begin prohibiting colleges and universities that receive Federal funds from offering scholarships especially for members of minorities. A1 + +The Living Section +Food +Drinks for holiday tables C1 +No schmaltz? No way. C1 +Eating Well C3 +Microwave Cooking C4 +European-style spirits C6 +Living +Pay phones for the deaf C1 +Metropolitan Diary C2 +Store scuttles a dream C8 + + Arts/Entertainment +Checking in with Hunter Thompson C15 +Film: "Havana" C15 +"The Sheltering Sky" C15 +Music: The Pop Life C14 +Richard Goode in piano recital C16 +Word and Image: Ismail Kadare's "Broken April" C21 + +Sports +Basketball: Knicks win first for MacLeod D21 +Column: Vecsey on N.B.A. old- timers D21 +Football: Parcells heading back to work D21 +Hockey: Islanders edge Devils D21 + +Obituaries +William A. Owens, a folklorist, author and professor D18 +George Peter Stavropoulos, fashion designer D19 +Armand Hammer, entrepreneur D20 + +Editorials/Letters/Op-Ed +Editorials A22 +How to put space in its place +Budget cuts: real and right +Capitalist in the Kremlin +Topics: What Regan raised +Letters A22 +Flora Lewis: After five years A23 +Tom Wicker: Who's a partisan? A23 +Karel Von Wolferen: Why militarism still haunts Japan A23 +Monroe Price: Cityspire -- music at its peak A23 + +LOAD-DATE: December 12, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +443 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 12, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +How a Great Store Stole a Customer's Secret Treasure + +BYLINE: By JOAN COOK + +SECTION: Section C; Page 8; Column 3; Living Desk + +LENGTH: 712 words + +FOR months I have lived in a secret world, wedded to a Tiffany credit of $112 and change. Catalogue follows catalogue in the mail, and I savor the options each page presents, browsing among jewels, household accessories and other gewgaws, trying to decide on my secret, selfish Christmas gift. +The windfall is the aftermath of a visit by friends from abroad. In parting, they thoughtfully presented me with a stylish stamp box, unaware that I already had one that had belonged to my grandmother and that I treasure. Thus the return and the credit, which I assumed could only be reclaimed on the premises. + That assumption is crucial, as is the amount of the credit, which establishes boundaries on what might otherwise be a preposterous, larger-than-life fantasy like that of the elderly Englishwoman who went around the world visiting all the exotic places she had longed to see using credit cards for currency. By paying off one with another, she kept her own version of the pyramid scheme afloat until well into her 90's, when she died happy owing a bundle of uncollectible bills. +Each month a creamy white envelope reminds me of my obligation to spend. The bill reads reassuringly: "Your account indicates a credit balance. No remittance is necessary," a subtle way of telling you that the money is burdening the store. +I have toyed with the crystal champagne bucket with scroll handles, which at $50 permits me to add four champagne flutes at $48 for the dining room sideboard. On the other hand, a dinner party for six could be preceded by a holiday nip from the 12-ounce double old-fashioned glasses at $13 a pop. I know, I know, six glasses at $13 apiece comes to $78, so I should order eight. My dinner table only seats six comfortably. +Faced with this dazzling variety of choices, I considered having my ears pierced -- an idea I have entertained off and on over the last 20 years or so -- and filling the spaces with those rosy-white cultured pearls, the ones with posts of 14-karat gold. +A phone call scuttled that one. +Even with a little help from the piggy bank, cultured pearls were clearly beyond the confines of $112. +Paloma Picasso does a heart pin in sterling silver for $95, which, taking into account the 8.25 percent sales tax, would do it. Ditto the silver "Love and Kisses" brooch, also at $95. The problem is that I am partial to gold, which Ms. Picasso's designs also come in but with considerably higher price tags. +Alternately I lingered over the "swirl" ring in sterling silver with 18-karat gold accents for $100, or the "hook and eye" bracelet in the same combination at $110. But would the gold accent be enough to take the curse off the sterling silver? +I could impress my friends with the "Ornament With Bow" greeting cards engraved on ecru folders (a box of 25 cards and envelopes is $62), and still have enough left for the sterling silver diamond-textured retractable ball point purse pen at $32. On second thought, 25 cards wouldn't be enough for the Christmas list, and as for those friends in need of being impressed, if any there be, the quicker they are winnowed out, the better. +Each time I wandered through the pages, I was stopped by the 3 1/4-inch-high quartz desk clock in black nickel. The more I studied it, the more ideal it seemed for the empty spot left by the French enamel clock my mother gave me long ago and that I, in turn, passed on to my son and his wife when they fancied it. Moreover the desk clock was a Tiffany exclusive, a clincher if ever I saw one. +It was at that point that my eye fell on the back of the store's monthly missive, where the fine print lies. +Under the heading "credit balances," in small, neat type, the catalogue said: "Any balance will be refunded after six months unless used. For an immediate refund write us at the address listed in the 'send inquiries' section on the front of this bill." +Tiffany, how could you? A few, ill-considered words and my Christmas fantasy is forever dashed on the hard rocks of reality. How can I become the proud owner of an exclusive Tiffany timepiece when the family exchequer shows a raft of bills crying to be settled, ranging from the required-by-law chimney extension to a needed pump replacement? +Dear Santa Claus. . . . + +LOAD-DATE: December 12, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +444 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 13, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +JAKARTA JOURNAL; +Echoes From Past Rattle Suharto's 'New Order' + +BYLINE: By STEVEN ERLANGER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 4; Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 901 words + +DATELINE: JAKARTA, Indonesia + +They are getting to be old men now and remain a marginal elite. But their voices and views still count for something, like a small claim of conscience, and their calls for more democracy and respect for human rights in Indonesia have a wider echo than before. +From time to time now, as Indonesia experiments with more "openness" and the rules of censorship and self-censorship grow more vague, their names even appear in the press. + They are the members and associates of the Movement of the Petition of 50, some of the few open dissenters to the development of President Suharto's New Order. Most broke with Mr. Suharto 10 years ago, when they signed a Statement of Concern about autocratic and antidemocratic tendencies they felt were distorting the promise of his Government. +Their complaints were not allowed to be published, said Slamet Bratanata, one of their leaders and a former Minister of Mines. They could not get passports, their telephones were tapped and few would dare to do business with them. + +The Criticism Mounts + But many were crucial to the Indonesian revolution against Dutch rule, the establishment of an independent nation and the formation of Mr. Suharto's New Order. So like fallen angels, they were tolerated by the authorities, even patronized, since they never represented much of an active threat to the Government. And many turned to opposition only after they themselves had been outmaneuvered or had fallen from grace. +But 25 years after Mr. Suharto emerged from the chaos of a 1965 coup attempt against President Sukarno and the purging of the Indonesian Communist Party, when about half a million people were killed, criticism of his long period in power and of his family's wide business interests is becoming more widespread, especially among students and the military. Many would prefer Mr. Suharto to retire in 1993 at the end of his fifth term. +As a way of answering and co-opting some of that criticism, President Suharto has himself called for more openness and debate. The press is somewhat freer, and as a result the voices of these men, like Mr. Bratanata, former Gov. Ali Sadikin of Jakarta and two retired generals, A. H. Nasution and H. R. Dharsono, are being listened to with more care, and their call for Mr. Suharto to step down has not gone unnoticed. + They are not democrats, exactly, but harken back to the principles of the 1945 revolution they feel has been betrayed. + +'25 Years Is Too Long' + "After 1965-66, which was like our Hiroshima, the whole nation was paralyzed," Mr. Bratanata said in an interview. "We all felt we should relinquish some of our freedoms and liberties for stability, to build up the country. But 25 years is too long. And even if we agreed with all the policies of the Government, in order to preserve the achievements of the New Order, we wish there was more democracy and less stealing." +"I'm not for democracy as just a chance to talk or to have openness," Mr. Bratanata, 62 years old, said bluntly. "I'm for democracy as an effective control on the Government." +There is a "saturation point," with too many "abuses of office, nepotism and corruption," he said. "The real danger is not Suharto, but the example of Suharto, which permeates everywhere." +While his talk is unusually forceful in this deferential, hierarchical nation, he is admired by others who have suffered more. +General Dharsono, for instance, who was released from prison in September after serving more than five years for "subversion," said of Mr. Bratanata and the signers of the Petition of 50, "They have opened the eyes of those who don't want to know the real situation." + +Emotional Welcome by Students + Students lined up before dawn, some of them weeping, to greet the general, now 65, on his release. He was an ally of President Suharto against the Communists in 1965. But he has always favored some form of opposition, and is widely admired for having defended student demonstrators in Bandung in 1978, for which he was removed from a plush job. After a four-month trial in 1986, he was found guilty on charges that he had somehow helped incite Muslim rioting at Tanjung Priok in 1984. +While Indonesians watch to see what General Dharsono will do now, his former superior, General Nasution, once Defense Minister and army commander, has lost none of his own candor. +Now 72, he was a close but critical ally of President Sukarno in the revolution, favoring a professional, impartial army. He was one of the seven top generals marked for killing on the night of the coup attempt, Sept. 30, 1965, and was the only one to escape, jumping over his garden wall. But his 5-year-old daughter was shot and died a few days later. +The general quietly showed a visitor the frame of the doorway where the bullet stopped. "I often think that if I had talked to them, I would already be in my grave," he said. +"Our system is not open," he said. "It works behind the screens. It depends on circumstances, not constitutional procedures." +"For me, that is the biggest problem -- not the man Suharto, but the political system, which is not yet a constitutional one." +But however dim the future, he said, "change is coming, and no one can stop it." And where will that leave the opposition? General Nasution looked up, surprised. "I'm not in the opposition," he said. "I'm a general committed to the Constitution." + +LOAD-DATE: December 13, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Students wearing T-shirts honoring retired Gen. H. R. Dharsono joined others who lined up in Jakarta to greet him in September as he was released from prison after serving more than five years for "subversion." (Steven Erlanger/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +445 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 13, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Mobile Homes? Think Of Them as Beach Houses + +BYLINE: By JO GIESE, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section C; Page 1; Column 1; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 1475 words + +DATELINE: MALIBU, Calif., Dec. 12 + +From their wraparound redwood deck, Sally and Ron Zamarin have a clear view of the white water at Zuma Beach directly below, the dolphins out in the Pacific and even the West Channel Islands. Nestled in a private, gated 93-acre community, the Zamarins' new home is a cocoon of seafoam green with three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a walk-in wine cellar, skylights and Mexican tile floors. +In Malibu, it might be just another beach house, except that it happens to be a triple-wide mobile home, model year 1970. + A year ago the Zamarins paid $250,000 for their mobile home in the Point Dume Club, a mobile-home park in the lap of Malibu luxury. It was the highest price ever paid at the park, said Bill Wood, the park's manager. The Zamarins said they were paying even more than that to renovate it. +Some of the 297 homes of this quiet, well-manicured community, where the black asphalt is so smooth it would make a perfect roller-skating surface (if roller-skating were allowed), look like the mobile homes in any other trailer park. But many do not, sometimes because of elaborate renovations, sometimes because the carport houses a Mercedes, a Maserati or a Rolls-Royce. +"This place is the best-kept secret in town," said Jim Baltutis. He has what he calls a "killer" view of the Santa Monica Mountains from the second-story deck of his mobile home, which, as a single-wide unit (12 feet wide by 60 feet long) is one of the park's smallest. +Mr. Baltutis, who is 24 years old and manages a rock band, is part of an influx of young people to Point Dume (pronounced du-MAY) in the last two years. Before then, they would not have looked twice at the 20-year-old park, since it was limited to people 45 years of age and older and considered a retirement community. Things changed in March 1989 when the park opened its doors to people of all ages to avoid meeting new, more stringent Federal regulations on limiting mobile-home parks to older adults. +Partly as a result, mobile homes that would sell for $30,000 to $60,000 elsewhere go for $100,000 to $250,000 here, said Mr. Wood, whose office in the clubhouse looks out on an immaculately landscaped pool and Jacuzzi. +In addition to the cost of the mobile home, residents lease the ground it rests on. The fee -- $650 to $1,300 a month -- is based on whether the site has a view of the Santa Monica Mountains or the Pacific Ocean. These ground-rent leases run five years. +The Point Dume Club may be the ultimate expression of the old real-estate adage, "location, location, location." +"A mobile home is a mobile home whether it's in Victorville or Redwood City," said Mr. Wood, who has worked in mobile-home parks in less glamorous places. "But the fact that you're in Malibu, no question about it, this is the upper-class mobile home park in California." +In this celebrity-studded area, entertainers like Johnny Carson and Martin Sheen have multimillion-dollar estates, condominiums start at $195,000 and the smallest house goes for $500,000. +The Point Dume Club, on the other hand, allows Californians to live near the beach in Malibu for much, much less, said Jack Evans, who walks his Lhasa apso, Buddy, near the thick rows of lush ferns that line the driveway of the double-wide unit that he shares with his wife, Deirdre. +Upscale mobile home parks appear to be peculiar to California. +"Treasure Island in South Laguna Beach is the one other oceanfront mobile-home park more costly than the Point Dume Club, where rents go up to $2,500 a month," said William T. Dawson, a mobile-home-park developer based in California. "I know of no other places in the United States where this condition exists. It's an aberration here in California. +"For anyone to be able to enjoy an oceanfront residence for under a million dollars, that's a bargain," Mr. Dawson added. +Like the Evanses, the Zamarins have long wanted to live near the beach. The couple, who are in their mid-50's, decided to move after their four children left home. +Although their 2,700-square-foot mobile home is the largest unit at the Point Dume Club, it would easily fit on the tennis court of the property in Encino they recently sold, said Mrs. Zamarin. She admitted that she probably cares too much about what other people think and still chokes on the term "mobile home park"; she prefers to say that she lives in a beach house. +But living in a mobile-home park does not appear to bother her relatives. Last year, after the Zamarins bought their mobile home, which has an enormous magnolia tree out front, Mr. Zamarin's sister, Peggy Khoury, and her husband, Joseph, also bought in the park. They were also joined by the sisters' recently widowed mother, Margaret Zamarin, whose triple-wide unit was big enough to seat 26 relatives and friends for Thanksgiving dinner last month. +Just up the hill and around the bend from the Zamarins the other day, painters were recently brushing a final coat of white paint on the thick stucco walls in Susan Cotton's mobile home. +Ms. Cotton, a former actress who now designs homes (this is her first mobile one, however), has spent close to $200,000 turning a 1972 24-foot-wide unit into a 1,800-square-foot Cape Cod cottage, making her home a little larger than the average home in the park, which is about 1,300 square feet. +Ms. Cotton and her contractor, Tim Lankford, have rounded corners and plastered the walls, and added a white Gaggenau stove and a Sub-zero refrigerator. Although Ms. Cotton's friends with big houses in Beverly Hills think her mobile home is quaint, she intends to make this her permanent residence. +"It's safe and friendly," she said. "It has the feeling of a little community." +For Mark and Josephine Madison, who have a 3-year-old daughter, the appeal of the park was less crime and less congestion than they faced in their old neighborhood in North Hollywood. +Last summer, the Madisons bought their first home, a double-wide fixer-upper for $120,000. They have spent the last six months remodeling the mobile home, which was completely gutted, and have yet to move in. Mr. Madison, who is 6 feet 2 inches tall, recently stood in the empty space where the shower will be, demonstrating that they need a bigger shower stall or he will hit his elbows on the glass. +One thing that disturbs some residents is the size of ground-rent increases. "When we moved in we paid $160 a month rent," said Paul Pierce, 80; he and his wife, Mary, were the first residents when the park opened in 1969. "Ours is now up to $1,000." +As he flipped through a scrapbook of clippings from the days when he was one of Los Angeles's first helicopter traffic reporters, he noted that "a lot of wealthy people are moving in and some old-timers are having to move out." About half of the mobile homes are occupied by people who moved in before the Point Dume Club lifted its age requirement. +Mr. Evans, who said he wished he owned his home site, asserted that when his rent, now $750, reaches $1,000, he will consider leaving. But Mr. Evans, who has lived at the park for 10 years, said it would be hard to give up the swimming pool, which is kept at 80 degrees year-round, and the small-town feeling of the pancake (and Bloody Mary) breakfasts that are held a few times a year. +While his double-wide unit has more than doubled in value from the $72,000 it cost 10 years ago, he said that other types of property had shown greater appreciation. For example, the ocean-view condominiums just outside the park gates were $150,000 10 years ago and now cost more than $500,000. +There have always been some people who used their mobile home in the park as a second house at the beach. Carl Scott, a senior vice president of artist relations at Warner Brothers Records who works with singers like Madonna, Prince, and K. D. Lang, said that the unit he bought for $71,000 two years ago meant the only way he could afford a getaway at the beach. His primary residence in Pasadena is a carriage house on what was once Gen. George S. Patton's estate. +Mr. Scott has spent about $20,000 to upgrade his mobile home. He added a wraparound deck, large windows for more striking views of the ocean, white Berber carpet and drywall where there once was vinyl. "It's very open, like being in a loft," he said. +In the hope of trading up, Mr. Scott has just put his mobile home on the market for $225,000, more than three times what he paid for it. He intends to take the profits and buy a duplex on the beach below. +"I'm going to miss the place a lot," Mr. Scott said. "I really love it, except in a storm or earthquake. Then it feels like you're in a can. In a recent small earthquake, it rattled, banged, squeaked, rumbled. Then you knew you were in a mobile home." +"But," he added quickly, "I never called it a mobile home. I always called it a cottage." + +LOAD-DATE: December 13, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Palm trees and elaborately renovated mobile homes flank the main street of the Point Dume Club in Malibu. (Bart Bartholomew for The New York Times) (pg. C1); Residents of the Point Dume Club have views of the Pacific Ocean or the Santa Monica Mountains; With landscaping and extensive renovations -- inside and out -- some residences no longer resemble mobile homes; Susan Cotton has spent about $200,000 turning her 1972 double-wide mobile home into a Cape Cod cottage.; Mark and Josephine Madison, with their daughter, Samantha, on the deck of their double-wide fixer-upper; Sally Zamarin has added kitchen cabinets with glass doors in her triple-wide mobile home, the park's largest unit. (pg. C10) (Photographs by Bart Bartholomew for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +446 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 16, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +For Many, Neediest Cases Fund Is a Chance to Hope Again; +Finding Quiet Home for a Broken Heart + +BYLINE: By DANIELLE M. DELINCE + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 2; Page 82; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 912 words + +Like many emigrants who flee their homelands in search of economic, political and religious freedom in the United States, Andres D. left the Dominican Republic 27 years ago for greater opportunities. +He settled in the Bronx, then later moved to Staten Island. For many years he worked as a welder and a janitor at an apartment building in the Bronx, providing for his wife, Eduarda, and their four children. He saw his children through high school and college: One is now an engineer, one is a minister, another is a bank manager and the fourth is an accountant for the city. Family and faith were the underpinnings of his life. + But in January, Eduarda died after a long illness and -- after 60 years of marriage -- Andres found himself lonely and depressed. He moved in with a daughter who lives in the Bronx with her husband and adult sons. + +'I Did Not Know What to Do' + The crowded house, with loud merengue, jazz and rock music constantly blaring, proved to be too unsettling for 88-year-old Andres, who had become accustomed to solitude in his former home. He stopped eating and "would not touch anything in the refrigerator," his daughter, Rosa, the bank manager, said in a recent interview. +"My dad really needed to be with people of his age," she added. "He was very attached to his memories and I did not know what to do." +Rosa sought help from her employer, who knew about a housing program for the elderly that was operated by the Community Service Society, the nonprofit agency that has been an advocate for New York City's poor since 1847. It is one of seven charities that receive contributions from The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. +Through its Enriched Housing Program, which has been in operation since 1979, the society provides housing and housekeeping assistance for people over 65 who -- like Andres -- are capable of living on their own. +The housing program is but one of many projects of the society, which shifted its focus in the early 1980's to address issues of homelessness, health and education as services declined and the demands for them became greater. +But "the most important element of the society's work is its academic approach to the basic problems of the poor," said Dwight Langhum, the society's director of special projects, + +Soup Kitchens and Reading Help + It publishes periodic reports on conditions that affect the poor and proposes solutions to government and private social service agencies. It also promotes participation in elections and in the last two years has registered some 135,000 voters. +Through its Retired Senior Volunteer Program, some 10,000 volunteers work in soup kitchens, teach adults to read, and assist in museums, libraries and schools. +The Society, which has an operating budget of $14 million, received $1.7 million from the Neediest Cases Fund's last campaign. +Five months ago, Andres became one of its thousands of beneficiaries when he was placed in a one-bedroom apartment in the Randall-Balcom housing project in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx. Designed for the elderly, the three adjoining red-brick buildings are home to several hundred men and women who find comfort in helping each other. Andres is one of 10 residents who are being assisted through the Society's housing program. +Each day about 9 A.M. a social worker, Idesia Bastos, calls to check on him. And two or three times a week a housekeeper does his shopping, making sure he has at least a three-day supply of food. She also cleans the apartment and does the laundry. Just as importantly, though, Mrs. Bastos and the housekeeper provide a bit of companionship. + +'They Take Good Care of Me' + "This is a cheaper and more pleasant alternative to a nursing home," Mrs. Bastos said. +Mrs. Bastos tries to make the residents' apartments as homey as possible -- she bought white lace curtains for Andres's living room and bedroom -- and she tries to make their holidays brighter. She has promised Christmas presents for Andres and his neighbors. +"They take good care of me," he said through an interpreter. He even acknowledged that he had gained a few pounds. +Andres, a shy, private man, lives in his apartment surrounded by symbols of his faith -- a blue-and-white wall-hanging in his bedroom proclaims "Mi Corazon Pertenece A Cristo" (My heart belongs to God) -- and photographs of his family, including his nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. But most of all, there are memories of his beloved Eduarda. +He brightens as he talks of their 60 years together and reverently looks at a small black-and-white photograph of them that was taken on their 25th wedding anniversary. +In his bedroom is a wooden plaque given to him and Eduarda by their children for their 50th wedding anniversary 10 years ago. +A tidy man, Andres gets up every morning about 7, makes his bed, prepares his breakfast, watches the news on television and waits for his daily calls. +At midday he goes to an adjacent building to have lunch with the other residents. As the only man in a crowd of ladies, Andres gets a lot of attention. But he does not say much because he speaks very little English and, he said, "I am embarrassed by my accent." +Andres often walks to a neighborhood grocery store for milk or bread and takes frequent walks in a nearby park. +In many ways Andres seems very content with his current life. Still, Mrs. Bastos said, she often finds him weeping silently. + +LOAD-DATE: December 17, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +447 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 16, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Shopping Across the Russia-Estonia Border + +BYLINE: By HENRY KAMM, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1; Page 14; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 664 words + +DATELINE: NARVA, Estonia, Dec. 9 + +The bridge across the Narva River, guarded by medieval fortresses built by Estonia on this bank and by the czars on the other, links this industrial town to its twin of Ivangorod and marks the border between Estonia and Russia. +It is the bond also between this town of shortages and high prices and its far poorer Russian neighbor, where store shelves are virtually bare. + A 37-year-old metalworker, his fur cap pulled deep over his face against a freezing rain outside, turned from the counter of Ivangorod's biggest food store with nothing but a chunk of margarine and a bag of colored candy in his shopping basket. He prepared to continue his quest for food wherever he could find it. +"I do the shopping, because when my wife does it she gets too upset and nervous," he said. +He said he had obtained his meager purchases on his November ration coupons, which the saleswoman had clipped off his card after much discussion. "Because in November there wasn't even this to be had," the man said, nodding toward his nearly empty basket.Old people are even worse off, he said, because their pensions make them dependent on what they can buy at the low-priced state stores in the Russian federation without recourse to the better-supplied Estonian stores. +The man said he would be happy to live in Estonia, where he works, if that republic achieves its goal of independence. "But maybe Russia will get independence, too," he added. "Maybe it will even have a revolution." +Pointing again at his basket, he said, "I don't know how Gorbachev lives, but I know our Communists here don't live like this." +The manager at the store's single checkout counter, asked whether she would take time to talk about the troubles of her work, replied: "What problem? We have so many." +Shoppers go back and forth across the bridge, she said, although Estonia in October proclaimed an "economic frontier" around its territory to prevent a drain on its resources. +Much more is available on the Estonian side, but prices here have tripled since October. This has caused residents from here to shop for food in Ivangorod to save a ruble or two. +This morning what they found in the Russian town were dusty jars of pickles, tiny brown-flecked apples, small turnips and black radishes that went soft waiting for customers, as well as small, fresh herrings. Maybe bigger fish have stopped swimming in the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea afew miles away, the manager said. +Of course she would like to live in Estonia if it regains its independence, the woman said, "but the Estonians don't like us Russians." However accurate this generalization may be in the rest of Estonia, it applies fully in this northeastern region, where Russians have almost completely supplanted the original population. +In this grievously polluted region -- where large deposits of oil shale are mined and burned to supply electricity or are converted into fertilizer, solvents and other chemicals -- masses of Russian workers were settled after World War II, when Moscow re-established its 1940 annexation of Estonia. +This was done for exclusively demographic reasons, to Russify a strategic region, said Prof. Endel Lipmaa, a nuclear physicist and chemist, who is alsoMinister in the non-Communist government that is negotiating with Moscow to achieve Estonia's independence. He said the chemical industry was not only severely polluting but also uneconomic, costing more than it produces. +In the republic as a whole, Estonians outnumber Russians by about 60 to 40 percent of the population of 1.6 million, but this area is more than 90 percent Russian. +As a result of this imbalance, the Russian-controlled Narva municipal administration is ignoring the "economic frontier" and does not interfere with cross-border traffic. +"Of course they come over here to shop," said a Russian saleswoman in Narva's biggest food store. "What does it matter if prices are higher? At least here you can buy something." + +LOAD-DATE: December 17, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +448 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 17, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Standing Alone, With Help From Neediest Cases Fund + +BYLINE: By JONATHAN RABINOVITZ + +SECTION: Section B; Page 11; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 587 words + +Marion B. said yesterday morning that her multiple sclerosis was no big deal and that she could take care of herself -- "just fine, thank you" -- on her own. +"I can't jump up and down the steps," said the 78-year-old woman, who did not want to give her last name. "But I don't have constant pain. My hands work fine. It's my feet that don't work. Actually they work, but they work sporadically. + "It's this walker I have," she added. "I hate to shlep it around." +She lay on her king-size bed, dressed in gray slacks, pink socks, a striped T-shirt, moccasins and a black tam-o'-shanter with a red pompon. Her walker stood a few feet away, and a swimsuit and bathing cap were draped over it. + +Swims and Plays Piano + Although Marion has trouble walking, she manages to go swimming three days a week in a special program for the elderly and disabled. There is a piano in her living room that she said she plays "badly." And her one-room apartment in Larchmont, N.Y., is decorated with rugs, pillows and blankets that she has woven and sewn herself. +For 16 years, since she was divorced, Marion, a retired interior decorator, has lived alone, and she cherishes her home. Despite the degenerative disease that has made it hard for her to talk and caused numbness in her feet, she has continued to keep her own place. But in recent years -- since breaking her hip in 1986 -- it has become difficult for her to maintain her independence. +Through the help of the Westchester Jewish Community Services, with money from The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, Marion has been able to continue to live by herself. Meals are delivered to her daily. A homemaker visits regularly to help her bathe and take care of other personal needs. And a caseworker has made sure that she receives health and social services benefits that allow her to keep the apartment. +Marion is one of hundreds of people -- elderly and young -- who have received aid from the Neediest Cases. The 79th annual appeal began last month, and all the proceeds go to seven charities. The New York Times pays for the overhead of the campaign. +For Marion, the assistance she received from the Westchester Jewish Community Services, an agency of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, has probably kept her from having to move to a nursing home. + +Each Step a Struggle + Marion said in an interview yesterday that she can still get around on her own. But when she got up to walk, each step was a struggle. A short trip to the bathroom took her several minutes. Her back was hunched as she walked. She had to use both arms to lean against a bedside table, a wall and a doorknob to support herself. Afterward, she collapsed onto the bed. +Marion said that she fell last week and bruised her back, but that it was not serious. She said her doctor told her that she was still "healthy as a horse" and that she should not let one fall stop her. +"The best bet is for me to keep moving myself," she said. "I don't want my muscles to atrophy, so I'm going to keep walking until I die." +The Westchester agency has been a source of support, she said, but ultimately she has made it on her own. +She stuttered slightly as she summed up her situation: "They were always present when I needed them. But the one who makes the difference is yourself. You have to get up and move." + +Previously recorded .... $1,632,329.87 +Recorded yesterday ...........27,154.55 + +Total ....................$1,659,484.42 + +LOAD-DATE: December 17, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +449 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 18, 1990, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Wide Errors Found In Drug Histories + +BYLINE: By The Associated Press + +SECTION: Section C; Page 2; Column 5; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 593 words + +HOSPITAL records erred 60 percent of the time in listing important medications that patients older than 65 were taking when admitted, raising a risk of serious treatment errors, a study has found. +Such recording mistakes mean patients may not get drugs they need in the hospital, or they may get unneeded drugs that cause harmful side effects, said the researcher, Dr. Mark Beers of the University of California at Los Angeles. + The study appears in the November issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. +The study involved 122 randomly chosen patients at two hospitals. Their average age was 77, and all were older than 65. + +Over-the-Counter Drugs + At least one error occurred in 60 percent of records when analysis was restricted to medications excluding over-the-counter drugs, cold medicines and medications applied on the skin, Dr. Beers said. Three or more errors occurred in 18 percent of the records. +When the other drugs were included, 83 percent of records contained at least one error, the study found. +Dr. Beers recommended that people of any age carry an updated list of current medications, including the name of each drug, the dosage strength and how often they take it. +He also recommended that patients older than 65 be asked a second time about their current medication use a day or so after admission, by a nurse or pharmacist who can devote 15 or 20 minutes to a thorough interview. + +Diabetes Drug Omitted + Dr. Beers cited the case of a patient whose records failed to note she was taking an oral diabetes medication. He said the drug was not continued in the hospital until he pointed out the error. +Another patient was given a blood-thinning drug because his record said he was on the medication, when in fact the treatment had been stopped months before, Dr. Beers said. The error created a needless risk of bleeding, he said. +"We found some really clinically very important problems here" that could lead to complications, prolonged hospital stays and perhaps even death, he said. +"I expected to find some errors, but the number of people involved and the quantity of errors and the kinds of drugs involved were much greater, much more serious than I had speculated," Dr. Beers said. +The 60 percent error rate is high enough that "I think every patient and every doctor would agree that's scary," commented Dr. Jerry Avorn of Harvard University Medical School, an authority on medication use by the elderly. +While most such mistakes will not cause any trouble, the high frequency means "it's just a matter of time and the law of probability that some unpleasant clinical outcome is going to occur," he said. + Part of the problem is that "physicians are not as preoccupied as we should be with taking a medication history," Dr. Avorn said. Another factor is that sick or injured patients are often unable to give a comprehensive list of their medications, both doctors said. + +Older People Take More Drugs + The study focused on older people because they tend to use more medications than younger people, to change prescriptions more frequently and to be more vulnerable to side effects, Dr. Beers said. +Researchers checked records written by doctors at the time of admission, and then carefully interviewed the patients within two days of admission to get their own list of medications for comparison. +For "important" medications, records for 52 percent of all patients omitted at least one drug and records for 22 percent listed a drug that the patient was not actually taking. + +LOAD-DATE: December 18, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +450 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 19, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Review/Dance; +The Tap Fraternity Honors a Master + +BYLINE: By ANNA KISSELGOFF + +SECTION: Section C; Page 16; Column 4; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 804 words + +Some of the best dancing in the world nowadays comes from American tap-dancers; young and old, they proved the point fittingly in an extraordinary concert on Monday night that was a tribute to one of their own. +Steve Condos, who died at the age of 71 on Sept. 16 immediately after performing at the International Dance Biennial in Lyons, France, was, many recalled at the Village Gate, a master among masters of the form. His thoroughly individual style kept him, unlike most tap artists, firmly rooted in place while he poured out a virtuosic torrent of ultraclear sound. It was percussion whose rhythmic complexity was impossible to imitate, as Gregory Hines remarked ruefully before his own performance in the Gate's packed basement cafe. + A few minutes later, Mr. Hines invited the teen-age Savion Glover up to the tiny stage for a traditional challenge dance. To see these two contemporary stylists, whose star projection has contributed to tap's new popularity, engage in a genuine dialogue is to see the form go forward. Slyly trying to trip each other up by inserting an extra rhythmic phrase, each going one better with a thundering outburst or throwing in a novelty or two, both raced finally to the finish. Playing senior citizen, Mr. Hines bit the dust, miming collapse and a cramp in his leg -- and got up to give his nonchalant opponent a bear hug. +Nobody lost, of course. The special quality of tap, which has been staging a slow comeback for 20 years, is the fraternal feeling among its performers, which others in the dance world have lost. +It was no surprise that this gathering, presided over by Lorraine Condos, Mr. Condos's wife, and Charles (Honi) Coles, was marked by a special warmth and that Mr. Condos's own generosity as a teacher and human being was constantly recalled. His versatility was remembered by jazz musicians with whom he collaborated as a drummer, and his film work was recalled with a clip from "Bella," in which he acted with Sally de Mey, who was also present. +The concert, which started the Steve Condos Scholarship and Emergency Fund, brought together a remarkable range of artists, from veteran hoofers like Chuck Green, whose light, skimming subtle footwork is as astonishing as ever, to the latest of young sensations, Marshall Davis Jr., a 14-year-old from Florida who danced with an unusual blend of live-wire energy and suavity. +Anita Feldman then danced on an amplified platform, dodging the long drumsticks of Gary Schall for an exercise in two-voiced percussion. Buster Brown accented his oldtime wide-ranging bent-knee bravura with scurries and stamps. Ira Bernstein, a definite innovator, threw clog-dance steps into his variety-packed phrases, which began with an amble and whipped into a jiving finish. +Dianne Walker's second solo was especially eloquent. "I miss Steve; I loved him," she said before tapping lightly into a flowing rivulet of sound. It was a composition of whole cloth, with the artist submerging herself in what she wanted to say and emerging all the more expressive for it. +LaVaughn Robinson and Germaine Ingram's fast unison work has to be seen to be believed. Mr. Coles's sophisticated banter introduced a change of pace with Jackie Paris, whose scat singing glowed with the hot intensity of a bygone era. +Mrs. Condos then presented film clips of Mr. Condos. A contemporary music video showed his performing recently with the Rager pop group, which played onstage (Chad Rager, Bob Murnahan, Doug Hall, Tim Davis). The Jim Roberts Trio collaborated -- for that is the word when improvisation is involved -- with the dancers. +The novelty act was certainly a long-haired saxophone player from Boston named Shoe Horn, who has enough breath to tap at the same time and later patter through a "rap tap." Jay Corre, an old friend of Mr. Condos, was content to prove himself as the fine saxophonist he is. +Lon Chaney, another veteran whose massive build belies the lightness of his feet, gave his all before Mr. Green came on with a baseball jacket that said, "Explore, Challenge the Frontier." Right. Attempts in that direction came from Lynn Dally, with a modern-dance tinge, and from Brenda Bufalino, in a snake-hipped contemporary style, and her American Tap Dance Orchestra, vibrant and elegant in white tie and tails (Barbara Duffy, Neil Applebaum, Robin Tribble, Margaret Morrison, Tony Waag). +Sarah Petronio danced with her daughter, Lila, before Jimmy Slyde and David Gilmore burst on the stage with contrasting but equally inventive fireworks. +Mrs. Condos and Mr. Coles called for a communal shim sham, in which the performers were joined by some members of the audience, including the 76-year-old Frankie Manning, the champion swing dancer. Mr. Condos and his artistry could not have been better celebrated. + +LOAD-DATE: December 19, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +451 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 21, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +U.S. Acts to Force Private Insurers To Pay on Claims Before Medicare + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1415 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 + +In an effort to shift Federal costs to private health insurers, the Bush Administration is proposing new measures to compel Medicare beneficiaries to file claims with any private insurers before the Government pays anything for services provided by doctors or hospitals. +That is what they are supposed to do under current law. But in practice, as a result of either fraud or error, Medicare pays many claims that have already been paid by private insurers or should have been. Several million of the 30 million elderly people enrolled in Medicare are also employed and have private health insurance through their employers. + To guarantee that people with both Medicare and private health insurance use the private coverage first, the Office of Management and Budget wants to create a giant computer clearinghouse with information on the health insurance coverage of all Americans. Before paying claims for Medicare, Medicaid or veterans' health benefits, the Government would check the computer to see if a person had private health insurance to cover any of the cost. + +Projection of Annual Savings + The proposal, intended to save $600 million to $1 billion a year, is one of many approved by the budget office this week for inclusion in President Bush's 1992 budget, to be proposed to Congress in early February. +Confidential budget documents show that the budget office, headed by Richard G. Darman, is proposing a wide range of cutbacks and savings in Medicare and Medicaid beyond those recently approved by Congress in a five-year deficit-reduction plan. The proposals are estimated to save $2.9 billion in 1992 and $19.6 billion over five years. There is no indication of how Mr. Bush would use the savings. +Under current law, Medicare is not supposed to pay for an item or service if payment "has been or could be made" under an employer's group health plan, under workers' compensation or under an auto insurance policy. +Medicare claim forms ask patients if they have private health insurance. Patients, doctors and hospitals are supposed to file claims first with private insurers, using Medicare as a secondary source to help pay medical bills not covered by an employer's health plan. +In practice, however, patients often fail to disclose their private insurance, so Medicare erroneously pays some claims already paid by private insurers or it pays claims that should be paid by private insurers and then never collects reimbursements. Under the new plan, the Government would save what the private insurers pay. +Under Federal law, employers with 20 or more employees must offer workers and their spouses 65 years old and over the same health insurance benefits offered to younger workers and spouses. So private insurers could not simply refuse to insure elderly workers if the Government established the clearinghouse. +The proposal would not affect private health insurance sold as a supplement to Medicare. Such Medigap policies pay for goods and services not covered by Medicare. +Insurers say they often have no clear idea of who is covered under a large group insurance plan until claims are filed. Some insurers warn that they would have to increase premiums generally if they are forced by the Government to absorb additional costs for elderly people enrolled in Medicare. But the Republican staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a report in July describing "instances of fraud and abuse," where insurers knowingly evaded their responsibility to pay medical bills of older workers enrolled in Medicare. In discussing fraud, investigators have mainly focused on the private insurers rather than the beneficiaries. + +Erosion of Original Promise Seen + The requirements that private insurers pay claims before Medicare have been adopted piecemeal over the last decade. Carl J. Schramm, president of the Health Insurance Association of America, which represents commercial insurance companies, denounced the trend as "a profound and fundamental erosion of Medicare's original promise, made in 1965, to cover the health-care costs of the aged." +Alan K. Richards, assistant Washington counsel for the association, said of the latest proposal: "It's immensely difficult to keep up to date on the health insurance status of employees and their dependents. I don't think the Government comprehends how difficult it would be to set up and operate a clearinghouse like this. It would be very convenient for the Government to have such information, but it would impose an unbelievable burden on private insurance companies and employers." +The latest proposal reflects the fact that people have been delaying retirement beyond the age of 65 and their numbers are expected to increase in the 1990's. Such people can qualify for Medicare even if their Social Security benefits are reduced or eliminated because of their earnings. +Under the budget office proposal, employers would be required to report information on the health insurance coverage of employees and their dependents as part of the W-2 form filed annually with the Government. +"Failure to report these data would carry the same liabilities as failing to report tax information," says the official description of the proposed "Clearinghouse on Third-Party Liability." The penalty for failing to file tax information ranges from $15 to $50 for each W-2 form, with a maximum of $250,000 for one employer. + +Billing by Clearinghouse + The President's budget includes $5 million to establish the insurance clearinghouse. The budget office said "the clearinghouse will be located centrally" in the Department of Health and Human Services. But it would bill private insurers for health care provided, under other Federal programs, to military personnel, veterans, Civil Service employees and American Indians. +In September, Senator William V. Roth Jr., Republican of Delaware, proposed creation of a Federal data bank like the one now envisioned by the White House. Gail R. Wilensky, head of the Federal Health Care Financing Administration, which runs Medicare and Medicaid, said she supported the idea. +The budget office is also proposing $10 billion of cuts over five years in Medicare payments to teaching hospitals. That proposal is sure to anger Representative Dan Rostenkowski, who presides over the Medicare budget as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Mr. Rostenkowski, an Illinois Democrat, has been a strong supporter of teaching hospitals and sits on the board of one, Mercy Hospital and Medical Center, run by the Sisters of Mercy in Chicago. +The budget documents show vividly how the Office of Management and Budget now dominates the formulation of domestic policy in the executive branch of the Government. They also show that lawmakers who thought they would have a respite from budget battles over Medicare and Medicaid were profoundly mistaken. + +Other Budget Proposals + These are some of the other proposals from the budget office: +*Hospitals and nursing homes would be required to pay "user fees" to cover the cost of annual inspections for compliance with Federal health and safety standards. +*Doctors would be charged a $1 fee for each Medicare claim filed on paper. The purpose is to encourage doctors to file claims electronically, by computer. +*There would be an across-the-board cut of 5 percent in Medicare payments to physicians under a new fee schedule. This would save $4.8 billion over five years. +The budget office said the insurance clearinghouse would hire private collection agencies to "recover amounts due the U.S. Government on a contingency fee basis." The collection agencies would try to collect money from private insurers and, in some instances, from employers. +Insurance executives said they doubted that the Government could manage the clearinghouse with any degree of efficiency. +Philip Briggs, vice chairman of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, said that private insurers were willing to pay the medical bills of people covered by their policies. But he said he did not know if a national clearinghouse was feasible. +Under current law, Medicare pays health-care costs of elderly workers only to the extent they are not covered by the employer's health plan. Medicare is the primary health insurer for retirees still covered by their employers. But if a retiree has a working spouse, the retiree must use the spouse's private health insurance before filing claims with Medicare. + +LOAD-DATE: December 21, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +452 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 23, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Tales Told by a Monopod + +BYLINE: By Hilma Wolitzer; Hilma Wolitzer's most recent novels are "Silver" and "In the Palomar Arms." + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 6; Column 1; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 953 words + + +HUNTING THE WILD PINEAPPLE +By Thea Astley. +175 pp. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. $19.95. + THE prolific Australian novelist Thea Astley employs the device of a sole narrator for this arresting collection of short fiction. He's an outspoken one-legged ironist, a middle-aged man named Leverson who refers to himself as a "monopod self-pitier" and a "people-freak." But it is really the verdant landscape of Queensland and Ms. Astley's own quirky vision that link and inform the diverse stories in "Hunting the Wild Pineapple." +Not that Leverson intrudes. The opening story, "North: Some Compass Readings: Eden," reveals the wry irreverence that colors the entire volume. "My parents," he tells us, "were a pair of sad marital misfits bound together by the tragedy of me." Leverson won't be conned by false sentiment, and when he meets a young woman on a train he resists her dogged proselyt izing with typical candor and black wit. When she insists, "Jesus wants you," he answers, without hesitation, "Not with my overdraft." And when she dismisses the fact of his amputated leg (lost "mundanely" in a car accident) by assuring him that he'll be whole again in the next life, he cries: "You mean I'll get it back? But it won't fit!" He finally succeeds in offending her, but never the reader. +There's compassion at work in these stories, too, but it's compassion with a decided edge. One both pities and disdains the beleaguered mother in "Write Me, Son, Write Me," who says to her promiscuous daughter: "Love isn't something you toss around like garbage. Love, love hurts." In this collection, mothers, for the most part, fail profoundly in their maternal striving. Leverson's own, for instance, resorts to the pseudo sciences to help change his luck, and she craves his worldly success more for her gratification than for his. Another, elderly mother, who makes a memorable cameo appearance in "A Man Who Is Tired of Swiper's Creek Is Tired of Life," is abandoned by her six grown children, who send her to a remote home for the aged. But when Leverson presses her for the details of the past that have led her to this sorry fate, they seem to have vanished in the extremity of the moment. +Actually, it's not just mothers but women in general who don't fare very well in Thea Astley's dark assessment of the world. In "A Northern Belle" -- a tougher, Australian variation of "Driving Miss Daisy" -- a young girl named Clarice is told by her mother that she "was once attacked by a sexually maddened blackfellow," which means that Clarice must keep all men at a distance. Suppressing her natural curiosity and desire, Clarice preserves her sexual self until she's no longer in demand. Eventually, she's reduced to complete social isolation and becomes dependent upon the considerable kindness of an elderly black gardener. In "Ladies Need Only Apply," the will of another fiercely independent woman is finally crushed by loneliness and carnal need. And at the end of "The Curate Breaker," one of the most powerful stories in the collection, the curate's wife is utterly humiliated by her husband for the crime of knocking on his office door and interrupting "the work of God." +But the lives of Ms. Astley's men aren't exactly sunny, either. As evidence, there's Leverson's sustained cynicism, and the insanely bitter conflict between the Roman Catholic priest and the Anglican canon in "The Curate Breaker." Like her women, Ms. Astley's men are all too susceptible to "the gobbledy-gook of sad little human rivalries setting flesh aquake." +When Leverson confides, in the title story, "I'm interested in the violence of quick friendships," he might well be describing the startling impact of these stories. I can't help thinking that Flannery O'Connor would have liked them, with their skewed language, oddball characters and deadly humor. They may not be as shapely or as redemptive as hers, but they're strongly regional and, in their own way, quite spiritual. +In the final story, Leverson says: "Birth, marriage, death, re-birth. They're the only neat endings, traditional culminations for living -- for books, even -- and what bogus back-watering punctuation they are! Living is serial, an unending accretion of alternatives." None of the stories in "Hunting the Wild Pineapple" has the usual tidy sense of closure. They all simply stop, leaving their characters stranded in the wilderness of their lives, and the reader at stark attention. + + + +HUMANS CAN'T DO WITHOUT TEARS + The wicker lamp-shade is alive with moths, one huge and orange and beautiful as a butterfly in this small golden room, with outside the starting steady hatchet of the rain. Nothing is as horrible as spring and balmy days that make me wretched with their cloudlessness. They animate some fearful antithesis in me so that, missing the heavy noise of river water fifty pounding feet below, I find everything dried up. Especially tears. Humans can't do without those. Again last summer during the monsoons there was one night in the violence of rain when . . . I switched on all lights, made coffee endlessly, and watched branches rioting outside glass, while between heart-beats and purist sips I pretended courage. . . . +This should really be a separate state. A separate country? +Once in Fixer's cabin, one hour, one year, Fixer and I worked out the new coat of arms -- a beer can rampant on a social security form couchant. Do we make it different, the people up here? Fixer and I sit and muse on his tree-mullioned veranda, and if we don't sort it out today there's always tomorrow or next week or next month. There's next year, for that matter. I like it here. +From "Hunting the Wild Pineapple." + +LOAD-DATE: December 23, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +453 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 24, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Intruder at Home for Aged Beats Six Elderly Residents + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 10; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 83 words + +DATELINE: DALLAS, Dec. 23 + +A man carrying a Bible and a length of pipe broke into a home for elderly Jews on Saturday and attacked six residents, but officials discounted bigotry as a motive. +Two of the six people attacked were hospitalized with concussions after the man beat them with the pipe, a hospital spokeswoman said. +The police said the assailant made no anti-Semitic comments in the attack, and a local Jewish leader said the man simply appeared to be deranged. +The injured included one man and five women. + +LOAD-DATE: December 24, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +454 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 24, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +New York City Churches Urgently Need Repairs + +BYLINE: By ARI L. GOLDMAN + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 26; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1015 words + +New Yorkers, who have received word in recent days that the city's bridges are in serious disrepair, should take a good look at their landmark churches as they gather for Christmas services. +Here are scenes from some of New York City's historic places of worship: + * The great rose window at the 126-year-old St. Elias Byzantine Catholic Church in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn has been replaced by plywood. Had it not been removed, engineers said the window would have fallen into the street below. +* The limestone stoops that lead to the Gothic doors of the 88-year-old St. James Presbyterian Church in Harlem are cracked, chipped and in danger of collapse from the vibration of subway trains below. +* Chunks of masonry have been falling off Madison Avenue's Church of the Incarnation, built in 1864. Officials at the church, which is at the corner of 35th Street, have put up scaffolding and mesh netting to protect passers-by. + +Other Needs Take Priority + These three churches are among the lucky ones. In the days before Christmas, they were among 14 churches statewide given grants of $3,000 to $8,500 from the Sacred Sites and Properties Fund of the New York Landmarks Conservancy. The conservancy, a private, nonprofit organization, has been donating money since 1986 to landmark churches, synagogues, meeting houses and religious burial grounds that are in need of repair and restoration. +Deferred maintenance, the bane of the city's bridges, has left churches' bell towers and cupolas, columns and arches, spires and stained-glass treasures in awful and sometimes dangerous disrepair. Other needs have always seemed to take priority: keeping open the soup kitchen, paying the gas and electric bills, buying new hymnals or opening a shelter for the homeless. +"Twenty years ago I thought, 'Let's feed the hungry, let's care for the children,' " said the Rev. Lenton Gunn Jr., pastor of St. James at the corner of 141st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem. "I was not so wrapped up in brick and mortar. But today I've come to the conclusion that if the steps fall down, if the roof caves in, you won't have a place for the senior citizens to meet or the children to play." + +'Carries a Lot of Prestige' + A $7,500 grant from the conservancy will cover less than a quarter of the $34,000 cost of rebuilding the limestone steps, the pastor said, and an even smaller portion of the $300,000 the church hopes to raise for other repairs. But Dr. Gunn and other ministers said that the conservancy grants were important for several reasons. +"It's not going to make us or break us," the Rev. J. Douglas Ousley, rector of Church of the Incarnation, said of the $5,000 his church received for brownstone renovation. "But this grant carries a lot of prestige. People will look at it and say, 'This church must know what it's doing.' " His congregation is contemplating a $1 million restoration. +Impressing the right people is important because many of the traditional financing souces have dried up. Millions that had been available for historic preservation of landmarks, including churches, through the New York State Environmental Quality Bond Act of 1986 have been used up and New York voters rejected a similar bond act last November. Many Federal landmark financing programs have ended. Churches have increasingly turned to their own members and friends and to private foundations. +Edward T. Mohylowski, director of the sacred sites program for the landmarks conservancy, said that the number of applications had been growing steadily since the fund began operating four years ago. "Many of the buildings are failing," he said. "And there are fewer places to turn for help." + +'We Have to Conform to the Rules' + The lack of public money has left many of the ministers disappointed. Msgr. Raymond Misulich of Brooklyn's St. Elias noted that churches often had landmark status, and all the responsibily that entails, imposed upon them by government agencies, like the National Park Service or the New York City Landmarks Commission. +"In everything we do, we have to conform to the rules of the landmarks commission," said Monsignor Misulich, whose church is in the Greenpoint Historic District. Without the landmark rules, the restoration of his church might be less faithful to its 19th- century Ruskinian Gothic architecture but much cheaper, he said. +At least one church spent the grant from the conservancy even before the notice of approval arrrived. The 87-year-old Holy Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church, at 65th Street and Central Park West, was so fearful of damage to its Gothic steeple that it went ahead with the project before the financing was fully in place. Stephen M. Endress, the operations manager of the church, said that several years ago the congregation chose the steeple as its new symbol. "Soon after that we found that our logo was in trouble." +Mr. Mohylowski said that in the present climate of few governmental resources and many demands placed on the churches, his organization was helping to "break down the misunderstanding between the religious community and the preservation community." +The sacred sites program, initiated with support from the J. M. Kaplan Fund, has awarded more than $775,000 to 165 religious institutions throughout the state since 1986. In addition to the four New York City churches mentioned above, two others in the city that received grants before Christmas were: Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South (built in 1892), and St. Martin's Episcopal Church at Lenox Avenue and 122d Street (built in 1888). +Others around the state that received grants in the latest round were: Trinity Episcopal Church, Roslyn (1906); United Church of Christ at Wadhams, Wadhams (1837); Perry City Friends Church, Perry City (1850); New Hempstead Presbyerian Church, New City (1827); St. James A.M.E. Zion Church, Ithaca (1836); St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Hamilton (1847); Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo, Buffalo (1904), and First Baptist Church, Saratoga Springs (1851). + +LOAD-DATE: December 24, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: The Judson Memorial Church at 55 Washington Square South in Manhattan, built in 1892, is in need of repair. Like 14 other churches around the state, it has received a grant of $3,000 to $8,500 from the Sacred Sites and Properties Fund of the New York Landmarks Conservancy; The limestone stoops at the 88-year-old St. James Presbyterian Church at 141st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem are in danger of collapse from the vibration of subway trains below. Repairs will be paid for in part by a grant from a nonprofit organization that has been donating money since 1986 to landmark churches and synagogues. (Photographs by Jack Manning/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +455 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 26, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +I.R.S. Says Many Retirees May Use a Simpler Tax Form + +BYLINE: By PHILIP SHABECOFF, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 895 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Dec. 25 + +The Internal Revenue Service, an unlikely source of holiday cheer, has announced that millions of older Americans will now be able to switch to a simpler income tax form. +The I.R.S. said Monday that income earned from pensions, annuities, individual retirement accounts and taxable Social Security benefits may now be declared on the relatively short and simple 1040A tax form. Previously, such income had to be reported on the longer, more complex 1040 form. + Arthur Altman, director of the tax forms and publications division of the I.R.S., said that as many as 4.5 million Americans, most of them retired, would be able to file the shorter form. He noted that not only was the form simpler, but also that it was printed in larger type and, therefore, easier to read. +Patricia Hoath, a senior program specialist with Tax-Aide, a volunteer program that provides free tax advice to retirees, said it might take a while for people to learn that they could use the easier form. But, she said, "Once the transition period is over, this will be helpful to older people." +This year, packages containing the tax forms and instructions from the I.R.S. will begin to appear in mailboxes on Dec. 28. In recent years, the forms had arrived on the day after Christmas. + Mr. Altman said that Fred T. Goldberg Jr., the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, had decided that it was not in keeping with the spirit of the season to have tax packages arrive in the mail the day after Christmas, and so directed that the mailing be delayed for two days. +About 97 million tax packages will be sent out this year. In addition, 11 million postcards, instead of the full package of tax forms and instructions, will be sent to people who filed farm or business returns last year. The presumption is that these businesses use professional preparers and do not need the package, although they can get one on request. Last year, the I.R.S. saved $1 million by sending out postcards in place of the full packages. +The service expects that about 113 million tax returns will be filed for 1990. +As for the new tax year, beginning on Jan. 1, employers must resume deductions for Social Security taxes for workers who had paid the maximum tax before the end of the year. The Social Security withholding in 1991 will be 6.2 percent on wages up to $53,400, an increase from the maximum taxable wage base of $51,300 in 1990. This withholding covers retirement, disability and survivor benefits. +In a change from last year, 1.45 percent of all wages up to $125,000 will be withheld in 1991 for Medicare insurance. In 1990, Medicare payments were included in the overall Social Security payments up to $51,300. +Employers are required to match the entire 7.65 percent payroll withholding for Social Security and Medicare benefits. + +Personal Deduction Rises + Mr. Altman of the I.R.S. noted that reporting requirements were virtually unchanged for 1990 from 1989. Most of the changes Congress made in the tax code in 1990 will take effect with 1991 earnings and will affect returns filed starting in 1992. +One of the few changes for 1990 filings is that the personal deductions for taxpayers and their dependents will rise to $2,050, from $2,000, as an adjustment for inflation. +Another change will reduce the amount that may be deducted for interest from personal loans, like car loans and credit card accounts. Last year 20 percent of such interest could be deducted from tax payments, but this year only 10 percent may be deducted. +Mr. Altman said he hoped taxpayers would use the prepared label sent along with the tax forms, which he says contains information that helps the I.R.S. tax processors complete their work on individual tax forms more quickly and accurately. +Based on experience, the I.R.S. expects to make refunds averaging $900 to more than 70 percent of taxpayers. Errors in filing tend to delay the refunds by several weeks, he said. + Henry Holmes, a spokesman for the agency, said returns prepared by accountants or other professionals tended, not surprisingly, to have a lower error rate than those filled out by the taxpayers themselves. Of 54.5 million returns prepared by professionals last year, about three million were found to contain errors, while of 57.5 million returns prepared by taxpayers, 7.3 million had at least one error. +One of the most common mistakes, Mr. Holmes said, is to state incorrectly one's filing status -- whether or not the filer is the head of a household. Many single people fail to identify themselves as heads of households even though they may have children or other dependents. +Another frequent error is made by people who fail to claim deductions for which they are entitled or who incorrectly compute those deductions. For example, people do not claim deductions for all of their children or do not identify dependents like elderly parents. People who are blind or have some other disability that makes them eligible for a deduction, in addition to the standard deduction, often fail to claim it, Mr. Holmes said. +There are also problems with the returns of low-income taxpayers who file incorrectly for earned income credits on their taxes, Mr. Holmes said. +These errors are usually caught during the processing of tax forms, he added, but they slow the operation, costing the Government and the taxpayers money. + +LOAD-DATE: December 26, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +456 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 26, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +BUSINESS DIGEST + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 634 words + +The Economy + + An overhaul of the banking system faces political opposition. Although many of the country's prominent banks are losing money and some are threatened with failure, the chances of sweeping changes in banking regulations are considered to have only a 50-50 chance of success. [Page A1.] + + Profits at many big oil companies will surge this quarter with the price of crude oil and natural gas rising sharply while fewer companies are expected to report big write-offs to cover a variety of items for costs like environmental expenses. [D1.] + + Many older Americans will be able to use simpler tax forms since the I.R.S. decided that income from pensions, annuities and individual retirement accounts, as well as Social Security benefits, may be declared on the short 1040A form. [D1.] + + California wine makers are increasingly interested in exports. The domestic market is growing weaker, but countries that historically consume wine but make little of their own, like Britain, Canada and Switzerland, are attractive markets. [D1.] + + Many manufacturers are having difficulties passing along higher costs to their customers. Unable to raise prices, manufacturers in the steel, tire, chemical and machine tool industries, are finding their profits are being squeezed and they are cutting back on plans to modernize and hire additional employees. Economists say the situation is a hallmark of recession. [D1.] + + Bank certificates of deposit and money market account yields have fallen for the 10th consecutive week amid expectations that large banks will soon cut their prime lending rates. [D10.] + + International + + China is expected to have the second-largest trade surplus with the United States next year. The growing surplus is emerging as an important irritant in relations between the countries, since the Bush Administration and some in Congress say China's trade gains are a result of unfair practices. [A1.] +Companies + + Trans World Airlines' chairman complained that the company's attempt to merge with Pan American could be destroyed by Pan Am's efforts to sell the shuttle serving Boston, New York and Washington. Pan Am was reported to be discussing a possible sale of the shuttle to Northwest Airlines. [D1.] + + American Airlines is accusing its pilots of protesting stalled contract talks by staging a sickout during one of the busiest travel times of the year. [A25.] + + Business Technology + + A small group of companies has profited by taking advantage of tax incentives offered by the Federal Government a decade ago to companies that gather natural gas from coal deposits. An estimated 500 billion cubic feet of natural gas recovered from coal deposits flowed into the pipelines in 1990, about 3 percent of the natural gas consumed in the United States this year. [D3.] +Today's Columns + + Skeptics wonder if food shipments to the Soviets make sense. Such emergency shipments are defended as a gesture of political support for President Gorbachev, but they may be used to undermine a healthy movement toward decentralization. Peter Passell: Economic Scene. [D2.] + + Justin Industries is fighting a tender offer to buy the company at a substantial premium. The company, a small conglomerate based in Fort Worth whose biggest interests are in boots and bricks, is emphasizing that the deal is not feasible because it relies on the sale of "junk bonds." Floyd Norris: Market Place. [D4.] + + The Ad Council began its first new public service campaign in six years aimed at preventing drunken driving. The campaign also adopts a new strategy calculated to help people overcome the embarrassment of interceding with friends who have had one drink too many. Kim Foltz: Advertising. [D10.] + +LOAD-DATE: December 26, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +457 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 26, 1990, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Books of The Times; +A Japanese Novella Pivots on a Cat + +BYLINE: By HERBERT MITGANG + +SECTION: Section C; Page 30; Column 1; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 888 words + + +A Cat, a Man and Two Women +By Jun'ichiro Tanizaki +Translated by Paul McCarthy. 164 pages. +Kodansha International . $18.95. +The theme of this tantalizing Japanese novella is simple: Who gets the family cat in a divorce? If this were a trendy American novel, the fight would be over divvying up costly possessions -- the second home in the Hamptons, the Mercedes instead of the BMW, the large-screen television. And so on until the divorcing characters are pickled in fame in the aspic gossip columns of the tabloids. + But in "A Cat, a Man and Two Women" by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, the tortoise-shell cat named Lily is more than a clever, appealing domestic animal. She serves as the deus ex machina for a story about marriages, what is expected of a first wife and the excuses made for the second wife, the attitudes that prevail in a male-ruled society, the methods used by women to plot behind the scenes and sometimes get their way, the customs of the country. +It's easy to see why Tanizaki (1886-1965) is recognized as one of Japan's most popular writers in this century. In this and his other books, he pulls aside the shoji that screens Japanese home life to eavesdrop on what people are really saying and thinking behind their polite facades. And sexuality and dominance are never far below the surface of Tanizaki's stories, but without the subtlety of novelists from Yasunari Kawabata, the only Japanese Nobel laureate in literature, to the best-selling modern writer Haruki Murakami. +Among his major novels are "Some Prefer Nettles," an autobiographical story based on his relationship with his first wife; "The Makioka Sisters," about the effort to find a husband for one of the sisters; "Diary of a Mad Old Man," about a man sexually obsessed with his daughter-in-law, and "A Fool's Love," about masochism and a man's attempt to Westernize a young bar hostess who reminds him of the American movie star Mary Pickford. "A Fool's Love" has just been reissued as "Naomi," the name of the hostess, by North Point Press. +The cat seems to be the most sensible and least devious character in "A Cat, a Man and Two Women," which is lucidly translated by Paul McCarthy from the Japanese. Lily has a gentle, appealing gaze. She has had her kittens and is now something of a senior citizen in the household, content to stroke and be stroked by her master without making too many demands. +The master takes a different approach from most people to cats in general: "When he heard people with no knowledge of a cat's character saying that cats were not as loving as dogs, that they were cold and selfish, he always thought to himself how impossible it was to understand the charm and lovableness of a cat if one had not, like him, spent many years living alone with one. The reason was that all cats are to some extent shy creatures: they won't show affection or seek it from their owners in front of a third person but tend rather to be oddly standoffish." +Lily becomes the center of what amounts to a custody fight after Wife No. 1 has been divorced. The cat lives with her master, his mother and his young second wife. His mother had persuaded him to divorce his wife and marry for wealth the second time. The master is a typical Tanizaki hero, ineffectual and self-indulgent, who seems to come alive only in the company of his cat. In this home-bound atmosphere, the feckless master is all-important. His mother and Wives No. 1 and 2 all struggle to gain his attention. But his attention is focused on Lily, who is his closest companion and nighttime bedmate. +Wife No. 1 enlists the help of Wife No. 2 to get Lily. Her argument is that she gave up her husband, her house and her happiness; couldn't she at least have the cat as a consolation? "Well, he got rid of nasty old me and has started a new life with you, the girl he loves," Wife No. 1 secretly writes to her successor. "As long as it was me he was with, he needed Lily. But why should he now? Isn't she just a bother to have around? Or could it be that even now, without her, there'd be something missing? And does that mean that he looks on you, like me, as something a little lower than a cat?" +It's a tricky and persuasive argument. Lily is returned to Wife No. 1. Naturally, the master longs for her. Quietly, not in the presence of his ex-wife, he visits Lily. He beckons to her but she does not respond, being a cat with more lives than one. He discovers that his ex-wife lavishes more attention on Lily than his present wife did. And he wonders to himself why he seems to miss his cat more than he does any of the three women, and what this tells him about his own life. +Two short stories flesh out the book. "The Little Kingdom" describes the shifting relationship between a poor schoolteacher and one of his pupils, who is determined to dominate the class and his schoolmates with the power of money. The author may have been trying to make a larger statement about influence and greed, but the story is too obvious. "Professor Rado" is more in the arena of the author's main fictional interest -- human behavior. Here, an esteemed professor is discovered by a reporter to live another life in the sexual underworld. But "A Cat, a Man and Two Women" is a tour de force. It can serve as catnip for Tanizaki's major novels. + +LOAD-DATE: December 26, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Junichiro Tanizaki (Kodansha) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +458 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 27, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Personal Health + +BYLINE: BY Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section B; Page 9; Column 1; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1191 words + +Each year 28,000 people over the age of 65 succumb not to disease or disability but to the cold. Thousands actually die of the cold in their own homes, the victims of hypothermia, a lethal drop in body temperature. +Outdoor temperatures do not have to be below freezing. Even in relatively mild cold weather, when temperatures are in the 60's, the body temperature of an older person can drop dangerously low. And as fuel prices rise in response to the confrontation in the Persian Gulf, many elderly people who try to save money by lowering their thermostats may raise their risk of developing hypothermia at home, especially while they sleep. + Most hypothermia deaths are preventable, and since about 80 percent of them occur among people over 65, this high-risk group can greatly benefit from an understanding of the problem and some simple precautions. Yet, the American Association of Retired Persons reports, studies show that only one older person in 10 is aware of the dangers of hypothermia. + + What Is Hypothermia? + Hypothermia, a life-threatening drop in the body's internal temperature below 95 degrees Fahrenheit, results from a loss of body heat faster than it can be replaced. As people get older, their ability to generate body heat in response to the cold declines because their heart rate slows, their blood vessels do not contract as well and they lose muscle tone (which generates heat) and body fat (which conserves heat and supplies body fuel). +An older person exposed to severe cold can experience a lethal drop in body temperature rather quickly. Even prolonged exposure to a temperature of 60 or 65 degrees may also result in hypothermia if an older person's body is not adequately protected. +The risk of developing hypothermia is increased by certain disorders common among the elderly as well as by a number of medications. The risk is high among people with underactive thyroids, or hypothyroidism, those with limited mobility resulting from conditions like stroke, severe arthritis or Parkinson's disease, and those with conditions like diabetes, heart disease or Sjogren's syndrome that can seriously impair circulation. +Medications that raise susceptibility to hypothermia include various drugs used to treat anxiety, depression or nausea and even some over-the-counter remedies for the common cold. Among the most dangerous are chlorpromazine and other phenothiazines, barbiturates, tricyclic antidepressants, benzodiazepines and reserpine. The self-administered drug alcohol is also a hazard because it dilates peripheral blood vessels and thus counters the body's mechanism for conserving heat. +Older people may not realize they are cold and therefore fail to take adequate steps to stay warm, even as others around them may shiver and put on extra clothing. + +Detection and Treatment + Recognizing the signs of hypothermia can be a challenge because symptoms frequently mimic those of other health problems common among the elderly. Manifestations of hypothermia are often mistaken for psychological problems. +A person suffering from hypothermia may appear confused, disoriented, uncoordinated, unresponsive, uncooperative, sluggish or drowsy. Speech may be slurred, breathing slow and shallow and the pulse slow and weak. The person may shiver uncontrollably. Muscles may be stiff and the skin may appear pale and puffy with large, irregular blue or pink spots. +The most reliable way to diagnosis hypothermia is to take the person's temperature. Unfortunately, most household thermometers do not give readings below 94 degrees Fahrenheit, but it is reasonable to suspect hypothermia if the mercury does not rise above 94. If no thermometer is available, place the back of your hand against the bare abdomen. If it is noticeably cold, hypothermia is likely. +A person with hypothermia should be treated as a medical emergency and should be immediately taken to a hospital. Rewarming must be done slowly -- often from the inside out -- by professionals. Rapid rewarming is dangerous because it may dilate blood vessels near the skin, further lowering blood pressure and possibly sending more cold blood to the body's core. +Hypothermia will not go away by itself, so however mild the condition, the person should immediately be examined by a doctor. Failure to reverse hypothermia can lead to permanent damage to the brain, heart and other vital organs. +While awaiting medical assistance, handle the person gently, since a cold heart is a weak one. The American Osteopathic Association suggests that if it is not possible to move the victim indoors, try to insulate the person from the wind and the ground with blankets or newspapers. +Remove wet clothing and, if possible, replace it with dry garments. Otherwise cover the victim's body and head with plastic, a raincoat or any other impervious material to prevent further heat loss. You can also lie down next to the person to provide heat from your own body. +Do not pile heavy layers on top of the person or rub cold limbs in an effort to warm them. If the person is unconscious, do not raise the feet; that will send cold blood rushing to vital organs and further decrease core temperature. Check for a pulse and breathing; if one or both is absent, start cardiopulmonary resuscitation or rescue breathing. +A person who is conscious and not vomiting or coughing can be offered warm, nonalcoholic beverages. Otherwise, give nothing by mouth. + +Preventing Hypothermia + Organizations that serve the elderly, including the National Institute on Aging, urge all elderly people to adopt these preventive measures: +*Keep room temperatures at 70 degrees or higher. If you cannot afford to heat your entire dwelling to that level, warm at least two rooms, including the bedroom, and stay in them most of the time. +*Always wear enough clothing -- indoors and out, awake and asleep. Sweaters (wool is warmest), robes, thick socks and a cap can be worn indoors in cold weather. Outdoors in cold or cool weather wear layers, which trap warm air and conserve body heat better. Start with long underwear, tops and bottoms. Cover the head and ears, wear waterproof boots and a water-resistant outer garment in wet or snowy weather and wear wind-resistant coats. +*Be sure to have enough blankets on the bed. Socks and a nightcap and perhaps long underwear will help keep a person warm while sleeping. If possible, use flannel sheets and place a wool or sheepskin mattress cover beneath them. +*Avoid prolonged exposure to the cold, but if it is necessary to be outdoors for long periods, try to stay in the sun. +*If living alone, ask friends, neighbors or relatives to look in once or twice a day. It is especially wise for them to check frequently during a cold spell and after a particularly cold night. +Finally, avoid more than moderate consumption of alcohol, and avoid alcohol near bedtime. Ask a doctor whether any of the medications being taken are among those that increase the risk of hypothermia. Perhaps an alternative might be prescribed, but if not, be very careful about following the above precautions. + +LOAD-DATE: December 27, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Table: "Life-Threatening Cold" lists some cold weather risk factors for older people. + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +459 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 27, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +U.S. Recalls Franks Sold at New York Store + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 17; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 235 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Dec. 26 + +Citing a threat of food poisoning, the Agriculture Department said today that it had ordered the recall of 502 pounds of kosher frankfurters sold by a retail store in the New York suburb of Monsey, in Rockland County. +Department officials said their inspectors had discovered bacterial contamination of the frankfurters during a routine import re-inspection in Buffalo. They said the Monsey store, The Meat Showcase, was cooperating in the recall of the product, Continental Strictly Kosher Beef Frankfurters, which are made in Montreal. + The Meat Showcase is the only store in the United States that has received the product, said the department's Food Safety and Inspection Service. +The 14-ounce packages are labeled "Product of Canada" and bear the crown inspection seal of Canada. They also bear the mark "Establishment Number 472" and have no sell-by date. +No illnesses have been reported, said Ronald J. Prucha, associate administrator of the inspection service. He said consumers should return the franks to the place of purchase. +The department said the suspected bacteria could cause listeriosis, which was described as "a rare but potentially serious disease." +Listeriosis is generally believed to pose "little risk" for healthy people, the department said, adding that the most vulnerable are those with weakened immune systems, including infants, the elderly and the chronically ill. + +LOAD-DATE: December 27, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +460 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 27, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +CURRENTS; +A Shower For Elderly Or Disabled + +BYLINE: By Elaine Louie + +SECTION: Section C; Page 3; Column 6; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 165 words + +LASCO Bathware, which is based in Anaheim, Calif., has introduced a barrier-free, wheelchair-accessible shower for the elderly and disabled. +"As the aged population has increased, we have gotten more requests for this kind of shower," said Karen Nardiello, marketing services administrator for the company. The Vitality shower is part of Lasco's Freedom Line. +The shower has a folding stainless steel and plastic seat, grab bars and a shower head that can slide on a 24-inch rail. +The shower head, which has a 69-inch flexible metal hose, is detachable. There are two soap shelves in each rear corner and a wide shelf on the rear wall. +The unit, which is made of molded fiberglass-reinforced polyester, is 77 inches high, 45 5/8 inches wide and 50 1/8 inches deep. It comes in white but can be ordered to match other bathroom fixtures. +The stall is $2,400 and an optional ramp is $200. For information on local distributors, call (800) 877-2005. Delivery is six to eight weeks. + +LOAD-DATE: December 27, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +461 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 28, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Helped by Fund for Neediest, Thankful Woman Sends Gift + +BYLINE: By JONATHAN RABINOVITZ + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 599 words + +Susan N. Faulkner remembers when her arms became so swollen and painful that she could no longer push a vacuum cleaner. She was having trouble walking, had lost her job as a secretary and feared that she could no longer afford her apartment. It did not appear that she could continue to live on her own. +Ms. Faulkner, then 62 years old, had seen hard times before. She fled Nazi Germany as a teen-ager, later watched her husband die from multiple sclerosis and then worked her way through a doctoral program in English at the age of 52. But never had she felt so helpless. +That was seven years ago. + This month Ms. Faulkner wrote a $25 check to The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund in appreciation for all this country has given her. And the money she sent is a small payback for the new home she has received with the help of the fund and the charities it supports. + +'Just Wanted to Share' + "These last few years my life has been secure -- I don't have to worry about making the rent any more," Ms. Faulkner said in a telephone interview yesterday. "I worked extremely hard here, and this country gave me the chance to reach my potential. I just wanted to share my good fortune." +She now lives on her own in a 14th-floor studio apartment with a view of the Manhattan skyline. She is one of about 800 people who rent units in four buildings for the elderly operated by Selfhelp Community Services in Bayside and Flushing, Queens. The agency offers its tenants subsidized rents, low-cost housekeeping, counseling, social activities and other services. +Selfhelp, an agency of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, receives money from the Neediest Cases Fund. The 79th annual appeal for the Neediest Cases began last month, and the proceeds are distributed to seven charities. The New York Times pays the drive's overhead costs. +Ms. Faulkner has given to the Neediest Cases on a number of occasions, but she said there was a time when it was impossible for her to give. In the late 1970's, she said, she began suffering intense pain from a connective tissue disease that is similar to lupus. + +A Desire to Help Others + "I would read the Neediest Cases stories about the people who needed help, and my heart would break," she said. "I'd wish that I could send them $100, and there was nothing I could do." +Her health has continued to deteriorate, and she now suffers from a kidney disorder that requires dialysis three times a week. But in her new apartment, she said, she can survive on her income of about $600 a month from Social Security and $600 from a pension from Germany. And this year she was able to save enough to contribute to the fund and to several other charities. +The 69-year-old woman, talked yesterday with the air of a professor about classical music and 17th-century English literature. The walls of her apartment are lined with hundreds of books and dozens of records (her favorites are Handel and Mozart). There is a word processor and a German typewriter. +Ms. Faulkner said that her future remains unclear, and she dreads the thought of eventually being in a wheelchair. +But she continues to live each day to the fullest. +She recently splurged on tickets for the operas that will be playing at Lincoln Center this spring, even though it is difficult for her to walk more than a block or so. +"It will be a tiresome trip," she said, "but I'm looking forward to it." + +Previously recorded .... $2,503,684.52 +Recorded yesterday ...........56,074.00 + +Total ................ $ 2,559,758.52 + +LOAD-DATE: December 28, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +462 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 28, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Quincy Journal; +Thou Shalt Not Curse In Town of Presidents + +BYLINE: By FOX BUTTERFIELD, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 704 words + +DATELINE: QUINCY, Mass., Dec. 27 + +This is a city that prides it self on being the home of two Presidents, John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, John Hancock. It is also a city whose City Council recently voted to ban swearing in public places. +The ordinance, passed 6 to 2 on Dec. 17, is intended to help control rowdy teen-agers in Quincy's historic center and to help a new city program attract tourists. + "We are trying to send a message to the people of Quincy that we are upset by the language people have to hear," said Theodore DeCristofaro, president of the City Council. Mr. DeCristofaro worked for 25 years for the National Park Service in charge of maintenance at the house where John Adams and John Quincy Adams lived, not far from downtown. +Mr. DeCristofaro says the new law, passed with little debate, has widespread support. But it has prompted concern by the American Civil Liberties Union, some Quincy residents and the minister of the church where John Adams, John Quincy Adams and their families worshipped. +"John Adams probably would have thought this was very silly, an infringement on citizens' unalienable rights," said the Rev. Sheldon W. Bennett, minister of the United First Parish Church, a Unitarian church established in 1639. +The church sits at a busy intersection in downtown Quincy, only yards from a large concrete bus and subway station of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. The station is the main transportation center for the suburban area south of Boston, known as the South Shore, and is a gathering place for young people. +It is the behavior of these youths that has alarmed Mr. DeCristofaro as well as Quincy's Mayor, James A. Sheets, who sponsored the ordinance. +"We are beginning to emphasize in a meaningful way the historical aspect of Quincy," Mr. Sheets said. In fact, the city is negotiating with the National Park Service to create a National Heritage Park in Quincy and is studying ways to attract more tourists. +"But right across the street from the church is the M.B.T.A. station, and frankly, it can be a nuisance, with drinking, drugs and the language they use," Mr. Sheets said. He added that he had witnessed the problem often, because his office in City Hall is next door to the station, and he has watched as groups of teen-age boys shouted obscenities at elderly women. +"We know what goes on in the real world, and we are not trying to legislate morality," Mr. Sheets said. "But we have to be concerned about the rights of families to come into downtown without being harassed by bad language." +The new ordinance specifies that "no person shall accost or annoy persons or disturb the peace or loiter or address another person with profane or obscene language" in any publicly owned place. Violators can be fined $100. +The police have not yet been asked to enforce the law, and no date has been set, Mr. Sheets said. "But we will do it when we have to," he said. +Lawrence O'Donnell, a prominent criminal lawyer whose office is near the transit station, thinks the new law is "totally absurd and ridiculous." +"It opens the City Council and the Mayor to ridicule," he said, "worrying about things like this with the problems we have in 1990." +"I'll probably get a life sentence, because I don't survive a day without indulging in profanity," Mr. O'Donnell said. Moreover, he added, "The police enforcing the ordinance probably teach the kids that language." +John Roberts, the executive director of the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said that if the ordinance was enforced and someone brought him a case, "We'd challenge it." +The language of the law is vague in describing profanity and obscenity, Mr. Roberts said, and the United States Supreme Court has struck down other local attempts to bar obscenity and profanity. In addition, he said, the Court has rejected a number of anti-loitering laws for infringing on the right to associate. +At the transit station itself, most teen-agers said they had not heard of the new law. But one 12-year-old girl, who would give only her first name, Lauren, said: "I think it's stupid. It is like, you know, the First Amendment, freedom of speech." + +LOAD-DATE: December 28, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +463 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 28, 1990, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +HEALTH SECRETARY REJECTS DEMANDS ON SPENDING CUTS + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1263 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 + +Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has complained that cuts in his budget request demanded by Richard G. Darman, the White House budget director, would harm services to 50 million Americans who benefit from Social Security, Medicare and other Federal health programs. +In a confidential letter, Dr. Sullivan also complained that Mr. Darman was interfering too much in the operation and management of the giant Department of Health and Human Services, which accounts for 35 percent of all Federal spending. + Dr. Sullivan asserted that Mr. Darman's budget proposals would delay payment of Medicare benefits to the elderly and Social Security benefits for disabled people, provide too little money for prenatal care and restrict health care for members of minority groups and low-income people. + +Effect on Programs + He also said that the Darman proposals would cut Medicare payments to teaching hospitals in inner-city neighborhoods and make it more difficult for elderly people to get information over the telephone about Social Security. +Dr. Sullivan's comments came in response to Mr. Darman's preliminary decisions on the 1992 budget, which President Bush will submit to Congress in early February 1991. A copy of Dr. Sullivan's letter, sent to Mr. Darman on Friday, was obtained today from a budget expert who said he regarded many of Mr. Darman's proposals as misguided. +In a personal declaration of independence, Dr. Sullivan wrote, "We intend to treat any detailed directions and requirements" in the proposal as advisory only. To underline his point, he said, "Specific staffing levels and management arrangements must be left to responsible policy officials and program administrations" in the department, and must not be dictated by Mr. Darman's office. + +Decisions Are Being Appealed + Some similar decisions by Mr. Darman have been appealed by other Cabinet officers, but Dr. Sullivan's protest is the strongest so far and has proved the most difficult to resolve, Administration officials said. Aides to Mr. Darman declined to discuss details of Dr. Sullivan's letter, but they said they believed that all disagreements could be resolved amicably. +Mr. Darman and John H. Sununu, the White House chief of staff, have said that many executive agency officials do not understand the severity of the limits on domestic spending that were imposed by Congress in the budget bill passed in October. +Mr. Darman's preliminary decisions on the budget for the fiscal year 1992, which begins Oct. 1, 1991, were distributed last week to all agencies. +Dr. Sullivan's letter did not specify the total amount of money involved in his disputes with Mr. Darman. But he did request particular amounts for certain programs, and the requests taken together would cost several billion dollars. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the agency spent $439 billion, while the Federal Government as a whole spent $1.25 trillion. +Dr. Sullivan said the Social Security and Medicare trust funds were "solvent and serving their clients daily." But he said, "The means of providing those benefits are seriously threatened by the level of resources for their administration" suggested by the Office of Management and Budget. + +Statutory Deadlines Imperiled + He further warned: "Our ability to respond to the needs of 50 million aged and disabled beneficiaries will be seriously eroded. Social Security Administration will experience systemwide backlogs which will be especially apparent in such high-visibility areas as disability claims, where processing times will grow by one-third and appeals will take a month longer to review. Medicare providers and beneficiaries will soon notice the deterioration in service delivery, as fiscal year 1991 Medicare claims processing times grow to 50 days, well in excess of statutory payment deadlines." +In other words, he said, elderly and disabled people, doctors and hospitals would have to wait longer for Government payments they are entitled to receive. +Dr. Sullivan said, "The outlook for fiscal year 1992 is even more bleak." At the level of resources provided by Mr. Darman, he said, "Social Security Administration will see the backlogs of disability claims double, increasing from three to six months." +More than half of all callers to the agency's toll-free telephone number would get a busy signal on some days, he said. +Mr. Darman's budget allowance would force the Health Care Financing Administration, which operates Medicare, to reduce its 3,000-member staff by 22 percent, Dr. Sullivan said, and the average time for handling Medicare claims "would increase to 80 days." + +A Plea for More Money + In his letter, Dr. Sullivan pleaded with Mr. Darman for more money to combat "disgracefully high rates" of infant mortality. +In addition, the Secretary said, "we are deeply concerned about the scope and content of the proposed reductions in spending for Medicare benefits," especially Mr. Darman's proposal to cut Medicare payments to teaching hospitals. Many of those hospitals are in inner-city neighborhoods. +Dr. Sullivan also requested additional funds for the Food and Drug Administration, saying the growth of its staff had not kept pace with the explosive growth in new uses of medical technology. +"Excluding staff associated with new problems arising during the 1980's -- for example, AIDS and generic drugs -- F.D.A. staff actually decreased by 16 percent between fiscal year 1980 and fiscal year 1991," Dr. Sullivan said. +He said he was seeking $785 million for the food and drug agency, which has a budget of $690 million and a staff of 8,000 people in the current fiscal year. The Government could raise $220 million if it required drug companies to pay "user fees" for F.D.A. services, he said. + +A Question of Trust + Dr. Sullivan's letter only hints at a problem pervading the executive branch: Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services and other agencies said they did not completely trust Mr. Darman when he told them that no extra money was available for domestic programs in the coming year. They have no way of independently verifying his account until the President's budget for all agencies is issued in February. +To help offset the costs of his own proposals, Dr. Sullivan suggested cutting the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, to $468 million, and he said such aid should be concentrated in Northeastern states, where low-income residents are most likely to use fuel oil to heat their homes. +For the current fiscal year, Congress provided $1.4 billion, plus a contingency fund of $200 million. The money is now available to low-income people in all states. +Dr. Sullivan affirmed his support for proposals to charge "application and user fees" to people who enlist the help of the Federal Government in collecting child support payments. +He objected to Mr. Darman's proposal to take away the department's responsibility for assistance to homeless people who are mentally ill or who abuse alcohol and drugs. Mr. Darman wanted to transfer the responsibility to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but Dr. Sullivan said his department had more expertise in serving such people. +Dr. Sullivan's letter shows how the Government must now make choices among groups of needy people. To get $42 million for homeless people with the most severe problems, he said, "we would eliminate the Emergency Community Services Homeless Assistance Program," which helps poor people find and keep shelter. + +LOAD-DATE: December 28, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Richard G. Darman, the White House budget director. His preliminary decisions on the 1992 budget were distributed to Federal agencies last week.; Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, Secretary of Health and Human Services, said that budget cuts would hurt 50 million Americans who benefit from Federal health programs. (Photographs by Associated Press) (pg. A18) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +464 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 29, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +When a Check Deposits Itself + +BYLINE: By LEONARD SLOANE + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 46; Column 1; Style Desk; Consumer's World Page + +LENGTH: 1139 words + +Increasingly, Americans are turning to direct deposits of their salaries, dividends, interest, pensions and Social Security payments. Many who were wary at first and uncomfortable with having money appear in their accounts without a check passing through their hands have grown accustomed to the convenience. +Some corporations encourage their employees and retirees to participate because it eliminates the time and expense of preparing checks. And millions agree because they don't have to trudge to a bank with their checks, and deposits are made regularly even when they are away from work or ill. + Still, there are shadows in this happy picture. +Some banks, savings and loan associations and credit unions bar withdrawals of directly deposited money from automatic tellers on the date of payment because the money is not posted until later in the day. +There is little participation by people with low incomes, who rely so much on each paycheck that they do not want to risk computer errors. And some people refuse to participate because they do not want their spouses to know how much money they earn. + +Delays Cited + "While the Government and the financial-services industry tout direct deposit as a virtually trouble-free payments mechanism, we fear such observations are overly simplistic and do not take into consideration all of the problems consumers are experiencing," said William Kent Brunette, legislative representative of the American Association of Retired Persons. He said many direct-deposit recipients "are experiencing significant delays in receiving their funds, particularly when they switch banks or their bank changes hands." +About 100,000 corporations in the United States now offer such electronic transfers to their employees, double the number that did so three years ago. About 17 percent of the workers in private industry now participate in direct-deposit plans, up from 12 percent in 1989, according to the National Automated Clearinghouse Association. And financial institutions say direct deposits of Social Security payments, private pensions and corporate dividends are rising. + +Some Remain Adamant + But some people still won't use direct-deposit services. Specialists in the field say many older Americans, for whom direct depositing was designed, are especially reluctant. On payment days, bankers are not surprised to be deluged with visits and telephone calls from the elderly asking if deposits were made on schedule. +Linda Golodner, executive director of the National Consumers League, said: "Some people feel more comfortable having a piece of paper in hand and taking it to the bank. It's also a social experience for seniors who feel uncomfortable with electronic methods." +But 20 million corporate employees feel comfortable enough with the procedure to have signed up for direct depositing of their paychecks. And the use of direct deposits for other purposes is steadily advancing. +The clearinghouse association, which represents 15,000 financial organizations that handle virtually all direct-deposit payments, said the major advantages are convenience, safety and, in some cases, increased interest. +"Direct deposit eliminates the need for people to make special arrangements to deposit their checks," said Elliott C. McEntee, president of the association. "Checks are never lost or stolen because payments are made electronically." +"Some banks give you a break on the pricing of accounts if you have direct deposit," said Louise Roseman, assistant director of Federal Reserve Bank operations of the Federal Reserve System. "Their either offer lower-cost or free checking accounts because they know these are more stable deposits and you become more of a loyal customer." + +Money Without Waiting + Direct deposits were started in 1976 when the Government offered people collecting Social Security the option of receiving monthly payments without waiting for a check in the mail. Today, about half of all such recipients have chosen direct depositing for their Social Security checks; new recipients are automatically put into the direct-deposit cycle unless they ask not to be. Over the last decade, thousands of corporations and state and local governments adopted direct depositing for payrolls and urged employees to participate. +The Control Data Corporation, which processes payrolls for 20,000 companies, said 11,000 of those companies offer the service and 33 percent of their employees participate. Most companies offering direct deposits promote the practice as an employee benefit. +"Employees know with absolute certainty that the money will be in their accounts," said David Smay, assistant treasurer of the Chevron Corporation, more than 60 percent of whose employees have chosen direct depositing. "We've had remarkable error-free success," he said. +Propopents of direct depositing are seeking to enlist more payers and recipients of corporate dividends and other money not connected to payrolls, a market of almost a billion payments a year. Norwest Bank Minnesota, which handles stock transfer services for companies, said 8 percent of its client companies have started to offer direct depositing of dividends to stockholders over the last year. +"The idea is starting to catch on," said Rodney D. Johnson, a vice president. "It's much more reliable than the mail and payments are clearing one to two days sooner." +"Our goal is to put anything we can on direct deposit," said Kathleen Hagan, manager of cash management of the Home Life Insurance Company, which already follows the practice for retirement pensions and life insurance benefits. "I have a long list of projects." + + + +IF THE DEPOSIT ISN'T SO DIRECT + What if a direct deposit never appears in your bank account? Peggy Miller, legislative representative of the Consumer Federation of America, offered this advice: +Get in touch immediately with the company or government agency that issued the check and report the problem, then go to the bank involved to fill out the necessary forms. +"Keep the names of all people in the bank and at the company you talk to, as well as the numbers accompanying any forms," Ms. Miller said. +She said it was the consumer's responsibility to make sure the direct deposit has actually been made. The consumer must bear in mind, she said, that by the time the problem arises, any number of checks may bounce. +Some banks charge as much as $20 for each bad check, for which the depositor may be liable. This can add up to a substantial sum in penalties, in addition to dunning and a damaged credit rating. +Ms. Miller also suggested finding out if there is a glitch that could make the problem arise again. As soon as a bank statement arrives, she said, the consumer should make sureeach deposit is credited. + +LOAD-DATE: December 29, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Suzanne Isaac, Chevron Corporation management secretary, fills out direct-deposit form with David Smay, assistant Chevron treasurer (Fred Mertz for The New York Times); Banks say depositors have access to their money sooner. + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +465 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 30, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +80's Legacy: States and Cities in Need + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL deCOURCY HINDS with ERIK ECKHOLM + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1; Page 1; Column 1; +States In Distress: The Seeds of Fiscal Calamity/A special report National Desk + +LENGTH: 3264 words + +All across America, state and city governments have been stricken by financial crises that were not even imagined a year ago. +More than half are facing serious financial shortfalls, and many are considering Draconian measures, including huge layoffs of public employees and major cutbacks in social services and public works. Some states, like Connecticut and Rhode Island, must find a way to cut their budgets by 20 percent in the next few months. + Making up for the cash shortage with tax increases may be political suicide for the public official who suggests it. Memories are all too fresh of the beating incumbent governors and legislators suffered in the November elections as voters registered their anger over rising taxes and reduced services. + +'Unprecedented Cutback' + "The fiscal plight seems to be worse than at any time during my memory," said Henry Aaron, director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a research organization based in Washington. "I think you would have to go back to the Great Depression to find similar anguish, in terms of the number of states that are facing an unprecedented cutback in service or significant increases in taxes." +The immediate cause of the crisis is the nation's economic downturn, which has drastically cut into tax revenues. But the seeds were sown over the last decade or so, and what public officials are now facing is the collision of several long-term trends, including these: +*Starting in Jimmy Carter's Administration and accelerating under President Ronald Reagan's "New Federalism," the Federal Government has shifted a heavy financial burden to the states and cities, cutting and eliminating Federal grants for housing, education, mass transportation and public works projects. In the late 1970's, Washington provided 25 percent of state and local budgets. It now provides 17 percent. +*The public is increasingly resistant to new or higher taxes, partly because they believe government is not wisely spending the money. In the November elections, voters in two states, Nevada and Oregon, approved initiatives to limit tax increases or roll back taxes. In other states voters showed their displeasure by ousting officials who raised taxes. Altogether 14 governors' offices changed political parties in the upheaval against the old order. +*The pressures to spend are enormous. They range from the public's demand for better schools and harsher punishment of criminals to an increased number of elderly people who need help with nursing home costs. For instance, Medicaid, the health program primarily for the poor and disabled, now accounts for 12 percent of state spending; 20 years ago it was 3 percent. + + Growing Responsibilities + In many cases the pressure to spend comes from the Federal Government itself. The growing body of Federal rules and regulations often place new responsibilities on states and cities without providing sufficient money to carry them out. And the situation is unlikely to improve soon because the budget compromise worked out this fall by Congress and President Bush provides some added money for domestic programs this year but freezes domestic spending for the next two years and restricts its growth for two years after that. +Sometimes the pressure comes from the courts, which have forced states to build new prisons to ease overcrowding or to make costly changes in education programs. +Unlike the Federal Government, which can and does operate at a deficit, all states but one -- Vermont -- are legally bound to have balanced budgets. So, their options are limited to raising taxes or reducing spending. +Experts say many states will be forced to raise taxes in the next year or two. And some predict that the electoral drubbing many governors suffered in November will turn out to have been but a preview of 1992. + + 'End of Their Political Careers' + "Our Federal politics are gridlocked, and governors have become the ones who have to have the courage to put their necks out," said Daniel M. Sprague, executive director of the Council of State Governments, an organization of state officials that is based in Lexington, Ky. +"Unfortunately, for a number of governors who raised taxes, that has been the end of their political careers," he added, referring in particular to William A. O'Neill of Connecticut and Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts, who both decided not to run for re-election this year. +Although the converging trends have produced a crisis atmosphere in governors' offices and state legislatures, they spell special disaster for poverty-stricken inner cities, said Richard P. Nathan, director of the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York at Albany. Worsening economic prospects, especially in the Northeast, a tapering off of state aid coming after a sharp drop in Federal aid and a "hardening and concentration" of social problems like drugs, crime, poverty, homelessness and AIDS mean "a new crunch time for cities," he said. + + The States +Most Ambitious Fall the Hardest + +Twenty-seven states are being forced to reduce spending below what they had planned this fiscal year to head off a deficit, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. They are eliminating programs, freezing hiring, laying off employees, raising college tuitions, increasing fees and fines, using up savings and doing almost anything to avoid raising taxes. The Northeast is hurting most: New York State is laying off 10,000 employees, Massachusetts has already laid off 1,700 and Connecticut, one of the handful of states that do not have an income tax, may impose one, something once considered unthinkable there. +In Rhode Island, Governor-elect Bruce G. Sundlun, a Democrat, predicted "a major downsizing in government." After he takes office in January, he said, he will have to make spending cuts of about 20 percent of the state budget to balance the books by June 30, the end of the fiscal year. New taxes are not an option, he said. Last year, Gov. Edward D. DiPrete, a Republican, added $200 million in taxes, and political analysts say that was a major reason he lost his bid for re-election by a resounding 3-to-1 ratio. +Rhode Island's financial experience is fairly typical of about one-third of the states, many of them in the Northeast, a region that had rapid growth in the 1980's, said Marcia A. Howard, research director of the National Association of State Budget Officers, which is based in Washington. These states were able to cut taxes, start new programs and put aside some money in the decade's strongest economic years, 1984 through 1988. The other two-thirds of the states, Ms. Howard said, saw relatively little or slow growth during the 1980's. Now the economy has pulled the rug out from under both groups of states, and the ones that started the most ambitious social programs are now falling the hardest. +Massachusetts, for instance, set up its own universal health care program two years ago, but now that the financial crisis has hit, Governor-elect William F. Weld, a Republican, has vowed to repeal parts of the program. +Some of today's problems have shallow roots. Uncertainties about how people and companies would react to the Federal Tax Reform of 1986, which eliminated many tax deductions, made it difficult for states to forecast revenue. Several, including New York, California and Massachusetts, were overly optimistic. In addition, economic forecasters did not predict that the Northeast would be on the leading edge of the recession, causing serious budget miscalculations in the region. +The states having the least trouble balancing their budgets this year are primarily those in the West with growing populations and energy-rich states that are benefiting from the rise in oil prices since the Persian Gulf crisis began, as well as slow-growth states like Arkansas and West Virginia that for years have tried to keep a tight rein on expenditures. +Ms. Howard of the National Association of State Budget Officers said that even without a recession, widespread fiscal problems were inevitable, paricularly because of spending on health care and prisons. "These problems are cascading on the states," she said. +Medicaid, the shared Federal-state program covering medical costs of the poor, and, increasingly, nursing home costs of the middle class, has become one of the states' biggest budget headaches. That is because of the aging of the population and the increasing number of middle-class elderly people who have exhausted their savings or transferred their assets to their children and are now dependent on Medicaid for nursing home care. +"Medicaid is becoming the Pac-Man of state government, eating up every dollar," said Ray Scheppach, executive director of the National Governor's Association. +Some experts argue that when the current economic downturn is over, state and local revenue is likely to pick up briskly enough to relieve the pressure. Others doubt it. +"The tax bases are going to grow more slowly in the 1990's than they did in the 1980's," said Steven D. Gold, director of the Center for the Study of the States at the State University of New York at Albany, citing projections of slower economic growth in the years ahead in many regions. + + The Cities +Major Burdens, Limited Options + +In more than half the nation's cities, spending is outpacing revenue this year, largely because of declining economic conditions, loss of Federal and state aid and state prohibitions on increasing local taxes, the National League of Cities said. +Philadelphia, which has already cut $65 million from social service programs this year, may not be able to pay its 25,000 workers their full pay after Jan. 4 and may soon be insolvent. New York and Washington each plan to lay off thousands of city workers and teachers. Los Angeles and Louisville, Ky., have already closed neighborhood health centers. +And New Orleans dealt with an expected $42 million deficit in 1991, in part by budgeting only enough money to run its criminal justice system and neighborhood health clinics for just six months in the hope that the state will make up the difference. But Louisiana's Governor, Buddy Roemer, said, "We can't spend the money we don't have." +The plight of cities is raising old questions about shared responsibility. "The cities have a disproportionate burden to carry, and nobody wants to talk about it," said Alair A. Townsend, who directed New York City's budget office under former Mayor Edward I. Koch. "New York or Chicago or Philadelphia cannot solve these problems on their own." +One problem for New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans and many other financially troubled cities is a limited taxing authority. New Orleans, for example, collected enough money through its sales and property taxes to deal with social problems when Federal and state governments shouldered 50 percent of the city's budget two decades ago. But now that Federal and state aid has fallen to 15 percent of its budget, the city's taxes do not bring in enough money to cope. +"Pressure from suburbanites is part of the reason we can't have a wage tax or a gas tax, and the legislature just prohibited us from having an inheritance tax," said Mayor Sidney J. Barthelemy of New Orleans. +He went on, "People can't constantly tell us to stand on our own two feet if they keep cutting our legs off." + + The U.S. Government +The Shift In Responsibilities + +Financial distress is focusing attention on a historic shift over the last decade in Federal relations with the states and cities. Federal grants, which blossomed during the Depression and President Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society," peaked in the late 1970's as the Federal deficit began to mount. Under President Reagan, Federal aid declined and more responsibility was transferred to the states. +As Federal grants waned, the share of total state and local spending paid for by Washingon declined from a peak of 25 percent in the late 1970's to 17 percent now. Cities lost much more than the states as programs like revenue sharing and aid for low-income housing were cut. Nor was there as much assistance as the cities and states needed to attack new problems like homelessness and AIDS. +While Federal aid to state and local governments has declined, Federal assistance to individuals has steadily climbed. The individual payments that pass through state budgets are mostly poverty-related money like Medicaid and welfare. The Federal Government pays more than half the cost of Medicaid and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and the entire cost of food stamps. In addition, the Federal Government directly pays the elderly and others through Social Security and Medicare. +From 1984 to 1988, the strong economy helped state and local governments raise the money to continue programs that had lost Federal support. But now as the economy sours, states are saddled with heavier social responsibilities and few options to pay for them. +"We don't have New Federalism, we have New Feudalism, where every community fends for itself with a hodgepodge of responsibilities and taxing powers," said George Sternlieb, an urban specialist and professor emeritus of public policy at Rutgers University. +Optimists view the financial distress as a chance to cut the fat from government. +"There's no question that the Federal cutbacks are part of the problem. or the opportunity, depending on your perspective," said Richard S. Williamson, who was a special assistant to President Reagan for intergovernmental relations and promoted the idea of transferring more reponsibility to the states. +"There are those of us who feel you get better decision making when both funding and execution are closer to local levels," he said. "If my name were Florio, and I had to increase taxes, I'd probably disagree with that." +He was referring to Gov. Jim Florio of New Jersey. Although Mr. Florio was not up for re-election last month, another New Jersey Democrat, Senator Bill Bradley, was. Mr. Bradley, who was expected to win re-election easily, barely squeaked into office as voters expressed their displeasure with tax increases pushed through the State Legislature by Mr. Florio earlier in the year. +Mr. Florio blames President Reagan for making it difficult for governors and mayors to govern. "Folks have become very skeptical, if not cynical, about government because President Reagan convinced people that you never need to make any tough decisions," he said. +Governor Roemer of Louisiana, also a Democrat, agreed. "I think the question of Federal responsibility needs to be discussed candidly with the American people," he said. "It might be that the government closest to the people works best, and federalism, in shifting to the states more responsibility is the best thing if done carefully. But the price tag, the purpose, the goals, the methodology, all need to be discussed." +Having less money to distribute has not stopped Congress from trying to set local priorities, often necessitating large expenditures. The states say they are being forced to take on responsibilities without the ability to pay for them. +"The Federal-state story is mandates," said Gerald H. Miller, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers. "The Federal Register averages 200 pages a day, and much of that is for new mandates and rules," he said. These range from rules on major national goals, like whether poor children should receive welfare, to less weighty matters. One proposed rule, fiercely opposed by governors as setting a new standard for Government meddling, tells states how they can spend interest income from fees they charge for fishing and hunting licenses. +Gov. John D. Ashcroft of Missouri, a Republican who is the National Governor's Association's spokesman on Federal policy, said, "The most pernicious part about it is that when the Federal Government wants to expand a program, the Government funds its share of the program by borrowing and printing money, while the states have to come up with real money by forfeiting other things we'd much rather do." +The major destabilizing force in Missouri's budget, he said, was $143 million needed to finance additional Medicaid costs , which were mandated by Congress. The new rules extend care for more poor children, pregnant women and elderly people. +But as that example shows, Federal mandates can involve goals with which most would agree. +Defenders of the expanded Medicaid coverage like Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, an architect of the program, agree that Medicaid is becoming unwieldy and is overburdening the states. But he argues that without broader restructuring of the nation's health system, Medicaid is the only available vehicle to meet crucial goals. "I think the Federal Government has a responsibility to be sure we provide prenatal care for low-income women and to make sure poor children have health care available," he said. +Governors also contend that the Federal Government, while saying the states should take on more responsibility, is hampering their ability to raise revenue. The new Federal taxes on gasoline, alcohol and tobacco are expected to decrease demand slightly for these products and thereby reduce state revenue from existing taxes on those products. In addition, the new Federal taxes make it harder politically for states to tax those items. + +The Outlook +Who Should Take Which Roles? + +More than just balanced budgets are at stake. Alice Rivlin of the Brookings Institution who formerly headed the Congressional Budget Office, argues that states must take the lead in some areas. "Infrastructure must be modernized," she said. "school systems dramatically improved and public services, from child development to adult retraining, made dramatically more effective." +She added, "These are the kinds of programs that work best when well adapted to local conditions and local people." +In turn, she said, the Federal Government should take more responsibility for programs like Medicaid and welfare, which can be fairly addressed only on a national scale. +There is surprising agreement among many liberals and conservatives that the Federal Government, with its unsurpassed ability to raise and redistribute money, should take special responsibility for welfare measures and leave service programs to the states. The main disagreement comes on the levels of services to be offered. +"Intellectually, I have no problem with federalizing programs like Medicaid," said Mr. Williamson, the former Reagan adviser. His fear is practical. "Politically, it's hard for me to see how in the process you won't end up ratcheting the coverage up in a fiscally irresponsible manner." +New roles for the states would mean more taxes. And Mr. Gold, the expert on state governments, is optimistic about the ability of the states to find the needed income, albeit at the cost of spilled political blood. +"If the governors are smart, they will present clearly the budgetary implications of not raising taxes," Mr. Gold said. +"They will be able to convince legislatures that there is no practical way to avoid raising taxes without spending cuts that are unthinkable." +"When the dust settles there will be many big tax increases in 1991," he predicted. "This will lead to a strong backlash in 1992." +"It's going to be real uncomfortable in state capitals," Mr. Gold said. + +LOAD-DATE: December 30, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: U.S. Presidents: Kennedy (The New York Times); Johnson (Yoichi R. Okamoto); Nixon (United Press International); Ford (George Tames/The New York Times); Carter (Teresa Zabala/The New York Times); Reagan (United Press International); and Bush (Jose R. Lopez/The New York Times) (pg. 16). + +Graphs: "Heavier Burden for the States," showing state and local spending, federal contribution to state and local spending, 1960-1989 (Source: Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations) (pg. 1) + +"The Changing of Federal Aid," tracking Medicaid, other welfare to individuals, revenue sharing, all other aid, 1960-1990 (1990, estimate) (Source: Rockefeller Institute of Government) (pg. 16) + +"The Federal Contribution Fades," tracking state and local spending and federal contribution, 1960-1989 (Source: Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations) + +"How the States Spend Their Money," detailing how states spend per $100 of personal income, in 1979 and 1989 (Source: Center for the Study of the States) (pg. 17) + +"The Growth in Taxes," tracking all taxes, as a percentage of total personal income, 1962-1988 (Source: Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations) (pg. 17) + +Table: "The State of the States," detailing the difference between each state's original projected revenue for the fiscal year 1991 and the amount collected as of Dec. 15, and whether the state is currently or is about to cut its spending. (Source: National Conference fo State Legislatures) (pg. 17) + +Map: U.S. indicating which state's revenues will exceed estimate, which are on target, which are 0.1 to 2.5%, 2.6 to 5.0% or more than 5% under estimate. + +TYPE: A Special Report + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +466 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 30, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The T-Shirt Industry Sweats It Out + +BYLINE: By ISADORE BARMASH + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 6; Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1304 words + +Their appeal transcends income, education and taste. While other fashions have come and gone, the lowly T-shirt keeps selling. But even this garment's sales may be vulnerable to a recession. Indeed, a surge in domestic capacity and the flow of imports have made T-shirt marketing a sweaty contact sport. Analysts are expecting cutbacks in domestic T-shirt output to continue in 1991. +"The T-shirt market this year is soft due to too much capacity and the erosion in general economic conditions," said Robert Blanchard, president of the National Knitwear Manufacturers Association, of Morristown, N.J. "Retailers knew that they can always get the supply they need and are controlling their inventories." + Because T-shirts are relatively cheap and readily available in a wide range of styles and designs, they appeal to many different people. For example, wearing a T-shirt is a way to assert one's identity or or back up a boast, whether it be about surviving the New York Marathon, visiting Dolly Parton's Dollywood in Tennessee or proclaiming an allegiance to Calvin Klein. "Over the last five years, demand for T-shirts has been very strong," said Deborah Bronston, apparel analyst for Prudential-Bache Securities Inc., in New York City. +Meeting the demand can yield stunning profit margins. Start with a simple white cotton or cotton-polyester shirt, dye it in the factory or run it through a screen or thermal printing machine. With little added expense, a basic $3-wholesale shirt can emerge as a garment that sells for several times more. +This year, about a billion T-shirts have been made for the United States market, or four for every back. Domestic mills produced about 609 million outerwear-style T- shirts and produced another 300 million meant to be worn as underwear. About 108 million shirts have been imported. +T-shirts are the only clothing sold not just in stores, but also on the street, in gasoline stations, bowling alleys, movie theaters and zoos. A single shirt can fetch as little as $5 or as much as $150 when sold in boutiques. Even better, in Manhattan's Times Square, three shirts can sell for as low as $10. +Large makers like Fruit of the Loom Inc. and the Hanes division of Sara Lee Corporation, together account for more than 50 percent of the domestic outerwear T-shirt market, with Fruit of the Loom having a somewhat higher share than Hanes. But retailers buy only about 15 percent of their shirts directly from the manufacturers. The rest filter through wholesalers who either print T-shirts themselves or sell to independent, entrepreneurial style printers. +Some executives and analysts forecast continuing strong sales. Millions of young and older Americans constantly add to their T-shirt wardrobes -- attesting to the enduring American passion for the casual. "T-shirts and jeans naturally go together, since each seems to be just right for the other," observed Richard Ruster, the president of the Tee Corporation of America, a producer and importer in New York City. "They're the leisure wear for the 1990's." +Few fashions are so adaptable. What began as outerwear for the fitness craze has become an all-purpose garment for the home and many work places. Indeed, the greatest growth in T-shirt sales has been in outerwear. Jack Hershlag, executive director of the National Association of Men's Sportswear Buyers, speaks of "the two worlds of T-shirts." +One, he said, is the world of fashion T-shirts, proprietary creations marketed by companies or designers, usually as part of coordinated wardrobes. The other includes the blank shirts that are printed with cartoon characters, team names, product logos, special events, political slogans and jokes. "Bart Simpson is probably outselling any other cartoon character," Mr. Hershlag said. "It's a case of the product creating its own market, and the more bright ideas there are, the bigger the market will be." +Some analysts say that fashion and novelty will continue to fill T-shirts and T-shirt demand. "Even though some see an oversupply, I see a continuing, solid trend because of the tie-ins with popular movies or television shows," said Arthur Britten, a New York retailing and apparel consultant. "The 'Dick Tracy' and now 'The Simpsons' shirts have had sales in the millions." +As demand grew in the late 1980's, factories expanded more than 10 percent a year but still ran at capacity. Domestic outerwear production boomed from 382 million shirts in 1986 to 648 million in 1989. Output fell closer to 600 million this year as the manufacturers, fearing oversupply, cut back. +Importers have had to retreat as well. The biggest source of imported T-shirts is Pakistan, followed by China, Hong Kong and the Philippines. While the foreign flow increased from 14.9 percent of the outerwear market in 1986 to 18.2 percent in 1989, it has slowed this year, dropping an estimated 6 to 8 percent through June, Mr. Blanchard said. +Domestic T-shirt makers have depended on automation to fend off the imports that have inundated many other types of apparel companies. T-shirts are made from knit jersey, either an all-cotton or polyester blend, by high-speed knitting machines that, in a plant with 500 employees, turn out 17 million shirts a year. But lower fiber costs help keep the price of imported shirts a dollar or two below the cost of domestic products. +Some American companies are trying to compete by shifting their production overseas. Mr. Ruster said that imports are more likely to thrive in 1991 than domestic production. His three-year-old T-shirt company produces all its garments from abroad. Foreign makers often pay more for import rights -- which, under national quotas, can be bought and traded -- than for actual shirt production. In Mr. Ruster's view, "That shows the demand still exists for the import." +For manufacturers like Mr. Ruster, T-shirts will never go out of style. "It's still a very hot business," he said. "The T-shirt business is at its peak and everyone still wants to be in it." + + + +DESIGNER T-SHIRTS' TRUE WORTH + Nobody would price a Claude Monet painting by totaling the value of its canvas, pigment, frame and labor, as well as the retail markup. Likewise, the Monets of the fashion world insist that standard accounting fails to capture their creations' true worth. Far from treating T-shirts as designer doodlings, clever retailers promote them as essential elements in wardrobes. +Earlier this year, at the Claude Montana boutique in Beverly Hills, Calif., $150 bought a white T-shirt with a big M on the front. However, the French designer will no longer produce these shirts, because, as the boutique manager said, "We do not renew last season's styles." +Those in the business stress that the finished masterpiece justifies a shirt's high price. "The designer who decides to do a T-shirt will design it totally, from the fabric, construction, shape and trim," said Jack Hershlag, of the National Association of Men's Sportswear Buyers. "Basic T-shirts are mass-produced and chopped out in standard shapes. But the designer might want his creation longer, shorter, fuller or deeper, or with a higher neck." +Not that this effort is always evident. "You are paying for the designer's name, which is usually on it, and for the pleasure of the reaction you get," Mr. Hershlag said. "It's a matter of fashion appeal and probably snob appeal. Is it better made? Yes, but probably not much more than the best-made, moderate-priced T-shirt." +Mr. Hershlag said that consumers will never tire of letting designers advertise on their chests. "Not one bit," he said. "People want that name on their jeans or their T-shirts. Manufacturers are falling all over themselves to get the permission of designers to use their names on the products they make." + +LOAD-DATE: February 3, 1991 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Richard Ruster, a T-shirt maker. (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +467 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 30, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Stress Points in the State Budgets + +SECTION: Section 1; Part 1; Page 16; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1145 words + + +MEDICAID + The fastest growing state expense is Medicaid, the joint Federal-state program to provide health care to the poor and disabled and, increasingly, costly nursing-home care for the middle-class elderly. The Federal Government sets general guidelines and pays 56 percent of the costs on average, the states the rest. + Costs are zooming, with no end in sight. Medicaid took 3 percent of state spending in 1970, but 12 percent of state spending in 1990. Medicaid outlays have been climbing by 12 to 15 percent a year and in 1990 by an astonishing 18 percent, far above the inflation rate. + The growth reflects many factors: a general rise in medical costs, federally mandated expansion of eligible groups, an increase in the number of poor people who qualify as the economy slows and pressure to raise the low fees that are paid doctors and hospitals. One major driving force is the aging of the population. Already, nursing home care and related expenses, mainly for the elderly, take half of Medicaid funds. These include both poor people and middle-income people who have seen their assets drained by nursing-home costs or have transferred their assets. Unless a new way is devised to support long-term care needs, Medicaid costs will climb relentlessly. + The governors have condemned Congressional expansions oof coverage and other rules, which require them to come up with ever greater matching money. But defenders of these mandates say that improved coverage of poor children and pregnant women is an important social goal that can only be met through Medicaid until broader national reforms of health care are achieved. + +WELFARE + Welfare, while still a major item in state and local budgets, has accounted for a smaller share of spending over the last two decades, in part because the real value of benefits has shrunk. The Federal government pays an average of 55 percent of the costs of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the major nonmedical program; states, which have discretion in setting benefit levels, pay the rst. The Federal Government pays the entire cost of food stamps. + A.F.D.C. began in 1935 but was limited until the 1960's when court decisions required states to cover families who met Federal eligibility requirements. The welfare rolls increased steadily, from 3 million recipients in 1960 to 11.4 million in 1975. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan tightened eligibility requirements, which reduced the number of beneficiaries, mostly the working poor, by 8 percent. Enrollment crept up and has jumped with the recession, but remains close to the 1981 level of 11.2 million recipients. + While states vary widely in their benefit levels, from 1970 to 1990 the average monthly grant per recipient grew from $183 to $383. But this was far below the inflation rate, and purchasing power delcined by 39 percent. Total A.F.D.C. payments in 1989 were $17.5 billion. + Food stamps made up for part of the loss, but the average decline in purchasing power of the combined benefits over the two decades was still 19 percent. Federal spending on food stamps in 1990 was about $15 billion, providing an average montly benefit of $59 to 19.9 million people including all A.F.D.C. recipients. + Financial woes have undercut the ability of states to reform their welfare programs. States have come up with enough matching money to qualify for only 65 percent of the $800 milion in Federal money to pursue welfare reforms. + + PRISONS + Spending on corrections - prison building and maintenance, parole and related costs - has nearly doubled during the past decade. The cost has been almost entirely borne by state and local governments, which spend $17.9 billion in 1988, for example, while the Federal Government spent only $1.1 billion. + Corrections, the biggest criminal justice expense after police costs, represents only 3.5 percent of state spending on average, but in some states with ambitious prison building programs, like Michigan, it now absorbs over 7 percent of the budget. And though it takes a relatively small bite, corrections spending has grown at an average annual rate of 13 percent since 1986, absorbing much of the growth in state revenues. + The flurry of prison building is less a reflection of rising crime than of changing public responses to it. From 1976 to 1985, according to a Federal study, the number of reported crimes actually declined 2 percent, though the number of reported violent crimes rose 19 percent. But there has been a shift in public attitudes away from rehabilitation toward punishment, an increase in mandatory sentences and a broadening of the definition of criminal activity to include such things as drunk driving and possession of weapons. Even as the prison population jumped, court cases forced many state and local governments to construct new prisons to relieve crowding. + The nation's overcrowded prisons and jails hold over one million inmates and the population is increasing at the rate of 2.650 per week, or enough to fill five average-sized prisons. Financial crises are forcing many states to search for alternatives to imprisonment, and new construction may taper off. But the prison expansion will have an expensive legacy: Housing inmates in new prisons costs up to $25,000 a year. + + EDUCATION + Education is the biggest item in the budget of every state, typically accounting for one of every three dollars flowing out of state treasuries. Over the last decade, as states sought to improve education and direct more money to poorer districts, state and local spending on elementary and secondary schools more than doubled, to $187 billion in 1990 from $89 billion in 1980. Federal aid, at $13 billion in 1990, accounts for only a small fraction of school money. + The launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957 prompted Congress to invest in the teaching of math, science and foreign languages, and in the 1960's Washington increased support for disadvantaged and handicapped students. By 1980 the Federal share of school spending reached 9.2 percent, but during the 1980's it fell to 6.3 percent. + While local governments have traditionally borne the costs of schooling, usually based on property taxes, over the last two decades the state governments have taken on a greater burden, with the state share of total spending rising to 50 percent in 1990, from 40 percent in 1970. Three major forces were at work. Lawsuits have challenged the primary reliance on the property tax, arguing that this discriminated against districts with low property values. Many states have responded by increasing aid to local districts. Second, in the 1980's, states tried to make up for declining Federal assistance. + More significantly, states have recently accelerated their efforts to improve schools, raising curriculum standards and teacher salaries. + + +LOAD-DATE: February 10, 1991 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + + +GRAPHIC: +Graphs showing increases and decreases in medicaid, welfare, prison and education spending by local, state and federal governments, 1960 - 1990 + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + + + +468 of 468 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 30, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Does Community Policing Work?; +Efficient, Cooperative + +BYLINE: By Herman Goldstein; Herman Goldstein, professor of law at the University of Wisconsin, is author of "Problem-Oriented Policing." + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 11; Column 2; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 1082 words + +DATELINE: MADISON, Wis. + +If New York and other cities want to succeed in aggressive campaigns to reclaim the streets for all citizens, they must make the most of a relatively new idea: community policing. This concept, also known as neighborhood policing, empowers the police to do more than just make arrests. +Officers are permanently assigned to one neighborhood so they can get to know the people living and working in it. They tackle problems once deemed unimportant: noise complaints, trespassing, teen-agers' hullabaloo. The public is given easy access to them through storefront stations and officers' telephone numbers at work, not the impersonal and frequently busy 911. + Community policing, which is expensive, cannot replace traditional investigations into such violent crimes as homicide, armed robbery and sexual assault. But by emphasizing crime prevention, it can improve a neighborhood's quality of life, an urgent issue in America's cities. +New York's 1,457-member Community Patrol Officer Program (called CPOP), which such evaluators as New York's Vera Institute of Justice considers promising, is staffed by special units. In other cities, the entire force does community policing. +Some programs are ambitious and far-reaching. Others are narrow and superficial. They are little more than public-relations efforts such as police athletic leagues and foot patrols intended to evoke nostalgic recollections of the friendly cop on the beat. These shallow efforts threaten the movement's credibility. +In the most advanced neighborhood programs, the police systematically identify and analyze particular crimes such as theft from cars and robbery of the elderly, and develop tailored responses. This fine-tuning approach, specifically labeled problem-oriented policing, is best exemplified by New York City; Baltimore County, Md.; San Diego, Calif.; Tulsa, Okla.; Newport News, Va., and Edmonton, Alberta. +The CPOP program began in June 1984, and within about a year it began making its mark: Vincent Esposito, a CPOP officer assigned to the 72d Precinct in Brooklyn, N.Y., foiled drug dealing in Rainbow Park, on Sixth Avenue. First, he arrested drug dealers, but that time-consuming process hardly stopped the traffic. After gaining the trust of elderly residents in neighboring apartment houses, he got them to telephone him confidentially and tell him where dealers were stashing drugs. He entered the park, ignored the dealers and seized the drugs. The dealers, suffering heavy losses, soon gave up and went away, and the park was restored to young mothers and elderly residents of the neighborhood. +Baltimore County's COPE (Citizen Oriented Police Enforcement) unit, begun in 1981, has reduced crime and repeated calls for police assistance and residents' fear in apartment complexes beset by burglaries, drug-dealing, vandalism, petty theft and conflicts among residents. It has done so by working with management to make repairs, improve lighting, modify areas where intruders could hide, and improve the appearance of buildings. It has organized tenants, mediated disputes between tenants and between tenants and management and made sure both sides honor leases. It has involved the fire, building inspection, zoning and health departments, and has connected residents with social services. +The police traditionally deal with the public the way many parents treat their children. Armed with authority, they have cultivated an omnipotent air, hoping the threat of arrest and punishment would keep things under control. Their bluff has been called. In many inner cities, they cannot control violence, curb disorder and reduce fear simply by a show of authority and the implicit threats that go with it. +Yet, large segments of the public have not yet acknowledged these limitations. They prefer old-fashioned approaches: a greater police presence, more arrests, more prosecutions -- even though investing more and more resources in such methods does not reduce street crime and violence. This is wasteful. It ignores everything learned about the complexity of policing in recent decades, and caters to the notion that more officers mean less crime. That sounds good, but it's not necessarily so. +Community policing discards the assumption that only criminal-law enforcement defines the police's social role and priorities. It recognizes that officers face an incredible range of knotty problems and that the law is but one means for engaging them. +Today, there are not enough officers to protect the public properly. Consider New York's Police Department, staffed by 26,992 officers of all ranks. Allow for days off, vacations, sick leave, court appearances, administrative support and supervision, and important special assignments such as investigative and organized-crime units. Apportion the remaining officers to cover the three daily shifts. Spread that number on the streets of five boroughs. +No more than 3,000 officers are on patrol on any shift to protect the lives and property of 7.5 million residents of widely varied cultural, educational and economic backgrounds in a volatile city. Would adding 2,000, 4,000, 6,000 officers dramatically reduce the crisis of the streets? I doubt it. +Besides being spread so thin, the police are preoccupied with responding to 911 calls, not all of which merit their attention. While foot and motorized patrols may reduce fear, researchers question whether they significantly reduce street crime. +Generally, officers lack legal authority to deal with many offensive street situations: harassment by panhandlers, disorderly behavior by the homeless. When they have proper authority, they must depend on the criminal justice system to enforce it. However, the overwhelmed courts can handle only the most serious offenders. Thus, traditional policing makes no sense in certain situations. +When officers arrange for the quick removal of abandoned cars and the speedy demolition or repair of abandoned buildings -- "quality of life" issues that can affect self-respect and crime rates -- they are not doing "soft social work," as critics charge. +Such community policing can succeed only by cultivating a neighborhood's respect and trust -- a tall order given the tensions between the police and certain ethnic groups. Alone, it cannot overcome such endemic problems as racial tensions. It is, at best, a holding operation to keep the peace until national social forces and political will address the underlying problems. + +LOAD-DATE: December 30, 1990 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo of police officers. + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company + diff --git a/TestFiles/NYT 1994.txt b/TestFiles/NYT 1994.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c54149e --- /dev/null +++ b/TestFiles/NYT 1994.txt @@ -0,0 +1,23149 @@ + + +1 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 2, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +POSTINGS: Housing for Low-Income Elderly; +71 Apartments in East Harlem and . . . + +SECTION: Section 10; Page 1; Column 3; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 256 words + +A 71-unit housing complex for the low-income elderly will soon be built in East Harlem as part of a special program begun by Mount Sinai Medical Center. +"It's very rare that a hospital builds low-income housing," said Laurie Anderson, a spokeswoman for the medical center. + Construction on a vacant lot at 309 East 118th Street is expected to begin by mid-1995 and be done in late 1996. The architects are Simmons Architects of Brooklyn. +The hospital's program, called Project Linkage, will be financed by a $5.8 million grant from the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. +The project, which also includes an after-school program for latch-key children, is a joint venture of Mount Sinai; the Union Settlement, an education and social service agency; the Community Association of East Harlem Triangle, a housing development and management corporation, and the Greater Emmanuel Baptist Church. +"Project Linkage grew out of a recognition that poor environmental conditions, such as substandard housing and extreme isolation, are widespread health threats to the older residents of East Harlem," said Dr. Robert N. Butler, director of Mount Sinai's International Leadership Center on Longevity and Society. +Dr. Butler is also the chairman of the hospital's Henry L. Schwartz department of geriatrics and adult development. The department, along with the New York Community Trust and the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York Inc., conducted a study that launched the project. + +LOAD-DATE: January 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +2 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 2, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +POSTINGS: Housing for Low-Income Elderly; +. . . 130 on 8.5 Acres in Westfield, N.J. + +SECTION: Section 10; Page 1; Column 3; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 253 words + +Construction began last month on a 130-unit housing project for the elderly in Westfield, N.J., on a site adjacent to an existing home, Westfield Senior Citizen Housing. +Forest City Ratner Companies is the developer of the project. The architect is Swanke Hayden Connell Ltd. of Manhattan. + The building, which will be owned by the Westfield Senior Citizen Urban Renewal Partnership, will be on an 8.5-acre parcel in the Manor Park neighborhood. The land is owned by the town of Westfield and leased for 33 years to the partnership. +Preliminary site-clearing work began in mid-November and foundation work is currently under way. The building is scheduled to be completed by the end of this year. +The project's design includes 130 one-bedroom apartments, two community rooms for residents, and administrative offices. The construction costs are estimated at about $10 million. +Financing will be provided by Chemical Bank of New Jersey, Transamerica Occidential Life Insurance Corporation of San Francisco and the Westfield Senior Citizens Housing Corporation. +A key part of the project was the Federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program. Westfield received an allocation for tax credits, which are being sold to Transamerica Occidential Life Insurance Corporation for about $4.5 million. +"Even though nobody had any idea whether the tax bill containing the tax credits would pass Congress, this team pushed ahead with the planning and the paperwork," said Westfield's Mayor, Garland "Bud" Boothe. + +LOAD-DATE: January 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +3 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 2, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Legal System and Protection + +SECTION: Section 13LI; Page 4; Column 1; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 377 words + +DAVID THALER, Director of Adult Protective Services in Nassau County, said his agency would be working with the Nassau County Coalition Against Domestic Violence to produce videos, hold seminars and increase publicity about abuse of the elderly. +Doctors and lawyers, too, are being trained. "We have to educate doctors all the time," said Carol Pichney, supervisor of the guardianship-court liaison unit of the Suffolk County Social Services Department. "Doctors used to write that a person was incompetent without investigating further. A brand-new guardianship law went into effect in April 1993 which states that no one in New York State can ever be declared incompetent again. Doctors didn't seem to understand the legal implication, because when we take a case to court we have to have a doctor's statement. + "We also have to educate lawyers. With a lot of them I think nothing is a problem until someone challenges it. They must be very, very careful when dealing with elder clients and be very careful of the client's mental capacity. We will now bring lawyers into court to tell the judge exactly what happened, and we will challenge the competency of the elder person on the date the document was signed. We have been successful on many occasions, especially on having powers of attorney stricken down." +Douglas McNally, a lawyer who specializes in elder law in Northport, said: "There are many cases in which an attorney takes advantage of the older person. So it's important to make sure you have an attorney conversant in the field of elder law. All too often attorneys look at their role as just preparing the document, and their role needs to go beyond that in determining the capacity of the client. There are many things they can do like consult with the medical profession and train themselves to administer the Mini Mental Status Exam. +"If there is the slightest question, like the setting is a nursing home, or there is a history of illness I believe attorneys must check with someone. It's a very sensitive issue, of course, and one of the things the lawyers have to answer right from the outset is who they are representing. If they're representing the elderly person, they owe it to that person to be painfully objective." + +LOAD-DATE: January 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +4 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 2, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +PUBLIC INTEREST; +Want to Help? Where to Call. + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 9; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1835 words + +There are thousands of places to volunteer in New York. What follows is a very limited listing. More possibilities are available through the Mayor's Voluntary Action Center, (212) -788-7550; the Volunteer Referral Center, (212) 889-4805; New York Cares, (212) 228-5000, or the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program (for people 55 and over), (212) 674-7787. + +SOUP KITCHENS + +CATHOLIC CENTER SOUP KITCHEN at N.Y.U., 58 Washington Square South, Manhattan, (212) 674-7236. Volunteers staff a soup kitchen on Mondays from 11:30 A.M. to 2 P.M. +CENTRAL SYNAGOGUE , 128 East 55th Street, Manhattan, (212) 838-5122. Volunteers staff a breakfast kitchen on Thursdays and Fridays. + +HOLY APOSTLE SOUP KITCHEN , 296 Ninth Avenue, Manhattan (212) 924-0167. Serves 1,000 people, Monday through Friday, 10 A.M. to 1 P.M. +YORKVILLE COMMON PANTRY , 8 East 109th Street, Manhattan, (212) 410-2264. Volunteers work in a soup kitchen three evenings a week and an all-day food pantry on Thursdays. +LOVE GOSPEL ASSEMBLY (LOVE KITCHEN) , 2315 Grand Concourse, the Bronx, (718) 295-6366. Lunches are served Monday through Friday, 11:30 A.M. to 3:30 P.M. +PART OF THE SOLUTION , 2763 Webster Avenue, the Bronx, (718) 220-4892. Volunteers do office work and help in the kitchen, serving a hot lunch seven days a week. Flexible hours. +MOUNT OLIVE HOUSE , 277-285 Eldert Street, Bushwick, Brooklyn, (718) 443-6010. Volunteers help with housekeeping and work in the kitchen for three meals a day. Flexible hours. +ST. JOHN'S BREAD AND LIFE PROGRAM , 75 Lewis Avenue, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, (718) 455-6864. Serves breakfast and lunch to about 1,000 people. Needs volunteers to serve and clean up, weekdays from 7 A.M. to 2 P.M. +CLADDAGH INN , 73-14 Rockaway Beach Boulevard, Rockaway Beach, Queens, (718) 945-2897. Volunteers cook and serve lunches, Monday through Friday, Noon to 1:30 P.M. + +THE ELDERLY + +GREATER HARLEM NURSING HOME , 30 West 138th Street, Manhattan, (212) 690-7400. Volunteers visit with residents and help with various events. Flexible hours. +RETIRED AND SENIOR VOLUNTEER PROGRAM , 105 East 22d Street, Suite 401, Manhattan, (212) 674-7787. An organization of 10,000 volunteers, working largely with children and the elderly in a wide variety of activities. Places volunteers 55 and older. Flexible hours. +VILLAGE VISITING NEIGHBORS , 401 Lafayette Street, Manhattan, (212) 260-6200. Pairs volunteers with elderly people who need help shopping, visiting the doctor or simply need company. +FORT GREENE SENIOR CITIZENS COUNCIL , 966 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, (718) 638-6910. Volunteers works as guards, kitchen helpers, lead field trips and visit the sick, among other activities. Flexible hours. +THEODORE G. JACKSON SENIOR CENTER , 92-47 165th Street, Jamaica, Queens, (718) 657-6500. Volunteers work with visually impaired residents, do clerical work and serve lunche. Hours, 9:30 A.M. to 3 P.M. +SUNNYSIDE COMMUNITY SERVICES , 43-31 39th Street, Sunnyside, Queens, (718) 784-6173. Telephone reassurance, visiting, tutoring. Flexible hours. +COMMUNITY AGENCY FOR SENIOR CITIZENS (CASC), 56 Bay Street, St. George, S.I., (718) 981-6226. Volunteers of all ages work as tutors, companions and aides to the elderly. +METROPOLITAN JEWISH GERIATRIC CENTER , (718) 851-5953. + +CHILDREN + +THE CHILDREN'S STOREFRONT , 70 East 129th Street, Manhattan, (212) 427-8525. Volunteers tutor, teach reading and help with academic and athletic programs at this private, tuition-free school. Flexible hours. +HARLEM DOWLING-WEST SIDE CENTER FOR CHILDREN AND FAMILY SERVICES , 2090 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, Manhattan, (212) 749-3656, extension 554. Volunteers work as mentors to children and families, among other activities. +MASTER ANGLERS , (718) 230-3221. Volunteers teach children from city 4-H programs about the environment through fishing. Flexible hours. +NEW YORK CITY SCHOOL VOLUNTEER PROGRAM , 443 Park Avenue South, Manhattan, (212) 213-3370. Volunteers do tutoring in reading, math and other subjects. Flexible hours; all boroughs. +URBAN YOUTH BICYCLE PROJECT , (212) 939-4005. This organization based at Harlem Hospital, uses bicycle-related projects to teach about managing in the world at large. After school and weekends. +HOMEWORK HELP , Edenwald-Gun Hill Neighborhood Center, 1150 East 229th Street, the Bronx, (718) 652-2232. Volunteers do tutoring and fund-raising. +THE MIRACLE MAKERS , 115-117 Ralph Avenue, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, (718) 385-2848. Volunteers assist in a variety of foster-care programs. Hours, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. + +AIDS + +THE ACTORS FUND AIDS INITIATIVE , 1501 Broadway, Suite 518, Manhattan, (212) 221-7300. Actors and others connected with the business do volunteer work as "angels" (doing occasional errands) and "buddies" (regularly visiting a person with AIDS). +GAY MEN'S HEALTH CRISIS (212) 337-3588. Volunteers participate in a buddy program, act as volunteer lawyers and therapists, do office work, help prepare meals and staff an AIDS hot line. +GOD'S LOVE WE DELIVER , 895 Amsterdam Avenue, Manhattan, (212) 865-6500. Volunteers help deliver meals to homebound people with AIDS in all boroughs, between 11 A.M. and 3 P.M. Kitchen shifts and office work available at all hours. +HOMELESS PWA/HIV SERVICES , 305 Seventh Avenue, Manhattan, (212) 645-3444. Volunteers secure apartments and other services for homeless people with AIDS. +THE MOMENTUM PROJECT , 19 West 36th Street, Manhattan, (212) 268-2610. Volunteers serve group meals to people with H.I.V. or AIDS in Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn, collect and distribute clothing, do baking and office work. Flexible hours. +MANHATTAN CENTER FOR LIVING , 704 Broadway, Manhattan, (212) 533-3550. Office work, chiropractic work, massage and cooking for people with debilitating illnesses, including AIDS. Flexible hours. +STAND UP HARLEM , 145 West 130th Street, Manhattan, (212) 926-4072. Volunteers help with hospitality and outreach and sort donated clothing. Flexible hours. +POWARS (Pet Owners with AIDS Resource Service), P.O. Box 1116, Madison Square Station, New York, N.Y. 10159, (212) 744-0842. Volunteers in all boroughs, at all hours, do dog walking and cat sitting, escort pets to the vet and other chores. +BRONX AIDS SERVICES , 2633 Webster Avenue, South Bronx, (718) 295-5690. The organization needs volunteers for AIDS education and programs for black and Hispanic people with AIDS. + +THE HOMELESS + +COALITION FOR THE HOMELESS , 89 Chambers Street, Manhattan, (212) 964-5900. Volunteers help distribute hot meals, clothes and blankets, and refer homeless people to social services. Monday through Friday, 7 P.M. to 9 P.M. +GRAND CENTRAL PARTNERSHIP , 152 East 44th Street, Manhattan, (212) 818-1220, extension 38. Volunteers help in a soup kitchen, help develop job skills and perform other services at a 24-hour drop-in center. +PARTNERSHIP FOR THE HOMELESS , 305 Seventh Avenue, Manhattan, (212) 645-3444. Volunteer programs include Emergency Shelter, which provides overnight shelter, and Project Domicile, which finds apartments. Flexible hours. +BOND STREET DROP-IN CENTER , 3941 Bond Street, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, (718) 935-0439. Volunteers work in overnight shelters, preparing meals and doing other tasks. Flexible hours. +FURNISH-A-FUTURE , 20 Jay Street, Downtown Brooklyn, (718) 875-5353. Volunteers solicit furniture donations and raise funds to help furnish apartments for the newly homeless. + +THE DISABLED + +MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS SOCIETY , New York City chapter, 30 West 26th Street, Manhattan, (212) 463-7787. Volunteers raise funds through mailings and events, assist in therapy, and conduct recreation programs. Flexible hours. +PUERTO RICAN FAMILY INSTITUTE , 145 West 15th Street, Manhattan, (212) 924-6320. Volunteers help raise funds and provide technical assistance and other services in clinics for the mentally ill and developmentally disabled. +SOUTHEAST BRONX RIVER NEIGHBORHOOD CENTER , 955 Tinton Avenue, the Bronx (718) 542-2727. Volunteers help in exercise, art and music programs for the mentally ill. +LEXINGTON CENTER , 30th Avenue and 75th Street, Jackson Heights, Queens, (718) 899-8800, ext. 391. Volunteers assist in classroom activities at the center's Lexington School for the Deaf, do research, participate in garden care, repair toys, and do office work. Hours, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. + +CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS + +ARTISTS SPACE , 38 Greene Street, Manhattan. Volunteers work in public relations, fund raising, research and other areas. . Tuesday through Saturday, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. +ASSOCIATION FOR HISPANIC ARTS , 173 East 116th Street, Manhattan, (212) 860-5445. Volunteers do office work and assist in fund-raising events. Flexible hours. +BUSINESS VOLUNTEERS FOR THE ARTS , 25 West 45th Street, Suite 707, Manhattan, (212) 819-9287. Volunteers work as management consultants for arts organizations. Flexible hours. +CHINATOWN HISTORY MUSEUM , 70 Mulberry Street, Manhattan, (212) 619-4785. Volunteers do office work and other jobs. Flexible hours. +THE JEWISH MUSEUM , Fifth Avenue at 92d Street, Manhattan, (212) 423-3208. Volunteers take tickets, hand out audiotapes and work at the membership desk and gift shop. Flexible hours. +EDENWALD-GUN HILL NEIGHBORHOOD CENTER , 1150 East 229th Street, the Bronx, (718) 652-2232. Volunteers are needed to help with ceramics class and other children's art programs. +THE QUEENS MUSEUM OF ART , New York City Building, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Flushing, Queens, (718) -592-9700, extension 67. Volunteers help with art workshops, curatorial and office tasks, and staff the gift shop. Flexible hours. + +LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION + +ENGLISH IN ACTION , the English-Speaking Union, 16 East 69th Street, Manhattan, (212) 879-6800. Volunteers converse with immigrants in English. +EAST HARLEM TUTORIAL PROGRAM , 2050 Second Avenue, near 105th Street, Manhattan, (212) 831-0650. One-on-one tutoring for children. Afternoons, evenings and weekends. +LITERACY ASSISTANCE CENTER , (212) 267-6000. Referral agency for schools and community centers that offer English as a second language or basic reading and writing. +LEARNING FOR ADVANCEMENT , Mexican Consulate, 8 East 41st Street, Manhattan, (212) 689-0456, ext. 37. Instruction in English as a second language, and tips about living in New York. Volunteers are needed evenings. +THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY , 150 West 100th Street, Manhattan, (212) 932-7920. Volunteers teach a basic literacy and writing program. +HIGHBRIDGE COMMUNITY LIFE CENTER , 979 Ogden Avenue, the Bronx, (718) 681-2222. Volunteers tutor adults and children in reading and writing. +THE BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY , Grand Army Plaza branch, Prospect Park at Grand Army Plaza. (718) 780-7791. Volunteers conduct literacy programs. Flexible hours. +THE QUEENS PUBLIC LIBRARY , Steinway branch, 21-45 31st Street, Astoria. (718) 932-3239. Volunteers conduct a basic literacy program. + +LOAD-DATE: January 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: List + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +5 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 2, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: CO-OP CITY; +Apartments for Elderly Poor + +BYLINE: By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 7; Column 5; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 203 words + +The Department of City Planning last week certified plans for an apartment building for the low-income elderly in Co-op City, a community with one of the highest concentrations of older people in New York City. The project now faces a lengthy public review process, including a hearing before Community Board 10 this month. +Proposed by the Metropolitan New York Coordinating Council on Jewish Poverty, the plan calls for constructing a 12-floor building with 123 apartments at 777 Co-op City Boulevard. It would provide affordable housing to individuals who earn less than $14,600 a year and couples who earn less than $16,700 a year. The project is financed by the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. + Arthur Taub, a board member of the Coordinating Council of Senior Citizens of Co-op City, said the neighborhood has a particular need for such a project because of its aging population. At the same time, he said, the neighborhood is ideal for the new residents, providing them with recreation and support through a network of clubs and centers serving the elderly. +"We're hoping to get them in here quickly," Mr. Taub said, "because they are going to be a great neighbor." + R.H. + +LOAD-DATE: January 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +6 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 2, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +PLAYING IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: EAST HARLEM; +A Timely Look at Mayors Past + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 10; Column 2; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 181 words + +With the arrival of a new occupant for Gracie Mansion, the Museum of the City of New York is opening an exhibition called "His Honor, The Mayor." It draws on its collection of paintings, photographs, manuscripts, costumes and objects to examine the city's political history. +New York's last British mayor, shown in an oil by John Singleton Copley, was Whitehead Hicks; appointed by the English governor in 1766, he retired and moved to Flushing when the Revolutionary War broke out. The dress coat worn by DeWitt Clinton, a three-time mayor, at the opening of the Erie Canal is on display, as is the oxblood silk smoking jacket of Fiorello LaGuardia. Not to mention the six-inch-high iron bank made in the shape of Tammany Hall's Boss Tweed, who is shown seated in a chair; when a penny is placed in his hand, it drops into a pocket and his head nods in thanks. + Museum of the City of New York, Fifth Avenue at 103d Street; Jan. 2 through May 22; Wednesday through Saturday 10 A.M. to 5 P.M., Sunday, 1 P.M. to 5 P.M.; $5, $3 for the elderly, $8 per family; (212) 534-1672. + +LOAD-DATE: January 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Ben Shahn's 1934 "Parade for Repeal" at the Museum of the City of New York. (Museum of the City of New York) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +7 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 3, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Modern Maternity + +SECTION: Section A; Page 22; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 339 words + +Several weeks ago, in London, a woman gave birth to twins. Why did this seemingly unremarkable event merit headlines? Simple. She is 59 years old. +True, her children came into this world by a somewhat circuitous route. Eggs donated by a younger woman were fertilized by the older woman's 45-year-old husband and implanted in her at a Rome fertility clinic. But in-vitro fertilization and donor eggs are, if not yet commonplace, not unusual in the wonderful new world of obstetrics. Once again, then, why the headlines? Simple. She is 59 years old. + Fifty-nine is, of course, a rare age to embark on motherhood. But it is not a rare age to embark on fatherhood. Fatherhood at 50-plus doesn't occasion much fuss unless the new Dad is, say, 60-plus and famous besides. Then the headlines read "What a Guy!" But this woman in England: you'd think she'd done something terrible. +"Women do not have the right to have a child." Virginia Bottomley, Britain's Minister of Health, snapped. "The child has a right to a suitable home." What makes Ms. Bottomley believe the twins won't have a suitable home? Youth is no guarantee of parenting skills: all too often the contrary is the case. And how would Ms. Bottomley define the homes in which parentless children are raised by grandmothers? Are they, ipso facto, unsuitable? +There is a strong case that Britain's National Health Service should not have to pay for in-vitro procedures in older women; such procedures, expensive and chancy at best, are even more so when the patient is post-menopausal. This new mother of twins, however, paid for her treatment herself. +Even so, finding a physician was difficult. She went to Rome because she was rebuffed by doctors in London who said she was too old for the emotional stress. +Motherhood is difficult at any age, and it's hard to imagine many women wanting to undertake it at 59. But if they do, and if they can, then why not say to them what is said to 59-year-old fathers? "Congratulations, good luck -- and good baby sitters." + +LOAD-DATE: January 3, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +8 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 4, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Frustrating Fight for Acceptance; +For Older Job Seekers, a Sad Refrain: 'I'd Love to Hire You, but You Just Won't Fit In' + +BYLINE: By ESTHER B. FEIN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1764 words + +Despite a decade-long push by private and government organizations to market older people as reliable and mature workers, advocates for people 55 and older say their efforts have largely failed. They say that employers continue to view age not in terms of experience or stability but as deterioration and staleness. +People who have worked to promote the older labor force say that 10 years ago they were confident that, through intensive public relations and educational efforts, American businesses would recognize and harness what they argued are the skills of older workers. Although it is impossible to tally how much money went toward that end, people who work in the field estimated that tens of millions of dollars were spent nationwide on studies, job fairs, seminars for executives and advertising. + Libby Mandel is 69 years old and has been looking for a job for two years. She has taken advantage of many of these programs, going to computer classes, resume writing workshops and job fairs, and thrusting herself forward as an experienced secretary who had, for 25 years, skillfully handled the paper, telephone and student traffic at Seward Park High School in Manhattan. +"These senior programs were all supposed to show people that age doesn't matter," said Mrs. Mandel, in a voice more resigned than hopeful. "But it does. It still does. It's like a handicap. Really." + +Anger and Frustration + Now people running these programs, as well as older workers themselves, say they are frustrated and angry at how little headway they have made in changing attitudes and hiring practices. +To be sure, all agree, the recession has not helped. But in many cases, they say, the burden of age in the job market is as profound as those of race and gender. +The Federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which was enacted in 1967 and amended several times since, prohibits any form of discrimination in the workplace due to a person's age. The law now eliminates mandatory retirement ages for all but very select positions, including top-level executives. +Employers may not ask a job applicant's age or consider it when making a hiring decision, except where it is a so-called "bona fide occupational qualification." An example of that would be a job like construction, where physical strength is an issue, but even then a fit and robust older worker would be protected. The fact that a job is entry-level or that a company envisions training someone for a longterm career track would be irrelevant to the law. +But it is too often relevant to employers, complain advocates for older workers, although proving age discrimination in employment is very difficult. +People like Mrs. Mandel who have journeyed futilely about the job market say that they can actually feel themselves dissolve from vital individuals into antique stereotypes as they sit before interviewers who, careful not to run afoul of discrimination laws, try surreptitiously to find out applicants' ages and couch their biases in the most deferential terms. +"When I look at myself, I see a funny person basically, a helper; I'm enthusiastic," Mrs. Mandel said. "But when I talk to these recruiters or go on interviews, I know what they see is an old lady. They don't have to see my date of birth. They see the gray hair, they see the wrinkles, and they think, 'Old.' " +The job market, while showing some recent signs of recovery, is still a grim odyssey for most unemployed people, but it is particularly so for older people. +Statistically, the situation for older workers in the New York region is significantly worse than the country as a whole. Nationwide in 1992, about 738,000 people age 55 and older were unemployed and actively looking for jobs, a rise of about 51 percent in five years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the New York area, those ranks swelled nearly 2 1/2 times in the same period -- from 28,000 to 67,000 -- due, in large measure, to the corporate reorganization that took place here in the 1980's and the subsequent recession. +Still, the jobless rate for older workers -- 4.8 percent in the United States and 6.8 percent in the New York region in 1992 -- is lower than that of the general work force. But experts say those figures reflect the stability of workers who have had steady jobs and have not been forced back into the marketplace. The numbers also don't reflect older workers who, put off by dismal prospects, have stopped looking for jobs. + +'Untapped Resource' + There are, to be sure, some companies that have responded and have reached out to aging workers. But experts say that the "untapped resource," as one report referred to workers 55 years and older, remains largely that -- untapped. +"I wish I could say that because of all these case studies, companies are running out in droves to hire older workers," said Michael Barth, a labor economist and senior vice president for ICF, a Washington consulting firm that specializes in labor market studies. "But if anything, they are finding more ways to get rid of them and the reason is because there is a lot of pure bias, of behaving toward older workers totally in the context of their age, not their ability." +People 55 and older are increasingly looking for jobs for many reasons. People are living longer and healthier and have a desire and ability to keep active professionally for longer. +In addition, in a period of massive corporate layoffs and downsizing, older workers are frequently induced into taking early retirement, afraid that if they don't accept severance packages one year, they will be let go without any safety net the following year. But the money is usually not enough for them to live on, considering average life expectancy and a troubled economy. + +Studies Offer Praise + A variety of studies -- some of which surveyed human resources executives at hundreds of firms, others of which focused on particular companies -- have found that workers age 55 and older are more reliable, have lower rates of absenteeism, higher productivity and were just as easy to retrain as their younger colleagues. +But the prejudices against older workers are so ingrained, people who have studied the issue say, they defy logic and hard data. +"In the beginning, I was more optimistic that if we corrected the stereotype, if we could document productivity, that it would help change attitudes," said Karen Davis, the executive vice president of the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation based in New York that recently completed a five-year, $4 million study of workers over 55. +"I really thought the reports would have had more of a positive impact. But we are running against the economic trends and some deep-rooted bias. I still think it may turn around, but it's clearly going to be an uphill struggle to make it happen." +At a recent job fair for older workers at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan -- promisingly named "Ability is Ageless" -- participants walked from booth to booth, leaving their resumes with recruiters and commiserating with each other about the indignities of job-hunting at their age. + +Handling the Age Question + "I'm ashamed to admit it, but I dye my hair, like a lady, to give myself a more youthful appearance," said one man, a 62-year-old former salesman from Flushing who declined to give his name. "And I wear bright ties. They should think I'm with it, and not stuffy." He fingered a yellow swath of silk with aqua crests and sighed, "So far, it hasn't helped." +Similar laments are repeated at job fairs in other cities and at workshops and training programs designed to make aging workers more competitive. At AgeWorks, a 16-week skills-improvement course run by the New York City Department for the Aging, several women compared euphemisms for "you're too old" that they had encountered in their job quests. +"They say that you're overqualified, even if you're willing to take a lower-level job," said Sara Lerner, a former bookkeeper from Riverdale, who, like many people interviewed, would give her name, but not her age. +"That's the main one they use," said Karen Halpern, who was given early retirement recently from her job at I.B.M. +"There's also, 'I'd love to hire you, but you just won't fit in,' " said Helen Miller, of Ridgewood, Queens, who was candid about her 66 years and is looking for clerical work. "They also get around asking you your age by asking what year you graduated, or asking to see your driver's license." +If they do get hired, many older workers find that it is for a job that is far lower in pay and stature than their previous position. +For 25 years, Cecil Frazier was a chef at the Gloucester House, a pricey midtown restaurant where he was known for his lobster bisque. Now he grills burgers and fries chicken for a T.G.I. Friday's restaurant in Manhattan, and in spite of that drop in status, he is grateful. +Most of the people he worked with before the Gloucester House closed in 1992 are still looking for work, their years of experience proving no lure to potential employers. "They're working 20 years and more and can't get no jobs," said Mr. Frazier, who is 60 and searched nearly a year before finding work. "But the younger guys, now they got the jobs. They've got no experience, but they got the jobs." + + +Signs of Change + There are some in the field who say they are optimistic that the trend is beginning to turn. But those voices are all but drowned out by the once hopeful -- and now befuddled -- advocates in the field, who say they are at a loss trying to figure out how to translate their information into jobs. +In a study issued last year, the American Association of Retired Persons and the Society for Human Resource Management surveyed about 1,000 managers in a range of businesses and found that even though "workers over the age of 50 are admired for their skills and their work habits" they are nonetheless "underutilized and undervalued." +"Everybody saw them as reliable, like a Saint Bernard," said Dr. Martin Sicker, director of Work Force Programs for A.A.R.P. "They love them, but they won't hire them and we really couldn't get at why. None of the negative stereotypes show up in the answers, but even positive stereotypes cause pigeonholing. +"They use words like 'mature' and 'dependable' but they don't look at individual skills and characters. They lump older workers together in a way that they don't younger ones, and any buzz words set off alarms for me. It does just come down to 'ageism' and we haven't found a way to crack it." + +LOAD-DATE: January 4, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: When many older workers find new jobs, the positions are often lower in stature and in pay. Cecil Frazier went from a job as a chef at a pricey midtown restaurant to grilling hamburgers for a T.G.I. Friday's restaurant in Manhattan. (Angel Franco/The New York Times) + +Chart showuing percentage of older workers in relation to the overall workforce in the US and NYC metropolitan area. (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics) (pg. B6) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +9 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 4, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +A Place Where Mature Workers Are Invited to Check In + +BYLINE: By ESTHER B. FEIN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 454 words + +Hazel Rathbun talks and acts as if she were on a one-woman mission to break stereotypes about age. And in a business world that continues to shun older workers, she has found an unlikely champion: her employer. +Mrs. Rathbun, who is 73, began working six years ago as a desk clerk at the Days Inn hotel in Ledgewood, N.J. She has mastered the computerized check-in and check-out system, the fax machine and the switchboard. She stands for most of her seven-hour shifts and hardly misses a day's work. + +Some Companies Are Eager + Although advocates for older workers say the corporate environment is overwhelmingly inhospitable to workers over 55, the Days Inn hotel chain is one of the few businesses that has seen the advantage in welcoming them. Other companies include the Travelers Corporation, the financial service company based in Hartford; the Riese Organization, a restaurant concern in New York and Tiffany & Company. + About 28 percent of the 1,500 employees at Days Inn's headquarters in Parsippany, N.J., and at its reservations centers in Knoxville and Phoenix are 50 years or older. +Days Inn began seeking and hiring older people to work in its reservations centers in the mid-1980's, as a way to solve a high turnover rate. "We thought, 'Who would be an attractive alternative to the young people we had been hiring to answer the reservations lines?' " said John Russell, the president and chief operating officer of the company. "We were losing them after two or three months. And then we thought -- retirees." +Mr. Russell said overcoming sterotypes in the corporate world was often hard. "We think with our eyes instead of our minds," he said. +The Commonwealth Fund, a private, nonprofit foundation based In New York City, analyzed Days Inn's use of older workers and found that they were trained in the same two-week period as younger workers. Moreover, it found that they stayed on the job three times as long -- an average of three years compared with one year for the younger workers. +As a result, the average annual training and recruiting costs for older workers was $618 per position, compared with $1,742 for younger workers. And while older workers did take longer to handle each call, company officials said that because of their patience in assisting callers, they booked more reservations. +"They filled our needs," Mr. Russell said. "Believe me, if the results weren't there, we'd take it back the other way." +Mrs. Rathbun said she refused to accommodate the prevailing expectation that a woman of her years should act a certain, doddering way. +"I work circles around the younger ones," Mrs. Rathbun said with a sly kind of smile. "They should be happy to have me here." + +LOAD-DATE: January 4, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Discouraged by the high turnover rate, managers at the Days Inn in Ledgewood, N.J., turned to older applicants and found Hazel Rathbun, 73. "I work circles around the younger ones," she said. (Norman Y. Lono for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +10 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 5, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +French Government Proposes Ban On Pregnancies After Menopause + +BYLINE: By ALAN RIDING, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 6; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 825 words + +DATELINE: PARIS, Jan. 4 + +Reflecting growing European concern about the moral issues posed by reproductive technology, France's rightist Government has decided to introduce legislation banning artificial impregnation of post-menopausal women, but some critics promptly charged that it was acting too hastily. +Defending the bill, Health Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said artificial late pregnancies were immoral as well as dangerous to the health of mother and child. He urged women not to be "egoistic" by trying to become pregnant after menopause. + But Elizabeth Badinter, a well-known writer, challenged the logic of a ban. "Nobody has ever banned a 20-year-old girl who is deeply neurotic, addicted to drugs or has AIDS from having a baby," she said. "Why should a woman of 60, who could be a good mother, not have the right to have a child?" + +Legislation Likely to Be Passed + With the conservative Government enjoying a huge majority in Parliament, the bill seems almost certain to win approval in the coming weeks, although it could be amended first. +Simone Veil, the Social Affairs Minister in France's new conservative Government, said today that she would ask the Cabinet on Wednesday to extend the bill to require that a judge give approval in every case of artificial insemination to create an embryo that has no genetic link to the parents. +"There have to be certain rules, because we could otherwise have some really bizarre situations," she said, adding that in practice, French fertility centers were following ethical rules barring artificial impregnation of post-menopausal women. +But Le Monde said pregnancies of older women were a secondary issue compared with what it said was a demand for the ability to create "the perfect child" through genetic engineering. Another Paris daily, Liberation, said the Government seemed to be acting with "suspicious haste." +The simmering debate resurfaced last month when a 59-year-old British woman gave birth to twins after having fertilized eggs implanted in her uterus by a clinic in Rome. The same clinic has reportedly given similar treatment to a 62-year-old woman who is now three months pregnant. +This brought an indignant response from Italy's Health Minister, Maria Pia Garavaglia, who proposed a law to limit artificial pregnancies. But adoption of such legislation may be delayed by general elections expected to be called in Italy this spring. +Since Christmas, the debate in Europe about so-called designer babies has been fed by a report that a British fertility clinic might implant a white woman's egg into a black woman. +In response to still another report, the British Government said today that it would prohibit the use of eggs from aborted fetuses to impregnate infertile women. Scottish researchers at Edinburgh University acknowledged this week that they had been studying a radical infertility treatment, used successfully so far in limited experiments with mice, that employs eggs from aborted fetuses. They have ceased their work on the technique, pending discussions with the Government. + +Health Minister Defends Bill + In France, Dr. Douste-Blazy, who is a physician, said the bill to be sent to Parliament later this month "will state clearly that medically assisted procreation techniques, particularly in-vitro insemination, will be reserved for women of childbearing age -- that is, before menopause." +In a radio interview on Monday, he said the child's welfare should be considered paramount. "What will happen when he is 15 or 20 and his mother is 80 or 85?" he asked. "That's why I think we must reserve these techniques to women of childbearing age." +In an interview with Le Parisien, the Health Minister said he personally favored still tighter controls on artificial insemination so as to exclude lesbians and widows who wish to be fertilized with the sperm of their late husbands. But he suggested that he would not seek a formal ban in such cases. +Noting that the Bible recorded many cases of elderly women giving birth, Liberation said the Government should admit uncertainty in face of scientific breakthroughs "rather than give in to either the mirages of technological imagination or the comfort of preconceived moral dogmatism." +Mrs. Badinter, whose works include the best-selling book, "XY: The Male Identity," said she recognized the perils of unlimited extension of the age of procreation. "But to limit the right of procreation seems to me to be even more dangerous," she said. +Reactions within France's medical establishment have been divided. Dr. Georges Velvet, a fertility expert, said pointedly, "No one ever asks the age of the father." But Dr. Maurize Auroux, another specialist in reproduction, said the uterus of a 60-year-old woman might be deficient in supplying blood to the embryo, impairing brain development. He added that in the case of fathers over 40, age could increase the risk of an embryo with genetic defects. + +LOAD-DATE: January 5, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +11 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 5, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Studies Are Grim on Dialysis Outlook + +BYLINE: By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 12; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 783 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Jan. 4 + +A bleak long-term outlook for older patients on kidney dialysis emerges from two studies being published on Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association. +The head of the National Kidney Foundation said the new findings underscored the need to improve kidney dialysis therapy because Americans have the highest death rates in the world while undergoing the treatment. + Medicare, the Federal health insurance plan, pays the costs of dialysis for all people in the nation who need it, and the costs of the national kidney program have far exceeded the original estimates when it began in 1972. Although the average cost of each treatment has dropped from $150 in 1973 to $115 in 1993, Medicare pays $5.5 billion a year for dialysis patients' care, more than four times the original estimates. One reason is that many more groups of patients now have dialysis than were treated in the early 1970's. +One new study found that the older a patient is when beginning dialysis, the worse the chances for survival. The study was conducted by the New York State Health Department and the State University Medical Center at Stony Brook, L.I. Researchers analyzed data from more than 90,000 patients age 55 and older who began chronic dialysis from 1982 to 1987. Such older people accounted for 52 percent of people undergoing dialysis in 1990, and the proportion is growing each year as more Americans live longer. + +Condition Determines Outlook + Because there are many causes of kidney failure, the study was intended to provide doctors data on specific causes to help them advise patients and their families about the statistical prospects for such care. +The most favorable outlook emerged for those with a common hereditary condition, polycystic kidney disease. After five years, 49.2 percent of those who began dialysis at age 55 to 64 were still alive, as were 14.9 percent of those 80 or older. +But the worst outlook was for diabetics, the group that comprises the largest number of people 55 and older who begin dialysis each year. After five years, 18.1 percent of diabetics age 55 to 64 when they started dialysis were still alive; among those 80 and older, the figure was 3.3 percent. +Survival rates for those with kidney damage resulting from high blood pressure and a common disease known as glomuleronephritis were regarded as intermediate. For these groups, 34 percent who began dialysis at age 55 to 64 were alive five years later, as were 6.1 percent of those 80 and older. +In a separate study by the State University of New York Health Science Center at Brooklyn, older patients told researchers that dialysis had failed to allow them to continue living as they had before the therapy began. Most patients said they spent most of their time indoors because of fatigue and weakness. Only 32 percent said they had participated in activities outside their homes other than dialysis sessions, while 78 percent had taken part in such activities before starting the therapy. +The Brooklyn team said that the "dismal outcome in functional rehabilitation" may lead many older people to withdraw from dialysis. Nationally, such passive suicide is the third most common cause of death among older dialysis patients. +The researchers drew the conclusions from interviews with 104 patients 65 or older undergoing dialysis at seven ambulatory centers in Brooklyn. +"All age groups do worse on dialysis in the United States than in other countries, and we can do a lot better than we are doing," said Dr. Neil A. Kurtzman, who heads the department of medicine at Texas Tech University in Lubbock and is president of the National Kidney Foundation. + +Short Sessions Draw Fire + About one in four patients on chronic dialysis die each year in the United States, while the rates are 8 percent in France and 7 percent in Japan, Dr. Kurtzman said. One explanation for the higher death rate here is that Americans who undergo the treatment are older and sicker than dialysis patients in other countries. But Dr. Kurtzman said that when age, severity of illness and other factors were taken into consideration, the American death rate fell to 14 percent, still considerably higher than that of other countries. +He said that the length of dialysis sessions was extremely important and that there was a critical link between the length of sessions and death rates. He added that more than one in two Americans have treatments that are shorter than the recommended optimum. +"Patients push the dialysis unit to shorten the dialysis time because they don't like being on the machine, but when they shorten their dialysis time they shorten their survival," Dr. Kurtzman said. + +LOAD-DATE: January 5, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +12 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 5, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Personal Health + +BYLINE: By Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section C; Page 12; Column 1; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1098 words + +ALTHOUGH winter may be the prime season for falls, among older people falling is a year-round hazard that is costly, frightening, debilitating and sometimes even life-threatening. +As people age, the risk of falling rises linearly and the risk of injury from a fall rises exponentially. One in three adults 65 or older falls each year. Among those over 75 who live independently, a quarter of the falls result in a serious injury. Falls are the immediate reason for 40 percent of all admissions to nursing homes, and they are the sixth-leading cause of death for people over 70. + Even when an older person who lives alone is not hurt by a fall, the resulting fright can prompt a voluntary restriction of activity and a loss of mobility, self-confidence and independence. Restricted activity also leads to a decline in physical strength, which further increases the risk of falling, as well as the chance that the next fall will result in a serious injury. +Even in a nursing home or other adult-care center, where the environment has been arranged for the safety of people with limited physical ability and agility, the risk of falling persists. + +Why Many Falls Occur + Researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo studied the incidence of falls at one center that provides custodial care for relatively well elderly people. Of the 348 residents who lived in the center during a three-year period, falls were reported for 95, or 27 percent. What the researchers learned can help make living safer for those in special residences as well as for older people who live independently or in another person's home. +The researchers, Dr. Beth Erasmus Fleming and Dr. David R. Prendergast, both rehabilitation physiologists, were astonished to find that even in a center arranged with the safety of elderly residents in mind, half the falls were attributed to "environmental hazards." Elderly residents tripped over furniture, slipped on polished floors and fell over their walkers, which are designed to help the frail remain upright. +Furthermore, nearly 60 percent of the accidents occurred in the most familiar environment, the elderly person's own room, with only about 14 percent occurring in the person's bathroom and 4 percent on steps, which are generally considered the most likely places for an older person to fall. +"Clearly, aspects of the environment that appear to be safe for fully functioning individuals present hazards to an ambulatory, but frailer, older population requiring custodial care," the researchers wrote in their report, which was published last summer in The Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. +Not surprisingly, nearly a quarter of the falls occurred at night, usually when the people had left their beds to use the toilet. +As for personal frailties, nearly a quarter of the falls were attributable to physical conditions like arthritis, loss of balance, dizziness and "collapsed" knees, the term used when a knee buckled for some reason. Many older people have poor vision or one or more chronic ailments -- like heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, Parkinson's disease or the residual effects of a stroke -- that can contribute to the risk of falling directly or indirectly, through the side effects of the drugs used to treat them. In addition, medications given to many elderly people to counter depression or insomnia can result in disorientation, grogginess or coordination difficulties that add to the risk of falling. +In another analysis, the researchers found that those who fell had significantly weaker muscles than those who did not fall. They also found that many residents for whom walkers had been prescribed did not use them because they considered them more of an impediment than an aid to mobility. + +Preventing Falls + Many measures to help prevent falls are easy to put into effect. To fall-proof the environment, cover floors with tacked-down carpets; keep walking areas clear of obstacles like shoes, footstools, toys and wastebaskets; avoid slippery fabric on beds, chairs and sofas; wipe up all spills on floors immediately and thoroughly; equip bathrooms with grab bars around the toilet and tub or shower; cover the floor of the tub or shower with glued-on nonslip strips; keep stairways well lit and covered with nonskid treads; mark top and bottom steps with glow-in-the-dark tape; place night lights along the route from the bed to the bathroom, and leave a light on in the bathroom during the night. +Pajamas and knee-length nightgowns, robes and coats are safer than longer ones for someone who is likely to climb stairs while wearing them. All shoes and slippers should have nonslip rubber soles, and rain and snow boots should have nonslip treads. +Symptoms like dizziness and loss of balance should be brought to a physician's attention. If the symptom is due to illness, getting proper treatment may reduce or eliminate it, and if it is due to medication, changing the dosage, administration schedule or type of drug will often help. The correction of sensory defects, like vision-impairing cataracts or hearing loss, is also helpful. +But perhaps the best way to prevent falls and fall-related injuries is to minimize the loss of muscle strength and flexibility that occur with age and infirmity and to rebuild the strength and flexibility of older people. Studies have shown that even healthy people show a significant loss of muscle strength after the age of 50, particularly in the muscles needed for climbing stairs, rising from a chair and walking. +A person is considered to run an especially high risk of repeated falls if he or she has difficulty rising from an armless chair or walking a straight line by placing one foot in front of the other, with the heel of the forward foot touching the toe of the one behind. Reduced grip strength and weakness of the muscles in the legs and around the hips are associated with falls in older people. +While many older people have taken up some form of aerobic exercise, like walking or dance therapy, to improve cardiovascular function and lift their spirits, this type of activity does little to build muscle strength. However, older people -- even those with multiple chronic ailments -- can significantly increase their mobility, strength and balance in just six weeks through physical therapy and strength training, Dr. Prendergast and his colleagues showed. Muscles are strengthened by working them against resistance, which includes activities like lifting weights or working out on Nautilus-type equipment. + +LOAD-DATE: January 5, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +13 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 5, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Eating Well + +BYLINE: By Marian Burros + +SECTION: Section C; Page 4; Column 3; Living Desk + +LENGTH: 1041 words + +THE Food and Drug Administration is trying to come to grips with one of the most difficult public health issues: how to balance the interests of the unborn with the interests of the elderly. +The agency must decide whether to fortify the American food supply with folic acid, which helps to prevent birth defects but, at the same time, can mask pernicious anemia, a problem prevalent among the elderly. Opinions on how to proceed cover the spectrum. + Dr. Irwin H. Rosenberg, director of the United States Department of Agriculture's Human Nutrition Center on Aging, at Tufts University, is opposed to fortification with folic acid until more is known about the risks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not think the Food and Drug Administration's plan to fortify the food supply goes far enough. +In 1991, researchers in England confirmed what had been suspected for three decades: that folic acid can help prevent such neural tube birth defects as spina bifida and anenceph aly. +Folate, the form of folic acid found in food, occurs in citrus fruits, dark, green leafy vegetables, broccoli and asparagus, dried beans and peas, peanuts, wheat germ, yeast, mung bean sprouts and liver. Americans are not especially fond of these foods and don't eat enough of them. The average American ingests only about 200 micrograms of folate a day; the level believed to prevent neural tube defects is 400 micrograms a day. +Folic acid is needed in the first weeks of pregnancy to prevent the birth defects, but because so many pregnancies in this country are unplanned, and because most Americans do not get enough folate from foods, supplementation has been recommended to all women of child-bearing age. +But many women in this country either cannot afford to take pills or are unaware of their importance. To reach those women, many health professionals as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the March of Dimes and the Spina Bifida Association, have urged the F.D.A. to fortify grain products with folic acid. They say this would cut the number of these birth defects in half. +In October, the F.D.A. published a proposal to enrich flour and corn grits with twice the level of folic acid that is lost in the refining process, or 240 micrograms per 100 grams (3.5 ounces). Flour is already enriched with several nutrients, like iron, which are lost when it is turned from whole wheat to white. The proposal would also require the fortification of cereals with 100 micrograms of folic acid per serving. +The Centers for Disease Control believes that flour should be enriched at a much higher level, 350 micrograms of folic per 100 grams. +Dr. Rosenberg says he is convinced that there is no good data on either the proper level of fortification to prevent birth defects or the level at which folic acid is unsafe. +From his perspective, it is important to consider the damage that too much folic acid might cause to the older population. A recent study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that up to one-fifth of healthy Americans 65 to 95 years old have subtle forms of B12 deficiencies and that if the B12 deficiency is treated with folic acid, pernicious anemia may be masked. Untreated pernicious anemia can cause irreversible nerve damage. +Dr. Rosenberg believes that the questions about pernicious anemia and folic acid levels could be settled in a year of study, and he wants the F.D.A. to hold off on any decisions about fortification. "We may find that we should fortify with folic acid and with B12," he said. +Marion Nestle, chairwoman of the Department of Nutrition at New York University, is opposed to fortification on principle. "The amount recommended can easily be obtained by eating a healthy diet," she said. "There are too many uncertainties about the data base on which these decisions are being made. We are not so sure how much people are eating, and the incidence of neural tube defects is dropping. I'm not opposed at all to women of child-bearing age taking folic acid supplements." +Bonnie Liebman, director of nutrition for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group, said: "For the F.D.A. not to act on the knowledge that folic acid fortification will prevent neural tube defects is outrageous. This is a devastating and costly birth defect that is irreversible. I'd be willing to trade off a number of masked B12 deficiencies in older people for the saving of one case of neural tube defect. +"Fortifying food with folic acid is a public health approach like adding flouride to water." +Dr. Godfrey Oakley, the director of the division of birth defects and developmental disabilities at the Centers for Disease Control, has been pushing hard for fortification. He believes that the F.D.A.'s proposal doesn't add enough folic acid to wheat and corn flour. +"Adequate medical care would prevent pernicious anemia," he said. +Such opposing points of view are making it difficult for the F.D.A. to reach a conclusion, and to confuse matters further there is some evidence that folate may be useful in reducing the risk of heart disease and certain cancers. +"This is one of the tougher decisions," said Dr. David A. Kessler, Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. "A decision to add a pharmacologically active nutrient to the food supply is very weighty. You have to get it right, and you have to get it right the first time. There is no simple answer and no simple solution is readily apparent. +"We want to make major inroads on this disease, but we don't want to harm anyone." +Some level of fortification seems likely (a final rule is expected in the next six months), and last week the F.D.A. announced that manufacturers of folic acid supplements would be allowed to include a health claim about birth defects. +Dr. Kessler said that even if foods are fortified under the current proposal, in order to reach the 400-microgram level, women of child-bearing age will still have to try to follow the dietary guidelines, eating plenty of fruits, vegetables and grains. If they don't, they will have to take a supplement. +"In the end," he said, "people are going to have to take some responsibility." + +LOAD-DATE: January 5, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +14 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 7, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Study Shows Wider Utility for Aspirin + +BYLINE: By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1162 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 + +A large new international study has shown that women, the elderly, diabetics and those with high blood pressure should be added to the groups of patients who should be given aspirin after they have survived heart attacks or strokes to prevent the risk of recurrence. +The study greatly strengthens the evidence that aspirin is beneficial for people who are experiencing a heart attack as well as for those who have survived a heart attack or stroke. + Nearly everyone who is in the midst of a heart attack should take aspirin, and people who have survived a heart attack or stroke should be taking it regularly, two American researchers involved in the study, Dr. Charles H. Hennekens and Dr. Julie E. Buring of Harvard Medical School, said today. +In London, Dr. Richard Peto of Oxford University, who headed the study, reported a 25 percent reduction in the risk of another heart attack for people who had already suffered one in all the groups studied, including women, the elderly, diabetics and people with high blood pressure, The Associated Press reported. He said the study indicated that the appropriate use of aspirin could prevent 100,000 deaths each year in developed countries, including 20,000 in the United States. +Another finding of the study was that aspirin could prevent many potentially life-threatening complications from the blood clots that often form after surgery or while a patient is bedridden for long periods, said Dr. Hennekens, who is also the head of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. +Not enough data exist to recommend the use of aspirin by apparently healthy people who have not had a heart attack or stroke, Dr. Buring said. She said she was directing a study of 40,000 nurses that should provide answers about the relative benefits and hazards of such therapy, but not until its completion in several years. +Dr. Buring said many doctors thought it might be dangerous to prescribe aspirin for patients who have had a heart attack or stroke and who are elderly or have medical conditions like diabetes or high blood pressure. "But these data clearly show that there is clear, substantial benefit, regardless of your age, sex, history of high blood pressure or diabetes," Dr. Buring said. +The new study is a statistical analysis of virtually all studies ever undertaken of the use of aspirin and similar drugs for heart attacks, strokes and other circulatory disorders. The study involved an international group of more than 50 researchers and focused on 140,000 patients in 300 scientifically controlled studies. The findings will be published in the next three issues of The British Medical Journal, beginning on Saturday. +Dr. Hennekens urged the F.D.A. to revise its labeling recommendations to advise the use of aspirin in heart conditions. Last October, the F.D.A. said it was seeking public comments on a proposal for a new label that would have to be prominently displayed on nonprescription products containing aspirin. The notice would advise consumers to consult a doctor before taking aspirin for new and long-term uses. +At the time, the F.D.A. said aspirin had been shown to be effective in preventing second heart attacks and treating chest pains from unstable angina. But it warned that aspirin use had risks, like bleeding from the stomach and intestines, and should be monitored by a doctor. +"Approved instructions and information for doctors about heart-related uses of aspirin are part of the professional labeling for aspirin, but they are not permitted on consumer labels because safe use for these conditions requires supervision by a physician," the F.D.A. said. +Today, Mike Shaffer, a spokesman for the F.D.A., said the agency had not seen the new findings. But Dr. Hennekens said a copy had been sent some time ago to an F.D.A. official. +Mr. Shaffer said that aspirin's use for heart conditions was controversial and that the drug agency was concerned about the widespread, indiscriminate use of aspirin. +But Dr. Hennekens said that at a penny a pill aspirin had "the best risk-to-benefit and cost-to-benefit" ratio of any therapy for acute heart attacks. +Aspirin has well-known side effects. Many people suffer varying degrees of bleeding from the stomach and intestines. Aspirin can also cause a stroke from bleeding into the brain. Some people have an allergy to the drug and can die suddenly if they take it. +Nevertheless, some cardiologists have suggested that even those people who have a tendency to bleed from aspirin should take it if they are in the throes of a heart attack because the benefits so greatly outweigh the risks under such circumstances, Dr. Hennekens said. +But Dr. Hennekens and others cautioned that people should consult a doctor before taking aspirin on a continuing basis for a heart or circulatory problem. The experts added that people should not regard aspirin as a substitute for taking other steps, like dietary and exercise changes, to avoid heart attacks. + +Pooling Results + The team that undertook the international study used a statistical technique called a meta-analysis. A meta-analysis aims at gleaning more information from existing data by pooling the results of many smaller studies and applying one or more statistical techniques. The benefits or hazards that might not be detected in small studies can be found in a meta-analysis that uses data from thousands of patients. +The meta-analysis underscoring the benefits of aspirin in heart disease is the largest study of its type , the authors said. +The Physicians' Desk Reference, a standard guide used by doctors, contains the labeling information approved by the F.D.A. for marketed drugs. For aspirin, the 1994 edition of the Physicians' Desk Reference makes no reference to its use for heart attacks in progress. +Dr. Hennekens urged the F.D.A. to approve labeling saying that every patient with an acute heart attack should take aspirin. He said that although the use of aspirin for patients with acute heart attacks had increased in recent years, to 72 percent of such patients from 40 percent, 28 percent of these patients were still not offered aspirin. That information came from a survey of hospitals in this country, he said. +The current aspirin labeling advises its use for men who have had a precursor of a stroke known as a transient ischemic attack, but not for women. Both sexes should be included, Dr. Hennekens said. +There is no current F.D.A. recommendation for aspirin use by people who have survived a stroke. The recommendations should reflect the new findings showing clear benefits for men and women, Dr. Hennekens said. +The F.D.A. now recommends that aspirin be prescribed for patients who have survived a heart attack or suffer chest pains from a condition known as unstable angina. Dr. Hennekens said the recommendations should be broadened to include those people who had had coronary artery bypass surgery or angioplasty. + +LOAD-DATE: January 7, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +15 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 8, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Beliefs + +BYLINE: By Peter Steinfels + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 9; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 956 words + +Three years ago today, the United States was a week from war with Iraq and still debating whether such a war was morally justified. At the center of that debate was the question of whether economic sanctions were the more humane way to the desired end. +A United Nations resolution authorized the use of force if Saddam Hussein had not withdrawn Iraqi forces from Kuwait by Jan. 15. Give the sanctions more time, was the cry of those opposed to military action. + Even today the chief argument by those who considered the Persian Gulf war unjust is that military force was not a "last resort," undertaken only after all alternatives had proved unavailing. +Throughout the 20th century, economic sanctions have been the hope of many who sought an escape from the moral impasse of warfare. "Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force," President Woodrow Wilson declared in his ill-fated campaign on behalf of the League of Nations after World War I. +Yet even in Wilson's day, John Foster Dulles opposed broad embargoes, spelling out his opposition in a report by the United States Committee on Economic Sanctions. Mr. Dulles, who became the Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, said sanctions harmed the innocent. His argument haunts discussions of economic sanctions in the case of Iraq and Haiti. +"Although sanctions have surely contributed to malnutrition in Iraq," wrote Mike Moore, the editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in introducing a special November issue on sanctions, "one supposes that Saddam Hussein has never involuntarily missed a meal." The magazine, a monthly, was founded by some of the scientiests who helped develop the atomic bomb and is devoted to preventing nuclear war. +Three years ago many people, including many religious leaders, conveyed a kind of moral innocence about sanctions. Their faith in economic pressure rested less on the historical record or economic and political facts than on their opposition to the alternative, military force. Even with hindsight, only a few have granted that maybe they underestimated Mr. Hussein's indifference to his people's suffering. +But most of the same observers soon realized that sanctions did exactly what they had considered most morally reprehensible about military action: wreak injury on civilians. Sanctions, it turned out, struck more directly at civilians than did smart bombs. Sanctions even seemed to strike at precisely those civilians -- infants, children, women, the elderly -- who were most vulnerable and least responsible for the regime's political or war-making strength. +Most studies of sanctions, of which there are few, focus on their effectiveness, not their morality. One recent study of 104 cases since World War II shows that sanctions succeeded about a third of the time when the goals were modest -- to obtain the release of captives, for example, or to demand respect for human rights. +The study, undertaken by the Institute for International Economics in Washington, shows that the success rate was much lower when the goal of sanctions was a major reversal of another nation's policy, or even the removal of its government. Success in the latter cases was usually linked to covert American action or local rebellions to undermine the government. +After reviewing these findings in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, two staff members of the Roman Catholic Bishops' Office on International Peace and Justice, Drew Christiansen and Gerard F. Powers, concluded, "We cannot presume that sanctions are an effective alternative to military force." +To mix and modify phrases from the psychologist William James and the military strategist Karl von Clausewitz, sanctions are not so much the moral equivalent of war as they are the continuation of war by other means. So is there need for a theory of just sanctions like the historical theory of a "just war." The country's Roman Catholic bishops tried to sketch something like that in one section of a major document on peacemaking they issued last November. +Referring to the suffering of "innocent people in Serbia, Haiti, Iraq, Cuba and elsewhere, the bishops said that sweeping economic sanctions are justified "only in response to aggression or grave and ongoing injustice" and only with "clear and reasonable conditions set for their removal." Embargoes should always "make provision for the fundamental needs of the civilian populations," the bishops said. +Echoing the language of the "just-war" theory, the bishops said that "the harm caused by sanctions should be proportionate to the good likely to be achieved." Sanctions should "avoid grave and irreversible harm" to civilians and therefore "should be targeted as much as possible against those directly responsible for the injustice." +"The consent to sanctions by substantial portions of the affected population is morally relevant," the bishops advised. In other words, be guided, at least in part, by what black South Africans or poor Haitians are themselves willing to undergo. +These criteria provide little more than a checklist of things to think about. The bishops admit their criteria are "tentative" and urged "much more study, reflection and public debate over the moral dimension of comprehensive sanctions." +None of this is very encouraging for those who dream of a new world order. They might, however, find one glimmer of hope in special issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. That is the impression that so far very little inventiveness and less willpower have gone into devising the kind of "selective sanctions" the bishops prefer, those directed against ruthless leaders and oppressive elites. + +LOAD-DATE: January 8, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +16 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 9, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +CONNECTICUT GUIDE + +BYLINE: By ELEANOR CHARLES + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 9; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 985 words + + +REMEMBERING DOUGLASS + Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday on Saturday was chosen as an appropriate day on which to present "Mr. Frederick Douglass," a one-man play written and performed by Fred Morsell, the noted stage and television actor. Curtain time is 8 P.M. at the Rich Forum on Atlantic Street in Stamford. + The piece was written about five years ago, based on Douglass' powerful speeches and on his autobiography, "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave," which he published in 1845. +Douglass' mother, who was exceptionally intelligent, was a slave, his father was white. His youth was spent in various households, some benign, others viciously disciplinarian. He escaped from servitude in 1838 at the age of 21, changing his name from Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey to Frederick Douglass, and made his way north to Massachusetts. +There and in the British Isles he became an eloquent orator and journalist for the abolitionist movement up to and throughout the Civil War, continuing as a popular speaker afterward. During the 1870's and 80's he was appointed to various diplomatic and other government posts. +Mr. Morsell received a master's degree in theater arts from Wayne State University in Detroit. His father, Dr. John A. Morsell, was Associate Executive Director to Roy Wilkins at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1956 to 1974. +Tickets are priced at $15 and $25, or $7.50 for students and elderly people. For reservations, 325-4466. + +BIG DEEDS, SMALL DOERS + Three stories from children's literature are incorporated into the Little Theater of the Deaf production titled "Heroes Under Five Feet," to be presented on Tuesday at 10 A.M. and again at noon at the Palace Theater in Stamford. +"Keep The Lights Burning, Abbie" by Peter and Connie Roop is based on the true story of Abbie Burgess, a young girl who, during the winter storms of 1856 kept the lighthouse lamps lit and saved many ships from disaster on the Maine coast. +A historic account of a little girl who wrote to the President is the premise of "Lincoln's Famous Beard." She thought his face was too thin and suggested growing a beard to make it look fuller. +The only fictional tale is "Brother to the Wind," which draws on African cultures and their close ties to nature as positive influences on the development of a young boy named Emeke. +Five performers make up the Little Theater of the Deaf, a division of the National Theater of the Deaf in Waterford. Four of the members are deaf, one has normal hearing. The production is designed for both hearing and deaf audiences, employing sign language, body language and the spoken word. +A warm-up before the show begins introduces the audience to signing, and after the performance the audience is invited to suggest situations that the cast acts out on stage. +Tickets at $6 may be reserved by calling 358-2305 weekdays from 9:30 to 4:30. + +THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE + "Toil and Plenty: Images of the Agricultural Landscape in England, 1780-1890," the new exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art, covers the century in which England gradually transformed itself from an agricultural to an industrial economy. +It will open on Saturday and remain on view through March 13, featuring 40 oils, 45 watercolors and drawings, and dozens of prints, photographs and illustrated books. Some of England's greatest artists are represented, including J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, George Stubbs, Peter DeWint and Samuel Palmer. +The show was organized by Christiana Payne, an English historian who also wrote the illustrated catalogue published by Yale University Press. The works on view have been gathered from public and private collections in Britain and the United States, with financial support by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. +As the pictures in the exhibition advance through the decades, they reflect a more realistic, less idyllic view of the landscape and the farm families who tended it. Agriculture was newly seen by artists as hard work rather than an Arcadian composition. Noontime meals in the fields, informal studies of haymakers and their implements, and the dignity of the lonely farmer performing chores in winter became prime subjects. +Ms. Payne will present a lecture about the exhibition on Friday at 4 P.M., and a symposium will be held on Saturday from 10:30 to 4:30. Scholars, lecturers and professors from four British universities and from the College of William and Mary in Virginia and Indiana University in Bloomington will speak on various aspects of the exhibition's contents and the periods in which the works were created. +Gallery talks by docents will take place for the duration of the show on Thursdays at 11 and Saturdays at noon, followed by a 27-minute video. +The Center, at 1080 Chapel Street, is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 to 5, Sunday from noon to 5. Admission to the exhibition and all related events is free. For more information, 432-2850. + +COMBINING THE ARTS + A series of interdisciplinary programs called "Dancing Out Loud" begins in New Haven on Friday with a concert organized by the choreographer Mary R. Barnett. She has combined her own innovative dance group, called In Good Company, with a number of artists from the Northeast, weaving them into variegated whole. The performance will take place at 8 P.M. at the Educational Center for the Arts, 55 Audubon Street. +Joining her troup will be Dan Hurlin, a New York performance artist who has created, among other things, a piece called "Quintland, The Musical," about the Dionne quintuplets. Berg, Jones and Sarvis head a modern dance company based in Portland, Maine, performing works ranging from lyrical to raucous, and Alison Farrell specializes in acoustic folk music. +Tickets cost $10 and may be obtained by calling 773-1102. + +LOAD-DATE: January 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +17 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 9, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +New Rules For Heat Eligibility + +BYLINE: By ELSA BRENNER + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 4; Column 6; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 756 words + +NOW that the coldest winter months have arrived, the county has announced that eligible individuals may apply for financial aid to help defer some of their home-heating costs. +This year, under a 10-year-old federally financed plan known as the Home Energy Assistance Program, eligibility guidelines have been broadened so that more applicants can be helped, said Lillian Bloom, a benefits supervisor for the County Department of Social Services, which administers the heating-assistance program in Westchester. + Ms. Bloom said that qualified households will be able to receive $55 to $220, depending on the kind of fuel used. But because eligibility guidelines were widened this year, the amount each applicant can receive has been reduced, she explained. +Also, the Department of Social Services is urging people to apply early because funds are limited. Westchester receives about $2 million a year for the program. +At the County Office for the Aging, Diane Booker, a program administrator, said her department receives nearly 3,000 applications a year from elderly people seeking heating assistance. "The cold weather tends to bring problems to a head," she said. +One recent example was an elderly woman living in the northern part of the county with a disabled adult child who ran out of heat during last week's storm, forcing her to rely on the oven and a kerosene heater to keep warm, Ms. Booker said. When the Office for the Aging intervened and sent an oil truck to the home for an emergency delivery, the truck was unable to get through the icy rural roads leading to the home. Finally, a small van was dispatched to carry in 10 gallons of fuel oil until the roads were cleared. +"We hear stories like this all the time," Ms. Booker said. "Typically, neighbors alert us to elderly people living alone, often in a remote area, who may be too proud to ask for help. They may be low on funds, frail and frightened. Other times, we get a call from an individual saying, 'I have no oil and I'm cold.' That's when a red flag goes up for us." +In addition to helping elderly people with their heating costs, the office will send workers to a house to devise a plan for other types of assistance: for energy audits, weatherization programs and Medicaid or prescription cost assistance, for example. In many cases, Ms. Booker said, elderly clients are not aware of available programs. +Additionally, there are emergency benefits to supplement the one-time energy assistance grant. +Westchester residents living outside of Yonkers who are not receiving public assistance may apply for Home Energy Assistance funds at local Community Action Program offices or by calling Westchester Community Opportunities Program at 592-5600, extension 150. +People receiving food stamps, Aid to Dependent Children or home relief for singles are automatically considered for the program, Ms. Bloom said. If eligible, they will receive their allocation beginning at the end of this month. +Yonkers residents seeking assistance should apply by calling the Yonkers Community Action Program at 423-5905. +The telephone number for the Office for the Aging is 682-3000. +The following are guidelines, based on income, as to who is eligible to receive energy assistance if heat is not included in the rent: +One-person household, gross monthly income $1,212; two people, gross monthly income $1,586; three people, gross monthly income $1,959; four people, gross monthly income $2,332; five people, gross monthly income $2,706; six people, gross monthly income $3,079; seven people, $3,149; eight people, $3,219. For each additional person, add $70 to the gross monthly income to determine eligibility. +In the case of a heat emergency, or for further information, residents can call the Department of Social Services at 285-5534. +Here is a list of Community Action Program offices in the county that can help applicants apply for heating assistance: +In Eastchester, at 142-144 Main Street, 337-7768; in Elmsford at 2269 Saw Mill River Road, 592-5600, extension 150; in Greenburgh at 30 Manhattan Avenue, 761-6605; in Mamaroneck at 134 Center Avenue, 698-7140; in Mount Vernon at 145 West First Street, 664-8680; in New Rochelle at 95 Lincoln Avenue, 636-3050; in Ossining at 37 James Street, 762-2369; in Peekskill at 1037 Main Street, 739-1451; in Port Chester at 35 Traverse Avenue, 939-1244; in Tarrytown at 105 Wildey Street, 631-7340; in White Plains at 70 Ferris Avenue, 428-7030; and in Yonkers at 164 Ashburton Avenue, 423-5905. + +LOAD-DATE: January 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +18 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 9, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +What They Say About 'Dixie' + +BYLINE: By Drew Gilpin Faust; Drew Gilpin Faust's books include "The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South" and "Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War." + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 20; Column 3; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1128 words + + +WAY UP NORTH IN DIXIE +A Black Family's Claim +to the Confederate Anthem. +By Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks. +Illustrated. 259 pp. Washington: +Smithsonian Institution Press. $24.95. +NOT only has blackface minstrelsy exerted "a pervasive impact on American music," as Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks argue in "Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem"; it has also served as both symbol and metaphoric expression of the complexities of American racial identity. Over the last decade, a growing body of scholarly work has debated the meaning of this extraordinarily popular 19th-century cultural phenomenon, its relation to authentic African-American musical traditions, its role in the self-definition of the white American working class that composed its chief audience, and its place in a sectional conflict that elevated the minstrel song "Dixie" into an enduring representation of a united white South. +To this discussion, the authors (he is the chairman of the department of anthropology and sociology at Kenyon College and she is an independent researcher) contribute the compelling story of the Snowdens, a family of black musicians who left a rich documentary record of their lives in Knox County, Ohio, a century ago. Combining the family's letters, scrapbooks and photographs with interviews conducted among elderly residents of present-day Knox County, the authors "endeavor to tie historical circumstances directly to the biographies of a particular family, transforming 'history' from an abstraction to lived experience." +In their vivid circumstantiality, the Snowdens' lives embody the complicated and ambiguous histories of American music and of American race relations. In an irony that crowns their exploration of intertwining black and white experience and creativity, the authors argue that the black Snowdens, not the white minstrel Dan Emmett, were the true authors of "Dixie," the song that served as an anthem of the Confederate cause and that has -- in the eyes of many 20th-century Americans -- become a symbol of persistent white racism. +In a cemetery in Mount Vernon, Ohio, a well-tended tombstone identifies "Daniel Decatur Emmett (1815-1904), whose song 'Dixie Land' inspired the courage and devotion of the Southern people and now thrills the hearts of a united nation." Just three miles away, a more obscure graveyard shelters a stone marking the graves of Ben and Lew Snowden. Its inscription says simply: "They taught 'Dixie' to Dan Emmett." +In the 1820's, Ben and Lew's parents, Ellen Cooper and Thomas Snowden, had been brought to Ohio by their masters, Marylanders migrating west with their bound black laborers. Freed by Ohio's prohibition of slavery, Cooper and Snowden married in 1834, a privilege that would have been denied them by the laws of their birthplace in the slave South. Yet even in Ohio, it was not easy to be black. The family lived in a county where in 1850 blacks made up less than one-fifth of one percent of the population and where, despite their legal freedom, the more informal power of racial prejudice still constrained their lives. +Working a family farm, the Snowdens produced seven children who survived infancy. By the 1850's, six of the children had formed a band to supplement the family income. Sophia, Elsie, Annie and Ben fiddled, while Lew played banjo and Phebe danced. On occasion, individual Snowdens also performed on dulcimer, triangle, castinets and guitar. Announced by handbill and by word of mouth, the family appeared across the rural countryside. Their repertory consisted of "the most current selections of the day," including spirituals, dance tunes and Stephen Foster melodies, but it contained neither the degrading songs in contrived Negro dialect characteristic of the minstrel stage nor the era's overtly abolitionist numbers. Performing in an overwhelmingly white environment, the Snowdens struggled at once to meet the expectations of their audience and to remain true to themselves. +The sense of self-esteem evident in their music expressed itself politically as well. When Knox County officials turned Ben and Lew Snowden away from the polls in 1870 despite the passage of the 15th Amendment earlier that same year, the brothers sued. In a telling example of the Northern failure to uphold black rights in the Reconstruction era, the Snowdens waited six years to learn that their petition had been denied and to endure the added insult of assessment for court and defendants' costs. +Although Howard and Judith Sacks offer an intriguing and textured portrait of the life of a black family in the 19th-century North, they have a more ambitious agenda. Arguing that those who have searched for black influences on minstrelsy have exclusively and mistakenly focused on the South, the authors seek to demonstrate the closely intertwined traditions of black and white music above the Mason-Dixon line. Not just showing that the Snowdens and Dan Emmett lived in the same Ohio county but documenting their interaction, the authors provide fresh and striking evidence of one specific context from which minstrelsy emerged. +BUT despite the book's assertions of the Snowdens' claim, the authorship of "Dixie" must remain in dispute, for the evidence is ultimately circumstantial. In fact, the book's depiction of the musical culture of Knox County suggests such an entanglement of black and white musical sources as nearly to undermine the notion of authorship altogether. Indeed, exactly such a communal understanding of music's origins underlay both the folk and black traditions in which the Snowden band worked. As the authors explain, we might characterize the family's "particular approach to their music . . . as guardianship rather than ownership." +In his movement from the musical environment of Knox County into the minstrel scene of the urban centers of the North, Dan Emmett came to represent a quite different commercial and capitalist ethos, one that propelled him toward claiming exclusive authorship of a song that made his individual name and career. For all its origins in black and white cross-fertilization, American popular music has rewarded the respective sources of its traditions quite differently, as Emmett's enormous success makes clear. A joke often repeated by whites in blackface on the 19th-century minstrel stage, recorded by David R. Roediger in his book "The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class," makes the point perhaps even more strongly in its honest acknowledgment of this exploitative heritage. "Why is we like a slave ship on the coast of Africa?" one minstrel asks. "Because," the other replies, "we both make money by taking off the Negroes." + +LOAD-DATE: January 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +19 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 11, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Supreme Court Roundup; +Review Set on Medicare At University Hospitals + +BYLINE: By LINDA GREENHOUSE, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 19; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1149 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Jan. 10 + +The Supreme Court agreed today to interpret a Federal policy aimed at curbing Medicare payments to hospitals affiliated with medical schools. The policy is intended to prevent the hospitals from using the federally financed Medicare program to cover increased expenses of running graduate teaching programs for interns and residents. +Medicare provides health insurance for the elderly and disabled. About $150 million in Medicare reimbursements are at stake in disputes between the Federal Government and some two-dozen teaching hospitals. + The dispute concerns both legislation and Federal regulations adopted in the mid-1980's to prevent hospitals from shifting to the Medicare program costs that had previously been borne by the medical schools with which teaching hospitals are affiliated. + +Law on Allowable Costs + With interns and residents providing much of the patient care in these institutions as part of their training, the line between educational expenses and the costs of patient care can be fine. In 1986, Congress tried to avoid ambiguity over allowable costs by adopting a cut-off date. This stipulated that hospitals could not claim reimbursement for any category of educational expenses that they had not claimed for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, 1983. +In the case before the Court, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, and its affiliated medical school, Thomas Jefferson University, commissioned a study in response to the law and found that they should have been claiming an additional $6 million in costs for interns and residents. +An appeal board at the Department of Health and Human Services allowed payment for the additional costs, but the Secretary's office overruled that on the ground that educational costs that the medical school had paid before 1984 could not now be shifted to the hospital for Medicare reimbursement. +The hospital appealed in Federal court, saying the costs should be allowed because the hospital's clinical training program for interns and residents was integrally related to patient care. But the Federal District Court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, both in Philadelphia, rejected that argument. +Another Federal appeals court, the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati, recently took the opposite approach, ruling in a case brought by Ohio State University that clinical training expenses were reimbursable. The Government urged the Court to hear the Philadelphia case, Thomas Jefferson University v. Shalala, No. 93-120, to resolve the conflict. +There were also these developments today as the Court returned from a four-week recess: + +Accomplice's Statement + The Court agreed to decide whether a defendant's constitutional right to confront the witnesses against him should have barred Federal prosecutors in a cocaine-trafficking case from introducing incriminating statements made to investigators by the defendant's accomplice. +The accomplice had been stopped on a Georgia highway with more than 40 pounds of cocaine in his car. His statements to a Federal agent implicated the defendant, Fredel Williamson. The accomplice, Reginald Harris, later invoked his right against self-incrimination and refused to testify at Mr. Williamson's trial, but the judge permitted the statements to be put in evidence. +Mr. Williamson was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison. The United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, upheld the conviction and ruled that the use of the statements did not violate the Sixth Amendment. The case is Williamson v. United States, No. 93-5256. + +Trade Pact Challenge + The Court declined without comment to revive a challenge to the North American Free Trade Agreement. A lawsuit last year argued that the office of the United States Trade Representative should have been required to prepare a study of the environmental impact of the trade agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico. +Judge Charles R. Richey of Federal District Court here agreed with the environmental groups that brought the lawsuit, ordering in a ruling last June that an environmental impact statement be prepared "forthwith." His decision was overturned on procedural grounds two months later by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. +When the environmental groups then appealed to the Supreme Court (Public Citizen v. United States Trade Representative, No. 93-560), the Administration told the Justices that the controversy was moot in light of the agreement's approval by Congress in November. The pact took effect on Jan. 1. + +Reviving Fraud Suits + The Court agreed to decide the constitutionality of a law passed by Congress in 1991 that had the effect of reviving several securities fraud suits that had been dismissed as a result of a Court ruling earlier that year. +The question in the case, First Republicbank Corporation v. Pacific Mutual Life, No. 93-609, is whether the new law violated the separation of powers by interfering with judicial judgments. +The 1991 Court decision, Lampf, Pleva v. Gilbertson, held that Federal securities fraud suits brought by private individuals must be filed within a year of discovering the alleged fraud and no more than three years after the events occurred. +Suits that did not come within the strict new time limits were dismissed, but the securities bar raised such an outcry that Congress ordered the dismissed suits reinstated as long as they would have been allowed under the old state limits. The sequence of events was highly controversial, and lower Federal courts for the last year have issued conflicting decisions on the 1991 law's constitutionality. +The case the Court accepted as a vehicle for deciding the question began as a lawsuit by purchasers of securities issued by a Texas bank. The suit was filed in March 1991, more than three years after the purchase. Texas law permits such suits to be filed within four years, but the suit was dismissed following the Court decision several months later. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, ordered the suit revived under the new law, rejecting the defendants' constitutional challenges. + +Teen-Age Abortions + The Court declined without comment to revive a challenge to an Ohio law that requires teen-age girls to notify a parent or receive a judge's permission before getting an abortion. +The Court upheld the law in 1990. A group of abortion clinics brought the new challenge, arguing that state juvenile court judges were rejecting requests that they should have granted. The lower Federal courts in Ohio dismissed the suit without addressing the law's constitutionality. The Sixth Circuit ruled that it did not have the authority to review individual decisions by state judges. (Cleveland Surgi-Center v. Jones, No. 93-787). + +LOAD-DATE: January 11, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +20 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 15, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Damascus Journal; +Persecution Ended, Syria's Jews Stage an Exodus + +BYLINE: By WILLIAM E. SCHMIDT, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 4; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1256 words + +DATELINE: DAMASCUS, Syria, Jan. 14 + +The only bakery to make Passover matzohs and cakes has closed, after its owners got exit visas and moved to Europe. The last kosher butcher shop will go this spring, one more casualty of Jewish emigration. +A few months ago, the Chief Rabbi in Damascus even discovered, to his surprise, there was no longer anyone left in Syria qualified to perform the circumcision ritual for newborn Jewish boys; he had to send to America for help. + After enduring years of suspicion, even persecution, and tough Government rules that restricted travel and emigration, the last remnants of a Jewish population that numbered 100,000 at the turn of century are now facing a new challenge: their own dwindling numbers. Since the Government promised to provide exit visas to all who wish to leave, Jews have been lining up to leave Syria. + +Only Hundreds Remain + In the last two years, nearly 3,000 of the estimated 4,000 Jews that remained in Syria in 1992 have chosen to seek a new life in America or Europe. They are leaving behind a remnant that may soon number fewer than 400, most of whom are either elderly people who believe they are too old to start over again, or well-placed business people who feel they cannot afford to leave. +With Jews in Syria unable to seek refuge or aid from Jews in neighboring Israel, with whom Syria remains technically in a state of war, their exodus may mean the disappearance of many of the ancient traditions and rituals that helped define part of Syrian cultural life since biblical times. +Few Jews now live in the city's Jewish quarter, a warren of narrow streets and ancient houses within the walls of the Old City. Nearly half of the 22 synagogues that existed just two years ago are closed, and so are many of the businesses where Jewish entrepreneuers historically held sway, including the shops in Damascus's noisy souk where Jewish artisans produced some of Syria's finest and most intricate silver handicrafts. +While there are also small Jewish populations in both Aleppo and Qameshli, an ancient Jewish community near the Turkish border, most of the roughly 1,200 Jews remaining in Syria live in Damascus. + +Rabbi's Daughter Emigrates + "Every day we must make new adjustments, find new ways, to deal with our shrinking numbers," said the Chief Rabbi, Ibrahim al-Hamra, whose own daughter has emigrated to America. "So little is left now, and it is very sad for me to see it go." +Would he consider leaving himself? "I am not like a doctor or an engineer or a pharmacist," Rabbi Hamra said with a small smile. "I am a rabbi, and if any Jew stays behind, so must I." +As the Government's officially designated spokesman for Syria's Jews -- his office in the sole Jewish school in Damascus is decorated with two portraits of President Hafez al-Assad -- Rabbi Hamra asserts that Jews in Syria no longer need to flee because of religious or political persecution. +"We are free to practice our religion and our culture," he said in an interview. "We can live a life of dignity." For that, he said, he prays for the good health and long life of President Assad, with whom he and other prominent Jews met in 1992 for the first time, when they were summoned for a special audience at Hanukkah. +To support his assertion, Rabbi Hamra showed a visitor a classroom where some 20 Jewish children, wearing yarmulkes, were reading from prayer books in Hebrew, receiving religious instruction. They were part of an overall enrollment of 200 Jewish pupils at the school. +According to some young Jews here, the problem these days is not the kind of harassment or surveillance their parents had to endure in the 1960's and 1970's, when many Syrians looked on Jews here as kind of Israeli fifth column. Rather it is a feeling of being left behind, a longing to once again be part of a larger Jewish family that no longer exists in Damascus. +At a clothing shop in al-Shaalan, one of Damascus's more fashionable shopping districts, a young Jew said he felt a great ambivalence about leaving. +"I have had my visa since last year, but I can't decide what to do," said the young man, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "My family has a factory here to make clothes, and I have a good life. But my brother will leave soon for Germany; my sister already lives in Brooklyn, and there aren't any Jewish girls left to marry." +Then, he was asked, why don't you use your visa and leave? He paused and looked straight at his questioner: "Let me ask you," he said. "Would it be so easy for you to leave your country?" +Murad Jajati, who is the son of Yosef Jajati, one of Damascus's most prosperous Jewish merchants, said: "I cannot complain about my conditions here. But it is difficult to watch every day as your friends and relatives leave." + +A Population in Long Decline + Throughout history, Syria's Jewish population has fluctuated. But during this century, it has been in a long decline. By the time the state of Israel was founded in 1948, the Jewish population in Syria had shrunk by more than half, to 50,000; in later years, as a succession of wars engulfed the region, many of those few thousand who remained came to regard themselves as hostages, denied permission to leave or even travel freely within Syria itself. +For years, American and European Jewish organizations, as well as human rights groups, protested the treatment of Syria's Jews, citing incidents in which Jews were imprisoned without trial and tortured, accused of trying to flee the country illegally. +In April 1992, in a good-will gesture after the Persian Gulf war, President Assad agreed to loosen emigration restrictions on Jews, including procedures where visas were given to every member of a family except one, making it difficult for all to leave. In the next six months, an estimated 2,600 Jews seized the chance to go. +But then about the time of the American Presidential elections, Syrian officials again slowed the flow of new exit visas to barely 10 a month. Jewish groups in the West accused Syria of using the 1,200 or so Jews still living here as a bargaining chip in Middle East talks. +Last month, when Secretary of State Warren Christopher traveled to Damascus to lay the groundwork for the meeting in Geneva between Mr. Assad and President Clinton on Sunday, the Syrian leader promised to speed up the process, and give exit visas by the end of the year to an estimated 850 Jews still waiting to leave. Syria missed that deadline, but Jewish officials here expect the process to be completed soon. +For Rabbi Hamra and others here who say they intend to remain in Syria, they are banking their hopes on the unfolding peace efforts, and an eventual settlement between Israel and Syria that might encourage Jews to return to Damascus. +"Already about 100 Jews I know have come back, some to stay, because I think they now know that life is better and simpler for them in Syria," Rabbi Hamra said. "With time, we hope more will come back." +But it depends on peace, because with peace, said the rabbi, Jews in Syria would no longer have to seek arrangements in Turkey or Morocco or America for kosher products or spiritual consolation. Syria's Jews would only have to cross the border to a place where no Syrian is now allowed to travel. +"There is an Egyptian song that begins with the line, 'Those who are closest to you are actually the farthest away,' " said Rabbi Hamra, who in his conversation never mentions Israel by name. "We ask God that some day soon, we will all be closer to each other." + +LOAD-DATE: January 15, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Reading from prayer books in Hebrew, a dwindling number of Syrian Jewish children receive religious instruction from the Chief Rabbi, Ibrahim al-Hamra, at the lone Jewish school in Damascus. (George Ashi for The New York Times) + +Graph: "Syria's Jews: Declining Numbers" shows the estimated number of Jews in Syria from 1900 to 1994 (Source: Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith) + +Map of Syria + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +21 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 16, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In the Region/Westchester; +A Rush to Build for the County's Aging Population + +BYLINE: By MARY McALEER VIZARD + +SECTION: Section 10; Page 10; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1190 words + +IN recent years, the 27-year-old White Plains Hotel attracted few guests. But a developer now hopes it will appeal to a growing market as a residence for the elderly who need some help with daily chores. +In Rye, a nursing home built in 1908 is about to be transformed into an apartment building for the aged who wish to live independently, but in a structured environment. + Such projects, as well as total-care nursing homes, are now being planned all over the county to accommodate an increasingly aging population. +Perhaps the most popular type of housing is called "assisted living apartments," where the elderly rent units, and meals, housekeeping and other services are provided. +"There's a real market out there for assisted-living apartments," said Solomon T. Scharf, who last month bought the 105-room White Plains Hotel on South Broadway and Lyons Place, which had been foreclosed in October 1992 by The Bank of New York. +Mr. Scharf, who is president of Lloyd Equities, a development company in Manhattan, plans to convert the hotel into 284 apartments, which he said he could do by making mostly cosmetic changes, such as installing new furniture, carpeting and wallpaper. +"This hotel, like many others, has rooms with connecting doors," Mr. Scharf explained. "You can create apartments simply by opening the doors." +There will be studio, one- and two-bedroom units, all with kitchenettes, that will rent for $2,500 to $3,000 a month. The price will include three meals a day in a central dining area, housekeeping, recreation and local transportation. Amenities will include a card room, library, exercise room, an arts and crafts center and a chapel. +The plan still requires the approval of the White Plains Common Council, but there has been little opposition, Mr. Scharf said. +He said he expected to begin the renovation in the spring and phase in assisted-living residents while continuing to operate the building as a hotel. The phasing in, he said, could take as much as four years. +Mr. Scharf owns and operates the Esplanade Hotel, a 181-unit assisted-living accommodation at West End Avenue and West 74th Street in Manhattan. "With life expectancy continuing to go up, there will continue to be a need for this kind of housing in the future," he said. +That opinion is echoed by Stephen Lopez, Planning Commissioner for the town of Greenburgh, where a 160-bed nursing home is now being planned. +"There's such a variety of living arrangements for seniors now," Mr. Lopez said. "There's still a great need for total-care facilities, but there's a greater call for more intermediate care for seniors who aren't fully capable of taking care of themselves, yet don't need to be in an institution." +One ambitious project involves the $60 million expansion of the Osborn Retirement Community, now under way between Theall and Boston Post Roads in Rye. It will involve an 84-bed skilled-nursing facility and 188 independent-living residences, including 148 one- and two-bedroom apartments in three buildings, and 20 two-family homes, each with 1,638 square feet of living space. +THE community, on a 56-acre campus, already has a 125-bed retirement residence for men women in a 186,000-square-foot Georgian building opened in 1908 for women only. The building will be converted into 65 one-bedroom independent-living rental apartments and 40 assisted-living units. +The original building, which already has dining rooms, parlors and a 200-seat theater, will also be equipped with a fitness center, and another building will be constructed to house an indoor pool and a spa. +Fees for all the various housing options have not yet been approved, according to Mark R. Zwerger, chief executive officer of the Osborn Retirement Community, who has submitted an offering plan to the New York State Attorney General. +Mr. Zwerger said a one-time refundable entrance fee would be charged in addition to a monthly service fee for the 188 new independent-living units. "Our entrance fees will be comparable to the prices of similar sized condominiums," said Mr. Zwerger. "But residents won't own their units. They will be owned by the Osborn." +When the resident dies, or if he or she moves, the entrance fee will be refunded to the estate or the individual, he explained. +Each resident will get a package designed to accommodate individual preferences, Mr. Zwerger said. "If they want, three meals a day will be provided, as will housekeeping services and recreation." +Mr. Zwerger said that market research showed that the needs of the elderly were changing. "They wanted larger personal accommodations," he said. +The other major impetus for the expansion, Mr. Zwerger said, was economic. "We needed more people living on the campus to make it economically viable. We couldn't continue to make it with the 125 people we have now," he said. +The first stage of construction, which will begin in the fall, will involve 13 of the two-family homes and the first of the three apartment buildings, the new 84-bed nursing home and the new indoor pool. +Another complex looking to expand its services is the 127-year-old Wartburg Home at East Lincoln and Bradley Avenues in Mount Vernon. The home, which now has 240 elderly people on its 35-acre campus, plans to build a new 160-bed nursing home and create 44 assisted-living units in a building that now houses 90 people. In addition, an auditorium will be transformed into an adult day-care center accommodating 100 people. +WHEN the new building opens early next year, the complex will accommodate a total of 240 nursing-home residents and an overall population of 370, said the Rev. Glenn C. Stone, spokesman for the Wartburg Home, which is affiliated with the Lutheran Church. +In the Town of Greenburgh, a 160-bed nursing home has been proposed by the Hebrew Hospital Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that now operates a 480-bed home in Co-op City, in the Bronx. The site plan for the four-wing, 85,000-square-foot home to be built on just under 60 acres on Grassland Roads at Stephens Lane is before the Town Planning Board. +At one time, the property was to be used for a one-family-home development that fell victim to the downturn in the real estate market. +Many people in town are happy that the land will now be used for a nursing home, since it will preserve more open space. +"The building itself will take up a very small percentage of the property," said Mr. Lopez, the Town Planning Commissioner. "The rest will be used for sitting areas and about half of the property is steep slopes." +Mr. Scharf, the owner of the White Plains Hotel, believes that the trend toward converting old projects and buildings into residences for the elderly will continue for some time. +He cites statistics that show that, in the next decade, the number of people 65 years of age or older nationwide will grow by 3.3 million, to 34.87 million people. +"And with good medicine, a lot of these people will be healthy and want a wide variety of housing options," he said. "Nursing homes and living with relatives are not the answer for everyone." + +LOAD-DATE: January 19, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos; Plans for Osborn Retirement Community in Rye include renovating 1908 building, top, and adding 20 two-family houses, left. (Photographs by Susan Harris for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +22 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 16, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Changing the Nature of Retiree Homes + +BYLINE: By TOM TOOLEN + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 13; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1169 words + +SOLOMON EISENROD has seen a lot of changes in his long career as a real estate developer, but none so striking as the way older Americans are turning the once sedentary retirement years into a period of vigorous activity. +Mr. Eisenrod knows what he is talking about. At age 85, he has followed the shift of living patterns for older people for more than three decades as the developer of two of New Jersey's largest communities for people 55 and over -- Rossmoor and Clearbrook, both in Monroe Township. + All told, Mr. Eisenrod and his partners have built more than 4,000 adult homes at the two communities, with more to come. He is also a developer of the Ponds, another adult community, which will open soon next to the two other communities. +Mr. Eisenrod said the changes in the way retired people are living have been significant. + +Skiing and Snorkeling at 80 + "Today, older people don't think -- as they once did -- that when they reach 60 or 65 years old they must trade in their active lives for a rocking chair; that is a myth of the past," he said. Mr. Eisenrod said he knew people who "ski and snorkel at age 80 and work longer days than their contemporaries, most of whom are 30 to 40 years younger." +Most of the residents of the adult communities work at least part time, he said. +Mr. Eisenrod does more than that. He puts in a full five-day week as chairman at the Manhattan office of the American Revenue Corporation, which has real estate holdings in several states. He often visits his New Jersey properties and enjoys talking to the residents. +"I can identify with the people out there, with their problems and their goals," he said, "because they are my goals, too -- namely to stay healthy, active and to be a vital force who can help family and friends by sharing knowledge learned over the years." +Each adult community was a product of its time, Mr. Eisenrod said. At Rossmoor, which opened in the 1960's, he said, the people who bought houses chose more sedentary activities like arts and crafts, and many of them were fully retired. +"They did not need as much recreational facilities, although those amenities have been added over the years as the residents have changed at Rossmoor," Mr. Eisenrod said. +At the time Rossmoor was being built, most people did not know about the concept of retirement communities, Mr. Eisenrod said. "I must admit that I hardly knew where Monroe Township was myself," he said. "It was all farmland then." + +A Significant Change + In just 10 years, when Mr. Eisenrod became a backer of Clearbrook, there had been a major shift in how the elderly were living. +The community's residents have a nine-hole golf course, tennis courts, two outdoor swimming pools and a fully equipped clubhouse with exercise and fitness rooms. +Clearbrook, like Rossmoor a 2,000-home community has more than 3,000 residents. It recently sold its last house. +Shirley and Henry Zager, formerly of Fair Lawn, recently bought a two-bedroom house there. They are clearly impressed with the activities in their new community. +"There is a special television channel which covers the activities," Mrs. Zager said. "My husband and I watch it all the time and are amazed by all the activities offered. We can't wait to get involved." +Mr. Eisenrod, who is also a lawyer, became involved in housing for older people when he met Ross Cortese, the founder of Rossmoor. It was then called Rossmoor Leisureworld and was being developed by Mr. Cortese on farmland off Exit 8A of the New Jersey Turnpike. +"Ross wanted to move to California, so he sold the property to us," Mr. Eisenrod said, referring to himself and his partners. "I could see the possibilities of such a development, and the land was literally dirt cheap in those days. Plus, in the 60's not many developers were involved in senior communities, and I saw a future in them." + +A Pioneer State + New Jersey was a pioneer state for the construction of housing for the elderly, Mr. Eisenrod said, because of its nearness to New York and its easy access to the New Jersey Turnpike and major highways. "It only takes a little over an hour to get to Monroe Township from midtown Manhattan," Mr. Eisenrod said, "and that's what makes the development very valuable." +Mr. Eisenrod's mild demeanor is in contrast with the flamboyance of many other real estate developers. Perhaps that is because of his upbringing. +"I remember growing up in a tenement on the Lower East Side, so I keep things in perspective," Mr. Eisenrod said. "I suppose we would be considered poor -- we had a bathroom in the hall that all the families had to share -- but all I can remember is how happy and united we always seemed to be in those days." +While he likes to reminisce, Mr. Eisenrod is very much a man of the present. He and his partners are focused on the Ponds, which is being built on a 42-acre tract across the road from Clearbrook. The initial construction includes 237 one-story homes, which are detached or in sets of twos and threes, and a 22,000-square-foot clubhouse. The two-bedroom, two-bath homes will be priced from $135,000 to $197,000. +Mr. Eisenrod said the key selling point to all the homes was the wealth of activities available to residents. But he said the members of a new generation of older people are also aware of environmental and other issues, and they will not live in developments that damage wide areas of the surrounding countryside. +"That is why we have set aside 19 acres at the Ponds to remain in wetlands and woodlands forever," he said. + +A Varied Career + Mr. Eisenrod, the son of immigrant parents from Poland, started out his career as a lawyer. He graduated at 21 from the first graduating class at St. John's University Law School in 1929. Later, he stopped practicing law and bought a Providence, R.I., manufacturing plant during World War II. The company had gone bankrupt, and Mr. Eisenrod turned it around. He has become a specialist in rejuvenating bankrupt companies. +Mr. Eisenrod and his wife, the former Sally Winston, who was a professional singer, have a daughter, Nancy Hartwell, who lives in Phoenix, and a son, Michael, who is a sales executive in his father's business. +In 1967, the elder Mr. Eisenrod began developing homes in Florida. He has built more than 2,000 units and 27 holes of golf courses in Boca Raton. He continues to develop property in Florida and Virginia. +He is an active partner in Clearbrook Partners, developers of the Ponds and Clearbrook. His partners are Kenneth A. Simons and Leonard Kohl, developers in the tristate area and members of the Bronfman family of the United States and Canada, who have large real estate holdings. +Mr. Eisenrod supervises a staff of two dozen at the American Revenue office on Madison Avenue, only a few blocks from the place he began his career as a lawyer more than 60 years earlier. Defining his role, he said, "I make the decisions, good or bad, and I get the blame or the credit." + +LOAD-DATE: January 19, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Solomon Eisenrod, chairman of the American Revenue Corporation, with real estate holdings in several states. (William E. Sauro/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +23 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 16, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +What Happens to People When Temperature Plunges + +BYLINE: By GINA KOLATA + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 26; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 953 words + +From studies in Europe, where people shivered through bitter winters without central heating, from studies of soldiers exposed to the rawest elements and of volunteers immersed in cold water, and from animal studies that investigated the limits of cold tolerance, scientists have pieced together a coherent picture of what happens when people get very, very cold. +The body has two principal ways to keep warm when the weather is cold, experts said: by generating heat through normal biochemical reactions in the muscles and through insulation by fat. + If the muscles cannot generate enough heat and the fat insulation is insufficient to keep what heat there is from draining away, the body's reaction is to try to preserve the heat it generates. Most body heat is lost through the skin, whose large surface area drains heat away from the blood into the cold air. To prevent this heat loss, the body shunts blood away from the skin, with the result that you feel cold. +But both of these normal ways of staying warm can be problematical for older people, and even young and healthy people can fall victim to the cold if they do not take proper precautions, experts said. + +Risks for Older People + The amount of time it takes before people suffer serious complications from the cold varies depending on how old they are, how muscular they are, how cold it is outside and whether they are wet as well as cold, experts said. But, one said, it can take as little as an hour for people to get into real trouble if they are wet and the temperature is about zero degrees. +Older people are at a substantial disadvantage in the cold because they have less muscle mass, said Dr. Jordan Tobin, chief of the applied physiology section at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore. Dr. Tobin said people lose 20 to 30 percent of their muscle mass as they age, making it much harder for them to generate enough heat to keep warm. +In addition, Dr. Tobin said, older people often take medicines that make them less able than younger people to shunt blood away from their skin. For example, drugs like alpha and beta blockers for high blood pressure, that act by inhibiting blood-vessel constriction. +Alcohol also can impair blood shunting, in older and younger people, because it dilates blood vessels. + +Signs of Hypothermia + When the body's heat-generating and heat-conserving mechanisms fail, hypothermia can set in. Dr. Murray Hamlet, director of research plans and operations at the Army's Research Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick, Mass., said that the first signs of hypothermia tended to occur when the body's core temperature, or temperature inside the body, falls from 98.6 to about 94 degrees. People start to stumble and they have slurred speech and a faraway gaze, Dr. Hamlet said. +As the body gets colder, the heart and brain falter. The heartbeat slows and its rhythm becomes erratic. As the brain fails to function, a person goes into a coma. Death usually occurs from a heart arrythmia, Dr. Tobin said. +Dr. Hamlet said that the coldest anyone had been and still survived was 58.8 degrees. "That was a 9-year-old boy in Milwaukee, Wis., a few years ago," he said. But, he added, there are many cases of people whose core temperatures got into the low 60's and who lived. +People who are near hypothermia should be given warm fluids, Dr. Hamlet said. When the body shunts blood to the internal organs, the extra blood in the blood vessels of these internal organs increases the blood pressure. In an attempt to reduce the blood pressure again, the body tries to drain excess fluids, with the result that people urinate and can become dehydrated. +Cold can also injure body tissue. When a person's feet are cold and wet, for example, the body releases histamines, immune-system hormones that constrict blood vessels in the feet in an attempt to conserve heat. The histamines, however, make the feet swollen and tender, a condition known as chilblains. If the cold continues, top layers of the skin, deprived of blood, can blacken and die, Dr. Hamlet said. The dead skin falls off without leaving a scar, he added, but the pain caused by this condition, called pernio, can last a lifetime. + +Cases for Amputation + After a much longer time with cold wet feet, generally days, the areas of dead tissue expand and the condition becomes known as trench foot, which can require amputation, Dr. Hamlet said. In fact, he said, 175 Argentine troops in the Falklands war had amputations of all or parts of their feet because of trench foot. He said he did not know how many British troops required amputations but said that the British reported that trench foot was their leading medical problem in that war. +Frostbite, another injury that affects only small parts of the body, occurs when exposed tissue freezes. The white patches that skiers and others have seen on their noses or ears often is frostnip, Dr. Hamlet said, explaining that frostnip is a superficial injury. But, he said, "when the freezing goes deeper, you get in trouble." The frozen tissue dies and falls off, he explained. "You can lose the tips of your toes or portions of your toes and fingers. You can lose the fat pad on your nose and you can lose your ears or portions of them." +The key to avoiding these injuries, Dr. Hamlet said, is to be aware. "Never accept numbness in your extremities," he said. "That's the key." +For old people, cold can be a problem even indoors, Dr. Tobin said. The room temperature should be at least 68 degrees, and if people feel cold they should put on another sweater or blanket. When the weather gets cold, he said, it is not the time "to try and save on your heating bills." + +LOAD-DATE: January 19, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +24 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 19, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +THE EARTHQUAKE: The Apartments; +With 16th Body Found, Grim Vigil Is Complete + +BYLINE: By DIRK JOHNSON, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 19; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 923 words + +DATELINE: LOS ANGELES, Jan. 18 + +Most of them were elderly, and from the windows of their apartments, they liked to watch the bubbling stream in the courtyard and listen to its soothing whisper. +One was a retired plumber, a man so proud of his craft that he showed off his ancient union card whenever a maintenance man came around, and then tipped for the work. + Two were twins, women in their 70's, who greeted neighbors with the same refrain, "It's a beautiful day for shopping," rain or shine. +Another resident belonged to a barbershop quartet, a gregarious man with a baritone voice and a special fondness for "My Wild Irish Rose." +Survivors of the crumbled Northridge Meadows apartments stood outside the building today and looked around for these familiar faces. But they did not see them. +Rescuers removed a 16th body from the wreckage today and called a halt to the search of the imploded complex, where a first-floor ceiling of the wood and stucco building collapsed Monday and left only a crawl space of 18 inches in some places. + +'No Other Victims' + This was the place where Monday's earthquake, which registered 6.6 on the Richter scale of ground motion, took its greatest toll. And all of those who died in Northridge Meadows lived on the first floor, which was destroyed in a matter of seconds when the quake struck at 4:31 A.M. on Monday. +"We are confident there are no other victims in this building," said Keno De Varney, a battalion chief with the Los Angeles County Fire Department. +Most of the dead were elderly people, who lived on the first floor so they would not have to climb stairs. But the victims also included a teen-age boy and a man in his 20's. +The last victim, who was found early this morning by searchers using fiber-optic cameras, was described only as a middle-aged man who lived in apartment 10-A. In all, the dead included nine women and seven men. +After somehow escaping the rubble on Monday morning, Hyan Sook Lee stood in the midst of screaming sirens, waiting for her husband, Phil Soom, and their 14-year-old son, Howard, who was home from boarding school, to emerge, too. She stood beside an oak tree, waiting, watching, hoping. +Four hours later, a paramedic told her, "The boy is dead." She sobbed and shook with grief. And then came word of the final painful loss: her husband had also been killed. + +An Anxious Wait + In all, about 30 people were rescued from the apartment wreckage, according to officials. And some onlookers at the complex here in the San Fernando Valley, about 20 miles northwest of downtown, whose friends or relatives had not been found at shelters or hospitals, paced nervously on Reseda Street. Above all, they hoped to learn that their loved ones had been among those saved. +"I'm looking for my wife's uncle," said Mike Karian, exhausted after a night without any sleep or any word. +Across the street from the tan-stucco ruins, Anat Laskier, a 35-year-old Hebrew teacher who lived in the complex, stood in a daze, clutching the hand of her 7-year-old daughter, who kept asking, "Mommy, those people died?" +Vanessa Owen peered at the gaping opening where a wall had been, and recalled an elderly neighbor. "I can see her smiling," she said. "I can't believe she's gone." +Francisco Pichreo, who knew some of the missing, began to speak and then fought back tears, shaking his head to say that he could not say anything. +Gustavo Garcia, a 27-year-old cook, whose boss, a restaurant manager, lived in the building, stood with arms folded, a look of defiant optimism in his eyes. +"I still hoping," he said. "He's my friend." +Jim Jordan, a former maintenance worker in the apartments, stared at the wreckage, where the roof of a three-story structure was now only two stories off the ground. +"There were some awfully nice people in there," said Mr. Jordan, 40. "I remember they always wanted to be able to hear the sound of the stream in the courtyard. It made it so peaceful." + +A Helping Hand + "A lot of them didn't get out much," he added. "And when you came to the door, you were treated like some long lost relative. They wanted you to sit down and talk. They wanted you to have a cookie." +Marco Palaez, a 33-year-old warehouse worker who wore a Desert Storm T-shirt, said that after the quake, he emerged from his second-floor apartment to hear screams and cries for help in the darkness. +"One guy was pushing his hand through the window," Mr. Palaez said. "I grabbed it and said, 'You're going to be all right man." +Reseda Street, usually a busy thoroughfare, was clogged with emergency vehicles. A National Guardsmen in camouflage fatigues stood brandishing a rifle, warning anyone from venturing too close. +A closed Chinese carry-out restaurant stood next to the apartment. Across the way was a closed Post Office. And a few blocks away, some students at California State University at Northridge, driven from their dormitories by the quake, were camping on a soccer field. +"We talk a lot in school about the homeless," said Maria Velasquez, who spent the night under a blanket and the stars. "It was all so abstract. But now I don't know where I'm going to stay myself." +Some of the survivors of the apartment complex's collapse were sent to a Red Cross shelter at nearby Birmingham High School, where people from throughout the San Fernando Valley who had lost their homes sat at cafeteria tables, waiting and worrying. +"We couldn't even find our hearing aides," said 79-year-old Bea Taylor, who sat alongside her 82-year-old husband, Clarence. + +LOAD-DATE: January 19, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Tigran Daniyelyan, left, with a friend, salvaged a television from his Northridge Meadows apartment. (Agence France-Presse) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +25 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 23, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +CONNECTICUT GUIDE + +BYLINE: By ELEANOR CHARLES + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 19; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1031 words + + +BOLD BALLET +Premieres of ballets on the exploratory edge of dance will make up the Hartford Ballet program at The Bushnell in Hartford on Friday and Saturday at 8 P.M. + Kirk Peterson, the company's artistic director, has choreographed two of the pieces. "Ballades," a work for 13 dancers set to the music of Chopin, evokes a variety of moods in three parts based on the times of day: Midday, Dusk and Midnight. Five dancers are involved in "A Quicker Blood," Mr. Peterson's second work, an energetic piece inspired by the music of Hungary. +Morton Subotnick's "The Keys to Songs" provides the musical background to "Glass," choreographed by Monica Levy; and the final piece created by Choo-San Goh is titled "Birds of Paradise," accompanied by Alberto Ginastera's "Harp Concerto." It was staged by Janek Schergen, official interpreter of Goh's works, and the director of a dance foundation established in Goh's name after his death in 1987. +Tickets priced from $9.50 to $37.50 may be ordered by calling the Bushnell box office, 246-6807, or any Ticketmaster. Discounts are available to students and people 65 and older. + +MEMORIALIZING JAZZ + An installation by Stan Douglas, a Canadian artist, will be on view today through May 1 at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, and will no doubt provoke discussion. +It consists of two large video projections appearing simultaneously on an eight-foot screen in a darkened room. Commissioned in 1992 by the Pompidou Center in Paris, the work, titled "Hors-champs," memorializes a type of music known as free jazz, an improvisational form favored by expatriate black Americans in France in the late 60's and early 70's associated with the Communist movement there. +George Lewis, trombonist, Douglas Ewart, saxophonist, Kent Carter on bass and Oliver Johnson on drums are presented in black-and-white projections reminiscent of French documentary television of the period. The accompanying tapes play music including gospel, a 1965 work by Albert Ayler, fanfares and "La Marseillaise." +Andrea Miller-Keller, curator of contemporary art at the museum, will give a gallery talk on the installation on Tuesday at noon. The talk is free with museum admission of $5 for adults, $2 for students and elderly people. Children are admitted free and admission is free to everyone on Thursdays, and from 11 to 1 on Saturdays. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 to 5. Call 278-2670 for more information. + +HOPI CULTURE, ART + The culture of the Hopi Indians will be the subject of a colloquium at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, scheduled from 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. on Saturday, with a film presentation on Sunday at 2 P.M. +A professor of anthropology at Yale and a curator at the Peabody, Michael D. Coe, will introduce the event on Saturday with an overview, "Hopi Traditions in a Changing World." Speakers throughout the day include Lydia L. Wyckoff, a curator of Native American Art at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Okla., and guest curator of the Peabody's current exhibition, "Design and World View: The Politics of Hopi Ceramics." +The director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, Leigh Jenkins, will talk about "Anglo Exploitation and Hopi Factionalism" from his viewpoint as an insider; and a Hopi craftsman, M. Jenkins, will discuss the function and significance of pottery in the Hopi home. The making and marketing of Hopi pottery will be the topic of a talk by a prize-winning Hopi potter, Karen Kahe Charles. +A panel discussion involving all the speakers and demonstrations of coiled clay pot making, weaving and other Hopi crafts will fill the afternoon. +"Imagining Indians," Sunday's 90-minute film by a Hopi cinematographer, Victor Masayesva Jr., takes issue with commercial films dealing with Indian issues, including "Dances With Wolves." +The Peabody is located at 170 Whitney Avenue and admission to the colloquium events is free with museum admission of $4 for adults, $3 for people 65 and older, $2.50 for children 3 to 15. For more information call the InfoTape, 432-5050. + +ALL ABOUT BETTE + During a New York hotel strike in 1985, arrangements were made by a friend for Bette Davis to spend the night in the Weston home of Elizabeth Fuller. She stayed for a month, taking every opportunity between drags on her ever-present cigarette to criticize the house, the food and the decor, her hostess said. +But Ms. Fuller, a longtime fan of the actress, said she was awed, and disregarded the streams of invectives, basking instead in the mere presence of her idol. +Her month in the country with the screen star later inspired her to write a play called "Me and Jezebel," which she has performed in Westport and elsewhere in Connecticut as a one-woman show. A revival to be presented on Friday and Saturday at 8 P.M. in the Westport Arts Center has Randy Allen rather than Ms. Fuller portraying Miss Davis. +Mr. Allen's one-man shows in which he impersonates Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli, Carol Channing, Marilyn Monroe and other female stars have been frequently shown on television. +Tickets are $10 and $15. Call 226-1806 for reservations or more information. + +DANCE WINNERS + Gus Solomons Jr., director of the Solomons Dance Company in New York City, was the judge in the Juror's Choice Dance Competition of New Dance New Haven 1993. Performances of the winning works will be given on Saturday at 5 P.M. and Sunday at 3 P.M. at Artspace, 70 Audubon Street, New Haven. +Mitzi Adams provided three works, titled "Sideshow," "Colors May Bleed" and "Judy's Nails," and Leslie Prodis choreographed a work whose title had not been confirmed. Performers in the Adams pieces will be Mindi McAlister, Paul Dennis and Penelope Wyler. +Willie Feuer and Susan Matheke are the choreographers for "Again Winter" and "Looking for Your Glasses." They will perform in "Again Winter," along with Sandra Kopell, Marianne Banar Fountain, Charlotte Gram and Tom Haskell. +A reception will follow the Saturday performance, for which tickets will be $30. Sunday tickets are $10. Call 772-2377 for reservations or more information. + ELEANOR CHARLES + +LOAD-DATE: January 23, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +26 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 23, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +TRAVEL ADVISORY: HOTELS; +Getting the Best Price + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 3; Column 4; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 115 words + +Though they don't always trumpet it, many hotel chains offer discounts, upgrades and other perks. One way to learn about deals is to call the hotel chain's 800 number. Or you can consult a new 40-page booklet, "The Hotel/Motel $ pecial Program and Di$ count Guide," that lists bargain offerings at more than 100 chains. Children accompanied by parents stay free of charge at Hampton Inns, for example. And at most Best Inns of America, local phone calls and evening coffee are free. Senior citizens, meanwhile, can get discounts almost anywhere -- although age requirements vary. + The guide costs $5.95, plus $1 postage, from Pilot Books, 103 Cooper Street, Babylon, N.Y. 11702. + +LOAD-DATE: January 23, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +27 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 23, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE NIGHT; +Scenes From a Sandbar + +BYLINE: By Bob Morris + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 3; Column 1; Styles of The Times + +LENGTH: 1021 words + +DATELINE: MIAMI BEACH, Jan. 21 + +This billion-dollar sandbar can appreciate a gold-digging seductress, and last Saturday night Eartha Kitt was working that side of her psyche for all it was worth. +For her final concert in the Naya Performing Arts Series, the limber diva slunk onto the stage of the Colony Theater in a tight money-green sequined gown that was breathtaking -- literally, by the looks of it. She dished in French. She sneered in Spanish. She flirted in Turkish. And in a nod to her role as Catwoman on "Batman" in the 60's, she let loose with a spine-straightening "meow." + "Go, girl!" a fan shouted as the orchestra vamped and she slowly sat down on a divan. +"Don't rush me," she growled back. With almost every song in her multilingual repertory about sex or money (or both), her performance sounded like one long, loud gimme that was both primal and Continental. +The instant the concert was over, however, Ms. Kitt, who was born in poverty, retired her venal outer diva for the more socially conscious diva within. And as she often does when she's asked (and sometimes when she isn't), she broke into her extensive repertory of political commentary. +"One of the problems with this country is that we're wasting the elderly," she said, having observed the youth-obsessed scene in Miami Beach. "Our old people have nothing to do and no reason for living. But nature wastes nothing, so why isn't their knowledge recycled into the children? To me, there's nothing more wonderful than an old person who loves children and wants to teach them." +Recalling a recent visit to New Zealand, where she witnessed Maori elders teaching in the schools, Ms. Kitt was inspired to expound on indigenous peoples. "In Australia, I'm always with the Aborigines, fighting for their land rights," she said. "It's just like here with the Indians. I'm part Cherokee, and what the Europeans did to my people -- uch! They gave us blankets and smallpox." +In 1968, at the peak of her career, she found herself holding forth against the Vietnam War in front of Lady Bird Johnson at a White House lunch. She was blacklisted as an entertainer in this country for years after that. +"A lot of politicians still ask for my opinions," Ms. Kitt said. "Ask me to lunch and I'll tell you what's going on in the world." Most likely, the meal would include courses on civil rights, sustainable agriculture and health care. +"I'm thinking of starting a camp in the Catskills with city kids growing their own food," she said. "We could get retired farmers to pass on their knowledge. You have to keep people involved! And don't ask the government to help in any fashion! Just do it and stop complaining about what the government isn't doing and start asking why we aren't doing things for ourselves." +Her daughter, Kitt Shapiro, 32, who is also her manager, was leaning against a mirror, marveling at her mother's energy. "She took three aerobics classes today," Ms. Shapiro said. "I took one. Then I took a nap." + +Two Wigs, One Physics Lesson + Tara Solomon, South Beach's youthful high priestess of party culture who writes her weekly "Queen of the Night" column for The Miami Herald using the royal "we," has the highest hairdo in town. +"I enhance my own hair with two wigs for extra height," Ms. Solomon said on Tuesday at her weekly "Martini Club" cocktail party, which is held at Allioli, a restaurant on Ocean Drive. +"I can get it on my head in about five minutes. That's important, because, as a working journalist, I have to get dressed fast. It's instant glamour, and it's very easy." +Usually, anyway. +"It did get stuck in my sunroof once," she said. "It became like Velcro, and I couldn't turn my head while I was trying to change lanes and I ended up bumping into another car." +Instant glamour can be dangerous. + +Field Trip to Study the Natives + Culture Clash, a three-man Hispanic comedy troupe from Los Angeles that has been on PBS, MTV and HBO, was in town to research a theatrical portrait of the city. Commissioned by the Miami Light Project, a local arts organization, it will be based on interviews with everyone from hipster Cubanos to farm workers, gospel singers, gay couples and hurricane survivors. +Over dinner on Tuesday, the trio, who'd already spent time with local Haitians and Bahamians, was scrutinizing Rhoda Levitt, the president of the Miami City Ballet. "I don't know what to say," Mrs. Levitt said. +"I wouldn't worry about it," said Richard Montoya, who was taking notes while his colleagues, Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza, looked at a Polaroid picture of Mrs. Levitt as if it were rare documentation of a tribeswoman from an uncharted island. +Mrs. Levitt then talked about Miami's exoticism, which fascinated the trio. "Santeria, voodoo, all that stuff's so everyday," she said. "I thought it would be really different for you to be with me, a nice middle-class Jewish lady." +Mr. Montoya put his arm around her. "I'm actually a Jewish boy trapped in a Santeria body," he said. "You should have seen my bar mitzvah." + +Dull Is Just Fine, Thank You + South Beach was far quieter this week than it seemed a year ago. It was so quiet that you could hear the squeaking wheelchairs of elderly men as they wheeled home from end-of-Sabbath services at the dilapidated Congregation Beth Jacob, just a block from the slickly renovated Pommier Models building. So quiet that on Tuesday night, you could hear the Century Hotel's music blasting onto the street as it tried to pull in diners with the go-go dancers it had imposed on its otherwise stark decor. So quiet that on Ocean Drive, with its hotels and cafes lit up and looking like a row of stood-up homecoming queens on prom night, you could hear the guard in front of Gianni Versace's empty villa yawning. +By Wednesday, you could almost hear all the arrogant young waiters with better careers pending practice being nice to the bigshots who'd be arriving for the National Association of Television Program Executives convention. One thing you couldn't hear, despite the cool weather and clouds, were people wishing they were in New York or Los Angeles. + +LOAD-DATE: January 23, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Eartha Kitt, in white and seated in booth, is entertained at a dinner after her show. (Sharon Gurman Socol for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +28 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 26, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Milk Helps to Combat Bone Loss From Coffee + +SECTION: Section C; Page 12; Column 4; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 479 words + +WOMEN who drink at least one glass of milk each day throughout their adult lives can largely counter the bone-thinning effects of a lifetime of coffee drinking, according to a new study of 980 women past menopause. +The study, conducted by Dr. Elizabeth Barrett-Connor and colleagues at the University of California at San Diego, showed that in women who do not drink milk, a lifetime habit of drinking as little as two cups a day of coffee containing caffeine results in a significant decline in bone density as they get older. + Such a decline, the hallmark of osteoporosis, which is epidemic among older women, can place them at risk of suffering debilitating and sometimes life-threatening fractures. Previous studies involving many thousands of women have linked coffee drinking to an increased risk of hip fractures. +The new finding, published in today's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, also strongly suggests that increasing calcium intake through supplements in middle age or beyond is not adequate to offset the bone loss induced by a lifetime of coffee drinking. Rather, it appears that the effects of coffee drinking on bone must be countered by appropriate calcium intake throughout life. +Because relatively few women in the study consumed only decaffeinated coffee, the researchers were unable to say whether the bone effects they observed were a result of coffee itself or the caffeine in coffee. Most of the participants who consumed decaffeinated coffee had been or were currently also regular consumers of coffee containing caffeine. +The researchers emphasized that their finding did not mean that a single glass of milk each day was sufficient to protect one's bones. Eight ounces of milk supplies only about one-third of the daily recommended intake of calcium for adults. Nor does the study provide guidance as to how much milk might be needed to counter the bone loss caused by coffee intake well above two cups a day. In general the researchers found that the more coffee women drank, the less milk they consumed. +The study was done by asking the participants to recall their coffee- and milk-drinking habits throughout their adult lives. No assessment was made of other caffeine-containing beverages, like tea or soft drinks, that the women might have consumed; nor did the study consider other dietary sources of calcium or the milk they might have added to their coffee. +The study did not consider the effects coffee might have on bone-thinning in men, who are less susceptible to osteoporosis than are women. +The research is part of a continuing assessment of heart and other chronic diseases in the upper-middle-class community of Rancho Bernardo, Calif., supported by the National Institute on Aging. The coffee study was partly financed by an unrestricted grant from the National Coffee Association. + +LOAD-DATE: February 4, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +29 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 28, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Critic's Notebook; +Sundance: Some Surprises Amid the Frivolity + +BYLINE: By CARYN JAMES, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section C; Page 7; Column 1; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 1248 words + +DATELINE: PARK CITY, Utah, Jan. 27 + +Just when you think the show-biz mania at the Sundance Film Festival can't get more intense, when it seems that every other person on Main Street is carrying a cellular phone, the atmosphere turns loopier. Now people are making their cellular power calls from their seats in the movie theaters. "I will talk to them," a young woman promised her office minutes before a 9:30 screening the other morning. "I'll deal with it." The problem had to do with underlings who were letting too many rotten scripts move up the chain. +It's easy to roll your eyes at this behavior, and there has been more of it since the Hollywood contingent arrived in a swarm on Wednesday, midway through this 10-day festival. But it's also easy to sympathize with the poor readers who can't tell a good script from a bad. One of the most revealing, eloquent and well-received films at the festival, a documentary about two elderly women called "Martha and Ethel," still sounds awful on paper. + The film, by Jyll Johnstone and Barbara Ettinger, is about the two nannies who raised them. Martha, a German refugee, worked for the Johnstones for 30 years, then retired to an apartment in Queens. Ethel, a black woman who brought up the Ettinger children, still lives with Mrs. Ettinger. This idea sounded so bad on paper that the film makers applied for more than 50 grants to help with the budget and were turned down every time. +But what sounds like a narrow view of a privileged world is ambitious and emotionally deep. An affectionate portrait of two completely different women -- the stern, well-meaning Martha and the loving, self-assured Ethel -- it deftly becomes a history of social change over 40 years, and a meditation on motherhood and family. Martha and Ethel themselves, interviewed in their late 80's, are such rich screen presences that one viewer asked, in a question-and-answer session with the film makers here: "Does Ethel have an agent yet?" +Ms. Johnstone, a former actress, and Ms. Ettinger, a former photographer, may be first-time film makers, but they are not naifs. They were smart enough to get good advice. "Everyone said if we were going to Sundance we should get a publicist because we don't know anything about the business," Ms. Johnstone said. There is no better Sundance tone: new but learning fast, and adjusting to a dream ending. Just before the film arrived at the festival, Sony Pictures Classics bought it, and will open it in theaters later this year. The only problem with the film is its title, which brings to mind Lucy and Ethel. Martha and Ethel have their comic moments, but they are far less familiar. +Among the best films at this festival, many come from unexpected sources. "The Last Supper," the short that precedes "Martha and Ethel," is the mordant story of a little girl who pilfers a forbidden object from her neighbor's refrigerator and shrewdly uses it to scare off her mother's boyfriend. It is directed with flair and authority by Daryl Hannah, of "Splash" and tabloid fame. +The dramatic competition was once the most talked-about part of the Sundance festival. No more. A glance at some of the titles suggests why. How can you tell "Fun" from "Fresh" from "Floundering"? What's the difference between "Risk" and "Grief"? Try to remember that "Blessing" is about a dysfunctional farm family, "Spanking the Monkey" about incest, and "Clean, Shaven" about a schizophrenic wanted for murder. Not that they aren't sincere. It's just that so many seem familiar; so many are part art, part Oprah. +"Fun," the story of two abused teen-age girls who meet, find that they are soulmates, and murder an old woman as a lark, plays like a high-school version of "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer." The direction, by Rafal Zielinski, grabs viewers. The performances by the young women (Renee Humphrey and Alicia Witt) are viscerally strong. But the shallow psychology of "Fun" is finally as disturbing as its technique is powerful. +The extremely violent "Clean, Shaven," deserves its reputation as the hardest film at the festival to sit through (though you could argue for hours about whether it is more gruesome than "Reservoir Dogs," which was shown here two years ago). When the writer and director, Lodge H. Kerrigan, assumes the persepective of his schizophrenic character -- with buzzing noises replacing most of the dialogue -- the film is impressive. When he leaves that character and follows the detective on the case, the film's awkwardness is painful. This is the kind of portentous film in which the camera shows a close-up of milk being poured into a cup of coffee, followed by a close-up of sugar being poured into the cup of coffee. +"Clerks" is one of the few films in the competition that won't send viewers out of the theater in tears or with their stomachs churning, which is only part of the reason for its popularity here. It is also extremely funny and unpretentious. This film comes with such a pre-packaged Sundance story that the background almost works against it. The writer and director, Kevin Smith, is a 23-year-old clerk in a New Jersey convenience store, who insists he is going back to work there on Monday. Really. +He shot this black-and-white film for just over $27,000. It is the meandering, irreverent story of a convenience-store clerk named Dante and his friend Randel, who works in the video store next door. They are having a bad day; creating a disaster at a funeral home is not even the worst of it. +The film maker already seems in control of his camera and his material. The acting (some by amateurs) is much more natural and convincing than in most no-budget films. "Clerks" has been invited to the New Directors/New Films festival at the Museum of Modern Art this spring, which is a good indication that if you want to buy milk from Kevin Smith you better move fast. +Because many of the dramatic-competition films are fledgling and uneven, the talked-about films here are often in the documentary competition or out-of-competition programs. +"Cronos," a Mexican film by a first-time director, Guillermo del Toro, is the stylishly told story of an accidental vampire and the search for eternal life. It has strong cult-film possibilities and will be released in April by October Films. +"Naked in New York" is a first film with unusual panache. Eric Stoltz gives an engaging performance as a 25-year-old playwright as muddled as any early Woody Allen character. The director, Dan Algrant, was a student of Martin Scorsese at Columbia University. Mr. Scorsese, the film's executive producer, and Frederick Zollo, its producer, helped fill the movie with cameos that make it seem like a junior New York version of "The Player" (released by the same company, Fine Line). The cameos by Richard Price, Ariel Dorfman, William Styron, Eric Bogosian and others are fun but overdone. No first director should seem that well connected; it could distract attention from his own comic flair. +The film also includes a small acting role by the great director Arthur Penn, who is coincidentally the subject of a tribute at the festival this year. For all its show-business slickness, sometimes there is an air of purity at Sundance. Mr. Penn, whose films include "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Little Big Man," is regarded here with great warmth and a touch of awe. Ordinary fans and many film makers turned up to hear a casual "Conversation With Arthur Penn." There was not a cellular phone evident in the room. + +LOAD-DATE: January 28, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Martha Kniefel, left, and Ethel Edwards in a scene from Barbara Ettinger and Jyll Johnstone's film "Martha and Ethel." (Stephanie Berger/Sony Classics Pictures); Renee Humphrey, left, and Alicia Witt in Rafal Zielinski's film "Fun." (Rafal Zielinski) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +30 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 30, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +POSTINGS: 199-Bed Bronx Nursing Home; +St. Barnabas Expands + +SECTION: Section 10; Page 1; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 181 words + +A $35 million, 199-bed, seven-story nursing home specializing in the care of patients with AIDS or tuberculosis, as well as of elderly people requiring long-term care, is to open on March 1 in the Bronx. +The St. Barnabas Nursing Home, on the campus of St. Barnabas Hospital at East 183d Street and Third Avenue, is connected to the fourth floor of the hospital by an enclosed bridge. + Dr. Ronald Gade, president of St. Barnabas, said the second through fourth floors, with 100 beds, would be used by AIDS and tuberculosis patients. The top three floors are to be used for geriatric care. Each floor is to have a dining room and a recreation room with television. +An adult day-care program is to be established in the nursing home for residents of the neighborhood who lack a source of primary care. +The building was designed by Perkins Geddis Eastman Architects and Davis, Brody and Associates. +St. Barnabas is a 458-bed voluntary acute-care teaching hospital affiliated with the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine and the New York Hospital/Cornell Medical Center. + +LOAD-DATE: January 30, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +31 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 30, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Conversations/Patrick T. Murphy; +A Defender of Chicago's Children Refuses to Be Polite About Abuse + +BYLINE: By SUSAN CHIRA + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 7; Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1230 words + +DATELINE: CHICAGO + +IT is impossible in this city to be neutral about Patrick T. Murphy. Call him a passionate and dedicated children's advocate, who arrives at his office every morning by 5:30 A.M. to call, write, yell, swear and sue anyone from incompetent bureaucrats to abusive parents. Or call him a polarizing figure whose yen for confrontation and intemperate grandstanding sometimes prolong the very cases he is working to resolve. +He is so driven by outrage that he dismisses diplomacy as a tactic of those who would sacrifice children's best interests. "Our job is to confront people on behalf of my clients," he said. "My clients are not the type you negotiate on behalf of because they're getting screwed. And if you stick them with D.C.F.S. [the state Department of Children and Family Services], it gets even worse. Will the kid go through 12 foster homes? Get beat up and maybe raped?" + Mr. Murphy, the Cook County Public Guardian, represents abused and neglected children, as well as senile or disabled elderly people. The 54-year-old lawyer made headlines last month when he argued, on behalf of a nine-month-old fetus, that a mother should be ordered to have a Caesarean because doctors believed the fetus was being deprived of oxygen and otherwise would die or suffer brain damage. The court ruled against him, and the baby was born alive in a normal delivery. +The case was actually a departure for Mr. Murphy, whose daily bread is the thousands of children caught in the morass of the child welfare system, failed just as badly by the people who are supposed to help them as they have been failed by their parents. +He has repeatedly sued the state's child welfare agency, winning more than $1 million on charges that children have been attacked while in the state's emergency shelters, that the agency arbitrarily divides siblings when it places them in foster homes, and that it keeps children with parents who torture or rape them. He won a landmark fathers' rights case, Stanley v. Illinois, in the United States Supreme Court in 1972. +Over the years, he has kept up with some of the children he championed -- one of them still sends him Father's Day cards. But time has taught him to curb his expectations. "What you learn is that you're not going to save anyone's life," he said. "You're not going to make vast changes. But if you can stop the downward slide . . ." + +Liberal 'Failures' + He talks in a staccato burst of words, with generous sprinklings of profanity and scorn for those he sees as villains. Consumed by the brutalities he encounters every day, he has no time for niceties. When a reporter suggested meeting for breakfast, he said he'd rather just talk at the office. +There, sitting in front of a wall of photographs, caricatures and awards, he held forth on how conditions for poor children have steadily deteriorated in his nearly 30 years of work. He started his career as a state's attorney in 1964, but grew discouraged and opted for the Peace Corps. In 1967, he began working as a legal services lawyer. He was appointed public guardian in 1978, responsible at first for helping elderly people who were being abused by their relatives or in state institutions and later, in 1987, for neglected or abused children. +When he started out more than 25 years ago, there were about 4,000 abuse and neglect cases in juvenile court a year. Now there are more than 30,000. "I'm on my third generation of welfare families since 1967," he said. "The programs we developed to cure the problem made it worse. Liberals are afraid to come to grips with their failures. We cannot give people money and services without demanding something in return." +This is the crux of his current crusade, an attack on family preservation programs. These programs, the darling of some social welfare agencies, provide such services as transportation and intensive social work to families in danger of having children removed. Mr. Murphy derides this as protecting abusive parents from the state, rather than children from abusive parents. +Whenever possible, Mr. Murphy said, children and parents should stay together; it is just that the state often does such a bad job of screening. "Take the depressed parent who wakes up at 25 with four kids," he said. "The crack vials are up to the ceiling. The kids are filthy. There are rats, cats, elephants in the place. Everyone at school makes fun of the kids because they stink. But the kids down deep love that mother." She is not an abuser and might be helped by intervention. +But his critics say that he tends to divide the world into bad mothers and good kids, and sees his job as keeping them apart. +He is ever ready with grisly stories. There is the mother who did not vaccinate her child for measles. The child lost three fingers and his eyesight. She never visited him in the hospital. Or the mother who visited her children six times in a year, ostensibly because she had to change buses three times to get to their foster home. "Most parents would climb over a mountain of glass barefoot to see their kids," he said. "Talk about a patriarchal racist attitude. The mentality is 'these people,' meaning in Chicago black people, are like children. We know what's best for them. We accept less from them. We expect less of their children." + +Defending a Fetus +He broke off to answer a call from his wife, who put his two sons on the phone for his daily before-school chat. "How's my boy?" he said. "What are you doing after school today? Don't forget to exercise. O.K., kid. How's my boy? You have any tests today? Science? Good luck." He leaves before they wake up so that he can put in a 12-hour day and still get home for dinner. +To his adversaries, Mr. Murphy's blunt talk is sometimes offensive. In October, a coalition of private child welfare agencies called on Cook County's Chief Judge to reprimand him for his language during a fight over a bill to curb family preservation programs. He is unapologetic about accusations that he used an obscenity during a conversation with a Catholic Charities bureaucrat. "This wasn't Mother Teresa I was talking to," he said. "I also called them vultures and whores. My language probably isn't the best. But this is an industry. They shouldn't hide behind religion." +Mr. Murphy says he usually regrets it when he is not belligerent enough. This fall he went along with a state agency's recommendation to return a 3-year-old boy to an abusive mother. She later hanged the child. +When he agreed to be the court-appointed lawyer for the fetus in the Caesarean case, feminists attacked him for interfering with a mother's right to control her own body. If he had won, they argued, anti-abortion groups might claim the right to represent younger fetuses and sue to prevent abortions. +"I do agree with the people who argued there is a slippery down slide to the case," he said, "but does the mother have the right to abuse the child in the womb? My initial reaction was to refuse the appointment. But when I started to think about it, we see hundreds of cases in a year with kids coming in heroin- or coke-addicted because moms were taking drugs." +Criticism mostly seems to stiffen his resolve. "My feeling is I'm going to do what I'm going to do," he said, visibly impatient to get back to work. "If you don't like it, you can fire me tomorrow." + +LOAD-DATE: January 30, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Patrick T. Murphy in his Chicago office. (Ralf-Finn Hestoft/Saba for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +32 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 30, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +TRAVEL ADVISORY; +Recalling a World's Fair + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 3; Column 5; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 261 words + +A century ago, more than 200 structures were built in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park for the California Midwinter International Exposition, which drew 1.5 million visitors in just over five months. After the event, one building was allowed to remain, eventually becoming the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, which is celebrating the fair's centennial with a special exhibition scheduled to open Jan. 27. +In the midst of a severe recession in 1894, the world's fair was orchestrated by the museum's namesake, M. H. de Young, who was inspired by the gargantuan World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago the year before. The San Francisco and Chicago expositions were among the few world's fairs to turn a profit since the tradition began in London in 1851. + On view at the museum through April 17 will be objects from its charter collection, including Greek, Egyptian and Roman antiquities, wood carvings from the South Sea Islands, 19th-century ladies' fans, bronzes by Troubetzkoy and Makovsky's painting "The Russian Bride's Attire." In addition to banners, medals and other memorabilia, some 40 folio-sized photographs of the fair taken by the exposition photographer Isaiah West Taber will be on display. +The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. On the first Wednesday of every month, the museum remains open until 8:45 P.M. Admission is $5, $3 for senior citizens and children 12 to 17, and free for 11 and under. Information: M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, Calif. 94118, (415) 863-3330. + +LOAD-DATE: January 30, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The Grand Court, San Francisco, 1894. (The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +33 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 30, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Tapping Home Equity to Cushion Old Age + +BYLINE: By PETER PASSELL + +SECTION: Section 10; Page 1; Column 4; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 2581 words + +BERNICE STUART, a Minneapolis suburbanite, worked hard most of her life and still didn't know how she was going to make ends meet when she retired in 1988 at the age of 73. Widowed when her only child was just a year old, Mrs. Stuart "didn't owe anybody a dime" and had managed to put aside savings in an I.R.A. But the retirement money all went to nurse her mother through a final illness, leaving her with little apart from Social Security. +"The handwriting was on the wall," Mrs. Stuart recalls: She would have to sell her three-bedroom house and move into an apartment that lacked space to put up her beloved nieces and nephews. + But the story has a happy ending. In 1991 she obtained through a local mortgage broker a $40,000 line of credit, which she uses to cover property taxes and insurance along with the unexpected expenses that wreak havoc on the budgets of those living on modest fixed incomes. +Like the home-equity loans taken out by millions of other Americans, this line of credit was backed by the value of a house. But there is one big difference: Mrs. Stuart is not obligated to pay back a dime until she moves. +Mrs. Stuart is one of a few thousand Americans who have borrowed through an insured "reverse mortgage," the broad term for a loan agreement that gives the elderly a way to tap the equity in their houses without worrying that the sheriff will show up some day with an eviction notice. +Reverse mortages have had a hard start, never quite making the widely anticipated splash. That may be about to change, however, as more lenders enter the field and terms become more flexible. At the moment, it is possible to find a reverse-mortgage lender in all but a handful of states. Anyone who is over the age of 62 and owes little or nothing on his or her home is eligible. +But if reverse mortgages are as good as they sound -- if they are indeed the best thing to happen to older homeowning Americans since the invention of the early-bird special -- why have so few people made use of them? And if reverse mortgages represent a lucrative and nearly virgin trillion-dollar market for lenders, why has the otherwise go-go financial-services industry generally ignored them? +One reason is that the terms of a reverse mortgage are harder to understand than those of a conventional loan. And in many cases they may simply be beyond the comprehension of the older retirees in the best position to make use of them. +"It is very expensive to identify and gain the confidence of customers," says William Texido, president of the San Francisco-based Providential Corporation, which is one of the very few specialized lenders that makes reverse-mortgage loans without financial backing from the Federal Government. +Another is that an insured reverse mortgage is neither a straightforward loan agreement backed by real estate nor a simple life insurance policy or annuity funded with cash. This means that both banks and insurance companies have to stretch their expertise beyond traditional boundaries to design and market the product, an exercise that is bound to be expensive and risky for the pioneers. +"Everyone is waiting for everyone else," laments Mr. Texido. +By the same token, reverse-mortgage loans raise eyebrows at government agencies that were caught looking the other way when savings and loans collapsed in the late 80's. +"There is folklore that some banks tried to get into the market but were turned down by their regulators because banks are prohibited from underwriting life insurance," notes David S. Bizer, formerly an economist with the Securities and Exchange Commission. +This dam may be about to burst, however. Congress has expanded the number of reverse mortgages it is prepared to have the F.H.A. guarantee, and several private financial institutions are now taking a fresh look at their own prospects. +Equally important, suggests Ken Scholen, head of the nonprofit National Center for Home Equity Conversion, lenders in the Federal program are making good use of their limited experience, learning to write reverse-mortgage agreements at lower costs and offering the more flexible terms that borrowers seem to crave. +THE idea of allowing house-rich, cash-poor older Americans to have their cake and eat it too is not new. The first reverse-mortgage loan was made in 1961 by a little savings and loan in Portland, Me. And just two years later the State of Oregon began allowing the elderly to defer property-tax payments, using public-employee retirement funds to finance the loans. +But the market has sputtered and popped ever since, with a handful of private companies leaving most of the action to state and local agencies that make loans to needy homeowning elderly people solely to cover property taxes and critical repairs. As of 1991, 143,000 of these public-sector loans had been made -- a seemingly impressive number until it is realized that the total amount of housing equity encumbered by the loans was just $720 million. +Much of what is still the infant reverse-mortgage market dates from 1989, when the first were made under a Federal pilot program that insured their repayment. To date some 5,500 of these Home Equity Conservation Mortgages, with a maximum value of $560 million, have been created, and the Federal Housing Administration has been authorized to guarantee a total of 25,000 through September 1995. +The nuts and bolts of the federally insured program are relatively simple. Banks, savings and loans, mortgage brokers and other finance companies make the loans, just as they offer F.H.A.-insured conventional mortgages. +To get past the preliminaries, applicants must agree to accept mortgage counseling from a federally approved counselor -- typically a nonprofit social service agency specializing in housing and/or the elderly. +"We encourage them to bring a friend, attorney, child, someone who will help them make the decision," says Carol Greifer, the head of Counseling for Home Equity Conversion, a state-financed service for Nassau County. +This protects the borrower: "Seniors are vulnerable," Mrs. Greifer emphasizes. It also shields the lender from later claims of fraud by disappointed heirs. +Houses of any value can be used as loan collateral. But the amount of equity backing a reverse mortgage is limited to the maximum the Federal Housing Administration can insure, locality by locality. This maximum ranges from $67,500 in most rural areas to $151,725 in the highest-cost housing markets. And the largest lump sum that can actually be borrowed is considerably less than this maximum claim against equity since the debt keeps rising as interest accumulates until the borrower leaves the house. +The interest terms on F.H.A.-insured reverse mortgages are negotiated between the lender and borrower. Only adjustable-rate mortgages linked to United States Treasury rates are currently available, however. This is about the same rate as on a conventional self-liquidating mortgage. +Once in place, an F.H.A.-insured reverse mortgage can be tapped in a host of ways. The simplest, and probably the most popular, is a line of credit like the one created for Mrs. Stuart. Alternatively, a borrower can opt for a monthly payment for a fixed term -- say 10 years. Or the borrower can choose the "tenure" option, which sets a fixed monthly payment as long as the borrower occupies the home. +F.H.A.-insured reverse mortgages are flexible. For a minimal fee, the borrower can change from one option to another. It is even possible to mix and match, combining a line of credit with a regular monthly term or tenure payment. And in no circumstance is repayment due before the departure of the resident. That guarantee applies to couples as well as to individuals. +Perhaps this all sounds too good to be true, And for some potential borrowers it is. One catch is that equity spent is equity spent. +"I tell them you can only go to the well once," says Mrs. Greifer. +AFTER the borrower moves or dies, the accumulated debt -- the lender's cash outlays, plus interest, insurance and any deferred mortgage closing fees -- comes due. Thus someone counting on home equity to cover, say, nursing-home costs of a spouse or to finance the education of a grandchild must choose among priorities. If the owner dies, the estate sells the house and must pay the money owed to the lender before distributing whatever remains to the heirs. +By the same token, it should not be forgotten that lenders are in the reverse-mortgage business to make a profit and the F.H.A.'s insurance program is meant to be self-financing. Thus borrowers must expect to pay a hefty origination fee ("points"), closing costs and the mortgage-insurance premium, along with interest. +Mr. Scholen of the National Center for Home Equity Conversion notes that these costs are generally no greater than those associated with a conventional F.H.A.-insured home mortgage. But many people who borrow against their homes don't need insurance to get a mortgage on good terms. And even at the F.H.A.'s standard rates, the insurance premiums are not trivial: A flat 2 percent of the maximum claim amount is charged when the mortgage is granted, along with another half-percent annually on the loan balance. Neither, of course, is actually collected until the entire loan is due. +A third, not-so-obvious drawback to F.H.A.-insured reverse mortgages is the cap on the maximum claim amount. For those with houses appraised at less than the F.H.A. maximums, this does not matter. But in other, not-so-rare circumstances, the cap can pinch -- especially where the borrower is still relatively young. +Take the hypothetical case of a 65-year-old with a very valuable house, who is nonetheless limited by F.H.A. rules to a maximum claim amount of $151,725. If he (more typically, she) wants to draw a regular sum as long as he stays in the house, the fixed monthly payment, at rates authorized by the F.H.A., will be just $402. A 75-year-old would collect more, receiving $584 a month because he has a shorter life expectancy. But only a relatively old borrower could cash in quickly: an 80-year-old with the same amount of housing equity would receive $723 a month. +THE typically modest payout on federally insured reverse mortgages goes a long way toward explaining the lure of privately insured ones. Robert and Mary Wilson of Ventura, Calif., for example, "had enough to get along" from savings and Social Security. +But in 1991 they opted to borrow against the $225,000 in equity on their house, making it possible for them to receive $927 a month from Providential as long as either of them lived there. The $927 figure was based on Mrs. Wilson's age, 74. If she had been as old as her husband (85) they could have borrowed considerably more. +Thus far, Providential makes loans only in California, where housing prices are exceptionally high and the property tax laws give homeowners enormous incentives to borrow against their equity rather than selling. Moreover, limited access to capital has prevented the company from marketing more aggressively: Through 1992, the company issued just a shade more than 1,000 reverse mortgages, virtually all of which were "tenure" mortgages with lifetime monthly payouts. +Both the availability and flexibility of reverse mortgages are likely to improve, however, and soon, predicts Mr. Scholen. For one thing, mortgage brokers are beginning to think of F.H.A.-insured mortgages as a serious source of profit. Several are offering reverse mortgages in several states, thereby cutting costs and gaining experience in marketing. Among them are Directors Mortgage of Riverside, Calif., ARCS Mortgage of Calabasas, Calif., Amerifirst Mortgage of Hempstead, L.I., and International Mortgage of Owings Mills, Md. +For another, new players are arriving on the scene with competitive privately insured products. Two lenders, Transamerica HomeFirst of San Francisco and Freedom Home Equity Partners of Irvine, Calif., are offering reverse mortgages in several states. And a third, the giant Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) is widely expected to issue its own next year. +Fannie Mae already plays an important, if passive, role in reverse mortgages, buying all the F.H.A.-insured mortgages issued by banks and brokers. But the more active role it is contemplating could prove the breakthrough Mr. Scholen has been waiting for. +WHILE Fannie Mae will not confirm it, there is little doubt that its reverse mortgage would carry a considerably higher insurance cap than the F.H.A. limit. Nor is there much doubt that the giant mortgage broker and investor would be able to match the flexibility of the F.H.A. product, providing lines of credit as well as term and tenure mortgages. +What's more, Fannie Mae has a wide network of banks and other financial agents that are eager to serve as its retailers. And last but not least, Fannie Mae has deep pockets. +"It wouldn't be difficult to fund very large numbers" of reverse mortgages, says Larry Dale, executive director of Fannie Mae's Housing Impact Division. +Oddly, perhaps, the question about reverse mortgages that has gotten the least attention is whether easy access to reverse mortgages is a good thing -- whether reverse mortgages serve broader social interests. +At first look, the answer seems an obvious yes. Society's welfare, after all, is the sum of individuals' interests. And "in a well-planned world," notes Paul Samuelson, the Nobel-prize winning economist, "a lot of people would like to die exactly broke." +But on second look, the answer is more elusive. Americans already save far less than their counterparts in Europe and Asia. If what Mr. Samuelson calls the "inadvertent savings" of the elderly were sharply reduced, the national savings rate would be even lower. +What's good for the elderly may not be good for their grandchildren. + + + +HELPFUL NUMBERS + Following are sources of further information on reverse mortgages: + +NEW YORK +Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, Mortgage Credit Unit (for names of all certified counseling agencies in New York providing reverse-mortgage counseling): (212) 264-0871, + + LONG ISLAND +Family Service Association of Nassau County, (516) 485-5600. +Suffolk County Department of the Aging, Julia Titus, (516) 853-3626. + + CONNECTICUT +Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development: (203) 240-4582. +Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Connecticut, (203) 233-4471. + + NEW JERSEY +Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development: (201) 622-7900, ext. 3417 +David M. Stephens, Community Outreach Coordinator, Urban League of Essex County, N.J., (201) 746-7725. +The Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) supplies an information pamphlet on F.H.A.-insured reverse mortgages and a list of F.H.A.-insured lenders. There is no charge. Call (800) 7-FANNIE. +The American Association of Retired Persons offers an extensive list of reverse-mortgage lenders (including privately insured lenders), along with agencies in many states that provide counseling services to prospective borrowers. Call (202) 434-6030 +The National Center for Home Equity Conversion publishes an easily understood nuts-and-bolts guide to reverse mortgages called "Retirement Income on the House" It costs $24.95. Write National Center for Home Equity Conversion, 7373 147th St. West, Suite 115, Apple Valley, Minn. 55124. + +LOAD-DATE: January 30, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: A Retiree Taps The Value of Her Home -- Bernice Stuart at home in Minneapolis. She has been able to use the equity on her three-bedroom house by taking out a $40,000 reverse mortgage in the form of a $40,000 line of credit. (Steve Woit for The New York Times)(pg. 1); Carol Greifer counsels reverse-mortgage seekers in Nassau County. (William E. Sauro/The New York Times)(pg. 8) + +Chart: "How a Reverse Mortgage Works" lists how a reverse mortgage works. (pg. 1) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +34 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 30, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +Tenant Rift Roils Calm In Gramercy + +BYLINE: By SHAWN G. KENNEDY + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 30; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 724 words + +Gramercy Park, an oasis of privilege and pride on Manhattan's East Side, has been long cherished for its beauty and serenity. + But behind the stately facade of 15 Gramercy Park South the atmosphere is anything but serene: a long dispute between factions at the National Arts Club has landed in court. Seven club members who occupy stunning duplex apartments in the club's studio building are facing eviction. +The club was founded in 1898 by Stanford White, Henry Clay Frick and other distinguished New Yorkers, to support and encourage artists and artistic endeavors. + The residents facing eviction contend in court papers that the move is retaliation for their opposition to the club's position in a rent-stabilization case. In that case, the club sought to exempt the building's 37 apartments from rent-stabilization rules, and the lawsuit says tenants who objected are now being told to leave. Some tenants are also part of a group of members suing in court to have club financial records and the membership list opened. + +Disloyalty Alleged + The club president, O. Aldon James Jr., will not say exactly why these tenants, who do not have leases, are being evicted, and he declined to be interviewed for attribution. But correspondence from him to members indicates that he found the challenge on rent regulation a particularly egregious display of disloyalty. Moreover, the club administration has asserted in court that if the tenants get rent-stabilization protection, a successful rent-overcharge complaint or other claim could ruin the 96-year-old club. + Unlike most landlord-tenant disputes, which usually center on rent matters or conduct, the issue here is not whether the tenants have been responsible. Now the court, in this case New York State Supreme Court, is being asked to decide which aspects of the New York State real property law take precedent in this matter. + Lawyers for the National Arts Club hold that the club, as the landlord, has the right to terminate month-to-month tenancies with 30 days' notice, without giving reason. The plaintiffs' lawyers have argued that another section of property law prohibits landlords from evicting tenants in retaliation for "good faith" complaints to proper authorities concerning their tenancies. + +Formal Tie Sought + "We are only trying to formalize our right to keep our apartments," said William Mayer, a 68-year-old composer who has lived in Studio House, as the residence is known, with his wife, Meredith, for more than 20 years. In a court affidavit, Mr. Mayer says that most of the tenants facing eviction are senior citizens and that one is undergoing chemotherapy. + At stake are coveted quarters indeed. Many club apartments are duplexes with soaring two-story living rooms and bedrooms off second-level mezzanines. Most have at least one fireplace and some have eat-in kitchens. + By Gramercy Park standards, rents on some units are modest. The Mayers, for example, pay $1,385 for a two-bedroom apartment. But one resident threatened with eviction is paying nearly $3,200 a month for a large one-bedroom apartment. + +Battle Began in '83 + The current unpleasantness started in 1983, when a judge hearing a rent dispute with a former tenant ruled that the apartments were protected by rent stabilization rules. These state-mandated rules cover such things as the amount landlords can increase rents, and building maintenance standards. In 1989 the club went back to court to challenge that decision. + "That made us nervous," said Tony Zwicker, an arts book dealer who has lived in the club residence for 30 years. + The court referred the matter to the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal, which ruled in the club's favor in December 1991 on the grounds that it was a charitable and educational institution and that residency in its apartments was open only to club members. + Some tenants decided to sign new nonstabilized leases offered by the club, but others, including the Mayers and Ms. Zwicker, pressed on with their rent status case with the state agency and then in Supreme Court. On Dec. 10, a judge dismissed the cases, and within a week the club served the plaintiffs with eviction notices. On Thursday, lawyers for five of the tenants filed in Supreme Court to have the evictions stopped. + +LOAD-DATE: March 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: March 18, 1994, Friday + + CORRECTION: +An article on Jan. 30 about the National Arts Club and a dispute among tenants at the club's building on Gramercy Park misidentified the club's founder. According to the Na tional Cyclopaedia of American Bi ography, the club was proposed and founded by Charles de Kay, a poet and the literary and art critic for The New York Times, not by Stan ford White and Henry Clay Frick. A descendant of Mr. de Kay telephoned The Times shortly after the article was published, but the correction was delayed because of the writer's four-week absence and because of communication lapses between the writer and editors. + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The studio area of the apartment at the National Arts Club rented by William and Meredith Mayer for more than 20 years. They and other tenants are fighting eviction from their apartments. (Jack Manning/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +35 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 31, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Hillary Clinton Rebuffs Pessimists on Health Plan + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 12; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1048 words + +DATELINE: LAS VEGAS, Nev., Jan. 29 + +Is there enough passion and political skill behind President Clinton's health care plan to get it, or something close to it, passed? In the nation's capital, there are doubts. +But the plan's hard-traveling champion, Hillary Rodham Clinton, argues that the uncertainty is baseless. "It has impassioned constituencies, especially in specific parts of the program," she said, citing the enthusiasm of older Americans for the plan's prescription drug benefits, or organizations concerned with children for the promise of care for the young. + "There is a lot of passion out there, and it's going to be important to get it focused and directed," Mrs. Clinton said in an interview here on Friday after a day of touring an AIDS ward at the University Medical Center and sparring with doctors at a public forum. While acknowledging that some promised political help from business and other groups has not yet been produced, she insisted that in 1994 it would appear. "When we focus on something, it gets done," she said. +When it comes to passing bills, pain staking policy design, which the Clinton plan has in spades, pales in significance compared to the right combination of fervor and skill. The last time Congress was faced with enacting vast social change, it took the bravery of civil rights demonstrators and the brutality of Birmingham to get the lawmakers' attention, plus the persuasive skills of President Lyndon B. Johnson and his aide, Lawrence L. O'Brien Jr., to win passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. + +Are the Clintons Enough? + But ever since Mr. Clinton proposed the health plan with a speech on Sept. 23, it has seemed that his oratory and the salesmanship of Mrs. Clinton are the main engines of change, and allies and potential allies on Capitol Hill worry they are not enough. +One major concern of supporters has been that some outside groups, which the Administration wooed as it drew up the plan, have offered only qualified support, or seemed to want still more favorable treatment. Big business, for example, was given the expensive promise that its medical costs for early retirees would be picked up by the Government, and yet the National Association of Manufacturers remains neutral. +Mrs. Clinton said that was to be expected. But she predicted that now that the plan was actually before Congress, many groups would swing in behind it. "I think you are going to see a lot of strong support, and a lot of effective arguing in favor of the President's plan, from these groups that we have worked with all this year," she said. +On the question of potential compromises with other plans, Mrs. Clinton deferred to Congress. She would not say just how strict was the definition of permanent universal health insurance, without which the President has threatened to veto any bill. She would not say, for example, whether full coverage could be delayed beyond their target date of 1998, or achieved with a slimmer benefits package, or with a lower employer's share of the cost than the 80 percent they urged. +"I think all of the details about how to achieve real, guaranteed private health insurance for every American, with comprehensive benefits that are affordable, is now in the Congressional process, and there may be all kinds of ways to get there," she said. +"But we are going to see how this process unfolds. And we are not ready to claim that any one particular way is better or worse. We want to see what emerges from the committees that are looking at proposals, and see how they come up with achieving the President's bottom line." + +Avoiding Specifics + Mrs. Clinton emphasized her hope that the Administration and Congress could create "a bill that will command support across party lines, that takes health care reform out of partisan bickering." +She avoided particular options. "It is difficult in a vacuum to talk about what might or might not work," she said. "We believe we put together a consistent, coherent financing package." +And other plans must be subjected to the same scrutiny -- from the Congressional Budget Office, the Administration and outside analysts -- that the Clinton plan has faced, she said, "before we even have a clue as to whether any of these other approaches are worth talking about or not." +She said now that health care "is on the front burner for the President and the whole White House," the Administration would be able to concentrate its energies, using people who had worked on other issues last year. But, she complained, "I don't think there has ever been a White House that is stretched as thin on as many important matters facing the country as this one." +Some commitments to senators and representatives, like delivering lists of small-business owners in their states and districts who support requiring employers to pay for insurance, may not have yet been fulfilled, she acknowledged. +But, she said, "when we focus on something, it gets done, and it's going to get done about health care, and all of the political work and the organizational work that we know has to be part of making the President's policy come alive and be presented effectively is going to get done." +Mrs. Clinton conceded that the President's plan was at a disadvantage because its complexity made it "very hard to describe easily." She said the task of selling was much easier both for advocates of the Canadian-style single-payer system, in which all health costs are covered by the Government, and "for defenders of the status quo, who feel passionate about taking care of themselves, and the piece of the health care system that has been their domain." +She cited some supporters of different approaches, like Senator John H. Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, and backers of the single-payer system like Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California, as being members of Congress who are "passionate about health care." +The others she put in that category were Senators John D. Rockefeller 4th of West Virginia, Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representatives John D. Dingell of Michigan and Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, all Democrats and co-sponsors of the Clinton bill. Mr. Stark is also a reluctant co-sponsor, one who has criticized the Clinton plan. + +LOAD-DATE: January 31, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: "There is a lot of passion out there, and it's going to be important to get it focused and directed," Hillary Rodham Clinton said of the Americans she described as enthusiastic about the health proposal. President and Mrs. Clinton held a dinner yesterday for the nation's governors. (Associated Press) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +36 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 3, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Scam Artists Turning Cold Into Profits + +BYLINE: By JOHN T. McQUISTON, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 5; Column 6; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 635 words + +DATELINE: MINEOLA, L.I., Feb. 2 + +With icy Arctic air threatening to make this one of the coldest winters on record, state consumer protection officials warned today that a variety of scam artists were at work, including bogus oil-burner repairmen who prey on the elderly. +In the last few weeks, officials said, several young men posing as oil company repairmen have approached elderly homeowners on Long Island, entered their basements, taken apart their heating-oil burners and demanded cash in advance for unnecessary repairs. + The bogus repairmen have also been helping themselves to pocketbooks, loose cash and other items in the homes of their victims, all of whom are 80 years old or older, said Richard M. Kessel, executive director of the New York State Consumer Protection Board. +"These men are predators, preying on innocent consumers, and they seem to have a special affinity for senior citizens," Mr. Kessel said. + +Call Dealer First, State Says + "If someone at the door says they have come to service your heating system, we recommend that you don't open your door unless you call up your oil dealer and confirm the repairs are legitimate," he said. +Mr. Kessel said the scheme was this winter's worst example of unscrupulous people's taking advantage of customers as a result of the cold weather. He said his office was also checking on complaints about price gouging for rock salt and antifreeze, and excessive charges by plumbers to repair frozen or burst pipes. +In Connecticut, consumer protection officials said they had been flooded this winter by complaints from automobile owners whose car batteries failed and who were then told by mechanics that they needed to replace not only the battery but several other parts. +Despite such complaints, customers are receiving a break in one area. A generous supply of home heating oil has served to keep prices relatively steady, said Kevin Rooney, executive director of the Oil Heat Institute of Long Island. + +Oil Supply Is No Problem + He said this was the case throughout the New York metropolitan area, where the price of fuel delivered by a full-service dealer has remained at $1.14 a gallon. +"Even with the increase in demand, the supply has never been a problem," he said. "And if you look at the entire heating season, we tend to forget the fact that October, November and early December were actually warmer than normal." +And since more people are staying at home keeping warm by the radiator, there are fewer drivers on the road. As a result, the American Automobile Association reports a lower demand for gasoline. This in turn has driven gasoline prices down. +The association says prices for self-serve regular unleaded gasoline averaged $1.06 a gallon nationwide on January 19, compared with $1.10 a gallon a year ago. The auto club says that when inflation is taken into account, gasoline has not been this cheap in 20 years. + +Flowing From Siberia + Winter, however, is far from over, and the colder-than-average weather is expected to continue through February, said Lee Grenci, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University. "And February is traditionally a fairly active month." +"Right now, the pattern still continues to be air flowing from Siberia, across the North Pole and Canada and into the continental United States," Mr. Grenci said. +"We expect to experience another big blast of Arctic air beginning in the middle of next week, and it could rival the last record outbreak," he said. +This morning's lows ranged from 3 degrees Fahrenheit in White Plains to 17 degrees at La Guardia Airport. +Mr. Grenci said that the figures were not yet in for January, but that preliminary indications were that when temperatures and snowfall were combined, "it may rank as one of the coldest, if not the worst January on record." + +LOAD-DATE: February 3, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +37 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 5, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO DIGEST + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 23; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk; Second Front + +LENGTH: 530 words + + +FETAL TESTS: WHEN ANY RISK IS TOO GREAT +A rapidly growing number of younger women, health-care professionals say, are ignoring conventional medical standards and having tests to detect chromosomal disorders in fetuses. Below age 35, the risk of miscarriage from the test is greater than the risk of genetic defects. But those who call earlier tests a waste of health-care dollars, the women point out, don't have to rear a severely disabled child. Page 1. + +NEW YORK CITY + +AIMING SCHOOL CUTS AT ADMINISTRATORS +How many administrators does it take to run the New York City public school system? Although it might seem the beginning of a bad joke, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani raised the questions in his plan to eliminate the job of every other manager at the Board of Education's headquarters at 110 Livingston Street -- as much a symbol of bureaucratic resilience as the Pentagon. News analysis, Page 25. + +RULING IS BLOW TO PREFERENCE PROGRAMS +By invalidating a New York City program that gives preferential treatment to women and members of minority groups who bid on municipal contracts, a State Supreme Court judge may have undermined incentive programs for other businesses in the city, regardless of the race or sex of their owners. Page 25. + +BIKERS CAN KEEP THEIR HOG HEAVEN +The Hell's Angels may keep their Lower East Side home, a jury ruled. They voted that America's best-known bunch of Harley-riding, tattooed nonconformists had successfully proved that the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club's East Coast Valhalla was not used for drug deals. Page 24. + +SHARPTON TO CHALLENGE MOYNIHAN +The Rev. Al Sharpton, who had been considering a campaign either for Governor or for the United States Senate, said he had decided to challenge Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Democratic primary. Page 26. + +For the second time since he named Ninfa Segarra as a Deputy Mayor, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has redefined her duties. Page 25. +An employee of Gay Men's Health Crisis has sued the group, saying it discriminates. Page 24. + A Bronx man has been charged with robbing 14 people, including five elderly women. Page 27. + +A jewelry store robbery in Brooklyn turned into a car chase and one robber dead. Page 24. + +REGION + +STUDENT DEFENDS A SPEAKER +The head of the Trenton State College committee that has invited Khalid Abdul Muhammad to speak has received four death threats, but he is standing firm about welcoming Mr. Muhammad, the Nation of Islam spokesman who was demoted after making anti-white and anti-Semitic remarks in a speech. Page 26. + +L.I.R.R. WORKERS THREATEN STRIKE +Long Island Rail Road workers who have gone without a raise since 1990 said they would strike on Feb. 17 unless they got a new contract, but the railroad said a Federal cooling-off period would block any job action until June. Page 26. + +LINDBERGH BOOKKEEPER ACCUSED OF THEFT +The former bookkeeper for Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the author and widow of Charles A. Lindbergh, has been charged with embezzling an estimated $136,000 from Mrs. Lindbergh's checking account, said the police in Darien, Conn., where Mrs. Lindbergh lives. Page 27. + +LOAD-DATE: February 5, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +38 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 5, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Bronx Man Is Charged in Robbing of 14, Including Many Elderly + +BYLINE: By NORIMITSU ONISHI + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 27; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 407 words + +The 92-year-old woman, less than five feet tall, showed a visitor to her Bronx apartment the bruises on her arms, still plainly visible two weeks after the attack. "My whole face was like this," she said. "He hit me on my face when I yelled for help. No one came." +On Thursday, the police arrested a man and charged him with 14 robberies in the Bronx since Dec. 3, crimes in which the victims were pushed into their apartments or cornered in elevators. The police said that five of the people preyed on by the suspect, Nathaniel Wilson, 25, of 2350 Ryer Avenue, were women over the age of 75. + In most cases, they said, he made off with paltry amounts of cash -- usually no more than $65 -- but one elderly woman was robbed of $3,000. +The 92-year-old woman, who the police said was the oldest victim, said just $10 was taken from her. "I was so shaken I couldn't add two plus two," said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous. "I can't sleep. I have nightmares." +She said the man who attacked her hid in a stairwell until she had opened the door to her apartment in the Parkchester complex, where she has lived for 53 years. "He pushed me into the apartment and shoved me on the floor," she said. "He took the keys from my bag and locked the door. He dragged me by my neck to the third bedroom so no one could hear me. He kept hitting me." +After taking the money from her purse, he fled, she said. +Mr. Wilson is also charged with pushing a 75-year-old woman into her Leland Avenue apartment, punching her or throwing her to the floor, breaking some of her teeth, ransacking her home and stealing $90. In another incident, the police said, he followed an 82-year-old woman returning from a supermarket, pushed her into her Metropolitan Oval apartment and hurled her to the floor, breaking her shoulder. +The police said some of the victims, seven of them woman and seven men, were held up at gunpoint. +Mr. Wilson was arrested on Thursday afternoon as he tried to leave the scene of the latest crime, the robbery of a 79-year-old woman in her apartment on Unionport Road, the police said. "The guy was jumping out the window," Sgt. Edward Monks said. "That's when he was grabbed." +Mr. Wilson served half of a three-year sentence for a 1989 conviction for possessing stolen property, said David Ernst, a spokesman for the State Division of Parole. He was paroled in April 1991, and completed his parole in August 1992, he said. + +LOAD-DATE: February 5, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +39 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 6, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +At Work; +Old Age Is No Place for Sissies + +BYLINE: By Barbara Presley Noble + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 29; Column 3; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1036 words + +NOMINALLY, there was good news from a report on pension coverage released late last year. The Employee Benefit Research Institute in Washington reported that the decline in coverage, which appeared in the mid- to late-1980's to be occurring at roughly the speed of light, especially for participants in traditional defined-benefit plans, had flattened. The increasing number of women in the labor force covered by pensions -- up 3 percentage points, to 66.7 percent in 1991 from 63.7 in 1987 -- helped stop the decline. Coverage of men continued to drop slightly, to 68.5 percent in 1991 from 69.8 percent in 1987. +In fact, the rise in women's coverage continues a trend that began in the 1980's, even while men's coverage was dropping dramatically as "good jobs," with hefty wages and benefits, vaporized in the contracting manufacturing sector. "I would hypothesize that has to do with the continuing integration of females into the mainstream work force," said Paul Yakoboski, the report's author. "More are entering as college graduates at higher levels that tend to be covered. They used to be at the lower-skill level, where you don't find much coverage, male or female." + But while the trend bodes well for the future of well-educated female workers now in their early 30's and younger, who are benefiting from the expanded occupational opportunities of the last two decades, the great mass of women are still only a man or a misstep away from penury in retirement. That group includes people who have little in common except their gender: younger working women without college degrees or high school diplomas; middle-aged women who worked outside the home intermittently to balance their responsibilities to children and, perhaps, to elderly parents, and older women who may never have worked outside the home. What they do share is a gender-based tendency to longevity -- and to outlive their retirement income. +Financial planners talk about the three-legged stool of retirement income: Social Security, investments and savings and pensions. A few sobering facts derived from several sources, including the Labor Department, the Pension Rights Center in Washington and analyses of current population survey data by the Older Women's League, a Washington-based advocacy organization, reveal that for women, the stool has very short and uneven legs: +* Three-quarters of the elderly poor are female, though they represent just half the 65-and-over population. +* The median income -- Social Security, pensions, investments but not assets -- for men 65 and over was $14,183 in 1990. For women in the same age group, it was $8,044. +* The median real benefits of first-time male recipients of pensions rose 6 percent between 1978 and 1989. For women, it dropped 17 percent, thus dragging their median benefits down to 37 percent of men's in 1989, from 47 percent in 1978. +* Nearly half of the 65-plus group of women First in a series of articles on women and pensions. were widows in 1990. The median income for white women in that group was $9,366, $5,938 for black women. Three-quarters of all adults 45 and over living alone in 1989 were female. +* The one of five women aged 65 and over who had pension income in 1990 received an average of $4,915. +NONE of these numbers should inspire confidence in many women over 45, or, for that matter, lower-wage workers in general. "There may not be retirement, people will have so little in savings, so little in employer contributions and so little in Social Security," said Cindy Hounsell, a lawyer at the Pension Rights Center. "You will need to continue working, if you're lucky enough not to be disabled." +And, though more women are entitled to pension coverage by virtue of their employment, there is still a wide gap between men and women in participation and vesting rates, the measures of who takes advantage of pension opportunities and who is on the job long enough to realize the income. Despite their gains in opportunities, women have been and are still more likely than men to work in low-paying, sex-segregated jobs without pension coverage. "It gets down to whether you have access, and whether you can afford it," said Lou Glasse, president of the Older Women's League. +Ms. Glasse pointed out that the growth in popularity of "defined contribution," or 401(k)-type coverage, requiring employee contributions, has generally not worked to the advantage of low- and middle-income employees. "Lower-wage workers are less likely to be able to participate," she said. "Lower-wage workers tend to be women." +Moreover, to double the whammy, a survey released last week offers evidence for the perception that women tend to be more conservative -- or less confident -- in planning for retirement. Research by Yankelovich Partners for Fidelity Investments indicates that women are much more worried about their ability to save for retirement, are in fact less likely to have substantial retirement assets and are more likely to expect to work in "retirement." They also are less likely to express satisfaction with their knowledge of retirement planning, though, given the facts for women, they may just be in an appropriate state of denial. + + + +AN UNEQUAL SHIFT OF THE BURDEN +THE increasing inclination of employers to shift the burden of retirement planning and saving from themselves to their employees will almost certainly have a disproportionate effect on women. The growth of 401(k) plans, for example, mainly benefits higher-paid employees. In 1991, only 11 percent of workers earning less than $21,000, a category dominated by women, were offered the opportunity to join plans, according to information provided by the Older Women's League. +The employer's idea may be to allow individuals more control over their retirement benefits and the degree of risk they assume. But women consistently rate themselves lower than men in investment knowledge and savvy. Whether that's true or simply a problem of self-image, the practical consequences may well be that women invest more conservatively than they need to. Come age 65, they will have an average of 19 hyper thrifty retirement years to ponder what might have been. + +LOAD-DATE: February 6, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graphs: "The Gap Goes On" shows number of worker who participate in pension plans from 1984 to 1991, percentage of women's income compared with men's, by age and full time occupations for women workers. (Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Older Women's League; Employee Benefit Research Group) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +40 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 6, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +CLINTON PROPOSING $30 BILLION SHIFT IN FEDERAL BUDGET + +BYLINE: By GWEN IFILL, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1532 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 + +Hamstrung by overall spending limits set by law, President Clinton will send to Congress on Monday a 1995 budget that will propose cutting more than $30 billion from Government programs to pay for increases for crime prevention, homelessness and other priorities, according to Government documents and Administration officials. +Mr. Clinton will propose ending some programs and squeezing others, like heating aid for the poor and public housing for the elderly. At the same time, more money will be sought for programs like job training, education for poor children under Head Start and highway construction. +In recent days, the Administration has released portions of the budget that emphasize the cuts Mr. Clinton is willing to make rather than the new spending he will endorse. The message is directed to Republicans as well as conservative Democrats in Congress who have sought to pass a balanced budget amendment and paint Mr. Clinton as an inveterate tax-raiser. +Mr. Clinton stressed the theme of retrenchment today during his weekly radio address, asserting that his plan would "maintain budget discipline" in cutting spending on more than 300 programs and reducing the Federal work force by more than 100,000. +"We had to cut spending on yesterday's outmoded programs so we can bring down the deficit and still invest more in tomorrow's most urgent priorities," Mr. Clinton said. +Many of Mr. Clinton's cuts, however, are the same ones that President George Bush went after every year, and there is little reason to think lawmakers will be more inclined to pass them now. [Page 34.] +Even so, the Administration's tactic is to send a signal to the financial markets as well as to critics of the President's expensive health care proposal that the White House is willing to make hard decisions that demonstrate fiscal responsibility. +The proposed cuts in the budget are likely to draw protests from some of the Administration's most loyal constituencies, including advocates for the poor and the elderly. But the budget would also cut deeply into the ranks at the Pentagon and slow the growth of spending in the space program. +While most departments would be forced to spend less money over all than they did during the current budget year, several, including Justice, Labor, Commerce, Health and Human Services and Education, would realize a net gain if Congress adopts Mr. Clinton's proposals. +At the Pentagon, the Administration wants to stretch out its procurement for several weapons systems, including the Air Force's B-2 bomber, reflecting a continuing desire to reduce the size of the military and long-term commitments to expensive hardware. +"They're squeezing the nickel where it won't have a major effect on force levels," said Eugene Carroll, a retired admiral who is the director of the Center for Defense Information, a private group. The new budget would also reduce civilian and military personnel at the Pentagon to save more than $4 billion. + +100 Programs Are to End + Elsewhere, the Administration is recommending that more than $700 million be cut from a heating aid program for the poor and $1 billion from a program to build public housing for the elderly. More than 100 small programs would be eliminated entirely, at a savings of about $3.2 billion. +Administration officials and Cabinet officers have chafed at the strict spending limits imposed by Congress in the deficit-reduction agreement with President Bush in 1990 and reinforced by the budget law President Clinton signed last summer. Instead of assembling a budget that would have increased by $16 billion just to keep pace with inflation, Mr. Clinton has been forced to come up with a spending plan that cuts $8 billion in 1995 in real dollars, without taking inflation into account. +More than half of Federal spending is devoted to mandatory programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, the health programs for the poor and elderly, and pensions for retired Government employees. The President has control over only the discretionary portion of the budget, and it is from this section that most of the proposed cuts would come. +Spending in almost every other area of Government, excluding the payment of interest on the national debt, is limited by law to $542 billion for 1995. Over the next five years, Government spending would have to be reduced by $221 billion overall to stay within the limits imposed by law. + +Money for Manhattan + But specific areas of the budget that reflect Mr. Clinton's priorities would see net spending increases. And although the budget calls for reductions in the politically difficult area of mass transit subsidies, the interests of Congress have not been entirely ignored. +The Clinton budget, for example, calls for $100 million in new financing for the renovation of the General Post Office at 33d Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan as a new Amtrak railroad hub: a project favored by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York. +That project would include a retail shopping complex like Washington's Union Station. After lobbying by Mr. Moynihan, who as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee will influence the fate of the President's health plan, Mr. Clinton said in October that he would support such an idea. About $10 million would by appropriated for the current budget year, officials said. +The total cost for the project is pegged at about $315 million. The state and city are expected to provide the rest of the money by using Federal transportation and community development grants. + +Broader Approaches + Other increases address broader needs. At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which will suffer a net loss in overall financing, spending for programs for the homeless would increase by $427 million, and the housing voucher program would increase by 25 percent. +At the Department of Labor, the Job Training Partnership Act would be reduced by $26 million, but much of the savings would be diverted to other training programs. Mr. Clinton said today that he hoped to replace a patchwork of job training programs with a more efficient system. +Those programs, he said, "have been trapped in a time warp, frozen in by-gone days when most laid-off workers could expect to be called back to their old jobs." +Administration officials said education programs like Head Start, the School-to-Work Initiative and the Chapter 1 program for schools with disadvantaged students would receive increases, as would technology programs administered by the Commerce department. +The following are among the cuts Mr. Clinton will propose: +*Agriculture: $242 million would be cut from watershed and flood-prevention operations, money that would be consolidated instead under programs operated by the Army Corps of Engineers. +*Army Corps of Engineers: No new projects would be started in 1995, delaying about $345 million in previously approved undertakings generally favored by members of Congress who lobby for discretionary spending for their home districts. +*Defense: The Pentagon would continue its shift away from increasing force levels and modernization programs and toward readiness, research and development. The operations and maintenance budget would actually increase by 2 percent, officials said. But very few new vehicles, missile projects or aircraft would be included. "No matter where you look, we are buying less," an official said. +*Health and Human Services: Although this department would realize an overall net increase of $1 billion, more than $1 billion in programs would be cut, including $247 million in health services and installations on Indian reservations. +*Housing and Urban Development: Administration officials would continue a trend begun under President Bush that replaces new construction with an emphasis on housing vouchers and incentives for private development. About $8 billion in previously authorized housing construction money would remain in the pipeline. +*NASA: Financing for the Space Shuttle would be scaled back to reflect the Administration's plan to emphasize maintenance of the existing fleet over new expansion. This would result in a $281 million cut. Another $203 million would be saved by shifting Federal involvement in aeronautics research to the private sector. +*Transportation: About $432 million would be cut, resulting in a 25 percent reduction in operation subsidies for mass transit programs in cities with populations of more than 50,000. Capital grants for construction of such systems, however, would increase by 40 percent, Administration officials said. +Fiscal reality has placed Mr. Clinton in an unusual and awkward position as he prepares to sell a budget that continues to emphasize deficit reduction and Government streamlining over ambitious new spending. Many past Presidents, Republicans and Democrats, have used budget pronouncements to brag of the contribution they will make to expanded Government programs. +Instead, Mr. Clinton is trying to focus on deprivation and discipline. Administration officials were reluctant to release any information on the amount of the budget they would divert to new + +LOAD-DATE: February 6, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: At the Government Printing Office in Washington, Freddie Tate stacked newly printed copies of President Clinton's 1995 budget proposal. (Associated Press) (pg. 34) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +41 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 6, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +A DIRECTORY OF CRUISES WORLDWIDE; +Checking Into a Floating Hotel + +BYLINE: By ELSA BRENNER; ELSA BRENNER often contributes to the Westchester Weekly of The Times. + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 12; Column 1; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 1531 words + +LEAVING behind an already harsh winter and the usual everyday obligations, 18 members of our extended family converged on Miami early one Saturday morning in December. We had come together for six days for a family reunion on the Sovereign of the Seas, Royal Caribbean Cruise Line's third-largest luxury ship, as we celebrated an 80th birthday, a 30th wedding anniversary and other markers in our lives. +I raced through the crowded airport toward a friendly-looking envoy from Royal Caribbean, who held aloft a sign welcoming passengers bound for the Port of Miami. One of the two octogenarians in our party followed closely behind, pushed along in a wheelchair by an airport aide, while my 23-year-old son, Gabriel, grumbled next to me under the weight of an extra carry-on suitcase that I packed in a last-minute fluster. + Then, weaving through the side streets of Miami, past the Orange Bowl and the Hard Rock Cafe, we made our way by bus through rows of palm trees to the port and the 880-foot-long Sovereign. The ship was filled to capacity for our cruise -- it was the week before Christmas -- which began late that afternoon with 2,506 passengers. +When christened in 1988, Sovereign of the Seas was the biggest ship of its kind. Since then, Royal Caribbean has built two larger boats, Monarch of the Seas and Majesty of the Seas, and three more are in shipyards under construction. +Floating hotels like these are not cozy or especially romantic, although there were several honeymoon couples among the passengers and one pair got married on board. Skeptical at first because of the ship's size and apparent lack of charm, I was soon won over by the many features it had to offer a diverse group like ours. +Along the hallway where our cabins were situated, the cousins, brothers, sisters and grandmothers in our party finally met up with each other before dinner. We had arrived at different times from our homes along the East Coast throughout the late morning and afternoon. +Over the next six days, we often separated into smaller groups, depending on the activities we wanted to pursue, and each evening at dinner was filled with animated tales of our adventures. For 5-year-old Alexander, my nephew, it was the play he was starring in at the ship's day camp. And for one 81-year-old grandmother, it was a daily update of her winnings at the casino the night before. For me it was the discovery of quiet nooks and crannies: a place to read in the sun away from the insistent beat of music by the pool, and a jogging track with a splendid vista on the seventh deck. +The best guide to getting around the ship was the daily Cruise Compass, a publication delivered to passengers' cabins each night that listed the next day's onboard activities. +For fitness-minded passengers, the day began at 8 A.M. with a stretch class on the eighth deck. There was also a "gut busters" calisthenics session at 8:30 A.M., and, at 9:45 A.M., a group walkathon. The ship has a gym equipped with weights and exercise equipment, although I found it disappointing. For those used to working out in health clubs, this gym lacked some important pieces of equipment, such as a treadmill or Nordic Track, and one piece had an "out of order" sign on it. After that first afternoon, during which I was also waitlisted for an overcrowded aerobics class, I opted for brisk walks each afternoon around the Promenade Deck, where the jogging track is to be found. +The crowds were a problem I was to experience throughout the cruise, although I also learned some strategies for coping. There were long waits for elevators, so I climbed stairs (admittedly not an option for everyone). The lines at the purser's desk were often daunting, so I went during off-hours. And deck chairs by the pool were sometimes in short supply, but on the uppermost deck I found a haven. +One special place that was also rarely crowded was the genteel wood-paneled library on the seventh deck. Here were comfy, gray leather sofas, softly carpeted floors, richly decorated book cabinets and 1,800 volumes to please a variety of tastes -- current fiction, travel writing, children's books and large-print offerings among them. There were also desks at which to catch up on one's correspondence, and soft chairs by a large widow. One elderly couple spent their afternoons by that sunny window reading to each other. The library also had a large collection of audio books. Another quiet place for an amiable chat or a snack was the glassed-in sun room that wraps around the Windjammer Cafe, where breakfast was served from 8:30 to 10:15, and a buffet luncheon was served from noon to 2. +BUT my penchant for getting away from the crowd was clearly not universally shared; many passengers were there for the express purpose of joining in such events as line dance classes, passenger talent shows, belly flop contests, singles get-togethers and teen events. There were also bridge and blackjack tournaments, a calypso band by the pool and bingo. At night there were several clubs to visit, among them Finian's Rainbow, Follies and, for teen-agers and those in their early 20's, the Anything Goes Lounge. There was also a piano bar where people gaered for singalongs. +Two stage shows featured big names: one night there was Jerry Lewis and another the Fifth Dimension singing group. There was also a twin theater that showed movies such as "Dave," "Indecent Proposal" and "The Fugitive" in the afternoons and evenings. Auctions of contemporary art were well attended, as was a series of talks on shopping in the ship's ports of call. There was also shopping on board, with eight duty-free stores where clothing, jewelry, cosmetics and liquor were on sale at prices similar to those on shore. +One of the highlights of the cruise was the quality of the food; there were two seatings for each meal in two dining rooms. The dining room staff was courteous, the wine steward helpful. The wine list for Caribbean night in the dining room included a California Inglenook Zinfandel for $15, and a Deinhard Chardonnay Brut from Germany for $14. +Breakfast options included broiled Scottish kippers with lemon butter and steamed potato, and an omelet made with fresh herbs. The morning menu also included three types of pancakes -- banana, buttermilk and blueberry -- and bacon, ham, sausages, hash browns and grits. The six-course dinners followed a theme; on Caribbean night, for example, many dishes were flavored with curry and coriander. Each night's menu also offered low-fat, low-cholesterol choices, which were delicious. Passengers with special dietary needs can also be accommodated. +The ship's decor was reminiscent of a Hyatt Hotel, not surprising I suppose when you learn that the Pritzker family of Chicago, which owns the Hyatt hotel chain, also holds a major share of Royal Caribbean's publicly owned stock. In the plush lobby, called the centrum, a futuristic-looking glass-paneled elevator shaft was set between two curving brass-trimmed staircases. +The standard cabins, 122 square feet, were quietly decorated and comfortable with televisions and sufficient drawer and closet space for two. The cabins with portholes were especially nice, and throwing open the curtains on the first morning out to the view of the sea was a pleasure. +The bathroom was small but efficient, with a large mirror and countertop and several shelves for storage. Water pressure in the shower was good (there was no bathtub in the standard cabins). +Ports of call on this trip included Georgetown in Grand Cayman, Montego Bay in Jamaica and Nassau in the Bahamas. In Georgetown we took off on our own, trusting to our cab driver to show us where to find the best beaches. On Seven-Mile Beach three of us swam out to a coral reef. +In contrast, Montego Bay was disappointing. We arranged a tour with a taxi driver, who showed us a hot and dirty city and took us on broken-down roads through the countryside. After several hours we returned to the ship, and I watched from the deck as a small band played in the port. +Montego Bay is not a regular port of call for Royal Caribbean, and those considering any future cruise might be wise to check with their travel agent ahead of time to find out whether it is to be included. The cruise line usually stops in Labadee, on the north coast of Haiti, where it has exclusive docking privileges. But the United Nations oil embargo on Haiti precluded our visit there, and the alternative port, Ocho Rios in Jamaica, was already booked by other ships, according to a Royal Caribbean spokesman. Nassau was our final port, and the best shopping stop of the three. +On Christmas Eve we disembarked in Miami with memories of a vacation that would be relived, through photo albums, with generations to come. There would be snapshots of me ensconced with a book in a deck chair; my brother presiding over dinner celebrations; the youngest nephews executing silly jumps into the pools. The Sovereign of the Seas had been a gracious hostess to each of us. +A listing of Sovereign of the Seas trips appears on page 18; information about where to call or write appears on page 36. + +LOAD-DATE: February 6, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: The sun deck and pool deck aboard Sovereign of the Seas. (Len Kaufman for The New York Times)(pg. 12); The author's cabin, No. 5568, on the fifth deck. (Len Kaufman for The New York Times)(pg. 40) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +42 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 7, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Foes of Balanced Federal Budget Focus on Effect on Social Security + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 12; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 552 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 + +Hitting one of the capital's most sensitive political nerves first, opponents of the proposed constitutional amendment to require a balanced Federal budget have asserted that it would lead to cuts of $1,000 a person in Social Security benefits. +The amendment's defenders disagreed, pointing out that lawmakers treat Social Security very gingerly. And Senator Paul Simon, the Illinois Democrat who is the measure's chief sponsor, said that Social Security recipients would be helped by the amendment because it would strengthen the economy and reduce the deficit. + The Senate is expected to begin debating the proposed amendment late this month. As now written, the amendment would require the Federal budget to be balanced by 1999, but Mr. Simon said he would substitute a version delaying the deadline to 2001 to make the transition easier. The amendment does not tell Congress and the President how to cut Federal spending; it only says that they must. + +Close Vote Predicted + Families U.S.A. and other groups supportive of the elderly asserted last week that if the budget was balanced with no tax increases and proportional cuts among all varieties of Federal spending, that would lead to a $1,081 cut in individual Social Security benefits in 1999, and about $100 more in 2001. +When reporters challenged those assumptions, observing that in most deficit reduction packages, taxes have played a part, Ron Pollack, head of Families U.S.A., said that except for Mr. Simon, most of the amendment's backers say they want spending cuts, not tax cuts. +Senator Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who heads the Appropriations Committee and who is the amendment's most dedicated enemy in Congress, said the study showed "exactly the kind of real pain this amendment can cause if it were to become part of the Constitution." +Mr. Byrd predicted a close vote, but said he had faith that the Senate would not give the measure the two-thirds majority, or 67 votes, that a constitutional amendment requires. + +'Momentum Is Building' + When Mr. Byrd's news conference on the fifth floor of a Senate office building was over, Mr. Simon and Senator Larry E. Craig, Republican of Idaho, held one on the building's second floor. +Mr. Simon said balancing the budget would solidify the United States currency. "The Social Security retirement fund is secured by U.S. Government bonds," he said, "and if those bonds drop dramatically in value, then all Social Security recipients will be devastated." +Critics' assumptions "do not recognize reality," Mr. Simon said, adding that Social Security was "the last thing that gets tackled around here." +Mr. Craig said he did not think that across-the-board, equal cuts would be imposed. "Without doubt, there will be priorities," he said. +Mr. Simon said Senate passage of the amendment would be difficult because Mr. Byrd was "using the clout that he has as chairman" of the Appropriations Committee to get votes for his side. He added that he did not mean to imply that Mr. Byrd was threatening to eliminate spending for senators' pet projects if they opposed him. +"Momentum is building" for the amendment, Mr. Simon said. He said he did not doubt that proponents would have the 60 votes they needed to cut off debate on the measure and bring it to a vote. + +LOAD-DATE: February 7, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +43 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 7, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Elderly Angered by Changes For Courses at New School + +BYLINE: By MARIA NEWMAN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1281 words + +Some of them make their way to class with the aid of walkers or wheelchairs. Others who are in their 90's have trouble completing reading assignments in less than two weeks. But the 550 members of the Institute of Retired Professionals are for the most part enthusiastic students of a daunting variety of academic subjects at the New School, and now they are angry. +What has them upset is a proposal by New School administrators to change an adult learning program that has been jointly sponsored by the institute and the New School for more than 30 years. + New School administrators want to limit to three or four the number of courses institute members can take -- some now take 10 or 12 -- and require the classes to be held once a week, not every other week. Institute members say the changes are a plot to get rid of them to make way for younger students, and some are so upset that there is talk of taking their program elsewhere. +"They are actually trying to get rid of the frail elderly," said Gina Liebow, 81, who attends courses at the New School. "We fill up the lunch room. Let's face it, we aren't as pretty as the young people." +But New School administrators say the changes have nothing to do with age. +"We're not looking at ways to get out of the business of serving older students at the New School," said Elizabeth Dickey, dean of the New School's Adult Division. "People having walkers or wheelchairs, no, that's not a problem." + +Diversity Called an Issue + Instead, she said that the program had become unwieldy and that it was not up to the academic standards of a university. +In addition, she said, the institute's members do not reflect the diversity of New York. Currently the institute's bylaws allow it to choose its own members, and most of them are white. Ms. Dickey and other officials say that the bylaws should not apply to the New School. +At the heart of the dispute is the changing image of a college that was founded 75 years ago as a forum for alternative adult education and now wants to move closer to being a traditional degree-granting university. +Most students at the New School, described as a "hotbed for nonconformist intellectuals" in one college guide, are not there to earn degrees. But the school has been trying, since its undergraduate school was founded in 1976, to increase the enrollment of degree students. +Ms. Dickey said 12,000 students, with an average age of mid- to late 30's, attended courses, mostly part time, each term. There are 200 students in graduate programs. + +Program Widely Copied + The Institute of Retired Professionals was founded in 1962 by Hyman Hirsch, an economics and history teacher, to provide retired executives and other professionals an opportunity to learn along with their peers. +The program was allowed to exist almost autonomously at the New School. The members -- they do not like to be referred to as students -- make up their course list every year, and then they lead the classes, calling themselves presenters or coordinators. +So successful has the retired professionals' program been that it was copied by about 130 other schools around the country as a way of teaching older students. +Ms. Dickey, who has been at the New School for two and a half years, said her mission was to review all programs of the adult division. When she came to the retirees' program, she saw the need for many changes. +"One of the things we've talked to them about is that this is a university," she said. "We're not a social-service center." +Emotions on both sides are so high that school officials have delayed the changes until the start of the fall semester. In the meantime, they are conducting a series of meetings between institute members and administrators, although Ms. Dickey said the changes would take place regardless. +The president of the retired professionals group, Sidney Rosenberg, said he did not want to complain publicly about the New School, since he was taking part in the meetings with the administrators. +But in the school cafeteria on the fourth floor of the West 12th Street campus, where one day recently older people outnumbered younger students, talk of the proposed changes buzzed from table to table. "I want to be with my community," said Anne Glenn, who directed an occupational therapy program before she retired. "I feel alive here, vibrant, and I'm going to cry because it's sad what they're doing to us. People need people. We would die if we were isolated in our own homes." +At the New School, institute members pay a discounted tuition of $485 a semester and can enroll in one traditional New School course and attend any number of the institute's "peer learning" courses. +The sessions are held during the day at the campus on West 12th Street, in rooms that would otherwise be unused since most New School classes are at night. +The retirees receive no academic credit. Most of them say they attend for the sheer love of learning. They also see no reason to change the class schedule. +"I don't want to coordinate a class every week," said Sandy Gordon, a retiree who teaches an art appreciation course. "We're retired. We do not get paid for this. We do it out of love." +The courses this semester include the African-American novel, current events and "habits of the heart," a philosophy class. +At a session last week of a class on the short story, every head of hair was gray, and bifocals and sensible shoes were de rigueur. Once the discussion on James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" got under way, the comments were reminiscent of university-level literature courses. + +Lively Class Exchange + "He reveals uncomfortable truths to a complacent society," Bob Hartman, who led the class discussion, said of Baldwin. "He is definitely a disturber of the peace." +One student said of the story: "I thought it wasn't up to James Baldwin's standards, as the brilliant writer and brilliant observer of his world. The passionate fighter, the passionate observer of relationships between blacks and whites -- none of that is in this story." +And on they went, one by one, with at least half of the 16 students waving their arms for the chance to voice their observations about the work of Baldwin and James Alan McPherson, the other writer assigned for that day, for an hour and 15 minutes. +Institute members say their courses are academically defensible. Most institute members have college degrees, and about a fifth have Ph.D.'s. And they say the hours they spend preparing papers or presentations for class discussions would daunt many younger college students. +Students sign in when they attend a class, but the arrangement is so loose that many drop in on discussions that seem interesting. +Ms. Dickey said the most controversial change had been to limit the number of courses each retiree may take. She said she has heard of some students taking 12 a semester. +"From their point of view, they say they can take all the classes they want because they're not studying for degrees, for credit," she said. "I have to say, look, this is a university." +In a letter to one institute member, New School president Jonathan F. Fanton wrote, "If the I.R.P. really wants to be autonomous and, as you put it, 'serves important social purposes' as its principal mission, then I wonder if it would not be better off run as a wholly independent organization at some other location." +His letter was written in response to one he received from Jane (Jinx) Herselle, who is 91 and has been a member of the institute for 26 years. +"We are glad to be connected with the New School," she said. 'This is our home and we don't want to move." + +LOAD-DATE: February 7, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: "They are actually trying to get rid of the frail elderly," Gina Liebow, 81, said of a proposal by New School administrators to increase the frequency of classes and limit the maximum course load by the Institute of Retired Professionals. (Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +44 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 9, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Men Are Told to Reconsider How to Treat Enlarged Prostate Glands + +BYLINE: By WARREN E. LEARY, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 19; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 810 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 + +Men with enlarged prostate glands should consider many treatments other than surgery to relieve their symptoms, including, in some cases, no treatment at all, Federal health officials said today. +New Federal guidelines for treating benign enlarged prostates say that men with mild-to-moderate symptoms may want to consider periods of doctor-monitored observation, or "watchful waiting," instead of choosing drug or surgical therapy right away. + Dr. Philip R. Lee, Assistant Secretary for Health in the Health and Human Services Department, said the guidelines conclude that the ultimate decision on treatment should be left up to the patient for enlarged prostates, which are not life-threatening. Depending upon symptoms, he said, observation may be sufficient and even preferable to more aggressive treatment. + +Unnecessary Tests? + Dr. John D. McConnell of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, chairman of a 13-member nongovernment panel that drafted the guidelines, said that the large regional variations in how enlarged prostate glands were treated indicated that doctors and patients needed therapy recommendations. +Studies and the experience of experts indicate that some doctors may be recommending drug therapy or surgery to reduce prostate size without adequately considering the patients' symptoms and how much the condition is interfering with their quality of life, Dr. McConnell said. In addition, he said, some tests routinely given to men who report prostate problems may be unnecessary. +Doctors should not use kidney X-rays, ultrasound imaging or cystoscopy, in which an endoscope to see in the urinary tract, unless they suspect an unusual problem, the guidelines said. Experts said these commonly used tests often do not add much to determining the best treatment and cost millions of dollars a year. +The Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, a unit of the Public Health Service, assembled the panel of doctors, researchers, nurses and other experts that drafted the guidelines. +The prostate is a walnut-sized gland in the pelvis that for unknown reasons enlarges in many men over age 50. This condition, called benign prostatic hyperplasia, is not related to prostate cancer, a leading killer of older men. +Enlarged prostate glands affect an estimated 10 million Americans, Federal health experts say, and are found in varying degrees in 50 percent of men over age 60. Those who have a family history of the condition and black Americans are at higher risk. + +Appropriate Surgery + The prostate surrounds the urethra, the tube that carries urine from the bladder. When the gland enlarges, it can block urine flow or cause a weak stream, and result in frequent urination or feelings of incomplete voiding. +The guidelines said surgery was the best treatment for patients with severe symptoms, like urinary blockage, but carried a small risk of complications, like latent leakage and sexual dysfunction. The most common surgery, called transurethral resection, involves inserting an instrument into the urethra and using an electrical loop to cut out pieces of the enlarged prostate gland. +A similar, but less severe surgery, called transurethral incision, offers fewer risks, but is underused, the guidelines said. This procedure, most useful with moderately enlarged prostates, involves making one or two small incisions into the gland, allowing it to pull away from the urethra. +The American Urological Association, the medical specialty group that worked with the Federal agency to develop the guidelines, and the National Medical Association, which represents many of the nation's black doctors, were among several groups that endorsed the recommendations. But both groups said they disagreed with one recommendation on routine use of a blood test for a protein called prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, that leaks into the blood from enlarged or diseased prostates. +PSA and several other tests can be helpful, but their use should be optional rather than recommended, the guidelines said. Dr. Abraham Cockett, president of the urological group, said positive PSA tests could be indicators of prostate cancers as well as measures of enlarged prostate glands. +"We will continue to recommend annual PSA tests for people over age 50 or in high-risk groups, and more frequent tests in those who show elevated levels," Dr. Cockett said at the briefing. +Dr. Jackson Davis of Howard University, president of the National Medical Association, said his group also recommended annual PSA testing along with manual rectal examinations for the same population, including black Americans. +Copies of the guidelines can be obtained by calling (800) 358-9295 or by mailing a post card, marked "prostate" with a return address, to AHCPR Clearinghouse, P.O. Box 8547, Silver Spring, Md. 20907. + +LOAD-DATE: February 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +45 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 9, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Advances in Cataract Surgery Bring Far Quicker Recovery + +BYLINE: By SABRA CHARTRAND, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section C; Page 13; Column 4; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 946 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 + +Leon Kaczmarek went home just hours after having a cataract removed one Friday last month. A soft bandage covered the eye where an artificial lens had been implanted, but he had no stitches and needed no painkillers. By Sunday he was outside his New Jersey house chipping ice off the front walk. +A few years ago, the operation to remove the cataract, a clouding in the eye's natural lens, would have left Mr. Kaczmarek puttering carefully around his house for three weeks, wary of jarring his stitches, unable to return to work until his eye healed. But recent advances in surgical techniques are shortening the recovery period to mere days. + "I've started to see things I've never seen before," Mr. Kaczmarek, 64, a retired display developer for the Woolworth Corporation, "colors, and looking into the distance and seeing sharpness." +Like most cataract sufferers, he had been crippled by blurry double vision and distorted depth perception. It forced him to use thick reading glasses. His wife had to do all the driving. +New technology, including the use of ultrasound to break up the cataract and remove it in fragments, artificial lenses that fold for insertion and new methods of entering the eye, means that doctors can make incisions that are so small they seal themselves, assuming they are properly shaped, meaning that no stitches are required. + +Savings Are Foreseen + The American Academy of Ophthalmology says cataract removal is the most commonly performed surgery in the nation. Cataracts usually strike the elderly, with such predictability that ophthalmologists believe they are an inevitable part of aging. So far, researchers have not pinpointed any way to prevent the condition, although they know it can also be caused by diseases like diabetes. +In 1991, Medicare spent $3.4 billion on more than one million cataract operations. The new surgical techniques not only offer patients a shortened recovery period but also may cut costs for the health care system over all. +"The biggest part of cost is the facility cost," said Dr. Monica L. Monica, a consultant to the American Academy of Ophthalmologists. Many ophthalmologists say surgery time can be halved if stitches are not required. And the use of topical anesthesia allows patients to bypass the recovery room. +"Small-incision surgery saves on operating room and recovery room costs, maybe by as much as $500 to $600, depending on the facility fee," Dr. Monica explained, "so it is cost effective." +In New Jersey, where Dr. Jaime Santamaria routinely performs stitchless surgery, he charges $2,500, and Medicare pays $1,200 of that cost. + +A Difficult Technique + So far, only about 30 percent of doctors nationwide use the tricky stitchless techniques. The surgery Dr. Santamaria performs requires cutting a precise tunnel in the eye. He said many surgeons found it difficult to avoid nicking the tunnel sides, which defeats its self-sealing potential. He has invented a sheath that covers the knife as it travels down the tunnel and is retracted when it reaches the damaged lens, to help avoid nicks. +Using ultrasound can be difficult as well. Surgeons must handle a rapidly vibrating tool without knocking other parts of the eye or losing fragments of the cataract. The chances of complications, including infection and detachment of the retina, are small, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmologists. The academy says 90 percent of cataract patients get their good vision back. +Before the middle of this century, crude stitches were used in cataract surgery, and patients had to spend two weeks in the hospital, lying in a dark room for days, sandbags against each ear, forbidden to lift the head or move while the eye healed. When eye stitches were refined in the 1950's, cataract surgery became an out-patient procedure, and sutures, bandages and painkillers made it possible to recover at home. +The stitches were necessary because doctors removed cataracts in one piece, meaning that the cut, usually about 10 millimeters, was too large to heal without stitches. But in the 1980's, many surgeons began using ultrasound waves to break up the cataract, which is then removed in pieces. +Ultrasound "allows us to bounce sound waves around to crack up the lens and take it out through a small port," explained Dr. Monica, who is also a New Orleans cataract surgeon. But while ultrasound lets doctors make a six-millimeter incision, small-incision surgery did not become stitchless surgery until the invention in the late 1980'sof folding and rolling artificial lenses, which could be unfurled after being inserted. +Together, ultrasound and folding lenses permit Dr. Monica and others to perform the operation with a three-millimeter incision. She uses anesthesia drops and enters the eye directly through the cornea, over the iris. +"You go through the cornea for the incision so as not to disturb the blood vessels in the white of the eye," she said, "so there is no bleeding, redness or blackening of the eye. No sutures are put in the eye to bridle and hold the eye in place. Patients return to full activity within 24 to 30 hours." +Another method favored by Dr. Santamaria involves cutting a tunnel three millimeters across from the white surface of the eye at an angle toward the cornea. In both types of surgery, stitches are unnecessary because the eye is a fluid-filled sphere. Internal pressure seals the incision. +Because the technique can be tricky, experts suggest choosing an opthalmological surgeon who has done the procedure many times before. "Unfortunately," Dr. Santamaria cautioned, "a patient may be on the doctor's learning curve." + +LOAD-DATE: February 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + + +GRAPHIC: Newer procedures for cataract surgery use smaller and smaller incisions and often replace the clouded lens with one that can be rolled up for insertion, then unfurled. Some techniques can shorten both the operation and recovery period and use only topical anesthesia. However, they require thorough training. + +Ultrasound procedure +Chart/Diagram: "New Routes to Clearer Vision" + In phacoemulsification, the cataract fragments are removed by suction through a small tube. + +Self-sealing incision + A small tunnel through the cornea must be precisely cut to allow the eye's internal pressure to seal the incision. +Source: American Academy of Ophthalmology + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +46 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 9, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Personal Health; +Depression in the elderly: old notions hinder help. + +BYLINE: By Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section C; Page 13; Column 1; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1092 words + +DEPRESSION is a popular disorder these days. Although it may not be more common than in the past, today more people are willing to admit to themselves that they are depressed, to talk openly about the problem and to seek treatment. The exception is among the elderly. +People over 60, who are more likely to suffer from depression than any other age group, including teen-agers, are the least likely to recognize or acknowledge that they are depressed. Dr. Martiece Carson, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City, explained: "It's a cultural thing, a sign of their times. The elderly tend to consider depression to be a symptom of weakness, of laziness, not a medical illness." + Dr. Ari Kiev, an expert on depression at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York, agreed. "The elderly haven't grasped that this is a medical condition, and that it is treatable," he said. "Old attitudes hang on." +Dr. Carson and other experts say that doctors generally do not help matters when they fail to look beyond physical complaints and to ask probing questions that would reveal depression as the real cause of a patient's symptoms. +"Often the doctor will work up a depressed older person for all kinds of physical illnesses and then turn the patient away, saying, 'I don't find anything wrong with you,' " Dr. Carson said. "Or the doctor may find an unrelated physical problem and assume that to be the cause of the patient's symptoms, leaving the depression unrecognized and untreated." +Dr. Kiev said another common situation was for the doctor and others to recognize that the older person is depressed but then try to "explain it away by saying there's no reason to feel that way, 'just snap out of it.' " +"Depression is a real condition, and denying it tends to make the depressed person feel worse, even suicidal," Dr. Kiev said. +According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 3 percent of Americans over 65 are clinically depressed, while 7 to 12 percent of the elderly suffer from milder forms of depression that impair their quality of life. In nursing homes, Dr. Carson said, the situation is far worse, with 20 to 40 percent of patients very depressed. + +Causes and Symptoms + Many people have a lifelong propensity to depression that does not become obvious until late in life when the condition is triggered by circumstances, which can range from retiring to developing a serious illness or facing the death of a friend or spouse. But while it is natural for people to feel depressed after a traumatic loss, when that depression persists for months or years it is likely to have a biological cause as well. +Often, a physical illness itself causes depression in the elderly by altering the chemicals in the brain. Among the ailments that could touch off depression, Dr. Carson said, are diabetes, hypothyroidism, kidney or liver dysfunction and sometimes heart disease and infections. In people with these ailments, treatment that controls the underlying disease usually eliminates the depression. But if the depression persists despite treatment of the physical illness, the emotional disorder should be considered an independent problem requiring its own therapy. +Sometimes medications prescribed for other conditions precipitate depression. In exploring the causes of depression, it is crucial to take a complete inventory of the prescription and over-the-counter medications that the person is using. +Diagnosing depression in the elderly often requires time and a careful and thorough workup. Dr. Carson pointed out that rarely do elderly people "come in carrying a sign saying 'I'm depressed.' " +"More than likely," she said, "if they seek treatment, they may complain that they don't feel good, they hurt here or there or they're having trouble sleeping." +Depression often assumes the guise of physical, or psychosomatic, symptoms like headaches, backaches, digestive problems, joint pain or insomnia. Just because the symptoms are psychosomatic does not mean they are imaginary, only that they are physical manifestations of an emotional disorder. The pain is real, but if the underlying emotional problem is treated, it will go away. +Some signs of depression, like memory lapses or difficulty concentrating, mimic symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. An older person who develops cognitive disorders should not be assumed to be becoming senile, nor should such symptoms be written off as an expected part of aging. But in other cases, Dr. Kiev said, once the depression is treated, there may still be residual cognitive symptoms that may warrant treating the patient as an Alzheimer's sufferer. + +Prevention + Older people face many real-life problems that can compound a biological tendency to become depressed, including physical illness, financial burdens, deaths of friends and relations and loss of purpose. Dr. Kiev said people "must prepare for making life meaningful or life will be tough and unfulfilling, and if you go through any kind of stress it can precipitate depression." +He suggests that older people get involved in things that are meaningful to them. He urges them to shed burdens and obligations and instead do something they really want to do. + +Treatment + Depression should be suspected in an older person who has frequent crying bouts, is continually sad or irritable, develops sleeping or eating problems, dwells on death or loses interest in previously pleasurable activities. +The first step in a workup for depression should be a thorough medical checkup to determine whether there is an underlying, undiagnosed physical disorder. If none is found to account fully for the depressive symptoms, treatment with an antidepressant, perhaps in conjunction with counseling, is usually the next step. Newer antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil are far less likely to cause disruptive or dangerous side effects in the elderly than older medications like Elavil. Participing in a regular exercise program and a support group for the elderly may also help. + +Further Information + The National Institute of Mental Health, through its Depression Awareness, Recognition and Treatment program, provides information on depression, its diagnosis and treatment. The institute has also produced a booklet, "If You're Over 65 and Feeling Depressed . . ." The booklet and other guidance can be obtained by writing to D/ART Public Inquiries, National Institute of Mental Health, 5600 Fishers Lane, Room 15C-05, Rockville, Md. 20857. + +LOAD-DATE: February 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Chart: "Depression: A Symptom Checklist" provides a list of symptoms of depression. (Source: National Institute of Mental Health Depression Awareness, Regognition and Treatment [D/ART] Program) + +Drawing. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +47 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 9, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Sports of The Times; +Sizing Up Outfielder Jordan + +BYLINE: By CLAIRE SMITH + +SECTION: Section B; Page 9; Column 1; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 766 words + +WHAT is the difference between Michael Jordan and Eddie Gaedel, besides 2 feet 11 inches? Or what is the difference between Michael Jordan and Minnie Minoso, besides more than 40 years in age? And, not the least bit less important, what is the difference between Michael Jordan and Lenny Dykstra, or Pete Rose, besides 1,110 career hits for Dykstra and a major league high of 4,256 hits for Rose? +According to Bud Selig, there's an awful lot of difference between Jordan -- the quintessential National Basketball Association All-Star and would-be major league right fielder -- and the above mentioned. And for a variety of reasons that have everything to do with the integrity of the game, Selig must make sure that remains so. + For Selig, as the titular head of baseball as well as the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, is the interim guardian of the integrity and best interests of the game. And he knows more than anyone else that there are many skeptics out there wondering if Jordan's presence in the camp of the Chicago White Sox come next Monday will test the sport's integrity or bump up against its best interests. +There are those who believe that Jordan's mere presence may be just as much a sideshow as was the appearance of the 3-foot-7-inch Gaedel at the plate for the St. Louis Browns in a 1951 game. Or just another publicity stunt, as many believed were the White Sox attempts to activate Minoso, the septuagenarian, the last two seasons. +"A lot of people question whether it's a spectacle," Selig acknowledged yesterday by telephone from Milwaukee. "I honestly don't think that it is. I look at it this way: The greatest basketball player of all time retired and now says that all along he really wanted to be a baseball player. +"I know he has worked unbelievably hard this winter. He's a man of enormous pride, enormous competitiveness. And I have every confidence that Michael Jordan is not going to do anything to embarrass himself. And the White Sox aren't going to do anything to embarrass themselves, or baseball." +Gaedel was a spectacle. No one could argue differently. The irrepressible Bill Veeck, owner of those Browns and later owner of the White Sox, would have been insulted if anyone ever did. +And so would Minoso have been a spectacle had not one commissioner, Fay Vincent, refused to allow him to play when nearing age 70 and had not the displeasure shown by White Sox players last year dissuaded the team owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, from putting Minoso on the field at almost age 71. +But Selig is convinced that the Sox and Jordan are looking for something more upstanding than a cheap laugh or an oddity. Simply put, Selig said: "The difference is that an Eddie Gaedel, even if he worked hard, could never have been a major league baseball player. A lot of people believe Michael just might be." +If the question of whether Jordan is or is not a spectacle becomes moot because of such skills, another question may not. For Jordan, shadowed by gambling charges, could be playing baseball while Rose continues to serve a lifetime ban for a gambling scandal that consumed his career. +Jordan exited basketball with a clean slate given him by the N.B.A. commissioner, David Stern, whose investigation cleared Jordan of any wrongdoing. +That does not mean Selig does not owe it to baseball to determine Jordan's suitability for the game. After all, baseball is the sport that has been absolutely obsessed with gambling ever since 1920, when members of the 1919 White Sox were charged with accepting bribes to throw World Series games. +"We should have that obsession and it will continue," said Selig, who plans to confer with Stern. "As the spring develops, we will, as we would in any normal situation, be very conscientious in that area. But let me also say this: We have no reason, as of now, to be concerned." +It may be that Jordan, like Dykstra, just got caught up in wrong-headed excessive gambling away from his sport. It earned Dykstra, the Phillies' center fielder, a one-year probation. It caused Jordan much anguish and public humiliation. +Baseball, like basketball, seems willing to overlook all that for now and let Jordan's skills be more of a judge of where he winds up. But Jordan should know what Selig believes: that the vigilance in the game will not lessen just because of the candle power of its newest "star." +"Michael Jordan will be treated no differently than any player in major league baseball, in any way, shape, form or matter," Selig said. "That's all I can say. He will be under the same scrutiny as any other player." + +LOAD-DATE: February 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Michael Jordan (Reuters) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +48 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 12, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +THE ENDLESS WINTER: ABOUT NEW YORK; +In Pursuit of Warmth In a City Transformed + +BYLINE: By David Gonzalez + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 25; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 898 words + +With the snow stinging his face like a blizzard of glass shards, the chilled New Yorker set out yesterday morning in search of warmth, or at least comfort. +East Harlem seemed like a good bet. After all, generations of Caribbean transplants had managed one way or another to reach some accommodation with the elements. + On East 116th Street accommodation was at a premium. Cars and pedestrians impatiently shared the road and the thigh-high snow banks that jutted out from the sidewalks and that concealed curbs, potholes and whatever else lurked underneath, making the simple act of crossing the street more like an act of faith. It wasn't enough for a group of elderly women who peered out through the glass doors of a spiritualist's shop -- with few customers for their statues of Lazarus, African beads or herbal conjures, they closed up and went home. +But like an arctic outpost with tropical aspirations, the sliver of a community garden on the corner of East 115th Street gamely beckoned with a Puerto Rican flag flapping atop a snow-covered gazebo. Nearby, a sign announced "Young Devils Inc." Looked promising. +No devils in the garden. They were, appropriately enough, in the basement of an adjacent building, which is the headquarters for the social club the Young Devils, started a half-century ago. Island travel pictures and old posters from sizzling-hot boogaloo concerts by Joe Cuba hung on the walls. Warm thoughts of one sort or another. +Lots of the Young Devils collect a pension now, and as it turned out, it might have been better to ask them about staying warm a half-century ago. +"When you're young, you don't feel bad," said Rafael Rivieron, a 68-year-old retiree and former Golden Gloves champ. "When you're older, you're finished." +A friend suggested that the champ stay warm with a sip of Scotch, and plopped a bottle on the counter beside him. +"No," he protested. It was 10:30 in the morning. "I haven't eaten." +His antidote to the weather -- go back to Puerto Rico. +"I can't stay here by myself," he added quietly. "My wife died so many years ago. This is my only place now." +A ruddy-faced friend piped up. +"You can't go to P.R.," advised the friend. "The airports are closed. You got to stay here." +His friend is called Pete Russia. Well, there's a man who might have some sub-zero survival smarts. +Maybe not. +Turns out Pete Russia is Pete Rivera. He got the moniker back when he sported an Afro hairdo that one day frizzed out beyond control. A friend said he looked like a mad Russian. +Back to the streets. +Sand is usually a harbinger of warmer climes and balmy islands. Unfortunately yesterday's sand was on the roadway of the Triboro Bridge and the island was Randalls. But an opportunity awaited below the bridge, where a collection of red-brick buildings was spread out at the practice center of the Fire Department training center. Fire. +Chuck Glover and Robert Duell dug out their station wagon. The two men, captains in an upstate fire department, had finished training early this week and were preparing for a 230-mile drive home to Cortland. +"There it's not considered a storm until you get up to a foot," Mr. Duell said. +Looked like a storm here, as the chilled New Yorker felt the snow crunching inside his boots. Mr. Glover offered his own suggestion on how to fight the cold. He pointed to his car, where he had stashed his fireman's boots, coat and other firefighting gear. +"The same stuff that keeps you from the heat, keeps you from the cold," he said. He paused, as if debating whether to share the real inside story. "Besides," he confided, "when you're an officer, you sit inside the car." +Become a boss. +Reason caught the better of the chilled New Yorker as he plodded off, pondering the freezing point of ball-point ink and the absorbency of notepad paper. Baseball caps and athletic socks, he was learning, were very absorbent. +Despairing the possibility of physical warmth, he decided to seek esthetic comfort and headed for a sculpture park along the Astoria waterfront. He slogged through knee-high drifts, leaned into a wicked wind that blew in from the East River, and found the objects of contemplation -- three life-sized sculptures, including one of a bare-chested basketball player. Very little snow on that statue. He wondered, How many more days to summer? +Across the street, a group of men slipped and slid along Vernon Boulevard as they corralled a convoy of coffee wagons into their garage. +"It's unbelieveable we came out in this weather," said Kharem Khan, an Afghan immigrant who was returning from a dreary morning of selling little coffee and even fewer donuts on a midtown street corner. +A twinge of empathy. +As for dealing with the weather, Mr. Khan pointed to his head. "I think it's in here." +Think warm thoughts. +An hour later the chilled New Yorker found himself walking, more or less, down the promenade at Battery Park City searching for a bench where he had once spent lazy Indian summer afternoons. The bench was all but hidden by snow. +He smiled, but decided that it was probably warmer on the subway. +A few stops later, he emerged at Times Square. A young man in the crowd stopped and scanned 42d Street. +"Praise God," said the man, Herman Gonzalez. "With all the sin, this city looks pure." +Maybe a warm heart is the best defense against this weather. + +LOAD-DATE: February 12, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: David Huling, armed with his snow shovels, yesterday on East 115th Street near Madison Avenue. (Angel Franco/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +49 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 12, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +THE ENDLESS WINTER: THE STRUGGLE; +Stubborn Guest Makes the Common Special + +BYLINE: By RICK BRAGG + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1212 words + +Because of the snow, so much snow, the miracle of birth had to unfold on a couch in Teaneck, N.J. +Because of the snow, a 90-year-old, one-legged man in Port Chester, N.Y., couldn't get a hot meal. But in Manhattan, a delivery man with ice in his eyebrows and terror in his eyes made a suicidal-type run on an out-of-control bicycle with a $7 order of moo-shu pork. + Because of the snow, a man stood waiting for a truckload of roses that never showed, on the one weekend of the year when lovers can't be lovers without something red. +The snow drifted down like feathers and piled up thicker than feather beds in New York and much of the rest of the region yesterday, smothering traffic, causing too many hardships to count and mocking the snow plows and shovelers who dared to challenge it. People slipped on it and cried and shook their fists at it and cursed, but it just kept on coming. +But nowhere did it have quite the effect that it did in the home of Sonia Alonso, who, trapped by impassable roads, gave birth to a 7-pound baby boy with the help of a few friends and a 20-year-old medical technician who had never done such a thing before. +The cold has kept others who need to get out locked in. +For 16 years, Mario Grasso has unfailingly delivered hot meals to elderly people who cannot leave their homes. Yesterday, when a plump carpet of snow fell upon plump carpets from earlier snows, he too was trapped. + +Human Contact Broken + "I couldn't get out of the church parking lot," said Mr. Grasso, a 76-year-old retired New York City auditor who was trying to deliver 10 plates of hot lasagna from the Scarsdale Congregational Church. "The parking lot hadn't been plowed and the wheels were turning around in the same spot." +It has been that kind of winter for the elderly of the New York City region. Meals on Wheels programs have been canceled for as many as nine days in some communities, and local pharmacies have had to stop delivering prescription medicine to the homebound. Visits to hospitals for physical therapy have been postponed. +The occasional fresh-air stroll or shopping expedition with a walker has been forgone for fear that a slip on unseen ice could leave a permanently disabling broken bone. Most painful for those who are shut in is that the human visits that brighten the flat routines of their days have become less frequent. +All those years of living have given the elderly the street smarts to put away provisions and extra medicine for a run of bad luck like this winter. But this run has been worse than most of them recall. +"This last week has been terrible," said Ansel Mason, 87, a retired security guard in Halesite, L.I., who had to make do yesterday with canned spaghetti instead of a delivered hot meal. "I've got enough canned goods to hold out for four or five days if I have to." +All through the snows of this winter, younger homebound adults have been suffering the restless anxiety known as cabin fever. But Raymond Daur, 90, a retired bank officer who lives alone in a house in Port Chester, N.Y., has not stepped outside since October, except for a four-day stay at his son's home during Christmas. +The reason he has been so pent up is that his prosthetic leg has been causing severe irritation and he has been wary of using it for more than a short period. He counts on the the visit by the Meals on Wheels volunteer, not just for the hot food, but for the break in his routine. That break didn't come yesterday because the volunteers, most of whom are elderly themselves, were afraid to drive, though Patrick Bradley, chairman of the local Meals on Wheels program, did telephone to make sure Mr. Daur had reserves of food. + +Classical Pasta + So Mr. Daur spent his day listening to classical music on the radio and doing crossword puzzles, and munching on a plate of pasta with tomato sauce that was delivered Thursday. +The elderly also put away extra medicine and other things they can't do without for this kind of emergency. +While many in the New York region spent yesterday worrying about food, medicine and friends, Lee Merto was wondering where his roses were. More than 50,000 of them. +For Mr. Merto, the manager of a wholesale flower distributor on Manhattan's West Side, the timing of the storm could not have been worse, given that he was to have shipped Valentine's Day orders yesterday to many of the 500 florists he supplies in the area. +Trouble was, with airports closed and highways treacherous, Mr. Merto had no way to receive the 14,400 roses that were being sent to him by air from California and the additional 40,000 that had been picked in South America but were stuck on a truck somewhere between New York and Miami. +"There's a lot of money that could be lost," said Mr. Merto, whose company, Atlantic Wholesale, at 46 West 28th Street, counts the days leading up to Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Easter as its busiest of the year. +"Our customers are counting on us to get the job done," he added. +To other business owners, the storm will be difficult to forget. Many hair salons, those that stayed open, found themselves with virtually no heads to cut or nails to polish. Department stores had few customers and even fewer employees. +For Zhang Fu Zhcen, even a little business was almost more than he could stand. He was half-frozen and weaving dangerously through sliding traffic on his bicycle, trying to make a food delivery in midtown. +"Bad" was all he said as he wobbled to a stop at the top of a long, gradual hill where even cars had a hard time maneuvering. He was still upright when he disappeared from sight. +Ms. Alonso, in labor, couldn't take a chance of the dangerous roads. She was snowbound in her Teaneck apartment when her labor started yesterday morning. Shana Prystowsky, a medical technician, went to her. +She arrived at 10:35 A.M. to find several women walking Ms. Alonso around the living room, and had no time to do anything more than lay her down on the nearest sofa and let nature proceed. +Thirteen minutes later, at 10:48, Ms. Alonso, with Ms. Prystowsky coaching, brought little Omar into the world. +"He was beautiful," said Ms. Prystowsky later, still breathless. "I was very nervous and excited. It was a good nervous, and all my training came right back to me. Nervous or not, I had to do it." +Immediately after the birth, Ms. Alonso was bundled into the ambulance and taken to the Hackensack Medical Center. "Luckily we pulled in right behind a snow plow and had it ahead of us for most of the trip," said Ms. Prystowsky. +A hospital spokeswoman, Mary Garcia, said last night that Ms. Alonso and her new son were in excellent shape. +But for others awaiting a child, the snow is causing a great deal of fear. +Robin and Jonathan Reich of Majestic Beach took an hour and a half to make what is normally a 15-minute trip to the hospital in Port Jefferson, for what turned out to be a false alarm. That was Thursday, and only 10 inches had fallen by then. Now, with more snow, there is more fear. +At the first sign of labor, Mrs. Reich said, she and her husband will leave the house and head for the home of a friend who lives close to the hospital. +"When it's clear, I tell the baby to hurry up. Now I say, wait a day." + +LOAD-DATE: February 12, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Snow interrupted power on the third rails of the electric portion of the Long Island Rail Road yesterday, halting service and leaving hundreds of passengers stranded at the Jamaica Station in Queens. (Steve Berman for The New York Times) (pg. 1); For Zhang Fu Zhcen, even a little business was almost more than he could stand. He was half-frozen and weaving dangerously through sliding traffic on his bicycle, trying to make a food delivery in midtown. (Monica Almeida/The New York Times) (pg. 25) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +50 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 13, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Last Romantics + +BYLINE: By DAVID FIRESTONE + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 44; Column 1; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 340 words + +Love in later life is a distillation of love, a reduction to the essence of human need. Single adults past retirement, past the deaths of spouses and friends, past the confused gropings and hesitant sputterings of youth, are finally liberated to seek simple comfort in another's companionship. +They find it amid coat-and-tie gatherings in high-rise parlors and in the everyday cheer of senior centers, where ardent friends swing-dance in the afternoon and trade histories over cardboard cups of decaf. Walk through any of these 335 centers in New York City and you can hear animated exploratory chat about books and politics, movies and weather; stay long enough and you notice the same couples pairing off, flexing in rhythm through Stay Well classes and saving seats near the television when it's time to cluck at the evening news. Some hope to marry or remarry, while others seek only to escape the loneliness of tiny apartments or empty houses. Few need to read the scientific studies that show how much longer and healthier life can be when it is shared. + Now and then, there are even those who manage to share a bit too much. +"There are a lot more women than men in the singles scene, and sometimes you have some of the more eligible men getting involved in triangular situations," says Pat Monaco, director of the Newtown Senior Center in Elmhurst, Queens, and occasional peacemaker between feuding older lovers. +Some, though, watch the field from the sidelines. Anna Smith, who leads some exercise classes at the Allen Community Senior Citizens Center in Jamaica, Queens, lost her husband 17 years ago and claims no interest in finding another. "I don't want somebody with some illness I have to take care of," says Smith, trim and resolute, "and I don't want anybody nursing me." +But when her friends invited her to the center's Starlight Cotillion late last year, Smith showed up in a chiffon dress and an expectant look, ready to take possibility by the arms and waltz through the night. + DAVID FIRESTONE + +LOAD-DATE: February 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Older women greatly outnumber older men and often find themselves waiting on the outskirts of rooms. At the weekly afternoon dance in the Newtown Senior Center, far left, a woman listened in patient anticipation. At the Springtime in Paris ball in the Milford (Conn.) Senior Center, near left, a widow and a widower danced; they have dated ever since. Anna Smith, in the yellow dress, and the other "post-debs" of the Allen Community Senior Citizens Center's Starlight Cotillion, below. Gripping their pool cues like shields, the men of the Corona Preservation Senior Center in Queens, right, stood fast around their table while a celebration for couples married 50 years continued in an adjoining room. Though in demand, many older men prefer the company of one another to another round of intimacy. Folk music, so often heard at senior centers, can revive the pleasant memories of youth and take the chill off awkward social situations. These old friends (she's a widow and he's married), above, lost themselves in a brisk tarantella during a 50th anniversary celebration at the Corona senior center. Private social clubs, like the Night Owls and Who's Who International, remain a popular, if expensive, way to shake hands and discover who's out there. At this holiday dinner party in Manhattan, left, which cost $70 a person, the man on the left, visiting from California, met someone he continued to date. In the middle of the afternoon, halfway through an old song, there can be a moment of pleasure when all the loneliness and fears of old age seem beside the point. If only for an instant, these two friends at the Newtown Senior Center stop the earthbound progress of advancing time. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY REBECCA COONEY) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +51 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 13, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +YOUR HOME; +Updating To Meet Needs + +BYLINE: By ANDREE BROOKS + +SECTION: Section 10; Page 5; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1084 words + +IT may all begin with frustration over lack of space, a desire for a room that was never needed before or even a fantasy of an updated kitchen or bathroom. +Whatever the catalyst, the family's current needs and yearnings govern most renovation programs. Even so, the best of these projects should also reflect marketplace trends to help make the home more marketable when selling day arrives. + Consider, for a start, the kitchen. According to Remodeling News, a monthly trade journal for the remodeling industry, kitchens have swollen in size like rising dough in the last few years. A kitchen, it observed, must now cater to a growing number of uses, all of which may be taking place simultaneously. +With less time available in two-income households, the magazine said in an editorial, the kitchen has become one of the only places where the family spends time together. So it needs to be redesigned to comfortably serve several people working at different tasks at the same time, people who also need to "relate while performing those household tasks." +Ellen Rand, a consultant in Teaneck, N.J., to the building industry and co-author of "The Complete Book of Kitchen Design," (Consumer Reports Books, 1991, $16.95), agreed. "You need enough space so a child can do homework, so one parent can fix a salad while the other cooks the pasta and where they can all eat," she said. Many families want space for TV, a desk and even a corner for entertaining friends. +For all these reasons Ms. Rand recommends adding even more counter space than one might at first think necessary. It may mean enlarging the square footage, even cutting into an adjacent parlor or family room. If that's not feasible, perhaps a wall can be removed, or partially removed, to provide a more open feeling and more light. +Center islands can be especially useful, she said, providing a locus around which several members of the household can work, socialize or eat in comfort and conviviality. If a sink or cooking facilities can be incorporated into the island, so much the better. +Since children tend to prepare much of their own instant food these days, Ms. Rand cautions homeowners about the height of cabinets and appliances. "Can storage areas be easily reached?" she asked. "Will the microwave oven be too high?" +Modifying for these needs, she added, also helps make the home more user-friendly to elderly people, another growing segment of the marketplace. +The same concerns should apply to all work surfaces, according to Remodeling News. It favors built-in recycling bins hidden behind cabinet doors for quick and easy clean-up chores. +In focus groups and from countless surveys, K. Hovnanian Companies of Red Bank, N.J., a builder of mass-market homes, finds buyers now prefer countertops in faux granite or marble, or even the real thing, rather than the more traditional formica. +Also trendy, said Richard Arzberger, Hovnanian's director of architectural services, are kitchens with ceramic rather than vinyl flooring. In older and antique homes, he added, wooden floors are back in style since newer and tougher polyurethene finishes allow for easier cleaning. Direct access to an outdoor area, such as a deck, is also highly desirable, he said. +When it comes to appliances, "think in terms of two of everything," said Kira Hann, vice president of marketing for Toll Brothers, a home builder based in Huntington Valley, Pa. This could mean two sinks, two range tops, two ovens "and even two dishwashers," said Karen Sneirson, a sales associate with William Pitt Real Estate of New Canaan, Conn. +"My customers love the idea," she said. "It's great for parties and you don't have to wait around while one load is being washed." +Since every member of the household may be trying to get off to work and school at the same time, the bathroom areas may also need redesigning to serve several people simultaneously. That means at least two vanities, suggested Ms. Kahn, separated by a comfortable distance or even at opposite ends of the area, as they are in contemporary hotel rooms. +Also gaining ground is the idea of having one or even two enclosed toilet stalls within the main bathroom area -- in this instance more closely reflecting the arrangements in commercial settings. +As a fantasy fulfillment, whirlpool tubs are really hot, report brokers. "People like them best when there are skylights too," said Jim Whittemore, a partner with Burbank/Whittemore Inc., real estate brokers in Larchmont, N.Y. +When it comes to bathroom fixtures, these experts agree that people are most eager to have a separate glass-enclosed stall shower in addition to an oversized tub. No longer is anyone content, it seems, with that awkward shower/bath combination so beloved by generations of suburbanites. +The home office has also been enlarged and made more luxurious, say these experts. At the top of the most-wanted list is a first-floor location, a separate entrance ("nobody wants to bring people through the entire house," said Mr. Arzberger), wiring that can accommodate the cornucopia of machines that typifies the modern office, multiple telephone lines and soundproofing, if feasible. +Built-in bookcases or storage shelves are other pluses, along with wiring for cable TV and a wide expanse of window for lots of natural light. "People expect to spend a great deal of time in these rooms," said Ms. Sneirson, the sales agent. "They want them to have a comfortable feel and a nice view, almost like a library." +A small bathroom or kitchen incorporated into the office suite will really provide a marketing boost. For example, Mr. Arzberger said his company was increasingly creating what it had dubbed a "flex room" -- a suite separated from the main traffic area that can serve as a home office, personal quarters for an au-pair or nanny or a mini-apartment for an elderly parent. +Ms. Hann, the marketing specialist from Toll Brothers, agreed. In fact, when she and her fiance, Jerry McCarron, a venture capitalist for the building industry, were planning a use for the unfinished lower level of their new home in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., last year they chose to have a multipurpose area even though they only needed a home office. +They made certain it had a separate entrance, a walk-in closet, a full bathroom and a galley kitchen, and was also heavily wired for electronic equipment. +"Even if we won't need it all," said Ms. Hann, "we were sure it would help sell the home one day." + +LOAD-DATE: February 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +52 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 13, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +At Work; +After the Divorce, the Deluge + +BYLINE: By Barbara Presley Noble + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 25; Column 3; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1012 words + +THERE are so many ways for a woman to end up living in poverty when she is elderly that it seems almost churlish to focus on one particular group as more victimized than any other. Women may, for example, work at jobs in companies unlikely to offer significant retirement coverage and for wages so low that saving is virtually impossible. Or, to increase their income, they may juggle two or three low-paying jobs. Together, the jobs may add up to years of more-than-full-time employment and yield a living wage -- but no benefits and certainly no pension. +Or they may enter and leave the labor force as family duties ebb and flow, interrupting the long march toward qualifying for retirement plans, or lowering the amount they will receive. Or their husbands may die, leaving them with considerably less than the expected amount of retirement income. "Our life patterns are different than the life patterns of men," said Lou Glasse, president of the Washington-based Older Women's League. + All women may be at the mercy of their life patterns, but women who divorce in midlife or later are shoved with sudden force into a vulnerable subset of the female experience. It is women who have done what was expected of them and led the most exemplary middle-class lives who may be the least prepared to face the reduced circumstances in which they will very likely find themselves in old age. +A study last year of the economic status of older divorced women by the Brandeis University Policy Center on Aging painted a Lucian Freud-ish picture of the so-called golden years. The study noted that only 5 percent of divorced women living on Social Security and a private pension were poor, but it also revealed that only about a quarter of older women (age 62 and over) receive a pension in addition to Social Security. The median annual income of older divorced women is about $9,000 (in 1990 dollars) and has been growing at a below-inflation rate of 1.5 percent. +Both the study and experts in pensions and divorce say changes in matrimonial law since 1970, when California became the first state to allow "no-fault" divorce -- based on irreconcilable differences instead of designating a guilty party -- have generally not worked to the benefit of women. Where the courts once used alimony and tangible assets to punish and reward, they now focus on distributing property fairly. They have expanded the definition of property to include intangibles like potential earning power and pensions, but in the process women have come to receive alimony less often and for shorter periods of time. The first major study of California's no-fault divorce law, published in 1985, found that men's standard of living went up 42 percent in the first year after divorce and women's went down 73 percent. +The last thing women may be thinking about as they contemplate the sinking trend line of their post-divorce income is a pension that won't come home to roost for several years. "Women, especially if they have children, may have other priorities. They have short-term problems," said Anna Rappaport, a senior actuary in the Chicago office of William M. Mercer Inc., the human resource consultants. "It's easy to say I'm going to solve a 2-year problem at the expense of a 10-year problem." +COMPOUNDING the difficulty is the well-documented reluctance of some women to throw themselves wholeheartedly into financial and retirement planning. "Women don't know enough about the issues," Ms. Rappaport said. "When they make a settlement, they let the husbands keep their pensions without realizing the economic impact." +Women are often not well-served by their lawyers, who themselves may be unfamiliar with the intricacies of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, the Federal law covering private pensions; the Retirement Equity Act of 1984, which broadened the rights of divorced spouses, or the particular pension system relevant to their client. And some lawyers, according to several pension advocates, simply don't think about pensions and benefits, which are not automatically put into play when the marital assets go on the table during a divorce. They may not anticipate changes, like remarriage or the death of the ex-husband, that could nullify the agreement and leave the woman with nothing. Such lapses are not uncommon despite the fact that a traditional defined-benefit pension accrued during a lifetime career at one employer will often be the couple's largest asset, after their home. +WHAT is to be done? First, learn about your family finances and catalogue your potential pension assets. Think long and hard before handling a divorce without a lawyer. When you do engage a lawyer, make sure he or she is knowledgeable about pensions, especially if you fall into a special category, like one of the Federal retirement systems. And if you feel you might be wrecking your karma by raising these topics when you are not contemplating a divorce, or if you can't cope with them when you are, ponder for a moment living alone in old age on the $500 monthly Social Security payment women typically receive. + + + +WHERE TO START LOOKING FOR HELP +THE comprehensive "Your Pension Rights at Divorce: What Women Need to Know," by Anne Moss, is available for $16.50 from the Pension Rights Center, 918 16th Street N.W., Suite 704, Washington, D.C. 20006. The American Association of Retired Persons has published "Women, Pensions and Divorce," a survey of pension issues with a section on proposed reforms. The booklet is available from the American Association of Retired Persons at 601 E Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20049. Also available free from the A.A.R.P. is "A Women's Guide to Pension Rights." +To receive a free packet of information on pensions from the Older Women's League, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to the league at 666 11th Street N.W. Suite 700, Washington, D.C. 20001. A women-and-pensions edition of the league's newsletter has several short articles and a list of resources. Call 800-825-3695 for the current price. + +LOAD-DATE: February 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +SERIES: Second in a series of articles on women and pensions. + +GRAPHIC: Chart: "A Checklist of Pension Question" shows suggested questions to ask when concerned about your pension plan. + +Drawing + +TYPE: Series + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +53 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 13, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +At Work; +After the Divorce, the Deluge + +BYLINE: By Barbara Presley Noble + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 25; Column 3; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1013 words + +THERE are so many ways for a woman to end up living in poverty when she is elderly that it seems almost churlish to focus on one particular group as more victimized than any other. Women may, for example, work at jobs in companies unlikely to offer significant retirement coverage and for wages so low that saving is virtually impossible. Or, to increase their income, they may juggle two or three low-paying jobs. Together, the jobs may add up to years of more-than-full-time employment and yield a living wage -- but no benefits and certainly no pension. +Or they may enter and leave the labor force as family duties ebb and flow, interrupting the long march toward qualifying for retirement plans, or lowering the amount they will receive. Or their husbands may die, leaving them with considerably less than the expected amount of retirement income. "Our life patterns are different than the life patterns of men," said Lou Glasse, president of the Washington-based Older Women's League. + All women may be at the mercy of their life patterns, but women who divorce in midlife or later are shoved with sudden force into a vulnerable subset of the female experience. It is women who have done what was expected of them and led the most exemplary middle-class lives who may be the least prepared to face the reduced circumstances in which they will very likely find themselves in old age. +A study last year of the economic status of older divorced women by the Brandeis University Policy Center on Aging painted a Lucian Freud-ish picture of the so-called golden years. The study noted that only 5 percent of divorced women living on Social Security and a private pension were poor, but it also revealed that only about a quarter of older women (age 62 and over) receive a pension in addition to Social Security. The median annual income of older divorced women is about $9,000 (in 1990 dollars) and has been growing at a below-inflation rate of 1.5 percent. +Both the study and experts in pensions and divorce say changes in matrimonial law since 1970, when California became the first state to allow "no-fault" divorce -- based on irreconcilable differences instead of designating a guilty party -- have generally not worked to the benefit of women. Where the courts once used alimony and tangible assets to punish and reward, they now focus on distributing property fairly. They have expanded the definition of property to include intangibles like potential earning power and pensions, but in the process women have come to receive alimony less often and for shorter periods of time. The first major study of California's no-fault divorce law, published in 1985, found that men's standard of living went up 42 percent in the first year after divorce and women's went down 73 percent. +The last thing women may be thinking about as they contemplate the sinking trend line of their post-divorce income is a pension that won't come home to roost for several years. "Women, especially if they have children, may have other priorities. They have short-term problems," said Anna Rappaport, a senior actuary in the Chicago office of William M. Mercer Inc., the human resource consultants. "It's easy to say I'm going to solve a 2-year problem at the expense of a 10-year problem." +COMPOUNDING the difficulty is the well-documented reluctance of some women to throw themselves wholeheartedly into financial and retirement planning. "Women don't know enough about the issues," Ms. Rappaport said. "When they make a settlement, they let the husbands keep their pensions without realizing the economic impact." +Women are often not well-served by their lawyers, who themselves may be unfamiliar with the intricacies of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, the Federal law covering private pensions; the Retirement Equity Act of 1984, which broadened the rights of divorced spouses, or the particular pension system relevant to their client. And some lawyers, according to several pension advocates, simply don't think about pensions and benefits, which are not automatically put into play when the marital assets go on the table during a divorce. They may not anticipate changes, like remarriage or the death of the ex-husband, that could nullify the agreement and leave the woman with nothing. Such lapses are not uncommon despite the fact that a traditional defined-benefit pension accrued during a lifetime career at one employer will often be the couple's largest asset, after their home. +WHAT is to be done? First, learn about your family finances and catalogue your potential pension assets. Think long and hard before handling a divorce without a lawyer. When you do engage a lawyer, make sure he or she is knowledgeable about pensions, especially if you fall into a special category, like one of the Federal retirement systems. And if you feel you might be wrecking your karma by raising these topics when you are not contemplating a divorce, or if you can't cope with them when you are, ponder for a moment living alone in old age on the $500 monthly Social Security payment women typically receive. + + + +WHERE TO START LOOKING FOR HELP +THE comprehensive "Your Pension Rights at Divorce: What Women Need to Know," by Anne Moss, is available for $16.50 from the Pension Rights Center, 918 16th Street N.W., Suite 704, Washington, D.C. 20006. The American Association of Retired Persons has published "Women, Pensions and Divorce," a survey of pension issues with a section on proposed reforms. The booklet is available from the American Association of Retired Persons at 601 E Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20049. Also available free from the A.A.R.P. is "A Women's Guide to Pension Rights." +To receive a free packet of information on pensions from the Older Women's League, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to the league at 666 11th Street N.W. Suite 700, Washington, D.C. 20001. A women-and-pensions edition of the league's newsletter has several short articles and a list of resources. Call 800-825-3695 for the current price. + +LOAD-DATE: February 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +SERIES: Second in a series of articles on women and pensions. + +CORRECTION-DATE: February 20, 1994, Sunday + + CORRECTION: +A chart with the At Work column last Sunday, about how women can evaluate their pension and retirement income, misstated the telephone number for the Social Security Administration. It is (800) 772-1213. + +GRAPHIC: Chart: "A Checklist of Pension Question" shows suggested questions to ask when concerned about your pension plan. + +Drawing + +TYPE: Series + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +54 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 14, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Keeping Elderly at Home and Care Affordable + +BYLINE: By TAMAR LEWIN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1721 words + +DATELINE: COLUMBIA, S.C. + +After Rosa Alston had her second leg amputated, her surgeon began making arrangements for her to go to a nursing home. +But Mrs. Alston, a 73-year-old widow who lives alone, would have none of it. Instead, she signed up for Palmetto Senior Care, a comprehensive-care program for frail elderly people based on a San Francisco model that is winning support among health policy makers nationwide. + Palmetto social workers helped Mrs. Alston find and move to an apartment that she could navigate in her wheelchair with the prosthesis on her right leg. On Mondays and Fridays, Palmetto sends an aide to clean the apartment and to help her bathe. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the Palmetto van takes Mrs. Alston to the program's day center, where she plays bingo, works on crafts, eats lunch, leads a Bible discussion group and is monitored for her diabetes and other health problems. +When necessary, Palmetto doctors make house calls. And when Mrs. Alston's dog, Skippy, had fleas, Palmetto paid to remove them. + +Costs Are Moderate + The program, which requires participants to sign over their Medicaid and Medicare policies, is free for Mrs. Alston, as long as she uses its doctors and nurses. And for Medicaid and Medicare, which pay its costs, the program is less expensive than care in a nursing home. +Palmetto and the eight similar programs across the country are an ambitious effort to weave medical care, home care, social services and case management into a single web of care. They are modeled on the 20-year-old On Lok center for frail elderly residents of Chinatown in San Francisco. +Unlike most other health plans for frail elderly Americans, the programs assign participants to a day center, where a team of doctors, nurses, social workers, therapists, nutritionists and pharmacists decide what services each person needs. The centers are small, allowing for individual attention. Palmetto's day centers -- one in a strip shopping center, one in an office building and one, for people with dementia, in a converted house -- serve a total of 200 people. +"This is what medicine is supposed to be like," said Dr. Paul Eleazer, the medical director of Palmetto, which is affiliated with Richland Memorial Hospital here. "It's taking care of people without worrying about funding sources, or malpractice, or inpatient-outpatient. All you have to think about is whether this is the best way to care for this patient." +The On Lok model, whose name comes from the Chinese words for "peaceful" and "happy," may be expanded to statewide use in both Massachusetts, where it has started in East Boston, and New York, where programs exist in the Bronx and Rochester. +"It's not for everybody," said Don Sherwood, who tracks On Lok for the Office of Research and Demonstration at the Health Care Financing Administration, the Federal agency that manages Medicaid and Medicare. "Only 5 percent of those over 65 are frail enough to be eligible, and many don't want to change doctors and go to a day health center. But for those who want comprehensive care, it's very good." + +Widespread Praise + Stephen Somers of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which helped finance the models in South Carolina and elsewhere, said the program helped frail elderly people close the gap between their day-to-day care and the treatment they received for acute problems. +"What makes a difference is helping people function in the community, instead of curing their heart or head or knee problem and letting them fall through the cracks and land in a nursing home," Mr. Somers, associate vice president of the foundation, said. "On Lok is really the leader in the field." +Mr. Somers and others suggested that the model might also work for people with AIDS, severely handicapped children who need intensive medical care or people with chronic mental illnesses. +Palmetto participants and their families describe the program as a godsend. Sandy McCutcheon said she could not run her day-care business if her 66-year-old husband, Kenneth, who has Alzheimer's disease, could not go to the Palmetto center. Nor, she said, could she bear the constant care-giving without the weekend off that Palmetto gives her every month. +Mrs. Alston, who lived in 35 states during a career that included picking oranges, cutting okra, working at an Army PX and ironing curtains, is another fan of Palmetto. +"Whatever I need, they give me," she said. "I don't even have to go the pharmacy anymore, because they hand out my medicine the last day of every month. I look forward to going to the center twice a week, but I wouldn't want to go any more than that. On my days at home, I read the Bible, and I'm not lonely. I like being on my own." + +Three Crucial Factors + Three factors make the On Lok model special. While most other comprehensive programs like health maintenance organizations serve healthy and ill participants, On Lok accepts only those ill enough to be eligible for nursing-home care. Most need help bathing, dressing or walking. Many are incontinent or demented. +Second, programs on the On Lok model receive from Medicaid and Medicare a set monthly payment per patient -- from $2,500 a month in Oregon to more than $5,000 in the Bronx -- and have broad discretion in spending it. The amount is based on the average Medicaid-Medicare payment for nursing home-eligible patients in the region minus 5 percent to 15 percent. +Third, each participant is assigned to an interdisciplinary team that meets regularly to assess the patient's needs. +"No doctor, no nurse, no case manager could on their own do the kinds of things the multidisciplinary team can, because we have both the flexibility and the authority to do whatever needs doing," said Susan Aldrich, director of Comprehensive Care Management, the program in the Bronx modeled after On Lok. "We can find housing. We can find a hospital bed. We can buy a microwave oven for someone who's no longer safe around a gas oven." +Central to the On Lok model is the day health center, a vastly expanded version of the social day programs for the elderly that proliferated in the 1970's. Most day centers offer activities that vary from basket-weaving to trips and discussions of current events. In recent years, many centers have added health services like blood-pressure checks or podiatric care. +But the On Lok model goes further, with geriatricians, rehabilitation therapists, nurse-practitioners and other health professionals. +At Mrs. Alston's center more than half the participants have to use wheelchairs. Some receive intravenous antibiotics or hydration in the treatment room at the back of the center. Others work individually with a physical therapist. Each has a complete physical examination at least every three months. +The program is attractive to participants because they are guaranteed free health care, including hospital or nursing-home care, until they die or choose to leave the program. And the support systems like home care, the day-center programs and the continued attention of a team of health professionals are far more extensive than would generally be available under Medicaid. + +A Financial Incentive + Health-policy planners find programs like Palmetto financially appealing, too. Because the health of participants is constantly monitored, their use of hospitals is so sharply reduced that On Lok models cost less than regular care under Medicaid or Medicare despite all the extra services that the models provide. +The director of Palmetto, Judy Baskins, said participants averaged 3.4 days in the hospital a year, less than half the average hospitalization rate for all Americans over 65. Hospital stays for participants in On Lok in San Francisco are briefer, and participants' mortality rates are also low. +Because of careful monitoring, Ms. Baskins noted, participants can often be hospitalized before health problems becomes expensive emergency crises. +Every three months, the Palmetto team discusses each participant, with reports from the doctor, pharmacist, social worker, nutritionist, home-care supervisor, nurse, physical therapist and activities director. +When patients require hospitalization or nursing-home care, the doctors act as admitting physicians, and the team stays in close touch with the patient. In one case, the team became so angry about the shoddy care that their client was receiving at a particular nursing home that they reported the institution to the state licensing agency. +One recent team meeting began with an update on a woman who was about to be discharged from a hospital and taken home to die, as she and her family had agreed. +"The family finally decided at 99 she can do what she wants," Ms. Baskins said, summarizing the case for the 23 health professionals around the table. "They've given her permission. They don't want any more tube feedings. But they have agreed to oxygen and whatever we can do for her comfort level." +The team agrees to increase the number of hours of home care that the woman will receive, and one member volunteers to visit her regularly. +In another case, the team reported that things were going better after an 88-year-old participant had left her grandson's home and gone to her daughter's. The family did not want an aide to go in and give them a break, although the team consensus was that such respite care would relieve the family's stress. While the elderly woman was too demented to take part in group activities at the day center, the activities director said she would continue to sit and hold the woman's hand. + +Decision on Services + Deciding what services each patient should receive is a delicate process, often involving negotiations with participants or their families. +"We thought at the beginning that we'd hear a lot of requests for more home health care," Ms. Baskins said, "but we actually hear more requests for new dentures. +"A lot of families, even ones having a very difficult time, say they manage just fine without the extra help we could provide. Of course, there are also families that seem to be doing fine but want more and more help. In those cases, we work very hard to accept what they want, to recognize that we're not in their shoes and that we can't really know what they're going through." + +LOAD-DATE: February 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Rosa Alston being escorted home from Palmetto Senior Care, a comprehensive-care program for frail elderly people in Columbia, S.C. (Alan S. Weiner for The New York Times)(pg. A1); Palmetto Senior Care in Columbia, S.C., and the eight similar programs across the country are an ambitious effort to weave medical care, home care, social services and case management into a single web of care for patients assigned to small day centers that allow for individual attention. (Alan S. Weiner for The New York Times)(pg. A14) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +55 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 14, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +NEWS SUMMARY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 872 words + + +International A2-9 + +HOW U.S. SHIFTED ON BOSNIA +The story of how the United States decided to enter the Bosnia negotiations illustrates how President Clinton does business, favoring deliberation over bold action and delegation over micromanagement. A1 + +NEW DEMANDS FROM THE SERBS +As a United Nations deadline for air strikes approached, Bosnian Serbs made new demands in return for withdrawing their heavy weapons, creating concern that the cease-fire would not hold. A7 + +The U.S. threatened broader air strikes if the Serbs resist. A7 + +ILLEGAL FUEL CAUSES FIRE IN HAITI +Drums of black market gasoline exploded in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, causing a major fire, and it was dramatic evidence of the problems posed by a United Nations embargo on fuel and weapons.A1 + +FALLOUT FROM PRETORIA CONLICT +News Analysis: The Inkatha freedom Party's decision not to take part in South Africa's elections will haunt the country and stems from a fundamental difference in ideas of what South Africa should be. A3 + +ECONOMIC CONFUSION IN RUSSIA +The resignation of Russia's best-known economic reformers has led to confusion over the condition of the economy and how to strengthen it, casting a chill over new relations with Western businesses. A9 + +DISPUTE OVER ISRAELI TALKS +Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is embroiled in a dispute with his own party over where the peace talks with Syria and the Palestinians are heading and whether he has been straightforward. A8 + +Another sex scandal involving a British politician. A2 + +The U.S. wants a swift response to Japan, but no trade war. D5 + +Crimea's new leader will hold a referendum on independence. A9 + +Paris Journal: Love, but only with the proper stranger. A4 + +National A10-15 + +REDISTRICTING FACES CHALLENGES +A year after Congressional redistricting brought a record number of minority lawmakers to Washington, new Congressional districts with high concentrations of blacks are facing court challenges that could threaten the new legislators' electoral gains. A1 + +COMPREHENSIVE CARE FOR ELDERLY +New programs for frail elderly people are seeking to weave medical care, home care, social services and case management into a single web of care. A1 + +MILITARY TECHNOLOGY CONVERTED +The beating of swords into plowshares is affecting the world of transportation, where military technology is being applied to an array of new projects. A10 + +DILEMMA FOR CALIFORNIA SCHOOLS +Last month's earthquake raises the question of whether California state universities should spend their limited capital to upgrade or demolish all of their buildings known to be hazards. A10 + +DEFENSE IN CAPITAL CASES +A case in Alabama demonstrates the imperfect legal representation given to poor defendants in capital cases. The extent and adequacy of the defense in trials are more and more becoming issues in appeals of death sentences. A12 + +CHOCOLATE LOVERS NEED NOT FEAR +Millions of Americans assume that the quickest way to a lover's heart is through a box of chocolates, even if it is not the healthiest of gifts. But according to recent studies of chocolate's effects on cholesterol, they need not worry. A1 + +President Clinton returned to his boyhood home in Arkansas. A15 + +Metro Digest B1 + +JOB SAFETY FROM CRIMINALS +With homicide now the leading cause of death on the job in New York City, the crimes are increasingly being viewed as occupational health threats. Employers or others with responsibilities in workplaces are being held accountable. A1 + +Arts/Entertainment C13-18 + +How Ralph Fiennes created a monster for "Schindler's List." C13 + +Rumors of a Beatles reunion. C15 + +Theater: Albee's "Three Tall Women." C13 + +Music: David Johansen at the Bottom Line. C13 + +Karrin Allyson sings. C15 + +Salsa for Valentine's Day. C15 + +Dance: Lucinda Childs Dance Company. C15 + +Books: "John Maynard Keynes, the Economist as Savior."C18 + +National Book Critics Circle awards. C18 + +Television: Critic's Notebook. C16 + +Valentine's Day. C16 + +Obituaries B8 + +Donald Judd, artist. + +Lucius Clay Jr., former Air Force general. + +Neediest Cases B3 + +Business Digest D1 + +Sports C1-11 + +Basketball: Pippen powers the East. C2 + +Wake Forest upsets Duke. C10 + +UMass edges Temple. C10 + +UMass and Temple coaches clash. C10 + +Column: Vecsey on Nancy-Tonya meeting. C7 + +On Pro Basketball C2 + +Golf: Pavin stands tall against Couples. C9 + +Olympics: American wins men's downhill. C1 + +News Analysis on Harding decision.C1 + +U.S. ties France in hockey. C1 + +Norwegian speed skater shatters mark.C4 + +Kennedy makes run at luge record books. C4 + +Editorials/Op-Ed A16-17 + +Editorials + +The emerging school bureaucracy. + +A demeaning travel ban to Cuba. + +Cupid, rider on the storm. + +Two for the Assembly + +Letters + +Anthony Lewis: Shultz on Bosnia. + +William Safire: Sink the clipper chip. + +Suzanne Gordon: Drive-through deliveries. + +Amitai Etzioni: What's wrong? + +Bridge C16 + +Chronicle A15 + +Crossword C18 + +LOAD-DATE: February 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +56 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 14, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +CHRONICLE + +BYLINE: By NADINE BROZAN + +SECTION: Section A; Page 15; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 267 words + +When JOYCE RANDOLPH , the renowned Trixie Norton of "The Honeymooners," and RICHARD I. CHARLES , a retired advertising executive, were married 38 years ago, they barely had time to celebrate, because Miss Randolph had to be back at work shooting the television show the next day. +Today along with some 50 other couples, they will renew their wedding vows in a Valentine's Day ceremony of reaffirmation at the Milleridge Inn in Jericho, L.I. + "We do a lot of weddings here," said BRUCE MURPHY , one of the restaurant's owners, "and we thought it might be nice to give something back." +For the second year in a row, Mr. Murphy called groups for the elderly, church parishes and synagogues on Long Island asking for names of couples over the age of 65 who have been married for at least 35 years. +"Last year, we had 40 couples, this year we will have between 50 and 55, and there are several hundred on a waiting list," Mr. Murphy said the other day. The couples will take part in a nondenominational ceremony, to be followed by a reception, with a five-piece orchestra, given by the restaurant. +Miss Randolph, who will wear a gold lace dress for the occasion and who has been asked to cut the wedding cake, said: "It seems like just a lovely idea. I thought it would be great fun to do this." +For the officiating judge, SEYMOUR J. REISMAN , the village justice in Roslyn Estates, L.I., it will be a welcome departure from his full-time occupation; he is a divorce lawyer with a firm in Garden City. "Because I spend every day taking marriages apart, I am so happy to do this," he said. + +LOAD-DATE: February 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +57 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 15, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Irked by Medicare Limits, Doctors Ask Elderly to Pay Up + +BYLINE: By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1610 words + +A small but growing number of doctors, angry with the Federal Government's limits on what they can charge for treating elderly patients, are finding ways to get around the Medicare rates by having patients pay extra fees, doctors, patients and Government officials say. +The practice, which usually involves doctors' asking their elderly patients to sign contracts that result in added out-of-pocket payments, is drawing scrutiny from the Government and from advocates for the elderly. And Medicare officials have written to some doctors warning them that taking excess payment under contract leaves them open to prosecution, fines and sanctions. + Some of these private contracts stipulate that the patient will forgo Medicare coverage for a particular visit and pay out of pocket a fee set by the doctor. Others hold the patient financially responsible for future services that Medicare deems unnecessary and refuses to cover. Still others require patients to pay separately for services, like phone consultations, that Medicare considers part of the standard fee for office visits. +Doctors say that at a time when Medicare is covering fewer services and when reimbursement rates often run only 75 percent or less of their standard charges, private arrangements are the only way they can afford to treat the elderly. They note that other doctors have dealt with the issue by refusing to see Medicare patients entirely. + +Seen as Strong-Arming + But some advocates for the elderly say the contracts and waivers are a thinly veiled scheme to get more money for doctors and to strong-arm vulnerable elderly patients into payments they are not legally obligated to make. They say that virtually all of these contracts skirt the intent of the Medicare law, and that others are blatantly illegal. +Medicare, the Federal insurance program for those over 65, prohibits doctors from charging more than 15 percent above its established rates and requires them to file Medicare claims for any services for patients covered by the program. Most private contracts are meant to bypass one or both of these requirements, Medicare officials say. +Although no one knows precisely how many doctors are using such contracts, Medicare officials say they are hearing more complaints. +Among the most vocal of the rebelling doctors is Dr. Lois J. Copeland, an internist in Hillsdale, N.J., who has sued Medicare for the right to contract with her patients. "That is a tyrannical system that forbids wealthy citizens to pay more and that's unfair to doctors and patients," she said. "Why should a patient lose the freedom to pay the doctor he wants for service he wants just because he turns 65?" She has private contracts for about 20 percent of the care she gives to elderly patients. +But to critics, the scheme is not about freedom but coercion. They say that elderly patients in search of quality medicine or afraid of losing a trusted doctor may feel they have no choice but to sign. +When a Long Island businessman consulted a specialist for a back problem last year, he balked when he was asked to sign a contract that would hold him personally responsible for doctors' fees, but then relented. +"They said, 'If you don't sign we won't service you,' " said the man who asked that he not be identified for fear of jeopardizing his relationship with other doctors in his small town. "Look, you've been referred to this doctor as the best. You're anxious. You're sick. You'd probably give him your right arm. And you're certainly not going to cause trouble and question him." +Wendy Mariner, professor of health law at Boston University, said: "There is no reason on God's green earth for patients to agree to pay more unless they are worried that their physician is going to refuse to treat them otherwise. In effect, the doctors are saying, 'I reserve the right to charge you whatever I want at any time.' And that's unconscionable." +Since the agreements are generally signed quietly in a doctor's office and kept in his files, the exact number of physicians who use such contracts is unknown. +But both the Health Care Financing Administration, which administers Medicare, and organizations offering advice to the elderly say they believe the practice is rising, particularly in areas like New York and Florida, where the gap between doctors' fees and Medicare rates is large. + +Stricter Limits in Some States + Diane Archer, executive director of the Medicare Beneficiaries Defense Fund in New York, said that in the last two years her organization has received a growing number of complaints from patients about such waivers, a majority from the New York area. She added that the complaints she hears are probably the tip of the iceberg, since many patients do not realize their rights under Medicare or do not report it out of loyalty to their doctors. +The current dispute dates back to 1991, when the Federal Government announced regulations limiting doctors' charges and insurance filing practices, in an effort to hold down costs and prevent price gouging of the elderly. Some states have stricter limits on fees than the Federal stipulations; New York permits doctors to charge only 10 percent more than approved Medicare rates. +Before 1991, many private doctors accepted the Medicare fee and then billed patients the difference between that fee and the doctor's standard rate, which in some cases was two or three times the Medicare price. Having lost this ability, a few physicians now refuse to see patients covered by Medicare. But a number of doctors say they cannot afford to turn away all patients over 65, nor do they want to. +"I could not turn my back on my older patients," said Dr. Copeland, in explaining why she resorted to suing Medicare. Thirty percent of her patients are over 65, and 50 percent of her income is from patients on Medicare, as is typical for internists. + +Doctor's Suit Dismissed + In 1991, Dr. Copeland sued to be allowed to contract privately with patients, arguing that the Medicare Act did not forbid such arrangements. In October 1992, Judge Nicholas Politan of Federal District Court in New Jersey dismissed the case, ruling that the Medicare Act did not necessarily forbid private contracts and the Department of Health and Human Services had not clarified its position, so that the case was not "ripe" for court action. +Dr. Copeland and her allies declared "an absolute victory." But many medical societies, while generally supporting Dr. Copeland's position, still advise doctors to seek legal advice before embarking on contracting plans. +And in June 1993, the Federal Medicare office announced its interpretation of the law: While signing a contract was probably legal, such contracts had no legal force and doctors who tried to recover the added payments in small claims court "may very well violate Federal law." Despite the contracts, doctors could not accept payments above Medicare's limits and would face civil fines if they did. +Denis Garrison, chief of the Medicare Eligibility and Technical Issues Branch of the Health Care Financing Administration, said: "There's a law that limits Medicare charges and another that requires physicians to submit Medicare bills. You can't get out of following laws by signing an agreement; the patient doesn't have the right to waive that." But he said he knew of no doctors who had been prosecuted for signing private contracts, because no complaints had made their way through the Medicare review process. +While some private contracts are intended to circumvent Medicare's charge limits or to rid the doctor of having to submit claims, others are blanket waivers that hold the patients responsible for any and all future claims turned down by Medicare as "unreasonable or unnecessary." +A doctor may hold a patient responsible for services not covered by Medicare only after informing the patient that a specific service, like cosmetic surgery or an extra office visit for a certain condition, is not normally covered. +Contracts that try to hold patients responsible for services normally considered included in payments for office visits, like calling in a prescription or a telephone consultation, can also get doctors into trouble, Medicare officials said. Medicare adds the charge for the phone call to the fee for the office visit, and if the total amount is more than 15 percent above the fee permitted for the office visit, the doctor has violated the law. +Doctors who support the contracts say that Medicare rates do not cover their expenses and they resent subsidizing patients who could well afford to pay. Dr. Richard Swint, a dermatologist in Paris, Tex., files with Medicare for major procedures, like cancer surgery, but has his patients sign contracts to pay him privately a $150 annual fee to cover the rest of their care. He said the $150 was generally lower than the payments he would get from Medicare over a year for each patient, so he said he was not defying Medicare's limiting charges. +Late last year, Dr. Swint received what he characterizes as a "threatening and intimidating" letter from Medicare. Nonetheless, he said, he plans to offer private contracts next year -- for a fixed $175 fee. +Dr. Copeland also continues to write contracts, and she said that while some patients have left, many have been "supportive and grateful" for the option of bypassing Medicare limitations. +Elvira Shepherd, a patient from Washington Township who said she had been turned away by a doctor in North Carolina because he did not take Medicare, said: "I have no problem with Dr. Copeland charging. I'd be delighted to pay." + +LOAD-DATE: February 15, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Doctors irked by Federal restrictions on fees for elderly patients have asked those patients to sign contracts and pay extra fees. Dr. Lois J. Copeland, right, an internist in Hillsdale, N.J., said, "That is a tyrannical system that forbids wealthy citizens to pay more and that's unfair to doctors and patients." Dr. Copeland has lost patients to the contracts, but most remain to bypass Medicare limitations. "I have no problem with Dr. Copeland charging," said Elvira Shepherd, a patient of Dr. Copeland's for 14 years who was turned away by a doctor in North Carolina because he did not take Medicare. (Photographs by Norman Y. Lono for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +58 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 15, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +INSIDE + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 115 words + +Health Plan and Retirees +The Clinton health plan's proposal to cover early retirees is in growing jeopardy because of troublesome financial projections. Page A17. + +Skirting Medicare Rate Caps + A growing number of doctors, angry at Medicare's limits on charges for treating the elderly, are finding ways to get around the rates. Page B1. + +Dead End on the Digital Path + Telephone companies are cutting jobs by the tens of thousands and many of those laid off will have trouble finding work. Page D1. + +Influential Israeli Indicted + A former Ambassador to the United States who heads Israel's powerful immigration program was charged with credit card fraud. Page A3. + + +LOAD-DATE: February 15, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +59 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 16, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Cabinet Officers Assail Balanced-Budget Bill + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 756 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 15 + +Jabbing at every exposed political nerve it could find, the Clinton Administration told Congress today that a Federal balanced-budget amendment would imperil the national defense, increase crime, cheat veterans, squeeze the elderly and weaken the economy. +Analyzing how cuts would affect the economy and their departments, five Cabinet officers testified today against a proposed amendment that would require the Federal budget to be balanced, probably by the year 2001. The Senate plans to begin debating the measure next Tuesday, and neither side is sure how the vote will go. + The Cabinet officers appeared before Senator Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who heads the Appropriations Committee and is the amendment's staunchest enemy. He variously called the amendment "seductive," "simplistic," "this monstrosity" and "this nefarious proposal." +Senator Paul Simon, Democrat of Illinois, who is the amendment's chief sponsor, sought to counter Mr. Byrd's display with a hearing of his own. He told the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, which he heads, that "no one can study the past 25 years of successive deficits without recognizing that there has been governmental abuse that must be halted." + +Injection of Discipline + Mr. Simon's leading witness was Paul E. Tsongas, the former Massachusetts Senator and Presidential contender, who said the amendment was a necessary "mechanism of discipline" to make Congress undertake the sacrifices required to balance the budget. +"This deficit is all too real, this debt all too crippling," Mr. Tsongas said. "Only a balanced budget amendment can inject the discipline to achieve this indispensable end." +A two-thirds vote, or 67 if all senators vote, is required to pass a Constitutional amendment. The House is expected to take the measure up later this year. If both chambers pass it with two-thirds majorities, then it would become part of the Constitution if approved within seven years by the legislatures of 38 states. +The Administration and Mr. Byrd are working to mobilize opposition to the proposal, which does not specify how the budget should be balanced. That gives different supporters the chance to offer different solutions, or none at all, which was what Senator Don Nickles, Republican of Oklahoma, offered today when Mr. Byrd asked him how he would eliminate the current fiscal year's deficit, now about $220 billion. + +Grim Pictures + On Monday at the White House, Administration officials told reporters of their opposition to the proposal. Today, the Administration took the battle to Capitol Hill, with Leon E. Panetta, director of the Office of Management and Budget, painting a grim picture of the uncertainties the amendment would thrust on the economy and four other Cabinet heads outlining probable cuts in their departments. Each assumed that their departments would have to share in spending cuts in proportion to how much they now spend. +Defense Secretary William J. Perry outlined more troop cuts, of 60,000 to 270,000, listed weapons that would have to be abandoned and said the amendment would inject "great uncertainty, and, I do not think it is hyperbole to say, chaos, into our defense planning." +Attorney General Janet Reno asserted that the amendment would undermine the Justice Department's ability to fight violence and that its passage would lead to "gutting the heart and soul of the Senate-passed crime bill." +She said that with such an amendment, prison spending would be reduced and violent offenders released to prevent crowding. +Jesse Brown, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, predicted that 20 Veterans Administration hospitals would be closed, burial in national cemeteries denied to 12,000 veterans a year, and the average annual compensation paid to veterans with service-related disabilities reduced to $4,968 from $5,602. +Donna E. Shalala, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, warned that the amendment, which permits deficit spending but only with three-fifths votes in both houses, would force the deepest cuts in "safety net" programs when they were needed most, in a recession. +In a similar vein, Mr. Panetta said that by forbidding any lift to the economy with an infusion of Government spending during a recession, "we would be doing exactly the wrong thing." +Chiding the amendment's supporters for requiring a three-fifths majority to allow deficit spending, Mr. Panetta asked, "Why can't they get a majority to tell us how they would cut the budget?" + +LOAD-DATE: February 16, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +60 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 16, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Personal Health + +BYLINE: By Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section C; Page 12; Column 5; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1154 words + +THERE is one incontrovertible fact of life: sooner or later it comes to an end. As societal conditions and medical care change through the decades, the causes of death change with them. +In the early part of this century, infectious diseases were leading causes of death. But environmental controls, vaccines and antibiotics brought most deadly infections to their knees and permitted a sharp increase in life expectancy. + Now, with Americans living about 30 years longer than they did in 1900, chronic diseases, especially cardiovascular diseases and cancer, have become the leading killers. +Here too some changes are taking place. An ever-widening effort to reduce the number of Americans at high risk for developing heart and other blood vessel diseases has resulted in a 40 percent decline in the cardiovascular death rate since 1968. Americans today are smoking less, eating less fat and exercising more. Those with high blood pressure are far more likely to have it under medical control, and those with high cholesterol levels are now more likely to be trying to reduce them. +But while fewer people are developing and dying of heart disease and stroke, more people are getting cancer and succumbing to cancer. This is in part a result of the aging of the population. Americans are now living long enough to get a disease that disproportionately strikes the elderly. It is also largely a consequence of changes in living habits like smoking and diet, and partly a result of occupational exposures and possibly exposure to environmental pollutants. +A report last week in The Journal of the American Medical Association noted that white men and women born in the 1940's were more likely to develop cancer, including cancers not related to smoking, than were their grandparents. Even when the data were adjusted for age and smoking-related cancers were disregarded, cancer was on the rise in the 15 years from 1973 through 1987, the report said. +The researchers, Dr. Devra Lee Davis of the Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. David G. Hoel of the Medical University of South Carolina and Dr. Gregg E. Dinse of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, suggested that exposure to environmental pollutants, like pesticides, engine exhaust and chemicals in the air and water, might be responsible for the rise in cancers. +No one is challenging the suggestion that environmental carcinogens warrant further study. Nor are they quibbling with the researchers' data, which were based on the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results Program. This program gathers reasonably reliable statistics on the incidence of cancer and mortality from nine regions of the country that combined represent 10 percent of the population. But many cancer experts do challenge the researchers' interpretations of their findings. + +Matter of Perspective + Analyses of cancer trends typically result in explanations that reflect the particular professional bent of those making the analysis. Thus, diagnosticians are likely to see rises in breast cancer cases as reflecting the increasing use of mammography and biopsy, while preventive medicine specialists point to increases in dietary fat and endocrinologists suspect the use of contraceptive or menopausal hormones. +And so with this newest analysis of cancer trends, which the researchers suggested may be related to as yet unidentified environmental exposures to cancer-causing agents, other experts offer other explanations, which they say are more strongly based on experimental studies and epidemiological observations. +But first there is a dispute over classification of several important cancers. The journal authors listed only five cancers as related to smoking: cancers of the lung, larynx, pharynx, mouth and esophagus. +In an accompanying editorial, however, Dr. Anthony B. Miller, a specialist in preventive medicine at the University of Toronto, pointed out that cancers of the bladder, kidney, pancreas and possibly the stomach and cervix had been directly linked to smoking as well. And, according to two reports published this month in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, smoking is also an important factor in cancer of the colon, doubling the risk about 35 years after a person's smoking habit became well-established. +Several other cancers that have become more common are also probably unrelated to exposure to carcinogens. For example, improvements in diagnostic techniques have contributed to the rise in reported cases of brain cancers, Dr. Miller noted, and AIDS has resulted in an increase in non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. +As for two of the most common cancers, Dr. Clark Heath, vice president for epidemiology and statistics at the American Cancer Society, said in an interview that "early diagnosis almost entirely accounts for the increased incidence of breast cancer and prostate cancer in recent years." He added that figures for these two cancers could easily skew the data and make it appear as if overall cancer incidence is rising. At this point, he said, there is no reason to think that environmental exposures account for more than 5 to 10 percent of cancers, an estimate made in 1981. + +Diet and Smoking + Dr. Ernst Wynder, president of the American Health Foundation, has another perspective. "If I were to blame anything for the modest increase in breast cancer that is not related to better detection, I'd point to dietary fat, particularly the polyunsaturated fatty acids that are known to increase mammary cancers in laboratory animals," he said. In addition to breast cancer, Dr. Wynder said, cancers of the ovary, endometrium and prostate also "seem to have a powerful dietary fat component." Dietary fat has also been linked to an increased risk of developing colon cancer and smoking-induced lung cancer. +Dr. Peter Greenwald, director of the National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Prevention and Control, agreed. "While you cannot rule out environmental factors, the major leads are dietary factors and early detection," he said. "A strong case cannot be made for singling out environmental contaminants as a driving force" in rising cancer rates, he concluded. +One of the most telling findings of the new analysis is that while the very high rates of smoking-related cancers among American men have begun to decline, among younger women they have risen to five to six times the rates seen in women born before the turn of the century. +Dr. Miller and the researchers concluded that smoking "is the major factor to control" in reducing cancer incidence and deaths. "We probably know enough already to prevent more than half of all cancers," Dr. Miller asserted. The major stumbling block, he wrote, is putting this knowledge into effect by getting people to quit smoking and preventing young people from taking up this lethal and costly habit. + +LOAD-DATE: February 16, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +61 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 17, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO DIGEST + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 456 words + + +CLINTONS PITCH HEALTH PLAN TO ELDERLY +Speaking at a forum in Edison, N.J., President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, began an aggressive effort to pitch their health-care proposal to older Americans, whose backing of the plan has been more tepid than expected. A20. + +NEW YORK CITY + +DEFENDANT WAS DUPE, HIS LAWYER SAYS +The lawyer for one of the four men on trial in the World Trade Center case admitted for the first time that there was a terrorist bombing plot and that his client was involved in it -- but only as an unwitting dupe. A1. + +PLAN WOULD PLACE E.M.S. IN FIREHOUSES +The Giuliani administration's plans to merge the Emergency Medical Service into the Fire Department will involve some crews' operating out of firehouses, top city officials said. B3. + +FOES OF POLICE MERGER DOUBT SAVINGS +Opponents of a Giuliani administration plan to merge the city's three police departments said it would not result in much savings and could diminish police protection. B3. + +Four tax preparers were charged with helping to file fraudulent refund requests. B3. + +A man who was beaten by police officers won a $350,000 settlement from New York City. B4. + +At City Hall, Mayor Giuliani praised a group of workers for their efforts in clearing snow, but more serious matters soon emerged. B9. + +Broadway theater puts $2.3 billion a year in New York's economy, the Port Authority said. C17. + +REGION + +CUOMO PUSHES MEDICAID PLAN +Governor Cuomo renewed his push for a complex plan to ease the large and growing costs of Medicaid on New York City and county governments and offered to sweeten the deal with more money sooner from the state. A1. + +THE THAW MAY BE PAINFUL, TOO +The sun is shining, but that does not mean the region's weather troubles are over. In fact, if the weather gets too warm too fast, the troubles may just be beginning. B8. + +LAUGHING ROBBER HOLDS A CHILD HOSTAGE + +A laughing gunman held a 2-year-old girl hostage as her mother obeyed his demands and withdrew money from an automatic teller machine, the Nassau County police said. B6. + +A group of Democratic state Senators said that seven Republican Senators violated internal Senate rules in 1992. B6. + +The Justice Department has accused Albany's bar examination board of bias against the disabled in the test to become lawyers. B4. + +Business is expanding for a New Jersey office that specializes in mediating complex legal disputes. B6. + +Salvatore Avellino Jr. will plead guilty in a murder conspiracy in Long Island's private garbage-collection business, his lawyer said. B2. + +The first death sentence under Connecticut's 1980 capital punishment law was appealed. B5. + +Chronicle B4 + +LOAD-DATE: February 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "PULSE: Office Rent" shows average annual asking rent for Downtown, Midtown South, and Avenue of Americas, in dollars per square foot, during December 1993. Also shown is the percentage change from December 1992. (Source: Edward S. Gordon Company) + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +62 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 17, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Clintons Asking Elderly To Support Health Plan + +BYLINE: By DOUGLAS JEHL, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1115 words + +DATELINE: EDISON, N.J., Feb. 16 + +President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, began an aggressive effort today to pitch their health-care proposal to older Americans, whose backing of the plan to overhaul the existing system has been more tepid than expected. +Unlike either of its main rival plans, the Clintons' proposal would extend current Medicare coverage to provide long-term care and prescription drugs, and Mr. Clinton called attention to that distinction today in appealing for support from the elderly. + "The time has come to be counted, to stand up, to take a stand and to fight with us if you want to get something done," the President said at a forum sponsored by the American Association of Retired Persons. "This is a fight, and if you want it, you're going to want to have to fight for it." +But the one-two salesmanship by the President and the First Lady to 2,000 older Americans at Middlesex Community College here this afternoon reflected a recognition by the White House of the misgivings still felt by the elderly -- even though the plan's benefits to them are more evident than for most other segments of the population. + +No Formal Endorsement + The 32-million-member association has been an important supporter of the President's plan, though it has not formally endorsed it. A survey done for the group last month found that more than half of Americans 50 years and older either opposed the Clinton plan or did not know whether to support it, and White House officials concede that the plan stands little chance in Congress unless the elderly give it strong support. +The Administration is not taking any group's support for granted, especially after several business groups recently rejected Mr. Clinton's plan despite provisions in it to benefit big corporations. +In beginning to fight back harder against critics of the plan, Mr. Clinton took his first swipe today at the "Harry and Louise" television commercials sponsored by the insurance industry. Deriding the commercial's characters as actors, the President introduced four New Jersey residents who had written to the White House about their health problems, and he said their experiences reinforced his argument that the Medicare system is inadequate. +"These are people you will never see in television ads," Mr. Clinton said. "But they are real people with real problems that need to be addressed. We want to talk about real people and real medical problems and not actors who are paid to act a certain way to promote a special interest." + +Heartened by Speech + After the speech, one of the letter writers, Helen Kallos of Fort Lee, seemed heartened. +"I feel pretty good he's going to do something about it," she said of her concern about current restrictions that allow Medicare to pay for her 82-year-old mother, bedridden with arthritis, to stay in a nursing home but do not allow payment of $65 a day for home health care. "He seems sincere." +Arthur Paranto, a 69-year-old retired Gloucester County social service worker, said the President's speech encouraged him in his fight to get Federal help to pay his $1,200-a-year prescription bill. +"I don't represent just me in this," Mr. Paranto said. "I know millions of others are in the same boat." +Today's joint appearance by the Clintons was their first at a health care event since Oct. 28. The association paid for a satellite link that made the proceedings available to television stations around the country, and White House officials hoped that it would be picked up in regions with large numbers of elderly people. +With White House aides concerned that too much attention has been focused on the $124 billion in Medicare cuts proposed in the Clinton plan, the President sought today to declare that his proposal was the only one in which those savings would be used to improve health care for the elderly. +The President's plan would create a prescription drug benefit, under which those eligible for Medicare would pay an extra $8 a month, and in return the Government would pay for most of their medications, after a $250 deductible. It would also provide for long-term care for those Americans who need help with daily tasks like eating, dressing and bathing. +Neither the rival plan sponsored by Representative Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee, nor the one by Senator John H. Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, would extend those benefits. While Mr. Clinton did not mention those plans by name today, the traveling White House released a testimonial from Senior Watch, a service of the Families USA Foundation, that portrayed the Clintons' plan as stacking up favorably against the two rivals. + +Benefits for Older People + Speaking in the college's gymnasium this afternoon, Mr. Clinton said, "We are the only plan that offers any help for long-term care and for prescription drugs, and I would respectfully suggest that the A.A.R.P. ought to be for the only plan that helps you, otherwise the interest groups will convince Congress that you don't really care, and you will lose these parts of the plan." +A plan sponsored by Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington, would impose a Government-administered health care system like Canada's, and White House officials acknowledged after Mr. Clinton's speech that the McDermott plan, too, would provide for long-term care. A spokesman, Jeffery Eller, described Mr. Clinton's failure to mention the McDermott plan as inadvertent. +Mr. Clinton also met briefly at Middlesex College with former Gov. Jim Florio to discuss how he might assist in the health care campaign. White House officials said Mr. Florio, who is now practicing law, did not want an Administration job but had sent word that he wanted to help any way he could. +Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican, also attended the forum and met with reporters afterward to the evident dismay of aides to Mr. Clinton, one of whom could be heard berating others for letting that happen at a White House event. + +Trying to Get Personal + By calling attention to the four New Jersey residents, whose letters were released by Mr. Clinton's aides, the White House sought to shift the focus of the health care debate from the abstract to the poignantly personal, where strategists say the Administration's arguments are most effective. +In one letter, Margaret Meding, whose husband has Parkinson's disease, described the troubles they face because neither her private insurance nor his Medicare will cover long-term care. +"One doesn't choose one's illness," Mrs. Meding, of Cedar Grove, wrote to Mrs. Clinton. "I lie awake some nights worrying about what lies ahead and beseech you to remember us in your plans." + +LOAD-DATE: February 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, yesterday at Middlesex Community College in Edison, N.J. (Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +63 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 18, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Clinton Tries to Win Over the Elderly With a Warning on Medicare + +BYLINE: By GWEN IFILL, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 622 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 17 + +Toughening his appeal to older Americans, President Clinton said today that critics of his health care plan and supporters of a balanced-budget amendment were trying to rob Medicare to pay for their goals. +At a White House brunch with leaders of groups that represent older Americans, the President took aim at Congress, where critics of his health care plan are flourishing and proponents of a balanced-budget amendment are pushing for a vote. + "Congress comes back next week and will take up the balanced-budget amendment," Mr. Clinton said. "It also will take money from Medicare without doing anything to strengthen the health care security of senior citizens. +"Make no mistake about it. Right now in Congress, there are people who represent interests who want to use Medicare as a sort of a bank to pay for other people's health care, to bring down the deficit, to do other things that have nothing to do with the purpose for which Medicare was paid in the first place." +The American Association of Retired Persons, which has not formally endorsed the President's approach, has nevertheless worked with the White House to disseminate the Clinton view on both issues. +Mr. Clinton, arguing against the balanced-budget measure, maintained that he had reduced the rate of increase in the budget deficit in a responsible manner that makes an across-the-board constitutional amendment unnecessary. He said the amendment would force Government to scale back needed social programs. +Abandoning the reasonable-people-can-disagree approach that typifies much of the White House response to proposals it opposes, White House officials have lashed out at the proposed budget measure and stepped up their criticism of competing health care proposals. +The White House scare approach could be effective. John Rother, the legislative director for the American Association of Retired People, said Mr. Clinton must use strong language to cut through the confusion now surrounding his health care plan. + +People Need Reassurance + "If people think Clinton's plan will somehow threaten Medicare, the President has to take that on right away," Mr. Rother said. "None of the other messages are going to get through until people are reassured on that point." +In many cases, the White House is battling members who support it on one measure but not the other. Senator Paul Simon, Democrat of Illinois, who is a sponsor of the balanced-budget measure, is also a co-sponsor of Mr. Clinton's health plan. He said the two issues were not necessarily incompatible. +"The reality is, the health care plan we have has to be on a pay-as-you-go basis," Mr. Simon said. "There's no reason we can't have a balanced budget as well as a healthier citizenry." +Mr. Clinton and his aides disagree with Mr. Simon on that point. +"We have demonstrated with our budgets that you can reduce the deficit and still be fair to older Americans," Mr. Clinton said. + +First Lady Speaks Out + Hillary Rodham Clinton also spoke out on behalf of the health care plan for a second consecutive day today, addressing scientists gathered at the National Insititutes of Health in Bethesda. +Mrs. Clinton said that the plan the Administration had proposed would do more to support academic health centers and finance ambitious research that the alternatives that have been presented in Congress. +"As scientists, you are well schooled in the art of perseverance," she said. "You know what patience and fortitude it takes to solve the riddles of disease and to unlock the mysteries of nature and the universe. You know how important it is to push ahead until you do succeed. Well, that is exactly the attitude we take with us into this health care debate." + +LOAD-DATE: February 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: President Clinton talking about health care and the budget with leaders of groups for older Americans yesterday at a White House brunch. (Paul Hosefros/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +64 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 18, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Glimmer of Spring: Flu Season Is Waning + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 207 words + +DATELINE: ATLANTA, Feb. 17 + +This winter's flu season is winding down, Federal health officials say. +With the week that ended Feb. 5, the number of states with widespread outbreaks of influenza dropped to 6 from 13 the week before, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention here. + "We're not sure when the peak was, probably in early January," said Nancy Arden, the centers' chief of influenza epidemiology. There is no way to know how much longer the flu season will last, she said. +The six states that reported widespread outbreaks were Alaska, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia, though the flu was losing its grip in those states as well. +Flu outbreaks usually do not occur until December or January. This season got off to an early start and was dominated by cases of the type A Beijing strain, which is particularly threatening to the elderly and the very young. +The centers does not yet have the final number of flu cases and deaths for this season but it said that fewer people than projected had contracted the flu. +Many nursing homes reported that 95 percent of their residents had been vaccinated. This was the first flu season that Medicare paid for the shot. Many large companies provide flu shots for employees. + +LOAD-DATE: February 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +65 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 18, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Abroad at Home; +Political Crime + +BYLINE: By ANTHONY LEWIS + +SECTION: Section A; Page 27; Column 2; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 705 words + +DATELINE: BOSTON + +At the urging of President Clinton and many other politicians of both parties, the United States is about to embark on a remarkable new social program. It is to house, feed and provide geriatric support services for elderly Americans who have led worthless, harmful lives. +That will be one result of "three strikes, you're out," the much-touted proposal to put criminals away for life after a third violent felony. It would make state and Federal prisons hold increasing numbers of men past the age of violence, living on into their 80's and 90's. + If the Federal Government and the states considering the idea go ahead with it, the cost will be enormous. Philip Heymann, who has just left the job of Deputy Attorney General, estimates that it will cost between $600,000 and $700,000 to keep one person in prison for life after age 50, when the statistics show that criminal careers run down. +Mr. Heymann, speaking out after he returned to private life, said what most students of the crime problem privately believe: The three-strikes proposal and much else in the crime bill passed by the Senate will do little if anything to reduce violent crime. +"It's feeling good by appearing to be tough," Mr. Heymann said on ABC's "Nightline." Ted Koppel, who is usually so wise an interviewer, sneered at Mr. Heymann as "a lousy politician." Telling the truth about the phoniness of much crime legislation risks sneers, and that is why few have the courage to do it. +Politicians produce tough-looking remedies for crime because that is what voters want. The public is right to be angry and fearful about crime. Though statistics do not show a recent rise in violence, people are aware of drive-by shootings, the murder of children and other random horrors. They want to be tough: longer sentences, more prisons, boot camps. But the question is whether that kind of toughness will reduce violence. +The United States has more prisoners per capita than any other country: 455 per 100,000. That is 10 times the rate in Japan. There are almost one million Americans in prison today, three times the number in 1990. +The number of prisoners is so large, and growing so rapidly, for two main reasons. This country imposes penal sentences for minor drug offenses. And in recent years Congress and some states have imposed mandatory minimum sentences, without parole, for a number of crimes. +We tend to think of people who are sent to prison as depraved and brutal. Many, probably most, are in fact nonviolent offenders. About 20 percent of Federal prisoners are drug offenders with no prior record, no violence and no connection with any big drug operation. +Consider the case of Joel Proyect, a lawyer in upstate New York, former president of the Sullivan County Bar Association. He grew marijuana plants at his place in the country. He was not a dealer, not a seller, just a user of pot. He is now serving a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in Federal prison. +Joel Proyect was wrong to violate the law. But can it conceivably benefit our society to keep him in prison for five years for growing marijuana plants? And there are many thousands like him. +This country needs to reduce its prison population. It needs to get away from mandatory minimum sentences. Janet Reno knew that and said so before she became Attorney General. But the Clinton White House, determined to make the President look tough on crime, has evidently muzzled her. +The Senate crime bill would cost upwards of $22 billion. That kind of money would make a difference in a serious effort to deter violent crime, but the Senate bill is not that. It is a rag-bag of politicians' gestures, such as turning local offenses into Federal crimes, that will do nothing except waste money and frustrate citizens concerned about crime. +The saddest thing about the political posturing over crime is that it turns us back toward remedies proved useless: more prisons, longer fixed sentences and the like. The politicians, from President Clinton down, are determined not to let a new thought on drug policy or the causes of crime enter our failed system. +A headline in The Economist of London put it exactly: "Three strikes, you're hoodwinked." + +LOAD-DATE: February 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +66 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 19, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Oregon Starts to Extend Health Care + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL JANOFSKY, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 6; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1178 words + +DATELINE: PORTLAND, Ore., Feb. 17 + +A woman stood up and asked, If someone makes absolutely no money, how could she possibly prove that her income was below the Federal poverty line to qualify for free medical insurance. +A man wanted to know if the cost of an operation that is not covered by insurance could be covered if the condition is discovered during a surgical procedure that does qualify for reimbursement. + "What about periodontal costs?" an older man called out. +The questions continued for an hour one night last week as two state administrators explained Oregon's new health care plan at a center for the elderly in Tigard, a suburb south of here. Many people listened with worried expressions. + +Questions on Ability to Pay + After years of dispute, Oregon is finally beginning to carry out an ambitious plan to extend health coverage to all residents, and the people at the Tigard Senior Center were some of the intended beneficiaries. In the first step, which took effect on Feb. 1, Oregon became the first state to extend Medicaid coverage, care paid for by the state and Federal governments, to most residents below the poverty line. +But serious questions are already being raised about the state's ability to pay for the new services and its political will to extend insurance to all. +The next step toward universal coverage is to require all employers to contribute toward health insurance, but that has been resisted by small-business owners, and the mandate has been put off until 1998. +Oregon's original idea was to help pay for the expanded coverage of poor people by eliminating payments for treatments deemed low in benefit, a step toward rationing that drew widespread criticism. In the end, only the most marginal of medical services were eliminated, saving little money, and the State Legislature had to come up with $65 million at a time of acute financial strain. + +Difficult Decisions Ahead + In coming years, unless it is bailed out by a new national health program, the state will either have to approve large additional outlays for health coverage or take the politically explosive step of scaling back the treatments it covers under Medicaid, denying medically useful care. +The five-year experiment guarantees coverage to all Oregonians whose income is under the Federal poverty level but too high to qualify for the existing Medicaid program. The estimated Federal poverty level for a family of four in 1993 was an annual income of $14,764. +The focus of most questions in Tigard last week was the list of covered services. The administrators' answers allayed enough anxieties to cause a near stampede when the audience was invited to fill out application forms. +"This is wonderful," said Janet Wieneke, 36, an unemployed radiation therapist. "Now, I've got no insurance and it's real scary. With every ache or pain, you think this is it. I could lose everything I own." +State officials estimate that as many as 120,000 of the 479,000 Oregonians without health coverage could qualify for the expanded Medicaid program. Applicants need to meet the poverty-line requirement for only a month to qualify for six months of coverage. +In formulating the Oregon plan, which provides a choice among 22 health maintenance organizations, a state panel produced a list of 696 health conditions and treatments, ranking them on a cost-benefit basis. After public hearings and negotiations with Washington, the state agreed to cover the first 565. + +Extent of Coverage + The plan provides general medical and dental coverage, with no stipulations for pre-existing conditions, and covers the entire cost of prescriptions. The conditions excluded from coverage are those that are not deemed to be serious enough to require treatment, like common colds, flu, mild food poisoning, sprains, cosmetic procedures and experimental treatments for diseases in advanced stages. +The program was approved for the 17 months through June 30, 1995, with financing of $20 million from the state's general fund and a gradual increase on cigarette taxes that is expected to produce $45 million. +But with the new plan scheduled to absorb all those who remain under the standard Medicaid plan by Jan. 1, 1995, and with benefits expanding to include mental health and chemical dependency treatment, officials are predicting that costs could rise to as much as $200 million over the next two-year period. With the cigarette tax increase expiring, it remains unclear where the money would come from in a state that prides itself on having no sales tax. +The entire Oregon plan could be folded into whatever national program is adopted by the Federal Government. "Which would be fine with me," said John Kitzhaber, a former state legislator who helped draw up the state's plan. +Mr. Kitzhaber, a Democratic candidate for governor, said the plan that went into effect two weeks ago differed from his original concept in one major area: the timing of the requirement that all employers offer health insurance. The original plan would have required employers to cover all workers by July 1993. For companies with 25 employees and more, the deadline was pushed back to July 1995, then to March 31, 1997. Companies with fewer than 25 workers were given until Jan. 1, 1998, to comply. + +Concern on Rationing + Advocates for the poor are concerned that the delay, combined with the possibility that health care costs will continue to rise in the short term, will force the state to begin cutting back on medical services that are covered, causing the dreaded rationing. +"Because Oregon has done nothing to control costs, there is only one way they will respond: move the benefit line," said Ellen Pinney, the executive director of the Oregon Health Action Campaign. But when the Federal Government approved the Medicaid experiment last year, it banned a reduction in services for two years, and required Federal permission for three years after that. What will happen if the state cannot come up with the required money is unclear. +In the past two weeks, the response to the plan around the state has been overwhelming, health officials say. Calls to an information number have far exceeded early projections of 5,000 a month, said Hersh Crawford, the assistant director of the state's medical assistance program. "The reality has been, we're getting 3,500 to 4,000 a day," he said. +Many of the 200 community meetings, like the one in Tigard, have attracted as many as 150 people at a time. +For people like John Oliphant, 26, an unemployed former marine who is now studying criminal justice at a local community college, the plan offers new hope. After his wife, Rae, was involved in an automobile accident, he said he called the health plan's information line and was told that her medical bills would be covered. He came to the Tigard center to enroll. +"When I called, they told me I would qualify, but I'm still a little skeptical," Mr. Oliphant said. "I know this is helpful. But I'll feel a lot better when my wife goes to the doctor and it's all paid for." + +LOAD-DATE: February 19, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Oregon residents examining material on the state's plan to extend health coverage at an informational meeting last week at a center for the elderly in Tigard, a suburb of Portland. (Don Ryan for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +67 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 20, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ART; +Redefining 'Immigrant' In the Bronx + +BYLINE: By MELINDA HENNEBERGER + +SECTION: Section 2; Page 32; Column 1; Arts & Leisure Desk + +LENGTH: 922 words + +THE SOUTH BRONX STUDIO OF the Peruvian artist Kukuli Velarde is filled with terra-cotta figures of concupiscent cupids, Indians impaled on crosses, and altars to her own saint: the long-suffering Latin American wife, her heart pierced with nails and her face covered by a smiling mask with the Anglo features that the saint's husband prefers. +"I decided it's better to be dramatic in my work and not in my life," Ms. Velarde says, pouring mugs of strong coffee in her adjoining apartment. On this point she is not convincing. It isn't every artist, after all, who has had her work in clay, the material used by her ancestors, approved by Mother Earth, speaking through an Incan priest. ("Maybe it wasn't true," she says, smiling, "but it was a nice ceremony anyway.") + But like others of the 30 artists whose work is displayed in "Beyond the Borders: Art by Recent Immigrants," an exhibition that opened on Friday at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, she finds that the experience of immigration has transformed her work in unexpected ways. +Ms. Velarde, 31, came to the United States as a refugee from a broken love affair, but stayed on to mine the themes of her own culture with a freer hand, irreverently reinterpreting the pre-Columbian and folk art of her country in works like a "First Love," a portrait with two faces -- both of them hers -- one of a naive romantic, the other of a broken-hearted cynic. +From a distance, she said, the "colonized" mentality of a Latin American yearning to be American or European has become clearer to her, and she has become all the more Peruvian in her art. At the same time, she says, it is easier for her as an expatriate to criticize Latin American history. +Artistic freedom was a more concrete concern for Emilya Dunayets, a Ukrainian artist. She says that she and her husband, Ilya Zomb, a painter, were unable to work freely under the Soviet regime, and they left in 1989. +In their Brooklyn apartment, a painting that is a takeoff on the Russian matryoshka dolls that fit one inside of the other shows her niece as a grown woman, holding hands with progressively younger versions of herself. The light dims over the woman as she ages, "heading to the darkness of old age," she said, "and the natural depression that makes old people say everything was better before." +Compared to her earlier work, she said, this piece is cheerful. "In Russia we were always humiliated. Because we are Jewish everybody could say bad words to us, and here nobody cares," said Ms. Dunayets, who is 33. "I feel younger, and all my works, they got color. Before, in Russia, I had mostly dark work. Now look at this red!" +Her earlier work shows funeral scenes of friends entombed, dead to art and to life because they are unable to work as artists. In one new piece -- a mixed-media work with acrylic paint and colored pencils -- a friend in a (red!) wedding gown and several would-be grooms each stand alone in a forest, waiting for the perfect mates that have yet to appear. +"In New York I got kind of a new attitude, and we think of New York as our real home," she said. "It's like I can do everything." +Shirin Neshat, who left Iran at age 16, when she was sent to California to study, discovered the source of her art not in leaving her country but in returning there for a visit. In 1990, she returned to Iran for the first time in 16 years, and found a "completely new country." She was shocked at the treatment of women, but also surprised to find beauty and meaning in the veils they were now compelled to wear. She became intensely interested in veiling, both as a metaphor and as a physical boundary, and the search for Iranian identity now drives her work -- much of it photographs of herself in the traditional veils. +"Some feel it frees a woman because it makes men look at them as who they are rather than as a sex object," she said, "but why should it be a woman's problem that men cannot control their sexuality?" +The question remains unanswered for her, the subject not yet fully explored. +"In some ways I began doing this work not to do a body of work but to answer questions for myself," she said. Her medium became her own body, "because I felt in many ways the only thing I had was myself: I exist and I'm from there." +Some of her photographs feature those parts of the body that can be exposed in Iran -- the eyes, the hands and the feet, covered with the writings of Iranian women. Her newest work -- gun barrels included -- also explores the history of Iranian women in the military. Americans, she said, often assume that her work is simple criticism of a repressive government in her country. "People thought that me wearing a veil was about "Get this off! I want to be naked,' but it was just the opposite. It was saying there is beautiful feminine symbolism that exists in Islam." +Like others in the show, Ms. Neshat said she was initially skittish about the entire concept of "immigrant art." The Bronx Museum curators themselves had long discussions about how to present the work without marginalizing it. +But Betti-Sue Hertz, guest curator of the exhibition, said she sees the artists as "cultural mediators" between their countries and this country, moving back and forth between two or more cultures in a way that is actually redefining the whole idea of immigration. +"The word immigrant itself is in jeopardy. The notion is becoming problematic in our post-modern reality," she said. "But this exhibit is about coming to the end of that word." + +LOAD-DATE: February 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Kukuli Velarde in her studio with "First Love," a self-portrait--Distance has made her more Peruvian in her art. (Steve Hart for The New York Times); "Women of Allah," by Shirin Neshat, from Iran -- Exploring Iranian women's history in the military, as well as their writings. (Cindy Preston) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +68 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 20, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Q and A + +SECTION: Section 10; Page 10; Column 6; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 517 words + + +Homeowners And Home Seekers + +Q. I have often heard about organizations that profess to match home seekers with homeowners and that cater mainly to retirees. I am a retiree looking to share a home that's now too big for its present owner, another retiree. Is there any organization or service that I can contact? . . . Harold Blau, Glen Oaks, Queens + +A. For older people who remain independent but are not in a position to buy or rent by themselves, home sharing has indeed become an option in recent years. +In New York City, there are several nonprofit agencies that provide home-sharing information. Call the New York City Department for the Aging at (212) 442-1000 for referrals. +There is also a program, Project Share, operated by the Family Service Association and financed by the Nassau County Department of Senior Citizen Affairs, that matches home seekers with home and apartment providers. For information, call (516) 292-1300. + +A Mentally Ill Co-op Resident + +Q. For some time now, there has been an offensive odor coming from the apartment next door in my co-op apartment. The woman who lives there is mentally ill and her parents own the apartment. +I have contacted the city's Protective Services for Adults, the Mobile Crisis Unit and my Councilman, but I have had no results. I also have a pending civil suit against the woman's parents. +The co-op board, meanwhile, has been reluctant to take action for damages or dispossession. It did try to evict the woman several years ago, but was unsuccessful. +What are my options? I don't want to stop paying my maintenance because I don't want to get sued by the board. I also don't want to sue the board because of the legal expenses and possible consequences of alienating the board members. . . . Jennifer Skopp, Manhattan + +A. According to Arthur Weinstein, a Manhattan lawyer, your situation is one of the most difficult issues that can ever affect a co-op, largely because the courts are reluctant to take action that could result in placing a homeless person on the streets of New York. +"Suits can be brought against both the occupants and the parents, but it is not clear that the results will be effective," Mr. Weinstein said. "The courts are reluctant to evict, make an involuntary commitment or impose judgments that the defendant cannot pay." +He added that the co-op board could very likely be taking all courses of reasonable action but would still not be able to solve your problem. +"Therefore, you would not be able to claim negligence on the board's behalf because they are taking all the reasonable steps to deal with the problem," Mr. Weinstein said. +He added that occasionally city social service agencies have sent social workers, who provide housekeeping, into apartments occupied by those who cannot care for themselves. +"That solution, called home-care services, has been the most effective that we have seen," Mr. Weinstein said. "The best advice is to keep contacting the social service agencies that you have been in touch with and urge them to provide home care for this woman." + +LOAD-DATE: February 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Question + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +69 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 20, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Shoveling-Out Service Offered to the Aged + +BYLINE: By MERRI ROSENBERG + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 13; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 290 words + +DATELINE: GREENBURGH + +IF the recent pileup of snow has left most residents with a bad case of cabin fever, the plight of the elderly and disabled extends beyond mere restlessness and boredom. Many are literally trapped by the snow, unable to shovel past their own doorways. +To help them, the town of Greenburgh recently began a Snow Angels program, in which volunteers will shovel driveways and walkways for the elderly and disabled. +"A lot of seniors and people with disabilities would call me because they couldn't get out of their house," said Paul J. Feiner, the Greenburgh Town Supervisor. "They felt they were prisoners. I thought it would be nice to get this program started, to match volunteers with people who needed help. I really want people to feel that the town is concerned about them." +So far, about 10 volunteers have signed up to offer their services. + +Acting as a Matchmaker + While the Greenburgh program is offered free to elderly and disabled residents who need to be shoveled out, the village of Tarrytown has offered to act as matchmaker for those in Tarrytown and North Tarrytown who need help and for those who are willing to do the work. +"We have people who are elderly and people who work in the city and leave too early to have time to shovel their driveways," said Gerald Barbelet, the Village Treasurer of Tarrytown. "We keep lists of youngsters and those wanting to shovel and those who want this service in conjunction with our sister village in North Tarrytown." +Those interested in the Greenburgh program can call Mr. Feiner's office at 993-1540 or his home at 478-1219. For the Tarrytown service, residents can call the village office at 631-1106 or the Recreation Department at 631-5990. MERRI ROSENBERG + +LOAD-DATE: February 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +70 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 23, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Job Applicants Face Age Bias, Study Finds + +BYLINE: Reuters + +SECTION: Section A; Page 15; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 229 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 + +A national study made public today by the American Association of Retired Persons concluded that older people are discriminated against in job offers. +The discrimination is less prevalent among successful companies than among less successful ones, the study showed. + The A.A.R.P. said it had conducted a test of age discrimination in which virtually identical resumes of two people were mailed to 775 large companies. +The results, released at a news conference, indicated that companies discriminated 26.5 percent of the time against a 57-year-old fictional applicant whose resume was virtually identical to that of a 32-year-old applicant. +The survey was conducted by sending out two pairs of resumes -- one pair for an older woman and a younger woman, the other for an older man and a younger man -- for each of three jobs. In each case there were less favorable responses to the older applicant, the association reported. The job types sought included writer-editor, executive secretary and management information specialist. +The $75,000 test was conducted to test assumptions that older people were more discriminated against in the job market, which is a violation of Federal law. +Noting that the test results showed less discrimination by successful companies than by less successful ones, officials of the association said discrimination did not pay. + +LOAD-DATE: February 23, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +71 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 25, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +NEWS SUMMARY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1026 words + + +International A2-10 + +PLAN TO EASE EXPORT RULES +The Clinton Administration plans to rewrite the export laws. The proposed overhaul, which would be the first since the cold war, is aimed at easing the sale abroad of machine tools, telecommunications equipment and other products that had been restricted because of their potential use in weaponry. A1 + +BIG GUNS ARE SILENT +After more than nine months of relentless bombardment, a steady rain of shells and sniper fire that has wreaked devastation beyond what Serbian gunners did to Sarajevo, the big guns besieging the Muslim quarters of the ancient city of Mostar have fallen silent. A1 + +SERBS IN HILLS, BOSNIA SAYS +The Bosnian Government charged that Serbian artillery, tanks and other heavy weapons were still combat-ready in the hills above Sarajevo despite days of upbeat pronouncements by the United Nations that they had all been withdrawn or placed under its control. A8 + +CROAT-MUSLIM TALKS IN U.S. +The Clinton Administration announced that it would play host to talks in Washington this weekend on an American-backed peace plan for Bosnia that would unite the Croatian-and Muslim-held parts of the country, a senior State Department official said. A8 + +DE KLERK STRESSES EXPERIENCE +On the stump, President F. W. de Klerk, is stressing that only the National Party, the party now ruling South Africa, has the experience to govern and that the African National Congress is too dangerous and too undisciplined to be trusted with unchecked power. A3 + +YELTSIN APPEALS TO FOES +Two years after he set Russia on the road of economic and political reform, President Yeltsin admitted that the results were disappointing and he called on his opponents to join in "a new political style" to move the country forward. A6 + +A POPULAR CZECH PREMIER +Vaclav Klaus, the 52-year-old Czech Prime Minister and a conservative economist, draws enthusiastic crowds to speeches around his country, thanks to his gift for communications. A6 + +CHINA'S VOW ON HONG KONG +China reiterated that when it resumes sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997 it will dismantle any democratically elected legislature formed under a vote taken early by the colony's lawmakers. A10 + +Lebanese seek Syrian help to insure calm in the south. A5 + +Algiers Journal: For foreigners, there's only one safe place. A4 + +National A12-18 + +HEALTH PLAN FAILS TO WIN ELDERLY +The American Association of Retired Persons has decided not to endorse President Clinton's health plan, despite a recent campaign by Mr. Clinton and his wife, Hillary, to win support from the elderly. A1 + +WHITE HOUSE GOT INQUIRY BRIEFING +In a surprising admission, the head of a Federal agency examining the failure of an Arkansas savings and loan at the center of the inquiry into the Clintons' real estate investments said he held a briefing three weeks ago for senior White House aides on the agency's progress. A1 + +THE INFORMATION DETOUR +News analysis: For all the talk of the information superhighway, the real vision behind the planned giant merger of Bell Atlantic and Tele-Communications was profit. The deal ultimately collapsed because the dollars and cents no longer seemed to add up. A1 + +SUSPECT TO FIGHT SPY CHARGES +The lawyer representing Aldrich H. Ames, the C.I.A. official accused of spying for Moscow, said his client would fight the charges. A1 + +U.S. FACES LARGEST BIAS CASE +Clearing the way for the largest discrimination case ever filed against the Government, a judge ruled that black employees may have systematically been denied promotions and training by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. A12 + +LETTER TO JURY LEADS TO INQUIRY +As the jury began deliberations in the murder trial of 11 Branch Davidians, the F.B.I. began an investigation into how letters highly critical of the Government's case were mailed to at least eight jurors. A12 + +ATTACK ON TEEN-AGE SMOKING +Releasing the Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health, Dr. Joycelyn Elders said health agencies, schools, and parents should make smoking prevention among teen-agers a priority. A12 + +STRATEGY ON BUDGET AMENDMENT +Democratic opponents of the proposed constitutional amendment requiring a balanced Federal budget offered a counterproposal that seemed intended to lead to the defeat of all versions of the plan.A14 + +Balancing the Federal budget would mean hard choices. A14 + +WELFARE PLAN MAY RAISE TAXES +Finding it difficult to produce a welfare plan that could be financed through spending cuts alone, the Administration is contemplating tax increases, and gambling establishments are among the targets. A16 + +A GATHERING OF LABOR LEADERS +The annual gathering of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s executive council drew James P. Hoffa, a staff member of the Michigan Teamsters' joint council who also happens to be the son of the late James R. Hoffa. A18 + +Law Page A19 + +Law firms have begun reining in sex-harassing partners. + +At the Bar: A fallen crusader and his unlikely champion. + +Metro Digest B1 + +ATTITUDES TOWARD THE HOMELESS +New Yorkers' frustrations about the homeless seem to have turned to apathy and then anger. A1 + +AIDS AND BABIES +A New York State panel on AIDS has rejected a proposal to identify newborns testing positive for H.I.V., amid concerns that it would jeopardize mothers' privacy. A1 + +Neediest Cases B2 + +Business Digest D1 + +Weekend C1-30, B14 + +Sports B6-13 + +Basketball: Rockets thump Knicks. B7 +Olympics: Baiul injured in figure skating mishap. B7 +American wins on short track. B7 +Italian woman wins giant slalom. B7 + +Obituaries B16 + +Dinah Shore, entertainer. + +Editorials/Op-Ed A28-29 + +Editorials + +Death and the Supreme Court. +New York: The movie set. +Moral it's not. +Slaughtering the messengers. + +Letters + +A. M. Rosenthal: The basic rights. +Anthony Lewis: Major discontent. +Frederick C. Cuny: The Serbs have lost. +David Rieff: The Serbs have won. + +Chronicle B4 + +Crossword C28 + +LOAD-DATE: February 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +72 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 25, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Clinton Fails to Get Endorsement Of Elderly Group on Health Plan + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1128 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 + +The board of the American Association of Retired Persons has decided not to endorse President Clinton's health plan, despite a concerted campaign by the President and Hillary Rodham Clinton to win support from the elderly, officers of the organization said today. +First word of the decision came from Administration officials, who said they were somewhat disappointed but not completely surprised. They noted that the board had not endorsed any specific alternative to the Clinton plan. + Meeting here on Tuesday and Wednesday, the 21-member board stood by a statement issued in November that described the Clinton proposal as "the strongest and most realistic blueprint to date for achieving our goals." The goals include universal health insurance, cost controls, prescription drug coverage and a national program of long-term care. + +33 Million Members + The Administration, in public and in private, had sought a much stronger show of support from the organization, which has 33 million members. An endorsement would have been a victory for the White House after three major business groups withheld their endorsements of the Clinton plan earlier this month. +Leaders of the association said that health care reform was their top priority but that there was no clear consensus among members for a particular legislative proposal. +In an interview tonight, Lovola W. Burgess of Albuquerque, N.M., president of the association, said: "The Clinton plan is the nearest to what we are looking for, but it falls short in a number of ways. We are concerned about the financing. We don't know if the proposed cuts in the growth of Medicare and Medicaid would provide enough money to help finance the President's plan. We fear that doctors would be less willing to see Medicare patients if their fees are cut." + +Appeal From President + Health care legislation is just beginning what promises to be a tortuous journey through Congress. The association, like many groups, seems to have decided that it can maximize its influence by preserving a degree of independence and by stressing its concerns, without giving a blanket endorsement to one proposal. Such independence gives lobbyists more room to maneuver on Capitol Hill, where the politics of health care are continually in flux. +Last week, at a forum in Edison, N.J., sponsored by the American Association of Retired Persons and at a White House meeting with lobbyists for the elderly, Mr. Clinton appealed for support of his health plan. +He said then that he was "very grateful for the kind words that A.A.R.P. has said" about his proposal. But he declared: "The time has come to be counted, to stand up, to take a stand and to fight with us if you want to get something done. This is a fight, and if you want it, you're going to have to fight for it." +President Clinton was in Norwich, Conn., today, continuing a two-week effort to sell his health plan to older people. He said the plan would ease the burden of prescription drug costs for the elderly. +Asked today why the American Association of Retired of Persons had not endorsed any particular bill, Judith N. Brown of Minneapolis, chairwoman of the organization, said: "We did not feel that was appropriate. We felt that we needed to look at all the options, and that our members should tell their representatives in Congress how they feel about the need for health care reform." +Ms. Brown added: "We represent many different points of view. When you have 33 million members, it's hard to say that every one of them feels any particular way." + +'Exactly the Same Message' + Lorrie McHugh, a White House spokeswoman, said the association's decision was not a setback for Mr. Clinton. The group, she said, has issued a call to action encouraging older Americans to make their voices heard. +"That's exactly the same message the President has been delivering," Ms. McHugh said. "Older Americans deserve prescription drug coverage, guaranteed long-term care and protection of the Medicare program. That's what the Clinton plan provides." +People become eligible to join the association when they reach the age of 50. About half the members are 65 or older. Dues are $8 a year. While many members praise the Clinton proposal, others favor a Government-financed program of national health insurance, known as a "single payer" plan. +Jack Guildroy of Port Washington, L.I., a director of the association, said today: "The Clinton proposal has a great many things going for it that coincide with our desires. But we stopped short of endorsing it. We are not endorsing any specific program as such." + +Ascertaining Views of Members + Another officer of the association, speaking on the condition that he not be named, said: "Our members are confused about what is in the various health care plans. As people learn about the proposals, they are apprehensive and nervous." +Leaders of the organization were burned by their experience with the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988, which expanded Medicare to cover the cost of catastrophic illness. The association lobbied for passage of that law. But after elderly people realized that they would pay the bill, through higher taxes and premiums, they forced Congress to repeal it a year later. +Since then, leaders of the association have carefully tried to ascertain and express the views of members. +Horace B. Deets, executive director of the association, said: "An organization's endorsement is only as valid as the degree of support it enjoys from its members. It is our members' endorsement that the President wants." +In Connecticut today, Mr. Clinton said he was not troubled by warnings from Capitol Hill that his health plan had little chance of being approved in its current form. +He said that he and Representative Pete Stark, the California Democrat who heads the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, shared a commitment to provide comprehensive health benefits to all Americans. "If you can get there," Mr. Clinton said, "I'm convinced we'll work out the details." + +Clinton Cites Two Studies + The White House says the Medicare prescription drug benefit proposed by Mr. Clinton would cost $69 billion from 1995 through 2000. But Mr. Clinton said today that his proposal "would actually save the health care system a lot of money in the long run." +To bolster his case, Mr. Clinton called attention to two studies released today by the National Association of Chain Drug Stores and the National Association of Retail Druggists. +The studies said the proposed drug benefit would reduce the cost of other Medicare services, by reducing the need for hospital care and visits to doctors' offices. These savings would offset perhaps half of the $69 billion, the studies said. + +LOAD-DATE: February 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +73 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 25, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Pharmacist Helps Clinton Sell His Health Plan + +BYLINE: By DOUGLAS JEHL, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 15; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 510 words + +DATELINE: NORWICH, Conn., Feb. 24 + +The backdrop was just right today but the dialogue was desultory until a pharmacist began to tell the kind of story President Clinton wanted to hear. +"I've seen people break down and cry across the counter," John Kiszkiel said, telling of his elderly customers who can no longer afford to pay for prescription drugs. It was just that painful problem that Mr. Clinton had flown here to dramatize, and he was quick to seize the opportunity. + "Say that again!" Mr. Clinton commanded, gesturing at the same time to the network and White House camera crews filming the proceedings from the other side of the Greenville Drug Store, just out of easy hearing range. "Can you people hear that?" + +Rent vs. Prescriptions + Mr. Kiszkiel cleared his throat and began again as the cameras zoomed closer. "I've had people come in here and break down and cry," he said. "I've had people who've had to sell their home. I've had people right here at the counter have to make the decision whether they were going to pay their rent that month or buy prescription drugs." +As he listened, Mr. Clinton nodded with a mixture of concern and satisfaction. For the past two weeks, his campaign to sell his health care plan has been aimed at older Americans, and his main message today was that any proposal adopted by Congress should expand Medicare so that recipients would for the first time be reimbursed for the cost of prescriptions beyond a modest deductible and small co-payments. +He made that argument at the pharmacy and later in a speech in the 19th-century auditorium of the Norwich Free Academy. While the cost of providing a prescription drug benefit to Medicare recipients has been estimated at $60 billion over five years, Mr. Clinton said he was convinced that the step would "actually save the health care system money in the long run" by keeping older Americans out of hospitals and nursing homes. +"We must not take the drug benefits out, because this is a pivotal part of what will change health care in America," Mr. Clinton said. + +Voices of Ordinary Americans + But like their opponents in the insurance industry, whose television advertisements feature "Harry and Louise," Mr. Clinton and his aides have concluded that their pitch is best made in the voices of ordinary Americans. In his visit to the pharmacy, Mr. Clinton posed in front of a remedy-laden counter as he listened to three longtime customers, including a man who appeared very ill, tell of the troubles that the high cost of drugs had caused for them. At the Norwich Academy, he met with four other Connecticut residents who had written to the White House of similar difficulties. +But it was Mr. Kiszkiel, a man just Mr. Clinton's age, who took over the drugstore from his father 19 years ago, who provided the sought-for sound-bite. As White House aides noted with satisfaction, a local television station that had strayed from its live coverage of the Presidential visit returned to it abruptly, allowing Mr. Kiszkiel to make Mr. Clinton's case to a Connecticut audience. + +LOAD-DATE: February 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: President Clinton traveled to Norwich, Conn., yesterday to dramatize his concern over the prices of prescription drugs. As a customer, Louise Jaczynski, listened, John Kiszkiel, the owner of the Greenville Drug Store, told Mr. Clinton, "I've had people come in here and break down and cry." (Keith Meyers/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +74 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 25, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +THE MEDIA BUSINESS: Advertising; +Can three elderly women in sensible cardigans +add a little sizzle to fast-food sales? + +BYLINE: By Stuart Elliott + +SECTION: Section D; Page 2; Column 3; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 891 words + +IF one little old lady shouting "Where's the beef?" could spark a national fad, helping a marketer achieve stellar sales, imagine what three times that many might accomplish talking about burgers, biscuits and chicken. +That's the idea behind a new campaign for Hardee's by Deutsch Inc., the new agency on the fast feeder's $75 million account. A series of warm, humorous commercials, carrying the theme "Have a good meal," features a trio of down-to-earth elderly women dubbed the Hardee's Girls, Meg, Peg and Ronnie. + The television and radio spots, which begin running on Sunday, present the women traveling around America, weaving pointed pitches about Hardee's menu items and promotional prices with grandmotherly observations about life and food. +In one television commercial, called "The Hardee's Girls Go to Washington, D.C.," Meg Potter, driving a sedate sedan, announces, "We are here to see the President." Ronnie Gibney chimes in from the back seat, "You know he likes down-home cooking," to which Ms. Potter replies, "Then he should jog himself into a Hardee's and get himself a great meal." +The other spots have similarly prosaic settings, from a construction site -- "We're bringing these young men some Hardee's Steak Melts," the women, wearing hard hats, declare -- to a girls' basketball game and a drive-in theater. +"We think they're our Charlie's Angels," Donny Deutsch, chief executive and executive creative director at Deutsch in New York, said yesterday, referring to a somewhat younger female threesome. (The Andrews or McGuire Sisters might be more demographically correct.) +"They serve double duty," he added. "They sell the brand and the menu at the same time." +The trio, with their sensible cardigans and sweet, though tart, straight talk and folksy patter, manage in almost every spot to walk that fine line between corniness and coyness, thanks to some deftly scripted dialogue by Rich Russo, the executive vice president and creative director on the Hardee's account at Deutsch. The spots combine a cheeky playfulness with a likable realism. +That enables the women to evoke popular archetypal predecessors like Clara Peller, whose beef-seeking bellow propelled Wendy's International to record results in the 1980's; the cast of the hit sitcom "The Golden Girls," and David Letterman's mother, Dorothy, whose wry reports from the Winter Olympics are helping her son's programs rack up their best ratings to date. +"These women represent what we call the essence of Hardee's," Mr. Russo said, adding that research among the chain's customers, and devotees of rival restaurants, found their blend of Hardee's family values and a "hip, irreverent attitude" enabled them to appeal "across the board to all age groups" -- even to younger men who predominate at fast-food outlets. +Jon Tracosas, the executive vice president and group director on the account at Deutsch, said: "We think we found something that can really differentiate Hardee's in a crowded marketplace." +The campaign is the first from Deutsch, formerly Deutsch/Dworin, since the agency was unexpectedly awarded the account in November, after a review that excluded the incumbent shop of eight and a half years, Ogilvy & Mather New York. +"If there's one thing Ogilvy deserves credit for," said Jerry Gramaglia, executive vice president of Hardee's in Rocky Mount, N.C., "it's keeping us on the track of a food-focused positioning." Among that agency's campaigns for Hardee's was one with the theme "Are you ready for some real food?" and another centering on Marty, the prototypical manager of a Hardee's restaurant. +"But we were never able to get traction in customers' minds," Mr. Gramaglia added, "a linking idea that both elevated the brand and separated us from our competition. 'The Hardee's Girls' is overarching, giving us a good, broad platform and not just a series of commercials." +That describes Deutsch's forte, as demonstrated for clients like the Ikea furniture chain and the metropolitan New York Pontiac dealers: seamlessly blending softly selling, image-building elements with hard-selling, product-moving appeals. +"What Deutsch is noted for is particularly smart retail advertising," Mr. Gramaglia said, "getting people onto the parking lot." +Nancy Kruse, a principal at Technomic Inc., a restaurant research and consulting company in Chicago, praised that ability. +"There has been a shift in the industry's strategic perspective," she said, "from 'the back of the house,' the kitchen and food preparation, to 'the front of the house,' the customer." As chains like Hardee's behave "more and more as brand marketers and retailers," she added, "perhaps the selection of an agency that's not a fast-food agency, but understands how to do business in the broad retail market, is not so strange." +The campaign is the first from Deutsch since the departure of Steve Dworin, the agency's president, who stunned Madison Avenue -- and Hardee's executives -- by resigning last week. +"Steve played an important role in getting the campaign where it is," Mr. Gramaglia said, "and it's difficult to see him leave." +"But we all recognize this campaign's success depends on the quality of the scripts," he added, "and we feel good about the ability of Donny, and the other folks on the Hardee's business, to see it through." + +LOAD-DATE: February 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +75 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO DIGEST + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 475 words + + +COMPASSION FATIGUE ON THE HOMELESS +In New York, the youths who used to give the old men cigarettes now curse them. In Seattle, the homeless are fined for sitting on sidewalks. Over time, the growing national impatience with the presence of dirty and desperate people has turned frustration to apathy and then anger. A1. +New York's new commissioner for the homeless said she would keep trying to have nonprofit groups run the city's homeless shelters. B2. + +NEW YORK CITY + +SEARCH OPPOSED FOR AIDS BABIES +A panel of New York State AIDS experts rejected a controversial proposal to identify newborn babies that test positive for H.I.V., amid concerns that it would jeopardize the privacy of mothers. A1. +Washington is expected to waive a rule and let foreigners with the AIDS virus attend the Gay Games in New York in June. B4. + +JOB CUTS MAY FOCUS ON POVERTY AGENCY +The Giuliani administration has identified many of the city jobs it hopes to eliminate through a severance offer, and almost half of those would come out of the agency that provides services to New York City's poor, officials said. B3. + +PLAN FOR JOURNALIST'S MURDER RETOLD +An admitted murderer and double-crossing drug dealer testified in court that he had recruited a teen-ager to shoot Manuel de Dios Unanue to death without knowing that the victim was a muckraking anti-drug journalist. B3. + +GIULIANI CRITICIZES SUBWAY CENSORSHIP +Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani criticized the Transit Authority for restricting the filming of violent movie and television sequences in the subway system. He said attempts to screen the content of films raised freedom-of-speech questions. B4. + +SLIWA'S HIRING MAKES MONEY FOR STATION +The hiring of Curtis Sliwa as a talk show host on New York City's main public radio station has been a surprising fund-raising bonanza for the station, even though many longtime listeners have stopped donating as a result, WNYC officials said. B3. + +REGION + +CUOMO PLEA TO WASHINGTON +Gov. Mario M. Cuomo went to Capitol Hill to urge New York's Congressional delegation to keep the fight for a formula that gives the state more Medicaid money at the center of its negotiations on President Clinton's health-care proposals. B5. + +CLUES SOUGHT IN VIRUS DEATH +Health officials began the painstaking medical detective work to explain the death of a Long Island college student last month from a mysterious virus spread through mouse droppings. B5. + +FISHERMAN SHOT IN HOLDUP AT HOME +Three gunmen, one of them masquerading as a police officer, entered the home of a 29-year-old fisherman in Bayville, L.I. Wednesday night and shot him after he refused to give them money, the Nassau County police said. B5. +Falling chunks of ice closed several bridges, jamming traffic in the region. B4. +Chronicle B4 +Neediest Cases B2 + +LOAD-DATE: February 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "PULSE: Sales of Existing Homes" shows the number of sales of existing homes in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New England in '92 and '93. (Source: National Association of Realtors) + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +76 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Pequots + +BYLINE: By Francis X. Clines; Francis X. Clines is a reporter and columnist for The Times. + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 50; Column 1; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 2861 words + +They really are palefaces under the neon lights, all these senior citizens and tourists playing the slot machines, blackjack tables and big-payoff bingo games at the Wisconsin Oneida tribe's casino. The casino booms around the clock in the reservation woods near the luck-hungry bettors of Green Bay. Rick Hill, with shoulder-length hair and a patient, earthen-hued outlook on life, reigns there, counting the wondrously gross receipts with the dedicated eye his ancestors once applied to tracking redcoats for George Washington. +Hailing good fortune's arrival on the rundown reservation, Hill first supplies its historical context -- genocidal defeats and the transcontinental retreat of his people, 27 broken treaties and six million lost acres in New York State alone. Only then, against the bleeping and bonging of fortune's reversal, does he comment on Oneida casino revenues, which have risen to more than $375 million a year: "Compared to the previous 170 years, it's not a lot of money, and there are still third-world conditions on most reservations." + A few hours later Hill stands before a dozen graduates at the Oneida elementary school, run on casino profits. "Don't hold back," he tells them. And no wonder. Their reservation, like scores of others, is resurgent. "With the community you've got all the resources you need. We'll back you up," he promises. After an elder says a tribal prayer, the young American Indians march off toward the future, their higher-education expenses already guaranteed by the gamblers just down the road. +The Oneidas are but one of more than 100 tribes across the country working to resurrect themselves with gambling after the long spiral of bad dealings with the white man. And they are not the richest. This turn of luck has come about since 1988, when Congress, prompted by the Supreme Court's bolstering of tribal sovereignty, adopted the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. Out of that law, which requires states to negotiate compacts with tribes, 170 casinos and high-stakes bingo halls have taken root. Where so recently there was utter destitution, the more fortunate tribes have created a $1.5 billion economy in which revenues have been doubling annually. +"Our day in the sun is arriving," Hill says of his tribe's new life of full employment and new schools, roads, sewers and houses -- the Indian version of a postwar Levittown. +"It's been wonderful. I never had these opportunities before in my life," says Pat Metoxen, who for years did odd jobs in Green Bay for $6.50 an hour. He has become an Oneida pit boss at $15 an hour, joining 2,500 other tribe members who work in the casino. Metoxen has a new house, a new car, and he says his three children "will probably need master's degrees in business, at the rate the tribe is progressing." +Law degrees wouldn't hurt either. Tribal gambling powers and sovereignty have come under increasing legal challenges from dumbfounded state officials crying foul at the Indians' success. The critical juncture for the gaming sachems is to come later this year, when Congress considers amending the act -- a familiar, frightening possibility for tribal leaders, who recall how countless compacts were written then disregarded in Washington. +"We've had 200 years of that process," says Timothy Wapato, executive director of the National Indian Gaming Association. The association has 96 member tribes and can afford an impressive lobbying presence in Washington. In recent months the tribes have been negotiating with state officials, searching for a peaceful common position to present to Congress in the growing conflict over tribal sovereignty and states' prerogatives. +In the face of Supreme Court backing of the tribes' sovereign rights, some experienced officials of the Las Vegas and Atlantic City gambling industry have begun cooperating and looking for a management interest in tribal casinos. Others, like Donald Trump, the owner of three casinos in Atlantic City, see their hegemony threatened. Trump is suing. He contends that his rights are being violated by what he calls a "very limited class of citizens." +"The Indians are only a sovereign nation when it comes to gambling," Trump argues, dismissing the nationhood precedent that tribes say was long abused by Washington to negotiate them into retreat. "Most people think casino gambling will be what alcohol was to the Indians of past generations," Trump says. "I have seen these Indians, and you have more Indian blood than they have." +As if measuring some tabloid-mache Custer, Hill smiles when he hears what Trump has to say. He dismisses Trump as a chronically bankrupt entrepreneur who talks a good game of competition until he's been bested. "Another white man has come to take even the measly beads left," Hill declares, matching Trump movie cliche for cliche. +For the lobbying effort, the 96 tribes of the National Indian Gaming Association elected Hill, a 41-year-old gaming tyro who emphasizes tribal culture, as chairman. His style is more Native American than that of his predecessor, Charles C. Keechi, a button-down executive and former chairman of the Delaware nation in Oklahoma. Hill's victory by a 3-to-1 margin last spring was a tribute to his skills in the art of Indian politics, inherited from his father, and to his success at investing casino profits in tribal welfare. +At the gambling tables, the palefaces seem indifferent to Trump's sudden sense of curtailed citizenship and Hill's recapitulation of the Great White Father's perfidy. "I don't know what I'd do with my days if it wasn't for the casino," a grandmotherly gambler says as her fellow retirees cluster vigilantly at Oneida's morning mega-bingo session. +To anyone who ever rooted for the underdog in tribal America's sad saga, the rise of Indian casinos is as heartening as it is amazing. "It's the return of the white buffalo," says Matt Connor of Gaming & Wagering Business International magazine, invoking the rare American bison, a traditional sign of renewed providence. W. Bruce Turner, a gaming company stock analyst with Salomon Brothers, assesses the Indian's gaming business less romantically -- "capable of 200 percent growth over the next several years." He finds their ability to adapt to gambling "nothing short of overwhelming." +A decade ago, the tribes had zero gross product and 70 percent unemployment. Now there are 70 major tribal casinos with table games and slot machines in 19 states. And dozens more are planned. A premise of the 1988 gaming act was that the reservations needed to be freed from patronizing restrictions that prevented them from amassing economic development capital. The result: they now generate, manage and reinvest betting profits that this year will approach $2 billion, over 3 percent of the nation's legal betting take. +"ISN'T THAT WHAT AMERICA IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT?" ASKS IRVING Wizenfeld, an enthusiastic regular at the furiously busy Foxwoods Resort Casino in Ledyard, Conn. Created by the once nearly extinct Mashantucket Pequot tribe, Foxwoods is unique even in these tribal boom times. In only two years, it has become the single most profitable casino in the Western Hemisphere, raking in an estimated $600 million a year in profits. +A two-and-a-half hour drive from Manhattan, Foxwoods offers "wampum" betting cards, cocktail waitresses in skimpy fringed and beaded tunics, and more than 3,000 slot machines. More than 15,000 gamblers show up every day, on weekends as many as 35,000. The gleaming 24-hour casino is the talk of the country's $30-billion-a-year industry -- a subject of both envy and fear. +Foxwoods was created almost single-handedly by Chairman Richard (Skip) Hayward, a reclusive, canny pathfinder. He cut a bold profit-sharing deal with the State of Connecticut that will eventually allow him to have 4,600 slot machines, more than any other casino on the East Coast. He also took care to hire as his chief executive officer G. Michael Brown, the former director of New Jersey's Division of Gaming Enforcement; Brown built his reputation as a prosecutor who forced Atlantic City casinos to steer clear of underworld ties. +Working in desolate woods, Hayward first had to rebuild his own withered tribe by searching out members from the post-Colonial diaspora, some of them lost in the urban underclass. Twenty years ago, the Mashuntucket Pequot reservation had fewer than a dozen residents; Hayward authenticated more than 200 others and campaigned to get them Federal recognition, the key to sovereignty and legalized gambling. All now profit in well-paid jobs, guaranteed educations and health insurance. The tribe has also hired an archeologist to disinter its history and stock the new museum. +"This is truly a case of the last becoming first," exults Tom Tureen, the lawyer who was lead counsel in the land claim fight that established Pequot sovereignty. "There has never been anything to approach this as a means of providing capital to Indians." +To protect the Foxwoods bonanza from corruption threats, Brown, the chief executive, has used his Atlantic City experience to ease back from the absolute sovereignty so dear to other tribes and has instead invited on-site cooperation with state and Federal law enforcement experts, and exchanges of gambling intelligence with Las Vegas and Atlantic City networks. +Federal law concerning Indians is rooted in respect for sovereignty and defers to state-tribal compacts for regulatory procedures. But Washington insists on professional accounting standards to head off sweetheart deals that could siphon funds from tribal welfare programs. The Pequots run a consultant service for other tribes, stressing the need for high-level security, strict controls in the movement of money and experienced management. +"We've found a predictable mix," notes Brown in reference to studies of two other casinos. "One was excellently run; the other was so lax in controls that it could easily fall victim to illicit dealings." He says the main threat to Indian gaming is not underworld infiltration as much as "bad business deals in a risky area, just as with junk bonds." +The tribes might eventually end up with 250 or more casinos of various sizes, if the Federal gaming law is not radically crimped. The Indians' good fortune has helped spur an even larger boom in legalized gambling off the reservation. And it's not just the Indians who are getting richer; areas surrounding the reservations are profiting too. +Gov. Lowell Weicker of Connecticut has agreed that Foxwoods may add slot machines, in a clever monopoly compact worked out under the Federal act by Hayward. The tribe provides the state at least $100 million a year, so long as competitive slot operations, the main engines of gambling profit, are not authorized in other Connecticut cities now agitating for their own action. Last year, as casino revenues rocketed, Hayward defended his golden monopoly by giving the state an additional $13 million in budget help. +In Minnesota, cooperation between reservation and Statehouse has put 11 tribes in control of 17 high-stakes bingo and gambling casinos that constitute an annual industry with betting in excess of $650 million and a $116 million payroll. Seventy-three percent of the casino workers are non-Indians, hired as unemployment on the reservation dropped toward zero. Minnesota found that in casino regions the economy grew twice as fast as in other areas and that welfare dependency fell 3 percent in casino counties while it was rising 15 percent elsewhere. +Hill says he believes that their new wealth has firmed the tribes' resolve to face up to the gaming act challenge. "Economics gives us more political power," he says. +The main opposition comes from the National Governors' Association, which has been negotiating tentatively with the tribes to find common ground for a proposal that might head off the riskier unknowns of unlacing the gaming act. The tribes' staunchest support comes from Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, who says court decisions demand that the act be amended this year. +The governors resent Indian independence of state control and freedom from taxes. But their problem is that court interpretations upholding Indian sovereignty limit their options. They want to avoid the theoretical possibility that financially pressed cities might, under land-trust arrangements, donate part of their downtown areas to Indians to set up casinos. In California -- a critical battleground because it supplies Las Vegas with one-third of its gamblers -- the state has balked at Federally mandated negotiations with tribes, forcing the issue into the courts. +The Indians know that critics are just waiting for a corruption scandal to bolster a wholesale gutting of the gaming act. Rick Hill, bemused at white society's tolerance of its own savings and loan scandal, stresses a Justice Department finding that tribal management has thus far proved more than a match for underworld intriguers. +"There has not been a widespread or successful effort by organized crime to infiltrate Indian gaming operations," the Justice Department concluded. That was two years ago; some tribes have since begun creating their own Vegas-like anticorruption networks. They also are emphasizing management training, something critics believe is needed to deal with intratribal rivalries and charges of executive profiteering. +This emphasis is clear in the security room at the Mystic Lake Casino, run by the Shakopee Sioux outside Minneapolis. A wall of television screens faces a 24-hour control desk where monitors run a high-speed taping system of closeup surveillance, custom-designed by industry experts to zoom in, from multiple angles, on the fingertips of gamblers and all money-handling employees. Discretion is considered counterproductive: when a worker is caught skimming or a gambler is taped tampering with the floor games, the tribe's policy is to make a dramatic on-the-spot arrest. +Success has brought some discord. Since losing his post as head of the National Indian Gaming Association last year, Charles Keechi of the Oklahoma Delawares has been warning that the casino issue may degenerate into a struggle among tribes. "I'm afraid it's the casino haves fighting it out with the have-nots," he says, speaking now as chairman of Natives of the Americas, a two-continent tribal economic organization. +There has been no move toward an intertribal sharing of profits. Most tribes pool their revenues for reservation development; some pay shared dividends to members, who keep details to themselves. Hill denies that the tribes with casinos would insulate themselves at the expense of weaker brethren in dealings with Congress. +At least 30 more tribes in 19 states are now trying to develop their own casinos. But in a universe of more than 300 Federally recognized tribes totalling 1.9 million people, the reservations of two-thirds of them seem less than fortunate, deliberately set far from tourist crossroads by treaty. Others are rebuffed at the statehouse. +The Indians are only part of a legalized gambling industry sweeping the nation in the recession-heavy years. Riverboat casinos now ply the Mississippi and Gulf Coast, with proposals to spread northeastward. And in the rush for revenues, bogus "boats" are being rushed into trenches like frontier settlements. Keeping up with the tribes is a selling point. +THE HEART OF the Indians' problem with unexpected success lies, as ever, in Washington. Hill and the other tribal leaders are wary of what may develop there. They have put their trust in Senator Inouye and Senator John McCain of Arizona, vice chairman of the committee on Indian affairs, who, under pressure from the governors and state attorneys general, have been trying to mediate the casino fight quietly by calling private conferences and serving, in effect, as diplomats among competing nations. Senator Inouye insists he has obtained reassurances from the governors' association that the states do not wish to attack the tribes' sovereignty or economic resurrection; rather, they would work out a better compact process of mutual profit. +Rick Hill expresses watchful faith in the "Inouye process." But characteristically he declines to hold his tongue in denouncing proposed gaming law amendments from Atlantic City and Las Vegas legislators as a "Trump Act" retrenchment of Indian sovereignty. "The civil war may be over for some, but not in Indian country," he says in the flat tone of determination the tribal chiefs sought to project when they chose him for the looming Congressional fight. +For this contest, Tom Tureen, the lawyer who helped create fresh Indian legend from gambling luck, counsels the greatest vigilance. +"History shows that any time Indians have anything of value, there's been people on the non-Indian side ready to take it away. Look at the Black Hills," he says, recalling how the Sioux were forced to move there by Washington, then illegally routed anew when whites discovered gold. "Look at the United States itself." + +LOAD-DATE: February 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Hayward: Foxwoods' camera-shy mastermind. (pg. 49); The tribal boom is extending beyond the reservation to non-Indian casino workers like this Foxwoods cocktail waitress, Angela Adams. (pg. 50); Foxwoods rakes in $600 million a year for the once destitute tribe. "Isn't that what America is supposed to be about?" asks one gambler. (pg. 51); Casino dollars are bankrolling Pequot child education and development. (pg. 52)(PHOTOGRAPH BY KAREN KUEHN/MATRIX, FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +77 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +YOUR TAXES; +Some Social Security Recipients Will Pay More for '94 + +BYLINE: By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr. + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 14; Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 577 words + +SOCIAL Security recipients with significant income were spared a tax increase for 1993, but some of them will pay more this year. +To avoid penalties, additional estimated taxes will probably have to be paid in quarterly installments beginning April 15. + So after dusting off the 1993 return, it's time to start estimating for 1994. +The tax law enacted last year called for an increase in taxes on Social Security benefits, but only for people who are relatively well-off. The Federal Government estimates that 5.5 million of the nation's 43 million Social Security recipients will be affected. +The rule of thumb is that if a retiree's benefits have not been taxed in the past, they will not be taxed now -- unless his or her income has risen. +People who had to count half their benefits as taxable income in 1993 might have to pay taxes on as much as 85 percent of their benefits this year. Whether or not they are affected depends upon their income from several sources, including pensions, Social Security benefits and even tax-free interest. +Because taxes are not withheld from Social Security checks, most people affected will need to make quarterly estimated payments. This calls for some fairly tedious arithmetic, however, and some critics say the legislation places a burden on the people least equipped to handle it. +The winners in all this may be tax preparers, whom retirees are consulting and asking to deal with the confusing changes. +"I just went to see my C.P.A. yesterday, and I am not sure whether it is going to up my income tax," Jan McClure, a 72-year-old widow, said. +Ms. McClure said she had planned to cut expenses by doing her own tax preparations, but decided against it because of the changes. +"We have created this complex situation for the people who should least have to deal with it," said Judy Eggleston, a professor of accounting at George Washington University in Washington, who also has a private practice. +Under the new law, married couples with income of more than $44,000, and singles earning more than $34,000, will generally pay tax on 85 percent of their Social Security benefits. +That 85 percent of benefits will be taxed at the retiree's normal rate, which is often quite low. +The most complicated element is determining income. For this tax test, income includes gross taxable income plus tax-free interest income plus half of Social Security benefits. +I.R.S. Publication 553, entitled Highlights of 1993 Tax Changes, contains an 18-line worksheet to calculate how much of one's benefit is taxable. +Other useful material from the Internal Revenue Service is found in Publication 554, Tax Information for Older Americans, and in Publication 915, Social Security Benefits. +People whose retirement benefits are taxable will need Form 1040-ES to make estimated payments every three months. +The I.R.S. provides free tax preparation for senior citizens through two programs, called Volunteer Income Tax Assistance and Tax Counseling for the Elderly. Both programs use volunteers trained and tested by the agency. +These services can be reached by calling toll-free the taxpayer assistance numbers listed in the blue pages of the phone book under the United States Government. The numbers, which end with the digits 1040, are also listed in the I.R.S. instructions mailed to taxpayers. +Public libraries and senior citizen centers can usually steer the elderly to these services as well. + +LOAD-DATE: February 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Stlvia Kass gives free tax couseling to the elderly at the New Youk Public Library. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +78 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Vital Signs Improve for the Nursing Home Industry + +BYLINE: By KENNETH N. GILPIN + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 5; Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1949 words + +AS with virtually all segments of the health care marketplace, change is sweeping through the nation's $70 billion nursing home industry. What is different here, though, is that few in this highly fragmented business are complaining. +People in the business are smiling because, among other things, there is a rising tide of senior citizens to take care of, and there is a stagnant to declining pool of beds in which to put them. Nursing home companies are also successfully competing with hospitals in taking care of patients who are recovering from surgery. + Indeed, even as reform is causing dislocation in important components of the health care system, from hospitals to drug companies to physicians, analysts say many nursing home operators, particularly the biggest ones, are in pretty good shape. +"Nursing homes are the only area in health care where there is a shortage," said Peter Sidoti, a health care analyst at the NatWest Securities Corporation in New York. "There are not enough nursing home beds in the country, and demand is growing." +Although other factors are playing a role, the driving force behind the positive outlook for nursing homes is demographic. Millions of Americans are getting old, and advances in medical technology are allowing them to grow older still. By the year 2000, there will be about 35 million Americans age 65 or older, and 40 million by 2010, according to Census Bureau Estimates; that's up from 31.5 million in 1990. +For nursing homes, the critical group is people 85 and older, which happens to be the fastest growing part of the elderly population. By the year 2000, their numbers are projected to swell by 40 percent, and to double by 2010. +According to a recent research report prepared by Todd B. Richter, a senior vice president at Dean Witter Reynolds in New York, and by Mark G. Banta, another health care analyst at the firm, more than half of those over 85 need long-term care. +The other critical part of the equation is where will all these older people go? For the foreseeable future they will compete for a finite number of beds that is not expected to get much bigger. There are more than 15,000 nursing homes in the country, with about 1.6 million beds. On any given day, between 90 and 95 percent of those beds are occupied. +Thus far this decade, the supply of nursing home beds has stabilized, or has even declined slightly, because of state Certificate of Need laws designed to control or reduce the number of nursing home beds. If a nursing home wants to expand, it must apply to the state, showing why there is a need for more beds in its area. Because most nursing home residents are on Medicaid, the government health plan that covers the poor, the state pays a big part of the tab at nursing homes. So as beds increase, so does the state's Medicaid costs. The effect: States don't hand out Certificates of Need like aspirin. +In 1990 alone, nursing home payments represented 38.2 percent of Medicaid expenditures nationwide, according to a report prepared by John F. Hindelong, a principal and health care analyst at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. Paying for Medicaid is the second-biggest cost item for state governments, and it is probably the single fastest-growing cost. +In their report, Dean Witter's analysts concluded that since restrictive Certificate of Need laws are in place in most states, "We do not believe the supply situation will change materially for the better over the next several years," possibly not before the turn of the century. +Nursing homes, however, have found a way to profit from the state restrictions. Now the average nursing home derives more than 60 percent of its revenue from Medicaid. But by holding down the number of new beds and effectively putting a lid on Medicaid patients, home operators have greater latitude to "pick and choose who they let in the door," Mr. Sidoti from NatWest Securities said. The ability to pick from a generally more affluent group is boosting profitability. +The search for greater profitability has pushed nursing home operators into direct competition with their big cousins, hospitals, for subacute-care patients. These patients, recovering from cancer, coronary bypass and joint replacement surgery, or from serious accidents, are increasingly receiving post-operative therapy at nursing homes. +"We are branching out into areas that until the 1990's were dominated by hospitals," said Paul Ormond, chairman and chief executive of the Health Care and Retirement Corporation, the nation's fifth-largest nursing home operator. For nursing homes able to afford the $10,000- to $15,000-per-bed investment Dean Witter's analysts estimate is necessary to accommodate subacute and rehabilitation patients, the attractions are clear: Operating margins for treatment of subacute care patients are roughly twice those on custodial geriatric care. +For payers like health maintenance organizations and insurance companies, there is one clear benefit of using nursing homes for subacute care: cost. +"We make a pretty compelling argument to payers about the price reductions we can provide," said Paul Willging, executive vice president of the American Health Care Association, a Washington lobbying group that represents 11,000 subacute residential care nursing homes. +"We are talking about a day of care that is one-half to two-thirds the price of what a day at a hospital costs. And we know we can do it cheaper than that." +In Mr. Hindelong's report on the nursing home industry, the Donaldson Lufkin analyst, citing figures from the 1992 Marion Merrell Dow Long Term Care Digest, notes that in 1991 H.M.O.'s generated an average of 30 percent of revenue at for-profit nursing homes. In 1989 and 1990, the H.M.O. contribution to nursing home revenues was 3 percent and 4 percent, respectively. +"People that run skilled nursing facilities are much more cost conscious than people who run hospitals," said Stewart Bainum, chairman and chief executive of Manor Care Inc., the nation's third-largest and most profitable nursing home chain. +David Vanderwater, chief operating officer at Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation, the nation's largest hospital chain, admitted that "historically, hospitals have not been the most economical place for these types of services. But the world is changing. I think hospitals are poised to meet that challenge. And we believe hospitals provide much more flexibility than nursing homes." +In order to meet the challenge, some hospitals are reducing their number of beds and sharply cutting their work force. +Columbia/HCA is nevertheless keeping its options open. Last week, the company and Beverly Enterprises, the nation's largest nursing home company, said they were discussing joint ventures in some cities. +All this change is getting Wall Street's attention. Over the last year, shares in the 16 publicly traded nursing home companies have risen an average of 30 percent to 40 percent, Mr. Richter of Dean Witter said.. +"We follow 10 publicly traded companies and have buy recommendations on all of them because we think the long-term fundamentals are superb," Mr. Sidoti of NatWest Securities said. That stated, he does have some particular favorites. He likes the Hillhaven Corporation, the nation's second-largest nursing home operator. And he said the Sun Healthcare Group, which NatWest is advising in its $320 million buyout of the Mediplex Group, has a great future. +"Hillhaven owns its own bricks and mortar, and they have good earnings," he said. "We also think that since National Medical Enterprises owns 35 percent of the stock, Hillhaven is a likely takeover candidate." +Sun Healthcare, meanwhile, "is a company that has been ignored by investors. Right now, it has a market capitalization of $250 million, but only $90 million of that is freely traded." +That will change after the buyout of Mediplex, a subacute care provider, is completed. +"After this deal, the company will have a market capitalization of more than $700 million, and more than $500 million of that will be freely traded," Mr. Sidoti said. +Although the big players are getting all the attention, the industry is still dominated by small entrepreneurs, and more and more of them are beginning to merge. There have been a half dozen nursing home combinations over the last 12 months. +At the moment, the nursing home industry remains widely diversified: The 20 largest chains operate just 18 percent of the homes, but that is expected to change. +"Right now the top 32 players have 21 percent of the beds," Mr. Richter said. "Five years from now, I would expect the top 10 players will have 21 percent of the beds." +Mergers make sense because of the need to work with managed care purveyors," said Carl Sherman, a senior vice president and health care analyst at Dillon Read & Company. "In the next few years, the nursing home industry sees this as being all-important." +Also important for the industry is keeping down labor costs, which represent close to 80 percent of a nursing home's expenses. Wages are under control, but that could change. +"So long as unemployment stays above 6 percent, we in nursing homes will do well," Andrew L. Turner, founding chairman and chief executive of Sun Healthcare, said. +Aside from the mergers, larger nursing home operators, including Manor Care, have also entered into joint-venture arrangements with hospitals, or are contemplating them. +Given the huge size of some hospital chains relative to nursing homes, "hospitals could purchase assets and capabilities from the nursing home industry," Mr. Ormond at Health Care and Retirement said. "But it is more likely they will focus on their segment of the market, and we will focus on ours. There will be ways for the system to enjoy the economics of both." +Mr. Turner of Sun Healthcare disagreed. "In 10 years we will be in the hospital business," he said. "But it will be called something different than that." + + + +SMALL FRY ARE MAKING ACQUISITIONS + Over the last year the nursing home industry has seen a flurry of mergers and acquisitions. But unlike the 1980's, when big companies spent too much for their acquisitions, the buying and selling in the last 12 months has involved smaller operators doing smaller deals. + "In the past, if there was acquisition activity, it was big fish swallowing little fish," saisd Andrew L. Turner, chairman and chief executive of Sun Healthcare Group, which in January announced in was buying the Mediplex Group for $320 million. + "Today, it's the little fish who are getting married," he added. "The five largest companies are not out there." + Indeed. Here is a list of the five biggest nursing home deals in the last year: + * Genesis Health Ventures/Meridian Healthcare. Price, $205 million. Combination increases the number of beds at Genesis to more than 10,000. Genesis also agreed to lease an additional seven nursing homes from Meridian, with an option to buy them for $59 million in 10 years. + * Horizon Healthcare Corporation/Greenert Rehabilitation Group. Price, $350 million. Combination gives Horizon just under 9,000 beds. + * Sun Healthcare Group Systems/Mediplex Group. Price $320 million. Combination make Sun one of the 10 highest nursing home operations in the country, with more than 13,000 beds. + * Integrated Health Services/Central Park Lodges. Price $184 million. Combination gives Integrated nearly 5,000 beds. Central Park had been a unit of the Trizec Corporation of Canada. + * Regency Health Services/Care Enterprises. Prices, $120 million in a stock swap. Combination is giving Regency just over 9,000 beds. + +LOAD-DATE: February 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graphs: "Leading Providers of Nursing Home care: An Analyst's Outlook" shows nursing home statistics for several of the leading providers in the field. (Source: Datastream) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +79 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +POLITICAL NOTES; +Clinton Aides Find New York Chillier + +BYLINE: By TODD S. PURDUM + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 34; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 786 words + +O, tempora! O, mores! O, lights and sirens! Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani takes pride in being a new Republican broom at City Hall, and it seems that at least some of the routine Democratic customs of former Mayor David N. Dinkins have indeed been swept away. +The other day, Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown visited New York City for a couple of events in Harlem with Representative Charles B. Rangel, one of the new Mayor's sharpest critics, and asked for a city police escort. Mr. Dinkins always extended that courtesy to Mr. Brown, an old friend and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. But this time the Police Department's Intelligence Division, which handles escorts for dignitaries, refused, to the chagrin of former Dinkins aides. + A police spokesman, Sgt. Nicholas Vreeland, said the division decided that no security or crowd-control concerns justified an escort. "It's a case-by-case evaluation," he said. "He has his own security, and based on the fact that there were no threats and nothing really confrontational on his itinerary, they determined that an escort wasn't warranted." +"You're kidding!" Mr. Rangel exclaimed when told of the Police Department's decision. He added, referring to the Giuliani administration: "They're so political, and so proud of what they don't know. It's just like they think the whole city was born in Staten Island." +Here's the puzzle: Carol Hamilton, a spokeswoman for Mr. Brown who was with him on the trip to a health clinic and a center for the elderly on Feb. 17, said their group in fact had an escort from a blue-and-white marked police car. +"We appreciate our friends looking out for us, but we've had no problems," she said. +So how did Mr. Brown get the car? "They may have called the highway unit on their own," Sergeant Vreeland said. +In any case, some Cabinet officers are more equal than others. The day after Mr. Brown's visit, Henry G. Cisneros, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, got a ride from the airport with Mr. Giuliani's personal security detail. His destination: City Hall, for lunch with the Mayor. + +Great Moments in Locution + +After nearly 12 years in office, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo is known far and wide as one of the most eloquent political orators of his generation. But sometimes his verbal footwork ends up sounding more like an Abbott and Costello routine, as it did last week in Washington. +The Governor went to Capitol Hill to lobby the New York Congressional delegation to keep up the fight for changes in the national Medicaid reimbursement formula that would benefit the state -- a cause for which he has long fought. After addressing a luncheon meeting convened by Mr. Rangel, the dean of the delegation, Mr. Cuomo told reporters that he had come to ask Mr. Rangel what he could do to help the fight, as Congress considers health-care legislation. +So, the Governor was asked, what did Mr. Rangel say? +"I sought his advice as to what I should do. I didn't seek his advice as to what he should do. He knows what he should do, and he didn't seek my advice as to what he should do. So the subject of what he should do remains very much with him. I asked him what I should do." +So, the Governor was asked again, what did he say you should do? +"He said, 'Keep doing what you're doing,' " Mr. Cuomo said. "Which is what I'm doing." + +This Sticker Paid for By . . . + The New Jersey Senate race between the Democratic incumbent, Frank R. Lautenberg, and his presumptive Republican challenger, State Assembly Speaker Chuck Haytaian, is already shaping up as a bitter fight. Lautenberg loyalists recently took some pains to show reporters red-white-and-blue Haytaian lapel stickers -- the cheaper, modern version of buttons -- that contain no disclaimer noting who paid for them. +"It's illegal," one Lautenberg aide gloated, on condition of anonymity. "I just hope they're this sloppy on everything." +In fact, according to the Federal Election Commission, Mr. Haytaian is on solid legal ground, since Federal law requiring campaign disclosure exempts small items -- pins, pens, buttons, bumper stickers -- "upon which the disclaimer cannot be conveniently printed." (The law also exempts other vehicles -- specifically, skywriting and signs on water towers -- where a disclaimer would be "impracticable.") +"Whatever is out there that has my name on it is paid for by my committee, and there's no intention to hide it," said Mr. Haytaian, who has yet to declare his candidacy officially. "If anybody is insinuating that, they ought to be worried about more important things, like reducing the deficit and cutting spending and national health care, and not some disclaimer on a tag." + +LOAD-DATE: February 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +80 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +AT YOUR SERVICE; +Rent Aid to Tai Chi to Meals-on-Wheels: A Program Guide + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 16; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 683 words + +NEW YORK CITY is blessed with an abundant variety of programs for the elderly, reflecting the city's cultural mix. But it is also cursed by a lack of coordination that makes it hard for people to find out what is available. +"People don't know what services there are," said Grace Harewood, executive director of the Fort Greene Senior Citizens Council in Brooklyn. "I know a woman who worked full time and would race home on her lunch hour to cook meals for her parents. Then one day she saw one of our vans going through the neighborhood, and she called to see if she could get meals delivered to them." + There are 335 centers for the elderly administered by the city Department for the Aging, and hundreds of other programs organized by nonprofit agencies. +They include the basic programs found around the country, like Meals on Wheels. But like many other aspects of life in the city, programs for the elderly can be innovative in the way they address their clientele's physical and psychological needs. +Information about city programs can be obtained by calling the Department for the Aging. For help in English, Mandarin or Cantonese, (212) 442-1000; for help in Spanish, (212) 442-3010. +Here are some services for the elderly in New York: +* Exemptions from rent increases for households headed by a person age 62 or older with up to $16,500 in total income in rent-controlled or rent-stabilized housing, Mitchell-Lama buildings or hotels. +* Reduced fares on subways and buses at all hours for people 65 and older. Buses charge 60 cents; subways issue a return transfer for every token purchased. +* Helmsley Alzheimer's Alert, in which people suffering from Alzheimer's disease are given bracelets imprinted with a number that helps identify them if they wander off. The program is run by the Alzheimer's Association; (212) 983-0700. +* The Ability Is Ageless job fair, held every autumn by the Department for the Aging to bring businesses together with older New Yorkers seeking jobs. Workshops help sharpen job-hunting skills; (212) 442-1000. +* SeniorNet, a computer network offering an electronic bulletin board, retirement information, games and other activities for people over 55. Classes are held at seven centers, including University Settlement at 189 Allen Street on the Lower East Side; (212) 473-8217. +* Family Mentor Program, introduced last year to match troubled families with people 60 and older who can offer guidance to keep families intact; (212) 442-3161. +* Meals on Wheels, for hot home-delivered meals, available regardless of income; (212) 348-4344. +* Ageworks, which trains people 55 and older to use computers and helps them find computer-related jobs; (212) 442-1355. + * A program to help elderly crime victims, run by the Department for the Aging; (212) 442-3103. +* A citywide home-repair program run by the New York Foundation for Senior Citizens. For no charge -- although clients are asked to pay for materials if they can -- workers will repair doorknobs, caulk bathtubs and perform other minor repairs; (212) 962-7653. +* A program that refers clients to agencies that provide personal alarms, which are worn around the neck or wrist and, with the press of a button, alert a central agency, like a hospital, if the wearer needs help; (212) 442-1195. + Here are a few senior-citizens centers with a cultural accent: +* The mostly Chinese La Guardia Senior Citizens Center, or Ho Lok Chung Sum, at 280 Cherry Street in lower Manhattan, where bowls of congee (rice porridge, with pork and shrimp on top) are served at breakfast for 20 cents; English classes are offered weekly, and tai chi daily at 7 A.M; (212) 732-3656. +* The Christopher C. Blenman Senior Citizens Center, 720 East New York Avenue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, with a mostly Caribbean clientele (and tai chi classes, too); (718) 773-7400. +* The Corona Program for the Elderly, a bilingual (English-Spanish) center run by the First United Methodist Church at 42-15 104th Street in Corona, Queens, which holds a Latin American festival every October; (718) 458-7259. + +LOAD-DATE: March 1, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +81 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Beyond Denial: An 'Eldercare' Primer; +Health-Care Rules Are a Dizzying Maze. It's Terribly Painful to Confront a Parent's Mortality. But Why Wait for a Crisis? + +BYLINE: By CONSTANCE L. HAYS + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 1; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 3911 words + +CAROL MAURO'S father lived happily and healthily on his own in a Manhattan walk-up apartment until last Father's Day, when, at the age of 82, he fell and broke his hip. That injury, complicated by a heart attack, transformed his life, and the lives of his three daughters as well. +Caught unprepared, Mrs. Mauro says, she and her sisters flailed about in their search for information, "all sort of tripping over each other in trying to be helpful." The months since have been a crash course in the elements of what has come to be called "eldercare" -- the runic regulations of Medicaid and Medicare, the relative benefits of home health care versus life in a nursing home. + "We got lulled into forgetting how old he really was," said Mrs. Mauro, who directs training programs for a large insurance company. "You live with a whole lot of denial about what's going to happen to your parents." +Now, her father, John Vitale, a retired postal worker who has lived alone since his wife died in 1981, has health aides helping him around the clock, and Mrs. Mauro and her sisters are paying his not inconsiderable bills. +Their story, experts say, is all too typical. It is the rare adult who begins to grapple ahead of time with the financial, medical and emotional implications of caring for elderly parents. Most of the time, such topics are addressed only in mid-crisis, with decisions made hurriedly and then frequently regretted in hindsight. +All of this, of course, is as simple, and as maddeningly complex, as the relationships and inevitable conflicts between parent and child, brother and sister, husband and wife. +Some parents may feel that to involve their children in highly personal decisions would be to surrender irrevocably to old age. Disagreements frequently erupt over whether parents' money should be used for their care or kept to pass on to their children. And often the need to plan for elderly parents gets pushed aside by the demands of a child's own children or career. +But the biggest hurdle for many is simply facing the fact that parents get old and frail and, ultimately, are gone. +"I just didn't want to think of this person, my mother, who I loved so much and who had always taken care of me, as a helpless person," said Linda Nochlin, a professor of modern art at New York University whose mother died at the age of 80 last month. "It's terribly hard. To say one can be rational about it is simply untrue. No one can really help you confront the notion of your mother's mortality, and then your own mortality, which goes along with it." +Still, while a parent may remain healthy and independent until 65 or 90, "the mortality rate is 100 percent, so it's foolish not to deal with these things," says Louise Fradkin, a founder of Children of Aging Parents, a national support group. +The often staggering financial burden of medical care for the elderly is one of the major factors driving the furious health care debate in Washington. And there is added urgency in the changing demographics of New York. While the total number of people over 65 in the city remained fairly constant between censuses in 1980 and 1990, the number of people 85 and older -- those most likely to need specialized care -- rose 32 percent. +"The average 40-year-old couple has more parents than children," said Barbara B. Lepis, director of the Partnership for Eldercare, an information center run out of the city's Department for the Aging. +The aging of the population and the growing complexity of the situation have given rise to an expanding industry of services for the elderly, and for the children who will care for them, from corporate help to a new species of social worker, the geriatric-care manager, who can navigate much of the eldercare maze for you. +The field is vast and complex. All the more reason to learn the basics now. What follows, then, is a primer in many of the major issues of caring for elderly relatives in a city of extensive and diverse but often poorly publicized services. + +THE PAPERWORK + The first step is the paperwork. +An essential, lawyers and advocates for the elderly say, is power of attorney, a document in which a parent designates someone who will be able to perform tasks like paying bills and writing checks. Someone who becomes incapacitated without having assigned power of attorney may end up having decisions made by a state-appointed guardian. +A lawyer usually draws up the document, which must be notarized. Forms are available from any stationery store specializing in legal forms, but experts urge great care; power of attorneyis a highly potent instrument that is easily abused. +Next is the health-care proxy, which allows the person designated to make decisions about medical treatment should a patient not be able to participate in such decisions. +Many lawyers also recommend that parents sign living wills, which state their feelings about the degree to which they should be sustained on life-support if they become terminally ill or recovery otherwise seems unlikely. Though New York, unlike many states, does not have a law regulating the use of living wills, "judges generally uphold them," said Ellen P. Rosenzweig, a director of the Institute of Law and Rights of Older Adults at Hunter College. +Lawyers draft these documents, but for those who want to do it themselves, forms for health-care proxies and living wills are available from an organization called Choice in Dying. A New York health-care proxy is essentially valid only within the state. +Parents should also be encouraged to make, and give their children, lists of their assets and of their monthly income from all sources -- pensions, Social Security, rental property, interest and dividends. The list should include safe-deposit box locations, the names and telephone numbers of lawyers and accountants, the location of a will and other important documents, and any information about funeral arrangements already made. + +HEALTH-CARE OPTIONS + The next subject -- one that is considerably more bewildering and emotionally fraught -- is health care. While many parents are in good general physical condition and able to manage their own care, and while most will never need a nursing home, many will need some kind of specialized care at some point. +Simply raising the subject can be painful. Carolyn E. Mayo, compensation manager for American International Group, where Mrs. Mauro also works, checked out home care last year for her parents, Dorothy and Walter Spence, who are 78 and 83 and living in their own house in North Bayshore, L.I., despite failing eyesight and other health problems. +"My mother said to me, 'You know your father doesn't like having strangers in the house,' " she recalled. So Mrs. Mayo continues to commute from her home on Staten Island when they need help. +Often the choice is between nursing homes and home health care, which has grown dramatically of late. +Carl D'Aquino, an interior designer, and his two brothers placed their parents, now 73 and 79, in nursing homes twice within the last six months and Mr. D'Aquino called the decision and the aftermath "probably the most difficult thing I've gone through in my entire life." +"As fine as the home is," he added, "every time I go and visit, it's completely draining. Leaving is so hard." +Many people resist nursing homes on a gut level. When Judith Brickman, a nursing-home specialist with the city's Department for the Aging, tells her clients to free-associate with "nursing home," she says, she frequently gets responses like "sick, institutional, depressing." +"They have an absolutely horrible reputation, but I don't think it's deserved," she said, though she allows that 20 years ago, many nursing homes were indeed bad. Still, the 1990 census found that 46,118 New Yorkers over 65, or 4.8 percent, were in the city's 160 nursing ing homes or in other residential facilities. +The Department for the Aging provides lists of nursing homes as well as advice on how to assess them. And there are safety nets to help protect residents of nursing homes. Federal law requires, and pays for, each home to have an ombudsman to take complaints. Another advocacy option is a group called Friends and Relatives of Institutionalized Aged. +Gaining admission to a nursing home usually requires two evaluations -- the patient review instrument and the patient screen instrument -- to evaluate the need for care. +The most popular alternative to nursing homes is home health care, in which aides with varying levels of nursing training assist elderly people in daily activities, from bathing to taking medicine to going to the grocery store. Many private agencies specialize in placing home health aides, for a fee. Nonprofit agencies like the New York Foundation for Senior Citizens will provide health aides under certain circumstances, using Medicaid or private funds. The city also provides them for needy residents through Medicaid. +Screening a health aide is essential, and people should ask about applicants' training, whether they hold a certificate as a home health aide or nurse's aide, whether they have experience and good references, whether they have had a recent physical examination themselves, and how they might respond in a specific medical emergency. Have the person try out for a few days, and monitor the situation closely. +"Employers should lay the rules down right at the start and make sure the aide understands," said Agnes Mak, who runs the home health aide program at the New York Foundation for Senior Citizens. "They should not make medical decisions. They should communicate with the family. The key is constant supervision." +An alternative that falls between home care and nursing homes is "enriched housing," in which frail elderly people live in apartment buildings where a hot meal is served once a day and other services, from transportation to personal grooming, are arranged. The cost varies, but at one large building in Manhattan it is just under $800 a month. A related alternative is "shared housing," in which roommates are found for elderly people who remain in their homes. + +PAYING FOR HEALTH CARE + Except for the wealthy and those who qualify for Medicaid, the Federal insurance program for the poor, paying for medical care poses the thorniest problems, and raises some of the most difficult questions, of all. +Generally speaking, for a healthy person over 65, visits to the doctor are covered by private insurance or by Medicare, the Government's insurance plan for the elderly. When a crisis requires hospitalization, Medicare and private insurance will also cover most of those costs. +But by and large, private insurers and Medicare do not pay for long-term nursing home or in-home care, although Medicare does cover up to 100 days of skilled care following a hospital stay of three days or more. For example, a heart-attack patient can have most of his or her hospital stay paid through Medicare, but someone who develops Alzheimer's disease and deteriorates to the point of needing daily care usually can not. +Another significant cost not covered by Medicare is prescription drugs. Most people pay for them out of pocket or with private insurance. +Both nursing-home care and home care can be tremendously expensive. The average New York City nursing home costs at least $5,000 a month, according to the Department for the Aging, and home health aides typically charge $10 and up an hour, which can quickly be just as costly. +"You find out ultimately that this is going to be more expensive than anybody but Rockefeller can handle," said Barry Herman, an economist whose mother, Fannie, has Alzheimer's disease and entered a nursing home last month. +For younger parents without serious health problems, insurers do offer policies that cover long-term care. Such policies are expensive, and don't always cover every contingency. +Which leaves a huge swath of peo-ple in the middle struggling to be covered for long-term care. Which leads in turn to a common, and often emotionally trying, financial maneuver known as "spending down," which allows someone who starts out relatively well off to be covered by becoming legally indigent. Here is how it works: +In New York, which is more generous than other states because of the high cost of living, the cutoff for Medicaid is $534 in monthly income, with $4,700 in assets. +Spending down can take two forms. The first is actually spending assets to pay for care. Mr. Herman's mother, for instance, is now paying for her nursing home, at a cost of about $7,500 a month. After about six months, he said, her money will be gone and Medicaid will take over. +The other route is what is known as the surplus income program. People who have income that exceeds the official limits for Medicaid can still qualify as long as their medical expenses absorb that surplus. They turn the excess income over to the nursing home or home health-care agency, with Mediciad picking up the difference, Ms. Rosenzweig said. +With a certain amount of planning, however, there are ways to keep money in the family. +Because of a 1988 change in Federal law, the spouse of a nursing-home patient covered by Medicaid is allowed to keep $72,660 in savings and have an income of up to $1,817 a month -- more if need can be proven in court. Homes and other possessions are not counted as assets, as long as the spouse or a disabled child is living in the house. +An elderly person without a spouse can also transfer money to other relatives, and the rules for such transfers can influence the choice between home care and nursing home care. +A patient can transfer unlimited assets to another family member, apply for Medicaid and be approved immediately for home care. The same person choosing to enter a nursing home, however, would have to wait out a penalty period based on the amount of money transferred. For example, a person transferring $100,000 in stock would have to wait roughly 18 months -- the value of the assets divided by $5,400, the average cost of a month in a nursing home. +Until last year, the penalty period was limited to 30 months, but now there is no limit, Ms. Rosenzweig said, adding that there is also a proposal in the State Assembly to apply the penalty period to in-home care. +Perhaps the most difficult thing about getting people to spend down or transfer assets, experts say, is that many find it frightening and humiliating, after a life of hard work +"No matter how much you trust and love your children," says Nora O'Brien, a counseling coordinator with the Partnership for Eldercare, "it's scary to take all your money and give it to someone else." +There are myriad tax considerations that affect the transfer of assets to qualify for Medicaid. Mrs. Brickman urges people to see elder-law specialists for help in planning. +Paying for long-term care is one of the issues dealt with in the various health plans now being debated in Washington. +President Clinton's plan would give states grants to pay for in-home care for people of all ages. The plan proposed by Representative Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Democrat, would eliminate Medicaid altogether and recommend that states pay for long-term care, while the plan offered by Senator John Chaffee, a Rhode Island Republican, would provide tax incentives for people to buy long-term care insurance, which is also part of the President's plan. + +HELPING THE HELPERS + Like elder-law specialists, geriatric-care managers are a byproduct of the huge growth in the elderly population. Frequently they are hired by adult children to help convince their parents of the need for care or to fill in for the children when they are out of town or otherwise preoccupied. +Many of them started out as social workers and a few are therapists as well, but all are trained to step into complex family situations and begin to sort them out. They are self-regulated, with no licensing required, although most of them belong to the National Association of Professional Geriatric Care Managers and are licensed in their original occupations. +Their fees are substantial -- $80 to $150 an hour, depending on the task at hand -- and are not covered by health insurance or Medicare. +Leonie Nowitz is one such care manager. She started her business, the Center for Lifelong Growth, in Manhattan, in 1979 and has 20 or so clients at a time. She might accompany one elderly person to the doctor, visit with another, help the children of another sign up for Medicaid or find a reliable home health aide. Sometimes the children, and their parents, live in New York; more often the children live in a faraway state. In that case, having a geriatric-care manager on call can eliminate the need to fly out on the next plane when a parent appears to be ill or having trouble. +"People get very nervous about a bureaucratic system, so they ask me to help them get on Medicaid and help them get into nursing homes when the need arises," Ms. Nowitz said. "It's helpful to have contacts at nursing homes. It can be an old-boy network." +For those who can't afford to hire a geriatric-care manager, public and nonprofit private agencies offer social workers who perform many of the same tasks, although usually with much larger caseloads. +Even considering the cost, clients seem to think geriatric-care managers can be invaluable. A 50-year-old New York City schoolteacher said he hired Ms. Nowitz to take his mother and his uncle to the doctor and find home health aides to care for them, but he also found Ms. Nowitz a reliable shoulder when he tired of hearing both his uncle, now almost 90, and his teen-age children complain that he didn't spend enough time with any of them. +"I talked to her once about my feelings, about having to deal first with my mother and now my uncle who needed care," said the man, who did not want his name used. "She seemed to understand that. I had tried therapy many years ago, and it really didn't work. I didn't think they understood me. This time, someone really seemed to have my emotions down pat." +He seems to have reached his own kind of peace with the problems of caring for elderly relatives. These days, he said, he keeps an old black-and-white photograph of himself as a toddler, dressed in a snowsuit and cradled in his uncle's arms, in a dresser drawer. +"He looks so proud," he said. "And now the situation is reversed. Every time I go for my socks in the morning I take a look at it. My uncle was always very good to me, and now I have an obligation to him." + +One Family's History + THE CHILD: Carolyn E. Mayo, 44 years old, married, with five children. Lives on Staten Island. Compensaiton manager for American International Group, an insurance company. + PARENTS: Dorothy and Walter Spence, ages 78 and 83, of North Bayshore, L.I. She is diabetic; he lost a kidney to cance.r Both have eye problems, but are generally healthy. + THE FINANCES: The Spences get annuity payments from Penn Central Railroad, where he worked, and have private health insurance and Medicare. + WHAT SHE'S DONE: She knows where the key documents are. Her parents have a burial plot. She researched home care, but her parents rejected it as too expensive and intrusive. + THE FUTURE: "I now have a list of resources, in the event I have to force my parents to take on these services." + + +BARRY HERMAN + HIS STORY: 50 years old, married, with two children, one in college, the other in high school. Lives in Manhattan. Works as an international economist. +PARENTS: Father died 25 years ago. Mother, Fannie, 81, worked as a bookkeeper. She developed early signs of Alzheimer's in 1992 and lived in a residence for the elderly until last month, when she moved to a Bronx nursing home. + FINANCES: Mother had assets. Some were transferred to family members; others are being spent to cover he care until she is eligivle for Medicaid, probably inApril. Total cost this year: about $50,000. + WHAT HE'S DONE: He and his sister have obtained power of attorney and a health-care proxy. + THE FUTURE: The nursing home is where their mother will stay. "We couldn't have done anything for her that would have been better." + + +CARL D'AQUINO + HIS STORY: 46 year old, self-employed interior designer in Manhattan. + PARENTS: Josephine andCarl D'Auino Sr., 73 and 79. Father worked as a laborer on the Manhattan Bridge, Mother worked until Carl and his two brother were born. Parents wanted to remain independent in their Brooklyn home but she suffered a serious illness in 1991. They were persuaded to move into a special housing complex for the elderlyin Queens. After a series of accidents on the ice last winter, they entered a nursing home, then another one. Both parents are alert. Mrs. D'Aquino is deaf. Mr. D'Aquino has advanced Parkinson's disease and has had three heart attacks. + FINANCES: Savings werenot substantial. Both parents applied for and received Medicaid, although a health aide remains on the family payroll to assist Mrs. D'Aquino. + WHAT HE HAS DONE: Divided responsibilities with his brothers. Carl takes care of housing and the physical environment; Roger does accounting and financial planning; Victor helped hire caregivers. The sons have been given power of attorney and health-care proxy rights. + THE FUTURE: The issue, Carl D'Auino says, is keeping both parents active and happy. + +Getting Beyond the Basics + The issues faced by the elderly and their relatives can be dizzyingly complex. Here are some of the government and private agencies that can provide help, as well as more in-depth information. +* General information: New York City Department for the Aging, (212) 442-1000; New York Foundation for Senior Citizens, (212) 962-7559. +* Living-will and health-care proxy forms: Choice in Dying, 200 Varick Street, New York, N.Y. 10014; (212) 366-5540. +* Information on nursing homes in New York City and help in assessing them: Judy Brickman, specialist at the city Department for the Aging, (212) 442-3092. +* Help in finding an advocate for a nursing home resident: Friends and Relatives of Institutionalized Aged, (212) 732-4455. +* Nurses who can conduct patient-review-instrument tests to evaluate need for care: Visiting Nurse of New York, (212) 714-9250; Catholic Charities, (212) 371-7000; Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, (212) 764-3878. +* Home health aides: New York Foundation for Senior Citizens, (212) 962-7559; Jewish Home and Hospital for Aged, (212) 870-5000. +* Enriched housing: New York Foundation for Senior Citizens, Housing Division, (212) 369-5523. +* Hospice care: Department for the Aging, (212) 442-1000. +* Information on tax planning and other financial issues: American Association of Retired Persons, (800) 424-3410. +* Information on elder-law: Friends and Relatives of Institutionalized Aged, (212) 732-4455. +* Alzheimer's programs: Alzheimer's Assocation, New York chapter, (212) 983-0700; Jewish Home and Hospital for Aged, (212) 870-5000; Department for the Aging, (212) 442-3086. +* Help in finding geriatric care managers: National Association of Professional Geriatric Care Managers, (602) 881-8008, or the New York chapter, (212) 222-9163. +* Help in finding a caseworker to function like a geriatric care manager: Foundation for Senior Citizens, (212) 962-7559; New York City Department for the Aging, (212) 442-1000. + +LOAD-DATE: March 1, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Carl D'Aquino with his father, Carl Sr., 79, and his mother, Josephine, 73, at the couple's nursing home. (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times); Barry Herman holding a photograph of his mother, Fannie, 81. (William E. Sauro/The New York Times) (pg. 12) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +82 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: UPPER WEST SIDE; +On Broadway, Book Is Mightier Than the Car + +BYLINE: By EMILY M. BERNSTEIN + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 6; Column 5; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 423 words + +Ending a debate that dates to the early 1970's, the city has decided to renovate a four-story garage on Broadway at 113th Street to make way for a branch of the New York Public Library. +For book lovers, the decision means more elbow room for a branch that has been housed since 1936 in a small room in the basement of Columbia University's Butler Library. + But for drivers it means the loss of 108 precious indoor parking spaces -- and therein lie the roots of the dispute. +About 20 years ago, the city bought the garage with the goal of giving the branch more space. But some local car owners fought to keep the garage, and the city began considering other sites. +The garage plan was revived last summer, when Columbia announced a plan to expand Butler and said the public library branch would have to find a new home by next January. +The Morningside Heights Residents Association, a community group, lobbied hard to take over the garage. It did a survey of surrounding streets and found hundreds of available spaces in parking lots in the neighborhood. +Now the city has determined that the building will be renovated to house the new library, though it is not clear how long that will take. Library officials have begun the design process and will decide whether to use three or four stories of the garage. If the fourth story is not incorporated into the library design, it might be set aside for the community's use, perhaps as a center for elderly residents. +But two sticking points remain. +First, there may be a long gap between moving the branch out of Butler and reopening it in the garage. If Columbia cannot delay the moving date, said Caroline Oyama, a spokeswoman for the library, the city may try to find an interim site. +Second, there are two businesses on the building's ground floor, a barber shop and a laundry. Laura Friedman, Democratic district leader for the area, said she would push the city to allow the shops to stay and make provisions for the library to take the space when they are ready to leave. +But Robert Roistacher, who lobbied for the new branch location on behalf of the community group, said the library space was more important. "I am against sacrificing library area for them," he said. "Maybe we can help them find other space." +Five-year-old Judy Green, an avid reader, said she was looking forward to using a library with its own children's room or even children's floor. "It would be great to be able to have as many books as I could read," she said. EMILY M. BERNSTEIN + +LOAD-DATE: March 1, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +83 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 1, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +The Aged Reject CPR Use + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section C; Page 6; Column 4; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 405 words + +DATELINE: BOSTON, Feb. 28 + +Elderly people overwhelmingly say they would prefer not to have cardiopulmonary resuscitation for cardiac arrest after they learn how slim their chances of survival are, a study concludes. +The researchers found that many people who at first favor CPR change their minds after they understand the long odds of getting better. + "Most seniors are good gamblers," said an author of the study, Dr. Donald J. Murphy of Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Denver. "It's not the life-sustaining machinery that intimidates them. They just don't want to be on it for any length of time if the prognosis is poor." +CPR is used to shock the heart back to life after cardiac arrest. + +371 Patients in Survey + Dr. Murphy and colleagues surveyed 371 patients over one year at a geriatrics clinic at the medical center. At first, 41 percent said they would like to have CPR if their hearts stopped while they were being treated for an acute illness. But when they were told that their chances of surviving were only 10 to 17 percent, half of them changed their minds. Just 22 percent still wanted CPR. +Asked what treatment they would want if they had a chronic illness in which they were expected to live less than a year, 11 percent initially said they would choose CPR. But after learning that their chances of surviving long enough to be discharged were zero to 5 percent, half said they were no longer interested in CPR. +The researchers said older patients readily understand information about likely health outcomes, and this influences their views on CPR. +The study was published in the current issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. +When hospitalized patients say they do not want CPR, "do not resuscitate" orders are placed in their records. Some experts believe that wider use of these orders would save health care dollars. +But a separate report in the journal argues that this and other attempts at reducing the cost of dying are unlikely to result in big savings. Based on a variety of other research, Drs. Ezekiel and Linda Emanuel of Harvard Medical School concluded that these measures would cut health care expenditures by 3.3 percent at most. +They said it was often difficult to judge when a patient was going to die and aggressive treatment was futile. And even if doctors avoid high-technology attempts to cure the hopelessly ill, keeping them out of pain as death approaches is expensive. + +LOAD-DATE: March 1, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +84 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 2, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Flake and His Church Agree to Repay Federal Money + +BYLINE: By DENNIS HEVESI + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 609 words + +In a settlement to a civil suit brought by the Justice Department, Representative Floyd H. Flake and the church he heads in Jamaica, Queens, have agreed to repay $530,000 in Federal money that the government had claimed was improperly used to help build a church school. +With interest dating to 1982, when construction on the school started, the repayment will add up to $925,000. + The settlement is the latest chapter of a case that began when the Department of Housing and Urban Development provided loans to help build a senior-citizen housing project sponsored by the Allen A.M.E. Church, which the congressman serves as pastor. + +First Amendment at Issue + The alleged misuse of the money to build a community center connected to the church school came to light at the time Mr. Flake and his wife, Margaret Elaine, were indicted on Federal tax-evasion and embezzlement charges. In April 1991, the tax case was dismissed for lack of evidence. +The settlement of the civil suit, first reported yesterday in New York Newsday, includes no admission of wrongdoing on the part of Mr. Flake or the church. +"We are a church that has been at the forefront of economic development, education and housing in the community," Mr. Flake, a Democrat, said yesterday, "and as we continue into our next phase it was incumbent upon us to get this matter behind us so that we can move forward." +The repayment, in 48 monthly installments, is to be made by Mr. Flake and the church to the Allen A.M.E. Housing Development Corporation, the church-sponsored organization that built the senior-citizens housing project. +Mr. Flake contended yesterday that it was proper to use the money to build a community center connected to the school because the center served the general public. +But Robert Begleiter, chief of the civil division in the Office of the United States Attorney for the Eastern District, said, "It was for the purposes of the church school, and there happens to be something called the First Amendment." The First Amendment, among other things, stipulates the separation of church and state. + +Prosecution Was Defeated + Mr. Flake's congressional chief of staff, Edwin Reed, said the money used to build the community center became available because "they brought the housing project in on time and under budget." +"When we set up the corporation for the multiservice community center, we set it up as the Allen Christian School," Mr. Reed said. "That was the mistake." The center provides space for community meetings and services, he said, but classes for the school are also held there. +When the use of the money for the center was discovered, Mr. Flake persuaded officials in the regional Housing and Urban Development office to forgive the misspending. That decision was later rescinded. +On April 3, 1991, at the request of prosecutors, all the criminal charges of tax evasion and embezzlement against Mr. Flake were dismissed in Federal court in Brooklyn. The case ended after three weeks of trial in a complete defeat for the prosecution. +The Flakes had been charged with not reporting $177,578 of income from two sources that they deposited in a ministerial expenses fund. The Government charged that the money was used to buy such "personal" items as jewelry, clothing, toys and a life insurance policy. +One source of those funds, prosecutors said, was a "parsonage allowance." The other was a program to transport elderly residents of the housing complex to shopping centers and elsewhere. +Jurors interviewed after the dismissal said that the Government's case was weak and was undermined by its own witnesses. + +LOAD-DATE: March 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +85 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 2, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Giuliani Picks Head Of Agency on Aging + +SECTION: Section B; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 207 words + +Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani yesterday named Herbert W. Stupp, a former Federal education official, to head New York City's Department of Aging. +Mr. Stupp, 43, served in the administrations of Presidents Reagan and Bush as regional director of the Federal Action agency, the national agency for volunteer services. + In 1989, he became the deputy regional representative to the Secretary of Education, until early last year. +Since Mr. Bush left office, Mr. Stupp has been writing and serving as a consultant. +The appointment of Mr. Stupps, is the latest in a series of Republicans to be named to administration positions in recent days. Mr. Giuliani had been criticized by some Republican officials for the number of Democrats and Liberals he had named and for not appointing more members of his political party. +Mr. Stupps was an active supporter of Mr. Giuliani during last year's mayoral campaign, often serving as a surrogate speaker for Mr. Giuliani. +The aging department, with a budget of $150 million last year and a work force of about 350 employees, administers the city's 335 centers for the elderly and provides employment training services. The department also provides volunteer opportunities for older New Yorkers. + +LOAD-DATE: March 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +86 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 5, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +ABOUT NEW YORK; +Lost Daughter's Images Touch a Mother's Heart + +BYLINE: By Michael T. Kaufman + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 27; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 811 words + +ON Dec. 22, Claire Avery, 82, left her retirement home in Stuart, Fla., and came to New York City to visit her 57-year-old daughter. The elderly woman knew that Rose Avery had not been feeling well, but she was not prepared for what she saw when she arrived at Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, where her only child had lived and painted for the last 20 years. +"She had been protecting me," Mrs. Avery said, sitting in the fourth-floor walk-up and stroking Murdock, her daughter's cat. "She never told me how sick she was or that the cancer had come back. It was terrible. When I got here she could barely walk." + Two days after Christmas, Rose Avery was carried down the narrow stairs and was taken by ambulance to Bellevue. The next day her old mother, strong-willed and clearheaded, began a devoted vigil that was to last two months. Each morning she left the three-room apartment, taking the bus to the hospital where she sat at Rose's bedside. As darkness fell in this winter of frequent snows, she returned to the box-like rooms on Ludlow Street. In a city where she knew no one, the octogenarian woman tended to motherhood. +As she carried food up the stairs, and fed the cat, and wondered whether she could get her arthritic legs into and out of the bathtub in the kitchen, Mrs. Avery was tormented by persistent worry. What, she kept asking herself, would happen to Rose's paintings? What should she do with them in case her daughter died? +They were all over the apartment, perhaps 30 or 40 canvases. Some hung on walls and some were stacked in corners. Mostly they showed street scenes and street people of the Lower East Side. In her sorrow, Mrs. Avery had not found the neighborhood particularly inviting. She missed the weather of Florida and the golf course. The dirty streets, the loud radios were so very different from what she remembered of her native Boston or the places on the West Coast and the Midwest, where she had lived while her husband, an engineer, was alive. +But from the paintings, anyone could see that Rose Avery had loved these streets and the people who were her neighbors. The art was peopled with Chinese shoppers, Latin grocers, Russians at street fairs. There were old-fashioned bums from the Bowery and representatives of the area's younger types, green-haired girls and black-leathered boys. They filled the space, and their images bore into Mrs. Avery's mind and heart. This was the world her daughter had chosen after studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale. This was where she settled, teaching at a Chinese nursery school and worshiping at a Russian church and painting. +Mrs. Avery felt the paintings should be seen. It would be awful, she thought, if they ended up being scattered or discarded. They did not belong in Florida. Whatever happened, she felt, they should be somewhere where people could understand their testimony. +By late January, as Rose weakened, her mother, haunted by the need to find a place for the paintings, phoned this columnist inviting him to look at her daughter's work. Impressed by the paintings and by the painter's mother, the columnist proposed writing a story about the Avery women. Perhaps some reader might offer a solution. +"Oh, no," said Mrs. Avery."I don't think Rose would let me do that. She is such a private person. I know it would embarrass her to think that people were paying attention to her paintings because of her illness or her mother. She never promoted herself. She just kept painting. I don't think you can write about the paintings while she is alive." +Last Wednesday Rose Avery died at the hospital. Her mother was at her side. A memorial Mass was offered at the small Russian chapel on the Lower East Side where Rose, as Irish-looking as her mother, had worshiped because she loved the music and the liturgy. +"It was a beautiful service," said Mrs. Avery. She added that she was thankful for the help she had from her daughter's friends and neighbors and from family friends from New England. In her mourning she was also pleased to have found a respectful home for the paintings. +In the last week of Rose's life, the elderly woman from Florida had made contact with the Tenement Museum, a growing institution whose exhibits at several locations document and portray the still valid melting pot experience so long associated with the Lower East Side. Anita Jacobson, the curator, examined the paintings and said the museum would be willing to show them and introduce them to collectors. "They recall the work of Edward Hopper but with an ethnic flavor," she said. "They have a great deal of character, with a roughness in texture that is like the neighborhood. I like that quality." +Soon Mrs. Avery will be able to leave the place on Ludlow Street to return to Florida. Her heart will be heavy but her work will have been done. + +LOAD-DATE: March 5, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Claire Avery with some of the paintings done by her daughter, Rose. (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +87 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 5, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +HOW THEY DO IT; +For The Elderly, Yet Another Way to Tap Home Equity + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 38; Column 3; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 108 words + +Marvin Kells, 70, of Los Angeles, recently used the equity in his house to buy a lifetime annuity. A retired freelance film editor, he had little savings and just $500 a month in income from Social Security. His 40-year-old house had been payed off long ago but was in desperate need of repair. + The financial arrangement is similar to a reversed mortgage, allowing a homeowner to tap the equity in his home for a stream of payments while he is still alive. + Mr. Kells took a loan on his home from Freedon Home Eqiuty Partners Inc., in Irvine, Calif., and used the amount to purchase the annuity from the Union Labor Life Insurance Company. + +LOAD-DATE: March 5, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Chart showing how Mr. Kells got a home equity loan to buy a lifetime annuity. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +88 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 6, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: SOUTHERN BROOKLYN; +Restoring an Old Friend + +BYLINE: By LYNETTE HOLLOWAY + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 10; Column 3; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 443 words + +When Sandy Koufax wasn't working on his fastball he was at the J, learning to control his jumpshot. +When Larry King wasn't announcing the makes of cars that passed in front of his family's stoop in Bensonhurst, he was at the J, meeting friends and playing basketball. + They are just two of the people who grew up hanging out at the J, the Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst, a 67-year-old Brooklyn institution that almost died four years ago. It had fallen into disrepair, and there wasn't enough money to have the needed work done. +But thanks to Mr. Koufax, Mr. King and their childhood pals, $4.8 million was raised for renovations that are now nearing completion. +To celebrate the refurbished building, a dinner was given last month at the J, at 7802 Bay Parkway, where awards were presented to the three men, all former habitues of the J, who led the restoration campaign: the public relations executive Howard J. Rubenstein; Stuart Subotnick, the executive vice president of Metro Media, and Martin Payson, former general counsel for Time Warner. Each man received a portion of the rusted beams that had been removed. +"This place helped shape my life and friendships," said Mr. Rubenstein, whose bar mitzvah took place at the J. "When I went back, it was a nice feeling." +Joel Karpp, executive director of the center for seven years, said he felt lucky to have such kindhearted and committed (not to mention well-to-do) alumni. +Work on the two-story beige brick building included restoring the exterior, repairing the roof, replacing eroded electrical, plumbing and ventilation systems, and installing an elevator and ramps for the handicapped. The architect was Irwin Chanin. +"It would have been a shame if this place had been destroyed," Mr. Karpp said. "People need this building today more than ever." +Over the years, the recreation center has evolved into a social service agency. It is the supervising agency for counseling, employment and health-care services for more than 1,000 people; the co-sponsor of government-subsidized housing for 100 elderly people and one of the city's largest resettlement services for Russian Jewish immigrants. The center also runs after-school programs, and the gym's basketball court is still there. +Mr. King reminisced about the center recently during two three-minute breaks from his radio talk show. +"My fondest memories of the J are the Sunday brunches," he said. "We ate bagels and cream cheese and then played basketball all day. +"I met Tobi Goodhart there when I was 17," he added. "She was the first love of my life, and she's still the love of my life." + LYNETTE HOLLOWAY + +LOAD-DATE: March 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Renovations are nearing completion at the Jewish Community House. + + + + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +89 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 8, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO DIGEST + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 526 words + + +NEW YORK CITY + +ELDERLY FOSTER CARE: LIKE A NEW HOME +Foster care, a system developed to find homes for abandoned and abused children, is growing in the New York region and across the nation as a way to keep elderly people in home settings and communities they know. A1. + +TRANSIT EXECUTIVE CONDEMNS MERGER +The president of the New York City Transit Authority condemned a plan to merge the city's three police forces, saying it would weaken safety on the subways. But Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said he still thought the authority's parent board would enact his proposal. B3. + +SHORTFALL OF PATROL OFFICERS SEEN +A panel set up by Mayor Giuliani said the city failed to put as many police officers on the street as envisioned in a 1991 anti-crime law that provided for a substantial increase in the size of the Police Department through special taxes. B3. + +HOSPITAL AGENCY TO REVIEW CONTRACTS +The president of the city's Health and Hospital Corporation ordered a review of consulting and technical contracts that were awarded without competitive bids, saying he was afraid the agency was not getting its money's worth. B3. + +EFFORT TO SHIELD SHEIK FROM PLOT +Tapes secretly recorded by a Government informer show a studied effort by those who surrounded Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman to insulate him from the appearance of involvement in a plot to terrorize New York City, transcripts in the court file show. B3. + +ACCORD SEEKS TO CURB GRAFT IN UNION +Federal prosecutors say they have worked out a legal agreement that will curb organized-crime corruption in a union that represents 30,000 carpenters in New York City and Long Island. B4. + +REGION + +SECOND TRIBE IS RECOGNIZED +The Department of the Interior said that the Mohegans of eastern Connecticut have qualified to become the 545th Indian tribe recognized by the Federal Government, opening the way for Federal aid for the 900-member tribe, settlement of its land-claim suit against the state, and possibly a second Indian casino in Connecticut. B6. + +MULTICULTURALISM GROUNDS PETER PAN +A middle school in Southampton, L.I., canceled its production of "Peter Pan" because administrators found that its portrayal of Indians was offensive to members of the Shinnecock tribe, whose children make up about 9 percent of the district's student body. B6. + +NEIGHBOR HELD IN DEATH OF 6-YEAR-OLD +A 6-year-old girl was killed late Saturday or early Sunday while her parents attended a party in their Manalapan, N.J., neighborhood with the parents of a 19-year-old man accused in the slaying, the authorities said. B6. + +CUOMO SLIPS, BUT STILL LEADS RIVALS +An independent poll of New Yorker State residents showed that Gov. Mario M. Cuomo's lead over several potential Republican challengers has slipped but remains in the double digits. B6. + +PLANS FOR GRUMMAN WORRY LONG ISLAND +The name Grumman has been synonymous with jobs and economic security on Long Island for more than five decades, so the announcement that it was being acquired by Martin Marietta came as a shock to many. Business Day. D6. + +Chronicle B5 + +Our Towns by Evelyn Nieves B6 + +LOAD-DATE: March 8, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "PULSE: Personal Bankruptcies" shows number of personal bankruptcy cases each quarter from 1991 to 1993. (Source: Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Bankruptcy Division) + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +90 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 8, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +Foster Care for Elderly: Like a New Home + +BYLINE: By ESTHER B. FEIN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1536 words + +DATELINE: YONKERS, March 2 + +In the middle of the night, when she gets a hankering for something tasty, Mary Taub slides into her slippers, goes into the kitchen and raids the refrigerator. +If she were in a nursing home, which is where some people thought the 77-year-old woman should go last year when she became too forgetful and scared to live on her own, she would not be able to indulge in the pleasure of a bologna sandwich at midnight. + But in a cozy brick house here surrounded by trees, Mrs. Taub has found privacy, companionship, a hand to help fix her soft white hair, three healthy meals a day and even after-hours snacks, living with a foster family paid to provide her with the amenities of home she can no longer provide for herself. + +'I Want to Stay' + "I like it here, I want to stay here," said Mrs. Taub, who has been living for the last three months with Cora and Fred Mondonedo and their two daughters, Cathy, 27, and Casandra, 12. "It's nice to be with a family. They make me laugh." +Foster care, a system developed to find homes for abandoned and abused children, is growing in the New York region and across the nation as a way to keep elderly people in home settings and communities they know. +As the number of elderly and frail elderly people in the country rises, along with the cost of nursing homes, the government, health policy experts and families are looking for alternatives to both save money and afford older people the greatest freedom in choosing a safe and comfortable place to live. +With monthly costs averaging about $1,000 -- one-third those of nursing homes -- and the immeasurable value of living within the embrace of a family, supporters say foster care should play an increasingly vital role in caring for the elderly. +Two states that have had extensive experience with foster care for the elderly, Oregon and Washington, have found few drawbacks. So far, cases of abuse have been very limited, people who work in the field said, although they add that as programs proliferate, they will have to be vigilant in looking out for such problems. +The problems that arise most often tend to involve emotional attachments, experts say. When the elderly person becomes too ill to stay in foster care and must move on to a nursing home, the move can be wrenching for all parties. +And the use of foster care can be difficult for relatives of the elderly. They often feel guilty that they are not taking in their aged parent, aunt or grandparent. Sending the elderly to a nursing home, experts say, offers the illusion that a greater level of care is needed, even when it is not. +There are no overall figures on how many older people are living in foster homes since there is no single agency or organization that monitors the dozens of programs nationwide. Experts estimate that tens of thousands of older people of varying ages and conditions are in foster homes and they see those numbers increasing. + +Responding to a Need + "We started this program as a response to a need we saw," said Eleanor Frenkel, director of programs for the Bergen County Visiting Homemaker and Home Health Aide Service, which administers a pilot adult foster-care project in northern New Jersey with 27 placements so far. +"We saw people wanting to be cared for at home," Ms. Frenkel said, "frail elderly not wanting to go into a nursing home but not having a situation that could support care at home either because they had no family or they needed more supervision than they could afford, or they were in substandard homes that were unsafe or unsanitary. But it was very important to them to stay in the community, not in an institution. This is not their original home, but it creates a home where they can be cared for." +In New York State, Gregory Giuliano, who heads the adult foster-care program in the Office of Housing and Adult Services, said the state had about 800 licensed adult foster-care operators, with 1,600 people in the program. "The important thing is to be creative, to look at many options and to realize that no one alternative is right for everybody," he said. + +Less Expensive + Foster care for adults is like foster care for children: a person or a family is paid to take in other people and provide them a home -- meals, laundry, a place to sleep, someone to talk to and watch over them. While children are placed in foster care when others decide it is best, the elderly in foster care choose it themselves. +In some programs, the residents pay for the care with their own money, although often a government agency or a nonprofit organization brings the family and the participant together. Mrs. Taub was matched with the Mondonedos through the Family-Type Home Program for Adults, run by Westchester County's Social Services Department, but she pays the family $950 a month out of her own income, which includes Social Security, dividends and her husband's pension. + +Medicaid Waivers + Some elderly people have their foster care paid for with Supplemental Security Income. And in some cases, states have received Medicaid waivers that allow them to spend Federal long-term nursing funds for community-based care programs like adult foster homes. +"It's a very cost-effective option for the elderly," said Dr. Susan Sherman, a professor of social welfare at the State University of New York at Albany, who has studied foster care for older people. "And one thing we have found is that it provides as much of a family for care providers sometimes as it does for the residents." +Taking in Mrs. Taub and Julia Schlegel, a 63-year-old mentally disabled woman, has allowed Mrs. Mondonedo to be home when Casandra gets out of school each day. The Mondonedos first became a foster family for adults when they were living in California and then in Oregon. +"Not everyone can do it -- it's a 24-hour-a-day job," said Mrs. Mondonedo. "It takes a lot of love, a lot of compassion, a lot of ear to listen to them. But I love elderly people and my daughter needs a grandma. Casandra just loves Mary." +"Casandra makes me laugh," said Mrs. Taub, her pale blue eyes crinkling as she giggled. +Regulations and licensing requirments vary with the programs. In New York a foster family can care for up to four adults; in Massachusetts, up to three; in Washington State, up to six, and in Oregon, up to five. +Many people in Oregon and Washington have made a business of adult foster care by buying several houses and hiring families to live in them and care for elderly people. + +'More Humane' + "It is a more humane and human environment than a nursing home for many older people," said David Olson, coordinator of the adult foster home program in Oregon, which has licensed more than 8,600 adult foster-care beds. "There is independence with supervision but without the feeling of an institution. It's a home and it quickly does become their home." +Helen Roethe brought her own chest of drawers, end table, bed and television set when she moved into a foster home in Gladstone, Ore., 13 months ago. She put some prints on the walls and family photos on the dresser top. Then it felt like home. +She is 81, was never married and was living with her sister and brother-in-law in Milwaukie, Ore., but it became too difficult for them to care for her. +"What else was there to do -- go live in an institution?" Miss Roethe asked. "Not me. I don't want it. We care for each other here, like a family. That suits me better." +Elderly people in foster care, even those with serious medical conditions, do not focus on their health problems, said Thomas Tobin, director of the Family Care Program of Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Mass., which has had an adult foster-care program for 15 years. +"The whole focus is on wellness despite whatever might be wrong with them," Mr. Tobin said. "Someone in a nursing home is constantly confronted with infirmity and so it becomes a center of their lives." + +'Very Excellent Break' + Richard Connor spent five years in a nursing home in Wareham, Mass., after a stroke. He was divorced and could no longer live alone, and it was not feasible for him to live with either of his two daughters. +The nursing home was confining and dispiriting, he said, and he considered it "a very excellent break" when he heard a year ago about the adult foster-care program on Cape Cod. He now lives in Yarmouthport with Matthew Keanan, a widowed psychotherapist, and his 18-year-old son, James, a college student. +"Nursing homes of necessity are very restrictive, very crowded," said Mr. Connor, 68, a retired physicist. "They can't take you for rides or to the beach. But here with Matthew, I can go out and do things. I can visit Boston for some plays and musicals." +The transition from the confinement of a nursing home to the freedom of living in a home with a family, Mr. Connor recalled, "was almost shocking." +"I had to readjust myself to my own way of doing things," he said. "There was a renewed pleasure in dealing with normal chores: what would I like to eat, or should I bake some bread? In a nursing home you tend to adopt the depression of people around you. In a home, you adopt the atmosphere there, and this is a happy one." + +LOAD-DATE: March 8, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: March 27, 1994, Sunday + + CORRECTION: +A picture caption on March 8 with an article about foster care for the elderly incorrectly described the financial arrangement Mary Taub has at her home with the Mondonedo family in Yonkers. Mrs. Taub pays the Mondonedos herself; the state does not pay for her care. + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Instead of being put in a nursing home, Mary Taub, 77, was placed in adult foster care in Cora Mondonedo's home in Yonkers. (pg. A1); "I like it here, I want to stay here," said 77-year-old Mary Taub of her foster home in Yonkers. She sat in her bedroom with Casandra Mondonedo, whose parents are paid by the state to care for Mrs. Taub. Monthly costs in the program average about $1,000 -- one-third those of nursing homes. (pg. B4) (Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +91 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 9, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +House Panel Begins Deliberations on a Health Bill + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 13; Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 606 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 8 + +Congress today entered a new phase in its effort to revamp the nation's health care system as a House subcommittee began deliberations on a bill substantially different from President Clinton's proposal. +The Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health began analyzing the bill, proposed by its chairman, Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California, with lawmakers of both parties saying they felt they were participating in a historic process. + "Few issues grip the American people as deeply as the health care crisis," said Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia. "Health care is a basic right of all individuals. It's not a privilege." +Lobbyists for doctors, dentists, psychologists, small businesses and other interests swarmed over Capitol Hill today as the subcommittee took up health care legislation after 36 days of public hearings. Just after the panel convened, President Clinton spoke to trade association executives defending his proposal and expressing optimism about its future. + +A Test of Strength + Mr. Clinton said he was not distressed by recent obituaries for his health plan. "I have seen a lot of endeavors in which I was involved over the last 15 years given up for dead," he said. +The ranking Republican on the subcommittee, Representative Bill Thomas of California, said he would push for an up-or-down vote on the President's proposal, just to show that it lacked support. "The American people deserve a test of strength for the President's plan," he said. +But Mr. Stark said he expected no votes till next week. At the moment, he does not have a majority for his proposal in the 11-member subcommittee, but he said he might be able to forge such a majority with help from other Democrats. +Mr. Stark's bill would expand Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for the elderly and disabled, to cover people who are unemployed, people who have no connection to the labor force and low-income people now in the Medicaid program, as well as part-time, temporary and seasonal workers. + +Leaner Benefits Package + Mr. Stark's plan, like the President's, would require employers to pay at least 80 percent of the cost of health insurance for their workers. In addition, he suggested a new Federal payroll tax, equal to eight-tenths of 1 percent of wages and salaries. But he made clear that he was open to other ways of financing his plan. +Mr. Stark said his proposal would achieve the President's goal of guaranteeing health insurance for all Americans while controlling medical costs. But he proposes a leaner package of benefits, with less coverage for mental health services and long-term care. +Mr. Stark would not require consumers or employers to obtain coverage through purchasing groups like the alliances proposed by Mr. Clinton. Under Mr. Stark's proposal, the Government could directly regulate doctors' fees and hospital charges but would not regulate health insurance premiums, as Mr. Clinton wants to do. +The prospects for Mr. Stark's proposal in the full Ways and Means Committee, on the House floor and in the Senate are unknown. But White House officials said they were pleased to see one Congressional panel moving ahead with health legislation. +Under Mr. Stark's proposal, employers with more than 100 employees would have to contribute to the cost of health insurance for their workers beginning Jan. 1, 1995. For employers with 100 or fewer employees, a similar requirement would take effect Jan. 1, 1997. These smaller businesses could enroll their workers in the new Federal program, known as Part C of Medicare, or they could buy private insurance. + +LOAD-DATE: March 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: A House subcommittee began deliberations yesterday on a health bill substantially different from President Clinton's proposal. Jon Tahsman, seated, a staff member of the Joint Committee on Taxation, and health care lobbyists listened to the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health discuss the bill. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +92 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 9, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Personal Health + +BYLINE: By Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section C; Page 13; Column 1; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1206 words + +AT the age of 96, George Abbott, the grand old man of American theater, had a pacemaker installed to maintain a normal rhythm in his aging heart. The surgeon told him that it would last about a decade, to which a distressed Mr. Abbott replied to the bemused doctor, "You mean I'm going to have to come back here in 10 years and go through all this again?" +Well, last month at the age of 106, Mr. Abbott returned to have a new pacemaker battery installed, leaving him well prepared to attend last week's Broadway opening of a revival of one of his greatest triumphs, "Damn Yankees." + Mr. Abbott's experience is testimony to the extraordinary life-prolonging power of a relatively simple implantable device that keeps the heart from slowing down to a point that is incompatible with normal living. Invented 34 years ago by Dr. William Chardack, a surgeon, and an electrical engineer named Wilson Greatbatch, "permanent" implantable pacemakers have undergone technological modifications that have greatly improved their therapeutic powers and rendered them useful even for the very old. +To 77-year-old George Piskiel of Brooklyn, a pacemaker installed last year means he has been able to return to his bicycle and the tennis court free from the nausea, dizziness and fainting spells caused by a pulse rate that periodically dropped to about 35 beats per minute. They resulted in a serious fall and, he suspects, an even more serious automobile accident. +To Doris Kapp, 72, also of Brooklyn, a pacemaker means she is once again free to travel widely with her husband, George, a retired science teacher. She had begun to experience terrifying fibrillations during which her heart raced at some 150 beats per minute for hours at a time. Between these episodes, her heart beat dropped to an abnormally slow rate of 38 or 40. The pacemaker made it possible for her to take heart-slowing drugs to control the fibrillations and still maintain a relatively normal heart rate of 50. + +Who Needs One? + The heart is equipped with a specialized group of cells called the sinus node that regulates how often the heart pumps blood, what is commonly called the heart beat or heart rate. These cells produce a biochemical signal that travels through the heart, first causing the upper atrial chambers to contract and then the lower ventricular chambers. The upper chambers pump blood into the lower chambers and the lower chambers pump blood to the rest of the body. +If the path of these signals is partly or completely blocked, the heart does not beat in a normal rhythm. The blood is pumped too slowly, and the heart may occasionally skip some beats altogether. As a result, the body receives an inadequate supply of oxygen and nutrients. In partial heart block, which is quite common in people over 70, the interruption in rhythm is intermittent. In complete heart block, the interruption is continuous and the heart beat can become irregular or very slow, falling into the 30's. +Many elderly people have heart rates of just 40 to 50 beats per minute. A daytime heart rate of 60 or 70 is more typical among adults, although in people who regularly do vigorous aerobic exercise, a heart rate of 50 is considered normal. A slow heart rate in itself is not a reason to install a pacemaker. +In most cases it is only when a very slow heart rate results in symptoms that installing a pacemaker is called for. Such symptoms include intermittent lightheadness or dizziness, weakness, shortness of breath, palpitations or fainting spells that coincide with a drop in heart rate into the 30's. A pacemaker may also be installed in patients with advanced heart block who have a persistent heart rate of 30 to 40. + +How They Work + A pacemaker, in a way, resembles a tiny Walkman. The main unit is a two-ounce pulse generator, a disk about a half-inch thick and two and a half inches in diameter powered by a long-lasting lithium battery. Extending from this power unit are insulated wire leads, each with an electrode at the end. +Depending on the precise abnormality in the patient's heart, a pacemaker with one or two leads is used. The pulse generator produces a signal that is transmitted through the flexible wires to the electrodes, which deliver the electrical impulse to the heart muscle. +To achieve this, the pacemaker leads must be inserted through a vein in the chest wall to reach the parts of the heart requiring stimulation. This is achieved by threading the wires through a catheter that is first inserted in the vein to the heart. Once the electrodes are in place, the power unit is implanted under a flap of skin, usually on the chest wall above the breast. After the incision heals, the unit is rarely noticeable. +Pacemakers are typically installed under local anesthesia with only overnight hospitalization, although sometimes a longer hospital stay is recommended for patients with special problems to be sure the device is performing as needed. +People with pacemakers can bathe and swim normally and perform nearly all their usual activities within weeks of installation. Before being fitted, patients should tell the surgeon what activities they enjoy -- for example, tennis or golf -- so that the power unit is placed most judiciously. Modern pacemakers are well shielded so that household and office electronic devices, including recent models of microwave ovens, do not disrupt their operation. +But patients with pacemakers are advised to avoid being in the vicinity of activities that emit strong electromagnetic fields, like arc welding and magnetic resonance imaging, the diagnostic procedure called M.R.I. Although airport screening systems do not disrupt the operation of a pacemaker, the device may cause the metal detector to signal, so it is best to request a hand check at all airports. +Most modern pacemakers are designed to function on demand; that is, they kick in only when the heart rate drops below a certain preset level. This allows the heart to beat faster when physical exertion demands more rapid blood flow. It also prolongs the life of the unit, since it has to work only when the heart malfunctions. The setting of a pacemaker, incidentally, can be reprogrammed without removing the device or opening the skin flap. +The operation of a pacemaker and the strength of its battery can be monitored by telephone, without the patient's having to go back to the doctor's office. A special modem in the patient's home or office picks up the electrical activity of the heart and transmits the patient's electrocardiogram by phone to a receiving unit in the doctor's office. The same modem can be used to transmit the signal being emitted by the pacemaker's battery. +Pacemaker batteries usually last about 10 years. But they do not fail abruptly. Even between tests, a patient can usually tell when the battery is weakening because there will be a return of the symptoms that prompted installation of a pacemaker in the first place. When the battery needs to be replaced, the patient must return to the doctor's office. The skin flap is opened, a new battery is installed in the pulse generator and the flap is closed once again. The unit is then primed to work for another decade or so. + +LOAD-DATE: March 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + + +GRAPHIC: In a normal heartbeat, first the upper atrial chambers contract and then the lower ventricular chambers. When the heart's own signals for normal contractions malfunction, a pacemaker can mimic them. Diagram shows how a pacemaker is connected to the heart. + +Source: "The Mayo Clinic Heart Book" (William Morrow & Company) +Diagram: "A Gentle Reminder for Heart Rhythms" + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +93 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 10, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Mr. Stark's Race Backward + +SECTION: Section A; Page 24; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 445 words + +Representative Pete Stark, a California Democrat, heads the House subcommittee in charge of Medicare. So it comes as no surprise that his idea of health-care reform is to shove as many Americans as possible into Medicare, making him czar over an industry almost as large as the Italian economy. +But while Medicare-for-all might be the right prescription for Mr. Stark, it is the wrong reform for the rest of us. Medicare has demonstrably failed to control costs and provide first-rate care. Building reform on the Medicare model would send health care careering in the wrong direction. + Mr. Stark would open Medicare -- the Government plan that pays hospital and doctor bills for the elderly -- to the uninsured of any age. The new program, which he calls Medicare Part C, would charge premiums to cover its costs. That is unlike existing Medicare, which charges enrollees only 10 percent of their medical cost (a fact that explains the program's popularity among the elderly). +Mr. Stark rejects the reforms of Mr. Clinton and Representative Jim Cooper of Tennessee, which are designed to control costs by forcing large health plans to compete against one another. He would, instead, attempt to control costs by slapping price controls on doctors and hospitals. That is the system that Medicare uses now. And it fails. Medicare costs spiral out of control because while Washington can control prices, it cannot control volume -- how many office visits, tests and procedures doctors provide patients. +The Stark plan is dismayingly backward-looking. Price controls, he proposes, would be based on how much Americans have spent in the past on individual health services. But in a system in which, as studies show, perhaps one-third of expenditures are wasted, such a calculation would lock in bad practice. +Medicare's fee-for-service coverage, which reimburses doctors for nearly anything they do, rewards doctors and hospitals for providing unneeded procedures. In attempting to control that problem, Washington has been forced to impose incomprehensibly complex regulations. The result is a system that does not constrain costs and drives providers toward procedures that patients do not need but that involve risk. +A better way to achieve high-quality, affordable health care is the creation of integrated networks of doctors and hospitals that are paid a fixed annual fee for taking care of enrollees. That way doctors have incentive to keep patients healthy, with ample doses of preventive care, and to weed out unwarranted procedures. That is the approach adopted by Mr. Clinton and Mr. Cooper. Mr. Stark wants to push health care back to the past. + +LOAD-DATE: March 10, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +94 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 11, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +McEnroe at 35 To Try Seniors + +SECTION: Section B; Page 14; Column 1; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 150 words + +John McEnroe turned 35 last month, and as far as tennis goes, he's now a senior citizen. Next month, he's going to prove it by headlining a five-stop semi-senior circuit, in which each player is, like him, a former No. 1. +McEnroe announced yesterday at the Manhattan headquarters of his representatives, the International Management Group, that he will anchor the $425,000 Advanta Tour, which starts April 21 in Denver. McEnroe's competition is familiar and unprecedented in this or any format: Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg, Mats Wilander, Ivan Lendl and McEnroe will make up a field that holds 50 Grand Slam titles and 488 major titles over all. + McEnroe said the chance to rekindle memorable rivalries was what persuaded him to experiment on the senior side of tennis for the first time. +The Advanta Tour will also visit Chicago; Anaheim, Calif.; Charlotte, N.C., and Key Biscayne, Fla. + +LOAD-DATE: March 11, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +95 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 13, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +COPING; +Wishful Thinking: Remembering Winter '94 + +BYLINE: By ROBERT LIPSYTE + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 1; Column 3; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 846 words + +ROY NEMERSON is on the phone. You remember Roy, the Coping column's comedy consultant. "Cold? Only time in New York history a cop yells, 'Freeze!,' a whole neighborhood obeys. How come Andrew Giuliani dropped out of sight? I guess you can't see him over the snowbanks." +Why are we still talking about winter? The calendar says spring is only a week away. But then again, this was supposed to be another greenhouse winter. I thanked Roy and put him on hold. There were others in the Coping corps to check up on. + "Coping is also knowing when to say, 'I surrender,' " said Rick Curry. "You have to understand that some things are just out of your control. I tell my students they have to sit out the storm." +You remember Brother Rick, the one-armed Jesuit who directs the National Theater Workshop for the Handicapped. He hates to suspend classes at his loft on Broome Street because life means showing up, being on time, knowing your lines. But this winter has had a curtain of its own. +"You don't have to be handicapped to see how dangerous it is out there," said Rick. "Go check the emergency room at St. Vincent's, see how many jocks for Jesus are on their tushes. If you're in a wheelchair it is absolutely impossible to navigate a snowbank. +"If you're using a cane or crutch that ice is just waiting to give you another one. So I tell them knowing when to wait it out is reality, too. +"Here's a funny story for you. One of my blind students -- you know when blind people lose the sense of their street corners they lose all perspective on where they are -- this blind student got so frustrated he decided to climb up and over a snowbank. Then someone told him he was on top of a Volkswagon." +* + "That's not funny, that's terrible," howled Roy. "Here's funny. This winter's so bad all my assets are frozen. Even my doorman gives me the cold shoulder." +Daphne Mahoney replaced him on the line. You remember Daphne, one of the five owners of Daphne's Hibiscus, a struggling Jamaican restaurant on 14th Street. +"January and February are always hard months," said Daphne, "but we've gotten some good publicity and some wonderful support." +One supporter, an elderly woman living on Social Security who can't even eat Jamaican food because of her medications and diet restrictions, demanded that Daphne accept enough money to repair the air-conditioning system. And a business executive, acting anonymously through this column, donated enough money for Daphne to buy a steam table, which is essential for the lunch and takeout business she hopes to attract. +Through it all, the Hibiscus continues its own outreach -- stepping up its contributions to Jamaican and city children and to a nearby soup kitchen. On Sunday, April 10, it will be host of a "cabaret lunch" benefit for the Harlem youth vocal ensemble, Expressions. +"Right now," said Daphne, her phone voice sounding kitchen-steamy, "I'm working on more vegetarian dishes. A lot of people have been coming in who don't eat jerk pork." +"I'll eat it," said Roy, whose sideline, selling one-line zingers for $15 each, helps him get through all the cold years his screen-plays are bought but not produced. "When you buy me dinner at Daphne's, we'll start with my favorite cocktail, a Tonya-Bobbitt. It's club soda with a slice. That was my biggest hit. Winter was good for me, I could do New York cold jokes for a national audience. For example, the snow only seemed to cut down the crime rate; what it really did was conceal the bodies. You hear about the new chief of staff at Lenox Hill? Dr. Zhivago." +I clicked him into Nynex limbo to talk to Carole Roberto, the Litter Lady of East 16th Street, who snatches fliers from car windshields before they pile up in front of her brownstone. +"Not this winter I don't," said Ms. Roberto. "I can't risk these frail old bones climbing over snowbanks. You can't find people to shovel the way they used to. Growing up in Brooklyn, my brothers loved snow, it was a chance to go out and make money. Of course, that was 60 years ago. Nowadays, people who love snow, even the children, go off to ski." +Ms. Roberto is a retired interior designer still active in civic organizations. Winter dreams have helped her slide through icy days and nights. She recalls the 1968 blizzard when Zero Mostel and the cast of "Rhinoceros" applauded the audience it outnumbered. After the show, Ms. Roberto and her husband, Joe, ran all the way home to 16th Street, laughing and throwing snowballs. +"I'm also looking ahead," said Ms. Roberto. "In two weeks, there will be crocuses down here. I saw them yesterday on the Upper East Side, where there is more sunlight and doormen shoveling. And clearer cross-walks. The city is always more responsive to where the money is." +Roy is hopeful, too. Several of his unproduced screenplays are getting a second look in Hollywood. +"So why don't you just go out there?" I asked. +"You know the difference between New York and L.A.?" he answered. "In New York you know that when the snow melts, the ground will still be there." + +LOAD-DATE: March 15, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +96 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 14, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Chinese Puzzle; +After Months of Dialogue on Human Rights, Beijing Takes Harder Line Toward the U.S. + +BYLINE: By PATRICK E. TYLER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 999 words + +DATELINE: BEIJING, March 13 + +From the outset, Warren Christopher's first visit here as Secretary of State has been a diplomatic mugging. Today he and his aides were trying to understand why. +But instead of answers, what Mr. Christopher got was a philosphical discussion punctuated by aphorisms in a meeting with President Jiang Zemin: + President Jiang: "You can't become a fat man with one big meal." +Rough translation: The Chinese must proceed step by step toward human rights reform, and no amount of force-feeding will speed up the process. +President Jiang: "You have to clash before you become friends." +Rough translation: We bashed you intentionally to put you on the defensive, and now that we have the advantage, we would like to resume our talks. +After six months of broad and deepening dialogue with the Chinese on human rights, one of the most sensitive issues in this society, Mr. Christopher has been treated to a Chinese attitude that an American official described as "in your face." +The Chinese reaction was not altogether surprising, because Beijing had asked Mr. Christopher to delay his visit, hinting that the timing was not good. But his aides said that this trip best accommodated the Secretary's calendar, and that he was insistent on delivering President Clinton's message on human rights. So Beijing relented. +With less than three months to go before Mr. Christopher recommends to President Clinton whether to renew or revoke China's favorable trade status with the United States, the Communist leadership refuses to articulate, by word or deed, how it intends to respond to Mr. Clinton's challenge to make "overall significant progress" on human rights. +What seems certain is that the struggle within the Chinese leadership over how to define human rights for the country's 1.2 billion citizens is very much unresolved. And therefore Mr. Christopher's mission to admonish, scold and cajole Chinese officials seems destined to be resisted. +The state security authorities who rounded up the usual suspects of dissent last week so Mr. Christopher and his aides would not be able to hear their voices have only reinforced China's image of being in a defensive crouch. +Some American officials have said Mr. Christopher's trip was ill timed, because the annual session of the National People's Congress, China's ceremonial Parliament, opened on Thursday, one day before Mr. Christopher arrived. The Secretary's message may have sounded too much like a rebuke to Chinese leaders concerned about losing face before the assembled cadres. +Other officials wondered whether a new hard-line current was in ascendance in the Chinese leadership. With Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader, appearing to be in frailer health, China's anti-reform octogenarians whom Mr. Deng forced into retirement may be pondering a comeback. +If that is so, President Jiang may be losing some of his political maneuvering room for tough decisions regarding human rights, like accounting for and releasing political prisoners and opening Chinese jails, detention centers and labor reform camps to international inspection. +No Chinese leader can contemplate concessions on that scale without considering whether the hard-liners will regard them as a sign of weakness. +Since January, when President Jiang told a delegation from the United States Congress that China was going to make an effort to improve human rights, his pronouncement has been followed by inaction. +Some American officials are worried that it could be paralysis. +Not since President Richard M. Nixon came to China in 1972 to begin to reopen relations after more than two decades of hostility has there been such a sense that China and the United States are on the cusp. But of what? +The stakes are enormous for both sides. No one in the Clinton Administration, and virtually no one in Congress or in the human rights organizations, actually wants China to lose its status as a favored trading partner. +Such a move would hurt American consumers, whose purchases of a wide range of Chinese products, including inexpensive textiles and toys, have given China a $20 billion trade surplus with the United States. +At the same time, the Chinese have enjoyed the phenomenal economic growth that comes from access to the United States market. Any slowdown risks social unrest. +American corporations, whose regional chiefs today also chided Mr. Christopher over the Administration's human-rights policy, depend on the low cost of Chinese labor. As their investments grow, what they want is stability in American-Chinese relations. +The simplest explanation for this month's clampdown on dissidents, and the hostile reception for Mr. Christopher, may be the most compelling. Many China analysts point out that the fear of chaos is deep within the Chinese leadership. "Stability" has become a code word not only for political repression but also for a "never again" attitude toward the remnants of China's democracy movement. +This winter's human rights dialogue with Washington and the June deadline for Mr. Clinton's trade decision have empowered and emboldened China's dissidents for the first time since the violent crackdown at Tiananmen Square in 1989. So it is not surprising that with the Communists' urgency for control and order, the authorities swiftly detained and intimidated members of the democracy movement and effectively muted them. + +A Display of Muscle + The prospect of Mr. Christopher's arrival seemed only to encourage the dissidents further. What better opportunity, one Chinese analyst said, for President Jiang to establish his credentials as a leader tough enough to crack down on dissent, strong enough to lead the country after Mr. Deng is gone? +"The leadership needs to demonstrate that it can run China," the Chinese analyst said. "It needs to demonstrate to itself and to the country that it is strong." +These currents may have converged as Mr. Christopher and his entourage made their way across the Pacific. + +LOAD-DATE: March 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: News Analysis + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +97 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 14, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Drop in Hospital Bill Is Found for Patients Having Living Wills + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section B; Page 8; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 286 words + +DATELINE: CHICAGO, March 13 + +Older people with living wills or other documents outlining the extent of medical care they want in case they are unable to convey their wishes spend about a third as much on their final hospital stays as those without such provisions, according to a new study. +Living wills are designed to keep such patients from getting unwanted treatment like life-prolonging therapy. + Results of the study appear in the March issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, which is published by the American Medical Association. The study looked at patients who receive Medicare, the federally financed health insurance program for the elderly. +For 342 Medicare patients who had not left oral or written instructions about what kind of treatment they wanted, the average in-patient charges during the final hospital stay of their lives was $95,305. For the 132 patients with preparations, the average charges were $30,478. +The pattern remained significant after the researchers considered differences in severity of illness, use of intensive care units and number of procedures on each patient. +"Our study shows that respecting a patient's right to choose the kind of medical care received at the end of life also results in a tremendous benefit to society by limiting resources spent on futile and often unwanted attempts to prolong life," said the study leader, Dr. Christopher V. Chambers of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. +Studies show that fewer than 15 percent of Americans have living wills. +About 28 percent of the Medicare budget goes to treat the 5.9 percent of Medicare patients who die in a given year, previous research has found. Medicare spent $142.9 billion on benefits in fiscal 1993. + +LOAD-DATE: March 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +98 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 14, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Wells Fargo to Offer Funds Designed for Baby Boomers + +BYLINE: By SAUL HANSELL + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 766 words + +Wells Fargo Bank will introduce today an innovative family of mutual funds in an attempt to reach affluent baby boomers who never enter its branches and may not even live in the bank's home state of California. +The products are a series of five asset allocation funds, which switch a customer's money among stocks, bonds and short-term money market investments. Each of the funds has a target date, from 2000 to 2040, representing the approximate year the investor will need the money, most likely for retirement. The further off the investment goal, the more aggressive the investment strategy will be. + Asset allocation funds have been quite successful recently at other mutual fund companies, but Wells Fargo's funds, called Lifepath Funds, are the first to offer target dates and strategies that change over time. +"People tend to take too little risk when they are young and then they get panicked as they get older and take too much risk," said Dudley Nigg, an executive vice president of Wells Fargo, which is based in San Francisco. "Our fund goes from growth in the early years to income later, which is exactly what the textbooks say you should do." +Wells Fargo hopes this twist will help its funds stand out from the thousands that are being offered by banks and investment companies. And in particular, the bank wants to appeal to young and affluent customers who use banks for checking accounts and credit cards but invest through companies like Charles Schwab and Fidelity Investments. +"We have 700,000 of these customers, but they regard the bank as a fuddy-duddy, not very interesting place to put their money," Mr. Nigg said. +Wells Fargo has already been among the most successful banks offering mutual funds through brokers in its branches, with $3.5 billion in its Stagecoach family of funds. But these sales have been to older customers looking for alternatives to certificates of deposit. The most popular offerings have been conservative tax-free bond funds. +To reach its younger customers, many of whom use automated teller machines and rarely set foot in the bank, Wells Fargo is copying the direct-marketing techniques of companies like Fidelity, offering new funds with a toll-free telephone through the mail and at its branches. +The new funds will not have an upfront sales charge, called a load, which turns off many customers, Mr. Nigg said. Until now, Wells Fargo, like most banks, charged sales loads, mainly to pay commissions to the brokers in the branches. +The new funds do charge a one-quarter of 1 percent annual sales fee, although their total annual expenses are about 1.2 percent, well within the normal range for such funds. +Wells Fargo is considering whether to offer its other funds without a load to customers who buy them by mail or telephone rather than in the branches, Mr. Nigg said. +Direct marketing of the funds would allow Wells Fargo to expand beyond California without buying other banks -- a strategy it considers too expensive. Wells Fargo plans to test advertising of the Lifepath funds in several other states. +A handful of other banks have tried to expand their mutual fund businesses beyond their branches. The Chase Manhattan Corporation has been successful selling its Vista mutual funds through stockbrokers, mainly because several of the funds have had top-ranked performances. Also, the Mellon Bank Corporation has agreed to buy the Dreyfus Corporation, one of the largest companies that sell funds nationwide mainly by mail and telephone. +Wells Fargo is also considering offering more traditional banking services through nontraditional distribution channels, probably through an all-in-one package of deposit and investment products. + +More Ambitious Funds + The Lifepath funds will be managed by Wells Fargo Nikko Investment Advisers, owned jointly by the bank and Nikko Securities of Japan. +While Wells Nikko has a successful 10-year track record for its traditional asset allocation fund, the Lifepath funds are more ambitious than any of its previous offerings. Instead of switching money between 3 categories -- stocks, bonds and cash -- the new funds have 14 categories: 6 types of domestic stocks, including large capitalization growth stocks and medium capitalization utility stocks; 4 kinds of domestic bonds; 3 of international securities, and cash. +Wells Fargo also hopes to offer the Lifepath funds through employers that have 401(k) plans, a form of tax-advantaged savings through payroll dedications. Wells Fargo and Wells Nikko already manage more than $17 billion in 401(k) funds. + +LOAD-DATE: March 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +99 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 16, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Citing Cancer, Fish Declares He Will Retire From Congress + +BYLINE: By JACQUES STEINBERG, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 5; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 633 words + +DATELINE: GARRISON, N.Y., March 15 + +Representative Hamilton Fish Jr., the New York State Republican who followed his father, grandfather and great-grandfather into the United States Congress, announced today that he would retire when his 13th term ends next January because he is battling a recurrence of cancer. +Mr. Fish's unexpected announcement leaves wide open the race for the House seat in his district, which covers all of Putnam County and parts of Westchester, Dutchess and Orange Counties. His withdrawal also raises the possibility that for the first time since 1843 a Hamilton Fish will not be representing the state in Congress. + Mr. Fish's father, Hamilton Fish Sr., a conservative Republican who served in Congress from 1920 to 1945, became nationally known as a bitter opponent of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who lived in his Congressional district, and the New Deal. He died in 1991. Hamilton Fish Sr.'s father and grandfather, both named Hamilton Fish, had also served in the House. +Hamilton Fish Jr., who is 67, has represented parts of the Hudson Valley since 1968. He underwent successful treatment for prostate cancer in 1982 and "did not lose a day's work," he said at a news conference here today in Putnam County. But recent tests had revealed a "new area of prostate cancer" that had spread to his right hip and perhaps elsewhere. +The Congressman, who represents the state's 19th District, said he would undergo surgery on March 25 to remove a lesion on his lung on which doctors have been unable to perform a biopsy. + +Bills on Civil Rights + Mr. Fish, a longtime advocate of civil rights, has been the principal Republican sponsor of a dozen such bills in recent years, most notably the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. Currently the ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Fish served on the committee during the Watergate hearings and twice voted to impeach President Richard M. Nixon to his father's chagrin. +Mr. Fish's eldest son, Hamilton Fish 3d, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully in the state's 20th Congressional District in 1988, declined to comment today on his political future. But neither he nor his brother, Nicholas, a Manhattan lawyer, would rule out seeking their father's seat. +Shedding no tears and appearing vigorous despite a broken left ankle attributed to "Old Man Winter," the elder Mr. Fish said he felt "fine" but had chosen to retire because he was unsure that he could serve out a 14th term. Mr. Fish said he was told by doctors, in a consultation last Wednesday, to expect "further progression of the disease" and intensive therapy and hospitalization. +After mulling the matter with his wife, Mary Ann, Mr. Fish told his daughter and three sons on Saturday that he had reluctantly decided to abandon the campaign he had already begun for a 14th term. +"I told them that this was not something I wanted to do," Mr. Fish recalled, speaking to reporters, staff members and supporters assembled here at the library named for his father. "Rather, it is something I must do in fairness to everyone." +Representative Fish, a Republican-Conservative candidate who beat his Democratic opponent, Neil McCarthy, by a 3-to-2 margin in 1992, would have likely faced a challenge in this year's Republican primary from Guy Parisi, a Westchester lawyer. Mr. Parisi, 47, a former lobbyist in Albany for the Westchester County Legislature, announced his candidacy for the Republican-Conservative nomination on Feb. 15. +Although Mr. Parisi appeared to have the Republican field largely to himself today, several political leaders predicted that other candidates would appear after the shock of Mr. Fish's announcement wears off. Al Lynn, a Westchester businessman, announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination in January. + +NAME: Hamilton Fish Jr. + +LOAD-DATE: March 16, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Representative Hamilton Fish Jr. held the hand of his wife, Mary Ann, at the announcement of his retirement in Garrison, N.Y. He said he would step down at the end of his 13th term because of a recurrence of cancer. (Chris Maynard for The New York Times) + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +100 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 17, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Panama Likes Ruben Blades But Not, It Seems, as Leader + +BYLINE: By HOWARD W. FRENCH, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 796 words + +DATELINE: PANAMA + +A sense of wonderment descends on Ruben Blades as he sets out late in the afternoon from his sparely furnished apartment in the Casco Viejo district, a stone's throw from the neighborhood where he grew up. +Girls in high-school uniforms muster the courage to approach, hoping to catch his eye. Elderly men leave their shops, crossing the street to exchange a word. Mothers lean from their finely wrought balconies for a peek at him. Shirtless young boys drop their street games to cry out his name. + Wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a straw hat, the salsa singer, Hollywood actor, Harvard-trained lawyer and now presidential candidate scarcely breaks stride. Still, he finds a special way to acknowledge each passer-by. +"What's happening?" he says in a street-tinged Spanish to one. "Hey, brother," he says to another. For the girls, there is a wave and friendly grin that quickly sets off giggles. + +A Valuable Asset + All of this is immensely refreshing to the man who would change Panama's long-standing political equations, based in equal parts on well-stoked party machines, unbridled corruption and military machinations. +"I have a very easy contact with people," he said, speaking as if in warning to those who write off his anti-campaign for its dearth of public events. "People here know me by my first name." +Many had said that after 20 years away from his homeland, Mr. Blades, who returned late last year to head the ticket of the newly formed Papa Egoro, or Mother Earth Party, was too much the outsider to be a serious candidate in the presidential elections in May. In fact, although his name is sometimes pronounced BLAH-dess here, the proper pronunciation is the English one; the Blades family traces its roots to the English-speaking Caribbean island of St. Lucia. +But as each stroll serves to reminds him, his star recognition has been a valuable asset. Months of pre-campaign polls showed him to be the runaway favorite to succeed President Guillermo Endara, who cannot run for re-election. The other major candidates are Ernesto Perez Balladares and Ruben Carles. Mr. Balladares is a member of the party of the former dictator, Manuel Antonio Noriega, and Mr. Carles was the comptroller in the Endara Government before he resigned to run for President. + +'I Really Love Home' + Recent weeks, however, have been much more sobering for Mr. Blades. +Dropping out of the lead in the polls and apparently losing steam, his campaign has been a difficult baptism for Mr, Blades. Recent polls show him in third place with only 9 percent of the vote. +He says his money is running short, and a pugnacious press often seems to be waiting behind every door. +Mostly, however, the 45-year-old Mr. Blades is realizing how much he enjoys his privacy. +"I really love home," he said, almost mournfully, reflecting on his absence from his wife, Lisa Lebenzon, who is also an actress and is in Hollywood. +"We are very private people," he said. "We read a lot. We don't go out much. You know, our dog, flowers in the garden, the whole thing." +But for skeptics, and there are many, attitudes like these reflect nothing so much as the quixotic flavor of his candidacy. +"We like him, but we are not sure how serious this is," a woman said, reflecting an attitude toward Mr. Blades that is widespread here. "A campaign for President is not like a concert, where you just sell tickets and everyone shows up." +Even Mr. Blades sometimes speaks of his candidacy in the past tense. The pessimism is fed not only by his decline in the polls, but by campaign coffers that he says contain "not even $100 that I know of." There are also worries about his own post-political career. +"We ran out of time," Mr. Blades said, contemplating the harbor through the bay windows of his airy, high-ceilinged new apartment. "There are only 77 days left. I don't know how we are going to do this." +The mood quickly passes, though, as he contemplates the alternatives to forging ahead with the race. "If we didn't run, it would have been a battle between two evils," he said. "It would be just a matter of which one won. This campaign is aimed at dismantling a system that believes that corruption is a necessary evil." +Since he is no longer a favorite, Mr. Blades looks to his music for another asset it has given him: a sense of timing that he now says he must count on, given his lack of funds, for his message to carry him over the top. In this instance, Mr. Blades is referring to a strategy that scorns the polls and awaits the final days of the campaign before launching a blitz of appearances, concerts and other events. +If this fails, the singer said with a remorseless smile, "I'll go back to my band and dust them off and say, 'Boys, let's hit the road.' "' + +NAME: Ruben Blades + +LOAD-DATE: March 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The floundering presidential campaign of Ruben Blades contrasts with the Panamanian entertainer's success as a singer and actor. (Anita Baca for The New York Times) + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +101 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 17, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +A Dangerous Homeless Policy + +SECTION: Section A; Page 22; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 514 words + +After well-deserved criticism for its plan to cut New York City funds from a successful program for the homeless, the Giuliani administration has been scrambling to come up with Federal money to keep the program alive. Give the Mayor and his advisers credit for admitting their error. But unless the Federal money is real and substantial, the administration needs to back down from an ill-considered plan that will cheat both the city and its homeless population. +The program in question, the S.R.O. Loan Program, finances the development of single-room-occupancy apartments and provides their tenants with support services. Such "supported S.R.O.'s" are one of the few techniques for helping the homeless that have proved effective, and one of the few policies of the Dinkins administration that Rudolph Giuliani said he supported as a candidate. + The program was supposed to lend about $160 million over four years to not-for-profit groups to develop the housing and provide social services that range from drug counseling to job training. The method works well largely because nonprofit groups do a better job than government does, and because housing is only part of the problem. Many homeless people lack the capability to live alone. They suffer from alcohol abuse or drug addiction, are mentally ill or elderly and sick. +Supported S.R.O.'s provide the services that can help single men and women get on their feet. Mr. Giuliani, who has acknowledged this, nevertheless cut the entire $89 million in capital funds to be contributed by the city in the next four fiscal years, or about 55 percent of the program's total cost, because the city budget is so strained. +That was shortsighted. It could easily cost more in law enforcement and other city services to deal with people living on the streets than to house and counsel them. And what of Mr. Giuliani's commitment to improve the quality of life in New York? +City Hall said from the beginning that it hoped to find Federal money to substitute for city funds. But a large part of the Federal money the administration is considering is reserved for people with AIDS. Only a small number of those in the S.R.O. loan program have AIDS. The city cannot transform this program into an AIDS program and thereby weaken its commitment to the elderly, the mentally ill and the addicted simply because certain funds might be available. +Federal funds already support about 45 percent of the program. It is not clear how much new Federal money City Hall can tap, whether those funds would be available every year and if they could be used immediately. +Mr. Giuliani has a budget gap to fill. He has to save money and he has to be creative about finding new sources of revenue. But his administration's belated search for Federal funds in this instance has a suspicious smoke-and-mirrors quality to it. If the funds are new and real, terrific. But if they are not, City Hall must rethink its plan to cut its own contribution to this valuable program. A saving like that would be counterproductive -- and inhumane. + +LOAD-DATE: March 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +102 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 17, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Panel Endorses Price Controls on Drugs + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 8; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 617 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 16 + +A Congressional subcommittee voted today to impose a kind of price control on prescription drugs, as part of a bill to provide all Americans with insurance covering the cost of such medications. +Under the proposal approved by the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, the Government would review drug prices and could deny Medicare coverage for drugs whose prices were deemed excessive. + The voice vote came amid impassioned debate over a bill to provide all Americans with insurance for a standard package of health benefits including prescription drugs. The bill was offered by Representative Pete Stark, the California Democrat who heads the subcommittee, as an alternative to President Clinton's health plan. But both plans share the goal of universal health insurance coverage. +The subcommittee also voted to guarantee coverage of a wide variety of mental health services. Mental health benefits guaranteed under the bill would be more extensive than those now provided under Medicare and some private insurance plans. + +Revisions Possible + Any of the actions taken today may be revised by the full Ways and Means Committee, other committees, the full House or the Senate. But the subcommittee's deliberations are the first measure of Congressional sentiment. +Chris Koyanagi, a lobbyist at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in Washington, welcomed the changes. "We are particularly pleased that the subcommittee has added intensive community services for people with severe mental disorders," Ms. Koyanagi said. "These services are an alternative to hospital care for people with mental illnesses." +Mr. Stark's bill would set "payment limits for prescription drugs" dispensed to Medicare patients, similar to those in the Clinton plan. +Mr. Stark said it was appropriate for the Government to review drug prices if it was going to require coverage of prescription drugs. "I don't intend to let the greedy drug manufacturers decide how they are going to waste the taxpayers' money," he said. +The drug industry vehemently opposes Government review of its prices and has aggressively lobbied against such a policy. On the other hand, many advocates for patients, including Consumers Union and the American Association of Retired Persons, say some limits on drug prices are needed. +Mark E. Grayson, a spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, said the group was "very disappointed." "The bill as it now stands contains disincentives for pharmaceutical research and development," Mr. Grayson said. + +Expansion of Federal Power + Republicans on the subcommittee said Mr. Stark's proposal authorized a huge expansion of Federal power. +Medicare now finances health care for 36 million elderly or disabled people. Mr. Stark's bill could double the size of the program by covering millions of people who lack private health insurance or have low incomes. Drug companies say Medicare would then have immense power as the biggest buyer of prescription drugs. +Mr. Stark proposes to create a new agency to assess the reasonableness of drug prices in general. Under his bill, the Government would require drug companies to give Medicare a discount equal to at least 17 percent of the retail prices. +If the Secretary of Health and Human Services found that the price of a new drug was excessive, the Secretary could demand a bigger discount. He could then deny Medicare coverage of the drug if the maker and the Government were unable to agree on the amount of the discount. +If total private self-spending on drugs exceeds goals defined by Federal law, the Government could also set "maximum rates of payment for each drug" bought under private plans. + +LOAD-DATE: March 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +103 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 18, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Health Panel Backs Costs Based on Size of Families + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 17; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 702 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 17 + +Having already decided that employers should help buy health insurance for their workers, a Congressional subcommittee voted today to set much higher premiums for people with children than for those who have no children. +The House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, drafting a bill to revamp the nation's health care system, decided that single people and childless couples should not have to subsidize the cost of coverage for children. Rather, the cost would be borne by the parents of such children and by companies that employ the parents. + How to divide these costs is one of the thorniest issues in health care. +The subcommittee is considering a slimmed-down version of President Clinton's health plan offered by Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California, the chairman of the subcommittee. The subcommittee proceedings are only the beginning of a complicated process of producing a bill that ultimately will involve at least five committees in the House and the Senate. But the subcommittee is taking the first actual votes on many of the most contentious elements in the debate. + +Allocating Family Costs + Under the original version of Mr. Stark's bill, there would have been only two categories of coverage. The premium would initially have been set at $2,500 a year for a family with one adult and $5,000 a year for a family with more than one adult. +Representative Gerald D. Kleczka, Democrat of Wisconsin, proposed an amendment "to more fairly allocate premium costs based on type of family," and the subcommittee approved. +"Single people and couples without children should not bear the brunt of the cost of children," said Mr. Kleczka. Of the 126 million people in the labor force, 62 percent have no children under 18 living at home, according to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. +Mr. Stark opposed Mr. Kleczka's proposal, saying it "would increase the minimum wage more than 50 percent for small businesses that are required to pay for family coverage." +Under Mr. Kleczka's proposal, the premium for a married couple with one or more children would be $6,075 a year. The employer would have to pay 80 percent of this amount, or $4,860. In other words, the employer would have to pay $2.34 an hour for an employee working full-time. +That amounts to 55 percent of the minimum wage, now $4.25 an hour. +The subcommittee also voted today to prohibit insurance companies from charging higher premiums because of a person's age or medical history. Under the concept of "community rating" endorsed by the panel, premiums would be calculated to reflect the average cost of insurance for all people in a geographic area, including healthy young workers in the same insurance pool with elderly retirees. + +The Age Factor + Representative Nancy L. Johnson, Republican of Connecticut, said that insurers should be allowed to adjust premiums for the age of subscribers. +"Community rating will impose a very significant increase in rates for young people," she said. "Young working people already support the retirement benefits of people over 65. It would be most unfortunate if those people were also asked to subsidize health insurance premiums of their parents, who have better-paying jobs. To make them share in the cost of their parents' insurance is unconscionable." +Representative Bill Thomas of California said pure community rating, as proposed by Mr. Stark and President Clinton, could provoke "a generational war" by increasing premiums for young people and reducing premiums for older people. "People above 65 are better off than at any time in our history," said Mr. Thomas, the ranking Republican on the panel. "Young people with children are falling through the cracks." +In other action today, the subcommittee voted to establish severe penalties for any insurance company or health plan that discriminates on the basis of race, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, "socioeconomic status," age, health status or need for medical services. +This provision would prohibit selective marketing aimed at high-income neighborhoods. +Under the bill, a company could serve as its own insurer only if it had 1,000 or more full-time employees. + +LOAD-DATE: March 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +104 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 18, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Last Chance + +SECTION: Section C; Page 26; Column 5; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 470 words + +Here is a sampling of shows and exhibitions in New York City that are to close soon: + +Closing This Weekend + +"NO MAN'S LAND," Roundabout Theater, 1530 Broadway, at 45th Street. Revival of Harold Pinter's drama about two elderly poets, starring Christopher Plummer and Jason Robards; directed by David Jones. Through Sunday. Performances: Today at 8 P.M.; tomorrow and Sunday at 2 P.M. Tickets: $50. Information: (212) 719-9393. + +"INNOCENT ERENDIRA," Gramercy Arts, 138 East 27th Street, Gramercy Park. Drama about a young girl forced into prostitution by her grandmother, based on the novella by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; starring Miriam Colon; directed by Jorge Ali Triana. Presented by Repertorio Espanol. Through Sunday. Performances: Today at 8 P.M.; tomorrow at 3 and 8 P.M.; Sunday at 3 and 7 P.M. Tickets: $20 and $25. Information: (212) 889-2850. + +MERCE CUNNINGHAM DANCE COMPANY, City Center, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan. Through Sunday. Performances: Today at 8 P.M.; tomorrow at 2 and 8 P.M.; Sunday at 3 P.M. Tickets: $15 to $35. Information: (212) 581-1212. + +FELD BALLET, Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea. Through Sunday. Performances: Today and tomorrow at 8 P.M.; Sunday at 2 and 7:30 P.M. Tickets: $30. Information: (212) 242-0800. + +"JEANNE MOREAU: NOUVELLE VAGUE AND BEYOND," Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53d Street, Manhattan. Retrospective of films starring or directed by Jeanne Moreau. Last screening, "Querelle," today at 2:30 P.M. Admission included in museum admission: $7.50; $4.50 for students and the elderly. Information: (212) 708-9480. + +Closing Next Weekend + +"HELLO AGAIN," Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, 150 West 65th Street. A musical by Michael John LaChiusa about 10 people in search of perfect lovers; directed by Graciela Daniele. Through March 27. Performances: Tuesday through Friday at 8 P.M.; Saturdays at 2 and 8 P.M.; Sundays at 3 and 7:30 P.M. Tickets: $47.50. Information: (212) 239-6200. + +"THREE BIRDS ALIGHTING ON A FIELD," Manhattan Theater Club, Stage 1, City Center, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan. Drama by Timberlake Wertenbaker about a woman who uses the art world to enhance her husband's social standing; directed by Max Stafford-Clark. Through March 27. Performances: Tuesday through Friday at 8 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays at 2:30 and 7 P.M. Tickets: $40. Information: (212) 581-1212. + +"ELEPHANT: THE ANIMAL AND ITS IVORY IN AFRICAN ART," Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue and 81st Street. An exhibition of sculpture, masks, headdresses, carvings and other items. Through March 27. Hours: Fridays and Saturdays, 9:30 A.M. to 8:45 P.M.; Sundays and Tuesday through Thursday, 9:30 A.M. to 5:15 P.M. Admission: $6; $3 for students and the elderly. Information: (212) 535-7710. + +LOAD-DATE: March 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Schedule + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +105 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 20, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WEDDINGS; +Jeffrey Goldstein and Carolyn Curtis + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 9; Column 3; Society Desk + +LENGTH: 128 words + +Carolyn Grace Curtis, a daughter of Nancy B. Strauss of Chapel Hill, N.C., and Richard R. Curtis of Lilburn, Ga., is to be married today to Jeffrey Brian Goldstein, a son of Leslie F. and Robert I. Goldstein of Bridgewater, N.J. Rabbi Ronald Isaacs will officiate at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, N.C. +The bride, 24, is a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a stepdaughter of Albrecht B. Strauss, who teaches English literature at the Duke Institute for Learning in Retirement, a continuing education program for senior citizens at Duke University in Durham. + The bridegroom, 25, graduated from Duke, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and where he is now a medical student. His father is an orthodontist in Bridgewater. + +LOAD-DATE: March 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Jeffrey Goldstein and Carolyn Curtis (Jeremy Goldstein) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +106 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 20, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ENDPAPER; +Spiro Agnew and I + +BYLINE: By Cathleen Schine; Cathleen Schine is the author of "Rameau's Niece" and a regular contributor to this page. + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 92; Column 1; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 882 words + +Monday. My birthday is coming up and not having had a midlife crisis at 40, I'm planning to have one now. I will be over 40! I can't focus. I have no energy. I think about Spiro Agnew more than other people do. Whatever happened to Spiro Agnew? Has he opened a restaurant, the way retired baseball players do? Spiro Agnew's Ribs. Or a used-car dealership? I can see his face so clearly, his hair combed straight back. It is the face of my youth. + +Tuesday. Did you know that an anagram of Spiro Agnew is "Grow a penis?" Did you know that the lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers was convicted of sexual battery because he waved his penis at a fan after a concert? I heard this on MTV. I think it would be dangerous to wave it at a fan. I was always told to keep my fingers away from fans. And I always have. + +Wednesday. How old was Spiro Agnew when he fell from power? Not much older than I am now. In the 60's, even the old people were young. But now! My birthday is next week: I don't have much time to determine exactly what form my midlife crisis will take. This is urgent. I could join a cult. But which one? And it seems a little strenuous for someone my age. Daydreaming about Spiro Agnew -- I remember his tie clips best of all -- I turn on the TV. "Mystery Science Theater 3000," my favorite show. That's it! I could become a "Mystery Science Theater 3000" groupie! Groupies are so youthful. You can do it from home in your spare time. No investment necessary. No special equipment. And I already watch the show twice a day, every weekday. A man and two robots sit in front of a big screen and we watch the backs of their heads as they watch bad movies and make wisecracks. Once, some devils in red leotards were writhing around plotting the demise of Santa Claus and one of the robots said: "Oh! Hell got an N.E.A. grant." + +Thursday A.M. Maraschino is an anagram for Harmonicas. Roast Mules become Somersault. Someone told me those, I didn't figure them out myself, I hate anagrams. "Mystery Science Theater 3000" is also on for an hour at 8. What am I doing? Anagrams? Four hours of bad movies a day? I must take up a more constructive hobby, a life-affirming hobby for my midlife crisis. Got a Smith & Hawken catalogue today, as I do every day. I will order English gloves and French watering cans and Japanese pruners. I will make things grow. + +P.M. Yorba Linda, C-Span 2. Richard Nixon is standing in front of the Presidential Library and Birthplace. It's the 25th anniversary of his inauguration. My heart pounds with excitement, rejuvenated by the sound of his voice. He poses in front of a fountain with Gerald and Betty Ford. Does former President Ford really count as a Vice President? Where is Agnew? Oh, it's all wrong, wrong. Nixon doesn't even look like his masks anymore. + +Friday. US Magazine says the "deck is stacked against today's younger actors." Sounds promising. Perhaps I can take up acting. Although I'm sure I read somewhere else that actresses over 40 can't get any parts. So back to gardening. I already have several oddly shaped aloe plants the kids brought home from school as cuttings. I never water them. Maybe that simulates the harsh life of the desert. I wonder if Spiro Agnew gardens. If he doesn't already, he should. Gardening is what every celebrity does when he sinks into obscurity. Or do they raise horses? It seems so unfair that Agnew gets so little exposure, and he's not even a younger actor. + +Saturday. I don't have to have a midlife crisis after all! I have discovered true immortality. I read in Audubon that ecologists in northern England are planning a "forest of the dead." People will be buried beneath trees to help enrich the soil, instead of wasting all those nutrients in crematories or cemeteries. You can choose your tree and the species of wildflowers you want to have planted above you. Pushing up the daisies, the Indian paint brushes; though blue bells and bunchberries might be more appropriate, more discreet. I've never had much luck with wildflowers, myself. I once bought one of those cans of seeds from the Smith & Hawken catalogue and sprinkled it on my mother's lawn near the septic tank, which had just been dug up, but the seeds washed away with the first rain or were eaten by birds, and she planted grass again instead. I wonder if the gardeners in Echoing Green, as the corpse forest will be called, will order their seeds from Smith & Hawken. + +Sunday. A birthday present has arrived! A pot of narcissus from Smith & Hawken, the first of a series of plants to come. Now I don't have to garden after all, just open cardboard boxes once a month. Well, it's 10 A.M. "Mystery Science Theater 3000" is on. But so is "The McLaughlin Report." What will I do? Which will I choose? Life is so full, so ripe with possibility. And I am only in the middle of it! The scent of narcissus drifts through the room. I hate the smell of narcissus. But the name is so historically and psychologically suggestive, so rich with meaning. And they're awfully pretty in the windowsill by the twisted aloes. I am content. I have made up my mind. Someday, as I lie decomposing in Echoing Green, it is this species I will feed. For now, I could just sit here and gaze at narcissus forever. + +LOAD-DATE: March 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +107 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 22, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Don G. Goddard, 89, Expert on Alcoholism + +SECTION: Section B; Page 8; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 260 words + +Don G. Goddard, a former broadcaster who became known for his work with geriatric alcoholism and other addictions, died on Sunday at Boswell Hospital in Sun City, Ariz. A Sun City resident, he was 89. +He suffered a long illness, his family said. + Mr. Goddard was born in Binghamton, N.Y., attended Princeton University and had a first career in print and broadcast journalism. He was the host of the ABC television series "Medical Horizons," an on-the-scene documentary about medical advances at American hospitals and research centers. He retired in 1970 as head of ABC's Biographical and History Archive, which he helped to establish. +Mr. Goddard's second career had its roots in the 1950's, when he met Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. The two collaborated on A.A. documentaries and the publication A.A. Grapevine. That experience led to his working with alcoholism after he retired and moved to Arizona, first becoming a consultant to the Mile High Council on Alcoholism and then joining the staff of St. Luke's Chemical Dependency Program in Phoenix as a consultant and therapist. +In Arizona Mr. Goddard developed special treatments for older people with addictions. His "Top o' the Hill Gang" for patients over 55 at St. Luke's fostered similar programs at clinics across the country. +He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Adele Letcher Goddard; three daughters, Marilu Nowlin of Acton, Mass., Dr. Susan Goddard of Rice Lake, Wis., and Meg Moss of Evanston, Ill.; a son, Donald L., of Manhattan, and nine grandchildren. + +LOAD-DATE: March 22, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +108 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 22, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Leader in House Proposes Trims On Health Plan + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1126 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 21 + +A powerful House committee chairman is circulating a scaled-back alternative to President Clinton's health care bill. It would maintain the President's goal of health insurance for all Americans while cutting the bureaucracy to administer it, reducing the cost to small business and promising not to increase the Federal deficit. +The plan, being put forward by Representative John D. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee, is the first significant movement by Mr. Clinton's supporters to trim the President's plan in the hope of gaining enough votes to pass it. + Unlike the Clinton plan, the draft would raise the cost to individuals to make up for decreased revenue from business. In addition, it would maintain Mr. Clinton's goals of making coverage permanent and cutting costs while doing away with a main element of his plan, insurance-purchasing alliances that all employers but the biggest would be required to join. But that proposal has seemed dead for weeks anyway. +The proposal is labeled a "staff draft," but there is no question that it is Mr. Dingell's concept for getting a health care proposal out of his committee, whose 44 members closely mirror the whole House in ideology and party balance. +The White House had no comment on the substance of the plan, although Lorrie McHugh, a spokeswoman, said, "We are glad that the committee is moving forward." +White House officials said they had been kept informed of the direction Mr. Dingell was taking, and there was no indication that they objected. +While Mr. Dingell was not available to comment, one of his subcommittee chairmen, Representative Philip R. Sharp of Indiana, said he believed the committee, with 27 Democrats and 17 Republicans, would approve this plan or something close to it after the Easter recess, which ends on April 11. If all Republicans vote against it, Mr. Dingell would need the votes of 23 of the 27 Democrats to get it through the committee. + +The Toughest Test + In many ways, the committee provides the toughest test health care legislation will face in the House. Its members include not only solidly opposed Republicans, but also several Democrats who have been critical of the Clinton plan, as well as two who have proposed slimmer alternatives, Representatives Jim Cooper of Tennessee and J. Roy Rowland of Georgia, a retired family doctor. +The Dingell draft says generally that the provisions of the Clinton plan that are not mentioned in its seven pages "are generally maintained." That suggests, but does not guarantee, that he would preserve the Clinton plan's additional benefits for the elderly, coverage for prescription drugs and a start on coverage of long-term care. +The President himself and his wife, Hillary, were urgently selling the his plan today to thousands of retirees in sun hats at Deerfield Beach, Fla. "Under our approach, you get more," Mr. Clinton told them. At the first event of a weeklong White House health campaign, Mr. Clinton also said that he now had three Republican Senators who had promised him their votes. Only Senator James M. Jeffords of Vermont has made his commitment public, and White House aides would not say to whom else Mr. Clinton was referring. +On Capitol Hill, a subcommittee of another House committee voted to control private health spending by setting limits on payments to doctors and hospitals in any state that exceeds spending goals to be set by the Federal Government. +As the health subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee plodded ahead in writing its version of the bill, it also voted to limit awards for "pain and suffering" in malpractice cases to $350,000, even though Republicans wanted a lower amount. + +Some Blanks Stay Blank + In addition, the subcommittee authorized the Federal Government to set priorities for the training of doctors. Washington could require 53 percent of medical residents to be trained as internists, family practitioners, obstetricians and gynecologists. Only 33 percent of new doctors are now trained in such primary care specialties. The subcommittee's work could be modified by the full Ways and Means Committee. +The Dingell plan, which was passed out in draft form to Commerce Committee members today, did not specifically mention another benefit included in the Clinton plan, the Federal assumption of most health insurance costs for early retirees and others from the ages of 55 to 64 without insurance. This idea has been widely criticized, especially by Senate Republicans, as a windfall for big manufacturers, But Mr. Dingell has said that he regards it as a major element in changing health care, as well as a benefit to the automobile industry, so in some form, it is likely to survive in his committee. +The draft concentrated on three major sources of concern about the Clinton bill that Mr. Dingell had encountered in his committee. They were its requirement that small business, along with other employers, pay most of the cost of workers health care, the concern that the revisions would end up increasing the budget deficit rather than curbing it as Mr. Clinton hoped and the concern about the alliances that employers would have to join. +The Dingell plan would allow the smallest employers, those with 10 or fewer workers, to choose not to buy workers' insurance, though it would require those with up to 5 workers to make a "minimum employer contribution of 1 percent of payroll." Those with 6 to 10 workers would start at 1 percent and eventually pay 2 percent. +The approximately 15 million workers in these small firms would have to buy their own insurance, but would be heavily subsidized by the Government. Regardless of income, they would have to pay no more than 3.9 percent of their income for coverage. Under the Clinton proposal all employers would have to pay a minimum of 3.9 percent of payroll for workers' health insurance. +The money to pay for those subsidies would come mainly from two changes in what individuals would pay for medical care. While the Clinton bill would require them to pay 20 percent of the cost of most services, up to an annual limit of $1,500, the Dingell plan would make that 25 percent, up to a limit of $2,500. +The bill would copy the Clinton measure in guaranteeing the renewal of health insurance, requiring that coverage be portable when a person changes jobs and prohibiting exclusions for pre-existing medical conditions. +The Dingell proposal would require states to set up insurance purchasing alliances and offer various types of plans, including the traditional fee-for-service system. But no one would be required to buy insurance through alliances, although everyone except employers of 1,000 or more could do so. + +LOAD-DATE: March 22, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: As a scaled-down version of the President's health care plan circulated among members of a House committee, Mr. Clinton campaigned for his plan with his wife, Hillary, in Deerfield Beach, Fla., yesterday. (pg. A1); A plan to provide universal health coverage but with fewer administrators and less cost for small businesses is being floated as an alternative to President Clinton's plan by Representative John D. Dingell. Mr. Clinton spoke to residents in Deerfield Beach, Fla., yesterday after a health care forum. (pg. A17) (Associated Press) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +109 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 23, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Youths Are Arrested After 12 Muggings + +SECTION: Section B; Page 5; Column 4; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 228 words + +Five teen-agers were arrested yesterday and charged with attacking and robbing elderly women in Canarsie, Brooklyn, over a three-week period, breaking one 70-year-old's skull and hip, the police said. +Lieut. Thomas Sbordone, a spokesman for the housing police, said the muggings began on Feb. 24 and quickly escalated in brutality. "What started as pushing and shoving grew to punching and choking," he said. + The five boys, ranging from 12 to 16 years old, apparently followed elderly women from a local store to the Glenwood Houses, a housing project in Canarsie. Twelve women between the ages of 60 and 81 were robbed, Lieutenant Sbordone said. +In the last incident, on March 15, the suspects robbed a 70-year-old woman who is still at Brookdale Hospital with a fractured skull and broken hip. The women were usually robbed of small amounts of money, though $500 was taken in one incident, the police said. +The housing police arrested two of the youths on March 19 in a stakeout during which they were observed stalking an intended victim, the police said, adding that the two teen-agers were carrying a gun. Those arrests led to three others yesterday, the police said. Arthur Roberts, 16, of Crown Heights was charged with robbery and assault and may be tried as an adult, Lieutenant Sbordone said. The four other youths also face similar charges. + +LOAD-DATE: March 23, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +110 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 23, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +HEALTH WATCH; +Don't Walk, Run! + +BYLINE: By JANE E. BRODY + +SECTION: Section C; Page 12; Column 3; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 553 words + +THIS, in effect, is the message given to many elderly people who try to cross busy city streets while the traffic light signals "Walk" and then flashes "Don't Walk" to warn that the light is about to change. A study of pedestrians at a busy intersection in Los Angeles found that 27 percent of elderly people who began to cross as soon as the light flashed 'Walk' were unable to reach the opposite curb before the light changed against them. At least one-fourth of those who were unable to cross in time were left stranded by at least one lane of traffic, according to a report in the current issue of The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. +In the study, Dr. Russell E. Hoxie and Dr. Laurence Z. Rubenstein of the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine watched 1,200 people trying to cross a street in an area where a lot of older people live. They found that all the younger pedestrians, who walked at an average speed of 1.27 meters a second, managed to get across the street in time. But among older pedestrians, whose walking speed averaged 0.86 meters per second, only 73 percent crossed in time. + Nearly all the elderly pedestrians observed walked more slowly than the 1.22 meters a second that city traffic engineers use in timing the interval between red lights. The researchers suggested that crossing times be increased, especially where many older people live. +The researchers believe their finding may largely explain why elderly people account for the largest share of the 7,000 pedestrian fatalities that occur annually in the United States. And, they suggested, that the number of fatalities might be even higher if not for the fact that many elderly pedestrians are reluctant to cross streets they consider dangerous. Three-fourths of the elderly pedestrians interviewed by the researchers said fear kept them from crossing the street as often as they would like to. + +In Praise of Red Wine + Yet another possible cardiovascular benefit has been uncovered for red wine: an anticlotting effect. Dr. John D. Folts and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin have singled out a substance called quercatin, found in the skin of grapes as well as in other fruits and vegetables, as the likely protective factor. They said it acts like aspirin to suppress the tendency of the blood to clot. Blood clots that close off arteries that feed the heart are a major factor in heart attacks. +Previous studies have shown that moderate consumption of any alcohol raises blood levels of protective HDL cholesterol. And other studies have found that red wine in particular contains a substance that inhibits oxidation of damaging LDL cholesterol, which in turn reduces the accumulation of cholesterol on artery walls. +Dr. Folts and his colleagues tested their own response to various wines, showing that within 45 minutes of drinking red wine the tendency of the blood platelets to form clots was reduced by 39 percent. White wine had no such effect, but one beer showed an intermediate benefit. +If red wine in fact is an effective clot inhibitor, its benefits may be largely limited to wine consumed with meals. Heavy meals, especially those with a high fat content, tend to increase the blood's tendency to clot, and drinking wine with them may counter that effect. + +LOAD-DATE: March 23, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +111 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 24, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Panel Endorses Alternative To President's Health Plan + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 18; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 849 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 23 + +After voting against President Clinton's original proposal to overhaul the nation's health care system, a Congressional subcommittee today approved an alternative plan to achieve his goal of universal insurance coverage but supply a more modest package of medical benefits. +The subcommittee voted 6 to 5 to approve the alternative and send it to the full House Ways and Means Committee for further action. + The alternative drops the idea of a payroll tax on all employers, which had been proposed by Representative Pete Stark, the California Democrat who is chairman of the subcommittee considering the legislation. +"The payroll tax has been dropped and is not included in this substitute amendment," Mr. Stark said in announcing a compromise on the alternative devised over the last few days in quiet negotiations among Democrats on the panel, the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health. + +Moving to the Center + Mr. Stark had earlier proposed an alternative to the ambitious health care proposal offered by Mr. Clinton in October. But Mr. Stark had to make concessions to gain the support of some Democrats on his panel like Representative Sander M. Levin of Michigan, who said he would not vote for any bill with a general increase in payroll taxes. +The tax proposed by Mr. Stark, equal to eight-tenths of 1 percent of payroll, would have raised $24 billion a year. But the Democrats found other ways to raise the same amount of money, with a variety of new taxes and cutbacks in the growth of Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for the elderly. The taxes are similar to those proposed by Mr. Clinton. +The new proposal, like one devised by Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, moves toward the center of the political spectrum in an effort to find votes for health legislation, which President Clinton has described as his top priority. +The chairman of the full Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski, said today that his panel would pass a "much more conservative" bill than Mr. Clinton has been seeking. In an interview with The Washington Post, Mr. Rostenkowski said that members of Congress would "not fall on their swords" to pay for health insurance for all Americans, even though Mr. Clinton has said such universal coverage is a major goal. +Earlier today, in a vote engineered by Republicans to embarrass Mr. Clinton, the Ways and Means subcommittee formally rejected the original version of the President's proposal. Democrats praised the President for initiating serious discussion of the nation's health care problems, but declined to vote for his bill. +The vote was four against and none in favor, with all seven Democrats on the panel voting "present." By voting present, the Democrats declined to take a position for or against the bill. All four Republicans on the panel voted against it. +Representative Bill Thomas of California, the ranking Republican on the panel, offered Mr. Clinton's bill as a substitute to show that it had little support in the subcommittee. + +First of Many Revisions + The health care bill is likely to be rewritten many times, but the work of Mr. Stark's subcommittee is significant because it is the first panel to vote on the issue. +These are the major provisions of the compromise devised by Mr. Stark, Mr. Levin and other Democrats on the Health Subcommittee: +*Employers with more than 100 employees would have to provide their workers with a standard package of health benefits by Jan. 1, 1996. Other employers would have to buy such coverage starting on Jan. 1, 1998. +*Medicare beneficiaries would have to pay 20 percent of the cost of health services delivered to them in their own homes. This would raise $6 billion a year. No such payments are required under current law. Mr. Clinton proposed requiring a 10 percent payment. +*Companies with 1,000 or more employees could serve as their own insurers, but in that case, they would be subject to a tax equal to 1 percent of payroll. This would raise $9 billion a year. Under Mr. Clinton's bill, companies could have served as their own insurers only if they had 5,000 or more employees. +*States would have to maintain current levels of spending on health care for Medicaid recipients and for people who get welfare benefits through programs financed entirely with state money. States that help elderly people buy prescription drugs would also have to continue such spending at current levels. Taken together, these requirements would raise $7 billion a year. +*State and local governments and their employees would all have to pay the payroll tax for Medicare hospital insurance (2.9 percent, equally divided between employer and employee). This would raise $1 billion a year. +By a vote of 6 to 5, the subcommittee today also rejected a bill that seeks to increase access to health insurance and control costs by fostering competition. By the same tally of 6 to 5, the panel rejected a Republican health care bill proposed by Mr. Thomas and Senator John H. Chafee of Rhode Island. + +LOAD-DATE: March 24, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Despite some indications of wavering by Democrats in Congress, President Clinton is pushing his proposal for overhauling health care. Sister Bernice Coreil of the Daughters of Charity moved a platform she had used as Mr. Clinton prepared to speak to 200 doctors and nurses at the White House yesterday. With him were Vice President Al Gore, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Dr. Jim Haggerty. (Paul Hosefros/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +112 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 25, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Italian, Held in Scandal, Muses on Dante and Sin + +BYLINE: By ALAN COWELL, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 8; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1114 words + +DATELINE: ROME, March 24 + +Languishing in prison, Mario Zamorani couldn't help but think of Dante's "Inferno." +Through the third-floor window of his cell in Turin, Mr. Zamorani said he could see the construction site for an extension of the prison building, a contract he himself had negotiated with the authorities before his arrest almost two years ago on charges of paying bribes to win contracts. + "In the 'Inferno,' the sinners were confronted with their sins," he said in an interview last week. "You could say the same thing happened to me." +These days, Mr. Zamorani, the 46-year-old former head of Italy's largest public construction company, Italstat, is out of prison, free to work while he awaits trial on five counts of corruption linked to the vast web of graft that brought down Italy's political old guard. +His position -- accused but not tried; freed but not judged -- reflects the anomaly of a country that has broken with its past without conjuring a vision of the future. Even the course of political renewal on which it embarked by scheduling elections on March 27-28 may prove far less of a catharsis than many had earlier expected. + +How Will It End? + Indeed, with a staggering number of businessmen and politicians -- 6,000 so far -- implicated in the corruption scandal, and investigators still scouring for evidence of public wrongdoing, figures like Mr. Zamorani raise the question of how it is ever going to end. +"I am hoping that after the election there will be an amnesty because what happened was more like a general levy, and that is not a crime," he said of the system of kickbacks that permeated political and business dealings. +"If it doesn't finish some time, we will reach a position where every single Italian family has one member under investigation," Mr. Zamorani said. "Either Tangentopoli finishes, or Italy is finished." +But that is not the view of those who helped expose the corruption scandal that has come to be called Tangentopoli, or "Kickback City," in Italy. + +Not the Moment for an Amnesty + "The investigations will go on as long as there's something to investigate," Gherardo Colombo, one of the magistrates in Milan who uncovered the scandal, said in a recent telephone interview. "This is not the moment to be talking of amnesty." +The scandal broke in February 1992, when an official in Milan, Mario Chiesa, was caught accepting a bribe in return for awarding a cleaning contract at a senior citizens' home. +Since then, magistrates have uncovered a network of graft that reached into the boardrooms of industrial giants like Fiat, Ferruzzi and Olivetti, as well as government-owned state holding companies. +The parties that have dominated Italy since the beginning of the cold war, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, have been all but obliterated by the scandal. +Former political barons like Giulio Andreotti, who has served seven times as Italy's Prime Minister, face accusations of corruption and consorting with the Mafia. Many of the nation's most prominent businessmen have been jailed, and at least 14 have taken their own lives, some in circumstances that have not been fully explained. + +A Taste of Jail + Mr. Zamorani, who in June 1992 became the first head of a state-owned company to be jailed under Italy's preventive detention laws, was initially held in San Vittore prison in Milan, where members of Italy's business elite were left to rub shoulders with drug dealers and other less illustrious prisoners until they agreed to cooperate with the investigation. +"I admitted my crime on the first day," Mr. Zamorani said. But he was not freed for another 60 days. +Under the pressure of incarceration, he told investigators about the system under which construction companies shared the state contracts for which they would submit bids and bribes. He did not, he said, name names. +So, in April 1993, it was back to jail, this time in Turin to answer more questions about illicit payments to politicians. Barely had he emerged from prison in Turin on May 11 than he was jailed again in the northeastern town of Pordenone, from May 22 until June 9, on the testimony of the same former associate. +"Considering that I've done six months in preventive custody," including 63 days of additional house arrest, "I think that's enough," he said. +Possibly more striking is the success of those involved in the scandal in cutting another deal, albeit in slightly less august circumstances. +Mr. Zamorani's post-jail job as a manager in a public sector company gives him a secretary, a chauffeured car and a cellular phone, though his salary has been cut to $200,000 a year before taxes, half of its pre-scandal level. + +Still Not Faced Trial + Like thousands of others implicated in the scandal, Mr. Zamorani has not faced a formal trial. Hearings in Milan are to begin in April, but a trial in Turin is not expected to start until next year. +Mr. Colombo, the investigating magistrate in Milan, said only about 100 of the 1,400 corruption cases being prosecuted in that jurisdiction alone have passed the first stage of the trial proceedings, which permit two appeals before final judgment. +Even then, a jail term is only a remote possibility. Like others, Mr. Zamorani maintains that any individual wrongdoing should be pardoned because the system of corruption involved virtually everyone. +"I have always said that it was the culture of the country," he said. The system was so widespread, Mr. Zamorani argues, that business people talked about it openly among themselves. + +'Everybody Paying Everybody' + "The joke at the end was that everybody was paying everybody so we canceled each other out," he said. +As for his business prospects, Mr. Zamorani has turned to other pursuits. +In a four-part magazine series, he wrote a businessman's guide to being arrested ("Don't bother to proclaim your innocence -- it won't work," he advised) suggesting that detainees pack a sweat suit, sandals, cigarettes, a radio, insect repellent and writing materials when the Carabinieri arrive. +Last month he published a 300-page book suggesting new procedures for bidding for contracts, and he has also compiled computerized lists of arrest warrants and investigations: more than 5,000 warrants and 20,000 continuing investigations into the activities of some 6,000 individuals. +Of those, according to his figures, 183 are legislators in the current Parliament, which is to be replaced in next week's election. +"There has been a revolution in Italy, and the ruling class has been changed," Mr. Zamorani said. By the time the cases finally come to judgment, he said, "I hope the revolution will be over." + +LOAD-DATE: March 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +113 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +EXPLOSION IN EDISON; +Diversity of Residents Is Reflection Of a Changing Central New Jersey + +BYLINE: By N. R. KLEINFIELD, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 32; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1967 words + +DATELINE: EDISON, N.J., March 25 + +Preeti Sanghavi came to Durham Woods from India by way of Texas. Chao-Tsun Yen came to Durham Woods from Taiwan by way of Brooklyn. Michael Adeyemo came to Durham Woods from Nigeria by way of Alabama. George Moices came to Durham Woods directly from Brooklyn. +In so doing, they joined an international bazaar of 1,500 residents in an apartment complex where so many people look and talk differently but wish and hope for the same things. A mix of middle-income professionals and members of the working class -- security guards, store owners, salesmen, teachers, police officers, warehouse managers, computer operators, chemists -- they constitute the full backbone of working America. Resigned to toiling hard for their money, they came here for opportunity, a touch of the bucolic and suburban equanimity. + +A Dissimilar Group + In these respects, Durham Woods affords a telling snapshot of the swarm of people who have converged on bulging central New Jersey during the last decade or so, a far more dissimilar lot than this state has been accustomed to. + They have largely brushed aside ethnic and cultural disparities and unpacked their suitcases in the spate of housing colonies that have sprung up in almost every crevice of space -- practically on the aprons of highways and in the backyards of factories and on land once inviting only to mosquitoes. Durham Woods itself began to rise in the mid-1980's on 137 acres of swampland just beyond the buzz of Interstate 287. +The housing development, of course, was pushed into the public eye by an event no family wishes for near its home: the natural gas pipeline explosion late Wednesday night that leveled 8 of the 63 buildings and touched off a hysterical flight for safety by the residents. Scores of people were hurt, and one death has been reported. +The residents proved their nimbleness in their midnight dash for salvation. But in their more humdrum existence, they have exhibited the character and concerns of the sort of people who in recent years have made this densest of all states still denser. +They are mostly young and middle-aged families, with two and three children and dual incomes, with a sprinkling of singles and senior citizens and one-parent households. +"We're the world in miniature here," said George Moices, a 40-year-old assistant warehouse manager. "What we do is we all get up early in the morning and work till we ache and try to get a dollar ahead. More days than we care to admit, we fall a dollar behind." + +Two From Taiwan +A Furniture Store Anchors the Dream + Part of the familiar immigrant saga, Chao-Tsun Yen and his wife, Vivian, came to this country in search of opportunity, and like many, they have experienced some of opportunity's heckling nature. +He arrived from Taiwan in 1982, first settling in Brooklyn, with a vision of a business of his own. "If you have the drive, it's good here," he said. "In my country, you need $10,000 to start a small business. Here, you can have $50 and set up a table and sell something. Little by little, you make more." +His first year, he worked part time in a liquor store and did little to bolster his dream. Then he switched to a jewelry store, and things brightened. Five years ago, the couple had a son and, like many other new parents, reasoned that life in the suburbs was the ticket to happiness. They moved to Edison and bought a house. + +'Business Wasn't So Good' + For a year, he sold posters and novelties at an outdoor flea market. Then, convinced that he had squirreled away enough, he opened his own furniture store. He called it Steve's Furniture, using the American nickname he adopted. +"Business was good, and then business wasn't so good," he said. "First, the couches and tables sell, then not so much. I put $5,000 into the store, and that is all gone. We couldn't afford the mortgage anymore -- $1,600 a month -- and so we sold the house and I closed down the store." +They moved to Durham Woods -- where monthly rents range from $600 to $800 for the one-and-two bedroom units. He found work as a warehouse manager at a computer company; his wife is an accountant. +"This is just for now," he said. "I'm waiting for the right chance -- maybe next year, or the year after -- and then it will happen. I'm going to bring back Steve's Furniture." + +Brooklyn Transplants +'A Lot of People Want to Be Like Us' + An employer relocation drew George Moices and his family to Durham Woods. He and his wife, Suzette, both grew up in Brooklyn. They lived in Midwood as he commuted into Manhattan to his job with Juki, the Japanese sewing machine manufacturer. Then Juki moved to New Jersey, and Mr. Moices commuted. In 1987, the wear of the journey convinced them to move to Edison, where Ms. Moices' father lives. +They chose Building 39 of Durham Woods, which had just been completed. "The rent was the most reasonable of the complexes we looked at," he said. "Everyone was very neighborly. They try to help each other out. We made friends right away. We're all the working class and some professionals. There are some BMW's, Mercedes and Corvettes. To be honest, I don't know how they do it. And then all the Pontiacs and Jeeps and pickup trucks." + +A Two-Shift Family + The Moices have three children -- 8, 3 and 17 months. Ms. Moices is a registrar at the emergency room of the John F. Kennedy Hospital in Edison. He gets home by 6; she begins work at 6:30 -- the dual-shift family. "So when she leaves, I take over the kids," Mr. Moices said. "We can't afford a baby sitter. Not with the rates and the amount of kids we have." +"We think about a house. I had some money put away, but I had to use it to solve a financial problem last year. I got backed up on my credit cards, and before I knew it, I'm over my head. My wife wasn't working then. For now, I've cleared my bigger debts and I'm trying to pay my little ones." +He and others already talk of how Edison is getting too crowded as more and more people just like him choose to live here. A condominium development -- Waterford Condominiums -- is under construction around the corner from Durham Woods. And the thicket of traffic continues to intensify. +"When we first moved here, there wasn't much traffic congestion at all," he said. "Now there's a lot. In the morning, just getting out of the complex can take time. A number of us have complained about trying to get a light at the exit to the complex. When it snows, it can take hours to get to the store. What can I say? I guess a lot of people want to be like us." + +Dreamers From India +'On the Treadmill' To Work and Back + Preeti Sanghavi, who's 25, and Amolika Tikekar, 26, are part of the young guard of Durham Woods. They were friends in India who both immigrated here in the late 1980's and now share an apartment in Building 23. +Ms. Sanghavi got a job about a year ago as a systems analyst for a consulting concern in Edison. Attracted by the complex's neat, spacious look, she moved into Durham Woods. Her husband is completing his doctorate in Pittsburgh, and she plans to move soon to join him. + +'Safe and Pleasant' + Ms. Tikekar, who is single, went to school in Michigan and stayed with her brother until she found a job three months ago in Oakland, N.J., as a data base operator. Ms. Sanghavi invited her to be her roommate. +"We like it," Ms. Tikekar said, "It's been safe and pleasant. But we really haven't met a lot of people. Like a lot of others here, we leave early to go to work and get back late. We're running on the treadmill." +Ms. Sanghavi said, "I like the mix a lot here. I don't like a concentration of one kind of people, and we certainly don't have that here. But we're really focused on working. Up early, off to work, back late, into bed. The American life. Sweet, huh?" + +Hailing From Alabama +'A Nice Little Life' In Relative Safety + Michael Adeyemo, who is 32, thought life would be "more lively" in New Jersey than in his previous home in Alabama, and he thought that even before the explosion. +For four years, he has lived with his wife, Florence, who is studying finance in college, and their three children in Building 46. He came to this country from Nigeria in 1984, bent on a good education and a career. He studied at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, then set his sights on New Jersey, where job opportunities were more plentiful. In short order, he found a position as an accountant for Merrill Lynch in Princeton and took a two-bedroom apartment in Durham Woods. +"I think it's a very nice community," he said. "It's like you have all these different societies together. You have China and India and Japan and America all together." + +Crime Is Infrequent + Like many residents of the complex, he pointed to the security, the quiet, the amenities like the swimming pool, tennis court and playground for the kids. Crime has visited Durham Woods infrequently. A few apartments have been burglarized, and some cars have had radios stolen. However, residents said that matters like vandalism, drugs and teen-agers armed with guns are unknown at the development. +"It's all about work for me," he said. "There are jobs here. It's very central. It's very convenient to a lot of places. With a family, you want all the conveniences, and we have that here. It's a nice little life." + +New Jersey Bred +Counting Pennies, Saving for a House + Still, not many residents of Durham Woods come here expecting to let their roots grow too deep. Rather, they look on the complex as a temporary way station on the way to owning a house. They know, of course, that the wait can get weary. But they count their pennies and they hope. +"Yeah, that's what we're doing, waiting on a home," said Steve Farnum. He is a shaggy-haired, 29-year-old receiving clerk at the Overlook Hospital in Summit. He lives in Building 10 with his fiancee, Donna Steffen, 35, a clerk and typist for an insurance agency. That is, they did live there. Building 10 was one of the eight that burned to the ground, taking with it the material possessions of their lives, including a 35-inch television that they had just bought. Among the people interviewed for this article, they alone lost everything in the blast and fire. +They have been together for 10 years, she promoting marriage, he hemming and hawing. When her father died in November, he felt saddened that he would never have the chance to attend their wedding. On Christmas, they were engaged. +In one important respect, the engagement will save them an appreciable amount of money. They had no insurance on their possessions until two months ago, when they bought some largely to protect Ms. Steffen's engagement ring. +Both of them grew up in New Jersey and have always lived in the state. Five years ago a friend who lived in Durham Woods recommended the place, and they liked what they saw. "We got a one-bedroom with an upstairs loft," Mr. Farnum said. "It's really something. I had never seen a two-floor apartment before." +Their lives have had their tribulations. His vision began deteriorating, and last year a rare disease was diagnosed that has left him legally blind. He held a paper right in front of him. "I can't see that," he said. He can no longer drive. Ms. Steffen takes him to and from work. +Planning their wedding has been consuming. "We've been saving for a real nice wedding, something that will cost like $20,000," he said. "We're only going to do this once. There are too many divorces. My parents were one of them. But that won't be us, I'll tell you that. We're marrying for good." +And, of course, the house. "We were going to stay here for a while, save and buy a house," he said. "We are looking forward to something better. Isn't that life? Waiting on something better." + +LOAD-DATE: March 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: A woman whose home was destroyed in the gas explosion last week being comforted by a friend yesterday in Edison, N.J. (Sam D'Amico for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +114 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Residents in Project Stand Up to a Gang + +BYLINE: By DENNIS HEVESI + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 31; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 908 words + +What struck the detectives, beyond the apparent viciousness of a group of youngsters, was that residents of the Glenwood Houses in Canarsie, including some of the older folks, were not going to take it, were willing to come forward and bear witness. +From their windows, or across the greens of the 20-building housing project off Ralph Avenue and Farragut Road, they saw the gang members -- none older than 16 and one only 12 -- stalking and mugging their victims, growing more violent each time. + More than half a dozen residents called 911, said Detective Lieut. Joseph Cardinale of the housing police. "We didn't have to wait for them to tell us they were terrified," he said. "The tenants, lots of the tenants, got involved, calling up and saying this kid did this. We had several eyeballs who said they knew the guys." + +'We're Doing Our Part' + "People weren't just sitting back and letting it happen," the lieutenant added. "They were telling us, 'Look, you do your part, we're doing our part.' It's what community policing is all about." +On Tuesday, the housing police announced that five boys -- who had named themselves Bebe's Gang after an animated movie called "Bebe's Kids" -- had been arrested and charged with attacking 12 elderly women over a three-week period, including, on March 15, a 70-year-old whose skull and hip were fractured. That woman remains in critical condition at Brookdale Hospital. +Because of their ages, the police would identify only one of the boys, Arthur Roberts, 16, of 349 St. John's Place, Crown Heights. Only two of the boys, Lieutenant Cardinale said, actually lived in the Glenwood Houses. +The lieutenant would not, of course, identify any of the witnesses. But the resolve of those who came forward was reflected among some of the elderly this week at the Glenwood Senior Citizens Center. + +'I'd Go for Them' + "Absolutely, I'd participate and call," said Ina Yudovin, 65, shielding a hand of poker from the view of her friends around the card table. "If I was seeing them do this, I'd go for them," Mrs. Yudovin said of the attackers. "I'm not afraid." +The Glenwood Houses, with its 1,200 apartments, is an integrated, working-class project that also is home to many elderly people who have lived there for years. +"Everybody's coming home from work; they have the same routine," Lieutenant Cardinale said. "And these kids were brazen, or stupid enough, to do most of their attacks around dusk." +The movie that gave the gang its name is about "a bunch of kids that get into mischief," Lieutenant Cardinale said. "But these kids were far from that; they really took it to the extreme." + +Gang Called a 'Wolf Pack' + The lieutenant called the gang "a wolf pack." He explained: "You know how a wolf sits and waits for the lamb?" +"Usually the people were returning from the stores on Ralph Avenue, or Glenwood Road," he continued, "and they would follow the victim to the entrance of the building, yoke her from behind, punch her, throw her down. But as they went along they got worse." The muggers took between $4 and $500 from the victims. +On March 19, based on information provided by witnesses, Detective Brian Lavin and Officer Chris Hein set up a stakeout at the project. +"They see the kids following a woman," Lieutenant Cardinale said. "They could see a couple of them maneuvering, and then they observed a gun. So these kids went from strong-arming to outright knocking them down and, now, carrying a gun." + +Five Boys Are Arrested + Two boys were arrested that night, and two nights later, three others were taken into custody. "There were lineups; a couple of victims and witnesses identified these kids," the lieutenant said. +Several youngsters from the project voiced disapproval of the attackers. A 12-year-old boy on his way to track practice at his school, identifying himself only as John, said he knew some of the arrested boys. +"It's no good, but that's what they do," John said. "At least this 12-year-old, maybe he'll behave himself now." +Dwain Bredwood, 17, offered a succinct view of the muggers: "They're crazy." +Still, the series of attacks created anxiety among residents of Glenwood Houses, particularly the elderly. One woman, who would identify herself only as Rosalie, said: "I've been here 28 years; it's never been like this. Used to be a kid walked on the grass and got a $5 fine." + +'We Don't Want to Take This' + Alan Weisberg, director of the Canarsie Neighborhood Development Corporation, which operates four centers for the elderly, including the one at Glenwood, said: "We have a full complement of support services for the seniors: meals on wheels, home care, transportation, cultural programs. And then this happens, and it creates uneasiness." +But some would not succumb. Belle Alpert, 75, a retired bookkeeper, was adamant: "By all means, we don't want to take this kind of thing. Believe me, I'd be the first one. If I see something out the window, I yell. You know that commercial where they scream out the window, "I don't want to take it any more'? That's what we feel around here." +And Martin Lawrence Klier, 60, a retired floor coverer who lives in the neighborhood, said the witnesses "did the right thing." +"I would tell," said Mr. Klier, sitting with two friends at a cement chess table in a playground at the housing project. "It's not squealing. It's doing some justice. Who the hell are these kids?" + +LOAD-DATE: March 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Map shows the location of Glenwood Houses. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +115 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: RIVERDALE; +At Home for the Aged, Lessons in Living + +BYLINE: By GARRY PIERRE-PIERRE + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 7; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 405 words + +For nine high school dropouts, the Hebrew Home for the Aged, a complex of eight well-tended buildings nestled amid rolling woodlands along the Hudson, is more than a nursing home. It's a chance to make good. +"I like this program," said Christina Manso, 17, who enrolled in the program last October. "Without it, I probably would be at home taking care of my baby." + And Lauren Shipsky, 20, said: "They're teaching me a lot. They're giving me a chance to work with the residents. I am part of the team." +Ms. Manso and Ms. Shipsky are part of the first wave of students, most from the South Bronx, who qualified for a special vocational education program sponsored by the home and the Board of Education. +The new 18-month program is one of the newest of 50 throughout the city that provide technical education in a nontraditional learning environment. About 700 students at other sites are studying building maintenance, food services and other subjects. +For some students, the home -- with its collection of more than 3,300 artworks, including pieces by Picasso, Andy Warhol and Alexander Calder -- is like an enormous private school, with about 900 grandparents. +"I used to think that the old people would be in bed and not talk," Ms. Manso said. "But now I realized that I have many things in common with them. We talked about makeup and dresses. One of them told me she was a model." +Last Wednesday morning the students took their daily walk to class down the first-floor corridor of the main building, passing an exhibit of lifesize photographs of immigrants at the turn of the century. +The students are working for their general equivalency diploma and from 8 A.M. to 1 P.M. receive a combination of classroom work like writing, literature, arts, math and social studies. For the rest of the school day, they get hands-on experience in their chosen field of health care. +Residents serve as mentors and tutors, so the students -- most of them black -- receive practical lessons in ethnic and racial relationships. But the biggest challenge for the students has been age, and it is one the home's administrators feel certain progress has been made. +Ms. Manso strolled through the nursing home Wednesday afternoon, talking with residents. "Hi! Mr. Katz," she said, holding her hands out to Harry Katz, 86, a wheelchair-bound resident. "I'm doing fine, sweetheart," he replied. GARRY PIERRE-PIERRE + +LOAD-DATE: April 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Christina Manso, a student in a vocational education program, visiting with Harry Katz at the Hebrew Home for the Aged inthe Bronx. (Ruby Washington/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +116 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +COPING; +Pedestrians' Plea: Please Curb Your Wheels + +BYLINE: By ROBERT LIPSYTE + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 1; Column 3; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 875 words + +ELENA PAPA found a new cause last September a few seconds after she stepped off a city bus and onto the sidewalk at 82d Street and Bay Parkway, a block from her Bensonhurst home. She remembers thinking how nice the bus driver had been to drop her off at the corner instead of at the official bus stop. Next she remembers feeling as though she was sliding into second base on her nose. A bicycle rider had struck her from behind and slammed her face-first into the concrete. +"If I wasn't in such great shape I would have been killed or at least broken my hip," Mrs. Papa said the other day. "But ever since my heart attack I've gone to cardio-rehab twice a week at Victory Memorial Hospital in Bay Ridge, and all that walking and lifting and stretching saved my life. I was on my way back from the hospital when it happened." + It was not a hit-and-run. In fact, the cyclist, a young man in his 20's who had apparently been racing another cyclist along the sidewalk, stopped and kept repeating that he was sorry until Mrs. Papa, now on her feet, waved him away. As it turned out, except for a broken pinkie, soreness and a face that resembled a Halloween mask almost until Halloween, Mrs. Papa was not damaged. +"But I think about what might have happened to an elderly person," said Mrs. Papa, a 72-year-old retired parochial-school teacher. "So I became a committee of one to remind politicians and police officers and bicycle riders that it is illegal to ride on the sidewalks. Most of my life I tried to help young people. Since the accident I am trying to help old people." +Mrs. Papa's story will fatten the files of two City Councilmen from Manhattan, Charles Millard and Andrew Eristoff, who have each submitted bills calling for stricter enforcement of bike laws and more severe penalties for violations by commercial riders. +The story will make Charles Komanoff, the bike-riding founder of Transportation Alternatives, wince. He wants to defuse the growing pedestrian anger at people who ride on the sidewalk -- most of them, according to Mr. Komanoff and others, Chinese and Mexican men delivering takeout food -- because it diverts attention from the crowded, chaotic, cratered streets that cause the problem in the first place. +The jostle for space between the wheeled and the unwheeled begins in the gutter. Buses and trucks bully one another and bully taxi cabs, which bully the cars of people who would be on buses if buses weren't so slow or on subways if subways weren't in a hole that gives the impression, not always untrue, of danger and dirt. +All the big wheels bully bicyclists, the brave commuters, the dashing messengers, the bringers of food. It seems reasonable (although it is illegal if you are more than 12 years old) to seek the security of the sidewalk and bully pedestrians. In the kind of urban irony that makes irony banal, it is the curb cuts for wheelchairs that make it so easy for the clunky old delivery bikes to mount the sidewalks. +Having just outlined a mature, fair-minded overview, I now admit to flashes of fury at being bullied on the sidewalk by someone lugging glutinous clots of MSG to yuppies too lazy to cook. I have yelled at deliverymen and chased them and once shouldered one off his bike when he tried to edge me into the gutter. It made my day. +Mr. Millard's 1993 bill, reintroduced this session, would give the police the right to confiscate a bicycle being ridden on the sidewalk for commercial purposes. That bill also mandates penalties for motorists who violate a bike lane and for cabbies who run red lights. +Mr. Komanoff, who originally supported the spirit of that bill, is uneasy at the idea of confiscation. At least take the food before the bike, he says. Mr. Komanoff says he has stopped and chastised hundreds of sidewalk riders and usually been brushed off. He has talked to Chinese restaurant managers about building good will by advertising that their delivery people ride only in the streets. So far, he has met only with politeness. He thinks an organized campaign aimed at restaurant trade associations might work. +Mr. Eristoff, punched in the face while campaigning last year by a bike rider he had asked to leave the sidewalk, has introduced a bill that would penalize the rider's employer. A person injured by a commercial delivery bicyclist would have the right to sue for $1,000 in punitive damages. +Mrs. Papa, who belongs to the Bensonhurst Council for Senior Citizens, among other civic and religious groups, is in favor of any such legislation, although she is not so sure it will be enforced. Police officers on foot usually can't run down a bike, especially knowing that serving a Criminal Court summons on someone who doesn't carry identification will probably be a futile exercise in exercise and paper work. +"I always tell bicycle riders that they shouldn't be on the sidewalk," said Mrs. Papa, "but I say it nicely because I believe you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Also, I don't want to get punched. +"Sometimes they listen to me and sometimes they ignore me. I was most successful right after the accident. I would say, 'Please don't ride on the sidewalk,' and then point to my face while it was still a mess." + +LOAD-DATE: April 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +117 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 29, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Medicare Claim May Be Rejected, It's Found, Depending on the State + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section D; Page 23; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 653 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 28 + +Federal investigators said today that they had found huge variations in the approval and denial of Medicare claims for the same services in different states. And they said there were no obvious reasons for the disparities. +Auditors from the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, examined claims that Medicare rejected on the ground that the services were unnecessary. + Representative Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who ordered the audit, said, "This evidence has great implications for the debate about national health care reform. +"As part of health care reform," he said, "Congress is considering a standard national benefits package for all Americans. But the new report shows that enacting legislation is not enough to insure uniform coverage. Medicare coverage seems to depend more on where the elderly live than on their medical needs." + +Public Claims, Private Judges + For doctor's office visits, Medicare denied 4 claims for every 10,000 approved in Northern California, while it denied 97 for every 10,000 approved in Wisconsin. +An older woman whose doctor prescribed a diagnostic mammogram to detect breast cancer was 180 times more likely to have a claim denied in Southern California than in Northern California or in North Carolina, the auditors said. +Likewise, for angioplasty, a technique for opening clogged blood vessels, Medicare denied 1,824 claims as unnecessary for every 10,000 approved in Southern California. Denial rates in North Carolina and Wisconsin were about 300 per 10,000. But in South Carolina and Illinois, Medicare did not reject any claims for this service in 1992. +The report, prepared for a Congressional hearing on Tuesday, highlights a little-known fact about Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for 36 million elderly and disabled people. Claims are reviewed and paid by private insurance companies serving as agents of the Federal Government, and their standards vary from place to place. + +'A Crazy Quilt' + In an interview tonight, Mr. Wyden, a co-director of Oregon Gray Panthers, said: "Most people think of Medicare as a Federal program with uniform benefits nationwide. But we are learning that Medicare is really a crazy quilt of separate and dramatically different programs run by 34 private insurance carriers." +The carriers last year reviewed 576 million claims submitted by 780,000 doctors and 136,000 suppliers under Part B of Medicare. +Carol Walton, director of Medicare program operations at the Federal Health Care Financing Administration, said that she had not seen the report by the General Accounting Office. But she said the regional disparities did not necessarily indicate a problem. The disparities, she said, reflect "variations in populations, disease rates and medical practice" in different parts of the country. +Eleanor Chelimsky, a G.A.O. official who supervised the study, suggested several reasons for the disparities. Different carriers use different definitions of what is medically necessary, she said. In addition, she said, medical practice, billing practices and even levels of fraud vary in different parts of the country. +Katy Samiljan of the Medicare Beneficiaries Defense Fund, an advocacy group in New York City, asserted that "Medicare carriers are denying coverage to patients in an arbitrary and irrational manner." As a result, she said, many people in poor health who are living on small fixed incomes do not receive the medical care they need. +Ms. Samiljan said the Government gave Medicare carriers too much discretion to decide whether services were needed. The insurance company employees who review claims for the Government "generally do not have the skills, the time or the medical documentation" needed to make such decisions, she said. +Mr. Wyden said the Government should consider fining Medicare carriers that improperly deny large numbers of claims. + +LOAD-DATE: March 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +118 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 29, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +GAPS IN COVERAGE FOR HEALTH CARE + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section D; Page 23; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 726 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 28 + +Twenty-five percent of all Americans were without health insurance some time from February 1990 to September 1992, the Census Bureau said today. +The statistic helps explain the political appeal of President Clinton's proposal to guarantee "health care that can never be taken away." Even people who have health insurance through their employers may lose coverage when they lose or change jobs, the bureau observed. + Thus, it said, 60 million Americans, or a quarter of the population outside institutions like prisons or nursing homes, lacked coverage for at least one month during the 32-month period. +In general, adults were more likely to have insurance as they grew older. Robert Bennefield, a statistician at the Census Bureau, said: "Young adults were most vulnerable to lapses in coverage, while the elderly were the least vulnerable. One-half of the people age 18 to 24 spent at least one month without coverage, compared with just 1 percent of older Americans, most of whom are covered by Medicare." + +'There's No Guarantee' + Hispanic people were much more likely than blacks or whites to experience a loss or lapse of coverage. Forty-eight percent of Hispanic people were without insurance for at least one month. By contrast, 36 percent of blacks and 24 percent of whites were uninsured for a month or more. +Women were slightly less likely than men to have had gaps in coverage, for two reasons. It was more common for women to be poor and to participate in Medicaid. In addition, a higher proportion of women than men were 65 and over; women were therefore more likely to be enrolled in Medicare. +Joshua M. Wiener, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said: "Thirty-nine million Americans, or 17 percent of the population, lack health insurance at any given time. But the problem affects many more people over a longer period, and the middle class is worried. Many giants of American industry -- I.B.M., Sears, Procter & Gamble -- have laid off thousands of workers. You might have great health insurance now, but there's no guarantee you'll have it in the future because you may lose your job." +In a poll taken by The New York Times earlier this month, people were asked what happened while they were uninsured. About one-third of the uninsured said they had serious medical problems in that time. Another third said they had no serious problems at all. One-third said they had no real problems, but worried a lot. +The Census Bureau said that only 13 percent of full-time workers experienced gaps in health insurance coverage from 1990 to 1992, while 38 percent of those who were unemployed for a month or more had such gaps. +The likelihood of having insurance coverage was closely correlated with a person's income. "Falling below the poverty line increases the odds of losing coverage," the bureau said. +Among people with incomes under the official poverty level, 49 percent were without insurance for a month or more from 1990 to 1992. By contrast, among people with incomes at least four times the poverty level, only 9 percent were uninsured for a month or more. (A family of three was classified as poor if it had income less than $11,521 last year.) + +Campaign Contributions + In a separate study, a consumer group reported today that the health and insurance industries had significantly increased campaign contributions to Congressional candidates. +Contributions from January 1993 through January 1994 totaled $11.3 million, up 22 percent from the comparable period of the last election cycle two years ago, said the consumer group, Citizen Action. +Michael Podhorzer, health policy director at Citizen Action, said, "These hefty campaign contributions have helped paralyze Congressional action." +Contributions from doctors and other health care professionals totaled $2.6 million, up 39 percent from the earlier election cycle, Citizen Action said. Contributions from drug companies and manufacturers of medical equipment totaled $1.5 million, up 21 percent. +Mr. Podhorzer said the top contributors in the health and insurance industries were the political action committees of the American Dental Association, which gave $474,847 last year, the American Medical Association ($411,569), the National Association of Life Underwriters ($359,310) and the American Hospital Association ($326,850). + +LOAD-DATE: March 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "Not Covered" shows percentage of people without coverage for at least on month from Feb. 1990 to Sept. 1992. (Source: Census Bureau) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +119 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 1, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Review/Film Festival; +Black, 12 and Complex: More Than Role Models + +BYLINE: By JANET MASLIN + +SECTION: Section C; Page 6; Column 2; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 906 words + +In addition to being the most commercially viable film to come out of this year's New Directors/New Films series, Boaz Yakin's "Fresh" is likely to be the most controversial. "Fresh" is the story of the title character, an impassive black 12-year-old who is first seen stopping off to visit an elderly couple on his way to school. The woman busily offers him milk and cookies. Fresh delivers her supply of drugs. +Fresh (Sean Nelson) has two important men in his life. One is Esteban (Giancarlo Esposito), the seductive drug dealer who employs him as a courier without realizing that Fresh is actually quite an independent-minded little entrepreneur. The other is Sam (Samuel L. Jackson), Fresh's father, an indigent chess whiz who does what he can to discipline his son. He can't do much. When Sam scolds the boy for casually using the word "nigger," Fresh makes it clear he's not about to take orders from any no-income, chess-playing old man. + "Fresh" starts off in such a slow, deliberate style that it initially looks like nothing special, at least in dramatic terms. Is this yet another story of a sensitive young man forced to choose between good and bad role models? No, it is not: it's much more complicated, thanks to the film's portrait of Fresh as a deeply troubling character. This isn't the usual pre-teen innocent, nor even the standard bad seed. This is a seemingly decent kid who can sit there eating a candy bar while other people die. +As "Fresh" examines the stock ideas that usually shape such stories, it ponders the question of how fully accountable Fresh is for his behavior. The film presents an ultimately devastating panorama of Fresh's problems, to the point where his actions can only be understood in a larger context. The warring drug dealers in his community are immensely powerful, which makes it clear why Fresh has learned to get along with them. His home life, with the 11 cousins who share his aunt's apartment, offers nothing. And the violence Fresh observes is terrible. Mr. Yakin doesn't include many violent episodes in this film, but the ones he stages are made so meaningful that their impact is brutalizingly intense. +Since Mr. Yakin is white, there are bound to be those who question his drug-, violence- and prostitution-filled vision of Fresh's world. But "Fresh" cannot be mistaken for an exploitation film; it earns the right to approach this subject through the obvious thoughtfulness of Mr. Yakin's direction. Deliberately lurid elements are avoided, especially noisy ones; there's a moody, effective score by Stewart Copeland instead of loud music, and the crowded apartment where Fresh lives is as quiet as a library. The film's most brazenly decadent characters, like Mr. Esposito's sinuous Esteban, are still played with intelligence and care. +Even the screenplay's jargon comes in for close examination. Fresh is so numb to racial epithets that he often uses "nigger" when addressing his white friend. This friend is Chuckie (Luis Lantigua), whose big-talking, reckless behavior within the drug culture underscores the value of Fresh's calculating restraint. One of the film's most anguished episodes involves Chuckie's dog, who should have been a pet but is being forced to fight instead. Fresh likes the dog, and he has reason to sympathize with its situation. Because of that, Fresh's last scene with this animal provides the film's most bitterly shocking moment. +Mr. Nelson is often so blank-faced he keeps Fresh's inner thoughts opaque. Backhandedly, that becomes an advantage. Only at the end of the film, as Fresh engineers a staggering set of human chess moves and goes on to acknowledge that his father's lessons have not been lost after all, is this boy's character fully revealed. +Mr. Yakin's pacing seems overly slow at first, but his measured style pays off in a major way. His screenplay has been written with similar care. He has also been inspired enough to hire Adam Holender, the cinematographer whose work on "Midnight Cowboy" apparently stuck in Mr. Yakin's memory. Mr. Holender does a stunning job: he makes "Fresh" extraordinarily handsome, with a sharply sunlit look that brings out the hard edges in its urban landscapes. The subject and visual style could not be more forcefully matched. +"Fresh" features delicate and sympathetic work from both Mr. Esposito and Mr. Jackson, whose fine characterizations say a lot about the originality of this film's vision. N'Bushe Wright makes a sadly affecting appearance as Nicole, Fresh's drug-addicted older sister. Though she seems barely to notice him, she becomes the essential pawn in Fresh's game. +"Fresh" will be shown tonight at 6 and Sunday at 9 P.M. at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the New Directors/New Films series. + +Fresh + +Written and directed by Boaz Yakin; director of photography, Adam Holender; edited by Dorian Harris; music by Stewart Copeland; production designer, Dan Leigh; produced by Lawrence Bender and Randy Ostrow; released by Miramax. At the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1 in the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53d Street, as part of the New Directors/New Films series of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the museum's department of film and video. Running time: 115 minutes. This film is not rated. + +Fresh . . . Sean Nelson +Esteban . . . Giancarlo Esposito +Sam . . . Samuel L. Jackson +Nicole . . . N'Bushe Wright +Chuckie . . . Luis Lantigua + +LOAD-DATE: April 1, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Sean Nelson. (Miramax Films) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +120 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 3, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Habitats/A Grand Victorian, With Water Damage; +Taking On a Big Job + +BYLINE: By TRACIE ROZHON + +SECTION: Section 10; Page 4; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 637 words + +DRIVING up Ashburton Avenue in Yonkers, past bodegas, auto-parts stores and fast-food outlets, Jeffrey Gardere keeps up a steady stream of badinage, preparing visitors for his new neighborhood and new house. +"Some people look scarier than they are," he says as the car passes a group of baggy-trousered teen-agers strolling down the street in a wide pack. "Their dress is stereotype rap-hip fashion." + The car turns up Palisade Avenue, toward his grand but decrepit Victorian Gothic mansion. Pointing to the Manor, a nursing home on the corner, he says to his wife, Deyanira: "Honey, this is where I'll stay after the renovation is over." +Deyanira Gardere, whose family is from the Dominican Republic, favors him with a wide smile. "Honey, when the renovation is over, we're going to have a very big party." +Dr. Gardere, a psychologist specializing in treating children, wants to establish a mental health center in the basement of his new house. "No drugs administered," he says. "That's the last thing they need around here." +"It was a calculated risk -- to buy in this particular neighborhood and own a mansion or to buy a smaller house in a fantastic neighborhood," he says as the car pulls up to a house that looks like something out of the Addams Family. Dr. Gardere says so himself and adds, "I do think Deyanira looks like Morticia, don't you?" +The 19-room hipped-roof stucco house, known locally as the Smith- Collins House, has Victorian gingerbread trim over the dormers and a balustraded square tower. Built in the 1850's and substantially remodeled several decades later, it sits on a hill overlooking the Hudson River, a somewhat tattered remnant of the glory days of Yonkers. +"What's this here? Somebody's broken in," Dr. Gardere says, dashing over to the side entrance, sprayed with graffiti. A glass panel in the door has been smashed and the window above the door is open, a shredded white cotton curtain waving in the wind. +As Dr. and Mrs. Gardere survey the damage, an elderly man picks up trash in the backyard. "He lives at the Manor and comes up here and cleans, just for something to do," Dr. Gardere says as the man waves hello. +The magnificent house was not always a wreck. The Garderes first saw it three years ago when they were looking throughout the five boroughs and beyond, telling realtors they wanted a "mini-mansion." +At that time, the mansion had been vacated by a lawyer who had had his practice in the offices downstairs. He had run into financial problems, according to the realtor who is selling the house and to Dr. Gardere, and the bank took over. +Disaster struck when whoever was responsible for securing the house for the winter failed to shut off the water. The pipes burst, flooding the house, bringing down parts of ceilings and -- most damaging -- buckling the fine old oak strip floors. +On a visit two weeks ago, the still-melting snow had leaked through the roof and was dripping into the sunroom, a beautifully lighted room at the back of the house, overlooking the river. Raccoons had gnawed through plaster ceilings in the attic and run amok on the top floor, where there were traps set. +Because of the flood and the ensuing damage, the Garderes were able to buy the house for less than they had originally offered. Just after it was taken over by the bank the asking price was $400,000. The Garderes offered $275,000, which was not accepted. Then the pipes burst and they came to see it again. They were set to buy the house last week for $138,000, with a contractor lined up to restore it for $115,000. +"It broke my heart to see it this way," Mrs. Gardere said, as she surveyed the damage, "and it's very scary to take on this big a job. We weren't even married when we saw this house, and now, two kids later, we're finally buying it." + +LOAD-DATE: April 3, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Jeffrey and Deyanira Gardere in the house they bought in Yonkers. (Chris Maynard for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +121 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 3, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Older People and the Need for Assistance + +BYLINE: By PENNY SINGER + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 11; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1317 words + +IF we live long enough, many of us will fit the profile of an older person: living alone, independent, with mental faculties intact but having a need for stimulation and possibly requiring some physical assistance to perform routine chores. +Now there is help for older people who want to remain independent but yearn to live richer lives. Selfhelp Community Services, a 58-year-old nonprofit agency, has started a household-manager program to bridge the gap between companionship and traditional home care, said Elizabeth N. Radow, the program's director. + "The first household-manager program was opened in White Plains last September to provide services to help improve the quality of aging residents of Westchester," Ms. Radow said. "A similar program was opened in Manhattan in November." +The population of Westchester is getting older. Quoting 1990 census figures, Ms. Radow said, "There are 33,400 people older than 65 listed as living alone in Westchester. And the number of people 85 and older was 14,104, which represents 35.9 percent growth over the 1980 census." The household-manager program, she said, is a logical extension of Selfhelp's existing services for older people. + +Giving Something in Return + Selfhelp Community Services, she said, was begun in 1936 by refugees from Nazi Germany to help other refugees find jobs, homes and schools in American communities. +"Over the years, Selfhelp's programs were expanded, and services were extended to the community at large," Ms. Radow said. This came about "because of the strong desire of those who once were refugees to return something to everyone in the community for the support they received when they first came to the United States." +Today, Selfhelp Community Services is one of the major nonprofit geriatric and home-care social agencies in the New York City area, offering programs at six centers for the elderly, which they operate, and four apartment houses, which they own and operate in Queens, in addition to offering services to individuals in their own homes. The average age of those in the apartments is 80. +Some of the Selfhelp programs are offered free to Holocaust survivors, but other programs, like the new household-manager program, are offered on a fee basis. Selfhelp receives financial support from U.J.A.-Federation and other philanthropic agencies along with donations and government funds for certain programs, Ms. Radow said, adding that Selfhelp's overhead costs are among the lowest in the field of elder care. + +Trained Companions Offered + Regarding the household-manager program, Ms. Radow said it is a fee-for-service program priced at $16 an hour during the week with a minimum of two hours. "But most all of the fee, $10 plus $2 for Social Security and unemployment, goes to the employee," she said. "The remainder, $4, goes to offset our overhead costs. We haven't reached the break-even stage yet, but we hope that over time we will be able to sustain ourselves." +What the household manager program provides are trained companions who deliver a variety of services to people in their own homes. +"Because the success of the program is largely dependent on the caliber of the companion, companions are chosen very carefully," Ms. Radow said. "They can be student nurses, free-lance writers, homemakers, office workers, retired executives -- but all of them have the ability to do what may be required of them, which can include such things as reading aloud and discussing current events, assisting with paying bills, walking a dog or shopping, preparing and serving lunch to a bridge club. However, one prerequisite is that the companion has to own and drive a car. In Westchester, especially, what many people need is transportation to stores, to see the doctor or even to the theater." +Ms. Radow, a real estate lawyer, has been a member of the New York State Bar Association special committee on seniors and has published a report on housing for the elderly. She was a member of Selfhelp's executive board when she was chosen to head the household-management program. +"I was enthusiastic about taking the job because I feel that this is an exceptional, unusual home-care service, and as far as I know there is nothing like it in the area," she said. "I do the interviewing myself," she added, explaining that candidates' backgrounds and references are checked thoroughly before the applicants are sent to Selfhelp's Guthery Institute in Manhattan where they take a 40-hour certification course in personal care. + +'I Saw the Difficult Time' + Cynthia M. Brill of Thornwood, one of the first people hired as a companion, formerly worked as an office manager in a family business. +"It was my father's company, and after he sold it and retired, I saw the difficult time and loneliness he was experiencing before he passed away," Mrs. Brill said. "It made me realize that many older people really could use something else, and that made me very receptive to becoming part of the household management program." +Mrs. Brill, who has found it more fulfilling to work one-on-one with people than in an office, said: "Every case is different. For instance, I drive one woman who broke her shoulder in a fall on the ice this winter to her physical therapist three times a week. I also walk her dog, take her to the grocery store and do whatever tasks in and around the house are necessary. And for an older client, whose eyesight is bad, I go in twice a week to read to her. She loves to know what's going on and is so eager to talk about things. We discussed the Tonya Harding affair in detail, and now I'm reading her Bette Davis's autobiography, which she seems to enjoy immensely." +One of Mrs. Brill's clients, a woman who broke her arm and agreed to be interviewed only on the condition of anonymity, said: "Cindy is a treasure. It is such a help for me to have her here. She is like a good friend." +Myra Doniger, who lives in Greenwich, has an elderly mother-in-law who lives in Purchase, and she, too, is enthusiastic about the household-manager program. +"My mother-in-law has a housekeeper, so our concern was not so much for her physical care, but it was our feeling that because she had very little mental stimulation the quality of her life was sadly diminished," Mrs. Doniger said. "She was always such an active, independent woman, who was constantly on the go, that when we heard about the companion program we decided to give it a try." +Just having someone to read the newspaper aloud, Mrs. Doniger said, has made a noticeable difference in her mother-in-law's life. +"Now that she has company, she seems much more animated and happier. What do they read? Mainly the society pages of The New York Times, especially the marriages, the charity affairs and, oh, then the obituaries. But it's more than companionship that Selfhelp provides. Companions are trained to be observant and to contact us if they spot any physical change in my mother-in-law that we should know about. And that is very reassuring." + +Cost Sharing + Too often, older people become homebound when they are unable to drive, Ms. Radow said. "Having transportation available helps them lead fuller lives," she said. "For example, if a woman wants to have her friends over for lunch and bridge, the companion will not only call for the friends and take them back home, but shop, prepare the lunch, clean up, everything. And if four friends share the cost of having the companion, each pays $6.50 an hour." +And for two people who want to go shopping or perhaps to the theater together, the fee is $10.50 an hour for each, she said. +"It's often the children of our clients who seek out and pay for our services," she said. "They feel that by helping their parents stay independent, they are giving them a great gift." +For more information, Selfhelp's telephone number is 684-1200. + +LOAD-DATE: April 3, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +122 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 5, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Medicare Paying Doctors 59% of Insurers' Rate, Panel Finds + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 928 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 4 + +Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for the elderly, pays doctors only 59 percent of what private insurance companies pay, and this gap may "compromise access to care for Medicare beneficiaries," a Federal advisory commission said today. +The gap has increased in the last five years, and President Clinton's health plan could widen it further, said the panel, the Physician Payment Review Commission. In 1989, Medicare paid doctors 68 percent as much as private insurers paid. + The 13-member commission, created in 1986, advises Congress on payment of doctors under Medicare and Medicaid, which together serve more than 65 million people. Recommendations of the commission are taken seriously by Congress, which has approved many of its past suggestions. +Judith N. Brown, chairwoman of the American Association of Retired Persons, said: "When retirees move into a new area, they often have difficulty finding a physician who will take them. It's becoming more difficult to find doctors who will take people if they're on Medicare." + +Long Viewed as Inadequate + Medicare has always been less generous than private insurers in paying doctors. But Government data show that Medicare was paying 85 percent as much as private insurers in 1970's. +Howard B. Shapiro, director of public policy at the American College of Physicians, which represents 80,000 internists, said the trend documented by the commission was worrisome. "Medicare payment levels are beginning to approach Medicaid payment levels," which have long been viewed as inadequate, he said. +Doctors' fees under Medicaid, the Federal-state program for low-income people, vary widely from state to state. On the average, the commission said, Medicaid pays doctors 47 percent of what private insurers pay. +Medicaid payments to doctors have increased in the last few years, mainly because of a Federal law that forced states to raise payments for pediatric and obstetric services. + +A Widening Gap + "Physicians continue to serve new Medicare patients," the commission said. But it added, "The gap between Medicare payments and those of private insurers is widening," and these disparities may reduce access to care for some patients, as doctors take patients with private insurance in preference to Medicare beneficiaries. Black, Hispanic and disabled people already report difficulties getting care under Medicare, the panel said. +The gap between Medicare and private insurance is partly a result of the Government's success in slowing the growth of Medicare spending for doctors' services. Such spending rose 4.8 percent a year from 1989 to 1993, as against 12.1 percent a year from 1980 to 1989. In recent years, private insurers have allowed much larger increases in doctors' fees than Medicare permitted. +The commission said that stringent limits on Medicare payments proposed by President Clinton would widen the gap, so that by the year 2000, Medicare would pay doctors only 43 percent to 52 percent of what private insurers pay. + +Ups and Downs of Fees + In its report to Congress, the commission also made these points: +*A Medicare fee schedule that took effect in 1992 has redistributed doctors' income. Payments per service increased 17 percent for family doctors and general practitioners, but only 2 percent for internists. For surgeons, payment rates dropped 8 percent. +*Medicare pays doctors 54 percent of what commercial insurance companies pay and 69 percent of the fees paid by Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans. +*The volume of doctors' services for each Medicare beneficiary increased, on the average, about 50 percent from 1986 to 1993. + +Variations in Payments + Dr. John M. Eisenberg, chairman of the commission, said that some of the increase occurred because of new technology and was "definitely appropriate." For example, he said, doctors are performing more endoscopy procedures, to screen patients for colon cancer, and more angioplasty procedures, using small balloons to open up coronary arteries. +The study found huge variations in Medicaid payments to doctors in various states. In New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island, it said, Medicaid fee levels are about half the national average. In Alaska, Arizona and Wyoming, Medicaid fees are at least 25 percent above the national average. In Connecticut, Medicaid payments to doctors are about the same as the national average. +Comparison of Medicaid fees in 1990 and 1993 shows a mixed picture. Payments to doctors in West Virginia, which had been among the lowest in the country, nearly tripled and now match the national average. Fees in seven other states -- Alaska, Connecticut, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire and Washington -- increased by 30 percent or more in this period. But fees in California, Indiana, Massachusetts and South Carolina declined slightly from 1990 to 1993. + +Concern Over Proposals + The commission welcomed efforts by Mr. Clinton and members of Congress to guarantee health insurance for all Americans. But it expressed concern about the complexity of proposals for regional health insurance purchasing groups, or alliances. +Instead, the commission urged Congress to create a national alliance, which would offer consumers a variety of health plans. The plans would include one that is run by the Government, like Medicare, and pays doctors a separate fee for each service performed. +This public plan would guarantee that low-income people have access to a full range of doctors, and it could compete with private plans, the commission said. + +LOAD-DATE: April 5, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +123 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 6, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Looking Beyond Family to Aid the Elderly + +BYLINE: By ESTHER B. FEIN + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1797 words + +Beverly Wagner has logged hundreds of hours on the telephone, flown regularly from Michigan to New York, and missed dozens of days of work, all trying to arrange care for her 94-year-old aunt, who lives in Manhattan and is losing the ability to care for herself. +After failing to persuade her aunt to move from her apartment of 50 years near Lincoln Center into her lakeside house in Michigan, Mrs. Wagner finally hired Fine and Newcombe Associates, a geriatric guidance and family counseling service in Manhattan. Fine and Newcombe is one of hundreds of companies that have sprung up over the last several years to help people coordinate and monitor the affairs of aging relatives who do not live nearby. + In the past, without local people to look out for them, the elderly have often been forced prematurely into nursing homes or made to move in with relatives in distant cities where people and geography are unfamiliar. +But these days, many who must minister to elderly relatives from a distance are turning to referral services that provide information about care of the elderly, and to geriatric care managers who, for a fee, will shoulder many of the tasks families usually take on. +The company Mrs. Wagner hired has arranged for a daily meal delivery for her aunt, found a housekeeper who comes twice a week to clean, shop and accompany her to doctors' appointments, and sends a social worker weekly to make sure everything is running well. If there is an emergency -- a phone that goes unanswered, a middle-of-the-night fall -- they respond. +"It has saved my life and my family life," said Mrs. Wagner, a nurse in Onekama, Mich. She paid the company an initial consultation fee of $150, and now pays the company $65 an hour, for a monthly average of about $100, none of which is reimbursed by insurance. The housekeeper is paid by Mrs. Wagner separately. +"I was spending so much time and money between the travel and the day-to-day calling that I finally had to take a leave of absence," she said. "If I wasn't physically there on one of my two-week stretches visiting her, then I was mentally involved. It took up my work days. It made for a bad relationship with my husband. It was really stressful and the distance just made it an awful, impossible situation." + +Older and Independent + Families, employers, governments and social-service agencies in the New York region and elsewhere face an explosion of challenges caring for an aging population, a population often reluctant to leave homes they are attached to, either to live in nursing homes or even to move in with family. +This growing elderly population's desire for independence, coupled with the mobility of the American workforce, has left millions of people like Mrs. Wagner scrambling to arrange for assistance to aging relatives who live far away. +"Adult children trying to do everything are getting overwhelmed and run down," said Kathy Lampe, manager of the employee assistance program at Philip Morris, which offers employees a referral and information service for problems in caring for the elderly. "And when you're not there, what can you do? Get the Broward County Yellow Pages? Trying to stitch together a plan of care when you're here and they're there is nearly impossible." + +A New Partnership + Executives at Philip Morris noticed several years ago that more and more employees were asking for assistance with problems caring for the elderly. In response, the company joined American Express, J.P. Morgan & Company and the New York City Department for Aging to start the Partnership for Eldercare, a nonprofit company hired by businesses to advise workers about caring for aging relatives. +The Partnership has contracts with 10 companies and serves almost 700 people a year, said Barbara B. Lepis, the director. At least 30 percent of those people are looking after a relative or friend long-distance, Ms. Lepis said, and the percentage is even higher when counting people within New York City, who may live more than an hour from an elderly relative. +"We've been operating since 1988, but this last year has been a crisis of growth," Ms. Lepis said. "The impact of elder care, especially at a distance, is one of the most critical issues companies are facing now." + +Taking Their Leave, by Law + Under the Federal Family and Medical Leave Act enacted last August, companies with 50 or more employees must allow their workers 12 weeks a year of unpaid leave with continuing health-care benefits and job security to care for a parent, spouse or child. Personnel executives at many companies said that in the short time the law has been in effect, many employees have taken the leave to care for aging relatives in distant cities. +Andrew E. Scharlach, a gerontology expert at the University of California at Berkeley, said care for the elderly will soon be a bigger problem than child care for most working people. But while child care is fairly predictable, he said, the problems of caring for the aged vary widely and are increasingly complicated by distance. +Over the last decade, the National Association of Professional Geriatric Care Managers, an organization based in Tucson, Ariz., has promoted quality care and services to the elderly. The organization, started in 1985, has seen its ranks swell from 30 members to more than 550 nationwide. "They go from the small, home-based business to major corporations, companies who have everything in house," said Jihane Rohrbacher, an association spokeswoman. The majority are hired by people whose elderly relatives live out-of-town. +For a fee ranging from $40 to $150 an hour, case managers, who are usually nurses or social workers, will do everything from assessing the needs of elderly people to shepherding them to day care programs and doctors appointments, signing them up for meal programs, hiring and checking up on home health aides, and stocking the refrigerator with healthy foods. +Eva Levine was living alone in an Upper West Side apartment and having trouble managing her affairs when her nephew, Jack Blechner, who lives in West Hartford, hired Fine and Newcombe Associates, the Manhattan company run by Claudia Fine and Nick Newcombe. At first, Mr. Newcombe arranged for a part-time companion and looked in on Ms. Levine weekly. Then she fell, was hospitalized and needed closer attention. +Mr. Newcombe arranged for Ms. Levine to move into an assisted living senior residence in her old neighborhood. He continued to visit weekly, but she no longer needed an aide. Then last summer, she was hospitalized with pneumonia and when she was released, she needed 24-hour care. +Dr. Blechner never had to rush to Manhattan for these emergencies. The company monitored Ms. Levine, who is 93, and its fees varied with the level of service. At the height of her illness, the monthly cost came to about $1,000; at her healthiest, it came to about $100. Her bills have averaged between $300 to $700, which the company says is fairly typical. + +'A Surrogate Family' + Phyllis Lufschtein, a high school librarian in Rye, N.Y., says she thinks of the geriatric-care manager who looks after her late husband's stepmother in Lauder Hills, Fla., as "a surrogate family." The stepmother-in-law, Hilda Rosenstein, has Alzheimer's disease and was forgetting to take her medication, failing to pay bills, and letting her insurance expire. +Mrs. Lufschtein hired Rona Bartelstone in Fort Lauderdale to size up the situation. Ms. Bartelstone drew up a care plan that she revises periodically to address Mrs. Rosenstein's deteriorating condition. +"I know her situation is inexorable," Mrs. Lufschtein said, "but I know she's safe and cared for." +For those who cannot afford such private management, information about services for the elderly across the country can be obtained from the Eldercare Locator, a toll-free information and referral line sponsored by the U.S. Administration on Aging. The phone line started as a regional pilot program in May 1991 and went nationwide the fall of 1992. About 4,000 people call the number -- 1-800-677-1116 -- each month, said Julie Beckley, the project manager. One-fourth of those people give care long distance, she said. + +People Movers + "Families are scattered," Ms. Beckley said. "Employers transfer people around. The population of older people is rising. They are moving around. All these factors have converged to the point where older people are not supported by people who are in the same place." +Jane Gould, New York State's commissioner on aging, said she practically commuted between Albany and her mother's Manhattan apartment for the three and a half years her mother suffered from Alzheimer's disease before her death last year. +"I'm in the field of aging and it was still a problem," Ms. Gould said. "I lost weight. I suffered from insomnia. I felt this tremendous tug between my job and my mother. Her experience and mine are extraordinarily typical, except that I had the advantage of knowing what to ask. And still, if you are not there, to some degree you are operating in the dark." + +Two Journeys Home + Even when someone has been hired to help with the care, there are times when shuttling between home and an aging relative is the only answer. One recent Friday evening, Melissa Boatright and her husband, Scott, got into their separate cars at their home in Fairfax, Va., and each began a journey of several hours to visit ailing parents. +Mr. Boatright's trip took him to Kingsport, Tenn., where his 88-year-old father moves with the aid of a walker but spends most of his time in a wheelchair, and his mother, even with the help of home health aides, is increasingly exhausted from the lifting, dressing and organizing that would tire someone a fraction of her 78 years. +Their situation is blessed, said Mrs. Boatright, compared with that of her mother, whom Mrs. Boatright drove 6 1/2 hours to see in a nursing home in Beverly, Ohio. The 80-year-old woman, already suffering from dementia, was placed there this winter after developing hypothermia and malnutrition living alone in a mobile home. +Mrs. Boatright has been making the trip every other weekend since January. It costs her about $200 in gas, untold stress and aggravates her asthma. When she's not there, she calls to check on her mother's condition, spending well over $100 a month in telephone bills. +"It's expensive financially, it's expensive healthwise and emotionally," said the 45-year-old government worker. "Psychologically, the whole situation really bothers me. I think I would handle it all a lot better if she were nearer. At least then I could check in more often and be reassured. It's distracting to never really know how she is unless I see." + +LOAD-DATE: April 6, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Eva Levine, 93, being visited by Nick Newcombe, who oversees her care with the aid of a home attendant, Linda Ingles, left. (Ruby Washington/The New York Times) (pg. A1); The long-distance arranging of medical care for elderly persons who prefer to stay in their own homes, far from concerned relatives, is inspiring new deep ties as well as spurring new enterprises. Phyllis Lufschtein, left, a high-school librarian in Rye, N.Y. (Susan Harris for The New York Times), thinks of the geriatric-care manager who looks after her stepmother-in-law, Hilda Rosenstein, right, in Lauder Hills, Fla., as "a surrogate family." (Susan Greenwood for The New York Times) (pg. B6) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +124 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 6, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO DIGEST + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 488 words + + +SPECIAL EDUCATION'S MINORITY TRAP +Nearly two decades after Congress passed a law requiring public schools to educate all children with disabilities, providing extra money for smaller classes, special assistance for a variety of disabilities and individual attention, many education advocates say New York City's special education system, which involves 130,000 students, insures a second-class education, particularly for black boys, becoming a trap that incubates failure. At the heart of the issue is compelling evidence that black and Hispanic students are harmed, not helped, by special education. A1. +CARING FOR AGING PARENTS, AT A DISTANCE +Many people who must minister to elderly relatives from a distance are turning to referral services that provide information about care of the elderly, and to geriatric care managers who, for a fee, will shoulder many of the tasks families usually take on. A1. + + +NEW YORK CITY + +FIGHT INTENSIFIES OVER SCHOOLS BUDGET +Schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani dug in their heels in the tug-of-war over the schools budget, with Mr. Cortines dismissing as unrealistic the Mayor's demand that 2,500 jobs be cut and the Mayor pushing a plan to dismantle the Board of Education. B2. + +SUSPECTS IN KILLING TIED TO HOLDUPS +The police have linked the two men indicted in the killing of Officer Sean McDonald to 10 armed holdups in the Bronx and Manhattan in the last several months. B2. + +STATE TO ALTER METHOD OF REPORTING AIDS +State health officials want to expand their system of reporting AIDS cases to try to avoid losing an estimated $9 million a year in Federal money, but advocates for people with H.I.V. say they fear a threat to confidentiality. B3. + +LETTER BOMB HURTS BROOKLYN WOMAN +A 75-year-old woman was critically injured when a letter bomb delivered to her Brooklyn home exploded and punctured her stomach, postal inspectors said. Investigators said the package was addressed to her brother, but do not yet have a motive for the bombing or know why it was mailed to him at an address where he had not lived for years. B3. + +REGION + +HEIRESS'S FAMILY SEEKS HER CHILD +The sister of Anne Scripps Douglas, the heiress to a newspaper fortune who was slain three months ago by her husband, asked a court if she could become the guardian of Mrs. Douglas's orphaned 3-year-old daughter, Victoria. B4. + +REACHING OUT TO JAZZ MUSICIANS IN NEED +A joint venture between the Jazz Foundation of America and Englewood Hospital and Medical Center provides free care and hospitalization for jazz musicians in need. B4. + +MISSING WOMAN BOUGHT TICKET +A Long Island woman who vanished from a shopping mall 12 days ago while shopping for a dress for a bridal shower apparently purchased a plane ticket to Canada a week before she disappeared, the Nassau County police said. B2. +About New York by Michael T. Kaufman B3 + +LOAD-DATE: April 6, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "PULSE: Unemployment Claims" shows the number of people filig their first claims for unemployment compensation in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut from Dec. '91-Dec. '93. (Source: State Labor Departments) + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +125 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 6, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +In America; +Out of Control + +BYLINE: By BOB HERBERT + +SECTION: Section A; Page 21; Column 5; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 684 words + +On Sunday night a teen-age boy who was doing well in school and had managed to stay out of trouble was shot to death when a fight broke out among other youths in a subway in Brooklyn. +Last Thursday gunmen invaded the O Street Market, a small cluster of retail stores in Washington, and began firing indiscriminately. When the shooting stopped nine people had been hit, including a toddler, a couple of elderly women, two security guards and a 15-year-old boy. The boy died. + On Friday the Justice Department released a study showing that carjackings, which are usually committed at gunpoint, have become as common as fatal auto accidents. +No one has to look far to find evidence that gun violence in the United States is out of control. The only question has been what to do about it. +One of the answers would be to pass a bill introduced last week by Representative Charles Schumer of Brooklyn and Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey. The point of the bill is to try and control the flow of guns into the hands of criminals. +The Brady law, which imposes a five-day waiting period and a background check on handgun purchasers, is already having a modest effect in this area. Early surveys have shown that some two thousand people have already been blocked from legally purchasing handguns because of information turned up by the background checks. +But Brady is not enough. As Representative Schumer noted, "Guns are still pouring into the hands of criminals and violently unstable people through loopholes in our gun laws." +There are four main elements to the Schumer-Bradley Handgun Control and Violence Protection Act: +* All handgun purchasers would be licensed. A national handgun card -- similar to a credit card, with a photo, an identification number and a magnetic strip -- would have to be presented at the time of purchase. The card would be issued only after an applicant is fingerprinted and a thorough background check is conducted. +* Handguns would have to be registered with the appropriate local law enforcement authority. This would help to thwart straw buyers -- individuals with clean records who buy guns for criminals and gunrunners. Transfers of handgun ownership after the initial purchase would require a registration transfer. This would be similar to the transfer of ownership of a used car. +* Handgun purchases would be limited to one gun a month. It would be illegal to buy or otherwise receive more than one handgun in any 30-day period anywhere in the United States. This provision is aimed at gunrunners who purchase weapons in bulk from legal dealers and resell them on the illegal market. +* New, uniform standards for legal gun dealers would be imposed. A dealer's license would cost at least $3,000 and licensees would undergo background checks and be required to have legitimate places of business with tough security measures in place. +This bill would not impose a tremendous hardship on law-abiding people who have guns for legitimate purposes. But it would place many effective obstacles in the path of illegitimate buyers and illegal and unscrupulous dealers. +"We are literally awash in a sea of guns," said Senator Bradley. "It's time to own up to the reality of guns in America and acknowledge the link between our lax gun laws and the horrible carnage on our streets." +A couple of weeks ago in Chicago there were more than 300 shootings in just four days at the Robert Taylor Homes, an enormous public housing project that has been the scene of a breathtaking outburst of violence. Residents are in a virtual state of panic. +Across Chicago, 88 people were murdered in March, a record. Most of them died by gunfire. Last weekend alone, 13 people, several of them teen-agers, died in shootings. +There are many causes of the epidemic of violence in America, and solutions have to be developed on many fronts. Guns are just a part of the problem, but they're a huge part. Support for the Schumer-Bradley bill is a way for politicians to get past their usual grandstanding and gibberish, and get down to the real business of fighting crime. + +LOAD-DATE: April 6, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +126 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 10, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEW JERSEY; +A Town Faces Cuts to School Aid + +BYLINE: By KIMBERLY J. McLARIN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 42; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1057 words + +DATELINE: WOODBRIDGE, N.J. April 8 + +When Gov. Christine Todd Whitman announced in her budget address in March that she was cutting state aid to some school districts and holding it steady in others, she told voters to blame their local officials if their property taxes went up. +The suggestion found fertile ground in Woodbridge. On Thursday night, when school boards across New Jersey voted on their 1994-95 budgets, taxpayers here let it be known that they were pointing the finger at the school board, and not Trenton, for a proposed 10 percent increase in the local tax rate. + "The Governor has made some attempt to give us relief, and yet the board comes back with an 8 percent increase," complained Peter Ballota, referring to the growth in Woodbridge's total tax levy. "For some people that doesn't matter, doesn't hurt. For some people, especially our senior citizens, it does." + +Cuts and Shifts + In her first budget as Governor, Mrs. Whitman has proposed holding state aid to most districts at current levels. She also proposed eliminating $14 million in so-called desegregation aid -- money that was supposed to be used by 26 school districts to carry out desegregation programs. Most significantly, she proposed shifting $28.5 million from some of the state's wealthier districts to the 30 poorest and so-called special needs districts. +School officials warned that the cuts would mean either higher property taxes or program cuts because districts face annual increases in salaries, enrollment, transportation costs and other areas. But Mrs. Whitman said that if she could pare the size of government, so could local officials. +Woodbridge, a district with about 11,000 students in Middlesex County, will lose nearly $1.6 million in state aid. State officials say about $500,000 will be made up by changes in the way pensions for the district's teachers are financed, but school officials have taken a wait-and-see approach on that issue. +"I say it's $1.5 million," the board's secretary, Vince Smith, said in referring to how much the district expects to lose. + +Drop of 2 Percentage Points + Superintendent Fredric Buonocore said the drop in state aid -- from 13 percent to 11 percent of the total budget -- and rising costs left the school board with only two choices. The board decided to raise taxes. +The board voted 7 to 1 on Thursday in favor of a $104 million budget that would raise the property tax rate by 25 cents, to $2.78 per $100 of assessed valuation. On a house assessed at $75,000, the taxes would increase by $187 to $2,085. +The budget must next be reviewed by Woodbridge voters, who have rejected every one for more than a decade. If comments at the board meeting were any indication, that scenario will not change in 1994. +Mr. Ballota called the budget offensive and spent many minutes going over the budget line by line, questioning item after item. +"We have some areas that are definitely overbudgeted," he told the board. "Not all the money is going in the direction it should be going, to the children." + +No New Staff Members + Mr. Buonocore defended the budget, saying school officials turned down $15 million in requests from various departments and tightened the belt everywhere they could. The district will add no new staff members in 1995, will leave some positions vacant, and consolidated its alarm systems to save money. Officials were conservative in their estimates of some costs, like the cost of electricity next year. +"If there's a five percent increase, we're underbudgeted in that area," he said. +Mr. Buonocore told the audience of about 60 people that it was easy to look at the budget from the outside and propose cutting it. +"But that person needs to be responsible for what occurs when we cut that item," he said. "If we don't provide a textbook for a child, what immediately happens? Someone complains." + +Complaints About Spending + People did complain. Sid Lieberman complained about teachers' aides who he said spent most of their time photocopying workbooks at a cost that was much higher than buying more of the books. He complained about money budgeted for teacher conferences, and he complained that too many items were overbudgeted to build up the district's surplus. +"The hour of reckoning is going to come," he said. "If I don't see a $3 million to $5 million reduction, I'm going for a certified audit." +Mr. Lieberman is a member of a committee appointed by the town council to review the school budget. It is the council that traditionally extracts money from the budget after voters reject it. Then district officials lobby the State Department of Education to put some or all of the money back in. +"It's a game," Mr. Lieberman said. "The Governor just gave us a five percent tax return and then they try to jack us up. We're losing." +The board and the president of the teachers union said teachers received raises of about 4 percent last year and will receive the same this year. But Robyn Teri told the board she calculated that some raises, especially those for administrators, were much higher. She complained about a deteriorating playground at her son's elementary school. +"How can you say you're working for the children when there's no money left over for their immediate needs?" she asked. + +Reluctant to Make Cuts + The issue of teacher salary increases is a concern not only in Woodbridge: members of a panel appointed by Governor Whitman to examine how to achieve educational parity recommended that school districts take a tougher stand in negotiations with teacher unions. +Jane Nowitz, the only board member voting against the budget in Woodbridge, said that as lay people, board members were reluctant to cut items that district officials say are vital to the quality of education in the district. +"The question becomes: how far are we willing to go to put ourselves on the line?" she asked. "And the answer is, not very." +Ms. Nowitz said she also believes that there is fat in the budget and that cuts in state aid do not necessarily have to lead to higher taxes. +"I would gladly give them 10 times as much of a tax increase, even from my meager resources, if I was confident that they were being fiscally responsible," she said. "As a parent I would religiously go out and vote to pass the budget. But now I know I'm going to vote against it." + +LOAD-DATE: April 10, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +127 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 10, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +PUBLIC INTEREST; +Community Board Meetings in the Bronx + +SECTION: Section 14; Page 5; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 440 words + +DISTRICT 1: Port Morris, Melrose, Mott Haven. Last Thursday of month; next meeting is April 28; 6:30 P.M.; Lincoln Hospital, 234 East 149th Street; (718) 585-7117. Chairman: George Rodriguez +DISTRICT 2: Hunts Point, Longwood; last Wednesday of month; next meeting is April 27; 6 P.M.; 1029 East 163d Street; (718) 328-9125. Chairman: Roland Lopez + +DISTRICT 3: Morrisania; 2d Tuesday of month; next meeting is Tuesday; 6:30 P.M.; J.H.S. 98, 1619 Boston Road; (718) 589-6300. Chairwoman: Marcella R. Brown +DISTRICT 4: East and West Concourse, Mount Eden, Highbridge, Concourse Village; 4th Tuesday of month; next meeting is April 26; 6 P.M.; 1650 Selwyn Avenue, Suite 11A; (718) 299-0800. +Chairman: Robert Hannibal Jr. +DISTRICT 5: Mount Hope, Morris Heights, Fordham University Heights; 4th Wednesday of month; next meeting is April 27; 6 P.M.; East Concourse Hebrew Center, 226 E. Tremont Avenue; (718) 364-2030. +Chairman: Kenneth Fogarty +DISTRICT 6: Bathgate, Belmont, Bronx Park South, Crotona Park North, East Tremont and West Farms; first Wednesday of month; next meeting is May 4; 6:30 P.M.; location t.b.a.; (718) 579-6990. Chairman: Patrick Lochrane + +DISTRICT 7: University Heights, Norwood, Fordham, Bedford and Bedford Park; 3d Tuesday of month; next meeting is April 19; 7 P.M.; St. Philip Neri Parish Center 3025 Grand Concourse at East 202d Street; (718) 933-5650. Chairwoman: Nora Feury +DISTRICT 8: Kingsbridge, Marble Hill, North Riverdale, Spuyten Duyvil, Fieldston; 2d Tuesday of month; next meeting is Tuesday; 7:30 P.M.; Riverdale Jewish Center, 3700 Independence Avenue at West 237th Street; (718) 884-3959. Chairwoman: Joyce M. Pilsner +DISTRICT 9: Bronx River, Castle Hill, Clason Point, Harding Park, Parkchester, Bruckner, Soundview, Unionport; 4th Thursday of month; next meeting is April 28; 7 P.M.; Caldor Plaza, 1967 Turnbull Avenue; (718) 823-3034. Chairwoman: Elizabeth Rodriguez +DISTRICT 10: City Island, Throgs Neck, Pelham Bay, Country Club, Co-op City; 3d Thursday of month; next meeting, April 21; 7:30 P.M.; Middletown Plaza Senior Citizens Center3033 Middletown Road; (718) 892-1161. Chairman: Tony Cannata +DISTRICT 11: Allerton, Eastchester, Pelham Parkway, Morris Park; 3d Thursday; next meeting is April 21; 7:30 P.M.; Knights of Columbus, Mary Queen of Peace Hall; (718) 892-6262. Chairman: Dom Castore +DISTRICT 12: Wakefield, Woodlawn, Williamsburg, Baychester, Eastchester; 4th Thursday of month; next meeting is April 28; 8 P.M.; 4101 White Plains Road; (718) 881-4455. +Chairman: Richard Gorman + Meetings in other boroughs will be listed in coming issues. + +LOAD-DATE: April 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +128 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 10, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Making the Unaffordable Affordable + +BYLINE: By PENNY SINGER + +SECTION: Section 14WC; Page 14; Column 3; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1188 words + +SPRING. Time to fix leaky roofs, paint peeling walls, repair broken walks. But tackling such improvements are far beyond the means of too many poor, elderly or handicapped homeowners in Westchester, people like Joseph C. Reyes, 69, whose Victorian house in Katonah is in bad shape. Mr. Reyes, who lives on Social Security and a small pension, cannot afford to make the necessary repairs. +In Bedford Hills, Lorraine Rossi, who suffered injury to her limbs and lives in a ground-floor condominium, cannot afford the remodeling needed to make the condominium suitable for wheelchair use. Ms. Rossi, a former schoolteacher, has been confined to a wheelchair since she lost control of her car on her way to school one icy morning five years ago, when she went over a 25-foot cliff. She lives with her 86-year-old father, Paul J. Scagnelli, an amputee, who also uses a wheelchair. + But help is on the way, thanks to a volunteer program called Americares Home Front, which has selected Mr. Reyes's house and Ms. Rossi's condominium for renovation. +The program, staffed by volunteers, mounts a one-day massive repair project, which helps people who are not physically or financially able to help themselves fix up their homes. + +Six Houses Selected + "Home Front works much in the same way as barn raising did in the early days of the country," said Judith Lynch, a volunteer. +May 7 has been designated Home Front Day. On that Saturday six houses in Katonah, South Salem and Pound Ridge are to be renovated. +Mrs. Lynch, who lives in Katonah, helped start the Home Front program in Westchester. A realtor in the Bedford and Katonah offices of Houlihan/ Lawrence, she said she was inspired by her own experience last year as a volunteer in the Home Front program in Connecticut. +"I was part of a team of 30 people assigned to work on a house in New Canaan that belonged to an elderly couple who were desperate to stay in the home but couldn't afford the repairs that would make it livable," Mrs. Lynch said. "I scraped shutters, painted the outside. We worked under the direction of a professional contractor who ordered the material and took charge of the project and gave out the assignments. What impressed me was the camaraderie that built up during the day. The simple act of doing something that made a difference, someone in need, was especially a satisfying experience." + +Corporate Sponsors Sought + The houses, which must be occupied by the owner, are selected by the New Canaan-based Americares Home Front on the basis of need from applicants with incomes of less than $20,000 a year. Service organizations, churches and groups for the elderly submit names. On May 7, Mrs. Lynch said, 5,000 volunteers will renovate 145 homes and shelters in Westchester, Fairfield, and Hartford counties. There is no cost to homeowners to participate in the program. +In order to begin the program in Westchester, Mrs. Lynch said, corporate sponsors willing to donate $1,500 toward repairing a house were sought out. +"The first Westchester sponsor was my office, Houlihan/Lawrence," she said. A. Stuart Fendler, a private citizen, is also a sponsor, as is the First Presbyterian Church of Katonah. Nynex is sponsoring two houses. A sponsor for a sixth house is still being sought. +The average cost for materials for one house is $2,222. Local suppliers and manufacturers also donate materials, and professionals in the buildings trades donate their services. + +No Experience Necessary + "Sherwin-Williams, the large paint manufacturer, has given us thousands of gallons of paint," Ms. Lynch said. "The Home Depot in Connecticut also gives us such things as plywood and nails. Alpine Tree has sent equipment and volunteers. It is a massive effort, and so many people have been good about contributing to it." +Volunteers need not be skilled in home repairs, Mrs. Lynch said, reiterating that the success of the program hinges on professionals who donate their services for specialized tasks. +"Any talent can and will be put to use, but without a cadre of skilled volunteers like electricians, carpenters and plumbers, we really couldn't do any major work." +Lee Lasberg, a principal in Lasberg Construction Associates in Armonk, has volunteered to be a house captain in charge of the work at Mr. Reyes's house. +"I inspected the house, and it's probably close to 100 years old, and it's in pretty bad shape," Mr. Lasberg reported. "A lot of slates are missing from the roof. There has been water damage. The kitchen needs shoring up. There is a lot of structural work to do, and how do we proceed? Just the way we would on any commercial job. First, there is the estimating, and then we evaluate the type of work to be done, schedule it and order the materials." +Mr. Lasberg, who will be working with both skilled and unskilled volunteers, said: "I will assign the bankers and corporate types to the simple tasks like scraping and painting, but we are going to need a lot of professionals on this job. Paul Handly, owner of Healy's Deli in Katonah, knows everybody in town. He has been instrumental in getting us volunteers such as plumbers, electricians, roofers and carpenters." +Because so much work has to be done on Mr. Reyes's house, Mr. Lasberg said he is going to give an extra day to the project. "Just to make the house safe and watertight will require an extra day, so five of our own people have agreed to donate their services to the job, which is teriffic of them." +Mrs. Lynch added: "People like Lee Lasberg are absolutely essential to the success of the program. If the houses were renovated commercially, it is estimated that the cost of the work would average out to $8,800 a house, which is completely beyond the means of the people whose houses will be renovated." +For Ms. Rossi and her father, improvements planned at their condominium include widening the doorways to accommodate their wheelchairs, adjusting the height of countertops, building a ramp to the outside and adding a bathroom and Jacuzzi with a hydraulic lift. + +A New Volunteer + "I can't wait," Ms. Rossi said. "Not long ago, I was evicted from my house, and I bought the condominium because it was all I could afford. But it has been difficult. It doesn't accommodate the wheelchairs, and we are always banging into the walls. I haven't been outside in two months. I can't get into the bathroom without help. This may be the best thing that has happened to me since I had my accident. I know the quality of our lives will be vastly improved." +Mr. Reyes, who raised seven children in his house, is also happy. "This is a family home," he said. "It means a lot to me. I think of it as our refuge. I want my kids to know it is here for them. I have tried and tried to make the repairs myself, but I don't have the means. However, I want to return something, so I have joined the Home Front program as a volunteer." +Others who would like to volunteer, make a donation, sponsor a home or know someone who might benefit from the Americares Home Front program in Westchester may call Mrs. Lynch at 232-5007. + +LOAD-DATE: April 10, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Joseph C. Reyes shows Judith Lynch, left, and Lee Lasberg, right, parts of his front porch needing Home Front repairs. (Chris Maynard for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +129 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 12, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +South Africa Tries to Prepare Those It Long Denied Ballot + +BYLINE: By FRANCIS X. CLINES, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1356 words + +DATELINE: JOHANNESBURG, April 9 + +There was a pastoral sweetness in the room as the once-fantastic idea of voting freely in South Africa was explained at the Soweto Home for the Aged to 50 black people who had suffered the longest across decades of racist white oligarchy. +"You have lived long and can give us a great legacy," Zweli Nkosi, a voting organizer, explained amid the grand metamorphosis now sweeping this nation toward the approaching election. "Mark your stamp on life. Give us your final gift: Vote." + The room of old people, poised as if at a bonus rite of passage, responded with a burst of applause and cheers, some putting aside cane and crutch. +"I'm voting for the return of my country," declared 77-year-old Jerry Buthelezi, lean-faced and content under a big brown fedora. "That's important. That's a beautiful thing." +The exchange, in which Mr. Nkosi returned as a successful businessman to preach free choice on his boyhood streets in the state-segregated ghetto, was one of the least slick moments in what has become the costliest, most integrated civic endeavor ever attempted in South Africa -- a get-out-the vote drive that is flooding the public with the message that historic duty and fortune await in the first fully free post-apartheid elections on April 26-28. +The campaign has vans cruising back roads to coax rural villagers to come forth and practice their "X." +"Some had never held a pencil before," said Nicholas Wolpe, a roving elections trainer. +A colleague, Sharon Balsys, a visiting elections worker from Canada, feels at home. "No worse than Rainy River," she said, referring to the electoral rigors of a multilingual Canadian town where ballot boxes sometimes have to be parachuted down through winter snows. +In South African cities, the message is carried in thumping rap lyrics, in a special voters' soap opera and "Make Your Mark" election quiz shows on TV, and in euphoric liberation ads worthy of the glossy yearnings in Ronald Reagan's "morning again in America" commercials. One shows a bright huge voting-X pattern of a throng of multi-hued humans moving lushly across a green and promising national landscape. +It is a ubiquitous message, from programmed cassettes on black workers' jitney vans to the fading primacy of the white Afrikaner-run television channel where a Wagner ian singer booms clunky two-step jingles about a future that will somehow prove grand for all. "We're gonna have a ball!" she croons and sways and grins to the tune of "After the Ball Is Over." +The message is not monolithic, for the voter education drive is directed at all sorts of problems. One pitch, emphasizing the secrecy of the ballot, is intended to undercut husbands' attempts in traditional tribal areas to dictate their wives' choice. Other messages warn against scheming tribal chiefs who are demanding patronage tithes as the price of franchise, and against white overseers who are confiscating their black farm workers' identity cards to hinder voting. +Cautions toward fairness rain down endlessly in the media. There are the sitcom family morality tales of the popular comic actor, Joe Mafela, spokesman for the Chicken Licken restaurants. There are the theater tableaux of Black Sash, the highly respected women's protest group. All the hurried innovations of democracy's mechanics -- from ultra-violet hand dye at the ballot box to an 18-party potpourri of options on the first of two paper ballots -- are being explained to the 22 million eligible voters, especially the black majority long denied a fair and thoughtful franchise. + +A Rite of Transformation + But the overall point of the voter education drive, costing somewhere beyond $30 million, is that the vote is not merely about a leadership choice, but about a people's passage to a higher phase of democracy and national definition. "Heal Our Land" is the slogan under an X of crossed Band-Aids. It is an imprimatur on liberation. The likely result, the choice of Nelson Mandela as national leader, is well known, but not the volume of turnout in ratifying a transformed nation. +"It is a grand, purificatory moment in which the nation is to pass through a membrane of history from darkness to a sunlit upland," wrote Simon Barber in Business Day, relishing with sarcasm the TV commercial blitz, including one showing a patriarchal old man walking miles to vote, clutching the hand of his grandchild. + +A Long Walk to Freedom + In fact, Mr. Wolpe saw just such a tough old man climb three hours down from his mountain home to join a hamlet crowd of 250 for a practice vote at the elections van. South Africa is in just such a state, trembling somewhere between the wondrous reality of the first-time voter facing the fullest choice, and the Utopian dreams of the modern media's motivation arts. +"This was real heart-and-soul stuff," said Linda Radford, account director on some of the most lyrical ads for the local J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. "The task was daunting," she said, noting professional crews were more integrated as they filmed idealized ethnic portrayals that would have been treasonous in the recent past. +Barry Gilder, one of the chief creative executives of the drive as communications chief of the Matla Trust, can talk in detail of fine tuning the message in such critical areas as radio, the most effective medium for reaching the black poor majority in rural and small-town areas. But he feels that foremost is the campaign's overall spiritual dimension. +"It's like a kind of catharsis," he said, "even for white people, who want an end to the uncertainties and the fear, the guilt and the anxieties." +Matla Trust, a nonprofit organization, was one of a score of groups in the Independent Forum for Electoral Education that began preparing for the day of a free vote well before the Government's moves to dismantle apartheid put that on the horizon four years ago. +The campaign now includes hundreds of organizations operating through the forum, and through the Democracy Education Broadcast Initiative of media professionals, the Business Election Fund of private entrepreneurs, and the Independent Electoral Commission, the interim Government body which has taken an ever firmer hand to avoid postponement of the elections in the face of violence and resistance in KwaZulu, the homeland created under apartheid for the Zulu people. +Even with all the problems and confusion and protest violence in some areas, campaign directors hope for a turnout of up to 85 percent. Blacks are the most enthusiastic, while the racially frayed nation's mixed-race and Asian minorities are most ambivalent, reflecting a fear that they will remain in a political limbo, second to black majority power as they have been a secondary buffer for the white regime. +Countless foreigners are arriving to help get out the vote and monitor the election. Craig Charney, a Yale political scientist, has been here for several years, working lately as a broadcast news polling expert. +"It's an extraordinary thing to see millions of people around the country put slips into a box and see their government change as a result, without tanks in the streets," he said, looking beyond the demographics. "South Africa is going to become not a Western style democracy but a wobbly, imperfect third-world democracy. But it is a vast improvement over what came before." + +Some Find Fault + In democratic fashion, there are numerous complaints. Some white political leaders charge the education drive favors the black majority. Other people feel too much faith has been placed on entertaining TV ads and not enough on the face-to-face approach favored by Mr. Nkosi in visiting the Soweto old folks. +"What's a political party?" he asked, and "Mandela!" was shouted in reply by one old man, grinning gap-toothed. +Jabu Mohlouwa, a social worker, smiled at the scene. "People think this election will put honey on their plates, but they're wrong," she said. "They think Mandela is a magician. He's not." +But her elderly charges plunged ahead into the future, intoning his name and asking more questions about how to vote free. + +LOAD-DATE: April 12, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: To prepare for South Africa's first open elections, set for April 26 through 28, a large-scale voter-education effort is being conducted among blacks who have long been denied the ballot. Gloria Mvulane, a resident of the Soweto Home for the Aged, listened to a lecture last week. (Ozier Muhammad for The New York Times) (pg. A8) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +130 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 12, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +NEWS SUMMARY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1116 words + + +International A3-11 + +NATO HITS SERBS AGAIN +NATO conducted its second air strike against the Bosnian Serbs in two days after they failed to stop shelling the town of Gorazde, and the attacks finally stopped. A1 + +RESTRAINT IN BOSNIA ATTACKS +The United States portrayed the bombing of Serb positions in Bosnia as a demonstration of its resolve to stop their attacks, but the NATO military operation was actually modest and restrained. A10 + +News analysis: The West is hoping that the Serbs bow to force. A10 + +SOUTH AFRICA, IN THE HUSTINGS +South Africa has undertaken a vigorous voter education campaign leading up to its first all-race election, appealing to people's sense of historic duty and opportunity. A1 + +Troops have not halted Zulu violence in South Africa. A8 + +Henry Kissinger will help mediate in South Africa. A8 + +WILDLIFE TRADE PUNISHED +The Clinton Administration said it was imposing trade sanctions on Taiwan for refusing to halt the sale of tiger and rhinoceros parts. D1 + +RWANDA REFUGEES LOOK BACK +Westerners evacuated from Rwanda, many of them church workers, spoke with anguish of the fate of friends they had left behind and looked to the day when they would be able to return. A6 + +RWANDA REBELS CLOSE IN +Rebels were closing in on the capital of Rwanda as Western nations struggled to complete the evacuation of their nationals. Reports said fighting continued both inside and outside the capital, Kigali. A6 + +The deadline for Palestinian self-rule will change. A7 + +Citing violence, the Pope has canceled a Lebanon visit. A7 + +NO SHOO-IN FOR MEXICO +While the ruling party's presidential candidate is expected to win in Mexico, voter dissatisfaction and party infighting are expected to make the race a difficult challenge. A3 + +A former East German official was sentenced in a bombing. A11 + +A suicide was troubling for France's President. A11 + +Hanoi Journal: Fiction with a dissident's sting. A4 + +National A12-15 + +BLEAK VIEW OF CHILDREN +A wide-ranging three-year study found a bleak picture for millions of American children: disintegrating families, poverty, child abuse and poor health care threatening their chances of growing to become whole adults. A1 + +CORPORATE-PAID THERAPY +To curb costs of treating workers for mental illness and substance abuse, companies are measuring treatment in a way that cuts expenses but also tries to apply a precision to psychotherapy that worries therapists. A1 + +FREEWAY SUCCESS STORY +The Santa Monica Freeway, a vital artery Southern California's road system, is reopening two months earlier than officials expected after repairs of its severe earthquake damage. A12 + +MEDICARE FUNDS IN PERIL +The Medicare trust fund that pays hospital bills for the elderly will run out of money in seven years and a separate trust fund that pays benefits to disabled workers will be exhausted next year if Congress does not act. A12 + +INQUIRY IN AIR FORCE CRASH +An especially volatile type of jet fuel is being investigated as a possible contributing factor to the high death toll in a crash at Pope Air Force Base last month. A13 + +RON BROWN IN ACTION +Washington at Work: Commerce Secretary Ronald Brown was temporarily detoured from the Washington fast track, but now he is back, and doings things Democrats could scarcely have imagined: building alliances with business. A14 + +SELLING THE CRIME BILL +President Clinton urged local and state law officers at a Justice Department rally to put pressure on members of Congress to pass anticrime legislation. A14 + +A CLINTON CORRECTION +The White House said a 1980 profit of $6,498 for Hillary Rodham Clinton in commodities trades was not reported to the I.R.S., and the Clintons have paid more that $14,000 in back Federal and state taxes. A15 + +A trucking company closed, leaving striking Teamsters jobless. A12 + +Accusations of forged signatures in radiation experiments. A15 + +Metro Digest B1 + +SIDE EFFECTS OF MAYOR'S VICTORY +Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani emerged from his weekend confrontation with the Schools Chancellor largely with what he wanted: a mayoral appointee to look into school finances. But his confrontational style may have used up some of the good will he needs for his long-term agenda. A1 + +WELFARE LURE SHIFTS +The view of New York City as a place attracting waves of poor people with relatively generous welfare benefits, if ever true, exists no more, fresh census findings reveal. Instead, in the late 1980's, New York City appears to have become a net exporter of welfare families. A1 + +Obituaries B10 + +Dr. Jerome Lejeune, geneticist. + +Matthew Feldman, New Jersey Democratic legislative leader. + +Science Times C1-14 + +The secret underground world of the naked mole rat. C1 + +Hopes of restoring full weather satellite coverage. C1 + +A cancer researcher won't explain data problems to Congress. C1 + +Putting a dollar value on urban trees. C4 + +Cells' 'everlasting life' chemical opens way to attack cancer. C10 + +Broccoli is good for you, just as your mother said. C11 + +Peripherals C9 + +Q&A C11 + +Personal Computers C14 + +Fashion Pages B8-9 + +Fashion reviews: Calvin Klein. B8 + +Michael Kors and Betsey Johnson. B8 + +Geoffrey Beene, Carolina Herrera, Mary McFadden. B9 + +Business Digest D1 + +Arts/Entertainment C15-24 + +Eastern Europe loses art to thieves for the West. C15 + +A battle over "Showboat." C15 + +Theater: Film as subject. C15 + +"Fragments" by Albee. C16 + +Music: Classical reviews. C16 + +Dance: Miami City Ballet. C19 + +Small 'Romeo and Juliet.' C19 + +Books: "The Birthday Boys," by Beryl Bainbridge. C24 + +Television: "AIDS Research: The Story So Far." C24 + +A life of Sid Caesar. C24 + +Sports B11-17 + +Baseball: Mets revert to '93 form in home opener. B11 + +Kruk comes back from cancer. B12 + +Yanks bullpen still unsettled. B14 + +Columns: Vecsey on Mets. B11 + +TV Sports. B13 + +On Baseball. B13 + +Basketball: Knicks lose fourth game in last five. B11 + +Hockey: It's for women, too. B15 +Sports People B14 + +Editorials/Op-Ed A16-17 + +Editorials + +Necessary air strikes in Bosnia. + +A cease-fire on schools. + +The Jordan effect. + +Letters + +Russell Baker: Been away too long. + +A. M. Rosenthal: Clinton in wartime. + +Robert I. Friedman: 25,000 saboteurs of peace. + +Brandon del Pozo: Everybody's corps. + +Chronicle B2 + +Chess C6 + +Crossword C16 + +LOAD-DATE: April 12, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +131 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 12, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Benefit Funds May Run Out Of Cash Soon, Reports Warn + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 12; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 905 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 11 + +If Congress takes no action, the Clinton Administration said today, the Medicare trust fund that pays hospital bills for the elderly will run out of money in seven years and a separate trust fund that pays benefits to disabled workers will be exhausted next year. +The estimates were part of reports on Social Security and Medicare finances that have to be submitted to Congress each year. Such reports are often gloomy, but the figures this year are, in some ways, slightly worse than those of recent years. + The Administration said there was a "high probability that the hospital insurance trust fund will be exhausted around the turn of the century." Looking to the future, the report added, "the Medicare program is not sustainable in its present form." +Medicare finances health care for 36 million people, at a cost of $143 billion in the last fiscal year. +The Administration said the Social Security trust fund that paid cash to disabled workers would be exhausted next year if Congress did not change the existing law. The Government is receiving record numbers of applications for disability benefits and approving them at a higher rate than in the past. + +Proposal to Cut Retirement Fund + The Administration said that problem could be solved, at least temporarily, by taking money earmarked for the Social Security retirement program and shifting it to the disability program. The trustees made a similar recommendation last year, but Congress did not act on it. The trustees said today that the need was "more urgent now." +Even without the change, the reports said, the trust fund for the retirement program will be exhausted in 2036, eight years sooner than predicted last year. People born in 1971 turn 65 in 2036. +Social Security paid $302 billion in benefits to 42 million people last year. As baby boomers age, the ratio of active workers to retirees will decrease, worsening the problems of Social Security and Medicare alike, the trustees said. But, they added, the hospital-insurance fund "is projected to become exhausted even before the major demographic shift begins to occur." +The outlooks for Medicare and Social Security were described in detailed reports from the trustees of the trust funds, including Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich and Dr. Donna E. Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The reports, widely regarded as authoritative, were prepared by Government actuaries. + +Specter of Political Trouble + The bankruptcy of Medicare or Social Security is politically unthinkable. As in the past, Congress is likely to pass legislation to keep money flowing to elderly people, their doctors and hospitals. +But the trustees' reports show that the financing of Medicare, the biggest Federal health program, is shaky as Congress considers large programs to finance care for 39 million people who lack health insurance. +The Medicare hospital trust fund had a balance of $127.8 billion at the end of last year. Under current law, the trustees said, it is expected to decline to $100.9 billion at the end of 1998 and $40.4 billion in the year 2000 before it runs out of money in 2001. +"Medicare's financial condition," Dr. Shalala said, "would improve significantly as a result of general cost containment under the President's health-care-reform proposal." But some members of Congress, as well as the Congressional Budget Office, say the Administration has underestimated the cost of the Clinton proposal. +In a separate statement the two independent public trustees of the Medicare trust fund, who are not part of the Administration, said, "Current national health-reform proposals do not adequately address the serious long-range financial imbalance in the Medicare program." +In an interview, one trustee, Stanford G. Ross, a tax lawyer who was Social Security Commissioner in 1978 and 1979, said: +"The long-term deterioration in the Social Security retirement trust fund is a serious concern. When combined with the long-term financial imbalance in Medicare it suggests that we need to take a serious look at the long-term financing of these programs." +Medicare is growing much faster than Social Security. The trustees highlighted the difference by measuring the programs in relation to the economy as a whole. Social Security outlays equal 4.8 percent of the gross domestic product, the total output of goods and services. That share will rise to 6.9 percent in 75 years, the trustees said. +By contrast, they said, Medicare outlays, now 2.5 percent of the gross domestic product, will rise to 10.4 percent of G.D.P. after 75 years. +Mr. Ross and the other public trustee, David M. Walker, an expert on employee benefits at Arthur Andersen & Company, the accounting firm, said people should worry about these problems now, when the solution is relatively painless. +"The changes that will be required can be relatively small and gradual if they are begun in the near future," they said in a joint statement. "However, the magnitude of those changes grows each year that action is delayed." +In a statement attached to the report, the chief actuary of the Medicare program, Roland E. King, expressed some concern about the trustees' estimates of growth in workers' earnings. He suggested that the estimates might be too optimistic. Medicare's hospital-insurance program is financed with a payroll tax on earnings. + +LOAD-DATE: April 12, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graphs: "BALANCE SHEET: Declining Federal Trust Funds" shows amount of money in the Medicare trust fund, Social Security Disability trust fund, and the money left in both funds at the end of the year. (Source: Department of Health and Human Services) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +132 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 14, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Decisions on Banning of Events On City Hall Steps Are Faulted + +BYLINE: By JONATHAN P. HICKS + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 342 words + +A day after two groups were denied access to the steps of City Hall, security officials allowed several organizations to conduct news conferences there yesterday, and several public officials asserted that the Giuliani administration was seeking to limit criticism. +Police officials allowed three news conferences, the largest by a group of nearly 50 elderly people protesting potential cuts in services for the aged. The other news conferences were held by the New York Public Interest Research Group and some Con Ed employees. On Tuesday a group representing organizations that represent parents of public-school children and another of people protesting the potential elimination of the Division of AIDS Services were turned away when they approached City Hall to hold news conferences on the steps. + A police spokesman, Officer Andrew McInnis, said a commanding officer at City Hall determined that the groups on Tuesday were conducting demonstrations, and police policy bans groups of 20 or more people from protesting on the steps. But yesterday's groups, he said, "were clearly conducting press conferences and a press conference is a completely different situation from a demonstration." +Though the policies are not official or part of any law, he said, they are longstanding security practices. +Nonetheless, several city officials, including Council Speaker Peter F. Vallone, said the groups on Tuesday were seeking to conduct news conferences. +"When I went outside, I saw Susan Sarandon and Rosie Perez," he said, referring to two actresses who were participating in a news conference about the Division of AIDS Services that was held along the sidewalk. "They didn't seem like they were about to make any trouble." +Several City Council members accused the administration of trying to regulate who can conduct news conferences on the steps of City Hall. +Mr. Giuliani has said that the Police Department, not his office, determines security policy for City Hall and that he has not interfered in how those polices are enforced. + +LOAD-DATE: April 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +133 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 15, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Study Finds Promise in Regimen for Treatment of Bone Disease + +BYLINE: By WARREN E. LEARY, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 17; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 610 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 14 + +A study released today supports the idea that a careful regimen of fluoride and calcium supplements appears to prevent new spinal fractures in patients with a major form of osteoporosis while helping to rebuild bone loss. +Experts on osteoporosis, the debilitating bone-thinning condition that afflicts millions of elderly Americans, said that if the findings stood up, the treatment would be the first to restore bone mass lost to the disease. + The interim results of the ongoing study were reported by researchers at the University of Texas. Dr. Charles Y. C. Pak and his colleagues said their controlled study of 99 post-menopausal women who were diagnosed with osteoporosis showed that fracturing in the spinal vertebrae could be greatly reduced with low doses of fluoride given in slow-release form along with a readily absorbed type of calcium not commonly used. Half the group had an increase of about 5 percent per year in the bone mass of their vertebrae, and their spinal fractures decreased by more than 50 percent. +The findings, reported in The Annals of Internal Medicine, should renew interest in the treatment, pioneered at the university's Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. +The results of the new Texas study are being hailed as solid indications that the right combination of fluoride and calcium, given on a particular schedule, may have a major impact on the bone disease. +"This study suggests that at the lower doses of fluoride that they used, using their different formulations of the drugs and using their schedule of treatment, that fluoride may be helpful," said Dr. B. Lawrence Riggs of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., a researcher who led a study published in 1990 that raised doubts about the fluoride treatment. "This is good, solid work, and it should encourage others to do more research on fluoride and osteoporosis." +Dr. Judith L. Vaitukaitis, the director of the National Center for Research Resources, a unit of the National Institutes of Health that sponsors the Texas work, said the few current therapies for osteoporosis slow bone loss but do not stop it. The Texas study shows that fluoride can rebuild weakened bones, she said. +More than 25 million older Americans -- 90 percent of them women -- have osteoporosis, which is responsible for 1.5 million fractures of the hip, spine and wrist each year, according to the National Osteoporosis Foundation. With the spinal form of the disease, fractures occur in the vertebrae, causing them to compress and the back to curve, a condition sometimes called dowager's hump. + +Reducing Toxicity + Dr. Pak said in a telephone interview that his group had been successful because lower doses of sodium fluoride stimulated the production of bone cells while reducing the toxicity the drug, which can cause severe nausea, vomiting and other problems. +The researchers also use a time-release form of sodium fluoride, developed by the Mission Pharmacal Company of San Antonio, that puts the drug in a porous wax capsule that passes through the stomach, the primary site of complications. +Building bone also requires adequate calcium supplies, Dr. Pak said. While most calcium supplements are commonly in the form of calcium carbonate, the Texas researchers use calcium citrate, which they say is more easily absorbed by the body. +The researchers gave patients two doses of fluoride and two of calcium daily for 12 months, followed by two months without the fluoride before beginning the double-drug schedule again. Dr. Pak said the interruption appeared to enable the body to clear itself of fluoride toxicity and restore its responsiveness to the drug. + +LOAD-DATE: April 15, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +134 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 17, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WESTCHESTER GUIDE + +BYLINE: By ELEANOR CHARLES + +SECTION: Section 14WC; Page 8; Column 4; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1255 words + + +'LA FRONTERA' EXHIBIT +The Neuberger Museum at Purchase College has turned to the Mexican border as the source of its new exhibition: "La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico-United States Border Experience." It opens today and runs through June 26 for its only East Coast showing. + Drawn across 1,952 miles, the border has been as much a ribbon of violence and aggression as a symbol of two cultures meeting and mixing. It is that intersection of cultural, historical and political movements that this exhibition seeks to portray. +The work of 35 artists has been mounted with the cooperation of the Centro Cultural de la Raza and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. +It includes painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media, drawings, installations and video art. Images of Tiajuana night life, political statements on the state of border hostilities, daily life, awesome landscapes and touching portraits will find their mark. +In conjunction with the exhibition, the museum has begun assembling personal stories by people who immigrated to the United States or who can relate the experiences of others. A team consisting of the Westchester Hispanic Coalition, La Casa del Pueblo and El Centro Hispano is collecting the stories in the New York City and southern Connecticut areas. +The results will be published in English and Spanish by the college's Center for Editions and Clifton Meador and titled "Border Stories," available for purchase by June 12, when the museum will hold a Community Day celebration. Although the time for submitting stories is limited, those wishing to participate should call 948-8466. +The exhibition can be seen Tuesdays through Fridays from 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. and Saturdays and Sundays from 11 A.M. to 5 P.M. Admission is by donation, and the number for museum information is 251-6100. + +'OLDER AND BETTER' + Dr. Joyce Brothers, the psychologist whose buoyant personality has earned her a niche in the media, will be the keynote speaker at the 18th yearly Aging Awareness Day at Westchester Community College in Valhalla on Wednesday. +She will speak on "Celebrating Life: Older and Better" at 9:30 A.M. after a registration period beginning at 8:45. +Later a panel discussion with Janet T. Langsam, executive director of the Westchester Arts Council, Christine Mastrangelo, chairwoman of the college's department of finance and computer information services, and other members of the college staff will deal with the subject of lifelong learning. +Afternoon workshops will focus on resources and services for caregivers, the family in dramatic literature, health and wellness, getting a center for the elderly started and other subjects of interest to older men and women. For free reservations, call 785-6793. Reservations may also be made for a buffet lunch at $10. + +DINOSAUR FOLLIES + Huge puppets named Willie Mammoth, Smiley the Saber-Toothed Tiger, Bessie the 22-foot Apatosaurus, Tony and Trixie Triceratops and 20 or so additional characters will cavort in "The Mammoth Dinosaur Follies" at the Tarrytown Music Hall today at 2 P.M. +As the latest creations of Lois Bohovesky's Hudson Vagabond Puppet Company, the creatures in this musical extravaganza explore the complexity of life in prehistoric times with amusing dialogue, song and choreography that tests the strength of the floor. The 14--year-old troupe is known for its unusual and unusually large puppets and its imaginative scenarios. +Tickets, thanks to a grant from the Nynex Corporation, are only $3.50. Call 359-1144 for reservations. The theater is at 13 Main Street. + +RUNNING FOR THE Y + The sixth yearly Rye Derby, a five-mile road race, steps off today at 1:30 P.M. from the corner of Purchase Street and Theodore Fremd Avenue, ending at the Rye Y.M.C.A., 21 Locust Avenue. A one-mile family run begins at 1 P.M. at the Y. +Winners in nine categories will share $1,500 in prize money, and first finishers will also receive inscribed trophies of silver and crystal. +Registration will be held at the Y from 10 A.M. to 12:30 P.M., with entrants in the five-mile race paying a fee of $14, while running the one-miler costs $8. Rye Derby ribbons will be awarded to the one-mile winners. +Awards will be presented by Eamon Coghlan, who broke the Masters four-minute mile in Boston in February, finishing at 3:56.5. He will lead off the five-mile race. Proceeds will help finance the Y's children's programs. For more information, call 967-6363. + +LITERARY LUNCH + Three notable writers will preview their latest work at the Westchester Library System's Book and Author Luncheon on Tuesday from noon to 2 P.M. at the Tarrytown Hilton. +Murray Kempton, a 1985 Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary, has spent 40 years as a newspaperman and written nearly 10,000 columns, formerly for The New York Post and now for New York Newsday. His new book, "Rebellions, Perversities and Main Events," due this month from Times Books, will be the subject of his talk. +Mary Higgins Clark's "Remember Me," a suspense novel set on Cape Cod, will be published next month by Simon & Schuster, joining the 25 million copies of her books in print in the United States alone. Her popular mystery novels, some of which have been made into movies and television dramas, include "A Stranger Is Watching" and "Where Are the Children?" +The third speaker will be Hilma Wolitzer, whose "Tunnel of Love" is being readied for publication next month by HarperCollins. Ms. Wolitzer writes about human relationships, and her books have been Literary Guild and Book-of-the-Month Club selections. +Tickets at $35 can be reserved by calling 592-8214. Tickets at $50 include a copy of "Reading Rooms," an anthology of works by prominent American writers. + +FISHING WISELY + Ecological preservation and the rainbow and brown trout fishing potential of the Neversink River might seem like contradictory topics, but Robert Ewald, proprietor of the fly shop on the Eosopus River, will present a slide lecture on how the two issues can be joined. Speaking before the Croton Watershed Chapter of Trout Unlimited on Tuesday at 7:30 P.M., he will discuss access to the river, little-known fishing spots and newly acquired property, which the state can use to improve and maintain water quality and fishing stock. +Trout Unlimited, a national nonprofit organization, is dedicated to the preservation of natural resources, which in turn permits ecologically sound fishing practices to flourish. +Regular monthly meetings, including this one, are held at the Fox Lane Middle School on Route 172 in Mount Kisco. Visitors are welcome free of charge. For more information about the lecture and the organization, call 666-5727. + +A SECURITY THREAT? + Peter G. Peterson, Secretary of Commerce during the Nixon Administration and now chairman of the Blackstone Group, a private investment bank based in Manhattan, will speak before a joint meeting of the Forum for World Affairs and the World Trade Club of Westchester on Wednesday at 7 P.M. His subject will be "Economic Weakness as a National Security Threat: Redefining the National Security Agenda." +The event will be held at the Thornwood Conference Center, at 500 Columbus Avenue, beginning with cocktails at 6:15 P.M., followed by the lecture and a question-and-answer period and ending with coffee and dessert at 8 P.M. It is open to the public for a fee of $20. Reservations can be made by calling the Forum office in Stamford at (203) 356-0340. ELEANOR CHARLES + +LOAD-DATE: April 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +135 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 17, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Rugged, Aggressive, A Hockey Throwback; +New York-New York Spotlight on Graves + +BYLINE: By JOE LAPOINTE + +SECTION: Section 8; Page 1; Column 2; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 1890 words + +With sandy brown hair that can't stay combed and full lips that frequently curl upward at the corners in a smile, Adam Graves looks a little like a kid on the cover of "Boy's Life," except for the ugly cuts, bumps and bruises that flare and recede during the course of a hockey season. +The wounds are part of the reason Graves is a key member of the Rangers, perhaps their most valuable player, as they begin their Stanley Cup playoffs today against the Islanders at Madison Square Garden. By leading the team this season with 52 goals, Graves has attracted a spotlight of his own, no longer merely sharing in the one that shines on Mark Messier, his linemate and mentor. + The Graves lore is well-chronicled. It starts with his boyhood in Caledon, Ontario, about an hour's drive north of Toronto where his parents, Henry and Lynda Graves, cared for Adam, his two older sisters and more than 40 foster children, or "Crown wards" as they are called in Canada. It includes Adam Graves's frequent charity work around New York, including hockey instruction to kids in Harlem and reading sessions with underprivileged children in Brooklyn. Then there's his impending summer wedding. Plus, don't forget his new contract, forced upon him by his employers, who tore up the old one for $400,000 and insisted on paying him $1.15 million this season, an average of $2.56 million for the five seasons beginning next September. +And although he would probably volunteer to walk senior citizens across Eighth Avenue, Graves isn't paid by the Rangers to be a Boy Scout. +They reward him because he plays a rugged, aggressive game of hockey, with a mean streak that enhances his talent and inspires his teammates. The approach is as basic and persuasive as a punch in the nose. +Consider, for instance, the opinion of a certain National Hockey League coach. +"He's very physical, he will do anything to get his team geared up," said the veteran strategist, smiling as he spoke, his voice booming with enthusiasm. "He plays the game every inch of that ice. He wants to command, and he commands a lot of respect out there. He's a total player. He's a spark. He's an inspiration. There's an m.v.p. guy, let me tell you. He's just an outstanding player and an outstanding person." +Mike Keenan, the Ranger coach, probably feels the same way, but those are the words of Al Arbour, the Islander coach, who needs to contain Graves in this four-of-seven-game series. + +Pure Canadian Hockey + In an era of a global talent pool and sophisticated scouting and training, Graves's style is traditional Canadian, distilled to the basic elements. Graves "finishes his check," a term that means he skates directly toward puck-carrying opponents and collides with them, before or after they pass the puck. Another trademark of Graves's style is to stand in front of the opposing net, especially when the Rangers have a power play. +A player who does this will get extra goals because pucks will find their way to his stick on rebounds and deflections. He also will feel the sticks and elbows of opposing defensemen and goalies who don't appreciate the poaching. One of those goalies used to be Glenn Healy, a former Islander who is now Graves's teammate on the Rangers. +"Adam and I have joked this season about some of the comments he and I have given each other in the past," Healy said. "You take a simple shot for a goaltender, a shot from the point, and that is a routine save. Put a guy like Adam in front of the net, with a defenseman trying to clear him out, and it's no longer a routine save. The split second you don't see the puck is the longest split second of your life." +Unlike some players, who tend to coast when they don't have the puck, Graves moves without it, looking for open ice. +"If you don't hold him up or get in his way, he's gone," said Brad Dalgarno, the Islander right wing. "The best you can do is try to take ice away from him and get in his way and make sure he doesn't get physical." +Earlier this season, Dalgarno cut Graves with a stick early in the game. Late in the game, Graves flattened Dalgarno with a shot to the chin. +Listed at 6 feet and 200 pounds, Graves carries much of his bulk in his thick upper torso. He just turned 26 years old and has the maturity of an older man and the trusting nature of a younger one. Despite his playing style, he is remarkably injury-free, playing every game in the last three seasons. Although not considered sneaky or dirty, Graves is one of the league's most combative athletes, fifth on the team in penalty minutes with 127. +This season, he has five major penalties for fighting and 21 minors for roughing. Many of these moments are for coming to the aid of teammates, especially Messier. They go back to their days as teammates on Edmonton's last Stanley Cup champion in 1990. Kevin Lowe, their teammate then and now, calls Graves "the sheriff" for his willingness to defend fellow Rangers. For their three seasons together in New York, Graves has been Tonto to Messier's Lone Ranger, Robin to Messier's Batman. +"Mark got him where he is," said John Davidson, the former Ranger goalie who now broadcasts their games on television, "but I think Adam is leaving the nest now." +Although N.H.L. rules mandate the ejection of instigators and of the third man who joins a two-man fight, Graves has only one game misconduct this season, partly because he knows the gray margins of the rules and partly because he treats referees with respect. Paul Stewart, a veteran referee who used to be a professional player, said Graves "is very businesslike, he goes about things in a professional way. +"When he's got a problem with me, he just rolls his eyes, he doesn't say much," Stewart said. "I've seen him in people situations, with fans, and he's not sheepish. He looks people in the eye. When he scores goals, he doesn't try to rub the other guy's face in it by celebrating too much." +After a game that included a fight this season, Graves said he knew he wouldn't be ejected for provoking it because all he did was glare at his intended target before punches were thrown. After another brawl, he explained that he wasn't really joining a fight that a teammate was losing, but merely "helping the linesmen" to break it up. + +The Lemieux Incident + Few of his fouls involve use of the stick, so it seems out of character that Graves's most infamous moment involved a stick foul against the Pittsburgh Penguins' star Mario Lemieux, two years ago, in the second round of the playoffs. +While killing a Pittsburgh power play, Graves swung his stick and broke a bone in Lemieux's right hand, putting him out of the series. Graves received a suspension that kept him off the ice for the rest of that series, and the Rangers, regular-season champions then, as they are now, were eliminated by the Penguins. +For this, Graves took a media beating that still rankles the Ranger brass, especially Colin Campbell, the assistant coach then and now. +"It wasn't like he was spearing or chopping some guy in the head," Campbell said. "He went out on the point on the face-off and he whacked the hands. And he hit him hard. He broke his hand. It happened to be Mario Lemieux's hand, the last guy you want to do it to." +Graves, curiously, seemed to take the storm in stride, never ducking reporters, repeating over and over that the deed was accidental. +"Deep down inside, he was a little hurt," said Rick Curran, his agent. "He was very sorry. He was a little surprised and disappointed that people didn't realize it wasn't malicious. He was very frustrated that a number of people were so critical, But he's never been a naive person. He's a mature individual and he has been ever since he was 15 years old. That maturity went a long way in allowing him to cope." +Campbell and Neil Smith, the Rangers' president and general manager, have known about the maturity for 10 years because they worked for the Detroit Red Wings and scouted Graves when he played across the Detroit River, for the junior team in Windsor, Ontario, in the mid-1980's. They were involved in drafting him for Detroit and in luring him to New York from Edmonton when he became a free agent with the Oilers in 1991. +"Adam was always the type of kid you wanted to make it," Campbell said. "He is conscientious, nice, hard-working, respectful. And usually those guys don't make it. Adam is the milk-drinker who goes through hell for you." +Perhaps that is why he has such a strong following among younger Ranger fans. Even a casual glance around the Garden will reveal more "Graves" jerseys than those of other players. +Graves's father said his son learned a lesson about fans when he was 8 years old, waiting for an autograph of an N.H.L. star. Henry Graves, a retired Toronto policeman, won't reveal the name of the player, but he said Adam waited a long time for this autograph and that the star brushed him off. +"Adam said to me, 'I'll never do that to a kid,' " Henry Graves said. "When you are a young kid, and you do that, it just crushes you." +"Giving an autograph is a privilege, especially to a little guy," Adam Graves said. "To give a kid an autograph and to see a smile on his face, there is not a better thing in the world than to do that. It really matters to them." +Along with his name, the back of the shirt has the number "9," which has special significance. In hockey's pre-expansion era, before 1967, this number always went to the best players: Maurice Richard in Montreal, Gordie Howe in Detroit, Andy Bathgate in New York and Bobby Hull in Chicago. +In a modern era dominated by superstar numbers such as 66 for Lemieux and 99 for Wayne Gretzky, Graves is a throwback, an ancestral memory of single-digit N.H.L. stars who didn't arrive from Moscow, Helsinki and Prague or from the college campuses of the United States. +"Hockey is a wonderful sport that appeals to blue-collar people, and Adam Graves gives you your money's worth," Davidson said. "In a society where things are crumbling, people are begging for guys like that. Seldom do you see guys like Adam Graves pop out. This is the real deal. This is New York." + +Commercial Appeal + Still, it's hockey, and it isn't as if Madison Avenue is beating down the door to Madison Square Garden. Curran, the agent, said the only approaches for Graves's endorsements have come from manufacturers of hockey equipment. Although the game's exposure is spreading through Sunbelt expansion, it's still seen as a cult sport by many who control the floodgates of the media mainstream. +Graves, with his bland quotes about team play and hard work, is not about to crash the airwaves and print columns with the bluster of, say, basketball's Charles Barkley. Always willing to chat with reporters for as long as they care to question him, Graves sometimes apologizes for speaking in cliches and thanks them for their interest. +Perhaps, during this much-anticipated New York-New York series, his profile will grow. And a long playoff run by the Rangers might bring about the exposure and hip status sought by the ambitious new N.H.L. administration in league headquarters on Fifth Avenue. +Wouldn't it be interesting if the game's trendy new personality turns out to be a plain, wholesome "milk-drinker" who wouldn't say "spit" if he had a mouthful? + +NAME: Adam Graves + +LOAD-DATE: April 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The physical play of Adam Graves enhances talent and inspires his teammates. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)(pg. 1); By setting himself up in the crease, here in front of Islander goalie Ron Hextall, Adam Graves gets his share of extra bumps and extra goals. (Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times)(pg. 3) + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +136 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 17, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THEATER; +'Spittin' Image' In World Premiere + +BYLINE: By ALVIN KLEIN + +SECTION: Section 14NJ; Page 14; Column 3; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 974 words + +DATELINE: METUCHEN + +THREE musical theater newcomers have compressed an expansive World War II novel about a Kentucky mountain clan, the Tussies -- 45 of 'em -- into a down-home show with a contemporary spin. +Down the country dirt roads more than 50 years ago, Grandpa, proudly illiterate, holds back his fatherless 12-year-old grandson, who is itching to learn. Grandpa just wants him to go fishing. + Segue to modern times. Sid, a grandfather who writes books, and Matt, a motherless, snooty pre-teen-age rock-and-roller who doesn't want to read or go to school, are newly written counterparts in reverse, and therein hangs a lesson plan. +So goes the motivation for "Spittin' Image," a musical freely adapted from "Taps for Private Tussie" by Jesse Stuart, once deemed the region's official chronicler; the Tussies were a nonfiction family in fiction form. In its world premiere at the Forum Theater Group, the show, overflowing with purposeful wholesome intentions, is more earnest than entertaining. +An appended story, written by Karin Kasdin, has Sid reading the Stuart book to Matt. It frames the show, supports the source material and appears so insistently validating that there would be no musical without it. Yet these scenes are totally devoid of music, with only Ms. Kasdin's slick, formulaic dialogue, between a wise, easygoing elderly man and a wiseacre kid, to maintain it. +In her adaptation, aided by the rescuing songs, Ms. Kasdin measures the mountain folk as if in lumps of ignorant bliss. Lacking vivid identities, the dopey and the unwashed reflect a writer's attitude that lands somewhere between affection and derision, between jest and mockery. +Within a toneless style, little mind is paid to the lush blue and greenery of the continuous Kentucky hills ("like heaven on earth"). It remains for flashes of Stuart's descriptive prose in the story being read by Sid to Matt to remind one of a flavorful folk tale. +Stephen A. Weiner's generically springy music, orchestrated with savvy by Steve Cohen, and Laura Szabo-Cohen's sassy lyrics form an agreeable mix of musical comedy convention spiked by the buzz of the backwoods. +Buoyed by the very real presence of a gestating musical at the Forum, where he is the artistic director, Peter J. Loewy has directed and staged -- whatever that means -- "Spittin' Image" with the sort of verve that presumably arises when one is doing the same thing twice. +Dan Siretta's "additional choreography" -- there is no indication of who made it up primarily -- abounds in high-stepping jigs, hoedowns and stomping, with washboards, books and spoons to enhance indigenous effects, especially in the sprightly "Divine Decree," wherein the widowed mother (Mama) of the mountain boy (Boy) is promised to her scuzzy brother-in-law. His name is Mott, and he is "as low as a mudhole." +One aspect of Stuart's plot preserved is the war death of Kim Tussie (Boy's father), reputedly a bully, a liar, a cheat and a fake. In an attempted comic number, "Bury Him Here," one of several clap-along tunes, the gluttonous Tussies show up for the funeral feast, giving Ms. Szabo-Cohen the chance to go all out with lyrics about crawfish fry, possum stew, angel food cake, hams and yams, "buns on the griddle and grits on the boil." +Another aspect of Stuart's story line, here recounted, has to do with the renting of the Big White House, a 16-room manse, and the onslaught of the Tussies -- "All your kin," Grandpa says -- and squatters all. They turn a free supper into a free-for-all -- jamboree is the operative word -- and wind up getting everyone thrown out for wrecking the place. Such other plot convolutions as Kim's returning from the grave are perhaps welcomely omitted. +Even in the story's most simplistic form, it's hard to cotton to a slothful Grandpa who thrives on being poor and getting "relief grub," appropriates Mama's insurance money (to rent the manse) and hollers to his grandson, "I ain't about to send you to school" while the town's kids taunt the boy ("Stupid and dirty," they call him). +Leonard Drum won't be faulted for failing to find folksy redemption in Grandpa's role, or for playing it with unshakable indolence. But it's easy to go with the boy -- so far as one can figure, his name is Boy -- when he protests that reading stars and befriending raccoons somehow ain't enough for dealing with the world out there. And Ramzi Khalaf as Boy, radiating genuine charm and no small talent, makes it easier still. +Eden Riegel as Becca, a neighboring rich -- they say "comfortable" -- girl, takes Boy as a charity case, teaching him to glide, twirl and sway, in one of Mr. Weiner's and Ms. Szabo-Cohen's most felicitous numbers, "Waltzing Tonight Together." The accomplished Ms. Riegel is capable of announcing that she's precocious and prim and making it winning. +At the same time, Charlie Hofheimer, playing Matt, is sulky, scowling, overindulged, overeducated (he thinks) and, of course, starved for acceptance. Sarah Hubbard (Lucy) tries to teach him manners. Mr. Loewy's direction and staging are especially adept in the overlapping scenes involving the four youngsters. +In a cast of 19, note Janine LaManna as Boy's lively Mama, who sings "Love Don't Have Nothing With Mansions, Money or Fancy Clothes," and John Carroll, Matt's executive father, who realizes, between trips to London, that money can't buy love and respect. +Finally, Boy teaches Grandpa that fishing is no substitute for reading, just as Matt's father learns life's lessons from his son. Class dismissed. "Spittin' Image," a musical in its world premiere, produced by the Forum Theater Group, 314 Main Street in Metuchen. Performances run through next Sunday: today and next Sunday at 2:30 P.M., Wednesday at 2:30 P.M., and Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 P.M.Box office: (9098) 548-0582. + +LOAD-DATE: April 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Performing in "Spittin' Image," a musical in its world premiere at the Forum Theater Group in Metuchen, are Leonard Drum, left, as Grandpa, and Ramzi Khalaf, as Boy. + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +137 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 19, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Budget Plan Draws Fire From Hevesi + +BYLINE: By JONATHAN P. HICKS + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 402 words + +City Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi said yesterday that the Giuliani administration's budget proposals would mean fewer home-delivered meals for the elderly, less support for companies owned by women and minorities, dirtier parks and more potholes. +The report by Mr. Hevesi, a Democrat, looked at the effect on city services of the preliminary budget plans announced earlier this year by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican. Mr. Hevesi applauded Mr. Giuliani's efforts to close a projected budget gap of $2.3 billion for the next fiscal year. But he added, "It is important to recognize that the proposed cuts will have long-term consequences -- in some cases severe -- for New York City residents." + For example, Mr. Hevesi said that a Giuliani administration proposal to cut the preventive housing subsidy, which is intended to help families remain intact, could result in more children being placed in foster homes. "The subsidy costs the city about $2.50 per day per family, while foster care costs the city about $10 per day per child," the report said. +The report noted that cuts in the city's Department for the Aging could result in fewer home-care visits and fewer meals for the elderly. That, it said, would lead to more elderly people being forced to go to nursing homes and higher medical expenses arising from nutrition problems. + +An Unusual Report + The report, issued before Mr. Giuliani releases his executive budget plan, is unusual since city comptrollers have traditionally waited until the executive budget to offer a critique. But Mr. Hevesi said there was no political motivation in his decision. +"The role of the Comptroller is not only to inform the public that there will be pain but to be alert that some of the proposed cuts, while helpful in the short run, are harmful in the long run," Mr. Hevesi said. "The Charter says that the Comptroller comments on the budget." +Forrest R. Taylor, a spokesman for Mr. Giuliani, said that although the Mayor "appreciates the comptroller's concern, his report is somewhat vague and does not provide alternatives to the Mayor's financial plan." He said that if Mr. Hevesi "is suggesting that certain cuts not be made, it's incumbent on him to offer proposals on where cuts should be made. If not, is he advocating tax increases?" +Mr. Hevesi's report did not offer many specifics on the impact of the proposed budget reductions. + +LOAD-DATE: April 19, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +138 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 19, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Cuts and Tax Rises Urged To Bolster Social Security + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 12; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 947 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 18 + +Representative Dan Rostenkowski, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, today proposed shoring up the finances of Social Security by reducing next year's cost-of-living adjustment, increasing the retirement age, trimming benefits for new retirees and raising payroll taxes in the 21st century. +Some of the proposals, standing alone, would provoke a political outcry. But Mr. Rostenkowski said he hoped they would be acceptable as part of a comprehensive plan to preserve Social Security for future generations. + Some combination of changes like those proposed by Mr. Rostenkowski has a good chance of passage. Social Security trustees said last week that unless Congress acted the Social Security trust funds would run out of money in 2029, seven years earlier than projected last year. The trustees said that Congress should worry about the problem now, when the solution is relatively painless. Bigger changes would be required in later years if lawmakers defer action, the trustees warned. +In opinion polls, young workers often say that they doubt Social Security will be available to them when they retire. Mr. Rostenkowski said his proposal would restore confidence in Social Security and guarantee the Treasury's ability to pay all promised benefits for at least 75 years. He said he hoped the proposal would stimulate debate on ways to solve the long-range problems of Social Security without drastic cuts in benefits or sharp increases in taxes. + +Limiting an Increase + Under Mr. Rostenkowski's proposal, all Social Security beneficiaries, about 42 million people, would receive a smaller cost-of-living adjustment in January 1995. The increase was expected to be 3 percent, but Mr. Rostenkowski's proposal would limit it to 2.5 percent. +As a result, the average monthly Social Security benefit, now $674, would rise to $691 in 1995, rather than $694. In the past, protests by elderly people have blocked proposed cuts in cost-of-living adjustments. +Mr. Rostenkowski is also proposing a tax increase for Social Security beneficiaries who are single and have incomes of $25,000 to $34,000 a year or are married with incomes of $32,000 to $44,000. +Under current law, these people must count up to half of their Social Security benefits as taxable income. Under Mr. Rostenkowski's proposal, up to 85 percent of their benefits could be included as taxable income. +The change would affect 13 percent of Social Security beneficiaries, about 5.5 million people. Single people with incomes of more than $34,000 and married couples with incomes over $44,000 are already subject to this requirement. + +Cutting Future Benefits + Mr. Rostenkowski would gradually reduce the generosity of the Social Security benefit formula over a 50-year period beginning in the year 2003. This would trim benefits for workers with average and above-average earnings, but not for those with low earnings. +For a person born in 1990 who earns average wages over a lifetime, benefits would be cut 8 percent. For a high earner, one who pays the maximum taxes, the reduction would be 20 percent if the person was born in 1990 and retires in the middle of the next century. High-earning baby boomers, those who pay the maximum taxes and retire early in the next century would experience reductions of 2 percent to 12 percent. +Mr. Rostenkowski's bill would also increase the age at which workers may retire with full benefits. This "normal retirement age," now 65, will rise gradually under current law, reaching 67 for people born in 1960 or later. Mr. Rostenkowski would speed up the change so it would take effect 11 years earlier, for people born in 1949 or later. +The first of Mr. Rostenkowski's proposed increases in the payroll tax would take effect in 26 years, in 2020, and additional increases would follow. +Under current law, employees and their employers each pay a tax equal to 6.2 percent of a worker's wages up to a maximum level, which is $60,600 this year. The tax rate is not scheduled to go up under current law, though the Social Security trust funds are expected to run out of money in 2029, when people born in 1964 will reach the age of 65. +Mr. Rostenkowski's bill would gradually increase the Social Security tax rate by nearly one-third over a 38-year period beginning in 2020. The tax rate would stay at 6.2 percent through 2019, then climb gradually to 7.35 percent in 2024 and remain at that level for 30 years. The tax rate would rise again in 2055 and in each of the next three years, reaching 8.15 percent in 2058. +The proposal would not affect Medicare's hospital insurance trust fund, which is expected to run out of money in 2001. Many experts say the Government will soon need to increase the Medicare tax, now 1.45 percent each for employee and employer. +Mr. Rostenkowski said the effect of the higher taxes would be more than offset by the growth of wages over the next 75 years. Even after paying the increased payroll taxes and taking account of inflation, he said, workers will still have higher incomes, with greater purchasing power, than they now have. +Under his proposal, a person who earns $32,600 in 2025 would pay a Social Security tax of $2,396, which is $375 more than the person would pay under current law. +Under Mr. Rostenkowski's proposal, all state and local government workers hired after Dec. 31 would have to pay Social Security taxes and participate in the program. Of the 21.5 million people who worked for state or local government some time last year, 5 million were not covered by Social Security, Federal officials say. Such workers may face severe financial hardship when they retire or become disabled. + +LOAD-DATE: April 19, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Representative Dan Rostenkowski yesterday in Chicago after he proposed a measure to insure adequate financing for Social Security. (Todd Buchanan for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +139 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 20, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Daniel Rudman, 67; Studied Hormones and Aging + +BYLINE: By WOLFGANG SAXON + +SECTION: Section D; Page 27; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 507 words + +Dr. Daniel Rudman, an endocrinologist and nutritionist who devoted his research to the well-being of the frail and elderly, died on Sunday in Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital in Milwaukee. A resident of that city, he was 67. +The cause was complications after brain surgery, according to the Medical College of Wisconsin, where he had worked since 1988. + Dr. Rudman and his team focused on the aging of the endocrine system and the resulting hormone deficiencies. At his death, he was professor of medicine at the college and associate chief of staff for extended care at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Milwaukee. + +Study on Growth Hormone + Dr. Rudman was the author or co-author of 173 papers, articles and book chapters. He received national attention in 1990 as the principal author of a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine, "Effect of human growth hormone in men over 60 years old." +The study was based on a clinical trial of 21 healthy men aged 61 to 81. It found that after six months of injections of a genetically engineered version of the natural human growth hormone, the men emerged with bodies that by many measures were almost 20 years younger than the ones they started with. +"This is not a fountain of youth," he cautioned at the time. "We need to emphasize that the aging process is very complicated and has many aspects." +He termed the study highly preliminary and said far more work was required to determine the long-term effects. In fact, a paper he published a year later reported adverse symptoms and found that the benefits -- such as an increase in muscle mass and a decrease in body fat -- tended to disappear after the injections were stopped. +He and other experts warned that the dosage of the hormone had to be determined carefully because of the possibility of adverse side effects. But the original article immediately stirred the interest of the scientific community. + +40 Years of Research + It focused attention on research into aging and the health care and nutrition of the elderly. Currently the National Institutes of Health supports several trials involving human growth hormone as an anti-frailty drug. +Dr. Rudman was born in Boston and graduated from Boston Latin School. A Yale University graduate in chemistry, he received his medical degree at Yale's School of Medicine in 1949. His research on aging, metabolism, nutrition and the deficiencies of old age spanned 40 years and resulted in many original contributions. +From 1957 to 1968 he was associated with Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. From then until 1983 he was at Emory University and, before moving to Milwaukee, served as chief of geriatric medicine at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in North Chicago, Ill. +Dr. Rudman is survived by his wife, Inge Weinberg Rudman, a senior researcher in geriatrics and his closest collaborator; a daughter, Nancy, of San Jose, Calif.; a son, Richard D., of Boston, and a brother, Dr. Irving Rudman of Frankfurt, Ill. + +NAME: Daniel Rudman + +LOAD-DATE: April 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +140 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 21, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +New in Congress, but a Powerful Friend of Drug Companies + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section D; Page 24; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 948 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 20 + +In a concession to the biotechnology industry and its supporters on Capitol Hill, the chairman of a major Congressional committee decided today to drop President Clinton's proposal for a Federal agency to review the "reasonableness" of new drug prices. +The chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Representative John D. Dingell, said the proposal "should not be included as part of any comprehensive health care reform," and he vowed to oppose it throughout the legislative process. + The Michigan Democrat's decision came in response to the pleas of Representative Lynn Schenk, a Democrat whose San Diego district contains nearly 100 biotechnology companies. This segment of the drug industry considers itself particularly vulnerable because many of these companies have invested large sums on research in a new field without yet realizing profits. Officials of these companies say the Clinton plan is frightening away investors. + +Accusations of Price Gouging + Within the committee, Ms. Schenk carries a crucial vote on health care legislation, and her role illustrates how a new member of Congress can influence major legislation by focusing single-mindedly on an issue of intense concern to her constituents. +President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, have accused drug companies of price gouging. Mr. Clinton's bill would establish an Advisory Council on Breakthrough Drugs to review the prices charged for innovative drugs to see if they were "reasonable." The 13-member council would publicize its findings, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services could deny Medicare coverage for drugs deemed to be overpriced. +Ms. Schenk campaigned tirelessly against creating the advisory council, saying that any Government review of drug prices would discourage research on new cures. +Mr. Dingell accepted her arguments to try to win her vote for a modified version of Mr. Clinton's health plan. Ms. Schenk said she had not made a commitment to support Mr. Clinton's bill or Mr. Dingell's variation of it. +Carl B. Feldbaum, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group for 380 companies, said: "Ms. Schenk has exercised extraordinary influence for a freshman member of Congress. The ultimate winners will be the people suffering from diseases that have no treatment or cure." +But Clinton Administration officials still want some mechanism to restrain drug prices. Lobbyists for the elderly, including the American Association of Retired Persons, also want some limits on drug prices. +Lorrie McHugh, a White House spokeswoman, said tonight: "The Administration wants to protect consumers. We want to provide prescription drug coverage at affordable prices to all Americans. We feel that we put forth a good proposal to help achieve this objective." +John C. Rother, chief lobbyist for the association of retired persons, said Ms. Schenk was "a crucial vote" for Mr. Dingell in his effort to round up support for health care legislation. He said Mr. Dingell's commitment, in a letter to Ms. Schenk, was apparently "the price of her support." +Ms. Schenk is still trying to eliminate part of the bill that permits the health secretary to deny Medicare coverage for certain drugs if the manufacturer refuses to pay "an acceptable rebate" to the Government. The effect of a rebate is to reduce the price of a drug. +In addition, Ms. Schenk said, she is working to minimize any adverse effects on small businesses. Mr. Clinton's bill would require employers to pay most of the cost of health insurance for their employees. Many small businesses oppose this requirement, saying it would be prohibitively expensive for them. +In an interview today, Ms. Schenk said: "I didn't sign on to the President's bill or anyone else's. I wanted to be able to have an impact on those issues that caused me great consternation." +Biotechnology companies regard Mr. Clinton's proposal for Federal review of drug prices as a form of price controls. The mere possibility of such review alarmed investors and depressed biotechnology stock prices, the companies said. Ms. Schenk said, "The proposal has already panicked financial markets and forced cutbacks on research and development in the biotechnology industry." +Mr. Feldbaum of the biotechnology trade group said: "Since the beginning of 1993, when Clinton took office and announced his plans for health care reform, the biotech industry has been stymied in its efforts to raise money for research. This is a survival issue for us." +Biotechnology drugs use discoveries in genetics, cell biology and molecular biology to combat conditions like cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, hepatitis and hemophilia. Other biotechnology drugs are being developed to fight Alzheimer's disease, AIDS, osteoporosis and heart disease. +Few biotechnology companies are profitable. Most do not have products on the market. Only 28 biotechnology drugs have been approved for sale to the public, but more than 270 are in clinical trials. +Mr. Feldbaum said Mr. Dingell's stance was important because "no member of Congress working on health care reform is more respected or powerful." But other lawmakers are seeking restraints on drug prices. +Henri A. Termeer, chairman of the Genzyme Corporation in Cambridge, Mass., met recently with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and urged the Massachusetts Democrat to drop the drug-review council. An aide to Mr. Kennedy, who is chairman of the Committee on Labor and Human Resources, said the Senator was "exploring possible compromises that would encourage the biotechnology industry to develop miracle drugs while also insuring that the drugs will be affordable to consumers." + +NAME: John D. Dingell + +LOAD-DATE: April 21, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +SERIES: One Health Care Vote -- A periodic look at a lawmaker. + +GRAPHIC: Photo: After pleas from Representative Lynn Schenk, a California Democrat whose district has many biotechnology companies, Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan decided to oppose a Clinton proposal for a Federal agency to review new drug prices. They conferred yesterday. (Stephen Crowley for The New York Times) + +TYPE: Biography; Series + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +141 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 21, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Attacker of Queens Woman, 74, Is Linked to 6 Other Robberies + +BYLINE: By RICHARD PEREZ-PENA + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 392 words + +The same man who pistol-whipped, robbed and shot a 74-year-old woman outside her home on Tuesday has also robbed six other persons in Queens, including four elderly people, in the last four weeks, the police said yesterday. +With Constance Vieira of Whitestone recovering from a gunshot wound to the stomach and a blow to the head with the butt of a gun, the police yesterday appealed for the public's help in finding her attacker. + "I would take help from the devil if I can in order to get this information," Capt. Donald Kelly said at a news conference at the 111th Precinct. "We've got to get a line on him." +He said the string of robberies in Whitestone, Bayside and Flushing is of particular concern because "the level of violence is escalating," as is the pace. Five of the robberies occurred in the week ending Tuesday. +Mrs. Vieira, who was in stable condition at New York Hospital Medical Center in Queens, was the most recent victim and the only one who was shot. After shooting her, the robber took her car, which the police are still looking for. It is a brown 1991 Oldsmobile 88, a four-door sedan, license QDE 603. +Captain Kelly said the suspect was a neatly dressed, well-spoken and clean-shaven black man, 28 to 35 years old, 5 feet 10 to 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighing 190 to 210 pounds. +In five of the seven instances, the robber wielded a silver-plated handgun, and in all seven, he took both cash and credit cards. Three times, the victim's car was taken. +On April 15, Captain Kelly said, the man robbed a 20-year-old woman, clubbed her in the head with his gun and took her car, a new Nissan Maxima. He said he thought the man took the car "more as a means of escape" than to steal it. +The woman reported the crime, and police spotted the car shortly afterward on the Grand Central Parkway and gave chase. The car thief hit another car, causing an accident, and escaped. +The first robbery, on March 25, was of a 78-year-old woman. In the second, six days later, the victim was a 24-year-old woman. +On April 13, the robber began to pick up his pace. That day, a 78-year-old man was robbed and his 1988 Buick was stolen. The next day, a 68-year-old woman was the target, and the day after that the 20-year-old woman was struck. +The day before Mrs. Vieira was robbed and shot, a 78-year-old woman was robbed. + +LOAD-DATE: April 21, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +142 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 21, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO DIGEST + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 536 words + + +NEW YORK CITY + +FAX BRINGS ARREST OF NUMBERS SUSPECT +For 30 years, Raymond Marquez was a thorn to law-enforcement agencies and a legend to countless gamblers in Harlem and East Harlem. With a clientele whose wagers ranged from a dime to more than $1,000 a day on numbers games, Mr. Marquez, nicknamed Spanish Raymond, built a gambling empire that raked in about $30 million a year, the authorities say. Much of the case that resulted in his arrest, they said, stemmed from one mistake: his use of a fax to get daily reports on his illegal gambling profits from Manhattan to his vacation retreat in Fort Lauderdale. A1. + +DARING ROBBERIES BAFFLE POLICE +Two well-dressed men have shown an unusual combination of precision and ruthlessness, pulling off seven armed jewel robberies during the last year, shooting and wounding three victims and taking $320,000 worth of diamond rings. B3. + +A BRUTAL PATTERN IN QUEENS +The same man who pistol-whipped, robbed and shot a 74-year-old woman outside her home on Tuesday has also robbed six others, including four elderly people, in Queens in the last four weeks, the police said. B3. + +SOME SKEPTICAL ABOUT CONTRACT SYSTEM +Some minority and women business owners responded skeptically to a new city procurement system designed to aid their companies and other small businesses, saying it does not go far enough in filling the void left by the elimination of a more aggressive affirmative-action contracting program. B4. + +REGION + +PACT IS REACHED ON DUNE EROSION +Property owners in erosion-ravaged West Hampton Dunes, L.I., have reached agreement with Federal, state and Suffolk County officials on a $32 million project to rebuild their beaches and reconstruct jetties blamed for robbing them of sand. B6. + +L.I.R.R. CHIEF ASSAILED AS OUT OF TOUCH +The president of the Long Island Rail Road may be unable to fulfill his responsibilities because he is habitually away from New York, the chairman of the State Senate Transportation Committee contended, as contradictory accounts emerged about where the president, Charles W. Hoppe, spends his off-duty hours. B6. + +YALE OFFERS WORKERS MONEY FOR HOMES +In an effort to stabilize New Haven's impoverished neighborhoods, Yale University said today that it would give its employees $20,000 if they buy homes in the city before January 1996. B6. + +JEWISH BOY FIGHTS RETURN TO PARENTS +The Jewish boy at the heart of a complex custody fight testified that he was dissatisfied with the religious life style his parents provided during a four-day stay with them in March. B5. + +25 HELD IN IMMIGRANT SMUGGLING +Federal agents charged 25 Chinese and Turkish immigrants with taking part in an elaborate smuggling and bribery scheme. B5. + +NEW JERSEY VOTERS REJECT TAX INCREASES +For months, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman has been telling New Jerseyans that local property taxes are their responsibility, not hers. On Tuesday, in a scant turnout, voters apparently acted on that message, rejecting school budgets and their higher taxes in almost half of the state's school districts. B7. + +Governor Cuomo criticized legislative leaders for failing to end the state budget impasse. B7. + +LOAD-DATE: April 21, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "PULSE: Helping Tourists" tracks the number of people seeking information in each month of 1993 at the Grand Central Parnership's tourist office at Grand Central Terminal. (Source: Grand Central Partnership) + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +143 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 21, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Review/Television; +Confessions of a Former Alarmist + +BYLINE: By WALTER GOODMAN + +SECTION: Section C; Page 22; Column 1; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 864 words + +Here's a how-de-do! A network news special that makes light of the perils on which network news specials thrive. ABC's "Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?" is a sharp expose of exposes about crime, pollution and other television favorites. +Leading the charge is a repentant sinner. In a mea culpa before an audience at Seton Hall University, John Stossel, who made his reputation as a consumer-affairs reporter, admits to having played up such transient worries as train accidents, lawn chemicals and coffee makers. But he has found the light and now maintains that in addition to raising blood pressures, the incessant scaremongering feeds public misapprehension and leads to the misallocation of public money. + His evidence is mainly statistical. Whatever impression you may get from television, for example, crime, including violent crime, is not rising. (The program includes a clip from a "20/20" segment, reported by one John Stossel, about "criminals dressed like cops, getting away with murder and robbery and rape.") Older Americans, who express the most nervousness about crime, maybe because they watch more news programs, actually have the least to worry about. (Although his targets have changed, Mr. Stossel cannot quite shake off news-magazine hyperbole. Now he is warning of the perils to the affluent elderly of living in "gated communities," which he describes as "fortresses like something out of the Middle Ages.") +The people who ought to be worried, and worried about, says Mr. Stossel, are black male teen-agers in the inner cities; their chances of being on the receiving end of violence are stunningly high. +Popular dangers that you need not lose sleep over abound. Mr. Stossel makes a case, for example, that the reaction to asbestos-flaking in New York City schools was overwrought but that no politician or official dared say so in the face of parental concern, stirred up by local television news. The expensive attempt to remove the asbestos, he says, not only may have spread the stuff into the air, but may also have subjected some children to more palpable dangers by leaving them on the streets while the schools were closed. (He does not go so far as to assert that the children may have been deprived of learning something in the classrooms.) +Also noted, as the debunking proceeds, is the lack of evidence of increased cancer at Love Canal, the object of much hand wringing by television reporters, and the unjustified agitation over the use of Alar on apples, stirred up by "60 Minutes." Mr. Stossel suggests, too, that the cost of tamper-proof packages is as excessive as the commotion about a few instances of contamination. (Not counting the damage to fingers and psyches in the efforts to open them.) +Particular attention is given to a lead-infested site in Aspen, Colo., that has made the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund list. The agency wants to remove 150 houses, and dig up and dispose of tons of earth. In a striking reversal of the usual environmental scare story, this ambitious project has so far been blocked by residents who, besides not wanting to be bothered, argue that the lead, which has been in the ground for 100 years, has not been shown to have hurt anybody. (Just as pictures of stricken children are customarily used to arouse emotions about the risk of the hour, so pictures of healthy children are presented here as a testament to the harmless or beneficial nature of the lead.) +Despite the evidence, officials tell Mr. Stossel they are still determined to go ahead with their earth moving, possibly in accord with the principle that once an agency has been given the power and money to do something, facts must not be allowed to get in the way. +Mr. Stossel also engages in an amusing exchange with Ralph Nader, who has evidently never met a product he liked. Here he warns against hot dogs, carpets, chickens and coffee, including some sorts of decaffeinated coffee. He is also not wild about flying. +For viewers in need of serious things to worry about, Mr. Stossel offers automobile accidents, smoking, falling down stairs and, especially, poverty. He maintains, much like business spokesmen, that regulations to prevent minor or imagined risks are a brake on the economy and that the money would be better used to create jobs. +After the hourlong report, Mr. Stossel gives the regulators and health campaigners in the audience an opportunity to respond to his argument that "since your rules probably made America a little poorer, might you have killed people in the name of safety?" (Viewers may add a new worry of their own. What will Mr. Stossel do with himself now that he has abjured his calling?) +You don't have to agree with Mr. Stossel on all particulars to welcome tonight's program as a breath of good sense in the fear-and-trembling atmosphere of much television news. The evening's lesson: Don't panic about decaf, but try not to swallow too much Ralph Nader. + +Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death? +ABC, tonight at 10 +(Channel 7 in New York) + +A special produced by Jeff Diamond for ABC News; anchor and reporter, John Stossel; Victor Neufeld, executive producer. + +LOAD-DATE: April 21, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +144 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 21, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +An Exposition for the Over-50 Population + +BYLINE: By ENID NEMY + +SECTION: Section C; Page 12; Column 3; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 893 words + +WHEN she was 60 years old, Evelyn Nef of Washington, a former executive secretary of the American Sociological Association and the author of several books on the Arctic, decided to become a psychotherapist. At 65, she graduated and got her first Social Security check the same year. She is now 80, still practicing and writing her autobiography. +"When I was 50, I thought my life was over," she said. "Little did I know the best years of my life were still ahead of me." + Unusual? Only in degree. There are tens of thousands of men and women today who change careers after the age of 50, voluntarily and otherwise, whose average life expectancy is 29 years longer than it was at the turn of the century and who can look forward to several active and productive decades. +The concerns and interests of this group, described by some as the "second middle age" and others as the "third age," and spanning the years between 50 and 80, will be addressed Sunday and Monday at the second Fifty Plus Expo, at the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan. Organized by Julie Frank, the exposition will include seminars, discussions, classes and exhibits on everything from finance, health care and fitness -- including tai chi exercises -- to careers, computer skills and hobbies. +"Expo was created to educate, inform and inspire the fastest growing, most affluent and most neglected segment of our population that they must plan for the second half of their lives," said Ms. Frank, who is 37. A former special assistant to Andrew Stein when he was the City Council president, she has created a number of community programs involving the elderly and also organized the first Fifty Plus Expo last year. +The planning now taking place for the next White House Conference on Aging will be discussed at the exposition by Robert B. Blancato, the executive director. The conference, scheduled for May 1995, will help shape aging policy for the following decade. A national series of state and regional conferences, aimed at encouraging grass-roots involvement, has already begun. +"By the time the conference begins, the baby-boom population will be one year away from turning 50," Mr. Blancato said. "It is estimated by the Census Bureau that more than one million baby boomers will reach age 100 and over." +Dr. Lydia Bronte, a former director of the Aging Society Project at the Carnegie Corporation, will be the keynote speaker. She said she believed the event was both timely and necessary since "the major change in the composition of our society is the increase in longevity." +Dr. Bronte warned of a danger already observable and likely to escalate -- the combination of increasing longevity and corporate downsizing, with the latter, she said, leading to a precedent "that the working years of an individual's life will be between 20 and 45 or 50." She said that "the logical extension of this current trend is that a smaller and smaller percentage of adult life will be spent in the work force." +"What I want to do today is to change forever the way you think about your own life," Dr. Bronte said. "The reality is that most Americans don't get old at 65 either physically or mentally." +More important, she said, she believes that the extra years of life expectancy are not being added to old age but to the "second middle age." She attributed this to the increasing number of men and women who maintain a high level of functioning in their 60's and 70's and who maintain it until they die. +Dr. Bronte interviewed 150 people over 65, all of whom were still working, for "The Longevity Factor," her recently published book (HarperCollins, $20). She found that some people had three different career peaks, one in their 40's, another in their 50's and early 60's and still another in their 70's. "Almost half had a major peak of creativity beginning at about the age of 50 and in many cases lasting for 25 or 30 years," she said. +"Essentially, if corporations want to increase productivity, they have to abandon what Robert Reich calls the 'butcher approach' -- chopping something to the size that you need and lopping off pieces that you don't want -- to the 'baker approach' -- increasing the value of all the ingredients and creating something different and useful out of them." +A number of seminars at the exposition will be conducted by IDS Financial Services Inc., a division of American Express. Financial planners will deal with the cost of long-term care, estate-planning techniques and strategies that can minimize taxes, and how to maintain life styles after retirement. +Cancer Care will present speakers on breast cancer and widowhood, and the Isabella Geriatric Center will sponsor a seminar on "Caring for Loved Ones With Memory Disorders," coping with depression and various aspects of fitness. +Other participants will include Dr. Norbert Sander and Dr. Kenneth Meiseler, both experts on fitness; Maureen Curley, executive director of the Retired Senior Volunteer Program; Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, who will moderate the Career and Life Planning seminar, and Msgr. Charles Fahey of Fordham University +The Fifty Plus Expo will be held at the Hotel Pennsylvania, Seventh Avenue at 33d Street, on Sunday from noon to 6 P.M. and on Monday from 9:30 A.M. to 5 P.M. The entrance fee is $8. For information: (212) 343-8975 and (212) 631-7547. + +LOAD-DATE: April 21, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +145 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 24, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +From Afar; +An Indomitable Man, an Incurable Loneliness + +BYLINE: By TOM WICKER + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 1; Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1366 words + +To many Americans born before World War II, the death of Richard Milhous Nixon seemed hardly believable, even though he was 81 years old and film clips had shown him looking somewhat feeble during a recent trip to Russia. That only alerted older Americans to look for another Nixon comeback. +He had, after all, played an improbably long, large -- sometimes unwelcome -- part in their lives and time, in a public career that lasted for nearly 50 years after he first won election to Congress in 1946. And he had seemed indomitable (or, to the many who did not love him, relentless), returning again and again to prominence after defeats and a disgrace that would have finished other politicians. + At his death, he had won his way painfully back from the Watergate scandal that had driven him from the White House in 1974 to a relatively respected position as elder statesman, political analyst, author and commentator. President Clinton paid tribute to him as a wise counselor on foreign policy. +Richard Nixon's jowly, beard-shadowed face, the ski-jump nose and the widow's peak, the arms upstretched in the V-sign, had been so often pictured and caricatured, his presence had become such a familiar one in the land, he had been so often in the heat of controversy, that it was hard to realize the nation really would not "have Nixon to kick around anymore." +That famous remark, directed at the press with which he so often warred, was the exit line in a self-proclaimed "last press conference" after he lost to Edmund G. (Pat) Brown in a race for governor of California in 1962. And that defeat came only two years after Mr. Nixon had lost to John F. Kennedy in the most celebrated, and the closest, Presidential election of modern times. +Yet in 1968, despite those crushing blows, he was elected in another close campaign as the 37th President of the United States. Four years later, Richard M. Nixon won a second term in one of the biggest landslides on record. +Americans young enough never to have voted for or against him -- he did not seek office after 1972 -- probably thought of Mr. Nixon mostly as the first President forced to resign the nation's highest office. And that, no doubt, is how he will be characterized in the thumbnail historical sketches of the future (it may be as the only President forced to resign). +That description is accurate and perhaps fair enough, but it leaves out much about the only American other than Franklin D. Roosevelt to have been nominated on five national tickets, to run for President or Vice President. Each won four times in those five elections, Mr. Nixon capturing two terms in each office. +It does not tell much, either, about the remarkable and contradictory record of a man who won early fame as a determined Communist-hunter, then became the President who conceived and carried out an "opening to China" that ended decades of silence between the United States and the second-largest Communist power. An unrelenting hawk in pursuing the war in Vietnam, he nevertheless, in 1972, entered into the first significant arms-limitation treaty with what was then the Soviet Union. +A Republican and a self-styled conservative, Richard Nixon was the only President ever to impose wage-and-price controls in peacetime. He sponsored and suffered the defeat of the Family Assistance Plan, essentially a guaranteed annual income and still the most far-reaching reform of welfare ever seriously debated. And in 1970, the Nixon Administration -- elected not least by a "white backlash" against the gains of black Americans -- helped desegregate more schools in the South than had any of its predecessors. +Those future sketches may not even include events in Mr. Nixon's career that have achieved near-mythic status. Even before his epic contest with John F. Kennedy in 1960, his so-called "Checkers" speech, rebutting charges of accepting illicit contributions, was a political masterpiece that may have saved the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign in 1952. It also became the butt of a generation's jokes, and is still derided by persons who neither saw nor heard it, because of its maudlin appeal to public sentimentality. +(The Checkers speech was named after a dog that had been given to the Nixon family, a pet Mr. Nixon said the family loved too much to even think of returning.) The speech attracted the largest television audience up to that time -- a record not surpassed until Mr. Nixon and John F. Kennedy engaged in the first televised Presidential debate in 1960. +To characterize Richard Nixon only as a President forced to resign would say little about a career and a character steeped in controversy long before Watergate. He was a tough and ruthless competitor who seldom hesitated to cut corners or engage in questionable tactics, and many opponents never forgave what they regarded as his smears and trickery. Though he made himself the heir apparent to President Eisenhower, and campaigned in that role against Kennedy in 1960, Eisenhower tried to dump him as Vice President in 1956 and secretly sought to thwart his Presidential nomination in 1960. +Nor does his resignation, which was preceded by two years of unrelenting investigation and shrill publicity, tell much about a personality that was clearly withdrawn and perhaps tortured. Mr. Nixon was a rare example of a lonely introvert who rose to the top in the extroverted world of elective politics. The unremitting effort to do so -- to convince the public that a shy and withdrawn man was a genial backslapper -- must have cost him a great deal psychologically; and it fixed on him the enduring suspicion that he never allowed Americans to see the "real Nixon." He rarely did. +Perhaps partially because of a perceived need to conceal his real self, Mr. Nixon was a secretive man, both personally and as President. His profound insecurities seemed strangely to have been enlarged when he achieved the White House, a goal he had tenaciously pursued, and became for a time the most powerful man in the world. Perhaps he felt he had more to lose; and one reason he tried to "stonewall" the Watergate break-in, leading to his downfall, seems to have been an almost fanatic unwillingness to "give in" to the enemies he imagined all around him. + Such insecurities may have been rooted in a lonely and emotionally deprived childhood. A mother he and all who knew her regarded as a "saint" may have provided less warm motherly love than saintly Quaker examples of determination, hard work, discipline, emotional privacy, self-control. These were qualities that marked Richard Nixon's life from adolescence in Whittier, Calif., to law school at Duke University, to the White House, in the last 20 years of decline and recovery, in his final desire to be subjected to no extraordinary life-saving procedures. In all of that life, he remained essentially a man alone, one who had always believed that people did not like him. +Bryce Harlow, a Republican who knew Mr. Nixon well and served him faithfully, believed that in youth he had been "hurt very deeply by somebody he trusted. . . . He never got over it and never trusted anybody again. But in life we get back what we plow into it." Indeed, if Richard Nixon trusted no one, millions of Americans never trusted him. +Arthur Burns, whom Mr. Nixon appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve, once wondered "if he ever really had a good, close, personal friend." Rather sadly, Mr. Burns decided not. "A friend like that could have saved him," he said -- from his lifelong isolation, surely, perhaps from his inability to trust, hence to be trusted outside his family circle. +Henry Kissinger, whose name will always be associated with Mr. Nixon's, once said to the journalist Hugh Sidey, "Can you imagine what Nixon would have been had somebody loved him? . . . He would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him." +Perhaps he might have been. There are those who believe he was. They probably did not include Richard Milhous Nixon, who in the aftermath of Watergate, uncharacteristically near tears, told David Frost that he had "let down my friends . . . let down the country . . . let down the American people." + +LOAD-DATE: April 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +146 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 24, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +GOOD HEALTH; +IS MISPLACING YOUR GLASSES ALZHEIMERS + +BYLINE: By Robin Marantz Henig; Robin Marantz Henig, who writes frequently for this magazine, is the author of "The Myth of Senility" and, most recently, "A Dancing Matrix: How Science Confronts Emerging Viruses." + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 72; Column 1; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 2303 words + +IN LITTLE MORE THAN A DECADE, ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE HAS moved from an obscure and supposedly rare condition to become the nation's fourth-leading cause of death. The disease slowly but relentlessly eviscerates a lifetime of memories, destroying brain cells and blocking communication from one cell to another. It eventually erases all that makes a person alive, unique and human. A recent Gallup Poll found that one of every three Americans now knows someone who has it and that nearly 50 percent worry about developing it themselves. The disease afflicts four million people, and family after family has a sad story to tell about it. + Harriet H., for example, says she did not understand her husband's condition until the night they gave a dinner party at their suburban Washington home. "It was a very nice evening; we all had a wonderful time," she says. "And then as people were getting ready to leave, my husband put on his coat to leave with them. He didn't know he was in his own home." +IN PART BECAUSE OF THE INCREASED FAMILIARITY WITH THE ailment, there is concern in the medical world that people, and occasionally their doctors, are jumping too quickly to a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease when all that's happening is normal aging. Scientists now recognize that Alzheimer's is totally different from the memory lapses that plague everyone who gets old; it is a specific, organic condition that develops only in some human brains. + "There is some tendency to diagnose Alzheimer's disease too readily when one is presented with the everyday kind of forgetfulness that all of us have," says Leonard Berg, professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and chairman of the medical and scientific board of the Alzheimer's Association. "Alzheimer's disease is the new phrase on the block." + Being too quick to the diagnosis can be tragic. In making such a judgment, the doctor might be overlooking some physical and potentially treatable condition that can cause almost identical symptoms. What looks like Alzheimer's might, in fact, be caused by one of scores of underlying, often treatable, conditions -- including depression, drug intoxication, thyroid imbalance, vitamin B-12 deficiency, even a mild heart attack. + The first step when evaluating an elderly patient complaining of memory loss is "to do a neurologic exam to see if the patient really has dementia," says Daniel A. Pollen, a neurologist at the University of Massachusetts. Dementia is the loss of intellectual abilities, like memory, judgment and language, without a loss of consciousness or alertness. "Then, if there is dementia, you have to look for a treatable cause that might explain it," adds Pollen, the author of "Hannah's Heirs: The Quest for the Genetic Origins of Alzheimer's Disease." A thorough examination is the only way to rule out these possibilities. + The disease is named after Alois Alzheimer, a German psychiatrist who in 1907 reported the perplexing case of a 51-year-old woman who experienced intellectual deterioration. When his patient died, incontinent and bedridden, four years later, Alzheimer conducted an autopsy of her brain. He found it riddled with two abnormal cell formations that he characterized as "plaques" and "tangles." These two types of brain cell masses are today the hallmarks of the neurological disease that bears his name. + Subsequent research has shown that the plaques are made of a brain protein known as beta-amyloid and that the tangles consist of abnormal nerve cell filaments wrapped around each other like a fraying piece of twine. To this day, the only way that Alzheimer's disease can be diagnosed with absolute certainty is if brain tissue examined under a microscope, usually after death, turns up sufficient evidence of these tangles and plaques. Brain biopsies are rarely done because they are difficult and dangerous. + For many years, the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease was used only for early-onset, then called "presenile," dementia. "When I went to medical school in the 40's, we were taught that Alzheimer's disease was a very rare disorder affecting people in their 40's and 50's and that none of us was ever going to see a case in our lifetimes," Berg says. "They told us that something else happens to old people, but because it affected people in their 60's and 70's, they weren't going to go into that." + Gradually, though, scientists realized that the same plaques and tangles that appeared in the brains of people who died of presenile dementia were found in the brains of people with a later onset of the very same symptoms. Since the late 1970's, Alzheimer's disease has been used to mean dementia caused by a specific kind of brain degeneration no matter what the age of the patient. + In much of medicine, the diagnosis of a specific disease is made by ruling out others. This is true of Alzheimer's. "If you have a good history of progression over a year or more, and if you've ruled out the possible reversible causes of the symptoms, you can usually make a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease," Pollen says. "Some people like to do MRI or CT scans to see whether there's brain atrophy -- but these are only consistent with the diagnosis, not proof." + Reversible pseudo-dementia occurs in only about 10 percent of patients who come in for evaluations. Still, it's worth looking for, since the alternative is to consign someone with a treatable disease to a category of illness that's progressive and incurable. + Just as there are reports of overdiagnosis, so too are there reports of underdiagnosis. Some physicians are reluctant to give such a dire name to a patient's condition; instead, they say the forgetfulness and confusion are the inevitable result of aging. "A patient came to us just a few weeks ago with dementia, who had been told by his doctor that it's just normal aging, and there's nothing anyone can do," Pollen says. It may not prove to be either; it's possible that something can be done or that it's not normal aging at all but rather a case of Alzheimer's. + Overdiagnosis does not completely explain why Alzheimer's seems so common today, affecting a million more Americans than a decade ago. A fuller explanation is the population growth of the people at highest risk. Alzheimer's is overwhelmingly a disease of very old age. Those over 85 represent the fastest-growing segment of the population. As this age group expands, the number with the disease is expected to grow exponentially, with as many as 14 million by the year 2050. + The prevalence rates rise steeply with age, according to a 1989 study conducted in the working-class neighborhood of East Boston. "We went door to door and interviewed everyone over 65," says Dr. Denis A. Evans, who coordinated the study while at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. More than 3,800 older people were interviewed and 467 were asked to come to a health center for further evaluations. From this sample, Evans's group concluded that for people aged 65 to 74, the prevalence of Alzheimer's was 3 percent; for those aged 75 to 84, it was 19 percent, and for people over the age of 85, the rate of Alzheimer's disease was an astonishing 47 percent. Earlier estimates had put the rate at closer to 20 to 30 percent. + "The age distribution curve," says Evans, now at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, "implies a dramatic increase in prevalence of the illness in the years ahead." The economic implications are staggering. The four million who have the disease now cost the nation some $90 billion a year. "Imagine the whole state of Texas," says Zaven S. Khachaturian, associate director of the National Institute on Aging. "Imagine all those people in need of long-term nursing home care. Our society simply cannot afford it." + In response to the problem, Federal support for Alzheimer's research has increased tenfold since 1983. This has led to an eruption of scientific discoveries in the past few years. Biologists have now identified several genetic markers that seem to correlate with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, which affects as many as 10 percent of Alzheimer's patients. + For the past 15 years, researchers have focused on the plaques and tangles identified by Alzheimer back in 1907. These brain abnormalities are most plentiful in two critical regions of the brain: the hippocampus, which controls memory, and the cerebral cortex, which controls higher order thinking and reasoning. + In those same regions, you can also find high concentrations of beta-amyloid, the protein in many of the plaques. This finding led to the amyloid hypothesis: that the first step in a sequence of destructive events in the brain involves beta-amyloid. But a small group of Alzheimer's researchers have questioned the amyloid hypothesis, saying the presence of beta-amyloid in Alzheimer's brains is the result, rather than the cause, of the brain cell devastation. + Then last fall, scientists at Duke University made one of the most important discoveries since Alois Alzheimer's original finding. They linked a different gene to an increased susceptibility to the most common form of Alzheimer's, the form that strikes after the age of 65. + The Duke scientists, led by Allen D. Roses, a neurobiologist, offered an alternative to the amyloid hypothesis. They proposed that the first step in the brain cell degeneration involves a protein called apolipoprotein E (ApoE). + The scientists found that 64 percent of Alzheimer's patients had at least one gene coding for the type of the ApoE protein known as E4. Among a control group, only 31 percent did. And they charted a clear relationship between the ApoE types and the age of onset of the disease. For those Alzheimer's patients with two E4 genes, one from each parent, the average age of onset was 68. For those with a single E4, paired with another type like E3, the average age was 75. For those with no E4, the average age of onset was 84. + It became clear, then, that having ApoE4 is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, just as high cholesterol is a risk factor for heart disease. "If you have E4, you're more likely to get Alzheimer's disease; if you don't have E4, you're less likely," Roses says. Research on how E4 works, he says, holds promise for a preventive therapy within the next 10 years, perhaps as simple as a pill to supply a missing brain chemical. + Just as diet and exercise can lessen the risk of heart disease for someone with high cholesterol, something in the environment might affect whether a person with E4 actually develops Alzheimer's. So far, evidence of environmental influences on Alzheimer's disease is scanty. But two recent studies have raised some possibilities. + At the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Dr. Victor Henderson reviewed the medical records and death certificates of some 2,400 women who had lived in Southern California and found that those who had been on estrogen replacement therapy were 40 percent less likely to have had Alzheimer's than those who had not taken estrogen. And at Duke, John Breitner examined 50 pairs of elderly twins who developed Alzheimer's disease at different ages -- or in which only one twin ever developed the disease -- and found that those who took anti-inflammatory drugs for arthritis were four times more likely than their co-twins to have developed Alzheimer's at a later age, or to be spared altogether. Now clinical trials are under way to see whether estrogen replacement therapy or anti-inflammatory drugs offer protection against Alzheimer's. + WHEN THE BRAIN CELL destruction begins, the effect is at first insidious. The earliest symptoms of the disease -- often noticeable only in retrospect -- are loss of recent memory and impaired judgment. But often these deficits are easily disguised. "My husband maintained his poise for a very long time," says Harriet H., whose husband's diagnosis in 1982 came after signs of decline that began eight years before. "If we ran into you on the street and you were a friend, he would say: 'How are you? Nice to see you. How's your family?' And you would think he was absolutely fine. But he would have no idea who you were. If you were a stranger from New Guinea who had just set foot on our shores, he would say the same thing." + At first, it's hard to distinguish these symptoms from normal forgetfulness. Harriet's husband, for instance, had always been absent-minded. But as the brain decays, the memory loss becomes more profound; people forget not only where they left their glasses but that they ever wore glasses. As the brain deteriorates, Alzheimer's changes not only memory but personality. One patient may lash out at a spouse or child; another, retreat into silence, or become confused, paranoid or belligerent. In the final stages, usually about 8 to 10 years after diagnosis, patients are often unable to control their bodily functioning, becoming unable to speak, swallow or recognize their own families. + Harriet cared for her husband at home for 10 years. Finally, when he could no longer walk and barely recognized anyone, she put him in a nursing home. Since there is no cure, this is where most Alzheimer's patients spend their last years -- bedridden, incontinent, an empty, sad shell of what they once were. + Curiously, the body often stays intact while the mind falls to pieces. Harriet is still moved to tears by her husband's face, which looks younger than its 80 years. "He's always had a very sweet face. Now it's just the same sweet face, but it's lost all its tension." Despite his mute helplessness, she can recognize in that face the man she once loved, the man who, in a changed but no less powerful way, she loves still. "It's a very dear face. He's a very dear man." + +LOAD-DATE: May 12, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +147 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 25, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Carjacker Unnerves the Elderly of Queens + +BYLINE: By LYNETTE HOLLOWAY + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 740 words + +Eight times now he has struck in broad daylight in several Queens neighborhoods, a lone attacker following his elderly victims from banks, threatening them at the point of a silver pistol as he demands money and sometimes a car. +Once he pistol-whipped, robbed and shot a woman inside the garage of her home. Once he stole a woman's handbag as she was unloading packages in the driveway of her house. And another time, he entered the passenger side of a man's car, demanded money and ordered him out. + The gunman, whom the police are calling the Silver Gun Carjacker, is still at large. But on Friday the police released a photograph of a man they identified as a suspect in the robberies, which began on March 21. +In the Queens neighborhoods of Bayside, Whitestone and Richmond Hill, where the robberies have occurred, people have altered their daily routines if only in subtle ways. Some say they are alternating their use of bank teller lines and cash machines. Others say they cast more glances over their shoulders than they used to or check their rear-view mirrors to see if anyone is following them. But even his victims are going on with their lives, saying it is hard to escape crime in a city like New York. +"My mother wanted to go out to the bank alone a few days after the attack," said Gayle Sablich, 35, a resident of Bayside whose parents were attacked in their driveway after they returned home from the bank 12 days ago. "What can they do? Stay in the house and barricade themselves? It's gotten me sick on the other hand, and I'm hesitant to go out without asking someone to join me." +Neal Vartanian, district manager for City Councilman Michael J. Abel, who represents areas including Whitestone, Bayside and parts of Flushing, said that people had expressed more anger and frustration than fear over the incidents. +"People are just being careful," Mr. Vartanian said. "They are, however, concerned about whether this type of thing is going to increase. They do want more police protection, and they want this thing solved. We've had a lot of problems with car thefts in these communities, and people are just fed up." +So far, the only pattern to emerge is that the gunman scouts most of his victims at banks, watching to see how much money is withdrawn, then follows them home and accosts them in their driveway or front door, the police said. He works mostly near bridges for a quick getaway. In Whitestone and Flushing, four attacks have occurred near the Cross Island Parkway, Utopia Parkway and the Clearview Expressway. In Bayside, the attacks have occurred near the Clearview Expressway, Francis Lewis Boulevard and the Union Turnpike. +Meanwhile, investigators have found themselves in the unusual situation of having to put a name to a face. The photograph of the gunman was made by surveillance cameras last Monday in a Flushing bank where the police say he was scouting another victim. +"We're advising people to take a good look at this picture and to beware," said John Miller, deputy commissioner of public information for the New York City Police Department. "We're working at an extra advantage here because it's not often that you have a picture of the person you're after." +Lieut. Kenneth Carlson, commanding officer of the Queens robbery squad, said officers are working on the case around the clock, including uniformed and undercover patrols. +"It's a difficult case because we don't have one bank," Lieutenant Carlson said. "And except for the proximity to major highways and the age of the victims, we really don't have any common denominators." +In five of the robberies, the man showed victims a silver pistol, and in each case, he took both cash and credit cards. Four times, the victim's car was stolen. +Last Tuesday, Constance Vieira was attacked in the garage of her Whitestone home on 154th Street at 12:45 P.M. The police say the gunman pistol-whipped her and shot her in the stomach after she refused to turn over her money and the keys to her Oldsmobile. She is serious but stable condition at New York Hospital Medical Center in Queens. +About an hour after assaulting Ms. Vieira, he drove her car to Richmond Hill, where he accosted 79-year-old Leo Feiner, who was in the parking lot outside his office at 129th Street and 101st Avenue. He escaped with Mr. Feiner's white Nissan Maxima and $36. Mr. Feiner is the gunman's most recent known victim, the police said. + +LOAD-DATE: April 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Map of Queens showing locations of recent carjackings. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +148 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 26, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +High Blood Pressure Tied to Memory Decline + +BYLINE: By DANIEL GOLEMAN + +SECTION: Section C; Page 10; Column 5; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 491 words + +FOR the elderly, chronic high blood pressure over the course of several years can lead to mental decline beyond that caused by the natural course of aging, researchers have found. +"The longer you have high blood pressure, the worse the decline, especially on tests of short-term memory and attention," said Dr. Merrill Elias, a psychologist at the University of Maine who reported the results at the meeting of the Society for Behavioral Medicine in Boston this month. + Older people with high diastolic blood pressure readings -- above 90 for the lower of the two readings -- had the greatest decline in memory and in fluid intelligence, mental tasks involving short-term memory, according to a report at the meeting by Dr. Michael Robbins, Dr. Elias's co-author on the paper. +In another study, in which people were tested regularly for 15 years, Dr. Elias also found that the longer a person's blood pressure was elevated, the greater their decline on a test of neurological impairment. +The findings corroborate earlier results with 1,702 men and women taking part in the Framingham Heart Study. People whose blood pressure was in the hypertensive range in the late 1950's and early 1960's, when the study began, had lower scores on mental tests 15 years later, Dr. Elias reported last September in The American Journal of Epidemiology. +Each rise of 20 millimeters of mercury in diastolic blood pressure that continued for 8 to 10 years was associated with a drop of about a quarter of a standard deviation on tests of some kinds of memory, including the ability to recall something just read. That amounts to 2 or 3 points on an intelligence scale where 100 is average. + +A Slow Decline + The negative impact of hypertension on mental abilities develops slowly, over the course of several years. Although Dr. Elias's study noted a drop after five years, the difference did not become especially notable until later. "At 10 years," he said, "you start to see larger drops and after 15 years, they are much more pronounced, especially for memory." +Dr. Elias suggests that hypertension may result in some sort of brain injury. Research with animals shows that chronic high blood pressure makes the oxygen supply to the brain less efficient. +When sustained over many years, hypertension also leads to small lesions throughout the brain, Dr. Elias said, "speeding up arteriosclerosis in the small arteries of the brain." He added, "You see small areas of microscopic tissue damage, which can hamper cerebral blood flow." +The results are another reason, apart from the increased risk of heart disease or stroke, for people with high blood pressure to treat it. +"If your blood pressure is in the hypertensive range, you have a higher likelihood of a cognitive decline in the years ahead," Dr. Elias said. "But if a medication holds the levels down, you are not going to have further damage. It puts you in a holding pattern." + +LOAD-DATE: April 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +149 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 26, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Mental Decline in Aging Need Not Be Inevitable + +BYLINE: By DANIEL GOLEMAN + +SECTION: Section C; Page 1; Column 4; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 1494 words + +SHE was 69, and still active as a professor at Harvard University. But, she told a research team there, she had begun to find it hard to recall the names of newer faculty members, and not long ago completely forgot her classroom number when asking for a slide projector to be set up. Just that morning, she said, she was at a loss to think of the word for "the thing you turn eggs over with." +She had one question for the research team, assembled to study the normal course of mental aging: "Am I losing it?" + That question, on the minds of thousands of people as they age, is the principal focus of a new wave of scientific inquiry on the decline in mental ability as people grow old. The findings are challenging some basic assumptions, like the belief that such decline is a natural part of the aging process, irrespective of a person's general health. +In fact, a number of recent studies have found that although it is common, it is by no means inevitable. From 20 to 30 percent of people in their 80's who volunteer for cognitive testing perform as well as volunteers in their 30's and 40's, who are presumably in their mental prime. +The intellectual and creative productivity in later life of such public figures as Martha Graham and Pablo Picasso and more recently of George Abbott, who at 106 helped plan the Broadway revival of "Damn Yankees," may represent not so much an exception as an ideal, some experts on aging now are saying. +Dr. K. Warner Schaie, a psychologist at Pennsylvania State University, is the director of a major study of normal mental decline in the elderly. For more than 35 years, his study has been following more than 5,000 men and women who have been tested regularly. +Dr. Schaie's research seeks to fill a gap in gerontological research, which, another geronotologist, Dr. Jack Rowe, said, "has focused on disease and disability, and neglected the prospects of maintaining high functioning in old age." Dr. Rowe is the president of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City and heads a research network on successful aging sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation. +Gerontolologists have focused on "the 6 to 15 percent of the elderly who are frail, and then lumped everyone else as 'normal,' " Dr. Rowe said, adding, "But there is a huge variation from person to person among older people: the older a group gets, the less like each other they become." +Dr. Schaie's study looks at three key areas of mental ability: the spatial skills involved in, say, assembling a piece of furniture from printed directions; the inductive reasoning used to read a bus timetable; and the verbal fluency that determines how readily you can think of a word. The men and women in the study were tested regularly in these areas over the decades; those who developed severely disabling diseases or senility were dropped from the study. Dr. Schaie's most recent findings were reported this month in The American Psychologist. + +Different Rates of Decline + Although the study's results show that on average, the decline in these basic mental abilities begins gradually in the middle to late 60's and accelerates in the late 70's, the rate of decline differs for various mental faculties and differs in men and women. +The sharpest declines are seen in the area of basic mathematics. At 74, men scored about a third lower on tests of addition than they had in their 50's. For women, the drop was slightly greater. By their late 80's, both men and women were only about half as adept in basic math as they had been in their 50's. +For men, the mental ability showing the least decline is spatial orientation, used, for example, in reading a map correctly. By the late 80's, it had dropped by only about one-eighth on average. +For women, the most enduring mental skill is inductive reasoning, assessing the information in a timetable, for instance. As women reached their late 80's, it had dropped just over one-eighth from its height in middle age. +One of the drastic declines for women proved to be in verbal comprehension, understanding what one reads; while that ability dropped relatively little into the 70's, it plummeted by about one-quarter during the 80's. For men, verbal understanding declined only slightly in those years. +Another study of normal memory loss, this one by Dr. Richard Mohs, a psychologist at Mount Sinai Medical School who is the acting director of a research consortium on normal memory loss and aging sponsored by the Charles A. Dana Foundation, has found that different kinds of memory differ in their vulnerability to aging. "Crystalized" memory, vocabulary or other knowledge accumulated over the years "holds up very well into old age," Dr. Mohs said. These abilities include knowing what words mean, using language and answering questions. +But "fluid" memory, the ability to add new information to memory or to recall something that happened recently, is more prone to decline, beginning in the 60's. He found little decline in very short-term memory, like remembering a telephone number that one has just looked up. + +A Test of Mental Skills + + + Whether a given man or woman is undergoing a consequential decline is a question that can only be answered by assessing them individually. Toward that end, a pair of Harvard psychologists, Douglas Powell and Kean Whitla, have designed a computerized test of mental skills like long- and short-term memory, attention, reasoning and calculation; they reported the test in the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science. +They are the researchers whom the 69-year-old professor asked whether she was "losing it." Their test compares a person's score with norms for others the same age, for people who are still in middle age and for others in their own professional group. +Dr. Schaie's study has found certain predictors for good mental function in old age. These include a high level of ability in reading comprehension or verbal fluency, a successful career or some other active involvement through life and continuing keen mental interests after retirement. Having a flexible attitude in middle age was also a promising indicator. "There is less mental decline in people who adapt easily to change, who like learning new things and enjoy going to new places," Dr. Schaie said. +The study also found that simply living with someone with these characteristics is beneficial. Over the course of long marriages, it found, spouses' scores on mental abilities tend to converge, with the brighter partner elevating the other's score. +"It helps to have a high-functioning spouse, since this is your major, immediate social environment and support," Dr. Schaie said. "You benefit cognitively." +Dr. Rowe and his colleagues have come up with a slightly different set of predictors of good mental functioning in old age. In a recently completed study of 1,300 men and women whose average age was 75 and who had stayed in good health, they found that besides a lifelong habit of intellectual activity, two other predictors of good mental function were physical: getting regular strenuous activity and having good pulmonary function. They also found a psychological factor: having a sense of mastery, a feeling of being in control of what happens in life rather than being at the mercy of circumstance. + +Training Can Help + + + Dr. Schaie's study has also found that it may be possible to slow or even reverse the mental declines that come with aging. Men and women in their 70's were chosen at random from those in his ongoing study for a five-hour training course in spatial orientation and inductive reasoning, the abilities in which men and women respectively show the largest drops in those years. The coaching in spatial orientation included tips on how to read a road map, and in inductive reasoning, how to recognize rules of thumb helpful in practical decision-making, like knowing from a timetable what train to take. +About 40 percent of those who took the tutorial had an increase in their scores to levels they had had 14 years before, in their early 60's. Seven years later, as the group entered their 80's, the five hours of tutoring still showed surprisingly strong effects, slowing mental declines. Those tutored were at the same levels as seven years earlier, just before the first coaching. +By contrast, those who had no coaching had declined greatly. "Presumably if we had given them booster sessions there would have been much less decline," Dr. Schaie said. +Dr. Rowe said: "It's an optimistic picture. We are responsible for our own old age: it's increasingly clear that factors under our control or which we can modify should enhance our capacity to have a successful old age." +The MacArthur researchers are moving on to design ways to slow or reverse the mental declines that have been taken as the norm. "It's time to change people's lives," Dr. Rowe said, "not just study them." + +LOAD-DATE: April 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "What the Mind Loses as It Ages" shows the decline of different mental capacities at varying rates as people age. (pg. C10) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +150 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 27, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +THE 37TH PRESIDENT: THE OVERVIEW; +Rainy Prologue to Subdued Funeral for Nixon + +BYLINE: By MAUREEN DOWD, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1245 words + +DATELINE: YORBA LINDA, Calif., April 26 + +In a scene worthy of "King Lear," the usually sunny California sky unleashed thunder, lightning, rain and hail today as Richard M. Nixon's body returned to his birthplace in a plain wooden coffin covered by a flag. +The former President's two sad-eyed daughters, Tricia and Julie, accompanied by their families and the Rev. Billy Graham, followed the coffin through the raging elements and delivered him to the Nixon library, where he will be "planted," as he dryly put it to a friend a couple of years ago, under an oak tree outside the little wooden bungalow where he was born. + As the hearse rolled down Yorba Linda Boulevard, with two small American flags on its hood reminiscent of the flag pin that Mr. Nixon always wore in his lapel, an elderly disabled veteran threw her own small flag at the car in tribute. With the rain acting as an adhesive, the flag remained stuck to the window as the car pulled up to the library. +The family had arrived at 12:30 P.M. at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station after a simple 15-minute departure ceremony and a 21-gun salute this morning at the Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh, N.Y. The coffin was carried west on the same Air Force plane that delivered the 37th President into exile in California in 1974, after the Watergate scandal forced him to resign. +But if the thing forever to be yearned for, with Richard Nixon, was affection and approval, he was bathed in that today, as thousands of people shivered and huddled under umbrellas, clutching bouquets and flags and presents and poems, for the chance to catch a glimpse, or a picture, or a video, of the military pallbearers carrying the coffin past the citrus trees into the library as "Hail to the Chief" played. The solemnity of the moment was marred a bit when the music from the military band was drowned out by the sound of seven television news helicopters crisscrossing the sky. +Mr. Nixon would lie in state throughout the night, until the funeral on Wednesday afternoon. +At five minutes past 3, the long line of people, who had been waiting since early morning, began filing into the library scented with roses, carnations, chrysanthemums and lilies. They passed a large color photograph of Mr. Nixon in his prime, smiling and thumbs up, along with pictures from some of the triumphant moments in Mr. Nixon's turbulent career: standing on the Great Wall of China, with Anwar el-Sadat at the pyramids, and more recently with Boris N. Yeltsin before the Russian leader snubbed him earlier this year. +As an honor guard stood sentry by the coffin, people of all ages -- some in strollers, some in wheelchairs -- filed into the entrance as hailstones the size of peas bounced off the sidewalk. As they passed the closed coffin, some made the sign of the cross, others doffed their hats or placed their hands over their hearts. They had checked their cameras at the door. + +File of the Silent Majority + +The largely white, middle-class crowd seemed subdued and quiet, conjuring up images of the great Silent Majority that Mr. Nixon so often appealed to in moments of political peril. +The former President would have appreciated this crowd. Jack Brennan, his chief of staff during the first years after his resignation, told reporters today that Mr. Nixon had designed his funeral with precisely these people in mind, specifying a plain wooden coffin and rejecting the idea of a grand state ceremonial in Washington. To Mr. Nixon, these were the sort of people who stood by him while the people in Washington deserted him. +"The blue-collar guys were more his type of people, even though the world didn't think so," Mr. Brennan said. "He wanted the simple stuff. He had an affinity for the blue-collar people, the 'dese, dem, dose' guys." +Whether they liked him or not, Mr. Nixon had an outsized presence in the lives of those that came to pay last respects today. +The scene was almost like a cathartic picnic, as people sat in lawn chairs before the foul weather began, and the children played games like solitaire and tic-tac-toe. Many came from the little towns in Orange County where Richard Nixon spent his youth -- Whittier, Fullerton, Dana Point, Placentia, Yorba Linda itself. +Near the spot where the motorcade would soon go by, Denis Jana stood, holding up a picture of himself and a smiling Richard Nixon at the Acropolis in 1967. The history teacher at National University in San Diego had met Mr. Nixon, dressed formally in a suit as always, sightseeing in Greece. And now he wanted to hold up the picture taken before a Presidency marred by Vietnam and Watergate. +Mr. Jana also had a framed picture of a signed form letter he had received from President Gerald R. Ford, thanking him for his letter in support of the Nixon pardon. +And, on top of that, he was handing out copies of a poem written by his 9-year-old daughter, Jennifer-Erin, who was at his side, munching on crackers. +"Swallow it," he barked at her. "Spit it out. Recite your poem for these people." +She obliged proudly, finishing the recitation with this couplet: +"Now he goes to his darling Pat. +We will remember him with a top hat." +Caroline Morse of Escondido said she had stayed up all night Friday after Mr. Nixon died, unable to sleep, jotting down a poem on scraps of paper by her bed. She had the finished product, framed, which included a note to Mr. Nixon's daughters and four grandchildren: "It is never easy to lose a parent. Please take heart." +"I don't think a single person ever sat in the Oval Office who did not make a mistake," she said. "Nixon was nailed to the cross because of Watergate. But he was held to a higher standard. Look who's sitting in the Oval Office now." +There were a few in the crowd who were not Nixon partisans. +Dee Flanagan, a 33-year-old nurse from Long Beach, said her father was a doorkeeper at the Senate when Mr. Nixon resigned and that she had come "to get closure on the whole Nixon ordeal." +"He was a liar and a crook, and the Ford-Nixon sweetheart deal on the pardon paved the way for Reagan and Bush to let people off in Iran-contra," she said, adding "History is getting all glossed over here." +Even many in the crowd who had come to bid him good-bye, readily acknowleged his foibles. +"I disagree with some of his paranoia in Washington, his personal police force, his certain regal quality," said Dan Payne of Newport Beach. "But I think he did a splendid job in the last 20 years recouping himself. He didn't just lie over and die." +Mr. Nixon brought forth Shakespearean references from both his admirers and detractors. "He strutted his hour upon the stage," said Ms. Flanagan, quoting from "Macbeth." "Now he is no more." +Mike Yoder of Fullerton said: "I keep thinking about 'Hamlet': 'Take him for all he's worth. He was a man. We shall never see his like again.' That's a paraphrase, that's not exact, but that's what I keep thinking about Nixon." +As the once-exiled leader's daughters brought him to his burial place, the storm began howling and raging, recalling the scene in "King Lear" when one of Lear's daughters turns the King out into the storm, with the admonition: "To willful men, the injuries that they themselves procure must be their schoolmasters." +Many in the crowd seemed flabbergasted at the freakish tempest. When the hail began falling, a member of a group of Chinese mourners commented, "When a great man dies, there are always storms." + +LOAD-DATE: April 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: The coffin of former President Richard M. Nixon is carried to an Air Force plane at Stewart Air National Guard Base at Newburgh, N.Y., yesterday for the flight to the El Toro Marine Corps Air Base in California. (Andrea Mohin/The New York Times) (pg. A1); Richard M. Nixon's daughters, Tricia Cox, left, and Julie Eisenhower at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in California yesterday, where their father's coffin was loaded into a hearse for the trip to Yorba Linda. (Associated Press) (pg. A14) + +Map shows the location of Yorba Linda, California. (pg. A14) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +151 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 29, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +TV Weekend; +How a Confederate Widow Became the Oldest + +BYLINE: By JOHN J. O'CONNOR + +SECTION: Section D; Page 16; Column 3; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 892 words + +Like the best-selling novel by Allan Gurganus, the television adaptation of "Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All" is a big old sprawling affair, beginning in the 1980's at a North Carolina home for the elderly and riding memories that reach back to the Civil War. The four-hour production will be broadcast on Sunday and Tuesday, at 9 P.M. +The title character is feisty Lucy Marsden, now 99 and played by Anne Bancroft. Widowed for nearly 50 years, Lucy is looking forward to her 100th birthday and an elaborate celebration planned by the town. Meanwhile, she confides that "the memories have been swarmin' lately." She thinks about 1899, the year she met and married Capt. William Marsden, a Civil War veteran. She, played by Diane Lane ("Lonesome Dove"), is 14 and, for no discernible reason, convinced that she isn't pretty. He, portrayed by Donald Sutherland, is 50, and, although basically gentle and genteel, is haunted by the war, particularly the death of his beloved boyhood friend. + Their marriage is a tempestuous, sometimes abusive affair, eventually producing six children. The lonely, uncertain and very young Lucy gets pointers on growing up from the initially hostile Castalia (Cicely Tyson), the captain's housekeeper and former slave. In flashbacks to the Civil War, the captain keeps nurturing the memory of his friend's death. The dead boy becomes a living presence in Lucy's family. At several points, the marriage teeters on disintegration, but two things keep it going. The captain adores his wife ("I surely do love your observations, Lucille"), and she comes to love him truly, not least his frequent physical advances. +"Confederate Widow" meanders, somewhat recklessly at times, but this handsome production manages to encompass an enormous number of the story's myriad eccentric details, right down to talk about the war chaplain who loved his wife so much that he wore her dress under his uniform. Some of the modern-day scenes in the retirement home are a touch too pat, especially the E. G. Marshall character of a grumpy professor who is finally won over by spunky Lucy's positive thinking. But Gwen Verdon is delightful as the liveliest member of a geriatric dance group called the Dixie Cups. +The heart of the drama, however, beats in the performances, all quite splendid, of Ms. Lane, Mr. Sutherland and Ms. Tyson. Struggling to survive and connect, their characters reflect the haunting influence of the Civil War that continues to this day. That's when this peculiar story works best. + +'Tonya and Nancy' +'The Inside Story' +NBC, tomorrow at 8 P.M. +(Channel 4 in New York) +They're back, quicker than you can say rip-off. This inside story, pieced together by Phil Penningroth ("Amy Fisher: My Story") from the very public records, holds no surprises. The film's construction, though, is diabolically clever. +A character called the Writer (Dennis Boutsikaris) tells how "sometimes I think this could be a fairy tale, that once upon a time there were two little girls . . ." Then as the stories of Nancy Kerrigan (Heather Langenkamp) and Tonya Harding (Alexandra Powers) unfold -- far more Tonya the Bad than Nancy the Good -- various people on the sidelines, including parents and coaches, offer their observations, pro and con, directly to the camera. +As for who was telling the truth to the police authorities about the knee-whacking incident, Tonya or her former husband, Jeff Gillooly (James Wilder), who insists that she was in on the planning, the film simply includes separate dramatized versions in support of each side. +Then in an ingenious ploy to undercut any suggestion of NBC cupidity, an entire scene takes place at the network, where one hotshot executive notes excitedly that 45 percent of the public was closely following the story of "Beauty and the Bitch" (oh, that fairy tale). "If we could get it on for sweeps," this executive says excitedly, "the ratings are going to be enormous." May sweeps officially began yesterday. +Curiously, Mr. Wilder turns Mr. Gillooly, something of a creep in his public appearances, into the film's most dynamic character. Docudramas have a nasty habit of distorting facts. In the end, the Writer, observing that the news media had moved on (except for NBC, evidently) and that Tonya was left with little other than an offer to wrestle in Japan, says, "Some fairy tales don't have a happy ending." +A journalist character gets the ultimate statement. Charging that the financial stakes have grown so enormous that the only Olympic ideal is money, and that ethics, fair play and sportsmanship are dead, he concludes, "We're all whores." Few viewers of this movie exercise will argue. + +Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All +CBS, Sunday and Tuesday at 9 P.M. +(Channel 2 in New York) + +Directed by Ken Cameron; written by Joyce Eliason, based on a book by Alan Gurganus; Ms. Eliason, supervising producer; produced by Jack Clements for the Konigsberg/Sanitsky Company; Frank Konigsberg and Larry Sanitsky, executive producers. + +Lucy Marsden . . . Diane Lane +Cap. William Marsden . . . Donald Sutherland +Older Lucy Marsden . . . Anne Bancroft +Castalia . . . Cicely Tyson +Bianca Honicut . . . Blythe Danner +Professor Taw . . . E. G. Marshall +Lady Marsden . . . Maureen Mueller +Etta Pell . . . Gwen Verdon + +LOAD-DATE: April 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +152 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 30, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +As Competition Expands, Nursing Homes Diversify + +BYLINE: By ESTHER B. FEIN + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1826 words + +From the corner outside his apartment on 51st Street in Borough Park, Brooklyn, Anthony Nardi can see patients from the Metropolitan Jewish Geriatric Center's nursing home one block away, sitting outside in their wheelchairs, their creased faces turned toward the warm noon sun. +That single-block distance pleases him immensely: he, too, is a patient of Metropolitan, having suffered two heart attacks and a stroke that left him weak beyond his 62 years -- but he is served by the staff in his home. + As a way of staying competitive with home care and the widening array of alternative services for the elderly, nursing homes in the New York area and around the country have begun to reinvent themselves, offering programs and services that reach beyond the traditional, residential institutions that so many people now say they want to avoid in favor of aging at home. +Some in the industry have compared the new nursing homes with shopping malls offering "boutique services" under one roof. Metropolitan, for example, offers adult day care and visiting nurses to people still living at home. It also has a respite program that allows people who need to go away on business or a vacation to leave an elderly relative temporarily in the nursing home's care. +The Glenn Hill Convalescent Center in Danbury, Conn., opened a housing complex for older people on the same grounds as the nursing home, offering amenities like housekeeping and meal service, while allowing them to live as independently as they like in spacious apartments designed to accommodate the needs of the elderly. +Pacific Homes in Woodland, Calif., has gone into what it calls the personal security business, in which older people in the community can pay to have the nursing home check up on them daily. +The Eddy, in Troy, N.Y., has evolved over the last decade from a 19-bed nursing home to a diversified organization providing a variety of services to some 14,000 mostly elderly clients. +For the frailest and the sickest among the elderly, and for younger people with debilitating injuries and illnesses, many nursing homes now also run subacute care units, admitting for long-term and temporary rehabilitation people who might otherwise have to remain in a hospital at greater expense. +"Our whole industry is on the verge of changing dramatically," said Craig Duncan, executive director of the Eddy. "We are moving away from an institutional base except for the frailest population, and that's because we have better-educated older consumers telling us what they want, and that is to stay out of a nursing home. If we want to maintain and gain a share of that market -- and let's face it, all of us are revenue-driven -- we had better respond." +Since these changes are fairly new, nursing home operators, both nonprofit and for-profit organizations, are still weighing which new services will prove most lucrative, said Donna L. Wagner, vice president for programs at the National Council on the Aging. +As with nursing home stays, reimbursement for these different services by Medicare, Medicaid and private insurers varies widely by state and by case. Much of the diversification by nursing homes is in areas that are not medical -- like adult day care, apartment complexes, transportation -- and are paid for out of pocket. +For someone requiring extensive care, health care experts say, putting together a home health care program either through a nursing home or other organization roughly equals, on the average, the cost of keeping someone in a traditional nursing institution, about $36,000 a year. +But the experts point out that people who can maintain their independence with support services usually heal faster and remain healthier than those forced unnecessarily into institutions, saving future health care dollars. +"Your home instead of a nursing home" is how Metropolitan's long-term home health care program was pitched to Mr. Nardi. But that also reflects the way Metropolitan and other nursing homes are responding to changing philosophies about aging that now promote independent living for people who in the past had been institutionalized. +Through Metropolitan, for example, Mr. Nardi has a home health aide who comes five days a week for seven hours each day, helping him to dress, bathe, prepare meals and go to doctors. Every two weeks he is visited by a nurse he calls a "master sergeant" who takes his blood pressure and other vital statistics. +He occasionally consults with a social worker about filing insurance forms and has blood tests done monthly in his apartment by a laboratory technician. And every four months a senior nurse comes by to re-evaluate his plan of care. Because of his age, disability and need, Mr. Nardi's costs are covered entirely by Medicare and Medicaid. + +'I'm a Free Man Here' + "There are days I can't go out of my house and days I can't get out of my bed," said Mr. Nardi, a chatty man who loves to talk about his days as a chef in Italian restaurants and to reel off sports trivia. "But I'm a free man here. I got my freedom all around. The home is still down the block." +There are about 1.7 million beds in more than 16,500 nursing homes nationwide: about 75 percent of them are for-profit concerns, 20 percent of them are nonprofit and 5 percent are operated by Federal, state and local governments. +Changes within the $70 billion nursing home industry will not lead to the extinction of those residential institutions, people in the industry and experts on aging say. With the United States Census Bureau predicting that the over-65 population will grow two and a half times over the next 40 years to more than 70 million people, and that the population of people over 85 will nearly triple to about 9 million, there will still be a demand for nursing homes. + +A Range of Services + But increasingly, people in the field say, for-profit and nonprofit nursing home operators have begun to compete not with one another but with organizations and establishments that have developed programs aimed at replacing the traditional homes. But unlike companies that provide specific services, like home care, the nursing homes hope to attract customers by providing a continuum of services that treat people, from the time they are most healthy to when they are most sick. +"They read the tea leaves correctly," said Daniel Thursz, president and chief executive officer of the National Council on the Aging. "There is still a place for nursing homes at the end of the continuum and for certain kinds of dementia. But nursing homes are facing the fact that they are only one of many alternatives and they will not be able to survive if they provide only that one service. What's going on is an important change that recognizes the desire of almost all people not to be institutionalized." +Glenn Crest, an apartment complex for older people in Danbury, Conn., was opened in December 1987 by the owners of the Glenn Hill Convalescent Center on the same grounds as the nursing home. Its owners recognized earlier than most in the industry that society was moving toward more community-based options for its increasingly aging population. +In a three-story building with 24 one-bedroom and 24 two-bedroom units -- each with a bay window, fully-equipped kitchen and bathroom, washer-dryer, living room and terrace -- Glenn Crest offers, among others services, a home-delivered meal daily, housekeeping, transportation to shopping and doctors' appointments and an emergency call system. +These services are included in the monthly rental fee, which is $1,860 for the one-bedroom apartment and $2,340 for the two-bedroom, and, like rent, is not reimbursed by insurance. Residents who get medical care in the nursing home pay extra for their treatment, which is reimbursed by either Medicare or private insurance. +Some residents have ailing spouses who live in the nursing home, and all it takes is a walk across the manicured lawns to visit. Inside the nursing home itself, Glenn Hill has a subacute care unit, respite care and a hospice. +"It made economic sense for us to expand this way," said James K. Malloy, Glenn Hill's administrator. "We've been in the business of providing services to the elderly since 1963. Reaching out to other segments of that population, meaning well people and very sick people, was logical." + +Subacute Care + One of the nontraditional services being most vigorously pursued by nursing homes is subacute care, which is comprehensive inpatient treatment for people recovering from illnesses like pneumonia, injuries like a broken hip or chronic diseases like arthritis that do not require the intensive level of diagnosis or surgery available at hospitals. +Usually, when nursing homes enter the subacute market, they broaden beyond geriatric clientele to include younger patients. Since they operate without the high overhead of hospitals, nursing home subacute care units typically charge 20 to 60 percent less than hospitals, according to studies by industry analysts and health maintenance organizations, which are increasingly sending patients from hospitals to such institutions. +A study last year by Dean Witter found that for appropriate patients, average daily charges in such units ranged from $300 to $550, while charges for the same treatment in acute care hospitals ran between $700 to $1,000. Health care analysts estimate that about 10 to 20 percent of general acute care hospital patients could be cared for in subacute care units at nursing homes. +Given the growth of managed medical care in the country and the increasing population of elderly people, industry analysts estimate that the subacute care units for nursing homes have the potential to grow into a $5 billion to $20 billion market in the next decade. + +'Everyone Is Specializing' + The field is so ripe that the American Health Care Association, which represents about 11,000 for-profit and nonprofit nursing homes, published a business guide this month to aid its members in setting up subacute care units. +"I don't know anybody in this business who just wants to keep being or buying up traditional nursing homes," said Richard F. Grosso Jr., administrator of the Lakeview Subacute Care Center in Wayne, N.J. "Everyone is specializing." His institution has changed over the last 14 years from a 120-bed traditional nursing home to a center with a variety of specialized subacute care wards, including ones for oncology and ventilators, and only 30 traditional beds. +"We shouldn't be linked to bricks and mortar," said Eli S. Feldman, chief executive officer of Metropolitan in Brooklyn. "We're here to provide the best services for the individual the way they want it, which is why we took an organization that was 100 percent institutional to where we are delivering services to 20,000 people in their own homes. We are changing as an industry. We have to evolve or we will die." + +LOAD-DATE: April 30, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: "Your home instead of a nursing home" is how Metropolitan Jewish Geriatric Center's long-term home health care program was pitched to Anthony Nardi, top right, who lives one block away from the center but has a personal care worker, Elaine Change, and a medical service coordinator, Yvonne George, center, coming by to help him. Martha and Harold Hansen have an apartment at the Glenn Hill Convalescent Center in Danbury, Conn. The center allows residents to live as independently as they like. (Susan Harris for The New York Times)(pg. 26) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +153 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 30, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO DIGEST + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 25; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk; Second Front + +LENGTH: 508 words + + +BRATTON APOLOGIZES FOR DOUBTS ON RAPE +New York City Police Commissioner William J. Bratton publicly apologized for comments from someone in his department that raised doubts about a Brooklyn women's report that she had been raped. Page 1. + +TO COMPETE, NURSING HOMES DIVERSIFY +As a way of staying competitive with home care and the widening array of alternative services for the elderly, nursing homes in the New York area and around the country have begun offering programs and services that reach beyond the traditional, residential institutions that so many people now say they want to avoid in favor of aging at home. Page 1. + +NEW YORK CITY + +HIGH SCHOOLS PICKED FOR REMEDIAL ACTION +A day after announcing that he would take over six of the city's worst-performing lower schools, Schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines said he was recommending remedial measures for 16 high schools because of academic failures. Page 27. + +GIULIANI PUTS OFF PLAN TO MERGE SERVICES +Mayor Giuliani has for now dropped plans to merge the Emergency Medical Service with the city's Fire Department, one of his administration's efforts to streamline government, in part because the city would lose reimbursements from the state. Page 27. + +OFFICERS HAILED FOR REJECTING BRIBE +After weeks in which officers have been whisked away in handcuffs, and the term "testilying," the police slang for perjury, has been added to the city's vocabulary, Mayor Giuliani brought five officers to City Hall and honored them as heroes for refusing a bribe -- a bag filled with $254,564 in cash. Page 27. + +TRIAL BEGINS IN PROSPECT PARK SLAYING +Nearly a year after a drama teacher was shot to death in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, a teen-ager went on trial for murder, accused of firing the fatal shots after the victim refused to surrender his bicycle to a group of youths. Page 26. + +Members of the Newspaper Guild approved a contract with The New York Times. Page 26. + +REGION + +L.I.R.R. CRIME DATA IS DEBATED +Five months after a gunman opened fire in a crowded commuter train and killed six passengers, Long Island Rail Road officials clashed with critics over the extent of crime on the railroad. Page 28. + +NEW GAS SAFETY WORRIES IN EDISON +An overhead electrical line, crackling and burning, fell near a natural gas transmission line, rekindling memories of a pipeline explosion five weeks ago and creating a new round of safety jitters in Edison, N.J. Page 28. + +WEATHER SEEN AS FACTOR IN PLANE CRASH +Federal investigators said they were focusing on the weather as a factor in the crash of a charter plane in Stratford, Conn., on Wednesday that killed eight people. Page 28. + +RIFKIN RECORDS SAID TO SHOW SANITY +Joel Rifkin, who has confessed to killing 17 women, was an honor student in high school, made the dean's list in college and scored in the superior category on intelligence tests, according to evidence presented by the prosecution in his murder trial. Page 29. + +About New York by Michael T. Kaufman 27 + +LOAD-DATE: April 30, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +154 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 1, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Police Arrest Man And Stepdaughter In Two Robberies + +BYLINE: By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 46; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 294 words + +A man and his 12-year-old stepdaughter were arrested yesterday in the robberies of two elderly men at public housing complexes on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the housing police said. +Investigators say they believe that the two suspects were also responsible for other recent robberies in the area. In those cases, they said, some of the victims were also elderly men who were robbed by a man and a girl. + The girl, who was not identified, and her stepfather, Stanley Everett, 34, were each charged with two counts of robbery, said Lieut. Thomas Sbordone, a housing police spokesman. +The charges resulted from two incidents on April 11 -- one in the Wald Houses at Houston Street near Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and the other in the Rutgers Houses at Madison and Clinton Streets. + +Grabbed by the Neck + In both cases, the police said, Mr. Everett and the girl followed the men off elevators, and Mr. Everett grabbed them by the neck and held them as the girl emptied their pockets. The suspects took $20 to $30 in each of the robberies, Lieut. Sbordone said. +Mr. Everett and his stepdaughter were picked up by the housing police after New York City detectives from the Seventh Precinct station house on the Lower East Side detained the two in connection with another robbery. +But when the victim in that case could not identify the suspects as his attackers, the detectives contacted the housing police to see whether they were searching for suspects who fit the description of Mr. Everett and his stepdaughter. +Lieut. Sbordone said the girl would be released into the custody of her family, possibly her mother, who the police said was apparently not involved in the robberies. "We don't think the mother was aware of this," he said. + +LOAD-DATE: May 1, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +155 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 1, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Agency Shift Wins Support From Clinton + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 25; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 838 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 30 + +In a reversal of Administration policy, President Clinton says he now supports the creation of an independent Federal agency to run Social Security, the nation's biggest social welfare program. +The change, Administration officials say, is the result of an informal deal between Mr. Clinton and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat who is chairman of the Finance Committee. In exchange for the President's support for the new agency, the officials said, Mr. Moynihan will redouble his efforts to get a health bill out of the Finance Committee by the end of May. + Mr. Moynihan and lobbyists for the elderly have long sought the change for Social Security, saying it would bolster public confidence in the program. Some 42 million people now receive monthly Social Security benefits. +Mr. Clinton's support virtually guarantees that the Social Security Administration will be given independent status. The agency, created in 1935, is now part of the Department of Health and Human Services. With outlays of $318 billion this year, Social Security accounts for 50 percent of the department's budget and 21 percent of the entire Federal budget. + +Senate Killed Previous Bills + In March, by a voice vote, the Senate approved a bill to establish Social Security as an independent agency. The House has passed similar bills three times in the last decade, most recently by a vote of 350 to 8, but those bills died in the Senate. +Donna E. Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, opposed the creation of an independent agency. Like her predecessors in the Reagan and Bush Administrations, Dr. Shalala argued that Social Security must be closely coordinated with Medicare, Medicaid and other programs run by the department. People apply for Medicare at Social Security offices. +Mr. Moynihan said, "Social Security was once a model agency run by the great civil servants of the New Deal era." But in the last 15 years, he said, "the agency has lost some of its distinctive energy" as top officials in the department focused increasingly on health policy. +In recent years, the Senator said, the Social Security Administration has been "brain dead and lost in the exurbs of the Department of Health and Human Services." As a result, he said, service to beneficiaries has deteriorated and many workers fear that Social Security will not have enough money to pay the retirement benefits they have earned. + +Agency Termed 'Vulnerable' + Representative Dan Rostenkowski, the Illinois Democrat who heads the House Ways and Means Committee, said that under the current arrangement the Social Security Administration had shown itself "vulnerable to political pressures." In the 1980's, he said, the agency improperly cut off benefits for thousands of disabled people and the agency's staff was curtailed, damaging service to the public. Social Security has 65,000 employees, down from 83,000 in 1984. +Social Security has separate trust funds to pay benefits to retired people and disabled workers. Federal officials say that the retirement program is financially secure until 2036 but that the disability insurance trust fund will run out of money next year unless Congress takes action. +Senator Richard H. Bryan, Democrat of Nevada, said, "Creation of an independent Social Security agency will protect the integrity of the Social Security trust funds, improve the delivery of services and restore public confidence in the system." +Under the Senate bill, Social Security would be an independent agency in the executive branch of the Government. The Commissioner would be appointed by the President for a four-year term coinciding with the President's. + +Cabinet Status Sought + Senator Moynihan said the President would still give overall direction to the agency. "We want this to be like a Cabinet department," he said. "The President should appoint a Social Security Commissioner at the same time he appoints a Secretary of State. You can't imagine any President in the last 20 years who has even known the name of the Commissioner of Social Security." +There have been 12 Commissioners in the last 20 years, including five who served on an acting basis. The current Commissioner, Shirley S. Chater, was president of Texas Woman's University for the last seven years +Under Mr. Moynihan's proposal, a bipartisan seven-member board would advise the Commissioner on policy questions, assess the quality of service to the public and suggest ways to improve the financial condition of the trust funds. The House bill would place Social Security under control of a three-member board rather than a Commissioner. +Victor F. Zonana, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said: "The President told Congressional leaders last week that he would support efforts to make Social Security an independent agency. Donna argued in the past that Social Security should stay within H.H.S., and she made her case to the President, but she supports his decision. She's a team player." + +LOAD-DATE: May 1, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +156 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 1, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +High Schools Mandating Community Service for Graduation + +BYLINE: By LINDA SASLOW + +SECTION: Section 14LI; Page 1; Column 1; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1730 words + +COMMUNITY service, performed without pay, is becoming increasingly familiar to high school students. Schools are encouraging students to include service as part of their school experience. Several Long Island districts have recently mandated service as a graduation requirement. Others have added courses that include service in the curriculum. +Although there is no argument over youth involvement, the question of whether to mandate service for high school students has encountered mixed responses. + In Nassau County the Roslyn and Hewlett-Woodmere districts recently approved service mandates. In Roslyn students beginning with the high school class of '97 will be required to take a one-semester half-credit community-service course and to complete a minimum of 30 hours of field work to graduate. For the class of '98 the number of field hours will increase, to 40. The course was introduced this year as an elective on a pilot basis. Superintendent Frank Tassone said that 40 percent of the high school students now participated in community service and that the goal was to encourage the rest to become involved. +"It's important for students to give back to the community that for a number of years has provided them with a wonderful public education," Dr. Tassone said. "This also gives the kids the opportunity for new experiences, whether it be visiting a senior-citizens' home, volunteering in a hospital or working right in the school district in the library or attendance office. From our research, we've learned that in school districts where community service is mandated many kids who might have been reticent or too shy to volunteer have admitted that they were glad they had been forced into participating." +Dr. Tassone added that there had been strong community support to require service. "At first, some kids questioned why this would be required," he said. "But once they realized how beneficial it is, their resistance has been minimal." +But elsewhere the constitutionality of mandated service is under fire. Last month a libertarian group, the Institute for Justice, filed a suit for two students at Rye Neck High School in Mamaroneck who refused to carry out the required 40 hours of service. The institute has sued other districts, including those in Chapel Hill-Carrboro, N.C., and Bethlehem, Pa. +In the Bethlehem case the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal on the institute's argument that mandated service violated the prohibition in the 13th Amendment against involuntary servitude. +The requirement in Hewlett-Woodmere starts with the class of '95. It will require students to complete 10 hours of service in a course called Participation in Government, a one-semester program usually taken in the senior year. +Superintendent Bert Nelson said 60 percent of the senior class was involved in some voluntary service. He added that several years ago a group of students started a Reach Out to Seniors program, in which they volunteered to help older people with activities like yard work, shopping, running errands and changing lightbulbs and smoke-detector batteries. +"We've had almost 100 kids participate in the program," Dr. Nelson said. "This told me that our kids were looking for ways to give something back to the community. We felt the need to reach out to those 40 percent who are not involved. +"We want our students to understand that a responsible commitment to the community is part of a well-rounded education. We've started with a small requirement. But our expectation is that once the students get a taste of satisfaction doing for others they will increase the number of hours on their own." +In Suffolk County the Sag Harbor high school has had a mandated program for several years. To receive a diploma, all students are required individually or in groups to complete at least one service project in their four years at the school. Superintendent John G. Barnes said that the the school suggested 10 hours of work, but that each project was individually evaluated. "We believe that community service is a must for all students," he said. + +Clearinghouse for Information + Up to this year there had been no clearinghouse to exchange ideas on service. This year, educators from public and private schools and representatives of community agencies organized the Service Learning Network to share programs and projects. +The director of the Student Service Center at Mineola High School, Diana Falk, said the network would help public schools learn about service. "Public schools are just beginning to see service as a way to reform education," she said. +As service becomes a growing priority, other districts are also considering mandating it, said Dr. William Johnson, Superintendent of Schools in Rockville Centre and president of the Nassau Council of Superintendents. +"But before a district can mandate a community-service requirement," he added, "it must have concomitant support and coordination from the community. +"First, there must be enough service opportunities to accommodate all students. Then you must define what will be accepted, how much service is required and how it will be verified and coordinated by school personnel. +"There are also the issues of what do you do with kids who don't have access to transportation? Or if they have paid jobs because their income is needed to help their families, would that count as community service?" + +Difficulties in Large Schools + Service requirements are especially difficult to enforce in large high schools, said Dr. Jorge Schneider, principal of Syosset High School, which has 1,700 students. +"With a graduating class of 450 students, it would be almost impossible to mandate and keep track of voluntary activities for every student," he said. "But there is no shortage of service opportunities -- from ongoing activities through the many school clubs, to short-term projects like the recent daffodil sale we had to raise money for the American Cancer Society, to one-day events like our senior prom for elderly citizens held in the school. While not required to participate, the majority of students, by the time they graduate, have some form of community service experience." +Some districts, without mandating service, encourage participation by offering credit. Students at Westhampton Beach High School who participate in community activities for one term receive a half-credit toward graduation. Superintendent Edward Broderick said most service programs were geared toward the elderly, who make up 80 percent of the village population. Other projects include beach cleaning, tree planting and community cleanups. +"By offering credit for these projects," Dr. Broderick said, "we're giving a strong message to the kids that this is of great importance. Community service also helps the students to understand that the school and community are related, and this helps to maintain our small-town atmosphere." + +Encouragement for Volunteers + At Great Neck North High School, 99 percent of the senior class takes a social studies elective course that includes community service. A spokeswoman for the district, Jessica Vega, said that the course was not required, but that faculty advisers strongly encouraged it. Over all, in the two Great Neck high schools, North and South, participation in activities like tutoring, AIDS awareness, Students Against Drunk Driving, day care, care for the elderly and environmental work is 30 percent, Ms. Vega said. +Other districts have programs to recruit students for service. Bay Shore High School formed a service honor society this year to recognize and reward students on all academic levels who have performed and documented service. +A teacher and adviser, Pat Ponzi, said students received credit for every hour working, whether at a hospital or in school making announcements. After 240 credits, they are eligible for the Honor Society. Mrs. Ponzi added that 70 students had qualified so far. +"We want to institutionalize and celebrate community service," she said. "The kids are still not sure what's in it for them. But we're trying to excite them with a sense of belonging, a feeling of satisfaction from helping others and the added incentive that this recognition will help for college admission. The bottom line here is that it doesn't matter how academic you are, just where you heart is." +At North Shore High School in Glen Head, the crucial factor for involvement is interest, said the service coordinator, Julia Salat. +"If kids are required to participate," Ms. Salat said, "it becomes a pressure point instead of a worthwhile experience. If they are interested in a specific project or charity, they are more dedicated and committed. +"My job is to help students explore options and find projects best suited for them. By the time they graduate, 90 percent of the students will participate in some form of community service." + +For All Levels and Abilities + An end-of-the-year breakfast at Mineola High School next month will recognize participants in the Student Service Center with awards and certificates. The center, started 11 years ago with a $1,500 grant, has expanded, from 4 programs to 14. In 1991, the center received the Eleanor Roosevelt Community Service Award from the Governor's office, one of 10 given each year. +Mrs. Falk, director of the Student Service Center, said the programs had been created to appeal to students of all levels and abilities. +"Some students enjoy working with handicapped kids, while others prefer visiting a nursing home or might join the Red Cross Club to be trained in disaster relief," she said. "This year we've added to our list peer mediation and a special recreation program for handicapped children. The kids know it's their effort that counts. At our celebration breakfast each student can invite a parent and one friend who hasn't participated in a community-service program. +"The community spirit is contagious. We don't have to mandate, because we have so many kids on board. When kids don't have to do something, but do it because they want to, you can't beat that. Long after they forget algebra, they'll remember the letters and words of thanks from these experiences. They get a sense of filling a need, of feeling important, and as corny as it sounds, of making a difference." + +LOAD-DATE: May 1, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +157 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 2, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Victims Use Photos to Identify Silver-Gun Carjacking Suspect + +BYLINE: By ROBERT D. McFADDEN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 557 words + +The Silver Gun Carjacker, a fugitive wanted in eight recent armed robberies of elderly and frail Queens residents who were accosted or attacked after being followed home from banks, has acquired an identity -- and with it, a history of similar crimes dating back nearly 10 years. +The 27-year-old suspect, Gerald Jerome, was identified by robbery victims from a bank-camera photograph and by Queens robbery detectives, who matched the bank's picture with photos in his criminal record. He remains at large after failing to appear in a Brooklyn court on an unrelated charge last week. + Criminal records show Mr. Jerome has been arrested many times in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan and Nassau County on more than 75 charges in an 11-year criminal history in which he has used many aliases, false birth dates and bogus addresses and has been imprisoned for nearly half of the last decade. + +Prison Sentences + Martin F. Horn, the executive director of the State Division of Parole, said Mr. Jerome was first convicted of robbing an elderly woman in Nassau County in October 1984, when he was 17, and was imprisoned for more than two years in the case. +Since March 21, the police say, Mr. Jerome, pursuing the same pattern, has struck eight times, following elderly women and frail men from banks where they took out cash, to their homes in Bayside, Whitestone, Flushing, Auburndale and Richmond Hill. The police say he has accosted them with a silver pistol in their driveways, cars or garages and taken money, credit cards and sometimes vehicles. +On April 19, the police say, he pistol-whipped and shot a 74-year-old woman in the garage of her Whitestone home when she refused to surrender her money and car keys; the woman called the police from a telephone in the garage and was taken to a hospital, where she survived. Later that day, the police said, the assailant drove the woman's car to Richmond Hill, where he robbed a 79-year-old man and took his car. + +An Unusual Situation + A day earlier, a camera at a Flushing bank had taken a photograph of a burly, bearded man in a warmup jacket, and several of the Queens robbery victims later identified the man in the photo as their assailant. But investigators found themselves in the unusual situation of having a suspect's face without a name, and dubbed him the Silver Gun Carjacker. +Last week detectives succeeded in matching the bank picture with photos in Mr. Jerome's extensive criminal record, but they did not immediately disclose the discovery because an opportunity to seize the suspect had unexpectedly come up. +Under one of his known aliases, Albert Brown, Mr. Jerome had been arrested in Brooklyn on April 15 on a car-theft charge; he was free on $1,500 bail and was scheduled for a court appearance in Brooklyn last Thursday. The detectives were there waiting for him. +But when he did not appear, they disclosed his identity as the suspect in the Queens robberies. +Over the years, investigators say, Mr. Jerome has called himself Albert Brown, Franz Santas, Mike Rome and other names and listed a smokescreen of addresses, birth dates and other bogus information about himself. But in each brush with the law, he was photographed and fingerprinted, and New York State knows him unambiguously by his criminal identification number, 5105896-N. + +LOAD-DATE: May 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +158 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 3, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Escaped Family of 5 Tells of Starvation in North Korea + +BYLINE: By ANDREW POLLACK, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 9; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 657 words + +DATELINE: SEOUL, South Korea, May 2 + +A family of five that escaped from North Korea said today that starvation is so severe there that children cannot keep their heads up in school and elderly people are being found dead in the fields, apparently having gone to die to relieve their families of the burden of feeding them. +Yo Man Chol, his wife and three children, arrived here Saturday, having escaped from North Korea by walking across a frozen river into China. While many individuals have defected from the North over the years, the Yo's are only the second complete family to do so, the first having arrived in 1987. + Today, at a packed news conference, the family members, sometimes breaking into tears, described their escape and the conditions they endured in North Korea. +There was no way to verify their account, but there have been many reports seeping out of North Korea about a severe food shortage, caused in part by a cold growing season. At the news conference, the Yo's did not look as if they had been starving, but they said they had been out of North Korea for more than a month. +South Korean press reports say that hundreds of North Koreans have tried to escape to China, but that many are captured by Chinese police officers or North Korean agents and taken back and executed. But the Yo's said they had decided to take the risk because of the food shortage. +"I thought that we would die if we stayed and we would die if we were dragged back," said Mr. Yo, 48. "We made the decision to try to escape." +Mr. Yo, who lived in Hamhung in the northeast part of the country, had also suffered a turn for the worse in his career. A captain in the North Korean security agency, he was dismissed for taking a bribe. Because of his disgrace, his daughter, Kum Joo, 20, was removed from the Kipumjo, or "Happy Group," an elite team of young men and women being groomed to work in the homes and resorts of the supreme leader, Kim Il Sung, and his son Kim Jong Il. +Mr. Yo said that food rations ran out last August and that some people were trying to eat tree bark. Many were dying of starvation, he said. +"There are many old people who leave the house and die in order to lighten the burden on their households," he said. His eldest son, Kum Ryung, 18, said 60 percent of his classmates did not eat breakfast and lacking the strength to work, merely put their heads down on their desks. +Mr. Yo's wife, Lee Ok Kum, 45, said she often took socks and other household items to the countryside to trade with farmers for rice. Despite her best efforts, she said, her children complained of hunger before they went to bed. "I couldn't feed my family," she said, breaking into sobs. +The escape took place in March. Through friends at the security agency, Mr. Yo obtained traveling passes and sent his eldest son and daughter to a border village of Hyaesan, ostensibly to obtain food. "I told them that if the Yalu River was frozen over to send back a telegram saying, 'Our cousin is getting married,' " he said. +He received the telegram on March 16, and he and the rest of the family arrived at the border village by train on March 19. Late that night, one at a time, they walked the 20 yards across the river, covering themselves with a bedsheet to avoid detection. +Once across, they were befriended by an ethnic Korean in China. They would not tell how they traveled from China to Hong Kong and then to Seoul, saying they did not want to endanger people who helped them. +Mr. Yo said that North Koreans were once extremely loyal to Mr. Kim but that the loyalty was now waning because of food shortages and other economic problems. "All North Koreans wore Kim Il Sung badges on their collars in the past, but now only about 20 percent wear them," he said. +Here in South Korea, President Kim Young Sam told the military today to be on round-the-clock alert after what officials here described as unusual moves by the North Koreans over the last few days. + +LOAD-DATE: May 3, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +159 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 3, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Case Breaks New Ground In DNA Tests For Paternity + +BYLINE: By JAN HOFFMAN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 804 words + +To resolve the question of paternity and a claim to an estate, a judge in Manhattan has ruled that both the parents of a dead man and the 7-year-old boy whose mother claims he is the dead man's son must submit to DNA testing. +Legal experts say this is the first case in New York State in which DNA tests will be used to determine inheritance by examining whether the chromosomes of a child born out of wedlock match those of his purported grandparents. + Last week, Judge Renee M. Roth of Surrogate's Court in Manhattan granted the request of the dead man's parents, Dorothy and Harold Sandler, who are contesting the child's claim to their son's estate. The Sandlers are trying to find out whether their son, Dr. Jeffrey Sandler, a dentist who died in 1992, was the father of the boy. +Typically, the father would be tested himself. But Judge Roth has already ruled that people who have died cannot be exhumed for DNA paternity testing. In a paternity dispute last year involving the estate of the Manhattan art dealer Sidney Janis, a woman claiming to be Mr. Janis's out-of-wedlock daughter had asked that his body be exhumed for DNA testing. But the judge denied the request, saying that testing to establish paternity had to be done on living people, a ruling which is being appealed. Harvey E. Corn, a lawyer for the woman, called the decision to test the Sandlers "absolutely novel." + +Court of Appeals Ruling + In reaching her decision, the judge relied in part on a March ruling by New York State's Court of Appeals, which permitted limited use of DNA testing in criminal matters. In that case, blood stains on a defendant's clothing were found through DNA tests to tie him to the rape and murder of an elderly woman. +Though methods of DNA testing are still evolving, many scientific and legal experts agree that it can provide more information about paternity than traditional blood tests. Its proponents claim that when the tests are done on living people, the accuracy of the test is 99 percent. +But Barry C. Scheck, a lawyer who has urged that stricter regulations be imposed on the testing, said the probability of a match depends on the extent of a population study with which the sample is compared. He said the test was more effective in establishing who was not the father than in determining who was. +According to state law, however, courts are not required to accept the results of DNA tests for paternity purposes if the laboratory has not been certified by the State Department of Health. A spokeswoman for the department said no laboratories in New York have yet been approved for those tests, although some may be certified as soon as July. +The quarrel over Dr. Sandler's estate, which his parents' lawyer estimated to be worth between $50,000 and $100,000, was triggered by a state law governing the status of children born after a will has been written. +In a will dated May 4, 1987, Dr. Sandler indicated that his parents and brother should inherit his estate. Two months later, Steven East Sandler was born. The will did not mention the boy or his mother, Regina East. + +Troubled Relationship + If a parent does not subsequently amend a will to mention the so-called "after-born child," the law provides a sharp corrective: if paternity can be established, that child can lay claim to the estate. And because Dr. Sandler had neither a wife nor another child who would also have had valid claims, Dr. Sandler's entire estate will go to Steven if the boy is found to be his son. +Lawyers on both sides said that while Dr. Sandler and Ms. East had a troubled relationship, they did live together in Manhattan after Steven was born. Indeed Ms. East offered an amended birth certificate on which Dr. Sandler had acknowledged that he was the father of the boy. +Under inheritance laws, a birth certificate alone may not be considered sufficient proof of paternity: a father could have been coerced or deceived into signing one. Often, additional material -- such as genetic testing-- is required. +Cirino Bruno, the lawyer for Ms. East, was dismayed by Judge Roth's ruling, which was reported in The New York Law Journal yesterday. Referring to the Sandlers, he said, "How do we know that they are his biological parents and that he wasn't adopted?" If that indeed was the situation, then the Sandlers' genetic material would not match the boy's, and the question of whether Dr. Sandler was his father would still be open. +Mr. Bruno said he believed that the dispute over the estate was fueled by the Sandlers' refusal to accept that their son, who is white, had a child by Ms. East, who is black. +But Lawrence Anderson, a lawyer for the Sandlers, dismissed that view. "It wasn't the child's color," he said. "Their attitude is: if that's our grandchild, we want him to have it all." + +LOAD-DATE: May 3, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +160 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 4, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +A.M.A. Says It Will Support Some Compulsory Insurance + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 884 words + +WASHINGTON, May 3 -- Taking a compromise position on a central question in the health care debate, the American Medical Association said today that companies with 100 or more employees should be required to buy health insurance for workers, but that smaller companies should not. +Dr. James S. Todd, executive vice president of the association, affirmed the group's commitment to health insurance for all Americans, but offered a new twist. For several years, the association supported an employer mandate, requiring all employers to provide coverage for workers, but in December it backed off amid complaints from some of its more conservative members. + Many doctors are small employers. A recent survey by the association found that one in three doctors' offices did not provide health insurance for employees like nurses, receptionists and laboratory technicians. + +Furor From Small Businesses + In a speech at the annual meeting of the Health Insurance Association of America, Dr. Todd said today that people working for companies with fewer than 100 employees should be subject to "an individual mandate" requiring them to buy their own health insurance. Government subsidies would be available to help lower-income people, he said. +Lorrie McHugh, a White House spokeswoman, said she was pleased that the association supported an employer mandate for large companies, but disappointed that it opposed such a requirement for smaller businesses. President Clinton wants to require all employers to buy health insurance for workers, but this idea has encountered fierce opposition from many small businesses. Representative John D. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee, has proposed exempting businesses with 10 or fewer employees. +The Small Business Administration says about 40 percent of workers in private industry are employed by companies with 100 or fewer employees. Twelve percent work for companies with fewer than 10 employees, it says. +Dr. Todd said the proposed insurance requirements should be put into effect gradually so that 95 percent of Americans would have health insurance within six years. Mr. Clinton proposes a more ambitious timetable: coverage of all Americans by January 1998. +In an interview, Dr. Todd said: "Employer mandates don't seem to be going anywhere. Indeed, opposition seems to be increasing. Individual mandates don't seem to be going anywhere. So how do we achieve the goal of universal coverage? It makes sense to use a combination." + +Alternative Proposal + Under Mr. Clinton's proposal, all Americans would be assured of coverage for prescription drugs. Merck & Company, the world's largest pharmaceutical concern, today proposed an alternative way of providing such coverage for Medicare beneficiaries without any of the price regulation envisioned by Mr. Clinton. Medicare finances health care for 32 million elderly Americans and 4 million disabled citizens. +Merck said that managed-care companies, like its own Medco Containment Services unit, should bid for the opportunity to manage pharmacy benefits for people in Medicare. +Under Merck's proposal, the nation would be divided into 10 regions, and the Federal Government would choose three companies to manage drug benefits in each region. The companies could control drug costs for Medicare as they now do for private health plans: by encouraging doctors and pharmacists to prescribe and dispense lower-cost, including generic, drugs; by offering mail-order pharmacy services and by negotiating discounts with drug makers. +Dr. P. Roy Vagelos, the chairman of Merck, said: "Our proposal will immediately reduce drug costs for the elderly. The Administration's plan for a Medicare drug benefit swims against the tide of market-based reform already taking place through the growth of managed care." +"Under the President's plan, there is no way to manage the utilization of drugs," Dr. Vagelos said in an interview. "It's a fee-for-service plan, with a mandatory 17 percent rebate and other mechanisms to control the prices of drugs -- mechanisms that would also deter investment needed for the discovery of important new drugs." + +Seeing Competitive Advantage + Rival drug companies and many retail pharmacists say Merck's proposal would give Merck a significant competitive advantage: the right to promote the sale of its own products to Medicare beneficiaries. Under the proposal, each pharmacy benefit manager would use a formulary, listing drugs preferred or required for specific purposes like lowering cholesterol, controlling high blood pressure or treating ulcers. +But Dr. Vagelos said: "An independent committee would select the drugs that are most cost-effective, whether they be Merck drugs or someone else's drugs. We recommend that there be three different pharmacy benefit managers in each region, so there would be competition. People could select any of the plans and could change once a year if they were not satisfied." +The pharmacy benefit manager would also monitor the use of drugs, to make sure Medicare patients took them as prescribed. Managed-care companies use similar techniques to control drug costs and to review the use of drugs by millions of people who work for large companies and government agencies. + +LOAD-DATE: May 4, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +161 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 4, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Personal Health + +BYLINE: By Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section C; Page 13; Column 1; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1189 words + +A YEAR ago, a neurologist described five cases of serious neurological problems, including four strokes, in women aged 54 to 84 after shampoos in beauty parlors. As is common practice when beauticians shampoo hair or neutralize a permanent wave, the women's heads were tipped back over the edge of the sink. +Now, after a year of detailed studies of blood flow to the brain, the neurologist, Dr. Michael Weintraub, believes that the risk of stroke and lesser forms of brain damage when the neck is arched or twisted in extreme positions is much greater than he had originally believed. + The hazard, he says, is not limited to older people and extends well beyond those who visit beauty salons. Also at risk are young people born with a hidden malformation of a main artery leading to the brain. Damage from extreme neck positions can affect them if they undergo prolonged dental work, paint ceilings or do other work over their heads, are subjected to extreme chiropractic manipulations of the neck or are fitted with a breathing tube in surgery. +Each of these circumstances can place the neck in a position that greatly reduces blood flow through one or both of the vertebral arteries, Dr. Weintraub's studies have shown. The problem is especially likely to affect older people who have complicating factors like high blood pressure or diabetes, which make them more vulnerable to stroke. +When blood flow becomes sluggish, clots can form that are carried into the brain when normal blood flow is restored. These clots can block circulation to part of the brain, causing a stroke. Dr. Weintraub suggested that this might account for the disproportionate occurrence of strokes during sleep or just after awakening. +In a report to be presented today to the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology, Dr. Weintraub is calling for doctors and potential patients to be alert to the warning signs of interrupted vertebral circulation, like dizziness or loss of balance when the neck is bent. He is also warning the elderly and anyone who already faces a higher than average risk of stroke to avoid extreme neck positions. + +Vulnerable Arteries + The two vertebral arteries carry oxygen-rich blood from the vessels leaving the heart up to the back of the brain -- the brain stem, cerebellum and thalamus -- as well as to parts of the spinal column. They are called vertebral arteries because where they rise through the neck they are housed in bony tunnels formed by projections from the sides of the cervical vertebrae. Together they are responsible for carrying 20 to 25 percent of the blood that reaches the brain. (The remaining 75 to 80 percent of the brain's blood supply comes from the large carotid arteries in the front of the neck.) +Because the vertebral arteries are next to the bones of the neck, they are easily twisted and compressed when the neck is bent in extreme positions. The risk is especially great in people born with an underdeveloped vertebral artery or who develop shifting of the neck bones or bony protuberances on the cervical vertebrae, which can displace or compress a vertebral artery even when the neck is not bent or turned. +The elderly are especially at risk because with age all major arteries tend to become clogged with fatty deposits that reduce the passageway through which blood must flow. The elderly are also more likely to have arthritic changes in their necks and irregular bony spikes on their cervical vertebrae, both of which can increase the risk of vertebral artery compression when their necks are turned in ways that caused no trouble in their younger years. +In last year's report in the April 28 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Weintraub described the cases of the five women who required hospitalization for severe neurological disturbances and stroke after shampoos in beauty parlors. He attributed the damage to "mechanical impingement" of blood flow through one or both vertebral arteries when, during the shampoos, their necks were arched back so that their chins pointed toward the ceiling. +Just a month before his report, 10 cases of stroke after anesthesia administered with the neck in an extreme position had been described in the journal Neurology. When anesthesiologists insert the tube that maintains lung function during surgery, they temporarily arch the neck far back to straighten out the airway. But sometimes the neck is kept in that position throughout the surgery, which could last for hours. +During the procedure, the anesthesiologist is not likely to be aware of any problem because patients under anesthesia cannot complain when they experience neurological symptoms like dizziness or imbalance as a result of disrupted circulation to the brain. + +The New Studies + To document the nature of the problem and further define its extent, Dr. Weintraub, who is chief of neurology at Phelps Memorial Hospital in North Tarrytown, N.Y., and a clinical professor of neurology at New York Medical College in Valhalla, undertook detailed studies of blood flow to the brain when the necks of older men and women were twisted or arched in extreme positions. He has so far completed his studies on 40 people who had prior symptoms suggesting a vulnerability to brain damage and 30 people of similar age who had no symptoms. +The group of 40, ranging in age from 55 to 95, had experienced symptoms like vertigo, double vision, loss of balance or numbness on one side of their bodies at some time during the month before the study. These are indications that they may have already suffered ministrokes or transient ischemic attacks, which are warning signs of a future stroke. +Dr. Weintraub used a technique called magnetic resonance angiography, a method that without a dye or penetration of body parts allowed him to track the flow of blood through the vertebral arteries as the position of the neck was changed. +He showed that as the necks of patients with symptoms were moved to one side, chin to shoulder, the vertebral artery was compressed, there was a marked decline in blood flow and symptoms of dizziness occurred in 70 percent. But in those who had no previous symptoms, only 13 percent experienced dizziness during the brief manipulation. Women in the symptomatic group experienced the most severe compression of the vertebral artery during the study. + +What to Do + Dr. Weintraub and other experts suggest that elderly people and especially those of any age who have experienced dizziness or loss of balance when the neck is bent should avoid activities that demand extreme neck positions. +For example, hair can be washed with the head bent forward instead of back. The dental chair, instead of the patient's head, can be tilted way back. The anesthesiologist should be reminded to restore the patient's head to a normal position as soon as the tube is inserted. +People already at high risk for stroke -- those who are obese, have high blood pressure, heart abnormalities, diabetes or smoke cigarettes -- might consider wearing a cervical collar while sleeping, the neurologist suggested. + +LOAD-DATE: May 4, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + + +GRAPHIC: Vertebral arteries, which run through bony tunnels on either side of the cervical vertebrae, carry blood from the heart to the brain. Extreme positions that arch the neck backward or twist it sharply to the side compress the arteries, reducting blood flow, and can pose a risk of stroke for the elderly and people with certain malformations of the vertebrae. +Diagram: "Extreme Neck Position and Blood Flow" + Diagram shows location of Vertebral arteries and how they are compressed at points of sharp angulation. (Source: Dr. Micheal I. Weintraub) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +162 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 7, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Employers May Get Reprieve In Reporting Health Coverage + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 10; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 554 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 6 + +Bowing to complaints from thousands of businesses across the country, the White House today asked Congress to delay or do away with a 1993 law requiring employers to report information on the health insurance coverage of their employees. +Presidents Clinton and George Bush both asked Congress to impose the requirement, which took effect on Jan. 1. But it has caused major problems for employers, who say they must gather large amounts of data never collected before. + Sally Katzen, a senior official of the Office of Management and Budget, asked Congress to delay the reporting requirements until July 1995. By then, she said, they may not be needed. Other White House officials said they hoped Congress would simply repeal the reporting requirements. + +Money-Saving Scheme + The requirements were part of an elaborate scheme to save money for Medicare and Medicaid, the Federal programs for the elderly and the poor. These programs are not supposed to pay for health care when a person has private insurance to pay the bills. But the Government often has no way of knowing who has private insurance. +So Congress last year created the Medicare and Medicaid Coverage Data Bank. The law says that any employer with a group health plan must report the names and Social Security numbers of all people covered under the plan, regardless of whether they also have Medicaid or Medicare. Employers say that while they know their workers' names, they often do not know the names of spouses and children and do not want to invade employees' privacy. + +'Data Bank Is Unworkable' + Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, has denounced the data bank as a waste of time and money. "I am pleased that the Administration has finally come to agree with what I have argued for some time," Mr. Lieberman said at a hearing today. "This data bank is unworkable." +The hearing was held by a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. Mr. Lieberman is chairman of the subcommittee. +The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, agreed that the data bank was a bad idea. The 1993 law, it said, would require employers to report insurance data on 160 million people, of whom only 7 million were also enrolled in Medicare or Medicaid. +Leslie G. Aronovitz, a supervisor at the General Accounting Office, said the data bank would save little or no money but would create "an avalanche of unnecessary paperwork." The Government, she said, would have to collect information on 160 million people just to identify the estimated 3 million Medicare beneficiaries and the 4 million Medicaid recipients who have another source of coverage. +Business lobbyists rejoiced at the reversal by the White House. "This is great news," said Kent Knutson, a lobbyist for the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents more than 600,000 small businesses. +Kenneth D. Simonson, chief economist of the American Trucking Associations, said: "I am elated in a small way. It's great that the Administration has come out and said, 'We don't want to go ahead with the data bank in 1994.' But my elation is tempered by the fact that it will be difficult to get Congress to act. In the meantime, employers apparently need to collect this information for their employees and dependents." + +LOAD-DATE: May 7, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +163 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 7, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Observer; +The Joys of Rome + +BYLINE: By RUSSELL BAKER + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 23; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 705 words + +The high-school flavor of the Washington news was more than the spirit could bear, so I took Rome off the shelf. Not always admirable, those Romans, but they wrote a muscular prose far more bracing than the wheezing, whining, hyper-inflated, empty-headed, tongue-twisting, death's-door English of Washington. +Here is Cicero, for instance, reminding us that "lustful pleasures . . . cloud a man's judgment, obstruct his reasoning capacity and blind his intelligence." + If this seems pertinent just now, it is probably because the press seems about to embark on yet another earnest-Puritan exploration of Bill Clinton's pre-Presidential sex life. +It is tempting to defend Mr. Clinton by noting that any American male under 75 who fails to behave goatishly at the drop of an eyelash risks disgracing the ideal of American manhood taught by our press, literature and entertainment. +Still, the American man's terrible conviction that he must remain a boy forever, while amusing, diverts us from the essence of Mr. Clinton's problem. Cicero states it with Roman Republican clarity of mind: "Let sensuality be present, and a good life becomes impossible." +He also mocks our prejudice against grown-up men by noting that in Rome the Senate was "an assembly of old men," which is the Latin meaning of the word. It comes from the same Latin word as "senility." +Roman senators obviously did not have to look friskily blow-dried, as their American versions must to pass inspection by an electorate besotted with dreams of eternal youth. Reading Cicero makes you feel a delightful 2,000 years distant from high school. +Cicero's Rome also played politics more robustly than today's Washington. There we have Republican sore losers trying to undo the last election with hints that Mr. Clinton is a shady-buck artist and godless philanderer. +Plutarch's account of Cicero's end reminds us how real men, as opposed to Washington's eternal high-school boys, play political hardball. +Cicero's politics had outraged Mark Antony, who seems to have been more Al Capone than Richard Burton. When Antony's party prevailed over Cicero's, Antony claimed the right to have Cicero's head, quite literally. He sent killers to cut Cicero's throat. When overtaken on his litter by the assassins, Plutarch says, Cicero ordered the litter set down. +"Holding his chin in his left hand, as he had a way of doing, he looked steadily at his murderers, his hair all unkempt and dusty and his face worn by anxiety. Most of those who were there covered their faces while Herennius was killing him. He was stabbed, stretching his neck out from the litter, being then in his 64th year. Following Antony's orders, Herennius cut off his head and his hands, with which he wrote . . . his speeches against Antony." +Antony had head and hands brought to Rome and publicly displayed, "a sight to make Romans shudder," says Plutarch, "for they saw there, they thought, not Cicero's face but an image of Antony's soul." +Antony's Rome had grown more civilized than the Rome of the early kings. The historian Livy, describing how King Tullus dealt with an unfaithful ally named Mettius around 670 B.C., shows a delicacy that suggests how little progress we have made these past 2,000 years. +Addressing Mettius, Tullus says, "Were you capable of learning loyally to abide by your word, I should have let you live. . . . But you are not capable. . . . Yesterday you could not decide between Fidenae and Rome: doubtless it was a painful division of mind -- but today the division of your body will be more painful still." +Then, writes Livy, "Two chariots were brought up, each drawn by four horses. Mettius was tied, spread-eagled, to both of them. At the touch of the whip the two teams sprang forward in opposite directions, carrying with them the fragments of the mangled body still held by the ropes. All eyes were averted from the disgusting spectacle -- never, in all our history, repeated. +"That was the first and last time that fellow-countrymen of ours inflicted a punishment so utterly without regard to the laws of humanity. Save for that one instance we can fairly claim to have been content with more humane forms of punishment than any other nation." + +LOAD-DATE: May 7, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +164 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 8, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +A THAI-HIGH AMERICAN + +BYLINE: By Rick Bragg + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 42; Column 1; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 488 words + +THE FIGHTERS PUNISH EACH OTHER WITH FISTS, FEET, knees and elbows, yet they wound without cruelty. Blood drips to the mat and eyes glaze from the force of the blows, yet they thank God for the honor. To be Thai, to stand inside a ring surrounded by hundreds of adoring, screaming, wildly wagering fans, is to reach for the sky and touch it. To be American, to be an outsider in the ring, is a feeling Steve Milles struggles to form into words. +"I could hear him hit me," he says, trying to describe his battle with a Thai kick-boxer on Ko Samui, an island in the Gulf of Thailand. "I couldn't feel it." + Milles, a 28-year-old graduate student in political science at the New School for Social Research in New York, was never a fighter, just a young man who found something beautiful in the physical and spiritual discipline of the 500-year-old art of muay Thai, Thai boxing. Milles trained for a year in New York and went to Bangkok in February to learn from one of its champions. He did not intend to fight. +Muay Thai was born on a battlefield in the 15th century and became a sport 300 years later, when fighters wrapped their fists in cloth soaked with glue and pressed into ground glass. Now they wear light boxing gloves, but feet, knees and elbows are bare. +"Pain is part of the art," Milles says. +Milles, six feet tall, dropped from 165 pounds to 145 pounds in two months of training. On the streets of Bangkok old women gave him food because he looked so thin, and people touched the bruises on his lean face. Day after day, he banged his tender shins against the hardened ones of other fighters until he began to lose sensation and the skin formed a ridge over bone. His teacher was Jitti Damriman, a former champion with skin like iron. It was he who suggested that Milles fight a professional, and it was the highest compliment he could pay him. +Milles entered the ring to the sound of drums and a cheering crowd, and faced Sakchai, a 28-year-old veteran of 100 fights who looked at him the way a cat looks at a bird. First they did a slow dance in the ring, to honor their teachers; then it was time to rumble. With the first blow -- a blow that probably won the match -- Sakchai kicked Milles in the thigh with the force of a $40 mule. The men were evenly matched, and at one point in the second round a flurry of punches by Milles had Sakchai dazed on the ropes. But the kick to Milles's leg would haunt him. +Throughout the 15-minute fight, divided into 3-minute rounds, Sakchai continued to methodically hammer the wounded leg. By the start of the crucial fifth round it had swollen to twice its normal size and Milles was left immobile, unable to attack. He lost by a few points. Sakchai, exhausted, praised him. As Milles limped through the crowd more people praised him. Many had bet on him, the outsider. Victory, in a fighting stadium in Thailand, is a relative thing. -- RICK BRAGG + +NAME: Steve Milles + +LOAD-DATE: May 8, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: "I took a class as a lark," says Steve Milles (left and above, in Bangkok), "and it was so fierce and so ferocious and so graceful all at the same time that I stayed." (pg. 42-43); At the Jitti Gym: Milles meets his match (above); his teacher ministers to his wounds during a break in the fighting (below). (pg. 44); Midfight, midring: Thai boxers hit with the shin, knee, elbow, not just the foot, and any part of the body is fair game (above). Milles prepares for battle (below). (pg. 45)(PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVE KRIEGER) + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +165 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 8, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: HARLEM; +Encounters With Ralph Ellison + +BYLINE: By RANDY KENNEDY + +SECTION: Section 14; Page 6; Column 2; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 458 words + +In the last years of Ralph Ellison's life, the Harlem neighborhood that he called home and transformed into a powerful metaphor for alienation was a place that had all but forgotten him. +But John B. Weaver still remembers. For 20 years, Mr. Weaver, a thin man with graying hair, delivered mail to Mr. Ellison's building on Riverside Drive. And until just before Mr. Ellison's death on April 16 at the age of 80, he would buzz each day around noon, so the writer could collect his voluminous mail. + Writer and postman, the two men followed the ritual almost unerringly for two decades. And through the years, through their brief encounters, they developed a friendship of sorts, at a distance. +The postman ribbed the writer, whom he called "doc," about his ever-present cigar, "this big, Cuban thing," as Mr. Weaver remembers. Mr. Ellison talked to Mr. Weaver about Yale, where Mr. Weaver's daughter attended college and where Mr. Ellison was a visiting scholar. +Mr. Weaver, in turn, helped the writer with small errands, once driving him to an office supply warehouse near Coney Island so Mr. Ellison could buy his favorite typewriter, an old I.B.M. model that he could not find in stores anymore. +"He was a man with a lot of respect about him," Mr. Weaver said the other day as he stuffed mail into boxes in the building where Mr. Ellison's widow, Fanny, still lives. +"He was not an easy man to talk to, so I did a lot of listening, and every once in a while I'd get around to asking him a question," said Mr. Weaver, who said he had read all of Mr. Ellison's writings many times. "It was always the high point of my day." +All of Mr. Ellison's literary peers -- Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Chester Himes -- left the neighborhood long ago. Alfred Kazin, the critic, said he believed that Mr. Ellison had remained "out of stubbornness." +Like many other elderly people in the neighborhood, Mr. Ellison only rarely ventured onto the streets, which drugs have made dangerous. He would sometimes walk the few blocks up Riverside Drive to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where his books sit in the hushed library beside biographies of Duke Ellington. +Most mornings, after he gathered his mail, would venture a few blocks south to buy his newspaper at a bodega on 145th Street and Broadway, but, like many people in what is now a largely Dominican neighborhood, those behind the counter did not know who he was. +"And it's a shame, too," Mr. Weaver said. "He should have been a king around here." +Mr. Weaver said he saw the author for the last time one morning in early April, a few days before he fell ill. "I remember thinking at the time," he said, "that he looked really too young to be 80 years old." RANDY KENNEDY + +LOAD-DATE: May 12, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +166 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 8, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THEATER; +'Over the River' in The Bronx + +BYLINE: By ALVIN KLEIN + +SECTION: Section 14WC; Page 13; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 795 words + +DATELINE: THE BRONX + +IT is customary for the audience in a small nonprofit theater to hear a pre-performance welcome; in other words, a pitch for donations and subscriptions. It is not customary for the audience to interrupt such a ritual three times with cheers and applause. +But that's the Belmont Italian American Playhouse experience for you. It's not that the people at Saturday night's performance of "Over the River and Through the Woods" weren't feeling perfectly welcome in the first place. It's just that the lively greeting by Lou Izzo, the theater's general manager, was a mere informality, rather like a communal embrace. + By no means intended as an audience-participation show, the new comedy by Joe DiPietro is as interactive as one can get, in Old World terms, before technology put a new spin on the word interactive. And it's the Old World, culturally and theatrically, that informs Mr. DiPietro's play about a young man brought up according to the three F's: family, faith and food. Yes, the audience calls out the third word in spontaneous, unsolicited chorus. +If anyone has run by Mr. DiPietro the vocabulary of contemporary pop psychology -- dysfunctionalism, 12-step programs -- he has not been paying attention. Guilt is beside the point; it comes with the territory and one mentions it only in passing, with eyes rolled upward. +For 27 years, Nick Cristano has been showing up for Sunday dinner at the home of his maternal grandparents, Frank and Aida Gianelli. His paternal grandparents, Nunzio and Emma Cristano -- "the loudest people I ever met," Nick says -- are also there to eat and to nag: "Be a man. Start a family. Don't eat Chinese food." More to the point, Emma says to Nick: "I want to see you married before I'm dead." Nick's parents moved to Fort Lauderdale, and Nick understands why. +What makes one Sunday night different is that Nick has to tell his grandparents the good news that he is up for a promotion and the bad news that a move to Seattle, Wash., is part of the deal. "Not the close-by Washington," the elderly folks quickly realize. They conspire to find a reason to keep Nick on home ground. Caitlin O'Haire, a pretty neighbor, is the reason. She is invited to dinner; the elderly folks are on their best behavior. +Sample table talk: +"Since when do we say grace?" +"Shut up; we've got company." +When Nick shows exasperation with his meddlesome grandparents, Caitlin retorts with a zinger: "How many grown adults have the opportunity to know all of their grandparents?" +Such unabashed sentiment is altogether sufficient to sustain Mr. DiPietro's warm and appealing play. In a "glimpse of the past splashed with color," the two elderly couples dance ("Yes, Sir, That's My Baby") and Frank Gianelli plays the banjo. +"We were always laughing; we always had time for fun," says Emma, married to Nunzio 60 years. No financial worries here. (Frank won't turn on the air-conditioner until the Fourth of July, but he certainly doesn't scrimp on food.) No hostilities. No rivalries. No recriminations. Just plenty of cannolis, crumb cake, ham and ricotta cheese sandwiches, fettuccine Alfredo and lasagna. And veal, pushed upon Caitlin, a vegetarian. +"Over the River and Through the Woods" (everyone is supposed to know the next line) makes no claim to be more than a story about a young man's coming of age and two sets of old folks with an ever-deepening love. The price a younger generation pays for the devotion of the elders, the extent of sacrifice -- such issues are delicate asides. Is Nick's complicated existence better than his grandparents' good life? Or just different? So much for philosophy. And stereotypes are dealt a good-natured whack. Nunzio could only get his factory job by pretending to be Irish. +Dante Albertie has directed an agreeable cast with brio. Marco Greco as Nick looks for life's formula and suffer's panic attacks in stride. John Marino (Frank) sits in a rocking chair, remembering the words of the father he misunderstood. He is resigned to not driving any more. "Good, the world will be safer," Emma says. "We'll sit in my car and pretend it's moving." +Add Evelyne Aronin's easy humor as Emma, Grace Bentley's dedication to the kitchen as Aida and Ralph Lucarelli as Nunzio, discovering peacemaking in a private way and realizing that it isn't too late for him to grow up. +With such all-around affection, who can be so churlish as to deny the play's recognition scenes and built-in entertainment value for a home-grown audience? Or its bracing, nourishing effect on an outsider? +"Over the River and Through the Woods" by Joe DiPietro. Produced by the Belmont Italian American Playhouse, 2385 Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. Performances through May 22. Box office: (718) 364-4700. + +LOAD-DATE: May 8, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +167 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 10, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +KENNEDY PROPOSES EXPANDED CHOICES FOR HEALTH PLAN + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1360 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 9 + +Edward M. Kennedy, the Senate's senior campaigner for national health insurance, today proposed changing President Clinton's health care plan to broaden individuals' choice of insurance and to lighten the burden on very small businesses. +The Massachusetts Democrat worked out his proposal in consultation with the White House and with Senator George J. Mitchell of Maine, the majority leader. It would require all but the smallest employers to buy insurance for their workers and would offer any American the same insurance choices Federal workers have. + Mr. Kennedy also proposed raising more money than Mr. Clinton would through higher taxes on tobacco and large corporations as well as higher out-of-pocket payments by individuals. This revenue would finance more generous benefits than Mr. Clinton proposed for women's health care, mental health and drug and alcohol abuse treatments, and greater support for biomedical research and academic health centers. +Mr. Clinton, campaigning for health care legislation in New York City today, praised the Kennedy proposal. "I think it clearly has health security for all Americans," he said. "It relies on the private insurance system. It tends to do more for the smallest businesses and has a comprehensive benefits package." +Mr. Clinton also told New Yorkers that the Federal Medicaid formula should be changed to provide more money to states with many poor people. The formula now provides less Federal aid for states with high percapita incomes, including New York, and lawmakers have long complained that it did not take sufficient account of the number of residents. [Page A20.] +In his proposal, Mr. Kennedy followed the basic outlines of the Clinton plan, but he would add benefits for women and the elderly and disabled, who have been supportive but not ecstatic of the President's program . He would offer concessions to small businesses while seeking to enlist the support of the insurance industry by requiring universal coverage but not compelling anyone to join an insurance-buying cooperative. +The Kennedy plan is instantly influential, not only because of Mr. Clinton's backing, but also because Mr. Kennedy heads the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, the only Congressional committee with a firm timetable for completing a health care bill by the Memorial Day recess. Its deliberations begin next week, and the measure he outlined today will be put before the committee, where he already commanded a majority for the Clinton bill without the sweeteners proposed today. +While the measure is unlikely to win any sudden Republican converts, it includes pet features taken from proposals made by about a dozen Republicans. + +'Road to a Compromise' + Mr. Kennedy, who first introduced a national health insurance bill in 1970, said today: "These modifications are the result of dozens of discussions with Republicans and other Democrats in the Senate. It's a good-faith attempt to respond to their legitimate objections and concerns. Clearly there is more to be done, but I think we are on the road to a compromise that preserves all of President Clinton's basic goals and has a realistic chance of winning broad bipartisan support." +On the touchiest political issue in health care, employer insurance payments, Mr. Clinton would require all employers to pay the bulk of their workers' health insurance premiums. Mr. Kennedy's proposal would exempt employers with five or fewer workers, though they would be required to pay a 2 percent payroll tax instead. Their seven million to eight million workers would be required to buy their own insurance, with substantial subsidies for the lower-paid among them. +Mr. Clinton defended this area of the Kennedy proposal, saying: "It still has coverage for everybody. Even the smallest firms have to assume some responsibility." +The biggest single way in which Senator Kennedy's plan varies from the President's proposal deals with how people would get insurance. +The Kennedy plan would borrow the idea of a bill offered by Senator William V. Roth Jr., Republican of Delaware, and allow Americans to join the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan instead of obtaining insurance through their employers. They could choose among the insurance options offered all Federal workers, from President Clinton through Congress down to the lowest-paid civil servants. "If it's good enough for us," Mr. Kennedy said in a statement, "it's good enough for all Americans." +Under the President's plan, all Americans, except those associated with companies employing 5,000 or more, would get their policies through insurance purchasing alliances. Employer participation in Mr. Clinton's alliances would be mandatory. +Mr. Kennedy would require all states to establish insurance-purchasing cooperatives, but at the same time he would allow employers to continue to purchase insurance from private insurers instead of joining the cooperatives. Individuals would also be allowed to get their insurance through the cooperative or directly from an agent. + +The Financing + There are further differences. Where Mr. Clinton called for an additional 75-cents-a-pack-tax on cigarettes, for a total of 99 cents, Mr. Kennedy recommends adding $1.25, for a total of $1.49. +Where Mr. Clinton proposed a 1 percent payroll assessment on companies with 5,000 or more workers to help pay the costs of academic health centers, Mr. Kennedy would expand its reach by imposing it on companies with 1,000 or more employees. +And, following a pattern suggested by Senator Mitchell in a meeting with Democrats last month, Mr. Kennedy would alter the formula for subsidizing small business. Mr. Clinton based it on the size of the company involved, but the Mitchell-Kennedy approach would partly base subsidies on wages. So there would be greater subsidies for low-wage workers and smaller subsidies for highly paid workers. +Each of these three provisions was estimated by Mr. Kennedy's staff as likely to produce or save about $40 billion over five years. More than half of that would be used to eliminate the $74 billion in increased deficits that the Congressional Budget Office found the Clinton plan would cause. +But Mr. Kennedy would also spend more money -- the exact amount will be specified on Wednesday -- on academic health centers and teaching hospitals. And, adopting a proposal by Senators Mark O. Hatfield, Republican of Oregon, and Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, he would add $7.5 billion over five years to Federal funds available for biomedical research. Mr. Clinton would add $2.4 billion. +Mr. Kennedy would also put $2.5 billion more than Mr. Clinton would into a program that aids hospitals serving the poor. +One major addition in the Kennedy program would be the establishment of a voluntary program of self-insurance for up to $90,000 worth of benefits for nursing home care. The younger a participant was when he signed up, the lower his premiums would be. + +Increased Benefits + Many of Mr. Kennedy's changes deal with the standard benefits package that insurers would have to offer the public, although here he would meet the cost with somewhat higher out-of-pocket costs to middle- and upper-income patients. +Where Mr. Clinton proposed covering mammograms every two years for women over the age of 50, Mr. Kennedy would provide them annually over 50 and every two years for women 40 to 49. It would also provide annual Pap smears for all women who have not had three consecutive negative tests. Mr. Clinton urged coverage every three years. Mr. Kennedy would also support annual physical examinations for children from 13 to 19, while the Clinton plan would authorize them once every three years. +By emphasizing services outside of hospitals, the Kennedy measure would offer greater benefits for Americans needing help with mental health and drug and alcohol abuse. Again, the precise terms were to be available Wednesday, but an aide to the Senator said his package would go beyond Mr. Clinton's in offering "more outpatient services including psychotherapy," and "residential non-hospital treatment for substance abuse." + +LOAD-DATE: May 10, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: May 12, 1994, Thursday + + CORRECTION: +A picture caption yesterday about an encounter between President Clinton and Senator Edward M. Kennedy described their conversation incorrectly. Referring to a health care bill Mr. Kennedy has proposed, Mr. Clinton said, "You've got a great bill there." They did not engage in "horse-trading." + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +168 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 11, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Personal Health + +BYLINE: By Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section C; Page 11; Column 4; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1201 words + +UNTIL recently, little was known about the effects of age on nutrition. Research into the vitamin and mineral requirements of Americans over 50 lagged seriously even as age distribution in the nation shifted toward the decades beyond midlife. In devising recommendations about how much of each nutrient should be consumed each day, nutrition experts assumed that people of 70 or 80 were no different from those of 50. +But now researchers seeking to correct this oversight are finding that millions of older Americans are nutritionally deprived either because they consume too little of various vitamins and minerals or because certain medical conditions or treatments prevent them from making full use of the nutrients in the foods they eat. + The potential consequences of such undernutrition are serious indeed. They include a much greater than average risk of developing heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis and infectious illnesses, as well as a debilitating brain condition with symptoms that resemble Alzheimer's disease. Caloric needs decline with age but the need for many nutrients rises, leaving less room for so-called empty calories and making it all the more important for older people to be sure most of their calories are nutritious. +But while dietary improvements can go a long way toward correcting nutrient deficiencies, researchers are discovering that many older people need to take supplements of certain vitamins and minerals to counter their susceptibilities and symptoms. + +For Better Health + While beta carotene and vitamins C and E have been the subject of much talked about and often controversial research, the B vitamins have not received anywhere near the popular attention they deserve. Recent studies indicate that many older people, including those with well-balanced diets, may need to take supplements of certain B vitamins. +Low blood levels of the B vitamin folacin, for example, have recently been linked to a significant rise in the risk of heart attack, stroke and possibly certain common cancers, including cancers of the colon, lung and cervix. Deficient levels occur even in people who consume recommended amounts of folacin, suggesting that the elderly may need more of this nutrient than younger adults. Folacin, also known as folic acid or folate, is prominent in dark-green leafy vegetables, liver, kidneys, wheat germ and dried peas and beans. +A large proportion of elderly Americans are deficient in vitamin B6; they are consuming considerably less than the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA), and to make matters worse, recent studies suggest that the RDA for B6 for older people is too low, as it is for folacin. Inadequate B6 has been linked to poor functioning of the immune system and an increased risk of infection in the elderly. It may also disrupt sugar metabolism. Vitamin B6 is prominent in whole grain (but not enriched) breads and cereals, liver, avocados, spinach, green beans, bananas and fish. +But it is a B12 deficiency that is perhaps most frightening, for it can cause devastating symptoms even though it may not show up as a deficiency on an ordinary blood test. About 20 percent of 60-year-olds and 40 percent of 80-year-olds have a condition called atrophic gastritis that results in a diminished ability to absorb B12 from foods. +The resulting subclinical deficiency of B12 can cause memory loss, disorientation, balance and coordination problems and other symptoms easily mistaken for Alzheimer's disease. In such people, supplements of crystalline B12, the kind found in an ordinary multivitamin capsule, can often correct the brain syndrome. + +Antidotes to Aging + Osteoporosis, the loss of bone mineral that can result in crippling fractures, is epidemic among older Americans. Among the many factors that contribute to it -- including a high-protein diet, cigarette smoking and sedentary living -- a life-long insufficiency of dietary calcium is the primary culprit. +The newest, unofficial recommended amount of calcium for women over 50 is 1,000 milligrams a day for those who take postmenopausal estrogen and 1,500 milligrams for those who do not. The typical American woman consumes about one-half the 800 milligrams listed as the current official Recommended Dietary Allowance. +The most popular supplement, calcium carbonate (found in Tums, for example), is poorly absorbed. Calcium is best absorbed from dairy foods like milk and yogurt; low-fat and nonfat products are the best sources. Other foods rich in calcium include collard greens, broccoli, and canned salmon and sardines eaten with the bones. +To be properly absorbed, calcium depends on vitamin D, which is also often in short supply in the elderly. About two-thirds of older adults consume less than the recommended amount of vitamin D. Milk is fortified with it and fatty fish like mackerel, salmon and sardines are rich in it. +Vitamin D is also made in skin exposed to ultraviolet B radiation from the sun. But the skin's ability to make vitamin D declines with age, older people tend to spend less time in the sun, and in northern latitudes, almost no vitamin D is manufactured in winter. Also as people age, they gradually lose the ability to convert vitamin D to the active hormone that is needed for dietary calcium to become incorporated into bones. Some older people may need treatment with this hormone to prevent serious bone loss. +Certain vitamins play a double role that makes them especially important to the health of the elderly. When consumed in recommended amounts, they prevent the symptoms of nutrient deficiencies. And in larger doses they protect against oxidation damage to cells and other substances involved in heart disease and cancer. These antioxidants, as they are called, include vitamins C and E and beta carotene, which is converted in the body into vitamin A. +Older people who consume lots of foods rich in vitamin C and beta carotene tend to have fewer heart attacks, lower blood pressure and less cancer. Vitamins C and E taken as supplements may also help delay the onset of cataracts, and vitamin E may protect against heart disease and macular degeneration, a vision-impairing disorder of the retina. +Although definitive evidence of benefits is still lacking, the apparent safety of large doses of vitamin E has prompted many experts to recommend supplements of 200 to 400 international units a day, particularly after the age of 50, since it is not possible to consume large amounts from foods. There is less agreement about vitamin C, in part because megadoses can sometimes cause problems like diarrhea and kidney stones and may also interfere with the absorption of vitamin B12. +As for beta carotene, the jury is still out. Evidence for its benefits as a supplement is sketchy at best, and taking beta carotene in supplement form might even be harmful. This nutrient is but one of some 500 carotenoids in foods, and it is uncertain which of them and in what combinations are beneficial. Until further facts are available, the best bet is to eat plenty of foods rich in carotenoids: carrots, dark-green vegetables like spinach and broccoli, cantaloupe, sweet potatoes and the like. + +LOAD-DATE: May 11, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Table: "Recommended Dietary Allowances for Adults" lists recommended dietary allowances for adults. (Source: National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +169 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 11, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +Lois G. Forer, 80, a Judge and Author, Dies + +BYLINE: By WOLFGANG SAXON + +SECTION: Section D; Page 25; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 580 words + +Lois G. Forer, an author, a retired Philadelphia judge and a lifelong advocate for the young, the elderly and the poor, died on Monday at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. A Philadelphia resident, she was 80. +The cause was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, her family said. + Judge Forer, an authority on criminal justice, spent 32 years practicing law and 16 years on the bench. Her books on the law received critical acclaim nationally. +She also headed a poverty law office for children, sat on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union and represented poor people in constitutional cases. As a private lawyer, she worked for wealthy clients and corporations, and as a judge she tried both criminal and civil cases. + +Benchmark Cases + From 1955 to 1966, she served Pennsylvania as Deputy Attorney General and played a key role in two benchmark cases. One of them ended the whites-only policy that the founder of Girard College had written into his will. The other opened the celebrated art collection of the tax-exempt Barnes Foundation to the public. +She became a judge of the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia in 1971 and retired as a senior judge in 1987. +Lois Goldstein Forer was born in Chicago and graduated from Northwestern University in 1935. She worked briefly as a reporter and then as a union organizer. Dissatisfied, she returned to Northwestern for a law degree and spent several years in public service in Washington before moving to Philadelphia as a law clerk in Federal Court. +After her stint as Deputy Attorney General in 1966, she organized the Office for Juveniles at Community Legal Services and headed it for nearly two years. +Judge Forer received national attention with her first book, "No One Will Lissen: How Our Legal System Brutalizes the Youthful Poor" (1970). In it, she argued that the humane ideal to treat juveniles differently had been mangled in practice. For the most part, she wrote, juveniles falling into the system are poor, nonwhite and defenseless. +Her "Criminals and Victims: A Trial Judge Reflects on Crime and Punishment" (1980) tried to make sense of seeking to mete out justice in an environment of abstract theories of the way things are supposed to be. A judge, she asserted, finds little in the way of either practical guidance or spiritual comfort from abstractions.) + +Critical Views on Justice + "Money and Justice: Who Owns the Courts?" (1984) describes a system that costs too much and takes too long and often results in "substantial injustice." "A Chilling Effect: The Mounting Threat of Libel and Invasion of Privacy Actions to the First Amendment" (1987) argued for definitions of what is libelous and what is newsworthy. Federal legislation to that end would help rid the First Amendment of the ballast a litigious society has heaped on it, she contended. +Since her fourth-stage lymphoma was diagnosed eight months ago, Judge Forer finished two more books. One, "What Every Woman Should Know Before (and After) She Gets Involved With Men and Money," is scheduled for publication by MacMillan later this year. +Her highly topical last book, "The Rage to Punish: The Unintended Consequences of Mandatory Sentencing," is on W. W. Norton's list for next month. +Judge Forer is survived by her husband, Morris L. Forer; two sons, Stuart, of Warwick, R.I., and John, of Philadelphia; a daughter, Hope Forer Ross of Manhattan; a sister, Marion Schott of Mount Kisco, N.Y., and two grandsons. + +NAME: Lois G. Forer + +LOAD-DATE: May 11, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: May 14, 1994, Saturday + + CORRECTION: +An obituary on Wednesday about Lois G. Forer, author and retired Philadelphia judge, referred incorrectly to the publication of her book "What Every Woman Needs to Know Before (and After) She Gets Involved With Men and Money." The publication, by Macmillan, is not due later this year; it occurred in February. + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Lois G. Forer (Roberto Celli) + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +170 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 12, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Patients Share Bigger Burden Of Rising Health Care Costs + +BYLINE: By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1929 words + +Patients covered by what they thought was comprehensive medical insurance are increasingly facing large out-of-pocket costs as insurers and employers turn to them to help pay the nation's ever-rising health care bill. +Personal outlays for medical care have risen steadily since the early 1980's, but the trend has accelerated in the last several years, with 1994 estimates showing yet another leap. + And patients are discovering that merely having insurance is no surefire protection from financial hardship or even ruin. In a survey of 1,623 households published in March in The Journal of the American Medical Association, one in five families reported problems paying medical bills. To the researchers' surprise, nearly three-quarters of those families were insured. +"The problem is that many people's insurance is not as deep as they think, and their medical bills are not being paid for adequately by insurance," said Dr. Bob Blendon, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and the study's main author. "You do not have absolute security. The real message of our survey is uncertainty: you think your insurance is going to cover you and the answer is, maybe you're right." +When Ann Nita Silverman of Manhattan was admitted to a hospital last year for a pinched nerve in her neck, she assumed that her private insurance would cover her hospital bills, which totaled $6,000. But her insurer concluded that the charges were beyond the "reasonable and customary" amount for lower Manhattan and offered only partial reimbursement. Ms. Silverman had to pay $2,000 from her own bank account. +Such rejections have become increasingly common; an estimated 8 to 10 percent of charges are now turned down. But most policies do not protect the patient from being stuck with bills when a doctor and insurer disagree about fees. +"I have a job and good insurance and I pay a lot for it," said Ms. Silverman, who works for a large New York advertising firm. "But now I still live in fear of serious illness or major surgery. Will it wipe out my savings, even with coverage?" +Even patients covered by Medicare, the Government insurance program intended to protect the elderly from unforeseen health care costs, are feeling the squeeze. A study by the American Association of Retired Persons released last month projected that older Americans would spend an average of $2,803 on medical care in 1994, or 23 percent of their household income -- more than twice what they spent in 1987. Even those who have bought supplemental insurance may find themselves paying more, since the costs of many private medical services have skyrocketing and supplemental Medicare policies may also reject charges that are deemed excessive. +When Lillian Drucker, 89, of Brooklyn transferred from a community hospital in Queens to the hospital in Connecticut where her cardiologist practices, the private ambulance bill came to $2,100. Medicare contributed $646. Her supplemental Medigap policy paid nothing. And Ms. Drucker kicked in $1,400. +"We pay for supplemental coverage, so I took it for granted that this would be paid for," her daughter, Phyllis Silvestri, said. +In fact, Dr. Blendon said he believed that the nation's determination to overhaul the health care system is fueled not primarily by concern for the 38 million uninsured -- who lack a strong political voice -- but by the frustration of the hundreds of millions of working and retired people who are paying more for medical care. +"We believe that we're having a national health debate because of the reduction of benefits that people are experiencing," he said. "You're covered for less. You're paying more. And you're nervous about what is going to happen in the case of large medical bills." +The rise in personal medical costs has many causes, but is often related to attempts by employers and insurers to shift their burden to consumers: +*An increasing number of insurers now review medical bills submitted for payment to make sure the charges are "reasonable" and the care "appropriate." Based on these reviews, insurers now refuse to pay an estimated 8 to 10 percent of submitted charges. And patients, caught between the insurer and the medical world, often end up footing the bill. +*The push by insurers for shorter hospital stays means that patients who are discharged quickly after operations or childbirth often need to hire nursing services privately to help out at home. This trend toward more outpatient surgery drives procedures to a setting where patients are often responsible for larger fees. +*Medically related expenses that are not always covered by insurance, like prescription drugs and ambulance service, had been relatively cheap, but have risen sharply in recent years. Mrs. Drucker, who paid $1,400 for an ambulance, also pays $225 a month for her prescription heart pills. +*People who long considered health insurance a free benefit that went with a job must now contribute more toward premiums and are facing escalating co-payments and deductibles. Many policies do not kick in until the patient has spent hundreds of dollars, and many require patients to pay 20 percent on thousands of dollars' worth of bills thereafter. +Often there is little patients can do to avoid such expenses, since they do not know how much they will be billed until after treatment has been given. But consumer advocates advise people to ask about charges in advance when possible, and to study insurance policies yearly to make sure they know about their changing obligations. They add that medical charges rejected by an insurer can be appealed. + +$2,000 a Year + A report released last year by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Commonwealth Fund found that Americans had an average of $909 in medical bills not covered by insurance, and that the average adult contributed $86 a month toward health insurance premiums, for a total annual expenditure of almost $2,000 on health care. Six percent of the adult population paid more than $3,600 yearly for health insurance, and 11 percent spent more than $2,000 for health care, aside from premiums. +That does not include people who face bills for nursing home or home care. Thirty percent of people with such bills have out-of-pocket expenses exceeding $3,000 a year, the survey found. Only one in five Americans contribute nothing toward health insurance. +"One of the key drivers of Americans' attitudes toward health care services and the system in general is out-of-pocket expenses," the report concluded. "The level of dissatisfaction with services and with the system increases as out-of-pocket costs increase." +In some cases, patients have chosen to gamble on the risk of out-of-pocket medical expenses to keep rising insurance premiums manageable. For her own policy, Mrs. Silvestri, a healthy 62-year-old who pays for her own insurance, chose a Blue Cross / Blue Shield policy with a $1,000 deductible and high out-of-pocket limits to hold down her premiums -- and hoped that she wouldn't get sick. Nonetheless, she paid nearly $3,000 for her 1993 coverage. +The gamble paid off until she got walking pneumonia last October and ended up paying well over $1,000 for doctors' payments and medicine. With her insurance premium, the doctors' fees and antibiotics, she spent over $5,700 on medical care last year. +"All of a sudden I'm getting big bills -- and paying cash," Mrs. Silvestri said. "And that was just for an outpatient pneumonia." + +An Unhappy Surprise + To others, the bills in the mail have come as more of a surprise. Mrs. Silverman had worked for the same Manhattan advertising firm for 14 years, where -- until recently -- the free health insurance that came with her job reliably covered medical expenses large and small. But over the past five years, her contributions to her premium have risen to $72 from each biweekly paycheck, and her out-of-pocket expenses have mounted as well. +After minor outpatient gynecological surgery in 1992, she submitted hospital bills totaling $2,203 to her insurer, which paid 80 percent of the charge, or $1,763. Since by that year her insurance required a 20 percent co-payment, she was asked to pay the remaining $440 of the bill. She initially withheld payment because of an error in the hospital bill, which the insurer had paid without review, but she eventually sent in a check after threats from a collection agency. +For families facing major illness, insurance policy limits or even the requirement of a 20 percent co-payment can prove financially ruinous. Tina and Joel Venutti of California have had two children die in intensive-care units in the last five years -- the last more than two years ago. Despite their insurance they are still paying off thousands of dollars in medical bills. +"Many policies have a number of exclusions: in total dollar limits; restricted coverage for pre-existing conditions; co-payments, which are the patient's responsibility, and deductibles," Dr. Blendon said. "When patients run up large bills, insurance gets to the point where it stops paying some of them. Policies have various limits, and unless you have a major illness you may not discover them." +Although Medicare is supposed to insulate these groups from the vagaries of the insurance marketplace, they too have seen out-of-pocket costs soar. Medicare does not cover a wide variety of what insurers refer to a "secondary medical expenses," including medicines, home nursing care and home medical equipment like wheelchairs. +And as more medical treatments move to the outpatient setting, outlays for such items have become increasingly common. Just five years ago most chemotherapy was administered to patients who stayed in the hospital for a few days after treatment to recover from the profound fatigue and nausea they suffered as side effects. Today these drugs are often given in a doctor's office or clinic, and patients bear the expense of dealing with the aftershock at home. A weakened patient who lives alone might have to pay for ambulance transportation and home nursing assistance. +In addition, while Medicare carefully regulates what doctors may charge and limits inpatient hospital bills, the movement of many minor but costly surgical procedures to "day surgery" departments has effectively decimated the protection of these regulations. Medicare does not yet regulate hospital outpatient charges, and the requirement that patients contribute 20 percent of all outpatient bills still stands. +Last year, Jeremiah Harris of Folsom, Pa., had five outpatient endoscopic examinations of his esophagus at Ridley Park Hospital in Philadelphia. The hospital fees, not including the doctor bills, totaled $5,709, which meant that his 20 percent co-payment was $1,141.80. +"The Government by its policy has allowed hospital to charge Medicare patients any amount they choose," he said. +The rise in patient expenses has led many to turn to health maintenance organizations or other forms of managed care, which in many cases provide a broad range of services for a yearly fee. But even many managed-care plans come with their share of co-payments and other patients costs. +As of Jan. 1, 1994, Ms. Silverman switched her health insurance to the Travelers Managed Care Plan, hoping that would insulate her from rising medical bills. But she has already spent more than $500 to treat bone spurs in her shoulder. She is scheduled for inpatient surgery on the shoulder this month, and she is holding her breath to see what bills she will accrue there. + +LOAD-DATE: May 12, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "HEALTH: What Insurance Does Not Cover" shows the per-capita out-of-pocket health care spending in the U.S. from '75-'90. (Sources: Health Care Financing Administration; Datastream) (pg. B6) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +171 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 12, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Books of The Times; +A Brother and Sister Excavate Their Past + +BYLINE: By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT + +SECTION: Section C; Page 20; Column 1; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 937 words + + +School for the Blind + By Dennis McFarland + 287 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $21.95. +Vivid memories of the past are said to be a recompense of old age, but what happens to Francis and Muriel Brimm in Dennis McFarland's accomplished new novel, "School for the Blind," may be too much of a good thing. At the age of 73, Francis has retired to the Florida town of his youth, where his spinster elder sister, Muriel, has spent her entire life. + As the novel's opening paragraph recounts: "He had been a news photographer -- a witness, a messenger amid the world's fire and ashes -- and he figured he had earned not only the right to let the world go, but also the poise to let it go with authority. He would read, write, sleep, visit the beach, fish, garden a bit, whatever he pleased -- the pastimes, he imagined, of solitary old people of some accomplishment." +But instead of puttering, Francis finds himself shamefully trying to catch glimpses of the beautiful young woman who lives next door. Too early in the morning, he wakes to see on the ceiling the face of the shorn French girl he long ago photographed being marched through the street for having a baby by a German soldier. And in his mind there echoes the indecipherable words that the crowds had chanted at her. +The effect of Francis's return on Muriel, who still lives in the house where they spent their childhoods, is similarly disturbing. "She had never been the least bit taken with the past," but lately the upstairs rooms have begun to seem haunted, and "on three or four occasions in the last few weeks, she'd found herself standing at the base of the old stairs, one hand resting on the pineapple-adorned newel post, gazing upward like some woebegone character in a Tennessee Williams play." +What is happening to Francis and Muriel is symbolized dramatically when the two of them take an evening stroll on a golf course near Francis's house and come upon a dog digging up human bones from a sand trap. The bones turn out to belong to one of two young girls who had been murdered, cut up and stripped of their flesh. They were students at a local school for the blind, where Muriel worked as the librarian until she retired. Yet the novel's title really refers to the experiences that Francis and Muriel are about to undergo in digging up their buried pasts. +These experiences are narrated in chapters that alternate between Francis's and Muriel's points of view, and that overlap in time so that the novel keeps catching up with itself and creating its own immediate past. Like the murder of the two girls, what the old folks gradually unearth is grim. +Muriel explores their father's suicide and her own long-repressed connection with it. Francis finally recalls what the French were chanting at the collaboratrice: " 'Ange de la mort,' the voices had said. . . . Of course, angel of death, not really a surprise at all." He shortly discovers that he has a terminal blood disease. +Yet for all the morbidness of these details, the prevailing mood of "School for the Blind" is one of gently comic wackiness. Muriel is finally drawn away from her crippling obsession with the past by her spirited cleaning woman, Deirdre, who has got herself pregnant by a fellow member of her Alcoholics Anonymous group. When Deirdre reminded him who she was and told him she was pregnant, "I thought he said, 'No regrets,' which kind of surprised me." She explains: "But when I asked him to please repeat what he'd said, it turned out to be 'No rug rats.' . . . You know, babies crawling around on the floor. Rug rats." +Meanwhile, as Francis lies dying with Deirdre reading aloud to him from detective mysteries, he dreams of an afterlife that resembles "a huge, sprawling, seaside bathhouse," in which "men of all sizes, shapes, ages and races wander tiled halls naked and in varying states ranging from bewildered to bitter to resigned." +Even the murder incident has an element of humor. The killer writes an anonymous letter to the local paper explaining his motives. He concludes: "This letter is not a work of art but there is no profanity and it is grammatically correct. I believe I have spelled everything correctly. When I don't know how to spell a word I look it up in the dictionary. I have read 'The Elements of Style,' a book on how to write in which it says to 'avoid fancy words' and that 'it is seldom advisable to tell all.' " +If the novel has flaws, they are a sometimes heavy-handed symbolism and gratuitous literary references to the likes of Chekhov, Conrad, Yeats, Joyce and Eliot. As Mr. McFarland demonstrated with his talented first novel, "The Music Room," which was also an exploration of a family's past, his own prose serves him more than adequately. +In "School for the Blind," the language soars with equal suppleness but takes a welcome turn for the droll. Muriel, who eventually survives her spiritual crisis, comes away from it thinking of God "as often sleeping, as someone who would sleep through anything, through practically any human peril, and as someone who has to be waked up." So "in the end she has felt guided, helped, but she has to pray really loud, figuratively speaking." +Her faith is intact and she feels proud that it is; "the pride, she imagined, had to do simply with her having survived this long, as if life were a tedious, meandering spectacle -- the halftime show in a stadium at a ball game, unsure of itself, amateurish, and she one of the few who had remained faithful enough in the bleachers to see it through to the last number, where, surprisingly, it redeemed itself." + +LOAD-DATE: May 12, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo of Dennis McFarland. (Tellis A. Lawson Jr./Houghton Mifflin) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +172 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 13, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Where There's No Car, There's a Bus; +Navigating and Surviving the Suburbs: Taking the No. 60 in Westchester + +BYLINE: By JOSEPH BERGER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1250 words + +DATELINE: WHITE PLAINS, May 12 + +On weekday mornings, buses like the No. 60 weave through the fraying urban neighborhoods of Mount Vernon, New Rochelle and Yonkers and fill up early with women who are heading out to clean the homes and care for the babies and tend the frail in the more prosperous villages farther north in Westchester County. +The passengers sit in cocoons of silence, gazing dreamily at the scene reeling film-like out the tinted windows, their bodies swaying gently as the bus rounds a curve or halts a little too suddenly. Some leaf through The Daily News or listen to radios or chat with other regulars. A few take naps, knowing their journey will be a long one. + Although suburban life was built around the car, about 55,000 people in Westchester prove every day that you can survive in the suburbs without one. They take the bus to and from work, to and from school, to and from the mall, enduring bus stops in January's blasts of snow or August's furnace-room heat. + +Workers and the Elderly + They are most definitely not a cross-section of Westchester. They are poorer, older and more likely to be immigrants, women and black or Hispanic, a survey done in 1990 for Westchester's Transportation Department found. Many do the jobs most of those who can afford to own cars would prefer not to do. +They are people like Lula Blue and Donna Carr. Ms. Blue, a health aide for an elderly woman in Elmsford, spends an hour and a half on two buses to get to her job from her home in New Rochelle. Ms. Carr, who immigrated from Jamaica six months ago, takes a bus from Boston Post Road and 216th Street in the Bronx to her job as a cafeteria worker at the Mamaroneck Avenue School in White Plains, an hour and half trip each way. +The long journeys are part of their daily rhythm, as inevitable as a rising and setting sun, and they do not complain. +"I read sometimes," Ms. Carr said. "Mostly I sit and think." +John and Margaret Kenyon are not working people, but they too are bus regulars. They gave up their car 14 years ago when they turned 70. +"We were getting too old and the insurance was too high," Mr. Kenyon, a retired postal worker, said. +But everyday brings a new adventure on the bus. On one recent morning, the Kenyons, he sporty in a newsboy cap, she more prim in a linen sunhat, headed from their home in New Rochelle to buy a few items at a new Bradlee's department store in Yonkers. +"We'd never seen it before," Mrs. Kenyon said. + +Making a Day of It + By car, Bradlee's is a 15-minute excursion to the west. But by bus, they had to travel far to the north to go south and west eventually. Such circuitousness is one of the wrinkles of bus service in Westchester, which is designed to run between towns rather than to blanket whole neighborhoods the way buses often do in New York City. You can get to White Plains, the county seat, from almost anywhere, and getting around Westchester's cities -- where there are large numbers of people who do not drive -- is not that difficult. But it is hard to plan a trip from say, Port Chester to Scarsdale. +The Kenyons took the No. 60 to the White Plains TransCenter, which has the dim, forbidding ambiance of a parking garage, and waited there for the bus that runs down Central Avenue, Westchester's main shopping strip. At Bradlee's, Mrs. Kenyon bought another white sunhat. Mr. Kenyon bought a pair of grass shears. Carrying their trove in white plastic bags, they headed home. The trip took two hours each way, but they had made a day out of it. +"It's very convenient," Mr. Kenyon said of the bus service. "They're right on time. They're clean. Most of the bus drivers are courteous." +Westchester has 328 buses that navigate 58 routes covering 846 miles, including one express route that runs from White Plains to Wall Street and several that just ferry people to village railroad stations. Eight years ago, the system was christened the Bee Line to give it a name that riders might identify with. Yet, most passengers still refer to it simply as "the Bus." Whatever its name, the system is actually seven separate bus companies that have contracts with the county's Transportation Department. +The buses carry 28.4 million passengers a year. With a basic fare of $1.15 a ride, the system took in $30 million last year, less than half of its operating expenses. Like almost every other public transportation system in the country, the Bee Line is heavily subsidized by local, state and Federal governments. + +Hewing to Schedules + The trick to mastering the bus system is knowing the schedule. Unlike New York City's system, where bus riders head for a bus stop and keep their fingers crossed that a bus will come soon, Westchester buses hew to a tight schedule. During most of the day, the No. 60, for example, comes every half-hour. Veteran riders memorize the times that buses show up, and most say the buses are generally on time. +The schedule is the bane of Melissa Sullivan's social life, however. Miss Sullivan, a 20-year-old sophomore at Westchester Community College, knows that when she visits a friend in say Bronxville, she must cut the visit short to catch the last bus leaving for her home in Larchmont. Even in the daytime when she catches a bus to college, she said, some drivers will come several minutes too early, and if she is not at the bus stop early, she will have to wait a half-hour for the next bus, a wait made more dismal by bad weather. +"And there's no booth at my bus stop," she said. +She and her mother, a secretary, used to own a car, but "it died," she said, and they will have to rely on the buses until they save up enough for a car. +"I used to hate taking the bus, but it's now part of everyday life," she said. +Similarly, the only thing Mr. Kenyon laments about surrendering his car is that he can no longer attend the weekend concerts at the State University at Purchase. He can get to the concerts, but there are no buses late enough to take him back to New Rochelle. + +Time to Socialize + Annie Lynch, a 30-year-old teacher's aide, genuinely looks forward to her rides on the bus, even though each way is an hourlong odyssey. She works at the Westchester School for Special Children in Yonkers, which would be a 15-minute ride from her home in Mamaroneck if she had a car. But she does not mind the long ride because she regularly encounters a hospital attendant who has become her friend. +"I just like to take the bus," she said. "I like to socialize with people." +One of the more farflung travelers is Susan Jankowski, who works as a "floating" cafeteria worker for a food service compnay. On any day, she not only does not know whether she will be working as a cashier or a waitress or kitchen worker, but she also does not know at which company she will be working. Yet, lacking a car, she has to get to wherever work is by a series of buses or a bus connection to a commuter railroad. She has worked as far away as Stamford. +Of course, not everyone on the bus is working-class, old or a student. Eriko Sato, a stylishly dressed woman in her 30's, was at the White Plains TransCenter the other day, looking suitably lost for someone who had never been there before. +She lives in Manhattan, but was here to catch a bus to Neiman Marcus a few blocks away from the TransCenter. There is no Neiman Marcus in New York City and she had her eye on a particular shoulder bag that the store carried. Luckily, she also had a whole day to spend getting to the store and back. + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Passengers settled into their seats recently on the Bee Line No. 60 bus, where some nap, read papers or ruminate during the 90-minute trip from the Bronx to White Plains in Westchester County. (pg. B1); Juan Castro sharing the rear seats of the No. 60 bus with Janae Crudup, left, her sister, Shadreya, second from left, and Ashley Janowski, right. For families without a car in the suburbs, the bus is their only transportation. (pg. B2) (Susan Harris for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +173 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 14, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO DIGEST + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 23; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk; Second Front + +LENGTH: 536 words + + +NEW YORK CITY + +TO OBEY LAW, HOMELESS MOVED AT 8 +The courts say New York City may not keep homeless families in emergency assistance offices overnight, sleeping on chairs and tables. But "overnight" has been defined as whether anyone is left in the office at 8 A.M. So just before 7 A.M., those who had spent the night at a city office in the Bronx were roused and moved, mostly to shelters. Page 1. + +7 SUSPENDED OFFICERS ARE BACK AT WORK +Seven of 14 police officers suspended after being arrested on corruption charges last month have returned to work while awaiting trial, earning full pay for what police officials call "modified assignment." Page 24. + +CLEANING SERVICES GET MIXED GRADES +The Mayor's office has proposed privatizing school custodial services. But the record of three decades of experimentation with such contracting in some schools is mixed. Page 25. + +AN 'UNFORGETTABLE' OMISSION IS CHARGED +Natalie Cole's studio-engineered duet with her father, Nat (King) Cole, may truly be "Unforgettable." But her record company has amnesia when it comes to giving credit, according to a lawsuit filed in Manhattan. Page 25. + +E.M.S. WORKER HAD WEAPONS CACHE +A 39-year-old paramedic, described as a loner by the police, had quietly stockpiled guns and crude explosives in his Bronx apartment until an informer led the authorities to arrest him, the police said. Page 25. + +NONPROFIT GROUPS LOSE JOB FROM CITY +The Giuliani administration has given a national for-profit company a contract to provide city services to elderly people, saying it can do the job cheaper than the four nonprofit groups that have been offering the services. Page 26. + +REGION + +DISMISSAL OF CHARGES SOUGHT +Lawyers for the owners of an armored car company who have been accused of stealing up to $38 million said that they want the charges dismissed because the Government allowed disposal of documents vital to their case. Page 26. + +PLEA DEAL IN KIDNAP CASE IS IN DOUBT +Efforts to reach a plea bargain that would have spared Katie Beers, the 11-year-old Long Island girl who was kidnapped for 16 days, from having to testify in a sex-abuse case have collapsed, a lawyer involved in the case said. Page 26. + +3 IN SENATE RACE BANK ON PRIMARY UPSET +The June 7 primary election in New Jersey is just a blip on the screen for the two major candidates for United States Senator, but for three lesser-known and less affluent candidates it's the big show. Page 27. + +WATERSHED POLICE LOOK FOR TROUBLE +On the pond was a white sudsy substance. Ronald A. Gatto didn't like the looks of it, especially considering where it was going: from the pond into the Kensico Reservoir, and from there to the taps of nearly nine million people. Page 27. + +SLAUGHTER OF A SWAN SHAKES A VILLAGE +In the 16 years that Angelo Albanese has been mayor of Manlius, N.Y., nothing, he says, has shaken the community like the slaying of a mute swan that lived in a village park. Page 27. + +STATE BATTLE OVER GUNS TO CONTINUE +Governor Cuomo and leaders of the Assembly say they will press for state legislation that would outlaw assault weapons. Page 26. + +About New York by Michael T. Kaufman 25 + +LOAD-DATE: May 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +174 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 14, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Aging Dept. Privatizes 4 Contracts For Services + +BYLINE: By JONATHAN P. HICKS + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 26; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 673 words + +The Giuliani administration has given a national for-profit company four contracts to provide city services to elderly people, saying the company can do the work cheaper than the four nonprofit groups that have been offering those services. +The decision has prompted protests from some elderly residents and City Council members, who say the four neighborhood-based organizations will now be forced to lay off dozens of employees and scale back the other services they provide. + The $1 million contract was awarded to Personal-Touch, a for-profit company with 23 offices across the country, by the Department of Aging. While the decision affects just four local organizations and involves a relatively small amount of money in the city's $31 billion budget, the controversy illustrates the difficult choices -- and consequences -- of trying to balance the city's budget and scale back government spending by opening up the competition for providing services.. + +Campaign Cornerstone + The Giuliani administration, facing a projected $2.3 billion deficit in the budget for the next fiscal year, says it has been looking for ways to shave costs in every quarter of municipal spending. Moreover, the concept of widening the competition for functions performed on behalf of government was a cornerstone of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's mayoral campaign last year. +Herbert W. Stupp, the Commissioner of the Department of Aging, said that the decision to award the contract to a corporation operating for profit resulted from an analysis that the company could provide the same services for 12.5 percent less than the four neighborhood nonprofit groups. +But several City Council members and officials of the organizations that are now losing those contracts say the decision will hurt not only their agencies, but also the level of service received by their elderly clients. +The four contracts cover a number of home care services currently provided by four centers for the elderly in Brooklyn and Queens to enable elderly people to remain independent -- from helping with shopping to assisting with chores. The nonprofit groups will continue to provide other services, including operating the centers for the elderly and providing meals there. +Mr. Stupp said that the department had no ideological preference for for-profit companies and that of eight contracts that had been awarded recently, four went to nonprofit organizations. But he said Personal-Touch was selected for its contracts because it could provide equal service at a savings of 12.5 percent. +Cheryl Heiberg, executive director of the Bay Ridge Center for Older Adults, said her agency will lose a $270,000 contract to provide home care services for the elderly. "We have had contracts with the city for 15 years," she said. "This action takes the services out of the community so that seniors can't come to our center and address all their needs." +Ms. Heiberg added that the loss of the contract will mean that her organization will have to lay off 15 of its 42 employees. "And these are older women who are not all that well off and probably won't get rehired because of their ages," she said. +Councilman Sal Albanese of Brooklyn said, "It is outrageous that community-based senior providers with excellent records of service to their communities have been perfunctorily terminated." +Mr. Albanese and several officials of the nonprofit health care organizations said the savings were not worth the inconvenience for elderly people and the pain that would be created for the groups' employees. +David N. Slifkin, chief financial officer of the Personal-Touch Home Care Corporation, said that as a larger company with 12,000 employees and 23 offices in 12 states, Personal-Touch had been able to achieve economies of scale and lower overhead costs. +The company, which has its headquarters in Jamaica, Queens, already has several contracts with New York City, most of them with the Human Resources Administration. The new contracts become effective on July 1. + +LOAD-DATE: May 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +175 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 14, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +ABOUT NEW YORK; +Ex-'Ward Heeler,' 95, Is a Healer + +BYLINE: By Michael T. Kaufman + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 25; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 808 words + +ELSYE ROTHSCHILD, who is a year older than the 20th century, likes to sit on the stoop of the apartment house on Fort Washington Avenue in upper Manhattan, the one she moved into when she married in 1926, and tell her neighbors what they should do. +"Well, these days I only talk to people who still ask me for my advice," said Mrs. Rothschild, a widow with eyes both twinkly and sharp. For several decades she was the Democratic Party's captain on the block, getting out the vote on Election Day and serving as a fixer and expediter much of the rest of the time. + In that time if someone wanted to open a bar, she would tell him which lawyer could make the phone call that would speed up the processing of his application for a liquor license. Or when neighbors born abroad applied for naturalization, she would shepherd them through the process, from filing first papers to standing with them when they went before the judge to offer their oaths of citizenship. She knew her way around housing regulations and housing court, and she would accompany newly widowed women to the Social Security offices or tell mothers which schools had the best teachers. +THESE days precinct captains have vanished from many streets. There are other conduits for patronage and pressure now, and Mrs. Rothschild has no official capacity, and the helpful and effective people whose numbers she knew to call are certainly retired and probably dead. The Washington Heights neighborhood, largely Jewish through much of her life, is now largely Hispanic. But still Mrs. Rothschild goes on functioning as what one of her two sons, Charles Rothschild, describes as a "freelance ward heeler." +"I keep the applications for food stamps and rent stabilization," said Mrs. Rothschild, who will turn 95 next Tuesday, as she sat at her table beneath the Raoul Dufy prints and the Ben Shahn poster where she eats the Stouffer's frozen dinners that she heats and prepares and where she advises those neighbors who still value her fixing and expediting skills. +"If they come by now, it's usually for help with health matters or to get food stamps." Mrs. Rothschild said. She helped one woman, an adopted child, to search for her natural mother by looking through pictures in high school yearbooks. She advises others on which plans pay best for prescription drugs. +"There's one woman who has been in the hospital a lot," she says, "who I am trying to convince that the best thing she can do is to give the few thousand dollars she has to her children in order to qualify for Medicaid." Mrs. Rothschild says she has gone over this ground before and she knows that for old people even tiny nest eggs symbolize the idea of autonomy. +She knows how much being on your own means. For her it is the most important thing. She lives alone, she says, because she likes it. Her sons call regularly and visit and they are giving her a party this Sunday. They are good boys, she says: Charles, who is a manager for performers like Judy Collins, the singer; and Edmund, a physician, who is a senior administrator at St. Luke's Hospital. "But you want to do what you can on your own; that's what keeps you going," said the woman, who only last year quit her job as bookkeeper of the Mount Neboh Cemetery in Brooklyn. +HER father, an upholsterer, had made sure that each of his six daughters learned some skill, something she could do with her hands. A few learned tailoring and upholstery, and she was taught to type. That came in handy when she served in the Navy as a yeoman first class in World War I. She reared her sons and worked as the neighborhood fixer. When her husband died 16 years ago she took over his job at the cemetery. +"It was good; I could talk to people," she recalled. First she traveled by subway, but then her employers paid for her to commute by car service. Her son Charles is fairly sure she kept using the train on the way back and pocketed the rest of the carfare. "She would pin her money to her bra and carry paper bags so no one would bother her," he said. +So how does she spend her time now? +"I have no trouble keeping busy," she said, pointing to one of the index cards on her table. "Here's one thing I do: anagrams. I take a long word like apostrophe and see how many words I can make from its letters. I get 300 or 400. I watch television at night, usually David Letterman, so I get up late. I was never much for cards or being around only old people. If there's somebody to help, I help them. I call my sister, the only one left. She's 92 and plays golf. +"Sometimes the people from the hospital come to test me on my memory. They want to know what I eat. I eat everything. I go downstairs and sit on the stoop and watch the world go by and talk to people. I wish I could get around better but really I've got nothing to complain about." + +LOAD-DATE: May 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +176 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 15, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +IDEAS & TRENDS; +Right, Then: Your Policy Covers Fido For Therapy + +BYLINE: By WILLIAM E. SCHMIDT + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 4; Column 4; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 765 words + +DATELINE: LONDON + +FOR hundreds of thousands of Britons, it is a sterling example of affordable, privately financed health care coverage that works. With modest annual premiums of less than $150, there is a full menu of coverage for surgical and medical procedures, from hip replacements to acupuncture; reimbursement for the costs of medical tests and physiotherapy, and even a lump sum payment of cash to replace the insured, once he or she, as they say, passes on. +But unlike Britain's National Health Service, which relies on taxpayer revenues to provide health care for every man, woman and child, this insurance plan is for the dogs. Not to mention cats, horses, budgerigars and the odd boa constrictor, parrot and gerbil. + Begun 20 years ago as a novelty, pet insurance is now a $150 million industry in Britain, with as many as seven companies competing to offer combination health, accident and mortality plans. Estimates vary, but more than a million pets and other animals may now be covered among Britain's population of 7.5 million dogs and 7 million cats. +For anyone who has ever seen a puppy wheeled through a London park in a buggy, or watched waiters fuss over dogs in restaurants where small children are not welcome, it is not surprising that pet insurance has become one of the fastest-growing health care niches in Britain. Pets are big business, fueling a $4.5 billion annual market in pet food, leashes, feeding bowls, shampoos and collars. +Indeed, with revenues from premiums expected to reach a record $50 million this year, Pet Plan, the largest of Britain's pet insurers, has even set up its own charitable trust to finance research into pet welfare. Among its first donations will be a $15,000 grant to fund a study on the problems of older cats. +Dr. Bruce Fogle, a veterinarian who runs one of London's more prosperous practices, estimates that half the dogs and cats he sees on a regular basis are now covered by insurance. "I pay one assistant the equivalent of a full day's pay just to fill out the claims paperwork," said Dr. Fogle, echoing a complaint heard in people-doctor offices across the United States But, he says, the insurance is a real boon, especially for older people on fixed incomes whose aging pets might fall ill, leaving them to deal with veterinary bills that can easily run more than $1,500. +Just recently, Dr. Fogle treated a dog that had lost its vision as a result of a tumor on the lining of its brain. By the time the regimen of magnetic imaging and radiation therapy was complete, the bills totaled more than $1,800. The owner's insurance sent a check for nearly the whole bill, along with a computer-generated note expressing the company's best wishes for the dog's speedy recovery. +In general, most pet policies pick up anywhere from $800 to $2,000 in annual veterinary bills. They also help pay for kennel costs, if the owner becomes ill and has to go to the hospital; third-party liability, if the pet bites or injures someone else, and the cost of newspaper advertisements, to recover a lost animal. Most policies also have an accidental-death clause, providing a modest benefit that helps cover the cost of replacing the pet. +Britain is not the only country with a private insurance sector serving pets. In Sweden, for example, a country where social welfare for humans is high art, an estimated 85 percent of the dog population also carries health and life coverage. +But in the United States, if insurance coverage is any measure, pets are facing a health care crisis. Only a handful of America's estimated population of more than 110 million dogs and cats have health insurance. The untapped market for pet insurance is vast, but until now, Americans generally have chosen to have their animals put to sleep rather than incur hefty bills. On April 1, in fact, an American company that had mounted a national effort to sell pet insurance went out of business. +In some ways, say those who have studied the issue, pet health care runs into the same sorts of problems the Clinton Administration is grappling with as it tries to cobble together a national health care plan for Americans: existing insurance schemes drive up costs, as providers order more sophisticated tests and procedures on the assumption that the insurers, not the consumers, will pay the bills. +"I think the British have a very pragmatic attitude toward their pets," said Dr. Fogle. "People love animals here, but I would only point out that it is not the English who take their cats to psychiatrists or buy pink satin baby doll pajamas for their boxers." + +LOAD-DATE: May 15, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Queen Elizabeth with her pet Corgies. (Associated Press (1971)) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +177 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 15, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +PUBLIC INTEREST; +Community Board Dates: In the Bronx + +SECTION: Section 14; Page 11; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 439 words + + +DISTRICT 1: Port Morris, Melrose, Mott Haven; last Thursday of the month; next June 30, 6:30 P.M., Lincoln Hospital, 234 East 149th Street; (718) 585-7117. + +DISTRICT 2: Hunts Point, Longwood; last Wednesday of the month; next May 25, 6 P.M., Feldco Building, 1029 East 163d Street (corner of Southern Boulevard); (718) 328-9125. + + +DISTRICT 3: Morrisania; second Tuesday of the month; next June 14, 6:30 P.M., Junior High School 98, 1619 Boston Road; (718) 589-6300. + +DISTRICT 4: East and West Concourse, Mount Eden, Highbridge, Concourse Village; fourth Tuesday of the month; next May 24, 6 P.M., 1650 Selwyn Avenue, Community Room; (718) 299-0800. + +DISTRICT 5: Mount Hope, Morris Heights, Fordham University Heights; fourth Wednesday of the month; next May 25, 6 P.M., East Concourse Hebrew Center, 236 East Tremont Avenue; (718) 364-2030. + +DISTRICT 6: Bathgate, Belmont, Bronx Park South, Crotona Park North, East Tremont and West Farms; first Wednesday of the month; next June 1, 6:30 P.M., St. Barnabas Hospital, East 183d Street and Third Avenue, auditorium; (718) 579-6990. + +DISTRICT 7: University Heights, Norwood, Fordham, Bedford and Bedford Park; third Tuesday of month; next May 25, 7 P.M., St. Brendan's School gymnasium, 268 East 207th Street; (718) 933-5650. + +DISTRICT 8: Kingsbridge, Marble Hill, North Riverdale, Spuyten Duyvil, Fieldston; second Tuesday of the month; next June 14, 7:30 P.M., Conservative Synagogue, West 250th Street and Henry Hudson Parkway; (718) 884-3959. + +DISTRICT 9: Bronx River, Castle Hill, Clason Point, Harding Park, Parkchester, Bruckner, Soundview and Unionport; last Thursday of the month; next May 26, 7 P.M., Blessed Sacrament Church, Chapel Hall, 1170 Beach Avenue, between Gleason and Watson Avenues; (718) 823-3034. + +DISTRICT 10: City Island, Throgs Neck, Pelham Bay, Country Club, Co-op City; third Thursday of month; next May 19, 7:30 P.M., Throgs Neck J.A.S.A. (Jewish Association Services for the Aged) Senior Citizen Center, 2705 Schley Avenue, between Randall and Balcom Avenues; (718) 892-1161. + +DISTRICT 11: Allerton, Eastchester, Pelham Parkway, Morris Park; third Thursday of the month; next May 19, 7:30 P.M., Knights of Columbus, Mary Queen of Peace Hall, 1919 Williamsbridge Road, between Rhinelander and Neill Avenues; (718) 892-6262. + +DISTRICT 12: Wakefield, Woodlawn, Williamsburg, Baychester, Eastchester; fourth Thursday of the month; next May 26, 8 P.M., 4101 White Plains Road; (718) 881-4455. + The schedules for community board meetings in other boroughs will appear in subsequent issues of The City. + +LOAD-DATE: May 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +178 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 16, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Gaps in Geriatric Medicine Alarm Health Professionals + +BYLINE: By ESTHER B. FEIN + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1511 words + +At a time when the population of the United States is growing older, the need for doctors properly trained in the problems and the process of aging is urgent. And so it might seem that Sean Morrison had entered a competitive field when he decided a few years ago, in the middle of his medical training, to specialize in geriatric medicine. +Through a fellowship program that links the Mount Sinai Medical Center with the Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged in Manhattan, Dr. Morrison has spent the past year treating elderly patients in the nursing home, in their doctors' offices and in the apartments they are desperately trying to remain in despite the encroaching years and infirmities. + Dr. Morrison, it turns out, is an anomaly. While the number of older Americans is rising quickly -- particularly those over 85 and in the frailest health -- experts say the number of doctors trained to meet their needs is in critically short supply and that this shortage is seriously endangering the health and quality of the lives of the elderly. +A reluctance by doctors to confront aging and death, poor reimbursement for medical services and a dearth of qualified academic leaders and role models all conspire to make geriatrics an unpopular field at a time of growing necessity. +"Older people in this country, particularly those 75 and older, unless they have an unusual primary-care physician, are at great risk for poor health care and an earlier death," said Dr. Robert N. Butler, head of the geriatrics department at Mount Sinai. "If we don't start doing something about it, these gaps in care will become a national disaster." +About 4,000 doctors in the United States are trained in geriatrics, according to a report by the Alliance for Aging Research. In 1980, a study from the University of California at Los Angeles estimated that, considering the growth of the elderly population, the country would need 13,000 doctors trained in geriatrics to teach, do research and treat older patients by 1990. +Not only are there not enough physicians, like Dr. Morrison, who intend to focus their work on the elderly, experts say, but also doctors in other specialty and general practices are not being educated adequately in the common problems of aging that they will see increasingly among their patients. +Undergraduate medical students, in general, have little, if any, systematic training in geriatrics. Of the 126 medical schools in the country, only 13 require course work in geriatrics and only 2 offer it as an elective, according to the 1993-94 Association of American Medical Colleges' Curriculum Directory. +While most medical schools sprinkle information about geriatrics in different courses, experts say this academic approach is inconsistent with demographic realities. About 32.3 million Americans are over the age of 65. That number is expected to more than double to about 70.2 million people over the next 40 years, according to the United States Census Bureau. The population of people 85 and older will almost triple, to nearly 9 million. +But while people over 65 now make up about 13 percent of the population, studies show they use 30 percent of the nation's health-care resources, accounting for 44 percent of all days spent in the hospital and 40 percent of all visits to internists. +"There is a tremendous mismatch between the curriculum for training physicians and who is out there," said Dr. Leslie S. Libow, medical director of the Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged. Dr. Libow leads weekly rounds for medical school students and geriatric fellows from Mount Sinai in one of the most comprehensive training programs in the country. "It's like nobody's looking." +The Alliance for Aging report noted that while not all people 65 and older need to see a geriatrics specialist regularly, the numbers showed "a gap in health care services of crisis proportion." +Susan Rosenberg, a retired accountant from Briarwood, Queens, said she had fallen into this chasm repeatedly in her visits to doctors. Either because they were improperly trained or impatient, she said, doctors have largely dismissed her complaints about worsening arthritis or other ailments as the inevitable and largely untreatable result of a progression of years. + +'Respect and Competence' + "They try to slough me off with a panacea, a pill," she said at a recent gathering of several older people at the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged in Manhattan, bemoaning the prevailing state of medical care for the elderly. " 'You have arthritis?' they say. 'Join the club.' I don't expect every ache and pain to be treated as a matter of life and death, but I want to be handled with respect and competence." +The only way for older people to guarantee themselves appropriate attention and care is to become professional medical consumers, said Charlotte Sinovoi, an 81-year-old retired secretary from Chelsea. She said older patients should check out which doctors had advanced training in geriatrics or were known to be responsive to older patients and what new treatments were available for common problems of aging like incontinence, arthritis and depression. And, she said, they should insist to the point of bullying that doctors address their needs. +"To know how to use the system is very important," she said. "It takes a lot out of you, but you have to do the research. The only reason I get good service and good care is because I demand it, not because the doctors or the system is prepared for dealing with people our age." +Many doctors admit the inadequacy of their training in geriatrics. Fewer than half of young physicians feel they were well prepared in their medical training to manage the care and needs of the frail elderly, according to a survey reported last September in the Journal of the American Medical Association. +Unlike younger people, who usually go to doctors to be treated for a specific injury or disease, older people usually have an array of ailments and are taking several medications. Often, the medical problems are complicated by social or psychological problems -- the death of a spouse, the loss of a job, the inability to climb the stairs in the building they have lived in for decades. +Doctors trained to do comprehensive geriatric assessments learn, for example, to distinguish depression from dementia or the delirium of malnutrition from senility. +"An internist with no geriatric training might not be able to make a diagnosis and is more likely to send an elderly patient to different specialists," said Deborah Friedlander, assistant professor of geriatric medicine at New York Hospital-Cornell University Medical College. +Such fragmented care, she added, is a particular burden to elderly people who have difficulty getting around and could be avoided if more primary care doctors were sufficiently versed in the basics of geriatrics. + +Too Few Doctors + But there are too few doctors in the nation qualified to train the number of geriatric specialists the population needs and to teach geriatrics in all medical school disciplines. +"The current training capacity is not even sufficient to maintain the current level of faculty over the next 10 years," said Dr. David B. Reuben, chief of geriatrics division at the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine. +Many doctors do not want to specialize in geriatric medicine because it is a time-consuming practice that is poorly reimbursed by Medicare. "Medicare doesn't cover even the most reasonable physician's costs," said Margaret E. Mahoney, president of The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation based in New York that focuses on issues affecting the elderly. "Dealing properly with an older patient requires patience and time, but that time is not taken into account by insurance payment schedules. And doctors feel that unless they reduce the amount of time they spend with older patients, they won't be able to make a living. But of course that undercuts the efforts to effectively evaluate patients. It's all a cyclical problem." +Dr. Morrison, who still has another year to go in his geriatric fellowship, said many of his peers stayed away from the field and from older patients because, like other people, they had biases against the elderly and tended to see them in the context of dying, not living. +"But to me, geriatrics offered a chance to drastically improve someone's quality of life," said Dr. Morrison, who is 29 and graduated from the University of Chicago Medical School. "To me the emphasis is on keeping people functioning, keeping them in the community. There are very few areas of medicine where you get to see the patient as a whole, not as a disease, where understanding the psychological and social side of a person is as critical as the medical side." +This view draws praise from Dr. Morrison's patients, like Yvette Berlowe, at the Jewish Home. "He is uncommon in his thinking," she said. "Most doctors, when they see an old person, a cloud covers their eyes. Then they overmedicate them and send them home." + +LOAD-DATE: May 16, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: At the Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged, Dr. Leslie S. Libow, second from left, showed a new hearing aid to Yvette Berlowe, a patient, during weekly rounds with medical school students and geriatric fellows. (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)(pg. B4) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +179 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 16, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO DIGEST + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 710 words + + +GAPS IN GERIATRIC CARE CAUSE ALARM +While the number of older Americans is rising quickly -- particularly those over 85 and in the frailest health -- experts say the number of doctors trained to meet their needs is in critically short supply and that this shortage is seriously endangering the health and quality of the lives of the elderly. A reluctance by doctors to confront aging and death, poor reimbursement for medical services and a dearth of qualified academic leaders and role models all conspire to make geriatrics an unpopular field at a time of growing necessity. So Dr. Sean Morrison, a specialist in geriatric medicine, is an anomaly. Through a fellowship program that links the Mount Sinai Medical Center with the Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged in Manhattan, Dr. Morrison has spent the past year treating elderly patients in the nursing home, in their doctors' offices and in the apartments they are desperately trying to remain in despite the encroaching years and infirmities. A1. + +NEW YORK CITY + +INDICTMENTS ARE NEAR IN CO-OP GRAFT +Law-enforcement officials investigating managers of Manhattan condominiums and cooperative apartments who took payoffs from contractors as the price of doing business in their buildings say prosecutors are moving to win a first set of indictments. So much new evidence has been uncovered that investigators are focusing on close to a hundred of the major bribe-takers, some of whom were found to have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars each. Others who took no more than several thousand dollars have been deemed too minor to pursue now. Because the payoffs ultimately increased the cost of building maintenance, tenant-owners and shareholders ended up being bilked out of untold millions of dollars, law-enforcement officials say. A1. +Commercial buildings provide similar opportunities for corruption, investigators say. Earlier this year, Federal agents arrested a former commercial building manager and an assistant manager for Four New York Plaza in lower Manhattan on charges of bilking the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company of more than $1 million in kickbacks through false and inflated bills. B2. + +OFF-DUTY OFFICER COMMITS SUICIDE +An off-duty rookie police officer involved in a traffic accident Saturday night got out of his car and, while fellow officers from another precinct filled out the accident report, shot and killed himself, the police said. The death of the officer, Stephen Griffin, 24, was the fourth suicide by a New York City police officer this year. It appeared to speak to the complicated pressures that can add to the challenges of police life: the sudden violent death of colleagues, pressure on personal relationships and fear of losing the job. B3. + +REGION + +EX-OFFICER KILLS 2 IN ANGER +A former police officer in Rome, N.Y., apparently angry that someone had slashed his garden hose, shot and killed two teen-agers who were riding past his house. He then took his own life. Two other people were wounded in the incident, and they remained hospitalized. B5. + +MAYOR'S VISIT IRRITATES STUDENTS +At 7:45 on a spring morning, the Mayor of Yonkers, Terence M. Zaleski, accompanied by a cadre of police officers armed with portable metal detectors, stormed onto the grounds of Roosevelt High School. The Mayor said it was an attempt to restore order, one day after a student had been stabbed in a school hallway. But many at the school saw the Mayor's unannounced visit as unnecessary and self-serving. B5. + +ANOTHER CLASS FACES THE FUTURE +The departing president of the State University of New York at Stony Brook told the 2,600 undergraduates and 1,700 graduates in the 1994 graduating class that the road ahead for them would be more difficult than the one he had followed. "The continuity of education and career that many of my classmates and I experienced is rare today," said the president, John Marburger. The future today, he said, is a field "for which no curriculum seems adequate." And the president of Adelphi University, Peter Diamandopoulos, warned graduates yesterday that they were entering a world of confusion, disputed values and "politics by talk-show consensus." B5. + +Chronicle B2 + +Traffic Alert B2 + +LOAD-DATE: May 16, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +180 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 17, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Addiction Center Sees Medicare Imperiled By Rising Bill for Smoking and Drinking + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 884 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 16 + +Smoking, excessive drinking and illicit drug use will cost Medicare one trillion dollars for hospital care over the next 20 years, and smoking will cause most of it, Joseph A. Califano Jr., head of the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, said today. +Mr. Califano issued a report by the center showing that at least $20 billion out of $87 billion being spent by Medicare for inpatient hospital care this year is due to such substance abuse, and that about $16 billion of that goes for conditions attributable to smoking. + As medical costs and the number of people covered by Medicare increase, the annual costs are expected to soar. +Mr. Califano said that repeated warnings about the financial instability of the Medicare system underlined the importance of antismoking efforts. He said the "key to preserving the viability of the Medicare trust fund for future generations is to mount a major national effort to make America smoke-free." + +Insurance Help Is Urged + When it comes to potential savings, he said in a telephone interview, "the big health care bucks are in smoking." He said a thorough effort to reduce smoking would also reduce the need to raise taxes or reduce benefits to preserve the solvency of Medicare, the Government health plan for the elderly and disabled. +Mr. Califano, who was Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in the Carter Administration, said health insurance should cover such proven antismoking devices as "the nicotine patch, smoking cessation programs and Nicorette gum." Nicotine patches deliver the drug gradually through the skin; Nicorette is a prescription nicotine chewing gum. +Richard Coorsh, a spokesman for the Health Insurance Association of America, said he did not know how widely either the patch or smoking cessation programs were now insured. He said that the patch was likely to be included in those insurance plans that covered prescription drugs, and that large employers often subsidized efforts to quit smoking. +Under President Clinton's plan, the patch would have to be covered and the smoking cessation programs could be. Both would have to be covered under Senator Edward M. Kennedy's bill, a modification of the Clinton plan that will come before the Senate Labor Committee this week. Mr. Califano said the Kennedy bill's substance-abuse coverage was the broadest he had seen. +Mr. Califano said he expected the share of Medicare costs attributable to tobacco to increase because women who were heavy smokers were just beginning to enter the covered group of people 65 and older. But he said it was impossible to know whether that addition would be outweighed by the rise in the number of people who had quit smoking. + +Medicaid Costs, Too + Compared with the 23 percent of Medicare hospitalization costs attributable to substance abuse, the Center reported last year that 19 percent of the hospitalization costs of Medicaid, the health program for the very poor, were caused by substance abuse. +But of that 19 percent, smoking and illicit drugs each accounted for about two fifths of the total, with the remaining fifth attributable to alcohol. +Among the elderly and disabled, smoking was dominant. It accounted for four-fifths of the substance abuse hospitalization under Medicare. Drug abuse accounted for only 3 percent, and alcohol abuse for 17 percent. The most frequent smoking-related conditions treated were lung cancer, chronic pulmonary obstruction disease and coronary artery disease. Eighteen percent of the Medicare population are current smokers, and 36 percent are former smokers. + +Concern for Medicare Fund + A spokesman for the Center cautioned that the Medicare numbers for alcohol and illegal drugs might be too low because physicians, out of concern for their patients' reputations, underreported their use and because there was relatively little research on their impact on the elderly. +The trustees who oversee the Medicare Trust Fund warned last month that it could run out of money for hospital care in seven years. +The addiction center's report argued that "the future solvency of the Medicare Trust Fund is inextricably intertwined with what we do today to reduce substance abuse in all its forms." +"Preventing diseases that result from substance abuse and prolonging a healthy life for the elderly can be a much more potent weapon against rising Medicare expenditures than the multitude of other, more frequently discussed cost-containment mesures or benefit reductions," it said. +"If there were no substance abuse, the Trust Fund's solvency would not be in doubt for almost twice the period that the trustees are now projecting." +Besides efforts to persuade people to stop smoking, another major campaign by the Center is to increase the tax on tobacco to discourage young people from starting. Mr. Califano urged the Senate Finance Committee in March to raise the tax not just by the 75 cents Mr. Clinton has proposed, but "by at least two dollars a pack." +The report said the United States was the only industrialized nation that taxed tobacco at less than 50 percent of its price. With an average tax rate of 30 percent on tobacco, the report said, the United States has not "yet made the commitment to address the problem of substance abuse." + +LOAD-DATE: May 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +181 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 18, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Medicare's Big Cigarette Burn + +SECTION: Section A; Page 22; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 227 words + +Smoking, as its adherents like to point out, is a private choice. But it is also a choice with public consequences. Just how extraordinary those consequences are is evident in a report issued this week by Joseph A. Califano Jr., head of Columbia University's Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. +Out of $87 billion spent by Medicare for inpatient hospital care this year, at least $20 billion is due to substance abuse. Drug abuse accounts for 3 percent; alcohol abuse, 17 percent; and smoking a whopping 80 percent. Those put in the hospital by cigarettes are, for the most part, suffering from lung cancer, coronary artery disease and chronic pulmonary obstruction disease. + Because women who were heavy smokers -- targets of the "You've come a long way, baby" school of smart sell -- are just beginning to enter the covered group of people 65 or older, Mr. Califano figures the share of Medicare costs attributable to cigarettes can only increase. That share might eventually be outweighed by a rise in the number who quit smoking. Even so, Mr. Califano says, substance abuse will cost Medicare $1 trillion for hospital care over the next 20 years -- and smoking will be responsible for most of it. +Cigarettes are beginning to burn a big hole in the elderly's medical safety net. To mend it, America had better start putting out the fire. + +LOAD-DATE: May 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +182 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 21, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Hiring Welfare Recipients and Making Them Management + +BYLINE: By DOUGLAS MARTIN + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 26; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1021 words + +Isabel Cruz's life used to revolve around the 7th and 27th day of each month. Those were the days the welfare checks came. +Then her caseworker handed her a flier from a South Bronx company whose business is attending to the elderly and ill in their own homes. After 11 years on public assistance, Miss Cruz, 34, got a job. After four years with the company, she is running for its board. + Miss Cruz works for Cooperative Home Care, a home-aide service begun nine years ago with 20 workers. Today, there are 300, almost all former welfare recipients. +At a time when the nation is focused on the effectiveness of the welfare system, Cooperative Home Care is one of several organizations, both profit and nonprofit, that revolve around finding jobs for people on public assistance. +But while most such organizations place clients in a variety of fields, Cooperative Home Care focuses on one field, and not only trains its employees but also makes them partners in the business. + +Program Being Copied + The goal is to improve conditions and promote careers in an industry in which poor people are likely to land jobs. The philosophy: better salaries and training in what has historically been a low-paying, almost transient field will increase motivation and, hence, the level of care. +Jack Litzenberg, a program officer with the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, which has helped finance Cooperative Home Care, says his organization is now working with other "sectoral development" projects, one in Philadelphia to develop child-care careers and another in Appalachia in food processing. +An operation modeled after Cooperative Home Care opened last year in Philadelphia, one is starting this year in Boston and two more are slated for unannounced Midwestern cities later this year. The Ford Foundation has pledged $400,000 and the Mott Foundation $1 million to help Cooperative Home Care set up the new companies and train personnel. According to the plan, the new cooperatives should become self-financing within two years as they attract clients and a stream of revenue. +"It's a wonderful recipe for success," said Margaret MacAdam, who studies home health care at the Baycrest Center for Geriatrics in Toronto. "They're the model." +The Visiting Nurse Service of New York, which taps 24 home-care agencies for aides, consistently rates the cooperative in the top four or five, said Brenda Lowther-Mandel, in charge of contracting with home-care agencies. +Each day, Miss Cruz goes to the apartment of Lillian Goldson, 96 and blind after two strokes. She makes strawberry shakes, describes the weather, dispenses medicine. +Miss Cruz welcomed the revolution in her life, though she allowed that it wasn't easy. "I was nervous and excited at the same time," she said. Like more than 80 percent of her co-workers, Miss Cruz is a company co-owner: she is buying her $1,000 share in $3.65 weekly installments. +The cooperative recruits half its employees -- most of them black or Hispanic, and all but two women -- through word of mouth and half through New York City's Department of Social Services. On the basis of references and interviews, one of five job applicants is selected. +The workers must pass a four-week training program, with courses ranging from bathing a patient to handling emergencies. In addition, there are regular brush-up sessions. +Rick Surpin, 44, the cooperative president and a longtime community organizer, started the cooperative in response to poor people's statements that they want jobs more than anything else. His strategy, developed in the early 1980's when he worked for the Community Service Society, was to pinpoint a growing economic sector and to improve job satisfaction and the workers' sense of well-being. + +Less Profit, More Pay + There are 70,000 home-care aides in New York City. The industry, experts says, traditionally pays slightly more than the $4.25 minimum wage to a part-time work force with no benefits. +Cooperative Home Care pays its workers $7 to $8 an hour and offers medical, dental and vacation benefits. But cooperative workers are still far from financially comfortable, with most earning just a bit over $200 a week. +The company has been set up as a for-profit enterprise to enable employee ownership and dividend payments. Cooperative employees split profits of $150,000 a year on $4.5 million in revenues. The dividends amount to a return of 20 percent to 50 percent. Workers must sell their shares for the $1,000 value when they leave the cooperative. +Aside from profit sharing, the company is bucking industry practices by guaranteeing at least 30 hours of work a week. +"They have created a workplace environment that is startlingly different from most of the home-care agencies in New York City," said Donald Gould, vice president of the United Hospital Fund, a New York hospital philanthropy and policy center that has given Cooperative Home Care $150,000. "Better care comes from better jobs." +Continuing training is vital, in part because learning sessions allow staff members to gather as a group, a break from what are often monotonous and lonely jobs. Four times a year, aides gather to learn new techniques and discuss problems. +It is this active involvement Mr. Surpin most values. He says it represents a shift in mind-set for the aides, who often had long felt it was best for them to avoid attention. +"These women thought if somebody saw them, they'd criticize them," he said. "Now, they become some of the most important people in the world to middle-class people worried about their parents and grandparents. That changes their lives in a fairly substantial way." +Phyllis Brown is an example. She takes care of Annie Peterson, who has diabetes, is nearly deaf and needs an ulcer treated twice a day, in the Jackson Avenue area of the South Bronx. "We are a bunch of serious people, intelligent, good workers," Ms. Brown said. +Mrs. Peterson said of her aide, "Ain't no problem with her." +"Am I a good cook?" Ms. Brown asked. +"A-plus," Mrs. Peterson shot back. +"See, I think that's what she loves me for." + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Isabel Cruz, who used to be a welfare recipient, now works for Cooperative Home Care, a home-aide service. At the prospect of holding a job for the first time in her life she said, "I was nervous and excited at the same time." Miss Cruz attended Lillian Goldson, 96, at her apartment. (Andrea Mohin/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +183 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 22, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +TRAVEL ADVISORY: CORRESPONDENT'S REPORT; +A New San Francisco Is Growing Downtown + +BYLINE: By JOHN MARKOFF + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 3; Column 1; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 665 words + +DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO + +EVERY morning on the Yerba Buena Gardens Esplanade, a block south of Market Street and four blocks from San Francisco's financial district, dozens of elderly people from a neighboring apartment complex, most of them Chinese, can be seen performing tai chi exercises. +They are a fitting symbol of how San Francisco has succeeded in its attempt to retain its multicultural heritage while redeveloping decaying neighborhoods. + Yerba Buena Gardens, a rolling five-and-a-half-acre site that opened in October 1993 after decades of frustration and litigation that delayed one of the nation's biggest urban renewal projects, is helping to transform a deteriorating area of the city without destroying its livability or turning it into a sterile high-rise ghetto. +For more than 30 years the 19-block Yerba Buena area was a legal and political battleground as the city struggled over ways to redevelop the downtown neighborhoods that lie between Market Street and the bay. +Home to the urban poor, retired sailors and longshoremen in the 60's, 70's and 80's, more recently the south-of-Market Street neighborhoods have become a trendy evening spot for the young and hip, with a variety of music clubs and dozens of restaurants. They have also become home to a burgeoning multimedia business, including small production houses that design interactive computer software, recasting the faded industrial lofts into low-cost office space. +In the 70's, San Francisco's Redevelopment Agency planned to transform the Yerba Buena area with high rises and a sports arena. Instead, after a political and legal battle that resulted in a new multicultural focus for the area, the $44 million Center for the Arts, designed by Fumihiko Maki and James Stewart Polshek, was opened last October. The center presents a diverse program of music, dance, theater and visual arts exhibitions. +The center is composed of two buildings, a theater and galleries intended to fulfill the same role as Lincoln Center in New York. The 755-seat theater is one of the best equipped in northern California, and the Arts Forum has three separate galleries and a large room designed for dance performances and receptions that is already fully booked through this year. +Next to the Esplanade, an oval walkway at the center of Yerba Buena Gardens, is a memorial to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. the work of the sculptor Houston Conwill, the poet Estella Majoza and the architect Joseph De Pace. Twelve shimmering glass panels are placed behind a 50-foot-wide, 20-foot-high waterfall; each of the panels is engraved with quotations from Dr. King's writings and speeches. +Set next to the city's Moscone Convention Center, the Yerba Center, which includes the gardens and the performing arts center, is still a work in progress. A cinema complex with a 12-screen theater and a giant-screen Imax theater as well as shops and restaurants is being developed next to Yerba Buena Gardens. In late 1996 a Children's Center is to open atop the Moscone Center with a large skating rink, bowling center, garden and carousel. +To the north of the center the redevelopment agency plans a 28-story office tower and retail shopping center scheduled to be completed in 1998. +The center is rapidly becoming a magnet for other institutions. Just across the street, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is scheduled to open next January. The work of the architect Mario Botta, the 225,000-square-foot building will have a steel-and-glass skylight mounted at 45 degrees on a granite-banded cylindrical turret to permit sunlight to pour into the museum's atrium. +The California Historical Society, the Mexican Museum and the Jewish Museum are all planning future sites in the area. Current neighbors include the Ansel Adams Center, 250 Fourth Street, a photographic museum with a permanent exhibit of Adams work, and Opts Art, next to the Adams Center, a gallery for contemporary art primarily from northern California. + +LOAD-DATE: May 22, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Map of San Francisco showing location of Yerba Buena Gardens. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +184 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 22, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +YOUR HOME; +Caring For Aged In Co-ops + +BYLINE: By ANDREE BROOKS + +SECTION: Section 10; Page 5; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1164 words + +NOT until he was stricken with a serious illness last year did Leonard Levine, 78, realize how much support older people need to remain in their apartments. +"I couldn't even change a light bulb," said Mr. Levine, a board member at Clearview Gardens, a 1,788-unit co-op in the Whitestone area of Queens. It helped him understand the need for a comprehensive program of assistance for the older people in Clearview. + When the program is in place later this year, Clearview will be joining a growing number of co-ops and condominiums acknowledging the effect that the frail or disabled elderly have upon the health, safety, quality of life -- and even property values -- of every other resident in a complex. +With no timely intervention by a caring relative or friend, these older residents can cause a fire, vermin infestations and even water damage by forgetting to complete such routine tasks as regularly removing refuse and turning off faucets or burners. Others may cause frustration or embarrassment by wandering naked in the hallways or sitting for endless hours in the lobby. +Caring for, and about, a needy neighbor is often discussed in terms of a moral obligation. But only now is the realization of a need for practical measures beginning to emerge. +The changing approach may be stemming from the rising numbers of the elderly in almost every community. Some 35 million Americans will be over age 65 by the end of the decade. They will also be spending more years when they are not disabled enough to require nursing home care but may be in need of minor housekeeping and other support services. +A survey taken six months ago at Clearview Gardens found that nearly two-thirds of the residents were over 65, Mr. Levine said. +What, therefore, are the obligations or requirements of a co-op board? +Ellen G. Hirsch, a partner in the law firm Becker & Poliacoff in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and a condominium specialist, knows all about the impact of the elderly from her work in a region heavily populated by retired people. +She maintains that any program of assistance must start with sensitizing every resident, regardless of age, to the shared perils. Otherwise, she argues in an article in a recent issue of Common Ground, younger residents may challenge any or all initiatives. Common Ground is the magazine of the Community Associations Institute, the national organization of common-interest community residents and their leaders. +"Too many people may see such assistance as a sign that the community is turning into a nursing home," Ms. Hirsch wrote in the article, "and resist providing even minimal assistance." +Any meaningful programs, she further suggests, may also require modification of the house rules or other governing documents. Unit owners, she notes, may have to provide information concerning next of kin, emergency telephone contacts, medical data and physicians. +The board may also need the authority to institute specific procedures for dealing with the deterioration of a resident's condition. Maintaining a regularly updated list of the individuals who can be reached at such a time or knowing which social service agency to call is therefore crucial. +A list of such services is most easily compiled through the area's agency on aging, which by law must maintain a comprehensive listing of all community organizations -- public and private -- that deal with concerns of the aging, according to the American Association for Retired Persons. +These include visiting nurses, companions, housekeeping, after-hospital care, senior day care, assistance with bill paying and other paperwork, cooking and programs such as Meals on Wheels. +Those services are expanding. Consider the six-month-old Household Manager Program operated by Selfhelp Community Services of White Plains and Manhattan, which even offers companions (at $16 an hour) who will drive the elderly to stores, a friend or a doctor, read to them and take them to the movies. +When dealing with an agency, it is important to speak in terms of the welfare of the elderly resident -- not the danger to neighbors or the building, warned another article on the topic of aging in place in the January edition of the Apartment Law Insider, a New York City trade publication aimed at landlords. The elderly resident may also need to make safety changes inside the unit, such as installing a smoke alarm or removing a slippery rug. +One source of ideas is a new illustrated booklet from AARP called "The Perfect Fit." For a free copy write for booklet D14823, AARP Fulfillment (EE0647), 601 E Street, N.W, Washington, D.C. 20049. The elderly person may also benefit from being reminded that the maintenance staff can assist them. +Putting into practice such caring initiatives can be handled in several ways. Consider the approach at Clearview Gardens. A letter was first sent to all residents, regardless of age, alerting them to the need for creating an assistance program. +The letter has since been followed up with personal visits from a team of 25 volunteers carrying identification cards -- "so people know it's safe to let them in," said Mr. Levine, the board member. The volunteers were professionally trained to pose questions in a nonthreatening manner and to work with difficult or fearful people. The questions were aimed at providing basic but vital information: nearest relative, name of physician and so forth. Gathering the data by mail was deemed impossible. +"Older people aren't going to give you this information easily," warned Elizabeth N. Radow, director of the Household Manager Program in White Plains, who regularly deals with such issues. "They treasure their privacy and feel vulnerable." Asking everyone the same questions also eliminates possible allegations of discrimination. +The Clearview Gardens team is also compiling a list of services in the area and maintenance personnel are being told to inform management when they see signs of disarray. +A program of this sort can be operated by a volunteer committee, as at Clearview Gardens. Or it could be run by management or a full-time paid employee, as at Waterside Plaza, a 1,470-unit rental complex in mid-Manhattan where 400 units are occupied by people over age 62. +Finally, attention must be paid, the housing experts say, to potentially delinquent monthly charges. Notifying a relative or case worker whenever payment is overdue may be more appropriate and effective than the usual dunning notices. +Even better -- but largely untried -- would be to encourage the elderly person to switch to an automatic debit plan. This way the maintenance fee could be automatically deducted from the person's checking account each month. +But even though it would eliminate dependency on someone else and the stigma (seen more often in the elderly than the young) of receiving repeated late notices, elderly people are known to be frightened of electronic transfers. So it may work only for a few. + +LOAD-DATE: May 22, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +185 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 22, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Q and A + +SECTION: Section 10; Page 11; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 692 words + + +Rent Limit For the Elderly + +Q I have lived for more than 10 years in a rent-stabilized building. I am over 62 years old and retired. My rent at the beginning was $1,200 a month; it is now $1,650 a month. Since I am a senior citizen, is there a limit to how much my rent can be raised when I renew my lease every two years? . . . Frank Catani, Manhattan + +A Your rent may be increased with every renewal unless you are eligible for the Senior Citizen Rent Increase Exemption Program, said Lou Ganim, a spokesman for the New York State Department of Housing and Community Renewal in Albany, which oversees rent regulation. +Increases on stabilized apartments are set annually by the New York City Rent Guidelines Board. Current guidelines call for increases of 3 percent on one-year leases and 5 percent for two-year leases on renewal leases signed between Oct. 1, 1993, and Sept. 30, 1994. +In New York City, if a tenant or a tenant's spouse is 62 or older and lives in a rent-regulated apartment; if the combined household disposable income is $16,500 a year or less, and if they are paying at least one-third of their disposable income for rent, the person who is 62 or older may apply for the exemption. +If the tenant qualifies, he or she is exempt from future rent-guidelines increases, maximum base rent increases, fuel-cost adjustments and increases based on the owner's economic hardship and major capital improvements. +The program is administered in the city by the Department for the Aging. Applications should be filed with the Department for the Aging, SCRIE Division, 150 William Street, Fourth Floor, New York N.Y. 10038. Telephone: (212) 240-7000. +In counties outside the city covered by the Emergency Tenant Protection Act, the program is administered by the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal. Outside the city, the program is a local option and communities have different income-eligibility limits and regulations. +The Department of Housing and Community Renewal has a Rent Infoline: (718) 739-6400. + +Designating Proxies At Co-op Elections + +Q The ballot for my cooperative's annual elections states that any shareholder can choose to have representatives of the board of directors vote his or her shares in any way that the representatives choose. All that needs to be done is for the shareholder to sign the proxy line and not vote for any candidate. +The board's agents in this matter, themselves on and off members of the board, have been the same two people for as far back as anyone can remember. They have never revealed how they voted the proxies. Many shareholders consider this a questionable practice. +Is this the norm for co-op elections? Does it make any sense? What can be done to change the ballot? . . . Jay Maurer, Manhattan + +A Things can be changed, said Marc Luxemburg, a Manhattan lawyer and president of the Council of New York Cooperatives. +"There are two basic types of proxies," Mr. Luxemburg said. "There's a general instruction proxy, which authorizes proxies to vote for directors using their own discretion. That is probably the most common form, with shareholders typically designating proxies who are board members or people chosen by the board. There is no legal requirement that the proxies reveal how they voted." +But there is also a second common form, he said, not as frequently used as the first. "It is a ballot-type proxy that directs the proxies specifically how to vote," he said. "The discretion of the proxies with respect to that issue is eliminated." +And, Mr. Luxemburg said, there is no mandate that a form of proxy promulgated by the board must be used. "Nothing says people can't use their own form of proxy," he said. "An individual shareholder can make up his or her proxy forms, and the forms can be similar to the second one described." +Also, he said, you may designate almost anyone as a proxy. "You are not obligated to designate the board's choices as proxies," he said. "You can pick anyone you want within the confines of the bylaws. The only legal requirement is that the proxies have to be physically present at the meeting." + +LOAD-DATE: May 22, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Question + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +186 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 22, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +It Is Time to Be Old + +BYLINE: By Sven Birkerts; Sven Birkerts is the author of "American Energies: Essays on Fiction" and of "The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age," to be published later this year. + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 12; Column 1; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1114 words + + +SCHOOL FOR THE BLIND +By Dennis McFarland. +287 pp. Boston: +Houghton Mifflin Company. $21.95. +FICTION has always been more about becoming than about being or ceasing to be -- which may explain why there are so few novels about the elderly. If writers address the subject at all, it is usually only once they are themselves older. Dennis McFarland, who can't be past his mid-40's, is an exception. He has followed the success of his powerful and emotion-driven first novel, "The Music Room" (1990), with an affectingly oblique meditation on age and time and the long-term wages of denial. The new novel, "School for the Blind," is, in tone and intensity and final effect, as unlike its predecessor as it is possible to be. +"His life's work and ambition fulfilled, Francis Brimm believed the only metamorphosis left him was a slow, affable decline toward death, and so at the age of 73 he returned to the town of his youth to retire." With the opening sentence Mr. McFarland not only situates us, but also plants the subliminal conviction that Francis is wrong, that there will be some other metamorphosis and that the "slow, affable decline" will be anything but. +A lifelong bachelor, now a retired photographer, Francis buys a small cottage in the Florida Gulf Coast town of Pines. He locates himself right next to a golf course and a short drive away from his older sister, Muriel, who is still living in the old family home. She, too, has never married. +Shortly after his arrival, Francis begins to have a recurrent vision. Morning after morning he awakens to the first bird calls and finds himself staring at the face of a young Frenchwoman he'd photographed years ago. It was just after World War II, and her fellow villagers had shaved her head and were subjecting her to public humiliation because she'd had a child by a German soldier. Neither Francis nor Muriel can figure out the import of this apparition. A reproach of some kind? An emblem of self-betrayal? We must abide with the uncertainty. +Though Muriel is glad to have her brother around, she soon starts to complain that his homecoming has stirred up the past. Long-forgotten images and memories present themselves: "Now it seemed to Muriel that she'd almost seen these events as she recalled them, as if they were painted on the silver canvas of the rain outside the window -- an expression that so pleased her when she thought of it that she slipped into a meditation about why she had never realized her youthful dream of becoming a novelist." Muriel will admit to such regrets, but as we read we sense the pull of something darker. Our suspicions are confirmed when we learn that she imagines she is in therapy and that part of her "work" involves conquering a phobia about unopened rooms in the upstairs of her house. +"School for the Blind" stirs easily to life, in part on the strength of Mr. McFarland's characterizations -- there is a crabby authenticity about Francis, an aura of dreamy depths enveloping Muriel -- and in part because of these odd portents. Then comes a tug, and the hook is lodged. Brother and sister take an evening stroll on the golf course, where they see a dog digging near a sand trap. Later Francis finds bones strewn about at the spot. They are large -- yes, human bones. And with this the novel acquires a mystery as well as a set of negotiable metaphors about returning to the scene of the crime, digging up what may be best left buried and so on. +Francis' find gets his picture into the local paper, and soon both he and Muriel receive a threatening phone call in the night and visits from Connie Shoulders, a soft-spoken young black police officer. But then, just as we tense ourselves for the shock and revelation pattern of a mystery novel, Mr. McFarland eases off. The flurry over the probable crime is displaced by certain more private psychological concerns. The excitement appears to have triggered the release of some of Muriel's more deeply repressed memories. As she begins to peer back through the decades, back to the years of her late childhood, her search becomes the central focus of the book. Francis and his perplexing vision must move to the side. +Mr. McFarland does, I'm obliged to say, implement the now fashionable and overused motif of the recovered memory of sexual abuse. He treads perilously close to formula: the dark hallway, the open door, the shattering discovery. By the same token, the mystery of the uncovered bones feels a bit creaky, as if it had been thought up expressly to give the novel a thematic center, an urgency. +IF "School for the Blind" has a conspicuous flaw, it is found here, on the author's planning sheet. Mr. McFarland must have felt the need to gather his characters around a strong narrative thread. But in truth Francis and Muriel do quite well without these more overtly scripted scenes. They register just right in their idiosyncrasies, and -- as with characters from Anne Tyler's later novels -- we like just reading about their movements through the day. Like Ms. Tyler, Mr. McFarland knows how to make time the warp and weft of a novel, and much of the pleasure of reading comes from shuttling about through the decades of a life. +Unsexy though it may be, writing about the elderly does have certain fictional rewards. The author need not exert himself to bring death -- Wallace Stevens's "mother of beauty" -- into the calculation. It is there naturally. At one point, for instance, Francis observes Muriel in her backyard: "Moving closer, he could see, beneath the curtain of leaves, that she had taken a seat in the arbor's wooden swing. She kicked off her shoes and dangled her bare feet, swaying gently back and forth in the swing." The fact that this is a woman nearing 80 makes an otherwise unremarkable action piercing. Indeed, just by existing Muriel seems to press on the heart of things. +And then there is the real, the Jamesian "distinguished thing" itself. In the second half of the book, Francis takes ill and begins to die. As he draws away from the world, from Muriel, from us, we cannot help flashing back to his hubristic assumption about an "affable" decline. This man has believed for too long that he can plan the outcome of things. The vision on his ceiling has long since vanished, but its inscrutable admonition -- about the need for passion and the danger of it -- has entered the texture of his last days. Mr. McFarland excels at capturing these increments of subjectivity. Readers of "School for the Blind" may find their attention held less by the plot than by everything that supports it. This is an inversion of expectations, but not finally a disappointing one. + +LOAD-DATE: May 22, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +187 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 23, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +With World War II Crew, Circle Line Boat Sails Back to '44 + +BYLINE: By DOUGLAS MARTIN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 2; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 934 words + +The Circle Line claims on its side to be "America's Favorite Boat Ride," and on Saturday afternoon, a sunny and splendid wisp of the summer to come, aboard a ship named Circle Line X, it was more than that. +The ship's former captain, officers, cook and deck hands, who served on it when it was a Navy landing vessel in the South Pacific, the Philippines and China during World War II, returned for a reminiscence-filled journey around Manhattan. From Florida and Colorado and many places in between, the old men came to glimpse faces they remembered from younger days, and to hug, cry and laugh. It was a reunion, their first, and they brought families, including one man's 5-month-old great-granddaughter. + They did all this as the ship -- once known simply as Landing Craft, Infantry (Large) 758, bought by the Circle Line in the 1950's as a Navy surplus bargain -- sliced through the Hudson, East, Bronx and Harlem Rivers. After the ship left Pier 83 on West 42d Street, an announcer, breathlessly and maybe accurately, pointed out the dwelling places of the rich and famous. Hundreds of passengers blissfully ignored them. Lovers kissed, beer drinkers swilled and children cried. + +A Peek at the Past + No one remarked on their flying the thin, snakelike flag of the original ship, an act some considered exuberantly defiant, since decommissioned ships are not allowed to fly their colors. It was the very flag hoisted at the ship's commissioning in Portland, Ore., 50 years ago -- the occasion for the gathering. +"They're so cute I can't stand it," said Daria Malinchak, who came to peek at a slice of the past that she knew her father, Charles, had long cherished. "For many, many years, we thought he was just making all this up." +Another grown child could express only awe. "The older I get, the more I appreciate how much history he holds in his head," said Rodney Beeson, a college student in Tampa who came to hear the tales firsthand. +In their memory, the veterans were churning along on LCI(L) 758, the ship on which they delivered Army troops to at least five Pacific invasions. In reality, they were traveling on one of three identical vessels refitted by the sightseeing company from surplus Navy landing craft. It rounded out its current fleet with five former Coast Guard cutters. +The Circle Line is itself a year younger than this combat vessel, whose crew never experienced a fatality. The ship, which carried about 250 troops and could deliver them right to the beach, sailed 100,000 miles in one two-year period. Most of the veterans said they had no idea their ship still existed until a year or so ago, when they learned about the reunion cruise. +But they remembered being at sea for six months without setting foot on land. A few recounted how they lost their virginity, one on a rickshaw with a Russian woman named Angelina. Somebody recalled counting 68 Japanese kamikaze planes plunge to their doom. Who could forget the typhoon in September 1945, off Okinawa? And remember that old Victrola, the one with the little lion feet and the horn decorated with flowers? + +A Bar Brawl, a Pet Monkey + One man muttered thanks to another for help in a never-to-be-forgotten barroom brawl. There were photographs of the pet monkey they had kept for a while, and stories about how the ship's dog, a mongrel named Baby, ended up living a satisfying retirement on Long Island. One photograph showed a crew member, Ray Jalley, posing with a big smile and a jellyfish on his head. +"We had a happy ship," said the ship's former captain, Gerard Marder, now a 70-year-old pediatrician from Gastonia, N.C. As principal organizer of the cruise, Dr. Marder tracked down 20 former crew members after a year's search. +"We bonded," said Dr. Marder of his crew. "You bond with me when you're under fire." +Ralph Wilson, the former quartermaster, agreed. "I got tears in my eyes, I can't explain it," he said. "We're lucky to be alive and most of us haven't seen each other in 47 years." +There was good-natured ribbing. The one Army veteran in attendance, Charles Novotny, remembered the last words he heard as he scrambled from the boat in the Philippines to invade Ormoc, a city now named MacArthur. "The only thing you said was, 'Good luck, dogface,"' Mr. Novotny, a former member of the 77th Army's Statue of Liberty division, only a few minutes before passing the Lady herself. +"Yeah, but we had four more invasions," shot back Dr. Marder, who four weeks ago had surgery for prostate cancer and insisted he would have come on a stretcher if necessary. He skipped his 50th reunion at the University of North Carolina, also held on Saturday. +Few of the veterans, conversing intensely, got their sightseeing money's worth. One geographic thought that did grip several conversations was the exact location of the officers' training school that some attended for 90 days to become, yes, "90-day wonders." It was agreed that school was near Riverside Church on the Upper West Side. +A few old-timers visited the pilot house and the engine room, where they found many things had changed. The crew enjoyed showing them around. "This was nice to see," said Tom Corsini, chief engineer of the Circle Line, of the special passengers. +The veterans were pleased to find faded typed descriptions of the ship's history as a naval vessel, which noted that it sailed and performed gallantly in difficult invasions. Some even heard the last words of the guide, though most were too busy talking among themselves. +"We're hoping in 50 years that you can come back again," the voice said. + +LOAD-DATE: May 23, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Robert Mills, left, a Navy veteran, holding a photograph of the ship known as Landing Craft, Infantry (Large) 758, when the ship was commissioned 50 years ago for service in World War II. Mr. Mills was radio man on the vessel, which was bought by Circle Line in the 1950's. (Joe Major for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +188 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 24, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +U.S. Investigating Report That Guards Beat Inmate + +BYLINE: By JACQUES STEINBERG, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 523 words + +DATELINE: WHITE PLAINS, May 23 + +Federal prosecutors are investigating an incident at the Westchester County Jail in November in which an inmate said he was beaten by several guards while handcuffed, law-enforcement officials said today. The incident was videotaped by an officer, which jail officials said was standard procedure. +In a separate case, the inmate, Kenneth DeGraffenreidt, 27, was arraigned this month on charges that he had held several guards hostage during an uprising at the jail on Aug. 15. + The County Corrections Commissioner, Norwood E. Jackson, said he forwarded the tape of the Nov. 5 incident to Federal authorities "right away" after investigators from his department viewed it and were concerned by what they saw. He said that jail policy stipulated that an officer with a video camera be present any time officers respond to another guard's call for emergency assistance. +Three officers involved have been informed by the United States Attorney's Office that they are the targets of a grand jury inquiry, said Bob DelBene, the vice president of the officers' union. + +Officers Identified + Union officials said that the three officers under investigation were Sgt. Michael Harrison, a 13-year veteran of the department who was honored in December by the State Federation of Police; Arthur White, a correction officer since 1986, and M. Sean McQuade, who has worked at the jail for four years. Attempts to reach lawyers representing the three officers were not successful. +Details of the investigation were reported today by Gannett Suburban Newspapers. +At the time of the incident, Mr. DeGraffenreidt was facing charges that he had tried to kill an elderly Westchester woman. Two weeks later, he was convicted of second-degree attempted murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. +In the Aug. 15 riot, Mr. DeGraffenreidt was accused of using a home-made knife to hold several guards hostage. The Westchester County Executive, Andrew P. O'Rourke, has suggested that the uprising was staged by the guards as a union negotiating ploy -- an assertion that the officers deny -- and it is being investigated by the Westchester District Attorney, Jeanine Pirro. +Asked today if there was a link between the uprising and the incident involving Mr. DeGraffenreidt three months later, Mrs. Pirro declined to comment. While Mrs. Pirro said that the Federal investigation began late last year, Carol Sipperly, a prosecutor in the United States Attorney's office in White Plains, refused to confirm its existence. +Word of the investigation comes one month after Federal prosecutors charged 10 other guards at the county jail with smuggling food, vodka and cash to prisoners. +Commissioner Jackson, who said he has yet to view the videotape, said the Nov. 5 incident began after Mr. DeGraffenreidt refused an order to enter his cell. +But in a civil rights lawsuit filed in December in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Mr. DeGraffenreidt said that he was handcuffed and then punched, kicked and stomped by guards after he "trashed the personal items on the floor" of his cell when he was denied permission to take a shower. + +LOAD-DATE: May 24, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +189 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 27, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +NEWS SUMMARY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 903 words + + +International A2-9 + +CHINA'S TRADE STATUS RENEWED +President Clinton renewed China's favorable trade status, saying he would stop using trade as a lever to force Beijing to make progress on human rights. A1 + +In wrestling with China, economic interests are the victors. A1 + +NEW TACTIC ON TRADE +Signaling a new tactic in the Administration's trade policy, the Justice Department won a settlement from a British company that keeps it from blocking American concerns from doing business overseas. A1 + +FEAR CREEPS THROUGH GAZA +In Morag and other Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, a fear deepened by Palestinian self-rule keeps many from venturing beyond their security fences unarmed. A1 + +VATICAN AT ODDS WITH SCHOLAR +In a documents, a German lay theologian has suggested that Roman Catholics acknowledge that they share historical responsibility and guilt for the Holocaust. But the Vatican moved quickly today to say that the draft did not have the approval of the Holy See. A3 + +VICTORS REVISIT D-DAY +As the 50th anniversary of the Normandy landings draws near, soldiers from the United States, Britain and Canada are everywhere, armed with their memories. A3 + +VIETNAM AND U.S. MEND FENCES +The United States and Vietnam announced that they would set up diplomatic missions, a move the countries consider an important step toward normalizing relations. A7 + +TROOPS SOUGHT FOR GEORGIA +Russian officials said today that Moscow was seeking permission from the Security Council to deploy several thousand peacekeepers in Georgia to reinforce a cease-fire. A3 + +Officials followed refugees out of the Rwandan capital. A5 + +A vast sanctuary for whales was created around Antarctica. A2 + +U.S.S. Peleliu Journal: The neverending mission. A4 + +National A10-20, B6-7 + +A BLOW FOR TOBACCO INDUSTRY +Florida's Governor signed a law intended to make it easier to hold manufacturers responsible for diseases associated with smoking. A1 + +The tobacco industry may have influenced a research group. A16 + +HARMONY IN ECONOMIC POLICY +What makes the way the Clinton Administration develops economic policy newsworthy is the remarkable absence of conflict among the prominent officials involved. A1 + +RECOUPING COSTS OF IMMIGRATION +Texas plans to sue the Federal Government to recover costs incurred in dealing with illegal aliens. A10 + +TESTIMONY IN CITADEL CASE +The woman who is suing the all-male military college testified that she sought relief after learning that her acceptance had been revoked only because of her sex. A10 + +NOT BEGINNER'S LUCK AFTER ALL +Records confirm that Hillary Rodham Clinton received preferential treatment as she turned a $1,000 investment into $100,000. A20 + +MISLEADING MAILINGS +Consumer groups charged that some conservative direct-mail organizations were scaring elderly people with inaccurate attacks on the President's health plan. A18 + +18 HOLES AND ONE JOB LATER +A White House official was dismissed for taking one of the President's $2,380-per-hour helicopters on a golfing trip. A20 + +POSTCARDS VERSUS STUMPS +A report to the Forest Service said recreation and tourism bring in far more money than timber harvests from national forests, and recommended that logging be curbed. B6 + +Law Page B18 + +Is justice delayed justice denied for a civil rights-era murderer? + +At the Bar: A hirsute lawyer turns hairless, and rumors and clients fly. + +Metro Digest B1 + +BRONX GANG INDICTMENTS +Seventeen gang members were charged with running a sophisticated operation that required dealers to pay them rent in order to sell drugs in the South Bronx. A1 + +Business Digest D1 + +Weekend C1-28, D17 + +Urban children meet wild animals. C1 +Multicultural folk festival. C1 +Things to do Memorial Day weekend. C27 +For Children C12 +Theater: On Stage, and Off C2 +"Big Momma 'n' 'Em." C3 +Film: "The Flintstones." C1 +Restaurants C20 +Diner's Journal C21 +Art: W. Eugene Smith photos. C24 +Western artists' African art.C24 +Finding Wayne Thiebaud niche. C28 +Inside Art C22 +Art in Review C24 +Books: Memories of a killer. C25 +Television: TV Weekend D17 +Home VideoD17 + +Sports B9-17 + +Auto racing: Lyn St. James blazing new trails at Indy. B11 Baseball: Yankees flying high. B10 +Eight doubles lift Red Sox. B10 +Pirates, led by veterans, outlast Mets, 11-10, in 13 innings. B11 +Basketball: Nets' Daly quits. B16 +Ewing scores 32 points as Knicks take 2-0 lead over Pacers. B9 +Jazz face 0-2 deficit. B16 +Columns: Vecsey on Rangers. B9 +Araton on Daly's resignation. B9 +Hockey: For Rangers and Devils, it's winner take all in Game 7. B9 +McMullen, Devils owner, struggling in Rangers' shadow. B13 +Sports People B14 +Tennis: Krickstein rolls. B11 + +Obituaries B8 + +Joe Brainard, artist, set designer and a poet. +John Devaney, author. + +Editorials/Op-Ed A26-27 + +Editorials + +Shortchanging rights in China. +On Denny's menu: discrimination. +I'll fly away. +For a better Board of Education. + +Letters + +A. M. Rosenthal: Bill Clinton's teachings. +Anthony Lewis: Savaging the great. +Garrison Keillor: Lighten up, graduates. +Louis V. Gerstner Jr.: Our schools are failing. Do we care? + +Chronicle B4 + +Crossword C25 + +LOAD-DATE: May 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +190 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 27, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +FLORIDA PREPARES NEW BASIS TO SUE TOBACCO INDUSTRY + +BYLINE: By LARRY ROHTER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk; Law Page + +LENGTH: 1456 words + +DATELINE: MIAMI, May 26 + +The State of Florida is preparing the ground for a new attack on the tobacco industry that is intended to make it easier to hold cigarette manufacturers responsible for diseases associated with smoking. +Gov. Lawton Chiles today signed legislation that would allow the state to file a suit on behalf of all its Medicaid patients who smoke. Such class-action suits make it more difficult for cigarette companies to defend themselves by using the two main arguments they have successfully employed in cases brought by individual smokers. + In beating back every individual suit that has been brought against them, the companies have maintained that anyone who takes up smoking knowingly assumes all the risks associated with smoking and that those who sue did not conclusively prove that smoking caused their illnesses. +Such arguments are generally less successful when people sue as a class or group and show through broad-based demographic and health statistics that they were harmed by a product or activity. Class action suits have been brought successfully in recent years to recover damages in cases of exposure to asbestos and the use of breast implants. +Other states are likely to follow Florida's lead and the tobacco industry is concerned that Florida's action could make it vulnerable to new efforts to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. +The industry suffered a new public relations setback today when the chairman of the Council for Tobacco Research, which identifies itself as an independent research organization run by a board of distinguished scientists, told a Congressional subcommittee that the council had carried out research suggested by lawyers for tobacco companies. [Page A16.] +At a news conference this morning in Tallahassee, the state capital, Mr. Chiles made it clear that Florida planned to move promptly to seek reimbursement from tobacco companies for the costs of treating Medicaid patients with smoking-related health problems. "We're going to take the Marlboro Man to court," Mr. Chiles, who is running for a second term in office, promised today after signing the bill. +A report just released by the state of Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration concluded that smoking-related illnesses, including lung cancer and emphysema, have cost Florida taxpayers at least $1.2 billion in Medicaid payments since 1989. The state agency also estimates that tobacco products are responsible for the deaths of about 28,000 people in Florida each year, many of them elderly people who have recently retired to the state after living most of their lives elsewhere. +Under the new law, which the Florida Legislature approved last month without public discussion as an obscure amendment to a Medicaid fraud bill, the state is authorized to sue tobacco companies on behalf of its Medicaid patients who suffer from smoking-related illnesses. The law also allows the state to introduce new types of statistical evidence, while prohibiting cigarette manufacturers from using the assumption-of-risk defense, with which they have fended off legal challenges in the past. +The threat of the new legislation to tobacco companies lies not only in Florida's ability to act on behalf of the entire class of smokers on Medicaid but also in the state's more privileged legal position as a sovereign entity. "The state can change the legal criteria for a suit and that is what we have done," said Harold D. Lewis, general counsel of the state health care agency. "Once we are past the threshold of showing that a cigarette is a harmful product, we can use statistics rather than bring in all 650,000 Medicaid patients." + +Suit by Mississippi + Earlier this week, Mississippi filed suit against 13 tobacco companies seeking to hold them legally responsible for the health consequences of smoking. +"Mississippi filed its suit under existing common law, whereas Florida has changed the law to make it easier to bring this sort of case," said Jennifer Lew, managing lawyer for the Tobacco Products Liability Project, an anti-smoking group based in Boston. "It basically tilts the playing field in favor of the state and streamlines the process of getting money from the tobacco companies." +Governor Chiles predicted during a telephone interview that the law, which goes into effect on July 1, will be the tobacco companies' undoing. "I think this will go through all kinds of legal tests, but at the end, I don't think the tobacco companies are going to be able to brag any longer that they have never paid out a dollar in a law suit," he said. +The law enables the state's Attorney General to use a formula based on each tobacco company's market share in collecting damages from cigarette manufacturers whenever they are found guilty of damaging the health of smokers. And it permits the state to sue for any additional harm to Florida residents stemming from fraudulent activity or other criminal violations by tobacco companies. + +Power Granted Only to State + The new law, the Medicaid Third Party Recovery Act, applies only when the state of Florida sues on behalf of its Medicaid patients. It would not change the standard of proof required when individual smokers or their families sue tobacco companies for damages. The law covers only economic damages incurred by the state and does not allow it to seek damages for the pain and suffering of patients. +Tobacco companies likely to be affected by the new law declined to comment on the measure. But the Tobacco Institute, an industry trade group based in Washington, attacked Florida's action as inherently unfair. "It is a travesty and poor public policy when legitimate businesses operating legally in the state of Florida are forced to the courthouse steps defenseless and guilty long before the first trial gavel is struck," the organization said in a statement today. +But anti-smoking advocates hailed Florida's action as an important blow against the tobacco industry and a model for the nation. Richard A. Daynard, chairman of the Tobacco Products Liability Project, said the new law was "the most important legislation ever adopted anywhere in the United States" on the issue of "holding cigarette manufacturers financially responsible for the health care costs their products and conduct produce." +The National Association of Attorney Generals said it had no information on how many other states are considering similar legislation. But Ms. Lew of the Tobacco Products Liability Project predicted that many other states would follow Florida's lead as news of the measure spreads. +Lawyers for the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration described the state as an innocent third party. +Governor Chiles said: "Our authority comes from the same place as the authority to sue in breast implant, asbestos and a whole line of other cases. The state does not buy that package of tobacco, so we don't read the warning on the side. We just pay for the carnage." +The law was strongly opposed by Associated Industries of Florida, one of the state's principal business organizations. In a letter to Mr. Chiles last month, Jon L. Shebel, president of the state business group, complained that the legislation "is tailor-made to foster a cottage litigation industry" that would affect all businesses in the form of higher insurance premiums. +In an interview today, Mr. Shebel said he was also concerned that the legal principles contained in the law could easily be extended to other industries, like dairy, beef, sugar, pharmaceuticals and automobiles. He said the language of the statute is so broad that the state could conceivably hold sugar manufacturers responsible for tooth decay and obesity. +Mr. Chiles has already said he was willing to modify the language of the new statute so that it applied only to cigarette manufacturers. But Mr. Shebel said such a change would not be acceptable to Florida businesses and vowed to work for quick repeal. +"It is against the principles of American justice to take all the defenses away from somebody because you don't like them or their product, so that when they arrive at the courthouse steps they are are already guilty by innuendo," he said. "This law makes conviction automatic. There is just no way to defend yourself under this law and that is wrong." +But Mr. Chiles was not sympathetic to the complaints of the tobacco companies. "These are the most arrogant people who have ever lived," he said. "They cover up material they've had for 30 years saying how addictive cigarette smoking is and hide research that could have made smoking less harmful, and then they have the gall to put on this face and say they don't know if they have caused any harm." + +LOAD-DATE: May 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +191 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 27, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +'Liars' Attacking Health Plan To Scare Elderly, Groups Say + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 18; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 723 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 26 + +Two large consumer groups charged today that conservative direct-mail organizations were scaring elderly people with inaccurate attacks on President Clinton's health plan. +Lawrence T. Smedley, executive director of the National Council of Senior Citizens, denounced the direct-mail organizations as "liars for hire." He said they were trying to raise money with "fright mail" warning elderly people that they might lose Medicare benefits under Mr. Clinton's health plan. + "The health care debate has brought out a feeding frenzy of fearmongers whose primary goal is to fleece older Americans," Mr. Smedley said. +He criticized letters, postcards and brochures sent out by the American Council for Health Care Reform, in Arlington, Va.; the Seniors Coalition, in Fairfax, Va., and the United Seniors Association, in Fairfax. + +Threat of 'Jail Time' + Christopher Manion, director of legislation at the American Council for Health Care Reform, defended its description of the Clinton plan as accurate. +A brochure prepared by the American Council says consumers face "jail time if you buy extra care," and it says people will want extra care because spending limits in the Clinton plan will force doctors to ration care. +A fund-raising letter from the Seniors Coalition begins by asking, "Do you want to be stripped of your Medicare benefits and pressured to enroll in Bill Clinton's Government-controlled health care plan?" +It asserts that "the goal of the Clinton health care plan is the systematic elimination of Medicare." It urges readers to "send $10, $15, $25, $50 or $100" to save Medicare and stop the Clinton plan. +Joining the Council of Senior Citizens in denouncing the solicitations were Senator David Pryor of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging; Representative Andrew Jacobs Jr. of Indiana, chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security, and the American Association of Retired Persons. +John C. Rother, director of legislation and public policy at the American Association of Retired Persons, said, "It is unconscionable to prey on seniors' fears by spreading untrue information to raise money." + +'Fear and Scare Tactics' + But he said such solicitations must be taken seriously. "Similar appeals, based on fear and scare tactics, had a large role in persuading Congress to repeal a program of insurance against catastrophic health costs in 1989," he said. +Senator Pryor, a close ally of President Clinton, said: "The same old breed of predators, direct-mail fund-raisers that pose as advocates for senior citizens, is attacking seniors by playing upon their fears about health care reform. Seniors should think twice before sending their retirement funds to these modern-day snake oil salesmen." +Paul E. Bramell, chief executive of the Seniors Coalition, said: "We have ginned up hundreds of thousands of letters to Congress from our supporters opposing Clinton's Government-controlled health care proposal. This has begun to sting and scare members of Congress, who are feeling the weight of opposition from their constituents." +Sandra L. Butler, president of the United Seniors Association, said: "David Pryor has refused to debate us on the issues. He's pushing the President's plan to socialize medicine, as is the National Council of Senior Citizens. Middle-class American seniors aren't buying it." +Ms. Butler said she worked from 1978 to 1990 for Richard A. Viguerie, a master of direct-mail fund raising for conservative candidates. + +Claim Is Defended + Mr. Manion said it was true, as his group asserted, that Mr. Clinton's health bill would provide prison terms for patients who offer "anything of value" to obtain special treatment from doctors. +The Clinton bill says that anyone who offers or promises anything of value to influence the actions of a "health care official" may be imprisoned up to two years. The bill defines health care official to include any employee of a health plan. A health care official who demands or accepts improper payments may be imprisoned up to 15 years, the bill says. +Mr. Manion's group, the American Council for Health Care Reform, was among the organizations that sued Hillary Rodham Clinton to gain access to meetings of her advisory committee, which developed President Clinton's health plan last year. + +LOAD-DATE: May 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +192 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 27, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +TVWeekend; +Edith Ann (or Lily Tomlin) Explains It All for You + +BYLINE: By JOHN J. O'CONNOR + +SECTION: Section D; Page 17; Column 3; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 571 words + +One of Lily Tomlin's more endearing characters on "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" in the early 1970's was a 6-year-old named Edith Ann. Sitting on an outsized rocker and wearing children's duds, Edith Ann observed the passing world with that special combination of innocence and mischief reserved for childhood. Her idealism was exceeded only by her determination, signaled by a very visible tongue poking through the corner of clenched lips as she made gloriously opinionated entries in her diary. +Ms. Tomlin went on, of course, to assorted personal triumphs in television, film and the theater, although in recent years her appearances have been far too few to satisfy more ardent fans. Now, coming full circle, she has returned to television and Edith Ann in a series of animated half-hour specials constructed around the little girl and her stress-laden but loving family. Jane Wagner, Ms. Tomlin's longtime collaborator, is the writer. The animation is by Klasky Csupo, best known for the original version of "The Simpsons." + The first "Edith Ann" show was broadcast on ABC in January and got hefty ratings; the second is on tonight at 8:30. Once again, Edith Ann is found in her rocker writing in her diary with an array of colored pencils. (Blue is for sad.) She lives in a working-class area of Edgetown. Daddy is unemployed and in a 12-step program. Mom tries to keep close tabs on Edith Ann's baby brother while working full time. An older sister appears to have overdosed on punk rock, resenting the fact that she has to have urine tests in school. Still, Edith Ann can enjoy a late afternoon by herself, noting that before dark, "it's the safest time for kids like me," not to mention the elderly. +While Edith Ann is preoccupied with environment pageants at school, her neighbors are busy compiling a petition to get rid of the town's homeless. "Property values could plummet," they warn. A good neighborhood would be destroyed, they insist. "Seems to me," says Edith Ann, "it would be a good neighborhood if we helped the homeless." +Edith Ann's instincts are buttressed when she meets an elderly bag lady named Twinkle. The feisty old woman tells how a meteorite spotted at her birth was a sure sign that she had charisma. Edith Ann is enchanted. The two are peas in a pod, knowing full well that "the truth can be made up if you know how." Meanwhile, buzzing around the central plot are two insects thought to be dreaded negflies, their very presence provoking demands to saturate the town with insecticides. Edith Ann's plate is obviously full. +Commenting on the show in a network release, Ms. Tomlin says: "Children are doing their best to understand how things work. They're not like adults. They haven't gotten used to things yet. They don't necessarily see problems as something to be ignored, avoided or swept under the rug. Kids are close to the real world." That's what comes across delightfully in "Edith Ann," and that's what makes the show the nicest thing to happen to family entertainment this year. + +Edith Ann +Homeless Go Home +ABC, tonight at 8:30. +(Channel 7 in New York.) + +An animated special created by Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner; written by Ms. Wagner; directed by Tamara Varga; produced by Sherry Gunther for ABC; with the voices of Ms. Tomlin, Thom Sharp, Amy Ziff, Pamela Segall and Reno; Ms. Wagner, Ms. Tomlin, Arlene Klasky and Gabor Csupo, executive producers. + +LOAD-DATE: May 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Lily Tomlin's character Edith Ann stars in an animated special. (ABC) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +193 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 27, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +For Memorial Day Weekend, Things to Do and Places to Go + +SECTION: Section C; Page 27; Column 1; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 2930 words + +Memorial Day is observed on Monday. Here is a sampling of activities planned in the New York metropolitan region for the holiday weekend. + +NEW YORK CITY + +Today + +BILL SIMS AND THE COLD-BLOODED BLUES BAND AND BUDDY MILES, blues and rhythm-and-blues, South Street Seaport, Ambrose Stage, Pier 16, at the East River, lower Manhattan. 5 P.M. Free. Information: (212) 732-7678. + +SEAPORT LIBERTY CRUISE, Pier 16, South Street Seaport, lower Manhattan. One-hour cruises around the southern tip of Manhattan. Tickets: $12 today; $16 tomorrow through Sept. 5; half-price under age 12. Schedule and other information: (212) 630-8888. + +"D-DAY: THE LIBERATION OF EUROPE," Intrepid Sea-Air-Space-Museum, West 46th Street and 12th Avenue, Manhattan. An exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Allied landing at Normandy, with videos, newsreels, combat film, photographs and memorabilia. Hours: Wednesdays through Sundays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Admission: $7; $6 for the elderly and veterans; $4 for those under 12. Information: (212) 245-0072. + +SALT 'N' PEPA AND R. KELLY WITH KID CAPRI, Radio City Music Hall. 8 P.M. and midnight. Ticket: $35 and $37.50. Information: (212) 247-4777. + +CIRCLE LINE, Pier 83, Hudson River and 43d Street, Manhattan. Daily three-hour cruises around Manhattan and two-hour "star attractions" and "harbor lights" cruises. Tickets: $18; $9 under age 12. Schedule and other information: (212) 563-3200. + +WORLD YACHT, Pier 81, Hudson River and 41st Street, Manhattan. Daily two- and three-hour dining and music cruises. Prices range from $27.50 to $75 for dinner and cruise, $16 to $25 for cruise only. Reservations: (212) 630-8100. + +"CAN'T TOP THE LINDY HOP!," Roosevelt Hotel, Madison Avenue and 45th Street. Four days of parties, dance instruction, lectures and discussions, sponsored by the New York Swing Dance Society. Tonight at 9; tomorrow and Sunday, 9 A.M. to 9 P.M.; Monday, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. Admission: $75 for all events; $15 for each party. Information: (212) 696-9737. + +BASEBALL: METS VS. CINCINNATI REDS, Shea Stadium, Flushing, Queens. 7:40 P.M. Tickets: $6.50 to $15. Fireworks after the game. Information: (718) 507-8499. + +ASTROLAND AND THE CYCLONE ROLLER COASTER, 1000 Surf Avenue, Coney Island, Brooklyn. The amusement park will be open tonight from 7 to midnight; tomorrow through Monday, noon to midnight. Rides are $1.50 to $3; a single admission of $12.99 allows unlimited access to major rides today and tomorrow. Information: (718) 265-2100. + +Tomorrow + +THE ROY GERSON BAND FEATURING HAYWOOD GREGORY, big band, South Street Seaport, Ambrose Stage, Pier 16, at the East River, lower Manhattan. 2 P.M. Free. Information: (212) 732-7678. + +LOWER SECOND AVENUE FESTIVAL, Second Avenue from St. Mark's Place to 14th Street. 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. Free. Information: (212) 809-4900. + +WASHINGTON SQUARE OUTDOOR ART EXHIBIT, sidewalks surrounding Washington Square Park, Greenwich Village. Noon to sundown, tomorrow through Monday and June 4 and 5. Free. Information: (212) 982-6255. + +GREENWICH VILLAGE WALKING TOUR, Sponsored by Adventure on a Shoestring. 6 P.M. Fee: $5. Reservations and meeting place: (212) 265-2663. + +TURKISH PARADE, Madison Avenue, between 47th and 55th Streets. Sponsored by the American Turkish Society. 2 P.M. + +"A LOVELY WAY TO SPEND AN EVENING," Symphony Space, Broadway and 95th Street. A concert produced by the jazz pianist Barry Harris, with singers from public schools around the city and Chris Anderson, pianist; Charles Davis and Jimmy Heath, tenor saxophonists; Scoby Stroman, dancer; Roberta Davis, singer, and others. Tomorrow at 8 P.M. Tickets: $20 in advance; $25 at the door. Information: (212) 864-5400. + +RICHMOND HILL MEMORIAL WEEKEND FESTIVAL, Jamaica Avenue, from Lefferts Boulevard to 108th Street, Queens. A celebration in honor of the area's 100th anniversary. 11 A.M. to 7 P.M. Information: (212) 995-9412. + +IRISH-AMERICAN FEIS, Floyd Bennett Field, Gateway National Recreation Area, southeast Brooklyn. A festival featuring the Irish tenor Frank Patterson and other Irish musicians, a storyteller, children's pony and amusement-park rides and food and cultural exhibitions. Hours: tomorrow and Sunday, noon to 8 P.M.; Monday, noon to 6 P.M. Free. Information: (718) 338-3799. + +LITTLE ODESSA WALKING TOUR, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. A tour of the area with an optional lunch. Sponsored by Adventure on a Shoestring. The tour starts at noon in Manhattan or 1:15 P.M. in Brooklyn. Fee: $5, lunch and subway fare not included. Information: (212) 265-2663. + +"SKY HUNTERS '94," Bronx Zoo, Bronx River Parkway and Fordham Road, Fordham, the Bronx. A variety of free-flying birds of prey to demonstrate various flying maneuvers. Beginning tomorrow, daily, except Wednesday, at 11:30 A.M. and at 1:30 and 3:30 P.M. Free with zoo admission: $5.75; $2 for the elderly and children 2 to 12 years old; free under age 2. Parking: $5. Information: (718) 367-1010. + +"HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WALT WHITMAN," Fort Greene Park, Visitors Center, Dekalb and South Portland Avenues, Fort Greene, Brooklyn. A walk and talk about the poet, who helped establish the park. 11 A.M. and 2 P.M. Led by the Urban Park Rangers. Information: (718) 287-3400 or (800) 201-7275. + +CITY BEACHES, the beaches operated by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation open for the season. The beaches are Orchard Beach in the Bronx; Rockaway Beach in Queens; Wolfe's Pond and Midland Beach on Staten Island, and Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn. Daily through Labor Day, 10 A.M to 6 P.M. + +"THE ESTUARY: ARM OF THE SEA," Inwood Hill Park. The Urban Park Rangers will lead a walk along the last remaining salt marsh in Manhattan. Meets at 2 P.M. at 218th Street and Indian Road. Free. Information: (212) 772-0210. + +BASEBALL: METS VS. CINCINNATI REDS, Shea Stadium, Flushing, Queens. 1:40 P.M. Tickets: $6.50 to $15. Information: (718) 507-8499. + +Sunday + +SHAWN COLVIN, folk music, South Street Seaport, Ambrose Stage, Pier 16, at the East River, lower Manhattan. 3 P.M. Free. Information: (212) 732-7678. + +FIREWORKS BY GRUCCI, South Street Seaport, Pier 16, at the East River, lower Manhattan. 9 P.M. Free. Information: (212) 732-7678. + +"RITES OF SPRING: PROCESSION TO SAVE OUR GARDENS," Lower East Side. An all-day procession with stops at more than 50 gardens on the Lower East Side and performances at five locations: Garden of Eden Memorial at Forsyth Street, between Rivington and Stanton Streets; La Plaza Cultural, northwest corner of Ninth Street and Avenue C; northeast corner of Ninth Street and Avenue C; Tree of Life, Sixth Street and Avenue B; El Jardin Paraiso, Fourth Street, between Avenues C and D. 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. Sponsored by Earth Celebrations. Free. Information: (212) 727-8283. + +EAST VILLAGE WALKING TOUR, sponsored by Adventure on a Shoestring. Noon. Fee: $5. Reservations and meeting place: (212) 265-2663. + +GREENWICH VILLAGE WALKING TOUR, led by Joyce Gold. Meet at the arch in Washington Square, Greenwich Village, at noon. Fee: $12. Information: (212) 242-5762. + +"THE TENDER LAND," Bryant Park, 40th Street and Avenue of the Americas. The New York Chamber Ensemble performs Aaron Copland's opera. 3 P.M. Free. Information: (212) 870-2439. + +FLATIRON DISTRICT WALKING TOUR, midtown Manhattan. Sponsored by Adventure on a Shoestring. 3 P.M. Fee: $5. Reservations and meeting place: (212) 265-2663. + +"ROLLER-SKATING REUNION," Wollman Skating Rink, Central Park; entrance at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street. Nonmember skaters are welcome to join members of the Metropolitan-Manhattan Skate Club, who are to roller skate to jazz and disco music. 5 to 9:30 P.M. Admission: $6; skate rental, $3.25; Rollerblade rental, $6.50. Information: (212) 687-1775 or (212) 517-4800. + +"TAP EXTRAVAGANZA '94," Haft Auditorium, Fashion Institute of Technology, 227 West 27th Street, Chelsea. A performance in tribute to the dancers Maceo Anderson, Gene Kelly and Ann Miller. Scheduled performers include Brenda Bufalino, Buster Brown, Savion Glover, Jimmy Glover and the Rhythm Queens. 7:30 P.M. Tickets: $22 to $34. Sponsored by the New York Committee to Celebrate National Tap-Dance Day. Information: (212) 279-4200 or (718) 597-4613. + +LIVABLE WEST SIDE STREET FESTIVAL, Broadway between 72d and 86th Streets. Sponsored by the Coalition for a Livable West Side. Sunday, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. + +"A WORTHY USE OF SUMMER: JEWISH SUMMER CAMPING IN AMERICA," Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92d Street. An exhibition on the history of American Jewish summer camping, told with photographs, letters, clothing and other items. On view through Aug. 21. Hours: Sundays through Thursdays, 11 A.M to 5:45 P.M.; Tuesdays, 11 A.M. to 8 P.M. Admission: $6; $4 for students and the elderly; free under the age of 12. Information: (212) 423-3200. + +"BERLIN AND FRIENDS," Woodlawn Cemetery, Jerome Avenue Gate and Bainbridge Avenue, the Bronx. Michael J. Buglio conducts the Bronx Arts Ensemble Orchestra's tribute to Irving Berlin and other American composers. 2 P.M. Free. Information: (718) 601-7399. + +SIWANOY TRAIL TOUR, Pelham Bay Park, Pelham Golf Clubhouse, off Shore Road, the Bronx. A tour of the marshlands, forest and meadows of Pelham Park, led by the Urban Park Rangers. 2 P.M. Free. Information: (718) 667-6042 or (800) 201-7275. + +"THE WORKS," Central Park. A five-hour walking tour of Central Park, led by the Urban Park Rangers. Meets at 10 A.M. at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street. Free. Information: (212) 772-0210 or (800) 201-7275. + +BASEBALL: METS VS. CINCINNATI REDS, Flushing, Queens. 1:40 P.M. Tickets: $6.50 to $15. Information: (718) 507-8499. + +Monday + +VINCE GIORDANO AND THE NIGHTHAWKS, jazz, South Street Seaport, Ambrose Stage, Pier 16, at the East River, lower Manhattan. 2 P.M. Free. Information: (212) 732-7678. + +TURTLE BAY FAIR, Second Avenue from 42d to 53rd Street. 11 A.M to 6 P.M. Free. Information: (212) 228-8262. + +"NEW YORK IN WAR AND PEACE," lower Manhattan. A walking tour exploring New York's military history. Sponsored by Big Onion Walking Tours. Meets on the steps of City Hall at 1 P.M. Fee: $9; $7 for students and the elderly. Information: (212) 439-1090. + +BROADWAY ASTORIA MEMORIAL DAY FESTIVAL, Broadway from 21st Street to 47th Street, Astoria, Queens. 11 A.M. to 7 P.M. Free. Information: (212) 995-9372. + +MEMORIAL DAY PARADE, West End Avenue and 72d Street to Riverside Drive and 90th Street. 10 A.M. Sponsored by the New York City County American Legion. Free. Information: (212) 788-7438. + +MAHLER'S SYMPHONY NO. 9, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Amsterdam Avenue at 112th Street, Morningside Heights. Kurt Masur is to conduct the New York Philharmonic. 8 P.M. Free. Information: (212) 662-2133. + +"MEMORIAL DAY WALK IN FORT GREENE," Fort Greene Park, Visitor's Center, Dekalb and South Portland Avenues, Fort Greene, Brooklyn. A walk past some of the war monuments, including the Revolutionary War Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument. Led by the Urban Park Rangers. Meets at 11 A.M. and 2 P.M. Free. Information: (718) 287-3400 or (800) 201-7275. + +BASEBALL: METS VS. COLORADO ROCKIES, Shea Stadium, Flushing, Queens. 1:40 P.M. Tickets: $6.50 to $15. Information: (718) 507-8499. + +BASEBALL: YANKEES VS. CHICAGO WHITE SOX, Yankee Stadium, the Bronx. 4:05 P.M. Tickets: $11.50 to $17. Information: (718) 293-6000. + +WESTCHESTER + +Today + +"SHELTER AND DREAM: PLAYHOUSES BY ARCHITECTS AND ARTISTS," an exhibition in the sculpture garden, where children can have fun figuring out commissioned play structures. At the Katonah Museum of Art, Route 22 at Jay Street, Katonah, N.Y. Hours: Tuesdays through Fridays, and Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Free. Information: (914) 232-9555. + +14th WESTCHESTER COUNTY FAIR, Yonkers Raceway. Rides, races, food and musical entertainment. Through June 12. Entertainers this weekend are to be the Tokens tonight at 7 and 9; Sh-Boom tomorrow at 3 and 8 P.M.; Larry Chance and the Earls on Sunday at 3 and 7 P.M., and the Regents, the Duprees and the Demensions on Monday at 3 and 8 P.M. Festival hours: Mondays through Fridays, 5 P.M. to midnight; Saturdays, Sundays and Memorial Day, noon to midnight. Admission: $6; children under 8, free. Parking: $3. Information: (914) 968-4200. + +"THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: REFLECTIONS ON REFLECTIONS," Philipsburg Manor, Route 9, North Tarrytown, N.Y. An exhibition on things that reflect, including early looking glasses and mirrors, a telescope, a shaving stand and a scientific prism. Hours: Wednesdays through Mondays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Admission: $6; $3 for ages 6 to 17. Information: (914) 631-8200. + +"MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND BASEBALL CARD AND SPORTS MEMORABILIA CLASSIC," County Center, Bronx River Parkway and Central Avenue, White Plains. Hours: today, 5 to 9 P.M.; tomorrow, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M.; Sunday, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Admission: $6. Information: (914) 285-4050. + +PLAYLAND BEACH, Exit 19 off the Gov. Thomas E. Dewey Thruway, Rye, N.Y. A 279-acre amusement park with rides, miniature golf and swimming. Hours: today through Sunday, noon to midnight; Monday, noon to 11 P.M. Swimming fees: $3.25; $1.50 for children. Parking: $3, today; $5 tomorrow and Sunday; $6, Monday. Information: (914) 967-2040. + +Tomorrow + +"ANIMALS AND ACROBATS," a 19th-century-style road show featuring elephant and camel rides, musicians, magicians, a slack-rope walker, puppeteers (including a Punch and Judy show) and food. Tomorrow, Sunday and Monday from 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. at the Van Cortlandt Manor, Route 9, Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. (within walking distance of Metro-North). Admission: $6 for adults; $3 for children; free under age 6. Information: (914) 271-8981. + WOODSTOCK-NEW PALTZ ART AND CRAFTS FAIR, Ulster County Fairgrounds, New Paltz, N.Y. More than 300 artisans are to display their work. Hours: Tomorrow and Sunday, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M.; Monday, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Admission: 5.50; $4.50 for the elderly; $3.50 for ages 4 to 12. Information: (914) 246-3414. + +Monday + +NATURE WALK, Lenoir Preserve, Dudley Street, Yonkers. A walk to identify wildflowers, led by by Tim Barton, a naturalist. 10 A.M. Free. Information: (914) 968-5851. + +LONG ISLAND + +Today + +FIREWORKS AND MUSIC, Bar Beach Park, Port Washington. Featuring the Impalas, a pop group. 7 P.M. Information: (516) 327-3100. + +CARNIVAL AT THE STATE UNIVERSITY AT STONY BROOK, South Parking Lot, Stony Brook Road, off Route 347. Games, rides and food. Sponsored by the State University of New York at Stony Brook University Hospital Auxiliary. Today, 5 P.M. to midnight. Also tomorrow and Sunday, 1 P.M. to midnight, and Monday, 1 to 10 P.M. Fireworks today and Sunday at 10 P.M. Free. Information: (516) 444-2699. + +Tomorrow + +SPRING FESTIVAL AND HORTICULTURAL EXHIBITION, Old Bethpage Village Restoration, Round Swamp Road, Exit 48 from the Long Island Expressway, Old Bethpage. Games, dancing and sheep-shearing demonstrations. Sponsored by the Agricultural Society of Queens, Nassau and Suffolk Counties and Friends for Long Island's Heritage. 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Also Sunday and Monday, same hours. Admission: $5; $3 for children and the elderly. Information: (516) 572-8400. + +Sunday + +INTERNATIONAL JEWISH ARTS FESTIVAL OF LONG ISLAND, Suffolk Y-J.C.C., 74 Hauppauge Road, Commack. Entertainment, crafts demonstrations, dancing, food. 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. Also Monday, same hours. Daily admission: $14; $12 for students and the elderly; free for children under 12. Two-day pass: $20. Information: (516) 938-4600. + +NEW JERSEY + +Tomorrow + +DOG SHOW, Wolf Hill Farm, Monmouth Park, Oceanport. A juried event with 1,500 dogs from all over North America. Presented by the Monmouth County Kennel Club. 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Admission: $3; $1 for children. Information: (908) 264-0658. + +COUNTRY MUSIC CONCERT, Six Flags Great Adventure, Exit 7A (Exit 98 off the Garden State Parkway to Interstate 195, Exit 16). Rides, games and food. Performance by Sammy Kershaw at 8 P.M. Admission: $33.92; $21.15 for those under 55 inches. Information: (908) 928-2000. + +Sunday + +IRIS SHOW, Quakerbridge Mall, Route 1, Lawrenceville. Sponsored by the Garden State Iris Society. Noon to 5 P.M. Free. + +Monday + +FAMILY FUN DAY, Meadowlands Racetrack, Route 4, East Rutherford. Clowns, pony rides, a petting zoo and the Tim Gillis Band. 11:30 A.M. to 5 P.M. Admission: $2; $1 for the elderly; children under 12, free. Information: (201) 935-8500. + +CONNECTICUT + +Tomorrow + +MYSTIC SEAPORT'S LOBSTERFEST, Mystic. Participants may buy lobsters or lobster dinners while being entertained by performers singing sea chanteys. Tomorrow through Monday, 11:30 A.M. to 3:30 P.M. Seaport hours: 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. daily. Admission (not including food): $15; $7.50 for ages 6 to 15. Information: (203) 572-5315. + +HOT-AIR BALLOON RALLY, Eastern High School, Route 229, Bristol. Saturday and Sunday, 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. + +Monday + +DECORATION DAY, Mystic Seaport, Mystic. Services and activities dedicated to the fallen heroes of the Civil War begin at 12:30 P.M. A parade starts at 2 P.M. Seaport hours: 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. daily. Admission: $15; $7.50 for ages 6 to 15. Information: (203) 572-5315. + +MEMORIAL DAY PARADE, Rocky Hill. Representative Barbara B. Kennelly is to speak at the ceremonies on the green. 9:30 A.M. Free. Information: (203) 529-2379. + +LOAD-DATE: May 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: May 28, 1994, Saturday + + CORRECTION: +A Memorial Day listing in Weekend yesterday misstated the admission price for a holiday party tomorrow at 9 P.M. in the series called "Can't Top the Lindy Hop!" at the Roosevelt Hotel, Madison Avenue and 45th Street. Tickets are $25, not $15. + +GRAPHIC: Photo: An African fish eagle and other birds are to demonstrate flying maneuvers in "Sky Hunters '94" at the Bronx Zoo. (Wildlife Conservation Society) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +194 of 457 DOCUMENTS + + +The New York Times + +May 29, 1994 Sunday +Late Edition - Final + +Discoveries Made Along The Croisette + +BYLINE: By Janet Maslin + +SECTION: Section 2; Column 5; Arts & Leisure Desk; Pg. 9 + +LENGTH: 1489 words + +DATELINE: CANNES, France + +THE REWARDS OF THE CANNES international Film Festival go well beyond the pleasure of hearing the word Hudsucker pronounced with a French accent, though certainly that was one of them. Cannes offers an incomparably broad overview of world cinema, with all its contrasts and extremes. The arts of self-promotion are as well displayed here as the artistry on screen, and it takes a cool head to keep them separate. Nearly two weeks' worth of cinematic overload and celebrity drumbeating do not encourage cool thinking, but then that's the whole point. The first step to frenzy is well-orchestrated confusion. + Cannes thrives on that. You arrive here to daily press handouts that do not necessarily intend to shed light. From one Monday's listings, some sample film synopses: "A deluded bank robber believes he is King Arthur." "The humdrum life of a couple is disrupted by the arrival of an anonymous love poem." "A nocturnal homosexual preys on elderly women, kidnapping them and killing them." "A retired judge wins the affection of a young model who accidentally hit his dog with her car." + I can't speak for the first two, since they appeared on a day when the program guide listed 166 screenings. But the third and fourth are, respectively, "I Can't Sleep," a widely admired French film by Claire Denis, the director of "Chocolat," and Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Rouge," a supremely subtle and enveloping work that could not possibly be summed up in a single sentence. Definitely not a sentence about a dog being hit by a car. But the fact that nothing at Cannes is what it sounds like only enhances the festival's suspenseful atmosphere. + So does the potential for making discoveries. This was a strong year for films outside the main competition, and a number of them will find international audiences now that this event is over. Among those that attracted attention: Hal Hartley's droll, spare "Amateur," which may not expand Mr. Hartley's following but should certainly please his admirers; "Muriel's Wedding," an Australian film by a director named Paul J. Hogan, not to be confused with Crocodile Dundee, although he turned up, too; "Eat Drink Man Woman," a tasty, commercial comedy from the Taiwanese director of "The Wedding Banquet," and "Bandit Queen," a super-violent Indian film about an avenging female outlaw. + The Leningrad Cowboys, Aki Kaurismaki's hopeless musical group known for their shellacked hairdos, could be seen roaming the Croisette during the wee hours. But they didn't do much for "Tatyana, Take Care of Your Scarf," an hourlong Kaurismaki film that continues the Cowboys' globe-trotting adventures. A more successful publicity gambit was the so-called Bronx Block Party to promote "I Like It Like That." This bright urban comedy is directed by Darnell Martin, who brings a knowing feminine sensibility to bear on her material and who made the most of Cannes's prominence as a showcase for new film makers. As a smart, appealing, young African-American film maker with impressive talent, Ms. Martin came to the right place at the right time. + Films in the main competition usually arouse the strongest emotions in Cannes, since the festival's international audiences are not shy about expressing audible opinions. But the crowds were polite this year, perhaps because half the main competition films were so eminently forgettable. Shrugs greeted "The Browning Version," starring Albert Finney and signaling every shading of Terence Rattigan's play within its first 10 minutes. Along with "The Whores," a black-and-white Italian film that is exactly what it sounds like, it prompted the greatest doubts about the festival's selectivity. + Many of the other main competition films played like rough drafts, since they will call for serious editing if they are to receive wide release. "Les Patriotes," a solemn two-and-a-half-hour spy film by Eric Rochant that could have been an hour shorter, was typical in that regard. On the other hand, Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" had virtually the same running time and didn't seem long. Mr. Tarantino, with an energy level that is somewhere beyond the volcanic, has no trouble holding an audience's attention. + Mr. Tarantino's success story is the sort that lends excitement to this entire event. Two years ago he was a new kid on the block with his first film, "Reservoir Dogs," which was shown in one of Cannes's ancillary festivals. This year he won the main competition with a much bigger film, jump-started the careers of some of his actors (notably John Travolta, whose performance was dubbed "la surprise du festival" by Le Figaro), and came across as such a fresh, avid cineaste that he will doubtless inspire many others. + The subject of screen violence always comes up when Mr. Tarantino's name is mentioned. And an event like this festival also raises the issue of violence in broader terms. For documentary film makers, addressing the bloodshed in Bosnia is now a matter of compelling interest; there are several such documentaries here, although the essence of the tragedy is not easily captured. A poster for one film, entitled "MGM Sarajevo -- Man, God, the Monster," also turned up in the window of an extravagant Cannes gourmet shop, which may offer some idea of how jarring festival-induced contrasts can be. + A different but equally fundamental idea of violence has colored recent Chinese films dealing with the Cultural Revolution. In Zhang Yimou's "To Live," hardship and brutality are depicted only indirectly, in the ways they affect the film's central family, and yet the horrors are overwhelming. It's truly disorienting to move from a film of such gravity, which split the grand jury prize, to something like Lodge Kerrigan's "Clean, Shaven," which tries to convey the inner turmoil of its deeply disturbed protagonist by shocking the audience in bloody, graphic terms. (A sign warning that "Clean, Shaven" might be violent enough to upset viewers guaranteed that screenings here drew huge crowds.) + The self-mutilation scenes in Mr. Kerrigan's film look ugly and exploitative, but then that's the way some critics dismissed "Reservoir Dogs" two years ago. If Mr. Kerrigan turns out to have new stature as dramatic and unexpected as Mr. Tarantino's, then the festival circuit (his work has already been shown at New Directors and Sundance) will have served its purpose. + Meanwhile, Mr. Tarantino has himself come a long way in dealing with violence. This time he has toned down the gore to a much more bearable level and offset it with wild, unexpected humor. + At a lunch with Mr. Tarantino (who turned up in one of the south of France's toniest restaurants wearing a Fred Flintstone T-shirt), both Mr. Travolta and Bruce Willis gave some thought to the violence in "Pulp Fiction." Mr. Travolta brought up "Goodfellas," which combines horror and humor in similar ways, and rightly observed that the unusual circular structure of Mr. Tarantino's film makes it ultimatley seem anything but exploitative. Mr. Willis, having starred in films in which the body count climbs into the hundreds, said that he saw this film as something very different from that brand of escapism. It is. + Mr. Willis and Mr. Travolta are old hands at dealing with celebrity. And, notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Willis rightfully blew his cork when a woman spoke contemptuously of his work at his festival press conference, they bring an obvious professionalism to the job. At the other end of the spectrum, 14-year-old Sean Nelson, who plays a drug dealer in "Fresh," came to France from the Bronx just after his picture had been plastered all over Cannes and was politely thrilled by the whole experience. Politeness, professionalism: nice qualities. But they aren't always what the Cannes press corps is after. And they can't compare to the inimitable je ne sais quoi of Mickey Rourke. + Mr. Rourke was only here for a couple of days, during which he announced his intention to be a Hollywood team player, then had a public fit. But on one of his good days, he appeared jauntily for an early-morning (1 P.M.) interview accompanied by a friend of his, a novelist named Michael Davis. Claiming that Mr. Davis deserved screenwriting credit on his latest movie, "S.F.W.," Mr. Rourke loyally defaced a poster to add his buddy's name. He punctuated his remarks with a "You agree with that, Mike?" every now and then. Sure enough, Mike agreed. + THE GREAT MYSTERY about Mr. Rourke, inescapable in Cannes, is that the French love him so. So he explained that he loved them too and had many French friends, including the renowned photographer Robert Doisneau, who recently died. + Mr. Rourke was too busy to go to the funeral, he said. So Mike went instead. Mr. Rourke wasn't sure how to spell his friend Doisneau's name. So Mike did that too. + "You see?" Mr. Rourke exclaimed, grinning at Mike. "That's why you always need a writer." + Or that's why you always need a writer in Cannes. + + +URL: http://www.nytimes.com + +LOAD-DATE: February 18, 2004 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: John Travolta, left, Uma Thurman, and the director Quentin Tarantino promote Mr. Tarantino's film "Pulp Fiction," which won the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival last week. (Associated Press)(pg. 16) + Lauren Velez and Jon Seda in "I Like It Like That." (Lisa Leona/Columbia Pictures)(pg. 9) + +DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review + +PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper + + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +195 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 29, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WESTCHESTER GUIDE + +BYLINE: By ELEANOR CHARLES + +SECTION: Section 14WC; Page 12; Column 4; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 910 words + + +FUNK FEST +The Mexican Mud Band and Tongue-in-Groove will bring their music and wit to the Funk Fest, which takes place at 10 P.M. today in the Port Chester night spot named for its address, 7 Willow Street, off Route 1. +Doors will open at 8, and admission is $10. + The Mexican Mud Band's repertory tonight will include some of the songs inspired by their initial success in the late 80's at Syracuse University: "What Can You Do With a Taxidermy Major?" "Cable Ready" and "The Palm Tree Song," a lament on spending one's last dollar on a two-week vacation. +The quintet consists of the drummer Matt Pedone, the singer-percussionist Scott Lehr, the bass player Don Martin and the guitarists Mark Czuj and Dave Parsons. +Tongue-in-Groove's eight members have become a popular attraction in Fairfield County. Andrew Gromiller, the lead singer, and Eddie Beard, guitarist, met while studying at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and formed the band in 1990, describing their style as funky soul. For more information, the number to call is 939-1474. + +AN ARTIST-ARCHITECT +Indicating that it pays for Mom to take not only her daughters but also her sons to her workplace is a new art exhibition at the Hopper House Art Center in Nyack. Theodore Ceraldi, whose oil and acrylic landscapes will be on view there from next Saturday through June 26, was inspired to enter the world of art by frequent trips to the studios where his mother worked as a commercial artist. +Mr. Ceraldi is an adjunct instructor of design, painting and landscape drawing at Rockland Community College and an architect as well as a painter. His conceptual design for an artist's studio, which was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, is in the Hopper House show. +Viewing hours are Saturdays and Sundays from 1 to 5 P.M.; a reception and gallery talk are to be held on June 12 at 3 P.M. Admission is free, but a $1 contribution will be welcome. Hopper House, the boyhood home of the painter Edward Hopper, is at 82 North Broadway. Call 358-0774 for more information. + +MEDICARE DEMYSTIFIED +Older people will have an opportunity to sort out "The Maddening Maze of Medicare" at a free program by that name. The Northern Westchester Geriatric Committee, the Central Westchester Geriatric Committee and the County Office for the Aging are sponsoring the event, to be held Thursday from 9:30 to 11:30 A.M. at the White Plains Library. +The speaker will be Diane Archer of the Medicare Beneficiary Defense Fund in Manhattan, a nonprofit patient-advocacy organization financed by the State Office for the Aging. She will address the issues of maximizing home health care, resolving problems with Medicare claims and exploring common misconceptions about Medicare. +Open since 1989 but not yet well known, the fund publishes five brochures about various aspects of Medicare. They may be obtained for $1 each by writing to Medicare Beneficiary Defense Fund, 1460 Broadway, Eighth Floor, New York, N.Y. 10036. +A hot-line number, said Anne Burt, a spokeswoman for the organization, becomes available after contact has been established with a Medicare patient by letter. She added: "The staff will discuss the patient's problems by telephone then call and write to its contacts in the Medicare administration and to the patient's doctors. We will help file claims and even go to the claims hearing with the client." For more information about the library program call 241-3421; the library is at 100 Martine Avenue. The office number for the Medicare Beneficiary Defense Fund is (212) 869-3850. + +THE VISUAL VIOLIST +Emanuel Vardi has had a long and distinguished career as a violist, but his paintings are the focus of attention in an exhibition at the Gallery in the Courtyard in Katonah through June 19. +His semi-abstract expressions of love for music, the instruments that produce it and the performers who coax the instruments to life are in the collections of many musicians and in institutions like the Bordighera Museum of Art in Italy. +The son of musical parents from Vilnius, Lithuania, who came to America, Mr. Vardi was a soloist with the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini and has performed at the White House for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He teaches at the Manhattan School of Music and at Temple University in Philadelphia. +Visiting hours at the gallery are Mondays through Saturdays from 10 A.M. to 6 P.M., Sundays from noon to 6 P.M. The phone number there is 232-9511. + +SPRING BULB SALE +Tuesday is the deadline for ordering bulbs and at the same time helping out the Scarsdale Historical Society. +Its yearly spring sale features more than 100 species, including anemones, snowdrops, fritillaria, wood hyacinths, amaryllis, allium, iris, narcissus, tulips, daffodils, and others. Color photos of every bulb on the list are on display at the society's headquarters at 937 Post Road. For information, call 723-1744. + +'PETER PAN' +A student production of the Broadway musical "Peter Pan" will be presented for family audiences on Saturday at 3 P.M. and next Sunday at 2 P.M. at the Kids Theater in Mount Kisco. The cast, from 7 through 14 years old, was selected at auditions held by the show's producer, the three-year-old Dance, Drama and Song Performing Arts School of Bedford Hills. The company has been in rehearsal since February. +Tickets are $7 and can be reserved by calling 666-0223. ELEANOR CHARLES + +LOAD-DATE: May 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The Mexican Mud Band is one of the attractions tonight at the Funk Fest in Port Chester. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +196 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 29, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +At Work; +Women's Pensions, Wilting Fast + +BYLINE: By Barbara Presley Noble + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 21; Column 3; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1018 words + +HEALTH CARE legislation may be the only item on the agenda on Capitol Hill this year, but there is now a light at the end of the tunnel bright enough to put a glint in the eye of those who would overhaul other less-than-seamless social security systems. As anyone knows who periodically has a good denial-driven laugh at how much should be set aside for retirement -- to make up for all those profligate years of paying rent, clothing the kids and buying food with stagnating wages -- pensions are a trouble spot. +It may not seem so on the surface. Women working full time are more likely than ever before to have pension coverage, according to a survey released on Thursday by the Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration, a Labor Department agency. The percentage of women in full-time, private-sector jobs with pension coverage grew to 48 percent last year from 38 percent in 1972. Coverage for men in the same category and period seesawed, ending at 51 percent in 1993, down 4 percentage points from the peak year of 1979. + But, increasingly, workers are losing out on traditional coverage, in some cases because whole, heavily covered industries have virtually disappeared. Or they are taking on more direct responsibility for assuring their retirement income. +Although the overall number of employees covered by pensions has held steady and even increased slightly, much of the increase has come from 401(k) plans, which are unlikely to provide adequate retirement income, given the contributions many people can afford to make, some benefits experts say. Thirty-five percent of employers offered such plans in 1993, up from 25 percent in 1988, according to the survey. +Moreover, part-time workers are far less likely to have pension coverage than full-time workers: only 15 percent of part-time female workers and 8 percent of part-time male workers are covered -- not a happy trend given the recent increase in contingent and temporary jobs. Three times more women than men work part time. +It is the more sobering numbers that brought the reform-minded pension community together in Washington this month for a kind of omnibus presentation on aging and retirement. Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum, Democrat of Ohio, used the occasion to preview the Pension Bill of Rights Act of 1994, legislation he will introduce next month. +The immediate cause was the kickoff of the "Pensions Not Posies" campaign, a nationwide educational effort sponsored by the Women's Pension Policy Consortium in Washington and several other groups to raise the awareness of the link between poverty among elderly women and their lack of pension income and of their inadequate access to the pension system. +The elderly poor, for example, are disproportionately female: roughly half of the 65-and-over population is female, but three-quarters of the elderly poor are female. The median income from Social Security, pensions and investments -- excluding assets -- for men 65 and over was $14,183 in 1990, the last year for which such numbers are available. For women in the same age group, it was $8,044. As Olena Berg, who heads the Labor Department's pension unit, noted at the gathering, the pension benefits received by men rose 6 percent between 1978 and 1989, in real dollars, and declined 17 percent for women; in 1989, women's benefits amounted to 37 percent of what men received, down from 47 percent in 1978. +"If you're lucky enough to be 35 and in a $70,000-a-year job, everything is O.K.," said Cindy Hounsell, the consortium's coordinator, in an interview. "Except you'll probably still be dropping out of the work force," she said, referring to the greater responsibility of women for child-rearing and the greater likelihood they will give up their jobs when conflicts occur. + +THE campaign, which will end next spring with the presentation of a "women's pension policy agenda" at the White House Conference on Aging, was called "Pensions Not Posies," Ms. Hounsell said, because women are often forced to leave jobs before their pensions are vested. "They are given a bouquet of flowers when what they really need is a pension," she said. +The consortium is working with 9 to 5, the National Association of Working Women, at grass-roots efforts to educate women on pension issues. Several chapters of 9 to 5, whose membership comes from the great majority of American women who work in traditionally "female" support staff jobs, have sponsored bag lunches to go over the consortium's "Guide to the Working Women's Pension Checklist." +"It's a big issue for our members," said Ellen Bravo, 9 to 5's Milwaukee-based director. "A lot are in undervalued women's jobs." They either don't have pensions or have less coverage. In some cases their husbands have lost pensions. She said even the younger members are worried about how they will finance their old age. "Everyone's feeling more vulnerable and conscious of not wanting to be naive," she said. "They don't see where the money will come from." + +A Push for Pension Reform + PENSION reform may go nowhere this year because of the 500-pound canary known as health care, but proponents want it on the agenda now. "It needs to be done because people are talking about it," said Nancy Coffey, a spokeswoman for Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum, the Ohio Democrat who will introduce the Pension Bill of Rights Act of 1994 after the Memorial Day recess. The measure would guarantee: +* Inclusion in an employer-sponsored pension plan. +* Fair treatment in earning retirement benefits. +* Timely access to information about pension and welfare benefits. +* Advice on the investment of plan assets. +* Adequate financing and secure investing. +* Labor Department help in protection of pension and welfare benefit rights. +* Court enforcement of legal rights. +* Equitable treatment of spouses of employees at death or divorce. +* Pension portability. +* Protection against fraud and abuse. +Introduction of the measure comes 20 years after the last large-scale reform of the pension system, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974. + +LOAD-DATE: May 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Olena Berg, head of the Labor Department's Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +197 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 29, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: UPPER WEST SIDE; +Synagogues Propose a Ritual Fence + +BYLINE: By RANDY KENNEDY + +SECTION: Section 14; Page 5; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 601 words + +If everything goes according to plan, Adeena Penner will soon be able push her 2-year-old daughter in a stroller to the Lincoln Square Synagogue. +Her husband, Marc, who is to become an assistant rabbi at the synagogue soon, will be able to carry keys to get the family back into their apartment after services. + These are things that the couple, and thousands of other Orthodox Jewish families on the Upper West Side, are not allowed to do now during the Sabbath because of religious laws that prohibit them from doing 39 types of work, including carrying things, from sunset Friday until Saturday night. +But now, concerned about losing congregants because of the strictness of the laws, the leaders of two large Orthodox synagogues have begun negotiations with the city to construct an eruv, or religious fence, around the entire Upper West Side. By extending the symbolic boundaries of a private home, the eruv would allow some of the restrictions to be relaxed. +The plan, being advanced by the Lincoln Square synagogue, at Amsterdam Avenue and 69th Street, and Ohab Zedek, at 95th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, has been discussed by the area's 14 Orthodox synagogues for a decade. It would rely mostly on existing structures, like buildings, the wall along Central Park West and walls and fences in Riverside Park. +The complex laws governing the construction of an eruv allow for some gaps in the boundary, which are considered doorways. But where spaces between fences or buildings are too great, the leaders propose to string translucent 100-pound fishing line between light poles or in trees. They say the lines would be almost impossible to detect. +Rabbi Penner, who is in charge of the plans, says that many Orthodox Jews have begun to move away from the Upper West Side to attend synagogues within eruvs in Brooklyn, New Jersey, Connecticut and upstate New York because the rules against carrying make going to services so difficult. Baby sitters must be hired, he said, and keys left with doormen or friends. The rules sometimes prevent elderly people who use canes or walkers from attending synagogue at all. +"We are really losing a lot of people on the West Side, which makes the eruv imperative," he said. +But proponents of the eruv are proceeding cautiously. Similar proposals in the New York area and elsewhere have drawn opposition from civil libertarians and have also exposed divisions in the Jewish community. +In London last year, a plan to build a six-square-mile eruv was opposed by preservationists who thought it would mar the landscape. Some were accused of anti-Semitism. +Rabbi Penner said he had worked to keep other synagogues informed and had not experienced any serious opposition yet. He said he was more worried about those who will view the boundary as a violation of the separation of church and state. +Arthur Eisenberg, legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the organization would monitor the plan. But he said that his group would probably not get involved because the construction would not require substantial entanglement between the city and the synagogues. +Martin Algaze, Manhattan coordinator for the Mayor's community assistance unit, said city officials foresaw no problems, so far. +Rabbi Irving Greenberg, president of the Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, a progressive Orthodox organization, said of possible religious opposition: "The fact that they're going ahead probably means that they've done their nose counting and figure that there won't be big opposition." RANDY KENNEDY + +LOAD-DATE: June 3, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + + +GRAPHIC: The construction of an eruv (pronounced AY-ruv) goes back at least 2,500 years in Jewish law. Orthodox Judaism prohobits any form of work, including carrying a child, pushing a baby stroller, keeping keys or a pen in one's pocket or using a cane, on the Sabbath. But an eruv (the word eruv comes from the Hebrew, meaning "to join together") permits certain kinds of carrying by extending the symbolic boundaries of a private home. More than 100 cities and towns have eruvs. + +SOME EXISTING ERUVS + +Queens: Covers a 90-block area on the Rockaway Peninsula. +Lawrence, L.I.: Cuts across several villages and encompasses 15 square miles. +Boston: Encompasses 18 square miles, one of the largest eruvs in the United States. +Orlanda: Circles a 57-acre Hyatt hotel complex with an unbroken strand of rope. + +PROPOSED SITE: Upper West side of Manhattan. The eruv would have actual physical boundaries. For example, it would use existing walls along the West Side Highway and Central Park. Where boundaries do not exist, fishing line would be strung up in trees and the tops of lampposts. + +Map of Manhattan showing location of the Eruv. +Chart: "RELIGION: What Is an Eruv?" + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +198 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 30, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Review/Theater; +D-Day Get-Together With a Captive Guest List + +BYLINE: By WILBORN HAMPTON + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 13; Column 2; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 461 words + +As D-Day veterans gather for the 50th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy, proving Vera Lynn a prophet, it seems only fitting that some small commemoration be held for the pilots, navigators, gunners and bombardiers who flew vital missions out of Italy against industrial targets inside Germany. +"The Last Sortie," a play by George Rattner at Theater for the New City, provides a nostalgic fly past for one American crew of the Allied Heavy Bomber Force, which flew B-17's out of an old German airfield at Foggia. + Set in a makeshift officer's club and moving back and forth between 1944-45 and an anniversary reunion in April 1990 (presumably the 45th of the Italian surrender), the dialogue is mostly a trip down memory lane, complete with a simulated bomb run in a Flying Fortress and padded with barracks banter about sex. But while these recollections might play well for the old bomber wing, to anyone else they quickly take on all the fascination of a Saturday night social at a V.F.W. hall. +In the second act, it soon becomes clear that this particular reunion is taking place in that great briefing room in the sky, and the reminiscences turn into a sort of "how did we get here from there" exercise of disgruntled old men for whom life once seemed to hold great promise. Mr. Rattner tries to build dramatic tension around an incident in which the crew members, eager for their 50th mission so they can go home, blame another flier for the mistaken downing of a German escort plane. But the victim of this betrayal, who is court-martialed and comes to a bad end, is not even a character, and the episode, which could have provided some emotional spark, is undeveloped. +The performances are uneven, with some actors seeming unsure of their characters. Exceptions include Steven Stahl, who is consistently convincing as Colonel McKay, and Christopher Healy, who is engaging as the conscientious young Grant. David Rosenbaum is credible as the older Joel, who traded neurosurgery for a Hollywood silicone practice, and Frank S. Palmer is mysterious as Justino, the otherworldly host at the reunion. Robert Landau directed. + +The Last Sortie +Theater for the New City +155 First Avenue, at 10th Street +East Village +Through June 5 + +Written by George Rattner; directed by Robert Landau; set and lighting by Fred Kolo; costumes by Helen E. Rodgers; sound by Gary Harris and Timmy Harris; production stage manager, Marybeth Ward. Presented by Theater for the New City, Bartenieff/ Field, in association with James Di Paola and Wind Merchant Productions. + +WITH: Fred Burrell, Anthony Grasso, Christopher Healy, Alan Levine, Kevin Martin, Frank S. Palmer, David Rosenbaum, Edward Seamon, Steven Stahl and Michael Twaine. + +LOAD-DATE: May 30, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Alan Levine, left, and Christopher Healy in a scene from George Rattner's play "The Last Sortie," at Theater for the New City. (Andy Warren/"The Last Sortie") + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +199 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 1, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Charges Against Tong President Threaten a Chinatown Institution + +BYLINE: By SETH FAISON + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1680 words + +A few dozen elderly men gather each day in the main hall of the Tung On Association on Division Street in Manhattan to drink tea and play mah-jongg beneath dusty paintings of George Washington and the Chinese leader Sun Yat-sen, restlessly clacking their colored tiles against the tops of worn wooden tables. +Members of the Tung On like to say that their association is as innocent as their afternoon gatherings. But Federal prosecutors say they can prove otherwise, and they have charged Clifford Wong, the Tung On's longtime president, with leading a criminal enterprise that killed 10 people and participated in many other crimes, like armed robbery and heroin trafficking. + The Tung On case has lifted a curtain on one of the most enduring mysteries about Chinatown: how leaders of tongs, or fraternal organizations, sometimes rely on street gangs and professional killers to protect and expand their businesses, many of them gambling operations. +For prosecutors, the case is a milestone. While they have periodically cracked down on street gangs during the last decade, until now they have never been able to link the violent acts of a gang to a tong. "We've never gone to a level this high before," said Catherine E. Palmer, the Federal prosecutor in the case, who has won convictions in several Asian organized crime cases during the last eight years. "We're talking about tong leaders here." +The central figure in the Tung On case is Mr. Wong, 39, a man with a slightly puffy face and a head of thick, black hair. Prosecutors portray him as a powerful businessman who owned race horses and restaurants in Florida and New York City, and who had close friends in the Hong Kong underworld. Acquaintances say that Mr. Wong also suffered from a gambling addiction. A secretive man rarely seen in Chinatown without two bodyguards, Mr. Wong cultivated the reputation of someone with dangerous friends to impress and intimidate his financial partners, and often exaggerated the extent of his wealth, acquaintances say. +Mr. Wong's lawyer, Barry Schulman, would not comment on the charges against his client, who is being held without bail in a Federal detention center in Brooklyn. A trial is scheduled for October. +Unlike Mafia crime families, law enforcement officials say, Asian crime networks are loosely organized, making it difficult to track patterns of wrongdoing. To minimize their risk in any given criminal enterprise -- whether operating a gambling den, importing heroin or smuggling illegal immigrants -- businessmen like Mr. Wong rarely act alone and frequently shift partners. +Court records and interviews with tong members show that Mr. Wong's downfall came after prosecutors found gang members willing to provide evidence that he ordered crimes to protect his gambling operations. +With about 120 active members, the Tung On led by Mr. Wong has traditionally been known as the third most influential of Chinatown's 70 tongs, after the Hip Sing on Pell Street and the On Leong on Mott Street. The Fukien-American Association on East Broadway has also become more prominent in recent years. + +Aid for Immigrants + In most of its functions, the Tung On is a legitimate association of businessmen and immigrants from the same part of China, with an executive board, monthly meetings and a banquet at Chinese New Year. When it was established early this century, named for two counties abutting Hong Kong whence its members came, the tong was like an unofficial social service center, helping new immigrants locate relatives and find a place to stay. +In recent decades, those functions dropped off as the pattern of immigration from China shifted to other parts of the country. But tong members say the Tung On is still a social anchor for people far from their native land. +Prosecutors say that like many other tongs, it was also a regular home to illegal gambling operations. + +Youths From Hong Kong + The need for guards, bouncers and debt collectors for the gambling operation led to the tong's hiring of disaffected young men from Hong Kong, said a member of the Tung On, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. A gang emerged in the 1970's. While it owed its main business to the tong, he said, it was involved in other crimes on its own, like muggings and kidnappings. +The ties between the Tung On and its street gang were symbiotic, the association member said. The Tung On relied on its gang to safeguard its gambling operations, and through the association, the gang gained prestige and the right to collect protection money from merchants along Division Street. Gang members sometimes frequented tong headquarters, but were rarely allowed to join. +The gang, calling itself the Tung On Boys, did not try to hide the identity of its parent association, and the name similarity confused people outside Chinatown about the relationship between the two. But while the tong was a permanent club of men over 30, the gang was an ever-changing collection of 80 or 90 youths divided into separate factions that competed for work. +"When the tong needed the gang for a job, the leader decided which faction to assign it to," said Ko-lin Chin, an assistant professor at Rutgers University who has written extensively about Chinese gangs. "A tong leader determined who headed the gang, and could replace or discredit him." +Mr. Wong was president of the tong from 1984 until his arrest late last year. Some tongs designate a lesser member of their executive board to be their liaison with a gang, Mr. Chin said. But at the Tung On, the member of the association said, it was Mr. Wong himself who directed the gang. + +Headed by Tigerboy + For several years, the Tung On Boys were headed by Mr. Wong's younger brother, Steven Wong, known as Tigerboy, until he was convicted of narcotics trafficking in 1988. He is serving a 15-year sentence. A successor, Sonny Mei, was arrested in December. +Prosecutors say they can show that there was a clear arrangement between gang and tong. +"Gang members slept in the Tung On Association, stored their guns and other weapons in the Tung On Association, and frequently met at the Tung On Association to plan their illegal activities, such as murders, assaults and extortions," they wrote in an indictment. +Although Mr. Wong is the only leader of the Tung On charged in the indictment, the association's fate is now tied to his. Using racketeering charges, the authorities have filed forfeiture proceedings that threaten to confiscate the tong's headrters, where elderly men play mah-jongg each afternoon. + +Breaking Sixence + Kee Chong, who replaced Mr. Wong as president of the Tung On early this year, broke the tong's practice of silence toward outsiders and agreed to an interview to talk about the tong and to defend its right to exist. He denied any formal connection between the Tung On and the Tung On Boys, but conceded that young men he could not control sometimes hung around tong headquarters. +"I know what people are saying," said Mr. Chong, 53, during a break from his nightly shift as a manager at the New Hong Kong City Restaurant on Division Street, of which he is a co-owner. "But none of our current members have anything do with organized crime." +Mr. Chong said the Tung On is financed by $1-a-game fees at its mah-jongg tables, by its $25 annual membership fee and by the rent from a restaurant downstairs. He declined to discuss the association's annual budget, but suggested that it was modest. +"We are a nonprofit organization," added Mr. Chong, a slight, balding man who said proudly that he is a United States Army veteran. +In 1991, Mr. Wong's troubles mounted. He was subpoenaed to appear before a Congressional subcommittee, where he declined to answer questions about his role in organized crime. He and his wife, Charlyne, also filed for personal bankruptcy to keep a bank from foreclosing on their Staten Island home. +The beginning of the end for Mr. Wong came in February 1992, when a Stuyvesant High School student, mistaken for a rival gang member, was shot and killed in a crowded pool hall in Greenwich Village by three members of the Tung On Boys. It was one of the 10 murders in the indictment, covering a period from 1986 to 1993. +At 11:30 on a Friday night, three men wearing black ski masks entered Le Q pool hall on East 12th Street, where a noisy crowd of beer-drinking teen-agers surrounded several billiards tables. All three men pointed semiautomatic handguns at a cluster of Asian-American teen-agers and fired more than 15 shots, the police said at the time. +James Rou, 17, was killed instantly. Four others were injured. The three gunmen, aged 19, 20, and 21, were caught trying to escape and identified by the police as members of the Tung On Boys. +The police were surprised to discover that the victims were not members of the Ghost Shadows, as the gunmen believed. Rather, Mr. Rou was simply a studious teen-ager from Queens who attended Stuyvesant. +Each of the gunmen later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 19 years. None are charged in the current indictment, but prosecutors say it was information from that incident that began a long investigation into the Tung On Boys and the association behind it. +With the cooperation of several gang members, investigators were able to piece together evidence on a total of 10 killings, including the 1987 murder of two men in a livery cab in Brooklyn that had remained unsolved. The February 1992 shooting, they found, was ordered by Mr. Wong; Paul Lai, the leader of a second tong, the Tsung Tsin, and four members of the gang. +Mr. Mei, the gang leader, relayed the order to his underlings that "blood must flow," according to the indictment. +The shooting, intended to kill a member of a rival gang that was trying to encroach on a gambling operation, instead hit an innocent teen-ager. +In the end, Mr. Wong, who depended on the loyalty of gang members for years, lost it. He was arrested at at 3 A.M. one day last December, as he emerged from a Chinatown restaurant. + +NAME: Clifford Wong + +LOAD-DATE: June 1, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Members of the Tung On in Chinatown say their association is merely a place where tea is drunk and mah-jongg played, but prosecutors have charged the tong president with heading a criminal enterprise that has caused 10 killings and other crimes. Men played mah-jongg last month. (Steve Hart for The New York Times); Clifford Wong, the association's president, has been charged with leading a criminal enterprise. (Associated Press) (pg. B5) + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +200 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 1, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO DIGEST + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 519 words + + +NEW YORK CITY + +CHARGES THREATEN AN INSTITUTION +A few dozen elderly men gather each day in the main hall of the Tung On Association to drink tea and play mah-jongg. Members like to say that their association is as innocent as their gatherings. But Federal prosecutors have charged Clifford Wong, the Tung On's longtime president, with leading a criminal enterprise that killed 10 people and participated in armed robbery and heroin trafficking. A1. + + +PARKS DEPT. ALTERS POLICY AFTER MELEE +A day after 20 concertgoers were arrested in a bottle-throwing clash with the police in Tompkins Square Park, the Parks Commissioner said that his department would make it more difficult for promoters to obtain permits for concerts in public parks. B3. + +CROWN HTS. SETTLEMENT TO BE OFFERED +The lawyer for a group of Hasidic leaders in Brooklyn said that he would propose a settlement in the Federal lawsuit against the city and former Mayor David N. Dinkins stemming from the racial violence in Crown Heights in 1991. B3. + +CHASED BY OFFICERS, A MAN DIES +Two undercover investigators seeking inmates who absconded from state prison work-release programs spotted a man in Brooklyn who they believed closely resembled one of the escaped inmates. After a chase, the man fell to his death from a building roof, the police said. B3. + +POLICE TO GATHER DATA ON THE DISTURBED +The Police Department is beginning a pilot program to improve how it gathers information about people with serious emotional problems who are taken to hospital emergency rooms. B5. + +COMPTROLLER WARNS OF EXCESS OPTIMISM +City Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi said that Mayor Giuliani's proposed budget includes measures that may fall hundreds of millions of dollars short of the Mayor's anticipations. B5. +It was the work of the devil when someone broke into the shop of the angels. B3. + +REGION + +EAGLE BREEDERS SET A RECORD +Giving eaglets a beak-to-talon medical exam is not all that difficult; the tricky part is getting them down from their nest atop a 75-foot pine tree. That is how Lawrence J. Niles, of New Jersey's Division of Fish, Game and Wildlife, came to be scaling the tree, and lowering two six-week-old eaglets, one at a time, in a blue canvas gym bag. B4. + +FORMER COMPANION KILLS WOMAN +A woman who had obtained two orders of protection against her former companion was killed when the man broke into her home, shot her in the head and then killed himself in front of their two sons, the Suffolk County police said. B4. + +EX-INSPECTOR FOR F.D.A. GUILTY IN BRIBERY +A former inspector for the Federal Food and Drug Administration was convicted of paying and conspiring to take bribes to allow tons of rotting seafood into the country. B4. + +BIKE HELMET LAW IS FOUND TO SAVE LIVES +In the first full year of New Jersey's bicycle helmet law, bicycle-related fatalities among the youngsters covered fell 80 percent, from 10 deaths to 2. C10. +The authorities have learned the identities of the teen-agers killed in the crash of a stolen car. B4. + About New York by Michael T. Kaufman B3 + +LOAD-DATE: June 1, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "PULSE: Office Rent" shows the average annual asking rent in dollars per square foot. (Source: Edward S. Gordon Company) + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +201 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 1, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Public & Private; +The Nurse Paradigm + +BYLINE: By ANNA QUINDLEN + +SECTION: Section A; Page 21; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 735 words + +An apple a day keeps the nurse away? Don't worry, you'll get used to the idea. +Because one of the most revolutionary parts of health care reform in America is bound to be the burgeoning role that nurses will play, including providing many of the services that were once confined to physicians. Their new prominence will benefit patients -- and raise some questions about the importance of tender loving care and the economic value of medical services. + Exhibit A in what the president of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City calls "a major paradigm shift" is that hospital's decision to give its nurse practitioners admitting privileges, further blurring the line between what doctors do and what nurses can. +This shift is apparent in many areas of the medical center, from the geriatric floor where Shelly Dubin is overseeing the treatment of a group of elderly patients to the primary care clinic in which Lisa Henderson is diagnosing childhood ear infections and prescribing antibiotics. Neither likes to be called doctor, because they aren't. They have seen the future, and in it nurse practitioners can order diagnostic tests, immunize and deliver babies, perform physicals, now even admit patients to the hospital. +Like a corporation that doesn't work, medicine -- or health care, as those dedicated to reform prefer to call it -- is being forced to change because of dissatisfaction from both within and without. Physicians will still be involved in specialty treatment of serious medical conditions, as they are today, but nurses may well step into the primary care and preventive medicine breach. Some say that they've been surreptitiously providing such care for years, along with the caring some patients complain doctors lack. +One issue surrounding an expanded role for nurses is whether it will save money or become an opportunity for long-overdue salary increases. Since studies show that nurses spend more time with patients, savings may be eroded by fewer patient visits per day -- or realized at the cost of the humane treatment some find such a signal part of nursing. And since nurses are one of the largest groups of female professionals in the nation, using them to cut costs raises troubling questions about equal pay standards, particularly if they are providing services once provided by doctors. +"I won't frame this as an economic argument," said Martha Orr, executive director of the New York State Nurses Association. "Nurses have long been under-recognized and under-appreciated, economically and otherwise, and that should change. But quality of service is where we should put the emphasis. And we can provide all kinds of care in a more humane and a cost-effective way." +Dr. William T. Speck, the president of Columbia-Presbyterian, says that in his hospital, which is both a prominent teaching and research center and the health care nucleus of a sprawling urban area, giving nurse practitioners more authority simply made good sense. +For years doctors and nurses played a hierarchical game in which nurses could only suggest treatment that only a doctor could give. ("Doctor, it appears that the patient is dead" is one of the bitter little examples nurses use to illustrate this dance of deference.) But more recently nurse practitioners have been providing a range of medical services, both in rural areas and in inner-city hospitals, like Columbia-Presbyterian, where there simply were not enough primary care providers -- or enough interest in poor patients -- to go around. +"It was always clear that the nurses knew as much about some things as the doctors, and more about others," said Dr. Susan Spear, the medical director of community health services for Columbia-Presbyterian. "But they were artificially prevented from doing all they could for patients." +That simply won't do anymore. While the use of nurses and nurse practitioners in growing areas of patient care will require some adjustment for patients and doctors and some thoughtful resolution of salary issues, it is clearly the future of health care in a system that must be reconfigured around needs, not job titles. To watch the nurse practitioners at Columbia-Presbyterian go about their appointed rounds is to see the necessary being done competently by the qualified. And if some patients call them doctor -- well, they'll learn to say nurse soon enough. + +LOAD-DATE: June 1, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +202 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 3, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Fleet Week, More Nostalgic Than Ever + +SECTION: Section C; Page 26; Column 3; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 1026 words + + +Fleet Week + +Regattas, concerts, street fairs and exhibitions will all be part of Fleet Week in New York City this weekend. Here are the events open to the public. Admission is free unless otherwise noted. Information for most events: (212) 245-0072. +Today + +COAST GUARD AND NAVAL SHIP TOURS, Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, Pier 86, 12th Avenue at West 46th Street, Manhattan. A tour of ship interiors; 1 to 4 P.M. + +COAST GUARD AND NAVAL SHIP TOURS, Naval Station, Stapleton Pier, Staten Island; 1 to 4 P.M. + +50TH-ANNIVERSARY SALUTE TO D-DAY, WQEW-AM (1560). Radio broadcasts with recorded music from the war years, reminiscences of World War II by celebrities and radio listeners, and live interviews with Freddie Roman, comedian (tomorrow at 4 P.M.), and Maureen McGovern, singer (Sunday at 4 P.M.). Continuous through Monday evening. + +Tomorrow + +TUNA YACHT CLUB REGATTA, Great Kills Harbor, Staten Island; Homeport, Pier 1, Stapleton, S.I. A "Farewell to the Navy" regatta, with 100 private ships, will sail from Great Kills Harbor to Homeport, Pier 1, where fireboats and other boats join in, and then head back to Great Kills Harbor, where there will be a blessing of the fleet; 8 A.M. to 1 P.M. From 2 to 6 P.M., a street fair with rides and food will be held along Mansion Avenue in the Great Kills Harbor area. + +EASTERN FRONT COMMEMORATION, Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum. A salute to Russians who fought on the front, with remarks by the Russian Ambassador and other diplomats; 11 A.M. Admission: $7; $6 for the elderly and veterans; $4 for children under 12. + +NEWPORT NAVY BAND CONCERT, Armed Forces Plaza, Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum. A performance by the Navy Band from Newport, R.I.; 1 P.M. + +FLEET WEEK REGATTA, Battery Park City, promenade south of North Cove Marina. A race in New York harbor between boats provided by members of the Manhattan Yacht Club and sailed by crew members from visiting ships; 1:30 P.M. + +SHIP TOURS, Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum. A viewing of ship interiors; 1 to 4 P.M. + +VOLLEYBALL TOURNAMENT, Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum. Games between teams from each of the visiting ships, on the flight deck of the Intrepid; 1 to 4 P.M. Admission: $7; $6 for the elderly and veterans; $4 for children under 12. + +NAVY BAND CONCERT, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, 1000 Richmond Terrace, Livingston, S.I. A performance by the Navy Band from Newport, R.I. Awards will be given to those on Staten Island who have helped in the project to build the Homeport; 8 P.M. + +Sunday + +LIBERATION OF ROME COMMEMORATION, Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum. Ship bells and church bells will ring for three minutes to commemorate the liberation of Rome and the Vatican City. The Vatican representative to the United Nations will bless the fleet in the harbor; Noon. + +INTERNATIONAL NAVAL CUISINE COMPETITION, Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum. "The best chow in the Navy" will be prepared by the ship's cooks and judged by chefs from some of New York City's restaurants; 12:45 P.M. + +MILITARY BAND CONCERT, Armed Forces Plaza, Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum. A performance by the Fort Hamilton Band from Brooklyn; 1 P.M. + +COAST GUARD AND NAVAL SHIP TOURS, Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum. Viewing today includes the USS Kearsage, an amphibious assault ship, which will be open for viewing from 1 to 3 P.M. Viewing hours: 1 to 4 P.M. + +COAST GUARD AND NAVAL SHIP TOURS, Stapleton Pier, Staten Island; 1 to 4 P.M. + +GOVERNORS ISLAND TOUR. A tour of the historic buildings on the island and the interiors of Coast Guard ships. Noon to 4 P.M. Free ferry service to the island is available every 15 minutes, beginning at noon, from the Coast Guard Ferry terminal at South Ferry in lower Manhattan. + +TUG-OF-WAR TOURNAMENT, Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum. Matches between teams from visiting ships; 3 to 4 P.M. Admission: $7; $6 for the elderly and veterans; $4 for children under 12. + +Monday + +D-DAY, LANDINGS AT NORMANDY, Destroyer Edson, Pier 86, Hudson River at 46th Street, Manhattan. Wreaths representing each Allied nation that fought in Europe will be dropped into the water from the Destroyer Edison by a member of the armed forces from the country; 11 A.M. + +COAST GUARD AND NAVAL SHIP TOURS, Piers 86 and 88, Hudson River at 46th and 48th Streets, Manhattan; 1 to 4 P.M. + +COAST GUARD AND NAVAL SHIP TOURS, Stapleton Pier, Staten Island; 1 to 4 P.M. + +Tuesday + +COAST GUARD AND NAVAL SHIP TOURS, Piers 86 and 88, Hudson River at 46th and 48th Streets, Manhattan; 1 to 4 P.M. + +COAST GUARD AND NAVAL SHIP TOURS, Stapleton Pier, Staten Island; 1 to 4 P.M. + +Wednesday + +SHIP DEPARTURES, lower New York Harbor. Visiting ships leave Piers 86 and 88 and travel down the Hudson River to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and out to sea; 8 A.M. Best viewing sites: Liberty and Ellis Islands. In Manhattan: Battery Park, Battery Park City and the Greenwich Village piers. In Brooklyn: Shore Road in Bay Ridge, Gravesend Bay and 69th Street Pier in Gravesend section. On Staten Island: Staten Island Ferry and Terminal, South Beach Boardwalk, the Naval Station in Stapleton and Richmond Terrace. In New Jersey: Liberty State Park; Exchange Place in Jersey City; Castle Point Lookout in Hoboken, and Boulevard East in Weehawken. + +Other D-Day Events + +Tomorrow + +100-GUN SALUTE, Belvedere Castle, Central Park, entrance at Central Park West and 79th Street. A ceremony by the Veteran Corps of Artillery in observance of the 50th anniversary of D-Day; noon. + +Tuesday + +"WORDS OF WAR: DOCUMENTS OF WORLD WAR II FROM THE FORBES MAGAZINE COLLECTION," Forbes Magazine Galleries, 62 Fifth Avenue, at 12th Street, Greenwich Village. An exhibition that includes a personal letter from Gen. Charles de Gaulle to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower asking for help from the Allies and a handwritten log that includes an eyewitness account of the bombing of Hiroshima by Robert Lewis, the co-pilot of the bomber Enola Gay. Through September 1995. Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. Free. Information: (212) 206-5549. + +LOAD-DATE: June 3, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Schedule + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +203 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 4, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +THE D-DAY TOUR: THE OVERVIEW; +Honoring G.I.'s in an Unsung Campaign + +BYLINE: By R. W. APPLE Jr., Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 6; Column 4; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1155 words + +DATELINE: NETTUNO, Italy, June 3 + +Surrounded by the graves of 7,862 Americans who fell during the drive to liberate southern Italy half a century ago, President Clinton urged his countrymen this morning "not only to praise their deeds but to pursue their dreams." +"We are the sons and daughters of the world they saved," the President said at the high point of a brief, dignified ceremony that marked not only the Allied entry into Rome on June 4, 1944, but also the fierce fighting in Sicily and up and down the boot of Italy. + It is the job of Americans today, he added, to make "common cause" with other countries "to ensure a world of peace and prosperity for yet another generation." +Seated before him were survivors of the Italian campaign, old men and women now, a few leaning on canes or using wheelchairs, many wearing hearing aids, some spry. One had hooks where his hands had once been. Most wore once again the blue-and-white stripes of the Third Infantry Division or the golden Thunderbird of the 45th, both of which struggled in the bitterly contested Anzio beachhead. + +Grim Memories of Anzio + Four Senators who fought in Italy were there -- Ernest F. Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina; Claiborne Pell, Democrat of Rhode Island; Bob Dole, Republican of Kansas, and Daniel Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii. Mr. Inouye lost an arm to a German hand grenade. Mr. Dole was grievously wounded in the shoulder by machine-gun fire. +John Shirley of Livermore, Calif., a retired veterinarian who served as a sergeant at Anzio, spoke before the President, telling of the grimness of the struggle there, with 100,000 men and women packed together in soggy foxholes and dugouts in miserable weather, desperately clinging to a dangerously constricted strip of sand. +"It was cold and difficult and dangerous," he said with soldierly understatement. +Neither he nor anyone else mentioned the dark secret of Anzio -- that in the first hours and days of the invasion, in January 1944, the road to Rome lay wide open, unpatrolled by German forces, as confirmed in the memoirs of Siegfried Westphal, the German chief of staff in Italy. But the American corps commander, Maj. Gen. John P. Lucas, who brought ashore more than 18,000 vehicles, waited too long to exploit his advantage and allowed the enemy to regroup. + +Hell's Half Acre + For his timidity, he was relieved of command. The British, Canadians, Americans, New Zealanders and others barely managed to avoid being pushed back into the sea, and there would be no breakout until late spring, when the dash for Rome began. In the meantime, hundreds died inside the perimeter. +So many casualties poured into one of the field hospitals that they christened it Hell's Half Acre, a former nurse recalled. +Churchill later wrote, "I hoped that we were throwing a wildcat onto the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale." +The long delay meant, among other things, that Rome was not freed until June 4. The lead elements of the 88th Infantry Division entered the Piazza Venezia, in the heart of the capital, at 7:30 that evening, only 24 hours before British and American paratroops began dropping into Normandy. +As Mr. Shirley noted today, the invasion in northern Europe quickly stole the limelight and led many veterans of the fighting in Italy to consider theirs "the forgotten campaign." The same thing will happen on Saturday, he said, when the President travels to Britain for three days of events there and in France, marking the 50th anniversary of D-Day. + +Briefly in the Spotlight + "But for today," Mr. Shirley added, to nods of approbation from many of the old soldiers, "the world's attention is focused on this American cemetery, and the Italian campaigns are not forgotten." +An American band played the Sailor's Hymn and Canadian bagpipers added their plaintive laments, underlining the solemnity of the speakers' words. Near the end, when buglers sounded taps and the band swung dolefully into the Dead March from Handel's "Saul," men wept. +But then jet fighters screamed low overhead, breaking the tension, the Italian formation trailing red, green and white smoke. +The cemetery, with its brightly blooming oleanders and its towering cypresses and Roman pines, had been groomed like a championship golf course for the occasion. At each of the headstones, arranged in gently curving lines, lay a single red or peach-colored carnation. At each, marked either by a white marble cross or a white marble Star of David, fluttered small Italian and American flags. +Fifty years ago, it was part of a stunted, treeless battlefield that "ran with the blood of those who fought to save the world," as Mr. Clinton said. +The President quoted Gen. Ernest Harmon, who commanded the First Armored Division at Anzio, as having said, "All of us were in the same boat. We were there to stay or die. I have never seen anything like it in the two world wars of my experience." + +'Italy Was Secondary' + John W. Vessey Jr., who came ashore as a 22-year-old first sergeant and won a battlefield commission here, rose to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and negotiated with Hanoi on prisoner-of-war issues. He was on hand today, and he described Anzio as "the closest thing to World War I trench warfare as we ever got in World War II -- no mobility, a war of position, a few yards gained at a time." +He said that even at 22 he had known that "Italy was secondary, because the big battles were going to take place in France and later inside Germany." +"But that doesn't mean that what we did here wasn't important," the retired general added. "Some of their best divisions -- parachute divisions, crack troops -- were pinned down in Italy, which meant they weren't in Normandy. It taught us lessons that we put to good use later, and it cemented the alliance that has lasted, in most respects, up to this day." +William Robertson of Tuscaloosa, Ala., a private first class at Anzio, remembered that it was impossible to move except after dark, "because the Germans held all of the higher ground, and if they saw you, they shelled you." + +A Spy in Rome + But none of the German attacks succeeded, in part because of the exploits of agents of the Office of Strategic Service, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. One of them, Peter Tompkins of Washington, now 75, also here for the ceremonies, said he had planted a mole inside the headquarters in Rome of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German commander in Italy, who "told us when every assault was coming, where, with how much." +They were all "people ready to fight and sacrifice their own lives for the liberty of others," declared Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, the President of Italy. "For this, Mr. President, my personal gratitude and that of the Italian people; for this, a profound, silent prayer to the God of Peace." +"Too many Americans," Mr. Clinton said, "do not know what that generation did." + +LOAD-DATE: June 5, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The front page of The New York Times for June 5, 1944, described the liberation of Rome. + +Map of Italy showing location of Nettuno. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +204 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 5, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Value of Laughter, Especially in Older Age + +BYLINE: By ROBERTA HERSHENSON + +SECTION: Section 14WC; Page 23; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 864 words + +DATELINE: ARDSLEY + +THE aging process may be nothing to laugh at, but growing older can provide rich opportunities for laughter. +This was the premise of a humor workshop held here recently that resembled nothing so much as a group therapy session. It was led by Izzy Gesell, a writer and humorist from Northampton, Mass., who takes his calling so seriously that he has formed a company called Wide Angle Humor to spread the word. + In his opening remarks at the free afternoon program, sponsored by the Town of Greenburgh Arts and Culture Committee and the Steinberg Senior Center, Mr. Gesell spoke of the perspective and balance a sense of humor can provide. He encouraged the 70 people in their 50's through 80's gathered in a room at Anthony Veteran Park here to notice what strikes them as funny in their daily lives and to use that self-knowledge to lighten their spirits. +To be successful at finding the humor around them, he told the group, they would need to take an honest look at themselves. "People see a stylized image of themselves when they look in the mirror," he said. "We don't want to see ourselves as less than perfect. But self-esteem is closely related to a sense of humor, and we need to be able to laugh at our imperfections." +Mr. Gesell, a balding, sad-eyed 46-year-old with a mustache, made it plain that the world frustrates and maddens him: there is aggravation at the supermarket, where the checkout clerk can't tell lettuce from rutabaga, and more on the highway, where other drivers are either idiots or maniacs. "The idiots drive more slowly than you do and the maniacs drive too fast, so there's always someone to be mad at," Mr. Gesell said. +But people needn't be victims of gut-wrenching stress, said Mr. Gesell, who holds a bachelor's degree in psychology and a master's degree in education. They can lift their own moods the way he lifts his, he said -- by doing something silly, like donning a pair of Groucho Marx eyeglasses with nose attached, or by summoning a particularly happy or funny memory. Everyone has these, he said, and the elderly have had time to gather more of them. +He asked his listeners to close their eyes and smile, and then he reminded them of psychologists' recent findings: when the facial muscles employed in smiling are exercised, pleasant feelings follow. Or, as Mr. Gesell put it, "Your body says: 'She's smiling -- she must be happy. I'm going to release the happy stuff.' " +To help the audience become more self-aware, he divided the group into pairs and asked people to tell each other the things that caused them stress. Some answers were dishonesty, taxes, family members, health problems, selfish people, driving, noise and shopping. Then he asked them to name the things that made them happy. +Suddenly the room buzzed loudly as people discussed their pleasures: food, sex, grandchildren, music, liquor, financial security. +"I have news for you," Mr. Gesell said. "There was a much higher level of intensity when you talked about your joys than about your stresses. Even thinking about your pleasures brings you pleasure." + +Humor Is a Risky Business + Mr. Gesell has conducted similar workshops with members of the United States House of Representatives and at many corporate headquarters. He stresses that each life is an accumulation of buried jewels that can be uncovered to bring renewed joy. "To the emotion, the memory is as real as the actual event," he told the audience here. +On a more practical level, he urged people to remove their souvenirs and old photographs from storage boxes or albums and keep them in view. "Use photos of people, places or events that make you happy and spend your time connecting with them in your memory," Mr. Gesell said. "When you are feeling down, go through your stuff and find things that have happy memories for you." +"Can't memories make you melancholy?" a man asked. +"That's a danger," Mr. Gesell answered. "Humor is a risky business and always operates in ambiguity." But, he pointed out, sadness passes, and besides, "It's good to grieve." + +It's All in the Delivery + He had promised to teach the group how to tell a joke, and now it was time. Jokes also operate in ambiguity, Mr. Gesell said. "They are always about the kinds of problems people face and the solutions to the problems, seen from a different point of view." +Many people have trouble remembering jokes because "we don't know if we will like a joke until it's over," Mr. Gesell said. But, he added, a joke need not be told verbatim so long as its three main elements are mastered: the setup, the problem or conflict and the solution or punch line. +The details can always be varied to the teller's own taste, Mr. Gesell said, urging listeners to learn a joke, practice it in front of a mirror and try it out on someone. +"In Florida, a lot of widows are looking for a man who can drive at night," a man called out, and the audience, made up about equally of men and women, laughed. +"What makes us happy changes throughout our lives," Mr. Gesell said, without missing a beat. "For instance, I chose my second wife because she has brains, beauty and a job with a health plan." + +LOAD-DATE: June 5, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Izzy Gesell, a humorist, leads workshops on laughter. (Roberta Hershenson for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +205 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 5, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Suspect in Queens Carjackings Is Arrested in North Carolina + +BYLINE: By NORIMITSU ONISHI + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 43; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 516 words + +The two-month hunt for a man suspected of robbing at least eight elderly Queens residents with a silver pistol ended quietly in North Carolina early yesterday when the local police acted on a tip and arrested him in a bar. +The suspect, Gerald Jerome, 27, of Brooklyn, was arrested about 2 A.M. in Rocky Mount, 50 miles east of Raleigh, the authorities said. + Mr. Jerome was sought in a series of attacks in several Queens neighborhoods between March 25 and April 19, including carjackings and the pistol-whipping and shooting of a 74-year-old woman. The police said he had been identified by robbery victims from a bank camera photograph. +Knowing that he had friends in North Carolina and might try to hide with them as photographs of his face were distributed, the New York City Police Department alerted the Rocky Mount police, said Sgt. Anthony Barlanti, a New York police spokesman. + +Caught in a Nightclub + In the last two and a half weeks, the suspect had shuttled between New York City and Rocky Mount, a city of 50,000, where he stayed with a female friend, said Sgt. Silvio Jacob, who is investigating the case for the Rocky Mount police. The friend is not being charged, he said. +Mr. Jerome was known to have other friends in the area, and sometimes they met at Morgan's Lounge, a reggae dance-bar in Rocky Mount, Sergeant Jacob said. +"We had an officer who worked there part-time," he said. "The officer located the subject coming into the lounge and called in for backup." +The suspect, who was alone at the club, was unarmed and did not resist arrest, the sergeant said. +Mr. Jerome was being held without bail in Nash County and is expected to be arraigned there on Tuesday. +The Queens District Attorney's Office obtained a warrant for Mr. Jerome's arrest after the April 15 gunpoint robbery of a Nissan 300ZX in Bayside. + +A History of Elderly Prey + The authorities said Mr. Jerome had a criminal record dating to his youth. In October 1984, when he was 17, he was convicted of robbing an elderly woman in Nassau County, according to the State Division of Parole, and was imprisoned for more than two years. +This year, the suspect, whom investigators called the Silver Gun Carjacker, operated in several communities in Queens including Bayside, Whitestone, Flushing, Auburndale and Richmond Hill, the police said. He followed elderly women and frail men from banks, where he watched to see how much money they withdrew, and accosted them with a silver pistol in their driveways, cars or garages, the police said. The robber took money, credit cards, and sometimes cars. +On April 19, in Whitestone, when a 74-year-old woman refused to surrender her money and car keys, the police said, the robber pistol-whipped and shot her. That same day, they said, he drove the woman's car to Richmond Hill, where he robbed a 79-year-old man and took his car. +Around that time, a camera at a bank in Flushing took a photograph of the suspect and several of his victims identified him. Detectives later matched the photograph with photographs from Mr. Jerome's record. + +LOAD-DATE: June 5, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +206 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 5, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +District Attorney Offers Tips to the Elderly + +BYLINE: By MERRI ROSENBERG + +SECTION: Section 14WC; Page 21; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 959 words + +DATELINE: YONKERS + +LIKE participants in some kind of support group, nearly all of the dozen elderly people gathered at the Jewish Community Center in Yonkers for a meeting on crime had a story to share. +Gertrude Kaufman, who lives in the southwestern section of the city, showed a visitor the safety pins she uses to keep her identification cards attached to her clothing in an effort to avoid loss should she be mugged. Hannah Goldberg, whose wallet was stolen from her bag at a supermarket, described her fear of taking the bus from her neighborhood to the Cross County Shopping Center or to downtown White Plains. + One 70-year-old woman, a lifelong resident of the same Yonkers neighborhood who declined to give her name, nearly wept as she chronicled her frustration at not being able to walk through a small park on her way to and from errands. And Rose Goldrich bemoaned the fact that a park, formerly a popular spot for the elderly to sit and sun themselves, had been taken over by loiterers. +"It isn't fair that you can't go out and sit in the parks anymore," Mrs. Goldrich said. Mrs. Goldberg, echoing a common concern, added: "Things are getting worse. I'm scared to take a bus, but why should I be so frightened?" + +Hourlong Session + The litany of distress and fear that so many of these elderly women expressed struck a poignant if familiar note to Peter Gormanly, an assistant district attorney who was meeting with the group as part of the Community Relations Program started by District Attorney Jeanine Pirro earlier this spring. +"I've done about five meetings so far, and this is very representative of the elderly's concerns," Mr. Gormanly said. During the hourlong session, he listened to complaints about high school students who harass the elderly at shops and about the fear many older people feel going back and forth to the bank alone. He also heard about the frustration that the threat of crime imposes on their daily lives. +He cautioned them about common ploys that criminals use to gain entry to their homes and offered suggestions as to how the elderly might protect themselves against fraud. +District Attorney Pirro had said earlier: "We want to address the specific law-enforcement concerns of a group, whether it is the P.T.A., Rotary Club, local business bureau or senior citizens. Then we can come back with some sense of what is going on in those communities. +"When we deal with senior citizens, we sense a tremendous amount of frustration, fear and concern. A big concern we are hearing has to do with home repairs and push-in burglaries. These are legitimate concerns. The elderly are afraid to walk the very streets they built. +"The world we live in is so different from the world they were raised in. They feel vulnerable. They fall prey to muggings, push-in burglaries and scams, whether it is telecommunications scams or home contractors. The assistant district attorneys are going to the public, talking about real crime-prevention tips and what individuals can do to minimize victimization -- although we are not placing the blame on the victim by any means." + +A Different Statistical Picture + The Community Relations Program, which is concerned primarily with providing an opportunity for members of the District Attorney's office to listen directly to citizens about crime in their communities and to offer specific tips, will be an ongoing process. The assistant district attorneys, who meet with community groups on their own time, will have conducted about 150 of these meetings from April through June. +Mr. Gormanly said: "We want to let you know that the District Attorney's office shares your concerns. We are listening to what you have to say, and we want you to know what we are doing so we are in a position to better serve you. I'm in court during the day, not in Shoprite, so we need you to be our eyes and ears. We have a commitment to you that the victimization of seniors has to stop. We will use all our resources to prosecute these people who make a living out of victimizing you." +Statistics indicate that the elderly are less likely to be victims than young adults, but their perception of crime has nevertheless affected their quality of life. According to a 1992 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a Federal agency that is part of the National Institute of Justice, those 65 and older were victims of violent crime far less frequently than people 12 through 24. In the older group, 4 out of 1,000 people or households were victims, compared with 64 out of 1,000 in the younger group. +Still, Robert Maccarone, director of the county's Criminal Justice Services Department, said, "With the elderly, there is more of a perception of crime because they are more vulnerable." In a paradoxical illustration of the problem the meeting was designed to address, the relatively low turnout at the May 18 session reflected some elderly people's reluctance to confront the topic. +May had been designated National Senior Citizens Month, and "we thought it was something that would be of interest to older adults," said Linda Last, director of special projects for the Jewish Community Center-on-the-Hudson. "We scheduled it in daylight hours for senior citizens, because they won't come out at night, but many of the elderly don't want to deal with it and don't like to be reminded of unpleasant things. I think there is also a sense on the part of many of the elderly that there have been lots of promises made in the past, but nothing happens." The District Attorney's office said the community outreach program is designed to counter that perception. +"When the elderly are pushed around, the whole community suffers," Mrs. Pirro. "We want to try to make them feel safe." + +LOAD-DATE: June 5, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +207 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 6, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +From Retiree, a Legacy of Volunteerism + +BYLINE: By KATHLEEN TELTSCH + +SECTION: Section B; Page 2; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 695 words + +Winifred Brown had a talent: She found volunteers willing to work without pay for New York City. +Now, after serving in five administrations as director of the Mayor's Voluntary Action Center, Miss Brown, 71, is retiring. + The city's mayors, past and present, agree she made municipal government run a little more smoothly. +"She brought help to New York when the city needed it," said John V. Lindsay who created the volunteer center in 1967 and often said it "revived the American tradition of neighborliness." Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said, "No one has done more to promote volunteerism than Winnie Brown." +Over the years, Miss Brown and her staff found tax specialists willing to advise low-income residents on filing their tax forms, recruited lawyers to compile a handbook on the criminal-justice system and trained 5,000 census-takers. Retired teachers returned to schools to serve as mentors, police officers were recruited to work with adolescents and an army of younger volunteers went to work in parks, museums and centers for the elderly. +As director of the center at 61 Chambers Street, she operated from small, uncarpeted offices decorated largely with hand-me-down furnishings and overlooking an unimpressive rear view of City Hall. But she liked the location: Dodging traffic and using an outdoor rear staircase, she could be in City Hall in minutes. + +The Discreet Miss Brown + Miss Brown, whose last day on the job was Friday, is discreetly silent about the nonpublic side of government she glimpsed and how she regarded the mayors. "The Lindsay administration was so young it made all of us feel old," is all she will say. +But she does not mind talking about her own experiences, including a few near-disasters linked to another important part of her job: serving as a clearinghouse for goods donated to the city. +There was the time that a major food producer, who had generously provided thousands of meals for the homeless, asked her to take 3,000 pounds of garlic, for distribution, but not resale. +"We wound up giving it away in neighborhoods we knew liked spicy food," Miss Brown said. "For weeks, I walked the streets imagining I smelled garlic everywhere." + +The Unmatched Shoe Fad + On another occasion, an apparel maker gave her a carload of sample shoes, none of them paired. "We tried to start a fad among teen-agers of wearing unmatched shoes," she said. "It didn't take." +The center had no difficulty disposing of 37,000 children's books from Barnes and Noble, which it distributed last year to 128 city and nonprofit agencies serving disadvantaged youth. +And its clothing bank has given away three million items worth an estimated $30 million donated by manufacturers who wanted to unload heavy inventories and got a tax break as part of the bargain. +"We were brokers but we also learned to be scavengers," said Miss Brown. "When a hotel was redecorating, we asked for beds and bedding." + +Helping the Jobless + One of the center's major accomplishments involved helping the jobless acquire work skills, said former Mayor Edward I. Koch. As part of the training, the center set up classrooms resembling personnel offices to prepare job-seekers for interviews. The seventh "model office" opens today at Baisley Bay High School, Linden Boulevard and 142d Street in Queens. +"Winnie Brown was an incredible person," Mr. Koch said. "She helped create a whole class of New Yorkers, most of them young people who then were able to apply for jobs in the private sector." +She came to the volunteer center in 1969 with a resume that traced her life through many New York City neighborhoods. She was born in Washington Heights, went to school in Flushing, graduated from Queens College, and received a master's degree in English from Columbia University. She worked for the Junior Red Cross and the Camp Fire Girls in New York. +Now that she is leaving, she will be honored at a private reception tomorrow night at Tweed Court House. After that, she said, "I'll take a holiday and then I want to be a volunteer. I've been on boards of directors; now I want to do hands-on work, like helping adults to read." + +NAME: Winifred Brown + +LOAD-DATE: June 6, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Winifred Brown is retiring after serving as director of the Mayor's Voluntary Action Center through five administrations. (William E. Sauro/The New York Times) + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +208 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 6, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +THE MEDIA BUSINESS: Advertising; +As baby boomers near 50, Keds goes after a new niche: casual footwear for today's 'mature' woman. + +BYLINE: By Glenn Collins + +SECTION: Section D; Page 8; Column 3; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 755 words + +O.K., advertising strategists of America, here are two demographic certainties: (1) The leading edge of the baby boom is turning 50. (2) Women of the baby-boom generation will not tolerate the conventions that many of their older Eisenhower-era sisters were accustomed to. +The big picture? There will be seismic changes in family relationships, employment patterns and the equality of opportunity for women. But advertisers, to be sure, are more interested in the small picture. The one that gives them a niche opportunity. + Such as? Well, baby-boom women want to be well grounded. Quite literally: They don't want to wear heels all the time. Unlike their older sisters, they won't willingly wear shoes that pinch. They are really, really tired of wearing sneakers to the office and they don't much like rummaging through a drawerful of work shoes in the desk. +They constitute a niche with a name: the mature casual footwear market, with revenues of $3 billion a year. While sales of dress shoes have been declining 5 percent a year, casual footwear sales have been growing by the same amount. +Enter the Keds Corporation. +Keds? +Today the company will attempt to establish a toehold in the older women's casual-shoe market by introducing a new line, Facets: shoes that can be worn to dinner or for a walk; for shopping or in an office where casual is not a dismissible offense. +"You wouldn't wear them on a five-mile run or at a formal dinner, but you'd wear them a lot of places in between," said Mindy Peterson, director of marketing and product development for the Facets brand. There will be 68 styles of Facets shoes; leather shoes will retail for about $50 or under, and canvas and linen models will sell for under $30 retail. +Ms. Peterson insists, as she must, that the Facets shoes will have all the comfort that cushioned rubber soles and latex-foam inner construction afford, but they will also provide the stylishness that baby-boom women are now demanding, she says. According to Ms. Peterson, the women's casual footwear market is quite fragmented, and no brand owns more than 6 percent of it. +Still, Keds may have a tough time. Easy Spirit has its canvas-ish sneaker collection; Nine West has its Calico and Spa lines of casual and dressier comfort shoes. Other major players are Rockport, Hush Puppies and Naturalizer. +The agency? Kirshenbaum & Bond, which at its debut in 1987 handled the Kenneth Cole shoe account, and has also represented Thom McAn footwear, as well as Snapple Beverage, Coach leather goods and Citibank. +The agency no longer handles Kenneth Cole. And to avoid potential conflicts with the Facets account, Kirshenbaum & Bond agreed to move its Thom McAn account in July to Mad Dogs & Englishmen, an independent agency partly owned by the Kirshenbaum & Bond principals, Jonathan Bond and Richard Kirshenbaum. +Kirshenbaum & Bond, with annual billings of $140 million, has done serious and it has done wacky. "We did wacky for Thom McAn, which needed to be jump started," said Bill Oberlander, the creative director for Facets. "There was a need for a young, irreverent voice." +But no wacky for Facets. "The campaign will be empathetic, upbeat, spirited, stylish," Mr. Oberlander said. Facets will reveal its campaign on June 24, and television ads will be rolled out in 7 to 10 spot markets when the shoes are introduced in the spring of 1995. +Mr. Oberlander said the campaign would get across the message that "there are scores of shoes that are incredibly comfortable but painful to the eye, and others that are stylish and painful to the foot." He added: "Facets is good to the eye and the foot." Sounds like a miracle ginseng derivative. +The Facets woman? She's between the ages of 40 and 60. "Her kids are now grown, she doesn't wake up in the morning and wonder how she can provide for her family," Mr. Oberlander said. "She is re-achieving the freedom she had in her adolescence. She can focus more on her own fulfillment." +And on her casual shoes. +"Lots of ads make fun of older women while marketing to younger people," Ms. Peterson said. "Or they advertise to older women in a way that's not life affirming." Facets ads will, instead, celebrate the older woman. +"These will not be the old Geritol ads," Mr. Oberlander said. +As Lieutenant Columbo likes to say, one more thing: Nowhere will the advertising mention the Keds name. +"Facets will stand on its own," Mr. Oberlander said. "That blue label skews a little too casual for this market." + +LOAD-DATE: June 6, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +209 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 7, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +THE D-DAY TOUR: RUSSIA; +Exclusion of Soviet Veterans From the Ceremonies Is a Source of Resentment + +BYLINE: Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 9; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 439 words + +DATELINE: MOSCOW, June 6 + +To many Russians, the absence of Soviet veterans at the ceremonies marking D-Day is another reminder of what they see as the West's reluctance to embrace the new Russia with much more than lofty words. +"The overall success of the Allies was due to the fact that the Soviet Union helped to accelerate the defeat of fascism," said Ivan Yershov, a 73-year-old retired colonel. "Now, the absence of our veterans at the ceremonies strikes a blow to the honor and worthiness of the alliance as a whole." + Mr. Yershov speaks for a varied group of Russian veterans who believe that post-Soviet Russia, relatively democratic and free, deserves more acceptance from the West on the 50th anniversary of D-Day, which was the opening of the second front that Stalin, the West's ally in World War II, had demanded for so long. +Russian nationalists have also been making an issue of the supposed slight to Moscow, suggesting that the West cannot cope with an independent Russia as an equal partner. +President Boris N. Yeltsin seemed to signal his compatriots' indignation over the D-Day issue on Friday when he told the Greek Foreign Minister, Karolos Papoulias, "Russia occupies half of Europe, but until now it is not even considered as part of Europe." +The Allied landing in Normandy on D-Day -- carried out mostly by Americans, Britons and Canadians -- is not regarded here with the same awe as elsewhere. Russians tend to focus on the role that the Red Army, fighting in battles and sieges from Stalingrad to Moscow to Kursk, played in helping defeat the Germans. +In a nation that lost more than 20 million people in the "Great Patriotic War," as many elderly citizens still call World War II, some veterans resent their exclusion from the commemoration in France. +"This issue has been entirely muted in the Western press," said Mr. Yershov, the retired colonel, who served in the early years of the war as an operations planning officer on the Belarussian front. +"It is well known to everyone that the Soviet Union was bearing the heaviest burden in the struggle against fascism, primarily in Europe," said Gen. Dmitri A. Volkogonov, a military adviser to Mr. Yeltsin. General Volkogonov, who heads a joint Russian-American commission investigating the fate of American and Soviet servicemen missing in the cold-war era, said he considered D-Day a "common victory over fascism" for Russia and the Western Allies. +"We are all people of the planet Earth and this is our spacecraft that we happen to be traveling on," he said. "Therefore this victory over the Nazis is our common heritage and this is our joint victory." + +LOAD-DATE: June 7, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +210 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 8, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Clinton in Normandy: Hands Across a Generation + +BYLINE: By R. W. APPLE Jr., Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1389 words + +DATELINE: PARIS, June 7 + +It was the soldiers whom people will long remember. Mostly brittle old men now, no longer the lusty youngsters who "saved the world," they were touching in their simple eloquence, heartbreaking in their heartache for their lost comrades. +Like the old men of the Grand Army of the Republic, veterans of Bull Run and Vicksburg and Antietam who lived through the direst days of their century, the survivors of the first momentous hours on the Calvados coast half a century ago have become icons for today, the symbols of courage and conviction that democracies crave. + Lincoln at Gettysburg said the world would "little note nor long remember" what he said there, dedicating a cemetery for the fallen in the most awful battle in America's most awful war. What he meant was that no words, not even his, had power adequate to the task of memorializing the deeds of those whose graves lay around him. +President Clinton succeeded in his D-Day speeches not because he made speeches worthy of comparison with Lincoln's or perhaps even with Ronald Reagan's "These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc . . ." of 10 years ago. He succeeded because with the help of many others he managed to keep attention focused on the veterans, not on himself and his problems. + +A Plea to the Young + Fully aware that their hour on the world's stage is nearing its end, many of them appealed earnestly to those they will leave behind, denizens of a world that sometimes has a lot of trouble telling right from wrong, to remember the values that inspired the heroism of their international band of brothers in Operation Overlord. +Amid the barbed wire and the artillery craters of Pointe du Hoc, a former Ranger, Richard Hathaway, said on Monday: +"Nations can and should unite to form the strongest possible bonds, devoted to all mankind so that they may enjoy freedom from oppression, freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of expression and freedom of religion. We leave this to you, for only by this can you and your descendants enjoy a free society of all mankind, devoid of such destructive forces as were exhibited here." +Many of the veterans fear that the young, President Clinton perhaps included, are all too prone to turn away from trouble abroad. So they were pleased with the repect that he bestowed on them and their ideas, not only by coming but also by urging members of his generation to learn the lessons of their struggle and sacrifice. +"It's an honor," Mr. Clinton said to almost every one of the hundreds of World War II veterans he met during his European tour. + +Evocative Ceremonies + For one aging onlooker at least, the ceremonies were most evocative. The old planes, the parachutes descending again near Ste.-Mere-Eglise, on whose church steeple Pvt. John Steele dangled for hours before being cut down, the coffin-shaped boats back at Omaha Beach, the stories the veterans told -- all rekindled the emotions stirred by the broadcasts of George Hicks, the radio networks' pool man on a ship out in the English Channel on June 6, 1944. +With very nearly every American household tuned in, with the big naval guns drumming behind him, Hicks reported the thrilling news: "The landing craft have been disembarked from their mother ships and are moving in irregular lines toward the horizon of France. All over the surface of the sea they can be seen cutting and zigzagging and heading toward the ribbon of land that's the coast of Normandy." +Fifty years later, the politicians did their part, secular priests in a secular age, in the solemn rites commemorating the D-Day landings. President Clinton found a few eloquent phrases for the preliminary ceremonies, then produced a gem of a speech late in the day for the main event at the American cemetery above Omaha Beach. +It would have been unseemly for anything to outshine the ordinary men who discovered such extraordinary things within themselves in the storms of fire they found on Normandy's cliffs and beaches. +"For a few days," said Lane Kirkland, the head of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., who was a merchant seaman in World War II, "the spirit of World War II lived again. I tried to give a tip to a cabdriver in London, and he refused to take it. 'No,' he told me, 'You saved us.' " + +'Didn't Disgrace Himself' + Called upon by the workings of the calendar to lead what will probably be the last ceremonies on such a vast scale, the President began with three strikes against him, but he refused to accept that he was already out. He is the first President since the World War II to have played no military role. He avoided the draft in Vietnam. He had a tough act to follow in Mr. Reagan, one of the great orchestrators of national emotion, a master of nostalgia and the might-have-been. +"He didn't disgrace himself, and that's what counts," said a senior American official in Europe. "If he had seemed callow, or ill informed, or lacking in respect, if he had grandstanded, that would have been terrible for him and the country. +"As it was, he gained some respect from the older generation, I think, by showing them the deference they deserve and insisting everywhere that their experience shows us where we ought to go. I doubt that that struck much of a chord with the younger generations, but that's not his doing." +Mr. Clinton will return to the United States after meetings and speeches in Paris today and a return to Oxford on Wednesday that is sure to revive talk of his antiwar sentiments during his days as a student there. It seems likely that in domestic terms he has been neither strengthened nor weakened by this second European tour of his 16-month-old Administration. + +Clinton's Burdens + No one can convincingly suggest any longer that the big ceremonial moments are beyond Mr. Clinton. He demonstrated that he can put aside his compulsively, sometimes exuberantly informal style for occasions requiring dignity and restraint. If his youth and inexperience sometimes deny his words the weight he would like them to carry, if the imagery he and his aides choose often seems forced or corny, he has shown himself capable of addressing complex issues involving many countries with varied interests and histories. +But health care is still in trouble, the more so with the indictment of Representative Dan Rostenkowski; the Democrats are still back on their heels in electoral politics, having lost almost every election before the off-year balloting in November, and the civil lawsuit brought against Mr. Clinton by Paula Corbin Jones still throws a long, foreboding shadow. +If he passed the test in the ceremonies in Britain and France, the President came a cropper, to a degree, in Italy. He felt that he had to honor the veterans of the "forgotten campaign" to liberate Rome as well as those who served in northern Europe, his aides reported, but in Italy itself and much of the rest of Europe he was seen as simultaneously celebrating the defeat of Fascism and condoning the entry of its offspring, the neo-Fascist National Alliance, into the new Italian Government. + +On the Agenda + What the Europeans wonder about is his strategic sense. It was clear, a top French politician said today, that Mr. Clinton was having more trouble than he should in balancing economic and political considerations, as on China, and in deciding where and in what kinds of situations American strength and prestige should be committed. +The President will be back on the Continent this month for the annual meeting of the seven biggest industrial powers, a meeting, this time in Naples, that will focus more than ever before on question of trade, now seen as the key to the domestic economic problems of the big nations. +After that, Mr. Clinton is to meet with President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia, also in Italy, and then will spend about 36 hours in Bonn and Berlin. In Berlin, he will hold a meeting in the Reichstag, walk through the Brandenburg Gate and ceremonially disband the Berlin Brigade -- powerful symbols of the end of Berlin's time as a ward of the West and its central new role in a unified Germany. +Those will be important days for Mr. Clinton and for his country, for it is trade, not war, and Germany and Russia, not so much Britain and France, that hold the key to future relations between the United States and Europe. + +LOAD-DATE: June 8, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: News Analysis + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +211 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 8, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Personal Health; +Chronic illness need not sap the vitality of life. + +BYLINE: BY Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section C; Page 11; Column 1; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1203 words + +MILLIONS of Americans know firsthand that, as President Jimmy Carter said, "Life is not fair." Despite the many miracles of modern medicine, it is still far from preventing or curing a host of ailments that strike prematurely and compromise the quality of a life. +Infants still succumb mysteriously to sudden infant death syndrome. Babies are born with debilitating chronic illnesses like congenital heart disease, cystic fibrosis or epilepsy. Children get cancer and die, or live for years under the Damoclean sword of cancer in remission. Young adults get multiple sclerosis, AIDS, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis or cancer. Middle-aged and elderly people are prone to heart disease, cancer and stroke. And anyone at any age can suffer an injury that causes substantial deterioration of health and permanently alters the course of that person's life. + A chronic or potentially fatal illness or injury in a loved one can also substantially and permanently affect the life of everyone else in the family. Far too often, the impact of these events is even more disruptive to the affected individual or the person's family than the actual medical problem warrants. Most people are ill equipped to cope with the effects of chronic illness on their emotional and social well-being. +Some may hide their torment, only to have it take its toll in ugly, self-destructive or family-disruptive ways. +Others may rage against their fate, wasting precious energy and pushing away those who could help them live more constructively. +Still others may try to struggle bravely through on their own, unaware of potential sources of assistance that could smooth their way and expand their opportunities. + +A Better Approach + When someone in the family develops a chronic, disabling, incurable or life-threatening disorder, everyone in the family is likely to get "sick" as well. Aspirations and plans of the spouse and children, as well as the affected person, must often be readjusted and roles within the family structure must be redefined. Communication patterns change, and not always for the better, and the resulting emotional and physical and financial stresses can strain even the most stable of relationships. +But as one therapist learned through bitter personal experience, the damage of chronic illness can be mitigated and for some, a long-term disorder can even become a growth experience. Irene Pollin, a social worker in Bethesda, Md., lost an infant son and a teen-age daughter to a congenital heart problem, and, as if that were not traumatic enough, both of her parents died within a year of her daughter's death. +When Mrs. Pollin sought psychotherapy to help her understand and cope with the resulting emotional devastation, she was given tranquilizers and urged to explore her early relationship with her mother. After nine years of sedation, she was no better. +To Mrs. Pollin, the need for a more appropriate, short-term, directed approach to dealing with irreversible medical problems was obvious. In working with chronically ill patients and their families, she developed what she calls Medical Crisis Counseling: eight, maybe 10, sessions with a trained therapist who focuses on how the medical problem affects the person's life and how the resulting obstacles -- emotional, professional, interpersonal -- might be overcome. +She also established the Linda Pollin Foundation, named for her late daughter and administered by Children's Hospital in Boston, to teach mental health professionals how to deal with patients and families caught in the entangling web of a chronic medical crisis. +Recognizing that many patients and families do not have access to trained psychotherapists, Mrs. Pollin also wrote a book, "Taking Charge: Overcoming the Challenges of Long-Term Illness" (with Susan K. Golant and published by Times Books, 1994, $22) which sensitively and graphically describes strategies to help patients and families cope on their own. + +The Challenge + As one of her disciples, Dr. Gerald P. Koocher, chief psychologist at Children's Hospital in Boston, put it: "When you're dealing with the emotional consequences of chronic illness, you need someone to help you cope with real-life problems triggered by the diagnosis of chronic illness. Lots of people are living and living longer with chronic illness, but the medical profession is ill-equipped to help them cope with it." +Typically, he said, after the diagnosis of a chronic illness, "self-image is permanently altered, people worry about being stigmatized, their angry feelings are buried so they can cope with day-to-day problems, they fear isolation and abandonment and they feel out of control, as if they were coming unglued." +This reaction does not represent mental illness, he emphasized, but is "a normal response" when chronic illness strikes. +Mrs. Pollin realized that the fears and feelings touched off by chronic illness need an appropriate release so they do not result in misplaced anger and depression. "Rather than losing control when you release pent-up pressure, you'll find yourself back in charge, calm, organized, able to think clearly and make good decisions," she maintains. +Too often in families struck by long-term illness, the lines of communication get crossed. One dynamic, independent woman who suffered a stroke that affected her speech "retired" from nearly all her activities, including the frequent dinners she had given and even from the stimulating conversations she often had with her husband. The devoted husband left his business to help care for her, took over her chores and tried to make her the woman she once was. +Through brief counseling, the couple learned that it was the husband's smothering devotion and determination to "get his old wife back" that had stymied her progress. She knew she was not and could not be the same women as before her stroke and so was reluctant to try anything. Once the husband accepted her limitations, she was able to regain her self-confidence and resume activities at her own pace, eventually becoming the spokeswoman for the local stroke support group. +Mrs. Pollin cautions patients and families against making drastic decisions, like changing jobs or moving, soon after discovery of a chronic illness. "Your medical condition may not be as bad as you anticipate," she tells patients. +This, in fact, was the happy fate of a 28-year-old unmarried woman who held an exciting job and was finishing law school at night when she discovered that she had multiple sclerosis. Counseling helped her overcome her reluctance to become a lawyer and her belief that now that she was "damaged goods" no man would want her. Not long after, she met and married a fellow lawyer who loved and accepted her with her illness. She went on to have two children and continued to pursue the demanding life she had led before the diagnosis. +As time goes on or illnesses progress, Mrs. Pollin said, patients and families may need to return to counseling to help them readjust to changing circumstances. But regardless of what happens, she has found that with a little help, people can "remain in control, even while their lives have been changed forever." + +LOAD-DATE: June 8, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +212 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 9, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +In Largest Drug-Law Takeover, U.S. Seizes New York City Hotel + +BYLINE: By SETH FAISON + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1325 words + +Federal authorities seized a filthy, dilapidated residential hotel near Gramercy Park yesterday, saying that drug dealers used it to operate "a virtual supermarket for crack cocaine." The owner, prosecutors said, did nothing about it. +Roving bands of drug dealers and addicts took over whole floors at the Kenmore Hotel, the largest single-room occupancy hotel in New York City, regularly robbing and sometimes killing elderly residents for a few dollars, prosecutors said. With unlighted stairwells, broken toilets in common bathrooms and prostitutes plying their trade in the hallways, the hotel "was permeated with violence," said the United States Attorney, Mary Jo White. + In a late-morning raid, Federal agents and the New York City police arrested 18 people and took control of the 22-story red-brick building at 145 East 23d Street, where the writers Nathanael West and Dashiell Hammett once lived. A private company will manage the hotel until a court rules on the seizure. +Federal prosecutors said their takeover of the hotel represented the largest seizure ever made under a little-used 1984 law that allows the authorities to take a building being used in the sale of narcotics. The law, different from one commonly used to seize the possessions of drug dealers, allows the authorities to take someone's property if they can show there was a pattern of drug offenses at the site and repeated arrests failed to stop the trafficking. +The hotel's owner, Tran Dinh Truong, was not charged with any crime. Yesterday's action was the first step in a civil suit, but prosecutors said that he was well aware of the crimes taking place on the premises and failed to respond to repeated warnings from New York City building and law-enforcement authorities over the last two years. +Mr. Tran has bought at least five New York City hotels since he immigrated in 1975 from Vietnam where, as a shipowner, he is said to have earned millions of dollars hauling cargo for the United States military. Prosecutors said they did not know the hotels' annual profit. But they said Mr. Tran received $2 million each year solely from tenants on public assistance in the Kenmore, about 20 percent of the tenants in the hotel, which has 621 rooms. +"The guy had a cash cow," said Christopher Marzuk, an assistant district attorney from the New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor's office. "Money was pouring in through the front door, but he didn't give a damn about anyone who lived inside." +In an interview in February, Mr. Tran said he was losing $50,000 a month at the Kenmore and could not afford the property taxes. He said 125 of 370 long-term tenants were not paying rent, and he had 16 eviction suits pending. +Mr. Tran's lawyer, Alan Lichtenberg, did not respond to repeated messages yesterday, and Mr. Tran could not be reached for comment. +Neighborhood residents have protested the hotel's deterioration for years, expressing impatience with the legal system for taking so long. In 1993, the Kenmore was cited for 362 violations by the New York City Buildings Department, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the Department of Health. +The Manhattan District Attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, said that Bac Tran, apparently a relative of Mr. Tran, was convicted of bribing a New York City building inspector in 1992 in the Hotel Carter, on West 43d Street, which Mr. Tran also owns. The conviction was overturned on appeal. +Mr. Morgenthau said his office turned its investigation of the Kenmore over to Federal authorities because state forfeiture laws are relatively weak. +In a court complaint, Ms. White, the United States Attorney, argued for seizure by saying that although the police had made 122 drug-related arrests in the hotel since 1991, dealers were easily replaced and drug trafficking continued. +"Many of the individuals arrested for selling narcotics worked as security guards at the Kenmore Hotel," Ms. White said in court papers. The guards, hired by Mr. Tran and his employees, often charged drug customers $1 to $20 to enter the building. +As recently as June 4, a security guard told a police informant that he had collected $ 200 that day from people who wanted to enter the hotel. But that was minor, compared with other crimes: an 86-year-old woman was robbed, strangled and her body left in a bathtub, last month, the police said. +Officer Scott Kimmins, who has patrolled the area for eight years, said yesterday that he typically entered the hotel twice a day and was continually stunned at what he called horrendous living conditions. +"A lot of elderly people live here, but you rarely see them because they're so terrified," he said. "They live in tiny rooms, like living in their own prisons. Today's a great day. The Marines came in." +Prosecutors said in court papers that Officer Kimmins received death threats from drug dealers. They sometimes tried to figure out his schedule to avoid him, prosecutors said, and discussed making an anonymous complaint on him to the Police Department's Internal Affairs Division in the hope of removing him. +Mr. Tran and his staff deliberately left some rooms unlocked so that crack dealers could work there, prosecutors said. One room cited in court papers was "the pigeon room," named because a broken window allowed birds to nest and live there. +"Embedded in the pigeon excrement on the floor are dozens of crack vials," prosecutors wrote. +A Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, Kenneth R. Weiss, said in court papers, "The Kenmore Hotel, the largest commercial single-room occupancy hotel in New York City, is a virtual supermarket for crack cocaine, where crack is sold freely in various brands.". + +A Check by Officers + Late yesterday morning, police officers and Federal agents brought suspects out in pairs and trios, asking each group to look across the street, so undercover officers in a car could say whether they were among those observed in drug sales. +The 15 men and 3 women arrested yesterday will all be charged in Manhattan Supreme Court. Fourteen face drug charges, and four also have to answer bench warrants for previous arrests. +Prosecutors noted that Mr. Tran had filed more than 500 eviction notices against tenants for failure to pay rent since he took over in 1985, but none based on narcotics activity. +Authorities could not identify the building's value. Mr. Tran took out a $2.5 million mortgage when he bought it in 1985, and although the overall condition has deteriorated badly, improvements have been made by some tenants who rent storefronts along 23d Street. +Melvin Buffill, 55, who has lived in the Kenmore for four years, said that more than one neighbor was killed at the hotel. +Mr. Buffill, who said he is disabled by bronchitis, arthritis, high blood pressure and diabetes, said he gets $54 a month in disability checks, $ 498 a month from Social Security and $112 a month in food stamps. He rents his room on the ninth floor for $360, doing what he can to insure his safety. +"I put my bed up against the wall at night," he said. "I have a knife, I have a big pipe and I have some Mace." +Les Vanderfecht, director of the Community Lounge for Senior Citizens on 22d Street at Gustavus Adolphus Lutheran Church, said the elderly people his program serves have complained for years of conditions in the hotel and even those who do not live there have been intimidated and victimized by the element it has attracted. +"It has been a real threat. This is a target population for thugs," he said. +A commercial tenant, Allan Menkin, who runs Bazaar East in a storefront on the hotel's ground floor, said Mr. Tran rarely performed even basic repairs and maintenance. +"We've had flooding in my store from broken pipes 32 times since Jan. 1," said Mr. Menkin, who posted a sign in his front window thanking the authorities for their action. "I only wanted to know what took so long." + +LOAD-DATE: June 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Roving bands of drug dealers that made the Kenmore Hotel "a virtual supermarket for crack cocaine" and life for its residents terror filled were stopped yesterday with the seizure of the hotel by Federal authorities. The front desk was being run by United States marshals. (Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times) (pg. B3) + +Table: "POLICE BLOTTER: A Month at the Kenmore Hotel" + There were 189 drug related activities and arrests at the Kenmore Hotel from January 1991 to May 1994. Chart shows the record of individual cases from the U.S. Attorney's Ofice for May 1994. (pg. B3) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +213 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 9, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Experts Urge More Calcium For Adults + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 17; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 529 words + +DATELINE: BETHESDA, Md., June 8 + +Half of America's adults are not getting enough calcium, and that is contributing to a plague of brittle bones and fractures that produce $10 billion a year in medical bills, a Federal committee said today. +The committee of experts, assembled by the National Institutes of Health, said the current recommended daily allowance for calcium is too low, leading to weakened bones among children, adults and especially elderly women. + "Calcium is an essential nutrient for developing and maintaining strong bones," the committee said. +Yet, said Dr. John P. Bilezikian, a professor of medicine at Columbia University and the chairman of the committee, most Americans are deficient in calcium. +"Recent nutrition surveys have shown that the average diet of Americans has a calcium intake considerably below the recommended daily allowance," Dr. Bilezikian said at a news conference. +Without proper levels of calcium, the panel said, children enter adulthood with a weakened skeleton, increasing their risk later for osteoporosis, the brittle-bone disease. Inadequate calcium in later years aggravates the problem. +Osteoporosis affects more than 25 million Americans, causing an estimated 1.5 million fractures and leading to medical costs of about $10 billion, said Dr. Bilezikian. +New studies, the committee found, show that recommended levels of calcium now carried on most food labels is far below what nature requires for strong bones. In its report, the panel recommended these levels of calcium, with the currently recommended daily allowance in parenthesis: +*Children and young adults, 11 through 24 years old: 1,200 to 1,500 milligrams (1,200). +*Women, 25 to 50: 1,000 milligrams (800). +*Men, 25 and older: 1,000 milligrams (800). +*Postmenopausal women: 1,000 to 1,500 milligrams (800). +*Women over 65: 1,500 milligrams. +Bone absorption occurs in women for up to eight years after menopause because of the drop in levels of the hormone estrogen, the panel said. Increased calcium does little to reduce this bone loss, but it can be controlled with hormone therapy. An increase in calcium levels to 1,500 milligrams after the age of 65, however, "may reduce the rates of bone loss in selected areas of the skeleton, such as the neck," the committee said. +The panel said that during the adolescent growth spurt, calcium can accumulate in bones at the rate of 400 to 500 milligrams a day. + +Calcium Supplements Needed + "Peak adult bone mass is largely achieved by age 20 years, although important additional bone mass may accumulate through the third decade," the study said. As a result, "optimal calcium intake in childhood and young adulthood is critical to achieving peak adult bone mass." +The committee said that foods, mainly dairy products and green leafy vegetables, are the best sources of calcium, but that most Americans might need to supplement their diet with calcium pills or processed foods enriched with calcium. +Almost all Americans can safely take calcium supplements of up to 2,000 milligrams daily, Dr. Bilezikian said. Higher doses are not recommended. Even this dosage can cause problems for people who have kidney stones. + +LOAD-DATE: June 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +214 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 10, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Health Legislation Advances in Senate + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1544 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 9 + +National health insurance took two major strides forward in the Senate today as one committee approved a bill, guaranteeing a Senate vote on the issue, and another, perhaps more crucial, committee shifted from general discussion to serious work on new legislation. +By a comfortable 11-to-6 margin, Senator Edward M. Kennedy's Labor and Human Resources Committee adopted the Senator's more generous version of President Clinton's health care proposal. It is the first Congressional committee to act, and its vote insures that the full Senate will confront the issue this summer. + At the Finance Committee, whose close partisan and ideological divisions parallel those in the full Senate, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the chairman, sought support for a detailed new proposal that he showed his colleagues today. It is a less generous plan than Mr. Clinton's. +Mr. Moynihan's proposal eliminated several politically popular benefits in the Clinton bill, like prescription drugs and long-term care for the elderly and government insurance for early retirees. Mr. Moynihan's willingness to eliminate those provisions, in a year when he is running for re-election, made it clear that he was seriously pushing for health care legislation and not just acting for show. He is also making known his worry that if the cost cannot be controlled, the bill cannot be passed. +The Clinton, Kennedy and Moynihan plans all rely on employers to buy health insurance for their workers and to pay most of the premiums. Mr. Kennedy's bill would exempt employers with 10 or fewer workers; Mr. Moynihan's would exempt employers with 20 or fewer workers but only for several years. +Mr. Moynihan, who has been skeptical of the Administration's financing estimates, proposed much higher taxes than the other bills did. He would raise the tobacco tax from 24 cents a pack to $2 and impose a 1 percent payroll tax on companies of 500 or more employees. Mr. Clinton proposed a tobacco tax of 99 cents, and Mr. Kennedy suggested a tax of $1.74. +All three measures would seek economies by enabling individuals to buy health insurance through purchasing cooperatives called health alliances. Mr. Clinton would make participation compulsory for almost all Americans, while Mr. Moynihan and Mr. Kennedy would make it voluntary while also giving the alliances much less authority than Mr. Clinton would. The provision to make participation voluntary should make the proposal more palatable to opponents of the Clinton plan in both parties. +The Labor Committee move was steeped in history, for Mr. Kennedy has campaigned for national health insurance for a quarter-century. But the bill moved out of his committee today was the first that was more than a political statement and that could perhaps become law. +President Clinton hailed the Labor Committee vote, saying it "gives me great confidence that Congress will pass legislation this year that meets the expectation of the American people: guaranteed private insurance for every American that can never be taken away." Referring to other measures in Congress, the President said, "For the first time in our history, committees in both the Senate and the House are seriously moving forward on health care reform." +Just before the vote, Mr. Kennedy told his committee, "Comprehensive health reform is a defining issue for this Congress." +He went on: "Comprehensive health reform has never been easy, or it would have been enacted long ago. The time for action is now. This committee is the first in the Senate or House to vote out comprehensive reform, but others will not be far behind." +There was drama of a different sort at the Finance Committee, as Mr. Moynihan ended the months of suspense about where he stood. He has fueled the uncertainty by speaking kindly about Republican ideas and by his occasional outbursts about parts of the Clinton plan that he thought were badly conceived. + +'This Is Where You Begin' + Mr. Moynihan was far more cautious in discussing his bill. Talking to reporters after his committee met, he said: "This is where you begin. You have to begin." +By proposing tax increases and an employer mandate, Mr. Moynihan was not reaching out to Republicans, who offered a range of comments, from negative to noncommittal. +Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the minority leader, said, "It doesn't look very good to me." Senator John C. Danforth of Missouri said, "I think it's a piece of paper, and we all need a piece of paper." But he added, "It's an awful lot of taxes." +More hopeful, Senator Dave Durenberger of Minnesota said, "This is more realistic" because it requires less Federal regulation than Mr. Clinton's plan. But he also said, "This is not yet a middle-of-the-road bill." +Two Democrats whose votes Mr. Moynihan will need if the committee's nine Republicans oppose his efforts were also cautiously negative. The committee has 11 Democrats. +One of these pivotal Democrats, Senator David L. Boren of Oklahoma, said, "I think the worst thing we could do for the country is press forward with a bill that's not on a bipartisan basis." The other, Senator John B. Breaux of Louisiana, said the bill had too much government and too many mandates. +In the House today, the Ways and Means Committee began going over the proposal of its new acting chairman, Representative Sam M. Gibbons of Florida. His plan would provide more benefits than the Clinton plan with fewer taxes. But he said his proposal was not final because he did not yet have a cost analysis by the Congressional Budget Office. He said he did not know when he would get that analysis but would not hold any votes until he did. +In addition, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and Labor voted in favor of a single-payer health plan, like the Canadian system. Under this plan, payroll taxes and others would replace insurance payments, and the Government would then pay all medical and hospital bills. +A subcommittee can send as many bills as it wants to a full committee, and this subcommittee has already approved a bill patterned on Mr. Clinton's but with more generous benefits. The full Education and Labor Committee will begin discussing that bill on Friday morning. +In approving the Kennedy bill, one Republican on the Senate Labor panel, James M. Jeffords of Vermont, joined the committee's 10 Democrats. The other six Republicans on the panel voted no. +The Kennedy bill would broaden the ability of individuals to choose health insurance beyond President Clinton's plan by allowing them to enroll in the Federal Health Benefits Program, which offers a variety of options to Federal employees, including members of Congress. +It also sought to meet widespread complaints about the potential effect on small business of requiring employers to pay for insurance. It would allow employers of 10 or fewer workers not to pay for insurance, though those who employed one to five workers would have to pay a 1 percent payroll tax and those with 6 to 10 workers would pay a 2 percent tax. +Mr. Clinton's plan had no such exemptions, though it offered subsidies, as Mr. Kennedy's does, to small employers. +The Moynihan bill is initially more generous to small business and eventually tougher on them. His plan would allow employers of up to 10 workers to pay a 1 percent tax and employers of 11 to 20 workers to pay a 2 percent tax. +But it would eliminate those exemptions and require all employers to insure their workers if by 1998 this system had not resulted in the insurance of 97 percent of employees and their dependents. Mr. Moynihan would raise the standard even higher by the year 2000, requiring all employers to insure all workers if 98.5 percent of workers and dependents were not insured. +The taxes in the Moynihan proposal drew some sharp attacks. Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, said, "It's a Burger King bill, a Whopper, $190 billion in taxes." He said that was "the Democrats' way out: tax and tax and spend and spend." + +Concern About Deficit + Mr. Moynihan expects final revenue and spending estimates from the Congressional Budget Office by late next week. But his proposal leans away from some expensive benefits and calls for more in taxes because of his fear about increasing the deficit. +All three measures are intended to reduce the soaring rate of health care costs by instituting more competition among providers. And all declare that their formulas will guarantee that all Americans have health insurance that cannot be canceled and that cannot be denied because of pre-existing medical conditions. +All three would insure people primarily through employers but would require individuals not covered either directly or as dependents to buy their own insurance. Each would offer much larger tax benefits than are now provided for such insurance and provide large subsidies for those with low incomes. +All three bills would leave the Medicare system of health care for the elderly as it is, while providing insurance under the new systems to those now covered by Medicaid, which serves the poor. +All three bills would enable states that preferred a single-payer system to adopt one for themselves. + +LOAD-DATE: June 10, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: As the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee approved a version of President Clinton's health care proposal yesterday, another, the Senate Finance Committee, was offered an alternative by its chairman, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Listening to Mr. Moynihan, standing, in shirtsleeves, were, seated from left, Senators Donald W. Riegle Jr., Dave Durenberger, and John C. Danforth. (Paul Hosefros/The New York Times); Representative Dan Rostenkowski, who had to give up his chairmanship of the House Ways and Mean Committee after he was indicted on corruption charges last week, conferred with Representative Charles B. Rangel of Manhattan as the panel met yesterday on health care. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times) (pg. A18) +; Charts: "At a Glance: The Three Plans" + +The Clinton Plan: + Universal health insurance coverage. + Mandatory enrollment in regional insurance purchasing alliances. + Employers required to pay at least 80 percent of premiums. + Would raise cigarette tax to 99" from 25" a pack. + +Kennedy Plan: + Universal health insurance coverage. + Participation in alliances is voluntary. + Employers required to pay premiums or a payroll tax in the case of small businesses. + Would raise cigarette tax to $1.74 a pack. + Adds benefits to those in Clinton plan. + +Moynihan Plan: + Aims at universal health insurance coverage. + Participation in alliances is voluntary. + Employers required to pay premiums or a payroll tax in the case of small businesses. + Would raise cigarette tax to $2 a pack. + Overall, offers fewer benefits than Clinton plan. (pg. A1) + +"POINT BY POINT: Comparing the Clinton, Kennedy and Moynihan Visions of Health Care" + +BENEFITS: + +Clinton: Basic benefit package includes doctor, hospital and emergency services; some coverage for mental health and substance abuse; prescription drugs; rehabilitation services; hospice, home health and extended nursing care services; preventive care; lab and diagnostic services. + +Kennedy: Follows outlines of Clinton package but provides additional benefits for women, children, the disabled, low-income individuals and for mental health and substance abuse. Provides increased coverage for preventive exams and additional benefits for long term care. + +Moynihan: Follows outlines of Clinton package with more generous mental health benefits but no coverage for long term care or prescription drugs for the elderly. + +ALLIANCES: + +Clinton: Most Americans would be required to get their coverage through regional insurance purchasing alliances. All firms with 5,000 or fewer employees would have to purchase coverage through an alliance. + +Kennedy: Individuals could purchasing insurance from private insurers, participating in consumer health purchasing cooperatives established by the states or participate in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan, the existing plan forFederal workers. + +Moynihan: Participation in alliances would be voluntary. People working for companies with fewer than 500 employees, self-employed people and those not connected to the work force could buy insurance through a cooperative. Companies with 2 to 10 workers could enroll employees in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan. + +EMPLOYER MANDATE: + +Clinton: Employers would be required to pay about 80 percent of the costs of the average health insurance plan in their area for a single person or about 55 percent of the cost of the average family plan, but no more than 7.9 percent of payroll. Companies with 75 or fewer employees and average annual wages under $24,000 a year would be eligible for subsidies. Individuals would pay up to 20 percent of the premiums. + +Kennedy: Would exempt small businesses with 10 or fewer employees and average annual wages under $24,000 per worker. Employers of one to five workers would be required to pay a 1 percent payroll tax instead. Employers of 6 to 10 workers would pay a 2 percent tax. Employees of exempted small businesses would be required to buy their own insurance, but with very substantial subsidies. Some companies would be elibigle for subsidies based on, depending on the wages of individual workers. + +Moynihan: All employers with more than 20 employees would have to pay at least 80 percent of the average premium for the standard health plan. Employers of 20 or fewer workers could, as an alternative, pay a payroll tax: 1 percent for companies with 1 to 10 employees and 2 percent for those with 11 to 20 employees. As in the Kennedy plan, employees of exempted small businesses would be required to buy their own insurance, but with subsidies. "Trigger" mechanism would require small employers to pay premiums if specified percentages of workers nationwide did not have coverage from employers by certain dates. + +TAXES: + +Clinton: Requires a 1 percent payroll tax on companies with 5,000 or more workers. Raises the current 24 cents a pack cigarette tax an additional 75 cents for a total of 99 cents. + +Kennedy: Requires companies with 1,000 or more employees to pay a 1 percent payroll tax. Increases the cigarette tax 75 cents above the President's plan to $1.74 per pack. + +Moynihan: Requires companies with 500 or more employees to pay a 1 percent payroll tax. Increases the cigarette tax to $2.00 a pack. Raises the current 11 percent tax on handgun ammunition to 50 percent. Imposes a new tax on health insurance premiums. (pg. A18) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +215 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 10, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Kenmore Hotel: The Place at the End of the Line + +BYLINE: By RICK BRAGG + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1237 words + +One old woman walks through the Kenmore Hotel and spells her name over and over, as if she is afraid of losing it somewhere down the long, dark hall. Another woman, her cheeks rouged a candy-apple red, goes from person to person in the lobby, asking people she has never seen before what they would like for dinner. +On the eighth floor, a man sits amid jumping fleas, crusted dirt and six-month-old newspapers, screaming that he should not have to live like this because he is an American. + Down the hall, a transvestite whose only possessions are a purple party dress and a fake fox fur with a hole in it talks about how the Kenmore is really not as bad as it looks, as the water backs up in the sink for the fifth straight day and a rat runs past a pile of garbage in the hall. +And on every floor, single mothers and families and other hard-working people are just trying to survive amid the craziness. +It is a blessing to be a little mad in the Kenmore, say some of the people who live there, held prisoner by their poverty and victimized by criminals who prosecutors say controlled whole floors of the building. +The 621-room Kenmore, a red-brick residential hotel at 145 East 23d Street, was seized by United States marshals on Wednesday under a little-used 1984 law that allows the authorities to take over a building being used in the sale of drugs. It had become a bizarre warehouse for crack dealers, prostitutes, robbers and extortionists, said both Federal investigators and people who live there. The criminals did not go outside. They worked the halls, said the residents. +"You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to live in the suburbs," said Phillip Yee, standing in one hall, his bare feet dirt encrusted. "I like the suburbs. In the suburbs, your neighbors don't light fires in the hall." +Residents said the hotel owner, Tran Din Truong, a Vietnamese immigrant who prosecutors say used the Kenmore as a "cash cow," allowed the building to fall apart, the filth to collect and the toilets to overflow, even as he allowed it to become a haven for criminals. +Rent that is considerably less than the usual Manhattan rate -- $ 200 a month for a room the size of a closet, with the bathroom down the hall, or $ 400 for a slightly bigger room -- has filled it over the years with elderly residents; poor people with physical, mental and emotional problems; welfare mothers, and others who cannot afford anything better. +"This is what I have to live in," said John Grant, 38, who sat on a bare narrow mattress in a filthy hole, five feet wide and about eight feet long. His voice became higher, shriller, as he talked. "Look at me. I'm dying in here. I'm dying." +He said he was unemployed, disabled and had lived in the Kenmore for 14 years. He does not own any pictures or keepsakes. The walls of his room are covered with yellowed newspaper photos that he likes to look at. +"It's not fair," he said, almost screaming. "It's not fair." +The Kenmore has been a rundown apartment house for as long as anyone can remember, but when the predators moved into the building and sold their drugs and stole from people who had almost nothing to give, when the prostitutes started having sex with clients in the stairwells and halls, the quality of life dipped even lower. The old people suffer most, said Kirk Mickels, 39, who lives on the 19th floor. +"Some are afraid to come out of their rooms," he said. "Some shouldn't be here. Some have mental problems. Some have health problems, and these people prey on them." +Dennis Brady, 43, studied music at Lehman College in the Bronx and once dreamed of being a concert pianist, but eviction from a building that went co-op, loss of a hotel job and injuries he suffered from being run over by a soda-delivery truck landed him in the Kenmore. He said he has neck, head and back pain, but he worries more about the old people there who may never get to live anywhere else. +His tiny room is crowded with books like "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" and "Celtic Heritage." One of his favorites is "Purity of Heart," by Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard, he said, would find hope in the lives of the people there, but he would want society to help them. +Others have lived worse than this already. + +A Way Station + For Mr. Mickels, 39, his little room is just a place to catch his breath. +"I've been told this is the last stop, but I don't believe that," said Mr. Mickels, bouncing his visiting 2-year-old grandson, Eric, on his knee. +Mr. Mickels moved into the $120-a-week room in March, shortly after being released from prison after serving six years for a crime he would rather not discuss. +"A lot of us make mistakes, and a lot of us recover," said Mr. Mickels, who grew up on Wyona Street in East New York. +Each morning he sweeps his room and then sweeps the hallway, he said, explaining that there has not been any janitorial service for a long time. +On the wall of his room, just to the left of an immaculate porcelain wall sink, are button-photos of Malcolm X and Marvin Gaye, and a photograph of Mr. Mickels, as an inmate, coordinating an entertainment event at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y. +"I want to do prison counseling," said Mr. Mickels, who is in a training program run by the Fortune Society, a nonprofit organization that helps former convicts. +He said that when he leaves the Kenmore, he doesn't want to travel far from needy people, explaining that "I want to live in the ghetto. A little place. A little car. And some food in the house would be nice." +On the hotel's eighth floor, two dark rooms are joined a by a small bathroom, and for four years this suite has been home to Lonie Houng, 40, her four young children and her husband, Steven Kaplovich, 59, who makes $24,000 a year as a handyman in a Sutton Place apartment building. +The children -- Max, 5; Joey, 6; Jonathan, 9, and Juliana, 8 -- sleep on mattresses on the floor of a main room with cracked and peeling walls. The toilet does not work; water has to be poured from a bucket into the tank to flush it. +There are vermin, "lots of mice," Ms. Houng said. The family's cat, Con Mel, lies purring in a dresser drawer, asleep. He is the first line of defense, when he is awake. +"I don't mind this that much, but I feel bad for the babies. They sleep on the floor and they have asthma," Ms. Houng said. "We can survive with no problem, but they need space and they can't eat good food here. I cook on a hot plate." +Conditions at the hotel are better, in some ways, than those she left when she was brought to the United States at 14 by an American airman who became her first husband. +"There was shooting," she said of her childhood in Pleiku, where she was raised by her father, Vu Quang Trong, whom she described as "the second most famous painter in my country." +A year ago, Ms. Houng was robbed by a man in the hallway who tried to stab her. He missed when she sank to the floor, she said. "We would move," she said. "But it is hard to find people to take us with four children." +Mr. Yee said people who live in the hotel should expect life to be hard. He said people get what they pay for. +Down the hall from him, residents point to a metal exit door that has been dented several times. One resident explained that it happened when one man repeatedly clubbed another man in the head with a baseball bat but missed several times and hit the door. + +LOAD-DATE: June 10, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Lonie Houng, her husband and four children live in two small rooms at the Kenmore Hotel. "I don't mind this that much, but I feel bad for the babies. They sleep on the floor and they have asthma," Ms. Houng said; Dennis Brady, 43, sitting on the bed in his room next to a piece of his door, which was forced open by law enforcement officers. (Photographs by Ed Quinn for The New York Times) (pg. B2) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +216 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 12, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +7 Victims Identify Suspect As the 'Gentleman Bandit' + +BYLINE: By DENNIS HEVESI + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 24; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 411 words + +Seven victims have identified a man arrested on Thursday night as the so-called Gentleman Bandit, suspected of committing more than 40 robberies in the neighborhoods surrounding Manhattan's Central Park over the last three months, the police said yesterday. +The suspect will be placed in more police lineups for other victims to view in the next several days, officers said. + The suspect, Dwane Hill, 29, of 1484 Inwood Avenue in the High Bridge section of the Bronx, was arrested at about 9 P.M. Thursday in front of an apartment building at 34 West 65th Street, said Sgt. Anthony Barlanti, a police spokesman. Mr. Hill faces robbery charges in connection with seven crimes so far, the sergeant said. +The suspect in the robberies had been dubbed the "Gentleman Bandit" because he usually was polite, saying please and thank you to his victims. "But I don't consider somebody who robs people polite," said Officer Merrie Pearsall, a police spokeswoman. +Sergeant Barlanti said that two officers, James Triola and Paul McMahon of the 20th Precinct anti-crime unit, became suspicious of Mr. Hill after they saw him follow a woman into the 65th Street building and then leave a few minutes later. They believed that he matched the description of the man who had stolen money and jewelry from 43 victims, most of them elderly women, since March 28. They initially charged Mr. Hill with trespassing. +But the officers later found the 54-year-old woman who had been followed into the building. She told them that she had become wary after Mr. Hill followed her onto the elevator. +"She became suspicious and got off the elevator while it was still on the first floor," Sergeant Barlanti said. "He then exited the building and was arrested by the officers." +The officers then notified detectives from the Manhattan Robbery Squad, who began calling in the robbery victims. +All of the robberies took place between East 70th and East 85th Streets or between West 62d and West 105th Streets, Officer Pearsall said, with the last occurring on June 6, on East 77th Street. +The crimes followed a pattern. "The suspect follows the victim into the building, robbing her in the lobby or the stairway," Officer Pearsall said. "Or, on the elevator, he always presses the second-floor, pretends he has a gun in his pocket, takes money and jewelry and flees down the stairs while the victim goes up in the elevator." All the robberies occurred between 4 and 8 P.M. + +LOAD-DATE: June 12, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +217 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 12, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: NORTH BRONX; +First, Surveys. Then, Plan to Change Bus Routes. Now, Protests. + +BYLINE: By RANDY KENNEDY + +SECTION: Section 14; Page 9; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 491 words + +After conducting detailed surveys and interviews to find out how to improve bus service in Co-op City, the Transit Authority recently announced a plan to alter several routes that serve the sprawling complex. +There is one small problem, however: It seems that no one in Co-op City wants the changes they supposedly requested. Residents by the hundreds have called officials at Community Board 10 to complain, and about 2,000 signatures have been collected on a petition to leave the routes untouched, Co-op City officials say. + Transit Authority planners say the changes will save riders time by eliminating numerous stops within the complex, where about 65,000 people live in 35 high-rise buildings. +But residents contend the changes are simply a way of saving money. +"This is a favor?" asked Iris Herskowitz Baez, board president of the Riverbay Corporation, which runs Co-op City. "Don't do us a favor, then, is what I want to say to them. Does it sound like a favor if everybody is yelling?" +The plan reduces the number of stops on two busy lines, the BX26 and the BX28, both of which now go to all five sections of Co-op city. +In the new routes, the BX26 bus, which runs along East Gun Hill Road past Montefiore Medical Center, would stop only in the south end of Co-op City. The BX28, which runs along Allerton Avenue, would serve the north. Riders who want to use a bus line that does not stop in their end of the complex would have to transfer where the two lines overlap. +Kevin Desmond, chief of operations planning for the Transit Authority, said eliminating the stops would save some people about 15 minutes of traveling time but would make it more difficult for others, who must transfer. +"We're inconveniencing some people," Mr. Desmond said. "We're not trying to hide that." +He also said part of the motivation was to make the lines more efficient and to save money. But the money, he said, would then be used reinvested to create other lines in the area, including a proposed rush-hour shuttle from Co-op City to the Pelham Bay subway station, which is at Dyre Avenue and Gun Hill Road. +Arthur Taub, who heads the municipal services committee of Community Board 10, said he believed the changes were being made to benefit younger rush-hour commuters at the expense of older residents, who make up a large portion of Co-op City. The older people, many of them retired, generally do not mind spending a little extra time on the bus if the stops are convenient; what they do mind, he said, is getting on and off and having to wait for another bus. +"In all my years on this board, I've never gotten as many calls on one issue as on this, and all of them saying no," Arthur Taub said. +Mr. Desmond said transit officials still believed the plan would work, but he added, "If in the long term this firestorm of protest doesn't go away, then the T. A. will have to reconsider the proposal." RANDY KENNEDY + +LOAD-DATE: June 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +218 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 12, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Navigating the Health Swamp: A Primer + +SECTION: Section 4A; Page 3; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 1317 words + +Nearly everyone agrees that the U.S. health care system needs fixing. But how much, and how to do it? This guide to the problems and the main proposals before Congress was prepared by Diane Rowland and Peter Long of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a national health care philanthropy. + +PROBLEMS + +The Uninsured: 37 Million +Millions of Americans become uninsured each year, most of them because they do not get insurance on the job and cannot afford to buy it. In 1992, 37 million Americans -- 15 percent of the non-elderly population -- were uninsured on any given day. Because the elderly have Medicare coverage and the very poor and disabled generally have Medicaid, the overwhelming majority of the uninsured (84 percent) are full- or part-time workers and their families. +The high cost of insurance limits coverage. Seven in 10 uninsured Americans make less than $30,000 a year. Although the uninsured do get care, they get less, get it later and end up sicker than people with insurance. + +The Vulnerable +While most Americans have insurance, changing jobs can often mean losing coverage: two-thirds of companies with fewer than 25 employees do not offer coverage. In the course of a year, one in five Americans -- more than 50 million people -- will be uninsured at least temporarily and one-third will be without insurance for at least a year. Only 7 percent of uninsured adults say they are uninsured by choice. Six in 10 say they cannot afford coverage and 22 percent cite loss of a job or lack of on-the-job insurance. Three percent can't get coverage because of health problems. + +The Cost of Care +The U.S. is the only major industrial nation that does not provide universal health coverage, yet it spends far more than any other country on health -- more than $800 billion a year, 14 percent of the gross domestic product. And the portion is growing: without cost-containment measures, it is expected to top 18 percent by the year 2000. From 1988 to 1993, the average family premium for employer-based group health insurance doubled, from $2,500 to $5,200. Families wanting to buy health insurance directly from an insurer can spend as much as $10,000 a year. + +CHOICES + +Single-Payer +The single-payer plan would create a universal public system of health insurance coverage with comprehensive benefits financed by income and payroll taxes instead of premiums. All Americans would be covered, in much the same way the elderly are now covered by Medicare. Employerbased coverage, private insurance, Medicare and Medicaid would be replaced by a single plan. Costs would be controlled through administrative simplification and by a national budget with Government-regulated payment rates for doctors and hospitals. (Example: McDermott-/Wellstone bill.) + +Employer Mandate +Employer-based approaches build on the already extensive system that provides private insurance to two-thirds of the non-elderly population. To achieve universal coverage, all employers would have to offer insurance to employees and help pay the premiums. The Government would provide coverage or help pay for private insurance for nonworkers; Medicare would be kept for the elderly. +To contain costs, some plans would regulate prices and set spending limits; others would expand use of managed care, and promote increased competition among health insurance plans. Some plans call for regional alliances, which would spool the purchasing power of small business and promote price competition among plans. (Examples: Clinton plan, House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee bill.) + +Individual Mandate +This approach places the responsibility for obtaining coverage on individuals and families, rather than employers or the Government. To achieve universal coverage, people would be required to obtain insurance either through their employers or by buying it on the private market. The Government would subsidize premium costs for low-income individuals and families. Employers could cover some of the premium costs, but would not be required to. +Costs would be controlled by promoting increased consumer consciousness, greater use of managed care and greater competition among health plans. (Examples: Thomas-Chafee bill, Stearns-Nickles bill). + +No Mandate +Voluntary plans build on the existing system by providing incentives to expand coverage and control costs, but do not mandate coverage. Expanded coverage would be encouraged through reforms in the private health insurance market (Like eliminating ineligibility for those with pre-existing conditions), subsidies for low-income people and alliances to help small companies and individuals buy insurance. +This approach would control costs and make coverage more affordable by increasing competition among proivate insurance plans and cost consciousness among consumers. (Examples: Cooper-Breaux bill, Michel-Lott bill.) + +ASSESSING THE PLANS + +Single-Payer +All Americans would have comprehensive health benefits through a single system, regardless of income or employment. This approach would reduce much of the complexity of the present system, but it would shift most of the financing from employers and the private sector to the tax system. It would virtually eliminate a role for private insurance and would concentrate control of the health care system under the Federal Government. It would greatly expand the role of the Government in health, but also provide Government with greater purchasing power to control costs. + +Employer Mandate +Employer-based approaches expand insurance coverage with the least disruption to current arrangements and would minimize change for most Americans. They rely on employers to cover workers and on the Government to provide coverage for nonworkers. Employers and their employees, rather than the Government, pay most of the cost for insuring all workers and their families. +Employer mandates would mean higher health insurance costs for some businesses, especially small companies that do not offer insurance today. Government assistance to businesses could help avoid wage cuts, job losses and other potential effects. +The mobility of the work force makes this approach administratively complex and requires explicit mechanisms to assure continuous coverage. Cost control based on greater use of managed care and competition among health plans would require much restructuring of the market, without assured effectiveness. + +Individual Mandate +Making individuals responsible for insurance would break the link between employment and insurance coverage -- easing the mobility of the labor force, but also potentially removing business as a source of financing and a force in controlling costs. +Government subsidies could be directed to low-wage workers and low-income families rather than more broadly applied to businesses, but the loss of employer contributions would mean substantial tax increases for Federal subsidies to make insurance affordable, without adequate subsidies, coverage could remain beyond the reach of many Americans. +An individual-based program would substantially alter current insurance arrangements, and would be complicated to administer and hard to enforce. Increasing consumer awareness could help restain costs, but unless they join alliances, consumers would lack the purchasing power that big employers have now. + +No Mandate +Voluntary approaches provide incentives for cost control and for reaching the uninsured and the vulnerable, but no assurances that these problems will be fully addressed. Market reforms and expanded coverage for low-income people would reduce the number of uninsured but not assure universal coverage. +Expanded coverage of low-income people would require additional Federal revenue. Cost containment would depend largely on the success of free-market competition in restraining premium increases. + +LOAD-DATE: July 8, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +219 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 15, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Metropolitan Diary + +BYLINE: By Ron Alexander + +SECTION: Section C; Page 2; Column 1; Living Desk + +LENGTH: 662 words + + +GENERATIONS + + My grandfather (who I + called Popsy) + was a Bricklayer from Bayonne and + wore spats and smoked stogies + and at five foot four + could expand any room with grins + and goodness. + And my father (who I + called Pops) + was a C.P.A. in Suburbia, + wore pleated pants and smoked Camels + and at five foot nine + could stretch any house with smiles + and sincerity. + And my kids' father (who they + call Pop) + is a Shrink in the City and + wears well-worn memories and chews gum + and at six foot one + hopes for the same wide warmth that Pops + and Popsy had to fill his family's hearts. ROGER GRANET + + + + . . . +It was one of the city's more enchanted evenings, with some 6,000 music lovers, including a tot or two, filling the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and spilling out on the lawn, to hear Kurt Masur conduct the New York Philharmonic in a free performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 9. It was one of those all-too-infrequent occasions when one would not have lived in any other town. +But even the most diehard Mahler-ites allowed themselves to be pleasantly distracted by the pajama-clad lad of 2 or so sitting attentively alongside his young dad who conducted silently from his seat, a smile on his face, an occasional whisper-finger to his lips. When he conducted gently, his son did likewise. When he used more aggressive movements, the youngster was equally enthusiastic. +Such shared delight between father and son did not go unnoticed by their neighbors. When at the conclusion of the second movement, the youngster left with a young woman, all nearby eyes were on Dad, who realized an explanation was in order. +"Oh," he said. "He really only likes the first two movements." + + + + . . . +Place: Corner of Bank and Greenwich Streets, Manhattan. +Dramatis personae: Man walking a large black Rottweiler; woman walking small black French poodle; Elisa DeCarlo, just listening. +Woman, with nod toward big black Rottweiler: Does he get enough exercise? +Man: I walk him twice a day; we have a yard and stairs. He gets plenty of exercise. +Woman: But does he get enough exercise emotionally? +Dear Diary: +I recently performed my stand-up comedy act at a center for the elderly in Chelsea. I'm in my 20's and it was no small task to gear my routine to a group with an average age of, say, 85. They seemed to like me; only a few fell asleep. After my act, a woman -- probably in her 90's -- approached me. "You, come here," she demanded, much as my grandmother does when she wants attention. +Who was I to argue? A fan's a fan. +"You're the comic, right?" +I nodded proudly. +"Well, I want you to know that I saw Milton Berle when he was your age." +"Yeah . . . wow!" I gasped in mock sincerity. +"Yes," she snapped. "And he was no good either. So stick with it." +There are no easy gigs in New York. BILL GORDON + + + + . . . + + +Dear Diary: +A balmy close-to-summer night. Jeanne T. Rhee and her boyfriend are strolling along Broadway. On the block between 73d and 74th Streets, Ms. Rhee sees a father carrying his daughter, about 4, atop his shoulders. The girl is adorable, with white-blond hair and a silliness that reminds Ms. Rhee of herself when she was young. +Unbeknownst to her father, the girl is forming rabbit ears with her fingers on top of his head. When she sees that Ms. Rhee has discovered her secret, she gestures "shhh" with her other hand. Both cover their mouths to suppress laughter. + + + + . . . + + +THE EGG CREAM + + There were ten stools + Covered in red vinyl + That always felt loose + As you twirled around + Waiting for the owner + To begin the process + That was as near to heaven + As you could get + From the contents of a 10-ounce glass; + A practiced sleight of hand; some syrup; + A dash of milk; a spritz of seltzer; + And once upon a time + Some part of an egg. ELLEN FUCHS + +LOAD-DATE: June 15, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Sketchbook drawing. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +220 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 15, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Personal Health; +The war on brittle bones must start early in life. + +BYLINE: By Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section C; Page 9; Column 1; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1195 words + +A CONFERENCE of experts is not needed to tell Americans that their bones are in jeopardy. All they have to do is look at the huge numbers of older people who have developed rounded backs and lost inches in height because their spinal vertebrae have collapsed, or the millions who have suffered debilitating fractures, particularly of the hip, which too often end in death. +More than 25 million people have osteoporosis, the bone-loss disease that results in more than 1.5 million fractures a year in people over 50 at an expense to society of more than $10 billion a year. Yet this costly problem has what appears to be a very inexpensive solution: Get every American to consume more calcium, the mineral that is the primary contributor to the density and strength of bones throughout the body. + Last week 32 experts on calcium and its effects presented telling facts to the National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Conference on Optimal Calcium Intake. The expert reports prompted the consensus panel to conclude that millions of people in the United States are not getting nearly enough calcium in their diets and that the current Recommended Dietary Allowances (R.D.A.'s) for calcium are inadequate for most age groups. +While this finding is hardly a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the problem of osteoporosis, the details of the panel's 25-page statement are likely to raise serious questions about current efforts to counter the problem. + +Start With a Full Deck + If you took a trip in a car that had a slow leak in the radiator, you would be likely to get stuck sooner if you left with the radiator half full than if you had filled it to the brim before starting out. The same holds true with your bones. The process of bone-building occurs almost entirely during childhood and adolescence. By the age of 20, your bones have become just about as big and strong as they will ever be, and after 30 they stop growing and start slowly losing the minerals that give them strength. +At menopause, bone loss in women accelerates at a dizzying pace for six to eight years, a process that the panel said can be slowed only by estrogen replacement therapy. Then the rate of loss declines, but the weakening of bones continues inexorably. By 65, men and women are losing bone at equal rates, and elderly men join women as the victims of fractures resulting from osteoporosis. +Like the car with a half-full leaky radiator, the more feeble your bones are by the third decade of life, the greater and sooner will be the impact of bone loss after midlife. +Participants in last week's conference, which sought a consensus on the ideal amount of calcium Americans should consume, were told that the need for calcium is greatest between the ages of 9 and 18, when youngsters lay down 37 percent of their total adult bone mass. According to Dr. Velimir Matkovic, director of the bone and mineral metabolism laboratory at Ohio State's Davis Medical Research Center in Columbus, the amount of calcium consumed in childhood can make a difference of 5 to 10 percent in adult bone density, which would translate into more than a 50 percent difference in hip fracture rates later in life. +Daily intakes of up to 1,500 milligrams of calcium -- the amount in five eight-ounce glasses of milk -- have bone-building effects in children, with no evidence of unwanted side effects, said Dr. Charles W. Slemenda, an associate professor of medicine at Indiana University Medical Center in Indianapolis. +Yet at every age, the Recommended Dietary Allowance (R.D.A.) for calcium is lower than the amount shown to increase youngsters' bone mass. And, as if that were not bad enough, after infancy, when soft drinks largely replace milk in youthful diets, most American children -- and especially teen-age girls -- fall far short of consuming even the R.D.A. for calcium. In fact, calcium intake among girls actually declines at puberty, just when they need it most. + +Containing the Losses + Several diet-related factors besides calcium intake contribute to the problem, Dr. Robert P. Heaney of Creighton University in Omaha noted. Most important is the amount of protein and sodium in the diet. When people consume these nutrients in excess, as nearly every American does, they seriously deplete the body's calcium supply by increasing the amount of calcium lost in urine. +"At low sodium and protein intakes, the calcium requirement for an adult female may be as little as 450 milligrams a day, whereas if her intake of both nutrients is high, she may require as much as 2,000 milligrams a day to maintain calcium balance," Dr. Heaney said. On the other hand, two nutritional factors people often worry about, caffeine and fiber in the diet, have very small effects on calcium balance. The reduced absorption of calcium associated with drinking one cup of coffee, for example, can be compensated for by adding a tablespoon or two of milk, the expert said. He also pointed out that the oxalates and phytates in some vegetables (spinach, rhubarb, beans and whole wheat, for example) only block absorption of the calcium in those foods, not calcium in other foods consumed. +Calcium supplements, which have become a crutch for millions of American women who spurn calcium-rich foods, are far from the ideal solution. First, supplements do little or nothing to slow the rapid bone loss that afflicts virtually all women in the decade after menopause, unless they take estrogen replacement. But calcium supplements can be used to enrich a calcium-deficient diet both before and after menopause and some studies indicate that after the age of 65 supplements can reduce the risk of fracture in both women and men. For most people, supplements of up to 2,000 milligrams a day are considered safe. +Dr. Bess Dawson-Hughes, a bone and calcium specialist at the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston, said the type of supplement taken makes little difference in the amount of calcium absorbed. But the body uses supplements best when the dose does not exceed 500 milligrams, and calcium carbonate (the type found in Tums) is best absorbed when taken with meals, Dr. Dawson-Hughes reported. For those who cannot or will not swallow pills, she recommended chewable tablets, those that bubble up in water and calcium-supplemented fruit drinks. +Another crucial factor in stemming adult bone loss is having enough vitamin D in its activated form. This vitamin is crucial to the body's ability to absorb dietary calcium and to use it to make bone. Older people are especially at risk of a vitamin D deficiency and may require supplements to enhance their ability to use calcium. +Still, Dr. L. Joseph Melton 3d of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., pointed out, using supplements to increase bone mass in later life may do little to repair the destruction of bones' internal architecture and thus may not reduce the risk of fracture. Calcium, he said, is most effective at preventing, rather than at correcting, bone loss, which means that the proper time to worry about calcium intake is as children and young adults. + +LOAD-DATE: June 15, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + + +GRAPHIC: The 15-member consensus development panel that studied calcium concluded that for some age groups, the currently recommended daily intake of calcium is not adequate to achieve optimal peak bone mass in children and young adults and to prevent bone loss later in life. The panel recommended that the RDA's for calcium be replaced by optimal calcium intake levels, as follows: + + + + Optimal Daily Intake +Group (in milligrams of calcium) R.D.A + +Infants + birth to 6 months 400 (250 if nursing) 400 + 6 months to 1 year 600 600 +Children 1 to 10 years old 800 800 +Teen-agers 1,200 to 1,500 1,200 +Men + 25 to 50 800 800 + 51 to 65 1,000 800 + over 65 1,500 800 +Women + 25 to 50 1,000 800 + over 50 1,500 (1,000 if taking estrogen) 800 + Pregnant and nursing women Additional 400 1,200 + + +"Good Food Sources of Calcium" + + +< + + Calcium +Food (milligrams) + +Breast milk, 8 ounces 79 +Skim milk, 8 ounces 302 +Whole milk, 8 ounces 291 +Buttermilk, 8 ounces 285 +Low-fat chocolate milk, 8 ounces 287 +Low-fat plain yogurt, 8 ounces 415 +Nonfat plain yogurt, 8 ounces 452 +Low-fat fruit yogurt, 8 ounces 314 +American cheese, 1 ounce 174 +Cheddar cheese, 1 ounce 204 +Low-fat cottage cheese, 1 cup 155 +Feta cheese, 1 ounce 140 +Goat cheese (hard), 1 ounce 254 +Part-skim mozzarella, 1 ounce 183 +Grated Parmesan cheese, 1 tablespoon 69 +Canned salmon with bones, 3 ounces 203 +Sardines with bones, 3 1/2 ounces 351 +Broccoli (cooked), 1 cup 178 +Collards (frozen, chopped), 1 cup 357 +Dandelion greens (chopped, cooked) 1 cup 147 +Kale (frozen, chopped), 1 cup 179 +Mustard greens (chopped, cooked), 1 cup 103 +Chocolate pudding, 1/2 cup 161 +Rice pudding, 1/2 cup 152 +Vanilla ice cream, 1/2 cup 85 +Vanilla soft-serve ice cream, 1/2 cup 113 +Chocolate soft-serve frozen yogurt, 1/2 cup 106 + +Charts: "Calcium: How Much Do People Need?" + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +221 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 16, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +U.S. Says Empire Blue Cross Billed Improperly + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 854 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 15 + +Federal auditors said today that Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the biggest health insurer in New York State, owed the Government $200 million because it had improperly billed Medicare for claims that the company should have paid. +Empire is both a private insurer and a Government contractor, reviewing and paying claims to elderly people enrolled in Medicare. While this arrangement is legal, it contains potential conflicts of interest, and the auditors said that Empire had shifted costs from its private lines of business to the Government. + The auditors said that Empire had improperly billed the Government for medical services to people who were enrolled in Medicare but also had private coverage from Blue Cross and Blue Shield. In these cases, under Federal law, Empire should have paid the bills. +The findings are included in a report signed on Tuesday by June Gibbs Brown, the inspector general of the Federal Department of Health and Human Services. +Her report says that Empire tried to put off Federal investigators with "delays and diversions" and refused to supply documents until the Government issued two subpoenas for the relevant records. +"In conducting this audit, our efforts were often impeded by resistance and a lack of cooperation from Empire," Ms. Brown wrote. +The audit took more than five years. Federal officials said it could have been completed in 18 months if Empire had cooperated. +John F. Kelly, a spokesman for Empire, acknowledged that the company owed money to the Government, but said it was much less than $200 million. +Empire probably could not pay the $200 million if the Federal Government demanded the money all at once. But the terms of payment may be negotiated with officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, who said they were aware of Empire's financial problems. +In its most recent financial report, filed with the New York Insurance Department in April, Empire said it had set aside $30 million to cover the cost of its dispute with the Government over Medicare. The company can take its case to court if it cannot reach agreement on the amount to be paid to the Government. +Empire told Federal investigators it was not responsible for compliance with the Medicare law in question. Rather, it said, the Government and Empire customers are responsible. +Under the law, Medicare does not usually pay for the medical care of workers 65 and older if they or their spouses have private health insurance coverage through their employers or former employers. In such cases, the private insurers are supposed to be the primary source of insurance. Medicare will cover part of the unpaid balance in some cases. +Congress established these rules in 1982 to help save the Government money. It has tightened the rules several times since then to increase the liability of employers, employees and private insurers. + +Nunn Was Concerned + The findings of the audit support concerns expressed last year by Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, the chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, who has been studying problems of Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans across the country. +The audit says that "Federal law and regulations provide that Empire has primary responsibility for compliance," despite Empire's contention to the contrary. +Empire provides private health insurance to seven million people in New York State. In addition, under contract with the Government, Empire administers the Medicare program, reviewing and paying claims for people in New York. +Ms. Brown, the inspector general, compared Medicare payment data and the enrollment records of Empire's private health insurance contracts. She and her aides used computers to scrutinize 13 million claims paid by Medicare for 327,000 elderly people who also had private coverage from Empire. +As a Medicare contractor, she said, Empire has "a fiduciary responsibility to the Federal Government to assure that only appropriate Medicare payments are made." +The inspector general has identified similar problems with private insurers, including Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans, that serve as agents for Medicare in other parts of the country. But the amount of the Federal claims against Empire far exceeds the amounts in dispute in the other cases, most of which were settled with the cooperation of the companies. +The board of Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield forced the resignation of the company's top executive, Albert A. Cardone, in May 1993, after an internal inquiry disclosed deep management and morale problems. Since then, Empire has hired a new team of managers. But Federal officials said the company had not displayed any greater willingness to cooperate with Government auditors. +Empire says most of its financial problems were caused by its providing coverage to all applicants, including many with expensive medical conditions. + +$75 Million a Year + The Government pays Empire $75 million a year to handle more than $8 billion worth of Medicare claims from doctors, hospitals, laboratories, nursing homes, hospices and suppliers of medical equipment. + +LOAD-DATE: June 16, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +222 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 17, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +G.O.P. IN THE HOUSE IS TRYING TO BLOCK HEALTH CARE BILL + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1230 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 16 + +At the urging of Representative Newt Gingrich, their deputy leader, House Republicans are trying to keep health care legislation from reaching the floor in a form that could pass. +Despite criticism from Democrats and even from one Republican who accused him of putting partisan politics first, Mr. Gingrish said today that Republicans should vote against amendments that might broaden the support for a bill that the House Ways and Means Committee is considering. + A few hours later, Republican committee members followed that prescription; all 14 opposed an amendment to soften the bill's impact on small businesses by providing tax credits to offset their new insurance costs. +But Mr. Gingrich's hardball strategy backfired when previously divided Democrats closed ranks and voted unanimously for a series of amendments, even though some made clear that they did not like them and might alter some later. Several said Mr. Gingrich's move had unified them. +Mr. Gingrich's comments confirmed in part accusations of obstructionism that Democrats had leveled at Republican leaders, saying they were muzzling moderates in their party and blocking compromise on any health care bill. But the Democrats had never provided specifics. +"It's becoming clearer and clearer that they are interested in frustrating action," Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the House majority leader, said today. Although Republicans have often said they desired bipartisan cooperation, he said, "their real intention is to, unfortunately, not do anything." He said Republicans were acting like "robots." +In an interview today, Mr. Gingrich, of Georgia, responded, "I think it is very sad to see Gephardt reduced to a Clinton level of dishonesty." He said that Republicans had repeatedly offered to work with Democrats on health care legislation but that "what they mean by bipartisan is us caving in." He said members of his party were resisting "selling out your principles to pass one bill." +Mr. Gingrich said he had told Republican members of the Ways and Means Committee that "they should do what they think is effective in minimizing the prospect that the Gibbons bill will pass." The committee's bill was proposed by its acting chairman, Representative Sam M. Gibbons of Florida. +The Gibbons bill would seek to provide health insurance for all Americans by requiring employers to pay most of the cost of premiums for their workers and by creating a new form of Medicare, the existing health program for the elderly, to include the unemployed and others not reached through employment. +"There is no point in improving it so it will pass," Mr. Gingrich said. "It's a bad bill, and it's wrong." He said the bill would cause "bigger government, bigger bureaucracy and higher taxes for worse health care." +Mr. Gingrich, who is all but certain to become minority leader after the November elections, confirmed a complaint made on Wednesday by Representative Fred Grandy, Republican of Iowa. In a meeting of the committee, Mr. Grandy said Mr. Gingrich had urged that an amendment suggested by Mr. Grandy not be offered because the taxes it involved might be used as an issue against Republican candidates. +Mr. Grandy agreed not to propose the amendment in the committee meeting, but he said today, "To see health care pre-empted by politics, even in the short run, is unsettling." +Senators have not made similar complaints in public. But if they are guaranteed anonymity, some senators of both parties say Presidential politics and a desire to deny Mr. Clinton success have driven Republicans to oppose compromising on health care. +Others insist that they merely feel very strongly that Mr. Clinton's proposal for national health insurance and the spinoffs offered by Mr. Gibbons and Senators Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York would be bad for the country. They usually focus on the damage to small business they foresee if employers are required to buy insurance for their workers, an element these bills have in common. + +Unity Above All + But at least one important player, Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon, cited Republican unity as a reason for going against his own preference. Mr. Packwood, the senior Republican on Mr. Moynihan's Finance Committee, said today that while he personally favored an employer mandate, for example, he would not vote for one. +"If you're going to go against your party, you do it either out of conscience or constituency," he said. "You do not do it over a matter of convenience." He said that he thought requiring contributions from employers would enable the nation to insure all Americans but that it could be done, though more slowly, without that requirement. Republican unity is worth a little delay, he said. +A group of Democrats held a news conference today to try to rally support for Mr. Clinton's call for universal insurance coverage and required employer payments to achieve it. Mr. Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, said he was confident the full Senate would support employer payments once it had debated the issue, because "you don't get to universal coverage without an employer contribution." +The Senate Democratic leader, George J. Mitchell of Maine, told reporters this morning, "We will be on the Senate floor with a health care bill in July." He said he was not dismayed by the disagreements that had stalled action in the Finance Committee. "I've been through dozens and dozens of bills where you start with disagreement and end up with agreement," he said. +The embattled Finance Committee held two closed meetings today, discussing what benefits should be included under any national health insurance plan. It also discussed what sort of national board should deal with changes in the package. The committee will meet, again in a closed meeting, next Tuesday. + +Grandy Would Tax Benefits + The Grandy amendment that started the House dispute is actually one that Democratic leaders like Mr. Gephardt oppose bitterly, though some members of both parties like the idea. It would tax health care benefits above those in a minimum insurance plan, both to discourage wasteful use of health care resources and to raise money to subsidize insurance for the poor. Labor unions have made the defeat of any version of this idea a top priority. +Mr. Gingrich told Mr. Grandy that his amendment could hurt Republican candidates, because Democrats could label it a tax increase on the middle class. Mr. Grandy said he understood, though he was disappointed. +This afternoon the Ways and Means Committee's Democrats, who were bickering last night over a patchwork series of amendments that would reduce proposed tobacco taxes, give tax credits to small businesses and delay the availability of long-term-care benefits, stood together and voted without dissent for each of them. +In a caucus this morning, Democrats encouraged one another to stand against the Republican enemy. +Mr. Gingrich's title is Republican whip, which means it is the Republicans whom he is supposed to keep united. But Representative Jim McDermott, a Washington Democrat who swallowed his unhappiness with details of the amendments and voted for them, said Democratic antagonism toward the Republican leader meant that "Mr. Gingrich was our whip today." + +LOAD-DATE: June 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Following the leadership of Newt Gingrich, the Republicans are trying to keep legislation on health care from going before the full House if it has a chance of passing. Mr. Gingrich worked in his office yesterday. (Kirsten Bremmer for The New York Times) (pg. A14) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +223 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 18, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Medicare Inquiry Subpoenas 100 Hospitals + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 11; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 996 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 17 + +Federal agents have issued subpoenas to more than 100 hospitals around the country as part of a broad investigation of claims filed under Medicare and Medicaid for the use of new medical devices not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. +The inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, June Gibbs Brown, issued the subpoenas as part of an examination of the use of all sorts of devices. A copy of one subpoena, obtained by The New York Times from a hospital, shows that investigators are also examining claims for a wide range of surgical procedures, many of which involve cardiac catheters, flexible tubes used in the treatment of heart disease. + Fredric J. Entin, senior vice president and general counsel of the American Hospital Association, said today: "The subpoenas appear to be extremely broad. They cover an extraordinary length of time, 10 years. The Government is asking for documents that may no longer exist. We are very concerned." +In general, Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for the elderly and the disabled, and Medicaid, the program for low-income people, will not pay for the use of medical devices that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. + +Not Considered Necessary + The Medicare manual for hospitals, issued by the Federal Government, says "payment may not be made for procedures" using such devices because they are not considered necessary for the diagnosis or treatment of illness or injury. +Among the hospitals that received subpoenas are St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, L.I., and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Doctors at both hospitals perform large numbers of cardiac procedures. Lucille P. Danaher, a spokeswoman for St. Francis, said, "We are cooperating with the investigation and complying with the subpoena." Ronald L. Wise, a spokesman for Cedars-Sinai, said the hospital would "respond appropriately," but he refused to give details. +Catheters are used for a variety of diagnostic purposes and treatments. Cardiac catheters are inserted into blood vessels in the arm or the leg and pushed up into arteries of the heart to remove plaque blocking the flow of blood needed to nourish the heart muscle. Another kind of cardiac catheter is also used to diagnose and treat wildly erratic heartbeats, which can kill people of any age. +Medical technology is changing rapidly. While many cardiac catheters have been approved by the F.D.A., many of the newer devices have not. One of the world's largest manufacturers of medical devices, C. R. Bard Inc., pleaded guilty last year to 391 criminal charges related to the sale of untested heart catheters. The company acknowledged selling the devices without F.D.A. approval, illegally experimenting on people and concealing problems with the devices from the Government. + +What Investigators Wants + Federal investigators are trying to determine whether hospitals submitted claims to Medicare and Medicaid for procedures involving such unapproved devices. The subpoenas say the Government is investigating the "submission of false or improper claims to, and their payment by, the Medicare and Medicaid programs." Under Federal law, there are criminal and civil penalties for filing false claims, and hospitals that file such claims may be excluded from Medicare and Medicaid. +The treasurer of Bard, Earle L. Parker, said he suspected that the Government was investigating cases in which hospitals had billed Medicare for purchase of devices that they received as samples, free of charge, from various manufacturers. Federal agents are also studying whether Medicare was improperly billed for clinical trials evaluating new devices. +Dr. Steven J. Evans, a cardiologist at Long Island Jewish Hospital in New Hyde Park, said: "Although some cardiac devices are investigational, they really have become standard accepted medical technique across the country and the world. They are much less expensive and less risky to patients than alternative therapies like cardiac surgery." +The Federal investigation is being coordinated by the Inspector General's field office in Seattle. The subpoenas direct hospital officials to deliver records to the Seattle office by July 1. +One type of information sought by the Government is a "listing of all procedures performed from April 5, 1984, through March 31, 1994, involving devices that were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for marketing, including the use of approved devices for nonapproved purposes." +For each procedure, investigators want to know the patient's name, the date on which the procedure was performed, the company that made the device, the price of the device and the name of the doctor who performed the service. They also demand copies of financial records, hospital bills and insurance claims for each procedure. +In addition, the subpoenas ask for "a listing of any and all persons employed as the director of the cardiac catheter laboratory, supervisor of the electrophysiology department, the cardiac nursing supervisor, the operating room nurse or any other person responsible for preparing the charge slips in connection with the procedures." +Among other things, Federal agents are investigating payments for the use of catheters to correct irregular heartbeats. In this procedure, doctors pinpoint a small area of heart tissue responsible for wildly erratic heart rhythms, and they insert a catheter into the heart. They heat the tip of the catheter so that it will destroy the cells in that area of the heart. +Barbara T. Dreyfuss, a vice president of Prudential Securities who follows health policy issues, said: "If the Inspector General cracks down on hospitals' ability to get reimbursement from Medicare, hospitals may be less willing to pay the device manufacturers. It could be hard for small companies to do clinical trials." Such trials are usually required before new devices can be put on the market. + +LOAD-DATE: June 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +224 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 19, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: SPUYTEN DUYVIL; +Quietly, a Slice of Bronx History Disappears + +BYLINE: By ROSALIE R. RADOMSKY + +SECTION: Section 14; Page 10; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 365 words + +A piece of 19th-century history vanished last week. +Until it was boarded up about nine months ago, the dilapidated two-story stucco house at 2975 Independence Avenue was the thrift shop of the Frances Schervier Home and Hospital. The building, which occupied a small section of the home's nine-acre complex, was leveled because it was unsafe. Grass will be planted and the site will be used as a park for elderly residents of the home and children in the day-care program. + But historians are mourning the loss of the Italianate structure, whose foundation was part of a Revolutionary War fort; the house was also a contemporary of the Hudson River villas in the Riverdale Historic District. +Peter J. Ostrander, president of the Kingsbridge Historical Society, said the house was built around 1860 for a family named Strang and first showed up on an 1867 map of Yonkers. He said his hopes had soared last month when the house was spray-painted. But it turned out that the coating had been applied only to keep lead and asbestos from flying during demolition. +"We lost the oldest house in Spuyten Duyvil," said Mr. Ostrander, "but we don't have to lose everything. Maybe this is a wake-up call for other historic sites." +An attempt to secure landmark status for the house failed in 1982 because it did not qualify architecturally, said Anthony Robins, a staff member of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. +Katrinka Walter, a spokeswoman for the Frances Schervier Home and Hospital, which is part of the Franciscan Sisters of the Poor Health System, said the organization had been unaware of the history of the building, which once housed staff members. +The house was on the site of the Revolutionary War Fort No. 1, which was built in 1776 by the Dutchess County militia, Mr. Ostrander said. +William C. Muschenheim, owner of the Astor Hotel, lived in the house in 1910. The Franciscan Sisters bought the house and land in the early 1930's. +Mr. Ostrander said the cleared site might provide opportunities for history buffs. An archeological dig could "give something back to American Revolutionary history and back to the community," he said. ROSALIE R. RADOMSKY + +LOAD-DATE: June 21, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: The two-story Italianate structure at 2975 Independence Avenue, top, was the oldest house in Spuyten Duyvil until its demolition. After the clearing, it will be used as a park by the Franciscan Sisters of the Poor.(Rolf von Hall (top); Steve Hart for The New York Times (above) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +225 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 22, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Veterans Changed Colleges' Attitudes + +BYLINE: By WILLIAM CELIS 3d + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7; Column 2; National Desk; Education Page + +LENGTH: 490 words + +The G.I. Bill went well beyond enrolling millions of Americans in higher education; it forever altered teaching styles and attitudes about older students in colleges and universities. +"For the first time, you had people in classes who had had real life experiences and had much to share," said Connie Odems, senior vice president of the American Association of Community Colleges, a group of 1,200 two-year colleges. "It was not all textbook learning anymore." + If the G.I. Bill helped change the way courses were taught, it also introduced the concept of continuing education. At colleges and universities, the push to accommodate these older students resulted in a much broader and more sophisticated menu of vocational job-training courses. +This was particularly true at community colleges, which grew tremendously in the years immediately after World War II and well into the 1970's, to accommodate veterans of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. +And the veterans generally enjoyed academic success, dispelling the fears voiced when the G.I. Bill was debated 50 years ago. Leading academicians had criticized Federal efforts to open colleges and universities to classes of people who, under the circumstances of the time, would not have pursued college educations. +"The first thing it did was indicate to college administrations and faculty that these people could learn, even though they didn't come from the best high schools or from the top of their graduating classes," said Henry Spille, the vice president and director of the Center for Adult Learning at the American Council of Education, an association of 1,700 colleges and universities. "The maturity and persistence that they brought turned around the thinking of many people on the ability of older persons to learn at the college level." +As more veterans entered colleges and universities, the institutions scrambled to find new ways to assess the academic potential of their students. As a result, standardized testing, which had been used on a limited basis, saw unparalleled growth. +"It created a whole new industry in education," said Mr. Spille, acknowledging that standardized testing today is widely criticized as being less-than-accurate barometers of an individual's potential. "Standardized testing served its purpose then, however, because institutions needed the information to make a lot of judgments." +The G.I. Bill's most lasting gift to higher education, however, may have been as a forerunner to Federal student loan programs. Never before had the Federal Government been involved to such a degree in financing college educations for students, a role that continues 50 years after the G.I. Bill became law. +Last year, 4.4 million college students, most of them from families with incomes of less than $25,000 a year, received college grants of up to $2,500 a year under the Federal Government's largest college loan program, the Pell grant. + +LOAD-DATE: June 22, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +226 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 23, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Study Finds That Weight Training Can Benefit the Very Old + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 421 words + +DATELINE: BOSTON, June 22 + +Even among the very old, it is never too late to benefit from getting in shape, a new study suggests. +The study found that frail people in their late 80's or their 90's get around more quickly, climb stairs better and sometimes even throw away their walkers after a few weeks of lifting weights to strengthen their legs. + "People have an unduly negative attitude about what can be done with those at the end of their lives," said the study's director, Dr. Maria A. Fiatarone of the United States Department of Agriculture's Human Nutrition Research Center at Tufts University here. "We need to be more optimistic." + +A Follow-Up Study + The work is a much larger follow-up to a groundbreaking study four years ago by the same team. That report showed that working out strengthens aging muscles. This one found that extra strength improves people's lives. +The new study suggests that one reason the elderly grow chair-bound is that their muscles are weak from lack of exercise. +Dr. Evan Hadley, associate director for geriatrics at the National Institute on Aging, recommended that nursing homes start exercise programs similar to the well-supervised routine used by the Tufts group. +"If done the way this was, this could benefit substantial numbers of older people," he said. + +Weight Lifters in Their 90's + The earlier study was conducted on just 10 people, and some experts were skeptical about whether the findings of such a small experiment could be applied to all old people. +The latest study, being published on Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, involved 100 men and women who lived at the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for the Aged in Boston. They appeared to be typical of frail nursing home residents. +Their average age was 87, and about a third of them were in their 90's. Half were demented, and many suffered from a variety of other ills, including arthritis, lung disease and high blood pressure. +They were randomly assigned either to participate in ordinary nursing home activities or to work out vigorously for 45 minutes three times a week. Those assigned to work out used exercise machines to strengthen their thighs and knees. +The exercising residents increased their walking speed by 12 percent and their ability to climb stairs by 28 percent. Four who had needed walkers to get around became able to walk with just a cane. +The people who worked out were also less depressed and more likely to walk around on their own and take part in nursing home activities. + +LOAD-DATE: June 23, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Sara Chiller, 89, a resident of the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for the Aged in Boston, works out on a leg-strengthening machine. A study there demonstrated the benefits of weight training among the elderly. (Associated Press) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +227 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 24, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Arthritis Rises as U.S. Ages + +BYLINE: Reuters + +SECTION: Section A; Page 13; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 317 words + +DATELINE: ATLANTA, June 23 + +As the nation's population ages, the percentage of Americans who say they have problems from arthritis has increased, and it will rise even more over the next 25 years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said today. +The centers, an Atlanta-based branch of the Department of Health and Human Services, said in its weekly report on health issues that a 1990 survey of nearly 60,000 people found that 15 percent of all Americans, or about 37.9 million people, said they suffered from arthritis. That compared with about 14.5 percent of the population five years earlier. + About 3.4 percent of the people surveyed said their ability to engage in everyday activities was limited in some way by arthritis. According to the study, 49.4 percent of all Americans over 65 said they had arthritis. +By the year 2020, the centers estimated, about 18.2 percent of the population will suffer from arthritis, said Dr. Chad Helmick, chief of the epidemiology section of the centers' aging studies branch. +"This is purely a function of the aging of the population," Dr. Helmick said. "Older people tend to have arthritis more than younger people, and there will be more older people in 25 or 30 years." +Dr. Helmick said arthritis was defined for purposes of the study as encompassing a number of conditions, including "gout, lupus, carpal tunnel syndrome, tendinitis and bursitis," as well as medically diagnosed forms of rheumatoid arthritis. +"We wanted a definition that would include the conditions most people would understand as joint problems," he said. "What we excluded were back problems, tumors and injuries." +Women were more likely than men, by a margin of 17.1 percent to 12.5 percent, to report arthritis. And although the rates of arthritis for blacks and whites were roughly equal, blacks were more likely to report limitation in their activities resulting from arthritis. + +LOAD-DATE: June 24, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +228 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 26, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Volunteer Advocates Helping Those in Need + +BYLINE: By ELISABETH GINSBURG + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 7A; Column 5; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1478 words + +LIKE many Essex County homemakers, Janet Klein and Patricia Sherman spend their days tending to the needs of children, husbands and homes. But the women also spend several hours each week filing medical claim forms, resolving disputes with housing officials and hacking through the bureaucratic thickets that surround government entitlement programs. +Mrs. Klein and Mrs. Sherman are volunteers in the Friend Advocate program of the Community Health Law Project in East Orange. Each works with a single elderly person, helping to sort through paperwork and find solutions to the problems that sometimes accompany old age and infirmity. + The Friend Advocate program is one of several around the state that train volunteers to serve as advocates for and advisers to the poor, the elderly and the handicapped. Typically these volunteers help resolve problems with entitlement programs, housing or the legal system. +Rather than taking the place of counselors, social workers and lawyers, they provide additional services to the elderly. Often they are the human bridges that keep their clients from falling through the cracks in the social welfare system. + +Getting Control of Things + Mrs. Klein assists an alert, independent 82-year-old woman who lives in a building for the elderly in East Orange. In the last year she has had problems settling a dispute over heat in her apartment, handling medical bills and arranging for the home health aide she has needed since being hospitalized for heart problems. +The elderly woman, who insisted on not being identified, said Mrs. Klein, who has been a Friend Advocate since August 1993, has "gotten things under control." +Mrs. Klein said, "I feel passionate about helping elderly people." This passion translates into tenacity when problems arise. "I sift through it," Mrs. Klein said, alluding to the voluminous documentation required for Medicare. +A strong relationship has developed between the two, and Mrs. Klein said she admires the elderly woman. "She knows her rights," she added. +Mrs. Sherman assists a 61-year-old woman. Since their first meeting two years ago, Mrs. Sherman has helped the woman, a widow, determine what entitlement programs she is eligible for and helped explain changes in program rules. The woman recently received a diagnosis of cancer, and Mrs. Sherman said she was "trying to stay on top of checks and payments" for medical services. +Like Mrs. Klein, Mrs. Sherman said she and her client had developed "a real bond." +Volunteers in the Friend Advocate program, which started in 1984 in Essex County and 1985 in Union County, receive two nights of training and orientation, during which they are given information on programs for which elderly people may be eligible. Barbara Havlik, director of the Community Health Law Project, said that during the training, the instructors also try to "teach what it means to grow old." +New Friend Advocates start out armed with some knowledge, but both Mrs. Klein and Mrs. Sherman said they had learned a great deal on the job. +Once advocate and client are matched, "the job can be as big or as small as you want it to be," Mrs. Sherman said. The two women visit their clients once or twice a week, and both have taken their own young children along on occasion. Mrs. Sherman saidsuch visits have been "wonderful" for her 8-year-old daughter, Allison. +Mrs. Klein volunteered for the Friend Advocate program as a first step in a transition from full-time homemaking back to the work force. Next fall, she expects to begin studying law at Seton Hall University. Her experience as a Friend Advocate has persuaded her to set her sights on specializing on the legal problems of the elderly. +Melanie Morris of Lawrenceville is also planning a legal career. For three months, she has been a volunteer for Womanspace, a shelter for battered women in Mercer County. Working two days a week with Jesse Manning, Womanspace's Family Court liaison, Ms. Morris counsels women, and sometimes men, before they make scheduled court appearances to seek restraining orders against abusive spouses. +"When you are dealing with victims one on one, every situation is individual," she said. Most of the women referred to Ms. Morris cannot afford lawyers. +There are times, she said, when the plaintiffs with whom she speaks go to court determined to drop their complaints. In such cases, part of Ms. Morris's job is to determine that the individuals are sure of their decisions. +Clients with legal problems are referred to Womanspace's volunteer lawyers. In her capacity as advocate and adviser, Ms. Morris also tells women which agencies and organizations can provide specific kinds of help. Though she cannot speak for her clients in court, Ms. Morris can accompany them into the courtroom to provide moral support. +Ms. Morris expects to continue her volunteer work at Family Court until she leaves for an out-of-state law school next fall. Though she is not paid for her services, Ms. Morris said she felt as if she received "a pat on the back" whenever she was able to help a battered spouse. + +Citizen Advocacy Program + Another program that usees volunteer advocates is the Citizen Advocacy Program sponsored by the Arc of New Jersey, an organization that helps people with developmental disabilities. The people aided by the program, who are mentally retarded or have cerebral palsy or epilepsy, are counseled by paid social workers, but may also be assigned to volunteer advocates. +Cathilyn Pappano, coordinator of the Citizen Advocacy Program in Mercer County, has a staff of seven volunteers, some of whom are college students majoring in special education. Ms. Pappano said that while some advocacy problems are handled by the organization's professional staff, volunteers may also help resolve welfare problems and give information about legal rights in various situations. +Ms. Pappano remembers one instance in which an advocate intervened with the County Division of Social Services on behalf of a woman who had put an incorrect name on an application form and was having trouble getting the error corrected. +"Sometimes government agencies don't have a lot of experience dealing with people who have these disabilities," Ms. Pappano said. +Leo Slatus, 81, is a volunteer advocate who spends his time smoothing out bumps in the Medicare system. Mr. Slatus is a volunteer in the Chimes (Counseling on Health Insurance for Medicare Enrollees) program sponsored by the Senior Service Corporation of Orange. He advises and intercedes for people who have problems with Medicare, supplemental insurance policies and long-term-care insurance. +Mr. Slatus set up the program that evolved into Chimes 11 years ago at the Senior Service Corporation, a nonprofit social services agency in Orange, and he refers to it as "my baby." The program's 39 volunteers work at sites around Essex County including libraries and centers for the elderly. +Rosalie Karl, the director of Chimes, said the volunteers include "retired executives and C.P.A.'s, housewives and nurses." All receive four days of intensive training, after which they are certified for two years. Once trained, volunteers must commit to work for at least six months for a minimum of three hours a week. "Many do more," Ms. Karl said. +Ms. Karl said that the most common problem for Chimes clients are managing health care-related paperwork, selecting from among the 10 federally approved "medigap" insurance policies and making choices about whether to buy long-term-care insurance. Chimes volunteers offer an informed, impartial explanation of insurance alternatives. "All people need is someone to discuss things with them," Mr. Slatus said. +In a more direct advocacy role, Chimes volunteers also help clients with medical claims and coverage disputes. When a client is billed for medical charges in excess of those allowed by Medicare and cannot pay, Mr. Slatus or a fellow volunteer may call the client's doctor in an effort to resolve matters. +"We do not browbeat doctors," Mr. Slatus said, adding that after talking with the volunteers, some doctors are willing to limit their remuneration to the amount covered by Medicare. +When a Medicare claim is denied, Chimes volunteers may also file for a hearing to appeal the decision. At such a hearing, the volunteer appears before the judge to testify as to the specifics of the particular case. There are no guarantees as to the outcome of these hearings, but the volunteers can offer both legitimacy and impartiality to the proceedings, Mr. Slatus said. +Armed with knowledge, tenacity and time, volunteers can wade through paperwork and get through to bureaucrats. Mrs. Klein's client said she wished her friends and neighbors could find advocates like Mrs. Klein. "A lot of people are hurting," she said. + +LOAD-DATE: June 26, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +229 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 26, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Volunteers Enrich Students' Lives + +BYLINE: By MERRI ROSENBERG + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 15; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1471 words + +DATELINE: ARDSLEY + +THE 16 children clustered on the rug in Judy Berg's kindergarten class offered up an exuberant Hola! in response to Harriet Barnett's Spanish greeting one recent morning. As Mrs. Barnett reviewed colors and introduced the youngsters to the names of farm animals in Spanish, the students practiced their new words and squealed when chosen to imitate animal sounds. +This wasn't a regularly scheduled language class at the Concord Road Elementary School here, where formal foreign language instruction is not part of the official curriculum. The kindergarten students were benefiting from the fact that Mrs. Barnett had come to the class at the behest of Mrs. Berg, one of whose students, Matthew Bakal, had introduced the teacher to his grandmother. + "I had started an elementary language program like this in Dobbs Ferry, where I had been a foreign language teacher for 35 years," said Mrs. Barnett, whose four other grandchildren live in Ossining and New Jersey. "This is a comfortable fit for me. Matthew loves it, seeing Grandma in his classroom once a week, and I love it. I miss having every day in the classroom." +Mrs. Barnett's weekly half-hour Spanish lesson is a highlight for Mrs. Berg's students. "Mrs. Barnett came in as a guest reader, and I realized what a command she had of the group," Mrs. Berg said. "This class absolutely loves it. They have learned so much." + +A Testing Outlet + Nor is Mrs. Barnett alone in her volunteer efforts. Although it sometimes seems as if older residents and the schools have an adversarial relationship, there are many older adults who actively support the schools. Some are readers for library storytelling sessions; some assist in the classroom or tutor children who need extra help, and still others simply volunteer wherever needed. +Leon Weisburgh, a retired computer-industry executive, drives from Stamford twice a week to work with children at Dows Lane Elementary School in Irvington. Mr. Weisburgh is developing a computer program to teach children how to read, and he works with the Irvington first graders to test his program. +"I had reached the time in my life where I wanted to do something for society," Mr. Weisburgh said. "I wanted to teach children how to read." +Many other volunteers want to help children overcome obstacles. Herbert Nechin, a retired City College psychology professor who lives in Hartsdale, has been involved at the Springhurst Elementary School in Dobbs Ferry for two years. He devotes an hour a week to work with an individual student. He sometimes also substitutes for a teacher or helps in an office. + +A Source of Patience + "This year I am working with a very shy little girl in third grade," Professor Nechin said. "She has marvelous ideas but has trouble putting her ideas on paper. I help her with the mechanics of writing, and she has been making tremendous progress. I have not done anything, except to be there for her. Essentially, it's the relationship and attention that have caused this kid to bloom. +"I'm all for having seniors come into the classroom. Because of our experiences, we may have more ability to understand that a kid may have difficulty learning. Hopefully, we have more patience and we have time to devote one-on-one to a particular child. I've seen the way the children respond to Grandparents' Day here -- they love grandparents. I enjoy giving back something to these children. What I'm getting is the experience of being a grandparent that I haven't had yet." +For the schools, in many cases hard pressed to find parent volunteers since so many mothers are working, the addition of older adults is welcome. +"A lot of schools are realizing the benefit of having older people around," said Sarah A. Britton, director of the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program of Westchester. As part of a national volunteer program, this nonprofit White Plains-based organization helps match older adults with volunteer opportunities. +"More and more schools are realizing the benefits of intergenerational programs," Mrs. Britton said. "Many of the students don't have grandparents nearby, so this helps fill in the grandparent gap. Those who want to work with children feel that it keeps them young. It's particularly gratifying for them to work with kids, because they see the results right there." + +A Math Tutor in Yonkers + One of the R.S.V.P. volunteers, Mary Lokay of Hastings-on-Hudson, helped at the Hillside Elementary School even before she became older. "I had done volunteering for 17 years before I was a senior citizen," she said. "I will keep doing it until I get it right! I go in every Tuesday morning for two or three hours and help the children with reading or math. I love it -- the children are just so nice. It opens up a whole new world for me on Tuesday mornings. My parents had always said that you are not a whole person until you give part of yourself to others. The kids give so much back to us." +Another R.S.V.P. volunteer, Edna Weinger, has been a tutor at Public School 26 in Yonkers for 21 years. Mrs. Weinger, who did volunteer work with her husband until he died last fall, has continued to go to the school every week to offer help in math. "I enjoy being with children," Mrs. Weinger said. "Both my children taught math, and I think I'm a frustrated teacher. I get as much, or probably more, out of it as the children do." +In Mamaroneck, a program begun in March has paired older volunteers with first-grade students at the Mamaroneck Avenue Elementary School for weekly read-aloud sessions. "It's not to teach them to read," said Madeline Longo, the school's library teacher. "The idea is for them to have a literacy relationship in which both become enriched. Children love the security and the personal attention they get." +Some grandparents volunteer at their grandchildren's schools. "Now a lot of parents are working full-time and would love to volunteer but don't have the time," said Jean Schon of Edgemont, a licensed schoolteacher who does library work at the Concord Road school in Ardsley where 2 of her 10 grandchildren are in second grade. "My daughter used to do it when she worked three days in the city, but now she works five days a week and can't. Since her daughters go to Ardsley schools, I thought I'd help there, but every school needs help. I never see my granddaughters when I'm there, but I love to see the little kids here in the library, to see what they are reading and see how they are learning to do reports and research. I want to keep in touch with children and the teaching role." +Not every volunteer focuses on academics. Irene Gifford, who is not herself elderly, is the coordinator of the senior citizens program at the Hillside School in Hastings. "Our senior citizens do a sewing project with students in grades one through five," Mrs. Gifford said. "Every grade gets one turn a year. They make stuffed animals, like stuffed rabbits or fish, that the children get to keep. The senior citizens love it, and every class writes a thank-you note." +In the Rye Neck School District, Louis Intervallo is active in a number of projects in the district's three schools. Sometimes he is tapped to accompany a class on a field trip. During the football season, he helps run the snack stand, and during the Christmas holidays he helps younger children prepare seasonal baskets. +A valued volunteer at the F. E. Bellows Elementary School in Rye Neck is Fran Braiotta, cashier for pizza lunches on Wednesdays. Although she had been an active parent when her own five children attended the district's schools, it wasn't until her grandson started in the second grade that Mrs. Braiotta became involved in the pizza program. "I like to be around children," Mrs. Braiotta said. "Some of them call me Nana and come to me for a hug." +For many children, that kind of nurturing is exactly what they need -- and precisely what older adults can offer. Grace Mittleman, a retired hospital administrator, works with learning-disabled youngsters at the Dows Lane School in Irvington. "During the time the teacher is giving the lesson, I am helping with the children," Ms. Mittleman said. "The children don't have an individual who is there for them, first and foremost. A senior citizen can give them that more than anything else. The minute you show them attention, they do respond." +Maria Harris, the learning specialist at Dows Lane, added: "She's an emotional support to the kids and to me. She is a very gentle soul and takes signals beautifully. I'm academically demanding, and the days Grace comes in, they love the nurturing and the gentleness she provides. It has just been great. I am a strong supporter of having senior citizens help in the classroom. With their vast experience, they add a dimension to class that I can't." + +LOAD-DATE: June 26, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Harriet Barnett, one of many older adults offering time to schools, has kindergartners repeat Spanish phrases while playing patty-cake. Her partner is Matthew Bakal, grandson. (Susan Harris for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +230 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 27, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Some Contractors Say Special Help Is No Favor + +BYLINE: By THOMAS J. LUECK + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1012 words + +As a woman born in Puerto Rico, and as a construction contractor in the blighted blocks of the central Bronx, Olga Perez Martinez is a model of the kind of business owner that the city's affirmative-action contracting program was intended to help. +Forming her company, PrimAlto Development and Construction, in 1989, Ms. Perez Martinez started small and grew slowly. The company's first job was to renovate a bathroom. Then came a sprinkler system that it installed at a center for the elderly, then a small renovation for a medical center, budgeted at $300,000. + Now, because of the city's affirmative-action program, Ms. Perez Martinez could race into the big leagues of New York City construction by teaming up with larger white-owned construction companies that would be eager to use her status as a woman and minority-group member to win special consideration from the city. +But Ms. Perez Martinez is still moving slowly. +"I want to be in control," she said. "My biggest nightmare is to become involved in a typical joint venture for city work and just fade away behind some other entity." + +Fears for Independence + Participating in a joint venture is one of three ways that women- or minority-owned businesses can benefit under the city program. They can also bid to become prime contractors or subcontractors. But none of the options seems attractive to Ms. Perez Martinez. Her company is too small to win large prime contracts, and she says she fears that a subcontract or a joint venture would not give her enough control. +Her reservations about joint ventures are shared by many business people, who say that the program, while assuring that more work goes to firms owned by minorities and women, limits their independence. +Sometimes, they say, it also makes them vulnerable to financial exploitation by their business partners. +"The minority gets a piece of the work, but he can also find it difficult getting paid," said Leslie Levy Jr., a black contractor in Brooklyn, who owns the Livel Mechanical and Equipment Company. He is still smarting over his experience as subcontractor on a job during the late 1980's for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey when, he said, the white-male-owned prime contractor shortchanged him for his work. + +Intended to Forge Links + Mr. Levy, like Ms. Perez Martinez, is certified to take part in New York City's affirmative-action program. But he has decided not to. "I don't need the headaches," he said. +When the minority contracting program was created by Mayor David N. Dinkins, it was intended to forge strong links between small minority- and women-owned firms and far larger and more experienced companies owned by white men. +Under the rules of the program, large companies owned by white men can seek out joint-venture partners from among the hundreds of construction firms that are certified as minority- or women-owned, and receive special treatment by the city when bidding for city work, because of their smaller partners. The larger company need give only 35 percent of the work in the program to the smaller partner. +In exchange, the larger joint-venture partners are supposed to provide advice, equipment and other professional support to their minority and women colleagues. More important, the larger partners provide the financial resources and experience to obtain bonding, the insurance coverage that is required for large-scale construction and that normally cannot be obtained by small companies. + +Getting Their Own Bonding + Bonding insures that a project will meet its specifications when it is complete, and that the work will be performed on time. In what has always been something of a Catch-22 for small contractors, the private companies that provide bonding will do so only for contractors that are large enough to meet their criteria. But without the ability to obtain bonds, many small companies are unable to grow. +Therein lies another goal of the affirmative-action program: helping minority- and women-owned firms develop the experience and financial strength to get their own bonding. +But according to Ms. Perez Martinez, minority participants in the joint ventures, instead of gaining respect, are assumed to be totally reliant on the skills of their majority partners. "We are stigmatized," she said. +Other critics agree, saying that the program has only reinforced the traditional barriers that prevent women- and minority-owned contractors from competing directly with larger companies owned by white men. + +A Critical Threshold + "A joint venture almost inevitably leaves the minority firm at the end of a job without a track record that is useful, and with little more than pocket change to show for it," said Kathy Wylde, the director of the New York City Partnership's housing program, who for years has monitored the success and failure of women- and minority-owned construction firms. +Ms. Perez Martinez said her company reached a critical threshold last year when she decided to bid on a project to renovate 32 city-owned low-income apartments on Monroe Street, just a few blocks from her office in the central Bronx. +But the project, budgeted at $1.3 million, required that its contractor be bonded, and Ms. Perez Martinez could not qualify on her own. So she formed a joint venture, but did so in her own way. +She approached a plumbing contractor in Queens who qualified for bonding. But she insisted on being the managing partner on the project, that the work and profits be split evenly between the two companies, and that the finances be managed through a joint bank account. + +Only if She Is Boss + Now, with the work nearly complete, Ms. Perez Martinez says she is seeking other large projects and will consider other joint ventures. But only if she is in charge. +"At some point every woman or minority business owner has to ask themselves a question," she said. "Are they going to make it by relying on somebody else or be independent business people?" +"I've decided," she added. "I'll make it on my own." + +LOAD-DATE: June 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Olga Perez Martinez, right, president of PrimAlto Development and Construction, in an apartment in the Bronx that her company is renovating. (John Sotomayor/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +231 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 29, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Eating Well + +BYLINE: By Marian Burros + +SECTION: Section C; Page 4; Column 1; Living Desk + +LENGTH: 1544 words + +WHO can forget the calcium craze of just a few years ago: silhouettes of old women with dowager's hump, caused by osteoporosis, were used to scare everyone into taking more calcium, and manufacturers were fortifying everything from tea to cookies with calcium. +In fact, most people did forget or were distracted by something else. Since then, nothing has changed. No one has announced that Americans are suddenly getting enough calcium and have nothing to worry about. + On the contrary. At the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., earlier this month, a panel of 32 experts on calcium intake concluded that the current recommended daily allowances are inadequate for teen-agers, men who are middle-aged and older, and all women. +They suggested that the recommended daily allowances, which are set by the National Academy of Sciences, be increased. Women between the ages of 25 and 50, for example, should consume 1,000 milligrams of calcium daily instead of the currently recommended 800 milligrams, and women over 50 should consume 1,500 milligrams (1,000 if they are taking estrogen) instead of 800. +The experts also said that men between 51 and 65 should get 1,000 milligrams instead of 800 and that men over 65 should take 1,500 milligrams instead of 800. +These levels of calcium are necessary in part, the experts say, because excessive amounts of protein and sodium in the average American diet increase the amount of calcium lost in urine. +More than 25 million people, predominantly women, have osteoporosis, in which the bones lose density and become brittle. Preventing it is relatively simple: get enough calcium, especially before the age of 30. Everyone starts to lose calcium in the 30's (and for women, the loss increases markedly during and after menopause). Although losses cannot be replaced, continuing to consume calcium throughout life can prevent even greater loss. +Most people turn to the easy fix: calcium supplements. Except for dairy products and broccoli, most other significant sources of calcium -- kale, collard greens, sardines, okra -- are not common in the majority of American diets. +Some people turn away from dairy products because of concern about fat intake. But now that low-fat and nonfat dairy products are as common as whole-milk products, it's easier to increase calcium consumption through foods people like to eat. +Among products that provide significant amounts of calcium without serious loss of taste are skim milk and milk containing 1 percent fat; low-fat and nonfat buttermilk; nonfat yogurt, plain and with fruit; reduced-fat ricotta, and reduced-fat sour cream. +That's the theory behind the accompanying recipes: a risotto made with Swiss chard and Parmigiano Reggiano; spicy pork with tofu and broccoli; potato salad dressed with buttermilk instead of mayonnaise, and pasta with portobello mushrooms and a ginger cream sauce. + +Risotto With Swiss Chard + Total time: 30 minutes + + 4 to 5 cups vegetable or chicken stock, the no-salt-added variety + 1 tablespoon olive oil + 1/2 cup chopped onion + 1 cup arborio rice + 1/2 cup dry white wine + 1/2 pound Swiss chard, washed well, trimmed of stems, leaves cut into strips + 1 teaspoon fennel seeds + 1/2 cup coarsely grated Parmigiano Reggiano. +1. In a medium pot, heat the stock until it simmers, and keep it hot. +2. Heat the oil in a heavy nonstick pot, add the onion, and saute over medium-high heat until the onion softens. +3. Stir in the rice, and mix well. Stir in the wine. Cook until the wine has almost evaporated. +4. Add 1 cup of the hot stock to the rice. Reduce the heat to medium-low, and cook the rice until most of the liquid has evaporated, stirring often. +5. Add more stock, a cup at a time, until the rice is almost tender. +6. Stir in the Swiss chard, fennel seeds and 1 more cup of the stock. Continue cooking and stirring until the chard is completely wilted and the rice is tender but firm. Stir in the cheese, and serve. +Yield: 2 servings. +Approximate nutritional analysis per serving: 640 calories, 20 grams fat, 40 milligrams cholesterol, 540 milligrams sodium, 25 grams protein, 85 grams carbohydrate. + +Bean Curd and Spicy Pork + Total time: 20 minutes + + 1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil + 2 cloves garlic + 1/2 teaspoon hot pepper flakes + 2 tablespoons coarsely grated fresh ginger + 3/4 pound lean ground pork + 8 cups broccoli florets (about 2 pounds whole broccoli) + 1 pound firm tofu made with calcium sulfate, drained and cut into 1/2-inch cubes + 1 cup chicken stock, the no-salt-added variety + 1/4 cup dry Sherry + 3 tablespoons fermented black beans + 2 teaspoons sugar + 4 teaspoons soy sauce + 1/4 teaspoon salt + 2 teaspoons cornstarch. +1. In a nonstick skillet, heat the oil, and saute the garlic, pepper flakes and ginger over medium heat for 30 seconds, stirring. +2. Add the pork, and stir to break up, cooking until the pork browns. +3. Add the broccoli, and stir well. +4. Stir in the tofu, stock, Sherry, black beans, sugar and soy sauce. Cover, and cook over medium-low heat for about 2 minutes, until the broccoli is tender but still crisp. +5. Mix the cornstarch with a little water to make a smooth paste. Stir into the skillet, and cook over low heat until the sauce thickens slightly. Season with salt. Serve over cooked rice. +Yield: 4 servings. +Approximate nutritional analysis per serving: 410 calories, 20 grams fat, 40 milligrams cholesterol, 625 milligrams sodium, 40 grams protein, 20 grams carbohydrate. + +Buttermilk Potato Salad + Total time: 20 minutes, plus cooking time for the potatoes. This will depend on their size. + + 3 pounds new potatoes + 1 cup low-fat buttermilk + 1 medium red onion, about 6 ounces + 1tablespoon caraway seeds + 4 teaspoons Dijon mustard + 2 tablespoons lemon juice + 2 tablespoons grated lemon rind + 1/2 teaspoon salt + Freshly ground black pepper to taste. +1. Scrub the potatoes, and boil until tender but firm. (For large potatoes, this will be about 45 minutes.) Drain. Do not peel. +2. Combine the remaining ingredients in a bowl. +3. Cool the potatoes slightly, and cut into 1-inch cubes. Stir gently into the buttermilk dressing. The salad can be eaten immediately but will be more flavorful if refrigerated for an hour or overnight. +Yield: 8 servings. +Approximate nutritional analysis per serving: 200 calories, 1 gram fat, 1 milligram cholesterol, 240 milligrams sodium, 5 grams protein, 45 grams carbohydrate. + +Pasta With Portobello + Mushrooms +Total time: 20 to 25 minutes + + 1 pound pappardelle or fettuccine, fresh or dried + 2 tablespoons olive oil + 6 large shallots, finely minced + 1/4 cup coarsely grated ginger + 1 pound portobello mushrooms or any assortment of wild and common white mushrooms (champignons de Paris), cleaned, trimmed and sliced + 1 1/4 cups reduced-fat ricotta cheese + 1 1/4 cups nonfat plain yogurt + 1 tablespoon cornstarch + 1/4 teaspoon salt + Freshly ground black pepper to taste + 1/4 cup chopped parsley + 1/2 cup coarsely grated Parmigiano Reggiano. +1. Cook the pasta in boiling water. +2. Heat the oil in a large skillet, and saute the shallots, ginger and mushrooms until the mushrooms soften and release their liquid. +3. Blend the ricotta and yogurt thoroughly. Then, thoroughly blend a little of the yogurt mixture with the cornstarch to form a smooth paste. Spoon the cornstarch mixture into the remaining yogurt-ricotta mixture, and blend thoroughly. +4. Reduce the heat under the mushrooms to very low. Stir in the yogurt mixture, and cook until the sauce is warmed, but not hot. If it gets hot, it will separate. +5. Season with salt and pepper, and spoon over the pasta. Sprinkle with parsley. Serve with cheese. +Yield: 4 servings. +Approximate nutritional analysis per serving: 710 calories, 20 grams fat, 12 milligrams cholesterol, 875 milligrams sodium, 35 grams protein, 105 grams carbohydrate. + +Coffee Drinks And Calories +HEALTH-CONSCIOUS people who think that ordering a caffe mocha or a latte instead of ice cream or cake saves calories and fat while adding to their calcium intake are only partly correct. +When it comes to calories and fat, they are in for a shock. A survey of more than 50 varieties of coffee-based drinks from Starbucks, Gloria Jean's Coffee Bean and other coffee chains found that a large caffe mocha typically contains about 400 calories and 30 grams of fat, which is 100 more calories and three times the fat of a wedge of devil's food cake or 180 more calories and twice the fat of a serving of Haagen-Dazs superpremium ice cream. +The survey is reported in the July issue of The Tufts University Diet and Nutrition Letter. +The good news is that the amount of fat in drinks like these can be reduced considerably by using skim milk or 2 percent milk instead of whole milk. For example, the study found that a large cappuccino from Au Bon Pain has only 156 calories and 6 grams of fat when it is made with 2 percent milk. +As for the calcium, the experts say that drinking coffee is associated with reduced absorption of calcium. But adding one or two tablespoons of milk to the coffee is an easy way of compensating. Just don't use whole milk. + +LOAD-DATE: June 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +232 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 30, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE: SPENDING LIMITS; +House Panel Backs Health Cost Controls + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 11; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1093 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 29 + +The House Ways and Means Committee has endorsed legislation that would, for the first time, set annual limits on health spending for the nation as a whole and for each state. +If any state exceeded its limit, the Federal Government would enforce strict price controls on doctors, hospitals, prescription drugs and the rest of the private health care industry in that state. + The cost controls are part of a comprehensive measure to overhaul the nation's health care system. The bill seeks to slow the increase in per capita private health spending so it grows no faster than the economy as a whole; in recent years, it has been growing nearly twice as fast. +Other Congressional committees working on health care legislation have also included measures to slow the growth of health spending. But the Ways and Means Committee is one of the most influential, and its proposal is the most extensive. +The committee approved these cost controls on Tuesday over strenuous objections from the American Hospital Association and the American Medical Association, which said the new regulations would freeze in place all the flaws and inefficiencies of the existing health care system. + +Hospitals' Objection + Michael J. Rock, a lobbyist for the American Hospital Association, noted that the bill would slice up the nation's health care spending into 10 categories and set separate budget goals for each. This, he said, runs counter to trends revolutionizing the health care industry. Under these trends, consumers and employers typically pay a lump sum to an insurance company or a group of doctors or hospitals for all the care needed by a person or a group of people. +But supporters of the measure maintained that doctors and hospitals would not work seriously to keep costs down unless they faced the possibility of price controls. +Another potential problem is that the Federal Government has only rough estimates of health spending in each state. Under current law, the Government is not required to tabulate spending by state, and it has had no pressing need for such data. +But consumer groups and labor unions support the cost controls as precisely the type of shock therapy needed for the health care system. + +Medicare as Model + The price controls the committee envisions for the private health care industry are modeled after techniques already used to pay doctors and hospitals treating patients under Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for the elderly and the disabled. Representative Pete Stark, the California Democrat who heads the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, said these formulas had effectively slowed the growth of Medicare, a contention many Republicans vehemently disputed. +President Clinton proposed a different type of controls on health spending. Under his proposal, the Government would limit annual increases in health insurance premiums, on the assumption that insurers would then force doctors and hospitals to accept lower payments than they would otherwise get. +The Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, headed by Edward M. Kennedy, follows the approach recommended by Mr. Clinton. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, chairman of the Finance Committee, wants to set annual goals for increases in private health insurance premiums, but he would let Congress decide at a later date what steps should be taken if the actual increases exceeded the goals. +In the Ways and Means Committee, no aspect of health care legislation has generated fiercer debate than the plan for spending limits and "standby price controls." +Representative Michael A. Andrews, a moderate Democrat from Texas, proposed eliminating the entire cost-control regime. All 14 Republicans supported his effort, but he lost by 20 to 18. The failure of the proposal had the effect of endorsing the cost controls in the original bill, which is expected to come to a vote on Thursday. +The committee's acting chairman, Representative Sam M. Gibbons of Florida, won over a few wavering Democrats by giving Congress a chance to re-examine the issue in the year 2000. But if Congress did nothing, and if health spending in any state exceeded the goal for that state, then the price controls would take effect in that state in 2001. +Representative Nancy L. Johnson, Republican of Connecticut, described the spending limits as Draconian and said no industrial country had curbed health spending as severely as the bill would require. +But Gerald M. Shea, director of employee benefits at the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said a regulatory mechanism, including the threat of price controls, was needed to force providers to bargain seriously with the consumers and purchasers of health care. +"Even with all the competition in the world," Mr. Shea said, "we couldn't get costs in line as fast as we need for the good of the economy" if there was no threat of Government regulation. + +H.M.O.'s Included + Mr. Shea said his only regret was that the price controls in the Ways and Means measure could not take effect before 2001. Liberal Democrats agreed to defer price controls to that year to placate more conservative lawmakers and economists who asserted that the cost goals could be met by encouraging competition among insurance companies, doctors, hospitals and drug companies. +Under the Ways and Means bill, health maintenance organizations would also be subject to the price controls. The maximum premiums would initially be computed with the same formula used to calculate Medicare payments to H.M.O.'s enrolling elderly people. +Health maintenance organizations describe current Medicare payments as inadequate. Karen M. Ignagni, president of the Group Health Association of America, which represents 500 H.M.O.'s with 37 million members, said "it would be devastating" to use a similar formula in calculating payments to health maintenance organizations for private patients. Private patients account for the vast majority of the 45 million people in health maintenance organizations. Medicare and Medicaid number fewer than five million. +Representative Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, observed that several states had been regulating hospital rates for years, with none of the dire consequences foreseen by Republicans. +But Richard J. Davidson, president of the American Hospital Association, said state officials demonstrated much greater sensitivity to local concerns and the problems of particular hospitals than could be expected of Federal officials responsible for a vast national program. + +LOAD-DATE: June 30, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: As the House Ways and Means Committee moved toward a vote on its health care bill yesterday, Representatives Michael A. Andrews, left, Robert T. Matsui, center, and Dan Rostenkowski conferred. (Michael Geissinger for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +233 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 1, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE: THE LEGISLATION; +Bill Passed by Panel Would Open Medicare to Millions of Uninsured People + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 12; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 977 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 30 + +The bill approved today by the House Ways and Means Committee would open Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for the elderly, to millions of people who have no other source of insurance. If the proposal is adopted, Congressional experts say, nearly half of all Americans will be enrolled in Medicare within a decade. +The proposed new program, known as Part C of Medicare, was conceived by Representative Pete Stark of California, chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, who has long favored "Medicare for all" as the best way to guarantee coverage for all Americans. + "Medicare is simple: no new rules, no new bureaucracy," Mr. Stark said in an interview today. +But many Republicans and some Democrats, including some in the Clinton Administration, say the Ways and Means Committee bill relies too heavily on the Government to cover the uninsured. They say it would be better to help people buy private insurance, rather than creating a new Federal health insurance program as part of Medicare. + +Emphasis on 'Private' + In his State of the Union Message last January, President Clinton said he wanted to guarantee every American "private health insurance that can never be taken away." White House officials emphasize the word "private." +The Ways and Means Committee bill would generally require employers to buy insurance for their workers or to pay premiums for those who enroll in the new Part C of Medicare. +The new program would be open to part-time, temporary and seasonal employees, full-time employees of companies with 100 or fewer workers, people who are not employed, people receiving welfare benefits and people with incomes below certain specified levels. Most Medicaid recipients would be transferred to the new program. +Part C of Medicare would start in 1998. In that year, it would be open to people with incomes up to twice the poverty level. In 2003 and later, people with incomes up to 2.4 times the poverty level could qualify. The poverty level, now $14,764 for a family of four, is adjusted each year to reflect changes in consumer prices. + +Health Coverage and Costs + People in the new Medicare program could obtain a wide range of medical services, including prescription drugs and mental health care. Employers would be required to pay 80 percent of the premiums for their workers. People enrolling in the new program would have to pay the remaining 20 percent themselves, but could get Federal subsidies if they had low incomes. +The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 55 million people will participate in the new program in 1998 if the Stark proposal becomes law, and it sees total enrollment rising to 95 million in 2004. The Government expects that there will be 42 million people in the regular Medicare program in 2004. So 137 million people, accounting for nearly half of the nation's total projected population, would be in Medicare in 2004. +The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cost of the new Part C of Medicare would rise from $175 billion in 1998 to $332 billion in 2004. A significant portion of this money, more than $50 billion a year, would be spent under current law for hospital care and doctors' services to Medicaid recipients. +Medicaid covers fewer than half of the nation's poor people. States have wide discretion in setting eligibility rules for Medicaid and welfare, and in many states the income ceiling for these programs is far below the poverty level. In addition, single people with no children have difficulty getting Medicaid in many states. + +'Feasible' With 'Uncertainty' + Joseph P. Newhouse, a professor of health policy at Harvard University, said the proposed Part C of Medicare was "an administratively feasible way to move toward universal coverage." But he added, "There is great uncertainty about how much it will cost and how many people will go into the program." +Many small businesses provide some health insurance to their workers now. Under the bill, Mr. Newhouse said, small businesses would be free to drop such insurance and enroll their workers in Medicare. +Representative Peter Hoagland, Democrat of Nebraska, said he could not support the new Part C of Medicare because it would become a huge government program. Moreover, he said, Medicare has done a poor job of controlling costs, and the new program would pay doctors and hospitals with the same fee schedules and formulas used by Medicare. +But Mr. Stark contended that Medicare had controlled costs much better than private insurers. +Gail E. Shearer, manager of policy analysis at Consumers Union, said the Ways and Means Committee bill would help many people who now had no health insurance. But she added, "We are concerned that there will be a multi-tier health care system, and Part C of Medicare could become a lower tier, for low-income people and high-risk consumers." + +Concern Over 'Risk Pool' + Representative Jim McDermott, a Democrat from Washington State who favors a "single payer" system of national health insurance financed with taxes, expressed similar concerns. He said Part C of Medicare would attract large numbers of people needing costly medical care who had no jobs and no connection to the labor force. Indeed, some of these people are unable to work because of sickness or disability. +From an actuary's point of view, Mr. McDermott said, it would be difficult to design "a worse risk pool." +The Senate has expressed little interest in expanding Medicare to cover the poor and the uninsured. Democrats trying to pass a comprehensive health care bill this year are doing all they can to win the votes of Senators like John B. Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana, and Dave Durenberger, Republican of Minnesota, who want to stimulate competition in the private health care market with a minimum of new government spending. + +LOAD-DATE: July 1, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Chart: "HIGHLIGHTS: The Ways and Means Proposal" + +MEDICAID RECIPIENTS and the uninsured could enroll in a new Part C of Medicare. + +EMPLOYERS who enroll their workers in Medicare would be required to pay 80 percent of the cost: 84 cents an hour for every hour a single employee works, $1.63 an hour for a single parent and $2.22 for a married worker with children. + +SMALL BUSINESSES would be eligible for subsidies, allowing them to pay as little as 42 cents an hour for health insurance for a single worker. + +THE GOVERNMENT would set annual limits on health spending for the nation as a whole and for each state. The Government would impose Medicare-style limits on payments to doctors and hospitals in any state that exceeded its limit. + +PRIVATE INSURANCE PLANS would have to provide at least the same level of benefits as Medicare Part C. Elderly people would gain prescription drug coverage. + +FINANCING would come in part from a gradual rise in the current 24-cents-a-pack Federal tax on cigarettes, to 69 cents by 1999. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +234 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 3, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: CHELSEA; +Co-op Learns to Age Gracefully + +BYLINE: By BRUCE LAMBERT + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 6; Column 5; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 379 words + +Disoriented people roaming the halls. Flooding from faucets that were turned on and then forgotten. Residents with unpaid rent bills -- and uncashed Social Security checks. A naked woman wandering onto a roof and freezing to death, apparently unable to find her way back inside. +These incidents took place at the Penn South housing cooperative in the 1980's. Why? Penn South had become something it was not intended to be: housing for the elderly. + It happened gradually. When the 10-building complex opened in 1962 along Eighth Avenue in the 20's, its first occupants were working people, without a single retiree. But the low-cost apartments proved so popular that many residents settled in for life. With the residents' advancing years came physical and mental impairment, along with growing isolation as spouses and friends passed away. +In 1986, recognizing the changing needs, the co-op's officers started a program for older residents that has become a model for other sites. It arranged for companion visits, medical care, home attendants, food delivery and other services to keep people functioning independently at home. +Citing Penn South's example, the State Legislature appropriated $1 million last month to encourage such efforts. Foundation grants are helping to start NORC programs -- the acronym stands for naturally occurring retirement community -- at the Warbasse Houses in Coney Island and Co-op Village on the Lower East Side. Penn South has relied on donations from the co-op, residents, charities and joint efforts with Selfhelp, the Jewish Home and Hospital and Hunter College. +Today, 75 percent of the co-op's 7,000 residents are older than 65, and in that older group the average age is 82. Most are women living alone. +"Things can be tough," said Karen Straus, a social worker at Penn South. "It's not always the golden years." +"People don't want to leave where they're living," said Ms. Straus, who directs the program's paid staff of 10, plus dozens of volunteers. +"I don't know what I would have done without the senior center," said Elaine Kagle, who is 74. "The nurse comes once a month for my injection, and I need my blood pressure taken once in a while." She remains active, she said. "I'm very happy here." B. L. + +LOAD-DATE: July 6, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Map of Manhattan showing location of Penn South Housing Cooperative. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +235 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 3, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Help in Knowing What to Ask a Lawyer + +BYLINE: By PENNY SINGER + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 8; Column 3; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1383 words + +IT was hit and run. He caught me off guard. I had no inclination that he wanted a divorce. I was totally unprepared. After all, he was my husband, and we had been married for 20 years." +The speaker, a professional woman in her early 50's who agreed to be interviewed only on condition that she not be identified for fear that her husband would sue her for libel, was still obviously troubled over the circumstances of her divorce, which had occurred several years before. She continued, "What was ironic is that my ex-husband is a matrimonial lawyer. He knew every trick in the book. I was in a daze, but I knew about LAW, and they and Diane White, saved my sanity. + LAW, the acronym for Legal Awareness of Westchester, is a nonprofit agency that acts as a clearinghouse for information on legal issues concerning family law, elder law and, most recently, a legal information service for teen-age parents. +The information is disseminated through several programs like the free telephone counseling service that offers callers legal information from trained counselors. The service receives more than 300 telephone requests for help every month. The organization also conducts workshops and seminars, including elder law seminars, which are held every month, and bimonthly legal clinics, which have matrimonial lawyers as guest speakers fielding questions from the audience. Some workshops carry a fee; otherwise, contributions are welcome. The telephone number is 472-2371. Counseling is offered Mondays through Thursdays from 9 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. +"I was very impressed with the lawyers at the clinics I attended," said the former wife of the divorce lawyer. "I could see that they were strong advocates of women. Women are very vulnerable going through a divorce, and too often lawyers seize this as an opportunity to take advantage of them sexually as well as financially. The lawyers at the LAW clinic covered such topics as distribution of property, child custody and support and alimony and debt, and they were generous with their time and energy answering all sorts of questions. Divorce is a minefield. They helped me with legal issues, which helped me sort out my options." + +Seminars and Counseling + Diane G. White, the group's founder and its executive director, said LAW has offered educational seminars and telephone counseling to more than 50,000 people since its founding in 1980. In addition to the family law programs, the elder law program offers information about legal issues of special interest to older people. +"We are the only group of our kind that helps people make informed choices in a growing, complex legal environment," Ms. White said. "And the organization started almost spontaneously. What happened is that I was at a meeting of Women of Westchester some years ago when it was the first woman's group in the county. We were asked to suggest areas that women especially needed help with. And I mentioned legal services. Ninety percent of the women at that meeting agreed that it was a top priority." +The response was so overwhelming, she said, that she was inspired to start Legal Awareness for Women. Several years later LAW evolved into Legal Awareness of Westchester, a name that better describes the group's services, which are available to everyone. + +Some Constant Complaints + Although LAW legal information telephone counselors are trained to give data related to divorce, equitable distribution of assets, child support, custody, domestic violence and the area of law that affects those older than 55 like health-care decisions, financial management, trusts, wills and estates, Ms. White emphasized that the organization is not engaged in the practice of law and that the information offered is not a substitute for legal counsel. +"Our function is to make sure people have access to the information they need to deal with lawyers," she said. "Take matrimonial law, for example. Excessive fees are a constant problem women complain about. Many are overcharged by their lawyers. Another common complaint is that they are not properly billed and not getting answers to their questions. +"And many are upset because they feel they are not being treated with respect by their lawyers. The legal information we give them focuses on things such as how to interview a lawyer, what questions to ask, the difference between a consultation and interview and the importance of the retainer agreement. That is so important that it's a subject at every seminar we run. There is literally no other place where people can get information on how to effectively deal with lawyers." +The benefits that come from being informed about the law are many, said a woman who after 42 years of marriage initiated divorce proceedings against her husband. + +Lack of Economic Independence + "Although I had already engaged a lawyer before I contacted LAW, the group was a tremendous help to me," said Dorothy W., who agreed to be interviewed on condition that her last name not be used. "It was at the seminars and through counseling over the phone that I learned how to talk to my lawyer and what questions to ask him and what I should expect him to do for me. And with the information, I kept him on his toes." +Observing that many women of her generation, who were married in the 1940's, were trapped in bad marriages because they had no economic independence, she said she was grateful that she had always worked. "It was my small pension that sustained me and gave me a measure of economic freedom that allowed me to proceed with the divorce," she said. "Although my former husband was verbally abusive to me for years, it still took a lot of courage for me to get a divorce. LAW helped me with advice on how to put my life together. I went back to school, got a master's in gerontology and eventually got a full-time job when I was in my early 60's." +Ms. White added that many women seeking advice from LAW are victims of mental violence. +"Husbands, by not allowing their wives to work, keep them under house arrest," Ms. White said. "We encourage women contemplating divorce to take courses and develop skills -- especially computer skills -- so eventually they can support themselves." +Every situation is different, though, she said, adding: "Every day we see a flood of calls from people who need advice. Seniors looking for information on living wills and health-care proxies and estate law. A mother will ask us if she could take her child out of state to protect her from an abusive father. The demand has increased tremendously over the years, but we have been forced to work with an ever smaller staff, now down to two full-time and two part-time counselors, and we've gone to a four-day week because of our severe funding problems." +Christine McCabe, president of LAW's board of directors, said nonprofit agencies have been especially hard hit by cutbacks in grants and government financing, +"This year has been the worst in LAW's history for funding, and yet the need is greater than ever," Ms. McCabe said. "We could operate seven days a week, and that would be barely enough for all the telephone counseling requests we get. It is remarkable to me that LAW, with a budget of less than $100,000, still manages to help more than 5,000 people a year. Diane White and her staff are remarkable. She has always worked for reforms in the law and has been an advocate for changes to bring about the passage of the 1980 Equitable Distribution Law, which established that marriage is an economic partnership. It is going to be very hard to replace her." +Ms. White, who is in her 70's, is retiring from the agency she organized 15 years ago. Last week she was honored at LAW's annual fund-raising event at the County Courthouse. +"Oh, I imagine I will miss my work, but I will still be around to act as a consultant," she said. "I really think it is time for a younger person to take over. My last hurrah is the Legal Information For Teens program, going by the acronym LIFT. It is beamed at young women who are pregnant and those men and women who are teen-age parents. The program has the support of the schools and has been given in many Westchester high schools. I think it's a good example of how LAW continues to change and grow." + +LOAD-DATE: July 3, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Legal Awareness of Westchester sponsors seminars. Diane White and Paul J. Noto, a lawyer, led a recent divorce clinic. (Lenore Davis for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +236 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 6, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Sports of The Times; +A Soccer Shootout in The Shadows + +BYLINE: By DAVE ANDERSON + +SECTION: Section B; Page 9; Column 1; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 753 words + +DATELINE: EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. + +THEY were wearing all forms and all shades of green, white and red. Large flags were wrapped like a serape around their shoulders. Small flags were perched on the tall crowns of straw sombreros. Some had the colors painted on their faces, many on dozens of different T-shirts. Others were parading with red and green lettering on white bedsheets. +"Viva Mexico," one banner shouted. + In the hours before yesterday's World Cup game between Mexico and Bulgaria, south of the border in the parking lots outside Giants Stadium suddenly was south of the Vince Lombardi service area on the Nueva Jersey Turnpike. +Some had come from Mexico City on a $1,700 package tour. Others had driven in from all over the Northeast and the Midwest. +This is what the World Cup is all about: a true World's Fair of ethnic loyalty. Young parents with their kids. Elderly people holding hands. Teen-age soccer players posing for a team photo against a backdrop of World Cup logos. +"Ole, ole, ole, ole," they were singing. "Ole, ole." +Oddly enough, the Bulgarian colors were the same. Their flag had thick horizontal stripes of white, green and red. Mexico's had thick vertical stripes of green, white and red. But almost all the flags in the crowd were Mexican. +Maybe a thousand Bulgarians were among the 71,030 aficionados but few were obvious. Even when Hristo Stoichkov quickly put the Europeans ahead, 1-0, the groan drowned out the cheers. And when Alberto Garcia Aspe scored, the Mexicans were singing again. +But after 120 minutes (plus the injury time that included about six minutes for a broken goal net), the qualifier for Sunday's quarterfinal here against defending champion Germany would come down to what any American could appreciate: a penalty-kick shootout. +No passing, no tripping. Just five players from each team taking alternate shots from the white penalty spot 12 yards in front of the goal that is 8 yards wide and 8 feet high, with the goaltender not allowed to move from the goal line until the ball is kicked. +Near midfield now during the brief intermission, Boris Mikhailov sprawled on his back on the grass, a towel over his face. +"I was trying to switch on," the Bulgarian goalkeeper would say later. "Trying to exclude myself from the surroundings." +In the twilight, the sun had dropped behind the western rim of Giants Stadium as Jorge Campos, in his yellow-lime-vermillion-orange-and-black outfit that resembled a designer parrot, talked to his Mexican teammates. When the players turned toward the shadows across the east goal, his amigos were chanting, "Campos, Campos." Silently, one Bulgarian was seen crossing himself. +Mexico would shoot first. Garcia Aspe booted the ball high over the net, then covered his face with his hands. Campos embraced him. +On the goal line now, Campos crouched as Krasimir Balakov kicked to his left. Campos leaped and deflected the ball wide of the net. +Marcellino Bernal's low shot was blocked by Mikhailov, but Boncho Guentchev drilled the ball high into the Mexican net for a 1-0 lead. Only three shots remained for each team. When Jorge Rodriguez's low kick was blocked by Mikhailov, the groan could be heard in Acapulco. +"I was just looking at the foot of the players," Mikhailov, who wore a purple-and-black outfit, said later. "I try to move in that direction." +Moments later, Daniel Borimirov lifted Bulgaria into a 2-0 lead before Claudio Suarez scored. But now, if Yordan Lechkov scored, Bulgaria's 3-1 lead would be insurmountable. Quickly, he drilled the ball and the net sagged. +Bulgaria, a small Balkan nation that borders Romania, had won and Mexico had lost. So had all those Mexican voices that had been singing in the cantina. +In the Bulgarian celebration, Stoichkov, their only goal-scorer yesterday, was observed comforting Jorge Campos -- a sense of sportsmanship that is not always seen in the "just win, baby" American cauldron. +"I think he is a great goalkeeper and he should have his dignity in helping the Mexican cause," the Bulgarian said. "They're all my colleagues and I have respect for them." +Bulgaria joined six other European nations in the round of eight: Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Romania and Sweden. The only non-European nation still alive is Brazil. But if Bulgaria is to advance to next Wednesday's semifinals at Giants Stadium, it must upset Germany. Not that Boris Mikhailov is intimidated by Germany's reputation. +"Germany plays soccer," the Bulgarian goalkeeper said. "And so do we." + +LOAD-DATE: July 6, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Jorge Campos (Barton Silverman) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +237 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 10, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: BROOKLYN; +The Liberation of 'Pigeon Park'? A Neighborhood Divided + +BYLINE: By DENNIS HEVESI + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 9; Column 3; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 428 words + +The cobblestone triangle where Fourth and Fifth Avenues merge in Bay Ridge is officially called Fort Hamilton Memorial Park, dedicated to the fallen of the First World War. But over the years, as elderly people met there during the day and fed the local fowl, a new name came into common use -- Pigeon Park. +In the late 1980's, however, other folks began congregating in Pigeon Park at night. And many residents were not pleased. + "The last stop on the R train is right there," said Martin Golden, president of the Fifth Avenue Board of Trade, representing about 500 businesses in the community. "Vagrants are forced out at the stop and spend the night there. It's like a summer resort for the homeless, the same people year after year." +In addition, Mr. Golden said, drugs were being sold in the park and alcohol was consumed. "It's supposed to be for the community, but people are fearful," he said. +The Board of Trade decided to adopt Pigeon Park. And at the urging of City Councilman Sal F. Albanese, a $430,000 rehabilitation of the park was included in the city's capital budget. The work, including new benches, restored cobblestones and landscaping, is expected to be completed by next June. +Well and good. Then last month, the Parks Department erected an 8-foot-high fence around the park perimeter. Lorelei's Restaurant, a member of the business group, assumed the tasks of opening the park and closing it at sundown each day, as well as keeping it clean. And Harbor Car Service agreed to pay for lighting. +Some in the neighborhood, though, have not been happy with the efforts. The fence, they complain, is unsightly. And although the manager of Community Board 10, Mary Sempepos, is in favor of having Pigeon Park adopted by the business group, she said the board had not been notified about the plans. +Nicholas Kastanis-Tsarnis, a member of the community board, said the chain-link fence "looks horrendous, like some kind of prison camp, and the park's dirtier now because the wind blows papers and other garbage against it." Mr. Kastanis-Tsarnis also voiced concern that the fence will merely "push the druggies and alcoholics" to other parks in the area. +An assistant to Councilman Albanese, Michael Behlen, agreed that the fence isn't "esthetically compatible with the neighborhood, but it does provide security until funds become available for a nicer looking wrought-iron enclosure." +Said Mrs. Sempepos: "The fence went up overnight. Now we're watching to see that the merchants keep their word and maintain the park." D.H. + +LOAD-DATE: July 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +238 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 10, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Four New Yorkers, Four Journeys of Discovery: BENJAMIN SOLOMOWITZ; +Learning the Horror of the Holocaust + +BYLINE: By CONSTANCE L. HAYS + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 11; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 455 words + +Benjamin Solomowitz grew up comfortably middle-class in Brighton Beach, graduated from dental school in 1983 and set up a practice in Jackson Heights. Around that time he also became interested in genealogy, an interest that has helped him understand the horrors of the Holocaust. +While visiting Brody, the town in Ukraine where his maternal grandmother was born, a resident told him how the road leading past the local synagogue had caved in one day. + When it was being repaved, workers made the gruesome discovery that it was a mass grave, where the bodies of Jews from the town had been dumped after being shot in front of the building. As the corpses collapsed, so did the road. +"In every town we went to, it was the same story," Dr. Solomowitz said. "The Nazis came in, they put all the Jews into a ghetto, they took the women and children and the elderly and shot them. The men went to concentration camps." He saw graves of children's bones, and found synagogues destroyed or converted to other uses. Frequently, he said, there were only one or two Jews left in towns that had had hundreds of Jewish families. "Part of doing this is very sad," he said. +Since he began his search, he has discovered the graves of his great-grandparents closer to home, in Mount Zion cemetery in Queens. He has met an awful lot of cousins. +"We're all about the same age, and it's nice to renew these ties with them," he says. Now he thinks of what began as a hobby as his obsession. "Besides learning about your own family," he said, "there's also history and politics and geography and a lot of detective work." +Which has turned up his ties to a pair of New York City institutions: the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which is in a building at 97 Orchard Street where his grandfather, also named Benjamin Solomowitz, lived in 1905, and former Mayor Edward I. Koch, to whom Dr. Solomowitz is related by marriage. +On a trip to France in 1990, he met one cousin who still lives in Paris. And on his trip to Ukraine, he visited Horodenka, the town where the ancestors of one of his cousins, Glen Koch, and Mr. Koch's ancestors crossed paths. The dentist and the former Mayor have never met. +But in Horodenka he found out that New Yorkers have been mispronouncing Mr. Koch's name all this time. "It's not pronounced 'kotch,' " he reports. "It's pronounced 'cock.' " +"Big deal," said Mr. Koch, when told of the connection. "And he should know that if he goes beyond me he will find my great-grandfather, who formed a band of robbers that would, like Robin Hood, rob from the rich and give to the poor. They were all Christians except for him, and he had one rule: that they couldn't rob anyone on the Sabbath." C.L.H. + +LOAD-DATE: July 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Dr. Benjamin Solomowitz, a dentist in Jackson Heights, Queens, and a picture of his paternal great-grandfather, Avraham Schlomie Solomovits. (Rebecca Cooney for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +239 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 13, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Happy Event on Shuttle: Baby Fish and One Newt + +BYLINE: Reuters + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 249 words + +DATELINE: CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., July 12 + +The aquatic nursery aboard the space shuttle Columbia saw its first arrivals today, a red-bellied newt and several Japanese Medaka fish. +The newt, a kind of salamander, was spotted among four mother newts in an aquarium inside a shuttle laboratory where seven astronauts are carrying out a nonstop schedule of science experiments during a two-week flight. + A mission specialist, Dr. Donald A. Thomas, found the newt "swimming around in his little container" when he made a routine check of the water tank today, the mission's fifth day. +The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said Japan's first female astronaut, Dr. Chiaki Naito-Mukai, discovered the Medaka minnows as she prepared to feed the adult fish. Two male and two female Medaka are the focus of the astronauts' animal reproduction studies. +Dr. Michael L. Weiderhold of the University of Texas said he would study the newt's inner ear to see how space flight affected the development of otoliths, stony internal-ear gravity receptors that newts use to keep their eyes pointing forward while swimming. "There will be no pull of gravity on these stones in space," Dr. Weiderhold explained, "so we want to see if these reflexes will develop normally." +The research applies to humans with balance problems, especially elderly people, because the ears of all vertebrate animals are similar, he said. +The international mission was launched from Florida last Friday. Columbia is due back on Earth on July 22. + +LOAD-DATE: July 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +240 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 13, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE: THE BUS TOUR; +Health Care Caravans To Deliver a Message + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 15; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1051 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 12 + +Supporters of President Clinton's proposal for national health insurance announced plans today for cross-country bus caravans that will deliver hundreds of people to Capitol Hill next month just as Congress begins to debate the issue. +Administration officials, while uncertain how much public excitement can be generated in the middle of the summer, describe the caravans as an effort to duplicate the successes of the Presidential campaign, when Mr. Clinton, Al Gore and their wives went on a six-day bus tour in July 1992, immediately after the Democratic National Convention in New York. + That trip featured rallies along superhighways and two-lane rural roads in eight states. It was such a success that the Clinton campaign staged other tours through the Southwest, the South and the Midwest. +But there is one complication to the health care caravans. Organizers are asking labor unions, businesses and other groups to finance the venture by paying $20,000 for each bus, and they are requiring the sponsors to promise, in advance, that they will support the bills recommended by the Democratic leaders of the House and the Senate. + +Endorsement in Advance + The bills have not yet been drafted, however, so prospective sponsors do not know all the details of the legislation they are endorsing. They organizers of the bus tour are confident that the bills will achieve the President's goal of health insurance for everybody. +The President, his wife, Hillary, and Mr. Gore are expected to address the bus passengers at various stops. Whether the Clintons and the Vice President will ride the buses is not yet known. +The main sponsors and organizers of the caravans are the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which has 1.3 million members; Families USA, an advocacy group founded by a Massachusetts businessman, and Health Right, which describes itself as "the people's lobby" for comprehensive health legislation. +Gerald W. McEntee, president of the government employees' union, said the bus caravans, known as the Health Security Express, would urge Congress to "pass the bill." +"At this point," he said, "we don't know exactly what bill will come from the leaders of the House and the Senate, but we will support it." + +Legislative Melding + He said he felt sure that the House majority leader, Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, and the Senate majority leader, George J. Mitchell of Maine, would devise bills to guarantee health insurance for all Americans by requiring employers to pay most of the premiums, as the union wants. +Mr. Gephardt and Mr. Mitchell are melding health bills from several committees. The bills differ in the amount of new taxes they would impose, the subsidies they would offer to low-income people and the cuts they would make in the growth of Medicare spending for the elderly. Three of the bills would require employers to buy insurance for workers; the fourth, from the Senate Finance Committee, has no such requirement. +The Health Security Express buses will start from Boston; Dallas; Independence, Mo.; New Orleans, and Portland, Ore. They will pick up passengers along the way and will converge in Washington from Aug. 2 to Aug. 4. There will be at least four buses on each of the routes, organizers say, with at least 40 "reform riders" on each bus. +The passengers will include doctors, nurses, labor union members, retired people, politicians and entertainers. In their fliers, the organizers say they are particularly interested in finding "people with personal and professional stories of health care difficulties." +One caravan will pass through Russell, Kan., the hometown of the Senate minority leader, Bob Dole, whose health care proposals have been criticized as inadequate by Mr. Clinton and some labor unions. + +Arranging the Logistics + Logistics for the Health Security Express are being arranged by John H. Hoyt, a 34-year-old Democrat who has organized special events to assist Indian tribes, homeless people and environmental groups, and is president of Pyramid Communications. +The American Association of Retired Persons, the influential lobby for people who are 50 years of age and over, is not sponsoring any buses, though some of its members may participate in rallies. "We want to see what the two majority leaders develop," said Martin A. Corry, director of Federal affairs for the 33 million-member association. +Arnold Bennett, a spokesman for Families USA, said the bus tour had a budget of $1.4 million to $1.9 million. Each of the three primary sponsors is contributing $100,000 in cash and $100,000 worth of staff time, he said. +Other supporters, which have contributed $3,000 to $100,000 apiece, include the United Automobile Workers, the Communications Workers of America, the Alzheimer's Association, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Waste Management Inc. and the Service Employees International Union, Mr. Bennett said. + +Bid to 'Relive Past Glories' + Tony Blankley, a spokesman for the House Republican whip, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, said the caravans were an effort to "relive past glories" of the 1992 campaign. "Public sentiment has crystallized against the Clinton health plan, and a bus tour won't change that," Mr. Blankley added. +For $5,000, contributors can sponsor a busload of reform riders for one day. For $500, they can sponsor one passenger on the Health Security Express for the full length of any route. For $100, a sponsor can buy a seat on a bus for one person for a day. +Groups sponsoring the tour will have their names displayed on buses and banners, and on T-shirts and baseball caps worn by the citizen-lobbyists. +Mr. Bennett, the spokesman for Families USA, said it was not enough for contributors and riders to support "health care reform" in general. +"The bus tour will be in support of the universal coverage bills put out by the leadership of both houses," he said. "We support the leadership bills. People who don't support those bills won't support the Health Security Express. We don't want to do all this work to give people a muddy message." +Mr. Bennett said he had turned down at least one cash contribution because the donor was unwilling to endorse the bills being drafted by Mr. Gephardt and Mr. Mitchell. + +LOAD-DATE: July 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: At the Washington headquarters of Families USA, one of the groups organizing the Health Security Express bus caravans, workers were busy yesterday calling local news organizations along the planned routes. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times) + +Map/Chart: "ITINERARY: Caravans to Washington" + Buses will also leave from the cities listed to join the main caravans to Washington. In addition, separate busses will proceed to Washington from Columbus, Ohio, New York City and Charlotte, N.C. The map/chart provides an itinerary for the Western, Midwest, Southern, and Northeast routes. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +241 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 13, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Make the Pools Safe for Everyone + +SECTION: Section A; Page 18; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 389 words + +Parks Commissioner Henry Stern says there is no real crisis in the city's public pools -- they are safer than the streets. So they should be. But in only 11 days, 10 young women have been the victims of sexual assaults or assault attempts in New York City pools. These incidents echo a nasty trend begun last summer with "whirlpooling," in which groups of young males surrounded girls and young women, rhythmically clapping and intimidating them, then assaulting them. +Betsy Gotbaum, who was Parks Commissioner at that time, insensitively referred to those incidents as "ordinary horseplay that got out of hand." Mr. Stern has shown that he is taking the problem more seriously. One idea he considered, but wisely rejected, was to segregate the sexes in the pools. Rather than deprive peaceful pool users of the pleasure of swimming with whomever they choose, he has opted to hold the thugs to civilized standards. A New York police officer is now constantly "on deck" at every intermediate- and large-size pool in the city. + Mr. Stern says he is considering creating "quiet zones" in which senior citizens or people who want a leisurely swim could enjoy the pools without having to deal with adolescent roughhousing. That is an idea worth trying, but it will not address the most pressing problem: the security of young women and girls in the city's pools. They should not have to retreat to feel safe. And in fact, most of the recent incidents have been charged to men well past adolescence. +Another suggestion is a revival of former Mayor David Dinkins's "Don't Dis Your Sis" campaign. That is a worthy slogan, but it trivializes the kinds of incidents that have plagued the swimming pools. There is a big difference between "dissing" and assault. +Arrests have been made in 8 out of the 10 cases reported so far. That should serve as a caution to men who might be tempted to prey on girls in the water. And Mr. Stern points to new signs posted at pools this year warning that disorderly conduct will be punished with prosecution. +That message, however, still leaves too much room for the traditional boys-will-be-boys attitude. All city pools need clear, unambiguous warnings as to what constitutes sexual assault, including the threat of jail. Young women have a right to feel safe in a place set aside for fun. + +LOAD-DATE: July 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +242 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 14, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE: THE HOSPITALS; +Drive Is Opened to Fight Cuts in Medicare + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 958 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 13 + +Hospital lobbyists today began what they described as an all-out fight to prevent Congress from making the kind of large cuts in the growth of Medicare that several committees have proposed as a way to finance health coverage for people who are uninsured. +Hospitals have generally supported President Clinton's effort to guarantee health insurance for all Americans, and they have endorsed many of his specific proposals to redesign the health care system. + But leaders of the American Hospital Association, the main lobby for the industry, said today that several Congressional panels, particularly the House Ways and Means Committee, had gone too far in tapping Medicare as a source of money to pay for new benefits and new coverage. + +Mobilizing Hospital Workers + Medicare finances health care for 36 million elderly and disabled people. The cost to the Government is $160 billion this year. +The lobbyists said they would mobilize hospital employees and trustees across the country, urging members of Congress to spare Medicare and find other sources of revenue. In many Congressional districts, hospitals are among the largest employers. +Richard J. Davidson, president of the American Hospital Association, said: "In its quest for universal coverage, Congress looks to Medicare as a huge source of money, a bottomless well. The Medicare cuts in the Ways and Committee bill are a farce. If Congress is serious enough to make a commitment to assure universal coverage, it should be serious enough to make the tough choices to pay for it. + +Warning on Care + "Members of Congress ought to quit kidding themselves. You cannot finance health care reform on the backs of hospitals and doctors who serve the elderly, or else you will harm the quality of care." +Representative Pete Stark, the chief architect of the Ways and Means Committee bill, rejected these complaints. "Hospitals," he said, "have always looked at Medicare as a bottomless pit to pay them. +"I'm dumbfounded by the hospitals' terribly narrow and parochial attitude," said Mr. Stark, a California Democrat who is chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health. "One would think they might have some interest in the health of the community at large and not just in their own self-interest. This bill is a good deal for hospitals that are well-managed. It's not too good a deal for hospitals that want to make a huge profit off sick people." +The Ways and Means Committee would slice $110 billion, or 10 percent, from projected Medicare spending over five years. Nearly two-thirds of the savings would come from Medicare payments to hospitals. President Clinton proposed Medicare savings of $103 billion, including $70 billion from hospitals. The Senate Finance Committee bill would cut about half that amount. +The House bill would set annual limits on Medicare spending, and it would gradually slow the growth of the program, so that after four or five years Medicare would not be allowed to grow any faster than the economy as a whole. + +Shifts in Kinds of Care + Despite strenuous efforts by Congress to rein in medical costs, limiting doctors' fees and payments to hospitals for specific procedures, Medicare now grows more than twice as fast as the economy. Part of the reason is that medical prices have been rising rapidly, and the type of care provided to elderly patients is more complex than it was just a few years ago. +The Ways and Means Committee bill sets Medicare spending limits for 10 separate categories of services. Thomas P. Nickels, a lobbyist for the hospital association, said these limits would perpetuate recent trends. +Services that have been growing fast in recent years, like home health care and nursing home care, would get a bigger and bigger share of Medicare spending, he said, while services like hospital care, which has been growing slowly, would get a dwindling share of the total. +Hospital lobbyists are telling members of Congress that under the Ways and Means Committee bill, Medicare would pay only 67 cents for every dollar of costs incurred in caring for patients admitted to hospitals, down sharply from 95 cents at present. +"Losses of this size cannot be made up through increased efficiency," said Mr. Davidson of the hospital association. +Clinton Administration officials and many Democrats in Congress say hospitals should be able to absorb cutbacks in Medicare because people who are now uninsured will have coverage in the future and can therefore pay their hospital bills. +Carmela S. Dyer, a vice president of the American Hospital Association, acknowledged that universal coverage would generate new revenue for hospitals. But, she said, the care provided free to people who are uninsured is much less significant than the proposed cutbacks in the Medicare program, which accounts for 40 percent of hospital revenue. +Moreover, she said, in the future, it will be difficult for hospitals to offset Medicare's underpayments by increasing charges to private patients, as they have done in the past. + +Market Forces at Work + "Market forces are already reducing our ability to shift costs," she said, and the Ways and Means Committee bill would virtually eliminate such cost-shifting because it would impose stringent new constraints on private health spending. +In the debate over health costs, hospitals have generally avoided the wrath of White House officials and members of Congress, who were more likely to criticize insurance companies and drug manufacturers. But if hospital lobbyists continue to mobilize their forces at the local level, they will immensely complicate the work of President Clinton and his allies in Congress, who want to squeeze large sums of money from Medicare. + +LOAD-DATE: July 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +243 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 15, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Blast in Italy Kills 27 At Home for Elderly + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 8; Column 6; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 232 words + +DATELINE: MILAN, Italy, July 14 + +A home for the elderly collapsed in an explosion today while residents were eating breakfast, and 27 people were killed. +A gas explosion touched off by workmen repairing sewage pipes was blamed for the disaster in Motta Visconti, 20 miles southwest of Milan. + The explosion brought the roof down on the dining room and caused the building's walls to collapse, leaving a pile of reinforced concrete, plaster and beams. +About 40 people were eating breakfast at the time. Seven people were injured, one critically, and eight escaped unharmed. +"First I heard a rustling sound, then a hissing, then there was a big blast," said Maddalena Iacobellis, 35, a worker at the home. +"I looked out the window just in time to see a man fly through the air," she said from her hospital bed. "Then everything fell on top of me." She was pulled out of the debris about 30 minutes later suffering a fractured vertebrae. +One of the first police officers to reach the scene said rescue workers began digging frantically with their hands to locate survivors. Some of the injured were unconscious, the officer said, speaking by phone from the town. +Elveno Pastorelli, a civil defense official, said the explosion was "almost certainly" caused by a gas leak. Sewage gas "had saturated the underground area, and this morning, at the start of work, a spark probably set off the explosion," he said. + +LOAD-DATE: July 15, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +244 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 16, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +DISCOUNTS; +Deals for Older People If They Will Just Ask + +BYLINE: By Andree Brooks + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 36; Column 1; Financial Desk; Your Money Page + +LENGTH: 688 words + +GROWING older has an upside for those who aren't shy about discussing their age. +More and more companies are trying to capture the elderly market by offering discounts and special deals to older people. The topic may bring early-bird dinner specials and movie discounts to mind, but much bigger returns are available. Financial services companies and even the Internal Revenue Service offer tax breaks based on age. + Many of the discounts go unclaimed because eligible people fail to speak up. "A ticket agent isn't going to ask, 'How old are you?' Neither is your insurance agent," said Joan Rattner Heilman, author of "Unbelievably Good Deals and Great Adventures That You Absolutely Can't Get Unless You Are Over 50" (Contemporary Books, 1994, $7.95). Reticence about telling your age is likely to hurt your purse more than your image, Ms. Heilman added, because the definition of older people keeps expanding to include younger people. No longer tied to the Social Security benchmark of 62 years, discounts for older people are often available at age 50. +Consider Thrifty Car Rentals. It used to limit its 10 percent discount to members of the American Association of Retired Persons. In March, it began offering the discount to anyone over 55. +Geico Insurance of Washington goes a step further. Policyholders over 50 who are retired receive a discount of 5 to 25 percent on homeowner and automobile insurance premiums, depending on the policy. Retirees are loosely defined as people working fewer than 20 hours a week. +An additional 10 percent off auto premiums is given to older people willing to take an accredited defensive driving training course (offered in many communities by the American Automobile Association). All of Geico's auto discounts end at age 74. +A veritable bonanza of deals can be found in the travel industry. The most widely known are the airline programs. Coupon programs for older travelers have been expanding as rapidly as frequent flier programs did in the early 1980's. "It's one of the really great deals," said Ed Perkins, editor of Consumer Reports Travel Letter. +Once confined to a handful of major carriers, coupons are now available from smaller airlines, like Kiwi. Older people can buy books of 4, 8 or 10 coupons in advance, good for travel anywhere in the continental United States. On average, the cost works out to $270 for each round-trip flight, generally lower than promotional fares, Mr. Perkins said. +Though travel may be limited to weekdays and advance booking may be requried (or waived for anyone willing to fly standby), the fares do not require a Saturday night stay, the mainstay of most promotions. +In a new offer, Continental Airlines announced this week that it would give people over age 62 up to 75 percent off full-price coach fares. Under the program, those eligible will pay $314 for a one-way trip from New York to Los Angeles, versus $693 for a younger traveler. Other airlines offer flat discounts of 10 percent for people of a certain age. + The Internal Revenue Service gives the elderly a break, too. In 1993, the standard deduction for a single taxpayer over 65 was $4,600, compared with $3,700 for others. Married couples over 65 who filed jointly were allowed a standard deduction of $7,600, instead of $6,200. If one spouse was younger than 65, the deduction fell to $6,900. +Figures for the 1994 tax year are not yet available, because they are adjusted for inflation at the end of the year. Taxpayers who itemize are simply out of luck. +Some states have gotten on the bandwagon. New Jersey, for example, permits any taxpayer over 65 to determine taxable income and then subtract $1,000 before calculating taxes owed. (New York and Connecticut do not offer elderly discounts.) +Credit card issuers, including American Express, reduce annual fees; municipalities cut fees for recreational use; hotels discount rooms; colleges lower tuition. Considering the wide range of discounts, it may be worth making it a practice to ask about age breaks. For people who may be embarrassed, the extra money in the bank may ease the sting. + +LOAD-DATE: July 16, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +245 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 17, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +F.Y.I. + +BYLINE: By ANDREA KANNAPELL + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 2; Column 5; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 494 words + + +Mailbox on the Move +Q. I would love to know why the mailbox at 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue keeps moving. It moves from the north side to the south side of 96th Street from time to time, and sometimes lands on the Amsterdam side of the corner instead of the street side. It would seem not an easy thing to do -- to pull up a mailbox from its moorings, fix the holes it leaves, and then re-install it. So why? +A. Well, first of all, you're quite right. That mailbox has been moving around, said Andrew Sozzi, a postal spokesman. + Up until a year ago, he said, the box was located on the northeast corner of 96th and Amsterdam. Because the box needed maintenance (which is quite common -- "people paste bills all over them, trucks hit them, people start fires in them," Mr. Sozzi explained), it was taken to a workshop at the General Post Office. +It just so happened that the work coincided with a grassroots campaign to have the mailbox moved so that a number of elderly people who lived on the south side of 96th wouldn't have to cross the street. "So we obliged them," Mr. Sozzi said. "Then we found out there were a couple of reasons that didn't work. One, there were complaints from elderly people on the other side of 96th Street." +And there were safety problems, because picking up the mail along Amsterdam meant blocking traffic, causing concerns for the carrier as well as motorists and pedestrians. +"Really," Mr. Sozzi said, "we did this with all good intention in mind every time." +As for the other moves you have noticed, it is possible that the Postal Service moved the box because of changing patterns of use, which it monitors carefully, or that a maintenance crew brought back a box after reconditioning and placed it a little off the mark. + + +Orphan A-Frame +Q. There's a tiny A-frame building on stilts at the southern end of Roosevelt Island. What is it? +A. From 1968 till 1988, it was the Delacorte Fountain, said Lynne Abraham, spokeswoman for the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation. +As such, it made a nice decorative spray of East River water that apparently killed some of the vegetation on the island. "So that was possibly a tree-killing fountain you had there," Ms. Abraham said. But the fountain broke in 1988, and now it's just another condemned building waiting to be dismantled. + + +Runaround Runaround +Q. I've been getting the runaround when it comes to ascertaining the correct mileage of the southernmost track in Central Park. Specifically, how long is the loop that goes from Columbus Circle up to East 72d, crosses over to West 72d and completes itself at the Circle again? +A. The Road Runners Club has measured all the park's loops for its various races, said Kelly Harvey, a receptionist there. So here's a handy map incorporating Road Runner figures not only for the lower loop, but also the other commonly used loops. Somebody oughtta make a T-shirt. ANDREA KANNAPELL + +LOAD-DATE: July 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Question + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +246 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 17, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: UPPER WEST SIDE; +Housing for the Elderly, or Maybe the Over-40s + +BYLINE: By RANDY KENNEDY + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 6; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 375 words + +After several months of accusations about bad promises and hidden intentions, neighborhood groups opposed to plans for Euclid Hall, a large single-room-occupancy hotel at 86th Street and Broadway, will get a chance to take their case to City Hall this week. +The seven-story hotel, with more than 290 rooms, has been at the center of a fierce campaign since residents in the area discovered last year that the nonprofit manager, the West Side Federation for Senior Housing, did not intend to stick to its original intention to house only people over 50 years old with no special problems with drugs or mental illness. + The age requirement, neighbors believed, would prevent the hotel from joining other notorious SRO hotels that have become magnets for drugs and other problems in the area. +Deputy Mayor Fran Reiter, in charge of city planning, has agreed to meet this Friday with representatives from several groups, said her chief of staff, David Klasfeld. +"This is not something that we can completely throw the brakes on now, so we have to find a way to make it work for everyone," said Mr. Klasfeld. +While it has long been unclear why the age specifications were dropped, Mr. Klasfeld said that since the Koch administration agreed to renovate the hotel for the large population of elderly homeless, that population has dwindled considerably. +"To state it simply, we couldn't fill the building," said Mr. Klasfeld. +The hotel plans to take 60 percent of its occupants from city shelters, using mostly city funds, and another 40 percent from other facilities. The West Side Federation did not return phone calls seeking comment on Friday. +The compromise that the deputy mayor hopes to reach with opposition groups, Mr. Klasfeld said, is to persuade them to allow the hotel's manager to drop the age limit to 45 years or perhaps to 40 to find enough eligible applicants. +Opponents, however, will not be easily persuaded, said Joseph H. Levie, an attorney who is representing people opposed to Euclid Hall. "I can tell you right now that I doubt there will be any interest," said Mr. Levie. "To walk in and tell people that we can't find people over the age of 50 who don't need housing help in this city is ridiculous." R.K. + +LOAD-DATE: July 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +247 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 17, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: BLISSVILLE/LONG ISLAND CITY; +Don't Blink, Or You Might Miss the Bliss + +BYLINE: By NORIMITSU ONISHI + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 7; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 469 words + +Before cars and highways bred suburbs and bedroom communities, people often lived and worked in the same neighborhood. In a collection of 14 blocks at the eastern edge east of Long Island City, the idea was pushed to its limits for generations, as immigrants, most of them Polish, lived in stark, two- and three-story houses wedged between small factories and auto repair shops. +Today, about 200 residents of varying ethnicities still coexist with truck drivers who block the streets and mechanics who fix cars on the sidewalks and sometimes spill oil in the open. On a recent morning on Van Dam Street, two elderly men, oblivious to the industrial din, played cards outside a house. + Outsiders may not know its name, and even those who work there may think they are in Long Island City, but its natives are fiercely attached to their 153-year-old home: Blissville. +"I keep my door open here," said Diane Ballek, 42, whose children are the fourth generation of her family to live in the area. "Someone gets robbed, everybody knows who did it." +Speaking of Maspeth, where her mother moved a few years ago, she said: "There people just wave. In Blissville, people stand and talk and go for coffee." +The Queens Historical Society said that Blissville was named after its founder, Neziah Bliss, a Brooklyn businessman who had helped develop Greenpoint. Until 1869, when the Borden Avenue bridge was built, Blissville was only accessible by boat. +Through the years, it was home to oil factories, whisky distilleries, a fertilizer plant and various small manufacturers. The second borough president of Queens, Joseph Cassidy, hailed from Blissville. And it even has its own, small-scale version of the Flatiron building. +Ms. Ballek, the president of the Blissville Block Association, said she remembers growing up with a bakery and barber shop in the neighborhood. Her mother, who is 75, attended a public elementary school on Greenpoint Avenue, which a Best Western Motel now occupies. +Today, Blissville also has four delis, though residents must cross the Long Island Expressway into Sunnyside for other services. +Though most of its houses are well maintained, some look like little more than trailer homes that have not budged in decades. Rents are cheap: $500 for a two-bedroom apartment. +Blissville has seen little redevelopment in recent years, except for a loft building that was built on 35th Street in 1990. It is shared by woodworking and building-services companies, said Penny Lee, the project director for Long Island City with the City Planning Department. Because the city regards the area as a manufacturing zone, she added, no new residential housing can be built in Blissville. But, of course, the people who are living there can stay as long as they want. NORIMITSU ONISHI + +LOAD-DATE: July 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Blissville's mini-Flatiron Building, at 35th Street and Van Dam, above, and the full-scale version. (Rebecca Cooney for The New York Times) + +Map of Blissville, Queens + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +248 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 17, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Weekend Volunteers Pitch In to Repair Neglected Houses + +BYLINE: By SUSAN KONIG + +SECTION: Section 13LI; Page 10; Column 1; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1170 words + +ON a tree-lined street in Glen Cove sits a dilapidated house, its paint peeled away by the ravages of time. A section of the roof is warped, as are several window frames. The outer front door hangs askew. +Neighbors say the house was once among the prettiest on the block. But now the owners, who are in their 60's, live on a fixed income. The husband, a laid-off service worker, has not found steady work. Their child, who is disabled, struggles to balance college classes and a part-time job. + The house will be saved, however, as have 11 others on Long Island this year, because of the Summer Work Assistance Program, sponsored by the Nassau South District Council of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. +Last month the council and other volunteers conducted the third two-weekend session of painting and rehabilitation to help the sick, elderly and disabled restore their homes and, the volunteers add, their dignity. +"We try and keep the homeowners' identities anonymous," a coordinator of the program, Nancy Dwyer, said. + +'Everyone Has Their Pride' + "They often get embarrassed," said Jim Nicklas, a high school teacher who helped organize the project in Glen Cove. "Sometimes we have to twist their arms to let us help. Everyone has their pride, and it can be difficult to accept help. But usually they do, and I think they're glad they did." +This year, 125 people volunteered, painting 12 houses and 16 rooms, repairing 4 roofs, installing 2 floors, building a wheelchair ramp and initiating yard cleanups. +"The houses we choose display many years of neglect," Mrs. Dwyersaid. "It is a source of concern to the homeowner, who is distressed to see his major financial resource literally falling down around him." +Neighbors, too, are concerned. Nearby property values may decline. +"But this is something that can happen to anyone," Mrs. Dwyer said, "if you are elderly, if a family member gets sick or if you lose your job. Long Island's population is getting older, and so are their houses. We can only look at these people and say,'Hey, this could be any one of us.' " +The program, which began in the 80's in East Patchogue, extends across the Island. Many groups contribute. Organizations like Parish Outreach of Queen of the Most Holy Rosary Church in Roosevelt, Habitat for Humanity, the Black Data Processing Association and Christmas in April, a group of volunteer crafts workers, are involved this year. +The Chase Manhattan Bank sent volunteers and a donation for supplies. Home Depot donated a power washer and other supplies. Lilco sent volunteers through the Long Island Volunteer Enterprise to paint and improve insulation. Many other businesses sent money and supplies. +"It's unbelievable how this program has mushroomed," Mr. Nicklas said. "At first volunteers came mainly from East Rockaway and Roosevelt. But every year more people and businesses get involved. It just keeps growing, which says a lot for Long Island." + +'To Give Something Back' + The Glen Cove project extended into a third weekend, because it was a pilot project, a chance for the northern district to observe the process before starting a program of its own. The expansion, Mr. Nicklas said, indicated "that the project does as much for the volunteers -- if not more -- than it does for the homeowners." +Al Eusini, an engineer at Northrop Grumman, observed, to help start the program in the northern district next summer. "It's exciting to see this happen," Mr. Eusini said. "And it's great fun to do, very satisfying. My wife will probably kill me for saying that, because I don't paint much around the house. But I've lived in Nassau County for a long time, and it's been good to me. This is my chance to give something back." +"You have to give back," Justin Connolly, a customer-planning representative from Lilco, said from atop a ladder as he applied primer. "I'm fortunate to make a comfortable living, and I think this is the least I can do." +Lilco helps find people who need help, another coordinator, Mary DeMott, said. The consumer affairs department identifies customers who have chronic difficulty paying bills. +The utility also sends employees to weatherize houses, checking windows and boilers, as well as determining eligibility for the Summer Work Assistance Program. "Our consumer advocates find government funding for new boilers for people who need them," a volunteer, Bob Allgor, an energy packer at Lilco, added. "We find that people who can't afford to replace their boilers will use electric heaters and subsequently run up huge bills." +Candidates for the program "aren't always easy to find," Mr. Allgor said, adding: I think it's a matter of pride. People don't like asking for help." +Candidates have to be unable physically or financially to do the work that is needed and cannot be qualified for Government-financed programs to carry out the work, Mrs. Dwyer explained. +Of the 12 volunteers who re-vamped the Glen Cove house, none complained about the 85-degree temperature. Thomas Bates, 15, of Glen Cove, was helping a friend. "It's a lot fun," he said. "The hard work feels very good. I'm not even tired." +"I really like to get things done, instead of just talking about them," said Mr. Nicklas, who, at noon, was taking his first break in four hours. "With the number of people we have here we can accomplish some major renovations in just a day or two. It's incredibly satisfying to see immediate results." +A 16-year-old neighbor, who walked over to investigate, also began painting, regretting that he could not spend the entire day because he had to go to a wedding. +Alexei Roschak, 4, did his part, too, scraping paint, hammering nails and painting the front porch alongside his mother, Sue, a Lilco employee. +The residents expressed their gratitude. "It's wonderful what they are doing," the child said. "My mother is extremely happy." +"It can really change the lives of these families, far beyond esthetics." Mrs. Dwyer said. "Last year we painted the house of a single woman who was raising nine children and grandchildren. Once the overwhelming work was out of the way she continued to improve her home. Her granddaughter fixed up an enclosed porch, and she finally felt comfortable inviting friends over to play." + +Continuation of Improvements + Most homeowners continue to make improvements after the volunteers finish their work, Mrs. Dwyer said, adding: +"I think they get a renewed sense of well-being. We encourage them to get involved from the start, if they are physically able. We want them to experience the feeling of accomplishment and camaraderie." +"An important thing to remember," Mr. Nicklas added, "is that hard times can happen to any one. We may not think of Long Islanders as having difficulty keeping up their homes, but the number of jobs we've done shows that they do. This is something that really happens. But it's also something that people -- a lot of people -- want to work hard to try and fix." + +LOAD-DATE: July 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Al Eusini, an aircraft engineer, on ladder, and Mike Fusco at work in Glen Cove. Right: Thomas Bates, 15, of Glen Cove and Debra Ieraci, president of the Lamplighters Association, paint porch. (Photographs by Linda Rosier for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +249 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 17, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +If You're Thinking of Living In/New Providence; +A Commuter's Delight, With 2 Stations + +BYLINE: By JERRY CHESLOW + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 3; Column 2; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1601 words + +WITH the luxury of two train stations in just 3.6 square miles, the borough of New Providence in Union County, N.J., is the quintessential bedroom community. During the day, most of its adult population empties out -- some commuting to Manhattan and others going to their jobs just across the borough line to Bell Laboratories in Berkeley Heights. +Perhaps because of the attraction of the easy commute to Manhattan, housing prices did not decline much during the slump of the last five years. The houses are on winding tree-lined streets that follow the contours of the lower ridges of the Watchung Mountains. + Residents say they are seeing a generational turnover of housing, as elderly residents, who make up 14 percent of the population, sell to young families. +Many elderly residents, including Ann Chovan, the borough historian, complain that many of their number are being forced to sell because they can no longer afford the rising taxes. Mayor Harold Weideli Jr. acknowledges that taxes have been going up and blames the rising cost of solid-waste disposal. +"Over the past year alone, I've seen three houses on my block sold by older people to young families," said Christine Tafel, who moved into a three-bedroom split-level house on Woodbine Circle from nearby Livingston two years ago. "That makes for a welcoming town." +Mrs. Tafel says that she and her husband Robert, both florists, chose New Providence after seeing more than 100 homes in surrounding towns. +"It's a cozy, grass-roots place," she said, "where people are more concerned with family life and less concerned with keeping up with the Joneses. There are block parties on most streets in the summer and you often see parents riding their bikes with their children." +Mrs. Tafel's 7-year-old son, Chris, plays T-ball in the borough-sponsored league and Mrs. Tafel is the coach. The Tafels' 10-year-old daughter, Katie, plays softball in a local league. +About three-fourths of the dwelling units in the borough are single-family homes. At the low end of the scale, a three-bedroom Cape Cod on Brook Road recently went for $184,000. The most expensive house in the borough, a six-bedroom restored 1905 Georgian colonial on more than three acres with a large pool and a carriage house, is on the market for $1.885 million. In general, the more expensive homes are to the south of the New Jersey Transit railroad tracks. Among the more representative upper-end houses, a five-bedroom expanded ranch south of the tracks recently went for $502,000. +According to A. Michael Del Ducca, a broker with Burgdorff Realtors in the Murray Hill section, the mid-market New Providence home is a three-bedroom split level like the one bought by the Tafels. Such houses go for $250,000 to $280,000. +There are roughly 800 apartments in town. The two largest garden-apartment complexes are the 172-unit Murray Hill Apartments off Southgate Road across from the Murray Hill train station and the 231-unit New Providence Gardens, off Springfield Avenue. One-bedroom units in both complexes rent for $715 and two bedrooms for $840 a month. +There are about 100 condominiums in the borough. The largest complex is the 55-unit Murray Hill Manor on Floral Avenue near the Murray Hill train station. The complex was patterned on historic buildings in northern New Jersey and in Colonial Williamsburg. The units range from about $120,000 for some one-bedroom apartments up to the upper $300,000 range for some four-bedroom town houses. +The first Europeans -- English Puritans from Long Island -- arrived in the 1730's and settled on land bought from the Leni Lenape Indians. Originally, the area was called Turkey because of the abundance of wild game birds. It was renamed New Providence in 1778, when the partly finished balcony of the Presbyterian Church collapsed onto the congregants. The incident caused no serious injuries but convinced the worshipers that Divine Providence was watching over them. +ALTHOUGH no Revolutionary War fighting was waged on the soil of New Providence, 48 soldiers who served in the Continental Army are buried in the cemetery of the Presbyterian Church on Springfield Avenue. The original church burnt and was rebuilt in 1834. +New Providence was part of the neighboring Township of Summit until 1869, when Summit broke away by act of the state Legislature. +"There were a lot of wealthy New Yorkers in Summit and they wanted their own community," said Mrs. Chovan, the historian. +The first railroad station was built in New Providence in 1884 on land donated to the township by Carl Schultz, a businessman known as the Seltzer King of New York. +"Mr. Schultz, who built his country home in New Providence, made one stipulation when he donated the land," Mrs. Chovan said. He wanted the section to be known as Murray Hill, after the Manhattan neighborhood where he had his regular home." +The Italianate railroad station on Southgate Road in the Murray Hill neighborhood in the south-central section is on the New Jersey Register of Historic Places and is under consideration for inclusion in the National Register. Originally operated by the Lackawanna Railroad, the station is now part of the New Jersey Transit system. The second train station is on Springfield Avenue on the east side of the borough. +A number of other buildings in the borough date from the 18th and 19th centuries, including the Historical Society Saltbox Museum on Springfield Avenue. It is a small house, built in the saltbox style, with a slanted rear roof and eyebrow windows close to the eves. It is open every Thursday from 10 A.M. until noon and every first and third Sunday from 1 to 3 P.M. Besides its regular collection of 19th century furnishings, costumes, fireplaces and documents dating to the mid-1700's, it is now exhibiting a teapot collection dating to the 1840's. Admission is free. +The main business district is the intersection of Springfield Avenue and South Street, site of the Village Shopping Center and the Adams Shopping Center. There are two supermarkets, several clothing stores, a Mailboxes Etc. store, a post office, five banks and two video stores. Among the best-known restaurants are Chez Z (continental) and Chen's (Chinese) in the Village Shopping Center and Fabio's (Mexican) on South Street. By local ordinance, which Mrs. Chovan says has been in force in one form or another since the area was settled, no alcohol can be served in public in the borough. +The closest mall is the Short Hills Mall in Short Hills, five miles to the northeast. +The largest recreational complex is the three-and-a-half-acre Oakwood Park off Commonwealth Avenue. It has two baseball diamonds, a combination soccer-football field, playground equipment, a picnic area and two open fields that are flooded in winter to form ice skating rinks. Among the other widely used town areas are eight tennis courts on Springfield Avenue and the adjacent New Providence Community Pool, which has an olympic-sized pool, a 25-yard pool and a kiddie pool. Annual family memberships cost $250. +According to a recent report issued by the borough, the majority of the residents "occupy professional, managerial or other executive positions." +"We're a well-educated town," said Borough Administrator Edward M. Bien. "Ninety percent of the people over the age of 25 have high school diplomas and 49 percent have college degrees." +The residents overwhelmingly support the New Providence Public School District, which has 1,503 students. There are two 450-student elementary schools for kindergarten through sixth grade. The New Providence Middle School, for grades seven and eight, and the New Providence High School occupy the same building on Pioneer Drive. +Ninety percent of the 103 graduating seniors are going on to higher education. Among the 150 colleges and universities to which they were accepted are Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Georgetown and Penn State. The senior class won a total of 117 scholarships. The most prestigious ones were the National Science Foundation Scholarship and the National Merit Scholarship. One of each was awarded. +New Providence also has one Roman Catholic parochial school for kindergarten through eighth grades, Our Lady of Peace, on Passaic Street. +WHILE many New Jersey municipalities defeated their school budgets last year, New Providence's passed by a 2-to-1 vote along with a $2 million bond referendum for upgrading the schools. +According to the Superintendent of Schools, David A. Sousa, the average class size is 18. He says that the system encourages the students to get involved in sports and the arts, as well as academics. He noted that although there were only 380 students in the high school, it fields 32 sports teams. +As for academics, Dr. Sousa says, "we stress more than the traditional three R's. We are helping the students develop communications, problem solving and critical thinking skills." +As an example of the school's approach, elementary school students are asked to work out alternative endings to stories they read in class. And science experiments are not recipe-type experiments, where the result is predetermined, but discovery experiments in which students manipulate variables and get different results. +Computers are introduced in the first grade with simple keyboarding and graphics programs. Each classroom in the elementary schools has at least one computer and each school has at least one computer laboratory. Dr. Sousa says the high school library is one of the most advanced in the state, with much of the information on CD-ROM's. + +LOAD-DATE: July 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: July 24, 1994, Sunday + + CORRECTION: +An article and a picture caption last Sunday about living in New Providence, N.J., misidentified a condominium complex on Floral Avenue and misstated its size. The complex is Murray Hill Square, and it has 56 units, not 55. The article also misstated the location of Our Lady of Peace School. It is on South Street, not Passaic Avenue. + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The New Providence Community Pool, with Olympic-sized, 25-yard and kiddie swimming areas. Annual family memberships cost $250. The Murray Hill Apartments. (Photographs by Eddie Hausner for The New York Times); On the Market -- 4-bedroom Cape Cod with full unfinished basement at 108 Union Avenue, $183,900. 4-bedroom bilevel with 2-car garage at 57 Pittsford Way, $269,000. 6-bedroom Georgian colonial with tennis court at 163 Oakwood Drive, $1.89 million. + +Chart: "GAZETTEER" + +POPULATION: 11,439 (1990 census). + + AREA: 3.6 square miles. + + MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME: $62,420 (1990 census). + + MEDIAN PRICE OF ONE-FAMILY HOUSE: $285,000. + + TAXES ON MEDIAN PRICE HOUSE: $5,200. + + MEDIAN PRICE A YEAR AGO: $270,000 + + MEDIAN PRICE FIVE YEARS AGO: $285,000. + + MEDIAN PRICE OF TWO-BEDROOM CONDOMINIUM: $230,000. + +MEDIAN PRICE ONE YEAR AGO: $220,000. + +MEDIAN PRICE FIVE YEARS AGO: $230,000. + + MEDIAN RENT ON TWO-BEDROOM APARTMENT: $840. + + GOVERNMENT: Mayor (Harold Weideli Jr. Republican) elected to four-year term and six council members elected to three-year terms. + +PUBLIC-SCHOOL EXPENDITURE PER PUPIL: $9,035. + + DISTANCE FROM MIDTOWN MANHATTAN: 25 miles. + + RUSH-HOUR COMMUTATION TO MIDTOWN: 45 minutes on New Jersey Transit train to Hoboken: $5 one-way, $42.50 weekly, $140 monthly, then 10 minutes by PATH, $1 or $40 for 46 trips. + + CODES: ZIP, 07974; area, 908. + + SALT BROOK: During the Revolutionary War, residents feared that the British would invade New Providence. Therefore, they poured salt in their brook to deny the Redcoats water. The British never came, but Salt Brook is on the borough seal, along with a turkey and the local Presbyterian Church. + +Map of New Providence. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +250 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 18, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +More 'Ethnic Cleansing' by Serbs Is Reported in Bosnia + +BYLINE: By CHUCK SUDETIC, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 2; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 648 words + +DATELINE: BELGRADE, Yugoslavia, July 17 + +Armed Serbian nationalists have rousted hundreds of Muslims from their homes in the northeastern Bosnian district of Bijeljina in recent days and have begun driving them across a battlefront to Bosnian Government territory, residents and aid workers said over the weekend. +A Serb from Bijeljina who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal said that, starting Thursday and possibly even earlier, Muslims had been picked up from Bijeljina's streets and detained outside the town by members of a local Serbian militia known as the Panthers. + The militia is notorious for operations to clear villages and towns in northeastern Bosnia of Muslims. +A spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Belgrade said the organization had heard of "problems" in Bijeljina on Friday morning, had complained on Saturday to nationalist Serb leaders, and had asked for permission to visit detainees. She refused to comment on details of the roundup. + +Meeting on Peace Plan + The incident comes on the eve of a meeting by the Bosnian Serbs' self-styled parliament in Pale on a proposed peace settlement that would divide Bosnia among the warring factions. The Serbs have signaled that they will reject the proposal, which would require them to give up a third of the land they hold. The Serbs now control about 70 percent of Bosnia. +The authors of the plan -- the United States, Russia, Britain, France and Germany -- have given the Serbs and a federation of Croats and the Muslim-led Government until Tuesday to accept or reject the settlement. Bosnian Government officials have said they will accept the peace proposal. +In April 1992, just as the war in Bosnia was beginning, Serbian militiamen, in an organized campaign, emptied the Bijeljina district of most of its Muslims. Only a few thousand Muslims -- mostly women, children and elderly people -- had remained. +Before the war, about a third of the district's 97,000 people were Muslims, while the town of Bijeljina had a Muslim majority. + +Exchange for Prisoners? + Under the peace proposal to be considered on Monday, the Bijeljina district would go to the Serbs. Townspeople speculated this weekend that the latest "ethnic cleansing" operation was aimed not only at terrorizing Muslims but using them as a means of exchange for Serbian fighters captured by the Bosnian Government. +"They've rounded up about 800 Muslims," said a 45-year-old woman from Bijeljina who said she feared to give her name because she is a member of a minority -group and is desperate to leave. "They're saving them for exchange. They're being dropped at the front line." +"We can't survive here," she said. "We have no choice but to leave." +The Serbian man said he heard from witnesses that members of the Panthers refused to obey local police officers, saying they had "orders." +A United Nations aid worker reported that he heard today from a Bosnian Army brigade commander in the village of Satorovici that Serbian militiamen pushed about 135 Muslims, mostly women, children and elderly people, across the nearby battlefront at 7 P.M. Saturday, said Kris Janowski, a spokesman in Sarajevo for the United Nations refugee relief agency. +The army commander said all but seven of the Muslims were from Bijeljina and Janja, a village that was entirely Muslim before nationalist Serbs drove out half of its population and replaced it with Serbs, Mr. Janowski said. +"The people were reportedly rounded up from their houses," Mr. Janowski said. "They were reportedly told that they were going abroad and instructed to sign papers renouncing title to their property." +"They were taken to the front line in trucks," he said, citing the commander's account. "They were forced to give up their personal possessions, such as jewelry and money. And shots were fired in the air to prod them over the confrontation line." + +LOAD-DATE: July 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Map of Bosnia and Herzegovina showing location of Bijeljina. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +251 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 19, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO DIGEST + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 507 words + + +HARDSHIP FOR OLD IN HAVEN FOR YOUNG +For the first time, more people over 65 are living in the New York region's suburbs than in its cities, small towns and rural areas combined. The growth of the suburban elderly population is presenting an array of disturbing new problems for local governments, social service agencies, medical workers, businesses and families, all being forced to deal with the aging in a setting created for the young. A1. +VALLONE PRESSES FOR A POLICE MONITOR +City Council Speaker Peter F. Vallone said that he wants a permanent independent agency to monitor corruption in the New York City Police Department, and Council leaders said that he has the votes to push it through. A1. + + NEW YORK CITY + + LOOKING ELSEWHERE +FOR A TOWER SITE +An over-the-fence squabble between two powerful Bronx neighbors cooled a bit when Fordham University agreed to look for a different place to put its new radio tower, other than directly across the road from the New York Botanical Garden. B3. +TRANSIT POLICE VETO PROPOSED CONTRACT +The union for transit police officers rejected a tentative contract that the city and union leadership had announced last week, making it likely that the dispute will go before a state arbitration board. B3. +ANOTHER LEGIONNAIRES' CASE SUSPECTED +Another traveler on a New York cruise ship to Bermuda has been hospitalized with the symptoms of Legionnaires' disease, and the condition of two of the three of those with confirmed cases has worsened, New Jersey health and hospital officials said. B2. + + REGION + + BIKER CLASH +LEAVES 2 DEAD +Perhaps 150 motorcycling enthusiasts were gathered in the picnic grove of an Elks Lodge in Hackettstown, N.J., on Sunday afternoon when arguments started near an outdoor beer and liquor stand. "In rapid succession, it went from fists to knives, and from knives to guns," said the Warren County Prosecutor, John J. O'Reilly. The violence that erupted between two motorcycle clubs at the charity barbecue left two men dead and three wounded. B4. +YOUTH'S KILLING ATTRIBUTED TO ROUGH SEX +The youth accused of strangling his 12-year-old classmate at a school for emotionally disturbed children told detectives he put his hands around the boy's neck as the two engaged in rough sexual intercourse, investigators testified during a preliminary court hearing. B4. +DETECTIVES PLEAD GUILTY IN $10,000 THEFT +Three grim-faced former detectives of the Mount Vernon Police Department, who were videotaped in May stealing $10,000 in an F.B.I. sting operation, pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in White Plains to charges of theft and conspiracy. B4. +LAW ON HASIDIC DISTRICT CHALLENGED +New York's state school boards association, which persuaded the Supreme Court to abolish a school district that was created specifically to accommodate ultra-Orthodox Jews, announced that it would return to court to challenge a new state law that was designed to circumvent the court ruling. B2. + + Chronicle B5 + Our Towns by Evelyn Nieves B4 + + +LOAD-DATE: July 19, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Chart: 'Pulse: Subway Crime' +The number of reported felonies in the New York City subway for the first four months of 1993 and 1994. +1993 -- 3,778 +1994 -- 3,147 +Decrease of 16.7% +(Source: Transit Police Department) + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +252 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 19, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +Empty Lawns: Aging in the Suburbs -- A special report.; +Elderly Find Hardship in Haven for Young + +BYLINE: By ESTHER B. FEIN + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 2630 words + +They moved out to the suburbs in the decades after World War II in record numbers with all the promise and trappings of youth, with bicycles and station wagons, baby strollers and basketball hoops. +They raised families there, had careers and now, in record numbers, they are growing old there. Across the United States, more older people are living in the suburbs than ever before. The trend is especially prevalent in the New York area. For the first time in the region's history, more people over 65 are living in suburbs than in cities, small towns and rural areas combined, an analysis of the 1990 Census shows. + The growth of the suburban elderly population is expected to continue, experts say, and it is presenting an array of disturbing new problems for local governments, social service agencies, medical workers, businesses and families, who are all being forced to deal with the aging in a setting created for the young. +"Suburbia was always geared toward youth and this huge new population bulge is radically altering life here," said Stephen M. Jones, director of the Suffolk County Planning Department. "These are people who are not into Little League or Cub Scouts, and they require their own services that governments and businesses now have to accommodate." +Medicaid expenditures in Westchester County, for example, have gone up 52 percent since 1989. Officials say that more than half of the growth was needed to cover the rising cost of caring for elderly people in nursing homes, which reached $218 million in 1993, from $147 million four years before. +In Hackensack, N.J., the Visiting Homemaker and Home Health Aide Service of Bergen County, a nonprofit agency that focuses on the elderly, has tripled the size of its home health aide program over the last five years, opened a branch office and added new programs. +An elementary school in Commack, L.I., that was closed down for lack of students was bought by a private organization, renovated and expanded into the Gurmin Jewish Geriatric Center, which has a 300-bed nursing home and an adult day care center. +And, in some places, entrepreneurs have seen an opportunity in meeting the needs of older suburban residents. In Glen Rock, N.J., a woman started a car service to shuttle older people on errands after she noticed the trouble they had getting around when they could no longer drive. +"I can't drive anymore and I can't walk far, so I can't get anywhere on my own," said Cornelia McDonald, a 77-year-old widow who has lived for 36 years in Fair Lawn, N.J., raising four children in a 10-room house that she reluctantly gave up for a three-room apartment after her husband died two years ago. +"Everything is so far away," she said. "I used to like that. I used to like not being crowded by neighbors and everything. But now I'm having a hard time managing. I don't want to leave because everything is familiar and I like it here. But it's really very hard to cope." +For older people who are healthy, still able to drive and able to care for their homes, the pleasures of space and privacy that drew them to the suburbs remain. +But for an increasing number of the suburban elderly, the houses and lawns that once seemed barely big enough to contain the giggles and the games are now oversized and overwhelming to maintain. The two-story and split-level homes that once seemed a triumph over the crowded apartments they had fled are now torturous to negotiate with walkers and arthritic knees. Driving to supermarkets, libraries and shops, once a routine of daily life, is now simply impossible. + +A National Phenomenon + The aging of the suburban population is a reflection of general demographic shifts in the country. The United States Census Bureau predicts that by 2030, the over-65 population will grow two and a half times, to more than 70 million people, and older people will make up 20 percent of the population, up from 12.6 percent. +But the trend is particularly stark in suburbia. In 1980, people over 65 made up 10.8 percent of the population in the suburbs of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. They now account for 13.3 percent, and demographers say that share is growing. In the same period the percentage of old people in the cities of the three states has declined slightly, from 13.3 percent to 13.1 percent. +The surge of the suburban elderly population also coincides with a growing desire among many older people to remain at home -- rather than in nursing homes or other institutions. As a result, vast numbers of people are aging in suburban houses designed for young families and in communities ill-equipped to deliver services older people need. +"Old people are simply not part of the raison d'etre of the suburbs, so it's psychologically harder to accept being old there," said Marjorie Cantor, a gerontologist at the Fordham University Graduate School of Social Services. "Everything there is geared toward young people, young families. +"In the city, the difference between being old and young is not so acute. Older people can find their niche more easily. They can find things to do more easily. And in rural areas, older people are still part of the natural cycle of life. But in the suburbs, despite their numbers, they become invisible because they basically withdraw." + +The Isolation +The Homebound Suffer in Privacy + The route that volunteers for the Visiting Nurse Association of Long Island drive as they make food deliveries to the homebound elderly in the Port Washington area is like a map of troubles older people face in the suburbs. +A brick house with peeling trim is an unwieldy asset for one older woman whose inability to drive leaves her stranded and dependent on home-delivered meals. A rundown Victorian with a neat lawn is home to a man whose children have moved on, as so many do, whose friends have died or become disabled and who knows none of his neighbors. A basement apartment on a quiet street is the only affordable alternative for a vibrant 80-year-old woman, tethered to an oxygen machine, who cannot get into a subsidized housing complex for the elderly. +Five days a week, volunteers for the Visiting Nurses and four other organizations financed by Nassau County's Department of Senior Citizen Affairs deliver a hot lunch and a cold supper to nearly 2,000 elderly people -- more than twice the caseload of 10 years ago. Dozens more are on a waiting list. + +Suddenly Defenseless + Many of the elderly say that they never thought ahead to their later years when they bought houses with staircases and lush yards. The distance between them and their neighbors, a zone of privacy they once treasured, is now a gulf that makes them feel alone and defenseless. +"I'm trapped," said one 73-year-old woman in Port Washington who, like many of the elderly living alone in the suburbs, said she felt too vulnerable to have her name printed in an article. "And I don't really know anybody in the neighborhood. Who would even hear or know if something happened to me?" +Since she became ill with cancer of the thymus gland and with a nerve disorder, and can no longer climb stairs, she has lived on the bottom floor of her two-story house, sleeping in her son's childhood bedroom. +The basement was flooded months ago, but she has been unable to do anything about the mess. The various medications she takes cause severe hunger, yet she can no longer drive to the supermarket, and there are none in the area that deliver. +"At first, I didn't want to sell because I was comfortable here," she said, her voice a whisper. "Now the property taxes are half my income and I'm spending more every month than I'm taking in. I know I'm going to have to sell, but I'll lose a lot of money." +She gets out occasionally to church, she said, but only when friends drive her. "There are a lot of people there with walkers and wheelchairs," she said. "I guess we were all young once here. We all fit in once." +For Susan Millman, the suburbs are still peaceful, not isolating, still engaging, not intimidating. +She is 77 and can drive to meetings of the Rye (N.Y.) Historical Society in Westchester and to shopping centers. She can walk down to the beach that borders the house she has lived in for 43 years, a house she chose because it was near good schools and open spaces where her two children could play. +She said she never worried about maintaining the two-story house, or tending the juniper, lilac and apple trees in the yard. Then her husband suffered three strokes and became paralyzed on his right side. In September, unable to care for her 84-year-old husband herself, Mrs. Millman placed him in a nursing home in nearby Larchmont. +"Until my husband got sick, I never worried about the house, never worried about money," said Mrs. Millman, a retired occupational therapist. "Now I'm worried. Do I paint the house this year or not? Do I get out now? It has come to the point for me physically where this and this I can do and this and this I can't. I can do the laundry in the basement and I learned how to change the filter on the furnace. But I can't mow the lawn or shovel snow or paint the basement or wash windows." +Mrs. Millman is in many ways typical of the suburban elderly in the New York area: she's married, living in her own home, still able to take care of herself and to get around without help. Myna Lavine, an 80-year-old widow living in Bergenfield, N.J., illustrates the increased dependency and loneliness suburbanites face as they live longer. +She had to give up driving several years ago when glaucoma clouded her vision and arthritis slowed her movements. She leaves her small brick house only to sit on the front porch and water the lawn. Once a week, a social service worker goes to the supermarket and then unloads the groceries into Mrs. Lavine's cupboards. +"See, I love living here," Mrs. Lavine said. "I'm out on my porch almost every day watching the traffic go by. Sometimes people stop at the fence and say 'hi.' But I'm alone here." + +The Obligations +Governments Face Growing Burden + The strain of aging is felt not only by older people. Local suburban governments also grapple with the pressure of the growing elderly population on their resources. +In Nassau County, for example, the general population has decreased over the last 20 years by nearly 10 percent, while the population of people 65 and older has increased by 54 percent and with it the need to finance services for the elderly, like centers and housing complexes, special transportation and medical care. +As with most local governments, most of the money Nassau County spends on the elderly goes to finance its portion of the Medicaid costs for nursing homes and home health programs. +Since the Medicaid program, which provides care for poor people, is required by Federal and state law, the county is obligated to finance part of it. To do so, officials said, they are often forced to cut other services. +"Medicaid costs are driving our budget," said Fred Parola, the Nassau County Comptroller. "The costs are so incredibly high that they have literally forced cutbacks in the system, like in the parks department, youth programs." +Over the last 10 years, Medicaid expenditures in Nassau County's Social Services Department rose 167 percent, to $126.2 million from $47.2 million, with officials saying that a growing portion went to cover care for the elderly. The Department of Senior Citizen Affairs, which is financed through Federal, state, county and some private money, increased its spending in that time 77 percent -- to $10 million from $5.7 million. +During the same period, the parks department budget was cut 26 percent, to $26.5 million from $36 million. +Complicating the budget juggling, Mr. Parola said, is the fact that most older people are on fixed incomes and have "tremendous antagonism toward tax increases" that could be used to pay for the services they need. +Increasingly, the county is trying to encourage businesses to meet the elderly's needs. In one program, developers who build housing for the elderly and restrict their own profits do not have to pay property taxes. +What keeps many older people independent and sane in the suburbs, they say, is driving. "The suburbs has a lot to offer an older person," said Mrs. Millman, of Rye, "if you can get places." +To keep up her skills, and to get a 10 percent discount on her insurance, Mrs. Millman has twice taken a driving course called 55 Alive offered by the American Association of Retired Persons. The instructors offered tips to compensate for the slowing of reflexes that often comes with age: don't drive at rush hours, at night or on highways; leave several car lengths between your car and the next; don't start making a left turn too early and don't start braking too late. +But she said that too few of her friends were as diligent as she. "Some of them shouldn't be driving, but they do," she said. "Their reflexes aren't what they used to be. But they're all terrified of being stuck in their houses. A friend of mine just had to give up her car and she's very depressed." +Transportation, experts say, is one of the greatest problems older people face in the suburbs. It affects their ability to eat, to get medical treatment, to work and socialize. +"How do you connect people to services in a setting where things are so spread out?" said Jane Gould, the director of New York State's Office for the Aging. "People assumed isolation of the elderly in rural areas and planned for it. We didn't assume it in the suburbs and it's very, very prevalent. And then there is the problem of older people hanging on to cars long after they should give them up. They say: 'How will I get to the doctor? How will I get to the store?' Meanwhile, they're a danger to themselves and to others on the road." +New York State is experimenting with new colors, sizes and placement of road signs to help older drivers, many of whom live in the suburbs, compensate for poor vision and reflexes and drive more safely for longer. +Advocates for the elderly have lobbied against any requirements that older drivers be retested and recertified, saying such efforts represent age discrimination. Younger drivers, they point out, have the highest accident rate. But insurance and transportation experts say that older people are involved in more accidents per miles driven, making their overall crash experience similar to that of the under-25 group. +Physical impairments also prevent older people from using the limited public transportation that is available in the suburbs. While most counties provide some sort of door-to-door van service for the elderly and the disabled, officials say that resources are severely limited and fall far short of the growing need. +Roberta Feinberg watched two widowed aunts in New Jersey struggle to get around the sprawl of suburbia. When she would help out by driving them, she said, their thanks were embarrassingly profuse. +Looking around her own neighborhood in Glen Rock, N.J., she said, she could see many more older people like her aunts with few transportation options. So eight years ago, she started Companion Express, a company she and her patrons describe as "more than a car service." +"A taxi could take them to the doctor," said Ms. Feinberg, who charges $16 an hour and now has about five other drivers working with her. "But I talk to them, I sit with them. I help them into the car. I help them to the bathroom. A taxi is not going to do that." +County and state planning officials say that despite the growing market of elderly people, businesses like Mrs. Feinberg's are few. Despite demographic shifts, most entrepreneurs in the suburbs still focus on the young. + +LOAD-DATE: July 19, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: July 21, 1994, Thursday + + CORRECTION: +An article on Tuesday about the problems of elderly people in the suburbs misspelled the name of a nursing home in Commack, L.I. It is the Gurwin Jewish Geriatric Center, not Gurmin. + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Susan Millman was unable to care for her ill husband, Herbert, and was forced to place him in a nursing home in Larchmont, N.Y. (William E. Sauro/The New York Times)(pg. A1); "See, I love living here," said Myna Lavine. Hampered by arthritis and glaucoma, she rarely leaves her Bergenfield, N.J., home. "I'm out on my porch almost every day watching the traffic go by. Sometimes people stop at the fence and say hi. But I'm alone here." (William E. Sauro/The New York Times)(pg. B2) + +Graphs: "CLOSE-UP: Old in the Suburbs" shows the elderly population in N.Y., N.J. and Conn. "COMPARISON -- Old and Older: A Changing Profile" shows some stark differences in people over the age of 65 and those over the age of 85. (Source: Dr. Andrew Beveridge, Sociology Department, Queens College)(pg. B5) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +253 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 21, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Corrections + +SECTION: Section A; Page 2; Column 6; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 31 words + +An article on Tuesday about the problems of elderly people in the suburbs misspelled the name of a nursing home in Commack, L.I. It is the Gurwin Jewish Geriatric Center, not Gurmin. + +LOAD-DATE: July 21, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Correction + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +254 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 22, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO DIGEST + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 492 words + + +BACKING OFF ON PRIVATIZING SCHOOLS +The Board of Education in Hartford is preparing to hire a profit-making company to manage the city's 32 schools, but fierce opposition from teachers and questions about the financial arrangements have caused the school board to reject the company's bid to take full control. A1. +Education Alternatives, a Minneapolis company, was operating at a loss. Then it took over nine Baltimore public schools. B6. +IMMIGRATION INQUIRY FINDS FRAUD +Elaine Wilson's wedding plans collapsed when colleagues of the prospective groom -- an undercover agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service -- arrested Ms. Wilson and two others on charges of participating in a marriage fraud ring aimed at illegal immigrants. A1. + +NEW YORK CITY + +KINGS COUNTY HOSPITAL IN DISARRAY +The head of the Health and Hospitals Corporation said he would appoint a new executive director to oversee Kings County Hospital Center because it is in danger of losing its medical accreditation. B3. +INQUIRY INTO TALKS ON CON ED VIOLATIONS +The Speaker of the City Council said a task force would investigate the circumstances surrounding Con Edison's negotiations with the state to settle environmental charges. B3. +ASSISTED SUICIDE LAW CHALLENGED +Two men in the terminal stages of AIDS, a woman dying of cancer and three physicians who care for such patients filed suit seeking to strike down New York's prohibition against assisted suicide. B3. +A group of retired police officers said they would establish a hot line to report corruption. B3. +A Columbia University official is nominated to head the Child Welfare Administration. B7. + +REGION + +SHIP TRAVELERS BEGIN TO RETURN +Some suntanned, some steaming, passengers from the ill-fated cruise ship Horizon arrived in New York City, their vacations scuttled by an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease. B4. +The first symptoms hit John Silivanch as he worked in his backyard. B4. +COLLEGE STRUGGLES TO STAY OPEN +Debt-burdened, its enrollment shrinking, its accreditation slated to be revoked, its faculty unpaid for a month, Upsala College will nevertheless remain open for at least another semester while it looks for a way out of its crisis. B6. +CONFESSION DESCRIBES SHOOTINGS +Using the clinical language of medicine, a 22-year-old premedical student charged with murder in a carjacking told investigators that he shot his two victims in a moment of panic. B4. +7 SICKENED BY TAINTED MEAT +In what health officials fear may be the first of many cases, six children and one elderly person have become ill in New Jersey from eating tainted hamburger that might have come from the same source. B4. +LEADING THE SCHOOL FINANCE CHALLENGE +Marilyn Morheuser still believes in the rallying cries of the 1960's. Why else would she have gone before the State Supreme Court to argue again that New Jersey has failed to do right by its impoverished students? B9. + +Chronicle B8 + +LOAD-DATE: July 22, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "Manhattan Mortgages" shows average interest rates for 30-year fixed-rate and 1-year adjustable-rate loans for Manhattan co-ops and condominiums (Source: Manhattan Mortgage Company) + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +255 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 22, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Mary Lasswell, 89, Novelist, Is Dead + +SECTION: Section B; Page 18; Column 4; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 197 words + +Mary Lasswell, an author whose humorous novels about life in Southern California and Texas were popular in the 1940's and 50's, died on Tuesday in the nursing unit of the Solvang Lutheran Home in Solvang, Calif., where she resided. She was 89. +The cause was Alzheimer's disease, said her husband, Dr. Dudley Winn Smith, a surgeon. + Her first book, "Suds in Your Eye," published by Houghton Mifflin in 1942, was described as "a crazy, funny story" about three impecunious elderly women. It was unlike most of the novels coming out of Southern California, wrote Beatrice Sherman in The New York Times Book Review on Dec. 13, 1942. A Broadway play in 1944, based on the book, was dramatized by Jack Kirkland. +Among her other books were "High Time" (1944); "Mrs. Rasmussen's Book of One-Arm Cookery" (1946); "Wait for the Wagon" (1951); "I'll Take Texas" (1958); "Let's Go for Broke" (1962), and "Tio Pepe" (1968). +Miss Lasswell, who was born in Glasgow, Scotland, of American parents, on Feb. 8, 1905, grew up in Brownsville, Tex. +She is survived by her husband, who lives in the Solvang Lutheran Home in Solvang, and a brother, Clyde Lubbock of Pensacola, Fla. + +LOAD-DATE: July 22, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +256 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 23, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE: THE DEMOCRATS; +Clintons Ask Senate Leader To Insist on Coverage for All + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1062 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 22 + +President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton appealed to the Senate majority leader on Thursday to stand firm for the idea of health insurance for all Americans, rather than make concessions before debate begins, two leading Democrats said today. +The Clintons came away from the Thursday meeting encouraged to believe that Senator George J. Mitchell of Maine, the majority leader, would do as they urged, said the two Democrats, who have been closely involved in developing health care legislation. + House leaders also came away from a later White House meeting with the President, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Mitchell believing that the bill Mr. Mitchell plans to unveil late next week would seek to insure all Americans and would probably rely ultimately on requiring employers to help pay workers' premiums if other approaches did not work, Congressional aides said. +The decision to propose such an approach is not easy for Mr. Mitchell because many in the Senate, including some Democrats, say they will not support sweeping measures. But it matters very much both to the Clintons and to House leaders. +If Senate Democrats are not seen by House members as fighting for a strong bill, the effort to pass a similar bill in the House may cave in. And if the Senate proposal seems soft and the President supports it, his own determination would be questioned. +Mr. Mitchell and his House counterpart, Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, are developing their proposals mainly from the bills approved by two committees in each house, although they may add some provisions. Mr. Mitchell is especially likely to do so. +Mr. Mitchell declined to comment either on his conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Clinton or on what his still-unfinished bill would embrace. But he said today that it was essential to provide "health insurance for all Americans, and that means not only providing health insurance to those who do not now have it, but also providing security to those who now have it but fear losing it." +House leaders have already made it clear that they expect to follow the lines of a House Ways and Means Committee measure. That bill would require employers to provide insurance and would put uninsured Americans into a new segment of the Medicare program, which now mainly insures the elderly. The committee bill would impose its requirements from 1996 to 1998, but the leaders plan to suggest proceeding more slowly. +In the House, Speaker Thomas S. Foley of Washington would not say today how long a delay in achieving universal coverage would be proposed. But he said at a news conference, "I think we are talking about some slight, not forever and ever, but some slight delay in phasing it in." + +Mitchell's Pessimism + Although some House Democrats strongly dislike the Medicare approach and others fear that disputes over abortion coverage will unravel the alliance behind the bill, House leaders are reasonably optimistic that they can assemble the 218 votes they need to pass a bill, so long as a debacle in the Senate does not scare off their troops. +But Mr. Mitchell is far less confident of mustering a majority for any bill, especially one that relies on mandatory employer payments. Supporters of that approach have worried aloud this week that Mr. Mitchell was being unduly pessimistic and have pressed him to go for employer payments, a plea also apparently made by the Clintons. +Among the options that have been discussed are lowering the required employer payments from 80 percent of the cost of insurance premiums to 50 percent. Eighty percent is the standard in Mr. Clinton's proposal and in one Senate bill and two House measures. Another alternative is requiring employer contributions only if other measures, like changes in insurance laws, fail to increase coverage sufficiently. +When the leaders said on Thursday night that their bills would be "less bureaucratic, more voluntary, and will be phased in over a longer period of time" than Mr. Clinton's original proposal, they were establishing symbolic distance from a plan that has been widely criticized despite popular support for its broad aims. +But they were also restating the obvious. Mr. Clinton's legislative proposal has not been the operative bill for several months. Most remakes of it have dropped the mandatory inclusion of most Americans in insurance purchasing alliances, its most unpopular feature. Mr. Clinton has praised several bills that did that. + +Exit Lines + The President took credit today for the words the Congressional leaders used as they left Thursday's meeting. Mr. Clinton said today at a news conference that when Thursday's meeting ended, the leaders asked what they should tell reporters waiting outside the White House. +Mr. Clinton said he replied: "Well, I have been saying for four weeks we have agreed to dramatically change this plan. We're going to string it out, we have to have a longer phase-in, we have to have less bureaucracy, we have to have totally voluntary small-business alliances, and we have to give a bigger break to small businesses to get them to buy into it. I'll bet if you go out there and say it, it will be treated as news. +"And that is exactly what happened," Mr. Clinton added. "And I'm glad that it finally is going out to the American people." + +A Plea for More Time + Meanwhile, Republicans were complaining that the legislation was getting patched together too quickly for serious consideration by Congress. +Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the No. 2 House Republican, urged that the House use August to study the bill Mr. Gephardt will introduce, as well as an unwritten "bipartisan substitute." +And Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, asked for a week's delay after Mr. Mitchell produces his bill. "With a 500- or 1,000- or 1,500-page bill that we've got no report on, no language, no estimates, I would hope at that stage we would be willing to take a one-week recess before the recess and say, 'All right, let's everybody look at this for one week,' " he said. " This is the most important piece of legislation we've had in 25 years. It is not fair to start on it on one or two days' notice." +Mr. Mitchell, mindful of the Senate's deliberate pace, said, "We expect there will be plenty of time for people to review and analyze the bill." + +LOAD-DATE: July 23, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Senator George J. Mitchell was urged from several directions this week to stand firm on universal coverage. (Paul Hosefros/The New York Times) (pg. 8) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +257 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 23, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Observer; +The Beethoven Defense + +BYLINE: By RUSSELL BAKER + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 19; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 672 words + +California, which is in the vanguard of practically everything, has started using classical music as a teen-ager repellent. +Apparently nothing works like a dose of Beethoven quartet for driving a horde of teen-agers out of your neighborhood, unless it's a Bach fugue. All the masters are powerful juice, however: Haydn, Mozart, Wagner, Brahms . . . The pity is they can't be sprayed out of a can. + In California, severe infestations of teen-agers occur, as in the East, in malls and around convenience stores. Biologists believe teen-agers are lured by the combination of generous parking space and chilled soda pop. +These, say the scientists, combine in mild weather to intensify a terrifying teen-ager lust for noise. At one time this could easily be gratified by a small car radio, or so it was believed by early teen-ager-ologists. +How wrong they were. Apparently the teen-ager has always had an ear organ -- ironic word for it in view of teen-ager detestation of Bach's magnificent organ music -- which creates an insatiable craving for decibels. +Only recently has electronic technology reached the stage where it can even begin to provide the decibels the teen-ager is capable of absorbing without pain. +In a laboratory test 97 of 100 teen-agers tolerated the sound of power saws ripping through every piece of plumbing in a 30-story building, while also carrying on what scientists took to be intelligible conversation, which they interrupted from time to time to complain that the amplifiers were too weak. +Industrial-strength electronic weaponry now being sold can make life insupportable for neighbors of open-air businesses like convenience stores experiencing a teen-ager infestation. +Malls can police teen-ager noise better than convenience stores, but they find that teen-agers nevertheless tend to scare older customers who associate them with noise capable of deafening the innocent for miles around. +Teen-agers say there aren't any innocents for miles around anymore and, in view of the unspeakable world their elders have created, leaving them nothing but hopelessness and despair, people for miles around, and everybody else for that matter, would be better off if they couldn't ever hear anything anyhow. +What excites the teen-agers to such sass? Scientists believe the fury results when a teen-ager hears what he regards as music referred to as "noise." +Experiments at the Institute of Teen-Ager Sturm und Drang suggest that the teen-ager does, in fact, believe that sound capable of blowing out eardrums eight blocks from its source is, as one specimen teen-ager called it, "the sweetest music this side of Heaven." +California malls, like most malls, provide incessant broadcast music which is theoretically supposed to stimulate the money-spending juices of their prototypical customer, a well- heeled baby boomer who is going on 50. +He is thought to be fetched for spending by rock music, not the bone-chilling variety that takes the teen-ager to paradise, but still rock. +To a teen-ager any rock is better than no rock. So the malls have been providing a rock to stay the teen-ager's hunger until he can get to a convenience store and turn up the sound to the point where it scares the hurricanes back to the horse latitudes. +California malls now find they can clear them out fast by replacing baby-boomer rock with the classics. Teen-agers simply can't stand it. +Four notes of a Mozart piano concerto affect them the way DDT used to affect earwigs. Scientists believe teen-agers instinctively fear that classical music is a deadly threat to their health, just as the boomer generation believes cigarette smoke will do them all in. +This could mean a grim future for people who are not already deaf, because teen-agers, who invariably get older, are bound to be in charge eventually. We could end up a nation of malls vibrating to unbearable sounds and of social outcasts huddled in lonely alleys listening through ear plugs to heavily taxed tapes of Verdi's "Requiem." + +LOAD-DATE: July 23, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +258 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 24, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +SUNDAY, JULY 24, 1994; +Saving Frequent Fallers + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 6; Column 1; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 223 words + +At last, an invention for old people, and one that has nothing to do with in-line skates. It's a floor -- to be tested early next year at a nursing home in Pennsylvania. "The home is a typical facility, with 225 residents," says Peter Cavanagh, who teaches biomechanics at Penn State. Somebody falls down at the home roughly once a day, and "about once every other month, one suffers a broken hip." +That's because the floor is so hard, thought Cavanagh and one of his colleagues, Donald Streit, a mechanical engineer. What if, when someone collapsed, the floor did, too? They call their creation dual stiffness flooring. It's a kind of sandwich, two plastic sheets separated by plastic columns, all of it about an inch thick and designed to break the force of a fall by as much as 30 percent. Then it bounces back. + There is a drawback, however. Cavanagh says it costs more than three times as much as ordinary linoleum or carpeting. But he and Streit are also social engineers. "A minority of residents account for most of the falls at this home," says Cavanagh. "It should be fairly simple to establish which residents are at high risk, and use the expensive stuff only in a 'falls wing.' " +Actually, the floor would also be great for people of any age who are frequent fallers. Maybe it does have a use in Rollerblading. + +LOAD-DATE: July 24, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +259 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 24, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +YOUR HOME; +Changes To Help The Aged + +BYLINE: By ANDREE BROOKS + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 5; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1144 words + +AS the nation's population ages, there has been an increased consciousness of innovations designed to permit an increasing number of older Americans to live comfortably and safely in their own homes well into later life. +They range from new ideas for structural modifications to inexpensive hand-held electronic gadgets that can be readily purchased from a neighborhood store. + Moreover, rather than detract from the appeal of the home the changes could make it more valuable because they are also useful for families with young children. +Items on such a list, say brokers, include the newer bathroom faucets with automatic temperature controls to prevent scalding; levers instead of doorknobs; kitchen cabinets and appliances that can be readily reached and operated from a wheelchair (and thus also by a child). +And any parent who has ever pushed a toddler in a stroller will appreciate the value of an attractively landscaped ramp in place or in addition to the (often deteriorated) steps that traditionally lead to the entrance of a suburban house -- especially if that ramp has been artfully concealed with a berm and a brick facade to cover the concrete. +Even items for the disabled such as ramps and grab bars no longer carry a stigma, said Ted Bobrow, a spokesman for the American Association of Retired Persons. He attributed this in part to better design and colors. +But, he added, they have also become more socially acceptable after having been installed in public buildings such as hotels and offices as a result of the new Federal disability laws. +No wonder the most recent surveys taken by AARP show less psychological resistance to needed changes even by the older people themselves. +First, some background reading. "The Perfect Fit: Creative Ideas for a Safe and Livable Home" is a 42-page illustrated booklet from AARP that provides practical, low-cost suggestions while stimulating the reader's own creativity through easy exercises. It's available free by writing for booklet #D14823, AARP EEO768, 601 E Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20049. +Its recommendations include moving the customary end-of-driveway mailbox to the front door or constructing a mail slot actually in the door so the older person doesn't have to go outside; installing automatic garage-door openers for greater safety and ease of movement and adding an open shelf between high kitchen cabinets and the countertop so regularly used objects can be easily seen and grasped. +The recommendations also include a useful listing of catalogue companies (with their toll-free numbers) that supply residential devices for the elderly. Lumex Inc. of Bay Shore, L.I. for example, produces reclining chairs with wheels for easier shifting around that can be custom covered in the client's own fabric. +Equally helpful is the "Home Safety Guide for Older People: Check It Out/Fix It Up," a checklist of potential hazards and possible solutions developed by gerontologists. Send $13.95 to Serif Press, 1331 H Street N.W., Suite 110, Washington, D.C. 20005 or order by phone at (800) 221-4272. +Jon Pynoos, associate professor of gerontology at the Andrus Gerontology Center at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, suggests starting with simple changes. In particular he favors levered door handles that -- in gleaming brass -- have become a standard fashion accessory in newer expensive homes. Not only do they add a touch of class to an older home but levers are also critical, he said, for anyone suffering from arthritis. +He also recommends any number of the newer remote-control gadgets. Mr. Pynoos said he recently provided his aging father-in-law with a device that allowed the man to turn on the interior lights before going indoors. +Technology is helping in other ways. Stair lifts can now be installed for curved stairways while certain models have dropped as low as $4,000 fully installed. Electronic sensors can be installed to turn lights on and off automatically as the person enters or leaves a room, eliminating fumbling and forgetting. +William K. Wasch, president of William K. Wasch Associates of Middletown, Conn., a contractor, said that any plan to modify the house might well include the creation of an accessory apartment on the second floor or basement for a live-in care giver -- an adaptation that local zoning codes normally permit whenever the home owner is elderly. +Planned changes should also permit the elderly person to live entirely on the first floor, which may mean creating a full bathroom out of a half bathroom or laundry area. +This bathroom (or any bathroom modification), say the experts, should ideally include a separate shower stall designed for wheelchair access. Also useful is a bench and a hand-shower in the shower stall so someone who cannot easily walk or stand can still maintain a modicum of independence and dignity. Special benches and rails that help someone get into and out of a bath are also proliferating. +Most of these items can now be found at hardware stores and home improvement centers in addition to hospital supply retailers and through catalogues. +An attached garage, said Mr. Wasch, is best modified for easier access to the main house by creating an inside ramp along a side wall of the garage and curving it around to cover the connecting stairs at the far end. Building a front-facing ramp directly over those stairs, he said, shortens the garage space and could end up with too steep a grade. +A small bench might also be placed along an inside garage wall, added Mr. Wasch, so the older person can put down groceries and other purchases while unlocking the connecting door. +The entire garage, he noted, should be brightly lit. Too many auxiliary areas, like staircases and passageways, he warned, are normally lit only with the dimmest lights even though these are the most hazardous areas of the home. +Screen doors, say these experts, should be removed if they have become an entryway hazard. Staircases (including basement steps) should have hand rails on both sides. +Side-by-side refrigerator-freezers are easier to reach than those with the freezer on top. Pull-out shelves should replace any of the drawers and cabinets that have fixed shelving. And simply taking a door off its hinges can become a quick and easy way to permit wheelchair access through tight doorways. +Finally, Evan Jeske, director of the Manhattan Household Management Program, which provides volunteers, companions and light housekeeping help for the elderly, believes in cleaning out the clutter and removing unnecessary items like scatter rugs that increase the probability of tripping. +Too many home-based accidents by the elderly, she said, could be eliminated if the dangers were identified and corrected in advance -- not left "until after something terrible has happened." + +LOAD-DATE: July 24, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +260 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 24, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THEATER; +Love Among the Risk Takers and Risk Averse + +BYLINE: By ALVIN KLEIN + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 17; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 570 words + +IT seems they stood and talked like this before. She remembers, instantly, where (the Isle of Capri overlooking the bay of Naples) and when (22 years ago). It isn't long before he remembers, too. Now on a veranda with a drop-dead view of Boston Harbor, surrounded by stars as if in possession of them. And yes, they are thinking of asking for the moon. +In "Later Life" A. R. Gurney establishes his most romantic setting yet. The scenic designer for the production at Westport Country Playhouse, Richard Ellis, has lived up to his part of the celestial bargain. + And Austin (Frank Converse), who is divorced, and Ruth (Maureen Anderman), who is separated, are not only available -- "relatively free and clear" -- but connecting. That, Ruth observes, is "something very rare in this world that is falling apart." Who among the audience isn't rooting for the final clinch? +In the best of all possible fantasy worlds, Mr. Gurney would oblige. But it is his sense of missed second chances that has made him write a ruefully truthful play rather than a satisfyingly dreamy one. +Austin and Ruth had their brief encounter after college and before marriage. Austin, then a Navy man, is still at sea. On the surface, he is shipshape. This is, remember, a Gurney play. +"A prince of a man" in the Groton School yearbook, he came from one of Boston's finest families, married the boss's daughter (from one of Boston's finest families), became a banker -- and remained a perfect gentleman. +But inside Austin is raging. All the top-drawer values that defined his breed are dying out. This is, remember, a Gurney play, a darker and deeper one than ever. Austin, overcome by a sense of dread, cannot move. Even Austin's psychiatrist misunderstands him. +In a coup of casting, concept and good economic sense, the inimitable Carole Shelley of the original Off Broadway cast and John C. Vennema, an Off Broadway replacement, play motley guests at the cocktail party inside. Under David Saint's graceful direction, they come onto the veranda to eavesdrop on Austin and Ruth. Mr. Vennema is a recovering smoker, a computer junkie and a crotchety elderly man asking to go to his retirement home in Florida. +Ms. Shelley is his wife who won't go. They are an overly gregarious couple, just moved to Boston, determined to show off their multicultural tolerances. Ms. Shelley also performs the roles of a hilarious series of snooty besotted and bewildered women. +As the overpriviledged Austin with a "Puritan sense of damnation," Mr. Converse, all pent up with pursed lips and furrowed brow, is made to look like a cloning of Charles Kimbrough, the play's original star. This is bothersome for Mr. Converse is giving a deeply felt attractive performance. Ruth, whose life has been a catalogue of disasters, in contrast to Austin's success, stability and sheer luck, is nevertheless a spirited risk taker, even if it means she is bent on destructiveness. Married four times to three men, she is on the run from an abusive ne'er-do-well. +Ms. Anderman, recreating her original role, wears the camouflage of charm and elegance perfectly. Her passion for life surfaces, but so what? +Ruth keeps on dancing. Austin goes on standing there. If his psychiatrist cannot understand why, who can? +"Later Life" by A. R. Gurney at Westport Country Playhouse, 25 Powers Court, off Route 1. 227-4177. Performances through Saturday. + +LOAD-DATE: July 24, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Maureen Anderman, left, Carole Shelley and John C. Vennema in a scene from A. R. Gurney's "Later Life," appearing at the Westport Country Playhouse through Saturday. (Jayson Byrd) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +261 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 27, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE: THE OVERVIEW; +Democrats Issue Draft of Health Plan + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 15; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1239 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 26 + +House Democratic staff members have drafted a summary of health insurance legislation for their leaders to discuss with other Democrats, but the preliminary document does not resolve many delicate issues, like timing. +As expected, the seven-page summary, widely circulated on Capitol Hill today, closely follows the lines of the bill adopted last month by the House Committee on Ways and Means, which aims to provide health insurance to all Americans, financed in large part by mandatory payments by employers. + Additions include allowing small businesses to enroll their workers in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, the same plan that covers members of Congress. Two Senate committees had also provided for opening that program to non-Federal employees. Some other provisions appear to be taken literally from the Ways and Means bill, although they concern issues on which the leaders remain open to compromise. + +A 'Work in Progress' + For example, the document speaks of requiring employers to pay 80 percent of workers' insurance premiums, while the Speaker, Thomas S. Foley of Washington, made it clear today that he would be open to reducing this to a 50-50 split between employers and employees. +Nevertheless, Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the House majority leader, is using at least some parts of this document as talking points with other Democrats. +Laura Nichols, Mr. Gephardt's press secretary, said tonight that the document was a "work in progress." She said it was prepared so leaders "can begin to not only educate members but talk them through what we could do in improving what the committee had done." +Ms. Nichols said the most sensitive issues, like how to structure the required employer payments toward workers' premiums, had not been resolved. The document, for example, does not discuss the possibility of exempting very small businesses, saying only, "In general, all employers would be required to contribute toward the cost of private health insurance for all employees." +She said, "The big policy decisions have yet to be made." +But as their leaders worked to turn legislation passed by committees into proposals for consideration on the House and Senate floors, Democrats were also busy using the health care issue to attack the Republicans. +Mr. Foley said the recent Republican National Committee meeting showed that Republicans wanted to defeat any health bill. He said their desire to "see any bill defeated is a remarkable confession of their putting politics above the interests of the people." + +Issue of Medicare + And Vice President Al Gore, addressing the National Council of Senior Citizens, said legislation proposed by Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the Republican leader, would "raid Medicare," provide "virtually no help with costly medications" and allow insurance companies to go on charging "older people four times as much as younger people" for health insurance. He said Democratic bills, unlike the Dole version, banned discriminatory rates and provided for prescription drugs and long-term care for the elderly. +Mr. Dole replied in a statement: "One day they attack me. The next day they attack employers. The next day it's insurance companies. It's politics as usual at the White House. They are looking for enemies instead of solutions." +And Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the No. 2 House Republican, said Mr. Foley was wrong in accusing the Republicans of opposing all health legislation. "We are working very hard to write a bill that can be passed," he said. "In a city where Rabin and Hussein spoke from the same microphone, we might even have the Democratic and Republican leadership work together." +Mr. Gingrich said he had repeatedly offered to work with the House majority leader and had been rebuffed. He contended that Republicans wanted to pass a moderate bill. "It's not just an effort to upstage and defeat the President," he said. +House Republicans have insisted that they would not consider any bill that would require employers to pay part of the cost of their workers' insurance. Democratic leaders regard that as an essential ingredient. +The attack on Mr. Dole in particular has been a determined Democratic strategy for the last few days. Rather than argue against compromise measures that have some bipartisan support, the Democrats have taken Mr. Dole's bill, which relies on insurance law changes and subsidies for the very poor but would leave many people uncovered, as the enemy. They have attacked it sharply, seeking to define the nation's choice as between their universal coverage measure, whatever it turns out to be, and his minimal measure. +In a day of heavy lobbying by the disabled and the elderly, New York City also weighed in, when hospital executives, labor leaders and Gov. Mario M. Cuomo traveled to Washington to demand that any bill provide universal coverage and not leave New York worse off than it is today. +Lieut. Gov. Stan Lundine, Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, and Dennis Rivera, president of Local 1199 of the hospital workers union, were among a group who called on Mr. Gephardt. They warned him that proposed cuts in Medicare and Medicaid payments for graduate medical education and for hospitals providing a disproportionate share of care to poor people would badly hurt New York's teaching and public hospitals, especially if legislation did not include coverage for everyone. + +Lobbying by Cuomo + In midafternoon, Mr. Cuomo made many of the same points at a meeting with the White House chief of staff, Leon E. Panetta, before going off to see Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and the dean of the state's House delegation, Charles B. Rangel of Manhattan. Mr. Cuomo said he had told Mr. Panetta that he thought that not enough Americans understood that universal coverage was not merely an altruistic goal but the linchpin on which successful change depended, even if it took several years to achieve. +"I think many of the people in the country misperceive the rationale for universal coverage," Mr. Cuomo said. 'They think it is purely a matter of compassion and concern for 36 or 37 million uncovered people. And that leads some of them to believe that you are asking the covered people to give up wealth for the benefit of the uncovered people, when the better rationale is in order to protect the covered people -- at least eventually -- you have to get the uncovered people into coverage, because they're receiving health care, but it's too expensive and the burden of that expense falls on the shoulders of the premium-payers, which is the rest of us." +Ross Perot said today that he was disappointed that the television networks had refused to sell broadcast time to the Republican Party for half-hour advertisements on health care. He said he had been willing to spend more than $1 million for the Republican commercials. Echoing what some leading Republicans are beginning to say, Mr. Perot added: "Right now there's this feeling that if you don't pass it during the election, all life on the planet will stop. We should take our time and do it right." +Mr. Perot said he would not have appeared in the Republican commercials and simply wanted them to be an even-handed analysis of health care options. But he made clear his belief that employer mandates would be a grave mistake. + +LOAD-DATE: July 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, at right, discussing health care yesterday with a delegation from New York including, at left, Representative Charles E. Schumer of Brooklyn, Dennis Rivera, president of Local 1199 of the hospital workers union, and Lieut. Gov. Stan Lundine. (Kirsten Bremmer for The New York Times) + +Chart: "DIARY: Health Care Developments" + +YESTERDAY + As a proposal drafted by Democratic staff members of pivotal House committees began circulating on Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats criticized the ideas and tactics of their rivals. + +CONGRESS +Democrats and Republicans traded barbs over rival proposals. Speaker Thomas S. Foley said Republicans were "putting politics above the interests of the people," while Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the Republican leader, said Democrats "are looking for enemies instead of solutions." The Congressional Budget Office said it would be unable to deliver an assessment of a legislation approved by the Senate Finance Committee on July 2 until staff members finished writing its precise language. The plan relies on changes in insurance regulations and Government subsidies to low-income families to provide insurance coverage to about 95 percent of Americans; its backers hope that the budget office report will strengthen their argument that the plan would be effective and affordable. + +WHITE HOUSE +Vice President Al Gore criticized Republican health care proposals as shortchanging the elderly, and his wife, Tipper, pressed for universal health coverage, including virtually unlimited coverage for mental illness. She spoke at the National Press Club. + +LOBBYING +New York politicians, hospital executives and labor leaders from Gov. Mario M. Cuomo down descended on the Capitol to emphasize the need for universal coverage and to insist that any health care bill take account of New York's historically rich system of health care benefits and its large population of poor sick people and not leave it worse off. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +262 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 27, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Wrong Drugs Given To 1 in 4 of Elderly + +BYLINE: By GINA KOLATA + +SECTION: Section C; Page 8; Column 5; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 937 words + +CLOSE to a quarter of all Americans 65 or older were given prescriptions for drugs that they should almost never take, a study has found. +Some of the drugs can produce amnesia and confusion, others can cause serious side effects like heart problems or respiratory failure. And, the investigators said, there is no need to prescribe these drugs to older people, either because safer alternatives are available or because the drugs are simply not needed. + The study, by Dr. Steffi Woolhandler of Harvard Medical School and colleagues, examined data from a national survey that included more than 6,000 older people who were not in nursing homes and that determined what medicines they were taking. The researchers used a list of 20 drugs that a panel of experts had said should not be prescribed for older people. The survey was conducted in 1987, but the data were only recently made available for analysis, the researchers said, and no similar studies have been conducted since then. +In their paper, being published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association, the investigators found, for example, that 1.8 million older people had prescriptions for dipyridamole, a blood thinner that, the researchers say, is useless for all except people with artificial heart valves. Yet only 36,000 Americans, half of them over 65, had heart valves put in in 1987. +More than 1.3 million older Americans had prescriptions for propoxyphene, an addictive narcotic that, the authors say, is no better than aspirin in relieving pain. More than 1.2 million were taking diazepam or chlordiazepoxide, which are long-acting sedatives and sleeping pills that can make people groggy, forgetful and prone to falls. + +Problem May Be Worse + The authors wrote in their paper that they were conservative in selecting the 20 drugs that should not be prescribed. "Standard published sources support the view that the 20 drugs in our primary analysis should virtually never be prescribed for the elderly," they stated. +Dr. Jerry H. Gurwitz of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, who wrote an editorial accompanying the paper, said in an interview that he hoped the study would serve as "a wake-up call" to America's doctors. "I hope that the medical community will take it as seriously as the general public, I think, will," he said. +But Dr. Gurwitz said the new study might have understated the problem. It did not consider drug interactions or drugs, like sleeping pills, that may be appropriate for short periods at low dosages but that are often taken for months or years at dosages that can make people groggy, confused and forgetful during the day. +Dr. Judith Ahronheim, a geriatrics specialist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, said the new study was "the tip of the iceberg." Even drugs not on the list are often inappropriately prescribed or are taken when they are not needed, causing serious side effects along the way, she said, adding, "I see that every single day." +"This kind of article should not give a false sense of security about the other drugs that are out there," Dr. Ahronheim said. She said her rule of thumb was to stay away from sedatives in the elderly and "to use as few drugs and in as low a dose as we possibly can." +Other geriatrics specialists, including Dr. Woolhandler, said they were disturbed, but not surprised, by the study's findings. +"Based on my own clinical practice, I knew it was a problem," Dr. Woolhandler said. "I have had elderly people call up who had taken a Valium and started falling or who had gotten home at night and not known where they were in the day because of amnesia. I have seen patients after a heart attack who were so drugged that they couldn't function at all. I had a lady who almost died from a fainting spell after she took a muscle relaxer that she shouldn't have been given." +"A lot of the problem is that doctors frequently ascribe side effects of drugs to old age," she said. "If a patient loses memory or loses balance, they say it's old age." +Dr. Robert Butler, chairman of the department of geriatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, said older people also attributed severe side effects to old age. +Dr. Butler said he often conducted what he called a brown bag test with elderly patients, asking them to bring in every medication they had in a brown bag. "You'd be shocked," he said. "Sometimes Mrs. Jones next door got a good result with her arthritis medication so our patient will take Mrs. Jones's drug. Some are taking medications that are five or six years old." And, he added, many older people do not take their medicines at the right time or in the right doses. +Dr. Robert Kane, a researcher at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, said pressures on doctors might lead to inappropriate prescriptions. + +Patient as Own Advocate + "As physicians feel under pressure to spend less and less time with their patients, they often don't spend the time needed to take a thorough drug history," Dr. Kane said. "And one of the most common ways to terminate an interaction with a patient is to write a prescription. There is a tendency to substitute the use of drugs for time and attention." +In an ideal world, doctors would change their ways, but Dr. Kane and others suggested patients and their families might have to play a role . +Dr. Kane suggested that older people take lists of their medications to their doctors and ask about interactions and side effects. "There are things that older people can do to help themselves and I think they should do them," Dr. Kane said. + +LOAD-DATE: July 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + + +GRAPHIC: The numbers and percentages of noninstitutionalized people 65 or older who were using prescription drugs that are inappropriate for the elderly, based on the 1987 National Medical Expenditure Survey conducted by the Federal Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. + + + + Number Percent Number of +Drug receiving drug receiving drug prescriptions + + +SEDATIVE OR HYPNOTIC AGENTS + + + +Diazepam 798,946 2.82 1,547,111 +Chlordiazepoxide 552,784 1.95 1,135,497 +Flurazepam 355,090 1.25 578,459 +Meprobamate 232,786 0.82 538,278 +Pentobarbital 33,093 0.12 60,696 +Secobarbital 8,486 0.03 25,459 + + +ANTIDEPRESSANTS + + + +Amitriptyline 886,629 3.13 1,966,922 + + +NONSTEROIDAL ANTI-INFLAMMATORY DRUGS + + + +Indomomethacin 747,729 2.64 1,300,212 +Phenylbutazone 80,023 0.28 83,327 + + +ORAL HYPOGLYCEMICS + + + +Chlorpropamide 589,218 2.08 1,68,666 + + +ANALGESICS + + + +Propoxyphene 1,367,478 4.83 2,412,308 +Pentazocine 85,641 0.30 104,105 + + +DEMENTIA TREATMENTS + + + +Isoxsuprine 87,088 0.31 221,376 +Cyclandelate 71,847 0.25 198,835 + + +PLATELET INHIBITORS + + + +Dipyridamole 1,822,300 6.44 4,832,889 + + +MUSCLE RELAXANTS OR ANTISPASMODIC AGENTS + + + +Cyclobenzaprine 198,731 0.70 263,671 +Methocarbamol 117,806 0.42 134,589 +Carisoprodol 108,298 0.38 149,108 +Orphenadrine 93,609 0.33 174,069 + + +ANTIEMETIC AGENTS + + + +Trimethobenzamide 77,022 0.27 99,990 + + +*ANTIHYPERTENSIVES + + + +Propranolol 1,774,370 6.27 4,995,358 +Methyldopa 1,280,297 4.52 3,663,512 +Reserpine 597,655 2.11 1,467,226 + + +*Many doctors classify these drugs as effective but with possible adverse side effects for the elderly. + +Source: Journal of the American Medical Association +Table: "Wrong Prescription for the Elderly" + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +263 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 30, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +The Failed House Health Bill + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 18; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 521 words + +The health-care bill that the Democratic leadership will take to the full House for debate early next month would do more harm than good. Though it starts off correctly -- achieving universal coverage by requiring employers to pay for most of the cost of insuring their workers -- it proposes insurance "reforms" that would bury the most innovative, cost-effective plans that many Americans routinely choose today. +The bill would be a victory for highly paid physicians and would reward those in Congress who want to control the huge health-care industry. But it would be a defeat for patients who expect high-quality care at a reasonable price. + The leadership bill, announced yesterday, would create Medicare C, a public, fee-for-service plan, to enroll the poor and otherwise uninsured. That might sound like a sensible way to provide fail-safe insurance to relatively few families because it would build upon Medicare, the existing plan for the elderly. But Medicare C, unlike the program limited to the elderly, threatens to trigger an inevitable roll toward government-run medicine for most Americans. +The Government cannot supervise treatment provided under Medicare. The only way it can control costs is to clamp down on prices it pays providers. Medicare pays doctors and hospitals less than their costs; that forces providers to make up the loss by jacking up prices to private patients. This "cost shift" is already widespread. But the leadership bill would add to Medicare the poor, who are now covered by Medicaid, as well as the unemployed and other uninsured people; that would bring 50 percent of the population under Medicare, according to Congressional staff estimates. The cost shift to the remaining patients would become devastating. Fees to private patients would skyrocket, driving premiums up and private insurers out of business through no fault of their own. +Other detrimental features of the leadership bill are provisions that render illegal the approach used by most existing managed-care plans -- which charge enrollees a fixed annual fee regardless of medical need in exchange for limiting care to a fixed panel of doctors and hospitals. The leadership bill would, for example, require most plans to hire any qualified doctors who apply -- thereby eliminating the plans' ability to control the quality and cost of treatment by closely supervising a small panel of doctors. Most managed-care plans would have to hire specialists, like chiropractors, that they believe are unnecessary. +But the special interests were too powerful for the leadership to resist. The effect of the bill's anti-managed-care provisions is to lock in fee-for-service medicine that lies at the core of the existing system's penchant for wasteful and often inappropriate care. +The leadership did not have the gall to forthrightly propose a government takeover. But it has proposed a bill that would achieve the same end through stealth. When it comes to the floor, the bill's provision for universal coverage through an employer mandate is worth fighting for. Much of the rest deserves to be scrapped. + +LOAD-DATE: July 30, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +264 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 31, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Nation; +New Role for Presidents Cuts 2 Ways on Health + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 5; Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1185 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + +WHEN Congress considered Medicare in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson had made the bill a major priority, and he was continually involved in twisting arms to get it passed. Yet his name rarely appeared in newspaper or television accounts of its progress on Capitol Hill. + Neither the bill's occasional setbacks nor ultimate passage were generally thought of as good or bad for Johnson. There was fierce debate, to be sure, but it was about whether a government-paid system of medical care for the elderly was a good idea. + + President Clinton, though far less involved in the day-to-day details and ready from the start to accept anything that could plausibly be called "universal coverage," is a constant visual presence in the debate over national health insurance. And that's the problem. +Of all the enemies health care legislation must confront, one of the least obvious but most powerful is a change in capital culture, one that puts the President in the center ring for every act. That position draws attention, but also makes it impossible to shrug off attention. It can bring support, but it inevitably solidifies and energizes opposition. + This phenomenon did not start with Mr. Clinton. It probably started with Ronald Reagan, who personalized issues with great success. From the start, Mr. Clinton developed his plan in Democrats-only secrecy, and he has made it clear he was staking his Presidency on this issue. And the President, Hillary Rodham Clinton and a White House staff, many of whom have never held a non-political job, have run their campaign for legislation like a bitter primary. They have been looking for enemies, finding some, making more. + One could argue that the continued focus on the President throughout the legislative process reflects a nationally diminished understanding of the Constitution, whose First article begins, "All legislative powers shall be vested in a Congress." + Over the two centuries since those words were written, the Presidency has come to share those powers, but chiefly in the sense of setting an agenda and suggesting solutions. Charles D. Ferris, a Washington attorney who served for years as a top Senate aide, recalled last week that even with a President as powerful as Lyndon Johnson, the understanding in Washington was that "it is the Congress that has the power to decide." + +Why an Erosion? + A major reason that understanding has eroded, in the view of two of the medium's foremost academic students, is television, with newspapers not far behind. + Thomas E. Patterson, professor of political science at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship, faults television for personalizing everything, covering the Presidency because it is easier to explain than Congress. "Once you start personalizing these things, institutional roles go into a secondary category," he said. "Most of the time, the Presidency is talked about alone. When Congress is talked about, in most cases it is Congress in terms of the Presidency." + He said all this reflects a change since the Sixties: "I think there was a better understanding at that time of how this constitutional system was supposed to operate." + Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications, said that the change has come about because the "natural structure of television is to take two things and set them against each other." In this setting, she said, "Compromise is considered a weakness." + In her study of this year's news coverage, she said, perhaps two-fifths of all reports focus on "what will this Congressional action do to Bill Clinton's ability to get re-elected." That, she observed, "is not very helpful information to the American people whose health care is ultimately going to be affected." + As one veteran network correspondent put it last week, "It's what we do worst: covering something for its effect on Clinton rather than its effect on people." + But Washington is not merely captive of simplistic reportage; it encourages it. These days, within the White House and without, "It's all viewed in campaign terms," said Thomas E. Mann, director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution. "The Clintons carried the campaign mode to governance." + They brought dedication and understanding of the health industry care to the issue. Without that investment, the legislation would be dead. But they brought the combative techniques of the campaign "War Room," too, and without them, the bill might be more robust. They began by designating the insurance industry as the enemy. The industry fought back, with television ads that helped discredit not merely the parts of the Clinton plan it disliked, but the whole thing. + From time to time, the Administration has announced initiatives by the Democratic National Committee. Not only have they been failures, they have legitimized Republican counterattacks. Those have been at least as mean-spirited, and often as clumsy, as Democratic partisanship, as when Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the Republican leader, said Thursday: "If you want to see a health care crisis, go to Sarajevo, or go somewhere in Rwanda. We don"t have a crisis in America." + In an election campaign, especially in a primary, you try to destroy your opponents. But dealing with Congress involves a different kind of politics in which today's enemy is tomorrow's ally. A major argument the Clintons have used is that the public should get insurance as good as Congress gets. It's a very catchy argument, especially to a public sure that Congress thrives on perks. But it angers members of Congress. + Charles O. Jones, president of the American Political Science Association, says that the media tendency to look at everything in Presidential terms is "amplified by a President who so personalizes the Presidency." He said Bill and Hillary Clinton "run it as a campaign, me against them." + +Different Bureaucrats + So it is hardly surprising that the dialogue is not over how cost-efficient a tax on expensive insurance policies might be, or even whether substituting government bureaucrats for insurance bureaucrats would be as bad as some people say. Instead, Republicans and Democrats in the House crabbed at each other Friday over the Democratic leadership's new bill. "Different from Clinton," claimed the Democrats. "Is not," said the Republicans. "Is too. . ." Sometimes it seems the debate is about how health care legislation will affect elections. + Joseph A. Califano Jr., who worked on health care in two administrations, said he found the focus on the President "remarkable because Clinton is really irrelevant to the details of this bill" because he was elected with only 43 percent of the vote and brought no swarm of supporters with him to Congress. Mr. Califano is troubled by the process: "Never has our health care system been in such peril. You have two people, Clinton and Dole, their Presidential ambitions are tied to this bill. You have a feeding frenzy among the special interests. There is a lot of room for mischief." + +LOAD-DATE: July 31, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +265 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 31, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE: THE ADVOCATES; +Many Health Groups Fight House Democratic Leaders' Plan + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 24; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1127 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 30 + +A broad assortment of doctors, hospitals, private insurance companies, health maintenance organizations, state officials and big employers said today that they disliked a central element of the House Democratic leaders' health plan, which would more than double the size of the Federal Medicare program. +Under the proposal put forward Friday by the House majority leader, Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the Government would create a new Part C of Medicare, open to people who are unemployed, receive welfare, work part time or hold jobs at companies with fewer than 100 employees. The new program is one of the Democratic leaders' main tools to guarantee health insurance for all Americans. + Mr. Gephardt's proposal differs from President Clinton's plan because it calls for a new Federal program. The President's plan calls for private health insurance. +Democratic aides to the House Ways and Means Committee estimated that 40 million to 60 million people would join the new program. Experts at the Congressional Budget Office said enrollment might exceed 90 million in the year 2004. Medicare already finances health care for 32 million elderly people and 4 million who are disabled. + +A Concern of Businesses + The new Part C of Medicare is intended to solve one type of concern created by requiring all employers to buy health insurance for their employees. But in trying to minimize business opposition to the bill, House Democratic leaders have left some supporters of universal coverage deeply unhappy. +The National Governors' Association, the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, the Health Insurance Association of America, the Group Health Association of America and the Association of Private Pension and Welfare Plans, a trade group that represents many Fortune 500 companies, criticized Mr. Gephardt's proposal to expand Medicare. +The proposal for a new Part C of Medicare confronts these groups with difficult questions of tactics and strategy. On the one hand, the groups share Mr. Gephardt's desire to expand coverage and control health costs, and they will fight to achieve these goals. But their deep reservations about the new Medicare program may cool their enthusiasm at a time when the White House is counting on them to lobby aggressively for the overall bill. + +Option for Some Employees + Mr. Gephardt's bill offers another option to people who work for companies with fewer than 100 employees: they can sign up for a private health plan offered through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. The conservative Heritage Foundation described that program as "a showcase of consumer choice," and Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the Republican leader, said today that he liked this feature of the Gephardt bill. +But Mr. Dole scorned the proposal for a new Part C of Medicare, saying it would enlarge the Government's role to an unacceptable degree. Nearly half of all Americans would be enrolled in some type of Medicare program, he said. +Mr. Gephardt's hopes for success depend on moderate Democrats. Representative Jim Cooper, a conservative Tennessee Democrat, said: "In many respects, the leadership bill is more liberal than the Clinton bill. Part C of Medicare would lead to a single-payer system for about half the U.S. population." In a single-payer system, the Government raises taxes to pay medical bills, and there is little role for private insurers. + +Hospitals' Opposition + Richard J. Pollack, executive vice president of the American Hospital Association, said there were several arguments against Part C of Medicare. First, he said, hospitals are rushing to link up with doctors, clinics and other hospitals in health care networks that can provide a full range of services to customers. +"The new Medicare program moves in the opposite direction," he said. "It perpetuates the fragmented fee-for-service system" in which hospitals are paid separately for each admission and patients can go to virtually any doctor. +Moreover, Mr. Pollack said, hospitals have had 12 years' experience with a process in which Congress sets Medicare payment rates, and they do not like it. +"Medicare rates are set in the middle of the night behind closed doors, based on what's necessary to meet deficit-reduction targets that have nothing to do with health policy," he said. + +Same Method of Payment + Under the new Medicare program proposed by Mr. Gephardt, doctors and hospitals would be paid in the same way they are now paid under the regular Medicare program. +Dr. James S. Todd, executive vice president of the American Medical Association, said the new Medicare program "would perpetuate cost-shifting to the private sector" because Medicare pays less than most private insurance plans. +If the new Medicare program was limited to companies with fewer than 20 employees, he said, "it would be more palatable, though not necessarily acceptable." +Supporters of the Medicare C plan say it is crucial to the political and practical success of the bill. + +No Haggling With Insurers + It does give small employers a relatively easy way to get insurance for their workers; they will not have to haggle with private insurers. And it gives people a way to pool their purchasing power without forcing them to join the purchasing cooperatives, or alliances, proposed by President Clinton. +The main argument for Part C of Medicare is that it is simple to administer and easy to understand because it is modeled on Medicare, which has become immensely popular with beneficiaries since it was created in 1965. "Medicare is simple: no new rules, no new bureaucracy," said Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California, the chief architect of Part C. +But Mary Nell Lehnhard, senior vice president of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, criticized Part C of Medicare as "a huge expansion of a Government program." It "fragments the market and picks people out of the big insurance pools we are trying to build," she said. + +'Insurer of Last Resort' + Mr. Gephardt and Mr. Stark evidently believe that "the Government needs to establish an insurer of last resort, a safety net available to small employers," said Ms. Lehnhard. But, she said, that view was wrong because the health care legislation moving through Congress would require insurers to provide coverage to all applicants at standard rates, regardless of any medical problems they might have. +When the Federal Government imposes such requirements, she said, "every health insurance company, every managed care company will be an insurer of last resort." +The National Governors' Association criticized the Gephardt plan on the grounds that it would limit states' flexibility to deal with health care costs. + +LOAD-DATE: July 31, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +266 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 31, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +On Sunday; +First Banana: A Welcome To a New Land + +BYLINE: By FRANCIS X. CLINES + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 33; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk; Second Front + +LENGTH: 771 words + +FOR some reason, when the tired, the poor and the wretched look back after an immigrant's lifetime in America, they often linger on the long-ago memory of seeing and eating their first banana. +The shipboard misery of migration is always detailed to interviewers, of course, and the glowing greenness of the Statue of Liberty's welcome is never forgotten. But, too, a reliably recurring episode in many sagas remains "my first banana": How it came to be wondered at and finally possessed, then puzzled over until shy observance of veteran Americans revealed the need to peel it before that first taste of sweet substance set memory's measure of the New World's exotica. + "The banana seems to become a metaphor for what was new and how they approached it," says Janet Levine, an oral historian on Ellis Island, the fabled place where the immigration heyday peaked 70 years ago. She is busy searching out those innocents who were bedazzled by bananas and more back then. She records their best hour's worth of remembrances as they near the end of earthly migration. +"Even today, I can eat 10 or 12 bananas because it's nothing to me," says one old man after happening on the memory with Ms. Levine. She scrupulously never asks leading questions about bananas but cherishes their frequent surfacing from the past, gleaming naive-yellow as a daub from Grandma Moses' scenes from memory. The man recalls the muscular uncles who preceded him to America dandling him with delight after he cleared Ellis Island and suddenly producing an entire stalk of the curved unknown. +"Eat them, son! They're the American fig," he was instructed, and the uncles roared with laughter when he took one unpeeled toward his lips. "Take off the skin." The uncles were measuring their own sophistication in the new land, maybe envying the boy's innocence. "Better eat all of them by tomorrow," one wise-guy uncle instructed the lad, whose stomach took that and much more across the decades. +Ms. Levine, gifted at questioning and listening, has heard so much of so many lives -- the island's collection is 1,200 interviews and counting -- that she is unsurprised by tales of families' having unraveled as much as prospered here, or even by a rare vivid recollection of homicide. An old woman reaches back into her girlhood and tells of sisters suffocated by her mother in the old country because male offspring were preferred. "How can a mother be so mean?" the aged daughter asks down the ages as her voice joins the tape archive. +Families still crowd wonderingly and line up on Ellis Island, enacting parody before this national monument's cornucopia of cafeteria snack foods -- Greek salads, Italian pizzas, American hot dogs and other global manna. No banana splits in sight, a missed bet as humanity feeds from past into present. +Upstairs, Ms. Levine prepares a field trip to the mainland, a scattering of fading old-timers she's tracked to city apartments and Long Island nursing homes. She estimates a 50-50 chance of taping something strong and crisp. "I've got a stowaway from Italy," she says, looking forward to his looking back. +Ms. Levine was a prison psychologist who became fascinated with the creative possibilities of interviewing and switched careers to oral history. As much as content, she savors the sounds of memory, the feast of terseness, for example, offered by Scandinavian immigrants in Maine. Her New World dream is to search back in the old countries and find untold stories that have no premium in American history, the failures after Ellis Island, "those who came, saw and left without being successful in their own eyes." +She works with Paul Sigrist in amassing the collection, which was started 20 years ago by Margo Nash, a thoughtful park ranger at the Statue of Liberty who found visitors sparked to recollection. There's a downside: "Sometimes I feel like I'm taking their stories, using them, and it's not a good feeling," Ms. Levine admits. +But she is rounding off the lives of old people who recount bitter prejudice as their grounding on the island and beyond. "Now they're being esteemed," she agrees in recording them for time beyond them. +Whatever the travails of listening, Janet Levine always has her banana tape to pop into play as a break from migrant memories. Forty-five minutes of pure recollections of first banana encounters. Post-steerage magic realism spinning waywardly into history. An old woman recalling the girl she was venturing forward in this strange place: +"Ma, can I have a nickel?" +"What for?" +"I want to buy that long thing over there." +"What is it?" +"I dunno." + +LOAD-DATE: July 31, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +267 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 1, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Mitchell Urges Action on Health Now + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 12; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1097 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 31 + +Seeking to rally organizations behind his unfinished national health insurance bill, Senator George J. Mitchell of Maine is warning them that "if this effort goes down, it's going to be a long time before any American President takes this issue on again." +Mr. Mitchell dismissed as insincere appeals by Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the minority leader, and other Republicans for time to study the bill. "What they want is time to generate opposition to the bill, of course," he said in an interview today. Earlier he said on the CBS News program "Face the Nation" that the Senate vote on his bill would be "very close." + Mr. Mitchell, the majority leader, also revealed in the interview that the bill he would unveil on Tuesday would include prescription drug coverage for the elderly under Medicare and provisions for long-term home care, with precise details still being settled. Those provisions are essential for winning the support of organizations representing the elderly, and were backed by the Senate Labor Committee but not the Senate Finance Committee. The House leadership bill presented last week includes them. +At a meeting on Friday afternoon with representatives of about 150 unions, churches, civil rights groups, health organizations and the elderly, Mr. Mitchell said, "I think ultimately we will get a good bill." But he added, "It is not as strong as I would wish, and I know it is not as strong as you would wish." + +Women and Children First + Mr. Mitchell's bill would start by providing insurance to several million children and pregnant women who have no coverage. "I want to do that as soon as possible," he said today. That would probably involve making a new tax on tobacco effective as early as next year, while other taxes to pay for other parts of the program could be phased in later. +But his bill would not require employers to help pay for their workers' health insurance before 2002, and only then if the subsidies and insurance law changes have not brought the share of Americans with health insurance to 95 percent from the current 85 percent. +Even then his bill would require employers of 26 or more people to contribute only 50 percent of premiums. President Clinton, the Senate Labor Committee and the House leadership have all recommended an 80 percent employer payment, at various years between 1996 and 1999. The employer share, the delay in implementation until 2002 and the still-unspecified cost-containment provisions of his bill are sure to leave some potential supporters unhappy. +"I told them they should not let the perfect become the enemy of the very good," Mr. Mitchell said in the interview today. He also told the group, according to participants in the meeting, that if the Senate passed a strong bill, it could be improved in a House-Senate conference, but if the Senate passed nothing or a weak bill, the chance for substantial change would be lost. + +'An Immense Task' + In the interview, Mr. Mitchell said the chance would be lost well into the 21st century. +"There is one thing that seems very clear," he said. "This is such an immense task that this effort would not have gotten to first base without a total commitment from the President, Mrs. Clinton and the entire Administration. Even with that commitment, it is very difficult." +"Look at the terrible abuse that man and his wife are taking because they are trying to do something they believe is right and good for the country," he said. "If this effort goes down, it's going to be a long time before any American President takes this issue on the way this President has." +Several lobbyists at Friday's meeting were lavish in praising Mr. Mitchell's two-hour presentation and response to questions. Gerry Shea, director of the employee benefits department at the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said the Senator "was impressive in his generosity of time and eloquent in stating his case. Even if you are nervous, as we are, about parts of what he is putting together, it was a very good meeting." + +'Deeply Respectful' + John C. Rother, legislative director of the American Association of Retired Persons, said, "He did an amazing job of appealing to people on the basis of what he was going to propose was the only realistic way to achieve the goals that everybody shares." Mr. Rother said most people at the meeting "would prefer a faster timetable, a more certain route to universal coverage and the employer mandate. But the mood in the room at the end was certainly deeply respectful and sympathetic to Mitchell." +In turn, Mr. Mitchell made two requests of the lobbyists. He asked them to give his bill "the strongest possible support that you in good conscience can put forth," one participant said. +"The crescendo has already begun from the other side attacking what we are trying to do," Mr. Mitchell said, "and it will only get more intense. If we are to have any chance of succeeding, your crescendo must be just as loud." He told them that Democratic senators sometimes complained to him that there was more intensity among the opponents of universal health care than there was among its supporters. +He also told them, the participant reported, "I hope you will exert the influence you can upon senators and ask them to agree to oppose the Republican effort to strike the employer mandate." +Mr. Mitchell made it clear to the lobbyists that he did not have a majority yet for his proposal. But he predicted that when the time came to cast votes on the floor of the Senate, some uncommitted senators would "rise to the occasion," said Bob Chlopak, who runs the Health Care Reform Project, an umbrella group of health care providers, companies, unions and other organizations supporting universal health insurance coverage. +Someone asked if it was true that one reason he had turned down a nomination to the Supreme Court was to avoid conflicts with getting health care legislation passed. He told the group that was "the reason." He said he could not be dealing with senators to get a bill passed while seeking their votes for his confirmation, nor could he manage a bill after he had been confirmed but not sworn in. +He said his aides and officials at the Office of Management and Budget were using computers today to calculate how much various options in coverage and subsidies would cost and how much could be raised how soon by various taxes. He said he would make his final decisions on Monday, announce them on Tuesday and present the Senate with a bill in legislative language by Wednesday. The bill will be debated next week. + +LOAD-DATE: August 1, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The Senate majority leader, George J. Mitchell, yesterday predicted a close vote on his health plan. He spoke with reporters after a television interview. (Associated Press) + +Chart: "DIARY: Health Care Developments" + +THIS WEEKEND +The Senate majority leader, George J. Mitchell of Maine, said the bill he would present to Congress this week would include prescription drug coverage for the elderly under Medicare and provisions for long-term home care. Two more health care bus caravans set out for Washington. + +THE WHITE HOUSE +The four bus travelers of the 1992 Presidential campaign -- President Clinton, his wife, Hillary, Vice President Al Gore, and his wife, Tipper -- went to Independence, Mo., on Saturday to meet the "Health Care Express" bus caravan. While Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Gore tore into the opposition, Mr. Clinton appealed to Americans to set aside fears and divisiveness. On Sunday, Mrs. Clinton went to Boston to address passengers on another caravan. + +THE CONGRESS +Senator Mitchell plans to produce his bill on Tuesday. In the House, leaders will begin seeking votes on the bill that Representative Richard A. Gephardt, Democrat of Missouri, put forward on Friday. The bill is based largely on a measure passed by the House Ways and Means Committee; that measure, in turn, is much like the President Clinton's original proposal. Many who have followed the debate say progress in the House will depend in large part on how representatives view the prospects of Mr. Mitchell's bill. They will be unwilling to go out on a limb for a proposal that they fear has little chance of success in the Senate. + +LOBBYING +Representatives of a wide assortment of doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and state officials expressed concern about a central component of the Gephardt bill that would expand Medicare as a way to cover the uninsured. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +268 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 4, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +HORSE RACING; +Throwback to the Days of Yore + +BYLINE: By JOSEPH DURSO, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 16; Column 6; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 829 words + +DATELINE: SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y., Aug. 3 + +The most popular race horse in Saratoga isn't Holy Bull or Tabasco Cat or Sky Beauty or any of those television stars. It's the 9-year-old gelding named Fourstardave, who gets a standing ovation every time he races, which is often. And in a sport increasingly marred by frailty on the track, he is a constant: He has won at least one race at Saratoga each year for the last eight. +In human terms, he would be an athlete in his 60's. But when he ran at Saratoga two weeks ago, he zipped a mile in 1:353/5 and won by five lengths. He got the customary standing ovation, even from rival owners and trainers, and he entered the winner's circle for the 21st time in a career of almost unthinkable range: 93 races, 21 victories, 18 times in second place, 15 times third. + At Saratoga, he has won 9 of 17 starts and run second in three others. Over all, he has run in the money 54 times and banked $1.6 million, and he is by no means finished. + +A Few More Campaigns + "With a little bit of luck," his trainer, Leo O'Brien, said today as he sat outside the great old horse's stall, "he'll go another two or three years. +"It'll be a sad day when we retire him. He loves racing. He comes off the farm every spring ready to run. He's never really had an injury. He never sulks. He always gives you a good race. You bet $2 on him, you get a run for your money." +Fourstardave even looks the part. He is tall and powerful at 16-plus hands, with a deep chestnut color and a white stripe down his face. He shows no signs of aging, even though he is the grand old man of Saratoga and, except for some senior citizens of steeplechase racing, probably the best old horse still winning anywhere in America. +In these days when race horses tend to be pampered, he is a throwback to the horses who made history. +The great John Henry raced when he was 9 years old in 1984, won six of nine races that year and even won $2.3 million in purses. He now is the star of the show at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, where he resides with another titan, Forego, who was named Horse of the Year three times and who raced as an 8-year-old in 1978. And Kelso raced until he was 9 years old in 1966, and he was named Horse of the Year five straight years, the last time in 1964 when he was 7. + +Focused on Racing + All of them, like Fourstardave, were geldings who were castrated at an early age because they had limited breeding potential and considerable racing potential, and they needed to focus their spirits on the business of racing. +"Dave was gelded as a baby," O'Brien said. "He was tough. And he was by an unknown sire, Compliance, and the dam was Broadway Joan. He wasn't well bred. I don't think he's as good as John Henry. I saw John Henry run, and he was phenomenal. He got better as he got older. +"But you could see from the start that Dave was going to be a runner. He has a huge heart, bigger than that tree. He loves being a race horse. He has had a dozen jockeys, and he's run for them all: Mike Smith, Jose Santos, Jean Cruguet, Richie Migliore, Randy Romero, Angel Cordero. And Declan Murphy even rode him once in Hong Kong. +"He runs on grass and on dirt, and he's carried 126 pounds. He never jumped -- not yet, anyway." + +Fourstars Galore + Around Barn 61 at Saratoga, he is the superstar of a family of thoroughbreds that includes his two full brothers: Fourstars Allstar, still racing at 6, and Fourstar Brother, just now going to the races at 2. They are all owned by Richard M. Bomze, who publishes sports information sheets and magazines and who awards stars for the best information he supplies. In his lexicon, four stars is -- well, four stars. +O'Brien, who presides over this empire of racing brothers and their stablemates, is something of a legend himself. He is a rosy sprite of a man at 5 feet 2 inches who tended horses on a farm in County Dublin before migrating to the United States 30 years ago. +He now has 29 horses in his barn, which he runs with his 26-year-old son, Keith, and his wife, Joan, who keeps the books. Their 23-year-old daughter, Leona, works in the press-relations office and is engaged to the jockey John Velasquez. + +Window on His Brother + O'Brien was sitting in front of his barn in a green shirt the other morning sorting through his horse folders while Fourstardave frisked around inside his stall. +"He fell in love with the cool and the quiet of Saratoga when he came here at 2," O'Brien said. "But he's a stall walker, he almost has claustrophobia. So, we cut a window with a screen in the side of the wall in his stall, so he could see his brother Fourstars Allstar in the next stall. No kidding, we even put their feed tubs next to the window so they can eat side by side. +"We also give him a vacation every winter, and that's the key to his longevity at the races. Four or five months down in Florida, where he can run and roll around in the fields. After that, he comes off the farm ready to run." + +LOAD-DATE: August 4, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Fourstardave has won at Saratoga for eight straight seasons. He got ready for a workout there yesterday. (Associated Press for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +269 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 7, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Ideas & Trends: Government Health Insurance; +An Idea Whose Time Has Come? It Came in 1965. + +BYLINE: By ROBIN TONER + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 1; Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1107 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + +OF the many strange experiences in the health care struggle of 1994, several lawmakers have found this to be among the strangest: an angry encounter with an elderly constituent, railing against the idea of government involvement in the health care system, declaring categorically, as one woman did to Representative Louise Slaughter, "I don't want government messing in health insurance." + The elderly are, of course, beneficiaries of a government health insurance program, one of the most popular domestic programs around, signed into law 29 years ago after a long debate on the very question of whether government should be involved in guaranteeing health care to a vast segment of the American people. Sometimes, a frustrated group of Democratic lawmakers say, it as if the debate over Medicare never happened; how else to explain why it is happening all over again? + + Many people do not even think of Medicare as a government program, according to the American Association of Retired Persons. Many people clearly do not see the argument over government involvement in health care -- or, for that matter, an array of other social needs, from unemployment to pensions -- as a settled issue, or even one with much of a history. And, judging from the polls, many people seem achingly vulnerable to slogans like "socialized medicine," "billion-dollar bureaucracies" and a "government takeover of the health care system." The past, as William Faulkner put it, is not dead. It isn't even past. + The debate now raging on Capitol Hill is, to a striking extent, often simply variations on the themes set forth in the Medicare struggle of the 1960's, not to mention President Harry Truman's unsuccessful effort to win national health insurance in 1949 and the debate over Social Security in the 1930's. Shortly before the final passage of Medicare, the American Medical Association was warning in full-page newspaper ads of "long waiting lines at doctors' offices," of "mountains of red tape" and of "delays of weeks and months for needed surgery." + The association concluded, with all the urgency and solemnity at its command: "Even at this late hour, we cannot -- in good faith to our patients -- stand silent as Congress prepares to start this nation on a dangerous adventure in government medicine, the end of which no one can see, and from which the patient is certain to be the ultimate sufferer." + That was a trace more formal than the warnings of "Harry and Louise," the current television spokescouple for the Health Insurance Association of America, but the thoughts are much the same. "Long waits for health care and some services not even available," Louise fretted as she pored over a health care proposal in one commercial. Anxious Harry chimed in, "Government-controlled health care." + Then as now, the role of government was central to the debate on Capitol Hill. In 1965, leading House Republicans also pushed for a "voluntary" approach to the problem, arguing that only those who wanted to participate in Medicare should be required to pay premiums. Democrats pushed for an all-inclusive system financed by a payroll tax. (In today's parlance, a mandate.) Conservatives in both parties warned that the country was poised at the crest of a slippery slope. "Let us not take this first step toward socialized medicine," Representative Joe R. Pool, Democrat of Texas, pleaded on the floor of the House. + Last week, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, surrounded by several of his Republican colleagues, stood on the lawn of the Capitol and declared that if the advocates of universal health care rallying in Washington that day "want socialized medicine," they could have it. But Mr. Gramm vowed to fight it tooth and nail. "I know the First Lady is passionate about this," Mr. Gramm declared. "I know it's the President's dream to take over and run the health care system. The future of America is at stake in this bill." + This debate dismays many advocates of health care restructuring, who had hoped by this point to be engaged in a discussion of alternative means to an agreed-upon end, rather than a replay of an ideological gutfight. Bob Blendon, an expert on public opinion and health issues at Harvard, said that the fears and the rhetoric about "socialized medicine" are not nearly as vehement nor as widespread as they were in the past, particularly in the jittery post-war America of 1949. + But the fears about government have a rich and fertile context of their own in the current debate: Since the passage of Medicare, Mr. Blendon noted, there has been a 30-year trend of diminishing faith in government. + Conservatives are keenly aware of this. "The liberal-social democratic agenda ultimately won the battle from the end of World War II through the mid-60's, and Medicare was part of that victory," said William Kristol, a conservative theoretician who has closely tracked the health care issue. "I think you could make the case that the liberal-social democratic agenda has been in retreat for the last 15 or 20 years. Clinton is trying to reverse it, and he is running into great skepticism." + Mr. Kristol sees the health struggle as an opportunity to define the Republican Party "as a party that resists further advances of the welfare state, and ultimately of relimiting government." + The flip side to this, of course, is the Democrats' struggle to reclaim their image as the party that uses government to deliver popular new benefits to the middle class. Given both parties' strategic imperatives, it was almost inevitable that this would become an ideological debate about government. + Beneath the partisan positioning, though, some analysts see an enduring contradiction in the American psyche. Lawmakers fight these battles again and again because they can never be resolved. + "Americans have in their heads a contradiction," said Stan Greenberg, the White House pollster, "disliking government and strongly supporting individualism, at the same time they're very strong supporters of a whole range of things we do together as a people, from Social Security to unemployment compensation." + Even Mr. Gramm seems to harbor this contradiction. After railing about the evils of government involvement in health care last week, he was asked how he would have voted on Medicare in 1965. + "I don't have the foggiest idea because I wasn't part of the debate," the former economics professor replied. "I would surely have been concerned about the costs, which turned out to be off by a factor of 10. But not having been there, I don't know." + And yes, Mr. Gramm's mother is covered by Medicare. + +LOAD-DATE: August 7, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Chart: "They Were There," The last time that member of Congress had a sweeping piece of health-care legislation before them was 29 years ago, when the Medicare program won approval. Here are the 1965 votes of those legislators who were in Congress then and now face a new health-care vote. + +Photos: Senator Kennedy in 1965; Senator Dole in 1970. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +270 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 7, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Attention City Shoppers! Kmart Bucks Retail Trend + +BYLINE: By KIRK JOHNSON, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 38; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 913 words + +DATELINE: NEW HAVEN, Aug. 4 + +When the first ceremonial shovels of earth were tossed this week for the construction of a super-sized Kmart store here, the score was undeniable: City 1, Suburb 0. +Kmart, a company whose fortunes mirrored the rise of the suburbs, as it transmogrified from the downtown five-and-dimes of S. S. Kresge to its empire of bargain bins and blue-light specials, is inching back here toward its roots. It may not be a trend, but next spring, the company will close its 1970's vintage store in East Haven, a neighboring suburb, and build a 172,000-square foot new superstore in New Haven. The store will sell everything from fresh baked bread and Oreo cookies to motor oil and beach chairs and will be the largest Kmart in New England. + In a state and a society where cities so often take it in the teeth from suburban rivals, this is news. New Haven lost its last major department store, Macy's, last year. + +Values in Urban Civilization + "If you look at Kmart's decision to come here," Mayor John DeStefano of New Haven said, "it bespeaks why cities not only have been important, but why cities will continue to be important. Cities remain places of commerce -- the traffic that goes through the cities and the concentration of people living and working together is what creates commerce." +Kmart officials said their decision reflected no sudden rediscovery of urban shoppers. Indeed, the store -- while situated on a city bus route and within walking distance of a large senior-citizens housing complex -- is nearly two miles from downtown, and store planners say they hope to draw shoppers from throughout Connecticut who can pop on and off nearby Interstate 91. +They said that good locations are where you find them, and that selecting sites involved a case-by-case analysis, allowing little room for generalizations about demographic trends. +"It depends on the individual city," said David L. Leonard, Kmart's district manager for the Northeast. "Obviously, this city has moved in the direction where it's favorable for us to be back in this proximity. But there's many cities where we're not saturated outside the city yet -- we don't want to move back into that city because we can still move out of it." + +Other Discounters' View + Other retailing experts say that in many areas, the suburban march of the bargain center may have ebbed, as discounters like Bradlees, Caldor and Marshalls have saturated the market. And the 40-acre New Haven site, an undeveloped field used by generations of local teen-agers as a park, was vacant and just as close to the interstate highway 20 years ago when Kmart built its last wave of centers and ignored New Haven. +"The cities are basically an untapped market," said David J. Handera, the project manager for the New Haven super Kmart. +Yet despite the statement of Kmart officials that each store site is a case-by-case matter, industry analysts who track the company's decisions over time see a trend. +They said the New York metropolitan area, in particular, has been a kind of laboratory for the company as it began moving into more densely populated areas, beginning on Long Island in the early 1990's. A store opened in Fresh Meadows, Queens, in 1992, and another is under construction in the Bronx. Other big discounters, like Wal-Mart and Price Club, have opened urban stores as well. +Retailing has survived better in downtown New Haven than in some other Connecticut cities, if at the level of small stores and boutiques. Compared with Hartford, for instance, where big office buildings have overshadowed more and more empty stores on Main Street, culminating in the loss of that city's last big department store, G. Fox, New Haven seems positively vibrant with its outdoor cafes and bookstores. +Still, local business leaders say the new Kmart does not mark the return of urban department store shopping, which they concede may be gone from this city. +"You can't buy toilet paper in downtown New Haven," remarked Matthew Nemerson, president of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce. "You can't buy oil in downtown New Haven. Where do you buy them now? You're buying them in Hamden, in East Haven, in North Haven." + +Staying Competitive + Behind the commercial competition, communities, too, are finding themselves in competition. In New Haven, where the local property tax rate is nearly three times as high as the two other towns where Kmart looked for a site, Orange and Wallingford, city officials said that the $300,000-a-year tax abatement given to the company was necessary to make the city competitive. +In return, Kmart agreed to a jobs quota: 35 percent of the roughly 650 employees at the new store must live in the city. +Across the border in East Haven, city officials are wondering about the 84,000 square foot building that will be left when the old Kmart closes next spring. But Kmart, they said, is only one of their anxieties. In Branford, the next town, Walmart has obtained approval to build a store, and some local residents and businesses are mounting a vocal protest to stop the company. With such winds blowing from every side, retailers and their real estate agents are being cautious. +"People are treading a little light just now," said Louis A. Zullo, East Haven's director of administration and management. When businesses look at empty sites, they're tentative. "They say, 'Are we filling a void, or is the market so tight we're not going to be successful here?' " + +LOAD-DATE: August 7, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Shovels marking the site of a ground-breaking ceremony in New Haven last week, where Kmart will open a 172,000-square-foot store. (Carl David LaBianca for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +271 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 8, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE: THE SENATE; +Am Emphasis on Subsidies and Assuring Insurance Coverage in Mitchell's Health Plan + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 13; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1511 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Aug. 7 + +When the Congressional debate on national health insurance legislation formally begins on Tuesday, the Senate will be considering a bill that relies mostly on subsidies to cover more people and on enhanced competition to control costs. +The bill, proposed by the majority leader, George J. Mitchell of Maine, would provide the most new help to children and pregnant women. It would also initiate two programs that advocates for the elderly have sought for years: prescription drug coverage under Medicare and Federal support for home and community-based long-term care. + But the parts of his bill that would affect the most Americans, if something like it becomes law, are a variety of changes in insurance law. They are intended to make the 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance more secure that they will not lose it or find its price suddenly doubling or tripling. + +'Frustrations of the Debate' + "It's one of the frustrations of the debate," Mr. Mitchell complained in an interview today, "that those who have insurance are unfortunately being persuaded by some that there is nothing in it for them." +The legislation that the House will consider, starting next week but probably finishing sooner than the Senate, has many of these same provisions. +But it also requires employers to pay 80 percent of the cost of their workers' insurance policies and puts the unemployed and workers for small companies into a new branch of Medicare, not into insurance purchasing cooperatives that would buy commercial policies as in the Senate plan. If each house passes something like the legislation proposed by its Democratic leaders, a House-Senate conference to reconcile their differences will "be a fairly tough conference," Speaker Thomas S. Foley, Democrat of Washington, said today on the CBS News program "Face the Nation." +But in the Senate, when debate actually focuses on the legislation itself -- and avoids the partisan heights and depths that will turn up on the evening news -- there will be little direct quarrel with any of Mr. Mitchell's objectives. + +Criticisms of Bill + There will be complaints, both genuine and political, that the bill tries to do too much and risks too much Government involvement in health care. At its extreme, the argument was made today as Senator Phil Gramm, Republican of Texas, contended on the same CBS News program that with Mr. Mitchell's bill "we are moving the Government into the position of actually running the health care system." +Specific changes in insurance law, in one form or another, are in most bills from either party. Indeed Republicans often suggest that Congress should be satisfied with them and leave the harder problems for later. +At higher or lower levels, insurance subsidies are a part of some Republican bills and all the Democratic measures. The case against them and against new benefits like prescription drug plans will basically be that the country cannot afford them, although the Mitchell bill has a budgetary fail-safe mechanism that should cut spending and with it additional coverage if costs seem about to outrun estimates. +The argument over cost control will probably be institutionally disingenuous. One senator after another will express disappointment that firmer measures were not included. But the insurance premium limits that President Clinton proposed fell to conservative opposition. + +Tax on Some Policies + For cost controls the Mitchell bill relies first on a modest tax on insurance policies whose rates go up much more quickly than the national average. +Then it hopes that by standardizing health insurance benefits it can promote competition among insurers that is based on price. And by requiring employers to offer workers different kinds of policies -- from traditional fee-for-service plans to membership in health maintainance organizations -- at different prices it will make consumers price-conscious. +This kind of price competition has already started curbing increases in the costs of health care as big employers and insurance companies insist on what are effectively volume discounts. +Mr. Mitchell said today that he agreed with the theory that "competition would serve to hold down the rate of increase in health costs," although no one could be sure how much. +And his bill establishes health insurance purchasing cooperatives for small employers, so they could get some of the bargaining power of big ones. It denies insurance companies the right to pick and choose to get healthy customers. That will save millions. +The first big argument is likely to be over the provision that, by a thread, has enabled both Senator Mitchell and President Clinton to describe this bill as one assuring universal coverage. It would require employers to pay 50 percent of cost of premiums for their workers and families, starting in 2002. + +Intermediate Steps + But it would take effect only if the earlier subsidy and insurance moves had not raised insurance coverage from its current 85 percent to 95 percent by the year 2000. Even then, the employer requirement would not be automatic. A commission would first recommend to Congress legislative steps to "cover the remaining uninsured population." Only if Congress did not enact such legislation would the 50 percent payment requirement take effect, and then only in states where 95 percent coverage had not been achieved. +The commission is also charged with recommending what to do to reach universal coverage if the percentage does reach 95 percent. But in that case, if Congress does not act, there is no fallback requirement. +But most of the increased coverage is expected to come from these four subsidy programs, which would take effect in 1997: +*Low-income families would receive a subsidy for the full cost of an average health insurance policy in their area if they have incomes of up to the Federal poverty level, or $14,764 for a family of four. The subsidy would be gradually phased out, stopping at twice the poverty level, or $29,528. +*Children under 19 and pregnant women would have full subsidies up to 185 percent of the poverty level, or $27,313, gradually phased out and stopping at three times the poverty level, or $44,292. +*Temporarily unemployed workers would be eligible for up to six months of subsidies if they have been insured for six months before losing their jobs by not having most of their unemployment benefits counted as income. +*Employers who expand their insurance coverage of their workers could be eligible for up to five years of subsidies so they would pay no more than 50 percent of the premium or 8 percent of a worker's wage, whichever is less. +The new benefits for the elderly would take effect later. But starting on Oct. 1, 1997, the Federal Government would help states pay for services that would enable the disabled and mentally impaired to live at home. By the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, 2001, the total provided to the states would rise to $15.4 billion annually. +The Medicare prescription drug benefit would begin on Jan. 1, 1999. After paying a deductible of about $500, Medicare recipients would be reimbursed for 80 percent of their prescription costs. Once their payments in a year reached $1,275, Medicare would pay the entire bill. The bill calls for the exact figure of the deductible to be determined by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. + +Changes in Insurance Law + The insurance law changes would be the first go into force. As soon as the bill became law, insurance companies would be required to guarantee that policies could be renewed. +On Jan. 1, 1995, they would be required to issue policies to all applicants and barred from dropping customers or raising their rates if they get sick. +Starting Jan. 1, 1995, the bill would impose increasingly tight limits on the ability of insurers to exclude from coverage pre-existing conditions, like a trick knee or a cancer. At that time, conditions that had been diagnosed or treated in the previous six months could be excluded for another six months. On Jan. 1, 1997, only conditions diagnosed or treated in the previous three months could be excluded, and on Jan. 1, 2002, no pre-existing condition exclusions would be allowed. +Moreover, starting in 1995, someone who had been continuously insured under one policy for at least three months could not have a pre-existing condition excluded when signing up for a new insurance plan. +Many health insurance policies now carry lifetime limits on reimbursement, often at $1 million. Lifetime limits would be prohibited, effective Jan. 1, 1997. +Beginning six months after the law is enacted, a system of "community rating" would be established that would charge all individuals in a region the same premium, except that premiums for people 65 years old could be twice as much as those for 18-year-olds. Age differentials now sometimes reach four times as much for the elderly as for the young. These age differentials would be gradually phased out and eliminated in 2002. + +LOAD-DATE: August 8, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +272 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 9, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Card Game Helps Trump Old Age; +Five Times a Week, Six Ladies Find a Comforting Anchor + +BYLINE: By ESTHER B. FEIN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1241 words + +The table was loaded with money, piles of money, as the six players sat down for their regular Monday night game of poker. There were raises, calls, a flurry of furtive glances and finally, a show of hands. +"Full house," said Martha Diasparra. "I win." + "That's not a full house," said Jeanette Smith. "It's five of a kind." +"So I made a boo-boo," said Mrs. Diasparra. "Anyway, regardless." +"I'm going to tell you something," said Joan Cox. "If you were in a real game, you'd have lost your hand." +"Oh," said Rose Giordano, host of the evening's game. "Suddenly, we're playing a real game." +Theresa Saragaglia pushed the money across the table to Mrs. Diasparra. +"Geez," she said. "Imagine if they were all dollars instead of pennies." +And on it goes in Sunnyside, Queens, six old friends around a poker table, using cards and wit to huddle close and face the ghosts and pains of their old age. +They have been playing together more than 20 years, and for them, the game has become an anchor. Five times a week, it gives them a place to go, steady conversation, a reason to do their hair and put on lipstick, a comfort born of familiarity and time. +"We've got a routine, just like when we worked," said Teresa Karsch, a retired secretary from Woodside and, at 67, the youngest of the group. +They came together not in their youth, when dreams were lavish and felt within reach, but when they were older and all too aware of life's gambles and losses. Mrs. Cox had already buried her husband when they first sat down to play; so had Mrs. Smith. Now all the husbands are gone. +Their older years have brought them not only the aches and the problems, but the simple rewards of family and friendship -- and the occasional trip to Atlantic City. + +'We're Not Hurting, Girls' + While most attention paid to the elderly focuses on the frailest and most dependent, most people over 65 are like these six friends from Queens: neither their needs nor their means are extreme. +"We're not hurting, girls," said Mrs. Giordano, after winning with a royal flush. "And right now, I'm hurting the least of all of you." +Three times a week they play rummy at the Self Help Senior Center in Maspeth. They arrive about 10 in the morning and sit, always in the same order, around a table up on the stage. +Their real passion, however, is poker, and twice a week they play in someone's house -- after church on Sundays at Mrs. Cox's and Monday nights at Mrs. Diasparra's, although in the summer they usually move that game to Mrs. Saragaglia's because she has air-conditioning. +A cardsharp could lose his shirt trying to keep up with the confusing variations they play. There is "Pushy-Pushy," in which the dealer gives everyone two cards face down, then starts the third round dealing a card face up. If the first player doesn't want it, she pushes the card off to the next, who can push it off to the next one, and so on. Whoever pushed the card off has to accept the next card. Then the pushing starts anew. +The game is usually accompanied by squeals of "Don't give it to me," and "I'm not taking that" -- sounding charmingly like children examining food at a cafeteria. +Other varieties are "Follow the Queen," in which queens are wild and so is the next card that is dealt after a queen, and "Power," where the low card in each player's hand is wild for that player. +Hard to follow? Don't ask about "No Peeking" and "Vegas 2-4-6-8." +"My husband thought we were stupid," Mrs. Diasparra said. "He used to say, 'That's not poker, no matter what you call it.' " +All but one of the women are widows; Miss Karsch never married. They live alone in their own homes or with relatives. They all worked, some in offices, some in factories, and are now retired. +They do their own housekeeping, shopping and gardening. Only now, the women pause for breath more often and take a day to do chores that used to take a few hours. +"I was in my nightgown and duster today until 4 o'clock cleaning my house," Mrs. Saragaglia, 74, confessed as they gathered for a Monday night game. "Finally, I said to myself, 'Theresa, it's time to get dressed.' Imagine." +Dealing steadily so the game wouldn't lag, Mrs. Cox said, "One thing about all of us, we keep a nice house." + +Poker and 'The Piano' + As they deal they talk, about their families, their houses, their health, movies, what they ate for supper the night before. One day, Miss Karsch came in flustered after seeing the movie "The Piano" on pay-per-view television. +"Whoa, was it dirty!" she said. +"How dirty?" asked Mrs. Cox, who delights in her own bawdy sense of humor. +"Filthy," Miss Karsch said. "I couldn't believe it. That was the first time I ever saw a movie where they show the man fully nude in the front." +"It's getting to be too much," Mrs. Saragaglia said. +"I thought that movie was more like a concert," Mrs. Smith said. +"It's not," Miss Karsch said. + +Breaks for Coffee or Pills + As the game wears on, the women break for a cup of coffee, a trip to the bathroom, to take their pills. +All are on various medications for ailments like high blood pressure, angina, stress ulcer, bronchitis. "We all have a little something wrong with us," said Mrs. Diasparra, 81. +Several of the women have had frightening brushes with serious illness. Among them they have had breast cancer, an aneurysm, two hip operations and a heart attack. Mrs. Saragaglia had open-heart surgery twice and two operations on her carotid artery. +"The last time, we didn't think Theresa would make it," Mrs. Cox said. "But she wasn't good enough to go up there, and she wasn't bad enough to go down there, so they threw her back at us." +Mrs. Saragaglia said: "When I was feeling a little better, they all came by to play cards. It felt good." + +Neither God Nor Men + Sometimes as they play, they ponder their futures, talking as if they are exhorting God to give them an easy exit from Earth. +"I hope I get a big heart attack and go just poof," said Mrs. Cox, her eyes shifting from her cards upward. +Mrs. Giordano, who is 73, nodded in agreement. "I say, 'Dear God, just give me a heart attack, not a stroke," she said. "I just don't want to be dependent on anybody." +But it would be foolhardy for anyone to think that the game is just an aside to the conversation. +One morning at the senior center, Mrs. Cox nearly missed her turn in the rummy game when she paused to flirt with one of the few men there. +"Would you please play the game," Mrs. Diasparra said. +"There's a man here," said Mrs. Cox. "How can I play the game when there's a man here?" +"Play the game," Mrs. Diasparra repeated. +"Play the game," echoed Mrs. Smith, who is 86 and the oldest and most attentive player in the group. + +Song, Recipe, Misdeal + The other night, in the midst of a game of "Pushy-Pushy," Mrs. Cox went off on a nostalgic tangent about how she learned as a teen-ager to cook gefilte fish and sing Yiddish songs when she kept house for a Jewish family in Canada. But in between the recipe and the lyrics for "Ich Bin a Mama" she dealt a card to the wrong person. The offense did not go unnoticed. +"You talk too much," said Mrs. Diasparra. "And you don't know what you're doing." +Mrs. Cox threw her a sideways glance, sharp as a spade. "Why do you get so excited?" she said. "It's only a card game and it's only for pennies." +Then they clasped hands, laughed -- and anted up two cents apiece. + +LOAD-DATE: August 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Six friends from Sunnyside, Queens, have been playing cards together for more than 20 years. Among those who play are, from left, Theresa Saragaglia, Jeanette Smith, Joan Cox, Martha Diasparra and Rose Giordano. (Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +273 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 9, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Educating Elderly On AIDS + +BYLINE: Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1283 words + +DATELINE: MIAMI, Aug. 8 + +The frank sex talk was right out of a college orientation program, but the men and women who gathered here in a community center lunchroom several weeks ago to hear about AIDS were far beyond their freshman year. +Juaquin Abaroa, 76, earnestly wanted to know if he could get AIDS from oral sex. Eugenia Astiazarain, 80, coyly asked if she could take some condoms home with her. And when 78-year-old Natalia Arzuaga walked off with a dozen, 68-year-old Obdureo Garcia called after her, "Natalia, save one for me!" + The playfulness brought a ripple of nervous laughter. Sex, after all, was not a topic these 40 or so older adults were used to discussing so publicly, in this case at the Eugenio Maria de Hostos Neighborhood Service Center as part of a program financed by local governments. And to talk about AIDS as something that might affect them, well, that was something entirely new. +But they were eager to know more about the disease. It had struck some of their friends, and now they were learning that they, too, were not immune. As Lisa Agate, the AIDS coordinator for the Broward County Public Health Unit, put it, "A lot of people in this age category don't believe they are at risk." + +Fraction of AIDS Cases + Older AIDS patients have always been a tiny -- and little discussed -- fraction of the total AIDS population. Nationwide, of the 349,701 AIDS cases reported through 1993, 10,440, or 3 percent, were of people 60 or older, according to the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. +But the number of cases among the elderly is rising at a faster rate than among other age groups, Federal officials say. Dr. William Adler, chief of clinical immunology at the National Institute on Aging in Maryland, a division of the National Institutes of Health, said that from 1990 to 1992 the number of new AIDS cases dropped 3 percent among those 30 and younger while increasing 17 percent among people 60 and older. +As a result, AIDS educators are making greater efforts to reach older people, particularly in South Florida, home to a large retirement population. There, a strong social service network is allowing health educators to establish several outreach programs quickly. From Palm Beach to the Florida Keys, advocates for AIDS patients have joined those who care for the elderly to hold seminars, train peer counselors, educate physicians and distribute condoms. +It couldn't have happened sooner, Dr. Adler said. "The educational programs seem to be working in the younger community," he said. "Maybe there needs to be better education in the older group." + +Risk for the Widowed + The elderly have been infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, mainly through blood transfusions and male homosexual sex, although in the last few years the number of cases attributed to transfusions has dwindled as the blood supply has become safer, Federal officials said. +While male homosexual sex is still a leading cause of AIDS among people 65 and older, accounting for about 36 percent of the new cases in 1992 among this group, the proportion of elderly getting H.I.V. through heterosexual sex has increased, and is slightly higher than that of the general population, according to C.D.C. statistics reported by Dr. Jonathan Ship, a former investigator for the National Institutes of Health who is director of the hospital dentistry program at the University of Michigan. +While just 2 percent of all AIDS cases in the United States can be attributed to heterosexual sex, that has been the mode of transmission in 9 percent of all AIDS cases reported among those 60 and older, Dr. Ship said. And he sees an upward trend in that category. In 1992 alone, he said, heterosexual sex accounted for at least 15 percent of the new AIDS cases among those 65 and older. +The risk among the heterosexual elderly often increases when people become widowed, said Ms. Agate, of Broward County. "A lot of them are seeking sexual experiences that are unconventional," she said. One sexual outlet that the elderly, particularly men, may turn to, she said, is prostitution, which because of AIDS is riskier than it was in their youth. "Back then, all they had to worry about was syphilis," she said. +In Florida, the number of recorded AIDS cases among the elderly has risen from 6 in 1984 to 1,341 through 1993, or nearly 4 percent of the state's cases, said Stephen Kindland, spokesman for the state's AIDS program. +Given those relatively low numbers, Mr. Kindland believes that special programs for the elderly may not be worth it. "We've only got so much money and we've got to set priorities," he said. +"Older people are at less risk," said Marcia Ory, chief of social science research at the National Institute on Aging, "but they are at some risk, especially those who engage in risky behaviors. Of those older people who are at risk, they are much less likely to have gotten the safe sex message." + +Symptoms Can Be Confused + In the Institute on Aging's $400 million budget for the 1994 fiscal year, $750,000 has gone for AIDS and aging, Ms. Ory said. Some of that money is used to educate doctors, who researchers say often confuse AIDS symptoms with signs of aging. +Doctors and AIDS advocates report that a common misdiagnosis is to say that a patient has Alzheimer's dementia when he actually has an AIDS-related illness. "It is a problem and it's growing because people are going to their doctors and they're not looking for symptoms," said Arlene Kochman, the executive director of Senior Action in a Gay Environment, a New York group. +In 1989, Ms. Kochman's group started an AIDS program for the elderly, an effort originally intended to provide services to older gay men who felt out of place at AIDS agencies geared toward younger men. Now, Ms. Kochman said, she is beginning to reach a heterosexual audience, advising programs in South Florida and receiving requests for assistance from groups in Nebraska, Wisconsin and Ontario. +Leonard Kooperman, a professor of public administration at Golden Gate University in San Francisco who has published studies on AIDS in the older population, said the most sexually active heterosexual elderly are found in Florida and Arizona retirement communities. "They don't like to use condoms," Professor Kooperman said. "It's probably the most difficult behavioral change in AIDS education." +The Century Village retirement complexes in Broward County recently sponsored a talk by Paul Withrow, the coordinator of public outreach for Center One, an AIDS service agency. +"It's unfortunate, but a good portion of the community thinks that the elderly are not at risk," Mr. Withrow said. "They believe that once you pass 65 years of age you are not sexually active." +Although older people are sexually active, many are uncomfortable speaking about sex at public meetings, said Susan Palomino, supervisor of AIDS prevention at Family Counseling Services of Greater Miami, a private agency that gets government financing. +"They're a little hesitant with the condoms," Ms. Palomino said. "They'll pick them up and say it's for their grandson." +Vincent Delgado, who organized the talk at the Eugenio Maria de Hostos center, in northwest Miami, said that getting the elderly to accept that they could be at risk of AIDS was only half his job as chairman of the AIDS and Aging Task Force for Dade and Monroe County, a South Florida nonprofit group financed by local and state governments. +"I'm having a lot of trouble getting funding for the task force because some foundations don't consider the elderly at risk," Mr. Delgado said. "They say, 'No matter what, they're going to die.' +"That's not right." + +LOAD-DATE: August 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Vincent Delgado distributing condoms to elderly people at the Eugenio Maria de Hostos Neighborhood Service Center in Miami. Although older people make up a small percentage of the total number of AIDS patients, AIDS educators are trying to reach people who live in retirement communities. (Tom Salyer for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +274 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 10, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Personal Health; +Strength workouts can help keep aging at bay. + +BYLINE: By Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section C; Page 8; Column 1; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1127 words + +IN just 10 weeks of a strength-training program, 50 frail men and women in their 80's and 90's were able to increase their weight-lifting ability by 118 percent, their walking speed by 12 percent and their stair-climbing ability by 28 percent, according to a study published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine. This study and previous work by the same researchers at Tufts University shows that strength training can help the elderly be more active and remain more independent. +Impressive though these accomplishments are in stemming some of the costly and debilitating incapacities of old age, they pale in comparison with what strength training can do for younger people who want to maintain or improve physical prowess even as their biological clocks keep ticking toward decline. + Strength training is a fancy way of describing the process of building muscle power by lifting free weights or working out against resistance, by using equipment like Nautilus or Universal machines or by working against large elastic bands. While "aerobics" was the exercise catchword of the 1970's and 80's, strength training is the trend of the 1990's, hailed as a critically important complement to aerobics in a total fitness program. In 1990, the American College of Sports Medicine revised its exercise guidelines to recommend a more balanced fitness program that includes both aerobic workouts and strength training. + +Variety of Benefits + Before you start thinking "enough already -- I have no time for any more activities," consider these established benefits of strength training: improved performance in other sports, like tennis, golf, basketball and even swimming; greater endurance and stamina in both recreational activities and the chores of daily life, like carrying groceries, children or a suitcase; loss of body fat and gain of lean muscle tissue, resulting in a dramatic improvement in body composition; more energy and self-confidence; a greater sense of power, both physical and emotional, and well-being, and a reduced risk of heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, back problems and joint injuries. Strength training can help reduce total cholesterol levels and raise the level of the desirable HDL cholesterol, keep blood sugar in balance and build bone strength better, it is thought, than weight-bearing exercises like walking. +Probably most enticing of all, strength training can make it easier to shed unwanted pounds and lose the inches you need to slip into those slender jeans. By helping you build muscle tissue and lose body fat, strength training revs up your metabolic rate, so you burn more calories whatever you are doing, even when sitting and sleeping. More muscle and less fat also mean fewer inches and smaller sizes, because fat takes up more room than the same weight of muscle tissue. After age 45 or so, sedentary people -- and even many who do aerobic exercise -- rapidly lose muscle mass and, consequently, strength. For every pound of muscle lost, the resting metabolic rate drops by nearly 50 calories a day. The lost strength largely accounts for the difficulty many elderly people have in rising from chairs, climbing stairs and carrying groceries. +You may not have to add any minutes to your current exercise schedule to make room for strength training. The current recommendation to achieve balanced fitness calls for aerobic workouts four times a week with strength training on the remaining three days. +The beauty of strength training is that it can be done by almost anyone, no matter how old or feeble, in a wide variety of circumstances and at little or no added expense. To do most of the recommended exercises, you need nothing fancier than a few full cans from the supermarket or plastic bottles filled with water or sand. And while women who work out with weights or against resistance can gain strength and muscle tone at the same rate as men, they need not worry about developing bulging muscles unless they also dose themselves with an extra shot of testosterone. + +A Balanced Workout + The goal is to work different muscle groups to achieve overall fitness and balanced muscular strength. Muscular imbalance increases the risk of injury. For example, cycling builds the quadriceps at the expense of the hamstrings, running strengthens the hamstrings at the expense of the quads and neither does anything for the upper body. To correct imbalances with strength training, you should work on the muscle groups that are otherwise neglected. +You can use a set of free weights, like barbells, dumbbells or add-on ankle and wrist weights; cans of different weights; elasticized exercise bands, which come in different resistances; a home gym, or the calibrated resistance machines found in commercial gyms. Experts say you can get a full workout in just 30 minutes. The basic rule is to start light and gradually increase the stress on your muscles so they will grow stronger. +Through trial and error, pick a weight that you can lift 10 to 15 times but no more. Or pick the heaviest weight you can lift once and then drop back to one that is 60 to 80 percent of that maximum weight. In each workout, begin with the large muscle groups of the legs, chest, back and shoulders, then move to the smaller ones of the arms and abdominals. Figure on doing at least 8 to 10 different exercises each session. +Start each session with a 5- or 10-minute warm-up (perhaps jogging in place) and gentle stretching, then do two or three sets, each with 10 to 15 repetitions, for each type of exercise, resting a bit between sets of the same exercise. After a few weeks, increase the weights you are working with by 10 to 25 percent. You may have to drop down to 8 to 12 repetitions, which is fine. As your strength increases, continue to add more weight. +People with high blood pressure or heart disease should avoid working with heavy weights or resistance, and anyone with a chronic illness -- arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, etc. -- should consult a physician before starting a strength-training program. +Be sure to breathe evenly throughout the exercises, exhaling at the point of maximum exertion. Holding your breath can cause a dramatic rise in blood pressure. Lift the weight smoothly and release it gradually so your muscles, not the weight itself, do the work. If anything causes pain, stop doing it right away, but muscle soreness the day after a workout is to be expected, especially if you are a beginner or have just increased the weights you are using. +Muscles grow by being torn -- microscopically -- and rebuilt, so they need a day between strength-training workouts to recover. It is best to space out your workouts, interspersing them with aerobic activities. + +LOAD-DATE: August 10, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Chart/Diagram: "Muscle by Muscle: A Complete Strength-Training Workout" illustrates exercises that strenghten various muscle groups. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +275 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 10, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +In America; +Punishing the Victims + +BYLINE: By BOB HERBERT + +SECTION: Section A; Page 19; Column 5; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 716 words + +There is a raging epidemic of medical incompetence and malpractice in this country, but as the national debate over health care intensifies, the most powerful elements of the health-care industry are engaged in a cruel campaign to limit the legal rights of malpractice victims. +Lobbyists for doctors, hospitals, the insurance industry and others claim that they are fighting on behalf of malpractice "reform," but that is not so. True reform would be an effort to prevent malpractice. This so-called reform effort is geared solely toward preventing victims (or their survivors) from collecting the damages they deserve for the dreadful injuries they have suffered. + The carnage from malpractice is astonishing. If you add up all the deaths each year from crime, from motor vehicle accidents and from fires, they will not equal the estimated 80,000 people who die in hospitals annually from some form of medical negligence or malpractice. That is a conservative estimate and it applies only to hospital foul-ups. It does not take into account those who die at the hands of incompetent health providers in clinics, Medicaid mills, doctors' offices and elsewhere. +Scores of thousands of patients each year are left paralyzed, brain-damaged, blind or otherwise horribly disabled from malpractice. Most are never adequately compensated. Yet virtually all the health-care reform bills that are growing like weeds in Congress contain provisions that would hinder the ability of malpractice victims to recover damages. The exceptions are the single-payer bills in both the House and the Senate. +The health-care bill that emerged from the Senate Finance Committee was particularly egregious in its approach to malpractice victims. That bill would put a $250,000 cap on damages that could be awarded for pain and suffering; would limit attorneys' fees for plaintiffs (but not for defendants), and would have required that 75 percent of all punitive damages go to the state, not the plaintiff. +Those are insidious proposals and they are still making the rounds in Congress. Caps on pain and suffering hurt the people most vulnerable to low-quality care -- women, the elderly and low-income people. There is no cap on compensation for lost income, which is a significant measure of protection for wealthy victims of malpractice. But others, without the cushion of wealth, would be limited to the maximum of $250,000 for even a lifetime of suffering. +Mern Horan, an attorney with Public Citizen, a health advocacy group in Washington, said, "What they're saying is that if you don't make a large income we're not concerned about your disfigurement, your paralysis, your inability to bear children or the fact that you're in extreme pain and living on morphine for the rest of your life." +Medical industry representatives have complained for years that malpractice lawsuits have been a major factor in the surge of health-care costs. It is a bogus argument. Doctors, on average, spend 2.9 percent of their gross income on malpractice insurance, just a shade over the 2.3 percent they pay for "professional car upkeep." +Meanwhile, the insurance companies are cleaning up. Figures from 1991 showed that malpractice policies earned the companies $1.4 billion in profits. +Big-time operators throughout the medical industry are cleaning up. Top executives of the leading health-care companies often earn millions of dollars annually -- in some cases, tens of millions. +But medical malpractice victims are not cleaning up. Only 1 out of 16 victims gets anything in the way of compensation. Many refuse to sue because they don't want to fight the phalanx of doctors who are sure to come to the aid of the defendant. Some victims of malpractice don't even know they have the right to sue. +Of those who sue and are awarded damages, very few receive payments that are unjustified, according to a study published two years ago in the "Annals of Internal Medicine." +Nevertheless, under the umbrella of reform, the assault on malpractice victims continues. +As the consumer advocate Ralph Nader noted, "All these health-care bills have some sort of restriction on malpractice victims, and none of them have anything in the way of malpractice prevention, which tells you where the balance of power is." + +LOAD-DATE: August 10, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +276 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 11, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE; +CLINTON DECLARES A MINIMUM DEMAND ON UNIVERSAL CARE + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1498 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 + +President Clinton said today that he could not accept health care legislation with less of a guarantee of universal coverage than Senator George J. Mitchell's bill, which would require employers to pay half the cost of their workers' health insurance if other measures did not reach 95 percent of Americans by 2000. +The majority leader's bill has been criticized by some liberals as moving too slowly toward universal coverage from the current level of 85 percent. But the President said in a telephone interview that he accepted the bill's premise that "if you can get 95 percent by the year 2000, that's evidence you can get to universal coverage without a mandate" requiring employers to pay. + But, he insisted, "you have to have some sort of backup mechanism in case that fails." Asked if there were any other approach that would substitute, he replied: "Everybody sat around here breaking their brains over what other alternatives were available. None emerged before he put his bill in. I can't imagine -- I just don't know what other alternatives there are." +He and Mr. Mitchell got a major assist today when the American Association of Retired Persons endorsed the Mitchell bill as well as the more-sweeping House leadership bill. +The influential organization, which had held back from formal endorsement of any proposal until today, said neither bill was perfect, but it was time to make "difficult choices." It cautioned, "If either bill is defeated, health care reform will be dead for years to come." [Page A20.] +The endorsement is likely to produce a torrent of phone calls and letters to Congress from the 33 million elderly people who are members of the group. +On Capitol Hill, the Senate debated the Mitchell bill for a second day, with Senator John H. Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, striking a particularly conciliatory note. "I firmly believe that the Senate has the courage and the wisdom to put partisanship aside, to enact health care reform with broad support, for the good of our country," he declared. [Excerpts, page A21.] +Mr. Chafee, the leader of a bipartisan Senate group that has been struggling to find a compromise on health care, praised Mr. Mitchell's handling of the employer payment issue, but he identified several areas where he believed Mr. Mitchell should shift. When he finished speaking, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, an important Mitchell ally, went over to his desk and they talked earnestly for about 15 minutes. +But other Republicans repeatedly criticized what they called an excessive government role in the Mitchell bill. And they complained that Mr. Mitchell had presented them today with an altered bill, just when they had finished reading the last 1,410-page version. + +Reprieve for Residencies + The most significant of the changes was one of considerable importance to New York City -- deletion of a provision that would have sharply reduced the number of residencies that hospitals were allowed to offer medical school graduates. A limit may be set later, but no number is established in the bill. +In the House, where debate is scheduled to begin next week, the effort to introduce a bipartisan substitute was coming to a rocky conclusion. Its sponsors were trying to devise a program with benefits sufficient to attract Democratic votes but without the need to pay for them with taxes, an idea that Republicans could not stomach. +On the Senate floor, Democrats lauded employer mandates in Hawaii, which established them 20 years ago. Hawaii requires employers to pay 50 percent of their workers' insurance costs; as a result, 96 percent of the state's residents have insurance and the state enjoys better health standards and lower insurance rates than the mainland, despite its generally higher living costs. +Senator Daniel K. Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii, disputed assertions that an employer mandate would cripple small business. His state, he said, is the most attractive in the nation for small companies. +Hawaii was on President Clinton's mind, too. In the telephone interview he described a meeting today with the state's governor, John Waihee 3d, and said he was surer than ever "that the closer you move to universal coverage, the more you achieve the other goals of the health care system, which are higher quality and lower cost." + +Republican Bureaucracy + Mr. Clinton said he intended to "keep hammering home" the story of Hawaii's success. With those arguments, he said, "we might be able to do some good with some of the wavering Democrats." +He also criticized Republicans who complained of bureaucracy in the Mitchell bill. He said those provisions were required by Mr. Mitchell's efforts to accommodate die-hard Republican opposition to employer mandates. If Republicans are willing to accept a system like Hawaii's right now, he said, "you can do that with no bureaucracy at all." +He added, "The only thing you have to do is say to every state that they will have to organize buyers' co-ops, and make it voluntary" for small businesses to purchase insurance through such an alliance. +"If you fight the mandates until the last dog dies," he continued, "it puts Mitchell in the position of doing what he did. You had to have some system by which you would try to induce small business to buy into a health insurance program." +Mr. Clinton did not say what he would do if presented with a bill that has a lesser commitment to universal care than Mr. Mitchell's proposal has. But there is no prospect that the Democratic leaders, if unable to pass a bill he would agree to, would go to the trouble of passing a lesser measure. Instead, they would blame the Republicans for deadlock. + +Wavering Coalition + Despite all the calls today on Capitol Hill for bipartisanship, the group of moderate House Republicans and conservative Democrats did not prove immune to the fundamental problem that has hampered all bipartisan efforts this year: the Democrats' desire to increase coverage balanced against the Republicans' unwillingness to raise taxes. +Potential Democratic supporters were briefed on the joint measure on Tuesday night but gave it a chilly reception, some participants said. They said the bill would raise coverage only from 85 to 88 percent. +Representative Fred Grandy, Republican of Iowa, disputed those numbers, saying the bill would produce 90 percent coverage. He said it would do so by subsidizing insurance purchases by Americans up to family incomes of $29,528, or twice the Federal poverty level for a family of four. It would be financed largely through savings in Medicare and Medicaid and would seek to keep prices down through insurance law changes intended to encourage competition. +Mr. Grandy acknowledged that this bill would "not do as much as fast" as the bill he originally proposed with Representative Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee. Mr. Cooper said the architects of the new measure were still trying to find ways to sweeten the plan, with such devices as a tax credit for purchasing insurance covering long-term care. + +Out of Patience + In the Senate, the early arguments today centered on Republican objections to Mr. Mitchell's revising his bill overnight. "I'm telling you, I've reached the limit of my patience," said Senator Bob Packwood, Republican of Oregon. +When Mr. Mitchell took the floor to say that at least he had produced a bill some time ago, while the Republicans had promised one for weeks and delivered it only this week, Mr. Packwood rejoined that the Senate's legislative staff had given priority to drafting the Finance Committee's bill. +For Mr. Mitchell to accuse the Republicans of delay, Mr. Packwood said, "borders on a bit of hypocrisy." +Then Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, complained that Mr. Mitchell's bill was "such a piecemeal project, I believe we would be back in six months with major surgery," and that rather than reducing costs, it would increase them. +"As we move to improve the physical health of Americans, I believe it is imperative that we preserve our fiscal health," he said. +Senator Kennedy replied, "Bipartisanship requires coming at least halfway." +Senator Chafee spoke next, and for the rest of the afternoon the tone was more conciliatory. The senators are expected to continue making statements tomorrow. +Senator John D. Rockefeller 4th, the West Virginia Democrat who supports the Mitchell bill though it moves more slowly toward universal coverage than he had wished, pleaded for bipartisanship. +"If too many Senators treat this debate upcoming as only a chance to score points," he said, "their win is the American people's loss." +Senator Bob Kerrey, the Nebraska Democrat who opposes Mr. Mitchell's bill, also called for bipartisanship. +"The question before us is whether we have the capacity to bridge the differences between Democrats and Republicans and pass a bill that's urgently needed by the people, urgently needed," he said. + +LOAD-DATE: August 11, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Republican leaders are assailing the Mitchell health care bill as having an excessive government role. Discussing strategy yesterday were, from right, Representative Robert H. Michel, the House minority leader, Senator Bob Dole, the Senate minority leader, and Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times) (pg. A20) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +277 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 11, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE: THE ELDERLY; +2 Bills in Congress Backed By Association of Retirees + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 902 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 + +The American Association of Retired Persons today urged its 33 million members to support the health care bills offered by the Democratic leaders of Congress, Representative Richard A. Gephardt and Senator George J. Mitchell, but did not express a preference for one bill over the other. +The association's action, coupled with its promise to lobby and advertise for the legislation, was a big boost for the Gephardt and Mitchell bills -- and for President Clinton, who has endorsed them. + Eugene I. Lehrmann, the president of the association, said, "Although neither bill is perfect, we conclude that these bills provide the foundation for comprehensive health care for all Americans." +Mr. Lehrmann, a retired supervisor of vocational education programs in Madison, Wis., said, "If either bill is defeated, health care reform will be dead for years to come." + +Bills With Differences + In February, the association spurned pleas by President Clinton to endorse his health care plan, although it did support many elements, including the goal of guaranteeing health insurance for all Americans. +The association is now backing two bills with major differences. The Gephardt bill, which aims to cover all Americans by 1999, relies primarily on a requirement that employers pay 80 percent of the cost of insuring their workers. Senator Mitchell says his bill would cover 95 percent of Americans by the year 2000, mainly by offering Federal subsidies to help people buy private insurance. If that goal was not met, employers would be required to pay half the cost of their workers' coverage. +Mr. Lehrmann said the choice for Americans was not between the two bills, but "between health care reform and the current health care system." Accordingly, he said: "We want to get on the bandwagon for both of these bills. Our members want health care reform, and they want it now, not only for themselves, but for their children as well." +The association's support for the Mitchell bill surprised some members of the organization and lobbyists for other groups with which it is often allied. Many labor unions and consumer groups have harshly criticized Mr. Mitchell's bill on the grounds that it would not necessarily achieve universal health insurance coverage and would not immediately require employers to contribute to the cost of insurance for their employees. +The A.F.L.-C.I.O., for example, strongly prefers the Gephardt bill. It said the Mitchell bill "would not solve the root causes of the current health care crisis" because it had "no effective cost controls." + +2d Group Backs Gephardt Bill + Another group that represents elderly people, the National Council of Senior Citizens, with five million members, also favors the Gephardt bill, saying it would control health costs much more effectively than Mr. Mitchell's proposal. Elderly people, already covered by Medicare, have for years sought Federal limits on what they pay for prescription drugs, doctors' services and hospital care. +The American Association of Retired Persons praised the bills for adding prescription drug coverage to Medicare and for starting a long-term care program for people with disabilities. Mr. Lehrmann said his organization could accept other elements of the two bills, which would cut projected spending in Medicare and triple Medicare premiums for retirees with six-figure incomes. +Mr. Rother said that 600,000 of the 32 million elderly Medicare beneficiaries would pay the higher premiums. The premium is now $41.10 a month. +John C. Rother, the chief lobbyist for the association, explained today's decision by saying, "We support the strongest bill in the Senate and the strongest bill in the House." +Peter L. Ashkenaz, a spokesman for A.A.R.P., said the group was expressing no preference between the Mitchell and Gephardt bills. +The association represents people 50 and older; half the members are under 65. Membership dues are $8 a year. The association offers health insurance, auto insurance, mutual funds and travel discounts to its members. The organization sways many votes in Congress, but has become much more cautious in its political advocacy in recent years. + +'Have to Pragmatic' + Leaders of the organization were burned by their experience with the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988, which expanded Medicare to cover the cost of catastrophic illness. The association lobbied for passage of that law. But after elderly people realized that they would pay the bill, through higher taxes and premiums, they rebelled against leaders of the organization and forced Congress to repeal the law a year later. +In explaining why the association expressed equal degrees of support for the Gephardt and Mitchell bills, even though they differ in many respects, Lena L. Archuleta of Denver, a member of the board of the organization, said, "We have to be pragmatic." +She said the association wanted to see bills passed by the House and the Senate, so lawmakers could strike a compromise in a conference committee of negotiators from the two chambers. "If we don't get these bills to a conference committee, we'll lose the battle," Ms. Archuleta said. +Medicare would initially remain a separate program under the Gephardt and Mitchell bills. But under both bills, states could eventually combine Medicare with private health insurance programs for people under 65 years old. + +LOAD-DATE: August 11, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +278 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 11, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +World of Opportunities For Tirelessly Retired + +BYLINE: By ENID NEMY + +SECTION: Section C; Page 1; Column 1; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 1625 words + +ORMAN W. KETCHAM put on a wig, stuck two enormous "beaver" teeth between his lips, went out on stage and danced his version of the Charleston. His recent performance was as much a surprise to him as it was to the audience, many of whom summed it up with their favorite word -- awesome. Mr. Ketcham, 75, is a retired judge of the Juvenile and Superior courts of the District of Columbia. +The audience in the big rustic cabin on the scenic shore of Lake Vanare in upstate New York consisted of 82 critically ill and severely handicapped children between ages 6 and 16. They were spending eight days at the Double "H" Hole in the Woods Ranch, founded last year by Paul Newman, the actor, and Charles R. Wood, a philanthropist, in Lake Luzerne, N.Y. + Mr. Ketcham was one of 19 men and women, all over 60, taking part in a new program sponsored by Elderhostel, a Boston-based nonprofit organization started in 1975 to offer older adults modestly priced learning opportunities with accommodations in academic settings. Last year, some 290,000 men and women took part in the 12,000 programs held at 1,800 sites around the world, about 1,000 of them in the United States and Canada. +The educational aspect of Elderhostel was extended two years ago to include service programs, but this was the first season that working with sick and handicapped children in the 300-acre camp was among the choices. (A similar site, "The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp" in Ashford, Conn., was founded by Mr. Newman and Mr. Wood in 1988.) A large majority of the campers, who are looked after by a staff that includes 36 young counselors, chosen from some 800 applicants, have cancer or serious blood disorders; a few suffer from neuromuscular impairments. +The hostelers, each of whom paid $550 for the eight days' room and board and the privilege of working, were on call for everything from shampooing the youngsters, baking cookies and helping with the camp's horses, goats, ducks, rabbits, ferrets, donkey and snake to teaching swimming, working in the infirmary ("Paul's Body Shop") and serving as mentors. +"We had a lot of apprehension, but it's a natural mix," said Max J. Yurenda, the administrative director of the ranch. "The children are responding to them like one of the family." In fact, although some of the youngsters referred to the hostelers as "the elders," others called them "the grands" or "the grandmas" and "the grandpas." +"These people are neat, because you think older people act old and these don't," said Adam Jed, 12, of Pleasantville, N.Y., who contracted a blood disease when he was 4 and spends most of his time in a wheelchair. Adam, who plans to be a lawyer, added, "They aren't like grandfathers and mothers; they're like friends -- after a while they get tired or something but they all act pretty young." +Participants in other Elderhostel programs throughout New York State agreed that, in addition to the programs, their enjoyment stemmed from the caliber of discussion among fellow participants. +"You never see pictures of grandchildren at these things," said Kaye Tobin, 64, a real estate broker and grandmother of two from Huntington Beach, Calif. "No one is on a diet, no one talks about doctors and they don't talk about themselves. They talk about places and things." She had traveled by bus across the country with her sister to attend a new program at Fordham University in Manhattan. +The program offered dormitory accommodations and lectures in the arts and literature of New York City. The five Fordham programs this season, each for 50 hostelers, were sold out, as were the two "Hole in the Woods" programs. +Ms. Tobin has seven children, each of whom, she said, sends her $300 a year. The gifts have paid for past Elderhostel programs and will go to future ones. +The cost for almost all the five-and six-day programs generally ranges from $275 to $355 for accommodations, meals and lectures. In most cases, participants stay in double rooms on campuses, in conference centers and commercial centers, with meals taken in cafeterias and dining halls. +At Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., Max E. Lourie, 85, a former mathematics teacher from Bayonne, N.J., was taking part in the type of program on which Elderhostel was built. He was living in a dormitory on the 1,200-acre campus, eating in the cafeteria and attending lectures on "The Thinking Person's Hamlet," "The Fate of the Family" and "Prints and Printmaking." +"I went to New York University and there's no campus there," he said, explaining his attraction to the traditional type of program. "I've always been jealous of friends who went away to school and had a campus, and I was determined to have one. This is my sixth Elderhostel, and I always choose programs on campuses -- they're so beautiful, you're inspired." +Mr. Lourie's wife was at home. "We have a philosophy that's lasted 50 years," he said. "She says, 'You row your boat and I'll row mine.' She can't see herself standing in line for food or using a communal bathroom." +Single men, or men who attend without their wives, are an exception at most Elderhostels. Women, single, widowed, divorced or with husbands at home, and married couples make up the bulk of the enrollment. +Elizabeth Belmonte, 64, was also alone at Hamilton, although she had attended several Elderhostels with her husband, whom she met while she was with the British foreign service. She had found, she said, that being on her own led to getting to know more new people than she might have as part of a couple. +In fact, part of the Elderhostel appeal is its comfort factor for single women. Almost all the women traveling alone commented on the ease of making friends and the feeling of inclusiveness. Many campus programs offer activities like visits to nearby places of interest, sports centers, movies and square dances. There is also mingling at meals. +Despite some initial trepidation among hostelers, the opportunity of spending a reasonably priced week in Manhattan ($355), combined with lectures on the city's attractions and history, accounted for the waiting lists for the Fordham programs. +"My fear factor of New York has gone down," said John Lees, 67, of Melbourne, Fla., a lawyer and former company tax officer. He and his wife, Mollie, who is 64 and a former biology teacher, "hit two Elderhostels a year," he said, adding, "They're congenial and affordable and on average the people are politically more liberal and more articulate than most." +Blanche Frenaye, 84, of Auburn, Calif., had a similar reaction to New York. "When I first came here, I didn't like the noise and the sirens," she said. "Now it's like a lullaby." +Mrs. Frenaye was a center of interest when word got out that she had met her husband at an Elderhostel in California nine years ago -- and that she is 13 years older than he. +"I had been married 51 years and was a widow and I thought 'it's all through,' " she said. "Then I met Bill." She had to gather her courage to tell him her age, she said, but his reaction was everything she could have hoped for. "Now, I'm invariably approached by single women who ask, 'How did you do it?' " +Mrs. Frenaye had attended several Elderhostels before her initial meeting with her husband, but it was his first. Both Californians, they were married two years later, after corresponding and getting together halfway between their two homes. In the interim, she went to more Elderhostel programs; he didn't. +"We didn't think it proper to go together if we weren't married," said Mr. Frenaye, a former student financial aid director who had been twice divorced. Since their marriage, they've attended five together. +For Mr. Ketcham, who lives in Chevy Chase, Md., a highlight of his time at the Hole in the Woods Ranch (smash stage performance aside) was hearing various children call, "Hey Orm, come sit with me." He added, "It's been worthwhile." +Marcella Rueda, 7, from New Rochelle, N.Y., was pleased at having braved, safely harnessed, a wire walk 40 feet above ground. That was only half the project -- she then had a long sloping slide back to the ground, into the arms of an elder. Three words summed up her thoughts on the hostelers. "I like them," she said. +When a friend telephoned Miriam Holt, 69, a retired nurse from Gibsonberg, Ohio, and suggested applying for the Hole in the Woods program, Mrs. Holt said she would think about it. "Then I read my devotional for that day and it said, 'Take your part in suffering.' " she said. "I thought, 'All right,' and I called my friend right back." +Frank and Eileen Entwisle of Cooperstown, N.Y., aren't new to service programs. Both 76, he a retired psychologist and she a retired dietician, they have had 30 previous Elderhostel programs, including working with a high school in Jamaica and teaching English in Poland. Still, they agreed it would take a lot to match their week at the ranch. +"After retiring, you're inclined to feel totally selfish," Mrs. Entwisle said. "This is a way to give back to the world. It's nice to feel useful." +There were nods of agreement when Judith Papier, 64, a former teacher in Beach Haven, N.J., said she was "getting more out of this than the children are." +Mary Vandergrift, 65, from Toledo, Ohio, summed up what her fellow participants expressed in a number of different ways. +"I'm very thankful I have five healthy grandchildren," she said. +On the final evening of their stay, the children made little boats out of twigs and vines, put a wish written on a piece of bark and a lighted candle in each boat and placed them in the lake to sail away into the unknown. The wishes could only be guessed. +Information is available from Elderhostel at (617) 426-8056. + +LOAD-DATE: August 11, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Florence Hein of Elmwood Park, N.J., helping Christopher Puglia from New Hampshire to swim at the Double "H" Hole in the Woods Ranch. (pg. C1); Nicole Maynard, left, a ranch counselor, and Janet Brown, an Elderhostel volunteer, assist Tiffany Clevenger. (pg. C8) (David M. Jennings for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +279 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 12, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE: THE CONSTITUENCIES; +Directors' Vote of Support Angers Members of Retiree Group + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 18; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 629 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Aug. 11 + +Calls from angry senior citizens clogged switchboards at the American Association of Retired Persons today after the group's board of directors stated its support for Democratic health care bills. +Most of the callers were incensed that the president of the association, Eugene Lehrmann, without first surveying the group's 33 million members, announced support for bills sponsored by George J. Mitchell of Maine, the Senate majority leader, and Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the House majority leader. + "It's just being ramrodded down our throats," said Lucette Worrel, 69, of Bay St. Louis, Miss., a member of the association for about seven years. "I've never been as riled up." +Ms. Worrel, who said she would not renew her membership "because of this one thing," was among those who called the association's national office in Washington. She also complained to her Congressman, two members of Congress from Louisiana and the television station and newspaper in her town. +"This health care has really gotten me," she said. "I don't believe the people really want it. I don't want my insurance to change. Maybe that's selfish, but damn it, I feel I have earned the right to be selfish." +An association spokesman, Peter Ashkenaz, said hundreds of calls had come into the headquarters, virtually all from angry members. Mr. Ashkenaz could not give a firm number, but the group's phone line was busy for hours this afternoon. + +Not Enough Phone Lines? + "Even if 1 percent of our membership starts calling," he said, "I don't know any organization with enough phone lines to handle that." +Most of the callers said they believed that the A.A.R.P. had endorsed President Clinton's plan, or they simply did not agree with the Democratic bills, Mr. Ashkenaz said. +Stan Smith, 53, who lives near Raleigh, N.C., said: "I will cancel my membership as soon as I can get in touch with them. I can't believe they would give that kind of support to anything without polling the membership. I don't care what it's for; it's inappropriate." +But some members voiced support for the health care proposals. +"The budget hawks are going to cut Medicare," said Stan Robinson of Cheney, Wash. "We'll either have it cut intelligently with health care reform, or we'll have it cut indiscriminately, to our hurt." +The association's 21 directors had resisted President Clinton's personal overtures to endorse his plan earlier this year, despite considerable arm twisting, including a meeting at the White House. They instead praised his bill and spent $3 million on advertisements promoting universal coverage, cost containment, prescription drug coverage for seniors and help with long-term care. + +Out of Touch or on Target? + Mr. Ashkenaz said his board had simply recommended that A.A.R.P. members support the Mitchell and Gephardt bills. "The board went into it understanding, agreeing they cannot speak for all 33 million members," he said. +Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said the association's board was "grossly out of touch" with its members. +But Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, defended the A.A.R.P. and accused Senator McCain of "trying to scare senior citizens, much like Republicans did in the years when Medicare was brought into being." +"It's not surprising that the American Association of Retired Persons would endorse this," she said. "They get to keep Medicare exactly as they like it, and they get two new things" -- prescription drug coverage and help with long-term care. +Senator Boxer said her mother had died in a nursing home after having her savings wiped out paying the costs of her care. People should be calling Congress "in droves" demanding the new long-term-care benefits in the Mitchell bill, she said. + +LOAD-DATE: August 12, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +280 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 12, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE: THE LEGISLATION; +Bipartisan Health Care Bill Gets Quick Industry Support + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 18; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 992 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Aug. 11 + +The health care bill unveiled today by a bipartisan group in the House of Representatives would offer billions of dollars to low-income people to help them buy private health insurance, but it would not raise taxes or require employers to contribute to the cost of coverage for their employees. +The bill won immediate endorsements from the American Medical Association and a coalition of five big insurers: Aetna Life and Casualty, Cigna, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, the Prudential Insurance Company of America and the Travelers Corporation. + White House officials denounced the bill, saying it came nowhere near President Clinton's goal of guaranteeing health insurance for all Americans. +Lorrie McHugh, a White House spokeswoman, said: "This bill does not help hard-working middle-class people, older Americans or small businesses. It does not control costs. It does not add prescription drug coverage to Medicare. It keeps insurance companies in the driver's seat." +But members of the bipartisan group said that at the moment their proposal could probably command more votes than the much more ambitious bill offered by the majority leader, Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri. +The chief architects of the bipartisan bill are Representatives J. Roy Rowland of Georgia, Michael Bilirakis of Florida, Jim Cooper of Tennessee and Fred Grandy of Iowa. Mr. Rowland, a family doctor, and Mr. Cooper are Democrats. Mr. Bilirakis and Mr. Grandy are Republicans. +Mr. Rowland said the bill would cover at least 90 percent of Americans by 2004. At present, 85 percent of Americans have health insurance. + +Subsidies for the Poor + In the first five years, Mr. Grandy said, the bill would provide $117 billion in Federal subsidies to help people buy private insurance. In the second five years, subsidies would total $223 billion. The money would come mainly from savings in Medicaid and Medicare. +Low-income people who now receive doctors' services and hospital care through Medicaid would buy private health insurance with the Federal subsidies. Sponsors of the bill said the subsidies would cost less than the current Medicaid program, in part because some people now covered by Medicaid would be ineligible for subsidies. Those people have incomes well above the poverty level but also have high medical expenses. +The sponsors said they were confident that subsidized private health insurance plans would operate more efficiently than Medicaid. +The House Republican leader, Robert H. Michel of Illinois, introduced the final version of his health care bill on Wednesday. It resembles the bipartisan measure but would provide less money for subsidies to low-income people. +In general, subsidies would be available to people with incomes up to twice the Federal poverty level. Subsidies would also be available to children and pregnant women in families with incomes up to 2.4 times the poverty level. (A family of four was classified as poor if it had income of less than $14,764 last year.) +The bill would prohibit insurers from discriminating against people with medical problems. There would be a penalty for those who put off buying coverage until they were sick: insurers could refuse to cover such conditions for six months. +Employers would have to offer at least two health insurance plans to employees but would not have to pay any of the cost. + +A Provision for Cooperatives + Under the bill, state government agencies and private groups could establish insurance cooperatives to pool the purchasing power of consumers and small businesses. If farm bureaus, chambers of commerce and other private organizations did not form such purchasing pools by 2000, states would have to establish them. No one would be required to buy insurance through such purchasing pools. +Insurance policies would have to cover doctors' services and hospital care under the bipartisan bill. But insurers would have more discretion in setting benefits than they would under the Gephardt bill or the measure proposed by Senator George J. Mitchell of Maine, the Senate majority leader. +The bipartisan bill would give doctors some relief from malpractice lawsuits. It would set a limit of $250,000 on damages that could be awarded for the pain and suffering of a patient injured as a result of a doctor's negligence. Doctors have long sought such limits, but consumer groups have vehemently opposed them. +Some members of the American Medical Association said that, in supporting the bipartisan bill, the organization had retreated from its commitment to health insurance for all Americans. But James H. Stacey, a spokesman for the association, said the doctors were still committed to universal coverage, and Dr. P. John Seward, chairman of the organization, said the bipartisan bill "is a substantial first step toward that goal." + +Stark's Objections + Representative Cooper, who seized the spotlight last year with his uninhibited criticism of President Clinton's health plan, said that under the bipartisan bill, "everyone will have access to high-quality, affordable health care." +But Representative Pete Stark, the chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, said the bipartisan bill would leave 27 million people without insurance and would lead to sharp increases in premiums for people who already had coverage. +Mr. Stark, a California Democrat, said that to cope with the proposed cuts in the growth of Medicare and Medicaid, doctors and hospitals would have to raise their charges to privately insured patients. Insurance premiums would increase as a result of such cost-shifting, he said. +The bipartisan bill was drafted over the last month by a group of 10 lawmakers. The other Republicans were Porter J. Goss of Florida, Dennis Hastert of Illinois and Bill Thomas of California. The other Democrats were Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma, Mike Parker of Mississippi and Charles W. Stenholm of Texas. + +LOAD-DATE: August 12, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Chart: "DIARY: Health Care Developments" + +YESTERDAY +As House Democratic leaders indicated that they may postpone debate on health legislation, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers offered a more modest proposal. + +CONGRESS +House. The bipartisan bill seeks to expand coverage through insurance changes, subsidies for the poorest of Americans, an expansion of community health centers and tax changes. Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the majority leader, delivered his bill as the pace of the health debate appeared to slow in the House. Speaker Thomas S. Foley told reporters that the chamber's schedule depended on the Congressional Budget Office's ability to review competing bills so that lawmakers have access to detailed information. Senate. A bipartisan group met to consider what an acceptable bill should contain. Leading Democrats hope that some changes in the bill put forward by the majority leader, Senator George J. Mitchell, could win their support. + +WHITE HOUSE +The White House said that President Clinton expects the Senate to amend Mr. Mitchell's bill but that he could accept changes as long as the legislation included workable provisions to guarantee coverage. + +LOBBYING +Members of the American Association of Retired Persons jammed its switchboard with irate calls after the group's board of directors endorsed Democratic health bills. Peter Ashkenaz, a spokesman for the organization, said many callers mistakenly believed that the group had endorsed President Clinton's original proposal. Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized the private health insurance industry, saying it is "spending a whole lot of premium dollars trying to prevent anything from happening" that would advance health care legislation. In a Hartford, Conn., radio interview, she lumped insurance companies with other powerful interests that she said were opposing change because the current system "puts money into their pockets." + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +281 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 13, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +NEWS SUMMARY + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 785 words + + +International 2-4 + +AN ACCORD WITH NORTH KOREA +After a week of negotiations, the United States and North Korea signed an agreement that includes steps toward full diplomatic relations and a promise by the North to open its nuclear installations to inspections and seal off a nuclear fuel reprocessing laboratory. 1 +EXODUS FROM RWANDA +Confirming the fears of relief officials, a second outpouring of refugees has begun from Rwanda to Zaire. They are Hutu running from their fear of Tutsi-led forces who will move into the Rwandan safe zone when the French leave. 1 +Fears are voiced that Zaire will be the next Gaza Strip. 2 +HARMONY ON MEXICO ECONOMY +The fault lines separating the candidates in the Mexican elections are many, but they are on the same firm ground as far as the economy is concerned. 3 +A HARD LINE ON CUBA +News analysis: Washington is balancing Florida's interests, Fidel Castro's threats and its own political fears in taking a hard line against another Cuban boatlift. 3 +A STEP TO THE RIGHT, THEN LEFT +President Yeltsin is taking a number of steps as he moves to the political center in an attempt to consolidate power and straighten out relations with the former Soviet lands. 4 + +A hard life grows harder for Haitians. 3 +Cabinet member's comment creates more trouble for Italian leader. 4 +Karbala Journal: Patching over the damage and the truth. 4 + +National 6-10 + +SIGNS OF COMPROMISE ON HEALTH +In a step toward compromise on health care, the Senate majority leader said issues raised by bipartisan moderates seemed negotiable. 1 +OMINOUS SIGNS IN HOUSE +News analysis: The latest delay on health legislation announced by House Democratic leaders was particularly ominous. 9 +ANGER AT A.A.R.P. +Two days after the retirees' association endorsed Democratic health plans, some members vented anger at a stand they said was not representative of older citizens. 9 +CLINTON COUNTERATTACKS +The President accused House members who voted Thursday to shelve the crime bill of betraying violence-weary Americans. 1 +CRIME BILL REVIVAL PLANNED +Democratic leaders promised to revive the crime bill that the House sidetracked on Thursday. 10 +GIULIANI OFFERS PRESIDENT HELP +New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican, offered to help the Clinton Administration's efforts to revive the crime bill. 10 +FUROR BUILDING OVER STARR +Criticism of the appointment of Kenneth Starr as Whitewater special prosecutor intensified into partisan furor over his political activities. 1 +FEDERAL CHARGES IN CLINIC DEATHS +The man charged with murdering a doctor and his escort was also indicted under the new Federal law protecting access to abortion clinics. 6 +FLAMMABLE SKIRTS ARE RECALLED +The Government announced the largest-ever clothing recall: 250,000 rayon skirts from India that burn faster than a newspaper. 6 +CITADEL RULING IS REVERSED +A Federal appeals court temporarily prevented Shannon Faulkner from entering The Citadel cadet corps. 6 +PHOTOS WITHHELD IN SIMPSON CASE +The judge in the O. J. Simpson case refused to let reporters see photos of the bodies of the victims. 6 +SEX INQUIRY ABOUT CONGRESSMAN +Investigators are considering charging a first-term Chicago Congressman with sexual assault of a minor and obstruction of justice. 7 + +Fragrance-free services for aromatically sensitive churchgoers. 10 + +Sports 29-34 + +MEDIATION FOR BASEBALL STRIKE +On the first day of the baseball strike, Donald Fehr, the players' leader, and Richard Ravitch, the owners' chief labor executive, accepted an offer of assistance from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. 1 +Baseball: Showalter shows up in vain. 29 +Small businesses feel effect of strike. 29 +Column: Vecsey on baseball strike. 29 +Football: Giants' defenders are confused. 33 +Golf: Price leads P.G.A. 29 +Horse Racing: Lure takes the Baruch. 30 +Tennis: Martina to miss U.S. Open. 29 +Metro Digest 23 +Business Digest 37 +Arts/Entertainment 11-17, 49 +The Bastille Opera dismisses its music director. 11 +A Getty wants to save a statue from the Getty Museum. 11 +Brian Friel's new play may turn things around. 17 +Music: Mozart's "Abduction." 11 +Television: "Parallel Lives." 49 +Obituaries 28 +Editorials/Op-Ed 20-21 +Editorials +Back to basics on the crime bill. +The unyielding AIDS epidemic. +The right to walk a street. +Press freedom, Indonesian style. +Letters +Anna Quindlen: In her defense. +Russell Baker: Living it down. +Milton Friedman: Once again -- why Socialism won't work. +Peter H. Schuck: Share the refugees. +Bridge 14 +Chronicle 22 +Crossword 16 + +LOAD-DATE: August 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +282 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 13, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE: THE ELDERLY; +Some Voices In A.A.R.P. Criticizing Leadership + +BYLINE: Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 9; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1114 words + +DATELINE: SUN CITY CENTER, Fla., Aug. 12 + +Phillip Hampson, the local shuffleboard champion and a member of the American Association of Retired Persons, peered intently at the disks spinning across the court and considered his view of the organization. +It was not a warm assessment, because two days earlier, Eugene I. Lehrmann, president of the A.A.R.P., announced support for the Democratic leadership's health care bills in the Senate and House. "The guy just comes out and says, 'We're for it,' out of a clear blue sky," said Mr. Hampson, a 68-year-old retired accountant from New Rochelle, N.Y. "He didn't poll anybody, or anything," he said. + Murmurs of agreement came from fellow players. "I'm not going to stay in it if they do this nonsense," said Doris Butterworth, 74. "They should not speak for 33 million people." + +Anger Flourishing + Anger at the A.A.R.P. flourished today in the balmy south Florida breeze in Sun City Center, a sprawling retirement community of 8,327 people about 30 miles south of Tampa. +On Thursday, the association's headquarters in Washington was flooded with angry telephone calls because of the organization's stand. Today, those sentiments were echoed here, where A.A.R.P. members are as common as golf carts. +The organization's chief lobbyist in Washington, John Rother, contended that the response would have been different in a less well-to-do area than Sun City Center, with its immaculate lawns and sweeping palm trees. +Frances FitzGerald, describing Sun City Center in 1983 in a book called "Cities on a Hill," depicted it as a heavily Republican, self-contained place of some affluence. +Mr. Rother said the phone calls on Thursday were "entirely unrepresentative," adding: "We have a very good picture of where our membership stands. It's behind health reform." +That assertion, Mr. Rother said, was based on "10 or 12" telephone polls conducted among members. Still, in the face of the torrent of calls on Thursday, the organization felt the need to take out newspaper advertisements today explaining its position. +"We did not want to be the victim of sound-bite television," Mr. Rother said. "We wanted to have a chance to explain directly to our members." He said calls to the organization on Friday had been more balanced regarding its stand. + +More Affluence in Sun City + A member of the group's national board of directors who lives in Florida, Dr. Beatrice Braun, agreed that the elderly in Sun City Center might be more affluent than most older people and therefore less receptive to a health care overhaul. But she said it "would really be very difficult to say" whether a majority of the organization's 2.3 million members in the state supported changes in the health care system. The group's total membership is 33 million. +Some Republicans in Congress have criticized the A.A.R.P.'s leadership as being out of touch with its membership. Today, the group's representative in the 13th Congressional District here, Walter Williamson, asserted, "I know hundreds and hundreds of people in Sun City Center who are absolutely in favor of health reform." +But out of more than two dozen A.A.R.P. members interviewed at random here, more than two-thirds were critical of the organization's position. Several said they thought members had not been adequately consulted. +"I object to this," said Bob Blackwood, 67, a retired Montgomery Ward employee. "They did this without surveying the members. My first reaction was, how the hell can they do that. They didn't ask any people any questions." +Many said they were happy with the health coverage they now have, typically a combination of Medicare and private insurance provided by the companies for which they worked. +"I think we have a good system," said Connie McCarthy, 72, a retired AT&T worker who was walking through the sprawling pink clubhouse, with its rooms for pinochle, bridge and other hobbies. "I think the people that don't have coverage do get what they need." +And most expressed confusion and apprehension as well as opposition to the health care bills before Congress. These feelings may mirror those of the elderly in Florida, where 26 percent of the population is over 60. "We see a large group of individual seniors who are confused about the variety of proposals," said June Noel, deputy secretary of the Florida Department of Elder Affairs. "That confusion is causing a lot of apprehension." +But when residents here were asked why they objected to the health bills, none pointed to specific provisions. Instead, their hostility was based on two general fears: the potential cost and the prospect of "more people working for the Government," as Mr. Hampson put it. +"I don't think anybody's ever read the whole darn thing," said Tom Minke, 67, a retired postal carrier playing shuffleboard, when asked about the bills."I don't know, how, really, it's going to affect me. They haven't come out and said how much it's going to cost the American people. Who is going to pay for the 30 million uninsured?" +Down the bench, Richard Sprenkle, 77, who ran a streetcar in Pittsburgh, commented: "It just seems like there's too much Government getting into everything these days. They don't leave anything alone." + +Opposition to Medicare, Too + The criticism of Government interference came even though many here, perhaps the majority, benefit from Medicare. A local historian, Phil Lange, said the average age in this community was between 70 and 75. +"I think to have socialized medicine is going to be a total disaster for this country," Ms. McCarthy said. "They should never have passed Medicare. The Government shouldn't be controlling doctors." +Still, the precise degree of opposition among the elderly here over a health care overhaul was difficult to gage. None of those interviewed mentioned calling or writing their Congressman on the issue. Many seemed more absorbed in the normal round of activities here -- golf, swimming, shuffleboard, card games -- than by the health care debate. Questions addressed to a room of about a dozen card players elicited only three responses, two hostile to the A.A.R.P. The players quickly went back to their game. +Several others interviewed, however, said they had recently left the organization because they were unhappy with the direction it was taking -- a direction confirmed, they suggested, by the group's endorsement of the Democratic leadership's health care bills. And a few said they were contemplating a quick departure from the organization. +"I would never give the A.A.R.P. one penny, never again," said a 76-year-old woman, lying by the swimming pool. "My blood pressure goes so high when I think about." + +LOAD-DATE: August 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: In Sun City Center, Fla., where many people belong to the American Association of Retired Persons, that group's support for the Democrats' health bills is generating a lot of discussion. Many comments are from disgruntled members, like Marion Guyer, 77, left, John McCollum, 66, and Pearl Lowe, 65. (Peter Cosgrove for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +283 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 14, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +TRAVEL ADVISORY; +Museum Offers a Look At Dinosaurs' Evolution + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 3; Column 4; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 146 words + +The Field Museum in Chicago has opened a $4 million, 16,000-square-foot, permanent display, "DNA to Dinosaurs," that tracks the course of evolution over 3.5 billion years, from the emergence of the first single-celled life form to the age of dinosaurs. The exhibit uses 648 fossils, interactive computers and videos to explore biology, geology and the Earth's climate. Walk-through environments recreate sea life of the Paleozoic era 400 million years ago, and a 300-million-year-old Coal Age forest. In the fall, the museum plans to follow up the dinosaur exhibit with an ambitious re-creation of the evolution of mammals and humans during the Ice Ages. + The Field Museum, Roosevelt Road and Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, is open from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. every day. General admission is $5,and $3 for students, senior citizens and children 3 to 17. Call (312) 922-9410. + +LOAD-DATE: August 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Copy of a Herrerasaurus fossil. (John Weinstein/The Field Museum) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +284 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 14, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE: THE LOBBYISTS; +Mitchell Bill Puts Liberals In a Quandary + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 23; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 796 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Aug. 13 + +For groups that have led the push for national health insurance, the current Senate debate on the issue raises exquisitely difficult questions of political tactics. +The biggest question is whether to lobby energetically for a bill they view as severely flawed, but which may also represent the only vehicle for achieving their goals. + Liberal lobbyists now find themselves in the awkward position of defending a bill they dislike against amendments they dislike even more. +Labor unions, consumer groups and advocates for the elderly had always seen the Senate Democratic leader, George J. Mitchell, as an ally in their campaign for universal health insurance. Since he first entered the Senate in 1980, Mr. Mitchell has shown a keen interest in health care issues. +But in the bill he laid before the Senate on Tuesday, Mr. Mitchell made so many concessions to conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans that he undercut his base, confusing and dividing his old allies. On Friday, Mr. Mitchell said he was open to even more negotiation, and it appeared that some of his liberal allies, like Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, would go along. + +Long-Term Care Cited + Stephen R. McConnell, a senior vice president of the Alzheimer's Association, said he supported the Mitchell bill because it would create a new program of long-term care. But he added: "If the bill is not all you would like, it's hard to go to your constituents and say, 'Rev up the engines.' It takes more explanation to mobilize your members." +The ambivalence and divisions among liberal groups and labor unions contrast with the unity of purpose among business organizations. Big and small businesses have coalesced in opposition to the Mitchell bill, for many of the same reasons they opposed President Clinton's plan. They fear it will vastly expand the powers of the Federal Government and rob them of the discretion they now have to design and manage their own health plans. +Robert A. Chlopak, coordinator of the Health Care Reform Project, a broad coalition of groups supporting national health insurance, said that one-third of its members supported the Mitchell bill, one-third opposed it and the remainder had not taken a firm position. +William H. Bywater, president of the International Union of Electronic Workers, scorned the Mitchell bill, saying it "seeks mild reforms in the vain hope they will lead to universal coverage." The A.F.L.-C.I.O. said, "The Mitchell bill has no effective cost controls." + +U.M.W. Sees Dangers + Leaders of the United Automobile Workers say that passage of Mr. Mitchell's bill would aggravate tensions between employers and employees in their industry. +The Big Three auto makers now pay the full cost of health insurance premiums for union workers. Mr. Mitchell's bill would give the Government's blessing to a much smaller employer contribution, requiring companies to pay at least 50 percent of health insurance premiums, but only in states where more than 5 percent of the people were uninsured in the year 2000. +Alan V. Reuther, legislative director of the auto workers union, said: "The 50-50 standard would create tremendous pressures at the bargaining table. Employers could argue, 'The Government has endorsed that standard, so let's cut back coverage.' The Mitchell bill would lead many employers to drop or reduce coverage. We don't agree with the notion that you pass a bad bill just for the sake of passing something." +Louise Novotny, a health policy analyst at the Communications Workers of America, said: "We have been pushing for broad national reforms with global goals like universal coverage. But the Mitchell bill could backfire on our members, who have coverage now and are battling in every set of labor negotiations to hold on to it. We spent several decades getting to the point that telephone companies now pay 100 percent of the health insurance premiums for our members. The Mitchell bill would undermine the progress we've made." +On the other hand, some of the early advocates for health care legislation, like the American Association of Retired Persons, Families USA and the Catholic Health Association, do support the Mitchell bill as a way to keep the legislative process alive. +"We support the Mitchell bill as the best political vehicle for moving the process forward, with the hope and expectation that the bill will be improved in conference," said Ronald F. Pollack, executive director of Families USA, the advocacy group that organized cross-country bus caravans in support of health care legislation. +William J. Cox, vice president of the Catholic Health Association, which represents 600 Roman Catholic hospitals and 300 nursing homes, supports the Mitchell bill for similar reasons. + +LOAD-DATE: August 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +285 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 14, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Bilingual Ballot Law Fails to Help Chinese-American Voters + +BYLINE: By ASHLEY DUNN + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 39; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1038 words + +Two years after the passage of Federal legislation requiring bilingual ballots for Chinese-American voters in parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, the city has failed to comply with the law, citing the inability of its printers and aging voting machinery to handle the task. +The city has been able to print sample ballots in Chinese, provide interpreters at polling station, and translate job titles, party titles and proposals on ballots to help the city's growing population of Chinese-American voters. + But despite repeated criticism from the United State Department of Justice, the city has yet to come up with a ballot that contains both the English names of candidates and a transliteration of the names in Chinese characters -- a deficiency that the Justice Department believes makes it "extremely difficult, if not impossible, for these voters to understand." +In a letter to the city in May, the Justice Department said the city's voting procedures were inadequate in meeting the requirements of the law and opened the city to possible legal action. + +A Problem of Mechanics? + Members of New York City's Board of Elections say the problem of providing bilingual ballots is not an issue of politics or policy, but simply mechanics -- the ballot slots on the voting machines are just too small to accommodate English and Chinese characters. +"There is no human way this can be done," said Commissioner Paul Mejias. "It's not because we don't want to do it. We all want to do it. But look at the machines. It just won't fit." +Dozens of Chinese-American community groups, including the Chinatown Voter Education Alliance and the New York Chinatown Senior Citizens Center, have joined together to try to force the Board of Elections to provide bilingual ballots for the Sept. 13 primary. +The groups argue that the translations are critical for Chinese-American voters because English letters are so different from Chinese characters. They say they believe the translations can be placed on the ballots and the board is only balking out of ignorance and an unwillingness to change. +"Chinese-American voters are not able to participate in the same way as other voters. There are Chinese-Americans who have been disenfranchised," said Margaret Fung, executive director of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. "When there is already so little participation in the voting process, this is an important issue." + +The Voting Rights Act + The changes to the Voting Rights Act require that bilingual ballots be provided in counties where more than 10,000 residents speak the same foreign language and are not proficient in English. +Prior to the law's passage, counties were required to provide bilingual ballots only if a group with limited English ability made up 5 percent of the voting-age population. +Under the old requirements, Spanish-language ballots were provided in several parts of New York City. Chinese-Americans, who make up 3 percent of the city's total population, did not qualify for bilingual ballots. +The new law requires that Chinese-American voters receive bilingual ballots in about 160 election districts in Chinatown in Manhattan, in Flushing, Queens, and in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. There are about 54,000 Chinese-Americans of voting age in the three boroughs who have limited proficiency in English, according to the 1990 census. +The new requirements have caused problems across the country, particularly in areas that have had to print ballots in Asian and American Indian languages. + +Los Angeles' Difficulties + For example, Los Angeles County has provided sample ballots in English, Chinese, Tagalog, Japanese, Vietnamese and Spanish, but has yet to find a way to print all those languages on the actual ballots. +"We would have to change our whole voting system," said Rosa Garcia-Viteri, head of Los Angeles County's multilingual voting. "I don't think there's any machine out there that could accommodate all those languages." +New York City's problems have proved difficult to resolve, in part because of the sheer enormity of the task. +With more than 5,000 election districts in the city and 3.3 million registered voters, translating material and coordinating its distribution has been a major undertaking. +But what has deadlocked the issue is the limitations of the city's voting machines, which were introduced about 30 years ago. +Both printing companies contracted by the city to produce the ballots for the machines agree that there is not enough room to add Chinese characters to a single ballot space. +But they add that the translation could be done if more space was used for each candidate's name, although they would have to develop some new methods. + +Space Is Limited + There are a limited number of spaces on the voting machines and using two spaces for each candidate would open the possibility of running out of room to list all the candidates. +In addition, several commissioners say that using two spaces would only complicate the already intricate process of printing ballots for hundreds of different election districts. For example, on ballots last year, the city erroneously printed the Chinese character for "no" as a translation for "yes." +Naomi R. Bernstein, spokeswoman for the Board of Elections, said that the problem in translating candidates' names will be resolved in a few years when the city begins using a new electronic voting machine that can display up to five languages at one time. +The machines were demonstrated in last year's primary and general election in the Bronx and could be used for the first time in an election next year. The machines are expected to be phased in throughout the city over the next four to five years. +"We won't have any problems then," Ms. Bernstein said. "We're asking the Chinese community to be patient and bear with us." +But Ms. Fung said that too much time has already elapsed. "I think the Chinese-American community has already been too patient and too willing to accept the excuses of the Board of Elections," she said. "They've had more than enough time. They have constantly said that if we just wait, it will happen. Well, we've waited and nothing has happened." + +LOAD-DATE: August 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + + +GRAPHIC: Federal law requires local officials to print ballots in other languages if enough voters lack proficiency in English. Here are the affected areas in the region and the languages that must be accommodated. + +CONNECTICUT +Chart: "AT THE POLLS: Speaking the Voter's Language" +SPANISH: Towns of Bridgeport, Hartford, New Britain and Windham. + +NEW JERSEY +SPANISH: Essex, Hudson, Middlesex, Passaic and Union Counties. + +NEW YORK +SPANISH: Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens; Suffolk and Westchester Counties. +CHINESE: Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. +MOHAWK: Franklin County. (Source: Justice Department) + +"BALLOTTING IN TWO LANGUAGES" shows a sample ballot from last November's election in English and Chinese. On the actual voting machines, there are two slots beneath each candidate's name, leaving no room for the Chinese characters. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +286 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 16, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Social Security Now Independent Agency + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 265 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Aug. 15 + +Using Franklin D. Roosevelt's pen, President Clinton today signed into law a bill to make the Social Security Administration an independent agency. +"We are strengthening those things which Social Security ought to do and taking precautions to make sure it does not do things which it ought not to do," Mr. Clinton said. + The House and Senate had voted unanimously for the legislation separating the $325 billion program from the Department of Health and Human Services. The intent of the law is to shield the agency, created in 1935, from political manipulation. The law will also restrict benefits paid to substance abusers. +With 64,000 employees and 1,300 field offices, the agency will be one of the largest in the Federal Government. More than 40 million elderly and disabled Americans receive Social Security benefits and 135 million pay into the fund. +Mr. Clinton signed the bill at a Rose Garden ceremony 59 years and one day after Roosevelt signed the historic legislation that created the agency. +The new law is intended to build public confidence in the Social Security Administration and fortify its leadership after two decades of upheaval and declining services. Under the new law, Presidents will appoint commissioners to six-year terms, removable only on grounds of wrongdoing. In the past, commissioners have been political appointees who have lasted as long as their White House patrons. +In addition, the Social Security agency will take its budget requests straight to Congress, rather than through the Office of Management and Budget at the White House. + +LOAD-DATE: August 16, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +287 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 16, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +COMPANY NEWS; +Humana Unit Rejected for Florida Area + +BYLINE: By THOMAS J. LUECK + +SECTION: Section D; Page 4; Column 6; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 519 words + +Humana Inc. said yesterday that it had been denied accreditation for a health maintenance organization it operates in South Florida, and it acknowledged that a separate health care program it operates for elderly people throughout the state was being investigated by the Health Care Financing Administration, a Federal agency that regulates Medicare and Medicaid programs. +Humana, based in Louisville, Ky., said its South Florida H.M.O., with 330,000 members in Broward, Dade and Palm Beach counties, had been denied accreditation by the National Committee for Quality Assurance, an industry oversight group. + The South Florida H.M.O. was acquired by Humana in 1987 from the failed International Medical Centers Inc. Humana said it had not sought accreditation in the past, and had done so this year because of a two-year-old Florida law that requires health maintenance organizations in the state to be accredited. +"We are committed to being accredited within a year," said Greg Donaldson, a spokesman for Humana, which operates H.M.O.'s in 13 states. He said the company believed accreditation had been denied because of questions about the "process of monitoring" its service, rather than the quality of that service. +Mr. Donaldson added that Humana was in negotiations with health officials in Florida about improvements, and expected to "get a determination any day now." + +State Officials Noncommittal + However, Florida officials said yesterday that it was unclear what, if any, penalty Humana would pay for being denied accreditation. John Black of the Florida Department of Insurance said the company might be barred from accepting new members for its South Florida H.M.O., or might have to shut it down unless it gains accreditation. +In Washington, officials of the Health Care Financing Administration said it was investigating allegations of substandard service by Humana's Gold Plus Plan, which has 217,000 members throughout Florida. +Dr. Rodney Armstead, director of the agency's office of managed care, said in an interview that the investigation had been prompted by reports on Humana by a peer-review organization in Florida. He declined to describe details of the inquiry, but said it focused on "the quality of service" provided to elderly Floridians who had chosen the Humana plan. +Dr. Armstead also declined comment on allegations against the Humana plan in an article in The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel on Friday. The report said the Federal agency was investigating whether Humana had falsified records of its flaws in medical treatment, and had ignored elderly patients' grievances. +Mr. Donaldson, the Humana spokesman, said the company believed the Federal agency was looking into charges that dozens of doctors were deeply in debt to its Florida H.M.O.'s because they had provided care costing more than what Humana had budgeted for them. +He also said the allegations were exaggerated. Of 250 doctor-owned medical centers that are associated with Humana's Florida H.M.O. programs, "only 13 are in debt to the company," he said, adding, "That's not a problem." + +LOAD-DATE: August 16, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +288 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 17, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE; +Excerpts From the Senate Debate on the Mitchell Health Care Legislation + +SECTION: Section A; Page 17; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1763 words + +Following are excerpts from statements made yesterday on the Senate floor in the seventh day of debate over the health care bill, as transcribed by The New York Times from a broadcast on C-Span: + +STATEMENT BY SENATOR MURRAY + What is most troubling to me is some of the statements that I have heard about how bad Government is: Government has taken over everything, isn't that awful? +Well, Mr. President, I am very afraid for this country if we continue to denigrate Government as we have heard over and over again. If the people of this country don't make the decisions for ourselves through a representative democracy, let us ask, who will make the decisions? Large corporations? Our insurance companies? The wealthy? +It is time for us to be a part of that representative democracy and forge a bill together that assures all Americans have access to health care reform. That's the kind of democracy I believe in. That's the kind of government I believe in. And I believe that's what this debate is all about. +And "bureaucracy" -- what a word. It's intimidating, it's frightening, it's scary. But I submit to you, Mr. President, one man's bureaucracy is another woman's assurance to quality health care in this country. +I hear the word "bureaucracy" thrown out, and I look in this bill to what we are referring to, and perhaps we're talking about the long-term health care provisions in this bill that provide grants to states, matching grants, so that they can put in place long-term health care for our elderly citizens so that instead of having to go to a nursing home as they get older or become sick that they can stay in their homes and have the kind of care that will provide them the dignity that they deserve. +Mr. President, I believe it's time to remember the American people. I came here to bring change, and change means we listen to the American people. +Maybe change isn't comfortable for everybody, but it does mean renewed hope for thousands and thousands of American citizens. And we should take some risks and put a program out there to provide hope for thousands of Americans today. +People are tired of waiting, because the current system does not work for too many of us. + +STATEMENT BY SENATOR D'AMATO + I think, Mr. President, that there probably is no area that is more important than the area of health care as it relates to us individually, as it relates to our family, as it relates to the American people. It's an area that no one can doubt needs reform; we need to improve it. +But despite its flaws, Mr. President, it is still the best health care system in the world, bar none. The best. I dare say that if the poorest of the poor in this country had a problem that they would get better medical treatment here than Boris Yeltsin in Russia. Indeed, if Boris Yeltsin had a severe medical problem, he'd probably come to this country, if he could, to get medical treatment. +So let's not take that choice away from Boris Yeltsin. And more importantly, let's not take that choice away from the American people. +I have a piece of advice because I've been hearing lots of people offering advice. I want to say to the President and the First Lady, passing bad legislation that the American people don't want is not good politics, and it's not good government. . . . +And I say we weren't sent here by the people to surrender good judgment on the altar of political expedience, or blackmail, or threat of being kept in. We were sent here to work and to achieve and to bring about a better system if possible. But not to destroy the best system that exists in the world. . . . +It's a flawed bill, deeply flawed. Whichever bill you choose, the result is the same: more taxes, more new entitlements and much more Government intrusion into our health care system. . . . +And I ask to submit this as a representation of the calls that have come into our office from Aug. 8 to Aug. 16 up to 12:00. +New York City is against implementing a health care bill this year. And, by the way, most of these people have expressed that they want reform, but they say: Do it right, don't rush it this year, wait till next year and then go ahead. +Against 475, in favor of going ahead and enacting the Mitchell bill, 291. Even in New York City the ratio is clearly 3 to 2 against going forward. +Rochester, N.Y., 162 against, 12 for; 14 to 1 against going forward. Our Washington, D.C., office, 691, most of these people called from New York City, 258 for going forward. Almost 3 to 1, almost 3 to 1, against going forward. Albany, N.Y., 190 against going forward, 25 for, a ratio of 7 1/2 to 1 against. Buffalo, 563 against going forward and adopting this bill. +And I tell you, if we begin to examine this bill in the kind of detail that it should in terms of discussion of just the issues, some of the issues that I've brought up here, you will find that these numbers will go off the chart. + +STATEMENT BY SENATOR DORGAN + We must do something. There are too many people out there without coverage, too many people who are sick, for whom health care is not readily available. And we must especially do something about cost. +We respond when the issue is skyrocketing costs in health care by talking largely about coverage. And that, I think, is a weakness of our approach. . . . +People want something done to bring down the cost of health care. And we're telling them that with a new program, we can increase the coverage of health care now. But can we do that without controlling costs? No, I don't think so. I don't think it's possible. . . . +How did hospital prices increase 413 percent from 1980 to 1991? The average total charge per day inpatient care for hospitals in Medicare in this country is $1,230 a day. And yet a third of the hospital beds are empty, and even many of those that are not full are expanding and building. In 1993, a study found hospital expenditures per day to be over $1,000 in this country, in the United States, $400 in Canada, less than $250 a day in France, Germany, Japan and Great Britain. +And physician fees, well, that's a lot of cost as well. In 1989, U.S. physicians on average had incomes more than three times their British, French, Swedish or Japanese counterparts. . . . +Physician fees, hospital costs, prescription drug costs, people are worried about prices. The cost of health care keeps rising. . . . +Let me credit also the majority leader for bringing the plan to the floor. The easiest possible thing is to bring nothing to the floor and say, Let's obstruct, let's wait, let's do nothing. +But most important to me is, Let's do the right thing. And the right thing is to do something to put the brakes on skyrocketing costs. +None of the plans that are now discussed, none of them, effectively do that. . . . +The solution is for us to do something and to do the right thing. The right thing, in my judgment is two steps: +Decide together that the market system doesn't work to control health care costs and define an effective way -- fair to everyone, fair to providers and fair to consumers -- to put us on a course of restraining, in an adequate way, health care costs. +And second, and importantly, make sure that when we finish, we are on a track to give every American family the assurance that they will have health care coverage, coverage they can afford and coverage that represents quality health care. + +STATEMENT BY SENATOR MITCHELL + I hope very much that we can have a good debate on this bill. But I hope it will also be accurate. . . . +Over and over and over again the statement has been made that this bill provides for a Government-run health insurance system. That's been said dozens, if not hundreds, of times: a Government-run health insurance system. +I make two points on that. +First, the bill does not so provide. It does not provide for a Government-run health insurance system. It provides for a voluntary system in which Americans would purchase private health insurance. Indeed, in that respect, my bill does the opposite of what's been suggested, because right now there are 25 million Americans who receive coverage under Medicaid, which is a Government program, and under my bill that portion of Medicaid would be abolished and those individuals would be encouraged and assisted in the purchase of private health insurance. +So they would receive health insurance coverage in the private market on the same basis that other Americans are now receiving it. So it actually reduces one of the largest Government programs and has those people enter into the . . . private insurance market. And so I hope that people will look beyond the slogans. +I know that the mood in our country today is that a popular way to attack anything is to say, It's Government-run. And to suggest somehow that it is therefore inefficient. +Of course, our colleagues who make these statements all support the Veterans Administration health care system. It's the largest health care delivery system in the country, and it is a Government-run system. +Not only do they support it, Mr. Chairman, they go around to veterans parades and veterans facilities and veterans meetings, and they tell the veterans how they're going to protect their health care system. And they run television ads when they're up for re-election saying how they're going to protect the Veterans Administration health care system. +They don't go around in their states and say, "I'm against Government-run systems, and the Veterans Administration system is a Government-run system so we are to abolish it." They say just the opposite. +The same is true of Medicare. Medicare is a Government-run system. Not one of our colleagues who stood here and said, "I'm against Government-run health programs" goes back home and says to the elderly citizens, "I'm against Government-run health insurance systems so I favor abolishing Medicare." They say just the opposite. . . . +And, of course, the largest Government-run program in the country is Social Security. It's a Government-run program, and it includes health insurance with Medicare Part A. Not one of our colleagues goes back to their states and goes around to senior citizens centers and says to the people there, "I'm against Government-run programs so I'm going to vote to abolish Social Security." They say and do just the opposite. . . . +And I conclude by saying the arguments made today are almost word for word the arguments made against Social Security. And almost word for word the arguments made against Medicare. Almost word for word. + +LOAD-DATE: August 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Chart/Photos: + +PATTY MURRAY + Democrat of Washington. Ms. Murray is a member of the mainstream Democratic group that strongly supports the Mitchell bill. But she says she wants to be sure that no bill interferes with the law in the State of Washington, which guarantees universal health care. + +ALFONSE M. D'AMATO + Republican of New York. Senator D'Amato is a vocal opponent of the Mitchell bill, which he says is being advocated for political reasons by the Democratic majority in Congress and the Clinton Administration. He says that most Americans do not want such a law and that Congress ought to be responsive to them. + +BYRON L. DORGAN + Democrat of North Dakota. Senator Dorgan opposes the Mitchell bill in its current form, as well as all of the alternatives, on the ground that they would not halt the steadily rising costs of health care. He advocates agreement on a bipartisan solution that will rein in costs as its first goal and move toward universal coverage as its second. + +GEORGE J. MITCHELL + Democrat of Maine. The majority leader of the Senate, Mr. Mitchell is the principal advocate of the Democratic side of the debate and the author the bill before the Senate. + +TYPE: Text + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +289 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 20, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +If Budget Is Not Agreed On, Yonkers Must Cut Spending + +BYLINE: By JACQUES STEINBERG, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 28; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 815 words + +DATELINE: YONKERS, Aug. 19 + +This city always seems to do things the hard way. +Torn by racial and political divisions, Yonkers has been under a court order to desegregate its housing since 1988 and has teetered on the brink of bankruptcy three times in the last 20 years. + Now, seven weeks into the city's new fiscal year, Mayor Terence M. Zaleski and the City Council have yet to agree on a budget that will satisfy the state agencies charged with overseeing the city's financial health since 1984, when it almost went broke. +One of those agencies, the State Emergency Financial Control Board, has ordered the city to cut its spending by 30 percent if a budget is not in place by Sept. 1. To comply, Mr. Zaleski's aides have said that the Mayor would be forced to lay off 350 city employees; reduce garbage collection from twice a week to once a week and close libraries, centers for the elderly and parks. The city has so far avoided layoffs by simply not paying many of its bills, mayoral aides said. + +Political Differences Cited + With the differences between the Mayor and the City Council relatively narrow -- the gap between their competing budget proposals has closed to $1.3 million, or three-tenths of 1 percent of the budget -- the squabble is more firmly rooted in the city's governance structure. +In 1989, voters replaced the city's 50-year-old form of government, headed by a city manager who was appointed by the City Council, with a "strong mayor" who would be elected. Mr. Zaleski, the city's first strong mayor under the new charter, was elected to a four-year term in 1991. Mr. Zaleski, a Democrat, and the seven-member City Council, which has a Republican majority, have grappled ever since for control of the state's sixth-largest city, with the budget only the latest sticking point. +On April 15, the Mayor proposed a $420.6 million budget with a 9.75 percent increase in property-tax rates. In June, the Council responded by passing its variation of the Mayor's budget, with $410.7 million in expenditures and a property-tax increase of 5.25 percent. Mr. Zaleski vetoed the Council plan. Then the Council, by a vote of five to two, overrode his veto. +According to state law, the Yonkers budget cannot take effect until it has been approved by the control board and certified by the State Comptroller, H. Carl McCall. Last month, Mr. McCall rejected the Council's budget. Among other factors, he cited the budget's heavy reliance on surplus funds, insufficient financing for the public schools and underestimation of the city's contribution to the state's police and fire retirement funds. +On July 15, the Council sued the Comptroller in State Supreme Court, seeking to compel him to certify its budget. At the same time, under the auspices of a lawsuit that it had filed against the control board earlier this year, the Council moved to prevent the board from imposing its spending cuts on the city. Both suits are pending. +But in recent days, many of the issues that have divided the Council and the regulatory authorities appear to have been resolved, although the Council appears to be headed for another showdown with the Mayor. + +Conceding to Requests + The Council's budget consultant, Nicholas DeSantis, said the Council had agreed to increase the city's contribution to police and fire funds from $8.9 million to $9.8 million, at the Comptroller's request. Mr. DeSantis said the Council, the Mayor and the Board of Education had agreed on an education budget of $222 million, $13 million less than the school board had sought but $5 million more than the Council's initial offer. And he said that the Council had reached agreement with the control board to draw about $10 million from the city's surplus fund as a budget revenue. +Gail S. Shaffer, the Secretary of State and the chairwoman of the control board, and Mr. McCall said in separate interviews today that substantial progress had been made, particularly after a nine-hour meeting on Thursday involving all the parties. +"We think we're moving toward a resolution," Mr. McCall said. +Still, sharp differences persisted today. Council leaders said their revised, $415.6 million budget, which might come to a vote as early as Tuesday, would require Mr. Zaleski to eliminate three top appointees, including one of his two deputy mayors. +Jim Surdoval, the Mayor's chief of staff, who said that Mr. Zaleski had revised his most recent budget to $416.9 million, countered that the Mayor would veto any budget that compelled those layoffs. Council leaders vowed to override Mr. Zaleski's veto again and send their budget to Mr. McCall for certification. +Mr. Zaleski could, at that point, ask the courts to block the Council's budget. But Mr. Surdoval said that the Mayor would be reluctant to do so. +"The Mayor might do a novel thing in the City of Yonkers," Mr. Surdoval said, "and choose not to sue." + +LOAD-DATE: August 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +290 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 20, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +A Place to Call Home + +BYLINE: By Robert F. Wagner Jr. and Julia Vitullo-Martin; Robert F. Wagner Jr., New York's former Deputy Mayor and Board of Education president, died last November at the age of 49 in San Antonio, where he was doing research for a Twentieth Century Fund book, with Julia Vitullo-Martin, on the future of American cities. This article -- adapted from City Journal, the quarterly magazine of the Manhattan Institute -- is Mr. Wagner's last. It was completed by Ms. Vitullo-Martin, former director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Commission. + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 23; Column 3; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 814 words + +Public housing was born during the Great Depression, a time of despair and hope. It was viewed then as young, innovative, forward-thinking, attracting the country's best architects and thinkers. Today, public housing is seen by many as dismal, tired, corrupt. Huge projects have deteriorated beyond habitability in many cities and are being torn down in Newark, St. Louis, Providence, R.I., and elsewhere. + Now several energetic, even charismatic local leaders are trying to bring about a renaissance in public housing. In Chicago, for example, Vince Lane, who has led the nation's second-largest housing authority since 1988, has won national attention for his efforts to revive the projects he oversees: rehabilitation programs that train and employ tenants, conversion of abandoned lakefront apartments into mixed-income housing, establishment of a private school headed by the pioneer educator Marva Collins, and aggressive police searches for illegal tenants, weapons and drugs. + But Mr. Lane and other public housing leaders must contend with a web of Federal laws and regulations that constrain their efforts to improve the way their projects are run. Here are a few: + * A Federal law intended to keep public housing affordable requires tenants to pay 30 percent of their income as rent. This creates two perverse incentives: tenants on welfare are discouraged from working, since they would automatically forfeit 30 percent of their wages, and those who do work have every reason to move out as their earnings increase and their rents rise. + * The Government's "minimum design standards" are, for all practical purposes, maximum standards that effectively mandate the dreary character of much public housing. The Department of Housing and Urban Development refuses to pay construction costs for work that exceeds the minimum standards, so if a local authority wants to builds attractive housing that fits inconspicuously into its neighborhoods, it must somehow find local funds. +* Urged on by advocacy groups, HUD pressed the New York City Housing Authority to reserve half its vacant apartments for homeless families, pre-empting its waiting list of 282,900 poor people. + * Since 1979, to reduce the concentration of public housing in poor neighborhoods, HUD rules have forbidden new construction in "impacted" areas. As a result, housing authorities are forced to hold on to grossly deteriorated buildings. They cannot simply replace them on the same site, since HUD regulations forbid new construction. "Non-impacted" -- that is, middle-class -- communities are seldom willing to accept public housing. + * By Federal regulation, public housing for the elderly must be open to disabled tenants; this includes the mentally ill, including many people damaged by drug and alcohol abuse. Many housing authorities now have large numbers of young disabled single males in buildings intended for elderly people. "The life styles just clash here," Mr. Lane says. "Both groups are unhappy. If the priorities emphasize housing the hard-to-house in existing projects, you'll risk making the whole project, and the surrounding neighborhood, fall apart. Why are we doing this? Because HUD tells us we must." + Public housing innovators like Mr. Lane face a rigid antagonist in the HUD bureaucracy, which bars most deviations from the rules. Yet HUD has been known to recognize the local character of public housing. When Boston's housing authority went into receivership, HUD, cooperating with the court, granted the receiver extraordinary powers to revive the projects, enabling a return to local control. + But a housing authority should not have to hit bottom before being granted the flexibility to reinvent itself. Authorities should have this freedom under normal circumstances as well. Modest revisions in the regulations are not enough. + Thus, HUD needs a drastic overhaul: throw out all regulations (making exceptions for housing authorities with records of incompetence and corruption) and then discuss which rules should be restored. + Public housing has some things going for it that it didn't have a few years ago. Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros cares about public housing and wants reform. In Assistant Secretary Joseph Shuldiner, former general manager of housing authorities in New York City and Los Angeles, he has an executive with extensive on-the-ground experience. + On Capitol Hill, Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, chairwoman of the appropriations subcommittee that oversees HUD, is also a champion of public housing. Congress has responded favorably to an Administration proposal to delay rent increases for newly employed tenants. + But real reforms will only come at the local level. The best thing the Federal Government could do is to free innovators like Vince Lane from regulations that have all too often been counterproductive. + +LOAD-DATE: August 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +291 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 21, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Nation; +Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying. . .Well, Something + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 3; Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1284 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + +TO Broadway, Washington is a small place, a tryout city where some plays are tested, reworked, and sometimes allowed to die. But today, the capital is playing out the melodrama of health care, which each side presents as tragedy (if it loses), on several stages at once. +Washington's biggest audience, the voters, is barely engaged. It worries about health care, all right, but is unimpressed with the Congress and the various plans. It does not believe this show will last. + But this is a city of specialized audiences. Lobbyists for thousands of interests turn thumbs up or down on each rewritten plan. The elderly, the handicapped and labor descend on Capitol Hill, passing insurance agents and doctors and drug manufacturers. +On all sides there is a recognition that this week will be critical, that the time is coming for deals to be struck -- if they can be -- and for a final script. +But that is not happening on stage in the ornate Senate chamber, where intermittently eloquent speeches are given, and the players use the simplest props in pursuit of public opinion. Republicans laboriously lift thick copies of the bill itself as a metaphor for the complexity and bureaucracy they fear. Democrats wave their own government health insurance cards and say they want every American to have one just as nice. +Except for the House chamber, booked right now for the Great Crime Show and uncertain when Health Care will open, the other theaters are smaller -- and more critical. Most lack any seats for spectators at all. For that reason, there is less hamming it up and more serious tension in them all. +For the last few weeks, "Mainstream Coalition" was playing in Senator John Chafee's Capitol hideaway, which has a view of tourists lining up to look at their Congress, and, through the trees, of the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress. They were trying to write a plan that would save the country some money, insure more Americans than the current 85 percent and, above all, pass. The floating bipartisan cast of a few regulars like Mr. Chafee and Senator John Breaux (Bill Bradley quit the cast Friday just before curtain time, saying the mainstream had shifted to the right bank) was augmented by others who came and went as they pleased. +Some of the playwright-actors in this merry band hope their message will prove so compelling that veterans of other versions of the health care saga, like George Mitchell and Bob Dole, perhaps even Ted Kennedy, will embrace the Mainstream script and volunteer for the bit parts, so all can take it to the Senate triumphantly. +Others are ready for still more rehearsals. They are ready to endure Mr. Dole's grumbling at their presumption in seizing the role he seems to have abandoned. They will even listen to Mr. Mitchell arguing that a finale in which all Americans can wave health cards is as important -- and more appealing -- than the green-eyeshade number these deficit-cutters want to close on. +These stages are the Capitol suites of the two leaders, stately rooms with polished tables, Presidential portraits and grand views of the Mall and the Monument. And sometimes there is action in the Oval Office, where President Clinton, on days when he isn't playing Statesman or Crime Fighter, plays the Salesman, trying to win Mr. Mitchell or House leaders a vote here or there. + +Warehouse Chic + If those surroundings embody the hopes of health care reform, perhaps the dumpy atmosphere of the Congressional Budget Office a few blocks away conveys its fears. Not since World War I-era temporary buildings on the Mall were torn down in the late 1960's have important government functions been conducted in such shabby surroundings, the warehouse chic of a former F.B.I. building. There, Robert Reischauer and his weary staff ponder the costs and consequences of one proposal after another. A C.B.O. analysis is the equivalent of a license for Congressional presentation. The House cannot take up its versions of health care legislation until Mr. Reischauer presents his findings. +All these efforts affect each other. Start with the public messages offered on the Senate floor. The Republicans' major message is that Mr. Mitchell's legislation intended to insure all Americans must lead to a bureaucratic "government takeover" of medicine. And bureaucracy worried the 20 or so senators in the bipartisan Mainstream Coalition. Of all their complaints, those will be the easiest for Mr. Mitchell to accept. +The secondary G.O.P. theme is that Congress ought to put the issue off until next year. Republican senators lift the three editions of the Mitchell bill and say they cannot be expected to understand them all in so short a time. Hams like Alfonse M. D'Amato even throw them to the floor in disgust. +Democrats respond with their handier symbol, the health care card they carry in their wallets, and occasionally ask Republicans if they have one, too. Again and again they ask why, if the Senate's employer, the American people, will pay 72 percent of their health insurance costs, why shouldn't the bosses of other Americans do the same? To the arguments for delay, Democrats respond that the issue has been studied for decades, and the American people want action now. +Neither side mentions a critical subtext: the expectation that Republicans will win lots of seats in the November elections, especially if Democrats cannot claim credit for passing a health care bill, and so waiting until next year means waiting for less. Proponents of national health insurance legislation chose to wait for an election once before and were disappointed; in 1974 they rejected President Richard Nixon's bill (more generous than anything they are likely to get today), anticipating sweeping victories in that year's election. They got the victories, but lost the focus on health care for two decades. + +You Mean It Costs Money? + Mr. Reischauer's intervention affected the direction the Mainstream Group was taking. They shifted away from seeking greatly expanded insurance coverage after they emerged grimly from a meeting with him and said they were "shocked, shocked" to learn that it costs a lot of money to buy health insurance for millions of people. +That is a lesson that non-senators without certification as brain surgeons absorbed many months ago. Moreover, that issue might usefully have been pondered before most Mainstreamers scornfully dismissed the very idea of requiring employers to pay part of their worker's insurance premiums. +Even the crime bill affected health insurance. On Aug. 10, the day before the House blocked it, President Clinton said in an interview that once it was passed, the public could focus on health care. He said the "focus they will be able to bring to the debate could change the dynamics considerably in our favor." If crime was out of the way, he said, "I think we have a real shot to do something really fine on health care that will work." Crime is still not out of the way. +Of course, each side says the audience is with them. Republicans cite a Newsweek poll that seems to show that 65 percent of the public thinks Congress should "start over next year." But that question offered a reason to start over, and none for pressing ahead. When a CBS News Poll asked a different question, including the warning that it "might be harder to pass" next year, 53 percent wanted action this year. +Ten days of Senate debate have given the House few clues of its direction. A grand total of seven amendments have been passed to Mr. Mitchell's bill, none of them controversial. And so, after one consecutive week of Saturday health care matinees, the Senate chamber was dark yesterday. + +LOAD-DATE: August 21, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +292 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 21, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +FLIGHT FROM CUBA: THE VOICES; +Cubans, Stay Home, Many Floridians Say + +BYLINE: New York Times Regional Newspapers + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 29; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 487 words + +DATELINE: TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Aug. 20 + +For Al and Gladys Ros, President Clinton is making the right move in trying to limit a new exodus of refugees from Cuba. +Mr. and Mrs. Ros, who fled Cuba in 1961, two years after Fidel Castro came to power, question the motives of those who are taking to boats now. "We left because of ideals," said Mrs. Ros, 67, of Plantation Key. "We didn't want to live in a Communist country. But now they are leaving because they are hungry. If Fidel gives them food, they would stay." + It would be a mistake for the United States to encourage another mass migration of Cubans, said Mr. Ros, 67. He added that keeping discontented Cubans at home would keep more pressure on Mr. Castro. +Although their reasoning was different, more than 30 Floridians interviewed here, nearly 500 miles north of Miami, expressed support for Mr. Clinton's plans to pluck Cuban refugees from rafts and transfer them to detention camps in Guantanamo Bay. +Marian Miller, 70, said she wanted a stronger immigration policy. "We've had such a time with them down in Miami that I really think something ought to be done," she said. "I don't like the completely open-door policy." +She said exceptions should be made only in cases where immediate family members were being reunited. "Our taxes are going up unless we have really big help from the Federal Government," Ms. Miller said. +Bill Leskanic, 38, a Tallahassee ambulance driver, said the refugees should stay in Cuba. "They need to straighten out their country," he said. +Fred Campana, 55, of Marco Island, said: "I don't think we should have to pay for them. I think they should straighten up their country and get rid of Castro." +Mr. Campana's wife, Chris, 56, added, "He wants Castro shot and a new government put in." +Rodney Gray, a 51-year-old mechanic from Medart, a small community south of Tallahassee, was one of the few residents who said he generally supported the resettling of Cubans in the state. "There's only so much you can take," he said, "but this country was founded on people coming over." +Bobby Scott, a 54-year-old retiree from Chattahoochee, said: "We've got about all that we can take care of as it is. I think they ought to have some way to slow them down. I'll tell you we've been doing this for years and years and years. It looks like you've got to draw a line sometime." +At a senior citizens center in Naples, a community on Florida's lower Gulf Coast, anti-immigrant sentiments ran high. +"We can't get into Cuba, but they can get into America," said Catherine Tomasic, 77, who moved to Florida from Pittsburgh two years ago. "It's not fair. And then they end up on welfare. And who pays for it? The taxpayers." +Dolly Scott, 71, suggested that immigration should be suspended until living standards for poorer Americans are elevated. "There are people here who need help, and we're giving it to them," she said, referring to Cuban and Haitian refugees. + +LOAD-DATE: August 21, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +293 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 21, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Learning To Live It Up At Last + +BYLINE: By SUSAN SHEEHAN; SUSAN SHEEHAN is a staff writer at The New Yorker. + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 33; Column 1; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 1188 words + +WHEN I was very young, I traveled with my parents to assorted destinations of their choice. Their choices were usually long weekends in the "country" -- places like the Delaware Water Gap -- a few hours by car from our apartment in Manhattan: my stepfather was an Ob-Gyn and always on call. Occasionally Mother and I went somewhere on our own; my first plane trip, in 1948, back when flying was still a real adventure, was to Corning, N.Y., for a cousin's christening. In my late teens, I traveled alone to places of my choice, going ever farther as jet planes replaced props. +After I became a journalist, I traveled with the song to faraway places with strange-sounding names, once to get married (in Jakarta), occasionally just to admire a cathedral or a mosque, but increasingly to write an article about a person who lived at destination X or an event that had occurred at destination Y. For many years my husband, Neil, and I lacked the money and leisure to travel for pleasure, and no matter: I had more adventures away from home when I was working than when I was sightseeing. At 15, I had flown to Switzerland to take funiculars up the Alps. At 50, I went to Cully, a small town on Lake Geneva, to write about a woman who had had her daughter stolen from her at birth by trickery and found her child alive and beautiful some 47 years later. Researching this fairy tale was more captivating than the scenery. + And suddenly I was 55. I hadn't fretted about previous milestones -- I was too busy. Two untoward events occurred after my 55th birthday. Neil (we are close in age) went to a pharmacy we don't customarily use and was given a 10 percent senior citizens' discount on a prescription: we hadn't planned on the dark privilege until we were 65. I received a form letter from the National Institutes of Health Marrow Donor Center stating, "with regret," that, because of age, I was being removed from their database. +Money had become less of a concern: one daughter was on her own, the other would graduate from law school the next year. We could have flown around the world annually for half the sums we had been sending bursars for a decade. We began to regard time from a different vantage point. Friends in their 50's, 60's and 70's had become infirm -- they had worked too hard and waited too long to travel for fun. +Around 9:30 on Sunday evening, March 20, 1994, during one of public television's fund-raising periods, I turned on the TV. "Carreras, Domingo, Pavarotti in Concert" had begun. I wound up listening, for two hours I didn't have, to the three tenors singing separately and together. The program was filmed in Italy in 1990 and used by PBS for fund-raising ever since. I had admired their voices for years, but on that particular Sunday I fell in love with Luciano Pavarotti's power and resonance. During a program break, I learned that the three tenors would be performing together again soon -- in summer, in California. +Ever since Neil's visit to the pharmacy, he had been saying "Once around the track." The four words were contagious. Self-denial gave way to self-indulgence. I acquired my first Burberry raincoat (rationalized as a Christmas present) and my first Vuitton duffel bag (an anniversary gift). In April, I faxed a friend in Los Angeles who is an amateur pianist and follows the world of music. Could he get me a ticket for "Encore! The Three Tenors," to be staged on July 16, at Dodger Stadium? He called back the following day. I sent him a check for an exorbitant sum. My birthday is in August. +Not that I had ceased fretting about extravagances or lost days. Workaholics don't become ne'er-do-wells in a year. I reminded myself that I had a free ticket to anywhere in the United States that would expire in August. (I had been bumped from an overbooked flight the previous summer.) +By the time my outsize concert ticket arrived in June, so much had appeared in the press about the conjunction of the opera extravaganza with the World Cup soccer finals that I was pleased simply to have the 6-by-10-inch multicolored piece of cardboard in hand. By then, good seats were available only from scalpers. +I FLEW to Los Angeles on Friday, July 15, and went with friends on a late-afternoon hike through Will Rogers State Park. On Saturday, I spent some agreeable hours in the rooms and gardens of the Getty Museum and rode from one end of Sunset Boulevard to the other. I reached my folding chair, situated in the vicinity of second base, at 7:50 P.M., shortly before Zubin Mehta picked up his baton to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic -- in deepest center field. +The best thing about the concert was simply being there, program in hand, with no emcee to distract me from the singing with gratuitous comments. Jose Carreras came to the podium first, and sang "O Souverain!" from "Le Cid" by Massenet under a pale blue sky with a few white and pink clouds close to the horizon. Placido Domingo didn't sing "Vesti la Giubba" as his first solo ("Program subject to change," the program stated), and Pavarotti's first aria was a substitute, and then I stopped even looking at the program and was carried away by the night and the music. By intermission, the sky had darkened, the air had grown cooler. The elderly couple on my left chatted softly in Italian. The young couple from West Virginia on my right went to the refreshment stand and returned with glasses of white wine and a box of popcorn. +At the end of the program, there was a standing ovation, and the first encores. To have seen and heard the three tenors on stage singing and gamboling through "La Donna e Mobile," "O Sole Mio" and "Libiamo" was joyful. The concert was to have ended at 10:30. The tenors didn't stop singing until 11 P.M. +When I came home on the evening of the 17th, I watched the concert on video. For me it was marred by Itzhak Perlman's sports lingo ("First up to bat is Jose Carreras"), close-up shots of Henry Kissinger and Tom Cruise, and routine household turbulence -- the telephone ringing, the cat coming in on three paws, the fourth having been injured in a fight. Most surprising was the absence of the last half-hour. +In my youth, I was wise enough to value experiencing life firsthand. I went to the theater, opera and ballet wherever I landed. Somehow in my middle years, caught up with raising children and working, I started living part of my own life vicariously. Instead of going to baseball games, Fourth of July fireworks and movies, I tended to watch them on TV. I even persuaded myself that it was sensible to avoid crowds. +With a limited number of years left when I will be fit to crisscross a continent in 56 hours for a concert, I realize that sensible is the wrong outlook. It is time to be profligate. I recently bought a plane ticket to London for October, and shall walk Roman roads and climb stiles in Sussex with friends. I have promised myself that if, in 1998, the three tenors again share a stage in France, where the World Cup soccer matches will be held, Neil and I shall be there. He doesn't want to miss out on the last half-hour either. + +LOAD-DATE: August 21, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +294 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 21, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Mormon Ranks Grow One by One by One + +BYLINE: By ANN COSTELLO + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 1; Column 3; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1621 words + +ROSA JONES still remembers what brought her to the Mormon Church four years ago. A single woman with no children to visit her, she was sitting alone in the tenement apartment in southern Yonkers where she had lived since she moved there as a 20-year-old nurse's aide in 1960. It was a hot Sunday summer morning, and she was watching television. +"Do you know where you were before you came into this world?" asked a voice on an advertisement from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons. Ms. Jones wrote down the 800 number printed on the screen and called it. To the operator who answered, she replied, "I want to know where I came from." + Told she would receive a book in the mail in four weeks, explaining this and other Mormon beliefs, she was surprised to receive, instead, a telephone call from a missionary who was among 24 church members between the ages of 19 and 21 living temporarily in Westchester to spread the word about their faith. They were hoping for converts who would be baptized, would adhere to a strictly observant life style in keeping with the church's teaching and who would, in turn, bring in more converts. Many young adult Mormons who have grown up in Westchester also interrupt their education or careers for two years to be trained as missionaries in Utah and then live a Spartan and somewhat nomadic life wherever they are assigned. + +Wards Are Growing + Westchester has four Mormon wards -- much like parishes -- with approximately 300 to 500 members in each ward. Three wards, two English-speaking and one Spanish-speaking, are based at a church on Wayside Lane in an upscale residential area of Scarsdale. The fourth ward is combined with the headquarters of the church's larger organizational unit -- a "stake" -- in a contemporary church building on semirural Kitchawan Road in Yorktown. These four wards are growing at a rate of 6 percent to 10 percent a year, which is a faster rate than other denominations, said the bishops heading the Westchester wards. +They added that the greatest growth was being experienced in the most urban areas, especially in Yonkers. A new "branch" -- smaller than a ward -- is scheduled to open soon in north-central Yonkers. +Ms. Jones was told by the missionary who called her to expect a visit by two "elders" the next day. She was impatient when they were late for their appointment, but she told herself that, in the extreme heat, the two old men were probably overwhelmed. When the two visitors turned out to be a 20-year-old from Utah and a 19-year-old from California, she was flabbergasted, she recalled recently. "You're kids!" she blurted out. "What can you tell me?" +They told her that in a previous life in a "spirit world" she had made a choice to come to live in this world on her own. This was such a revelation, she said, that she immediately set about to learn all she could about the Mormon Church, with the intention of joining. Legally blind, suffering from diabetes and weighing 350 pounds, Ms. Jones was unable to work at the two health-care jobs she had juggled over the years. +Up to that time, she had believed that her disabilities were punishment for her own sins or those of family members. The elders told her otherwise -- that God does not punish anyone. They told her that she had volunteered to leave the spirit world and take on whatever trials and tribulations would come her way. +"No wonder," she exclaimed. "I knew I should have kept my hand down!" After laughing with relief, she asked the elders to come back every day to give her lessons. +"They told me to pray, and I did," she said. "I felt a burden had lifted." +She read the entire "Book of Mormon," which the elders left her. Mormons describe this book as another "Testament of Jesus Christ," and they add it to what they feel are the less accurate Old and New Testaments. Mormons believe that their founder and prophet, Joseph Smith, responded to a divine revelation and then dug up and translated ancient golden plates on a hillside in the upstate New York town of Fayette in 1830 and that this translation is the "Book of Mormon." + +Made Her Feel Useful + The book details the migration of ancient Hebrews to North America in 600 B.C. and Jesus' visit to these lost tribes six centuries later. A member of a local Methodist church when she made the phone call, Ms. Jones had often felt pitied there because of her disabilities, she said. In stark contrast, the Mormons at the Scarsdale church, where she now worships each Sunday, immediately made her feel useful. Ms. Jones was greeted with open arms. On Dec. 23, 1990 (Joseph Smith's birthday), Ms. Jones was baptized there in the customary immersion ceremony and was put to work. She was given several small jobs, which she has performed with pride. The Latter-day Saints have no paid clergy, and all members expect to be "called" to a variety of tasks to help run the church. +Richard Bushman, a professor of history at Columbia University, a practicing Mormon and the author of the book "Joseph Smith and the Beginning of Mormonism," recently commented on the experience of Rosa Jones and others like her. In the more urban, less affluent parts of the suburbs, "there are those looking to move up, to gain a new life," he said. "The Mormon Church has always appealed to people crossing social, racial or ethnic boundaries." +He added: "The church is a wonderful place to cushion this process. The Mormon Church gives them small jobs to do, and they gain a new set of skills." He added that those who persevere and succeed are given "a leg up in society." +Ms. Jones, who credits the church with helping her lose more than 100 pounds, said, "The Mormons have given me back my self-esteem." +She has spoken in church twice to the women's Relief Society and three times in the communion or "sacrament service." She has also helped coordinate the transportation program, in which long-time members from Scarsdale drive the newer, and often minority, members from Yonkers and other parts of lower Westchester to and from church. Ms. Jones has also performed the most important of all Mormon jobs: she has brought in one new member and continues to spread the word to anyone who will listen. +She has visited the closest Mormon Temple, in Kensington, Md., for her "endowment" ceremony -- one of the denomination's closely guarded secret rituals that can only be performed in these large and specially consecrated churches, which are closed to the public. Because of membership growth in the Northeast, a new temple is planned for Hartford. +Bishop Paul Clayton, who has presided over the Scarsdale wards for 14 years, is a professor of medical informatics (a computer-related medical specialty) at Columbia University's medical school when he is not volunteering for the church. In a recent interview, in which he discussed the growth of his church, especially among minority groups, Dr. Clayton said: "Our ward complexion has definitely changed. We love that. It's good for us." + +Volunteers on a Worldwide Mission for Their Church +THE two young Mormon elders who called on Rosa Jones in Yonkers and answered her questions about their religion were volunteers. They belonged to a cadre of 49,000 missionaries worldwide sent out by the church's 8.7 million members. +Last year, these missionaries helped convert more than 300,000 members, with their biggest gains in Latin America. +A high birth rate (Mormons discourage birth control) and conversions, makes the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints one of the world's fastest-growing denominations. +Some who study the church claim that the approaching year 2000 -- the millennium, "the beginning of the end" -- is the reason for the Mormons' avid proselytizing, advertising and public relations campaigns, but several local Mormon leaders and lay members play down that idea. +Nevertheless, there are suddenly 4.4 million Mormons in this country, making the denomination the sixth largest, behind Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans and members of the Church of God in Christ. There are also more Mormons than Jews, with 4.3 million practicing Jews living in the United States. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is still mostly a Western states' religion in this country, with 34 percent of its members living in Utah, but it is rapidly branching out worldwide. +Mormons vicariously baptize the ancestors of each of their converts so that many generations of the family may enjoy the much-anticipated days of glory, when they believe that Christ will reappear and Zion will be re-established in this country. +Family-tree enthusiasts of all religions may use the church's genealogical records, which, for Mormons especially, are a valuable link to the past and to eternity. +Mormons were recently in the news when their former president, Ezra Taft Benson, died at the age of 94 and was replaced by the president of the church's Council of 12 Apostles, Howard W. Hunter, 86, a former corporate lawyer. It was Mr. Benson's predecessor as president and living prophet of the church, Spencer W. Kimball, who received a divine revelation in 1978, the kind of message from God that Mormons firmly believe in and are encouraged to listen for. +This particular revelation cleared the way for all Mormon men, when they reach the age of 12, to be ordained to the priesthood "without regard for race or color." Up to that point, only white males could be priests. +Women are still excluded from the priesthood and from the entire church hierarchy. Motherhood and support for one's husband is still the ideal, with strong and large families being the goal. ANN COSTELLO + +LOAD-DATE: August 21, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Westchester County has four Mormon wards with 300 to 500 members in each. Rosa Jones, left, converted to the faith four years ago, wanting to know "where I came from." (Chris Maynard for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +295 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 21, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: ELMHURST; +Senior Center's Long Search For a New Home + +BYLINE: By NORIMITSU ONISHI + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 9; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 504 words + +For two decades, the Elmhurst-Jackson Heights Senior Center has been a second home to hundreds of elderly men and women who gather there daily. But the center's lease expires at year's end, and efforts by city and center officials to find a new site have become, well, very complicated. +The center occupies the basement and first floor of 87-11 Whitney Avenue, a two-story, red-brick building in Elmhurst. Since the Christian Testimony Church bought the site three years ago, the church has used the top floor, and church officials have pressed for the use of the other floors for its congregation. + That, along with the lease deadline, set the city's Department of General Services, which finances the center, to looking for another site. The department found one at 78-14 Roosevelt Avenue and drew up a lease agreement with the owners, said Charles Walker, a spokesman for the department. +But early this year, the owners, who had incorporated themselves as 78-14 Roosevelt Avenue, failed to make their mortgage payments, Mr. Walker said. And the property was seized by the lender, the Korean First Bank of New York. +Last week all the parties met. The center hopes to lease the building from the bank, according to terms agreed upon with the former owners. The bank is reviewing the matter, and Mr. Walker said he thought a decision might be forthcoming at the next scheduled meeting in two weeks. +"We're not going to allow these seniors to be tossed out on the street," he said. +Some of the center's employees say that a move from the current location is overdue. Old men and women must climb down a flight of steps to go to the basement cafeteria; the center's caseworkers are in makeshift offices in a large, noisy auditorium, and the center has no air-conditioning. +The center has 1,352 members, said Lucy Bermudez, the assistant director, and an average of 500 visit every day, to socialize and to eat breakfast or lunch, at 50 cents a meal. Chinese and Hispanic members, many of whom are recent immigrants and speak little English, make up the majority of the membership. The center is operated by the Institute for the Puerto Rican/ Hispanic Elderly. +The other members of the center are Koreans, Filipinos and those who remain from the time when Elmhurst was chiefly white and European. +The Elmhurst-Jackson Heights Senior Center is one of only two centers -- the Newtown Senior Center is the other -- that provide daily services to the elderly in Elmhurst, said Rose Rothschild, district manager of Community Board 4. +"We have a big senior citizen population," Ms. Rothschild said. "The longtime residents are getting older, and the new immigrants have parents and aunts and uncles." +The new site, which formerly housed some small stores, is near public transportation and accessible to the disabled, Ms. Rothschild said. "We couldn't find any other place," she said. "We really don't have any empty buildings. Landwise, we're a really small district, but we have a lot of people." N.O. + +LOAD-DATE: August 24, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: About 500 people gather daily at a center for the elderly in Elmhurst, to play mah-jongg, above, and keep physically fit. (Photographs by Rebecca Cooney for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +296 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 21, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Offering Youths Role Models and Hope + +BYLINE: By MERRI ROSENBERG + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 13; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1150 words + +DATELINE: PEEKSKILL + +IN an effort to direct young black and Hispanic men away from the dangers of the streets, a new program from the Peekskill Area Health Center is marshaling community resources to offer positive alternatives. +"Minority males are at risk disproportionately for a whole gamut of health problems like heart disease, H.I.V. infection, diabetes and substance abuse," said Roberta Marcus-Leiner, associate vice president of community initiatives for the center. "We're looking to help the community use its own strengths to redraft that imbalance." + Toward that end, the new program, the Minority Male Youth Empowerment Project, was started in December, supported by a $50,000 grant for salaries and other expenses from the Federal Department of Health and Human Services. +The center contacted members of Peekskill churches and social and service clubs to find adult mentors for the program. +Twenty-five volunteers, including some women, are being trained at the health center to act as mentors and will be working in the fall with young men in the community who could benefit from such attention. +Earlier this year some mentors went into the Peekskill schools during lunch hour to offer advice and assistance to those who were struggling with personal problems. Others will be available in the future to offer help with career planning. + +Missed by Other Programs + "One of our goals is to offer 10- to 25-year-olds something that would help them to get better life skills and give them somebody to stand behind them and support them," said Pearl Woods, coordinator for the Minority Male Youth Empowerment Project. +The program is particularly interested in identifying adolescents and young adults who would be overlooked by other programs. +"We're trying to reach out to the kids out there in the streets, those who have dropped out and are hanging out on the street corners," said Clarence Washington, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Institute for Nonviolence, a nonprofit organization based at Manhattanville College. "These youngsters are not in church; they are not in the Boys' Clubs, and they may have more difficulties. We hope to help them establish better communications skills." +Many of the young men are being raised in single-parent households and have little contact with adult males who could be positive role models. + +'Reach Back and Help' + "It's unfortunate that these kinds of situations have to be planned, where older adults interact with younger people," said one of the mentors, Don Bennett, a sales manager for WLNA radio in Peekskill. +"When I was growing up in the projects in Baltimore, I had a grandfather, father and an uncle to help me as well as other adult males at my church," Mr. Bennett recalled. +"This is something that should have been natural, but I'm hoping that it will help show some of our young people that there is an alternative to anger and that there is a system to follow," he said. +"It's time to reach back and help the people who were left behind," Mr. Bennett continued. "There's an African saying that it takes an entire village to raise a child. Because of slavery, we got away from that, but we want to get back to that idea. Making a donation by way of a check won't cut it anymore. Being the ears for a young child during lunchtime is more important." +Besides the mentor program, the project also features peer leadership and education. During the summer, two local 17-year-olds have worked daily at the health center with up to a dozen youngsters who drop by after day camp. +"One day we just sat down and played cards with them," said one of the peer leaders, James Roberson 3d, who will be attending Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania in September. His father is the associate minister at the Mount Lebanon Baptist Church in Peekskill. +"We talk with them, but we don't try to tell them what's right or wrong," James Roberson said. "We are not like Big Brothers, Big Sisters or big whatever. +"If they want to talk about something, fine. They brought up domestic violence, so we talked about it. What we do is show them the consequences of some of their choices and try to build up their self-esteem." + +Help to Relieve Stress + For his colleague, Eric Bannister, who will be attending Hampton University in Virginia in the fall, the main purpose of his work is to provide a safe and secure place for the youngsters. +"James and I have an understanding of what's going on in the community," he said. "We are here to help them relieve stress. It's not meant to be formal." +During the summer, 19-year-old Deronn Jones, who will be a student at Westchester Community College in September, helped organize various programs, including educational sessions on H.I.V., AIDS and drug and alcohol abuse. +One recent steamy evening, when the rumbles from just-finished thunderstorms still echoed in the damp air, 10 youngsters gathered in the basement offices of the health center to talk about drugs. The free-ranging discussion, which included the personal testimony of a recovering addict and graphic slides of addicts injecting themselves with heroin, appeared to have an impact on its audience. +Reginald Austell, 16, of Peekskill, who attends the Harvey School in Katonah, said he "knew a lot of this stuff -- but it was good." +He added: "I learned a lot about the effects of drugs. A lot of people don't know what drugs are doing to them." +Keeping the messengers, and the message, close to the community is one of the project's goals. "A lot of young blacks have nothing to guide them," said Terry Harris Sr., a senior maintenance worker at Friedman Rehabilitation Institute for Children in Ossining who was interviewed at a previous mentor program about spirituality. +"They need people to be there in the community. I really hope a lot of people come and see how minorities are helping each other," Mr. Harris said. + +Keeping Students in College + Minority males often need extra support and help when they enter college. +A two-year-old program to help such students stay in school has helped the College of New Rochelle win national recognition. About 200 students out of a population of 1,800 are enrolled in the program at two of the college's seven campuses. +"We have had a retention program for everyone since 1988, but in 1992 we targeted minority males," said Dr. Bessie Blake, dean of the college's School of New Resources, which is geared to adult students. +"We offer tutorials and academic support, but we also do stress management and personal-finance issues with these students," she said. +Dr. Blake continued: "We added a male support group because those students who had dropped out said they could have used it. This program has had a positive impact for the female students involved because it often helps get their significant other involved." MERRI ROSENBERG + +LOAD-DATE: August 21, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Taking part in mentor training session of Peekskill Area Health Center program for minority male youths: from left, Richard Sabune, adviser; Jeannette Phillips, executive vice president; Terry Harris, mentor; Eric Bannister, peer leader, and Larry Hilton, mentor. (Susan Harris for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +297 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 23, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +CHRONICLE + +BYLINE: By ENID NEMY + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4; Column 5; Style Desk + +LENGTH: 190 words + +ANN JORDAN of Lake Ronkonkoma, L.I., is planning to go to college this fall, but she can't make up her mind what to study. She is considering taking history, but that's not written in stone. Originally, she had thought about computers but "it didn't seem sensible," she said. She then considered law but, in her own words, "I wouldn't live long enough to graduate." +Ms. Jordan is 92, and the classes she hopes to attend at Dowling College in Oakdale, L.I., will be her first college experience. A high school graduate, she retired from Con Edison 30 years ago after 35 years there as a secretary. + Her adventure in higher learning was partly prompted by the Gershow Recycling Corporation of Brookhaven, L.I., which earlier this year established an informal scholarship program for senior citizens. Kevin Gershowitz, a vice president of the company, said the $500 contribution to Ms. Jordan was a way of "giving back something to senior citizens who have contributed so much to all of us." +Ms. Jordan said that she is in "fine health" and that she has a sister who is 95. "We didn't smoke cigarettes," she added. ENID NEMY + +LOAD-DATE: August 23, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +298 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 24, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +HEALTH WATCH; +Exercise Prevents Hemorrhage in the Elderly + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section C; Page 8; Column 3; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 775 words + +THE potential benefits of regular physical exercise for older people continue to mount: reduced risk of heart attack, high blood pressure, arthritic pain, fractures from falls, among others. Now a research team from the National Institute on Aging and the University of Iowa has found in a three-year study of more than 8,200 people 68 and older that regular moderate activity like walking or gardening can reduce the risk of severe gastrointestinal hemorrhage. +The research team, headed by Dr. Marco Pahor, who has since gone back to Rome, reported that those who took frequent walks were half as likely to develop this often-fatal condition as were inactive people of the same age. They suggested that exercise prevented hemorrhage by improving the flow of oxygen-rich blood to the gastrointestinal tract. This, in turn, can reduce the risk of bleeding caused by insufficient oxygen under a variety of circumstances, including the body's usual reaction to stress. Furthermore, by stimulating bowel function, exercise may reduce a person's chances of developing several intestinal disorders, including ulcers and diverticulosis, all of which increase the risk of hemorrhage. + Although only a small percentage of participants in the study regularly took part in vigorous activity, the researchers found no special benefit in preventing bleeding associated with activities more strenuous than walking. The study findings were published in today's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association. JANE E. BRODY + + +Poor Sleep in Smokers + Smoking not only can kill but also detracts from the quality of life. A survey of more than 3,500 adults in Wisconsin found that people who smoked were more likely than nonsmokers to suffer from a variety of sleep disturbances, including difficulty falling asleep, difficulty waking up, daytime sleepiness and nightmares. +The researchers, David W. Wetter and Dr. Terry B. Young of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, suggested that smoking's effects on sleep could trap smokers in a vicious cycle, with the symptoms of sleep disturbance -- depression, fatigue and impaired ability to think, which resemble the effects of nicotine withdrawal -- possibly motivating the desire to smoke. Their findings were published last spring in the journal Preventive Medicine. +Both men and women who smoked were more likely than nonsmokers to have trouble falling asleep and waking up. Women who smoked more often found themselves plagued by daytime sleepiness, and men who smoked were more likely to have disturbing dreams, including nightmares. The researchers suggested that various effects of smoking, including the stimulant effects of nicotine, nightly nicotine withdrawal and breathing difficulties associated with smoking, might increase the risk of sleep disturbances among smokers. +It is also possible, they wrote, that frequent sleep disturbances may increase a person's desire to smoke, since those trying to cope with the problems of nonrestorative sleep, difficulty waking up and daytime sleepiness findings, may turn to smoking as a "remedy." JANE E. BRODY + + +Exercise and Fat + Dr. Jorge Calles, an endocrinologist at the University of Vermont, offered what he called the first carefully controlled study to show that fat burning increases significantly with exercise, even if people overeat. +He reported his findings yesterday at the Seventh International Congress on Obesity. +It is well known that people burn more fat if they begin to exercise while keeping their food intake constant. +The study supports the idea that exercising can help people lose weight, which has been the subject of debate among obesity specialists, Dr. Calles said. "There's no question about the cardiovascular benefits, and no question exercise is helpful for people with diabetes," he said. "But for treatment of obesity, there is a debate." +Dr. Calles's study involved 20 people. Some were overfed by 1,000 calories a day without being allowed to exercise, while others were overfed and assigned to do just enough exercise to compensate for the excess calories. +In those who were overfed without exercise, the amount of fat burned dropped from the equivalent of 518 calories a day to 97 calories. The burning of carbohydrates rose. +In those who were overfed and who exercised, fat burning rose from the equivalent of 406 calories a day to 685, while the burning of carbohydrates fell. +The studies so far have been done on people with normal weights, said Dr. Calles, who plans to do similar studies with obese subjects to see if they react differently to exercise. (AP) + +LOAD-DATE: August 24, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +299 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 27, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +FLIGHT FROM CUBA: THE DRAGNET; +Cubans Rescued From Rafts Ask Simply, Where To Now? + +BYLINE: By MIREYA NAVARRO, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1298 words + +DATELINE: ABOARD U.S.C.G.C. GRAND ISLE, off Florida, Aug. 26 + +Less than three hours after setting out from Key West amid thunder and under darkening skies, the Coast Guard cutter Grand Isle encountered a first raft in the Florida Straits. It was empty except for what appeared to be a dead dog, its brown coat shiny wet. +Over the next six hours on Thursday, the cutter found nine occupied rafts among many more "empties" and rescued 56 Cuban refugees who had been at sea as long as four days. They included two elderly men, six women and a 2-year-old boy sucking on a blue pacifier and wearing sagging diapers and a red T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Atlantic Ocean" over a maritime scene. + The first question the refugees asked was always the same: Where were they going? Most, according to interpreters on board, thought they would be taken to the United States, just like thousands of other Cuban refugees for so many years before them. Some asked how long it would take to get to "the base in Florida." +The officers who replied made no mention of the refugees' destination: the United States naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. All that the crew of 16 coastguardsmen and 4 marines would tell them was that they would be transferred to another ship. Then, as a precaution against unrest, their compasses were confiscated, an effort to keep them from recognizing that they were not headed north. +The 56 refugees picked up by the Grand Isle were among more than 1,600 plucked from the sea by American vessels on Thursday as the exodus from Cuba continued despite worsening weather that made the refugees' voyage increasingly life-threatening. +But the weather, which has grown progressively stormy over the last three days, has begun to have some effect, however temporary, on the refugee flow. The Coast Guard said this evening that only 414 Cubans, about a quarter of Thursday's total, had been lifted from their rafts today as of 6 P.M. +Conditions in the Florida Straits were made all the worse by winds that blew from the east, bucking the current of the Gulf Stream and causing whitecaps that swelled to 10 feet. The waves dumped water on makeshift rafts and made seaborne rescue harder than it had been in recent days. +For search aircraft, too, the job became more difficult, because their crews had a hard time distinguishing between the whitecaps and the tiny rafts, which were already tough enough to see. And not only did drifting squalls kick up winds as high as 40 knots, their curtains of rain shrouded parts of the seascape from the airborne searchers. + +Specks From Nowhere + From the deck of the Grand Isle on Thursday, rafts seemed to appear on the horizon out of nowhere, carrying bobbing figures barely discernible through binoculars. +Once on board the cutter, the refugees were frisked by officers wearing rubber gloves, and their bags were searched. Knives, wrenches, syringes and other potential weapons were confiscated. The Cubans were given water, blankets and plastic cups of rice and red beans. +Sitting close to one another as the marines kept watch and tended to requests for more water or a trip to the bathroom, the refugees resembled a docile, quiet school class, clad in orange life vests provided by the crew. One young couple talked in low voices, the man's arm wrapped around the woman's shoulders. Two men took drags off the same cigarette, passing it back and forth. A woman counted money that she had taken out of a small plastic bag. +Most wore long pants and long-sleeved shirts, by now dirty, many of them shredded. Many men were barefoot. Their faces burned brown and orange by the sun, they looked dazed and fatigued but kept alert to the crew's every move. +Asked what had prompted him to get on a raft in an effort to cross at least 90 miles of perilous sea, one of the men, Roberto Ruiz, 34, answered in one word: "Hunger." + +Many Empty Rrafts + The 110-foot Grand Isle, whose home port is Gloucester, Mass., was on her second trip sweeping the water for rafts. On her first mission, earlier in the week, she had picked up nearly 300 "migrants," as the officers call the refugees, in 30 hours of patrolling just off Key West. +This time she swept to within 16 miles of the Cuban coast, and the blip on the radar screen or the speck through the binoculars that caused her constantly to switch direction or slow her speed usually turned out to be a raft that was empty. Because other cutters were in the area, the crew's assumption was that the unoccupied rafts, the occasional lone inner tube or the square of foam that floated by like discard signaled earlier rescues and not death. +Although the rafts are generally occupied by no more than three or four people each, the Grand Isle encountered one carrying 15 men on Thursday afternoon. The ensuing rescue was one of her most difficult. The men kept missing the lifeline that the crew tossed to them, and, with strong winds and seven-foot waves, the seas were too rough to launch the cutter's 12-foot inflatable motorboat. +"Grab it; come on, guys, that's it," Petty Officer Bryan Miller mumbled as he looked down from the bridge. "It's unbelievable what they're putting themselves through." +Finally, on the fourth attempt, the men managed to tie the lifeline to metal on the violently rocking raft, and it was pulled alongside the cutter. Four of the men did not wait for life vests to be tossed to them before grabbing a cargo net and clambering on board. There were no injuries, only complaints of pain and seasickness. + +Staccato of Drama + Over the Grand Isle's radio, communications from other cutters blared snippets of drama played out elsewhere at sea: +"A pregnant woman, four to five centimeters dilated." +"Two broken arms." +"Four migrants -- three adult males, one adult female. Inner-tube-tied raft. We lost visibility in rainswell. You want to head over and check them out?" +The Grand Isle was directed to some rafts by other cutters and, in the case of the 15 men, by airplane pilots from the volunteer group Brothers to the Rescue. +Two levels below, on the mess deck, as they took breaks and played video games, some rescuers tried to reconcile the excitement, even the fun, of their mission with their feelings for the people whom they saw taking such risks. +"Unless you're here grabbing them, you don't have a grasp of how vast it is," said Petty Officer Bill Cutchens, a deck supervisor. "Their desperation is awesome. We as Americans cannot fathom it because we don't have anything to compare it to." +As the sun set shortly after 6 P.M., the Grand Isle approached the Clark, a Navy frigate that would take the refugees to Guantanamo, on Cuba's southeastern coast, where they would be held indefinitely. Navy officials say it is in such transfers between ships that the refugees are first told where they are going, although otherCoast Guard cutters report that more and more of the refugees already know their destination when they set out from Cuba on their rafts. +The group on the Grand Isle -- almost all of them men, almost all in their teens, 20's or 30's -- lined up for the transfer, blankets in plastic wrap under their arms. They carried few belongings, and a man looked frantically for an orange "tube" where, he said, he had carried all his legal papers. Without finding it, he crossed over to the frigate, where a white tarpaulin on the deck sheltered him and the others. +By order of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, contact between the press and the refugees was kept at a minimum. But as he left the cutter, one of the refugees, Mr. Ruiz, was asked what he hoped for. +"To uplift myself," he said. +"To improve," whispered the man behind him, unsolicited. +The 2-year-old boy just pointed to the gigantic gray ship above, his green eyes opened wide. + +LOAD-DATE: August 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: When the Coast Guard cutter Grand Isle encountered 15 Cuban refugees on a single raft on Thursday afternoon, rough seas made it difficult to rescue them. Finally, though, after four attempts to throw them a lifeline, they clambered on board. There were no injuries. (Pool photo by Mike Stocker); Empty rafts, like these two spotted yesterday south of Key West, are a common sight to Coast Guard crews on patrol off Florida. And it is not always evident whether the refugees they carried were rescued or died. (Keith Meyers/The New York Times)(pg. 4); Cuban refugees on a makeshift raft fighting high seas about 40 miles south of Key West yesterday. (Keith Meyers/The New York Times)(pg. 1) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +300 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 27, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Stranded, for Security's Sake; +Bridgeport Residents Cry Racism as Mall Limits Bus Service + +BYLINE: Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 25; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk; Second Front + +LENGTH: 1106 words + +DATELINE: TRUMBULL, Conn., Aug. 26 + +On a winter's night last year, the illusion of security that shopping malls treasure was shattered when gunfire broke out between teen-agers at a bus stop outside the 200-store Trumbull Shopping Park here. +Now, in an effort to restore that sense of security, the mall has decided to prohibit buses from stopping on mall property on Friday and Saturday nights after this weekend, effectively halting bus service from inner-city neighborhoods of Bridgeport at those times. + The move has prompted charges of racism, but mall officials say they have little choice. +"Customers are afraid to come to the mall because of the hundreds of young people who congregate here, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights," said the mall's general manager, Gary Karl. + +Transit District to Go to Court + "Merchants are losing business," he said, "and our goal is to reduce large numbers of youth coming at the same time simply to hang out at the mall. Eliminating the buses during those peak times is just one part of a multifaceted program we are undertaking." +But the Greater Bridgeport Transit District, which operates the bus service, said the decision discriminates against the disabled, the elderly and members of minority groups. It said that the move would cost the district $100,000 a year in lost revenue, and that it planned to seek a temporary injunction in Federal court early next week to retain the bus service. +The Transit District's lawyer, Thomas J. Weihing, said eliminating the bus service would violate the constitutional protections of freedom of assembly and equal protection under the law. +"How do you get elderly people and handicapped people down the hill and to the mall without the bus service?" Mr. Weihing said. "I guess they've got to be pretty desperate to try something like this." +One Transit District board member, Wilfred Murphy, said: "This is flat-out racism. Most of the people who use the buses come from the inner city and it is their only means of transportation. It's a subtle apartheid that is really going to hurt the handicapped and elderly the most. The kids will still find a way to get to the mall anyway." +All the buses to the mall come from Bridgeport. Eliminating the stop at the mall would mean that passengers would have to walk about a quarter-mile on a hill, with no direct walkway to the mall. +While large groups of teen-agers pose a problem for malls throughout the country, curtailing bus service has not been tried before, said mall security consultants and a shopping center trade group. +"There are malls that have restrictions and codes of behavior, but I've never heard of a mall trying to keep anybody out by eliminating bus service," said Mark Schoifet, a spokesman for the International Council of Shopping Centers, a New York-based trade association representing 1,800 enclosed regional malls. +"Malls everywhere are in a real quandary regarding this issue," Mr. Schoifet said. "Teen-agers visit malls more than any other demographic group and are its future customers, but their presence in very large numbers has also become a major concern because some can at times be bothersome to other customers and employees." +John T. Horn, senior marketing director for Kroll Associates, one of the largest private security companies in the world, said there are more conventional ways to solve the problem, including increased security, electronic surveillance and strict behavior codes. +"Curtailing access to the mall seems to be contrary to what the merchants would want," said Mr. Horn, who has been in the security consulting business for 35 years. "These things don't develop overnight, and the problem is not going to go away overnight, either. You need a long-range plan." + +Additional Plans + Mr. Karl said that curtailing bus service is part of a long-range plan that includes beefing up security and enrolling the guards in a new training program run by the state police, as well as hiring local police officers as guards and adding an upgraded $100,000 electronic security system. +Mr. Karl said the shooting last year, in which a Bridgeport youth shot another youth in the leg, as well as continued disruptive behavior by teen-agers, led to the decision to limit the bus service. An earlier plan to eliminate bus service after 5 P.M. was abandoned last year. +"The shooting led to a feeling that we needed to study the entire issue of teen-agers congregating in the mall," Mr. Karl said. "We felt it was not reasonable to allow the public or our employees to feel they are in any kind of jeopardy." +Some merchants said business had dropped sharply since the shooting and pointed to the increasing presence of roaming youths as one of the reasons. +"Business was off nearly 25 percent in the first half of the year," said Ted Healy, owner of Gloria Jean's Gourmet Coffee, "but it's coming back directly as a result of the mall security program. The new security measures, combined with better managing of the bus traffic, should help the merchants and make it better for customers and employees." + +'Who Else Uses These Buses?' + But some customers and employees said curtailing the bus service would hurt riders who need the service most, while having little impact on the number of teen-agers in the mall. +"When they cut down on the buses, I'm going to have to stop shopping here," said Tracy Jackson of Bridgeport as she waited at the mall for a late-afternoon bus home. "The problem is the people in Trumbull don't want blacks and Puerto Ricans coming to their mall. Who else uses these buses?" +Sondis Green, 21, of Bridgeport, who works at a shoe store in the mall, said he would probably have to quit if the bus service is curtailed. "I don't have a car and I have no other way to get to work," he said. "It would be pretty devastating to lose this job. It would hurt a lot of people who work here, a lot of people who have no other way of getting home." +Teen-agers at the mall said curtailing the buses would not prevent them from getting there. +"The kids who come here regularly will find a way, you can bet on that. They'll walk, get rides, do whatever it takes," said 14-year-old John Leonetti of Milford. He said that malls have become modern-day gathering places for teen-agers. +"I come here three or four times a week, to hang out with my friends, to meet girls and to just have a good time," he said. "They say they don't want us to be here, but they have the arcade, the food court and the movies. Who are they trying to kid? Without us, they would have no business and we would just be hanging out on the streets." + +LOAD-DATE: August 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: In an effort to restore a sense of security to shoppers at the Trumbull ( Conn.) Shopping Park, the mall has decided to prohibit buses from stopping there on Friday and Saturday nights. Youths caught the bus home from the mall. (George Ruhe for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +301 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 29, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +FLIGHT FROM CUBA: THE CUBANS; +Cuba Patrolling Beaches to Keep Children Off Unseaworthy Rafts + +BYLINE: By MARIA NEWMAN + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1265 words + +DATELINE: HAVANA, Aug. 28 + +For the first time since thousands of Cubans began to flee the country by boat more than two weeks ago, President Fidel Castro's security forces were patrolling the beach today, warning departing Cubans not to take children aboard their rickety boats. +The order to keep children from risk came in a message from Mr. Castro published today in Juventud Rebelde, Cuba's only Sunday newspaper. + He said he would send border guards and internal police to patrol the beaches because "despite repeated warnings to people not to leave the country with children and adolescents aboard insecure boats, some people have continued to do so." +He said the guards would work on land to "persuade" people not to take children of high school age or younger on boats that were not seaworthy. If the would-be refugees persisted, the guards would use force if necessary, but they would not resort to using arms, the message said. +Mercedes Pichardo, 35, said today that she was approached on Cojimar beach by a guard in camouflage uniform carrying a pistol. "He told us that it was prohibited to take children, pregnant women or old people on our boat, and if we did we would get four years in prison," she said. She added that her children are 19, 15 and 10 and the younger two will stay behind with their grandmother. +"It is very dangerous for children, so we leave them at home, but people are going to go anyway," she said. +Mr. Castro's message also said the forces would patrol Cuban waters in search of those who chose to defy the warnings on land. +Cubans who live near the coast and others who have been camping out on the beaches preparing to flee said that, until today, no security forces had interfered with the surge of people making their way to the Florida Straits after Mr. Castro relaxed his measures to keep Cubans from fleeing and President Clinton tightened his policy on admitting Cuban refugees. +The patrols were not stopping every attempt to leave the island. Just before sunset five men carrying a raft on their shoulders walked toward the harbor in downtown Havana, near where anti-Castro protests on Aug. 5 set off the current exodus of refugees. As the men approached the shore, about 3,000 people poured out of their apartment buildings to cheer them on. Police officers appeared and demanded the credentials of foreign journalists, but did not interfere with the crowd. No arrests were made and in the confusion, the men pushed out to sea. +The mass migrations began after a speech by Mr. Castro after the protests, when he told Cubans that if they wanted to leave, he would not stop them. Cuba has allowed some people to travel outside the country, but every year some escape illegally by taking to the sea and evading the naval patrols in coastal waters. +Since the speech, the United States Coast Guard has reported picking up nearly 17,000 fleeing Cubans. No one knows exactly how many people have perished in the seas, but officials say children were certainly among them. +The new patrols arrived as word spread up and down the beaches and throughout Havana that President Clinton agreed on Saturday to talks with Cuba on immigration issues. +On the rocky beaches of Cojimar, where Cubans eager to put to sea were waiting for better weather, the news blared out of Raquel Perez Ruiz's house, where she had her radio tuned to Radio Marti for all to hear. +"I am so happy," said Mrs. Perez, who is 61 years old. "They should have talked a long time ago. There has already been so much Cuban blood shed." +The stormy weather that had kept people from fleeing this weekend did not improve, but some people waiting on the beaches said the news of the talks was one more reason to speed their departure, for fear that the political climate would change. +"They say that if they talk, Mr. Castro will close off the coast," said Mayoris Ramirez Ochoa, hurrying to gather up her meager belongings. "So everyone is talking of leaving today." + +Negotiations Bring Hope + For others, however, the idea of talks represented hope for Cuba. Perhaps now, they said, there was at least a wedge in the door that the United States long ago closed on relations with Cuba, a policy that many here believe has led to hardship. Perhaps now there would be no need to go. +"This is a disgrace, for people to be throwing themselves into the ocean in search of a better way of life," said Ana Rosa Hidalgo, 39, as she sat on a rubber inner tube on the beach. +"Both of them, Mr. Clinton and Fidel Castro, have the means to come up with a better immigration policy to avoid all these deaths. +"If I were there," said Mrs. Hidalgo, who worked as a guard on a military base, "I would ask Mr. Clinton why he is imposing this embargo on us. It is not hurting Castro's people but only the common people of Cuba." +News reports about the talks were sketchy in this country where the Government controls communication. Yet as the word spread, Cubans were debating whether the talks had come about as a result of strong leadership on Mr. Castro's part as his country faces its toughest economic challenge in three decades. + +'A Good Plan' by Castro + "It was a good plan on Castro's part if there is now going to be some dialogue," said Alberto Ruiz, Mrs. Perez's grandson, who is in the military. "If what I hear is true, the United States was not allowing as many Cubans to visit as they had visas to give." +He also said he hoped the talks would lead to negotiations on other matters, like the United States trade embargo against Cuba. +In Havana, Maria de la Caridad Cabrera, a day care worker, strolled down a Havana street with her granddaughter today, the Sunday before the start of the school year. +"All the people here are glad that the two sides are going to talk," she said. + +Building Boats at Home + At a garden restaurant, children celebrated a birthday. And at a restaurant that accepts only dollars, young Cubans in fashionable sports clothes munched on cheeseburgers and sipped TropiColas. At the same time, the sounds of construction were everywhere as people worked feverishly to build boats, some working in their front yards. Construction was underway in downtown Havana and for miles along the shore east of the city. +"Cuba is hungry," Mrs. Cabrera. "There is no food here. We don't have enough shoes or clothing for the young people." . +"Everyone would stay if there were enough food and clothing and medicine in Cuba," she said. +Mrs. Cabrera said the country is much worse off than before the revolution. But she said that this is partly a result of the damage done by the embargo. Mr. Castro, she said, has done his best. +"I am a Fidelista," she said. "We must have patience with him, because he will come through for us." + +'A Circus, a Farce, a Disaster' + But others were more bitter, compaining that Mr. Castro has led the country into severe food shortages, declining medical care and routine fuel shortages. +"What do you know, my love?" a man, who said his name was Rene, asked angrily. "Do you know what it's like to live under a dictatorship?" +"You outsiders come and you stay in your good hotels and you eat your food that most Cubans can't eat and you don't see that this is all a circus, a farce, a disaster," he said. +Rene, who works as a lineman for the Government electrical company, said the reason there is not more protest against Mr. Castro is that people are afraid to speak up. +"Remember that Mr. Castro is an intelligent man," he said. "He has created the most perfect system of repression in the world." + +LOAD-DATE: August 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: This field of tents at Guantanamo Bay naval base, photographed on Saturday, is home to thousands of Cuban refugees picked up at sea. (Pool photo by Joe Marquette)(pg. A6); On a beach near Havana, a tearful Ana Rosa Hidalgo tried to persuade her son, Jose Mared Hidalgo, not to risk his life fleeing on a rickety boat. (Wesley Boxce/JB Pictures, for The New York Times)(pg. A1) + +Graph: "TALLY: Fleeing Cuba" shows cuban refugees picked up by the Coast Guard each day from Aug. 1st to the 28th and Cuban refugees housed at Guantanamo bay each day from Aug. 24th to the 28th. (Sources: Immigration and Naturalization Services, United States Coast Guard)(pg. A6) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +302 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 29, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Stamford's Elderly Keep Fighting for a Center + +BYLINE: Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4; Column 4; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 835 words + +DATELINE: STAMFORD, Conn., Aug. 28 + +Most communities in Connecticut have senior citizen centers, but this Gold Coast city, headquarters to many international corporations, is not one of them. +For more than a decade, older residents have been fighting for a center, and even though the city has agreed to provide a former Board of Education building as a site and has set aside $1 million for renovations, the fight continues. + Last month 200 people turned out for a rally at the city's Government Center, where older residents, shouting slogans like "You'll be our age some day," called on the city to open a center. +But the Board of Finance has refused to provide the operating funds. With taxes going up 13 percent this year because of revaluation, board members say the city cannot afford the $160,000 the center would cost in its first six months of operation. +"It's not that I'm against the senior center," said Robert Harris, a Board of Finance member who voted against the center, "it's just that we cannot in good conscience provide funding for it in a year when we had to lay off 23 municipal workers." + +'It's Always Something Else' + Of Stamford's 108,000 residents, 20,000 are senior citizens. Still, one city administration after another has killed plans for a senior center. +During the early 1980's when Stamford had the money to operate a center, advocates say, it lacked the space. Now that it has the space, it lacks the money. +"It's always something else," said Velma Carter, 72, a retired nurse who has lived in Stamford for almost 50 years. "But the fact is we need a center so badly. Stamford is supposed to be so affluent, but we can't get something done for our seniors that is crucial to our health and well-being." +Mrs. Carter attends a limited senior program one day a week at a church and is a member of the Senior Citizens Council, a coalition of 30 groups fighting for the center. "We have some small programs," she said, "but it is an absolute disgrace for a city of this size and wealth not to have a comprehensive center. A lot of people are staying home watching television because they have nothing else to do." +Cynthia Matthews, executive director of the State Commission on Aging, agrees. "They need a center there," she said, "because there are a lot of moderate- and low-income people in Stamford who are isolated and need both the medical attention and socialization that such centers provide." +Such a center would offer health and nutrition programs, exercise classes, education, lectures and a variety of counseling programs, said William Rosenfield, 80, president of the Senior Citizens Council and co-chairman of the Senior Advisory Committee for the proposed center. +"We've been getting a raw deal in Stamford for a long time and things are actually getting worse," said Mr. Rosenfield, a retired dentist who has lived in the city since 1946. "We have visited a number of senior centers across the state and it's very disheartening to see the wonderful kinds of services elderly people are receiving just about everywhere else but Stamford." +One of those places is Stratford, a mostly blue-collar Fairfield County town half the size of Stamford, which operates one of the state's most comprehensive senior centers, the Baldwin Center. It provides an array of programs for between 400 and 500 people a day, said its director, Judith Henchar, former program director for Stamford's Commission on Aging. +She led the battle for a senior center in Stamford for nearly a decade. +"The whole thing is so pathetic and frustrating and after many years of feeling like we were hitting one dead end after another, I decided to accept this job in Stratford a few years ago," said Ms. Henchar, who still lives in Stamford and serves as an adviser to the senior council. +"After working here I am even more angry because in a smaller town with a much lower per-capita income than Stamford, this center is able to provide so many vital programs for seniors that should be happening in Stamford. It's a game of political football and the seniors in Stamford are the victims," she said. +City officials said the issue has become politicized, with the latest battle now going on between Mayor Stanley Esposito, a Republican who has reversed his earlier position and now supports the senior center, and the Republican-controlled Board of Finance, which recently cut proposed financing for the center and then refused the Mayor's request to transfer money from elsewhere in the $257 million fiscal 1994-95 budget or from a $2 million city emergency contingency fund. +"That fund is for unforeseen emergencies and this is not unforeseen and it is not an emergency," said the board's chairman, William McManus. "The Mayor knows the city can't afford to fund that program this year because of the budget he put together." +But Mayor Esposito says the blame does lie with the finance board. "We tried a number of ways to do it, but their minds are closed and now they're trying to blame me." + +LOAD-DATE: August 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +303 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 30, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Budget Office Sees Flaw in G.O.P. Health Plan + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 18; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 680 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 + +The health care legislation proposed by House Republican leaders could have the unintended consequence of raising the cost of standard insurance plans and threatening their existence, the Congressional Budget Office said today. +Representative Robert H. Michel of Illinois, the Republican leader, is pressing Democrats to use his plan as the basis for Congressional action now that Speaker Thomas S. Foley, Democrat of Washington, has conceded that Congress is unlikely to pass the kind of broad-based plan proposed by President Clinton. + But the budget office said a crucial feature of the plan offered by Mr. Michel and Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, "could result in rising premiums for standard policies." +Mr. Michel proposes expanding the availability of catastrophic health insurance plans that would pay for specified medical expenses exceeding $1,800 a year for an individual and $3,600 for a family. To cover out-of-pocket expenses, his proposal would allow people to establish tax-sheltered medical savings accounts. + +Attractive to the Healthy + The budget office said such a plan could be attractive to relatively healthy people, who expect few out-of-pocket expenses but still want insurance in case they become seriously ill. +The people left in standard plans, however, would be relatively sicker and older, driving the premiums for those plans so high that even sick people would find it cheaper to choose minimal-coverage plans to deal with catastrophic illnesses, the budget office said. +It concluded that in the long run, a catastrophic-insurance plan with an option for a medical savings account "that would be attractive to a large number of people could threaten the existence of standard health insurance." +The agency said that Mr. Michel's plan would be good for the budget deficit, reducing red ink by $11.3 billion over 10 years but that it would do almost nothing to curb growing health care expenditures and little to expand insurance coverage. At present, about 85 percent of Americans have insurance. +The analysis said an additional 2 percent of the population -- five million poor children and two million other poor people -- could acquire coverage as a result of subsidies proposed by Mr. Michel. + +Self-Employed Deduction + The Republican's plan also would allow self-employed people to deduct all of their health insurance premiums. It would limit awards for medical malpractice, require employers to offer, but not pay for, insurance, and restrict the right of insurance companies to deny coverage to sick people. +It would pay for the subsidies and tax benefits by increasing the Medicare premium for high-income elderly people, by making about one million legal aliens ineligible for Social Security and Medicaid and by limiting Social Security benefits for abusers of drugs and alcohol. +In a letter to Mr. Foley, Mr. Michel said the budget office report supported his contention that his bill was "the most reasonable, straightforward and realistic health reform proposal on the table." +"We still have the most appropriate bill to undertake the reforms that can be enacted this year," he wrote. "It should be the basis for action in the House and Senate in September." +In the meantime, Senator George J. Mitchell of Maine, the majority leader, said today that he remained optimistic that Congress would enact significant health care legislation. But Mr. Mitchell acknowledged that such legislation would fall short of the Clinton Administration goal of full coverage for all Americans. +"I think we can make a substantial amount of progress toward that goal and set us on the right path, and that's what I'm going to try to do," he said at a news conference in Portland, Me. +President Clinton's spokeswoman, Dee Dee Myers, said the President had not concluded that he could not get comprehensive health care legislation enacted. +"We're still hopeful that some sort of health reform will be passed this year," she said on Martha's Vineyard, Mass., where Mr. Clinton and his family are vacationing. + +LOAD-DATE: August 30, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +304 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 30, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Study Suggests Tests Can Predict Alzheimer's + +BYLINE: By The Associated Press + +SECTION: Section C; Page 3; Column 5; Science Desk; Medical Science Page + +LENGTH: 510 words + +ELDERLY people who take a series of standard psychological tests can learn whether they have high or low risk of getting Alzheimer's or a similar disease, a study suggests. +The tests, given to outwardly healthy people, identified one group with an 85 percent rate of developing intellect-robbing dementia within four years, and another group who went on to get dementia at only a 5 percent rate over that time. + That means the tests can distinguish between those who should get a more detailed evaluation and make plans for their future care, and those who can be reassured that they have little short-term risk, said the lead author of the study, Dr. David Masur. +"If you score well on these tests, we can confidently say that over the next four years you probably won't be getting dementia," he said. +Dementia basically refers to significant declines in intellectual abilities like memory and reasoning. Alzheimer's disease is the most common kind of dementia. +Dr. Masur is an associate clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Montefiore Medical Center, both in the Bronx. He and colleagues reported on the results of the study in the August issue of the journal Neurology. +While other scientists are doing similar work, Dr. Masur's result "is probably the best in terms of predictive value so far," said Dr. Leonard Berg, chairman of the Alzheimer's Association Medical and Scientific Advisory Board. +"It's good work and it's important work," said Dr. Berg, a neurologist who directs the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. +Dr. Masur and Dr. Berg called the tests useful for people in their 70's and 80's who are generally healthy and free of multiple medications that could impair their performance on the tests. +The study involved 317 healthy people whose average age was 79 and who at first showed no sign of dementia. Researchers gave them a battery of psychological tests and then followed them for four years. Then they went back and identified four tests that best predicted dementia. +In an interview, Dr. Masur noted that the tests did better at identifying people who would remain free of dementia than at pointing out those who would develop it. +He noted that 202 of the 253 participants who avoided dementia had high test scores predicting that outcome, while of the 64 people who became demented only 11 had shown a high risk by getting low test scores. +Of the 212 people with high test scores, 202 remained free of dementia, for a 95 percent predictive accuracy, whereas 11 of the 13 with poor test scores developed the condition, for an accuracy of 85 percent. The other 92 participants scored in a gray zone that did not allow a firm prediction of getting or avoiding dementia. +The two best-performing tests focused on memory for words and objects. Another called for rapidly naming as many items as possible from a category, like vegetables. The fourth involved rapidly finding and copying a series of symbols. + +LOAD-DATE: August 30, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +305 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 30, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Researchers Find a Diverse Face On the Poverty in New York City + +BYLINE: By CELIA W. DUGGER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1037 words + +Challenging the stereotype of the poor as single mothers on welfare who soak up more and more tax dollars, a new study has found that only one in four poor households in New York City is headed by a single parent and that spending on welfare in the city, when adjusted for inflation, has declined by 20 percent since 1975. +In fact, the report, released yesterday by the Citizens Budget Commission, found that Medicaid, not welfare, had been the prime engine of growth in public spending on the poor in the city, particularly in the exploding costs of medical care for the disabled and the elderly poor. + In 1992, the most recent year studied, expenditures by the city, the state and the Federal Government for Medicaid in New York City amounted to $10.2 billion, far more than for any other antipoverty program and about three times as much as the total spending on welfare and food stamps combined. +The authors of the study say the results raise questions about whether government spends too much on medical care as compared with food, shelter and other basic needs. Runaway health care costs and eroding welfare benefits have skewed spending toward the elderly, and away from children in poor families, they say. +Citing United States census figures, the researchers noted that nearly one-third of the city's children lived in poverty in 1990, while 13 percent of the elderly were poor. +"Certainly the elderly are taking up the lion's share of the poverty spending," said Philip Thompson, an assistant professor of political science at Barnard College. He conducted the study with Charles Brecher, research director for the budget commission and a professor of public administration at New York University. +The budget commission, a nonprofit city government monitoring group that usually focuses on financial matters, decided to venture into the poverty debate after the 1992 riots in Los Angeles. The commission's trustees decided that the riots showed the dangers of ignoring the dispossessed, said Ray Horton, president of the commission. +The portrait of the poor that emerges in its report, "Poverty and Public Spending Related to Poverty in New York City," is a varied one. One-quarter of poor households were headed by single parents. Another quarter were headed by an elderly person, one in five consisted of single adults, one in six were headed by a disabled adult and one in eight by a couple. +"I certainly would have guessed a larger portion of households were single-parent families," said Mr. Brecher, who had previously specialized in the financing of city government, not in poverty. "The extent to which different kinds of households were represented among the poor was news to me." +The researchers also report that the poor are ethnically varied, though clearly minorities are disproportionately represented. Among poor households, 31 percent were headed by blacks, 28 percent by non-Hispanic whites, 20 percent by Puerto Ricans, 14 percent by others of Hispanic heritage and the balance by people from other minorities. Almost half the poor households headed by an elderly person were those of non-Hispanic whites. + +Variance Among Boroughs + The profile of the poor varied widely by borough. In the Bronx, which has the city's highest concentration of poor people, more than one-third of the poor households were single-parent families. In Manhattan, the largest group of poor households -- 30 percent -- consisted of single adults. In Queens, households headed by the elderly made up the largest group, representing 26 percent of the poor. +The study noted that government cash payments to the elderly lifted most out of poverty. In 1990, the poverty rate among households headed by the elderly would have been 63 percent without Social Security and other cash benefits. With those benefits, only 21 percent were classified as poor. +But a negligible number of poor families were lifted above the Federal poverty level by welfare payments. Because welfare is so politically unpopular, lawmakers in New York State and elsewhere in the country have refused to increase welfare payments to keep up with inflation. +As a result, between 1970 and 1992, the inflation-adjusted dollar value of welfare benefits in New York City declined by 30 percent, to $2,206 per person, according to the report. In 1992, overall spending on welfare in the city was 20 percent lower than in 1975 after adjustment for inflation, while the number of families on welfare increased by 6 percent during the same time. +Like many others who have studied the growing phenomenon of homelessness among families, Mr. Thompson suggests that the declining value of welfare payments to poor families is closely connected to their inability to pay the rent. + +New York Is Typical + Despite the Dickensian contrasts of wealth and poverty in the city, the study also found that the New York metropolitan area was about average nationally in the proportion of its households that were poor -- 11.7 percent. The diversity of the city's poor people was also mirrored in the national data. +Mr. Brecher said he had assumed that all social problems were different or worse in the New York area, and was surprised that it was actually quite typical in most ways. +The researchers did find, however, that poverty in the New York metropolitan area is more concentrated in the city than in every other large metropolitan area except San Antonio, making the contrast between city and suburb more pronounced than in other parts of the country. More than two-thirds of the New York metropolitan area's poor population live in the city itself. +In 1992, the city spent $4.8 billion of its own money on the poor, about 28 percent of all locally financed spending, the commission found. Each year from 1970 to 1992, the proportion of local spending devoted to the poor ranged between 25 and 29 percent. +From 1985 to 1992, the city-financed portion of Medicaid spending more than doubled, to $2.1 billion, about 45 percent of total city-financed spending for the poor. +The rapidly rising city spending on Medicaid highlights the importance of the city's push to have the state take over local Medicaid costs, Mr. Brecher said. + +LOAD-DATE: September 15, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graphs: "Poor in New York City" shows number of people below poverty level in each borough from '70 to '90; The amount of public assistance to the poor from '70 to '92; Who heads poors housholds in each borough (pg. B3) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +306 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 2, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +The Real Truth of Poverty + +SECTION: Section A; Page 24; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 492 words + +Demonizing welfare mothers has become political sport, with politicians everywhere blaming them for moral decline, budget deficits and even poverty itself. A report this week by New York's Citizens Budget Commission challenges this stereotype in useful and enlightening ways. It shows that women on welfare make up a far smaller percentage of the poor than popular wisdom would have it. It also confirms what previous studies have shown: Medicaid, not welfare, is the prime source of runaway spending on poverty. +Welfare mothers are routinely portrayed as slackers who make up the bulk of the poor and soak up more money every year. The fact is that only one in four poor households in New York City is headed by a single parent; welfare payments, when adjusted for inflation, have actually declined by 30 percent since 1972. + The poor in New York are also more ethnically diverse than commonly supposed. Among the elderly, for example, nearly half of all households in poverty are headed by whites. Like earlier studies, the commission's report suggests that the failure of welfare payments to keep pace with inflation contributes to homelessness. +For years, Gov. Mario Cuomo has proposed that New York State assume the share paid by local governments for Medicaid, the program of medical insurance for the poor. That is because New York is one of the few states that makes local governments pick up part of the tab for Medicaid. The Governor's plan foundered partly because he would take back local sales or income taxes in exchange for picking up Medicaid, a prospect that worried many suburban legislators. +Medicaid siphons off money that might be devoted to education, training, infrastructure. Because it has a large poverty population, New York levies onerous state and city taxes that become a major factor in persuading businesses to locate elsewhere. This, over time, erodes the tax base. +New York City will spend about $2.5 billion on Medicaid in 1995. It ought to pay nothing. The nation's poor should be a national responsibility, with Washington paying the entire tab. Short of that, the state should pay Medicaid bills for all its poor citizens. +The commission's report provides a fresh rationale for a state takeover of Medicaid. Medicaid, it says, is the "largest and most rapidly growing expenditure for the poor." Again, welfare mothers and their children account for far less spending than one might think. The elderly and disabled make up less than a quarter of New York's Medicaid population but account for nearly 60 percent of total Medicaid costs. +New York City taxpayers have been hit hard by the need to pay for programs that cater to a large poverty population. But welfare mothers are not breaking the city's back. The costs of providing housing, education and police protection to an economically disadvantaged population are huge -- as are the runaway costs of health care for the elderly and disabled. + +LOAD-DATE: September 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +307 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 4, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: CO-OP CITY; +The Latest in Security: Spoke and Sprocket Patrol + +BYLINE: By NORIMITSU ONISHI + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 6; Column 4; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 357 words + +The city police do it. So do the housing police. And as of last week, so do four private security officers in Co-op City: patrol on bikes. +Co-op City is hoping to draw the same benefits from the bicycle patrols reported by the larger police forces -- increased visibility, mobility and interaction. Co-op City, a sprawling community of high-rises and town houses, with its own shopping centers and schools, is the first private force in the Bronx to try bicycle patrols. Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan is thought to be the only other development in the city with a private force on bikes. + Despite a decline in reported crimes in the last year, many residents had complained that officers were not visible enough in the community, which is also patrolled by police officers from the 45th Precinct. So, shortly after becoming director of the 100-member force in June, Adrian Rosario introduced the bicycle patrols. +"It's good for public relations and visibility," Mr. Rosario said. "Every time I attend a public meeting, these issues come up." Whether the program, which cost about $3,000 to set up, will grow has not been determined yet, he added. +In the development's Bartow Mall the other day, mounted on white Raleigh mountain bikes, Officers Michael Scudder and Henry Sabater were keeping an eye on a group of teen-agers. +Officer Scudder, one of four officers who went through a weeklong bicycle patrol course, said: "I'm 36 and the perp's probably at least 10 years younger. So if I have to chase him, this gives me a better chance." On a bicycle, he said, he could get places cars can't go, like the narrow spaces between buildings. +Officer Sabater, in sporty blue shorts, made comparisons to regular duty: "You're in a car all day. How many people do you say hello to?" +A group of elderly men nodded to the officers. "Hey, no bike riding in the mall," one of them chided. +Lee Stein, a resident for 23 years, said he was reserving judgment. "It's too early to tell. But it's nice to see them floating around." +"They should all be carrying guns," another man grumbled. "They need guns out there." NORIMITSU ONISHI + +LOAD-DATE: September 8, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Henry Sabater, Anthony Schiffano, Johnny Rodriguez and Michael Scudder on patrol in Co-op City. (Susan Harris for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +308 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 5, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Serbs Drive 800 More Muslims From Homes + +BYLINE: By CHUCK SUDETIC, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 5; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 577 words + +DATELINE: SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sept. 4 + +Bosnian Serb militiamen stepped up the pace of "ethniccleansing" in Bijeljina today, driving about 800 Muslims, mostly women, children and elderly persons, across a battle-front, a Red Cross spokeswoman said. +"They were forced to walk through a no man's land, about two kilometers of woods and fields," said Lisa Jones, the Sarajevo spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, adding that the refugees crossed into Government-controlled territory near the village of Djokici, in northeastern Bosnia. + Tension is also rising around Sarajevo, where Serbian fighters have increased small-arms and anti-aircraft fire on trucks and cars along the only supply route into the capital, a mountain road to the suburb of Hrasnica that links up with a tunnel under the United Nations-controlled airport. +United Nations officials said that in two incidents today, snipers fired at peacekeepers near the Olympic speed-skating rink where Pope John Paul II is to celebrate Mass during a visit here scheduled for Thursday. A United Nations spokesman said the first sniper fire originated from a Serbian rebel position, while the second probably came from a building held by the Bosnian Army. + +400 Driven From Banja Luka + This morning's expulsions from Bijeljina, the largest from the town since the Serbs first seized it on April 1992, came a day after the Serbs forced about 400 Muslims and members of other minority groups out of Banja Luka, in northwestern Bosnia, Ms. Jones said. +The Serbian militia has uprooted more than 4,000 Muslims from their homes in Bosnia since mid-July, despite protests from the leaders of the Bosnian Serb "republic" and the International Red Cross, Ms. Jones said. +"We have exhausted every avenue we had," she said. "Nothing has changed." +Ms. Jones said the Red Cross had used four-wheel-drive vehicles to ferry elderly people and children from the no man's land outside Bijeljina to a first-aid center behind Bosnian Army lines. From there, the displaced persons were being transported to a reception center in Tuzla, she said. +Muslims from Bijeljina said the "ethnic cleansing" is being carried out by Vojkan Djurkovic, a local Serbian militia leader who collects "fees" from the people expelled. + +Draft-Age Men to Camps + The Serbs have separated draft-age men from the other Muslims being expelled and have instead sent them to labor camps in Lopare, Piperi and other nearby villages, an International Red Cross official said, adding that the Serbs have refused to allow Red Cross delegates access to the camps. +"The young men had to pay 1,000 German marks and the others between 100 and 200 marks," Ms. Jones said, referring to the Muslims expelled today. "It didn't matter for the young men. Even the ones who paid were taken off the trucks and buses and taken away in the direction of Majevica." +Majevica is a mountainous area northeast of Tuzla where, Red Cross officials have said, the Serbs run labor camps. +Ms. Jones also said Bosnian Army officials were conscripted draft-age Muslim men in the group that had been expelled on Saturday from Banja Luka. The women, children and elderly people from the group were transferred to a shelter in the town of Bugojno, she said. +Ms. Jones said "they had to pay 20 German marks for a 'exit visa' " from the Serbs controlling Banja Luka. "They were allowed to take about 300 marks with them, plus some personal possessions," she added. + +LOAD-DATE: September 5, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Map of Bosnia and Herzegovina showing location of Bijeljina. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +309 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 5, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Age Cannot Wither the Magic of Theater + +BYLINE: By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 9; Column 3; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 1257 words + +A small, soft-voiced woman of 80-odd years, cautiously bundled in a winter coat on a summer night, Hannah Smepvangers ignored the rain that fell in broken lines over the Delacorte Theater on Wednesday. Isabella Leniz disregarded the fatigue from holding a finger to her hearing aid, the only way to stop its strange tendency to whistle "Jingle Bells" and let her hear the rapid-fire parries of Shakespeare's Verona. Catherine O'Regan leaned closer in her front-row wheelchair, defying the arthritis that had been plaguing her 79-year-old bones all week long, to be captivated by a recalcitrant pup and dubious nuns parading before her. +Not all of them noticed the nudity or the mustaches on the nuns, or even the motor scooter that the director Adrian Hall dropped on "The Two Gentlemen of Verona." The next day, some did not even remember having been at the performance. But art's power to cheat time, to transport the spirit from earthly aches, was perhaps never so starkly demonstrated as by the elderly and infirm seizing what they could from this outdoor stage. + "On my floor, everyone is crippled up in the wheelchair," said Mrs. Leniz, who is 94. She tipped an ankle toward her walker, nicknamed "Hopalong Cassidy," and said: "Maybe I won't be able to do it tomorrow, because of my age. But as long as I can, I want to do everything." +The three women were part of a group from the Mary Manning Walsh Home for the elderly in Manhattan who went to see the "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" last week. The trip was organized by Hospital Audiences Inc., a nonprofit group that connects people in nursing homes, hospitals and mental health programs with New York's cultural life, either by bringing performers to the institutions or by taking patients out to parks, theaters and concert halls. + +By Bus to the Delacorte + This summer, the group has got tickets and arranged transportation for a different group to attend each of the performances in Central Park: Shakespearean plays, opera and classical music. It secures a place near the stage for wheelchairs and gurneys and transports patients in a 38-seat bus that can accommodate 10 wheelchairs or 5 beds and is outfitted with special shock absorbers that ease the ride over the city's bumpy streets. +The group was started by Michael Jon Spencer, who began by playing piano in state psychiatric hospitals 25 years ago. A graduate of the Mannes School of Music, Mr. Spencer's background was more music than medicine. When patients told him, "You're better than Thorazine," Mr. Spencer did not catch on at first. "I thought they meant Vladimir Thorazine, a pianist who had just been there," he said in his office. +Mr. Spencer calls culture "the chicken soup of the soul," and links the hunger for a song, a dance, a painting or a poem to a yearning for health itself. Music, researchers have suggested, can be reminiscent of the rhythms of the womb and the mother's heartbeat. Based on proportion and structure, music can serve as a kind of psychic antidote to the bodily disorders that illness represents, Mr. Spencer contends. +The organization provides other diversions as well, bringing performers into nursing homes, hospitals and shelters, taking blind people to museums that allow them to touch the works, supplying companions or cassettes to describe the scenes to blind people through a special headset they can wear to Broadway plays. It uses role-playing to teach people in shelters about AIDS prevention, job hunting and interviewing for an apartment, and runs workshops in painting, sculpture and dance. "The purpose isn't therapy; it's creativity," Mr. Spencer said. + +And Also at Christmas + At Christmastime, Mr. Spencer's group loads up the bus with patients and points it down Fifth Avenue, making it probably the only vehicle whose passengers pray to get stuck in traffic. A slow crawl turns out to be just the right pace for taking in department store windows, the lights at Rockefeller Center and the shopping throngs. The bus ends up at the World Trade Center for a light show just after sunset. +Mr. Spencer estimates his organization used its $3.6 million budget to expose some 357,000 people, the vast majority of them mentally ill, to the arts, or to take them on decidedly nonartistic, but hugely popular, trips to Bear Mountain or the races at Belmont Park over the last year. +It is in regularly taking people out of all sorts of confined settings that Hospital Audiences does what no other organization in New York does, and it is this -- allowing people to escape the monotony of institutional life -- that health experts sayis the strongest medicine against the assaults of age and illness. Even in the best of nursing homes, the sameness of a patient's room, a schedule that usually varies little from day to day and diets that are typically bland all combine to flatten the days, rendering them indistinguishable, said Honey Shields, director of recreational therapy at New York University Medical Center. +"You need that change to keep that sense of time," Ms. Shields said. "For many people who have Alzheimer's or short-term memory loss, social contact is the key to keeping their mind going." + +It Takes One Night + Jeanne McPartland, director of recreational therapy at Mary Manning Walsh, noted that outings like Wednesday night's create a buzz that livens the residents long after the trip ends. "You could hear about it straight for a week, that it's the best thing that's happened to them," she said. "It would be like us going to Europe for six weeks. One trip does that for them." +Elizabeth McCormick, a resident who jokingly gives her age as 40, praised Mr. Hall, the play's director. Ms. McCormick said that she worked in the theater in her younger days. "He introduced bits and pieces of Americana, modern feeling, that made it delightful," she said. +At Mary Manning Walsh, the schedule is peppered with classes on painting and ceramics, hobbies that Catherine O'Regan, for one, did not have the time to pick up while she was caring for her husband of 45 years, who died last year. Nor had she ever been to a Shakespeare play before. +Mostly, she plays Scrabble and watches television. She was napping, in fact, when a klatch of other residents roused her to alert her about the trip. (Ms. McPartland had kept it a secret, because rain threatened and she did not want to disappoint the residents with a last-minute cancellation.) +Mrs. O'Regan just had time to fix her hair and put on a bit of lipstick before heading out. She has to use a wheelchair because of her arthritis, though she hopes to get back to using a walker. She fights the arthritis and tries therapy to bring some strength back to a right arm left paralyzed by a stroke 16 years ago. + +'A Part of It' + She deemed the play "great," and said she "really felt a part of it." Then she paused a moment, as if trying to get to the heart of her thought. "I hope I never lose control up here," Mrs. O'Regan said, and tapped her temple. "Then I'll be lost altogether." +For some, the adventure proved too strenuous. Catherine O'Leary, who is 82 years old, watched the scattered rain with a worried eye before the play started. As Proteus set out for Milan, she fell asleep, her head dropping forward in her wheelchair. Ms. Smepvangers kept watch over her, fearing she would fall down; each time her head dropped, she touched Mrs. O'Leary's elbow to wake her, reaching for her in the silent camaraderie of women escaping death in the New York night. + +LOAD-DATE: September 5, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Enjoying the show, Catherine O'Regan and Elizabeth McCormick of the Mary Manning Walsh residence. (C. M. Hardt for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +310 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 7, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY; +Health Net Takes Interactive Plunge + +BYLINE: By SABRA CHARTRAND, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section D; Page 5; Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 736 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 + +When -- if -- the interactive television future arrives, what might viewers do besides order movies and pizzas? +How about researching the symptoms of gallstones? +That is the idea with Health Net, an interactive television system demonstrated here today by a start-up company with technical assistance from the Microsoft Corporation and financial backing from the David Sarnoff Research Center. The Sarnoff center, formerly the research arm of the RCA electronics and broadcasting empire, is now an independent laboratory that conducts commercial research in telecommunications and computer technologies. + +Data Base Building + Although the system is still only a rough prototype, the developer, Interactive Health Network Inc. of Princeton, N.J., has compiled a computerized data base of text and videos on health topics for consumers: information about diseases and injuries, fitness and nutrition, preventive medicine and mental health. + The system shows cartoon-like faces across the bottom of the television screen -- a child, man, woman and an elderly person. Viewers with a remote-control device can select from these icons using a simple remote control with arrow keys and an enter button. Choosing the woman's face brings another list to the screen: updates, nutrition, fitness, breast cancer, menopause and stress. And choosing breast cancer brings informational videos to the screen that describe the disease's causes, symptoms, complications and treatments. +The Health Net system was demonstrated for the first time publicly today at a Washington conference on the "national information infrastructure," held by the Council on Competitiveness, a nonprofit industry group. +Steven B. Schlossstein, a former investment banker who is president, chief executive and founder of Interactive Health Network, is hoping that Health Net will get picked up by one or more of the five cable television or telephone companies planning to begin interactive television systems within the next year: the Bell Atlantic Corporation, Tele-Communications Inc., Time Warner Inc., U S West Inc. and Viacom Inc. The Health Net data base would be stored on centrally situated "video server" computers, from which viewers would download their choices. + +Baby Boomers a Target + The prospective audience for Health Net, Mr. Schlossstein said, includes the 81 million baby boomers just entering middle age, when health care concerns grow. +Already, computer networks like Compuserve Inc. and America Online Inc. have become increasingly popular forums in which subscribers using their personal computers and modems share information about health care. And several companies, including Hughes Communications Inc. are developing interactive video and computer information systems for hospitals, clinics and doctors' offices. +On the other hand, Whittle Communications L.P. last month canceled its Medical News Network, a video network for doctors, after testing the system for 18 months with 5,000 physicians. That service was not "interactive," however, and Mr. Schlossstein contends that the real market will be in providing medical information to consumers. +"Once people are described as being at risk or having a disease, they become highly focused on wanting to learn about that condition," Mr. Schlossstein said. "We've developed a system to give patients an additional source of information, or make patients more informed when they go to the doctor." +The system could raise a host of ethical questions, such as whether interactive television companies should practice medicine. Mr. Schlossstein sees the day coming when two-way cameras will let viewers at home show an injury or symptom to a doctor or nurse for a tele-diagnosis. +The advent of interactive television is comparable to the birth of shopping malls, said Larry Plumb, a spokesman for Bell Atlantic, which will begin hooking up homes in the Washington suburbs of Arlington and Alexandria, Va., to test systems by next year. +"A developer had the idea that shopping malls would be successful if he lined up anchor stores," he said. "You can open the shopping mall and have 40 or 50 little stores left to fill. Our test in Virginia is really with the anchor stores like video-on-demand. +"Once we get into homes with those, what will we fill up the other slots with?" Mr. Plumb said. "Health care is absolutely something we're considering." + +LOAD-DATE: September 7, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: "We've developed a system to give patients an additional source of information, or make patients more informed when they go to the doctor," said Steven B. Schlossstein, founder of Interactive Health Network. (Dith Pran/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +311 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 9, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Grandparents Lack Child Aid + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 22; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 288 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 + +Americans bringing up their grandchildren have trouble obtaining help from state welfare caseworkers even though many are clearly eligible for assistance, according to a report issued today by the American Association of Retired Persons. +The study by the A.A.R.P., the nation's largest organization of elderly people, documents the hardships faced by grandparents who are being asked to raise their grandchildren, often at a time when their own health is failing and their financial security at risk. + The group found a rising number of three-generation families, with homes headed by grandparents that included children under age 18 increasing by more than 50 percent in the last two decades, to 3.34 million in 1993 from 2.2 million in 1970. +In most cases, the mother of the children was living with the family. But in one-third of such families, neither parent was present. +The group based its study on Census Bureau data and its own telephone survey of a small sample of the estimated half-million Americans age 45 or older who are caring for a grandchild without the help of the parent. +These families, the study found, tended to be poor. More than half had annual incomes of less than $20,000, and more than a fourth lived at or below the poverty line. By comparison, 10.6 percent of families with two parents are below the poverty line. +Twenty-eight percent of the grandparents in such families collected welfare benefits. But the organization said others had difficulties when they sought Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the state-Federal welfare program. +The association said the problem was largely due to state welfare workers who "violate the law by refusing to follow Federal guidelines." + +LOAD-DATE: September 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +312 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 9, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +For the New York State Legislature + +SECTION: Section A; Page 26; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 659 words + +The New York State Legislature's poor record this year on budgetary and social issues leaves no doubt that Albany could use some shaking up. But who will do the shaking? The paucity of quality challengers taking on incumbents in next Tuesday's primary voting for safely Democratic Senate and Assembly seats is a disappointment. Some of the least worthy incumbents face no challenge. +Here are our endorsements in several of the livelier contests in New York City districts where a primary victory virtually guarantees election. + SENATE -- 27th District, Manhattan: The retirement of Manfred Ohrenstein, the Senate minority leader, has produced a three-way race. The most promising candidate is Catherine Abate, a respected Commissioner of Correction during the Dinkins administration. Ms. Abate has knowledge of criminal justice issues, and the resourcefulness to get things done. +Her opponents, Charles Dworkis, a former district assistant for Mr. Ohrenstein, and Anne Compoccia, president of Community Board 1, know the district and generally share Ms. Abate's progressive views. But they cannot match her experience. +ASSEMBLY -- 33d District, Queens: Barbara Clark, an eight-year Assembly veteran, has been most active on education and child care issues. Though she sometimes needlessly alienates her would-be allies, she has generally been an effective advocate for her constituents. Neither of her opponents, Harvey Elwood, a school counselor, or Stephen Jackson, a promising political newcomer, has made the case for unseating her. +37th District, Queens-Brooklyn: In her decade in the Assembly, Catherine Nolan has emphasized family and transportation issues, fighting for increased subsidies for mass transit. Her challenger, Pamela Fisher, the director of a senior citizens' center, seems capable, but she has not made a compelling case for dumping a reasonably effective incumbent. +47th District, Brooklyn: The challenger, Joseph Cardieri, a former District Attorney now in private legal practice, insists that the 22-year incumbent, Frank Barbaro, is out of step with the times and the district. But Mr. Barbaro has used his seniority to push issues of concern to his constituents. He deserves re-election. +51st District, Brooklyn: The incumbent, Javier Nieves, became vice chairman of the Black and Puerto Rican Legislative Caucus in his first term. But he can point to few other achievements and has alienated community leaders with his unpredictability. The challenger, Felix Ortiz, a former budget analyst for the city, has a firmer grasp of the issues and promises to be a more effective consensus builder. We favor Mr. Ortiz. +54th District, Brooklyn: Darryl Towns, another first-term incumbent, is off to a good start, actively promoting much-needed economic development efforts in his district. His opponents, F. Louis Caraballo, an attorney, and Anibal Ortiz, a former police officer, do not make a case for denying Mr. Towns a second term. We support Mr. Towns. +55th District, Brooklyn: In this race a lackluster 12-year incumbent, William Boyland, faces two challengers. Reginald Bowman, a community activist and school board member, is smart but can be divisive. Beatrice Jones, another community activist who runs a day-care center, is sincere but might not be effective in the rough-and-tumble world of Albany. Mr. Boyland gets our lukewarm endorsement. +68th District, Manhattan: After nearly 20 years in the Legislature, Angelo Del Toro's record should be more impressive. Although chairman of the Education Committee for four years, Mr. Del Toro only recently became energetic in pushing reforms on school custodians and teacher discipline. His opponent, Nelson Antonio Denis, is an attorney who speaks articulately about economic development and the need for expanding youth programs. While Mr. Denis is untested in office, he offers the possibility of much-needed change. We endorse him with hope. + +LOAD-DATE: September 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +313 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 12, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +SENATE OPTIMISTS OFFER SOME HOPES FOR A HEALTH BILL + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1327 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 + +As they return from a two-week recess that began with universal health insurance legislation dead and incremental measures in critical condition, determined Senate optimists are still working to pass a measure that would insure about half the 39 million Americans who currently lack coverage. +The senators themselves will not be meeting until later in the week, but their staffs spent most of the time their bosses were away looking over the details of the plan offered by the self-styled mainstream coalition, a bipartisan group of about 20 senators, and making line-by-line comparisons with Democratic bills. + Senator John H. Chafee, the Rhode Island Republican who has led the bipartisan group, said on Friday that those talks had been going "quite well." Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who has been the Senate's leading voice for national health insurance since 1970, said there were fewer sticking points than he had expected. +"We are much closer to agreement on many of them than had seemed possible," Mr. Kennedy said. +Still, a very steep uphill path lies before them. It is made especially difficult by the lack of enthusiasm for health care legislation that many Democrats have encountered at home, the fact that they would prefer campaigning for re-election to possibly futile efforts on health care and the pressure on President Clinton to take a firm position and make it clear that when he said he would veto a bill that fell short of universal coverage, he meant it. +But those are not the questions of the moment. Both Mr. Clinton and the House Democratic leaders are waiting to see what Senator George J. Mitchell of Maine, the majority leader, and Mr. Chafee think they can come up with before taking a position on their efforts. +Before the senators can agree, they have to find a way around the differences their aides have identified, including the unwillingness of the mainstream group to give states much leeway in trying changes, or the insistence of most Democrats that because a major source of money for the bill will be reductions in Medicare payments, some substantial new benefit for the elderly must be included. +If senators can overcome these, they will also confront two other hurdles: the antagonism of liberal groups that wanted more done and the parliamentary devices that could be used by Republicans who want even less, including the minority leader, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas. +"Life would certainly be made easier if Senator Dole found some parts of this, or all of it, acceptable," Mr. Chafee said wistfully. But Mr. Dole, appearing today on the CBS News program "Face the Nation," dismissed the mainstream plan as more than Congress could deal with this year. + +Seeking at Least 30 Votes + So, the simple fact is that Mr. Chafee's group needs at least 30 more votes to have a majority. And of senators outside their ranks, Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to shift their way, which in turn makes it inviting for the mainstream group to move a bit in the Democrats' direction. +Even if the senators conclude they can assemble a majority, and they could need 60 votes if die-hard opponents filibuster, it is far from clear that either the President or House Democrats will want the effort to go forward. One consideration for them is plainly that the longer this issue is kept alive this year, the more obvious and politically painful any ultimate failure would become. If the issue is to be buried, politics dictates burying it as soon as possible. +But both Mr. Clinton and Speaker Thomas S. Foley of Washington have said they could accept legislation that fell short of their original hopes of universal coverage, as long as it made progress in that direction and did not cause more harm than good. +Mr. Mitchell, also appearing on "Face the Nation," said today that Mr. Clinton had not given him any signals on what would be acceptable. He said that when he last saw the President on Labor Day, "What he told me was 'Go ahead and do the best you can, and then I'll take a look at the results.' And I think that's the approach he ought to take." +Even before Mr. Mitchell sits down on Wednesday with Mr. Chafee, who will return to Washington only after his primary on Tuesday, a campaign is underway to define their work as inevitably inadequate. + +Opposition in Advance + Various groups have begun holding press conferences to denounce incremental change -- as the Clinton Administration did when it thought it could get a bill that would insure everybody. +On Friday, for example, the Consumers Union warned that more harm than good could result from even well-intentioned moves like subsidies for the poor, the route the mainstream plan pursues to increase insurance coverage to about 92 percent of the population by the year 2004 from the current 85 percent. Gail Shearer, Consumers Union's manager of policy analysis, said such subsidies would provide incentives for people to stay poor. +Senator Paul Wellstone, an advocate of "single payer" systems in which the government levies taxes to replace insurance premiums and uses them to pay all medical bills, sent a letter on Thursday to other advocates of such universal coverage warning against partial steps. +Mr. Wellstone, a Minnesota Democrat, attacked the mainstream proposal as "an unworkable retreat" that imposed deep cuts in Medicare "with no corresponding promise of improvements for current Medicare beneficiaries." +That is plainly not Mr. Mitchell's view. "I'm hopeful that we are going to get a good bill," he said Friday, adding there were some differences "we've got to figure out a way to resolve those." +Some solutions have already suggested themselves. Mr. Mitchell's bill, which is technically before the Senate but is not going anywhere, has $48 billion in it for long-term care for the elderly and handicapped, while the mainstream proposal has only $10 billion. But aides to the mainstream group said they had been informally advised that their bill not only achieved the deficit reduction they sought by $100 billion but also saved another $85 billion over 10 years. Some of that could easily be used to sweeten the pot for long-term care. +Senator Kennedy said that as aides examined the details of the mainstream proposal on such issues as denying insurance coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions and allowing associations who had insurance programs to continue them, the mainstream plan seemed much less menacing than they had initially thought. "The clarification of language in those areas has really been quite impressive," he said. +Even so, time remains a serious obstacle. The earliest that Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Chafee and other mainstream senators could reach an agreement is late this week. If a deal could be done that fast, there would still be only four weeks left until Congress is expected to quit for the year. Some Republicans would certainly try to filibuster. +But the current hope is for the Senate to act first, the House to act on the Senate bill, perhaps considering a few amendments on the floor, then not necessarily taking the time to go to conference, a step especially vulnerable to stalling tactics. +If the House is slighted by this approach, that is one part its own nervousness about taking a stand the Senate could later undercut, and one part Mr. Chafee's design. His group always feared that even if their bill made it through the Senate, House members in a conference would make the measure much more generous. +Mr. Chafee asserted that Senate Democrats understood his concern. "There is a recognition that whatever is done in the Senate, has absolutely got to hold in the House, and there has got to be a guarantee of that," he said. +That approach, of course, may just add to the difficulties of getting the House to act at all. Still, what the Senate is worrying about now is whether it can find its own path to agreement. + +LOAD-DATE: September 12, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +314 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 13, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Gene Study Suggests Why Cancer Is a Disease of the Elderly + +BYLINE: By GINA KOLATA + +SECTION: Section C; Page 5; Column 1; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 605 words + +CANCER is overwhelmingly a disease of the elderly, and molecular biologists think they know why. As people age, the scientists theorize, they accumulate genetic errors in their cells that may eventually send them careering down the path to cancer. +But proof of this hypothesis has been hard to come by. Now one group of investigators, led by Dr. Gino Cortopassi, a molecular biologist at the University of Southern California, has found evidence consistent with the aging hypothesis for one common cancer of the blood cells: non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Cells with mutations that can lead to this cancer are 13 times more common in old people than in young people, Dr. Cortopassi and his colleagues have found. + Dr. Cortopassi and his colleagues are reporting their work today in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. +Non-Hodgkins lymphoma strikes about 37,000 Americans a year. Nearly all are elderly. In children under 5, fewer than one in 100,000 develop the cancer. Among 40-year-olds, the incidence is 1.2 per 100,000. But in 80-year-olds, there are 50 cases per 100,000. + +Gene Linked to Cancer + One gene that is associated with non-Hodgkins lymphoma is BCL2, a gene that when mutated, makes cells immortal. The idea is that a white blood cell has a BCL2 mutation that prevents it from dying after its usual life span of a few weeks. As the mutated cell remains in the bloodstream, it may accumulate other mutations and eventually pile up enough errors in its genetic material that it becomes cancerous. +Dr. Cortopassi and his colleagues looked at the rate of BCL2 mutations as people age. They examined blood from people, unafflicted by cancer, whose blood was being drawn for other reasons at the university. In addition, they examined spleens obtained on autopsy at the Los Angeles County Hospital. None of the spleens were from lymphoma patients. +The blood was from people ranging in age from newborn infants to those in their 70's. The spleens were from people who ranged in age from stillborn infants to an 85-year-old woman. Using polymerase chain reaction, a tool of molecular biology that enables researchers to pick out one mutated gene in one cell out of a million, Dr. Cortopassi and his colleagues looked for BCL2 mutations. +They found that there were 0.3 mutations per million cells in blood from people 20 and younger as against 3.93 mutations per million cells in those 65 and older. They found no BCL2 mutations in the spleens from the youngest autopsy patients but found 146 per million cells in the spleens from people over 60 when they died. +Dr. Cortopassi said these mutated cells persisted, as might be expected if the mutations made the cells immortal. He said he found the same mutated cells a year later when he looked again at blood from the same people. + +Words of Caution + Although the new data are consistent with the mutation theory of aging and cancer, some experts advised caution. The study did not prove cause and effect, they said. And individuals with BCL2 mutations may never develop cancer. +Dr. Arnold Levine, a cancer researcher at Princeton University, warned that "the consequences of these genetic mistakes is unclear." He added, "It's not so simple as to say that just because there is a mistake, you get cancer." In fact, he said, none of the dead people whose spleens were examined had had cancer, yet many had BCL2 mutations. +Nonetheless, Dr. Levine said, Dr. Cortopassi's work does support the genetic injury theory of cancer and aging. "It's an interesting idea," Dr. Levine said. "It doesn't prove it, but it is consistent with it." + +LOAD-DATE: September 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +315 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 13, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +President Leads Swearing-In Of New Corps of Volunteers + +BYLINE: By WILLIAM H. HONAN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 17; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 820 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 + +Raising his right hand and beaming like a proud scoutmaster, President Clinton swore in a group of the first 15,000 members of Americorps, the domestic Peace Corps that he promised in his campaign and that was authorized by Congress a year ago. +The members, most of whom will receive educational grants in exchange for their service, will begin work around the country in programs ranging from immunization efforts for children and the elderly to recycling, tutoring, crime prevention and urban revitalization. + Some 850 were inducted as more than 2,000 dignitaries and supporters took part in the ceremony on the North Lawn of the White House. They were kept sweltering there for more than two hours, and an elaborately synchronized satellite television transmission was thrown awry because of the crash of a light plane early this morning on the South Lawn, where the event was supposed to have taken place. +Mr. Clinton swore in five members in the Oval Office, and this ceremony was broadcast to more than 50 places around the country where members of the Cabinet, governors and mayors swore in groups of volunteers. + +Not a Question of Money + "Any of us could get a job that pays much more," said Russell C. Teter 3d, a 22-year-old from Middletown, N.Y., who will work in a psychiatric hospital for veterans. "I'm young, not married -- no children. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give something to my country." +For his part, Mr. Clinton seemed to exult in an opportunity to seize the moral high ground. In recent weeks, a rebellious Congress has apparently shelved his ambitious plan for expanding health insurance coverage, and he has had a difficult time in several areas of foreign affairs. +"I will get things done for America to make our people safer, smarter and healthier," the President said, leading volunteers in an oath written for the occasion. "Faced with apathy, I will take action. Faced with conflict, I will seek common ground. Faced with adversity, I will persevere. I will carry this commitment with me this year and beyond. I am an Americorps member, and I am going to get things done." + +Favorite Clinton Idea + The idea of a national service agency has been a favorite of Mr. Clinton's ever since he proposed it at a meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council in May 1988. +Both Mr. Clinton and his aides were eager to link the National Service Corps with such warmly remembered predecessors as Franklin D. Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps of 1933 and John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps, which was created in 1961 and is still going. +"We hope our program will delight Americans in the same way that the Peace Corps has," said Eli J. Segal, chief executive of the Corporation for National Service. +Mr. Segal emphasized that the program had bipartisan support and took pleasure in ticking off a list of Republican governors and mayors, like Mayor Richard J. Riordan of Los Angeles, who officiated at swearing-in ceremonies around the country. +Kimberly Barnes O'Connor, an aide to Senator Nancy L. Kassebaum, the ranking Republican on the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources who led the fight against authorizing the program last year, said: "There has always been bipartisan support for the general concept. We would have preferred a slower growth rate, less Federal control and a few other things, but now it's the law and we hope it succeeds." +Senator Don Nickles, Republican of Oklahoma, is less reconciled. "This program gives a lot of help to people who don't need it," he said. + +'An Opportunity to Serve' + Mr. Segal disputed the view. "This is not a jobs program or primarily a financial aid program, but an opportunity to serve," he said. "We never thought it wise to ask any one income group to perform national service. +"You might say we're doing two things at once. We're asking people to serve their country and in the process helping them with the cost of higher education at a time when those costs continue to skyrocket." +Under the present program, members will receive $7,500 a year for their living expenses and an education award of $4,725 a year for a maximum of two years to help finance their college education or vocational training, or to pay back their college loans. There are no restrictions on age. +Educators around the country said they were generally pleased with the program. Ernest L. Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, said: "It's the right program for the right time. Young people feel disengaged, but there are many signs that they're ready to be inspired by a larger commitment. +"The numbers are small, but the message is significant. Of course, it doesn't begin to solve the problem of college costs. That requires another solution." +The Corporation for National Service is sponsoring 350 programs in more than 700 communities around the country. + +LOAD-DATE: September 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: President Clinton talking with the audience at the swearing-in for the corps of volunteers that was established last year. Groups totaling 15,000 were sworn in yesterday at the White House and in 50 cities. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +316 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 14, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Foley Urges Republicans to Meet With Democrats on Health Care + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 13; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 680 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 + +Speaker Thomas S. Foley suggested today that House Democratic and Republican leaders meet to see if there was any sort of incremental health insurance legislation they could agree on, but Republican leaders promptly disagreed among themselves about accepting the offer. +The House Republican leader, Representative Robert H. Michel of Illinois, "is receptive to the idea," a spokesman said. "He will be meeting with the Speaker to discuss it." + But Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, who is all but certain to succeed Mr. Michel after his retirement at the end of this Congress, scoffed at the suggestion. "I don't want to be suckered," he said. "I do not trust them." +In the Senate, George J. Mitchell of Maine, the majority leader, sought to ease the fears of some of the more liberal Democrats who feared that any partial steps would do more harm than good. + +Critical Meeting + He met with a group of senators committed to universal coverage, the goal that all concede has been lost for this year, to reassure them about his discussions with the self-styled "mainstream coalition," a bipartisan group of about 20 senators who have been working on a relatively modest health care plan. It would use subsidies to increase insurance coverage to about 92 percent by 2004, from the current 85 percent, and cut the Federal deficit by at least $100 billion. +Mr. Mitchell will have a critical meeting on Wednesday afternoon with the leaders of the coalition, Senators John H. Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, and John B. Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana. Their staffs have been meeting during the last two weeks, trying to narrow differences between the coalition proposal and the earlier, more expansive plan put forward by Mr. Mitchell. +But now it is time for the senators themselves to deal with the remaining, significant differences, like how much latitude to give states to experiment with broadening health coverage, and what sort of taxes should be used to finance the plan. +On all sides, these discussions are seen as the best of the fading hopes for some action on health care in this Congress. But if they fail, some Democrats who are hoping to find Republican allies may put forward an even slimmer scheme that intends to insure all children and pregnant women, providing community- and home-based long-term care for the elderly and the disabled, and making a number of widely supported changes in insurance laws. + +'Sticker Shock' + Even so, the idea of taking partial steps that would produce changes in insurance law but not provide universal coverage drew a sharp warning of "sticker shock" from the Health Insurance Association of America today. It warned that seemingly benign changes in insurance laws, like prohibiting exclusions for pre-existing medical conditions, could lead to sharply higher premiums for people who now have insurance, and they might choose to drop their coverage. +While most Senate Democrats are ready to give Mr. Mitchell a chance to cut a deal with the Senate coalition, there is less tolerance for such an idea in the House, which is traditionally impatient with the Senate and where Democrats are less impressed with the utility of incremental steps than their Democratic colleagues in the Senate. Even so, like President Clinton, House leaders say they are waiting to see what Mr. Mitchell can come up with. +In that context, Mr. Foley's offer, made in a news conference, was little more than a formal courtesy. Mr. Michel seemed to treat it as such. His aides said that while he was always willing to explore compromises they doubted very much that the Democrats would give enough ground on serious differences like the limiting of awards in malpractice lawsuits. +But Mr. Gingrich, signaling the tone that the Republicans increasingly strike in the House and that he can be relied on to echo next year, would have none of it. Saying he feared that liberal Democrats would somehow get hold of any measure and make it more liberal than House leaders might agree on, he said, "I don't want to be set up." + +LOAD-DATE: September 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +317 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 14, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Still a Chance on Health Care + +SECTION: Section A; Page 18; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 486 words + +When Congress left town last month, the health care debate simmered down. But the staffs of the Senate majority leader, George Mitchell, and the bipartisan Mainstream Coalition continued to talk and have reportedly reached substantial agreement. Though the emerging bill would be incremental -- leaving some individuals uninsured -- it would improve health care for most Americans. Incremental reform would be substantial reform. +Why, then, does passage seem so distant? Standing in the way are political calculations by Robert Dole, the minority leader of the Senate, and Richard Gephardt, the majority leader of the House. They have yet to decide whether to go for limited reform this year or use defeat as an election-year strategy. Health care security for millions hangs in the balance because no one expects Congress to rebound from total defeat this year to pass reform next year. + The bill emerging from the Senate discussions would do much to improve medical markets. The coalition would guarantee everyone, including the seriously ill, the ability to buy coverage. There would be standardized policies and report cards so customers could judge prices and quality. Small companies and individuals could join large purchasing cooperatives. The bill would provide subsidies to poor families and would require individuals who choose lavish policies to pay the extra cost largely out of their own pockets. +These provisions would transform the health care industry with minimal bureaucracy. Of course, the bill contains flaws. It fails to require employers to pay for workers' premiums -- guaranteeing that tens of millions will remain uninsured. But no flaw appears so grave that it could make make matters worse or difficult to correct in the future. +Congress is two steps away from victory. Negotiators must first resolve remaining differences. Mr. Mitchell wants to give an expensive drug benefit to the elderly even though the Federal budget already heavily subsidizes this group. The coalition says, correctly, that individuals should win this new benefit only if they choose to drop Medicare and use a Federal voucher to buy into a private health plan -- the best way to subject Medicare to competition. The hardest problem seems to be settling how much flexibility states should have in taxing large companies that cover their workers. +The second step is political. Senate negotiators cannot budge unless they are assured that the deal will not unravel in the House. That requires Mr. Gephardt to back, unequivocally, the bill that emerges from the Senate; here President Clinton can apply pressure. Also moderate Republicans in the Senate need to lean on Mr. Dole and their House colleagues. +The problem is no longer health care architecture but election-year politics. Neither Mr. Dole nor Mr. Gephardt has decided whether to back the most important domestic legislation in a generation. + +LOAD-DATE: September 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +318 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 18, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Soup Kitchen Is Not Just a Phenomenon of the Cities + +BYLINE: By BILL RYAN + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 1; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1140 words + +THE center of scenic Old Saybrook, a popular shore town that more than doubles its population in summer, is always busy on Saturdays no matter what the season. Cars pass in endless streams along both sides of its wide and divided Main Street, a pattern only broken when one veers swiftly into a just-vacated parking space. The street has an aura of late 20th-century commercial bustle and prosperity coupled with the earlier American charm of three stately churches and some homes that date to the 18th century. +It also has two soup kitchens. + That fact would probably amaze casual visitors to the town, and even some of its residents. The soup kitchens do not receive a great deal of publicity and certainly do not fit into a Chamber of Commerce image of the community. +Soup kitchens in Old Saybrook? Next thing you know, there will be one in Essex, the even more upscale town just up the river. As a matter of fact, there are four soup kitchens in Essex now. And another in quaint little Chester, also upriver, where some residents proudly display a bumper sticker: "Chester, We Know Where It Is." And another in Clinton, a town down the shore a piece from Old Saybrook. +The soup kitchens are modest affairs compared to those in cities like Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport. None of them operate full time and they have clientele that differ in major respects from those in the cities. But they do illustrate a major point about life in Connecticut today: In the midst of plenty, there is also poverty. +"The people who come to us are not homeless or addicted, although we have a few who are alcoholic," said Robert P. Little. "A lot of them are just unemployed, or unemployable. Thirty percent of them are senior citizens, mostly women whose husbands did not leave them well enough off to survive without help. We have single mothers, some with many children." +And some, he said, are the people who are hurt first when the economy goes bad: the undereducated, the illiterate, the untrained, the poor who just get poorer. Towns like Old Saybrook and Old Lyme do have, he said, pockets of poverty tucked here and there, out of sight. +Mr. Little is a retired executive from the Southern New England Telephone Company. For the past two years, he has been the volunteer, unpaid chairman of Shoreline Soup Kitchens. The board is made up of four Protestant clergymen, a rabbi, six lay people and Mr. Little, who is Catholic. "We're an interfaith group and we have a simple aim. We chose to feed the hungry," he said. +Shoreline Soup Kitchens began five years ago, said Eleanor LaPlace who has been one of its leaders from the start, when First Baptist Church in Essex solicited suggestions on programs the church should undertake. The only one that survived, she said, was for a soup kitchen, to be held once a week, on the theory that some people might be hungry in a town with a reputation for affluence. "And people actually were hungry," she said. "These are the poor that people ignore because they don't see them." +The first meal served at the church only attracted seven or eight people, Mrs. LaPlace recalled. But the need was obviously there and the figures kept growing. + +A Hot Meal Every Day + Today, anyone who is hungry can get a hot meal every day of the week at one of the eight churches in the area that participate in the soup kitchen program: Sunday at 5 P.M. at Church of Christ in Chester, Monday at 5:30 P.M. at First Baptist in Essex, Tuesday at 5 P.M. at St. John's Episcopal in Essex; Wednesday at noon at Grace Episcopal in Old Saybrook and at United Methodist in Clinton; Thursday at 5 P.M. at Our Lady of Sorrows in Essex; Friday at noon at Trinity Lutheran in the Centerbrook section of Essex; Saturday at noon at St. John's Catholic in Old Saybrook. +About 350 meals are served in all during the week. Some people eat every day at one of churches. Some, particularly those without cars, only eat out one day of the week at the nearest participating church. + +Distributions Made + Saturday is the big day for the soup kitchen organization. After the meal is served in Old Saybrook at St. John's, bags of food are distributed. At this time of the year, about 200 people arrive each Saturday to get bags of food, Mr. Little said. Demand goes up radically in the heart of the winter. +No one is asked questions about need, Mr. Little said, either at the church meals or when bags of groceries are distributed. The only question is about how big a family is. Bigger families get more bags of food. "The 200 people who come each Saturday for bags of food represent 900 family members," Mr. Little said. "We distribute about $100,000 in food a year now." Forty percent is donated, by residents and local stores, he said. The other 60 percent must be paid for by church revenues. +On any Saturday at noon, the soup kitchen operation continues at the grammar school in back of St. John's Church where three rooms have been used for food storage and for meals for the past two years. The building has been mostly unused but this fall it will reopen as a parochial school. Mr. Little said he had been assured that the soup kitchen operation could stay. +People, mostly in family groups but occasionally by themselves, filter in quietly for lunch. Most have come by car, some sharing rides. Mothers with toddlers join people well into their 80's or more. All are dressed perhaps not stylishly but certainly cleanly. Certain people stand out. One is an older man, impeccably groomed, who looks as if he could be a resident of Fenwick, Old Saybrook's enclave of old money. Two little girls look as if they were dressed for a recital. +The face of the needy in Old Saybrook does not have the face of defeat of a more urban soup kitchen. It would be impossible to separate the volunteers serving food from those getting food and sometimes, indeed, they are both. "Some of the volunteers are also clients," Mr. Little said. +But he is very conscious that some people regard the Saturday meals as a demeaning experience. "Some wait outside and send their kids in for their bags of food," he said. "We try to ease people in, and then they find out that others here are in the same boat." + +A Social Occasion + Some seem to regard the Saturday lunch as a social occasion. Two old brothers come each Saturday from a nursing home in Essex, complaining that the food is terrible there. Children play with other children they see each week. +Mr. Little says grace, then the chatter starts. It is more like a church supper than a soup kitchen and a visitor is likely to forget the reason people are there is that they need, really need, the food. It is a quiet drama that unfolds each Saturday. And a few hundred feet away, the cars pass by in a steady stream on Main Street, in another world. + +LOAD-DATE: September 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: At St. John's in Old Saybrook, food for all generations. A bad economy still widens its grip. (Pg. 1); Art See, left, and Don Gillis organize groceries to be handed out at the St. John's Church soup kitchen in Old Saybrook. (Pg. 5) (Bruce Johnson for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +319 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 18, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: BUSHWICK; +2-Family Subsidized Housing Almost Sold Out + +BYLINE: By BRUCE LAMBERT + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 8; Column 3; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 341 words + +The rebuilding of Bushwick, one of Brooklyn's most troubled neighborhoods, is taking another step forward with the construction of 68 two-family homes to be occupied by low- and moderate-income families. The homes, part of a housing program called Bushwick Green, are expected to be completed by early next year. Most are already sold. +The construction has two parts: 28 buildings known as Linden Gates, on a site bounded by Linden, Gates, Central and Bushwick Avenues, and 40 buildings known as Madison Park, bounded by Broadway, Bushwick Avenue, Gates Avenue and Madison Street. + Work began early this year on the two-family buildings, each with a three-bedroom apartment upstairs and a two-bedroom apartment downstairs. +All the Linden Gates buildings and all but eight of the Madison Park buildings have been sold. The owners will live on one level and rent the other to help pay the mortgages. +The buildings cost about $196,000 each in Linden Gates and $205,000 to $210,000 in Madison park. A qualified applicant can receive up to $80,000 in subsidies, reducing the price to as little as $116,600 in Linden Gates and $125,677 in Madison Park. +The subsidies come from Borough President Howard Golden, the City Housing Preservation and Development Department and the New York State Affordable Housing Corporation. +The maximum family income allowed is $53,000. The minimum down payment is 5 percent. The home owners also benefit from an abatement in property taxes, which will be phased in over 20 years. +The New York City Housing Partnership is assisting the project, and the homes are being sold by the Ridgewood-Bushwick Senior Citizens Council. +The Bushwick Green program, announced in 1989 by Mayor Edward I. Koch to follow up on an earlier campaign promise to revitalize the community, originally called for homes for 650 families but was later cut. The first phase, 49 two-family homes called Bushwick Estates, was built in 1989. More homes are being planned after the latest projects are finished. BRUCE LAMBERT + +LOAD-DATE: September 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Madison Park houses, which are under construction in Bushwick. (Photographs by Adam Fernandez for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +320 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 19, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Felisa Rincon de Gautier, 97, Mayor of San Juan + +BYLINE: By ERIC PACE + +SECTION: Section D; Page 9; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 466 words + +Felisa Rincon de Gautier, Mayor of San Juan, P.R., from 1946 to 1969 and the only woman to hold that post, died on Friday in a nursing home in San Juan, where she had lived in recent months. She was 97. +She died after suffering a heart attack, The Associated Press reported. + She was appointed Mayor in 1946 to replace an incumbent who had resigned, and she was elected to office in later years. Running for another four-year term in 1964, she said, "After this term I want to lead my own life," and she did not run for re-election in 1968. Her other political work included membership on the Democratic National Committee. +Even before she became Mayor, Mrs. Rincon de Gautier, widely known as Dona Fela, worked on behalf of social causes, including the campaign to win Puerto Rican women the right to vote, which succeeded in 1932. +It was then that she went into politics, going on to press for child-care programs, centers for the elderly and legal aid for the poor. Her political power came in large part from the support of the city's poor residents, whom she organized within her Popular Democratic Party. +She worked hard to please the electorate. "My opponents campaign just before elections and then they disappear," she once said. "I start campaigning the day after the election and never stop." +She was also good at political repartee. After detractors said she had given city jobs to too many of her relatives, she replied: "I wish I had 20 more nieces. They work better -- for less." +As Mayor, she had a highly personal style that included enchanting local children by flying in planeloads of snow for Christmas parties. She maintained that personal touch even as San Juan grew, from a population of 180,000 when she first took office to 600,000 by 1961, when she was still meeting once a week with residents who needed advice or assistance. +But she also attended to larger matters, like public works. She was proud of having provided the city with well-equipped and hospitably managed dispensaries, as well as new schools and housing projects with nurseries and other amenities. +After stepping down as Mayor, she maintained her interest in politics. In 1992, at the age of 95, she was the oldest delegate to the Democratic National Convention, which was held in New York. +The eldest of eight children of a lawyer, she was born in Ceiba, 33 miles southeast of San Juan. She had to leave school at age 15 to care for her siblings. +Early in her life, she was a supporter of independence for Puerto Rico, but her views changed, and she went on to support the United States Commonwealth Constitution that came into effect in 1952. +In 1940, she married Jenaro A. Gautier, a lawyer who was secretary general of the Popular Democratic Party at the time. He died in 1971. + +NAME: Felisa Rincon de Gautier + +LOAD-DATE: September 19, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Felisa Rincon de Gautier (Gertrude Samuels, 1955) + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +321 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 20, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Senators Hope for a Deal on Health Today + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 728 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 + +Senator George J. Mitchell, the majority leader, and a bipartisan group of senators trying to pass health insurance legislation that would extend coverage to more than half of those now uninsured met again today and said they hoped to strike a bargain on Tuesday. +In the session today, they discussed the issues that still divide them, like whether to provide the elderly with new benefits for prescription drugs or long-term care. They also took up procedural questions of how to try to get a bill through the Senate and the House in the three or four weeks that remain before Congress adjourns in mid-October, discussing, for example, how much debate should be allowed before supporters try to force a vote. + "My objective is to pass a bill this year," Mr. Mitchell, Democrat of Maine, said after the two-hour meeting. +A few hours earlier, in a speech at a Washington hotel, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the minority leader, contended that there was no more hope for anything except perhaps a minimal bill. "Time has almost run out," he said. "I don't see anything happening this year." +Mr. Dole's opposition has been a given for almost all members of the self-styled "mainstream coalition." But efforts to pass any version of their bill this year must also contend with an uncertain quantity of opposition from the left, from senators who say the proposal does not go far enough. +Mr. Mitchell and the leaders of the group were encouraged that the threat of armed conflict in Haiti had evaporated, a development that might allow the Senate to take up other matters, including health care. Although Mr. Mitchell was twice called out of the two-hour meeting to discuss Haiti, he said he was sure that fighting would have meant much more of a distraction. +Senator Dave Durenberger, Republican of Minnesota, went further. He said that if there had been fighting in Haiti, then health care would have been dead. "Now," he said, "at least there is a hope." +After a morning meeting of the bipartisan group, whose fluctuating membership is around 20 senators, Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, told reporters that the Congressional Budget Office had estimated that their system of subsidies and changes in insurance laws would increase insurance coverage from the current 85 percent to about 94 percent by the year 2000. That was somewhat higher than the group's own estimate. +But he said the budget office also said the plan would reduce the Federal deficit by about $56 billion over 10 years, well under the $100 billion the group had hoped to achieve. +That issue is closely tied to one of the main remaining differences: the question of how much money can be saved by reductions in the future growth of Medicare spending. That, in turn, is connected to the strong desire by Mr. Mitchell and other Democrats to offer the elderly some new benefit to compensate for cuts in Medicare. +Another important unsettled issue, Senate aides say, is just how much flexibility to allow the states in developing their own efforts to broaden health insurance coverage. In general, Mr. Mitchell and most Democrats favor giving the states more leeway than the mainstream group does. +Nor have the two sides agreed on how to deal with the issue of malpractice litigation. The mainstream group favors limits on awards; Mr. Mitchell opposes them. +Mr. Mitchell and Senator John H. Chafee of Rhode Island, the Republican leader of the mainstream group, refused to discuss what they had settled today and what disagreements remained. +Mr. Mitchell said, "We did reach general agreement on a couple of major issues tonight." He said another meeting will be held on Tuesday afternoon. "We are moving on this just as fast as possible," he said. +Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, began a tactical campaign to protect the group's proposal from the accusation that it was a belated, last-minute effort, an assertion Republicans and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, are beginning to make. +He said the ability of Mr. Mitchell and the group to agree on so much so quickly was evidence that the issues were thoroughly understood. "We have debated this sufficiently," Mr. Kerrey said. The task supporters of the legislation now face, he said, was to persuade the American people to back their efforts and "get to the obstructionists." + +LOAD-DATE: September 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Senator George J. Mitchell, right, the majority leader, meeting with members of a bipartisan group searching for a health care compromise that can pass Congress before adjournment. Clockwise, from Mr. Mitchell, were Senators John B. Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana; Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska; Dave Durenberger, Republican of Minnesota, and John H. Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island. (Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +322 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 20, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +OUR TOWNS; +A Rare Find: A Doctor Who Makes House Calls + +BYLINE: By Joseph Berger + +SECTION: Section B; Page 5; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 831 words + +DATELINE: TARRYTOWN, N.Y. + +ELIO J. IPPOLITO is a relic, as rare and obsolete as a Philco radio, and as cherished. He is a doctor who makes house calls. +Stocky and rumpled, with the burdened but ever-hopeful trudge of a door-to-door salesman, he spends eight hours a week visiting the homes of the old and frail in the polyglot warrens of Tarrytown. Other doctors may tell invalids to summon an ambulance and make an office visit at government expense, but Dr. Ippolito, 61, thinks of home visits as he does the remedies in his plump black satchel. They can be curative. + "When you walk into a house, you see how people live," he said in a voice that is gravelly but spirited. "You see if they're in a cramped bedroom. If the mother and daughter don't get along, you'll see that better at home than in an office. You'll see if they're clean or filthy, if there's enough light or ventilation, if there's food in the refrigerator, if they're taking their medicine." +Others family practitioners know these benefits, but they eschew house calls as a losing proposition. Medicare pays $58 for a home visit, the same as for an office visit, whether the home is down the street or miles away. +Sure, Dr. Ippolito, who began his practice in 1961 delivering babies of Cuban refugees, shares his colleagues' anger with the idiocies of bureaucracies. He is often frustrated by patients as well. They'll eat too much salt or fail to tell him about lumps in their breasts until it is too late. Those are the burdens that silently weigh on his soul. +But he never takes his eye off what counts, the same values that drove him toward medicine a half-century ago as he worked in his father's drugstore after school. +"I enjoy taking care of the elderly, and I have vowed not to change my attitude, no matter how little I get paid," he said. "I feel home care is part of medical care." +ASTETHOSCOPE protruding out of his jacket pocket, Dr. Ippolito started a round recently at the home of Manuel Flores, a 74-year-old widower. Mr. Flores could not easily visit his office. Circulatory blockages had forced both legs to be amputated. He lay under a blanket in a dim, airless room lighted by a shaded bulb and a votive candle. A Spanish Bible rested on the night table and a portrait of Jesus looked down from the wall. +But he seemed to cheer instantly when Dr. Ippolito entered with his hoarse "Buenos dias!" Dr. Ippolito took Mr. Flores's blood pressure and listened to his chest. +"Is he coughing?" he asked Mr. Flores's son, Albert. +"He's coughing a little bit," Albert replied. +Dr. Ippolito renewed Mr. Flores's prescription for blood-pressure medication and ambled out. +"He takes care of me," the younger Mr. Flores told a visitor. "He takes care of my father. He takes care of my brother. Anytime my father wants, he's here right away." +AT Dr. Ippolito's next stop, James Hunt, a 79-year-old widower, was waiting sullenly in a narrow kitchen adorned with magazine photographs of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lucille Ball. Because of diabetes, Mr. Hunt had lost a leg, and grumbled about the fit of a prosthetic leg that cost $1,495. Dr. Ippolito can do nothing about such endemic injustices. Prosthetic legs are often painful. "Sorry, James" was his gentle response. +He was there to give Mr. Hunt a flu shot, then he checked four medicine vials to make sure there were enough pills, something he could not have done in an office. "You call me in a month and I'll get another sugar test," he said, turning toward the door so he could visit the home of Frances Yozzo, five miles away. +Dr. Ippolito drives his weatherbeaten Chevrolet Corsica as if Westchester's back streets were a test track, banking his turns screechingly and jolting from drive into reverse. "When I was younger, I could make five house calls and be back in the office in an hour," he said. "Time is all I've got. Time and experience." +Of course, his patients will implore that he sit down to dinner, and he generally obliges even if he knows his wife, Elisabetta, will unfailingly have dinner waiting whenever he comes home. +"Usually, I'm in a hurry, but if you don't do it, they're offended, so I stay and have a cup of coffee." +Mrs. Yozzo, 87, and suffering from heart failure and arthritis, was sprawled in a green armchair, her legs over an ottoman, watching a soap opera in an apartment where the curtains were drawn at midday. Dr. Ippolito examined her right calf. +"This feels cold," he said. "You've got poor circulation. If that leg starts to turn color and you get any black spots, I want to know." +He has been her doctor for 15 years and, in that time, she has visited his office just once. Her family long ago cultivated a sense of ownership of Dr. Ippolito, and she echoes Mr. Flores in praising Dr. Ippolito: "He took care of my husband. He took care of my daughter. Now he takes care of me." +As he headed put, this dinosaur among doctors said: "Call me in a month, honey. If there's any problem, call me before." + +NAME: Elio J. Ippolito + +LOAD-DATE: September 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Dr. Elio J. Ippolito, left, paying a visit to James Hunt, a 79-year-old widower who lost a leg to diabetes. Dr. Ippolito gave Mr. Hunt a flu shot in Mr. Hunt's kitchen and checked to make sure he had enough medication in the house, which the doctor could not have done from the office. Dr. Ippolito, arriving at the home of a patient in Tarrytown, N.Y., said home visits can be curative. (Photographs by Susan Harris for The New York Times) + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +323 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 22, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Meredith Monk Looks Into Roosevelt Island's Past + +BYLINE: By JENNIFER DUNNING + +SECTION: Section C; Page 17; Column 1; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 1014 words + +Roosevelt Island is a strip of land in the East River with ghostly remnants of history at its northern and southern tips. Meredith Monk is a composer and choreographer who specializes in creating and exploring archetypal memories. And Dancing in the Streets, a group that presents performances in nontheatrical outdoor spaces, is devoted to the proposition that the city is full of places in need of a little extra history of their own. Those are the ingredients that have gone into "American Archeology No. 1: Roosevelt Island," a two-part piece to be performed outdoors on the island tomorrow through Sunday afternoon. (Reservations are necessary.) +The island's first settlers were probably Indians from the Leni Lenape tribe. From the late 1600's to 1828, the place was known as Blackwells Island, named after the family that lived and farmed there and whose rebuilt house still stands, dwarfed by high-rises. New York City bought the island in 1829 and began sending its castoffs to live on what became known as Welfare Island, in prisons, poorhouses, hospitals for people with infectious diseases and asylums. Legend has it that inhabitants of these institutions included the newspaperwoman Nellie Bly, Typhoid Mary and Mae West, who is said to have been imprisoned for obscenity. + In the mid-1970's, the island was rebuilt as a model community, though two hospitals for the incurably ill and a ghostly abandoned nursing home remain, with the ruins, as links to the past. +"American Archeology" will begin at the northern end of the island in Lighthouse Park, near the remains of a 19th-century madhouse that Charles Dickens wrote of and a small stone lighthouse said to have been constructed by a madhouse inmate. +"That part deals pretty much with the community as it is now on Roosevelt Island," Ms. Monk said in a recent interview. "There will be about 40 extras, children, office workers and senior citizens, a horse and my singer-dancer-actors." +Ms. Monk's performers will be dressed in 19th-century period costumes and will sing choral music she wrote for them. The cast of extras will also include doctors from Bird S. Coler Hospital and Goldwater Memorial Hospital. +After an intermission of about an hour, the audience will gather again at the island's southern end, normally not open to the public. The quiet is even greater here, a place of haunted-looking ruins, where scraps of grimy curtain still flap at gaping windows and ailanthus trees and tall grasses guard abandoned doorways. The second part of "American Archeology" will center around a jewel-like ruin of a building that used to be a smallpox hospital designed by James Renwick. +The audience will watch as performers gradually become visible in a dance of death that Ms. Monk has choreographed for actual hospital patients and members of her company, who play characters that include, as she put it, "three crazy doctors." "You wonder who the sane and the insane are," she said. +The dirt road the performers will move along was probably never a real street. But Dancing in the Streets, one of the producers of "American Archeology," is not literal about its name. The organization came into existence 10 years ago when a young choreographer named Elise Bernhardt innocently decided a piece of hers ought to be danced on the Brooklyn Bridge. +To do that, she was soon made to understand, she had to put together an impressive-sounding package. "I had never run anything," Ms. Bernhardt, 38, recalled recently. "I bought my first high heels and a new dress and walked into the offices of the Brooklyn Bridge Centennial Commission with a lot of diagrams. They asked me if I had backing." +She wasn't sure what that meant. Thinking it had to something to do with supporters, she went to all her friends and asked if they wanted to be in a festival. "Sure," they told her, "if you organize it." +City officials explained to Ms. Bernhardt about permits. A customer in the restaurant where she was a waitress taught her about budgeting and got the company where he worked to give her $10,000. And she was on her way. Today, Dancing in the Streets has a budget of a little over $500,000 and has presented performances at Wave Hill, Coney Island, Grand Central Terminal, the Apollo Theater and sites around the United States and Europe, among them a hydraulic bridge in Newcastle, England, run by a drunken operator in the midst of a fireworks display. +Ms. Bernhardt is now plotting to get City Water Tunnel No. 3 opened for a piece by Marty Pottenger, a construction worker who is also a performance artist. She is particularly proud of the relationships Dancing in the Streets has established with public schools in Queens and Brooklyn. +As a student at Sarah Lawrence College, she came under the influence of Bessie Schonberg, a teacher of composition, and Ms. Monk, with whom Ms. Bernhardt studied in a workshop that changed all her ideas about the interaction of music and art. "And then, last fall, I saw the ruins," she said. "Bingo. Meredith Monk. I always think matchmaking is my real job." +Ms. Monk said she was a little worried about imposing her vision on the place, "getting in the way of the space." +"I'm trying to stay out of the way of their beauty and poignancy," she said of the ruins, while still trying "to make them come alive so people will see them that way." +She has created dream landscapes before, but most often inside theaters. "It's a pleasure to work with a concrete space," she said of the island sites. "We really have shovels. We dig real dirt." +"This is a young country," she added. "We have a sense of the future, of speed, of not having to carry around on our backs a lot of the past. That leads to a fragmented and violent contemporary reality. The present moment has to incorporate the past. This is my attempt to do something about it, I guess." +For Ms. Bernhardt, the pleasure of the project is a little simpler. "One of the nicest things," she said, "is when people tell me, 'I will never see this place again without these dancers, that music.' " + +LOAD-DATE: September 22, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Meredith Monk, second from right, rehearsing her "American Archeology No. 1: Roosevelt Island" with cast members. The piece will be performed outdoors tomorrow through Sunday. (Nancy Siesel/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +324 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 23, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Ideal Juror for O. J. Simpson: Football Fan Who Can Listen + +BYLINE: By DAVID MARGOLICK + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 5; National Desk; Law Page + +LENGTH: 1540 words + +Men rather than women, black men if possible. Older people rather than younger. Discerning rather than deferential. Shepherds rather than sheep, football buffs rather than football widows, fans of "L.A. Law" rather than "NYPD Blue." +And though there are no longer any blank slates when it comes to O. J. Simpson -- "If you get people who don't know anything about this case, they must be total idiots," Gerry Spence, the high-profile defense lawyer, remarked -- it's better that they get their news from "MacNeil/ Lehrer" or Newsweek than "Geraldo!" or Star. + Among lawyers and jury consultants that is the consensus prescription for Mr. Simpson's ideal juror, the type his legal team should seek on Monday, when jury selection in the case is scheduled to begin. +Yesterday, the judge in the case described news organizations as "irresponsible" and said they were disseminating incorrect and "prejudicial" information to the public. [Page A16.] +Jury selection, experts agree, is perhaps the crucial phase of the case -- matched, said Roy M. Black, a prominent defense lawyer in Miami, only by Mr. Simpson's potential appearance on the stand. +"Everything else in the case is not even in the same universe," said Mr. Black, who successfully defended William Kennedy Smith against rape charges in 1991. "You've got to put people on the jury who are willing to listen to what he has to say." +But these rules of thumb on jury selection in this case, while widely shared, are by no means universally held. Jury selection remains one of the last refuges of ethnic, racial and sexual stereotypes, a process in which political correctness has no place. In deciding who will decide Mr. Simpson's fate, however, these stereotypes are often contradictory. +Women, particularly white women, particularly those who know bad marriages or abuse, may be more likely to empathize with the slain mother of two small children, but they could also be more likely to fall in love with a dashing male defendant. Blacks may be more wary of law enforcement, more inclined to think that Mr. Simpson was set up. But they may be just as inclined to resent such assumptions and assert their independence. +Law-and-order types may favor the prosecution, but they, more than others, could be offended by what the defense has characterized as bungling by the Los Angeles Police Department. Younger jurors may be more conservative than the aging alumni of Woodstock Nation, more inclined to see Mr. Simpson as huckster and hack actor than hero, but their minds are supple enough to attend to tedious testimony, and thereby spot cracks in the state's case. So would more intelligent jurors, but too much scientific sophistication may make them easily dazzled by the results of DNA tests. +"Anyone who tries to sell you on the idea that jury selection is a science is jerking your chain," said Robert Hirschhorn, a jury consultant in Galveston, Tex., and co-author of a leading text on the subject. "What you're trying to do is match your client, your case and your lawyer with your juror. At best, it's 20 percent science, 80 percent art." +In a sense, "jury selection" is a misnomer. It is more a matter of de-selection, damage control, forensic triage. Each side may challenge an unlimited number of candidates as being biased, but only 20 without explanation -- so-called peremptory challenges. "You're not selecting people but eliminating those you find offensive," said Gerry Goldstein of San Antonio, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "What you get is what's left over, the people who don't tell you very much." +Neither side is sparing any expense. The defense team, led by Robert L. Shapiro, has brought in Jo-Ellan Dimitrius of Pasadena, Calif., a veteran of the Rodney G. King, Reginald O. Denny and McMartin Preschool cases. The Los Angeles District Attorney's office has retained Decision Quest of Los Angeles, which assisted Pennzoil in its celebrated battle against Texaco. +To lawyers like Mr. Spence, it is a waste of money. Lawyers, he believes, can do the job just as well using little more than instinct. "I don't care whether jurors are rich or poor, black or white, male or female, old or young or what they do," he said. "I want to know if it's someone I can bare my soul to, someone who will listen to me, someone I can be a friend to, or if it's some cynic or jerk who's full of hate." +But to Mr. Black, it is money well spent. Because the case is so extraordinary, he said, all conventions about picking jurors are inapplicable. Candidates must be asked the standard questions -- about the people they admire, the books they read, the television programs they watch, the bumper stickers on their cars -- plus others particular to the Simpson case: their views on interracial marriage, for example. +They must also be asked questions about particular evidence, arguments or personalities in the case that emerge only by staging simulated trials before focus groups or mock juries, as the defense has presumably been doing and the prosecution did earlier this month in Arizona -- much to its chagrin when word of the panel's distaste for the prosecutor, Marcia Clark, and her case leaked out. +Just what all those questions will be, and who will ask them, remains to be determined. Both sides have submitted proposed jury questionnaires to Judge Lance A. Ito, highlighting the queries they deem most important. After consulting with counsel, he will amalgamate the two, and ask those candidates for whom three to six months of jury duty would not impose a disabling hardship to fill out the resulting form. +In many states, lawyers conduct the questioning process known as voir dire themselves. They use it not only to select jurors but also to establish rapport with potential panelists and lay out their cases. To the dismay of defense lawyers, who believe that by asking open-ended, touchy-feely questions, they plumb subterranean psychological strata that judges miss, a California law adopted by referendum four years ago authorizes courts to question jurors entirely by themselves. +But state law also authorizes judges to let the lawyers take part should the lawyers demonstrate "a significant possibility of bias because of the nature of the case or its participants." Judge Ito is expected to allow both sides to participate to some degree. For each it could be critical: for the prosecution, because a single Simpson sympathizer can produce a hung jury; for the defense, because of the need to ferret out subtle, pro-prosecution biases. +Mr. Hirschhorn and Mr. Black said Ms. Clark should seek out female jurors. "Women are more likely to bond with a female prosecutor and more likely to be sympathetic to the abuse angle of the case, particularly if they've had any problems with men -- and there are very few who haven't," Mr. Black said. +But Linda A. Fairstein, chief of the sex crimes prosecution unit of the Manhattan District Attorney's office and the prosecutor in the Robert Chambers "preppie murder" case, strenuously disagreed. "In general, and across all racial borders, when the defendant is attractive, articulate and a celebrity, women more than men tend, unfortunately, to base their verdict on external appearances," Ms. Fairstein said. "It's one of the saddest lessons I've learned in doing this work." +Female jurors, she added, tend to judge female victims harshly, a factor that could prove crucial in this case, where the defense is expected to depict Nicole Brown Simpson as a habitue of life's fast lane. +Mr. Hirschhorn joined Ms. Fairstein in also challenging the widely held notion that black jurors, feeling kinship with Mr. Simpson and disdain for the white establishment, would favor the defense. "If that's what the defense is thinking, O. J.'s going to go from Hall of Fame to the halls of San Quentin," Mr. Hirschhorn said. "African-Americans become leaders when other blacks are on trial, and they may very well judge them more harshly." +Mr. Black advised the defense to stay away from young jurors. "People who went through the 1960's are probably a lot better, and older people would know O. J. better," he said. "To people in their 20's, O. J. is ancient history." +Ms. Fairstein thought the prosecution should stay away from younger jurors as well, but for different reasons. "Young jurors have trouble putting people behind bars for a long incarceration," she said. "And young jurors tend to waffle. They're not leaders in the jury room." +However long it lasts and however much they may participate, the voir dire will provide the lawyers a chance to shape -- or reshape -- their images. Ms. Clark, for example, can humanize herself, Mr. Hirschhorn said, thereby avoiding the fate of Moira K. Lasch, the wooden, icy and ultimately unsuccessful prosecutor in the William Kennedy Smith rape case. +And if he were defense counsel, Mr. Hirschhorn said, he might want to abolish some of the polish. "I'd be a little worried about coming across as slick," he said. "I would not wear double-breasted suits, I would not wear a shirt of any color other than white or blue, I'd stay away from the power collars, cuff links, tie bars and pinkie rings." + +LOAD-DATE: September 23, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Linda A. Fairstein of the Manhattan District Attorney's office says women are more likely than men to base a verdict on appearances. (Jill Krementz); But Robert Hirschhorn, a jury consultant, says little is certain in jury selection. (F. Carter Smith for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +325 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 25, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +New & Noteworthy Paperbacks + +BYLINE: By Laurel Graeber + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 40; Column 1; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 910 words + +THE QUEEN AND I +By Sue Townsend. Soho, $11. +There are those who believe that Britain's royal family has always lived on its subjects' charity; in this comic novel it is literally so. After Queen Elizabeth and her kin end up in public housing, the author "takes what we think we know about the royals and lets them act according to our preconceptions," Michael Elliott said here last year. "So they have a marvelous familiarity." + +THE FOUNTAIN OF AGE +By Betty Friedan. Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, $15. +The author who tackled "the feminine mystique" turns to "the age mystique." Debunking the image of the years after 65 as a time of inevitable decline, she offers a view of this period as one of enhanced creativity and greater freedom from sex roles. Last year our reviewer, Nancy Mairs, said: "I can't imagine a more heartening gift for a woman of any age. . . . Or a man, for that matter." Ms. Mairs's own exploration of the journey of life, ORDINARY TIME: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal (Beacon, $12), includes reflections on aging, as well as on her experience with multiple sclerosis and her husband's with cancer. Detailing her reluctant but persistent embrace of religious belief, it "is a remarkable accomplishment: a confessional book that avoids . . . narcissistic pitfalls," Kathleen Norris said here last year. The effects of aging are also examined in OLD FRIENDS, by Tracy Kidder (Richard Todd/Houghton Mifflin, $10.95), which focuses on two elderly men in Linda Manor, a Massachusetts nursing home. Last year our reviewer, Mary Gordon, said, "We see Linda Manor clearly, from the piano in the lobby to the flowered carpet that causes problems for the impaired minds of some of the patients." +PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION +By D. M. Thomas. Carroll & Graf, $10.95. +This novel by the author of "The White Hotel" features a Jewish doctor and inmate at Auschwitz who agrees to treat a Nazi physician. Years later, one of the men resurfaces under a different name -- but which one? "Mr. Thomas's construction of a narrative puzzle . . . is masterly," Frederick Busch said here last year. +LIFE FOR ME AIN'T BEEN NO CRYSTAL STAIR +By Susan Sheehan. Vintage, $11. +Crystal Taylor, the daughter of drug addicts and a drug abuser herself, gives birth at the age of 14. This book describes Crystal's and her son's journeys through New York City's foster care system and their eventual reunion. Last year our reviewer, Samuel G. Freedman, said the book "should disabuse any reader of utopian fantasies about 'family preservation.' " Drug-shadowed lives are also explored in SIX OUT SEVEN, by Jess Mowry (Anchor/Doubleday, $12.95), a novel about a teen-age gang in Oakland, Calif. "Few authors capture the slang and terrors of inner-city streets the way Mr. Mowry does," Michael Upchurch said here last year. +WHOREDOM IN KIMMAGE: Irish Women Coming of Age +By Rosemary Mahoney. Anchor/Doubleday, $12.95. +In 1991 the author hobnobbed in Irish pubs, interviewed Ireland's first female president and reported on feminism. Last year our reviewer, Peter Finn, praised her "wonderful ear" and "alert, cutting sensibility." +DIVINE INSPIRATION: A Homer Kelly Mystery +By Jane Langton. Penguin, $5.95. +Boston church organs and organists fall victim to foul play in this ecclesiastically inclined whodunit. The novel's "affectionately drawn characters make church going a memorable, if not entirely spiritual, experience," Marilyn Stasio said here last year. +The FBI +By Ronald Kessler. Pocket Star, $6.50. +J. Edgar Hoover gave this Government agency an identity that it has been trying to shake ever since the former director's death. This book includes the F.B.I.'s expansion into undercover work, high-technology methods and investigation of white-collar crime. Last year our reviewer, John P. MacKenzie, called it "an informative study by a resourceful student." +THE FORMS OF WATER +By Andrea Barrett. +Washington Square/Pocket Books, $12. +This novel chronicles the declining fortunes of several members of the Massachusetts Auberon family, whose land and happiness have been destroyed by the advent of the Stillwater Reservoir. "Ms. Barrett nicely details the quiet agonies of people who have fallen from grace," Jennifer Howard said here last year. +NO BREATHING ROOM: The Aftermath of Chernobyl +By Grigori Medvedev. Translated by Evelyn Rossiter. Basic Books, $11. +The engineer who wrote "The Truth About Chernobyl" describes his attempt to warn the public about the potential danger in the years before the disastrous 1986 nuclear-reactor accident. Last year our reviewer, Felicity Barringer, said the book offered "tantalizing glimpses of the stolid bureaucracy of censorship." +GOLDMAN'S ANATOMY +By Glenn Savan. Bantam, $8.95. +A lovers' triangle develops when Arnie Goldman, a disabled gem dealer, suddenly becomes host to Redso, his former best friend and a kooky aspiring playwright, and Redso's neglected girlfriend. The result is "a fast-paced comic romp," Andrea Barnet said here last year. +PARADISE OF THE BLIND +By Duong Thu Huong. Translated by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson. Penguin, $9.95. +A young Vietnamese woman's widowed mother and her aunt battle for her loyalty in this novel, which examines the damage the country's Communist regime inflicts on family life. Last year our reviewer, Anne Barnard, said the characters' emotions are revealed in "sudden, searing glimpses." LAUREL GRAEBER + +LOAD-DATE: September 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Betty Friedan. (ICHAEL SHAVEL) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +326 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 25, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Harriman Suit: Misconduct, Or Just Bad Luck Investing? + +BYLINE: By JAN HOFFMAN with MATTHEW PURDY + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 2182 words + +It was when the trust fund checks stopped coming last fall to the elderly daughters of Gov. W. Averell Harriman, the railroad heir and financier, that the family began to sweat. +A son-in-law had already been dispatched to make discreet inquiries. The family discovered that funds that had once held $25 million had dwindled to scarcely $3 million. The fortune had been overseen by their patriarch's widow, Pamela Harriman, now the United States Ambassador to France, and his legal adviser, Clark M. Clifford, the Washington power broker. + In place of their cash, the Harriman heirs found that they owned a brown behemoth deep in rural New Jersey: the Seasons Resort and Conference Center (nee the Playboy Hotel), a 560-room hotel on 43 acres, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. +In a lawsuit that landed in Federal Court in Manhattan this month, three generations of Harriman heirs contend that Mr. Clifford, Mrs. Harriman and others not only frittered away the fortune that Mr. Harriman had set aside for them, but also deceived them about the sorry state of the investments. +The defendants are essentially saying that the beneficiaries were informed throughout and that, unhappily, a prudent investment went awry in the real-estate crash. +But what the next months and probably years of Harriman family litigation comes down to is this: "It's a terrible way to live out your last years," said a party to the litigation, referring to the principals, who are in their 70's and 80's. "That's what the children and Mrs. Harriman and Mr. Clifford are facing." +By all accounts, the Harriman heirs -- who include two elderly daughters, six grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren -- are severely allergic to the spotlight. +"They're the least litigious people in the world," said Peter Duchin, the society orchestra leader who was raised in the Harriman household and who has made no secret of his animosity toward Pamela Harriman. "They're old-fashioned, classy people with a good sense of values who believe that civilized people should be able to air differences without lawyers. They must be mad as hell." +By contrast, Pamela Harriman's English cream complexion bloomed under decades of the spotlight. She was a society column fixture known for her husbands, companions, money and power. She has a son named Winston Churchill, after her first father-in-law, and until recently, she owned the royalties to "The Sound of Music" as a result of her second marriage, to the Broadway producer Leland Hayward. +She attracts admirers and detractors of equal intensity. Mr. Duchin is married to Mr. Hayward's daughter Brooke, who chronicled her bitter battles with her former stepmother in her 1977 autobiography, "Haywire." +But George Trescher, a New York fund-raiser, said Mrs. Harriman's riveting charm made her "the best person a man could sit next to at dinner." +Her 1971 marriage to Mr. Harriman, when he was 79 and she was 51, made her the pre-eminent hostess and fund-raiser within the Democratic Party. Through a political action committee nicknamed Pampac, she raised millions for Democratic candidates, including Bill Clinton. +Mr. Harriman doted on her, and when he died in 1986, the lawsuit says, he left her $33 million of his $65 million estate, plus a trust valued at $11.6 million. He named her executor, giving her vast power over his numerous investments. + +Trust Funds For the Heirs + The other descendants were virtually shut out of the Harriman will. +"I have intentionally refrained from making substantial provision for my beloved daughters," Mr. Harriman wrote, "not from any lack of love and affection for them but because I know them to be otherwise well provided for." +From 1935 through 1971, he had set up trust funds for his daughters, grandchildren and successive generations, which paid them income. +The beneficiaries say that scarcely $3 million in cash remains in the trusts, and they are seeking at least $30 million in damages. +Although Mary Fisk, one of the daughters, is said to ride city buses when she is in Manhattan, that is a matter of preference rather than penury. Both daughters married comfortably, and Mr. Harriman gave them gifts during his lifetime. In recent years, Mrs. Harriman also gave the heirs about a million dollars, her lawyers say. +The grandchildren relied to greater and lesser degrees on the trust checks: one is a storefront lawyer in Washington, another works in a rehabilitation clinic near New York, a third is a developer in Palm Beach, Fla. +While reports vary about the tone of the relationship between Mrs. Harriman and the Governor's descendants -- "She was very, very fond of some of them," said her friend, Kitty Carlisle Hart -- the lawsuit and the plaintiffs' recent efforts to freeze Mrs. Harriman's and Mr. Clifford's New York assets have caused a deep rift. + +Complete Confidence In an Administrator + In 1984, Mr. Harriman, who in his long career had been Governor of New York, an Ambassador to the Soviet Union and to Britain, and Commerce Secretary, asked Mr. Clifford and Paul C. Warnke to be unpaid trustees for those trust funds. Mr. Clifford was Defense Secretary under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Mr. Warnke was the chief arms negotiator under President Jimmy Carter. +A trustee has a basic obligation to research investments diligently and give prudent advice to beneficiaries. +The men pooled the various funds, which totaled nearly $13 million, into two investment partnerships. Mr. Clifford, Mr. Warnke and, as of 1986, Mrs. Harriman were the general partners, the lawsuit says, giving them control over the funds and responsibility for the investments. +The money was directly administered by a New York office run by William Rich 3d, who is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit. +Mr. Clifford said in an interview that Mr. Harriman placed complete confidence in Mr. Rich. "Harriman said, 'He's a lawyer, he's worked with me, he's exceedingly intelligent and wise,' " Mr. Clifford said. "He told Pamela: 'Don't interfere with Bill Rich's judgment. It has proved itself again and again.' " +Initially, the trusts flourished along with the stock market. From 1984 to 1989, the $12.9 million grew to approximately $25 million. But after the 1987 stock market slide, Mr. Clifford said, a decision was made to diversify the family's holdings. +Real estate, they thought, was the answer. +A $1.4 million real-estate investment in Queens arranged by a New Jersey financier, Eugene W. Mulvihill, had been a winner for the Harrimans, turning a $3.1 million profit, according to a defense lawyer in the case. So when Mr. Mulvihill soon after offered a fresh investment opportunity -- a hotel in Sussex County, New Jersey -- Mr. Rich, with the approval of Mr. Clifford and Mrs. Harriman, grabbed at it, investing $4.4 million. +The resort, which opened as the Playboy Hotel and Resort at Great Gorge in 1971, had been only intermittently successful when a company controlled by Mr. Mulvihill bought it in 1988. By 1989, when the Harriman investment was made, the company was hungry for cash. +But Mr. Mulvihill exudes optimism and is a consummate self-promoter who tosses off comments like, "The smartest people in the country invest with me." He is also a convicted felon. +In 1984, he pleaded guilty to charges that he set up a fake insurance company after investigators found he had paid himself premiums to give the appearance that he had insurance on a ski area that his company owned near the resort. As a result, he was barred from the securities business. +One of Mr. Mulvihill's partners in the hotel was Robert E. Brennan, a brash securities dealer who piloted his helicopter in television ads during the 1980's for his company, First Jersey Securities. +In 1984, without admitting wrongdoing, he resolved Federal securities fraud charges by agreeing not to violate such laws in the future. He is currently on trial in New York on charges of inflating stock prices. +Mr. Brennan's travails were widely covered in the press, and Mr. Mulvihill's were detailed in a corporate annual report just months before the Harriman investment was made. "Back in 1989," Mr. Clifford said, "neither name meant anything to me." + +Pouring More Money Into a Faltering Hotel + With the Seasons Resort needing renovation and real-estate values plummeting, the Harrimans' investment faltered. To shore up the initial investment, the trust kept pouring money into the hotel. In 1991, the Harriman partnerships bought the hotel outright from Mr. Mulvihill's company. +By 1993, the lawsuit contends, the trusts' investments were hardly diverse: $21 million had gone into the hotel. Mrs. Harriman, according to one of her lawyers, William J. Perlstein, also lost more than $3 million of her own money in the hotel. +The only investor to be made whole, the lawsuit says, was First American Bank of New York, whose $5.5 million loan to the resort was repaid. Mr. Rich was a director of the bank, and Mr. Clifford was president of the bank's parent company. +In 1992, Mr. Clifford was charged with fraud for concealing First American's ownership by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. The charges against Mr. Clifford, who is 87, were dropped because of his ill health, and his law partner, Robert Altman, was acquitted of similar charges last year. +Despite the infusion of capital, the renovations were never completed. +"One person says, 'Let's cut our losses,' and another says, 'Put a couple more million in,' " said Sara Moss, Mr. Rich's lawyer. "They're two different opinions, but that's not chicanery." +She said the hotel received "positive appraisals from a serious investment bank and accounting firm that looked at it." +The hotel's value will be among the disputes in the litigation. A 1991 appraisal done for the Harriman trust put the hotel's worth at $45.1 million, pending completion of the renovations. But when the hotel declared bankruptcy in August 1993, the Harriman heirs who now control the property set the value at $9.3 million. +Another litigation issue is the heirs' claim that Mr. Clifford, Mr. Warnke and Mr. Rich misled them by concealing the extent of the investments in the resort and other ventures, like a start-up plastics company now nearing collapse. The suit says the heirs were paid from the funds' principal, to give the appearance that the investments were yielding a profit. +In the summer of 1992, Averell Mortimer, a Harriman grandson who is an investment banker in New York, asked that up to a million dollars of his trust money be placed in a fund that invests in distressed companies. According to the lawsuit, a letter signed by Mr. Clifford and Mr. Warnke discouraged the move, saying, "We have real concerns about the prudence of relying on such a high-risk investment fund for trust assets." +In truth, the lawsuit contends, Mr. Mortimer's money was not available: It had been pledged against an $18 million line of credit from Morgan Guaranty for the hotel. +Ms. Moss, Mr. Rich's lawyer, echoed the position taken by Mrs. Harriman through her lawyers and by Mr. Clifford when she said: "The beneficiaries were informed throughout about the investment in writing and orally." + +Negotiations End Without Settlement + Early last year, as Mrs. Harriman was preparing for hearings on her ambassadorial appointment, she resigned as general partner of the family's investment companies. Later that year, Mr. Clifford, who was under indictment in the B.C.C.I. case and in poor health, and his partner, Mr. Warnke, resigned as trustees. Mr. Rich assumed the post. +By late summer of 1993, Charles C. Ames, a Boston lawyer who is married to Mr. Harriman's granddaughter Kathleen, was looking into the management of the funds. Mr. Rich stepped aside as trustee this February. Mr. Ames and W. Nicholas Thorndike became the new trustees, and they are pressing the lawsuit on behalf of the Harriman heirs. +Negotiations began early this year, with Mrs. Harriman represented by Lloyd N. Cutler, the temporary White House counsel, who got approval to handle a few private matters when he accepted the position. Offers and counteroffers were made, but talks eventually broke down. +Formal responses by the defendants will not be filed for two months. Already they are trying to distance themselves from each other. Mr. Clifford has said that, at Mr. Harriman's behest, he relied solidly on the investment advice of Mr. Rich, who was in frequent contact with the beneficiaries. +Mr. Rich, through his lawyer, has said that while no duties were breached, his role was to give advice while the others had final responsibility. +Mr. Warnke, who did not return calls for this article last week, said earlier that he had not known the extent of the investment in the hotel. +And through her lawyers, Mrs. Harriman said that she had not been a trustee and that she had understood her role as general tax partner not to encompass investment responsibility. +Meanwhile, the Harrimans' hotel is open for business and has plenty of rooms available. + +LOAD-DATE: September 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: The Seasons Resort and Conference Center in Vernon Valley, N.J., in which the fortune of three generations of Harriman heirs has been invested. The 560-room hotel on 43 acres is almost bankrupt. (Norman Y. Lono for The New York Times); Pamela and W. Averell Harriman in 1981, after 10 years of marriage, at a political fund-raising event to celebrate his 90th birthday. (United Press International/Bettmann, in "Life of the Party" by Christopher Ogden; @Little, Brown, and Co., 1994); Clark M. Clifford, who had been W. Averell Harriman's legal advisor, is also named in the lawsuit filed by Harriman heirs. (Associated Press) (pg. 46) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +327 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 25, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Welfare for Middle-Class Elderly?; +In Final Years, Many Transfer Assets to Qualify for Medicaid + +BYLINE: By ESTHER B. FEIN + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 39; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk; Second Front + +LENGTH: 1771 words + +On a sunny floor in a New Jersey nursing home, two elderly women share a room, news about their grandchildren and a plight ever more common among their aging and ailing peers: both are poor, and their bills are paid by Medicaid. +But while one depleted her life savings in the first two months she spent at the nursing home, the other, a widowed homemaker debilitated by Parkinson's disease, intentionally reduced herself to poverty to qualify for Medicaid. Several years ago, she paid a lawyer to transfer $50,000 worth of stocks, bonds and cash to her sons and grandchildren. + For the last several years, thousands of middle-income elderly people, terrified that long-term health care costs could wipe out their savings, have transferred their assets to relatives to qualify for Medicaid. +The practice has created a swelling corps of lawyers who help people to pauperize themselves legally and has prompted an intense ethical debate over whether people with money should benefit from a medical program intended for the poor. +"It's a growing subterranean economy done with professional help," said Mildred Shapiro, associate commissioner of Health and Long Term Care in New York State's Department of Social Services. +Although the money is no longer in their names, the older people depend on a tacit agreement that those who control the assets will use some of the money to care for them. More importantly to many older people, such planning allows them to leave money to their heirs that would otherwise be depleted for health care. +But critics say that those who qualify for Medicaid through such financial preparations are getting middle-class welfare. They say that soaring Medicaid costs, which are paid through a combination of Federal, state and, in some cases, local dollars, are straining government budgets and that recipients should be limited to the truly needy. +"I don't believe the Medicaid system can sustain itself and serve the people it was intended to if it's being used this way by upper- and middle-income people," said Carl S. Young, president of the New York Association of Homes and Services for the Aged in Albany. "It's perfectly legal, and it's happening in the absence of any coherent public policy on how we're going to pay for long-term care." +The issue of such transfers has become so pervasive that both Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, and his Republican challenger, George E. Pataki, have had to answer questions about arrangements they made for their parents' long-term care. +In response to the criticism, Congress tightened some Medicaid rules last year to make it harder for wealthy and middle-income elderly people to qualify. +Supporters stress that the methods are legal and necessary, and not unlike tax planning that other lawyers perform. They say that while Medicare covers acute illnesses like heart attacks and cancer, it does not cover prolonged stays in nursing homes and largely neglects care for chronic, degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, forcing people to seek Medicaid's security. +"The real problem is that no one is forming a sound, workable policy for long-term health care at a time when demand for it is growing so quickly, so Medicaid becomes the answer," said Jane Gould, director of New York State's Office for the Aging. +Most Medicaid estate planning, as the practice is called, is being done with the help of a new cadre of lawyers who specialize in issues affecting the elderly. The Academy of Elder Law Attorneys, a professional society in Tucson, lists 4,000 members nationwide; 10 years ago, the group did not exist. +In the last few years, most state bar associations have started sections or committees on elder law, and law schools are beginning to offer courses on the subject. +"Our numbers are growing because health care costs are growing, the aging population is growing and nursing home costs are growing," said Peter J. Strauss, an elder law specialist with the New York firm Epstein Becker & Green. "People are afraid of becoming destitute." +Nationally, the cost of a nursing home, for example, is about $36,000 a year, and experts say that most people enter one after they have already had severe medical problems that have eaten away at their savings. +Private long-term care insurance is available, but its use remains limited, experts say. Although such insurance costs only a few hundred dollars a year for healthy people who sign up before they turn 60, it is unavailable to those who are already infirm, and the policies are often only good for a limited period. +The woman in the New Jersey nursing home who spent her savings paying for her own care, said it pained her to have worked her entire life as a seamstress, to have carefully set aside money for her grandchild only to lose it to poor health. +"I wanted to give my granddaughter a leg up," said the woman, who is 84 and partly paralyzed by a stroke. "Not to be able to leave her anything hurts." Like several other elderly people interviewed, she preferred to speak of her finances anonymously. +To be sure, many older people choose not to transfer their assets. Some feel degraded by accepting public assistance intended for the poor. Others are reluctant to cede control of their finances and worry that if relationships sour, their money will be jeopardized. +"Even those who think their money is safe find sometimes that it was used to pay for college or because some lazy son decided not to work for two years and to live off of it," said Rona Bartelstone, a geriatric care manager in Florida. "And the risk is not just losing the money, but losing the relationship when the older person realizes they've been swindled by someone they trusted." +But fear of poverty, experts say, is motivating a growing number of middle-income elderly people to shed their assets and assure their Medicaid eligibility. +"They're scared of being caught in a crunch," said Ruth Sabatini, a care planner with Loretto Senior Choices, a nonprofit social service organization in Syracuse. "They all want to know, 'How am I going to be cared for?' It's not necessarily verbalized, but it's what most of our conversations consist of." +To curb the growth of Medicaid estate planning, Congress approved legislation last year to limit the transfers. +For example, the Government can now check on any asset transfers made within 36 months of a person's application for Medicaid and penalize an applicant for resources transferred within that period. They may not, however, confiscate the transferred assets. The so-called look-back period used to be 30 months. +States are also required to recoup expenses from the estates of Medicaid recipients after they die. Since Medicaid rules allow people to keep their homes, personal property, a car and limited cash, there are often assets that can be sold to pay back the Government, although officials said enforcement of this was spotty. +Still, the Government's ability to take and sell these assets provides yet another impetus for older people to transfer them to their relatives. +The laws governing qualification for Medicaid are federally mandated, but they give states leeway in setting their own standards. New York, for example, has the most generous allowances for holding on to assets. Single people can keep $3,200, as well as property and limited money for funeral expenses. +In addition, the Government allows husbands and wives of Medicaid beneficiaries to keep money and other liquid assets without jeopardizing their eligibility. The amount varies by state, with New York, allowing about $73,000 per spouse. The intent is to keep spouses from becoming destitute in caring for their partners and to discourage people from hiding their wealth. +"But, there are still ways that you can get around the rules," said Sally Richardson, the director of the Medicaid Bureau in the Health Care Financing Administration, "and people are taking advantage of them." +Much of the growth of Medicaid estate planning, officials said, is because of more aggressive marketing and advertising by elder law specialists. Lawyers across the country regularly offer free seminars to urge older people to plan their financial futures and Medicaid eligibility. +Nursing home administrators say that lawyers increasingly prepare patients' applications to the homes and take care of filing the necessary forms with local Medicaid offices. +Many administrators have criticized the practice for creating a growing clientele of Medicaid patients in nursing homes. They say that since Medicaid reimbursement does not cover their costs, they depend on private-paying customers. The more Medicaid patients they have, the administrators say, the higher costs are for other patients. +"It's especially galling when Mother's Day rolls around and the kids come to visit mom who is on Medicaid in their chauffeur-driven limousines and B.M.W.'s," said the head of one Manhattan nursing home. Like most of his colleagues, he spoke anonymously because, he said, people tend to think that nursing homes gouge their clients. +Although there is some public perception that wealthy people are manipulating the system, government officials, lawyers and nursing home administrators say most people are trying to shelter modest amounts of money, from as little as a few thousand dollars to as much as a few hundred thousand dollars, with most around $50,000. +"You know who tends to come to me?" said Dean Bress, an elder law specialist in White Plains. "A middle-income person who sees a neighbor facing staggering costs because her husband is in a nursing home. Or one of the couple gets sick with the wrong disease and the other panics. Why should someone with a heart condition be covered and treated better than someone with Alzheimer's? They're afraid of getting stuck." +A retired teacher from Queens said she was embarrassed, but relieved, that she and her husband, who has Alzheimer's disease, had transferred almost all their liquid assets, about $60,000, to their two sons over the last decade, anticipating that her husband would soon need nursing home care they would be hard pressed to afford. +"I felt devious doing it, even though it was all technically legal," the woman said. "You think of yourself as comfortable, middle-class. You can afford a trip to Atlantic City when you want. A nice dinner in the city sometimes. Welfare, Medicaid, food stamps. That's for other people. For poor people. But then you look and realize, without this money, I am poor and this money will be devoured in a flash. I don't feel like I had a choice." + +LOAD-DATE: September 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: "They all want to know, 'How am I going to be cared for?' " Ruth Sabatini, a care planner with Loretto Senior Choices in Syracuse, said of middle-income elderly people who fear poverty. She spoke with Roy Bernardi, a Loretto employee. (Mike Greenlar for The New York Times) (pg. 39); "People are afraid of becoming destitute," Peter J. Strauss, a specialist in elder law, said of the large numbers of middle-income elderly who have transferred their assets to relatives to qualify for Medicaid. (William E. Sauro/The New York Times) (pg. 47) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +328 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 25, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: LOWER MANHATTAN; +Vendors' Mall Draws Mixed Reviews + +BYLINE: By MARVINE HOWE + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 8; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 402 words + +A vendors' mall, intended to ease the sidewalk gridlock in lower Manhattan by luring peddlers to Sara D. Roosevelt Park, is to open next month. And despite the opposition of a major vendors' group, the project is already over-subscribed. +Michael Zisser, executive director of United Settlement, the nonprofit organization that will run the mall, Roosevelt Market, says he has 350 applications for about 100 stalls. "We will have no trouble getting vendors," Mr. Zisser said. "Anyone who knows real estate rates in Chinatown knows this is a good deal, with no hidden costs." + The mall will be located in an abandoned wading pool in the park, just north of Grand Street. In recent years, the site has been taken over by drug abusers and the homeless. The city's Parks and Recreation Department hopes the mall will clean up the park as well as the nearby sidewalks. +But the project has critics. On a busy stretch of sidewalk along the Bowery off Canal Street, Shiu Yee Tam proudly showed his vendor's license and said he had no plans to rent a stall at the market. "I pay for this sidewalk," he said, pointing to the area around his modest jewelry stand. "Parks should be for children and elderly people." +Mr. Tam is the vice president of the Chinatown Vendors Association, a group of nearly 300 licensed peddlers. Members of the association have refused to move to the mall, he said, because they cannot afford the extra cost and they doubt that customers will be drawn to the park, given its unsavory reputation. The monthly rental ranges from $125 to $350 depending on the booth's size. +Many Chinatown vendors fear that the recent ban on Grand Street vending and the opening of Roosevelt Market may be steps toward the elimination of vending in Chinatown, and for them, the loss of a treasured way of life. +Steve Goldman, a Manhattan lawyer who represents the vendors association, says that under current law, licensed vendors cannot operate in most of Chinatown where sidewalks are too narrow to comply with the ruling that requires vendors to be 20 feet from a business. "At this point," he said, "we feel there's no alternative; we will have to litigate to change the statutes." +The Roosevelt Market, originally scheduled to start Oct. 1, will open Oct. 10, said Ning Zhou Zhang, the director of the mall for University Settlement. It will operate daily from 7:30 A.M. to 7:30 P.M. M.H. + +LOAD-DATE: September 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: October 2, 1994, Sunday + + CORRECTION: +A map with an article last Sunday about plans to open a vendors' mall in Sara Roosevelt Park in lower Manhattan gave incorrect locations for that market and some others proposed for Manhattan and Brooklyn. A corrected version appears on page 8. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +329 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 25, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Hooked on Philosophy + +BYLINE: By John Vernon; John Vernon is the author of the novel "Peter Doyle." His fourth novel, "All for Love: Baby Doe and Silver Dollar," will be published next year. + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 42; Column 1; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1035 words + + +SOPHIE'S WORLD +A Novel About the History of Philosophy. +By Jostein Gaarder. +Translated by Paulette Moller. +403 pp. New York: +Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $19. +NO wonder Euro Disney is a flop; Europeans are too busy reading philosophy. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's "Qu'est-ce Que la Philosophie" (recently published in English as "What Is Philosophy?") was an unlikely best seller in France a few years ago. And "Sophie's World," by Jostein Gaarder, subtitled "A Novel About the History of Philosophy," is, according to Newsweek, "Europe's hottest novel." +There the resemblance stops. "What Is Philosophy?" was written by two elderly gentlemen who have been dubiously honored (by The Modern Review) as the Beastie Boys of current thought; the book is abstract, thick, difficult and brilliant. In the grand French tradition, it disdains bourgeois culture. "Sophie's World" is a tiptoe through the suburbs of the mind in search of eternal and universal truths that can be grasped by its 14-year-old heroine. Philosophy's search for truth, we learn, "resembles a detective story," a rule of thumb the novel takes literally. Thus the history of philosophy becomes inserted into the tale of a Norwegian Nancy Drew like an aspirin into a piece of cheese. +Sophie Amundsen arrives home from school to find two cryptic messages in her mailbox: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" Soon she is receiving lectures in the mail on ancient thought from an unknown correspondent. Then a dog begins dropping off the lectures. A videotape arrives in which her teacher reveals himself and narrates a tour of the Acropolis in Athens. The modern Acropolis becomes transformed, on tape, into the Acropolis of 402 B.C., and Plato introduces himself to Sophie on the screen. At last, Sophie and Alberto Knox, her mysterious instructor, meet in person, and his lectures continue in the form of one-sided Socratic dialogues at various locations in Sophie's hometown. +To Mr. Gaarder's credit, many of these lectures are lucid summaries of difficult thought. But many are canned to provide intellectual quick fixes. Democritus' atoms resemble Lego blocks; Plato's ideas are cookie molds. Mr. Gaarder's tour through the past of Western thought will perhaps have the good effect of encouraging some readers to seek out the real thing. But I suspect that most will be content with the bus ride; if it's Tuesday, this must be Descartes. +About midway through the novel, a further unexpected twist occurs, one designed to distract us while the philosophy drips steadily into our veins: Sophie and Alberto begin to suspect they are characters in someone else's novel. In fact, they are. The introduction of Bishop Berkeley's thought becomes a pivotal lesson enabling them to understand their uncertain metaphysical status as figments of an immaterial world imagined by a Norwegian major named Albert Knag, who is serving with the United Nations forces in Lebanon. Knag, it turns out, has been writing a novel called "Sophie's World" for the birthday of his daughter, Hilde, who is the same age as Sophie. Whether Sophie and Alberto will be able to escape this man's "gluey imagination," and what sort of daughter the U.N. major will find when he returns home from Lebanon, become the chief carrots luring us toward the climax. +Woven into the twist-run plot, the lectures on philosophy frantically approach the 20th century in order to conclude simultaneously with the story framing them. Mr. Gaarder discovers ingenious ways to make the thought of each philosopher pertain to Sophie's -- and Hilde's -- solution of her personal mystery. A climactic philosophical garden party becomes the novel's most comic and memorable set piece, inserting into this Norwegian book of virtues, with its homage to the Western intellectual canon and its spirit of common sense, a counterspirit of carnival and sexual anarchy. +In a sense, "Sophie's World" is an old-fashioned conduct book of the sort written by a father for his daughter's education. The function of such books used to be to produce a middle-class domestic woman who could occupy her leisure with uplifting activities and thoughts lest she desire something illicit. Mr. Gaarder updates such a supervisory project with feminist asides designed to empower his heroines. Alas, poor Sophie, empowered by philosophy, becomes more and more immaterial to the story -- literally so. Whether her alter ego, Hilde, will learn from Sophie's adventures to doubt, wonder and think for herself is the question we are left with once Sophie disappears into the world of fairy tales. +Mr. Gaarder, a high school philosophy teacher -- yes, Phyllis Schlafly, they teach philosophy in Norwegian high schools -- wrote his book for young adults. But adult adults made it a best seller. Whether the adults of America will do the same remains to be seen. It will surely be a plus that the novel makes few pretensions toward art; Mr. Gaarder undoubtedly suspected that such an added +virtue would only encumber a narrative already suffering from the kitchen-sink effect. As rendered by his translator, Paulette Moller, the novel's style is sturdy and unsubtle, plain as a box. The characters made to fit inside the box are tissue thin. +Moreover, there is enough about the wonder and magic of philosophy in "Sophie's World" to make some readers reach for their guns. The meat of the book -- its account of Western philosophical thought -- ranges in quality from philoso-Disney to a series of accurate and intelligent precis. Alberto the philosopher is a kind of latter-day Mr. Wizard; whether we swallow his generously sweetened bait and become hooked on philosophy depends on the philosophy being expounded. On Spinoza and Hume he is superb, but when he gets to Romanticism we see the supermarket encyclopedias lying open before his hidden God, Mr. Gaarder. As philoso-narrative, "Sophie's World" is a world above "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" but a universe below "The Magic Mountain." In my view, literate readers would do better to try Bertrand Russell's "History of Western Philosophy," which is shorter on magic but longer on wit, intelligence and curmudgeonly skepticism. + +LOAD-DATE: September 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +330 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 27, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Sheelah Ryan, 69, Who Started Charity With Lottery Winnings + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section B; Page 14; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 254 words + +DATELINE: WINTER SPRINGS, Fla., Sept. 26 + +Sheelah Ryan, who won a $55.2 million lottery prize in 1988 and spent the following years giving the money away, died on Saturday at her home in this Orlando suburb. She was 69. +The cause was cancer, said a friend, Nancy Damron. + Mrs. Ryan won the jackpot in the Florida Lottery on Sept. 3, 1988, and in December that year she set up a charitable foundation that donated to causes as diverse as stray cats and poor children in need of operations. The Ryan Foundation also built low-cost housing and paid overdue rent to spare single mothers and their children from eviction. +"I think it was by the grace of God I won," Mrs. Ryan said in 1989. "I realized there must have been a reason He gave me the money, so I decided to give some of it to senior citizens and the homeless." +With her jackpot, Mrs. Ryan became the largest individual lottery winner in American history, a distinction she held until a Wisconsin man won a $110 million prize last year. Mrs. Ryan's jackpot was payable over 20 years in annual installments, and she had received about $16.6 million. The remainder will go to her estate. +Pamela Ohab, who serves on the foundation's board, said it "will definitely continue." +"It's really her legacy, and that's what she wanted," Ms. Ohab said. "She left it very well funded." The foundation declined to say how much money it had given away. +Mrs. Ryan, who was born in New York City, worked part time selling real estate before she won the lottery. +A widow, she leaves several nieces and nephews. + +NAME: Sheelah Ryan + +LOAD-DATE: September 27, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +331 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 29, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Drugstore Chain to Provide Flu Shots for $10 + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section B; Page 11; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 176 words + +DATELINE: CHICAGO, Sept. 28 + +People who are unable to go to a doctor's office for flu shots will be able to get them at a drugstore, under a program announced on Tuesday by the Walgreen Company. +Nearly 2,000 drugstores will participate in the program, which seeks to make influenza prevention more convenient for elderly Americans or for those suffering from chronic illnesses. + The shots will be available at each Walgreen drugstore on at least one day from Oct. 1 through Oct. 22, the company said. The shots will cost about $10, and no appointment or prescription will be necessary. +Phil Schneider, a spokesman for the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, said it appeared to be the first time that a national drugstore chain had offered to provide flu shots for the public. +A spokesman for Walgreen, Michael Polzin, said the shots would be administered by nurses through individual disposable syringes. +The centers recommend flu shots for people 65 and older, nursing home residents, children with asthma and adults and children suffering from chronic disorders. + +LOAD-DATE: September 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +332 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 29, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +IN THE STUDIO WITH: Cassandra Wilson; +Singing a Song of the South + +BYLINE: By CHARISSE JONES + +SECTION: Section C; Page 1; Column 2; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 1461 words + +CASSANDRA WILSON crafts her melodies in an apartment that looks out over the Harlem River. +It is a space imbued with the past, the same sense of memory that guides Ms. Wilson's spirit and shades her music. It is here that she practices jazz licks and smoky riffs under the watchful gaze of her elders. + They stare from photographs -- her father, Herman B. Fowlkes, a jazz guitarist who, while millions of blacks moved north, trekked the opposite way; the tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, caught on camera as he jammed in Jackson, Miss.; her maternal grandmother standing tall in front of the family home down south. +"It's really important to keep in touch with them," Ms. Wilson said on a recent sunny afternoon. "There's a line from the film 'Daughters of the Dust,' where the old woman says something like, 'It's up to the living to keep in touch with the ancestors.' It epitomizes how I feel about what we need to do in order to regenerate." +Not that Ms. Wilson is afraid of breaking with tradition. With nine solo albums to her credit, shehas been hailed by critics as the greatest female jazz vocalist of her generation. But she rejects category, choosing to call herself simply a musician. And her first album for Blue Note, "Blue Light 'Til Dawn," belies easy categorization, using folk and the blues as well as jazz to celebrate love and the preciousness of the past. +On the album, she reinterprets songs first sung by Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and Robert Johnson. She recasts the Stylistics' "Children of the Night" and croons a slow, aching rendition of "I Can't Stand the Rain" to the backdrop of a steel guitar. She also wrote three of the album's selections, including the bluesy title tune, and "Sankofa," a haunting, a cappella song about the mythical Ghanaian bird of redemption. "Blue Light 'Til Dawn" has sold about 150,000 copies worldwide, making it one of the top-selling jazz records of the year and her own most successful recording. +In April, Ms. Wilson starred in Wynton Marsalis's epic concert piece on American slavery, "Blood on the Fields." She will sing in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film "Junior," due out at Thanksgiving; she performs on albums of songs by Van Morrison and the artist formerly known as Prince, and this month she will begin a concert tour. +But Ms. Wilson is not fazed by her rapidly rising star nor worried that she may lose her way on the road to commercial success. +"I continue to choose the path I take musically," she said. "And it's not motivated by becoming famous or having a lot of money, or any other pop aspiration." +Instead, Ms. Wilson said she records "because I have to be heard." "Sometimes I feel as if Cassandra Wilson on stage is a conduit," she continued. "I think music provides a language for us to communicate with each other and to the world of spirits." +This apartment that is now her studio was once her home. She was married then, and she and her husband chose this place on Edgecombe Avenue because a friend once lived here, and the apartment's rooms resonated with memories of lively parties where film makers, musicians and other artists mingled. +Later, Ms. Wilson, who is in her 30's but refuses to reveal her exact age, moved next door but kept the first apartment as a place to create and rehearse. +There are the necessary tools: a set of drums, a piano, her guitar. The apartment's edges are softened with white lace and pillows wrapped in African cloth. There is a black-and-white pencil drawing of Ms. Wilson, a painting of a pensive man and a chair covered in blue velvet, spotted brown from coffee stains and cigarette burns. +Compact disks stacked in the corner testify to Ms. Wilson's eclectic tastes, from Billie Holiday to Edith Piaf to the Gipsy Kings. And then there is Charlie Parker. +She once fantasized that she was the legendary saxophonist reborn. That was back in the early 1980's, when Ms. Wilson moved from New Orleans with her husband to New Jersey and she became part of New York's young jazz scene. +Asked to describe herself back then, Ms. Wilson said she was probably striving to be heir apparent to Betty Carter, personalizing jazz melodies with her smoky contralto but staying within the boundaries set by her predecessors. +"I listened to Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington and Nancy Wilson," she said, "and there was a time I romanticized that period and wanted to live through that music." +To tell the story of Ms. Wilson, one must venture across the Mason-Dixon line, to Jackson, Miss., where she was born and raised. There, the patois had the lilt of music, her grandmother brewed medicine from herbs and passed along family history, and her great-grandmother was born into slavery. +There is an earthy spirituality about Ms. Wilson, in the way she sashays in cool clothing, golden dreadlocks dangling down her back. It took a while for her to feel comfortable reshaping jazz to better fit her own musical contours. +"I have from time to time been worried about the quote-unquote jazz police," she said. "That's the musical community I grew up in. The worry was that somehow they would view it as turning away from the music." +Then she came to a realization. "I think people tend to forget what jazz was like in the beginning," she said. "It's not a form of music that came out canonized and etched in stone. It comes from people absorbing what they live. So I don't have a problem doing music that's popular. Billie Holiday and even Charlie Parker interpreted what was known as the popular music of that time. I don't see any difference between that and what I'm doing." +"Blue Light 'Til Dawn" is about the mating ritual, "my memories of it, and the way I feel about it," Ms. Wilson said. It is about paying homage to the elders of blues and jazz. "But it's also about something else -- a yearning and a longing to have that kind of life again down south," she added. +She is, at her center, a Southern woman. "I've been here 12 years, and there are some things about this city I refuse to adjust to," she said. "I still speak to people on the street. I look at people. That's why I like this neighborhood. You have a strong sense of community." +As a child, Ms. Wilson studied classical piano and played the guitar. She briefly attended Millsaps College and then finished her education at Jackson State University, where she earned a degree in mass communications. Along the way, she took time out to play with a blues band called Bluejohn but eventually became a jazz singer. Later, when she moved north, she teamed up with M-Base, jazz musicians with whom she made her first recordings. +Since then, Ms. Wilson's life has undergone many changes, including separation from her husband and the loss of her father, who died last year. He was from Chicago but went south while he was in the military. His was a family of so-called "blue-veined" people, blacks vaulted into an upper caste because of the lightness of their skin. But while in Mississippi, he fell in love with a dark-skinned Southern schoolteacher, Ms. Wilson's mother, and he decided to stay. +Because her father was a jazz guitarist and bassist, jazz was a part of Ms. Wilson's household. So were Motown and folk music, and she briefly sang in a folk trio while in high school. But she picked up the blues another way. It scented the air, emanated from the soil and in the midst of everyday living, pierced Ms. Wilson's soul. +Ms. Wilson noted the ambivalence many African-Americans feel toward the blues. Even her father, who recorded with Sonny Boy Williamson and played with Ray Charles, tried to shield the daughter he called Little Sis from the blues. She believes his efforts rose not from disdain but from concern that embracing the blues would stamp her as socially unacceptable in certain circles. +"It's something I think about a lot," she said of black people's relationship to the blues. "Some people say that the blues places limitations on us, on our experience, on our hopes as a people. Some people feel that it is what provides us our catharsis or maintains our connection with the past. And for some that past is very ugly and very painful. But I think ultimately we have to face that pain, deal with that pain and express it, in order to move forward." +A sense of the past, of traditions that helped Southern blacks live and thrive, seems to have eroded in the trek north, Ms. Wilson said. The essence of such spiritual fortitude is still there, she believes, but is sometimes obscured by the urban hustle. +Still, she looks for it in her neighbors' faces, writes about it in her songs, tries to pass it on to her 5-year-old son, Jeris. "You don't have to abandon those values, that culture in order to be successful," she said. + +NAME: Cassandra Wilson + +LOAD-DATE: September 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: "I choose the path I take musically," Cassandra Wilson says. (Andrea Mohin/The New York Times) (pg. C1); Cassandra Wilson at the JVC Jazz Festival last year. (Jack Vartoogian) (pg. C8) + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +333 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 30, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Study Offers Tips for Elderly On Reducing Risk of Falling + +BYLINE: Reuters + +SECTION: Section A; Page 17; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 401 words + +DATELINE: BOSTON, Sept. 29 + +Elderly people can significantly reduce their risk of falling by monitoring blood pressure, taking prescription drugs carefully and using techniques to increase mobility, a study has found. +Falls are a major cause of death and disability among the elderly. The research, led by Dr. Mary Tinetti of Yale University, was published today in The New England Journal of Medicine. It contradicts earlier studies that suggested that nothing could be done. + "For an older person, this type of fall prevention strategy can mean the difference between being able to live safely and independently at home, or needing nursing-home care or other assistance," said Dr. Evan Hadley of the National Institute of Aging, which helped finance the study. +Nurses and physical therapists, under the guidelines of the study, visited the homes of 153 people who were 70 and older. Their purpose was to identify and resolve potential problems. An additional 148 volunteers were visited at home, but the health care workers took no actions to prevent falls. +After one year, 35 percent of the people in the intervention group had suffered falls, as against 47 percent of those in the nonintervention group. +Safer techniques for walking, climbing stairs and getting out of the bath were taught, as were exercises to improve balance. Doctors were asked to review drug prescriptions and dosages to make sure they were necessary. +Those at risk, researchers found, tend to use sedatives, take more than three prescription drugs a day and experience problems using the toilet or bathtub. They may also have an impaired gait and muscle weakness. +Treatment of fall-related fractures costs an estimated $10 billion in the United States, and unintentional injury, often caused by falls, is the sixth leading cause of death among people over 65. +The researchers found, however, that costs were not significantly different for prevention and for injury. Researchers estimated that it cost $12,400 to prevent each fall, while the typical charge for treating someone who has fallen is $11,800. +But they noted that the cost estimates did not take into account pain and suffering, or the loss of independence resulting from such falls. +"Falls can break self-confidence as well as bones," Dr. Steven Cummings and Dr. Michael Nevitt of the University of California at San Francisco, said in an editorial in the journal. + +LOAD-DATE: September 30, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +334 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 1, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Grief and Anger in City Where Friends Are Gone + +BYLINE: By RICHARD W. STEVENSON, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 6; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 785 words + +DATELINE: NORRKOPING, Sweden, Sept. 30 + +Right after hearing on Wednesday morning that a ferry had gone down en route from Tallinn, Estonia, to Stockholm, Majlis Alm rushed down to the senior citizen's center here, fearing the worst. +Mrs. Alm, a town council member who had previously run programs for elderly residents, knew that a group of local retirees were on a ferry trip to Tallinn. When it became clear that it was their vessel that had capsized and sunk, she summoned up the will to look at the list of their names. Six of the first eight names she saw were friends. Of the 56 people on the list -- all still missing and presumed dead -- she knew 20 well. + "I was reading the list and just crying," she said. "It was hard to be of much help to others." +In a country that has been knocked off its bearings by the loss of the ferry Estonia and more than 800 of its passengers, most of them Swedes, no town has taken a harder blow than Norrkoping, a placid port city of 120,000 people 100 miles south of Stockholm. +The 56 travelers from Norrkoping, including 14 married couples, were nearly all grandmothers and grandfathers, longtime residents with relatives and friends all over town. Bengt Malmstrom was known to all as the former chairman of the local health authority. Arne Engberg had long organized a popular bicycle race. +"The whole town is shocked and sad," said the Rev. Henrik Dareus, a local clergyman who has been counseling friends and relatives of the victims. "Wherever you are in the town, it's all anyone can talk about." +Today, red-eyed relatives besieged the town's crisis center with difficult questions. How could they accept and put behind them the deaths of loved ones if the vessel was not raised and the bodies recovered? How would they deal with the financial and other personal affairs of the victims? And with what counselors at the center said was growing forcefulness, they asked how such a tragedy could have occurred and who was to blame? +"They're alternating between sadness and anger," Mrs. Alm said. +Similar feelings appear to be common in many other communities. The city of Uppsala lost 26 court officials who had been on a trip to study the Estonian legal system. The town of Jonkoping was mourning the loss of 13 students and two teachers from a Bible school. Ericcson, the telecommunications company, lost 14 of its executives. +Swedes readily admit that they have little experience with tragedy on a large scale, that their nation of 8.5 million people, long neutral in world conflicts and known for the security of its cradle-to-grave social welfare system, has felt somehow insulated from many of the world's horrors. The exceptions -- like the assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986 -- have left deep impressions on the national consciousness. +"What we thought could not happen, happened," the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper wrote on Thursday. "A ship cannot sink, not with hundreds of Swedes aboard. The thought is absurd, just as unreal as a Prime Minister being shot." +The air of unreality was clear today in the still-stunned looks on the faces of relatives of the Norrkoping victims. Reports from witnesses made clear that few of the very old or very young passengers on board had any chance of getting out or of surviving more than a few minutes in the frigid sea. +"In their minds, they know there is no hope," said Mr. Dareus. "But in their hearts, they don't believe it." +Standing in front of a piano draped with a white sheet and turned into a makeshift altar of flowers and candles at the crisis center, Margeveta Klausen, a 72-year-old member of the senior citizen's organization, said that she knew most of the victims, and that one, Elvy Hagstrom, was a neighbor. +"We can't find the words to describe what we feel," she said. "We can feel the sorrow, not just in this room, but throughout the whole town." +Mrs. Klausen said that seven of the victims were close friends and that most had left children and grandchildren. +"It's still a little strange to think that all these friends of ours are gone," she said. +A dozen Swedish flags flapped at half staff on a bridge on Drottningatan, the main street. Churches prepared for memorial services over the next few days. Although schools and businesses were open, there was little activity on the streets, and one elderly woman, asked about the tragedy, stared for a moment, shook her head and walked silently away. +Mrs. Alm said that for now, most of the victims' relatives and friends are getting plenty of support at the crisis center. But she said she feared how they would fare once the current flood of attention passes and they return to their normal routines. +"It will only get harder," she said. + +LOAD-DATE: October 1, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Map of Sweden showing location of Norrkoping + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +335 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 2, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +YOUR HOME; +Reducing Property Taxes + +BYLINE: By ANDREE BROOKS + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 5; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1118 words + +PROPERTY-TAX relief is traditionally won when an assessment appears out of line with comparable properties -- not simply because taxes are high. But homeowners need to be alert to special conditions that can also lower taxes. These include abatements for personal circumstances and environmental factors that may have altered the appeal of the property. +First, personal circumstances. Those over 65 should check to see if there is a program in their community for them. Taxes can often be lowered, suspended or frozen, although the specifics vary by municipality. + "We're constantly amazed at how many people who might have qualified never even knew about the opportunity," said Fred N. Perry, a lawyer in Dix Hills, L.I., who specializes in property-tax appeals. +For those with incomes around $23,000 or less, Mr. Perry said, the abatements on Long Island can save one-third of the amount due, in part because school taxes are not included. +He was recently contacted, for example, by an elderly woman in Uniondale, L.I., who would have been billed $3,569 this year had she not applied for her abatement. After it was approved, her tax bill was lowered to $2,408. Some 24,000 homeowners in New York City now receive abatements based on age and income, up from 17,000 in 1989. +Since initiatives to include more property-taxpayers by raising the income ceiling are constantly being proposed, no one close to the income ceiling should think of himself as disqualified for good. Paul Raffiani, tax assessor for the town of Edison, N.J., has even started a list of rejected applicants he plans to notify whenever the ceilings are raised. +Then there are the tax-deferral programs. Although available now only in a few places, they normally let people 65 and over defer some or all of their taxes until they sell their house. A lien is placed on the home to insure payment upon sale and interest is charged on the unpaid amount. +Though the taxes must eventually be paid, it does save taxpayers with substantial equity from being forced out because of high taxes. Westport, Conn., for example, offers this particular opportunity to taxpayers with a household income under $40,000. It currently has 110 homeowners enrolled. +Combat veterans also qualify for special treatment throughout the country, although the concession can be as little as $50. The widow of a qualified veteran should also qualify, provided she was still married to the veteran at the time of his death. +The environmental reasons for gaining property tax relief are only now beginning to emerge. Randy Airst is a lawyer with the Marga Environmental Corporation of Exton, Pa., a company that trains lawyers, lenders and assessors and other professionals on how to deal with environmental problems that affect properties. +He has documented an increasing number of successful appeals because problems inside or outside the property -- asbestos, lead, a nearby landfill or high-tension wires -- reduced the market value of the home. +Consider Edward McGrath, who has been living in Edison, N.J., only 50 feet from high-tension wires, for 36 years. "They haven't bothered me," he said, noting that he was now 70 years old and still in good health. But, he recalled, about three years ago he took action because "everyone was squawking and I figured it must have affected resale values." +He called George Yaeger, president of Real Estate Tax Reduction Inc. of Matawan, N.J., a consultant on property-tax relief, who won an assessment reduction of $10,000, thereby reducing Mr. McGrath's tax bill by about $170 a year. +But it's not all that easy. To mount a successful challenge in an external environmental situation it's usually best, experts say, to do so in cooperation with neighbors facing a similar situation because a reduction will have to made for all. "You can't make an exception for just one house," said Mr. Raffiani, the Edison tax assessor, who is facing a situation concerning the tax treatment of homes near a big gas-pipe explosion in Edison last February. +Eric Lukingbeal, a partner with Robinson & Cole, a Hartford law firm that has already handled such cases for commercial clients, noted that in Connecticut a change could be made only during a general re-evaluation, which takes place every 10 years, unless the condition (like lead paint) was present when the prior re-evaluation took place. +Further, assessors will demand the kind of detailed documentation that can be costly. It will be necessary, say, to show that other homes with the same problem actually sold for less -- not that the potential was lowered. "We can only work from history," Mr. Raffiani said, "not what might be." +The first step recommended by Mr. Airst is therefore to get together with neighbors to lower the cost of hiring expert counsel and because they will all be affected by the results. +Next, an appraiser should be selected. But not just any appraiser. Few have had training or experience in presenting environmental cases because the field is so new, Mr. Airst said. So it will need someone with background in this area. +A two-tier appraisal will be needed, Mr. Airst continued, one showing the value of these type of homes without the environmental problem and another after the problem arose. +Stigma alone -- even if the health impact is still being debated, as with high-voltage wires -- may be enough if it has already turned buyers away and thus lowered values. An engineer's report documenting the presence of toxic material could also help, he said. So could evidence from local real estate agents. +But what about the danger that any publicity surrounding the challenge may raise the red flag even higher with potential buyers? +It's no reason to hold back, Mr. Airst insisted. "They will find out anyway because lenders are requiring a lot more environmental information before they will agree to a loan," he said. Moreover, there's been an increase in data banks available to purchasers that highlight threatening conditions associated with particular properties or neighborhoods. +Another difficulty attached to these cases is that the assessor could suggest that certain problems, like lead paint, were deferred maintenance and therefore values were diminished only temporarily. If so, a temporary concession might be sought, Mr. Lukingbeal said. +That was indeed the approach of Douglas Layne, chief review assessor for New York City's Department of Finance. After a major storm in December 1992 seriously damaged 186 waterfront homes, the department reduced assessments, allowing each homeowner to pay about $100 less for the year. As they restore their homes the differential will disappear. + +LOAD-DATE: October 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +336 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 2, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +TRAVEL ADVISORY; +The Hudson Valley By Train and Minibus + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 3; Column 4; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 213 words + +Exploring some of the Hudson Valley's highlights without a car is easier this fall with the introduction of a new package by Metro-North. Called the Sleepy Hollow Excursion, the package provides round-trip rail fare from Grand Central Terminal to Tarrytown; minibus service between the station and three historic sites, and admission fees. +The sites are Sunnyside, the home of the author Washington Irving; Lyndhurst, the 1830's Gothic-revival mansion, and Philipsburg Manor, a Colonial-era farm and grist mill. Guided tours are provided at all three. + The package is available on Saturday and Sunday through Nov. 13. Trains depart Grand Central at 8:55 A.M., 9:55 A.M., 10:55 A.M. and 11:58 A.M., with frequent returns through the afternoon and into the evening; each site closes at 5 P.M., and the last minibus drops off passengers in time for the local train that leaves Tarrytown at 5:49. The express train takes 39 minutes, the local 51 minutes. The price of the package is $18.50, $14.50 for senior citizens 65 and over, $5 for children 5 to 11, free for those under 5. It must be purchased at Grand Central ticket windows and is not available from conductors on the trains. +For train information or details on the package, call Metro-North at (212) 532-4900. + +LOAD-DATE: October 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +337 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 2, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Battle Hymn of a Republican + +BYLINE: By Susan Lee; Susan Lee is an economist. She is writing a book on the last 30 years of United States economic policy. + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 9; Column 2; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 827 words + + +DEAD RIGHT +By David Frum. +230 pp. New York: +A New Republic Book/Basic Books. $23. + +THIS is one tough book. David Frum, a former writer for The Wall Street Journal's famously fierce editorial page, is furious. He is not angry with, as might be expected, left-wing liberals and Whitewater conspirators, but with right-wing conservatives -- politicians and penseurs alike. +"Dead Right" is a look at what went wrong during the last 14 years of conservative politics as the message of economic conservatism was abandoned in favor of social conservatism. Simply put, Mr. Frum argues that the Republican right shifted away from its anti-big-government position because it was reluctant to keep pushing for a reduction in the growth of government and, as a consequence, to risk losing elections. +Unlike most conservatives, who feel that things were hunky-dory until the Bush Administration, Mr. Frum argues that things started going bad during the Reagan years. He attributes the problem to the failure of what he calls the Reagan gambit -- the promise that taxes could be cut, defense could be rebuilt and the budget balanced, all simultaneously. The gambit could have worked, he says, but the Administration allowed spending to zoom out of sight because it was unwilling to check the rise in social welfare spending. He is especially harsh on the Reagan Administration's decision to bump up Social Security payroll taxes -- a choice that eventually nullified Ronald Reagan's own income tax cuts. (As for the Bush Administration, Mr. Frum heaps scorn on its self-advertised legislative achievements, like the Clean Air Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act -- laws that will require, for compliance, enormous amounts of money.) +Mr. Frum offers suitably tart observations on many of the players on the right. In describing Jack Kemp, for instance, he says he found the man more of an "adept Jack Kemp imitator" than a real person. And he offers a bunch of great "gotchas," such as the difficulty faced by the right's intellectual -- and secular -- swami, Irving Kristol, when a guest at a conservative powwow asked him whether "intellectuals who lack religious faith can effectively advocate it for others." +But zingers aside, the book presents a powerful argument that the abandonment of economic conservatism is a big mistake: that is, one cannot change values without changing the economic structure to which those values are a response. "If the old American culture and the old American character were rational responses to the riskiness of life, you cannot alleviate that riskiness and expect the old culture and the old character to persist," he writes. +Consider that catchall category, family values. According to Mr. Frum, the old American attitude toward family -- caring for an aging parent, helping a cousin through a spate of unemployment, minding your sister's kids -- was based on the mutual glue of economic interests. That glue, he argues, loses its adhesive properties when government provides social welfare programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance and day care. Affection is now the only thing holding families together, and, Mr. Frum says, "affection is one of the most impermanent and weakest of human ties." Thus it is silly for conservatives to run around calling for programs to "support" the family when it is those very programs that undermine the economic self-interest that could reinforce family ties. +MR. FRUM is essentially correct in saying that when government policies reward failure and punish success they create perverse incentives. But when he launches into an analysis of the relationship between economic structures and social values, he does less well. For every instance of the sort Mr. Frum describes, in which economic changes have social consequences, one can point to another case in which changing social attitudes caused economic shifts, or to cases in which the two types of changes are almost inseparable -- as with the Protestant ethic and the rise of capitalism. +Moreover, Mr. Frum says the problem lies in the unpopularity of economic conservatism, but it isn't clear that economic conservatism is unpopular. True, polls show that voters want to have their cake and eat it too -- both to have less government and to keep the government programs that benefit them directly. But it is also true that the polls indicate most people don't expect middle-class programs like Social Security and Medicare to offer them the same level of benefits that obtain currently. This realistic mood allows considerable wiggle room for politicians who are fighting big government. +As for what should be done, Mr. Frum encourages the right to return to its message of minimalism -- less government spending, even at the risk of less electoral success. Although he is severe in his judgments and stern in his admonishments, perhaps he'll excuse me for calling his anger a form of tough love. + +LOAD-DATE: October 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +338 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 6, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +THE 1994 CAMPAIGN; +Democrats Taking Up Arms To Fend Off Voters' Apathy + +BYLINE: By RICHARD L. BERKE, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1257 words + +DATELINE: OAKLAND, Calif., Oct. 4 + +Four evenings a week, about a dozen Democratic workers gather at a union office here on a mission that national party leaders say could be the difference between victory and defeat in November: motivating once-loyal party members who this year seem stuck in neutral. +But it is not an easy sell. + Throughout the country, the Democrats are beset by anti-incumbent fever and disappointment with the Clinton White House. On top of that, the prospect of a low turnout in the general election next month terrifies party officials. +At a phone bank in Oakland on Monday night, one of dozens in the state, Democrats called elderly party regulars to help get out the vote. But caller after caller found that many of the people on whom Democrats have always relied had grown too frail to participate. +"People are not making the time they did in '92," Saundra Andrews, a veteran volunteer, said as she was calling her latest prospect for the evening. "Two years ago, if someone was ill, we'd still get a volunteer out of their household. I'd have cases where they'd send their gardener to help. This year, they're not as enthused or excited." +Whether they are in poor health, soured on politics or just do not care, once reliable Democratic voters, young and old, are threatening to sit out next month's elections. In an extra complication, especially here in California, party strategists fear that television advertising may be wasted because the public is transfixed by the O. J. Simpson trial. +Turnout has generally been sagging since the late 1960's, but a study by the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate showed that about 19 percent of eligible Democrats voted in this year's primaries -- slightly less than four years ago -- while Republican turnout was a bit higher. +"We'd be in a lot of trouble if primary turnout in '94 is a predictor of turnout in the general election," said Don Foley, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. +To keep that from happening, party officials said they and individual campaigns alike planned to spend about $20 million for aggressive registration and get-out-the-vote drives to rouse the party faithful -- blacks, the elderly, women, union members, Jews, young people and some Hispanic Americans -- from their lethargy. +Republicans are also waging intense efforts to get out the vote, but they are less worried than Democrats. Republicans have historically been more inclined to vote. This year, moreover, Republicans have built-in incentives: the discontent in general with incumbents, who are largely Democrats, and with President Clinton in particular. +"The radical right's got people all stirred up, and the anti-Clinton sentiment on the Republican side has got people all stirred up," said Donald R. Sweitzer, political director for the Democratic National Committee. "We don't have a national emotional issue that moves our base." +Larry Grisolano, field director for the California Democratic Party, said his challenge was far greater than it was in the heat of the Presidential contest two years ago. "Ninety-two was like going fishing and having the fish jump in the boat," he said. "The interest this year hasn't been at a level that would indicate any enthusiasm." +There is the possibility that Democrats are making the situation sound more dire than it is to insure that Democrats go to the polls. +Nevertheless, party officials have demonstrated their nervousness by urging the President to attend more black church services in the coming weeks to help persuade one of the party's most partisan constituencies to vote. +As part of the effort, the Democratic National Committee has produced 25,000 glossy brochures for distribution in heavily black precincts. Among other things, they list the names of black appointees to the Administration, calling them "20 of the African-Americans who are making a difference." +Celinda Lake, a Democrat pollster, said Mr. Clinton's efforts to motivate voters was "one place where the President can be a big help because he's extremely popular with the base still." +As part of an effort to energize another loyal Democratic group, organized labor, Mr. Clinton is scheduled to campaign in Detroit next week for candidates and address a get-out-the-vote rally. And, to reach the elderly, Democratic candidates are contending that the platform espoused by Republican House candidates will lead to big cuts in Medicare and Social Security. +Besides California, the Democrats are channeling the most resources to the largest states with the most closely contested races: New York, Texas, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Minnesota. +In New York, party officials said the fate of Gov. Mario M. Cuomo hinged on whether enough blacks in New York City and other urban pockets could be encouraged to vote. The officials said they had budgeted more than $1 million for such an effort, which is also targeting Hispanic and Jewish voters in the state. Overall turnout in this year's primaries in New York was 7.8 percent of the voting-age population. +Virginia is another nail-biter for Democrats. Officials said the turnout of black voters will determine whether Senator Charles S. Robb can fight off a challenge from Oliver L. North. +But nowhere are the Democrats' efforts at persuasion more aggressive than here in California, where the party is spending more than $8 million on their core voters. Nineteen percent of eligible voters went to the polls in the California primaries this year, compared with 21.4 percent in the 1990 primaries and 27.8 percent in the 1982 primaries. +Democrats are experimenting with an assortment of messages to get their rank-and-file interested. At a get-out-the-women's-vote rally in San Francisco on Monday, Vice President Al Gore's wife, Tipper, got a lukewarm reception at a half-filled outdoor plaza when she declared that it was in "women's self-interest, pure and simple" to vote for women. +But Josie Mooney, president of the San Francisco Labor Council, was more combative. She drew a much more enthusiastic response when she explained why women should support State Treasurer Kathleen Brown, the Democratic nominee for governor, over the incumbent, Pete Wilson. "I've been asked to say a few words about Pete Wilson," Ms. Mooney said. "How about short and mean?" +Ron Jackson, the Bay Area regional director of the state party's drive to encourage blacks to vote, said he got little mileage out of extolling the virtues of Ms. Brown. Instead, he said the best way to motivate black voters was to urge them to oppose a ballot initiative that would significantly stiffen jail sentences for three-time felons. "The one thing that turns on African-Americans is three-strikes-and-you're-out," Mr. Jackson said. "That issue goes to bed with them." +One of the most intense efforts is aimed at the 800,000 women in the state whom the party labels as occasional voters. Every woman who voted in 1992 but not in 1990 or in this year's primaries has been sent a letter from Hillary Rodham Clinton, who wrote, "Their silence could lose these elections and turn back our mandate for change." +Indeed, party officials hope their work will pay off better in November than it did here on Monday. +"My husband has cancer and I don't feel like talking about the election right now," one Oakland resident replied when she was phone by a party worker, Lisa Tucker. +"Sorry about that," Ms. Tucker replied. After hanging up, she conceded, "This was not our best list." + +LOAD-DATE: October 6, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "OVER TIME: Voters Lose Interest in Midtown Election" shows turnout, as a percentage of voting-age population, in primaries held for each midterm election from '62-'94. (Source: Committee for the Study of the American Electorate) (pg. D22) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +339 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 6, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Expelled From Villages, Bewildered Muslims Trudge to Sarajevo + +BYLINE: By ROGER COHEN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 15; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 571 words + +DATELINE: SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzego vina, Oct. 5 + +The central image of the Bosnian war was repeated yet again in Sarajevo today when Muslim men, women and children expelled by Serbs from eastern Bosnia trudged across a city bridge clutching their only remaining possessions in a few ragged sacks. +Dazed and frightened, some of them in tears, they came slowly across the so-called Bridge of Brotherhood and Unity between the Serb-held Grbavica section of Sarajevo and Government-held territory. Then, as United Nations officials looked on, they were bundled onto city buses and taken off to one of the many refugee centers in the Bosnian capital. + "Serbian soldiers came to my house today and said I was to leave at once," said Fatima Potorkevic, aged 75, from the village of Burati, near Rogatica, in Serb-held eastern Bosnia. "I have no idea where I am going." +Sejdalija Mirvic said his village of Satorovici, near Rogatica, was entirely emptied of its remaining Muslims today. The Serbian authorities came to each Muslim household and told the families to prepare to leave. Then they were bundled onto buses to Sarajevo. +"I had three apartments in my house and a small farm with cattle," Mr. Mirvic, 56, said. "Now all I have left is in these bags." He pointed to two bundles on the floor of the bus. +Next to him a woman clutched a sleeping child, a young man stared vacantly into space and an old women wrapped shawls tighter against the gathering cold. The bewilderment on the faces of these uprooted Muslim farmers was that of a rural community thrust suddenly into the harsh lights of an unknown city. +The scene at the bridge seemed to capture the intractable suffering of the Bosnian war and the apparent powerlessness of international organizations to do anything about it, even after the forced eviction of an estimated 750,000 Muslims from the 70 percent of Bosnia held by the Serbs after 30 months of fighting. +The eviction of Muslim civilians came as Yasushi Akashi, the top United Nations official in the former Yugoslavia, secured an agreement on the reopening of the Sarajevo airport after a two-week shutdown in a meeting with the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. +Mr. Karadzic had threatened that his forces would shoot down any United Nations flights until the principle of Serbian ownership of the airport was accepted by Mr. Akashi. But the United Nations official said he had made no concessions in gaining Serbian agreement to the reopening. +Most of the food aid that reaches the city comes through the airport and the prolonged shutdown as winter approaches has caused food stocks to dwindle sharply and food prices to increase. +Mr. Akashi expressed satisfaction at the fact that a long-delayed prisoner exchange involving 115 Muslim prisoners of war and 160 Serbs had been agreed between the warring parties. Described by United Nations officials as a hopeful breakthrough, the planned exchange was largely overshadowed by the refugees' arrival. +Many international agencies were represented at the bridge --the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, United Nations peacekeepingtroops and the Red Cross. But they had little comment on the Muslim civilians crossing the bridge. +A local official, Azem Muzan, said 83 Muslims from the Rogatica area crossed into Bosnian Government territory. They have entered a city that is surrounded, short of wood and coal and psychologically exhausted after a 30-month siege. + +LOAD-DATE: October 6, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +340 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 7, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Waiting Out Japan's Trade Surplus + +BYLINE: By ANDREW POLLACK, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 3; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1277 words + +DATELINE: TOKYO, Oct. 6 + +Even as the United States struggles to reach new market-opening agreements with Japan, some foreign and Japanese economists believe that natural forces could eliminate Japan's huge trade surplus within the next decade or two. +"The trade surplus will disappear toward the end of the decade," Robert Alan Feldman, the chief of economic research for Salomon Brothers in Tokyo, predicted. Edward J. Lincoln, an economic adviser to the United States Embassy in Tokyo, said, "Certainly in the first decade of the 21st century it will disappear." + According to some economic theories, what will make the trade surplus disappear is the aging of Japan's population, which will bring about an economic and social transformation of the nation that could liquidate its current account surplus -- essentially the trade surplus adjusted for some other flows, such as foreign aid, gifts to relatives in foreign countries and earnings from foreign investments. This surplus measured $131.4 billion last year. +By the year 2020, about one in four Japanese is expected to be at least 65 years old, compared with about one in seven now, in large part because of a low birth rate. That could give Japan, which celebrates a national holiday every September called Respect-for-the-Aged Day, the oldest population in the world. +Older people tend to draw down their savings to support themselves. So as Japan's population ages, the nation's currently high private savings rate should decline. +Economists say that Japan's current account surplus is a byproduct of the fact that Japan saves more than it invests at home. That difference is what it invests overseas -- and by definition it equals the current account surplus. So if saving is replaced by consumption, and if there is not an equal drop in investment within Japan, the inevitable result will be a drop in the current account surplus. +Japanese households save about 14 percent of their disposable income compared with about 4 percent for Americans. This is partly because many Japanese remember the deprivation after World War II. They must also save for a long time for home down payments, which are extraordinarily large compared with those in America, both because housing is expensive and because mortgage lenders demand large equity cushions. +But Charles Horioka, a professor at Osaka University, predicts that Japan's savings rate will "decline very sharply, possibly approaching zero or even negative by 2010 or 2020." The rate has already dropped from a peak of 23 percent in 1974. +The Japanese Government has been citing such an argument to its trading partners out of self-interest. Tokyo has urged other countries to take a long-term view of its perennial trade surplus, because the problem will go away as Japan's working- age population shrinks. In the short term, some Japanese say, the trade surplus is needed so the nation must keep saving to prepare for the burden of caring for more and more elderly citizens. +"There is an aspect of preparing for the aging society in Japan's current account surplus," Motoshige Itoh, a professor at the University of Tokyo, wrote in "Misunderstandings about the Trade Surplus," a book published this year by the research institute of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry. +Washington ran into this argument recently when it urged Tokyo to cut taxes to stimulate its economy, which would in turn increase imports. When the Japanese Government recently cut income taxes, it also decided to offset this by raising the sales tax, partly on the ground that it was worried about affording care for the aging population. +Even if Japan's trade surplus with the rest of the world falls away, it might not mean better trade relations with the United States, since the surplus with America could continue. +While the trade imbalance between the United States and Japan of roughly $60 billion a year has come to symbolize the larger trade problems between the two nations, pressure to correct it comes from American companies that have trouble selling in Japan. +"It's not just an issue of macroeconomics, it's also an issue of fairness," Ambassador Walter F. Mondale of the United States said at a news conference last week. +Even if Japan's trade surplus were to disappear, Western economic analysts say, there could still be complaints that Japanese markets are closed, just as there are complaints from other countries about trading practices of the United States, which runs a large trade deficit. +In fact, relying on theories alone is chancy, because Japan's trade surplus has defied other predictions and proved remarkably resilient. In the last two years, the surplus has soared to new records, partly because Japan's recession reduced domestic demand for imported goods. +Kenneth Courtis, an economic strategist at the Deutsche Bank in Tokyo, points out, moreover, that in the future Japan will have a huge stream of income from the investments it is now making overseas with its surplus savings. That income, he argued, will largely offset the decline in the current account surplus caused by an aging population. +Even those who expect the surplus to diminish say it may not take place soon. Yukio Noguchi, a professor of economics at Hitotsubashi University, has analyzed this question, and thinks the surplus will turn negative for Japan, but not until the year 2025 or so. +Clinton Administration officials agree that the recent agreements opening Japan's insurance, government procurement and flat glass markets will not shrink Japan's trade surplus very much by themselves. An agreement on automobiles and auto parts, which accounts for the largest part of the American trade deficit with Japan, could have far more effect, but over the long run. +Far more effective in reducing Japan's surplus, some economists say, has been the increase by roughly 25 percent of the yen against the dollar in the last two years. That makes Japan's exports less competitive abroad and the country's imports more attractive at home. +The rising yen, coupled with a resumption of economic growth in Japan, should reduce the nation's current account surplus to below 2 percent of economic output in a few years. This is one of the goals of the trade framework agreement signed by the United States and Japan last year. The International Monetary Fund predicted last week that Japan's surplus would fall to 2.9 percent of gross domestic product this year and 2.6 percent next year, compared with 3.1 percent last year. +But complete elimination of the deficit might have to wait until Japan grows older. The nation has the world's highest average life expectancy, with women likely to live for 82.51 years and men for 76.25 years. The Government reported last month that 5,593 Japanese were now at least 100 years old in a population of 125 million, up by 791 from last year. +Kazumasa Iwata, a professor of social and international relations at the University of Tokyo, said that a reduction in savings by the Government would go far toward eliminating the trade imbalance. +Japan has slipped into a national budget deficit, although it still has a surplus in its social security account. But as people get old and start drawing their social security payments, that surplus, too, will turn into a deficit. +The effect of demographic change on investment in the domestic economy remains unclear. With the labor force shrinking, some economists say, investment in new factories might decline. Or it might rise, as more automation is stimulated by the scarcity of labor. +"We do not know what will happen to investment," Professor Noguchi said. + +LOAD-DATE: October 7, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Saving habits of Japan's elderly may be key to the nation's trade surplus. Older women exercised in Tokyo. (The New York Times) + +Graph: "View of a Less Rosy Future" shows the percent of population over 65 in 1990 and 2010, and Japan's household savings rate from '77-'92. (Source: Ministry of Health and Welfare, Japan) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +341 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 9, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +An Aging Generation Looks for Answers + +BYLINE: By CHARLOTTE LIBOV + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 8; Column 5; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1316 words + +AS women seek to take more control of their health and their lives, conference organizers are finding that subjects like breast cancer, menopause and self-defense are drawing large audiences. +Many of the conferences are aimed at women over the age of 40, among them the baby boomers thought not to be content to go through the aging process without plenty of information. + Such interest comes as no surprise, said the television journalist and writer Linda Ellerbee, who will give the keynote speech at a conference titled "Health and Women Over 40: Prevention and Survival." +"My generation has always been a noisy one," Ms. Ellerbee said, "and one thing which we have made clear is that women's health is no longer going to be ignored." +The conference, which features speakers on breast cancer diagnosis and management, hormone replacement therapy, osteoporosis, exercise and humor, will be held from 3 to 9 P.M. on Thursday at the Marriott Hotel in Farmington. The program costs $55 (including dinner). +And the UConn conference is by no means the only such program this fall. Many community centers and hospitals offer similar programs. +Why are the programs so popular? One explanation is offered by Leslie Laurence, an author of the just published book "Outrageous Practices: The Alarming Truth About How Medicine Mistreats Women" (Fawcett) She believes that women become very interested when they are faced with the health issues associated with menopause. +"If a woman entering menopause is considering hormone replacement therapy and she asks her doctor about it, she'll find out that these is no real answer on whether or not she should take it," Ms. Laurence said. "She'll find out hormone replacement therapy hasn't been that well studied, we don't have a lot of definitive answers. When women find out their doctor can't really give them an answer, they're realizing that they have to become informed." +Older women's interest in health conferences does not surprise Dr. Cynthia Adams, associate dean of the School of Allied Health at the University of Connecticut, which is sponsoring the second women's health conference in Farmington, along with the University of Connecticut Health Care Center and Cigna Health Care Inc. (Information: 786-0007). Last year's session drew almost 500 women, and this year's is expected to be even larger, Dr. Adams said. "All the baby boomers are aging at the same time," Dr. Adams said, referring to menopause. "Since we are all getting into it at the same time, it's become more acceptable to discuss. I don't think women discussed it a decade ago, but now, it's in." +Dr. Priscilla D. Douglas, a professor of allied health at UConn, who will also speak at the Farmington program, said that women who are at this phase in their lives are a particularly good group to reach about making healthy life style changes. +"Young people often think they are immortal, but the middle-aged woman is in a different place," Dr. Douglas said. "She's seen people who have gotten ill. She should be aware of how things can be better for her. This is a group that is ready, willing and able to make changes in their lives." +Several breast cancer survivors, including Ms. Ellerbee, are expected to speak at the Farmington conference. Among them will be Lynn Wabrek, a Hartford-area psychotherapist who underwent a mastectomy and now includes her experience with breast cancer in her talk, "Sex at Midlife." +"I really feel it is my calling to provide information," Ms. Wabrek said. "When I talk to groups, I always mention that I am a breast cancer survivor, and I've had to cope with these things myself." +Ms. Ellerbee said that many women of her age were getting breast cancer and that they have looked at what gay men with AIDS have done to get attention and money for their disease. "There is a feeling that if we do not do this, we will be ignored," she said. +October is National Breast Cancer Awareness month, and many other women's health programs are focusing on the disease. Among them is New Milford Hospital, which will sponsor a free program on breast cancer at 7 P.M. Thursday at the hospital. The speakers will include Dr. Ann Walzer, a hospital radiologist, Dr. Linda DeMarco, a cancer specialist, and Yolanda Miller, director of the hospital's diagnostic imaging center. (Information: 350-7216). +The program is part of a wider effort this month. Hospital representatives will visit the Kimberly-Clark Corporation and Fidco Inc., a food research company, to provide information about breast cancer. In addition, the hospital is providing low-cost mammograms to women in the community, said Gretchen O'Shea Reynolds, director of community relations at the hospital. +"There are more and more health programs geared toward women, in part I think because there is a lot more information available on women's health now than there ever was before," Ms. Reynolds said. +Menopause will be the topic when the Hospital of St. Raphael in New Haven holds another in its series of free "Women's Health and Life Style Lectures" on Wednesday from 6 to 7:30 P.M. The program will feature Dr. Bonney McDowell, discussing "what women can expect as they approach menopause," said Sandy St. Pierre, hospital spokeswoman. This is the second in a series of three lectures on women's health; a program on breast cancer was held in September and, on Nov. 9, the subject will be osteoporosis, Mrs. St. Pierre said. Additional lectures are planned for the spring, including a program on eating disorders, a session for parents of teen-agers and a program about child care. (Information: 780-4304) +The lecture series is "something brand new for us," Mrs. St. Pierre said. The series was initiated by the staff at the hospital's obstetrics and gynecology department. +Last year, Rockville Hospital in Vernon created a Women's Center for Wellness that offers a year-round roster of courses on such topics as eating disorders, menopause, relationship issues and self-defense, said Anne Marie Capossela, director of marketing and program planning. This fall's schedule lists 37 courses, ranging from one-day events to hourlong sessions that run throughout the season. Most classes cost $5 a session, although some are free and others do cost a little more, she said. +"We surveyed women as to what they wanted and they said: 'Tell us more about our health. Tell us more about our well-being.' Women want more information and they've told us that very clearly," she said. The classes are not held at the hospital, but nearby, because the women surveyed said they did not want to take wellness classes in a hospital setting, she said (Information: 871-2046). +Another organization that sponsors women's health programs is the Women's Health Initiative at Yale, a joint program of the Yale School of Medicine and Yale-New Haven Hospital, which is designed to help integrate women's health care into its programs, said Dr. Florence Comite, the program's director. +The Women's Health Initiative recently held a dinner and health program in August as part of the SNET Classic Professional Women's Tennis Exhibition and last spring joined with the American Heart Association's Connecticut affiliate in presenting a program on women and heart disease, breast cancer, mental illness, and the controversy over hormone replacement therapy, Dr. Comite said. Tentative plans call for a spring fashion show for women with special needs, like those with osteoporosis or those who have undergone mastectomies, Dr. Comite said. +In Dr. Comite's view, these programs are not designed to substitute for a woman seeing a doctor, but to give her information so that she can work in concert with her doctor to get optimal medical care. "Women want to be able to help themselves," she said. "We're seeing that women are very hungry and devour the information we give them." + +LOAD-DATE: October 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Health groups are offering more courses for women on issues ranging from cancer to self-defense. At the Women's Center for Wellness in Vernon, Donna Betancourt, an instructor, demonstrates a headlock on Peggy Chaffee. (George Ruhe for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +342 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 9, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +PLAYING IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: RIVERDALE; +Flight Path: Hawks on the Wing + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 14; Column 4; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 180 words + +"SUMMER is over and people think it's time to turn their backs on gardens," said David Manning, a spokesman for Wave Hill, the gardens in Riverdale, but "heading into the fall season the whole environment is even more spectacular as the leaves turn and garden colors start emerging." +Not to mention the hawk migrations: Wave Hill is along the hawks' autumn north-south skyway. "Because of the sweeping views along the Hudson," Mr. Manning said, "it makes a great place to watch for them." + On Saturday, Todd Miller, a naturalist, will point out rough-shinned, red-shouldered hawks to those gathered at the Pergola, the Italianate structure in the middle of the great lawn. +"The question is not whether or not you see any hawks, but what variety and how big and rare they are," said Mr. Manning. +He could also add, what other big birds might be around: last year, the hawk-watching group saw an eagle. Bring binoculars. +Wave Hill, 675 West 252d Street, Riverdale; admission to grounds: $4, senior citizens $2; hawk watch, Saturday, Oct. 15, 2 P.M.; (718) 549-3200. + +LOAD-DATE: October 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +343 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 9, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Topics of The Times; +No Swearing Allowed + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 14; Column 2; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 228 words + +Who says you can't legislate morality? The homey borough of Raritan, N.J., may soon enact an ordinance that prohibits "rude or indecent behavior," including profanity or "making insulting remarks or comments to others" on its quiet streets. The ordinance would outlaw not only the vagrancy other municipalities try to ban, but also "unnecessary congregating in groups . . . to the annoyance of other persons." +In short, no cussin' on Main Street, or any other unusual conduct the Raritan council might be worried about. Is there a problem that needs this remedy in that hamlet of 5,800 souls, mostly senior citizens? "Not now," says Mayor Anthony DeCicco, "This is just an ounce of prevention." + Also a ton of unconstitutionality, as Raritan's police chief, Joseph Sferra, has noted. The First Amendment protects the right of people to say things that annoy, even insult others if they do not threaten physical harm. The Constitution also has safeguards against laws so sweeping or so vague that ordinary people cannot tell when they are breaking them. +Mayor DeCicco, a genial official who operates a family bar, says the borough's lawyers will study the bill more deeply before Tuesday's scheduled council vote. The best advice would be to lose this bill, hold off on lawmaking until trouble arises and trust to the people's good sense and civility. + +LOAD-DATE: October 9, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +344 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 11, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +At Last, Life Care Comes to New York + +BYLINE: Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7; Column 4; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 739 words + +DATELINE: ITHACA, N.Y. + +In 1989, Jim and Ceil Spero, both retired and in their early 60's, were invited to a meeting about a new idea for New York State: a retirement community that comes with a guarantee of health care at a predictable cost. +Ms. Spero did not want to go. + "I said to Jim, 'How can you possibly take me to a place like this?' The people in the room were so old. Ancient, in fact." +But after the Speros heard the pitch, they were persuaded. And in December 1995, they are to become residents of the state's first "life care community," which is being established here by the Kendal Communities Development Company, a Quaker-run nonprofit insurance company. +So will Alice Cook, who turns 91 in November. +"Ten years ago, I wasn't ready to think that far ahead," said Ms. Cook, a professor emeritus at Cornell University. "But I seemed doomed to live into my 90's. And I'm in a position to take care of myself." +What life care will provide here is a system to deal with the chronic health problems of the elderly. (Residents are required to have Medicare coverage plus supplemental insurance to pay for hospitals and specialists' fees.) There will be an on-site nurse practitioner trained in gerontology, and doctors will be available by appointment and on call. Coverage for residents will include annual physicals, routine health screening and prescription drugs. If they fall ill, there will be a variety of options for care, from home health care to a nursing home where each resident will have a private room. The health care package will also provide physical, occupational and speech therapy, nutritional counseling, psychological counseling and help with insurance billing. +Life-care retirement communities have been around since the 1960's in California, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and elsewhere. +But until 1989, life care was expressly forbidden in New York State because of nursing home scams in which people put their life savings in a non-refundable, prepaid 10-year nursing home contract. If they died before the contract expired, there was no way for the estate to get back unused money. To prevent such abuse, the Legislature passed laws that forbade prepayment of nursing home care more than two years in advance of need. +Life-care communities, however, require a substantial lump-sum payment and require sizable monthly maintenance charges. +The initial investment at the Kendal project ranges anywhere from $76,000 for an efficiency cottage or apartment to $240,000 for a two-bedroom cottage or apartment on the proposed 110-acre site in the Cayuga Heights area of Ithaca. Monthly maintenance charges are $1,415 for a single person in the smallest unit to $2,485 for a single person in the largest. Add another $830 for the second person in the same unit. (People sharing cottages or apartments need not be related.) +Until now, the only way for New Yorkers to buy life-care insurance was to move out of state -- with all their retirement money. +"Why should wealthy New Yorkers have to go to Ohio, where the weather really isn't any better, when we can keep people in New York?" said Assemblyman Marty Luster, a sponsor of the legislation allowing the care communities here. "It keeps money and people here. It creates temporary construction jobs and permanent jobs in administration, services, etc. You are buying housing, recreation, companionship and health care at all levels for the rest of your life. And you know what it's going to cost. So that's security." +Though the legislation was approved in 1989, it took until April 1994 to win passage of a bond measure essential for construction of the state's first life care community. Ground-breaking occurred on June 30. +Ms. Cook and the Speros will be among the first to move in. Ms. Cook has chosen a one-bedroom apartment in which she has invested $126,000. There will also be a $1,700 monthly fee to cover cleaning, repairs, taxes and the health care package. For her money, she also gets one meal a day in a restaurant-style dining hall; access to an indoor swimming pool, library, bank and beauty parlor, all within the community, and scheduled transportation to shopping and other outside activities. +The Speros are happy with their choice. "Do you realize that we have actually made plans for the rest of our life?" Mrs. Spero said. The couple's biggest problem now? +"Getting rid of our stuff that we know the kids don't want," she said. + +LOAD-DATE: October 11, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: October 15, 1994, Saturday + + CORRECTION: +An article on Tuesday about a retirement community in Ithaca, N.Y., that comes with a guarantee of health care at predictable cost referred incompletely to the history of such "life care" communities in the state. The Ithaca project, established by the Kendal Communities Development Company, will be the first to open. Another, the Glen Arden Life Care Community in Goshen, was the first approved, under legislation passed in 1989; its developers plan a groundbreaking by the end of the year. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +345 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 12, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Runners Far Ahead In Aging Healthfully + +BYLINE: By JANE E. BRODY + +SECTION: Section C; Page 11; Column 5; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 687 words + +ACTIVE Americans do not wear out, but sedentary ones are likely to rust out, according to the findings of an eight-year study of nearly 800 people 50 and over. As they age, the study showed, those who regularly engage in vigorous aerobic exercise like running are much less likely to develop life-inhibiting disabilities. +The study, conducted by a research team from Stanford University and published in the current issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, followed the health of 451 members of a runners' club and 330 nonrunners living in the same community. All participants were 50 to 72 when the study began. + "Long-distance running, and presumably other regular aerobic exercise activity, is associated with preservation of good physical function in the later years of life, compared with persons with more sedentary life styles," the researchers concluded. They said their findings underscored the importance of promoting "regular lifetime physical exercise to improve the quality of life of the growing older population." +The study also showed, as have earlier ones, that the runners had a lower death rate than the nonrunners. +As one might suspect, at the time of enrollment the runners were in better shape than the nonrunners. When the study began, runners, who had already been pursuing their chosen activity for an average of 12 years, were leaner, had fewer medical problems and fewer joint symptoms, took fewer medications and were less likely to have experienced previous disability than were the nonrunners. +The researchers, headed by Dr. James F. Fries, a specialist in arthritis, suggested that the initial health differences could be the result of the previous years of running or it could reflect the fact that people in good shape initially are more likely to choose to be vigorously active. Nonetheless, in following the fates of the two groups of men and women for eight years, the researchers showed that the health differential persisted and further increased, even after taking the participants' initial health status into account. +The nonrunners, both men and women, were several times more likely to develop some form of disability during the eight-year period. This health difference persisted even when the data were adjusted for potential health influences like smoking, body weight, history of arthritis, age, sex and disabilities present when the study began. +"There was but a slight increase in disability in the runners and a substantial increase in the nonrunners during this period," the team reported. By the end of the study, the nonrunners reported three and a half times more disabilities than did the runners. Disability measures included the participants' ability to walk, arise from a straight chair and grip objects. +"These findings underscore the fact that people who are physically active will remain physically fit despite the process of aging and the chronic diseases that can accompany aging," said Dr. Ralph Paffenbarger, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California at Berkeley. "They are another argument for undertaking activities to promote flexibility and strength and to reduce the risk of fatal coronary heart disease and stroke and the risk of developing hypertension, osteoporosis, obesity and noninsulin-dependent diabetes." +To eliminate a possible bias that would result if some people had once been runners but gave it up because of health problems, the researchers divided the participants into "ever runners" and "never runners," and here they found an even greater difference in disability was found between the runners' club members and the entire nonrunning group. +The runners reported less frequent joint pain and swelling than did the nonrunners. But when X-rays of joints were taken of a smaller group of participants in the study, no differences in arthritic changes were found between the runners and nonrunners, suggesting that differences in disability rates were due to factors like improved conditioning and low rates of other health problems like heart disease, rather than a reduced incidence of arthritis. + +LOAD-DATE: October 12, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +346 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 13, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Campaign Briefs; +Democrats' New Ads Attack G.O.P. 'Contract' + +BYLINE: Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 12; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 226 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 + +The Democratic National Committee today announced a $2 million advertising campaign that portrays Republican candidates as intent on tax cuts for the rich, huge new spending for the Pentagon and "devastating cuts in Medicare." +The campaign reflects an effort by Democrats to turn the "contract with America," a list of promises embraced by Republican candidates for Congress this month, into a liability in the final weeks of the fall election campaign. "A trillion dollars in promises," an announcer in the advertisements declares. "How will they make up the spending gap? Explode the deficit again? Make devastating cuts in Medicare?" + The advertisements, one of which is specifically aimed at older Americans, argue that the Republicans are determined to resurrect the economic and fiscal policies of the Reagan years. "Why would we go back to that?" the commercials ask. +Republicans contended that Democrats were twisting the truth because they feared a Republican surge in November that could cost Democrats control of the Senate and perhaps even the House. +Representative Dick Armey of Texas, the chairman of the House Republican Conference, said, "The White House and Clinton Democrats in Congress have resorted to what's known in politics as the big lie to try to salvage some House and Senate seats in this volatile election year." + +LOAD-DATE: October 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +347 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 13, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +THREATS IN THE GULF: THE KUWAITIS; +Hope and Anxiety for Kin Of Those Missing in Iraq + +BYLINE: By CHRIS HEDGES, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 17; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1095 words + +DATELINE: KUWAIT CITY, Oct. 12 + +The rumblings of war along the border with Iraq have heightened the hopes and anxieties of the hundreds of Kuwaitis who have relatives believed to be held in Iraqi prisons since the Persian Gulf war in 1991. +Senior Kuwaiti officials, who are lobbying hard to establish an exclusion zone in southern Iraq to limit future military movements, also say they will now press for a final accounting of 609 Kuwaiti citizens who vanished with retreating Iraqi troops during that conflict. + "When the Security Council sits down to discuss the future plan for Iraq, we will have two issues we will push," said Sheik Salem al-Sabah, the chairman of the National Committee for Missing and Prisoner-of-War Affairs and a member of the ruling family. "We will call for some kind of a security zone in southern Iraq, and we will ask that the Iraqi Government be pressed to inform us about the fate of our hostages." +"Many families hope that the coalition will hit Saddam and once he is finished off, our hostages will be released," Sheik Salem said, referring to the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein. "Families are actually disappointed with the news of a possible Iraqi withdrawal. They believe they may have to wait for Saddam Hussein to be removed, and for a new government to take power, before those who are missing come home." +The 609 missing Kuwaitis include a large number of students, 8 women and 2 people over 80. Their plight has dominated the national debate in Kuwait since the war. Posters are plastered around the city calling for their release, and many establishments display yellow ribbons as a sign of solidarity with their cause. Huge signs, including one at the International Airport, call on Kuwaitis not to forget those who have disappeared, and Kuwaiti newspapers and television often have reports about the families waiting for news of their loved ones. +"Why would anyone want to detain senior citizens?" one poster says, showing an empty rocking chair. "Ask Saddam Hussein." +The committee for the return of the prisoners has its headquarters in a cavernous hall in a suburb called Sabaha Salman. The walls are covered with photographs, many of them studio shots of university graduates in black robes clutching new diplomas, or new brides or bridegrooms. There is a large replica of a jail cell, complete with a heavy chain, lock and black iron bars. +There are 740,000 Kuwaitis in the emirate, and nearly every family has a relative or friend who remains unaccounted for. +"The issue of the missing takes priority over everything else for the average Kuwaiti," a Western diplomat said, "including the demand for Iraqi recognition of Kuwaiti's sovereignty and the acceptance of a common border. The Government is under constant pressure to resolve this." +The Iraqi Government denies any knowledge of the missing Kuwaitis. But in September, as part of a diplomatic effort to appear cooperative with the United Nations, Iraqi officials handed over information in Geneva on 45 Kuwaitis on the list. +The Iraqis said the 45 had been arrested during the seven-month Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. They said 39 had disappeared in the chaos after the gulf war and that 6 were killed during the uprising by Shiites in southern Iraq. Sheik Salem dismissed the report as "inadequate." +Although the Iraqis maintain that they lack information about the missing Kuwaitis, there have been many reports from people released from Iraqi prisons saying that they had been held with some of the Kuwaitis and that some have passed on messages or personal items. +"The Iraqis have let us know through officials from Qatar and Iran that if we call for the lifting of the sanctions against Iraq, we will get information about our missing," said Abbas Habib Mounar al-Mussin, the chairman of the Kuwaiti Parliament's Defense and Interior Committee. "But we are refusing to be blackmailed." +The families waiting for information ride an emotional roller-coaster that often leaves them exhausted and depressed. They have been some of the country's most effective lobbyists abroad for the continuation of the sanctions against Iraq and often accompany Government officials on state visits. +Bahja Maraffi last heard from her 30-year-old daughter, Samira, in June 1991, when she passed on a message from a prison in Iraq through a released prisoner. The note was ominous. It said she and a few other Kuwaitis were being held on the orders of Oday Hussein, the President's son and designated heir. +"After this we heard nothing," Mrs. Maraffi said. "But I can feel in my heart that my daughter is alive." +Those who have lost spouses or parents struggle to create a presence out of memories and stories. +"I have a son who was born after his father was taken," Fawzia Abdullah said. "I show him his father's picture every day. When he sees a man on the street who looks like the photograph, he will run after him crying, 'Daddy, Daddy.' I have to sit him down and start to explain all over again." +Baghdad has often in the past denied knowledge of missing foreigners in Iraqi but then suddenly released them in good-will gestures or as part of a diplomatic campaign. +During a recent visit by Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, Iraq released eight Pakistanis about whom, they had said only days before, they had no knowledge. And after the eight-year war with Iran, the Iraqis freed more than 2,000 prisoners who were presumed dead. +Most foreigners now released from prisons in Iraq are interviewed by Kuwaiti officials, who travel to their home countries with portfolios filled with pictures of the missing. +The return of the Kuwaiti captives was one of the conditions of the cease-fire imposed on Iraq after American-led forces drove Iraqi troops from Kuwait. At least 5,727 civilians and prisoners of war were turned over to the International Committee of the Red Cross between March 1991 and December 1993. +Many Kuwaiti officials and Western diplomats now refer to those who remain missing as hostages, rather than prisoners of war. And while Kuwaiti officials expect that some of the 609 are dead, they also have no doubt that some are alive. +During a recent visit to the Kurdish-held security zone in northern Iraq, a Kuwaiti Foreign Ministry official, Abdul Hamid al-Awadhi, was handed the watch and prayer beads of a missing Kuwaiti by a Kurdish bus driver who had transported him to another prison. +"These people are being held as bargaining chips by Saddam Hussein," Mr. Awadhi said. "It is a familiar tactic." + +LOAD-DATE: October 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +348 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 15, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Consumer Prices Up Modestly + +BYLINE: By ROBERT D. HERSHEY Jr., Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 37; Column 6; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1117 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Oct. 14 + +Consumer prices rose modestly in September while retail sales climbed and industrial production slowed, the Government reported today. +Over all, the unusually heavy batch of figures portrayed an economy still expanding at a robust, but perhaps slackening, pace, while price pressures that have developed in various areas remained bottled up before reaching consumers. But even if that outlook continues, the Federal Reserve is still expected to raise short-term interest rates another time this year in an attempt to hold growth and inflation in check. + "We've got a healthy economy on our hands," said Joan D. Schneider, an economist in Chicago for BA Securities Inc., an arm of the Bank of America. "And we haven't seen the inflation rate yet pick up." +The Dow Jones industrial average rose 20.52 points, to 3,910.47, while the yield on the 30-year Treasury bond dropped to 7.83 percent from 7.85 percent. [Pages 38 and 48.] +Retail sales climbed six-tenths of 1 percent in September and sales were revised somewhat higher for July and August, the Commerce Department reported. The Federal Reserve found industrial production unchanged last month as the operating rate of factories, mines and utilities declined for only the second time since mid-1993. +The report on inflation, which followed Thursday's unexpected decline in prices received by the nation's producers, showed the Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers rose two-tenths of 1 percent last month. +As a result of the inflation report, some 50 million Americans receiving Social Security and other Federal benefits will get 2.8 percent increases for 1995, the third-slimmest cost-of-living raise since the payments were automatically coupled to inflation in 1975. [Page 35.] +The average monthly benefit for all retired workers is to rise $19, to $698, with an elderly couple who both qualify for benefits getting a $32 increase, to $1,178, the Social Security Administration calculated. +The Labor Department reports two consumer price indexes, the Consumer Price Index-U, for all urban consumers, and the Consumer Price Index-W, for all urban wage earners and clerical workers, which rose one-tenth of a percent last month. +The index for all urban consumers is the more widely followed of the two but the index for urban wage earners and clerical workers is used to calculate increases in the Federal benefit programs. +The impending 2.8 percent raise reflected how much the Consumer Price Index-W rose between the July-September quarters of 1993 and 1994. +The September increase of two-tenths of 1 percent in the more widely followed Consumer Price Index came after three straight months in which it climbed three-tenths of 1 percent. The so-called core rate, which leaves out the wide-swinging food and energy components, also rose two-tenths of 1 percent. +Over the last 12 months the index has advanced 3 percent, the performance of its main elements ranging from a 4.7 percent increase for medical care to a decline of three-tenths of 1 percent for clothes. +A downturn in energy prices last month was the chief reason for the slightly lower September advance but a stabilization in coffee prices, up about 22 percent in each of the two preceding months, also contributed. Gasoline and airline fares fell but the price of new motor vehicles rose five-tenths of 1 percent -- they were lower in the Producer Price Index -- while used cars rose 1 percent. +Automobile finance charges rose an additional 2.2 percent, to a point 15.6 percent higher than at the end of last year, the Labor Department's report also showed. +In the New York metropolitan area, one of five regions for which September figures were reported today, prices edged down one-tenth of 1 percent and now show a 2.4 percent rise over the latest 12 months. +The retail sales tally showed that consumers spent $188.43 billion in stores last month, six-tenths of 1 percent more than in August and 8.1 percent more than in September 1993. These figures are adjusted for seasonal and holiday differences but not for inflation. +Sales of durable goods climbed 1.1 percent, with home furnishings up 1.4 percent, automotive up six-tenths of 1 percent and the building materials-hardware-mobile home category up 1.6 percent. +In nondurables, up three-tenths of 1 percent over all, sales rose five-tenths of 1 percent at stores selling general merchandise, two-tenths of 1 percent at food stores, 1.1 percent at gasoline service stations, 1 percent at bars and restaurants and three-tenths of 1 percent at drugstores. The only decline was at stores selling clothing and accessories, where sales dropped 1.5 percent last month. +This retail spending, which accounts for about one-third of economic activity, was aided by a four-tenths of 1 percent rise in real average weekly earnings last month, the Government also reported. +The Fed's figures on industrial production, which include factories, mines and utilities, showed a slackening in production, with factory output up just one-tenth of 1 percent after a 1 percent August gain. A brief strike at General Motors was a negative factor but when motor vehicles and parts are excluded the gain was still just two-tenths of 1 percent. +Motor vehicle assembly was at a 12-million-unit annual pace, down from 12.3 million in August, and appliance production was down for the second straight month. +Output at mines and utilities each posted a third straight decline. +The operating rate for industry edged down to 84.6 percent last month, two-tenths of a point lower than in August and the first decline since April. +But analysts seemed not to find this persuasive evidence that the progressively greater strains on industry this year have eased. +"It doesn't change my overall impression that the amount of excess capacity as well as skilled and semiskilled workers is essentially used up," said Kelly K. Matthews, chief economist at the First Security Corporation in Salt Lake City. +Calculations by the Social Security Administration today showed a widowed mother with two children getting a $37-a-month increase, to $1,365; an elderly widow or widower $18, to $656; a disabled worker with a spouse and at least one child, $30, to $1,118. +A couple on Supplemental Security Income for needy aged, blind or disabled people will get an $18 increase in their monthly maximum, to $687. +A year ago it was announced that the average retirement benefit would rise $17, to $674, but the benefit actually turned out to be $679, today's report showed. A spokesman said the extra $5 reflected more higher-income people retiring during the year, one in which taxes were raised, than had been estimated. + +LOAD-DATE: October 15, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graphs: "Retail Sales" shows total retail sales from April 1993 to Sept. 1994. (Source: Commerce Department); "Industrial Production" shows index of total industrial production from April 1993 to Sept. 1994. (Source: Commerce Department); "Capacity Utilization" shows total output and a percentage of capacity from April 1993 to Sept. 1994. (Source: Federal Reserve Board); "Consumer Prices" shows percentage change in consumer prices from Oct. 1993 to Sept. 1994. (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics)(pg. 48) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +349 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 16, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +Sports of The Times; +The Locker Room Was Less Hospitable Than Hanoi + +BYLINE: By GEORGE VECSEY + +SECTION: Section 8; Page 3; Column 1; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 888 words + +THE DAY she threw the wad of tape back at the football player, Kristin Huckshorn knew it was time to get out. Athletes had often lobbed missiles at her and made remarks, but she had assumed it was their quaint way of expressing befuddlement at seeing a female reporter in the locker room. +Now she had to move on. Huckshorn became a news reporter for The San Jose Mercury News in 1988, and recently she became the first American certified as a foreign correspondent by the postwar Vietnamese Government. + "I still say that covering sports was the most difficult thing I ever did," Huckshorn said the other day by telephone from Hanoi. "You feel so alone." +This is a journalist who has covered Bosnia and Somalia, yet many athletes, coaches and many male colleagues couldn't understand why she was asking questions about a botched third-down play. +These days, Huckshorn spends her mornings learning the intricacies of a language in which you either order a bowl of the national soup or insult somebody's ancestors, depending on the subtle intonations. This is a journalist who travels the length of that buffeted peninsula, living and dining with the people. +"I have eaten snake," Huckshorn said. "It tastes like chicken." +And most important, she writes about the heritage of America's involvement in Vietnam. Recently, she went to My Lai, the scene of that ghastly massacre a quarter-century ago. +"People in Vietnam are so kind, so gracious," Huckshorn said. "But one elderly woman who was injured at My Lai took me by the shoulders and asked me why America had come to Vietnam. I had no answer for her." +But Huckshorn feels the respect for her, as an American reporter sent to ask questions and write stories. She never felt quite that way as a sportswriter. +Because of the priorities of sports-page readers, most ambitious female sportswriters must take a shot at "the big three," as she calls them, football, baseball and basketball. But very quickly, many come to prefer sports where female athletes are prominent, and where the press corps is more equal -- tennis and Olympic sports and, to some degree, racing. (Bluntly, there is a higher level of conversation and camaraderie in those press boxes; the gene pool is bigger and therefore better.) +Even today, there is very little space for female athletes at the front of sports sections or magazines. Tomorrow, the Women's Sports Foundation will hold its annual celebration in New York, honoring achievers in every sport, and particularly Martina Navratilova, who is retiring next month. Navratilova is about twice as interesting as any male athlete today, yet she languished in the female-sports ghetto for a long time. Female sportswriters also debate just how far they've traveled. +"I wasn't even a pioneer," said Huckshorn. "When I started in 1979, most of the male writers in the Bay Area were tremendously supportive, but you'd go somewhere else and expect to get into the locker room, and the other men would glare at you as if to say, 'Why are you causing trouble for us?' " +Is it important that female journalists cover big-time men's sports? My answer is that we need different perceptions about men's personalities, men's rituals, men's games. There are female anthropologists. Why not female sportswriters? +After a few years on the job, Huckshorn and several colleagues formed the Association for Women in Sports Media (pronounced "awesome"). It is part professional association, part support group. +"There's nothing I've done in my career than has meant more to me than helping found A.W.S.M.," Huckshorn said from Hanoi. +Eventually, Huckshorn began to realize just how much she had been willing to play the game. In 1990, reporter Lisa Olsen of The Boston Herald was mistreated -- I would say sexually harassed -- by a few cretins in the New England Patriots locker room. By then a news reporter, Huckshorn wrote a column for The Mercury News: "Female Sportswriter Finally Rocks Boat." +Huckshorn's piece has been reprinted in a significant anthology titled "A Kind of Grace; A Treasury of Sportswriting by Women," edited by Ron Rapoport of The Los Angeles Daily News and published by Zenobia Press of Berkeley, Calif. (Yes, Rapoport is the first to concede the irony of a man's editing an anthology of women's sportswriting.) I counted 70 different bylines, some of the best and the brightest in sportswriting. +"I remember being reduced to tears by Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight," Huckshorn confessed. "I didn't complain. I might never again have been assigned to cover the team. I remember being hit with jockstraps, dirty socks, wads of tape, obscenities. I didn't snitch. Players might avoid me. I never rocked the boat." Of Lisa Olsen, Huckshorn wrote: "I wish she would shut up. She makes me wish that I hadn't." +On the phone the other day, Huckshorn sounded hopeful. +"I know that if Michelle Kaufman of The Detroit Free Press has a problem, she goes right to the front office and takes care of it," Huckshorn said. +In the last decade, many women have left sports after a few years. Is it because they couldn't stand the heat? No. It's because talent needs to keep moving. For Kristin Huckshorn, the trail led to My Lai, where an American female reporter can ask questions and nobody throws tape. + +LOAD-DATE: October 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: October 23, 1994, Sunday + + CORRECTION: +The Sports of the Times column last Sunday, about female sportswriters, referred incorrectly to the Vietnamese Government's admission of American news correspondents. Kristin Huckshorn of The San Jose Mercury News was not the first admitted; she was preceded by George Esper of The Associated Press. + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Kristin Huckshorn, standing at center, with other sports journalists at a ball game in Oakland, Calif., in 1988. (Terrence McCarthy for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +350 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 16, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Death Before Dying + +BYLINE: By Hilma Wolitzer; Hilma Wolitzer's most recent novel is "Tunnel of Love." + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 20; Column 1; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 818 words + + +RECESSIONAL +By James A. Michener. +Illustrated. 484 pp. New York: +Random House. $25. + JAMES A. MICHENER seems to heed the old dictum to "write about what you know," which in his case is hardly limiting. In more than 40 books, published over the past 47 years, he's covered such diverse topics as wartime in the South Pacific, Alaska's social development and the space program. These heavily researched, fact-filled works are enormously popular, especially with readers who prefer their history and geography in the guise of fiction. +Now, in "Recessional," Mr. Michener, who was born in 1907, addresses the complex issues associated with aging in America. He has chosen to present what must be an intensely personal subject through the perspective of his novel's idealistic young hero, Dr. Andy Zorn. After enduring some nasty malpractice suits and a divorce in Chicago, the 35-year-old Zorn has abandoned his medical practice to become general manager of the Palms, a flagship facility in Tampa, Fla., for people too old and infirm to live independently. +At the Palms, terms like "nursing home," "hospital" and "hospice" are forbidden. Instead, residents are discreetly moved from the "Retirement Area" to "Assisted Living" to "Extended Care." Euphemisms and ironies abound. The book's epigraph explains that a recessional is "a hymn or other piece of music played at the end of a service while the congregation is filing out." And as Andy Zorn drives through Tampa, he notes a welcoming sign: "You are now entering God's Paradise. The O'Neill Crematorium. Complete Services $475." +Mr. Michener, whose own views (like Zorn's) on medical ethics appear to be liberal and humanistic, allows some of his characters to offer more conservative opinions. (Of the system of triage created by managed care, one man notes: "The budget, inescapable from the moment of birth till the instant of death, will have dictated the value decisions." Replying to the idea of a "therapeutic abortion" done, as a character explains, "to correct nature's accident," another responds that "God does not make mistakes.") In fact, "Recessional" provides a thoroughly informed overview of what happens to the elderly in this country (along with a survey of numerous other matters, from religion to politics), mostly through the impassioned discussions of a four-member tertulia, or informal debating society, that regularly convenes in the dining room at the Palms. +Unfortunately, the prose style and dialogue in this issue-driven novel are too often stilted and expository. Characters tend to speechify rather than speak, and even Andy Zorn's thoughts are rendered in unnaturally formal, coherent blocks of prose that halt and summarize the action. "Here I sit," he remarks early on, when informed of the Florida laws that regulate the Palms, "a certified doctor with these handsome facilities at hand, and I'm forbidden to use either my own skills or these wonderful lifesaving machines. I've thrown myself into a weird world." +The world of old age is indeed weird, and terrifying, as autonomy diminishes along with physical and mental well-being. Among the villains here (aside from nature) are greedy children, ambitious doctors and medical science itself, which manages to prolong life without sustaining its quality, "so the loved one who has died without dying lives on and on." +The best moments in the novel occur when the characters disclose what's in their hearts and minds with rueful, snappy humor. One Palms resident succinctly complains, "Television six hours a day, and the yogurt machine is never working." Another quips, "The two sorriest days in a man's life in this joint is when his wife dies and when he has to give up his driver's license. Not necessarily in that order." There are also some genuinely poignant passages. An articulate member of the tertulia finds himself mysteriously unable, one morning, to knot his own necktie. And an Alzheimer's patient who manages to elude her warders by wandering outdoors discovers "what she had sought from the moment she climbed out of bed, the freedom of the open air, escape from nurses and bells, the joy of striding along as the sun began to display its power in the east." +But the wordiness and melodramatic subplots of "Recessional" -- including Andy Zorn's romance with a beautiful young double amputee, the comings and goings of a mysterious Kevorkian-like figure at an AIDS hospice and the infiltration of the Palms by a spy from a fanatical organization called Life Is Sacred -- eventually swamp the essential drama of old age and how we deal with it. James Michener's own remarkable career, as it is intriguingly revealed in his 1992 memoir, "The World Is My Home," not to mention his continuing vigorous engagement with that infinite world, makes a much stronger argument against the isolation and disenfranchisement of the elderly. + +LOAD-DATE: October 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +351 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 19, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +THE 1994 CAMPAIGN: THE ADVERTISING; +Democrats Find a Target in G.O.P. 'Contract' + +BYLINE: By ROBIN TONER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 8; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 792 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 + +They are filmed from a distance, moving in slow motion, and often in lockstep, sometimes with the whir of a camera's motor drive in the background and a threatening, ominous soundtrack. Visually, these scenes from Democratic commercials have the feel of an illicit gathering, recorded on the sly. +That, of course, is the Democrats' design: In advertisements running throughout the country in the final three weeks before the Nov. 8 election, Democrats are trying to turn the Republicans' "Contract With America" into a dark and frightening ceremony -- and along the way, meet some urgent political needs. + Democrats are hoping that the political extravaganza staged by Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia on the Capitol steps last month, when 300 Republican candidates committed to the "contract" of political promises, can be used to galvanize core Democratic voters, strip away the Republicans' image as a party of outsiders and turn the political debate to a much less dangerous terrain. +Republicans scoff, but Democrats clearly scent an opportunity to at least blunt their losses. The Democratic National Committee is running $2 million worth of advertisements in nine states tied to the contract, and Democratic strategists estimate that as many as 40 Congressional candidates are either already broadcasting or about to broadcast their own versions of the commercials. +"When Republicans were the angry protest party, they were in a very strong position," said Stan Greenberg, President Clinton's pollster. "But once they begin to tell people what they're for, they've complicated this election." +Mr. Greenberg added, "These outsider candidates didn't need to be anything but vessels for people's alienation, and now they've taken on a form." +In fact, Democrats are trying to use the contract to cast Republicans in a form they are very comfortable campaigning against. The contract commits the Republican Party to an array of tax cuts, a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget and a stronger military. As one Democratic Party advertisement puts it: "How will they make up the spending gap? Explode the deficit again? Make devastating cuts in Medicare?" +In several of the advertisements, as the announcer talks about the contract as a return to the Reagan years, the camera lingers on a headline: "Reagan's ax to cut Social Security." Republican strategists are crying foul, asserting that Democrats are up to old tricks: when in danger in a close election, try to mobilize the elderly by warning of Republican plans to cut Social Security or Medicare. +"They obviously don't want to run on Bill Clinton and the Clinton Congress, so they'll resort to lies or distortions to try to divert attention," said Barry Jackson, who runs the Contract With America office at the Republican National Committee. +"Tony Coelho was notorious when he was at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for going in on the last 10 days and doing scare tactics on seniors," Mr. Jackson added, referring to Mr. Clinton's top political adviser. +Still, the economic promises in the Republican agenda have attracted critics from outside the partisan fray. The Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group devoted to reducing the deficit, said, "As is often the case, if it sounds too good to be true and it looks too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true." And Democratic consultants say the editorial response to the contract was so negative that they have the makings of another round of advertisements. +Peter Fenn, a Democratic consultant, said, "It seems to me the second wave in this campaign is the citing of editorials that call it a joke, that call it voodoo two, that criticize Republicans for the fact that they're not going to be able to pay for the program." +Still, it is the Washington imagery that is so attractive to so many Democrats, since they have been hammered this year for being part of the establishment. +"Three hundred Republican candidates flew to Washington, signed over their votes to the Republican leadership and then promptly returned to the states to accuse the Democrats of being insiders with an agenda out of step with their districts," said Anita Dunn, a Democratic consultant. +Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster, said that he understood what the Democrats were trying to do. But he said they were fighting major political forces. +"Midterm elections are instinctively a referendum on the President and the party in power," Mr. McInturff said, "and the Democrats are doing all they can to change the locus of the election to a different question." +He added, "As someone painfully caught in the backwash in 1982 and 1986, what we learned was doing this is enormously difficult." + +LOAD-DATE: October 19, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +352 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 19, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +THE 1994 CAMPAIGN: THE AD CAMPAIGN; +Attacking the Republican 'Contract With America' + +SECTION: Section B; Page 8; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 441 words + +CANDIDATE -- Representative Jolene Unsoeld, in a tough re-election race in Washington State, is one of many Democrats around the country broadcasting advertisements that attack the Republican "contract with America." + +PRODUCER -- Fenn King Murphy Communications + + +ON THE SCREEN -- In slow-motion, the Republican challenger, State Senator Linda Smith, walks up to a table to sign the contract. She is highlighted, but in the background are clearly visible row after row of Republicans in suits -- a seeming tableau of the Washington establishment. The ad then shows headlines about the dangers of the Reagan Administration's economic policies superimposed over still pictures of women, children, elderly people and workers. Among the headlines: "Reagan's Ax to Cut Social Security." + +SCRIPT -- "You're looking at Congressional candidate Linda Smith, taking the lead, signing a contract with the national Republican leadership. What's the deal she's agreeing to? More tax breaks for the wealthy, paid for by devastating cuts in Medicare. Or, increasing the deficit again. It's a contract to revive the failed 1980's. +"You remember -- trickle down economics, exploding deficits, slashing Social Security. That's what Linda Smith just signed us up for again. But why would we ever want to go back? + +ACCURACY -- Democrats assert that the "contract with America," which promises a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget, an array of tax cuts and an increase in military spending, will inevitably mean cuts in entitlement programs like Medicare, which make up more than half of the Federal budget. Republicans reject that charge, and Ms. Smith's campaign chairman, Bill Kinkade, says the candidate "has pledged never to cut Social Security or Medicare." +But many budget experts have long argued that achieving substantial, long-term deficit reduction is impossible without some pain. Warren Rudman, the former Republican Senator from New Hampshire and a founder of the Concord Coalition, the bipartisan group devoted to reducing the deficit, said, "You cannot get deficit reduction of any substantial nature without a huge tax increase, or significant means testing of all entitlement programs, including Medicare." + +SCORECARD -- This commercial presents a non-incumbent, non-Washington politician as a tool of Washington elites. It also tries to galvanize voters who historically have voted Democratic; the fear of cuts in Social Security and Medicare is one of the most potent fears in American politics. The risk in such ads, some analysts suggest, is they may not reach beyond the Democratic core voter. + +LOAD-DATE: October 19, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: October 20, 1994, Thursday + + CORRECTION: +A picture yesterday with a summary of a campaign advertisement for Representative Jolene Unsoeld of Washington State was published in error. It showed an advertisement for Representative George Hockbrueckner of New York, one of many Democratic campaigns around the country that attack the Republican "Contract With America." + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +353 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 23, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +CONNECTICUT GUIDE + +BYLINE: By ELEANOR CHARLES + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 10; Column 4; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1251 words + + +SONO CENTER STAGE + The attractions of South Norwalk will be on display next weekend beginning with a preview party on Friday evening from 6 to 9 P.M. at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion, 295 East Avenue. +Reconstructed from a waterfront slum, Washington Street and the adjoining area have become an enclave of art galleries, restaurants and boutiques, enhanced by the Maritime Center around the corner on Water Street, a new railroad station two blocks away, and the restoration of the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion. + Mario Buatta is the honorary chairman of an antiques show to be held at the mansion on Saturday from 11 to 6, and Sunday from 11 to 5. Admission is $7. A tour of the elaborate 50-room Victorian home, built in 1868 by LeGrand Lockwood, a railroad tycoon, will be guided by Connie Beale, a Greenwich interior designer, on Saturday at 10 A.M. +A free walking tour of SoNo, led by Ralph Bloom, the city's historian, will begin at Hope Dock next to the Maritime Center on Saturday at 1 P.M., or on Sunday if it rains. +Hope Dock is where the Island Girl is berthed, offering cruises to the historic Sheffield Island Lighthouse and the Norwalk Islands on Saturday and Sunday at 11 A.M. and 1 P.M. Naturalists will be aboard to talk about the ecology of Long Island Sound and oystering operations in Norwalk waters. Cruise tickets are $9 for adults, $8 for those 62 and older and $7 for children under 12. +A new Imax film at the Maritime Center, called "Destiny in Space," is narrated by Leonard Nimoy and features space explorations that include flyovers of Mars and Venus -- spectacular when seen on the 8-story-high screen. Daily showtimes are 11 A.M., noon, 1, 2 and 3 P.M. and on Friday and Saturday at 7 and 8 P.M. Admission is $6 for adults, $4.50 for senior citizens and children under 12. +Street entertainment will be provided throughout the weekend and a Halloween costume party is scheduled at the Maritime Center on Saturday from 7 to 11 P.M., with costume competitions, entertainment, dancing and a cash bar. The phone number for tickets or more information is 852-0700. + +MIDNIGHT GOTHIC + "Gothic at Midnight," an evening of ghost stories for adults, will be presented at the Westport Arts Center on Thursday at 7:30. It's the first of three storytelling performances by Joshua Kane, known in the area as the Bard of Central Park. +Drawing on his acting and mime studies with Stella Adler, Marcel Marceau and the National Shakespeare Conservatory, Mr. Kane weaves his solo performances out of literary classics, myths, original stories and folklore. Sans costumes or sets, he portrays a daunting range of characters and narrates a prodigious repertory of tales, this week concentrating on the fantasies and horrors of Halloween. He will return on Feb. 23 with an evening dedicated to the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, and on April 27 the program will be based on "Time Machine," by H. G. Wells, traveling to the year 802,701 A. D. +Individual tickets are $15, subscriptions for the three shows are $39. The number for tickets or more information is 226-1806. + +ARCHITECTS HUDDLE + The Connecticut chapter of the American Institute of Architects will sponsor the national 1994 convention in Hartford on Saturday from 11 A.M. to 9:30 P.M. The event, titled "Accent on Design Convention and Exposition," will be held at the Civic Center and feature speakers from across the country. Aimed primarily at professionals, from architects to engineers to building officials, it will offer information of interest to home owners and prospective home buyers as well. +The morning seminar on "Seismic Design Requirements for Masonry Construction" may sound more applicable to the West than the East Coast, but New England is subject to its own breed of earthquakes and builders are concerned about providing an ounce or more of prevention. +New Connecticut building and fire codes, and five critical elements of environmental design will be the afternoon topics, and there will be a variety of demonstrations throughout the day. +Following a reception from 7 to 8 P.M., Fred Koetter, Dean of the Yale School of Architecture and a founding partner of Koetter, Kim and Associates, will discuss "The Future of Architecture." His firm advocates principles for urban design that include lively streets, mixed commercial and residential uses and accomodations for pedestrians. +The fee for all-day attendance $50, admission to individual programs is $10 and $20. A walk through the exhibits and demonstrations is free. Complimentary bus service for ticket holders will be provided from Norwalk, Bridgeport and New Haven. Call 865-2195 for tickets or more information. + +FOCUS OFF PLANET + Outer space is the focus of the new exhibit for children and adults at the Science Center of Connecticut in West Hartford. On view through Jan. 2, 1995, "The Endless Frontier" celebrates the 25th anniversary of the lunar landings and the Apollo program itself. +The principal element of the exhibit, which originated at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is a 20-foot by 12-foot video wall featuring 22 color monitors tracing the history of America's space exploration programs and technology, including a day aboard the Space Station. +Current and future spacecraft models are on display, along with a vintage Apollo space suit, and a robot prototype of the ones that will be sent to Mars. A hands-on gyroscope exhibit that explains defying gravity in order to keep rockets on course, and a planetarium show titled "Moon Shadows," recapturing the astronaut-vs.-cosmonaut race to the moon, are additional attractions. +The center is located at 950 Trout Brook Drive, open Tuesday through Friday from 10 A.M. to 4 P.M.; Saturday from 10 to 5 and Sunday from noon to 5. Admission is $5 for adults, $4 for people 62 and older and children 3 to 15. Admission to the planetarium is an additional $2. For information or directions call 231-2824. + +WORKSHOPS ON FLORA + Three workshops at the Garden Education Center in Greenwich this week explore aspects of the plant world. +On Wednesday at 10 A.M. Edwin T. Morris of the New York Botanical Garden will talk about "The Plants of Vice." Botanical species that have been used down through the ages as aphrodisiacs or stimulants, or to bring about altered states, or intoxication, and as elements of strange rituals will not only be discussed in historical context, but also sampled, judiciously. The fee is $25. +The art of Japanese flower arranging will be tackled by Judith Hata on Thursday at 10 A.M., focusing on the Sogetsu school, in which the natural beauty of the flower is paramount. The class is suitable for beginners as well as more experienced practitioners. Participants must supply a container 10 to 12 inches in diameter and 2 to 3 inches deep, a pin flower holder at least 3 inches in diameter, and Japanese flower scissors or pruning shears, all of which may be purchased at the center's shop. The workshop fee is $35. +A free, drop-in, hands-on workshop that will cover everything anyone needs to know about orchids will be conducted by Carrie Raven on Saturday from 11 to 2. All aspects of growing and maintaining suitable conditions for orchids will be discussed and questions will be answered. A supply of phalaeonopsis orchids will be available for sale. The center is located on Bible Street in the Cos Cob section of town, and the phone number for more information is 869-9242. ELEANOR CHARLES + +LOAD-DATE: October 23, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +354 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 23, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE 1994 CAMPAIGN: SENATE; +Castro Runs Against Moynihan, D'Amato and Her Childhood Image on TV + +BYLINE: By FRANCIS X. CLINES + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 40; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1385 words + +Bernadette Castro always knew she had to get beyond that old Castro sofa-bed commercial from her girlhood to have a shot at a real political identity. But what can she do when a well-meaning fan like John Zero, a white-haired stalwart at the 58th Street Republican Club in Woodside, Queens, sidles up with a twinkle in his eye when she wants to talk big politics -- her hard-run but equally hard-to-notice United States Senate race -- and he wants to talk sofa beds? +"I want to know, do you still got that cute little nightgown you wore when you were 4 years old and used to open the Castro Convertible on TV?" Mr. Zero asked the other night. Thirty Republican senior citizens applauded Ms. Castro after she proved that she could be a surprisingly bracing clubhouse speaker, for all her inexperience. + "Oh sure, still got it," laughed Ms. Castro, 46 years after that ad made her famous -- back when television was in black and white and marketing specialists actually thought it was better suited to selling furniture than political candidates. +"I've got to get beyond that," she resolved later in a conversation. "I mean calling me 'the sofa heiress,' that sort of thing," groaned Ms. Castro, a 50-year-old Republican business executive, with a saucer-eyed look of exasperation that heightened her resemblance to Nancy Reagan. +But the very morning after Mr. Zero's nostalgia for her nightie, Ms. Castro showed every sign of finally inventing a heartfelt political identity. In a sudden burst of anger, she began complaining last week not so much about Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democrat she wants to unseat, as about Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato, the fellow Republican and money-raising master. She has fashioned his inattention to her candidacy into a homestretch whip in her excruciatingly long-shot race. +"I think we have a new song for Alfonse to sing in the Senate: 'A Bicycle Built for Two,' " she declared, road-testing a new sound bite at a news conference the morning after charging that there was a clubby deference by Mr. D'Amato toward Mr. Moynihan to steer campaign funds and attention away from her to the top of the G.O.P. ticket. The charge garnered the first front-page headline of her money-strapped, five-month-long campaign, and it has put fresh spring in her step. +"Women talk of the glass ceiling -- well, I'm facing a brick wall with two guys holding it up in the back," she complained, running spiritedly against New York's senatorial tandem as an "outsider" who has found her candidate's voice at last. +An untested, gravely underfinanced candidate after her initial political years as a low-key suburban fund-raiser, Ms. Castro turned out early to have the feistiness on the stump of a natural campaigner. But she was little noticed until she criticized "Alfonse." +Senator D'Amato has denied any scheming, noting that he has endorsed Ms. Castro but is preoccupied with the gubernatorial candidacy of his upstate protege, State Senator George E. Pataki. After her complaint made news, Mr. D'Amato insisted he had helped Ms. Castro raise money. +"Maybe Alfonse is confused," Ms. Castro tightly retorted after privately debating with her campaign aides whether he deserved a stronger word than "confused." "He's not made any effort to help me raise funds." +"I'm not backing down -- no way, no way," she said in a car ride to Binghamton Wednesday morning, surveying her audacity in trying to bell the combative Republican Senator and exploit the state campaign's most interesting subtext: the expectation that Mr. D'Amato might become the veritable kingfish of New York politics should Mr. Pataki defeat Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. "Had I not talked about this issue, would I have gotten any help?" she asked after hearing a mixed reaction from Republicans. +"I think Alfonse would understand," she said, hardly timorous at Mr. D'Amato's celebrated wrath as she identified with his own reputation as a scrappy, opportunistic underdog. The Senator made a point of hugging the candidate at a G.O.P. dinner after news reporters bombarded the two with questions. +This was not lost on the Moynihan campaign. "She's about four years early in her Senate run," said William Cunningham, the Democratic Senator's campaign chairman, relishing Ms. Castro's criticism of Mr. D'Amato as Mr. Moynihan enjoys double-digit leads in the polls. +Ms. Castro, who won Conservative Party cross-endorsement in a primary challenge, insists Mr. Moynihan is the ultimate target, if voters would only pay attention. Her latest charge is that the Democrats may be preparing a last-minute barrage of polls using negatively worded questions to "blindside" Ms. Castro. The Moynihan campaign denies this. +"Interesting that the prince of darkness and his forces are concerned about dirty tricks," said Mr. Cunningham, referring to Edward J. Rollins Jr., the Castro campaign strategist and Republican consultant who embarrassed himself with his tactics in the New Jersey governor's race last year. Since she raised the issue of party regularity in campaign financing, Mr. Cunningham accused her of inconsistency, citing public records that she once made contributions to a past campaign for Governor Cuomo. +The campaign's preoccupation with money was signaled when Ms. Castro was the surprise Senate nominee last May at the Republican State Convention. Party professionals expected her to dip freely into her family fortune in her campaign against the financially well-ensconced Mr. Moynihan. "The goal was to raise three to four million if she wanted to make this a competitive race, which she didn't do," said Howard C. de Martini, the Suffolk County Republican chairman who sponsored the candidacy of his friend from Lloyd Harbor, L.I. "That doesn't mean she can't win; it just makes it more difficult." +Ms. Castro says the greatest shock of her campaign baptism has been the news media's equation of a candidate's credibility with the size of the campaign war chest. Ms. Castro estimates she will donate $1.2 million of her own family money to a total campaign of $1.7 million, mostly for a late blitz of TV ads. +This is about half the minimum stake that professionals think is needed against Mr. Moynihan, who raised $5 million in his last race. +She was in the paradoxical position one recent night of being invited to a private fund-raising event for another candidate at Peter Max's elegant art studio in Manhattan. Invited to say a few words, she was polished in attacking the Democrat and casually noted that she owned an original Peter Max oil. This, along with her designer clothes and self-confident delivery, hardly made her seem the political mendicant she has become. +Born in the Bronx, Ms. Castro was raised in Mamaroneck and Florida and has a degree in broadcasting and a master's in education from the University of Florida. Married for 15 years to Dr. Peter Guida, a New York surgeon, she has four grown children from a previous marriage. +She rebuffs any questions about losing. Her years as a hands-on executive in the family business are on display with a passion each day as she travels the state virtually alone, looking for an open microphone for her message that, like her role model, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, she can "take out" a well-financed incumbent. +"You used to know me as the little girl who put New Yorkers to sleep; well, now get ready for the woman who wakes New York up," she boomed the other night, drawing cheers at a Staten Island Conservative Party dinner. +Ms. Castro is single-minded as she drives from one campaign stop to the next, and the only thing that diverts her from her schedule is a chronic craving for french fries. She confided over a plateful: "Campaigning is like running a business in which all this preparation comes down to a one-day sale." +The challenge presented by Senator Moynihan remains formidable. But Ms. Castro's attitude has lightened as she enjoys the novelty of stirring some sensational attention as a politician, even if at the expense of Senator D'Amato. "I think Alfonse overdid it," Ms. Castro decided anew, comfortable with her new role in attacking "the insiders' club" as the fall foliage blurred past on the hustings. "I'm in this as a giant killer, and they're, like, cutting the bean stalk." + +NAME: Bernadette Castro + +LOAD-DATE: October 23, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Bernadette Castro, the Republican candidate for the United States Senate, greeted voters yesterday in the Dr. John Henrik Clarke House in Harlem. (Ed Quinn for The New York Times) + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +355 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 25, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Deaf to Estrogen's Call: A Man's Strange Story + +BYLINE: By NATALIE ANGIER + +SECTION: Section C; Page 1; Column 1; Science Desk; Medical Science Page + +LENGTH: 1896 words + +HE was a towering young fellow, nearly 6 feet 8 inches, the sort of height that prompts strangers in elevators to ask, "Do you play basketball?" or "How's the weather up there?" But that wasn't the problem -- too tall is better than too short in this culture, right? And, yes, his feet and hands were unusually big; his size 18 shoes were beginning to pinch. But that wasn't what brought him to the doctor, either. No, it was his gait. His knock-knees were getting ever more knocked, the upper legs twisting inward so that his knees were too close together, his ankles too far apart, his feet splayed, his abnormal walk a growing embarrassment to him. So he consulted an orthopedic surgeon. +By the time his case had been reviewed in detail, his bones X-rayed, his blood sampled, his genes assayed and anatomized, he had overturned a long-standing medical paradigm, belied the endocrinology textbooks and defied scientific predictions merely by being alive. + The young man, whose identity is being kept confidential by his doctors, has a genetic defect never seen before in a human, one that is supposed to be so devastating that he should not even be alive. The cells of his body lack a component needed to allow them to respond to estrogen, a hormone once thought to be critical to life. He makes plenty of estrogen in his adrenal glands, his testes and elsewhere, as men normally do, but he lacks the receptor necessary to allow his body tissues to respond to all the estrogen he generates. +According to scientific presumption, a person without estrogen receptors should have died in the womb, or perhaps ended up with a grossly distorted central nervous system. Yet here he is, healthy in appearance and normal by most measurements, with a couple of outstanding exceptions. At age 28, 10 years after most males have reached their adult height, he is still growing. His epiphyses, the tips of the bones which are supposed to harden and fuse together at about 18 and thus spell an end to skeletal growth, remain soft and cartilaginous, as though he were a 15-year-old boy who is still upward -- and outward -- bound. +"He told me the other day that he just moved up to a size 19 shoe," said Dr. Eric P. Smith, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. Dr. Smith and collaborators from several institutions describe the paradigm-smashing case in the current issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. +At the same time the young man's bones are elongating, they are also becoming progressively weaker and more porous. As it turns out, he suffers from osteoporosis of a degree that might be expected, said Dr. Smith, "in an elderly, postmenopausal woman." +The two symptoms together -- lack of epiphyseal closure and the degradation of the bone structure -- surprised all the researchers who took part in the study. The findings demonstrate that estrogen is as important to a man's bone strength and skeletal structure as it is to a woman's; in the past, doctors thought that male hormones, the androgens, controlled bone development in men. +The symptoms also suggest that estrogen acts directly on bone cells, rather than through an indirect mechanism, as had been proposed. The young man's bone cells, like all his other cells, lack the estrogen receptor and so are unable to benefit from the strengthening influence of the hormone coursing through his bloodstream. Without the estrogen signal, his skeleton is gradually demineralizing, the calcium dissolving away like chalk in water. The means for preventing further decay remain unclear: estrogen replacement therapy cannot help a man whose cells are deaf to estrogen's call. +Beyond its relevance to medical understanding of bone metabolism, the case of the man without estrogen receptors highlights science's profound ignorance about the role of the sex steroids, the estrogens and the androgens, in dictating human physical or psychological growth. Although estrogen is commonly thought of as a female hormone and testosterone -- the most famed of the androgens -- as a male hormone, in fact both sexes produce considerable amounts of the other's hormones. In addition to manufacturing estrogen, men also turn some of their circulating androgens into estrogens, which then act on the body's tissues in various ways. +The man without estrogen receptors may lead to a radical reinterpretation of how the male and female hormones independently influence the body and brain. Not only does he challenge the notion that estrogen responsiveness is fundamental to life, he also appears to contradict a widely accepted idea that estrogen is an essential signal for shaping the masculine brain and forming its sexual identity. According to this notion, which is supported by a considerable amount of data from animal studies, testosterone's effects on the male brain are actually carried out in large part through estrogen: When the androgen reaches the brain, most of it is transformed into estrogen by an enzyme called aromatase, and it then speaks to the brain cells via their estrogen receptors. +Testosterone also interacts directly with some parts of the brain, linking up with receptors designed to recognize the male hormone. But the two classes of hormones were thought jointly important in organizing the male brain during its development and in creating some of the behavior seen in most men, including a general propensity to like women as sexual partners, a robust libido, perhaps even a tendency toward aggressive, competitive behavior. +Even without estrogen, however, the man's brain appears to be perfectly normal. Moreover, says Dr. Smith, he seems to be your average heterosexual guy, who expresses avid interest in women and has nocturnal emissions and morning erections and the like. Certainly his male hormones have in every other way turned him into a man. He reached puberty at the normal age, around 12, he has a full beard, normal genitals, a deep voice and masculine muscle development. +Dr. Daniel D. Federman of Harvard Medical School, who wrote a commentary accompanying The New England Journal of Medicine report, said in an interview that he hoped others like the young man will be identified. By studying such cases, he said, science may begin to parse out the various effects of male and female hormones on the brain and behavior. "We look at the different ways in which men and women play sports and just generally compete in life, and we also notice that men are disproportionately involved in violence," he said. "We assume some of this is testosterone-induced, but if the brain can make estrogen out of testosterone, we always have to wonder which of the two hormones is really having an effect. +"If we had, say, 100 people with this sort of genetic mutation, people who had no estrogen receptors, we could begin to cleave the impact of one hormone away from the other," he added. In other words, people like the young man in the report could offer a reasonably clean portrait of how testosterone alone influences brain architecture and any number of behaviors. There is some indication from mouse studies that male animals without estrogen receptors are less aggressive than are normal male mice, but the results are highly preliminary, and in any case the relevance of mouse data to human behavior is questionable at best. Rodent brains develop in a very different manner than do those of humans and other primates. +It may not be difficult to identify other men with this mutation, the researchers said, now that the symptoms have been described. If doctors see men who are much taller than their parents and who do not have excess growth hormone production (a sign of a well-known disorder called acromegaly), such men might prove to have unresponsive estrogen receptors. One of the researchers on the report suggested that the National Basketball Association may be reasonable place to start searching. +However, the mutation is likely to be rare in the general population, and for it to have an effect it must be inherited in a double dose. The young man in the report, for example, is the son of parents who are third cousins, each a silent carrier of the mutation. +Dr. Frederick Naftolin, a neuroendocrinologist and chairman of obstetrics-gynecology at Yale School of Medicine, said that while he found the new report "extremely interesting," he cautioned that much remains to be resolved about this patient. He proposed that, even without working estrogen receptors, the man may still be responding to his inherent estrogen signals in subtle ways. +Some scientists lately have argued that estrogen can exert its potent and multifarious effects through means other than by coupling with the designated estrogen receptor, perhaps by hooking onto cell receptors meant for other hormones in the body or by changing the properties of the delicate cell membranes. Scientists have also argued that estrogenlike compounds in the environment end up having a broad range of ill effects on human health and fertility through just such unexpected and indirect mechanisms. Here, too, the man could prove a useful guinea pig, should he be willing; scientists could study him for evidence that estrogen can indeed bypass the traditional receptors and still get across some sort of stimulatory message. +Whatever the outcome of the discovery, the new work stems from a striking convergence of basic and clinical observations. The young man came to Dr. Smith's attention after it was discovered that his epiphyses were unfused and that his circulating estrogen level was high. He also had an elevated insulin concentration, suggesting a minor defect in sugar metabolism. It was an excellent medical mystery for a pediatric endocrinologist, who looks at hormone imbalances in children; despite the man's age, he seemed to have a child's bones. The elevated estrogen led Dr. Smith to suspect he was unresponsive to the hormone, and thus it lingered in the bloodstream uselessly. To test the possibility, he put the young man on a regimen for six months that raised his estrogen level tenfold. In most men, such a manipulation would have led to obvious problems like breast growth, headaches, weight gain and mood alterations. In this man, nothing happened. +Dr. Smith then heard about new results from experimental mice. Dr. Kenneth S. Korach of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, N.C., and his co-workers had bred genetically altered mice that lacked estrogen receptors. The fact that such mice survived astonished Dr. Smith as well as others in the scientific community, and he began to wonder whether his patient might be a human version of these receptor-free rodents. The researchers decided to collaborate. +On analyzing the young man's DNA, Dr. Korach discovered that, sure enough, both his copies of the gene that allows the body to create estrogen receptors were so defective that no receptors at all could roll off their chemical templates. He defied the dogma that such receptors were needed, and even grew to a supermasculine height. His growth is now slowing and is expected to stop fairly soon (although the osteoporosis may continue to worsen), and he might never have made medical history had his bones not proved incapable of supporting the house they had built. + +LOAD-DATE: October 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: X-rays of left hand of normal 15-year-old boy, left, and that of patient with no estrogen receptors; bone stage is the same but bones are longer. (pg. C3) (University of Cincinnati College of Medicine) + +Graph: "Bone Growth And Estrogen" shows normal growth patterns, and height of estrogen-deficient subject at different ages. (New England Journal of Medicine) (pg. C3) + +Diagram: "How Hormones Sculpture a Male Body" + Estrogen, converted from androgen, is as important for the male as it is for the female for normal bone growth and structure. (Source: Dr. Eric P. Smith/Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +356 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 26, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +A Choice and an Echo + +BYLINE: By Robert Eisner; Robert Eisner is author of "The Misunderstood Economy: What Counts and How to Count It." + +SECTION: Section A; Page 27; Column 2; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 502 words + +DATELINE: EVANSTON, Ill. + +Just when the Democrats seemed to have something going with their attacks on the Republicans' "Contract With America," the Republicans have pounced on a counterweapon -- an internal Administration memo prepared by Budget Director Alice Rivlin. Titled "Big Choices," the memo is a list of largely unpopular options to hold the deficit in check and permit adequate financing of programs like the new national service corps, welfare reform and Head Start. +There is a fundamental difference, though, between the two documents. The Republican contract was signed by more than 300 candidates for Congress and presented by their leader, Newt Gingrich. The memo by Ms. Rivlin, a distinguished economist, is a set of hypothetical choices, with no endorsement from President Clinton or anyone else. + There is another difference: the Republicans tell us we can increase military spending, cut taxes and balance the budget at the same time and asks us to endorse that impossibility with our votes. Ms. Rivlin is at least honest. She says we have to choose. +But this does not necessarily mean that deficit reduction should be placed above all else. It is hardly clear that the tremendous deficit reduction Mr. Clinton has already achieved -- down this year to $203 billion from a Bush Administration forecast of $270 billion -- has won the Democrats many votes. +The Clinton Administration's focus on deficit cutting has caused it almost as much difficulty in enacting its programs as have Republican filibusters. The White House and the Congress are in a straitjacket that prevents them from spending more for one program without cutting something else. It is like telling your daughter that she cannot have a college loan and her education will have to be financed out of her brother's food money. +More important, curbing Social Security benefits is simply a bad idea, whether it is mentioned as a possibility in an internal Democratic laundry list or whether it is implicit in a Republican contract. Reductions in cost-of-living allowances would not only hurt the elderly, they would hurt the economy by reducing purchasing power just when our growth may be in danger of collapsing. And cutting Medicare or Medicaid, by leaving people sicker, would also undermine economic health. +Yet there could be a White House memo that the Democrats would be happy to see leaked. This one would set forth a comprehensive well-financed program to prevent and not merely punish street crime. It would include measures to bring up a new generation of educated citizens whowould be productive in a technologically advanced economy. It would include a program to support the basic research necessary for scientific and economic progress. It would include money for public investment on which economic growth depends. +I'll bet there are many such memos floating around the Clinton Administration. Perhaps if one or two were leaked, the voters could begin to see more clearly some of the real choices they have to make. + +LOAD-DATE: October 26, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +357 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 26, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +Mildred Natwick, 89, Actress Who Excelled at Eccentricity + +BYLINE: By PETER B. FLINT + +SECTION: Section B; Page 13; Column 1; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 627 words + +Mildred Natwick, a versatile actress who created an engaging gallery of eccentric, whimsical and spunky characters in plays, films and television for more than 60 years, died yesterday at her home in Manhattan. She was 89. +Miss Natwick, a small woman with sharp features and a mischievous manner, was a familiar figure on the Broadway stage, where she appeared in some 40 productions. Among other roles, she played an idiosyncratic secretary in George Bernard Shaw's "Candida," an extroverted medium in Noel Coward's "Blithe Spirit" and a shrewish wife in Jean Anouilh's "Waltz of the Toreadors." + The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson, in his review of the Anouilh play in 1957, characterized her performance as "protean" and one that "rides the whirlwind with a great sweep of venomous extravagance." +Miss Natwick's comic brilliance in Neil Simon's "Barefoot in the Park" prompted Walter Kerr to acclaim her in 1963 as "the most hilarious woman in the Western hemisphere." She further confirmed her versatility in 1970 in Harold Pinter's "Landscape" and in 1971 when, at the age of 62, she made her debut in a singing role in a John Kander-Fred Ebb musical, "70, Girls, 70," as the disarming leader of a circle of elderly people seeking self-esteem by stealing furs. +Among Miss Natwick's films were four directed by John Ford. She appeared as a prostitute in "The Long Voyage Home," a doomed mother in "The Three Godfathers," a hard-bitten Army wife in "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" and a sly widow in "The Quiet Man." +In a 1990 interview, she praised Ford as a masterly director who needed just a few words to inspire actors and give them the right clue or insight for a scene. In contrast, she said, Alfred Hitchcock, in directing the comedy "The Trouble With Harry," told her and the other actors precisely what he wanted. +Miss Natwick concentrated her career on Broadway, saying she had always preferred plays to movies because "on the stage, you're in control for two hours, while in a film, you do bits and pieces, usually out of sequence." +She received an Academy Award nomination as best supporting actress for her work in the 1967 film version of "Barefoot in the Park." She also received several Tony and Emmy nominations and was awarded an Emmy for "The Snoop Sisters," a 1973-74 television series in which she and Helen Hayes played successful mystery writers who were obsessed with solving real crimes. +In an interview in her Park Avenue apartment, she said her main criterion for creating a role was to make a character as inseparable from herself as possible. Nearly everything, she remarked, "is hit or miss for a while, until it all comes together." She said her advice to young performers was: "Act every time you get a chance. At least in the beginning, go wherever acting is." +Miss Natwick, who was called Milly by friends and associates, was born in Baltimore on June 19, 1905, to Joseph Natwick, a businessman, and the former Mildred Marion Dawes. She graduated from the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore and also from Bennett Junior College in Dutchess County, N.Y., where she majored in drama. +She began performing at the age of 21 with the Vagabonds, a nonprofessional group in Baltimore. She soon joined the celebrated University Players on Cape Cod, trading lines with such other young performers as Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan and Joshua Logan. She made her Broadway debut in the melodrama "Carry Nation" in 1932. +Among her films were "The Enchanted Cottage" (1945), "The Late George Apley" (1947), "Cheaper by the Dozen" (1950), "The Court Jester" (1956), "If It's Tuesday This Must Be Belgium" (1967), "Daisy Miller" (1974) and "Dangerous Liaisons" (1988) +No immediate family members survive. + +NAME: Mildred Natwick + +LOAD-DATE: October 26, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: November 8, 1994, Tuesday + + CORRECTION: +An obituary on Oct. 26 about the actress Mildred Natwick referred incorrectly to her debut in a singing role in a musical. It was in "Stars in Your Eyes" in 1939, not in "70, Girls, 70" in 1971. + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Mildred Natwick (1970) + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +358 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 28, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Issues of Race Are Raised In Simpson Jury Selection + +BYLINE: By DAVID MARGOLICK, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 29; Column 1; National Desk; Law Page + +LENGTH: 936 words + +DATELINE: LOS ANGELES, Oct. 27 + +Lawyers for O. J. Simpson asserted today that prosecutors were attempting, through needlessly persistent and provocative questioning, to keep blacks off the jury. Their accusations brought race to the surface of a case in which it has always lurked not far below. +The assertion, made in twin impromptu news conferences by two of Mr. Simpson's lawyers, followed a testy exchange between Deputy District Attorney William W. Hodgman and an elderly black man, one of six candidates screened today for the Simpson jury. "You're pumping me as if I'm on trial or something!" the man, a 71-year old retiree from South-Central Los Angeles, exclaimed. "I don't like that. You're sort of riling me." + Mr. Simpson's principal lawyers, Robert L. Shapiro and Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. were quickly out in the corridors, denouncing Mr. Hodgman's conduct. "We are very concerned about the tenor of questions and that they go after certain jurors," Mr. Cochran said. "In order for this jury to have credibility, it must have people from all walks of life and from all over the community." +In fact, the potential jurors who have survived the first round of questioning are an extraordinarily diverse group in which whites are a distinct minority. Jury selection was suspended late today as lawyers argued over whether poor supervision of Mr. Simpson's seized Ford Bronco should invalidate evidence taken from it in August. Judge Lance A. Ito put off a decision on the matter until at least Nov. 7. +A few minutes after Mr. Cochran spoke, and 12 floors below, Mr. Shapiro swung into action. He maintained that the prosecution was harassing black candidates, hoping they would talk themselves off the jury by betraying bias, and sparing the prosecution from having to use any peremptory challenges to remove them. +"It implies an insidious effort to try to get black jurors removed for cause because they are black, because they have black heroes and because O. J. Simpson is one of them," Mr. Shapiro said. "There's no other reason. I'm not saying they don't want them. They question them differently, and I don't think that's right." +The comments brought a quick and angry retort from Mr. Hodgman, who had pressed the unidentified jury candidate to elaborate on a number of statements he made on his questionnaire -- that he considered the Los Angeles Police Department "pushy," for instance; that he had read about the case in various supermarket tabloids and that he considered Nicole Brown Simpson's recorded 911 call to be merely "family matters." +Tension escalated when Mr. Hodgman pressed the man on whether he would convict Mr. Simpson were his guilt proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and the man just as repeatedly equivocated. It finally boiled over when Mr. Hodgman asked the man whether he had heard any discussion of polygraphs in the case -- Mr. Hodgman's colleague, Marcia Clark, recently talked of giving jury candidates lie detector tests -- then asked if he knew what a polygraph was. +Mr. Cochran said that question had not been asked of anyone else and called it "demeaning." And he said it was not the first time prosecutors had badgered potential jurors who are black, noting an earlier examination of a woman who broke down in tears when asked to discuss her brother's brushes with the law. +But at a news conference of his own, Mr. Hodgman accused the defense of bad faith. "This appears to be just the latest in a series of efforts to try to manipulate public opinion," he said. "And in the midst of jury selection, I think it is very inappropriate and unfair." Throughout his questioning, he said, he has attempted to insure "fairness and humanity for individual jurors." +Throughout the case, Mr. Simpson's lawyers have vowed not to introduce race as an issue, though they have said that the racist attitudes of one police detective assigned to the case may have prompted him to try to frame Mr. Simpson by transplanting a bloody glove to his property. It was unclear whether their statements today represented a change of tactics or simply the spin de jour. +Having just made the accusation, Mr. Cochran said he was not accusing anybody of anything but only sending a message to the Los Angeles District Attorney, Gil Garcetti. "Mr. Garcetti has said that his office is not going to exclude people on the basis of race, gender or ethnicity," he said, "and we are going to hold him to that." +It is widely but by no means universally believed that black jurors will be more sympathetic to Mr. Simpson, and that the defense is anxious to have as many of them as possible on the 12-member panel. +The juror questionnaire asked potential jurors whether they believed Mr. Simpson was guilty of the crime charged: murdering his former wife, Nicole, and her friend Ronald L. Goldman. "No," the black candidate questioned today wrote. "Let the law prove him guilty." +He was also among the few prospective jurors who, on the questionnaire, described racial discrimination in Southern California as "a very serious problem." Only questionnaires of potential jurors who have been examined have been released briefly to pool reporters. +It is unconstitutional to exclude jurors solely on the basis of race. But even if the prosecution offered race-neutral reasons to exclude black jurors, they would be unable to eliminate them all. In six days of questioning, 34 candidates have passed the court's muster, and of them, more than half are black. That included all three prospects approved today. Of the remainder, nine are white, three are Hispanic, two are American Indians, and two are of mixed ancestry. + +LOAD-DATE: October 28, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +359 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 30, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +COPING; +Talking Politics in a Municipal Bad Mood + +BYLINE: By ROBERT LIPSYTE + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 1; Column 3; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 839 words + +EVEN after 17 years in the city, Timothy Tate feels "politically transient"; he probably won't vote in this election. But Carol Roberto can't wait to vote for Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, "twice if you can figure out how I can do it." Eleanor Papa will be voting for George E. Pataki, because "a new broom sweeps pretty good at first, until it loses its fibers." Johnny Colon thinks "yelling in the streets" may be at least as effective as voting. And Daphne Maloney senses a confusion that she hopes won't translate into people sitting this one out, and then not even in her restaurant. +This pre-election poll may be as shallow as it is narrow -- only middle-aged or older registered Copers who have appeared at least once in this column were surveyed about the cityside impact of the gubernatorial election -- but it seems to echo the deep concern and the broad loss of optimism in current urban life. Nevertheless, most Copers say they will citizen on. What's the choice? Move? + Watching the city's economy from her cash register at Daphne's Hibiscus, a Jamaican restaurant on East 14th Street, Daphne Maloney can tell that "people are going out to dinner less, and there's more sharing of entrees." +"My main concern is crime, and then youth," she said. "Not enough is being done for them. What could the reason be for the little ones committing murder? No jobs, no hope. And people really do want to work. I had a young man, early 30's, come in two Mondays in a row to do some work, and I said I'd call him if I needed him again. He showed up a third Monday, just in case, made a long trip for a few hours work. I gave him something to do. All this would get worse with Pataki. A Republican Mayor and Governor would be a disaster." +* + "I'm a very loyal Republican," said Eleanor Papa, a retired Bensonhurst schoolteacher. "The only time I cross party lines is for my State Senator, Marty Solomon, a Democrat. He was very helpful when I got knocked down by a bike on the sidewalk. +"People aren't really talking about the election a lot. But then I spend a lot of time with the elderly, and they're not so concerned about issues as about themselves. Oh, they'll vote; see them come out with their little canes while the young people sit home and watch TV. +"I believe in the death penalty, workfare, not welfare, and cutting entitlements. Take some things from old people and give it to youngsters, they're the future." +Carol Roberto, a retired interior designer who lives near Union Square, thinks Mr. Pataki isn't "concerned about people." +"Lower taxes never work, they just cut into education and services for the poor," she explained. "My heart belongs to Mario. A great mind, fair and honest. He's too smart for people, they are envious. It was courageous for Giuliani to endorse him. I might just vote for Giuliani next time." +People are getting fewer haircuts these days, said Timothy Tate, who cuts hair at Pentomo, on the Upper East Side. "You never talk about religion or politics, you can lose a client over a disagreement," he said. "But I do listen. People are moving right-wing to justify their concerns about themselves, about making money for a second child, a first house out of the city. +"I'm not sure how political poorer people are, they're so busy just surviving. . . . Meanwhile, we're not getting the information we need. What about these Russian gangsters in New York? And where do all the guns in the ghetto come from? You give us the black persona of a street kid with a turned-around cap ready to steal, not the middle-class black person trying to embrace culture, live a life beyond race. +"I voted for Dinkins the first time, but would have voted for Giuliani the second time. I don't feel part of my times here as a black man without a college degree who is also not funky enough for SoHo. Giuliani's not good for me, but he's good for the city. He has a fixed purpose, he'll screw whole groups, get others off their butts to keep the city afloat." Mr. Tate has been spending more and more time lately at his computer, on-line. "I think of myself as non-aligned right now," he said. +Johnny Colon runs a music school and alternative high school in East Harlem. "You don't really hear a buzz up here," he said, "but that may be because people are apathetic. They've lost faith in the system, and rightly so. +"But getting up in politicians' faces, protesting, organizing on a grassroots level, is as important as voting. We have to get back out in the streets and make noise. Pass that old spark on to the kids. +"Cuomo's tired, he's fought the fight, but he wants to go out on top, with a bang for the city and the state. He wants people to feel about him the way they did when they talked about him for president." +Mr. Colon knows about fight and fatigue. A month ago, his longtime partner and wife, Stephanie Munoz, died. "The school and other nonprofits, we've got to get through the next couple of years, until things turn around again," he said. "Right now it's all about survival." + +LOAD-DATE: October 30, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +360 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 30, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Sound Bytes; +Going Interactive, Creatively + +BYLINE: By J. Greg Phelan + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 7; Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 686 words + +WHEN she saw the first portable video camera in 1970, Red Burns recognized the potential of the new technology to enable people to make their own documentaries. It was a defining moment that changed her career from a film maker to a creator of interactive tools. +Over the next two decades, she used a grant from the National Science Foundation to create a two-way television system that allowed elderly residents of Reading, Pa., to interact with one another and "visit" community sites like the city center, Social Security office and local high schools. The system is still used. + In 1979 Professor Burns helped start the Interactive Tele-communications Program at New York University, where she is the chairwoman of a graduate program with 150 full-time students devoted to learning how to create new interactive media. The faculty is composed of adjunct professionals -- artists, designers, and software creators. +Professor Burns's projects include the production of a CD-ROM on Chaos Theory with HarperCollins and a research project with Nynex called the Electronic Neighborhood, an interactive television program combining narrowband (telephone) and broadband (cable) communications. +Question. What is the motivation for a program in interactive tele communications? +Answer. People come here for one purpose -- to understand the possibilities of this new form. I don't see them coming here as a prelude to a career. These technologies are going to change all the time. They're really going to have to understand the fundamental nature of the technologies and the possibilities. And we look for ways for the technology to be applied in very human ways. +Q. Is technical obsolescence a problem? +A. No, because it's not about technology. We're not a trade school. We're training people who have to learn to navigate in a world of change. If there's anything constant, it's change. It's not like you open somebody's head and pour in a skill. +Q. What characteristic do you look for in prospective students? +A. Curiosity. This field isn't here yet. It's just developing. You have to be an adventurer, an entrepreneur. We accept people who have never touched a computer, who have never looked at video. We're more interested in people's approach. +Q. How does the program contrast with traditional computer science? +A. We're in the Tisch School of the Arts, which is primarily interested in creative communication. In computer science, they might see the arts as frosting on the cake. We see the arts as absolutely essential in the mix that's going to create new form. We don't have classes where a professor sits up at the front and teaches how to use a computer. People learn that in the labs on their own. +We're also a professional school. There are ethical and aesthetic issues, and ways of looking at how one creates an original piece of work. +Q. What do you think the "killer" application is going to be? +A. I don't think there is going to be one. It was McLuhan who said we always look through the rearview mirror. We're looking at what we've always looked at before, which was the big application or the big audience or the big statement, because we're basing our audience on cost per thousand. +What I'd like to see is a network that's open enough for people to be able to design their own uses, much the way they use the telephone. It's too early to talk about whether it's educational, whether it's social or whether it's entertainment. These categories that people feel the need to define really get in the way. + +Red Burns + + Born: Ottawa; "in the predigital age." + + Education: Apprenticeship at National Film Board of Canada. + + Current position: Chairwoman of the interactive telecommunications program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. + + Noncomputer reading: "Six Memos for the Next Millennium," by Italo Calvino. + + Family: Four children: Wendy, Michael, Barbara and Catherine. + + Ideal vacation: Tuscany region of Italy. + + Favorite movie: "Grand Illusion." + + Computer: Macintosh. + + E-mail address: burns@nyu.edu. + +NAME: Red Burns + +LOAD-DATE: October 30, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +361 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 1, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +THEATER REVIEW; +A Woman With an Eye For Talent and Revolt + +BYLINE: By WILBORN HAMPTON + +SECTION: Section C; Page 16; Column 5; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 685 words + +"Mother of All the Behans" is one of those celebrations of Irish lore, song and dance that often tend to leave the uninitiated feeling a bit left out. Fortunately, the one celebrating is Rosaleen Linehan, who weaves the tale with such enchantment that she converts Kathleen Behan's rather ordinary life story into a one-woman music hall. +Ms. Linehan, warmly remembered for her brilliant performance as Kate, the eldest sister, in Brian Friel's "Dancing at Lughnasa," has brought the show to the Irish Repertory Theater with such a twinkle of eye and toe that she makes the audience wish it had personally known her subject, if only better to appreciate her portrayal. + Adapted from Brian Behan's book by Peter Sheridan, who also directed, with additional material by Miss Linehan, "Mother of All the Behans" is an affectionate biography of Kathleen Behan, the mother of the playwright Brendan Behan and a fireball in her own right, who bore seven children, three of whom, she is proud to say, ended up in English jails. +The monologue opens with Kathleen in a nursing home at the age of 95, more afraid of an earthquake striking Dublin than of dying, and still an unrepentant Stalinist. For Kathleen, who is described by her neighbors alternately as "Lady Behan" and "that Commie Fenian," Uncle Joe was always a friend of the workers, no matter what they say about him now. +Miss Linehan then throws the covers off the iron bedstead in which the aged Kathleen is ridden, adjusts her voice from that of a croaky nonagenarian to the lilt of a colleen, and recounts nearly a century of Irish history as filtered through her own special lens. +Punctuating her narrative with refrains from old Irish songs, and once or twice kicking up her heels in a jig, Miss Linehan carries Kathleen from a childhood in an orphanage to her first husband, through the Easter Rebellion to home rule and partition, from her employment by Maud MacBride to her marriage to Stephen Behan, whom she describes simply as "the drunkard." +Miss Linehan is especially funny in passages describing her new mother-in-law, a slum landlady who spent years receiving visitors in bed and kept her teapot filled with whisky. The best parts of the evening are in Kathleen's remembrances of the literary figures whose paths she crossed at Madam MacBride's or of her own son, Brendan, mainly because they are familiar to the audience, if only through their work. +Although she never met Joyce, she knew Nora Barnacle well (Miss Linehan's arched eyebrow speaks volumes) and shared some of their gossip. As for Yeats, she divulges that Madam MacBride (nee Maud Gonne, the love of the poet's life) always referred to him as "silly Willy." +One may forgive Kathleen's excuses for Brendan's drinking excesses and general antisocial behavior as a mother's prerogative. "He swung the world by the tail," she says with pride, and she recalls the gala opening of "The Hostage" in London, to which he flew her from Dublin, and the playwright's rapid decline and death. +If the accounts of Kathleen's brief encounters with early Irish rebels like Connolly, Pearse and the assassinated Michael Collins strike less of a chord, it could be because local heroes and patriots, like some local wines, simply don't travel well. +There are sections of Kathleen's story that would need a Frank O'Connor, a Joyce, a Yeats or even a Brendan Behan to turn into something more than passing interest. But Miss Linehan keeps the tale entertaining. + +MOTHER OF ALL THE BEHANS + +Adapted by Peter Sheridan from the book by Brian Behan; additional material by Rosaleen Linehan. Directed by Mr. Sheridan; set and costumes by Chisato Yoshimi; lighting by Tony Wakefield; production stage manager, Kathe Mull. The Irish Repertory Theater, Charlotte Moore, artistic director, Charlotte Moore; Ciaran O'Reilly, producing director. Presented by Jim Sheridan, Peter Sheridan, the Irish Repertory Theater Company and One World Arts Foundation, in association with Georganne Heller and Beverly Karp. At Theater Four, 424 West 55th Street, Clinton. + +WITH: Ms. Linehan. + +LOAD-DATE: November 1, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +362 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 2, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +INSIDE + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 59 words + + +Cholesterol and the Elderly +A Yale University study finds that high cholesterol is not an accurate predictor of heart disease among those over 70. Health, page C12. + + + +N.A.A.C.P. Is Out of Money + Its cash reserves depleted and contributions drying up, the civil rights organization stopped paying most of its professional staff. Page A14. + +LOAD-DATE: November 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +363 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 2, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +When the Investors Came Second + +BYLINE: By KURT EICHENWALD + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 3; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1985 words + +Why is your pay so high, an elderly investor angrily asked Leonard G. Levine recently, when your real estate trust's misfortunes have cost so many people their life savings? +Mr. Levine replied that the problems leading to the huge losses were caused not by his management but rather by the previous managers, according to people who witnessed the exchange at the trust's annual meeting last June. Mr. Levine added that his team at the Banyan Management Corporation was merely trying to salvage the investment. + But Mr. Levine left out one important fact: He had also been an officer of the previous management, VMS Realty Partners. And he, along with the directors of other Banyan entities once controlled by VMS, had been named in a court document, recently unsealed from a class-action lawsuit, accusing them of helping to defraud investors in the partnerships and investment trusts once controlled by that company. +To hear Banyan's critics, the conversation with the shareholder is a telling example of how Banyan executives, putting their own interests first, have failed to tell the whole truth to the tens of thousands of investors in the trusts and partnerships the company manages. Since investing $1.2 billion, those investors have lost more than $600 million, after considering distributions, according to filings by various entities with the Securities and Exchange Commission. +Now a group of powerful financiers, including George Soros, the famed hedge fund manager, contend in a lawsuit that Banyan's deception of investors extended to critical management decisions. At issue is 33 acres on the Florida coast at Key Biscayne, the major asset of a Banyan real estate partnership that the Soros group recently acquired. +The investor group contends in its lawsuit that before the Soros group's takeover of the partnership, Mr. Levine arranged for most of the proceeds from the sale or development of the property to be transferred to another company he controlled. That was done without the approval of both entities' boards, according to documents filed with the S.E.C. +Nor did Banyan disclose the Soros takeover bid to its investors when it was received, according to merger documents filed by the investor group with the S.E.C. +Through his secretary, Mr. Levine declined to comment. Robert Higgins, Banyan's general counsel, declined to comment on any matters in litigation in the Key Biscayne dispute. He also said that Mr. Levine, in answering the elderly investor's question in June, "responded to the shareholder's question at that meeting appropriately." +The proceeds-transfer arrangement has already contributed to the dismissal of Mr. Levine from his executive posts at three Banyan partnerships. Yet he remains the senior executive of five other Banyan entities. + +Beginnings In the 1980's + The Soros group is not the first to raise accusations about improprieties at the entitities formed by VMS in the 1980's. VMS was a Chicago real estate concern that developed properties throughout the country. It raised cash from investors and lent the money to other VMS entities, which bought real estate and sometimes sold it to yet other VMS entities. VMS received fees for the transactions and other fees for managing the property. +To keep this arrangement going, VMS needed new money. The company turned to Prudential-Bache Securities. The VMS investments, assembled from 1984 through 1988, were sold by Prudential brokers to their customers as safe, conservative investments. +But, in reality VMS was falling apart. According to the recently unsealed court filing made on behalf of investors in a 1989 class action, executives with VMS knew as early as 1986 that numerous properties were in deep financial trouble. The lawsuit -- which was settled by VMS and other parties in 1991, with investors receiving about 4 cents on the dollar -- based that accusation on confidential company documents. +Mr. Levine, then a senior vice president at VMS, was among the executives who knew of the financial problems, according to the recently unsealed 1991 court filing. +Mr. Higgins, the Banyan lawyer, said the 1991 filing contained only accusations and that they should not be assumed to be true. +Shareholders were not informed of any problems until February 1990, when the company announced it was having significant cash flow problems. After the disclosure, the values of the publicly traded VMS entities, already suffering, collapsed. +About the time of the announcement, according to the recently unsealed filing, Mr. Levine resigned from VMS Realty Partners. He was hired shortly afterward by the eight entities as their president. The entities dropped their affiliation with VMS and were eventually renamed for Banyan, the company that Mr. Levine serves as president. +Over the next few years, the losses at the funds continued to rise under Banyan's management, S.E.C. filings show. From 1990 through 1993, the combined losses for the eight Banyan entities totaled more than $316 million. The annual losses did decline each year, with total losses of $7.2 million in 1993. Since 1991, only one entity has paid distributions to investors. + +No Interruption In Compensation + Despite that performance, Banyan was well paid. In 1990, according to the S.E.C. filings, the eight funds paid $612,000 in fees to Banyan. That climbed every year, reaching almost $3.5 million in 1993. The total paid to Banyan in three years is almost $10 million. +Mr. Levine also did well. In 1990 he received about $627,000 in salary and bonus. That rose to well over $1 million each year in 1991 and 1992, falling last year to about $673,000. Those payments were spread among the eight entities, meaning investors would know the total Mr. Levine received only by examining each entity's filings. +The seeds of the troubles that led to the battle with the Soros group were planted shortly after Banyan took over. In 1990, Banyan negotiated a number of settlements to compensate the investor-owned entities for the loans they made to other VMS units. In several deals, the Banyan entities took control of real estate in exchange for canceling debt. +In one of those agreements, 55 acres in Key Biscayne were divided between two entities, Banyan Mortgage Investors L.P. III and Banyan Strategic Land Fund II. Under the deal, the mortgage partnership owned 33 acres zoned for the construction of condominiums, and the land fund owned a contiguous 22 acres zoned for a hotel. +At the time, the land fund seemed to get the better deal because a hotel appeared to have more potential for profit than condominiums. +And indeed that made sense: the land fund had lent the most money to VMS for the property -- about $31 million, compared with about $7 million from the mortgage partnership. +The two entities negotiated an agreement in 1990 to work together in developing the Key Biscayne property. That agreement would become the focus of litigation. + +A Hurricane Plays a Role + By last year, the investment appeared to have become a disaster for the land fund and a boon for the mortgage partnership. The devastation caused by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 had crippled the values of coastal hotels because of the perceived risk. A March 1993 appraisal by Grubb & Ellis valued the hotel property at $6.3 million, far less than the land fund had invested. +But with demand for condominiums growing, the same appraisal found the market value of the mortgage partnership's property had more than quadrupled, to about $28.8 million. +That kind of jewel resting in the publicly traded mortgage partnership attracted the attention of high-profile investors. One interested group included Mr. Soros; Theodore V. Fowler, a former president of Prudential-Bache Capital Funding who had managed his own investment banking firm since 1990, and John Hinson, a Florida real estate investor and developer. According to S.E.C. filings by the Soros group, Mr. Fowler told Mr. Levine in December 1993 that the group was interested in the mortgage partnership. +Mr. Levine responded that such a deal could be done only if the group purchased the hotel parcel from the land fund, because he thought the two properties were inseparable, the filings state. Effectively, Mr. Levine rejected an offer for one company unless the bidders bought an asset from a separate company with conflicting interests. +Moreover, according to lawsuits in the case, the financial interests of Mr. Levine may also have been in conflict. Neither Mr. Levine nor any directors of the mortgage partnership held a stake in it. But Mr. Levine did own 25,428 shares in the land fund, and options to purchase 60,000 more shares, the lawsuit says. + +Rearranging The Money Flow + With the mortgage partnership days away from possibly receiving a tender offer, Mr. Levine amended the joint development agreement from four years earlier. The amendment, effective as of 1990, said that the two Banyan entities had to share all future net revenue, at a split of 75 percent to the land fund and 25 percent to the mortgage partnership. That revenue sharing would continue until all monies invested by the two entities had been returned, at a 15 percent interest rate. +Mr. Levine signed the document on behalf of both entities. The directors of the mortgage partnership were not consulted, according to S.E.C. filings by the partnership. +With the amendment, Mr. Levine effectively transferred three-quarters of the potential investment return of the condominium parcel from the mortgage partnership in which he had no interest to the land fund in which he held a large stake. In return the partnership received one-quarter of the potential return of the financially troubled hotel parcel. +In S.E.C. filings, the Banyan land fund has stated that the amendment reflected the deal's original intent. But no revenue-sharing terms had previously been disclosed by Banyan. The fund has filed suit in Illinois to have the amendment enforced. + +Premium-Price Bid Is Kept Quiet + For its part, the Soros group, apparently assuming that its own lawsuit would lead a court to declare the amendment invalid, submitted a $28.1 million bid for the partnership. The price was $2.50 a unit, a 105 percent premium over the market price at the time. Banyan did not tell its shareholders that it had received the bid. +The offer was revised twice, but investors were still not informed. On April 15, Mr. Fowler sent a letter to the partnership's directors that discussed Mr. Levine's amendment to the joint development agreement and criticized Banyan for not telling its investors of the takeover bid. +Also on April 15, Mr. Levine was dismissed from Banyan Mortgage Investors L.P. III. Within days, but still almost six weeks after the first bid for the partnership was submitted, Banyan disclosed the takeover offer to its investors. During the summer, the investor group acquired a majority of partnership units, and a full takeover was recently completed. +Despite his dismissal for cause from the mortgage partnership, Mr. Levine continued to run seven other Banyan entities, including two with the same directors as the mortgage partnership. Last month, he was dismissed from those two partnerships, but he retains management control of the other five. +The Banyan land and mortgage entities are now enmeshed in litigation with each other, as well as suits brought against executives and directors. Mr. Levine has also filed a claim against the mortgage partnership seeking more than $240,000. As for investors in the mortgage partnership, some lawyers say that even if there is a finding that the partnership acted improperly, investors might not be able to recover any money from Banyan. +After all, most of those investors had settled their claims against those executives in 1991 to conclude the class action against VMS. + +LOAD-DATE: November 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: A Banyan Management partnership reached an agreement with another Banyan entity in 1990 about developing a hotel and condominiums in Key Biscayne, Fla. An investor group has acquired the partnership and its residential project, which currently consists of one abandoned structure. (Cindy Karp for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +364 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 2, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Heart Ills and High Cholesterol May Not Be Linked in Old Age + +BYLINE: By GINA KOLATA + +SECTION: Section C; Page 12; Column 4; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1640 words + +CHOLESTEROL levels, which so accurately predict risk of heart disease in middle-aged people, appear to have no such predictive value in the elderly, a new study has found. +The study, by investigators at Yale University, included 997 men and women 70 years old or older who were followed from 1988 until the end of 1992. It is one of the very few studies of cholesterol to focus on people over 65, and in fact the average age of the study participants was 79. The researchers report that although a third of the women and a sixth of the men had high cholesterol levels, these people did not have any more heart attacks during the study period than those whose cholesterol levels were normal or even low, nor were they more likely to die from heart disease or from any cause. + The study is being published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association. +"This is good news for old people," said Dr. Stephen B. Hulley, the chairman of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California at San Francisco. He said the study showed that after about the age of 70, "they can take it easy and relax" and stop worrying about cholesterol. Dr. Hulley, who wrote an editorial accompanying the paper, said that the findings were "very important" because there has been virtually no information on cholesterol's effects in the very old. Although this study by itself is unlikely to be definitive, he said, its findings are bolstered by those of the Framingham Heart Study, now in its 46th year, which also found no effect of cholesterol in the elderly. +Dr. Michael Criqui, an expert on cholesterol and heart disease at the University of California at San Diego, said the Framingham data showed, in fact, that cholesterol levels taken at the age of 50 were a better predictor of heart disease risk at 70 or 80 than cholesterol levels at 70 or 80. +Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz, the study director, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Yale University School of Medicine, said many old people were alarmed by their cholesterol readings and were trying desperately to get them down, with diet or often with cholesterol-lowering drugs. But Dr. Krumholz, Dr. Hulley and others say that since there is no evidence that lowering cholesterol helps in people over 70, doctors should not even take cholesterol measurements in old but otherwise healthy patients. +Dr. Hulley explained: "At least for people in their late 70's and beyond, we don't know what's a good cholesterol level. We actually don't know whether you're better off with a high one or a low one, so there is no point in measuring it." He added that there was especially no point in treating old people with cholesterol-lowering drugs and said he was deeply concerned because many people in their late 70's and older were taking those medications. +At first glance, the questioning of cholesterol's effects may sound odd, heart disease researchers said. After all, if large amounts of cholesterol in the blood encourage the buildup of artery-clogging plaque in middle-aged people and even in people as old as 65, why would they not do the same in the very old? +One possible explanation, said Dr. David Kritchevsky, a cholesterol researcher at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, is that anyone who reaches 80 or so with a high cholesterol level and no evident heart disease may be immune to cholesterol's effects. "The bullet has missed you," he said. +But Dr. Kritchevsky said many people did not want to hear that they could ignore cholesterol after reaching a certain age. "What has happened is that the risk factor has become the disease," he said. High cholesterol levels themselves have come to be viewed as a pathology. +Dr. Kritchevsky said many old people and their doctors were so convinced that high cholesterol levels were dangerous at any age that the question of whether to measure them, or try to lower them if they were high, might never come up. "My own father, who is 82, announced to me that he was going to stop eating eggs," Dr. Kritchevsky said. "I told him, 'Eating eggs is what got you here.' " +Until very recently, nearly all studies that looked at whether high cholesterol levels were a risk factor for heart disease focused on people under 70 and most looked predominantly at men under 65. And the studies that showed that lowering cholesterol could prevent heart attacks focused on middle-aged men, in whom the relationship between high cholesterol levels and heart disease is strongest. +The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute is starting a study that may eventually involve as many as 40,000 people over 60, looking into whether reducing cholesterol levels and blood pressure prevents heart disease. But the study is in its earliest stages and the results will not be known until after the year 2000. In the meantime, researchers have been forced to extrapolate from studies of the middle aged in giving advice to the elderly. +Dr. Basil Rifkind, a senior scientific adviser to the heart institute's vascular research program said studies had consistently shown that as people grew older, the relationship between cholesterol levels and heart disease risk steadily weakened. Eventually, he said, "there is some point where the return is not worth the effort, where benefits are not likely to be seen." But the problem is deciding at what age that point occurs. +Dr. Rifkind said that when the heart institute's cholesterol education panel tried to decide what to recommend to old people with high cholesterol levels, "they did not come up with a blanket recommendation." Essentially, they said doctors should use their judgment in treating people over 65; for example, asking if the person was healthy and vigorous or chronically ill. Nonetheless, Dr. Rifkind said, there has been "a shift toward being more aggressive about treating cholesterol in the elderly." +Some think that is appropriate. Dr. William P. Castelli, director of the Framingham study, one of the largest observational studies ever done, said his data showed that cholesterol remained a risk factor at any age, for men and women. +In an analysis published in 1992, he reported that total cholesterol levels predicted heart disease risk in 992 men 50 to 64 years old and in 1,295 women 50 to 79 years old. But, he said, he could predict heart disease in older men if he looked at a particular fraction of the cholesterol-carrying proteins, the ratio of total cholesterol to the cholesterol carried by high density lipoproteins, or H.D.L., which are the proteins that carry cholesterol away from blood vessels. +Using this ratio is a way of correcting for the fact that people who have high levels of H.D.L. cholesterol, the so-called good cholesterol, are at lower risk than those whose H.D.L. levels are low. +Dr. Castelli focused not on death from heart disease but on heart attacks and chest pain, signs that arteries are becoming blocked. He said his findings showed why doctors should aggressively treat old people: not to prevent deaths from heart attacks, since few die the first time they have a heart attack, but to prevent the heart attack in the first place. +"I want to slow the progress down so you will not shut down an artery and have a heart attack from which you will not die but the quality of your life will go downhill," he said. +But others say the case is not so clear-cut. Dr. Hulley argued that Dr. Castelli had not, in fact, shown that cholesterol or the cholesterol ratio was important after 79, so that his results were actually consistent with those from the new study. And another investigator, using the Framingham data, looked at heart disease deaths and found no relationship to cholesterol levels among the very old. +Dr. Richard Kronmal, a statistician at the University of Washington in Seattle, found that the relationship between cholesterol levels and risk of death from heart disease diminished as people grew older, eventually becoming nonexistent. +The new study, by Dr. Krumholz, found no relationship between cholesterol and deaths from heart attacks or between cholesterol and symptoms of heart disease in the elderly whether he looked at total cholesterol or at the ratio between total cholesterol and H.D.L. levels. +Dr. Anthony Gotto, chairman of the department of internal medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and a past president of the American Heart Association, said he still felt that high cholesterol levels in the elderly should be treated because some studies showed that artery-clogging plaque regressed in the elderly when they reduced their cholesterol levels. +"As a matter of fact," he said, "we have seen patients treated with angioplasty and bypass operations when they are in their 80's and when they have severe symptoms. If it's worthwhile treating with invasive therapy, then surely it's worth preventing." +But, Dr. Kronmal said, that sort of statement "requires several leaps of faith." He explained: "You have to believe that treating old people will work. And there are no data one way or the other. You have to believe it is safe to treat. And what is safe in young people may not be safe in old people. And you have to say that the benefit is substantial enough to make a difference. If you save people from a heart attack, they may suffer the ravages of another disease soon thereafter." +In the end, definitive answers will come only from studies that test treatments in the elderly. Dr. David Gordon, the heart institute's main adviser on its new study, said that for now he was "a little more comfortable recommending treatment to old people who actually have heart disease." But, he added, he cannot say how high cholesterol levels should be before treatment should begin. "There's not a lot of hard data to base that on," he said. + +LOAD-DATE: November 2, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + + +GRAPHIC: In a four-year study of 387 men and 610 women over 70 (with an average age of 79), the percentage of each group who suffered heart attacks and the death rates from coronary heart disease and from all causes were compared for those with high, medium and low levels of total cholesterol, measured in milligrams per deciliter of blood. Adjusting for other cardiobascular risk factors, ther would be no statistically significant difference. Graph shows results of study. (Source: Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz/JAMA) +Graph: "Survival and Cholesterol: What Happens in Old Age?" + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +365 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 3, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +THE 1994 CAMPAIGN: THE PRESIDENT; +Clinton Stumps for Candidates But Watches Where He Goes + +BYLINE: By DOUGLAS JEHL, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 29; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 732 words + +DATELINE: PROVIDENCE, R.I., Nov. 2 + +To hear his advisers tell it, this is Bill Clinton's mission as he begins his final cross-country charge of the fall campaign: define the choices, rally the faithful, fill the coffers and help those Democrats who want to be helped. +But these are his instructions: never, never, never stray south of the Mason-Dixon line. + With six days to go before the election, Mr. Clinton is spending his evenings in halls like the Rhode Island Convention Center here on behalf of candidates like Myrth York, the Democrat who hopes to be the state's next governor. By week's end, he will have carried his exhortations to New York, Iowa, Minnesota, California, Michigan, Delaware and Washington. +But in Tennessee, Oklahoma, Florida and Texas, where the Democrats are facing some of their toughest Senate and statehouse races, Mr. Clinton will nowhere be seen. Even as the White House maintained today that his resurgent popularity had given the party new momentum, his itinerary reflected a view that there remained much of the country where Democrats were better off if the man from Arkansas stayed at arm's length. +"We go where we're invited," a senior White House official said today with a shrug. With voter antipathy toward Mr. Clinton still running fierce across the South, that has left his autumn march confined to fewer than a dozen states across the Northeast, Midwest and the West Coast where candidates believe that the President can make a positive difference. +Missing from the ranks of candidates that Mr. Clinton will try to help in the coming days are some of his party's leading figures, including Gov. Ann W. Richards of Texas, Gov. Lawton Chiles of Florida, Senator Jim Sasser of Tennessee, and Representatives Jim Cooper of Tennessee and Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma, both of whom are seeking to maintain the party's hold on open Senate seats. Instead, Mr. Clinton will spend the final days before the election in the frequent company of statehouse candidates like Ms. York and Bonnie Campbell of Iowa, and Senate hopefuls like Helen Wynia of Minnesota and Ron Sims of Washington, who all are running behind in the polls and are hardly household names. +For the White House, the calculation has been frustrating but simple. Rather than risk alienating voters elsewhere, Mr. Clinton is limiting his stops to states like this one, where he can mobilize Democratic loyalists. +As in every other state he is scheduled to visit, a majority of Rhode Island's voters cast their ballots for Mr. Clinton in the 1992 Presidential campaign. And at a stop this afternoon near here in Pawtucket, Mr. Clinton found the kind of unrestrained support he sought as several hundred senior citizens at a Portuguese Social Club took in his warnings that Republican campaign promises would leave that party no choice but to cut back on Social Security benefits. +"We're moving forward," the President declared to loud applause. "You be thinking on Tuesday: 'I'm in control. I have a remote control on America's movie. I'm going to go into a polling place and I'm going to push forward. Maybe I'll even push fast-forward. But I certainly won't push reverse.' " +As Mr. Clinton repeated that message here in radio and television interviews via satellite with stations in Iowa, Connecticut and Massachusetts, his advisers portrayed his choice of venue as almost incidental. "The President's role in the final week is to travel around the country and help define the choice between Republicans and Democrats," said Joan Baggett, the White House political director. +At the same time, the White House issued a three-page fact sheet in an effort to substantiate its assertions that Mr. Clinton's trips had begun to have an effect on the Democratic fight to maintain control of the House and the Senate. Titled "A Week in Politics Is an Eternity," the document pointed to recent gains by Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York and other candidates for whom Mr. Clinton has campaigned, and it said that recent good economic news and the President's trip to the Middle East would underscore what should matter most to voters: "The nation is at peace, and the economy is growing." +With some recent national polls showing a surge in Mr. Clinton's approval ratings, one senior White House official said today: "I think the danger that voter anger at the President could cause the defeat of a local candidate is gone." + +LOAD-DATE: November 3, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +366 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 3, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +THE 1994 CAMPAIGN: CAMPAIGN DIGEST; +On the Trail + +SECTION: Section B; Page 9; Column 6; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 204 words + +Developments yesterday in campaigns in New York and New Jersey. + +NEW YORK +Governor -- A day after he endorsed Gov. Ann Richards of Texas, Ross Perot agreed to extend his blessing to the candidacy of B. Thomas Golisano, the third-party challenger for New York governor. The Texas billionaire has agreed to come to New York to campaign with the Rochester millionaire, a move that is expected to hurt State Senator George E. Pataki and help Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. Page A1. + Senator -- Bernadette Castro accused her opponent, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, of having a poor memory or intentionally misleading voters. In an interview in Newsday, he said that her charge during their debate on Sunday that he had voted for increased energy taxes was "a lie." "I didn't lie," Ms. Castro said. + +NEW JERSEY +Senator -- The Democratic incumbent, Frank R. Lautenberg, and his Republican challenger, Chuck Haytaian, squabbled over who was the true friend of the elderly. Mr. Haytaian said older people would benefit under his simplified income tax proposal because it exempts Social Security income. Senator Lautenberg said that in his third term he will work for health care reform that includes long-term care. + +LOAD-DATE: November 3, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +367 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 3, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +The Art of Growing Older Forcefully + +BYLINE: By ENID NEMY + +SECTION: Section C; Page 8; Column 3; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 1094 words + +DATELINE: STAMFORD, Conn. Oct. 30 + +Turn the word "mom" upside down and what do you have? No guessing here, it's "wow," and one might well ask, so what? +So, as Dr. Ruth Harriet Jacobs pointed out at a workshop entitled "Be an Outrageous Older Woman" this weekend, WOW can, and does, stand for wonderful, wise or witty older woman. The women in the audience, most of whom admitted to being over 50, loved it. + The workshop was one of 30 offered at a three-day conference here on "Conscious Aging," organized by the Omega Institute and attended by some 1,000 men and women. +Dr. Jacobs, a sociologist and author obviously fond of initials, went on to further flights of descriptive fancy -- a WOW, she said, was also a RASP, an acronym that could be read as anything from Remarkable Aging Smart Person and Ravishing Aging Sensuous Person to Radical Aging Stressed Person or, for that matter -- and why not -- all three. The objective of the initials: to turn around society's current view of older women and, not incidentally, to mobilize their energy and potential. +"Dignity, decorum and the don'ts have limited the fun and growth of older women," she observed, adding that being feisty was preferable to being frightened of what people might think. +"There is so much age-ist, sexist prejudice against older women that we might as well enjoy life without worrying about others' opinion of us," said Dr. Jacobs, who has written a book, "Be an Outrageous Older Woman: A RASP," published in 1993 by Knowledge, Ideas & Trends in Manchester, Conn. "I think the underdog has a right to bark." +The underdog, in this case older people, also has "the same needs and rights to sex as anyone," she said, despite the fact that older women were often seen as figures who ought to be chaste and Madonnalike (no, not the singer). +This cultural stereotype about sex and age was reiterated by another speaker, Myrna I. Lewis, who observed that "love and sex in the mid and later years are frequently surrounded by jokes, ridicule and misinformation." +"Look out for your adult kids," she warned jokingly. "They may have a hard time believing Mom and Dad have a sex life." On the other hand, she said, men and women who are not interested in sex should relax -- "it gives them a lot of extra time to do other things." +Ms. Lewis, an assistant professor in the community medicine department at Mount Sinai Medical School and co-author with Robert N. Butler of "Love and Sex After 60" (Ballantine Books, 1993), spelled out a psychological difference between men and women as they became older. +With men, she said, the earlier emphasis on youthful physical speed and prowess meant that when normal slowing began, it brought with it worries about masculinity. For women, the lifelong emphasis on youthful physical beauty often led to stress when aging became noticeable. +"For both men and women, we still see too little social value placed on late life character, intelligence, experience, achievement and the social skills acquired over a lifetime," she said. "Love and sex after 60 has more to do with intimacy than it does simply with the act of sex." +Colette Dowling, whose book "Red Hot Mamas" is to be published by Bantam next year, also touched on the cultural emphasis on physical beauty for women. "Youth is not the apotheosis of sexiness in men," she said. "In women it is. Because of the way society views aging women, there is serious danger of our turning against ourselves. +"In adolescence, girls enter the age in which they become objects, viewed by society as sexually desirable, or not. After puberty, the basis of their social value begins to shift, and ineluctably, they enter the mating game." +As a result, she said, "we spend the rest of our lives trying to regain the boldness we had as girls." Midlife, she suggested, offered an opportunity for women to regain the courage they had when they were young. +Ms. Dowling admitted that the myth of "if you're not in a marriage, you're alone," was undergoing change. Nevertheless, for many women who had been married for years, finding happiness as a single person required action -- constructing social networks, looking for intellectual challenges and shifting internal gears. +The conference, which had a ratio of about 10 women to 1 man, was the second on aging organized by the Omega Institute, a holistic education center, founded in 1977, with headquarters in Rhinebeck, N.Y. +For a registration fee that ranged from $215 to $275, there were Betty Friedan, Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland and Dr. Dean Ornish among the keynote speakers, and workshops on everything from "Tibetan Teachings on Living and Dying" to "the Harlem Council of Elders." +The importance of a dialogue with aging parents was taken up in a workshop led by Barry Barkan, Debora Cushman Barkan and Taun Cosentino Relihan, executives of the Live Oak Institute Elder Living Center, a nursing and assisted-living center in El Sobrante, Calif. +Mr. Barkan emphasized the importance of explaining to elderly parents the need to know certain facts to insure appropriate support if the need arose. He suggested a tactful approach to the subject might be "what do I need to know -- I want to be your ambassador, representing your will." +Dr. Nuland drew some of the most enthusiastic response of the conference when, in his keynote address, he noted that in an age of super-specialists, he had become "a great advocate" of the family doctor. +"We do not know our patients," said Dr. Nuland, clinical professor of surgery at the Yale School of Medicine and author of "How We Die" (Knopf, 1994). The house calls that doctors used to make gave them a certain knowledge of their patients and their families, he said, but now very often "we are making decisions for people we barely know." +He lamented that comparatively few geriatricians were in practice (about 4,000 in 1992, he said). These were the specialists who could become family doctors to the aging. "When we become older, who can we turn to who understands the spectrum of things that go on in our bodies?" he asked. +Part of what went on was that from 20 to 50 percent of brain cells were lost by the age of 80, he said, adding quickly that "fortunately they are not the cells giving us intellectual prowess or judgment." For most people, the loss was related to spontaneity, speed and stamina, quantitative rather than qualitative, and, he said, "after the 80's and 90's even that slows." +His advice: "We should think more of cerebral functions and less and less about things that go on below the jawbone." + +LOAD-DATE: November 3, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +368 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 5, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Hamish Munro, 79; Studied Nutrition of Elderly + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 13; Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 305 words + +Hamish N. Munro, a nutrition scientist and doctor who was the first director of the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, died on Oct. 28 in a nursing home in Glasgow, Scotland. He was 79. +He had suffered from Parkinson's disease for eight years, the university said. + For six decades, Dr. Munro studied the biochemical effects of nutritional change, particularly protein metabolism. His studies led to a deeper understanding of the role of nutrition in aging. +Hamish Nisbet Munro was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on July 3, 1915, and began his studies of protein metabolism while a student at Glasgow University, where he completed his medical training in 1939. From then until 1966, he held academic positions in medicine at the university. He wrote a four-volume work, "Mammalian Protein Metabolism" (Academic Press, 1964-70). +In 1966, he became a professor in the department of nutrition and food science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1980, he was appointed professor of medicine at Tufts and director of the world's first research center devoted to the nutritional needs of the elderly. He was director of the center for three years and continued to teach at Tufts and conduct nutrition research until he retired in 1991. +From 1975 to 1980 he was chairman of the United States Recommended Dietary Allowances Committee of the National Academy of Sciences. He was also a member of international nutrition committees. He was a former president of the American Institute of Nutrition and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the recipient of several awards. +His wife, Dr. Edith Munro, died in 1985. He is survived by a daughter, Joan Munro of London; three sons, Colin and Michael, both of Glasgow, and Andrew, of Acton, Mass., and three grandchildren. + +NAME: Hamish N. Munro + +LOAD-DATE: November 5, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Hamish N. Munro (1982) + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +369 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 6, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE 1994 CAMPAIGN: Pennsylvania +The Last Weekend: Senate Races Where the Battle Has Been Intense; +A War of Words On Social Security + +BYLINE: By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 26; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 613 words + +DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA, Nov. 5 + +The Senate candidates in Pennsylvania have become locked in a pitched battle over Social Security, a fight that defines their vast ideological differences. +Both candidates -- Senator Harris Wofford, a liberal Democrat, and Representative Rick Santorum, a conservative Republican -- began this unusually warm autumn day courting votes in Philadelphia. Mr. Santorum shook hands at the Italian Market in South Philadelphia, a must-stop on any political tour, before campaigning in Harrisburg with the Senate Republican leader, Bob Dole of Kansas, and going on to West Hazleton, where he received the endorsement of the City Council President, a Democrat. Mr. Wofford, meanwhile, joined a motorcade with Philadelphia labor leaders and met with residents of suburban Narberth to talk about his opposition to assault weapons. + But it is Social Security that has moved front and center in the campaign, and both candidates spent Friday scouring some of the many retirement homes and senior citizen centers in Pennsylvania, which has more older people than any other state except Florida. Invoking a familiar Democratic theme, Senator Wofford, who has run a relentlessly negative campaign, accused Mr. Santorum and his fellow Republicans of wanting to cut Social Security benefits. +In a burst of political recklessness, Mr. Santorum had provided some evidence that he thought that step would be necessary to keep the Social Security fund healthy for future generations of retirees. Mr. Santorum told a college-age audience on Oct. 18 that it was "ridiculous" that retirees receive full benefits at 65, an age set in 1936, when life expectancies were shorter. Eligibility now, he said, should not begin until 70 at the earliest. +The Democrats taped Mr. Santorum's remarks, and Mr. Wofford has been trying to buy time to broadcast the video, which runs nearly five minutes. But the network affiliates have already sold their political time slots, and the Wofford campaign is now scrambling to show the video on cable television. +Mr. Wofford told a nursing home audience on Friday that raising the age of eligibility would be "the least reasonable" solution. He advocated retraining workers in mid-life and enforcing age-discrimination laws, but he offered no details on how to keep the fund solvent. +Still, he may have scored some points. +"Any time you have a politician who is trying to prey on fears, especially of seniors, you can expect to have some sort of marginal impact," Mike Mihalke, a spokesman for Mr. Santorum, said today. "But in the final analysis, Pennsylvanians will realize that this is nothing but a defensive tactic from a desperate incumbent who is trying to divert attention from his ineffective record." +The other hot topic here is Mr. Santorum's recent suggestion that Teresa Heinz, the widow of Senator John Heinz, who was a popular Pennsylvania Republican, had made disparaging remarks about Mr. Santorum because she is dating a Democrat, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. +Mr. Wofford is exploiting the Santorum-Heinz dust-up in an effort to link Mrs. Heinz, a liberal Republican, with his own candidacy and to convince moderate suburban Republicans, whose votes could well decide this race, that Mr. Santorum is not of their ilk. Mr. Santorum, an aggressive campaigner, fiercely promotes less government and lower taxes, opposes the ban on assault weapons and favors more spending on the military. +But he has received strong support from the state's moderate Republican Senator, Arlen Specter, who campaigned with him today. He was also endorsed on Friday by Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey. KATHARINE Q. SEELYE + +LOAD-DATE: November 6, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos of Wofford and Santorum. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +370 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 8, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +PRO FOOTBALL; +Saturday Movies and Sunday Moves + +BYLINE: By FRANK LITSKY, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 15; Column 4; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 755 words + +DATELINE: HEMPSTEAD, L.I., Nov. 7 + +The Jets, like all other pro football teams, have a pre-game ritual -- "Saturday Night at the Movies." For most teams, these movies or videotapes feature the next day's opponent. They are more "Basic Blocking and Tackling" than "Basic Instinct." +Pete Carroll, the Jets' first-year coach, believes in keeping his players relaxed, so his Saturday night movies have been different. One night, a Three Stooges show was spliced into the middle of football sequences. Another night, there were cut-ins of Ronnie Lott riding a motorcycle in a B movie. + This past Saturday's surprise was "Knockout Night," hard hits from football and boxing. One of the victims was George Foreman being knocked out by Muhammad Ali in 1974. Three hours after the Jets saw that, Foreman, at age 45, regained the heavyweight title. +"I think for us older people," Boomer Esiason, 33, said with a semistraight face, "George Foreman's victory was inspiring." +Even more inspiring to the Jets and their fans was Sunday's 22-17 upset victory over the Buffalo Bills at Giants Stadium. Although the Bills are not quite the fearsome team that has played in the past four Super Bowls, they still have many weapons. The Jets contained them all with what safety Brian Washington called their most ferocious defensive game of the season. +"The intensity was special," said middle linebacker Kyle Clifton. "But I kind of think we've had that the last four weeks and we've been building on it. We had real good execution with the intensity. That's the difference between winning and losing." +Execution and intensity are the magic words of football. You must want badly to do it right, and then you must do it right. It sounds simple, but no one can explain why a team can be so good one week and so numb the next. +"Don't make too much of this win," said Pat Terrell, who played safety for much of the game after Lott pinched a nerve in his neck. "It's just another mile in a 16-mile race. And it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the team we play this week will concentrate on us even more." +That team is the Green Bay Packers, who have a rugged defense and the home-field advantage. The Packers, like the Jets, have a 5-4 record and are fighting to stay in the playoff picture. +"But if we play like we did yesterday," Esiason said, "we can beat anybody we play. We won yesterday, and we still didn't play our best game." +Nick Lowery, who kicked three field goals, was watching anxiously in the final seconds when Jim Kelly ran around madly on fourth down, looking for a receiver. His pass was wild. +"I don't know if he could have scrambled for a first down," Lowery said. "But he didn't seem to be scrambling with enthusiasm because he knew he would get racked if he ran. That's a tribute to our defense, and it sends a message to other teams." +If only the Jets could bottle the formula that produced their smash-mouth play against the Bills. +"We're working on it," Carroll said. "In all sports, you raise your level to the competition if you're capable. The better the players we're playing, the higher the level of our performance. We got the Bills up and they got us up. Bottling is hard to do, but we're trying to take it in stride, keep it in perspective and go to next week." +Bottle it? Esiason cringed at the thought. +"The first thing you do," he said, "is forget about yesterday. It was one game. We played a solid game. But you're going to be in another hard-fought battle in Green Bay." + + + +EXTRA POINTS + CLIFFORD HICKS, the punt returner, sprained his right ankle against the Bills and will be out for two weeks. RONNIE LOTT (neck) and AARON GLENN (toe) are questionable and JOHNNY JOHNSON (hamstring) and ANTHONY JOHNSON (shoulder) probable. Glenn was walking around with an ankle cast and a cane. . . . BOOMER ESIASON (ankle and kidney) was not on the injury report. . . . Esiason's 2 touchdown passes against the Bills gave him 200 for his career and moved him into 17th place, past PHIL SIMMS. "It means I'm old, I guess," Esiason said. "I'd like to say there will be 200 more, but I don't think I'll last that long." . . . The coaches awarded game balls to BOBBY HOUSTON and DONALD EVANS on defense, JAMES THORNTON on offense and NICK LOWERY on special teams. . . . Coach PETE CARROLL praised PAT TERRELL for filling in for Lott at safety, and said that if Lott could not start this week, Terrell would. If Glenn cannot play, MARCUS TURNER will start at cornerback and ANTHONY PRIOR will play in the nickel defense. + +LOAD-DATE: November 8, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +371 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 8, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +New Ability to Find Earliest Cancers: A Mixed Blessing? + +BYLINE: By GINA KOLATA + +SECTION: Section C; Page 1; Column 4; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 1507 words + +AS scientists develop ingenious techniques to detect smaller and smaller cancers, some investigators are voicing a note of caution. Finding a cancer early may not be better, they say, unless it is one that will progress if left untreated. +It sounds heretical but, these critics say, studies show that many, if not most, early cancers do not grow large and dangerous and would never be noticed unless doctors with an early detection method went looking for them. Yet tiny cancers are so common that autopsy studies of middle-aged and older people have found that almost everyone's body contains them. If the cancers are harmless, treatment could be useless or possibly even harmful because it might subject people to needless surgery or chemoterapy. The skeptics add that even with cancers that do become life-threatening, early detection and treatment do not always help. + "We're heading down a very slippery slope" said Dr. H. Gilbert Welsh, a specialist in internal medicine at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in White River Junction, Vt., who has made a study of the early diagnosis problem. He noted that the current breathtaking pace of research on the molecular biology of cancer is leading to "an explosion of new tests." As a result, more and more people will be told that they have a very early cancer and be treated for it, yet no one can tell which early cancers are dangerous and which are not. With very early cancers, "we just don't know that it's the same disease" as cancer that has already grown large and noticeable, Dr. Welsh said. +Scientists like Dr. Welsh say they are not trying to be Jeremiahs, but that the new era of molecular diagnostics must be entered with open eyes. Nearly every advance in molecular genetics makes possible some new test for finding microscopic tumors. For example, a test that is now under development at Johns Hopkins University relies on the fact that many cancer cells have characteristic mutations in the nonprotein-coding or "junk" regions of their DNA, the genetic material. This provides a test for detecting even very small groups of cancerous cells in sputum or urine. +Once such cells are detected, the tumor of origin can now be found even if it is microscopic, said Dr. David Sidransky, the developer of the test and director of head and neck cancer research at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Sidransky said one new method relied on fluorescent dyes to mark cancer cells. Another new technique, contact microendoscopy, allows a doctor to insert a microscope into a tissue and "see down to the level of individual cells," Dr. Sidransky said. +Using a molecular diagnosis to find cancer cells in body fluids, fluorescent dyes to mark cancer cells and microendoscopy to find each tiny tumor, investigators should soon be able to find tumors smaller than a millimeter, or about four-hundredths of an inch, a tenth the size that can be found today, Dr. Sidransky said. And he added, this is just an example of the sorts of methods that are on the horizon. When it comes to cancer diagnosis, "we'll be in a different world," in the near future, he said. +The problem with this, some cancer researchers say, is that no one understands enough about the natural history of cancer to know what it means to find a tumor so small. Do all such tumors eventually grow and spread, or only some? How can the doctor decide which path a particular tumor is headed down, whether a long passivity or a spiraling path that will lead to a deadly metastasis, in which the cancer spreads to other parts of the body? +"We have to meticulously avoid the tendency to assume that early diagnosis in and of itself will make a difference," said Dr. Barry Kramer, associate director of the early detection and community oncology program at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md. +Dr. Arnold Levine of Princeton University, who studies the molecular biology of cancer, said: "There is no doubt that the best possible response to cancer is to find it early. If you find it early, you have a chance to treat it. But it does present a problem: How aggressive do you want to be if you find a precursor or a lesion?" +There is good reason to believe that many very early cancers never become clinically significant, said Dr. William Black, an investigator at the Center for Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth University. "The harder you look for cancer, the more you find it," he said. +For example, Dr. Black said, autopsy studies have shown that 39 percent of women from 40 to 50 years old turn out to have tumors in their breasts. These are usually very small lesions that have not spread and remained so quiescent they were never noticed. Yet had they been detected while the woman was alive, they would have been labeled as breast cancer. An interesting reflection on current detection methods is that tumors are diagnosed clinically in just 1 percent of women in this age range. +Forty-six percent of men from 60 to 70 have prostate cancer, also in the form of small tumors, although once again the cancer is diagnosed clinically in just 1 percent of men in this age group. And autopsies of people from 50 to 70 have shown that virtually all had small tumors in their thyroids. Yet thyroid cancer is diagnosed in just one person in 1,000 of this age. +These findings call into question the definition of cancer, a word that historically has been used to describe a large tumor with the potential to spread and kill. Are these tiny lesions cancer? +"I'm very, very concerned by the labeling and misuse of language to describe the things we're finding," Dr. Black said. "The terms we use are so loaded that they almost prevent rational thought. If you tell someone that they have an early cancer or say its a cancer that won't progress, that doesn't make sense to them. Most people think of cancer as something that will kill you if you don't intervene." +Cancerous cells are ones that have somehow thrown off the usually tight genetic controls on unwanted division and growth. This escape from regulation occurs when a mutation develops in the genes that control cell division or monitor for abnormal growth patterns. +With most cancers, a sequence of several separate mutations must probably occur to convert a cell into a fully formed tumor capable of spreading to other sites in the body. The microscopic tumors that now appear to be so common are presumably cells that have gathered a few but not all of the mutations necessary for a full cancer. In this sense, they are probably better thought of as "precancers," although there is currently no way to tell them from the real thing. +Dr. Kramer said the limits of scientists' knowledge were perhaps best illustrated by the pitfalls of a screening test for prostate cancer. The test, which looks for an antigen in the blood, can lead to early diagnosis. But there is no way of distinguishing between the vast majority of tumors that will not spread and are harmless and the few that can be deadly. +"We don't know enough yet to know which ones demand treatment and which ones can be left alone," Dr. Kramer said. So, essentially, all are treated, with surgery or radiation, both of which can have severe aftereffects, including impotence and incontinence. +Dr. Sidransky said the questions raised about the new era of very early cancer detection were "very valid." But, he said, he expects that researchers will proceed cautiously and use the new tests at first to screen people who are already at high risk of cancer -- cigarette smokers, for example. A small cancer in a high-risk person might be more likely to turn into a malignant tumor. And the screening would be done in a research setting, where it could also be asked whether early diagnosis and excision of microscopic tumors leads to a reduction in cancer deaths. +Very early diagnosis might also allow investigators to refine tests of anticancer drugs by tracking a cancer from its earliest stages, Dr. Sidransky said. +But others are less sanguine. +Dr. Kramer said the nation ought to be meticulous in every step it takes in investigating the benefits. "We ought to have serious discussions with trained ethicists about the implications for society," he said. "We have to be prepared to weigh risks and benefits and not simply assume that there is benefit and no risk." +Dr. Black said the tests would be promoted by companies that made them and unleashed on a public that had been taught that the earlier a diagnosis was made, the better. He said there was "no limit to the amount of sickness we can tell people they have." +Dr. Black said the tests could be enormously beneficial once the science caught up with the diagnostic technology. "The main thing is to be patient and to recognize that there are limits to our knowledge," he said. "When we first make new observations, we don't understand what they mean." +"I'm not totally negative," Dr. Black added. "I'm not saying there could not possibly be a benefit. But there is a lot of potential for abuse." + +LOAD-DATE: November 8, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawings (pgs. C1 & C12) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +372 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 11, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +CHRONICLE + +BYLINE: By NADINE BROZAN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 2; Column 5; Style Desk + +LENGTH: 221 words + +How far will powerful women travel to meet other powerful women? Quite a distance, said GAEL GREENE, the restaurant critic, who has noticed increasing numbers of women from out of town and out of state making reservations for the eighth annual Citymeals-on-Wheels Power Lunch for Women. This year, 340 women (and a dozen men) are expected to converge for lunch at the Rainbow Room on Monday. +For example, Dr. Mae C. Jemison, the astronaut, is coming from Houston; Donna E. Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, is coming from Washington, and Margie Profet, the biologist who theorizes that menstruation evolved as a mechanism to protect against infection from male-borne diseases, is coming from Seattle. + "Every year the response is bigger and sooner," said Ms. Greene, a founder of Citymeals-on-Wheels, which distributes meals to homebound elderly people on weekends and holidays. "This year we had 200 reservations before the invitations even went to the printer." +The message? "For anyone who hasn't figured it out," she said, "women really like women, and our appreciation for each other and for loyalty and networking has become important. We put out a networking book that tells how to reach everyone who comes or sends a contribution. It's the most valuable party favor of the year." + +LOAD-DATE: November 11, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +373 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 11, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +The Spoken Word + +SECTION: Section C; Page 27; Column 1; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 309 words + + +HUDSON VALLEY STORYTELLING FESTIVAL. A weekend of events sponsored by Bard and Vassar Colleges and the Mid-Hudson Teacher Center. Tonight at 8, "Storytellers on Stage!" with Donna Bailey, Jim May and Peninnah Schram at Vassar College, Chapel Building, Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.; tickets: $9. Tomorrow, 8 A.M. to 6 P.M., a conference with workshops at Bard College, F. W. Olin Humanities Building, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.; fee: $60. Tomorrow at 8 P.M., "Storytellers on Stage!" with Motoko, Tom Weakley and Marianne McShane at Bard; tickets: $8 in advance; $9 at the door. On Sunday, two storytelling programs, at 1 and 3 P.M., with the Ivy Vine Players, Jonathan Kruk, the Storycrafters and Motoko; tickets: $4 in advance; $5 at the door. Information: (914) 635-3887. + +WARTIME STORYTELLING, Seamen's Church Institute, 241 Water Street, lower Manhattan. Four World War II veterans who spent time in the port of New York City speak. Today at 3 P.M. Free. Information: (212) 349-9090. + +FLAMENCO LECTURE AND DEMONSTRATION, Julie Saul Gallery, 560 Broadway, at Prince Street, SoHo. A lecture and slide show illustrating the evolution of castanets in flamenco dance, by Matteo, a dancer and choreographer, followed by a dance performance by Jerane Michel. Tomorrow at 5 P.M. Photographs of flamenco dancers taken by Isabel Munoz are on view through tomorrow. Free. Information: (212) 431-0747. + +TALK AND FILM SCREENING, Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park. "Reel-to-Reel Harmony: Great Classical Voices on Film," a lecture by Christian Labrande, a program director at the Louvre in Paris, followed by a screening of the 1969 film "Medea," starring Maria Callas and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Tomorrow at 2 P.M. Admission: $6; $4 for museum members, students and the elderly. Information: (718) 638-5000. + +LOAD-DATE: November 11, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Schedule + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +374 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 11, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +THE 1994 ELECTION; +In Their Own Words: The Republican Promises + +SECTION: Section A; Page 26; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 488 words + +During the election campaign, Republican candidates for Congress gathered in Washington to endorse a set of proposals for legislative action that they called their "Contract With America." They said that in the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, they would introduce bills they described as follows: + +1. The Fiscal Responsibility Act: A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses. + +2. The Taking Back Our Streets Act: An anti-crime package including stronger truth-in-sentencing, "good faith" exclusionary rule exemptions, effective death penalty provisions, and cuts in social spending from this summer's "crime" bill to fund prison construction and additional law enforcement to keep people secure in their neighborhoods and kids safe in their schools. + +3. The Personal Responsibility Act: Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC for additinal children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility. + +4. The Family Reinforcement Act: Child support enforcement, tax incentive for adoption, strengthening rights of parents in their children's education, stronger child pornography laws, and an elderly dependent care tax credit to reinforce the central role of families in American society. + +5. The American Dream Restoration Act: A $500 per child tax credit, begin repeal of the marriage tax penalty, and creation of American Dream Savings Accounts to provide middle class tax relief. + +6. The National Security Restoration Act: No U.S. troops under U.N. command and restoration of the essential parts of our national security funding to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world. + +7. The Senior Citizens Fairness Act: Raise the Social Security earnings limit which currently forces seniors out of the work force, repeal the 1993 tax hikes on Social Security benefits and provide tax incentive for private long-term care insurance to let older Americans keep more of what they have earned over the years. + +8. The Hob Creation and Wage Enhancement Act: Small business incentives, capital gains cut and indexation, neutral cost recovery, risk assessment/cost-benefit analysis, strengthening the Regulatory Flexibility Act and unfunded mandate reform to create jobs and raise worker wages. + +9. The Common Sense Legal Reform Act: "Loser pays" laws, reasonable limits on punitive damages and reform of product liablility laws to stem the endless tide of litigation. + +10. The Citizen Legislative Act: A first ever vote on term limits to replace career politicians with citizen legislators. + +LOAD-DATE: November 11, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +375 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 11, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +A Simpler Test for Alzheimer's Is Reported + +BYLINE: By GINA KOLATA + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1160 words + +Researchers at Harvard Medical School believe they may have stumbled upon a simple test for Alzheimer's disease, one that can easily distinguish between those who have the devastating disorder, which relentlessly robs its victims of their minds, and those who do not. +The investigators, led by Dr. Leonard F. M. Scinto, of the Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, and by Dr. Huntington Potter, of Harvard Medical School, report that people with Alzheimer's appear to be exquisitely sensitive to eye drops similar to those that doctors use to dilate the pupils before performing an eye examination. + They found that the pupils of people with Alzheimer's dilate in response to an atropine solution that is just one-hundredth the strength needed for dilation. +Moreover, the researchers report, people with other brain diseases appear to respond normally to the eye drops. And, they say, they have preliminary evidence that people with Alzheimer's may test positive months before their symptoms become obvious. +The findings are being reported today in Science magazine. +The tests looks for small changes in the size of the pupil, using equipment that is readily available at most medical centers, although not in opthalmologists' offices. +So far the researchers have tested 19 people in whom Alzheimer's disease had been diagnosed and found 18 had positive tests. They have also tested 33 old people who were thought not to have the disease and found that 30 tested negative. One of the three who tested positive has now been diagnosed with Alzheimer's; another shows symptoms of mental deterioration. +Patients with other brain disorders, including multiple small strokes and Parkinson's-like diseases, have tested negative, the investigators report. One patient with alcoholic dementia tested negative; another tested positive. The investigators are following the patient with the positive test to see if he also has Alzheimer's. +The researchers are continuing to test people with Alzheimer's and with other brain disorders, and other old people. Other researchers are starting their own studies of the test. +Anticipating that the test will fulfill its promise, Harvard University has granted the Genica Pharmaceuticals Corporation of Worchester, Mass., exclusive rights to market the eye drops and a device for measuring pupil sizes, and to interpret test results for doctors; in exchange, Harvard will receive stock in the company and royalties. The company says the test may be available clinically by the end of 1996, and estimates that each test will cost $100 to $200. +Experts say there are two reasons to want a simple and accurate diagnostic test. One is to detect people with Alzheimer's early enough that experimental medications to slow the disease can be most effective. The other is to be able to respond accurately to people who fear they may have the disease but whose symptoms are not clear. +It is the problem of assuring the healthy that makes investigators so cautious, said Dr. Steven DeKosky, director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh. +"Although it is easy and exciting for all of us to talk about public health and screening, this would still come down to the patient wanting to know," he said. "If we were to give that information, how confident could we be that we were absolutely correct?" +Alzheimer's disease afflicts an estimated four million Americans, mostly elderly people, and is the fourth leading cause of death, according to the Alzheimer's Association, in Chicago. +Its hallmark is the progressive loss of brain cells involved with memory and reasoning. Although initial symptoms vary, people with the disease always get worse. They lose their memory for recent events and for familiar names and faces; they lose the ability to reason and to find their way around, getting lost in parking lots or stores and even in their own homes. +Other causes of mental deterioration include depression, drugs, small strokes and brain tumors. +An Alzheimer's diagnosis can cost several thousand dollars and includes brain scans and psychological tests, blood tests and repeated visits to make sure that the person's symptoms are growing worse. +A person is said to have the disease when no other cause can be found for their worsening symptoms, but autopsies have shown that if the diagnosis is done carefully, it is correct at least 90 percent of the time. +Most people with Alzheimer's have symptoms for several years before the disease is diagnosed, said Dr. John Growdon, director of the Massachusetts Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. +Many people deny their symptoms or hide their memory problems at first, he said; others know something is wrong long before the tests reveal it. Dr. Growdon said he had seen a lawyer who insisted he was becoming demented even though the standard tests showed he was normal. A year later, Alzheimer's disease was diagnosed. +On the other hand, said Dr. John Breitner, a researcher at Duke University, most elderly people who have memory lapses do not have Alzheimer's. They are more likely to be depressed or to be drinking too much or to have had small strokes. +For years investigators have searched for a simple and accurate diagnostic test for Alzheimer's, and many that looked promising have fallen by the wayside. But other proposed tests were not as sensitive or specific as the new one appears to be, nor were they as simple. For that reason, the new test is being met with enthusiasm. +The test is "an exciting development," said Dr. Zaven Khachaturian, director of the Office of Alzheimer's Disease Research at the National Institute on Aging. +One of the most surprising aspects of the test is that anyone even thought to try it. +Dr. Potter, the researcher from Harvard, said he reasoned that since virtually everyone with Down syndrome eventually develops Alzheimer's, perhaps the syndrome and the disease share some clinical sign. So he looked thorough the voluminous literature on Down syndrome and found three papers, the first published in 1958, noting the curious observation that a very dilute solution of atropine makes the pupils of people with Down syndrome dilate. +"I went to my colleagues at the hospital and said, 'Why don't we try this in Alzheimer's disease,' " Dr. Potter said. +The investigators began testing people with Alzheimer's and other elderly people who did not have the disease. +"The fourth normal patient we examined walked in off the street as a volunteer," Dr. Potter said. "He was perfectly normal by standard tests and had no indication of Alzheimer's disease. But he turned out to be positive on the eye test. That might have been enough to stop the study right there, but we persevered. +"The excitement came when we brought him back in 10 months and tested him again." +The man had developed Alzheimer's disease. + +LOAD-DATE: November 11, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: November 12, 1994, Saturday + + CORRECTION: +Because of an editing error, an article yesterday about a new test for Alzheimer's disease misidentified the journal in which scientists reported their findings. It was Science, not The Journal of Science. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +376 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 13, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +CONNECTICUT GUIDE + +BYLINE: By ELEANOR CHARLES + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 21; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1354 words + + +HOLLAR'S ETCHINGS + The first great etchings produced in England were made by a Bohemian from Prague named Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677), who had been brought to London by the Earl of Arundel in 1636. A comprehensive exhibition of his work, the first such display in America, opens at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven on Wednesday, remaining through Jan. 22. +A free symposium is scheduled on Saturday with English and American scholars and experts appearing at the museum, 1080 Chapel Street, from 10:30 to 4:30. + Forty watercolors and 219 prints have been assembled from the British Museum and the Yale Center for British Art by Richard Godfrey, an authority on the subject at Sotheby's in London. They include views of Germany, Antwerp and London, and some large watercolors depicting the British colony at Tangier. Also featured are some works by Hollar's contemporaries: Rembrandt and Van Dyck. +Mr. Godfrey will lead off the program on Saturday with a talk on "An Artist in Search of a Market: Hollar's Early Years in England." Christopher White, a professor of art history at Oxford and director of its Ashmolean Museum, will address "The Iconography of the Earl of Arundel" and a talk on "The Culture of the Early Modern Metropolis" will be given by Lawrence Manley, a professor of English at Yale. +Following a lunch break, there will be "Hollar and the English Revolution" by David Underdown, professor of history at Yale; "Hollar's Graphic Art and the Culture of Curiosity" by Celeste Brusati, associate professor of the history of art at the University of Michigan, and "The Antiquarian Endeavor in the 17th Century" by Graham Parry, reader in English at the University of York. +Visiting hours for the exhibition are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 to 5 and Sunday from noon to 5. Admission is free. The number for more information is 432-2850. + +ARTISANS IN WESTPORT + When the first Creative Arts Festival of the Westport Young Women's League was held in 1976, about 65 artisans set up their displays in the junior high school cafeteria and admission was 50 cents. +This year's two-day edition, on Saturday and Sunday from 10 to 5, will feature the work of 145 craftspeople from around the country, be held at Staples High School and cost $6 for adults, $3 for people 65 and older and nothing for children under 12. A breakfast preview on Saturday from 8:30 to 10 A.M. is also available at $12 for adults and $9 for older people. +In recent years the festival has drawn more than 10,000 people annually. Pottery, quilts, jewelry, toys, leather goods, dolls, food, clothing, textiles, furniture and holiday decorations are for sale. +Proceeds are distributed to the more than 50 organizations that the league helps support, in the arts, education, human services, and programs for children and the elderly. To reach the high school take Exit 18 off I-95 or Exit 42 off the Merritt Parkway and follow the signs. For more information, the number is 222-1388. + +SLAVERY IN GREENWICH + "Chains Unbound: Slave Emancipations in Greenwich, Conn." is the title of a book to be published early in December by Gateway Press of Baltimore. Its author, Jeffrey B. Mead, will be discussing the work on Monday at 7:30 P.M. in the Greenwich Arts Center, 299 Greenwich Avenue. Mr. Mead is a 12th-generation descendant of one of the founders of the Town of Greenwich. He is a local historian and a member of the Connecticut Society of Genealogists and the New England Historic Genealogic Society. +While slavery was not widespread in what is now Fairfield County, its existence in Greenwich was prevalent enough to arouse Mr. Mead's curiosity. To investigate the period of abolition, from 1776 through 1838, He relied on Town Hall probate records, deeds and texts of the time. Admission to the lecture will be $10, or $8 for students. + +ON THE MIDDLE EAST + Each year the Program in Judaic Studies and Middle Eastern Affairs at the University of Connecticut's Stamford branch holds a public conference and this year's program comes at an especially significant point in that region's stormy history. +The conference topic is "The New Middle East: Opportunities and Risks in an Era of Peace," scheduled today from 10 A.M. to 3 P.M. on the Scofieldtown Road campus. Admission is $45 and includes lunch. +The first speaker will be Dr. Mary-Jane Deeb, the Egyptian-born director of the Omani Program at American University. She is also an author and television commentator. Her subject is "The Arab World and the Peace Process: Dissent and Support." +Dr. Howard Rosen, a former economist for the Bank of Israel and the United States Department of Labor will talk about "The Economics of Peace: Interaction between the Israeli and Arab Economies;" and Dr. Bernard Reich, professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, will address "Peace from the Israeli Perspective: Benefits and Risks." +The final hour, from 2 to 3 P.M., will be devoted to a discussion among the three speakers, moderated by Dr. Abraham Aschkenasy, a former senior lecturer at Tel-Aviv and Hebrew Universities in Jerusalem. Subjects will include international terrorism, economic reconstruction, Islamic fundamentalism and politics, the status of women and family planning. For more information, the numbers are 322-6336 or 322-3466. + +TABLE SUGGESTIONS + With the holidays coming, people who entertain at home will welcome the tips they can pick up at the Ridgefield Community Center's Women's Committee exhibition, "Creative Table Settings: A Table for All Seaons." The show contains more than 40 inspired table settings, seminars on all kinds of entertaining, and boutiques offering decorations and knick-knacks. +It will take place Thursday through Saturday from 10 to 4 at Lounsbury House, the 19th century Georgian Revival headquarters of the Community Center at 316 Main Street. Tickets, at $7, or $5 for older adults, will be good on all three days. +Among the exhibitors are Ruth Henderson, co-proprietor, with her husband, Skitch Henderson, of The Silo in New Milford; Ira Joe Fisher, the NBC weatherman and poetry buff; Tonya Walker, known as Alex Olanov on the TV soap, "One Life to Live;" Lisa Nichols, whose sweater designs are sold under the Marisa Christina label, and a number of shops and antique dealers including Yellow Monkey Village, Keeler Tavern, the Pottery Barn, and Paper Connection. The number for more information is 438-4657. + +TALL (AND SMALL) TALES + The time for telling tales tall, small and in between has arrived again, as storytellers around the country prepare to gather on Saturday for the annual "Tellebration: Night of Storytelling." +One location for the Connecticut Storytelling Center's observance will be the Unitarian Church at 10 Lyons Plain Road in Westport, starting at 8 P.M. Tom Callinan, Ann Shapiro and Connie Rockman will be among the local taletellers, joined by Diane Crehan, who specializes in Irish yarns; Josephine Fulcher-Anderson with African-American stories, and Lot Therrio with ballads of the American South. Admission will be $8 at the door, or call 227-5986 or 972-3731 for reservations or more information. + +BRUCE BAZAAR + The Bruce Museum in Greenwich, recently renovated, will reopen its seasonal International Bazaar, but for only four days, from Thursday through Sunday. Merchandise has been separated by point of origin -- England, Russia, South America, Morocco, India, Mexico, Guatemala and the Orient -- and displayed in a "Street of Shops." +Items available include glass ornaments, Russian nesting dolls, silver, porcelain, amber jewelry from the Baltic, silver cuffs from Israel, toys, cookbooks, handmade quilts and baby clothes, hooked rugs and needlepoint. Prices start at $5 and go up to the hundreds. Hours are 10 to 5 on Thursday through Saturday, 2 to 5 on Sunday, and museum admission is $3.50 for adults, $2.50 for older people and children 5 to 12. There is no charge for visitors to the bazaar in the museum's store. For more information call 869-0376. ELEANOR CHARLES + +LOAD-DATE: November 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +377 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 13, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Senator Says Home Oxygen Is Overpriced + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 34; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 566 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Nov. 12 + +Medicare is paying about $300 million a year more than it should to lease home oxygen machines for people with lung diseases, a Senator contends. + Medicare reimburses more than 200,000 elderly and disabled Americans who use oxygen-concentrating machines, the Senator, Tom Harkin, said at a subcommittee hearing on Wednesday. The devices, which are about the size of a room dehumidifier, remove nitrogen and other gases from the air and deliver concentrated oxygen. + Mr. Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said Medicare recipients of oxygen therapy received "shockingly poor levels of services" despite "exorbitantly high prices." If adequate reforms were instituted, he said, "we're talking about Medicare savings of $300 million annually." + Medicare pays about $280 a month, or $3,360 a year, to provide a home oxygen machine, said Jonathan Gaev, director of the health devices group for the Emergency Care Research Institute, a nonprofit organization. + An institute study found that oxygen concentrators are sold for as much as $1,175 each to companies that rent them out. The institute estimated that it cost the rental companies about $600 year, including purchase and maintenance, for each machine over a seven-year span. + Assuming an equipment rental company received $280 a month from Medicare, the company would make a profit of $7,689, or 650 percent, a machine over three years on each machine. Over seven years, the profit would exceed $17,941, or 1,500 percent, Mr. Gaev said. + "Clearly, the $280 a month reimbursement level needs to be closely scrutinized," he said. + Gary J. Krump, acting Assistant Secretary for acquisition of the Department of Veterans Affairs, said his agency paid from $40 to $175 a month for an oxygen concentrator. About 11,000 veterans administration patients are on concentrators in any given month, he said. +Mr. Harkin, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education, asked the head of the Health Care Financing Administration, Bruce C. Vladeck, to explain why his agency paid so much more for concentrators than the Veteran Affairs Department. + Mr. Vladeck said his agency was precluded by law from obtaining competitive bids, while the Veterans Affairs Department was not. + Mr. Harkin pointed out that the veterans agency had been able to lower the price it paid for blood glucose monitors. But Mr. Vladeck said because oxygen concentrators are not sold at retail, "it would take an extraordinary investment of time and effort in 200 separate localities" to prove that Medicare is grossly overpaying for the devices. He said it would be easier if Congress changed the law to allow the agency to solicit competitive bids. + "I can't promise you a legislative fix," Mr. Harkin said. + Mr. Vladeck then promised to start the process of trying to prove that the agency was grossly overpaying for the concentrators. + James Liken, past president of the National Association for Medical Equipment Services, said Medicare's reimbursement level should not be changed. He said most Medicare patients on oxygen concentrators received services, including home visits, equipment maintenance and monitoring that are included in the Medicare cost. + Reducing the Medicare fee would send "the wrong message to an industry committed to increasing levels of quality beneficiary services," he said. + +LOAD-DATE: November 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +378 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 13, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +2 Plans to House Elderly Opposed by Neighbors + +BYLINE: By MERRI ROSENBERG + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 23; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 736 words + +DATELINE: YONKERS + +TWO unrelated projects that seek to provide housing for the elderly have triggered opposition in two disparate communities. +Along the Hudson River here, a 122-bed nursing home proposed by St. John's Riverside Hospital is being opposed primarily on environmental grounds. The hospital wants to build the home about 260 feet from the old Croton Aqueduct and 70 feet from Untermyer Park. + "Untermyer Park is a historic landmark," said Nortrud Spero, a co- chairman of the Hudson Communities Coalition, a nonprofit preservation organization. "These gardens, which were designed by the same architect who did Kykuit, once superseded Kykuit. The remains are still intact, with the marble basins and the water channels. The nursing home would totally destroy it. We need a nursing home in the community, but this is an ill-chosen site." +Opponents of the project have also expressed concern that construction would increase storm-water runoff and that blasting would damage the aqueduct. They say that the project would also disrupt some of the open space of the Hudson flyway for migrating birds. +In response, Jim Foy, chief executive officer of St. John's Riverside Hospital, said: "There is a terrible shortage of nursing homes for patients in our community. I took over 14 months ago, and put this project on hold until February in an attempt to acquire a different site. We are now in the process of drafting a final environmental-impact statement that will be submitted in two weeks. This project will bring 140 permanent jobs to Yonkers, and we will make every effort to go ahead with the project. We think it's a badly needed service in Yonkers." +In the other case -- in Bronxville -- a proposal to build Kensington Manor, a 90-unit condominium complex for affluent residents, is being opposed by a group called Villagers Against Kensington Manor. The group says the project will have a negative impact on quality of life and will fail to provide the financial benefits that the development's supporters claim. +Opponents question whether there is a market for older residents willing to spend $295,000 to $400,000 to buy the units and pay $2,000 a month in maintenance charges. +"The Board of Trustees is hurting this village by opening it to large development," said Dorothy Brennan, a member of Villagers Against Kensington Manor and a former Bronxville Village Trustee. "The sun won't shine anywhere, and it will look like Riverdale. The trustees have the audacity to fight Metro-North on the parkway issue, but this would allow the urbanization of the village." +The opponents to the project developed by Henry George Green are also concerned about the lease period -- 50 years with an option to renew for 100 years -- and the type of structure being proposed. They question the wisdom of the developer's having to pay only $2.5 million over the first five years and then only $1 a year. +"We are concerned that this project will fracture the quality of this community," said Anne Agee, a member of Villagers Against Kensington Manor. +David Fuller, a senior warden at Christ Episcopal Church in Bronxville, said: "We are concerned that this kind of high building will be oppressive. The scale is way off for the village. The loss of parking would be inconvenient to our parishioners, who wouldn't use an underground garage. And we are also worried about the the possibility of the blasting causing significant damage to the church, with cracking the stained-glass windows and the risk of dust affecting our pipe organ." +Terry Rice, a lawyer with the Suffern firm of Rice & Amon, who is representing Villagers Against Kensington Manor, said: "If you are leasing a municipal property, the village has to determine that it's an unneeded property." +Supporters of the development argue otherwise. "This project is the culmination of seven to eight years of investigation and research," said Nancy Hand, Mayor of the village of Bronxville. "This is the best possible use for the property. A villagewide committee studied it and tried to analyze the best solutions to this dilemma. The village has put $3.5 million into the property since 1985. +There will be substantial financial benefits to this project. It returns the property to the tax rolls. There will be $2.5 million in lease payments during the first five years, and after the third year, $450,000 in tax revenues will go to the village." + +LOAD-DATE: November 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +379 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 13, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +CHILDREN'S BOOKS; +The New History: Showing Children the Dark Side + +BYLINE: By Martha Saxton; Martha Saxton teaches American history at Columbia University and is the author of a biography of Louisa May Alcott. + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 32; Column 1; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1676 words + +NOT so long ago, the Americans who made the history I read all appeared to be old men, dressed in dull clothing and devoted to principles so high I could perceive them only dimly. They seemed to have lived far away in that adult world where you were not to say anything at all if it was not to be something nice. +By the time I began teaching in the 1980's, American history had been invigorated by the belated inclusion of a wide variety of groups traditionally excluded from the enterprise. Their presence has altered the discipline forever. As long as women and blacks, American Indians, Asian-Americans and others were not part of history, then what white men did to them was not part of the great narrative of the nation. Now that all of our pasts figure in our history, however, tragedy is never too distant and celebration must share its place with reconciliation in the stories we teach. + Studying the American past today is a complicated and demanding exercise, but not one that has to bore and alienate students anymore. Out of the rich materials only recently designated "history," almost all children can find meaningful stories. And providing young people with tales that make them understand and admire their forebears is one of the most moving experiences a teacher can have. +At the same time, teaching American history demands active engagement with the moral questions it never stops asking us. Contemporary historians are finally learning not to flinch at showing to children both the good and the evil dimensions of the American tale. Bruno Bettelheim once wrote, "Prettified or bowdlerized fairy tales are rightly rejected by any child who has heard them in their original form." Students also instinctively turn away from bowdlerized history. Children from elementary school on up have a lively sense of fairness and are more than ready to engage with fully human stories of good and evil, struggle and resistance. The epic seizes their imaginations, not sanitized visions of the Founding Fathers. +Just in time to meet the interest level of the children who are the last offspring of the baby boomers and now in the middle grades, a number of books, including several series, have appeared that present American history in new and inviting ways. A HISTORY OF US, by Joy Hakim (Oxford University, 8 volumes, $14.95 each; ages 8 and up), is particularly successful in working toward the goals of inclusiveness and frankness. Her exciting series -- eight volumes are now available, two more are promised -- is based on the most up-to-date academic research and provides historical contexts for all kinds of Americans. In her account, groups once written off in a sentence become inviting topics of study for a schoolchild. +When historians used to see pre-Columbian civilizations in America as a digression in the superstory of the European march to mastery of the New World, they described them as static and indistinguishable from one another, existing in a hazily described, primitive world and disappearing with the appearance of Europeans. In Volume 1, "The First Americans," Ms. Hakim provides a sense not only of the wide differences among these Native Americans, but also of their independent rhythms of success and failure as well as their extraordinarily developed systems of communication and trade. She pursues their civilizations on into the colonial era, not allowing us to forget what happened to these ancient cultures. And with simple but imaginative comparisons, like one in Volume 3, "From Colonies to Country," between the dangerous, muddy, rocky colonial roads and the far-reaching net of smooth, paved highways of the Incas, she makes us feel the different emphases and achievements of these two civilizations. +In her evenhanded treatment of an explorer like George Rogers Clark, she frees children from the grasp of hoary American myth nurtured by novelists and historians; without sermonizing, she allows them to glimpse the horrific underside of the once magical word "frontier." +AMERICA ALIVE: A History, by Jean Karl, illustrated by Ian Schoenherr (Philomel, $22.95; ages 10 to 14), seems written for younger children and clearly embraces the ideal of the new history. The attractive and amusing illustrations by Mr. Schoenherr include sketches of a wide range of individuals -- some famous, some just typical individuals -- set in the margins beside the text. A variety of specific incidents are illustrated as well. The necessary condensation of the book is so great, however, that it forces occasional oversimplifications. Even young children, in my experience, are able and eager to confront moral complexity. +Ms. Karl, the editorial director of Atheneum Books for Children for 24 years, mentions as a cause of the Revolution England's insistence that Americans not move west of the proclamation line of 1763, "to keep people close enough to the sea to trade with England and to let a valuable fur trade with Indians to the west go on unchanged." But she leaves out the English desire to protect beleaguered Native Americans from further white encroachment on their lands. +After the Revolution, Ms. Karl writes, "No reason now not to move west of the Appalachian Mountains." But there was a reason: the presence of substantial Indian populations. American policy in this period was to treat Indians as defeated enemies whose lands should be spoils of war. Fighting after the Revolution devastated the Cherokees, Shawnees, Miamis, Iroquois, Delawares, Ottawas and many others. As many as 6,000 Cherokees died of disease and warfare, and the Iroquois lost half their population. Although they thwarted American plans to be made over into Americans or be exterminated, Native Americans found the post-Revolutionary period a dark one. +The series BROWN PAPER SCHOOL USKIDS HISTORY, by Marlene Smith-Baranzini and Howard Egger-Bovet (Little, Brown; cloth, $19.95; paper, $10.95; ages 8 to 12), is most serviceable for a middle-grade audience somewhere between Ms. Hakim's and Ms. Karl's. With this new series, the "Brown Paper School" books, which have previously included works on sociology, science and fitness, enter the arena of history. Like the Hakim series, this one gives a widely differentiated view of Americans before Columbus, including aspects of their mythology and material culture. Because the first volume, "Book of the American Indians," is one of a series of single-theme books, it does not attempt to do the harder job of integrating the fate of these societies (and their evolving myths) with the arrival and settlement of the Europeans. But it provides valuable introductory portraits of indigenous people from the Northwest to the Southeast before contact with Europeans. +The authors of "Brown Paper School USKids History" have a wonderfully latitudinarian sense of what constitutes history. Their "Book of the American Revolution" provides delightful portraits, anecdotes and odd pieces of information, like how to mold a cannon and what it was like aboard a privateer. One of my favorite stories in this volume is about the Sons of Liberty surprising the austere Samuel Adams with two elegant new suits of clothes to wear to the First Continental Congress. It suggests Adams's character and priorities at the same time that it speaks of the powerful bonds among Boston patriots, while never losing sight of the simple humanity of all of them. We read a poem the slave Phillis Wheatley sent to George Washington; we are present at the Battle of Breed's Hill (known as Bunker Hill), and we get a sympathetic view of the lives of Redcoats stranded in the hostile New World, living in bleak poverty and constantly threatened by the ferocious military discipline of the 18th century. +Joy Hakim's series is illustrated on every page with drawings and reproductions of portraits, cartoons and broadsides. She has organized her books into relatively short historical periods, which helps tame what would otherwise be an unruly amount of material. For those who worry about the fate of narrative history with so many stories and so many people to accommodate, Ms. Hakim braids multiple narratives together to bring alive material long dead to children's imaginations. Her chapters are short, written in a jaunty, immediate style. She occasionally comments upon her own decisions to focus on particular incidents and characters, thus opening up to children the idea that historians make personal choices and are not simply recorders of immutable fact. Entertaining inserts and boxed asides comment on her text. +Dramatic black and white sketches illustrate the "Brown Paper School" texts. The books' evocative set pieces are, in turn, punctuated with many suggestions and directions for games and projects. +OTHER useful supplementary works compiled in the same expansive spirit are the excellent YOUNG READER'S COMPANION TO AMERICAN HISTORY, edited by John A. Garraty (Houghton Mifflin, $39.95; ages 8 to 12), and HAND IN HAND: An American History Through Poetry, edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins and illustrated by Peter M. Fiore (Simon & Schuster, $19.95; ages 8 to 12), a collection of poems about American history decorated with charming watercolor illustrations. "The Young Reader's Companion to American History" is a useful, clearly written compendium of knowledge about Americans and their country that schoolchildren will have an easy time using. It is extensively illustrated with photographs and well-reproduced cartoons and sketches from the period. And "Hand in Hand" is a judicious medley of old celebratory favorites and some newer, more somber contributions. +Altogether, these books represent an exciting step in the evolution of the stories with which we teach our children. To paraphrase a recent remark by the historian Vincent Harding, they constitute a belief in the healing role historians may play in presenting the American past. They also testify to the fascination and vitality that are byproducts of opening up the study of history to include us all. + +LOAD-DATE: November 13, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +380 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 14, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Essay; +Transfer Of Power + +BYLINE: By WILLIAM SAFIRE + +SECTION: Section A; Page 17; Column 6; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 723 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + +Bill Clinton remains President of the United States for foreign affairs, but the center of power in domestic affairs -- both in voting strength and intellectual energy -- has shifted from the White House to the putative Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. +Our first elected half-term President has only himself, his wife and their political advisers to blame for this unprecedented power division. When Representative Gingrich sought to nationalize local elections by submitting a platform of clear, conservative promises, Mr. Clinton foolishly agreed to escalate the mid-term elections into a stark choice between Reaganism and Clintonism. + He publicized Gingrich's "Contract With America," warred happily against it on the campaign trail, nuked it by misleading the elderly into fearing for their Social Security, and laid his leadership on the line. As a result, as the Chinese say, he lost the Mandate of Heaven. +Keeper of the voters' mandate is now Gingrich. Since the election, the future-shocking history teacher from Georgia has been forthright, at times eloquent, in articulating his policy goals to a much wider audience. Counterproductively, he added a few ungracious and dated shots at the "counterculture" and media elite, which gave losers not still shell-shocked their chance to demonize him. +But consider why some of us think of him as Newt the Beaut. Not so long ago, our 435 House members were served by a staff of 3,000; today, aides and hangers-on have ballooned to 20,000, and are an integral part of the government-intrusion problem (the Congress makes regulations for idle hands). He has pledged to cut staff by one-third, and as Speaker, he will have the power to deliver; that example should induce the Senate to do the same. +He'll also deliver in the House on term limits and a balanced-budget amendment, too, along with the line-item veto that will give the President greater power to break up costly legislative package deals; we'll see how many Democrats join Senator Robert Byrd, prince of pork, to thwart the will of the people. +That element of Newt's First 100 Days will be aimed at restraining and disciplining the way Washington does political business. What about the way the Federal Government then helps the average family cope with modern social and economic life? +The trick, according to Newtonom-ics, is to let people keep more of what they earn to spend the way they want. But that's selfish, say liberals; what about compassion for the poor? +That takes us past the easy stuff, like health-insurance reform and tax fixes to encourage marriage and parents' support of children, to the hard part: welfare reform and -- want a new long word? -- disentitlementarianism. +The Clinton notion of welfare reform -- a make-work requirement after a couple of years -- is a far cry from what Representative Gingrich and Senator Phil Gramm have in mind. They can show how welfare to the able-bodied has bred dependency, and believe the only way to discourage unemployed single mothers from having more children is to make it unprofitable. +Does this mean we're going to let little kids starve to provide a disincentive? That's where Newt starts muttering about orphanages, as if the nation is going to allow Oliver Twisting in the wind. No; draconian threats may be needed to break the old patterns, but cooperation can find a way -- none dare call it compromise -- to quickly transform welfare to workfare. +Libertarian conservatives like me recoil at the intrusiveness in Newt's call for a "voluntary" school prayer amendment. He's being inconsistent on his bedrock principle of individual responsibility: If parents want to imbue their children with spiritual values -- as more should -- the parents should take the kids by the hand to Sunday School and not fob off that family duty on educators employed by local government. +But we don't have to agree with Newt down the line to admire the boldness of his futurism, the energy with which he mobilizes his forces and the joy he takes in upsetting the apple cart of power in the nation's capital. +The transfer is only temporary, of course. One of these days, a President will offer a competing vision of public support for personal freedom. Could even be Clinton; but for now, the Congress proposes and the Congress disposes. + +LOAD-DATE: November 14, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +381 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 15, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +NEWS SUMMARY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 910 words + +International A3-17 + +PACIFIC TRADE AGREEMENT +As the summit meeting of east Asian and Pacific nations began in Indonesia, they neared an agreement to try to remove all barriers to free trade by the year 2020. A1 + + +President Clinton sought support for the North Korea accord. A14 + +CUBANS MAY GAIN ENTRY TO U.S. +The United States was reported leaning toward reversing its stance on the Cubans being held at Guantanamo bay, to allow all families there with children to enter the country on humane grounds. A1 + +SERBS REGAINING TERRITORY +Bosnian Serbs were regaining much of the land they lost recently to Government troops in northwest Bosnia, but the Bosnian Army said that its withdrawal was actually a tactical maneuver. A1 + +CLINTON DEFENDS BOSNIA MOVE +President Clinton offered a defense of his decision to stop enforcing the Bosnia arms embargo, saying that Congress gave him no choice and that the international embargo had not been violated. A12 + +TOO COSTLY TO DIE IN RUSSIA +Burial, once subsidized by the state, has become so costly in Russia that few can afford it, a nightmarish situation for many elderly people who now believe they will have no dignity in death. A3 + +President Yeltsin called for more military preparedness. A17 + +GROWING TENSION IN GAZA +Palestinian authorities in the Gaza strip promised a sustained crackdown on radicals, as tensions grew between the Government of Yasir Arafat and Islamic militants. A6 + +China said it would ban sex-screening of fetuses. A5 + +The United Nations retained its economic sanctions on Iraq. A6 + +Storms killed at least 75 people over the weekend in Haiti. A9 + +The Pope proposed marking the millenium with atonement. A16 + +Cairo Journal: New battle for an ailing author. A4 + +National A20-26, B8-10 + +BIG PLANS FOR HOUSE +House Republican leaders announced plans to force Congress to work 20 hours a day, seven days a week, if necessary, at the same time that they said they would try to make lawmakers work schedules "more humane." A1 + +CRACKS IN G.O.P. FRONT +News Analysis: In opposition and in victory last week Republicans in the House and Senate seemed to be echoing each other, but as they began to decide their approach to the new era, leaders in each body were taking divergent stands. A1 + +Republican victory gave Representative Bill Paxon a boost.B10 +Tennesee voters, feeling ignored, gave up on Democrats. B8 + +DRIFTER GOES ON RAMPAGE +Victor Boutwell, a 37-year-old who had spent the last six years living out of the back of his van, attempted a carjacking Sunday night that led to a 25-minute firefight with police officers in San Francisco. A20 + +NAVY REBELS AT CUTBACKS +As the Pentagon worries about declining money and the armed forces' rivalry intensifies, the Navy's top admiral has repudiated an earlier plan to speed up the retirement of ships. A20 + +JUDGE ADMITS SIMPSON EVIDENCE +Judge Lance A. Ito turned down a request by lawyers for O. J. Simpson to exclude items taken from his Ford Bronco as evidence in his double murder trial. A22 + +WARNING FROM BISHOPS +As victorious Republicans talk about having charities take greater responsibility for the poor, the head of the nation's Roman Catholic bishops warned against "punitive welfare provisions" that could hurt families. A24 + +LOUISIANA DESEGREGATION ACCORD +A Federal judge approved a plan to settle a 20-year-old lawsuit against Louisiana by having the state spend $100 million in the next 10 years to attract white students to its predominantly black universities and vice versa. A24 + +Metro Digest B1 + +PLAYGROUNDS IN CRISIS +With maintenance a critical problem in parks and playgrounds, the city is considering plans that would change the way they have long been operated and financed. A1 + +COURT RULING ON JEFFRIES CASE +The Supreme Court gave City College a second chance to show that its demotion of Prof. Leonard Jeffries, the outspoken chairman of its black studies department, did not violate the Constitution. A1 + +Business Digest D1 + +Science Times C1-14 + +Saving the salmon by saving their environment. C1 + +Toward making atoms out of antimatter. C1 + +Responding to a challenge, a bird grows a bigger brain. C1 + +The Doctor's World: Was it plague or not in India? C3 + +Rwandan refugees endanger the oldest national park in Africa. C4 + +Fashion Page B11 + +All the bustle over retro. + +Obituaries D29 + +Dr. Jules H. Masserman, psychoanalyst. + +Arts/Entertainment C15-20 + +Musical gender gap. C15 + +Theater: Shepard's "Simpatico." C15 + +Music: Lyle Lovett concert. C15 + +"American Transcendentalists," at the Brooklyn Academy. C20 + +Books: "Vamps and Tramps," by Camille Paglia. C19 + +Television: "Killer Quake!" C20 + +Sports B12-17 + +Knicks to Starks: Temper, Temper. B13 + +Columns: Berkow on Beard. B13 + +Football: Giants could lose Corey Miller. B13 + +Editorials/Op-Ed A28-29 + +Editorials + +Making China trade fairly. + +G.P., call City Hall. + +The mess at Youth Services. + +Indonesia's embarrassment. + +Letters + +Russell Baker: The final analysis. + +Christopher Winship: Lessons beyond "The Bell Curve." + +Katie Leishman: We only wanted to scare you. + +Chronicle A26 + +Chess C7 + +Crossword C20 + +LOAD-DATE: November 15, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +382 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 15, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +In Russia, Corruption Inflates the Cost of Dying + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL SPECTER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 3; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 942 words + +DATELINE: MOSCOW, Nov. 14 + +The Russian way of death would make anyone want to live forever. +Burials, once one of the many subsidies doled out by the worker's state, have become so costly and so thoroughly dependent on graft, bribery and connections that few people can contemplate finding quiet plots of land or buying headstones. + The simplest municipal burial in Moscow costs about $160 without a headstone, not much by American standards perhaps, but more than the average monthly industrial wage in Russia. In many provincial cities the costs are even higher because the Moscow city government subsidizes Ritual, the main public burial company. Flowers for a municipal service cost an extra $25, and many Russians believe profoundly that funerals without flowers are an insult to the soul. +"This has become a nightmare for many pensioners," said Leonid A. Sidov, a sociologist at the Russian Center for Public Opinion Studies. "But in many ways the problem is a mirror of life in Russia today. The young accept the changes. They are flexible. But for the old people, many of whom served in World War II, to have no dignity in death, to have no hope of a headstone, to know that you will lie so far from Moscow that your family will have trouble visiting the grave -- it's all too painful. +"Russians overwhelmingly feel that a proper burial is an essential right. But if it is, it has gone unfulfilled." +Cremations have increased steadily in the past three years, largely because the costs are only half those of a burial, despite the Russian Orthodox Church's call for all faithful to be buried in the ground. +But the competition for burial space has become so intense that even the church has granted believers grudging permission for cremation if no alternative is available. +"These days if you get out of the morgue and into the ground, you are lucky," said Vladimir I. Panin, chairman of Kristall, one of the many private funeral companies that have sprung up. "But to be buried in Moscow is practically impossible. You have to be in the mafia or a major politician for that." +Even Ritual, the municipal company, offers special services with "American hearses" and "European embalming techniques" for the wealthy. The prices start at $1,500 -- tombstone not included -- and can run to many times that. +But for most people, the best they can hope for is that their survivors have enough money to bribe the undertakers, grave diggers and cemetery operators necessary to be buried only 30 or 40 miles from Moscow, where there is still space in several cemeteries. +People encountered recently at Mitingskaya Cemetery, about 20 miles from the center of Moscow, were particularly eager to express their bitterness at a system that demands bribes and dispenses humiliation at a time they feel exceptionally vulnerable. +"I don't know how they can live with themselves," said Lyudmila V. Povilovka, 56, recalling the bribes she had to pay to bury her father last year. "I had to give vodka to a grave digger. I had to pay the morgue extra to make sure everything went all right. And of course I couldn't afford a headstone." +The funeral director, Vladimir M. Smirnov, acknowledged that a normal burial service includes putting a rough wooden coffin into the ground. But it does not include covering that coffin with dirt. That costs extra. +Perhaps not surprisingly, the only happy people in the cemetery were the grave diggers. +"If people want to pay me something, I am certainly not going to refuse," said Roman V. Vikhayal, 23, a grave digger at Mitingskaya, the cemetery closest to Moscow that is still not full. "If people want to do it themselves, of course they have that right." +Mr. Vikhayal said he made an excellent living, though he declined to cite specifics. +It is not only the free market that has made people like him so successful and his clients so angry. The laws of supply and demand are also on his side. More than 150,000 people died in Moscow in the first half of 1994, 12 percent above the corresponding period in 1993. At least 400 people need to be buried every day in the capital, and as the director of Ritual, Anatoly Pokhorov, pointed out in an interview, "if we take a day off, we have 800 to bury the next day." +Russians traditionally make the journey to a funeral in a bus, usually supplied by the funeral parlor, which doubles as hearse and conveyance for mourners. Once, Ritual put only one coffin on each bus. But in Moscow, Ritual only has three or four working buses, and now it loads as many as three coffins on each, with mourners sharing their grief with people they have never met. +"It is a horrible time," said Galina P. Runina, 63, whose uncle had just been buried. "You don't think it can be made worse by what surrounds it. But it is worse, degrading, to think that even in death we are treated with so little respect. We can't have privacy for an hour." +Important cemeteries like Danilovskaya and Novodivechy, or the smaller one at Peredelkino where former Communist and cultural leaders are buried, are only open to the elite. But money talks here now, and someone with the right connections can even be buried in a "closed" central Moscow cemetery. +Russian law permits a new coffin to be laid on top of another after 15 years, so there is always the occasional opening at the choicest of the city's 59 cemeteries -- for the truly privileged. +"Anything is possible if you can pay for it," said Mr. Panin, of Kristall. "Even the closed cemeteries are open if you have enough money. I'm not talking about what is right or wrong; I'm not making a value judgment. I'm only saying what is possible." + +LOAD-DATE: November 15, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Burials in Russia have become so costly and so dependent on graft, bribery and connections that few people can contemplate finding quiet plots of land and some cannot afford headstones. At the Mytingskaya Cemetery outside Moscow, where many mourners expressed bitterness at the system, relatives of Anastasia I. Zalnikova waited for her grave to be dug last week. She will lie next to her husband, who died in 1986. (Otto Pohl for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +383 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 16, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Storm Off Florida Leaves 2 Dead and Dozens Hurt + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 203 words + +DATELINE: FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Nov. 15 + +A tropical storm pounded Southern Florida with high wind and heavy rain today, spinning off a tornado that skipped through a retirement community and left one person dead and 40 people injured. +The storm, Gordon, whipped up winds that grounded a 506-foot freighter just off the beach here and knocked out a traffic signal, causing an accident on Monday that killed a pregnant motorist. + Six people from the mobile home community of about 7,000 people, Barefoot Bay, on the east coast 40 miles south of Melbourne, were taken to hospitals, officials said. +Fifty to 100 homes were damaged. Mangled metal hung from trees, and debris was strewn everywhere. +The tornado followed a two-mile path, damaging or destroying at least 500 homes, most belonging to the elderly, said Sheriff Jake Miller. +Gordon, about 115 miles south of Sarasota late tonight, moved into the Gulf of Mexico off Key West with 50 mile-an-hour winds. More than eight and a half inches of rain fell in parts of South Florida. The storm knocked out power to 397,000 homes and businesses. +The storm killed at least 100 people in Haiti, although unofficial reports said the toll was much higher. Two people each died in Jamaica and Cuba. + +LOAD-DATE: November 16, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: A tornado caused heavy damage in a retirement community, Barefoot Bay, on Florida's east coast, yesterday. (Associated Press) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +384 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 17, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +In Fearful Thrift, Elderly Forage in Garbage Bins + +BYLINE: By ALAN FINDER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1535 words + +A gray-haired man in a blue Yankees cap lifts the lid of a garbage bin next to a supermarket. Peering inside, he pulls out a tray of mushrooms still wrapped in plastic and slips it surreptitiously into a small gym bag. +A few minutes later, a man in his 80's walks to another of the three green bins outside the market. He forages through the garbage, using his cane to stir the bottom, and removes a red pepper, some potatoes, an apple and wilted broccoli. + The scene is repeated nearly two dozen times over the course of a week. While shoppers stroll in front of the bustling Key Food supermarket on Seventh Avenue in the commercial heart of Park Slope, Brooklyn, elderly people go almost unnoticed as they scavenge for food in the garbage bins just around the corner. +They are not homeless, and they are not entirely destitute. But they say they are driven to the unappealing, even humiliating task of foraging through the trash by a disturbing combination of immediate financial need and a more general fear of the future. +"I lost my pride a long time ago," said Casey Losik, an 87-year-old retired shipping clerk, as he scoured the sidewalk bins one morning. Mr. Losik lives four blocks away in Park Slope with his ailing wife, Florence, in the fourth-floor walkup apartment they have rented for 62 years. +Like Mr. Losik, the people who forage in the bins are elderly, most of them retired, and they struggle to get by on limited incomes. Sometimes what they receive each month in Social Security and small pensions simply does not meet their expenses. An unexpected medical bill may leave them short of cash, or they may be hoarding what's left in their checking account for fear that an unanticipated bill may come in the mail. +Some say they are reluctant to go to nearby soup kitchens or churches that provide free meals, leaving them in the paradoxical position of maintaining their independence by picking through smelly supermarket garbage, just a few feet from the bookstores, boutiques and restaurants that define the upscale neighborhood. +There is no way to know how widespread these scavenging practices are. Yet supermarket managers and shoppers in other middle-class New York City neighborhoods, including Brooklyn Heights and Bay Ridge in Brooklyn and Woodhaven and Richmond Hill in Queens, say they, too, have seen elderly people pick through the markets' refuse for food. +Mr. Losik, the retired shipping clerk, says the fruits, vegetables and frozen foods he plucks from the Dumpsters early each morning help offset large medical bills. +While he seems somewhat embarrassed by this routine, he is also clearly pleased by his resourcefulness. Mr. Losik held up two Golden Delicious apples and a large butternut squash he had found in the bins. "What's wrong with these apples?" he said. "What's wrong with this squash? +"The young people, they won't buy it if it has a nick or a scratch or a bump," he said. "They weren't brought up right. My father said people throw out food that's perfectly good." +As many as one in six elderly Americans -- many of them, like the Losiks, living above the poverty line -- are either hungry or have inadequate diets, according to a survey last year by the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Washington. +Madeline Menard, whose hands were filled with food from Key Food's garbage on a recent Saturday morning, says she is forced to forage because her Social Security check does not cover all her expenses. +Ms. Menard, who is 67, held two wrapped packages, each with three ears of corn, that she had just retrieved from the Dumpsters, along with seven eggplants, a clear plastic bag of mixed greens and a large green garbage bag stuffed with assorted produce. +"I do it out of necessity," Ms. Menard said. "If I didn't have to do it to eat, I wouldn't do it. +"I don't understand why they throw it out," Ms. Menard said, holding up one of her packages of corn. "This is good food. See, there's nothing wrong with it. It's fine to eat." +Some people, embarrassed to be seen poking through the supermarket's garbage, denied to a reporter who had watched them that they had done so. The 62-year-old man in the Yankees cap implied strongly just seconds after taking the mushrooms that he had not even looked into the Dumpster, much less taken something from it. +He did say, quite nervously, that he had worked for years in printing shops, but had not worked since being dismissed from his last printing job in 1989. "It's hard out there," he said, before rushing away. +Many others declined to talk at all. But the half-dozen people who agreed to be interviewed after they were seen scavenging in recent weeks outside the Key Food and a second supermarket in Park Slope said that they often found decent food in the Dumpsters. They said that they always washed and cooked the food, and that they had never been made sick by it. +Saul Rivera, 61, said that as a welfare recipient he got $100 a month in food stamps. But $25 a week does not buy a lot of food, he said, so he regularly goes to the Dumpsters at Key Food. +"It's good food," Mr. Rivera said. "You can always get fruit and vegetables, and sometimes you can find part of a ham or a salami. You take it home, you wash it off and it's good to eat. I never got sick from it or anything." +Another retired man, who refused to give his full name, said he preferred another set of Dumpsters outside a Met Food supermarket on Ninth Street near Fifth Avenue, about a half mile from Key Food. He said he usually picked through those bins once or twice a week, but recently had been forced to do so daily for a week. He said he had misplaced $200 right after withdrawing the money from a bank, and was short of cash. +"The thing is, you have to know the schedules," he said. "You have to get there right after they throw it out so you get the best stuff." +"I tell all my friends, if they complain about money, 'Stop whining; go down to the Dumpster at Met Food and make yourself a nice stew,' " he said. "But they don't listen to me. They think it's dirty. It's not dirty. I'm a very clean person. Do I look like the kind of person who would eat dirty food?" +He was well groomed, his gray hair neatly combed and parted on the side, and he wore a clean dress shirt and brown slacks. He was, in fact, considerably better dressed than most of the elderly people who pick in the supermarkets' trash. While they are not homeless, most are clearly not affluent. They are usually dressed in old, worn clothing. +Mr. Losik, for example, was wearing a shirt with a rip in a front pocket and several large, dark stains when he was interviewed at length in his apartment one afternoon. Mr. Losik said he had begun searching in supermarket Dumpsters for fruit and vegetables not long after he retired 22 years ago, after nearly five decades as a shipping clerk in a warehouse along the Brooklyn waterfront in Sunset Park. +He apparently always had a scavenger's streak: When he was working he often spent summer evenings searching for coins in the sand at the Riis Park beach in the Rockaways, he said. +But his recent forays into the garbage, he said, were driven primarily by financial insecurity. "When you get a pension of $270 a month from the firm you worked for, you haven't got much to live on, do you?" Mr. Losik said. "So what are you going to do when they are giving good stuff away?" +In addition to his pension, Mr. Losik and his wife each get monthly Social Security checks. Altogether, they receive $1,286 a month, he said, plus a few dollars he makes for doing small chores in his apartment building. Their apartment, which is rent stabilized, costs $373.91 a month, he said, and telephone and utilities are an additional $100. +That should leave enough for food and incidentals, except that medical bills keep cropping up. Mr. Losik said that he had surgery for a hernia in August, and that even with Medicare, he had to pay 20 percent of the bill, or about $1,000. That was a big setback, he said. +"Ten dollars a day, that's what I'm trying to get by on, so I can have some money around to pay medical bills and what not," Mr. Losik said. And while he shops inside Key Food for milk, cheese, crackers and other staples, he depends on his daily forays into the garbage bins to limit his expenses. +"Every day I go look there," he said. "If it's too rotten, I pass it by. But this is good stuff they put out there." +"My father said, 'That's God's gift to mankind -- don't throw it away,' " he added. "People are starving around the world, and in this country they are throwing food away." +Mr. Losik said employees at Key Food were aware that he and other elderly people were taking things from the Dumpsters, and that they did not harass anyone. "They tell you not to mess up, that's all," he said. +Mr. Losik said he had seen 20 to 30 different older people picking through the garbage bins there. An outgoing man, Mr. Losik said he tried to help the others, offering tips on the best times to come and which foods to avoid. "I don't blame the people for doing this," he said. "They just want to have enough to get by. +"It's not easy for old people," he said. + +LOAD-DATE: November 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Many elderly New Yorkers, like this man at a grocery in Park Slope, Brooklyn, jscrounge for edible garbage. (Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +385 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 17, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO DIGEST + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 537 words + + +ELDERLY FORAGE IN GARBAGE BINS +While shoppers stroll in front of the bustling Key Food supermarket on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, elderly people go almost unnoticed as they scavenge for food in the garbage bins just around the corner. They are not homeless, and they are not entirely destitute. But they say they are driven to the unappealing, humiliating task by a combination of financial need and fear of the future. A1. + +NEW YORK CITY + +CO-OP SETTLEMENT HAILED AS GAY VICTORY +Five years after his companion died and a year after his own death from AIDS, Harry Kirkpatrick has won a long and bitter battle with a Sutton Place co-op board over the right to inherit an apartment the two men shared. As a result, co-ops throughout the city may find themselves extending to gay, lesbian and other unmarried couples the privilege customarily granted to married couples. B3. + +MEDICAID MYTHS LINGER AFTER ELECTION +Call them the Medicaid Myths. They were threaded through the New York governor's campaign. And they are built on misunderstandings, confusion and a few politically useful distortions. Metro Matters, B3. + +GIULIANI BACK ON POLITICAL OFFENSIVE +Momentarily chastened after losing his gamble in the governor's race, Mayor Giuliani is back on the political offensive, seeking to use George E. Pataki's refusal to call him to showcase himself as the champion of the city. B3. + +DRUG TESTS FOR WELFARE RECIPIENTS +A new work-for-welfare plan by the Giuliani administration will require single, childless people who say they cannot work for medical reasons to undergo a medical exam and drug test to get benefits, officials said. B7. + +36 MOB 'WANNABES' ARRESTED IN SWEEP +They are known in the underworld as "wannabes," ambitious criminals who hope to become full-fledged Mafia members by committing violent crimes and sharing their spoils with mob leaders. The authorities arrested 36 men they identified as "wannabes" and accused them of engaging in dozens of hijackings, robberies and narcotics deals. B9. + +The Top 10 Ways to Mispronounce the Name of Governor-Elect George Pataki. B3. + +A man who intervened in a sidewalk fight was shot and critically wounded. B8. + +Mike Wallace was reprimanded by CBS News for a hidden-camera interview. B9. + +Mayor Giuliani announced a sweeping program to combat graffiti. B10. + +REGION + +CARJACK-KILLING SUSPECT SPEAKS +Edward L. Summers, the Bronx premedical student accused of stealing a Jeep at a suburban mall and killing its driver, took the witness stand in his own defense and told how he had been terrorized into taking part in the crime by a shadowy figure named Dino who had once saved him from a street fight. B6. + +NEW EDITOR FOR INFLUENTIAL NEWSPAPER +Mort Pye, editor of The Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey's largest daily newspaper, will retire at the end of the year. He will be succeeded by James P. Willse, former editor and publisher of The Daily News. B6. + +POLICE FORCE IS OFF DUTY FOR GOOD +The local police made their last patrols in the rustic village of Greenport on the East End of Long Island, after the people they had sworn to protect voted to throw them out of work. B6. + +LOAD-DATE: November 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "AIDS in Other Cities" tracks the annual rates of new cases per 100,000 population in five major metropolitan areas, as reported July 1993 through June 1994. (Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +386 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 17, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO MATTERS; +Medicaid Myths Linger In Wake of Campaign + +BYLINE: By Joyce Purnick + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 818 words + +CALL them the Medicaid Myths. +They were threaded through the New York governor's campaign. They emerge every year in Albany at budget time. They dominate the public debate about Medicaid. And they are built on misunderstandings, confusion and a few politically useful distortions. +Since Medicaid accounts for about a fifth of the state's spending, Governor-elect George E. Pataki will have to cut it considerably to help to close the looming $4 billion budget gap, especially if he really does begin to lower taxes. + A LOOK, then, at the Big Three Medicaid Myths: +Myth No. 1: New York spends three times what California does per Medicaid patient. +Mr. Pataki repeated that comparison so often during the campaign that it took on the air of fact. It isn't. +New York is among the top Medicaid-spending states in the country, and does indeed outspend California's Medi-Cal program by nearly 3 to 1. But the comparison is misleading because New York's Medicaid basket includes some services that California finances through other Federal programs and local taxes. +"While it appears that New York spends considerably more than California, many features of New York's programs are funded in California outside its Medi-Cal budget," concluded an analysis in 1991 by the Republican State Senate -- where Mr. Pataki sat for the last two years. +Experts contend that correcting for that accounting difference still leaves some disparity between the two states, contrary to Gov. Mario M. Cuomo's assertions during the campaign. New York's labor costs are higher than California's, some of New York's Medicaid services are more generous and its population is older and needier. +How much more New York really spends per patient is not clear. But the real question is what can New York learn from California and other states reputed to be doing a better job of containing Medicaid costs. +That won't be so easy, because New York, as is its wont, has pursued its own Medicaid style. +Myth No. 2: Medicaid is health insurance for the poor. +That is how Congress envisioned Medicaid in 1965. But ever-creative New York concentrated on taking maximum advantage of Medicaid dollars. As a result, many nonpoor New Yorkers also have a stake in Medicaid. +For instance, 41 percent of the recipients are receiving Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the largest welfare program, but they account for only 12 percent of the state's Medicaid spending. The elderly and disabled, some poor and some not, make up quarter of the recipients and account for two-thirds of the Medicaid costs. +Medicaid is also a large employer. "We've got a Medicaid industrial complex in this state," said James Fossett, professor of public administration and public health at the Rockefeller College of the State University at Albany. "New York has a whole wide range of state and nonprofit agencies that make lot of money by providing services to Medicaid clients." +And many of these are upstate, in areas that voted heavily for Mr. Pataki, which means that in taking on Medicaid, the Governor-elect would also be taking on his constituency. +Myth No. 3: Medicaid is bleeding the state budget dry. +That is a matter of opinion. Medicaid accounts for 6 percent of annual state spending of its own revenues and it is expensive to localities. But some argue that Medicaid benefits the state's finances. +"This legislation said we," meaning the Federal Government, "will pay half of anything a doctor says a patient needs," said Professor Fossett. "New York said, 'Hmm, boy, can we find a lot of things a doctor says a patient needs.' ' +Starting under a Republican Governor, Nelson A. Rockefeller, New York "Medicaided" some services that had been financed only by the state. Now New York, with about 9 percent of the country's Medicaid recipients, gets 13.5 percent of all Federal Medicaid dollars. +"New York realized if we're already doing it, and paying 100 percent, it reduces our costs to do it through Medicaid," said John Holahan, director of the health policy research center at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research group in Washington. +OF course, New York could eliminate some services or cut them dramatically. The state has, for instance, a generous personal care program: nonmedical help for the disabled, like shopping and bathing. Would New Yorkers stand for cutting that service? +So far, Mr. Pataki has only mentioned cutting administrative bloat and preventing Medicaid funding for hair transplants -- which no one has ever received. Elizabeth P. McCaughey, the Lieutenant Governor-elect, says the administration will look at expanding managed care, privatizing long-term care and other options. There are several, and each would have an impact not only on cost, but also on recipients, providers or both. + + + + -------------------- +MONDAY: A look at ways of reducing Medicaid costs. + +LOAD-DATE: November 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +387 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 17, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Asthma Deaths Tied to Error In Use of Drug + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section B; Page 11; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 427 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 + +The maker of a new, long-acting asthma drug has issued a warning after doctors reported that the death of some asthma sufferers might be attributable to their improper use of it. +Twenty deaths among users of the drug, Serevent, have been reported to the Food and Drug Administration since the new medicine entered the market in April. It is not yet clear how many of those deaths resulted from misuse of the drug, but its maker, Glaxo Inc., told patients and doctors today to take special care to use it properly. + Experts agree that Serevent is effective at preventing asthma attacks and that its effects last longer than do those of other drugs. But it is not intended for use once an asthma attack starts, because it takes at least 30 minutes to begin working. +At least some of the 20 deaths reported since April are believed to have occurred when patients inhaled the drug during attacks and waited in vain for it to help. +In addition to the danger that Serevent may prove lethally ineffective to a sufferer who needs quick relief from a severe attack, there is the danger that such a sufferer might frantically overdose on it, causing abnormal heart rhythms and other perils, said Dr. Roger Bone, president of the Medical College of Ohio. +In The New England Journal of Medicine last week, Dr. Frank Finkelstein of Plymouth, Mass., described two elderly women found dead while holding their Serevent. "Both had been told they could use their previous inhaler (albuterol) for emergencies, but they did not do so," he wrote. +Asthma is an inflammatory lung disease characterized by attacks in which the airways become blocked, keeping patients from breathing. Some 10 million Americans have asthma, and about 5,000 die each year. +Quick-acting bronchodilators, medicine inhaled straight into the lungs to widen airways, usually alleviate attacks. The most popular is albuterol. +Yet the effects of these quick-acting drugs last only about four hours, so patients often awake during the night, wheezing as their drug wears off. +Serevent, or salmaterol xinafoate, is the nation's only long-lasting bronchodilator. It is for patients with moderate asthma, who have stabilized the disease with other drugs. They inhale two puffs in the morning and two at night, 12 hours apart. +The drug has proved safe in trials involving hundreds of people, so patients should not abandon it, said Susan Cruzan, an F.D.A. spokeswoman. +"It is one of the most useful drugs for asthma," Dr. Bone said. "But if it's used inappropriately, it can cause problems." + +LOAD-DATE: November 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +388 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 17, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Few on Welfare Said To Defeat Addiction + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section B; Page 13; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 159 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 + +Just 1 percent of the low-income drug addicts and alcoholics who receive Federal disability benefits recover from their addictions or get jobs, a Federal study shows. Most are dropped from the rolls only when they die or go to jail, the study says. +The study has also found that Government workers failed to make sure that addicts and alcoholics were being treated even though it was a requirement for receiving monthly disability checks of $446. + A report on the study, by the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, was made public on Monday. +More than 80,000 drug addicts and alcoholics receive benefits under Supplemental Security Income, a welfare program run by the Social Security Administration for the elderly and disabled. Fewer than 10 percent of addicts and alcoholics receiving benefits were in treatment, and the administration did not know the treatment status of most of the rest, the report said. + +LOAD-DATE: November 17, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +389 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 18, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +2,000 Evacuated While Bomb Is Disarmed + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 33; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 281 words + +DATELINE: REDDING, Calif., Nov. 17 + +About 2,000 people were evacuated from their homes and offices today after authorities found an object that looked like a bomb attached to two large propane tanks. +Members of the bomb squad removed the device at about 6:30 P.M., said Lieut. Herb Davidson of the Shasta County Sheriff's Department. They said it appeared to be a genuine explosive device, which they planned to dismantle. + If the device had exploded, it could have devastated everything for several blocks, said Sgt. Arlin Markin of the Sheriff's office. +All homes and businesses within a mile radius of the industrial area south of downtown were evacuated after authorities found the bomb this morning. The residents were allowed to return Thursday night. +Before the bomb squad disarmed the device, the officers made two failed attempts to knock the bomb off the 30,000-gallon propane storage tanks at the Campora Propane Company. There were a total of four such tanks and three 30,000-gallon railroad tank cars at the company. +The authorities were alerted by an anonymous caller shortly after 8 A.M. +Evacuation centers were set up at the Shasta District Fairgrounds and at a senior citizens center near an elementary school in the Northern California community, 175 miles north of San Francisco. +Only about 40 people went to the shelters, with the rest apparently staying elsewhere, officials said. +The Redding city police reported that while the evacuation was under way, a Sacramento Savings Bank branch about three miles away was robbed by a gunman who fled on foot with an undisclosed amount of cash. +"There is no reason to link it to the bank robbery other than coincidence," Markin said. + +LOAD-DATE: November 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +390 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 18, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +They Said She Was D.O.A., But Then the Body Bag Moved + +BYLINE: By ROBERT D. McFADDEN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 696 words + +The old woman was sprawled on her living room floor, cold and motionless, and the apartment manager who found her on Wednesday was sure she was gone. Paramedics and the Albany County Coroner, Philip Furie, found no heartbeat, no pulse, no breath or other signs of life, and the coroner declared her officially dead. +They zipped Mildred C. Clarke, 86, into a body bag, took her to the morgue at the Albany Medical Center Hospital and left her in a room where corpses are kept at 40 degrees, pending autopsies or funerals. About 90 minutes later, the chief morgue attendant went in to transfer her to a funeral home. + "He was wheeling her out of the cooler when he noticed movement in the body bag -- actually a rising of the bag," said Gregory McGarry, a spokesman for the medical center. "He also detected a faint breathing sound. At first he assumed it was just air escaping from the bag. But then he noticed a rhythm to it." +The attendant, Herman Thomas, opened the bag with widening eyes and found the woman alive, breathing shallowly and unconscious. A medical team, quickly summoned, used a ventilator bag to force air into her lungs, moved her to the emergency room and took other measures to resuscitate her, Mr. McGarry said. +Yesterday, with Mrs. Clark in critical condition, unconscious but resting comfortably, doctors were puzzling over the cause of the death-mimic case. The coroner -- an elected official who is an insurance agent, not a doctor -- was calling it a miracle, and health officials, mindful that a Poe-like premature burial had narrowly been averted, were debating whether Albany ought to have a full-fledged medical examiner. +"Albany is the only major city in New York State that does not have a medical examiner, an official who is trained in forensic pathology, and this would be a real advantage," Dr. Jeff Ross, chairman of the department of pathology at the Albany Medical Center, said in an interview. +In a relic still used in many American cities, Albany elects four coroners to declare deaths and investigate their causes, when necessary, leaving autopsies to forensic pathologists. The coroners are experienced in evaluating crime scenes and suspicious deaths, but have no medical training. Dr. Ross said he would retain coroners for investigations, but place primary responsibility in a medical examiner. +Mrs. Clarke, a widow and a retired bank worker who lives alone at the DeWitt Clinton Apartments, a complex for elderly, disabled and handicapped people, was found at midafternoon on Wednesday by Lori Goodman-DePietro, the manager, who had not seen her since Monday and became worried. +She called the Albany Fire Department and a squad of paramedics listened to the woman's chest with a stethoscope and found no heartbeat. Mr. Furie, the coroner, also was summoned. He felt her pulse, found none and declared her to be dead. +"She was cold as ice, right down by her face, and also she was stiff as a board," he told The Associated Press. "Actually, when you come right down to it, this might be called a miracle of God." +Dr. Ross said there were several generally effective tests to determine whether someone is dead. One is using a stethoscope to detect a heartbeat, though a very weak beat may not be heard. Another is to shine a flashlight into the eye to see if the pupils react. Another is a pain-reflex test, pinching an ear or the nose, which are sensitive. But none is absolutely foolproof, he noted. +Mr. Thomas, the chief attendant and autopsy technician, said the movement in the body bag was something he had not seen in 30 years in the morgue. "He opened the bag and was startled to discover she was in fact breathing. He couldn't believe it," Mr. McGarry said. +Mr. McGarry said hypothermia was the most usual cause of symptoms that mimic death; it lowers the body temperature, slows the heart and respiratory rates and makes the body stiff. A stroke victim or a person who has taken an overdose of drugs may also appear dead, and lying down for a long time can cause blood vessels to collapse, making the pulse hard to detect, he said. +The cause of Mrs. Clarke's condition remained a mystery yesterday. + +LOAD-DATE: November 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +391 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 18, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Kohl Trims His Cabinet + +BYLINE: Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 10; Column 6; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 129 words + +DATELINE: BERLIN, Nov. 17 + +Two days after being formally re-elected by Parliament, Chancellor Helmut Kohl named a slimmed-down Cabinet today in which all key ministers retained their posts. +But Klaus Topfer, Minister of Environment, was named Minister of Construction and Housing. Chancellor Kohl said he needed Mr. Topfer to help oversee the move of the capital from Bonn to Berlin. He was replaced by Angela Merkel, a physicist and Kohl ally who has not shown special interest in environmental issues. + Reducing the Cabinet from 14 members by consolidating two posts, Mr. Kohl named Claudia Nolte, 28, to the portfolio for youth, women's affairs, family matters and senior citizens, and appointed Jurgen Ruttgers, a 43-year-old lawyer, as the Minister of Education, Science and Research. + +LOAD-DATE: November 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +392 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 19, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +U.N. Says Rwandans Are Not Getting Food + +BYLINE: Reuters + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 3; Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 244 words + +DATELINE: ROME, Nov. 18 + +The United Nations World Food Program said today that a growing number of Rwandan children in refugee camps in Zaire are going hungry because food distribution is controlled by corrupt former Rwandan leaders. + The agency, which is based in Rome, said in a statement that the situation was especially bad in the Mugunga camp near Goma on Zaire's border with Rwanda, where 200,000 refugees are living. + "The number of children under the age of five who were suffering from severe malnutrition has more than doubled from August, to 8.3 percent," the statement said. "More than 30 percent of the population of the camp are not receiving full rations. Those especially affected are the elderly, children and families headed by women." + The agency, which delivers an average of 20,000 tons of food every month, blamed rising malnutrition on those who distribute the rations. + "The more vulnerable groups do not receive enough food because of corruption and food leakages at the distribution level," the statement said. "At camps, relief food is delivered to village heads, elders and officials of the old Rwandan hierarchy who keep the control of the food distribution." + The food organization said food should be distributed "based on a family/household level." + The Hutu-dominated Rwandan Government was ousted by the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front after Hutu militia and troops massacred hundreds of thousands of Tutsi between April and July. + +LOAD-DATE: November 19, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +393 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 20, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE WORLD; +Taxpayers Are Angry. They're Expensive, Too. + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL WINES + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 5; Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 445 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + +AMERICANS believe that their Government wastes vast wads of cash on pork-barrel highways, naval bases in the landlocked home states of important Senators and handouts to an ungrateful underclass -- and that wiping out all this would balance the budget. +After the election of 1994, few Republicans or even Democrats deny that the voters have a point. + But like most truths, this one is not absolute. Sure, Congress is a certain soft touch. But the biggest beneficiaries of the benefits mandated by law are not grifters or crack addicts or well-connected defense contractors: they are mostly average folk, like you. Or me. +Direct aid to the Government-certified poor -- food stamps, Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, Aid to Families with Dependent Children -- totals about $140 billion a year. That is roughly what the Government spends on Medicare, providing services to the elderly at roughly one quarter of their actual cost. +And payments to the poor add up to less than the three largest tax breaks that benefit the middle class and wealthy: deductions for retirement plans, the deduction for home mortgage interest and the exemption of health-insurance premiums that companies pay for their employees. + +Don't Touch + Perhaps more important, most tax breaks and payments to the well-situated are practically exempt from the debate over controlling expenditures. +There are some arguments in favor of this. Cutting Social Security and tax-deferred retirement plans could push some of the elderly below the poverty level. Curbing the mortgage interest break would devalue homes and crimp sales. +And politically, the principle known in budgetese as "means-testing" seems a dead letter. Republicans and Democrats alike say they won't seek limits in the largest entitlement, Social Security, although a large share goes to people who live in relative comfort. When Mr. Clinton's budget director, Alice Rivlin, floated the idea of limiting some popular middle- and upper-class tax breaks, like the mortgage deduction, Republicans pounced on the Democratic "tax-and-spend" philosophy, and the White House disavowed her. +Some experts say that ignores the Willie Sutton law of accounting: to balance the budget, you go where the money is, and the money these days is put mostly in the hands of people who are not poor. "My view of life is, you rule out taxes and Social Security and most Medicare, and you're not serious" about balancing the budget, said Charles Schultze of the Brookings Institution, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Carter. "I don't care what you say. You're not really playing the game." + +LOAD-DATE: November 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graphs: "Taxpayers Are Angry. They're Expensive, Too." +New that Republicans control Congress, there will be some pressure to fulfill one of the promises of the "Contract With America" -- a balanced budget. Back in the early Reagan years, balanced budget promises were accompanied by stories of welfare mothers buying vodka with food stamps. Now the watchword in welfare reform. Either way, the implication is that cracking down on the poor will bring about big savngs. + But once budget committees start looking at Ferderal costs, both indirect payments and in monet the Government doesn't take in through tax breaks, they'll find that there are precious few poor people's programs to cut. The bulk of the money goes to the politacally potent middle class. + Below are figures for some Federal spending programs in fiscal 1993 and tax breaks given for individuals in 1992 and filed in 1993, based om early reviews of the returns. (Sources: Congressional Budget Office; I.R.S.; Congressional Research Service; Office of Management and Budget; Employee Benefit Research Institute; Department of Agriculture; Census Bureau); "Entitlements vs. Tax Breaks" shows percentage of households that receive Federal entitlement benefits in 1990 and tax breaks in 1992. (Sources: Congressional Budget Office; I.R.S.; Office of Management and Budget) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +394 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 20, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In One Town, Fed Move Brings Some Fear + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL JANOFSKY, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1222 words + +DATELINE: FREDERICK, Md., Nov. 18 + +Sitting in the Chat 'n' Chew Restaurant, Chris Adams and Dennis Price were eating their $3.75 hot turkey dinners and saying today that they were as mystified as anyone in town about the economic direction of the country. +As partners in a year-old home improvement company that has enjoyed a reasonably good start, they now have the latest interest rate increase by the Federal Reserve to think about. The Fed action, raising the short-term interest rates it controls by three-quarters of a percentage point, was announced on Tuesday as an essential step to contain inflation. Big banks across the country immediately raised the prime lending rate, a response generally considered bad news for people seeking loans and good news for most investors. + For the partners, it was a little of both, and their ambiguity was reflected around town, as most people said they were not sure what to make of the Fed's latest move. Many said that they were unconvinced that the economy has been stabilized or that average people would be better off. +And almost all expressed a disquieting fear that whatever security they might have with their current jobs or financial situation could be jeopardized tomorrow or the next day. +"I was happy the way things were going," said Mr. Price, whose company specializes in vinyl siding and other exterior work. "But now, I don't know. I don't know what the answer is." +On the one hand, he explained, the company might benefit because 90 percent of its clients are elderly -- people who have lived in their houses for decades, who have invested wisely and, with the higher interest rates for their investments, expect to have more money to renovate their homes. Over the several years that interest rates fell, through 1993, Mr. Price and Mr. Adams said that many elderly home owners could not afford home improvements. +But on the other hand, Mr. Price said, "Higher rates will eliminate some of our Yuppies with a couple of kids, cars and a house to pay for. They're not going to be able to do as much. Maybe the elderly will offset that." +In addition, the partners' plans to construct a building for the business next year could be shelved. "We have to reassess that now," Mr. Adams said. +Frederick is an old but fast-growing town of 45,000 people that serves as a bedroom community for Baltimore to the east and Washington to the south. Francis Scott Key, the author of "The Star-Spangled Banner," came from here, but 180 years after he wrote his famous song, he would hardly recognize the place. All around its quaint central district of antique shops, small boutiques and eateries is an expanding nexus of insurance companies, mortgage brokers, high-tech industries and strip malls. +With crime, traffic and other urban ills spreading into the near suburbs of Baltimore and Washington, each about an hour away, Frederick has grown to the second-largest city in Maryland, but a place residents say still offers a high quality of life with minimal crime, safe streets, affordable housing and superior schools. The area has become so attractive that some town leaders say they would be just as happy if the population growth slowed and subsequent economic development served only to lower the county's already low 3.9 percent unemployment rate. +Yet the climbing interest rates have crept into the town like a thick smog: People are not sure how it might affect them or when it might clear out. +Joseph Dahms, a professor of economics at Hood College in Frederick, predicted that the rate increase would hurt the city and surrounding areas in a variety of ways. Fewer people, he said, will be able to buy or refinance houses or purchase cars and other high-cost items. Retailers could suffer the immediate effects of people spending less money for Christmas, he said, because they do not want to run up their credit card balances. +"This has scared people, and it's a surprise," he said of the timing and size of the rate increase. "A quarter of a point people could have lived with. The Fed has always been more paranoid about inflation than unemployment, but three-quarters of a point is pretty unusual." +For some area residents, like Mary Losovsky, the higher interest rates could not come at a worse time. A 29-year-old secretary who trained as a teacher but could not find a job, she and her fiance, Jason Hoffman, are getting married on Nov. 26. More than anything, she said, they wanted to buy a house. Now, that seems impossible. +Some time ago, she said, she shopped around and found that a decent town house in the area would cost more than $100,000. A bank would only qualify her for a loan of about $70,000. Even with Mr. Hoffman's salary as a worker with a lawn-care company, the single-family house she wants is out of reach. "It seems to be a ways off now," she said. +"I have a lot of friends with kids who want to buy a bigger house but they can't afford it," Ms. Losovsky said. "That frightens you." +Marvin Lohr, owner of the Village Restaurant and Soda Fountain, has watched his business slowly improve in recent years. But now he wonders how long that might continue. New restaurants are opening all the time, he said. Some of the bigger and better-financed operations are advertising on radio and in the local newspapers. "I can compete with their food," he said. "But not their advertising." +Before Tuesday, Mr. Lohr said he had been thinking about refinancing his debts to improve his cash position. Now, he is hesitant. "I know there's this fear about inflation," he said of the Federal Reserve's rationale, "but I still think they are ahead of the game. Or I don't see that far enough out. I'm not sure." +Almost every morning at the Village, a group of octogenarians push a few tables together to drink coffee and discuss current events. Most are long-time residents of Frederick, like Charles V. Main, the 84-year-old former police chief and de facto host of the table. +"It's just wrong," he said of the rising interest rates. "Middle-class people just can't afford it. It only enhances the value of the rich, the man with a lot of investments. It doesn't hurt me, but I must console people younger than me." +Don Falconer, an 80-year-old retired engineer, said: "It's an overreaction by the Fed. The Government seems to dabble a little too much into the economy, and by so doing, they're going to stifle it. They're being too tight about inflation." +Bud Radcliffe, a 78-year-old former banker, was the only member of the group who acknowledged a personal gain from the higher rates. With money invested in certificates of deposit, he said he would make money as a result. "But I don't think it's good for the economy," he said. +Sitting at a table nearby, Linda Foflygen, a 42-year-old mother of four, shook her head. The wife of an art teacher who supplements his income by working for an engineering firm, Mrs. Foflygen said recent interest rate increases had cost them money. They had been waiting final approval for refinancing their house in Frederick's historic district, she said, before finally getting a rate of 8.25 percent. +"I don't know why they are rushing to raise the rates again, now that people are becoming comfortable with the economy and spending," she said. "Why stifle it? If we were trying to refinance now, we couldn't afford it." + +LOAD-DATE: November 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Almost every morning at the Village Restaurant in Frederick, Md., a group of octogenarians push a few tables together to drink coffee and talk. One recent day, the topic was rising interest rates. (pg. 1); Dennis Price, center -- Runs home improvement company with Chris Adams, right -- "I was happy the way things were going. But now, I don't know. I don't know what the answer is;" Linda Foflygen, Mother of four -- "I don't know why they are rushing to raise the rates again, now that people are becoming comfortable with the economy and spending, Why stifle it?" (Photographs by Michael Geissinger for The New York Times) (pg. 26) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +395 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 20, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Social Security Finds '78 Underpayments + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 27; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 175 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 + +Hundreds of thousands of retired people were underpaid an average of $1,000 in Social Security benefits because of a 1978 computer glitch, officials said today, adding that the Government now wanted to reimburse them or their survivors or estates. +The Social Security Administration, which recently discovered the mistake in its computer program, must now identify as many as 426,000 elderly people whose retirement checks were shorted by an average of $10 a month, some for a decade or more. The total of the underpayments was $478.5 million, the officials said. + A Social Security spokesman, Phil Gambino, said the error affected fewer than 1 percent of the 43 million Americans who receive Social Security benefits. +Officials said the underpayments affected mainly recipients who had returned to work after their retirement. +Patrick Burns, a spokesman for the National Council of Senior Citizens, a Washington advocacy group, urged elderly Americans not to inquire about the underpayments but to wait until the agency notified them. + +LOAD-DATE: November 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +396 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 20, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: UPPER WEST SIDE; +At a Loss for Words With Those Who Aren't + +BYLINE: By JENNIFER KINGSON BLOOM + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 8; Column 4; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 497 words + +Meeting one of his favorite authors, David Kratz was at a loss for words. +"I was worried about what I would talk to E. L. Doctorow about," said Mr. Kratz, a public relations executive who lives on Central Park West. "I mean, he is E. L. Doctorow." + Luckily, Mr. Kratz -- whose favorite novel of Mr. Doctorow's is "Ragtime" -- had been to a seminar that day where several famous authors, including Kurt Vonnegut and Tama Janowitz, discussed the future of the novel. +Sipping from a goblet of white wine while a pianist played Gershwin, Mr. Kratz described the event to Mr. Doctorow -- "Ed" to some guests. "We gossiped about the other writers," he said. +The soiree Thursday, with Mr. Doctorow and Walter Mosley, the mystery writer, as featured guests was one of 20 held in the last two weeks to benefit the Goddard Riverside Community Center, which offers housing and services to homeless and elderly people. For eight years, authors and publishing executives from the Upper West Side have held a book fair to benefit the center. And increasingly, the book fair spins off a swirl of parties. +This year's book fair is in its final day today, from noon to 5 P.M, in the cafeteria at Goddard Riverside, at 593 Columbus Avenue. All 20,000 books are sold half-price, and the volunteers who sell them include entry-level publishing employees and the heads of publishing houses. With the book fair, the parties and an auction, organizers hope to raise more than $200,000 for Goddard Riverside this year. +"We have aimed to make this the publishing industry's cause, much like AIDS has become Seventh Avenue's cause," said Florence Janovic, a co-chair of the event. +In the name of that good cause, hundreds of book lovers paid at least $200 to attend meet-the-author dinners this month, in which 43 writers participated. The 20 guests at last Thursday's dinner at the home of Terry and Jerry Shargel were treated to a catered buffet that included mesclun salad, wild rice and chicken in Port sauce with figs. +"They ask me how I work, what my habits as a writer are," Mr. Doctorow said as waiters passed canapes on silver trays. "They ask me what I think of the films that have come out based on my books. Then a great number of people who ask you these questions confess that they have literary aspirations." +Mr. Shargel, a criminal defense lawyer, asked both writers to sign copies of their latest books and make brief speeches. Mr. Mosley revealed that he worked as a computer programmer for 15 years, enjoys writing dialogue and has an odd passion for Brooklyn accents. The soft-spoken Mr. Doctorow said he avoids in-depth research for his books. +Donald Porter, a writer and former West Sider, founded the book fair. The literary dinner parties followed quickly, he said. +"I was at one at which Allan Gurganus read from "Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All," Mr. Porter said. "He just sat by the fire and read -- it was magic." JENNIFER KINGSON BLOOM + +LOAD-DATE: November 22, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: E. L. Doctorow, right, amid guests and wine goblets last week. (Philip Greenberg for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +397 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 20, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: UPPER EAST SIDE; +For the Elderly, a Deli Is a Lifeline + +BYLINE: By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 6; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 438 words + +In Manhattan, getting from one place to another usually involves considering up- or downtown, not up- or downhill. But for elderly people living along a slice of the island's easternmost avenue, the threat of losing the only deli for a mile is bringing local topography into unusual focus. +"We are at the bottom of a hill," fretted Ursula Maksic, 72 years old, who lives around the corner from the Sutton House Deli, at 1155 York Avenue, between 62d and 63d Streets. First Avenue, she said, has a variety of stores, but they are inaccessible to her. "Sixty-Second, 63d and 64th are all uphill streets," she said. "For elderly people or the handicapped -- I happen to be both -- this is impossible." + Come February, though, the deli's 10-year lease is up, and, because of a misunderstanding, its survival now hinges on whether the city will renew a zoning variance. +The owner of the building -- a consortium of schools and hospitals that includes New York Hospital and the Rockefeller University -- allowed the variance to lapse, planning eventually to place medical clinics, which are permitted by the zoning, in the building. +That was before it realized that the deli had an option to renew the lease for five more years. "The deli does have the ability, we believe now, to renew their lease for five years if they want to continue to stay there," said David Lyons, the vice president and treasurer of Rockefeller University, chairman of the committee that manages the property. +But he calculated the cost of reapplying for the variance at more than $100,000, counting for architectural plans and legal fees. +Residents, fearing the loss of the deli, gathered hundreds of signatures on petitions to Community Board 8. At a meeting on Wednesday, the board resolved to urge the consortium to keep the deli at its present site. Mr. Lyons said the outcry had changed the consortium's attitude about future plans to replace the deli. +"We understand that people in the community find this very convenient," Mr. Lyons said. "We certainly hadn't realized that there were so many people who thought it was important to them." +Still, applying for the variance and receiving it are two different things. Assemblyman Pete Grannis said he planned to help the consortium obtain the new zoning variance. "This will be a test of the city's bureaucracy, of whether the city will be willing to work with the community," he said. +Karam Awad, a co-owner of the deli, said he had no plans to move. "We are not going anywhere because we can't and because the community badly needs us," he said. DAVID M. HERSZENHORN + +LOAD-DATE: November 22, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The Sutton House Deli is the only one for a mile and its survival is in question. (Jakc Manning/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +398 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 20, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +A LA CARTE; +Alternatives to Turkey on Turkey Day + +BYLINE: By RICHARD JAY SCHOLEM + +SECTION: Section 13LI; Page 31; Column 1; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1001 words + +UNUSUAL Thanksgiving dinners with flair are widely available this year. Those seeking nontraditional turkeyless meals will have no problems. Grilled venison with green-peppercorn sauce, fillet of sole stuffed with salmon mousse and lobster sauce, roast breast of goose with holiday stuffing and lingonberry sauce, pan-roasted salmon with rock shrimp and caper-thyme butter and Chesapeake Bay jumbo lump crab cakes with red-pepper coulis compete with turkey for top billing. +Venison ($29) is one of six entrees at the Fusion Grille in East Setauket (751-2200), where cheese pumpkin soup with curried Granny Smith apples ($6.50) and pumpkin souffle with ginger clove Anglais and fresh berries ($6.50) are also on the menu. + The stuffed fillet of sole at Dar Tiffany in Greenvale (625-0444) is part of a three-course $25 prix fixe meal that includes pumpkin bisque and bread pudding with Wild Turkey bourbon sauce. +Pan-roasted salmon with Rock Island shrimp is one of three entrees on the $29.95 fixed-price menu at the Pine Island Grill in Bayville (628-3000). Pumpkin-bread pudding with calvados cream is one of three desserts available. +Tierra Mar in Westhampton (288-2700) is serving a six-course feast at prices for a complete dinner that range from $30 to $60. The stuffed roast goose with lingonberry sauce ($50) will be preceded by interesting accompaniments like curried pumpkin soup and venison tart. +The crab cakes are part of a four-course meal at the Inn on the Harbor in Cold Spring Harbor (367-3166). The complete dinners cost $22.95 to $29.95. For the crab cakes with red-pepper coulis -- the signature dish of Guy Peuch, the chef -- the price is $28.95. +The inn is also serving a complimentary Thanksgiving dinner to people from the Huntington Senior Citizens Center who will be alone for the holiday. Last Thursday the restaurant contributed pumpkin pies to the Thanksgiving dinner at the center. +Among the other interesting possibilities at Nassau and Suffolk restaurants are an Australian free-range rack of lamb with cranberry-port-Pommery mustard sauce at Bruzells, 451 Middle Neck Road, Great Neck (482-6600); cod and lobster with spinach risotto and sauce American at Starr Boggs, 10 Beach Road, Westhampton Beach (288-1877), and braised lamb shanks with mixed root vegetables over orzo served in a pan au jus at Caffe Angelica at 2370 Jericho Turnpike in Garden City Park (739-0525). + +A Guide Revisited + Long Island restaurants are receiving second looks from the Zagat Survey. The 1995 update of restaurants in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut rates 53 places not in the 1993 edition. The newly listed restaurants, unlike those in the original, are evaluated by Zagat editors rather than diners. +On a scale of 1 to 4, Zagat gives just East Hampton Point a 4, calling the new American food offered by the chef, Gerard Hayden, "innovative, exciting, yet still grounded in tradition." +Among the spots with a 3, or "very good bet," are Cafe Europa in Roslyn, Cilantro's of Blue Point, Ken's Place in Sea Cliff, Me and Mom in Greenlawn, 107 Forrest Avenue in Locust Valley, the Siena Cafe in Syosset, the Station Bistro in Water Mill, the Station House Cafe in Glen Head, Trattoria Grasso in Huntington and the Taj Mahal in Huntington and West Hempstead. + +Wine Tasting + The Bellport at 159 South Country Road (286-7550), is featuring five Chapoutier wines and a six-course, $48 dinner, at 7 P.M. on Thursday, Dec. 1. The French wines, some of which were awarded a perfect 100 rating by the wine expert Robert Parker, will be paired with a number of dishes created by Taylor Alonso who, along with his wife, Patricia Trainor, own The Bellport. +Orlando Restaurant, 15 New Street, Huntington (421-0606), is holding another of its Italian nights, on Sunday, Dec. 4, from 5 to 10 P.M. The five-course, $49.95 dinner features a choice of veal, chicken and fish entrees, wines, dancing, Italian music and the singing of Silvia. +Panama Hattie's every-night-but-Saturday $65 tasting meal features Chateau St. Jean California wines, four pastas and an entree of herb-crusted smoked-pork mignon. The restaurant, at 872 East Jericho Turnpike in Huntington Station (351-1727), is offering the five-course wine dinner until Dec. 5. + +Closing + Mainstream, 415 Main Street Port Washington, an American seafood restaurant. + +Potpourri + A few weeks ago the chef at Stresa in Manhasset (365-6956), Roberto Calabresse, started to offer off-the-menu country-type specials. The down-to-earth peasanty dishes have become so popular that diners request them. Among the hearty casual offerings are rabbit, deboned and stuffed much like a suckling pig, with vegetables and smoked ham or bacon ($16.75); roast leg of lamb with flageolets ($17.75), roast loin of pork with apple sauce ($15.25) and a stew of marinated salt-preserved cod ($16.50). +Palmer Vineyards 1992 barrel-fermented chardonnay won a double gold medal at the New York Wine and Food Classic. A double gold goes to a wine selected first in its class by every judge. Palmer's 1993 Riesling also won a gold medal at the Atlanta Wine Summit. +Ken's Place, one of the most innovative restaurants on the Island, at 64 Roslyn Avenue in Sea Cliff (674-3752), has introduced its fall-winter menu. Among the new dishes being cooked by the chef and owner, Ken Lammer, are a crisp organic-tomato-garlic polenta appetizer; a vegetarian pizza with organic eggplant, garlic puree, beans, mushrooms, roasted peppers and jalapeno oil; black fettucini with smoked scallops and a warm apple tart made with butter-free puff pastry, homemade granola and ice cream. +Gumbo Alley, a Cajun-creole restaurant at 18 South Park Avenue, Rockville Centre (766-9758), is presenting live jazz every Friday night. + +Chef's Corner + Alain V. DeCoster, who was executive chef at the Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley and the Garden City Hotel, has moved to Manhattan. He is the sous chef at the Four Seasons Hotel. + +LOAD-DATE: November 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +399 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 20, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Amid Affluence, Hunger Is at Home + +BYLINE: By ELSA BRENNER + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 1; Column 3; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1268 words + +DATELINE: WHITE PLAINS + +LAST Monday morning, 74-year-old Stefan Szymik arrived at the soup kitchen at Grace Episcopal Church here for his first hot meal in three days. The former machinist, a homeless man who said he lived meal to meal on Social Security checks, had purchased a package of luncheon meats from the local A.&P. two days before but had eaten little since. +Like many of the 80 or so other people in the dining room -- the elderly, the newly unemployed, homeless and disabled among them -- Mr. Szymik had come to depend on the bounty of the soup kitchen. + Another man, Harold Chavis, 48, said he used to be a tractor-trailer driver and that he comes to the soup kitchen every day. A man of few words, Mr. Chavis described himself as "homeless and hungry." +A 43-year-old woman, who would identify herself only as Roxanne, was also waiting for a meal, as was her daughter, Fatima, 2, who sat quietly at a table counting coins in her pink plastic purse. +Victoria Stewart, 35, a former telephone operator, and her companion Bubby Seabrook, 46, who said he had worked as a pediatric nurse, had come for a free meal, too, because they were out of work now and living on public assistance. +It was the first hot meal for many since the weekend, when the soup kitchen was closed, and some said they had stolen food from supermarkets during the two days to get by. Others had visited food pantries, where they received dried goods and food staples to tide them over. Others described a network of church-run soup kitchens, where they could count on a hot Sunday meal. +A few, however, said that although they had eaten little for several days, they were not hungry. +"The less you eat, the less you want to eat," Mr. Szymik explained. "You learn to get by." +According to Second Harvest, a national nonprofit hunger relief organization in Chicago, 10.4 percent of the population -- close to 26 million Americans -- are fed by local food banks throughout the United States. +Like Fatima, 42.9 percent are children. And like her mother, Roxanne, 26.8 percent of the nation's hungry are single parents. +Another 8.1 percent are elderly, like Mr. Szymik, many of whom are living on fixed incomes. +Others are newly unemployed, like Ms. Stewart and Mr. Seabrook, and social workers say it is especially difficult for them in a county like Westchester, where housing and other cost-of-living expenses run high. +In Westchester, where the mean household income was more than $48,000 in 1990, according to the Census Bureau, the statistics on hunger follow the national patterns -- although those studying the problem locally say the county presents a special picture. +"Poverty and hunger tend to be invisible in Westchester, and most people like it that way," said Priscilla Denby, who is directing a study of hunger at Pace University. +But attitudes have recently begun to shift, and Dr. Denby said that in telephone interviews with Westchester residents during the study, respondents were asked if they would be willing to spend another $100 in taxes to feed the poor. The survey found that 61.5 percent would. +According to the university study -- titled "A Growing Hunger: A Study of Food Inadequacy in Westchester County, 1993" -- even though the county is one of the wealthiest in the nation, one-third of Westchester's residents have "had to choose at some time between being hungry or paying the rent." +Numbers from the county's Department of Social Services show that 9,078 residents received food stamps during the fiscal year 1993-94, up from 8,700 the year before. +The Pace University survey also says poverty and hunger are not confined to the big cities of the county, and interviews revealed "pockets of problems throughout Westchester." +"Wherever it occurs, in the southern tier cities of the county or in the suburbs, poverty and hunger are joined at the hip," Dr. Denby said. +Ghassam Karam, assistant professor of economics at Pace University and a coordinator for the hunger study -- he prefers to call it "The Other Westchester" -- said that according to the 1990 census, 58,164 Westchester County residents were listed as living below the poverty line, which is considered to be $14,700 a year for a family of four. +But the actual number for those who are "hungry and in need" was probably closer to 135,000, if one includes residents living at 200 percent of the Federal poverty level, he said. +Dr. Denby described "a new type of person" who was going hungry in Westchester, saying that "more and more, it's the newly unemployed that we are seeing." +At Second Harvest, which represents 189 food banks and 50,000 agencies nationally, Christine Vladimiroff, president and chief executive officer, said that the "face of hunger was changing." +"Increasingly," she said, "we are seeing the working poor, who receive minimum pay and no benefits. +At Food-Patch in Millwood, a local food bank allied with Second Harvest, Christina Rohatynskyj, the executive director, described it as "a broad spectrum of people who are suffering, who are having to ask themselves, 'Do we buy the kids shoes, or do we eat? Do we pay the rent or do we eat?' We're talking about people who never dreamed they would enter the emergency food network." +Food-Patch, which stands for People Allied to Combat Hunger, fed 200,000 people during the 1993-94 fiscal year, with about 43 percent of those being children, Ms. Rohatynskyj said. The organization distributes food to local food pantries, soup kitchens and emergency shelters. +Food banks and soup kitchens are now worried that sources of Federal funding for their relief efforts will be jeopardized by the change in administration and Ms. Rohatynskyj said, "We're all feeling threatened." +The food banks expect even less money from Congress to buy United States Department of Agriculture commodities -- like butter, cornmeal and canned meat, beans, fruits and vegetables -- to distribute to the food pantries. The Government's $25 million budget to purchase commodities for food pantries was down from $85 million last year. +Meanwhile, as the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays approach, food pantries and soup kitchens continue to feed the poor, relying increasingly on private donations. +At the Ossining Food Pantry in Trinity Episcopal Church, Aileen Hunt, a supervisor, said her organization was distributing bags of groceries that contained a three- or four-day supply of food to 115 people a week. +The typical mix of groceries for a mother and two children from the food pantry includes soups, vegetables, cereal, dried milk, beans, oil, peanut butter, jelly, tunafish and pasta -- worth about $28. +For Thanksgiving, turkey hams, which are pressed turkeys flavored like hams, will be distributed by the pantry, along with 150 turkeys. +At Grace Church, Lesma Howard-Zepeda, director of the nutrition center, said that although the soup kitchen was receiving less money from donors and had already seen a $14,000 shortfall this year in its $110,000 annual budget, it would keep its doors open, and full-course holiday meals would be served. +"At holiday time we talk of abundance," said Ms. Vladimiroff of Second Harvest, "and some are offended that we only pay attention to the hunger problem at this time of year. Our hope is that what happens at Christmas and Thanksgiving carries over." +"The numbers keep going up for domestic hunger," she said, "Maybe we don't see the bloated stomachs, the skeletal frames" and the orange hair from vitamin deficiency, "the graphic images of famine and death, but the problem in this country is not going away." + +LOAD-DATE: November 20, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Harold Chavis dines at Grace Episcopal Church's soup kitchen. Studies show hunger is not confined to county's big cities. (Pg. 1); Lesma Howard-Zepeda of Grace Episcopal Church in White Plains. (Pg. 21) (Susan Harris for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +400 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 21, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO MATTERS; +Cutting Medicaid Will Not Be Easy + +BYLINE: By Joyce Purnick + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7; Column 4; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 807 words + +THERE is no debate about it. New York's Medicaid system, the kudzu of health-care programs, needs pruning. It is one of the most expensive and expansive Medicaid programs in the country, and Governor-elect George E. Pataki has pledged to cut it. +But how? New York has done such a masterly job of wringing dollars out of the Federal Government, which pays half of all Medicaid bills, that the program has spawned a vigorous lobby of clients and providers. + Gov. Mario M. Cuomo's efforts to contain Medicaid costs have met resistance in the courts and from the Democratic Assembly, protecting patients, and the Republican Senate, protecting providers. Lawmakers propose cuts every year but they are always trivial, because in New York, which set out when Medicaid began in 1965 to take advantage of Federal dollars, Medicaid has become a strong, $20 billion piece of the state's economy. +MR. PATAKI could try to remake the program in the image of those in more cost-conscious states. He could shake up the complicated system of hospital reimbursement, which links Medicaid to other hospital costs. He could reduce Medicaid's contribution to graduate medical education, drop categories of recipients, reverse the state's aggressive effort to get Medicaid coverage for mental health programs. +More likely, Mr. Pataki could consider these more realistic options: +Cutting benefits +The service most often proposed for reductions is personal care, at $1.7 billion a year the most expensive piece of Medicaid in New York, after hospitals and nursing homes. It provides help for the elderly and disabled -- with shopping and bathing, for instance. +In 1992, the Cuomo administration tried to cap monthly personal care, which averages 200 hours, at 156 hours. The Senate said 120 hours and the Assembly said no. Then Mr. Cuomo tried more stringent screening standards, but they were tied up in court. +Cutting recipients +Proposals to reduce the Medicaid rolls center on two categories: New Yorkers on Home Relief, and elderly middle-class people who give away their assets so Medicaid will pay nursing-home costs. +Some argue that people on Home Relief, a state welfare program mostly for single adults, should be earning their own way. Providing Medicaid for them is expensive because they are not covered by the Federal Medicaid program. New York uses its own money, supplemented by Federal dollars from non-Medicaid programs. Those funds do not quite reach the 50 percent Federal Medicaid pays for other programs. +Canceling Medicaid coverage that now goes to about 380,000 New Yorkers on Home Relief would save New York about $650 million. Or would it? "These people will still show up at the hospital doors," said John Holahan, director of the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute. "Then what are you going to do?" The Cuomo administration did try to limit this group's benefits, but litigation stopped that, too. +Throughout the country, the elderly spend down their assets so they can qualify for Medicaid payments to nursing homes. Most would likely exhaust their money on nursing-home care and then qualify for Medicaid coverage anyway. But the ruse is costly and infuriates those who remember that Medicaid was meant for the poor. +The state could try to prevent the practice, but Mr. Pataki rejects that. Another alternative is private insurance for long-term care. The Cuomo administration recently began a program that gives people Medicaid coverage if they buy private insurance; once the insurance is exhausted, they contribute their retirement income, but keep their assets. +Reducing rates paid to hospitals and nursing homes +Hospital and nursing-home fees account for half of New York's Medicaid costs. The state could pay less for Medicaid patients than is paid by private insurers. That risks tempting institutions to provide inferior care to the poor, which offends New York's sensibilities. +Delivering care more efficiently +New York and most other states are moving to managed-care systems, aimed at getting patients out of emergency rooms and into health centers where they can get preventive and primary care. +So far, 420,000 of the state's 2.5 million Medicaid patients are in managed care, but the goal is to enroll half by the year 2000. Will managed care save money? It is actually expensive in the short run; eventually, it could save up to 15 percent on some patients, but not on the elderly and disabled, Medicaid's most costly clients. +Elizabeth P. McCaughey, the Lieutenant Governor-elect, says that she and her new Medicaid task force will consider all options, especially managed care and private insurance programs for the elderly. No approach will be an easy sell in New York, though. "If it had been easy," says Michael J. Dowling, Social Services Commissioner, "we'd have done it." + +LOAD-DATE: November 21, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +401 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 23, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Region News Briefs; +Suffolk Cracking Down On Crime Against Elderly + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 196 words + +DATELINE: HAUPPAUGE, L.I., Nov. 22 + +The Suffolk County District Attorney's office announced a crackdown today on crimes against the elderly, which rose 25 percent in the county last year. +The District Attorney, James M. Catterson Jr., said he had created a task force to respond to the rising number of such crimes. + Nina Pozgar, chief of Mr. Catterson's White Collar Crime Bureau, was appointed to head the task force. +The most common crimes, she said, involve financial abuse, which often escalates into physical abuse. She said in most of the cases the victims have been abused by a family member or a home-care worker. +Two people were arrested today and charged with stealing more than $40,000 from elderly victims in two separate incidents. +In one case, a home health-care worker was charged with stealing more than $10,000 from a 96-year-old woman. The worker, Christine Mapes, 48, of Riverhead, was charged with grand larceny and forgery. The authorities said she forged checks in the victim's name. +In the second case, a worker for the Homebound Meal Program for the Town of Islip, Paul D'Arcy, was charged with stealing more than $30,000 from elderly people to whom he delivered meals. + +LOAD-DATE: November 23, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +402 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 23, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Nutrition Guides May Be Deceptive for the Aged + +BYLINE: By JANE E. BRODY + +SECTION: Section C; Page 7; Column 1; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 668 words + +IT should surprise no one to learn that people's bodies change in significant ways as they age. But researchers are just beginning to discover important nutritional differences between the old and young that, if ignored, could adversely affect the health and well-being of older Americans. +In today's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, for example, Dr. Susan B. Roberts and colleagues at the Federal Agriculture Department's Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging in Boston report that older men seem to have trouble balancing the amount of calories they consume with the amount they expend. When forced to gain weight, they hang on to the extra pounds, and when their weight drops below normal, they do not readily gain it back. Either way -- overweight or underweight -- this failure to adjust could increase the risk of serious illness in older people, Dr. Roberts said. + In a second, unrelated, study conducted at the same center, Dr. Wayne Campbell found that the protein needs of older people were significantly higher than the daily protein intake recommended by Federal agencies. Although the average older American is already eating 25 to 50 percent more protein than is recommended, Dr. Campbell, who is now at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, noted that the many older people who consumed exactly what was recommended or less were probably being shortchanged. +The consequences could be a reduced ability to respond to stress or weakened muscles, the researcher said. He called for more research on the nutritional needs of older people, who until recently have been relatively neglected by nutrition researchers. +In setting Federal dietary guidelines, experts have largely relied on studies in people 50 or younger. The nutrition research center on aging, which is at Tufts University, was established to conduct studies to fill in the many gaps in knowledge about nutritional and metabolic changes with age and to stimulate researchers elsewhere to do similar research. +In the study directed by Dr. Roberts, 17 men in their 20's and 17 others who were about 70 spent three weeks in the center's metabolic research unit where they were provided with either more or less food than they normally consumed. In the weeks following the period of forced overfeeding or underfeeding, the young men automatically made adjustments in their caloric intake that enabled them to lose weight gained or gain back their losses. But the older men made no such adjustments. +Dr. Roberts concluded that aging, even in those in good health, impairs a person's ability to match food intake with energy needs. Thus, when an older person splurges on calories day after day, say, on a vacation cruise, he or she is not likely to readily shed the extra pounds upon returning home. The result could be an increased risk of high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease. Similarly, should a prolonged illness causes an older person to become significantly underweight, failure to gain back the lost pounds could impair the person's resistance to infectious diseases. +The findings of the protein study were published in a recent issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The study involved a dozen healthy adults from 56 to 80 whose diets were very closely controlled for 11 consecutive days. Half were given the daily recommended amount of protein and the other half got twice that amount. +Dr. Campbell measured the amount of protein each person consumed and the amount of nitrogen they excreted. Nitrogen is the critical indicator nutrient in protein; when more protein is eaten than the body needs, the excess is lost through the stool. To be sure that a person is in nitrogen balance, small amounts of this nutrient should be found in the stool. But Dr. Campbell found that the participants who consumed just the recommended amount of protein were not in nitrogen balance; to meet their bodies' needs, they needed more protein than they took in. + +LOAD-DATE: November 23, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Chart: "Protein Needs and the Elderly" + The current recommendation is for 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight each day, which would mean about 63 grams (about 2.2 ounces) of protein for a 170-pound man and 50 grams (about 1.75 ounces) for a 143-pound woman. + However, because caloric needs drop with age, protein has to provide an increasing share of daily calories as people get older. Based on his findings, Dr. Wayne Campbell suggested raising the protein recommendation to 1 gram or even 1.25 grams for people over 55. This would amount to 93 grams (about 3.3 ounces) of protein daily for the 170-pound man and 78 grams (about 2.75 ounces) for the 143-pound woman. + +How to Fill Them: + Three ounces of cooked beef, flounder, canned tuna or turkey each provide about 24 grams of protein, or about a third of a 143-pound woman's needs, by Dr. Campbell's estimates. + Eight ounces of skim milk provides nearly 9 grams of protein + One-half cup of cottage cheese provides 15 grams of protein. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +403 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 24, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +BOOKS OF THE TIMES; +Of Older People and Their Need for Love, Sex and Marriage + +BYLINE: By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT + +SECTION: Section C; Page 20; Column 1; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 927 words + + +LATE LOVE +A Celebration of Marriage After 50 +By Eileen Simpson +208 pages. A Peter Davison Book/Houghton Mifflin. $21.95. + Here is a book that explores a variation on the old joke about the man and woman in their 80's who finally decide to divorce, and when the judge asks why they are bothering so late in life, they reply, "We wanted to wait until the children were dead." The difference in Eileen Simpson's new book, "Late Love: A Celebration of Marriage After 50," is that the old couple in the story are marrying instead of divorcing. +True, Ms. Simpson doesn't tell either version of this joke in her book. Her sense of humor simply isn't that dark. But she does explore why such a couple would want to marry. +Old people are doing it more and more these days. As Ms. Simpson points out, the sexual revolution of the 1960's had its effect on older people as well as younger ones: "Many in the over-60 population began to ask, If the young are free to become sexually active earlier in life than was permissible in our day, why shouldn't we, who envy them their freedom and feel cheated that we were denied it, remain active later in life?" +Changed expectations have served to rejuvenate dormant sexual desires, the author finds. When older people complained of problems, doctors no longer were permitted to say, "At your age what do you expect?" +And older people's children have often enough proved an impediment to geriatric sexual satisfaction. In several cases Ms. Simpson writes about, the hardest adjustment for people remarrying later in life has been getting along with the partners' children, particularly those who fly back into the nest for some reason. +Moreover, as Ms. Simpson found out, people who never remarry, even when there's an opportunity to do so, often choose not to because the children object. The children fear losing their inheritance, which they very likely equate with love. If the trends described in "Late Love" continue, we are going to need a whole new set of fairy tales, ones that explore the behavior of the wicked stepchildren. +To gather material for "Late Love," Ms. Simpson interviewed 50 men and women who married after the age of 55. At the time she saw them they ranged in age up to 90. She also talked to 25 people in the same age group who had remained unmarried. Because these people were more affluent than the subjects of some other recent studies, material possessions often played a big role in how the partners adapted to each other. Clashing furniture styles took the place of conflicting egos. Instead of disagreeing over what movie to see, couples debated whose country house to live in. +Yet sex reared its silvery tresses. Ms. Simpson found that while couples continued to feel desire at increasingly advanced ages, men tended to run down and to worry about it. But loss of sexual prowess is made up for by more open talk. Women feel freer to express their needs. The author writes, "With this shift in roles women release men from the demand to perform, which in turn allows men the freedom to express tenderness they formerly repressed." +What you miss in Ms. Simpson's interviews is the playing out of certain potentially dramatic situations like the conflict between Saul and Phil, for instance. Saul grew up scarred by the Great Depression and when his new wife's beatnik son, Phil, moves back into her house to recover from an illness, his free-spending ways drive Saul to distraction. +Or the case of Ed Parker, who not only brings no furniture with him when he moves into May's house, but also doesn't seem to mind the oil portrait of her late husband, which dominates the living room, or the many photographs of him on the walls. Or even the case of the man who irritates his new wife by never screwing the caps back on the bottles in the refrigerator! Unfortunately, these are situations, not stories. +The failure of these potential dramas to fulfill themselves in Ms. Simpson's pages perhaps explains why she is forced to tap history and literature for her best illustrations of late love. The geriatric passions that stand out most distinctly in her book are those of Dickens, George Eliot, Goethe, Yeats and Bertrand Russell, each of whom illustrates some aspect of Ms. Simpson's exploration. And just as colorful in her narrative are the late-life affairs of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel "Love in the Time of Cholera" and of Alexander and Alexandra in Gunter Grass's novel "The Time of the Toad." +Ms. Simpson, whose best-known previous books are "Reversals: A Personal Account of Victory Over Dyslexia," "Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir," and "Orphans: Real and Imaginary," even turns to fiction to interpret the most dramatic incident that emerged from her research, namely what happened to 72-year-old Todd Bufford after the death of his wife of 45 years. +As background to Todd's story, Ms. Simpson tells the plot of Isaac Bashevis Singer's short story "Old Love," about Ethel, a Miami widow who first courts Harry and then suddenly throws herself out of her apartment window, leaving a note that reads: "Dear Harry, forgive me. I must go where my husband is. If it's not too much trouble say Kaddish for me. I'll intercede for you where I'm going." +Ms. Simpson then speculates that a similar guilt over disloyalty to a dead spouse might well explain why Todd, while courting an attractive divorced woman, suddenly committed suicide. +As so much of "Late Love" goes to show, fiction is simply truer than life. + +LOAD-DATE: November 24, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Eileen Simpson (Dominique Nabokov/Houghton Mifflin) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +404 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 25, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Milton J. Shapp Is Dead at 82; Ex-Governor of Pennsylvania + +BYLINE: By GARRY PIERRE-PIERRE + +SECTION: Section B; Page 19; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 631 words + +Milton Jerrold Shapp, former Governor of Pennsylvania and a Philadelphia industrialist who was the first Jew to mount a campaign for the Presidential nomination of a major party, died on Thursday at Lankenau Hospital in the Philadelphia suburb of Wynnewood. He was 82. + The cause was Alzheimer's disease, family friends said. + Mr. Shapp, a Democrat, served as Governor from 1971 to 1979 and brought an income tax and lottery to the state. He ran unsuccessfully for President in 1976. + Before he became Governor, Mr. Shapp was politically active with President John F. Kennedy and is credited with promoting the idea that eventually led to the creation of the Peace Corps. + Fresh out of the Army Signal Corps after World War II, during which he was a captain and served in North Africa, Italy and Austria, Mr. Shapp, an electrical engineer, founded the Jerrold Electronics Corporation in 1948. The company went public in 1956 and did $25 million-a-year in business. A decade later, when Mr. Shapp sold his interests, the corporation's business was up to $50 million a year. + Born in Cleveland, Mr. Shapp attended the Cleveland public schools and earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University) in 1933. + He entered public life in 1960, when he became an early supporter of Mr. Kennedy. In the 1960 election, he served as chairman of the Business and Professional Committee for John Kennedy in the Mid-Atlantic States. During that campaign, Mr. Shapp suggested to Mr. Kennedy the idea of forming a Peace Corps. In a speech at Penn State University on March 9, 1961, entitled "Peace and the Peace Corps," Mr. Shapp outlined for the first time the basic policies that were to serve as a guide for the operation of that organization. + He returned briefly to business in mid-1963, but plunged very quickly again into politics. He made an unsuccessful run for the Senate in 1964. After that effort failed, he worked in the campaign of Lyndon B. Johnson and organized businessmen in the East for him as he had done for President Kennedy. + Mr. Shapp won national attention for his consumer-advocate policies and his innovative programs for elderly and handicapped people, including using lottery money for elderly people. He was largely credited with bringing Pennsylvania back from the brink of deficit. + Mr. Shapp also instituted full financial disclosure for top officials, the most comprehensive of the so-called Sunshine Laws for open government in the nation and a strict code of ethics for all state employees. + In an interview during his Presidential bid in 1976, he was asked why he was running. + "I compare myself to the people who were talking about becoming candidates," he told the interviewer. "In knowledge of the economy, in ability to develop programs and get them implemented, and I couldn't see anybody comparable. I saw the caliber of these people and I said, 'What the hell.' " + In a 1981 letter to The New York Times, Mr. Shapp, sharply criticized President Ronald Reagan's sale of Awacs electronic-warfare planes to Saudi Arabia. +"It would be far more beneficial to America's future economy and to its security if the President would implement a major civilian Awacs program by beginning a war against city slums in our nation," he wrote. "Unless we soon start to cope realistically with our major internal problems, no amount of sophisticated weapons in our possession or in the hands of so-called allies will be able to stave off internal disruption." + Mr. Shapp battled Alzheimer's for several years, said Richard Gross, a family friend. + He is survived by his wife, Muriel; two daughters, Dolores Graham and Joanne Shapp; a son, Richard, and three grandchildren. + +NAME: Milton Jerrold Shapp + +LOAD-DATE: November 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Milton J. Shapp (Associated Press, 1975) + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +405 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 25, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +U.S. Study Shows Half of Food-Stamp Recipients Are Children + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 25; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 481 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 + +As House Republicans push a plan for changing the welfare system that includes dismantling Federal nutrition programs, the Clinton Administration has issued a new study showing that half of the food stamp recipients are children in poverty. +The Agriculture Department's Food and Consumer Service, which runs the Government's largest nutrition programs, released the study this week as the debate intensified over the Republican proposal. + Republicans preparing to take control of the House want to consolidate several nutrition programs for the poor -- including food stamps, school lunches and the supplemental feeding program for women, infants and children -- and give the money to the states in a lump sum. +Under their plan, spending on nutrition assistance would be limited, and low-income families would no longer be automatically entitled to receive benefits. +Republican lawmakers say that their proposal would end duplication among programs and give the states greater flexibility to distribute aid for food to poor families. The block grant would save $11 billion over five years, they say. +Advocates for the poor say the plan, if it becomes law, could lead to increased hunger and homelessness among American families because spending could not grow automatically in times of recession and rising poverty. +They also say families could be taken off the welfare rolls or put in waiting lines for benefits. They seized on the new study to make their case that the Republican plan would hit children, the elderly and the working poor especially hard. +"This underscores how heavily targeted the Republican welfare reform plan will fall on children, including very poor and often very hungry children," said Robert J. Fersh, president of the Food Research and Action Center, an advocacy group in Washington. +The Agriculture Department report, dated Oct. 27 and released this week without any comment from the Administration, profiled the population that receives food stamps in the summer of 1993. +The program then served an average of 27.3 million people in almost 11 million households. More than half of the people in the program, 51.4 percent, were children. Seven percent were elderly, and the rest were adults ages 18 to 59. +The study found that food stamps were about a fourth of a family's total income. The average benefit per household was $170 a month. +The study also found that a fifth of the families receiving food stamps were working, but not earning enough to escape poverty. +Darold Johnson, deputy director for programs and policy at the Children's Defense Fund, said the block grant was a bad idea because it replaced coupons, which must be used to purchase food, with cash, which could be used for other purposes like rent and utilities. +"The decision between heating and eating is one that low-income families make constantly," he said. + +LOAD-DATE: November 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +406 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 26, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Older Men Are Warned About Predatory 'Nurse' + +BYLINE: Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 28; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 255 words + +DATELINE: LEVITTOWN, L.I., Nov. 25 + +The police have issued a warning to elderly men to beware if an attractive young woman dressed as a nurse approaches them at a stop light, says her car has broken down and asks for a ride. + Since April 1991, the police said, the woman has robbed at least 15 men by fondling them and then stealing their money. +She usually works at shopping areas on Long Island, seeking out older men in late-model cars, the police said, although twice she approached men as they sat parked in their driveways. + Anthony Letterel, a Nassau County detective, has posted written warnings about the woman. "She'll tell them she has car trouble, something to do with her battery," he said. "She says she is a home health-care nurse and she needs a ride to a house nearby, where she is caring for an elderly patient." + He said she then engaged the men in sexual conversations and fondled them "long enough to lift their cash from their pockets." + Detective Letterel said most of the men are upset by her advances and demand that the woman get out of the vehicle, not realizing that she has already taken their money. + All the incidents occurred between 4 and 8 P.M. The police said they had received complaints from virtually every precinct in Nassau County. They said they thought that some victims are too embarrassed to come forward. + The woman is described in the police warning as a "female black, approximately 30 years old, attractive looking, oval face, dressed in a nurse's uniform, approximately 5 feet 5 inches, stocky build." + +LOAD-DATE: November 26, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +407 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +83 Is His Age. His Golf Scores Are Lower. + +BYLINE: By JACK CAVANAUGH + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 23; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1509 words + +IN a chance meeting outside the clubhouse at the Race Brook Country Club in Orange, Ed Silver feigned shock when, peering into George Dunham's golf bag, he found an outsized Big Bertha driver and a collection of other up-to-date graphite clubs. +"What are you doing using all of this state-of-the-art stuff?," Dr. Silver, a retired dentist, asked with a smile. + Smiling back, Mr. Dunham replied, "At my age, Ed, you take every edge you can get." +In fact, at the age of 83 Mr. Dunham does not take many edges or advantages. For instance on this crisp late October day he had just finished playing 18 holes in five hours while walking the 6,080-yard course and carrying his own bag. He is not happy over his round, although, as always, he enjoyed playing. +"I think today I may have shot my age or over it," said Mr. Dunham, who did not keep score. If he shot over his age -- which did not seem likely to his two companions -- it was one of the few times in about 150 rounds this year. More often than not, he shoots in the 70's or around 80, always while carrying his golf bag. "Shooting my age or better is no big deal. The older I get, the easier it is to do," said Mr. Dunham, now retired after an eclectic career that ran from sportswriter to realtor. + One day a week earlier Mr. Dunham shot a 77. Coincidentally, so, too, did the other three players in his foursome. But all three, considerably younger than Mr. Dunham, rode in golf carts. +The game took place at the Farmington Woods Country Club, Mr. Dunham's home golfing base. It was there, in August, that he became perhaps the oldest player ever to win a club tournament, capturing the trophy for those 55 and older. (Officials at the United States Golf Association in Short Hills, N.J., said if anyone older had won a senior tournament, they were unaware of it.) In the 18-hole final, he beat Bob McDaniel, who is just 63 and who rode the course. +"Bob is actually a better player than I am," Mr. Dunham said, "but he putted poorly that day and I was aided and abetted by his failings." +It was an event he had never entered before. "I entered because I knew I'm not going to have that many good golfing days left," Mr. Dunham said. "I also got in this year because they didn't allow handicaps, which they had in the past." +Mr. Dunham's golfing friends feel that there are still plenty of good golfing days ahead for the octogenarian, who lives in Salisbury. "He's my idol," said Dick McAuliffe of Farmington, a former major league infielder who plays often with Mr. Dunham. "He loves the game of golf and he has a great outlook. And he's always working on something, trying to improve his game. He'll say, 'I've got to get my right elbow tucked in closer to my body on my swing.' He's an absolute delight to play with." +And to talk with. "Golf is the greatest game of all," said Mr. Dunham, who began playing in 1926 at the age of 15. "You can play when you're 12 and when you're 90, and you can have fun. Exercise is blended with sport, and, for me, it's a tonic." +How often does he play? "Any day that ends in y," he says, smiling. "Actually, I play Monday through Friday, weather permitting, but not on weekends when courses tend to get crowded." +Despite his small stature -- "I'm 5 feet 7 and shrinking and weigh 138 pounds," he says -- Mr. Dunham is a big hitter. Most of his drives carry around 225 yards, and some of his fairway wood shots travel as far. One challenging quirk: on long fairway wood shots he uses his Big Bertha War Bird driver, instead of a 3 wood or a 3 or 4 iron. +About his insistence on walking, Mr. Dunham explains that "For one thing, that way I can smell the flowers, as Walter Hagen used to say. And for another, it's easier to concentrate on your golf game. When you ride, the chatter between players in a cart destroys concentration. +"Also, I find it's very difficult to suddenly go from a sitting position in a golf cart to a standing position where you're trying to execute a golf shot. Carts are fine if you have a physical problem, but otherwise it's much better to walk, both for the exercise and for your golf game." +There are few golf courses in the state that Mr. Dunham has not played or visited as a scorekeeper for the Connecticut State Golf Association. His favorite? The Country Club of Fairfield. "It's a partial links course, with some holes overlooking Long Island Sound," he said. "And every hole is a delight to look at." +The toughest courses in the state? "Wee Burn in Darien, Black Hall in Old Lyme and the Waterbury Country Club," said Mr. Dunham, who thinks nothing of driving two hours or more from Salisbury to Greenwich to play a round of golf, and sometimes as many as 27 holes. +That keeps him away from home most days, from early spring through late fall and sometimes beyond. Does Victoria, his wife of 56 years, object? "No, not at all," he says. "It keeps me out of the way." +Mrs. Dunham, who has never played the game, described herself as "the original golf widow." +"But I love having George play," she said. "He's happy doing it. And his doctors are amazed that he keeps walking instead of riding after his operation." +After surgery on his left leg five years ago, Mr. Dunham was told by his doctor that he should ride while playing. "But there's no way I was going to do that, because I can't play that way, he said. "So I've kept walking, and my leg is just fine." +Mr. Dunham's first job was at The Fort Myers News Press in Florida, where he wrote a column entitled "Hooks and Slices" and where he met golfing legends like Mr. Hagen and Gene Sarazen. In the early 1930's, he also got to know and play golf with Connie Mack, the longtime manager of the old Philadelphia Athletics, and such A's stars as Jimmy Foxx and Lefty Grove. +"Mack would play golf wearing his black suit, straw hat and winged-tip collar and tie," Mr. Dunham recalled. "And Foxx would hit tee shots more than 300 yards, but with an enormous slice." +After being marryied and graduating from the University of Michigan, Mr. Dunham served four years in the Navy during World War II as, first, a gunner in the North Atlantic and, later, as a pilot in the Pacific. +"I was a 90-day wonder," he said, alluding to his shift from enlisted man to officer, from seaman to lieutenant commander. Then he operated his own flying service on Long Island and later flew small planes to South America on consignment. Then for 20 years, while living in Redding, he was an executive at a freight company in Manhattan. +In the 1970's, in between dabbling in real estate, Mr. Dunham, then living in Norfolk, spent five years as a golf pro at the Norfolk Country Club. "The club was a playground for the idle rich from New York and New Jersey who would come up on private trains," Mr. Dunham recalled. "The Vanderbilts had nothing on them." +It was around that time that Mr. Dunham shot his lowest score ever, a 67, at the Torrington Country Club in Goshen. "My best since then was a 72 at Farmington Woods about 10 years ago," he said, "and I doubt if I'm going to top that." +Mr. McAuliffe, who spent 14 seasons with the Detroit Tigers and two with the Boston Red Sox, marvels at Mr. Dunham's power and endurance. +"George can put it out there 225 to 230 yards," said Mr. McAuliffe, who has a 6 handicap. "And he never seems to get tired even though he always walks the course." +If anything, he tends to do better as a round progresses. "Sure, I get tired sometimes, but as a rule I do better on the back nine," said Mr. Dunham, whose diet usually includes fruit and cereal for breakfast, an apple or some raisins for lunch and a light dinner. ("At 80, one doesn't need much to eat -- only the right things.") +Unlike many older golfers, Mr. Dunham does not head to warmer climates during the winter. Instead, he and his wife remain in Salisbury in the coldest and snowiest part of the state. +"I stay home to hibernate and become a curmudgeon," he said before getting into his pickup truck for the 75-mile drive back to Salisbury from the Race Brook Country Club in Orange. "I stay in shape by splitting wood, shoveling snow, of which we have plenty, and walking the mountain." That's really the foothills of the Berkshires, which he visits with his border collie. +"I also swing my clubs in the house while looking in a full-length mirror. Most of the rest of the time, I spend listening to Mozart, writing poetry, reading -- especially Winston Churchill -- and writing my book." The book is a humorous novel -- "I think it's satire," he said -- about life, and especially golf, at a mythical country club. +Will Mr. Dunham be back to defend his senior title at Farmington Woods next summer? + "No way," he replied. "I don't like to play in tournaments because at my age I get buck fever hovering over a four-foot putt. The tournament last summer was my last hurrah. I know when the party's over. Or almost over. And besides Dick McAuliffe's going to be 55 and eligible for the senior tournament next summer. And he's much better than me." + +LOAD-DATE: November 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: George Dunham's home base is the Farmington Woods Country Club. (Photographs by Steve Miller for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +408 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Should Historical Buildings Yield to Square Glass Boxes? + +BYLINE: By BILL RYAN + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 1; Column 3; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1244 words + +A GIANT metal claw started to rip away at the 100-year-old Laurel Street School in Branford one day late in October, only hours after a Federal judge in Hartford concluded that town officials had not acted unreasonably in deciding to demolish the school to make way for a new police station. +The destruction of the school was the culmination of a 10-month sometimes bitter battle between town officials and their supporters, who wanted to raze the school, and a citizens' organization known as SOS (Save Our School). Eventually the battle also involved the Connecticut Historical Commission and the State Attorney General's office, both of which favored retaining the school building as a historically important structure. + For the historical commission's director, John W. Shannahan, the demise of the old school meant one more folder he will add to a stack in a cabinet in his office. Each folder represents a lost cause, a sort of necrology of buildings Mr. Shannahan felt were important reminders of Connecticut's past. +The necrology includes structures like the huge 19th-century Whittemore summer home overlooking Lake Quassapaug in Middlebury, dismantled to be sold piece by piece by a salvage company; the old New Britain Opera House, still structurally sound but ignominiously reduced to showing pornographic movies, battered to earth by a wrecker's ball; the Hartford Aetna building, constructed in the early part of this century as the capital city's first skyscraper, imploded and tumbled to dust in the center of Hartford to make way for a new Society for Savings headquarters that to date has not materialized. +Of course, Mr. Shannahan said, not all worthy buildings receive such unworthy endings. Efforts of his commission and of non-governmental preservation organizations, sometimes working in concert, have been successful in saving some of them. +One of his favorites is the three-story yellow brick building near City Hall in Milford. It had been the city's high school at the turn of the century, but by the start of the 80's had degenerated into a prime example of municipal neglect, boarded up and falling apart. It was slated to be razed to make way for a new government complex, a plan supported by the local newspaper, The Milford Citizen. "It obviously is time that it goes," the newspaper commented editorially. +The building, however, did not go. It now contains 39 apartments for elderly people and is considered a prime example of a successful second life for an elderly building. After it was dedicated to its new use in 1993, The Milford Citizen admitted it had been too enthusiastic in seeking its demise. "Historic minds prevailed and the sow's ear became a silk purse," the newspaper then commented editorially. +But such successes are not often enough, Mr. Shannahan feels. Connecticut has destroyed, and keeps destroying, too many buildings with little regard for their historical significance or what they contribute to the overall architecture of a community. "People go to Disney World to see Main Street U.S.A.," he said. "We have them right here, but they're being destroyed. +"It's not that we went to keep all old buildings in the state," he said about his commission. "Many buildings are beyond hope. They should be torn down. We don't worship old buildings here. But there has to be a balance. Some buildings you can recycle. You can find new uses. +"People say, 'What's one building?' But you get one developer after another tearing down one building after another, and finally you have a city of square glass boxes." +Both major cities and smaller towns in the state have been guilty of excessive demolition, he said, but Hartford demonstrated the greatest zeal for destruction, particularly in the 80's. He described it as a frenzy, with developers rushing in to put up bigger and higher and more glitzy new buildings. "It just sort of got out of control. They were taking down buildings you can't replicate, you can't duplicate," Mr. Shannahan said. +Then, when the boom times ended, what Hartford had to show for the frenzy was a devastated central business section, lots of vacant lots where distinctive buildings had once been and a reputation as one of the poorest cities in the country. "Last Christmas, I went up to Main Street," Mr. Shannahan said, "and it struck me, all those vacant buildings and empty lots. The city has lost its identity." +Haven't cities elsewhere also lost their identities? Not to the same degree as Hartford, Mr. Shannahan said. "I'm a native of Boston," he said, "and when I go back there, I still get a feeling of history when I walk around. It's a nice feeling." +The sad fact, Mr. Shannahan said, is that there are very few safeguards when it comes to retaining the historical character of Hartford or other Connecticut cities. +The state does have a law on establishing historic districts, which makes it difficult to change or destroy old buildings within their boundaries. At present, there are 104 such districts in various parts of the state (although none in Hartford). But Connecticut is the only state that requires historic districts to be placed on the ballot, he said, and currently that means two-thirds of all property owners in a proposed district must vote to approve it. +Elsewhere, he said, it is easier to protect historical places and areas. "In New York City, Boston, Chicago, if the city designates a building as a landmark, that's it," Mr. Shannahan said. When the Penn Central Railroad wanted to put a high rise above Grand Central Terminal and the city refused to allow it, the case went to court. " And the court said the station represented the best use of the property, not the highest use," he said. It was a ruling that gladdened the heart of preservationists. +Connecticut also has a 1982 amendment to the state Environmental Protection Act that provides that before an old building of historic significance is torn down, it must be demonstrated that "feasible and prudent alternatives" for keeping the building have been explored. The problem is that the wording is subject to interpretation. What does "feasible" really mean? How much money does "prudent" mean? +Mr. Shannahan's best advice to municipal leaders is to examine what architectural history is left in the cities and then build on that base rather than continually tearing it down. The commission that Mr. Shannahan heads was established in 1955 at a time when cities were on the verge of massive changes. It has remained a tiny branch of government that today numbers only 19 full-time and 6 part-time employees. Its headquarters is in the Bull House near downtown Hartford, one of only a half-dozen 18th-century structures that remain in one of the country's oldest cities. +Perhaps the greatest irony about the commission is that it has had more than a bit of trouble preserving its own identity. In 1971, 1977 and 1992, attempts were made to merge the it into bigger state agencies. The latest attempt was by Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. when, in his 1992-1993 budget, he proposed the transfer of the historical commission to the Department of Economic Development. +Members of the commission, backed by preservationists around the state, convinced the General Assembly that such a move was ill advised on the basis that the historical group oversees all state and Federal projects, to insure that they do not encroach on places of historic significance. + +LOAD-DATE: November 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: The Laurel Street School in Branford recently fell to a wrecking claw. Lamenting its demise is John W. Shannahan, right, director of the state's Historical Commission. (Pg. 1) (Thomas McDonald for The New York Times; right, George Ruhe for The New York Times); A mural of the Aetna building, a Hartford landmark that was demolished to make rooom for a bank office building. The new building never materialized. (Pg. 16) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +409 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +A Thelma and Louis Take Love on the Lam + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 48; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 488 words + +DATELINE: NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 26 + +With her boyfriend facing a 20-year sentence for armed robbery, a young woman who had "never gone anywhere" embarked on the trip of a lifetime, seeing Graceland and getting married before being arrested on a Georgia island, law-enforcement officials said. +The woman, Consuella Monique Gaines-Thomas, began her 1,100-mile journey on Nov. 10 in Opelousas, La., about 130 miles northwest of New Orleans. + As her boyfriend, Gordon Ray Thomas, and two other prisoners were being led in shackles through the crowded town square at about noon, Ms. Gaines-Thomas, who was two months pregnant, suddenly appeared, the authorities said. Shotgun in hand, she ordered the deputies to unchain Mr. Thomas, and they complied, wanting to avoid a gunfight in the noontime traffic. +"She had never gone anywhere, and she wanted to go sightseeing," Chief Criminal Deputy Laura Bal thazar said last week in describing the events that had led to the capture of the couple on Nov. 18. +But in order to get anywhere, the couple, both 23, needed transportation. Their solution, Deputy Balthazar said, was a powder-blue Cadillac, which they stole from two elderly women. +They headed north to Little Rock, Ark., via northeast Texas. "They followed a prison bus all the way," the deputy said. "They thought that was the safest thing to do." +With a few thousand dollars in savings, Mr. Thomas and Ms. Gaines-Thomas had planned to fly to Jamaica from Miami. But they decided to do some sightseeing instead and drove to Memphis, stopping several police officers to ask for directions, Deputy Balthazar said. +The couple toured Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley, and looked for a place to stay. Discovering that the Memphis hotels were all booked with a convention of Baptist ministers, they picked a minister and were married, on Nov. 15. +They then drove to Nashville and Chattanooga, Tenn., on their way to Tybee Island, east of Savannah. +"The only reason they ended up in Tybee Island was she wanted to see the beach," the deputy said. +The couple got no farther. As Mr. Thomas was putting the shotgun into the car at a trailer park, the gun accidentally went off. Residents called the police, and one roadblock later, the honeymoon was over. +Before the couple were caught, they threw their remaining money, about $2,500, into the Atlantic Ocean, the deputy said. +Mr. Thomas is serving his original sentence. Officials also plan to charge him with aggravated escape, armed robbery and avoiding prosecution. Ms. Gaines-Thomas is being held on $500,000 bond, facing charges of carjacking, armed robbery, aggravated escape and aggravated assault. +Deputy Balthazar, who escorted them to Opelousas in her squad car on Tuesday, said the newlyweds laughed and chatted the whole way. +"I don't think it's dawned on them, what they're facing," she said. "They're looking up to 99 years for that armed robbery. Especially on two elderly ladies." + +LOAD-DATE: November 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +410 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In America; +Starve the Weak + +BYLINE: By BOB HERBERT + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 11; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 711 words + +The elderly woman was moving slowly up Lexington Avenue in East Harlem, her face ashen and her eyes tearing against the sudden wind and the cold that had rolled in on the day before Thanksgiving. By the end of the day there would be snow showers, but the snow hadn't started yet. The sun was still shining on a cold autumn morning that felt like winter. The woman had a long brown scarf draped over her head like a hood. Her steps were painfully slow. She was heading north on Lexington, in search of a meal. + An old man had directed the woman toward Emmaus House, at Lexington and 124th Street, which provides a bit of food for the destitute and the working poor in a setting reminiscent of the Great Depression. + The man had said: "Try them, sister. They might have a little something for you." + New York is gearing up for another spectacular holiday season. The enormous tree is in place in Rockefeller Center. The ultimate American value (the value of the almighty dollar) is about to be reaffirmed. A bountiful season has been forecast. But all the festivities in the world cannot hide the fact that something evil is eating at the national soul, and New York has not escaped it. In the midst of plenty, in the most advanced society on earth, the prevailing political mood calls for humbling the weak and the helpless. National and local policies already in the works would empty the storage bins of community programs like Emmaus House and would take food out of the mouths of individuals like the old woman on Lexington Avenue. + The prosperous are on the march against the poor. In the new political climate, driven by talk radio and the emerging Republican majority in Congress, no quarter is to be given, no mercy shown. Toddlers who can't ante up the price of their breakfast had better get used to the sound of their stomachs growling. + "We serve 500 meals a day, but it's not enough and our resources are dwindling," said the Rev. David Kirk, a Melkite Catholic priest who is the president of Emmaus House. "We have elderly people here who are trying to stretch their Social Security checks. We have poor families. We have a lot of grandparents who come looking for baby food for their grandkids. It's a terrible situation." + The demand for soup kitchens and food pantries has become intense as more and more Americans find themselves sliding into the ugly pit of poverty. But government support for anti-hunger efforts is rapidly diminishing. + "We had to shut our pantry down for three weeks," said Father Kirk. "The money dried up." + Much worse is ahead. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, struggling with a perennial budget deficit, wants to cut city funding for anti-hunger projects. And the coming Republican majority in Congress can hardly wait to begin battering anti-poverty programs on all fronts. + "We're already in bad shape," said Kathy Goldman, who directs the Community Food Resource Center, a citywide nonprofit program. For those who imagine that hunger is a small problem, Ms. Goldman noted that there are 750 soup kitchens and food pantries in the city that distribute the equivalent of 2.5 million to 3 million meals per month. Even so, 30,000 to 35,000 people are turned away each month. In the midst of plenty there is plenty of suffering. + A week and a half ago, The Times's Alan Finder wrote about elderly New Yorkers who routinely forage for food in supermarket garbage bins. "I lost my pride a long time ago," said 87-year-old Casey Losik, a retired shipping clerk. + When next year's Republican-led Congress begins showing off its muscle with an unabashed assault on the needy, food programs across the country will be caught in an awful squeeze. With their funds diminishing, the programs will find the lines of hungry people at their doors lengthening. + Among other things, House Republicans plan to hack away at funding for food stamps, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, and the school lunch and breakfast programs. + Those are the kinds of cuts that send people in droves to soup kitchens and food pantries, the providers of last resort. No one has figured out what happens when they arrive at the kitchens and the pantries only to find the pots and the shelves are bare. + +LOAD-DATE: November 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +411 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Population Trends Hold Surprises + +BYLINE: By ELSA BRENNER + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 1; Column 3; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1373 words + +A REPORT issued earlier this month on the county's population has broad implications for educators, health-care workers and taxpayers, demographers and planning officials said last week. +The report, "Westchester County and Municipalities: Population Estimates for Jan. 1, 1993," found that last year's count of 885,731 follows moderate increases since 1990 and reverses a downward trend of the 1970's and 1980's. + The latest figures reflect an increase in both the birth rate and migration to Westchester from other countries and other parts of the New York City area, according to the County Planning Department. +The report predicts that if the birth rate continues at its high level, if the economic recovery continues at a moderate pace and if migration continues at its current level, Westchester's population will exceed 890,000 by 1995, approaching 1970's historic ceiling of 894,000. +The County Clerk's office reported last week that there was a surge last year in naturalizations, which paralleled an increase in immigrants counted by the Planning Department. +Demographers had predicted that the county's population would stabilize in the 90's, and Planning Department officials said they were surprised to find the population up by 1 percent in 1990 and 1.24 percent last year. +Last year's increase was mainly the result of growth by two groups -- school-age children and the elderly. That is expected to have a profound impact on both the type and amount of public services needed in the future, officials said. +For one, the number of children entering the public schools has jumped in recent years -- the result of the highest birth rates since the mid-60's. In 1992, there were 15 births per 1,000 people in Westchester, compared with 11.4 births per 1,000 in 1982. +While birth rates are not expected to hit the record high of 19.6 per 1,000 in 1961, the recent surge -- or boomlet, as it is being called -- was not expected. School planners nevertheless face serious implications. +Mary R. Carlson, a researcher for the Department of Planning, attributed the boomlet in part to post World War II baby boomers who are bearing children relatively late in life. +Children entering school next fall in Westchester are expected to be among the largest class in the county since 1970, and they will be followed by even larger classes of children born since 1990. +Last year, there were 10,141 students enrolled in Westchester's public kindergarten classes, compared with 7,193 in 1983. +Ruth Robinson, a statistician for the State Department of Education, said that the increase in incoming kindergarten classes occurred as the overall public school enrollment dropped to 115,996, from 117,598 in 1983. +Evelyn M. Stock, president of the Westchester-Putnam School Boards Association, a nonprofit organization serving 55 school boards, said that the growing enrollments are translating into pocketbook issues. +"We're talking about a greater tax burden, new buildings in some cases and caring for new populations with special needs -- the immigrants," she said. +Janet S. Walker, executive director of the Westchester-Putnam School Boards Association, said that both the smaller, suburban school districts and the big city systems were feeling the impact of newly arrived immigrants in the classroom and that by law public schools were required to educate all children "regardless of their legal status." In California earlier this month, voters approved a proposition that would limit public services like education to illegal immigrants, but a Federal judge later blocked implementation of the law pending determination of Constitutional questions of due process and invasion of privacy. +The largest immigrant groups in the county include those from Japan, India, Central and South America, the Caribbean islands, Korea, China and the Middle East. +Dee R. Barbato, a program administrator in the County Clerk's office, reported that her office was performing more than 300 naturalizations a month -- more than double the usual number. She said the increase that began last year followed a general amnesty granted five years ago by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service to illegal immigrants. In most cases, it takes about five years to complete the paperwork and classes needed to become naturalized. +Dr. Vincent T. Beni, Superintendent of Schools in Hastings-on-Hudson and president of the Southern Westchester Chief School Administrators, noted that the demands on school districts for more classrooms and teachers comes at a time when state aid has hit historic lows. +Dr. Beni, whose organization represents 35 school districts, said schools were facing devastating pressures and many districts had to float bonds to pay for renovations and expansion. +At the same time that the school-age population has been increasing, the Department of Planning's population report for last year said that the number of elderly living in Westchester -- those older than 60 -- had also risen, while the number of young adults and middle-aged people remained relatively stable. +According to 1990 census figures, there were 170,971 elderly people in Westchester during 1990, up from 126,023 a decade earlier. Moreover, the number of "old-old" residents, those over 85, had increased by 35.9 percent in a decade to 14,200 by 1990. +The Planning Department's report showed that the nursing-home population had increased to 8,759 by 1992 from 7,256 in 1990. +"What was unbelievable and unique -- like living to be 100 -- is becoming more commonplace," said Laura Bolotsky, an administrator for the County Office for the Aging, who said that as population figures for the elderly rose, her office was increasingly being called upon for its services. +The Office for the Aging finances municipal and agency services for the elderly: nutrition, transportation, housing assistance, crime prevention and legal aid. It also provides information and referrals for nutritionists and has a case-management staff, which attempts to prevent premature institutionalization. +Its $8 million yearly budget "is certainly seeing a strain," said Mae Carpenter, director of the office. "We're stretching ourselves to the limit. It's a triage situation. First, we have to serve those most at risk. Then we look at preventive care. Sometimes, quality-of-life services get pushed to the side." +Ms. Stock of the school boards association said that the elderly, who were often on fixed incomes, were also being called upon as taxpayers to pay for new school expenses. +"They are being squeezed financially," she said. "But they are also grandparents, and when it comes to funding schools, we hope they are able to look at the broader picture." +The Planning Department's population estimate report -- the first in a new series prepared by the research division of the department -- also reported an increase in the number of single-person households. Between 1980 and 1990, those numbers were up by 25 percent to 322,999, and about half of those represented elderly people living alone. The 1993 report did not contain revised figures. +The report also says that the county is showing signs of recovering from the economic recession of the late 80's and early 90's, demonstrated by the absorption of unsold and unoccupied housing in many parts of Westchester, along with an increasing demand for new residential units. +The population estimates were arrived at, in part, by using housing-vacancy rates from the 1990 census in the absence of more recent data, the report says. +Population increases were registered by all cities in the county, with the largest gains in Peekskill (up 2.61 percent to 20,045), White Plains (up 1.87 percent to 49,627) and Yonkers (up 1.22 percent to 190,377). +Population in the northern part of the county grew at twice the rate of the county, with an increase of about 5,600 or 2.3 percent. +The central part, led by Greenburgh and White Plains, grew by 1.04 percent or 2,200 people. +Growth in the southern tier of Westchester, while modest, was bolstered by an increase of nearly 2,300 in Yonkers and represented the first population gain in that part of the county in more than 20 years. + +LOAD-DATE: November 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +412 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 28, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +OPERA REVIEW; +In All-Male Revue, Art Meets Noise + +BYLINE: By ALEX ROSS + +SECTION: Section C; Page 11; Column 1; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 571 words + +It is a bland fact of nature that falsetto goes up, not down: men's voices can climb into mezzo-soprano or even soprano registers, while most women's voices cannot likewise descend. The male transgression most often results in excruciating noise, but it can sometimes attain high art; there are several countertenors presently before the public who produce genuinely beautiful mezzo tone. In the case of La Gran Scena's all-male opera revue, seen on Saturday night at the Kaye Playhouse (Hunter College, 68th Street between Lexington and Park Avenues), moments of high art and excruciating noise produced comedy of a sophisticated kind. +This is the company's 13th year -- what it likes to call its bar mitzvah season -- and it presented a gala array of maimed excerpts from various operatic genres: the "Ride of the Valkyries," the closing trio from "Der Rosenkavalier," the duet of the title character and Arsace from "Semiramide," the St. Sulpice scene from "Manon" and the entirety, more or less, of Act II of "Tosca." The evening's host was Sylvia Bills (Joe Simmons), "America's most beloved retired diva," expertly sending up the gala chitchat of Beverly Sills. + The members of La Gran Scena have created a colorful array of fictional divas to essay this ambitious repertory. Ira Siff, the company's founder and artistic director, stars as Madame Vera Galupe-Borszkh, the great traumatic soprano known as "La Dementia" to her legions of fans. Mr. Siff resourcefully exploits the inevitable obstacles his voice encounters in the soprano range, suggesting the vocal difficulties of a Slavic singer past her prime and out of her league. To say that Mme. Galupe-Borszkh has a problematic register break is to understate the case severely. +The "Rosenkavalier" trio was supposed to be an excerpt from an iconoclastic production-in-progress directed by Mme. Galupe-Borszkh. It takes place at a shopping mall outside Fort Lee, N.J.; the Marschallin has been renamed Marsha Lynn, and Octavian is a footloose teen-ager wearing a baseball cap turned backward, a Walkman and a T-shirt that reads, "I Love Older Women." Supertitles provide an up-to-date translation of Hofmannstahl's libretto: "Sophie's cool, but, like, Marsha's awesome." +The evening's tour de force, however, was the manhandling of Act II of "Tosca." Mme. Galupe-Borszkh exploded every cliche associated with the lead role. The noted Hungarian baritone Fodor Sedan matched her move for move, tangoing around the stage to Puccini's striding rhythms. This parody was notable for its detail: each of the comprimario singers had his own routine, and no bit of stage business went unscathed. (Tosca discovers the instrument of Scarpia's demise while carving slices of turkey for herself.) +These antics would be tiresome if real voices were not at work behind the satire. Keith Jurosko's impersonation of a very elderly Italian soprano, called to the stage to sing her favorite encore, "The Last Rose of Summer," was very funny, but also rather uncanny; he was a 78-rpm record brought to life. Mr. Siff, too, stepped outside of comedy for his bizarrely beautiful rendition of "Vissi d'arte." By the time all the evening's characters came onstage for an encore, slaughtering Broadway tunes in high operatic style, one had begun to believe in their crazed world, and La Gran Scena had become opera itself. +The revue will be repeated on Friday and Saturday. + +LOAD-DATE: November 30, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Ira Siff as Madame Vera Galupe-Borszkh (a k a "La Dementia") in La Gran Scena's all-male opera revue. (Beatriz Schiller for The New York Times) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +413 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 29, 1994, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Pfizer Forms Japan Alliance + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section D; Page 2; Column 3; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 179 words + +DATELINE: TOKYO, Nov. 28 + +Pfizer Inc. has formed an alliance with the Eisai Company of Japan to develop a new drug for Alzheimer's disease, the companies said today. +The alliance will focus on an Eisai compound, E2020, which is undergoing clinical tests in Japan, the United States and Europe. + The companies plan to market the drug jointly in the United States, Britain, Germany, France and Japan pending regulatory approval. Pfizer will hold the marketing rights for E2020 in all other countries. +Alzheimer's is a form of dementia that generally afflicts elderly people. Its symptoms include memory loss, behavioral changes and, eventually, loss of language and motor skills. The disease is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States. +The companies will also work together on the possible development of other dementia agents, including Pfizer's CP-118,594. +Eisai, which had $2.3 billion in 1993 sales, said the agreement would help it establish a presence in Europe and the United States. Pfizer is a New York-based health care company with annual sales of $7.5 billion. + +LOAD-DATE: November 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +414 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 30, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +In America; +Business Beats Brooklyn + +BYLINE: By BOB HERBERT + +SECTION: Section A; Page 23; Column 6; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 688 words + +Final approval of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade will tear a large hole in the Federal budget. But this breach of the budget is not considered a major problem by Government leaders in Washington because the new GATT agreement will be a bonanza for big business, and that is something favored by Democrats and Republicans alike. +When benefits for working people or the poor are involved, the budget deficit is seen as an insurmountable problem. There is no money for investments in ordinary Americans. But the specter of $42 billion in lost tariff revenues over the next decade is met with a shrug by the movers and shakers in Congress and the White House. As long as it's for business -- well, then, that's all right. + Brownsville, a desolate and mostly forgotten neighborhood in Brooklyn, is light years from Washington. Its residents will never be mistaken for the champagne-drinking, limousine-riding lobbyists who are swarming all over Capitol Hill in a gaudy display of corporate muscle on behalf of GATT. A glimpse of this crippled neighborhood was provided in Senate testimony last spring by Anne Kohler, who runs a soup kitchen in a tiny storefront that once housed a bakery: +"Our clients consist of the working poor, single mothers with children, long-term unemployed single men (part of the blue-collar work force, where many jobs have disappeared), married families with children, senior citizens, the mentally ill, the disabled and the handicapped. Some are illiterate, some are college-educated, some are chemically dependent, some worked all of their lives only to find that in old age the safety net has begun to crumble beneath their feet." +What these soup kitchen clients have in common is an economic predicament so dire they cannot be sure from one day to the next that they will eat. This is not easily understood by Congressmen, senators and Presidents who have trouble buttoning their jackets over their ample midsections. Hunger is alien to them. +Ms. Kohler's soup kitchen is called Neighbors Together and is the second-largest in Brooklyn. It serves a simple lunch (canned meat, a starch, canned vegetables) to 500 people a day, five days a week. +"I think most people are unaware of the tremendous poverty that exists in this country," said Ms. Kohler during an interview on Monday. "I see the suffering in the eyes of these people. Some of them are frail and old. There are women who are retarded. They can't work. I get sick to my stomach when I hear the stereotypes about how lazy the poor are, how they're living such great lives at the taxpayers' expense." +One evening Ms. Kohler took a boy from a desperately poor family home to spend the night with her and her husband in a different part of Brooklyn. "I told him he could sleep on the sofabed, or on a makeshift bed on the floor, beside our bed." +A stricken look crossed the boy's face. "Do you have mice?" he asked. +Ms. Kohler said the boy was afraid because his experience was that children who slept on the floor would have mice running over them. +GATT is about power and money and influence. Brownsville is about survival. Some of the very same Government officials who are going to the mat for GATT are also trying to cut the food stamp allotments of the poor. If there is equity in that kind of governing -- not to mention a sense of humanity -- Ms. Kohler has been unable to find it. +"Food stamps!" she cried, her eyes angry. "Can you believe they want to cut food stamps? A monthly allotment of food stamps provides about 88 cents per meal. I'll take you shopping and you see if you can buy a meal for 88 cents. Now they're going to give them less?" +The fine restaurants of the nation's capital are heavily booked for tomorrow night as corporate representatives prepare to celebrate the Uruguay Round's final passage. If the Senate gives the thumbs up, there will be toasts and laughter and triumphant applause, the kind of exuberance that accompanies a sudden acceleration of wealth and worth. +It's the kind of celebration that's as alien to Brownsville as hunger is to Capitol Hill. + +LOAD-DATE: November 30, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +415 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 1, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Stone Age Man Had Modern Pains, Study Says + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 18; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 376 words + +DATELINE: CHICAGO, Nov. 30 + +The 5,300-year-old "ice man," whose well-preserved body was discovered in a glacier three years ago in the Alps, had arthritis, hardening of the arteries and broken ribs that healed slowly, researchers said today. +Dr. William A. Murphy Jr., head of diagnostic imaging at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, reported on the ice man's medical condition at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. + "It's really not much different from modern man," Dr. Murphy said. "There are just very impressive similarities." +Researchers believe that the gap-toothed Stone Age man was 25 to 40 years of age when he died, but he had already developed fairly severe osteoarthritis, a slowly progressive, degenerative bone disease found chiefly in elderly people, in his neck, lower back and one hip, Dr. Murphy said. +Osteoarthritis in one little toe also suggests that he may have suffered from frostbite, Dr. Murphy added. +Calcium deposits were found in the blood vessels of the ice man's chest, pelvis and neck, indicating heart disease. +"He had hardening of the arteries, arteriosclerosis," Dr. Murphy said. +But researchers have no way of knowing whether this was unusual for men of that age in that era, he said, adding, "He's the only reference point we have for 5,300 years ago." +Eight fractures were found in the ice man's ribs, but no one can say whether they occurred all at once or at different times, Dr. Murphy said. +"It's the kind of thing that might have hospitalized modern man," he said. "He did very well with these; he certainly lived well beyond the injuries." +Dr. Murphy was part of an international team assembled at the University of Innsbruck in Austria to examine the mummified body with X-ray techniques. +The researchers have taken more than 2,000 images of the man since he was found, Dr. Murphy said. +The body was found in the ice by hikers. The corpse is the best-preserved European known from 4,000 to 6,000 years ago, when humans were just starting to use copper for tools and weapons. +The body is being stored in a freezer at the University of Innsbruck, and researchers are allowed to work with it only 20 or 30 minutes at a time to prevent it from deteriorating. + +LOAD-DATE: December 1, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +416 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 4, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WEDDINGS; +Dana Selig, Steven L. Kahn + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 65; Column 6; Society Desk + +LENGTH: 162 words + +Dana Selig, a hearing officer for the New York City Board of Education in Brooklyn, is to be married today to Steven Lewis Kahn, an associate at Loft & Zarkin, a law firm in New York. Rabbi Shlomo Balter is to perform the ceremony at Tappan Hill in Tarrytown, N.Y. +The bride, 27, graduated cum laude from Clark University. She and the bridegroom received law degrees from Brooklyn Law School. She is the daughter of Karen and Benjamin Selig of Wesley Hills, N.Y. + The bride's father is a senior partner in Hurley, Fox, Selig & Kelleher, a Stony Point, N.Y., law firm. Her mother is an administrative assistant at the firm. +The bridegroom, 28, graduated from Cornell University. He is the son of Myra and Joel Kahn of New City, N.Y. +The bridegroom's mother is the director of the senior citizens program at the Rockland County Association of Retarded Citizens in Congers, N.Y. His father retired as a court reporter at the State Supreme Court in Manhattan. + +LOAD-DATE: December 4, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +417 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 4, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WEDDINGS; +Heather Vrooman, Neal Zuckerman + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 65; Column 5; Society Desk + +LENGTH: 210 words + +Heather Anne Vrooman, a daughter of Lynda and Edward A. Vrooman of Garrison, N.Y., is to be married today to First Lieut. Neal Jeffrey Zuckerman, the son of Phyllis S. Zuckerman of Scarsdale, N.Y., and Richard J. Zuckerman of Mohegan Lake, N.Y. Donald J. McGrath, the town clerk of Philipstown, N.Y., is to officiate at the Putnam County Historical Society in Cold Spring, N.Y. +The bride, 25, graduated from St. Lawrence University. She was until recently the personnel coordinator at D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, a New York advertising agency. Her father, a lawyer in Garrison, is also a director of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and chairman of the Metro-North Railroad Committee. Her mother is director of development at the Dutchess County Association for Senior Citizens in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. + The bridegroom, 24, graduated with honors from the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He recently returned from South Korea, where he served as the company executive officer, and has been reassigned to Fort Carson, Colo. His mother is an administrative assistant at Leon Reimer & Company, an accounting firm in Tarrytown, N.Y. His father is a senior partner in Lesser, Leff & Company, an accounting firm in New York. + +LOAD-DATE: December 4, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +418 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 4, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Plan to Give Venison To the Poor Hits a Snag + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 54; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 749 words + +The idea was simple enough: deer hunters in New Jersey would donate their venison to the poor, making good use of meat that might otherwise go to waste. +While the hungry would get the food, the hunters of New Jersey would get the good publicity. Several other states, including Maryland and New York, have similar government-sanctioned programs. + Yet in New Jersey, the plan, which drew opposition from anti-hunting groups, has fallen victim to an unexpected bureaucratic misunderstanding in the state legislature, which supports the idea. +The deer hunters' trek through the brambles of bureaucracy began in the mid-1980's, when Bergen County Bowmen, a sportsman's group affiliated with the United Bowhunters of New Jersey, proposed donating venison to soup kitchens. +In autumn 1989 the bowhunters obtained permission to begin a three-year demonstration program under the auspices of the New Jersey State Department of Health and the Division of Fish, Game and Wildlife. Some 1,800 pounds of venison were distributed to two charities in Hackensack and elsewhere over the three-year period, said Mike Volpe, president of the United Bowhunters of New Jersey. +The hunters tried to create a permanent statewide program, but ran into delays. "We got caught in the legislative process," Mr. Volpe said. "We ended up shutting down for two years." +Finally, Gov. Jim Florio signed a bill in 1993 introduced by Assemblyman John Gaffney, Republican from the 2d District, that would allow venison donations gathered from hunts to be given to the needy, and for the meat to be inspected by the state. +Six butchers and seven charities in Hackensack, Union City, Atlantic City, Pomona, Salem and New Brunswick were ready to handle the meat. Mr. Volpe said that strict record-keeping would have allowed the state to trace the hunter and the kill if there were any problems with the meat. +But in the confusion of keeping track of several similar proposals, supporters did not realize that it was an earlier version of Mr. Gaffney's bill that had gone through committee. That version gave jurisdiction for the program to the Department of Agriculture -- which doesn't have the capability to inspect the meat. +"The Department of Agriculture doesn't have an inspection bureau for this particular activity," said Joe Marczyk, an assistant to Mr. Gaffney. +Meanwhile, New Jersey Assembly's Senior Citizens and Social Services Committee has voted to replace the mistakenly passed measure with one that would give jurisdiction to the Health Department. But by the time the legislature acts, this year's opportunities may be lost: The final day for all deer hunting is Jan. 31. +The committee has asked Governor's Council to determine if Gov. Christine Todd Whitman could invoke executive power to jump-start the program until the legislative process catches up. Calls to the office of the Governor's Council were not returned as of last week. +"We already have a three-year proven track record with the health department," Mr. Volpe said. "I can't see any reason for not granting our request." +The venison-donation program in neighboring states has proven more successful. The Maryland Deerhunter's Association runs the Hunter's Harvestshare program in cooperation with the Maryland Food Bank and the State's Department of Natural Resources. In New York State, agriculture and public health laws were amended in 1993 to allow nonprofit food kitchens to accept deer meat. Richard Svenson of the New York Health Department's Bureau of Community Sanitation and Food Protection said there had been no reported problems with venison donated by hunters. +Last year, a Pennsylvania program called Hunters Sharing the Harvest provided 70,000 pounds of deer meat to the poor, said Ken Brandt, executive vice president of Pennsylvanians for the Responsible Use of Animals. +"The anti-hunters can't say anything bad about this program," Mr. Brandt said. +But Stu Chaifetz, chairman of the Anti-Hunting Committee of the New Jersey Animal Rights Alliance, does. +"These are people killing for fun and then trying to make an excuse for it," said Mr. Chaifetz, whose organization makes alternative donations of vegetarian food to charities in Atlantic, Bergen, Morris and Cumberland counties. +Mr. Marczyk, Assemblyman Gaffney's assistant, called the problem unfortunate. +"It's kind of embarrassing how something like this can happen," he said. "The bill goes through, gets signed, and it doesn't help anyone." + +LOAD-DATE: December 4, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +419 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 4, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Neediest Cases; +An Array of Troubles Afflicts the Elderly Poor + +BYLINE: By ABBY GOODNOUGH + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 56; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1147 words + +If her chiming wooden clock did not prove otherwise, Elizabeth Malon would insist that time slows down in old age. Ninety-seven years old and partly blind, she spends her days wandering through a dark apartment in Queens, fending off illness, boredom and depression. +For weeks on end, Mrs. Malon's only contact with the outdoors is the sunlight that filters through her thick curtains. A woman from her church delivers a hot lunch four days a week, sometimes lingering for small talk. Other visitors are rare. Of Mrs. Malon's 4 children, 15 grandchildren and 26 great-grandchildren, only a few call regularly. + Last year she slipped in the bathtub, injuring her leg. She screamed for help for several hours before the building superintendent came to her aid. In April she fell again, fracturing her pelvis and ending up in bed for several months. +"I'm an independent person and I don't like to ask for help," she said last week, easing into her favorite armchair and clutching a pillow that she crocheted when her eyes were healthy. "The time gathers and lags on, and I do feel lonely." +For thousands of frail elderly New Yorkers, survival is a daily ritual of hardship and frustration. Mrs. Malon is among the more fortunate: her mind is still sharp, and with regular meal deliveries, she hangs on. But a growing number of New Yorkers are suffering from hunger and the many mental and physical ailments of old age. With government resources limited, poverty is taking a disproportionate toll on the city's elderly. And private charities, including those served by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, say the need is overwhelming. +According to the city Department for the Aging, New York has 953,317 residents over 65, or 13 percent of the total population. More than 150,000 of them, or 15.8 percent, have annual incomes below the poverty level: $7,360 for a single person, or about $20 a day. The national poverty rate for the elderly is 12 percent. +Those most likely to be poor are New Yorkers over 85, whose ranks grew by 32.6 percent between 1980 and 1990. Twenty percent of this group live in poverty, and the majority are women living alone. +The practical effects of these statistics are many. Waiting lists for home-delivered meals and subsidized public housing are long. Some elderly New Yorkers supplement meager diets by foraging in garbage bins. Others, in a few extreme cases, starve. +"A substantial number of elderly people are living on extremely meager incomes in an extremely high-cost city," said Marjorie Cantor, a gerontologist at the Fordham University Graduate School of Social Service. +"One of the main problems is that many of these people are not taking advantage of entitlements," said Ms. Cantor, who recently completed a study on aging New Yorkers. She found that only 57 percent of poor elderly New Yorkers received Medicaid in 1990, and 32 percent received food stamps. +Since only a fraction of elderly people can afford nursing homes, the need for community-based services is urgent. But charity officials say services for the elderly are not keeping up with the population explosion. +"Every hospital tells me stories of frail elderly who come to their emergency rooms malnourished, confused and sometimes even homeless," said Bob Wolf, director of medical and geriatric services for UJA-Federation of New York. +In a city where many elderly live alone, charity officials say malnutrition is rampant. According to the Department for the Aging, about 13,500 elderly New Yorkers receive government-subsidized, home-delivered meals. But the number of poor elderly is roughly 11 times that amount. +At the Woodside Senior Center in Queens, which is supported by Catholic Charities,four social workers assess piles of applications for hot meals. Choosing who receives help, they say, can be excruciating. +"Sometimes we have to decide between someone who's had a leg amputated and someone who's blind," said Donald Young, supervisor of the center's Meals on Wheels program, which delivers 50 lunches a day. +The Department for the Aging requires that delivered meals provide a third of daily nutritional needs. But many who receive meals, especially the physically or mentally disabled, eat little else. Jose Lopez, 67, who lives alone in Sunnyside, Queens, said that besides his daily lunch, he eats only cereal and peanut-butter sandwiches. +In Long Island City, an 86-year-old named Lucille G. forgoes lunch and eats her free meal in the evening, sitting on an ancient couch that is also her bed. +"It's not the best in the world, but I count my blessings," she said, heading to her tiny kitchen with a tray of chili and bread. +Too often, worries about food are compounded by the struggle to pay rent. According to the Census, elderly people living alone pay an average monthly rent of $311 -- half the average Social Security check. +In Flushing, Queens, Joan Cooke, 66, pays $433 in rent for a two-room apartment, which leaves about $100 until her next Social Security check. She survives on crackers, soup and egg sandwiches from a nearby coffee shop. For the past three years, the Community Service Society of New York has helped pay her electricity bill, which averages $28 a month. +Mrs. Cooke is still able to seek help on her own, but charity officials say a growing number of elderly New Yorkers -- especially those who are Hispanic or over 85 -- are not. Because of this, the Woodside Senior Center sends a nurse and a social worker to visit elderly residents who are physically or emotionally frail. The situations they encounter can be bleak. +Laura Zimmermann, the social worker, and Maggie Silver, the nurse, describe dozens of people unfit to live alone: an emotionally disturbed woman living in a tent in her living room. A man with Alzheimer's disease left alone when his wife was hospitalized. A woman who had not eaten in four days. Twice, they found people dead in squalid apartments. +"The typical case is an elder who is paranoid and suspicious of everything, living alone in a dirty house with no food," said Mrs. Zimmermann. "You don't want to take over these peoples' lives, but you want to help them live with dignity." +Last week, after receiving a call from a local church, Mrs. Zimmermann made her first visit to Elizabeth Malon. She found a woman who was entirely lucid, but frail, anxious and confused about her options. In the course of an hour, she advised Mrs. Malon on Medicare benefits, suggested a summer camp for the blind and told her how to cure her chapped hands. She listened as Mrs. Malon vented her frustrations about being housebound and nearly blind. +"I worked so hard for years to have a good retirement, and now I can't do anything," the old woman said, staring straight ahead with red-rimmed eyes. "Between the world I grew up in and this life, there's a vast difference." + +LOAD-DATE: December 4, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Fragile Independence: Elizabeth Malon, 97, at home in Middle Village, Queens, as Laura Zimmermann, as social worker, visits; A Need Fulfilled: For many, the hunger for food and companionship is acute. Michael Machado, left, a driver for a Meals on Wheels program run by Catholic Charities in Queens, readies hot lunches for delivery in Long Island City, Sunnyside and Woodside. (Photographs by MARILYNN K. YEE/The New York Times); Vernetta Crawford of the Woodside Senior Center, above right, and Rose Pennasilico share a meal on a field trip to a restaurant. (Andrea Mohin/The New York Times); Lucille G., below, of Long Island City, opens her door to a meal delivery; Finding Solace: A man climbs the steps to St. Mary's Senior Center, a place for recreation and meals in Long Island City. (Photographs by MARILYNN K. YEE/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +420 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 4, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Neediest Cases; +Lean Times for Catholic Charities + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 56; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 270 words + +After a sharp drop in private donations this year, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York is conducting a mail campaign for the first time in its history. Msgr. James Murray, executive director, said the agency is $250,000 short of its budget, mostly because individual contributions have fallen off. +Catholic Charities, which has provided social services for the poor through a network of agencies since 1917, is one of seven charities supported by the annual appeal of The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. The New York Times Company Foundation pays all the costs of running the appeal, so all contributions go directly to the charities. + Besides its own programs, Catholic Charities supports a network of hospitals, nursing homes, child care agencies and community centers in the New York region. Services range from prenatal care for indigent mothers to day care for the elderly. In New York City, eight family service centers provide emergency housing or food, legal advice and psychiatric care. +Monsignor Murray said the aftereffects of a long recession still weighed heavily on poor New Yorkers, many of whom depend on Catholic Charities for services. "All the layoffs and early retirements caused by the recession are making life difficult for hundreds of people," he said. +Like other charity officials, Monsignor Murray said he didn't know how city budget cuts would affect his agency. But he is especially concerned about programs supported by the Human Resources Administration, the Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation Services and the Department of Youth Services. + +LOAD-DATE: December 4, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +421 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 4, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +SERVICES; +For Elderly, Places That Help + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 17; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 420 words + + +Various services for the elderly are available through the Department for the Aging, other city agencies and volunteer groups. The Department for the Aging's telephone number for information and referrals: (212) 442-1000. Here is a sampling. + +HOME SHARING + +NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR SENIOR CITIZENS (212) 962-7559. Arranges house partners, provides screening and financial advice. + +MEAL DELIVERY + +AGING IN AMERICA 1500 Pelham Parkway South, the Bronx, N.Y. 10461; (718) 824-4004. + +BHRAGS TOMPKINS PARK SENIOR CENTER 550 Greene Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11216; (718) 638-3000. + +CENTRAL HARLEM MEALS-ON-WHEELS 163 West 125th Street, Room 1320, New York, N.Y. 10027; (212) 222-2552. Housekeeping and personal care available. + + +PROSPECT HILL SENIOR SERVICES 283 Prospect Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11215; (718) 499-9574. Some housekeeping services available. + +SOUTHWEST QUEENS SENIOR SERVICES 103-12 101st Avenue, Ozone Park, N.Y. 11416; (718) 847-9200. + +STANLEY ISAACS SENIOR CENTER 415 East 93d Street, New York, N.Y. 10218; (212) 360-7620. + +OUTINGS + +PETER DELLAMONICA SENIOR CITIZEN CENTER 23-56 Broadway, Astoria, N.Y. 11106; (718) 626-1500. Offers assistance to crime victims, health screening, shopping and chore services, and meal delivery. + +PROJECT FIND -- HAMILTON SENIOR CENTER 141 West 73d Street, New York, N.Y. 10023; (212) 787-7710. Organizes trips and offers exercise and art classes, concerts, movies and a daily lunch program. + +REPAIRS + +ALLEN A. M. E. NEIGHBORHOOD PRESERVATION/SENIOR TRANSPORTATION 114-02 Guy Brewer Boulevard, Jamaica, N.Y. 11433; (718) 658-6660. + +DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING PRESERVATION AND DEVELOPMENT Emergency Repair Program, (212) 960-4800. Emergency heat and water repairs, 24 hours a day. + +NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR SENIOR CITIZENS 150 Nassau Street, New York, N.Y. 10038; (212) 962-7653. Home safety inspections and minor repairs, throughout the city. + +TRANSPORTATION + +AGING IN AMERICA (718) 824-4004. Transportation throughout the Bronx for medical purposes. + +HAMILTON GRANGE SENIOR CITIZENS CENTER 420 West 145th Street, New York, N.Y. 10031; (212) 862-4181. Transportation throughout Manhattan for elderly Harlem residents who live between 110th to 155th Streets, west of Fifth Avenue. + +VISITING +SENIOR ACTION IN A GAY ENVIRONMENT 208 West 13th Street, New York, N.Y. 10011; (212) 741-2247. + +VISITING NEIGHBORS 401 Lafayette Street, New York, N.Y. 10003; (212) 260-6200. + +LOAD-DATE: December 4, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: List + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +422 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 5, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +JUDGES PROPOSING TO NARROW ACCESS TO FEDERAL COURT + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1263 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 + +A panel of Federal judges is proposing new limits on access to Federal courts for Social Security beneficiaries, victims of job discrimination and consumers as part of a long-range plan to cope with huge increases in the caseload. +The panel of nine judges, who have a combined total of more than 160 years on the bench, was created in 1990 by the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy-making arm of the Federal judiciary. + If recent trends continue, the judges said, the Federal courts will be inundated with civil and criminal cases. The crime bill passed this fall, for example, has extended Federal jurisdiction to a new range of crimes. +The report says there are already signs of "impending crisis" and predicts that the problems will grow steadily over the next 25 years. The growing burden of criminal cases has produced significant delays in the handling of civil cases, and a report done for the committee says "the civil trial is a chimera" in some places, like Southern California, where criminal cases account for more than 85 percent of the Federal trials. +By the year 2020, the judges estimate, more than one million new cases will be filed in a year in Federal district courts, up from the 281,740 in the year that ended June 30. +The report described that projection as "nightmarish." +"Numbers alone do not adequately capture this frightening picture," it said. To handle the anticipated caseload, even assuming some increase in judicial productivity, would require more than 4,000 judges, up from the current total of 846, the report says. Without hiring new judges, delays would grow intolerably. +With so many judges, the report says, it will be difficult to maintain the coherence and consistency of Federal court decisions. "Federal law would be Babel, with thousands of decisions issuing weekly and no one judge capable of comprehending the entire corpus of Federal law, or even the law of his or her own circuit," it says. +To prevent such confusion, the judges recommend limiting the courts' jurisdiction over certain types of cases. +After hearings, a final version of the report will be submitted in March 1995 to the full Judicial Conference, which is expected to accept most of the recommendations. +Some proposed changes can be made by the judges, but most would require action by Congress. While Congress has contributed to many problems described in the report, it may also be receptive to some of the judges' suggestions. In the current climate, Congress is unlikely to provide the money needed for judicial hiring and budgets to keep pace with rising caseloads. +Advocates for the elderly and others viewed the report with concern. Burton D. Fretz, executive director of the National Senior Citizens Law Center, which represents elderly people in cases involving Social Security, Medicaid and welfare programs, said, "The proposals would significantly shrink the availability of Federal courts to low-income clients." +A theme of the report is that people should rely more on state courts and on administrative appeals at Federal and state agencies. Mr. Fretz said the proposals would raise new obstacles to people suing state officials for denial of welfare, Medicaid and other benefits guaranteed by Federal laws. +But Judge Otto R. Skopil Jr. of Portland, Ore., the chairman of the Judicial Conference's Committee on Long-Range Planning, which wrote the report, said the new proposals could help people applying for Government benefits in some ways, he said. +"A Social Security disability case goes through more reviews than a capital punishment case," said Judge Skopil, who sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. "It seems strange to me that people asserting a disability must wait five to seven years to find out whether they are disabled. In fairness to the disabled person, we should expedite that process." +The Federal courts are, in a sense, a victim of their own success. Lawyers and lawmakers trust them so much that they continually try to give them new duties. Conservatives want to define new crimes, liberals want to define new rights and together they make a Federal case out of every violation. +Wilfred Feinberg, a former chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, said this trend clogged the courts and made it difficult for them to perform their most basic functions. +Judge Skopil said the report's projections of new Federal court cases, based on historical trends, were conservative because they did not take account of a sweeping anti-crime law signed by President Clinton in September. The law creates new Federal crimes, and Judge Skopil said: "It could have a very, very large effect on criminal caseload. The possibilities are staggering." +Civil cases are increasing even faster. The number of new civil cases has quadrupled since 1960, and five times as many civil cases as criminal cases are filed each year. The House Republicans' Contract With America could produce many more. It would authorize citizens to sue the Government for unfair or inconsistent application of "any law, rule, regulation, policy or internal standard." +In developing its recommendations, the committee solicited advice for four years from thousands of lawyers, legal scholars, Federal and state judges and other experts. It will hold three public hearings on the plan: in Phoenix on Dec. 7, Washington on Dec. 9 and Chicago on Dec. 16. The committee may revise the plan in the light of comment from judges and the public. +The long-range plan made these recommendations: +*Disputes over Social Security disability benefits should ordinarily be resolved in the Department of Health and Human Services, perhaps by establishing a new "benefits review board." +*Congress should curtail the Federal courts' jurisdiction to decide routine claims under employee pension, health and welfare benefit plans. State courts should be the primary forum for review of such claims. "The availability of a Federal forum in these cases suggests erroneously that state courts and agencies are inadequate to the task." +*Job discrimination claims, involving bias on the basis of race, sex, age, national origin or disability, should initially be resolved by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. While Federal judges would still handle some of these disputes, the commission should be required to investigate cases more thoroughly before allowing workers to sue. +*Federal courts should no longer be required to take cases merely because they involve citizens of different states. Such cases should be heard by a Federal judge only if plaintiffs can show that state courts would be prejudiced against them. This type of case, in which Federal judges apply state law, accounts for one of every four civil cases filed in Federal district court and "constitutes a massive diversion of Federal judge power." +In an interview, Judge Skopil said that the problems described in the report were not hypothetical. In the last few years, he said, Federal courts have run out of money for juries in civil cases and for court-appointed lawyers in criminal cases, and Congress took emergency action to provide extra money. +The report says judges ought to have greater control over courthouse security and should be offered training in the use of firearms so they can better protect themselves outside the courthouse. A spokesman for the United States Marshals Service, which is now responsible for court security, said judges were threatened almost every day. + +LOAD-DATE: December 5, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "BY THE NUMBERS: A Heavy Workload" shows new Federal filings of civil and criminal cases and number of district and appelate judgeships from 1940 to 1994. (Source: Judicial Conference of the U.S.)(pg. B9) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +423 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 7, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +William Hiscock, Civil Servant, 71; Was Health Expert + +BYLINE: By WOLFGANG SAXON + +SECTION: Section D; Page 21; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 293 words + +William McConway Hiscock, a retired public-health specialist who helped to draft the legislation that created Medicaid and other Federal health programs in the 1960's, died on Nov. 29 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. A resident of Towson, Md., he was 71. +The cause was pancreatic cancer, his family said. + Mr. Hiscock worked in the Health, Education and Welfare Department's Office of the Surgeon General in the early 1960's when he became involved in writing legislation that ultimately led to Medicaid and health programs for children and the elderly. In 1967 he received a superior-service award for "major contributions to the improvement of health legislation and to the development of the comprehensive health planning programs." +More recently he was cited for having started a program for mothers and children, and for his work on the child health program at the Medicaid bureau. +He retired earlier this year as a program analysis officer for the Medicaid bureau in Baltimore. +Born in New Haven, Mr. Hiscock was a graduate of Phillips Andover Academy and received a bachelor's degree in political science from Yale University in 1943. He earned a master's degree in public administration at Wesleyan University in 1952. +Before working for the Federal Government, he directed studies in public-health training at the Yale University School of Medicine and at the Central Maryland Health Systems Agency. +Mr. Hiscock is survived by his wife, Barbara Strangmann Hiscock; his son, Robin M. of Silver Spring, Md.; his daughter, Susan C. of Los Angeles; a sister, Margaret H. Weatherly of Mount Laurel, N.J., and a granddaughter. Also surviving are two stepsons, William M. and David M. Donovan of Baltimore, and a step-granddaughter. + +NAME: William McConway Hiscock + +LOAD-DATE: December 7, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +424 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 7, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +HEALTH WATCH; +Walking a Mile a Day Helps Delay Bone Loss + +BYLINE: REUTERS + +SECTION: Section C; Page 13; Column 4; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 662 words + +WOMEN who walk a mile a day, whether on the track or in the course of a busy day, reduce their chance of losing bone density as they age. +Agriculture Department scientists found that women who walked more than 7.5 miles a week can delay complications from loss of bone density better than non-walkers. + Previous studies have shown that there is a link between bone density and lifelong physical habits, including walking, and that women who begin a walking program during and after menopause can turn around the rapid bone loss that usually occurs during that period. +But a study by Dr. Elizabeth Krall of the Agricultural Research Service, focusing on walking as a specific type of exercise, found that walkers have up to seven years' worth more bone in reserve than non-walkers. +"A major finding of the study was that the type of walking that women were already doing in their day-to-day routines is probably benefiting their bones and doesn't require any major change in their exercise habits," said Dr. Krall, study leader of the Jean Meyer Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University. "It takes walkers four to seven years longer to reach the point of very low bone density." +Dr. Krall measured bone density in 238 healthy, post-menopausal white women whose average age was 62, separating personal walking histories from other physical activity data. Most in the study group were well past menopause. +"With menopause comes the most accelerated rate of bone loss," Dr. Krall said. Typically, women lose from 3 percent to 6 percent of bone density each year in the five years surrounding menopause, with the rate eventually dropping to about 1 percent a year later on, she said. +In the yearlong study, Dr. Krall found that those who walked about one mile a day had 7 percent more density in the leg bones and 4 percent more bone density over all than those who had walked less than a mile a week. The walkers also had a slower bone loss rate in the leg. +Based on the walkers' measurements, women who consistently walk more than a mile each day are likely to gain several years free of bone density loss. Severe bone density loss, or osteoporosis, can lead to fractures that occur from very little trauma. +Dr. Krall said she studied walking because the activity was done "more than any other type of exercise." +"In this age group of women, walking was the exercise that they did year round," she said. "It is a nice, moderate-intensity thing that just about anybody can do. Also, walking appeals to many more women in this age group than something more vigorous." (AP) + + +Predicting Bad Driving + Yale University researchers say they believe three simple tests can help predict whether an elderly person can safely operate an auto. + In a study published in the current issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, five Yale School of Medicine researchers said elderly people who walk less than a block a day, who have foot abnormalities, like toe deformities, and who perform poorly when copying designs during mental tests are much more likely to to be involved in accidents. + Dr. Richard Marotolli, leader of the research team, wrote that while the total number of automobile crashes involving drivers older than 72 is low, the rate of collisions per mile driven is very high. + "We believe that clinicians, family members and state regulators need guidance in identifying older drivers who are at particular risk for adverse driving events," the study said. + The researchers studied 283 people 72 and older from 1990 to 1991 and found that 46 percent of those who walked little, had foot problems and had trouble copying diagrams were later involved in serious traffic problems. Of those who had none of the three risk factors, only 6 percent had driving problems like crashes or violations, while 12 percent of those with one factor had trouble driving and 26 percent of those with two factors had trouble. (REUTERS) + +LOAD-DATE: December 7, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +425 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 8, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +BOOKS OF THE TIMES; +A Mute Girl's Theatrical Journey + +BYLINE: By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT + +SECTION: Section C; Page 18; Column 4; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 927 words + + +THE MYTH MAN +By Elizabeth Swados +326 pages. Viking. $21.95. +"A theater artist is an alchemist of human behavior. We take what is horrible and make it into something deep and beautiful. Sometimes, however, we must take golden moments and change them into something savage." + With these high-flown words, Sasha Novotny, the director of a famous lower West Side of Manhattan theater ensemble much admired by the likes of Susan Sontag and Ionesco, invites a 9-year-old mute girl to go on the soul-saving pilgrimage recounted in Elizabeth Swados's ambitious new novel, "The Myth Man." +The child whom Sasha addresses is actually the daughter of a Florida prostitute who named her Rikki Nelson, "after the rock-and-roll singer from the happy postcard family." When a doctor threatened to turn Rikki over to the Social Service Department because of the sexual abuse inflicted on her by her mother's older customers, Rikki's alcoholic father kidnaped her, drove her north to New York City, coached her to become a child star of television commercials and then sold her to Sasha's drama company. +Rikki's reaction to her traumas was to cease speaking. "Talking was treacherous," she explains. "I chose silence. Like nuns or monks." Still she willingly submits to rigorous training in mime, music and dance by the multicultural members of Sasha's troupe. Looking back at the age of 20, she describes in the first person how she became the central figure of a show called "The Myth Man." +As Bruce, the company's dramaturge, explains to her: "The way it goes is that there's a small child -- guess who? -- and the kid won't go to sleep. So her ancient, wise grandfather conjures up some Greek gods to teach her about life, death and the here, there and everywhere after. The gods become so real, the grandfather has no power to help the little girl. She must save herself and her grandfather with what she learns on her journey." +Ms. Swados is, of course, the playwright, composer, songwriter, director and choreographer whose best-known theater works are "Runaways" and "Nightclub Cantata." But she has also published a previous novel, "Leah and Lazar" (1982), and a memoir, "The Four of Us" (1992), both of which concerned her embrace of art as a way of overcoming the experience of growing up with an emotionally disturbed elder brother. +In "The Myth Man," she has distanced herself from this material somewhat, sublimating it into a plot removed from herself and writing about it in a cooler, more objective style than she did in her earlier books. Where the poetry of "Leah and Lazar" was in its language, here it is more in the events of the story, leaving the language to be sharper, wittier and more playful. +The most lyrical passages are spent on descriptions of the mythic scenes in Sasha's drama. "Sasha began to spin," Rikki recalls. "He was a heron. The sky was turning red. It blazed behind his circles. . . . After a while I didn't hear the drum anymore. Sasha had taken off. I was behind him. He was circling Manhattan higher and higher. I was on his wing. We were going to burn up and God was waiting in the flames." +Yet such verbal flights are continually undercut by humor. The overserious Sasha has a brother, Charles, a famous drag queen who takes over as Rikki's nanny and nurtures her with a healing love. After a spellbindingly sensuous performance of Narcissus falling in love with his reflection, Charles gets stuck in the trapdoor representing the pool of water. +When Rikki gets sick from training too hard, Charles visits her in St. Vincent's Hospital dressed in a nun's magnificent white habit. As the fame of the troupe spreads, and Europe vies with America to toast its celebrity, Ms. Swados misses no opening to satirize what happens to artists in the corporate state. +Predictably enough, the myths that Rikki must learn from grow more and more contemporary, as Ms. Swados develops her thesis "that no matter how much human beings may have advanced technologically, we are still ruled by the same forces which tormented our primitive ancestors." +Unfortunately, the reader is not as deeply engaged by the experience as Rikki becomes. One problem is that the story's appeal depends on our caring about an experimental theater company that resembles the Living Theater of the 1960's and 70's or Artaud's Theater of Cruelty or Jerzy Grotowski's Polish Laboratory Theater or Brecht's Berliner Ensemble, none of which ever resembled a utopian community, even in an age when the profession of acting is no longer disdained. And, after all, even Shakespeare retired from the King's Men at a relatively early age when he could afford to. +Moreover, Ms. Swados fails to create a goal worthy of a reader's deep concern when she has Sasha take his troupe into the Amazonian jungle in a nonsatirical search for some annealing vision. The author does write strongly about the sufferings of the ensemble on its trek deep into the heart of darkness. But as Rikki and her companions grow feverish from heat and disease, you half expect the appearance of Ambrose, the butler who shows up in the jungle hallucination at the end of Evelyn Waugh's novel, "A Handful of Dust," and announces to the delirious protagonist, "The City is served." +Finally, although Ms. Swados has created spirited characters, along with vivid, often funny, scenes for them to act in, you don't care enough about their conflicts to stay deeply engaged. "The Myth Man," for all its flights and aspirations, never quite bursts into the flame of truth. + +LOAD-DATE: December 8, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Elizabeth Swados (Sara Krulwich/Viking) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +426 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 10, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +NEWS SUMMARY + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 856 words + + +International 3-7 + +CUBAN REFUGEES IN LIMBO +Although the Guantanamo refugee camp at the American naval base in Cuba has not experienced riots like the one in Panama, it is filled with refugees who are desperate to resume normal lives. 1 + +Calm returned after riots in refugee camps in Panama. 6 + +FACING REALITY IN BOSNIA +News analysis: The threats to withdraw peacekeepers from Bosnia should have the effect of forcing both sides to realize what it would be like to fight an all-out war without the peacekeeping buffer. 1 + +EUROPE PLEDGE ON BOSNIA +Although France and Britain have threatened to withdraw troops from Bosnia, European Union leaders agreed that it would be necessary to keep peacekeepers there to help supply civilians. 7 + +UNITY TOUCHY AT LATIN SUMMIT +President Clinton opened the meeting of Latin American leaders in Miami saying it heralded a new era of cooperation, but officials conceded it was hard to achieve agreement on some tough issues. 6 + +ULSTER TALKS BEGIN +The political wing of the Irish Republican Army and Britain met for the first time in exploratory talks that are designed to lead to a political settlement of the violence in Northern Ireland. 3 + +PRIZE IN OSLO, PRESSURE AT HOME +The Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Israel and the Palestinian leader went to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize on Saturday, but both sides left touchy political situations at home. 4 + +Syria indicated willingness to resume the Mideast peace talks. 4 + +China ordered nationwide inspections after a major fire. 3 + +Giza Journal: Urban sprawl causes more suffering for the Sphinx. 4 + +National 8-12, 30 + +SURGEON GENERAL RESIGNS +The White House forced the resignation of Joycelyn Elders, whose views about drugs and sex made her a target of conservatives. 1 + +ESPY INVESTIGATION EXPANDS +The inquiry into the departing Agriculture Secretary has expanded to examine the operations of Tyson Foods, the Arkansas poultry empire with ties to the Clintons. 1 + +COMMUTER PLANES RESTRICTED +The F.A.A. banned two models of propeller airplanes from flying in conditions where ice is likely to build up on their wings. 1 + +A transcript revealed the final seconds of USAir Flight 427. 10 + +E.P.A. RETHINKS EMISSION RULES +The Environmental Protection Agency is considering changes to make auto emissions inspections less burdensome on car owners. 8 + +COURT TO HEAR DISTRICTING CASE +The Supreme Court accepted a Louisiana voting rights case that raises crucial questions about the role of race in legislative districting. 8 + +MORE MONEY FOR U.S. TROOPS +The Pentagon announced it would cut $7.7 billion in new weapons over six years to pay for increased salaries and improved living conditions for American troops. 11 + +RETHINKING HOUSE COMMITTEES +House Republicans scaled back plans to reduce committee sizes but left Democrats with a problem: who to kick off the committees. 30 + +COUNTERATTACK ON BENEFITS +Labor unions and spokesmen for the elderly attacked proposals advising President Clinton on how to slow the growth of Social Security and other Government benefit programs. 30 + +Religion Journal: A priest returned to the church before dying. 12 + +Metro Digest 25 + +CARGO SHIP SINKS IN ATLANTIC +Battered by ferocious winds, with crew members clinging to debris and life rafts, a Ukrainian ship sank 1,200 miles off New Jersey in the Atlantic Ocean. 1 + +TAKING A BYTE OUT OF THE BUDGET +As the City Council and Mayor wrangle over control of the budget, the Comptroller has reprogrammed six city computers to implement all the cuts both sides want. 1 + +Business Digest 39 + +Your Money 37-38 + +Arts/Entertainment 13-19 + +Theater: "Suddenly Last Summer." 13 + +Music: Oslo Philharmonic. 13 + +Music: Victoria Williams. 13 + +Dance: Buglisi/Foreman troupe. 16 + +Sports 32-36 + +Baseball: Mantle's name surfaces in memorabilia investigation. 33 + +Basketball: Knicks fall to the Hawks, 89-85, in Atlanta. 33 + +Nets, a team in turmoil, try to iron things out. 34 + +Lopez getting the attention for unbeaten St. John's. 35 + +High School Report. 32 + +Columns: Rhoden on Charlie Ward's Heisman Trophy year. 33 + +Football: A playoff atmosphere for today's Jets-Lions game. 33 + +Soccer: Virginia edges Rutgers to reach N.C.A.A. final. 35 + +Obituaries 52 + +Enrique Lister, an anti-Fascist general in the Spanish Civil War. + +Adda Bozeman Barkhuus, an expert in international relations. + +Editorials/Op-Ed 22-23 + +Editorials + +Rescue mission in Bosnia. + +Dr. Elders's untimely candor. + +Personal prayer is not illegal. + +A break on legislative secrecy. + +Letters + +Anna Quindlen: The good mother. + +Russell Baker: Newt's pal Warbucks. + +Bruce Ackerman: Gingrich vs. the Constitution. + +Keith Spicer: Propaganda for peace. + +Emily Kelton: Brown, Bowdoin, Brandeis and Prozac. + +Neediest Cases 26 + +Chronicle 24 + +Bridge 19 + +Crossword 18 + +LOAD-DATE: December 10, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +427 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 10, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Denny's Hit By Protests At Only Site With Union + +BYLINE: By JON NORDHEIMER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 29; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1088 words + +DATELINE: ABSECON, N.J. + +The crowd gathered outside Denny's restaurant here on Dec. 2 was not lined up for a Super Slam breakfast (three eggs, three pancakes, three bacon strips and three sausage links for $2.99). + The 40 or so men and women were there for an event rare in the American labor movement: a job action directed against one of the few fast-food, family restaurant outlets in the nation organized by a labor union. + "Denny's has good food at a good price, but they're terrible to their workers," said Pauli Mortillite, a 30-year-old waiter who joined an informational picket line outside the chain restaurant on the White Horse Pike near Atlantic City. He was one of the employees and their supporters who rallied to draw attention to what they claim is the franchise operator's refusal to negotiate a contract with the upstart union. + The Denny's in Absecon is the only one of the chain's more than 1,500 restaurants where service and kitchen workers have formed a union. + Four days later, as the protest continued, Superior Court Judge Anthony Gibson of Atlantic County ruled that seven people can picket outside Denny's at any one time, but cannot stand in the parking lot or be closer to one another than 10 feet. + Though Denny's is a full-service restaurant chain, with waiters and tips, and occupies a niche in the food industry just above companies like McDonald's, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken, it is part of the fast-food explosion of the last quarter-century that has pushed aside roadside diners and mom-and-pop breakfast bars to offer standardized fare at low prices. + It is rare, though, for workers paid minimum wages or dependent on tips to risk jobs by demanding better working conditions and benefits. Only 3 to 5 percent of waiters and waitresses in the country are union members, industry statistics show. + "In an industry where you have teen-agers, senior citizens and illegal aliens lined up to take these jobs, most of the workers don't want to rock the boat," said Jack Lavin, a spokesman for the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, whose 400,000 members work chiefly in quality hotels and "white tablecloth" restaurants in major cities. + Mr. Lavin said skill levels drop with menu prices at the lower end of the industry and managers can easily replace strikers with new workers who have little or no experience. + It is no accident that a Denny's near Atlantic City, where the casino industry is heavily unionized, was the first in the chain to organize. + "A guy who was a waiter laid off at one of the casino hotels was hired last Christmas and he told us we were crazy to do all the side work our management made us do," said Frankie Vigue, 18, a waitress. + She said part of the daily routine was to perform "deep cleaning" work between waiting on tables, like scrubbing garbage cans, storage spaces and table bases. + "I don't know how the customers would like it if they knew I am handling chemicals and trash, and the next minute serving them coffee," she added. + Servers dependent on tips for most of their income earn a starting wage of $2.13 an hour at the restaurant, said Vicki McMahon, 36, a waitress who has worked there two years. + "On some days, I am stuck there two hours after the end of my shift to do cleaning," she said. "Since I'm not waiting on tables during that time, I don't make more than $2.22 an hour, which is my nontip wage. When I'm told to run the cash register for a few hours, it can cost me $20 a day." + Denny's in Absecon is owned by a franchise operator, American Family Restaurants of Englishtown, N.J. "It is company policy not to make statements on labor relations," said a woman at its headquarters who identified herself only as Marie. + The chain is operated by Flagstar Company Inc. of Spartanburg, S.C., which owns about 1,530 outlets. Flagstar also coordinates marketing and food policies with 493 independent franchise operators like American Family Restaurants. + Denny's recently underwent a public relations crisis in dealing with allegations that its outlets discriminated against black patrons, and Flagstar has agreed to pay $54 million to settle claims growing from these complaints. + "Flagstar has absolutely no involvement with the union negotiations at the Absecon outlet," said Debbie Atkins, a Flagstar spokeswoman. "The franchise is a totally independent business." + Her statement was in response to a union suggestion that Flagstar was heavily involved behind the scenes in the negotiations. + "I simply cannot understand why the local owners are refusing to offer a decent raise unless they are being directed to do so by the Denny's corporate office," said Terry McCabe, business agent and chief negotiator for Local 54 of the restaurant workers union. + She charged that Flagstar was afraid that a successful union contract at Absecon would encourage workers at other Denny's restaurants to organize. There are 16 other outlets in New Jersey, 32 in New York State and 10 in Connecticut. The National Labor Relations Board is looking into the treatment of Denny's workers at outlets in Mount Laurel and Marlton who were laid off after signing union organizing cards, Ms. McCabe said. + The union was certified to represent the Absecon workers last April and negotiations since then with the franchise operator have failed to produce a contract. The latest offer, which included elimination of most of the "deep cleaning" requirements, proposed a 1 percent annual salary increase, tantamount to a raise of two cents an hour, for most of the hourly workers, Ms. McCabe said. Before the workers organized, they were given average yearly increases of 3 to 4 percent, she said. + While a strike had been threatened, the workers voted on Nov. 30 to continue working while holding job actions like the Dec. 2 rally to call attention to the outlet. + "Because they are in the service industry, chains are vulnerable to public relations pressure, one of the few tools workers in high-turnover, low-wage jobs can use," said Dorothy Sue Cobble, an associate professor at Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations. Dr. Cobble is author of "Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions" (University of Illinois Press, 1991). + But she said it was very difficult for service workers to organize restaurant by restaurant. "The target needs to be the entire chain," she said, of the industry in general, "and there doesn't seem to be much success in getting any large movement started." + +LOAD-DATE: December 10, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Denny's, which recently settled a lawsuit charging widespread racism toward customers, has another problem: a picket line in Absecon, N.J., at the only Denny's with a union of kitchen and service workers. (Dith Pran/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +428 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 10, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +THEATER IN REVIEW + +BYLINE: By D.J.R. BRUCKNER + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 16; Column 3; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 319 words + + +One Play Is New; +2 Have New Versions +'Shelter,' 'Live Witness' and + 'Older People' +Greenwich Street Theater + The Chain Lightning Theater company's short play festival is presenting one new work and new versions of two others. +In "Shelter," the new play, by Sandford Stokes, a prostitute (Leslie Colucci) and a gay hustler with AIDS (Max Faugno) try to bring a little holiday spirit to a New York alcoholic (Kricker James) who lives in a refrigerator carton, tortured by an unbearable memory of family tragedy. There are touching and funny moments in this overlong short play, but the dialogue and ideas are exhaustingly cliched. +Jim Neu's snappy 1992 work, "Live Witness," stages an on-the-air battle of innuendo and suspicion between the co-hosts of a television interview show (Cheryl Horne and Jerry Mettner). As the pair undermine their very identities in mind-twisting repartee, we are teased into recognizing and laughing at our own gullibility as television watchers. The high point is a witty song in which Ms. Horne declares passionately: "Whoever you are, I'm glad it is you./There's nothing you and I can't co-do." +"Older People," a play with 15 comic scenes by John Ford Noonan, has not been seen here since its first production in 1972. Three of its funniest segments make up the last part of this festival. In a seaside episode Sandi Skodnik is a delightfully crazed old hysteric longing for life to begin over again and Sanford Morris a perfect straight man for her. Two episodes feature Mark Barkan and Frank O'Brien as lifelong friends in a retirement home and as doddering cowboy songwriters trying to remember the second stanza of an absurd, bawdy song that once made them famous. These actors know how to make an audience feel the bite in Mr. Noonan's jokes. The festival continues at the theater, 547 Greenwich Street, in SoHo, through Dec. 18. D. J. R. BRUCKNER + +LOAD-DATE: December 10, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Leslie Colucci (Daisy Taylor/"Shelter") + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +429 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 10, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Attacks Begin on Plan to Cut Social Programs + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 30; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 950 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 + +In a taste of battles likely to dominate American politics for the next decade, labor unions and spokesmen for the elderly today attacked proposals from a panel advising President Clinton on how to slow the growth of Social Security, Medicare and other Government benefit programs. + After three hours of debate, the chairman of the panel, Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, admitted that he had only four or five votes of the 20 needed to win an official endorsement of his recommendations. The 32-member panel, the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform, is scheduled to hold its final meeting on Wednesday, with no consensus in sight. + As part of a comprehensive plan to control the cost of Federal benefit programs, Mr. Kerrey and the vice chairman of the commission, Senator John C. Danforth, Republican of Missouri, proposed raising the eligibility age for Medicare and the normal retirement age, at which full Social Security benefits become available, to 70, from the current 65. They would also reduce Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance and certain veterans' benefits for people with high incomes. + Critics immediately denounced the proposals, just as Mr. Kerrey had predicted. Thomas R. Donahue, secretary-treasurer of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said, "These measures would destroy the retirement income and health system that Americans have enjoyed for 60 years." He asserted that "there is no crisis in the Social Security retirement program." + Robert M. Ball, a former Commissioner of Social Security, said that Mr. Kerrey's proposals, taken together, would mean a 44 percent reduction in benefits for workers who have earned average wages over the course of their lives. "Raising the normal retirement age to 70 would reduce benefits not only for early retirees, but also for those who wait until age 70 to retire," Mr. Ball said. + It is unclear whether Senator Kerrey, who expressed impatience with his critics, will engage in the lengthy discussions and negotiations that will be needed to forge agreement within his panel. It is also unclear whether his proposals will improve or worsen the political climate for members of Congress who want to curb the growth of Social Security and Medicare. + Horace B. Deets, executive director of the American Association of Retired Persons, said he was stunned by Mr. Kerrey's proposals because they would require older people to "bear, not share, the burden of deficit reduction." The proposals, he said, are not balanced; two-thirds of the proposed savings would come from Social Security and Medicare. + Martin A. Corry, director of Federal affairs at the association, said: "Only a small proportion of workers retire at 65. The average retirement age is now 61 1/2, though some retirees return to the labor force for part-time or seasonal work." + Workers can now collect Social Security retirement benefits at ages as low as 62, but the benefits for early retirees are reduced, and the reduction is larger for people who retire earlier. + Thomas R. Margenau, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration, said: "Fifty-one percent of the people who apply for Social Security retirement benefits do so at the age of 62. Only 25 percent wait till age 65." + Richard L. Trumka, a commission member who is also president of the United Mine Workers of America, said Mr. Kerrey seemed to be operating on the premise that "we must destroy these programs in order to save them." + "The means-testing of Medicare would, in effect, redefine it as welfare," Mr. Trumka said. "And we all know the level of public support for welfare programs." + Mr. Kerrey said such hostile reactions suggested that Americans could not deal with serious problems until they turned into a crisis. + Several commission members expressed support for Mr. Kerrey's approach. Among them were Robert E. Denham, the chairman of Salomon Inc.; Peter G. Peterson, chairman of the Blackstone Group, an investment bank, and two Republican Representatives, C. Christopher Cox of California and J. Alex McMillan of North Carolina. + Some members of the commission said they needed more time to analyze and discuss Mr. Kerrey's proposals, so they would understand how the changes affected people at different income levels. + One commission member, Senator Alan K. Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, said the critics of Mr. Kerrey's plan were trying to whip up "raw political fear" by using inflammatory words like "cut, slash, chop, destroy and dismantle." In fact, he said, people over the age of 50 will not be much affected. + Wade J. Henderson, director of the Washington office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said the proposals would have disproportionate effects on blacks and "could exacerbate racial divisions." For black males born in 1992, he said, the life expectancy is 65 years, so many of them will not live long enough to receive Social Security benefits if the retirement age is increased to 70. + One of Mr. Kerrey's proposals would reduce the Social Security payroll tax for employees. Workers would have to invest the extra money they received in private savings plans or individual retirement accounts. + Asked whether this was a first step toward "privatizing Social Security," Mr. Kerrey said: "Yes. But private retirement benefits are not destructive of Social Security." + Under Mr. Kerrey's proposal, elderly people could stay in Medicare, but they could also get Government vouchers to enroll in private health plans. In addition, he would limit the tax deductions that employers may take for the cost of employee health benefits. Under current law, there is no such limit. + +LOAD-DATE: December 10, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: No sooner had the head of a panel advising the President on how to slow the growth of Government benefit programs made his suggestions than opponents attacked them. The chairman, Senator Bob Kerrey, talked about his proposals yesterday before a hearing of the panel. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +430 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 11, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In Praise of the Counterculture + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 14; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 731 words + +Generational bonding experiences have always been important in American life. Civil War veterans kept meeting until time scythed down the last of them. The Depression shaped the economic dreams, and fears, of millions of young couples and their children. People who fought in World War II have moved through history with a fortifying set of common memories. So have the children born to them during and shortly after that war. + This last group profoundly altered the way Americans think about their inner lives, their fellow citizens, the earth upon which we live and the process by which older citizens in Washington decide when and where young Americans die in combat. + Now, in an excess of Republican triumphalism, the party's new leaders have decided to make "counterculture" into a pejorative. What flapdoodle. Only a few periods in American history have seen such a rich fulfillment of the informing ideals of personal freedom and creativity that lie at the heart of the American intellectual tradition. Like many of his elders, Representative Newt Gingrich may prefer a stricter regimen of social conformity and religious observance. + But the millions of Americans who incorporated the cultural ideals of the Sixties and the decade's healthy spirit of political activism are foolish to abandon the high ground because of his post-election slanging. Certainly the excesses of the decade are easy to parody, and its summery, hedonistic ethos then and now reduced modern puritans to fits of twisting discomfort. America is still close enough to the frontier experience of relentless work and danger to view any kind of fun with suspicion. + No true historian, however, can believe that it is possible to repudiate so large a cultural event in a nation's history, or to dismiss its seminal political events as a "McGovern-nik" aberration. + The 60's spawned a new morality-based politics that emphasized the individual's responsibility to speak out against injustice and corruption. It was this renewed sense of responsibility that led enough people to raise their voices to end America's most disastrous foreign military adventure, the Vietnam War. On this level, the Sixties saw an exercise in mass sanity in which a nation's previously voiceless citizens -- its young -- overturned a war policy that was, in fact, deranged. + The spirit of the age, like the tactics of the antiwar movement, was shaped by the civil rights movement. Its lessons of citizen empowerment, to use the 90's term, led to the progress of the environmental, women's and gay rights movements. The counterculture, in sum, produced a renewal of the Thoreauvian ideal of the clear, defiant voice of the dissenting citizen. + There was another empowering aspect of the counterculture's confrontation with the Washington monolith. Those days produced the sad wisdom, now indispensable in American politics, that the Government will lie to protect its interests and that constant vigilance is necessary to keep it honest. + The influence of 60's individualism was not limited to politics. It fostered a psychological movement that, while it burdened our shelves with tomes of psychobabble, also enabled people in emotional torment to ask for help without being stigmatized. It gave people in dead or abusive relationships permission to break out. + Would many Americans truly like to imagine a society returned to the dictatorship of the majority culture? Would they like to go back to the days of blatant, sanctioned discrimination against African-Americans and women, to a world deprived of all the 60's ingredients that still simmer in the cultural stew, including an American music that has become a global language? + We think not. For one thing, there are too many Republicans who are also Grateful Dead fans or, for that matter, divorced, ex-potheads and opponents of state-regulated prayer and abortion. + At its essence, the counterculture was about one of conservatives' favorite words: values. It was a repudiation of the blind obedience and reflexive cynicism of politics as usual. It was about exposing hypocrisy, whether personal or political, and standing up to irrational authority. As in any large movement, it accommodated its share of charlatans and sociopaths. But it is part of us, a legacy around which Americans can now unite, rather than allow themselves to be divided. + +LOAD-DATE: December 11, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +431 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 11, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Crime + +BYLINE: By Marilyn Stasio + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 38; Column 3; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1143 words + +Forget about English country houses -- there is no more insular setting for a mystery than an Israeli kibbutz. Inspector Michael Ohayon, the reflective detective who puzzles out Batya Gur's intellectually challenging mysteries, feels the waves of suspicion and hostility in MURDER ON A KIBBUTZ (HarperCollins, $20) when he invades one of these closed societies to investigate the death of its administrative secretary. "You're wasting your time," one elder says dismissively. "It's impossible to understand from the outside." +As far as the murder mystery goes, that's not true. There are some obvious suspects in the poisoning death of Osnat Harel, whose progressive views about letting children sleep in their parents' homes and setting up separate quarters for the elderly sowed a great deal of dissension in this very old, very traditional commune. But the deeper mysteries of how life is lived on a kibbutz do, indeed, seem almost impenetrable to an outsider. Which is why Ms. Gur, speaking through Dalya Bilu's lucid translation from the Hebrew, can grab her readers with dry discussions of "egalitarian elitism" and fussy deliberations over who picks the peaches and who cuts the dress patterns -- seemingly simple housekeeping matters that actually reflect earthshaking political and ideological changes transforming kibbutz society. + It's always nice to know what the boys in the back room are up to, and the F.B.I. agents Cuthbert Gibbons and Mike Tozzi are the guys with their eyes glued to the peepholes. The odd-couple partners in Anthony Bruno's crime books have a sting operation going in BAD APPLE (Delacorte, $21.50) to get the goods on Armand (Buddha) Stanzione, a New Jersey loan shark, and his associate Tony (Bells) Bellavita. But something goes wrong with Operation Shark Bite. An undercover agent is shot, and that hot dog Tozzi compromises his own cover, as a porn merchant hitting up the wise guys for a business loan, by making time with the Mafia princess whom Tony Bells has designs on. +Although there is less of a plot here than in other novels in this manic series, Mr. Bruno keeps us entertained with a razzle-dazzle style that tap-dances from horror to farce without tripping. If the stakes weren't so high, a furious car chase with good guys and bad guys being chewed out by the spirited women in their lives would be truly hilarious. Tony Bells has just the right moves for this style. Smooth and sadistic in a shakedown scene, he goes berserk in a frighteningly funny shoot-out at Macy's and upstages Santa in the Thanksgiving Day Parade. "His focus and execution were extraordinary," Tozzi enviously notes of Tony Bells, who slips into the author's big mug book of memorable villains with the silken grace of an adder. +American politicians think they're so tough. They'd get their ears torn off in the dogfights that erupt in Stephen Cook's ONE DEAD TORY (Foul Play/Countryman, $20) when the governing Conservative Party in a prosperous London suburb proposes a business tax break that would mean another 10 percent cut in social spending. There are riots in the streets, a snarling standoff between Tory and Labor, and vitriolic infighting among factions of the Conservative Party leadership. "It's like something out of 'Animal Farm,' " observes one combatant who was bloodied by his own party cohorts at a fractious borough council meeting. +But the participants in this political brawl agree that someone has gone too far when John Bullock, the abrasive council president who stirred up all the mischief, is found at the bottom of a quarry with his head bashed in. "Very un-British" seems to be the consensus. +Mr. Cook, a journalist at The Guardian, makes British municipal politics look a little dirtier than pig wrestling and a lot more fun than the sack of Rome. His detective, an earnest young police sergeant named Judy Best, wastes too much energy fighting outdated job prejudices about "female intuition" and garbage like that. But she has a good head for what turns out to be a complicated case, and she brings a vigor to her work that should keep this new series solidly on its feet. +Shirley McClintock's unsentimental view of life -- which asserts itself in a tart tongue and an overall prickly temperament -- brands her a welcome maverick in the sisterhood of gushy heroines who work the cozy mystery. Recent knee surgery and a move from her working ranch in Colorado to her spread of guesthouses in New Mexico make B. J. Oliphant's amateur sleuth, who is looking age 60 in the eyeball, even more testy than usual in DEATH SERVED UP COLD (Fawcett, paper, $4.99). A custody suit over her 14-year-old adopted daughter doesn't do much for Shirley's mood, either. She really doesn't need the aggravation when a tourist staying in one of her cabins dies suddenly from some mysterious bug -- and when that death proves to be murder. +"Obsession plus superstition yields inquisition, and inquisitions kill a lot of people," Shirley concludes after discovering that her murdered guest had a secret agenda tantamount to witch hunting. This sensible attitude is typical of Shirley's thinking, which cuts through a lot of the spiritual rant that filters up from nearby Santa Fe. Her plain-talk opinions on everything from teen-age pregnancy to the suicidal impulses of sheep get the proper deference from the guests at Rancho del Valle, who are not your usual assortment of tourist oddities but vital characters who play an active part in Ms. Oliphant's well-laid plot. +Can you take a cliche? A jerky wisecrack? How about a lot of cornball cliches and puerile private-eye humor? Dennis Lehane sure makes it hard on himself in A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR (Harcourt Brace, $22.95). But once he drops the affectations that he seems to think are de rigueur in hard-boiled detective fiction, he has some honest things to say about racial and class warfare in working-class neighborhoods like Dorchester, Mass., where this debut novel is set. +Patrick Kenzie, a tyro investigator who operates out of a church belfry (I warned you!), takes a fishy assignment from a state senator: to recover vaguely described "documentation" swiped by the woman who cleans his Statehouse office. The cleaning woman is a sad case. Her husband and her son are the leaders of rival street gangs, and the only respect she gets is at her funeral. +Mr. Lehane's detective goes where few gumshoes have gone before -- into the mean ghettos and rough bars of depressed mill towns and down memory lane for recollections of his own brutal father -- to follow the author's theme of the angry alienation of blue-collar dads and their disaffected sons. This is good, serious stuff, but it's not easy to reconcile it with the flippant style of Kenzie and his improbable partner, a tough cookie named Angie who belongs in some other comic book. + +LOAD-DATE: December 11, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +432 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 12, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +U.S. Census Study Reveals A Nation of Rolling Stones + +BYLINE: By SAM ROBERTS + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 781 words + +Nearly three times as many Americans are transients with shallow roots only months old as homebodies who have lived in the same house for more than three decades, a new study shows. +Over all, according to a Census Bureau analysis being released today, more than 2 in 10 of the nation's households moved in the 15 months before the 1990 census, evidence of a mobility that among developed countries, is unique to the United States. + The analysis also found that fewer than 1 in 10 households had been in the same house since Dwight D. Eisenhower was President and the newly transplanted Los Angeles Dodgers, heralding the West's ascendancy, won the World Series. +Pittsburgh and two New York City suburbs -- Long Island and northern New Jersey -- were the only major metropolitan areas in the nation where people who moved in the 15 months before the census were outnumbered by people who had lived in the same house since 1959. +According to the analysis, the proportion of renters who were recent movers rose slightly in the last three decades. Among owners, though, the share who had moved recently declined to 9.4 percent from 12.2 percent, which census officials described as perhaps a historic low. +"As far as we know, it's the lowest," said Robert Bonnette, the Census Bureau demographer who conducted the analysis. +Striking differences separated the restless Americans who had moved in the 15 months before April 1, 1990, from the rooted stayers who had stayed put since before 1960. +The more foot-loose householders were likely to be unmarried men who were striking out after living with their parents or with roommates in rented houses or apartments, were younger and earned more than stayers, and tended to live in college towns or near military bases in the South and West. +People with the shallowest roots lived in Dallas, Orlando, Fla., and San Diego and in Bryan-College Station, Tex., home of Texas A & M University, where more than 4 in 10 householders were recent newcomers. The stayers were often homeowners and empty-nesters and other older married couples and elderly women living alone in the Northeast and Midwest. +In western Pennsylvania, Johnstown and the Beaver Valley area led the nation's 335 metropolitan areas in stayers, with 24 percent and 22 percent, respectively. +"I believe it," said Linda Weaver, the mayor of Johnstown. "Families grow up in a home and when the parents pass away it's turned over to the children, a cousin, an uncle. It becomes the family homestead. My family lived in the same house for 40-some years, until about five years ago when my mother and father moved into the house that I bought." +Not surprisingly, the nation's renters are more mobile than homeowners, with the typical renter living in his home for only two years and the typical owner at home for 10 years. Four in 10 of the rented households had recently moved. In five metropolitan areas, including College Station and Lawrence, Kan., home of the University of Kansas, more than 6 in 10 renters had pulled up their shallow roots in the last 15 months. +Renters in metropolitan New York defied the pattern. More than 1 in 20 lived in the same apartment or house for three decades or more, which demographers largely attributed to regulations in New York City and Westchester County that limit rent increases. In the New York suburbs, restrictive zoning crimped new construction after housing booms in the 1950's and 1960's. +Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island, and Bergen and Passaic counties in northern New Jersey, which ranked just behind Pittsburgh in the proportion of stayers to movers, shared several characteristics with the quiescent metropolises of western Pennsylvania. +"It's very satisfied people who raised their kids and who then filled their houses with goods," said William B. Shore, senior fellow of the Regional Plan Association of New York, who also attributed some of the recent immobility to depressed housing prices, which may have discouraged owners from selling. +Demographers noted that the South and the West had more than their share of movers. As evidence, all four metropolitan areas where about 1 in 6 or more of the owners had just bought homes were in the South and the West: in Las Vegas, Nev.; Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.; Yuma, Ariz., and Naples, Fla. In contrast, Pennsylvania was home to all but 3 of the 15 metropolitan areas where about 1 in 6 households stayed put. +Among people between the ages of 15 and 24, more than 7 in 10 had recently moved, the census found. Among those 75 and older, the mobility rate was about 1 in 20. The median age of recent movers was 33; of stayers, 71. + +LOAD-DATE: December 12, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graphs: "On the Move" shows percentage of renters and owners for 1960 and 1990. (Source: Bureau of the Census); "Demographics: Movers and Stayers" shows the top five U.S. cities with the highest percentages of recent movers and stayers. (Source: Bureau of the Census) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +433 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 12, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +THEATER REVIEW; +On Both Sides of Urban Violence: Dehumanized and Interchangeable + +BYLINE: By BEN BRANTLEY + +SECTION: Section C; Page 13; Column 1; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 992 words + +The murderous teen-ager who is the title character of Charles Fuller's "Zooman and the Sign" is, on his own harrowingly skewed terms, a thorough egalitarian. In the stunning monologue that begins the 1980 play, which has been revived at the Second Stage Theater, this inner-city Philadelphia youth seems to cast an eye of combustible contempt over anyone who crosses his line of vision. +He knifed an "ole jive West Indian" at a subway stop, he tells us, because the man was swinging his arms as if he owned the platform. He is glad, he says, that his aged aunt's Social Security check was stolen by junkies. Old people in general, "all bent over and twisted up, skin hanging off their faces," make him sick. + As for the girl he accidentally killed that day in a shooting that is the mainspring of the play's plot, it was entirely her fault. The "little bitch," as he puts it, had no business sitting on her front steps in the middle of what everyone knows is "a war zone." +As portrayed by Larry Gilliard Jr., in a smart, bravura performance that makes no apologies for his character, Zooman is a marvel of disaffection. He punctuates his frightening pronouncements with a mechanical, joyless whinny of a laugh, and his eyes rove the audience with a dead, ever-defensive gaze. He's a morally anesthetized punk, a spiritual cousin of the futurist hoodlums of "A Clockwork Orange" who nonetheless belongs, all too familiarly, to the America of today. +Mr. Fuller's take on the phenomenon this character represents still seems remarkable in its nonjudgmental clearsightedness and intelligence. "Zooman" remains a play with problems, and Seret Scott's straightforward production, while admirable in its nonsensationalist restraint, doesn't succeed in disguising them. The drama lacks the taut narrative drive and full-bodied characterizations of "A Soldier's Story," the 1981 work for which the author won a Pulitzer Prize. +But its searing presentation of the logic of a world in which people on both sides of the law become dehumanizingly interchangeable continues to demand attention. "Zooman" animates a moral argument in rich and uncompromisingly complex ways that avoid reductionist explanations and consoling solutions. +The play shifts between Zooman's self-justifying monologues and scenes that show the family of Jinny Tate, the 12-year-old girl the youth killed, dealing with the effects of the crime. There is grief, of course, but also righteous indignation when they realize that while many of their neighbors must have witnessed the killing, none will admit it. +The Tates deal with this realization in resonantly different ways. Jinny's mother, Rachel (Oni Faida Lampley), numbed by pain and disgust, wants only to leave the neighborhood. Her 14-year-old son, Victor (Alex Bess in an affectingly understated performance), gets a gun from a friend. Jinny's father, Reuben (Tony Todd), a bus driver and former prize fighter, puts up a sign that says, "The killers of our daughter Jinny are free on the streets because our neighbors will not identify them." This in turn sets off a chain of events, including nasty harassment of the family, that becomes a study in social pathology. +The play's most remarkable achievement is that Zooman makes a certain warped sense. His undiscriminating hostility reflects an environment that perceives him as faceless, a ready-made scapegoat. "Every time somebody black did something and the cops didn't have a name, they busted me!" he says. The arbitrarily brutal life he knows is for him part of a given system with its own set of rules. Even more disturbing is the fact that most of the Tates' neighbors seem to accept those rules as well. +As Rachel observes: "No one buried in the graveyard can read their own inscription. And this neighborhood is dead." And throughout the drama, there is a sense of people acting blindly with misbegotten results. Zooman, aiming at a gangland enemy, shoots a girl he has never met. The Tates accuse the wrong neighbor of withholding evidence. And Zooman's final undoing involves his being mistaken for someone else. +Mr. Fuller charts this futile pattern compellingly and persuasively. The domestic drama of the Tates is less convincing. A subplot about tension in the marriage and its effect on the children seems perfunctory and patly sentimental. And Ms. Scott, while keeping themes in sturdy focus, is less sure in building the play emotionally, and its climax is curiously flat. +The actors, who include Stephen M. Henderson and Saundra McClain in deftly shaped turns as visiting relatives, are all solid. Mr. Todd, a towering man who wears his size with appealing awkwardness, is considerably more. His Reuben is a giant of confused sorrow, loaded with the potential for violence, and his suppressed explosiveness is the perfect foil for Mr. Gilliard's casually worn destructiveness. +The current theater season, with its revivals of such recent works as Wendy Wasserstein's "Uncommon Women and Others" (also at the Second Stage) and Michael Cristofer's "Shadow Box," has demonstrated that topical plays can date quickly. "Zooman," however, remains a bracing and unfortunately relevant piece of theater. + +ZOOMAN AND THE SIG +By Charles Fuller; directed by Seret Scott; sets by Marjorie Bradley Kellogg; costumes by Karen Perry; lighting by Michael Gilliam; sound by Janet Kalas; production stage manager, Elise-Ann Konstantin; stage manager, Elaine Bayless; associate producer, Carol Fishman. Presented by the Second Stage Theater, Carole Rothman, artistic director; Suzanne Schwartz Davidson, producing director. At 2162 Broadway, at 76th Street, Manhattan. + +WITH: Larry Gilliard Jr. (Zooman), Oni Faida Lampley (Rachel Tate), Tony Todd (Reuben Tate), Stephen M. Henderson (Emmett Tate), Alex Bess (Victor Tate), Willie Stiggers Jr. (Russell Adams), Ed Wheeler (Donald Jackson), Saundra McClain (Ash Boswell) and Kim Bey (Grace Georges). + +LOAD-DATE: December 12, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Oni Faida Lampley, left, Tony Todd and Saundra McClain play members of a bereaved family. (Susan Cook/"Zooman and the Sign") + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +434 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 15, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Kohl Names Abortion Foe To Family Post in Cabinet + +BYLINE: By CRAIG R. WHITNEY, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 645 words + +DATELINE: BONN, Dec. 12 + +With German political parties still struggling four years after unification to reach consensus on a new abortion law to replace one that the courts rejected as unconstitutional, Chancellor Helmut Kohl has given the debate a new twist by naming an opponent of abortion as his Cabinet minister in charge of family policy. +East Germany permitted free access to abortion in the early stages of pregnancy. After unification, the Government loosened some of the restrictions West Germany had placed on abortion, until the country's highest court stepped in. Since then abortion has been technically illegal, though not punished. + The Cabinet member is Claudia Nolte, an eastern German Roman Catholic who heads the Ministry for the Family, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. As minister, Mrs. Nolte will play an important role in influencing the debate in Parliament over a new abortion law. +When appointed last month, Mrs. Nolte told Parliament that she would do her best to seek a consensus. But she also said a new abortion law should encourage prospective mothers to say "yes to the child." +At 28, Mrs. Nolte is the youngest Cabinet minister in 50 years, and she is one of only three women in the Cabinet. She is also one of only two people from eastern Germany in Mr. Kohl's slimmed-down 16-member Cabinet; the other is Environment Minister Angela Merkel. +The Chancellor, who is also Roman Catholic, has avoided staking out a position on abortion. He said he had chosen Mrs. Nolte because he was impressed by her determination to stand up for principle. +But the appointment has provoked criticism. Barbara Ritter, a member of a nationwide abortion-rights movement here, said: "Her position on abortion is extreme -- she wants to make it punishable, period. At least now the Government has put its cards on the table." +Mrs. Nolte led the Christian Democratic Party list in Thuringia State in the first all-German elections in December 1990, and in the Parliament in Bonn she soon acquired a reputation for being independent minded, particularly on the issue of abortion. Mrs. Nolte voted against one liberalization bill supported by a majority of her own party. +From 1972 East German women had had the right to abortion until the 12th week of pregnancy, and more than 70,000 a year underwent the procedure in the late 1980's. This was about as many as in the western part of the country, which had four times the population. +West Germany also tried to lift the legal prohibition on abortion in the mid-1970's, but the courts overturned the first attempts and made it possible in most cases only if the attending physician approved. +After reunification in 1990, Parliament approved a law that gave women the right to abortion after mandatory counseling about the dangers and drawbacks. That law was overturned by the country's highest court in May 1993 on the ground that it violated the constitutional requirement to protect human life. But it also ruled that women who underwent abortions in the first three months of pregnancy, and their doctors, should not be prosecuted. +In practice, since the state-mandated health insurance program was barred from paying for abortions and state-run hospitals rarely performed them, the ruling meant that it was easier for women who could afford it to go to some other country for the operation or pay for it themselves in private clinics here. +The political parties have been struggling to reach agreement on a new law that would pay for the operation for indigent women who needed it, but have been divided on the income limit needed to qualify and other details. +Parliament gave up trying to enact a new law over the summer, but the Parliament elected on Oct. 16 is under pressure to resolve the problem soon, since the interim arrangements permitted by the court decision expire at the end of this year. + +LOAD-DATE: December 15, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +435 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 16, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +THE CLINTON TAX PLAN: THE OVERVIEW; +Clinton Outlines a Plan for Tax Breaks + +BYLINE: By TODD S. PURDUM, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1459 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 + +Bracing for battle with a Republican Congress and striving to win back a disgruntled electorate, President Clinton tonight sketched a blueprint of middle-class tax breaks, smaller government and new incentives for education and training for the second half of his term. +In a 10-minute televised address to the nation from the Oval Office, the President returned to the winning themes of his 1992 campaign, presenting himself as the champion of hard-working ordinary Americans. He sounded what amounted to the opening notes of his 1996 re-election effort in remarks aimed as much at reshaping himself as the Government he wants to continue to lead. + Mr. Clinton summoned Congress and the country to support a package of tax breaks intended to help middle-class families care for young children, send them to college or technical school, and plan for retirement and life's biggest and most important expenses, like buying a first home. [Transcript, page A36.] +In a move to cast himself as the fiscally responsible defender of the elderly -- which could severely limit his options -- Mr. Clinton challenged Congress to pass his program "without adding to the deficit and without any new cuts" in Social Security or Medicare. He said he would finance his tax package, which aides said amounted to about $60 billion over five years, by shrinking and reorganizing Government departments in ways that he left mostly unspecified. +"Fifty years ago, an American President proposed a G.I. bill of rights to help returning veterans from World War II go on to college, buy a home and raise their children," said Mr. Clinton, who, in a speech by turns bookish and personally upbeat, recalled his own youth as the son of a widowed mother who fought to make a better life. "That built this country. Tonight, I propose a middle-class bill of rights." +As he strove to assure a hearing for proposals that the Republican Congress could well ignore, Mr. Clinton embraced such traditionally Republican notions as smaller, less intrusive government and lower taxes. But he put the debate in his own terms by suggesting his actions were a fulfillment of his 1992 campaign pledge to cut the tax burden of the middle class and invest in education and training to prepare the nation for the 21st century -- ideas also long supported by the moderate Democrats who have recently accused him of forsaking them. +The President's plan would offer an annual income tax credit of up to $500 for each child under age 13 to families with adjusted gross incomes of up to $75,000, and up to $10,000 in annual deductions for any kind of post-high school education for families earning no more than $120,000. +Mr. Clinton also proposed expanding eligibility for tax-deductible contributions to Individual Retirement Accounts to families earning up to $100,000, from $50,000 now. He would permit tax-free withdrawals before retirement age to pay for education, catastrophic illness, care of an elderly parent or the purchase of a first home. +The President also proposed to consolidate 60 Federal job training programs into a single system that would give vouchers of between $2,000 and $3,000 to those who qualify for training in private employment programs. +Speaking from his desk with a flag and bright red poinsettias behind him, the President went out of his way to seem above partisan bickering, insisting: "This is not about politics as usual. As I have said for years, it is not about moving left or right, but moving forward. It is not about Government being bad or good, but about what kind of Government will best enable us to fulfill our God-given potential. +"And it's not about the next election, either. That's in your hands. Meanwhile, I'm going to do what I think is right. My rule for the next two years will be country first, and politics as usual dead last. I hope the new Congress will follow the same rule. And I hope you will, too." +But Republicans were swift and sharp in their response. Representative Jim Leach of Iowa, the new chairman of the Banking Committee and Mr. Clinton's chief Congressional critic on the Whitewater affair, accused the President of blatant accommodation to the new Republican realities. +"In a pretense of leadership, the President has strapped on the seat belt in the caboose of the freight train engineered by the new Speaker of the House," Mr. Leach said, "and made a leaner-government theme the centerpiece of both political parties." +In the Republicans' official televised reply to the President's speech, the newly elected Senator Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee vowed that his party would renew efforts to slash the size of Government, reshape Congress and set the country on a new path. +"We campaigned on these principles, and now we are going to do something that has become all too unusual in American politics," Mr. Thompson said. "We are going to do exactly what we said we were going to do during the campaign." +Officials said the President intended to pay for his plan with a sweeping mix of consolidation and cost cutting in five Federal agencies -- the Departments of Energy, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, as well as the General Services Administration (the Government's real estate management arm) and the Office of Personnel Management -- and by continuing existing caps on spending for discretionary programs into 2000. +Discretionary programs are the part of the Federal budget that must be approved each year and have a specific, limited budget. They do not include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or other "entitlements" on which the Government spends as much as necessary to cover all those who are eligible. +The Administration's approach postpones, at least until after the 1996 elections, hard decisions about just which programs would have to be cut to pay for the tax cuts. The White House deliberately deferred any detailed discussion of the rest of the budget until Mr. Clinton's State of the Union and budget messages next month, though the President tonight pledged a top-to-bottom review of spending in the coming weeks. +The new Republican majority in Congress has already proposed a broader, deeper range of tax and spending cuts, so even Presidential proposals that otherwise might be broadly popular with voters now face at best uphill fights and uncertain coalitions on Capitol Hill -- and quite likely will simply be declared dead on arrival in Congress. +Since the election, Mr. Clinton has struggled, first simply to absorb the Democrats' sweeping defeat, and then to respond to it, and he has been buffeted not only by bold pledges from the triumphant Republicans but also by harsh criticism and lukewarm support from many fellow Democrats. Indeed, the strongest statement that the new Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, made for Mr. Clinton tonight was that his "proposal appears to be a good one." +For the last 10 days, Mr. Clinton and his top advisers have reviewed scores of options, and aides said Mr. Clinton was still tinkering with the final version of his address until early this evening, striving to communicate both his vision for the future, and his resolve to pursue it. +"He lived the American dream," one senior aide said in a White House briefing before the speech. "He's going to say that to the American people, and he wants others to believe it again as well." +Mr. Clinton himself stressed that theme in one passage of his speech, explaining his desire to make the tax code work to support worthy social goals. "Just as we made mortgage interest tax deductible because we want people to own homes, we should make college tuition tax deductible because we want people to go to college," the remarks read. +The President repeated a line from his inaugural speech, saying "I still believe deeply that there is nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by what's right with America." He also echoed the second inaugural address of Abraham Lincoln, saying that the country needed "less malice and more charity." +The proposed tax cuts would take effect on Jan. 1, 1996, but senior officials acknowledged that their full effect was likely to be phased in over time, which would diminish the initial benefit. +Officials said about $24 billion in savings necessary to finance the tax breaks would come from restructuring Government agencies and farming out some functions to the private sector, though no cabinet department would be eliminated. It appears that the bulk of such savings would come from the Department of Energy. Another $52 billion in savings would come from continuing in force the caps on discretionary spending initially adopted as part of the 1990 budget accord through the turn of the century. + +LOAD-DATE: December 16, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: President Clinton addressed the nation last night from the Oval Office, proposing a series of tax breaks intended to help the middle class. (CNN) (pg. A1); President Clinton yesterday proposed a combination of tax reductions and Government cutbacks geared to help middle-class families buy houses, educate their children and save for retirement. Earlier in the day, he worked on his speech in the Treaty Room, in the residential quarters of the White House. (White House Photo via Reuters) (pg. A36) + +Charts: "CASE STUDIES: How the Tax Cut Would Work" + How the White House says the President's tax cut for the middle class would work for three hypothetical families. In each case, the four-person family (two adults, two children) has $50,000 in wage and salary income, $7,500 in itemized deductions, and $10,000 in personal exemptions ($2,500 a person). + +A $1,000 REDUCTION, OR 21 PERCENT CUT + Both children are 12 or under + Current Tax Bill -- $4,875 + Clinton Plan -- $3,875 + +A $1,500 REDUCTION, OR 31 PERCENT CUT + Both children are over 12; family has $10,000 in education expenses + Current Tax Bill -- $4,875 + Clinton Plan -- $3,374 + +A $600 REDUCTION, OR 12 PERCENT CUT + Both children are over 12; no education expenses; $4,000 contribution to individual retirement account + Current Tax Bill -- $4,875 + Clinton Plan -- $4,275 (pg. A36) + +"HIGHLIGHTS: The President's Proposal" + Highlights of the President's proposed package of tax and spending cuts as outlined by White House aides. + +TAX CUTS: $60 BILLION OVER FIVE YEARS + Children -- Create tax credit of $500 for each child under 13. Applies fully for families with incomes of less than $60,000; phased out at $75,000. + Education -- Allow deduction of up to $10,000 for post-secondary education. Applies fully to families with incomes of up to $100,000; phased out at $120,000. + Individual Retirement Accounts -- Raise cutoff for full IRA deduction for people not covered by retirement plan (up to $2,000 per wage earner) to family incomes of $80,000, up from current limit of $40,000. Phased out at $100,000, up from current $50,000. + Allow penalty-free early withdrawal of IRA funds for to pay for education, illness or illness of a parent or purchase of first home. + +SPENDING CUTS: $76 BILLION OVER FIVE YEARS + Cuts and management changes at Departments of Transportation, Energy and Housing and Urban Development and other agencies -- $ 24 billion. + Extension of freeze on discretionary spending -- $ 52 billion. + Spending cuts would be used both to cover cost of tax changes and to reduce the deficit by $16 billion over five years. (pg. A36) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +436 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 16, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO DIGEST + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 486 words + + +MAYOR PLANS INCENTIVES FOR WALL STREET + Mayor Giuliani proposed tax breaks and zoning changes to bolster the sagging real estate market of Wall Street and lower Manhattan. A1. + +GIULIANI SEEKS CUTS IN AID FOR POOR + The Giuliani administration began planning sharp reductions in health and welfare benefit programs for the poor as part of its strategy for handling a $2 billion budget gap. A1. + A judge urged the City Council and the Mayor to resolve their budget standoff. B8. + +NEW YORK CITY + +SHOWDOWN OVER THE SCHOOLS CHANCELLOR + As Mayor Giuliani continues to press for the ouster of Schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines, the Mayor stands all but alone, abandoned even by those who have supported his efforts to streamline government and eliminate waste. News analysis, B3. + +CONVICTION OF RABBI'S WIFE OVERTURNED + A Brooklyn judge threw out the conviction of a rabbi's wife on charges that she conspired with her husband and others to help a Jewish teen-ager hide from his family for two years. B3. + +A PHONE LINK TO LOVED ONES FAR AWAY + Hundreds of elderly people took advantage of free phone lines set up for the holidays by the Teleport Communications Group to call friends and loved ones overseas. B3. + +INCENDIARY DEVICE GOES OFF ON SUBWAY + Two teen-agers on a subway train in Harlem were burned, one seriously, when an incendiary device that one of them was carrying set a book bag on fire, the transit police said. B3. + +BROOKLYN JAIL WILL BE CLOSED + The City Correction Department said that it would close its jail near the old Brooklyn Navy Yard next week and transfer 400 inmates to its sprawling complex on Rikers Island. B3. + +GIRL DIES FROM FALL AT SCHOOL + An 11-year-old Brooklyn girl has died from a neck injury she received when she fell down a flight of stairs at her junior high school last week, the police said. B2. +The Coast Guard suspended its search for survivors from a merchant vessel that sank. A11. + +REGION + +ROWLAND FINDS TABLES TURNED + For two weeks, John G. Rowland, the first Republican elected governor in Connecticut in 20 years, has been barnstorming around the state, meeting people to build momentum for his plans to shrink government. But almost everywhere that he stopped someone demanded more money and more help from the state. B6. + +SUSPECT QUESTIONS MAN WHO STOPPED HIM + Colin Ferguson came face to face with Kevin Blum, the man who tackled him a year ago on a Long Island Rail Road train and halted a shooting rampage. B6. + +PATAKI FILLS 3 KEY POSITIONS + Governor-elect Pataki filled three jobs to complete his inner circle, announcing the appointment of an old friend, a chief aide to his mentor in the Legislature and a former press secretary to Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato. B7. +One of the victims of a stampede at an Elizabeth, N.J., club was carrying $1,715. B10. +Neediest Cases B2 +Chronicle B4 + +LOAD-DATE: December 16, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "PULSE: Housing Starts" shows seasonally adjusted annual rate, in thousands, for New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New England. (Source: Commerce Department) + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +437 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 16, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +For Elderly, a Phone Link to Loved Ones Far Away + +BYLINE: By JOE SEXTON + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 587 words + +Ann Kaufman is 91, and so she says she has trouble with words. She can never seem to find the right one, and she has lost some altogether. +"I'm old," she said. "I have the privilege to forget words." + Yesterday, though, as she punched numbers on a telephone trying to reach Israel, Ann Kaufman was confident she could master the vocabulary of the moment. +"I just want to say hello," she said. +She reached Israel, said hello and then some, as did hundreds of other elderly residents of Brooklyn. Taking advantage of free phone lines set up for the holidays by the Teleport Communications Group, people from Brighton Beach and Flatbush, Canarsie and Bushwick, walked into Borough Hall in Brooklyn yesterday and called Russia, Argentina, Mexico, Panama and South Africa. Similar setups were organized in the other four boroughs. +"I had wanted to call a young man who is in the Army in Germany, and who is like my own child," said Hazel Collman, a 64-year-old former bookkeeper who moved to Brooklyn from Jamaica 27 years ago. "He was a friend of my daughter. They didn't marry, but I didn't hold it against him. We stuck together. I live on a fixed income, and so I haven't spoken to him since May. +"I didn't reach him this morning. But I can pray. I think that line is open." +Alongside Mrs. Collman in the vaulted community room of Borough Hall, the men and women hunched over tables of phones, fingers stuck in their ears to hear above the din, above the assorted languages and dialects and accents colliding over their heads. +They pored over frayed personal phone books and crumpled paper, deciphering numbers. +"A lot come with only partial numbers," said Claire Hart, an employee of the communications company who was assisting the callers. "But as soon as you get them through, they tell you to go, go away and let them talk." +No one checked ages at the door. The half-hour call limit was only loosely enforced. There were a lot of tears and some spectacular arguments. +"I don't do much writing anymore," said 86-year-old Hilda Domingo, as she dialed Panama City. "A stroke slowed me down. But I can't get through." +She waited, her eventual reward a mixed one. A cousin she had considered a brother had died. In July. +"He was only 45," Hilda said. "But I'm glad to know." +Through her call, Olga Reichman learned yesterday that she had become a great aunt, her niece in Tel Aviv having given birth three weeks ago to a daughter, Noa. Mary Chernomordyn, who doesn't speak much English, slid a scarf around her face, but couldn't muffle a laugh. "Son," she said. "Leningrad." Clyde Sealy, 69, surprised a cousin in Barbados. +"We're old people now," he said. "We can talk about nothing. Easily." +The hardest thing Lillian Quiteman had to do after placing her calls was calm down. She phoned one old friend, who told her the conversation was "better than penicillin." Then she called France and spoke with the child she had helped raise. The girl, Linda Fulford, is a now a woman, married and living in the south of France. +"I never had a daughter myself, only sons," Lillian said. "She sounded beautiful. But I'm so charged up now. I'll have to put something in my coffee. I'm still in France." +Freida Robaschek was about to call Warsaw, although her list was short, as all of her relatives died during the war. +"I live in Brighton Beach now -- a poor man's paradise," she said. "I love America. You can say what you want." +Which is exactly what Freida Robaschek, phone in hand, then did . + +LOAD-DATE: December 16, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Hundreds of elderly residents of Brooklyn took advantage of free phone lines set up in Borough Hall to call relatives in Russia, Argentina, Mexico, Panama and South Africa. (Ruby Washington/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +438 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 16, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +GYMNASTICS: A Gymnast's Toughest Balancing Act; +Shannon Miller Juggles School, Social Life and Sports With a New, Mature Assurance + +BYLINE: By JERE LONGMAN, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section B; Page 13; Column 5; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 1310 words + +DATELINE: OKLAHOMA CITY + +Since she won five medals in gymnastics as a 15-year-old at the 1992 Summer Olympics, Shannon Miller has grown. She has grown into a two-time world champion and she has also grown 4 inches and gained 20 pounds in a sport that remains a race against the clock, the body clock. +The maturing of her body since the Barcelona Games has shifted Miller's center of gravity and brought a transformation in her performance from a pipsqueak with a rubber-band body to a young woman of confidence, power and sophistication. And that's just the problem. + Ever since 1976, when Nadia Comaneci of Romania scored the first perfect routine and became the youngest Olympic gymnastics champion, judges, officials and coaches increasingly began to neglect maturity, grace and elegance, preferring instead the acrobatic stunts of athletic munchkins. +Recently, however, women's gymnastics has turned an institutional back flip, attempting to deflect criticism that it robs children of their youth and fosters the potential for eating disorders like anorexia, which led to the death last summer of Christy Henrich, a star in the 1980's. +After the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, female gymnasts must be at least 16 to compete in the Olympics and the world championships. Advances in training techniques, nutrition and physical therapy have allowed careers to mature along with women's bodies. No longer is a driver's license the gymnastic equivalent of a senior citizen's discount card. +"In the past, we didn't know how to deal with puberty," said Steve Nunno, who coaches Miller. "Now we do." +With the 1996 Summer Games to be held in the United States, careers that might have been mothballed are being extended. Miller, now a high school senior in the Oklahoma City suburb of Edmond, is 17. Dominique Dawes, the national all-around champion, is 18. +"It's important for people to know you don't have to be a young kid to perform difficult routines," Miller said at a recent workout. +A year ago, according to her mother, Claudia Miller, Shannon nearly abandoned gymnastics to get on with a normal teen-ager's life. With the medals from the 1992 Olympics and the all-around title at the 1993 world championships, her challenges seemed conquered and her body felt battered. +Eventually, her determination returned with rest and the continued dangling of this carrot: American women have never won a gold medal in Olympic team competition. She could vault herself and her teammates into history. +"I don't want to just be part of the team," Miller said. "I want to help the team. If you step back and look at the big picture, I guess you could say the clock is ticking, but I don't think about it." +Still, women's gymnastics is hardly given over completely to women. Every Olympic all-around champion since 1968 has been under 20 years of age. Three of the six have been younger than 17. Currently, the fourth-ranked American, Jenny Thompson of Houston, is 13. +To maintain her standing atop the world, Miller will have to continue her three-ring juggling of gymnastics, school and a nascent social life as her body and her outside interests continue to develop. +Inevitably, new routines have been devised to accommodate her new height and weight. A gymnast who is 4-11 and weighs 90 pounds cannot perform all the tricks that she performed when she was 4-7 and weighed 70 pounds. +In designing new routines, Nunno counters her loss of speed on twists and spins by accentuating her increased power in vaulting and tumbling. A new jazzy, lyrical floor routine, still in dress rehearsal, displays her metamorphosis from elfin exuberance to womanly self-assuredness. +"She's always been known as so shy, but now she comes in the gym and takes over," said Peggy Liddick, who coaches Miller on the balance beam and choreographs her floor routine. "Her inhibitions have subsided." +At 15, Miller could go nonstop, as if she were running on batteries. At 17, she needs more rest. Last month, she attended the world team championships in Germany but departed after competing in the compulsory events to prevent what Nunno called overuse. Her next international competition is likely to be the Pan-American Games in March in Argentina. +Nunno has built a physical therapy center at his gym to treat the inevitable nagging injuries. And he has purchased a 60-foot trampoline runway to ease the pounding on Miller's knees and ankles and back during tumbling maneuvers. +"Without that, she wouldn't have won the world championship this year," Nunno said. "She might not have competed." +Nunno admonishes Miller during practice, "Take nothing for granted." She has suffered a pair of rare defeats this year, finishing second at the Goodwill Games and the United States championships over the summer. Atlanta is 18 months away, a generation for women's gymnastics. +"If there is a clock ticking, it is a mental clock," Nunno said. "It's all mental, not physical. If an athlete thinks she's washed up, then she's washed up. It's my job to keep dangling that carrot, to keep her motivated." +In a sport where young athletes can balance wondrously on a four-inch-wide beam but often seem to struggle with personal equilibrium, Miller has brought some much-needed normalcy. She lives at home with her parents, Ron, a physics professor, and Claudia, a bank executive, and maintains a straight-A average in public school. Last week, she won the Dial Award as the nation's top female high school student-athlete. +There is no way around the abstinent life style required to be a world-class gymnast. Miller's social life -- movies, shopping -- is restricted to weekends when she is not competing or making a personal appearance. Classmates describe Miller as friendly but shy and uncomfortable with the public attention paid to her. So much so that she has never really discussed her trip to the 1992 Olympics. +"After she got home, we drove her to school the first day," said Erin Jones, a classmate of Miller's. "My mom said she looked more nervous than she did at the Olympics. It was a huge deal. One guy tried to kiss her in the hall. She freaked out. This year, she seems much more relaxed and comfortable." +Andy Branich, a friend from a rival high school in Edmond, said he first asked Miller out to dinner and a movie several months ago. "I'm a gymnast," he said, "and I've missed out on a lot of things that I wished someone had invited me to. Being a teen-ager, you want to be able to get out." +Given 35 hours of training each week, however, most of Miller's free time is devoted to studying. She has insisted on remaining in public school, and administrators at Edmond North High School have accommodated her with a flexible schedule. A tutor, Terri Thomas, picks up her class assignments when Miller is away at competitions and monitors her work in a home-study calculus class. +If the clock is ticking on her daughter's career, Claudia Miller is determined to make sure that the alarm doesn't go off despite some nervous moments from overzealous fans and concerns about a healthy social life and eating habits. +"She hasn't shown any signs of anorexia or bulimia," Claudia Miller said. +Her daughter's interest now lies in the challenge of new routines: a vault never before attempted, an original maneuver on the uneven bars, an innovative dismount. If it is unusual for Miller to stay with the sport beyond high school, Nunno said, it is because she is an unusual athlete. +"People are saying this is kind of crazy, she's over the hill, she'll never make it," Nunno said. "If we listened to everybody else, we'd have been through a long time ago. But Shannon's actually gotten better since the Olympics. She's the Martina Navratilova of gymnastics, is what she is. She has kept loving the sport, so why get out? At some point, you do it for yourself because you want to." + +NAME: Shannon Miller + +LOAD-DATE: December 16, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Shannon Miller, right, during practice with a coach, Peggy Liddick, who choreographs her floor routines. (Pat J. Carter for The New York Times) (pg. B13); In 1992, at the age of 15, Shannon Miller won five medals at the Summer Olympics. She has since grown 4 inches and gained 20 pounds. (Associated Press) (pg. B14) + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +439 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 18, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Q. & A. + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 8; Column 6; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 732 words + + +Roaches Out of Control + +Q. We are senior citizens living as tenants in a co-op complex. We have a roach problem that has gone out of control. It is causing me physical and emotional problems. + The apartment next door is occupied by a 90-year-old woman who cannot take care of herself or her apartment, which is absolutely filthy and full of roaches. Social Services wanted to clean the apartment at their expense but the neighbor refused to let anyone in. She does not allow the exterminator in. (I do.) +Because of this, I cannot control the roaches. Several months ago I called the Board of Health. Nothing was done. I telephoned Social Services and was told that the co-op board should institute legal action. The board claims it can't do anything because the law would not allow the eviction of a 90-year-old woman. What recourse do we have? . . . Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Mesisca, Bronxville, N.Y. + +A. The writer may seek recourse against the co-op, the neighbor and the owners of the neighbor's and the writer's apartment, said Ronald A. Sher, a White Plains lawyer. +"A pest-infestation condition may constitute a breach of the warranty of habitability and violate the Westchester County or New York State Sanitary Codes," Mr. Sher said. "The co-op corporation has a duty to maintain the premises and provide proper care of the building, including pest-control extermination services. The corporation also has the right of entry and may conduct inspections, with notice or at any time without notice in an emergency." +It also has the right to make repairs and cure any unsanitary condition, he said. "The corporation has apparently tried to provide the necessary services, but has failed to alleviate the vermin situation by requiring treatment of the infested apartment," he said. "It has the right to bring the resident to court for a limited purpose, to cure the unsanitary condition, rather than seeking eviction of a senior citizen." +The tenant should ask the board and the managing agent to inspect the infested apartment, Mr. Sher said, and to find out of other residents are affected. The board should also notify the neighbor's family, the Westchester County Office for the Aging or the Department of Social Services' adult protection unit, he said, "since the resident is clearly unable to care for herself and is in need of assistance." +In addition, he said, the tenant should file another complaint with the Board of Health and contact the State Division of Housing and Community Renewal seeking an abatement of rent based on a lack of necessary services. +Finally, he said, if none of the above works, "the commencement of litigation may be considered against the board, the neighbor and owners of both the neighbor's and the tenant's apartment." + +Approval of Co-op Applicants + +Q. The proprietary lease of my co-op has a provision that requires the managing agent, rather than the co-op board of directors, to approve applicants for purchase of apartments under foreclosure. The reasoning for this, our attorney says, is to protect the bank from being stuck with an apartment because of a very selective co-op board. +Is this kind of provision common? If the co-op should get rid of this rule, would banks be reluctant to give mortgages in our building? If we want to get rid of this rule, how can we do so? . . . Laura Kirsner, Manhattan. + +A. The provision is by no means unusual, said Marc Luxemburg, a Manhattan lawyer and president of the Council of New York Cooperatives. "There are probably many buildings that have proprietary leases that provide for some lesser degree of scrutiny of applicants brought in by banks in a foreclosure proceeding," Mr. Luxemburg said. +The co-op, however, may change the provision, he said. "Most proprietary leases contain a provision that allows the lease to be amended," he said. "The procedure typically requires agreement by two-thirds or three-quarters of the shareholders." +The provision, though, may only be changed prospectively, he said. "You can't take away the rights the banks have under the existing proprietary lease with regard to apartments that have bank loans on them now," he said. +As far as such a change making the banks wary, "many proprietary leases require full board consent, and that hasn't stopped banks from making loans to any buildings I'm aware of," Mr. Luxemburg said. + +LOAD-DATE: December 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Question + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +440 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 18, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +BACKTALK; +Baseball Fan: Heal Thyself + +BYLINE: By ROBERT LIPSYTE + +SECTION: Section 8; Page 9; Column 1; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 847 words + +We came back after the Fix of 1919 and we came back after the Abandonment of 1957 and we'll come back after the Strikeout of 1994, sadder Budweiser, wearing our rally caps, salary caps, dunce caps, backward, of course. We need to be tested every four decades or so to prove that fan is short for fantasist. +"We're the problem," said Roger Sims, an acknowledged fan. "We have this unrealistic view of who they are, and what our relationship is. The owners are truly from another planet, these gray old men who smell of cologne, but what did we ever do about the reserve clause or the antitrust exemption? And the players haven't been one of us in years, but we still demand some connection between our lives and theirs, just because we need them so much. + "Which is the point. We are junkies. We will forgive and forget as soon as the next season starts. And so what? Baseball don't mean nothing. That's what's so good about it." +Sims, who played baseball briefly at Howard University 35 years ago and who was loving last season because the Yankees were winning, lost interest when the conversation got to Bud Selig and Darryl Strawberry, who will probably be the handiest effigies for those looking to hang Poor Sportsmen of the Year from columns and wrap-ups. Why can owners collude and players be in a position to take money under the table and all we can do is wax nostalgic? +"Two stories," said Sims, who was watching a night rain bat on his condo windows in Everett, Wash. "In 1948, my grandfather took me to my first baseball game, in Wrigley Field. Loved that place. I held his hand as we walked in, and he said, 'If anyone asks you your favorite Cub, say Phil Cavarretta.' +"I waited the whole game but no one came up to us. I mean, who interrogates an old black man and a fat 10-year-old at a ball game? But holding my granddad's hand and baseball and Phil Cavarretta are mixed up in my mind forever. That's why I'm a fan. How could it have anything to do with right now. I mean, Gregg Jefferies. How many millions? +"And some years after that, when I was living in New York, I was waiting outside Yankee Stadium, too cool to rush for autographs, just watching other kids run after the players, and here comes Hector Lopez, and he's friendly and he signs for everybody and he talks while he's doing it and then he goes off to the subway. I remember the little half moons of sweat under his armpits. To the subway. So his fielding wasn't always perfect. You better not call him Whatta Pair of Hands Lopez in front of me unless you're smiling." +Having established his credentials, Sims turned a little mean. "We keep talking about the greedy owners and the greedy players, but what about the third corner of that triangle, the greedy fan? Emotionally greedy for a romance that never existed. We helped create all this. They know we'll be here when it's over. So how will anything ever change?" +Nevertheless, there are theories of change: a young generation of fan will be lost to multimedia, for example, less of a blow to club-owning corporations already in that field than to players; the bursting economic bubble will send players' salaries sliding back toward their fans', and fans will return but emotionally distance themselves from the game to prevent further disappointments. +Maybe fans will take a closer look. The reflexive bashing of owners is based on the Figaro complex, the common man reaffirming his fate as servant by railing at the master for not being perfect. Did we really expect owners to be smarter, more virtuous than players because they're richer? On the other hand, owners ARE the future of the game because they amass the capital, create the arena and meet the payroll, which is at least as important as throwing and catching. In the history of the game, Bud Selig is more important than Paul Molitor, and has done far more to keep it going. +That players are not necessarily smarter and more virtuous than fans may even be excusable, certainly understandable. Fans masquerading as parents, teachers, lovers and friends have been letting these adolescents off the hook all their lives so long as they performed. And as soon as they get into trouble, we wonder how they could be so ungrateful. Some compassion, please. +How much of Strawberry's current problems for allegedly taking card show fees without declaring it grew out of the addict's need for unaccountable cash? +"C'mon," Sims said. "That's just another hero-with-feet-of-clay story. You guys love that. Build 'em up and knock 'em down. Look, the world didn't end without baseball, which is good. It means we can keep on being fans. As much as we love and need it, baseball don't mean nothing. It's based on unrealistic expectations. Enough for now. I'm just gonna wait for the new season." It was getting late, even on the West Coast, and his voice sounded dreamy. +"When I get to the hereafter," he said, and it was hard to tell if he meant heaven or spring training, "I've got two questions to ask granddad: Is he proud of the way I turned out? Why Phil Cavarretta?" + +LOAD-DATE: December 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +441 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 18, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Dec. 11-17: A Nation of Movers; +Study Shows America A Land of Transients + +BYLINE: By SAM ROBERTS + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 2; Column 2; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 142 words + +In Pennsylvania, there are neither movers nor Shakers. A new Census Bureau analysis found that the western portion of the state is home to a disproportionate share of households that had lived in the same home for three decades or more. Everywhere else, though, Americans were on the move. + Overall, nearly three times as many Americans were transients who had moved in the 15 months before the 1990 census as the number who had lived in the same house since 1959. The stayers were older, often elderly women who owned their own homes in the Northeast and Midwest. Transients typically were unmarried young men in the South and West. While the proportion of renters who were recent movers has been rising slightly, the share of owners who had switched homes within the previous 15 months dipped to what may be a record low. SAM ROBERTS + +LOAD-DATE: December 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +442 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 18, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Dec. 11-17: Gore Another's Ox; +Looking to Trim Benefits, Federal Panel Fails + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 2; Column 3; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 253 words + +As Democrats and Republicans rushed to voice their support for tax cuts last week, they all but ignored a plea for fiscal responsibility from a bipartisan Federal advisory panel headed by Senator Bob Kerrey. + Many economists and Government officials agree with the panel's conclusion: that the cost of commitments made through programs like Social Security and Medicare exceeds the money available to pay for them over the next 35 years. But the problem grows gradually, and Americans are unwilling to deal with such problems until a crisis is at hand, Mr. Kerrey said. So the panel concluded its work without recommending a package of specific changes to slow the growth of these programs. + The panel, the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform, established by Mr. Clinton in November 1993, said that benefits like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Federal employee pensions now accounted for 47 percent of all Federal spending and, with no change in current law, would account for 58 percent in the year 2003. Mr. Kerrey, a Nebraska Democrat, proposed savings that would have primarily come from Social Security and Medicare, but Mr. Clinton said no. + Mr. Kerrey infuriated labor unions and spokesmen for the elderly, who said his proposals would gut social insurance programs. And he had the audacity to suggest that the middle class might need to make some sacrifices, just as the White House was proposing "a middle-class bill of rights," full of new tax breaks. ROBERT PEAR + +LOAD-DATE: December 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Senators Kerry and Danforth (David Scull/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +443 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 18, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Interest Groups Rally to Prevent Medicare Cuts + +BYLINE: By ROBIN TONER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 30; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 966 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Dec. 17 + +At the moment, the budgetary news out of both parties is blissfully painless: an array of tax cuts for the middle class, a stern stance on fiscal responsibility and the trimming back of inefficient, generally discretionary domestic spending programs. +But the interest groups in Washington are not so easily fooled. Ahead lie some wrenching political battles, and nowhere is that more clear than in the sprawling, complicated, exceedingly sensitive and exceedingly costly Medicare program for the elderly. The fear among groups representing doctors, hospitals and the elderly, and the expectation among many members on Capitol Hill, is that Medicare will become a tempting piggy bank to help pay for tax cuts, deficit reduction or just the general tightening and reordering of the Federal budget. + The program's protectors won a first round this week, when President Clinton challenged Congress to achieve his "middle-class bill of rights" without "new cuts" in Medicare. But the struggle has just begun, and newly influential Republicans in Congress, notably Representative John R. Kasich of Ohio, the incoming chairman of the House Budget Committee, are taking a hard look at the benefits and the financing of the Medicare program. +In the time-honored tradition of mobilizing one's constituents on the eve of a budget battle, the groups with a stake in Medicare are beginning to sound the alarm. "In our opinion, in 1995 we're looking at the biggest assault on the Medicare program in its entire history," said Richard J. Davidson, president of the American Hospital Association, which sent a letter to Mr. Clinton last week imploring him to hold the line on cuts in Medicare. "It's going to be assaulted from every part of town for a simple reason: it's where the money is." +John Rother, legislative director of the American Association of Retired Persons, said: "We're in a defensive position. Where the objective in the last few years was to solve some of the problems in the program, now our objective is to keep the situation from worsening." +The political calculus has, in fact, changed starkly on just about every issue since last month's elections, but nowhere more so than on health. Just six months ago, Congress was still debating comprehensive health care plans to achieve universal coverage and a vast expansion of health benefits. Many proposals, including the Clinton plan, sought to extract substantial savings from the Medicare program by such means as raising the premiums paid by affluent retirees. But those proposals would have also added new benefits for the elderly, like a prescription drug program and new home-based services for the disabled. +After the collapse of those efforts, and last month's conservative sweep at the polls, only incremental changes in the health care system are expected in the new Congress, if that. But the temptation to squeeze savings out of Medicare remains. +"The reason people are looking at it is that potential savings were identified in health care reform," said Robert Reischauer, director of the Congressional Budget Office. +Administration officials said the President could achieve his middle-class bill of rights with cuts in other, discretionary programs. But Republicans are committed to a far more sweeping program, including a constitutional amendment to balance the budget and an array of tax cuts; given that agenda, many on Capitol Hill say it is hard to imagine keeping both Social Security and Medicare off the table. +There are several ways Congress can trim the Medicare program. In the 1993 budget agreement, it put limits on the growth of payments made to hospitals and doctors. It can impose a broad spending cap on Medicare and other non-Social Security entitlement programs, those programs offering benefits to all who meet the criteria in the law. This idea has been embraced in the past by Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, the incoming chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. Congress can also raise co-payments, adjust premiums for income or do both, approaches advanced by Mr. Kasich in the past. +A spokesman for Mr. Kasich said this week that while House Republicans had not yet produced their budget, "nothing has changed his mind" on three Medicare ideas he put forward in the past. These would raise certain premiums and deductibles for affluent retirees, and require a new co-payment for home services. +These approaches draw varying degrees, and kinds, of opposition. Doctors and hospitals bitterly complain that they are already undercompensated by Medicare and that further limits would have serious consequences for the health care system. +Advocates for the elderly also warn that continuing limits on Medicare reimbursement raise the possibility that more and more doctors will stop seeing Medicare patients. +Raising the premiums on upper-income beneficiaries has considerable political support, but some Democrats wonder whether it can be achieved if it is not linked to new benefits for the elderly. +In general, officials at the hospital association, the American Medical Association and other groups argue that decisions on Medicare should be made in the context of health policy, not the need to free up money to use elsewhere. Mr. Davidson argues for the creation of an independent commission to review the Medicare program and decide how to allocate the existing resources. +In reality, though, the positioning around Medicare is already deeply political, and likely to become more so. The great health care struggle of 1994 may have a reprise. +"In a way, this is easy," said Mr. Rother of the American Association of Retired Persons. "The easiest thing in the world is to ask people to call or write their members of Congress to ask them to protect Medicare." + +LOAD-DATE: December 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "INTO THE FUTURE: Spending on Medicare" tracks actual and projected spending on Medicare, according to a 1993 secenario, for fiscal years from 1967 through 2004. (Source: Congressional Budget Office) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +444 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 18, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Gunman Is Sought In Four Robberies + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 59; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 231 words + +DATELINE: LITTLE FERRY, N.J., Dec. 17 + +A statewide alert is in effect for a gunman believed responsible for three attacks, two involving elderly people, over the last few days. +"He's armed and dangerous and he's going to hit again," said Capt. Dennis Hoffman of the Little Ferry Police Department. "It's just a matter of time." + The latest attack occurred this morning at a River Edge gas station when the gunman got away with $45, police said. On Dec. 16, the gunman pistol-whipped the owner of a photo store in Little Ferry in a failed robbery attempt, the police said, and about an hour later robbed an 81-year-old woman of her wallet at gunpoint in a Fairfield parking lot. +A witness who saw the gunman flee empty-handed from the Express Photo shop in Little Ferry took down the suspect's license plate numbers, The Record of Hackensack reported today. +The police say the numbers matched those of the plates of a rented Ford Escort that was stolen Dec. 14 from Sanford Blackman, 67, of Colorado, and his 93-year-old mother, in the parking lot of the Totowa Holiday Inn. +The police said that they believe the same man was responsible in all the attacks. The authorities added that the assailant wore a blue bandanna to hide his face. +The owner of the photo shop, Mark Iarkowski, 30, was treated at the Hackensack Medical Center for abrasions and released, officials said. The other victims were unharmed. + +LOAD-DATE: December 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +445 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 18, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE NEEDIEST CASES; +A Chance to Help Your Neighbors + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 73; Column 4; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 447 words + +Expecting a decrease in financing over the next few years, Catholic Charities, Diocese of Brooklyn and Queens, is recruiting volunteers to deliver social services to the poor. +Thomas A. DeStefano, executive director of the agency, said it is relying more heavily on a network of 1,600 volunteers, saving money that would otherwise be spent on salaries or contracted services. He pointed to the example of a retired couple who cook meals in a center for the elderly in their Brooklyn neighborhood. + "There are some things the local communities just cannot provide, so we step in with our volunteers," Mr. DeStefano said. "They are working in their own communities, where they are already invested and really want to make a difference." +Catholic Charities may fall about $100,000 short of its $5 million budget because longtime donors are not able to give as much this year. "Up until this year we have been holding our own," Mr. DeStefano said. "But times are harder and people are really feeling threatened by the economy." +A loss of $150,000 from the city Department of Youth Services means 15 staff positions will be eliminated, affecting services for children. Project Bridge, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, will lose four after-school programs for 240 children aged 6 to 12. A skills-building program in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, called Pass II Play will be eliminated. +Catholic Charities was founded in 1899 when several smaller agencies in Brooklyn and Queens pooled their resources. It now offers dozens of services, including job training for teen-agers, prison ministry and day-care centers. Six mental health clinics provide individual and group counseling for people of all ages. A program delivers hot meals to more than 5,000 homebound elderly people. A refugee resettlement program provides emergency help, counseling and job training to new immigrants. And a Human Mobile Outreach Team provides help to mentally ill homeless people in Brooklyn and Queens. +Mr. DeStefano said the organization's four Family Action Centers, which receive no government funding, desperately need private donations. The centers, which provide crisis intervention, emergency assistance and long-term counseling, serve more than 35,000 families a year. Their services include parenting workshops, support groups for grandmothers and child safety workshops. But only 10 to 15 people staff each center, with a total budget of $2 million. +"People come to these centers with every kind of issue you can imagine, and our staff monitors each case," Mr. DeStefano said. "But with limited resources, there's no way they can cover the whole barrage of issues that arrive on their doorsteps." + + +LOAD-DATE: December 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +446 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 18, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE NEEDIEST CASES; +Helping Immigrants Adjust to U.S. + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 73; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 429 words + +A record 19,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union arrived in New York City last year, and UJA-Federation of New York helped many of them find homes and jobs. +Working with the New York Association for New Americans and more than 60 other member agencies, UJA helped immigrants learn English, find work, get counseling and receive proper health care. + In addition, the agency helped more than 2,500 Jews from Syria adjust to life in Brooklyn. +UJA works with a network of 130 member agencies in the metropolitan area to provide a far-reaching range of social services. But Stephen D. Solender, executive vice president of UJA, said private donations to the agency have remained flat over the past five years. +"Wall Street is a primary source of support, but it is very unstable," Mr. Solender said. "The major firms are all cutting back, and we will continue to feel the after effects." +In addition to resettlement programs, UJA agencies provide services like child care, job training, rehabilitation for the disabled, medical and geriatric care and religious programs. Twenty-seven Jewish community centers provide various social services, including programs for physically and mentally disabled people. The philanthropy also subsidizes numerous Jewish educational programs, including summer camps, youth groups and trips to Israel for teen-agers. +Last year, UJA allotted $2.5 million to the Jewish Board of Education for assistance to synagogues, schools and other educational organizations. An additional $3 million went to the Fund for Jewish Education to help 429 yeshivas and day schools serving Jewish communities. +For frail elderly people, UJA extended its program of on-site social services to two more retirement communities in New York: Cooperative Village, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and the Warbasse Houses in Coney Island, Brooklyn. Member agencies will provide residents of these buildings with recreational activities, transportation to local hospitals and stores and help in applying for public assistance. +Mr. Solender said he did not know how UJA, which receives considerable public financing, would manage under anticipated government budget cuts. +"As the government cuts back on expenses and doesn't raise taxes, I worry that people will start taking a Darwinian approach to our society," he said. "The assumption is that private charities can pick up the slack, but we just don't have the resources." + +Previously recorded . . . $1,833,119.76 +Recorded Friday . . . 56,631.23 + +Total . . . 1,889,750.99 + +LOAD-DATE: December 18, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +447 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 19, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Caring at Home, and Burning Out; +Tending for Infirm Relatives, Guardians Suffer Themselves + +BYLINE: By ESTHER B. FEIN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1949 words + +The women sat in a circle and talked about the pains that age and disease had forced on their lives. There was the sleeplessness, the sore backs and the strained shoulders. All felt dogged by anxiety. They would pass days, they said, sometimes weeks, depressed. +But it was not their own aging bodies that had caused them such aching and fatigue. Each woman said she had become exhausted -- mentally, physically and emotionally -- caring for a husband weakened by age and illness. + These women, who meet regularly in a support group at a Manhattan synagogue, are among the millions caring for the country's growing elderly population, burdened with the relentless, often excruciating, chore of caring for someone aging and frail. +They are often daughters tending to parents and in-laws, distracted at work and feeling guilty that their own children are being neglected. They are husbands and wives who have become lonely and frustrated caring for bedridden spouses and couples whose marriages are strained by taking in an elderly aunt. +This caregiver burnout, as experts call it, is growing rapidly as people in the United States live longer. Many survive crises that years ago would have killed them, and choose to live at home, rather than in nursing homes or other institutions, despite debilitating conditions that require round-the-clock feeding, bathing, diapering, dressing and turning. +In fact, one of the biggest health care crises looming over the nation, say doctors, psychologists and social workers, is the exhaustion and depression faced by those who minister to aging relatives and friends -- sometimes for decades. +"Moving my husband from the bed, to the commode, to the chair, I just completely threw my back out and needed a chiropractor," said Faye Joyce, who is 72 and has been caring for a husband with Parkinson's disease since 1980. "That really got me down, because I am very healthy, and suddenly it was hard for me to move." +The other women in her support group, one of thousands around the country offering comfort and camaraderie to family caregivers, nodded knowingly, the story understood even before it was finished. +"Even when you think you've got it together you lose it," said a woman who has been caring for 11 years for a husband partly paralyzed by a stroke, and who did not want her name used. "It just never lets up. It's detail after detail. And no matter where you are, a tiny part of you always wonders: 'Did he fall? Is he dead?' Sometimes, you just feel like you're going to snap." + +The Extent +Number of Elderly Is Increasing + Such weariness is expected to increase sharply, experts say, as the proportion of elderly people in the country rises. The Census Bureau predicts that by 2030, the population over 65 will nearly triple, to more than 70 million people, and older people will make up 20 percent of the population, up from 12.6 percent now. At some point, many of them will need full-time care. +"Caregivers have become the casualties of our ability to live longer," said Jack A. Nottingham, executive director of the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Human Development at Georgia Southwestern College, who has led several studies on caring for invalid relatives. +While some handle the job with great equanimity, experts say that others suffer symptoms from general sadness to states of overwhelming anger, severe anxiety and clinical depression that have broken up marriages and destroyed careers. A survey by the National Family Caregivers Association, a nonprofit information and advocacy group based in Kensington, Md., found that 49 percent of the people tending to sick elderly family members have experienced prolonged depression. +"I feel like a prisoner, and I'm terribly resentful of the situation," said a 73-year-old writer who said she would speak candidly about caring for her 77-year-old husband, sick with Parkinson's disease and rheumatoid arthritis, only if her name was not used. +He is too well for a nursing home and too sick to care for himself, she said, so her life is swallowed up by his needs. "Is it right," she asked, "for me to give up my life for his?" +When the stress or the level of care needed is too great, however, some families do turn to nursing homes. In fact, studies have found that more elderly people are placed in such institutions because of relatives' burnout than because of a decline in their own condition. +But a growing preference for aging at home causes many people to resist such a move, often, experts say, past the point when it would be more beneficial to both patient and relative. Some people feel that placing a relative in a nursing home stigmatizes the family as callous; others worry that nursing home care is poor, and many choose to keep their relatives at home out of devotion, feeling that it is their duty, however arduous. +Family members provide about 80 percent of home care for the elderly, according to various studies, but are seldom trained for the job and are often working full time and raising families, at the same time. +Family members, unlike professional aides, must also face the psychological trauma of dealing with the incapacitation and mortality of someone they love, or equally complicated, someone with whom they have unresolved conflicts. +"Going back into your parents' house very often brings up buried issues at a time when they basically cannot be dealt with," said Vivian Fenster Ehrlich, executive director of Dorot, a social service agency for the elderly on the Upper West Side. Some conflicts involve siblings or other relatives, who may disagree over care plans or leave most of the responsibility to one person. +"Even when the initial impulse to care for someone is based in love, and even when you find some aspects of being a caregiver rewarding, the pressure can still be unmanageable," Ms. Ehrlich said. "And the idea that this is going to go on for a long, long time is terrifying to people." + +A Daughter's Story +At 41, a Life Held Hostage + When she takes a break and thinks about her life, which she does not have time to do very often these days, Dona Lyttle finds it hard not to cry. +She is 41 years old and single, yet she lacks the will, the energy and the time to socialize. +Ms. Lyttle's world revolves around her 74-year-old mother, Lillian, whose Alzheimer's disease was diagnosed seven years ago and who has quickly slipped away into its mind-robbing cavern. In the years since, Ms. Lyttle also nursed her father through a brain tumor, then buried him last summer when prostate cancer took his life. Now, her days and nights are crammed with the logistics of caring for her mother and working full time as an administrator at a Harlem Hospital clinic. +Ms. Lyttle's situation is not likely to change soon. Her mother cannot feed, bathe, dress or lie down to sleep herself. She does not talk and is barely responsive. But apart from the Alzheimer's and some arthritis, her health is good. Her doctor says she is likely to live this way for at least 10 more years, her mind deteriorating far ahead of her body. +"Sometimes, I can be driving to work and suddenly, I start crying," said Ms. Lyttle, who moved back into her childhood home in St. Albans, Queens, four years ago to manage her mother's care. "I was depressed. I wasn't sleeping at all. I'd fall asleep, and within an hour I'd wake up. I was tired all the time and I had this huge knot in my stomach. I'm pulling myself at all ends and I feel like I have no life. I need a life." +When she is at work, Ms. Lyttle pays for a health aide to stay with her mother, using money from her mother's pension and her father's estate. She is usually gone from 8 A.M. to 8:30 P.M., and pays the aide's wages of $7 an hour herself because her mother is ineligible for Medicaid. Twice a week, for about six hours each day, she sends her mother to the Alzheimer's Respite Program at the Parker Jewish Geriatric Institute in New Hyde Park, Queens, again paying the $13-an-hour fee herself. +At work, Ms. Lyttle said, a part of her is always worrying about her mother. At night, a part of her is always awake. +"Sometimes I say to to myself, 'Dona, you have to stop,' " she said. "But I can't. I love my mother. I don't want this burden, but here it is. It's mine." +Friends have convinced her, she said, that she needs to hire someone to help watch her mother on weekends so that she can try to build a personal life for herself. If she can feel less isolated, she said, she will be able to keep her mother at home, where she is more confident about the care and they can spend more time together, even if her mother doesn't realize it. +"Really, my mother has become my child," she said. "Sometimes I go and sit on her bed and talk to her, I guess the way she used to with me when I was a child. It's a total reversal and it breaks my heart, and I know that no matter how much help I get, I'm going to have to see this and feel this day after day for many, many more years." + +The Isolation +A Feeling Of Invisibility + When they describe themselves, caregivers often say they feel invisible -- to the doctors who treat their aged relatives, and to other family members and friends who, when they call at all, ask only how the patient is doing. They even feel invisible to themselves. +"I ignore my own needs," said Richard Davis, 73, a retired office manager from Newark, who cares for his 94-year-old mother, incapacitated by senility and heart disease. "It's just easier to put all my focus on her." +Mr. Davis said he had considered a nursing home but had found the expense too great. He also figured he would spend so much time traveling to visit his mother and would worry so much that she was being mistreated that the stress would barely be eased. +While there has been some increase in the numbers of respite programs, adult day care programs and support groups that offer temporary relief for families providing care, experts and families say they fall far short of the growing need. +Doctors who deal with the elderly say that in generations past, the family physician might have noticed the stress on relatives and intervened with sympathy and suggestions. But they say the pressures for productivity in the trend toward managed care have diminished the attention that many doctors can give to those providing their patients' daily care. +Faye Joyce has worked very hard to build a life for herself outside of the apartment she shares in midtown Manhattan with her husband, Clive. He is bedridden and demented by Parkinson's disease, which was diagnosed 14 years ago and is now in an advanced and hopeless stage. Because her husband is on Medicaid, she has a home health aide for part of every day, so she is able to be active in the Horticultural Society and the Women's City Club, to go to her support group and museums. +But every week she prepares 21 meals for her husband that she stocks in the freezer. It takes an hour to feed him each one. Once a week she divides the pills that he takes several times a day among little jars. +Her bed is next to his hospital bed so that she can hold his hand as they sleep, and so that she is nearby if his diaper needs changing in the middle of the night. +"The only reason it sounds like any kind of life is my attitude," said Ms. Joyce, who has refused to put her husband in a nursing home because she fears the care would be inadequate and because she likes being with him, despite his condition. "Either you can work out a good life around your problem, or you can let it defeat you. But I know the down side. I know the dark side. And that's why I spend so much energy avoiding it." + +LOAD-DATE: December 19, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: "Sometimes, I can be driving to work and suddenly, I start crying," said Dona Lyttle, 41, who moved back into her childhood home in Queens to manage the care of her mother, Lillian, 74. "I'm pulling myself at all ends and I feel like I have no life. I need a life." (Nancy Siesel/The New York Times)(pg. B8); Faye Joyce's husband, Clive, is bedridden from Parkinson's disease. She has taken care of him at home since 1980. (Nancy Siesel/The New York Times)(pg. B1) + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +448 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 21, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +A 40-Mile Chain Against Russian Troops + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL SPECTER, Special to The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 18; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 989 words + +DATELINE: GROZNY, Russia, Dec. 20 + +As Russian planes and mortar shells battered the Chechen capital today, more than 100,000 people formed a remarkable, 40-mile human chain to protest the assault on Grozny. +The demonstrators, called to their task by a radio broadcast, began the line on the western edge of the capital and stretched along the only open highway to the border of Dagestan, where regiments of Russian troops have been waiting for a week. + At times, it seemed as if the only people not taking part in the protest were Chechen soldiers, who were again involved in heavy fighting to the northwest of the capital. Grandmothers in shawls cradled infants in their arms, old men kneeled on prayer rugs facing Mecca, and factory workers stood in the driving snow. For miles, people linked arms in solidarity against a rapidly worsening war, and against the Russian government of President Boris N. Yeltsin. +"My children think that planes are for bombs," said Elina Saidoya, who stood for hours with her family and fellow villagers on the ice-covered Moscow-Baku highway. "I want them to stop. But I want them to know that we have always been here, and we are not going away." +That message is increasingly evident, even as the assault by Russian troops has intensified and as residential neighborhoods of Grozny have come under fire. The ninth-floor office of the Chechen leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev, was empty this morning; most government officials have evacuated the Presidential Palace to a bomb shelter beneath the Parliament building across the street. +"The whole government is leaving now," said Abdullah Dadayev, an assistant to the Chechen president, as he peered down onto Freedom Square through shards that were once his office window. +Russian fighter jets dropped what appeared to be one-ton bombs today on several parts of the capital, destroying more than 25 houses in a quiet neighborhood not far from the city's main tram station. Only one person was known to have died, and several were wounded. The casualty figures are low almost certainly because many women and children have already fled. Today thousands more could be seen piling carpets, food and whatever else could carried into carts, cars and buses. +Residents of Russian nationality -- with fewer relatives in the mountains and villages nearby -- are far more likely to remain stranded in Grozny. +Sergei Stepashin, director of the Russian counter-intelligence service, said on television tonight that mercenaries -- including Mujahedeen fighters from Afghanistan and snipers from Latvia -- were fighting against Russian troops in Chechnya. +And in a sign that Moscow fears the Chechen conflict could spread to other volatile areas in the Caucasus, the Russian Government suspended all air, sea and road traffic from Georgia and Azerbaijan into Russia, especially its North Caucasian republics. +Russian television reported that Chechen rebel fighters, using machine guns and rocket launchers, downed a Russian helicopter near a village 12 miles northeast of Grozny. The helicopter was being used as an air ambulance, and two doctors and one crew member were reported killed. +Russian troops entered the secessionist republic 10 days ago after three years of increasing conflict in this predominantly Muslim, oil-producing region. Moscow never recognized Chechnya's call for independence. The assault on Grozny has quickly become the nation's largest military operation since the end of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, where 13,000 Russian troops died. +Chechen people say this adventure will end that way too. They seem ready to die, bitter about Mr. Yeltsin -- whom most supported in the 1991 presidential elections -- and unwilling to accept any terms that keep them a part of an empire with which they have had intermittently hostile relations for 300 years. +Russian troops are poised to take the city and they are clearly under orders only to secure the villages that surround it. At the moment, however, the Russian military has carried out irregularly timed bombing raids at irregular intervals. +The most recent bombings were the closest yet to the Presidential Palace, which Russian forces consider a crucial target. Flames lit the sky this morning as gas mains burned out of control from bombs that fell during the night. Stunned residents shifted through the twisted wreckage that had become their homes for anything worth keeping. +"I have died and yet I live again," said Abdul Evilbayev, 44, a manual laborer who stood with dried blood on his face in front of the smoking pile of rubble that was once his ranch-style house. Pointing to it, he added caustically, "The humanitarian aid of Yeltsin, Chernomyrdin and Grachev." +He was referring to the Russian President, Prime Minister, and Defense Minister, who have all offered economic incentives to the secessionist republic to try to cool the hostilities. "They want to fight us and they know where we are," he said. "I am not afraid." +Most of the population seem to share his sentiments. There were few tears on the line that stretched from Grozny to the Dagestan border. Huge banners denounced Mr. Yeltsin in every way and protested what people here see as the American indifference to the conflict. "Chechnya will always be free," said one. +"The fight for Chechnya is the subject for Allah," said another. +Some said they had not believed that a Russian president would ever assault a city he considers to be Russian. But now that he has, many say they are prepared for anything that might follow. +"I came here to make a protest to the Russian leadership, against their armed intervention into our internal affairs," said Andi Natsulkhanov, 52, a watchmaker from the hamlet of Kerla-Engenoy. "I don't want these issues to be solved by bombs or death," he said, flashing gold teeth. "No Chechen does. But this will be a drawn out war. Every stone, every bush will fight against the aggressors." + +LOAD-DATE: December 21, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Map shows the location of the Moscow-Baku Highway. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +449 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 21, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Comrades Up in Arms; +Ranks of American Communists Split Over Future of Their Party + +BYLINE: By JANNY SCOTT + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1769 words + +The Communist Party, U.S.A. had a coming-out party recently. It laid out doughnuts and invited more than 100 reporters. When a handful showed up, they were ushered into the inner sanctum of party headquarters in Manhattan. +An elderly man with watery blue eyes entered slowly, using a cane. He was introduced as Gus Hall, the longtime party chairman. He began speaking about his party's accomplishments and its bright future. + "There is no question we are now the fastest-growing political organization in America," he declared. The party was changing. It was becoming a "mass party." It was going public. +How big is the party, Mr. Hall was asked. He said he didn't know. Then how did he know it was the fastest growing? He said he just knew. What did it mean to be more public? +"It means doing things publicly," he snapped. "That's what it means." +The Communist Party, U.S.A. is celebrating its 75th anniversary at a time when its public profile seems to have hit a new low, with the Soviet variety of Communism that the party has long venerated now repudiated at home and abroad. +But now the party has been decimated by a new spate of defections. It is at war with former comrades over money and property it says they stole, and over the direction of what remains of the American far left. +Many of the party's best-known members have quit to form a new organization, the Committees of Correspondence, which says it is looking for a new path to socialism. +The party is suing some of those defectors, charging they have absconded with its property -- holdings in San Francisco that the party values at more than $1 million and money it says had been willed to it. +Leaders have called on Communist parties worldwide to boycott the new group -- "a thoroughly petty-bourgeois phenomenon," as Mr. Hall put it, made up of victims of "ideological collapse, political dishonesty and simple greed." +At 84, Mr. Hall remains at the helm, one of the world's most durable Communist leaders, in office since 1959. Lieutenants say he is hale and hearty; detractors claim he slips out of meetings to snooze. +Acolytes encircle him. At least in public, there is no talk of succession. +"Whoever succeeds Gus will fracture what's left of the party," predicted Jay Schaffner, 42, who quit the party in 1992 after 23 years. "Because Gus is an icon. Gus is what you worshiped." +At party headquarters, a dreary eight-story building on West 23d Street across from the Chelsea Hotel, an elderly elevator operator controls access and the front door is often barred with a wooden paddle. +Receptionists still answer the telephone cryptically, reciting the phone number's last four digits. In the spirit of openness, they have been encouraged to answer "Communist Party," but old habits die hard. +Upstairs, the National Board meets weekly in a dimly lit room, its orange carpet buckling. A display case nearby holds gifts from Syria's ruling Baath Party and the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. +Downstairs, the Communist Party Bookstore, open to the public, sells theoretical tomes, a new 75th-anniversary calendar, the voluminous works of Mr. Hall and other material. Elderly volunteers come and go, known fondly as "old Bolsheviks." + +A Resurgence, Or Not? + Despite the appearance of quiescence, party leaders claim membership is "exploding." In New York alone, they say, hundreds of people have signed up since spring, many at Communist Party booths at street fairs around the city. +Part of the appeal, leaders say, is the current campaign to get Congress to pass a giant public-works bill -- something along the lines of the legislation that created the Works Progress Administration in the 1930's. +Yet they are still cagey about membership, estimated at 80,000 during the party's heyday. Defectors guess the number at 1,500. Officials hedge, then offer the figures they've trotted out for a decade: 15,000 to 20,000. +"Since 1991, the party has been trying to regroup itself," said John Bachtell, 38, chairman of the New York district. "This explosion in membership is the first sign that the party is healthy and growing and really on the move." +Observers have doubts. +"Somewhere along the line, people simply stopped being Communists," said Daniel J. Leab, general secretary of the Historians of American Communism. "The real problem is it became out of touch with reality. You can't even use the name as an epithet anymore. If I called you a Communist, who the hell cares?" +The troubles began well before Communism crumbled, as perestroika abroad inspired reformist impulses in America. Some members began saying they wanted a more democratic party and a rethinking of goals and methods. They accused the party of ignoring movements like environmentalism and feminism and of neglecting the ways in which immigration, technology and other social forces were changing the working class. +By late 1991, hundreds of members had signed an initiative demanding what they described as party reform. The signers included many of the party's best-known members, like Angela Davis; Herbert Aptheker, the historian, and Charlene Mitchell, the party's Presidential candidate in 1968. +Another who signed was Pat Fry, who had grown up in Detroit, become a campus radical in the late 1960's, traveled to Cuba in 1972 and become convinced that socialism promised a humane way of organizing society. But by the late 1980's, she began to suspect the party was not growing. People seemed to join, quickly lose interest and leave. +"It was cultish," said Ms. Fry, now 47, living in New York and working for the Committees of Correspondence. "You couldn't question the faith. And once there were questions raised, there was this circle-the-wagons phenomenon." +The crisis culminated in Cleveland in December 1991 at the 25th national party convention. Anyone who had signed the initiative suddenly found themselves excluded from nomination for party leadership. The dissidents insist the convention was rigged. Loyalists say "the factionalists" simply failed. But within months, hundreds of members had quit and begun making plans for the Committees of Correspondence. + +Differences Spill Into Court + In the aftermath, the legal troubles began. In one case, the party sued former members of its Northern California district who had tried to hang onto the party's building in San Francisco's Mission District and two corporations that were used to do party business. Last year, the Superior Court sided with the party. The former members are appealing the ruling. +It is unclear how many other suits have been filed by the party, which was reported to have lost a Soviet subsidy of $2 million a year in 1989. Mr. Hall has referred to "numerous lawsuits, involving millions of dollars" against former members, at least some of the suits involving money the party says was willed to it. +"We call it grave robbery," said Jarvis Tyner, 53, a top party leader. "These are old comrades, dedicated to the party, who left their resources for the purpose of continuing the work of the party. No other organization would allow this to happen." +One defendant in two of the lawsuits is Danny Rubin, who for many years was the third highest-ranking official in the party. In 1991, he signed the initiative, lost his leadership post and left the party by mutual consent. +Mr. Rubin received $18,400 from the estate of a Brooklyn woman who, he says, wanted him to use the money to support progressive causes. Mr. Rubin says he gave the money to the Committees of Correspondence. +But party officials say the money was intended for the party. They have filed suit in State Supreme Court in Manhattan against Mr. Rubin and two other former members who had received similar amounts from the estate. +The case has not come to trial. Mr. Rubin, 63, his eyesight failing, is retired and living in Park Slope "on very low Social Security because I worked for the Communist Party at poverty wages for 31 years." +"I do not consider the Communist Party my enemy," he said. "They can go their own way. But one of their very bad habits is to treat anybody who has left their ranks as enemies to be slandered. It makes me angry and a little bit sad." +Slander, party officials suggest, goes both ways. One former member, Michael Myerson, accused Mr. Hall in print of living "the good bourgeois life" in a "multilevel" house in Yonkers, with an "underground garage," first-class flights and "an estate in fashionable Hampton Bays." +Mr. Tyner said, "He lives in a humble, working-class home." The estate is "a shack" owned by his son. As for the flights, Mr. Tyner said that he did not know whether Mr. Hall traveled first-class, but that "if he traveled by bus cross-country, everyone would say: 'Your party's insignificant! You can't even put your chairman in a car.' " + +Even Nature of Split Is Debatable + Why the party's crisis turned so bitter is a matter of debate. Barry Cohen, former editor of the party newspaper, The People's Weekly World, who says he lost his job in a dispute over an article thought to be tainted by factionalism, suggested that the party's long history as an organization under seige in the United States contributed to its inability to "be open in its own thinking and self-critical." +Loyalists, on the other hand, say the collapse of Communism abroad shattered the dissidents' faith in the working class. They say the dissidents then tried to jettison the party's Marxist-Leninist orientation in favor of what Mr. Tyner calls "an amalgam of every ideological trend on the left." +"They rejected the path to socialism as we perceived it," said Mr. Tyner, who joined the party at age 21 as a printing-plant worker and civil-rights advocate in Philadelphia. As the party sees it, he said, that path is through a mostly working-class, not middle-class, movement. +Whatever the reasons, the battle left the party severely diminished. Depending on who's counting, 300 to 1,300 people quit. The newspaper's staff is half what it was before the split, said Tim Wheeler, 54, who was brought in to replace Mr. Cohen. +The Committees of Correspondence, meanwhile, held its founding convention last summer. It says it has 1,600 dues-paying members. +"The Communist Party is kind of a sad remnant of what at one time in our history had been very vital," said David McReynolds, co-chairman of the Socialist Party U.S.A., now working with the Committees of Correspondence. "It is just living on its history and its funds and its bank account and its buildings. But that's it." + +LOAD-DATE: December 21, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: 1940's -- The secretary of the Communist Party in the United States, Eugene Dennis, above, addressing a rally in 1947, when the group was unified in its purpose. (The New York Times); 1990's -- Gus Hall, right, the longtime chairman of the Communist Party, U.S.A., denies that membership in the organization has dwindled. (Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times) + +Chart: "TIMELINE: 75 Years of American Communism" + +1919: The first American Communist parties, the Communist Labor Party and the larger Communist Party of America, are founded by dissident factions of the Socialist Party. They unite a year later. + +1924: The Daily Worker, the first Communist English-language newspaper in the United States, is published. + +1929: The party faction of Wiliam Z. Foster and Earl Browder becomes dominant. They criticize established labor leaders and court blacks. The Depression boosts membership. + +1935: The party courts the trade union mainstream and begins organizing unio for the Congress of Industrial Organizations. + +1937: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade - 2,800 volunteers, mostly American Communists - fight Spanish Facism. + +1939: With the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, the American party opposes American involvement in World War II, an unpopular position that ends party alliances with other progressive groups. Many leave the party. + +1941: Hilter invades the Soviet Union. The party supports Washington. + +1945: The Cold War begins: anti-Communist laws are passed and Communist-dominated unions expelled from the labor movement. + +1947: President Truman bars Communist and sympathizers from Federal employment. The "Hollywood 10" - blacklisted screenwriters, directors and producers - are imprisoned for contempt at hearings before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. + +1953: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are excuted for spying for the Soviet Union. + +1954: The Communist Control Act is passed. The party is stripped of its rights as a legal organization. + +1956: The party loses thousands of members after Khrushchev crushes the Hungarian uprising and denounces Stalin as a tyrant, confirming what many had long resisted. + +1966: Open activities resume after court rulings, but support is only fringe. + +1989: Gus Hall, party leader since 1959, criticizes Gorbachev's reforms on the fall of the Berlin wall. Moscow reportedly cuts off secret subsidies to the American party, said to amount to $2 million a year. + +1991: Hundreds of members quit after being ostracized for signing an initiative calling for reform. + +1994: The party become embroiled in lawsuits over money and property it says former members have stolen. +; Photos: The first issue of the Daily Worker; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; Russian tank in Hungary during Hungarian democratic uprising of 1956. + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +450 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 22, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +SKIING; +Areas That Have the 50-Plus Enthusiasts in Mind + +BYLINE: By BARBARA LLOYD + +SECTION: Section B; Page 19; Column 1; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 718 words + +There is an accent on youth in the ski industry, as there is in everything else. But increasingly, resorts are finding that sports-minded seniors are staying north to ski rather than following the exodus south to play golf. +"Being 70 and skiing isn't an oddity anymore," said Gwen Allard, the founder in 1987 of a senior skier development program at Windham, N.Y. "People are running up and down our slopes at 80 and 90. There's no reason for them to give up their participation in the sport as they age. But what we're trying to do is develop quality programs that won't break seniors or ski-area budgets." + The seniors program, coordinated through the Educational Foundation of the Professional Ski Instructors of America, has grown to include 48 ski areas in the East. More areas in the West are beginning to see its merits. +Under the program, ski areas offer clinics and ski instruction to people 50 and older for nominal fees. "People entering the golden years are much more active participants than their parents were," said Allard, who is 57. "When I started the seniors program seven years ago, I felt that the ski industry was not looking at this growing population." +Statistics from the National Sporting Goods Association, a trade group, show that the number of people 65 and older who skied in 1988 was .3 percent of the country's estimated 12.4 million skiers. In 1993, the number grew to .7 percent of 10.5 million skiers. +"There is no reason for aging skiers to give up their participation in the sport," Allard said. "They can stay warm if they dress right, and they can still ski 80-90 percent of the slopes they did at 20. I'm not saying they're going to ski it the same way, but they can still enjoy it." +Ski areas are designing their senior clinics to meet this increasing demand. At Jiminy Peak, in Hancock, Mass., the program is open to people 50 or older, beginner to advanced, each Thursday morning. +"We find there are a whole bunch of skiers who are pretty happy with their skiing," said John Root, director. "But they want to know how to handle certain tactical situations, like bumps, ice, the steeps, or powder. They want to know how to use the skiing they already own." +At Attitash/Bear Peak, N.H., the "Thank Goodness I'm Fifty" program costs $25 for seasonal membership. Included in the price of the Thursday morning classes is a social get-together from 8:30 to 10 A.M., and lessons from 10:30 A.M. to noon. +"In this area, the older folks have been coming here for quite awhile," said Jean Leone, administrator for sales at Attitash. "Most of them are good skiers, and they're very aggressive." +Low as the prices are for lessons, they are not free. But it is common in the industry for ski areas to give free lift passes to people who are 70 and older. Allard believes that aging skiers, many of whom are on the leading edge of the baby-boomers population bulge, will ultimately drain ski resort budgets if the practice persists. +Her opinion doesn't mesh with that of Lloyd Lambert, a 93-year-old skier from Ballston Lake, N.Y., who founded the 70-Plus Ski Club in 1977. With 11,000 members, the club has agreements with ski areas worldwide for free lift tickets for its 70-something skiers. +"I ski the lower runs now, maybe four or five times, and then I take a rest," Lambert said. "I used to go to the top and ski everything. But I stopped that. I thought, well, what's the use of taking chances. There's moguls out there, and I don't like moguls." +Lambert said that he gets letters from new members on fixed incomes who spoke of waiting to become 70 so they could take advantage of a free lift pass. +Alta, a ski area in Utah noted for its large annual snowfalls, has acknowledged the aging skier for years. But the cutoff for a free pass has always been 80 years old, and still is, said Rosie Gale, sales supervisor. Founded in 1936 as the second oldest ski resort in the West to Sun Valley, Idaho, Alta has numerous seniors who frequent its slopes. +Gale defends the area's policy, noting that an adult lift ticket at Alta, a large area with 2,500 acres of ski terrain, is $25. The price is comparable to a child's pass at many other ski areas. +"Everybody here get's a kid's price," she said. "If they make it to 80, they get a free ticket." + +LOAD-DATE: December 22, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +451 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 25, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +CHRISTMAS ON THE ROAD -- TENNESSEE: PETER APPLEBOME; +After Fire and Flood, Home at Last + +BYLINE: By PETER APPLEBOME; PETER APPLEBOME is a Times correspondent who reports on education nationally from Atlanta. + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 8; Column 3; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 477 words + +If Christmas is a time for surprises, New York Times correspondents have had their share: along with the Japanese Santa and tree-trimming Muscovites there were the Serbian snipers, the bullets in Beirut, the tragic fire in Tennessee. +In writing of their most memorable Christmases away from home, 10 correspondents range around the world; some recall elegant feasts, in a Swabian castle or a Hong Kong hotel; others cannot forget the fruitcake they could not possibly eat in Somalia, the joy radiating from a Saigon cathedral, or the tearful Mass in Sarajevo. All remember how they counted their blessings. + Sometimes disasters afar can be disasters at home as well. Objectively, there isn't the slightest question which is worse. Subjectively, it can get a little murky. +I'm Jewish, but we always mark Christmas as a secular day of peace and quiet, a day when the world stops, and we do too. In fact, we -- meaning my wife, Mary Bounds, 3-year-old son, Ben, and I -- were all feeling kind of snug, toasty and happily familial on a frigid Christmas Eve in Atlanta in 1989, when the phone rang. My wife picked it up. "It's the desk," she said, in a tone a doctor might use in announcing, "It's malignant." +There had been a nursing home fire in Johnson City, Tenn. More than a dozen people had died, and I was the nearest available reporter to cover it. +I got up at dawn, flew to Knoxville and drove up an icy Interstate 81 past a handful of jackknifed 18-wheelers that had failed to navigate the icy patches toward Johnson City. There I found the charred remains of the John Sevier Center and perhaps 100 elderly people who had escaped a fire that had killed 16. Most of them had been trapped on upper floors as black smoke billowed round them. "It was sad, pitiful," a survivor named James Grizzle recalled. "There were people with walkers, with canes, with crutches. Their eyes were like saucers. They thought they weren't going to make it." +I did my interviews, wrote my story, sent it in and dashed for Johnson City's Tri-Cities Airport, which had a plane back to Atlanta at around 8:30 P.M. I checked in at home, to say that at least I'd get home for the end of the day. My wife icily said fine, and by the way, in the middle of the afternoon she heard a sudden loud crack downstairs, and ran down to find that a pipe had burst sending water cascading through our furnished basement. Luckily, the next door neighbor dashed over to shut off the water, but the downstairs was like a shallow pond. +I got home expecting the worst, but some days are so bad they can't do anything but get better. There was turkey and dressing on the table. Our son was soundly asleep. The water gently lapped around downstairs. I kept thinking of the old people in the stairwell, their eyes as big as saucers, counted my blessings, and felt happy to be home. + +LOAD-DATE: December 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +452 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 25, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Experts Say Improved Treatment Of Bed Sores Could Save Money + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 28; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 433 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Dec. 24 + +Hospitals and nursing homes could alleviate suffering and save millions of dollars by improving treatment of bed sores, an ailment that afflicts hundreds of thousands of bedridden patients and people in wheelchairs, experts say. +Bed sores, also called pressure ulcers, can form in less than two hours and infect muscle and bone unless checked. The experts, backed by an agency of the Public Health Service, said prompt, simple treatments like frequently changing a patient's position could undo the damage in most cases. + Treatment guidelines were released on Wednesday by the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, which Congress created in 1989 to encourage the spread of the most effective medical treatments. +One in 11 hospital patients and almost 1 in 4 nursing home patients are afflicted by bed sores. In addition, quadriplegics in wheelchairs and most elderly patients who fracture their hips suffer from them. +The sores cost an estimated $1.3 billion a year to treat, and cause untold suffering. The experts said hospitals and nursing homes could save at least $40 million if they followed the new guidelines. +"These recommendations can save pain, lives and money," said Clifton R. Gaus, the administrator of the health policy agency. +Dr. Nancy Bergstrom, a professor of nursing at the University of Nebraska Medical Center who was chairwoman of a 16-member advisory panel, said, "The fundamentals of good care are making sure the patient has good nutrition." In addition, she said, "relieving pressure on the skin frequently, and properly cleansing and dressing the wound" can prevent bed sores. +The sores tend to form on bony prominences like the hips or heels, which bear weight when someone is seated or lying for a long time. Healing usually takes two to four weeks, but infected sores can take longer. +The sores form when pressure squeezes and closes tiny blood vessels that normally supply tissue with oxygen and nutrients. Among the experts' recommendations were these: +*Keep pressure off the sore. +*Change positions at least every two hours. +*Clean sores with saline solutions; antiseptic agents and skin cleansers like peroxide and betadine should not be used. +*Maintain good nutrition to promote healing. +*Keep both heels off the bed by placing a thin foam pad or pillow under the legs from mid-calf to ankle. +*Avoid doughnut-type devices; they are more likely to cause pressure sores than prevent them. +The guidelines were the 15th clinical practice ones published by the health care agency. Free copies may be obtained by calling (800) 358-9295. + +LOAD-DATE: December 25, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +453 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 26, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +THE MEDIA BUSINESS; +Magazines + +BYLINE: By Deirdre Carmody + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 57; Column 1; Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 859 words + +EVER conscious that sex sells and trendiness titillates, magazines do not usually go out of their way to put aging men on their covers. +But this month, it was a race for the face of the man New York magazine called "The Sexiest (70-Year-Old) Man Alive." + He is none other than Paul Newman, whose new movie came out yesterday, on Christmas Day. (Actually, Mr. Newman will turn 70 next month.) He appeared on the covers of the Dec. 12 issue of New York, the Dec. 19 issue of Newsweek and the December issue of GQ. +Entertainment Weekly reluctantly dropped plans to run a Jan. 6 Newman cover because everyone else seemed to have run him already. +"The reason we put him on the cover was because our culture people came back from seeing "Nobody's Fool" and said this is an absolutely terrific movie, he is going to be nominated for an Oscar and he is a great American icon," Maynard Parker, editor of Newsweek, said. +Did Mr. Parker mind that Mr. Newman had been on the cover of New York the week before? +"I thought long and hard about it. And I thought that the only people who would see both magazines were the hothouse New York media community," he said. "And that is so small a number that I didn't think it was a good enough reason to deprive the rest of our readers." +Arthur Cooper, editor in chief of GQ, had planned Jack Nicholson for GQ's December cover. Then, at the last minute, Nicholson's new movie, "The Crossing Guard," was postponed until spring, leaving Mr. Cooper coverless. He jumped at the opportunity to get Mr. Newman, not caring that the two other magazines already had him. +But does Paul Newman sell? +Kurt Andersen, editor of New York, said that the final results were not in yet but that it appeared that 50 percent of the Dec. 12 newsstand copies were sold -- an unusually high percentage for any magazine. Average weekly sales for New York are in the "low 40 percent," he said. + +Postscript + Despite his enormous appeal, Paul Newman actually ended up in second place this month, as far as cover-selling oldsters go. +Pope John Paul II, 74, walked away with the honors. Having appeared on the Dec. 11 cover of The New York Times Magazine (with a circulation of 1.7 million) and on the Dec. 26 cover of the Man of the Year issue of Time magazine (4.2 million circulation), the Pope reached far more readers than Mr. Newman did. +All in all, it was a great month for septuagenarians and near-septuagenarians. + +News Weeklies Double Up + Time and Newsweek each broke a longstanding practice this year and came out with their first double year-end issues. A third news weekly, U.S. News & World Report, has been running year-end double issues since 1976. +The cover date on Time is Dec. 26, 1994/Jan. 2, 1995. Newsweek wisely has no date on its cover since virtually everybody knows cover dates don't mean much. Both Time and Newsweek actually appear on newsstands the week before their dates. +Many weekly magazines, including Entertainment Weekly and The New Yorker, run year-end double issues, enabling them to save production costs and give the staff a week off. +Generally speaking, advertisers love any kind of special issue and magazines can sell more ad pages in a double issue than in two issues combined. Since the double issues of Time and Newsweek came out before Christmas, they were particularly attractive to advertisers seeking to snag last-minute shoppers. +Time was also able to capitalize on its double issue because it carried its Man of the Year profile. + +Buzz Widens Its Net + What would make a local magazine with a circulation of not quite 75,000 think it might be able to lure enough readers across the country to justify national distribution? +Four-year-old Buzz calls itself The Talk of Los Angeles. (Maybe a slight exaggeration, given the size of its circulation, but never mind.) Being a true chauvinist, Buzz believes that the City of Angels -- and articles about its culture, life style and mindset -- have enough of an aura to warrant being a national magazine. +Response to direct-mail tests supports this belief, Susan Gates, the publisher, said. As a result, Buzz plans to increase its circulation to 125,000 and step up its subscription efforts and newsstand presence in New York and other big cities. +Ms. Gates added that the small circulation posed no problem in attracting advertisers. "From the very start," she said, "our strategy has been to offer an extremely targeted, top-demographic readership to upscale national advertisers. Advertisers like these certainly find much of the nonprint media too broad for their message -- and interestingly, some of them even feel that the traditionally 'upscale' magazines offer a broader reach than they need." +Buzz, whose subscribers have a median household income of $74,700 -- higher than that for New York or Vanity Fair -- runs ads by Bulgari, Louis Vuitton, BMW and Giorgio Armani. +Buzz is also starting Buzz Books, a publishing venture with St. Martin's Press. It plans to publish six to eight fiction and nonfiction titles a year, focusing on the culture of Southern California, beginning next year. + +LOAD-DATE: December 26, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +454 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 26, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Volunteering Is Therapy For the Volunteers, Too + +BYLINE: By ABBY GOODNOUGH + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 42; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 601 words + +Paul Adams spent years struggling with mental illness and learning how to function on his own. Not long ago, he realized that reaching out to other vulnerable people would have an invaluable effect on his own well-being. +Mr. Adams participates in Rehabilitation and Education in the Art of Living, a program in the Bronx that helps mentally ill people work toward independence. As part of his treatment, Mr. Adams volunteers as a companion for elderly people in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx. His responsibilities include escorting people to doctors' offices, buying groceries, picking up prescriptions and even chatting on the telephone. In more than one case, the volunteers have helped elderly people to continue living independently rather than enter nursing homes. + "Before I started doing this, I would lie in bed and be depressed all day," said Mr. Adams, who is going back to school now that the program has helped stabilize his life. "Volunteering gets my mind off my own burdens and makes me responsible." +Mr. Adams is an accomplished pianist, and as part of his volunteer work, he learns songs from the 1930's and performs them at centers for the elderly. The music, he said, is a form of therapy for both him and the people he works with. +"It has helped me deal with the pressure of performing in front of a lot of people," he said. "And it puts them in a good mood." +The Senior Citizens Project is just one aspect of the rehabilitation program, which was started by the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services in 1985. The board is an agency of UJA-Federation of New York, one of seven organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, in its 83d year. Participants, who are referred by psychiatric hospitals, learn prevocational skills, cook for one another and receive group therapy. But Mr. Adams and several others say the Senior Citizens Project has been the key to building their confidence. +"It makes you feel like you're accomplishing so much," said Shirley Rios, who calls an elderly woman every morning to check on her. "Some of these people have nobody to talk to but us, and they really depend on us." +Dror Nir, director of the rehabilitation program, said that people often attach stigmas to both mental illness and old age, so the volunteers and their elderly companions share a sense of vulnerability. "Both groups are labeled negatively by society, but both have a lot of strength," he said. "They have a reciprocal relationship, helping each other get over obstacles." +A man named Lloyd, who would not give his last name, said he used to work with an elderly man who had lost a daughter to leukemia. Since Lloyd's parents had died young, the two helped each other work through their grief. "I was like a social worker to him," Lloyd said. "You can share their hurt and sorrow, but you can also share their joy." +In some cases, working with elderly people has helped the volunteers overcome their fears. One woman was afraid to use public transportation until she started escorting people to doctors' appointments, and now she rides the subway alone. But more than anything, the volunteers say, focusing on other people's needs has helped them stop obsessing about their own problems. +"I'm not as uptight as I used to be, and I'm a lot more empathetic," said George Fisher, a former artist who could not keep a job before he came to the program. "When you see how happy you make these people, it gives you such an uplifting feeling." + +Previously recorded $2,164,560.34 +Recorded Friday 104,237.20 + +Total $2,268,797.54 + +LOAD-DATE: December 26, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +455 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 28, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Personal Health + +BYLINE: By Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section C; Page 10; Column 5; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1153 words + +BY the age of 3, virtually every American child has had at least one respiratory infection caused by a virus that few people have heard of and fewer still take seriously. It is respiratory syncytial virus, or R.S.V., which was first discovered in chimpanzees in 1956 but was soon recognized as a nearly universal cause of a cold-like illness in people. +Regardless of its relative obscurity and usually benign nature, R.S.V. is not an organism to be taken lightly. An R.S.V. infection can result in serious, even fatal, respiratory illness when it infects very young infants or any children with medical conditions like congenital heart or lung disease or respiratory damage after premature birth. + R.S.V., a highly contagious virus, is the leading cause in young children of severe lower respiratory illness -- bronchiolitis and pneumonia -- which often requires hospital treatment. Each year, 90,000 children are hospitalized with R.S.V., and the virus is responsible for an estimated 4,500 childhood deaths. It can be a very expensive illness, costing more than $5,000 a day to treat infants who need respiratory assistance and a total of $77,600 for a two-week hospital stay. In addition, after recovering from R.S.V., some children develop an asthmatic condition that can persist throughout childhood and occasionally into adulthood. +Adults too sometimes become very ill with an R.S.V. infection. In most adults, the virus causes a mild respiratory infection that is clinically indistinguishable from any other common cold. But British researchers reported last year that in elderly people R.S.V. might be as important as influenza viruses in causing serious and even fatal respiratory illness. The virus's symptoms in the elderly often mimic those of influenza, Dr. D. M. Fleming and Dr. K. W. Cross of the Birmingham Research Unit in England reported in The Lancet, a medical journal published in Britain. In fact, the researchers suggested that R.S.V. infections might be one reason flu vaccine appears to be less effective in older people; such people may think they have the flu but actually have R.S.V. +The "season" for R.S.V. infections in the temperate zone starts in December, peaks in January and February and peters out in April. There is no better time than now to learn how best to protect very young and high-risk children and how to recognize and deal with a serious R.S.V. infection should it occur. + +Is It R.S.V.? + Dr. Susan Brugman, a pediatric pulmonologist at the National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine in Denver, said R.S.V. typically started like any cold: in the upper respiratory tract, causing a runny nose, slight fever and fussiness. But the infection can then move into the lower respiratory tract -- the bronchioles and lungs. She explained that although "the majority of babies are not at risk of developing severe R.S.V., infants under 6 months of age have much smaller airways that are more likely to become plugged up, making breathing difficult." +Dr. William C. Gruber, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, said the virus spread to the lower respiratory tract in about 20 percent of infected children. Signs of such spread include wheezing, a sinking of the chest between the ribs when the child inhales, rapid breathing and halted breathing for periods of time. +Dr. Brugman cautions parents to be on the alert for a serious infection. "The infection has become severe if the baby begins to breathe faster, has difficulty breathing, wheezes and coughs and stops drinking fluids," she said. "That's the time to see a physician right away. And especially if the baby was born prematurely, has congenital heart disease or cystic fibrosis, the sooner the baby gets to the doctor the better." +Babies with such respiratory symptoms should always have their blood checked to see if they are getting enough oxygen. Even if the baby does not look blue, more oxygen may be needed, Dr. Brugman said. Although a 20-minute antibody test for the viral infection can be performed in a doctor's office, the test is complex and the diagnosis of R.S.V. is more often made in a hospital laboratory, Dr. Gruber said. +Reinfection is common, but the severity of the illness nearly always diminishes with age. Other less serious complications of R.S.V. infection in young children include tracheobronchitis, middle ear infection and reactive airway disease, a tendency to wheeze when exposed to any respiratory irritant. Most children outgrow wheezing by the time they are 3 to 5 years old, but some develop persistent asthma. Dr. Brugman said those at high risk of developing asthma included babies with a family history of asthma, those who already had allergies and babies exposed to cigarette smoke or other environmental irritants at home. + +How It Spreads + There may be no virus more efficient at finding hosts than R.S.V. The organism can live on surfaces and clothing for hours, sometimes days, Dr. Brugman said. "Good, frequent hand washing is the single most important thing to do to curb the spread of this disease," she noted. "You can easily infect yourself after touching a contaminated surface and then touching your nose or eyes." +Likewise, an adult whose hands become contaminated by a child's virus-laden secretions can readily spread the infection to other children. Dr. Brugman noted, for example, that "almost 100 percent of children in a day care center will get R.S.V. if one child does." The infection often becomes epidemic in hospital settings, presumably spread by health professionals from child to child. Dr. Brugman said the risk of R.S.V. was the primary reason for avoiding elective pediatric surgery at this time of year. +About the only effective treatment for infection by the virus is the antiviral agent ribavirin (Virazole). When administered as an aerosol to hospitalized children, it can reduce the severity of lower respiratory infections. +Although antibodies to the virus form after an R.S.V. infection, they are not very protective, and no lasting immunity develops. A previous attempt to develop a vaccine against R.S.V. ended in disaster, with vaccinated children developing very serious and even fatal disease. +Researchers have also experimented with passively immunizing babies at high risk of severe R.S.V. infection by giving them intravenous injections of antibodies extracted from the blood of people, like pediatric nurses, who have high antibody levels. +Dr. Gruber and Dr. Kathy Neuzil, an infectious disease specialist, are exploring the value of extra doses of vitamin A in reducing the severity of infections from the virus. He explained that levels of vitamin A in the blood dropped after an R.S.V. infection, and that this might interfere with the repair of respiratory lining cells damaged by the infection, leading to more severe disease. + +LOAD-DATE: December 28, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +456 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 29, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +When Hope Falters, Balm for the Soul + +BYLINE: By ANNE RAVER + +SECTION: Section C; Page 1; Column 3; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 1927 words + +WHEN the ancients were sick, they walked among trees and plants and breathed the fresh air to soothe their pain. +Then came the discovery of penicillin, chemotherapy, laser beams. High-tech medicine buried the garden under high-rise hospitals with sealed windows. + But now there's a movement afoot to return nature to the lives of patients. It is spurred by an army of landscape architects, horticulture therapists, nurses, environmental psychologists, gardeners and most of all, the patients, families and friends who have found themselves inside dreary hospitals, facing a disease -- like cancer, AIDS or Alzheimer's -- for which there are no magic bullets. +Throughout history, the idea of providing gardens for patients "has waxed and waned," said Dr. Sam Bass Warner, an urban historian at Brandeis University. "Wherever medicine has no magic -- for AIDS or cancer or mental illness -- gardens reappear. When we think science can do it all, they disappear." +Gardens are popping up in hospitals, hospices and residences for the elderly all over the country. They may be as small as a rooftop terrace in East Harlem or as large as a 60-acre hospital complex in Texarkana, Tex. And though there is no cure for the diseases, the power of plants to heal the spirit is evident. +* In Vancouver, at a residence with a specially designed garden for Alzheimer's patients, violent incidents declined 19 percent over a two-year period. At three comparable residences with no outdoor space, the rate of violent incidents increased 681 percent over the same period. +* In an AIDS unit at the Terence Cardinal Cook Health Center in East Harlem, a patient looks out his window onto a garden he has followed from the moment of its construction. "I saw a bee seducing a flower out there," he says. "On a windy day, I can hear the chimes. That's what I call unorchestrated music." +* At the new St. Michael Rehabilitation Center on the outskirts of Texarkana, Leta Shelby, who had recently had a hip operation, did her leg exercises on a mat in a sunny room that faced a wooded glen full of birds. "It's so nice to look out and see the trees and have the sun shining in the window." Mrs. Shelby had been wheelchair-bound for 20 years with rheumatoid arthritis. "It makes a tremendous difference. And I'm walking now, with a walker." +Sister Damian Murphy, the director of pastoral care at St. Michael, also notices a change. "I've seen a drastic improvement in patients here," she said. "The average rehab patient is home now in two to three weeks -- compared to about six weeks or more in the old facility." +Incorporating plants in healing is as ancient as the Egyptian physicians who prescribed walks in gardens for the mentally disturbed. +At Friends Hospital, which was founded in 1817 on a 57-acre farm outside Philadelphia, mentally disturbed patients were encouraged to work in the fields and gardens. Today, at a group home for schizophrenics on the grounds, a man once locked in a ward under heavy medication now tends the garden. +"Down here, he's off the medication," said Barbara Hines, the group home director. "He grows flowers; that's his medication." +In the Middle Ages, the monasteries and convents that housed the sick often had open courtyards that were divided into four squares that echoed the Garden of Eden. +By the 19th century, Florence Nightingale was designing hospital wards laid out in pavilions open to the light and air, with gardens on either side. +But after World War II, with antibiotics and medical technology, fresh air and greenery were nearly forgotten as cures came from petri dishes and radiation machines. +"Today's hospitals look more like office buildings or factories than places of healing," Dr. Warner said. +That's what James Burnett, a landscape architect, discovered two years ago, when his mother was dying of lung cancer at a hospital outside Dallas. She was in a tiny room with a tiny window, overlooking a gravel roof. She died there after months of invasive procedures. +"I would have liked to have gotten her out of there," he said. "She lived on a lake and she just wanted to go home." +After his mother's death, Mr. Burnett, who had concentrated much of his work on office parks for corporations, turned instead to designing gardens and landscapes for hospitals. +Two weeks ago, he stood in the middle of his latest project: the landscape for the $138 million St. Michael Health Care Center, which rises out of 60 acres of woods. +The gleaming glass towers of its new 400-bed acute-care hospital reflect the great pines that were carefully preserved during construction. Offices face a fountain in a courtyard surrounded by pear trees, and patients undergoing radiation and chemotherapy can look out on climbing roses and a pond with goldfish. +The new complex, which is owned and run by the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate World, a Catholic order, has many human touches: little kitchens where family members can cook a loved one's favorite food, chairs that open up into single beds for family members who want to stay overnight, meditation rooms and plenty of gardens. +No one is saying that gardens can cure cancer or AIDS, but over the last 10 years, social scientists have begun to try to measure the effects of nature on an anxious mind. +A 10-year study of patients recovering from gall bladder surgery, conducted by Dr. Roger Ulrich, an environmental psychologist at Texas A & M's College of Architecture, compared 23 patients whose windows looked out on trees and sky with 23 patients whose windows faced brick walls. Those with views of nature had shorter stays, took fewer painkillers and complained less to nurses. +Subsequent studies by Dr. Ulrich and others show similar reductions in patient anxiety from just gazing at pictures of natural scenes. +Even a postage-stamp garden can give an anxious person respite in the noisy, enclosed spaces of a modern hospital where there is little chance for contemplation. +When Topher Delaney, a garden designer, was told she had malignant breast cancer six years ago, she found herself in a state of shock at a hospital in California. She was to have surgery in two days. +"I went into the waiting room, which was filled with young people," she said. She couldn't bear to stay there. Her only refuge was the cafeteria in the basement, where people were watching television and eating. +"At that moment, I said, 'Topher, you're going to spend the rest of whatever life you have making healing gardens,' " she said. +After recovering from her mastectomy, she built a garden in an 800-square-foot space at the Marin General Hospital Cancer Center north of San Francisco. It features a stone fountain surrounded by plants known for their medicinal qualities, like echinacea, periwinkle and yew, and is intended as a quiet place for patients awaiting radiation and chemotherapy. +She is now building a two-acre meditation garden at the Norris Cancer Center in Los Angeles, with a donation from a family whose daughter died at the hospital. Ms. Delaney designed the garden with two different groups of people in mind. +"You have people coming in who are panicked that they aren't going to survive," she said. "And ones who aren't, who are accepting it." +The gardens that Ms. Delaney and others are designing around the country are often built with volunteer labor and donations. Perhaps nowhere is this sense of community more alive than among those artists and designers who are building gardens for AIDS patients. +"I've lost about six friends to AIDS and two more are just starting the process," said David Kamp, who used to design landscapes for estates in Connecticut. +Two years ago, Mr. Kamp joined forces with Bruce Detrick, a founding member of the Tamarand Foundation -- a nonprofit group in New York devoted to making life better for AIDS patients. With private donations, they built a garden on a terrace off the AIDS unit at Terence Cardinal Cook Hospital on Fifth Avenue at 105th Street. The terrace, once a barren space that baked in the sun, now offers shady sitting areas for patients whose medication makes their eyes sensitive to light, and low planters that are accessible to people in wheelchairs. Patients have grown tomatoes, peppers, fragrant herbs and colorful flowers. Mr. Kamp's design emphasizes the sound of trickling water and wind chimes as well as the fragrance of herbs because hearing and smell are the two senses least affected by AIDS. +Mr. Kamp has also learned much from the horticulture therapy program at the Howard A. Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in Manhattan, which has been in the forefront of using gardens in physical therapy. +"It feels really good to be touching the soil and plants again," said Jane Porcino, who is regaining the use of her hands after a stroke. +"You lose so much when you have a stroke," she said as she potted a plant in the institute's greenhouse. "The ability to walk, to use the computer. It feels very good to do this. It's one less loss." +The neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks, who recounts the soothing effects of plants on his patients in "Awakenings" and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," is a familiar face at Rusk. +"I had people who were so anxious in the hospital that I would do my consultations in the greenhouse," he said. "They would often feel less pressured there and have less ticks and involuntary movements." +Dr. Sacks has watched deeply demented patients "who couldn't tell a knife from a fork" planting gardens. "They do not put a plant upside down," he said. "They have a deep natural sense of how plants grow." +Gardens have also been found to soothe Alzheimer's patients, especially if the spaces are designed to fit their special needs. +"Alzheimer's patients are very mobile and they have a huge amount of energy," said Patrick Mooney, who teaches landscape architecture at the University of British Columbia. "If they get agitated, they can go over a six-foot fence." +Mr. Mooney has compared the rate of violent incidents at five different residences for Alzheimer's patients in British Columbia. One, Cedarview Lodge, had a garden designed especially for these patients. Another had an outdoor area with no special design, and three had no outdoor space at all. +In both residences with gardens, the rate of violent incidents declined by 19 percent between 1989 and 1990. In the non-garden institutions, the rate of violent incidents increased by 681 percent. +Gardens for Alzheimer's patients need fences with hedges or vines to screen out distractions on the other side, a path that will always bring them back to where they started, continuous lighted handrails to help navigate, and colored concrete surfaces to cut out glare. +The Cedarview garden includes fragrant herbs to awaken the senses and stir childhood memories, and even a clothesline where some patients enjoy hanging up the linens. +"Residents are not inclined to be violent, provided they are secure and can have access to spaces and get off on their own," said Lenore Nicell, director of Cedarview. "They need to experience solitude, yet feel safe." +Such widely varying accounts of the soothing powers of nature may well lead to a new vision for health care. "Until it becomes common knowledge," said Mr. Mooney "that the experience in naturalistic environments is fundamental to psychological wellness -- whether in the normal population or or special population -- then we cannot make the case for really improving the human condition." + +LOAD-DATE: December 29, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Topher Delaney in Healing Garden that she designed for patients at the Marin Cancer Institute near San Francisco when she learned she had breast cancer. The tiny atrium, below, has a fountain and medicinal plants. (Setb Affoumado; Marc Geller for The New York Times) (pg. C1); Gene Kelley relaxes in the Enid A. Haupt glass garden at the Howard A. Rusk Institute in Manhattan. People recovering from spinal cord injuries and strokes go there for regular horticultural therapy. (Andrea Mohin/The New York Times); James Burnett (above), landscape architect of St. Michael health center (right) in Texas. Old engraving (above left) of Friends Hospital in Pennsylvania. (Alan S. Weiner for The New York Times; master plan from Watkins Carter Hamilton, Architects, and James Burnett, Landscape Architecture.); The garden of Cardinal Cooke health center in East Harlem. (Alan S. Weiner for The New York Times) (pg. C6) + +Drawings + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + + + +457 of 457 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 30, 1994, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +THE NEEDIEST CASES; +With Help, Overcoming An Illness Of Solitude + +BYLINE: By ABBY GOODNOUGH + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 435 words + +The old man turned his eyes toward the floor and spoke softly of his wife's death. He had stood by her hospital bed for months, witnessing the waning of her life. As she grew sicker, Mike F. succumbed to an unfamiliar helplessness. +"All I could do was sit there and watch her go," he said. "And then I was alone." + After Mr. F.'s wife died of cancer in 1991, the silence in his Brooklyn apartment was unbearable. At his daughter's urging, Mr. F. started visiting a center for the elderly in his Brooklyn neighborhood, but his depression made it difficult to form friendships. He criticized activities at the center, and others found him pushy. Soon, he stopped going out. +"I didn't know how to cope in a social situation," said Mr. F., who is 78. "I was starting from scratch, and it was hard to mix with new people on my own." +Last year, after more prodding from his daughter, Mr. F. set out to deal with his depression. He started going to the Kings Bay YM-YWHA for counseling offered through the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services. The board is affiliated with UJA-Federation of New York, one of the charities helped by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. Money raised by the fund, in its 83d year, helps poor and sick people throughout the city. +Rita Landberg, a social worker with the board, has helped Mr. F. work through his grief and soften his gruff exterior. +"In the beginning, Mike was alienating people because he came across as bossy," said Ms. Landberg, who works with 25 elderly people at the Kings Bay Y and an office on Avenue J. "He had a profound depression and loneliness to deal with." +After a few months of therapy, Mr. F. ventured back to the center for the elderly in his neighborhood. Instead of criticism, he offered ideas for improving activities. He suggested printing menus and signs with large letters so everyone could read them, and helped raise money for a new pool table. Mr. F. also persuaded the center to hold dances twice a week instead of once. All his ideas were met with enthusiasm. +"It wasn't until I was visiting Rita on a regular basis that I realized you have to listen as much as you talk," Mr. F. said the other day. "I've learned to keep my mouth closed and not come across as a heavy." +His gentler approach has paid off: this fall, Mr. F. married a 68-year-old friend he met at a center for the elderly. "I asked her to dance and it led to a marriage," he said. "Hardly a day goes by that people don't tell me how wonderful she is." + +Previously recorded $2,375,744.45 +Recorded yesterday 31,237.00 + +Total $2,406,981.45 + +LOAD-DATE: December 30, 1994 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company + diff --git a/TestFiles/NYT 1997.txt b/TestFiles/NYT 1997.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7056896 --- /dev/null +++ b/TestFiles/NYT 1997.txt @@ -0,0 +1,30024 @@ + + +1 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 1, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Lilco's Reviled Chairman Emerges on Top Again in Merger + +BYLINE: By DAN BARRY + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 41; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk; Second Front + +LENGTH: 1612 words + +DATELINE: HICKSVILLE, L.I., Dec. 31 + +William J. Catacosinos has a job that few people can appreciate, other than meter maids, dentists and maybe George M. Steinbrenner 3d. He is the chairman of one of the most detested businesses in the nation's corporate pantheon, the Long Island Lighting Company. +Lilco's 1.1 million customers pay the highest utility rates in the continental United States, and they let Dr. Catacosinos know it. The owner of a Long Island diner once slammed his Lilco bill so hard on a table that it rattled the Catacosinos family's hamburger platters. Another time, an elderly woman in a crowded Manhattan elevator railed at him for so long that his wife finally told her to back off. + Throughout Long Island, he is known as the man who stubbornly tried to open the ill-fated Shoreham nuclear power plant before finally agreeing to abandon it. +For all the abuse he has taken as the personification of Lilco, Dr. Catacosinos, 66, is not ready to enjoy the multimillion-dollar retirement package that awaits him. On Sunday, he completed a deal in which Lilco and Brooklyn Union Gas would merge to create a new company with 2.2 million customers and more than $4.5 billion in annual revenues. But rather than step aside, Dr. Catacosinos (pronounced CAT-a-co-SEE-nos) demanded that he stay on -- as chairman of the new entity. +His insistence on this point, he acknowledged in an interview today, contributed to an abrupt halt to negotiations with Brooklyn Union late last summer. And when talks resumed, thanks to the intervention of the Pataki administration, Dr. Catacosinos was no less insistent on what role he would play. He prevailed. +This is not the first time Dr. Catacosinos has prevailed under bleak circumstances, to the bafflement of admirers and critics alike. The public's perception of Lilco has gone from dark to black, as rates continue to rise and the company grapples with billions of dollars in debt because of the Shoreham debacle. Through it all, Dr. Catacosinos has endured, reviled by ratepayers, adored by shareholders. +"He has survived bigger storms than some Presidents have been able to survive," said Richard Kessel, a Long Island consumer advocate who has opposed the Lilco chairman many times in the last decade. "And it's no secret that he wanted to stay on. I've got to give him credit. For all the brickbats he's taken, he says, 'Give me more.' I would call him a very worthy adversary." +Although such comments bring a momentary smile to Dr. Catacosinos's face, he says he prefers to focus on realities, not perceptions. He maintains -- and some analysts agree -- that Lilco is a well-managed company that makes money for its investors and provides reliable service to its customers. +But perception can overtake reality, he acknowledges. Officials from both companies have been trying to come up with a name for the new company. One possibility is New York Energy, Dr. Catacosinos said, adding, "But it's not going to be called Lilco." +There are signs in the chairman's office that, despite his reputation, Dr. Catacosinos is more than a corporate automaton. Some, like framed photographs of grandchildren, are found on his desk. +Others are found in his personality, which critics acknowledge can be appealing. Before discussing the merger today, Dr. Catacosinos talked about how he and his wife, Florence, recently had an amiable tiff over the correct way to dance the macarena. +Still, he knows that to many on Long Island, he is Mr. Lilco, which is not the same as being the Good Humor Man. "It's been a very difficult 12 years," he said. "I've become the lightning rod for the company." +The son of Greek immigrants, he grew up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, served in the Navy and graduated with a doctorate in economics from New York University. +For many years, he worked at Brookhaven National Laboratories before beginning two companies of his own. Then, in 1978, he joined the board of Lilco. +By then, Lilco was in the midst of plans to build Shoreham, a decision supported by both Suffolk County and the Federal Government. But an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1979 raised questions about the safety of plants like Shoreham. By the early 1980's, protesters were scaling the fences at Shoreham, and politicians were actively campaigning against Lilco. +In 1984, Dr. Catacosinos became Lilco's chairman. He planned to steady the company's course and then resign, all in about 18 months. But Lilco was beyond simple solutions; cost overruns for the Shoreham project had soared into the billions. "We were preparing various options, including a bankruptcy filing," he said. +Instead, Lilco pursued two approaches: it moved forward with plans to open Shoreham at the same time that it sought a government settlement to keep the plant closed. The company even received a license to conduct low-level tests, which many critics perceived as a threat. +Finally, in 1989, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo signed an agreement allowing Lilco to pass on a $4 billion Shoreham debt to ratepayers. Shareholders cheered; ratepayers never forgot. +Pursuing the low-level testing license "certainly strengthened his hand at the bargaining table," said Nora Bredes, a Suffolk County legislator who fought the Shoreham plan. "He has strengthened the company, but always at the expense of ratepayers." +Although his business acumen and tenacity are rarely questioned, Dr. Catacosinos's sense of public perception often is. And the examples are part of Long Island lore. +In 1985, Hurricane Gloria knocked out power on parts of Long Island for almost two weeks, at the same time Dr. Catacosinos and his wife were celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary in Italy. He says now that he had been working 12-hour days, 7 days a week, for almost 2 years, and that he and his wife needed a break. +"But I came back later than I should have," he said. "That was 12 years ago. It's over, but it lingers." +Other controversies have centered on his salary. In 1995, he accepted a $55,000 raise, then later declined it when critics complained. He now earns about $580,000 a year and has a $5 million retirement package, about average for executives in charge of corporations the size of Lilco. +But Mr. Kessel said that Dr. Catacosinos, who has lived on Long Island for almost 40 years, still does not understand its hothouse environment. "Maybe it's legitimate in the real world," he said of the chairman's compensation. "But this isn't the real world. This is Long Island and this is Lilco. When someone heading Lilco is making more and more money and is getting bonuses, it rankles the people who are paying the highest rates in the continental United States." +Dr. Catacosinos faced a new adversary in 1995 with the election of Gov. George E. Pataki. The Governor, who derived much political support from Suffolk and Nassau counties, vowed to eliminate Lilco and reduce electricity rates by more than 10 percent. +He demonstrated his resolve by appointing a new chairman to the Long Island Power Authority, a state agency charged with solving the Lilco problem. +At about the same time, Brooklyn Union's chairman, Robert B. Catell, 59, reiterated his desire to merge with Lilco. By early last summer, the chairman of the two utilities, along with their advisers, were meeting -- in their offices, at diners on Long Island, at a small restaurant near La Guardia Airport in Queens. +Although a merger would not solve many major questions for the state -- like the $4 billion Shoreham debt or the $1.1 billion that is owed Lilco for tax overassessments -- it was seen as an important first step, and was encouraged by the Pataki administration. The new company, it was argued, would be more cost-effective and stronger in the ever-changing worlds of gas and electric utilities. +But where would Dr. Catacosinos come out in the end? This became a central question. +"When you're bringing together two companies, the succession of who will be in power is always an important issue," said Lou Tomson, a senior aide to Governor Pataki who kept abreast of the negotiations. Regarding Dr. Catacosinos, he said: "He's only been very straightforward with me. But he's also not a guy who's going to give away his negotiating position. He's tenacious." +Talks broke off in late summer, in part because of Dr. Catacosinos's insistence that he play a central role. He said his demand was only natural: he was more familiar than Mr. Catell with the Long Island market and electric utilities, and he could ease the transition for all involved. "My feeling is, I always try to do right," he said. "I can be single-minded as I go toward my goal." +The two sides were eventually brought back to the negotiating table by Frank G. Zarb, chairman of the power authority. +Of Dr. Catacosinos, Mr. Zarb said: "It was clear to me that he wanted to leave on an up note and not on a down note." +By the middle of December, Dr. Catacosinos and Mr. Catell were comfortable enough with their negotiations' progress that they asked to meet with Governor Pataki. "It was a courtesy thing," Dr. Catacosinos said. "He encouraged us to keep talking, recognizing that it may not happen." +But it did, and as part of the deal, Dr. Catacosinos will serve as chairman and chief executive for the first year. Then Mr. Catell will take over as chief executive. +That does not mean that Dr. Catacosinos will be concentrating on the macarena. He will continue to serve as chairman. And page 44 of the agreement stipulates that after he steps down as chief executive, he will continue to serve for five more years as a consultant, at a salary not yet determined. + +LOAD-DATE: January 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: William J. Catacosinos, chairman of Lilco, who has confounded his critics, including ratepayers, for a decade, will be chairman and chief executive after a proposed merger of Lilco and the Brooklyn Union Gas Company. (Vic DeLucia/The New York Times)(pg. 45) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +2 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 2, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Quiet Doctor Finds a Mission in Assisted Suicide Court Case + +BYLINE: By JANE GROSS + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1885 words + +DATELINE: ROCHESTER + +More Marcus Welby than Jack Kevorkian, Dr. Timothy E. Quill treats bronchitis and acne, high blood pressure and diabetes, depression and sprained ankles. He cares for several generations of the same family and makes house calls. +But Dr. Quill, a 47-year-old internist at Genesee Hospital here, has become an unlikely spokesman for the cause of physician-assisted suicide, a status he gained five years ago by admitting in an article in The New England Journal of Medicine that he had helped a patient die. + Now, he is the central figure in a landmark case before the Supreme Court on Jan. 8. The case asks the Court to rule that assisted suicide is an accepted part of medical practice, and it could transform the way Americans die at a time the elderly population is expanding and the health care system is in flux. +To watch Dr. Quill work is to understand that assisted suicide is, for him, part of a patient's treatment from birth to death, an option that brings reassurance but hardly ever needs to be used. +"Assisted suicide is unimportant," he said. "It's a method." +He is somewhat abashed to be the standard bearer in a national debate. "What is important is the individual, listening to them and helping them make the best choices when they don't have the choices they want." +Proponents argue that assisted suicide is a logical extension of earlier high court rulings permitting the terminally ill to discontinue treatment, and that the practice of prescribing lethal drugs is already common, with no regulation. +Opponents, who include the Roman Catholic Church and State Attorney General Dennis C. Vacco and the American Medical Association, fear that legalization will leave elderly, poor and disabled patients at risk of being pressured by family members or unscrupulous doctors into a premature death. +The New York case, and a similar one from Washington State, will be argued in tandem. The appellate court in New York, upholding a right to assisted suicide, cited the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, saying that under current law those on respirators or feeding tubes have a right to die, while those without life support do not. The Washington case also cited the 14th Amendment, saying one has a right to choose the circumstances of death. +After the Washington case was filed, lawyers sought doctors who would be willing to participate in a legal challenge in New York. They approached Dr. Quill because of the attention he garnered as a result of his New England Journal of Medicine article. +Dr. Quill, a slightly built man with owlish glasses and a graying goatee, said he did not join this debate because of a single experience, but rather as a result of the development of his career. As a medical student, he helped a professor develop a course on death. As an intern, he was appalled by what he called harsh, hopeless efforts to keep people alive in the emergency room. Later, he ran a hospice. +This evolution, in the context of patient care, sets Dr. Quill apart from Dr. Kevorkian, the Michigan pathologist who first meets his clients when they request help in dying. Since 1990, when Dr. Kevorkian connected a woman in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease to a makeshift suicide device, he has helped in at least 40 suicides, inspiring debate about a previously taboo topic. +Even the fiercest critics of assisted suicide say Dr. Quill's approach is thoughtful and his credentials are impeccable. He is a professor of medicine and psychiatry at the University of Rochester, the associate director of medicine at the Genesee Hospital and a general practitioner. +Dr. Quill's insistence that aid in dying is a rare, last step in a long, rich doctor-patient relationship is what makes him a model plaintiff in a case at the frontier of social change, said Laurence H. Tribe, the Harvard law professor who will argue the case in the Supreme Court. +"He is a good representative of what ought to happen, because death is not his subspecialty but an integrated part of his practice," Mr. Tribe said. "He treats someone as a whole person, not an anticipatory corpse," as opposed to Dr. Kevorkian and others "who have a stake in finding clients and justifying their own existence." +But what troubles many of those who oppose assisted suicide, including the New York State Attorney General, Dennis C. Vacco, the Catholic Church and the American Medical Association, is not Dr. Quill, but doctors who might be less able or willing to protect patients. To legalize it, they fear, is to put the nation on a slippery slope, without first changing the health care system and improving access to hospice care. +Daniel Callahan, until recently director of the Hastings Center in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., called Dr. Quill a nice fellow, cautious and moderate. But he said Dr. Quill was naive to conclude that legal assisted suicide would not leave powerless patients vulnerable. +"He needs to take a harder view of what's likely to happen in the world," Mr. Callahan said. +Dr. Nancy W. Dickey, chairwoman of the American Medical Association, echoed the concern. "He can draw scenarios that make me step back and say, maybe," Dr. Dickey said of Dr. Quill, adding that she agreed with 95 percent of what he advocated. "But I'd be less worried if everybody had a doctor like him." +Mr. Callahan also disputed Dr. Quill's belief that pain was but one barometer of suffering, and that suicide could be appropriate for patients if they did not want to linger comatose, demented or incontinent. +"That is lethal sentimentality," Mr. Callahan said. "Doctors cannot be expected to solve existential crises. He is treating the psyche. That is not his job." +Dr. Quill disagrees, contending that caring for the whole person is his mission and has been since medical school at the University of Rochester in the 1970's, when a mentor was Dr. Art Schmale, a psychiatrist who specialized in cancer patients. +How troubling, Dr. Schmale said, that all medical students dissect dead bodies but few discuss death; that they are taught how to insert an intravenous line, but not how to tell a patient that the test results are bad and the diagnosis fatal. +Inconsistencies like these led Dr. Quill to accept a position as medical director of a hospice in Rochester, where he met Penny Townsend, a nurse who became his wife. There he learned the tenets of palliative care: pain control, patient autonomy, family relationships, helping a patient seek peace and meaning after technology has failed. +By the time his tenure at the hospice ended, Dr. Quill said, he viewed the care of dying patients as an essential part of his practice. That meant giving clear facts and options to the dying. It meant early discussion of stopping further treatment in favor of palliative care, a conversation many doctors, particularly high-technology specialists, avoid. +"There's an elephant in the room and nobody's talking about it because they don't want to deal with the darker side of illness," Dr. Quill said. +It meant recognizing that a small group of dying patients -- Dr. Quill estimates 5 percent -- could not be made comfortable. +"These few bad deaths must be considered a medical emergency," he said. "People sometimes end up in very bad situations at the end of life, and you have to be creative, bold, in the way you help them. You hope it doesn't involve anything active. But you solve what has to be solved." +The present system, Dr. Quill and others say, does not prevent doctors from helping patients die, although the legal means are sometimes grotesque. He describes in "A Midwife Through the Dying Process" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), the most recent of his two books on terminal illness, the case of an 80-year-old man whose lung cancer had spread to his bones. After months of comfortable hospice care, the man's pain ran wild, responding only to doses of morphine so high they left him agitated and hallucinating. +He begged to die and Dr. Quill used a procedure he found repugnant: sedating the patient to unconsciousness and then letting him die of dehydration. "We would never put our pets through such a process," he said. +In 1991, Dr. Quill faced his first explicit request for help in suicide. A patient, Patricia Diane Trumbull, was dying of leukemia. Rather than undergo chemotherapy, radiation and a bone marrow transplant, which would have given her a 1-in-4 chance of survival, Ms. Trumbull went home, untreated, and spend her last months with her family. +But she was haunted by fears of dying in pain or incompetent, and asked Dr. Quill for barbiturates, in the guise of a sleep aid. After deliberation, he agreed. Ms. Trumbull took the pills and died alone, lest Dr. Quill or her family be implicated for helping her die, considered second-degree manslaughter in New York. +Dr. Quill said he was tortured by the fact he was not with her, and decided to initiate a conversation about this common but hidden practice. He wrote about the case for The New England Journal of Medicine and unleashed a storm. +A grand jury was empaneled and Dr. Quill waived immunity from prosecution to testify, against his lawyer's advice. The state pursued misconduct charges. Demonstrators marched outside his house, as a few still do at the hospital. The grand jury chose not to indict him. +Dr. Quill's fellow doctors at the hospital rallied around, as did his patients. But the university was more equivocal. While Dr. Quill was promoted to a full professorship during this time, a task force at the medical school condemned assisted suicide. Dr. Quill was instructed that all further writings include a disclaimer that his views were his own. +The article set the stage for the two cases about to be argued at the Supreme Court, both with plaintiffs chosen for their reputations. The other plaintiffs in the New York case are Howard A. Grossman, an AIDS doctor; Samuel C. Klagsbrun, a Westchester psychiatrist, and three patients who have since died. +Most of Dr. Quill's patients are aware of his advocacy for the terminally ill. Recently, Ronald Miller, a mediator who suffers from depression and a prostate disorder, interrupted an examination to thank his doctor of many years. +"Do you realize what you represent to a patient, how comforting it is that you'll take them from birth to death?" Mr. Miller asked. +But some are unaware of Dr. Quill's crusade, like Esther Randall, 81, a longtime patient who entered the hospital recently with a broken arm, to be told she had leukemia. +Mrs. Randall had been in failing health for years. She wanted no more treatment. She asked to go home and die in her own bed. +Dr. Quill visited the family -- husband, son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren -- as Mrs. Randall lay dying. He advised the home health aide to stop turning her to prevent bedsores. Moving caused her pain, and she would not linger much longer. He asked her husband to eat more and get some sleep. +On the night of Dec. 25, five days after she left the hospital, Mrs. Randall died in relative peace. Her husband and son said afterward that they had no idea that Dr. Quill was about to make Supreme Court history. He was simply their doctor. +"That's all he wants to be," said Penny Townsend-Quill. "That's what it's about for him." + +LOAD-DATE: January 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Dr. Timothy E. Quill, an internist and associate director of medicine at the Genesee Hospital in Rochester, with a patient at the hospital. (Phil Matt for The New York Times)(pg. B4) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +3 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 3, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +A Needless Obstacle to the Poor + +SECTION: Section A; Page 26; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 638 words + +The Clinton Administration has created a needless problem that could make the tough new welfare law even worse. Officials are now saying that states may not be able to spend their own money to fill gaps created by the law. This has alarmed even some of the most conservative proponents of welfare reform. The new law is stringent enough without Washington's finding new ways to frustrate states that want to take proper care of the poor. +The issue involves a provision known as maintenance of effort. Under the old welfare law, Federal spending on state-run welfare programs was tied to state contributions. The new law turns over fixed amounts of money, called block grants, that are no longer tied to the number of poor residents in a state or to what services the state decides to provide them. Republican sponsors of welfare reform were satisfied to let states do pretty much as they pleased with block grants. But liberals, mostly Democrats, fought for and won maintenance-of-effort provisions that require states to spend on the poor at least 75 percent of the amount they spent under the old law. + The Administration is now suggesting, ominously, that some state programs that could be vital to poor people may not count toward a state's maintenance-of-effort minimum. Experts agree that the law prevents states from getting credit for money they spend on non-welfare programs, or on most of the people who are ineligible for Federal aid. But Congress, wisely, softened even these conditions by granting credit to states that spend money on two important groups of ineligible families. These are families that collect welfare benefits for more than five years and legal immigrants. +However, some states will want to spend money on other needy groups without triggering all the restrictions that accompany the use of Federal block grants. For example, several states want to help elderly retirees who have custody of their grandchildren. If the states use Federal money for these purposes, they will be forced to include the retirees in work programs and impose other requirements that apply to everyone receiving money through Federal block grants. There are other programs, like emergency counseling for families in danger of splitting apart, or wage subsidies for low-paid workers, that states may wish to establish without federally mandated time limits and other onerous restrictions. +The answer to this dilemma, some states concluded, would be to set up a separate program free of Federal restrictions that would be financed with state, not Federal, money. As the states interpreted the law, these state funds could then be applied toward the maintenance-of-effort requirement. It is that reading that the Clinton Administration is now questioning. +How the Administration proceeds on this tricky question of interpretation matters a lot. If Washington denies credit for money spent on, say, grandparents or wage subsidies, then states will be driven to spend money on some other, less important program. But that would contradict Congress's major reason for replacing the 61-year-old entitlement with block grants -- to give states the flexibility to design welfare programs that make the best sense locally. +It is good policy to give states the leeway to count toward their federally specified target money they spend on worthwhile programs for truly needy people. The Administration can point to no specific provision of the welfare law that would prohibit the states' interpretation. For a Democratic President to hurt the poor with a provision pushed into law by liberals to protect the poor would be more than ironic. It would also be a dismaying sequel to the President's election-year decision to sign a welfare bill that his own staff told him would impoverish a million or more children. + +LOAD-DATE: January 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +4 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 3, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +In a Tough Hint to Rebels, Peru Fills Hostages' Jobs + +BYLINE: By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO + +SECTION: Section A; Page 8; Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 731 words + +DATELINE: LIMA, Peru, Jan. 2 + +With the siege of the Japanese Ambassador's residence in its third week, leftist guerrillas have been freeing Peruvian and foreign dignitaries in dribs and drabs, at once alleviating the crisis and heightening the fear of a violent showdown. +Today, President Alberto K. Fujimori replaced the president of the Supreme Court and six police generals who are among the hostages, including the heads of the counterterrorism and state security services, in what a diplomat called a "brutal" message to the rebels that their Peruvian hostages were expendable. + In only his second address since the guerrillas took over the embassy residence, Mr. Fujimori again branded the guerrillas "terrorists." +Widespread expectations earlier in the week that 1996 would end with the encouraging release of 50 or so hostages, propelling the two sides toward a negotiated end to the standoff, have been eclipsed by a hardening of positions and the slow release of small clusters of hostages. +Tonight, 74 hostages were still being held, and the electricity, which the Government had restored to the Ambassador's residence on Tuesday morning, had been cut off again. +After the initial release of women, elderly people and children from the nearly 600 people first taken hostage at a cocktail party on Dec. 17 celebrating the Japanese Emperor's birthday, the rebels released scores of hostages. This week the releases were down to a trickle. +"The situation is becoming more tense as the number of hostages nears a level the guerrillas can control," Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto of Japan was quoted as saying today as he left the Foreign Ministry's hostage crisis center in Tokyo. +With each release -- two men on Tuesday evening, seven more on Wednesday -- both the Government and the Marxist guerrillas move closer to the moment they will have to confront the rebels' fundamental demand for the release of some 400 guerrillas from Peruvian jails, a point on which the Government has shown no sign of yielding. +"If all the foreign hostages are going except for the Japanese and Bolivian Ambassadors, there won't be any intermediate stands left," said Fernando Rospigleosi, a columnist for the news magazine Caretas. "It makes the situation more risky in terms of the prospects for a negotiated settlement." +Until now, the concessions that President Fujimori has made have been relatively minor: to allow the guerrillas limited access to the press, to temporarily restore electricity to the house and to hold out the prospect of safe passage if the guerrillas would lay down their weapons. +While the periodic release of hostages may advance the guerrillas' image as a willing partner in possible negotiations, reducing the number of hostages inevitably lowers the stakes in an assault to end the standoff, experts here said. In addition, the patience of the Fujimori Government -- known for its tough stand against the rebels and loath to grant them a platform for their views -- may well be wearing thin. +Mr. Fujimori was reportedly infuriated by an impromptu news conference the rebels held Tuesday with photographers and cameramen who, allowed to approach the residence for pictures, crossed the outer wall and entered the house. Several of the photographers said they have been harassed by the Peruvian police since the incident: one was detained, another followed, and the home of a third was broken into, in what they said was an attempt to intimidate them. +Despite the public relations setback to the Government, the pictures gave Peruvian military officials their first unedited views of the interior of the house and some of the weapons on hand. +Mr. Fujimori's surprising replacement of key officials whose lives are in the hands of the guerrillas signaled his unwillingness to bend for their sake, one diplomat here said. +"Fujimori is saying two things to the terrorists: one is that it is business as usual," the diplomat said. "The other thing is something very brutal, and that if you didn't kill them before, go ahead and kill them now." +"In my opinion, this is an image contest," said Representative Lourdes Flores Nano, of the opposition Popular Christian Party. That is why, she said, the rebels of the Tupac Amaru "let the journalists in, to show that they're not hurting anybody, and to release those who are not directly involved with Government." + +LOAD-DATE: January 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: President Alberto K. Fujimori reviewed an honor guard outside the Palace of Justice in Lima after replacing top officials who are being held hostage by leftist guerrillas in the Japanese Ambassador's residence. (Reuters) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +5 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 3, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +COMPANY NEWS; +ABBOTT IS SETTLING F.T.C. CHARGES OF FALSE ADVERTISING + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section D; Page 3; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 104 words + +Abbott Laboratories is settling charges of false advertising involving a promotional campaign for its Ensure nutritional drink, the Federal Trade Commission said yesterday. The F.T.C. had contended that Abbott, based in Abbott Park, Ill., said without adequate proof that doctors recommended Ensure as a meal supplement and replacement for healthy adults, including those in their 30's and 40's. Initial advertising for the drink was aimed at senior citizens. Abbott has admitted no wrongdoing but has agreed to make only claims that can be supported by "competent and reliable" scientific evidence, the F.T.C. said. + +LOAD-DATE: January 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +6 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 4, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Metrocards Sent Late, Irritating Elderly Users + +BYLINE: By RICHARD PEREZ-PENA + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 27; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 537 words + +Peg Myerson loves her Metrocard. Her half-fare card has meant a lot less standing in line at subway token booths -- a serious concern for someone with multiple sclerosis. So when her old card expired on Dec. 31 and a new card did not arrive in the mail, she had a problem. +"I fear that I've fallen through the cracks," said Ms. Myerson, who lives on the Upper West Side, and still had not got her replacement electronic fare card yesterday. "I've been delighted with the card, and I desperately want it back." + She is one of several hundred elderly and disabled people whose half-fare cards expired at midnight on Dec. 31, but who had not yet received new ones in the mail yesterday. But transit officials say the problem should correct itself shortly. +"We got the last 400 of them out on the 30th," too late for use on New Year's Day, said Edward Spellman, chief revenue officer of the Transit Authority. "We did get some calls from some senior citizens saying that they did not get their cards." +People who did not get the new cards have had to return to the old way of getting a 50 percent discount, which, for subway riders, means standing in line at the token booth for every trip. +To get a half fare, an elderly or disabled person can go to a booth and pay $1.50 for a token and a paper ticket. For the next trip, the rider has to stand in line again and present the paper ticket. Half-fare tokens must be bought one at a time. +There are 61,000 passengers who have half-fare Metrocards, available since 1995. When a half-fare card is swiped through a turnstile or fare box, 75 cents is deducted, rather than $1.50. Like any Metrocard, a half-fare card can be coded for dozens of fares in a single trip to a token booth. +For bus users, having a half-fare card does not make boarding any faster. Seniors and disabled people who do not have the cards can simply pay 75 cents in cash when they board. +It is not clear exactly how many replacement cards failed to arrive by year's end, but Mr. Spellman said they had either arrived by now, or should arrive in the next few days. +It will be none too soon for Ms. Myerson, who commutes by subway to her job as president of the Women's City Club, a civic group. +"The inconvenience for me is considerable," she said. +The cards generally last two years; transit officials say an open-ended card would be more easily used by an unauthorized person. On Dec. 31, 7,709 expired, and the next group will expire on March 31. +A replacement is supposed to be mailed automatically to every holder of a half-fare card. +To get a half-fare card, a person must fill out an application and show proof of disability or age. The cards have the owner's photograph on them, and are color-coded so that police officers, subway clerks and bus drivers can tell at a glance if an able-bodied young person is illicitly using a half-fare card. +The program originally was administered by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Transit Authority's parent agency. Last month, the responsibility was transferred to the Transit Authority, which officials said may have slowed the issuance of replacement cards, but is supposed to make the operation smoother in the future. + +LOAD-DATE: January 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +7 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 5, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ON POLITICS; +Wary of Those Promises? Check the New Budget + +BYLINE: By Jennifer Preston; Jennifer Preston is Trenton bureau chief of The New York Times. + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 2; Column 5; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 685 words + +DATELINE: TRENTON + +Politicians can give grand speeches, and talk all they want about their ideas and their proposals for new programs and reducing government waste. But if you want to know their top priorities and what they really think, take a look at their budget. +In just a few weeks, Governor Whitman will be presenting her budget to the Legislature. Since both Mrs. Whitman and lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Assembly and Senate face re-election campaigns this year, the budget is one of the most important political documents of 1997. + Election-year budgets offer incumbent politicians a chance to try out their campaign themes and address the needs of various constituencies, both large and small. For example, extra dollars might finally be found for a road project in Monmouth County that residents have long been clamoring for. Or small-business owners might find there are more state loan funds available than there were last year. +Election-year budgets are also important for what they do not include. It is unlikely that Governor Whitman will make another attempt this year to reduce prescription subsidies for the elderly. Every politician, particularly in New Jersey, needs the their votes. +It is also unlikely that the Department of Environmental Protection will face another round of large budget cuts. Democrats believe that Governor Whitman is vulnerable on environmental issues, and Whitman aides have been working hard, behind the scenes, to improve the Governor's image in that area. +The Governor has already hinted that her proposed budget will not include a significant number of layoffs of state workers. +Although an important theme for the Whitman administration has been reducing the size of state government, neither Governor Whitman nor lawmakers want to further anger the union that represents state workers. Republican lawmakers, particularly in Mercer County, would like to avoid having the union actively campaign against them in November. +But election-year budgets are not designed to please everyone. +Certainly, not the schoolchildren in the state's 30 "special needs" school districts. +Governor Whitman and Republican lawmakers met the Dec. 31 deadline to come up with a new school-financing plan to try to end the two-decades-long court battle over disparity between the richest and poorest districts. Governor Whitman will show how she will pay for it when she presents the budget later this month. By putting a $285.5 million price tag on the plan, the Governor and Republican lawmakers agreed to spend $15 million more on education than what even advocates and lawyers involved in the case had said was necessary. +So what's the problem? Why are these same lawyers going back to the State Supreme Court to argue that the new financing plan is unconstitutional and fails to meet the court's ruling that the spending gap between school districts? Why do some fiscal analysts worry that New Jersey might have to come up with even more money, weakening the state's ability to balance the books and possibly leading to higher taxes? +Only half of the $285.5 million in state dollars is going to the state's 30 "special needs" -- or most financially needy -- school districts. And a lot of the money, allocated to these districts, is to pay for pre-kindergarten and full-day kindergarten programs. +Such programs, almost everyone agrees, are essential to give children in low-income communities a better chance of success in school. But the plan does not increase the level of per-pupil spending for regular education to the levels spent on children in wealthier districts. +That's what the lawyers for the children in the 30 "special needs districts" say is what the State Supreme Court demanded. The court is now reviewing the plan, and no one knows what action, if any, the court will take. +The justices don't run for re-election. So they don't have to worry about election-year budgets and making sure enough plums are handed out to the right supporters. That could be good news for tens of thousands of the state's schoolchildren who are too young to vote. + +LOAD-DATE: January 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +8 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 5, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Clinton and G.O.P. Are Unlikely To seek Medicare Premium Rise + +BYLINE: ByBy ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1302 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Jan. 4 + +Administration officials say President Clinton has made a significant decision about budget strategy for 1997: he will not propose any increase in costs for Medicare beneficiaries, but will try to cut back payments to hospitals, doctors and others who provide health care to the elderly. +Congressional Republicans say they too are unlikely to seek any increase in premiums or other charges for beneficiaries because, in last year's elections, they were pummeled by Democrats for having supported such proposals. + But another battle is looming this year over Mr. Clinton's proposal to solve some of Medicare's most conspicuous financial problems by shifting the cost of home health care from one account to another. The home health benefit is the fastest growing component of Medicare. +Mr. Clinton plans to send his budget to Congress early next month. If there is no change in current law, the Medicare trust fund that pays hospital bills will, by his estimate, run out of money in 2001. That is 10 years before the first baby boomers reach 65, the age of eligibility for Medicare. +A bipartisan group of experts summoned to the White House recently to advise the President's budget director, Franklin D. Raines, said Mr. Clinton's home health care proposal -- one of his main proposals to keep the trust fund afloat -- was little more than a bookkeeping gimmick. +Under Mr. Clinton's proposal, most of the cost of home health care for the elderly or disabled would be shifted from the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund to a separate Medicare account with unlimited access to general revenue. +Medicare spending on home health services has exploded in recent years, exceeding $18 billion and accounting for nearly 10 percent of Medicare benefit payments in 1996. Mr. Clinton wants to exclude these costs from the computation of Medicare premiums, so beneficiaries will not have to absorb the cost. +When Mr. Clinton suggested a similar change last year, Republicans said it was not a serious proposal. After the November elections, they told him that they wanted a good-faith gesture on the budget, and that a repeat of his earlier recommendations would not do the trick. +In an interview on Thursday, Representative Bill Archer, the Texas Republican who oversees Medicare as the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said: "We're looking for a signal from the President as to how real his budget will be. I want to work with him on a bipartisan basis, but this proposal on home health care is a shell game, an artificial solution. It may help the trust fund, but creates enormous problems in the general Treasury and for future generations." +Among the experts who met recently with Franklin D. Raines, the budget director for the Clinton Administration, were Charles L. Schultze, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Jimmy Carter; two former directors of the Congressional Budget Office, Rudolph G. Penner and Robert D. Reischauer, and Dan L. Crippen, a White House aide under President Ronald Reagan. +Mr. Schultze said the home health care proposal was "accounting shenanigans," and added: "It doesn't save the Government any money. It doesn't save any money for the Medicare program. It just shifts costs out of the hospital trust fund." Mr. Reischauer and Mr. Penner called it a "gimmick." +White House officials say that because many users of home health services have not been hospitalized recently, there is no reason for the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund to pay for those services. Increasingly, they say, Medicare's home health benefit is used by homebound people who have chronic illnesses or need long-term care for other reasons. +Medicare finances health care for 38 million people who are elderly or disabled. Its costs grew 10 percent a year in the last decade, reaching $191 billion in 1996. +Many Republicans and health policy experts say Medicare beneficiaries should pay more for their care, through premiums, deductibles or co-insurance, because such payments would generate revenue and curb the unnecessary use of services. +Chris Jennings, a White House aide who coordinates health policy for President Clinton, summarized the conventional wisdom: "In the eyes of a lot of people, we are not real men unless we hit beneficiaries with significant increases in out-of-pocket costs." But Administration officials note that the elderly already spend 21 percent of their family income, on average, for health care. +Medicare was a central issue in the Presidential election, as Mr. Clinton and Vice President Al Gore asserted that the Republicans' budget plan could force hundreds of hospitals to close. Now Mr. Clinton must explain why his plan to balance the budget will not have similar effects. +Bruce C. Vladeck, who heads the Federal Health Care Financing Administration, which runs Medicare, defended the decision to seek big savings from health care providers. Medicare, Mr. Vladeck said, has been less aggressive than private insurers in demanding discounts. +"There are now many markets for many services in which Medicare is paying more than the most effective private purchasers." he said. "That is very hard to defend or justify." +Richard J. Pollack, executive vice president of the American Hospital Association, said "it was pretty clear from last year's election campaign that most, if not all, of the savings in Medicare" would come from hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and suppliers of medical equipment. The savings sought by Congress and the President are so large, Mr. Pollack said, that hospitals and doctors may face "real cuts, not just a reduction in the rate of increase," in their Medicare payments. +He said such cuts were inevitable as long as Congress focused on Medicare's immediate fiscal problems rather than on the long-term changes needed to finance the program for the baby boom generation. The hospital association espouses the idea of "shared responsibility," meaning that beneficiaries, especially those with higher incomes, should pay more, Mr. Pollack said. +Some lawmakers have suggested that the Government increase Medicare premiums for beneficiaries with incomes above a certain level, like $75,000 a year. But Marilyn Moon, an economist at the Urban Institute who is a public trustee of the Medicare trust fund, said such proposals would not raise much revenue because they would affect relatively few people. Census Bureau data show that fewer than 7 percent of the elderly have household incomes above $75,000 a year. +President Clinton, like many Republicans, wants to encourage the use of health maintenance organizations, in the hope that they will save money for Medicare. Nearly five million Medicare beneficiaries are in H.M.O.'s, and enrollment is growing by more than 80,000 a month. +But a summary of the President's budget proposal says the use of H.M.O.'s "does not reduce Medicare costs" today because the Government's method of calculating payments is flawed. Medicare officials said they believed that their payments to H.M.O.'s were 5 percent to 7 percent too high, and they want Congress to correct the formula to eliminate such overpayments. +H.M.O.'s give comprehensive care for a fixed monthly premium. For each Medicare beneficiary in an H.M.O., the Government pays roughly 95 percent of the average cost for a patient in the traditional Medicare program. But Federal officials said that Medicare patients in H.M.O.'s tended to be healthier than the average beneficiary and therefore had lower medical expenses. +H.M.O. executives disagree. They say many of their elderly members have chronic illnesses. And, they say, if the Government cuts Medicare payments to H.M.O.'s, it will reduce their ability to offer prescription drug coverage and other benefits that attract new members. + +LOAD-DATE: January 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +9 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 5, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The View From: New Canaan; +Building a Community Center Meant for Everyone in Town + +BYLINE: By DIETER STANKO + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 2; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 934 words + +WITH a combination of volunteer effort, more than $750,000 in private contributions and, perhaps most important, an available town building, New Canaan has put together what other area towns might envy: a full-fledged community center. +As other Fairfield County towns struggle to find suitable space to meet a growing need for community and senior citizen activities, New Canaan has the brand-new Lapham Community Center, created at a former luxurious vacation home owned by the town at the town's woodsy, 300-acre Waveny Park. + The center opened this summer after a nearly three-year-long volunteer effort spearheaded by Penny Young, chairwoman of the New Canaan Senior Center's board of directors. It offers a home for the senior center and a place for various community programs and classes offered by the Center, as well as for the town's Parks and Recreation Department and the Norwalk Community-Technical College's continuing education program. +And the Lapham Center was renovated without any cost to the town's taxpayers. About 1,100 private donations paid for all renovation costs. +"It's been very rewarding to see how the community has come together to preserve a part of itself," said Mrs. Young. "The community has made this happen and it should be very proud." +Planning for the new community center began in late 1993, when it became clear that New Canaan's population of elderly men and women was growing dramatically and a larger, permanent home for senior programs was needed, Mrs. Young said. The one-story stone home at Waveny Park, called the Stone Cottage or the Bungalow, was selected as a site. +By the following spring, all town approvals for the new center were granted, with the stipulation that all costs were to be paid with private funding. Then began a longer process -- hiring architects, designing a new building interior, updating utilities and bringing the residence up to code. It was also decided to have the new building become a center for the whole community. +Although its bedrooms have been changed to classrooms, the spacious L-shaped building still retains the atmosphere of an old New England inn or hotel. +The main entrance, reception area and a library all feature refinished oak paneling and trim. There is also a commercial kitchen, a workshop, a greenhouse, a game room, an exercise area and a small office for Lynda Bond, executive director, who is in charge of the community center's overall operations. Painting and drawings by elderly men and women taking art classes at the community center hang in the hallways. +Mrs. Bond said the center was previously hampered by having to conduct programs at different locations in town. +"Some mornings I would have to figure out where I was going to be that day. Now, we have the advantage of having everything in one place and we can expand," she said. "We're really doing better that we ever anticipated." +While initially fearful that not enough people would sign up for classes at the new center, Mrs. Bond says she now is adding more t'ai chi, tap and line dancing classes to meet demand. Overall, adult programs have doubled with the center's opening and there are crafts, dancing and other classes for children. Free children's movies are shown on Wednesday; adult films are on Friday afternoon. +A New Canaan couple, Clarence and Lucille Brown, are taking full advantage of the Lapham center, with Mrs. Brown teaching a seasonal crafts class and Mr. Brown taking a drawing class. "This is absolutely wonderful," said Mrs. Brown. "Now we don't have to move when there is something else going on. Added Mr. Brown, "This building is really beautiful and we have good lighting. In the past, we had rooms with bad lighting." +In other Fairfield County towns, residents might be casting an envious eye on New Canaan. In Westport, where the town's senior center shuttles seasonally between a former elementary school school building and a dilapidated building at Longshore Club Park, the senior center's fate is uncertain. +Westport has been forced by rising student enrollment to at least consider reclaiming the former Greens Farms Elementary School building and opening a school there again. And plans to renovate the Longshore building did not meet zoning approval. +Unlike New Canaan, Westport does not own a building suitable for use as a senior and community center. "I think that's a great concept, but we don't happen to have any old buildings that we can convert," said Westport First Selectman Joseph Arcudi, who has proposed buying a private estate, +The Stone Cottage was one one of four buildings acquired by New Canaan when it purchased Waveny Park from the Lapham family in 1967. It had been built in 1915 as a summer home for a son of the family patriarch, Lewis Henry Lapham. The other structures are also being used for community purposes, including an arts center and a theater. +At the community center's opening ceremony, Elise Lapham, the wife of F. David Lapham, a grandson of Lewis Henry Lapham, fondly recalled living in the Stone Cottage for six years prior to World War II. During those times, the spacious Waveny fields were used for polo matches, baseball games and as landing strip for planes flown by the many avid Lapham family pilots, she said. Today, model airplane enthusiast fly on the fields. +"I'm absolutely delighted that the cottage can be used like this," Mrs. Lapham said. "I take my hat off to all the people who are behind this. They've kept it so much like it was, but they've also made it better. It's not as dark as it used to be." + +LOAD-DATE: January 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: At the Lapham Community Center in New Canaan, painting draws George Borkin and Agnes Quinn, above left; Lynn Berns leads the line dancing, and frosting a cookie house occupies Kendall Larkin. (Photographs by Helen Neafsey for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +10 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 5, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Defense Spray Law Leads to Lessons in Use + +BYLINE: By TOM CALLAHAN + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 1; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1058 words + +DATELINE: MOUNT VERNON + +On a recent morning, 52 elderly residents gathered at the Doles Center on South Sixth Avenue here to learn about pepper spray. It was the first session conducted by the Westchester County Office for the Aging in response to a New York State law, which went into effect on Nov. 1, legalizing the possession of personal defense sprays and their use for self-defense. +The audience watched a half-hour videotape, which explained what pepper spray was and included several crime victims telling how they were attacked and how pepper spray might have helped them escape. The audience then listened as Officer David Hecker of the County Department of Public Safety explained the proper use of the spray, when it can be legally used and first aid procedures. + Those residents interested in buying the spray were offered an application for a 75 percent rebate for attending the program. The sprays normally sell from $9 to $12 and can be bought only from licensed firearms dealers or pharmacies. The County Office for the Aging has singled out eight places that are selling pepper spray. Money for the rebate will come from assets seized from drug traffickers. +Although the program here was for the elderly, other presentations will be open to women of all ages and women's groups. County officials believe that the program can help victims of abuse. +"I think it is important that victims of crime and potential victims of crime be given the opportunity to defend themselves," said Louis D'Aliso, Commissioner of Public Safety. +Westchester is the first county in New York to offer a public information program of this kind. Soon after the new law took effect, a county telephone number was set up for those interested. The program will be offered to groups of 10 people who can meet at a convenient place. +"Pepper spray is not for everyone," County Executive Andrew P. O'Rourke told the audience here. "Maybe you don't want to carry anything. In the end you have to make you up your own mind." He added that the county wants to make the spray available at the lowest possible cost." +County officials stressed that the sessions were intended to provide information, not training. The video, prepared by the County Executive's office, emphasizes that the county assumes no liability for any use of pepper spray. Although tear gas like Mace is also legal now in New York, the county program concentrates only on pepper spray, an inflammatory agent derived from cayenne pepper, because it is considered more effective than Mace. +Several prominent elected officials, notably Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, opposed the new law, contending that the sprays could fall into the hands of criminals. Robert M. Maccarone, Director of Criminal Justice Planning for Westchester, observed that the law restricts the sale of the sprays to those over 18 who sign a document stating that they have never been convicted of a felony. This information is then sent to Albany for verification. +"We are not arming the public with this information," Mr. Maccarone said of the county's information program. "But we are providing valuable information to a portion of the public by targeting the elderly and victims of domestic violence. What we're doing here is providing a balanced presentation as to whether this spray is right for them or not." +During the session Officer Hecker, who is certified to train police officers in the use of the spray, held up a canister resembling pepper spray, but it was filled with water. He demonstrated how to hold it and explained that it shoots out about 10 feet. It should be aimed at an attacker's face and fired in one or two bursts of about a second each, to avoid the possibility of its spraying back. +Officer Hecker then described an experience of being sprayed in training, which he called extremely uncomfortable. Within 5 to 10 seconds, he said he experienced an incredible burning sensation, and his eyes temporarily locked shut. "The only thing I could think about was that I needed water and air, and I had to get it off," he said. "That might give you enough time to run away." +The sensation lasts for 30 to 35 minutes. Officer Hecker advised the audience that if they ever use the pepper spray, they should stand back far enough so the spray doesn't splash back and hit them. If hit accidentally, they should get under a water tap or shower head to wash it off. In answer to a question, he said that the spray can be used in situations "when you would use physical force to stop something that is happening to you." +Karen Coleman, 41, a Yonkers resident and nurse who appears on the video describing the assault and rape by her husband in 1994, spoke to audience members individually after the session. She carries two canisters of pepper spray, one attached to her house key and the other to her car keys. +"If I had the spray when I was attacked, I believe I would have escaped," Ms. Coleman said. "I accidentally got a drop of it in my eye once, and it hurts very bad. Using it would allow you to get away. That's all I want. Nothing is more important." +The reaction of the elderly residents at the session was generally favorable, with many picking up the rebate applications. Several were uncertain, though, if they would buy the spray, or be able to use it. +"I think it was a wonderful presentation," said Rose Mages, 75, of Mount Vernon. "They gave us a lot of information. The big question now is whether I will get it. I'm leaning toward no because I think many seniors would have a hard time using it. If it's in your bag, by the time you get it out, it would be too late." +Margaret Bess, 75, of Mount Vernon, walked out of the auditorium with the aid of a cane. "I think it could be helpful, but if you're walking with this," she said, lifting her cane for emphasis, "it might not help too much. I do think it's all right to sell the spray as long as it does not get into the wrong hands." +Pearl Perry, 78, also of Mount Vernon, decided that she did not need pepper spray. "It was an interesting talk, but I have a better way," she said. "Jesus is my pepper spray. If you look to Him, He will walk with you and protect you. Besides, I don't want to hurt anybody. I was raised that way." +More information about the pepper spray program is available by calling 665-7233. + +LOAD-DATE: January 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Officer David Hecker, holding a canister of pepper spray, with Pearl Perry. (Chris Maynard for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +11 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 7, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Model Shows How Medical Changes Let Population Surge + +BYLINE: By GINA KOLATA + +SECTION: Section C; Page 3; Column 2; Science Desk; Medical Science Page + +LENGTH: 763 words + +DEMOGRAPHERS often like to toy with statistical trends. If the world's population keeps growing as it is now, how long will it be before there is just one square foot of space for each person? If the death rate keeps falling, how long before there are more old people than young people in the population? +But Dr. Samuel H. Preston and one of his graduate students, Kevin M. White, demographers at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to do a sort of reverse experiment. Suppose, they asked, the mortality rate at the turn of the century had not changed? How many Americans would be alive today? + The answer surprised them. They concluded that there would be about half as many Americans in today's population, 139 million instead of 276 million. Half of the missing population would be absent because one of their parents would not have survived to reproductive age. And the other half would have been born but would have died young. +Of course, said Dr. Paul Demeny, a demographer at the Population Council, a nonprofit research group in New York, and the editor of Population and Development Review, it is well known that death rates have plummeted in the 20th century. But, he added, Dr. Preston's paper, published in Population and Development Review in September, "translates this in an uncommonly interesting and gripping way." +Dr. Richard Suzman, who directs the office of demography at the National Institute on Aging, said: "It's a rather simple but profound simulation. I was stunned by the magnitude of the effect." +Never before in history, Dr. Preston said, have life spans increased so much. "The expansion in longevity ranks among the great social achievements of our time," he wrote. +At the turn of the century, life expectancy at birth was 47.3 years. In 1994, it was 75.7 years. Moreover, Dr. Preston noted, people are not only living longer but they are more likely to survive long enough to have families of their own. In 1900, fewer than 60 percent of women lived to the age of 50, while 95 percent of women can now expect to live to be at least 50. +The effects on population size have been striking. "Most people believe that the population has grown because of immigration," Dr. Preston said. But his study, he said, "is a concrete way of expressing how important the health advances are." He added that when he calculated the effects of immigration on the population's size, he found they were only half that of the changing death rates. +Most of the health advances and resulting declines in mortality rates occurred in the first few decades of the 20th century. This means, Dr. Preston said, that they were due to simple changes in hygiene and public health, not to sophisticated medical treatments. +To illustrate this point, Dr. Preston asked how large the population would be if mortality rates had remained static since 1950. The result, he said, would be that 94 percent of Americans who are alive today would be still be alive. +The declining mortality rates in the first half of the century benefited children, for the most part. As children who would have died survived and had children of their own, the population jumped. In the second half of the century, in contrast, the improvements in death rates affected mainly older people, who had already had their families, and so had a much smaller effect on the population's size but a large effect on the number of very old people. +Asked what changed the death rates in the first half of the century, Dr. Preston said he thought it was the ascendance of the germ theory of disease. This resulted, he said, in profound changes in personal and public health practices, like cleaner water, the sterilization of food, keeping flies away from food, washing hands and isolating sick patients. +Dr. Preston said medical advances early in the century could not have so markedly changed the mortality rates. After the advent of smallpox vaccinations, in the 18th century, and vaccinations against diphtheria in the 1890's, there was no major medical advance until the late 1930's, he said, when sulfa drugs were introduced to fight bacteria, and in the late 1940's, when penicillin was introduced. +Most people, Dr. Preston said, are entirely unaware that they probably owe their very existence to something so simple as an ancestor's hand washing or to the isolation of a sick child nearly a century ago. +Dr. Suzman, for one, said that the new study opened his eyes. It shows, he said, "how one sometimes has to go back several generations to understand what's happening today." + +LOAD-DATE: January 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +12 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 7, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Peru Turns A Deaf Ear To Rebels + +BYLINE: By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO + +SECTION: Section A; Page 8; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 861 words + +DATELINE: LIMA, Peru, Jan. 6 + +From the instant the guerrillas of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement seized the Japanese Ambassador's residence three weeks ago, their siege has seemed calculated to win over public opinion. +Within hours of the takeover, they released some 200 women and elderly people in the group of nearly 600 hostages. Later, they freed another 225 who had no connection to the Government of President Alberto K. Fujimori. Many of the hostages who came out told of guerrillas, their chests puffy with explosive-laden vests, stripping off their bandannas to expound their political views in sessions that lasted for hours. + But if the Tupac Amaru gained a platform on the world stage, their message does not seem to be winning over ordinary Peruvians. There are no graffiti around town sympathizing with the rebels. In fact, in parks in Lima, handwritten notes left at the bases of statues bear messages calling for peace, and many houses are flying the country's red-and-white flags from their rooftops in solidarity with the Government. +For many Peruvians, the most disheartening message of the protracted siege has been perhaps the same one the rebels expected people would celebrate: that guerrilla violence, which they thought Mr. Fujimori's crackdown on Tupac Amaru and on the Shining Path movements had defeated, was still a factor in life here. +"They're terrorists, and we don't agree with them," said Alfredo B., a 45-year-old fruit peddler who spoke on condition that his full name not be used. He acknowledged that the group may well have mounted the assault on the Japanese Ambassador's residence to present its case for a peace accord with the Government and perhaps to open the way to legalizing the movement, as some contend. "But this isn't the way to do it," he said. +Samuel Castillo, who sells ice cream from a yellow pushcart, said that if the Government acceded to the guerrillas' demand that 400 imprisoned Tupac Amaru rebels be released, it would set the country back. +"It'll be even worse," said Mr. Castillo, who is 30. "They'll get stronger. They'll kill people in the jungles. That's what they're about." +So far, the crisis at the Japanese Ambassador's residence has not exposed deep rifts in Peru over the country's policy toward the guerrilla violence that has claimed an estimated 30,000 lives since 1980. +On Friday, a group of four members of Congress sent Mr. Fujimori a letter urging him to stick to his uncompromising policies toward guerrillas. "Even though I am very tough against Fujimori and hope he's out of office by 2000," said Congresswoman Lourdes Flores Nano, one of the signers, "right now we want the Peruvian state and its President to project a strong image." +The letter said that, "This position of firmness before blackmail and terror does not mean to stop negotiating," and it added that the Government should try to persuade the rebels to give up their hostages. +"But if this hope is denied and the price to pay is the sinking of law and security in Peru, then the national interest must come first," the letter said. +Another letter, signed by six members of Congress, warned the President that his top priority must be to avoid bloodshed. +Congressman Carlos Chipoco, one of the signers, said the group feared that the hard-line letter sent out by Congresswoman Flores and others would "open the door to violent solution." +Mr. Chipoco said, nevertheless, that he did not believe that the guerrillas had won allies among Peruvians. "People remember the past, and all the terrorism," he said. +Perhaps the guerrillas' crowning moment came last week, when they ignored an agreement with Government negotiators and turned a photo opportunity with foreign journalists into a news conference during which they criticized Mr. Fujimori's Government and conditions in Peruvian prisons. +Alfredo Torres, managing director of Apoyo Opinion y Mercado, a polling agency here, said that pollsters had agreed to refrain from publishing any surveys concerning the President or the Tupac Amaru during the siege, so there was no way of knowing the overall reactions of Peruvians to the situation. +But he had no doubt that the answer was important to the hostage-takers. Mr. Torres, who was among those taken prisoner at the Ambassador's residence, recalled that Nestor Cerpa Cartolini, the guerrilla commander, was curious about the group's image in opinion surveys. +Mr. Cerpa asked Mr. Torres whether people made any distinction between Tupac Amaru and the Shining Path movement, which is associated with far more random violence. +"I told him that people don't see a real difference, and he said 'Yes, that's a problem they have,' " Mr. Torres recalled. "He asked me whether there was a difference between what people thought in Lima and in the jungle, and I said most of our work is done in Lima, so I didn't know." +Mr. Torres said he believed that the group saw itself as playing a role in the country's political future, but he felt that its self-image was out of line with reality. "Peru is not Central America, and we're not in a dictatorship, and they don't have a great popular support," he said. + +LOAD-DATE: January 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Spiritual healers from the Andean highlands went to Lima yesterday to try to persuade guerrillas to release the 74 hostages being held in the Japanese Ambassador's home. The rebels did not respond. (Associated Press) + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +13 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 9, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Pension Economics + +BYLINE: By LOUIS UCHITELLE + +SECTION: Section B; Page 9; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1035 words + +DATELINE: EW ORLEANS, Jan. 7 + +Today, millions of elderly Americans are nearly as well off in retirement as they were in their working years. But to live that well, they are absorbing, in Social Security and Medicare alone, an ever-growing portion of the nation's annual income. And one of the big questions raised by this week's Federal advisory report on Social Security is whether this trend should continue or whether more of that money should go to younger people. +"To an extent previously unknown in Western societies in modern times, the retired elderly are now able to live independently rather than as resident dependents of their adult children," Benjamin Friedman, an economist at Harvard University, said in a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, which ended here this week. + The advent of Medicare in 1965 and the practice adopted soon after of linking increases in Social Security benefits to increases in the inflation rate have kept millions of elderly Americans out of the poverty many of their retired parents suffered. But will such living standards be sustainable after the baby-boom generation starts retiring in the next decade or so? +No one contends that the Social Security system can go on as it is. The recommendations of the 13-member Advisory Council on Social Security represent, in part, an attempt to sidestep the issue by suggesting that it is possible to generate a higher return by investing some Social Security revenue from payroll taxes in the stock market. The money that is not needed immediately to provide for current beneficiaries now goes entirely into Treasury securities, which have tended to perform worse than stocks. +But putting aside a stock market gamble designed to help cover the future fiscal shortfall in Social Security, two schools of thought have emerged about the more fundamental economic question. +On one side are those who argue that the elderly and their children are struggling over national income that in the 21st century will no longer be sufficient to support retirees in the current style without squeezing their children. That balance, they say, should be redressed. +"The real story is that we are taking from young savers and giving to old spenders," said Laurence J. Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University. +But the other school says that this sort of talk is scare-mongering. There will be enough income for young and old, they say, without major changes in the current level of Social Security benefits, Medicare and long-term care for the elderly under Medicaid. "The burden is not that great," said Dean Baker, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. +The statistics lay out the framework of the debate, and in the process make clear that the real challenge is not so much Social Security as it is the cost of providing health care to the elderly. Nearly 9 percent of the $8 trillion a year in national income, or gross domestic product, is dedicated to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Social Security currently represents 5 percentage points of this 9 percent. Add in earnings from private income and the total percentage of national income going to the elderly is even higher. +Without changes in policy, that 9 percent share will more than double, to 19 percent of the national income, by 2050. But even without cutbacks in Social Security benefits, the 5 percent now dedicated to Social Security will rise to only 7 percent, the budget office projects, while Medicare will swell to 8 percent and Medicaid outlays for long-term care will reach 4 percent. +"If we could somehow get the cost increases in health care down closer to the growth of the economy," said Eugene Steuerle, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, referring to a two-and-a-half-percent growth rate for the economy, "then you take care of about half the total growth in spending for the elderly." +But Mr. Kotlikoff says this is wishful thinking. More likely, he says, the national economy, and with it, the national income, will not grow sufficiently to finance the current level of Government benefits to the elderly. As a result, working-age Americans by the middle of the next century would have to pay out in Federal, state and local taxes more than 80 percent of their earnings to maintain retirement benefits at their current levels. All of these taxes are currently less than 35 percent of income. +"We are either going to bankrupt the next generation with sky-high tax rates or ask the elderly to pay their fair share," he said. +Many experts, on both sides of the issue, would cut back retirement benefits, at least somewhat. Most Social Security proposals, for example, argue that the retirement age, which is already scheduled to rise gradually to 67 early in the next century, should be pushed back even further. But while Mr. Baker and Mr. Steuerle would stop at small cuts in Government benefits for the elderly, Mr. Kotlikoff and Mr. Friedman would try to sharply reduce the proportion of national wealth going to the elderly. +They would do so by such measures as cutting Federal benefits for those with sufficient private income, by reducing the annual increases in Social Security pensions, by taxing the benefits, by requiring the elderly to pay more from their pockets for medical care, and by stiffening the eligibility requirements for Medicare. +But others see the glass as half full rather than half empty. Mr. Baker argues that if the Social Security payroll tax, now at 12.4 percent, were pushed up one-tenth of a percentage point a year, starting now and continuing through 2046, the total rise of just under 5 percentage points would pay for Social Security, without cutbacks, for 75 years. +"Given moderate economic growth," Mr. Baker said, "the income of American workers after paying this higher tax and allowing for inflation would still be higher than it is today." +But Medicare remains an issue, although Mr. Steuerle, who spoke by telephone, sees it as a declining one. Health care costs are no longer rising as rapidly as they were, he notes, and that decline is likely to continue. + +LOAD-DATE: January 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: News Analysis + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +14 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 10, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Nazi Gold and Portugal's Murky Role + +BYLINE: By MARLISE SIMONS + +SECTION: Section A; Page 10; Column 4; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1598 words + +DATELINE: LISBON + +As World War II raged across Europe, Portugal sold tungsten and other goods to Nazi Germany, profiting handsomely from its neutral status in the conflict. The Nazis paid with gold bullion looted from countries they conquered and, it is suspected, from victims of the Holocaust. +After the Nazis lost the war, Portugal secretly sold off some of this gold to Indonesia, the Philippines and above all China, working through Macao, its colonial enclave near Hong Kong. + Those sales, disclosed for the first time by a former senior minister who insisted on anonymity, were the final chapter in a story that has now come back to haunt Portugal's central bank and some of the country's more prominent business families. +Fifty years after the defeat of Germany, Europe has been stunned by a stream of revelations about Nazi gold: who handled it, where it came from and who reaped financial rewards from genocide. +The issue initially arose in Switzerland, where investigators are now examining the Swiss financial transactions with the Nazis and the fate of lost Jewish wealth in World War II. +In recent months, the focus has broadened to include Sweden, Spain and Portugal, where newspapers and historians are raising a separate set of questions about the role of local banks in financing trade and collaborating with the Nazi regime. +At the same time, the Poles have ordered an investigation into the missing wealth of Poland's victims. The Netherlands, too, plans an inquiry to find out what happened to 75 tons of public and private gold, half of the total plundered, which is still missing. +The story of the Nazis' gold has struck a particular nerve in Lisbon because, after Switzerland, Portugal was the largest importer of the gold. The country was officially neutral during the war but its regime had strong Nazi sympathies. +Like a dark, forgotten ghost, Lisbon's past has revived with tales of the city as a pivotal center for spies and a place of unscrupulous deals, where weapons and goods were transshipped to support the German war machine. +Older people here say they knew that the country's neutrality was a useful cover for doing business with all sides. But few had heard of the enormous gold trade with Germany. +According to Allied records, close to 100 tons of Nazi gold ended up in Portugal after first passing through Swiss banks that were apparently helping to disguise its origins. Almost half of this gold is believed to have been stolen from the treasuries of European countries that fell to the Nazis. +Records of Portugal's wartime dealings have recently been revealed in the news media here, astonishing today's generation of Portuguese. They also appear to have embarrassed the establishment deeply. President Jorge Sampaio and Prime Minister Antonio Guterres have discussed the issue in meetings of the Cabinet, but have so far declined to comment publicly. +Until 1968, when the dictator Antonio Salazar retired, censorship was used to keep secrets. When Portugal became a democracy in 1974, there were more pressing matters like the leftist revolution and the independence of the colonies. +Now, politicians, historians, students and news organizations are demanding that the Government open its archives and give a full accounting of collaboration with Hitler. +"It's a political and a moral issue," said Fernando Rosas, a professor of contemporary history at New University in Lisbon. "This Government should speak out. It's not their doing." +The Bank of Portugal, which occupies a somber building on the downtown Rua do Comercio, has long had a venerable image, but recent celebrations of its 150th anniversary were clouded by the public debate about its Nazi collaboration. It declined to send representatives to recent round-table discussions on the gold issue organized by the city of Lisbon, television stations and universities. +Because the bank had a monopoly over the gold trade until after the war, its archives are considered vital. But it has spurned requests from historians and journalists for access to wartime documents, saying it is bound by strict secrecy laws. The bank has promised to study the matter. +Down in its vaults, the bank still has "two or three" gold bars stamped with swastikas, according to Nuno Jonet, a bank official. +"We kept them as curiosities, Mr. Jonet said. "We do not admit any wrongdoing. The gold acquisition was the result of perfectly legal trade operations. I'm sure people at the time did not know the gold coming here was stolen." +Portugal used the same arguments before the Allied Tripartite Commission, which was in charge of recovering stolen gold after the war. American officials tried to pressure Portugal to surrender 44 tons of gold by freezing its assets in the United States and cutting back on wheat exports. +But the Salazar regime did not budge. In 1953 the Allies finally gave up, accepting the four tons Lisbon offered to return and letting it keep the rest. +"By then the cold war was under way and the Americans wanted to keep the Azores as a strategic base," said Jose Freire Antunes, who has written a history of the Azores. +Both Portugal and Switzerland insist that they were not aware that the Nazi gold they used for trade had been looted. +Antonio Louca, a historian at New University who is writing a doctoral thesis on Portugal's dealings in Nazi gold, dismisses these claims. +He said that as early as 1942 the Allies officially notified Western countries that Nazis were disposing of stolen gold through Swiss banks. Mr. Louca said he has recently obtained documents from Portugal's Foreign Ministry archives that cite the warning. +Old trade records tell part of the story: in 1940, less than 2 percent of Portugal's exports went to Germany; by 1942, that figure had reached 24.4 percent. Portugal sent Germany textiles, boots and food, but it earned most from tungsten, an alloy used in steel, which was indispensable to the Nazi war machine. +"At the height of the tungsten fever, prices in Lisbon increased by up to 1,700 percent," one history book reports. +Lisbon was also a crucial intermediary for Berlin, bringing insulin and industrial diamonds from Latin America and food from its African colonies and selling Nazi gold in South America. A businessman whose foreign company had a long presence here said: "Salazar, the President, was the master of wartime neutrality. He charged extortionary prices." +The full story of Portugal's Nazi gold may not be hidden in bank ledgers. There were other, secret channels. +Mr. Louca, the historian, said he has obtained German documents, recently declassified, that show that in 1944 couriers were secretly running large gold shipments from Germany to its embassy in Lisbon. The couriers bypassed the Portuguese central bank and sold the gold locally. +The documents raise several disturbing questions and touch briefly on the fate of one large and wealthy Jewish family. +By the summer of 1944, Europe was in chaos. German forces had occupied Hungary, an ally, when it took steps to withdraw from the war, and the Nazis had captured several members of the Weiss-Chorin family, owners of the country's largest industrial empire. +Under duress, the family made a deal with the SS, according to postwar American intelligence reports: the Nazis would get a large part of the Weiss empire and the family could leave Hungary. At least 44 family members left, of whom 32 arrived in Portugal in June 1944. +In July, the German Embassy in Lisbon began complaining in telegrams to Berlin that the gold price in Lisbon was dropping. Berlin responded by asking if this was a result of the sales by the couriers or sales by the Weiss family, which it suspected of bringing valuables from Hungary. Members of the Weiss family have said they brought no gold to Lisbon. +"Why was this gold coming here and why did the couriers not sell the German gold to the central bank?" Mr. Louca said. "The chances are that the gold included coins and jewelry, which had been stolen from individuals." +Buyers reportedly included Portuguese businessmen and bankers, some of whom still own large establishments today. +After the war, the Allies demanded that Portugal give back at least 44 tons of looted Nazi gold. But Lisbon instead began to sell off its Nazi bullion secretly through Macao, with much of it going to China in the 1950's and 60's. +According to a government official who was himself involved in supervising numerous shipments, the China-bound gold was flown from Portugal to Macao, and from there moved across the Chinese border. The former official said some ingots sent to Macao were still embossed with the sealof the Dutch Treasury, which had been plundered by the Nazis; others were marked with swastikas. A number of bars were carried from Macao to the Philippines and Indonesia, strapped on people's bodies, the official said. +Historians, politicians and journalists are demanding that the Lisbon Government tell all. Fernando Rosas, the professor who is also editor of the prestigious magazine Historia, said the Government must allow free research and clarify the whole issue. "The country needs to know the truth," he said. +Mr. Louca wonders if the gold story will ever be fully unraveled. +"Looting monetary gold was one thing -- stealing it from individuals, from victims, is another," he said. "There is evidence that both types of gold came to Portugal." But, he added, even if new details spill out of official archives, it may be too difficult to separate the different sources of gold. + +LOAD-DATE: January 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +15 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 10, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Abortion and Gulf War Studies + +SECTION: Section A; Page 32; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 638 words + +Two research reports on politically sensitive issues this week -- one on abortion and breast cancer, the other on Persian Gulf war illnesses -- offer a cogent reminder that scientific studies differ widely in credibility and authority. The abortion study, which largely disproved the notion that abortions cause breast cancer, was the most authoritative research yet on the issue. It surveyed a very large number of women and used a research design that virtually eliminated the main cause of bias in previous studies. +By contrast, the gulf war illness study, which suggested that some gulf veterans may have suffered neurological impairments from exposure to multiple chemicals, was only preliminary and suggestive. It covered a very small group of veterans and its results may have been distorted by selective participation. + The abortion study, performed in Denmark, should go a long way toward resolving an issue that has been clouded in controversy for more than a decade. As long ago as 1980, some scientists theorized that women who abort their pregnancies may be left with vulnerable breast cells that, deprived of hormonal changes in late pregnancy, are prone to becoming cancerous. But dozens of studies of this possibility showed conflicting results. +Unfortunately, virtually all these studies were marred by likely reporting bias because they relied on women to tell the truth about whether they had had an abortion. The studies typically compared the abortion histories of a group of women who had breast cancer with a group of comparable women who did not. The breast cancer victims, as subsequent research showed, were far more apt to admit they had had an abortion, presumably because they wanted to give the doctor all relevant facts that might help in their treatment. The other women were less honest, presumably because they considered the abortion embarrassing. +The Danish study got around this inevitable bias by relying on official records rather than the testimony of the women. Abortion has been legal in Denmark since 1973 and mandatory registries are kept of births, cancer cases and abortions. The Danish researchers examined the records for 1.5 million women, of whom 280,000 had had abortions, some more than once. Over all, these women were no more likely to develop breast cancer than women who had never had an abortion. +The only uncertainty was a suggestion that women who had abortions in the second or third trimester did have an increased risk of breast cancer, but the number of women in this category was too small to warrant firm conclusions. The Danish work has also been challenged on the ground that even the registry does not fully eliminate bias because women with recent abortions have not had time to develop cancer and older women may have had abortions before the registry started. Further research is needed. But for now, this study shows that women need not shun a first-trimester abortion for fear of developing breast cancer. +The other study, involving 249 gulf war veterans, was more suggestive than authoritative. Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center surveyed veterans of a Navy seabees unit about their health, asked them about possible exposures to chemicals, and performed neurological tests on 23 ill veterans and 20 healthy controls. They found subtle differences in neurological function and concluded that some of the impairment may have been related to pesticides, chemical warfare agents or anti-chemical medications. +But the small size of this study and the possibility that only the sickest veterans participated undermines its authority. Research on multiple chemical exposures in the gulf war is in the early stages and will require more comprehensive follow-up, perhaps comparable to the Danish abortion study. + +LOAD-DATE: January 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +16 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 10, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Mayor Adds Some Star Power To His Immigration Campaign + +BYLINE: By DAVID FIRESTONE + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 659 words + +Last October, when Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani announced the formation of a coalition to make Americans more aware of the virtues of immigration, it was at a sparsely attended news conference in a Harvard University basement in Cambridge, Mass. +Yesterday, as the Mayor announced he was putting together an expanded group to do the same thing, he chose to do so in a far more elaborate and politically resonant setting. Surrounded by the history of Ellis Island, along with several hundred real-life immigrants and elderly people brought in from city-run centers, he once again dispatched 25 celebrities and business leaders to lobby Congress and the nation about immigration's benefits. + The coalition includes the musicians Isaac Stern, Carlos Santana, Itzhak Perlman, Teresa Stratas and Zubin Mehta; the authors Oscar Hijuelos and Frank McCourt; the film directors Ang Lee and Milos Forman, and the business leaders Preston Robert Tisch, William Fugazy and Alan Greenberg. In addition, 63 groups that deal with ethnic and immigration issues responded to the Mayor's request to sign up. +The members of the group have agreed to lobby Congress and issue public statements emphasizing the positive contributions that immigrants make. Only a handful of the coalition members were actually present yesterday, but none are likely to speak louder than Mr. Giuliani himself in a role that he has taken on with particular gusto. +It is no accident that Angelica O. Tang, the Mayor's director of immigrant affairs, introduced her boss yesterday as "our nation's most tenacious champion for immigration and the best friend to the immigrant community." For months, since the passage last fall of the Federal welfare law that restricts some benefits for immigrants, the Mayor has traveled nationwide speaking out against the law. +No other issue he has taken up has done more to soften his often imperious image, particularly among the liberal city voters he will need to court in his re-election campaign. It has also won him national attention. +Yesterday, his planning department released a major study showing that immigration had grown 32 percent in the 1990's over the previous decade, a report that landed on the front pages of three of the city's four newspapers. An Op-Ed article he wrote, "Keep America's Doors Open," was published in The Wall Street Journal yesterday. +And on Ellis Island yesterday, standing in front of a huge globe with lights that showed past migration patterns, he said his coalition planned to sponsor an immigration conference in New York this spring, which will include officials from Texas, Florida and California, the three other states with the greatest number of newcomers. +"The coalition's first order of business has to be to build a very, very strong case for the positive contributions of immigration, and to show Congress and the President the mistakes that have been made in both the welfare bill and in the immigration bill," Mayor Giuliani said. "And they're serious mistakes, practical ones, which really have to do with the heart and soul of America." +The Giuliani administration has already gone to court to overturn some aspects of the new laws, including one change that allows city employees to turn in illegal immigrants who seek services like police protection, hospital care and public education. The provisions overturn a New York City executive order that forbids city employees to report illegal immigrants. +Members of the coalition say they have not been told precisely what their roles will be, but expect to give speeches, write articles and lobby lawmakers. +Mr. McCourt, the Irish-American author of the best-selling memoir "Angela's Ashes," said he agreed wholeheartedly with the Mayor that the effect of the new legislation would be to cut off America's lifeline by imposing new restrictions on immigrants, and he praised the Mayor for raising his voice on the subject. + + +LOAD-DATE: January 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +17 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 10, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +OPPENHEIMER, PETER + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 3; Classified + +LENGTH: 171 words + +OPPENHEIMER - Peter. On January 7, 1997, in Walnut Creek, CA. Beloved husband of Muriel Wolfson Oppenheimer. Devoted father of Michael, David, and Amy Oppenheimer. Loving father-in-law of Donna Tuths, Marcy Kates, and Jennifer Krebs. Adored grandfather of Alexander and Joel DiGiorgio, Harry and Julius Oppenheimer, and Talia Krebs-Oppenheimer. Cherished brother of Philip, Jack and Herbert Oppenheimer. Dear uncle, cousin, friend, and teacher of many. A pioneer in the field of geriatric education, Peter led the City University of New York's efforts to establish the Institute of Study for Older Adults, providing college level classes to older New Yorkers throughout the city. He also carried on his family's proud tradition of civil rights activism. Family services are being held Friday, January 10, in California. In lieu of flowers the family suggests contributions in Peter's memory to the American Civil Liberties Union, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, the Southern Poverty Law Center, or West Side One Stop. + +LOAD-DATE: March 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +18 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 11, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +THEATER REVIEW; +Beloved and Frustrating, A Brain-Damaged Aunt + +BYLINE: By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 16; Column 5; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 534 words + +F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed that a novelist was an impossible subject for a biographer because if a novelist was any good, he was too many different people. +He might have said the same of good playwrights. + But there are exceptions to every rule. And when the playwright is the talented author of a one-woman show and the material is autobiographical, sometimes you can sit back and watch all those people come alive. +So it is at Manhattan Theater Club's Stage 2, where Charlayne Woodard is presenting her touching and engrossing "Neat," directed by Tazewell Thompson, through Feb. 9. +Ms. Woodard, whose stage, television and film credits range from "Ain't Misbehavin' " to "Roseanne" and "The Crucible," here displays her gifts as a storyteller, tracing her own early days and those of her somewhat older aunt, Neat. +She brings to life not only assorted incarnations of herself, but also Neat, other family members and people like Charles Bowman, the oh-so-cool, sullen tough guy who chooses an awestruck Charlayne to be his girlfriend when she is in high school. +In addition, "Neat," a companion piece to "Pretty Fire," which Mr. Woodard presented here in 1993, is an excursion into sociology, from entrenched prejudice in the South to racial violence in the North, where Ms. Woodard grew up, with side trips into teen-age fashions, hairdos and pop music, family relations, friendship and religion. +In the powerful, heartbreaking and beautiful tale that opens the evening, Ms. Woodard tells how the infant Neat's life was shaped by bigotry. In 1943, when she was 9 months old, Neat was poisoned by an illiterate great-grandmother unable to distinguish between two almost identical bottles. In convulsions but turned away by doctors at an all-white hospital in Savannah, Ga., she was saved by a black doctor, but too late to prevent brain damage. +Switching between Savannah and her own home in Albany, N.Y., Ms. Woodard tracks her own growth, from the little girl who delighted in Neat's innocent playfulness to the older child a bit put off when the disheveled Neat arrives to take up life in Albany to the adolescent in search of black history and the high-schooler experiencing first love and Neat's mysterious pregnancy. +Ms. Woodard sings, she dances, but most of all she tells good stories, bringing them to life in ways that are poignant or, in the case of Charles Bowman, sidesplitting. In memorable moments, the observant Ms. Woodard captures Charles's swaggering walk, the body language of children, the gingerly movements of the elderly Neat clutching her pocketbook with both hands and her ecstatic smile. +If there is a tragic inevitability to Neat's life, then Ms. Woodard has built for her a fine and loving memorial. + +NEAT + +Written and performed by Charlayne Woodard; directed by Tazewell Thompson; sets by Donald Eastman; costumes by Jane Greenwood; lighting by Brian Nason; original music and sound by Fabian Obispo. Presented by Manhattan Theater Club; artistic director, Lynne Meadow; executive producer, Barry Grove; in association with Seattle Repertory Theater. At Manhattan Theater Club, Stage 2, City Center, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan. + +LOAD-DATE: January 11, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Charlayne Woodard, writer and actress, in her show "Neat." (Susan Johann/"Neat") + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +19 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 11, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +No Death Penalty in a Double Slaying + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 31; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 232 words + +District Attorney Charles J. Hynes of Brooklyn announced yesterday that he would not seek the death penalty for Lavonda Prater, 27, a home-care attendant charged with murdering two elderly women in Bensonhurst last May. +"I have concluded, after review and deliberation, that a sentence of life without parole is the appropriate punishment to seek in this case," Mr. Hynes said in a statement. + Although Mr. Hynes says he opposes the death penalty, he is the only New York City prosecutor who has sought executions under the capital punishment law that took effect in New York State on Sept. 1, 1995. +Despite his personal objection to the death penalty, Mr. Hynes has said he is duty bound to pursue it in appropriate cases. +Mr. Hynes said he would seek a sentence of life without parole against Ms. Prater, who is accused of killing Concetta D'Andrea, 85, and her cousin, Vincenza Weaver, 75, by striking them with a blunt instrument and strangling them with a cloth belt in the apartment they shared. +Among other crimes, a 13-count indictment charges Ms. Prater with forging Ms. Weaver's signature on three $200 checks and depositing them in her bank account. Ms. Prater is being held without bail, pending trial. +The Legal Aid Society, which is defending her, issued a statement expressing pleasure and relief at Mr. Hynes's decision not to seek Ms. Prater's execution. + +LOAD-DATE: January 11, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +20 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 12, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +COVER STORY; +Dressed to Kill in the World of Fashion + +BYLINE: By MARILYN STASIO + +SECTION: Section 12; Page 6; Column 1; Television + +LENGTH: 1134 words + +THE chic crowd that runs New York's fashion industry is terrorized by a ruthless killer in "While My Pretty One Sleeps," a two-hour suspense thriller, adapted from a 1989 Mary Higgins Clark novel, that will be shown tonight at 9 on the Family Channel. +The killer's first victim, a fashion columnist who is about to publish an expose of the city's top designers, is struck down without mercy. The murderer confronts this venomous gossip in her elegant Manhattan brownstone, slashes her throat with an antique dagger and covers his tracks by dumping the body on a wooded estate north of the city. Only then does he realize that he has committed a fatal error. Chances are that no one will spot its damning significance except a nice young woman who owns an exclusive boutique on Madison Avenue. But that's enough to tag our heroine (Connie Sellecca) as the killer's next victim and send this story off to a nice, creepy start. + Ms. Clark's lofty sobriquet, America's Queen of Suspense, has been well and truly earned. As the author of 16 international best sellers (from "Where Are the Children," in 1975, to "Moonlight Becomes You," in 1996), she is not only the nation's top-selling female suspense writer but also, at $12 million a book, its highest paid. Two of her novels, "A Stranger Is Watching" and "Where Are the Children?," have been made into feature films, and several of her stories have been adapted for television. +Ms. Clark obviously knows which buttons to push to get a rise out of us. What's her secret? +Maybe this isn't the best time to ask. It is less than a week since her marriage to John Conheeney, a retired Merrill Lynch executive, and the newlyweds are at Ms. Clark's home on Cape Cod. As it turns out, they've been caught in the middle of a blustery nor'easter, so the distraction suits her. +"The one really scary thing that is universal to all of us," says Ms. Clark, "is when you are going about your ordinary life, doing exactly the right thing -- not being silly or foolish or reckless -- and something goes wrong. Something happens, and suddenly the ordinary becomes extraordinary." +The other sure-fire way of making an audience's skin crawl, she says, is to tap into people's fears about the disquieting things one hears about in the real world. In her novels, embryos are stolen from laboratories and children are kidnapped; elderly people come to no good in nursing homes; women of all ages suffer from multiple personalities, from obsessive lovers, from loneliness. And doctors are always up to mischief. +Her basic gauge of successful suspense, she says, is when she makes a reader or a viewer say: "This could be me. That could be my daughter. This could happen to us." +Considering the source, then, there is every reason to anticipate delicious chills from "While My Pretty One Sleeps," in which Ms. Clark has a small role. But what is this sophisticated thriller doing on the Family Channel, a division of International Family Entertainment that features shows like "The Waltons," "Home and Family," "Tooth Fairies," "Forgotten Toys" and "Mary and Joseph: a Story of Faith"? Pat Robertson, the Christian evangelist who started the station to inject some decent family values into the television wasteland, must be flabbergasted. +"I would run 'The Sound of Music' every night, if I could," said Gus Lucas, the president of Family Channel programming, "but not every film has to be a Hayley Mills movie." The mandate of "positive value programming" that gives the station its identity, he says, does not mean that a show can't be entertaining, or even thrilling. +BESIDES, the Family Channel has undergone some quiet changes since 1977, when, as the CBN Satellite Service, it was the first basic cable network to deliver its (mainly religious) programs via satellite. In 1989, when the station became the Family Channel, it cut back on the religious programming and started picking up spicier stuff. Today you'll find John Wayne and other gunslingers shooting it out on Saturday afternoons in a block of westerns, as well as detective series like "Columbo," "Hart to Hart" and "Murder, She Wrote" elsewhere in the schedule. +"While My Pretty One Sleeps" fits into the Family Channel's efforts to jazz up its programming further with more original dramas, something with a little kick for the grown-ups but that won't give children the heebie-jeebies. "Stolen Memories: Secrets From the Rose Garden," a domestic suspense drama starring Mary Tyler Moore, Linda Lavin and Shirley Knight, did very well for the channel in the ratings. So did "The Night of the Twisters" and "Panic in the Skies!" ("No, the plane didn't actually crash," said a station executive. "We are, after all, the Family Channel.") +"You're not going to see blood and gore," Gus Lucas said. "The emphasis is on suspense and tension, not on spilling blood." +Ms. Clark's plot-driven mysteries are not known for violence, anyhow, he points out. He expects viewers to be titillated by the inside information that "While My Pretty One Sleeps" offers on the New York fashion industry, and captivated by the "very warm father-daughter relationship" between the heroine and her father, a retired New York City policeman. +"It felt natural to write about that," says Ms. Clark, whose father died when she was 10 years old. "I certainly had that relationship, and I certainly missed it." Speaking as a mother of five (with her first husband, Warren Clark, who died in 1964) and grandmother of six, she says she is tired of books "about parents and children at each other's throats." "I got along well with my parents and I get along fine with my own children," she adds. +Ms. Clark's insights into the fashion world were also drawn from experience. She credits her mother, who was a bridal buyer at B. Altman & Company, for her own fashion sense: "We had no money after my father died, but we were always well dressed because Mother knew how to work the sales racks in the Fifth Avenue stores." She picked up more fashion savvy while covering the industry for "Women Today," a syndicated radio show. +"You always do put something of yourself in your work," Ms. Clark says. The tragedies of her life have also made their way into her books. When her first husband died, she was left with five young children and very little income. More than 30 years later, she drew on those feelings for "Moonlight Becomes You." "In that book, I have a young widow missing not only a person but also the situation of being married," she says. +Mr. Lucas says he would like the television rights to all of her books for the Family Channel. On this dark and stormy night, with the ocean churning up dark waves and dashing them against the shore, Ms. Clark sits by the fire and mulls that one over. + +LOAD-DATE: January 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Left, Beau Starr as United States Attorney and Connie Sellecca (inset) as his daughter in "While My Pretty One Sleeps." Above, Mary Higgins Clark. (Family Channel) (pgs. 6-7); Jill Clayburgh in "Where Are the +Children?" (Columbia Pictures) and James Farentino in "The Cradle Will Fall," two other films from Mary Higgins Clark novels. (CBS) (pg. 27) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +21 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 12, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Phone Messages Help the Elderly Alone at Home + +BYLINE: By DARICE BAILER + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 5; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 594 words + +DATELINE: OSSINING + +LAST April, six days before her 90th birthday, Lillian Lambert climbed on her flowered sofa in her apartment and reached up to change the top light bulb on a pole lamp. She lost her balance and fell, fracturing a rib. Mrs. Lambert could not get up, nor could she reach the telephone to call for help. There was no one to help her to her feet or drive her to the hospital. She spent the night on the floor. +At 7 the next morning, Mrs. Lambert's telephone rang. It was a daily scheduled call made by the R.U.O.K.? telephone-reassurance program run for the elderly by the by the Town of Ossining Senior Center, which is in the Joseph G. Caputo Community Center. The program is offered in the town and village of Ossining and parts of Briarcliff Manor. The program is also offered in several other Westchester communities, including the city of Rye, the towns of Eastchester and New Castle and the villages of Elmsford and Tuckahoe. + If Mrs. Lambert had been able to pick up the phone, she would have heard this recorded message: "Good morning. Are you O.K.? This is the Town of Ossining Police Department calling you from the Ossining Community Center. If you are O.K., hang up now and enjoy the rest of your day. If you need to speak to us, please call us at 762-1350." +When Mrs. Lambert did not answer the phone, the computer called her back 15 minutes later and a third time 15 minutes after that. When Mrs. Lambert did not answer the third call, the computer screen flashed red inside the center for the elderly. An alarm rang, and a sheet of information was printed out with Mrs. Lambert's medical history, the names and phone numbers of her doctor, clergyman, next of kin and neighbors and the person who had a key to her Maple House apartment. +Fran Anderson, site director of the Town of Ossining Senior Center, who was monitoring the program that day, asked a resident in Mrs. Lambert's building, Priscilla Stanhope, to pick up the key and check on Mrs. Lambert. When Mrs. Stanhope did, she found Mrs. Lambert on the floor and called 911 for an ambulance. +The Are You O.K.? program, said Roslyn Robinson, director of the New Castle senior citizen program, "enables seniors to remain in the community longer than they would otherwise be able to." +Theresa Guarnieri, 90, is one of 15 elderly people who hear the recorded voice of Police Chief Frank Nanna of Elmsford when they receive a daily call from the Police Department. Mrs. Guarnieri's husband died 44 years ago, and having lost most of her eyesight 4 years ago, she is legally blind. Mrs. Guarnieri is afraid of falling. "The first thing you think of is that you'll be left alone too long," she said. +Anne and Gerald Crennan take part in the city of Rye's program. "You reach a certain age, and it's nice to know that someone will check up on you occasionally," Mrs. Crennan said. +After the program software and a computer to run it are obtained, the cost of the program is minimal. City Manager Frank Culross of Rye donated a computer to the police department in his town, and the police department paid $3,500 for the software. "We have a fairly large senior citizen community in Rye," Lieut. John McCarthy said. "We thought it would be something nice to do for them." +The program is free in all of the towns mentioned here except Eastchester, where there is a $20 yearly fee. +To sign up, call 771-3300 in Eastchester, 592-8383 in Elmsford, 241-1100 in Mount Kisco, 238-8888 in New Castle, 762-8953 in Ossining and Briarcliff Manor, 967-1234 in Rye and 961-4800 in Tuckahoe. + +LOAD-DATE: January 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +22 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 12, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Schools Take Steps To Aid Communities + +BYLINE: By MERRI ROSENBERG + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 1; Column 5; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1613 words + +DATELINE: WHITE PLAINS + +AMID national concern about how to improve education and enhance performance, a variety of initiatives have recently been started to bring schools and communities closer, and in doing so, redefine the relationship. +Whether it is students researching reports for health centers, businesses adopting an elementary school, colleges extending help to county workers who want to acquire advanced skills or high school students devoting time to homeless children, the implicit contract between schools and their communities has been revised. + "There are three things happening that are pushing this trend," said Dr. Shirley L. Mow, executive director of the Westchester Education Coalition, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to improve the quality of education in the county. "School-to-work initiatives have reached out to businesses for internships and mentors; technology has pulled the classroom out through the Internet so students can communicate across the country and the world, and community schools are reaching out to parents." +Schools in the county are no longer perceived as shelters cloistered from the real world. A combination of social forces, technology and changing economics has meant that the schools are increasingly partners in their communities. Not only are they benefiting from community involvement in their programs -- which can include business partnerships and hands-on classroom volunteers -- but in many cases, the schools are also offering students' talents to help solve local problems. +For example, schools typically invited the elderly into the district's buildings for special meals or performances. Harrison recently embarked on a program to offer seminars to elderly residents on Social Security and Medicare as well as inviting them to take part in exercise programs before and after school. +While schools have long had a practice of working to pass budgets, or in some cases to provide gymnasiums, cafeterias and libraries as recreational and meeting places, the concept of how schools are part of the community has evolved. +"There is now this concept of school as a community place that would be open a good part of the day and evening for parents to learn as well as their children," Dr. Mow said. "Schools haven't had the tradition of working with people outside the schools, other than interacting with parents in the P.T.A., or with the community to pass budgets." +In Hastings-on-Hudson, the schools have tried to change that perception. "We tried to set a cultural framework where people felt welcome to come in, and teachers would be welcoming," said Dr. John Russell, Superintendent of the school district. "Hastings had a reputation as a very interesting community, and it didn't seem as if we made an effective use of that. These residents wanted an opportunity to add depth to the curriculum and provide the kids with the best possible experience." +In the fall, the district sponsored meetings that drew members of the conservation committee, youth council, Hastings Arts Gallery, historical society and teachers, among others, to discuss ways community members could work in the schools. Experts in various fields taught courses to teachers as part of a continuing staff-development program, so that the curriculum would be enhanced. +"We have guest speakers, and students talk to the volunteers in mentor relationships," said Brian McGuinness, who is chairman of the science department for grades 6 through 12 in Hastings. "Local environmental groups provided teachers with a local environmental study course. These are very knowledgeable people with no agenda. It's a very positive project." +In the Lakeland School District, ninth graders at the Walter Panas and Lakeland High Schools take part in the Discovery Research project, which is an interdisciplinary English and math program requiring students to apply their skills to community problems. +"The purpose is to teach the research process, with writing and critical research skills," said Dr. Carol Boyle, chairwoman of the English department for the Lakeland school district. The students learn statistics and logic as part of the mathematics course and research and writing skills in the English section. The 350 ninth graders at Walter Panas work with the Hudson Valley Hospital, while the 100 students at Lakeland work with the New York Power Authority at Indian Point to identify potential research problems. The project includes several visits to the organizations and interviews with staff members, ending in a public presentation of the students' work. +Schools' increasing participation in the Internet has also presented opportunities for students to solve outside problems. At the Rye Neck Middle School, students have worked with professionals at the Bronx Zoo to design animal habitats. The students' research will be sent, on the Internet, to the Wildlife Preservation Trust, which will put the material on their Web site. +"We want to give kids a hands-on, realistic sense of science," said Edward Woods, principal of the Rye Neck Middle School. "The whole concept of our science curriculum is that each unit is linked to some activity in the real world." +Similarly, students in the environmental science course at Pelham High School use the Internet for current information and have lent their expertise to creating a Web site for Sound Watch, a community environmental group. +"Students use Route Net, from Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, to find out what's going on in the scientific community," said Linda Fusco, an environmental science teacher at the high school. "They can capture lots of current studies on environmental issues, because the environment is changing so much." +Students have also embraced the community in other ways. At Roosevelt High School in Yonkers, members of the recently formed Youth in Philanthropy/Community Service Club are working with homeless children and their families through the South Yonkers Y.W.C.A. +"So often we hear comments about how teen-agers are self-absorbed and selfish," said Daniella Phillips, a social studies teacher and adviser to the club, which has a matching grant from the Volunteer Center's Youth in Philanthropy program in White Plains. "These students feel that the school community is larger than just their building. These are kids who are juggling school, 20-hour-a-week jobs and family responsibilities at home, but make the time to help homeless children and their families." +Businesses are also taking more active roles in the schools. At a recent career fair at the Rye Neck High School, workers from several local businesses, ranging from banks, hotels, medical centers and restaurants to the military, police and teaching fields, met with students to discuss their occupations. +"I live in this community, and having young people in my household made me aware of the importance of exposing them to the workplace," said Rose Silvestro, branch manager of the Mamaroneck Avenue branch of the Bank of New York in Mamaroneck. "Students are aware that there isn't necessarily a job waiting for them." +County businesses are increasingly taking more direct responsibility and interest in the schools. Two years ago, International Business Machines, the United Way of Westchester and Putnam and the Westchester Education Coalition began the Community Schools Initiative. The project was meant to establish extended-day programs in schools seen as having at-risk students who could benefit from intensive educational and social services, available from the beginning of the school day until 7 or 8 at night. +The group selected the A. B. Davis Middle School in Mount Vernon. "The goal was to reduce the potential for dropping out, absenteeism, violence, and to increase parent involvement," said Ralph Gregory, president of the United Way of Westchester and Putnam. "Out of a total of 800 students, 420 have participated in some form of extended day, and 50 parents show up regularly." +The project, whose services are provided by the Westchester Community Opportunity Program, includes homework tutoring, counseling, computer literacy classes, vocational and entrepreneurial workshops, a nutrition program and a center for parents. + +College Degree Program Helps Public Employees +A YEAR-OLD program for county employees and local municipal employees, which was started by Long Island University at its Mercy College campus in Dobbs Ferry, offers another example of the fluid boundaries between education and the workplace. +The program offers graduate degrees in 36 fields and provides scholarships of up to one-third of tuition for eligible public employees. +There is no cost to the county for employees' participation in this program. "We felt it important to provide this," said Dr. Dennis L. Payette, provost of the regional campuses of Long Island University. "As more county employees received advanced training, it would improve service in the county. It's education for the sake of education." +Susan Lauer, a health care administrator at the County Medical Center, is pursuing a master's degree in public administration through the program. +"My career has taken me in a different direction, and it's a benefit to have more formal education in what I'm doing," Ms. Lauer said. "The county really supports education." +Cynthia Boone, an eligibility examiner in the child protective services division of the Department of Social Services, is working toward a master's degree in counseling. +"The issues are so intense in the work we do with families that it is really helpful to continue my education," she said. MERRI ROSENBERG + +LOAD-DATE: January 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +23 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 12, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WEDDINGS: VOWS; +Gertrude Bernstein, David Edelstein + +BYLINE: By LOIS SMITH BRADY + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 37; Column 3; Society Desk + +LENGTH: 621 words + +A FRIEND recently asked David Edelstein why he did not wait a little longer to marry Gertrude Bernstein, whom he had dated since September. "Are you kidding?" replied Mr. Edelstein, 83. "At my age, I don't even buy green bananas." +A retired New York City school principal and history teacher, he had been a widower for six years. Until he met Mrs. Bernstein, he never thought he would dance or recite love poems aloud again. + The two were introduced last fall by a mutual friend who invited them to his weekly dinner party for widows and widowers. Within days, they were in love. +In some ways, they sound unmistakably like elderly people when describing their romance. They encourage each other to nap and support each other while climbing stairs. When it gets too dark for him to see when driving, she takes the wheel. +But when they discuss how they feel about each other, they could be of any age. +"He's one of the most knowledgeable men I've ever met," gushes the bride, who is 81 and a retired math teacher. "Mention anything in history and he will know about it. Mention anything in geology and he will know it. +"The dullest tasks, emptying closets and things of that sort, are fun to do with him. We read junk mail together and it's fun." +Mr. Edelstein said: "Both of us are walking on air, as if we were 16 years old, although it's been a long time since I was 16. When I fell in love then it was all-out, and this is similar, only lighter. It's much more pleasant now than when you're young and all fired up and every imaginary slight can throw you into a funk. We look at each other, we smile. When one does something absent-minded, the other one says, 'It's O.K., all of us do it.' " +While they are young at heart, they both yelp, "Heavens, no!" when asked if they would rather be in their 20's or 30's. +"You laugh more at 81," the bride said. "For example, I met David's son for the first time when he came to dinner one night. Now, normally I'm a good cook but I burned the steak. If that had happened at 35, I probably would have burst into tears, but at 81 you see the humor in it." +Both lived in Yonkers, she in a house decorated in aquas and pinks and he in one filled with brown furniture and books. While he said he never expected to live anywhere else again, he is now moving his encyclopedias, paintings, diaries and a lifetime's worth of keepsakes into her house. +"We both have a tremendous amount of memorabilia," the bride said. "But it's the present that counts." +Last Sunday, they were married in Rye, N.Y., in the large stone home of the bride's son, Allan Sperling. There were about 60 guests of all ages, and many commented afterward on what it was like to watch two octogenarians marry. +"It truly made me appreciate the fact that nothing really ends," said Susan Kelz Sperling, a writer and the bride's daughter-in-law. "Growing older with my husband, I'm learning you don't just face a dead end as you age. Instead, possibilities widen. David and Gertrude didn't get married out of desperation or deprivation. They were thinking, "Wow! Look what the world has to offer us.' " +Helen E. Freedman, a New York State Supreme Court Justice and the daughter of the bridegroom, added, "I've learned from them that the human emotions, the desire to love and be loved, and the ability to love seem to be ageless." +Adam Freed, a young man who catered the afternoon lunch, said: "Usually, when your parents get old, they get sick and it is not fun. To see someone having fun and making herself look beautiful and marrying the love of her life -- this swarthy, sexy-looking, 80-something man -- it's really cool. They're not pitiful or sad. It makes me think, 'Never give up.' " + +LOAD-DATE: January 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Rye, N.Y., Jan. 5. (Photographs by Edward Keating/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +24 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 12, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +IN BRIEF; +Consolidating Programs Delays Heat Aid for Aged + +BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 6; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 213 words + +Heating subsidies for more than 180,000 of the state's elderly and disabled residents will come more than half a year later than usual this year. The delay is the result of a change in the Lifeline Credit Program, designed to help low-income residents pay winter bills. While these subsidies usually arrive Oct. 1, an attempt by the state to combine several services for the aged mean that the money will not reach many older residents until June 30. +Called New Jersey Ease (Easy Access Single Entry), the new program is expected to save the state $200,000 a year in administrative costs for Lifeline alone, when it is combined with the Pharmaceutical Assistance to the Aged and Disabled program. The state Department of Health and Senior Services said the savings would not affect the $72 million in heating subsidies it provides annually. Utilities have been notified of the aid delay, and seniors having trouble paying their bills will not have service cut off, the department said. + The new program will mean fewer forms for applicants. Applications will be accepted at any time of the year rather than between Jan. 1 and March 15 as before; aid will arrive after applications are processed. There are 312,000 people receiving Lifeline benefits. KIT R. ROANE + +LOAD-DATE: January 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +25 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 12, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Nation; +In the Market We Trust + +BYLINE: By FLOYD NORRIS + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 3; Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 994 words + +Common stocks, as such, are not superior to bonds as long-term investments, because primarily they are not investments at all. They are speculations. +-- "Investments and Speculations," by Lawrence Chamberlain and William W. Hay, published by Henry Holt in 1931. + The more data we analyze, the more confident we are that stocks are superior long-term investments. In the long run, the true risk resides with fixed-income investments, not with common stocks. +-- "Stocks for the Long Run," by Jeremy J. Siegel, published by Irwin in 1994. +THE American view of financial risks and opportunities has come a long way in six decades. +Four years after Lawrence Chamberlain, a respected investment banker, warned that stocks could not even be deemed an investment, the Social Security system was born as a way of providing an assured means of support for elderly Americans. Money would be raised by taxes on working Americans and, to the extent not needed to pay immediate benefits, invested in safe Government bonds. +In 1935, memories of the 1929 crash were fresh. No one suggested that the road to safety led through buying common stocks. +Now, three years after Jeremy J. Siegel, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, published his influential book, a commission has recommended to Congress that the Social Security system be partly financed by common stock investments. It split on important details, but on the central thesis it came down solidly with Mr. Siegel: Stocks are safe, for in the long run they always go up. Bonds, including government bonds, whose real value can be eroded by inflation, are the risky asset. +The change has come slowly, with some converting early and some not at all. The stock market gained adherents in the 1950's and 1960's, then lost them in the 1970's, when inflation scared many investors away from all securities, and briefly into such hard assets as gold and diamonds. But since 1982, the start of a bull market with few historical rivals, the academic work showing that stocks are the best long-term investment has gained widespread acceptance. +Accordingly, investors have been willing to pay more and more for stocks, feeling secure in the knowledge that they will do well in the long run, even if prices fall over shorter periods of time. +One way to measure the changing attitudes is to look at the relative level of dividends on stocks compared with interest rates on bonds. Investors have the choice of buying bonds, with a guaranteed interest rate and certainty (barring default) of getting their principal back when the bond matures, or of buying stocks, with a less certain yield from dividends and the possibility that the stock's price could rise or fall. +In the aftermath of the 1929 crash, it became accepted wisdom that the dividend on stocks should be higher than the yield on bonds. After all, investors deserved compensation for taking the risk of falling share prices. In the late 1940's, investors were quite willing to buy bonds that yielded little more than a third of the dividends they could obtain from a diversified portfolio of stocks. + + + +25-Year Recovery + But as the widely forecast post-World War II depression failed to occur, investors gradually became more and more willing to buy stocks, and stocks became more expensive relative to bonds. In 1954, the Dow Jones industrial average finally got back to its pre-crash high of 381.17. There was nervous commentary, but no crash. +Then, in 1958, there was much hand-wringing over the fact that the dividend yield on stocks was now actually lower than the bond yield. A scary article in Business Week was titled "An Evil Omen Returns." It warned that stock yields had been below bond yields back in 1929, and look what happened. +But it didn't happen again. It was not until the 1970's that stocks again performed badly over a long period. And after prices began to soar again in 1982, academics gradually produced what they viewed as proof that rising stock prices, in the long run, were inevitable. That gospel has been proclaimed in newspapers, personal finance magazines and on countless television shows. +Now the interest you can get on a high-quality corporate bond is about four times the dividend yield on the stocks in the Standard & Poor's industrial average, but most on Wall Street figure that is irrelevant. Companies can return money to shareholders by repurchasing shares, and in any case it is the prospect of rising prices, not dividend income, that draws in buyers. "It's a sea change in attitudes," says Paul Macrae Montgomery, a strategist at Legg Mason, the brokerage house. +"The Jeremy Siegel book hit at exactly the right moment," Peter L. Bernstein, a founding editor of The Journal of Portfolio Management, said last week. Now the expected return from stocks is seen as "a reliable projection," he said. "I think that is just extraordinary," he added. +Last week, in The Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Clements, a columnist, confronted the question of what a parent should do if he had all the savings for his daughter's college education invested in stocks, only to have her go to college in one of those rare periods when stock prices had fallen substantially. Mr. Clements's response: Pay the tuition with borrowed money "while you wait for stocks to bounce back." +Some people are appalled by such attitudes and worry that research "proving" that stocks are the best long-term investments may persuade investors to bid up share prices until they are dangerously overvalued, much as happened in the 1920's. +Mr. Siegel admits that is possible but says share prices would have to rise another 25 percent or so, to perhaps 8,000, for him to be really concerned. Still, he is not enthusiastic about the idea of putting Social Security money into stocks. "Suppose we come to a 10-year period when the return on stocks is not good," he said. "They happen." + +LOAD-DATE: January 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: In 1936, Social Security was young, and the nation freshly burned by the stock market. + +Graph: "The Sweet Smell of Stocks" compares the relative yield from dividends on a diversified portfolio of industrial stocks with interest from high-quality corporate bonds, 1871-96. (Source: Paul Macrae Montgomery, Legg Mason) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +26 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 13, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Offer of More School Aid Elicits Smiles and Doubt + +BYLINE: BY MELODY PETERSEN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 588 words + +In suburban towns yesterday, where homeowners have repeatedly vetoed school budgets that would have forced property taxes up, both school administrators and local taxpayers welcomed Gov. George E. Pataki's plan to have the state bear more of the cost of public education, but questioned how he could pay for it. +"It was a smart thing for the Governor to do, to release this over the weekend, because who wouldn't say this is wonderful?" said Lorraine Deller, the president of the Nassau-Suffolk School Boards Association. + Governor Pataki's plan to both reduce local property taxes and increase state aid to schools comes at a time when budget analysts have already estimated that the cost of state services next year will exceed the money flowing in to the treasury by $3 billion. +"I have to be cynical about the possibility of this happening," said Andrea Vecchio, a board member of the East Islip Tax Pac group on Long Island, which formed in 1989 to battle local governments over rising property taxes. "If it were really to happen it would be a wonderful thing because people are struggling." +Under the plan announced by the Governor on Saturday, the owner of a home valued at the state median of $110,000 would get a $30,000 tax exemption. That would mean that the owner would pay school taxes on a home worth $80,000 rather than $110,000. The state would pay the school district the equivalent of taxes on the home's remaining value of $30,000. +Senior citizens, who often depend on fixed incomes like Social Security, would receive even more property tax relief. Homeowners age 65 or over would receive an exemption of $50,000 on the value of their home. +"It's like something coming down from heaven," said Vic Incorvia, a retired elderly businessman from Harrison in Westchester County, who complained about high property taxes at every local school board meeting last year -- except the one held on a night when health problems forced him into the hospital. +Dr. Vincent T. Beni, superintendent for 35 districts in southern Westchester County, said, "It's clearly a first step in the right direction." +Since 1991, the state has paid a steadily smaller portion of the cost of public education. In 1991, the state paid 44 percent of those costs, Dr. Beni said, but now pays only 37 percent. In many of the more affluent suburbs, he said, the state contributes far less. For example, many districts in Westchester County receive 8 percent or less of their school budgets from the state, Dr. Beni said. +That forced schools to depend more and more on local property taxes, he said, prompting complaints from more and more homeowners. +Property tax is "the most unfair tax," Dr. Beni said. On the other hand, he added, "The more you rely on income taxes, the more you balance the cost of education across the population." +In Harrison last year, voters -- many of them senior citizens -- defeated the school budget twice, forcing the district to revert to an austerity plan that reduced full-time positions to part-time and reduced the district's use of substitute teachers. +"The school tax increases have been slamming us very seriously," Mr. Incorvia said. +In East Islip, voters passed the school budget this year for the first time since 1990, Ms. Vecchio said. The budget passed this year, she said, because it included a slight property tax decrease. +Since 1990, East Islip property taxes have risen by 40 percent, Ms. Vecchio said. "We're still paying much, much more than we should be." + +LOAD-DATE: January 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +27 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 15, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +What Crisis? + +BYLINE: By Richard C. Leone; Richard C. Leone is president of the Twentieth Century Fund. + +SECTION: Section A; Page 19; Column 5; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 692 words + +Critics of Social Security claim that the system is near collapse. Privatizing the system, they argue, will give everybody better protection in old age. But without a complete understanding of what Social Security already provides to Americans, how can we know whether to junk it in favor of something else? +First, despite what its critics claim, Social Security is not similar to a savings or investment program whose purpose is to yield the biggest return. Social Security is more like a disability and life insurance policy that provides vital protections to virtually every member of our society. Currently, seven million survivors of deceased workers and four million disabled Americans receive income support. + The Social Security Administration calculates the value of the disability insurance as the equivalent of a $203,000 policy in the private sector; for a 27-year-old average-wage worker with two children, Social Security provides the equivalent of a $295,000 life insurance policy. The total value of these two policies nationally is about $12.1 trillion, more than all the private life insurance currently in force. +Second, Social Security provides a lifetime retirement annuity whose benefits rise with inflation. Many corporate pensions run out after 20 years, and most are not adjusted for inflation. While there is a lot of loose talk about greedy geezers living luxuriously on the backs of their impoverished children, the facts tell a quite different story. Without Social Security, approximately half the elderly in America would fall below the poverty line. +The notion that these basic protections would be unnecessary if we all saved more money is simply false. The truth is that neither of these protections is available in the private market at a price that the vast majority of Americans can afford. +Social Security works because virtually all of us belong to it and pay into it. Social Security, after all, does not consist of a bunch of piggy banks with our names on them. Our pooled contributions insure that almost every senior citizen receives a minimum income. +Although some of us need the protection more than others, all of us get some benefits. It is the nature of such pooled plans that both the most fortunate among us (the wealthy) and the least fortunate (those who die young and without a family) get the least from the program. +It is a fallacy that everyone can do better than average if we take control away from the Government. Averages exist because some of us do worse and some of us better. In the brave new world of individual accounts, each winner would be matched by a loser. The only way we can insure that every citizen has a minimal retirement benefit is by requiring that we all participate in the Social Security system. +Though the search continues, there is no free lunch. Advocates of privatizing Social Security dangle the prospect of riches in front of impressionable young workers, but hide from them its high costs and risks. +The privatization plans proposed by two minority factions of the Advisory Council on Social Security come with an enormous transition cost. One plan would require increased taxes amounting to $6.5 trillion during the next 72 years; the other would raise payroll taxes by 1.6 percent, costing American families $13 billion each year. +Social Security has some minor problems, but faces no life and death crisis. In fact, without any changes at all, the system will be able to pay full benefits for the next 30 years and more than 70 percent of those benefits for 75 years. +Moreover, the entire Advisory Council agreed that modest changes -- such as including state and local government workers in the system -- could eliminate a fair share of the projected gap between revenues and benefits. +Thus, as this debate continues, let us agree that we cannot all be above average, and that when it comes to benefits we should compare apples to apples. We shouldn't give up a critical universal insurance program for no insurance at all. And we should not compare a guaranteed lifetime inflation-adjusted annuity to a 401(k) plan or brokerage account. + +LOAD-DATE: January 15, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +28 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 16, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +In the Fight Over Medicaid Cuts, Signs of a Tense Year in Albany + +BYLINE: By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1020 words + +DATELINE: ALBANY, Jan. 15 + +Representatives of the health care industry today began a fierce attack on the deep cuts Gov. George E. Pataki has proposed for the state's Medicaid program, saying the reductions would be devastating for elderly and disabled residents of the state. +The criticism came a day after the Governor presented a $66.1 billion budget that wrings most of its cuts from the state's huge Medicaid expenditures for hospitals, nursing homes and home care providers -- particularly those in New York City and its suburbs, health experts said. + Mr. Pataki's aides said he would reduce state financing for Medicaid by $913 million in the next fiscal year, a drop of about 7.4 percent, largely by eliminating a host of reimbursement formulas that they say have encouraged waste and replacing them with set fees for recipients. +But health care providers said the Governor's plan essentially balanced the state budget on the backs of sick people. +"Our industry is being asked to do more than any other in terms of deficit reduction," said Kenneth E. Raske, the president of the Greater New York Hospital Association. "These proposals are so damaging to us that they are going to create an enormous amount of anxiety." +Joining the fray, the Democratic leader of the State Assembly, Speaker Sheldon Silver, said today that he believed the Governor's cuts would force hospitals to close and would lead to the loss 28,000 jobs in the state's health care industry. +The reactions presaged another mammoth budget fight in Albany this year involving not only lobbyists for one of New York's largest and powerful industries but also the state's leaders. +Indeed, Joseph L. Bruno, the Republican Senate majority leader, this afternoon criticized Mr. Silver's remarks, and said, "I believe this will be the most contentious year that we have had in government in a lot of years, and it's going to be because Speaker Silver is refusing to recognize that the campaigns are over and it's time for us in this state to get on with governing." +Donna Arduin, the Governor's deputy budget director, defended the proposed cuts, saying, "We want to get rid of the patchwork reimbursement system that has encouraged inefficiency and replace it with a system that rewards health care providers that operate efficiently." +The Governor called for similar cuts in the state's Medicaid program last year. But legislative leaders restored most of his proposed cuts after lobbyists for the health care industry and the industry's unions began a blistering statewide television and radio advertising campaign attacking his plan. The lobbyists spent $5 million on the effort. +Privately, lobbyists for the industry said they would hold their fire for now and give the Governor the opportunity to scale back his proposed cuts. But they added that they were prepared to spend as much as they did last year if he sticks with his current position. +"We will spend whatever resources we have to defend the health care industry," said Dennis Rivera, president of 1199, the National Health and Human Service Employees Union, which represents 120,000 health care workers in New York. "If enacted, these cuts will lead to a dramatic loss of jobs among health care workers and throw the health care industry into deep turmoil." +Because the Federal Government and localities match each dollar the state pays for Medicaid, the actual cut for hospitals, nursing homes and home care providers is $2.1 billion. Though Medicaid is often regarded as a program that pays only to tend the medical needs of the poor, such a cut would affect communities rich and poor because health care institutions have long relied on Medicaid to help cover overall expenses. +"There are no Medicaid nurses, no Medicaid doctors, no Medicaid X-ray technicians in New York State hospitals," Mr. Silver said. "When an emergency room is forced to shrink its staff because of these cuts in health care, we all lose. Whether you pay by credit card, by third-party insurance, Medicaid or Medicare, you lose as a result of these cuts." +The state's hospitals take the biggest hit under the Governor's plan. Over all, the Governor's plan would cut state, Federal and local Medicaid financing for hospitals by about $824 million, with $275 million of that involving state cuts. +Part of the reduction is accomplished by limiting to 15 the number of days the state will pay to hospitalize an elderly person who is well enough to enter a nursing home. But many experts say such limits ignore the fact that there are often waiting lists at nursing homes. The limits, they add, would force hospitals to absorb the extra costs or discharge elderly people before they have been accepted in a nursing home. +The state would also no longer pay the entire tab for nonemergency treatments that are provided to Medicaid recipients in emergency rooms. The Governor's aides contend that recipients with minor ailments should seek help at clinics or doctors' offices, not emergency rooms. +But hospital administrators say there are many instances when they must examine a person to determine whether the ailment is minor or truly serious. An example would be someone suffering chest pains that could be the result of a heart attack -- or heart burn. +The nursing home industry shoulders a large share of the cuts as well. The Governor's budget reduces state, Federal and local Medicaid expenditures for nursing homes by about $601 million. Of that, $278 million involves state reductions that are achieved by largely eliminating a formula that ties reimbursement to the relative health of patients and the kind of care they receive. +The Governor's aides say he wants to replace that formula with a flat rate that is determined by the average spent on nursing home patients in a given region. That way, they reason, nursing homes are rewarded if they are efficient and penalized if they are wasteful. +But nursing home administrators say the cuts produced by the change would discourage them from accepting patients with more serious illnesses, forcing patients to spend more time in hospitals. + +LOAD-DATE: January 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +29 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 16, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Metro Digest + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 838 words + + +NEW YORK + +Medicaid Cuts Are Criticized +Representatives of the health care industry began a fierce attack on the deep cuts Governor Pataki has proposed for the state's Medicaid program, saying the reductions would be devastating for elderly and disabled residents. Health care providers said the Governor's plan, which would reduce financing for Medicaid by $913 million, essentially balanced the state budget on the backs of sick people. The reactions presaged another mammoth budget fight in Albany this year involving not only lobbyists for one of the state's largest and most powerful industries but also the state's leaders. [Page A1.] + +Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, mounted a broad attack on Governor Pataki's proposed budget. And in a sign of growing hostility in Albany, Joseph L. Bruno, the Republican majority leader in the State Senate, challenged Mr. Silver in unusually blunt language. [B6.] + +Judge Sets Back Hospital Sale +A State Supreme Court judge dealt a serious blow to Mayor Giuliani's effort to sell the city's hospitals, ruling that any such sale would require a change in state law, as well as extensive public review and the approval of the City Council. The decision, which the Mayor said he would appeal, has the practical effect of stalling a deal to allow a Pennsylvania company to run Coney Island Hospital. The ruling also raises questions about the sale or lease of any of the city's 10 other hospitals. [B1.] + +Officer Tells of Bronx Encounter +After months of street protests and a high-profile criminal trial, Officer Francis X. Livoti described publicly for the first time how a late-night encounter with a group of men on a Bronx street turned violent when they challenged his police powers. But he insistently denied using an illegal choke hold on a man who died in his custody. His testimony came during an administrative hearing to decide whether he should be dismissed from the force. [B1.] + +Defining Ruth W. Messinger +In Manhattan, Ruth W. Messinger is known as the earnest if slightly stern career legislator: a leader of battles for the city's downtrodden, fighting a huge project one day and City Hall the next. But in much of the rest of the city, the Manhattan Borough President is, more often, a vaguely familiar face from the edges of politics and local television. What she is remembered for is not always helpful to someone running for citywide office, and it poses a central challenge to her candidacy. [B1.] + +The Mayor's re-election campaign raised $1.14 million in the second half of last year, much of it from real estate and construction companies and law firms. His Democratic rivals raised less. [B4.] + +Peekskill as Artists' Enclave +Peekskill has always been Westchester County's sad little city to the north. But thanks in part to a planning consultant hired to bring new life to the city's decrepit business district, it is now a haven for artists. Our Towns by Evelyn Nieves. [B1.] + +Challenge to Extreme Fighting +Just three months after New York became the first state to sanction an attraction known as extreme fighting, Mayor Giuliani and other New York City leaders are joining to try to prevent the matches from taking place in the city. But Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader, suggested regulating it. [B3.] + +Casino Measure Faltering +Amid a growing campaign by church groups to block a measure that would legalize casino gambling, the Republican leader of the State Senate said he considered it increasingly unlikely that the proposal would pass in his house this year. [B6.] + +An 86-year-old woman who immigrated from Iran lives on memories of a once happy life. The Neediest Cases. [B2.] + +NEW JERSEY + +Whitman Takes On an Old Fight +Auto insurance reform has bedeviled New Jersey's last two governors. Now, as she prepares her run for re-election, Governor Christine Todd Whitman has waded in with a new plan to reduce premiums anywhere from 5 to 25 percent by combatting fraud and offering motorists a choice of policies that link savings to reduced coverage. [B6.] + +CONNECTICUT + +Judge Gives Up Rape Case + The judge in the Alex Kelly rape case removed himself amid defense accusations about his impartiality, including his alleged reference to Mr. Kelly's girlfriend as "Amelia Airhead." Judge Martin Nigro of the Superior Court said he disagreed with many of the defense claims. But he said judges should remove themselves from cases even if there is the appearance of bias. [B2.] + +From State to Foxwoods +The state's top gambling regulator resigned to take a job with the giant Indian casino he had been charged with overseeing, bringing criticism from legislators who called the move a flagrant conflict of interest. John B. Meskill, executive director of the Division of Special Revenue, will be the executive director of the gaming commission of the Mashantucket Pequot Indians, a tribe which operates the Foxwoods Resort Casino. [B4.] + +LOAD-DATE: January 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +30 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 16, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +THE FINE PRINT: A new rule on advocacy.; +House Rule May Rein In Liberal Advocacy Groups + +BYLINE: By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE + +SECTION: Section B; Page 8; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 944 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Jan. 15 + +Last week, while all eyes on Capitol Hill were on the re-election of Newt Gingrich as Speaker, the House passed a little-noticed rule, long sought by conservatives, that could be the first step toward stripping liberal advocacy groups of Federal financing. +This was not the declared intention of the measure, which was buried in a package of rules that the House quickly approved by a vote along party lines on Jan. 7, shortly after the tense re-election of Mr. Gingrich. + Called "Truth in Testimony," the rule requires that anyone from a nongovernmental group testifying before the House disclose how much money in grants and contracts the group has received from the Federal Government in the previous three years. +The rule, designed in part as a check on Federal spending, would affect an estimated 3,000 grant recipients and contractors whose officials testify before the House each year, said the conservative Heritage Foundation, which strongly backed the measure. It would cover military contractors and other major corporations involved in Government work, as well as hundreds of nonprofit -- often liberal -- organizations that receive taxpayer money. +The political subtext is that the rule will disproportionately affect some of the liberal advocacy groups simply because there are more of them. Liberals also tend to believe in using Federal money for what they call public interest purposes, unlike conservative groups, which tend philosophically to oppose using taxpayer money, relying instead on private donations. +Supporters say the rule will force some grant recipients to disclose that they depend on the very programs for which they are seeking financing but are offering supposedly objective testimony. Beyond that, they say, it will put on the record how much taxpayer money these groups receive as they further their own partisan ends, working against the Republican majority as some did in the health-care and budget-cutting debates in the last Congress and opposing Republican candidates. +It is illegal for nonprofit groups to use Federal money to lobby or engage in political activity. But the groups contend that they are not using Federal money for these purposes. +Opponents say the measure could intimidate some organizations from sending representatives to testify and cause them to scale back their activities. +House Republicans said eight groups, including the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the United Automobile Workers, the National Council of Senior Citizens, the Sierra Club and the American Association of Retired Persons, received a total of $99.9 million in Federal grants in 1994, and then spent $5.5 million "attacking Republican members and lobbying against G.O.P. legislative proposals." +Representative Ernest J. Istook Jr., the Oklahoma Republican who in 1995 proposed an even broader measure, supports the new rule as a step in the right direction. He said the financial disclosures would generate a lot of hard-hitting questions on how nonprofit organizations "use our tax dollars and should demonstrate the big difference between true charities and groups which sponge off the public treasury." +In turn, he said, these disclosures "should help us take the next steps necessary to put a permanent end to taxpayer-subsidized lobbying." +Bradley Keena, a spokesman for the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative research group headed by Paul Weyrich, described the new rule as "a first step toward leveling the playing field" and "part of a much larger plan to defund the left." It has been a long-dormant conservative goal to eliminate the liberal advocacy establishment that sprouted on Capitol Hill under 40 years of nurturing by a sympathetic Democratic Congress. +Marshall Whitmann, director of Congressional affairs for the Heritage Foundation, home of a project dubbed P.T.L., for "privatize the left," said: "For 40 years, we saw the growth of a spending complex that involved nonprofit organizations and governmental organizations that worked in tandem to grow Government. This rule is an opportunity to shed some light on this phenomenon and educate the taxpayer." +But Representative David E. Skaggs, a Colorado Democrat who opposes the rule, said it was "a tool that can be used to selectively embarrass and intimidate certain organizations and witnesses, and trivialize their participation in Government as being merely self-serving." +Mr. Skaggs said the ramifications of the rule were not yet clear. "It was essentially encrypted in the rules," he said, "and people are just breaking the code now." +Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, a coalition of public interest law groups, described the new rule as "an effort to brand witnesses who receive Federal funds with a scarlet A for advocacy." +"What they really want is to establish a link between the Federal dollars and lobbying," Ms. Aron said, "but they have never come up with one abuse of a Federal grantee lobbying with Federal funds." +The Republicans contend that money is interchangeable, so that even if a group keeps its Federal money in one pocket, having it can free other money for lobbying. +"Yes, the money theoretically is fungible," Ms. Aron acknowledged. "But in this climate, what dwindling Federal funds there are for these groups really are going into direct services that the Government specifically needs." +Mr. Istook's broader proposal would have been in the form of legislation. But after that was withdrawn last year in a rift with Senate Republicans, the House simply included it in its rules package. It needs no further approval and will apply only to witnesses testifying before House committees. + +LOAD-DATE: January 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +31 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 16, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +The Governor's Divisive Cuts + +SECTION: Section A; Page 24; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 607 words + +The $66 billion budget proposed by Gov. George Pataki on Tuesday is tailored for his familiar theme that New York State is "roaring" back toward fiscal health. But his proposed cuts in higher education and health programs for the disabled, elderly and poor are certain to yank the Legislature right back into the bitter wrangling that has paralyzed the budget process for two years in a row. Despite the Governor's claim, the budget also relies too heavily on the kinds of gimmicks that have given New York the worst credit rating of any state in the country. +Mr. Pataki has proposed some welcome new spending initiatives, particularly increases for children's services and welfare recipients. There were a few more details in the budget about how the state plans to mobilize job training, counseling and day care to help get families off welfare, and to provide vouchers for food and shelter for those thrown off the rolls because of the new Federal welfare law. The Legislature will have no higher priority than guaranteeing that the state use its resources to protect those hurt by the new law. +Because the state economy is doing better and providing more tax revenue, Mr. Pataki's budget achieves balance without the harsh cuts he has urged in years past. Even so, nursing homes, hospitals, community health centers and home care for the elderly are being hit by significant cuts to help pay for the Governor's proposed property tax relief and other programs. Such huge reductions will inevitably impair health services for the neediest recipients. There are also ambitious schemes to introduce managed care and competition into the delivery of health services for the mentally ill, disabled and elderly that remain untested. +Also unwise are Mr. Pataki's proposed cuts for both the City University and State University systems. These would be offset by increasing tuition by $400 for students at both systems, making them less affordable for the poor and working class. +Mr. Pataki has brought some badly needed restraint to state spending. Like New York City's Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, he argues that his policies have led to declines in crime and the welfare rolls and higher tax revenues resulting from an improved economy. But the Governor undercuts his own record by repeatedly relying on dubious bookkeeping to balance the budget. His own numbers show that if the latest fiscal plan were subjected to generally accepted accounting standards -- which bar gimmicks like deferring the paying of bills or assuming revenues that are not really available -- it would be $768 million out of balance, and would increase the accumulated state deficit to nearly $2.8 billion. +In the coming year, moreover, Mr. Pataki wants to roll over a $1 billion revenue surplus from the current year and use it to pay for ongoing expenses -- a dangerous practice because the money may not recur even though the expenses will. In addition, his proposal for $3.4 billion in increased school aid and property tax relief is funded only in part for the next year. There are no details on how it is to be funded later, only projections of growing deficits in the years ahead. +With Mr. Pataki's re-election campaign less than two years away, the budget fighting is likely to be more fierce than ever this year. The Assembly Speaker, Sheldon Silver, who leads the Democratic opposition, only made tensions worse by leaving the room before the Governor began his budget speech. Whatever his motives, Mr. Silver's snub was a provocative and juvenile gesture incompatible with the Speaker's responsibility to work constructively on legislative issues. + +LOAD-DATE: January 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +32 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 17, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Last Chance + +SECTION: Section C; Page 6; Column 5; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 652 words + +Here is a sampling of shows and exhibitions in New York City that are to close soon: + +Closing This Weekend + +"COROT," Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82d Street. Some 150 paintings dating from the early 1820's to the 1870's. Through Sunday. Hours: Today and tomorrow, 9:30 A.M. to 8:45 P.M.; Sunday, 9:30 A.M. to 5:15 P.M. Suggested admission: $8; $4 for students and the elderly. Information: (212) 535-7710. + +"LATIN AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY: A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY," Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park. Works by 50 photographers from the museum's collection. Through Sunday. Hours: Today through Sunday, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Suggested admission: $4; $2, students; $1.50, elderly; free for members and children. Information: (718) 638-5000. + +"FROM COURT JEWS TO THE ROTHSCHILDS: ART, PATRONAGE AND POWER 1600-1800," Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92d Street. An examination of the cultural life of court Jews in Germanic states. Sunday only, 11 A.M. to 5:45 P.M. Closed today and tomorrow. Admission: $7; $5, students and elderly; free for members and children. Information: (212) 423-3200. + +"NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY," York Theater, at St. Peter's Church, Citicorp, 54th Street and Lexington Avenue, Manhattan. A revival of the 1987 musical comedy thriller, based on the William Goldman novel; book, music and lyrics by Douglas J. Cohen; directed by Scott Schwartz. Through Sunday. Performances: Today at 8 P.M.; tomorrow and Sunday at 2:30 and 8 P.M. Tickets: $30 and $35. Information: (212) 935-5820. + +"CLOUD TECTONICS," Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42d Street, Clinton. A modern fairy tale by Jose Rivera about a man who gives shelter to a hitchhiker who is searching for the father of her child; directed by Tina Landau. Through Sunday. Performances: Today at 8 P.M.; tomorrow at 2 and 8 P.M.; Sunday at 2 and 7 P.M. Tickets: $35. Information: (212) 279-4200. + +"THE BARBER OF SEVILLE," Pearl Theater, 80 St. Mark's Place, East Village. The 18th-century comedy by Beaumarchais; directed by John Rando. Through tomorrow. Performances: Today at 8 P.M.; tomorrow at 5 and 9 P.M. Tickets: $24 and $30. Information: (212) 598-9802. + +Closing Next Week + +" JASPER JOHNS: A RETROSPECTIVE," Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53d Street, Manhattan. Through Tuesday. Hours: Today, noon to 8:30 P.M.; tomorrow through Tuesday, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. Admission: $8; $5 for students and the elderly; free for those under 16; pay-what-you-wish today after 5:30 P.M. Information: (212) 708-9480. + +Closing Next Weekend + +"AN IDEAL HUSBAND," Barrymore Theater, 243 West 47th Street, Manhattan. The Oscar Wilde comedy; with Michael Allinson, Nicky Henson, Stephanie Beacham, Madeleine Potter, James Warwick and Kim Hunter; directed by Peter Hall. Through Jan. 26. Performances: Tuesday through Fridays at 8 P.M.; Saturdays at 2 and 8 P.M.; Sundays at 3 P.M. Tickets, $32.50 to $60. Information: (212) 239-6200. + +"THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA," New Victory Theater, 209 West 42d Street. The Shakespeare comedy presented by the International Shakespeare Globe Center and the Theater for a New Audience. Through Jan. 25. Tickets: $10 to $25. Performance times and other information: (212) 239-6200. + +"THE MAIDEN OF LUDMIR," Folksbiene, 123 East 55th Street, Manhattan. A musical based on the true story of a 19th-century Hasidic girl who became a distinguished rabbi in Ukraine. In Yiddish with simultaneous English and Russian translations. Book and lyrics by Miriam Hoffman; music by John Clifton; directed by Robert Kalfin. Through Jan. 26. Performances: Wednesday at 2; Saturdays at 8 P.M.; Sundays at 2 and 5:30 P.M. Tickets: $22 to $25.Information: (212) 755-2231. + +ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT SERIES, Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea. Through Jan. 26. Tickets: $17. For performance times and other information: (212) 242-0800. + +LOAD-DATE: January 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Schedule + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +33 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 17, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Medicaid Costs Are Seen Rising At Slower Rate + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 974 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 + +The Congressional Budget Office radically reduced its estimate of future Medicaid costs today, relieving pressure on President Clinton and Congress to cut benefits for the poor. But the financial outlook for Medicare, the health insurance program for the elderly, improved only slightly. +The estimate of total Federal spending on Medicaid from 1997 to 2002 dropped by $86 billion -- more than all the Medicaid savings that Republicans proposed in their long, bitter struggle with Mr. Clinton over the budget in 1995 and 1996. + With no change in current law, the budget office said, Federal spending on Medicaid will rise an average of 7.8 percent a year, to $144 billion in 2002 from $92 billion in 1996. In contrast, the agency was predicting just six months ago that Medicaid would grow 9.7 percent a year. +The budget office's estimate assumes that greater use of managed care will help control Medicaid costs, as it has in the last few years. With permission from the Clinton Administration, many states are requiring the poor to join health maintenance organizations as a condition of Medicaid coverage. +But for the elderly, H.M.O.'s are purely optional: the Federal Government does not require any Medicare beneficiaries to join. +The Congressional Budget Office said today that it foresaw continued rapid growth in Medicare spending. And on the question of most interest to politicians, it said that Medicare's Hospital Insurance Trust Fund would run out of money in 2001 if Congress took no action to shore up the finances of the program. That prediction coincides with a forecast offered last June by the Administration. +The trust fund pays hospital bills for Medicare beneficiaries, who are elderly or disabled, and Republicans often cite it as a symbol of the need to slow Medicare growth. +Representative Bill Thomas, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, said: "This new report from the Congressional Budget Office is disappointing and unfortunately dashes any hopes that Medicare's financial condition was significantly improving, or that Medicare would go bankrupt later than expected. It underscores the need for Congress and the President to forge a bipartisan agreement to save Medicare, without resorting to accounting gimmicks or tax increases." +The budget office said Medicare payments to doctors would increase more slowly than it predicted last year. But the savings in that part of the program do not help the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund. +Over all, the budget office said, Medicare spending will grow 8.6 percent a year -- to $314 billion in 2002 from $191 billion in 1996 -- a very modest decline from the 8.9 percent growth that the agency predicted in August. +The report today increases pressure on Mr. Clinton and Congress to take action to slow the growth of Medicare. But it may reduce the pressure to make major changes in Medicaid. +The White House said earlier this week that Mr. Clinton would propose firm limits on Medicaid spending as a way to help balance the Federal budget by 2002. Many Democrats in Congress contend that such limits are unnecessary and would undermine the program's ability to meet an increased need for assistance in times of economic recession. +The budget office's report predicted that increasing numbers of Medicare beneficiaries would voluntarily join H.M.O.'s, so that enrollment in them would rise from the current level of 5 million to 9.8 million in 2002 and then 14 million in 2006. +The budget office estimated that the proportion of Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in H.M.O.'s, now about 12 percent, would rise to 25 percent in 2003 and 32 percent in 2006, even if Congress took no action to encourage such enrollment. +The budget office sees annual Medicare payments to H.M.O.'s soaring from $26 billion this year to $73 billion in 2002 and $141 billion in 2006. The White House contends that H.M.O.'s are being overpaid, and Mr. Clinton plans to propose cutbacks in reimbursement as part of his budget proposal, scheduled for submission to Congress on Feb. 6. +The Congressional Budget Office sees only modest increases in the premiums that Medicare beneficiaries pay for physician and outpatient services. Under current law, it said, the monthly premium, now $43.80, will rise to $45.60 next year and to $47.10 in 1999. +But, it said, premiums will pay for a declining share of Medicare costs, and general revenue for a growing share. +Without waiting to hear from Mr. Clinton, Senate Democrats said today that one of their top legislative priorities was to provide health insurance for the 10 million American children who have none. +The Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said they would pursue this goal as tenaciously as they fought last year to make health insurance more readily available to workers who change jobs or lose their jobs. +These two Democrats are pursuing somewhat different approaches. Mr. Daschle said he would offer tax credits for the purchase of private insurance, while Mr. Kennedy would offer vouchers to families to subsidize premiums. +Mr. Daschle said he hoped Republicans would join him and Mr. Kennedy in supporting such proposals. +But Senator John H. Chafee, a Rhode Island Republican who has worked with much success in the last 15 years to extend Medicaid coverage to more children, said, "A new program is always very difficult in this atmosphere," when Congress is trying to balance the budget. +The uninsured children who would be helped by the Daschle and Kennedy bills are generally not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. +Nine of 10 uninsured children live in families with working parents, and about two-thirds of such children live in two-parent families. + +LOAD-DATE: January 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +34 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 17, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Accused on Hill, Welcome at Home + +BYLINE: By CAREY GOLDBERG + +SECTION: Section A; Page 22; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1010 words + +DATELINE: SEATTLE, Jan. 16 + +An old Democratic colleague nudged him in the ribs and murmured in his ear, "You old rabble-rouser, you!" A local law professor predicted that the brouhaha over the Gingrich tape would only enhance his reputation. A friendly pollster lamented that if he went to jail, it would be "a sad end to a great achievement." +Representative Jim McDermott of Seattle, facing accusations that it was he who leaked a tape of Speaker Newt Gingrich discussing his ethics case with his colleagues, has a tricky road ahead. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department are investigating the release of the tape to The New York Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a possible Federal crime and the Florida couple who made the recording say they gave the tape to him. The allegations led Mr. McDermott to effectively resign from the ethics committee this week. + But here in his home state, where he won 82 percent of his district's vote this fall and is considered to hold one of the safest liberal seats in the country, the furor appears mainly to be making extra points for Mr. McDermott. Like-minded constituents and colleagues, like the one who called him a rabble-rouser, hugged him and slapped his back on Wednesday night at the inauguration of the new Governor, Gary Locke. +If Republican opponents "continue to pound on me, they'll make me into a hero -- I'll get 99 percent of the vote next time," Mr. McDermott said today in an interview in which he declined to discuss anything substantive about the tape or the investigations. He said the great majority of the calls coming into his office were to tell him, "Don't back down." +His Republican opponents denounce Mr. McDermott as an ideological, partisan street fighter who went too far this time: "He plays hardball," one said. +But his allies say that if he sinned -- and they do not think the whole story has been told yet -- it was a sin of zeal in the anti-Gingrich fight that most here support. +Mr. McDermott, 60, is an outspoken liberal whose greatest prominence until now came from his push for Canadian-style national health insurance in the health-care debates of President Clinton's first term. He has also fought to block Mr. Gingrich's moves to cut back on Medicare and Medicaid, the medical insurance programs for the elderly and poor. +The only clinical psychiatrist in Congress, Mr. McDermott began his political career after working with traumatized Vietnam veterans and becoming angrier and angrier about the war. +In his 27 years in politics, he has won quite a few and lost quite a few: among the more notable defeats was an initial run for governor in which he bicycled the length of the state. He has run three times for governor and failed. But his victories afforded him 15 years in the State Legislature, where he was chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, and five terms in Congress. +Mr. McDermott is known in Washington -- both the district and the state -- as smart and persuasive on the issues but also as a hot-tempered fighter in the political fray. He has made his antipathy for Mr. Gingrich and his positions well known, and has been openly frustrated by having to spend countless hours in ethics committee meetings. (Actually, he did count them last year, and they came to more than 250 hours in the committee room alone, he said, time he would much rather have spent working on health-care bills.) +Opponents who watched him in his years in the State Legislature say they have no trouble imagining him using any means required to bring down an enemy. +The minute word got out that a member of Congress had leaked the tape, said Brett Bader, a Republican political consultant, "There was no doubt in any insider's mind who it was. The question was only how long it would take him to admit it." +In Seattle and Olympia, the capital, Mr. Bader said, Mr. McDermott "is known as the toughest of pols with an absolute political agenda." +Mr. McDermott disputes descriptions of himself as a ferocious partisan, saying that he has long seen himself as a political professional and that he does not like to make political disagreements into personal feuds. But he added that since 1981 he has seen cooperation between Republicans and Democrats deteriorate -- first in the Legislature and then in Congress, where partisan rancor seemed 10 times worse than back home, especially recently. +"I think Gingrich tried to create a national parliament in the last election," he said. "And that says, 'Our party's in, we'll do whatever the hell we think is right, and we don't need you so go on home. So you can sit over there and yell and scream all you want.' " +All this is not what Mr. McDermott came to Congress for. In 1987, he had contracted with the State Department to serve as the mental health officer for United States embassies in sub-equatorial Africa. But then the Seventh District seat opened up and his brother and campaign manager persuaded him to come back from Zaire to run for it. +Health insurance and health care are the issues he cares most about, he said, adding that he also wants to focus on trade with Africa and India. +Asked if he was considering making this his last term, Mr. McDermott, dapper in monogrammed cuffs and a blue shirt that matched his Irish eyes, bridled: "You think I don't have any passion left?" +Federal investigators have not made contact with him, Mr. McDermott said. If anybody has been after him, it has been the local reporters who besieged him in his central Seattle office until this afternoon, leaving after he had consistently refused -- with a smile -- to speak. +Letters about the Gingrich tape have inundated local newspapers and the topic has been hot on radio talk shows, where most callers seem to back him and worry that he may have got himself into deep hot water. +But Mr. McDermott said he expects the whole thing to die down after Jan. 21, when Congress votes on Mr. Gingrich's punishment for the ethical misconduct he has admitted. +"It's all diversionary," he said. + +LOAD-DATE: January 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington. (Larry Davis for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +35 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 17, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +News Summary + +SECTION: Section A; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 872 words + + +International A3-12 + +NEW FEARS BEHIND KOREAN STRIKE + +South Korea's strike reflects the desires of workers to protect the gains they have reaped from their country's economic progress, and also their fears that global forces will take prosperity elsewhere. A1 + +HEBRON PACT LEADS TO PULLOUT + +The Hebron agreement cleared the Israeli Parliament as expected, and early this morning the army handed over its command post there to Palestinian troops. A1 + +HAMAS SCORNS HEBRON ACCORD + +Hamas, a militant Islamic organization and a rival to the authority of Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, condemned the Israeli-Palestinian agreement on Hebron. A12 + +FOR SWISS GUARD, DUTY OVER JOB + +A night watchman at the Union Bank of Switzerland, knowing he might lose his job, still felt it his duty to save documents that could shed light on the Holocaust. A6 + +ITALY ACQUITS TWO IN MURDER CASE + +An Italian court acquitted two men accused of killing a 7-year-old American boy in 1994. The parents' donation of their son's organs won national acclaim in Italy. A4 + +REBEL PROPOSAL REJECTED IN LIMA + +The Peruvian Government rejected a proposal by the leader of leftist rebels holding 74 hostages in Lima that a Guatemalan official be included in a commission that is being formed to end the crisis. A3 + +SO FAR, BALLOON CLEARLY SAILING + +An American balloonist on his way around the world was over Spain after a speedy Atlantic crossing; the voyage began in St. Louis. A11 + +Protests against austerity measures broke out across Haiti. A3 + +A French surgeon with AIDS almost certainly infected a patient. A5 + +Belgrade Journal: A Serbian protest singer is in vogue again. A4 + +National A14-24 + +TOUGH REPORT ON GINGRICH + +The independent counsel's report on Speaker Newt Gingrich was reported by Congressional aides to be highly critical of the Speaker for his admitted ethical lapses. It recommends a heavy fine and suggests that the matter be turned over to the Justice Department for further investigation. A1 + +MEDICAL PROGRAMS ASSESSED + +The Congressional Budget Office radically reduced its projection of Medicaid costs, relieving pressure to cut benefits for the poor. But the outlook for Medicare, the health insurance program for the elderly, improved only slightly. A1 + +BILL COSBY'S SON IS KILLED + +The only son of the comedian Bill Cosby was shot to death as he stopped to change a tire on a Los Angeles freeway. A14 + +RATING THE STATES ON EDUCATION + +A broad state-by-state comparison of education in all 50 states rated each state according to 75 specific measures. No state received consistently high marks. A14 + +ABORTION CLINIC IS BOMBED + +Two bomb blasts, apparently timed to go off about an hour apart, damaged a suburban Atlanta abortion clinic and injured six people, including investigators and news reporters drawn to the first blast. A15 + +SHIVERING TIME IN THE MIDWEST + +A ferocious storm roared through the Midwest on Wednesday night, followed by subzero temperatures and gales that closed schools and created general havoc. A16 + +TROVE OF HISTORY ON THE BLOCK + +As many as one million bound copies of newspapers, documenting two centuries of American history, are to be offered for sale. A18 + +NEW DOUBTS ON MAD COW DISEASE + +A new study of mad cow disease is casting doubt on what sort of infectious agent causes mad cow disease and similar ailments. A19 + +TOP JOBS REVEAL STATE OF PARTIES + +While President Clinton had to twist arms to find a suitable chairman for the Democratic Party, eight candidates who want to lead the Republican Party are engaged in a furious competition. A22 + +The Administration opposed a balanced-budget amendment. A24 + +Metro Report B1-5 + +CROWN HEIGHTS, PART II + +Five and a half years after racial violence tore through Crown Heights and sent shock waves from City Hall to Washington, the case again riveted a Brooklyn courtroom, as two black men were accused of being part of a murderous "vigilante gang" that stabbed a Hasidic man to death in 1991. A1 + +PLAN FOR A FADING HOTEL + +The St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South, a once-chic establishment whose Continental atmosphere has faded in recent years, would become luxury condominiums under an agreement between its Australian owners and Donald Trump, sources said. A1 + +Business Digest D1 + +Obituaries B6-7 + +Sports B8-14 + +Baseball: Plan to put team in each league barely passes. B9 + +Torre irked by Yanks' shortfall on extension. B10 + +Weekend C1-23 + +Americana (and surprises) at Winter Antiques Show. C1 + +Editorials/Op-Ed A30-31 + +Editorials + +The dossier on Anthony Lake. + +Ban this extreme barbarism. + +The hazards of Seldane. + +Letters + +A. M. Rosenthal: Netanyahu's peace plan. + +Anthony Lewis: Force backing up diplomacy. + +Barbara Ehrenreich: Silence of the Beltway feminists. + +Natan Sharansky: Now it's Arafat's turn. + +Chronicle B5 + +Crossword C16 + +LOAD-DATE: January 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +36 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 19, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +FRUGAL TRAVELER; +Planning a Trip, Fingers Crossed + +BYLINE: By SUSAN SPANO + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 6; Column 1; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 2026 words + +THERE is a Chinese proverb that says, "A man's life is but a candle in the wind." This is never more true than when you are traveling. Flights can be grounded or missed; ferry schedules can change; the weather in Boca or Bora-Bora can turn nasty, and every room in the perfect little Left Bank hotel can be taken (even though you have a reservation). +When I first started traveling to write this column three years ago, I lived in fear of these sorts of mishaps, which are often costly and time-consuming. I grew superstitious, giving my seats on subways and buses to elderly ladies in order to accrue good karma, and stopping in Catholic churches to light candles for the positive outcome of my trips. + I still believe that there is such a thing as traveler's luck, but I have also learned two lessons that have assuaged my fears somewhat. The first is that -- in retrospect and with a little sense of humor -- bad trips, rotten hotels, rude service and every other variety of mishap can make great stories: the one souvenir every traveler wants to take home. +Moreover, they help you hone your travel skills, teaching you how to anticipate problems and overcome them on the spot -- in sometimes immensely satisfying ways, like the time I defected from a rather dispiriting Alaska camping tour by hopping on a train to Anchorage, eating grilled salmon steak in the dining car while watching a moose charge through the woods. +The second has to do with thorough planning, which, along with a flexible attitude seems to me the best kind of traveler's insurance. I tend to organize trips myself (as opposed to calling a travel agent or taking a tour), partly because I think I can find the best deals on plane tickets and accommodations myself, and because researching and planning puts me at a distinct advantage when I reach my destination. Besides, I'm a planner by nature. I actually like the process, though it takes time and hard work. +I start at least a month before I plan to leave and probably put in about two days of intensive phoning, faxing and legwork for every week I'll be away. I read and grow confused, pursue leads and become stymied -- but then, in a wonderfully Zen-like way, the answers arise, hotels fax me confirmations, plane tickets turn up in the mail. +I begin plotting my itinerary by reading general guidebooks and cracking open my Rand McNally Cosmopolitan World Atlas, a huge ungainly volume I couldn't do without. Or I buy a map of the country I intend to visit, which I ceremoniously post on the wall beside my desk. +I spent three weeks in China last October, which was a daunting trip to plan, full of problems I'd never faced (like the immensity of the language barrier, and the fact that there are no central tourist information offices in Chinese cities). Still, I approached China in the same way I plan any trip, first by reading, in this case the beautifully illustrated "Passport Guide to China," by Charis Chan, and poring over a Bartholomew map of China and Mongolia. Then I moved on to studying descriptions of the cities that most appealed to me in the "Lonely Planet Guide to China," geared to budget travel, and "The China Guidebook" by Fredric M. Kaplan, Julian M. Sobin and Arne J. de Keijzer -- both of which include vital practical details like how to get from place to place. +If I could afford it, I'd buy every guidebook on the shelf. Instead, I often wind up reading in the travel sections of bookstores, or parked in the aisles at libraries, skimming historical volumes and foreign language books. +Before bed, I dip into something with a narrative to keep me turning the pages, like Colin Thubron's "Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China," Nien Cheng's "Life and Death in Shanghai," on the Cultural Revolution, or Mark Salzman's "Iron and Silk," about a year the author spent in Changsha studying the martial arts. I didn't stay in Shanghai, practice tai chi, or travel rough, the way Thubron did. But from Salzman I learned that the best way to tour a Chinese city is by bike; Thubron convinced me to avoid hard sleepers on trains, where the floor is used as a cuspidor, and Cheng's horrifying story of Communist Party politics made me pray every night I was there for the health of Deng Xiaoping. +Next, I collect every piece of information on my destination I can. Newspaper ads are a great source for airfare bargains, and I sometimes call the offices of magazines and weeklies published in my destination for free issues, which include good event calendars and ads offering specials at hotels. I contact friends, and friends of friends who've gone there recently, and sometimes simply rifle through the phone book for clues; for instance, under China, I found the China Institute in New York, which offers intensive Chinese classes for travelers and a two-hour workshop on how to tour the People's Republic (for $30). My sister told me to check in the phone book for the National Committee on United States-China Relations, which I doubted could help an independent tourist, but a man there sent me a packet of information that included an old newspaper clipping on pedicab tours through the alleyways of Beijing which turned out to be one of the most exhilarating sightseeing trips I've ever taken. +The more calls I make, the better the information gets. Hunting for a place to rent kayaks in or near the Baja, I recently phoned a shop named Southwest Kayaks in San Diego, which sent me a newsletter that contains a catalogue of hard-to-find books and maps on the long Mexican peninsula and a list of inexpensive kayak tours I intend to try out one of these days. +Most of my leads come from guidebooks, though, which generally supply the addresses and phone numbers of tourism bureaus in New York. I like to visit them in person, partly because it puts me in a traveling mood -- though such excursions yield inconsistent results. For instance, at the Mexican Government Tourist Office I found almost nothing to help me plan a trip to the Baja, but a visit to the Irish Tourist Board last spring provided me with all the brochures I needed to organize a cycling holiday in County Clare. +Technically, most tourist information offices aren't supposed to recommend one travel agency, airline, or hotel over another, but if you can involve them in your trip, they may open up on specifics. This works when you call tourist offices and chambers of commerce in the United States, and when you stop in at travel agencies as well. +I feel a little guilty about the way I tap travel agents for general information, itinerary ideas and airline price quotes, without always intending to use their services. But then again, I occasionally buy airplane tickets from travel agencies (which sometimes offer the best deals on exotic destinations); I have taken a number of low-cost package trips to European cities that can only be booked through airline tour companies, like a five-day trip to Venice on Alitalia, and it didn't take me long to realize I couldn't possibly plan my China trip without the help of a travel agent. +First, though, I considered taking the easiest route of all, by joining an organized tour. I called about a half dozen travel agencies for brochures. I had already checked with a number of airlines, finding that the lowest fare from New York to Beijing was currently on China Air, for about $1,000. This helped me assess the value of the trips I was offered. I quickly rejected the tours, because I couldn't find one in the right time frame, and because those that looked most enticing were invariably the most expensive. +However, the tour dead end left me with the names of travel agents to contact for help in planning an independent visit to China. I faxed each one a sample itinerary, and got a variety of results; one said he couldn't respond without a deposit, another never answered and a third lost my business when I went to visit her Chinatown office -- a closet of a place with stacks of paper everywhere and phones ringing off the hook. (I salvaged the afternoon trip by stopping at a print shop underneath the Manhattan Bridge, where a nice man translated my name into Chinese and made 200 Chinese business cards for $20 -- which a friend of a friend had suggested I would need.) +Three of the agencies came up with price quotes. I went with the lowest, from an agent named Lena Zhao at Eastquest, who spoke with a quiet authority that reassured me, suggested I visit Nanjing on my way to the garden city of Suzhou (which turned out to be a very good idea), and offered to expedite my visa application for a service charge of $10. From her I purchased the skeleton of my China trip, and organized the rest myself, finding sights and hotels on my own in Beijing and working with the biggest travel agency in China (by fax) to arrange a five-day stay in Chongqing. +Whether I use a travel agent or not, the next step involves drawing up a calendar, first booking and marking the dates for the least expensive available flight and ground transportation. I have yet to explore the Internet, partly because my initial forays have yielded travel information too general to be useful and airline price quotes I bettered by calling around myself. Besides, I get along fine with my telephone, and buying a fax machine has had benefits I never anticipated -- especially when it comes to booking hotels. When trying to make reservations at hotels in foreign countries, faxed messages usually get immediate attention, even if they're in English, and faxed confirmations are invaluable. +I once left for a week on the South Pacific island of Huahine with little more than a fax from a Tahitian travel agency in hand. When I arrived at the Papeete airport around 1 A.M., the representative from the agency didn't have my name on her list. But once I showed her my fax she put me in a van headed for a hotel -- and even gave me a left-over lei. +With me, choosing a hotel is largely a matter of chemistry. I check guidebooks to see if more than one has included a place, but above all, it has to be a good deal. Over the phone, I sound out innkeepers to gauge their warmth and knowledgeability; and I always ask them to send or fax me a brochure, which usually has pictures. +But booking a hotel sight unseen is a frustratingly dicey business. I prefer to find a place to stay when I reach my destination. This is also risky, because I could get stuck without a room. +BUT I take that chance under certain conditions -- if it's low season in my destination; if the place has a good tourist bureau with a hotel booking service (as in Britain), and if I'm planning to arrive early in the day, giving me time to prowl before night falls. +Backpackers find the best hotel deals this way; in fact, they keep the whole trip-planning process to a bare minimum, winging it with little more than airline tickets, traveler's checks and a guidebook. On an overnight sleeper from Beijing to Xian, I met a couple from Washington State traveling like this, with the wind at their backs. And I envied them. +But the trouble with traveling like a backpacker is that you've got to make difficult choices about lodgings, sightseeing and transportation at every step along the way -- which would bollix me up. Once I've cobbled my trip together and set off, I try to cut loose and enjoy. +And when I do have to make hard choices on the road, I remember a piece of advice a friend once gave me about getting ahead in business; it applies to travel as well. "Make a decision, make it fast, and don't look back," she said. +But I do look back at the end of a trip. After a disappointing visit to Rhodes -- during which I spent most of my time trying to catch a ferry to a smaller and less touristy island -- I decided that four days isn't enough time for a Greek island idyll. And when I go back to China I'll travel to Sichuan and Kunming Provinces, partly in the style of a backpacker; I will learn more Chinese and study local cuisines, so that I can eat better than I did in October. But I will go back someday; I still have lots of Chinese business cards. + +LOAD-DATE: January 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Alison Seifer) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +37 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 19, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEW YORKERS & CO.; +A Young Women's World Where Men Vanish at 11 + +BYLINE: By SARAH KERSHAW + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 4; Column 2; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 923 words + +IT was 8 P.M. at Katharine House, a residence for young women on West 13th Street, and not a boyfriend was in sight. Had a suitor arrived, he would have been shown into one of the beau parlors, two rooms off the lobby filled with elegant furniture and the smell of roses. In there, and only in there, courting and flirting are permitted -- but not past 11 P.M. +The Victorian Age lives on at Katharine House, where receptionists still buzz the 80 young residents in their rooms: twice for a guest, once for a phone call. No guests are allowed above the first floor without special permission. In the dining room, housecoats and curlers are permitted only at breakfast. + "It's like a movie, like the old black-and-white movies I would sit down and watch with my grandmother," said Shannon McLaughlin, 18, an aspiring model from Baltimore who has rented a room at Katharine House since September. "I guess it's good because if you do meet a guy somewhere he can't just come into your room and use you. You're dropped off, the old way." +At one time there were dozens of long-term hotels for young women throughout the city. But many have closed down or opened their doors to older women and to men, drastically changing the character of what were once the homes away from home for generations of young women making their way in New York. +Some, like Katharine House, were originally opened to provide "respectable" housing for poor young working girls who streamed into the city from small towns around the country. Others were more upscale, and housed proper young women from affluent families. The most famous of them was the Barbizon Hotel for Women, which opened its doors to men in 1981 and became a spa in 1988. +"The young girls want the boys, so those places died out," said John Kelly, who has worked the front desk of the Allerton Hotel for Women on East 57th Street for 22 years. The hotel began accepting women of all ages several years ago, he said. +"There were ladies here like the Jacqueline Kennedy types, you know, the white gloves, the whole bit," he recalled. "Oooh, they were ladies! And they wanted services. We could have had Grace Kelly here, but of course she went to the Barbizon." +Katharine House, opened in 1910, is run by the Ladies' Christian Union, a nonprofit organization founded in 1860 by three New York society women who eventually ran six such homes. All but two of those residences, most of them in historic brownstones, have been sold. Because the rents were kept low, the houses became too expensive to run, according to members of the organization. The other remaining home, Roberts House, is on East 36th Street in Murray Hill. +Like the women who rented rooms at Katharine House before them, today's residents -- among them dancers, models and actresses -- moved to the city to make their fortunes or to be discovered. They came seeking a lucky break and, as one resident, Anna Jones, put it, "a wild and crazy life." +At dinner last Tuesday night, Ms. McLaughlin, the model, chatted with several other residents over a meal of eggplant Parmesan, Caesar salad and pound cake. She ate two salads, pushed the eggplant dish across the table and discussed her first big break: Her left eye appears in the February issue of Glamour magazine in an article about mascara. +Joining Ms. McLaughlin at the table were a ballerina from San Francisco who had recently auditioned for "The Phantom of the Opera," a magazine stylist from Kansas City who is temping at Calvin Klein until she finds a permanent position, and Ms. Jones, 23, a modern dancer from Los Angeles who is studying to become a physical therapist. +"It's very exciting here because back in Kansas City, every time someone talks about fashion, it's the Gap," said the magazine stylist, Anne Leffingwell, who moved in last March. "The big city is my calling." +Ms. Leffingwell said that while she enjoyed some aspects of life at Katharine House, she was planning to move soon. "I have a boyfriend and he lives with his parents on Long Island," she said. "So it's like high school kids in a car when we want to be alone." +While it would seem that the restrictions at Katharine House could cramp a girl's style, surprisingly few of the young women said they were bothered by the rules. For most the appeal is safety, comfort and price, and there are typically 50 or 60 women on the waiting list for a room at Katharine House, said the resident director, Andrea Doolan. Residents must be 18 to 25 years old and earn no more than $25,000. +"This place is out of the 1800's," Ms. Doolan said. "But I find the girls are happier here. It's the only place for a girl in the city to be." +Before she moved to Katharine House a year ago, Ms. Jones, the modern dancer, had shared an apartment with a boyfriend, paying $600 a month for what she described as a rotten deal. When she heard about Katharine House -- it is decorated with oak hutches and embroidered curtains, and has a baby grand piano in the second-floor lounge, a terrace for summer socializing and maid service -- Ms. Jones said she thought there had to be a catch. +"To be a woman in New York City -- in such a fertile place -- with my own room in a house like this," she said. "I mean, hello! It changed my whole life." +Posing for a photograph in her fourth-floor room, Ms. Jones had a revelation involving her new boyfriend. "This is really interesting because my boyfriend hasn't seen my room," she said. "Now he might actually see a picture of it. I hope he likes it." + +LOAD-DATE: January 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: At Katharine House, $135 a week gets you two meals a day, left, a common sitting room, top, and a bedroom like this one, rented by Alwyn McCormick, a dancer. (Photographs by Rebecca Cooney for The New York Times) + +Chart: "FOR WOMEN ONLY: Rules of the House" +Since Katharine House's opening in 1910, its mission has been to provide housing to "young ladies who are supporting themselves by their own exertions." Some rules governing contemporary life at the hotel: + +Residents -- Women between 18 and 25, earning less than $25,000 a year. + +Minimum stay -- 3 months. + +Maximum stay -- 3 years. + +Rates -- $135 a week includes breakfast and dinner. All rooms are single. + +Visitors -- Boyfriends and dates may visit with residents in one of two first-floor "beau parlors." No guests -- male or female -- allowed past the first floor without special permission. Last year for the first time, men -- usually male relatives of residents -- began being admitted overnight to the two guest suites. + +Meals -- Breakfast, 7:30-9 A.M., dinner, 5:30-7 P.M. + +Attire -- Housecoats, bathrobes or slacks at breakfast. "Street dress required" and "no bathrobes, housecoats, curlers or pin curls" allowed at dinner and in "the lounge," a second-floor living room where residents read, play piano and socialize with one another. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +38 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 19, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Promises to Keep: Rethinking the Future of Social Security + +BYLINE: By TOM REDBURN + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 1; Column 1; Money and Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 5330 words + +SOCIAL SECURITY may not be broke -- yet -- but there are already plenty of ideas about how to fix it. +The recent report from a Federal advisory panel of experts, who split into three factions because they were unable to agree on any full solution, only underscores the range of clashing views on one of the most vexing social and economic problems facing the nation. + For the debate over Social Security is not just about how to prevent the retirement system itself from running out of money, but also about much bigger questions: Do Americans spend too much and save too little? How much burden should the old impose on working generations? Is it better to continue the collective "all-for-one-and-one-for all" sense embodied in Social Security and other Government benefit programs, or should Americans be asked to assume more responsibility for their own needs? +None of these questions are easy to answer. And your perspective often depends on where you stand: the young tend to view matters differently from the old, and the comfortable see things in a different light than the afflicted. That is why The New York Times asked several prominent experts -- three from the Advisory Council on Social Security and three others representing varying viewpoints -- to make their cases. Their comments on the latest proposals to overhaul Social Security follow, inside this section. +To a large extent, Social Security is a victim of its own success. The basic quandary of the program is that the Government has promised to deliver trillions of dollars more to retirees and other beneficiaries over the next several decades than it can reasonably expect to collect in payroll taxes from workers. A crisis is not immediate: Social Security now takes in more than it pays out, with the extra money marked as a future obligation from the Treasury to the Social Security system. +But after 2012, the program is expected to start paying out more each year than it receives in tax revenues. In theory, Social Security could continue to call on the Treasury to redeem the obligations held in the Social Security trust fund through 2029, yet it is not clear today just how the Government will respond. Will it have to cut other programs, borrow more from the public or impose higher taxes to pay those bills? Regardless of what happens during the interim, Social Security would have to tap additional resources, reduce its benefits or come up with some combination of the two in order to remain in balance after 2029, according to official projections. +To overcome this problem, advocates split basically into two camps. +On one side are longtime supporters of Social Security and those representing the elderly and labor unions, who favor shoring up the existing pay-as-you-go system. They want to retain its essential character in which today's workers pay taxes to provide income for today's retirees because they believe that doing so sustains the commitment to a system built to encourage the haves to share their bounty with the have-nots. To keep it going, they are prepared to risk some of Social Security's assets in the stock market in hopes of painlessly generating higher revenues. +On the other side are those who argue that Social Security, in its current form, undermines the economy by discouraging Americans from saving more for the future. They want to limit its guaranteed benefits, saying that Social Security should be transformed into a hybrid public-private system that requires people to invest in advance for their own retirement. +Few in Washington expect action anytime soon. But that could be costly. Because the longer policy choices are delayed, the more abrupt and painful any changes are likely to be. TOM REDBURN + +Benefit Cuts, Kind and Gentle +EDWARD M. GRAMLICH, dean of the University of Michigan School of Public Policy and chairman of the Advisory Council on Social Security. +In trying to reform Social Security, I am guided by three goals. The first is to retain the important social protections of this program that has worked so well for 60 years. The second is to make these social protections affordable by bringing Social Security back into long-term financial balance. It is not in balance now. The third is to add new national savings for retirement -- both to help individuals maintain their own standards of living in retirement and to build up the nation's capital stock in advance of the baby boom retirement crunch. +In the recently released report of the Advisory Council, I have introduced a compromise proposal, the Individual Accounts Plan, that tries to achieve all three goals. I would preserve the important social protections of Social Security and still achieve long-term financial balance through what might be called kind and gentle benefit cuts. Most of the cuts would be felt by high-wage workers, with disabled and low-wage workers being largely protected from the cuts. Similarly to the other two proposals offered by Advisory Council members, the I.A.P. would involve some technical changes, like including all new hires of state and local government. +Then, beginning in the 21st century, there would be a slight increase in the normal retirement age for all workers and a slight reduction in the growth of Social Security benefits for high-wage workers. Both changes would be phased in very gradually to avoid actual benefit cuts for present retirees and "notches" in the benefit schedule -- instances in which younger workers get lower real benefits than older workers with the same earnings records. +These adjustments would result in a modest reduction in the overall growth of real Social Security benefits. When combined with the rising number of retirees, the share of the economy's annual output devoted to Social Security spending would be approximately the same as at present, eliminating this part of the impending explosion in future entitlement spending. +These benefit cuts alone would mean that high-wage workers would not experience rising real benefits as their real wages grew. So I would supplement these changes with another measure to raise overall retirement (and national) savings. All workers would be required to contribute an extra 1.6 percent of their pay to new individual accounts. +These accounts would be owned by workers but centrally managed. Workers would be able to allocate their funds among 5 to 10 broad mutual funds covering stocks and bonds. Central management of the funds would cut down the risk that funds would be invested unwisely, would cut administrative costs and would mean that Wall Street firms would not reap a financial bonanza. The funds would be converted to real annuities on retirement, to protect against inflation and the chance that retirees would overspend in their early retirement years. +Together, these changes would mean that approximately the presently scheduled level of benefits would be paid to all wage classes of workers, of all ages. The difference is that this plan would mean that these benefits would be affordable; under present law, they are not. +The changes would eliminate the system's long-term financial deficit while holding together the important retirement safety net that Social Security provides. But the changes do move beyond the present pay-as-you-go financing plan by building up the nation's capital stock in advance of the baby boom retirement crunch. + +Turning Workers Into Investors +CAROLYN WEAVER, director of Social Security and pension studies at the American Enterprise Institute and a member of the Advisory Council. +Social Security is in trouble again. An infusion of $3.1 trillion, we are told, is required to keep benefit checks going out in the long range -- assuming we don't experience any more "adverse" economic or demographic shocks, like living longer than expected. This cash infusion could be met by a payroll tax increase of about one percentage point, on average, every decade over the next 70 years. Alternatively, benefits for middle- and high-wage workers who retire after the turn of the century could be reduced by 25 percent to 30 percent. +If cash-flow deficits were all that ailed the system, the situation would be difficult enough. But it is actually more serious. Since Social Security basically operates on a pay-as-you-go basis -- with income roughly equal to outgo -- it holds few assets against accruing liabilities. +This has two important implications. First, Social Security can now offer younger workers an average real rate of return on their taxes of no more than 1 percent to 2 percent, the real rate of growth of wages. That is substantially below the real return of private capital investment. Cuts in benefits and increases in taxes can only aggravate these poor returns and undermine political support among young workers. +Second, even if the deficits were closed, Social Security would have an enormous unfunded liability. The current $550 billion reserve fund is a mere 5 percent of the estimated $9 trillion to $11 trillion in net benefits that Social Security has promised to current workers and retirees. This "off the books" liability, or implicit debt, is fully double the Government's explicit debt of about $5 trillion. +The fundamental economic problem with financing Social Security in this way -- through income transfers from younger to older generations -- is that it depresses savings and investment, resulting in a lower capital stock, lower real wages and less national income than there would otherwise be. Workers -- and society, more generally -- have forgone the opportunity to invest in real private capital and to earn the higher return it affords. +While it is too late to recover the income lost as a result of the Government's past decisions, it is not too late to halt the losses caused by the continued growth of these promises. The Personal Security Accounts Plan that I support would sharply curtail the growth of future unfunded liabilities, while transforming Social Security into a straightforward retirement savings program backed by a Government safety net. The benefits to American workers, and to their children and grandchildren, would be very large. +The P.S.A. plan would gradually replace one-half of our pay-as-you-go retirement program with a system of personal accounts that would be owned and invested by workers and managed by the financial institutions of their choice. Workers would receive a rebate of part of their taxes for investment in their P.S.A.'s, allowing workers at all earning levels to begin accumulating real wealth. The balance of the retirement program would gradually be converted to a flat benefit, set at a level that would insure all full-career workers -- those who work all or most of their adult lives, low- and high-wage alike -- a base level of retirement income at or above the poverty level. +Under this plan, digging out from Social Security's debt while continuing to provide basically full benefits for current retirees and older workers would involve significant transition costs. It would require a supplemental payroll tax of 1.5 percent (or equivalent spending reductions) over a 70-year period, substantial reductions in long-range spending, and new -- explicit -- Federal borrowing. Despite these transition costs, this plan, when compared with the alternatives, holds the greatest promise for increasing national saving and expanding economic output over the long haul. +The benefits of the P.S.A. plan are not limited to increasing national saving. Under reasonable assumptions, single workers and two-earner couples are expected to fare better than they would under either of the other plans or a shored-up pay-as-you-go system. Younger workers stand to gain the most. In addition, workers and families would be directly involved in the financial decisions that will affect their own future well-being. While workers would take on financial risks, they would gain ownership of their P.S.A.'s and shed some of the political risks attached to Government benefit promises 20, 30 or 40 years down the road. +Critics decry the idea of workers managing their own accounts -- somewhat surprising in a nation with extensive experience with 401(k) plans and various mutual funds, not to mention the most sophisticated financial markets in the world. But what is the alternative? With literally trillions of dollars at stake, it is essential that our investment policy be structured so that workers' taxes are actually saved and invested for the future, rather than spent on current consumption, and that the allocation of capital in the economy is shielded from political manipulation. +Those of us who support the P.S.A. plan believe that securing Social Security in the decades ahead will take more than the traditional "nip and tuck" changes. Creating a system of real value to younger workers requires reforms that create real wealth, bolster expected returns and lessen the political risks attached to the Government's long-term promises. + +First, the System Is Hardly in Crisis +ROBERT M. BALL, former Commissioner of the Social Security Administration and a member of the Advisory Council. +The difficulty of balancing Social Security over the next 75 years is being greatly exaggerated. There is no need to make major cuts in promised benefits or to make major increases in contribution rates. And certainly there is no need to substitute uncertain returns from individual savings accounts for part of the basic Social Security system. There is, in short, no need to panic. +Here are the facts: +* It is estimated that without changing present law, full benefits can be paid on time until 2029. +* After 2029, without changing present law, 77 percent of benefits could still be paid -- and even after the end of the 75-year projection, 70 percent of benefits could be paid. +* Common-sense adjustments -- several of which are desirable in any event -- would make full benefits payable on time through 2050 and reduce the 75-year deficit from the present estimated 2.17 percent of payroll to 0.80 percent of payroll. +* This remaining deficit can be eliminated in several ways, and there is ample time to evaluate the options calmly. A system in balance until 2050 is hardly in crisis. +The common-sense changes we support should be made promptly. They include improving the accuracy of the cost-of-living adjustments; taxing the Social Security benefits that exceed what the worker paid in, just as other private and public contributory defined-benefit pension plans are taxed today, and making Social Security universal by covering new hires in some 3.7 million full-time state and local government jobs not now under Social Security. +It would also be necessary to either cut the benefits of future recipients modestly, by an average of 3 percent, or increase the contribution rate by three-tenths of a percentage point on employers and employees combined. And we need to correct an anomoly in the allocation of Social Security taxes to the Medicare program. +As stated above, these modest steps would bring the 75-year deficit down to eight-tenths of 1 percent of payroll. In considering how to bring Social Security into complete balance and how to improve the return people get on what they pay in, there is no reason to put a part of Social Security's promised benefits at risk by substituting private individual investment accounts for basic benefits. If we want to improve the return on Social Security contributions by investing in stocks -- rather than putting all the accumulated funds in long-term Government bonds as is now the case -- the Social Security Administration could do this directly. That would be a much safer and more prudent approach. +The idea of Social Security investing, say, as much as 40 percent of its accumulating funds in passively managed stocks indexed to the broad market is certainly worth considering. Through the higher returns expected on the investments in the stock market, the program could come fully into balance and would not compromise any of the principles that have been so successful over the last 60 years in greatly reducing poverty among the elderly and forming the foundation on which just about all Americans build protection for their retirement years. +We recommend for immediate actionthe common-sense changes advocated by the six Advisory Council members backing the Maintenance of Benefits Plan. And we recommend for further study the proposal to directly invest a portion of Social Security funds in stocks. Such actions protect Social Security and avoid the major uncertainties of the individual investment accounts advocated by some council members. +With our approach, there would be no need for an increase in the payroll tax of more than one-and-a-half percentage points beginning in 1998. (To finance the system beyond 75 years, we do recommend such an increase, but not until 2045.) +There would be no need to cut Social Security's defined benefit plan by 30 percent, as in the Individual Accounts Plan, a proposal that is based on the hope that the return from individual investments would on average make up for the cut. There would be no need to borrow $2 trillion from the Federal Government and greatly increase the Federal deficit and debt, as called for in the Personal Security Accounts Plan. Over time, that approach would abolish Social Security as we know it and substitute a flat benefit of $410 a month (increased in line with average wages), supplemented by whatever the individual might earn from a compulsory savings plan. +We do not believe that the Advisory Council has produced three acceptable choices. It has produced just one; the other two plans would be high-risk, high-cost gambles. + +Paying for Yourself, And for Your Parents +PETER G. PETERSON, chairman of the Blackstone Group, an investment banking firm, and the author of "Will America Grow Up Before It Grows Old?" (Random House). +I have come to believe that the best way to evaluate any Social Security reform proposal, including those now placed on the table by the Advisory Council, is to focus on four bottom-line tests. +Does the proposal add to the publicly held federal debt? +We are told repeatedly that Social Security can pay every penny of promised benefits through 2029. This "solvency" rests on the fiction that trust fund surpluses accumulated in prior years will alleviate the burden that Americans must face in future years. They won't. The assets held by Social Security consist of nothing but Treasury i.o.u.'s. When it comes time for the trust funds to redeem them, Congress must raise taxes, cut other spending, or borrow more from the public -- that is, turn the trust fund paper i.o.u.'s into real i.o.u.'s. +What matters is the annual difference between Social Security's outlays and its earmarked tax revenues. Under current law, this operating balance is due to turn negative in 2012 and widen to an annual deficit of $650 billion by 2029, the last year the trust funds are "solvent." By 2040, this annual deficit would hit $1.2 trillion. This level of Government borrowing is obviously unsustainable. +Does the proposal increase payroll taxes? +To pay promised benefits without adding to the debt, taxes will have to increase to an astounding 17 percent to 22 percent of payroll by 2040. (The current payroll tax is 12.4 percent on earnings up to $65,400.) Add in the still more daunting costs of Social Security's sister program, Medicare, and the tax burden will rise to 35 to 55 percent of payroll. Even the lower figure would kill the economy -- not to mention the taxpayer. +The fact that health-benefit spending is growing so fast makes Social Security reform all the more urgent if we are to afford the metastasizing health care costs of an aging population. The apologists for the Social Security status quo disagree. They prefer to think of each benefit program as an isolated problem. As they see it, Americans won't mind paying a stupefying total tax burden as long as many different Government agencies are collecting and spending the money. +Tax increases also raise the issue of payback fairness. Most of today's elderly are getting back much more than the market value of their prior contributions. Younger Americans know that, in the next century, most of them will be big "market losers" -- even if the current system were sustainable. Any reform that merely raises taxes will worsen the system's cascading pattern of generational inequity. +Does the proposal increase national savings? +More national savings make possible more investment and more economic growth, which in turn makes public benefits more affordable. Moreover, to the extent that households save more, Americans will become less dependent on public benefits to meet their retirement needs. The latter point is crucial. Fewer than half of private-sector workers have a pension, and the median net financial assets of adults in their late 50's -- when workers are staring straight at retirement -- is a paltry $12,000. +If an overhaul merely shifts part of current Social Security tax revenue into the stock market, it will simply force the Government to borrow that much more. If the proposal assumes that stocks will do much better than bonds, then presumably those buying the additional bonds will do less well. This is a zero-sum game. We must increase savings to make us all better off in the long run. +Does the proposal take full account of any transition costs? +Privatizers want to revoke the pay-as-you-go chain letter and require each generation to save for its own retirement. I, too, favor a system of personally owned, portable and fully financed retirement accounts -- combined with a reformed Social Security system that provides a durable safety net. +But there is no escaping the brute fact that today's workers would have to consume less and save more to prefund their own retirement since, at the same time, they would have to keep paying for their parents' benefits. These transition costs are huge. To be fair and realistic, many retired parents -- those who can afford it -- will have to forgo some of the Social Security benefits they are now receiving. That is why I recommend three gradual, humane and, I believe, reasonable reforms to reduce costs: + * Increase the retirement age to 70 over the next 20 years. + * Reduce each year's cost-of-living adjustment by at least one-half of a percentage point. +* Progressively reduce all entitlement benefits to upper-income households (what I call an "affluence test"). +The first proposal of the Advisory Council -- the Maintenance of Benefits Plan -- fails the first three tests. Since it doesn't include any transition to a new system, the fourth test does not apply. The council's other two proposals are more promising, though not perfect. The Personal Security Accounts Plan, for instance, adds to the public debt, thus neutralizing some of its boost to private savings. Still, the P.S.A. plan has the great merit of confronting the real issue framing today's debate, which is not how to meet some technical solvency test but how to insure Social Security's economic sustainability and generational equity. + +Deep Thinking, Not Quick Fixes +JOHN ROTHER, director of legislation and public policy for the American Association of Retired Persons. +A financially secure retirement for all generations will require reform in pensions, savings and Social Security. But as we debate these reforms, we must not ignore the needs of American families. +Any discussion of reform should begin with the recognition that Social Security is not in crisis. It can pay full benefits on time until 2029, and thereafter it still has sufficient revenue to pay about 75 percent of the benefits promised under current law without increasing payroll taxes. But, as we have done before, we must address Social Security's longer-term problems to keep it strong for the future. Waiting too long to act means even more significant changes will be needed later. People will have less time to adjust. +Each of the three plans put forward by the Advisory Council includes investing some Social Security money in the private market instead of exclusively in Government securities. Many regard this change as revolutionary, but far more radical is the concept of substantially replacing Social Security with individual investment accounts. +This go-it-alone approach means income security would depend on individual investment skills, luck, the health of the markets and the ability to accumulate sufficient assets to maintain a reasonable living standard throughout retirement. Such uncertainties are a problem, particularly for low- and moderate-income families, who have less to invest, who pay proportionately higher fees and who have limited ability to diversify their portfolios to shield against market downturns. +The cost of financing the transition from the current system to individual accounts would mean higher taxes or additional Federal borrowing, or both. One generation would pay twice -- once for its parents and grandparents, and again for itself. +Social Security was never intended as an investment program or as a stand-alone pension. It works because individuals pool their contributions and share the risks and the benefits -- the basis of a social insurance approach. It is designed to help assure an adequate basis for family economic security throughout an individual's life. That is why the benefit formula helps low-wage workers, why workers with dependents receive family benefits and why disability insurance is provided. +The Advisory Council's differences are significant, but the areas of agreement are instructive and encouraging. The council emphasizes Social Security's ongoing importance. All three factions agree on continuing basic features like employee/employer contributions and universal participation, providing benefits to all contributors, and full benefit adjustments for inflation determined by technical experts, not politicians. They reject means-testing, or limiting benefits for those with higher incomes, and they reject legislating reductions in calculating the Consumer Price Index. +Means-testing of benefits is inconsistent with a fundamental tenet of the program -- that retirement benefits are earned based on contributions -- and would greatly weaken future public support. Political reductions by fiat to the C.P.I., on the theory that the index is inherently flawed and exaggerates inflation, would make beneficiaries poorer in real terms as they age. +The debate should begin with a close examination of the impact of reforms on families, the nation and the economy. Social Security's essential role creates a moral imperative that we insure its viability for future generations. The program is strongly supported by Americans of all ages, has always paid benefits on time and keeps 15 million beneficiaries of all ages out of poverty. More than 44 million people receive benefits -- one-quarter of them under age 65. About four million are children. +The American Association of Retired Persons hopes a national dialogue will lead to pragmatic steps that strengthen the program and improve the economic well-being of future generations. Social Security must continue as the base of family income security. Pensions and individual investments should complement, not replace, Social Security. Now is the time for thoughtful and careful steps to insure Social Security's future, not for quick fixes. Let's make sure we keep the "security" in Social Security. + +Generation X Sees An Unfair Burden +RICHARD THAU, executive director of Third Millennium, a nonpartisan, Manhattan-based advocacy group begun by and for Americans born after 1960. +Many young adults view Social Security with an odd combination of confusion and contempt: How is it that the Federal Government's largest program, which consumes thousands of dollars of their annual income, is scheduled to become insolvent at the very moment they will need it most? +Until this question is addressed, Social Security is very likely to face a crisis of sinking confidence among the young. This is no idle point, because Generation Xers, people in their 20's and early 30's, will be asked to foot the bill for the baby boom generation that precedes them. If they balk, the system could come to a screeching halt, with perilous consequences. +Although people in this demographic group recognize how vital Social Security is to their grandparents, they do not possess a deep attachment to it. To them, F.I.C.A. is just another tax on their pay stub, not the Federal Insurance Contributions that the acronym stands for. Moreover, this generation was not around during Social Security's developmental phase, and as today's young adults came of age they were never asked whether they wanted to participate in this particular compact among generations. Now, as they learn the strengths and weaknesses of the existing social contract, most 20- and 30-somethings recognize that it needs to be renegotiated, not scrapped. +Social Security represents a terrific deal for today's seniors, but could become a raw deal for the young. A typical single male worker born in 1915 who earned an average wage paid $51,000 in aggregate Social Security taxes during his working life and received a generous $90,200 in benefits (both figures in 1993 dollars), according to Eugene Steuerle and Jon Bakija of the Urban Institute. That worker's single, average-earning grandson, born in 1965, is currently expected to pay $195,800 in Social Security taxes and receive just $139,600 in benefits (also in 1993 dollars), the Urban Institute researchers found. +Aware that one's elders nearly doubled their Social Security "investments," why should any young adult consent to a projected $56,200 loss over a working lifetime? +Given this dismal forecast, it is particularly unreasonable for some putative reformers to deny young people the chance for a positive return, and to instead suggest a 2.2 percent F.I.C.A. tax increase to keep the system solvent. Even if this increase saved the system (and it wouldn't; the Trust Fund would have to contain real assets, not Treasury i.o.u.'s, for the math to work), it would prove onerous to workers, particularly lower-wage earners with young families. +For the record, the proposed 2.2 percent F.I.C.A. hike would mean an additional $550 above the $3,100 in combined employer and employee annual payroll taxes already paid by a family earning $25,000 -- and would do nothing to increase the return. This would make a lousy deal even more costly. +To fix Social Security, Third Millennium has recommended -- in repeated Congressional testimony -- several reforms. The Government should introduce an affluence test on benefits for wealthier retirees, based on a sliding scale that exempts the poor; it should raise the official retirement age to 70 over the next two decades, and the law should be changed to enable workers to redirect a portion of current Social Security taxes into private accounts, as a number of Advisory Council members recommended. +Surveys by Third Millennium and others have shown overwhelming support by Americans for greater personal control over their F.I.C.A. contributions. This has been recognized by a handful of visionary political leaders -- including Senators Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, and Judd Gregg, the New Hampshire Republican, and Representatives Jim Kolbe, Republican of Arizona, and Charles W. Stenholm, the Texas Democrat -- who are working in their respective chambers to build bipartisan consensus for substantive reforms. But to be successful, they ultimately will need the help of the primary builder of the bridge to the 21st century, Bill Clinton, who undoubtedly knows it makes no sense to drive across that bridge in an Edsel. + +LOAD-DATE: January 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: A Government poster from the 1930's promoted the new Social Security program. (pg. 1); Edward M. Gramlich; Carolyn Weaver; Robert M. Ball; Peter G. Peterson; John Rother; Richard Thau. (pg. 13) + +Chart: "RESCUING SOCIAL SECURITY" +The 13 members of a Federal advisory council recently put forth three plans to enable Social Security to meet its obligations in the years ahead. They agreed that benefits must be trimmed, that the retirement age should be pushed back, that state and local government workers should be required. +But they split sharply over whether to continue the pay-as-you-go system, in which today's workers basically pay benefits to current retirees, or to move closer to a true pension system in which workers are required to put aside money in advance for their own retirement. +In addition to the three proposals from the panel, others have suggested a variety of fixes for Social Security, including an immediate payroll tax increase, significantly lower cost-of-living adjustments and strict limits on benefits for more affluent retirees. +Here are the important differences among the three major proposals. + +MAINTAIN BENEFITS PLAN: Keeps the pay-as-you-go system. To help pay future benefits, the Government would consider putting up to 40 percent of the Social Security trust funds in the stock market. Advocated by Robert M. Ball and one other member of the panel. Higher taxes would be needed later. + +INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNTS PLAN: Serves as a middle ground between the two other plans. In addition to the current 12.4 percent payroll tax, workers would pay a 1.6 percent payroll tax that would go into their individual accounts, managed by the Government. People would choose from limited options, including stock investments. Advocated by Edward Gramlich and one other member of the panel. + +PERSONAL SECURITY ACCOUNTS PLAN: Turns over much of the resources and responsibility for retirement to individuals. Diverts 5 percentage points of the 12.4 percent payroll tax into personal accounts, which could be invested through a wide variety of private channels. An increase of 1.5 percent in the payroll tax and additional borrowing would help finance the transition to the new system. Advocated by Carolyn Weaver and four others on the panel. + +(Source: Advisory Council on Social Security) (pg. 13) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +39 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 19, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Marie Thompson, 92, Public Housing Leader + +BYLINE: By WOLFGANG SAXON + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 32; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 404 words + +Marie Collins McGuire Thompson, who worked to improve the design of public housing for the elderly and low-income people as the Public Housing Administrator in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, died last Monday at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md. Mrs. Thompson was 92 and lived in Kensington, Md. +Marie McGuire, as she was known, came to public housing with an aversion to "bare, stark shelter" that, she said, "has brought no happiness to us." Instead, she espoused programs to create homes of which their occupants could be proud. Her advocacy drew criticism from legislators and defenders of traditional approaches, but architectural organizations backed her. Housing projects begun under her leadership won unaccustomed design awards. + She came to national attention as executive director of the San Antonio Housing Authority, where she championed amenities like balconies for every apartment. Studying the special needs of the elderly with limited means, she insisted on features like weatherproof ramps, handrails in all rooms and corridors and emergency bells in the bathrooms. +Her crowning achievement was the Golden Age Center, with 185 low-rent apartments designed for the elderly, that opened in 1960 in San Antonio. The next year, President John F. Kennedy recruited her as the first woman to become Public Housing Administrator. She held the post until 1966, when her office was merged into the new Department of Housing and Urban Development. There she became special assistant to the Secretary, working on housing and problems that affect the disabled and the elderly. +She left the Government in 1972. Until 1982, she was the housing specialist at the International Center for Social Gerontology in Washington, now the Center for Social Gerontology in Ann Arbor, Mich. +Mrs. Thompson was born in the Georgetown area of Washington. She studied journalism at George Washington University and, years later, studied architecture and real estate management at the University of Houston. +She wrote four books, "Housing for the Elderly" (1957), "Housing and the Disabled" (1976), "Housing for the Handicapped" (1977) and "Housing for Rural Elderly" (1982). +Her first marriage, to John McGuire, a Government geologist, ended in divorce. Her second husband, Thomas B. Thompson of San Antonio, an architect, died in 1983. She is survived by a sister, Margaret C. Schweinhaut, also of Kensington. + +NAME: Marie Collins McGuire Thompson + +LOAD-DATE: January 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +40 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 19, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +MEDICARE PANEL ADVISES A FREEZE ON HOSPITAL PAY + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1232 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Jan. 18 + +A Federal advisory panel has decided to recommend that Congress freeze Medicare payments to hospitals next year. It would be the first time in the history of the program that hospitals have not received an increase. +In approving the recommendation, the panel said that hospitals had effectively controlled their costs, so that existing Medicare payment rates were generally adequate. + The chairman of the panel, Prof. Joseph P. Newhouse of Harvard, said in an interview that payment rates could be kept level next year without harming the quality of health care or access to care for beneficiaries. +Medicare finances care for 38 million people who are elderly or disabled. Payments to hospitals totaled $84 billion last year, or 44 percent of all Medicare spending. +The Federal advisory panel, the Prospective Payment Assessment Commission, voted this week to recommend a "zero update" -- no change -- in Medicare payment rates for hospitals. Congress pays close attention to the panel's advice, often providing less money but rarely more than it suggests. +The unexpected recommendation offers President Clinton and Congress a relatively easy way to reduce the Federal budget deficit and shore up the Medicare trust fund that pays hospital bills. +Carmela S. Coyle, a vice president of the American Hospital Association, said: "We are surprised that the commission recommended no increase at all in Medicare payment amounts. It's unprecedented. Hospitals have become more efficient. We've kept down costs for two or three years in a row. There have been real cuts in the cost of treating Medicare patients. But how long can these cost reductions be sustained?" +Mrs. Coyle said hospitals were, in effect, being punished for having improved their productivity. Federal officials contend that Medicare should share the benefits of such improvements, and that hospitals can continue increasing productivity. +Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, said the Medicare proposal was "the third stroke of a triple whammy" adversely affecting hospital revenues. New York State recently lifted price controls on hospitals, forcing them to compete for patients by offering discounts to insurers. In addition, Mr. Raske said, New York has cut Medicaid payments to hospitals, and Gov. George E. Pataki is proposing deeper cuts. +The recommendation from the Federal advisory panel coincides with new evidence showing how inflation has been squeezed from the health care industry. +The cost of medical care, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, rose last year by just 3 percent, the smallest amount in three decades. The price index for all items increased 3.3 percent. It was the first time since 1980 that medical prices rose less than the overall index, which measures changes in the prices paid by consumers for a fixed market basket of goods and services. +While the Government data show that medical prices are leveling off, some economists say they are actually declining. +"For example," said Dahlia K. Remler, a health economist at Tulane University in New Orleans, "the price you have to pay for extending your life after a heart attack is not rising as fast as the price of other goods in the economy like food, clothing and housing. In the last 15 years, the price of what we care about -- the price of having our health improved when we are sick -- has gone down in real terms." +Since 1984, hospitals have received a fixed amount of money for each Medicare patient they treat, regardless of how long the person stays in the hospital. Each Medicare patient is assigned to 1 of 495 categories, depending on the illness. Payments are set in advance for each category and can be updated annually. +The Congressional Budget Office had assumed that payment rates would be increased 3 percent next year. Based on that figure, the panel's recommendation would save more than $2 billion in 1998. It would permanently lower the base for future increases, saving more than $11 billion over five years. +The sum, while substantial, is a relatively small part of the savings that will be needed to guarantee the long-term solvency of Medicare. +In the last decade, the commission has recommended increases averaging 3 percent a year, and Congress has approved increases averaging 2.6 percent a year. +Stuart Guterman, deputy executive director of the commission, said: "Hospital costs have been declining while Medicare payments have increased at a moderate rate. As a result, hospitals have found their Medicare business more profitable." +The hospital association boasted last year that "increases in hospitals' costs of delivering care hit their lowest point in 40 years." One reason, the commission said, is that wages and benefits of hospital employees are growing more slowly than compensation in many other industries. +Data collected by the Government show that hospital profit margins have, on the average, been rising for several years. But Mrs. Coyle said the data also showed that some hospitals were experiencing financial difficulties. Nineteen percent of hospitals lost money over all, she said, while 39 percent lost money on their Medicare business. +Kay Ford, an economist at the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, said that the growing use of managed care had helped hold down health costs. Nearly three-fourths of workers with health insurance are in some type of managed care. +Both H.M.O.'s and traditional insurance plans are negotiating with hospitals to get lower rates for their patients. Hardly anyone pays the full list price any more. +Economists told Congress last month that the Consumer Price Index tends to overstate increases in the cost of living because it does not fully account for the development of new products, improvements in the quality of old products and other changes in the standard market basket of goods and services. +Such changes are occurring throughout the health care industry. New drugs and devices and medical procedures are introduced every month. Employers, labor unions, H.M.O.'s and insurance companies are continually devising new ways to pay for services. Different people often pay different prices for the same service provided by the same doctor or hospital. +The Bureau of Labor Statistics has data showing the prices of hospital rooms over the last 60 years. But the price index does not take account of the fact that the average length of hospital stays has declined in the last 15 years, especially for elderly patients. +In addition, "a hospital day today is very different from one 10 years ago in terms of the procedures a patient receives," said Dr. Mark McClellan, an economist and physician at Stanford University. +David M. Cutler, an economist at Harvard, said that the services provided by doctors and hospitals today were worth more than those provided 10 or 20 years ago. +Mr. Cutler, Dr. McClellan, Ms. Remler, and Mr. Newhouse recently studied the care of people who had suffered heart attacks. In a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, they found that while the "use of more intensive procedures like bypass surgery and angioplasty has skyrocketed," prices have come down and patients are living longer. +For these patients, they said, the cost of living in a literal sense -- the cost of prolonging life after a heart attack -- has declined. + +LOAD-DATE: January 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "KEEPING TRACK: Have Medical Prices Leveled Off?" +The cost of medical care rose last year by just 3 percent, the first time since 1980 that medical prices rose less than the overall Consumer Price Index, a widely-used measure of inflation. The increase in medical prices was the smallest in three decades. Graph compares the Consumer Price Index and the Medical Care Component, 1960-95. + +Hospital have controlled costs so effectively that operating expenses for each Medicare patient have actually declined in each of the last three years. Graph shows annual change in hospital Medicare costs, 1985-95. + +(Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics; U.S. Prospective Payment Assessment Commission; Department of Health and Human Services) (pg. 22) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +41 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 20, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +Parishioners Come to Services, Despite Arrest of Their Pastor + +BYLINE: By NORIMITSU ONISHI + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 358 words + +On the Sunday after their pastor was charged with selling drugs out of their church, about 90 people attended services yesterday at St. John's Episcopal Church in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and heard a bishop tell them that their minister, the Rev. Chester LaRue, would be stepping down. +On Friday night, Father LaRue, 54, had been arrested in his bedroom on the second floor of the church rectory and charged with possessing and selling cocaine and drug paraphernalia, the police said. + Three other people at the church -- including Thomas Miller, 28, the pastor's nephew; Ruben Serrano, 20, and Shala Forte -- were arrested on the same charges, the police said. +The arrests followed the investigation of a reported robbery at the church on Dec. 30. Father LaRue told the police and several reporters then that he had fought off a robber. +Yesterday, the police said they believed that the incident may have been rooted in a dispute over drug money. It was not clear yesterday how long drugs were said to have been sold out of the church, a small, historic stone building with a history of trouble. Ten years ago, a prior pastor, the Rev. George Hoeh, was killed by his male lover. +Yesterday morning, parishioners -- mostly elderly men and women -- gathered for prayers. The church's boiler was not working properly, so a meeting room was put into service. +Bishop Blair Hatt filled in for the pastor yesterday as churchgoers clutched a folded program that made this request: "Please pray for Father LaRue at this trying, stress-filled time in his life and ministry." +Most parishioners, whether they believed their pastor guilty or not, seemed willing to do just that. +"He's a good man," said Shirley Kahaly, a member for 10 years. "I'll keep him in my prayers. He's been very good to parishioners. I won't believe these accusations until they're proven." +Tom Aylward, 82, said the minister had performed the ceremony when he married his second wife, Dorothy, 82, seven years ago. "There was really no sign that anything was wrong," he said. "It was a total surprise. But we're all human beings, and we all make mistakes." + +LOAD-DATE: January 20, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: January 22, 1997, Wednesday + + CORRECTION: +An article on Monday about the arrest of an Episcopal priest in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, on charges of having sold drugs misstated the title of the clergyman who presided on Sunday in his absence. The Rev. Blair Hatt is a priest, not a bishop. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +42 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 22, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +THEATER REVIEW; +A Life and a Country Stripped of Illusions + +BYLINE: By BEN BRANTLEY + +SECTION: Section C; Page 11; Column 1; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 1200 words + +The old man longs for a uniform: something "with a touch of gold," he says, like a child with a Christmas wish list he knows will never be answered. For Thomas Dunne, once a superintendent of Dublin's metropolitan police and now a resident of a bare cell in a mental home, the shelter and camouflage of clothes are as distant as youth. Time and age have stripped him raw, and there is no one in the world, he says, to identify him as human. +It seems unlikely that anyone has ever appeared as utterly and cruelly naked on a stage as Donal McCann, the astonishing Irish actor who stars in "The Steward of Christendom," Sebastian Barry's magnificent portrait of a life recollected, now at the Majestic Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. + As Mr. McCann's Thomas maps a tortured, circular course through some 70 years of memories, the images of loss, great and small, expand to the point that they are almost unbearable: a child's toy fire engine is buried in a dung heap; a son is devoured by World War I; a 45-year career fades into uselessness and with it, the vision of an Ireland that once seemed to stretch into an eternity of stability. +The man who catalogues these losses, with both bewildered rage and a quiet, bottomless sadness, wears only his stained, crusted long underwear. In one harrowing moment, he is deprived even of this, to be bathed by a surly nurse. Crouched abjectly, his hands cupped over his genitals, Mr. McCann brings to mind Durer's Adam, expelled forever from the sanctuary of Eden. +This moment, like the play itself, opens the door to a flood of associations, both particular and universal. Children of aging parents will certainly recognize Thomas's mournful cries of deprivation. Students of Irish history will find a metaphor for that country's devastating political vicissitudes in the early part of this century. +Readers of Irish and English literature will perceive a host of antecedents: the cool, elegiac eye of James Joyce's short story "The Dead" (made into a memorable film by John Huston, starring Mr. McCann); the bleak absurdity of Samuel Beckett's lost, primal characters; the cosmic anger of "King Lear." +The extraordinary accomplishment of this production by the Out of Joint touring company, imported from London's Royal Court Theater and allowed a mercifully generous run here through Feb. 23, is its ability to keep all of these levels in play without floating into abstraction. +Under the direction of Max Stafford-Clark, who brings a lucidity and a lyricism to his staging that matches the play's prose, "Steward" bears the rare mark of theatrical greatness: it is rooted in specific, even earthy detail but it sets off echoes that go way beyond its sad story. +Like the American dramatist Horton Foote, Mr. Barry has written a cycle of brooding, exquisite plays that draw from his family's history ("Steward" was inspired by his great-grandfather) to portray a world in which the reassurances of home, family and nation are only ephemera. An overwhelming feeling of solitariness sweeps through "Steward" like the wind through Lear's blasted heath. One arrives in and leaves this world naked and alone. +Mr. McCann doesn't look anywhere near Thomas's 75 years. Nor, as he goes through the many ages of one man, does he employ the obvious actorly tricks of aging. His head shaved, his large-boned body a paradoxical emblem of strength and collapse, he is an almost elemental presence: man reduced to brute flesh. +Yet the way in which Mr. McCann animates this flesh is a marvel of delicacy. He not only turns time remembered into time present, he also elucidates a sense that past and present coexist in an infinitely shaded dialogue. Time is not lateral here, and Thomas the boy is every bit as alive as Thomas the geriatric outcast. +When first seen, Thomas is only a head and a pair of hands, stranded among the bedclothes of a small iron bed and among recollections of his infancy: "Da Da, Ma Ma, Ba Ba," he chants. Wakened by a gruff attendant (Kieran Ahern) of the mental ward to which his daughter Annie (Tina Kellegher) has consigned him, he seems to grow by degrees as he rises. +Standing, he fiercely clutches the fingers of one hand with another or anchors his arms to the top of his head. Clearly, all he has to cling to now is himself, and there's no guarantee of solidity there. As the play continues, he rebukes himself not to speak to shadows. They will arrive anyway, most poignantly in the form of his dead son, who appears as a child (Carl Brennan) dressed in splendid military uniform. +In his prime, Thomas oversaw Dublin's police force. He had risen, he notes, as high as a Catholic could, and he perceived himself as the steward of Queen Victoria's England. The political turmoil of the last years of his 45-year career, combined with the deaths of his beloved wife and son and the departure of his favorite daughter (Aislin McGuckin) to America, unhinged every notion of order. And when he retired to the countryside, with the ascension of the Republican revolutionary Michael Collins in the 1920's, it was to a land without form. +This is told through monologues, flashbacks and encounters between Thomas and visitors from the outside world. There are no evident villains or heroes here; everyone (most affectingly, Mr. Ahern and Maggie McCarthy's ward attendants) is democratically tarred with the brush of human frailty. +Throughout, repeated images of parents and children, of forms of clothing, of dogs and chickens from Thomas's rural childhood are woven into a tight poetic pattern that never violates naturalistic flow. Only the memory scenes between Thomas and his daughter feel at all strained or disruptive. Julian McGowan's deceptively simple single set and Johanna Town's masterly lighting create a haunting, impressionistic canvas of a world in dissolution. +Lighting is especially crucial. Morning dawns again and again in "Steward," and it as likely to bring ruin as new life. Yet this stirring play somehow transcends despair. +In the splendid monologue in which Thomas recalls awaiting a fatal childbirth, he is, he says, "allowed by God a little clarity and grace." And Mr. Barry generously and compassionately concludes his work with a beautifully rendered chapter from Thomas's childhood that, for once, ends happily. You leave the theater with both sadness and a glow of gratitude for a play and a performance that have bestowed the illumination of more than a little clarity and grace. + +THE STEWARD OF CHRISTENDOM + +By Sebastian Barry; directed by Max Stafford-Clark; sets by Julian McGowan; lighting by Johanna Town; music by Shaun Davey; sound by Paul Arditti; production manager and company stage manager, Rob Young. The Out of Joint production presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Bruce C. Ratner, chairman of the board; Harvey Lichtenstein, president and executive producer. At the Majestic Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn. + +WITH: Donal McCann (Thomas Dunne), Ali White (Maud), Tina Kellegher (Annie), Aislin McGuckin (Dolly), Carl Brennan (Willie), Rory Murray (Matt and Recruit), Maggie McCarthy (Mrs. O'Dea) and Kieran Ahern (Smith). + +LOAD-DATE: January 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Donal McCann, right, as a mental patient and Rory Murray as his son-in-law, a painter, in "The Steward of Christendom." (Tom Brazil for The New York Times) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +43 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 22, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +A Japanese Generation Haunted by Its Past + +BYLINE: By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 2501 words + +DATELINE: OMIYA, Japan + +Nearly six decades have passed, but when Shinzaburo Horie sees a baby he still cringes inside, and his mind replays the indelible scene of himself as a young soldier in China, thrusting his bayonet through the chest of a Chinese infant. +Mr. Horie says the killing was unintentional, but the memories follow him everywhere, and he has never mustered the courage to tell even his wife. Nor has he ever told her how as a young soldier, equally inadvertently, he ate the flesh of a 16-year-old Chinese boy. + "I can't forget the fact that I ate a human being," said Mr. Horie, a lean 79-year-old farmer whose hands trembled as he excavated his war memories. "It was only one time, and not so much meat, but after 60 years I can't put it behind me." +Old men like Mr. Horie all across Japan are still besieged by memories of what they did, and no treaty can end the conflict in their minds and dreams. World War II has also been impossible to lay to rest because disputes about it remain a major cause of friction in East Asia. +China and North and South Korea, for example, want Japan to make a clearer apology for aggression and to pay the individuals whom it brutalized during the war. Just recently, a new quarrel broke out between Japan and South Korea over the Japanese Government's refusal to pay official compensation to the Imperial Army's former sex slaves in Korea. +Yet while nothing in this century has so transformed Japan as the war and its aftermath, discussions of it remain a virtual taboo in many families. Of course, veterans in all countries are often reluctant to talk about their worst memories, but in Japan many young people have no idea that Grandpa even went to war. +Old men are now taking their war secrets with them to the grave here in Omiya, a little farm town of 5,700 people set in the jutting hills of Mie Prefecture almost 200 miles southwest of Tokyo. +The men -- and to a lesser extent, the women -- who endured the war years are often deeply upset that young people know so little about those wrenching times, yet they feel unable to open their hearts to those who were not there. +"My story is nothing to be proud of," said Mr. Horie, who was deeply agitated as he spoke about his role in the war. "So I don't think I should talk too much about it." +Over all, looking at Mr. Horie's generation, it would be difficult to imagine more upstanding people who did worse things. +From the time they invaded Northeast China in 1931 and the rest of China in 1937, through World War II, Japanese troops massacred civilians, tortured captives and raped young girls almost everywhere they went, and yet those same men -- now graying at the temples, raising wrinkled hands to the ear -- are unfailingly courteous, gentle and honest. +They are deeply respected in their communities, and everyone knows they would never think of cheating anybody or losing their tempers. Yet they collectively killed 20 million or 30 million people. +Paradoxically, a decency shines through even as they talk about the things they did, for at least in Omiya the tone is often not defensive but deeply contrite. +While many Japanese argue that there is no need for the country as a whole to apologize to overseas war victims or compensate them, many veterans say the Government should do more to show remorse for the war and to teach young people about atrocities committed by Japanese troops. +"We should absolutely apologize to China and Korea," Mr. Horie said without hesitation. "Absolutely." +The tension was thick as he began to peel away his own memories, and his hands shook like dry leaves in the wind. After two hours he took a deep breath and volunteered that he had eaten human flesh. +Mr. Horie and his buddies had eaten some rare fresh meat that had suddenly become available in the local market in northeastern China one day in 1939, he recalled. Then the kenpeitai, the Japanese secret police, came around asking whether anyone had bought that meat in the market. +"Some Japanese soldiers who were hungry had killed the boy and eaten some of his meat and sold the rest to the Chinese merchant, and we bought it from that merchant," Mr. Horie said. He added that he had heard that the Japanese soldiers had been punished for the killing and the cannibalism. +The killing of the baby, Mr. Horie insisted, was just as accidental. He said he had been searching a village for anti-Japanese guerrillas when he saw a stack of dried reeds with an arm sticking out, holding a gun. +"I charged with my bayonet and thrust it into the reeds at chest height, and I heard a scream," he said. "I pulled the rifle out, and there was a baby skewered on the bayonet. It was maybe six months old, and the hilt had gotten caught in its belt, so it was stuck to the bayonet. +"It turned out that the baby's mother was a guerrilla, holding the baby as she hid in the reeds. The bayonet had gone through her as well as the baby, so she died too." +Mr. Horie paused, overcome by the rush of memories. + +Brutality of Officers +Young Draftees Feared Superiors +Omiya, like most of Japan, was caught up in the militarism of the 1930's, and the local elementary schools taught the boys military drills using wooden guns. "The greatest honor," the young men of Omiya were told, "is to come back dead." +Yet very few in Omiya volunteered for service, most waiting until they were drafted. The reason for this hesitation had nothing to do with doubts about the aims of the war. The young men were simply afraid -- not of the enemy, but of their own officers. +"Very few kids wanted to become soldiers, because we knew that the army was very strict," said Setsuo Ono, who spent four years in the war in China. "If you were a low-ranking soldier, you had to wash the officers' underwear and polish their boots. If you didn't do everything just right, you got beaten up." +Often the new soldiers were lined up for officers to slap them in the face, or punch them or beat them with belts, sometimes until blood poured down their faces. +For many of the troops, this kind of brutality was more evident, on a daily basis, than the atrocities against civilians for which the Imperial Army is better remembered. Most veterans in Omiya do not dispute that atrocities occurred, but they add that it is not as if the typical soldier had been killing and raping civilians daily. +Wazo Nishi, 80, a stooped widower with a few days' stubble on a deeply lined face, was a medic. He says that he never killed anyone and that in the entire war he saw only one barbaric incident -- although he adds that he can never forget it. +It was in the Philippines in 1942. A Japanese military surgeon decided to show a few medics how to remove an appendix. So he spread a sheet on a field, brought in a healthy Filipino, a civilian, and put a mask over his nose to anesthetize him. +The surgeon cut the Filipino open, removed his appendix and sewed him back up. Then, the lesson over, the surgeon pulled out a gun and shot and killed the patient. + +Everyday Atrocities +Crimes in China Were Routine +None of the veterans in Omiya is such a puzzle of contradictions as Teruichi Ukita, 71, a burly man with a crown of white hair shorn in a crew cut. Amiable and remorseful, Mr. Ukita acknowledges that he served in China in the kenpeitai, the dreaded military police, and that he killed many Chinese people during the war. +"I saw lots of torture scenes, but I don't want to talk about it, or remember it," Mr. Ukita said coolly. "It was said that even crying babies would shut up at the mention of the kenpeitai. Everybody was afraid of us. The word was that prisoners would enter the front gate but leave by the back gate -- as corpses." +The torturers themselves, Mr. Ukita said, were "regular people" who simply did their job. Yet he acknowledged that some torturers had been worse than others, and he drew a distinction between those who were "cold" and others who were more "humane." +"If you look in a man's eyes as you torture him, then you understand him," Mr. Ukita said. "When you ask him for information, you can tell from his eyes if he's telling the truth when he says, 'I don't know, I don't know.' The humane torturers would stop at that point, if they saw the man really didn't know. The cold ones would keep going." +The victims were mostly men, Mr. Ukita said, but there were some women as well. These were extremely disagreeable memories for Mr. Ukita, and he repeatedly turned aside questions about what he himself had done and seen. +"I just can't talk about it," he said. +Asked about the "comfort women," or sex slaves in army brothels, Mr. Ukita acknowledged that he had frequently visited them. Although some Japanese now insist that the women were prostitutes who had volunteered, Mr. Ukita said that from his own experience he knew that the women had been forced to work in the brothels. +"At the time of the war, I was in my 20's and single, and I didn't understand," he said, growing more emotional. "But when I had two daughters myself, I started to realize what I had done." +At that point, Mr. Ukita's voice choked and blinked, and tears welled in his eyes. He would not say exactly what his role had been, but in a tremulous voice he said that Japan should compensate the women for the injuries done to them. +Westerners often complain indignantly that Japanese see themselves as victims of the war rather than the aggressors. One reason for this perception in Japan is that by the end of the war, many people like Mr. Ukita -- along with countless civilians -- came to endure trials as severe as those the Japanese Army had previously inflicted. +In the chaos of defeat, Mr. Ukita remembers seeing Japanese refugees trying to ford a river, and one young woman in particular sticks in his mind. She was carrying a bag of possessions and leading a child and an elderly woman. When the river got too high, she had to let go of the bag. +"Then the water got deeper, and she had to let go of the grandma," Mr. Ukita said. "And it got even deeper, and so the only way she could make it was to let go of her child. She got to the other bank and survived, but she was shattered. She looked as if she were sleepwalking." +Mr. Ukita was captured by Russians at the end of the war and sent to Siberia. It was when he saw fellow Japanese being killed, he said, that he belatedly realized the universal value of human life. +"Watching Chinese being killed, I had had no emotions," Mr. Ukita said. "It was like a game. But when I saw Japanese being executed in Siberia for stealing things, I got so angry and emotional." + +Ancient History +For Schoolchildren, The War Is Hazy +Naruki Orita is a 13-year-old boy who is known as a good student in Omiya Junior High School. The other day he was doing his homework, sprawled on the living room floor, his feet toasty under an electric blanket. +He knows his algebra cold, but -- like teen-agers everywhere -- he has trouble keeping track of events that happened before he was born and thus seem like ancient history. +What country dropped the atomic bomb on Japan? +"Hmmmm," he muttered. "I'm not really sure. I don't know." +"What are some countries that Japan fought against in the war?" +"I just don't know. I think I used to know, but I forget." +Naruki said he knew that his grandfather had died in the war, but he did not know where. "We don't ever talk about the war," he said. "No one's interested." +His grandmother, Tsune Orita, a stooped woman of 87 who lives with the family, looked a bit embarrassed. +"I just don't tell him about his grandfather," she said. Some people in Omiya say the war is not mentioned because it ended in a humiliating defeat, but the elders also say that when they were children there was never much talk about the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 either, and that was a national triumph. +Perhaps one reason for the taboo, aside from the painfulness of the memories, is that in Japan it is considered poor form to brag or to whine, and it is hard to talk about a searing experience like battle without seeming to do one or the other. +"In my cluster of houses, there were four other families that had lost people in the war, but I was the only war widow," said Kimie Ono, 74, a spry woman who raised two daughters by herself. "I didn't want to sound like a whiner, so I did what people say. 'Widows tough it out,' as the saying goes. I toughed it out." +The term Mrs. Ono used for toughing it out is ganbaru, a word central to the Japanese value system. +It means to struggle on uncomplainingly, and even now children and adults alike are constantly told to ganbaru their way through difficulties. +When the veterans straggled home after the war, no one praised them or even much sympathized with them. Yet while the Japanese veterans say their efforts went unappreciated, they add that they have never heard of veterans suffering from emotional problems because of the war. +Perhaps one source of resiliency has been the strong sense of structure in Japanese life, based on family, job and community, giving each veteran a familiar niche in which to move ahead. In any case, most veterans never looked back. +"I don't talk about my experiences in the war with my family," said Teisaku Yoshida, the former town barber, who served in Korea. "I never told my son about it, not even once. I never told my wife or grandkids, either. +"I don't think my grandkids even know that I was in the war at all." +Most of the old men who discussed the war said they were recounting their war experiences for the first time, and they spoke with a mixture of ache and relief. Some seemed happy in the twilight of their lives to talk about the specters that still rattled chains in their minds, but they could not discuss quite everything. +"I did some terrible things that I would never be able to talk about," said Junji Murata, who served in China and also guarded American prisoners of war in a camp in Vietnam. "But we also endured awful experiences ourselves." +By all accounts, those experiences changed the veterans of Omiya, so that the arrogant young men who left for war returned humble and chastened, and in most cases ferociously hostile to war itself in any form. +"War makes people do terrible things," said Mr. Ukita, the former military policeman who watched Chinese being tortured. "Humans are so stupid. You do terrible things, and you regret them later. At first, humans seem so smart. And in reality they're such idiots." + +Main Street, Japan +The first article in this look at life in Omiya, a small town in Japan, appeared on July 18, 1995, and reported on the schools. The second, on Oct. 15, was about religion; the third, on Jan. 2, 1996, about farmers; the fourth, on Feb. 11, about love and marriage; the fifth, on May 3, about small-town civility; the sixth, on June 19, about the role of women; the seventh, on Sept. 29, about the Japanese way of death, and the eighth, on Oct. 13, about politics. + +LOAD-DATE: January 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +SERIES: MAIN STREET, JAPAN -- Wounds of War + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Teisaku Yoshida, who served in Korea, has refrained from telling his family about his war experiences. (Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times) (pg. A1); Shinzaburo Horie and his wife, Teru, near their house in Omiya, Japan. Mr. Horie, who was with the Japanese Army in China, is tormented by memories of bayoneting a baby and eating the flesh of a teen-age boy. (Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times) (pg. A8) + +Map shows the location of Oniya, Japan: In Omiya, old men are haunted by what they did in World War II. (pg. A8) + +TYPE: Series + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +44 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 22, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +PRESIDENT OFFERS MEDICARE SAVINGS + +BYLINE: By ALISON MITCHELL + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 964 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 + +One day after his inauguration, President Clinton made a conciliatory gesture to Congressional Republicans today by announcing that his budget proposal would contain more savings in Medicare than he was willing to consider last year. +At a White House appearance before a strategy session with his economic advisers, Mr. Clinton said his budget for the 1998 fiscal year would propose trimming the growth in Medicare spending by $138 billion over six years. + "The only way we can actually balance the budget is if we seize this moment to work together," he said. "And I'm going to do my best to reach out to the Republicans." He added, "I want to meet them halfway on this and on many issues. And I hope they'll meet me halfway." +Prominent Republicans, in fact, said the President had met them halfway, and they gave him high praise. When budget talks between Congress and the President collapsed last January, Republicans were seeking to rein in Medicare spending by $158 billion over six years, and Mr. Clinton had proposed $116 billion in reductions. While it was not clear today whether the President was using precisely the same economic forecasts in his latest proposal, he did appear to be trying to strike a mid-point. +Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for the elderly, has been one of the most politicized issues dividing Republicans and Democrats as they have sparred over budget proposals over the past two years. Mr. Clinton and the Democrats campaigned hard against the Republicans on the issue in the 1996 campaign, running against the House Republicans' bid in 1995 to make $270 billion in savings over seven years in the program. +Democrats often went so far as to suggest that the Republicans wanted to dismantle Medicare altogether -- charges that the Republicans bitterly repudiated as scare tactics. +But today the tables were turned as influential Republicans praised the President's gesture while Democratic leaders of Congress remained conspicuously closed-mouthed. +"I am very encouraged by President Clinton's decision today to meet Republicans halfway on the Medicare savings level," said Representative Bill Archer, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee. "This is a very positive and very significant development." Representative John R. Kasich, the Ohio Republican who chairs the House Budget Committee, said, "This frankly brightens the prospects for being able to get a budget agreement." +Democrats, however, were circumspect. "We have not seen the details of it and I think until we know more about it we have to reserve judgment," said Laura Nichols, the spokeswoman for Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the minority leader. Senator Tom Daschle, the minority leader, also had no immediate comment. +Most of the savings in Mr. Clinton's proposal would come from health care providers, with hospitals losing $45 billion in payments over the six years, while health maintenance organizations would lose about $46 billion. +Administration officials said that their ability to propose more savings than they had previously endorsed would be made possible in part through a reduction in Medicare payment rates to H.M.O.'s. The H.M.O.'s are paid 95 percent of what the Government pays for beneficiaries in the standard Medicare program. The Administration would reduce that figure to 90 percent beginning in the year 2000. +Another $18 billion in savings over six years would come from Medicare recipients through the premium charged for Medicare services. Under law, the monthly premium paid by Medicare recipients is expected to drop after 1998 to below 25 percent of the cost of Part B of Medicare, which pays for doctors' services. In Mr. Clinton's proposal however, the percentage would hold relatively steady at 25 percent. +A recipient now pays a monthly premium of $43.80, which is about 26 percent of the Part B program's costs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that in the year 2002, if current law remains in effect, the premium would be $51.50 a month and would pay for 20.8 percent of those costs. Using these assumptions, Mr. Clinton's proposal would result in a monthly premium of $61.90 in 2002, about 25 percent of the costs. +Bruce C. Vladeck, the adminstrator of the Health Care Financing Administration, which runs Medicare, defended the increase at a briefing by noting that the Republicans' various Medicare plans had all included even higher premium increases. +On another question affecting Medicare premiums, Mr. Clinton's aides declined to rule out the possibility that the President might agree in negotiations with the Republicans to go further and make premiums contingent on a Medicare recipient's income. +"There are a number of policies that relate to premiums that could very well be acceptable to us in the right context and there are some other approaches that aren't," said Franklin Raines, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. +While Mr. Clinton would no longer be in office six years from now, any Medicare agreement he strikes with the Congress could produce long-term annual savings. Unlike most other Government spending, which is set annually in individual bills, changes in the Medicare program would be put into the permanent law and would have long-lasting effects, unless the changes were modified in the future. +The Administration has estimated that without any changes in the Medicare program, the trust fund that pays hospital bills will run out of money in the year 2001. +"In the long term, in the big picture we really do have to get a balanced budget done this year," said Gene Sperling, the director of the National Economic Council, "and we do have to address the Medicare trust fund this year." + +LOAD-DATE: January 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +45 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 23, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +FILM REVIEW; +From Pinsk to Brooklyn, The Kings of Klezmer + +BYLINE: By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER + +SECTION: Section C; Page 19; Column 1; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 495 words + +Time and memory are woven through the captivating documentary "A Tickle in the Heart," which opened yesterday at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center as part of the Sixth Annual Jewish Video and Film Festival. +Made by Stefan Schwietert and photographed in beauteous black and white by Robert Richman, this multilayered film reverently preserves the artistry of the musical trio known as the Kings of Klezmer, documents the revival that gave the ensemble new life in the retirement communities of Florida and among younger audiences abroad and traces them and their soulful music back into the vanished world of the shtetls of Eastern Europe and the altered landscape of postwar New York City, where they first made their mark. + Altogether, "A Tickle in the Heart" provides a hearty helping of some of the world's liveliest and most poignant folk music and shines a richly deserved spotlight on Max, Willie and Julie Epstein, the octogenarian brothers who are the Kings of Klezmer, while erecting a monument to industry and artistry in old age and riveting the eye with film making of unusual visual riches. +From beginning to end, "A Tickle in the Heart" is propelled by the sweet wail of Max Epstein's clarinet, backed by Willie on trumpet and Julie on drum, occasionally abetted by other musicians and a singer. Max does most of the talking, as Mr. Schwietert addresses himself to preserving the technique and recording the talent and history of a family of klezmorim who must surely be the most immediate heirs of an art form whose practice was devastated by the Holocaust and later by changing tastes. +In the course of the film, with Max, the eldest brother, doing most of the talking, the German-born, Swiss-reared Mr. Schwietert evokes the brothers' musical upbringing as the film records their engagements in Florida, follows them to a concert in Berlin, takes them on a train trip to their ancestral home in Pinsk, in what is now Belarus, and brings them back to the Hasidic neighborhoods of Brooklyn. +The film takes its title from something the Epsteins' maternal grandfather said after he returned from the opera. While much of its pleased him, he said, he would have liked to hear something that would tickle his heart. +"The heart, you play from here," Willie says, gesturing. This documentary is one from the heart. + +A TICKLE IN THE HEART + +Written (in English and Yiddish, with English subtitles) and directed by Stefan Schwietert, based on an idea by Joel Rubin and Rita Ottens; director of photography, Robert Richman; edited by Arpad Bondy; music by the Epstein Brothers; produced by Edward Rosenstein, Martin Hagemann and Thomas Kufus; released by Kino International. At the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, 165 West 65th Street. Running time: 84 minutes. This film is not rated. + +WITH: Max Epstein, Willie Epstein, Julie Epstein, Peter Solokow, Harriet Goldstein Darr, Pat Merola, Harry Kolestein and Joel Rubin. + +LOAD-DATE: January 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Max Epstein in a recording studio in "A Tickle in the Heart." (Kino International) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +46 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 25, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +NEWHOUSE, BERTHA S. + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 11; Column 1; Classified + +LENGTH: 303 words + +NEWHOUSE-Bertha S. Died on January 23 in New York City at the age of 78. Beloved wife of Roy for over 53 years. Loving mother of Martin and Lina Wood. Devoted grandmother of Katherine, Philip, Samuel, Emma and Rebecca. Born in Mt. Vernon, New York, she lived most of her life in New York City, where she was educated and where her children were raised. She graduated from Morris High School in the Bronx, received her B.A. from Hunter College and an MS from the School of Business, Columbia University. In addition to caring for her family, she was the first woman accountant to do field work for the firm of S.D. Leidesdorf Co. and the first woman CPA in the department of Accountancy at Baruch College, CUNY, where she taught for many years and, at her retirement, was Associate Dean and Professor of Accountancy in the School of Business and Public Administration. As an officer of the Gustave Hartman YM/YWHA in Far Rockaway, she helped formulate an ongoing drug abuse discussion program. She was also founder and president of the Atlantic Shore Section of the National Council of Jewish Women, setting up the first recreation center for senior citizens in the area. In 1984, she was named as a distinguished alumna to the Hunter College Hall of Fame by the Alumni Association of Hunter College. A voracious reader, a devotee of The New York Times cross word puzzle, a woman of inspired conversation, a deeply caring friend, and a person who never lost her passionate love for the cultural life of this city, her death leaves a void that can never be filled. Funeral services will be at 10:45 a.m. on Sunday, January 26 at The Riverside Memorial Chapel, 76th St. and Amsterdam Ave., followed by burial at Mt. Ararat Cemetery in Farmingdale, New York. Thereafter, her family will be at 140 Nassau Street, N.Y. + +LOAD-DATE: January 30, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +47 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 26, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Q and A + +BYLINE: By Paul Freireich + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 30; Column 5; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 1076 words + + +Hosts Aboard Ship + +Q. I was told that cruise lines are interested in older men to serve as "gentlemen in waiting." I've just turned 65 and have a lot of time on my hands. -- Nick Comforti, Miami + +A. In an effort to balance out the preponderance of women on some cruises and to provide dance partners, a number of ship lines provide hosts. Their function is also to socialize at meals and to pitch in with some chores. Hosts are forbidden to favor one person or group of people. +A couple of lines had used hosts on long cruises, but in the early 1980's Richard Revnes, then president of Royal Cruise Line, started putting them on shorter cruises. Now, hosts can be found on at least nine lines. George Royle, a 57-year-old retired director of nurse education from Wales who said he had been a host on three ships in the last 18 months, recalled his experience dancing with an elderly widow: "When she says how much she enjoyed it, I feel I've really done my job." + Most lines recruit through Lau retta Blake the Working Vacation, 610 Pine Grove Court, New Lenox, Ill. 60431; (815) 485-8307, fax (815) 485-7142. Applicants, who are single men usually aged 45 to 65, have their dancing evaluated for a $25 fee. Those hired are compensated by getting an essentially free trip, with lines often providing allowances for liquor and laundry and sometimes covering air fare. Hosts do pay Blake a $175-a-week fee. Among the lines with hosts are these, with recruiting done by Lauretta Blake unless otherwise specified: +American Hawaii Cruises. Two hosts on the Independence for five weeklong big-band sailings this year. +Crystal Cruises. Three or four hosts on the Crystal Harmony and Crystal Symphony. The line, which hires its own hosts, is not accepting applications at this time. +Cunard Line. The QE2, the Vista fjord and the Royal Viking Sun typically have four hosts each, but on world cruises the QE2 has 10 hosts and the Royal Viking Sun has 6. +Delta Queen Steamboat Company. The American Queen and Mississippi, which ply the Mississippi, have two hosts aboard, except on 13 big-band cruises, which have four. +Holland America Line. Four to six hosts on the line's ships. Recruiting through Lauretta Blake for cruises 14 days or longer. But for 62- and 102-day cruises Holland America recruits hosts, but needs none now. Larry Dessler, director of public relations, says that a host engaged by Holland America "earns a couple of hundred dollars" a week. +Orient Lines. On the Marco Polo's cruises, there are three to four hosts everywhere except in the Mediterranean, where there are none. +Royal Olympic Cruises. The Stella Solaris, Odysseus, Triton and Stella Oceanis have four hosts in the winter season on cruises of a week or more and two or three hosts on European cruises in the other seasons. Recruiting: Cruise Crafts International, 1005 Bonnet Creek Court, Oviedo, Fla. 32765; telephone and fax, (407) 365-4426. Fee to agency: $200 a week. +Silversea Cruises. The Silver Cloud and Silver Wind, which sail all over the world, usually have two hosts on a total of 10 sailings a year. +World Explorer Cruises. The Universe Explorer, whose ports include Alaska and the Caribbean, has a host or two on all sailings. + +The Severn Bore + +Q. I shall be visiting England's West Country in April and would like very much to see the Severn bore rolling. Could you recommend a convenient site? -- Michael W. Varese, East Hampton, L.I. + +A. A bore, or wavelike inrush of water advancing like a wall, occurs during high tides in several rivers. The bore at the Severn estuary, in Gloucestershire, experiences the second highest tide in the world, after the Bay of Fundy on the east coast of Canada. Because of the Severn's topography, bores form twice daily on several days every month, when the tides are highest. +For a bore to form requires a considerable rise in the tide as it runs into a funnel: a narrowing river and a rising riverbed. This configuration -- found along a 15-mile stretch of the Severn, from just below the city of Gloucester -- causes the front of the tide to be held back so that the water behind it builds up into a wave. Traveling at about 10 miles an hour, the bore sometimes reaches over six feet in height. +This is an excellent year to witness the Severn bore because the tides are expected to be higher than any in living memory. A timetable that rates bores from one to five stars, with five being the highest, predicts nine five-star bores in 1997 -- in February, March, September and October; usually there are three or four a year. Five four-star bores are predicted for April alone. +Three sites, near Gloucester, 110 miles west of London, are recommended for viewing the bore: Minsterworth, Over Bridge and Stone bench. Minsterworth is considered best by the local tourist bureau for its ease of access and parking. Because visibility at night is unpredictable, mornings are better. The four-star morning bores in April will occur in Minsterworth on the 7th (due at 8:44), 8th (9:28) and 9th (10:09). Times can vary, so it's advisable to arrive a half-hour early. The area can be reached by taking the M4 highway from London, over the old Severn Road Bridge (not the new Second Severn Crossing) and then heading north on the A48. Don't count on public transit; bus schedules rarely dovetail with bore-watching plans. +A timetable and information booklet is available from the Customer Services Department, Environment Agency, Riversmeet House, Newtown Industrial Estate, Tewkesbury, GL20 8JG; telephone (1684) 850951, fax (1684) 293599. The booklet warns that the water level rises markedly for about an hour after the bore wave and suggests that spectators -- especially at Stonebench -- be careful about where they stand and park. + +Australian Open + +Q. I am planning to go to Australia in the next year or two. How can I get tickets to the Australian Open? -- Stephen Borell, Brooklyn, N.Y. + +A. With the 1997 tennis open just ending, you've got plenty of time. Tickets for 1998 are to go on sale in October. Write to Ford Australian Open, Private Bag 6060, Richmond South, Victoria 3121 Australia. As a guide, here are this year's rates for day sessions (at $1 in U.S. funds equal to $1.28 Australian); at night, it's about $4 to $9 less. First eight days, $17 to $30; quarterfinals, $35; semifinals, $44; women's finals, $54; men's finals, $65. PAUL FREIREICH + +LOAD-DATE: January 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Question + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +48 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 26, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +HOME CLINIC; +Indoor Pollution, Nature's and Man's + +BYLINE: By EDWARD R. LIPINSKI + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 16; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 879 words + +FEW people are aware that indoor air can be more polluted than outdoor air. Indoor air pollution is a serious threat in homes with young children, elderly adults and chronically ill people, because those people usually spend long periods indoors and are more susceptible to harmful pollutants. +Indoor air pollution has many sources, including combustion byproducts from gas, oil, kerosene and wood-burning heaters; tobacco smoke, cleaning and maintenance products, organic and biological contaminants and outdoor sources like radon. + Effective strategies for controlling indoor pollution consist of identifying and eliminating the sources, improving ventilation and circulation and adding air cleaners. +Often exposure to bad air results in health problems like nose, throat and eye irritations, headaches, dizziness and fatigue. Pay attention to the time and place that they occur. If they fade or disappear when away for any length of time, it is possible that they are brought on by air conditions in the house. Not everyone will experience the symptoms. The likelihood of a reaction to air pollutants depends on sensitivity, age and general health. +Other signs include accumulations of moisture and excessive condensation on walls or windows. That may indicate a lack of circulation. +Stagnant air, stuffiness and odors are also clues. Patches of mold or mildew stains are signs of excessive humidity and inadequate air circulation. +Finally check for sources. Even though the presence of such sources does not necessarily mean that they are contaminating the air, a careful evaluation of potential pollutants can help in evaluating the air quality. +The sources may include stoves, fireplaces, heaters and furnaces. They can introduce carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and particles into the air. Gas stoves will pollute the air if they are improperly adjusted. A visual check of the burner flames may signal a problem. Persistent yellow-tipped flames indicate improperly adjusted burners. Ask the gas company or an approved repair service to tune the burner so that all the tips are blue. In addition, the range should be fitted with a hood equipped with an exhaust fan vented to the outside, if possible, to expel contaminates. Inspect the fireplace periodically for cracks in the flue or chimney that could allow combustion gases to leak back into the house. +Examine the wood stove to make sure that the doors are tight and that all gaskets are in good shape. Inspect the furnace and air system at least annually and adjust or replace malfunctioning or damaged parts. +Environmental tobacco smoke usually comes from cigar, cigarette and pipe tobacco. It is a mixture of 4,000 compounds, more than 40 of which are strong irritants and are known to cause cancer in humans or laboratory animals. It affects not only the smoker, but all those who inhale it. +The simplest and most effective way to avoid polluting the indoor air with tobacco smoke is to ask all smokers to smoke outdoors. If that is not possible, install fans to increase ventilation and circulation. That, however, is not as easy as it sounds, because mechanical ventilation devices do not remove the smoke as quickly as it builds up. Also running a number of large fans can add to energy bills. +Household products like paints, varnishes, wax and many cleaning, disinfecting, degreasing and hobby products contain organic chemicals that can affect health. Obviously these products are useful or necessary, making it difficult to do without them entirely. +To limit exposure to household chemicals first follow the label directions carefully and use the solutions in the prescribed amounts and the proper manner. Read and observe all warnings. If a label advises using the product in a well-ventilated area, go outdoors. Indoors, open windows and set up exhaust fans. Buy only as much as needed and discard partly full containers or old or unneeded chemicals in a safe and environmentally approved way. +Another common chemical that most people come in contact with is perchloroethylene, which is widely used to dry clean clothes. Studies have shown that it can evaporate into the air from newly cleaned clothes. People who wear dry-cleaned clothes can also breathe low levels of the chemical. +Dry cleaners are supposed to try to recapture the perchloroethylene and recycle it in their cleaning tanks, but not all remove it every time. Do not accept clothes from the cleaner if they have a strong odor of cleaning fluid. Instead, ask the cleaner to remove the chemical and properly dry the garment. +Biological contaminants include bacteria, molds, mildew, viruses, dust mites, pollen and animal dander. Most of those contaminants breed and multiply in warm moist environments. By keeping the relative humidity levels from 30 to 50 percent, their effects can be minimized. +Thoroughly dry or replace wet carpets or water-damaged materials to prevent mold and bacteria from forming. Be sure to refill the water reservoirs in humidifiers daily with fresh water and clean the filter elements according to the manufacturer's directions. Finally, keep the house clean. Dusting and vacuuming regularly will help reduce the concentrations of dust mites, pollen and animal dander. + +LOAD-DATE: January 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Diagram. (Edward R. Lipinski) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +49 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 26, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +HOME CLINIC; +Indoor Pollution, Nature's and Man's + +BYLINE: By EDWARD R. LIPINSKI + +SECTION: Section 13LI; Page 8; Column 1; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 879 words + +FEW people are aware that indoor air can be more polluted than outdoor air. Indoor air pollution is a serious threat in homes with young children, elderly adults and chronically ill people, because those people usually spend long periods indoors and are more susceptible to harmful pollutants. +Indoor air pollution has many sources, including combustion byproducts from gas, oil, kerosene and wood-burning heaters; tobacco smoke, cleaning and maintenance products, organic and biological contaminants and outdoor sources like radon. + Effective strategies for controlling indoor pollution consist of identifying and eliminating the sources, improving ventilation and circulation and adding air cleaners. +Often exposure to bad air results in health problems like nose, throat and eye irritations, headaches, dizziness and fatigue. Pay attention to the time and place that they occur. If they fade or disappear when away for any length of time, it is possible that they are brought on by air conditions in the house. Not everyone will experience the symptoms. The likelihood of a reaction to air pollutants depends on sensitivity, age and general health. +Other signs include accumulations of moisture and excessive condensation on walls or windows. That may indicate a lack of circulation. +Stagnant air, stuffiness and odors are also clues. Patches of mold or mildew stains are signs of excessive humidity and inadequate air circulation. +Finally check for sources. Even though the presence of such sources does not necessarily mean that they are contaminating the air, a careful evaluation of potential pollutants can help in evaluating the air quality. +The sources may include stoves, fireplaces, heaters and furnaces. They can introduce carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and particles into the air. Gas stoves will pollute the air if they are improperly adjusted. A visual check of the burner flames may signal a problem. Persistent yellow-tipped flames indicate improperly adjusted burners. Ask the gas company or an approved repair service to tune the burner so that all the tips are blue. In addition, the range should be fitted with a hood equipped with an exhaust fan vented to the outside, if possible, to expel contaminates. Inspect the fireplace periodically for cracks in the flue or chimney that could allow combustion gases to leak back into the house. +Examine the wood stove to make sure that the doors are tight and that all gaskets are in good shape. Inspect the furnace and air system at least annually and adjust or replace malfunctioning or damaged parts. +Environmental tobacco smoke usually comes from cigar, cigarette and pipe tobacco. It is a mixture of 4,000 compounds, more than 40 of which are strong irritants and are known to cause cancer in humans or laboratory animals. It affects not only the smoker, but all those who inhale it. +The simplest and most effective way to avoid polluting the indoor air with tobacco smoke is to ask all smokers to smoke outdoors. If that is not possible, install fans to increase ventilation and circulation. That, however, is not as easy as it sounds, because mechanical ventilation devices do not remove the smoke as quickly as it builds up. Also running a number of large fans can add to energy bills. +Household products like paints, varnishes, wax and many cleaning, disinfecting, degreasing and hobby products contain organic chemicals that can affect health. Obviously these products are useful or necessary, making it difficult to do without them entirely. +To limit exposure to household chemicals first follow the label directions carefully and use the solutions in the prescribed amounts and the proper manner. Read and observe all warnings. If a label advises using the product in a well-ventilated area, go outdoors. Indoors, open windows and set up exhaust fans. Buy only as much as needed and discard partly full containers or old or unneeded chemicals in a safe and environmentally approved way. +Another common chemical that most people come in contact with is perchloroethylene, which is widely used to dry clean clothes. Studies have shown that it can evaporate into the air from newly cleaned clothes. People who wear dry-cleaned clothes can also breathe low levels of the chemical. +Dry cleaners are supposed to try to recapture the perchloroethylene and recycle it in their cleaning tanks, but not all remove it every time. Do not accept clothes from the cleaner if they have a strong odor of cleaning fluid. Instead, ask the cleaner to remove the chemical and properly dry the garment. +Biological contaminants include bacteria, molds, mildew, viruses, dust mites, pollen and animal dander. Most of those contaminants breed and multiply in warm moist environments. By keeping the relative humidity levels from 30 to 50 percent, their effects can be minimized. +Thoroughly dry or replace wet carpets or water-damaged materials to prevent mold and bacteria from forming. Be sure to refill the water reservoirs in humidifiers daily with fresh water and clean the filter elements according to the manufacturer's directions. Finally, keep the house clean. Dusting and vacuuming regularly will help reduce the concentrations of dust mites, pollen and animal dander. + +LOAD-DATE: January 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Diagram. (Edward R. Lipinski) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +50 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 26, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +HOME CLINIC; +Indoor Pollution, Nature's and Man's + +BYLINE: By EDWARD R. LIPINSKI + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 12; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 879 words + +FEW people are aware that indoor air can be more polluted than outdoor air. Indoor air pollution is a serious threat in homes with young children, elderly adults and chronically ill people, because those people usually spend long periods indoors and are more susceptible to harmful pollutants. +Indoor air pollution has many sources, including combustion byproducts from gas, oil, kerosene and wood-burning heaters; tobacco smoke, cleaning and maintenance products, organic and biological contaminants and outdoor sources like radon. + Effective strategies for controlling indoor pollution consist of identifying and eliminating the sources, improving ventilation and circulation and adding air cleaners. +Often exposure to bad air results in health problems like nose, throat and eye irritations, headaches, dizziness and fatigue. Pay attention to the time and place that they occur. If they fade or disappear when away for any length of time, it is possible that they are brought on by air conditions in the house. Not everyone will experience the symptoms. The likelihood of a reaction to air pollutants depends on sensitivity, age and general health. +Other signs include accumulations of moisture and excessive condensation on walls or windows. That may indicate a lack of circulation. +Stagnant air, stuffiness and odors are also clues. Patches of mold or mildew stains are signs of excessive humidity and inadequate air circulation. +Finally check for sources. Even though the presence of such sources does not necessarily mean that they are contaminating the air, a careful evaluation of potential pollutants can help in evaluating the air quality. +The sources may include stoves, fireplaces, heaters and furnaces. They can introduce carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and particles into the air. Gas stoves will pollute the air if they are improperly adjusted. A visual check of the burner flames may signal a problem. Persistent yellow-tipped flames indicate improperly adjusted burners. Ask the gas company or an approved repair service to tune the burner so that all the tips are blue. In addition, the range should be fitted with a hood equipped with an exhaust fan vented to the outside, if possible, to expel contaminates. Inspect the fireplace periodically for cracks in the flue or chimney that could allow combustion gases to leak back into the house. +Examine the wood stove to make sure that the doors are tight and that all gaskets are in good shape. Inspect the furnace and air system at least annually and adjust or replace malfunctioning or damaged parts. +Environmental tobacco smoke usually comes from cigar, cigarette and pipe tobacco. It is a mixture of 4,000 compounds, more than 40 of which are strong irritants and are known to cause cancer in humans or laboratory animals. It affects not only the smoker, but all those who inhale it. +The simplest and most effective way to avoid polluting the indoor air with tobacco smoke is to ask all smokers to smoke outdoors. If that is not possible, install fans to increase ventilation and circulation. That, however, is not as easy as it sounds, because mechanical ventilation devices do not remove the smoke as quickly as it builds up. Also running a number of large fans can add to energy bills. +Household products like paints, varnishes, wax and many cleaning, disinfecting, degreasing and hobby products contain organic chemicals that can affect health. Obviously these products are useful or necessary, making it difficult to do without them entirely. +To limit exposure to household chemicals first follow the label directions carefully and use the solutions in the prescribed amounts and the proper manner. Read and observe all warnings. If a label advises using the product in a well-ventilated area, go outdoors. Indoors, open windows and set up exhaust fans. Buy only as much as needed and discard partly full containers or old or unneeded chemicals in a safe and environmentally approved way. +Another common chemical that most people come in contact with is perchloroethylene, which is widely used to dry clean clothes. Studies have shown that it can evaporate into the air from newly cleaned clothes. People who wear dry-cleaned clothes can also breathe low levels of the chemical. +Dry cleaners are supposed to try to recapture the perchloroethylene and recycle it in their cleaning tanks, but not all remove it every time. Do not accept clothes from the cleaner if they have a strong odor of cleaning fluid. Instead, ask the cleaner to remove the chemical and properly dry the garment. +Biological contaminants include bacteria, molds, mildew, viruses, dust mites, pollen and animal dander. Most of those contaminants breed and multiply in warm moist environments. By keeping the relative humidity levels from 30 to 50 percent, their effects can be minimized. +Thoroughly dry or replace wet carpets or water-damaged materials to prevent mold and bacteria from forming. Be sure to refill the water reservoirs in humidifiers daily with fresh water and clean the filter elements according to the manufacturer's directions. Finally, keep the house clean. Dusting and vacuuming regularly will help reduce the concentrations of dust mites, pollen and animal dander. + +LOAD-DATE: January 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Diagram. (Edward R. Lipinski) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +51 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 26, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +VIEWPOINT; +Trouble on the Waiting List For Heart Transplants + +BYLINE: By JOHN BRAY; John Bray is a writer and editor in Woodbury, Conn. He has written extensively on the science and business of medicine. + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 15; Column 4; Money and Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 739 words + +WHEN demand far exceeds supply, does it make sense to generate more demand? Perhaps, if you are a commodities trader and want to run up the price. But what if we are talking about the business of heart transplants, with its substantial public investment and nonnegotiable raw materials? +The number of people waiting for heart transplants far exceeds the number of those receiving them. Yet a new technology approved by the Federal Government will probably exacerbate the imbalance, add to the cost of transplants and intensify turmoil on the waiting line. + Devices that can keep people alive for months while they await donated organs are entering the health care mainstream. The products, called ventricular assist devices, mechanically help pump the heart. +Since October 1994, the Food and Drug Administration has approved three models by three manufacturers -- Thermo Cardiosystems, Aviomed and Thoratec -- for use as bridges to transplants. All had already been used experimentally for some years. In January 1996, the taxpayer-financed Medicare program for the elderly and disabled started paying for the use of the first design by Thermo Cardiosystems. Now, the Health Care Financing Administration, which runs Medicare, says it will cover the two other models, too. +So far, hundreds of patients have received these devices, which have done their job. +By using such a machine, a patient makes an impressive demonstration of his need for a new heart, and can move up on the waiting lists for donor hearts. And hospitals that don't offer the machines risk losing patients to institutions that do, further fueling competition among transplant centers that may not be appropriate. +In a distribution system that is supposed to be driven by the patient's medical needs and time on the waiting list, Medicare has introduced a twist that seems to add special urgency to Medicare patients on these devices. +In its guidelines for the pumps' use, the Health Care Financing Administration has specified that surgeons should make "every reasonable effort to transplant patients on such devices as soon as practicable." +An analyst with the Health Care Financing Administration told me last December that "we don't want 50 people on these devices, 40 of whom are not going to get an organ." +Medicare's payments vary for using these devices, depending on the circumstances of each case, the differences in hospitals' billing decisions and the payment scales of the region. In an example provided by the agency, Medicare would pay about $15,000 for a patient to be on such a device for one week at a Boston hospital. +Then there are the surgeon's fees associated with installing and removing the devices, about $3,000 total, the agency said. +A heart transplant is already expensive -- usually about $100,000. Medicare spent nearly $45 million on 494 heart transplants in 1995; the total reflects only the costs associated with the procedure and immediate postoperative care, not the continuing associated expenses like drugs. It costs $325 just to get on a waiting list. +The analyst with the Health Care Financing Administration told me that it almost didn't approve coverage for the devices. It gave its O.K. only after taking a second look and setting some ground rules -- requiring, for example, that the patient be approved and listed as a candidate by a Medicare heart-transplant center. +The Health Care Financing Administration is betting that its guidelines will encourage the medical establishment to use the devices responsibly. The agency wants transplant centers to show some restraint, but the technology has spread quickly. +Heart transplant centers have popped up all over the country in recent years. The number of patients awaiting new hearts at all transplant centers has grown steadily, but the number of transplants has failed to keep pace. In 1994, the last year for which complete figures were available, 6,378 people were in line for transplants, while just 2,340 received them, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, the Federal contractor that tracks transplant data. In that year, 724 people died while on the waiting list. +Patients understandably grasp at the glimmer of hope these devices offer. But heart transplantation is not ready for greater demand, and taxpayers should not be asked to subsidize it, especially when Washington is talking about reining in Medicare spending. + +LOAD-DATE: January 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +52 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 26, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +January 19-25; +The Vodka Tax + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL SPECTER + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 2; Column 2; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 173 words + +The Russian government is in a bit of a bind. Because nobody is paying taxes, there isn't enough revenue to pay salaries or pensions to the millions of poor and elderly who need money the most. The search for revenues has taken on a desperate air. +So, swinging for the fences, President Boris Yeltsin has done the natural thing: he has decided to reinstate a federal monopoly on the most prized and ubiquitous of all Russian products, vodka. Starting in February, taxes will be doubled and police will vigilantly pursue bootleggers. It is a noble idea and an obvious one, since the Russian Government could add $350 million a month to the budget, enough to make good on its embarrassing debt to its people. + In order to succeed, Mr. Yeltsin must double the price of an average bottle -- from +$2 to $4. "It will never happen," sniffed one elderly woman recently, buying her daily portion of illegally imported vodka on the street. "He would be better off taxing the dead." No doubt that will be next. MICHAEL SPECTER + +LOAD-DATE: January 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: A Russian woman sells vodka illegally. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +53 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 26, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +In the Region/Connecticut; +A Flood of Proposals for Caring for Wealthy Elderly + +BYLINE: By ELEANOR CHARLES + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 7; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1281 words + +A GROWING number of older people who can afford entry fees of as much as half a million dollars plus monthly fees of $36,000 a year to live in luxurious residential complexes has generated a record number of proposals for such housing all over Fairfield County. +Homing in on any available parcels of land in Greenwich, Stamford, Westport, Redding, Ridgefield, Wilton and the Town of Fairfield, among others, developers are offering life styles that vary from independent living to assisted living -- help with bathing and dressing and other personal care -- to nursing wings. Some will provide all three. + Unfazed by Connecticut's moratorium on skilled nursing homes, imposed to limit the state's Medicaid liability, developers are focusing on independent- and assisted-living complexes instead. But by obtaining a certificate of need from the state they can add a nursing wing to a life-care project, which by definition contains both of the other components. They must also certify that none of the residents will ever apply for Medicaid. +In Greenwich, three proposals for a total of some 200 units in three complexes lined up along King Street at the Westchester border are to be voted on this Tuesday by the Planning and Zoning Commission. A fourth project of 84 units off the Post Road will be proposed within two months. +The unusual number of projects surfacing at once has the town worried. "We have no idea what we can absorb," said Diane Fox, the Greenwich town planner. "It's a free-for-all. We know there's a need, but not this much." +During six public hearings over the last few months, concerns were expressed over traffic, septic capability, wells, overbuilding, and an influx of people from New York State, where a moratorium on assisted-living residences has generated a marketing blitz by Connecticut developers of high-end elderly housing. +"This is a trend that will continue for many years," said Richard Redniss, president of Redniss & Mead, a real estate consulting firm in Stamford. He helped prepare several proposals for Marriott Senior Living Services, including 130 assisted-living units of about 350 square feet on King Street in Greenwich, and 115 units are under construction at Brighton Gardens in Stamford. +"It will be better for the state," Mr. Redniss said. "We won't continue to lose our wealthy elderly to Florida." +"My own mother is moving into Edgehill," he added, referring to the Marriott life-care community that will break ground this spring in Stamford. +Entry fees for one- and two-bedroom independent-living residences at Edgehill will range from $225,000 with monthly charges of $1,950, rising to $565,000 plus monthly charges of $3,100, depending on such features as a den, eat-in kitchen, fireplace, separate dining room, two exposures and the number of walk-in closets. A second person in the apartment adds $15,000 to the initial fee and $700 to the monthly charge. Edgehill will contain 216 independent-living apartments, 20 assisted-living units and a 60-bed nursing wing. +Frank and Elizabeth Goldsmith of White Plains placed a 20 percent deposit on a 2-bedroom, 2-bath and den independent-living apartment at Edgehill last year. "We realized that we couldn't take it any more," said Mr. Goldsmith, referring to "this large house we've had for 46 years, on an acre and a half with a swimming pool." +"I'm 75 and Liz is 72," he said. "This morning the oil burner went off and I couldn't get it going." +THE Goldsmiths fit the profile that operators of these complexes have developed -- "generally independent, well-educated," said Michael J. Giacopelli, vice president for development of some 75 Marriott Senior Living Services complexes nationwide. "They move in in their 70's and 80's, tend to be planners, enjoy being part of a social environment and they are more than comfortably well-off." +"This is not a real estate purchase," he explained. "Entry fees must be paid in cash and are 90 percent refundable after the occupant dies or + moves out and the apartment is re-sold." +In one respect the Goldsmiths diverge from the profile. According to the Assisted Living Federation of America, a trade organization in Fairfax, Va., 65 percent of the people who move into upscale retirement communities are single women like Violet Crimmins of Darien. +"I've been a widow for seven years," she said, "and I've lived in a nine-room house on an acre of land for 40 years. Nobody is still here, and I get a little tired of fussing with roofs and chimneys." She signed up for a one-bedroom apartment at Edgehill. +Like the Goldsmiths, and Karl and Betty Davies of Greenwich, she has learned that people she knows will also be moving to Edgehill. +"The only thing we are changing is our address," said Mrs. Davies. They will keep their membership at the Indian Harbor Yacht Club in Greenwich and enjoy the companionship of several friends who took apartments at Edgehill. +Rentals at Stony Brook Court, an assisted-living community of 86 studio and one- and two-bedroom apartments under construction in Darien, will be $2,750 to $4,875 a month with a second-person charge of an additional $500 to $1,075 a month and a one-time $3,000 membership fee for everyone. Carematrix of Needham, Mass., and B & G Associates of Stamford are building the complex and also would develop Pickwick Park, a proposed western Greenwich project to that is to be the subject of a hearing this spring. +At Pickwick Park, independent-living apartments of 1,100 to 1,400 square feet would carry an entry fee of $325,000 to $475,000. An arrangement for priority admittance to Greenwich Hospital is being negotiated. +Getting around the scarcity of vacant land, Carematrix, like many other companies, is using its existing properties to advantage. Currently, it is adding 220 residential units selling for $240,000 to $360,000 at Laurelwood, its nursing home campus in Ridgefield. +Sales of 91 units will be financed by the buyers with cash or mortgages, according to Michael J. Zaccaro, executive vice president at Carematrix. The rest will be rented as assisted-living apartments at $2,700 to $4,000 a month. +The same procedure is being followed at Greenwich Woods, a 210-bed nursing home on King Street, and at Wilton Meadows, a nursing home in Wilton. An additional 32 assisted-living units of 300 to 500 square feet are proposed in Greenwich, and 86 units for Wilton, to be rented for $2,800 to $4,200 a month, including meals, housekeeping, transportation, recreation and help with dressing and bathing. +Liberty Healthcare Management Company of Naples, Fla., is seeking approval for 60 rental studio units in Greenwich and 54 in Westport. Rents will be about $4,000 a month. And Meadow Ridge in Redding, being developed by David Reis of Woodbridge, expects to break ground next year for a life-care community of 208 independent-living apartments of 1,350 to 1,500 square feet. +Meadow Ridge entry fees of $300,000 to $410,000 with second person fees of $10,000, will be accompanied by monthly charges of $1,600 to $2,000 plus $650 for a second person. A 20-unit assisted-living section and a 50-bed nursing home are also planned. +"What if they build it all and the people don't come?" asked Bernadette Settelmeyer, a consultant on elderly housing in Greenwich, referring to fears that small units in particular could turn into a glut of condominiums, downgrading expensive neighborhoods. +Mr. Giacopelli of Marriott doesn't think so. +"The industry has standards and penetration rates," he said. "The demand curve is deeper than the supply curve, and a certain percentage of projects will fail because of zoning or lack of financing." + +LOAD-DATE: January 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: February 16, 1997, Sunday + + CORRECTION: +An article in some regional editions on Jan. 26 about proposals for residences for older people in Connecticut omitted three words, altering the meaning of a quotation from Frank Goldsmith, referring to the upkeep of his house. He said, "We realized that we couldn't take care of it all anymore." + +GRAPHIC: Drawing: Rendering of Meadow Ridge, a life-care community that expects to break ground next year in Redding. (Abraham Gelbart) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +54 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 30, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Whitman Plans $2 Million to Help Immigrants Become Citizens + +BYLINE: By ABBY GOODNOUGH + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 644 words + +DATELINE: TRENTON, Jan. 29 + +New Jersey would spend $2 million a year to help poor legal immigrants who are elderly or disabled become United States citizens under Gov. Christine Todd Whitman's new budget proposal, a move that might protect them from losing benefits under the new Federal welfare law. +The plan is the newest component of Governor Whitman's proposal to overhaul New Jersey's welfare system and bring the state into compliance with the Federal welfare law adopted last year. The Federal Government will no longer provide benefits for legal immigrants under its new law. + And many states, including New Jersey, are reluctant to pick up the cost of those benefits, which include food stamps and Supplemental Security Income. +A citizenship program would help New Jersey avoid that extra cost because once legal immigrants became citizens, they would be eligible for the Federal benefits. +"It's to the financial advantage of both the immigrants and the state to achieve naturalization," said William Waldman, the State Commissioner of Human Services, who said that most of the eligible immigrants live in Essex, Hudson and Passaic Counties. "So we're really mounting a campaign to help them out." +Although much of Governor Whitman's welfare plan mirrors the Federal legislation, New Jersey and many other states have softened the provisions concerning legal immigrants in their own proposals. Gov. George E. Pataki has said that New York will provide assistance through its home relief program to many people losing benefits. If the New Jersey legislation is adopted, the state will continue providing cash benefits to the 15,000 legal immigrants who already receive them in New Jersey and Medicaid benefits to 50,000. +Under the Federal law, most legal immigrants here and around the nation will no longer receive food stamps and Supplemental Security Income, a change that is supposed to save the Federal Government $24 billion over seven years. +But the citizenship program announced today could help the state's most fragile legal immigrants become citizens quickly, state officials said, so they could start receiving the Federal benefits again. Roughly 22,000 legal immigrants in New Jersey receive food stamps from the Federal Government, state officials said. +Under New Jersey's welfare proposal, legal immigrants who arrived here before last August, when the Federal welfare law was adopted, will still be eligible for cash benefits and Medicaid, all of which will be paid by the state. But those who arrived after the law was passed will not be eligible for these benefits, Mr. Waldman said. +Jack Tweedie, a welfare policy analyst for the National Conference of State Legislators in Denver, said New Jersey's stance on legal immigrants is not unique. Of 41 states that have submitted welfare plans to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, only four have not extended family assistance benefits to legal immigrants, Mr. Tweedie said. Those states -- Kentucky, Louisiana, Wyoming and Oklahoma -- all have tiny immigrant populations, he added. +The $2 million for citizenship efforts would be distributed through the New Jersey Immigration Policy Network, a coalition of private charities that provide programs for immigrants, state officials said. +Any organization wanting to provide services through the plan would have to pay for half of the total cost, with state money covering the other half. The state would not pay more than $325 for each immigrant participating. +The money would initially help more than 5,000 elderly or disabled immigrants pay for English, history and civics classes, which anyone applying for United States citizenship is required to take. It would also help pay for the legal services immigrants need to apply for citizenship, interpreters and transportation to citizenship classes and immigration offices. + +LOAD-DATE: January 30, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +55 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 30, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Simple Test May Sharply Cut Colorectal Cancer Toll + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 700 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 + +An easy home test for colorectal cancer could lower the cost and unpleasantness that deter many people from being examined for the nation's second-leading cancer killer, according to new medical guidelines being issued on Thursday. +Taking those simple tests to detect blood in stool samples every year after the age of 50 could cut colorectal cancer deaths by a third, making them about as effective as mammograms are for breast cancer, say the guidelines, which are endorsed by the American Cancer Society and seven other medical groups. + "For people who don't want to go through a lot of hassle and expense that's a reasonable option," said Dr. Robert Fletcher of Harvard Medical School, a co-author of the guidelines for the American Gastroenterological Association. +But the guidelines offer options, including testing once every 10 years by snaking a fiber-optics tube into the colon to spot precancerous growths that could be removed to prevent cancer from forming. The simpler stool tests, in contrast, detect cancer early enough to cure. Even better for some people, the guidelines say the manual rectal exams doctors offer today are not worth the time and embarrassment. +The guidelines are "a call to action," said Dr. Sidney Winawer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, a co-author. "The public and physicians have been skeptical" about colorectal testing, he added, but "the evidence is strong now for the benefits." +Some managed-care companies already cover these routine cancer examinations, but Medicare, the Federal health-care system for the elderly, only pays if someone has cancer symptoms. President Clinton will ask Congress for Medicare financing for routine colorectal tests in his 1998 budget, and Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California, has already introduced similar legislation. +About 131,000 Americans get colon and rectal cancer each year and more than 54,000 die. It strikes men and women about equally. And while relatives of cancer patients or people with colon growths called polyps are more prone to the disease, the biggest risk is simply getting older. +"This offers the biggest potential for lives saved if the country would adopt these guidelines," said Dr. Harmon Eyre of the American Cancer Society. +Some doctors already advise people over 50 to get regular manual rectal examinations, stool tests and a more unpleasant examination called a sigmoidoscopy. But only one in five Americans gets tested. So the gastroenterological association assembled independent experts to find the best tests. They decided that most people over 50 should choose one of these tests: +*Annual fecal blood tests, a $5 kit a doctor sends home for the person to collect six stool samples and mail back for analysis. Although easy to use, they can cause false alarms that necessitate further cancer testing. The Food and Drug Administration has approved over-the-counter versions that people can use without a doctor. Dr. Fletcher said as long as people got six samples from three consecutive stools, because blood may appear intermittently, those tests should work fine, but Dr. Winawer recommends the doctor's version. +*A sigmoidoscopy, where a tube threaded into the rectum checks just the lower half of the colon for polyps or cancer, every five years. +*A barium enema every five to 10 years. This is a 20-minute procedure that lets doctors view the entire colon by X-ray to spot large polyps. +*A colonoscopy every 10 years. Patients are sedated while a finger-wide fiber-optics tube is snaked up the rectum to view the entire colon. It requires a liquid diet and enemas to flush out the colon and costs $350 to more than $1,000. But it is the best test for catching tiny polyps that years later could turn cancerous. +For people at increased cancer risk, the guidelines advise a colonoscopy three years after discovery of large, precancerous polyps; testing beginning at the age of 40 if one close relative had polyps or cancer, and genetic testing for families with multiple cancer or polyp patients to find the relatives who need an entire colon examination every one to two years or perhaps even colon removal. + +LOAD-DATE: January 30, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +56 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 31, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Greenspan Urges Action to Curb Cost-of-Living Rises in Benefits + +BYLINE: By RICHARD W. STEVENSON + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 2; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1056 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 + +Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, urged Congress today to move quickly to limit cost-of-living increases for Social Security and other Federal benefits. In doing so, he waded directly into one of the most politically sensitive issues facing the Government. +Mr. Greenspan said the Labor Department should speed its efforts to fix a range of shortcomings in its main measure of inflation, the Consumer Price Index, that have led, according to estimates by some economists, to overstating increases in the cost of living by about one percentage point. But in the meantime, Mr. Greenspan said, Congress should establish an independent national commission to set more accurate cost-of-living increases. That would avoid payment of what are seen as overly generous benefits to Social Security recipients and others whose annual increases are tied to the inflation index. + Over time, putting a brake on cost-of-living increases could save the Government hundreds of billions of dollars and make it easier to balance the budget without cutting other programs. But it would do so by every month giving a little less money than now planned to tens of millions of voters who receive checks from the Federal Government. +"This type of approach would have the benefit of being objective, nonpartisan and sufficiently flexible to take full account of the latest information," Mr. Greenspan told the Senate Finance Committee. +Mr. Greenspan's suggestion for a commission revived an idea he had proposed two years ago, before the issue had any political visibility. It was immediately embraced by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, the committee's ranking Democrat, and aides said it intrigued some Republicans, including the panel's chairman, Senator William V. Roth Jr. of Delaware. +Mr. Greenspan's stature provides some political cover for members of both parties who support revising the price index downward but fear the outcry from the elderly and other benefit recipients. Labor unions and the American Association for Retired Persons have already expressed opposition. Nonetheless, Mr. Greenspan's strong advocacy for the proposal could help its prospects in negotiations between Congress and the White House over how to balance the budget and could also offer a mechanism to extend the long-term solvency of Social Security. +Asked about Mr. Greenspan's call for a commission, the White House press secretary, Michael D. McCurry, said the Federal Reserve chairman would be "an influential voice" in the debate over how to address the issue. The Clinton Administration has said it is open to considering a change in the price index, but only if there is a consensus among economists about how to proceed. +Some Republicans said they were considering introducing a nonbinding "Sense of the Senate" resolution in the next few weeks calling for an improved measure of inflation. They said the vaguely worded resolution would be a first step in gauging how much support could be mustered for a change with which neither party wants to be closely identified. +The Administration also said today that it would propose increasing funds for the Bureau of Labor Statistics by $2 million next year and $7 million to $10 million for each of the succeeding six years for additional research into the price Index. The bureau now spends $40 million a year administering the index. +Katharine G. Abraham, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, told the Senate Budget Committee that the increased funds, amounting to $55.1 million over seven years, would allow the agency "to speed up the process" of updating and expanding the price index to achieve a better approximation of changes in the cost of living. The bureau has always said that the Consumer Price Index is not a pure measure of inflation and should not be used to set Federal benefit payments. But it has taken on that role anyway, and it also adjusts tax brackets, private employment contracts and other transactions. +Mr. Greenspan has said publicly for years that he believes the Consumer Price Index overstates inflation. Last week he told the Senate Budget Committee that research by the Federal Reserve concluded that the overstatement was around one percentage point a year, roughly the same conclusion reached by a Congressionally appointed panel of economists last month. +That panel, headed by Michael J. Boskin, a Stanford University economist, said the overstatement would cost the Government hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 12 years in more generous benefit payments and smaller tax collections. +The Boskin report said that inflation was being overstated by 1.1 percentage points. Social Security payments for this year are being calculated on a 2.9 percent increase in the cost of living. If that increase was 1.1 percentage points lower, the average monthly payment, now $724, would go to $737 rather than to $745 -- a difference of $96 a year. +In his statements today, Mr. Greenspan appeared to be making his most concerted effort yet to put his reputation as a tough-minded apolitical policy maker behind a revision of the price index. +Urging senators to ignore criticism that tinkering with the price index would be viewed as a "political fix" to a technical problem, Mr. Greenspan argued that failure to address the overstatement of inflation would be a decision to ignore overwhelming evidence that the nation was overpaying benefit recipients. +"There is almost a 100 percent probability that we are overcompensating the average Social Security recipient for increases in the cost of living," Mr. Greenspan said, "and almost a 100 percent probability that we are causing the inflation-adjusted burden of the income tax system to decline more rapidly than I presume Congress intends." +Asked who should serve on an independent commission, Mr. Greenspan said he would "tend to choose academics who clearly have no evident interest in the outcome." +Congressional aides said it was unclear what consideration the Senate and the House might give to the idea of a commission. Mr. Moynihan, one of the leading proponents of revising the price index, said he intended to discuss the idea with Mr. Roth. Republican aides said Mr. Roth was interested in a commission but was concerned that it would take too long to establish. + +LOAD-DATE: January 31, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve chairman, testifying yesterday. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times)(pg. D13) + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +57 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 31, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +3 Dead as Wall at Houston Mall Collapses + +BYLINE: By The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 469 words + +DATELINE: HOUSTON, Jan. 30 + +A wall next to a construction site collapsed this morning at a shopping mall, killing at least three people injuring seven, many of them elderly. +Officials speculated that more people might be trapped in the rubble of a 150- to 200-foot section of the 20-foot-high wall. Federal safety investigators, as well as city officials, began an inquiry into what caused the accident, just after 9 A.M. at the Northline Mall. + The wall was shared by the mall and a department store that was being demolished, to be replaced by a complex of theaters. Earvin (Magic) Johnson, the former basketball player, broke ground on the project in 1995, part of his plan to invest in neglected urban areas. +The dead were not publicly identified by this evening. Many of the injured were elderly people who walked in the mall for exercise before most stores opened. +One victim, Alfonse Rabel, 68, cut his arms and legs by jumping through a window. +"He assured me he was O.K.," said Mr. Rabel's wife, Kayla, who added that he drove himself to a hospital emergency room. She said her husband walked in the mall five mornings a week. +This afternoon, construction cranes were brought in to lift large concrete slabs, and an interior wall was shored up so that rescue workers could search the debris. Dogs were brought in to search but were removed before long because of the danger, officials said. +"We have a team of investigators on the site," said Diana Petterson, a spokeswoman for the regional office of the Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. "Our aim is to do as through and comprehensive an investigation as possible." +The mall management did not answer calls for comment. +The city issued a demolition permit to Demolition Services Inc. on Nov. 12, and officials said they were not aware of any problems with the company. The company did not return requests for comment. +Three people, including a couple who were members of the Northline Mall walkers club, went to Memorial Northwest Hospital. Mr. Rabel was one of those. +"He had a lot of lacerations on his arms and legs because as he was walking he saw the ceiling start to collapse and he ran through a glass window," said Caroline Osmond, spokeswoman for the hospital. Mr. Rabel was released this afternoon. +Four patients, including a firefighter with a twisted ankle, were taken to Hermann Hospital, and all but one were released by early afternoon after treatment for bumps and bruises, said a hospital spokeswoman, Patty Riddlebarger. The remaining patient, Maxine Bell, 67, was treated for a broken ankle. +The Fire Chief, Eddie Corral, said officials could only speculate on the number of people trapped in the rubble and whether they might have survived. +"A lot of times," Chief Corral said, "miraculous things happen." + +LOAD-DATE: January 31, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Emergency workers searching yesterday for victims after a wall at the Northline Mall in Houston collapsed. The wall was shared by the mall and a department store that was being demolished for a theater complex. (F. Carter Smith for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +58 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +January 31, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Bill on Deficit Clears Panel Buts Hits Snag + +BYLINE: By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 535 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 + +The Senate Judiciary Committee today approved a constitutional amendment that would require a balanced Federal budget, but the eventual prospects for the amendment may have dimmed. +Two Democratic Senators on whose votes the Republican proponents of the amendment had relied for the two-thirds majority needed for Senate approval said at the Judiciary Committee meeting that they might vote against it on the floor without substantial changes. + The two, Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Robert G. Torricelli of New Jersey, voted for an almost identical amendment two years ago, Mr. Biden in the Senate and Mr. Torricelli when he was in the House. +But today they advocated changes including the exclusion of Social Security from deficit calculations and the creation of a separate capital budget to allow borrowing for "physical infrastructure that provides long-term economic benefits." +A Republican staff assistant who has been keeping track of probable votes said it would be difficult if not impossible to reach the 67-vote threshold if Mr. Biden and Mr. Torricelli voted "no." All 55 Republican senators plan to vote for the amendment, which means 12 Democratic votes will be necessary. +Mr. Torricelli said in an interview that he was trying to put pressure on Republicans to open negotiations. +The amendment's chief Republican sponsor, Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, who heads the Judiciary Committee, said the changes suggested by the two Senators would open "big loopholes" he could never accept. +The panel approved the amendment today in a 13-to-5 vote. It would require the budget to be balanced by early in the next century and every year afterward unless the Senate and House voted by three-fifths majorities to waive the requirement. +Mr. Biden and Mr. Torricelli were among those who voted for the amendment. But they said they could vote differently on the floor. +Many Democrats, as long as they are not identified, acknowledge that the issue of excluding Social Security from budget calculations is something of a Trojan horse. +The latest Congressional Budget Office calculations show that without counting Social Security, which now runs a large surplus, the lawmakers would have to find an additional $465 billion in tax increases or spending cuts over the next five years. As a practical matter, that would make it impossible to balance the budget early in the next century. +But politically, few other issues carry so much weight; no politician wants to be seen as jeopardizing Social Security. Proposals like those of Mr. Biden and Mr. Torricelli allow lawmakers to say that they favor a balanced budget amendment but want to make sure Social Security is not at risk. President Clinton, who opposes the amendment, said in a letter to lawmakers on Wednesday that it could put the elderly at risk. +In the House, where a close vote is also expected, a small group of Republicans called a news conference today to advocate excluding Social Security from the calculations. +Democrats held a news conference to advertise a letter signed by more than 1,000 economists warning that an amendment could make recessions worse and restrict necessary Government borrowing. + +LOAD-DATE: January 31, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Senator Orrin G. Hatch, center, Republican of Utah, at a Judiciary Committee meeting on a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget. At right was Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont. (Paul Hosefros/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +59 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 2, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Hartsdale Fights to Reopen Doors of Once-Thriving Stores + +BYLINE: By ROBERTA HERSHENSON + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 1; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1185 words + +DATELINE: HARTSDALE + +YOU can have your nails done, choose new wallpaper, plan a vacation and eat sushi in the shopping district that everyone here calls Hartsdale Village, although Hartsdale is really a hamlet in the town of Greenburgh. +You can also buy a bagel at five different places on your way to the Hartsdale train station, which anchors the hamlet on its eastern border. But except for commuters rushing to catch the morning express, the foot traffic is scarce along East Hartsdale Avenue. Just a few years ago the sidewalks were bustling. + One after another, longtime merchants have closed their doors, leading residents to ask: is Hartsdale becoming a ghost town? +The answer is a resounding and determined no, say Greenburgh town officials, members of the Hartsdale Chamber of Commerce and others who say they are tired of the negative talk about their community. They are fighting back, resolved to resist the trend that is occurring nationwide as shoppers desert Main Street for bargain country -- in this case, Central Park Avenue, less than a mile away. +Some businesses here are still thriving, but talking with merchants in the business district, a block of stores just a tenth of a mile long, is like being at a seminar on urban planning. The situation, though not yet a crisis, has made sidewalk experts of everyone from building superintendents to deli workers. Although there is much head shaking, there is also a common theme: Hartsdale can be rescued, if everyone -- town, merchants, landlords and residents -- works to save it. +The trouble began here, many say, when a Gristedes supermarket closed on East Hartsdale Avenue two years ago. "That was the turning point," said Liz Marrinan, Greenburgh's Director of Community Development, who is preparing a commercial profile of the Hartsdale business district. She said 4 out of 32 stores, including the former supermarket, are empty, representing 18 percent of the total 60,000 square feet of retail space available here. +George Prokos said, "I guess it's part of the domino theory," as he ordered breakfast one recent morning at the Deli Experience across the street from the former supermarket. Mr. Prokos, an assistant superintendent at the nearby Rockledge House, one of a group of apartment complexes on the street, recalled how many elderly residents used to walk to the supermarket for their daily necessities. Now, he said, they wait for rides to take them to Central Park Avenue. "This is a nice town," he said, "but it's a little bit on the decline, I think." +Larry Menze, manager of the Deli Experience, said he had seen business slow down a lot since he began working there three years ago. "You rack your brain and say, 'Why, why, why,' " he said, shrugging his shoulders. +But others say that the reasons are obvious, and that a new supermarket -- reports of imminent lease-signings are frequent -- would address only one issue. "The biggest problem is that there is not a big mix of stores in this town," said Cliff Hall, an owner of the Cheesery, a gourmet shop, which is one of the most successful businesses on the block. He lamented the loss of stores that invited window shopping, like a children's clothing store, a bookstore and a store devoted to handmade gifts, all of which have closed in the last two years. +"You can't browse anymore," he said. "That's what makes small towns like this special." +He and others said the street desperately needed a face-lifting. "Look around," Mr. Hall said, pointing to a broken sign above a beauty parlor and to a hodgepodge of clashing storefronts. +"This mishmash of styles tends to the tacky," he added. +Mr. Hall said he was not a member of the Chamber of Commerce because "there's absolutely nothing they can do for me. The landlords do what they want." He said it was up to landlords to improve their buildings' facades, as well as to stop strangling successful businesses by renting their stores to competing ones. +"Years ago, there used to be honor," he said. "Now it's all dog eat dog. The biggest competition on the block is for food; even stores that shouldn't be selling food are selling food. But the block could support all the food stores if there were a bigger mix of stores bringing people into town." +Nick Cioppa, the owner of Deli Experience, agreed, calling for an ordinance to limit the number of food stores in the district. "I'm here, and I'm not going to go under," he said of the 50-year-old deli, which he bought nearly 5 years ago. "But the street is turning into a food court." +Stephanie W. Bellino is president of the real estate concern of Blum and Bellino, which serves as both a managing agent and a rental agent for landlords. "I don't care what kind of mix you have, but you will not have an area survive unless the neighborhood will support the merchants," Ms. Bellino said. +She explained that she was referring to the 2,500 families who live in the apartments and single-family houses between the railroad station and Central Park Avenue. +She added, "If there is a good workable plan to spruce up the village, and maybe bring back some of the older facades, I'm sure the landlords will review the plan with an open mind." +Paul J. Feiner, Greenburgh's Supervisor, said that the town had begun to formulate just such a long-range plan with an urban-revitalization consultant, Louis Lopilato, of Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry. +There are bright spots in the picture. Ms. Bellino said two new businesses had opened since Gristedes closed -- a pet-grooming shop and a card shop -- and that both were doing well. The farmers' market, which operates at the train station on Saturday mornings from June to November, does a brisk business. The Chamber of Commerce fixed up a pocket park opposite the train station, and the town of Greenburgh recently installed attractive street lamps along East Hartsdale Avenue. In addition, the autonomous public parking district has recently been giving a 10- to 20-minute grace period on meters and has brightened up the district's two-level parking structure with new lighting and fresh, graffiti-proof paint. +"We're all doing what we can to improve the situation here," said Stephanie Kavourias, executive director of the parking district. +Mr. Feiner said the town would invest up to $250,000 in the Hartsdale shopping district if landlords and merchants would take part in a partnership. "The problems we're having could be a blessing in disguise," he said. "We had an opportunity to reinvest in this street and come up with innovative approaches. We are totally optimistic. This is such a great challenge." +Mr. Feiner met recently with the Chamber of Commerce to articulate his ideas. But Phil Benincasa, the chamber's president, said that everyone had to pitch in and do more, including the town. +"There has been a lot of talk for a long time, but nothing concrete," said Mr. Benincasa, who bought the 70-year-old Aristocrat Terrace and Cleaners three years ago from its original owner. "There's a lot of 'we'll do this, we'll do that.' It's easy to say. It's much more difficult to do." + +LOAD-DATE: February 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Vacant stores along East Hartsdale Avenue, where Hartsdale merchants and residents fear a decrease in foot traffic and shoppers is affecting business, causing shops to shut down. (Photographs by Roberta Hershenson for The New York Times) (pg. 1); East Hartsdale Avenue is "turning into a food court," said Nick Cioppa of Deli Experience. (Roberta Hershenson for The New York Times) (pg. 4) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +60 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 2, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +POSTINGS: Part of $33 Million Expansion and Renovation; +Bronx Home for the Elderly To Get 8-Story Glass Tower + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 1; Column 2; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 388 words + +An eight-story glass tower is to be a major component of a $33 million expansion and renovation at the Jewish Home and Hospital at West Kingsbridge Road and University Avenue in the West Bronx. +"It's time to refresh and recreate the geriatric campus," said Harvey Finkelstein, chief executive officer of the facility for the elderly. + The project is being financed mainly by a $51.5 million bond issue from the New York State Dormitory Authority and a $3 million donation from the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation of Baltimore. (The bond issue is also going toward $17.5 million in outstanding mortgages; $4 million will go into a reserve fund). +The 4.5-acre Bronx campus, established in 1950 on the site of the former Hebrew Infant Asylum, has 816 beds in three interconnected buildings for skilled nursing care, as well as 300 apartments for the independent elderly in Kittay House across the garden. It also provides outpatient services to about 1,000 people. +The new 17,600-square-foot tower will sit atop four lower floors, already adjoining the 12-story Salzman Pavilion, one of the three interconnected buildings. The extra space will provide dining and lounge areas on the upper eight floors. The ground floor, now the site of the main dining room, will be turned into a Main Street where residents can get haircuts at a barbershop/beauty salon, shop in a boutique and lunch with visitors in a cafe. The Saul Alzheimer Disease Special Care Unit, built above the dining area four years ago, may be expanded later. +Another 5,200 square feet will be added atop the ground floor adjoining the five-story Zweig building to provide dining and family meeting meeting rooms on each floor. A total of 220,000 square feet will be renovated. +"The whole industry has recognized these are residential facilities that provide health care," said Bradford Perkins, president of Perkins Eastman Architects, in charge of the overall project. "We're trying to use furnishings with a residential feel." +The Jewish Home and Hospital, a nonprofit organization, has roots in a brownstone that once stood at 215 West 17th Street and housed four or five indigent elderly Jewish residents in 1870. The organization now has a total of 1,600 beds and 360 apartments in the Bronx, Manhattan and Mamaroneck in Westchester. + +LOAD-DATE: February 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing: Rendering of renovation at Jewish Home and Hospital in West Bronx. (Sven Johnson for Perkins Eastman Architects) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +61 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 2, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ON THE TOWNS + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 11; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 3644 words + +An opinionated guide to cultural and recreational goings-on around the state this week. To submit items for consideration, write to On the Towns, Sunday New Jersey Section, The New York Times, 229 West 43d Street, New York, N.Y. 10036, or send a fax to (212) 556-7219. + +MUSIC + +BERGEN MUSEUM OF ART AND SCIENCE Don Glaser Trio. Next Sunday at 2 P.M. Free. 327 East Ridgewood Avenue, Paramus. +(201) 265-1248 + +COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY Marvin Hamlisch, composer and pianist. Tuesday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $20. Pennington Road, Trenton. +(609) 771-2898. + +COMMUNITY THEATER OF MORRISTOWN Leslie Uggams and Ben Vereen. Thursday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $15 to $50. Family Concert Series, featuring cartoon classics. Next Sunday at 3 P.M. Tickets: $10. 100 South Street, Morristown. (201) 539-8008. + +GRACE NORTON ROGERS SCHOOL THEATER Eddie From Ohio and Peter Spink. Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $8 in advance, $10 at the door. Stockton Street and Oak Lane, Hights town. (609) 259-5764. + +JERSEY CITY MUSEUM The New Jersey Chamber Music Society performs "Joyful Voices: Sounds of Nature and the Spirit." Wednesday at 6 P.M. Free. 472 Jersey Avenue, Jersey City. (201) 547-4380. + +MONMOUTH UNIVERSITY Hesperus, an early-music ensemble. Today at 3 P.M. Tickets: $20; $18 for the elderly, alumni and students. Michael Brecker Quintet, featuring Pat Metheny, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette and Joey Calderazzo. Monday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $28. 400 Cedar Avenue, West Long Branch. (908) 571-3483 + +MONTCLAIR HIGH SCHOOL The Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by Christph von Dohnanyi, performing works by Schubert and Mahler. Today at 3:30 P.M. Tickets: $25 to $48. Unity Concerts of New Jersey, Community Auditorium, Park and Chestnut Streets, Montclair. (201) 744-6770. + +NEW JERSEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA "A Night at the Movies: Great Loves," music and clips from classic films. Friday at 8 P.M. at the State Theater, 15 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick. Saturday at 8:30 P.M. at the Count Basie Theater, 99 Monmouth Street, Red Bank. Next Sunday at 3 P.M. at Symphony Hall, 1030 Broad Street, Newark. Tickets: $20 to $40. (800) 255-3476 or +(201) 624-8203. + +PATERSON MUSEUM Willy Dalton, composer and guitarist, performs his "Riverwalk." Today at 4 P.M. Free. 2 Market Street, Paterson. (201) 881-3874. + +RICHARDSON AUDITORIUM Billy Taylor Trio. Friday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $17 to $26; students, $10 to $19. Princeton Pro Musica and the Princeton Girl Choir. Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $22 to $27; students and seniors $6 to $22. Alexander Hall, 126 Alexander Street, Princeton. (609) 258-5000. + +SHANGHAI JAZZ Frank D'Amelio Trio. Wednesday at 7 P.M. Michael Denny and the Centennial Dixieland Band. Thursday at 7 P.M. Nancy Nelson and Jerry Vezza. Friday at 7 P.M. No cover charge; $15 to $20 minimum in dining room only. 24 Main Street, Madison. (201) 822-2899. + +TURNING POINT Richie Havens. Tonight at 5:30 and 8:30. Tickets: $21. Roomful of Blues. Wednesday at 7:30 and 10 P.M. Tickets: $18. John Renbourn and Archie Fisher. Thursday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $17.50. Savoy Brown. Friday at 8 and 10:30 P.M. Tickets: $15. Hubert Sumlin Blues Band. Saturday at 8 and 11 P.M. Tickets: $12.50. Piermont Avenue, Piermont, N.Y. (914) 359-3219. + +THEATER + +AMERICAN STAGE COMPANY "The Gig," a musical about five amateur musicians who get their chance to live a dream when they travel to a Catskills resort to play a professional gig. Today and next Sunday at 2:30 P.M. Thursday and Friday at 8 P.M.; Saturday at 4 and 8:30 P.M. Tickets: $27 and $29. River Road and Route 4, Teaneck. +(201) 692-7744. + +BICKFORD THEATER "Mister Lincoln," by Herbert Mitgang. Through Feb. 23. Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 P.M.; Sundays at 2 P.M. Tickets: $17.50; $15.75 for the elderly; $15 for students and members; $7.50 for students on Thursdays. Morris Museum, 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. +(201) 538-8069. + +COUNT BASIE THEATER Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company and other traditional artists will perform to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Today, hands-on arts demonstrations at 1 P.M; stage performance at 3 P.M. Tickets: $10 to $15. 99 Monmouth Street, Red Bank. (908) 842-9000. + +CROSSROADS THEATER COMPANY "The Meeting," by Jeff Stetson. Through Feb. 16. Wednesdays and Fridays at 8 P.M.; Thursdays at 11 A.M. and 8 P.M.; Saturdays at 3 and 8 P.M.; Sundays at 3 P.M. Tickets: $22 to $32. 7 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick. (908) 249-5560. + +ELIZABETH PLAYHOUSE "Heaven Can Wait." Through April 14. Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 P.M.; Sundays at 2 P.M. Tickets: $6 and $8. 1100 East Jersey Street, Elizabeth. (908) 355-0077. + +ELMWOOD PLAYHOUSE "Glengarry Glen Ross." Through Saturday. Tonight at 7:30; Friday and Saturday at 8:30 P.M.; . Tickets: $12; $10 for students and the elderly on Friday and Sunday. 10 Park Street, Nyack, N.Y. (914) 638-0777. + +GEORGE STREET PLAYHOUSE "Lost in Yonkers," by Neil Simon. Today at 2 P.M.; Tuesday through Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $24 to $32; discounts for students and the elderly. 9 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick. (908) 246-7717. + +LUNA STAGE "The Homage That Follows," by Mark Medoff. Through next Sunday. Today and next Sunday at 2 P.M.; Thursday through Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $10 to $20. 7 Oak Place, Montclair. (201) 744-3309. + +PAPER MILL PLAYHOUSE "Out of Order." Through next Sunday. Today, Saturday and next Sunday at 3 and 8 P.M.; Wednesday through Friday at 8 P.M.; matinee Thursday at 2 P.M. Tickets: $31 to $46; $10 for students. Brookside Drive, Millburn. +(201) 376-4343. + +RITZ THEATER "Funny Girl." Through Saturday. Today at 2 P.M.; Friday and Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $12 to $15. 915 White Horse Pike, Oaklyn. (609) 858-5230. + +GALLERIES AND MUSEUMS + +ABC GALLERY "Mostly Flowers," watercolors by Betty Chardon. Through March 1. Mondays through Thursdays, 1 to 9 P.M.; Fridays, 1 to 5 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. +Lambertville Public Library, 6 Lilly Street, Lambertville. (609) 397-0275. + +AMERICAN LABOR MUSEUM "Faces From an American Dream," photographs by Martin J. Desht on the de-industrialization of America. Through Feb. 15. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 1 to 4 P.M. 83 Norwood Street, Haledon. (201) 595-7953. + +BERGEN MUSEUM OF ART AND SCIENCE "Joachim Oppenheimer: A Lens of Air," photographs. Through March 16. "Zhiyuan Cong: An Honest Bridge," contemporary scroll paintings in the Chinese tradition. Through March 29. "Time by Light," sundials by Robert Adzema. Though April 6. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. 327 East Ridgewood Avenue, Paramus. (201) 265-1248. + +TATUM PARK "Celebrating African-American History and Culture." Closes today.Noon to 5 P.M. Red Hill Activity Center, Red Hill Road, Middletown. (908) 842-4000. + +CAMERON GALLERY AT SOUFFLE "Order and Chaos," paintings by Sara Soffer. Through Feb. 28. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. 14 Farber Road, Princeton. (609) 987-2600. + +CHAMOT GALLERY "Fashion Art," by Mary Anne Vaccaro, Sung E. Whang and Alice Malloy. Closes today. "Geology," works by Spelman Evans Downer, painter, and Konstanze Priess, sculptor. Thursday through March 2. Tuesdays through Sundays, noon to 3 P.M. 111 First Street, Jersey City. (201) 610-1468. + +GALLERY OF SOUTH ORANGE "30 Years East, 30 Years West," steel wall sculpture by Paul Zawisha. "Suburban Disasters," paintings by Tim Heins. "Drawings and Paintings," by Larry McKim. All through Feb. 23. Wednesdays and Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 2 P.M. and 4 to 6 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 P.M. Free. Baird Center, 5 Mead Street, South +Orange. (201) 378-7754. + +GROUNDS FOR SCULPTURE "Associated Media," recent works by Don Bonham, Nancy Cohen, Don Porcaro and Carol Rosen. Through Feb. 28. Fridays through Sundays, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M.; Tuesdays through Thursdays, by appointment, 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. 18 Fairgrounds Road, Hamilton. (609) 586-0616. + +HIRAM BLAUVELT ART MUSEUM "Beyond the Edge and Deep Within," paintings by John Schoenherr, a wildlife artist. Through April 13. Wednesdays through Fridays 10 A.M. to 4 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays 2 P.M. to 5 P.M. Free. 705 Kindermack Road, Oradell. (201) 261-0012. + +HUNTERDON ART CENTER "Riva Helfond: Selected Paintings and Prints, 1930-1996." Through Feb. 23. Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 A.M. to 5 P.M. 7 Lower Center Street, Clinton. (908) 735-8415. + +J. RICHARDS GALLERY "Charles Levier, the Twilight Years," paintings and watercolors. Saturday through Feb. 27. Opening reception next Sunday, noon to 4 P.M. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M.; Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. 64 East Palisade Avenue, Englewood. (201) 871-6940. + +JERSEY CITY MUSEUM "Subversions/Affirmations: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, A Survey," 40 paintings, works on paper and mixed-media works. Through Feb. 15. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10:30 A.M to 5 P.M.; Wednesdays, 10:30 A.M. to 8 P.M. 472 Jersey Avenue, Jersey City. (201) 547-4514. + +JERSEY CITY STATE COLLEGE Watercolors by Elaine Lanagan. Through Friday. Tomorrow through Friday, 11 A.M. to 4 P.M. Artspace, Hepburn Hall, Room 323, 2039 Kennedy Boulevard, Jersey City. (201) 200-3441. + +KENT PLACE SCHOOL "After the Fall," paintings by Woody Jackson. Through Friday. Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit. (908) 273-0900. +MACCULLOCH HALL HISTORICAL MUSEUM "A Public Office Is a Public Trust: Images of the Election of 1884," featuring campaign memorabilia, drawings and wood engravings by the caricaturist Thomas Nast. Through April 20. Admission: $3; $2 for students and the elderly. Thursdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 P.M. 45 Macculloch Avenue, Morristown. +(201) 538-2404. + +MARSHA CHILD CONTEMPORARY "Through Eastern Eyes," paintings, drawings, etchings and sculpture from Eastern Europe. Through Feb. 10. Fridays and Saturdays, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. and by appointment. 240 Nassau Street, Princeton. (609) 497-7330. + +MONMOUTH COUNTY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION "Politics as Usual: Campaigns and Elections, 1789 to 1996." Through June 3. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 4 P.M. Admission: $2; $1.50 for the elderly. 70 Court Street, Freehold. (908) 462-1466. On the World Wide Web: www.monmouth.com/mcha/. + +MONTCLAIR ART MUSEUM "Reflecting America: Highlights From the Permanent Collection." Through July 27. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 11 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Sundays and Thursdays, 1 to 5 P.M. Admission: $4; $3 for students with ID and the elderly. 3 South Mountain Avenue, Montclair. (201) 746-5555. + +MORRIS COUNTY LIBRARY "World War I: The Forgotten War," featuring collectibles and memorabilia. Through March 7. Mondays though Thursdays, 9 A.M. to 9 P.M.; Fridays and Saturdays, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Sundays, 12 to 5 P.M. 30 East Hanover Avenue, Whippany. (201) 285-6979. + +MORRIS MUSEUM "Focus on Rodin," 21 bronzes and three works on paper by the French artist. Through April 27. "Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry," featuring works by Jim Goldberg, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, Jack Radcliffe and Kathy Vargas. Through Feb. 23. Sculpture Courtyard: three steel sculptures by Peter Vanni. Through June 30. Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M.; Mondays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 8 P.M. Admission: $4; $2 for the elderly. 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. (201) 538-0454. + +NABISCO GALLERY "The 66th National Print Exhibition" by the Society of American Graphic Artists. Through Feb. 19. Daily, noon to 4 P.M. River Road and DeForest Avenue, East Hanover. (201) 503-3238. + +NEW JERSEY CENTER FOR VISUAL ARTS "Pastel Landscapes," by Peter Homitzky. Through March 3. "Threads: Fiber Art in the 90's," works by 34 textile artists. Through March 2. Mondays through Fridays, noon to 4 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 to 4 P.M. +68 Elm Street, Summit. (908) 273-9121. + +NEW JERSEY STATE MUSEUM "The Great Russian Dinosaurs," a traveling exhibition featuring 24 full skeletons from sites across Russia and Mongolia. Through June 1. "The Buffalo Soldier: The African-American Soldier in the United States Army, 1866-1912." Through March 2. "Major Works/Major Gifts: Selections From the Fine Arts Collection, 1966-1996," including works by Milton Avery, John Marin, Georgia O'Keefe and Gordon Parks. Through May 4. "Nikon's Small World," 20 prize-winning photomicrographs. Through March 2. Paintings by Ann Starkey. Through March 9. Photographs by Laurinda Stockwell. Through March 23. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 9 A.M. to 4:45 P.M.; Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. Museum admission by donation; special admission for "The Great Russian Dinosaurs": $5; $3 for children under 12 and the elderly. 205 West State Street, Trenton. (609) 292-6464. + +NEWARK MUSEUM "Quilt Masterpieces," quilts from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries from the museum's collection. Through Feb. 23. "Portugal: Here and There," photographs of Newark's Ironbound district, a predominantly Portuguese neighborhood. Through Feb. 16. "The Printed Pot: Transfer-Printed Tablewares, 1750-1990," featuring 100 pieces of household pottery and porcelain. Through 1997. "African Design: Heirs to the Trans-Saharan Trade," with Islamic amulets, weapons from North and West Africa, jewelry, textiles and pottery. Through June. "Cooking for the Gods: The Art of Home Ritual in Bengal." Through July. Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. 49 Washington Street, Newark. (201) 596-6550. + +NOYES MUSEUM "Between Dreams," drawings by Patricia O'Maille. Through March 23. "The New Jersey Oyster: Relics of a Fading Industry," featuring harvesting tools, antique oyster tins, photographs and miniatures of famous regional oyster boats. Through Feb. 23. "Tramp Art and Whimsies From the Ciardelli Collection." Through April 13. "Dust Shaped Hearts: Photographic Portraits by Don Camp." Through March 23. Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 A.M. to 4 P.M. Admission: $3; $1.50 for the elderly. Lily Lake Road, Oceanville. (609) 652-8848. + +PLAINSBORO PUBLIC LIBRARY "Sketchbook Pages," paintings by Yong Zhou. Through Thursday. Today, 1 to 5 P.M.; tomorrow, 9 A.M. to 5:30 P.M.; Tuesday through Thursday, 9 A.M. to 8:30 P.M. Free. Municipal Complex, 641 Plainsboro Road, Plainsboro. +(609) 275-2897. + +PRINTMAKING COUNCIL "Fish Tales" and "Artists' Handmade Book Project." Through March 22. North Branch Station, 440 River Road, Somerville. (908) 625-2110. + +ROCKLAND COMMUNITY COLLEGE Relics from the Henrietta Marie, a slave ship that sank in the Caribbean in 1700. Through Feb. 28. Mondays through Thursdays, 8 A.M. to 10 P.M.; Fridays, 8 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Saturdays, 9 A.M. to 2 P.M. Library Media Center, 145 College Road, Suffern, N.Y. (914) 574-4409. + +TOMASULO GALLERY "The Graven Image," an exhibition devoted to the totemic roots of modern art. Through February 27. Union County College, 1033 Springfield Avenue, Cranford. (908) 709-7155. + +ZIMMERLI ART MUSEUM "Lit From Within: Amish Quilts of Lancaster County," featuring 34 quilts made between 1860 and 1950. Through Feb. 16. "Aleksandr Arefiev: Father of Leningrad Nonconformist Art." Closes today. "Four Centuries of Prints: Selections From the Permanent Collection," including works by Durer, Rembrandt, Hogarth and Goya and introducing the basic methods and history of print production, and "Recent Acquisitions to the Rutgers Archives for Printmaking Studios," featuring prints by the American Indian artists Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Truman Lowe and James Lavadour. Both through Feb. 16. Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. Rutgers University, George and Hamilton Streets, New Brunswick. (908) 932-7237. + +THEATER + +COMMUNITY THEATER "Cartoon Classics," a family concert of cartoon music featuring members of the New Philharmonic. Next Sunday at 3 P.M. Tickets: $10. 100 South Street, Morristown. (212) 420-8202. + +GREAT SWAMP OUTDOOR EDUCATION CENTER Maple sugaring, a demonstration of how to tap a maple tree and boil the sap to make syrup. Saturdays and Sundays at 2 P.M. Through Feb. 23. Free. 247 Southern Boulevard, Chatham. (201) 635-6629. + +J.C.C. OF METROPOLITAN NEW JERSEY "Sounds Like Fun," a concert series. Sundays at 2 P.M. Today, brass; next Sunday, woodwinds; April 6, strings; April 13, orchestra concert. Tickets: $34 for the series; $8 for individual tickets. Robbins Hall, 760 Northfield Avenue, West Orange. (201) 736-3200. + +LIBERTY SCIENCE CENTER "Special Effects," Imax film views behind the scenes of "Star Wars," "Jumanji," "Kazaam!" and "Independence Day." Through March. Daily on the hour. Omni Theater. "Busytown," a "community" created by Richard Scarry, with a factory, grocery store, shipyard and power plant, for ages 3 to 6. Through May 4. Tuesdays through Sundays, 9:30 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. Admission: $9.50; $8.50 for students and the elderly; $5.50 under age 12. 251 Phillip Street, Jersey City. (201) 200-1000. + +MONMOUTH MUSEUM "Changing Cultures: From the Lenape to the Urban Age, 1400-1900," exploring the history of America through changes in family life, from the Lenape through the Victorian era. Through June 1998. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. Becker Children's Wing, +761 Newman Springs Road, Lincroft. +(908) 747-2266. + +MORRIS MUSEUM Drop-in workshop on sculpture with clay, in conjunction with the "Focus on Rodin" exhibition. Through April 27. Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Admission: $4; $2 for the elderly. 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. (201) 538-0454. + +NEW JERSEY CHILDREN'S MUSEUM An interactive center for ages 2 to 8. "Mardi Gras Weekend," crafts and festivities. Saturday and next Sunday. Museum hours: Mondays through Fridays, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. Admission: $7. 599 Industrial Avenue, Paramus. +(201) 262-2638. + +NEW JERSEY STATE MUSEUM "The Great Russian Dinosaurs." Through June 1. "The New and Improved Hubble Space Telescope." Through next Sunday. Laser concerts on weekends through May 11. Tickets for Friday and Saturday laser shows: $7; $5 for children 12 and younger. Tickets for Sundays: $4. Museum hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 9 A.M. to 4:45 P.M.; Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. Admission by donation. Special admission for dinosaur exhibition: $5; $3 for children and the elderly. 205 West State Street, Trenton. (609) 292-6464. + +NEWARK MUSEUM The Dreyfuss Planetarium presents "Partnership Earth," exploring the planet from its volcanic birth. For ages 6 to 10. Through Feb. 23. Saturdays and Sundays at 2 and 4 P.M. Tickets: $2; $1 for children, students and the elderly. "Explore Korea: A Visit to Grandfather's House," an interactive exhibition exploring daily life of a Korean family in the 1930's. Through Friday. Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. Free. 49 Washington Street, Newark. (201) 596-6550. + +TEMPLE EMETH David Grover and the Big Bear Band, of "Grover's Corner" on PBS, plays music with environmental and social lessons. Today at 2:30 P.M. $7 suggested donation. 1666 Windsor Road, Teaneck. (201) 837-3852. + +TRAILSIDE NATURE AND SCIENCE CENTER "A Collection of Cold Constellations." Children 6 and older will explore the constellations of the winter sky. Sundays at 2 P.M. Through Feb. 16. "Dinosaurs and Space Dust," examines the connections between dinosaur extinction and outer space. Today at 2 P.M. Admission: $3; $2.55 for the elderly. Groundhog Day, today at 2 P.M. Donations accepted. Planetarium, 452 New Providence Road, Mountainside. (908) 789-3670. + +ZIMMERLI ART MUSEUM "Bears All Around," an exhibition of bear illustrations from children's literature. Through Feb. 16. Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. Rutgers University, George and Hamilton Streets, New Brunswick. (908) 932-7237. + +SPOKEN WORD + +BARNES & NOBLE Charlotte Mandel and Victoria Repetto, poets. Thursday at 7:30 P.M. Free. Caldor Shopping Center, Route 46 West, West Paterson. (201) 445-4589. + +BORDERS BOOKS AND MUSIC Authors of "Feeling Light: The First How-To Holistic Solution to Weight Loss and Wellness." Friday at 8 P.M. Free. Bill Bradley, former Senator and author of "Time Present, Time Past," a memoir. Saturday at 4 P.M. Free. Route 1 at Province Line Road, Princeton. (609) 514-0040. + +ENGLEWOOD LIBRARY Susan Dworkin will read and discuss her new novel, "The Book of Candy." Thursday at 8 P.M. Free. 31 Engle Street, Englewood. (201) 568-2215. + +MONTCLAIR ART MUSEUM Keith Christiansen, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will discuss the work of the 18th-century Italian painter Tiepolo in conjunction with an exhibition at the Met. Friday at 7:30 P.M. Tickets: $10; $8 for members. 3 South Mountain Avenue, Montclair. (201) 746-5555. + +RECTO VERSO BOOKSTORE Eliot Katz and Denise Oliver, poets. Thursday at 7:30 P.M. Free. 90 Albany Street, New Brunswick. (908) 247-9791. + +SUMEI MULTI-DISCIPLINARY ARTS CENTER Amiri Baraka, Maria Maziotti Gillan, Sander Zulauf, poets. Today at 2 P.M. Tickets: $5. (908) 931-1343. + +ETC. + +DEFENSIVE DRIVING An eight-hour course in two sessions. Tomorrow and Feb. 10, and March 3 and 10, 9 A.M. to 1 P.M. Fee: $15. Ocean County Social Services Offices, 1027 Hooper Avenue, Building 5, third floor, Toms River. (908) 929-2130. + +JCC ON THE PALISADES "Sensory Meditation," a workshop on diet, excercise and meditation. Wednesday at 10 AM. $6 non-members; $4 members. 411 East Clinton Avenue, Tenafly. (201) 569-7900. + +UNITARIAN SOCIETY OF RIDGEWOOD "Beyond the Planets: Male-Female Communication," a workshop on sex differences and increasing understanding between men and women. Saturday 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. 115 Cottage Place, Ridgewood. (201) 801-0064 or (201) 848-0263. + +LOAD-DATE: February 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Welcoming the Ox The Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company will be featured in a festival celebrating the Chinese New Year 4695. The festival will also include demonstrations of calligraphy and painting, acrobatics and music. COUNT BASIE THEATER Today. Hands-on arts demonstrations at 1 P.M; stage performance at 3 P.M. Tickets: $10 to $15. 99 Monmouth Street, Red Bank. (908) 842-9000. (pg. 11); In From Cleveland Unity Concerts presents the Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by Christoph von Dohnanyi, in a program including the Andante in B Minor from Schubert's Symphony No. 10, and the Adagio from Mahler's Symphony No. 10. MONTCLAIR HIGH SCHOOL Today at 3:30 P.M. Tickets: $25 to $48. Community Auditorium, Park and Chestnut Streets, Montclair. (201) 744-6770. (pg. 13); Focus on Rodin The Morris Museum will present 21 bronze sculptures and three works on paper by Rodin, including "Paolo and Francesca," above, and his most ambitious work, "The Gates of Hell."; MORRIS MUSEUM Through April 27. Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M.; Mondays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 8 P.M. Admission: $4; $2 for the elderly. 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. (201) 538-0454. (pg. 14) + +TYPE: List + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +62 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 2, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +MUTUAL FUNDS; +A.A.R.P. Is Adding Some Spice To Its Menu + +BYLINE: By TIMOTHY MIDDLETON + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 7; Column 1; Money and Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1285 words + +THERE'S conservative -- and then there's conservative. +Or so retirees have been telling the American Association of Retired Persons. When it comes to investing, they clearly want mutual funds that are sturdy and capable of handling sudden swerves, much as a well-built car can, but many of them also want investments with a little zip. + After hearing that message repeatedly in telephone calls, surveys and focus groups, the A.A.R.P. plans to add a half-dozen mutual funds, mostly in the stock category, to its investment offerings this week. Many of the new models are designed for senior citizens who are eager to travel a bit faster down the investing highway. +The A.A.R.P. group already has seven stock and bond funds and two money market funds -- all managed by Scudder, Stevens & Clark of Boston -- with a total of more than $13 billion in assets. While the group's stock and bond assets have more than tripled since the end of 1990, assets in the industry have more than quadrupled during that time. To pick up the pace for more sophisticated investors, the group is adding funds like small-company and international stock portfolios. For novices, it is adding one-stop "funds of funds," mutual funds that invest in other funds. +"Our members are looking for more variety in investment options," said Wayne F. Haefer, director of the association's membership group in Washington. +NTIL now, the group has kept its roster small, in part to keep things simple, and its offerings very conservative, to match its investors' distaste for risk. +"There are no standout A.A.R.P. funds, but there are no dogs, either," said Steve Savage, editor of Value Line Mutual Fund Survey. "Their performance ranks right in the middle, while the risks they take are below average." +For example, the recent favorite of investors, A.A.R.P. Growth and Income, with more than $4 billion in assets, declined in only one year since it started in late 1984. The fund lost 2.07 percent in 1990, but in every other year, including the generally dismal 1987, it posted gains. It has often trailed broad market gauges, however, like the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index. +Key to the fund's management has been an emphasis on stocks that pay hefty dividends. In fact, all the A.A.R.P. stock funds look for high yields; such stocks tend to hold up better in market downturns because of their annual payouts. Maintaining a conservative bent, the new funds will also emphasize such stocks. "If there's one thing we've learned from our members," Mr. Haefer said, "it's that they don't want to lose money in a fund." +The target audience for the funds is the 33 million members of the A.A.R.P., which is open to people 50 and older. Although anyone may invest in the funds, fewer than 1 percent of the shareholders are not members of the group, which represents more than half the country's over-50 population. +The Mutual Fund Monthly newsletter, published by Stolper & Company, an investment firm in San Diego, likes the group's longstanding bond fund, A.A.R.P. GNMA and U.S. Treasury. For investors using the newsletter's Sanctuary Portfolio, its most conservative model, Stolper recommends that half of all assets go to this fund. +"Anyone who's really concerned about preservation of capital should have at least 50 percent of their money in something very stable, and that's what this fund is," Barbara Malone, a principal in Stolper, said. "We've met with the manager of the fund and he clearly understands this is the goal of his investors." +Vowing not to lose sight of that goal, the association and Scudder created funds both for experienced investors who are eager to build a diversified portfolio and for beginning investors who want some stock exposure without creating their own portfolios. +Among the six new offerings, half are souped-up portfolios of stocks, one is a high-octane bond fund and the other two are funds of funds. The group's shift to equity funds has been gradual. Fixed-income assets now account for less than half of the A.A.R.P. funds' total assets, down from about 60 percent in 1993. +For investors clamoring for an index fund, Scudder and the retirees' association have hit upon an answer. The A.A.R.P. U.S. Stock Index fund will own only S.& P. 500 stocks, but, by emphasizing issues with high dividends, the fund will yield at least 25 percent more than the index's average. Bankers Trust, which specializes in enhancing indexes, will serve as subadviser. +The fund should duplicate the returns of the S.& P. benchmark when stocks are rising, said Daniel B. Gross, who oversees product development for Scudder's United States mutual fund business. But its real value should be more stability when the stock market heads south. "About 70 percent of the time this fund should do better than the S.& P. in down markets," he said. +The A.A.R.P. Small Company Stock fund, while confining itself to companies with market capitalization below $1 billion, will avoid initial public offerings and other high-risk issues in favor of long-established companies with a history of regular dividends. About half the securities in the Russell 2000 index of small-cap stocks pay dividends. The fund expects to yield about 2 percent. +The A.A.R.P. International Stock fund will choose from stocks that pay dividends, and Scudder officials say this universe contains at least 1,000 issues. Stocks that yield 25 percent more than the average in their country's markets will be the investments of choice. +A new fixed-income portfolio, called A.A.R.P. Bond Fund for Income, is designed to provide a yield of up to one percentage point more than the flagship GNMA portfolio. It will invest primarily in investment-grade bonds, but as much as 35 percent of the holdings can be below investment grade. +"Allowing investors access to these asset classes allows them to spread their risk around, and often to earn as good or better a return at the same or lower risk," Mr. Savage of Value Line said. +The A.A.R.P. funds generally have lower expenses than the industry's average, but they can't quite keep up with the Vanguard Group, known for its low-cost funds. For example, the A.A.R.P. Growth and Income fund charges investors 0.69 percent of assets a year, while the giant Vanguard U.S. Growth fund keeps expenses to 0.43 percent. +OUNDING out the new A.A.R.P. offerings are two "funds of funds" that will invest in stocks and bonds and that are intended for beginners, a shrinking but still significant market. About 50 percent of the investors in A.A.R.P. funds are first-time investors, down from about 75 percent a few years ago. +"Some people are frankly overwhelmed by the investment choices available to them," said Linda C. Coughlin, chairwoman of the A.A.R.P. program at Scudder. +For investors in this group who are more aggressive, the A.A.R.P. Diversified Growth Portfolio will invest 60 to 80 percent of its assets in other A.A.R.P. stock funds, with the rest in fixed-income funds. For the more cautious, the A.A.R.P. Diversified Income Portfolio will put most of its assets in fixed-income funds but at least 20 percent in equity funds. +Based on a study by the group in 1995, people who invest in A.A.R.P. funds have lower incomes (a household median of $36,972) than retirees in general ($51,025). They are also less likely to work full time or part time and tend to be older. +If the new strategy works and the group attracts more investors, the payoff could be substantial not only for Scudder but for the association, too. Each year, the A.A.R.P. gets back a portion of the assets under management in the funds, or about $8.5 million based on its current $13.65 billion in assets. + +LOAD-DATE: February 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graphs: "Taking Stock" +The AARP funds from Scudder Stevens & Clark have not grown as rapidly as the industry as a whole. Recognizing the growing interest in stock funds, the group is adding several funds this week. + +Percentage change in assets since 1990 + +AARP funds 215% +All funds 326% + + +Assets in AARP funds +(Dollars in millions) + 1990 1996 +Stock funds: $439 $6,023 +Bond funds: $3,650 $7,070 +Money market: $482 $554 + + Total $4,571 $13,647 + +(Source: Morningstar Inc., Scudder Stevens & Clark) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +63 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 2, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Human Rites; +Africa's Culture War: Old Customs, New Values + +BYLINE: By HOWARD W. FRENCH + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 1; Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1237 words + +DATELINE: ADIDOME, Ghana + +FOR 16 years, Mark Wisdom, a 54-year-old Baptist preacher and a native Ghanaian, has been waging a lonely campaign to end a form of slavery here as old as the culture of the Ewe peasants inhabiting the dusty villages of this poor corner of Ghana. +Ancient Ewe religious custom holds that for serious offenses like murder, rape and theft, the spirits can be appeased only by the enslavement of young virgins from the offender's family in the shrines of traditional priests. While hardly legal, the bondage of such girls, including their sexual enslavement to the priests, is a custom whose roots run far deeper than the paper-thin veneer of Western law that nominally governs life in this west African nation. + Three hours away in Ghana's modern capital, Accra, responding to recent press reports that have brought the practice of ritual slavery to light, legislators have been debating how to eradicate a custom that may victimize as many as 10,000 girls. But Mr. Wisdom knows better than to expect much from this; if laws and Government proclamations were enough to truly change the way people live, he said, Africa would already be a much different place. +"Africa's traditions were formed over many generations," he said. "It is not enough to be disgusted with practices like these. It requires very gradual persuasion and lots of patient work to make people change their ways." +Mr. Wisdom's campaign against slavery -- not to mention witchcraft, demon worship and ritual sacrifice -- is emblematic of a much broader struggle taking place across Africa. Throughout much of the continent, from the ritual slavery of the Ewe to female genital mutilation to polygamy, ancient practices that strike both Westerners and many Africans as abhorrent coexist side by side with modernity, and show no sign of imminent abandonment. +The clash between modern values shaped by colonialism and contact with the West and ancestral ones is by no means unique to Africa. In China, for example, the last imperial eunuch only recently died, and in rural villages elderly women whose feet were bound as infants can still be found, relics of another time. Under the harsh interpretation of Islamic law governing Afghanistan today, criminals are often punished with amputation. +But in Africa, where crushing poverty is more widespread than anywhere else and the inroads of literacy are minimal, many seemingly anachronistic customs appear destined to die the slowest of deaths. While rationalism and material progress are taken for granted in the West, they have very little bearing on views of the world shaping life in much of Africa. Here clinging to the belief that death is the result of evil spells rather than accidents or disease provides comfort in a world where life is short and, for many, brutish still. +There are few better examples of the strong hold of old views than in Sierra Leone, another west African nation, where a small group of women has been working, with little success so far, to end the practice of female genital mutilation. +Female genital mutilation or circumcision involves the excision of the clitoris and the cutting of other genital parts to diminish sexual pleasure and supposedly thus insure the woman's fidelity to husband and family. While it exists in many African societies, elsewhere on the continent it is usually confined to specific regions or ethnic groups. In Sierra Leone, as many as 90 percent of women are thought to suffer the practice, making it easy to isolate the few who advocate its abolition as a suspect and foreign-influenced fringe. + + + +Defenders of the Ancient + When a newspaper in the capital, Freetown, launched a series of articles against the custom, it became the target of a hostile protest movement by a group of women sworn to defend the rite. Since then, conservative elements in Sierra Leonean society, mostly led by women, have enjoyed great success drumming up support for genital mutilation, warning against outsiders who seek to impose alien values. +"Almost nothing is happening to stop circumcision," fumed Claudia Anthony, a reporter at the newspaper, For Di People (the name is in the local creole), who has often written on the subject. "No one wants to speak out. People are afraid of taking unpopular measures." +Ms. Anthony's complaint is echoed by frustrated foreign diplomats. "This kind of practice is just plain wrong," one United Nations official in Sierra Leone said. "When are we going to see some Sierra Leonean women, articulate people who have undergone this experience themselves, step forward and condemn it?" +As satisfying as placing a country on an international blacklist might be for some, many Africans who oppose genital mutilation and other traditional rites warn that such a tack would be counterproductive. +"For me, you cannot bring a Western approach, lecturing people about their customs," said Zainab Bangura, a women's rights advocate in Sierra Leone. "The more you decide you are going to take something like this on, the more you are going to face resistance. Instead, a dialogue has to be established, and women here have to understand that Sierra Leone is part of a global community and should not be left out." +Mrs. Bangura said ending female genital mutilation in her country would require an understanding of some of the rituals that surround it, and even rehabilitating them. Traditionally, she said, genital mutilation was the culmination of a months-long retreat into the bush known as Bondo -- a sort of finishing school run exclusively by women in which one generation passed on its knowledge of womanhood to the next. Over time, however, such retreats withered into gatherings lasting only a few days, in which traditional teachings faded, leaving the rite of genital mutilation as an exaggerated centerpiece of what was once a rich rite of passage. +"We have to let them know that we are not coming to take something away from them," Mrs. Bangura said. "We could begin by telling women that Bondo has been trivialized by reducing it to a circumcision ceremony. Instead, the institution could be modernized by teaching abstinence or sexual education to young girls." +Then again, different approaches to changing local customs in Africa have been tried across centuries. Competing for converts, many Protestant sects roundly denounced traditional African religious rites as the work of the devil. Roman Catholics, meanwhile, if no less accepting of animist customs, tended to stress their own teachings and spend far less energy castigating Africans for their beliefs. +Looking back at the limited success of either approach, it's not unreasonable to conclude that by itself neither would get very far today. Without education for all and a rise in living standards neither new laws nor angry sermons, like those delivered by Mr. Wisdom at his bamboo-walled church here, will make much difference. +In the Ghanaian coastal village of Tefle, where ritual slavery is still practiced, the wizened men who gather daily in the cooling air of late afternoon seemed to make this point over and over when asked how they felt about a measure being debated in Parliament aimed at wiping out the practice. +"Our customs go back a very long way and they are what we are comfortable with," one said, exasperated by an outsider's questions. "Call us pagans, but we will die happy with the way we are." + +LOAD-DATE: February 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: A 12-year-old girl, given up as a slave to atone for a crime by a member of her family, stands at the beck and call of a traditional priest in Tefle, Ghana. (Robert Grossman for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +64 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 3, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Church's Role in Serbia Protests May Block Reforms + +BYLINE: By CHRIS HEDGES + +SECTION: Section A; Page 3; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 861 words + +DATELINE: BELGRADE, Serbia, Feb. 2 + +The Rev. Stevo Vlacic, his deep baritone voice reciting a liturgy that has changed little in the last millennium, stood in his gold embroidered vestments today and began a two-hour Mass for his standing congregation. +Candles flickered in long black metal troughs filled with sand. Oil lamps, with dim flames, hung from the ceiling. The sweet smell of incense wafted up toward the vaulted ceiling. Women, their heads covered with scarves, and elderly men lined up to kiss a framed picture of Jesus on the side of the church and a large, graphic painting of the dead Christ on the cross. The soft cadence of the priest's voice filled the building. + The service was as old as Serbian society itself. But in the last few weeks, priests like Father Vlacic have emerged from their parishes to take a leading role in the anti-Government protest movement sweeping the country. The marriage of the Serbian Orthodox Church and the demonstrators has thrust the institution to the forefront of the political arena as it did a decade ago when the church was involved in the birth of the Serbian nationalist movement. +The church has emerged as a major force in the protests over the annulment by the Socialist Government of opposition victories in municipal elections. The church involvement has deeply alarmed those who would like to see the country move toward democracy. They see the church as the main repository of Serbian nationalism and as deeply hostile to secular, Western political systems and ideas. Critics fear that the church will prove a powerful force in blunting reforms that would usher in a democratic, open society. +"The church is on the side of truth," said the 50-year-old black-robed priest as he sat after Mass in the parish house next to the church. "And the truth is that the Communists stole the votes. America, unfortunately for us, supports these Communists who run our Government because it needs them." +The Serbian Orthodox Church, during five centuries of Ottoman occupation and during the last 50 years of Communist Government, was the guardian of Serbian national identity. It was the blunt ideological instrument that President Slobodan Milosevic wielded in his drive to wrest power from the Communist bosses 10 years ago. And many priests, including Father Vlacic, enthusiastically backed the Bosnian Serb army in the war against the Muslim-led Government in Bosnia, often traveling to bless the troops and meet with the Bosnian Serb leadership. +"The Orthodox church does not know the meaning of reform," said Miladin Zivotic, a former philosophy professor at Belgrade University. "Its theology precludes individual relations with God. It calls on its followers to be collective, unified supplicants." +Professor Zivotic contends that the Orthodox theology negates modern concepts of free speech and tolerance. "The church's ideology is common to that of all authoritarian ideologies," he said. "It was because of the Orthodox church that this society was easily convinced that it had to become obedient followers of the Communist Party." +The imprint of the church is increasingly felt in the street protests, where marchers carry crosses, candles and posters with saints and icons. Patriarch Pavle, the leader of the Serbian Orthodox Church, rebuffed pleas by university students for support when the protests began in late November. But in the last month he has addressed the protesters on at least three occasions, led a procession through the streets of the capital on the holiday honoring St. Sava, the founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and blessed demonstrators on the Orthodox Christmas. +But by bringing the church into the protest movement, the opposition seems to have tied its fortunes to an institution that calls for a unified Serbian state that would include Serb-held Bosnia, which would violate the peace agreement. The opposition has also made it more difficult to reach out to the one third of the country that is not Serb. +The church, which was silent when Bosnian Serb forces carried out the brutal siege of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, adamantly defends the war in Bosnia. Church leaders repeatedly condemn what they term the "genocide" by Muslims and Croats against the Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia. Many in the hierarchy support the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who was indicted by an international court for war crimes. +The theological precepts of the church, firmly rooted in the patriarchal Byzantine world of several centuries ago, may only add to the confused political debate as the country struggles to define its future. +"The Roman Catholic church announced in the Second Vatican Council that it was the duty of believers to support democracy and human rights," said Mirko Djordjevic, a retired literature professor who just finished a book about the Serbian Orthodox Church. "But the church in the east has never addressed these issues and found itself unprepared with the fall of Communism. +"The Orthodox church has yet to formulate answers to the questions posed by this century," he said. "It lacks a social doctrine. It is unable to deal with the next millennium." + +LOAD-DATE: February 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +65 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 5, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Metropolitan Diary + +BYLINE: By Ron Alexander + +SECTION: Section C; Page 2; Column 4; Living Desk + +LENGTH: 480 words + + +DEAR DIARY: +I was staying in a hotel in San Francisco overlooking Chinatown a few years ago on the night the Chinese New Year started. At the appointed hour an explosive din from fireworks rose to my upper-story window. I looked down in time to see a bewhiskered elderly Chinese man light a string of firecrackers that landed under a parked car. +The car began smoldering, and wisps of smoke appeared inside the passenger compartment. A fire extinguisher was no match, and the Fire Department was called. Unable to see if the car was occupied because of the smoke inside, the firefighters broke the windows with axes. + At that point flames erupted and the firefighters turned their attention to the fuel lines and tank, chopping mightily through the fenders. +The elderly man watched it all, even as firefighters left and the police arrived to examine the blackened wreckage, and he gave the police a breathless description of what happened, all with fervent admission of responsibility. An officer listened, then walked over to the car and, under the charred remains of a windshield wiper, placed a ticket, explaining to the old man: "Hey, no problem. This car was illegally parked." DENNIS JAMES + +Dear Diary: +Crossing Amsterdam Avenue on my way home, I saw a fellow approaching his parked truck, marked Jerrick's Window Washing Service. When asked for a business card, he replied, "Sorry, I don't do apartments." JOY ALISON WEINER + +Bulletin from Living Life in the Fast Lane: a course offered at the 92d Street Y entitled, "Intimacy: How to Build It, How to Sustain It." +"One session: 8-10 P.M." CHERYL CHALMERS + +Dear Diary: +The other night at the video store I heard a man shout: "Here it is! 'Enola Gay.' I told you!" His wife had no idea what he was talking about, but the woman in the line in front of them did. "The movie about the atomic bomb, right?" she asked. +"Yeah," the man replied. "I told her about it when we saw that play where the girl was Enola and the guy was Gay. Remember?" he asked his wife. She obviously didn't, but by now the other woman was curious. +"Was it 'Love, Valour and Compassion,' " she asked. +"I don't know," the man whined. "But it was long! Remember?" +By now the wife had checked out "The Bridges of Madison County" and their new acquaintance was following them out the door. +"Maybe it was 'Jeffrey,' " she suggested. The man shook his head in frustration, as the eager woman tried one more time -- "Boys in the Band" -- before giving up and heading in the opposite direction. +Then it hit me! I rushed out to the street but they were gone. Smiling, I went back inside to rent the video of "Show Boat," which has a leading lady named "Nola" and her beau, "Gaylord." +I regret I couldn't catch the guy, but the movie was great. Now, I'm waiting for "Enola Gay: The Musical." RICK McKAY + +LOAD-DATE: February 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Phil Marden) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +66 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 6, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +SENIOR CLASS; +How One Man Confronted And Conquered Impotence + +BYLINE: By ROBERT W. STOCK + +SECTION: Section C; Page 4; Column 1; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 1546 words + +MY new doctor told me he was sending over a questionnaire before my appointment. The first page turned out to be a snap: marital status, date of birth, education. The next few pages were something else again: During sexual activity are you preoccupied about getting and maintaining an erection? How often do you have sexual intercourse or attempt to have sexual intercourse? Are your erections straight? +Seeing those questions there in black and white gave me pause: What had I let myself in for? + I had called the doctor because I hoped he could help me with a case of creeping impotence. My erections were getting smaller, softer and less reliable. I had seen ads for gadgets that promised to make everything right again and read articles about testosterone patches that supposedly did wonders for one's libido. I had my doubts, but I was determined to stop the creep, and that was how I ended up on the doorstep of Dr. E. Douglas Whitehead, a Manhattan urologist. +He has no lack of potential patients. Some 30 million American men suffer from partial or chronic erectile dysfunction, as the doctors call it, and the majority are older than 65. But only 10 percent of impotent men seek medical help. Many assume nothing can or should be done; older men often accept impotence as an inevitable part of aging, which it is not, and buy into the widespread notion that sexuality in the old is distasteful and unnatural. Doctors tend not to take the problem seriously. +Most older men don't know what to expect if they seek treatment or are afraid of the treatment itself. They are often ashamed even to consider exposing their weakness to strangers. +My generation -- I'm 67 -- was raised to believe that the performance aspect of sex defined our manhood. Failure would be crushing, unthinkable. We were also told that 90 percent of impotence was psychological. +Somehow, the thought that the problem could be psychological made it more of a personal failure, something you should be able to control. Today, the experts say that the vast majority of impotence in men of any age is organic in nature -- a problem with blood vessels or the nervous system. When I decided to seek treatment, I prayed for a physical diagnosis. It would be like having arthritis or a toothache -- it would mean I was not to blame. +In men over 65, physical causes are the chief culprit 90 percent of the time. And once the particular physical problem is determined, there are effective treatments available -- from vacuum pump devices to self-administered medications. Several more treatments, including pills to be taken shortly before sex, are on the way. +The pills, which are still experimental, are likely to change the whole treatment of impotence. They include one that blocks the action of an enzyme that prevents erections. Another pill combats the restriction of blood vessels caused by adrenaline, and yet another, which is placed under the tongue, stimulates the center in the brain that signals for an erection. +But before I could be treated, there had to be a diagnosis. Impotence has a host of possible causes, including high blood pressure, diabetes and prostate cancer, and many of the medications used to treat them. +T HE urologist's office is a great leveler of men. My first visits to Dr. Whitehead made it clear, for example, that he and his staff did not attach the same significance to my penis as I did. It was merely an object of professional interest, like a foot or a shoulder -- something to be examined, tested, its performance noted. Dr. Whitehead, a tall, patrician-looking 57-year-old, whose surgical career included a tour in Vietnam, is courteous, concerned and businesslike. Impotence treatment makes up about 80 percent of his practice; he is also an associate clinical professor of urology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and director of the Association for Male Sexual Dysfunction, a medical group that includes physicians, sex therapists and psychiatrists. +Dr. Whitehead started me off with a physical exam and blood tests, which eventually showed that my testosterone levels were normal. No patch for me. +Next came a test called the Rigiscan. For three nights in a row, I went to bed wearing a heavy, battery-laden monitoring device strapped to my left leg. Two wires emerged from the monitor, each ending in a loop. I attached the loops to my penis, one at the base, the other at the tip, and then I tried to sleep. +Men of all ages have erections during the rapid-eye-movement stages of sleep. If mine were measured at the normal frequency, duration and rigidity, it would mean my main problem was not organic but psychological -- something in my head was overriding my body's normal sexual reactions. For the first time that I can remember, I prayed to fail a test. +A few days later in his office, Dr. Whitehead took a gulp from a can of Diet Black Cherry and delivered the verdict. "I'm afraid you had only infrequent erections, and they were poorly maintained," he said. +I was delighted -- even though I knew it meant that something physical was wrong. +Then the nerves in my penis were tested. An aide touched me here and there with a mechanical wand and asked if I could feel any vibration. I did, and she pronounced my nerves normal. +The next test called for the penile injection of a drug called alprostadil, which is supposed to stimulate an erection. Sitting alone in an antiseptic examining room, I waited, and eventually the drug did its job. Then a technician used an ultrasound machine to check the state of the arterial blood flow in my penis. The report: "A certain degree of impairment." +Difficulty with penile blood flow is the most common cause of impotence, Dr. Whitehead said. Then, with plastic models and full-color drawings, he proceeded to explain my options. Last November, a panel of the American Urological Association listed five potential therapies. The three it recommended -- and which Dr. Whitehead suggested I consider -- are all covered by Medicare and medical insurers. The two that failed to pass muster or had very limited benefits were yohimbine, a drug that can be taken orally, and surgery to correct defective penile veins or arteries. +One approved treatment is a vacuum device that consists of a plastic cylinder that looks like a test tube with a pump attached. The patient places the cylinder over his penis and pumps the air out, drawing blood into the penis and creating an erection. An elastic band is then placed around the base of the penis to maintain the erection. +Surgical implants are another option. One kind is a pliant rod that keeps the penis somewhat distended and can be raised or lowered at will. Another kind is more complicated: two inflatable cylinders are set in the penis, a reservoir of liquid is implanted in the abdomen or scrotum, and a pump is placed in the scrotum. When the pump is squeezed, the liquid from the reservoir fills the cylinders, and the penis becomes erect. Squeezing a release bar near the pump returns the fluid to the reservoir. +The third approved treatment is the penile injection called Caverject, which was used as part of my ultrasound test. The self-injected alprostadil relaxes the smooth muscles in the penis and expands the arteries to improve blood flow. +I considered the advantages and disadvantages of each treatment. The surgical implants require no rigmarole -- no pumping or injecting. The inflatable version provides a natural-looking erection. But implants are invasive and subject to mechanical failure (though it is rare). And surgery was more than I was ready to think about. +The vacuum pump is simple to use and noninvasive, but it is cumbersome and provides a wobbly erection because the vacuum does not affect the half of the penis within the body. And the band should be left on for no more than 30 minutes at a time. +I finally chose the Caverject. There are needles, of course, but they are short and fine, and virtually painless. Erection occurs within a few minutes and lasts an hour or so. I am more than content. +Last month, a new therapy called Muse entered the market. It, too, is self-administered and relies on alprostadil, but instead of being injected through a needle, the drug is delivered by a tiny plunger that is slid an inch or so down the urethra. +The development of tests and treatments, as well as the growing number of sexually active older people, has spurred the establishment of hundreds of impotence clinics around the country, as well as 55 chapters of the support groups Impotence Anonymous and I-Anon, for their partners; information on nearby chapters of either group is available by calling (800) 669-1603. +The availability of more clinics and programs to aid the impotent is having a positive effect on public attitudes, said Dr. Troy A. Burns, the medical director for the Diagnostic Center for Men, based in Kansas City, Kan. +These clinics are mainly staffed with primary-care physicians. Dr. Burns says that the Kansas center is the largest in the field, with 30 clinics in 18 states. +"People are beginning to understand," he said, "that impotence in the old is not automatic, something they should expect and accept. Much can be done." +I can vouch for that. + +LOAD-DATE: February 6, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (David Suter) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +67 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 7, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +THE 1998 BUDGET: THE NEGOTIATIONS; +Between Budget Line Items, Horse Trades in Invisible Ink + +BYLINE: By DAVID E. SANGER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1134 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 + +Long before the Clinton Administration sent its budget tables, its pie charts and its five-year projections to the printers, it was already hinting at answers to the one question that dominates budget debates in Washington: where is the deal? +The first part of any deal, Mr. Clinton's budget aides told Congressional Democrats earlier this week, probably lies in the one concession Republicans say they want most in life: a cut in capital gains taxes, presumably one that could benefit the millions who have reaped big paper profits in the stock market. + "They have already told us to be ready to have a capital gains proposal or to respond to one," Senator Daniel P. Moynihan of New York, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said today. "That should tell you something." +Part two of any meaningful deal, both Democrats and Republicans say, is finding a way to change the Government's calculation of inflation, which would greatly slow increases in the Government's Social Security payments and other entitlements linked to inflation. +But unlike most budget problems, that is not a battle between parties. Instead, it is a problem, as one of Mr. Clinton's top advisers said recently, "of finding a way to do this that allows everyone to deny paternity" for the idea, which already has Social Security recipients and other powerful interest groups screaming. +Solving those two problems, of course, is hardly the end of the battle. Mr. Clinton's chief budget negotiators -- the White House chief of staff Erskine B. Bowles, Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and the budget director, Franklin D. Raines -- will spend the next few months wrangling over the Administration's proposal to restore money for welfare programs and commit new funds to rebuilding schools. There are still major arguments ahead over how to reduce the costs of Medicare, the health care program for the elderly, and over Mr. Clinton's insistence that discretionary spending must rise and that military spending, at least in the short term, must shrink. +But those are increasingly arguments around the margins. What is perhaps most striking about the statistics this year is not how much the Republicans and Democrats disagree, but on how much they agree. +Consider this: the budget the Democrats say would be balanced in 2002 is the same budget that the Republicans, using different economic assumptions, say would run a $60 billion deficit. Sixty billion dollars, of course, is a lot of money by anyone's measure, and no politician can risk sounding cavalier about it. But it is also roughly 3 percent of the Federal budget that year, and one half of 1 percent of the overall economy. +And the number itself could be a total fiction: the Congressional Budget Office, in estimates published just 14 months ago, predicted the fiscal 1996 budget deficit would be $173 billion. In reality, it came in at only $107 billion -- $66 billion less than estimated -- because of a surge of unpredicted revenue. +"We are down to the point where we are arguing over insignificant figures that no one could accurately project a year ahead, much less five years ahead," said Stanley E. Collender, the managing director of Burson-Marsteller's Federal Budget Consulting Group. +In fact, some economists say there is reason to wonder whether the whole argument about balancing the budget is still worth the enormous expenditure of political energy on all sides. They point out that this year, the United States has the lowest budget deficit, as a percentage of gross national product, of any of the world's seven largest industrialized nations -- lower than Japan's, lower than Germany's. Yet only in Washington is it a subject of daily preoccupation. +"Balancing the budget, the actual precision of reaching balance, has become as much an issue of public trust as it has one of economics," acknowledged Gene Sperling, the new chairman of the National Economic Council. Indeed, in budget politics, symbolism is often more important than the numbers. And that is certainly true when it comes to fashioning a compromise. +So in the selling of the fiscal 1998 budget, capital gains taxes are the first symbol. Mr. Clinton made the first move, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, when he proposed eliminating virtually all capital gains taxes on the sale of a home. +"That opens the door for us to talk about it," Representative Bill Archer of Texas, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said the other day. Today Senator Pete Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, added: "I think we just have to start with the proposition that this is the time to change the capital gains permanently, not just for houses but for assets held for business purposes and equities." +The Republicans have something grander in mind, however, than do the Democrats. They have called for halving the 28 percent tax on capital gains, which hits most investors when they sell winning stocks and mutual funds. It is highly unlikely such a sharp cut would happen, but there are occasional hints that the tax rate could eventually fall to, say, 20 percent or 21 percent. +On the record, Clinton Administration officials say this is bad economics, and they would not trade a capital gains cut for winning new funds for education, one of Mr. Clinton's big new priorities. Speaking not for attribution, however, they say that a capital gains cut is an issue they have to take seriously. +Recalculating the consumer price index is a different kind of problem altogether. Both sides concede it must be done, both because they believe inflation rates are significantly overstated, and because they know that correcting the statistics would save billions of dollars in Social Security payments and in other programs in which benefits are guaranteed to all who meet eligibility criteria. "This is where the real money is," a leading Democrat said the other day. +But neither side can figure out how to cast this change as a statistical fix, rather than a midnight maneuver to balance the budget on the backs of the elderly. +Representative John R. Kasich of Ohio, the budget master of the House Republicans, said today that the inflation measure "ought to be changed," adding, "But we can't go and change it on our own because the President -- we risk the possibility that our political enemies will not only not change it, but then they'll scare people again." +Those are problems of spin, not differences of ideology. But that may be what the next six months of budget arguments are chiefly about. The two sides have almost reached a statistical middle ground; now the question, as one Senator said, "is whether we can give each other the political cover to stand there." + +LOAD-DATE: February 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, right, and the budget director, Franklin D. Raines, listening to President Clinton present his budget. (Paul Hosefros/The New York Times) (pg. A24) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +68 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 7, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +THE 1998 BUDGET; +Clinton's Budget Holds Few Clues on Exactly How to Lower Spending + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL WINES + +SECTION: Section A; Page 25; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 725 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 + +President Clinton plans to lower Government spending over the next five years by $252 billion, even as he increases spending -- sometimes dramatically -- on some of Government's most popular programs, from welfare to education to the environment to tax relief. +So how does he do that? + The budget Mr. Clinton released today offers some answers but not with great clarity. Sometimes it postpones a reply for years. +The White House would get some of its savings by reining in Medicare, the second-biggest Federal benefit after Social Security, shaving $100 billion over five years. But some of that is illusory; Medicare is cut in part by shifting some expenses to the general treasury. +The budget also saves $22 billion by applying a new spending formula to Medicaid, the health-care program for the poor. But $13 billion of that savings would be reapplied to other programs like health care for children, leaving $9 billion for deficit reduction. Military spending would fall by almost $80 billion from current projections, perhaps the single biggest cut, barring any new wars or peacekeeping duties. +But the handful of larger, highly visible cuts do not begin to offset the costs of expanded programs and wiping out the deficit. Mr. Clinton appears to get the rest from increases in Federal fees, better management, one-time sales of Government assets like the broadcast spectrum and unnamed cuts years from now. +And so, in the bowels of the 2,000 and more pages of tables and numbers handed out today, the White House says it would raise $700 million next year by auctioning off the rights to toll-free "888" telephone numbers, and $118 million by "increased attention to integrity activities in state unemployment insurance operations," in other words, cutting waste, fraud and abuse. +It would collect $350 million over the next five years by raising the fee companies pay when they submit merger proposals to antitrust experts for Federal approval. And it would scrape up $13 million, in $3-and-$4 million-a-year increments, with a "test employment strategy for the disabled" at the Social Security Administration. +The savings and profits in those and other "mandatory" programs -- benefits like Medicare, and other activities whose spending is determined mostly by fixed formulas -- total almost $159 billion. Mr. Clinton would spend $37.5 billion of that on new mandatory programs like child health care, leaving about $121 billion for deficit-cutting. +The remainder comes from changes in military spending and the other so-called discretionary programs, like roads and schools, whose budgets are set each year by Congress. And it is there that the Administration's intentions are least clear. +The budget trumpets its new programs. With contracts about to expire for 1.8 million housing units for the poor, elderly and disabled, Mr. Clinton seeks $24.8 billion next year for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, an increase of almost 30 percent. +Education and job-training spending would jump by almost 12 percent in 1998 alone, to $36.2 billion. The Environmental Protection Agency would reap a 12 percent increase over the shrunken budget that the Republican Congress approved for this year. Energy conservation spending would rise by one-quarter. Spending on Indian health and housing programs would rise by 6 percent. +And the Justice Department, whose budget has already swelled by 69 percent under Mr. Clinton, would get another 5 percent increase next year, to $19.3 billion. Much of that would go to programs to reduce juvenile crime. +All of those increases, and billions of dollars worth of others, must be balanced by cuts elsewhere in the budget for domestic discretionary spending, which is walled off from the military and mandatory budgets. But spending cuts are harder to find. +Mr. Clinton plans to shave his previously planned spending on nonmilitary discretionary programs by $58 billion. Of those cuts, about $600 million -- or about 1 percent -- would be made in the fiscal 1998 budget submitted today. Barely 6 percent would occur in fiscal 1999. +The new budget only hints at those proposed cuts in the 1,000-page book that outlines the 1998 spending plan. The remaining 93 percent of domestic spending reductions are left to future Congresses, and in some cases a future President. + +LOAD-DATE: February 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +69 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Q and A + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 23; Column 1; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 1086 words + + +Spanish Glass Museum + +Q. Do you have details on a new glass museum in La Granja de San Ildefonso in Spain? -- Francine Philip, Tampa, Fla. + +A. The 18th-century Royal Glass Factory in La Granja de San Ildefonso, near Madrid, has been under going restoration since 1982, when the nonprofit National Glass Center Foundation undertook the project. The finishing touches are expected this year on the former factory, an imposing gray granite structure, where some of the finest crystal in Europe was once produced by glass-blowers from Venice, Bohemia and Spain. + The Museo del Vidrio, or Museum of Crystal, which opened in 1991, is housed inside the building. The museum has nearly doubled in size since last June, to 172,000 square feet. Its new exhibition space houses historic flasks and test tubes used for science and medicine. The space dedicated to contemporary artistic glass has also been enlarged. Some of these abstract, multicolored glass sculptures are for sale. Prices range from about $190 to $2,000. +The museum's core exhibits are 500 Spanish pieces ranging from decanters to ornamental amphoras to fire-gilded glass from the factory's glory days in the 18th and 19th centuries, and a selection of 300 glass items from the rest of Europe, from the 16th through 19th centuries. Glass-blowing implements and some of the machines used to make glass are also on view. +A temporary exhibition beginning in May will feature antique French crystal once used for perfumes or as candle holders. +The Glass Center is at 1 Paseo del Pocillo, near the entrance to town. It is about a 15-minute walk down the hill from La Granja's Royal Palace, which was built by a grandson of King Louis XIV of France and is modeled on the Versailles Palace. +The museum is open daily, except Monday, from 11 A.M. to 7 P.M. Admission is about $3, $1.50 for senior citizens and students. Information: (34-21) 471-712. La Granja, at the foot of the Guadarrama range, is an hour's drive north of Madrid. + +Sahara Side Trips + +Q. My husband and I would like to find a tour package to Morocco that includes a few days in the Sahara. Can you help? -- Josephine Colin, Washington + +A. Morocco, with its ancient imperial cities, exotic souks and Islamic monuments, is a popular tour destination. You'll find many companies that include the requisite stops at places like Fez, Marrakesh and Casablanca. Packages that include desert detours are slightly less common. Here are two such tours. +General Tours, 53 Summer Street, Keene, N.H. 03431, (800) 221-2216, fax (603) 357-4548, has a brochure about its many Morocco tours, which range from fly-drive packages to major cities to more wide-ranging packages like Treasures of the Casbah, a 13-day trip with departures scheduled throughout most of the year. The latter would probably be of most interest to you. In addition to stops at Casablanca, Rabat, Fez and Marrakesh, participants in this tour will venture into the Sahara in four-wheel drive vehicles, stopping at places like the sand dune of Merzouga, an ancient casbah at the desert village of Rissani and Ouarzazate, an old French Foreign Legion outpost. A drive through the pine and cedar forests of the Middle Atlas Mountains, a visit to Todra Gorge and an exploration of the Roman ruins at Volubilis are also on the itinerary. The trip's cost begins at $1,699 and includes air fare, local transportation and accommodations with private bathrooms. +Overseas Adventure Travel, 625 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138, (800) 221-0814, is offering a 15-day Morocco Sahara Odyssey, which includes a three-day camping trip in the Sahara. The campsite is near the Merzouga sand dune and visits by Bedouins, excursions to desert areas where there are no roads and few people, and dining under desert starlight are promised in the company's brochure. The tour also includes stops at Rabat, Volubilis, Fez, Casablanca, the Todra and Dades gorges, Ouarzazate and Marrakesh. The cost starts at $2,990 from New York and includes all meals and accommodations. Departures are scheduled in the early spring and fall. + +Mayfest in Glasgow + +Q. What are the highlights of this year's Mayfest in Glasgow? -- Stuart Maynes, Rochester + +A. Mayfest 97, the 15th annual performing arts festival that celebrates theater, dance, rock, pop and classical music, will take place May 1 to 24 in and around Glasgow. Over the years, the Glasgow Mayfest has become West Scotland's largest annual arts extravaganza. Although the full program will not be available until the beginning of April, these highlights have been announced: +A May Day parade is scheduled to leave George Square on Sunday, May 4, and will travel through the city's streets ending up with a grand finale on Glasgow Green at 1 P.M. Glasgow's trade unions and community groups will take part with puppets and banners. Celebrations will continue throughout the afternoon on Glasgow Green with music, comedy and special events for children, followed by a Ceilidh -- a traditional fete involving song and dance -- at the Old Fruit Market in the evening. +Scottish theater and dance will be well represented, as well as drama from Ireland, Russia and the Slovak Republic and dance from Belgium, Africa and Spain. Among the dance productions will be the British premiere of "Fuenteovejuna," choreographed by Antonio Gades, and performed by the Compania Antonio Gades, a Spanish company of 35 dancers, singers and musicians, from May 6 to 10 at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall; and "Les Ballets Africains" by the National Dance Company of the Republic of Guinea, from May 19 to 24 at the King's Theater. +Theater productions include the world premiere of "A Funny Thing Happened" by Clare Boylan, an Irish novelist and short-story writer, performed by the Nippy Sweeties Theater Company from Scotland at the Citizen's Theater (Stalls Studio) May 1 to 3 and May 6 to 10; and at the Citizen's Theater, the O'Casey Theater Company will perform Sean O'Casey's "Song at Sunset" starring Niall Buggy, on May 20, 22 and 24. Prices range from about $4.25 to $38.25. +The program will also feature Scottish country music, jazz and opera, magic and storytelling. For information, call (44-141) 552 8444 or fax (44-141) 552 6612. Tickets may be booked by calling (44-141) 287 5000. Travel and accommodation information is available from Greater Glasgow and Clyde Valley Tourist Board, (44-141) 204 4400, fax (44-141) 221 3524. SUZANNE MacNEILLE + +LOAD-DATE: February 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Question + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +70 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In the Region/New Jersey; +A Rush to Build Complexes to Care for the Aging + +BYLINE: By RACHELLE GARBARINE + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 9; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1409 words + +WITH the nation's ninth largest population of residents 65 and older, New Jersey is becoming a magnet for the development of specialized housing for the elderly. +Developers are starting or planning a spate of such projects, which provide housing and varying levels of services and health care, from independent to assisted living and nursing beds. Some, called continuing-care communities, offer all three. + Several factors beyond the state's number of older people -- which will rise from 1.1 million to 1.3 million by 2010, with those 75 and over growing the fastest, according to state figures -- are stoking the activity, analysts said. They include an improving economy and the trend among the elderly to stay near their families. +As a corollary, the state's Department of Health and Senior Services is advocating less costly alternatives to nursing homes, including assisted-living communities or components of communities that offer residents meals, transportation, housekeeping and personal and medical care. +Since 1994, when the state began regulating assisted-living communities, 15 entire developments or complexes with assisted-living components have been built and licensed. And 457 more are in various stages of the approval or application process, according to the department, which also monitors care. +Many of the projects cater to the affluent elderly, but a few are geared to those with middle incomes. To keep prices affordable three semi-autonomous state agencies are offering construction loans at or below market interest rates. They are the New Jersey Health Care Facilities Financing Authority, the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority. +Qualification differs from agency to agency. For example, the Housing Finance Agency will offer funds to projects by both for-profit and nonprofit builders that reserve some units for people with incomes of 50 to 80 percent of the area's median. +The pace of development has some in the industry worried about overbuilding. "The concern is that this market sector is being perceived as the next get-rich-quick bandwagon to jump on," said James Robbins, president of RAD Consultants, a Fairfield-based real estate consulting firm. "This activity is just the tip of the icebreg." +But developers say that in the short term the demand for such housing is greater than the supply under or nearing construction. And analysts say that some of the activity will be in northern New Jersey, where few such communities are now available. +LEN FISHMAN, Commissioner of the state's Health Department, said that the licensing needed from his department would temper growth because it "puts everyone's cards on the table and considers the potential competition." In turn, he added, securing financing "will not be easy." +Developers also must meet state regulations, find properly zoned land on which to build and address municipal concerns over traffic and sewage capacity, among other issues. +Some municipal leaders are becoming more receptive to such projects, developers say. Among the reasons are that they add to the tax base without having an impact on schools and provide a way to help keep older residents from moving away. +The larger projects offer a transition from independence to assisted living to nursing care. In some continuing-care communities residents pay an entry fee for access to all levels, as well as monthly service fees. +The biggest is the 2,026-unit Senior Campus Living of Baltimore complex planned for Tinton Falls in Monmouth County. The 134-acre site along Essex Road, off the Garden State Parkway, will be the first project in the state for the company, which had advanced two previous development plans in north Jersey that were derailed by community concerns. +Brian P. Froelich, the Senior Campus Living president, said that while the size of his company's projects "does cause concern it is what makes it possible to reach the untapped middle-income market." +The company has won rezoning to build the Tinton Falls project on the once commercially zoned site, but still must reach an agreement to buy the sewage capacity for it from Neptune Township. Company and Tinton Falls officials said they were hopeful a solution could be worked out. +Entry fees, which will be 100 percent refundable upon death or departure, range from $75,000 to $312,000. There is expected too be a monthly charge of $900 to $1,500 for the 1,650 studio to two-bedroom independent-living units and $2,200 for the 136 assisted-living units. The fee for a second person has not yet been set.. +The fees will cover everything but advanced medical care, "which residents pay for when they need it," said Mr. Froelich. There will also be a 240-bed nursing wing, as well as four 50,000-square-foot community centers. +In Plainsboro, work is proceeding on the first phase of the Windrows at Princeton Forrestal, which is set up as rentals and a condominium, where units may be bought and sold as in a regular residential condominium and no entry fees are required. It is rising on 45 acres in the 1,700-acre Princeton Forrestal Center, the commercial center owned by Princeton University. +The first phase has 83 assisted-living units, 180 nursing beds and a 22,000-square-foot medical center. Rents, including meals and all other services, are $2,500 to $3,500 for the studio to two-bedroom units, said Bernard N. Plante, senior vice president at Care Matrix of Needham, Mass., the developer. The second-person fee is $650 for independent living, $825 for assisted living. +ULTIMATELY there will be 300 independent-living units, from condominium apartments to villas, as well as a 45,000-square-foot community center. Prices for the residences will be $160,000 to $400,000, with monthly fees of $980 to $2,000 covering all meals. Construction is to start this fall. +Developers are also building assisted-living projects alone or with nursing homes. In Park Ridge, Care Matrix will start construction this month on a project with 100 assisted-living units and 210 nursing beds. Monthly fees will range from $2,950 to $3,850 for studio and one-bedroom apartments, respectively, including all meals and services. The second-person fee is $825. Advanced medical care will cost more. +Mr. Plante said projects were also planned in Livingston and Monroe. +Paul E. Johnson Jr., president and general manager of Marriott Senior Living Services, a division of the Washington-based hotel chain, said his company had put a major focus on the growth of its assisted-living suites nationally and in New Jersey. +It has opened two in the state -- one in Edison with 98 assisted-living suites and 30 nursing beds, the other in Mountainside with 98 assisted-living units and a 21-bed special-care wing for people with Alzheimer's disease and related memory disorders. +Monthly rents, including all meals and services, range from $2,425 to $3,690; second-person fees at both complexes is $500. The fees for the nursing and special-care units range from $5,400 to $5,730 a month at Edison and $3,060 to $3,860 at Mountainside. Mr. Johnson said several more projects were planned, including one each in Paramus, Saddle River and Cherry Hill. +MARRIOTT expects to break ground next year for a continuing-care community in Wayne. It will have 220 independent-living apartments, 20 assisted-living units and 60 nursing beds. Entry fees are expected to be $176,000 to $427,000, which will be 90 percent refundable, plus monthly fees of $1,900 to $3,100. For a second person, there will be an added $15,000 entry fee and an additional $700 monthly fee. +Sunrise Assisted Living, based in Fairfax, Va., has four assisted-living communities under way in Morris Plains, Old Tappan, Westfield and Wayne. Each will have 77 units and a wing for residents with Alzheimer's disease and other memory disorders. Rents for a shared unit with an unrelated person, including meals and services, will be $1,700 to $2,800, a month, said Lori M. High, its regional director of sales and marketing. Advanced and specialized health care will cost more. +Rents for a private unit will be $2,900 to $4,300. The second-person fee will be $725 to $1,075. +Of all the activity Mr. Fishman, Commissioner of the state's Health department, concluded: "We will have to see how it plays out, but the licensing of 15 projects so far suggests a reasonable rate of growth." + +LOAD-DATE: February 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Rendering of the Care Matrix project in Park Ridge, which is to start construction this month. (Donkig Lee) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +71 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +MINDING YOUR BUSINESS; +Social Security and the First Wives' Club + +BYLINE: By LAURA PEDERSEN-PIETERSEN + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 10; Column 2; Money and Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 974 words + + +Q. I'm over 50, divorced after 21 years of marriage and my ex-husband has remarried. Can I still collect his Social Security benefits or will his new wife get them all? + +D. RYAN +Manhattan + +A. Until now, the only involvement I've had with the Social Security system is sitting up late with Peter G. Peterson's new potboiler "Will America Grow Up Before It Grows Old?" and wondering if Hollywood will turn it into "Grumpy Old Men With Benefits," starring Walter Matthau and Bob Dole. +I really should pay more attention. Pessimists say the fund will run dry in 2030, exactly the year I turn 65. But, as they say, enough about me. +The rules governing spousal Social Security benefits are complex, and there are lots of exceptions, but generally, yes, you will be able to collect from your ex-husband's benefits. Here is how it works: +If you were married to your former husband at least 10 years, then both you and his new wife will be entitled to some of his benefits. But don't make cruise reservations yet -- you must wait until you're 62 to collect. +Then, as long as your ex-husband is also 62, and you are not drawing bigger benefits on your own Social Security account, you can collect up to 37.5 percent of his full benefit. Or if you wait until you're 65, you can collect up to 50 percent. It doesn't matter if he is still working. Upon his death, you (as well as his surviving wife) can claim up to 100 percent of the amount he'd be receiving if he were still alive. +All this assumes that you don't remarry while he is alive. If you do, the checks stop. In Social Security language, remarriage is "a terminating event." +"Most people aren't aware that once they've been married for 10 years, their Social Security situation becomes interdependent," said Stephen A. White of Milliman & Robertson, an actuarial firm in Seattle. Because the benefits are not considered marital property and thus are not divisible like a stock portfolio or bank account, many people don't consider them. +"Social Security was designed for men," added Ken Stern, a financial planner in San Diego and author of the Comprehensive Guide to Social Security and Medicare (Career Press, 1995, $11.99). "Theoretically, women are not treated differently, but realistically, they often end up with far fewer benefits, particularly if they leave the work force to raise the kids." +During that lengthy interval, women do not contribute to Social Security. So by the time they re-enter the work force their accounts will have fallen so far behind their husbands' that in the event of a divorce, they're often better off picking up 50 percent of their ex-husband's benefits than cashing in 100 percent on their own. But they cannot collect on both at the same time. +Incidentally, these benefits are based on the former spouse's total contributions, not just those made during the years of the marriage. And the benefits are available to ex-husbands as well as ex-wives. +President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Social Security into law on Aug. 14, 1935, and various amendments over the years have expanded the benefits. +In 1965, the program was extended to deliver some benefits to ex-spouses -- if the marriage had lasted 20 years. By 1979, the 20-year figure was halved, and six years later the Social Security Administration agreed to let former spouses collect even if his or her ex was of retirement age but not yet ready to cash in -- assuming they'd been divorced at least two years. +Of course, if you were three times a bride and never a bridesmaid, you are entitled to benefits from only one ex-husband. So make your choice count: select the one with the largest Social Security account. And if you are a widow or widower who has already begun to receive benefits, the terminating event of remarriage will not halt the checks. +The net cost to the Treasury of financing this First Wives Club is actually minimal, since many divorced women remarry. And once they do so, their club membership is automatically revoked, unless they become unmarried again. Then there's that 10-Year Rule, a milestone Liz Taylor hasn't managed to hit once in eight marriages. Without such caveats, taxpayers might have ended up supporting the many mates shed over the years by the actor Mickey Rooney, the band leader Artie Shaw and the asbestos heir Tommy Manville. +Yet, Mr. Stern said, even these payouts "can be a good reason not to remarry," though it's hard to imagine someone staying single just to collect, say, an annual benefit of $7,956 (50 percent of the maximum monthly benefit of $1,326 for a 65-year-old retiree in January 1997). +The Social Security Administration advises all applicants to have a consultation by phone (800 772-1213) or to visit the nearest office. First, order two of the agency's brochures, "Social Security: What Every Woman Should Know" (publication 05-10127) and the bread-and-butter "Social Security: Understanding the Benefits" (05-10024). +If you've been contributing to Social Security and need to find out which is greater, your own benefit or a portion of your ex-spouse's, order and complete Form 7004: "Request for Earnings and Benefits Estimate Statement." This will explain what you're entitled to receive. Then call the agency, prove your relationship and get an idea of what you would be entitled to if you opted instead for your ex-spouse's account. +And while you're at it, make sure your own account is accurate. Though boasting a computer system second only to that of the Department of Defense, the Social Security agency can make mistakes. When Peter LaBadia, a Flemington, N.J., printing executive, checked his account, he found it had no record of three years he spent as a broker on Wall Street. Don't take chances: send in that Form 7004 every five years to make sure your work record is up to date. + +LOAD-DATE: February 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +72 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Medicare Cuts Would Reduce At-Home Care for Patients + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 30; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 972 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 + +Medicare spending on home health agencies and nursing homes has skyrocketed in the last five years, and Congress and the Clinton Administration have decided that they must control those costs as part of any plan to balance the Federal budget. +Just as they slowed the growth of Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals in the last few years, lawmakers and Administration officials say, they are determined to focus on those other health care providers. But it will not be easy. + Home health care is one of the fastest-growing benefits in the Medicare program, and Medicare, in turn, is the largest purchaser of home health services in the United States. +Medicare spending for such services, which are provided by nurses, home health aides and therapists, has increased 31 percent a year, to $16.7 billion in 1996 from $3.3 billion in 1990. +And Medicare payments to skilled nursing homes rose 26 percent a year, to $11.1 billion in 1996 from $2.8 billion in 1990. +Medicare patients, who are elderly or disabled, like the home health benefit because it allows them to receive care without traveling to a doctor's office or hospital. In fact, they must be homebound to qualify. +But Donna E. Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, said some of the spending was clearly inappropriate. +"Our recent investigations in several states show that 25 percent to 40 percent of home health visits paid for by Medicare were for services that were either never delivered or were provided to people who did not qualify for those services," Dr. Shalala said. +A recent investigation by the General Accounting Office, the Congressional watchdog agency, said: "Controls over the Medicare home health benefit remain essentially nonexistent. Few home health claims are subject to medical review, and most claims are paid without question." +The people who receive home health services are typically women older than 75. But growing numbers are disabled people younger than 65. +In his new budget, President Clinton proposes to cut $100 billion, or 7 percent, from the $1.35 trillion that would otherwise be spent on Medicare in the next five years. He would cut payments to home health agencies by $14 billion and would squeeze $7 billion from nursing homes. +Home health agencies and nursing homes are paid on the basis of the costs they incur. Mr. Clinton said this arrangement did little or nothing to control the volume of services. +He is asking Congress to establish new payment systems, setting fixed rates in advance. Mr. Clinton would put the rates for home health care at levels intended to reduce spending for such care by 15 percent. +James C. Pyles, a lawyer and lobbyist for hundreds of home health agencies, said the providers strongly supported the idea of payments fixed in advance. But he said the proposal for a 15 percent cut was absurd. +"For the industry," Mr. Pyles said, "it would be like walking off a cliff. It would cause a huge drop in total reimbursement and would devastate the home health care industry. Medicare now pays home health agencies for the actual costs they incur in providing services to patients. If you cut that by 15 percent, agencies would be forced to stop providing services. Patients will have to go back to higher-cost hospitals and nursing homes for their care." +The Federal Government pays the full approved cost of home health visits covered by Medicare. There is no co-payment. Beneficiaries have to pay 20 percent of the Medicare-approved amount for doctors' services, but there is no comparable requirement for home health visits. +The General Accounting Office said: "Beneficiaries do not receive an explanation of benefits because they are not billed for in-home services. Therefore, neither the physician nor the beneficiary has any way of knowing whether Medicare is paying the home health agency for services not rendered." +A new study by the Congressional Budget Office says, "The use of home health services by Medicare beneficiaries skyrocketed after 1990," in part because of actions by Congress and Federal courts that liberalized the eligibility criteria. Because the number of visits is not limited, the study said, "Medicare home health services now provide chronically ill beneficiaries with extensive assistance, on a long-term basis, with the activities of daily living." +The number of Medicare beneficiaries has been growing about 2 percent a year. But the number of home health visits has soared 30 percent a year, to 236 million in 1995 from 63 million in 1990. +The average number of visits for each user doubled, to 69 in 1995 from 34 in 1990. The number of Medicare patients who receive home health services reached 3.4 million in 1995, up from 1.9 million in 1990. +Health care experts suggested some of these reasons for the increased use of home care: +*Hospitals have strong financial incentives to discharge Medicare patients as soon as possible. If the patients are sick or frail, they may need care in their own homes. +*Because of advances in medical science and technology, people living at home can receive complex services that were once available only in hospitals or nursing homes. An example is infusion therapy, which supplies medication and nutrition to patients with cancer, AIDS or other serious illnesses. +*People are living longer, the average age of Medicare beneficiaries is increasing and more of them have chronic illnesses. +*The number of home health agencies that are participating in the Medicare program has increased 60 percent, to 9,147 in 1995 from 5,718 in 1990. Most of the new agencies are owned by investors seeking profits. The General Accounting Office found that such "proprietary agencies consistently provide more home health visits than nonprofit agencies," even for patients with the same illnesses. + +LOAD-DATE: February 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +73 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 10, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Hamtramck Journal; +For Fat Tuesday, a High-Calorie Treat + +BYLINE: By KEITH BRADSHER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 12; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 809 words + +DATELINE: HAMTRAMCK, Mich., Feb. 9 + +Ask most Americans what they associate with the Fat Tuesday celebrations before Lent and they are likely to mention the Mardi Gras parades of New Orleans, and maybe the Deep South tradition of exchanging king cakes, foot-wide loops of pastry covered with brightly colored icing. +But for a growing number of southeastern Michigan residents, the day before Lent means a trip to this Polish-American enclave within the city of Detroit and the purchase of paczki: Polish jelly doughnuts. For even as Detroit and the city of Hamtramck have lost much of their population to the suburbs, the Polish-American tradition of buying paczki (pronounced "POONCH-key") seems to be strengthening here and spreading to other ethnic groups. + William Kotowski, a 78-year-old retired Chrysler worker who grew up here and now lives in suburban Warren, said that only in the last few years had he resumed driving the 10 miles to buy paczki here. +"You reminisce about how good they were and then you start wanting to go back," Mr. Kotowski said this morning, picking up raspberry-filled paczki at the huge Oaza Bakery here. +Across the street at Post 10 of the Polish Legion of American Veterans here, the mostly elderly men in the wood-paneled social room were already looking forward to Paczki Day, as it is commonly known. +"Every year I go and get three dozen -- one dozen go to my son, one dozen go to my neighbor and a dozen for myself," said Edward L. Oleksiak, 80, a retired Hamtramck firefighter who also lives in Warren now. "It's a tradition you don't forget." +For the last two years, Oaza has stopped producing bread and other pastries near Fat Tuesday so workers can make more than 100,000 paczki, said Wayne Quinn, a manager who married into the Polish-American family that started Oaza in 1930. It opened at 5 A.M. today and will operate around the clock until late Tuesday to meet the demand. +The Polish tradition is for Christian households to make paczki by using up all the sugar, lard and other treats that they will be forsaking during the 40-day penitential season of Lent, starting on Wednesday. Paczki devotees say eating the 600-calorie pastries makes it easier to give up sweets in the weeks ahead. +"I gorge myself on two or three of them and you lose your sweet tooth for a few days, so it gets you off to a good start," said Jerry C. Lubanski, 56, a retired auto worker who bought a half-dozen paczki this morning. +The recipe has changed little over the years, with the exception that vegetable shortening has generally replaced lard, said Richard E. Yagloski, the 60-year-old head baker at Oaza. The dough is formed into hundreds of balls that are put in a steam room, where the yeast in the dough makes them rise. The balls are then deep-fried in vegetable shortening, injected with custard or preserves by a machine and covered with icing. +Paczki, which are also available in New York, Chicago and elsewhere, are sold here all year long. But this week's paczki are especially rich, and more flavors of filling are available. Mr. Yagloski puts extra sugar in the dough and uses egg yolks instead of whole eggs. +A single paczek (pronounced POONCH-eck) costs 75 cents at Oaza this week -- up from the regular 60 cents -- and is made with six fillings: raspberry, strawberry, blueberry, lemon, custard and prune. Raspberry paczki are the most popular while prune paczki are the least popular. +"Prune probably would get the ax if it weren't for the old-timers," Mr. Quinn said. "They'd probably lop my head off if I took it off the list." +Polish immigrants began pouring into the Detroit area, and Hamtramck in particular, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Fleeing poverty and the repression that followed a failed revolt in 1863 against Russian rule, the immigrants replaced earlier arrivals from Ireland in many low-skill jobs, and flocked to the auto factories that opened early in this century. +By the 1930's, the Detroit area was believed to have more people of Polish descent than anywhere else in the nation, a distinction now held by Chicago. Deteriorating race relations, the decline of the auto industry and the growth of suburbs all contributed to an exodus that has cut the population of Detroit and Hamtramck in half in the last several decades. +Hamtramck has a median annual household income of $16,751 in the 1990 census, or half the national median. But there have been signs of revival as young people buy cheap apartments and as nightclubs open. +The paczki tradition endures, close to its Polish roots. Wanda Butynski, a 38-year-old baker who immigrated seven years ago from Poznan, Poland, said paczki were very popular in her hometown the day before Lent. +"Everybody eats one," she said, grabbing two paczki at a time and crunching them onto spigots that instantly injected lemon filling. + +LOAD-DATE: February 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The Polish-American tradition of buying special jelly doughnuts before Lent has been gaining popularity. Rebecca Kuyda and her son, Andrew, shopped for some yesterday at the Oaza Bakery in Hamtramck, Mich. (Peter Yates for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +74 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 10, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Essay; +Load in the Back + +BYLINE: By WILLIAM SAFIRE + +SECTION: Section A; Page 15; Column 2; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 713 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + +President Clinton's "balanced" budget pretense is now plain to see: delay two-thirds of any spending slowdown until after leaving office. When the time to cut comes, he'll be gone. +Do you suppose that candidate Al Gore, scrambling leftward for the Democratic nomination in 2000, will then subscribe to proposals loaded on the back end for reducing the rate of spending made by Clinton in 1997? Or that a President Gore would cut environmental spending in half, as Clinton's budget now proposes? + Hold not the breath. We should ask the V.P. if he will carry out promises made in today's Clinton budget by the man who won't be there. He can only respond with a mouthful of mush. +The rhetoric of "balance" being perpetrated by Mr. Clinton is a fraud. He orates about making "the tough choices," but -- with the exception of the gutsy way he double-crossed gullible veterans -- he shoves the hard part beyond his Presidency. Tough choices get postponed until tomorrow. +If this budget is any guide, Gore will kick the can on to the day after tomorrow. This year, he had one big opportunity to sop up red ink -- by getting Clinton to put the valuable broadcast spectrum up for public auction, as Gore's ally, F.C.C. Chairman Reed Hundt, privately urged. But Gore was not about to deny the media lobby its corporate welfare; instead, he issued one forlorn bleat about broadcasting in the public interest, as his cover for the missed opportunity to bring the Treasury tens of billions for the public's airwaves. +The second fraud in the Clinton "someday balance" is the pretense of tax cuts. Almost every dollar of "cuts" -- as in his plan to subsidize years of college to remedy the failure of union-stultified lower schools -- is offset by proposed tax increases elsewhere, or by his extensions of taxes due to expire. His expected tax revenues presume that the business cycle has been repealed. +And how is the Republican Congress responding to these pie-in-the-sky promises of budget balance in the next millennium? By perpetrating a fraud of its own -- slyly pretending to take the Clinton proposal seriously. +This is what's on the elephant's memory: Last year, with Gingrich talk of willingly taking a "train wreck" of Government shutdown to achieve an end to decades of deficits, the poll-driven Clinton savaged the deficit hawks by heaping compassion on dependent old folks and single women. +That's why we hear no more brave Republican talk of the President's budget being "dead on arrival." Instead, Trent Lott's strategy is to welcome the Clinton fake-balance as a basis for compromise and then nibble it to death. Balance, like God or the Devil, will be in the details. +Maybe it's politically astute to counter a phony budget-balancing act with a phony welcome. But by fighting pretense with pretense -- by letting the President bamboozle the public into believing we are already on the road to ending deficits -- the G.O.P. undercuts both current budget-balancing and the realism needed for a balanced budget amendment. +Most Democrats don't want that amendment because it would make permanent today's taxpayer toughmindedness. They'll try to generate fears that such discipline would cause a depression and sink Social Security, but their best argument is based on logic: Why amend the Constitution when a balanced budget is just around the corner? +The truth is that it is not. Recent declines in the deficit are a result of booming times, not normal times. Splitting the difference between Clinton's budget and timid G.O.P. counterproposals won't stop the red ink. +If we are to reduce the debilitating dependence on government, we must let workers and investors keep more of their earnings and savings. And if we are to reduce government borrowing, we must curtail entitlement spending now, starting this year in the real America, not wait until "out years" in Never-Never Land. +Says Clinton: Not to worry, balance is on the way; delay the spending curbs and trust my successor. +The G.O.P. response should be: Stop fooling the people with promises of "out years." Our children will be forced to pay interest tomorrow on the debt we choose to run up today. It's up to us, now, to lift the crushing burden of debt from our next generation. + +LOAD-DATE: February 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +75 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 14, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Metro Business; +Hyatt Affiliate Studies Site + +BYLINE: By MARY McALEER VIZARD + +SECTION: Section B; Page 5; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 241 words + +Last March, when Kraft Foods announced plans to vacate its sprawling five-story building in White Plains, with 623,700 square feet, brokers fretted about finding a buyer for such a distinctive property. +Built in 1954 as headquarters for the General Foods Corporation, which merged with Kraft in 1995, the building, on a 38-acre site on North Street, was considered too highly specialized for most corporate users. + Now, an unexpected potential buyer has entered the scene. Classic Residence by Hyatt, an affiliate of the Hyatt Corporation, which is based in Chicago, has signed a contract to buy the building with the intention of converting it into a retirement community. +The elder-care provider will first enter a 120-day period of financial investigation known as "due diligence" to study the feasibility of such a conversion. +"It seems ideal," said Penny Pritzker, founder and president of Classic Residence by Hyatt. "The way it's laid out on this sprawling property, it's easy to visualize it as a residential community." +The company operates 10 upscale retirement communities across the nation. The one proposed for White Plains will feature independent residences for the elderly and a health care center offering assisted living and skilled nursing services. +The majority of Kraft employees who now work in White Plains are expected to be relocated to other Kraft sites in Westchester by September. MARY McALEER VIZARD + +LOAD-DATE: February 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +76 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 16, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The View From: Milford; +Seniors in Partnership at the Public Schools + +BYLINE: By JACKIE FITZPATRICK + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 2; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 949 words + +JEN STABELL, 15, tucked a few strands of blond hair behind her ear, smoothed down the front of her black vest and then stepped out to serve hot bowls of lentil soup. She and about a dozen of her peers from the culinary arts program at Platt Vocational Technical School were serving lunch to club leaders from the Milford Senior Citizen Center, to Milford school administrators and some school principals. +"I'm a little nervous," she whispered. "But excited too." + The luncheon -- cooked and served by Platt Tech students -- went off without a hitch. The guests dined, after the soup, on stuffed breast of chicken with fresh herb dressing. Then came diplomat bread pudding and coffee. Entertainment was provided by the Woodwind Choir and the After School Chorus of Harborside Middle School. "These young people are great, aren't they?" said John Lofthouse, of the Devon Senior Citizens' Club. +The mingling of old and young is something school administrators and senior-citizen leaders hope there will be a lot more of, thanks to an innovative, recently devised program. Under the program, anyone in town aged 60 or more will be provided with a Gold Card, which "entitles the bearer to free attendance at school-sponsored events" like basketball games, wrestling matches, softball games, school plays, choir programs and band concerts. +The idea was conceived and championed by Francine Farber, director of educational services and personnel for the Milford Public Schools; Mary Jo Kramer, superintendent of schools, and two members of the Board of Education, Raymond Watt and Pat Giel. +"We believe in the power of bringing the generations together," Ms. Farber said. "What we want to do is open our school doors to the seniors, in the hope that they will enjoy our activities but also that they will see what we do in our schools and consider becoming part of our school community as volunteers." +As for the students, she went on to explain, "Today, when extended family is not always right at hand, we think it is important for our students to see that growing older doesn't mean you lose your vitality. There's a lot to be gained by our students and our seniors." +Mr. Watt likened it to two fishermen meeting -- one who has never fished before and another who has lured in some big ones -- and lost some too. "Our seniors have lived life. They have a great deal of expertise in many areas and then, so do our students and they can share," he said. +Mary Steinmetz, the program director at the Milford Senior Center, said that with older people often living on tight budgets, perhaps living away from grandchildren or simply looking for a fun way to spend some time, "this is just the thing." +As Mr. Lofthouse sees it, "These children are our future. They'll be running our country in the next century. We want to be connected with them." +The principals of all three Milford schools talked with the senior leaders about upcoming events and about the needs they have for older volunteers -- as tutors, readers and library aides. They urged older people to share gardening know-how with sixth graders in a school greenhouse or history with fourth graders or to chaperone field trips. +Jane Baljevic, principal of Foran High School, said the athletic, drama and music directors at the school embraced the Gold Card idea because they want to fill their stands and auditorium with a new, interested audience. +Richard Krusewski, the culinary arts instructor at Platt Tech, said experiences like the luncheon, provide the real-life experience his students need. "Great things can happen through people working together," he said. "It's good for them and it's good for us." +School officials also talked about what they can give -- beyond free entry to events -- to the older population. Gregory Baecker, principal of West Shore Middle School, plans to offer an after-school computer course for older people, taught by a member of the West Shore staff. Approving murmurs greeted the idea. He talked about plans to create a lending library for older people who might want to take out a book by an author a grandchild is reading. +Frank Santino, principal of Orange Avenue School, presented the seniors with the first of periodic lists of coming events at his school -- athletic schedules, drama news, concert dates. +Many schools have already tapped into the growing older population. At Meadowside School, one Milford senior citizen spends part of each week reading to students. At Harborside Middle School last year, students worked jointly with the Senior Center, which is just across the street, on a six-month project on World War II. Students took detailed oral histories from members and wrote reports. +"We are the bearers of history, the history that isn't in the history books," said Sunny Boncek, who heads public information for the Senior Center. +Ms. Steinmetz added, "At first, I think they felt like they were being dragged over to talk to old people. But the more they talked, the more they learned about the war and, also, about each other." +Florence Chiemlewski, a volunteer at the center, said, "I talked about how we sacrificed and what life was like in the Big War. I think they learned a lot about it." +Ms. Boncek concurred. "There was this one girl, she was chewing gum and asking a few questions, kind of bored, and then she asked, 'So whadja wear back then?' " Ms. Boncek laughed. +Clothes, said Ms. Boncek, cut across any age divide. "I think at first they thought we didn't have lives before, that we weren't interested in clothes, that we were always old," she said. "Then they started to find out we were teen-agers once, just like they are." + +LOAD-DATE: February 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Above, Sara Trumbell reads at the Meadowside School in Milford. Below right, lunch from Platt Vocational Technical School students, with music by Harborside Middle School. (Photographs by Joseph Kugielsky for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +77 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 16, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Facing New Challenges, Law Firms Diversify + +BYLINE: By STEWART AIN + +SECTION: Section 13LI; Page 1; Column 1; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 2220 words + +WHEN Bernard Hyman founded the law firm of Certilman Balin Adler & Hyman in 1965, the practice concentrated primarily on real-estate law and thrived on the building boom that had enveloped Long Island -- housing complexes and shopping centers. +But the real-estate market hit the skids in the 80's. And with the advent of no-fault in automobile accident cases and equitable sharing of property in divorce cases, the need for lawyers in those areas declined. + "We looked around our firm and wondered what to do next," Mr. Hyman recalled. "We had to do something to change the nature of our business." +Mr. Hyman said that Certilman Balin, which is in East Meadow, did what other firms had done, diversifying and recruiting lawyers and firms with needed specialties. +Specialization is clearly an important trend in the law business. Even large firms that had prospered by concentrating on real estate are scrambling to meet new challenges and to stay ahead of the competition. +As they search for specialists firms have to tread carefully. Environmental law, for example, was a field that lawyers a few years ago saw as having significant potential, said a senior assistant dean for career services at the Hofstra Law School, Michael J. K. Schiumo. But that field has not boomed, he added. +Mr. Schiumo said students were being told that potentially better fields in light of the aging population and the boom in high technology would be law involving the elderly, trust and estate planning and technology law. +Mr. Hyman said he tried to gauge the needs of Long Island at the beginning of the 90's and hired two young bankruptcy lawyers, brought in a mortgage-foreclosure expert and strengthened the litigation department. "In a declining economy," he said, "litigation goes up, because people can't live up to their commitments. +As the economy started to improve, Mr. Hyman said, the firm began to work with start-up biotechnology businesses, helping with financing and initial public offerings. +As a result of highly specialized laws and regulations in fields like the environment and trademarks, the legal profession has become increasingly complicated, Mr. Schiumo said, adding: +"My sense is that all of society has become more complicated. Just go into Starbucks. There are 12 different coffees to choose from. It's difficult today for one person to be a jack-of-all-trades." +Mr. Schiumo said solo practitioners generally shied from corporate work for work in fields like divorce and home buying. But specialization is clearly a powerful trend, he said, and many young lawyers are being encouraged to specialize in fields that may be in demand. +He said he envisioned a greater need for lawyers to handle trusts and estate planning because of all the baby boomers who will be thinking about retiring in the next 10 to 15 years. +Another area where demand is bound to increase, Mr. Schiumo said, is in technology. "As more and more people use the Internet," he said, "disputes are bound to arise over who owns what on the Internet. Another field is bioethics and genetics research. Whether it is technology, communications or the biomedical field, it will be driven by advances in technology, and the legal profession must react to it." +One difficulty for a solo practice, he said, is the business side of the practice. "Not every good lawyer is a good businessman," he added. "You could be a great lawyer and lack business skills." +The largest firm on the Island, Rivkin Radler & Kremer, was forced to "retool divisions in the firm to stay alive," said a senior partner, Arthur J. Kremer. Mr. Kremer said changes in the corporate world were occurring so fast that instead of re-evaluating corporate needs annually Rivkin Radler & Kremer was conducting monthly reviews. +"If we think there is an area in which we need expertise, we will put ads out and begin interviewing lawyers immediately," Mr. Kremer said. +The primary insurance business, Mr. Kremer said, has been dropping off, and Rivkin Radler expanded in other areas. In the last 18 months six lawyers have been assigned to sexual-harassment and job-discrimination cases. Four of the six were in the same field at New York City firms. "The number of job-discrimination cases we handle has skyrocketed, from a half-dozen two years ago to 50 or 100 a year," he said. +Another growth area is bankruptcy law, Mr. Kremer said. Two years ago, one lawyer worked on those cases. Now there are four. +In the last year, he said, the number of lawyers on hi-tech cases has increased, from four to nine. "We are primarily working with small hi-tech firms that want corporate advice and assistance with initial public offerings," Mr. Kremer said. "There was a time that a banker needed a lawyer in his top desk drawer. Now it's the hi-tech firms that need us on a moment's notice." +The firm, with 31 partners and 150 associates in Uniondale, is the lone national law firm on Long Island, Mr. Kremer said. It has offices in five cities and plans to merge with a firm in New York City. +In addition, Mr. Kremer said it expects to soon merge with two Long Island law firms. +The largest firm in Suffolk County, Siben & Siben in Brightwaters, was founded in 1933 by Sidney R. Siben, now 85, and his brother Walter, 81. Sidney Siben said the firm prided itself on working on all types of cases, except those that involve the stock exchange. +"Our matrimonial department is getting so big that we have had to farm out some of the work to our former employees," he said. +The biggest change is the addition of computers and the hiring of female lawyers, which began eight years ago, Mr. Siben said, adding: +"It was a big mistake not having them earlier. I have 197 employees in my office, and the women are the best." +Last summer the Certilman firm expanded in two directions, merging with the firm of Michael C. Axelrod, an expert in labor law, and his partners, Joseph Famighetti and Brian Davis, who are criminal lawyers. +Now Mr. Hyman is scouting again, looking for a merger partner to expand the merger, I.P.O. and acquisitions business. His firm has grown, from 25 lawyers in 1989 to 50. +"Our real-estate practice," he said, "has exploded. It's back to what it was in the go-go early 80's. It's so busy. So we're going to expand that area, too." +As it expands, Mr. Hyman's firm has succeeded in wooing the Nassau County Republican chairman, Joseph N. Mondello. Mr. Mondello, also chairman and president of Nassau Downs, the offtrack betting operation, said he was glad to return to the practice of law, which he left in 1993 after 23 years. +He spent the last 21 of those years at Flaum, Imbarrato & Mondello in Levittown. Among his cases, he said, was one that overturned the blue laws that restricted business on Sundays. +"I've always loved the law and want to get more active," Mr. Mondello said. "I love politics, too. There's room for both. I feel I have a decent name in the county and that I will attract some business. I plan to consult with major clients." +Mr. Axelrod, the labor lawyer and senior partner in Mr. Hyman's firm, said his desire not to distance himself from the business end was one reason that he sought to merge his midsize practice with the full-service Certilman Balin Adler & Hyman. +"The advantage of being in a full-service operation is that administration and management responsibilities are handled by administrators and managers," Mr. Axelrod said. "I don't have to worry about making the payroll and buying computers and having the leaky roof fixed. I can now fully practice law. I don't have to worry about the operation of the business and whether the secretary took too much sick leave or called in sick." +He said he foresaw a growing number of large firms that sell a full-range of services, including real estate, labor relations, taxes and litigation. +"It will be one-stop shopping," he added. "It's the wave of the future. There will be full-service well-managed law firms and small boutique specialists who are very good at what they do and who can manage their overhead. The midsize firm is going by the wayside unless it is a specialty shop. And the large firm lets lawyers concentrate on their specialty. Rather than being a jack-of-all-trades, he is a master of one." +Mr. Axelrod said that he foresaw growth in the area of elder law and that the firm was starting to position itself in that field. +"We're talking of health-care management," he said, "helping families deal with nursing homes and home attendants and maximizing the use of the insurance that is available." +Mr. Schiumo said he found that firms on Long Island were "savvy enough to respond to their clients' needs." +"The most successful ones are those that are flexible," he added. +By the year 2000, the United States will have nearly 1 million lawyers, estimated Paul W. Brennan, a marketing consultant at Erin-Edwards Communications in Glen Head who specializes in work for accountants and law firms. +"It is no longer enough just to do good work anymore," Mr. Brennan said. "You have to go out and aggressively promote what you are doing, whether it be through brochures or a Web site. Years ago you could come out of law school, hang up a shingle, and business would walk in. But I tell students today not to go to law school unless they are prepared to practice marketing." +Meltzer, Lippe, Goldstein, Wolf & Schlissel in Mineola, which once concentrated on real estate, has adapted, said a partner, Charles Guttman. +"We saw that Long Island was reorienting itself in terms of becoming a hi-tech center in nondefense areas, and we tried to orient ourself to that," Mr. Guttman said. "As a center for advanced technology, there are a lot of new companies that need patent, litigation and trademark work. The basic asset of hi-tech firms is their technology and what we do is protect it." +Mr. Guttman said he and his partner, Kenneth Rubenstein, had a two-person office in Manhattan that specialized in intellectual property protection, like patents, copyrights and trade secrets. They decided to merge with Meltzer in 1992. after having done work on intellectual property for some of Meltzer's corporate clients. When Mr. Guttman and Mr. Rubenstein joined Meltzer they had one associate. Now they have five. +The intellectual property division at Meltzer now totals 15 to 20 percent of the firm's business, and Mr. Guttman said it was growing and would add associates. +He said that as startup companies consulted corporate lawyers for help in financing, his division evaluated their technology to determine, among other things, if it might infringe on others' rights. +"We are the only general commercial firm on Long Island that has an intellectual property division," said Mr. Guttman. +Another rapidly expanding field is dispute resolution, in which mediators settle cases out of court. In 1995 the former Chief Judge of New York, Sol Wachtler, opened Comprehensive Alternative Dispute Resolution Enterprise in Great Neck, after having completed a 15-month Federal prison term for threatening to kidnap the daughter of his former mistress. +The firm, with a panel of 50 retired judges, has had more than 700 cases, Mr. Wachtler said. Most are referred by the courts with the consent of both sides. He said nearly 90 percent of the mediated cases were settled. In about 20 percent both sides agree to let the mediators be binding arbitrators. +"It used to be that cases would not be settled until the jury was in the box," Mr. Wachtler said. "Now insurance companies are realizing that the cost of litigation and delay is astronomical. They have wasted $25,000 in court costs alone when they could have settled the case for $25,000. " +The mediating judges charge $300 for the first hour and then $150 a hour. Mr. Wachtler said most mediations are resolved in one hour. He noted that he did not draw a salary. "When I was chief judge I preached pro bono," he said. "This is mine." + +Top 5 Firms And Clients +The following are the five largest law firms on Long Island, by number of lawyers, as compiled by Long Island Business News: +Rivkin, Radler & Kremer, EAB Plaza, Uniondale. Founded in 1953, it has 140 lawyers and a total of 337 employees on Long Island. Major clients: Chase Manhattan Bank and State Farm Insurance. +Siben & Siben, 90 E. Main St., Bay Shore. Founded in 1934, it has 55 lawyers and a total of 154 employees. Major clients: New York State Parkway Police, Mercedes Benz and John Esposito, convicted kidnapper of 10-year-old Katie Beers. +Cullen & Dykman, 100 Quentin Roosevelt Blvd., Garden City. Founded in 1850, it has 52 lawyers on Long Island and a total of 111 employees. Major clients in commercial law; declined to discuss clients. +Certilman Balin Adler & Hyman, 90 Merrick Ave., East Meadow. Founded in 1965, it has 50 lawyers and a total of 105 employees. Major clients: Federated Department Stores and North Fork Bank. +Meltzer, Lippe, Goldstein, Wolf & Schlissel, 190 Willis Ave., Mineola. Founded in 1970, it has 50 lawyers and 85 employees. Major clients: Solgar Vitamin Company and Cheyenne Software. +According to the New York State Office of Court Administration there are 9,359 lawyers registered to practice in Nassau and 4,056 in Suffolk. + +LOAD-DATE: February 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Specialization has become an important trend in the law business. Siben & Siben in Bridgewaters, extreme top, is one firm that has expanded. Members of Certilman Balin Adler & Hyman meet. (Photographs by Michael Shavel for The New York Times)(pg. 1); At Siben & Siben, above, space is at a premium. Arthur Kremer of Rivkin Radler & Kremer. (Michael Shavel (top) and Rebecca Cooney for The New York Times)(pg. 26) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +78 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 16, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Pataki Budget Plan Draws Mixed Reviews + +BYLINE: By ELSA BRENNER + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 1; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1296 words + +FOR many groups in Westchester, Gov. George E. Pataki's latest budget proposal, his third since taking office, signals a sky-is-falling year ahead. +"Draconian" was how Assemblywoman Naomi C. Matusow, a Democrat from Ossining, described the $66.1 billion spending plan, which would reduce funds for special education, the mentally ill and public colleges and take most of its cuts from the state's Medicaid expenditures for hospitals, nursing homes and home-care providers. "Mr. Pataki is going after the most vulnerable populations," Ms. Matusow said. "He's playing with people's lives." + But for taxpayer groups, the Governor's package, unveiled in mid-January, could not have looked more promising. +"It's an extremely fair budget, another example of the Governor's commitment to reducing the tax burden," said Urs Broderick Furrer, a Mount Pleasant Councilman and vice president of the 500-member Taxpayers' Alliance of New York. +Mr. Furrer was especially happy with the Governor's proposed $3.4 billion school-tax-relief program, which would cut property assessments for all New York homeowners an average of 27 percent over four years and increase aid to schools. +Under that plan, taxpayers would receive a $30,000 exemption from the full value of their homes for school-tax purposes, and the elderly would receive a $50,000 full-value reduction. For the average White Plains homeowner, that could mean a saving of $1,290 a year. For an elderly homeowner, the saving could amount to $2,160 a year. +Besides the detractors and the supporters, there were those who struck a middle ground in evaluating the Governor's spending blueprint. +"I see the budget as positive in some respects, challenging in others -- but not as bad as it could have been," said Steven J. Friedman, the County Commissioner of Mental Health. Using the mental-health category as an example of the budget's plusses and minuses, the Commissioner said that while proposed cuts would mean fewer residential services for the mentally ill, the Governor is also proposing to increase financing for drug and alcohol abuse treatment. +"In other words," Mr. Friedman said, "it's a mixed picture." +Meanwhile, there was another worry that all sides shared: would passage of the budget be delayed for the 13th consecutive year? +Approval of last year's spending package was 104 days late, coming on July 13. The deadline is April 1. +"Perhaps this year it will be on time," said Assemblywoman Audrey G. Hochberg, a Democrat from Scarsdale. "Anything is possible." +By most accounts, though, timely passage of the budget is considered unlikely, and most legislators are predicting that this year's partisan conflict in the State Legislature could be even more intense than it has been in the past. +Signaling that a rancorous debate over spending was ahead, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat and Mr. Pataki's major challenger, did not attend the Governor's budget speech in January. Mr. Silver has since said that the proposed tax cuts are intended to favor rich suburbanites. He also said that Medicaid cuts would hurt the state's health care system. +Meanwhile, Joseph L. Bruno, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, is also predicting that this year could be the most contentious year of any in recent memory in the State Legislature. +In Westchester, the split over the budget has similarly followed party lines, with Democrats predicting dire consequences and Republicans proud of their first-term Governor, who will come up for re-election next year. +Overall, the budget would raise state spending 2.2 percent. As initially proposed, Mr. Pataki's plan calls for a 3 percent increase for school aid, a 7.4 percent cut in Medicaid, a 1.5 percent reduction in funds for higher education, an 18.1 percent increase in welfare spending, a 1.1 percent cut for mental-health services, a 2.7 percent increase for prisons and a 3.3 percent increase for environmental programs. +School aid statewide would go up to $10.5 billion from $10.2 billion. For Westchester schools, that would mean about $9.4 million more than in the 1996-97 school year. +The Governor, however, has also proposed ending payments to districts for each student in special education, which he claims gives educators an incentive to put students into such programs. Instead, Mr. Pataki wants to pay districts based on the statewide proportion of special education students and give them more freedom in spending that money. +Not surprisingly, that proposal is highly controversial, although New York City school officials have endorsed it. But Vincent T. Beni, Superintendent of the Southern Westchester Board of Cooperative Education Services, said: "There's not an educator I know who agrees to put students into special education to get more money. This is an ill-conceived proposal that doesn't consider the needs of students already in special ed." +In another budget category, Medicaid funds would drop to $25.4 billion from $27.5 billion next year. Reimbursement systems for nursing homes and home-care providers would be replaced by set fees. And reimbursement rates for hospitals would be lowered. +Also, Medicaid payments for psychiatric stays would be limited to 60 days, and that proposal came as bad news for hospital administrators like Michael B. Friedman, director of network development for the Department of Psychiatry at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in White Plains. +"No matter what, the impact will be damaging," said Mr. Friedman, who argued that the hospital might either have to stop accepting patients who required longer-term care or cut back on its services. +Local community-based services for the mentally ill are also expected to suffer as a result of budget cuts for mental health and new policies, said Carolyn S. Hedlund, executive director of the Mental Health Association of Westchester. +The proposed budget in that category calls for a decrease in spending to $4.1 from $4.2 million. Mr. Pataki also plans to continue moving residents out of institutions that house the mentally ill and those with developmental disabilities. +The state and city university systems are also bracing for cuts. The Governor proposed reducing the present $4.4 billion budget allotment to $4.3 billion and increasing tuition at the state and city systems by $400 a year. The Governor would also cut financial aid for poor students by 16 percent. +Mr. Pataki's plan increases the welfare budget to $4.6 billion from $3.9 billion, with most of the increase coming from a Federal restructuring law that gives more money at first to states that reduce their welfare roles. But payments will decline in coming years. +Yet the Governor is now proposing a $148 million increase for children's programs, and last month he suggested that the state establish a Department of Children and Family Services. +Westchester's Social Services Commissioner, Mary E. Glass, called it "a very good move" on the Governor's part. "If we're talking about children and want to make their issues and protection a priority, then we have to put our money where our mouth is," she said. +The proposed budget increases spending for prisons to $1.7 billion from $1.6 billion and increases money for environmental programs to $343 million from $332 million. The Pataki Administration announced earlier in the month that it would also speed up plans to spend money from a bond act for environmental projects after receiving complaints that it was reneging on a promise to use the money quickly. +Typically, the Governor amends sections of the budget before negotiations with the Legislature begin. At midweek he had decided, for example, to make cooperative apartments eligible for school-tax relief. + +LOAD-DATE: February 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing. (Gorka Sampedro) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +79 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 16, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: FLATBUSH; +Uncertainty Unites Agencies + +BYLINE: By DAVID ROHDE + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 10; Column 3; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 582 words + +From parents predicting a sharp rise in dangerous crime to children worried about the prospect of supporting their elderly parents, New York's 500,000-strong Haitian community is worried about the effects of changes in welfare laws. +Overcoming a history of little coordination, eight Haitian social service agencies in the city are joining together to respond to an expected onslaught of clients. + Lola Poisson, the executive director of one of the eight, the Haitian Community Health Information and Referral Center in East Flatbush, said that under the new alliance the eight groups would apply jointly for grants and try to reduce costs by referring cases to one another. +Financed by a $50,000 grant from the Strategic Alliance Fund, which is managed by the United Way, the groups will try to eliminate duplicate services, like day care, and create those that they lack, like programs for the elderly. +The biggest challenge that agencies say they face is explaining the changes to immigrants, regardless of their origin. The New York Association of New Americans is holding a series of free clinics in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan in the next three months for counseling on the new laws. +The confusion and fear of many Haitian immigrants was illustrated last week at Ms. Poisson's center, where about 75 attended classes in English as a second language and in child care and talked about the new Federal welfare law. +In voices of frustration and anxiety, they called the legislation "extreme," "lazy" and "racist." One woman predicted that black people would be invited to a meeting on the prextext of explaining it and that a bomb would be dropped on them. +"I heard they're going to limit it," said Gessy Degand, 20, "Aren't they going to cut it out completely in five years unless people work?" +While agreeing that the welfare system needed tightening, most in the class criticized the new law's impact on the elderly. Few complained about younger people being forced to work because, they said, most could learn new skills. But many said there were no jobs for older people with few skills. +They also voiced the fear that older relatives and friends would suddenly be stripped of Supplemental Security Income. Under changes in Federal welfare law enacted last summer, legal immigrants who have not worked for 10 years in the United States will be ineligible for S.S.I., which averages $410 month and goes to the elderly poor and disabled. +Vanier Bain, who arrived from Haiti in 1969 and retired as a taxi driver after 24 years, wondered about the eventual fate of his brother, who worked in the kitchen of a Boston hospital for nine years but was forced to leave briefly because of an illness. He is now a year short of the new law's 10-year requirement for benefits. +"After he got better they wouldn't give him his job back," Mr. Bain complained. "Now he has no job, no S.S.I. I want to know why." +Ms. Poisson said women were already being denied various forms of public assistance as they came up for their standard six-month review. +One woman, who spoke on condition that her name not be used, echoed the complaints of many Haitians who said they paid taxes but were denied benefits. "We clean the bathrooms, we do the bad jobs," she said angrily. "I've been working very hard and paying my taxes for 15 years." She said her mother, whom she had recently brought here, was being denied benefits. "Why can't she get S.S.I.?" she asked. DAVID ROHDE + +LOAD-DATE: February 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Lola Poission says her agency is trying to avoid overlap with others. (William Lopez for The New York Times) + +Chart: "ALLIANCE: Confronting Change" lists agencies that joined to respond to the impact of changes in welfare laws. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +80 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 16, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +ATLANTIC CITY; +Bankrupt? So What? + +BYLINE: By BILL KENT + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 16; Column 4; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 758 words + +NO, Robert M. Renneisen, chief executive of the Claridge Casino Hotel, is not looking for his next job. +"Reports of the demise of the Claridge have been greatly exaggerated numerous times," he said in an interview. "Going through periods of bad news, or reputed bad news, is not something new to us." + Every Atlantic City casino hotel has had some bad days, but the Claridge seems to have had more than its share. It has consistently finished last in yearly rankings of casino gambling revenues. +Mr. Renneisen (pronounced REN-neh-sen), who joined the Claridge in 1988, tried to turn necessities into virtues. "We've always been at a competitive disadvantage, compared to any of the properties in town," he said. "We've always been small, so we've never made the money that the big places have, and we never had the land to expand, or enough operating profits to build the kind of visible improvements that other properties used to distinguish themselves from each other." +He tried to enhance the Claridge's image by equating its small size with an atmosphere of friendliness and wholesomeness. That strategy was, at best, a modest success until the punishing winter of 1996. The Claridge endured a run of what can only be explained as bad luck. +After unseasonably harsh snowstorms reduced the numbers of gamblers coming to Atlantic City, the Claridge found many of its patrons lured away by more extravagant incentives and giveaways offered by larger casinos. As the Claridge tried to match these costly incentives, the Trump World's Fair opened, pulling away even more gamblers. +Then, last summer, two elderly women died when they drove their car through a wall of the Claridge's new parking garage and fell six stories to the street. The garage, which was supposed to bring in the highly coveted drive-in gamblers, remained closed for repairs most of the summer. For the busy months of July, August and September, the Claridge had total pre-tax earnings of $1.6 million -- about as much as the Trump Taj Mahal takes in in a single day. Mr. Renneisen responded by laying off 150 of his 2,450 full-time employees in September. +In December, shortly before his contract came up for renewal, Mr. Renneisen told the casino's bondholders that the Claridge would have to restructure its debts and would probably not be able to meet its current interest obligations. +The new year has not changed the Claridge's run of ill luck. In January, Mr. Renneisen announced that the Hilton Hotel Corporation was acquiring Claridge stock with the anticipation of taking over the Claridge. Two weeks later, Hilton launched a $5.6 billion hostile takeover of ITT Corporation, parent company of three hugely profitable Caesars casinos, effectively suspending any plans for acquiring the Claridge. Then, after failing to get their share of the $5 million interest payments, three Claridge bondholders filed for involuntary bankruptcy and sued the casino. +Mr. Renneisen said he worked off his on-the-job frustrations by writing a novel. A Vietnam combat veteran, he is working on an action story about Vietnam veterans "caught up in a casino environment." He is also the author of "How to Be Treated Like a High Roller, Even if You're Not One" (Lyle Stuart, 1992). +He is better known for his civic duties than his literary efforts. While other casino operators derisively referred to him as "the Boy Scout," Mr. Renneisen, who was a president of the Atlantic County Boy Scout Council, became the casino industry's single most visible advocate for civic improvement. +"Everybody wants to believe, deep down inside, that you're doing something worthwhile," he said. "I've always considered the operation of any business a privilege, and not a right. +"Casino gaming was legalized by the voters of New Jersey primarily as a means to restore Atlantic City. I think collectively the casino industry and the government has missed the boat on that. In the last few years, I'm glad to say, progress in that direction has been at light speed." +Sounding like a scoutmaster cautioning wilderness campers, he added: "We have an obligation to leave this city better than how we found it. That means acting responsibly all the time, not just when the casino regulators are looking." +He said he believed his casino had improved greatly under his command and that even if the Hilton merger didn't go through, "other companies are interested in us." +"If we end up being an attractive acquisition, that may not be a home run," he said. "But it's a base hit any day." + +LOAD-DATE: February 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: February 23, 1997, Sunday + + CORRECTION: +The headline of the Atlantic City column last Sunday misstated the financial situation of the Claridge Hotel and Casino, and the error was also reflected in the front-page index. The Claridge announced in December that it was seeking to negotiate a restructuring of its debt with corporate bondholders; it has not filed for bankruptcy protection. + +GRAPHIC: Photo: "We've always been at a competitive disadvantage," says Robert M. Renneisen, shown outside the Claridge. Then came a run of bad luck. (Laura Pedrick for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +81 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 18, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Chocolate Lover or Broccoli Hater? Answer's on the Tip of Your Tongue + +BYLINE: By SANDRA BLAKESLEE + +SECTION: Section C; Page 2; Column 1; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 1450 words + +DATELINE: SEATTLE, Feb. 16 + +Babies are born with a number of obvious genetic traits, like brown or blue eyes, black or red hair, dark or light skin. But parents take note: infants also enter this world equipped with a genetically determined number of taste buds embedded into the tips of their tiny tongues. Some have a few hundred or so buds while others are endowed with tens of thousands of receptors for sweet, sour, salty or bitter foods. +From birth to old age, this inborn characteristic helps determine what foods people crave or leave on their plates, scientists say. It explains why some people detest double chocolate fudge frosting on cake while others deftly maneuver themselves into getting an end piece with twice as much goop. It sheds light on why some individuals hate broccoli, raw cabbage or grapefruit juice, while others look forward to eating those foods every day. + It is the reason some people like food close to room temperature and others like it hot, or cold, why certain people can gobble down spicy foods laced with red chili pepper, why some children are notoriously picky eaters and why many older people lose their appetites. +It may even play a role in evolution, leading pregnant women to avoid bitter foods that might be toxic to the fetus and prompting men to eat everything in sight, on the premise that they require more calories for brawny pursuits. +Research has shown that people inhabit vastly different taste worlds, said Dr. Linda Bartoshuk, co-organizer of a symposium on the genetics of taste held here on Sunday afternoon during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Genetic differences in taste lead people to eat or refuse certain foods and play a role in how fat or thin they are, said Dr. Bartoshuk, a professor of surgery at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. +Such differences may even influence who gets cancer, said Dr. Adam Drewnowski, the symposium's other co-organizer and a professor of public health, psychology and psychiatry at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He speculated that those who avoided the sharp or bitter tastes of many fruits and vegetables might be at a higher risk for some diseases. +Given that food preferences and eating habits are profoundly influenced by a person's family and life experiences, and cultural factors, "it's really amazing that a biological variable like taste genetics shows up at all," Dr. Bartoshuk said. "But the tongue is hardwired for behavior in ways scientists are only beginning to understand." +The study of human taste genetics got under way in 1931 when Dr. Arthur L. Fox, a chemist at the Du Pont Company, synthesized a chemical called phenylthiocarbamide. After some of the PTC exploded into the air, a colleague commented on how bitter it was, yet Dr. Fox tasted nothing. Intrigued, Dr. Fox handed out crystals of PTC at the 1932 A.A.A.S. meeting, asking how many passers-by could taste it. About a quarter of the people were nontasters, while everyone else said PTC was bitter, Dr. Bartoshuk said. +That fascinated the geneticists and anthropologists of the day. They determined that nontasters carried two recessive genes that played a role, still unknown, in taste physiology and that tasters carried at least one dominant gene for the trait. People all over the world can be classified as tasters or nontasters of PTC. +PTC testing remained a curiosity until the early 1970's, when Dr. Bartoshuk decided to expand the question to ask: What difference does it make in everyday life if someone is a taster or a nontaster of PTC? +Instead of PTC, researchers now test with a similar compound called 6-n-propylthiouracil, or PROP. Again, some people cannot taste it, while others retch because it is so bitter. +"We now divide the world into three groups," Dr. Bartoshuk said. A quarter of all people tested are nontasters, half are medium tasters and a quarter are supertasters -- people who react violently to PROP. Medium tasters say the substance is bitter, but they are less sensitive than supertasters to small concentrations. Genetically speaking, two medium taster parents can produce a supertaster or a nontaster child, or a medium taster like themselves. +In looking at people's tongues with a special blue dye, researchers have found that supertasters have as many as 1,100 taste buds per square centimeter of tongue, while nontasters have as few as 11 buds per square centimeter. +"I am a nontaster," Dr. Bartoshuk said. "The dye on my tongue produces a pink and blue polka-dot pattern, with blue dots indicating a taste bud. A supertaster's tongue has dense blue patches." +Each taste bud feeds information into two types of nerves, Dr. Bartoshuk said. One, the chorda tympani, a branch of the facial nerve, sends taste signals to the brain for processing. A second, the trigeminal nerve, senses pain, temperature and touch. +"This is really critical," Dr. Bartoshuk said. "It tells us that supertasters are superfeelers and superpain-perceivers, at least with their tongues." +These findings led Dr. Bartoshuk and her colleagues to begin studying food preferences with regard to taste genetics. While all humans are born with an innate liking for sweets, she said, supertasters find many sugary foods to be sickeningly sweet. Frosting is yucky. Saccharine has a strong aftertaste. Coffee is too bitter, and alcohol too sharp. Hot peppers and ginger produce an unpleasant burn. Food should be tepid. +Supertasters are sensitive to fats, said Dr. Valerie Duffy, a registered dietitian at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. Taste buds do not react to any flavor of fat, but they react to its touch, sending that information through the trigeminal nerve. Fat molecules literally press against the taste buds, producing a tactile sensation that is interpreted by the brain as viscous, slippery or greasy, she said. +In an experiment, Dr. Duffy asked people to taste different milk samples -- skimmed, 1 percent fat, 2 percent fat, 4 percent fat, half and half, heavy cream and cream with oil added. Nontasters could not tell the difference between skim milk and the heavy creams, she said. Supertasters were extremely sensitive to gradations in fat. As fat content increased, they perceived more creaminess. +"If you go through life as a nontaster," Dr. Duffy said, "it takes more to get the flavor out of food than it does for a supertaster." +"The world is built for regular tasters," Dr. Bartoshuk said. For them, most foods are not too sweet, bitter, salty or sour. And their diets may be healthier because of it. +Dr. Drewnowski has found that supertasters tend not to like the strong tastes of many fruits and vegetables, which are the main sources of flavinoids, isothiocyanates and other cancer-preventing agents. PROP tasters do not like grapefruit juice, and many even find orange juice unpleasant, he said. +But foods like broccoli, which many supertasters do not like, can be cooked in ways that blunt the bitter undertaste, Dr. Drewnowski said. Asians tend to be supertasters, yet they eat a mainly vegetarian diet, often stir-fried dishes with oils and other flavors mixed in. Raw cruciferous vegetables are not a mainstay of Chinese cuisine. +However food is cooked, one's PROP status may play a role in weight control, said Dr. Laurie Lucchina, a postdoctoral student in Dr. Bartoshuk's laboratory. A small study of older women found that supertasters tend to be thinner than nontasters and have serum lipid values associated with lower cardiovascular risk. +That makes sense, Dr. Lucchina said. Supertasters tend to eschew sugary, fatty foods throughout their lives. Preliminary data suggests that the same holds true for younger women. +At the same time, sensitivity to PROP tends to decline with age, Dr. Lucchina said, suggesting that hormones play a role in taste physiology. After menopause, women who are supertasters tend to be less sensitive to bitter foods. +Studies now under way suggest that monthly estrogen fluctuations alter PROP sensations in younger women so that the sense of bitterness in foods varies throughout each month, Dr. Bartoshuk said. And during the first trimester of pregnancy, even nontaster and medium-taster women find many previously acceptable foods, like coffee, to be suddenly unpalatable. +That makes evolutionary sense, Dr. Bartoshuk said. Bitterness often predicts toxicity. Pregnant women are good poison detectors because their tastes are designed to protect the developing fetus. +Morning sickness would therefore not be an accidental misery that just has to be put up with, but a way of avoiding harmful foods -- a useful, if troublesome, gift of natural selection. + +LOAD-DATE: February 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Diagram: "A Matter of Taste: How Genes Affect Preferences" +Researchers find that a quarter of people are supertasters, who react violently to a bitter test of chemical; half are medium tasters, a quarter nontasters. Genetics seems to determine characteristics of tastings apparatus. + +Pores on papillae on tip of tongue are conduits for taste stimuli to reach taste buds. + +Supertaster: Supertasters have many more papillae, very closely arranged, but much smaller. + +Nontaster: Nontasters have many fewer papillae, with far fewer pores, though they are larger. (Sources: Dr. Linda Bartoshuk, Dr. Valerie Duffy and Dr. Laurie Lucchina; The A.M.A. Encyclopedia of Medicine [Random House]) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +82 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 18, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Repeal Urged for Law on Giving Away Assets to Get Medicaid + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 13; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1012 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 17 + +Clinton Administration officials urged Congress today to repeal a new law that makes it a Federal crime to dispose of assets to qualify for Medicaid coverage of nursing home expenses. They said that such abuses were not common. +Medicaid helps pay the bills for two-thirds of the 1.6 million people in nursing homes in the United States. Families can easily exhaust their assets on nursing home care because the costs average more than $100 a day -- and much more in urban areas like New York City. + Many elderly people give assets to their children. But the new law, added to a broader health insurance measure, makes that illegal if the purpose is to qualify for Medicaid. It is not entirely clear which transactions may result in criminal charges. Critics cite this ambiguity as a serious defect in the law. +Moreover, Bruce C. Vladeck, administrator of the Federal Health Care Financing Administration, which supervises Medicaid, said there was no evidence that large numbers of elderly people had given away assets to qualify for Medicaid. +"A few people doing something egregious can create a public perception of a widespread problem," Mr. Vladeck said. "It's important not to exaggerate the importance of this." +Mr. Vladeck said Congress ought to repeal the criminal penalties, which took effect on Jan. 1. And he said that his agency would not press states to enforce the new restrictions on transfers of property by people seeking Medicaid. +The American Association of Retired Persons, the Alzheimer's Association, the National Senior Citizens Law Center, the American Bar Association and the bar associations of New York State and Ohio have all called for repeal of the law. +Patricia B. Nemore, a lawyer at the senior citizens law center, said: "The people likely to be jailed or fined are old, sick people needing nursing home care. The typical nursing home resident is an 85-year-old widow." +Under the law, a person who "knowingly and willfully disposes of assets" in order to become eligible for Medicaid may be fined $10,000 and imprisoned for one year. In general, a person will not be subject to criminal penalties if he or she gives away assets more than three years before applying for Medicaid. +Some members of Congress say it is possible that some violators could be subject to much stiffer penalties, including a $25,000 fine and imprisonment for five years. +Representative Steven C. LaTourette, Republican of Ohio, recently introduced a bill to repeal the provision, which he described as the "Granny goes to jail" law. +Mr. LaTourette, a former county prosecutor, said, "The new law has scared and confused senior citizens" and might discourage eligible people from applying for Medicaid. +Moreover, he said, "adult children who assist their parents could also be subject to criminal penalties." +The American Bar Association said that the language of the new law was "riddled with uncertainty." Without some clarification, it said, the law is "largely unintelligible and possibly unconstitutional" because it is so vague. +The new provisions were buried in legislation that makes health insurance more readily available to millions of people who lose their jobs or change jobs. The overall legislation was pushed through Congress by Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Nancy Landon Kassebaum, Republican of Kansas. +It is not clear who added the criminal penalties because there were no hearings or debates on those provisions, which were also included in the Republican budget bill that was vetoed by President Clinton in December 1995. +Republican Congressional aides say the criminal penalties originated in the Senate Finance Committee in 1995, when Senator Bob Packwood, Republican of Oregon, was chairman. The main targets, they say, were lawyers and financial planners who advise the elderly. After Mr. Clinton vetoed the budget bill, House Republicans picked up the criminal penalties as one of many provisions intended to crack down on fraud and abuse in Federal health care programs. +The nursing home industry and companies that sell insurance to cover the costs of long-term care want to discourage greater reliance on Medicaid as a way to pay for such care. Medicaid usually pays nursing homes less than the amounts charged to people who pay for their own long-term care. As a result, many nursing homes say they prefer patients who pay for themselves. +Paul R. Willging, executive vice president of the American Health Care Association, a trade group for nursing homes, said: "Most people who rely on Medicaid are truly impoverished, but far too many recipients who could otherwise afford the cost of their long-term care hide their assets to meet Medicaid's eligibility requirements. Clearly, it's wrong to throw someone's grandmother in jail for hiding her assets. But falsely impoverishing oneself on paper to qualify for Medicaid is also wrong." +Vincent J. Russo of Westbury, L.I., chairman of the elder law section of the New York State Bar Association, said the law authorizing criminal penalties for the transfer of assets was "an inappropriate, excessive response" to what some lawmakers saw as a problem. +"We ended up with a really bad statute," Mr. Russo said. "Do we really intend to put Grandma in jail? Is that what society wants to spend its resources on? It's ludicrous." +Congress may have wanted to curb the practices of some lawyers, he said, "but now more than ever seniors need to consult an attorney so they can be sure they're not committing a crime." +Mr. LaTourette said the threat of imprisonment was being used to frighten the elderly. For example, he said, at several estate-planning seminars in the Cleveland area, elderly people were told that they could go to jail under the new law. +"Seniors who go to these seminars are being pressured to hire estate planners, financial planners and elder law attorneys," Mr. LaTourette said. "They are also being pressured to purchase long-term care insurance so they don't do the wrong thing and wind up in jail." + +LOAD-DATE: February 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +83 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 18, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +HealthSouth May Acquire Horizon/CMS + +BYLINE: By MILT FREUDENHEIM + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 5; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 688 words + +The HealthSouth Corporation, which has gobbled up the competition to become the nation's biggest operator of rehabilitation and outpatient surgery centers, is negotiating to buy the Horizon/CMS Healthcare Corporation, which operates hospitals and clinics, for about $1 billion in stock, people familiar with the talks said yesterday. +HealthSouth's board approved the purchase yesterday, and Horizon's board was meeting last night, these people said. They cautioned that the deal still might not go through. + The acquisition, in which HealthSouth would also assume $700 million in Horizon debt, would cap a series of 10 acquisitions in three years that have left HealthSouth, which is based in Birmingham, Ala., with 90 rehabilitation hospitals and 700 outpatient rehabilitation clinics. HealthSouth boasts that it is the only health care company with patient centers in all 50 states. +The purchase of Horizon, which operates the second-largest network of such centers, would virtually complete the process of consolidation in that field. Horizon, of Albuquerque, N.M., operates 33 rehabilitation hospitals, 282 outpatient centers and 48 specialty hospitals. +Horizon agreed last week to pay at least $17 million, and no more than $20 million, to settle a class-action shareholder lawsuit that contended the company made misleading statements about expected earnings and failed to promptly disclose that it was the subject of a Federal investigation into possible billing fraud. +Combined with Horizon, HealthSouth would have one-quarter of the nation's outpatient rehabilitation centers and almost two-thirds of the 190 rehabilitation hospitals. But analysts said they did not expect problems with antitrust regulators. +Deborah J. Lawson, an analyst with Morgan Stanley, said regulators look at each metropolitan market separately. She said there were relatively few overlaps between HealthSouth and Horizon hospitals, and she noted that both companies competed with the rehabilitation units of local general hospitals. +Analysts said that almost all of Horizon's assets fit well with HealthSouth strategically. +Ms. Lawson said HealthSouth might eventually sell or spin off some Horizon nursing homes, a pharmacy business serving institutions and a physician-staffing unit. +HealthSouth has acquired 571 centers in the last 30 months for a total of $3.4 billion. The acquisitions included Surgical Care Affiliates for $1.4 billion; Advantage Health, $345 million; Novacare, $245 million plus $20 million of debt, and Relife Inc., $220 million. +Not counting the Horizon deal, analysts project revenues for HealthSouth of almost $3 billion in 1996 with earnings of $350 million. HealthSouth's contracts already cover 130 million people in managed care, workers' compensation and self-insured health plans. +About one-third of revenue is from Medicare, the Federal program for the elderly and disabled, but analysts say budget slashing in Medicare is likely to fall most heavily on hospitals, perhaps benefiting outpatient companies like HealthSouth. +Analysts said the deal would immediately add to HealthSouth earnings because its costs were lower than Horizon's. "They key is getting your costs down," Ms. Lawson said. "HealthSouth has that in place." +Robert Hoehn, an analyst with Salomon Brothers, said, "HealthSouth's operating margins were more than twice as high as Horizon's last year -- 32.5 percent, compared with about 14 percent." He added, "Horizon has over $100 million in corporate overhead, a lot of which can come out," for example, at offices in Mechanicsburg, Pa., that Horizon acquired when it bought Continental Medical Systems Inc. in April 1995. +Under the proposed deal, Horizon stockholders would receive 0.42169 share of HealthSouth common stock for each Horizon share. +Stock markets were closed yesterday for the Washington's Birthday holiday. On the New York Stock Exchange Friday, HealthSouth closed at $43.125, up 37.5 cents, and Horizon at $14.25, up 12.5 cents. Both stocks have climbed sharply since last July, when HealthSouth traded at $28.50 and Horizon at $9.625. + +LOAD-DATE: February 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + + +GRAPHIC: HealthSouth operates the nation's largest network of rehabilitation centers. Graph tracks net sales and net income of HealthSouth from the beginning of 1995 through the third quarter of 1996. It also lists the company's previous acquisitions. (Sources: Bloomberg News; Smith Barney) (pg. D4) +Graph: "Leading Rehabilitation Network" + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +84 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 19, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Shares of Horizon/CMS Jump After Takeover Announcement + +BYLINE: By MILT FREUDENHEIM + +SECTION: Section D; Page 3; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 762 words + +Shares of the Horizon/CMS Healthcare Corporation jumped nearly 16 percent yesterday following the announcement that the company had reached a definitive agreement to be bought by the HealthSouth Corporation for nearly $1 billion. +By buying Horizon, HealthSouth will be acquiring its last remaining big competitor for hospital patients who need physical rehabilitation after an accident or a debilitating disease. Including the assumption of $700 million of Horizon's debt, the acquisition, which is to be carried out through an exchange of HealthSouth shares for Horizon stock, is valued at $1.65 billion, based on HealthSouth's closing share price before the deal was announced yesterday morning. + Analysts said HealthSouth, whose revenues have quintupled in five years of aggressive acquisitions, would now pursue freestanding surgical centers and diagnostic imaging centers to keep up the pace of growth. HealthSouth, based in Birmingham, Ala., agreed in December to buy Health Images, a diagnostic chain, for $270 million. +"With this deal, they have acquired the last remaining big pool of rehabilitation assets," Helen T. Donnell, an analyst with Paine Webber, said. +HealthSouth is the nation's biggest rehabilitation chain, with 90 hospitals and 700 outpatient clinics. Combined with Horizon, based in Albuquerque, N.M., it would have about two-thirds of the country's rehabilitation hospitals and 25 percent of the outpatient rehabilitation centers. +Although Richard T. Scrushy, chief executive of HealthSouth, said the Horizon merger would add to earnings this year, the stock fell $2.125, or 4.9 percent, to $41 on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday. Horizon rose $2.25, to $16.50. +HealthSouth intends to continue on the acquisition path, Mr. Scrushy said. The company had revenues of about $2.5 billion last year, up from $470 million in 1991. Analysts estimate 1997 revenues at $2.9 billion, not counting Horizon. +Mr. Scrushy said nearly all of Horizon's 33 rehabilitation hospitals and 250 rehabilitation centers were in markets where they could refer patients to HealthSouth's diagnostic and surgery centers. +Analysts said HealthSouth would probably sell some of Horizon's nursing homes. "Essentially the purchase price was buying acute rehabilitation and specialty hospitals, as well as outpatient centers," said Jean Swenson, an analyst with Alex. Brown in Boston. "It put a very low value on the nursing homes." +But Mr. Scrushy said HealthSouth was in "no rush" to divest. "These facilities, over all, are very profitable," he said. "There's no pain." +HealthSouth has prospered by trimming costs and winning managed care customers. The company hopes to increase its share of elderly Medicare patients as the population ages and the Federal Medicare program tries to hold down costs by pushing more patients into health maintenance organizations. +Each Horizon share would be exchanged for 0.42169 HealthSouth share. HealthSouth would issue 22.6 million new shares for a total of 202 million shares. The deal is subject to antitrust review by Federal regulators and approval by Horizon shareholders. +HealthSouth shareholders will not be asked for approval because the number of outstanding shares would be increased by only about 13 percent -- below the 20 percent threshold at which shareholder approval is needed, HealthSouth said. + + + + -------------------- + +Sun Healthcare in Deal +ALBUQUERQUE, N.M., Feb. 18 (By Bloomberg News) -- Sun Healthcare Group Inc. said today that it had agreed to buy a rival nursing home operator, Retirement Care Associates, and its Contour Medical Inc. unit for about $328 million in cash, stock and assumed debt. +Retirement Care stockholders will receive 0.6625 share of Sun Healthcare for each share of Retirement Care, which operates nursing homes and assisted-living centers. The purchase values Retirement Care shares at $9.28 each, based on Sun's Friday closing price of $14. +Atlanta-based Retirement Care owns 65 percent of Contour Medical, which makes medical and surgical supplies. Sun will pay $8.50 for each outstanding share in the remaining 35 percent stake. Contour had 8.96 million common shares and equivalents at the end of December. +On the New York Stock Exchange today, Sun shares fell 37.5 cents, to $13.625. Retirement Care declined 75 cents, to $8.25. Contour rose 87.5 cents, to $7.875, in Nasdaq trading. +Following the purchase, Sun will operate 376 nursing homes with almost 37,000 beds and 47 assisted-living centers with 4,600 units. + +LOAD-DATE: February 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +85 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 21, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Residential Real Estate; +Assisted-Living Quarters for the Aged Are on the Rise + +BYLINE: By RACHELLE GARBARINE + +SECTION: Section B; Page 5; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 906 words + +With the number of older people in the city expected to grow, developers are scrambling to build hotel-like rental projects that will offer tenants meals, as well as help with dressing and the monitoring of medication. +Three major operators of what are called assisted-living residences are developing the projects alone or with builders. The developers have built thousands of these residences elsewhere, and only now are turning to New York, which they had avoided because of high costs and tight regulations. + Construction will start soon on a 143-unit project in Kew Gardens, Queens. A 206-unit project is to begin next month in the Bronx, and one with 128 units is to open for tenants in May in Brooklyn. Contracts for similar projects are pending on four sites: in midtown and downtown Manhattan, and in Forest Hills and Rego Park, Queens, for a total of 640 units. +"As the granddaddy of demographics, New York City is too appealing a market to ignore any more," said Jeffrey E. Levine, president of Levine Builder Inc. of Douglaston, Queens, which is building the residences in Riverdale and Kew Gardens with Kapson Senior Quarters Corporation of Woodbury, L.I., among the region's larger assisted-living developers. +Assisted living is the term for housing for people 75 and older who need help with daily chores but do not need constant medical care. +Until now, most older New Yorkers who needed such housing have turned to adult homes, which are licensed by the state and provide meals and personal and limited nursing care. Under the regulations, publicly owned companies cannot be the provider of personal care services, a stipulation that traces back to nursing-home scandals of the 1960's. +Developers said other hurdles are that adult homes are limited to 200 beds, and obtaining the special permits to build them is costly and uncertain. The expense of building in the city and the lack of sites are also problems. +The new projects have found a way around the regulations by separating housing from health care. The projects offer apartment living with hotel-style services, including meals, housekeeping and social activities. The market-rate rents are expected to be $2,800 to $4,900 a month. Personal care will be provided at extra cost through a licensed agency or a provider chosen by residents. Under this arrangement, developers and operators of the housing do not need any state licenses or special permits. +The 1990 Census found 953,400 people 65 or older in the city. That number is expected to dip to 834,300 by 2000, then rise in 2005. The fastest-growing segment of the elderly population will be those 85 and over, which will increase by 5,200 to 107,700 in 2000. +The new projects reflect a nationwide surge in assisted living, a $12 billion-a-year industry that is expected to grow to $30 billion by 2000, according to the Assisted Living Federation of America in Alexandria, Va., which says there are 40,000 assisted-living residences in the country. +Developers are also turning to New York now because so many of these residences are being built in the New York area. Until recently, "no one wanted to take the time and effort to understand the complex continuum of care," or take chances in a tough real estate market, said Susan Peerless, executive director of Empire State Association of Adult Homes and Assisted Living Facilities in Albany. +The New York City Department of Planning is considering zoning changes to encourage more residences for the elderly. Andrew S. Lynn, executive director of city planning, said, "The city has to invest in accommodating the needs of these people in the city, rather than for them to move elsewhere." +Efforts will also be made this year in Albany to streamline the regulatory processes, Ms. Peerless said. +Work is being completed at the former Madonna Residence at 35 Prospect Park West in Brooklyn, which is being converted into the 128-unit Prospect Park Residence at Grand Army Plaza. The renovation of the one-time nursing home is being done by ARV Assisted Living Inc. of Costa Mesa, Calif., in partnership with Castle Assisted Living of Teaneck, N.J. +"New York City is one of the most underserved markets," said Stanley Diamond, Castle's chairman. +Rents, including services, for the studio and one-bedroom units, with 330 to 550 square feet of space, will be $2,800 to $3,300. Residents can arrange for personal care through a licensed provider set up by Castle, or may choose their own. +Next month, Kapson, with Levine Builder, is to begin a 206-unit project at 3718 Henry Hudson Parkway, at West 239th Street in Riverdale, the Bronx. By August, they expect to start a 143-unit project at 117th Street and 84th Avenue in Kew Gardens. +Rents at both will be $2,900 to $3,600 for the 325- to 600-square-foot, studio to two-bedroom units, including meals and services. Personal care will be available through a Kapson subsidiary, or residents may select their own provider. +Another large national operator, Care Matrix of Needham, Mass., has contracts pending on sites in Manhattan, Forest Hills and Rego Park, Queens. Michael Zaccaro, executive vice president, declined to give exact locations, but said plans call for 160 studio- to two-bedroom units, with 400 to 925 square feet of space. +Rents, with meals and services, are expected to be $3,100 to $4,900, Mr. Zaccaro said. He said hospitals will provide personal care. + +LOAD-DATE: February 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The Madonna Residence, a one-time nursing home in Brooklyn, is becoming the 128-unit Prospect Park Residence at Grand Army Plaza. (Nancy Siesel/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +86 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 21, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Clinton Prohibits H.M.O. Limit on Advice to Medicaid Patients + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 22; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 882 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 + +President Clinton today prohibited health maintenance organizations from limiting what doctors may tell Medicaid patients about treatment options. And he urged Congress to guarantee similar protections for more than 100 million Americans with private insurance. +In December, the Clinton Administration said H.M.O.'s and other health plans might not limit what doctors tell Medicare patients about treatment options. Nearly five million elderly people, about 13 percent of Medicare beneficiaries, are in H.M.O.'s. + Today's action, for Medicaid, is more significant because it affects more people. About 13.3 million, or 36 percent of Medicaid recipients, are in H.M.O.'s, and states are rushing to increase the number because they see managed care as way to hold down costs. +In announcing his action today, Mr. Clinton declared that changes revolutionizing the health insurance and health care industries must not be allowed to erode the quality of medical care. +The President's comments foreshadow a battle over the role of Government in regulating managed care, which has reined in health costs in part by limiting the use of medical specialists and costly procedures. Three-fourths of Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance are in managed-care plans. +Some health plans have discouraged doctors from telling patients about expensive treatment options like bone marrow transplants. Doctors who flout such rules say they face retaliation from the health plans for which they work. The managed-care industry recently promised not to restrict communications between doctors and patients on medical questions. +Surrounded by doctors and nurses in the Oval Office of the White House today, Mr. Clinton said: "On the whole, the growth of managed care has been a good thing for our country. But we also know, we've seen enough to know, that we have to make absolutely sure that this rapid transformation does not lead to a decline in the quality of health care. That's why I've been concerned about these so-called gag rules that some H.M.O.'s and other health care plans have." +H.M.O. patients must be assured that "their doctors will give them the very best information" about medical treatments, Mr. Clinton said. +The American Medical Association strongly supported the President's initiative. The H.M.O. industry, while supporting Mr. Clinton's action on Medicaid, said it saw no need for legislation on the issue. +Representative Greg Ganske, an Iowa Republican who has introduced a bill to ban gag clauses in managed care, said that policy statements by the H.M.O. industry were inadequate because "they have no enforcement mechanism." +Next week two senior Democrats, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan, will introduce much more comprehensive bills to protect consumers by systematically regulating H.M.O.'s and other forms of managed care. +The new protections for Medicaid recipients are set forth in letters sent today to state Medicaid directors by Bruce Merlin Fried, director of the office of managed care at the Department of Health and Human Services. If H.M.O.'s limit the ability of doctors to discuss treatment options with Medicaid recipients, Mr. Fried said, they are violating Federal law. +Under the law, he said, Medicaid patients in H.M.O.'s "must have access to the same services" available to other Medicaid beneficiaries. Therefore, he said, "any contractual provisions, including so-called gag rules, that restrict a health care provider's ability to advise patients about medically necessary treatment options violate Federal law." +At the White House today, Vice President Al Gore explained the Administration's rationale this way: "Physicians take a solemn pledge to do no harm. It's called the Hippocratic oath. But for too many doctors, strict rules imposed by health plans have been turning the Hippocratic oath into a vow of silence." +Alixe R. Glen, a senior vice president of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, said that its members did not restrict what doctors could tell patients. Ms. Glen said the association, whose members provide health insurance to more than 70 million people, had not taken a position on the Ganske bill. +But Ms. Glen said: "This should be handled by the industry, not by onerous new laws. There seems to be a shoot-from-the-hip tendency to create laws based on anecdotes that are not representative of a trend. Government intervention can inflate premium costs and, in some cases, limit the flexibility of health plans and physicians to meet the needs of patients." +Dr. Daniel H. Johnson Jr., president of the American Medical Association, welcomed Mr. Clinton's effort to ban gag rules. +On Dec. 17, the American Association of Health Plans, a trade association for H.M.O.'s, said its members would "not prohibit physicians from communicating with patients concerning medical care." +Carol L. O'Brien, a lawyer at the American Medical Association, said today that the managed-care industry had been "virtually forced to take a more pro-patient position" to address consumers' concerns and to head off Federal and state legislation. +But Ms. O'Brien said, "We remain skeptical that the industry is capable of self-regulation." + +LOAD-DATE: February 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +87 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 22, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Condolence Calls Put Rare Light on Deng's Family + +BYLINE: By SETH FAISON + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 3; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1324 words + +DATELINE: BEIJING, Feb. 21 + +Just north of the Forbidden City, where China's emperors once lived, a maze of dusty lanes and grubby back alleys are punctuated by simple red doorways befitting ramshackle homes. Behind some of these doorways, however, lie the elegant and spacious courtyard dwellings of the families of China's Communist Party leaders, a new kind of Forbidden City. +In one dirt-and-cobblestone lane, one black limousine after another came to call this week to see the elderly widow and five middle-aged children of Deng Xiaoping. + The visitors were classmates and colleagues, relatives and friends, fellow members of a select club: the sons and daughters to China's senior leaders, also known as princelings, or taizi, as they are called in Chinese. +The five Deng children have enjoyed being at the pinnacle of this club for years, but one question that looms over Beijing since Mr. Deng's death is exactly how it will affect them. +Mr. Deng's death has not led to any repudiation of his rule, at least not yet, so there is no sudden movement to purge his relatives. Their wealth, though it causes resentment among more ordinary folk, is partly protected by the deep sense of fraternity among the politically privileged. +"None of the Deng children have any money problems, but the problem lies right there," said the daughter of a senior official, suggesting that they had taken advantage of their positions to make large sums of money. "They are all vulnerable, but I don't think anything will happen to them unless they look as if they're getting excessive." She spoke on the condition of anonymity. +Translating superior connections into lucrative business, the class of princelings has profited enormously from the economic freedom the previous generation introduced. +The myth of Communist China was that everyone would be equal, if poor; today's version is that a socialist-market economy gives everyone a chance to grow rich. But the rules are stacked, it turns out, in favor of the families of the leaders who make the rules. +While the Deng family's position at the top of this club has receded slightly with Mr. Deng's health in the last year or two, the brothers and sisters are so entrenched in the network that purging one or more would require serious political effort by Jiang Zemin, China's President. +Last year he had a chance. The younger of Mr. Deng's sons, Deng Zhifang, was at the top of a state-run corporation whose leaders were prosecuted for corruption. +Deng Zhifang returned to China in 1990 after studying physics at the University of Rochester for seven years. A socially awkward man, he was fascinated by the challenge of adapting computer software to Chinese characters, but, apparently unable to resist the lure, he turned to business. +He accepted some of the deals offered by the many Hong Kong businessmen looking for "iron connections" within China, including a partnership with Li Ka-shing, a billionaire real estate developer. But the young Mr. Deng became most closely allied with Zhou Beifang, who headed the Hong Kong subsidiary of China's leading steel producer, Shougang Corporation, and whose father, Zhou Guanwu, the head of the corporation, was close to Deng Xiaoping. +Last November, when the younger Mr. Zhou was sentenced to life in prison for taking bribes of more than $1 million, it was unclear whether Deng Zhifang would also be investigated, a decision so sensitive that it could be made only with the approval of President Jiang. Since then, Mr. Deng has resigned his position as a managing director at the Hong Kong company, but remains a consultant. +"Deng Zhifang has probably set it up so he can go overseas if he needs to," a member of a prominent political family said. "It's hard to imagine Jiang Zemin moving against him." +Deng Xiaoping's youngest daughter, Xiao Rong, angered senior leaders when she gave The New York Times an interview in January 1995 without their prior permission, and discussed her father's failing health. +Deng Pufang, her older brother, made a speech last summer that ostensibly defended his father's aggressive economic reform policies, but which apparently was interpreted by some senior officials as a defense of the Deng family's influence, and their right to wield it. +Family members are said to have frequently quarreled with the Communist Party staff over how to care for Mr. Deng as his health deteriorated. These instances may be a normal part of the push-and-pull tension that always exists between a political family and the government with which it is intertwined. +Yet such clashes often required the intervention of Wang Ruilin, a top aide to Mr. Deng for decades, and head of Mr. Deng's personal office until it was formally disbanded a few months ago. +"The importance of his role in assisting Jiang Zemin has been in getting the Deng family out of politics," said Michael D. Swaine, director of the Center for Asia-Pacific Policy at the Rand Corporation. +Zhuo Lin, Mr. Deng's wife of 58 years, is 80 and has suffered from a nerve disease that became so painful, acquaintances said, that one day last year she took so many painkillers that she almost died. The panic that ensued among doctors set off a round of rumors that Mr. Deng was close to death, before word gradually spread that it was his wife. +The leader's widow is said to eschew the kind of ostentatious luxury her children enjoy, keeping with the tradition of the elder generation of China's leaders, who extolled Communism and simple living. +But the sons and daughters of senior leaders are highly secretive and almost tribal in the way they keep to insulated circles of friends, It is often difficult to uncover even the most basic information about them, including where they work or live or invest their money, except in unusual cases like Deng Zhifang's. +Yet some information is available: +*Deng Lin, the eldest daughter, 55, was once a painter of traditional Chinese watercolors who more recently started dabbling in abstract expressionism. Critics have not been as enthusiastic about her work as have Japanese businessmen, particularly ones with operations in China. +*Deng Pufang, the eldest son, 52, is chairman of China's Federation for the Disabled. He has used a wheelchair since he fell from a fourth-story window after being harassed by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. +*Deng Nan, a second daughter, 51, is a deputy minister in the State Commission for Science and Technology. +*Xiao Rong, 46, who for years accompanied her father and yelled in his ear to compensate for his poor hearing, has two positions listed on her business card: deputy chairwoman of the China Association for International Friendly Contact, and deputy to the National People's Congress, the rough equivalent of a Congresswoman. +Also a consultant to many Hong Kong companies, Xiao Rong has said she still draws a $125-a-month salary from the army, where she once worked full time. +Her husband, He Ping, is president of the Poly Group, one of China's leading arms sellers. +Deng Xiaoping had four grandchildren, and at least one is enrolled in a secondary school in the United States. +Since the end of the Cultural Revolution, when a breakdown in social and political order meant that the families of leaders were divided, persecuted and often sent to internal exile, the system has deemed that party families maintain discipline; consequently, few are actually prosecuted except in extreme and unusual cases, like Zhou Beifang's. +Nor do they like to talk to, or at times even be seen by, outsiders. +This week, a few policemen stood at the entrance to the lane, firmly stopping any outsiders who tried to enter, saying the residential street was "a restricted military area." It is such a small and modest-looking lane, an outsider might be forgiven for thinking it an unlikely place for a home for a man who once ruled a fifth of humanity. + +LOAD-DATE: February 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Deng Pufang in August 1994 at the Disabled Games in Beijing. (Reuters); Xiao Rong, youngest daughter of the late Deng Xiaoping, promoting her biography of her father in 1995 in New York. She angered senior Chinese officials when she discussed her father's ailing health. (Agence France-Presse) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +88 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 23, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +POP/JAZZ; +Quebec's Little Girl, Conquering the Globe + +BYLINE: By ANTHONY DePALMA + +SECTION: Section 2; Page 34; Column 1; Arts and Leisure Desk + +LENGTH: 1427 words + +DATELINE: MONTREAL + +LANGUAGE IS AT THE HEART OF just about everything in the independence-minded province of Quebec, as the French singer Charles Aznavour found out last October when he tried to sing a few songs in English during a concert here and nearly got booed off the stage. +When the insulted Quebecers shouted "en Francais!" at Mr. Aznavour, he argued that another French-speaking performer, Celine Dion, is permitted to sing there in English. The crowd was unmoved. In the second half of his show, he used only French. + A few weeks later Ms. Dion -- who is French Canadian -- took the same stage at the Molson Center for one of her last concerts of the year. She performed her first two songs in a booming French that wowed the crowd. Then she belted out two in English, a language she didn't speak a word of until she was 18, and the applause was even greater. +By the concert's end, she had the hard-nosed audience of teen-agers, housewives and a few elderly people singing, in English, "I'm everything I am, because you loved me." The line comes from her hit song "Because You Loved Me," which is in contention for record of the year at Wednesday's Grammy Awards ceremony at Madison Square Garden (where she'll also be appearing in concert on April 12). Ms. Dion has also been nominated for three other Grammys, including album and pop album of the year, and best female pop performance. +Ms. Dion is no favorite of many music critics. They claim that her singing is as passionless as her voice is big and that her songs, which she does not write, are more likely to become next year's prom hit than to break new ground. +But here before the hometown crowd, a sentiment that could seem softhearted on the radio seemed to carry authentic feeling. And as Ms. Dion scooped up an armful of cuddly stuffed frogs brought to the stage by her fans, it truly seemed that the audience did have a lot to do with her amazing climb from singing in her father's bar not far from here as a girl to international superstardom at 28. +"They were the first ones to support me and I trust them," Ms. Dion said after the concert. "I believe in them. They're a big part of my life." Dressed in a plain white bathrobe and huge slippers shaped like black cows, the petite blond with large expressive eyes seemed relieved to be at home in Montreal after a year in which she toured the world. That same year her album "Falling Into You" sold 20 million copies worldwide, one of the biggest sellers in an otherwise grim year for the record industry. +But with her mother and many of her 13 brothers and sisters in the audience, Ms. Dion admitted that she had been a bit anxious, even though she has performed and recorded professionally since she was 13. +"Before I go on, there's a little bit of nervousness," she said. "I don't know if it's possible to say nervousness in English. In French we say nervosite, which I think means stress a little bit." +While her current success makes any roughness in her English seem quaint, she says the decision to record in English was so sensitive that some of the more political members of her team quit in protest. "We lost a few of our friends at the beginning of my career because they thought it was stupid for me to record in English and they didn't believe in it," she said. +She only wanted to be able to perform in English, she insisted, because she remembered listening to her siblings singing Beatles and Stevie Wonder songs as they rehearsed new shows. Her parents had formed a Quebec version of the Trapp family, but only Celine, the youngest, ever made it to the big time. +That success was in great part because of her five-octave voice and a single-minded dedication that drove her to drop out of school at 14 so she could spend more time singing. Also instrumental was a chance encounter with a Montreal producer named Rene Angelil, a man with both vision and a taste for taking risks, who had also guided the career of Ginette Reno, another child star. +One day in 1981 he received a demonstration tape from Ms. Dion's older brother Michel of his 12-year-old sister singing "It Was Only a Dream," written by her mother, Therese. "I listened to it right away, and I couldn't believe it," said Mr. Angelil, 54, who remains Ms. Dion's manager and two years ago became her husband. He called her in to audition. +"She wasn't the cutest 12-year-old." She had a problem with her teeth and she was very shy, but her eyes were incredible." And she could sing. +When the song was released the next year, it became a No. 1 hit in French Canada and later in France. Other hits in French followed. Then, when she turned 18, and decided she had grown up, she cut her hair, got a more adult wardrobe and learned to speak English with a three-month crash course at Berlitz. +"At the beginning, because I was a Francophone from Quebec, it was more difficult for me to be played on the radio in the English part of Canada than it was in the United States," she said. "But when it started to work for me in the United States, well, they kind of had no choice." +Polly Anthony, the president of Ms. Dion's label, 550 Music, a subsidiary of Sony, said her march toward the top of the charts had been remarkable because it had been so steady and so quick. In the United States alone, her first English album sold a million copies, her second two million and her third three million. Her fourth, "Falling Into You," which spent almost an entire year in Billboard magazine's top five, is now at eight million in the United States. +"The timing was right for a pure pop artist," said Chuck Taylor, radio editor of Billboard. "But there's a lot more to her success than just timing and luck." +Mr. Taylor also attributed part of Celine Dion's good fortune to a general weariness with 60's style rock-and-roll, which he said had helped open radio airwaves for ballads and pop music. +Ms. Dion is often compared to Mariah Carey for her style and Barbra Streisand for her voice. Her latest CD in French, called simply "The French Album," is a simple production, filled with soulful songs and a few recordings that hint at contemporary jazz. But on "Falling Into You," almost nothing is simple. +The slickly produced torch song "It's All Coming Back to Me Now," written by Jim Steinman, starts with a dramatic piano chord swept by howling winds and builds from there for seven and a half minutes. Sexy ballads like the title cut and a remake of "All by Myself," which lets Ms. Dion show off her powerful voice, deal with recaptured love and longing. +Her voice was attraction enough to get the producer Phil Spector to begin a rare recording session in 1994. But the session ended in a disastrous clash of views. Mr. Spector would not discuss the incident but last spring he told Entertainment Weekly that he had quit the project because Ms. Dion's team "simply wanted to record 'hits' even if they were contrived and repugnant." Mr. Angelil says Mr. Spector mistakenly thought he would produce an entire album when there was only time to do three songs. The album they were working on with Mr. Spector became "Falling Into You." +Still, Ms. Dion said she was growing weary of just being a voice, of running to the studio to lay a track of lyrics someone else wrote on top of music that is already recorded. She says she is eager to take more control of her career, which until now has been under the strong hand of Mr. Angelil. +"Sometimes I have to read the liner notes to find out who played guitar on my record, who played percussion," she said. "It doesn't mean that what we've done is no good, but the last French album I recorded in one week, the English album in two weeks. I'd like to take the time to record an album." +She keeps a blue-and-white Fender Stratocaster in her dressing room, and her fingernails have been pared back by practice sessions on the guitar. She wants to continue recording in both French and English, but she also wants to learn Spanish and maybe Japanese (one of her songs was No. 1 in Japan last year). +Any artist can be overexposed, however, and with her many concerts, talk show appearances, even the Celine Dion phone cards advertised in "Falling Into You," Ms. Dion may have come dangerously close to her limit. Mr. Angelil says that is why they are going to take a year off, starting in May. They are building a mansion in Florida, a state that has long been a favorite among French Canadians. They are also planning to start a family, though not a family anywhere near as large as her parents'. + +LOAD-DATE: February 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Celine Dion, top and below left, at a hometown concert in Montreal in December and, above, her fans--"I believe in them," she says of her audiences. (Photographs by Christopher Morris for The New York times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +89 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 23, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Personal Tales of 300 Years of Life in Connecticut + +BYLINE: By ALBERTA EISEMAN + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 23; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1019 words + +THE experiences of a young soldier during the Revolutionary War, the impressions of an English immigrant writing home in 1870, the reminiscences of a group of working women in the year 1914 -- these are some of the stories told first-hand in a new book, "Connecticut Speaks for Itself." +Published by the Connecticut Humanities Council, the state arm of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the anthology is drawn from diaries, letters, journals and interviews reflecting 300 years of life in Connecticut. + The volume starts with the diary of Joshua Hempsted of New London, who recorded, in 1711, that he had "met with some hurt with a cow which, having newly calved and being angry at me, struck me in the face, cut my lip and hurt my arm and leg" and ends with a 1994 interview with nonagenarian Gladys Tantaquidgeon who founded the Mohegan Museum in Montville and calls herself "the last of the Mohegans." +Edited by David P. Shuldiner, scholar in residence with the elderly services division of the Department of Social Services, and Thomas R. Beardsley, a British historian who has specialized in American urban history, the anthology sheds light on themes like the growth and subsequent decline of the state's industries, the immigrant experience, the role of women at home and at work and the response of established residents to ethnic changes. The selections are arranged in three major parts, devoted respectively to cultural diversity, changing occupations and women's lives. Each is introduced by an essay written by a scholar in Connecticut history. +The project originated in 1984, when Dr. Shuldiner, a folklorist and anthropologist, began assembling materials for programs for older adults in senior centers, libraries and nursing homes. +"One of the most important steps I took was to go out and talk with elders throughout the state, to get a sense of what they wanted to learn more about and discuss," he related. "I found that many of the people I met had an avid interest in local history. No matter how long or short a time they had lived in the state, they seemed to adopt it." +Later, Dr. Shuldiner began to explore the possibility of developing an anthology of personal accounts. From colleges around the state he recruited a group of scholars who searched for archival material. "I discovered to my surprise and delight diaries, journals, collections of letters and oral histories going back to some first-hand accounts of encounters between Colonial settlers and Native Americans," he said. +"In addition, several of my colleagues had conducted interviews of their own and shared their transcripts. When I started out I was concerned that I wouldn't have enough first-hand accounts for a whole book, but I ended up having to pick and choose from an embarrassement of riches." +Few famous names appear in the book's pages. Most of the men and women selected are average people, engaged in everyday pursuits -- "history from below," it has been called. +The insights provided by these testimonies are considerable. Take for example the diary kept by Hannah Heaton of North Haven during the 1700's. It illustrates not only the hard life of Colonial farm women but also the pervasive influence of the Great Awakening, the religious revival movement that swept New England in the mid-18th century. +The memories of William Grimes, born a slave in Virginia in 1784, document the hazards of fleeing to the North and the hardships endured while attempting to begin a new life in Connecticut. +The hostility that some established residents felt toward newcomers were made clear in several entries, perhaps most strikingly in a 1940 conversation with a young man named Raymond Blair. The interview, one of hundreds conducted as part of the Works Project Administration, a New Deal program, quotes Mr. Blair as boasting that he was "early taught that the old American stock was superior to all other races" and that "members of those races which have settled in America during the past 50 years . . . pay no attention to our laws." +Listening to the diverse voices -- kind or negative, humorous or poignant -- the reader is struck by the irony of certain stereotypes widely believed about Connecticut. +Take the term Yankee state: The passages reveal the diverse backgrounds of the residents, the variety of cultures from which they had sprung. As for "the land of steady habits" -- the state has undergone radical changes over the centuries, from farming to skilled crafts to small industries and peddling; then powerful industrial empires, insurance and other service fields. +The versatility of many of the characters is a source of amazement. Joshua Hempsted, for example, describes his activities as farmer, surveyor, house and ship's carpenter, lawyer, stone cutter and sailor. All the while he was also serving on juries and participating in frequent town meetings. +Details of daily life make the account vivid. Readers can visualize the dull routine of endless marches, meals, church services, laundry duty, seasickness and distant battles reported by the young soldier Simeon Lymon in 1775. +One of the few people whose name strikes a familiar chord is Isabella Beecher Hooker, younger half-sister of the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe. Like other members of the enlightened Hartford family, Mrs. Hooker was an advocate of voting rights for women. Her fervor and high intelligence are evident in "A Mother's Letter to A Daughter on Woman Suffrage," a tract published anonymously in a magazine in 1868 and then reprinted under her name by the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association, of which she became president. +Equally interesting is the response of a farm woman with "only the dreary routine of household cares to occupy my mind." Married to a tight-fisted man "bitterly opposed to woman's rights," she wrote to seek Mrs. Hooker's advice "for you are a friend to us all." +Copies of "Connecticut Speaks for Itself" ($15.95) are available at the Connecticut Humanities Council, 955 South Main Street, Middletown, Conn. 06457, or by calling 860-685-2260. + +LOAD-DATE: February 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: From "Connecticut Speaks for Itself," the Himmelstein family's homestead and farmhouse in 1910 (above), at work in a spinning mill circa 1915 (top right) and Lucius Bigelow on his peddler's cart circa 1920. The cart was donated to and may still be seen at the Simsbury Historical Society. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +90 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 23, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +COMMUNITY; +Increasingly, Grandparents Raise Their Children's Children + +BYLINE: By JULIE BEGLIN + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 6; Column 2; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 910 words + +On a typical day, Rita Tyler is up at 6 A.M. to make breakfast for her 5-year-old, Kamillah, and her 10-year-old, Leslie. She walks them to the school bus, does errands and house cleaning until 3 P.M., then watches over homework and playtime until it's time for dinner and, afterward, baths. +At bedtime, Kamillah wants a story. Mrs. Tyler tries to comply, but every once in a while she cheats a little by using a storytelling cassette tape. + "They're a joy most of the time," she said, "but sometimes I get so tired. I just get so tired." +Being a single parent is draining enough. But not only is Mrs. Tyler a single mother; she is also a senior citizen. "I thought I'd be a swinging single grandmother," said Mrs. Tyler, 70, an Orange resident who was widowed years before she took her grandchildren in. +She is one of a growing number of grandparents in New Jersey caring fulltime for their grandchildren. Social service workers throughout the state say they have seen more and more grandparents coming to them with concerns about school placements, day care, child discipline and health insurance, as well as questions about applying for public assistance for the additional mouths to feed. +Yet the exact number of grandparent caregivers is not known, and their needs are not fully understood. To fill in this knowledge, the state Legislature in December passed a law establishing committees in Atlantic, Essex, Mercer, Middlesex, Monmouth and Bergen counties to count the number of grandparents raising their grandchildren and assess their needs. +"We may find that the services that are out there need to be expanded to include programs geared specifically to the grandparent parent, such as how you raise a child on Social Security," said state Senator John Bennett, who sponsored the bill with two other Republicans, state Senator Peter Inverso and Assemblyman Joseph Azzolina. "The only way to do that is to compile the information and see what's needed to address the problem." +Five years ago, Mrs. Taylor's daughter was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and Mrs. Tyler started caring for the children. Now Mrs. Tyler supports her household of three on Social Security, welfare payments and food stamps that total about $1,100 a month. +Mental illness is one reason a parent's parents take over raising the children. Others are drug and alcohol addiction, teen-age motherhood, incarceration and serious illness or death. In New Jersey, this trend is expected to increase because of changes in the welfare law, the effects of AIDS and crack cocaine, and an emphasis on keeping children out of foster care, said Claudette Haba, of the state Division of Youth and Family Services. +Alice Abner of Piscataway has been raising her 18-, 13- and 12-year-old grandchildren singlehandedly for 12 years. In 1989 she started a support group called the Grandparents Need More Than a Hug of Central New Jersey, which has grown from 12 to 40 active members and accumulated a mailing list of 400. +Similarly, officers in the Salvation Army of New Jersey noticed that an increasing number of their clients cared full-time for grandchildren. After receiving a grant from the United Way of Essex and West Hudson, the Army began grandparent support groups in its Newark and East Orange offices in September. There is already a waiting list for the monthly sessions. +"It's helpful to know you're not the only one going through what you're going through," said Frances Banks, a 61-year-old East Orange woman who has attended every meeting of the East Orange group since it started. She is the mother of six children, and raised a granddaughter when the child's mother died of AIDS; she is now raising a great-grandson whose mother is addicted to drugs. +Other parenting groups offer little help. "I tried them," Mrs. Banks said. "They were talking about boyfriends and wanting to go out Saturday nights.." +At the January meeting of the Salvation Army's East Orange support group, Donny Bellamy of the organization Parents Anonymous, which tries to deter child abuse, talked with the grandparents about parenting skills.Many of the 17 grandparents said the children in their houses were harder to raise than children a generation earlier. "These children challenge a lot more," Mr. Bellamy said. "Why do you think they're mad?" +"We're paying for what the parents have done to them," said Mrs. Banks. +Financial matters also weigh heavily. Nationally, the median income for grandparent-caregiver households is $18,000 -- or about half of the $36,204 median income of traditional households with children, according to a 1992 study by the American Association of Retired Persons. +Grandparents receive far less aid for the children they raise than do people raising foster children. Nancy Feldman, staff attorney for the Association for Children of New Jersey, suggests the state direct foster care prevention money to these households. +The state's new welfare initiative requires teen mothers to live with their parents or other adults if they are to receive public assistance. Welfare recipients must also find work within two years of receiving assistance, which means that many grandparents may be caring for grandchildren while the parent is at a job. +"I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing," said state Senator Bennett. "You could have the child going out to work and the grandparent watching the baby. That's the way it used to be." + +LOAD-DATE: February 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Rita Tyler, 70, is raising her grandchildren, Kamillah, 5, and Leslie, 10, in her home in Orange. (Lenore Victoria Davis for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +91 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 23, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +IN BRIEF; +Drug Council Proposes Switch to Managed Care + +BYLINE: By KAREN DeMASTERS + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 6; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 237 words + +The Governor's Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse would like Medicaid substance-abuse treatment programs to be handled through managed-care organizations, just like other medical treatment for Medicaid patients. The switch could save substantial amounts of money, said the council's executive director, Carolyn Bronson. But instead of putting the money back into the state and Federal coffers, the council would like the money used to increase the number of people eligible for treatment and the types of treatment. +The recommendation, delivered to the Assembly on Thursday, is part of the council's three-year master plan. A few other states already have switched substance-abuse programs to managed-care organizations, with varying results, Ms. Bronson said. + In New Jersey, 700,000 residents -- women and children who receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children and blind, disabled and some elderly residents -- are eligible for Medicaid, paid half by the state and half by the Federal government. Last year, $35 million from Medicaid was spent on alcohol- and drug-abuse programs in New Jersey, but currently only inpatient hospital programs and outpatient programs connected with hospitals are covered. +The switch from standard coverage to managed care would require changes in regulations of the Department of Human Services and possible legislative changes, Ms. Bronson said. KAREN DeMASTERS + +LOAD-DATE: February 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +92 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 23, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Labor to Recruit Elderly Protesters + +BYLINE: By STEVEN GREENHOUSE + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 30; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 792 words + +DATELINE: LOS ANGELES, Feb. 20 + +From the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s point of view, the internship program it set up last year to immerse college students in the labor movement was such a success that it has decided to set up a similar program for retirees. +The new program, Senior Summer, is intended to tap the wisdom, commitment and spare time of hundreds of retirees by getting them to help with strikes, organizing drives and political campaigns. + "These are the people who built the labor movement," said Richard Bensinger, the federation's organizing director. "We can learn lots from them. It's tragic not to tap their potential." +Officials of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which has 13 million members, stay in regular touch with nearly 4 million retired members, usually asking them to mobilize in political campaigns, but not in battles with employers. +Jay Mazur, chairman of the federation's committee on older citizens and president of the Union of Needletrade, Industrial and Textile Employees, said he had come up with the idea when he saw how the energy and commitment of young people had added much-needed vitality to the labor movement last year in the internship program Union Summer. Coming from the needle trade union, which has more than 250,000 former workers in 175 clubs for retired members, Mr. Mazur said he was convinced that older people could be a great help to the federation. +The A.F.L.-C.I.O. leaders quickly embraced his idea. +"Many senior citizens still feel they are part of unions," said Mr. Mazur, who attended the federation's winter meeting, which ended here today. +A.F.L.-C.I.O. officials say Senior Summer will involve hundreds of retirees from at least 10 cities, which have yet to be selected. Among those under serious consideration are New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco and San Jose, Calif. +Senior Summer is part of a strategy in which John J. Sweeney, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s president, has tried to increase labor's popularity and clout by forming alliances with many segments of society, including academics, women's organizations, minorities, community workers and environmental groups. +In Union Summer, a total of about 1,200 college students and young workers spent three weeks in 22 cities, walking picket lines, distributing fliers and learning at the feet of labor leaders. Union Summer participants, who received weekly stipends of $210, usually stayed in dormitories, many in their hometowns, many hundreds of miles from home. +A.F.L.-C.I.O. officials say they still have to work out many details for Senior Summer, but organizers said that it would last one or two weeks and that retirees would probably participate in the cities where they live. The federation has not decided whether retirees involved in Senior Summer will receive stipends. +Roosevelt Alexander, 78, a retired garment cutter from the Bronx, said he would be thrilled to participate in Senior Summer because he had already been involved in several labor protests a year as president of a union retirees' club. +"Working people often don't have the time to get out and protest," Mr. Alexander said. "We retirees have time on our hands. We can bring problems before the people." +Andrew Levin, the federation official who oversaw Union Summer and will coordinate Senior Summer, said he hoped that the retirees would often work side by side with college students taking part in the second edition of Union Summer. +"It's totally false to think that seniors care only about their own issues," Mr. Levin said. "The most exciting thing for me is not just getting seniors involved, but the cross-fertilization. They will have a lot to teach Union Summer participants about their days in the labor movement." +Union leaders said Union Summer and Senior Summer would have a common theme this year: informing Americans about the right to organize. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. selected that theme after undertaking a campaign to recruit millions of new members to reverse its decline in numbers and bargaining power. +Mr. Bensinger said Senior Summer would build on some small-scale union efforts in which retirees have taken part. In Florida, retirees often join picket lines at nursing homes that unions are trying to organize. In the Boston area, several older people were arrested for sitting in at a rug factory to protest its opposition to unionization. +Mr. Bensinger said a stroke victim had offered to support a drive to unionize 20,000 strawberry workers by lying in a grower's driveway. At a demonstration at a factory, Mr. Bensinger said, the employer offered chairs to some octogenarian pickets. +"Senior citizens carry themselves with a reverence and moral authority," Mr. Bensinger said, "that it's impossible for even a callous boss to ignore." + +LOAD-DATE: February 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +93 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 24, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Rectifying a Legislative Blunder + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 458 words + +When Representative Steven LaTourette of Ohio introduced a bill last month to repeal a section of the Kassebaum-Kennedy health insurance reform legislation enacted last year, he assumed someone would come forward to defend its purpose. He has yet to hear from anyone willing to claim authorship. The language apparently migrated from an earlier budget bill that was vetoed by President Clinton, but how it wound up in the health insurance law remains a mystery. End-of-session legislative fatigue could explain why no one seems to remember anything about it now. +The silence is not surprising. The provision, which became effective Jan. 1, is supposed to impose criminal penalties on the elderly who give away their assets in order to qualify for Medicaid assistance with nursing home bills. But it is so poorly worded that fair enforcement is impossible. Worse, it does not target those who abuse the system but escape detection by hiding their assets. + Under longstanding law, individuals are not eligible for nursing home assistance under Medicaid if, in the 36 months prior to being institutionalized, they gave away assets that would have allowed them to pay their own way. The law allows some exemptions, like transfers to a spouse or disabled child. The penalty period is determined by the size of the asset transfer and the average monthly cost of nursing home care, which in most states is about $3,000. An individual who gives away $36,000, for example, is ineligible for Medicaid assistance for 12 months. In other words, those who give away assets must live with the consequences. +The new law adds criminal penalties of up to $10,000 in fines and one year in jail for those who are deemed ineligible for Medicaid because they transferred assets. But it would only affect those who play by the rules and report their asset transfers. Individuals who make sham transfers or fail to report transfers would not be punished under this provision. +Jailing the honest and the ignorant will not reduce Medicaid fraud. Besides, there is little evidence that large numbers of the elderly are intentionally impoverishing themselves in order to get Medicaid. The cost of nursing home care is so high that many seniors become eligible for Medicaid in a short time anyway. +The Federal Health Care Financing Administration, which oversees Medicaid, has asked Congress to repeal the provision. Other groups such as the National Senior Citizens Law Center, the American Association of Retired Persons, the American Bar Association and the New York State Bar are also calling for repeal. Congress should take action against a flawed law that serves no purpose other than to threaten unwitting senior citizens with the prospect of jail. + +LOAD-DATE: February 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +94 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 25, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Scientists Rethinking the Role Of Chromosomal 'Leader Tape' + +BYLINE: By GINA KOLATA + +SECTION: Section C; Page 3; Column 1; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 602 words + +A TANTALIZING hypothesis linking the length of the ends of chromosomes to aging and cancer is wrong, new research suggests. +Every time cells divide, they reproduce their chromosomes. But the cellular enzymes that copy the DNA in the chromosomes have a problem with the chromosome ends, called telomeres, and cannot copy them completely. + The hypothesis was that telomeres were intimately related to cancer and aging. As people grew older, this hypothesis said, their telomeres got shorter until they finally reached a length that meant a person's time was up. Cancer cells, which are immortal (they appear to be able to divide forever in a laboratory) were said to have telomeres that remained as long as a newborn baby's. +The theory said that if scientists could lengthen the telomeres of the elderly, they might be able to restore youth. And if they could shorten the telomeres of cancer cells, they might cure cancer. +But, said Dr. Elizabeth H. Blackburn, a cell biologist at the University of California in San Francisco, it turns out that telomeres do not always shorten significantly with age and that cancer cells do not always have telomeres of a constant length. +The telomere hypothesis, she said, is no more true than proposing that since everyone who grows old gets wrinkled, it is wrinkles that cause old age. +"It was a black-and-white world a few years ago," Dr. Blackburn said. "But now the real world has intruded." +As the old hypothesis has fallen, however, researchers are beginning to understand what does happen with telomeres and why they are important to cells. +New research, reported in the past two weeks in the journals Science and Nature, suggests that telomeres shrink and lengthen over and over as cell division is repeated many times. Because the telomeres are stretches of nonsense DNA, no important information is lost. They function as buffer zones to protect the more important DNA in the rest of the chromosome. +The cyclic changes in chromosome size depend on the proteins that attach themselves to telomeres. The proteins group tightly together so that the longer a telomere is, the more proteins are attached to it. +When the number of proteins exceeds a critical value, an enzyme that lengthens telomeres cannot work. As a consequence, when the cell divides, its telomere shortens. It continues to shorten with each cell division until it finally becomes so short that it is not binding enough proteins to inhibit the enzyme that lengthens the telomeres. +At that point, the enzyme goes to work, copying the telomere and making it grow long again. +Dr. Titia de Lange , a cell biologist at Rockefeller University who recently published a paper on this phenomenon in human cells, said that telomeres "are constantly moving back and forth between states." They alternate between growing and shrinking "in a dynamic equilibrium," Dr. de Lange said. +A wide variety of species use the same mechanism, said Dr. Thomas R. Cech, a Nobel Prize-winning cell biologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who published a paper recently on telomere length regulation in yeast. +"The story is consistent," he said. +That still leaves the question whether telomeres have any use other than as buffer zones. Dr. Blackburn said an answer was imminent. She and others, she said, are about to publish papers showing that telomeres are essential for nuclear division, the process of pulling apart the chromosomes when cells divide. +So, she said, the telomere story may not be the simple one of a few years ago but "scientifically, it is a lot more interesting." + +LOAD-DATE: February 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Proteins show up as light spots at the ends of human chromosomes. (Elsevier) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +95 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 25, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +THE MEDIA BUSINESS; +Quarterly Edition of Money Planned for Asian Readers + +BYLINE: By CONSTANCE L. HAYS + +SECTION: Section D; Page 8; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 689 words + +Seeking to capitalize on what it says is an era of growing interest in personal financial planning in Southeast Asia, Time Inc. plans a quarterly Asian edition of Money magazine. +The 28-page, English-language quarterly, which will hit newsstands in the region on May 26, will be produced in Hong Kong by freelance journalists, bound into the Asian edition of Time and presented as Time Money, said Caroline Donnelly, an executive editor at Money in New York, who will be moving temporarily to Hong Kong to direct the coverage. + "It will be 100 percent local," she said. "Most American magazines publishing over there use essentially domestic content with a thin overlay of local content. This will all be produced by Asian reporters and writers." +Time's Asian edition has 133,494 readers in Southeast Asia, Ms. Donnelly said, almost half of the edition's total paid subscribers. In the six months ending Dec. 31, Time, a unit of Time Warner Inc., had 288,063 paid subscriptions for its Asian edition, said Ginny Sexton, communications director for the Audit Bureau of Circulations in Schaumburg, Ill. +The decision to produce Time Money comes at a time when workers and professionals in the region are feeling less secure about their futures and are also more willing to take on some investing matters themselves, Ms. Donnelly said. "All over Asia, planning for retirement has become an issue," she said. "The state is not there to take care of you as it once was. Real estate is so hideous that there is no room to put your elderly parents in your home." +She added: "This generation is in much more of a self-help mode. These are people who are young, with big ambitions for themselves and their families, who don't see prosperity or even security quite guaranteed to them the way it might have been in another time." +That may be, but one publishing expert in the region cautioned that an English-language publication would encounter obstacles. +"For that kind of magazine to have an impact, it has to be localized, and in the local language of whatever country it's in," said one media analyst in Hong Kong who works for a large Wall Street firm and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The South China Morning Post, a major daily newspaper in Hong Kong, plans to publish a personal-finance magazine called M, the analyst said. It will be written in Chinese, which is spoken by the majority of Hong Kong's 6.3 million people. +At the same time, other English-language financial magazines are written and sold in Southeast Asia, including Asia Inc. and the Far Eastern Economic Review, both of which run features on personal finance and investing topics. +Ms. Donnelly said publishing in every language spoken in the seven countries where Time Money will be sold -- Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines -- would not be possible economically. And an analyst in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, said Time Money might do well in Asian countries with no comparable, local personal-finance publication. +John Marcom, publisher of Time's Asia edition, said English-language publications were complementary to other media in the region and were attractive to advertisers because they were read by people who used English on the job -- generally, better-educated professionals. "We never pretend we're reaching the bulk of the Asian population," he said. +Articles in the planning stages include preparing for buying a house, paying for education and establishing retirement funds, Ms. Donnelly said. All of the articles will discuss the specifics of doing so in each of the countries where the magazine will be sold. The newsstand price for the Asian edition of Time, $35 (Hong Kong), or about $4.50 (United States), is not supposed to rise when the Money insert is included, Mr. Marcom said. +"Because this is a market that is more interested in certain topics than the market in the U.S., I expect we'll write a bit more on things like real estate, currency trading, small business and family businesses," Ms. Donnelly said. "We hardly ever write about family business." + +LOAD-DATE: February 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +96 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 25, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +MAJORITY LEADER PROPOSES A PANEL ON INFLATION INDEX + +BYLINE: By RICHARD W. STEVENSON + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1049 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 + +The Senate majority leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi, proposed a commission to find a way to fix the Government's main inflation gauge today, providing possible political cover for a deal that would help balance the budget by reducing cost-of-living increases for Social Security. +Mr. Lott's statement was the first specific proposal from a Republican leader to solve the problems with the Consumer Price Index, which many economists believe overstates inflation and leads the Government to overcompensate benefit recipients by billions of dollars a year. It seemed intended to draw the Clinton Administration into a shared effort to resolve the issue, which holds great political peril for both parties but could yield some of the savings that many in Congress think would be necessary to eliminate the Federal budget deficit. + Mr. Lott said the panel of experts he has in mind should make a specific recommendation for a cost-of-living adjustment, and that Congress and the White House should accept it. "I think we will do it," Mr. Lott said. "I think it should be done." +White House officials were noncommittal in their response but did not criticize Mr. Lott's idea. +"Our goal is to find the best broad-based technical agreement on this technical issue," said Gene Sperling, the chairman of the White House's National Economic Council. "We have not ruled in or out any specific means for exploring where that agreement lies." +Any reduction in the cost-of-living adjustment made to Social Security and other benefit payments would probably be small at first -- less than $100 a year for most recipients -- but could build over time to thousands of dollars a year. Powerful lobbying groups like the American Association of Retired Persons have warned that they would vigorously oppose any adjustment that was not based on rigorous technical study and have warned against engineering a reduction in the payments as a political solution to balancing the budget. +Wary of angering senior citizens and other constituencies yet intrigued by the potential fiscal benefits, the Administration has held the position that there are problems with the index that need to be fixed, but that any change should be the result of a consensus among economists. +Leaders of the two parties have been maneuvering for the last several months to find a way to deal with the issue without leaving themselves to suffer the political consequences alone. In endorsing the idea of a commission, Mr. Lott was clearly hoping to accelerate the tempo of what will no doubt continue to be a delicate political dance without directly exposing himself or his party to the attacks that would inevitably be unleashed on a detailed proposal for reducing cost-of-living payments. +"If the number is accurate, leave it alone," Mr. Lott said. "If it's understated, fix it. If it's overstated, fix it." +Speaking at a conference of the National Association of Broadcasters, Mr. Lott said he would like to see a cost-of-living formula developed by a group of four "graybeards" -- presumably prominent economists -- who would be chosen by the White House and the Congressional leadership with advice from Senator William V. Roth, the Delaware Republican who heads the Senate Finance Committee, and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York. +Mr. Lott, who made the proposal in response to a question from the audience of broadcast executives, said he would want to see the commission get to work quickly and make its recommendations this year. Such a timetable could enable any change in the formula to be accounted for in negotiations to balance the budget. +The idea of a nonpartisan commission of experts was first floated several months ago by Michael J. Boskin, a Stanford University economist and former Bush Administration adviser. Mr. Boskin led a Congressionally appointed commission that concluded in December that the price index overstates inflation by about 1.1 percentage points a year. The index rose 3.3 percent last year. +The Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, gave his support to a commission last month, saying it could determine the proper cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security and other Federal benefit programs each year while the technical experts at the Bureau of Labor Statistics continue to refine the price index. +The Consumer Price Index attempts to measure inflation by tracking the prices of a "market basket" of products meant to approximate typical consumer purchases. Although it was never intended as a broad cost-of-living index, it has been widely used as one, and currently is the basis not just for annual increases in Social Security and other benefits, but for adjusting tax brackets for the effects of inflation and for determining wage increases under many union contracts. +By reducing outlays for benefits and generating higher tax revenues, any reduction in the cost-of-living adjustment below the current forecast for the price index would go a long way toward solving the nation's fiscal difficulties. +The Congressional Budget Office estimated last year that a 1 percentage point reduction in the cost-of-living adjustment would narrow the deficit by $195 billion over the next five years. In 2002, the year by which both parties have pledged to balance the budget, it would save $63.5 billion, about a third of the $188 billion deficit projected for that year. +Social Security recipients would be most directly affected by any change to the cost-of-living formula. Social Security payments for this year were calculated on the basis of a 2.9 percent increase in the index over a certain period last year. +If that increase had been 1.1 percent lower, as advocated by the Boskin commission, the average monthly payment would have gone from $724 to $737 rather than to $745 -- a difference of $8 a month. But the effect would build on itself each year, with the difference ultimately amounting to thousands of dollars a year for each recipient. +With both parties eager to reach a balanced budget agreement but loath to give up their priorities to do so -- sweeping tax cuts for Republicans, education and health care initiatives for Democrats -- the appeal of an adjustment to the price index has grown strong in Congress. + + +LOAD-DATE: February 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +97 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 25, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final +(New Jersey) + +NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFING; +Seniors Take Joke Seriously + +BYLINE: By TERRY PRISTIN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 117 words + +DATELINE: MOUNT LAUREL + +The issue the passage of a $28 million school bond referendum -- was serious. But Chuck Fest, the president of the Mount Laurel teachers' union, said yesterday that he thought he was being funny when he referred to the elderly opponents of the measure as "old coots" in his February newsletter. A copy wound up at a senior citizens' home, where residents did not appreciate the attempt at humor. + Mr. Fest had also suggested handing each of Mount Laurel's 3,050 elderly residents a roll of quarters on the day of the vote and shipping them to Atlantic City. He said yesterday that he planned to apologize to the senior citizens at a Board of Education meeting tonight. + TERRY PRISTIN + +LOAD-DATE: February 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +98 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 25, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +New York Study Finds Uninsured Are on the Rise + +BYLINE: By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 4; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1193 words + +In a report that has implications for the entire country, researchers have found that the number of New Yorkers without health insurance has jumped in the last five years. +One quarter of New York City residents under 65 now have no health insurance at all: the exact figure is 24.8 percent, up from 20.9 percent five years ago. Surprisingly, most of the uninsured hold full-time jobs. + More and more companies have curtailed health benefits as the cost of health care has gone up, requiring employees to contribute heavily to premiums, especially for family members. +Others have stopped offering health coverage altogether. So while government insurance programs have continued to cover the elderly and large numbers of the poor, low-income workers and their families are increasingly vulnerable. +Most uninsured families make between $15,000 and $45,000 a year, the report found. The number of children without insurance has gone up twice as fast as the number of adults. +"This is a crisis that is growing exponentially," said Mark Green, the New York City Public Advocate, who released report. "But unlike kids being shot on the streets, the rising uninsured rates among kids and working families is a quiet crisis that is too easy to overlook." +One of President Clinton's main goals in his failed health plan was to provide health coverage for the 38 million Americans who lacked it. He and Hillary Rodham Clinton repeatedly showcased poor working people who were uninsured. But since that plan failed, their plight has faded into the background. Although managed care companies have effectively taken up the President's call to practice more cost-conscious medicine, they have little incentive to worry about the uninsured. +By 1995, the number of Americans without health insurance had grown to 40.3 million, or 17.4 percent of the population under 65, the Employee Benefit Research Institute said. +In New York State, the percentage of people under 65 who are uninsured was 17.2 percent, up from 13.9 percent in 1990. The Public Advocate's office said the higher rate in New York City reflects a concentration of the working poor and immigrants, who tend to be in low-paying jobs and are not always eligible for government insurance. Many of New York's poor are part of the underground economy, meaning they are paid in cash, their earnings are unrecorded and they do not receive benefits. The proportion of people without health insurance is even higher in California (22.7 percent) and Texas (27 percent), states that have large immigrant populations. +This growth in the number of people without medical insurance comes at a particularly inopportune time. In the past, such people have relied on emergency rooms or clinics that dispensed care cheaply or free. But now, even that option is becoming less available, since hospitals under pressure to cut costs are increasingly unwilling and unable to dispense care below cost to the uninsured. +"Everyone's going to be competing for paying patients, but there's no one looking out for the uninsured," said Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospitals Association, an industry group. "And with the squeeze on doctors and hospitals, the problem will become more acute as you go along." +The state has earmarked tens of millions of dollars to compensate hospitals for charity care, but Mr. Raske said that with the number of uninsured New Yorkers growing, that pool could be overwhelmed. He said his organization is about to begin a national campaign to highlight the growing number of people who lack health insurance, hoping to encourage a national solution. +Angela Pollatos of Washington Heights in northern Manhattan is typical of those who have lost insurance in the last five years. Her husband is a painter, working for a midsize company, who made $30,000 last year. His company does not offer health insurance. +Three years ago, when Mrs. Pollatos was working, the family bought private insurance through a government-subsidized program. But the premiums were rising quickly, and when Mrs. Pollatos stopped working after the birth of a son, the family could no longer afford the program. Mrs. Pollatos has tried to buy insurance, but has been discouraged by the cost: $500 a month for the cheapest family plans. She found free coverage for her 2-year-old son at a health maintenance organization, the Bronx Health Plan, through a state program that offers insurance to cover outpatient care for children of the working poor. +But she had close to $3,000 in medical bills after she suffered an ectopic pregnancy last year. Her husband, who lives with chronic pain in his shoulder, cannot afford a scan that might determine the cause. Patients without insurance coverage tend to delay care so that minor illnesses fester, becoming more serious problems, health experts say. +"We try to put a little money away each month in case for God's sake something happens," Mrs. Pollatos said. "Then your stomach hurts and you go to the doctor and you use it all up." +Mr. Green's report, "Who Are New York City's Uninsured?" contains this information: +*Fewer than half of New York City residents now have private insurance, down from almost 60 percent five years ago. +*The proportion of children who have no medical insurance rose to almost 20 percent in 1995, up from 14 percent in 1990, despite new state programs to subsidize insurance for children. +*About 22 percent of the uninsured work for companies of more than 1,000 employees, contradicting the conventional wisdom that large companies usually offer comprehensive benefits. +*Forty-one percent of men and 28.4 percent of women between 18 and 34 were uninsured in 1995. People in this age group are the most likely to be uninsured. +Having failed at systemwide reform, Mr. Clinton has had to settle for piecemeal change. Last August, Congress passed legislation that allows workers to keep their health insurance if they lose or change jobs, and forbids insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. Statistics in the Green report predate this legislation, but health experts doubt that these provisions will reverse a quickly growing trend. +Many say that the situation could worsen in the short term, since many states, including New York, are trying to trim Medicaid rolls. +Doctors who run primary care clinics say that since the failure of the Clinton health plan, the trend has been in one direction: growth in the number of uninsured. +At the Covenant House medical clinic in midtown Manhattan, doctors say they are suddenly treating patients from working-class families, in addition to their usual patients, poor homeless teen-agers. The doctors say that when they advertised their free medical clinic on the subways last spring, they were overwhelmed by the response. +"We are seeing college kids who live at home but were off the family budget, who saw the ad on their way to C.C.N.Y. and have no other access to health care," said Bruce J. Henry, the executive director of Covenant House. "We are seeing kids falling through the cracks all across the spectrum." + +LOAD-DATE: February 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "KEEPING TRACK: The Growing Uninsured" shows the number of New York City residents who are uninsured, have public insurance and have private insurance from 1993 to 1995 and shows uninsured New York City residents below age 65, by income. (Source: Office of the Public Advocate)(pg. B2) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +99 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 26, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Remember the Neediest + +SECTION: Section A; Page 22; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 313 words + +A family burned out of its home is given help to avoid living in the street. A single mother receives money for food and shelter so that her child does not have to go into foster care. A onetime drug addict receives money for clothing so he can train for a job. These and other stories have stirred readers to respond generously to The New York Times Neediest Cases appeal for 1996-97, which ends Friday. +At a time when New York City is experiencing an economic boom, pressures on the city's most vulnerable people -- the sick, the elderly and the poor -- are greater than ever. In part that is because longstanding government programs like food stamps and disability payments are being cut back. The seven social-service agencies that receive contributions from the Neediest Cases Fund are finding it tougher to fulfill their mandates. + As of yesterday, the Neediest Cases Fund had received contributions this year of $4,690,188.96, much more than last year but still short of the record $5 million received in 1992. Along with contributions from celebrities and people of means have come extraordinary gifts from schoolchildren who contribute their allowances and from families who have suffered themselves and want to give others the chance they were given in a moment of crisis. +There is still time to contribute. Though this year's drive is ending, the institutions that receive the money operate year round and can receive gifts anytime. Any money received by The Times after Friday will go into next year's drive. All gifts go directly to help people in need. No money is kept to pay for administration or solicitation by agencies the fund supports. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. Checks should be made payable to The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund and mailed to P.O. Box 5193, General Post Office, New York, N.Y. 10087. + +LOAD-DATE: February 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +100 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +February 27, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +ROSENTHAL, ALEXANDER E. + +SECTION: Section B; Page 10; Column 1; Classified + +LENGTH: 157 words + +ROSENTHAL - Alexander E. Daughters of Miriam Center/The Gallen Institute notes with profound sorrow the passing of friend and benefactor Alexander E. Rosenthal on Tuesday, February 25. Recently named an honorary president, Alexander Rosenthal was involved with the center for half a century. He was president of the facility from 1972 to 1976 and served on many committees including chairing the Investment Committee, co-chairing the Nominations Committee, treasurer of the Daughters of Miriam Foundation, senior vice president of the Brawer Building Association and a member of the Executive and Development Committees. A dedicated champion of the aged and steadfast supporter of the center, Alexander Rosenthal leaves a legacy of years of service to the elderly of the Jewish community. The Board of Trustees & the entire Daughters of Miriam family extend their most heartfelt condolences to Lorraine, Richard and his grandchildren. + +LOAD-DATE: February 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +101 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 1, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Doctors Assert There Are Too Many of Them + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 9; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 682 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 + +The American Medical Association and representatives of the nation's medical schools said today that the United States was training far too many doctors and that the number should be cut by at least 20 percent. +"The United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians," the A.M.A. and five other medical groups said in a joint statement. "The current rate of physician supply -- the number of physicians entering the work force each year -- is clearly excessive." + The groups, representing a large segment of the medical establishment, proposed limits on the number of doctors who enter training programs as residents each year. +The number of medical residents, now 25,000, should be much lower, the groups said. While they did not endorse a specific number, they suggested that 18,700 might be appropriate. +In the statement, the groups acknowledged that many inner-city neighborhoods and rural areas had too few doctors. But they said this would not be helped by increasing the overall supply of doctors. +Dr. Jordan J. Cohen, president of the Association of American Medical Colleges, said: "Simply continuing to flood the country with excess physicians, the vast majority of whom wind up in suburbia, will not do." +The groups said the Federal Government should address that problem by providing financial incentives for medical schools to train doctors in inner cities and rural areas, and should encourage new doctors to practice in those places. +And to achieve the goal of reducing the overall number of residents, they said, the Federal Government should limit the amount it spends on training doctors. Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for the elderly and disabled, subsidizes such training through special payments of more than $7 billion a year to teaching hospitals. +The recommendations are a response to changes revolutionizing the health care industry. More and more Americans now receive care from health maintenance organizations and other managed-care plans, which emphasize outpatient services and the use of nurse practitioners and physician assistants to help doctors. Many doctors have lost their jobs as hospitals merge and shrink under pressure from managed care. +The surplus of doctors is particularly large in New York State, which has 15 percent of the nation's medical residents but only 7 percent of the nation's population. Federal officials last week announced an experimental program under which 41 of New York's teaching hospitals will be paid to train fewer doctors. +Dr. Cohen said medical schools had been producing the same number of doctors, 17,000 a year, for more than a decade. But, he said, there has been "explosive growth in the number of entry-level positions for residents." About 8,000 of the 25,000 such positions are filled by graduates of medical schools outside the United States. +American medical schools "are already turning out an ample supply of doctors for the country's needs," but the nation imports 8,000 graduates of foreign medical schools, Dr. Cohen said. Some graduates of foreign medical schools are United States citizens, but most are citizens of India, Pakistan or the Philippines. +Dr. Cohen said Federal money should "no longer be used to support the training of foreign nationals." +Dr. William E. Jacott, a trustee of the American Medical Association, said that the new policy did not "close the door on foreign medical graduates." +Foreign-born doctors who graduate from foreign medical schools could still come to this country for training as residents. But the policy statement says, "It is important that these physicians return to their country of origin after completing graduate medical education in this country." +At a news conference, Dr. Jacott was asked whether the proposals sought to protect doctors' incomes by limiting the supply of doctors. +"That is not the agenda of this initiative," he replied. It is socially irresponsible to invest large sums in training doctors who are unlikely to find jobs practicing medicine after their training, he said. + +LOAD-DATE: March 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +102 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 1, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +A Rational Way to Reduce the Deficit + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 22; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 327 words + +The Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, has bravely called for a commission to fix -- more accurately, lower -- the Government's measure of inflation, the first step toward reducing Social Security payments to the elderly and raising personal income taxes. Revising that yardstick, the Consumer Price Index, would knock perhaps $1 trillion off the deficit over 12 years and spread the burden of the budget cuts across the population. +But President Clinton and most Congressional leaders -- with the notable exception of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York -- have refused to take on the elderly and other beneficiaries of an overly generous inflation gauge until Mr. Lott made the first move. The Senate minority leader, Tom Daschle, embraced the proposal. The White House expressed lukewarm acceptance. + A panel of economists reported last year to Congress that the gauge was probably off by about one percentage point a year. The panel estimated that if Congress adjusted its benefit and tax schedules accordingly, it could reduce the deficit by about a third, or $60 billion, by 2002. The correction would reduce Social Security benefits by an average of $100 next year, and raise taxes by about the same amount for a family earning $50,000. +To fix the problem, Congress need not tamper with the actual computation of the index, which is produced by a professional, nonpartisan staff at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Instead it could forthrightly acknowledge that the official measure is exaggerated, that a reliable measure is not yet available and that it will make a reasonable correction for the purposes of adjusting Federal spending and tax programs. But because the exact size of the correction is uncertain, Congress should exempt disability benefits and other payments to the poor. +Adjusting the Consumer Price Index is a better way to balance the budget than big cuts to public investments and other valuable Federal programs. + +LOAD-DATE: March 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +103 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 2, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Q. & A. + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 8; Column 6; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 564 words + + +Apartment Succession Rules + +Q What are the regulations concerning rent-stabilized apartments and family members? I have lived in the same apartment for 22 years. There is a possibility that I may be going away to school for nine months out of the year but spending summers in New York. My mother recently moved in with me. If I have to leave New York City, can her name be put onto the lease in addition to mine? Also, what are the limits to subletting a rent-stabilized apartment? . . . Gerry Visco Capello, Manhattan. + +A Sherwin Belkin, a Manhattan lawyer who specializes in landlord-tenant matters, said that a landlord of a rent-stabilized apartment is under no obligation to add a name to a lease. However, Mr. Belkin said, a family member living with a rent-stabilized tenant can often succeed to the tenant's apartment if the tenant dies or permanently vacates the apartment. +Generally, he said, for that to happen the family member must have resided in the apartment with the original tenant for at least two years. In the case of family members who are 62 and older, and those who are disabled, the time period is reduced to one year. + But since it appears that the letter-writer's absence from the apartment will be on a temporary basis, Mr. Belkin said, succession rights would not be triggered. +With regard to subletting, Mr. Belkin said, the state's real property law allows a tenant to ask for a landlord's permission to sublet an apartment for up to two out of every four years. By law, Mr. Belkin said, a landlord cannot unreasonably withhold such permission. +However, he said, in the case of a rent-stabilized tenant, the tenant must be able to establish that the apartment being sublet is his or her primary residence and that it will once again become the primary residence at the end of the sublet term. + +Guidelines for Scrie + +Q Could you please sum up the main guidelines for applying for the Senior Citizens Rent Increase Exemption (Scrie) program? Please include specifics regarding eligible age, qualifying income and any other pertinent factors. . . . Mary Cameron, Manhattan. + +A The Scrie program exempts qualified tenants in rent-controlled, rent-stabilized, Mitchell-Lama and hotel housing in New York City from certain rent increases. Generally, the program covers maximum base rent increases, fuel pass-alongs, landlord hardships, lease renewal increases and increases attributable to major capital improvements. (Landlords are reimbursed through property tax abatements from the New York City Department of Finance.) +As of Jan. 10, 53,950 households were participating in the program. +To be eligible for Scrie, the head of the household must be 62 or older. Total household income -- after taxes and court-ordered support payments -- cannot exceed $20,000, and the monthly rent must be at least a third of the net monthly income. Also, rent-stabilized tenants must have a valid one- or two-year lease. +Applications for the program may be obtained by writing to the New York City Department for the Aging, 2 Lafayette Street, 6th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10007. The telephone number is (212) 442-1000. Generally, it takes about 10 days for the department to issue an acknowledgment and reference number after an application is received. The total time required for approval of an application is about 60 days. + +LOAD-DATE: March 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Question + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +104 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 2, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Whatever Went Wrong With Amy? + +BYLINE: By BILL RYAN + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 1; Column 2; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1250 words + +IN a way, Amy Duggan Archer Gilligan might be considered a pioneer in health care in Connecticut. In the early part of this century, Mrs. Gilligan operated a home "for elderly people and chronic invalids," in the town of Windsor. She offered some enticements for living there: Most of her clients were elderly men and they could get lifetime care simply by signing over their life insurance policies to her or by giving her $1,000, a healthy amount of money at the time, when they checked in. In 1916, however, Mrs. Gilligan was arrested. State police, after an investigation, concluded that she had shortened the lives of up to two dozen or so men by poisoning them with arsenic. One of them was Michael W. Gilligan, her second husband. The union had lasted three months when Mr. Gilligan turned up dead. The arrest of Mrs. Gilligan and her trial in 1917, after many bodies had been exhumed, rocked the state; there were headlines that would do credit to today's tabloids: "Police Believe Archer Home for Aged a Murder Factory," screamed The Hartford Courant's Page 1 on the morning of May 9, 1916, the day after Mrs. Gilligan was arrested. It set the tone. +Mrs. Gilligan, a prim woman approaching her mid-40's, was tried for one murder only, at the discretion of the state's attorney. She was convicted and sentenced to be hanged. + But the verdict was eventually reversed on a technicality and during a second trial she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment. She was incarcerated at the state prison, then a grim old fortress near Wethersfield Cove that normally housed only men. Subsequently Mrs. Gilligan was certified as insane and spent her final years at the state mental hospital in Middletown. In 1962 she died there at the age of 89, having outlived nearly everyone involved in the case. But her story has never died. +For more than eight decades of this century, it has never been totally out of the public consciousness for a couple of reasons. The first is the macabre nature of the case itself, inspiring its retelling in various publications from time to time. +The other is that it was also the inspiration for -- of all things -- a stage comedy. Many people know of Amy Gilligan, although perhaps not by name. +In the late 1930's, a New Yorker named Joseph Kesselring, who had read about the Gilligan case as a boy, decided to write a play about it. He journeyed to Connecticut to talk to the people involved and to study court records. The result was "Arsenic and Old Lace," the Amy Gilligan story with a lot of poetic license by Mr. Kesselring. +He transformed Amy into a pair of Brooklyn spinsters, Abby and Martha Brewster, who took to murdering elderly gentlemen by giving them elderberry wine spiced with arsenic and then burying them in the cellar. The cast of characters included an equally dotty brother, Teddy, who thought he was Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, forever yelling "CHARGE!" and running up the stairs, and two nephews, the sane Mortimer and the homicidal Jonathan. +The play opened on Broadway early in 1941 and stayed there for three years, allowing people a pleasant few hours' escape from the real homicide en masse going on in World War II. The stage run was followed by a Frank Capra movie, starring Cary Grant as Mortimer, that also was a big commercial success. +Both the stage play and movie have lived on healthily since, the play in countless productions varying from high school drama clubs to a successful revival on Broadway in 1986, the movie on video cassette. +One new bit of evidence for the abiding interest in the Amy Gilligan story is a book to be published this spring by Rainbow Press in Torrington. +It is called "Chronicles of Milton: Village Left Behind by Time." Milton is a section of the town of Litchfield and the book has been written by a dozen members of the Milton Woman's Club, some of whom once attended a one-room schoolhouse in the village. Each has written one chapter, in a cooperative effort to detail the history of the village from 1740 and tell about some of the more fascinating people who have lived there. +One of the latter was Amy Duggan. +The Duggan family, says one club member, lived on Saw Mill Road, in a house that still stands. One of Amy Duggan's sisters was an invalid, because of a jump or fall from a second floor window. There was a brother who would stand in front of a mirror all day, playing the violin. +As Hazel W. Perret, one of the authors. put it, Amy Duggan, and her eventual infamy, is only one small part of the book. "And the rest of it is very good." Conversely, she will admit that a bit of sensationalism doesn't hurt to sell some copies. +Not that the club needs much help. It is paying Pioneer Press to run off 500 copies, 200 of which have been sold in advance, Mrs. Perret said. +In Windsor, 40 miles from Litchfield, interest in Amy Duggan Archer Gilligan continues. +"We get a lot of queries, particularly from students," said Laura Kahkonen, director of the Windsor Public Library. Some people ask about the old home for the aged, she said, and then go to check it out. +There it still sits, on a pleasant street called Prospect, just off the center of town, a three-story brick structure with little ornamentation. Today it contains three apartments, its lurid past put behind it. +At the Windsor Historical Society, people drop in to check the file on Amy Gilligan, said Connie Thomas, a staff member. Many visitors also want to watch a video cassette of a television pilot called "Local Legends." The story of Amy Gilligan was shot in 1991 by an independent production company as one of the initial offerings for the series, but the series was never sold. +On one recent day, Ruth Bonito, who is active in the historical society of the nearby town of Windsor Locks, was at the Windsor society, checking out the Gilligan file and advancing a theory not often heard about the old case. +She believes that Amy Duggan Archer Gilligan, a woman vilified for most of this century, just might have been innocent. +As far as she can determine, Mrs. Bonito said, all the evidence against Mrs. Gilligan was circumstantial. She did buy arsenic but said it was to control rats at her home. She never confessed to any crimes. The home she ran did have a high death rate, but that didn't prove the men who lived there were poisoned. +Besides, said Mrs. Bonito, Mrs. Gilligan was a church-going woman who donated a stained-glass window to a Windsor church. Is this the kind of woman who systematically murders people with arsenic? +And then, Mrs. Bonito added, there is even some question about the post-exhumation arsenic found. Mrs. Bonito said she has been informed by Connecticut's state archeologist, Nicholas Bellantoni, that arsenic was once used extensively by American embalmers. Could that explain the arsenic found in the bodies from Mrs. Gilligan's home? +"I had heard the story of Amy Gilligan for years and I never doubted it until now," said Mrs. Bonito. +Dr. Bellantoni confirms that arsenic was indeed widely used for embalming, from the Civil War to about 1910 and cites a recent publication of the Interior Department that warns that elevated levels of arsenic near old cemeteries is only now beginning to emerge. However, Dr. Bellantoni says he is not sure that those facts can be connected to the Gilligan case. +One thing is sure however. Amy Duggan Archer Gilligan does have a certain fascination. + +LOAD-DATE: March 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Hartford Courant photo of Amy Duggan Archer Gilligan, above right, at time of her arrest in 1916; eventually she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Above, the house in Windsor where her elderly boarders died. Top, a playbill for "Arsenic and Old Lace." (Photographs by Helen Neafsey for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +105 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 2, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Donation of Property for Housing Is Withdrawn + +BYLINE: By MERRI ROSENBERG + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 4; Column 3; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 606 words + +DATELINE: IRVINGTON + +A DONATED half-acre parcel of property, which had been intended for a 14-unit affordable-housing town house project here, was recently withdrawn by its owners, the Immaculate Conception Church. +Instead of providing housing for elderly residents, municipal workers, volunteer firefighters and ambulance corps workers, the land will now be used for a playground and parking lot for the church's school. + While reaction here has been muted, the village's Mayor, Dennis P. Flood, said, "We've contacted just about everybody who has been involved with this project, and at this point in time, no one has come up with an alternative." Mr. Flood, along with other village officials, had been working on the affordable-housing plan for the last four years. +"We're disappointed," he said. "We put so much time and effort into it, and we're very disheartened. Everybody seemed to be on board, and when you put so much time and effort into something like this, it just hurts. The reaction from the community has not been what I had hoped. People seem to be silently disappointed, but there have been no outcries." +A former village resident, James Dinan, bought the property from the Catholic Archdiocese of New York in 1988. He decided to donate the land to the village for a project to benefit the community, like affordable housing. When Mr. Dinan, who has since moved out of state, offered the land to the village last year, the village declined because of liability reasons. Mr. Dinan then donated the land to the church. Although the Rev. Raymond Byrne, the pastor at Immaculate Conception Church, had agreed in a letter dated Feb. 22, 1996, to give the village 18 months to develop the affordable-housing project, last November Father Byrne told the village that the church would be using the land. +"The reasons given were that the church needed more parking and needed to expand its school playground," said Stephen McCabe, Village Administrator. Despite the apparent thwarting of the donor's original intention, Mr. McCabe said, "The Village Board is determined not to go forward with litigation." +Father Byrne, however, sees the situation differently. "Affordable housing was my idea," he said. "When the parishioner came to me and asked what should be done with the land, I told him to donate it for affordable housing. However, my ideas of affordable housing are different from other people's ideas of affordable housing. I'd like to provide housing for the working poor, but the village didn't seem interested in that. These proposed units were going to be two-bedroom units at $100,000 to $125,000. +"And the village didn't move on this for almost five years, and in that time, my needs have changed," he continued. "I need a safe place for my children to play, and I need more parking since the parish has grown tremendously." +The project's demise highlights some of the pitfalls and obstacles that continue to plague the development of affordable-housing projects in the county. +"The village of Irvington, to its credit, has engaged in efforts to develop affordable housing," said George E. Raymond, chairman of the County Housing Opportunity Commission. "This only shows how difficult it is to bring about affordable housing to Westchester County. Here you seemed to have all favorable conditions -- donated land, a total commitment by the Village Board -- and it still didn't happen. I hope the reasons for which the church has decided to thwart the village's efforts are sufficiently important to justify denying people who have been waiting years for these affordable housing units." MERRI ROSENBERG + +LOAD-DATE: March 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +106 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 2, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Other Mexican Drug Trade; +Pill-Popping Deals by Prescription + +BYLINE: By ALLEN R. MYERSON + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 3; Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 929 words + +DATELINE: NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico + +AS more reports of corrupt dealings between narcotics traffickers and top Mexican officials emerged last week, another, more open form of drug dealing continued to flourish along the border here. +On a street steps away from the bridge linking this city's downtown with Laredo, Texas, up a narrow flight of stairs with exposed wiring leading to a bare bulb, was a doctor's office to which a visitor had been referred by a pharmacy around the corner. + "Valium?" said a woman in a white doctor's jacket, who didn't seem at all to be the physician named Horacio whose name appeared on her prescription forms. The visitor confirmed his request with a nod. +She filled out two forms, one for the drugstore, one for United States Customs. "Ten dollars, please," she said. +She changed a twenty. Was she a doctor too, or perhaps a nurse? "The doctor's assistant," she said. +Back on the street, half a dozen drugstores could be found nearby during a three-minute stroll, along with several more doctors' offices, at the ready to dispense prescriptions for American customers. +They are outlets in the other, less-publicized Mexican-American drug trade. American retirees and pill-popping youths have becomes mules of a sort in a market with some of the same dynamics as the violent trade in illicit drugs. There is robust demand on the American side, cheap and ample supply on the Mexican and a casual regard for legal niceties. +Though nobody keeps precise records, one recent study estimated that visitors legally brought back about 4 million Valium tablets through Laredo alone in a one-year period, along with large quantities of drugs like Halcion, Ritalin and Percodan. Law enforcement officials say that while some customers buy just for themselves, others go across day after day, stocking up on pills for pennies to resell illegally for $5 each back home. + +Young and Old + +Traditionally, the buyers have been ailing elderly Americans whose Medicare insurance doesn't cover drugs and who can afford essential medicines only at Mexican prices. They sometimes ride buses for 14 hours or more each way, from as far away as Louisiana. Increasingly, however, the customers are hard-partying, drug-dealing youths in their own cars. +Jose A. Garcia, a top Customs Service official in Laredo, said inspectors are nearly weaponless against such young buyers in what he calls the "pill war." Especially on weekends, swarms return from trips to Nuevo Laredo with 90-day supplies (the legal maximum) of drugs like Valium, each brandishing the Mexican doctor's prescription needed to make the purchase legal. +"Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah -- you can't touch me," he said, loudly mimicking their attitude. "They look you right in the eye and say, 'I'm 19 years old and I have had a nervous breakdown.' " +By now, Mr. Garcia looked like he needed some Valium himself. "There's nothing I can do," he said. +Mexico has long been a destination for Americans seeking pleasures harder to obtain back home. Nuevo Laredo has a red-light "zona de tolerancia" and the old Cadillac Bar (albeit renamed in an ownership feud), a dusky refuge dating back to Prohibition. + +Growth Industry + +In border towns like this, however, the hawking of pharmaceuticals to Americans has become the growth industry, the more so since the peso's crash two years ago made drugs even cheaper for those with dollars. +At Benavides Pharmacy in Nuevo Laredo, 90 Valium tablets come to $9.58. At a chain drugstore in Dallas, the same supply would cost $68.57. Fifty tablets of Zantac, the ulcer medication, costs $73.59 in the United States with a prescription, but only $23.74 in Mexico, no prescription needed. +Explaining lower prices south of the border, drug companies point to lower production costs in Mexico, adding that they have to recoup research and development expenses in the more lucrative United States market. Many critics say these costs are overstated. +Under Mexican regulations, all but mood-altering drugs are generally available without a prescription. And new, experimental and even doubtful drugs are approved more readily than they are in the United States. +Decades ago, American cancer patients come south of the border for sham treatments like Laetrile. In the late 1980's, AIDS victims came to buy promising drugs that the Food and Drug Administration was slow to approve. Since then, the agency has speeded its approvals; the most advanced drugs are now available only in the United States. +Three years ago, several American pharmacists' associations, smarting from their Mexican competition and eager to denigrate it, hired scholars from the University of Texas College of Pharmacy to study Customs declarations at Laredo. +The 14 drugs most often purchased through the year ended June 1995 were all what the United States somewhat vainly calls controlled substances. Valium was the most popular, followed by Rohypnol, or "roofies" -- a powerful anxiety-relief medication used in the commission of so many "date rapes" that the Drug Enforcement Administration banned the tablets a year ago. +More than 60 percent of the buyers were men, median age 24. +With such traffic growing over the last few years, Texas has been applying its own laws banning controlled substances not prescribed by a doctor licensed in the state. So those who clear the Feds at the border can still be pulled over and arrested by state troopers. +As Sgt. Charles A. Haight of the Texas Highway Patrol, put it, "It's not grandma and grandpa getting their heart medicine out here." + +LOAD-DATE: March 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Prescription drugs are cheap and easily obtainable at stores in Mexican border towns like Nuevo Laredo. (J. Michael Short for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +107 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 2, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +U.N. Workers Leave City As the Rebels Gain in Zaire + +BYLINE: By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 4; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 607 words + +DATELINE: NAIROBI, Kenya, March 1 + +The United Nations has evacuated all foreign aid workers from the eastern Zairian city of Kisangani, leaving thousands of Rwandan refugees to an uncertain fate, United Nations officials said today. +The move came one day after the United Nations Secretary General called for an international peacekeeping force in eastern Zaire. + United Nations officials said aid workers had been pulled out because the increasingly feeble Zairian Government could no longer guarantee their security in Kisangani, a strategically important city on the Congo River that rebel forces have been trying to capture. +The evacuation set back the United Nations' effort to save between 100,000 and 200,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees in the region from disease and starvation. Kisangani is the headquarters for the relief operation that has been flying food to the refugees. +"This is almost a catastrophic blow to the whole aid effort in the east," said Peter Kessler, a spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency. +Kisangani is also the nerve center of the Zairian Army's operations against the rebels. In the last month, the army's counteroffensive has sputtered to a standstill, while the rebels have continued to advance on several fronts. +There were unconfirmed reports today that the rebels had taken Kindu, a transportation hub on the Lualaba River about 250 miles south of Kisangani. +With rumors circulating in Kisangani that the rebels were pressing close to that city as well, tensions have been running high, aid officials said. United Nations officials said they feared that panicking Zairian soldiers would loot aid organizations and attack relief workers while retreating, as they did in Goma and Bukavu when the rebels took those cities last fall. +"If we have learned anything in this past year, it's that aid workers working in insecure areas are not only vulnerable to the circumstances around them, but can even be targeted in these situations," said Michele Quintaglie, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program. +Ms. Quintaglie said 57 relief workers were flown out of Kisangani today. +On Friday, aid workers had retreated to Kisangani from the two main refugee camps near the village of Tingi Tingi, 140 miles to the southeast, where Hutu refugees have been bivouacked in squalid conditions for weeks. The aid workers withdrew from Tingi Tingi because refugee leaders passed on rumors that the camps were about to be attacked by the rebels, missionaries and aid officials said. +By Friday evening, thousands of refugees were packing their belongings and beginning to move away from the camps, though it was unclear where they were going, United Nations officials said. +The refugees, mostly Hutu who fled Rwanda in 1994 to escape a Tutsi rebel army, are not all innocent victims of war, complicating efforts to help them. +Although the camps contain thousands of malnourished children, women and elderly people who are at risk of dying if relief is cut off, the refugees also also include tens of thousands of former Rwandan soldiers and militiamen who took part in massacres of Tutsi in Rwanda and have been fighting on the side of the Zairian Army against the rebels. +In the last two weeks, the Zairian Government has armed these groups, flying in planeloads of weapons to the camps as part of an effort to check the rebel advance. +The United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, said on Friday that the United Nations should reconsider its decision not to send in a multinational force to extricate the refugees and deliver food. The idea was dropped in December after more than 600,000 refugees returned to Rwanda. + +LOAD-DATE: March 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Map showing the location of Kisangani, Zaire: The United Nations has pulled its aid workers out of Kisangani. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +108 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 3, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +THEATER REVIEW; +He's an Errant Husband, So She Has a Face Lift + +BYLINE: By PETER MARKS + +SECTION: Section C; Page 14; Column 3; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 825 words + +Too fat, too passive, too wrinkled. The older women in Peter Hedges's movies and plays are neurotics disfigured in their quest for male approval. In "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," a 1993 movie written by Mr. Hedges based on his own novel, Gilbert's mother balloons to 500 pounds after her husband abandons her. In "Imagining Brad," his 1990 surreal stage comedy, a Nashville Stepford wife, beaten black and blue by her husband, comes to believe the only trustworthy man is one without fists. +In his scattershot new work, "Good as New," which opened last night at the MCC Theater on West 28th Street, an aging, enlightened woman of the 90's, pretty certain that her husband is unfaithful, decides her only recourse is to go under the knife. Jan, played by the sad-eyed Laura Esterman, has the skin on her face tightened and lifted, "like a bedsheet," in the words of her disgusted 16-year-old daughter, Maggie (Jennifer Dundas). + As far as Jan is concerned, the nip and tuck is as much a rite of passage as the change of life. Driving home with Maggie from the hospital, Jan, bruised and bandaged, rationalizes her decision, reciting a list of the famous women over 50 who have been surgically transformed: the sisterhood of the operating room. "Look," she explains, "I didn't like my situation, and I did something about it. I changed it." +Ms. Esterman is so sure-footed in her portrayals of women trampled by the stampede of life. Her superb work as the homebody Bessie in the stage version of "Marvin's Room" and as the mercy-killing daughter in last season's "Curtains" are prime examples. She does a variation here on the good-hearted martyr. Jan's no saint. (She, too, has "wandered," as her husband, Dennis, played by John Spencer, patly couches his acts of sexual betrayal.) But she has never abandoned her 60's idealism, devoting herself to worthy causes like Amnesty International and the equal rights amendment. She even gets Christmas cards from Gloria Steinem. +Still, it isn't Dennis who has let Jan down as much as Mr. Hedges. After a promising start, "Good as New" wanders aimlessly through a mushy swamp of dysfunctional-family issues. Jan's predicament -- first she wanted to change the world; now she settles for changing her face -- is by far the evening's most intriguing. But it is forced to compete with the more tiresome problems of Dennis, a lawyer of waning energy lost in nostalgia for his one shining argument before the United States Supreme Court, and of Maggie, a whining teen-ager whose chief grievance is that her friends think her parents are cool. +As a playwright, Mr. Hedges is a kind of family practitioner, and "Good as New" is filled with acutely observed household behavior, which is capably drawn from the actors by the director, Brian Mertes. Ms. Esterman and Mr. Spencer have down the body language of partners in a decaying marriage who pace the same floors but are no longer in step. Mr. Spencer, who played a hard-boiled New York-style defense lawyer on "L.A. Law" for several seasons, provides an incisive accounting of a disaffected spouse who still has the decency to tread lightly around his wife. +The behavior, however, gives no clue as to what has gone wrong in this family. The characters remain opaque. Mr. Hedges spends so much time airing complaints, heaping problem upon problem, that there's no psychic payoff in the final escalation, when Maggie obnoxiously taunts her shellshocked parents with a tattoo on her backside and an intimation of precocious sex. +The shrill, unappealing Maggie is a tough role for any actress. The talented Ms. Dundas ("Arcadia") has a particular credibility problem here. She may have a baby face, but it's clear that she has a woman's figure. (She is, in fact, 26.) She's simply too old to be playing not-so-sweet 16 believably. +Ms. Esterman, too, has an uphill struggle. Although she came late to the production, replacing Mercedes Ruehl, the difficulty is not preparation. Jan seems underwritten. There's a lot about the character's plight, a woman of intelligence and accomplishment resorting to a painful cosmetic overhaul because her husband is straying, that is left unexplored in this play. In the pantheon of Mr. Hedges's mutilated women, Jan, in a sense, doesn't get the face time she deserves. + +GOOD AS NEW +By Peter Hedges; directed by Brian Mertes; production stage manager, David Sugarman; sets by Rob Odorisio; costumes by Sharon Sprague; lighting by Blake Burba; music and sound by David Van Tieghem; properties and dressing, Jeffrey Wallach; makeup artist, Helen Gallagher; production supervisor, Ira Mont; production manager, Bernadette McGay. Presented by MCC Theater, Robert LuPone and Bernard Telsey, executive directors; W. D. Cantler, associate director; Lynne McCreary, administrative director. At 120 West 28th Street, Chelsea. + +WITH: Jennifer Dundas (Maggie), John Spencer (Dennis) and Laura Esterman (Jan). + +LOAD-DATE: March 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Laura Esterman as Jan, after her face lift, in "Good as New." (Joan Marcus/"Good as New") + + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +109 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 4, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Gene Discovery May Lead to Test for Devastating Eye Disorder + +BYLINE: By DENISE GRADY + +SECTION: Section C; Page 3; Column 1; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 1240 words + +WHEN people first meet him, John Kebodeaux says, most do not notice anything unusual. But after a few minutes, some notice that he seems to be gazing past them, and they start glancing back over their shoulders, trying to see what he is looking at. +If he catches them fidgeting, Mr. Kebodeaux, a personable 19-year-old, will try to put them at ease by explaining that he is legally blind. He sees light, some color and the broad outlines of things, but little detail: the shape of a person, but not the face. Much of his central vision is gone, meaning that if he looks straight at an object, he cannot really see it. What remains of his eyesight is essentially his peripheral vision, which he makes the most of by swiveling his head so that he can look at things, and people, out of the corners of his eyes. + Ten years ago, Mr. Kebodeaux and his mother learned that he had a rare genetic disorder, Stargardt disease, which affects about 25,000 Americans. It is a progressive degeneration of the retina, the layer of light-sensitive cells at the back of the eye. More specifically, the disease attacks the macula, the few square millimeters of cells in the center of the retina that are responsible for central vision. There is no treatment for it. Damage to the macula destroys not just the ability to look straight ahead, but also to see details, to read, to drive, to recognize faces and to cross the street safely. +With the help of Mr. Kebodeaux and others who have Stargardt disease, a team of researchers from four institutions has identified the gene that causes the disorder. The discovery, reported in the March issue of the journal Nature Genetics, will make it possible to offer a blood test for the disease, simplifying a diagnosis that can be hard to pin down. In addition, for children known to be at risk (usually because a sibling has already been affected), the test will also predict whether they, too, will lose their eyesight -- a bleak forecast that some families may choose not to seek. +Finding the gene also has implications that extend beyond Stargardt disease. The scientists think their discoveries may also improve the understanding of a far more common eye disease, age-related macular degeneration. +Stargardt disease is a type of macular degeneration, but it strikes children and young adults, whereas the age-related form affects older people, usually those over 60. About 1.7 million elderly Americans have severe vision loss or blindness from advanced macular degeneration, and another 11 million show signs of earlier stages of the disease. The cause of the age-related form is unknown, but it does run in some families, suggesting that heredity plays a role. There is no treatment, though laser treatments can sometimes slow the progression. +Although Stargardt disease is not identical to age-related macular degeneration, "it is the closest approximation," said Dr. James Lupski, an author of the paper, who is a professor of pediatrics and molecular and human genetics at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. +The hunt for the gene began 10 years ago at Baylor, when Dr. Richard Lewis, Mr. Kebodeaux's ophthalmologist and a specialist at Baylor in hereditary diseases of the retina, began to collect blood samples from families with Stargardt disease. It was already known that Stargardt is caused by a recessive gene. +Because most human traits are determined by a pair of genes, one from each parent, people affected by a recessive trait like Stargardt disease must have inherited copies of a defective gene from both parents. The parents, who carry just one copy themselves, are normal. +The Baylor researchers, working with Dr. Mark Leppert, a geneticist at the University of Utah, began searching for genetic markers, distinctive stretches of DNA that would occur only in patients and carriers and that would act as signposts to the actual gene. In 1993, a French group edged ahead of them, by mapping the gene to a region on chromosome No. 1 (there are 23 pairs in humans). +Subsequent studies at Baylor and Utah pinpointed the gene even further, and then, last fall, a third team joined the hunt, when Dr. Michael Dean, of the National Cancer Institute, called Dr. Leppert. +"He said, 'Hey, I've got a gene for you,' " Dr. Leppert recalled. A gene that Dr. Dean and a colleague, Dr. Rando Allikmets, had been studying, mapped to the precise location that the Baylor and Utah groups had described as the site of the Stargardt gene. Moreover, Dr. Dean said, the gene was expressed, or active, only in the retina. +"It turned out to be an absolute, ground-zero, dead-square hit," Dr. Lewis said. +The gene belongs to a family of genes known as ABC transporters. They code for proteins that, bound into cell membranes, function as one-way pumps. Most are exporters, meaning that they pump a single type of molecule out of the cell. +"A quite remarkable number of genes from this family are involved in diseases," Dr. Dean said. Transporters make some tumors drug resistant by enabling cancer cells to pump out chemotherapy drugs swiftly. Similarly, they render some parasites immune to medication. In addition, the gene that causes the disease cystic fibrosis is a type of transporter. +The researchers do not know what molecule the Stargardt transporter is pumping. But what they have learned about it already has come as a surprise. +The fourth collaborator in the study, Dr. Jeremy Nathans, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has shown that the newly discovered gene is active in the retinal cells known as rods. And yet the devastating effects of Stargardt disease derive from its destruction of the macula, the part of the retina most densely populated not with rods, but with cone cells, which are responsible for the perception of both detail and color. +That finding has led the researchers to suggest a chain of events that may lead to Stargardt disease and age-related macular degeneration as well. First, a substance that should be pumped out of the rod cells instead builds up inside them, because of the defective transporter. Gradually, the unwanted substance makes its way into the pigment epithelium, a layer of cells underlying the rods and cones. It poisons that layer, which in turn leads to damage to the cone cells of the macula. +"If we can figure out what substance is being pumped," Dr. Dean said, "we might figure out a way to correct the condition." +Another important question that the researchers are trying to answer is whether the Stargardt gene is also linked to age-related macular degeneration. They suspect that in some cases it is, and that being a carrier, even though it does not bring on Stargardt disease, may increase the risk of the age-related disease later in life. +"There is no clue as to how age-related macular degeneration occurs," Dr. Lupski said. "Now, I think we've made a molecular entry into what may be going on." +It is not clear when or even if the genetic findings will lead to treatments for macular degeneration. For people with advanced cases of the disease, in which much of the macula has been destroyed, the damage may be irreversible. +Mr. Kebodeaux was pleased that the hunt for the gene had succeeded. But he said: "I'm not going to sit and wait on a cure. You've got to do the best with what you've got. The research had to start somewhere, and I'm just glad to be part of it." + +LOAD-DATE: March 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Diagram: "A New Theory of Vision Loss" +New findings on a rare genetic disorder, Stargardt disease, suggest that loss of vision may occur when a defect in photoreceptors called rods leads to accumulation of lipofusin, a compound that cells cannot digest, in nearby cells of the retinal pigment epithelium. (Source: Dr. Jeremy Nathans/Johns Hopkins University) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +110 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 4, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Abroad at Home; +The Clinton Mystery + +BYLINE: By ANTHONY LEWIS; A. M. Rosenthal is on vacation. + +SECTION: Section A; Page 23; Column 5; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 687 words + +DATELINE: BOSTON + +President Clinton's fund-raising abuses are the focus of political attention these days. But for me there are far more serious questions about his substantive policies. Sleazy money will dissipate. Unprincipled policy is likely to leave its mark on the law of the United States for years to come. +Welfare is a signal example. Last August Mr. Clinton signed legislation described as welfare "reform." Its true character, not reforming but vindictive, is brought out in a devastating article by Peter Edelman in The Atlantic Monthly for March. + Mr. Edelman, who was an Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, resigned over the welfare bill. He said little at the time. Now he has spoken out, in a voice more compelling than anger: a cool, clear analysis of the welfare law's human consequences. +A total of 11 million poor families will lose income as a result of the legislation, Mr. Edelman shows -- 10 percent of all American families. Of those, eight million are families with children. +Sponsors of the legislation said it would get people to work instead of depending on welfare. Mr. Edelman agrees with that aim. But the new law, he shows, does little to see that those who have been on welfare get jobs or are qualified to do the work. It simply ends the Federal assurance of help to needy families with children. And it puts an outside limit of five years on how long any family, however desperate, can get help. +Then, beyond welfare, the legislation makes savage cuts in food stamps for the poor, including working families. (That is a blow at the philosophy of work that the law purports to embrace.) It cuts out food stamps and other benefits for legal immigrants, many of them elderly and disabled people who have paid Social Security and other taxes for years. +Much of the legislation, indeed, has nothing to do with welfare or reform. It cuts Federal spending at the expense of the poor while leaving middle-class benefits untouched. Many provisions, Mr. Edelman says, "are just mean, with no good policy justification." +The excuse made for President Clinton when he signed the legislation was that he had to do it to win re-election. And it is true that Republicans in Congress pushed the meanest provisions, hoping to embarrass the President with his 1992 promise to "end welfare as we know it." +But Mr. Edelman demonstrates that the President had many opportunities to head off the worst. Instead he neither did nor said anything. At crucial points he just caved in. +"The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done" is the title of the article in The Atlantic Monthly. I am not so sure. There is a strong argument that what he has done to civil liberties will have even more damaging consequences for American ideals. +The anti-terrorism bill and the immigration bill that he signed into law last year contain numerous provisions stripping courts of their power to hold government officials to constitutional standards. Not even in the worst days of McCarthyism did legislation so trample on individual rights. Bill Clinton has the worst civil liberties record of any President in at least 60 years. +Why has it happened? How can a man so bright have done those things to principles about which he seemed to care? People ask those questions, mystified by this President. +But it is not really a mystery. President Clinton will not stand on principle when he thinks he might be damaged politically. In the end he is interested in only one thing: his own survival. +In signing the welfare law Mr. Clinton quoted Robert Kennedy on the value of work. In April 1967 Senator Kennedy went to Mississippi to look into reports of hunger. He found children with swollen bellies and sores that would not heal. He held a child on his lap, tears running down his face. And then he fought for more food for those desperate Americans. +Robert Kennedy would never have traded off the poor of this country for transitory political advantage, or agreed to strip the courts of power to protect individual rights. In the long run, in history, Bill Clinton will pay a heavy price for doing so. + +LOAD-DATE: March 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +111 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 4, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Clinton Figures On the Budget Are Questioned + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 15; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 419 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 3 + +The Congressional Budget Office said today that President Clinton's budget plan would leave the Government with a deficit of $69 billion in 2002, rather than a surplus of $17 billion, as Mr. Clinton asserted last month. +Most of the discrepancy is caused by the Administration's having more optimistic economic assumptions. + In addition, the Congressional Budget Office said that Mr. Clinton's proposals to slow the growth of Medicare would not save as much as he has predicted. The program finances health care for 38 million people who are elderly or disabled, and the conflict over it was a large factor in the stalemate between Mr. Clinton and Congress in 1995 and 1996. +Commenting on the report, Representative John R. Kasich, the Ohio Republican who is chairman of the House Budget Committee, said, "The President should submit a new budget, one that is in balance in 2002." +Representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee, said the new figures from the budget office, especially the Medicare numbers, were disheartening. +Mr. Clinton submitted his budget on Feb. 6. The nonpartisan budget office reviews the President's plan on behalf of Congress. It often disagrees with the White House. +On Feb. 13, the director of the office, June E. O'Neill, said the Administration's plan would produce a deficit of at least $50 billion in 2002. But that estimate was based only on differences in economic assumptions. Today's estimates reflect a more detailed analysis of the substance of the President's proposals. +With no change in law, the Congressional Budget Office said, the Federal deficit would rise to $153 billion in 2002, from $107 billion last year. Mr. Clinton's proposals would cut the deficit in that year by 55 percent, the office said. +Mr. Clinton has said that his Medicare proposals would save $34.6 billion in 2002 and a total of $100 billion from 1998 through 2002. But the Congressional Budget Office said that Mr. Clinton's proposals would save $29 billion in 2002 and $82 billion over all five years. +In his budget, Mr. Clinton proposed expanding Medicare benefits and cutting payments to doctors, hospitals and other providers. The Congressional office found that the new benefits would cost more than Mr. Clinton said, while the cuts in payments to providers would save less. +Without a change in law, the office said, the deficit would rise to $121 billion next year and under Mr. Clinton's plan it would be $145 billion. + +LOAD-DATE: March 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +112 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 4, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Clinton Wants Deal With Congress on Cost-of-Living Adjustments + +BYLINE: By RICHARD W. STEVENSON + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 476 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 3 + +President Clinton gave his aides the go-ahead today to try to forge a deal with Congress to reduce cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security and other benefit programs, White House officials said. +The officials said the Administration had not decided on a specific proposal but would start consulting on Tuesday with members of Congress from both parties, as well as with outside economists, to find a bipartisan way of dealing with the issue, which could determine the success of efforts to balance the budget. + The decision is the Administration's response to a call last week from Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Republican majority leader, for a commission of experts to make a binding judgment on how big the cost-of-living adjustment should be each year for Social Security and other programs. +Although it does not irrevocably commit the Administration to backing a politically explosive effort to reduce increases in Social Security, the decision is the first overt sign that Mr. Clinton is willing to join Republicans in taking the inevitable heat over the issue from powerful constituencies like the elderly. +The officials said the Administration would float several ideas, including the creation of a commission to make nonbinding recommendations to Congress and the Administration. +They said the emphasis would be on trying to create a panel that would have technical credibility on a subject that is complex even for economists. +The Administration would prefer a panel whose members do not already have strong views on the subject so that their work did not appear rigged to find budget savings at the expense of benefit recipients. +The Government now relies on the Consumer Price Index, which most economists agree overstates inflation to some degree. +The index is used to set increases each year in Social Security and other Government benefit programs, and is also used to adjust tax brackets for the effects of inflation. +A panel of economists appointed by Congress reported last year that the index overstated increases in the cost of living by about 1.1 percentage points a year. By inflating benefit payments and decreasing tax revenue, an overstatement of that size would cost the Government tens of billions of dollars a year, money that could go a long way toward eliminating the Federal deficit. +Administration officials including Robert E. Rubin, the Treasury Secretary; Franklin D. Raines, the budget chief; Gene Sperling, the chairman of the National Economic Council, and Erskine B. Bowles, the White House chief of staff, will begin sounding out members of Congress about a deal, White House aides said. +Other officials, including Janet Yellen, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Lawrence H. Summers, the Deputy Treasury Secretary, will solicit opinions from economists, they said. + +LOAD-DATE: March 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +113 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 5, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Metropolitan Diary + +BYLINE: By Ron Alexander + +SECTION: Section C; Page 2; Column 4; Living Desk + +LENGTH: 547 words + + +DEAR DIARY: +It is a cloudy, showery afternoon on Hudson Street, below Jane Street. A visitor from Maryland emerges from a bar and automatically raises his newly purchased umbrella. Threading his way through the rush-hour pedestrians, always careful with the beaded points, he looks down to see that a very short man has popped up under his umbrella. + "I've got news for ya, buddy," the short man announces. "It ain't raining." And with that, he vanishes. A few more steps and the visitor sheepishly closes the umbrella. +I often tell this story when asked, "What's it like in New York?" + THEODORE F. WATTS + +Dear Diary: +The scene is the Rainbow Room, on the occasion of her 46th birthday. She is dressed in black, the beading on her dress picking up the lighting just so. He is elegant in pinstripes and white shirt, with antique enamel cuff links. +Doing the mambo, they reap the benefits of weeks of dance lessons. They are pleased with themselves. He turns her and turns her again. On the third turn, his wrist dips slightly and her hair becomes entwined around a cuff link. They attempt grace, gingerly returning to the table, head attached to wrist. +Martinis await their separation. They start to giggle, humor trying to overcome embarrassment. No one stares overtly, except two teen-age girls dining with their parents, whose boredom is interrupted by this live cartoon. +It will be a story they will all tell over and over again. RUTH COHEN + +Dear Diary: +I found myself sharing an elevator in the trendy SoHo building where I have my office with two smartly dressed women in their 30's. One was dressed and accessorized entirely in brown and the other, with similar attention to detail, entirely in red. +After a few moments Red spoke up and offered warmly, "I love your brown." +Brown, apparently flattered, responded: "Thank you. Of course, brown is this year's black." +After a very slight hesitation, Brown said, "I love your red." +Red could hardly stifle the cattiness in her rejoinder: "Yes, you know, red is this year's brown." +They settled into semi-satisfied silence. + CHARLES GIFFORD + +Dear Diary: +On a recent flight to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the plane was filled with senior citizens. Before takeoff, the flight attendant walked up and down the aisle. Holding a bottle of water and small cups, she made this announcement: "Does anyone else need to take their pills?" BRIAN BRASH + +Dear Diary: +While attending a recent international trade show in Frankfurt, Germany, I ran into Charlie, an American friend and client of mine. Our conversation drifted from his worldwide travels to our common Upper East Side upbringing. +"But," he said with a sigh, "I've had enough. I'm thinking of moving west." +"To California?" I queried. +"Oh, no," he replied. "I was thinking about Columbus or Broadway in the high 70's." NANCY WOLKOW + Observations for this column may be sent to Metropolitan Diary (The Living Section), The New York Times, 229 West 43d Street, New York 10036. Please include your name, address and daytime telephone number; upon request, names may be withheld in print. Letters become the property of The Times and cannot be returned. They may be edited, and may be republished in all media. + +LOAD-DATE: March 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Phil Marden) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +114 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 5, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Alzheimer Studies Thwarted + +BYLINE: By JANE E. BRODY + +SECTION: Section C; Page 10; Column 1; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1256 words + +EVIDENCE that taking estrogen after menopause may prevent or delay and perhaps even treat Alzheimer's disease is increasingly compelling. But it is hardly conclusive, and the precise role that estrogen may play in curbing this devastating brain disease remains uncertain. +Now, however, researchers fear that recent publicity has made it nearly impossible to conduct a proper study of estrogen's ability to protect the brain from the leading cause of dementia. + At a recent symposium on estrogen and Alzheimer's disease at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, researchers said that the needed clinical studies might never be completed because so many women were already convinced of benefits from estrogen and were unwilling to take part in studies that might place them on a dummy medication for years. +To define a clear role for estrogen as a preventive of Alzheimer's disease requires two or more large, long-term clinical trials like the Women's Health Initiative, in which thousands of healthy older women are randomly assigned to receive either estrogen or a look-alike placebo and are then followed for years to see who develops dementia and at what age, how severe the symptoms are and how rapidly they progress. To determine the value of treating Alzheimer's patients with estrogen, hundreds would have to be randomly assigned to receive either the hormone or a placebo for several years. +The federally financed Women's Health Initiative has had difficulty recruiting participants in a long-term prevention study intended to follow 5,000 women over 70 years old for eight years. So far, only 1,500 have agreed to take part in the 39-center study. +"Estrogen has had so much publicity that women don't want to chance being placed on placebo for eight years," said Dr. Ruth Mulnard, a nurse-researcher at the University of California at Irvine. +Treatment studies are also having recruitment problems. Dr. Lon S. Schneider, a psychiatrist at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, said: "Many Alzheimer's patients and their families and physicians think estrogen is the treatment and they don't want to try anything else. It's been really difficult to recruit patients into estrogen studies, in part because they believe it works and their doctors can prescribe it." +Yet, Dr. Caleb E. Finch, who organized the recent symposium, said: "We are still at a very early stage in the discovery process. Although estrogen is a powerful physiological molecule that appears to modify various aspects of aging in the brain, the effect is not universal." +Dr. Finch, a gerontologist and neurobiologist, noted that Jeanne Calment of Arles, France, the oldest person in the world of confirmed age, turned 122 on Feb. 21. Although she is nearly blind and deaf, he said, she is not demented. "She's a wily, witty, manipulative old lady who loves to twist questions to suit her own purposes," Dr. Finch said. "Yet she is 70 years past menopause, has had no estrogen replacement and has no sign of Alzheimer's disease." +At the moment, the only certainties are that Alzheimer's disease, which already afflicts 4.5 million Americans and costs at least $80 billion a year, will become increasingly prevalent and costly as the population ages. After the age of 65, the incidence of the disease doubles every five years and, by 85, it affects nearly half the population. Within 40 or 50 years, experts predict that 10 million Americans will have their memories and learning abilities subverted by the disease. +Even if studies proved that estrogen could keep the disease at bay, researchers would still have to establish who might be most likely to benefit from taking the hormone, what form of estrogen would be most helpful and whether men, who have a lesser risk of dementia, might also be helped by some sort of hormone replacement. +Nonetheless, professional excitement about the potential of estrogen to diminish the ravages of age on the brain is growing by leaps and bounds. Speaking of estrogen, Dr. Galen Buckwalter, a psychologist at the gerontology center, said: "The brain just lights up with this stuff." He noted that estrogen acts on cells in specific areas of the brain that are damaged by the disease and also on neurotransmitter systems -- the chemicals that transmit messages between brain cells -- that are disrupted in dementia. +Animal experiments have shown that estrogen stimulates growth of brain cell branches, which increases the connections between cells "precisely in those areas of the brain damaged in Alzheimer's disease: the regions required for verbal memory and certain kinds of learning," Dr. Finch said. Estrogen also stimulates the activity of brain cells that release a major chemical messenger, acetylcholine. +Dr. Victor Henderson, a professor of neurology at the University of Southern California, listed other potentially beneficial actions of estrogen in the brain, including its role in regulating the proteins that end up as brain-destroying plaques in Alzheimer patients and its ability to increase cerebral blood flow and the use of glucose, brain energy source. +Even in a healthy brain, estrogen can improve cognitive function, Dr. Henderson said. Dr. Buckwalter reported that "women generally perform better than men on a variety of verbal tasks" and that menstruating women "show better verbal skills during the parts of the menstrual cycle when estrogen levels are high." +In men's brains, the enzyme aromatase converts testosterone to estrogen, and, Dr. Buckwalter suggested, the fact that men do not experience a precipitous decline in testosterone in midlife may be why they are less susceptible to Alzheimer's disease. Furthermore, he said, among men and women with Alzheimer's disease of equal duration, cognitive skills in men are likely to be more intact than they are in female patients who do not take estrogen. But female patients on estrogen are on a cognitive par with men. +Clues to estrogen's role in the brain have been around for nearly half a century. A placebo-controlled study in 1952 first suggested that estrogen could combat brain atrophy in Alzheimer's patients. Thirty nursing home residents with dementia were given injections of either estrogen and progesterone or a placebo for six months. Those receiving the hormones showed improvements in comprehension, memory, learning and test-taking behavior. A second treatment study in 1968 of 50 nursing home residents with dementia revealed improved performance in activities of daily living and behavior among women randomly assigned to treatment with Premarin, a mix of estrogens that is used by millions of postmenopausal women. +Most exciting to researchers and public health officials are indications from recent studies that estrogen replacement after menopause can prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease. Several studies that compared hundreds of Alzheimer's patients with otherwise similar but healthy women showed that those who took estrogen after menopause had a one-third to two-thirds lower risk of developing dementia. And in two of three large long-term studies, older women who took postmenopausal estrogen were 60 percent less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease. +But until the completion of clinical trials in which thousands of women are randomly assigned to receive either estrogen or a placebo, researchers cannot be certain that estrogen, and not some other unrecognized factor, was responsible for the benefits observed in these studies. + +LOAD-DATE: March 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +115 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 5, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +National News Briefs; +Glaucoma Link Found In Some Inhalants + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 15; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 217 words + +DATELINE: CHICAGO, March 4 + +Older people may raise their risk of developing glaucoma if for months at a time they take high doses of asthma inhalants that contain steroids, new research has concluded. +The study, being published on Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, found that eye patients in Quebec over the age of 65 were 44 percent more likely to have glaucoma or conditions that commonly precede it if they had been using such inhalants for three months or more. + But a co-author, Dr. Samy Suissa, an epidemiology professor at McGill University in Montreal, urged asthma patients not to stop taking their medications but instead to have their eyes checked for early signs of glaucoma. +Further, while it is well known that steroids can promote glaucoma, Dr. Harry A. Quigley, director of the Glaucoma Service and the Dana Center for Preventive Ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said that this particular study had many flaws and that more research was needed to confirm a link between glaucoma and the steroids in inhalants. +One problem is that the researchers depended on insurance records rather than actual medical charts. As a result, they had no way of being sure whether glaucoma diagnoses were correct or asthma medications were actually taken. + +LOAD-DATE: March 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +116 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 5, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +National News Briefs; +6 Are Accused of Fraud In Sweepstakes Scheme + +BYLINE: Reuters + +SECTION: Section A; Page 15; Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 135 words + +DATELINE: SPRINGFIELD, Mass., March 4 + +Six people were charged today with cheating elderly people out of more than $1 million by leading them to believe they were winners of the Publishers' Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. +Four Massachusetts residents and two Connecticut ones were charged in Federal District Court in Springfield, Mass., with conspiracy to commit wire fraud in the alleged scam, the United States Attorney for Massachusetts said. + The six people are alleged to have defrauded elderly residents of nine states in 1992 and 1993 by telling them they had won the grand prize of up to $10 million, but first had to pay Federal income taxes on the prize money, according to the United States Attorney's office. +Each of those deceived by the fraud sent from $20,000 to $270,000 to private mailboxes in Massachusetts and Florida. + +LOAD-DATE: March 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +117 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 7, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Doctor in Insurance Scheme Admits It Was All for Vanity + +BYLINE: By JOSEPH P. FRIED + +SECTION: Section B; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 404 words + +A doctor who gave his patients fuller lips and wrinkle-free skin ended up getting into trouble by making private insurers and the Federal Government pay, claiming he had performed medically necessary procedures instead. +Admitting what prosecutors called a "massive health-insurance fraud," the now-retired doctor, Leon Cantor, told a judge in Federal District Court in Brooklyn yesterday that from 1987 to early last year, "I billed various insurance companies for services I did not render." + "I knew these cosmetic procedures were not covered by health insurance or Medicare," he told Judge Raymond J. Dearie. +Dr. Cantor defrauded private insurance companies and Medicare out of nearly $1.5 million, investigators said. While he claimed he had performed medically necessary diagnostic procedures, all he really did, in many cases, was inject the patients with collagen to smooth out wrinkles and puff up lips, prosecutors said. In some cases, he did not perform any procedures at all. +The doctor, who practiced in Fresh Meadows, Queens, and Manhasset, L.I., before retiring last year -- because of his own health problems, his lawyer said -- faces up to three years in prison and a $3 million fine. Under a plea deal, he is required to pay back the swindled money to the insurance carriers and Medicare. +The 58-year-old former resident of East Hills, L.I., who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., was permitted to remain free on a $500,000 bond until sentencing June 13. +His lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, later said that Dr. Cantor would likely lose his medical license, but that this would be moot because a heart condition had caused him to retire. He termed Dr. Cantor's crimes a far cry from his days as an Army surgeon during the Vietnam War, when, he said, his client had been highly decorated for rescuing wounded soldiers under enemy fire. +According to Lisa J. Klem, an assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, at least 150 of Dr. Cantor's patients received cosmetic treatments in the false-billing scheme, most often injections of collagen. She said that Dr. Cantor would falsely tell insurers or, in the case of elderly patients, Medicare officials, that he had performed such procedures as bronchoscopies and laryngoscopies. She said the scheme was uncovered when Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield became suspicious of Dr. Cantor's billings and notified the F.B.I. + + +LOAD-DATE: March 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +118 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 7, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Backlog Threatens Immigrants With Benefits Loss + +BYLINE: By CELIA W. DUGGER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1162 words + +The backlog in processing citizenship applications has grown so large that many immigrants will almost certainly lose their welfare benefits because they cannot get citizenship credentials before an August deadline, Federal immigration officials say. +The slowdown in approving the applications began late last year. Officials said then that they hoped it would be temporary, but so far it has persisted. And in recent months, the number of immigrants applying to become citizens has grown, greatly increasing the number of people in the pipeline. + The longer wait for citizenship could not have happened at a worse time, advocates for immigrants say. Elderly and disabled people who are not citizens are, with some exceptions, scheduled to lose their benefits in August and September as a result of a welfare law adopted last year. + David Rosenberg, who heads the citizenship program at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said that once an application is filed, the naturalization process now takes nine months or longer in New York City, Los Angeles and Miami, an increase from five or six months last year. +The Social Security Administration last month began notifying 544,000 aged and disabled immigrants -- 86,000 in New York City -- that they will lose their benefits in five or six months if they have not been naturalized by then. +"I'm very scared," said Salvador De Leon, a 76-year old retired carpenter from the Dominican Republic who lives alone in a rented room in Washington Heights and receives Supplemental Security Income. "I can't work because I have a weak heart and S.S.I. is my only income." +Federal officials say three factors have slowed the processing of citizenship applications: a computer system relying on obsolete software, a large increase in the volume of applicants, and more stringent, time-consuming procedures for criminal background checks. + The panicky rush to naturalize, visible in New York City centers for the elderly where immigrants are rolling to citizenship classes in wheelchairs and filling out applications with trembling hands, has helped drive the number of citizenship seekers to a record high in recent months. From October to December, the number of people applying for citizenship rose 55 percent nationally and 96 percent in New York City compared with the same period the year before. Immigration officials expect 1.8 million people to apply this year. +In New York, the state, the city and the philanthropist George Soros's nonprofit Emma Lazarus Fund are planning to put up a total of $4 million to help immigrants apply for naturalization this year. +But the New York Immigration Coalition, an umbrella association of more than 100 groups that serve immigrants, estimates that it would cost $17 million, or $200 a person, just to provide citizenship classes and other help to the old and disabled people expected to have their benefits cut off in New York City. +Those who lose Federal Supplemental Security Income and food stamps, typically worth $600 to $650 a month in New York, could then apply for about $350 a month from a welfare program financed by the state and city. But there is now a 45-day waiting period before an applicant can qualify for aid, a delay that advocates say would leave thousands of immigrants with no income for at least a month and a half. +Social workers, doctors and others who assist this vulnerable population of immigrants say they are worried not only that the immigrants will temporarily lose benefits that pay for rent and food until they can be naturalized, but also that the very old will be too anxious and forgetful to learn enough English and American civics to pass the citizenship test. +Enriqueta Echeverria, a 78-year-old widow from Ecuador who lives in Washington Heights, in Manhattan, admits she is very nervous about taking the test. She was confident as she named the colors of the American flag but grew flustered when asked to name the introduction to the United States Constitution. +"The Supreme Court?" she tentatively asked, knowing she was wrong. (It's known as the Preamble.) "I study every morning, but sometimes I forget." +Mr. Rosenberg, of the immigration service, said that citizenship would not be a solution for many immigrants. Some will not be eligible because they have not been legal residents for five years. Others will fail the test or become citizens too late to avoid losing their federal benefits temporarily. +"We're trying to lower expectations," he said. "There are a lot of people who won't qualify, and logistically it's going to be hard for people who are not already in the process to become citizens before the deadlines." +This week, the immigration service was harshly questioned by Republican Congressmen at several hearings about the 180,000 immigrants who were naturalized without undergoing criminal background checks. The Congressmen said the immigrants were made citizens as part of a the Clinton Administration's politically motivated push to generate voters for the November election, while immigration officials contended that the failure to perform the background checks was the result of a flawed system swamped with record numbers of cases. +Whatever the reasons for the problem, the solution imposed in December -- that the immigration service must receive a written clearance for each citizenship applicant from the Federal Bureau of Investigation before the oath is administered -- has significantly slowed the nationwide naturalization process. +In June, 187,281 people were naturalized nationally, 43,138 of them in New York City. In December, the number of people naturalized plummeted to 42,281 nationally, and 7,291 in New York. +Not surprisingly, the number of immigrants waiting in line to become citizens has grown to about one million, from 700,000 last year. +"For the last few months, we have been particularly slow," Mr. Rosenberg of the immigration service said. "If you look ahead at the current low rates of production, it's very scary. We had a couple of districts that swore in almost no one." +But Mr. Rosenberg said he believed the pace would pick up as computer problems are fixed and the new process for criminal background checks becomes established. +The 15-year-old computer software that serves the New York district was built to handle a fraction of the volume of citizenship cases and is written in a language that is now "completely obsolete," Mr. Rosenberg said. Just a handful of people even know how to write in the language the computer understands. +"They keep telling us it's just about fixed," he said. +Advocates for immigrants say they fear that the computer system will continue to malfunction. And they also worry that the immigration service is being overly optimistic about how quickly it can gear back up, especially as it starts working with a growing number of old and disabled people who will take more time to process. + + +LOAD-DATE: March 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +119 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 7, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Doctor in Insurance Scheme Admits It Was All for Vanity + +BYLINE: By JOSEPH P. FRIED By JOSEPH P. FRIED + +SECTION: Section B; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan DeskSection B;Page 2;Column 5;Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 404 words + +A doctor who gave his patients fuller lips and wrinkle-free skin ended up getting into trouble by making private insurers and the Federal Government pay, claiming he had performed medically necessary procedures instead. +Admitting what prosecutors called a "massive health-insurance fraud," the now-retired doctor, Leon Cantor, told a judge in Federal District Court in Brooklyn yesterday that from 1987 to early last year, "I billed various insurance companies for services I did not render." + "I knew these cosmetic procedures were not covered by health insurance or Medicare," he told Judge Raymond J. Dearie. +Dr. Cantor defrauded private insurance companies and Medicare out of nearly $1.5 million, investigators said. While he claimed he had performed medically necessary diagnostic procedures, all he really did, in many cases, was inject the patients with collagen to smooth out wrinkles and puff up lips, prosecutors said. In some cases, he did not perform any procedures at all. +The doctor, who practiced in Fresh Meadows, Queens, and Manhasset, L.I., before retiring last year -- because of his own health problems, his lawyer said -- faces up to three years in prison and a $3 million fine. Under a plea deal, he is required to pay back the swindled money to the insurance carriers and Medicare. +The 58-year-old former resident of East Hills, L.I., who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., was permitted to remain free on a $500,000 bond until sentencing June 13. +His lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, later said that Dr. Cantor would likely lose his medical license, but that this would be moot because a heart condition had caused him to retire. He termed Dr. Cantor's crimes a far cry from his days as an Army surgeon during the Vietnam War, when, he said, his client had been highly decorated for rescuing wounded soldiers under enemy fire. +According to Lisa J. Klem, an assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, at least 150 of Dr. Cantor's patients received cosmetic treatments in the false-billing scheme, most often injections of collagen. She said that Dr. Cantor would falsely tell insurers or, in the case of elderly patients, Medicare officials, that he had performed such procedures as bronchoscopies and laryngoscopies. She said the scheme was uncovered when Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield became suspicious of Dr. Cantor's billings and notified the F.B.I. + + +LOAD-DATE: March 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +120 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 7, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Backlog Threatens Immigrants With Benefits Loss + +BYLINE: By CELIA W. DUGGER By CELIA W. DUGGER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 3; Metropolitan DeskSection A;Page 1;Column 3;Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1162 words + +The backlog in processing citizenship applications has grown so large that many immigrants will almost certainly lose their welfare benefits because they cannot get citizenship credentials before an August deadline, Federal immigration officials say. +The slowdown in approving the applications began late last year. Officials said then that they hoped it would be temporary, but so far it has persisted. And in recent months, the number of immigrants applying to become citizens has grown, greatly increasing the number of people in the pipeline. + The longer wait for citizenship could not have happened at a worse time, advocates for immigrants say. Elderly and disabled people who are not citizens are, with some exceptions, scheduled to lose their benefits in August and September as a result of a welfare law adopted last year. + David Rosenberg, who heads the citizenship program at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said that once an application is filed, the naturalization process now takes nine months or longer in New York City, Los Angeles and Miami, an increase from five or six months last year. +The Social Security Administration last month began notifying 544,000 aged and disabled immigrants -- 86,000 in New York City -- that they will lose their benefits in five or six months if they have not been naturalized by then. +"I'm very scared," said Salvador De Leon, a 76-year old retired carpenter from the Dominican Republic who lives alone in a rented room in Washington Heights and receives Supplemental Security Income. "I can't work because I have a weak heart and S.S.I. is my only income." +Federal officials say three factors have slowed the processing of citizenship applications: a computer system relying on obsolete software, a large increase in the volume of applicants, and more stringent, time-consuming procedures for criminal background checks. + The panicky rush to naturalize, visible in New York City centers for the elderly where immigrants are rolling to citizenship classes in wheelchairs and filling out applications with trembling hands, has helped drive the number of citizenship seekers to a record high in recent months. From October to December, the number of people applying for citizenship rose 55 percent nationally and 96 percent in New York City compared with the same period the year before. Immigration officials expect 1.8 million people to apply this year. +In New York, the state, the city and the philanthropist George Soros's nonprofit Emma Lazarus Fund are planning to put up a total of $4 million to help immigrants apply for naturalization this year. +But the New York Immigration Coalition, an umbrella association of more than 100 groups that serve immigrants, estimates that it would cost $17 million, or $200 a person, just to provide citizenship classes and other help to the old and disabled people expected to have their benefits cut off in New York City. +Those who lose Federal Supplemental Security Income and food stamps, typically worth $600 to $650 a month in New York, could then apply for about $350 a month from a welfare program financed by the state and city. But there is now a 45-day waiting period before an applicant can qualify for aid, a delay that advocates say would leave thousands of immigrants with no income for at least a month and a half. +Social workers, doctors and others who assist this vulnerable population of immigrants say they are worried not only that the immigrants will temporarily lose benefits that pay for rent and food until they can be naturalized, but also that the very old will be too anxious and forgetful to learn enough English and American civics to pass the citizenship test. +Enriqueta Echeverria, a 78-year-old widow from Ecuador who lives in Washington Heights, in Manhattan, admits she is very nervous about taking the test. She was confident as she named the colors of the American flag but grew flustered when asked to name the introduction to the United States Constitution. +"The Supreme Court?" she tentatively asked, knowing she was wrong. (It's known as the Preamble.) "I study every morning, but sometimes I forget." +Mr. Rosenberg, of the immigration service, said that citizenship would not be a solution for many immigrants. Some will not be eligible because they have not been legal residents for five years. Others will fail the test or become citizens too late to avoid losing their federal benefits temporarily. +"We're trying to lower expectations," he said. "There are a lot of people who won't qualify, and logistically it's going to be hard for people who are not already in the process to become citizens before the deadlines." +This week, the immigration service was harshly questioned by Republican Congressmen at several hearings about the 180,000 immigrants who were naturalized without undergoing criminal background checks. The Congressmen said the immigrants were made citizens as part of a the Clinton Administration's politically motivated push to generate voters for the November election, while immigration officials contended that the failure to perform the background checks was the result of a flawed system swamped with record numbers of cases. +Whatever the reasons for the problem, the solution imposed in December -- that the immigration service must receive a written clearance for each citizenship applicant from the Federal Bureau of Investigation before the oath is administered -- has significantly slowed the nationwide naturalization process. +In June, 187,281 people were naturalized nationally, 43,138 of them in New York City. In December, the number of people naturalized plummeted to 42,281 nationally, and 7,291 in New York. +Not surprisingly, the number of immigrants waiting in line to become citizens has grown to about one million, from 700,000 last year. +"For the last few months, we have been particularly slow," Mr. Rosenberg of the immigration service said. "If you look ahead at the current low rates of production, it's very scary. We had a couple of districts that swore in almost no one." +But Mr. Rosenberg said he believed the pace would pick up as computer problems are fixed and the new process for criminal background checks becomes established. +The 15-year-old computer software that serves the New York district was built to handle a fraction of the volume of citizenship cases and is written in a language that is now "completely obsolete," Mr. Rosenberg said. Just a handful of people even know how to write in the language the computer understands. +"They keep telling us it's just about fixed," he said. +Advocates for immigrants say they fear that the computer system will continue to malfunction. And they also worry that the immigration service is being overly optimistic about how quickly it can gear back up, especially as it starts working with a growing number of old and disabled people who will take more time to process. + + +LOAD-DATE: March 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +121 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 8, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final +(New Jersey) + +NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFING; +Checking on Aides for Elderly + +BYLINE: By TERRY PRISTIN + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 25; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk; Second Front + +LENGTH: 106 words + +DATELINE: TRENTON + +More than half the 35,000 residents in Manchester, in Ocean County, are elderly, and many fall prey to crimes committed by the people hired to take care of them, State Senator Leonard T. Connors, Republican of Surf City, said yesterday. Starting in 1989, Mr. Connors unsuccessfully sponsored legislation that would require criminal background checks for people who work with the elderly. + After an elderly woman from Ocean County was killed in January and a home health aide was charged in her death -- the second such case since 1993 -- Mr. Connors's bill was revived. It is expected to be voted on by the Senate on Monday. + +LOAD-DATE: March 8, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +122 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WORD & IMAGE; +Less Medicare, More Magic + +BYLINE: By Max Frankel + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 30; Column 4; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 1010 words + +The serious journals are full of alarms about a budgetary crisis that threatens to sink America in perhaps 20, maybe 30, surely 50 years. They say that I, as one of the elderly, am a major cause of the impending catastrophe. I am accused of bleeding the Government by claiming a richer pension and health insurance than my contributions would have earned from an insurance company. And I am accused of producing so many boomer children that *their* retirement with similar benefits will surely deplete the Treasury. +Duly shamed, I am struggling to help shape a remedy. I have absorbed Peter Peterson's "Will America Grow Up Before It Grows Old?" in hardcover and newsprint and scores of reactions: Paul Krugman's rave (and recantation) on the Web; critiques by John Judis in The New Republic and John Cassidy in The New Yorker; caveats from Herbert Stein in The Wall Street Journal and a ream of Op-Ed essays in The Washington Post and The New York Times. I've come through a dense semantic fog. + Plainly, the Social Security payroll taxes exacted from me and my boss by the Federal Insurance Contributions Act of 1935 (F.I.C.A.) were never handled as "insurance contributions" to any "trust fund." The taxes were simply mingled with Treasury revenues and spent not only for pension and Medicare payments to my parents but also on highways, moon shots, drug busts and jungle wars. Similarly, the retirement benefits now owed to me are being paid, along with all other Government expenses, with all the taxes drawn from the working population. +So while Social Security and Medicare masquerade as capitalistic insurance schemes, they serve the socialistic function of redistributing wealth, from the energetic young to the retired old. And the popularity of those programs, I am convinced, is sustained by this duplicity. By covering almost all the elderly, irrespective of need, they have avoided the stigma that attaches to other redistributions, like welfare and Medicaid. The young have borne a growing burden because they were assured their turn to benefit would come. The old have cashed their checks with no trace of guilt because they've been led to believe they are only drawing down their own investments. +"The resulting consensus about the system is its magic," said the late Arthur Okun, a Great Society economist; the fiction of earmarked contributions "serves mainly to preserve pride" while actually fulfilling a "right to survival." But he wrote 20 years ago. Now Peterson and other hardheaded analysts condemn Okun's consensus as a cruel Ponzi scheme, a promise of entitlements that threaten to bankrupt the nation. Whereas every person over 65 is currently supported by the taxes of five working people, the rapid aging of the population, they warn, means that every retiree in 2030 can expect support from only three. +That bleak prospect assumes that Medicare outlays will continue to grow much faster than the general cost of living and go on claiming two of every three Government dollars paid to the elderly. Yet though we old folks run up huge hospital and nursing bills in the last years of life, Americans have only begun to discover how to reduce medical costs. I don't think we should bet against our learning to live more healthily and to age less expensively. +Still, the number of the aged will soon explode, and they will live longer than ever before. The sooner we cover their deficits the less painful the retrenchment. All the available remedies involve some increase in payroll deductions -- either modest tax increases or genuine contributions to annuity schemes. And all the experts urge assorted caps and cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare allowances, with new efforts to steer benefits away from the affluent toward the needy. There are suggestions to raise the retirement age past the already scheduled increase from 65 to 67. There are responsible plans to reduce the cost-of-living increases in Social Security pensions and to withhold benefits from retirees with sizable earnings or investments. And there are many ideas for making most of the elderly pay a larger share of their medical expenses. +My greatest concern, however, is not for the economics of the remedy, but for the ecumenism of its design. I want to preserve Arthur Okun's magical consensus -- and the psychic income that the liberated young have derived for half a century from the independence of the old. +"My mother thanks you," I said to Lyndon Johnson after he signed Medicare into law in 1965. +"No," he replied, "It's *you* who should be thanking me." +As Peterson and other conservatives urge, Congress could invoke the specter of bankruptcy to impose forced savings on future generations and to ration payments to the elderly with a means test that would eventually pay benefits only to the "truly needy." But as we know from Medicaid, a means test will have two deplorable consequences. It will tempt the non-needy to shed their assets to qualify for benefits, as many have done to get Medicaid coverage in nursing homes. And it will stigmatize all aid to the elderly poor as "welfare," depriving them of significant political support. +The only effective way to favor the poor without robbing them of dignity and public favor is to preserve the universality of Social Security -- and to quietly reclaim moneys from the affluent by progressively taxing their medical and pension benefits. +One other image in this discussion urgently needs repair. It is destructive to stir up intergenerational warfare. That would occur if a powerful voting bloc of the elderly were pitted against an angry younger population. But there is no profit for either side in such a war. If the elderly emerged with wildly excessive benefits, they would only succeed in devaluing the currency in which they are ultimately paid. And if the young reneged on too many promised benefits, they would only inherit the burden of their parents' distress and feel compelled to support them in other ways. +Cut back on Medicare. But keep the magic. + +LOAD-DATE: March 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Illustration (Illustration by Lou Beach) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +123 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Age Boom: The Boom Is Discovered; +Still at Work on a Self + +BYLINE: By Mary Cantwell; Mary Cantwell is a former member of the editorial board of The Times and the author, most recently, of "Manhattan, When I Was Young." + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 57; Column 1; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 833 words + +Twenty-three years ago, I flew to England to interview the novelist Jean Rhys, whom I idolized. Rhys, by then in her 80's, had dressed for the occasion, and so had I -- she in a lame jacket and I in gypsyish gear. We may have looked odd, but not to each other, not given the pleasure she took in my festive rags and I in her glints of gold. +Perhaps it was that recognition of our mutual vanity that made us, despite her age and my awe, cozy. "You know what I miss as I get older?" I said, my tongue loosened by camaraderie. "That look of anticipation in a man's eyes when he first meets you." + "Yes," she sighed. "I miss it still." +I had forgotten that conversation until last month, when a pretty young woman joined a group of partygoers for after-dinner coffee and turned the other women among us into part of the wallpaper. Once, I might have felt a Rhysian pang. But not now, now that I have discovered my powers. +Talking is one of them. The pretty young girl I was once could not talk, but I can. In a sense, I sing for my supper. Most older men don't have to. They just have to show up and use the right forks. But the days when I had only to "be" are gone, along with my skimpy Puccis. Do I care? Scarlett, I don't give a damn. +Having the guts to declare my dislikes is another power. I hate football, basketball and sitcoms and have never, except on the wonderful night when Madonna told David Letterman that urine cured athlete's foot, watched a talk show. I haven't seen half the movies celebrated by the Academy Awards and don't know half the musicians celebrated by the Grammys. Once, I would have pretended enthusiasm, so anxious was I to join the mainstream. Today I am content to travel my own tributary. +Third, I am finally released from the desire to make nice. No longer do I find excuses for those acquaintances with the tongues of adders. Instead, I shake them off as surely as I do raindrops from an umbrella. +A famously beautiful friend of 73 says, "I am younger now than I ever was, and my health is a blessing." Although I have not always had that blessing, my ailments are the type that can come anytime. So I associate them with living, not with aging. As for dying, that as well is a concomitant of life. At Sunday school, I was taught that since death doesn't count one's years, one must always live in a state of grace. My younger self would have been embarrassed to admit that she tries, however fruitlessly, to live without sinning. But not I. +A family trait had me going gray at 20 and taking action by 25. I have also taken action against several nuisances that arrived years later, including a nose that without makeup is a perennial pink. But despite the urging of my beautiful friend, I will not go to the plastic surgeon who magics her back to, say, 45. I am given to telling myself, "You'll do." +But I am lucky. Free at last of the workplace, I no longer feel a need to look ageless and a la mode. To many of my editors I am only a voice on a phone. That is not true for a publicist I know. "I'm smarter than I was, and better able to do the job because I'm past being distracted by children or a husband," she says. "But possible employers look at me twice. Before they see my skills, they see my age -- and devalue me." +I am lucky, too, because had it not been for a passion for work, I might be one of the millions of divorced and widowed American women who are poor or close to poor. I have not had a husband since I was 39, but I have had a job since I was 18. "Every woman should have a trade," my hard-headed great-aunt announced, and I heard the message. Twice in my life I have seen money disappear, when my father died and when my husband left. But my mother, a schoolteacher, had a trade. So, eventually, did I. Ensconced in marriage, we never dreamed that one day our trades would be our bank accounts. +"Love," my beautiful friend says. "One cannot live without love." Sexual love, though, is not all she is speaking of. I knew someone whose greatest love affair was with objects, another whose was with books and a third whose was with ideas. Even so, there is something one gets by loving another person that one cannot get elsewhere. +"I don't know if I miss sex," the publicist, a widow, says. "But I miss his arms around me and the way he cradled me when I slept." She won't get those hugs again, not simply because he is the only man from whom she would have wanted them but also because the odds on her remarrying are slim. My friend's male counterpart, statistics say, is almost certain to wed her junior. For him, to look at the widow is to see himself in a mirror. But to look at a younger woman is to see reflected a vibrant, more macho man. +Ah, this getting older, however fortunate one's circumstances, is a scary business. I fear my memories, of which, good and bad, I have far too many. But lost friends are better honored with smiles than with tears. And having too many memories is better than having too few. + +LOAD-DATE: March 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Mary Cantwell. (PHOTOGRAPH BY NIGEL PARRY/C.P.I., FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +124 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ON LANGUAGE; +The Young Old + +BYLINE: By William Safire + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 14; Column 1; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 951 words + +'Geezer Strategy' was the headline of a front-page story in The Wall Street Journal about the attempt of CBS to woo an older audience back to the network. The lead: "The italics grown-ups are battling back." +Those two locutions -- geezer and grown-up -- run the gamut of characterizations of age. As a modifier, grown-up has all those good things going for it: "mature, experienced, dry behind the ears." But the last time I used geezer in a column -- denouncing the "geezer power" of the most powerful lobby in Washington -- a mail clerk, with a military cry of 'incoming!' dragged in a load of mail complaining of an age-ist slur. These advocates of the silver set were far from T.S. Eliot's "quiet voiced elders" -- one creative soul signed his blast "Gerry Atrix." + Age-ist is an awkward word, easy enough to say, harder to put on a page. The spelling ageist, though sanctioned by Webster's New World Dictionary, looks as if it should sound like 'aguyst,' and when you drop the e, to agist, it seems analogous to aginner. The hyphen can be used to signal the pronunciation of a hard a and a soft g, at least until the word and its -ism become more familiar. +Oldsters in their 60's can use geezer with impunity because we're ensconced in early codgerhood. The word may be rooted in disguise: in Scotland, the guisers were revelers who, like Mummers, dressed in ancient costumes, or guises, on certain holidays. (Sound farfetched? You got a better etymology, y'old coot?) With the meaning "fool," usually but not necessarily old, coot had its first citation in 1766; old coot is not redundant, while old geezer is; all geezers, no matter how sprightly, are old, just as all pups are young. +But how old is old? To many, it seems that the old-age clock begins to run at Social Security's 65, though the American Association of Retired Persons begins hitting you up for membership at 50. "You're as old as you feel" is a helpful adage, reminding us that age can be a state of mind. +With the general aging of the population, a differentiation is being made among the young old (65 to 75), the old old (75 to 85) and the oldest old (85 to 99). Beyond that is centenarian, a word chosen by David J. Mahoney, the philanthropist who heads the Charles H. Dana Foundation, for his seminal Rutgers commencement address, "The Centenarian Strategy." He spoke about how the old young -- now in their 20's, just beginning to trust anybody over 30 -- should plan their lives on the probability of living to 100 -- with worn-out organs transplanted and brain functions, especially memory, relatively unimpaired. +In the synonymy of age, elderly -- with its comparative sense of "older than," as in "elder sister" -- is the gentlest, signifying the respect bordering on veneration, as in "tribal elder" and "elder statesman." As an adjective, elderly connotes judgment based on experience rather than only the seniority of age; as a noun, it suggests a group only approaching old age. Plain old, without the modifiers of young or old, deals with "advanced years" but not with degrees of physical decrepitude, first cited in this space in 1980 as "the dwindles." Superannuated, though fallen into linguistic desuetude, occasionally gets used to describe people pensioned or forced to retire because of arbitrary age limits. However, to be in one's dotage , from the Middle Low German dotten, "to be foolish," suggests a state of near-senility, though the portmanteau pun anecdotage has softened that word's meaning. +Slang treats age breezily. Granny, from grandmother via the British grandam, is gaily applied in fashion's granny glasses and granny dresses, but is more poignantly applied in the abandonment of aged dependents, called granny dumping. +The shunning of elderly women shown by the disparaging crone or hag is to be discouraged.At the 1972 Mscovw summit, Alexei Kosygin pointed to a female American reporter and asked Pat Nixon, "Who is that bag of rocks?" Mrs. Nixon professed not to hear. However, no spring chicken is acceptable, and of a certain age is preferred. The American equivalent of the Russian bag of rocks is battle-ax. (Spelled either ax or axe, it will get you a pocketbook in the choppers.) Wise guys who use the pejorative gramps are invariably called whippersnappers. Fogy, cited in 1879 as "phogey," extra military pay for long service, can be young or old, but old fogy is a label more derogatory of hidebound beliefs than of age. +The hypersensitive old or their unctuous caregivers are constantly plumbing the depths of the fountain of euphemism. Senior citizen has had its day, as has golden years and sunset years. The jocular chronologically advanced is a play on correctness, and old folks is considered patronizing. +What's good geezer etiquette? Gray is acceptable, but silver is the preferred adjective; forget gold. Those teeth in the glasses will really smile at the use of the aforesaid grown-up. Although adult has been seized by the porno crowd to describe sexy movies, that has not tarnished the adjective in the minds of what used to be known as the Geritol set; older adult is guaranteed to offend nobody. +The best-loved euphemism of all is mature. (The name of the A.A.R.P.'s publication is Modern Maturity, Pops, not Old-Fashioned Old Age.) In the reality-avoiding terminology of Geezerland, mature is to old what full figured is to buxom. +When the band strikes up the Stephen Collins Foster tune that begins "Way down upon the Swanee River," substitute "Lordy" for "darkie" to bypass racism and then watch out for that last line. Ditch its reference to old folks and get ready for a fast fix at the end to the updated title, "Mature Adults at Home." + +LOAD-DATE: March 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (ILLUSTRATION BY TERRY ALLEN) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +125 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Connecticut Q&A: Dr. Michael McCloud; +Practical Geriatrics for an Aging Nation + +BYLINE: By GITTA MORRIS + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 3; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1530 words + +PAST civilizations venerated their elderly, considering them to possess magical powers and wisdom," says Dr. Michael McCloud, director of geriatrics for Yale-New Haven Hospital and medical director for the Dorothy Adler Geriatric Assessment Center. "And I believe they were right. Yet, older people today are regarded as being dependent and unable to contribute." +Over the past decade, the over-65 age group grew by 33 percent while the general population rose only 11 percent. There are now about 36,000 people 100 years old or older in the United States. + Not surprisingly, gerontology and geriatrics are in great demand. The Adler Center, founded in 1981, is one of the oldest and busiest in the country. Dr. McCloud joined the staff last fall, after completing a fellowship at Duke University Medical Center; previously he was in private practice in San Francisco. +A proponent of "successful aging," he maintains it is possible to compress the inevitable problems we all face to the very end of our lives and to enjoy comfortable living until that point. +In his office at the Adler Center, Dr. McCloud talked about comprehensive geriatric assessment, a multidisciplinary approach that is his particular area of interest. Following are excerpts from that conversation. +Q. Why did you decide to specialize in geriatric medicine? +A. I've always been fascinated by the common thread amongst the very elderly: They didn't die. Through some combination of genetics, life style choices, luck and sheer grit, they have outlived their peers and often their own children. They have much to teach the rest of us. +Q. What is a multidisciplinary approach to treating an older patient? +A. It incorporates not only the physician's assessment, but nursing, social services, physical therapists, pharmacists and additional disciplines. We really focus on older patients with threatened independence and declining levels of function, and try to make recommendations and interventions that will allow them to perform at the maximal capacity and to remain independent. The impact that we make is tangible and enormously gratifying. +Q. Who is your typical patient? +A. I recall a woman in her early 90's who lived in Florida, who was on her annual trip here to see her family. She suddenly developed weakness in her arms and legs, trouble walking, and was virtually wheelchair confined in a matter of weeks. Her family brought her in for a comprehensive assessment. +We determined that she had an arthritic spur that was depressing her spinal chord but she was otherwise in superb health. We referred her to a neural surgeon who was able to decompress the spinal cord surgically. She has done beautifully and has returned to living independently in Florida. +Q. What other reasons might a patient come in for evaluation? +A. Memory loss and confusion. The first step is to determine, is this something mimicking a dementia, such as depression, or is it perhaps related to an illness, medication or alcohol. Once we determine if there is a true dementia, we ask, is this an irreversible decline, such as Alzheimer's, or a process we can possibly reverse or prevent from getting worse, such as small strokes caused by hypertension. +It's very exciting to find a process that mimics Alzheimer's, such as an underactive thyroid condition, vitamin B12 deficiency, a depression that's gone untreated. These are often our most rewarding cases. +Q. How would you treat depression? +A. We use drugs in conjunction with other interventions and therapies. Fortunately, in recent years we have developed psychopharmacological agents that are quite safe in this age group. +Q. What does the evaluation entail? +A. The initial evaluation is usually 90 minutes. If the problems are complex we have the patient return a second or third time. We arrange for all the involved family members to be present and we separate; a case manager will meet privately with the family to discuss issues that they are not comfortable bringing up in the presence of the patient. And we sit with the patient separately and have a heart to heart. +We perform the physical and psychological examinations. Then we have a huddle between the staff, propose recommendations and discuss them with the family. We provide a report for the referring physician; if the patient doesn't have one, we are very good at finding one. +Q. Is over-medication a problem? +A. Absolutely. We have many patients who are on 6, 8, 10 or more medications. I can only guess at the potential interactions these medications have. Often they're taking over-the-counter remedies that they don't even consider medication. We ask a patient to bring a brown bag with everything from the medicine cabinet. We look it over, ask the physician if it is still necessary and then chart the essential medications. +Q. Did we have the same geriatric problems 50 years ago? +A. They were there, but who was talking about senile dementia 50 years ago? Who was concerned about osteoporosis? We just didn't recognize it. +Another crucial issue is that while the age of menopause has not changed -- it's about 50 -- a woman is spending hopefully several decades in post-menopause. It becomes much more important now to address hormone replacement therapy than it was for her grandmother. +Q. What is your view on estrogen replacement therapy? +A. I'm a very strong proponent of it unless there is a good medical reason not to. Life expectancy increases by at least one year, and it greatly enhances the quality of life. +Q. Should an older woman still have mammograms? +A. Yes. A woman's risk of developing breast cancer increases with age at least until around age 80. +Q. What's about older men? +A. Prostate cancer remains the No. 1 cancer in men, and we're still struggling to find the best approach to it. But we have made great progress in what is often the bane of the older man's life: benign prostate enlargement. Medications are providing an effective means of delaying or avoiding surgery. +We're also hitting some home runs in treating male impotence -- beyond implants and vacuum pumps. A self-injected, generally safe, medication, alprostadil, is our best treatment, although it has drawbacks. +Q. What innovations do you see ahead? +A. We now have very effective medications to retard the osteoporosis process. And within the past month, we have our second memory enhancing medication for treatment in Alzheimer's disease. We're developing ways to reduce the risk of falls -- for example, home assessment visits by a physical therapist and a nurse to look at environmental hazards or medications. One large managed care organization will be offering it to its Medicare enrollees. +Q. In addition to advice about nutrition, alcohol and exercise, what are other tips for successful aging? +A. First, stop smoking. Even if you've smoked for 50 years, the benefits of quitting accrue rapidly at any age. +Secondly, immunizations are the best health insurance bargain you will find. An annual influenza vaccination, and the once-in-a-lifetime vaccination against Pneumococcal pneumonia, the most common bacterial pneumonia. Tetanus boosters every 10 years; tetanus has become uncommon, but when it occurs it is usually in the older unvaccinated person. And speaking of "protection," be aware that 10 percent of new H.I.V. infections are now in the over-50 age group. +Q. What about romance between very elderly people? +A. It's wonderful to see. I have to confess in my private geriatric practice, we sometimes scheduled them to come on days when other patients were in the waiting room. And we sparked a few romances. +Certainly after we grow older, we don't lose our basic needs for intimacy and love. Children often fail to recognize that, and underestimate the impact that nursing home placement has on older individuals. +Q. Can you comment on physician-assisted suicide for older people? +A. It certainly is a topic that many geriatricians are actively debating right now. I continue to take my Hippocratic oath very seriously, not to provide the medications to allow a person to take one's own life. But I do think it's a dialogue that we need to have as a society. My frustration is, why haven't we become better at relieving the suffering of chronic terminal disease? +Q. But aren't many nursing home patients beyond attaining any enjoyment of life? +A. There's no reason why a nursing home should be a place where people sit and wait to die. My colleagues at Duke University went into a nursing facility with computers and had volunteers teach the residents how to use them so they could have access to E-mail and the Internet. These people benefited enormously in terms of loneliness and quality of life. +Q. What do you think of a doctor who tells you, "Well, you're getting older, you've got to expect these aches and pains?" +A. We don't accept that response. It brings to mind a story that every geriatrician loves to cite. The 95-year-old man goes to the doctor complaining of knee pain. The doctor says, "What do you expect at your age?" And the man responds, "Well, my other knee is the same age and it doesn't hurt." + +LOAD-DATE: March 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Michael McCloud at his office at Yale-New Haven Hospital. (Helen Neafsey for The New York Times) + + +TYPE: Interview + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +126 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The View From: Yonkers; +Burial Society's Sacred Task of Performing a Ritual for the Dead + +BYLINE: By LYNNE AMES + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 2; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1121 words + +DATELINE: YONKERS + +GEORGE BERMAN is neither doctor nor mortician, yet he deals with death on a regular basis. Two or three times a month, he enters the preparation room of a funeral home, peels the plastic body bag from a corpse and prepares it for burial. The work he does is not part of his profession -- he and his wife Rochel, both 61, own a public relations concern here -- but, he said, it is a calling, a religious activity "of the highest order." Readers should know at the outset, however, that this article contains some graphic details. +The Bermans are members of the Jewish Burial Society, or Hevra Kadisha. They and 45 other volunteers countywide go to funeral homes as needed to conduct the Tahara, the purification ritual that observant Jews have performed for their dead since ancient times. Working in teams of three men or three women, depending on the sex of the deceased, they say prayers, wash the body, clothe it in shrouds and place it in a coffin made of wood. + Although the work they do is spiritual in nature, there is a highly visceral component as well. For example, corpses coming from a hospital often have catheters or intravenous tubes still attached to them, Mr. Berman said, and the elderly may bear bruises and bedsores. Members of the Burial Society are inoculated to guard against hepatitis B; when working on the body of someone who has died of AIDS, they wear masks, gowns and double pairs of rubber gloves. +Mr. Berman acknowledged that the tasks of the Hevra Kadisha are not for everyone, but he said that he is not unnerved. "Usually what I see is just a little old man who has accumulated the insults of a lifetime," he said. "Maybe there is a colostomy. Maybe a catheter. We remove everything, even the tiniest bandages. Then we begin the purification. It makes me feel good -- in fact, elated -- that after the doctors have stopped, after all the tubes have been disconnected, there is still something I can do for him." +Mrs. Berman added that she finds a sort of peace in the simple act of repetition, finds comfort in the predictable order of the ritual. "I'm a task-oriented person. I'm methodical. This has a beginning, a middle and an end. When I'm preparing the body the world stands still." +Tahara dates from ancient times, Mrs. Berman said, explaining that the Talmud stipulates that every town should have a designated burial society. Today the local organization consists of volunteers ranging from their 20's to their 90's, including lawyers, business people and artists. Each receives a 90-minute training session with Mr. Berman or Nancy Klein, co-chairwoman of the local society with Mr. Berman, and a dummy like those used in cardiopulmonary resuscitation classes. Mr. Berman founded the group 12 years ago when he saw a need for the services locally -- until then, Westchester people needing help from a Hevra Kadisha had to get in touch with one in New York City. The Westchester Hevra Kadisha charges $180, $30 of which goes to defray operating costs, with the remaining $150 going to charities. The society will perform its services free of charge, however, for anyone unable to pay. +Funeral parlors that need the services of a society member, contact the group's scheduler, who in turn lines up a team to handle the particular job. Men perform rituals only for men; women do it for women; anyone who feels he or she cannot emotionally handle a specific situation may decline the task. For example, when a society member who had small children of her own recently got nervous, Mrs. Berman took part in a Tahara for an 18-month-old baby who had died of cancer. +In the room with the corpse, the first step is to say a prayer in Hebrew "introducing the person to God," Mr. Berman said. The body is taken from its plastic bag and covered with a sheet, and all medical equipment, clothing and jewelry are stripped away. The body is washed (the water runs into wells in the preparation table), and while this is going on, someone recites a prayer, which says, in part, "I have removed your iniquity from you." Even nail polish is taken off (nail polish remover is part of a kit that society members take with them to an assignment). +At this point, society members peel off the rubber gloves they are wearing and put on new ones, signifying that the process has gone from impure to pure. Then, in accordance with custom, 24 quarts -- three bucketsful -- of water are poured over the body continuously, including the face and genitals, which have previously been covered. As the water is poured in a stream, a prayer about purification is chanted. Then the Hevra Kadisha members say three times in Hebrew in unison either, "He is pure" or "She is pure." +The next step is to dry the body with a sheet and dab a mixture of egg white and vinegar on the forehead. The Bermans are not sure of the origin of this custom, although some speculate that during the Middle Ages, when plague-ridden corpses were piled in the street, the glossy mark left by the mixture indicated that the body was to be taken to a Jewish graveyard. After this, the shrouds are put on. These are two tunic-like tops and a pair of pants sewed shut at the feet, like a child's pajamas. The women wear pants as well as the men, Mrs. Berman said, "because everyone is supposed to be the same in the eyes of God." The head and face are completely covered by a hood or a bonnet and veil. All knots on the shrouds are tied only halfway -- "The idea is that the decomposition process, the return to earth, should be as fast as possible," Mrs. Berman said. The use of embalming fluids are prohibited by Jewish law, Mr. Berman said. +The coffin must be made of wood and be completely free of metal. It has three holes in its base. In Israel, Mr. Berman said, the coffin is dispensed with, and the body is put directly into the ground. In America, Israeli earth, imported by a Brooklyn-based company that makes the shrouds, is placed on the facial hood. So are pieces of broken pottery, to symbolize the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem. +The Hevra Kadisha's work would probably repel or frighten many people other than those who are professionally conversant with death, like morticians and doctors. Mr. and Mrs. Berman, however, say that their own metaphysical fears have been eased, not exacerbated, by their experiences. +"I used to think death was like walking into an abyss, into nothingness, that I would be nothing but food for the worms," Mr. Berman said. "But now I have been touched by the ceremony, touched by the prayers. I see that the body retains its sanctity after the soul departs. I see death as a rite of passage. I now feel that after death, there will still, somewhere, be a me." + +LOAD-DATE: March 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: George and Rochel Berman, demonstrating some aspects of the ceremony at a home in New Rochelle. (James Estrin/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +127 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Testing Younger Women for Osteoporosis + +BYLINE: By VIVIEN KELLERMAN + +SECTION: Section 13LI; Page 4; Column 3; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1348 words + +KATHLEEN MUCCIOLO was 35 when her mother Katherine, then 57, was diagnosed with osteoporosis. The disease seemed to come without warning, when a vertebrae in her mother's back spontaneously collapsed while she was gardening. "She had never even complained of a backache before that," said Ms. Mucciolo of Manhattan. "Suddenly, her life revolved around pain and fractures." +In the 11 years since her diagnosis, Katherine Mucciolo, of Floral Park, has suffered spontaneous fractures in bones throughout her body, until she wryly refers to herself as an eggshell. Meanwhile, her daughter has been a witness to a future that could be hers. + Recognizing that she herself might be at risk for the same disease, Ms. Mucciolo, now 46, nevertheless resisted the idea of getting tested for it. "I guess I didn't want to think it would actually happen to me. I was still so young." +At the urging of her mother, she took her first bone density test, and to her dismay discovered that she was already in the early stages of the disease. "I had been in denial," she said. "That didn't last long." +Although the knowledge that her bones were already thinning took her by surprise, the discovery has allowed her to take steps to educate herself about new treatments and to attempt to slow the progress of the disease through a program of calcium intake, weight-bearing exercises and annual bone density screenings. +"My mother's life has become one of canceled plans, no travel and theater tickets bought and sold at the last minute," she said. "I'm determined that will not happen to me." +Most people think of osteoporosis as a disease of the frail elderly, said Liz Stone, manager for support services for the National Osteoporosis Foundation in Chicago. Long before the first symptoms appear, osteoporosis is silently doing its damage. In 1988, 250,000 Americans aged 45 and over were admitted to hospitals with hip fractures related to osteoporosis. +"Building strong bones, especially before the age of 35, can be the best defense against developing osteoporosis," said Ms. Stone. Unfortunately, getting that message out has been frustrating. +"People don't want to talk about it because they equate it with old age," she said. "But it's not something that has to happen. It can be prevented." +Ms. Stone said risk factors, like being a small-boned female Caucasian with a family history of the disease, may be unavoidable. But she said, not enough calcium intake, lack of exercise, especially weight-bearing activities, cigarette smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, hormone replacement therapy after menopause and at least one baseline bone density test are choices that can and should be addressed. +"Women can lose up to 20 percent of their bone mass in the five to seven years following menopause," she said. +Osteoporosis, or porous bone, is a disease characterized by low bone mass and structural deterioration of bone tissue. It is often called the "silent disease" because bone loss occurs without symptoms. People may not know they have it until their bones become so weak that a sudden strain, bump or fall causes a fracture or a vertebra to collapse. +In the United States today, 7 million to 8 million individuals already have the disease and 17 million more have low bone mass, placing them at increased risk for osteoporosis. +"In terms of awareness, osteoporosis is today where breast cancer was 10 years ago," said Ms. Stone. "But while mammograms are considered a crucial element in breast cancer prevention, bone density testing is not. What I'd like to see are some high profile people come out and admit to having it. I think that would be an important step in facilitating a change in attitude." +Lillian Langhorst, a retired music teacher from Sound Beach, discovered that many women do not even want to talk about it. In the seven years she has had the disease, which has taken her from being an independent woman who sawed branches off trees to one who cannot even lift a grocery bag, she said she often felt as if she were all alone. +Her first attempt at getting a support group failed, after a request to the retired teachers' association for fellow-sufferers brought not one response. +She said: "Can you believe that? Not even one?" +Undaunted, Ms. Langhorst has reached out to anyone who will listen. Finally, in January, , she held her first meeting, at the Emma S. Clark Library in Setauket, and to her pleasant surprise, 15 people showed up. Some had the disease, some were family members who wanted to know more about it. All shared stories similar to hers. "It made all the difference to know that I wasn't alone," she said. +Ms. Langhorst's support group comes on the heels of the introduction of an osteoporosis center at the Stony Brook University Hospital. The center, which opened in March 1996, engages in clinical research trials and offers bone density screening and a prevention program that includes both a nutritional and an exercise component. +"Even people that have the disease can still be helped," said Dr. Barry Gruber, director of the center. Hormone replacement therapy to prevent bone loss and a fairly new drug, with the generic name of Alendronate, that actually increase bone mass as much as 3 to 4 percent the first year and 2 percent each year after that, has proved to be successful in treating the disease. +A year and a half ago, Mrs. Mucciolo began drug therapy and since that time has had no fractures. Normally, she said, she would have fractured every three or four months. Ms. Langhorst recently began drug therapy and is hopeful that her decline has also been halted. +But Alendronate has only been around for three years, and while it appears safe and with minimal side effects, doctors say they cannot know for sure what the long term effects will be. +Dr. Gruber said that in the future, Alendronate may be taken as a preventative drug by people at risk. Moreover, even more powerful drugs show promise. Some may only need to be taken by injection every three months. +At Winthrop Hospital in Mineola, an osteoporosis diagnostic and treatment center and a related support group has been in existence for 20 years. Patients learn how to obtain proper calcium and vitamin D without compromising cholesterol and fat intake and how to read and understand labels on supplements. Exercise programs are tailored to individual needs and abilities. +Dr. John Aloia, director of the center, said that he had seen a marked change in the perception of osteoporosis over the last few years, with more than 2,000 people a year coming in just for bone density testing. +"Ten to 15 years ago, this was a disease where you went to an orthopedist who told you it was just a part of getting older and there was nothing you could do about it," said Dr. Aloia. "I think as people become aware that is not true, they take a more proactive stance in prevention and treatment." +Although bone mass loss is part of the aging process, Dr. Jordan Tobin, chief of applied physiology for the National Institute of Aging, said that not all bone loss meant osteoporosis. +Unless one bone density test is measured against another, there is no way of knowing just how much or how quickly the loss is occurring. Accelerated loss, which begins after menopause, lasts for 10 to 15 years. After that it slows, but continues throughout life. Dr. Tobin said the problem was that by the time it slowed, so much damage might have been done, that the risk for fractures had dramatically increased. A proponent of hormone replacement therapy, Dr. Tobin said estrogen could prevent that acceleration for a decade or more. +Long before menopause, he said, women should be thinking about osteoporosis, because during childbearing years they can do the most to minimize the effects of later bone mass loss. +"Building bone mass while young is the most important preventative step you can take to preventing osteoporosis," said Dr. Tobin. "We've said often that the best way to treat the mother is to treat the daughter as well." + +LOAD-DATE: March 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: A bone densitometry shows the density of a spine; At Winthrop Hospital, Sharon R. Sprintz runs a bone densitometry on Selma Stutchbury. (Photographs by Vic DeLucia/The New York Times) + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +128 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +CONNECTICUT GUIDE + +BYLINE: By ELEANOR CHARLES + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 12; Column 4; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1018 words + + +A LIGHTSHIP ARRIVES +Ceremonies welcoming Lightship No. 112, the Nantucket, to its permanent home in Bridgeport will begin at 11 A.M. on Saturday at Captain's Cove Seaport. The vessel will open for tours from noon to 5 P.M. + The 61-year-old ship served at the most isolated spot in the Coast Guard's lightship network, standing guard and guiding ships through the treacherous shoals of Nantucket Island on their way to Boston and New York. +The only United States lightship stationed in international waters, she was called the Statue of Liberty of the Sea because she was the first glimpse of America for immigrants nearing the end of their voyage. +Lightships were retired in the 1980's and the 897-ton Nantucket, built in 1936, was donated to the H.M.S. Rose Foundation in Bridgeport by the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum in Manhattan, joining the reproduction of the 1757 H.M.S. Rose frigate on permanent display at Captain's Cove. The Rose serves as a sailing school vessel. +Tour fees for the Nantucket are $3, $2 for children and the elderly. The ship will be open for tours on a regular basis on Saturdays and Sundays through April, then from Tuesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. In the fall she will be taken on a month-long tour of Northeastern ports. The number is 203-335-1433 for directions or more information. + +INNOVATIVE DANCING +The Mary Barnett/In Good Company troupe presents an evening of innovative choreography on Friday and Saturday at 8 P.M. at the Educational Center for the Arts, 55 Audubon Street in New Haven. +"Back Dancing" is the 11th concert in a five-year-old series titled "Dancing Out Loud," produced with four additional choreographers: Sarah Franklin, Sandra Kopell, Rebecca Lazier and Alison Molloy. +The title "Dancing Out Loud" indicates the occasional use of spoken text, and "the way we try to speak to the audience through dance," said Ms. Barnett. "Back Dancing" is a play on words, signifying Ms. Barnett's return to the stage following an injury. +Each of the five choreographers will have a piece on the program, plus a work by Christina Duffy Burnett, guest artist, who will present the Yale dancers in choreography set to a Beethoven adagio. +Tickets are $15, with discounts for students and older people. The number is 203-245-3090 for reservations or more information. + +ANTIQUES IN WILTON +At least 107 antique dealers from Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Virginia and Washington, D.C. will participate in the 30th annual Wilton Historical Society Antiques Show next weekend. +The event, which will be held at the Wilton High School Field House on Route 7 on Saturday and Sunday from 10 to 5, may be previewed in abuying and breakfast session on Saturday from 8:30 to 10 A.M. Admission for early birds will be $25, admission at regular hours will be $8. Proceeds will benefit the Wilton Heritage Museum. +A variety of furniture and accessories will be displayed in room settings, offering items in a wide price range. An array of formal 19th-century furniture, American country style pieces, quilts, coverlets, samplers, hooked rugs, oriental carpets, samplers and early needlework will be displayed. +Ceramics includes Delftware, English creamware, pearlware, historical Staffordshire, spatterware, spongeware, redware, Bennington ware, and Chinese porcelain. +American Indian arts will be represented in baskets, blankets, rugs, pottery and jewelry; additional categories include American folk art, 19th-century fine art, period clocks, rare maps, early glass and silver, jewelry and decorative arts from the Arts and Crafts Movement, and architectural elements. For more information, the number is 203-762-7257. + +BITS AND PIECES +An unusual exhibition of the work of Jackie Nach may be seen at Art/ Place, 400 Center Street, in the westbound railroad station of Southport through March 29. A reception will be held today from 3 to 5:30 P.M. +Ms. Nach's art might be described somewhat inadequately as the ultimate collage, composed of old photographs and bits and pieces of dressmaker patterns, clothing racks, fabric, coat hooks and mannequins, some seen through diaphanous material, some free-standing, some on the wall, embellished with hand-painting, needlework and graphite. +As a child Ms. Nach escaped with her mother from Kelm, Lithuania, at the outbreak of World War II and lost many friends and relatives in the Holocaust. They landed in South Africa, where Ms. Nach spent her adolescence. Fascinated by her mother's collection of photographs depicting the warm community life in Kelm from 1922 to 1935, she sought to bring closure not only to the loss of that life and the suffering in concentration camps, but also to the effects of apartheid and censorship that she was exposed to in South Africa. +The exhibition, titled "Yiskor/ Lithuanian Legacy" may be seen on Wednesdays through Sundays from noon to 4:30. The number is 203-255-9847 for directions or more information. + +YALE THEATER +"The Ride Across Lake Constance," a rarely produced but celebrated 1972 drama by the Austrian playwright, novelist, screenwriter and poet Peter Handke, will have a limited engagement at the Yale University Theater, 222 York Street, New Haven, this week. +Presented by the Yale School of Drama, performances are scheduled on Tuesday through Saturday at 8 P.M., with a Saturday matinee at 2 P.M. +Handke is considered by many critics to be the most original playwright since Beckett, and this particular play is generally acknowledged to be his best work. +Its setting is a dream-like soiree attended by elegant people seeking to make sense of their refined environment. With a mixture of humor, eccentricity and menace they explore words, stories, gestures and attitudes usually taken for granted as though they were part of a parlor game. The audience is thereby drawn into self-examination of the most basic elements of living. +Tickets are $10 and $15 and may be reserved by calling 203-321-1234. ELEANOR CHARLES. + +LOAD-DATE: March 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The lightship Nantucket has a new permanent home at Captain's Cove Seaport in Bridgeport. + +TYPE: Schedule + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +129 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: WESTCHESTER SQUARE; +Quiet by Day, Coffee by Night + +BYLINE: By ANDREA K. WALKER + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 9; Column 5; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 307 words + +The main room of the Owen Dolen Golden Age Center on Westchester Square was lifeless and empty except for a few blue plastic chairs scattered around small, square tables. Every now and then an elderly person straggled in to watch the old wooden television sitting on a carpeted stage. +In an attempt to add a little spice to this otherwise drab atmosphere, the Northeast Bronx Coalition, a consortium of 45 community groups, and the City Department of Parks and Recreation, which runs the senior center, is transforming the room into the Underground Coffeehouse. They envision a performance space where, on Friday evenings twice a month, dim lighting will replace bright lights, the sounds of live folk-rock, blues and jazz will replace the low murmur of the television, and the smell of hot cappuccino and coffee will permeate the air. + "The Bronx is always lacking in culture and entertainment," said John Collazzi, a board member of the Northeast Bronx Coalition. "A lot of people go to Manhattan and Westchester for the things we'll offer here." +The coffeehouse will give Bronx-born entertainers a chance to perform in their home territory. Poetry readings, comedy and open-microphone nights are future plans for the establishment. +While the Parks Department continually tries to increase use of its five centers for the elderly citywide, the department said the coffeehouse was the first such establishment at one of its centers. +"Centers around the country are looking for programming day and night," said William Castro, Bronx Commissioner for the Parks Department. "The question usually is what to do at night." +Admission to the coffeehouse, which will be open next on March 21, is $8 for adults. Proceeds will go toward scholarships for local youths and financing other projects at Owen Dolen. ANDREA K. WALKER + +LOAD-DATE: March 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +130 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Age Boom: The Boom Is Discovered; +The Man Who Saw Old Anew + +BYLINE: By Michael Norman; Michael Norman is an associate professor of journalism at New York University. He wrote about the meaning of old age for the Magazine in January 1996. + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 54; Column 1; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 2434 words + +His career started at a chicken farm in the rural reaches of southern New Jersey, the perfect place, as it turned out, to nurture a curiosity about life and its limits. Today Robert Neil Butler, a 70-year-old neuropsychiatrist with a gentle countenance and a penchant for building organizations, is one of the foremost American experts on old age. He helped create and was the first director of the National Institute on Aging, a Federal agency. And perhaps more than anyone else, he is responsible for establishing geriatrics as a formally recognized medical discipline in the United States. + Butler, an agile, almost stately looking man, got the notion to become a doctor as a small boy in the care of his maternal grandparents on their farm in Vineland. That notion, set against his grandmother's pluck and verve, led to an interest in aging and a career in gerontology. In 1990, in conjunction with Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, where he teaches and practices, Butler established the International Longevity Center, an organization with offices in Japan, France and, soon, Britain. The center serves as a think tank, research institute and development office for intergenerational community-based programs. Butler is also the author of the groundbreaking book Why Survive? Being Old in America, which won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. + +Q:In Why Survive? you coined the term ageism to describe bigotry toward the old. Are we still a country that treats its older people with cultural prejudice? +A:I don't think any country has the kind of smallness or harshness with respect to older people that America does -- the very idea of calling them, as one magazine did, greedy geezers. So, yes, I think there is still ageism. + +Q:What is the image of older people in 1997? +A:Some people think of older people as impoverished, impaired, ready for nursing homes, senile, sexless. Others see them as rich, as playing golf. + +Q:Creatures of leisure? +A:Yes. In fact, there are pampered older people, rich older people. But it is dramatic to see, for instance, the special problems of older women, who have a poverty rate very much like minority children. + +Q:When did you first distinguish between the so-called young-old and the old-old? +A:In 1955, when I went to work at the National Institutes of Health, we purposely selected community residents -- healthy older people -- to study, whereas in the past old-age studies had been conducted largely on nursing-home chronic-disease populations. Almost from Day 1, the prejudice or the imagery of decrepit old age sort of drained away in my mind. I still have some films of our subjects playing volleyball. + +Q:When did that image begin to take some kind of formal shape? +A:In 1963, I wrote a paper called The Facade of Chronological Age, which has to do with this new stage of life, if you want to call it that. I said that we had attributed to age much that was actually a function of disease, social adversity and personality but not aging. And that attracted Bernice Neugarten, who was a professor of human development at the University of Chicago. She was, to my knowledge, the first to use the categorization of young-old and old-old, and what she had in mind was function. That is, the young-old still retain function, and the old-old have begun to show pathology of one sort or another related to disease or disability. So I've always thought this was a stage in the life cycle, whereas people in classical medicine didn't feel quite the same way. + +Q:You seem to be saying that clinicians were not taking into account the advances that medical science was making in longevity. +A:I think physicians have always realized there was this healthy group. It's just that it has expanded. + +Q:When did this growth begin? +A:Well, when I first started seeing patients, in the 50's, the age of admission in the nursing homes was around 70. Now it's around 81. So in the 50's and early 60's, we knew about what I always called the new gerontology. + +Q:So when is the rest of the culture going to catch up? +A:I'm waiting for you baby boomers. I think they've been the transformative generation, and now they're into the menopause story. Bill Clinton will be 51 this August, which means he's 14 years away from 65. So I think the culture will start to catch up. There'll be more movies with heroes and heroines that are older, more attention to the silver industries. + +Q:When in your calculations does the period of old-old age begin? +A:It's a functional designation. It's not so much a matter of years --that's the point. More and more, I don't even begin to think of patients as geriatric until they're in their late 70's or 80's. While the definition is intended to be functional and not chronological, after 80 and 85 function probably begins to be impaired. + +Q:You went to live with your grandparents when you were 11 months old, after your parents separated and your mother set out to build a career. +A:Yes, my grandparents had a chicken farm, and that's how I got introduced to medicine. At the end of the chicken coop, my grandfather had what he called a hospital. He would cut the craws of chickens when they got things in their throat, and he would put drops in their eyes. I think seeing that stimulated my interest in medicine. + +Q:Your grandfather died about six years after you arrived on the farm. +A:I was 7 and sort of mystified. I wrestled with whether it would be possible to have kept this person, who I thought was spectacular, alive. I had this thought that there should be some sort of celestial commission that would decide who were the good people and who was bad and would die. But then I decided that there would always be mistakes or politics and that it wouldn't always work out the way it should. So I thought about Dr. Rose, our family doctor. My sense of his mission was that he did his best to bring comfort to people and keep them alive as long as possible. Being a doctor seemed like an appropriate compromise to my commission idea. + +Q:As a child, did you have a sense that you were being raised by people who were much older than the parents of other children? +A:I had a sense that they were certainly chronologically older than the parents of my pals but also that they were just as vigorous as anyone. My grandmother began to work in a W.P.A. sewing room, then she learned how to type and became a secretary -- and all of this in her later life. I made about $12 a week fixing bicycles and selling and delivering newspapers. I was working and she was working. We were like a couple of troupers trying to survive in rough times. + +Q:So you had a picture of old age that was quite different from the popular conception. +A:I think I was just privileged enough to see that there was such a beast as healthy, community-residing, ambitious, hard-working older people. + +Q:At what point did you decide to specialize in psychiatry? +A:Actually I was all set to be a hematologist, but about halfway through my internship, in 1953, it began to hit me: a lot of the patients I was seeing clearly had psychological, behavioral and social issues, not just medical ones. It also occurred to me that we didn't know anything about aging. So both of those ideas were in my mind while I was training. + +Q:Did anything specific happen? +A:Well, there was one incident at St. Luke's in which I was called down by the charge nurse because a 72-year-old man was very agitated. In the tradition of the times, I prescribed Seconal. Instead of quieting down, he became more agitated. So that led me to pore through the books, and I found that there were some descriptions of older people with brain damage who actually became more agitated by the drug instead of less -- a paradoxical drug reaction. I concluded that either I was asleep in class at Columbia or they never gave that lecture. So I thought, there is something about old age that I've got to know. + Also, the average age of the patients on our wards was much higher than those I saw during medical school. And that was because Columbia referred stroke patients, problematic old patients, to the city hospital on the grounds that they were not good teaching material. There was quite a bit of age prejudice then. I had heard my professor use terms like old crocks. + Anyway, I couldn't go for that because of this very special experience I'd had with my grandparents. So then I thought I should try psychiatry, and in 1954 I applied to a neuropsychiatric institute that is part of the University of California, San Francisco. As it turned out, the chair and the vice chair were both interested in aging, which was very unusual, and that made my own interest seem more respectable. + +Q:For the most part, the national press covers only one disease of old age -- Alzheimer's -- but there are many other forms of dementia, and there is the huge problem of depression in older age. +A:Don't forget suicide. + +Q:Yes. Is there enough research going into those other areas? +A:No. In fact, we know that as we grow older we become more susceptible to disease -- all kinds of disease -- and we've known this for a long time. Out of a nearly $12 billion N.I.H. budget, we spend only $60 million on the basic biology of aging. + +Q:So why the emphasis on Alzheimer's? +A:Well, it's partly my fault -- it is! -- because when I asked to start the National Institute on Aging, my perception was that we shouldn't just focus on aging, because aging was not considered a disease and was obviously not something that was immediately eradicable. And since one of the key horrifying diseases of old age was dementia, the one I myself had studied, it seemed reasonable for me to try to make it a household word. So I did. And it was so successful. I don't regret the push for Alzheimer's disease, but I do think it's out of balance. + +Q:You helped pioneer the life review -- the individual practice of cataloging memory or creating autobiography as a tool for older people who are seeking meaning. How did that begin? +A:In 1955, I was taking part in an 11-year study on the life span. It was striking that the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic and statistical manual labeled people who reminisced as garrulous and that this was seen as an early sign of what at that time was called senile psychosis. Now, here I was seeing these incredibly interesting people who would talk about their past and would be dealing with some of their concerns, maybe estrangements with siblings or whatever. I was more and more struck by the evaluative aspect of this life review, and I began to use that term in my mind. It seems so ridiculous now because how could anybody in their right mind today even think that reminiscence wouldn't have some importance psychologically? But at the time, it was against the image, against the stereotype. + +Q:From your studies in life review, as death draws closer in the minds of the old and as they begin to reconsider their lives, do common themes begin to emerge? +A:Well, certainly reconciliation. With siblings, with relationships, even with a spouse. This brings to mind a traveling salesman who had affairs on the road, which his wife discovered. And he had to deal with that much later. That was a life review of some power. So reconciliation in terms of acts of commission and omission, acts of cowardice, acts of estrangement, anger, injustice, acts one regrets. + +Q:What was most important to the people you studied? +A:A sense of love and affection and closeness and how they had behaved. Those are the key issues, I think. + +Q:At what point do people begin to think about death? +A:People think about death all their lives, mostly when there are crises. Schopenhauer said there comes a point when you begin to think backward from death instead of forward from birth, and that may be a way to define middle age. I mean, that's when you get serious. Death is a powerful motivator. One of the reasons I think older people respond effectively to psychotherapy is because of death. They know they don't have all that much time to mess around, whereas a 20-year-old or a 40-year-old thinks he can go on forever. + +Q:At my father's 80th birthday, in January, we had a little roast for him, and I noticed that a number of the older folks who got up to speak made jokes about death. The other older people in the room were laughing at the jokes, while those of us who were under 50 were wincing. +A:Some of it's nervous humor, of course, and some of it is a way to deal with death, because you can kind of laugh about it. Freud said that wit was a way to deal with tension and conflict. + +Q:I had the feeling that a lot of what these older folks were saying was going over my head. +A:I remember the first two people I interviewed when I took part in a major study on old age in 1955. Part of the protocol was to inquire in depth about death and sex, and I was beside myself. How could I possibly, at 28, ask these older people whether or not they masturbated? How could I ask them if they'd made burial arrangements or if they were afraid of death? I really had to screw up my courage to do it, only to find that the first two interviewees jumped right in. They were happy to get into it. So, just like at your dad's party, it's partly a way to adapt and to survive and to solve your anxiety. Their behavior is counterphobic, like facing the fear directly. + +Q:Does that mean that we become more courageous as we get older? +A:No, I think it means we're more and more realistic as to what's going to happen and we take some comfort in being with others who also know. + +Q:You're 70 years old this year. Is old age what you thought it would be? Were there any surprises? +A:I do think I've been awfully lucky. I have not been ill. You know, there is something that might be called a frailty identity crisis -- a moment when someone realizes they really are not immortal. They become really sick for the first time, or they have a fall and break a hip or something, and you then begin to feel more frail. Of course the next one is when you know you're dying. I'm not there, fortunately, with either the frailty or the dying -- so I haven't really had my mettle tested yet.nof what at thathey have a fall and break a hip or something, and you then begin to feel more frail. Of course the next one is when you know you're dying. I'm not there, fortunately, with either the frailty or the, dying -- so I haven't really had my mettle tested yet. + +LOAD-DATE: March 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Robert Butler. (PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTIAN WITKIN/ART DEPARTMENT, FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg. 55) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +131 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Age Boom + +BYLINE: By Jack Rosenthal; Jack Rosenthal is the editor of The New York Times Magazine. + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 39; Column 1; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 3187 words + +When my father died at 67, leaving my mother alone in Portland, Ore., I thought almost automatically that she should come home with me to New York. Considering her heavy Lithuanian accent and how she shrank from dealing with authority, I thought she'd surely need help getting along. "Are you kidding?" she exclaimed. Managing her affairs became her work and her pride, and it soon occurred to me that this was the first time that she, traditional wife, had ever experienced autonomy. Every few days she would make her rounds to the bank, the doctor, the class in calligraphy. Then, in her personal brand of English, she would make her telephone rounds. She would complain that waiting for her pension check was "like sitting on pins and noodles" or entreat her granddaughter to stop spending money "like a drunken driver." Proudly, stubbornly, she managed on her own for 18 years. And even then, at 83, frustrated by strokes and angry at the very the thought of a nursing home, she refused to eat. In days, she made herself die. + Reflecting on those last days, I realize that the striking thing was not her death but those 18 years of later life. For almost all that time, she had the health and the modest income to live on her own terms. She could travel if she chose, or send birthday checks to family members, or buy yet another pair of shoes. A woman who had been swept by the waves of two world wars from continent to continent to continent -- who had experienced some of this century's worst aspects -- came finally to typify one of its best. I began to understand what people around America are coming to understand: the transformation of old age. We are discovering the emergence of a new stage of life. + The transformation begins with longer life. Increased longevity is one of the striking developments of the century; it has grown more in the last 100 years than in the prior 5,000, since the Bronze Age. But it's easy to misconstrue. What's new is not the number of years people live; it's the number of people who live them. Science hasn't lengthened life, says Dr. Robert Butler, a pioneering authority on aging. It has enabled many more people to reach very old age. And at this moment in history, even to say "many more people" is an understatement. The baby boom generation is about to turn into an age boom. + Still, there's an even larger story rumbling here, and longevity and boomers tell only part of it. The enduring anguish of many elders lays continuing claim on our conscience. But as my mother's last 18 years attest, older adults are not only living longer; generally speaking, they're living better -- in reasonably good health and with enough money to escape the anxiety and poverty long associated with aging. + Shakespeare perceived seven ages of man -- mewling infant, whining schoolboy, sighing lover, quarrelsome soldier, bearded justice, spectacled wheezer and finally second childhood, "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." This special issue of the Magazine examines the emerging new stage, a warm autumn that's already altering the climate of life for millions of older adults, for their children, indeed for all society. + +Longer Life +In 1900, life expectancy at birth in America was 49. Today, it is 76, and people who have reached 55 can expect to live into their 80's. Improved nutrition and modern medical miracles sound like obvious explanations. But a noted demographer, Samuel Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, has just published a paper in which he contends that, at least until mid-century, the principal reason was neither. It was what he calls the "germ theory of disease" that generated personal health reforms like washing hands, protecting food from flies, isolating sick children, boiling bottles and milk and ventilating rooms. Since 1950, he argues likewise, the continuing longevity gains derive less from Big Medicine than from changes in personal behavior, like stopping smoking. + The rapid increase in longevity is now about to be magnified. The baby boom generation born between 1946 and 1964 has always bulged out -- population peristalsis -- like a pig in a python. Twice as many Americans were born in 1955 as in 1935. Between now and the year 2030, the proportion of people over 65 will almost double. In short, more old people. And there's a parallel fact now starting to reverberate around the world: fewer young people. An aging population inescapably results when younger couples bear fewer children -- which is what they are doing almost everywhere. + The fertility news is particularly striking in developed countries. To maintain a stable population size, the necessary replacement rate is 2.1 children per couple. The United States figure is barely 2.0, and it has been below the replacement rate for 30 years. The figure in China is 1.8. Couples in Japan are typically having 1.5 children, in Germany 1.3 and in Italy and Spain, 1.2. + To some people, these are alarming portents of national decline and call for pro-natalist policies. That smacks of coarse chauvinism. The challenge is not to dilute the number of older people by promoting more births. It is to improve the quality of life at all ages, and a good place to start is to conquer misconceptions about later life. + +Better Health +This, Gloria Steinem once said famously, "is what 40 looks like."And this, many older adults now say, is what 60, 70 and even 80 look like. Health and vitality are constantly improving, as a result of more exercise, better medicine and much better prevention. I can't imagine my late father in a sweatsuit, let alone on a Stairmaster, but when I look into the mirrored halls of a health-club gym on upper Broadway I see, among the intent young women in black leotards, white-haired men who are every bit as earnest, climbing, climbing, climbing. + Consider the glow that radiates from the faces on today's cover, or contemplate the standards maintained by people like Bob Cousy, Max Roach, Ruth Bernhard and others who speak out in the following pages. + That people are living healthier lives is evident from the work of Kenneth G. Manton and his colleagues at Duke's Center for Demographic Studies. The National Long-Term Care Survey they started in 1982 shows a steady decline in disability, a 15 percent drop in 12 years. Some of this progress derives from advances in medicine. For instance, estrogen supplements substantially relieve bone weakness in older women -- and now seem effective also against other diseases. But much of the progress may also derive from advances in perception. + When Clare Friedman, the mother of a New York lawyer, observed her 80th birthday, she said to her son, "You know, Steve, I'm not middle-aged anymore." It's no joke. Manton recalls survey research in which people over 50 are asked when old age begins. Typically, they, too, say "80." Traditionally, spirited older adults have been urged to act their age. But what age is that in this era of 80-year-old marathoners and 90-year-old ice skaters? As Manton says, "We no longer need to accept loss of physical function as an inevitable consequence of aging." To act younger is, in a very real sense, to be younger. + Stirring evidence of that comes from a 1994 research project in which high-resistance strength training was given to 100 frail nursing-home residents in Boston, median age 87 and some as old as 98. Dr. Maria Fiatarone of Tufts University and her fellow researchers found that after 10 weeks of leg-extension exercises, participants typically doubled the strength of the quadriceps, the major thigh muscle. For many, that meant they could walk, or walk without shuffling; the implications for reduced falls are obvious. Consider what this single change -- enabling many, for instance, to go to the bathroom alone -- means to the quality and dignity of their lives. + Just as old does not necessarily mean feeble, older does not necessarily mean sicker. Harry Moody, executive director of Hunter College's Brookdale Center on Aging, makes a telling distinction between the "wellderly" and the "illderly." Yes, one of every three people over 65 needs some kind of hospital care in any given year. But only one in 20 needs nursing-home care at any given time. That is, 95 percent of people over 65 continue to live in the community. + +Greater Security +The very words "poor" and "old" glide easily together, just as "poverty" and "age" have kept sad company through history. But suddenly that's changing. In the mid-1960's, when Medicare began, the poverty rate among elders was 29 percent, nearly three times the rate of the rest of the population. Now it is 11 percent, if anything a little below the rate for everyone else. That still leaves five million old people struggling below the poverty line, many of them women. And not many of the other 30 million elders are free of anxiety or free to indulge themselves in luxury. Yet most are, literally, socially secure, able to taste pleasures like travel and education that they may have denied themselves during decades of work. Indeed, many find this to be the time of their lives. + Elderhostel offers a striking illustration. This program, begun in 1975, combines inexpensive travel with courses in an array of subjects and cultures. It started as a summer program with 220 participants at six New Hampshire colleges. Last year, it enrolled 323,000 participants at sites in every state and in 70 foreign countries. Older Americans already exercise formidable electoral force, given how many of them vote. With the age boom bearing down, that influence is growing. As a result, minutemen like the investment banker Peter G. Peterson are sounding alarms about the impending explosion in Social Security and Medicare costs. Others regard such alarms as merely alarmist; either way a result is a spirited public debate, joined by Max Frankel in his column on page 30 and by the economist Paul Krugman in his appraisal of the future of Medicare and medical costs on page 58. + Politicians respect the electoral power of the senior vote; why is the economic power of older adults not understood? Television networks and advertisers remain oddly blind to this market, says Vicki Thomas of Thomas & Partners, a Westport, Conn., firm specializing in the "mature market." One reason is probably the youth of copywriters and media buyers. Another is advertisers' desire to identify with imagery that is young, hip, cool. Yet she cites a stream of survey data showing that householders 45 and over buy half of all new cars and trucks, that those 55 and over buy almost a third of the total and that people over 50 take 163 million trips a year and a third of all overseas packaged tours. + How much silver there is in this "silver market" is Jerry Della Femina's subject, on page 74. It is also evident from Modern Maturity magazine, published by the American Association of Retired Persons. Its bimonthly circulation is more than 20 million; a full-page ad costs $244,000. + All this spending by older adults may not please everyone. Andrew Hacker, the Queens College political scientist, observes that the longer the parents live, the less they're likely to leave to the children -- and the longer the wait. He reports spotting a bumper sticker to that effect, on a passing Winnebago: "I'm Spending My Kids' Inheritance!" Even so, the net effect of generational income transfers remains highly favorable to the next generation. For one thing, every dollar the public spends to support older adults is a dollar that their children won't be called on to spend. For another, older adults sooner or later engage in some pretty sizable income transfers of their own. As Hacker observes, the baby boomers' children may have to wait for their legacies, but their ultimate inheritances will constitute the largest income transfer to any generation ever. + Longer years, better health, comparative security: this new stage of life emerges more clearly every day. What's less clear is how older adults will spend it. The other stages of life are bounded by expectations and institutions. We start life in the institution called family. That's soon augmented for 15 or 20 years by school, tightly organized by age, subject and social webs. Then follows the still-more-structured world of work, for 40 or 50 years. And then -- fanfare! -- what? What institutions then give shape and meaning to everyday life? + Some people are satisfied, as my mother was, by managing their finances, by tending to family relationships and by prayer, worship and hobbies. Others, more restless, will invent new institutions, just as they did in Cleveland in the 1950's with Golden Age Clubs, or in the 1970's with Elderhostel. For the moment, the institutions that figure most heavily for older adults are precisely those that govern the other stages of life -- family, school and work. + +FAMILY: The focus on family often arises out of necessity. In a world of divorce and working parents, grandparents are raising 3.4 million children; six million families depend on grandparents for primary child care. And that's only one of the intensified relationships arising among the generations. Children have many more years to relate to their parents as adults, as equals, as friends -- a fact demonstrated firsthand by the Kotlowitz-to-Kotlowitz letters on page 46. + +SCHOOL: Increasingly, many elders go back to school, to get the education they've always longed for, or to learn new skills -- or for the sheer joy of learning. Nearly half a million people over 50 have gone back to school at the college level, giving a senior cast to junior colleges; adults over age 40 now account for about 15 percent of all college students. The 92d Street Y in New York has sponsored activities for seniors since 1874. Suddenly, it finds, many "New Age seniors" want to do more than play cards or float in the pool. They are signing up by the score for classes on, for instance, Greece and Rome. At a senior center in Westport, Conn., older adults, far from being averse to technology, flock to computer classes and find satisfaction in managing their finances on line and traversing the Internet. + +WORK: American attitudes toward retirement have never been simple. The justifications include a humane belief that retirees have earned their rest; or a bottom-line argument that employers need cheaper workers; or a theoretical contention that a healthy economy needs to make room for younger workers. In any case, scholars find a notable trend toward early retirement, arguably in response to pension and Social Security incentives. Two out of three men on Social Security retire before age 65. One explanation is that they are likely to have spent their lives on a boring assembly line or in debilitating service jobs. Others, typically from more fulfilling professional work, retire gradually, continuing to work part time or to find engagement in serious volunteer effort. In Florida, many schools, hospitals and local governments have come to depend on elders who volunteer their skills and time. + +FAMILY, SCHOOL, WORK -- AND INSTITUTIONS yet to come: these are the framework for the evolving new stage of later life. But even if happy and healthy, it only precedes and does not replace the last of Shakespeare's age of mankind. One need not be 80 or 90 to understand that there comes a time to be tired, or sick, or caught up by the deeply rooted desire to reflect on the meaning of one's life. For many people, there comes a moment when the proud desire for independence turns into frank, mutual acknowledgment of dependence. As the Boston University sociologist Alan Wolfe wrote in The New Republic in 1995, "We owe [our elders] the courage to acknowledge their dependence on us. Only then will we be able, when we are like them, to ask for help." + That time will come, as it always has, for each of us -- as children and then as parents. But it will come later. The new challenge is to explore the broad terrain of longer, fuller life with intelligence and respect. One such explorer, a woman named Florida Scott-Maxwell, reported her findings in "The Measure of My Days," a diary she began in her 80's. "Age puzzles me," she wrote, expressing sentiments that my mother personified. "I thought it was a quiet time. My 70's were interesting and fairly serene, but my 80's are passionate. I grow more intense as I age. To my surprise I burst out with hot conviction. . . . I must calm down." + +Bob Cousy, 68, Sports Commentator. + I still thrive on competition, and when I feel those competitive juices flowing I've got to find an outlet. Of course, at 68, it's not going to be playing basketball. Basketball's not a sport you grow old with. Sure, I can manage a few from the free-throw line, but being in shape for basketball's something you lose three months after you retire. I stay in shape by doing as little as possible. I play mediocre golf and terrible tennis. My wife calls it my doubleheader days, when I go out and play 18 holes of golf in the morning and then three sets of tennis in the afternoon. +Now I'm working in broadcasting and schmoozing the corporates. I'm a commentator for the Celtics' away games. I like it because I'm controlling my own destiny. People always said I was born 20 years too soon, that I was the highest-paid player in the league. I was getting $30,000 a season. The last time Rodman had that incident with the official in New Jersey, he had to pay something like $200,000, that's almost as much as I made in my 13-year career! But the professional game's changed. There's a sameness out there now. The coaches are too conservative. The plays are too structured. There was much more of a free flow when we were playing. That's what's exciting for the fans, not redundancy. +Everything I've done since I graduated from Holy Cross in 1950 has been sports-related, and it's all because I learned to throw a little ball into a hole. A playground director taught me how to play when I was 13. To me it'll always be a child's game. + +Ann Cole, Age "Between 59 and Forest Lawn", Swimsuit Designer + Everyone has certain features that they hate, and that doesn't change much as you get older -- it just gets closer to the ground, as Gypsy Rose Lee once said. So you do just grin and bear it unless you want to sit indoors and grump about it. I get a lot of women who come in and say, "You wouldn't wear that." And I say, "Why, yes I would." I haven't become more comfortable with my body. I've just taken an attitude that its easier not to care or worry. Just do it. Sure, someone's probably saying: "Oh, my God! What's this old bag doing in that suit?" I've always been a great advocate of people not listening to their children. There used to be a lot of children who weren't happy unless their mother wore a skirted suit down to her knees. They'd say, "Oh, Mom, you can't wear that." I tried to get people over that in the 60's and 70's, because what do they know? You can't be worried about every bump and lump. + +LOAD-DATE: March 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Bob Cousy, 68, Sports Commentator -- "I go out and play 18 holes in the morning and then three sets in the afternoon." (pg. 41); Ann Cole, Swimsuit Designer -- Age: "Between 59 and Forest Lawn" Sure, someone's probably saying: 'Oh, my God! What's this old bag doing in that suit?' (PHOTOGRAPH BY FRED R. CONRAD/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg. 43) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +132 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: ELMHURST; +Church Says Center for the Elderly Must Go, Dancing Quietly or Not + +BYLINE: By CHARLIE LeDUFF + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 8; Column 3; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 404 words + +There was no dancing or card games Thursday morning at what has become known as the mah-jongg church in Elmhurst. Instead, there was a quiet trilingual discussion about eye care for the elderly. +The Christian Testimony Church, at 87-11 Whitney Avenue, made news in late 1995, when it moved to evict the Elmhurst Jackson Heights Senior Center from its basement, complaining that the dancing and mah-jongg games among the members went against the tenets of the church. + But after some pressure by local officials, church elders acquiesced, and the city-financed center was granted a lease extension last year. That extension expires March 31, and what happens to the center as of April 1 is anyone's guess. +"We just don't know what's going to happen," said Lucy Bermudez, assistant director of the center. "We are hoping to hear some good news soon, but we just don't know." +The city's Department of General Services, which finances the center, has not found an alternative site and seemed unaware that the lease extension was about to expire when a reporter phoned for comment. A spokeswoman, Paula Young, said the department would investigate. +To accommodate the church, center workers discouraged mah-jongg playing and asked everyone to dance quietly. Although they could not persuade all 2,000 members to obey, the noise was cut to a minimum, workers said. Still, the church wanted its basement and first floor back. +The church elder, Andrew Yu, said that the church has been trying to reclaim its space for the last five years to accommodate a growing, mostly Chinese, congregation. "The city said we were going to get the place for ourselves," Mr. Yu said. "It has not happened. This time the extension expires at the end of the month and we are expecting the people to move on." +The matter is pending in court, said the church's lawyer, Burton Apat, adding that the only reason the center has remained this long is by the goodwill of the church. "But as of April 1, they're out of there for good," Mr. Apat said. +At 11 A.M. Thursday, the smell of lunch -- chicken in tomato sauce -- permeated the church. Three health-care workers discussed eye care with an audience of about 50, fielding questions in English, Spanish and Chinese. Afterward, many members were surprised to hear that the center may be forced to leave. +"It's moving?" said Han Park, 68. "No. It's not moving." CHARLIE LeDUFF + +LOAD-DATE: March 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Card players at the senior center are facing their last games at a church. (Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +133 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE BIG CITY; +No Stairs, No Driving, No Tropical-Colored Pants + +BYLINE: By John Tierney + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 20; Column 4; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 1472 words + +It may sound a lit-tle strange, especially to the elderly natives fleeing to Florida, but a few entrepreneurs have begun marketing New York City as a lovely place to retire. + The Esplanade, a hotel building at West End Avenue and 74th Street that was recently converted into a residence for the elderly, is enticing customers with this advertisement: "Just one block west is lovely Riverside Park, with its splendid views of the Hudson, walking paths and year-round enjoyment of the ever-changing scenery. Then one block east is bustling Broadway with its potpourri of specialty shops, restaurants, boutiques and bookstores. Just a short stroll downtown are the many cultural offerings of Lincoln Center. Excitement or tranquillity are just steps away." + You might question how much tranquillity anyone can find in Manhattan, but otherwise you can't really fault the ad's pitch. What other retirement community offers so much so conveniently? In New York, you can get everywhere without driving; you can get whatever you want delivered to your door. In other places, the elderly complain about feeling isolated; here, you have seven million neighbors. You don't have to beg your relatives to visit you; if you have a free guest bed, they will come. + In New York, an elderly person can live a full existence without ever being expected to walk up a staircase, ride in a tour bus or put on a pair of tropical-colored pants. The city encourages black formal dresses and dark business suits -- a great look for the elderly, as Italian villagers have known for generations. New York may not be the most serene place to retire, but at least you can age here in dignity. + The Esplanade, which offers housekeeping services and meals to the elderly who rent apartments there, has proved so popular that it has a nine-month waiting list. Charging between $2,500 and $4,500 a month per person, it is attracting people who could afford to flee to more bucolic settings -- people like Hannah Kimmel, who's known as Honey, and her partner, Harry Rackow. She's 82; he's 89. In 1995, when they decided to sell their apartments in the Rockaways, they considered traditional retirement communities. + "We looked at a beautiful place up the Hudson that had 4,000 acres," Harry explained recently as he and Honey sat in their two-bedroom apartment at the Esplanade. "But it was too isolated." + "It was a million miles from nowhere," Honey said. "If there's a sale in a department store, we want to go right away." + Why not Florida? Honey grimaced. Harry tried to be diplomatic. + "We spent winters around Boca Raton and found it enjoyable," he said. "They're beginning to get more culture in the Miami and Lauderdale area. They're getting museums." + "They're getting a muse-um," she said. +"Some touring theater companies." + "One-night stands." + "But you can't compare it to New York," he concluded. + "It's the opposite side of the universe," she said. "You go to Florida to die. Here in New York, your brain is still working." + One of their neighbors, Beatrice Grossman, has become a devout Manhat- + tanophile since moving in last year from Nanuet, a suburb 25 miles northwest of New York. "It was kind of lonely for me in Nanuet after I retired," she said. "It got boring. You could take a walk, but you wouldn't see anybody unless you went to the mall. Here, you leave your apartment and there's always something going on." In the suburbs, she had felt especially limited once she stopped driving after dark. + "Now I'm as busy as the day is long," she said. "I go to the gym a block away every day -- I've got a personal trainer. I go out and shop on Broadway for the other people in the building. I have subscriptions to both opera companies at Lincoln Center, and I can go to the evening performances without worrying about driving home. I walk to the ballet, to the movies, all the way to midtown. Last year, someone spotted me and hired me to do a music video with Sheryl Crow. They had me stand in the background wearing a short, tight dress and a red fake fur. That's not the kind of thing that happens to you in Nanuet." + Statistically, Beatrice is still the exception: New York hasn't been attracting many elderly immigrants. The typical old New Yorker is a woman who has lived here for many years. Of the roughly 950,000 New Yorkers 65 and over included in the 1990 census, fewer than 15,000 had moved here from another place in America during the previous five years. Meanwhile, the census found that more than 90,000 elderly New Yorkers had left the city during that five-year period. (A third of them moved to local suburbs, and a third went to Florida.) + New York politicians have tried to persuade the elderly to love New York. The city has its own Department for the Aging, which delivers meals, pays for trips to the doctor and runs a raft of programs ranging from computer training to a counseling service billed as the nation's only Grandparent Resource Center. But the city and state governments have also done their part to drive away the elderly. Besides high income taxes, New York has one of America's most onerous estate taxes; it also has a set of burdensome regulations that has discouraged large companies from opening "assisted living" facilities for people who don't need a nursing home but do want some special services. + These facilities, already popular in other states, are only now starting to be built in New York by developers who recently worked their way around the confining regulations. (The solution is for the facility's operator to provide just basic housekeeping services and meals, and for an independent agency to provide personal-care attendants.) One such facility is the Prospect Park Residence on Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. Scheduled to open in May, it will include private apartments, communal facilities and a branch of the New York University Medical Center. + "We're going to take advantage of the city's cultural resources," says Stanley Diamond, the chairman of Castle Senior Living, one of the facility's partners. "We're going to set up programs with the Brooklyn Museum and Public Library. Experts from the Botanic Garden are going to help the residents with a garden on the roof. New York offers the elderly more opportunities than any place in the world. We're hoping to build a dozen of these residences around the city in the next two years. The challenge is to keep down the costs so it's affordable. If we do that, it won't be hard to find people who want to retire here." + While New York's cost of living is intimidating to people on fixed incomes, the elderly do meet one of the crucial criteria for surviving in Manhattan: childlessness. Young families are practically forced to go to the suburbs for backyards and better schools, but once the children are grown, the city becomes more affordable. Even the most skeptical aging suburbanites sometimes come to appreciate the city's pleasures, as Sig Gissler and his wife, Mary, recently discovered. + Until 1993, the Gisslers were living in a suburb of Milwaukee. She was a retired nurse; he was the editor of The Milwaukee Journal. New York did not strike them as a great place to live. In 1990, after the much-publicized murder of a Utah tourist on a subway platform, Gissler dispatched a reporter and photographer to do a series about New York's evils. One of Gissler's sons, who was living in New York, tried telling him that he was exaggerating the problems. But he didn't believe them until he retired from The Journal and came to Manhattan for a nine-month fellowship at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center. + To everyone's surprise, the Gisslers ended up selling their house (and two cars) and settling in New York. Mary began doing volunteer work with AIDS patients; Sig became a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. They bought a two-bedroom apartment on Columbus Avenue and took to calling Central Park "our 844-acre front yard." When Mary happened to mention to a relative back in Wisconsin that she had just returned from taking a nap in the park, she heard a gasp at the other end of the line, then a question: "You did what?" Sig's friends heard about him circling the park on Rollerblades. + "I've become a repentant New York-basher," he says. Gissler, 61, has no plans to leave New York when he eventually retires from teaching. "I'd rather be here than in some retirement community named Sun City," he says. "People start to go to seed in those places because they're so isolated from the young and from new ideas. Here, you feel the energy pulsating as soon as you walk out the door. If you come here at age 60 or 70, you find that New York has a hidden elixir of youth -- no matter how much you thought you knew, the city gives you a good kick in the pants." + +LOAD-DATE: March 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Illustration by Mark Matcho) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +134 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Age Boom: The New In-My-70's Life Style; +And at Their Age! + +BYLINE: By Philip Weiss; Philip Weiss is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 63; Column 1; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 2506 words + +The bus reached new orleans at about 1 o'clock on a Tuesday in January and went down City Park Avenue, past the Greenwood Cemetery. The people on board looked out at the sinuous shapes of the live oaks and the raised graves beyond. The Elks mausoleum had a bronze clock, the hands fixed forever at 11 o'clock. + "Time is near," Sam Dodson, 81, announced dryly. + "Do you know there's a difference between interment and inurnment?" his 80-year-old wife, Tena, said, leaning across the aisle toward me. "We're going to be cremated and have our ashes in a columbarium. Sam calls it a common-bury-em. I was concerned that my sister would be upset about it." + "I said, 'So what if she is,' " Sam said. "We could send her part of the ashes by U.P.S. and put the rest in the common-bury-em." + The bus pulled up at the New Orleans Museum of Art. We were going to see a show called "Faberge in America." Sam Dodson went one direction into the museum, and Tena went another. They never stick too close, she explained earlier over a lunch of shrimp remoulade: "Togetherness is two bridges in the same glass." + The trip began that morning at 7 outside Jackson, Miss., under the auspices of St. Dominic Health Services. I went along with 35 oldsters because I'd heard that "old" doesn't mean what it used to. It's true; these people are enjoying themselves in ways that my grandparents would never have thought was allowed. "We are living it up," 81-year-old Mary Coleman said. Then, knitting her brow, she added, "And sometimes I wonder what will be left for the young people." + The place where the trip began, St. Catherine's Village, is typical of modern retirement communities that provide "life care," with most of its 381 residents (100 percent white, average age 79) living independently in apartments. Still, someday many of them will pull the emergency cord in the wall near the bed and possibly move to a nearby building where they will live less independently. Rather than keep up their private homes till a collapse forces relatives to make panicked arrangements for nursing, these privileged old people -- it costs between $40,000 and $96,000 to move into St. Catherine's -- are taking matters into their own hands. "There was a very strong determination on my wife's and my part that we did not want to wind up on our children's backs," said Gus Blanchard, one of the residents. + St. Catherine's is also typical in that it is a whirl of activities, from senior Olympics to lectures and classes. Many residents have computers. The night I arrived at St. Catherine's, which is run by the Dominican sisters of Springfield, Ill., there was a sculptor in the chapel working a thick column of clay into an image of Jesus. Last year, in the same chapel, the community staged a "womanless wedding." Men in drag played bride and mother of the bride; women with mascara mustaches played groomsmen. + Not all the vows involve playacting. St. Catherine's has had two real weddings. "Our picture was on the front page of The Clarion-Ledger," said one groom, Philip Kolb. "The switchboard lit up. People said, 'I thought you were a nursing home -- what are you doing having line dances and marriages!"' + After spending an hour and a half at the Faberge exhibit, we boarded the bus and were driven down to Le Richelieu, a hotel in the French Quarter. Workmen had set up a ladder over the walk in front of the hotel, and almost everyone walked right under it. These are the winners in the age race -- generally 75 to 85 and showing few signs of flagging -- and one of the marathoners' secrets is, worry kills. As the imperturbable Mary Coleman said, "I used to never have aspirin in my medicine cabinet, till my boys complained." + We went to our rooms, and at 6:30 the bus came to take us to the river. It was dark, and I tilted over the seat in front of me to gossip with two women, one with silver hair and one with white hair, who asked that I not use their names. One of them informed me that they had just dipped into their flasks upstairs. "I like good Scotch," she said. + St. Catherine's is about 70 percent female. On the bus trip, there were 34 women and one man, Sam Dodson. I asked the ladies in front of me whether they sought male companionship. "I wouldn't mind a young one, say 62, who can see at night to drive," the silver-haired one said with a wicked chuckle. + "I have found you get better service if you have a man sitting with you ordering," the white-haired one said. "And he can pick up the check." + "Not for me," her friend said. "We're dutching it. I don't want any obligations." + "I guess you don't need anyone," I said. + The white-haired woman regarded me quizzically. "Right, that's the problem," she explained. "You don't need a man, so you're critical. You look at them all with a fine-toothed comb." + Our group spilled out onto the dark terraces of Riverwalk, the shopping area that a freighter hit back in December. We had a half-hour before we could board the paddle-wheel boat for the cruise, and all the bars were closed. Someone reported that there was one open two blocks away, at the top of the New Orleans World Trade Center, and without hesitation our group set out for it. When we got up to the revolving restaurant on the 33d floor, my table ordered Scotch on the rocks, bourbon and 7-Up, vodka Collins, vodka martinis. (The ladies were parched!) + I asked them about the female culture of old age. The big mistake, it seems, is to be too male-defined. One woman said that someone at St. Catherine's was mildly ostracized for saying, "It'd be nice to talk to a man around here for a change." Then there was the woman who sat at a table with a man and hissed when another woman sat down with them. She now wears her unfortunate comment on her back: "We call her 'He's mine,' " my informant said. Old-fashioned feminine wiles are scorned. One woman told me, derisively, about a woman who studied obituaries, looking for women about her age who had died, so she could show up at a funeral and palm herself off to a widower as one of his late wife's friends. (Yes, she landed a sucker.) + "Are you feminists?" I said. + They laughed at me. + I took the elevator down with Tena and Sam Dodson, who'd been at another table. + "I got coffee and they served it in a glass cup -- that's just not right," Tena said. "It reminds me of Depression glass. You know, Martha Stewart set a table with Depression glass and it was beautiful, but I won't have it. I don't think it tastes the same in a glass." + We came outside and walked up the steps to Riverwalk. "Of course, in my other life I wouldn't say that," Tena said. "I would think that was too negative." + Sam was somewhere behind us, trailing along in the shadows. Since abdominal surgery, he has lost a step. + "When did that other life end?" I asked Tena. + "Maybe when I started to drive," she said. And for another thing, she went to work. Sam had fought the idea for years -- "Gentlemen's wives didn't work," she said -- till one day Tena told him to meet her at 5 in the bar of the Netherland Plaza in Cincinnati, where they lived. + "He came in, his face was white," she said. "He didn't know what I was going to say. I don't know how to embellish anything except embroidery. He sat down and I said: 'Sam, I've got a job. I'm going to work tomorrow.' He just said O.K. He didn't have a word to say." + "What did he think -- that you were having an affair?" I said. + "Oh, no. Sam's not jealous. He's too sure of me. Sam would trust me if he saw me in bed with another man." + Sam caught up with us, and we boarded the Creole Queen. I couldn't help thinking that the women are having the times of their lives, while the men seem to be having a harder time adjusting to old age. John Stennis, the longtime Mississippi Senator, had never wanted to leave the Senate, and the word at St. Catherine's is that he never did. After he retired, he moved into the community, and he soon began treating the dining room like another Senate parlor, giving orations over breakfast about bills and riders. + "Men grew up with their vision being to provide for their family," said Charles Carter, who is 73 and still practices law. "They wanted to excel. When they get to the part of their life where that's over, they don't quite know how to live it. They've lost their responsibility for children. They've lost their contact with the business world. Maybe they give up." + Most of the men I met at St. Catherine's seemed to have come to terms. They gathered for calisthenics every day in the swimming pool. Kem Risley finagled a key to a storage room and turned it into a shop. Sam Dodson is one of the village's best bridge players. Gus Blanchard, a retired Coca-Cola executive, just bought a new computer. + "I figured out that I had always been a 'we' person," Blanchard told me over stiff vodka tonics that he poured one night. "I thought of myself as being a part of a team. When my wife died, four years ago, the team was dissolved. Now I'm an 'I' person. I've had to figure out how to live and be productive with that notion." + Something else happened to Blanchard. "I was amazed to think I could fall in love at my age," he said. He did, with a widow across the hall. They travel together everywhere, sometimes to children's homes across the country. "I count on her," he said. "But I never commit her without checking." + The creole queen steamed up river for a while past giant freighters loading rice for foreign ports. A jazz band played, and I danced with Mary Coleman. When we sat down, she told me about a man on a dance floor in Mexico who had whirled her in the air. I asked her to list her travels. "I've been to Turkey, Russia, the Galapagos, China, India, Israel," she said. "I've been to Japan and Europe and to Alaska twice. I went whitewater rafting in Alaska last year, in Denali Park. And I blew a wad going to Antarctica." + Like many other old people today, Coleman is well off. How well? Coleman splayed her long fingers in the air helplessly. "Frankly, I cannot tell you how much I have," she said. "I was just working, and I'd put a thousand or a couple thousand in a CD, and I don't ever add them up. I've gotten to the point where I don't balance my checkbook. When I had four boys growing up, we watched every penny." + Coleman told me about a man who pushed for her to invite him on one of her trips, and I could relate to him. Who wouldn't want to go somewhere with such an attractive, vital person? Someday Mary Coleman will dance on my columbarium. But she has been a widow for 29 years, and she cherishes her independence. She doesn't seek male companionship; she likes traveling with a girlfriend. + The bus trippers' attitudes were not a great advertisement for the institution of marriage. Now and then I heard of a great relationship, but there was more talk about alcoholism, and domineering men who had held them back. "My mother gave me bad advice -- that the husband was the leader and you should look up to him," one widow said ruefully. "I was 19, and I married him because he was a take-charge sort of guy. It wasn't a few years before I realized he was insecure. He wanted a mother." + There were cautionary tales about late marriage: that 70-year-old men might have AIDS from dating younger women, that a woman they knew married a perfectly healthy 85-year-old and seven months later he developed cancer. "You can get a geezer -- but who wants a geezer?" one woman said. Another told me about the birds and the bees: "When a man starts to lose other things, he loses his ability to have sex. That's not true for women." Then there was a story about a woman who, having just buried an abusive husband, took a cruise to the Caribbean. She sat down for dinner one night, and a man promptly took an empty seat next to her. Her sister reported: "He had just become widowed, and he said he was looking for a wife. She said, 'Don't look at me.' " + "A man is just interested in two things," a strong-jawed woman explained that day over lunch. "Nurse. Or purse." + The newlyweds I met at St. Catherine's seemed an exception. Everyone respected the Kolbs because Colleen had a difficult first marriage and because Philip Kolb is a gentle, loving man who -- most important -- courted her. "The first date he asked me for I turned him down," she said. "My husband hadn't been dead a year. Later, I found out his wife hadn't been dead very long. I said: 'Phil, I apologize. I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. Delay is not denial.' + "Our first date he picked me up in an Oldsmobile. We came home, and I had told myself, I'm not going to invite him up to my apartment. Then I heard myself saying, 'Would you like to come back to my apartment?' I was just dumbfounded." + Their friendship ripened into love. "There's an old swing in the wooded section," she said. "It has the nicest little squeak in it. We used to sit in that swing and talk about what we expected and what we wanted." + One of the things they talked about was money. Philip Kolb said his accountant told him to get a prenuptial agreement. Colleen consented to it after he told her that he'd marry her whether she signed it or not. "I pay 60 percent of all household expenses," he told me. "I deposit it in our account at the beginning of every month." + Another thing they discussed was Colleen's bed, a mahogany four-poster she'd been born on. Her first husband never liked the bed, so it was in storage. When Colleen and Philip set up house, they got it out and refinished it. That's the bed they sleep on. This has been the happiest year of my life," she said. Someone said to me, how does it feel to fall in love at over 70? I said, I hope it happens to you." + Then Colleen got out her wedding invitation. It said, "God in his Providence has brought together Colleen Hamilton Watrous and Philip Kolb." She said, "I knew that's what had happened." + After the jazz cruise, we didn't get back to the hotel till 11, and the next morning the schedule was jammed. During a bus tour of the French Quarter, Tena Dodson cried: "Hey girls, there's Gucci's!" + We didn't stop there, but we fanned out across Jackson Square for lunch. Mary Coleman and I were finishing up at a cafe when Ruth Simmons came in from a neighboring place. She had a knowing expression as she sidled up to our table. + "We checked on where you powder your nose -- here or across the street," she said. "Powder it here." + Then we got back on the bus. At dusk, as we crossed into Mississippi on I-55, Jean Clark, the young woman who runs St. Dominic's program for seniors, stood up and announced: "We're already planning a Gulf Coast pilgrimage in March. We'll spend the night at the Grand, go to the Grand Casino in Biloxi. We'll eat at Mary Mahoney's, see a few of the homes around there." + There was a stir of excitement among the weary New Orleans gang. "I've got to go to that," Tena Dodson said. "But I'm not taking Sam. I'm going to be footloose and fancy free." + +LOAD-DATE: March 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Over 80 and still swinging: Tena and Sam Dodson on a jazz cruise. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX WEBB/MAGNUM PHOTOS, FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg. 63); Daniel Bell, 77, Sociologist -- "As one gets older, one modifies one's utopian view. It's not easy to be holy and pure." (PHOTOGRAPH BY FRED CONRAD/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg. 65) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +135 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 10, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +TRACK AND FIELD; +This Time, Slaney Isn't Oldest, or Fastest + +BYLINE: By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY + +SECTION: Section C; Page 10; Column 3; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 856 words + +DATELINE: PARIS, March 9 + +As she stood there on the podium at the world indoor championships with a silver medal dangling from her delicate neck, Mary Slaney could be excused for feeling "like a kid again." +For the first time in a long time, the famously fragile American runner was healthy for a major competition, and for the first time in a very long time, the woman who had just beaten the 38-year-old Slaney in the 1,500 meters was her elder. + "I'm surprised there is anyone older than me out here," Slaney said. "I had kind of gotten used to being the senior citizen." +Today, the senior citizen was a 44-year-old Russian citizen named Yekaterina Podkopayeva. Like Slaney, Podkopayeva juggles the demands of motherhood and world-class competition. Like Slaney, she has been competing internationally since the 1970's. But when the two grande dames sprinted toward the finish line in Paris, Podkopayeva caught Slaney in the last 5 meters to take the gold by the gut-wrenching margin of three-hundredths of a second in 4 minutes 5.19 seconds. +"Don't get me wrong; I don't like getting second, but I think it's neat that we're both older and still doing this successfully," said Slaney, who took the lead at 150 meters and held it until nearly the end. +Several other Americans fared better on the final day of these championships. The United States won four gold medals to finish atop the medal standing by a large margin over Cuba and Russia with six golds, three silvers and seven bronzes. The reigning Olympic champion Charles Austin won the men's high jump with a leap of 7 feet 8 1/2 inches. Jearl Miles-Clark came from behind to win the women's 400 meters in 50.96 seconds, but seemed more excited by her sister-in-law Joetta Clark's bronze medal in the 800. +The American men's relay team won the 4x400 in 3:04.93, which was more than three seconds better than the second-place Jamaicans. But the most surprising American victory of the day came from 25-year-old Stacy Dragila in the women's pole vault. The engaging Dragila is a heptathlete by training and an assistant track coach at her alma mater, Idaho State, by trade. She upset Australia's Emma George and the Chinese by equaling George's indoor world record of 14 feet 5 1/4 inches. +"I guess I'm just glad to be here among these great athletes," Dragila said. "After college, I didn't think there was anything out there I could do at this level." +For the second time in three days, Wilson Kipketer of Denmark made astonishingly quick work of the 800-meter world indoor record, and once again, the Kenyan-born runner did it all on his own. In the first round on Friday, Kipketer broke the mark of another Kenyan-born runner, Paul Ereng, by nearly a second with a time of 1:43.96. Today in the final, he took the lead immediately and won the gold in 1:42.67. +"I decided after I broke the first one that today I would try to do better," Kipketer said. +Kipketer earned $50,000 for his victory, but did not improve on the $50,000 bonus he won on Friday. Meet rules stipulated that there was one bonus per customer. The only other athletes to profit in Paris were the members of the Russian women's 4x400-meter relay team who broke Germany's 1991 indoor mark of 3:27.22 by finishing in 3:26.84 today. +But the day's most poignant moment had little to do with prize money. Maria Mutola, the talented middle-distance runner from Mozambique who is based in Eugene, Ore., wore a black ribbon on her track uniform today in honor of her father, who died about two weeks ago. She initially planned to withdraw from these championships, but her family convinced her it would be a fine way to honor his memory. Moments after she won the 800 in 1:58.96, she was kneeling on the track, covering her eyes with her hands and sobbing. +"He used to like watching this sport so much," Mutola said later. "I don't know how I'm going to do it without him." +If the 24-year-old Mutola is looking for tips on how to endure through the pain, she need only consult a fellow Eugene resident, Slaney, whose career has been filled with nearly as many ailments and leg injuries as victories. But with a new treatment for the exercise-induced asthma that hampered her at last summer's Olympics, she has returned to form this winter and won the United States indoor title in a world-best 4:03.08. +Her luck remains poor, however. When the Slaneys finally arrived in Paris -- after two days of flight troubles -- it was Friday morning, and Slaney admitted to feeling "heavy" and "tired" today as a result. Her time -- five seconds slower than she had hoped for -- reflected it. +"I certainly felt better in Atlanta, but I am very happy to medal in another world championship after all these years," she said. +The last time she did medal was in 1983, when she swept the 1,500 and 3,000 at the outdoor world championships in Helsinki, Finland. The bronze medalist in the 1,500 in Helsinki happened to be Podkopayeva. Until today, they had not raced each other again. +"Mary was too strong that day in Helsinki and I got third," Podkopayeva said. "But I'm very happy that at age 44, I finally got my revenge." + +LOAD-DATE: March 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Yekaterina Podkopayeva, left, overtaking Mary Slaney in a sprint over the final 5 meters to win the 1,500. (Reuters) + + + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +136 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 13, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +CLINTON TO DEFER PLANS FOR PANEL ON A PRICE INDEX + +BYLINE: By RICHARD W. STEVENSON + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 878 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 12 + +President Clinton has decided to shelve for now the idea of establishing a commission to recalculate cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security and other benefit payments that are tied to an index that many economists say overstates inflation, Administration officials said today. +The officials said the Administration was not ruling out reopening the issue later, perhaps even in time to use it as part of any agreement between the White House and Congress this year to balance the Federal budget by 2002. + Reacting to studies saying that the Government's current inflation gauge, the Consumer Price Index, overstates inflation, some members of both parties have been seeking to reduce cost-of-living payments to help insure the long-term viability of the Social Security program and to help eliminate the Federal deficit. +For the last several weeks Mr. Clinton has been studying whether to support the creation of a commission of economists that would set a more accurate -- and presumably lower -- cost-of-living adjustment than the price index provides. +But after extensive talks with members of Congress and others, Administration officials said they had determined that there would be such strong opposition to setting up a panel now to deal with the issue that it would set off a political hue and cry sufficient to poison the entire budget process, perhaps fatally. +The decision, which was first reported by The Washington Post in its Thursday issue, is almost certain to provoke criticism of Mr. Clinton from proponents of the idea in both parties, particularly Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Republican majority leader. Mr. Lott has been publicly pushing for a commission to deal with the issue and last week said that only Mr. Clinton's leadership could overcome the political obstacles to making it happen. +But other Republicans were cool to the proposal, in part because they feared being attacked by Democrats as shortchanging the elderly to pay for the tax cut proposals being pushed by the Republican leadership. And indeed many Democrats, including Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the minority leader, came out staunchly against the idea of a commission. +At the same time, influential pressure groups like the American Association of Retired Persons and a number of labor organizations made clear that they would go all-out to fight the idea of a commission, saying any improvements to the price index should be made by the experts within the Bureau of Labor Statistics and not by a politically appointed panel. +Opponents of a commission made clear to the White House that any downward adjustment in cost-of-living payments could not be seen as even indirectly paying for tax cuts, especially the capital gains tax cut proposed by the Republicans to trim the tax rate on investment profits. +"The goal of doing a cost-of-living commission at this moment was to take the issue out of politics and to make it an issue of technical accuracy only," a senior Administration official said tonight. "There was a large, significant reaction from all sides that doing a commission at this moment, in this context, might have the opposite reaction and serve to politicize the issue." +But the official said the White House wanted to leave open the possibility of finding a less politically explosive way of dealing with the issue, perhaps by postponing consideration of it until after Congress and the Administration reach a broad agreement on balancing the budget. +"We are not ruling in or out whether it could be done at other times or in other contexts," the official said. +Reducing the cost-of-living formula, even slightly, could save tens of billions of dollars in the next five years, making it much easier for Congressional Republicans and the White House to agree on a budget deal. Given the differences between the Administration and the Republican leadership on taxes and spending, some members of Congress had said the only way to get a budget agreement was to have a bipartisan agreement on the cost-of-living issue. +Efforts to negotiate a budget deal have been stalled for weeks. Republicans have been lambasting the Administration's budget proposal as built on unrealistic assumptions, and today the House passed a resolution asking the White House to submit a new budget. +Administration officials responded by noting that the Republicans have yet to make a proposal of their own and that any Republican proposal would have to include such deep spending cuts to pay for the party's proposed tax cuts that it would subject the Republicans to a painful political backlash. To some extent, both parties have been waiting for a resolution of the cost-of-living issue before determining how to proceed on budget negotiations. +Whether Mr. Clinton's decision today accelerates the budget process or derails it could depend on how much Republican criticism is generated. With relations between the parties already strained by revelations about possible campaign finance abuses by the Administration, some Democrats have said in recent days that the budget process could be imperiled by any return to the intense partisanship that surrounded budget talks over the past few years. + + + + + +LOAD-DATE: March 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +137 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 13, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +FAULDING, CHARLES + +SECTION: Section D; Page 22; Column 1; Classified + +LENGTH: 357 words + +FAULDING-Charles. The 100,000member Transport Workers Union of America mourns the passing of our retired Secretary Treasurer on March 9, 1997 after a brief illness at Parkway Hospital, Forest Hills, Queens. He was 81. He had retired in February 1991 after a distinguished 48-year career as a member and officer of TWU's flagship Local 100 in New York City and the national TWU of America. In 1980, as Secretary Treasurer of the 35,000-member Local 100, Mr. Faulding played a key role in the 11-day New York City transit strike. Despite his retirement from TWU, Mr. Faulding remained 1st Vice President of the New York City Central Labor Council's Black Trade Union Leadership Committee; an officer of the Municipal Credit Union; a member of One Hundred Black Men, a life member of the NAACP, and was founder of the Senior Citizens Garden Club in Roy Wilkins Park, Queens. During his nearly five decades as a union officer for TWU, Mr. Faulding held almost every elected position in Local 100, except President, including 26 years of service as Shop Steward, Vice Chairman and Chairman of the Local's United Motormen's Division. Born in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, in 1916, he came to New York at the age of 11. He became involved in the union movement for transit workers when he became a Trolley Motorman. He joined Local 100, and soon after was selected Shop Steward and immediately became a solidifying force. Mr. Faulding joined the national union's staff in 1985 as Secretary Treasurer, a position he held until his retirement. He is a charter member and former President of the BMT Surface Operators Club which was founded in 1943 when minorities were first hired into New York Surface transportation. Our deepest condolences to his son George, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Friends may pay their respects at J. Foster Phillips Funeral Home, 179-24 Linden Blvd, Jamaica, NY Friday, March 14, 1997. Funeral Services Saturday 9 AM, Trinity Lutheran Church of Locust Manor, 121-02 Merril St, Jamaica, NY. Sonny Hall, International President Frank McCann, Executive Vice President John Kerrigan, Secretary Treasurer + +LOAD-DATE: March 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +138 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 14, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +TALKS ON BUDGET REACH AN IMPASSE, LEADERS DECLARE + +BYLINE: By RICHARD W. STEVENSON + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1367 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 13 + +Just weeks after both sides expressed optimism that they could reach quick agreement on balancing the Federal budget, the White House and Congressional Republicans are again deadlocked, raising the prospect of another long and acrimonious standoff. +With their earlier pledges of bipartisanship giving way to rancor, leaders of both parties were openly pessimistic today about getting substantive negotiations started soon. And they warned that, if there was not a breakthrough soon, positions on both sides could harden further, leading to a repeat of the bitter partisan budget battles that led to Government shutdowns in the last two years. + In the day's starkest indication of the deteriorating atmosphere, Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, the chairman of the Budget Committee and the Republican most directly involved in early negotiations with the White House, said the chances "of getting a negotiated budget between Republicans and the President are finished." +Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Republican leader, said he had been unable to get the White House to focus on serious budget negotiations. Mr. Lott declared that President Clinton lacked the courage and leadership to deal with one of the principal issues, saving billions of dollars by recalculating the cost-of-living index in a way that would reduce inflationary increases for Social Security and other benefit programs. +Mr. Clinton decided on Wednesday not to pursue that enticing but politically risky avenue for now in the face of more vehement opposition than he had expected from his party and constituencies like labor and the elderly. Republican sensitivity over the matter was also heightened in recent weeks by disclosure of a two-year-old White House memorandum outlining how Democrats could exploit the issue against Republicans. +Mr. Lott warned that unless the Administration proved more responsive to the need for compromises, Republicans would declare Mr. Clinton's budget plan dead and start working on a purely Republican proposal. But Republicans themselves are divided over how to proceed, as are Democrats, further complicating efforts to forge a strategy that could bring the parties together. +White House officials continued to call on Republicans either to develop their own detailed blueprint for eliminating the deficit by 2002 or to stop attacking the Administration's plan. But they said they would otherwise keep their responses to Republican criticism muted in the hopes of eventually developing a consensus about how a deal could be struck. +"Our hope is to continue engaging everyone who is interested in being engaged in a serious dialogue as to how you could put together a majority in each party to agree on a balanced budget," said Gene Sperling, the chairman of the White House's National Economic Council. "By continuing that constructive dialogue we hope things will start moving in the right direction, perhaps gradually as opposed to in a dramatic moment." +Congressional Democrats were more downbeat, castigating Republicans for attacking Mr. Clinton's budget but refusing to put forth their own specific alternatives. +"While the President and Democrats in Congress have stepped up to the line with a balanced budget, Republicans are afraid to even reveal their game," said Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader. +The Republicans' goal, Mr. Daschle said, "continues to be a huge tax break for people who don't need them, paid for with spending cuts from people who can't afford them." +Today's sniping was set off in large part by Mr. Clinton's decision not to proceed, at least for now, with a plan to establish a commission to devise a new way to calculate cost-of-living increases, which are now based on the Consumer Price Index, a measure that many economists believe overstates the effects of inflation and costs the Government billions of dollars each year in overpayments to benefit recipients. +If the Administration will not support an effort to reduce the cost of living formula, it will be extremely difficult to bridge the gaps separating the two sides' tax and spending plans, members of both parties said. +"I don't think it's possible to come forward with a candid budget, so to speak, that comes to balance in 2002 without it," said Senator John H. Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island. Senator John B. Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana, said that reaching a budget deal would be "much, much more difficult" without a change in the formula. +Although some White House officials had been optimistic in recent weeks about forging a bipartisan consensus to set up such a panel, they said they had run into strident opposition from Democrats and Republicans, as well as powerful interest groups like the elderly. +Despite support for the proposal from a bipartisan core of several dozen senators, liberal Democrats, especially in the House, said they objected to anything that would be seen as abandoning their traditional protection of benefits from entitlement programs. They were led by Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the minority leader, who, as a potential rival to Vice President Al Gore for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2000, has not been shy about distancing himself from the White House. +More conservative Democrats did not want a reduction in the cost-of-living formula to pay for the sweeping tax cuts Republicans are seeking. And Republicans in the House, still smarting from Democratic attacks last year on their proposals to slow the growth in Medicare, proved deeply suspicious that Democrats would similarly attack them for cutting Social Security benefits. +The Republican fears were crystalized by a memorandum written in 1995 by Harold M. Ickes, then a top White House aide, detailing how Democrats would respond to plans Republicans were formulating to recalculate the cost of living formula. +The memorandum, which was among the documents turned over last month to Congressional committees investigating campaign financing activities, contained a draft Democratic fund-raising letter accusing Republicans of "trying to use a cowardly, backdoor political gimmick to take tens of billions of dollars out of the pockets of senior citizens." +Republicans said that Representatives Dick Armey and Bill Archer, both Texas Republicans, had waved a copy of the memo at a meeting of the Republican leadership recently. +"They told the Republican leadership that this was the trap waiting for them," said one Republican aide. "It scared every Republican on the Hill, especially those in the House, who face re-election every two years, from taking action on an important policy front." +Over the past several months, the cost-of-living issue has stood at the center of an extremely delicate political dance that both sides privately admit was heading toward a trade-off critical to any budget deal: the savings from a reduction in the cost-of-living formula would help pay for the tax cuts Republicans are demanding, while allowing Mr. Clinton his spending proposals in areas like health and education. +White House officials said they had not ruled out reopening the question of adjusting the Consumer Price Index, perhaps after reaching a general agreement with the Republicans on tax and spending priorities. +But the two sides are having enough trouble even sitting down to talk generally about the budget. Since President Clinton visited Capitol Hill a month ago to meet with leaders of both parties, there has been only sporadic contact. +An agreement reached during the President's visit to Capitol Hill to set up bipartisan working groups to hash out deals on taxes and four other issues has so far come to nothing. +Republicans are feuding among themselves over how hard to push for deep tax cuts and whether to put out their own detailed budget proposals. Democrats in Congress are themselves divided over how to proceed, with some eager to take a hard line with the Republicans and others more open to compromise. And both sides are trying to determine how much the furor over campaign finance will wound President Clinton and poison whatever air of bipartisanship remains. + +LOAD-DATE: March 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Preparing for a briefing on the budget were, from left, Senators Barbara Boxer of California, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, all Democrats. (Paul Hosefros/The New York Times)(pg. A22) + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +139 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 14, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +FAULDING, CHARLES + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7; Column 1; Classified + +LENGTH: 357 words + +FAULDING-Charles. The 100,000member Transport Workers Union of America mourns the passing of our retired Secretary Treasurer on March 9, 1997 after a brief illness at Parkway Hospital, Forest Hills, Queens. He was 81. He had retired in February 1991 after a distinguished 48-year career as a member and officer of TWU's flagship Local 100 in New York City and the national TWU of America. In 1980, as Secretary Treasurer of the 35,000-member Local 100, Mr. Faulding played a key role in the 11-day New York City transit strike. Despite his retirement from TWU, Mr. Faulding remained 1st Vice President of the New York City Central Labor Council's Black Trade Union Leadership Committee; an officer of the Municipal Credit Union; a member of One Hundred Black Men, a life member of the NAACP, and was founder of the Senior Citizens Garden Club in Roy Wilkins Park, Queens. During his nearly five decades as a union officer for TWU, Mr. Faulding held almost every elected position in Local 100, except President, including 26 years of service as Shop Steward, Vice Chairman and Chairman of the Local's United Motormen's Division. Born in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, in 1916, he came to New York at the age of 11. He became involved in the union movement for transit workers when he became a Trolley Motorman. He joined Local 100, and soon after was selected Shop Steward and immediately became a solidifying force. Mr. Faulding joined the national union's staff in 1985 as Secretary Treasurer, a position he held until his retirement. He is a charter member and former President of the BMT Surface Operators Club which was founded in 1943 when minorities were first hired into New York Surface transportation. Our deepest condolences to his son George, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Friends may pay their respects at J. Foster Phillips Funeral Home, 179-24 Linden Blvd, Jamaica, NY Friday, March 14, 1997. Funeral Services Saturday 9 AM, Trinity Lutheran Church of Locust Manor, 121-02 Merril St, Jamaica, NY. Sonny Hall, International President Frank McCann, Executive Vice President John Kerrigan, Secretary Treasurer + +LOAD-DATE: March 15, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +140 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 15, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Dwight L. Wilbur, 93, President Of A.M.A. Who Aided Medicare + +BYLINE: By WOLFGANG SAXON + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 31; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 541 words + +Dr. Dwight Locke Wilbur, a prominent San Francisco gastroenterologist and past president of the American Medical Association, who helped overcome the organization's aversion to Medicare as "socialized medicine," died on Sunday at his home in San Francisco. He was 93. +In the 1960's, when Dr. Wilbur rose to leadership in the A.M.A., his profession, like the rest of the nation, was deeply divided over crucial issues. Medical insurance for the country's elderly was one of them, and he was considered a moderate in the A.M.A.'s determined struggle against Government encroachment in medical care. + Medicare, the basic Federal health insurance program for everyone over 65, was enacted in Social Security amendments in 1965 in the Johnson Administration. The A.M.A., supported by private insurers and hospitals, pursued its own alternative, called Eldercare, as a comprehensive plan for the elderly needy. +Upon his inauguration as president of the A.M.A. in June 1968 for a one-year term, Dr. Wilbur broke with his predecessor, Dr. Milford O. Rouse of Dallas, and endorsed the notion that adequate health care was a right of all citizens. Although he personally favored the private approach wherever possible, he had resigned himself to the Social Security-based program as a new fact of life, and the organization reluctantly went along. +Dr. Wilbur is the only son of a former A.M.A. president to attain the organization's highest office. His father, Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, who was president in 1923-24, also served as president of Stanford University and as Secretary of the Interior in the Hoover Administration. +Dwight Wilbur was born in Harrow-on-the-Hill, England, while his father was studying medicine there. From boyhood, he said, he could not conceive of anything but following his father's footsteps into medicine. +Like his father, he was an outdoorsman and rugged individualist. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford in 1923 and received his M.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1926. +He held teaching positions at the Stanford School of Medicine throughout his career of more than 50 years, rising to clinical professor in 1949, and retired from private practice in 1983. He founded both the San Francisco and the California Societies of Internal Medicine. +He held office in various other professional organizations and served in clinical and teaching assignments in and beyond California. He wrote more than 200 papers and articles on conditions affecting the kidneys, the gastrointestinal tract and nutrition, as well as on general health. +As for retirement at age 65, Dr. Wilbur considered it "biologically unsound" and advised careful planning and a new activity to stay "young in spirit." A person shows signs of an aging mind, he once observed, when he reads the obituary page before the sports section, studies the menu before looking at the waitress, and mopes at a party "because he thinks of how he is going to feel in the morning." +He is survived by his wife, Ruth; two sons, Jordan R., of Mill Valley, Calif., and Gregory F., of Menlo Park, Calif.; a sister, Lois W. Hopper, of Palo Alto, Calif., and seven grandchildren. A son, Dwight L. 3d, also a gastroenterologist, died last fall. + +NAME: Dwight Locke Wilbur + +LOAD-DATE: March 15, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +141 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 15, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Liberties; +Banks For the Memories + +BYLINE: By MAUREEN DOWD + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 23; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 718 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + +I told my mother I was writing a memoir. +"Of whom?" she asked. +She doesn't get it. She's still in the dark ages, stuck in a time when people wrote about themselves only if they had something interesting and valuable and exceptional and wise to say. A time when people kept their dirty laundry in the hamper. +Now we are in an exhibitionist era and publishers are frantically signing up the hampers. We have revenge memoirs. Good mommy memoirs. Bad mommy memoirs. Bad daddy memoirs. Very bad surrogate daddy memoirs. Celebrity memoirs. Nonentity memoirs. Pubescent memoirs. Senescent memoirs. Anyone remotely associated with a celebrity memoirs. I-could-have-run-I-did-run-I-might-still-run-for-President memoirs + As Mark Fuhrman's literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg, so eloquently puts it, "Everybody deserves to tell their story." +This week's publishing sensation is an almost-centenarian. A Wall Street Journal story brought to light an autobiography, written in longhand for a senior-citizens program, by a 97-year-old Kansas woman -- "The Life of Jessie Lee Brown From Birth Up to 80 Years." A bidding frenzy erupted over her picaresque tale of surviving two wars, the Great Depression, an alcoholic husband, eight children, a job as a door-to-door cosmetics peddler and the first time she saw Lawrence Welk. +"It feels like real people talking about real people," enthused a Random House editor. +Creepy people talking about creepy people works even better. Kathryn Harrison, who wrote "The Kiss" about her four-year consensual adult love affair with her father, is also hot. "It's a book without villains," she told The New York Observer. +Out of the top 11 books on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, 9 are autobiographical. Katharine Graham, Frank McCourt, Mark Fuhrman, Cardinal Bernardin, Walter Cronkite, Ron Goldman's family, O. J. detectives, the widow of the Russian ice skater who collapsed on the ice and Mia Farrow. +But the kicker for me was when Little, Brown announced that they were so impressed with Paula Barbieri's "honesty and sensitivity" that they were paying O. J.'s ex $3 million for a book. "She has a bittersweet story to tell," said Rafe Sagalyn, her Washington literary agent. +Hey, Rafe, I have a bittersweet story to tell. And you can have it for $2.4. +I never experienced incest, but I had a couple of very annoying boyfriends. I didn't break Watergate, but I've eaten there. A President never asked me for advice on foreign policy, but I did give Dan Quayle the proper pronunciation of Pago Pago. +George Stephanopoulos is getting $3 million from Little, Brown for his thoughtful assessment on Clintonian governance: a tempestuous tale of mussable hair, a President who stressed him out by day and a Stairmaster that calmed him by night. +I can do that. I have hair. The President stresses me out. I use a Stairmaster. Okay, so it doesn't calm me down. Like I said, only $2.4. +I don't have anything as dramatic as Walter Cronkite or Katharine Graham. Mrs. Graham, after all, had Lyndon Johnson bawling her out in his bedroom at the White House while he stripped and put on pajamas. But George Bush once sent me a picture of himself wearing Bermuda shorts at Bohemian Grove. +In his $2.5 million stab at rehabilitation, Dick Morris wrote about growing up with a chip on his shoulder: "I began life weighing only two pounds, eleven ounces, and spent my first three months in incubators, untouched by anyone, even my mother. Only after years of therapy did I begin to understand how this early deprivation affected my personality thereafter." +Well, get this: When I was born, a nurse, trying to clean out my throat, accidentally slit it on the inside. I couldn't cry for months, only make little mewling sounds, like a kitten. I could spend pages exploring how this early deprivation affected my personality thereafter. I'm a recovering wailer with a wound that will not heal. +And as for my mother. I thought she was wonderful in every way. But, for $2.4 mil, the scales will suddenly fall from my eyes and I will see what I really endured. What about that night, when I was 10, and I said I was in the mood for Italian, and she put an unopened can of Chef Boyardee ravioli on my plate? +Harsh. That's the kind of thing that can haunt a girl. + +LOAD-DATE: March 15, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +142 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 16, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +New Face of AIDS: Older and Overlooked; +As More Cases Arise in People Over 50, a Silent Group Slowly Gets Help + +BYLINE: By JANE GROSS + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 41; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk; Second Front + +LENGTH: 1367 words + +Wrinkled faces do not appear on billboards promoting safe sex. Researchers have not investigated the interaction of AIDS drugs with those for high blood pressure and other ailments of aging. AIDS and older people is not a popular topic with the Gay Men's Health Crisis or the American Association of Retired Persons. +But the overlooked victims of the AIDS epidemic are no longer totally invisible. + Nearly 7,000 cases were diagnosed nationwide last year in people over 50, a number that has climbed steadily through the epidemic. That represents 11 percent of the new AIDS cases in 1995, a slight increase from previous years. In New York, by contrast, 15 percent of the new diagnoses are in those past the age of 50, the standard cutoff point for Federal and local statistics, up from 8 percent when AIDS first surfaced in the early 1980's. +The sharp increase in the number of cases in this age group has inspired the first advocates, conferences and support groups devoted to AIDS and older patients, with much of this activity in the New York region. But with doctors often overlooking AIDS as a diagnosis in older adults, and the patients themselves tight-lipped about their personal lives, the issue of caring for them is much more complex than among the younger population. +The director of a New Jersey AIDS organization, Carol DeGraw, is among the earliest AIDS workers to make a specific effort to reach out to older people. She learned firsthand of their ordeal not long ago when a woman in her late 50's went to the Coalition on AIDS in Passaic County, begging for an H.I.V. test. +The woman's partner, now dead, had been an intravenous drug user. She was steadily losing weight and complaining of thrush and swollen glands. But despite clear risk factors and classic symptoms, her doctor scoffed at the idea that she might have AIDS. +"Some doctors just don't believe old people have sex or do drugs," Ms. DeGraw said. +With new drugs prolonging life, she and other patient advocates expect the number of older people with the disease to grow. But Ms. DeGraw, familiar with statistics that showed the number of older people with AIDS as more than double the number of infants, teen-agers and young adults combined, thought this fast-growing group was slipping through the cracks. So she ventured to housing projects and nutrition centers to offer condoms, counseling, case management and care. +The most polite among the aging met her presentation with blank stares. +Some blurted, "Not me or anyone I know." Others demanded to know who had authorized her visit. Ms. DeGraw conceded that her effort had failed. The doctors, she saw, were not alone in their denial. The stoic generations of older adults were their collaborators, unwilling to confide in strangers. In 1994, a study conducted at the University of California at San Francisco showed that people over 50 known to be at risk of AIDS were one-sixth as likely as those in their 20's to use condoms and one-fifth as likely to be tested. +Other patient advocates were learning similar lessons, including Joan Zimmerman at the Park Slope Center for Mental Health in Brooklyn, who has a grant to run support groups for older AIDS patients but cannot fill them. +"The discomfort the younger doctor has in asking the right questions and the discomfort the older person has in disclosing these things are two sides of the same coin," Ms. Zimmerman said. +Charles DeGuzman, 64, of the Bronx, said that after one episode of infidelity in a 32-year marriage, he had a mysterious string of illnesses, including viral meningitis and pneumonia. But not until his third hospitalization did doctors discuss his sexual history and diagnose AIDS. +"I don't care if you're young, old or what, in a medical work-up they should ask about these things," Mr. DeGuzman said. "But doctors are skittish with senior citizens. They're afraid of getting a growl and a what-business-is-it-of-yours?" +There are signs of change. +*A conference on AIDS and aging was held for the first time last year, under the leadership of the Brookdale Center for Aging at Hunter College in New York City. Two more conferences are scheduled soon, one in San Francisco this Saturday and another in New York in April. +*A task force on AIDS and aging, also born at the Brookdale Center, last year pressured the American Association of Retired Persons, whose primary constituency is retirees, to produce an educational video called "It Can Happen to Me." +*The National Institute on Aging financed another video, "The Forgotten 10th," and also made a grant to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where scores of older AIDS patients are now being interviewed to assess their social and psychological needs. +One of the few support groups for older adults with AIDS meets biweekly at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Mary Ann Malone, a social worker and the group leader, knows the half-dozen women would be out the door in a heartbeat if she forced them to "sit around and talk about their feelings." +Instead, Ms. Malone reels them in with guest speakers, videos and her homemade apple-dapple cake. And every once in a while, raw anger or heartache breaks through. Recently, Ms. Malone said, a woman railed against the man who knew that he had AIDS before their one-night stand, but told her he had an ear infection. +Participants say they would be totally alone were it not for the group. Sandra Baker, for one, who was infected through intravenous drug use, has been shunned by most of her family; has lost the one child who stood by her, a gay son, to AIDS, and stopped seeing old friends when they served her Thanksgiving dinner on paper plates. +"My world is the group," Ms. Baker, a 60-year-old Harlem woman, said. "I have nobody to talk to but strangers." +The risks for AIDS among the older groups are the same as in the population at large, although the demographics of the disease are different and so are the burdens. +Gay men represent the majority of the 56,000 AIDS cases diagnosed in those over 50. But unlike their younger peers, they grew up in a world in which homosexuals could be imprisoned or institutionalized. +The few social workers or health experts who have reached out to this group say they are often closeted, married to unsuspecting women and unwilling to turn to the advocacy groups that have supported younger men throughout the epidemic. +"If you feel the sex you're having is wrong and not to be discussed, are you going to be comfortable in a sex workshop with a bunch of young guys talking about what they do?" said James Masten, a social worker at SAGE, or Senior Action in a Gay Environment, who counsels older men. "Would the younger people even understand how these people had to live their lives?" +Among the older heterosexuals with AIDS, 15 percent were infected through transfusions, before testing largely eliminated tainted blood in 1985. Once they were the lion's share of cases in this age group, terrified they had infected spouses during unprotected sex -- a realistic fear -- or irrationally afraid of transmitting the virus by kissing a grandchild. +But as the transfusion cases have died off, the proportion of older men and women infected through heterosexual sex has increased, to 10 percent, the highest proportion to get AIDS this way in any adult age group. +Many are low-income women endangered by drug use or promiscuous partners. They are aware of the peril, unlike most middle-class heterosexuals in their age group, but doggedly loyal to their mates, said Dr. Mark Johnson, a specialist in infectious diseases at Queens Hospital Center. And they are at increased risk if they have passed menopause, Dr. Johnson and others said, sometimes infected more easily because they see no need to use birth control. +"People my age are totally ignorant," Mr. DeGuzman said. "We don't even know what safe sex is." +Jane Fowler agreed. A 61-year-old well-to-do woman, she began dating men in her social set in Kansas City after the end of a 23-year marriage. +Now she has AIDS. +"You don't know the sexual history of anyone," Ms. Fowler said. "Not anyone. You may think you do, but you don't." + +LOAD-DATE: March 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Forgotten Voices -- Charles DeGuzman, left, was hospitalized three times before doctors discussed his sexual history and diagnosed AIDS. His struggles with depression, drugs, bereavement and guilt mirror those of many other older AIDS patients. "People my age, we think it could never happen to us," said Mr. DeGuzman, 64, one of several patients who spoke about their illness. Article, Page 44. (James Estrin/The New York Times) + +Graphs: "A Rising Toll" shows number of new AIDS cases in the United States among those 50 years of age and older, 1983-1995. (Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)(pg. 41); "BREAKDOWN: AIDS and Aging" shows percentage breakdown, by age and sex, of adult AIDS cases reported from 1980 to 1996. (Source: New York City Department of Health, Office of AIDS Surveillance)(pg. 44) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +143 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 16, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +A LA CARTE; +In a World of Flux, an Atypical Evergreen + +BYLINE: By RICHARD J. SCHOLEM + +SECTION: Section 13LI; Page 25; Column 1; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1410 words + +VOLATILE is the word that best describes restaurants on Long Island. They come and go, open and close, with dizzying rapidity. Many of them do not make it through the first year. Yesterday's darling is today's forgotten wallflower. +In this world of flux, virtually nothing is static, much less permanent, except, perhaps, for Hildebrandt's in Williston Park, the most atypical of Island restaurants. Yes, there are still traditional, nostalgic, unapologetically-old-fashioned places like Hildebrandt's in middle America, but few remain in Nassau or Suffolk. + Hildebrandt's has never moved from 84 Hillside Avenue (741-0608), the first building to be constructed on the Williston Park portion of that thoroughfare. A picture of the structure on a dirt road with a horse-drawn carriage in front shows the same siding and neon sign that are in place today. +Fortunately, this restaurant, luncheonette, ice cream parlor, candy store has itself not changed much over the years. Al and Joanne Strano, the custodians of this Island institution, still grind their own hamburger meat, hand cut their french fries, make their own syrups and hot fudge and even turn out candy canes by hand. Hildebrandt's 1946 Ford truck continues to putter around the streets of Williston Park. Dishes like pork chops and meat loaf are always on the menu. +Mr. Strano learned to prepare Hildebrandt's renowned homemade ice cream and chocolates from Henry Shriever, the original candy and ice-cream maker, 23 years ago. Mr. Shriever, who lives in New Hyde Park, is in his 90's, and Hildebrandt's, which opened in 1927, is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. +Although Island restaurants that are 40 years old are extremely rare, Hildebrandt's has many customers that have been coming to this hometown hangout for that period of time. A few couples even got engaged there. +At the front of the restaurant, where the soda fountain of everyone's youth lives, elderly women eating banana, butter pecan, coffee and coconut ice cream (with a 17 percent butterfat content) can be heard telling tiny children, "This is where your father and grandfather had their first ice cream." +Other patrons sit at the marble counter sipping what might well be the Island's best hot chocolate (made with evaporated milk and top-quality cocoa) and everything from grilled cheese sandwiches ($3.25) to salmon ($16.95). +One of those youngsters eating ice cream 15 years ago, Tom Bauman, is now making it under Mr. Strano's direction. His brother, Jim, a Culinary Institute of America graduate, is the chef. His repertory includes straightforward Italian fare like bruschetta, lasagna, manicotti and chicken scapariello (some of it from Mr. Strano's Sicilian mother's recipes), occasional thai and contemporary American dishes. +Most nights Mr. Strano emerges from the candy factory under his restaurant with chocolate on his shoes, on his nose and under his fingernails, after making Valentine's hearts or Easter bunnies. He washes in time to escort the evening's ever-waiting lines of customers past the soda fountain, with its 13 leatherette counter stools, to the booths in the rear room, where two of his three daughters met the men they married. +Island diners continue to congregate at this reassuring restaurant, with its time-warp atmosphere and its very appropriate slogan, "Since 1927. . . . because one person tells another." + +Openings +Despite a substantial Polish population and a growing Russian presence, Nassau-Suffolk has until now offered diners only two Russian choices and one all-Polish possibility. The ranks of both were joined a couple of months ago when Polonez Restaurant, featuring both Polish and Russian cuisine, opened at 123 West Main Street in Riverhead (369-8878). +The bargain-priced, 60-seat spot is owned by Elizabeth Sorka, who came to this country from Poland, and Alla Kouznetsoza, who emigrated from Russia. Their experienced Polish and Russian chefs specialize in hearty peasant fare like stuffed cabbage with mashed potatoes and salad ($5.50), bigos, a layered sauerkraut, onion, apple, meat casserole ($5), a Polish sampler platter ($8.50) and Russian-style shish kebab ($12). Sixteen entrees and six or seven specials are available seven days a week at Polonez. +The rumors that the owners of the Bridgehampton Cafe are negotiating to buy the shortlived Boom Bistro on Main Street in Bridgehampton have been confirmed. They plan to open the Bull Head Tavern, a 125-seat moderately priced restaurant with a woodburning grill. It will feature casual, contemporary, tavern dishes like hanger steak sandwiches and whole fish from the grill at entree prices of $10 to $17, and, if approved by the town, outdoor dining for 50. +Don Evans, who along with Carmine Parisi and Frank Gemino owns the Bridgehampton Cafe, said John Lopresti, the cafe's sous chef, will be the kitchen commander at Bull Head while Robert Fairbrother, formerly the assistant general manager of Oceana in Manhattan, would manage both restaurants. +Portofino, a Mineola Boulevard mainstay for 13 years, opened an all- new Portofino Ristorante last month at 2024 Hillside Avenue, in New Hyde Park (488-5100). The moderately priced, 80-seat, family-oriented operation offers more moderate prices than the original upscale spot. Pastas start at $9, chicken dishes at $10.50, fish, $13.50, and veal, $14.50. +The Northern Italian restaurant, which took two years to complete, has European villa decor that includes murals, terra cotta roofs and neon highlights. John Gardi, the owner, indicated that an upstairs banquet room would soon be available. +Atavola, which means "at the table," is the name of a 13-month-old restaurant at 39 Mineola Boulevard (739-3094), where Portofino had been. The 65-seat, Northern Italian-continental spot offers main courses from $12 for pastas to $24.95 for porterhouse steak or lobster tails. It is owned by two brothers, Augistino and Maurice Benavedes. +Augistino Benavedes was a chef at La Cisterna in Mineola while his brother cooked at Bevans in Garden City. They have retained much of Portofino's decor and added a grand piano and partitions that separate the bar from the dining room. +There will be a change for the 1997 season when the Downtown Grille and Wine Bar, South Elmwood, Montauk (668-4200), opens on May 1. Tom Schaudel, the chef and owner, has sold the operation to a husband-and-wife team: Lonnie Lewis and Maureen Kinney. +Mr. Lewis is an experienced Montauk chef and restaurateur who most recently was the chef and general manager at the Port Royal. His menu will continue to feature eclectic American cuisine with a distinct Asian influence. +Ms. Kinney, who formerly owned Country Flowers in Montauk and was once a floral designer at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, will oversee the front of the house. The wine bar will also continue to offer an all-American selection of wines by the glass. + +Wine Tastings +Capriccio's Restaurant in Jericho (931-2727) is presenting a dinner on Thursday at 7 P.M., that features the wines of the Wine Wave. The $60 Hello, Spring! meal includes an entree of roast rack of veal, porcini mushrooms and polenta accompanied by a 1991 Barolo Artone vineyard, Gigi Rosso. +The Mykonian House Restaurant in Great Neck (466-1194), which features eclectic Hellenic cuisine, is offering a special four-course, wine-and-dine, gourmet dinner every Monday and Wednesday night from tomorrow through April 30. The $50, prix-fixe menu includes a different glass of Greek wine with each course, a variety of Greek hors d'oeuvres, a grilled shrimp orzo salad appetizer, a choice of two entrees and a platter of Greek desserts. + +Potpourri +Pomodoro Restaurants of Long Island received an unexpected boost from television recently when NBC selected their Manhattan restaurant, at 229 Columbus Avenue, to be included in five episodes of "Seinfeld." +Bill Wharton, a recording artist known as the Sauce Boss, is bringing his traveling gumbo show to Big Daddy's in Massapequa (799-8877) next Sunday at 3:30 P.M. +Mr. Wharton dons a chef's coat and toque, straps on his guitar and tends to a pot of gumbo as he tears through 75 minutes of rocking blues with the help of his backup band, the Ingredients. At the close of the set, patrons are invited up to sample the smoking pot of gumbo. The Big Daddy's show is his only area appearance. Tickets are available at Big Daddy's for $5. + +LOAD-DATE: March 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Patrons at the counter of Hildebrandt's, an old-time luncheonette in Williston Park. (Linda Rosier for The New York Times) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +144 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 17, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +In Manhattan's Big Race, Task Is to Become Known + +BYLINE: By JONATHAN P. HICKS + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 839 words + +They are already spending their days and nights crisscrossing Manhattan, appearing before everything from block associations and tenant groups to senior citizens and labor audiences. +Though the Democratic primary for Manhattan borough president is six months away, the campaign is moving ever so gradually from preseason to the main event. And as the candidates immerse themselves in the campaign, their most formidable challenge is simply to be recognized by an electorate that knows little about them or the office they seek. + The task is doubly difficult because their views on issues are strikingly similar and they often describe themselves in the same terms, as independent or progressive. +For now, their energies seem to be focused on striking chords they hope will appeal to voters beyond their home areas. +The candidates seeking to succeed Borough President Ruth W. Messinger are Deborah J. Glick, an Assemblywoman from Greenwich Village, and three members of the City Council: C. Virginia Fields, who represents central Harlem and the Upper West Side; Antonio Pagan, who represents the Lower East Side, and Adam Clayton Powell 4th, who represents East Harlem and portions of the Upper West Side. +"For these candidates, becoming well known is a task of herculean proportion," said Hank Morris, a political consultant who works with Democratic candidates. +"They are in the most information clogged area in the world, campaigning for an office that most people don't really understand," Mr. Morris said. "The person who wins will be the person who figures out a way to communicate outside of their base." +That mission, the candidates agree, will be particularly difficult. The borough president, who is now widely characterized as half figurehead, half ombudsman, is far less powerful than presidents were before 1990, when the position meant having a seat on the Board of Estimate and, with it, significant influence over the budget and land use in New York City. The Board of Estimate was abolished in 1990. +But the borough presidency is still seen as a stepping stone for officials with mayoral aspirations, like Ms. Messinger, who is seeking to challenge Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. +At a forum for Democratic candidates for borough president last week, sponsored by two political clubs on the Upper West Side, all of the candidates stressed an ability to collaborate with groups outside their political bases and to champion issues that are not often associated with them. +Ms. Fields, a former social worker who has been a Councilwoman for eight years, focused on economic and development issues rather than some of the social service issues for which she is well known. She says she aims to woo voters from the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side. +Ms. Glick, the first openly lesbian member of the Assembly, reminded the audience that she had been an advocate of tenant rights and abortion rights as well as gay rights, and an opponent of overdevelopment on Manhattan's West Side. +"I have not been a single-issue legislator," she said, explaining that she had been able to forge strong political alliances outside her Greenwich Village district. "I have always been involved in progressive struggles." +Mr. Powell sought to counter speculation, rampant in political circles, that he was not seeking to become borough president so much as trying to enhance his name recognition and campaign contributions for another City Council race. "Many people thought I wasn't very serious and I was just putting my name out there," Mr. Powell said. "But I have made my decision." +Mr. Pagan, too, emphasized that he could appeal to voters outside his Council district on the Lower East Side. +Each candidate is allowed to spend $1 million on the race, and most have suggested that they need at least half that much to conduct a viable campaign. So far, Ms. Glick is leading the group in contributions, having collected nearly $200,000. Next is Ms. Fields, who has raised $170,000, followed by Mr. Pagan, who has raised $150,000. Mr. Powell has raised $50,000. +Much of the attention paid to the race has been devoted to which candidates would remain in it. Last week, David A. Paterson, a State Senator from Harlem, announced that he was no longer a candidate, a move that was widely seen as assisting Ms. Fields, since it would most likely lessen the splitting of the Harlem vote. +Because many Manhattan politicians cast the race as a contest between Ms. Glick and Ms. Fields, Mr. Powell and Mr. Pagan are busy assuring audiences that they are serious about the campaign. +Mr. Powell, in an effort to show that his campaign is in earnest, often brandishes a poll that he commissioned. In the poll, conducted by Zogby Group International, Mr. Powell said he placed first, the choice of 20.2 percent of the 461 respondents. Ms. Glick was next, with 12.1 percent, followed by Ms. Fields, with 9.6 percent. Mr. Pagan was the choice of 6.3 percent. More than half of those surveyed said they had no opinion. + +LOAD-DATE: March 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +145 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 18, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Cyril Brickfield, 78, Leader Who Made A.A.R.P. a Power + +BYLINE: By WOLFGANG SAXON + +SECTION: Section B; Page 8; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 375 words + +Cyril Francis Brickfield, formerexecutive director of the American Association of Retired Persons and once the No. 2 official at the Veterans Administration, died on Friday at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md. He was 78 and lived in Bethesda. +The cause was cancer, said the A.A.R.P., from which he retired as executive director 10 years ago. + Mr. Brickfield spent 20 years with the association, serving as executive director for 12 of them and in other periods filling posts like legal counsel and director of legislative activities. He is credited with a swelling of the organization's membership, from a million in 1967 to 28 million two decades later, by which time the A.A.R.P. had become one of the largest secular groups in the country. +He was also a former president of the Federal Bar Association and, for part of his time with the A.A.R.P., served concurrently as executive director of the National Association of Retired Teachers. +A tireless advocate for the elderly, Mr. Brickfield was an American delegate to the United Nations' World Assembly on Aging in Vienna in 1981, and a member of the advisory council for the White House Conference on Aging that year. +Mr. Brickfield was born in Brooklyn and graduated from Fordham University. He piloted B-17 bombers over Europe in World War II, left the Army Air Forces with the rank of captain, then graduated from Fordham Law School in 1948 and later, at George Washington University, earned a master's degree in public administration and a doctorate of law. +He was a law clerk for the chief judge of the Court of Appeals, New York State's highest court, from 1949 to 1951 and then worked for 10 years as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee in Washington. +He was appointed counsel to the Veterans Administration in 1961, then became the agency's chief benefits director before he was appointed Deputy Administrator in 1965. In that post, he established a V.A. nursing care system and oversaw the agency's 169 hospitals and 70 regional offices. +Mr. Brickfield is survived by his wife of 46 years, Ann Jacobsen Brickfield; a daughter, Ann Brickfield of Reston, Va.; a son, Edmund, of Arlington, Va.; a brother, Francis X. Brickfield of Brooklyn, and one granddaughter. + +NAME: Cyril Francis Brickfield + +LOAD-DATE: March 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Cyril F. Brickfield (American Association of Retired Persons) + + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +146 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 18, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Housing Chief Going to Bat For Elderly + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL JANOFSKY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 12; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 730 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 17 + +When the telephone solicitor told Maxine Wittig of Norwalk, Calif., that she could borrow money against the equity in her house, she was elated. +Mrs. Wittig, a 69-year-old widow, had lent money to a friend and now needed some of her own. The solicitor arranged for a representative from America's Trust Inc., of San Juan Capistrano, Calif., to visit and explain how she could take out a "reverse mortgage," a bank loan that could be repaid by Mrs. Wittig if she ever sold her house or by her estate after her death. The deal sounded fine to her, and she signed to borrow $60,000. + But when the representative asked for the consulting fee of $5,571, she was stunned. Later, Mrs. Wittig learned that the same service is provided at no cost by the Department of Housing and Urban Development for people applying for such loans. +"Needless to say, I was shocked," Mrs. Wittig said in an interview. +She is hardly alone. With a growing number of elderly people paying for mortgage services that are offered elsewhere without charge, Housing Secretary Andrew M. Cuomo today called marketing companies like America's Trust "scam artists" and announced that the department was taking steps to shut them down and to try to get the applicants' money back. +"We are going to put an end to a scam targeting senior citizens, literally charging them thousands of dollars for nothing," Mr. Cuomo said at a news conference. Referring to the Federal Housing Agency, a branch of the housing department that guarantees the reverse mortgages, he added that the companies "will be eliminated from all F.H.A. business." +"That's how strongly we feel about it," he said. +Mr. Cuomo said that the department had so far found "a couple hundred" people who had used paid consultants to help secure reverse mortgages among 20,000 who have applied for them since the program was introduced in 1989. +To insure that the number does not rise, he said, a letter was sent today from the department to thousands of lending institutions around the country, notifying them that, effective immediately, the F.H.A. will stop insuring any reverse mortgages that are "obtained with the assistance of estate planning services." +Mr. Cuomo also said the department would seek whatever criminal, civil and administrative sanctions against the companies that might be available, as well as refunds for the mortgage buyers. +Jeff Butler, owner of America's Trust and another service cited by the housing agency, Patriot Inc., said that the housing department was acting precipitously and unfairly in attacking the service companies. +Mr. Butler said that all the printed material for his companies told customers that they did not need to use the service to secure a loan. He also said that in recent conversations with housing officials in Washington, he had offered to help write guidelines for the role that companies like his could play in loan applications. +"But they never got back to me," Mr. Butler said. "What this is really about is that we're making money and they don't like it." +Mr. Butler said that his companies were involved in helping secure 260 reverse mortgage loans in 35 states. But those applications, he said, have been "frozen" by the housing department's efforts to put the companies out of business. +He denied that his companies had violated any laws and said that none of the applicants his companies had helped had complained to any Better Business Bureau in California. +But applicants have begun complaining to the housing department, lenders and the American Association of Retired Persons, Mr. Cuomo said, and that has prompted housing investigators to try to find out how active the services have become. +Mrs. Wittig, who joined two other elderly people in relating their experiences by conference call at the news conference, berated herself for not reading the material from America's Trust, part of which indicated that she would pay the company a percentage, but no more than 10 percent, of her loan request. +"I didn't pay attention," she said. "It was there, and it was my error for not being more careful." +She also said she felt betrayed by the company. +"A friend of mine was going to do this; I stopped her," Mrs. Wittig said. "I didn't want her to pay the fees like I did. I wouldn't want my worst enemy to be taken the way I was. To me, $5,000 is a lot of money." + +LOAD-DATE: March 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +147 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 18, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +H.M.O.'S LIMITING MEDICARE APPEALS, U.S. INQUIRY FINDS + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 932 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 17 + +Elderly people in health maintenance organizations often find that they cannot obtain the medical services they need because H.M.O.'s limit their ability to appeal adverse decisions on treatment, Federal investigators said today. +June Gibbs Brown, inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, said that many Medicare beneficiaries were never informed of their appeal rights. And Ms. Brown said that many H.M.O.'s -- more than half of those examined by Federal auditors -- did not fully comply with Federal rules for handling appeals and grievances. + Five million of the 38 million Medicare beneficiaries are in H.M.O.'s, and enrollment is growing by more than 80,000 a month. +The Congressional Budget Office predicts that more than 15 million Medicare beneficiaries will be in H.M.O.'s by 2007. +H.M.O.'s receive a fixed monthly payment, set in advance, for each subscriber, regardless of what services the person receives. This method of payment, Ms. Brown said, "may provide incentives to limit services," so it is important for H.M.O.'s to rule promptly on appeals challenging the denial, reduction or termination of services, including home health care and skilled nursing home services. +A report on the appeal procedures of Medicare H.M.O.'s, written by Medicare officials, says that the Government has received "increasing numbers of complaints from beneficiaries" who had difficulty appealing cutbacks in care. +Federal officials said that some H.M.O.'s had told Medicare patients that they could not appeal decisions terminating or reducing services. The H.M.O.'s argue that "because a service was provided, not denied, the reduction or termination of the service is not appealable," the report by Medicare officials said. +Thus, the officials said, H.M.O.'s sometimes terminate coverage for skilled nursing home stays and patients are discharged without any further services, but they are not allowed to appeal. +Bruce C. Vladeck, administrator of the Federal Health Care Financing Administration, which runs Medicare, said he agreed that "improvements are needed." And he said that his agency would soon issue new rules to clarify the appeal rights of Medicare beneficiaries. +But the new rules do not go nearly as far as an order issued this month in a nationwide class-action lawsuit. In that case, Federal District Judge Alfredo C. Marquez of Tucson, Ariz., said that Medicare H.M.O.'s must give written notice to beneficiaries whenever they deny, reduce or terminate services. +"Notice shall be given promptly, but no more than five working days after written or oral request for a service or referral by a health care provider" or a patient, "and at least one working day before reduction or termination of a course of treatment," the judge said. +In addition, he said, when an H.M.O. denies services to a Medicare patient, it must provide "an explanation in lay language of the coverage rule upon which the adverse decision was based," so the patient can appeal. The judge said, if an H.M.O. does not substantially comply with these requirements, the Government "is prohibited from renewing or entering into a subsequent Medicare contract with the H.M.O." +Without waiting to see what policies might be devised by the Clinton Administration, Judge Marquez said that Medicare H.M.O.'s must rule on patients' appeals within three days if services are urgently needed. And if the H.M.O. denies such appeals, he said, an independent decision-maker must review the case and rule within 10 days of the request for review. +Peter Garrett, a spokesman for the Health Care Financing Administration, and Sheila M. Lieber, a Justice Department lawyer working on the case, refused today to comment on the order by Judge Marquez. The judge said that the Government had until July 1 to carry out the changes described in his order. +Dr. Beatrice Braun, a director of the American Association of Retired Persons, which represents 19 million Medicare beneficiaries, said: "The biggest problem in the current appeal process is the lack of meaningful time limits. Under current regulations, an H.M.O. can take as long as 60 days to make a formal denial of care and then an additional 60 days to reconsider its denial. This is unacceptable." +Existing rules generally do not require H.M.O.'s to continue services while patients pursue appeals. As a result, Dr. Braun said, treatment like therapy or rehabilitation "can be cut off abruptly and then later resumed, after irreparable harm has been done, when a decision is finally rendered in the beneficiary's favor." +Judge Marquez addressed this problem in his order. "When acute care services are denied so as to trigger the expedited reconsideration process," he said, "services must continue until a final reconsideration decision has been issued." +Candace K. Schaller, a lawyer at the American Association of Health Plans, which represents H.M.O.'s, said: "Our members make every effort to do what they're expected and required to do. But the current rules are not all that clear. So plans understand their obligations differently, and regional offices of the Department of Health and Human Services answer the same questions in different ways." +Medicare patients are not alone in wanting to appeal H.M.O. decisions. Thousands of younger patients challenge H.M.O. treatment and coverage decisions every year. The Federal Government does not normally regulate H.M.O.'s operating in the private health insurance market, but many states have begun to set standards for their appeal procedures. + + +LOAD-DATE: March 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +148 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 18, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +BUSINESS DIGEST + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 587 words + + +Ahmanson Sweetens Bid For Great Western Financial +H. F. Ahmanson & Company, battling to acquire Great Western Financial, a rival California savings and loan, sweetened its all-stock hostile bid for the company, to $6.6 billion, or about $50 a share. +The value of the revised deal would change with the price of Ahmanson stock, but it appears to top the friendly $6.25 billion offer that Great Western accepted on March 6 from Washington Mutual. [Page D6.] + +Dow Rises as Nasdaq Falls +Blue chips staged a late rebound, with the Dow Jones industrials closing up 20.02 points at 6,955.48. But losers exceeded winners by almost 2 to 1 on the New York Stock Exchange, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq index lost 13.54 points, closing at 1,279.43. [D10.] + +Prices of Treasury securities slipped, as investors worried about a possible Fed rate increase and were wary ahead of the week's economic data. The yield on the 30-year bond edged up to 6.95 percent. [D20.] + +S.E.C. Considers Shift on Funds +The S.E.C. is considering dropping its requirement that mutual funds disclose to shareholders all the securities they hold. Rather, it might require a list of the top 25 to 50 holdings. Industry analysts were critical. [D2.] + +Thyssen Sees Hostile Krupp Bid +Thyssen A.G., Germany's largest steel producer, said that the Krupp-Hoesch group was planning to attempt a rare hostile takeover, and that Thyssen would fight it. Krupp refused to comment. [D2.] + +For Time Warner, Delay Could Pay +Time Warner may be able to avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in capital gains tax if it keeps its troubled partnership with U S West intact through late June. Market Place. [D10.] + +News Corp. to Acquire Heritage +Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation said that it would acquire Heritage Media, a direct-marketing and broadcasting company, in a tax-free stock deal worth $754 million. [D4.] + +Rockwell to Shed Auto Operations +Rockwell International, continuing to reposition itself as an electronics and communications company, said that it would spin off its automotive parts operations as an independent, publicly traded company. [D2.] + +A New Approach at Pearson P.L.C. +Pearson P.L.C., the British media and entertainment company, announced it would invest $160 million in The Financial Times over the next five years in the United States and Asia. Marjorie M. Scardino, the chief executive, also said she had put a new management team in place and begun a system to raise profits and cut costs. [D4.] + +H.M.O.'s Found To Limit Elderly +Elderly people in health maintenance organizations often find that they cannot obtain the medical services they need because H.M.O.'s limit their ability to appeal adverse decisions on treatment, Federal investigators said. More than half the H.M.O.'s examined by Federal auditors did not fully comply with Federal rules for handling appeals and grievances. [A1.] + +Canada Criticizes U.S. Plan on Air +The Government of Canada criticized proposals in the United States to toughen air quality standards -- denounced by industry as too demanding -- saying they "will continue to result in health damages and death." [A17.] + +Former Chief Returns to Luby's +Luby's Cafeterias, whose chief executive, John Edward Curtis Jr., died last week in what the police have ruled a suicide, said that its chairman, Ralph Erben, had quit. A former chairman of the chain, John Lahourcade, will return as chairman and chief executive. [D20.] + +LOAD-DATE: March 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "TODAY" + +Housing Starts + February figures due at 8:30 A.M. Eastern. + Expected: +5.9% + +Chart: "YESTERDAY" +Dow Industrials -- 6,955.48, up 20.02 +30-yr. Treasury yield -- 6.95%, up 0.01 +The Dollar -- 123.66 yen, up 0.28 + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +149 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 19, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Ukrainians Demand Return of Communists + +BYLINE: Reuters + +SECTION: Section A; Page 4; Column 4; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 174 words + +DATELINE: KIEV, Ukraine, March 18 + +Angered over unpaid wages and pensions, tens of thousands of people across Ukraine marched today to demand a return to Communist rule. +Interior Minister Yuri Kravchenko was quoted by the Interfax-Ukraine news agency as saying that as many as 85,000 people had taken part in the demonstrations, which were called by left-wing groups. + "Wages! Wages!" chanted a crowd of about 3,000 mostly elderly people as they marched under a red flag past Parliament and the main government building in Kiev. +The crowd carried an effigy of a businessman hanging upside down with American dollars falling from his pockets, an expression of resentment against the new dollar-rich class that has emerged since independence in 1991. +Some 5,000 Communist supporters demonstrated in Dnipropetrovsk, an eastern industrial city that is Mr. Kuchma's hometown. A crowd of about 3,500 gathered in the southern Crimean city of Simferopol, chanting "Power to the Communists!" And some 7,000 protesters rallied in Donetsk, center of the eastern coal region. + +LOAD-DATE: March 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +150 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 19, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +U.S. Says Mental Impairment Might Be a Bar to Citizenship + +BYLINE: By CELIA W. DUGGER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1438 words + +Under new Federal rules announced yesterday, legal immigrants who cannot knowingly take an oath of allegiance to the United States because they are disabled by Alzheimer's disease, severe retardation or other mental impairments will be unable to become citizens. +A 1994 law exempted seriously disabled immigrants from English proficiency and civics requirements, but the rules announced yesterday made clear that these same immigrants will not be exempted from taking the citizenship oath. + The rules come after Congress passed a separate welfare law last year that denies welfare benefits to elderly and disabled legal immigrants who are not citizens. The two laws together mean that the most severely mentally handicapped immigrants will lose Federal welfare benefits in five or six months because they cannot become citizens. +In seven states -- Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming and Delaware -- elderly and disabled legal immigrants who have not become citizens by the deadline will also have their Medicaid benefits cut off unless those states change their laws, Federal officials said. +Federal officials say they do not know how many of the disabled legal immigrants now receiving benefits are mentally incompetent. +The Social Security Administration is now in the process of notifying 544,000 elderly and disabled immigrants -- 86,000 of them in New York City -- that they will lose their Supplemental Security Income if they have not become naturalized citizens by a deadline that takes effect in August for some, September for others. +News of the new rules yesterday sent a shudder of fear through the relatives of the severely mentally impaired. +"So they have to be able to take the oath?" said Helene Calderon, whose 81-year-old grandmother, Fredesvinda Marmol, a Dominican immigrant living in Washington Heights, has Alzheimer's and cannot remember her own name. "Oh, my God." +President Clinton has proposed restoring S.S.I. benefits to legal immigrants who became disabled after entering the United States, but his proposal is part of budget negotiations with Congress that will go on for months. +Republican leaders have opposed benefits to legal noncitizen immigrants, who they believe have abused the system, using it as a substitute pension system and a way for immigrants to avoid supporting elderly relatives they brought into the country. +Representative Clay Shaw, a Republican from South Florida who was the chief sponsor of the welfare law and is chairman of the human resources subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee, said yesterday that proposals to restore benefits are simply too costly. He said he favors a two- or three-year block grant to states to help elderly and disabled immigrants who lose their Federal benefits. +His spokeswoman, Donna Boyer, acknowledged: "It would be a Band-Aid approach. It would not permanently help the people who didn't become citizens." +But Representative Shaw said he is confident that the number of very severely mentally incompetent people will shrink over the years of the block grant "simply because of natural attrition." +"The death rate will see that that population shrinks in those two to three years. There will be some left but it will be much smaller, and if necessary, we'll revisit the issue then. We're not going to see people pushed out of nursing homes onto the sidewalk with no one to care for them." +The United States Immigration and Naturalization Service announced the new rules, which go into effect today, almost two and a half years after Congress passed a law to exempt mentally and physically disabled legal immigrants seeking citizenship from requirements that they prove their English proficiency and knowledge of American civics. +The rules released yesterday spell out who qualifies for the exemptions (those whose disabilities make them unable to demonstrate an understanding of English or civics), which doctors can certify a person's disability (doctors licensed in the United States who have experience diagnosing such impairments), and the immigration service's right to ask for a second opinion from another doctor if it doubts the claim. +The immigration service has estimated that 300,000 people may apply for the exemption from the English and civics tests. +Despite the waivers for the English and civics tests, immigration officials said they decided they could not waive the oath of citizenship for those too mentally impaired to understand they are taking it. +"The oath is a thorny legal issue," said Terrance O'Reilly, acting assistant commissioner for naturalization. "The way the naturalization section is written, each person has to take the oath. There was no wiggle room." +The immigration service will try to be flexible about ways that immigrants can show they understand they are becoming citizens and forswearing allegiance to their homelands. If they can communicate only by nodding their heads or blinking their eyes, that would be acceptable, officials said. +Naturalization examiners will decide whether an applicant can knowingly take the oath. The examiners are not required to have college degrees, though immigration officials say most have them. +They receive 14 weeks of training at an academy in Georgia to qualify for the task. Immigrants whose applications are denied can reapply or file an appeal to the immigration service. +Advocates for disabled immigrants say the immigration service has taken such a long time to issue the regulations that many immigrants who are ultimately able to become citizens because of the new waivers of the English and civics tests will not be able to do so before the deadline for losing their benefits. +They will be joining a general stampede to citizenship at a time when the immigration service's processing of citizenship applications has slowed because of the huge volume, an obsolete computer system and more stringent procedures for criminal background checks. There are now about a million people in line to become citizens, and the wait has grown to nine months or more, immigration officials say. +"These regulations are too little, too late," said Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican from Miami who is herself a naturalized citizen. "This bill was passed in October 1994 and it's taken the I.N.S. two and a half years to come out with regulations. We've had thousands of constituents twisting in the wind in that time." +Mr. O'Reilly, of the immigration service, said that he wishes the rules could have been prepared more quickly but that immigration officials had to engage in time-consuming consultations with several federal agencies, as well as advocates for the immigrants. +"It would have been nice if they had come out sooner, but this is the Government," he said. "We have so many bases we have to touch." +As to whether the immigration service will be able to process the applications of the disabled before the benefits cutoff deadline, Mr. O'Reilly said, "The I.N.S. will adjudicate the cases as fairly as possible and will try to complete as many as we can by August, but there are no guarantees, of course." +For the families of mentally incompetent immigrants who are likely to lose their benefits, the new rules are a frightening jolt. +Luz Gross, an 88-year-old widow from the Dominican Republic, is one of those with severe Alzheimer's. She lives alone in an apartment in Washington Heights, a tiny, stooped woman whose lips are sunken and whose home attendant had neatly brushed her hair into a ponytail and painted her nails on a recent day. Mrs. Gross receives $570 a month from Supplemental Security Income. +With help from her social worker, Patricia Hernandez-Kenis, who works at a geriatric clinic that is part of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, Mrs. Gross applied for citizenship last month, but it seems unlikely she will qualify. +Asked when she was born, Mrs. Gross said, "When I came to the United States, I wasn't born." Asked if she wanted to become a citizen, she began talking about her childhood when she lived close to the sea in Santo Domingo. +Mrs. Gross's only child, Felix, is 72 himself, retired and living on $10,320 a year from Social Security and a small union pension he earned after working for 18 years as a building handyman in Manhattan. He visits his mother every day, repairing whatever breaks in her apartment and watching television with her. +But he said he cannot afford to support her. And there is no room for her to live in his small one-bedroom apartment. +"I feel in denial," he said. "I can't believe this is happening." + +LOAD-DATE: March 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Fredesvinda Marmol, 81, an immigrant with Alzheimer's disease. New rules could prevent her from becoming a naturalized citizen. (Librado Romero/The New York Times) (pg. B6) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +151 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 19, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +COMPANY NEWS; +MARRIOTT INTERNATIONAL UNIT SELLING 29 PROPERTIES + +SECTION: Section D; Page 4; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 118 words + +DATELINE: Reuters + +A subsidiary of Marriott International Inc. has agreed in principle to sell 29 of its residential communities for the elderly to the Host Marriott Corporation in a deal valued at about $540 million, the companies said yesterday. Under the agreement Marriott Senior Living Services would sell all of the common stock of Forum Group, which owns the communities, to Host Marriott. Host Marriott would pay about $433 million for the communities and has set up a $107 million plan to add 1,075 residential units by January 1999. Marriott International operates and franchises hotels. Host Marriott owns controlling interests in 83 upscale and luxury hotel properties. Both companies are based in Bethesda, Md. + +LOAD-DATE: March 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +152 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 20, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +When Money Counts + +BYLINE: By Marianne Rohrlich + +SECTION: Section C; Page 8; Column 3; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 289 words + +LIFE is uncertain enough. Why climb on a shaky chair or an unsteady carton to change the light bulb when you can rise to any household occasion safely with a well-balanced, easy-to-stow step stool? They come in all shapes and sizes, from a tall, dark and handsome model to a short-legged number disguised as a toolbox. +For the elderly or those with uncertain balance, any step stool poses a serious hazard. "Know yourself, know your limits," cautioned David Stern, the executive vice president of Jewish Association of Services to the Aged in New York. + Rubbermaid's plastic step-stool toolbox (No. 1) is 13 inches high and has a skid-resistant top and space for a full complement of tools. It can be ordered for $18.29, plus shipping, from the Everything Rubbermaid Store in Wooster, Ohio; (330) 264-7119. For local retailers, call (800) 643-3490. +The small nonskid three-step ladder (No. 2) by Polder has a rail to hold on to or to lean against. It is $59.98 at Zabar's, 2245 Broadway (80th Street). +An Italian-made double step (No. 4) has locking wheels. The banister is sturdy enough to grab, but not to lean against. It is $185 at MOMA Design Store, 44 West 53d Street. +After using the white metal and black rubber two-step stool (No. 5), you can fold it flat and hang it up. It is $39.99 at S. Feldman Housewares, 1304 Madison Avenue (93d Street). +A wooden step stool (No. 6), which doubles as a seat, is $49.98 at Zabar's. +Joyce Greenberg, an owner of Take Good Care, a health-care department store in Springfield, N.J., recommends a "reacher" for anyone for whom steps pose a risk. The Reach-It Grabber (No. 3) adds five feet to your reach. It is $34.99 at Gracious Home, 1220 Third Avenue (71st Street). + +LOAD-DATE: March 20, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo (David Corio for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +153 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 20, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Sometimes Mother Nature Knows Best + +BYLINE: By Susan Love; Susan Love is a breast surgeon and an adjunct associate professor of clinical surgery at U.C.L.A. She is the author, most recently, of "Dr. Susan Love's Hormone Book." + +SECTION: Section A; Page 25; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 1104 words + +DATELINE: LOS ANGELES + +Just as the baby boomers hit middle age, the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession have discovered a new disease: menopause, or as it is called clinically, estrogen deficiency disease. +That this diagnosis automatically applies to the 40 million women turning 50 over the next decade doesn't seem to bother the medical powers that be, especially since they have a remedy at hand: artificial replacement hormones. + It is true that women who have had hysterectomies may want to take hormones until the natural age of menopause. Other women have troubling symptoms like hot flashes and insomnia as they approach menopause that warrant treatment with hormones. No one has argued that short-term use of hormones is dangerous. +The symptoms before menopause are transient, a kind of puberty in reverse. After three to five years, women can gradually taper off the treatment and suffer no more symptoms. But now the push is on to use these drugs on a long-term basis, in the name of disease "prevention." From my position as a breast cancer surgeon, I worry that prolonged hormone treatment increases the risk of a woman developing breast cancer and other diseases. +Yet pharmaceutical companies have launched an expensive "educational" (read: advertising) campaign directed at both doctors and women. Premarin, an estrogen product made from the urine of pregnant horses, is already the biggest-selling drug in the United States. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology recommends that every postmenopausal woman should be on "replacement" hormones for the rest of her life unless she has a compelling medical reason not to be. +But this sweeping recommendation is based on inadequate scientific evidence. Menopause is not a disease; it is a normal part of life. A woman's ovaries don't shut down at menopause. They continue to produce low levels of hormones well into a woman's 80's. Synthetic hormones don't replace something that is missing when women reach menopause. They add something that is not naturally there. +Many gynecologists who favor long-term hormone therapy argue that as the average life expectancy has expanded, these drugs are necessary to maintain our health. Wrong. Women have long lived well beyond menopause into old age. Our ovaries are genetically programmed to shift gears. +Pharmaceutical companies have realized that in marketing their products to women it is smarter to emphasize diseases rather than the hormone treatment. Some advertisements warn women about conditions like osteoporosis, which occur in postmenopausal women. +In this effort, the companies are helped by the medical profession, which in recent years has redefined osteoporosis. The disease used to refer only to actual fractures caused by the thin bones of old women. Now osteoporosis is defined as low bone density. This is like telling someone with high cholesterol that he or she has heart disease. +Women are also encouraged to have bone-density tests just as they are encouraged to have mammograms or Pap smears. The result is an epidemic of healthy 50-year-old women being "diagnosed" with osteoporosis -- even though women on average don't have hip fractures until they turn 79. (Someone once said that if you are healthy, you haven't had enough tests done yet.) +There is some question whether a woman has to take hormones starting at age 50 to prevent these fractures. In a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, women who took hormones after the age of 50 had a better bone density at age 70 than women who had not taken the drugs or who had stopped taking them. +But the research also indicated that women who started taking hormones in their mid- to late 60's had almost the same bone density in their mid-70's as those who had taken them for 25 years. +The studies on osteoporosis are confusing; the data on heart disease are inconclusive. The most often quoted studies that claim estrogen prevents heart disease are based on studies observing women who are on hormones for whatever reason compared with women who are not on hormones. +True, the women on hormones have 50 percent less heart disease -- but they are also better educated, richer and more likely to see a doctor and take care of their health than the women not on hormones. Until a study takes these factors into account, we won't know whether hormones make women healthy, or whether healthy women take hormones. +There is one thing we do know: Taking hormones for more than 10 years could increase a woman's risk of developing breast cancer. The Nurse's Health Study, a definitive 14-year study of 122,000 nurses issued in 1995, estimated that women between ages 60 and 64 who took hormones for at least five years increased their risk of getting breast cancer by 71 percent. They increased their risk of dying of breast cancer by 45 percent. +Yet pharmaceutical companies defend their products by pointing out that one in three women dies of heart disease, while one in eight women gets breast cancer. Although this is true, it is important to note that in women younger than age 75 there are actually three times as many deaths from breast cancer as there are from heart disease. +If you take smokers out of the mix (smokers are more likely to develop early heart disease than nonsmokers), there are six times as many deaths from breast cancer as from heart disease for women under 75. +And several studies have concluded that hormones also increase the risk that women will develop blood clots and gall bladder disease. Uterine cancer is 14 times higher in women on estrogen alone and four times higher in women on both estrogen and progestins. +Estrogen therapy may prevent diseases, yet it could cause others. Are there women who could benefit from taking hormones for prevention? Probably. But should all postmenopausal women be on them? Certainly not. +Graham Colditz, one of the authors of the Nurse's Health study, estimates that 90 percent of heart disease cases could be eliminated if people changed their life style; this means encouraging women to exercise, watch their diet and quit smoking. But no one would get rich. And hormone therapy is, after all, about money, isn't it? +Merck and Wyeth Ayerst have announced a joint venture to develop "disease management" programs for women. I can imagine what these programs will suggest to postmenopausal women. +Women must redefine menopause as something natural. We need to make sure that we have accurate information and not wishful thinking. And we must be on our guard lest vested interests sell us a bill of goods. + +LOAD-DATE: March 20, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing. (Paula Scher) + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +154 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 21, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Giuliani Pushes Plan To Change Welfare Law + +BYLINE: By DAVID FIRESTONE + +SECTION: Section B; Page 2; Column 6; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 783 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 20 + +Faced with the impending cutoff of Federal benefits for 200,000 legal immigrants in New York City, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani came here today to lobby Senate Republicans for a change in the new welfare law that would minimize the effect on immigrants already in the country. +The Mayor met with his on-and-off rival, Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato of New York, who said he agreed with Mr. Giuliani on the need for a "grandfather" provision that would allow legal immigrants already in the United States to retain the right to receive food stamps and Supplemental Security Income, which provides benefits to the elderly and disabled. Under the current law, legal immigrants who are not citizens will lose these benefits on Aug. 22. + The two officials also spoke to Senator Trent Lott, the Republican majority leader, whom they described as noncommittal but willing to consider the idea. +A telephone message to Mr. Lott seeking comment was not returned. +Mr. Giuliani and other like-minded governors and mayors face an uphill battle in persuading Congress to consider such a major change to the welfare law, which was signed by President Clinton last fall. Not only are many conservative legislators opposed to the idea but the proposal also could cost more than $2 billion a year and would complicate budget negotiations now taking place. The removal of benefits from immigrants represents about 44 percent of the $54.6 billion savings in the welfare law. +Senator D'Amato, who voted for the welfare bill, said that passage of a grandfather provision would be "tough," because of the budgetary impact, but that he was more optimistic that the Aug. 22 date could be delayed by as much as a year to cushion the impact on immigrants, and on the cities and states likely to pick up much of the cost. The four states most affected by the cutoff are New York, California, Florida and Texas. +In a speech to an immigration conference today, Mayor Giuliani asserted that preserving basic benefits for immigrants who pay taxes represents the most elemental level of governmental fairness. +"You don't treat people unfairly like that," he said in an address to the Center for Migration Studies at Georgetown University, which presented him an award for his pro-immigration positions. "A government that does that changes the nature of the kind of government that it is. If you're going to let people in and charge them the full rates you charge anyone else, then if they have difficulties, as some percentage of them will have because human life is not perfect, then they should be treated in exactly the same way." +City officials say there are about 75,000 legal immigrants in New York City now receiving S.S.I. benefits, and an additional 135,000 people receiving food stamps. Because the city and the state are considered obligated under the State Constitution to pick up the cost of those benefits, the cutoff could cost the two New York governments about $450 million a year, according to Giuliani administration estimates. +President Clinton has also urged Congress to restore benefits for legal immigrants, as have several governors, including George E. Pataki of New York. But Republican Congressional leaders have been skeptical. +Representative E. Clay Shaw Jr. of Florida, chairman of a key House subcommittee that controls the issue, said recently that the welfare bill would not be reopened and that restoring benefits would be too costly. He has proposed a two- or three-year block grant to states to help elderly or disabled immigrants, but the solution would be temporary. +Senator D'Amato said a delay in the cutoff -- the Mayor's second choice, after the grandfather provision -- might allow more immigrants to become citizens, although many of those affected are too disabled to take the oath. If they are cut off from benefits, Mr. Giuliani said, it could change the image of America. +"The message would become that America is an unfair place to come to, because it takes your money and it doesn't treat you fairly," the Mayor said in his speech, his voice crackling from a cold. "That would be a different kind of America than the one that built up over 200 years." +The Mayor, joined by Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, also met with Attorney General Janet Reno to urge the Justice Department not to overturn a new state law that gives the Chancellor more power to supervise community school districts. The department has been investigating whether the school governance law violates the Federal Voting Rights Act, but the Mayor contended that the act was not applicable. +Ms. Reno, who also met with Mr. Crew last week, said she would issue her decision soon, city officials said. + +LOAD-DATE: March 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +155 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 21, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Afraid to Compromise + +SECTION: Section A; Page 30; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 473 words + +The Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, took a chance last week when he called for a commission to reduce cost-of-living adjustments, an act that would lower Social Security benefits and raise income taxes. This would be a sensible, fair way to cut the deficit. President Clinton and Vice President Gore dismissed the idea, afraid to take on factions of their party that want no part of slowing Social Security increases. +Mr. Clinton had a second chance to forge a budget compromise this week when the Republican leaders Newt Gingrich, Pete Domenici and Tom DeLay broke with the conservative wing of their party by offering to drop for now the G.O.P.'s huge proposed tax cuts, the centerpiece of the Republican economic strategy. Again, Mr. Clinton made no equivalent concession. + This is a sorry turn of affairs. The Republicans are unlikely to take any more risks if the White House refuses to back their initial, timid steps toward a responsible budget this year. +Until Mr. Lott's move, budget negotiations were at an impasse. Both parties knew they could never fulfill their pledge to balance the budget in five years -- a regrettable pledge, in this page's view -- unless they chipped away at entitlements through a cut in cost-of-living adjustments. +Such a cut is justified because many economists believe the adjustments overstate the actual increases in the cost of living. But neither side would say so first, fearing a backlash from the elderly and other taxpayers. The deadlock appeared unbreakable until Mr. Lott spoke up. Sadly, Mr. Clinton refused to align himself with Mr. Lott, blaming the lack of bipartisan support. But the best way to create support is for the President to make the case for change. +The White House missed a similar chance to back away from harmful tax cuts. For months now, Democrats have criticized the G.O.P.'s proposed $200 billion tax cut that would be offset by equally huge cuts in welfare and other spending programs for the needy. Mr. Clinton knew that tax cuts have no logical place in a deficit-reduction plan, yet he felt politically compelled to offer his own, smaller tax-cut proposals during an election year. +This week Mr. Gingrich and friends offered the White House a risk-free way to drop tax cuts completely. The speaker suggested that the Republicans forgo tax cuts until after Congress passes a balanced-budget plan. Then the G.O.P. would reopen a fight for tax cuts, along with spending reductions to keep the budget balanced. Instead of embracing the idea and dropping his own tax-cut plan, Mr. Clinton merely called Mr. Gingrich's comments "a positive sign" and sought bipartisan talks. +Voters have a right to expect their President to lead Congress out of budgetary gridlock. Mr. Clinton ought to recognize the Republican offers as a good place to start. + +LOAD-DATE: March 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +156 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 22, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Health Chief Quits to Take Job as Adviser In Washington + +BYLINE: By DAVID FIRESTONE + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 26; Column 6; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 398 words + +Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, the City Health Commissioner, resigned yesterday after five years on the job to take a senior position in the Clinton Administration, city officials said yesterday. +She will become Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation of the Federal Department of Health and Human Services, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. In her new position, Dr. Hamburg will be the senior policy official in the sprawling department, and one of the principal advisers to Donna E. Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services. + As Assistant Secretary, she will be responsible for strategic planning as well as budgetary and legislative issues, and will help determine the long-range direction of the department rather than administer specific agencies. +Dr. Hamburg declined to comment yesterday on her resignation, which she presented personally to the Mayor and which is effective April 15. No successor has been named. +Dr. Hamburg, 41, was one of the few city commissioners appointed by former Mayor David N. Dinkins who was asked to stay on when Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani took office in 1994. She had been a deputy commissioner in the department when she become Acting Commissioner in 1991, and was named Commissioner the next year -- the youngest Health Commissioner in city history and the third woman in the position. +She has a long background in public health, having served as assistant director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one of the National Institutes of Health. A native New Yorker, she is married and has two children. +As Health Commissioner, Dr. Hamburg was best known for developing a tuberculosis control program that produced sharp declines in the incidence of the disease in New York. The program, recently cited as an international model by the World Health Organization, has produced an 82 percent decline in the drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis since 1992. +Also under her tenure, child immunization rates rose in the city, and the number of AIDS cases declined. She was often seen at City Hall news conferences urging senior citizens to get their flu shots, or parents to get their children immunized. +Officials described her parting as amicable and said she had planned to stay with the city until she was recruited by the Clinton Administration for a high-ranking position. + +LOAD-DATE: March 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +157 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 23, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Final Days, at Home + +BYLINE: By BARBARA STEWART + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 1; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 3026 words + +JOHN CLAUSE always urged his children to settle close to his Hasbrouck Heights home and, with his generosity and jokes, made them want to. Now dying of Parkinson's disease, suffering the effects of strokes and dementia, bedridden and unable to remember his wife's or daughters' names, he is still the center of the home and the focus of the family. +One or another of his three daughters, their husbands and his five grandchildren are continually dropping by to see him. Opening the front door, they immediately peer through the living room into the back room where he lies, where he has lain for more than a year. At 89 pounds, down from 200, he barely makes a dent under the neatly tucked blue flannel sheets. He lies on his back, motionless except for his eyes, huge and expressive in his skeletal head, which seek out and follow the movements of his family, especially his wife, Ann. + Family members gather around Mr. Clause, now 74, as if he were a newborn baby -- rubbing and patting, cooing and singing. +"Hey, Pop," crooned Debra DeVoe, his middle daughter, stroking his sunken cheek on a recent afternoon. Donna Rizzo, the eldest, reached over and adjusted his homemade plaid flannel nightshirt. Ann Clause stood to the side, smiling slightly, as her husband's dark, liquid eyes darted around the room before resting on her face. +For five years, Mrs. Clause has cared for her husband of a half-century as he has gradually deteriorated. The care of her husband has absorbed all her time, day and night. She has become isolated from friends. Her blood pressure has risen. She is frequently depressed, has gained weight and is exhausted all the time. She can't even take long breaks to duck away and cry. The expenses are diminishing her finances. She longs for and dreads the end. +She is one of countless thousands who give months or years of their lives to care for dying family members at home. These are the unpaid care givers who must balance the intensity of death with the mundane, endless chores of nursing -- all day, every day, with few breaks. +Like Mrs. Clause, a majority of these people are over 65 years old and female. Except for hospice services, which counsel and provide palliative medical care and equipment during a dying person's final six months, Medicare and private insurance -- with rare exceptions -- do not cover home health care. Care givers take on the exhausting job because nursing homes can bankrupt them and because they want the patient at home, for their own and the patient's sake. While Medicaid may cover nursing-home expenses for the poor, older people who are not impoverished frequently must spend or give away most of their assets to qualify for subsidized -- and very expensive -- nursing-home care. +With modern medical care, a terminal illness can slip almost imperceptibly from merely annoying to incapacitating, as it did with Mr. Clause. +Four or five years ago, as his health declined, his gait slowed. He began to shuffle. His fingers fumbled as he pulled on a sweater from his huge collection. He began to mumble, and forget. As he worsened, he hallucinated and wandered. Dressing, feeding and supervising him became an overwhelming chore. +"It was like having an 18-month-old," Mrs. Clause said. "He'd go out the door. He'd turn the gas jets on full. He'd fall down and hit his head and cut his face." +It was easier, in a way, when he could no longer walk. She helped him into his wheelchair and pushed it until he could no longer sit up. Like a wary swimmer slowly slipping a toe into chilly water, each day he has seemed to step a little further from his corporeal and emotional ties -- forgetting where he is, who is with him, seeing angelic visions on the wall. As he has lain in bed, Mrs. Clause has tended to him -- feeding, washing, turning, administering medications. Mr. Clause is unable to name the woman caring for him, but he is almost certainly aware that she belongs to him, and he to her. +Many times Mrs. Clause has expected her husband to die before dawn. Family members have crowded into the living room to pray and grieve and wait out the night. Each time Mr. Clause has rallied, surviving to deteriorate further. "He's my Energizer Bunny," said Mrs. Clause, her voice sweet, with an edge of exhaustion. +The family never debated whether to put Mr. Clause into a nursing home. This was the uniformed merchant mariner who so dazzled 18-year-old Ann at the Passaic Armory dance that she never bothered to meet her blind date. This is the father who, after Sunday dinners, would play songs on the piano -- "the corny ones, 'Five foot two, eyes of blue,' " said Jonni, his youngest daughter -- and who would advise his teen-agers' friends as they gravitated to the Clause house. +"I couldn't imagine walking out and leaving him," Mrs. Clause said of nursing home care. "It would definitely kill me." +At home someone is there, always, to meticulously bathe and soothe Mr. Clause and to catch and wonder over his every mouthed word. "We really listen," Mrs. Rizzo said. "We don't want to miss a minute. He does, too. He opens his eyes and looks right at you. He doesn't know our names. But he knows he trusts us. We tell him: 'This is your home. You are home.' " + +Life Span Increases; Death Is More Complex + At the turn of the century, virtually all Americans died at home. The primary causes of death were injury, infection and parasitic diseases. Half of all women died in childbirth, half the men of work-related injuries. Influenza and pneumonia were common killers. Life expectancy was 47. Most dying people lingered a few weeks or months, almost always nursed by female family members. +Today the primary causes of death are degenerative diseases like heart disease, cancer and emphysema. Life expectancy is 77. A person with a terminal illness may linger for years, in need of increasingly intensive care. "It is not an emergency," said Marilyn Webb, author of "The Good Death: The New American Search to Reshape the End of Life, " to be published this fall by Bantam Books. +"It's a way of life," she said. "The dying process goes on so long. Caretaking becomes overwhelming, confusing, exhausting. It's the hidden impact of great medical successes." +After World War II, most terminally ill people went to hospitals to die. Now, 77 percent of Americans die in institutions, a majority in hospitals. For people whose illnesses are too advanced to try to cure, who need only palliative care, hospital care may be unnecessary. +"The imperative in a hospital is to save lives," said Dr. Steven Schroeder, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, which studies health and health care and recently completed a study called Support, a analysis of 4,301 terminally ill patients who died in hospitals. "It is not a good place to die. A large proportion of people die in pain. The hospital wards are busy; the nurses and doctors are busy. They're surrounded by people they don't know. They're not with their loved ones." +Certainly, if the needs of both the family and the patient can be met reasonably well, most terminally ill people would prefer to stay home. But that's a big if. The terminally ill person needs an adequate home, attentive care, sufficient pain medication and, frequently, specialized medical equipment and doctors' visits. Many worry, with justification, about burdening their families and draining their finances. Family members worry about becoming overwhelmed with stress, neglecting themselves and their spouses and children, losing savings on medical care and hired aides, and losing income. +"If you're living behind six locks and can't go to the deli for food, nursing homes can be liberating, like summer camp," said Joanne Lynn, director fof the Center to Improve Dying in Washington. +Nursing homes provide meals and palliative care but cannot give the close attention an attentive care giver can offer at home. At least as important is the comfort most people feel at home, the sense of belonging that cannot be quantified. +"You have much more control of your day-to-day bodily processes," said Dr. Schroeder, describing the advantages to the dying person. "You're minimally hooked up to machines. You're likely to be with people and things you love -- pets, neighbors, family. You have direct control over pain medication. You eat when and what you want. You can have the music you want. It's much quieter." +But someone, usually a family member, must provide or oversee care, which is demanding, often round-the-clock work. Several studies indicate that 30 percent of families with terminally ill members, either at home or in hospitals, lose most or all their savings. In 1 of 4 families, a primary care giver has to quit work or make another major life change, further reducing household income. And until a doctor has given the patient six months or less to live, the family is frequently on its own to patch together care. +Those expected to die within that time can receive Medicare-covered help from a network of hospice centers offering pain medication, medical advice and on-call care, equipment like hospital beds, and psychological and spiritual counseling for the terminally ill and their families. Many care givers say hospice made the seemingly impossible task possible. +"By myself, I just couldn't have," said Janet Frins, who has drastically cut her hours managing a dentist's office to care for her 81-year-old mother, who has a brain tumor. Many care givers feel the same way. + +Those Who Give Care Not Well Themselves +But care givers, not hospice workers, must provide bedside nursing. Although for-profit and hospice home care is the most rapidly growing segment of health care -- hospice care is available throughout New Jersey -- many regions have no hospice. Of the 2.2 million people who died in the United States last year, only 300,000 received hospice care, and a majority received care for less than six months. +In the United States, more than 7 million spouses, adult children, friends and relatives provide long-term care to the elderly each year, without pay. Most of those people care for a terminally ill family member for at least a year, according to a study by the Families U.S.A. Foundation, a nonprofit organization for health-care consumers in Washington. A vast majority of care givers are women. Half are over age 65; one-third are in poor health themselves. A high percentage have developed chronic depression, insomnia, stress-related illness and exhaustion, according to a survey by the National Family Caregivers Association in Kensington, Md. Frustration and feelings of isolation are common. In New Jersey, hired aides cost about $15 an hour, making their regular use prohibitively expensive for most families. +"It's a 24-hour-job, no respite," Ms. Lynn said. "It's not a role that enjoys a lot of favor; we don't even want to talk about it. But almost all, especially women, will have that role." +When she was caring for a terminally ill father-in-law, people thought it was "odd, excessively ethical behavior to take him in," she said. +" But when my child was sick," she said, "people couldn't accommodate fast enough. +Dr. Ira Byock, president of the American Academy of Hospice Physicians and author of "Dying Well: The Prospect of Growth at the End of Life" (Riverhead Books, 1997), said: "It's constant attention to basic needs: going to the bathroom, brushing teeth, showering, shaving, cooking. It takes a toll on your time and schedule and sleep patterns and emotions. It is tough and gritty and hard work. I cannot glorify or romanticize this experience. +"But it goes to the core of what it means to be a family: caring for each other because to do otherwise would be unnatural," he said. "It can be extremely valuable to the care giver, knowing the dying person was cared for in a way that meets their standards, and was being honored and cherished in their passing." +Dying people fear physical agony and abandonment, Dr. Schroeder said. "If they're lucky, they've got a loved one who can give them medicine, meals, toileting, keep them out of pain. Those that aren't lucky are likely to die in the hospital." +Anne Langdon, 68, known to her four children as the General, used to repair the plumbing, drop the ceilings and talk shop with the man at the hardware story. "She was very, very strong and very independent," said Suzanne Congdon, her eldest daughter, who lives in Harrington Park, where she and her two sisters and brother grew up. +Maybe the loss of her independence was what made Mrs. Langdon miserable when she spent a few weeks in a nursing home after lung cancer was diagnosed. "She was a johnny one-note," said Mrs. Congdon. " 'When am I going home?' " +The children worked out a system. Mrs. Congdon, who lives nearby with her husband and two children, would quit her part-time library job to care for her mother. Her sisters, who live out of state, would compensate her for the lost wages. +But nursing her mother took enormous amounts of time. She was rarely home. Her 13-year-old son, an honor-roll student, started bringing home C's and D's. She would go home to find him in front of the television set eating crackers and cookies. "I was neglecting them terribly," she said. +She made rules. She would be home weekdays between 3 and 5 P.M. A sitter or her 83-year-old father, unable to handle much nursing, would watch her mother. She hung a big calendar in the kitchen and scheduled the days her siblings were on duty a month in advance. "It's like having a baby," she said. "You can plan your brains out, but it doesn't mean it's going to work." +For 14 months, her own household chores have given way to her caretaking duties. "My house is a disaster. I drag big bags of laundry here and try to do it when the home health aide is on. I feel like I've aged." When she had surgery last summer for a pre-cancerous pancreatic tumor, she cut her convalescence short to return to her post. +Her brother and two sisters, who spell Ms. Congdon about three days each twice a month, are also strained. +"My life is, I work, I take care of my mother," said a sister, Jeanne Langdon, an environmental prosecutor in Delaware. "My work has suffered, very much. My house has gone to hell in a handbasket." +Mrs. Langdon's children -- and, experts say, most families grappling with terminal illness -- did not debate or plan for their mother's long-term care. "At this time she needs me," Jeanne Langdon said. "It was never a decision. It was one situation at a time. We've been adapting to each change of circumstances." +The ceaseless, gritty chores have the advantage of making people forget what is really going on, forget that it is their mother or husband slipping from life. But during breaks, they have time to feel the emotions. That's when the grief or anger can be overwhelming. +Pat Roberts, a nurse from Paramus, loves caring for the sick. From childhood, she never wanted to do anything else. Her father, Sal LoPinto, is dying of congestive heart failure and liver cancer. She moved in to care for him. When Mr. LoPinto's catheter fell out, she could insert it expertly. When he fell and broke his hand, she could diagnose and bandage it. She can track the course of his illness with precision, picking up on symptoms that would bewilder a lay person, and with a nurse's efficiency, even keeps the rooms immaculate. +But at night, she says, she becomes frightened. This is not just another patient. This is her father. By day, little problems shake her. "Monday night, the garage door broke," she said, placing a doughnut in front of her father, who sat in a wheelchair at the kitchen table. "The dog came in covered in tar. I had to bathe him outside. That's what makes me cry -- stupid things. That's when I feel overwhelmed." +The question of how much of a family's resources -- time, money, attention -- should be devoted to a terminally ill member is given short shrift by medical ethicists. Unlike assisted suicide, for example, it is a quiet issue. But it is one that far more people, at some time in their lives, are likely to face. +"How far can people be expected to go to help others?" said Daniel Callahan, co-founder of the Hastings Institute in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., a biomedical ethics research center. "The concern is when the care begins to destroy the care taker." +Managed-care organizations are insisting patients shorten hospital stays and be cared for at home or nursing institutions. Nursing homes are not being built fast enough to keep up with the demand. The proposed Federal budget includes disproportionate cuts in home care -- 13 percent of Medicare's cuts, as opposed to 6 percent for nursing homes -- and more restrictive time limits. +In addition, hospices, under pressure from the Federal Government, are getting stricter about adhering to their six-month limit. Although a majority of patients use hospice far fewer days than are allotted -- the national average stay is 37 days -- people who survive too long may be cut from hospice services. Last week, Hackensack Medical Center dropped John Clause from its hospice because, as Patricia Puchalik, the director, put it, "he wasn't progressing fast enough." Mr. Clause has received only three months of Medicare-covered services, but hospice workers were concerned he would run out of benefits when his condition worsened. Mrs. Clause, who is unable to lift or turn or bathe her husband, had relied on hospice workers, who came two hours a day. Now she will have to pay for this help, as well as $600 a month for the hospital bed, unless it is determined to be medically necessary. +The government, in short, says Mr. Clause is living longer than he should. Therefore the family must get along without Medicare-covered hospice services. Mrs. Clause's only choice is to push herself harder. In the future, more American families will share her plight, one way or another, Mr. Callahan said. +"Families will be more burdened," he said. "The question is how to live out our ancient, but still viable, still important, obligation." + +LOAD-DATE: March 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Pat Roberts of Paramus, tucking in her father, Sal LoPinto, who is dying of cancer. Those who give relatives long-term care at home often find themselves suffering from depression or other stress-related illnesses. (Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times)(pg. 1); Eileen Ford, a cousin who is also a nurse, helps Rita LoPinto at her Paramus home. Mrs. LoPinto, whose husband is also seriously ill, suffers from Alzheimer's disease; Family photos on a living room table just outside the room where John Clause lies gravely ill in a rented hospital bed. His wife, Ann, has cared for him at home for several years. (Photographs by Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times)(pg. 9) + +Graphs: "Care Without Pay" +In 1993, a study found that the vast majority of elderly Americans receiving long-term care at home got only unpaid help from family and friends. Graphs show demographics. (Source: Families USA Foundation)(pg. 9) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +158 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 24, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Accidental Author: From Doily Maker to Literary Light + +BYLINE: By TRIP GABRIEL + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1486 words + +DATELINE: MANHATTAN, Kan., March 23 + +The nation's latest literary sensation is used to spending days watching soap operas, napping in the afternoon and fashioning lacy bookmarks for each new member of her church. +She has lived a simple, homespun life rearing eight children and, before retirement, working in a laundry and as a nurse's aide. + But nothing has been simple since word got around publishing circles two weeks ago about the memoir that Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux wrote at age 80, describing the quietly heroic struggles of a woman to win her independence while in a bitter marriage to an alcoholic. +A barrage of phone calls has come from publishers, agents and television producers. Family members, for whom Mrs. Foveaux (pronounced FOH-voh) originally wrote her memories in longhand nearly 20 years ago, have gathered from as far as Georgia and Minnesota. Television crews invaded her tiny, immaculately kept house, where there is a 1977 Jimmy Carter calendar on the wall. +On Thursday she learned that after a frenzied book auction 1,500 miles away in another Manhattan, Warner Books had bought her 208-page memoir, "The Life of Jessie Lee Brown From Birth Up to 80," for more than $1 million. +And last week the mayor of Manhattan, a town of 60,000 on the broken brown prairie along the Kansas River, proclaimed a day in Mrs. Foveaux's honor. +It was too overwhelming for the snowy-haired author, a great-great-grandmother who last week turned 98. A party for her scheduled for today had to be canceled when she was hospitalized with exhaustion and a sinus infection on Friday. A new digital hearing aid, her one indulgence since becoming a celebrity, may have been partly to blame. It amplified sounds so intensely that even a mouse inside the walls could be heard, and gave her a headache. +"When you're used to sitting quietly and making doilies, it's all too much," said Joan Foveaux, the wife of one of Mrs. Foveaux's 14 grandchildren. +Mrs. Foveaux's rather stunned emergence into the literary spotlight offers a striking lesson in how publishing works at a time when commercial success is so closely tied to attention in the news media. +Publishers who took part in the auction said the high price paid the unknown author was in part a result of the recent success of other memoirs by older people, like "Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years." But they said the real coin of the realm was the built-in publicity that Mrs. Foveaux's book arrives with. +Her life story first came to light in a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal on March 7, which imbued her Kansas struggles with a mythic quality. Had her manuscript arrived unsolicited at major publishing houses, it almost surely would have been ignored. But the national attention conferred by the newspaper set off frantic efforts to buy the book, even before publishers had read a full paragraph. +The frenzied tone was echoed by Sue Carswell, a senior editor at Simon & Schuster's Pocket Books, who predicted in a second Wall Street Journal article on March 14 that the auction would be "the biggest day in publishing this year." Adding fuel to the fire, word spread that "60 Minutes" planned a story about Mrs. Foveaux timed to publication day in the fall, one of the greatest marketing send-offs a book can have. +"It's absolute gold," said an agent who competed unsuccessfully to represent the book and spoke on condition of anonymity. "It sets off all the commercial bells." +Carolyn Reidy, the president and publisher of Simon & Schuster's trade division, said: "This is not about the insight of the book. It's about how we try to sell them. If she didn't have this flush of publicity, I doubt it would have gotten past an editor." +None of these doings in elite Manhattan media circles mean much to the residents of hard-working Manhattan, Kan., an agricultural center and home of Kansas State University about two hours west of Kansas City. On Saturday, after recuperating for a night at Memorial Hospital, Mrs. Foveaux was helped back into the single-story house on Thurston Street where she has lived 74 years. "I feel much stronger than I did yesterday," she said. "The phone was ringing from 8 o'clock on the 7th until I left the house. It was getting on my nerves." Her fingernails were freshly manicured and her skin had a translucent glow. Despite her frailness, she shows a remarkable independence of spirit. +Her three surviving children have pleaded with her to move in with them, especially after she broke a hip two years ago, but Mrs. Foveaux insists on living on her own. She makes her bed each morning, then puts a kettle on for oatmeal. She has refused to let family members buy her a dishwasher or a clothes dryer. +Family members scoffed at the possibility that she might move to a bigger house. "She wouldn't move if we bought her six of them," said her son Marion Foveaux, 62, a retired crane operator who looks in on her two or three times a day. Mrs. Foveaux said she would donate some money to the First Baptist Church and to home care and hospice groups. She could think of almost nothing she wanted for herself. +Her mind seemed sharp and she displayed a sly sense of humor. Asked if she would now buy cars and houses for her relatives, she shot back, "They didn't help me, did they?" As a dozen family members burst into nervous laughter, Mrs. Foveaux smiled serenely. +"To tell the truth," she said, "I haven't decided on what I want to do. I imagine it'll be like everyone else that ever got into a mess like this." +Her memoir, which she never intended for publication, was written while she attended a class at Manhattan's Adult Learning Center taught by Charley Kempthorne, who was also a part-time farmer. "This story just poured out," Mr. Kempthorne recalled. "She had bottled it up for many, many years." +Married at age 20 to Bill Foveaux, a World War I veteran, Mrs. Foveaux had child after child while her husband sank into heavy drinking, sometimes landing in jail after fights. He was unable to support the family, so she took a series of menial jobs. Reluctant to seek a divorce at a time it was considered shameful, she finally went to court to end the marriage in the early 1940's. +"I made up my mind to live my life so that I need not be ashamed to look at myself in the mirror," she wrote. +Over the years, photocopies of her manuscript circulated beyond her extended family, nearly all of whom know her as "Granny." In 1994 Mr. Kempthorne wrote to a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Clare Ansberry, pitching an idea for an article about family history writing, and later sent along Mrs. Foveaux's work. +The day the first news article appeared, Marion Foveaux recalled, "Granny called me at 8 in the morning and said, 'Marion, come up because there's something going on here I don't understand.' +"Everyone was calling, clear for a week. Book companies, movie companies, TV companies, agents. You'd get one name scribbled down and hang up and it would ring again." +Mr. Foveaux hired a local lawyer, and together they picked a New York City agent, Laurie E. Liss, who had represented the self-published best seller "The Christmas Box." Almost 20 publishers were originally reported ready to bid in the auction. Warner Books, a unit of Time Warner, won the right to top the best offer by setting a $375,000 floor price. But by last Wednesday, the number of bidders dropped to four and Simon & Schuster was notably absent, even though three of its divisions had initially shown interest. +Ballantine, a division of Random House, dropped out at a bid of $750,000. Another division, Villard, declined to get involved. "The piece about her was more interesting than the book," said David Rosenthal, Villard's publisher. +Seven people reviewed the manuscript for Simon & Schuster and ultimately came to a similar conclusion. "It was so boring it was unbelievable," said a Simon & Schuster executive, who insisted on anonymity. +The word at Simon & Schuster was that Mrs. Foveaux's prose needed heavy rewriting. Penguin USA also passed on the manuscript, though its executive director, Cathy D. Hemming, was more charitable: "pretty raw and rough, but absolutely compelling." +But at Warner Books, the manuscript struck Claire Zion, the editor who acquired it, as the "very plain, very clear" writing of an everyday heroine. "We're not going to touch it because we feel it's evocative and emotionally powerful," Ms. Zion said. "We in New York try to sit here and think what the country is thinking. This is Kansas talking." +Back in the other Manhattan, Mrs. Foveaux and her family are united in asserting that the windfall and sudden celebrity will change little about their lives and not cause familial dissension. "We like to keep things simple and calm," Joan Foveaux, 52, said. "Yesterday was yesterday and today's today and nothing's changed. Grandma's still grandma." + +NAME: Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux + +LOAD-DATE: March 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux, in her Manhattan, Kan., home, gets a hug from her granddaughter, Linda Rutledge Clavin, who lives in Georgia. (Chris Ochsner for The New York Times)(pg. D7) + + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +159 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 25, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Clinton to Offer New Steps to Eliminate Fraud in Health Care + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 17; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1071 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 24 + +President Clinton will soon propose new steps to crack down on health care fraud, following the discovery that many doctors still receive Medicare payments after their licenses have been revoked or they have been expelled from Medicare for professional misconduct. +Administration officials said Mr. Clinton would announce the legislative proposals in a ceremony at the White House on Tuesday. + In a new report, June Gibbs Brown, inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, found there was "no centralized source of information" on state actions revoking the licenses of doctors, dentists and other practitioners. As a result, Ms. Brown said, Medicare, the health care program for the elderly, and Medicaid, the program for the poor, often continue paying doctors who have lost their licenses. +The report also said the Administration had not carried out laws passed in 1996 and 1987 to help exclude unscrupulous doctors from Medicare and other Federal health care programs. +Under the Federal law passed last year, the Secretary of Health and Human Services was supposed to establish "a national health care fraud and abuse data collection program for the reporting of final adverse actions against health care providers, suppliers or practitioners." The law set a Jan. 1 deadline for the new program, but Federal health officials said that it had not yet been established. +Representative Christopher Shays, the Connecticut Republican who heads a subcommittee that monitors the Department of Health and Human Services, said today, "We will follow up on this, not to criticize the department, but to encourage prompt action." +The inspector general expelled 1,937 health care providers from Medicare for various offenses last year, double the number expelled in 1993 and four times the number barred in 1988. +Medicare officials have no estimate of how much these providers collected in Medicare payments. But the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said recently that fraud and abuse accounted for perhaps 3 percent to 10 percent of all Medicare outlays, or $6 billion to $20 billion of the $197 billion Medicare paid last year. +In her report, Ms. Brown said: "Better controls are needed to prevent improper payments. Without improved controls, unsuspecting beneficiaries are vulnerable to the dangers of unfit and unscrupulous health care providers." +The huge sums spent under Medicare and Medicaid have proved irresistibly attractive to dishonest health care practitioners. In the last decade, Congress has repeatedly tightened the laws governing these programs, giving new powers to the Secretary of Health and Human Services to detect fraud and abuse. But scam artists have devised ever more clever schemes to outwit auditors and prosecutors. +For example, doctors move easily from state to state, Ms. Brown said. Thus, she said, "it is possible for providers who hold licenses in more than one state to have one license suspended or revoked by a state licensing board, and then relocate and continue to treat Medicare patients in another state." +In one instance, Federal investigators said that Medicare paid $172,000 for services provided in Virginia by a doctor who had lost his license in Maryland and been forbidden to practice in New York and Ohio. +The doctor's patients are probably unaware of the disciplinary actions taken against him, the inspector general said. +Such health care providers "can endanger the lives of beneficiaries and should not be allowed to further abuse our health care system," Ms. Brown said. +One of the measures to be announced by Mr. Clinton would require doctors and other health care providers to list their Social Security numbers when they apply for permission to participate in Medicare or Medicaid. Doctors, home health agencies and medical supply companies often circumvent existing law by using different names to re-enter the programs after being expelled for fraud or other offenses. +The President will also ask Congress to close what he describes as loopholes, including one that has allowed some health care providers to avoid civil fines and other penalties by declaring bankruptcy. +White House documents show that Mr. Clinton will also propose these steps: +*Hospitals, health maintenance organizations, home health agencies and medical equipment companies would be prohibited from hiring anyone who had been expelled from Medicare for misconduct and not been reinstated. +*Any health care provider convicted of a felony could be expelled from Medicare and Medicaid, regardless of whether the crime was related to health care. +*Providers expelled from Medicare or Medicaid could not re-enter the programs for at least six months, and they would first have to correct all the deficiencies for which they were cited. +In 1987, Congress required states to inform the Federal Government of "any negative action" taken by state authorities against doctors or other practitioners. +States were supposed to notify the Federal Government whenever they reprimanded or censured doctors or revoked their licenses. +But Ms. Brown found that the 1987 law "has not been implemented." As a result, she said, the "data bases that contain exclusion and adverse licensure actions are incomplete and inaccessible," making it difficult for Federal authorities to halt payments to doctors who have lost their licenses or been found incompetent. +Bruce C. Vladeck, administrator of the Federal Health Care Financing Administration for the last four years, agreed with many of the inspector general's recommendations. +"Licensing of health care professionals is a state responsibility, and most states have at best a very rudimentary system for maintaining and sharing licensure information with their sister states," Mr. Vladeck said. "They are even less able to make the information available for use by Federal agencies." +Claims for services to Medicare beneficiaries are reviewed and paid by private companies working under contract to the Government. Mr. Vladeck said he was instructing these companies to revise their computer programs to prevent payments to doctors who have lost their licenses. +Mr. Vladeck acknowledged that the Public Health Service "has not exercised its authority" under the 1987 law to collect and share information on doctors punished by state authorities for misconduct or fraud. + + +LOAD-DATE: March 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +160 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 26, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Backers of Rival Health Tests Fight to Get Medicare Dollars + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1083 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 25 + +Legislation to expand Medicare coverage of preventive health services is all the rage on Capitol Hill as Republicans and Democrats trumpet the value of tests to detect breast cancer, prostate cancer, diabetes and other diseases. +But behind the scenes, lobbyists are waging a shadowy, fierce battle to win the Government's imprimatur for some tests while denying coverage for others. At stake are millions of patients' lives and billions of dollars in revenues for doctors and medical-supply companies. + The debate over testing for one particularly deadly disease, colorectal cancer, illustrates how Congress grapples with such issues, which raise complex questions of science, economics and politics. +Gastroenterologists say they can best detect cancers, and the benign polyps that can turn malignant, by inspecting the colon with a fiber-optic instrument in a procedure known as a colonoscopy. +Radiologists say they can spot the abnormalities just as well by taking X-rays of the large intestine filled with a barium solution that shows up on film. The largest maker of barium products used in the X-ray procedure, E-Z-EM, says that test is cheaper and safer than the colonoscopy but just as effective. +Each side has lined up a politically well-connected law firm to argue the case, knowing that private insurers and health plans often follow the example set by Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for the elderly and disabled. +The American College of Gastroenterology has hired the law firm of Patton Boggs here to obtain Medicare coverage of colonoscopy as a screening procedure. +E-Z-EM, of Westbury, L.I., has hired the law firm of Manatt Phelps Phillips, which has a large office here, to obtain coverage of barium X-rays for screening. +A Congressional aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity said, "You'd think barium was gold, the way they've lobbied on this." +Daniel R. Martin, president of E-Z-EM, said: "Barium is not gold. It's a product that happens to be opaque and inert and exceedingly safe, much safer than colonoscopy. I won't allow anyone in my family to have a colonoscopy if they can get a barium examination." +Mr. Martin wants Medicare to cover barium exams and colonoscopies "on an equal footing" so doctors and patients can choose whichever they prefer. +But Dr. Seymour Katz of Great Neck, L.I., a former president of the American College of Gastroenterology, said: "We have overwhelming evidence to show that colonoscopy is the best screening device for high-risk patients. The barium lobby, the companies that sell products used in barium X-ray procedures, have, in my view, placed their own commercial interests ahead of the best interests of patients." +Colorectal cancer is the second-leading cause of death from cancer in the United States, killing 55,000 people a year. It strikes men and women in roughly equal numbers. Doctors say it is largely preventable because most colorectal cancers develop slowly over many years from benign polyps. Finding and removing these polyps radically reduces the risk of such cancer. +David M. Klaus, a lawyer at Manatt Phelps who lobbies for E-Z-EM, said: "There is some pretty tough politics going on here. I've never seen a medical specialty group campaign so vigorously to knock out a competitor." +Mr. Martin of E-Z-EM said: "Colonoscopies account for a very significant part of gastroenterologists' income. The gastroenterologists have made a very determined effort on Capitol Hill to exclude barium procedures. And they have misrepresented the effectiveness of these procedures." +The College of Gastroenterology and Patton Boggs insist that colonoscopy is the preferred method of screening, especially among blacks, who are much more likely than whites to die of colon cancer. And they say the fight over barium may confuse Congress and jeopardize the passage of legislation providing colorectal screening for the 38 million people covered by Medicare. +But Dr. C. Daniel Johnson, a radiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said the barium examination was "the most cost-effective way of screening for colorectal cancer" and should at least be available to Medicare patients as an option. +Medicare now covers these procedures for treatment but not screening. The Medicare fee schedule for 1995 shows that the Government paid $131 for an X-ray examination and $434 for a colonoscopy with removal of tumors or polyps. +Dr. Johnson, the chairman of the colon cancer committee of the American College of Radiology, said: "I hope this legislation doesn't get bogged down because of disputes over these techniques. Let's hope the patient doesn't lose in the end." +Each side has inundated Congressional offices with articles from medical journals to support the use of its preferred technique. +President Clinton; Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California, and Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, have all proposed wider Medicare coverage of preventive services, including colon cancer tests, and their proposals have broad bipartisan support. But the proposals differ on details. +Representative Norman Sisisky, Democrat of Virginia, has an intense interest in the issue because his own colon cancer was detected in a routine screening two years ago. He praised Mr. Thomas's efforts, but faulted his bill on the ground that it would not immediately cover barium X-ray tests, which Mr. Sisisky described as "one of the most cost-effective screening procedures currently available." +Mr. Sisisky's cancer was found by colonoscopy in August 1995. He had surgery, and doctors then performed barium X-ray tests to confirm that the operation had been successful. +On the other hand, Dr. LaSalle D. Leffall Jr., a professor of surgery at the Howard University College of Medicine, said colonoscopy was "the best means presently available for detecting and preventing colorectal cancer." With that test, Dr. Leffall said, a physician can remove cancerous and precancerous growths as they are identified, with no need for separate surgery later. But "barium X-ray has not been well established for colorectal cancer screening in either the average-risk or high-risk populations," he said. +In a newsletter summarizing the issue, the College of Gastroenterology said it was resisting a compromise with "the barium lobby," fearing that private health plans would cite Medicare to justify "selection of lower-cost barium enema instead of colonoscopy for high-risk patients." + +LOAD-DATE: March 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +SERIES: SPECIAL PLEADERS: A look at lobbying. + +TYPE: Series + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +161 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 28, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +HEALTH CARE'S GIANT: Powerhouse Under Scrutiny -- A special report.; +Biggest Hospital Operator Attracts Federal Inquiries + +BYLINE: By Martin Gottlieb, Kurt Eichenwald and Josh Barbanel; This article was written and reported by Martin Gottlieb and Kurt Eichenwald. The computer analysis was by Josh Barbanel, who also contributed additional reporting. + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 3743 words + +Law enforcement officials and several Government agencies are investigating an array of business practices at the nation's largest health care company, the Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation, which runs about 350 hospitals and treats 125,000 people a day. +The Government's scrutiny of Columbia came to light last week in a Federal criminal investigation of Columbia operations in El Paso. In a raid of Columbia hospitals and doctors' offices, agents with search warrants carted off truckloads of billing and medical records. The inquiry appears, at least in part, to involve the company's dealings with Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for the elderly. + But a yearlong examination of Columbia by The New York Times has found that the company faces problems on several fronts. The Federal agency that runs Medicare is trying to determine if certain Columbia hospitals engaged in a practice known as upcoding, in which hospitals receive larger payments from Medicare by inflating the seriousness of illnesses they treat. +"A specific review is going on of upcoding at Columbia hospitals," said Bruce Vladeck, the head of the agency, the Health Care Financing Administration. +In addition, Federal civil and criminal investigators are examining whether it is illegal for Columbia doctors with a financial interest in outside medical services associated with the company's hospitals -- like home care and rehabilitation -- to send patients to them. +The Times's examination of Columbia, including a computer analysis of more than 30 million billing records, casts some light on the Government's concerns. Among the findings were these: +*Many Columbia hospitals bill Medicare for high-paying respiratory treatments far more often than do competing hospitals serving similar populations. Federal authorities called such findings an indication of possible overbilling of the program. +*In Texas, where Columbia has its greatest number of hospitals, Medicare paid unusually high amounts for Columbia patients who received costly services like home care. Mainly because of Columbia's use of these services, Medicare pays nearly 10 percent more for treatment that begins at a Columbia hospital than at other Texas hospitals. That meant extra Federal payouts of nearly $50 million in 1995, the last year for which data are available, the analysis shows. +*In a Federal-state investigation last year in Florida, law-enforcement agents interviewed four hospital officials who said they or their colleagues had been offered enticements or approached about jobs while Columbia was trying to buy their institutions. The inquiry was closed without prosecution, but a memo summarizing the inquiry has been referred for review to a dozen other law enforcement agencies. +Columbia executives said that the company's policies and practices adhered to the law, and that its use of medical services outside the hospital were in the best medical interests of its patients. +As for billing practices, the executives attributed any disparities between the company and its competitors to Columbia's more efficient operation. Rather than billing too much, the executives said, its competitors are billing too little. +"We believe that Columbia is more efficient in accurately billing the Medicare program than are our competitors," said David Manning, a Columbia vice president. He said that the company maintained an internal compliance program that was charged with making sure Medicare was billed appropriately. +In response to the Federal-state inquiry in Florida, a company spokeswoman, Lindy B. Richardson, said Columbia could not comment completely because it had not seen the summary memorandum, which describes the testimony obtained by the Government. But she added that based on The Times's description the testimony appeared to be uncorroborated by documents, "thus undermining the credibility of the allegations." +The investigations of Columbia's Medicare billing practices come as the Clinton Administration has introduced legislative proposals to crack down on fraud and abuse in the program, which many in Washington fear could go broke in less than five years. +Columbia, which is based in Nashville, has been a leader in the impressive revival of the nation's for-profit hospital business. Not yet 10 years old, Columbia controls about 7 percent of the nation's hospitals -- as well as hundreds of related medical operations -- in 38 states, mostly in the Sun Belt. With 285,000 employees, it is the nation's ninth-largest employer, bigger than General Electric, bigger than McDonald's. +Because of its size, Columbia is Medicare's single largest biller. Reimbursements from the program make up 36 percent of the company's revenue, by far its largest source. +As Columbia has tried to acquire hospitals across the country, it has often found itself at loggerheads with some state regulators, not-for-profit hospitals and community groups. At the same time, though, it has helped bring a bottom-line sense of efficiency to the hospital industry. Columbia, which has $20 billion in annual revenue, has also become a top-performing health care stock. +But since the El Paso raid last week, Columbia's stock price has suffered, falling almost 7 percent in the first two days after the investigation was disclosed. Yesterday, the shares closed at $37.50, down 12.5 cents, in trading on the New York Stock Exchange. +A Federal law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that investigations of Columbia were going on in cities besides El Paso. From Florida to Texas to Illinois to Nevada, agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been interviewing witnesses about the company's practices. Peter Young, a consultant in Florida who has advised a number of Columbia's not-for-profit competitors, said that Federal agents had gotten in touch with him several times about Columbia's dealings with Medicare and other Federal programs. + +The Billing +A Propensity For Higher Fees +The Federal review of Columbia's billing practices began at a small Kentucky hospital, Columbia Spring View Medical Center. +Responding to queries from The Times about the hospital last year, the Medicare agency reviewed Spring View's records. The agency's review, which focused on billings for four related respiratory illnesses, found that the hospital charged Medicare for the most expensive one far more often than did nearby competitors. And it charged for the least expensive ones far less often. +Federal officials said the results raised concerns that Spring View might be inflating its Medicare payments through upcoding. +Medicare pays a fixed rate for treatment of each of roughly 470 coded illnesses. Rates vary sharply -- the more severe the illness, the more Medicare pays. In upcoding, a hospital bills for a more severe illness than the one treated -- and is thus paid more. +At Spring View, the review found its bills were "skewed" toward the highest-paying cases, Mr. Vladeck said: "The a priori numbers are definitely a source of concern." +In 1995, Spring View billed for treating 191 cases of complex respiratory infection and only 10 cases of the lower-paying pneumonia with complications. By contrast, four nearby hospitals billed more than twice as many cases of pneumonia with complications as of the complex infection -- 263 to 117. At Spring View, Medicare pays roughly $5,700 for treatment of a complex respiratory infection, or about $1,700 more than a case of pneumonia with complications. +In the wake of those findings, Mr. Vladeck said, the agency opened its wider examination of Columbia hospitals. Mr. Vladeck made his comments over several months, as The Times's investigation evolved. +To examine Columbia's billing on a larger scale, The Times analyzed records from Florida and Texas -- where Columbia's hospitals are most concentrated -- and found the same pattern as at Spring View. +The Times's analysis found that in Texas in 1995, the latest year for which data are available, five Columbia general-care hospitals ranked tops for the proportion of cases billed at the highest-paying of the four respiratory codes. In Florida, the top 6 billers, and 7 of the top 10, were Columbia hospitals. +At Columbia's Cedars Medical Center in Miami, 93 percent of the respiratory cases in the four codes were in the highest-paying category, ranking it fourth in the state. Across the street at the county hospital, Jackson Memorial, only 28 percent of the billings were for that code. +Cedars billed for 355 cases of complex respiratory infection -- the best-paying diagnosis -- and only 28 cases of the three lower-paying diagnoses. Among the cases studied, it did not bill a single case of the lowest-paying illness, simple pneumonia. At Cedars, Medicare pays roughly $6,800 for a case of complex respiratory infection, and only $3,150 for simple pneumonia. +Particularly striking was how the billing at Cedars changed after Columbia took over. In 1992, when it last operated independently, 31 percent of the respiratory cases were billed at the highest rate. A year later, 76 percent were, and in 1995, 9 of 10 cases came under the top category. +When The Times examined more than 100 pairs of Medicare codes that define an illness as simple or complex, it found that, in an aggregate 9 cases out of 10, Columbia hospitals in Florida were more likely than others to choose the more complex -- and more highly paid -- code. The magnitude of the differences varied but over all were found to be statistically significant. +At Columbia, employees responsible for billing Medicare recalled being presented with lists of "focus codes" on which Columbia wanted them to concentrate, each with alternatives that were far more remunerative. In particular, they mentioned several codes later examined by The Times. +Hospitals across the country try to code as aggressively as possible, to receive the highest reimbursement a patient's symptoms will allow. Before Columbia even came into existence, hospitals were being caught going beyond simply aggressive billing. A series of Federal studies on upcoding, some of which focused on the respiratory codes, concluded that upcoding had cost Medicare hundreds of millions of dollars. +If upcoding is found, the agency seeks restitution. If a pattern of upcoding is found, the case can be referred for possible prosecution for fraud. Few cases have been prosecuted but Medicare overbilling related to upcoding and other activities has been identified at numerous hospitals and among large numbers of doctors. +Mark Krushat, who participated in those studies for the Inspector General office that monitors Medicare, called the findings by The Times an initial indicator of a potential problem. But he said that only an analysis of patient charts could confirm violations. +Mr. Manning of Columbia said that the company's billing is "in complete adherence to all applicable Federal laws." + +The Investing +Physicians Have Stake In Costly Services +Since its start, Columbia has invited doctors to invest in the hospitals where they practice. At the same time, it built highly profitable networks of medical services affiliated with the hospitals, offering home care, rehabilitation and the like. +Now, Government investigators are examining whether those two initiatives might, in combination, violate a law prohibiting doctors from referring patients to facilities in which they invest. +The 1992 law, written by Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California, was intended to curb doctors who might tailor treatments to their personal investments, rather than patient need. Physicians were barred from referring patients to medical businesses like home care agencies if they owned a stake in them. +But Congress allowed hospital investments, in part because doctors were often the only ones willing to open rural hospitals. +Columbia relied on the exemption to sell hundreds of doctors stakes in health networks anchored by its hospitals. But those networks also own such services as home care agencies and skilled nursing facilities built around the hospitals. +Should those services really be considered part of the hospital exemption? Medicare is examining whether Columbia's doctor investors may be violating the law by indirectly profiting from referrals to businesses they cannot otherwise own. +"To the extent that their physicians have ownership relationships with any of these long-term-care services, I think that raises real legal questions about whether that's allowable behavior under the law," Mr. Vladeck said. "If we have physicians who are referring patients to home-care agencies or skilled nursing facilities in which they have an ownership, that may very well be against the law." +The agency is analyzing whether to issue rules specifically barring physician-investors from referring patients to any outpatient service facilities included in their investment, Government officials said. +Compounding Medicare's concern is the runaway cost of the services, the fastest-growing piece of the program's budget. +Last year, a Congressional advisory panel noted that such services consumed almost a quarter of all Medicare payments in 1995, compared with just 9 percent in 1990. +While it pays a pre-set amount for hospital care no matter how much that treatment actually costs, Medicare uses a far more lucrative method to pay for treatment outside the hospital: it pays an amount based on what the provider says its costs were. +The Government hoped that payment structure would limit expensive hospitalization. And hospitalization rates have dropped. +But the structure also led to huge, unanticipated expenses, particularly for services provided after hospitalization. The advisory panel, the Prospective Payment Assessment Commission, concluded that the system "encourages the development of new facilities and rewards those that have high cost." +An analysis by The Times of Columbia's business in Texas shows that care provided after hospitalization cost Medicare far more than such services provided by rivals. That was mainly because Columbia patients use the services more often, and at higher cost. +For example, Medicare's cost from the time of hospitalization until 30 days after the patient was discharged averaged $9,011 at non-Columbia hospitals in Texas. But at Columbia hospitals, that same course of care cost on average 9.5 percent more, or a difference of $855. Alone, the treatment after hospitalization cost Medicare on average nearly 23 percent more, or $667, at Columbia. All figures were adjusted for differences in severity and conditions of illnesses. +As a result, the course of care for patients treated at Columbia hospitals in 1995 cost Medicare at least $48 million more than if the care had been billed at the state average. +Columbia patients were sent to skilled-nursing units 27 percent more often than other patients with similar illnesses, the analysis found, and they cost Medicare 44 percent more for such care, or an extra $306 each. Similar outcomes were found for rehabilitation. Columbia used home care at the same rate as its rivals, but home care at Columbia cost more. +In El Paso, as in other Texas cities, scores of doctors are investors in Columbia medical networks. In that city, the average cost in 1995 for the course of care -- $11,072 -- exceeds the average for the city's non-Columbia hospitals by more than 11 percent. The cost for treatment outside the hospital was 23 percent higher. +Mr. Manning, the Columbia vice president, said that the company's development of these services demonstrated its commitment to providing a quality continuum of care. One factor in their costs to Medicare, he said, was the program's policy of paying start-up costs for these units in the first few years of their operation. +"It is not in any patient's interest to be served in an acute-care setting when less-intensive care is more appropriate," he said, adding that Medicare encouraged "hospitals and physicians to deliver care in the most appropriate setting." +A Columbia consultant also noted that large Columbia hospitals with teaching programs -- a modest part of the company's Texas presence -- were somewhat less expensive than other similar hospitals. +But Mr. Vladeck questioned the value of much of the care provided by these ancillary services throughout the industry. +"I don't have confidence that the dollars we are spending are buying increased benefits for beneficiaries," he said. "They're buying services, but the extent people are benefiting is really questionable." + +The Acquiring +Accusations of Offers Made to Executives +Investigators from some agencies now examining Columbia practices in El Paso and elsewhere earlier spent more than a year delving into another key piece of Columbia's business: How it acquires hospitals. +Agents from the F.B.I., the Internal Revenue Service and the State of Florida worked with Federal prosecutors examining Columbia's acquisition efforts there. +They found executives who said that as they talked with the company about the sale of hospitals they managed Columbia offered them perquisites and promises of jobs. The agents concluded that such offers might have violated laws against bribes to officials of institutions receiving Federal money. +"All of these inducements were made by, or on behalf of, Columbia to persons in position of responsibility at hospitals which received millions of dollars in Federal funds and were arguably made for the purpose of affecting the decisions of those persons," the agents wrote in a Feb. 26, 1996, memorandum summarizing the inquiry. +The agents recommended against prosecution, in part because of the small value of the perks offered and also because of concerns about the quality of evidence, which involved conversations difficult to corroborate. But they recommended referring the evidence to 12 state and Federal law enforcement and regulatory agencies. +The memo summarizing that evidence was distributed to those agencies late last year. A copy was obtained by The Times. +In it, the agents describe the story of John Geanes, the administrator of South Miami Hospital in Miami. Columbia was one of the hospital's several suitors, and Mr. Geanes played an important role in negotiations. +The memo says that Mr. Geanes reported that he was first approached by a consultant to South Miami who told him "that large sums of money were available to people who delivered a hospital to Columbia." +Soon, Dan Moen, president of Columbia's Florida division, approached Mr. Geanes. According to the memorandum, Mr. Moen "offered to 'protect' Geanes by creating a position for him at Columbia and offered him investment opportunities with Columbia which would make him 'wealthy.' " +Shortly after, Mr. Geanes told investigators, he ran into Richard L. Scott, Columbia's chief executive, in a restaurant parking lot. In that encounter, the memo says, Mr. Scott "inquired of Geanes regarding Geanes' desire to work in North Carolina." +Within days, Mr. Geanes received a call from another Columbia executive offering him a job in that state, the memo says. +Mr. Geanes immediately informed hospital lawyers of each approach. South Miami was sold to another hospital. Once the hospital "decided not to sell out to Columbia, the offers to Geanes ceased," the memo says. +Mr. Geanes, who is no longer with the hospital, said he had made his statements under subpoena before a grand jury and refused to comment further. +Mr. Moen did not return phone calls. Ms. Richardson, the Columbia spokeswoman, declined to comment fully until she researched the events, but she said "the integrity of this company is impeccable." +Three other hospital officials told law enforcement agents that they or their colleagues had been offered personal benefits or approached about jobs as the company was negotiating to buy their hospitals. +For example, Joe Kiefer, the chief executive of a hospital in Tarpon Springs, Fla., told investigators that, while negotiating a sale to Columbia, the company offered him a trip to the Super Bowl -- including tickets, travel and hotel accommodations. Mr. Kiefer declined; the negotiations were unsuccessful. +During the investigation, the agents made oral and written requests for interviews with senior Columbia executives, including Mr. Scott and Mr. Moen. The case was closed months later, the memo says, without any response from the executives. + +How the Analysis of Medicare Costs Was Done +The study of Medicare costs is based on an analysis of more than 30 million records of Medicare patients who were admitted to hospitals in Texas and Florida in 1995. The New York Times matched records of these patients with bills for hospital readmissions, admissions to rehabilitation and skilled nursing units, outpatient services and doctor bills within 30 days of discharge. +To account for differences among patients, hospital stays were grouped into 1,500 categories that took into account the type and severity of patient conditions. Costs figures and referral rates were then calculated and adjusted to account for differences in conditions. +The possibility that differences found in costs or referral rates between Columbia/ HCA hospitals and the typical Texas hospital were due to chance alone is less than 1 in 10,000. Differences remained after taking into account statewide variations in hospital size and wage rates. +The study included only patients in conventional Medicare programs for the elderly who were admitted to an acute care hospital. It excluded patients admitted for drug or psychiatric treatment, patients transferred to hospitals from nursing homes and other institutions, patients living out of state and patients discharged in the last 30 days of 1995. +The study did not calculate precisely how much of the post-hospital care was paid to a Columbia/HCA affiliate across Texas. But it examined such payments for referrals to rehabilitation units in two metropolitan areas, Corpus Christi and El Paso, and found that a large proportion went to Columbia facilities. +To examine differences in medical coding practices for simple and complex respiratory infection and pneumonia, The Times compared groups of related Medicare payment codes using 1995 Medicare records for Florida and Texas. + JOSH BARBANEL + +LOAD-DATE: March 29, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graphs: "Columbia Bills Medicare Aggressively. . ." shows number of billings at the lowest and highest reinbursement levels for Columbia Spring View Medical Center and other selected Kentucky medical centers, for 1995 and shows percentage of cases billed at highest reimbursement levels for Cedars Medical Center and Jackson Memorial Hospital from Dec. 1992 to Dec. 1995. ". . . Outside as Well as Inside the Hospital" shows Medicare spending on up to 30 days post-hospital care for Columbia hospitals, other for-profit hospitals, Government hospitals and nonprofit hospitals, in Texas, for 1995. (Sources: New York Times computer analysis; Health Care Financing Administration; Florida Agency for Healthcare Administration)(pg. D15) + +TYPE: Special Report + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +162 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 29, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Paralyzed, Again, in Albany + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 18; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 593 words + +For the 13th year in a row, New York State will start a new fiscal year next week without a budget and with a Governor and Legislature once again paralyzed by arguments over money. But the spectacle seems sorrier than ever, since the two sides cannot even agree on how far apart they are. An even sadder reality is that there is enough money available to finance a sensible compromise between Republicans and Democrats, if only there were leadership instead of posturing. +Gov. George Pataki started the budget cycle off on a confrontational note by proposing another round of unnecessary cuts in payments to hospitals, nursing homes, community health centers and home care for the elderly poor. Once again he advocated raising tuition at the State and City University systems and cutting tuition assistance for those who desperately need it. His school aid and property tax cut formulas are almost brazen in the way they discriminate against New York City. These cutbacks are unconscionable at a time when tax revenues are rolling in from Wall Street and an expanding economy elsewhere. + Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, the top Democrat in Albany, obviously suspects that Mr. Pataki wants to push through tough budget cuts this year so he can have a surplus handy to pay for popular programs when he runs for re-election in 1998. To head off that possibility, Mr. Silver's budget goes to the other extreme. Passed in part by the Assembly last week, it would add $2.25 billion in spending and tax cuts by the Democrats' estimate. Republicans say the Democratic proposals will actually add $4 billion. +At this point in the annual Albany budget game, the two sides are at least supposed to agree on the cost of what they want to do, but partisanship has fuzzed even the numbers. +Then there is the problem of holding the budget hostage to each side's pet concerns. Last year Mr. Pataki successfully demanded that the Democrats accept reform of the workers' compensation system before he would agree to a budget. This year the Democrats are naming their price, threatening to resist any budget negotiations until Republicans agree to drop their threat to remove rent controls from New York City apartments. The law governing rents expires June 15, and many fear that there will be no budget until then. +The first priority for Mr. Pataki, Mr. Silver and other legislative leaders is to separate rent, welfare reform and other emotional issues from the budget itself. Second, they should direct their aides to reach a sensible compromise on the amount of revenue available for the budget. That compromise should be a cautious one, reflecting the realistic concern that the current stock market boom will not go on forever. Both sides should drop their destructive habit of enacting multi-year tax cuts and spending programs that cause deficits to balloon in the years ahead. +Finally, Mr. Pataki should accept the idea that the budget cannot be balanced with cuts that fall disproportionately on the poor, as they now do, and that his tax cut proposals should not penalize New York City. The Governor says he wants to increase the city's portion of school aid, but the budget for next year goes in the opposite direction. Only about 9 percent of Mr. Pataki's $1.7 billion proposed cut in the property tax would benefit New York City homeowners. +The Governor says that he is ready to compromise on his ideas, but that the Democrats are being unreasonable. All sides could use a dose of reality. There is no reason they could not get to it right away. + +LOAD-DATE: March 29, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +163 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 29, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Cut Urged in Medicare Money to H.M.O.'s + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 10; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1001 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 28 + +A Federal advisory panel says that explosive growth in managed health care for the elderly is increasing costs for the Government, and it recommends that Medicare reduce its payments to health maintenance organizations. +In a report being sent to Congress on Monday, the panel says the Government overpays such health plans because it assumes that their patients are just like those treated outside H.M.O.'s, when in fact the H.M.O. patients tend to be healthier. + Also, it said, H.M.O.'s receive extra Federal money to help cover the costs of treating Medicare patients at teaching hospitals, but they do not have to pass the money on to the hospitals. As a result, it said, there is no guarantee that the payments subsidize the training of new doctors, as Congress intended. +Gail R. Wilensky, chairwoman of the panel, the Physician Payment Review Commission, said some H.M.O.'s were reaping "windfall gains" on their Medicare business. The commission estimated the overpayments at $2 billion a year and said they were growing "as H.M.O. enrollment grows." +H.M.O.'s deny they are overpaid, and say that if Medicare cuts payments to them, they will have to reduce benefits like prescription drug coverage or raise charges to beneficiaries. +"We reject the assumption that H.M.O.'s have healthier populations than the regular Medicare program," said Donald B. White, a spokesman for the American Association of Health Plans. "It may have been correct at one time. It's not correct now." +The recommendations from the panel come amid turmoil in the health care industry, as doctors, hospitals and other health care providers scramble for financial survival in fiercely competitive markets. +Five million of the 38 million Medicare beneficiaries are in H.M.O.'s, and enrollment is growing by more than 80,000 a month. Medicare spent $18 billion on H.M.O.'s last year, and the Congressional Budget Office predicts that such spending will soar to $150 billion in the next decade as the number of Medicare beneficiaries in H.M.O.'s leaps to 15 million. +In its annual report, the commission, which advises Congress on how to pay doctors and H.M.O.'s, said, "Beneficiaries in managed-care plans are healthier than average," but Medicare payments to these plans are based on the costs of a typical beneficiary in the traditional fee-for-service Medicare program, who is sicker than the average. +The Government pays H.M.O.'s about 95 percent of the average cost of patients in the traditional Medicare program, but the commission found that new H.M.O. subscribers were so healthy that their costs just before enrollment were only 63 percent of the average for patients in the traditional program. +Private employers have embraced managed care as a way to control the cost of employee health benefits. But the panel said promoting managed care for the elderly "will lead to higher Medicare outlays" unless Congress eliminates the overpayments. +The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, reached a similar conclusion. In California alone, it said, "excess payments" in 1995 amounted to $1 billion, out of $6 billion in total Medicare payments to H.M.O.'s in the state. +H.M.O.'s contend that such problems have disappeared because they now enroll a broad cross section of the elderly, including people with chronic illnesses. +But Jonathan Ratner, a health policy analyst at the G.A.O., disagreed. +"Contrary to what the industry predicts, the severity of the problem appears to be greater when H.M.O.'s succeed in attracting more beneficiaries," Mr. Ratner said. "The excess payments were much larger in California counties with a large proportion of their Medicare beneficiaries in H.M.O.'s." +Medicare rules forbid overt discrimination against people in poor health. But Dr. Wilensky said the overpayments encouraged H.M.O.'s to engage in "undesirable behavior" by signing up healthy people and avoiding those with costly medical problems like heart disease. +"You are asking for trouble if you don't make adjustments for the health risk" of beneficiaries, Dr. Wilensky said. "It's time to start." +President Clinton addressed the problem in his new budget. He proposed cutting Medicare payments to H.M.O.'s across the board, starting in 2000. He would reduce the basic payment for each H.M.O. member to 90 percent of fee-for-service rates, down from 95 percent. +But Dr. Wilensky and her panel said this adjustment was too crude because it would not take account of differences among H.M.O.'s and would, in effect, penalize those with large numbers of high-cost patients. +The commission said that Congress should take immediate action to reduce the overpayments and should not wait till 2000, as Mr. Clinton proposed. +Specifically, the panel said, Congress should reduce Medicare payments for H.M.O. members during their first year or two in such health plans, "based on solid evidence that they typically have low costs prior to enrollment." Dr. Wilensky acknowledged that this was an imperfect method of calculating the true cost of caring for H.M.O. patients, but she said it was more accurate than the President's proposal and could be used right away. +The panel's recommendation would affect many H.M.O.'s because new members account for much of total enrollment. About 55 percent of the Medicare beneficiaries in H.M.O.'s have been enrolled for three years or less, the panel said. +If Medicare paid H.M.O.'s less to care for healthy people and more for sick people, the commission said, consumers would benefit because health plans would have a financial incentive to enroll people with costly medical problems. + While managed care offers advantages to patients who are seriously ill, the commission said, Medicare does not adequately protect H.M.O.'s against the "high cost of catastrophic losses" that may be incurred in treating such patients. Five percent of the elderly account for more than half of all Medicare spending on the elderly, the panel noted. + +LOAD-DATE: March 29, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +164 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 30, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +When Memory Speaks + +BYLINE: By Larry Wolff; Larry Wolff is the author of "Inventing Eastern Europe" and "Child Abuse in Freud's Vienna." + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 19; Column 1; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1457 words + + +THE EMIGRANTS + By W. G. Sebald. + Translated by Michael Hulse. + Illustrated. 237 pp. New York: + New Directions. $22.95. + A profound and original work of fiction, "The Emigrants" pursues the stories of four people as they move from land to land -- and, above all, as they move through history. In tracing these wanderings, W. G. Sebald has created an end-of-century meditation that explores the most delicate, most painful, most nervously repressed and carefully concealed lesions of the last hundred years. +Published in German in 1992, Mr. Sebald's book is now appearing in a sensitive and elegant English translation by Michael Hulse. In German fiction, "The Emigrants" stands alongside Gregor von Rezzori's "Memoirs of an Anti-Semite," which similarly is composed of related stories, explores the personal past in historical circumstances and meditates upon the significance of the Jews and of Jewish identity in our understanding of the cultural complexes of modern Europe. Yet "The Emigrants" is not exactly a fictional memoir. Rather, it is the record of its narrator's investigations into the mysterious memories of others, preserved in stories that dramatize the sometimes treacherous enchantment of memory itself. In the shaping of these stories, Mr. Sebald's book reflects the irresistible retrospective circlings of our contemporary culture, even as he pursues a post-modern fictional inspection of the delicate relationship between memory and history. +In the opening section, the novel's narrator meets Dr. Henry Selwyn, an elderly Englishman, devoted to gardening, whom he eventually discovers is not English by birth. The old man, we are told, "confessed (no other word will do) that in recent years he had been beset with homesickness more and more." Home turns out to be the village in Lithuania that he left at the age of 7, in 1899. "For years the images of that exodus had been gone from his memory, but recently, he said, they had been returning once again and making their presence felt." +In the second section, the narrator learns of the suicide of the man who had been his favorite elementary school teacher in Germany: "Almost by way of an aside, the obituary added, with no further explanation, that during the Third Reich Paul Bereyter had been prevented from practicing his chosen profession. It was this curiously unconnected, inconsequential statement, as much as the violent manner of his death, which led me in the years that followed to think more and more about Paul Bereyter, until, in the end, I had to get beyond my own very fond memories of him and discover the story I did not know." It emerges that Bereyter's paternal grandfather was Jewish, and that although Bereyter believed "he was a German to the marrow" and fought in the German Army during World War II, he finally realized "that he belonged to the exiles." +Inspired by a family photo album, the narrator goes to America to interview surviving relatives in New Jersey about his third subject, his own long-dead great-uncle. The story that he learns takes him back to the years before World War I, when Ambros Adelwarth immigrated to America and became the butler for a wealthy Jewish family on Long Island, returning to Europe as the valet and lover of the polo-playing scion, Cosmo Solomon. Through Ambros's pocket diary, the narrator traces the two men to the casinos of Deauville in 1912 and 1913, then across the Mediterranean to Constantinople and Jerusalem, a city that looms mythologically large as the point of departure for the original emigrant diaspora. The narrator himself arrives at Deauville in 1991, and returns in a dream to the resort as it was in 1913 to look for Cosmo and Ambros. Here the roll call of the aristocrats recalls the grand and ghostly survivors assembled at the party of the Prince de Guermantes, as described by Proust in the final volume of "Remembrance of Things Past." In their midst sit Ambros and Cosmo, dining together romantically, sharing a lobster on a silver platter, surrounded by speculative interest and prurient murmurs. +In a telling passage in his diary, Ambros Adelwarth comments on the phenomenon of memory: "It makes one's head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds." +Mr. Sebald's last subject, Max Ferber, an artist in Manchester, again opens up a family history that rolls back through the years to the beginning of the century. In 1939, at the age of 15, Ferber had been sent by his family from Germany to England; his parents stayed too long in Germany and were deported to Latvia, then murdered by the Nazis. Ferber tells of his own attempts to recover the memories of his youth -- looking, for instance, at a book on Tiepolo and studying the Wurzburg frescoes in order to recall the summer of 1936: "I sat looking at those pictures with a magnifying glass, trying to see further and further into them. And little by little that summer day in Wurzburg came back to me." +Gazing at Tiepolo's work, Ferber succeeds in seeing deeper and deeper into himself, remembering a time of Nazi rallies and bonfires, and his parents' deepening uneasiness. The story also includes a girlhood memoir by his mother, Luisa Ferber, an idyllic remembrance of Jewish family life at the beginning of the century in the German spa town of Bad Kissingen. In 1991, the narrator visits the Jewish cemetery there and finds Luisa's name on a family gravestone, though he knows that only her mother, "who took her own life, lies in that grave." +The impact of the Holocaust on the novel's emigrant survivors lies at the silent heart of the book, the suppressed tragedy they find so difficult to address directly. Henry Selwyn remarks that "the years of the second war, and the decades after, were a blinding, bad time for me, about which I could not say a thing even if I wanted to." Like Selwyn, Mr. Sebald's other tormented characters reach back in their remembrances to the years before World War I, seeking to establish the kind of continuity that will help them make sense out of a century so brutally ruptured by horror at its center. +Himself an emigrant from his native Germany, Mr. Sebald has lived in Norwich, England, since 1970. A professor at the University of East Anglia, he has published two other works of fiction in German, as well as several important books of literary criticism, with a particular focus on Austrian writers. These interests surface in "The Emigrants" -- when, for instance, the narrator's Deauville dream world involves a mysterious Austrian countess who seems to have stepped out of the pages of a novella by Arthur Schnitzler. +Mr. Sebald's art of allusion culminates, however, in Luisa Ferber's memoir, when she notices at Bad Kissingen "two very refined Russian gentlemen, one of whom (who looked particularly majestic) was speaking seriously to a boy of about 10 who had been chasing butterflies and had lagged so far behind that they had had to wait for him." Butterflies, as well as a spectral lepidopterist called "the butterfly man," flutter on the margins of all these stories, but in this case the boy can be identified from Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography, "Speak, Memory," which describes this exact scene taking place at Bad Kissingen; the boy was the young Nabokov. The spirit of the great Russian writer, pre-eminent among literary emigres, presides over Mr. Sebald's entire book. +The author has also made photographs an integral part of this fiction, from the Jewish cemetery at Bad Kissingen to the hotels of Deauville. And he includes photographs that purport to show the characters themselves: Ambros Adelwarth in Arab costume in Jerusalem, Paul Bereyter in the German Army. Playing upon the boundaries between imaginative fiction and personal history, "The Emigrants" thus becomes a kind of scrapbook of the 20th century, set with haunting images of its victims and survivors. As the narrator remarks, when looking at these old photographs one feels "as if the dead were coming back, or as if we were on the point of joining them." +Illuminatingly engaged with the history and literature of the modern era, Mr. Sebald's book gains power through its poetic obsessions with the past. When Max Ferber hands over his mother's memoir, the warning he gives to the narrator is one that might also apply to "The Emigrants" as a whole: it is "like one of those evil German fairy tales in which, once you are under the spell, you have to carry on to the finish, till your heart breaks, with whatever work you have begun -- in this case, the remembering, writing and reading." + +LOAD-DATE: March 30, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +165 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 30, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: ELMHURST; +They're Ready to Move but Not Twice + +BYLINE: By CHARLIE LeDUFF + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 8; Column 5; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 322 words + +The ink had not even dried on the new lease at the Knights of Columbus hall in Elmhurst, when the elderly began kicking up their heels. +"Never underestimate old folks," said one sexagenarian, who is a member of the Elmhurst Jackson Heights Senior Center. "We are not going anywhere." + That remains to be seen. +The center, which has occupied the first two floors of the Christian Testimony Church on Whitney Avenue for 20 years, was ordered by a court to leave by tomorrow.. +The red-brick building had become known as the mah-jongg church, since it was reported that church elders objected to the gambling by senior citizens who played the game, as well as their after-lunch dancing. +The center has been occupying the space without a lease for the past five years and the congregation wants its church back to conduct its own programs. Last month, the church's lawyer served the center with eviction papers. +The Department of Citywide Administrative Services said it had found a temporary 5,000-square-foot site at the Knights of Columbus Hall at 91-28 43d Avenue, and officials hope to complete negotiations for the group's permanent site on the old 14,000 square foot Nynex building. +But the elderly want to remain at the church while completing negotiations for the Nynex building. They say that the Knights of Columbus hall is three blocks farther from the nearest subway stop and the roof leaks. +Jose Prince, the director of the center, said the idea of moving twice in eight months concerns the elderly. He has asked the church to grant one more extension until the permanent center is completed. But the church is owed five months rent, or nearly $40,000. +"If the rent is paid in full, and the city can demonstrate that they will have a permanent site for these people, then the church will entertain an application to extend their time," said Burton Apat, the lawyer for the church. CHARLIE LeDUFF + +LOAD-DATE: March 30, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +166 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +March 30, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Nation; +Acting Their Attitude, Not Their Age + +BYLINE: By ALLEN R. MYERSON + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 3; Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1009 words + +THOUGH inspirational to some, former President George Bush's sky dive over the Arizona desert last week at age 72 -- just like his political career, perhaps -- was less on the leading edge and more part of a trailing afterburn. Many other elder-heroes have been there and done that and much more. +Why, just last June, Al Dietzel, an executive at The Limited, the retailing conglomerate, celebrated his 65th birthday with his own parachute jump -- which came before 18 holes of golf (a 93, with no cart) and after two sets of singles tennis, a 180-pound bench press and a two-mile run at a nine-minute-a-mile pace. "I'm stronger at 65, 66, than I ever was in my life," he says. For his 66th birthday he is planning, among other feats, a 190-pound-plus bench press, three miles at his nine-minute pace and a six-mile kayak trip ending at the Statue of Liberty. + Kenneth Cooper, founder of the Cooper Aerobics Center in Dallas, recalls being taught back in medical school that vigorous exercise over 40 increased the risk of a heart attack. Hah! Now, at 66, he still runs or race-walks several times a week, lifts weights, skis at least two weeks a year and scales a 13,000-foot peak every summer in the Colorado Rockies. He says the effects of aging can be not only slowed but actually reversed through a diet-and-fitness regimen that strengthens bones and builds muscle mass. "We're eventually going to rewrite the textbooks on aging," he adds. +The new-found capabilities of the elderly are forcing the revision of a lot else: health and demographic studies, rules of athletic competition, marketing plans and -- soon perhaps -- assumptions about geezers that permeate popular culture. It could be goodbye Walter Matthau and hello Walter Mitty in a new era of modern immaturity. + +More Active + Aging studies have been more apt to measure a duffer's ability to dress himself than clock his performance in a triathlon, so as yet it's hard to definitively gauge a trend toward sport and risk-taking among the elderly. But even existing surveys suggest a more active elderly population, because as a group the elderly have become healthier and more functional in daily life. +The Duke University Center for Demographic Studies -- whose surveyers periodically sample 20,000 Americans over 65 -- has noted a 15 percent drop from 1982 to 1994 in what it calls chronic disability rates -- measuring things like the ability to feed oneself. Now the center is beginning to track activities like tennis, bicycling and long-distance running -- although "jumping out of airplanes is beyond what I would measure," says Kenneth G. Manton, the professor who oversees the studies. + +Watch It + +He attributes higher activity rates more to healthier, smarter living than to better medical treatment. And in fact would-be superseniors are forewarned that they are not indestructible. Mr. Bush took his doctor along as a precaution. And though Dr. Cooper once ran marathons, he now says that running long distances leaves older people vulnerable to injuries that outweigh the added benefits. Woe to the elderly who try skiing at Colorado's high altitudes without having followed an exercise program that went beyond hoisting second helpings onto their plates. "You'd be surprised at the number of heart attacks that occur in Colorado," Dr. Cooper says. "It's primarily older people who conk out." +But many who began exercising when young now continue throughout their lives, while others who never dreamed of bungie-jumping are pondering the actuarial probabilities and thinking, oh, what the heck. +Swimming, track and bodybuilding are only some of the sports that have strong national programs for older athletes. Organizers of even the most challenging, downright masochistic events are having to add older and older award categories. +Helen Klein, 74, successfully hectored the directors of ultra-marathons like the Western States 100, a 100-mile jaunt across the Sierra Nevada, to add awards for women over 70. Older athletes like Mrs. Klein are gaining a measure of celebrity -- appearing, for example, on the TV networks' morning shows -- as well as profiting from their obsession, in Mrs. Klein's case through sponsorship by an outdoors clothing maker. +Consulting and marketing firms like Age Wave of Emeryville, Calif., are bringing forth 90-year-old black belts and Iditarod sled-mushers to help persuade clients like American Express, Coca-Cola and General Motors that the elderly can be vigorous customers too. The company's stated goal: "to replace gerontophobic marketing with a new, more positive image of aging." +In the downsizing workplace -- at a time when courts are holding that dismissing a company's best-paid workers is not age discrimination -- some older employees appear to have concluded that the best defense is a solid marathon time or bench-press mark. "It keeps me competitive in a young environment," Mr. Dietzel says of his regimen. Speaking from his office at The Limited, he explains: "The average age around here is 29. I got a young lady sitting right across from me who is 24. She knows I can work as hard as she can." +Four years ago, not just his career but also his life was at stake, when he had surgery to remove a cancerous left kidney. Now, not even his children can keep up with him. "My grandkids, they go out jogging with me, or bicycling," Mr. Dietzel says. "Their dads can't do it and their moms can't do it, but they go get the old man." +An even greater challenge for the age wave might be revising cultural stereotypes that stretch from ancient Roman comedy through King Lear to Mr. Magoo and "Grumpy Old Men." A corporate King Lear of today would never sink into senility as his daughters arranged for his outplacement. He would refresh himself with an Outward Bound adventure, then mount a comeback. Any jibes about his "infirm and choleric years," as his daughter Goneril put it, he might deal with by inviting his tormentors to keep up with his infirmities down at the weight room. + +LOAD-DATE: March 30, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + + +GRAPHIC: +Photos: Less Walter Matthau, more Walter Mitty: an eightysomething set for a 200-yard dash. (Jim West/Impact Visuals); He came from 12,500 feet: Bush lands. (Pool Photograph by Mike Nelson) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +167 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 1, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +TELEVISION REVIEW; +Putting the Cheesy on a Pedestal + +BYLINE: By JOHN J. O'CONNOR + +SECTION: Section C; Page 14; Column 4; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 476 words + +The scene is a chintzy set presided over by a sleazy host named Mr. Laupin (pronounced lah-PAAN, a little like the rabbit), who fancies himself to be Mr. Show Biz. His co-host is the haughty Agatha, the former Mrs. Laupin, for whom he still hopelessly lusts. Their eager sidekick, sporting a pompadour out of a fourth-rate tour of "Bye Bye Birdie," is Johnny Blue Jeans, who yearns for people to look at him and say in awe, "Hey, that guy can party!" +Welcome to "Viva Variety," momentarily indistinguishable from any of those curious European variety shows that can be glimpsed while channel surfing on a stormy night. The hosts are irrepressible; the audiences applaud anything. "Viva Variety" supposedly takes place in France, but this New York production was created by Michael Ian Black, Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, members of The State, a sketch-comedy company once on MTV. The talented men met eight years ago at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. + The soul of "Viva Variety" hovers somewhere between "The Ed Sullivan Show" and the Three Stooges, spiced with Folies-Bergere-like dancers called the Swimsuit Squad who, Comedy Central says proudly, have been likened to the Gold Diggers on "The Dean Martin Show." +Pushed along by the loopy Laupins (Mr. Lennon and Kerri Kenney), the first couple of half-hour installments include the Bandbaz Brothers, who perform balancing feats on knife points, and Larry Cisweski, a knife thrower. Let's not get into Yogi Baird, the world's only contortionist fiddle player. +Johnny Blue Jeans (Mr. Black), a regular Yankee Doodle Dandy who has never been to America, is a sort of dimwitted foil for all occasions. In the studio, he's the reluctant volunteer for the knife-throwing act. Outside, he judges the gymnastic competition between a young Olympics contender and a monkey. After singing his heart out for senior citizens at a suburban mall, he confronts the devastating question, "So what do you do for a living?" +Meanwhile, the music segments feature established music groups like They Might Be Giants and Shudder to Think. The celebrity guests, diving happily into the wackiness, include Ben Stiller, who next week gets caught playing the Fonz in a dizzy tribute to "Happy Days." +The variety is certainly different, and frequently hilarious. Did I mention Scotland's premier regurgitator, Stevie Star, who swallows a pool ball and other things and then spits them up triumphantly? The concept of Eurotrash takes on deliciously new dimensions. + +VIVA VARIETY +Comedy Central, tonight at 10 + +Jim Sharp, executive producer; Thomas Lennon, Michael Black and Ben Garant, producers; Rich Goldman, line producer. A production of Comedy Central. + +WITH: Thomas Lennon (Mr. Laupin), Kerri Kenney (the former Mrs. Laupin) and Michael Black (Johnny Blue Jeans). + +LOAD-DATE: April 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Michael Black, left, with Thomas Lennon, Walter Koenig and Kerri Kenney in "Viva Variety" on Comedy Central tonight at 10. (Comedy Central) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +168 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 1, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +DEATH IN A CULT: THE SILENCE; +For Ex-Wife of Leader, No Wish for the Limelight + +BYLINE: By JAMES BROOKE + +SECTION: Section A; Page 18; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 307 words + +Down a long ranch road in the rural Southwest, where grazing deer mingle with cows, is a rustic wooden house marked "Gran's Cabin," the retirement home of Ann P. Nickerson, once the wife of Marshall Herff Applewhite. +After the news last week that Mr. Applewhite had led his followers into mass suicide, Mrs. Nickerson and her husband, Sam, retreated behind three "No Trespassing" signs and a chained cattle gate. Forgoing Easter services at their church, the couple remained secluded at home on Sunday, screening telephone calls with an answering machine and watching the Heaven's Gate story unfold on their television set. + In the evening, a knock on the front door brought a response from Mr. Nickerson, a lean mustachioed man in blue jeans and a denim shirt. Anticipating the question, the elderly man quickly volunteered, "We have nothing to say." +Referring to the attention that had followed Mr. Applewhite's earlier brushes with notoriety, the rancher said, "We don't want to go through all that again." +He said his wife had not heard from her first husband since he left in 1964. +Emphasizing the distance created by more than 30 years of separation, he added, "My stepson hadn't heard from him since he was 5 years old." +Stepping into the night air and closing the door behind him, Mr. Nickerson added that his wife had recently commented that Mr. Applewhite had never shown any interest in the occult in their decadelong marriage. +"The guy who killed himself in California, he wasn't the same man" as the music teacher who married Ann Pearce, Mr. Nickerson said. Referring to the first reports of the mass suicide, he added, "We had no idea it was him." +As the Hale-Bopp comet burned low in the sky, Mr. Nickerson, a retired elementary school principal, said in parting, "We'll call you if we see any U.F.O.'s." + +LOAD-DATE: April 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +169 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 2, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +What's Wrong With This Plan? + +BYLINE: By David Frum; David Frum is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. + +SECTION: Section A; Page 21; Column 2; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 906 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + +For conservatives, the performance of the Republican Congress is rapidly deteriorating from the depressing to the embarrassing. Each week we wonder, can things get worse? And the answer always seems to be, yes, they can. +Now Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah has unveiled a plan to give the Government an even greater role in health care. Senator Hatch and his Democratic co-sponsor, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, propose to give states up to $5 billion a year to subsidize health coverage for children who lack insurance but whose parents earn too much to qualify for Medicaid. The Senators would raise the money by increasing the Federal tax on cigarettes by 43 cents a pack. + Politically, the plan is perfect -- Dick Morris himself couldn't have triangulated anything more clever. It goes after everybody's favorite bad guy -- the cigarette industry -- and redistributes the money to the most photogenic beneficiaries possible. But the plan begs a follow-up question: If Federal spending is the key to providing coverage for uninsured children, why hasn't the problem been solved already? +After all, back in 1986 Congress greatly enlarged the reach of Medicaid by permitting states to use Federal dollars to provide health coverage to all children under 19 they considered poor, even those whose parents didn't receive welfare. Then in 1990, Congress took a further step and made it mandatory that states provide Medicaid coverage to all poor children by the year 2002. +What has been the result of all this largess? In 1986, Medicaid consumed a little more than $27 billion a year. In 1997, the program cost $105 billion, and by 2002, when the mandate to extend Medicaid is to be fully imposed, it will cost more than $133 billion. Yet despite this colossal tide of money, the number of uninsured youngsters under 19 remains enormous: an estimated 10 million (as compared with 7.8 million in the late 80's). +So Senators Hatch and Kennedy are now suggesting that the Government spend even more: Their program would subsidize even families earning up to 185 percent of the official poverty level, or nearly $20,000 a year. +Some might say, well, why not insure all the kids we can? Because the Hatch-Kennedy plan would not be as helpful as it seems. +First, few people really believe that insurance is a children's issue. The real casualties of the breakdown in the insurance market aren't 15-year-olds -- they tend not to need much medical care in the first place -- but older people, like the 50-year-old salesman who was downsized a year ago and is now working part time without benefits. Health-care reforms that ignore the middle-aged in favor of children are sentimental, not sensible. +Second, the Hatch-Kennedy proposal has a perverse incentive for employers: It would encourage them to quit providing health benefits to their workers. Employers pay the cost of health benefits, for the most part, not because they're kind-hearted, but because they couldn't attract workers otherwise. When unscrupulous employers of low-wage labor hear that Washington is volunteering to take responsibility for every working parent's biggest worry -- his or her children -- they will be tempted to offload that cost. +Third, the financing plan for Hatch-Kennedy is extremely wobbly. The $5 billion it would give the states wouldn't insure very many kids -- probably fewer than half of those now without coverage. And that's before employers accept Hatch-Kennedy's invitation to reduce coverage for their workers' children. +Fourth, nobody can truthfully promise to bring the number of uninsured children down to anywhere near zero through a Government program. Too many of the uninsured young -- at least one million of them and possibly twice that number -- are the children of illegal residents and therefore are ineligible for any Federal benefit. +The sad truth is, the failures of the American health-care system are what doctors call iatrogenic: a problem caused by failed attempts to cure it. Yet members of Congress who complain that insurance is unaffordable ought to remember the enormous new costs they themselves have imposed on providers. For example, it's now illegal to sell a health-insurance policy that does not include mental health benefits and a minimum 48-hour hospital stay for new mothers. +Yes, mental health coverage and 48-hour maternity stays are desirable things. But it makes no sense to require that every plan be as loaded down with features as a brand-new Cadillac if that means that millions of Americans are locked out of the health-insurance market as a result. +What America needs from Washington is not more regulation followed by more subsidies to compensate for those regulations. Rather, the Government should allow insurers and other health-care providers to sell basic coverage that lower- and middle-income earners can afford on their own. And it should give the self-employed and others who buy their own insurance equivalent tax benefits to those given businesses who provide coverage for their employees. +Americans should have a choice among comprehensive health plans, but the 38 million uninsured -- adults and children -- need a stripped-down plan that's adequate and affordable: a Model T for health insurance. This idea may not poll well with focus groups. But over the long term it would do more good than any policy gimmick that's come out of Washington so far. + +LOAD-DATE: April 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Gary Panter) + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +170 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 3, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +DUST BOWL '97; +A Little Help From Friends + +BYLINE: By MARIANNE ROHRLICH + +SECTION: Section C; Page 4; Column 5; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 419 words + +EVEN for those elderly who may need a little help with chores, spring is prime time for cleaning and sprucing up the home. Following are some organizations that offer minor repair services or housekeeping. Unless otherwise noted, services are free, with clients paying only for materials. But donations are always encouraged. The New York City Department for the Aging can make further referrals; (212) 442-1000. The Jewish Association for Services for the Aged will mail a home-safety checklist to identify problem areas. Write to the JASA Help Center at 40 West 68th Street, New York 10023. + +Repairs + +MET COUNCIL'S PROJECT METROPAIR -- Does minor repairs for low and middle-income people over 60 in all boroughs; (212) 267-9500. + +CARING COMMUNITY -- A minor-repair program for people 60 and older in Manhattan; (212) 675-2257. + +NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR SENIOR CITIZENS -- Helps low- and middle-income elderly owners of houses and some co-ops and condominiums. The group also provides safety inspections to identify hazards. Participation requires verification of home ownership, age and income; (212) 962-7653. + +CITIZENS ADVICE BUREAU -- Does minor home repairs for Bronx residents. The agency also has a referral list of cleaners; (718) 293-0202). + +RICHMOND SENIOR SERVICES -- Provides minor home repairs for anyone over 60 and for physically disabled people of any age. Work is done only on Staten Island, for $5 a visit, plus materials. The center will make referrals for other types of work; (718) 816-1811. + + +Home Care and Housekeeping + +SELF-HELP COMMUNITY SERVICES -- Home help for the elderly in all boroughs except Staten Island, for $12.25 an hour. The agency assesses home needs and accepts both private and Medicaid clients; (212) 971-7723. + +NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR SENIOR CITIZENS -- Short-term home care for the elderly in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The fee is $6 an hour, plus carfare; (212) 962-7559. + +IDA'S EMPLOYMENT AGENCY -- Specializes in people who work with elderly clients. Helpers do light housekeeping for a minimum of four hours a day, twice a week, at $8 an hour; (212) 730-8323. + +EMANUEL AGENCY -- Specializes in elderly clients who need light housekeeping. Workers are trained in kosher dietary laws. Fees are $6 to $10 an hour plus carfare; (718) 692-0812. + +NEW YORK STATE EMPLOYMENT SERVICE -- Provides workers who will do heavier housework, at $7 to $10 an hour, plus carfare and lunch; minimum of four hours; (212) 621-0719. + +LOAD-DATE: April 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Good Grips tools have egg-shaped handles of soft slip-proof rubber that make cleaning easier for those with painful joints. (Photo by Naum Kazhdan/The New York Times; Good Grips brush, left, at Mxyplyzyk; other tools, Bed, Bath and Beyond; feather duster, top, Bed Bath and Beyond.) + +TYPE: List + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +171 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 3, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +A War-Crimes Trial, but of Muslims, Not Serbs + +BYLINE: By MARLISE SIMONS + +SECTION: Section A; Page 3; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1157 words + +DATELINE: THE HAGUE + +Once again, the courtroom of the war-crimes tribunal here echoes with accounts of cruelty and murder, the ghastly but now familiar tales of Bosnia's war. +But in this case, it is not Serbs but Bosnian Muslims who are on trial. + The three Bosnian Muslims and one Croat stand charged with 14 murders and numerous incidents of torture and abuse committed against Serbs at a prison camp in 1992. +The Bosnian Serbs are blamed for almost all the horrors of the war, and they in turn accuse the tribunal of political prejudice. But court officials have insisted that the United Nations tribunal is not driven by politics. Cases like this one, officials say, show that the court will try war-crimes suspects regardless of their politics or ethnic origin. +At the same time, the latest trial is also a reminder of how little the tribunal has achieved since its creation in 1993. It has only seven defendants in its custody, four of whom are now in court. Of the 74 people indicted here for war crimes, 67 remain at large, even though in many cases their whereabouts are known. +The four men now on trial are charged with terrorizing hundreds of men and women who spent time at a prison camp controlled by Bosnian Muslims between May and December of 1992. The camp, at Celebici in the mountains some 30 miles southwest of Sarajevo, used to be a military storage site. +Prosecutors said that some 500 people passed through the camp during those months, most of them Serbs from villages around Konjic. Some had helped defend their villages when Muslim forces attacked, but others had not. The indictment said that many of the camp's inmates suffered hunger, beatings, torture and rape. +The camp conditions described in the court sound familiar. They mirror the stories that have been told and retold by survivors of dozens of Serbian-run camps where Bosnian Muslims were held and persecuted. +But Celebici was run by Muslims and the victims were Serbs. Two of the men charged in the Celebici case are the highest-ranking defendants so far to stand trial in The Hague: Zejnil Delalic, 48, and Zdravko Mucic, 41, the Croat, who are charged with overall responsibility for the atrocities linked to the camp, Mr. Delalic as regional commander of the Bosnian Muslim forces, Mr. Mucic as the camp commander. +Hazim Delic, 32, deputy commander of the camp, is individually charged with four murders and torture, including the rapes of two women. Esad Landzo, 24, a camp guard, is accused in five deaths, and of torture and cruelty. Their crimes, as listed by the prosecutor, included beating elderly men to death with wooden planks, baseball bats and shovels. The prosecutor said the two charged with torture also used pliers, acid, electric shocks and hot pincers to torment their prisoners. +In the courtroom, the four defendants appeared to follow the proceedings, conducted in English, via earphones providing them with translations. At times they took notes; often they looked bored or dozed. Each defendant has two lawyers paid for by the court. +The defense lawyers have requested that their clients be tried separately, in part because they fear that the suspects may testify against each other, as they already have in pretrial statements. +But the court has ruled that the four were closely linked through the chain of command and that separate trials would mean duplicating much work and recalling the same witnesses many times. +Among the first witnesses to appear was Mirko Babic, 63, a Serb. He pulled up his trouser leg to show his scars. He said Mr. Landzo had poured gasoline on his legs and set fire to them. "I saw the flames, it was very painful," he told the court. +Another witness, Branco Gotovac, 66, also a Serb, said Mr. Landzo had beaten him so hard that he swallowed his tongue and nearly suffocated until a fellow prisoner, a nurse, rescued him. "I had to put my hands behind my head and then he kicked me in the testicles," Mr. Gotovac said. "During all this, my tongue went inside my throat. I was urinating blood." He said he had lasting injuries. +Mr. Gotovac, a frail and sick man, was questioned by Mr. Landzo's lawyer in such a strident way that the presiding judge, Adolphus Karibi-Whyte, from Nigeria, intervened. He said to the lawyer, Cynthia White McMurrey, an American, "I left you at large when some of the things you said have been complete rubbish. If you continue being irresponsible, I think I will have to take a different attitude." +In the courtroom, Grozdana Cecez, 47, a Serb, came face to face with the man who she said had raped her at the camp. Speaking of Mr. Delic, she said: "I thought he was going to beat me. Then he started to rape me. I will never be the woman that I was." +On another night, four men raped her, she said. Mr. Delic did not look at his accuser. While she described the event in detail, he chewed gum and kept his hand over his face. +For this trial, Bosnian Serbs have cooperated with prosecutors and agreed to testify. Until a year ago, tribunal workers frequently complained that they were unable to conduct their investigations in Belgrade or in the Serbian-controlled part of Bosnia. As a result, much of the evidence they collected involved crimes against Muslims or Croats, to whom the investigators did have access, but they learned little of what had happened to Serbs. Serbs nonetheless accused the court of being anti-Serbian. +Belgrade's attitude toward the court began to change when, as Antonio Cassese, the tribunal president, put it, "the Serbs understood finally that they were making a huge blunder" by not talking to court investigators. +Even during this trial, some Serbs continue to criticize what they call the tribunal's anti-Serbian bias. +Branco Jovanovic, a representative of an association of Serbian war victims based in Belgrade, said her group is demanding that charges against the four defendants be broadened. Prosecutors have defined the charges as "grave breaches of the Geneva Convention" and as "violations of the laws and customs of war." But Ms. Jovanovic said her group wants the crimes to be classified as "genocide" and as "crimes against humanity," which carry greater legal and moral weight. +"What happened at Konjic was ethnic cleansing against Serbs," she said. "More than 5,000 Serbs were driven out. More than 150 were killed and 120 women were raped. Why is that different, I ask, why are those attacks defined only as war crimes, and not as crimes against humanity?" +The prosecution has not explained why it selected some charges over others. But crimes against humanity must involve a widespread or systematic attack on a people or group, court officials say, and many Serbs have been indicted on these charges in connection with planning and carrying out ethnic cleansing. +The trial is expected to go on for several months. Prosecutors said they have a list of 76 witnesses but may not call all of them. + +LOAD-DATE: April 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Three Bosnian Muslims and a Croat, shown with a courtroom guard at the center, are standing trial in The Hague accused of war crimes, though it is the Serbs who are blamed for almost all the horrors of the war. The trial of the men -- from left to right, Esad Landzo, Hazim Delic, Zdravko Mucic (the Croat) and Zejnil Delalic -- addresses charges of murder and rape at a prison camp in 1992. (Reuters) + + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +172 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 3, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final +(New Jersey) + +NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFING; +Neighbors May Get Their Say + +BYLINE: By TERRY PRISTIN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 118 words + +DATELINE: MONROE TOWNSHIP + +When residents at Rossmoor, a senior citizens development, learned that Nobody Beats the Wiz planned to build a warehouse nearby, they were outraged. But they had a problem. Although the warehouse would be a few hundred feet away from Rossmoor, it would be across the municipal border in Cranbury Township. Monroe Township officials would have no say in the plans. + But a bill to be unveiled today would require county planning boards to review plans for proposed projects that would be within 500 feet of a municipal border and to consider complaints from residents of neighboring towns, said Bobbie Schott, an aide to Assemblywoman Barbara Wright, Republican of Plainsboro. TERRY PRISTIN + +LOAD-DATE: April 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +173 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 6, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In the Region/Long Island; +A Mix of Uses for a Port Washington Wasteland + +BYLINE: By DIANA SHAMAN + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 7; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1317 words + +DATELINE: PORT WASHINGTON + +A 460-ACRE tract on West Shore Road owned by the Town of North Hempstead will soon be transformed from barren wasteland into a mix of municipally owned recreational facilities and privately owned housing. +The major components of the plan are an 18-hole golf course, a 165-acre nature preserve and housing for people 55 and older. + Its 675 residential units will range from 3,000-square-foot, single-family detached houses overlooking the golf course to a 400-unit life-care facility for the elderly, a concept that includes skilled nursing care. +The property, a scarred valley stretching below eroded cliffs left behind by more than a century of sand mining, has been costing town taxpayers $3 million a year to maintain because it is encumbered by a $73 million loan. +"We are taking a neglected burden and are turning it into a major asset both from an environmental and from a fiscal point of view, while pioneering the idea of a life-care community," said May W. Newburger, the Town of North Hempstead Supervisor. "This was a horror movie, but we've rewritten the script and given it a happy ending." +The town bought the tract known as the Morewood property in 1988 for $33.1 million, intending to build a solid-waste incinerator. The site had been mined for sand since the 1860's. +The incinerator proposal was abandoned because of environmental fears and concerns that it would not prove profitable. While the land lay fallow, the town's costs mounted. +An original $33.1 million debt was refinanced and increased to the $73 million, incurring annual interest-only payments of $3 million. Developers wanted to buy the land, but offers were rejected because of fears of the impact major development would have on schools and traffic. Environmental groups wanted to preserve the tract as parkland. +Mrs. Newburger, who became supervisor in January 1994, said her priority on taking office was to "find a solution that would be fiscally and environmentally responsible." She added, "Our goal was to retain as much open space as possible and still solve the fiscal problem." +At the suggestion of Alma E. Hyman, the town planning directorr, the town conducted an environmental study, hiring Saccardi & Schiff, planning consultants in White Plains. +What evolved was a plan under which 89 percent of the land will stay open space, addressing some of the concerns of environmentalists. And since housing sales are restricted to older people, schools will get tax revenues without adding pupils. The impact on traffic also will be reduced. +The town will retain ownership of 420 acres, with the remaining 40 acres sold to North Shore Associates of Great Neck, which will develop the residences. +North Shore has agreed to pay $26.9 million for its site, which will be used to reduce the existing $73 million debt. +However, the town will incur $27 million in new debt. That sum, which is to be paid for through bond issues, will go in part toward construction of recreational facilities that include the 18-hole golf course, a nine-hole course and a driving range, a 15,000-square-foot clubhouse and several athletic fields. +More than $8 million will be spent on environmental cleanup and site remediation, which includes stabilizing severely eroded sand cliffs, some of which are 200 feet high. A road into the property also has to be built. +Town officials say the golf courses will generate sufficient income to pay off all debt over 20 years. In addition, the facilities are expected to generate $400,000 in net income annually. +After the 20th year, the town will receive $1.6 million annually from the properties, said Michael P. Locorriere, the town comptroller. +The golf course, designed by Michael J. Hurdzan of Columbus, Ohio, will have an irrigation system that will minimize demands on public water supplies. +Water used for irrigation will come in part from rainfall trapped in a lined basin that can hold up to seven million gallons of water. Another source will be runoff from nearby town landfills, which will be drained into underground wells where it will be purified before being pumped back to the surface. +COMPOST will be added to the soil to minimize the use of fertilizers, and hardy grasses will help cut maintenance costs of fairways, said Paul M. Roth, Commissioner of the Department of Public Works. +North Shore Associates was chosen from among 19 respondents to a request for proposals issued by the town in 1995. Guidelines called for housing for the elderly. +In addition to the $26.9 million purchase price, the developers will give the town a $2 million endowment to be used for subsidizing moderately priced housing for the elderly elsewhere within the town. +North Shore is a partnership of Jobco Realty and Construction of Great Neck; Pearson Partners, a Manhattan-based investment banking company, and Tully Construction of Flushing, Queens, a road building contractor. +Jobco, which will build the housing, is an experienced builder of moderately priced housing for the elderly. +However, residences at Harbor Ridge, as the new development is to be called, will sell for whatever the market can command, said Michael F. Puntillo, Jobco's vice president. He said prices had not yet been established for the different housing types, which will include co-op apartments. +There will be 275 houses and condominium units for sale. The 150 houses will be a mix of detached, semi-attached and town-house styles. +The 3,000-square-foot, two-bedroom detached houses will occupy 6,000-square-foot lots. The semi-attached houses and the town houses, all of which will also have two-bedrooms, will range from 2,400 to 2,700 square feet. Homeowners will belong to a homeowners' association that will take care of outside maintenance and recreational amenities. +There will also be a 125-unit apartment house with one- and two-bedroom condominium apartments averaging 1,500 square feet. +The 400-unit life-care building, if approved as planned, will have a 300-unit co-op and a 100-bed assisted-living and nursing-home facility. Marriott Senior Housing Services of Bethesda, Md., will be in charge of management, and North Shore University Hospital will provide health-related services. +The building will have on-site recreational facilities, lounges, a store, a bank, a library and a communal dining room. +The one- and two-bedroom co-op apartments will range from 750 to 1,550 square feet. Prices have not been established, but in similar operations managed by Marriott, such units typically sell for $175,000 to $350,000, said Michael J. Giacopelli, vice president of development at Marriott. +Co-op residents will have 25 meals a month included in their monthly maintenance. Although fee structures have not been established, monthly fees generally range from $1,900 to $3,000 for an individual and about $600 more for a couple, Mr. Giacopelli said. +Part of the fee at the Harbor Ridge project will support the assisted-living and nursing-home component of the co-op. Should co-op residents need those services, they will move from their apartments into those facilities, but their monthly overhead will only be increased by the amount needed to cover the cost of extra meals, all of which would then be provided. If the move is permanent, the co-op apartment can be sold, with all revenues from the sale going to the owner. +Thus co-op residents will never face catastrophic nursing-home expenses and will be able to stay in noninstitutional and familiar surroundings for as long as they live, Mr. Giacopelli said. +Cleanup of the Morewood property, which was littered with debris left behind by mining operations that continued up to 1989, began in January and has been completed. +Construction of the 18-hole golf course has begun. Construction of the housing is expected to start in the fall, with occupancy in the spring of 1998. + +LOAD-DATE: April 6, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: North Hempstead Town Supervisor May W. Newburger at development site. She calls project a major asset. (Steve Berman for The New York Times) + +Map showing the location of Port Washington, L.I. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +174 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 6, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +CONNECTICUT GUIDE + +BYLINE: By ELEANOR CHARLES + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 15; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1087 words + + +MARINE ART +"Wind, Waves and Sail: Marine Art and Artifacts," the largest interdisciplinary exhibition undertaken by the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, will open on Saturday in several of the museum's galleries. +More than 50 paintings and prints by Winslow Homer, James E. Buttersworth, Antonio Jacobsen, Fitz Hugh Lane and other artists illustrate two centuries of change in the design of sailing vessels and yachts. They are embellished by photographs and models of some of the more significant ships, and more than 100 marine-related objects. Four sections of the exhibition will cover warships and battle scenes, clipper ships, whaling and fishing vessels, and racing yachts and cruising vessels. +Among the lenders to the exhibit are Mystic Seaport, the United States Naval Academy, the Smith College Museum of Art, the Peabody Essex Museum and 15 yacht clubs in Fairfield and Westchester Counties. Ship models and trophies from the Indian Harbor Yacht Club in Greenwich will be on display. +Among the special events planned in conjunction with the exhibition is a dinner-lecture series with James Taylor from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England; Revell Carr from the Mystic Seaport Museum, and Peter Neill from the South Street Seaport Museum in Manhattan. +The exhibition will remain open through July 13, Tuesday through Saturday from 10 to 5, Sunday from 1 to 5. Admission is $3.50, $2.50 for people 65 and older, and children 5 through 12 years of age. There is no charge on Tuesday. +The museum is just off Exit 3 of Interstate 95. The number for more information is 203-869-0375. + +SONTAG AT YALE +Susan Sontag will present a lecture entitled "The Art of Fiction: A Reading" on Tuesday at 4:30 in the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street on the Yale campus, followed at 8:30 P.M. with an informal conversational session at Ezra Stiles College, 9 Tower Parkway. Both events are open to the public free of charge. + +OLD LYME ARTISTS +A collection of paintings by members of Old Lyme's turn-of-the-century artists' colony are preserved in the Florence Griswold Museum, a historic landmark that was then a summer boarding house for the American Impressionists. +Through June 20 the stately yellow and white building will house an exhibition of landscape paintings that depict scenes in a five-acre contiguous parcel that the museum is in the process of acquiring. +The museum, at 96 Lyme Street, is also the headquarters of the Lyme Historical Society and is open Wednesday through Sunday from 1 to 5. Admission is $4, $3 for older people and students, free to children under 12. The number is 860-434-5542 for more information. + +PETERS AT FAIRFIELD +A concert of light operatic classics will be performed by Roberta Peters next Saturday at 7:30 in the Quick Center for the Arts at Fairfield University. The event is a benefit for the Children's Community Day Care Center. Ms. Peters, of the Metropolitan Opera Company, has in recent years been a musical ambassador to Russia, where she was the first American to receive the Bolshoi Medal, and to China, where she gave recitals and conducted master classes. +Tickets are priced from $25 to $75 and may be reserved by calling 203-254-4242. + +ART BY LEAR +Donald Gallup, former curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Library, has given the university his collection of the works of Edward Lear. It is housed in the Yale Center for British Art, and until it is formally exhibited in 2000 it may be seen by scholars who must call 203-432-2800 to arrange an appointment. +Lear is more familiar as the author of verses like "The Owl and The Pussycat" than for his skill as a painter, illustrator and draftsman. This collection contains 7 oil paintings, 2 oil studies, 362 drawings, 30 prints, 10 autograph letters and additional manuscripts and printed matter. +Among the works are drawings of the Lake District in England from the 1830's, works in oil of Corfu and sites in India, Italy and Egypt, and illustrations for a tract on parrots. His documentations of landscapes are now considered invaluable. + +WEAVERS' ART +A juried exhibition of handwoven rugs, wall hangings, baskets, tapestries, bobbin lace, off-loom weaving and other prime examples of the weavers' art are on view and for sale at the Lyme Art Association in Old Lyme through Saturday. +A special feature of the show, held every other year by the Handweavers Guild of Connecticut, is the work of Helena Hernmark, whose tapestries are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, among others. +Visiting hours are Tuesday through Friday from noon to 4:30 and today and Saturday from 1 to 4:30. Admission is $2 and the number for more information is 203-434-7802. + +FORESTS' FUTURE +Scientists, researchers, land planners and forest managers will present their varied perspectives on the future of America's Northeastern forests during a symposium to be held next Saturday from 8 to 5:30 at Connecticut College in New London. +Sponsored by the college's Center for Conservation Biology and Environmental Studies and the Connecticut Forest and Parks Association, the event is open to the public for a fee of $25, including Continental breakfast and lunch. An additional $25 will cover attendance at an evening reception, dinner and keynote address. +Robert Askins, professor of zoology at the college, says "many new developments, from the introduction of new pathogens to acid raid and new construction projects, will take an enormous toll on our forests." +The number is 860-4390-5021 for reservation, directions or more information. + +BOGART BIOGRAPHY +"Bogart," a new biography of the actor, was written by two authors who never met him. One of them, Eric Lax, will discuss the book today at 2 P.M. at the R. J. Julia bookstore, 768 Post Road in Madison. +Mr. Lax took over the writing of "Bogart" after Ann M. Sperber, author of "Murrow: His Life and Times," had spent seven years compiling a massive archive of material. Ms. Sperber died in 1994. Mr. Lax is known for "Woody Allen," a 1991 best-seller. +Also at the bookstore, Sydney Eddison, author of "The Self-Taught Gardener: Lessons from a Country Garden" and other books and articles on gardening, will give a talk on Thursday at 7 P.M. for beginners and experienced home gardeners alike. Free reservations are required by calling 203-245-3959. ELEANOR CHARLES + +LOAD-DATE: April 6, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: "U.S.S. Pennsylvania Off Gibraltar," by James E. Buttersworth, is among the marine art at the Bruce Museum. + +TYPE: Schedule + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +175 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 6, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Rare Look Uncovers Wartime Anguish of Many Part-Jewish Germans + +BYLINE: By WARREN HOGE + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 16; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1160 words + +DATELINE: CAMBRIDGE, England + +It was 1938 in Berlin, and 19-year-old Hannah was shocked to hear that her father had been arrested by the Nazis. She had been raised in the Lutheran faith of her mother, and her father's being a Jew had never been an issue, much less a deportable crime. So she went to the Gestapo to complain. +Officers said they couldn't help her and told her to go to the Jewish community center. Once there, she told people what had happened and was questioned about her upbringing. "We don't help your kind," she remembers being told. + Determined, she went back to the Gestapo to protest. This time the officer in charge took her into a back room and asked two leering junior officers if they "liked what they saw." The commander left, and the two men raped her. +Hannah was one of tens of thousands of Germans with Jewish forebears who in the late 1930's learned that their Nazi leaders were categorizing them as human mongrels and giving them dreadful options for survival. +Now 78 and living outside Hamburg, she tearfully told her story to Bryan Mark Rigg, a personable 25-year-old former Texas high school football star and honors graduate of Yale who is now on a research fellowship at Cambridge University. Through videotaped interviews, painstaking attention to personnel files and banal documents not normally consulted by historians, and spurred by a keen sense of personal mission, he has turned up an unexplored and confounding chapter in the history of the Holocaust. The extent of his findings has surprised scholars. +"These people have suffered the same fate in academic life as they did in fact," said Jonathan Steinberg, the modern European history teacher here who is Mr. Rigg's supervisor. "They were nobody's property, so nobody talked about them." +Mr. Rigg said: "They didn't know where they belonged. They were the so-called mischlinge, a horrible word, a bastard, a half-breed." +Mr. Rigg's project began with a chance encounter in a movie theater in Berlin with an elderly man of Jewish parentage who had fought for the Germans. The meeting led him to explore similar cases and in the process discover that he himself, a Bible-belt Protestant, had a Jewish great-grandmother and 22 relatives who disappeared during the war. +Over the next four years he was to discover documents called "declarations of German blood" that Hitler had personally signed to keep valuable officers with Jewish forebears in the Wehrmacht. The existence of such people had been known -- one was Field Marshal Erhard Milch, deputy to Hermann Goring, the Luftwaffe chief -- but Mr. Rigg has discovered that their numbers were far greater than anyone had imagined. +Helmut Schmidt, the West German Chancellor from 1974 to 1982, kept secret the existence of a Jewish grandfather to remain a lieutenant in the Luftwaffe. Mr. Schmidt told Mr. Rigg he had always thought his own case was rare, and was startled to learn that the young researcher had unearthed a previously unknown 1944 German personnel document listing 77 generals and colonels "of mixed Jewish race or married to a Jew" whom Hitler had declared "of German blood." By now Mr. Rigg has confirmed the existence of more than 80 additional individuals formally exonerated for having Jewish forebears. +Mr. Schmidt has written letters of introduction for Mr. Rigg praising the "seriousness of the undertaking" to aid him in his interviewing. "I had no idea of the extent of the phenomenon and I am stunned by it," he wrote. +Some of the people whose stories Mr. Rigg has uncovered considered themselves Jews and hid their backgrounds to survive, sometimes serving in the army of the regime that was annihilating their relatives. But many -- Mr. Rigg believes them to be the great majority -- were raised as Christians and had never thought of themselves as Jews or people of Jewish heritage. +Only after the 1935 Nuremberg laws for the "protection" of German blood did thousands of Germans find out that the Nazis considered them "quarter Jews" (people with one Jewish grandparent), "half Jews" (people with two Jewish grandparents) or "full Jews" (people with at least three Jewish grandparents). +While Mr. Rigg's research does not alter understanding of the Third Reich or dispute Holocaust studies, it shows that assimilation in Germany was far more a fixture of the culture than the Nazis anticipated, forcing them into such categorizing. "Hitler was not only fighting against the Jews, he was fighting against hundreds of years of assimilation," Mr. Rigg said. "This makes the story much more complicated, much more difficult, but much more real." +Mr. Rigg says he is not interested in passing judgment. But he finds himself continually brought up short in pondering the choices people faced and wondering about those who ended up serving in the Wehrmacht. +Mr. Rigg has encountered feelings of shame among those who falsified papers to survive, while their relatives were being killed in death camps. He has also met former officers who believe their families were spared by Gestapo officers who intruded in a Jewish household, only to spot a framed picture of a son in full uniform fighting on the front. +Some servicemen of Jewish parentage, on learning of the treatment their relatives were receiving, raised objections. +"After the French campaign in 1940," Mr. Rigg said, "a lot of petitions came to Hitler from these officers saying, 'I have an Iron Cross, and I come home to find my mother and my grandmother being persecuted.' Hitler had to decide either to protect the parents, or kick the officers and N.C.O.'s out. So there was a huge discharge in 1940." +Arnold Paucker, 76, director of the London office of the Leo Baeck Institute that chronicles the history of German-speaking Central European Jews, said that he worried about the authenticity of stories told 50 years later, but that he found Mr. Rigg's discoveries about the depth of assimilation in Germany "surprising." +"Every story is different, but I would call them Christians of Jewish descent," he said. +Mr. Rigg now has more than 400 hours of video interviews documenting more than 2,000 soldiers of Jewish parentage. He has spoken personally with some 350 veterans and their families, and projects the number of such people who served as having reached as high as 80,000. +Each new lead in Mr. Rigg's research raises new questions, but one of his discoveries allowed the Lubavitcher movement to answer a question. Lubavitcher legend has always held that the grand rebbe, Joseph Schneersohn, and his followers were spirited through German lines by a Jew in a German uniform after being trapped in Warsaw in September 1939. Mr. Rigg established the truth of the story and identified the officer as Maj. Ernest Bloch, whose father was Jewish and who obtained a declaration of German blood signed by Hitler. +Rabbi Avraham Laber, speaking from Troy, N.Y., said, "He has really helped us uncover the mystery." + +LOAD-DATE: April 6, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Bryan Mark Rigg, an American at Cambridge University, is studying the wartime fate of Christian Germans who had Jewish forebears, and has found that their numbers were far greater than anyone had imagined. (Justin Leighton for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +176 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 7, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +THE RENT DEBATE: THE ANTICIPATION; +On Upper East Side, Anxiety Over Rent Rules + +BYLINE: By CLIFFORD J. LEVY + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 843 words + +The Upper East Side of Manhattan often seems to have a stately air, a place where just eking by is not much of a concern. But even this neighborhood has many middle- and working-class residents apprehensively watching the debate over rent regulations, as if bracing for a long-awaited storm. +"People are worried -- people on fixed incomes who have been here for years," said Arden Cohen, 55, who pays $760 a month for a rent-stabilized studio apartment on East 83d Street. "They are so anxious about what is going to happen. They feel that after June 15, they are going to be out on the streets." + There are more than 80,000 rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments on the Upper East Side out of the 1.1 million regulated apartments in the state. In recent interviews that took place throughout the Upper East Side, residents generally favored continuing the rules, particularly for the elderly, the disabled and the poor. +Of course, there was talk of the need to crack down on wealthy people who might be abusing the system by taking apartments with rents that are only a fraction of their incomes. But even the well-to-do who own co-ops and brownstones expressed fears that the gutting of rent regulations in Albany might rend the fabric of the Upper East Side. +The conversations also revealed a simmering sense of powerlessness and anger among residents in rent-regulated apartments, an emotion not normally associated with so politically potent an area. Some said they feared that they might no longer be able to afford their homes because of the crusade by upstate Republians in the State Senate to scale back or abolish the rules, which expire on June 15. +"It creates a very anxious situation," said Colleen Fitzgerald, 27, a public-school teacher who pays $547.97 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. "I would not be living in this city if this apartment didn't have the rent it did." +A few residents said the rules should be ended, asserting that housing would improve for all classes of people if government allowed the free market to set rents. "It would be a great thing for the city," said Mike Tepedino, 33, an investment banker who pays about $1,000 a month for a one-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment. "Even if it works against me, it's a great idea. The rent rules are working for the benefit of the few at the expense of the rest." +Opinions on the Upper East Side may be more important to the rent debate in Albany than those in many other city neighborhoods because the area is represented in the State Senate by Roy M. Goodman, a Republican who says he is trying to mount a mutiny against his own party's plan. +Democrats contend that if the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, an upstate Republican, succeeds in doing away with rent regulations, then Mr. Goodman's standing will suffer, even if he defies Mr. Bruno. So if the outcry in Mr. Goodman's district is large enough, it might help persuade Mr. Bruno to scale back his plan to avoid jeopardizing a Republican seat. +In the last two months, Mr. Goodman's office has received more than 1,300 letters from people who want to keep rent regulations, and only a handful from opponents. On some days, the office has fielded more than 50 calls from supporters of the rules. Like Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, his fellow Republican, Mr. Goodman has been trying to distance himself from Mr. Bruno. So far, this strategy may be working. +Ms. Fitzgerald said, "I would think negatively about his party, but if he is trying his hardest, I wouldn't necessarily hold it against him." +Mr. Bruno himself appears to have become more well known in the district than any other upstate legislator in memory. Most of this sentiment is not flattering. "This guy Bruno should be dipped in this Hudson with weights on his feet," one elderly woman said as she hurried out of a supermarket on Third Avenue. +Democrats say such views may ultimately damage Mr. Goodman, who has represented the district since 1968 even though it has more Democrats than Republicans. +"I think that people might be fed up about hearing about how hard Roy fights for them, if in the end result, people are still getting hurt," said Assemblyman Alexander B. Grannis, a Democrat whose district overlaps Mr. Goodman's. +Mr. Goodman acknowledged that his constituents were angry. "They are distrustful of Republicans, but they know that I have been a champion of tenant protections throughout my career," he said. Asked whether he thought the rent fight would injure his reputation, he said: "I would tend to doubt it. I have been around a long time, and people know my record." +For many residents of the Upper East Side, though, the politics of rent regulation is less important than what will be in place on June 16. +"It's very, very frightening," said Kim A. Bosotina, 30, whose family has lived in a two-bedroom rent-controlled apartment for 35 years. The rent is now $400 a month. +"There is going to be a mass exodus, God forbid this happens," he said. "It's another assault on the working class." + +LOAD-DATE: April 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Colleen Fitzgerald -- "It creates a very anxious situation. I would not be living in this city if this apartment didn't have the rent it did;" Arden Cohen -- "People are worried -- people on fixed incomes who have been here for years. They are so anxious about what is going to happen;" Kim A. Bosotina -- "There is going to be a mass exodus, God forbids this happens. It's another assault on the working class;" Mike Tepedino -- "Even if it works against me, it's a great idea. The rent rules are working for the benefit of the few at the expense of the rest." (Photographs by Chang W. Lee/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +177 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 8, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Clinton and Congress at Odds On Aid to Legal Immigrants + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1091 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 7 + +Republicans said today that they were drafting legislation to provide as much as $2 billion in aid to states with large numbers of legal immigrants who will lose benefits under the new welfare law, but Clinton Administration officials said they strenuously opposed the plan because it would result in disparate policies in different states. +Instead, the officials said they wanted full restoration of disability benefits for most legal immigrants, including children and elderly people who have not become citizens. + Republicans in Congress want to provide states with lump sums of money, or block grants, to help legal immigrants. House Republicans, led by Representative E. Clay Shaw Jr. of Florida, said they were considering a maximum of $2 billion in aid over the next two or three years. +By contrast, Mr. Clinton would permanently restore disability benefits and Medicaid for many legal immigrants, at a cost of $15 billion over six years. New York would receive about 15 percent of the money in each case, while New Jersey would receive perhaps 3 percent. +The dispute continues a philosophical debate that has raged since Republicans took control of Congress in 1995 on whether states or the Federal Government can better design social welfare programs. +The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna E. Shalala, said the Administration opposed block grants because they would be "unfair and unworkable." +In an interview, Dr. Shalala said the Administration believed that the Federal Government should set uniform national standards for providing disability benefits to legal immigrants, who were admitted to the United States under Federal policies. +"We believe that an elderly disabled immigrant -- a 75-year-old disabled woman -- in New Hampshire ought to be treated the same as a woman of the same age in California or Ohio," Dr. Shalala said. "Their eligibility should be determined through national policy, not left to the discretion of the states." +Republicans on Capitol Hill said that they were surprised by the Administration's position -- and they said it could backfire. The President and the immigrants risked ending up with nothing if they insisted on getting far more than Congress was willing to provide to legal immigrants, the Republicans said. +Mr. Shaw, the chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources, said he recently had a sobering conversation with the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Representative Robert L. Livingston, of Louisiana, who said it would be difficult to find even $2 billion to assist states with benefits for many legal immigrants. +As for the $15 billion sought by President Clinton, Mr. Shaw said: "That's just out of sight. It ain't going to happen. There's no way Congress is going to be able to find that kind of money. There's no sense even thinking about it." +With some exceptions, the 1996 welfare law bans immigrants from receiving Federal Supplemental Security Income and food stamps unless they become citizens. +But Cecilia Munoz, deputy vice president of the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic civil rights organization, said today: "A 95-year-old woman losing Supplemental Security Income benefits is not going to be comforted by the fact that her governor will get a block grant. What she needs is her S.S.I. check. It will be extremely difficult for states to find the people most in need and get them enrolled in a new program." +The Congressional Budget Office has said that more than 40 percent of the savings attributable to the new welfare law -- $24 billion of $55 billion over six years -- would result from restrictions on benefits for legal immigrants. Republicans see these savings as essential to their plan to balance the budget. +New York Republicans, including Gov. George E. Pataki, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Representative Susan Molinari, strongly support efforts to restore Federal benefits for legal immigrants who are disabled or elderly. +Immigrants in New York and California recently filed class-action lawsuits challenging the denial of Supplemental Security Income benefits and food stamps to noncitizens. They said the restrictions violated the constitutional guarantee of "equal protection of the laws." +Under the new law, states may deny welfare and Medicaid to noncitizens here before Aug. 22, when Mr. Clinton signed the law. A recent commentary in the Harvard Law Review said that this last provision authorized states to violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. +The welfare law says that the denial of benefits to immigrants is warranted by two "compelling Government interests": to assure that aliens will be self-reliant and to "remove the incentive for illegal immigration provided by the availability of public benefits." But plaintiffs in the two lawsuits said that the denial of subsistence benefits to legal immigrants would do nothing to deter illegal immigration. +On a lobbying trip to Capitol Hill last month, Mr. Giuliani won some initial support for a proposal that would allow legal immigrants already in the United States to continue receiving benefits. City officials estimate that 75,000 legal immigrants in New York City are receiving Supplemental Security Income, while 135,000 receive food stamps. +A wide range of bills to revise the welfare law have been introduced in Congress. Representative Luis V. Gutierrez of Illinois and Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, both Democrats, have offered the most comprehensive proposals, which would repeal all of the new restrictions on benefits for immigrants. They would cover the cost by eliminating some corporate tax breaks. +Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Representative Tom Campbell, Republican of California, have introduced bills that would restore S.S.I. benefits for legal immigrants who were in the United States on Aug. 22 and are elderly, disabled and poor. +Other bills to restore benefits have been introduced by Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, both Florida Republicans who were born in Cuba and represent many Cuban-Americans; Carrie P. Meek, Democrat of Florida; Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Patrick J. Kennedy, Democrat of Rhode Island. +Mr. Campbell and Ms. Molinari said they strongly supported the 1996 welfare law. But Mr. Campbell said: "No law is perfect. There is one glaring problem to be corrected, dealing with those legal immigrants who are too old and infirm to obtain their citizenship." + +LOAD-DATE: April 8, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +178 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 9, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Health Watch + +BYLINE: By JANE E. BRODY + +SECTION: Section C; Page 10; Column 5; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 494 words + + +A Noisy Cure for Colic +GRANDMAS have been the source of much health wisdom. So Lisa VonCanon, a pediatric nurse at the Medical College of Virginia Hospitals in Richmond and a first-time mother, did not question her grandmother's advice to run the vacuum or clothes dryer to soothe her colicky infant son, Tucker. Nor was she surprised when the remedy offered by her grandmother, Hope Clapp, worked. Tucker stopped his heart-wrenching sobbing almost immediately. Again and again, the "white noise" of a household machine provedable to calm the irritable baby. Mrs. VonCanon's sister, Andrea Edmunds, had similar success with her baby. +So Mrs. Edmunds's husband, Andy, a musician with a small home-recording studio, produced a compact disk of six white noise sounds: vacuum cleaner, hair dryer, water running into a tub, clothes dryer, dishwasher and lawn mower. Called "Grandma's Colic Cure," the CD is sold for $11.95 in stores in Richmond and, with an additional $2 handling fee, through its inventors: Two Sisters Productions, P.O. Box 29362, Richmond, Va. 23242. Tucker's favorites, his mother reports, are "The Hoover Hustle" and "Someone to Wash Over Me." + Grandma Clapp and her granddaughters are not the only advocates of white noise to calm babies. Dr. William Sears, author of "Nighttime Parenting" (NAL/Dutton, 1993; La Leche, 1985), also noted that "babies often settle best with what is known as 'white noise,' such as the fan of an air-conditioner, a dishwasher or a vacuum cleaner. + +Pets' Power to Soothe +Ask cat or dog lovers and they are likely to tell you that their pets are as good companions as people or even better, always ready to offer unconditional love and affection. New research also suggests that pets can enhance physical as well as emotional well-being. +Dr. Karen Allen and her colleagues at the University of Buffalo have shown that four-legged companions are nearly as effective as two-legged friends and relatives at controlling blood pressure in women who live alone. The results of their research were presented last month at the meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society in Santa Fe, N.M. +The six-month study was conducted among 100 such women, half in their mid-20's and the other half in their early 70's. Half the women in each group owned a dog or cat to which they were very attached. The other half had never owned a pet. +Repeated recordings of the women's blood pressure showed that over all, the blood pressure of pet owners was lower in both age groups than it was among the women who did not have pets. Among the older women, the differences in blood pressure were medically highly significant, with systolic pressure (the pressure when the heart beats) lower by 20 points, on average, in the women with pets. In fact, elderly women with pets but little human companionship had blood pressure readings nearly as low as those of young women with lots of friends and family around. + +LOAD-DATE: April 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +179 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 9, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +PRESIDENT OFFERS $18 BILLION MORE IN MEDICARE CUTS + +BYLINE: By RICHARD W. STEVENSON + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 919 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 8 + +The Clinton Administration offered today to make additional cuts of $18 billion in projected Medicare spending over the next five years to help reach agreement on eliminating the Federal deficit, people involved in the budget negotiations said today. +In saying that it was willing to compromise further on Medicare, the issue that has most divided the Administration and Congressional Republicans through two years of budget wars, the White House was clearly seeking to appear flexible as the two sides began their first serious negotiations since their impasse in late 1995 led to a Government shutdown. + The Administration had previously proposed a plan that it said would cut the growth of Government health care spending for the elderly by $100 billion over five years, while the most recent Republican offer was $158 billion over six years. +"There is a serious intent here to show that we want to get this process off to the right start," said a senior Administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. +Republicans said that they welcomed the Administration proposal but that they wanted to study it further. They said they had offered their own proposals, which they did not specify, for narrowing the gap between the White House and Republican plans for slowing the growth in Medicare spending and averting a long-term financial crisis in the program. +Today's meeting on Capitol Hill, attended by the leaders of the Congressional budget committees and members of the White House economic team, was the first of several scheduled over the next week. +President Clinton has proposed meeting directly with the Republican leadership at the White House next week in an effort to give the process further impetus. +Expressions of optimism by both sides early this year have given way in the last month to predictions that the effort to eliminate the deficit by 2002 was on the verge of collapse. But with both parties eager to strike a deal, the Administration and Congressional Republicans have been conducting quiet preliminary talks for several months even as each tried to pin the blame on the other for the apparent lack of progress. +Both sides said today's discussion had improved the atmosphere and the prospects for a deal, although they must still address myriad other differences, like the size of any tax cut and the depth of spending cuts in military and domestic programs. +"I would assess it for an opening round as a very successful three-and-a-half hour discussion," said Senator Pete V. Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who heads the Budget Committee. +Franklin D. Raines, the White House budget director, told reporters after the meeting that the two sides were "making progress in that we are moving forward with discussions and we are seeing common ground." +President Clinton had already made one effort at compromise on Medicare this year, saying the day after his inauguration in January that he would move halfway to the last Republican proposal. Mr. Clinton said that compromise would reduce Medicare spending by $100 billion over five years or $138 billion over six years. +But the Congressional Budget Office analyzed Mr. Clinton's plan and found that it would save $82 billion over five years, or $18 billion less than Mr. Clinton said. Republicans have insisted that the budget be balanced using the budget office's analysis rather than on the slightly more optimistic assessments of the White House's Office of Management and Budget. +In today's meeting, Administration officials essentially offered to accept the Congressional Budget Office analysis on Medicare. They presented specific proposals to increase the savings from their plan, mainly by reducing payments to hospitals and other health-care providers, so that their plan would yield $100 billion in reduced spending over five years even under the Congressional Budget Office's assumptions. +Mr. Clinton used the Republican proposals to reduce the growth of Medicare spending as a major theme in his effort to recover from the Republican sweep of Congress in 1994 and to win re-election last year. His continued move toward compromise -- without the Republicans having made any specific counteroffer -- is likely to generate grumbling or worse from liberal Democrats. +White House political strategists have kept a close eye on Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the Democratic leader in the House, who is a likely challenger to Vice President Al Gore for the party's Presidential nomination in 2000 and who has shown a willingness to clash with the Administration. +It is unclear whether the White House can win enough support from Democrats to pass a compromise budget if the party's liberal wing objects. Similarly, Republicans remain divided over how hard to push for deep spending and tax cuts, and Republican negotiators are looking back over their shoulders at their party's right wing, which had vowed to oppose any deal that does not significantly reduce the size and role of the Federal Government and provide sweeping tax cuts. +Republican leaders including Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, have threatened in recent days to declare the President's budget proposals dead and to proceed with their own if there is not progress in the negotiations with the White House in the next week. +But Republicans have so far not produced their own budget proposals, which would require spending reductions to pay for proposed tax cuts. + + +LOAD-DATE: April 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +180 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 11, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +The Spoken Word + +SECTION: Section C; Page 29; Column 1; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 270 words + + +PETER BOGDANOVICH, Barnes & Noble, 1972 Broadway, at 66th Street. The director and author will discuss his new book, "Who the Devil Made It" (Knopf, 1997). Tonight at 7. Free. Information: (212) 595-6859. + +"QUILTING WORKSHOPS AND STORYTELLING," American Craft Museum, 40 West 53d Street, Manhattan. In celebration of African-American Quilters. Tomorrow and Sunday, 11 A.M. to 4 P.M. Admission: $5; $2.50 for students and the elderly; free for those under 12. Information: (212) 956-3535. + +"AN ASTRONAUT'S EXPERIENCE IN SPACE," New York Hall of Science, 47-01 111th Street, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Flushing, Queens. A lecture by Ellen Baker, a veteran of the United States space program. Sunday at 4 P.M. Free with hall admission: $4.50; $3 for children 4 to 15 years old and the elderly. Information: (718) 699-0005. + +"SONGS OF MY ANCESTORS: TAINO POETS IN NEW YORK CITY," Huntington Free Library and Reading Room, 9 Westchester Square, the intersection of East Tremont and Westchester Avenues, the Bronx. Featuring readings by poets with ties to the Taino people of Puerto Rico, including Machiste Quintana, Gypsie RunningCloud, Bobby Gonzalez and Magda Martas. Tomorrow at 2 P.M. Free. Information: (718) 829-7770. + +"THE POLITICS OF POWER -- THE POWER OF FILM," Ethical Society of Northern Westchester, 108 Pinesbridge Road, Ossining, N.Y. A screening of the 1962 film "The Manchurian Candidate," followed by a discussion with David Amram, who composed the score for the film. Tomorrow at 7:30 P.M. Suggested donation: $5; $4 for students and the elderly. Information: (914) 241-6922. + +LOAD-DATE: April 11, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +181 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 11, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +A Bad Deal Is Worse Than None + +SECTION: Section A; Page 28; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 580 words + +Congressional and White House negotiators will meet again today to prepare for possible budget talks next week involving President Clinton. These talks are likely to determine not only what a future budget might look like, but even whether any budget deal at all will be struck this year. The pressure is on both sides to reach agreement and prove they know how to govern. But unless the concessions made by each side are right, the better outcome would be no deal at all. +Mr. Clinton's first task is to follow offers already made by his Republican rivals. Trent Lott, the Senate majority leader, has proposed that Mr. Clinton join him in appointing a commission that would pare back cost-of-living adjustments used to calculate benefit levels as well as tax brackets -- the best way to spread the pain of deficit reduction across the population. But Mr. Clinton let Mr. Lott's proposal die, no doubt fearing backlash from the elderly, whose Social Security benefits would be reduced, and other voters whose taxes would be slightly raised. Speaker Newt Gingrich angered his conservative backers by proposing that tax cuts be postponed until after a balanced budget is passed. A Democratic President should have seized this proposal in order to spare huge offsetting cuts to his spending initiatives. Instead Mr. Clinton reacted with reckless indifference. + Many presume that the President will eventually embrace these sensible ideas in the eleventh hour of negotiating. But the Republicans are already backing away. Besides, they do not trust that he will do what he might promise in private. The leaders need public declarations, and soon. +For the Republicans, the task is to admit that their vaunted welfare "reform" wrongly victimized legal immigrants and childless adults. The President has proposed reinstating disability payments and Medicaid coverage to legal immigrants who become disabled after they enter the United States and to the children of legal immigrants. He also proposes reinstating uninterrupted food-stamp benefits for adults who cannot find private- or public-sector work or a government-provided workfare slot. Some Republicans counter these socially responsible suggestions with offers to postpone some of these provisions, or turn over small blocks of money to states that bear the heaviest burdens of poor immigrants. +But these palliatives are much too small and badly targeted. The Republicans need to accept that their bill was, at least with respect to legal immigrants and childless adults, wrong in principle. The solution is a change in principle, as Mr. Clinton has proposed, not a pittance of temporary money. +Mr. Clinton wants to spend about $20 billion on legal immigrants and food stamps and about $50 billion on a variety of programs of much less importance. His first responsibility is to stand firm on the $20 billion to partially fix a welfare law he should never have signed. Only then can he push for spending more on the rest of his list. +If the appropriate concessions are not made by each side, with the President following Mr. Lott's lead on cost-of-living adjustments and Mr. Gingrich's lead on taxes while standing firm on welfare, then the best outcome would be budget impasse. That would suspend for one year any progress on deficit reduction -- but that is hardly threatening since the goal of zero deficit by the year 2002 is of little economic significance. Impasse would at least not make matters worse. + +LOAD-DATE: April 11, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +182 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 12, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Ending Battle, Suburb Allows Homes for Poor + +BYLINE: By RONALD SMOTHERS + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 21; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk; Second Front + +LENGTH: 1425 words + +DATELINE: MOUNT LAUREL, N.J., April 11 + +Planning officials in this prosperous suburb in southern New Jersey approved a rental complex of 140 town houses for low- and moderate-income families early today, culminating a 26-year legal battle that turned Mount Laurel into a national symbol of suburbs that used their zoning laws to exclude the poor. +The project, to be built on 63 acres of farmland, will be named for Ethel R. Lawrence, who brought the original complaint after township officials rejected a proposal from her and a group of other black residents to use Federal subsidies to build 38 garden apartments. + The unanimous vote by the board came after midnight, and after more than 200 opponents of the plan, fearful of increased taxes, crime and devalued property, had peppered the developers and board members with derisive taunts and angry threats. In the speeches of many of the opponents in this township 21 miles east of Philadelphia, there was a sense that the Planning Board vote would usher in the same urban ills that they had fled years before. +"You're history," shouted Jacob Herman, one of the leaders of a group of opponents from a senior citizens development across the road from the proposed town houses, as he gestured toward board members, the Mayor and members of the Township Council. +But for Peter O'Connor and Carl Bisgaier, the lawyers who undertook the lawsuit 26 years ago; Ethel Halley, the daughter of Mrs. Lawrence, and Mayor Peter R. McCaffrey, there was another sense of history in that moment, growing out of the landmark ruling in the legal battle. +Minutes after the vote, Mayor McCaffrey walked up to Mr. O'Connor and Ms. Halley, who now head the nonprofit development company that will build the housing, stretched out his hand and said, "Welcome to Mount Laurel." +The contrast could not have been sharper with the words of his predecessor back in 1970. According to historians of the fight here, Bill Haines, who was then Mayor, went to the small black church attended by many of those who were seeking approval for their low-income housing proposal to deliver the town's response. +The answer was no, and then he added, "If you people can't afford to live in our town, then you'll just have to move." +The nine-member Planning Board had been under a state court order to evaluate the housing proposal only in light of whether it complied with local ordinances. +They had little room to turn it down, even in the face of vocal opposition from residents of neighboring subdivisions, where homes range in price from $150,000 to $400,000. +According to Census Bureau data, more than 30,000 people lived in Mount Laurel in 1990, about 3 percent of them black. Race, though, was never directly mentioned in the hearings on this latest proposal. +Mayor McCaffrey later praised the sponsors of the housing for their calm amid the emotions surrounding the proposal. +"But knowing the history, it was inevitable that this was going to come," he said. "I'm happy it's over, and I'm sure that the people who move in will be good citizens and will be accepted." +Mr. O'Connor and Ms. Halley said they were proud of the board members for the message of support their unanimous vote sent. They were particularly pleased, they said, with two of the board members who expressed unequivocal support for the plan as "right" and "only fair." +"It's taken us more than 25 years to bring about a fundamental change in the relationship between the suburbs and the cities in America," Mr. O'Connor said. "The unanimous vote by the Mount Laurel planning board indicates that a new day in affordable housing in the nation is dawning." +Ms. Halley said the vote had "lifted a weight" for her. After the years of watching her mother fight local officials over housing and become a target for racist taunts and threats, she applauded the courage that board members had shown in overturning past actions, particularly in the face of an angry crowd gathered in the auditorium of the Harrington Middle School. +"I appreciate what they have gone through because people can be cruel," she said, as she sat with two of her sisters after the vote. "But I'm not sure whether more than a few of them appreciate what we have been through." +The vote will allow Fair Share Housing Development Inc., the nonprofit developer, to meet the April 31 deadline for applying for the scarce Federal tax credits that are crucial to the financing of the $15 million project. There had been some fears among supporters of the development that the planning board, which usually holds a single hearing on a project but had allowed three public hearings on this one, might again delay a vote. Mr. O'Connor said the company could begin construction by the end of the year, if the tax credits are awarded. The tax credits are awarded to such projects on a competitive basis. +The Planning Board, in an apparent acknowledgment of some of the specific complaints of opponents or in a face-saving move, did impose about a dozen conditions on their approval of the plan. But they were carefully worded in recognition that they often exceeded the actual authority of the board and might run afoul of the order from the Supreme Court that town officials had to judge the plan on its compliance with local ordinances and state law, not their personal preferences. +The board asked the developers to "look into" the possibility of including patios for the town houses, relocating the recreation complex from a position bordering the woods next to a neighboring subdivision, and building a second emergency access over sensitive wetlands. They also asked them to include local residents in the development of tenant selection criteria and meet with some neighboring subdivisions to discuss some of their concerns. +"We have to make a judgment on whether we can live with the conditions and, if not, seek relief from the planning board or relief from the court," Mr. O'Connor said. Privately, however, some experts suggested that none of the conditions could be required under the terms of the court order. +John Payne, a professor at Rutgers University Law School, said the Planning Board vote was at once a "significant development" and a "drop in the bucket" in terms of the need for low-income housing. He said that it was not likely that the arrival at this milestone of sorts would have any ripple effects since there is little money for low-income housing now and most state legislatures are dominated by suburban interests likely to oppose measures that would spur such proposals. +"But this is unequivocally a good development in the history of the case," he said. +At the time Mrs. Lawrence began the fight, Mount Laurel's zoning did not allow multifamily housing. In the court battle that followed, advocates for the housing not only won the right to build up to 255 low-income units in the town, but won a New Jersey Supreme Court ruling that extended to other communities across the state and prohibited them from using zoning to block low- and moderate-income housing plans. But the impact of the ruling went beyond New Jersey and popularized nationally the concept of towns being required to shoulder a fair share of regional housing needs. +Philip Caton, the court-appointed master who supervises the court decree covering Mount Laurel, said that the larger significance of the series of rulings in the case was that they "created an obligation on the part of municipalities to affirmatively provide for the construction of affordable housing." +The court rulings also led to the passage of New Jersey's Fair Housing Act, a law that set up a system of determining the need statewide for such housing and allocating it to each community. But that law has been criticized for failing to set a realistic level of need and creating loopholes that allow communities to avoid building such housing. Critics have also said the law encouraged construction of moderately priced single-family homes for those who could qualify for mortgages to the exclusion of low-income rentals. +When the Ethel R. Lawrence Homes are completed, 50 percent of its units will be allocated for families whose income is 45 to 65 percent of the area's median income, and 50 percent will be for families earning 65 to 80 percent of the median income. Consequently, a family of four with a moderate income of $34,678 to $41,000 will pay a maximum rent of $778 a month for a three-bedroom unit while a low-income family of the same size with income of $24,008 a year would pay $511 a month for the same unit. + +LOAD-DATE: April 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Dorothy Fox, who lives near the Ethel R. Lawrence Houses site, shook hands yesterday with Roosevelt Nesmith, Burlington County president of the N.A.A.C.P., during a Mount Laurel Planning Board meeting. (Laura Pedrick for The New York Times)(pg. 22) + +Chart: "CHRONOLOGY: The Push for Yes" + +1970 -- Mt. Laurel's zoning board rejects a plan put forward by Ethel Lawrence and her neighbors to build low-income housing. The following year they file suit challenging the township's action. + +1975 -- The New Jersey Supreme Court rules in favor of the low-income housing advocates. The ruling holds that "developing" communities have a constitutional obligation to provide a fair share of regional housing needs. + +1976 -- In response to the ruling, Mt. Laurel Township changes its zoning law, allowing the low-income housing project to be built, but on unusable, swampy land. Mrs. Lawrence and her neighbors return to court. + +1983 -- The state's highest court again rules in favor of the advocates for low-income housing in a ruling known as Mt. Laurel II. In addition, the court specifies how many units of affordable housing should be built in the township, and, in response to some 60 similar court challenges from around the state, instructs lower court judges to set similar goals for the towns also facing lawsuits. + +1985 -- The State Legislature, under pressure from towns that object to the Mt. Laurel rulings, passes the Fair Housing Act, creating a Council on Affordable Housing and an administrative process for setting local housing goals. Groups on both sides of the issue who are unhappy with the law challenge its constitutionality. + +1986 -- In what came to be known as Mt. Laurel III, the State Supreme Court unanimously upholds the law as constitutional and consistent with Mt. Laurel I and II. + +1994 -- Ethel Lawrence dies. + +1997 -- The Fair Housing Corporation, the non-profit group which grew out of Mrs. Lawrence's early efforts, wins approval from the Mt. Laurel Planning Board to build 140 units of low- and moderate-income housing. (pg. 22) + +Map of Mount Laurel. (pg. 22) + +TYPE: Chronology + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +183 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 13, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Program Helped Westighouse Finalist + +BYLINE: By MERRI ROSENBERG + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 15; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 812 words + +DATELINE: ARMONK + +ONE way to measure improved scientific training in the classroom is seeing how students fare in national competitions like the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Although such contests are not the only measure of students' scientific prowess, they reflect the opportunities schools offer for performing scientific research. +This year, 9 students from Westchester were named among the 300 national semifinalists for their research in areas as diverse as how ballet training affects academic performance; the cardiac benefits for the elderly from having pets and identifying natural predators of the ticks that carry Lyme disease, among others. + The students are Caroline DeFilippo, James Masi, Farah Mehta and Jason Post of the Byram Hills High School in Armonk; Brent Gottesman of the Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua; Brian Chin of Mamaroneck High School; Indrajit Roy-Chowdhury of New Rochelle High School; Heather Fletcher of Rye Country Day School, and Elizabeth Gallagher of the Ursuline School in New Rochelle. Caroline, 17, a senior, was selected as one of 40 finalists for her research into the effects of zebra mussels on a stream in the Mianus River. During the Science Talent Institute part of the competition, which was held in Washington last month, Caroline's research earned her 12th place as well as a $1,000 scholarship. +Caroline did her research at the Louis Calder Center, a field station of Fordham University, under the auspices of the Byram Hills Science Research Program. The program was developed eight years ago by Dr. Robert Pavlica, who directs it, to allow students who are interested in science to pursue complex and challenging projects. +"Science education has to go beyond the learning of concepts," Dr. Pavlica said. "It has to give greater attention to the development of scientific thinking and processes. The students in this program do exactly what professional scientists would do in their lab. They identify the focus of their research, identify a hypothesis, map out a methodology and do an extensive literature search." +Students in the course, which offers three Regents credits after three years, take biology, chemistry and physics in addition to the course. To pursue their research projects, students apply for grants and work with mentors. They are required to spend seven hours every two weeks on research outside the classroom and one hour in class every two weeks. Thirty-six sophomores, juniors and seniors at Byram Hills are taking part in the program. +The program, which has been copied in other districts -- including Croton-Harmon, Mamaroneck, Mount Vernon and New Rochelle -- will be added next year in Edgemont, the John Jay High School in Somers, Rye High School, Yonkers and White Plains, among others. +"This is raising the level of the essential ingredients of what you should know," Dr. Pavlica said. "What I do for three years is try to develop scientific minds. The process is a transferable skill." +For Caroline, who has been accepted by Harvard for next year's freshman class as an early-decision admission, curiosity about zebra mussels spurred her investigation. +"I've always loved science," said Caroline, who is an avid fly fisherman and grew up with a pond in her backyard. Among her many other interests are serving as captain of the varsity tennis and lacrosse teams, running winter track, being sports editor of the school newspaper, serving as president of the Outdoor Club, playing flute in the All-County Orchestra and the Byram Hills High School Orchestra, being president of the school's debate club and running a catering business. +Her interest in stream ecology prompted her to study the threat that zebra mussels pose to North American waterways. "The zebra mussels came from Europe and clog water pipes," she said. "They remove all food from a stream and pose a problem for all animals in that system. We're looking for a solution on how to manage their spread." +Her experiment involved setting up two tanks in a laboratory to mimic conditions in the Mianus River and identifying exactly how the zebra mussels contaminated the stream. "The zebra mussels disrupt the entire food web," said Caroline, who plans to continue her research. "The Westinghouse is not an end-all. I hope to publish in science research journals and enter other competitions." +Caroline's research has potentially valuable applications. "Because of the dangers associated with zebra mussels invading the waters of North America, there is a concern," said John D. Wehr, associate professor of biology and director of the Louis Calder Center. "The mystery is why they haven't taken hold in smaller streams. Mianus River is one of the county's most precious resources. This research is not only scientifically important but also stands very well from a conservation point of view." + +LOAD-DATE: April 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Caroline DeFilippo with tanks used in zebra mussel study at science center in Armonk. (Chris Maynard for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +184 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 13, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In the Region/New Jersey; +A Plan to Raise Jersey City's Home-Ownership Rate + +BYLINE: By RACHELLE GARBARINE + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 7; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1251 words + +AT 30 percent, Jersey City's homeownership rate is less than half of the nation's 65.2 percent. And for the city's Hispanic residents it is even lower -- 18 percent. +To help raise those rates a program called Everyone's at Home in Jersey City was initiated last month after more than a year of discussion and planning by the city in partnership with the Federal National Mortgage Association, known as Fannie Mae. It will offer low- to middle-income buyers mortgages with flexible credit and income requirements as well as reduced down payments and lower closing costs. + "We have a disproportionate number of people at the margins of home ownership," said Mayor Bret D. Schundler. "What this initiative will do is shift those margins because it opens the gates of home ownership that much wider for more people to qualify for mortgages." +Among other things, the program is designed to allow the city's elderly homeowners to retain their homes by making reverse mortgages, which allow homeowners to borrow against the value of their houses, available to them and to maintain the municipality's aging housing stock by providing loans tp purchase and, if necessary, to renovate a home. The loans are available for one- as well as two-family homes, a predominant housing form in Jersey City. +The city will also assist buyers with down payments and closing costs. And to encourage lenders to approve such loans, which have traditionally been considered risky, Fannie Mae has agreed to buy them. The federally chartered mortgage company purchases loans made by lending institutions and combines them with other such loans in pools that are sold to investors -- and therefore strongly influences the underwriting standards used by lenders. +There are income restrictions for some loans, and private mortgage insurance may be needed, depending on the amount of the down payment. Borrowers must also attend a home-buyer education class to guard against mortgage defaults. +"The city has been pushing home ownership for three years," said Annemarie C. Uebbing, director of Jersey City's Division of Affordable Housing. But there were only a few lenders, she said, making it difficult for prospective buyers to get mortgages. The guarantee that Fannie Mae will buy the loans reduces the risk to lenders and will encourage more of them to make more loans in Jersey City, she said. +Under the program, borrowers can obtain mortgages of up to $214,000 through some 25 lenders with as little as 3 percent down. +Projections are that the program will help raise the city's home-ownership rate by five percentage points over the next two years. In that same time it is also expected to increase by an equal amount the pace of production for new and renovated for-sale housing for low- and moderate-income families in the city. Some 100 such units have been developed each year for the last three years, said Ms. Uebbing. Estimates are that the city, which has 229,000 residents, needs 2,431 of these units by 1999. +At present about 318 rental and for-sale housing units affordable to low- and moderate-income families are in various stages of development in the city. They include the renovation of eight burned-out, two-family rowhouses on Astor Place in the historic area of the city's Bergen Hill neighborhood. The three- to five-bedroom homes are expected to sell for $72,500 to $90,000. The project is being developed by the nonprofit Astor Place Neighborhood Association. +Construction on another project consisting of 27 two-family homes is expected to start soon on scattered vacant lots along Wilkinson and Bayview Avenues in the city's Greenville section. The homes are expected to sell for $98,500. The project will be developed with city and state funds by a nonprofit group, Minority Contractors and Coalition of Trade Workers of New Jersey, based in Jersey City. +Ms. Uebbing said both projects would be helped by the new mortgage financing provided under Everyone's at Home in Jersey City. The added hope is that the program will help spur housing for middle-income residents, she said. +THE program, seen as way to help Jersey City's revitalization efforts, is Fannie Mae's sole community partnership in the state. It is also part of the corporation's nationwide plan, announced in 1994, to make housing more affordable. +Fannie Mae has made its made its mortgage underwriting guidelines more flexible and tailored loans "to meet the unmet housing need in Jersey City," said Rosemary McManus, its vice president for housing impact. +For example, she said, the reverse mortgages are available to elderly Jersey City residents who own two- as well as one-family homes. Elsewhere they are available only for one-family homes. +Such loans enable homeowners to borrow against the value of their homes to make home improvements or to have extra cash flow. To qualify people must be 62 or older and own their homes outright or have a low mortgage debt remaining. +With the home-improvement mortgages borrowers in Jersey City may finance repair costs of up to 50 percent of the estimated appraised value of a home after it has been renovated, said Ms. McManus. Elsewhere the maximum is 30 percent. +With those mortgages, as well as the program's flexible home loans, the minimum down payment for two-family homes is 5 percent and there are no income restrictions. For one-family homes the down payment could be as low as 3 percent, but borrowers can earn no more than the median income in Jersey City, which is $44,700 for a family of four. +The program's flexible mortgages will also be combined with down-payment and closing-cost assistance from Jersey City. The city's assistance includes grants of up to $2,500 to eligible city employees who purchase homes in Jersey City as a primary residence. Initially, the city has allocated $100,000 for that purpose and low-income employees will be given first preference, said Ms. Uebbing. The assistance will be available in July. +The city is also setting aside Federal funds to help first-time buyers earning up to $38,300 a year with down payment and closing costs and to provide an additional $20,000 to city employees who are first-time buyers. The program also allows 33 percent of a borrower's monthly income to be used toward the mortgage, compared to the usual 28 percent. And borrowers who lack a traditional credit history may count their ability to meet monthly rent payments as part of their credit requirement. +In addition Fannie Mae awarded grants to two nonprofit organizations to increase home-buyer education and counseling services in English and Spanish. They are Jersey Citizen Action, a statewide group, and the local Puertorriquenos Asociados for Community Organization, or Paco. +The program generally has been well received by lenders. +"It makes more money available to and expands the opportunities for low- and moderate-income families by lowering the down-payment requirements," said Joseph L. Grabowski, senior vice president of The Trust Company of New Jersey, based in Jersey City. +Robert A. Jordan, president of County Mortgage in Jersey City added: "It is a good step, but still only a step and more needs to be done." He said his company was approaching the program cautiously. +Ms. Uebbing, Jersey City's affordable housing director acknowledged that the program would not solve all the city's housing concerns. But, she said, it provides "an additional incentive to get more people to become homeowners." + +LOAD-DATE: April 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Eight rowhouses are being renovated on Astor Place by a local nonprofit group. But owners of No. 29, right, opted to renovate on their own. (Photographs by Norman Y. Lono for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +185 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 13, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +MUSIC; +One Man's Harmony, in Many Tongues + +BYLINE: By LESLIE KANDELL + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 14; Column 3; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 864 words + +FINDING that voice, accented from everywhere, on the phone message machine may not be the same as winning the lottery, but it sure feels that way. "Hello, this is Theodore Bikel." Would it be all right to call back and sing "Edelweiss" on his tape? +It would not. Those timeless lyrics, the last that Oscar Hammerstein penned, may be universal, yet they are somehow Mr. Bikel's. And they were sung and played eight times a week for two years in "The Sound of Music," by a man who never took a guitar or singing lesson in his life. + Mr. Bikel, who created the role of Baron von Trapp, doesn't even recall which folk song he auditioned with, on a whim -- even though it was that song, and not his prepared "Luck be a Lady," that won him the part. +He looks good at 72, and has dropped some unneeded weight. Onstage, he invokes his show credits with Tevye's exasperated gestures upward, Alfred Doolittle's spry kicks, and Zorba's strong finger snaps, between folk songs of many nations and even more languages. The big baritone voice is still there, top and bottom, aided now and then by an octave change. "I'm in my late youth now," he joked to an appreciative audience at a "senior citizens" concert at Queens College on Tuesday. +Next Sunday afternoon he and Jonathan Irving, a teacher and administrator at Queens College who is Mr. Bikel's usual pianist, will bring a similar program of show tunes, folk tunes, discursions and lore, to the State Theater in New Brunswick. Some of it is on the 20 albums he has recorded, mostly for Elektra. And he also tours with a new little revue, "Greetings . . . Sholem Aleichem Lives!" +Like the babel of tongues he turns into sense, his homeland provenance is a mix. In 1938, a year after his bar mitzvah, his family joined the hordes fleeing Vienna to Israel. Moving toward an acting career, he settled some years later in London, appearing in major productions, including "A Streetcar Named Desire," under Laurence Olivier's direction. Though Mr. Bikel saw himself as an actor, and von Trapp as just another acting role -- like those in "The African Queen" and "The Defiant Ones," (which gained him an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor) he also loved folk songs and playing guitar. On trips to Paris, he frequented nightclubs, "spending money I didn't have on champagne I didn't want," to learn from gypsy performers. +With 21 languages to perform in, he could probably dream up a concert where you couldn't make out one word, but that's the opposite of his objective. Introducing each song, he injects an English verse or two, often in his own translation. +In the film "My Fair Lady," he played the language expert whose opinion Henry Higgins gloats over: "Her English is too good," his character says. "That clearly indicates that she is foreign." Mr. Bikel, however, rarely sings in his mother tongue, German, though he gave no political reason. He prefers songs of Russia, which he visited only later in life. +He can point to differences in delivery of show and folk music -- "in a show tune I dance, and keep to framework" -- but acting infuses and enlivens his folk songs. Mr. Bikel is not above mumbling and snoring in "Un az der rebbe tanzt," or hissing and stage-whispering in "Mac the Knife" (by now virtual folk music). +A man of many hats, from the Greek fisherman's he usually sports -- he was Zorba in the national company -- to a borsalino from San Francisco, he wears figurative hats too. A review of his autobiography, "Theo," (HarperCollins, 1994) says he "invented himself over and over again as a character actor, a folk singer, an impresario, a union activist." +His activism is manifest in the high-level elected positions he continues to serve in for Associated Actors and Artists of America, Actor's Equity, the National Council for the Arts, Amnesty International and the American Jewish Congress. On his lapel is a six-pointed star with a red AIDS ribbon. Asked if all this service to professional organizations means he has big gripes, he replied simply, "I don't like to see people exploited or denigrated." +By the same token, he refuses to accept current Orthodox pronouncements that are causing debate about who is a Jew. "It's abominable that anyone seeks to invalidate people as Jews," he said. "It's politicizing the law of return to the homeland, so that Jews can be refused automatic citizenship. Fundamentalists of any stripe are very dangerous people. They are the least democratic, the least tolerant." He abhors what he calls "long-distance hawks," Jews outside Israel who support the radical right, sending money to exterminate Arabs. +"My guitar is the only weapon I care to have," he said onstage, by way of introducing the song "Two Brothers." His setup Tuesday for that song, about brothers on opposite sides of the American Civil War, was that when he entertained Israeli soldiers in a Golan Heights bunker, it was the one requested. And as a postlude, patting the strings like a funereal drum, he said softly, "There is no alternative to peace -- none." + +THEODORE BIKEL + State Theater +15 Livingston Ave. +New Brunswick +April 20, 2 P.M.; + (908) 246-7469. + +LOAD-DATE: April 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Theodore Bikel, at Queens College last week, will bring his songs to New Brunswick next Sunday. (Steve Berman for The New York Times) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +186 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 13, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: FLUSHING; +Inexplicably, New Worker at Botanical Garden Fit in Well + +BYLINE: By EDWARD LEWINE + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 9; Column 3; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 445 words + +When In Soo Song began doing some part-time work at the Queens Botanical Garden in February 1996, Patricia Cook was not sure why he was so good. Mr. Song does not speak much English, and so Ms. Cook, who is one of two head gardeners, could judge him only by his work. +"If I asked him to weed the roses," she said, "he would also lay out a line and edge the area. He made it look good." + At first, Mr. Song, 58, did not have the words to tell Ms. Cook that he had received a bachelor's degree in horticulture in his native South Korea, but eventually he did get it across. Last week he was hired, full time, as a garden maintenance worker. +On a recent day, Mr. Song seemed content as he weeded a sun-dappled row of oaks in the 39-acre garden. Never mind that he is an educated man whose duties now include collecting the trash. Never mind that it takes him two hours to commute each way from his apartment in upper Manhattan to the garden, in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. +"This job is good for my health and my mind," Mr. Song said. "And hopefully the garden will be happy too." +The garden is happy. Its director, Susan Lacerte, said that Mr. Song got the job "on the merits," when another worker quit, but that Mr. Song's background is also a bonus. Around 90,000 Koreans live near the garden and many visit each year. In recognition of this, a new formal Korean garden will be planted, she said, a task for which "Mr. Song will be invaluable." +Mr. Song said he came to America in 1978, looking for an easier life for his four children. Today, his son is a doctor, one daughter is a nurse, one an accountant and one a college student. But Mr. Song, who had taught horticulture in the city of Inchon, did not fare as well. +First he ran a grocery, but after he was pistol-whipped by a robber in 1982, he said, he closed the store. Then he worked in a warehouse, but the company folded in 1989, leaving him unemployed for seven years. +"I decided to immigrate," he says with a shrug. "I had to expect a little hardship." +Finally Mr. Song enrolled in an employment program for older people at Korean Community Services of Woodside, Queens. By chance Patricia Hong, who runs the program, had an agreement to place people at the botanical garden. +"I said, 'My God, do I have a job for you,' " Ms. Hong said. +Mr. Song says he would like to remain at the garden until he retires. Ms. Lacerte says if his English improves, he might be promoted. Even without a fancy title, he is a figure who is respected. "I still call him Mr. Song," said his boss, Ms. Cook. "Now that he's hired, I'm going to talk to him about using his first name." + EDWARD LEWINE + +LOAD-DATE: April 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: In Soo Song's skill impressed a boss at the Queens Botanical Garden. (Frances Roberts for The New York Times) + +Chart: "VITAL STATISTICS: Queens Botanical Garden" +Size -- 39 acres +Where -- Northeast orner of Flushing Meadows Corona Park. (718) 886-3800. +Founded -- 1946 +Attractions -- The Woodland Garden, a small forest with trails; the Wedding Garden, a Victorian-style area with a gazebo; the Cherry Circle, with Japanese Kwanzan cherry trees; the Rose Garden, with many varieties of roses; the Arboretum, 21 acres of trees and lawns. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +187 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 15, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Senate Takes A First Step To Restoring Aid for Aliens + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 17; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 786 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 14 + +Several thousand people rallied on Capitol Hill today, urging Congress to restore welfare and disability benefits for legal immigrants who have not become citizens. And the Senate took a first step to address the concerns that prompted the rally. +By unanimous consent, the Senate endorsed a measure declaring that "elderly and disabled legal immigrants who are unable to work should receive assistance essential to their well-being." Further, it said, "the President, Congress, the states and faith-based and other organizations should continue to work together toward that end." + The declaration, expressing "the sense of the Senate," originated in a proposal by Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrat of Minnesota. But Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Republican leader, offered a substitute, which was adopted by the Senate. +The resolution does not provide money or alter the 1996 welfare law, which made noncitizens ineligible for many types of Federal aid. But it does suggest that lawmakers are coming under political pressure to soften the most stringent provisions of the law affecting immigrants. +Earlier today several Republican lawmakers joined Democrats in saying they would try to relax the restrictions imposed on benefits for immigrants last year. +Senators John H. Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, and Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said they would soon introduce legislation to preserve disability benefits and food stamps for legal immigrants who were receiving such assistance before Aug. 22, 1996, when President Clinton signed the welfare bill. +Republican Representatives like Susan Molinari and Peter T. King of New York and Nancy L. Johnson of Connecticut have signed up as co-sponsors of a separate bill to allow food stamps and Supplemental Security Income benefits for legal immigrants who became disabled after entering the United States. The bill was introduced by Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Florida Republican who was born in Cuba and represents many Cuban-Americans. +Of today's vote, Mr. Wellstone said: "It's a small victory, but it can lead to a bigger victory. It shows that pressure is bubbling up from different states, from mayors, county commissioners and governors." +Mr. Lott expressed no interest in providing assistance to legal immigrants when Republican governors first appealed to him in late January, but he now says he is willing to help if the money can be found. +Mr. Wellstone said that while many elderly immigrants were not citizens, they had sons and daughters who were citizens and would vote. Yosef I. Abramowitz, president of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, said: "We will play electoral hardball in November 1998. We will penalize those in Congress who are trying to throw our parents, grandparents and neighbors into the streets." +Today's rally was organized mainly by immigrants from Russia, Ukraine and other republics of the former Soviet Union, who had not previously lobbied much on the welfare law. The protesters included many older men wearing medals from World War II, who said they had fought the Nazis and then been persecuted by the Communists. Koreans and Hispanic-Americans were also in the crowd. +The rally began with klezmer music as Russian immigrants gathered on the west side of the Capitol with signs and banners. Many said they would soon lose disability benefits because they could not pass the required English-language test. +Sabina Pello of Chicago held a notice from the Social Security Administration that warns immigrants that they may soon lose disability benefits. "This letter is a death sentence for many people in their 80's and 90's," she said. "They are shocked by the new welfare law." +Mr. Abramowitz told the immigrants: "You came to our shores for a safe haven from persecution. By Labor Day, we may have half a million new homeless and starving people." +In an interview, Representative King said: "From a parochial point of view, cutting off welfare benefits for legal immigrants will have a devastating effect on New York State and its budget. We have a large number of legal immigrants, and under our state constitution, we have to make aid available to them. Legal immigrants came to this country legally, played by the rules and should not be penalized. To just cut them off altogether is unconscionable." +Representatives Jerrold Nadler of New York, Carrie P. Meek of Florida and Luis V. Gutierrez of Illinois, all Democrats, spoke at the rally. +Mr. Nadler called the ban on benefits for immigrants "un-American and disgusting, cruel, mean-spirited, unjust." Ms. Meek said she hoped that Congress would repeal the ban or delay it at least a year. + + +LOAD-DATE: April 15, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +188 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 16, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Personal Health + +BYLINE: By Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section C; Page 8; Column 1; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1193 words + +CHARLIE HAMM, the 59-year-old president and chief executive of the Independence Savings Bank in Brooklyn, is not the retiring type. He is an irrepressible leader, a champion of his borough and the people who live there. He has also been a lifelong squash and tennis player, but his hips gradually became so stiff and painful he could hardly walk. So in January, Mr. Hamm joined about 125,000 Americans who will undergo hip replacement surgery this year. With two new titanium joints and daily physical therapy, he will soon be ready to engage in all kinds of activities that he has been watching from the sidelines for years. +The procedure was once limited almost entirely to people over 60, who would be likely to subject their new joint to less stress for fewer years than younger people. But improved techniques have removed the age barriers, and growing numbers of people in their 30's, 40's and 50's are rediscovering an active life after having crippled joints replaced with artificial ones. About one-third of hip replacements are now done on adults younger than 65. + Even 20 years after hip replacement surgery in which old methods were used in older people, 95 percent of the patients rated the results as better or much better than their condition before surgery, according to a study of 112 patients who were operated on at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., in 1968 and 1969. And in a study of 180 patients who got new hips at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York in 1988, more than 90 percent said they were satisfied with the pain relief, improved ability to walk and psychological benefits and would have the surgery again if necessary. +Although orthopedic surgeons who specialize in hip replacement do not encourage their postoperative patients to pursue stressful activities like football, basketball, downhill skiing, ice skating or singles tennis, some do return to vigorous sports, and a vast majority are able to be physically active, usually for the first time in many years. +Robert M. Doherty, then of Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., and an agent for the New York Life Insurance Company, was thrilled to find that after hip replacement surgery at the age of 57 and postoperative physical therapy, he was able to go back to playing golf and tennis. "With the latest techniques doctors are using today, it is amazing what can be accomplished," he said. +Bo Jackson, whose professional football career was abruptly ended by a routine tackle that severely damaged his hip, returned after hip replacement surgery to his first sport: baseball. In his first at-bat as a member of the Chicago White Sox, he hit a home run and sent the spirits of hundreds of thousands of hip replacement patients soaring. But experts fear that Mr. Jackson has also sent the wrong message to fellow patients because the demands of baseball will almost certainly shorten the life span of his new hip. + +Getting a New Hip +Arthritis -- rheumatoid in most younger people and osteoarthritis in those over 60 -- is the most common reason for needing a hip replaced. Other candidates, also usually young, are athletes and accident victims with severe injuries to a hip joint. For those with arthritis, the surgery is usually recommended when the pain can no longer be managed by medication and the person's ability to meet the demands of life has become seriously impaired. +Total hip replacement results in an almost immediate transformation. It relieves pain, restores virtually all motion and dramatically improves the person's quality of life. Even among the elderly, about 90 percent are able to get along without assistance. The replacements last, on average, 20 to 30 years, but they can last indefinitely. +The hip is a ball-in-socket joint, with the ball being the upper end of the femur (thigh bone) and the socket an indentation in the pelvis. Lining the end of the bone and the socket is articular cartilage, which acts as a cushion, keeping the bones from rubbing together. In osteoarthritis, with chronic wear and tear, the cartilage gradually deteriorates, resulting in grinding pain and inflammation with each movement of the hip joint. +The artificial hip replaces the damaged ball-in-socket joint. It has two main pieces. A nonreactive metal shaft, with a metal or ceramic ball at the top, is fitted into the thigh bone. The other half is a cup-shaped socket of tough plastic, encased in metal, into which the ball of the metal shaft fits. +The original hip replacements relied entirely on cement to hold the artificial joint in place. But through the years, pressure on the new joint often caused the cement to crack and the artificial joint to loosen. The younger the patient and the more vigorous the person's activities, the more quickly the artificial hip was likely to fail. +To get around this problem, surgeons devised a new technique in the 1980's: the cementless joint. Instead of being a smooth, solid piece, the cementless implant has a roughened, porous surface into which bone can grow and hold the new joint in place. Dr. Jacob D. Rozbruch, former chief of orthopedic surgery at Beth Israel Medical Center North in New York, explained, "A special coating on the implant encourages the surrounding bone to grow into the prosthesis, making it an integral part of the body." +Cementless joints are now being used in most younger patients in need of hip replacement, among them Sandy Reynolds of Yorktown Heights, N.Y., who at 35 needed two new hips because of bilateral hip dysplasia, a hip deformity that she was born with, and Phil Bilba of New York City, who at 40 could no longer tie his shoelaces because of chronic inflammatory arthritis in his hip. +In some patients, especially those 50 to 70 years old, a combination of a cementless socket and a cemented thigh piece is often used, but in older patients, a totally cemented joint is still preferred by most surgeons. + +After the Surgery +Hip replacement does not end with the surgery. Physical therapy begins almost immediately, while the patient is still in the hospital, and continues after the patient leaves the hospital, usually within a week of the operation. +There are also some lasting precautions to consider. In addition to avoiding undue stress on the artificial joint, anyone with an implanted prosthesis has to be concerned about the possibility of infection. Since the new joint has no blood supply, it is not able to prevent the growth of infectious microorganisms. Any time such a patient has dental work or surgery (even minor surgery), or develops a bacterial infection or undergoes catheterization, a large dose of antibiotics must be taken to reduce the risk of a hip infection. +A single hip replacement costs about $20,000 to $25,000; annually, $2.5 billion to $3 billion is spent on such operations, most of which is paid for by Medicare and other health insurers. But Dr. Rowland W. Chang of Northwestern University Medical School has calculated that the procedure nearly always saves money. Over the remaining years of life for a 60-year-old woman, for example, more than $100,000 would be saved in the cost of her care. + +LOAD-DATE: April 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Diagram: "Cementless Replacement Joint" +In the 1980's, hip replacements were devised with porous surfaces into which bone can grow to hold the joint in place. They hold up better under the stresses put on them by physically active people. Diagram illustrates how this replacement techology works. + +(Source: Bristol-Meyers/Zimmer) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +189 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 18, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Easing Stand, Bruno Sees Rent Decontrol Over 4 Years + +BYLINE: By RANDY KENNEDY + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 888 words + +Responding to pressure from fellow Republicans, the majority leader of the New York State Senate, Joseph L. Bruno, softened his stance yesterday on ending almost all rent regulations, saying that he would consider phasing out the laws over four years instead of two. +It is the second time Mr. Bruno has moderated his position since he first vowed last December to do away with laws limiting rents on 1.2 million apartments, most in New York City, by mid-1999 for all but the elderly and the disabled. Shortly afterward, Mr. Bruno promised to maintain protections for poor renters as well, though he did not specify who would be covered. + Yesterday, addressing the New York Building Congress, a group of contractors and labor organizations, at Windows on the World, Mr. Bruno said that several Republican state senators from New York City had warned him recently that ending the laws in two years would be too hasty. "I'm told that that's too short a period of time," he said to reporters afterward. "I'm listening." +"I want to do something that's responsible," he said. "And if four years is more responsible than two, then that's where we can be." +But Mr. Bruno continued to insist that he would accept nothing less than a complete elimination of rent protections for all but the most vulnerable. In response to a question, he said that included eliminating a 1974 provision that guarantees tenants the right to a lease renewal. +"I don't think that we have to be the negotiator between tenants and landlords, because that's artificial," he said. "Common sense tells me if a landlord doesn't want a tenant or tenants, O.K., then maybe there's some reason. Do we force a tenant to stay in a building whether he wants to or not?" +"So it ought to work both ways, I guess, is all I'm saying," he added. +Mr. Bruno also strongly criticized parts of the current laws that give spouses, family members and those in long-term relationships the right to take over rent-stabilized or rent-controlled apartments when the leaseholder or primary tenant dies. "Common sense tells me that if I don't own something, then I shouldn't have the right to will it to someone else," he said. "I would like to be able to, maybe, have my daughter use your car. That would be very nice. But that's not mine." +Sheldon Silver, the Democratic Speaker of the Assembly and the leading defender of rent protection laws, said he questioned whether "Senator Bruno is suggesting that when a husband dies we throw out the children or a widow. I don't know." +While Mr. Bruno's concession yesterday appeared unlikely to mollify proponents of rent regulations, it did shed some light on the struggles the issue has caused within his own party. +Mr. Bruno said he was prompted to consider allowing four years instead of two for an end to the laws because several Republican senators had urged him to do so. He mentioned Guy J. Velella, the Bronx Republican leader and a critical fund-raiser for Republicans, and Nicholas A. Spano, chairman of the powerful Westchester County Republican Party. +Both Senators had expressed their opposition to Mr. Bruno's initial proposal. They and other Republican senators, vulnerable to attacks in districts where there are many rent-regulated apartments, have privately urged a compromise that would change the laws far less than Mr. Bruno wants. Gov. George E. Pataki has also called the Bruno plan too hasty and said he would push for a more gradual approach. +Senator Roy M. Goodman, a Manhattan Republican who represents the Upper East Side and advocates continuing the regulations as they are, said yesterday Mr. Bruno's softening would not affect his position. "The problem we are faced with here is that the removal of protections would cause rents to skyrocket," he said. "Whether they skyrocket in four years rather than two is a distinction without a difference." +By again modifying his initial position, however slightly, Mr. Bruno also seemed to be trying to put the ball back in the Democrats' court on moving toward a compromise. Describing his initial call for an end to rent regulations in two years as his opener, he said the Democratic-controlled Assembly's response was to urge that the laws be extended with no changes and to try to make it harder to challenge them in the future. "And that's their position, totally polarized," he said. "I at least talked about a transition." +Asked whether a four-year transition period was the longest he would consider, Mr. Bruno responded that it was "not a line in the sand." +"It's an indication that I want to do what's responsible and reasonable as we transition out of rent control," he said. "We don't want to hurt anyone here." +Mr. Bruno has threatened to allow the current rules to die when they expire at midnight on June 14 if the Assembly Democrats do not agree to phase them out. +Martin Brennan, campaign coordinator for the New York State Tenants and Neighbors Coalition, which opposes any changes in rent protections, said he thought that Mr. Bruno's statements yesterday reflected his fears that he is becoming increasingly isolated within his party. +"He clearly appears to be negotiating with himself," Mr. Brennan said. "It also appears clear that he doesn't have the votes to pass his extremist agenda even in his own conference." + +LOAD-DATE: April 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Paul Carroll, center, an advocate of keeping rent regulations, and supporters demonstrating last night outside the South Street Seaport in Manhattan, where a Republican fund-raiser, with Gov. George E. Pataki, was held. (Chang W. Lee/The New York Times)(pg. B4) + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +190 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 18, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Nordic Study Links Dementia To Drivers in Fatal Crashes + +BYLINE: By DENISE GRADY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 17; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 895 words + +A study of the brains of elderly drivers killed in automobile accidents in Sweden and Finland has found that an unusually high percentage, as many as half, showed signs of early Alzheimer's disease, researchers said today. But the condition had not been diagnosed before their deaths, which led the scientists to suggest that even in its preliminary stages, Alzheimer's can cause enough mental impairment to make driving dangerous. +Finding such a high incidence of Alzheimer's disease in crash victims over the age of 65 surprised the researchers, they said. In Sweden's general population over 65, they said, only 5 percent have the disease. In the United States, from 5 to 10 percent of people older than 65 and nearly half of those older than 85 are estimated to have the disease. + The Swedish researchers reported their findings in today's issue of The Lancet, a British medical journal. +They appear to raise the possibility both that many more accidents than thought are caused by Alzheimer's and that the incidence of Alzheimer's in the population is higher than thought. +Hazards created by drivers with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia have become a focus of increasing concern and research in the United States, as the share of the elderly in the population increases. There were 13 million drivers older than 70 in this country in 1995, and the number is expected to rise to 30 million by 2020. +"It's an area of considerable concern," said Dr. Barry Gordon, a neurologist and director of the memory clinic at Johns Hopkins University, who was not involved in the study. "In many areas, if you don't drive you're effectively trapped. But individual needs must be balanced against societal needs." +The Swedish researchers examined the brains of 98 drivers, 65 to 90 years old, who were killed in traffic accidents in Sweden and Finland. They paid special attention to two regions of the cerebral cortex involved in decision-making, judgment and visual and spatial ability. In 33 percent of the accident victims, they found brain lesions characteristic of Alzheimer's disease, and in 20 percent, they found lesions that suggested it, perhaps reflecting an earlier stage of the disease. The accident victims also had an unusually high incidence of a gene that has been associated with an increased risk of late-onset Alzheimer's disease. +About half the accidents in the study involved only the drivers' vehicle, but in the rest, which often occurred at intersections, other motorists were injured as well, Dr. Bengt Winblad, an author of the study, said in a telephone interview. Dr. Winblad is head of the department of geriatric medicine at the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm. +"This is a good study," Dr. Gordon said, "and it adds to the growing evidence that there's undiagnosed or perhaps unappreciated dementia in a fair proportion of older individuals, and that dementia might be contributing to societal problems as well as the individuals' problems." +Dr. Karlene Ball, a professor of psychology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, who has devised tests to detect cognitive impairment in drivers, said she was not surprised by the new findings. "Studies in the U.S. of Alzheimer's and driving have shown pretty much that even in the mild stages of the disease most of the drivers are not fit to drive," she said. "If mild dementia corresponds to this undiagnosed category, that would make sense." +Dan Foley, a biostatistician at the National Institute on Aging, one of the National Institutes of Health, said that studies in this country indicated that the onset of Alzheimer's disease led to a two- or threefold increase in a driver's risk of a crash. The increased risk does not occur right away, he said, but it becomes significant as the dementia progresses from mild to moderate. "Then they pass the margin of safety and need to quit," he said. "But severely demented people don't drive. They can't." +Dr. Winblad and his colleagues urged that older drivers, their families and doctors be on the lookout for cognitive problems that might interfere with driving. They suggested that older people who have already had accidents be tested to see whether they should continue driving, but Dr. Winblad advised against the routine testing of elderly drivers in general. +"I agree with that conclusion," said Dr. Leonard Berg, director of the Alzheimer's Disease research center at Washington University in St. Louis, and vice president of the Alzheimer's Association, a national group based in Chicago. But Dr. Berg emphasized that a diagnosis of Alzheimer's does not mean a patient must give up driving immediately. Many can drive safely for a while, he said, though they should be tested regularly. +"Driving is such an emotional issue," said Linda Hunt, an occupational therapist at Washington University who often conducts road tests to assess the driving ability of patients with dementia. +"Nobody is willing to step up and make a statement like, 'Anyone with a dementia diagnosis should not drive.' " +Only one state, California, requires that doctors report a diagnosis of dementia to the state authorities, who may then order an evaluation. "There's controversy in the field about whether that's a good idea," Mr. Foley said. "Doctors worry that it scares people away from coming in to be assessed." + +LOAD-DATE: April 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +191 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 18, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Metro Business; +Caring for Aged Parents + +BYLINE: BY DAVID CHEN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 5; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 183 words + +Baby boomers and their aging parents have vastly different views over how much financial responsibility and personal attention are involved in providing health care for the parents, according to a national survey. +While 80 percent of the children say that their parents' health condition has affected the quality of their life, 94 percent of their parents believe that there has been little effect. While 53 percent of the children anticipate that their parents will eventually move in with them, 22 percent of parents think so. And while 31 percent of the children feel that they will have to offer a great deal of financial support to their parents, only 18 percent of parents feel that way. + "There seems to be a lack of communication," said Harriet Dronska, vice president and chief operating officer of Elderplan Inc., which conducted the survey of more than 500 people. Elderplan Inc., is part of the Metropolitan Jewish Health System, a Brooklyn-based organization providing health care programs to almost 20,000 people annually in the New York metropolitan area. + DAVID CHEN + +LOAD-DATE: April 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +192 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 20, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In the Region/New Jersey; +A Small Town Helps to Save a Big Rental Complex + +BYLINE: By RACHELLE GARBARINE + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 7; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1317 words + +DATELINE: COLLINGSWOOD + +FOR more than a decade this Camden County borough watched the 1,037-unit Sutton Towers, its biggest apartment complex, steadily slip into decline. In the summer of 1995 its owner filed for bankruptcy. +Rather than leave the future of the local landmark to an uncertain fate, the borough took ownership to the land beneath the complex and, in an innovative agreement, became a 45 percent owner of the four-building site to insure its revival as a mixed-income rental. + Now the property at the corner of Collings Avenue and Whitehorse Pike, which had been 50 percent vacant as recently as last fall, is in the midst of a leasing and renovation program. It also has been renamed Parkview, its name when built in the 50's as one of the first high-rise apartment complexes in South Jersey. +Eighty percent of the 550- to 1,000-square foot one- and two-bedroom units in the 9- and 10-story buildings are being leased at market rents of $575 to $875. The remaining units are reserved for elderly residents with low and moderate incomes -- a housing product that is in short supply in the area, borough officials said. +Getting involved in the project was a way for Collingswood "to control its own future," said M. James Maley Jr., a borough commissioner and lawyer who led the negotiations on the agreement. It was struck last July after nearly a year of discussion involving the borough, GE Capital Corporation, which took back the property through bankruptcy in late 1995, and Capital Properties Associates, a Manhattan-based developer. +Under the agreement the borough and Capital Properties formed the for-profit Park Collingswood Urban Renewal Corporation to buy and redevelop Parkview. Capital Properties, which owns the remaining 55 percent of the complex, is also managing and renovating it. +Financing for the nearly $50 million redevelopment is coming mostly from the sale of bonds, including $36.5 million issued by the Camden County Improvement Authority to buy the complex from GE Capital, retiring its $27 million mortgage. GE Capital is guaranteeing those bonds against default. +The $9.5 million remaining after the mortgage is retired is to be used for the renovation, along with $7.6 million from separate bonds sold by the borough and invested in the project and $5 million from Capital Properties. The borough also gave the project a 25-year tax abatement. +"We assured ourselves that the market was there, but without these financing incentives we would not have done the project because it would not have made economic sense," said Richard Cohen, president of Capital Properties. Putting the package together required joint action by the county, borough and GE Capital along with his company, Mr. Cohen said, adding that "we need each other, desperately." +This is the first project in New Jersey for Capital Properties, which has worked with GE Capital on other troubled developments and owns and manages some 7,000 condominium and rental units in 10 states. +Betty D. Davis, senior vice president of GE Capital, said of the deal: "It is the best strategy to maximize the value of the asset." +The deal was appproved by the state's Local Finance Board, part of the state's Department of Community Affairs, which oversees housing. The board provides financial oversight to municipalities, counties and improvement authorities. +Mr. Maley. the borough commissioner, said the borough would repay its debt from several sources -- payments in lieu of taxes, which will be at least the $819,000 a year the property had paid the borough, and profits from the project's rental income. +He said that since the project was not initially expected to be profitable the borough projected Parkview's redevelopment would have cost each taxpayer $25 in each of the first two years. By trimming its budget that cost was eliminated this year. +The borough still could lose money if the project fails. But, said Mr. Maley, "there was more to lose if we did nothing." +PARKVIEW is the biggest taxpayer in the 1.2 square mile borough. And at full occupancy it represents 20 percent of Collingswood's 5,000 households. +"If Parkview went south it had the potential of taking the whole community down with it," said Frank Law, the Mayor of Collingswood, referring to concerns of its impact on the borough's finances, schools and property values. +Wendy Morze, who with her husband, Ronald, have owned their home across the street from the complex for 24 years, said she feared the value of her property would fall if Parkview was left to deteriorate. As for the deal, she said: "It is a big responsibility for the community and there is no 100 percent guarantee of success. But something had to be done to keep Collingswood a family-oriented town." +Mary M. DiBartolomeo, a 72-year-old widow who has lived at Parkview for eight years, was also worried. "I was ready to leave because the complex was close to becoming a slum," said Mrs. DiBartolomeo. But she said the redevelopment effort convinced her to stay. "It will be a beautiful place again when all the work gets done," she said. +Through the late 60's Parkview flourished, attracting tenants who included a Federal judge, a United States Representative and many doctors and lawyers. But in the 80's a series of changes in ownership and management pushed the complex into a downward spiral. +The situation worsened in the first half of this decade. The owner, Sutton Towers Associates of Newark, Del., fell behind on its tax payments, ultimately accummulating arrears of more than $1 million, and stopped making needed improvements. +From 1990 to 1995 over 200 violations were filed against the complex. After the borough made two unsuccessful attempts to work with Sutton to turn the property around Sutton filed for bankruptcy. +Despite its risks, industry professionals consider the strategy to revive Parkview a creative way to rescue a troubled project. +The number of troubled properties has dwindled as the state's real estate market has improved. Moreover, the investment climate for apartments has remained strong nationally for the last five years. +But troubled properties still exist, said Nathan Slovin, executive vice president of the New Jersey Apartment Association, a trade group in East Brunswick. The major reasons are poor management or owners' inability to anticipate improvement costs, he added. +Parkview's redevelopment "involves players not typically involved in such projects, Collingswood key among them," said Mr. Slovin. If successful, Parkview could be a model, he added. +Involvement in such a deal is possible under a 1992 amended state law that enables municipalities to assist in redevelopment of areas that they designate as in need of rehabilitation. Collingswood declared the Parkview site such an area. +The law also puts limits on the amount of profits the redevelopment entity could earn based on a formula tied to the renovation cost and acquistion price. In the case of Parkview Collingswood, which owns the apartment complex here, the for-profit entity can earn 12 to 15 percent in profits a year, said Mr. Maley, and any additional profits go to the borough. +To rebuild its value, Parkview is undergoing a $16 million renovation. The improvements, to be completed by year's end, include installing new mechanical systems and windows in the four buildings and upgrading their lobbies and common areas, said Mr. Cohen of Capital Properties. +Apartments are also being renovated at a cost of $10,000 each, he said, and a health club is being added to the existing amenities, among them a swimming pool and tennis courts. The buildings frame a retail plaza, overlook a municipal park, and offer views of Philadelphia. +Since leasing began in February more than 200 apartments, 30 of which had been set aside for the elderly with low or moderate incomes, have been leased, said Mr. Cohen. + +LOAD-DATE: April 20, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The 1,037-unit Parkview rental complex in Collingswood, now undergoing a leasing and renovation program. (Frank C. Dougherty for The New York Times) + +Map showing the location of Collingswood, N.J. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +193 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 20, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +SPENDING IT; +When the Policy Covers Only One Disease + +BYLINE: By CAROL MARIE CROPPER + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 8; Column 1; Money and Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1657 words + +ANN AND JOHN HARRELL had paid cancer insurance premiums for half a century, starting long before his liver cancer was diagnosed. So as Mr. Harrell was dying last year, Mrs. Harrell, a retiree in Windermere, Fla., turned to the insurance company for help with about $6,000 in bills that Medicare and a Medicare supplement did not pay. +Instead of thousands, she said she got hundreds -- one check for $50, another for $250 -- from her carrier, the American General Life and Accident Insurance Company. "They said that's all I was entitled to," Mrs. Harrell, 83, said. "Truthfully, I've quarreled with them so much I don't want to hear from them." + The company, based in Nashville, said it had honored the policy. "We paid all claims in full covered under the policy," said John Pluhowski, director of corporate communications for the American General Corporation, the holding company for the insurer. State insurance officials agreed with that assessment. Mr. Pluhowski said some of the claims Mrs. Harrell submitted were not covered, including claims for X-rays used to diagnose her husband's cancer. +The company added that it had paid Mrs. Harrell about $4,000 for two other claims since her husband's cancer was first diagnosed in 1994. +Consumer groups widely criticize cancer insurance, calling it a waste of money and contending that its marketing literature preys on people's fears, especially those of the elderly. They say consumers sometimes do not understand the limitations of the coverage and can have a difficult time collecting even when they do contract cancer. Besides, they say, anyone with standard health insurance or Medicare is already covered for cancer. +The biggest complaint about cancer insurance is that it returns fewer premium dollars to policyholders than standard health insurance. A 1994 study by the Federal General Accounting Office showed that the largest companies that sold plans providing coverage only for hospital stays or dreaded diseases like cancer paid out as little as 35 percent of the premiums they took in. In comparison, New York State sets 82 percent as payout targets for most standard major-medical policies bought by individuals, and 75 percent for group policies, said Peter Newell, an aide to Assemblyman Alexander B. Grannis, a Manhattan Democrat who is the chairman of the State Assembly Insurance Committee. +"They don't pay out much; that's the concern," said Cheryl Matheis, a legislative representative for the American Association of Retired Persons. +Because of the complaints, New Jersey and New York do not allow the sale of stand-alone cancer policies, but the New York Insurance Department is considering lifting its ban, saying it is simply trying to permit the sale of a product that people want. Connecticut recently changed its law, with policy sales scheduled to start in June. +Aflac Inc., the country's largest seller of cancer coverage, spent about $175,000 on lobbyists and campaign contributions in an effort to change the rules in New York. The company says cancer insurance is a product that fills a need and rates highly with those who buy it. Such a policy often pays a $1,500 lump sum when cancer is diagnosed and a fixed amount, typically $200, for each day that a policyholder is hospitalized or is being treated as an outpatient for the disease. It will also pay for specific procedures -- up to $3,000 for surgery, for instance, and $10,000 for a bone-marrow transplant. +AFLAC, based in Columbus, Ga., and the holding company for the American Family Life Assurance Company, points to happy customers like Harold Keller, 51, of Gladewater, Tex. Mr. Keller, an elementary school principal, bought an American Family policy in 1973. His older brother had died of bone cancer at 26. +"I just thought, not a bad idea," Mr. Keller said. "A lot of people die with cancer. You're always looking for things to make life easier for the people you leave behind." Besides, he said, the policy cost only $11 a month for family coverage. +Twenty years later, it was not Mr. Keller but one of his 18-year-old twin sons who contracted leukemia. Mr. Keller remembers the frantic 120-mile trip to Dallas, made without packing even a shaving kit, to take his son Jeff for the tests that would confirm their local doctor's suspicions. He recalls the weeks the young man spent in the hospital, with family members staying in hotel rooms and paying for transportation to and from Dallas. +Jeff was covered under his father's standard medical insurance, but American Family also sent more than $18,000 to the family under the cancer policy, Mr. Keller said. Some of that money was left to help send Jeff to his first year of college. He has been free of cancer for three years. "He is doing quite well," his father said. "He is fixing to graduate from Texas A & M with a degree in information management systems. He plans to get married in August." +Mr. Keller still has the cancer policy, which now costs $27.50 a month. "I'm sold on it," he said. "It was a godsend for us." +But consumer advocates like Bonnie Burns, a consultant with the California Health Insurance Counseling and Advocacy Program, worry that low-income families without employer-provided insurance might be tempted by a cancer policy's low premium to buy only that policy and wind up with coverage for cancer but nothing else. The Florida Department of Insurance says that some people, not understanding that the policies covered only cancer, have complained about cancer insurers' not paying their medical bills when they were hospitalized for other ailments, said Henry Burke, an insurance administrator there. +There are also concerns that elderly consumers, anxious about health costs, become targets for people hawking one-disease-only insurance. A 1986 lawsuit in California helped persuade Congress to pass a law to protect the elderly from unnecessary policies. +In the California case, filed against a San Jose insurance agency, evidence showed that one elderly couple had been sold 29 insurance policies in 18 months. An 87-year-old woman later found to have Alzheimer's disease bought 14 policies from another agent with the same agency in a year and a half. Most of the unnecessary policies were Medicare supplements, said Don Gartner, an assistant district attorney in Santa Cruz County, but some were cancer policies. +Congress passed a law in 1990 prohibiting the sale of any policy that duplicated Medicare coverage and allowing the sale of only one Medigap policy to a recipient, said Paul Olenick, an administrator with the Health Care Financing Administration, which oversees Medicare. But in 1994 and last year, lawmakers weakened those protections, opening the door again to widespread sales of cancer policies as well as heart-disease coverage and other narrow policies to the elderly, Ms. Burns said. +MS. MATHEIS of the A.A.R.P. warned that the policies had some restrictions. They might require a multi year waiting period after purchase, during which the policy will not pay for cancer treatment. Or they might insist on a pathologist's confirmation of the cancer rather than just a doctor's diagnosis, meaning that a biopsy would be required. That might not be practical if, say, the patient had an inoperable brain tumor or had died and already been buried. +Tom Schermaul, an insurance specialist in Florida, recalls a man who complained to the Florida Department of Insurance after burying his mother, who had died of cancer. He had discovered her cancer policy after the funeral. The insurance company wouldn't pay without a pathology report, which he didn't have, Mr. Schermaul said. +William Kahn, 74, of Orlando, Fla., fought with his cancer insurer, the American Pioneer Life Insurance Company, when it refused to cover a follow-up exam to make sure his colon cancer had not returned. +Mr. Kahn, a retired college professor, underwent surgery to remove the cancer in 1992. At first the company paid, he said, but it started balking late last year when he returned to his doctor for the follow-up examination. He says he was told that such check-ups don't count as cancer treatment. +American Pioneer, a subsidiary of the Universal American Financial Corporation based in Orlando, finally paid him about $1,700 this month after he complained to the Florida Department of Insurance. "The pressure was on them," Mr. Kahn said. +"It was an error," said Dorothy Jordan, claims manager at American Pioneer, explaining why it took the company seven months to pay. She said the medical forms did not indicate the exam was for cancer. +Kriss Cloninger 3d, the executive vice president and chief financial officer of Aflac, defends cancer insurance, saying many of the consumer complaints are based on problems in polices from 20 years ago. +Aflac policies have a 30-day waiting period and require a pathologist's confirmation, Mr. Cloninger said, although that requirement can be waived by a physicians' committee working with Aflac. The company also says that it will not sell an individual cancer policy to anyone over 65 and that the average age of its policyholders is 41. +Moreover, the company said a 1995 survey had found that 94 percent of Aflac cancer policyholders had other coverage. The company also said its cancer insurance paid out 62.4 percent of its premiums to policyholders. +"We agree that people ought to have comprehensive health insurance," Mr. Cloninger said. But "there are many costs that aren't covered by comprehensive health insurance." +"I think the proof is in the marketplace," he said. "People do find it a valuable product." +Ms. Burns disagrees. "Insurance is a real confusing subject area, not just for older people but for a lot of people." Cancer insurance, she said, is simply "a dubious purchase." +"In most cases," she said, "it is a waste of insurance dollars that could be better spent on, say, long-term care insurance." + +LOAD-DATE: April 20, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: William Kahn of Orlando, Fla., fought with a cancer insurer over coverage of a follow-up examination. He collected about $1,700 after he complained to the state. (Joe Skipper for The New York Times) + +Chart: "Dominating a Market' shows premiums collected in 1995 by dread-disease insurers. (Source: A.M. Best Company) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +194 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 21, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +U.S. Challenges Courts on Disabilities + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section B; Page 9; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1417 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 20 + +In a move that could delay or deny benefits for tens of thousands of people, the Social Security Administration has told its judges that they should, in most cases, disregard Federal court precedents if those rulings conflict with agency policies. +The order, issued as the agency faces a huge backlog of disputed claims, has drawn protests from Federal courts, members of Congress and agency employees. + Moreover, it is being compared to positions taken in the early 1980's by the Reagan Administration, which said it was bound only by Supreme Court decisions and did not have to "acquiesce" in decisions of lower courts that contradicted its reading of the Social Security law. Democrats denounced the Reagan Administration's practice as lawless, and the Administration took a more moderate position after Congress made clear that it disapproved of the practice. This week, the House Ways and Means Committee will hold a hearing to examine the practice. +The Social Security agency recently told its administrative law judges, who rule on claims for benefits, that they might face remedial training and "disciplinary action" if they did not follow the agency's policies or if their productivity was considered too low. +"An administrative law judge is bound to follow agency policy even if, in the administrative law judge's opinion, the policy is contrary to law," the agency said in a confidential memorandum to its judges. A copy of the memorandum was obtained from a Social Security employee who disagrees with its conclusions. +In practice, the directive means that some people who file claims will be less likely to obtain benefits because the agency's policies are often stricter than the court decisions. +The disputes often involve evaluating pain. A person, for example, complains of excruciating pain, but doctors cannot fully explain its cause with X-rays or other "objective medical evidence." In thousands of cases, Social Security officials have given such complaints less weight than courts have said they should in deciding whether to award or continue benefits. At issue are benefits under the Social Security Disability Insurance Program and Supplemental Security Income, which is for the needy elderly, disabled and blind. +Likewise, a claimant's doctor might find disability in a 58-year-old man who has had a heart attack and has chronic respiratory problems. Government doctors might say the man could still work. But courts often conclude that the treating doctor's opinion is entitled to much more weight than the Social Security Administration gave it. +Social Security officials said they could not operate a uniform nationwide program if they had to follow the potentially conflicting decisions of various courts around the country. +"Administrative law judges can decide facts, but not the law," said a spokesman for the agency, Philip A. Gambino. "They have to apply the law as written in our regulations and policies." +But Ronald G. Bernoski, acting president of the Association of Administrative Law Judges, which represents Social Security judges, said he and his colleagues in the organization had taken an oath to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States and should not be required to disregard court decisions. +In a recent policy statement, the Social Security Administration reserved the right to accept or reject decisions from Federal appeals courts as precedents in other cases that raise the same legal issues in the same judicial circuit. +When the agency disagrees with a court's interpretation of the law, the new statement says, "Social Security Administration decision makers will continue to be bound by S.S.A.'s nationwide policy rather than the court's holding," unless the Social Security Commissioner voluntarily chooses to accept the court ruling as a precedent. +Mr. Bernoski, who presides over hearings in Milwaukee, said the agency's action threatened the independence of the 1,042 Social Security judges across the country. +The Clinton Administration says it will apply the final decision of a Federal appeals court to a plaintiff in the specific case decided by the court. But the Administration says administrative law judges should not follow the decision as a precedent in other cases, unless the Social Security Commissioner has accepted it by issuing a formal notice of "acquiescence." +The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, recently admonished the Clinton Administration on that issue. +"Regardless of whether the Commissioner formally announces her acquiescence, she is still bound by the law of this circuit and does not have the discretion to decide whether to adhere to it," the court said in an opinion written by Judge Roger L. Wollman. "The regulations of the Social Security Administration are not the supreme law of the land. It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is, and the Commissioner will ignore that principle at her peril." +Arthur J. Fried, general counsel of the Social Security Administration, said the number of requests for hearings had exploded in recent years. The number rose 90 percent, to 588,596 in 1995 from 310,529 in 1990. The average time from the request for a hearing to the issuance of a decision has nearly doubled, to more than a year, and "that's unacceptable to all of us," Mr. Fried said on April 3 at a conference of lawyers who specialize in Social Security cases. +The agency's chief administrative law judge, Charles R. Boyer, said he worried that the backlog might increase. "I look with fear and trepidation at the possible workload that's going to hit us in the fall," Mr. Boyer said. The Government, he added, expects tens of thousands of immigrants and children to pursue appeals that challenge the denial or loss of disability benefits under the new welfare law. +The Social Security Administration pays more than $1 billion a week in cash benefits to people with disabilities. Few of the recipients leave the rolls and return to work. In the last decade, the number of beneficiaries of working age jumped, to 6.6 million from 4 million. The number of children on the rolls has nearly tripled since 1990, to more than 965,000. +Victor G. Rosenblum, a law professor at Northwestern University, said, the new policies "raise a real risk of politicizing the function of the administrative law judge and making him or her a mere flunky of the agency." +Representative George W. Gekas, a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, deplored the practice of "nonacquiescence." Mr. Gekas, a Republican of Pennsylvania, said he would hold hearings and introduce legislation to curb the practice, as recommended by the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy-making arm of the Federal judiciary. +The Social Security Administration is an independent Federal agency, but it is closely supervised by the White House. Congress controls the agency's budget and can change its policies by passing laws or by exerting informal pressure. The Judicial Conference said the policy of refusing to follow circuit court precedents was "unfair to litigants" and of "questionable propriety." +Nancy G. Shor, executive director of the National Organization of Social Security Claimants' Representatives, which includes more than 3,000 lawyers, said she was surprised to see Federal officials once again asserting a right to disregard court decisions. +"The institutional memory seems to have been erased in the last 12 to 15 years," Ms. Shor said. "There are so many new faces in new places that the crisis of the early 1980's has become an item of history." +Lyle D. Lieberman of Miami, a former president of the organization of claimants' representatives, said the Government's refusal to accept court precedents could easily delay the payment of benefits to disabled workers for two or three years. +"The Federal courts will just send the cases back to the agency to follow circuit court precedents," Mr. Lieberman said. +If that happens, Judge Bernoski said, the backlog at the Social Security Administration will grow as the agency is forced to re-examine the cases and issue new decisions. +Social Security officials said their policy was somewhat similar to that of the Internal Revenue Service. But tax officials said they followed the precedent set by a Federal appeals court decision in the circuit in which it was issued, even if they sought different rulings elsewhere. + +LOAD-DATE: April 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "SNAPSHOT: Busy Times in Disability Courts" +Judges at the Social Security Administration have been ordered to follow agency guidelines rather than Federal court rulings when deciding cases. The Social Security judges face a heavy caseload as disability benefit programs continue to grow. Graph tracks number of new requests for hearings and of cases pending at the end of the year, from 1990 through 1996. Also tracked is the number of people receiving disability benefits and the amount of benefits paid, from 1985 through 1995. (Sources: Social Security Administration; U.S. General Accounting Office) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +195 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 22, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Governor Orders a Clarification on Medicaid + +BYLINE: By RACHEL L. SWARNS + +SECTION: Section B; Page 8; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 494 words + +Hoping to stop nursing homes from mistakenly turning away legal immigrants needing care, Gov. George E. Pataki directed his staff yesterday to send letters to all the state's nursing homes to make it clear that most immigrants will not lose Medicaid coverage. +Confused by the new Federal welfare law that will terminate the benefits of thousands of noncitizens, some nursing homes had begun to improperly deny admission to legal immigrants eligible for care, fearing they would default on their bills. + "The Governor is concerned that seniors and those families be assured access to nursing home care," Dr. Barbara A. DeBuono, the Commissioner of Health, said in an interview yesterday. +"The number of people potentially losing their benefits is very small," she said. "We don't want them to use this as an excuse to deny people deserving home care." +Officials said Mr. Pataki's order was issued in response to an article on Sunday in The New York Times, which reported that some health care centers had begun to turn away dozens of sickly and elderly legal immigrants, leaving them to languish in hospitals and with families who could no longer care for them. +In fact, state health officials say that virtually all of the state's legal immigrants, those who arrived before Aug. 22 of last year, will keep Medicaid, which covers nursing home costs. Only a small group of people, including those granted temporary residency and those who arrived after Aug. 22, are expected to lose Medicaid coverage. +The letters, which were being drafted yesterday, will be sent out to health care centers this week, Dr. DeBuono said. "We will have the guidelines that nursing homes are specifically to use," she said. +Several congressmen had expressed concern about the issue yesterday afternoon, including Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato, the Republican from New York, and Representative E. Clay Shaw, a Republican from Florida and the chief sponsor of the Federal welfare law. +"We need a clarification with respect to that," Mr. D'Amato said of the changes in Medicaid eligibility, "and I would hope we would be able to get one so that question can be answered and we will not have a situation where people are being turned away when they need not be turned away." He said he planned to seek further clarification of the law. +Mr. Shaw said he intended to hold Congressional hearings to weigh the impact of welfare reform on elderly immigrants. "We're going to have to watch this whole thing to see who gets hurt by it." +Advocates for the elderly applauded the efforts to clarify the issue to insure that legal immigrants receive the care they need. +"Nursing homes now will have no reason to refuse people who in fact will have a source of payment," said Cynthia Rudder, director of the Nursing Home Community Coalition of New York States, which lobbies on behalf of nursing home patients. "I'm really pleased they're going to clear up the entire confusion." + +LOAD-DATE: April 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +196 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 22, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +BEYDA, JOSEPH + +SECTION: Section B; Page 10; Column 1; Classified + +LENGTH: 104 words + +BEYDA-Joseph. Once in a generation, the Almighty gives us a gift and puts on this earth a person whose purpose is to lead, and make a difference. In his 57 short years, Joseph has touched thousands of souls from children to senior citizens. His humanity, his kindness, and his caring inspires us all. His impact on our community and on the lives of those he touched will last forever. We miss you, Joseph, but you will never be gone. Our heartfelt condolences to his wife Barbara, his daughter Shirley, sons David and Jeffrey, his mother Shirley and the whole family. May he continue to look after us all from above. + +LOAD-DATE: April 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +197 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 23, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Exercise Aids Older Women + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section C; Page 8; Column 3; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 205 words + +DATELINE: CHICAGO, April 22 + +A new study finds that women who exercise after menopause tend to outlive sedentary women, and as little as one long walk a week can make a difference. +The more older women exercise, the better their chances of a long life, the researchers added in a report in Wednesday's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association. + Findings in the seven-year study of more than 40,000 postmenopausal women in Iowa parallel earlier research in men, in younger adults of both sexes and in small studies that included older women. +Women who engaged in moderate activity, likw bowling, gardening or a long walk, four or more times a week were 33 percent less likely to die during the study than women who were never physically active, researchers found. Women who engaged in moderate activity just once weekly were 12 percent less likely to die than their sedentary counterparts, said researchers led by Dr. Lawrence H. Kushi of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health in Minneapolis. +Vigorous activity -- jogging, racket sports, swimming or aerobics -- appeared to afford even greater advantages, but so few subjects regularly engaged in vigorous activity that results were not statistically significant. + +LOAD-DATE: April 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +198 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 23, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Boys of the Holocaust Tell Their Stories; +732 Were Found and Flown to England, and They've Kept in Touch + +BYLINE: By DINITIA SMITH + +SECTION: Section C; Page 9; Column 3; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 1729 words + +On Aug. 14, 1945, 300 Jewish orphans recently liberated from Nazi concentration camps sat huddled on the floor of 12 Lancaster bombers on their way to the British Isles. "The precious cargo," their social workers called them. +The children were cold and airsick but excited. The philanthropist Leonard Montefiore had persuaded the reluctant British Government to take them in, and the Home Office had given permission for 1,000 to land. But such was the toll in the camps that only 732 children could be found, mostly boys age 12 to 16. There were only 80 girls. + Over the next few months, the children were flown to England, Ireland and Scotland and nursed back to health. Eventually, as young adults, they scattered. But they kept in touch. They formed the '45 Aid Society to help one another in time of need. And as the years passed "the boys," as they continue to call themselves well into their 60's, had annual reunions. +Now they have told their story in "The Boys," a book by Sir Martin Gilbert, a British historian of the Holocaust and the official biographer of Winston Churchill. It compiles their reminiscences from Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia before and during the war. There are accounts of the death camps, of parents killed in front of their children's eyes, of hunger, of bodies ridden with lice. There are the memories of the long road back to health. +About 650 boys are alive, including 250 in Britain and 120 in the United States. Their unofficial leader for nearly 50 years has been Ben Helfgott, 67, originally from the Polish town of Piotrkow, south of Lodz, now a retired clothing manufacturer in Harrow, England. His mother and younger sister were shot in a roundup of Jews. His father was killed trying to escape a death march. On May 9, 1945, at 15, he was liberated from Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. He was on the first transport of Jewish children from Prague to Windermere, in the Lake District. He is chairman of the '45 Aid Society. +"For our 1995 anniversary, I thought it was time a book was written about us," Mr. Helfgott said recently in a phone interview from London. "I approached Sir Martin," the honorary president of the '45 Aid Society. +"He agreed," Mr. Helfgott continued, "so we wrote to all our members to ask them to send in their stories." "The Boys" (Henry Holt & Company) was published in England last year and will be issued in the United States tomorrow. The story is little known except for journalists' accounts from the time. There is little if anything about the boys' journey in the Holocaust archives, Sir Martin discovered. +Sir Martin found that in many ways the lives of the younger survivors had taken a different trajectory from those of older people who emerged from the camps. There is a sense among them of buoyancy and hope, a zest for life. "There is something different about them from older survivors," he said. "The older survivors came out of the camps as individuals. This group stayed together for three, four, five years. It seemed to have given them a sort of collective strength. They were never without someone who understood. +"Very few of the older survivors had that opportunity to be in a group for which there is no shame, no inhibitions." + +One Typical Story Of Losing a Family +For some of the boys, it took nearly 50 years and Sir Martin's prodding to be able to express their memories. Some still cannot; they have not fully shared their stories even with wives and children. +In many ways, Maurice Vegh's story is typical. Mr. Vegh, a 66-year-old hairdresser in Long Beach, N.Y., recalled an idyllic childhood in Rakhov, then in Czechoslovakia, now in Ukraine. "It was peaceful, very pretty," he said in an interview at his home. "My mother prepared lovely Sabbath meals. The smells on Friday evening were marvelous." +Mr. Vegh was 13 when he was taken to Auschwitz with his parents and 11-year-old sister. There, Josef Mengele, the camp's SS doctor, selected his mother and sister to die. He was sent to work as a slave laborer in a coal mine and never saw his father again. +In January 1945, Mr. Vegh was sent on a forced march to Buchenwald. "It was windy and cold," he said. "All we had were our striped clothing and wooden shoes. They told us to rest in the snow. Half of us never got up." +Mr. Vegh was 15 and weighed 68 pounds. On April 11, the Americans arrived. "It was deadly silent," he remembered in the interview. "All of a sudden, roaring tanks broke through the barbed wire. We saw American uniforms. I have never seen soldiers cry before." +As soon as he was well enough, Mr. Vegh made his way to Prague, where he was reunited with an uncle. But as the Communists gained their grip on Czechoslovakia, he got on the second transport of children, from Prague to Scotland, where he was taken to Polton House, a manor in Midlothian. + +Some Had to Fib To Get on the Planes +Mr. Vegh contributed to "The Boys." Victor Breitburg, the retired owner of a woodworking plant in nearby Levittown, N.Y., may have found the effort too painful. He appears in the book in a group photograph of the first contingent of children on their way from Prague to Windermere when he was 18. +Mr. Breitburg did agree to talk about his experiences in an interview. He was one of the children who lied about their age, shaving a year or two, to get on the transports. "You had to be 16," he said. "I was 18. I was tall, but skinny." +Mr. Breitburg's father died of malnutrition in the Lodz ghetto in 1943. His mother, brother and sister were separated from him at Auschwitz. "I wanted to stay with them," he said. "My mother said, 'You go.' I never saw them again." +Social workers who met the planes in England, Ireland and Scotland were surprised that the children, several months out of the camps by then, seemed relatively healthy and had already gained some weight. But that appearance was only superficial, said a report on the Windermere children by the Westmorland County Council that Sir Martin cites in "The Boys." Some had running sores, tuberculosis, teeth knocked out by guards, toes missing from frostbite. "On exertion, it was found they easily became breathless," the report said. +Social workers noticed that many wore "an anxious expression." +Having known only hunger for years, the children grabbed food at meals, fought over it and hoarded it. "They just kept giving us food," Mr. Breitburg said. "They gave us clothes, whatever we wanted. And it worked. We learned for the first time that you had to take clothes off to be cleaned." +In many ways, though, they were typical teen-agers. Sir Martin quotes the Westmorland report: "They seemed to attach more importance to being clothed decently than to anything else, feeling that this was a certain proof that they were to be cared for and looked after." +The strength that helped the children survive also made them demanding. They insisted on pocket money, bicycles and movies. But they did not cry, social workers noted. +By July 1947, the boys had begun to feel safe. A magazine article noted, "Boys who on their arrival would have flown out in a passion at any rebuke, now accept a telling off with an engaging grin." +When they were well enough, the children were sent to hostels. Their lives revolved around the London hostel at 27 Belsize Park, which they named the Primrose Club. There they played football and had dances where some, like Mr. Vegh, met future wives. +"One Saturday night I walked into the Primrose Club like a big shot in my suit and tie," Mr. Vegh remembered. "I saw this pretty little blonde girl. I thought, I would like to dance with that girl. She didn't say no. It was love at first sight. We have been dancing ever since." + +Achieving Success And Staying Hopeful +As the boys became young men, some returned to Europe to look for lost relatives. Almost all were disappointed. Some never gave up hope. "Help me to find my brother," Sam Weizenbluth of Toronto wrote in the memoir he sent to Sir Martin. +Most remained in England. Some went to Israel and fought in the Israeli war of independence. In 1963, the Primrose Club was replaced by the '45 Aid Society. +"By and large, the men were successful," Sir Martin said on the phone from London. A few earned Ph.D's. Some were tailors or jewelers. Mr. Helfgott represented Britain twice on its Olympic weight lifting team. Hugo Gryn, a survivor of Auschwitz, became a prominent rabbi. +"We came here naked," Mr. Helfgott said from London. "We've tried to build a family and inject into it a zest for life. You would think we could not have had a family. There were very, very few divorces." +Mr. Helfgott agreed that the children who survived the camps seemed to fare better than the adults who did. "Most older survivors lost wives and children," he said. "Then in their 20's and 30's, they remarried. The husband and wife led a double life: in their minds they always thought of the past. +"But the children, beyond our original loss, we didn't have a family. We married local girls. They had a family. Then our lives were bringing up our children." + +A Sense of Closure And a 50th Reunion +In 1995 the boys had their 50th reunion in London. There was a reception and a dinner dance. Some boys found long lost friends. They danced, teased each other, talked into the night. "At the reunions, the affection, intimacy and hugging each other is quite extraordinary," Sir Martin said. +"It is no accident," he said, that the boys want their story told now. "They are all into their late 60's," Sir Martin explained. "Their life struggle has ended. Their children have grown up, gone to universities. They have seen their grandchildren, seen a continuity. They now have more leisure, to look back and to be caught in their dreams and nightmares." +With the book and with the coming of old age, a sense of closure has affected the boys. Last year Mr. Breitburg returned to Poland. "I went to Auschwitz, went to the apartment where I lived," he said. "I showed my wife the ghetto. I was saying goodbye." +At the end of the book, Moniek Goldberg, who lives in Florida, observes: "Fifty years on I reflect that I could tell my father that I have not forgotten what I learned as a boy. I helped my fellow man when I could. We were among the beasts, and I am proud to declare that we upheld the dignity of man." + +LOAD-DATE: April 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: FROM PRAGUE TO NEW YORK -- Some of "the boys" in Prague, top, before leaving for England; at the Theresienstadt camp; and at a picnic and on a beach on the Isle of Wight. (Archival photographs from "The Boys" [Henry Holt, 1997]; At bottom, Victor Breitburg, left, and Maurice Vegh in New York this Year. (Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times); Sir Martin Gilbert. + +Chart: "Birth of a Book" +"It all began with my wededing, " Sir Martin Gilbert, the historian, said by telephone from London. "We needed a rabbi. And my wife-to-be knew Hugo Gryn, who was one of 'the boys.' He became my best friend." Through Rabbi Gryn, Sir Martin met the others. Over dinner in 1977, Rabbi Gryn suggested that the historian take on the Holocaust as his subject. "Like many survivors, Hugo got what he wanted," Sir Martin said: in 1986, the historian published "The Holocaust," his monumental work. "Then, Ben Helfgott began to say I should write a book about the boys." Sir Martin initally resisted, then started soliciting memories. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +199 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 23, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Nursing Home Lobbyists Had Access + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section D; Page 21; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1489 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 22 + +Nursing home executives were lobbying the Clinton Administration to relax enforcement of rules affecting their industry even as they contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic Party last year. +The executives attended coffees at the White House with President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. One slept in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House and has since become finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee. + Several big contributors in the industry pressed their case in meetings with Donna E. Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Bruce C. Vladeck, who supervises Medicaid and Medicare as administrator of the Federal Health Care Financing Administration. +The executives were also fighting cuts in the two Federal health programs, for poor people and the elderly. They did not get everything they wanted, they say, but interviews with Federal officials and nursing home executives suggest that their contributions helped them gain more access than they would otherwise have had. +Nursing homes, which are extensively regulated by the Federal Government, derive more than half of their revenue from Medicaid and Medicare. Even small changes in rules or reimbursement can have enormous implications for them. +Alan D. Solomont was chief executive of the ADS Group, the largest nursing home company in Massachusetts, when he wrote to Mr. Vladeck complaining about "serious problems and flaws" in the enforcement of nursing home regulations last May. In his letter, he urged the Administration to limit the use of "civil monetary penalties," or fines, imposed on nursing homes found to have violated Federal standards. +Fines for violating the regulations, covering almost every aspect of nursing home care, can range up to $10,000 a day. +When he wrote the letter, Mr. Solomont was chairman of the Democratic Business Council, which raised almost $20 million for the Democratic Party last year. On Jan. 22 of this year, he became finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee. +"I believe I was recommended for this job by the President and the Vice President," he said in an interview last week. Administration officials confirmed his statement. +The Democratic National Committee has been at the center of a furor over fund-raising, as investigators try to determine what, if anything, donors got for their contributions. +Mr. Solomont, a former president of the Massachusetts Federation of Nursing Homes, said he met with Federal officials last year not because he was a big donor, but because he was "a credible, progressive voice" for the industry. At the time, he said, he and Mr. Clinton were resisting Republican efforts to dismantle the Medicaid program and to roll back Federal standards for nursing homes. +"I wanted to get nursing home people solidly behind the President's plan to preserve Medicaid and to preserve Federal standards," Mr. Solomont said in the interview. +"I thought that the Administration would find more support for its stand if it listened to the legitimate concerns of health care providers. The average nursing home provider hates Government and feels burdened by Federal regulation. I wanted the providers and the Government to sit down and see how they could collaborate to elevate the quality of care." +Mr. Clinton had already unveiled his own plan to reduce the growth of Medicaid, but it would not have saved as much or turned the program over to the states. +The Multicare Companies of Hackensack, N.J., bought Mr. Solomont's company for $60 million in December. He recently relinquished his position as vice chairman of Multicare, but remains a consultant. +In 1995 and 1996, Mr. Solomont, his company, his wife, his mother and his three brothers gave more than $187,000 to the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton-Gore campaign. Since becoming finance chairman of the Democratic Party in January, Mr. Solomont said, "I have not engaged in any advocacy on matters related to nursing homes." +Mr. Clinton has repeatedly asserted that big campaign contributors received no special favors from his Administration, and nursing home executives echo that view. Some of their requests were granted; some were denied. But the executives had exceptional access to top Administration officials. +Though money often buys access to power in Washington, the efforts of the nursing home industry are particularly well documented. Federal election laws limit donations to candidates to $1,000 from an individual and $5,000 from a political action committee. But there is no ceiling on contributions to political parties for party-building activities. +Paul R. Willging, executive vice president of the American Health Care Association, which represents more than 10,000 nursing homes, said he wanted the Government to take "a more reasonable approach" to enforcement of nursing home rules. +"I have never seen money tied to favors," said Mr. Willging, who was deputy administrator of the health care financing agency under President Ronald Reagan. "But access is critical. There is no question that a willingness to participate in the electoral process, including financial participation, does help insure access." +Bruce Yarwood, chief lobbyist for the American Health Care Association, attended coffees with Mr. Gore in May 1995 and March 1996, according to White House records. Records of the Federal Election Commission show that Mr. Yarwood donated $90,000 to the Democratic National Committee in those years. Mr. Willging said most of the money came from the trade association. +Mr. Vladeck came to Washington as a critic of the nursing home industry. In a 1980 book, "Unloving Care," he documented mistreatment of nursing home residents. He served on a panel of the National Academy of Sciences that recommended tougher regulation of the industry in 1986. Most of the recommendations were incorporated in a 1987 law. +Howard J. Bedlin, vice president of the National Council on the Aging, a research and advocacy group, said: "Bruce is probably the best H.C.F.A. administrator we've had. But in the last 18 months, there has been a clear pattern of the agency caving in to industry pressure to weaken the nursing home quality law, to the detriment of nursing home residents." +Chris Jennings, a White House aide who coordinates health policy for the President, said he met with Mr. Solomont several times and knew he was a big contributor, but was not influenced by him any more than by the consumer advocates he met with. In any event, Mr. Jennings said, nursing home executives dislike many of the President's policies, because they believe the policies will reduce their revenues. +Another big contributor, Dr. Robert N. Elkins, chairman of Integrated Health Services of Owings Mills, Md., and his company gave $560,000 to the Democratic National Committee from December 1995 to November 1996. Two of the contributions, totaling $125,000, were made on Dec. 20, 1995, one day before Dr. Elkins attended a coffee with Mr. Clinton. White House records show that Dr. Elkins attended one coffee with Mr. Gore and three with Mr. Clinton in a six-week period in 1995-96. +Dr. Elkins's company operates nursing homes, home health care agencies, hospices and other medical services regulated and reimbursed by the Federal Government. Marc B. Levin, executive vice president of the company, said that neither he nor Dr. Elkins would discuss the campaign contributions. +Nursing home executives and Federal health officials were particularly active in July 1996, as the Presidential campaign heated up, though people on both sides now insist that the timing was just a coincidence. +Government records show that Dr. Elkins's company gave $100,000 to the Democratic National Committee on July 5 and $120,000 on July 24. +In a letter to the nursing home association on July 26, Dr. Vladeck said he had given the industry a draft policy statement describing the proper use of civil monetary penalties, and he added, "My staff is available to discuss the language of this instruction before it is final." +In the past, the Government had authorized the use of fines to correct minor violations. In the new policy issued in January, the Government said such penalties should be "reserved for situations of serious noncompliance." +Toby S. Edelman, a lawyer at the National Senior Citizens Law Center, a consumer group, said: "Advocates for nursing home residents had far less access to senior Federal officials and much less opportunity to review the changes in policy on civil monetary penalties. Indeed, we saw no reason to change the policy." +In October, the Administration came up with a proposal that would have scaled back inspections of many nursing homes. But in December, after the plan became public, the White House shelved it under a barrage of criticism from consumer groups and members of Congress. + +LOAD-DATE: April 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +200 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 23, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +VAN LEER, PIET + +SECTION: Section D; Page 23; Column 3; Classified + +LENGTH: 76 words + +VAN LEER-Piet, died on April 12th from chronic Lyme Disease. Born in 1914 in Amsterdam, Holland. Investment manager and then Vice President of DrexelBurnham-Lambert. Retired in 1982. Mr. Van Leer is survived by a son and three daughters. Remembrances: Older Adult Services at Mt. Hood Community Mental Health Center, 400 NE 7th Street, Gresham, Oregon 97030. For further information contact Bateman Carroll Funeral Chapel, Gresham, OR. (503-665-2128). + +LOAD-DATE: April 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +201 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 24, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final +(New Jersey) + +NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFING; +Money for Buses Is Sought + +BYLINE: By TERRY PRISTIN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 110 words + +DATELINE: TRENTON + +During last-minute budget deliberations last year, the State Legislature eliminated $700,000 from a $22.2 million bus and van program serving the elderly and disabled, cutting service throughout the state, several lawmakers said. +Yesterday, three Republican legislators urged that the money be restored in next year's budget. + Ocean County lost only $52,000, but officials said that small cutback has made it impossible to keep up with the demands of a growing population of elderly residents. +The money would have paid for a badly needed new bus, said Richard A. Pinho, director of the county's Department of Transportation. + TERRY PRISTIN + +LOAD-DATE: April 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +202 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 24, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +A Record and Big Questions As Woman Gives Birth at 63 + +BYLINE: By GINA KOLATA + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1470 words + +In a feat that has raised questions about the uses of medical science, a woman 63 years and 9 months old recently gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Her doctors say that as far as they know, she is the oldest woman ever to give birth. +The woman was well past menopause, but she became pregnant by using a donated egg from a much younger woman. + The woman's doctors refused to identify the woman, saying she was adamant about preserving her privacy. They said only that she lived in the Los Angeles area, that her baby was delivered by Caesarean section late last year, that the woman recovered uneventfully and that she breast-fed her baby. The fertility center that assisted her bars women over 55, but her doctor said she had lied about her age. +The woman's successful pregnancy and births to other women over age 60 raise questions about whether there should be an age limit for pregnancy and, if so, who should decide that a woman is too old to bear a child. +Doctors who run infertility centers set their own age limits for pregnancies and decide for themselves who is a suitable mother. Some find it abhorrent that women past menopause can now bear children and others find it only fair that older women, like older men, can become parents. +"I'm on her side," said Dr. Ronald Munson, an ethicist at the University of Missouri. Arbitrary age cutoffs are "just a matter of age discrimination," he said, and it is irrational to wink and grin at an older man who has a new baby but to look with horror at an older woman. "Quite frankly, I can understand why that woman lied," Dr. Munson said. +Until recently, and despite the growing use of donor eggs, doctors would never have suspected that a woman who was 63 -- or even 55 -- could become pregnant and carry a fetus to term, even if she used a donated egg from a younger woman. +"We really believed that, as we see in other animals, that as women reached the age of 50 or so, pregnancy wastage might be high, the uterus might not be fit to carry a baby," said Dr. Mark V. Sauer, who directs the infertility program at Columbia University in New York. +Now it has become clear that any woman who has a uterus can potentially become pregnant with a donated egg, as long as it comes from a relatively young woman. Women who have gone through menopause are just as likely as younger women to become pregnant using donor eggs and their babies are just as healthy, said Dr. Richard J. Paulson, the director of the infertility center at the University of Southern California and the doctor for the 63-year-old woman. The age of the oldest mother keeps getting pushed forward. Until now, the record-holder was a woman in Italy but she was younger by months than the woman who gave birth in California. +The donated egg is genetically unrelated to the woman, but because her husband's sperm fertilized it, the baby received half her genes from him. Dr. Arthur Wisot, executive director of the Center for Advanced Reproductive Care in Redondo Beach, Calif., said that older couples have few other options if they want to have children. Adoption agencies will not give them babies and, in any event, he added, many couples prefer using an egg from a catalogue of donors, who provide information on their appearance, interests, ethnic background and education. +It is expensive to try to become pregnant with donor eggs, costing about $15,000 for each attempt, and it takes an average of four attempts before women succeed. Health insurance virtually never covers the procedure for older women. But, doctors said, if a woman stays with the program, she is very likely to have a baby. "Persistence is the name of the game," Dr. Sauer said. +"I'm sure we are going to run into a biological clock as far as pregnancies are concerned," Dr. Paulson said, "but so far we have not." +Some doctors have loose age limits at best, saying it is the woman's choice; others say it is unnatural or medically unsound to have a baby late in life and refuse to do the procedure. Some found that their limits kept changing as women lied about their ages and had successful pregnancies. +The 63-year-old had enrolled in a program that had one of the most generous age limits of all. Women who were age 55 or under could enroll and become pregnant with donated eggs. Dr. Paulson said the 63-year-old woman conceded later she knew the program rules, so she told her doctors that she was 53. She had never had any children and had been married for 13 years. +Dr. Paulson said that he accepted the woman into the program and that her 57-year-old husband's sperm fertilized the donated eggs. On her third try, she became pregnant, Dr. Paulson said, and he referred her to an obstetrician for prenatal care. "A week later, we got a call from her obstetrician," Dr. Paulson said. "He said, 'She's 63, not 53.' I called her and said, 'How do I know this is true?' " The woman produced her passport showing she was 63. +Dr. Paulson and his colleagues reported the case in the current issue of the journal Fertility and Sterility. +Dr. Sauer, a pioneer in establishing pregnancies in older women and a former director of the infertility program at the University of Southern California, said he had seen similar situations ever since he first used donor eggs and started setting an age limit for pregnancies. +It began about a decade ago, when Dr. Sauer, like virtually everyone else running infertility clinics, decided that they would only provide donor eggs for women who were under 40. Then, he said, he discovered that some women had misled him about their ages and that he had helped women in their early 40's become pregnant. He reported seven of those pregnancies, in women ages 40 to 44 whose ovaries had failed prematurely, in a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine, concluding that it was possible to establish successful pregnancies "even in older women." +And so Dr. Sauer decided to raise his age limit. He set the limit at 50. Soon he discovered that there were women over 50 lying to get into the program. So he raised the age limit to 55 and added medical tests, like mammograms and treadmill tests. +But even with an limit of 55, women above that age tried to enter the program and it was hard to spot them. Many had had plastic surgery, Dr. Sauer said. The first time he discovered he had established a pregnancy in a woman over 55, Dr. Sauer had thought the woman was 50. "After she delivered, in Wyoming, one of her so-called girlfriends called to let me know she was 61," he said. +That is a common way for a woman's deception to be unmasked, Dr. Sauer said. "A friend will call us and say, 'Ha, Ha. The trick's on you.' " This month, for example, he was just about to use a donor egg on a woman from London, when "we had an anonymous call from someone in London who said she's known this woman from the time she was a child and that she was in her early 60's," Dr. Sauer said. He called the woman's doctor in London who admitted that he had put a false age on the woman's medical records to allow her to have donor eggs at Dr. Sauer's clinic. Dr. Sauer subsequently refused to help the woman become pregnant. +When Dr. Sauer confronts women who lied about their age, they say, "We knew there was a cutoff at 55 but we know we're as healthy as 50-year-olds are," Dr. Sauer said. "They'll say, 'It was just a small white lie.' I look at them and say, 'Well, yes and no.' " +And yet, doctors say, there is no particular reason that 55, or any other age, should be the limit for donated eggs and different medical centers have different age cutoffs. +"There are no hard and fast rules, there is no legislation," said Dr. Wisot at the Center for Advanced Reproductive Care. "This whole area of medicine is totally unregulated. We don't answer to anyone but our peers." +His age limit is 50, Dr. Wisot said, because he does not think that it is "fair to the child" to have a very old mother and because "we feel more comfortable using women in this age group." +Dr. Zev Rosenwaks, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in New York, said age 46 or 47 is about as high as he will go. "I believe it's not that easy for someone in their 50's to bring up a baby," he explained. +Dr. Joseph Schulman, director of the Genetics and IVF Center in Fairfax, Va., says his limit is 55 but he does not treat his guidelines "as rigid rules." +Dr. Sauer is torn. He looks at the handful of women he treated who were over 55 and whose deceptions came to light after they became pregnant and sees that "despite their dishonesty, the outcomes were really good." And so, he said, "I'm glad in my heart that they did lie to me." Yet, he said, "on the other hand, I think, 'Gee, what have I done?' " + +LOAD-DATE: April 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: May 1, 1997, Thursday + + CORRECTION: +A front-page article last Thursday about a woman from the Los Angeles area who gave birth at age 63 referred incorrectly to Dr. Mark V. Sauer, an infertility researcher who has established pregnancies in older women. He is the former director of the donor egg program at the University of Southern California, not the former director of the infertility program there. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +203 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 25, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Medicare's Hospital Fund Going Insolvent, Trustees Affirm + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 820 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 24 + +The Government said today that the Medicare trust fund that pays hospital bills for elderly people would run out of money in just four years if Congress took no action to slow spending or raise taxes. +In their annual report, the Medicare trustees, including three members of President Clinton's Cabinet, said no progress had been made in alleviating the program's severe short- and long-term financial problems. + Last year's report also predicted insolvency in 2001. Since then, Congress and Mr. Clinton have taken no action to shore up the finances of Medicare, the health insurance program for 33 million elderly and 5 million disabled people. +Donna E. Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, said she wanted to assure elderly people that "there is no immediate crisis facing the Medicare trust fund," which gets most of its revenue from payroll taxes. +"The health of the Medicare trust fund has not gotten any worse in the last year," Dr. Shalala said, but "2001 is one year closer today than it was when we issued our last report." +Thus, she said, in a comment echoed today by members of both parties on Capitol Hill, "we cannot afford to debate and delay." +"It is time for action," the Secretary said. "It is time for an agreement." +Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, chairman of the House Republican Conference, said: "Democrats have insisted on using Medicare reform as a weapon against Republicans. They've been cynically exploiting people's fears, making responsible debate almost impossible." +Medicare was a flash point in conflicts between Mr. Clinton and the Republican Congress over the last two years. It was also a pivotal issue in the 1996 elections, as Democrats accused Republicans of wanting to finance tax cuts for the affluent by cutting health benefits for the elderly. +Budget negotiations now under way on Capitol Hill would address Medicare's short-term problems. In his latest budget, Mr. Clinton proposed to cut $100 billion, or 7.5 percent, from projected Medicare spending in the next five years, largely by curbing payments to health care providers. +The Medicare trust fund had a balance of $130.3 billion at the end of December 1995, when Mr. Clinton vetoed a Republican bill that would have redesigned Medicare and slowed the growth of the program. The trustees predict that the assets of the fund will decline to $115.4 billion by Oct. 1, the earliest date on which any Medicare agreement would take effect. +Richard S. Foster, chief actuary for the Medicare program, said today that the President's budget proposals would prolong the life of the trust fund by seven years, to 2008. But it would not keep the program solvent for members of the baby boom generation, who will start to retire in 2011. +In general, the Congressional Budget Office says, the longer Congress defers action, the deeper the cuts that must eventually be made in Medicare spending. +The Hospital Insurance Trust Fund's outlays exceeded its revenue by $2.6 billion in 1995 and $5.3 billion in 1996. The trustees predicted today that without corrective action, the losses would grow to $12.8 billion this year, $20.1 billion next year and $28.6 billion in 1999. +The report suggests that the Medicare trust fund will contribute a total of $148 billion to Federal budget deficits in the next five years. On the other hand, the Social Security trust fund is running surpluses, which are expected to total $438 billion in the same period. +Representative Bill Archer, the Texas Republican who oversees Medicare as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said lawmakers could strike a deal with Mr. Clinton "if the President can resist the pressure from liberal Democrats who want him to avoid making a Medicare agreement with Congressional Republicans." +Medicare's hospital trust fund spent an average of $3,400 for each person on the rolls last year, an increase of 9 percent from 1995. Administrative costs accounted for just 1 percent of the $130 billion spent by the fund. +Doctor and laboratory bills are paid by a separate Medicare trust fund. It is much smaller than the hospital trust fund and is financed in a different way, with general revenue and with premiums paid by beneficiaries. It is virtually impossible for this trust fund to run out of money, because it can tap general revenue as needed. +In a separate report today, the Administration said the Social Security trust fund would increase for two decades and then start to decline. If there is no change in current law, it said, the trust fund will be depleted in 2029, just as the last of the baby boomers reach 65. +But John J. Callahan, the Acting Commissioner of Social Security, said that even after 2029, annual tax revenue would be enough to pay 75 percent of each year's benefits. +"Contrary to what many people think," Mr. Callahan said, "Social Security will not go broke." + + +LOAD-DATE: April 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +204 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 25, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Pregnant At 63? Why Not? + +BYLINE: By Marcia Angell; Marcia Angell, a physician, is executive editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. + +SECTION: Section A; Page 27; Column 2; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 550 words + +DATELINE: BOSTON + +To any middle-aged mother, having a baby at age 63 probably seems like a colossally bad idea. Imagine the constant backache at that age, the 2 A.M. feedings and the endless diaper changes. Didn't nature arrange for us to stop doing this sort of thing after our mid-40's? +But nature has been overruled. It has recently been announced that a 63-year-old woman gave birth late last year to a healthy baby girl. A doctor implanted into her hormonally primed uterus an embryo created in a test tube with her husband's sperm and a young donor's egg. The woman's doctor, Dr. Richard J. Paulson, said she had lied about her age to get around his age limit of 55 years for in vitro fertilization. + The 63-year-old woman was not the first postmenopausal woman to have a baby, only the oldest. In the last several years, progressively older women have given birth through in vitro fertilization. So we now must contemplate the curious possibility of women on Medicare becoming pregnant. +Many people are probably offended, even repelled, by postmenopausal women's having babies. To many observers, it seems somehow unethical; they believe that if a woman doesn't know any better, her doctor should. There will probably be calls to regulate this technology and forbid women of a certain age to receive in vitro fertilization. +This would be a mistake. Why is it wrong for a woman in her 60's to have a baby? If the technology exists, why shouldn't she take advantage of it? For a healthy woman who is willing to take the medical risk of being pregnant at an advanced age, it may be her last chance to become a mother. +Many people will object that it is unnatural for postmenopausal women to have babies, that it is a perverse use of a technology that has been widely accepted for younger women since 1978. To these critics, women in their 60's are simply too old to become good mothers. +But all sorts of women who, by nearly anyone's standards, are extremely unlikely to be fit mothers can choose to have babies, including girls barely in their teens, drug abusers and the homeless. +Some people also point out that an older mother is less likely than a younger mother to live long enough to raise her children to adulthood. But any responsible mother, young or old, should make provisions for the care of her baby should she die before her child is grown. A postmenopausal woman who is willing to have a baby is especially likely to do so. +Much of the distaste for older women's having babies, I suspect, is age and sex discrimination masquerading as high-flown ethical concern. Many of us feel uncomfortable when old people behave in unexpected ways, like deciding to have babies. Our expectations are more restrictive for older women than for older men. We are more likely to react to older men's becoming fathers with amused tolerance rather than disapproval. +One thing is clear: Women in their 50's and 60's who are willing to undergo the rigors of pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing must really want to be mothers. Their children will be greatly cherished in a world where many children are not, and where many young women have babies with scarcely a thought. +If an older woman still wants to become pregnant after the risks are explained to her, I see no good reason not to help her. + +LOAD-DATE: April 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Luba Lukova) + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +205 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 25, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +INSIDE + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 89 words + + +Warning on Medicare Fund +Medicare trustees warned that no progress had been made in alleviating the financial problems of the fund that pays hospital bills for the elderly. Page A16. + +Suing Over Filtration Plant +The Federal Government sued New York City for failing to build a $600 million plant to filter drinking water from polluted reservoirs. Page B4. + +No Proof of Abuse at Shelter +No evidence has been found to back charges of serious misconduct by the staff of a Bronx women's shelter, an official said. Page B1. + +LOAD-DATE: April 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +206 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 26, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Giving Birth at 63 + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 20; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 435 words + +The news that a 63-year-old California woman gave birth late last year has prompted calls to set a maximum age limit for women who receive treatment at fertility centers to get pregnant. While individual fertility centers can, and already do, set age limits, this is not an area that requires regulation or other government intervention. The decision on whether to undergo pregnancy after menopause should remain a private choice between a woman and her doctor, based on individual circumstances. +Advancing technology has rapidly expanded the possibilities for assisted reproduction, and eggs donated by younger women have allowed older women to conquer infertility. As long as a uterus is healthy, the pregnancy barrier can be pushed well beyond menopause. + The clinic that assisted the California woman bars women over 55 from receiving donated eggs, and many fertility clinics set age limits at 50 or lower, usually because of health concerns. But the California woman, like many others in her position, simply lied about her age. She told the infertility specialists that she was 50 at the time she started treatment when she was, in fact, 10 years older. Even so, she passed extensive medical evaluations. +It was not until three years later, after she was successfully implanted with a donated egg fertilized with her now 60-year-old husband's sperm, that she revealed her true age. According to her doctors, she experienced few complications during the pregnancy and delivered a healthy baby girl late last year. She now goes into the record books as the oldest known woman in the world to deliver a child. +While this older mother is a monument to the increasing health and fitness of senior citizens, she has become the focus of debate over the propriety of becoming a parent at an age when contemporaries are enjoying the freedom of being grandparents. But in terms of maturity and knowledge, a child may be better off with a 60-year-old mother than a 15-year-old one, especially if the older woman makes provisions for the child in the event she dies or is incapacitated. Society already accepts the notion that older men can be fathers. Surely it is no more selfish or shortsighted for an older woman to have a child. +The ethics committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine believes that postmenopausal pregnancies should be discouraged because of physical and psychological risks to the mother or child. But the society says such pregnancies are not unethical and that individual circumstances, not age alone, should dictate a woman's eligibility for egg donation. + +LOAD-DATE: April 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +207 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 27, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Study Focuses on the Health of Older Women + +BYLINE: By LINDA PUNER + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 11; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 908 words + +DATELINE: HARTSDALE + +BARBARA TORINA, 57, does not have time to get old. The New Rochelle resident is too busy teaching music, playing tennis, bowling, singing in a choir, playing guitar, doing organic gardening and making habits for a monastery in the South Bronx. And she traveled to Florida on spring break with her two college-age children. +In the future, she said, "I will keep active and maintain my weight -- it hasn't changed in 33 years -- or maybe lose a little." + To insure this, Mrs. Torina has volunteered to take part in the Women's Health Initiative, a study of 160,000 postmenopausal women, which examines how to prevent the major health risks for older women and how to improve the quality of their later life. +Financed by the National Institutes of Health, the $628 million research project is being conducted at 40 medical centers nationwide. Albert Einstein College in the Bronx runs the study and recently opened a satellite clinic for the study here. +More than 500 women from 50 to 79 have offered to take part here in tests that may cover 10 years. All of the slots for women 50 to 54 are filled, but the clinic, at 141 South Central Avenue, needs more women from 55 to 79. The number to call for more information, is (800) 549-6636. +The Women's Health Initiative is studying heart disease, cancer and osteoporosis and assessing three treatments of the diseases: hormone-replacement therapy, a low-fat diet and calcium and vitamin D supplements. A side study will take a look at the effects of hormone-replacement therapy in preventing or delaying memory loss in women from 65 to 79. +"Heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death in postmenopausal women," said Dr. Sylvia Smoller, an epidemiologist who heads the Einstein study. "The myth is that it's a man's disease. Men do get it earlier and die younger, but one in three postmenopausal women dies of heart disease." +Dr. Smoller said the study is notable for its size and because it focuses on older women, who have been ignored or excluded from previous medical research. "W.H.I. is possible now because women have an increasing voice in this country," she said, adding that it has helped to have had women like Representative Patricia Schroeder in Congress to raise research money and Bernadine Healy, former head of the National Institutes of Health, to promote women's health issues. +"Women are living longer," said Dr. Yasmin Mossavar-Rahmani, lead nutritionist for the study. "Some women will spend half their lives after menopause." +Dr. Smoller and Dr. Mossavar-Rahmani said the study is the only clinical trial to assess the effects of hormones on heart disease and bone loss as well as those of diet on memory. Other studies have been less controlled or what medical researchers call observational. +Dr. Smoller said: "In observational trials, for example, you look at a group of women on hormones and look at some not taking hormones, then you compare them. The problem is those taking hormones may have different characteristics, like higher educational or income levels. In clinical trials, a computer randomly assigns women to one group or the other so the inequities are equalized." +The motivation for joining the Women's Health Initiative is varied. Some women seek the immediate free health attention provided by screening tests like pap tests and cervical exams. +"After taking care of my husband night and day before he died of brain cancer in October, I wanted to do something for my own health," said Muriel Woodson of Elmsford, a participant in the hormone-therapy group. +Kathryn Vollmer, a medical technologist from Scarsdale who attends low-fat diet sessions for the study at Einstein College, said: "I don't have many of the risk factors for disease. But what I think is important is what can be learned about women totally." +Many participants worry about the lack of information about women's health and hope the study will change that. "I was intrigued by the idea of a large study of older women and the incidence of heart disease and cancer. In the past, the studies were all of men," said Phyllis Rodriguez, a 54-year-old artist from White Plains. +She is part of the low-fat diet group here and has found keeping a food diary revealing. "I thought I basically ate well," she said. "But I'm learning that my little transgressions -- like snacking on cheese -- are more significant than I thought." +Ms. Rodriguez said the sessions were fun. Recently, while emphasizing the importance of five servings of fruits and vegetables and six servings of grain daily, Dr. Mossavar-Rahmani offered tastings of low-fat lasagna and brownies. +"One of the benefits is that the women like to get together and talk," Dr. Smoller said. "They want a sense of community. Separation and isolation are problems of aging." Some women indicated that they were interested in the Women's Health Initiative because they believed they have been misdiagnosed or mistreated by doctors uninformed about women's health issues. Emma Damico of Elmsford, who attended an informational talk but did not enroll in the study, reported finally finding effective treatment for the onset of menopause from a certified midwife rather than a doctor. +Even now some participants hesitated to set a chronological marker for old age. "It keeps moving away as I get older," Kathryn Vollmer said. +Dr. Smoller observed: "Who knows? With all the attention age is getting, maybe age is in." + +LOAD-DATE: April 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Participants in the Women's Health Initiative eating low-fat food at a clinic in Hartsdale. (Susan Farley for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +208 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 27, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ON THE MAP; +A Pro to the Rescue of a Place Where He Shot Hoops as a Kid + +BYLINE: By STEVE STRUNSKY + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 3; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 707 words + +The multiplayer deal that brought the NBA All-Star Chris Gatling to the Nets from Dallas in February marked his return to a New Jersey basketball team for the first time since high school. But the 6-foot 10-inch, 230-pound forward has been sidelined by an ear infection since Feb. 23, and as the regular season ends he is already focusing on another homecoming of sorts, in Irvington. +Mr. Gatling, 29, grew up in the Irvington and played his first organized ball at the Police Athletic League recreation center there. But a lack of funding forced the center to shut in 1994. Last fall Mr. Gatling bought the brick building for $135,000 and in January began leasing it to the town for $1 a year. "It's the kind of thing you hope your child will do when he grows up," said his mother, Rebecca Gatling. Officials hope to have the Chris Gatling Irvington P.A.L. in action by winter. Its benefactor recently talked about the center's comeback. + Q. Why are you doing this? +A. If I can do something positive, maybe I can make some other people wake up. Because there's a lot of people in the pros who have a lot more money than I do and they could do it very simply. But they're just selfish and they're blind. +Q. What prompted you? +A. I guess when I used to come home all the time to my aunt's house and eat chicken and fish and stuff, and I'd drive by the P.A.L. building and say, "Why isn't anybody doing anything with the P.A.L. building?" Now I've got a living and I said, "Well, why can't I do something?" So I called one of my good friends, Larry Reynolds -- he's a police officer in Irvington. He's like, "I can get in touch with my chief, he can get in touch with the mayor." And my aunt -- she does a lot of stuff for Irvington, like Little League -- why don't I call her? Get my dad (Ray Gatling) involved -- Dad's my business manager, handles all my business. +Q. What do you plan for the center? +A. I want to get away from the tile floor [on the basketball court] and put a wood floor in there. I want to do some things for the senior citizens. I want them to get bingo back, but I want to do it at an early hour, not as late as it usually is because of the crime and things of that sort. A lot of teens now are having pregnancies, and I want to have a program set up so they can drop their kids off at a day-care there -- because there's plenty of room -- and be able to go to school, get a degree, finish up. I want to do some leagues there for the summer. I want it to open up for the police also, so that they can come there and have a place to work out. And they can do some community services there and things of that sort. +So that's what I want to do to the P.A.L., make it like it was when I grew up, to give kids a chance to get off of the street. Because they are our future. I remember a lot of times, you know, I was growing up, I was a kid, "Hey, let's go over here, do this, do that." But I would go to the P.A.L. and play some basketball. You know, you have your little card, you go in, you show it. It made me more responsible. That's what it's all about: being responsible. +And now I have a lot of people calling me, writing me, and they want to donate things, which is good. I have a paper company, they want to donate my writing materials. Reebok, they want to donate sneakers. No Fear, they want to put a big banner up and put up stickers and give away T-shirts and different apparel. And I can go there and do some off-season training, shoot, things of that sort, and interact with the kids. +Q. What was a typical day like at the P.A.L.? +A. Sometimes we'd get there in the morning, we'd play, the league. There was a sub pace down the street called Suzy's. We used to all run down there and get a cheese steak, and then run back to the P.A.L. And I didn't live too far from the P.A.L., so I could walk home, hang out, and then go back down there and meet the guys. They had a rim in the back and we used to go back there after hours and play because there's a street light that lit up the back. We'd shoot all night. It was definitely an outlet. +Q. Did the P.A.L. contribute to your NBA career? +A. I would say so. I mean, more than anything, it's my foundation. STEVE STRUNSKY + +LOAD-DATE: April 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Chris Gatling has bought the Police Athletic League center and leased it to Irvington for $1 a year. (Frank C. Dougherty for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +209 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 27, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Word for Word/Age Lines; +Some Truths About Getting Old Are Only Too Self-Evident + +BYLINE: By ROBERT W. STOCK + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 7; Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1239 words + +THE lot of America's elders has vastly improved over the last few decades. Their income, their health and their longevity are all up. Many men and women in their 60's and 70's today remain vigorous, adventurous and amorous. Last week came word of yet another record-breaking event: the birth of a healthy baby girl to a 63-year-old woman. +What has not changed much, if at all, however, is the negative attitude that Americans of all ages have toward older people and the experience of aging. In "The Spectator Bird" (1976), Wallace Stegner perfectly captured that view. Society, he wrote, "does not value the old in the slightest, finds them an expense and an embarrassment, laughs at their experience, evades their problems, isolates them in hospitals and Sunshine Cities and generally ignores them except when soliciting their votes or ripping off their handbags and their Social Security checks." + The simple reality of the human condition -- that age steals our hair and loosens our skin on the way toward our eventual demise -- has metamorphosed our youth-worshiping culture into an irrational fear and loathing of all aspects of growing old. So that when one's elderliness can no longer be denied, it can be a painful, even traumatic, moment. Some of the ways that people cope with that experience were on display recently when the American Association of Retired Persons invited visitors to its America Online site to take part in an electronic bulletin board discussion called "I Knew I Was Old When . . . ." +Following are some of the contributions. ROBERT W. STOCK +I knew I was growing old when I stopped wearing a girdle and high-heeled shoes because I realized no one was looking anymore!KOFAN +A waitress gave me the senior citizen discount when I didn't even ask! +Youngorig +I knew I was old when I had my fourth grandchild. I stopped coloring my hair. Focci5 +An old friend said, "Gee, you're looking good." I realized there are three stages of life: YOUTH, MIDDLE AGE and "YOU'RE LOOKING GOOD." WalterW336 +When I saw a sign on the freeway which said, "Forgive and forget: It will add years to your life." I said to my spouse, "I'm getting so good at the forgetting part I may live forever!" +JRYELT +Everything I have either started leaking or dried up. ConductorB +I helped an old lady across the busy intersection and she turned out to be my wife. +DANKNOTT +I kissed my wife and she yawned. +Jmoore5727 +When I knew quality was more important than quantity. Circle1234 +Reality Knocks +Knew I was getting old when I started getting some urges and couldn't remember what they were for. Llen106 +I knew I was getting old when I realized that my children belonged to the A.A.R.P. +WALKERDOYL +I really felt ancient when last Halloween a little kid in my apartment complex said that since I couldn't go trick or treat for myself (I use a cane), he'd go for me and later brought me a share of his "loot"! His folks are sure doing something right to have a six- or seven-year-old so thoughtful and kind! Bridget612 +When most of the people in our wedding album had died. THELMSH +I returned home from the dentist today and was entering my next appointment in my datebook and noted that my appointment was not for today but for tomorrow. +I phoned the dentist to apologize and the receptionist informed me they were aware of my mistake and informed the dentist I was there a day early and he agreed to fit me in rather than have me make another trip tomorrow and they were trying to be kind to me by not mentioning it.GordoCrock +I knew I was old when I couldn't find anyone who knew about Burma Shave signs. +CMDRBIX +I knew I was old when a kindergarten student looked up at me and said, "Whose grandma are you?"JCSTOFFEL +I was reading the comics and I said to myself, "That Mary Worth is a damn fine-looking woman." Jpreusse +I was giving my four-year-old grandson a horseback ride on my shoulders when he said, "Grandpa, you are getting taller and taller." I said, "No, honey. Grandpas may get bigger around but they never get taller. Why do you think I am getting taller?" He said, "I know because your head is coming up through your hair." +DANF1924 + My great-grandchildren started arriving. I now have three. Hmgbird731 +When the older I get, the better I WAS. +RCroweSr +I knew I was old when all the names in my address book ended in M.D. Maremark +My 12-year-old grandson said, "Grandma, were you alive when tennis balls used to be white?" +HelynneG +The Wal-Mart greeter offered me the motorized cart.MicLacRLTR +When at the local community fund-raiser everyone gets up to dance and they asked you to watch the table! +KAJ4889 +I knew I was old when my husband passed away and I thought the only things left in life were getting from one day to the next and spending what time I had left with my children and grandchildren. And then -- I met a wonderful man who asked me to marry him after less than three months. Now I am a "teen-ager" again. Life has just begun all over for me.Eengelb561 +I knew I was old when I ceased to worry about my gray hair, dentures, baggy knees and blue feet and started to really enjoy myself and life, and when I found myself saying, "Back in my day . . . ." Creaky9399 + +Those Were the Days +I remember our first whisker set.Only one person at a time listened with earphones and would tell the others what was being said. It lost something in translation. I was born in a log cabin updated with clapboard. We still had gas jets on our walls that worked. +I knew I was getting old when the whole world was being run by kids around my grandchildren's age. It's hard to take advice from a doctor 50 years younger than yourself. +SKinneyBB +I grew up with the outhouse out back, a one-room schoolhouse and the radio -- no TV. My Mom just loved Arthur Godfrey and listened to him on the radio along with all the soaps, "Stella Dallas" and "Ma Perkins." When Arthur Godfrey came to TV, she was in seventh heaven. When I have these fits of nostalgia, I know I'm getting old. But at least I feel pretty sure my memory is still pretty sharp. No one who was losing it could remember the junk that still fills my head. Talking about replacements, I've had the ultimate . . . a heart transplant. From goose grease for a chest cold to heart transplant. Oh, I feel like a time traveler sometimes.Pswan56193 +Sitting in a diner alone eating my supper on Mother's Day, in walked a group of young men -- college age and older. One walked over to me and said, "You don't mind if I give you a kiss on the cheek and wish you happy mom's day, do you? You could be my mom for now." With that, he leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek and said, "Thank you, Mom." . . . I never forgot that moment. Lwill34625 +It surprises me when I look in the mirror and don't know who's looking back. When did this happen? When did my hands become my mother's? When did my sons get so old, to say nothing about my grandchildren? Why only yesterday I was saying how they were all driving me crazy and I wish they would all grow up. When did they? +It's not one thing that makes you realize you're growing old, but everyday things. Do you remember when it didn't hurt to get out of bed? How about not groaning when you've been on the floor too long playing with the grandkids? +OLD AGE IS NOT FOR WIMPS!!! +NoHose + +LOAD-DATE: April 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +210 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 27, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Parent Trap; +Old Mother Hubbard Was Never a Sex Pot + +BYLINE: By GINA KOLATA + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 5; Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 805 words + +ON April 11, at 12:05 a.m., Julia Randall was born in Manhattan's Beth Israel Hospital. The proud father, Tony Randall, age 77, announced, "I want to have another one right away." +The writer George Plimpton, at age 69, is the father of two-year-old twins. He said his babies and a tonic from the bark of pine trees that grow in the south of France are what invigorate him. + So, are these men sexy, or what? After all, they have young wives, presumably impregnated in the normal way, and what better proof is there of virility than the birth of a baby? +Compare those new parents with the 63-year-old Los Angeles woman who gave birth to a baby of her own, hiding under a cloak of anonymity. Like Mr. Randall, she had never had a baby before. But few cooed over her accomplishment (her doctors say she's the oldest woman on record to give birth). No one said she was sexy. +Those who are offended by last week's news of an old woman giving birth tend to cite reasons other than sexiness. They argue that it is not fair to the child to have two elderly parents, adding that old men who are fathers are different because they often have young wives who, presumably, will be healthy and energetic enough to raise the child. But old mothers usually come with old fathers. The husband of the 63-year-old woman was 57 when he fathered the child. + +Maybe It's an Esthetic Question + But is this really an ethical question or an esthetic one? Is the issue of old mothers really about parenthood or sexiness? +Dr. David M. Buss, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said he detects a sexual undertone to the public's reaction to the 63-year-old mother. There is no question, he said, that by giving birth this woman defied not only natural rules but sexual rules. +"It's absolutely right" that sex is part of the reaction, said Dr. Barbara Koenig, an anthropologist who is executive director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University. It is, she said, "a typical case of how technology is challenging some fundamental assumptions," in this case, about the sexuality of older women. +In the 37 cultures Dr. Buss has studied, he said, one truth prevails: Old men who are rich or powerful have erotic power as well. It can gain them a young wife and give them an air of sexuality even when their faces are wrinkled and their eyesight dimmed. Older women are in a different category. Men are not looking for a powerful woman. What they want is youth -- "smooth skin, clear skin, full lips, and a waist-hip ratio of .70," Dr. Buss said. +If movies are any guide, women are portrayed as over the hill when men are just hitting their sexual stride. Why else would men and women who are roughly the same age be cast in roles a generation apart? When Dustin Hoffman played a young college graduate in the 1967 movie "The Graduate" he was 31. The older woman, the friend of the young man's parents, was played by Anne Bancroft when she was 36. In the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock film "North by Northwest," the Cary Grant character's mother was played by Jessie Royce Landis, when she was several months younger than Mr. Grant. +But it's not just a Hollywood fiction that young women often find old men -- particularly rich and powerful men -- sexy. Justice William O. Douglas of the Supreme Court was 76 when he married a 23-year-old woman. Senator Strom Thurmond was 66 when he took his second wife, a 22-year-old woman who was a former Miss South Carolina, Nancy Moore. Mr. Thurmond was older than his young wife's father. They had four children. "No one accused him of being a pervert," said Dr. John Gagnon, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. +But power does not usually confer the glitter of sex appeal to older women. "No one is turned on by Madeleine Albright or Elizabeth Dole," Dr. Gagnon said. +"Women are primarily valued for sex and reproductive purposes," said Dr. Susan Sherwin, a professor of philosophy and women's studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. So, when they no longer are young and nubile, when they no longer carry the outward signs of fertility, they are cast aside. That may explain, Dr. Sherwin said, why there is "something approaching cultural horror" when a woman past menopause moves herself back into the role of the fertile woman. +Dr. Buss said he had noticed, among his own friends and colleagues, that men react differently than women to news of the 63-year-old mother. "The women I spoke to said, 'Go for it.' The men furrowed their brows and said it was repugnant," Dr. Buss said. +His own reaction? He said, "I believe people should live their lives whatever way they want to." That, he said, is his response "on a meta-cognitive level." And on an emotional level? "I don't want to say," Dr. Buss said. + +LOAD-DATE: April 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Tony Randall, age 77, with his newborn, Julia. ((c) The National Enquirer) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +211 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 27, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Thomas H. D. Mahoney, 83, Advocate for Elderly + +BYLINE: By WOLFGANG SAXON + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 40; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 478 words + +Thomas H. D. Mahoney, an elder statesman of Massachusetts and world-traveling advocate for the elderly, died on Monday at Stanford Medical Center in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 83 and lived in Cambridge, Mass. +He was on the way home from Seoul, South Korea, after addressing the 97th conference of the Interparliamentary Union, a gathering of legislators from 125 countries, and suffered a stroke while stopping over in California, said his son, Thomas H. Mahoney 4th. + The younger Mr. Mahoney said his father attended a similar meeting last month in Russia. He was to have flown to Cairo soon to discuss the health and welfare of the elderly at a gathering of women from the parliamentary union, his son said. +Dr. Mahoney had a first career as an educator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty in 1945, served as chairman of the history section twice in the 1960's and 1970's, and retired as a professor of history in 1984. +He wrote and edited a number of books on the life and thought of the 18th-century British political writer and statesman Edmund Burke, including volumes on his perspectives on Ireland, the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Another notable textbook was "The United States in World History," written with J. B. Rae. +Thomas Henry Donald Mahoney liked to note that he was born on an election day, Nov. 4, 1913, and never lost in his 11 campaigns for public office. His first election was as a school committeeman in his native Cambridge in 1948. He was a state representative in the 1970's when he became the founding chairman of the ethics committee and headed the energy committee. +In 1979, Gov. Edward King appointed him Massachusetts' first Secretary of Elder Affairs. It was the first such state office in the country and, with a yearly budget of $100 million, bolstered his standing as a national figure. +He led the state delegation to the White House Conference on Aging in 1981. He became a senior social gerontologist and adviser to the House of Representatives and was increasingly involved in the work of United Nations agencies, panels and conferences and other world bodies. +At his death he was a member of the executive committee of the United Nations Nongovernmental Organizations Committee. +A 1936 graduate of Boston College, he earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. at George Washington University. He may well have been the oldest recipient of a doctor of public affairs at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government when he finished his dissertation in 1989 at the age of 75. +Besides his son, Thomas, who lives in Manhattan, Dr. Mahoney is survived by his wife of 45 years, Phyllis Norton Mahoney; three other sons, David, of San Francisco, Peter, of Newton, Mass., and Philip, of Los Altos Hills, Calif.; a daughter, Linda, of Cambridge, and four granddaughters. + +NAME: Thomas H. D. Mahoney + +LOAD-DATE: April 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Thomas H. D. Mahoney. (The Boston Globe) + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +212 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 27, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Florida Suing to Save Benefits for Its Poor but Legal Immigrants + +BYLINE: By The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 26; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 643 words + +DATELINE: MIAMI, April 26 + +Florida has become the first state to sue the Federal Government to prevent the loss of $300 million a year in welfare benefits to the state's legal immigrants, many of them elderly or disabled. +A provision of the Federal overhaul of welfare would deny Supplemental Security Income, food stamps and other benefits to 100,000 legal immigrants in the state unless they become citizens by Aug. 1. + "These people have paid taxes -- they have contributed," said the state's Governor, Lawton Chiles, a Democrat. "And now they're pulling the rug out from under them. They have no other support. These are the disabled, the frail elderly. Congress saw this as the easy way to save billions of dollars. This will not hit equally across the nation. It is a terrible burden on states like Florida, California and Texas." +Governor Chiles said the loss of benefits could ultimately cost Florida $1 billion. +The suit, filed in Federal District Court in Miami by lawyers for Florida and Dade County, alleges that the denial of benefits to legal immigrants by the Federal Government under the welfare overhaul violates the equal-protection clause of the Constitution because it discriminates against noncitizens living legally in the country by singling them out to lose benefits. The suit also charges that the Federal action is unconstitutional because it forces Florida to shoulder the economic burden of supporting the people losing benefits. +The welfare overhaul is supposed to discourage illegal immigration and encourage able-bodied people to work, said Mark Schlakman, special counsel to the Governor. +"These people are legal immigrants and are already here," Mr. Schlakman said. "And, by definition, those that receive S.S.I. are the indigent, the elderly and the disabled, those that cannot work." +A similar lawsuit, seeking to keep benefits for legal immigrants, was filed by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York last month in Federal District Court in Manhattan. +About 98,000 of Florida's one million legal immigrants get an average of $76 a month in food stamps, and 54,000 receive an average of $342 a month in S.S.I. benefits. Seventy-two percent of those who stand to lose S.S.I. benefits are 65 or older. Under the welfare overhaul, all that aid will cease on Aug. 22 for immigrants who are not citizens by Aug. 1. +The State of Florida has extended Medicaid and other benefits indefinitely for legal immigrants, at an annual cost of $72 million to the state. The Florida House and Senate are working out a proposal that would earmark $18.5 million to $22 million for legal immigrants to cover the shortfall, but Governor Chiles said the amount was "infinitesimal" compared with what was needed. +A short-term welfare measure supported by Republicans in Congress would provide $125 million through September to extend benefits to elderly and disabled legal immigrants in certain areas, said Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Republican of Florida. +Dade County, which has a large elderly immigrant population, would bear the brunt of the loss of benefits in the state. Most of the 11,000 elderly residents of the county who stand to lose all of their benefits are Cubans who immigrated legally 30 to 40 years ago but have not become citizens. In many cases, their monthly S.S.I. check is their only income. +"People are confused because they don't understand why, at this stage in their lives, the Government would do this," said Ramon Perez Goizueta, a spokesman for the Little Havana Activities and Nutrition Centers, which serve lunch and provide activities for approximately 4,000 poor elderly people every day. +About a third of the centers' regulars stand to lose their benefits in August, Mr. Perez Goizueta said. He said most of them were either too infirm or too limited in their language abilities to take citizenship tests. + +LOAD-DATE: April 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +213 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 27, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Childbirth at 63 Says What About Life? + +BYLINE: By GINA KOLATA + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 20; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1130 words + +It was hard for most people to avoid a visceral reaction when a group of doctors at the University of Southern California announced last week that they had enabled a 63-year-old woman to become pregnant, with a donated egg, and give birth to a baby girl. +After all, the woman was at an age when most people are thinking about retirement, not 2 A.M. feedings. Yet the woman obviously wanted the child, so much that she lied about her age to meet the guidelines of an infertility program that had arbitrarily set 55 as its maximum age for recipients of donor eggs. + [The woman, Arceli Keh, revealed her identity in an interview published in the British newspaper The Express, The Associated Press reported yesterday. She said her 60-year-old husband, Isagani, was still working at a carpentry shop because they spent at least $50,000 on the treatment that led to the birth of their daughter, Cynthia. ] +With eggs donated by a younger woman and fertilized in the laboratory, almost any woman with a uterus can become pregnant. What matters is not the age of the mother but the age of the egg. But the birth announced last week and other births to women well past menopause have left ethicists with a question: Are older mothers yet another example of the way society encourages women to clutch at eternal youth or are they a laudable example of the way that technology can overcome the barriers of age, helping women seize opportunities that eluded them when they were younger? +Beyond that, is there a good reason to disapprove of older women who become mothers? After all, older men who father children are often greeted with a wink and a grin. +Few ethicists criticized the 63-year-old mother, but they had mixed reactions about infertility clinics that will, for a price, enable women who are well past the age of menopause to give birth. +Dr. Willard Gaylin, a founder of the Hastings Center, an ethics center in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., said he found pregnancies in women who are past menopause distasteful. "I certainly understand a desire for progeny," he said, "but I do feel we have a responsibility to the symmetry of life and to some of the rules of nature." By the way, he added, he is not happy about elderly fathers, either. "I do not think it's attractive for a 70-year-old man to have a child," Dr. Gaylin said. +Dr. Lisa Cahill, a theology professor at Boston College and a member of the National Advisory Board for Ethics and Reproduction, wondered what the new phenomenon says about the meaning of life and aging. +"As a feminist, I have to ask, What are these infertility programs saying about women's roles?" she said. "It is not enough to just say that it's wrong. We have to ask why pregnancy is perceived as a solution" as women seek meaning in their lives. +Dr. Gilbert C. Meilander Jr., an ethicist and theologian at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Ind., said he was "reluctant to use right-wrong language." +"I'm reluctant to say, 'Well, it's just wrong to bear a child at that age,' " Dr. Meilander said. "I might say something like, 'It just doesn't seem fitting.' That's a little weaker, but it captures our sense that there is a kind of unwillingness or inability to come to terms with what the trajectory of a life really is." +The argument that older men often father children and face little public censure does not sway Dr. Meilander and others. Almost always, he said, these are old men married to young women, "so there will be at least one member of the couple who is not pretending to be young." Dr. Leon Kass, a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, was also troubled by pregnancies among older women. His gravest fear, he said, is that the woman's child "will be prevented from really being a child." +After all, he said, when she is 15, her mother will be 78, and, in essence, "she will be looking after her grandparents." A teen-ager, he said, "will have responsibility for people that those of us in our 40's and 50's have struggled with," people at an age when they "become senile, become ill." +The woman, Dr. Kass said, "has thought about herself and her desire to have a child," but he questions whether she has "really thought about what it means." +Beyond that, Dr. Kass said, pregnancies in older women raise profound questions about the human life cycle. "One feels that people are finding the natural boundaries of life unacceptable," he said. And, he added, "once you go that route, there's absolutely no limit." +"Nobody wants to stand around and point a finger at this woman and say, 'You're immoral,' " Dr. Kass said. "But generalize the practice and ask yourself, What does it really mean that we don't accept the life cycle or the life course? That's one of the big problems of the contemporary scene. You've got all kinds of people who make a living and support themselves but who psychologically are not grown up. We have a culture of functional immaturity." +And, he said, as the example of the 63-year-old woman illustrates, "there really is no cultural script that guides anyone." +But maybe such scripts are period pieces. R. Alta Charo, a law professor and ethicist at the University of Wisconsin, said the moral question of having mothers who had passed menopause was last discussed about two years ago when an Italian doctor announced a similar feat, with a woman who was just slightly younger than the one at the University of Southern California. The "argument from nature," Ms. Charo said, did not persuade her. +That argument, she said, assumes that "if women's bodies aren't capable of making babies after menopause, then there's something inherently wrong with doing something that nature doesn't permit." But, she said, we do not hesitate in medicine to do all sorts of unnatural things to heal the sick or to delay death. "Over and over again, we see very different reasons to circumvent what is biologically programmed," she said. +Dr. Susan Sherwin, a professor of philosophy and women's studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, said she was concerned by the "worrisome social attitudes" that she saw in the anxiety about elderly women giving birth. +"I do think there is a tendency for society to want to write off postmenopausal women," she said. "Women are primarily valued as a class for sexual and reproductive purposes." She added that when, by allowing postmenopausal women to give birth, "we want to move them back into these categories, we feel there is something odd." But, Dr. Sherwin said, "what is it that we are horrified about?" +"Is it that she may not live long enough to see her child grow up?" she asked. "If so, we should be equally horrified by elderly men" who father children. "It seems to me that symmetry should apply." + +LOAD-DATE: April 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +214 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 28, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Budget Negotiators Step Gingerly Toward Deal + +BYLINE: By RICHARD W. STEVENSON + +SECTION: Section B; Page 10; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 867 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 27 + +After years of partisan warfare over balancing the Federal budget, the White House and Congressional Republicans enter this week closer to a deal than ever before. But both sides are still wary that the delicate negotiations could collapse under an array of political pressures, officials said today. +After trading offers last week on critical components of any budget package, including tax cuts, spending levels for domestic and military programs and reductions in the rapid growth of Medicare expenditures, both sides now say their biggest problem is not the numerical gap between them, but finding a structure that allows both sides to claim victory on their priority issues. + Republican negotiators continue to insist that they cannot sell any deal to their party that does not include reductions in capital gains taxes, for example. But the Clinton Administration is arguing that it will not be able to bring Congressional Democrats along if its proposals on education, the environment and welfare are not accommodated, people involved in the talks said. +Discussions in coming days are likely to cover some of the most politically sensitive topics the negotiators have faced as they look for ways to pay for both sides' demands. Both sides have expressed some willingness to reduce the cost-of-living adjustments paid to Social Security recipients, a step that could set off explosive opposition from the elderly and other interest groups but that could save tens of billions of dollars over the next five years. +Republicans will also have to decide whether they are willing to accept the slightly more optimistic economic assumptions used by the Administration in calculating the size of future deficits, a largely technical step but one that could reduce the necessary spending cuts by billions of dollars a year. Republicans in earlier years have adamantly opposed such a move, saying the Administration's numbers could not be trusted, but they have softened their opposition as the White House's figures have proved credible, and they seem likely to agree to a compromise. +"We will know within a few days if we can get an agreement early or not," President Clinton said in an interview broadcast today on the CBS News program "Face the Nation." +"I think there's a good chance we can," Mr. Clinton said, adding that negotiations had reached a stage at which "the less we say about it in public and the more we work these things through, the better." +The budget negotiators hope to reach a deal by the time Mr. Clinton leaves on a trip to Central and South America on May 5. Republicans have made clear that if no bipartisan agreement is reached by then, they will press ahead in Congress with a budget blueprint of their own. +Although negotiations would no doubt continue if no deal is struck this week, both sides have warned that reaching an agreement will only become more difficult as the wings of both parties exert pressure on moderates to eschew any compromises. +Indeed, because the talks up to this point have been dominated by moderate pragmatists from both sides, both Republicans and Democrats said one of the biggest challenges to finalizing any deal would be selling it to their own parties. Both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans have been warning leaders of their parties not to sell out their principles to get a deal. +Although leaders of both parties have long since conceded that they will lose the extremists in their ranks in any compromise, they remain unsure whether they will be able to fashion a broad-based coalition of moderates willing to withstand the political pressure that would come from giving even a partial victory to the other side. +Officials said some of this week's negotiating sessions would be held in secret. Administration officials, including Franklin D. Raines, the budget chief, John Hilley, the Congressional liaison, and Gene Sperling, the chairman of the National Economic Council, have been working closely with a Republican team led by Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico and Representative John R. Kasich of Ohio. Congressional Democrats have been represented in the talks by Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina. +On taxes, Republicans have reduced their initial demand for $200 billion in cuts over the next five years to $150 billion, partly paid for by nearly $50 billion raised by extending existing taxes or closing loopholes. The Administration has raised its offer of $98 billion in cuts to $125 billion, both offset by $76 billion from extending taxes and closing loopholes. +On Medicare, which has been one of the most divisive issues of the last several years, the Republicans want to cut the planned spending growth by $126 billion over five years, while the Administration's latest offer is $105 billion, up from an earlier proposal of $100 billion. +Both sides said that perhaps the most difficult remaining disagreement was over financing for domestic programs, where Republicans are seeking cuts roughly twice as deep as those the Clinton Administration and Congressional Democrats have been willing to consider. + +LOAD-DATE: April 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +215 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 29, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Lott Now Opposes Change in Inflation Adjuster + +BYLINE: By RICHARD W. STEVENSON + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 719 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 28 + +The Senate Republican leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi, today all but ruled out reducing cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients to help balance the budget. His remarks complicated prospects for a bipartisan deal to eliminate the Federal deficit even as the two sides prepared for a big push to reach agreement this week. +Mr. Lott said President Clinton had waited too long to signal a willingness to take the political heat that changing the cost-of-living formula would generate. As a result, he said, Republicans have become so fearful of being blamed for harming the interests of the elderly and other powerful constituencies that they will not vote for any budget package that provides for revising the formula. + "I think it's too late," said Mr. Lott, who had publicly prodded Mr. Clinton for months to support such a change. +On Sunday, Mr. Clinton said he would be willing to consider changing the formula because most economists agree that the Consumer Price Index, on which the adjustments are based, overstates the effects of inflation. Although the White House had been wary of embracing any change publicly, Administration officials had said for months that they thought revising the index could be part of a budget package, saving tens of billions of dollars over the next five years. +Taking a change in the index off the table in the budget negotiations, as Mr. Lott apparently did today, puts increased pressure on the two sides to find other ways of bridging the differences between them. Among the most likely options now is for Republicans to adopt economic assumptions closer to the slightly more optimistic outlook used by the Administration in calculating how big the deficit will be in coming years. +Several Republicans said today that they were increasingly open to using more optimistic numbers, especially since strong economic growth and tax revenue so far this year make it likely that the deficit for 1997 will come in far lower than either the Administration or the Congressional Budget Office projected. +White House officials will consult with Democrats on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to gauge their willingness to go along with elements of a compromise that have taken shape over several months of negotiations. +Leaving Philadelphia today after attending the conference on volunteerism there, Mr. Clinton told reporters that he was returning to Washington "to try to conclude our budget negotiations within the next, I don't know, two days" -- a timetable he quickly amended to "two months, two years." +But in one sign of how far the negotiations have come, some influential House Republicans said they were largely satisfied with the tax-cutting package worked out between the two sides. That compromise would allow a net tax cut of about $100 billion over the next five years, after accounting for some $50 billion in revenue increases from the closing of loopholes and extending existing taxes that would otherwise expire. +Key Senate Republicans including William V. Roth Jr. of Delaware, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, have been pressing for net tax cuts of at least $143 billion, but they rely in part on reductions in the cost-of-living formula for Social Security to pay for them. +One Republican said that even at $100 billion, Republicans could get a reduction in the capital gains and estate taxes and a credit for families with children -- all goals they have considered non-negotiable. +After exchanging offers last week, Republicans and the White House remain about $50 billion short of eliminating the deficit by the target year, 2002. Both sides now say it is increasingly likely that they will find some way of saving at least half of that $50 billion by changing the economic assumptions underlying any deal. +The Administration's slightly more optimistic outlook for the economy and for future deficits has won increased credibility in recent weeks as strong growth and an unexpected surge in tax receipts have led forecasters to revise sharply downward their estimate for this year's deficit. Many economists are now projecting a deficit of around $90 billion, the lowest in 16 years and well below the $125 billion forecast by the Administration and the $113 billion forecast by the Congressional Budget Office. + +LOAD-DATE: April 29, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +216 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +April 30, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Progress Reported in White House-Congress Talks on Budget + +BYLINE: By RICHARD W. STEVENSON + +SECTION: Section D; Page 22; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 867 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 29 + +The White House and negotiators from both parties in Congress inched closer to a deal on balancing the Federal budget today, with both sides saying a compromise was possible, but by no means certain, within days. +Clinton Administration officials scurried between meetings on Capitol Hill, sounding out Congressional Democrats and hearing almost nothing but criticism that the White House was too eager to get a deal with the Republicans. But officials said President Clinton was prepared to meet with the leaders of both parties to try to bridge the remaining differences, which center on the size and composition of the tax cuts demanded by Republicans and the insistence among Democrats that cuts in domestic spending be limited. + "We have an opportunity here in the next 24 hours to come to closure on this," said Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader. +The broad outlines of the deal under discussion include a net tax cut of about $100 billion over the next five years, a reduction in the growth of Medicare spending of at least $105 billion, and cuts in domestic programs greater than the $46 billion contained in the budget proposal that the President sent to Congress earlier this year. +But the two sides would still fall about $50 billion short of eliminating the deficit by the target date of 2002. They hope to plug that hole in part by adopting slightly more optimistic assumptions about the size of future deficits than Republicans had previously been willing to consider. +Last year's budget deficit was $107 billion, the lowest since 1981, and even without a budget deal the deficit is declining sharply again this year because of unexpectedly strong economic growth and a surprising surge in tax revenue. Government analysts said this year's deficit could be as low as $90 billion, and some private economists think that number could be as low as $70 billion. The total budget this year is $1.6 trillion. +Negotiators from both sides also showed a new willingness today to publicly embrace a change in the way cost-of-living adjustments are calculated for Social Security recipients, a money-saving move that budget analysts have long said would be a critical component in any deal. Both Democratic and Republican officials said they would support including in the budget a reduction in the Consumer Price Index of a quarter of a percentage point, or perhaps a bit more, to reflect revisions in the index being studied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. +Such a change would save tens of billions of dollars by 2002, the year by which both parties have pledged to eliminate the Federal deficit. Some influential Democrats and Republicans had been pressing for a far bigger revision on the ground that the index appears to overstate inflation by more than one percentage point, but they ran afoul of intense opposition from the elderly and other powerful interest groups. +As recently as Monday, Senator Lott had said Republicans could not vote for any change in the index. But today he said that if the change derived from recommendations by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, "that would be a different matter." +Administration officials were slightly more cautious, especially after spending the day hearing warnings from Congressional Democrats that they would not go along with a deal that did not fully protect spending on education, health care, the environment and welfare. +Senate Democrats told Administration officials at a closed-door meeting that they were particularly concerned about the White House's apparent acquiescence to Republican demands for tax reductions that would become increasingly costly after the five years covered by the agreement they are negotiating. Republicans are particularly intent on a deep reduction in the capital gains tax on profit from the sale of stocks, real estate and other assets. +Tax analysts project that a reduction in the tax could generate additional revenue for the Government in the short run by encouraging people to sell assets that they would otherwise have held onto. But there is deep disagreement among economists about whether that effect would continue in the long run, with one camp insisting that the cost of the tax cuts would mount rapidly, and the other arguing that the tax cuts would spur greater economic growth and a continued surge in revenue. +Democrats in both the House and the Senate also subjected Administration officials, including the White House chief of staff, Erskine B. Bowles, to sharp criticism of the Administration's handling of the budget negotiations, saying Mr. Clinton should strike a more aggressive posture with Republicans and not be so eager to get a deal. +"Almost everyone there believes strongly that we need a balanced budget," Mr. Bowles said after meeting with House Democrats. "Some would rather for us to wait and discuss it for a longer period. " +But Administration officials as well as Mr. Lott are pushing hard to wrap up a deal before the President leaves on a trip to Mexico next week. While both sides said they were prepared to continue negotiating indefinitely, the negotiators have said their job will become harder as time passes. + +LOAD-DATE: April 30, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +217 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 1, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Conseco Planning to Acquire Colonial Penn + +BYLINE: By Bloomberg News + +SECTION: Section D; Page 5; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 339 words + +DATELINE: CARMEL, Ind., April 30 + +Conseco Inc., continuing a string of acquisitions that helped its earnings more than double in the first quarter, said today that it had agreed to buy a unit of the Leucadia National Corporation for $460 million. +The purchase of the unit, the Colonial Penn Life Insurance Company, from Leucadia, a New York holding company, will give Conseco a direct-mail sales system. That is consistent with a desire among larger insurance companies to sell insurance without using agents. + Colonial Penn relies on advertising, including television campaigns, to sell its policies. It focuses on elderly customers, offering a life insurance policy that requires no physical exam but that pays a lower benefit to those who die within two years of enrolling. + The acquisition, for $60 million in cash and $400 million in five-year debt, is the latest in a series of consolidations in the insurance industry and furthers the transformation of Conseco through purchases. It may also help Conseco, which is based here, become a key seller to baby boomers planning for retirement. + In seeking growth, Conseco is more "interested in the existing direct mail system that's set up there than they are in Colonial Penn's life insurance products," said Cathy Seifert, an equity analyst at Standard & Poor's. + During the last year, Conseco has bought the Life Partners Group, Transport Holdings Inc., the American Travellers Corporation and the Capitol American Financial Corporation. It has also purchased the shares it did not already own of American Life Holdings Inc. and the Bankers Life Holding Corporation. +Reflecting its acquisitions, Conseco's operating profit rose to $119.1 million, or 59 cents a share, in the first quarter from $48.4 million, or 44 cents a share, in the comparable period a year earlier. Net income was $111.5 million, or 49 cents a share, up from $46.3 million, or 42 cents a share. +On the New York Stock Exchange today, Conseco was unchanged at $41.375. The price has almost quadrupled in two years. + +LOAD-DATE: May 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +218 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 2, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +THE BUDGET BATTLE: THE CUTS; +Negotiators Move to Rein In Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 24; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 856 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 1 + +The budget deal shaping up on Capitol Hill would significantly restrain the growth of spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, further reducing the Federal deficit. But lobbyists for the elderly and governors of both parties said today that they found parts of the agreement unacceptable. +Under the agreement, as outlined today by negotiators of both parties, millions of retirees would face higher Medicare premiums and would receive somewhat smaller Social Security checks in future years than they would get under current law. + In addition, Federal spending on health benefits for poor people under Medicaid would probably be capped for the first time, a radical change in a program that has been open-ended since its creation in 1965. +The negotiators also said they had accepted President Clinton's proposal to shore up Medicare's Hospital Insurance Trust Fund by shifting much of the cost of home health care to another account, which pays doctors' bills. But contrary to Mr. Clinton's suggestion, Republicans insisted that home health costs be financed by higher premiums, and they have apparently prevailed. +Congressional experts estimate that this change would eventually add $8.70 to the monthly Medicare premium, which is now $43.80 and is already expected to rise to $51.50 by 2002 under current law. Elderly people with incomes below a certain level, perhaps $30,000 a year, would not have to pay the extra premium for home health care. +Representative Pete Stark of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, said he could not vote for the budget blueprint in its current form. But he offered to help the Republicans write their proposal to increase Medicare premiums. +"We'll win back the House if they do it," Mr. Stark said. In last year's election campaign, Democrats battered Republicans for proposing Medicare cutbacks, and Republicans acknowledge that the attacks hurt them. +Congressional Republicans and Clinton Administration officials said they had tentatively agreed to reduce projected Medicare spending by $115 billion, or 8.5 percent, over the next five years, splitting the difference between them. Mr. Clinton had originally proposed to cut Medicare spending by $100 billion in that period, but later increased his offer to $105 billion. The Republicans had sought savings of $125 billion. +The proposed changes would keep Medicare's hospital trust fund solvent until 2008 but would not address the huge fiscal problems that will face the entire program after baby boomers start to retire in 2011. +The emerging budget agreement would also shave perhaps four-tenths of one percentage point from the annual cost-of-living adjustment in Social Security and other benefits. Supporters of this proposal said it would partly correct the overstatement of inflation that many economists perceive in the Consumer Price Index. +Dan J. Schulder, a lobbyist for the National Council of Senior Citizens, said the developing budget agreement was "a bad deal for seniors." +John C. Rother, chief lobbyist at the American Association of Retired Persons, which has more than 33 million members, said: +"The authors of this agreement are cutting Medicaid. They're raising premiums for Medicare beneficiaries. They're cutting Social Security cost-of-living adjustments based on the Consumer Price Index. Those changes all affect low-income people. +"At the same time, they're cutting taxes on estates and on capital gains to benefit the better-off. This is income redistribution in reverse. It makes us more unequal as a society." +The budget negotiators have agreed to cut projected spending on Medicaid, the Federal-state health program for low-income people, by $22 billion to $24 billion, or 4 percent, over the next five years. +The negotiators assume that much of the savings will be achieved by setting firm limits on Federal spending for each Medicaid beneficiary -- a "per capita cap," like the one Mr. Clinton proposed in February. +The National Governors' Association joined advocates for the elderly and for children in denouncing this proposal today. They said the proposal undercut efforts to expand health insurance coverage of children. +A letter to Mr. Clinton signed by 41 governors says, "We adamantly oppose a cap on Federal Medicaid spending in any form." +As for Medicare, budget negotiators said they were determined to curb its spending on home health services, which has exploded in recent years, rising to $16.7 billion in 1996 from $3.3 billion in 1990. Medicare patients treasure the benefit because it allows them to receive care in their own homes, rather than in a hospital, a doctor's office or a nursing home. +Home health agencies are now paid a separate amount for each visit, based on their costs, and there is no limit on the number of visits. Under the plan being devised in Congress, those agencies would receive a fixed amount of money for all the visits to a patient in a given period, perhaps four months. If they provided the services for less than that amount, they could keep some of the savings. + +LOAD-DATE: May 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +219 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 2, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Before His Armed Standoff, Texan Waged War on Neighbors in Court + +BYLINE: By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK + +SECTION: Section A; Page 12; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1413 words + +DATELINE: FORT DAVIS, Tex., May 1 + +From a trailer in the sun-bleached mountains of West Texas, Richard L. McLaren declared himself at war with the United States five days ago. But as far as the people of Fort Davis are concerned, he has been at war with them for the past 14 years. +His weapon of choice was the legal petition, his battleground the silver-domed Jeff Davis County Courthouse in the middle of town. Dressed in jeans, a tweed coat and beat-up tennis shoes, Mr. McLaren was a daily presence there, says the county clerk, Sue Blackley. And in a cramped file room, drawers of old legal documents offer evidence of a bewildering array of volleys -- lawsuits, affidavits, contested land surveys and deeds of trust -- aimed at his neighbors. + The lawsuits here offer a striking early preview of the tactic that Mr. McLaren more recently came to employ statewide and that Texas authorities have described as "paper terrorism." They say members of his Republic of Texas group, which claims that Texas is still an independent nation and that the group controls all state assets, have clogged courthouses around the state with thousands of bogus liens and other claims. +As the standoff continued tonight, state negotiators made their final offer, said Mike Cox, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety. "It is now in his court to respond to this," Mr. Cox was quoted as saying by the Reuters news agency, but he declined to give details of the offer and did not say how long Mr. McLaren had to respond. +In the earlier lawsuits, Mr. McLaren -- who is not even a native Texan, but a son of the Midwest who dates his fascination with Texas to a third-grade book report on the Alamo -- did much the same thing. He swamped his imagined enemies with so much paperwork that some simply surrendered, unable or unwilling to pay the legal fees to fight off his fraudulent claims. +With more than 80 of his neighbors thrown out of their homes by the government standoff with the Republic group that began on Sunday, people here have plenty of reason to dislike the 43-year-old Mr. McLaren. But his nasty legal battles here further help explain the profound enmity that so many residents of this quiet mile-high town feel for him. +The feeling seems to be universal: even mild-looking elderly women say they want the government to "blow him away" or "take him out," ending the siege and ridding Fort Davis forever of the town menace. To hear some people talk now, it is a wonder Mr. McLaren did not take a bullet in the back years ago. +"His whole operation has always involved getting something for nothing," said Joe Rowe, the man who was shot in the arm and taken hostage for 14 hours by three of Mr. McLaren's followers Sunday, and a former president of the property owners' association where Mr. McLaren lives. "He's been involved in one land grab after another." +Mr. McLaren filed a lawsuit in 1985 challenging the way the association spent its annual fees; after a decade of legal battles at the courthouse, an out-of-court agreement resulted in Mr. McLaren's being given 20 lots, $87,000 in cash, and two buildings, including the old firehouse that had served as his "embassy" until he moved further up the mountains. +Another property owner, desperate to care for a daughter who had cancer and a grandson who had been gravely hurt in a car crash, found his assets tied up by liens Mr. McLaren had filed. The man, Larry Stewart, gave up 100 acres of land in order to get Mr. McLaren to drop his claims. +In all cases that can be studied at the courthouse, those who decided to fight Mr. McLaren to the end did win, but often at great personal and financial cost. +"I just decided I'd be danged if this bozo was going to get anything of ours," said Mary Lynn Wofford, the owner of the Paradise Ranch Bed and Breakfast, whose family has been on the land for four generations. She spent 12 years and $100,000 battling 17 separate claims by Mr. McLaren that their 11,000-acre ranch was illegally surveyed. +Last September -- "It was the 17th of September, at 10:38 in the morning," Mrs. Wofford says -- she won in state court. But Mr. McLaren ignores any judgment that orders him to pay legal fees of his opponents, pointing up a supreme irony in all his legal battles. +As much as he has used the legal system against his opponents, he seems to have completely avoided paying any awards that have gone against him -- indeed, he has never paid his taxes here and is $3,300 in arrears, according to the county tax assessor. As Mr. McLaren explained in an interview earlier this year, such judgments against him are meaningless. He is the head of the nation of Texas, he said, and state courts are illegal entities. +Said Michael T. Morgan, a Midland, Tex., lawyer who represents a Houston title company that secured a $1.8 million judgment against Mr. McLaren for fraud and slander, which he has never paid: "Unless the judgment was granted by a court of his creation, he seems quite willing to ignore it." +Last spring, Mr. McLaren was jailed in Pecos after he refused to stop filing liens against the title company. In June, after posting a $10,000 bond and promising to stop, he was released. Back in the mountains, he quickly resumed directing a statewide campaign of "legal terrorism," as the state described it. +Members of his group filed liens against Gov. George W. Bush, the state's Chief Judge, the Attorney General, and hundreds of other individuals and businesses. Last year the A. H. Belo Corporation, which owns The Dallas Morning News, spent six months and $12,500 in legal fees to fight off a $1 billion lien. +The false liens, a tactic used by the Freemen separatist group in Montana, can cost thousands of dollars and months of aggravation to settle. +Governor Bush persuaded the State Legislature earlier this year to pass emergency legislation making the filing of false liens a criminal act under many circumstances. +In expanding his legal battles to the state, Mr. McLaren also has boasted of buying computers, cellular telephones, fax machines and other expensive equipment with official-looking Republic of Texas checks, which claim to be backed by the "full faith and credit of the people of Texas." State officials say group members have passed at least $3 million of the worthless checks. +All these tactics, it seems, had their incubation during the years Mr. McLaren was harassing his neighbors with legal claims, usually on property adjacent to his own. Indeed, he has said, it was while researching old land claims in West Texas a few years ago that it suddenly dawned on him: Texas was never legally annexed to the Union. +Mr. McLaren's roots hardly suggest those of a man who would come to proclaim himself the leader of the nation of Texas. +A graduate of the Wilmington, Ohio, High School class of 1972, Mr. McLaren was described by his former father-in-law as "a little high-strung" and "real nervous," as well as lazy, but also a man with a humorous side who was constantly cracking jokes, The Cincinnati Post reported this week. He attended some college; he never went to law school. +Mr. McLaren moved to West Texas sometime in the late 1970's, apparently after seeing an article in Texas Highways magazine that featured the spectacular scenery of the area. At first, he did a variety of odd jobs, including carpentry, and, in a place where many people come to be left alone, he did not seem to bother anybody. He later worked in an organic winery in the Davis Mountains Resort, the subdivision where he is holed up, and eventually came to own the enterprise. +While much can be gleaned about Mr. McLaren, less is known about his followers, especially the hard core of a dozen or so armed Republic "guards" now bunkered down with him at the "embassy." +A dissident faction of the Republic of Texas said today that it had issued an arrest warrant for Mr. McLaren, charging him with fraud and treason. +Several neighbors describe the people around Mr. McLaren, including the three who took Mr. Rowe and his wife hostage on Sunday, as "true believers" who are more than willing to die for the cause, preferably in an Alamo-style gun battle with state or Federal agents. +But, Mr. Cox said earlier, officials were not planning a gun battle, and remained hopeful that a peaceful surrender could be arranged. After a day and a half of silence, Mr. McLaren picked up the phone today at the trailer, and started talking again, Mr. Cox said. + +LOAD-DATE: May 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: In a photograph taken on April 11, Richard McLaren, head of the Republic of Texas, sat in the Fort Davis, Tex., building he calls the group's embassy, where he has been holed with his followers since Sunday. (Annie Etheridge/Sygma) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +220 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 3, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +THE BUDGET BATTLE: THE BENEFITS; +Budget Negotiators Soften Impact of Cuts for Elderly + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 12; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 813 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 2 + +The economic windfall that put billions of additional dollars into the budget pot allowed negotiators today to soften the impact of their proposed cutbacks in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. +The last-minute revisions went far to assuage the concerns of the elderly, whose lobbyists said tonight that the agreement reached by President Clinton and Congressional Republicans had improved substantially in the last 36 hours and was now more acceptable to them. + Among the changes they applauded were the scaling back of an increase in monthly Medicare premiums to $1 from $8, the removal of a cap on Medicaid spending for the poor and the moderation of a proposed change in the Consumer Price Index that would have lowered Social Security and other Government benefit payments. +The budget negotiators said they had softened the effect of their plan on beneficiaries after adopting more optimistic economic assumptions, which produced higher estimates of expected revenues in the coming decade. +Martin A. Corry, director of Federal affairs at the American Association of Retired Persons, which has more than 33 million members, said tonight, "We want to get more details, but it appears that the package improved markedly in the last 36 hours." +Here are some highlights of the budget-balancing agreement, as provided by Congressional leaders and Administration officials: +*Projected spending on Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for the elderly and disabled, would be reduced by $115 billion, or 8.5 percent, over the next five years. +*Medicare's Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, now expected to run out of money in 2001, would remain solvent until 2008. +*The cost of home health care services, which has soared in recent years, would be shifted from the hospital trust fund to a separate Medicare trust fund, which pays doctors' bills. To help cover these costs, Medicare premiums, now $43.80 a month, would be gradually increased over the next five years. But beneficiaries would not have to pay the extra amounts if their family incomes were less than the official poverty level ($9,491 for an elderly couple) or as much as 20 percent above the poverty threshold. +*Projected Federal spending on Medicaid, the health program for low-income people, would be reduced by 3 percent, or $16 billion to $17 billion, over the next five years. Most of the savings would be achieved by cutting special payments to hospitals that serve large numbers of indigent patients. +At the last minute, negotiators dropped their plan to impose firm limits on Federal spending for each Medicaid beneficiary -- a "per capita cap," which would have saved $9 billion from 1998 to 2002. President Clinton had proposed such a cap, but it was vehemently opposed by governors of both parties and by advocates for children and the elderly. +The Federal Government would earmark $15 billion to $17 billion in the next five years for new initiatives to provide health insurance for children. The goal is to provide coverage for five million youngsters, or half of the nation's uninsured children. Budget negotiators did not say whether the money would be used to expand Medicaid, to provide lump-sum grants to the states or to finance some other approach. +Medicare would offer several new preventive health benefits, to help detect diabetes, colorectal cancer and breast cancer. Mr. Clinton proposed these benefits, and Speaker Newt Gingrich enthusiastically supported the proposal on diabetes. +Starting in 2000, the annual cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security benefits would be reduced slightly, compared with the amounts that would be paid under current law. Budget negotiators said this change would save perhaps $10 billion to $15 billion from 2000 to 2002. It is justified, they said, because many economists believe that the Consumer Price Index, used as a basis for computing the cost-of-living adjustment, overstates inflation. +House Republicans said the proposal would lower the cost-of-living adjustment by 0.1 to 0.25 of a percentage point -- less than $2 a month for a retired worker receiving the average Social Security benefit of $745 a month. Under the budget agreement, Congress will not legislate a specific cut, but assumes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics will make the appropriate "corrections" in the Consumer Price Index. +Senator John H. Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, said it was fortunate that the budget negotiators had dropped the idea of a cap on Medicaid spending because "that proposal wouldn't have flown anyway," given the opposition of governors and health care advocates. +Jose M. Zuniga, a spokesman for the AIDS Action Council, a lobbying group for people with AIDS, said, "We are thrilled that the Medicaid cap has apparently been dropped." But he said, "We are still concerned about the other cuts in Medicaid." + +LOAD-DATE: May 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "At Issue: Slowing the Growth" shows Medicaid and Medicare revenue from 1967-97. (Source: Office of Management and Budget) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +221 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 3, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +News Analysis; +The Mantra For 1997: It's the Best Of Times + +BYLINE: By DAVID E. SANGER + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 37; Column 5; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 921 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 2 + +When it comes to economic news, it does not get much better than this. +Unemployment, the Government concluded today, fell below 5 percent for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century. Economic growth in the first quarter of the year, at 5.6 percent, was nearly double the predictions. + And in striking the broad outlines of a budget deal, Democrats and Republicans engaged in the kind of budget negotiation no one could have anticipated a year ago: haggling over what to do with an unexpected surge in Government revenues that, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate that raced around Capitol Hill this morning, could bring an extra $200 billion to the Treasury over the next five years. (In minutes, they found several things to do with it.) +Spurred on by the dedication today of the Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial on the Mall, people in Washington even began talking in overarching terms about today's economy as the fulfillment of a grander vision. +"If we were in 1945 now on the day F.D.R. died," Michael Beschloss, the historian, said today, "and we tried to imagine the best scenario for a half-century later, this would be it: unemployment this low and a country that is at the center of an interdependent world economy." +Herbert Stein, the chairman of the council of economic advisers in the Nixon Administration, said today, "I remember when we held a press conference around this time in 1972 and I said what we had was the best combination of economic numbers in history -- and then I amended that to say I meant the Christian era of history." But the numbers then, he added, were reached somewhat artificially, with the benefit of price controls. "I think the numbers are even better now," he added, "because they are purer." +But good economic news always has a way of making people nervous, and this time is no exception. +The political impact of prosperity has been clear here this week. It has forestalled some truly difficult political choices as the White House and Congressional leaders raced to put together the budget package. +With the extra $200 billion in hand (the fact that it was a projection, and a rough one at that, was considered a small detail), both parties were able to sidestep a politically unpopular recalculation of the rate of inflation, a recalculation that would effectively lower the increases for Social Security recipients and other beneficiaries of entitlement programs. Most of the evidence suggests that the current inflation rate is significantly overstated. +But the political reality is that the good times helped Washington avoid a face-off with the politically powerful groups that represent the elderly, led by the American Association of Retired Persons. +The longer-term risks of celebrating good times, though, are harder to measure. +Countries have a way of convincing themselves that they have found the magic formula, to the point of ignoring disturbing signals of trouble -- Japan in the late 1980's comes to mind. +Markets have the same tendency. The Treasury Secretary, Robert E. Rubin, never stops reminding his aides that Wall Street traders -- he once was one -- move from extremes of optimism to extremes of pessimism even faster than politicians do. Every new sign of economic expansion, profit growth and budget peace only fuels what Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, termed "irrational exuberance" -- because the news makes exuberance seem a lot more rational. +And perhaps it is more rational. "Looking at the last 20 or 25 years, what has recently been going on is one hell of a lot better -- well significantly better -- than virtually anybody thought possible," said Charles L. Schultze, who headed the Council of Economic Advisers in the inflation-ridden days of the Carter Administration. +"If you had told me and 90 percent of my colleagues just three of four years ago that you could push the unemployment rate down to below 5 percent, and inflation would have for all practical purposes no uptick, we would have said that you are just plain wrong," he said. +Mr. Schultze has identified only one of several recent economic guesses that have turned wrong. +The Treasury and the Congressional Budget Office were not even close in predicting the kind of revenue that has flowed into Washington, the logical consequence of economic growth rates that were also underestimated. Of course, that is the kind of mistake everyone likes to discover. "The scary part," said one Treasury official early this week, "is that if you can't make good guesses six months out, what does that say about our ability to project a balanced budget five years out?" +Naturally, all this good news leads to the natural question: Can it last? +Perhaps the better way to put that question is whether the Federal Reserve will let it last, or whether Mr. Greenspan thinks the heat will come out of the economy of its own accord. +The conventional wisdom, naturally, is that the decline in the unemployment rate will force the Fed's hand when it meets on May 20, even without evidence of inflation. +Nonetheless, the bond markets, perhaps looking to the long term, decided this afternoon that maybe a budget deal was not such a bad idea after all. Worries about the Fed were put aside, and interest rates dropped after the news flashed across screens around the world. +That was exactly the reassuring vote of confidence the White House was looking for, whether the deal President Clinton announced was the best to be had or not. + +LOAD-DATE: May 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +222 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 3, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +THE BUDGET BATTLE: THE OVERVIEW; +AFTER YEARS OF WRANGLING, ACCORD IS REACHED ON PLAN TO BALANCE BUDGET BY 2002 + +BYLINE: By RICHARD W. STEVENSON + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1658 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 2 + +The Clinton Administration reached agreement with the Republican leadership today on a plan to balance the Federal budget in five years, using a last-minute financial windfall to help forge a deal that could alter the nation's economic and political landscape. +The pact came after years of bitter partisan wrangling, months of intense negotiations and several hours of high drama in which an astounding piece of news -- that deficits over the next five years were likely to be $225 billion lower than the Republicans had previously projected -- provided the final impetus to completing the deal. + In the end, that unexpected maneuvering room enabled both sides to claim victory in achieving their primary goals without undue political pain, although both the White House and the Republican leadership still had to rally support for the package within their own parties. +President Clinton argued that he had won new spending for education, health insurance for children, welfare benefits and other programs that he had made the core of his second-term agenda, all while protecting the elderly from big increases in their Medicare premiums. +"I wanted a balanced budget with balanced values," Mr. Clinton said. "I believe we have got it today." +Republicans exultantly claimed a prize that has eluded them for years, a big tax cut, including a reduction in the capital gains tax, as well as success in scaling back overall domestic spending and beginning to rein in the costs of Medicare and other entitlement programs. +"Under this budget agreement, official Washington must learn to make do with less, while Americans will keep more of what they earn, and they will be able to save it and invest it in their own families," said Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Republican majority leader. +The agreement does not insure that the budget will be balanced by 2002, because it cannot anticipate possible economic downturns or tax and spending decisions by Congress. And although the agreement won far more support today from liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans than did the outline that circulated on Capitol Hill on Thursday, it must still go through a legislative process that provides opportunities for changes and conflicts. +In a broader sense, the agreement gave Mr. Clinton a chance at a place in history as the President who restored the nation to a degree of fiscal and economic health it has not enjoyed in decades, an assertion that was bolstered by the news today that unemployment had fallen to 4.9 percent, its lowest rate in 23 years. +For the Republican majority in Congress, it was a chance to repair its image as overly partisan and obstructionist and to take home to voters a fiscal austerity package that leaves them largely insulated from Democratic attacks. +That the two sides were able to reach an agreement with so little political pain was largely a function of the strong economy, and the resulting decline in the deficit. Even without a budget agreement, this year's deficit is now expected to fall nearly 30 percent, to $75 billion, its lowest level relative to the size of the economy in more than two decades. +The Federal budget was last in balance in 1969. It began growing rapidly in the early 1980's after President Reagan and a Democratic Congress enacted tax cuts and spending increases and hit a peak of $290 billion in 1992. Since then the deficit has steadily declined, thanks in part to tax increases pushed through by Mr. Clinton in 1993 over Republican objections but primarily to a long period of steady economic growth. +The deal's major provisions, covering 1998 through 2002, include these: +*A reduction of $58 billion in domestic nonmilitary spending, about $12 billion more than Mr. Clinton had initially proposed. But the budget would provide $34 billion for most of Mr. Clinton's priority programs, including health insurance for up to 5 million children, the restoration of welfare benefits to legal immigrants and expanding the student loan and Head Start programs. +*A reduction in the planned growth of Medicare spending by $115 billion, accomplished largely through reductions in payments to health care providers. Elderly beneficiaries would have to pay slightly higher premiums. The Medicare trust fund, which would otherwise go bankrupt in 2001, would remain solvent until 2007. +*Tax cuts of $135 billion, partly offset by $50 billion in revenues from closing loopholes and extending existing taxes set to expire. The Republicans assured the White House that $35 billion of the cuts would be allocated to the President's proposal for tuition tax breaks. The remaining $100 billion would go to a reduction in the capital gains tax, a phased-in doubling of the amount exempted from estate taxes to $1.2 million and a credit for families with children. +The deal does not specify the size of the capital gains tax cut, but aides to Representative Bill Archer, the Texas Republican who, as head of the House Ways and Means Committee, is responsible for all tax legislation, said there appeared to be enough money available to reduce the top rate to the Republican leadership's goal of 19.8 percent from 28 percent if the members of the committee agree to do so. +The cost of the tax cuts in the five years after 2002, a major impediment to a deal in the last few days, would be limited to $165 billion, a level that both sides agreed would not lead to a return of big deficits. +Although the broad outlines of the budget deal were in place by Thursday, it was completed this afternoon only after the negotiators agreed to tradeoffs made possible by the Congressional Budget Office's dramatic decision on Thursday to slash its deficit estimates for coming years. +The new projections allowed negotiators to take out politically sensitive components of the deal like a legislated change in the cost-of-living formula for Social Security and to scale back cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. +The budget office told Republicans on Wednesday that it was working on new projections that would show the scope of the nation's fiscal problems to be far smaller than anticipated. By Thursday, budget office officials had concluded that the deficit would be about $45 billion a year lower than they had previously projected, $225 billion lower over the five years covered by the budget deal. +The negotiators, however, had already decided on their own to use slightly more optimistic assumptions about the deficit. Still, the gain was substantial, $12 billion for 2002 alone. +And the news was shocking to both sides. Administration officials learned of it on Thursday from a phone call during a meeting with House Democrats. They returned to the White House to mull over the implications, with some aides saying it could scuttle the deal by causing Republicans to demand bigger tax cuts and Democrats more spending. +Indeed, when the negotiators met at 9:45 this morning in a hideaway office deep under the Capitol, there was considerable tension on both sides, participants said. The Republican team was led by Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico and Representative John R. Kasich of Ohio, along with their top aides, G. William Hoagland and Rick May. Congressional Democrats were represented by Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina. The Administration's team included Erskine B. Bowles, the White House chief of staff; Franklin D. Raines, the budget chief; Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin; John Hilley, the Congressional liaison, and Gene Sperling, the head of the National Economic Council. +But it quickly became apparent that both sides were willing to carve up the windfall in a way that would improve the agreement's prospects for winning bipartisan support, particularly given the negative reaction that early reports of the package had brought on Thursday from liberal House Democrats and conservative Republicans. +The negotiators decided that the new-found money gave them the chance to remove from the agreement a proposal that would have had the effect of lowering cost-of-living increases in Social Security and other Government benefits and raising taxes for some people. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress had warned that they might have to vote against the package if it contained the provision reducing the Government's main cost of living gauge, the Consumer Price Index, to correct for an overestimate of inflation by about one percentage point. The negotiators had planned to seek legislative approval to double a 0.15 percentage point reduction in the index expected to be implemented on technical grounds by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. +The negotiators agreed to phase in increased Medicare premiums over seven years instead of five, and to exempt more low-income recipients from higher premiums. At the urging of Vice President Al Gore, they eliminated a per-person cap on Medicaid spending, a proposal that had drawn fire from the nation's governors and from many Democrats. And they agreed that about $8 billion in additional funding could be allocated over five years for transportation spending. +As word of the changes spread across Capitol Hill, the compromises defused much of the criticism leveled at the deal on Thursday. Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the Democratic leader, said he was "encouraged at the movement towards addressing Democratic concerns." +Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts said, "There's been some improvement but I still want to see more details." And in a sentiment common to many members of both parties who had watched the budget wars rage for the last several years, Senator Charles S. Robb, a Virginia Democrat, said, "This is the best deal either side could get." + The article also referred incorrectly to a $290 billion figure from the 1992 budget. It represented the deficit that year, not the entire budget. + +LOAD-DATE: May 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: May 8, 1997, Thursday + + CORRECTION: +An article on Saturday about a balanced-budget agreement between the White House and Congressional Republicans referred incorrectly to the party makeup of Congress in the early 1980's. While Democrats controlled the House, Republicans held the Senate. + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Representative Bill Archer of Texas, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, is responsible for all tax legislation. (Associated Press)(pg. 1); Negotiators announced a budget deal yesterday. The Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, discussed details. Behind him, from left, were Senator Connie Mack, Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senator Pete V. Domenici. (Scott Robinson for The New York Times)(p. 12) + +Chart: "The Deal" +Here are the highlights of yesterday's budget agreement. Figures are five-year totals. Spending cuts are subtracted from what would otherwise be spent to maintain existing programs through 2002. + +Taxes +$135 billion in cuts, offset by some $50 billion in revenues from renewing expired taxes and closing lopholes. Scholarships and tax credits for college tuition, a White House favorite, will claim $35 billion. The other $100 billion will be used largely for tax credits for families with children; to lower estate taxes and to reduce the 28 per cent tax rate on capital gains; Republicans aim for a 19.8 per cent rate. + +Domestic programs & benefits +$58 billion in unspecified program cuts; $34 billion in new spending to extend health and disability benefits to legal immigrants and to provide free health insurance for up to 5 million poor children. + +Medicare +About $115 billion in savings, mostly by cutting payments to medical providers and increasing many insurance premiums by $1 a month. + +Medicaid +About $16 billion in savings from limiting payments to hospitals that serve large numbers of medicaid patients. + +Military +About $85 billion in unspecified cuts. +(pg. 12) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +223 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 4, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The RENTOCRACY; +The Case for Rent Regulation + +BYLINE: By Sam Roberts; Sam Roberts is deputy editor of the Week in Review section of The New York Times. + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 43; Column 5; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 791 words + +Here's where Bill Eimicke comes out on rent regulation: "Fundamentally, I have a problem with it, and I can understand anyone who believes in the United States system of capitalism would have a problem." Despite these reservations, he's for keeping some version of rent regulation -- doing away with it would be even worse. "There's more to risk than there is go gain." + Eimicke has earned the right to be heard on the subject. He is an unabashed liberal and Columbia University professor (and Columbia tenant) who as State Housing Commissioner during the Cuomo years administered the tangle of regulations that govern rents on more than one in three New York City dwellings. But Eimicke isn't enlisting in the crusade to scrap the system altogether. +Nobody defends the rent regulation bureaucracy that was first codified during World War II. But given some important conditions, knowledgeable people like Eimicke think the system remains defensible. Here's how they answer the arguments made against the regulatory regime loosely called "rent control." +[Only 70,000 of the city's 1.1 million or so regulated apartments are subject to the strictest controls.] +Rent control governs apartments built before 1947 and occupied by the same tenant since 1971. About a million more apartments (those built before 1973 with more than six units) are rent stabilized -- governed by somewhat looser regulations but with rent increases still subject to official guidelines. Nearly 600,000 other rental apartments are unregulated. +[Rent regulation applies citywide, but the debate about price controls largely concerns Manhattan.] +Among apartments renting for less than $600 a month, three out of four are governed by rent regulation. But in poorer neighborhoods, the market is already determined by what tenants can afford: market rents are below nominal regulated rents. In Jamaica, Queens, for example, according to the real-estate industry's estimates, market prices are about 25 percent less than the regulated rate. On the Upper West Side, though, the median rent would rise 36 percent a month if they were rapidly decontrolled. Without special protection, where would tenants on fixed incomes, the poor, the elderly and struggling artists go? +[What about all those celebrities who pay peanuts to rent cavernous apartments?] +Generally, vacated apartments become deregulated if they can be rented for $2,000 a month or more. Even occupied apartments can legally be deregulated if the rent reaches $2,000 and the household income surpasses $250,000 for two consecutive years. Maybe those thresholds are too high. Still, a tenant who earns even $100,000 but has a spouse and children to support might be hard pressed to pay 25 percent of his income on rent. +[Arguably, rent regulation is a middle-class subsidy, like lower property taxes on one- and two-family homes. But regulation is also about guaranteeing at least minimal building maintenance and services.] +There's evidence that regulation -- and the threat of mandated rent reductions -- offers great leverage over aggressively greedy landlords, managing agents and even co-op boards that might otherwise find means to force tenants out. +[Rent regulation would lapse if more than 5 percent of apartments were available. But has regulation really deterred developers from building more?] +Somewhat. But to rectify the situation, swaths of manufacturing and commercial districts would have to be rezoned to allow for housing. Also, so-called affordable housing is hard to build without subsidies or tax abatements. Plenty of higher-priced apartments are being built anyway -- and landlords may charge the first tenants whatever the market will bear. And, what the Legislature taketh away it can bring back. +[Not all economists condemn rent regulation -- even if the theoretical goal is to redistribute income in a city where diversity is a virtue.] +Writing a few years ago in The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Richard Arnott of Boston College concluded that original rent controls aside, New York's more flexible system of rent stabilization deserves another look. "Many of the claimed effects of second-generation controls are imperceptible," he wrote. "It is possible to design a set of rent regulations that results in an improvement in efficiency over the unrestricted market equilibrium." +[Yes, but the truth is that the defenders of rent regulation aren't moved by economics, only politics.] +Cynics say that in repeatedly renewing rent regulation, the Legislature has been guided largely by one equation: Tenants outnumber landlords. To which Eimicke replies: "If you're arguing that it's because the people want it, excuse me. This is a democracy." + +LOAD-DATE: May 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +224 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 4, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +STAGE VIEW; +A Banquet Of Classics On the Table In London + +BYLINE: By Benedict Nightingale + +SECTION: Section 2; Page 4; Column 1; Arts and Leisure Desk + +LENGTH: 1696 words + +DATELINE: LONDON + +"OFF, OFF YOU LENDINGS!" bawls King Lear as madness overwhelms him, and, in every production of Shakespeare's play that I recall, he is stopped from stripping naked by a solicitous Fool. +Not Ian Holm; not in Richard Eyre's production at the National Theater. Lear, the "bare forked animal," stumbles helplessly about a bleak stage, his old man's pouchy, crinkled skin creating an impression of extreme vulnerability, as if some once-vital stroke-victim or once-eminent Alzheimer's sufferer were roaming the monkey house at the zoo. The Fool manages to shove a blanket over the ex-king's shoulders, but can't prevent him from clinging to the dirt-encrusted vagrant they have just encountered. Ian Holm's Lear and Paul Rhys's Edgar are united in the crackpot camaraderie of the lower depths. + It's one of many wrenching moments in what the critics are acclaiming as a major Shakespearean performance. It also helps answer a worrying question: With the Royal Shakespeare Company spending the next six months away from the Barbican Theater in the City of London, won't the metropolis be painfully short of its customary diet of classical work? +Last spring, the troupe brought "Romeo and Juliet," "The Taming of the Shrew" and "Julius Caesar" to London, along with Jonson's play "The Devil Is an Ass" and works by Calderon and Vanbrugh. In 1997, and every year for the foreseeable future, the Royal Shakespeare Company will be out of town from April to late October, presenting productions in Stratford-on-Avon that will move on to Newcastle, Plymouth and other areas in the English regions. Will its absence leave us feeling like diners who wanted roast lamb -- and ended up with lots of potatoes, brussels sprouts and mint sauce, but barely a slice of good, yeomanly mutton? +Well, I can't say the R.S.C. isn't missed. Some of us resent the fact that 35 years after Peter Hall successfully battled to give the company he had created a year-round presence in London, his successors should decide to go summering elsewhere. But there's meat on the table, and maybe more waiting in the kitchen. +Sir Peter himself has opened what gives every sign of being a strong season of classic and new work at the Old Vic. In early June the Globe, or as close a replica of Shakespeare's original theater as scholarship can conceive, will be opening with "Henry V" and "The Winter's Tale." Even the R.S.C. has left London a fine keepsake in the form of Peter Whelan's play about Shakespeare's elder daughter, "The Herbal Bed." It has just transferred from the Barbican to the Duchess Theater in Covent Garden. + +'King Lear' + But "King Lear" seems in itself almost enough to fill any holes left in a theatergoer's stomach, heart and head. There's a stirring personal story behind the production too. In the 1960's Ian Holm rose from spear-carrier rank to become one of the R.S.C.'s young lions, playing Richard III, Henry V, Malvolio and the original Lenny in Harold Pinter's "Homecoming." But during a preview of Eugene O'Neill's "Iceman Cometh" in 1976, stage fright laid him low, forcing him more or less to abandon theater for television and film until he played the dying father in Mr. Pinter's "Moonlight" in 1993. +Now Mr. Holm has definitively emerged from his time capsule to take the most demanding role of all. Rip van Winkle has awoken on the mountain top. Lazarus is playing Lear. The potentially great actor who departed 21 years ago is back with us -- and at age 65, he touches greatness. +That is clear from the moment a squat, fierce old king half-struts, half-trips to the table where his cowed family sits, awaiting his latest largesse, explosion, or both. Unwisely, they mistake the dry cackle he gives when he talks of "crawling towards death" as evidence that he is making a joke. But it doesn't matter too much. Lear's scowl at the sycophantic laughter turns into a surprisingly soft smile as he fondles Regan and plays with Cordelia's hair. +But then his mood changes again, this time irrevocably. The smile is replaced by a great wail of anger and despair as, his mouth heaving and twitching, he actually clambers onto the table to formalize his rejection of Anne-Marie Duff's overhonest Cordelia. By the scene's end, Mr. Holm already has a remarkably complete purchase on the character. He is regal and paternal, erratic and authoritative, vindictive and tender, dangerous to himself and others, and old, old, old. +Everything Mr. Holm attempts afterward, then, is built on sound emotional foundations; and he attempts as much as any Lear I've seen. Even Paul Scofield, who famously played the role for Peter Brook in 1964, emphasized the dour, harsh tyrant at the expense of the loving father. Mr. Holm is both. His reconciliation scene with Cordelia, which begins with him abjectly on all fours and ends with him doddering out hand-in-hand with her, leaves you feeling there's something invasive in watching humility and happiness as private as this. But he's unrelenting in his bitterness at his bad daughters, and, when he finally carries in the body of his good one, his "howl, howl, howl!" is less a lament than a great accusing snarl directed at an uncaring world. +What links these moments is an intense capacity for feeling. With Mr. Holm's Lear, the emotional stakes always seem sky-high and, as a result, Mr. Eyre's revival fills the National's little Cottesloe auditorium with pain and pity. That's not to say the performance lacks detail. Note the panic that crosses Mr. Holm's face when Goneril threatens to ban Lear's unruly knights, or the uncontrollable tics of his head when he wildly vows vengeance on her and Regan, or his weird mixture of glee, grief, scorn and sympathy for the underdog as he scuttles round a Dover meadow dressed in wildflowers and tattered patchwork. +Yet his upright stance and baleful glare make you believe him when, in the very depths of his madness, he says he is "every inch a king." And when he slumps, mumbling and keening, over the platform from which the corpses of all three daughters seem to reproach him for his follies and failures -- well, you don't doubt he is a man too. +Though Mr. Eyre's production is lucid enough to show us every aspect of the play, including the political, it would be fanciful to see its portrait of an anguished leader battling for survival as especially topical. John Major's whitening haircut doesn't quite make him King Lear. + +'Waste' + But "Waste," the first of 12 plays Peter Hall is presenting at the Old Vic this year, is all about sleaze, scandal, jockeying for power, and much else that has preoccupied Britain during its general election campaign this spring. Harley Granville Barker, the author, was an actor, director, playwright and scholar eulogized by Shaw as "the most distinguished and incomparably the most cultivated person" to adorn the British theater in the century's opening decades. You can certainly see evidence for that view in "Waste," which was written in 1907, banned by the censor because of its candor about sex and politics, updated in 1926, and publicly staged a decade later. Barker's tale of the maverick politician ditched by a scared Tory Party is subtle, sophisticated -- and as contemporary as anything in London. +Michael Pennington plays Trebell, who loses one sort of child when his mistress dies during a back-street abortion and a second when he is prevented from fathering a reformist bill in Parliament. What Barker catches, better than any dramatist since, is the knowing banter in the airless Tory salons, the clubbish maneuvering as the party leaders loll in their leather armchairs with their smiles and their knives. +He also writes very well of a peculiar mindset. There is no affection in Trebell's seduction of Felicity Kendal's Amy and no malice in his rejection of her. A moment after she has escalated from a minor distraction to a major threat to his career, he manages to put her out of his head and launch into an excited discussion of the practicalities of his Church Disestablishment Act. Mr. Pennington's yellowing face shows the strain inside; but he gets the chilling realism, the casual brutality, the sheer monomania of the one-track public man. +Two other plays have so far joined the repertory currently playing 10 performances a week at the Old Vic, including Sunday and Monday, and, thanks to ultra-simple sets and staging, capable of changing productions three, four, five times in the same week. One of them is the British premiere of David Rabe's 1984 "Hurlyburly," with Elizabeth McGovern bringing a little class to its satire of the Hollywood reptile-house; and a revival of Caryl Churchill's 1979 play "Cloud Nine," which asks sharp questions about the complexities of gender in comic, caricature form. Classic stuff is on the way too, including Alan Howard's Lear, which Peter Hall will himself direct in August. + +'The Herbal Bed' + Anybody wanting more Shakespeare than London currently offers should consider a side-trip to "The Herbal Bed," a play that, had he been in the now-fashionable business of washing his dirty linen in public, the Bard might almost have written himself. +Actually, the curtain falls just as a sickly Shakespeare is being carried into the house of his son-in-law, the eminent physician John Hall. Until then, Mr. Whelan's play has concentrated on his daughter Susanna Hall, who spent 1613 suing the local loudmouth who claimed that Susanna had caught syphilis from a Stratford haberdasher. We know little of the case, except that Susanna was found innocent at a church court, but Mr. Whelan's guess is that behind the smoke there was just a little fire. +At any rate, Teresa Banham's calm, warm Susanna uses her inherited intelligence and imagination to construct a defense that nobody quite believes but that everybody agrees to accept. The result is a tense, tantalizing play, partly about the fibs and fixes that make everyday existence supportable, partly about the ambiguities of human nature. You leave the theater agreeing that our lives are "of a mingled yarn, good and ill together." And who wrote that? Susanna's father, of course. + +LOAD-DATE: May 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Ian Holm, in foreground above, in the title role of "King Lear," with Michael Bryant at the National Theater; Michael Pennington and Felicity Kendal, left, in "Waste," part of Peter Hall's repertory series at the Old Vic. (Conrad Blakemont; Alastair Muir)(pg. 4); Stephen Boxer and Teresa Banham in "The Herbal Bed" in London. (Alastair Muir)(pg. 18) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +225 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 4, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: RICHMOND HILL; +Shuffleboard Without a Shuffle + +BYLINE: By CHARLIE LeDUFF + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 9; Column 3; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 367 words + +The game of shuffleboard takes a certain finesse, a particular stamina and an exact playing field. +According to the Florida Shuffleboard Association, the court must measure 6 feet wide by 52 feet long and the top surface must consist of one part cement to three parts sand, giving it a smooth veneer. + But when the Parks Department renovated Victory Field, which is part of Forest Park, seven years ago, an egregious error was made. In repaving courts, contractors used coarse cement. That left shuffleboard aficionados with a playing surface on which the disks do not slide. +But if all goes smoothly, the disks should be gliding again by summer. The Parks Department will soon begin taking bids for the repair job. +If the agency keeps its promise, shuffleboard players will have Irving Ohlberg to thank. For the past several years Mr. Ohlberg and his friends have lobbied for a proper court. But until recently, letters to the Parks Commissioner officials and the local Assemblyman went unanswered. "I told them when they were laying it in that they were doing it wrong," said Mr. Ohlberg, 79, a retired salesman. "What they gave us was the cheapest, not the best. The surface is so rough that even waxing the disks doesn't help." +For 25 years, Mr. Ohlberg played shuffleboard at the park on Woodhaven Boulevard, which is a short walk from his apartment. There he and dozens of other retirees gathered for daylong competitions and conversation. But now the players shun the park. Since then, he said, the empty courts have become magnets for wine-drinking loiterers and rowdy teen-agers. To play shuffleboard these days, he uses the courts at the senior citizens center in Rego Park. +Jacqueline Langsam, an administrator for Forest Park, said the Parks Department hopes to complete the work within the next month. The cost of the renovations, expected to be about $2,000, will be paid for by the Friends of Forest Park, a volunteer group. +Mr. Ohlberg's goal is to play one more game on his home court. "I hope that I can play here once more in my lifetime," he said. "I don't want a plaque on court to say: 'In memoriam to Mr. Ohlberg. He wept here.' " CHARLIE LeDUFF + +LOAD-DATE: May 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Coarse cement was used on the court, and the disks don't slide smoothly. (Steve Berman for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +226 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 4, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +LUTZ, WILLIAM CHARLES + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 45; Column 1; Classified + +LENGTH: 432 words + +LUTZ-William Charles. December 12, 1911-April 14, 1997. Bill Lutz was born in Brooklyn, NY. He met "the light of my life," Natalie Trentowski, at the end of a fencing foil in 1937. They were married in 1940 and had three daughters: Winifred, Barbara, and Beverly. In 1945/46, he served as an Army Corps of Engineers 1st Lieutenant in Manila, the Philippines, utilizing his real estate appraisal skills in the reconstruction efforts. He had joined the New York Life Insurance Company at age 14 as office boy, and rose to Senior Vice President in charge of Real Estate and Mortgage Loans during his 51 years there. He was highly regarded for his ethical integrity, social conscience, and irreverent humor. His business career included membership in the Institute of Real Estate Appraisers, Institute of Real Estate Management, Chicago Real Estate Board, Mortgage Advisory Committee of the New York State Employees' Retirement System, and Advisory Board of NYU's Real Estate Institute. Bill's energy was boundless and his ability to focus this energy over a breadth of interests was amazing. A skillful self-taught carpenter, he obtained a patent on an adjustable rocking horse, remodeled four homes, built exquisite bookcases for his bibliophile wife. He exercised his considerable flair for drama at church play-reading groups and took his family camping in the national parks every summer. He served on the boards of the many Unitarian Universalist Churches he joined as his family moved across the U.S. due to his promotions at NYLIC. He also found time to write eloquent letters to the government against the Vietnam War, supporting reproductive rights, decrying pollution, advocating gun control and the fight against racism. On retirement, he embarked on an active schedule of Elderhostels, and also served as an RTM member in Greenwich, CT. Late in his 70's, he became a volunteer income tax counselor for "the old folks," ESL tutor, and blood donor to age 80. He will be remembered for his creativity, commitment to family and friends, his love of laughter, his embrace of life. After his wife died, Thanksgiving Day, 1996, Bill dreamt he heard her say, "why don't you join me?" A confirmed secular humanist, he responded, "where are you?" All of us who loved this remarkable, generous man are sure that he will find her. Memorial service, May 31, 3:30 PM, Unitarian Society of Stamford, CT (203-348-0708). In lieu of flowers, the family requests contributions in his name to Environmental Defense Fund, 257 Park Ave., NY, NY or Unitarian Society, 20 Forest St., Stamford, CT 06901. + +LOAD-DATE: May 6, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +227 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 5, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Worldwide, People Live Longer, Often in Poor Health, U.N. Says + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 5; Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 489 words + +DATELINE: GENEVA, May 4 + +Medical advances mean more people around the world are living longer lives, but bad habits mean they are not necessarily healthier and happier ones, a new United Nations report said. +The World Health Organization, a United Nations agency, warned that what it calls "diseases of the rich" -- cancers, heart attacks, strokes and other illnesses in which diet and lack of exercise are often believed to play a part -- are on the rise in poorer countries. The increase, it said, could be attributed to longer lives and changing life styles. + "Longer life can be a penalty as well as a prize," the group said in its World Health Report 1997. "A large part of the price to be paid is in the currency of chronic disease." +Thanks to medical progress, life expectancy is averaging 64 years in third-world countries and reaching 80 years in some industrialized nations, the report said. But it added that millions of people throw away the chance of a healthy old age because of sedentary life styles, bad diet, smoking and alcohol abuse. +Trying to improve the health of the elderly is of crucial economic importance, it said. In the next 25 years, the population of people older than 65 is likely to grow by 82 percent, compared with 46 percent in the working-age population and only 3 percent in newborns. +Still struggling with ailments linked to poverty, third-world countries are now facing the added burden of increased rates of heart disease and strokes, which killed 15.3 million people last year and are already the leading cause of death in many industrialized nations. +Cancers killed 6.3 million people worldwide in 1996, and there were 10 million new cases reported, not all of them fatal. The number of cases is expected to at least double in most countries in the next 25 years, the report said. +The agency said the increase in cancer was caused in part by the elimination of other fatal diseases, which lengthened lives and increased the odds of getting cancer. But it also said much of the cause was diet and, above all, cigarettes. +Smoking is on the increase throughout the third world and accounts for one in seven cancer cases worldwide, it said. +Long the leading cancer killer among men in industrialized countries, lung cancer is now the top cause of cancer deaths among women in the United States, killing 375,000 of them in 1996. The number of cases among women in the European Union is expected to increase by a third in less than 10 years, it said. +The agency said the risks of getting cancer in third-world countries were smaller but growing. The reasons for the rise are unclear, it said, although the main factor appears to be longer life expectancies. +The report also said that from 1995 to 2025 the number of people with diabetes will grow from 135 million to 300 million, with a resulting increase in kidney failure and blindness, a rise it again attributed to more sedentary life styles. + +LOAD-DATE: May 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +228 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 6, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +A Newark Group Says It Lost Aid Because It Opposed a Ball Park + +BYLINE: By RONALD SMOTHERS + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 428 words + +DATELINE: NEWARK, May 5 + +Officials of a Newark community organization that has fought city and county plans to build a minor league baseball stadium at a park in their East Ward neighborhood charged today that their opposition has cost them county financing for two programs they have run for 19 years without complaints. +Joseph Della Fave, the executive director of the Ironbound Community Corporation, said the group was notified late Friday that it would no longer receive $155,000 annually to provide meals for the elderly nor would it get an additional $15,000 for a transportation program for the elderly. Instead, the county said, two other community groups in the North Ward and Central Ward would be given the contracts for the programs in his area. + He contended that the group was being "targeted for political retribution for opposition to the sportsplex proposal," a plan to build a 6,000-seat, $22 million stadium in Riverbank Park. The stadium plan was approved in a nonbinding referendum in March, with the winning margin coming from the North and Central Wards. The Essex County Board of Chosen Freeholders is scheduled to vote on the change at a meeting on Wednesday night. +Vincent A. DiMauro, the Essex County Administrator, disputed the group's contention, saying it was being replaced because of poor county audit reports from the last year. He said the two other groups could deliver the services at lower costs and therefore reach more people. As one example, he said, the new meal provider, because it had its own kitchen, could provide a meal for $3.29 as opposed to Ironbound's cost of $6.84 for catered meals. +He denied that the Ironbound group's position on the stadium had anything to do with the decision and added that he was unaware of what their position was. +Mr. DiMauro said that the county had solicited additional bids after the Ironbound group submitted the only proposal. He said that he had not approached them to amend their bid or improve their performance because the "deficiencies," documented by the 1996 audits, were clear. +Mr. Della Fave, however, said that he was unaware of any negative audits of the program and said that the Ironbound program had only received good evaluations from the county's Division on Aging, which oversees the funds. He added that the Division on Aging had on several occasions asked his organization to take on areas of the city that were not being served. +"Our service is the essence of community-based service," he said, adding that the group planned to contest the move at the freeholders' meeting. + +LOAD-DATE: May 6, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +229 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 7, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Medicare Rift Becomes Sequel Of Earlier Budget Agreement + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section B; Page 10; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 970 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 6 + +Just 96 hours after celebrating a bipartisan agreement to balance the Federal budget, Republicans and Democrats started squabbling today over details of the provisions affecting Medicare. +The disputes did not imperil the overall agreement, but illustrated the problems sure to bedevil the process of translating the accord into law. + The ambiguities and misunderstandings involve the politically volatile question of how to protect low-income people against increases in premiums under Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for the elderly and disabled. +On Friday, the White House said that the budget deal would increase the number of low-income Americans exempted from having to pay the Medicare premium, which is now $43.80 a month and was already scheduled to rise to $51.50 in 2002 under current law. But several Republicans said their negotiators had not agreed to such a change. +"It's up in the air, it's not settled, it's a big area of misunderstanding," one Republican said today. +Advocates for the elderly scrambled to make sense of the confusion. "It's weird to have the celebration over and the negotiations still going forward," said John C. Rother, chief lobbyist at the American Association of Retired Persons. +Ari Fleischer, a spokesman for Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee, said, "There have been various degrees of overreaching by Administration officials as they explain what's in the budget agreement." +Administration officials said the Republicans were backing away from their commitments. Democrats said the Republicans were showing insensitivity to widows with incomes of $10,000 a year. +The comments confirmed the observation of Howard J. Bedlin, vice president of the National Council on the Aging, a research and advocacy group, who said, "It's clear that there will still be lots of big fights over a number of issues involving the future of Medicare." +The disagreements appear to have two possible causes: confusion and jurisdictional rivalries. +Budget negotiators were harried as they rushed to announce an agreement last week, and they could not specify the detail of every provision affecting Medicare. In addition, Democrats suggest that Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee and the Ways and Means Committee, which write Medicare legislation, may now be balking at commitments made informally by the Republican negotiators, Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico and John R. Kasich of Ohio, the chairmen of the budget committees. +When the deal was announced last week, the White House said there would be "an excellent improvement" in Medicare to help low-income people. Under current law, those with incomes below 120 percent of the Federal poverty level are exempt from having to pay premiums. The White House said on Friday that the threshold would be increased to 150 percent of the poverty level. So an elderly couple could have annual income of $14,236, up from the current $11,389, without having to pay premiums. +In a summary of the budget agreement on Monday, the White House said, "Premium protection for low-income Medicare beneficiaries is expanded from its current 120 percent to 150 percent of poverty." It said that more than 8 million beneficiaries, including one-fourth of the elderly, would receive assistance with their Medicare premiums. +But Mr. Fleischer, the spokesman for Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee, said today: "We have not agreed to that. We'll work cooperatively and constructively with the Administration to resolve the disagreements about the budget agreement." +Administration officials said the Medicare provisions of the budget agreement were in flux today. +Another area of disagreement involved the amount of a new premium increase needed to pay for home health costs. On Friday, President Clinton said there would be a "modest one-dollar-a-month premium for home health services." White House officials said the monthly charge would rise $1 a year, adding no more than $5 to the premium by 2002, beyond the increases that would otherwise occur. +But a Republican said today that the President's account of the $1 increase was "not an accurate portrayal." And budget experts said it was unclear whether such premiums would generate as much revenue as the White House expected. +Medicare spending for home health care has skyrocketed in recent years, and it has become a major burden on the Medicare trust fund that pays hospital bills under Part A of the program. To prolong the life of this trust fund, budget negotiators agreed to shift most of the home health costs -- $86 billion over five years -- to a separate trust fund that pays doctors and laboratories under Part B. +After a seven-year transition, beneficiaries would be expected to pay 25 percent of the home health costs shifted to Part B of Medicare, just as they pay 25 percent of other Part B costs. +More generally, Republicans said they were determined to use the budget-balancing bill as a vehicle for major changes in the structure of Medicare, to provide elderly people with more choices, including new options for managed care. +Pamela G. Bailey, president of the Health Care Leadership Council, composed of top executives from the industry, said, "The worst outcome of the budget deal would be that Congress and the President bypass this opportunity to reform Medicare and instead just impose price controls on doctors, hospitals and health plans." +The Republicans are particularly eager to create tax incentives for the elderly to establish "medical savings accounts," which are anathema to the Administration and to many Democrats in Congress. Under this proposal, beneficiaries could use their share of Medicare money to set up tax-free savings accounts to pay routine medical bills. + + +LOAD-DATE: May 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +230 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 7, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +About New York; +Overdue Fame For Preserving That Rhythm + +BYLINE: By DAVID GONZALEZ + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 741 words + +IT don't mean a thing if nobody hears you swing. That's not in the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band's repertoire. It's in their hearts. Surely, Duke Ellington wouldn't mind their improvising on his classic. Some of these octogenarians played with him, after all, as well as with Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Fats Waller. +They have seen it all after decades in jumping joints. What they don't see -- at least in their hometown -- are the crowds and respect their music gets in Europe. It is easier for their gigs to be listed in French newspapers when they hit Paris than in New York, where they play on Friday nights at Ed Sullivan's, at Broadway and 54th Street. + "Why?" asked Al Casey, the guitarist in Waller's band. "Every individual in this band is not too young. We worked with the biggest bands in the country. We don't sound that bad. I can't understand why we don't get the recognition." +How about a permanent listing? Tomorrow night, the band will be inducted into the People's Hall of Fame at the Museum of the City of New York along with the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Bronx Old-Timers Stickball League, the Yeh Yu Chinese Opera Association and the newspaper The Forward. The idea of a Hall of Fame for regular folks is an oxymoron, but it is also an acknowledgement that ordinary people do extraordinary things to make sense of life in this crazy town. They toil by day to feed their families. At night, they pursue the muse and sustain their souls. +"We live in a society that is fame-crazy," said Steve Zeitlin, the executive director of City Lore, an urban folklore group that dreamed up the award four years ago. "The famous get more famous and the ordinary are getting obscure. They know they really don't matter except as consumers of other people's fame. We're trying to find people at the grass roots who contribute to our culture." +ART happens throughout the city, not just in the halls of high culture. It thrives in neighborhood haunts, on dimly lighted stages and out-of-the-way havens. Consider one past Hall of Famer, DJ Kool Herc. +At house parties in the South Bronx in the 1970's, Kool Herc used to stand behind two turntables, spinning records and blending beats. With a maestro's skill, he blasted body-rocking sonic booms from snippets of songs. +"People started coming up to the mike and doing riffs," Mr. Zeitlin said. "The early rappers were at those parties. A whole world of popular culture grew from that. Yet Herc was somebody who just loved to do what he did in his community." +It was no accident that DJ Kool Herc was from Jamaica, a nation where the proto-rappers known as toasters had taken to the stage years earlier. Nor was it chance that it took a few years in the hothouse of New York's streets for it to reach its potential. +"That's why New York will never become a strip mall," Mr. Zeitlin said. "People find communities. They take their immense frustration with living in the city and create expression." +Whether it leads to fame is another matter. Dr. Albert Vollmer, the manager of the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band, said the musicians were pleased but realistic about being inducted into the Hall of Fame. +"They're fairly inured to getting their hopes up," said Dr. Vollmer, who put together the group in 1976 as a gesture of gratitude to the musicians whose recordings he treasured as a young man in Europe. "They're not just being cool. It's like the guitarist keeps saying, 'How many times we have to prove ourselves?' " +THEY already have, as architects of the swing era. They continue each weekend at gigs in the city. On Friday night, they sat in the balcony at Sullivan's as the revelers leaned back against the bar or nuzzled on banquettes. +Laurel Watson, the group's singer, scribbled her song set onto a scrap of paper as she waited to go on stage. +"Put it here," she said to a waitress carrying a tray of drinks. "I need it." On stage, the drummer pounded out a big-band beat, the kind that conjured up images of loose-hipped Lindy Hoppers. +"You know, I was with 16 bands," she said, segueing into a high-speed list of jazz greats. "The leaders of those bands passed. I'm lucky. I'm here." +Soon, she joined the band. Her rhinestone-studded gown sparkled, as did her eyes. "You're nobody until somebody loves you," she sang. "You're nobody until somebody cares." +She wooed the crowd, vamping with saucy winks and waves. She looked, and sounded, like a somebody. + +LOAD-DATE: May 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +231 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 7, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Vitamin E May Enhance Immunity, Study Finds + +BYLINE: By JANE E. BRODY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 342 words + +A new study suggests that the near-universal decline in the health of the immune system that accompanies aging may be slowed by supplements of vitamin E. +According to findings being published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association, various immune functions were given a significant lift by daily supplements of vitamin E for 235 days, with the best results occurring with a supplement of 200 milligrams a day. (One milligram is roughly equal to one international unit of vitamin E.) + Vitamin E is a powerful antioxidant that has received much scientific and popular attention in recent years for its purported ability to delay the ravages of age. +The new study, directed by Dr. Simin Nikbin Meydani of Tufts University in Boston, involved 88 healthy men and women 65 and older who were randomly assigned to receive one of three levels of vitamin E -- 60, 200 or 800 milligrams a day -- or a look-alike placebo. The lowest dose tested represented twice the current daily recommended intake of vitamin E. The study measured such immune functions as the amount of antibody produced in response to a vaccine. +Since vitamin E is found primarily in vegetable oils and margarine, wheat germ, nuts and seeds, it is nearly impossible to consume amounts significantly higher than the recommended intake through a normal, wholesome diet, particularly a diet that is low in fat. Because of budgetary and health constraints, the elderly are especially likely to consume too little of this essential nutrient. Furthermore, some medications interfere with vitamin E and chronic diseases common among the elderly may impair their ability to absorb foods rich in vitamin E. +Vitamin E in amounts of 100 to 400 international units a day have previously been linked to a reduced risk of developing heart disease and some cancers. But higher doses of vitamin E can interfere with blood clotting and may increase the risk of bleeding disorders and hemorrhagic stroke. High doses also may weaken bones and reduce the body's stores of vitamin A. + +LOAD-DATE: May 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +232 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 8, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Giuliani Urges Speedup in Naturalization of Immigrants + +BYLINE: By CELIA W. DUGGER + +SECTION: Section B; Page 12; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 795 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 7 + +At a time when Republicans in Congress are regularly questioning the integrity of the naturalization process, New York's Mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, yet again struck a very different note from his Republican brethren today. +In a speech to the American Jewish Committee here, Mr. Giuliani hailed the value of citizenship, called for an infusion of staff at the Immigration and Naturalization Service to hasten the naturalization of more than a million waiting immigrants and advocated his new plan to create a $12 million city agency to assist citizenship seekers. + He pointedly made no mention of faulty fingerprinting procedures or botched criminal background checks of legal immigrants seeking citizenship. Instead, he attacked as "un-American" a Republican-sponsored welfare law, passed last year, that denies food stamps and other benefits to legal immigrants. They pay taxes just like citizens, he said, and are entitled to help if they are sick or down on their luck. +Mr. Giuliani, who opposed the cutoff of benefits to legal immigrants from the start, said the welfare law told immigrants, "We'll keep your money, but we won't give you benefits." +He also said that the political climate on Federal aid to legal immigrants had begun to change, in large part because state and local officials had realized that the Government was shifting a huge financial burden for the care of disabled and impoverished immigrants to them. Evidence of that shift has become clear only in the last week, he added. +"I feel that we have at last gotten the attention of Washington and people in other parts of the country," Mr. Giuliani said. +House and Senate budget negotiators have agreed to restore benefits to disabled immigrants in the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. Mr. Giuliani said New York City now believed that most of the elderly and disabled immigrants there who were expected to lose their Supplemental Security Income benefits in August and September would retain them under the new agreement. +"That's 40,000 or 50,000 of the most vulnerable people in the city of New York," he said. +And yesterday, the Senate overwhelmingly adopted a measure proposed by Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato, Republican of New York, to delay the cutoff of Supplemental Security Income benefits to both the elderly and disabled until Sept. 30, bridging the gap to the next fiscal year. The House has not yet taken up the proposal. Such a delay would also give immigrants a month or two more to complete the backlogged citizenship process, Mr. Giuliani said. Immigrants who become citizens will be able to keep their benefits. +National advocates for immigrants in the audience yesterday said the Mayor's emotional, wide-ranging speech on immigration, delivered without notes, only consolidated his position as one of the nation's leading champions of immigrants. As he has in the past, Mr. Giuliani even had kind words for illegal immigrants, who he said often work hard and pay taxes just like legal immigrants and citizens. +His decision to focus on the importance of helping immigrants become citizens, rather than on the flaws in the immigration service's management of the process, was typical of his leadership on the issue, the immigrant advocates said. +Several times yesterday, Mr. Giuliani said the immigration service needed more resources to handle the surge in citizenship applications, which has grown to an estimated 1.8 million this year from 1.2 million in 1996. +The Mayor this week proposed creating a new city office staffed by 100 caseworkers who would help immigrants through the citizenship process, especially focusing on those facing the loss of Federal benefits. But since it now takes up to a year to become a citizen because of a backlog of applicants, unless the immigration service hires more workers, the length of time it takes to become a citizen will be even longer. +The Mayor's efforts to help more people apply are likely to actually increase the backlog. +When an advocate in the audience asked what could be done to ease the bottleneck, Mr. Giuliani called for a concerted lobbying effort. +"You've got to put pressure on the President and the Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service to increase the number of people and resources to bring people through the citizenship process quickly," he said. +Immigration officials said yesterday that they were developing a proposal for more resources, which would have to be submitted to Congress for approval. "Obviously, when faced with a 50 percent increase in our workload in citizenship applications, we'll need to improve our infrastructure," said Eric Andrus, a spokesman for the immigration service. "We welcome the Mayor's own citizenship initiative." + +LOAD-DATE: May 8, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +233 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 8, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +A Game of Strategy They Take Seriously: Dominoes + +BYLINE: By TONY MARCANO + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 471 words + +There was a competition yesterday in a game of strategy, played with ceramic pieces, involving deep concentration and formidable opponents. But it is a safe bet that no one at this competition was named Garry, and the only things that brought deep blue to mind were the crepe-paper streamers hanging from the ceiling. +When all was said and done, the moves were not analyzed, there was no Internet chatter and there were no cash prizes. But the second annual Bronx Battle of the Dominoes was no less competitive than Garry Kasparov's world-class chess battle against his computer opponent, Deep Blue. + And it surely looked like a lot more fun. Just compare and contrast the scenes. In the staid Equitable Center in midtown Manhattan, there was Mr. Kasparov, a study in intensity, almost brooding over his bishops. In the Betances Senior Center on St. Ann's Avenue in Mott Haven, where pillars were wrapped in lavender construction paper, there were more than 40 senior citizens gossiping, arguing and laughing amid the sound of clicking dominoes and the aroma of arroz con gandules y pernil -- rice with pigeon peas, served with pork -- coming from the kitchen. +Still, there were similarities. Like the chess matches, the domino games were long -- the five-round elimination tournament was expected to last about two hours, but it went on for five. The players, it seemed, were better at their recreation and more serious about it than the organizers had expected. +And there was drama. As the field, culled from eight senior citizen centers in the Bronx, thinned out, there were loud arguments. Kibbitzers commented on players' strategies, leading one player, Jose Santana, to storm away. +Indeed, there was a lot of pressure on Morris from the start. With a 19-player contingent on hand, including the in-house champion, Sonia Quinonez, who was one step away from winning last year's first annual Bronx Battle, Ms. Ayala was expecting to bring the winning trophy back to the center. "I said at least two trophies," she said, recalling a pep talk with her players. +But Mr. Santana's forfeit left him as the highest-ranking Morris player, taking third place along with his partner, George Velez. In the end, it came down to the home team, Lydia Pagan and Rafael Compre of Betances, against Andy Rumbaut and Angel Rivera of the nearby Sebco Senior Center. +As about two dozen spectators gathered round, the teams squared off in the dining room. The tiles clicked. The competitors began slapping them down with aplomb, punctuating blocks and victories. But despite the home-field advantage, Mr. Rumbaut and Mr. Rivera won the final match by 243-112. +"We get plenty of time to practice," said Mr. Rivera, 70, a retiree who was a contracting company foreman. "All I have to do is collect my check and play dominoes." + +LOAD-DATE: May 8, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: May 9, 1997, Friday + + CORRECTION: +Because of an editing error, an article yesterday about a domino tournament in the Bronx omitted the given name of the coordinator of the Morris Senior Center, which sponsored a team. She is Nilda Ayala. + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The game pieces are black and white and the players concentrate at the Betances Senior Center, site of the Bronx Battle of the Dominoes. (John Sotomayor/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +234 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 9, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Landlord Group Begins Drive to Reassure Elderly Tenants + +BYLINE: By RANDY KENNEDY + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 789 words + +Joining the battle for public opinion on the issue of rent regulation, New York City's largest landlords' group began mailing brochures yesterday to about 200,000 elderly residents of rent-regulated apartments, seeking to reassure them that they would not be affected if the laws were changed. +The glossy, two-page color brochures are intended to sway a group that has become increasingly vocal in the grass-roots campaign to preserve rent regulations. + And although landlords play down the suggestion, the mailing is also a tacit acknowledgment that the elderly go to the polls in high numbers, making their voice a persuasive one for Republican lawmakers in Albany who have vowed to scale back rent protections. +Joseph Strasburg, the president of the Rent Stabilization Association, which represents about 25,000 residential property owners, said the landlords' group decided to aim its first concerted public relations efforts at tenants age 62 and older mainly because it felt the message they were receiving from tenant advocacy groups was distorted. +"They will be protected under any resolution of this dispute and that has not been truly conveyed to them for a variety of reasons," Mr. Strasburg said. "Tenant advocates have told them not to trust anything their elected officials tell them. And to create unnecessary fear, using them as pawns, is very unfortunate." +While Republicans led by Joseph L. Bruno, the State Senate majority leader, have threatened to let rent protection laws expire on June 15 if there is no agreement on a plan to phase them out, they have said from the beginning that they intend to protect elderly, disabled and poor tenants. There has been no agreement, however, on how those groups will be defined. +The brochures, which were mailed to tenants in New York City and Westchester and Nassau Counties, where most rent-regulated older tenants live, include a full-page picture of a smiling elderly woman with a shawl draped over her shoulders, sitting in what appears to be her living room. +The picture is emblazoned with the announcement, "No matter what happens with rent laws, seniors are safe." +Inside are seven more pictures of older people smiling, talking and embracing, interspersed with quotations from Gov. George E. Pataki and Mr. Bruno, in which they insist that protections must remain for elderly tenants. +The brochure warns the elderly not to be "fooled by the doom and gloomers." +"Even if rent regulations change, your rent will stay the same," the brochure says, adding that "some people with a political agenda are trying to panic" the elderly, "but seniors shouldn't worry." +Tenant advocacy groups rushed to condemn the mailing yesterday. They said that despite promises from Mr. Pataki and Mr. Bruno, elderly tenants had every reason to worry that their rent protections would eventually be eroded. +Martin Brennan, the campaign coordinator for the New York State Tenants and Neighbors Coalition, also dismissed as "a pathetic fabrication" suggestions that tenant leaders had engaged in fear-mongering to use the elderly as a cudgel. +"This message is a response to the extraordinary grass-roots organization that has formed over protecting rent regulations over the past few months," Mr. Brennan said. "And what they are doing is attempting to split out and divide the tenant mobilization against itself in order to severely weaken the laws." +The mailing, which will begin to reach most households early next week, comes at the end of a television and radio campaign by the state Democratic Party that urges voters to hold Governor Pataki and Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato personally responsible if the State Legislature allows rent laws to expire. +The Rent Stabilization Association and other opponents of rent regulation contend that they have been fighting an uphill battle to have their message heard amid the other side's ads and tenant rallies, which they say receive an inordinate amount of attention from the news media. +Mr. Strasburg, who would not disclose the cost of the mass-mail campaign, said that while the group believed that most advertisements and mailings would not be effective, they felt a need to address the elderly. +"They've been fed this stereotype of a landlord from an old movie, where this guy with a top hat and mustache is coming to kick people out of their apartments," Mr. Strasburg said. "Our side always gets lost in the stories." +He also acknowledged that the strategy of the message was to reach a much wider audience than 200,000. The message, he said, was intended to "trickle down" to the adult children of the elderly recipients, who may live in unregulated apartments but are concerned about their parents' fate. + +LOAD-DATE: May 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Brochures from New York's largest landlords' group are going to roughly 200,000 tenants. + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +235 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 9, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +GIULIANI'S BUDGET PLAN: SERVICES; +More Money for Schools and Child Welfare and Less for Police + +BYLINE: By JACQUES STEINBERG + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1272 words + +After shearing more than $1 billion from the Board of Education's projected spending in the first two years of his administration, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani yesterday proposed increasing the board's budget next year. He wants to add $172 million for new programs, and nearly $1 billion over several years for new classrooms and computers. +The Mayor did not explain his reasoning yesterday, but he has done so many times in the last eight months, in announcing many of the plans that he bundled together yesterday in his proposed budget for the coming fiscal year, which begins on July 1. The reason is his confidence in Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew. + Whatever Dr. Crew's influence, critics have been quick to note that this is a mayoral election year, and they contend that the Mayor has been responding to polls showing that voters give him low marks for his handling of education issues. +Since schools opened in September, the Mayor has repeatedly referred to his intention to add money to the board's budget. The Mayor said yesterday that he wanted $125 million to go to a reading program for elementary school students and $25 million to restore some arts programs, and he said he would provide $22.7 million for technical support and staff development as more classrooms are equipped with computers. +Mr. Giuliani estimated that the budget would ultimately grow by 0.7 percent over the current fiscal year, to $8.3 billion next year. School enrollment, however, is expected to grow by 1.4 percent, or 15,000 students, to 1.09 million. +The proposed increases in capital spending are far more drastic. The Mayor has proposed spending $500 million to create thousands of new classrooms. The Mayor and the City Council have also agreed to spend $275 million to refurbish aging school buildings and $150 million on computers and wiring. +The Mayor's proposed spending drew praise from the Chancellor, but his operating budget drew criticism from the city teachers' union and parents' groups. Sandra Feldman, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, called the new programs "mostly one-shots that sound suspiciously like election-year promises." +And John Fager, the executive director of the Parents' Coalition, a citywide group, accused the Mayor of "micromanaging" the school system, and argued that school administrators, teachers and parents should decide how the money is spent. + +Social Services +Advocates for the poor found nuggets of hope yesterday in Mayor Giuliani's proposed social services budget. While they said there was not nearly enough money for day care, there were 93 new positions for the child welfare agency, $75.9 million to support elderly and disabled immigrants expected to lose their Federal cash benefits and $900,000 to help finance a telephone line for public assistance recipients bewildered by changes in the Federal welfare law. +But to finance these initiatives, among others, Mr. Giuliani is relying, in part, on several assumptions. +He expects, for instance, that a state proposal will save the city $77 million by decreasing the amount of money the city must contribute toward public assistance for single parents with children. But the proposal has yet to be voted on by the State Legislature. +Mr. Giuliani also fails to include the potential costs of developing and running a new voucher program proposed by Mr. Pataki. The plan would replace the state's cash-assistance program for single adults and would offer the poor vouchers for food, shelter and clothing. +And in totaling the dollar figure needed for the city's legal immigrants, the Mayor is also hoping that the Federal Government will pay for many of them. +Under Mr. Giuliani's plan, the Administration for Children's Services, the child welfare agency created last year, would get $492.1 million in city money, $145.6 million more than was first forecast. Most of the increase is from the budget of the city's day-care agency, which was integrated into the children's agency. +But city financing for the Human Resources Administration would decline. Mr. Giuliani said he planned to spend $3.059 billion in 1998, a $587 million decrease from 1996. About 21 percent of that was the day-care budget that moved to the new children's services agency. +Already, day care seems to lack the necessary money. Mr. Giuliani plans to spend $4.4 million for 8,700 more day care slots in 1998 and $13.3 million in 1999 for 13,000 more children. +The city now helps pay for day care for about 75,000 children. +But the city estimates that about 15,000 single parents will enter the workfare and work-related programs in 1998, and many will need child care. + +Police +The Police Department, long a sacred cow, will have less in 1998. The proposed budget has $89 million less than the last fiscal year, bringing the operating budget to $2.399 billion. When anticipated Federal money and private grants are included, officials said, the department faces a $29 million cut from last year. +Police Commissioner Howard Safir said there would be savings from such efficiencies as expanding new technologies, speeding arrests and cutting overtime. He also plans cheaper paint jobs and decals for police cars. The police also plan to stop patrolling the five city-owned tow pounds, and to award a contract to a private security company. +"We are not skimping in any way with officers on the street or operational equipment," Mr. Safir said. +In some areas, spending will go up: $1.3 million for the Intelligence Division, which will maintain an up-to-date crime data base and share information with state and Federal law enforcement agencies. And the police will open a new crime laboratory in January 1998. + +Sanitation +The city's on-again, off-again recycling program appears to be on again, but not at levels desired by some private environmental groups. +The proposal noted that "the frequency of residential waste collection services has not been reduced," but critics of the administration said that this simply leaves the collection schedule almost everywhere in the city at every other week -- leaving residents to deal with 14-day accumulations of newspapers and other recyclable material. +In the 1998 fiscal year, programs for collecting metal and mixed paper like junk mail are scheduled to be expanded to the last boroughs without them: Brooklyn and Queens. +The budget calls for the first significant expenses related to closing the Fresh Kills Landfill in 2001. The city will begin sending some residential garbage, from the Bronx, to disposal sites outside city limits. + +Cultural Affairs +For the second year in a row, the 33 city-owned cultural institutions financed by the Department of Cultural Affairs are facing a large cut. +Mayor Giuliani's budget for the 1997-98 fiscal year calls for aid to the department to be cut by $15 million, to $79.5 million. Of that, $63.8 million would be allocated to the 33 institutions, a 15 percent decrease from last year. Those that focus on children's programs would face smaller cuts than most others. The news came as a surprise and a disappointment to the Cultural Institutions Group, an informal organization of the 33 groups. +"There have been these two years of real cuts, but because of inflation we never recovered from the cuts in 1990," said Rochelle Slovin, the director of the American Museum of the Moving Image. The group plans to lobby for a restoration to the 1990 level, she said. "This Mayor really is a mayor who completely understands cultural life and cultural institutions," she said, "So it's very disappointing." + +LOAD-DATE: May 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Chart: "BY THE NUMBERS: Examining the Increase" shows the current and proposed budget for the Board of Education. (Source: Office of Management and Budget) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +236 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 10, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Mixed Messages on Benefits; +Immigrants Don't Know What to Believe About S.S.I. + +BYLINE: By JOE SEXTON + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 21; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk; Second Front + +LENGTH: 1862 words + +Two years ago, the Federal Government sponsored advertisements broadcast on foreign-language radio stations telling immigrants to apply for Supplemental Security Income -- the 23-year-old welfare program for the elderly and disabled. Last year, President Clinton signed a welfare reform law that denies the benefits to immigrants who are not citizens. Government letters, 85,000 of them to New Yorkers, warned immigrants that the checks that sustain them, which average $410 a month, would end this August. +One week ago yesterday, political leaders in Washington annouced an agreement to continue benefits to disabled noncitizens. While they disagree about whether new immigrants would be eligible, as many as four out of five of those who faced cuts would have benefits restored. But as some politicians cautioned that last week's agreement may be unraveling, social workers in New York were warning immigrants that nothing is certain. + In Southside, a Brooklyn neighborhood of immigrants from Ecuador and Russia, Bulgaria and Cuba, uncertainty is the one thing the elderly and disabled know they can count on. +Maria Reyes Gonzalez, 76, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, counts her S.S.I. checks as her sole income. The front room of her Southside apartment had been an improvised war room over recent months. Grandchildren calculated how much they could contribute if she lost benefits, which she receives because she is elderly. Returning to the Dominican Republic was broached. Hard information was never in great supply. +The agreement in Washington last week, if it holds, will mean that Ms. Gonzalez, whose failing eyesight is among a number of her physical impairments, will have to prove she is disabled to maintain her monthly benefits of $470 a month. +"God is big," Ms. Gonzalez said, with a trembling smile. "God knows what he is doing." +The deal worked out by the White House and Republican leaders has allowed lawmakers to ease worries about disabled immigrants being left penniless and homeless. Many Republicans regard the agreement as a reasonable price for preserving a larger end: eliminating S.S.I. as an open-ended welfare program for noncitizens. +When modest dancing broke out in the building at 204 Ross Street May 2 after the budget agreement was announced, Danilda Suncar, 83, did not join in. Instead, the immigrant from the Dominican Republic sat in her kitchen and tried to figure out what to trust. She had her S.S.I. check, gained because of her age, but she also had a pacemaker and heart problems. Would that be enough to qualify for benefits for the disabled? She had spent the last several months studying for the citizenship exam -- naturalization would preserve her benefits -- but also talking of arriving "at the hour of death." +"They say this; they say that," Ms. Suncar said of the lawmakers. "I know nothing." +The welfare legislation signed by President Clinton last August eliminated S.S.I. benefits for roughly 500,000 legal immigrants who are not citizens -- 85,000 of whom lived in New York City. The reasons included concerns about abuse, a desire to set limits on what noncitizens could demand from the Government and enormous budgetary savings. The cuts accounted for $13.5 billion of the act's $55 billion in long-term savings. +The budget agreement, however, would rework the entire landscape again, restoring $10 billion of the $13.5 billion over the next five years. That means some immigrants would not receive benefits. +Under the agreement, legal immigrants who were receiving S.S.I. as of Aug. 22, 1996 because of a disability -- estimated to be 40 percent of the 500,000 -- would keep their checks and Medicaid coverage. The disabled among the other 60 percent, who receive S.S.I. because of their age, would be able to reapply for disability benefits. Congressional budget officials say they believe two-thirds of those applicants would qualify. +In all, then, as many as 400,000 of the 500,000 could be spared. +Senior lawmakers and Congressional staffers predicted there would be disputes as the proposed S.S.I. restorations move toward actual legislation. The agreement says that immigrants who were here legally on Aug. 22, 1996, who become disabled in the future would also be eligible. Some Republicans have said they would seek to strike that provision. There is a dispute over future immigrants. The White House's view is that S.S.I. will continue to be offered to all immigrants who come here legally and wind up disabled. Republicans say they have not promised aid to new immigrants. +"There is a lot about the deal that gives me indigestion," said Representative E. Clay Shaw, a Republican from Florida who was a chief sponsor of the welfare reform legislation. "But there are limits. S.S.I. will be ended as pension plan for third world countries. We are not giving on that." +John Clark, a spokesman for the city's Social Security Administration office, predicted that the agreement would require a vast review of thousands of cases. "It is not going to be a picnic," he said. +There are plenty of calculations to be done in a neighborhood like Southside, where roughly 900 elderly or impaired adults were set to lose their monthly checks. Not everyone would be protected, and no one knows how easy -- or difficult -- it would be for those who need to requalify, this time citing disability instead of age. Moreover, the budget deal would not restore food stamps or Medicaid to legal immigrants without disabilities. +The budget agreement would also retain the toughened eligibility requirements for disabled children. Roughly 15,000 children in the city who receive S.S.I. have been notified that they would likely lose their subsidies because their behavioral problems or learning difficulties like attention deficit disorder are no longer considered sufficiently severe. Many of those children live in Southside. +Many immigrants who feared they would lose benefits already face practical problems. Nursing homes, fearing payment hangups, have denied beds to S.S.I. recipients lacking citizenship. One Brooklyn landlord, Isaac Heitz, said he had refused apartments to 20 legal immigrants on S.S.I., saying that to grant the apartments "doesn't make business sense." +The word of mouth that has been most efficient at spreading fear across Southside has been slow to spread much relief. In classrooms and apartment bedrooms in Southside, immigrants gathered and studied citizenship exam sheets. Citizenship is the one absolute way to continue receiving benefits, and nothing about the budget agreement is expected to slow the flood of applications at the Immigration and Naturalization Service. At Transfiguration Roman Catholic Church, a list was kept of households willing to take in immigrants who were losing benefits, a list that will be kept no matter what the budget agreement says. +Justina Garcia could well need to take advantage of the list. Ms. Garcia, 72, came to Southside as a Mariel boatlift refugee from Cuba in 1980, and has received S.S.I. for years. While suffering from serious health problems, she obtained her S.S.I. because of her age. She lives in a housing project apartment with her nephew. The boy, Roberto Caraballo, 7, has been told he will lose his S.S.I. subsidy because his disability, a slight walking problem and hyperactivity, do not meet the toughened criteria. +Ms. Garcia has taken a citizenship exam. She believes she did well. She could keep her $400 a month. It could well not be enough. Her rent is $270 a month. She and her nephew have no other income. +"We hope," she said. "What else is there to do?" +Others plainly do not know what took place last week. Ida Steinmetz, a caseworker at the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, the main social services office for Southside's Hasidim, did not as of two days ago know any of the details of the agreement. Thus a client, Micha Katz, 76, a Russian immigrant, remained in his apartment on South 10th Street, angry and alone. +Indeed, interviews with immigrant S.S.I. recipients, both before the budget agreement and after, underscore how disconnected they are from the the political debate, how far they are from Washington. +When the initial reform legislation was signed into law last year, the memories of the immigrants were fresh with the recollection of Government workers only months before signing up as many immigrants as they could for S.S.I. Those legitimately receiving the benefits, many of whom had paid taxes for years, never hid their sense of appreciation for what they freely called generosity. Thus, they felt bewildered but powerless when they began receiving termination notices. They do not vote, often do not speak English, certainly do not have easy informational access to Washington. +"It has all happened so fast," said Gloria Guerrero, 63. She has received S.S.I. -- $560 a month -- for five years because of a herniated disc. +"I had worked. I had decided I would work again somehow if I had to," Ms. Guerrero said. "I decided to accept what they had said would happen. Now, they change their minds. They are the ones in a limbo state. They have passed so many laws they don't know how to implement them." +The Federal Government created S.S.I. in 1974, replacing more than 1,000 state programs assisting elderly, blind or disabled people with impoverished incomes. Over the years, however, the program increasingly became a retirement and disability fund for many new immigrants. +A 1995 investigation by the General Accounting Office reported that some immigrants were being coached to feign mental illness to obtain benefits, with the coach then demanding kickbacks. Social Security Administration officials acknowledge that some people came from other countries, signed up for benefits and left, their money forwarded. +And because household income is not considered in determining eligibility, the question of legitimate need has always been thorny. A 1995 analysis of census data by The New York Times showed that 20 percent of the nation's foreign-born S.S.I. recipients lived in households with incomes above $50,000. +The welfare reform law eliminating benefits came on the heels of what had been a Government effort to increase S.S.I. participation, including the foreign-language radio advertisements. Public school officials in New York City were trying last year to move children from public assistance to S.S.I. as a way of limiting costs to the city. +All of those efforts washed over Southside, making the legislation of last August perplexing as well as unnerving. Now, there is an alternative, if mostly comforting, twist to comprehend. +"I was always grateful for what this country gave me," Ms. Suncar, a widow, said. "I owe my life to this country. That's why it felt like entrapment when they said they were taking it all back. Now, I suppose they realized how many of us there were. I think they panicked." + +Welfare Neighborhood +This is the fifth in a series of articles describing how an array of changes in welfare policy are coming together in one Brooklyn neighborhood, Southside, in Williamsburg. + +LOAD-DATE: May 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +SERIES: WELFARE NEIGHBORHOOD: Change Comes to Southside. + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Maria Reyes Gonzalez, 76, could lose her Supplemental Security Income check, her only source of money. (Angel Franco/The New York Times)(pg. 21); Both Justina Garcia, 73, and her nephew, Roberto Caraballo, 7, stood to lose their Supplemental Security Income benefits under the new rules. (Angel Franco/The New York Times)(pg. 22) + +Graphs: "A CLOSER LOOK: Benefits at Risk for Legal Immigrants" +Although under the new budget agreement in Washington some benefits cut by the Welfare Reform Act would be restored, thousands of children and legal immigrants in New York City would still lose Supplemental Security Income (S.S.I.) benefits. Graphs show percentage of foreign-born elderly from each country receiving S.S.I., for selected countries and number of immigrants who were expected to lose S.S.I. benefits, for the five boroughs. About a third would still lose benefits under the agreement. (Sources: Analysis of 1990 Census data by Andrew Beveridge, professor of sociology at Queens College; Social Security Administration)(pg. 22) + +TYPE: Series + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +237 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 11, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +PLAYING IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: PARK SLOPE; +If Mom Wants to Dance Like an Earth Goddess + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 14; Column 3; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 202 words + +FOR a change of pace from the usual Mother's Day flowers and visit, the Spoke the Hub Recreation Center is offering a daylong series of events today that might blow Mama's mind just a little. +The day begins at 11 A.M. with a choice of participatory sessions: "Macho Girls' Workout" with Elise Long; "Isadora Duncan Dancing" with Lynn Armentrout (pictured at left) and "Afro-Caribbean Earth Goddess Dancing" with Judith Samuel. + The sessions, which the center says are for "girl children of all ages," are free. +An entertainment schedule begins at 2 P.M. with music, theater, poetry and dance by various Brooklyn mothers, and storytelling by octogenarians from Elders Share the Arts. +At 4, there is free storytelling for the whole family, and at 5 a reception for Mary Elmer De-Witt, a photographer whose exhibition on children and childhood opens today at the center. +"Brooklyn Mothers of Invention Day," Spoke the Hub Recreation Center, 748 Union Street, near Sixth Avenue, Park Slope. All events free except the 2 P.M. entertainment segments, for which admission is $10, or $5 for children 17 or under and people 65 or over. A complete schedule of events is available by calling (718) 857-5158. + +LOAD-DATE: May 11, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +238 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 11, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +IN BRIEF; +New Jersey Doctors Offer Least Access to Medicare + +BYLINE: STATES NEWS SERVICE + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 6; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 165 words + +New Jersey physicians and other health-care providers have the lowest Medicare participation rate in the nation, the United States Department of Health and Human Services reported last week. +The study found that, as of January, 62.8 percent of New Jersey's health-care providers were enrolled in Medicare, the Federal program for the elderly and the disabled -- well below the national average of 80 percent. But an official with the Medical Society of New Jersey said that many doctors are willing to accept Medicare patients on a case-by-case basis. + The same month as the study was taken, New Jersey doctors accepted more than 94 percent of the Medicare-eligible patients seeking treatment, said Eileen Moynihan, the medical society treasurer. +New Jersey is dominated by doctors in solo or small-group practices, Dr. Moynihan said, adding that such small operations often can't afford to hire staffto track Medicare billings, so they don't enroll. STATES NEWS SERVICE + +LOAD-DATE: May 11, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +239 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 11, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Harsh Medicine + +BYLINE: By Robert Pear; Robert Pear is a Washington correspondent for The New York Times. + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 31; Column 2; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 699 words + + +MORTAL PERIL + Our Inalienable Right + to Health Care? + By Richard A. Epstein. + 503 pp. Reading, Mass.: + Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. $27.50. + Richard A. Epstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, is one of the stars in the firmament of conservative intellectuals. He knows more about economics than most lawyers, doctors and health policy analysts. And health policy desperately needs the insights to be gleaned through economists' and lawyers' intellectual discipline. Mr. Epstein would seem ideally suited to the task of analyzing the nation's health care system -- and in some ways he is. But "Mortal Peril" is a curiously uneven book, combining flashes of brilliant insight with commentary that may strike many readers as morally obtuse. +He is best as a critic. His critique of President Clinton's ill-fated plan for universal health insurance, which embodied, he writes, an "egalitarian impulse," is skillful: "Congress was told all or nothing, and nothing was the response." But like many conservatives, Mr. Epstein has a hard time constructing a coherent set of health care proposals to replace the conventional wisdom in this field. +His thesis, in short, centers on "the mortal peril of beneficent regulation," the "unintended consequences" of high-minded schemes to guarantee access to health care. "Taken together," he says, "the full range of reforms poses a mortal peril to the very ends they are supposed to advance: the health and prosperity of society." The effort to transform charitable impulses and "moral intuition" into legal rights, like a right to health care, is, for Mr. Epstein, futile. He is a purist, and he does not want the Government to dabble in health care because, he says, "noble intentions quickly lead to an endless tangle of hidden subsidies, perverse incentives and administrative nightmares." +Thus, Mr. Epstein is skeptical of Medicare for the same reason he scorned Mr. Clinton's health plan. Medicare, the health program for the elderly and disabled, establishes, he says, "a single-payer monopoly for large parts of the health care market -- a perfect microcosm of a command and control economy." He recalls that his father, a radiologist, railed against Medicare with the admonition that "he who pays the piper calls the tune." +Mr. Epstein's aversion to Government intervention is so strong that he disapproves of a 1986 Federal law requiring hospitals to examine and stabilize patients with "emergency medical conditions." The law was prompted by reports of patients who died or were sent to public hospitals after being denied care at private hospitals. Mr. Epstein describes the law as "an institutional mistake," whose "hidden costs" have forced some trauma centers to shut down because they are not assured of payment for the care they must provide. "As far as government is concerned, any hospital should be able to 'just say no' to any patient," he writes. He would let hospitals deny care to people who persist in abusing drugs or alcohol. +Mr. Epstein's analysis is more subtle and useful when he explores the frontiers of medicine, ethics and the law, grappling with issues like organ transplants and physician-assisted suicide. But it seems odd that after arguing that people have no right to health care, he insists that the terminally ill should be able to hasten death with a doctor's help. "Why balk at active euthanasia if it is honestly invoked to avoid the pain and suffering that would otherwise follow?" he asks. Nor is "public support for children in a permanent vegetative state" high on his list of priorities. "We should suck in our gut and say no when asked to provide life support devices for those without hope of recovery," he writes. +The system of individual rights and duties enshrined in English common law "does a far better job of providing health care than the endless set of legislative and judicial innovations of our day," Mr. Epstein says. But it is a bit late in the day to sweep away those innovations and erect a new health care system on the old foundations. A more pressing task is to repair the internal defects and contradictions that Mr. Epstein cogently catalogues. + +LOAD-DATE: May 11, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +240 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 11, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +When Youngsters Become Their Elders' Teachers + +BYLINE: By JACK CAVANAUGH + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 1; Column 4; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1154 words + +JANET KLINGNER, seated in front of a computer at the Brunswick School in Greenwich, listened in rapt attention as Paul Wilford clarified a point about the Windows aspect of her computer. At about the same time at nearby Greenwich Academy, Karrie Martineau and Katherine McGirr showed Frank and Faye Simon how to play solitaire on the computers in front of them. +What made these scenes on a recent Friday afternoon particularly noteworthy is that Paul Wilford, Karrie Martineau and Katherine McGirr, all middle school pupils, are about six decades younger than those they were coaching. + In all, 31 men and women in their 60's, 70's and 80's are enrolled in the eight-week course that began in April as a joint venture of the Greenwich Commission on Aging, the Greenwich Retired Men's Association and the Brunswick School and Greenwich Academy. A faculty member from each school teaches the classes, which run for three hours each Friday afternoon, assisted by student coaches, veritably weaned on computers, and a half-dozen older people, including one who took the inaugural course last fall. +"It's a very rewarding experience for the kids," said Sydney Uhry, an instructor at the Brunswick School who taught the first class last fall. "They're so used to being told what to do and how to do it -- by parents, teachers and coaches, among others -- and here they are knowing something that the adults don't know." +That twist has not been lost on the young coaches. "It felt real weird at first," said Paul Wilford, a 13-year-old seventh-grade student who was also a coach during the first class. "Here I am trying to help teach them something and they know so much more than me in so many different fields." +On the flip side, as Ron Klingner said, the youngsters "know so much about computers, but they don't lord it over you. They take you through a problem step by step, if necessary, and they're very patient." +For the most part, the older people have proven to be quick, and very determined, students, say Ms. Uhry and Holly Silvestri, the instructor at the Greenwich Academy class. +Among the 17 students enrolled in the course at the otherwise all-male Brunswick School was Mrs. Klingner, who was following in the footsteps of her husband, who took the course last fall. "Ron would come home so happy with what he was learning," she said, "and it motivated me to take the course." +Like the majority of the students, the Klingners were, in a sense, nudged along by family. "Everybody seems to be into computers, and we felt left out," Mrs. Klingner said. "Our two sons, our daughter and five of our six grandchildren all use them, and, when they talked about computers, we had no idea what they were saying." (The only grandchild who does not use a computer is 2 years old, "and he's trying to start up," Mr. Klingner said.) +During the first class last November, Ms. Uhry, who is a computer teacher at Brunswick, asked each older student why he or she was taking the course. "Most of them said they wanted to be able to keep in touch with their children and grandchildren through E-mail," she said. "But they also said they wanted to experience what others were talking about and to learn about the Internet and electronic communication in general." +Mrs. Klingner said she hoped that her classroom training would enable her to communicate with her sisters in Colorado, California and Ohio via E-mail, which is cheaper than by conventional long distance telephone calls. +Mr. Klingner has put his course to good use. "I write a weekly newsletter for the Retired Men's Association, and had been doing it longhand and then giving it to my daughter to do on her computer," he said. "But now I write it on the computer myself. Also, I now can do my voluntary public relations work for the Greenwich Call-A-Ride on the computer, instead of doing it longhand." +One of Mr. Klingner's fellow pupils last fall was Howard Conley, who is also a member of the Greenwich Retired Men's Association. Mr. Conley, a quick learner, is now one of the adult coaches at Brunswick. "I can now communicate with my three sons -- who are Washington, Newton, Mass., and London -- by E-mail," he said, "and for the last three and a half months I've been on the Internet." +At the all-female Greenwich Academy, the volunteer turnout has been so great that there are almost as many coaches are there are students. At the second class, for example, eight middle school students and three older coaches supplemented Ms. Silvestri's instruction. "The volunteers outnumber the students overall, since we have 14 enrolled in the class and between 15 and 20 coaches from the Academy," Ms. Silvestri said. +As in the class at the Brunswick School, most of the older people said children or grandchildren spurred them on, plus a feeling that time and technology were passing them by. Robert Eichler, a retired engineer, said, "My daughter is fluent in computers, but then she moved to Pennsylvania. Now I'm catching up with the world." +Ross H. Ogden, a member of the Greenwich Commission on Aging and Brunswick alumnus, said "Here you have the wisest family members who knew nothing at all about computers. Their kids and grandchildren were all tuned in to computers but they were being left out. Now here they are learning the complexities of computers and even how to communicate through E-mail with children and grandchildren who are scattered all over." +After enlisting the aid of the Greenwich Retired Men's Association, Mr. Ogden asked the Brunswick School if it would be willing to join in the venture. "We were delighted to," said Steven Dudley, the assistant headmaster at the school. "It was a great match." +The program has received financial support from Christ Episcopal Church and several donations from Brunswick alumni. The $50 student fee goes toward paying the two instructors. And this year the students can use an optional one-hour practice lab session on Tuesdays, aided by their young volunteer coaches. +"We're looking for more sponsors, and we'd also like to expand the program to other schools in town," Mr. Ogden said. "We had to turn people away this year. A lot of the seniors who've taken the course, or are taking it now, are on the Internet and sending E-mail messages to their grandchildren." +While none of the older people have yet brought in apples for their teachers, Ms. Uhry's students found a novel way to show their appreciation for her at the end of the first class. "We felt we had to do something, and finally decided on flowers," Mr. Klingner said. +So it was that on the last day of class last December, Ms. Uhry walked into the computer lab and was given a long-stemmed rose by each of her 14 students. "I was very touched," she said. "We had become friends, and it was a lovely gesture and a marvelous way to end what had been a very pleasant and gratifying experience." + +LOAD-DATE: May 11, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Leslie Santiana moving mouse for Bernadine Ponticelli, left; behind them are Nick Ponticelli and Karina Aguirre; In Greenwich, Adam Durity, left, working in a computer session with Len Mawhinney. (Photographs by Janet Durrans for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +241 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 13, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +NYC; +For Youth, Bargain Rent Is Just a Ticket + +BYLINE: By CLYDE HABERMAN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 759 words + +IT seems only right, given the political climate, that one of Broadway's hottest tickets is a high-wattage musical that dwells on tenant-landlord relations. "Rent" remains so popular that people, generally those too young to clearly remember any President before Ronald Reagan, start lining up the night before for the 30-odd tickets available for each performance at the rock-bottom price of $20 apiece. +Waiting for Sunday's matinee, some of them since 11 P.M. on Saturday, they looked like an encampment of the homeless, wrapping themselves in plastic sheets and huddling inside cardboard boxes against a chilling wind. "Now you know what it feels like to be on the street," a truly homeless man grumbled as he walked past them, outside the Nederlander Theater on West 41st Street. + These 20-somethings were for the most part newcomers to New York, proof that the city is still a beacon not just to struggling families from Rawalpindi and Santo Domingo but also to wide-eyed, hopeful youngsters from places like Grinnell, Iowa, and Upper Bluff, Mo. The city has always depended on their likes for infusions of creative energy. +They are not at the heart of the simultaneous monologues masquerading these days as political debate over rent controls. But their personal futures -- and with them, perhaps, New York's future vibrancy -- are as much on the line as the fate of the elderly couples and working-class families normally invoked in this argument. +NOT surprisingly, the people waiting for "Rent" worry about paying the rent, should decades-old regulations disappear just as they set out to make it in New York City. +"I'm leery, because there are bad people out there who would charge whatever they want," said Rusty Van Praag, the emigre from Upper Bluff, who studies at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy on the Upper West Side and is on the prowl for an affordable apartment. Lying on the pavement under a blanket, a young woman expressed a similar concern. "A lot of people come to the city in a not very stable financial condition," she said. "Rent controls give them a way to get started." +On the other hand, Mr. Van Praag had little sympathy for the rentocrats paying peanuts for sprawling apartments. Ditto for those who regard rent control, originally imposed 50 years ago as an emergency measure, as an entitlement to be taken to the grave or even beyond, if they have children to inherit their apartments. +(Gov. George E. Pataki, in endorsing "vacancy decontrol" yesterday while managing to avoid even once uttering those two words, recommended that the concept of family "succession" continue. One can already envision thousands of young people paying off rent-controlled old-timers to adopt them, much the way many immigrants have rushed to marry American citizens to stay in the country.) +"There definitely are people out there who should be paying more for the space they have," Mr. Van Praag said. +Jodi Conn, who left Iowa to become an assistant fashion designer in Manhattan, lucked into a rent-stabilized studio apartment on West 72d Street. She pays $567 a month, which is good these days. +She feared the worst when the rent monologues began, Ms. Conn said, but now she is not so sure. "At first, it sounded like they were going to make great changes," she said. "Now, it doesn't sound so bad." +FOR sure, neither she nor the others were steeped in the Borghesian ways of New York politics, guided by the imperative to do unto others before they do one to you. But they felt they had been around long enough to know an extreme position when they heard one. +They had difficulty accepting the apocalyptic visions of the tenant-group professionals who predict an end to civilization as we know it should rent regulations disappear. By the same token, they did not accept sweetness-and-light forecasts from State Senator Joseph L. Bruno and his allies, who see a deregulated paradise of new construction and overall lower rents. +Most of all, though relatively new to New York political wars, they were no less perplexed than older hands as to why decisions of such moment are made in Albany, by upstaters who, in some cases, do not even like the city. New Yorkers should decide their own fate, they said, a point made the same day by Manhattan Borough President Ruth W. Messinger, a Democratic candidate for mayor. +"This is the only city I know of that can get away with charging so much for tiny studios," Ms. Conn said. "People who live upstate probably have no idea how high rents already are here." + +LOAD-DATE: May 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +242 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 16, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Pataki Weighs Portable Rent Protection for Some Elderly + +BYLINE: By JAMES DAO + +SECTION: Section B; Page 5; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 582 words + +DATELINE: ALBANY, May 15 + +Gov. George E. Pataki said tonight that he was considering a proposal to let elderly tenants take rent protections with them if they moved from regulated apartments into unregulated ones. +The Governor said the idea of making rent protection portable under certain circumstances might make sense if the Legislature enacted a policy he supports called vacancy decontrol, under which rent limits are lifted from apartments that are vacated. One argument against vacancy decontrol is that it might discourage people in regulated apartments from moving, since any unit they would move to would be decontrolled. + In response to a question during a live call-in program on WCBS radio, Mr. Pataki gave an example in which an elderly couple wants to move from a large, rent-regulated apartment into a smaller, decontrolled one in the same building. In that circumstance, he said, it might make sense to allow the couple to take their protections with them, making the smaller unit rent-regulated. +In a telephone interview later, Mr. Pataki said the idea had not been fleshed out and was just one of many ideas he and his staff were reviewing to "enhance" his proposal to gradually phase out the rent protections. He did not elaborate, for example, on whether tenants might be allowed to transfer protections to a different building, or whether the transfers would require a landlord's consent. +The Governor's comments came as groups representing tenants planned an advertising campaign charging that he and United States Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato were working to dismantle rent regulation through vacancy decontrol. +The advertisement will begin running on several New York City television stations on Friday. +"The Pataki-D'Amato plan for vacancy decontrol means an end to rent protection, and it's a disaster for 2.7 million New York tenants," the narrator in the commercial says. +Current laws restrict rent increases on 1.1 million regulated apartments, even when they are vacated. But those laws are scheduled to expire on June 15, and are now the focus of a bruising political fight in Albany pitting Republicans, who want to abolish or scale back the rules, against Democrats, who want to extend them unchanged. +The tenants' advertising campaign is relatively modest, costing $100,000, and will place the 30-second spots in and around newscasts over the next two or three weeks, said Martin Brennan, campaign coordinator for the New York State Tenants and Neighbors Coalition, one of the groups paying for the campaign. +The campaign is part of a strategic shift by the tenants' group toward focusing their lobbying efforts against Mr. Pataki -- and, to a lesser degree, Mr. D'Amato -- and away from Republican state senators. +The shift indicates that the tenants' groups now believe that Mr. Pataki, who released a rent plan earlier this week endorsing vacancy decontrol, has replaced the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, as the main Republican negotiator with the Democrats over the rent laws. +"George Pataki and Al D'Amato are clearly the two most powerful Republican leaders in the state and have the most direct control over the policies that its party implements," Mr. Brennan said. +The tenants' campaign also comes just two weeks after the state Democratic Party began running commercials -- created by the same political consulting firm used for the tenants' ads -- that urged voters to hold Mr. Pataki and Mr. D'Amato responsible if the rent laws expire. + +LOAD-DATE: May 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +243 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 16, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Crowd in Chinatown Reveals an Unexploited Market for Metrocards + +BYLINE: By GARRY PIERRE-PIERRE + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 829 words + +Ask a transit official why the Metrocard has been so unpopular and you will get a variety of reasons, ranging from the fact that the electronic fare card is not accepted by the entire system, to New Yorkers' deep affection for the token. +Yesterday, transit officials learned two more reasons: they have done a poor job of telling New York's myriad ethnic groups about the cards, and they have made it too difficult for some straphangers to obtain them. + After the Transit Authority sent a news release to three Chinese-language newspapers announcing that a bus would be in Chinatown in which the cards would be sold, about 400 people showed up yesterday to enroll for a special Metrocard available to senior citizens for half price. Pandemonium broke out when the door to the bus was opened, with immigrants rushing the vehicle and overwhelming a police officer who was trying to keep order. +The unexpected response showed not only how advertising aimed at immigrants could push a product that transit officials have had trouble getting off the ground, but also how broad a market the immigrant population can be. +In the past, transit officials typically would let senior centers know when they would be in a neighborhood, and then hope that the word got around. +"We had no idea it was going to be like this," said Bill Woods, the director of the Transit Authority's Metrocard program, who added that he had expected about 50 people. +The bus, deep blue and yellow and emblazoned with a huge Metrocard sign, has been parking near senior centers around the city for about six months, after potential customers had complained that the card was not readily available. +The process to get the senior Metrocard is cumbersome, many seniors say. To get the discounted cards, seniors must fill out an application, pay to have it notarized and send it back with a passport-size photograph and a copy of a Medicare card to prove their age. But with the bus, the process is free and takes one step. +Immigrants have also complained that the application is only in English. +"I'm not sure how to use this," said Wah Ng, who lives in Chinatown, waving the application in the air. "They were speaking to me in English, and I didn't understand. How do you use this card? Do you slide it somewhere? Does money come out the other end? Can I still use my tokens? Do I need to use both the card and the token to ride the subway? It's all very confusing." +Yesterday, tempers flared when the bus, which was expected to be on the north side of Canal Street, appeared on the opposite side. Some of the Metrocard-hungry people, who had been waiting for more than three hours, began to push and shove in an effort to maintain their original positions in line. +"It was uncontrollable," said Mei Chen, program coordinator at the Chinese American Planning Council, a social service agency which helped coordinate the event. "At one point we were afraid to open the door of the bus because nine to 10 people wanted to get in." +Some people came from Queens and Brooklyn to sign up for the Metrocards, which officials said are now being used by 18 percent of the system's 3.5 million daily riders. +In a city with a fast-growing immigrant population, yesterday's event marked the first time that transit officials made a strong effort to reach out to one of New York's ethnic communities by advertising the Metrocard in a language other than English or Spanish. +"I heard about it this morning through the newspapers," said Wai Yee Fong, 67, of Woodside, Queens, who took the No. 7 train. "I didn't come this morning because there were too many people. I think this card is more convenient -- I don't have to show my Medicare card each time I take the subway to get a discount." +While people were lining up in Chinatown, a Transit Authority committee voted unanimously yesterday to allow free transfers between subways and buses throughout New York City beginning July 4 in what would be the biggest change in transit service since the three subway systems were unified in 1940. +The move is expected to gain final approval next month from the entire board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Transit Authority's parent agency. +Under the proposed fare structure, for the first time, riders would be able to transfer within a two-hour period from any bus to another bus or subway, and vice versa, for a single fare of $1.50. Staten Island ferry riders will get the free transfer as well as riders of the 1,100 city-subsidized private buses. But the gold Metrocard cannot be used to re-enter the subway for free at a stop where a trip began. Senior citizens will continue to get their discount. +"It is a milestone," said Beverly J. Dolinsky, executive director of the Transit Riders Council, an organization whose members are appointed by elected officials. "I think it's really important for all customers and there probably will be a lot of changes in riding patterns." + +LOAD-DATE: May 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Shoving broke out as about 400 people waited at Canal and Mott Streets in Manhattan to enroll for discounted Metrocards. A transit official said he had expected 50 people. (Carrie Boretz for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +244 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 17, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Clinton Regrets 'Clearly Racist' U.S. Study + +BYLINE: By ALISON MITCHELL + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 10; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 913 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 16 + +A quarter of a century after the infamous Tuskegee experiment came to an end, President Clinton, his voice cracking with emotion, apologized today to the few remaining survivors and to relatives of 399 black men who for 40 years were left untreated for syphilis as part of the Federal Government's study. +"What was done cannot be undone, but we can end the silence," Mr. Clinton said in the White House East Room. "We can stop turning our heads away. We can look at you in the eye and finally say on the behalf of the American people: What the United States did was shameful, and I am sorry." + At one point as he spoke, the President extended his arms from his lectern toward the frail, elderly victims of the study -- one of them more than 100 years old -- men who he said had been "betrayed" by their Government. +The United States Public Health Service's "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male" represents an infamous chapter in the annals of American medical research. Starting in 1932, 399 indigent Southern black men were recruited by health researchers who led them to believe they would receive free medical treatment for what they called "bad blood," and were carefully monitored as the disease claimed its victims. +The men were not told they had syphilis, which can cause mental illness and death. And they were never treated for the disease, even after penicillin was found to be a successful cure in the mid-1940's. +Tuskegee, a historically black college in Alabama, did not participate in the syphilis study. The program was ended when it was publicly exposed in 1972, and only then were its survivors treated for syphilis. +Some of those sitting in the audience began to cry as Mr. Clinton spoke, and he, too, shed a tear. And a low murmur swept the room as the President said, "To our African-American citizens, I am sorry that your Federal Government orchestrated a study so clearly racist." +Before Mr. Clinton's apology, military escorts led five of the eight survivors of the study -- several of them in wheelchairs and all over 90 -- into the room. One of the men, Herman Shaw, introduced the President and said the day closed "this very tragic and painful chapter in our lives." +"We were treated unfairly," said Mr. Shaw, who will turn 95 on Sunday and was helped to the lectern by Mr. Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. "To some extent like guinea pigs." +"We were not pigs, Mr. Shaw continued, his voice slow and steady. "We were all hard-working men, not boys, and citizens of the United States." +When he had finished speaking, he and the President embraced. +Since 1973 the Government, in an out-of-court settlement to a class action suit, has paid $10 million in compensation to the Tuskegee experiment's victims and heirs, but the nation's leaders had never formally apologized to the victims. +White House officials said that in the next few months the President plans to concentrate on race relations in the nation. Today he called the victims and their relatives "a living link to a time not so long ago that many Americans do not like to remember but we dare not forget." +The Government, he said, "did something that was wrong -- deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens." +Mr. Clinton said the legacy of the experiment "has reached far and deep, in ways that hurt our progress and divide our nation," and added, "We cannot be one America when a whole segment of our nation has no trust in America." +For a moment his voice broke as he thanked the victims and their families for the fact that they had "not withheld the power to forgive." +Mr. Clinton announced a $200,000 planning grant to allow Tuskegee University to help establish a Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care. He also announced the creation of fellowships for post-graduate studies in bioethics, with a special effort to recruit minority students. +In addition, he extended the life of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission until 1999, and directed Donna Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, to report within 180 days on how to best involve communities -- particularly minority communities -- in research and health care. Doctors and medical researchers have said that the Tuskegee study left such a legacy of Government distrust among black Americans that it has hindered their ability to treat blacks for AIDS or H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. +For those who have long sought recognition of the pain inflicted on their families, Mr. Clinton's apology offered some solace. Albert Julkes Jr. of Columbus, Ga., whose father and two uncles had been subjects of the experiment, was left in tears. "I wish my father was here," said Mr. Julkes, whose father is dead. "He would have appreciated this." +Dr. Vanessa Northington Gamble, chairwoman of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Legacy Committee, a group formed last year to press for an apology, called the President's remarks moving but said that a $200,000 planning grant for Tuskegee University should be "just a beginning." +"It's not enough," she said. "It's not sufficient." +Dr. Randall Morgan, the president of the National Medical Association, the nation's oldest black professional medical association, said in a statement that Mr. Clinton's apology did not excuse the tragedy of the Tuskegee study, "but it may help close this unfortunate chapter in our nation's history." + +LOAD-DATE: May 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: President Clinton yesterday hugged Herman Shaw, a survivor of the Tuskegee experiment, as Vice President Al Gore and Dr. David Satcher, right, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, looked on. (Paul Hosefros/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +245 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 17, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Democrats Use 2d Debate For Attacks on Each Other + +BYLINE: By BRETT PULLEY + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 25; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 800 words + +DATELINE: TRENTON, May 16 + +The three candidates competing in the Democratic primary for governor met in their second televised debate here tonight. And with little more than two weeks to go before Primary Day, they continued their chorus of attacks on Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, but also became much more aggressive in their attempts to discredit and stand apart from one another. +Representative Robert E. Andrews, the member of Congress from Camden County, in the southern region of the state, cited what he called "the Whitman record of failure" as he continued to blame the Republican Governor for high auto insurance rates, cuts in funding for the environment and poor allocation of state revenues. + While Mrs. Whitman's incumbency may make her the most formidable candidate in the governor's race, she is running unopposed in the June 3 Republican primary. So Mr. Andrews also used the debate, which was taped for broadcast on Sunday, to go after one of his opponents in the primary, James E. McGreevey, the State Senator and Mayor of Woodbridge. +Between them, Senator McGreevey and Representative Andrews have the backing of the state's 21 Democratic county organizations and are expected to win the most votes on Primary Day. While they attacked each other, the third candidate, Michael Murphy, played the role of the plain-talking, peaceful underdog with unabashed affection for his state, as he had in the first debate last week. +"I have chosen not to characterize the records of the other gentlemen at the podium," Mr. Murphy said at one point. And as he has done before, he talked about his "love affair" with New Jersey. +One of the more contentious moments came after Mr. McGreevey said he was concerned about protecting the state's shores. Mr. Andrews responded by attacking the State Senator for voting in favor of some parts of Mrs. Whitman's tax programs, which he said were harmful to the environment. +"Governor Whitman brought forward her tax programs that you knew would cut environmental protection, cut education, hurt our cities, hurt our senior citizens," Mr. Andrews said. "Candidate McGreevey is running against the Whitman tax plan, but Senator Jim McGreevey voted for the Whitman tax plan." +But Mr. McGreevey, looking earnestly into the camera and seeming more relaxed and polished than he did during last week's debate, said that he thought she had done the right thing by cutting taxes, but had not established the right priorities for spending. +And for his part, Mr. McGreevey took his own shots at Mr. Andrews, who has been forced to explain repeatedly why he voted in Congress for early versions of House Speaker Newt Gingrich's welfare reform bill. +"That would have placed two million children into poverty," Mr. McGreevey said, "It was wrong for the children. It was wrong. We should not be another flavor of Republicanism." +During the debate, campaign workers for Mr. Andrews walked around the room set up for reporters, passing out forms with what they dubbed "the truth" about Mr. McGreevey's record. +Meanwhile, Mr. Murphy, the former Morris County Prosecutor and stepson of the late Gov. Richard A. Hughes, was trying to take advantage of the fact that they were not bothering to attack him. Not needing to go on the offensive, he cast himself as the most civilized candidate and said that at 48, he is also more mature than the other two men, who are both 39. +The debate is scheduled to be broadcast at noon on Sunday on WABC in New York and at 1 P.M. on WPVI in Philadelphia. The third and final debate before the primary is scheduled to take place on Thursday. +When the candidates were asked if they would hold the line on taxes, only Mr. Murphy said that he would consider a tax hike. He proposed raising the cigarette tax by 25 cents a pack to cover education costs and cut property taxes. +"I do not accept the premise that Governor Whitman has cut taxes," Mr. Murphy said. "What we have seen is a shift in our state. Real New Jerseyans have not seen the benefit of those alleged tax cuts." +The candidates shared the same position on most issues. They support abortion rights. They believe in stricter gun laws. They favor the death penalty. +Each of the candidates told a personal story about how breast cancer had touched the lives of their families when asked whether they would support more money for breast cancer research. Mr. Andrews told of holding his wife's hand last year as she underwent a biopsy that turned out to be negative. Mr. Murphy revealed how his wife's breast cancer was diagnosed nine years ago, and how she underwent a mastectomy. +Mr. McGreevey said that breast cancer had touched his family, too, and he took the opportunity to promote legislation he had sponsored requiring insurance companies to cover the cost of mammograms. + +LOAD-DATE: May 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +246 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 18, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Books in Brief: Fiction + +BYLINE: By Tobin Harshaw + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 21; Column 2; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 268 words + + + I Saw a Man Hit His Wife + By Mark Greenside. + White Pine Press, paper, $14. + It used to be that all men would be tyrants if they could. Nowadays, or so it would seem from Mark Greenside's collection of short fiction, men are struggling just to get a word in edgewise, and maybe catch a ball game once in a while. Consider the very funny first story, "What Is It With Women, Anyhow?" -- the rambling monologue of a 52-year-old lawyer who is profoundly befuddled by his second wife's infidelities, his secretary's sudden self-empowerment and his daughter's predilection for masturbating while watching "Oprah." Other stories offer us a suburban dad who frets that his son will never be able to hit a hanging curveball (and, worse, that he will never even care), as well as a middle-aged husband who finds himself abetting his wife's sexual liberation through S&M. The problem with writing about men's insecurities is that they aren't necessarily any more interesting than women's insecurities -- or your neighbor's or your butcher's. After a while, you too want these guys just to shut up and go walk the dog. For the most part, Mr. Greenside does best in the few stories in which he leaves men behind, as in "Dreamers of Dreams," where an elderly woman stranded in a nursing home finds romance outside her window, and "Inside and Out," set in a bordello on a slow New Year's Eve. But after such excursions to the female side of the trenches, the writer faithfully returns to more guys worrying about guy things, making us wonder why women bother with them in the first place. Tobin Harshaw + +LOAD-DATE: May 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +247 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 18, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Taking the Bus to a Wider World + +BYLINE: By ROBIN F. DeMATTIA + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 27; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1221 words + +EARLY morning and late afternoon are busy times for JoAnn Miller, of New Milford, who has three children and a job outside the home. But thanks to the Kennedy Center in Bridgeport, she has one less thing to worry about -- how her sister, Jeanette Hipp, will get to work. +Ms. Hipp lives on the same street as Ms. Miller, and works as a packer at a company in Brookfield. Last summer, travel training staff members of the Kennedy Center -- which provides a wide range of services to people with disabilities -- taught Ms. Hipp how to use public buses instead of relying on family or on what is called paratransit, vans equipped to help those with disabilities. + "It was a good thing," Ms. Miller says, "because if this didn't happen, there's no way one of us would have been able to take her to the bus stop and pick her up every day. My Dad can't take her, and I have to get to work on time." +Ms. Miller says the family initially had reservations about letting Ms. Hipp ride the bus alone. "We were afraid she would get confused and end up in the wrong spot, because she had to do so much transferring. But she seems to be doing O.K. with it. The Kennedy Center told her about 911, and she always has change in her pocket to make a phone call." +Placating families' concerns was just one barrier the Kennedy Center has overcome since instituting its travel training program in 1991. The program, officially called People Accessing Community Transportation, involves training people with disabilities and elderly men and women who currently use the special vans to ride on public buses. +More than 350 people statewide have gone through the program, with nearly 95 percent continuing to use public transportation one year after their training. The idea is for individuals to develop more confidence and greater independence, and have increased options for jobs and housing because they can travel more freely. +The state also benefits, because fixed-route transportation costs for people with disabilities are much less than those of the paratransit vans. John Broker, a transit planner with the State Department of Transportation, estimates that the average passenger subsidy on a public bus is $2.50 a ride, while the subsidy for paratransit service is $20 a trip. He says the subsidies are paid through a transportation fund supported by state taxes. "Our main goal is cost savings to taxpayers," says Mr. Broker. The department now allocates $180,000 a year to the travel training program. He says that the Kennedy Center "has done a substantial and fantastic job" helping people use the regular buses. +In the beginning, however, there was skepticism from all sides about whether the training program could work. +A Kennedy Center administrator, Wendy Bloch said, "We thought that previous travel training hadn't been as successful as it could have been." Ms. Bloch continued: "Our first goal was to develop a generic travel training curriculum that could be used for a person with any type of disability." +First, there is individual attention. A trainer works one on one with an individual, tailoring the training to that person's needs and abilities. The trainer meets the trainee at his or her home; they walk to the bus stop together, and the trainer rides the bus with the trainee to and from a destination. The individuals with disabilities learn to deal with situations like missing the bus as well as with panhandlers, strangers and other events or people. The trainers stick with the plan until the individual demonstrates proficiency, whether it takes 2 hours or 60 hours. After the trainer rides the bus with the trainee for several trips, the trainer may then shadow the trainee -- much the way parents do when helping their children learn similar skills -- by driving behind the bus to make sure the trainee gets on and off at the right stops. The trainer follows up with the trainee at regular intervals throughout the first year after training, to insure that the person is still comfortable with public transportation. And, finally, families are included in the process so they can lend their support. +In the second year of the program, the need for some home-office education became apparent, Ms. Bloch said. Some Kennedy Center employees were hesitant to recommend the travel training, so the trainers asked their coworkers to ride a city bus. +"People had misconceptions of being on a bus," said Ms. Bloch, "because so many people have not used public transportation." The trainers also needed to address societal barriers, because "sometimes drivers' attitudes were a major deterrent. So we developed a driver training program." +The trainers' manager, Robert Hoyt, says the drivers learn how to help passengers with disabilities and how to get wheelchairs on and off buses. +Mr. Hoyt says some drivers initially didn't communicate well with people with disabilities. "For a couple of folks with wheelchairs, drivers would say 'That's what paratransit is for,' and it hurt the consumer, Mr. Hoyt said. But with training, he added, "the drivers have become much more cordial.' +Connecticut Transit's general manager, David Lee, calls the travel training program a "win-win-win arrangement." +"For us," Mr. Lee said, "it means more passengers, and that's what we're in business to do. For the paratransit service, which is oversubscribed and very costly to operate, it means that that service really only has to carry people who cannot use the fixed-route system. And for the individuals who receive travel training it opens up whole new opportunities for independent travel." +The president and chief executive officer of the Kennedy Center, Martin D. Schwartz, agrees. "The more access people with disabilities have to public transportation," he said, "the more they are going to be able to become involved in the community. It enables them to broaden their horizons for vocation, housing and social life." +Mr. Schwartz says the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority recently asked the Kennedy Center for help in widening access to bus, subway and ferry transportation in the Boston area. It poses challenges, he said, but "It's nice that another state recognizes the quality of our services." +In Connecticut, several people who took travel training four or five years ago have moved from sheltered work situations at the Kennedy Center site to new jobs with less Kennedy Center -- or no -- support. +Many have also moved from group homes to more independent living situations. "Getting back and forth to work without paratransit," Mr. Hoyt said, "gave them more confidence in their work and living situations." As Ms. Bloch sees it, "One of the nice things that happens is that if we train someone who lives in a group home and is successful, everyone else wants to try it themselves." +The program has achieved its goals for Barbara Clark of Bridgeport. "I was nervous,"she said, "because I used to take the bus with my Mom but not by myself. But somebody was with me when I travel trained. They taught me where to get off and how to get to and from the bus." Ms. Clark has taken the bus not only to work but also to visit friends and to meet a group for a boat cruise. "Now I will try to take the bus to Trumbull for shopping and to church," she said confidently. + +LOAD-DATE: May 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: With Lisa Barney, a trainer from the Kennedy Center, Kevin Meadows of Andover heads for the Buckland Hills Mall. (George Ruhe for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +248 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 18, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: FLUSHING; +Reassuring The Arrivals In a New Age + +BYLINE: By CHARLIE LeDUFF + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 8; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 491 words + +From the window of her new apartment, Galina Mankovskaya can see the former Russian soldiers playing chess in the courtyard. There is some friendly cursing down below, and Mrs. Mankovskaya, 65, can smile with them. It has been a tiring trip from Moscow to Flushing, Queens. +Mrs. Mankovskaya came to the United States in 1991, to find that it was not everything she had imagined. A librarian by training, she could not find a job. + "No one wants you with your age and poor English," she said. Without work, she became eligible for Supplemental Security Income. But the $500 a month barely covered her rent. She lived on morsels and fell into a deep depression. +These days, Mrs. Mankovskaya says she feels good. She wears pink lipstick and a fresh dress. She is one of 88 immigrants who have found affordable apartments in the new Harry and Jeanette Weinberg House at 140-16 45th Avenue in Flushing. More than 1,000 people applied for the new housing. +The seven-story building, which was constructed with a $6.5 million grant from the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and $1 million from the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, has 66 apartments. The building was dedicated Thursday afternoon, in a small ceremony in the courtyard. +It is operated by Selfhelp Community Services, founded in 1936 by a group of German Jewish refugees to help other Holocaust survivors. The group operates three other nearby buildings in Flushing and one in Bayside, providing housing for 947 elderly people. +"Our mission has changed over the years," said Richard S. Arsonsen, chief operating officer of Selfhelp. "As there are fewer Holocaust survivors left, we've turned to helping the new Americans." +The ethnic mix of the new center is approximately one-third Russian, one-third Chinese and a combination of other nationalities. The rents are subsidized but residents are required to contribute about about one-third of their income to the cost. Most of them pay about $165 a month from their S.S.I. benefits. The center provides social services, English classes and hot kosher meals. The building is designed to be accessible for the handicapped, and all of the bathrooms have emergency chords. Legal help is also provided. +With impending cutbacks in S.S.I. benefits for noncitizens and affordable housing already at a premium, the elderly here are worried that they will not be able to afford to stay. But Grace S. Nierenberg, director of housing, said that whatever happens, no resident will be evicted. "We will manage and we will fight," she said. +Still, things have changed, said Gertrude Feinstadt, 90, who lives at the Helen R. Scheur residence that abuts the Weinberg House. Her apartment complex used to be comprised entirely of German Jews. "Most of the old people have died and their families have moved away and the new ones don't speak English," Mrs. Feinstadt said. "It gets lonely." CHARLIE LeDUFF + +LOAD-DATE: May 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Galina Mankovskaya, who left Russia in 1991, is among the tenants in new housing for the elderly in Flushing. (Photographs by Steve Berman for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +249 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 18, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Sports of The Times; +The Knicks May Replay This Forever + +BYLINE: By GEORGE VECSEY + +SECTION: Section 8; Page 1; Column 1; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 679 words + +THE moment haunts Buck Williams. He reviews it in his mind, wondering how he could have stopped four of his impetuous teammates from leaving the bench during a brawl last Wednesday. +The Knicks and the Miami Heat are one game away from being the Branca and Thomson of basketball. Decades from now, when they are old men, scattered all over the world, the players on both teams may be pursued for their versions of this notorious shift of fortunes. + Ralph Branca and Bobby Thomson -- two of the most gracious men of sport -- still relive the moment in 1951 when Branca strode out of the Brooklyn Dodgers' bullpen and Thomson hit the home run that won the pennant for the New York Giants. +Of course, the Knicks could clinch the seventh game of this playoff series today in Miami, without two of their suspended stars, and go on to face the Chicago Bulls at full strength. +What is transpiring between the Knicks and the Heat is merely the second round of the lumbering two-month playoffs that keep us indoors all spring. What happened in 1951 was the end of a taut three-game playoff for the pennant. +But at least in New York, this sudden reversal has the potential for bitter folklore for the ages. The Knicks had won three of the first four games in this series, and then played a sloppy and surly game down in Miami, which touched off this nightmare. +The Brooklyn Dodgers of 1951 had a 13 1/2-game lead in mid-August before it got away. +This may or may not be an omen: In 1951, the Giants were managed by Leo Durocher, the former manager of the Dodgers. In 1997, the Heat is coached by Pat Riley, the former coach of the Knicks. Leo the Lip was a spiffy dresser, and so is Coach Riley. +This 1997 reversal will always hinge on the impulsive choice by four Knicks to leave the bench when P. J. Brown dumped Charlie Ward under the near basket. +By league rule, Patrick Ewing and Allan Houston were suspended for Friday's game and Larry Johnson and John Starks were suspended for today. Ward missed Friday's game because of his part in the brawl. +On Friday night, the Knicks faltered, 95-90, running out of steam without Ewing, the focus of their offense. Afterward, Williams had the woulda-coulda-shoulda blues. He is a superb rebounder and mature adult and union leader who spent his first 15 seasons in New Jersey and Portland. He has been a joy to watch this season, with his intensity and discipline. +The discipline was evident Wednesday night in Miami. When the brawl broke out, Buck Williams immediately thought about the three-year-old rule forbidding players from leaving the bench. So did 39-year-old Herb Williams, no relation, another class act, sitting on the bench. +"It happened to us at Portland," Buck Williams said. "We got into a fight with Phoenix and guys left the bench and were suspended." He said he told Ewing, "Stay on the bench." He explained later, "I knew if he went out there, it would cost him one eighty-second" -- meaning a game's pay -- "and he would get suspended once they rolled the videotape." +Despite being warned, Ewing, who exists in a civil world halfway between leader and loner, wandered slowly away from the bench, to observe the action up close. +"He stayed out there two to three minutes," Buck Williams said Friday night, after he and Herb Williams had played valiantly in defeat. "He just casually walked on the floor and walked off the floor. He wasn't fighting. He wasn't a peacemaker. He was a jaywalker." +Sometimes jaywalkers get run over, and that is what happened when the league office employed the rule book like a Sherman tank rumbling down Broadway. +"If I had it to do all over again, I'd have grabbed two or three guys and pinned them to the ground," Buck Williams said. +Defiantly, he said the Knicks should have won Friday, once they were ahead in the second half, and he said they would win today with their normal "game plan" of getting the ball to the big feller. But it didn't have to be this way. The Knicks are one game away from being history, not fading history but indelible history. + +LOAD-DATE: May 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Buck Williams. (Barton Silverman) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +250 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 18, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +EARNING IT; +For Some, Pensions Still Find Ways to Disappear + +BYLINE: By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 11; Column 1; Money and Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1812 words + +WHEN Vincent Russo of Forest Hills, Queens, retired in 1993 after 31 years as an insurance agent for the New York Life Insurance Company, he expected a secure future, with money coming in every month from two company pensions. But three years after he left work, New York Life reduced the monthly payments on one of his pensions, contending that he no longer deserved the money. +Mr. Russo sued the company, trying to get what he calls his full pension restored. A New York Supreme Court judge in Queens dismissed the suit in November, ruling that the company had acted within its rights. Mr. Russo is appealing that decision. + The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, known as Erisa, was supposed to end such disputes by protecting employees' pensions. But though many people think their pensions are secure thanks to the law, not all pensions fall under its jurisdiction, as Mr. Russo discovered. +Even for the vast majority of pensions that the law does govern, say lawyers who represent people fighting for their benefits, the courts have severely limited the remedies. +"Erisa has accomplished a lot," said David Levin, a lawyer with the Washington office of Reish & Luftman, a benefits law firm. But, he added, it is "incredibly more participant unfriendly than it needs to be." +ERISA covers all pensions from corporations as well as pensions from most nonprofit groups. It regulates whom pensions must cover and how much they can be reduced by Social Security, and it establishes financing standards. +But the law does not govern pensions from state and local governments or religious organizations. Nor does it govern the supplemental pensions that corporations provide to their higher-paid executives and salespeople, like Mr. Russo, when their earnings exceed Federal caps on traditional pensions. (Supplemental executive pensions are called "nonqualified" because they do not qualify for the tax breaks that employers receive when they sponsor qualified pension plans.) +Phyllis Borzi, a pension expert at George Washington University who was chief of staff to a House subcommittee on pensions for 16 years, says that if you are in a pension plan that is exempt from Erisa "they can do whatever they want to you." +Ralph B. Jackson worked for 27 years for the City of New York and for the state, retiring in 1988, but he never collected a penny in pension money. His lawyer, Edgar Pauk, deputy director of Legal Services for the Elderly in Manhattan, says that's because of a host of rules and technicalities set by his two employers and because Mr. Jackson made errors in his pension forms as he transferred between various city and state jobs. +"Everyone who looked at his case agreed it was unfair, but they would do nothing because there was nothing in the rules to correct this outrage," Mr. Pauk said. +In a letter to Mr. Pauk, the New York City Employees Retirement System said its board members had "concluded that they are statutorily barred from granting the relief Mr. Jackson seeks." +In Mr. Russo's case, New York Life reduced the payouts only from his supplemental pension; his qualified pension was not touched. +The company canceled 80 policies that Mr. Russo had sold since 1963, returning premiums to the customers in connection with a lawsuit it settled last year with policyholders who contended that many agents had used deceptive sales techniques. Mr. Russo says he did nothing improper. But the company says that it can take back an agent's commissions if it cancels a policy for any reason and that in docking Mr. Russo's supplemental pension it was merely following its longstanding practice. +Because his supplemental pension was based on his earnings, the company subtracted from those earnings the commissions he had received from the 80 policies. New York Life recalculated his supplemental pension and so far has reduced his pension payouts by about $55,000, said Mr. Russo's lawyer, Herman Kaufman, of Manhattan and Old Greenwich, Conn. +Mr. Kaufman said his client had sold policies as instructed by the company and that the company's rules allowed it to take back commissions only within about a month of a sale, not as much as 33 years later. +Even the thousands of people with pensions that are covered under Erisa can have problems collecting. +"In the normal course, benefits get paid," Mr. Levin, the benefits lawyer, said, "and how well it goes for the vast majority of people is a wonderful thing. But there are also all sorts of shenanigans." +THE most common problems, he and others said, are that companies are sold, merged and split up, and it is hard to track where the pension plans went. Once you locate your particular pension plan, the company may not have records of your employment, especially if you changed jobs years ago. Erisa requires companies to keep records for only six years. +John Kovalichik of Holyoke, Mass., worked for 31 years at Adams Pakkawood, a manufacturer there, and for its corporate predecessors. But when the company folded in 1991 he could not find out where to go to start collecting his pension. He and other workers eventually called on the Pension Assistance Project at the University of Massachussets Boston Gerontology Institute, which runs a clinic to help people collect their pensions. The clinic works with the Pension Rights Center, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in Washington. +Jack Pizer, an institute employee who counsels people about their pension problems, said that in the Adams Pakkawood case, "it took nine months, but we finally learned that the pension plan was terminated and the money was used to buy annuities" at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. +"Met Life made no attempt to find these people," Mr. Pizer said, "and when I confronted them about that, they told me that these people were not their clients so there was no reason for them to notify them that it had their money." +William Rhatigan, a Met Life vice president, said the problems began when Adams Pakkawood closed before all the annuities paperwork was finished. He also said that when the company sold off its equipment, it sold the file cabinets containing the pension records. +The Adams Pakkawood retirees are now receiving payments. +Another common difficulty occurs when a company refuses to respond to requests to begin payments or miscalculates the benefits when it does pay. The law makes it a wrongful act to pay either less or more than the pension plan specifies, but plans are so complicated that mistakes and disagreements can easily arise about what the proper amount is. +In recent years, the Labor Department's Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration and the Government-owned Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation have received a small but growing number of complaints about shortchanging, especially in lump-sum settlements. +"We are finding lots of calculation mistakes in lump-sum payments," said Judy Welles, senior spokeswoman for the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which insures defined-benefit pensions and takes over those that fail. +Two years ago, Piggly Wiggly Southern Inc. paid $1 million to retirees of its Alabama supermarkets whom it had shortchanged by using an improper interest rate. But the company paid only after losing a lawsuit. The company had contended that it was entitled to use a different interest rate than the guaranty corporation required. +In March, TRW, the military contractor, was found by a Federal judge in Cleveland to have underpaid more than 5,000 employees by as much as $40 million in pension money by using improper interest rate calculations. TRW is appealing. +But pursuing claims for Erisa-protected pensions can be burdensome. The courts have held that lawyers' fees generally cannot be awarded unless there has been willful misconduct by the pension plan, a high hurdle to surmount. For example, it hardly pays to spend thousands of dollars in legal fees if your pension is short $100 a month. +And although it can be hard to receive pension payments when you think they are due, it's a lot tougher when you don't even know you are entitled to anything. According to Norman Stein, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who specializes in retirement law, some employers create pension plans but do not tell their workers, as the law requires. +"I have seen cases that border on outright fraud," he said, most of them in small plans. "A lot of problems in small plans simply go undetected. Some people don't know they earned a pension from an employer they left 20 or 25 years ago. It may not be much money, but for someone on a fixed income, even a $25- or $50-a-month pension can be pretty meaningful." + +How to Protect Your Money +THERE are steps you can take to reduce the risk of not getting your full pension. +Susan Martin, a pension specialist at Martin & Bonnett, a benefits law firm in Phoenix, says many problems can be avoided if workers collect key documents. +"Keep a photocopy of all correspondence you send," she said. "Send everything by certified mail, and keep the receipts. +"If you have a problem, ask for not just the plan summary, but the complete and updated plan with all amendments," she added. "Your employer is allowed to charge up to 25 cents per page, but few plans are as long as 100 pages, so regard it as money well spent to protect yourself. And if there is a problem that requires you to hire an attorney, the first thing you will be told is to get those documents." +Before leaving your job, Ms. Martin said, get a copy of your statement of accrued benefits. Then, about a year after you leave, write for another one. By law you are entitled to such a statement each year. +If the pension plan administrator does not respond to your letters, send more and remind the administrator that Erisa, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, allows you to collect damages of $100 a day if the company fails to provide plan documents within 30 days. +"You should also keep photocopies of all your W-2 forms," Ms. Martin said, because Federal regulations require employers to maintain pension records for only six years. A company that is merged, sold, broken up or otherwise reorganized may not keep track of records, and when you file for your pension, it may contend that it has no records of your work or that it paid you less than it did. +When you receive your statement of benefits, a lump sum or your first pension check, study the numbers and the plan documents. If the amount seems low, Ms. Martin recommends hiring an actuary to calculate your benefits. +"How much an actuary costs depends on how nice the actuary is," she said. "A lot of actuaries will do it for under $200. Shop around. And call the Pension Rights Center in Washington for advice on finding a good actuary." DAVID CAY JOHNSTON + +LOAD-DATE: May 20, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Vincent Russo of Queens found that his supplemental pension from New York Life was not protected by the Federal law known as Erisa. (Steve Berman for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +251 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 21, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Honorary Avaiator Tends Blue Angels Shrine + +BYLINE: By RICK BRAGG + +SECTION: Section A; Page 10; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1035 words + +DATELINE: PENSACOLA, Fla., May 18 + +In the cool of the morning, before even the first of the daytime drinkers enters his ramshackle bar on Palafox Street, it is just Martin Weissman and the angels. +The angels, Blue Angels, peer down from hundreds of photographs tacked to the walls, all clean-cut, confident, smiling young men in flight suits, men who pose beside their lovely, dangerous planes. The old bar is a shrine to all aviators, but especially the Angels, the Navy's precision flying squadron, based here, that has thrilled and terrified air-show audiences for 50 years. + "It's natural to love guys who take chances," said Mr. Weissman, the elderly but spry owner of this world-famous aviators' bar, Trader Jon's. +Since he opened it in 1950, he has been like a father to these pilots, the Navy's best. He has flown with them, again and again, delighted, like some very old child on the grandest playground swing in the world. +Their relationship has outlived wars, has witnessed the change from propeller planes to jet engines, has even outdistanced the lives of some of the men whom he loves. They died in wars, in mid-air collisions, other ways, and here and there in the bar there is an empty flight suit, or a sentiment scribbled on a black and white picture by a dead man's hand. +Of the thousands of mementos that decorate this place, where pieces of wing hang from the ceiling and a giant tail fin adorns the scarred bar, it is those reminders of fallen angels that are most precious to an old man who turned a place to buy beer into a home for generations of pilots. +On one wall, past the pool tables where a civilian is drinking whisky straight up, is a golden flight suit hanging from a wall. The name patch reads "Harley Hall," who led the Blue Angels in 1970 and 1971. He befriended the old man, or the old man befriended him. When he left, he left his suit, about the most precious thing a pilot has to give. +"In 1973, he went to Vietnam," Mr. Weissman said, standing underneath the suit. "The day the war was over, he was shot down. Never been found. It wasn't right." +The face in the nearby picture is strong, intense. All of them look that way. +"It's hard to believe anything like that would come apart," the old man said. +He feels the same old sadnesses when he looks at Skip Umstead, who died in a mid-air collision in 1974. There are 12 in all, pilots of unusual reflexes and abilities who died from a twitch of the controls or a lucky shot, or other things. "Not too many. Twelve. In 50 years," he said, considering the dangers. Then he moves quickly along the walls to the ones still alive, the ones he can look at without it breaking his heart. +"He is flooded with memories," said Lieut. Comdr. Milton J. (Gus) Goss, United States Navy, retired, who flew Corsairs in World War II and taught a baseball player named Ted Williams how to fly. Commander Goss, who frequents the bar, carries a sack filled with magnolia blossoms, and hands them out to the pretty women. +"I've been everywhere and I've done it all," the former carrier pilot said. "The only thing is, I can't remember it," and he smiled. +"But he's the legend," he said, of Mr. Weismann, whom most people call by the name of the bar, Trader Jon. "I'm honored to know him." +Martin Weissman, who is 82, is as much a puzzle, a peculiarity, as the bar, where hundreds of model planes dangle from the ceiling by fishing line and old pilot helmets rest on a back bar. The Blue Angels are just part of this display, which includes photos, patches and paintings, from officers and enlisted men. They come to drink and talk jets, mixing with local people, listening to the blues. +Locals bring him their paychecks to cash. Pilots bring him a photo, or a patch or a small present, and take their place on the wall, in history. This has been the way it has been for almost 50 years. Some of the things left are a little puzzling, like the wooden statue of the South American headhunter who holds aloft a severed head. +Mr. Weissman works the bar most every night. Last week, he ate pork and beans out of a can with a spoon and explained how it all started. +He has loved to fly, since he was a boy on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. When he joined the Army in the late 1930's, he volunteered for the paratroopers, 36th Infantry. +He stepped from the plane and flew, for a few precious seconds. +"It was beautiful," he said. +Landing, he had trouble with. "I got hurt," he said, simply, and acknowledges that it is why he now walks in a kind of hurried limp, like that very old child that he is. +He has always been a bar owner, first in Manhattan, then in Key West, finally here, after the end of World War II. Word got around at the nearby naval base that the old man was friendly to fliers, to sailors. +"You got to earn their love, their friendship," he said. He found them to be like young men and boys anywhere, homesick, fearless in the sky but a little afraid on the ground. The pilots were tense, looking for someone to share their burdens. Mr. Weissman was a good listener. +They adopted him as much as he adopted them, and he has seen their characters faintly shift, especially the Blue Angels. Each team has had 10 members, and he remembers them all. In the 1950's and 1960's, they were more prone to swagger, to drink whisky. "Loose," he said. "Fancy free." +Now the young men seem much more a part of their highly technical aircraft. They drink beer. They are not swashbucklers, but triggers. If anything, they are more tense. The way Mr. Weissman sees it, they need an auxiliary family, a listener, a home away from home, more than ever. +They repay him with a ride in the clouds, a few times a year. +"I've never been afraid," he said. +He concedes that now they take it easy on him, with no loops or dives. +He flew himself, once, as a private pilot, but he has not been physically able to fly for a long time. +The Blue Angels made him an honorary flight leader some years back, but it is the rides he cherishes. +Among the mementos on the walls is a patch that was worn by an astronaut on the space shuttle. He acknowledges, sadly, that it is one flight he is just too old to make, now. +"But," he said, "wouldn't it be great?" + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Martin Weissman, owner of Trader Jon's, a Pensacola, Fla., bar that honors aviators, showed visitors flight memorabilia. His fond relationship with the Blue Angels, the Navy's best pilots, has survived for decades. (Lee Celano for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +252 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 21, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Child Insurance Bill Opposed As Threat to Cigarette Revenue + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 605 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 20 + +Republican senators attacked a children's health insurance bill today, saying the higher Federal tax it would place on tobacco would cost the states more than $1 billion in revenues annually by cutting cigarette sales. +The measure, proposed by Senators Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, and Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, calls for raising the current 24-cents-a-pack Federal tax to 67 cents to pay for subsidized insurance for children of the working poor. The sponsors of the bill intend to offer it on Wednesday as an amendment to the budget resolution. + The Republican Policy Committee, an arm of the leadership, today called the sponsoring Senators' intention "admirable" but misguided, "because states depend to a great degree on excise tax revenue." The committee estimated that decreased smoking resulting from the tax increase would cost states and localities $6.5 billion over five years. +"Even if one believes that decreased demand for tobacco is positive from a societal view, it still has negative fiscal aspects for the states," the committee said. +Mr. Kennedy scoffed at the report. +"If we can keep people healthy and stop them from dying," he said, "I think most Americans would say 'Amen; isn't that a great result?' " +He added, "If fewer people smoke, states will save far more in lower health costs than they will lose in revenues from the cigarette tax." +Mr. Hatch called the report "absolutely preposterous." +He said: "Does that mean that 419,000 Americans must die every year in order to preserve the state tobacco revenues? That's like saying we should withhold life-saving treatment from senior citizens in order to save Medicare money. If raising taxes on cigarettes results in less consumption, then it's worth it." +Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, joined the policy committee in attacking the bill. Mr. Lott said that there was already a budget agreement that had money for children's health care in it and that he hoped "the Senate will not be duped" into backing the bill. +The cigarette industry gave Republicans more than $8 million for the last election, about four times what it gave Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. But Senator Don Nickles, the deputy Republican leader, said that had nothing to do with the party leadership position. +"Oh, no, no, no," Mr. Nickles said. "It's a concern about having an open-ended entitlement program." +The legislation does not provide a formal entitlement, with as many individuals as qualify guaranteed benefits like those of Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. Instead, it offers a specific sum of money in the form of block grants that states can apply for or not. +But Republicans still call the bill an entitlement, saying states would feel politically compelled to take the grants and provide the insurance. The policy committee report said the legislation would "create a situation where states will be persuaded to assume new Federal mandates." +Mr. Hatch and Mr. Kennedy do not expect to win Wednesday's Senate vote. But Mr. Hatch said they planned to keep bringing the measure up during the year, expecting support to build. +Today they announced the support of five former Republican Secretaries of Health, Education and Welfare or Health and Human Services, and a newspaper advertisement paid for by a coalition of 150 health and children's advocacy groups that asks, "Senators, who do you stand with: "Joe Camel or Joey?" It is accompanied by pictures of the Camel cigarette advertisement character and of a winsome tyke in a cowboy hat. + + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +253 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 21, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +N.B.A. PLAYOFFS; +The Bulls Wake Up To Beat Heat + +BYLINE: By SELENA ROBERTS + +SECTION: Section B; Page 9; Column 5; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 925 words + +DATELINE: CHICAGO, May 20 + +There was no rivalry to stoke their intensity. No Jeff Van Gundy to prod Michael Jordan. No Knick cockiness to tweak them. +Only fear of losing to the Miami Heat seemed to excite the Chicago Bulls tonight. Only Michael Jordan's 37 points and Dennis Rodman's frenetic defense could roust them from their REM sleep, using a 12-4 run in a tense final four minutes to win Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals, 84-77, at the United Center. + For some reason, that detested designer coach, Pat Riley, was not a suitable incentive substitute for the Bulls. They wanted the Knicks, a fact that appeared to leave the Bulls treating the Heat as an oversight for most of the game. +"I think we might have caught them napping a little bit today," Riley said. "I know they were yawning for two days when they found out they were going to play us. Maybe we woke them up and will get their very, very best in the next game." +Was this a challenge? Riley was at it again, already working on his mental game in this four-of-seven-game series. +The master of motivation had his team ready. The Heat was up by 11 points at the half and by 5 points heading into the fourth quarter. Then the Bulls revealed their best side, using the lively Rodman (19 rebounds) on the boards and aggressive defense to force three turnovers in the last 3 minutes 23 seconds. +Suddenly, a Bulls team that was looking rickety and vulnerable -- suggesting that the age issue Tim Hardaway brought up on Monday was a real factor -- perked up like kids on a sugar binge. +"We heard comments that we may be too old to deal with them," Jordan said. "Maybe in the first half we looked like old men, missing layups and things like that. We came out in the second like young men. +"We didn't look like old men to me." +They looked like the Bulls of old, a championship team that can gather itself at will. +That experience flustered the Heat, which scored just 11 points in the fourth quarter. +"They showed their greatness with defensive pressure at the end," Riley said. "We succumbed to that." +That wasn't all. + After Alonzo Mourning had done so much -- 21 points, 6 blocked shots and 8 rebounds -- he unraveled under pressure. Once again, free throws befuddled him. He missed 5 of his last 6 attempts in the last 2:20 of the game. Same old problem. +"It's mental," Mourning said. "It's just going up there and being able to erase everything from my mind." +But how do you erase the indelible Rodman? +He slapped himself on Mourning like a neon decal in the second half, part of a double-team effort to stop the Heat's center. Rodman has a way of agitating big men, as well as officials. It was a test of who would crack first: Mourning, Rodman or the officials. At first, Rodman seemed to be sneaking by unnoticed, able to lower his shoulder into Mourning in the third quarter, leaving Mourning stretched out on the floor. He was holding his right rib cage. No Rodman foul was called. +"It's unfortunate we have to play with things like that happening on the court," Mourning said. "But if you slap me, I'm going to turn the other cheek. I can't do anything that would hurt my team. I need to be on the floor." +Mourning lasted longer than Rodman, who managed to pick up his 12th technical of the playoffs with 3:26 left in the third quarter -- when he flicked Mourning in the back -- and his sixth personal foul with 1:19 left in the game. In between the naughtiness, Rodman dived and scrambled and popped up and down. He did exactly what the Bulls needed. +The Bulls also needed that kind of effort from Ron Harper, who was assigned to contain Tim Hardaway. +All Hardaway needs is an inch on a pick-and-roll and he is launching 3-pointers as quick as skeet. Sometimes he doesn't even need an inch. Maybe he was distracted by the onslaught of his family and friends -- all of them wanting tickets from the Chicago native -- or maybe fatigue was a factor. Whatever it was, Hardaway did not have a chance to find his groove. +"They played good team defense on me," said Hardaway, who was 4 of 14 for 13 points. "We weren't aggressive with the ball at the end. We let this one slip away." +The Bulls did not seem to take the Heat seriously until the third quarter, able to trim the Heat's 49-38 halftime lead with an inspired 16-7 run. They drew that inspiration from Jordan and Rodman, able to force the Heat into turnovers and frustrate Miami's shot selection. Still, the Heat was able to remain calm enough to hold a 66-61 lead after the third quarter. +The Heat's Riley-induced will was evident from the start. Even though there was Riley on the sideline, even though the Heat had been the only team to beat the Bulls twice in the regular season, the Bulls were unprepared for what the Heat's quick start. +But in the end, the Bulls took the Heat seriously. The Knicks were the farthest thing from the Bulls' mind when they were down by 4 points with five minutes left. And yet, the Bulls won this game despite shooting just 36 percent, despite falling behind by 16 points in the first half. They won because they are the Bulls. +"With that big baseball bat they carry in Michael Jordan, they know they are going to have a chance to win at the end," Riley said. "We just needed to be stronger at the end. Instead, we got flustered. +"We led 45 minutes and we let it get away from us. We knew they were going to make a push at us. Experience has a lot to do with that." +Experience allowed the Bulls to take the Heat for granted before simply taking their opponents over. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The Bulls' Michael Jordan slicing to the basket in the first half last night as Chicago took a 1-0 series lead. (Agence France-Presse)(pg. B12) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +254 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 21, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Honorary Avaiator Tends Blue Angels Shrine + +BYLINE: By RICK BRAGG + +SECTION: Section A; Page 10; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1035 words + +DATELINE: PENSACOLA, Fla., May 18 + +In the cool of the morning, before even the first of the daytime drinkers enters his ramshackle bar on Palafox Street, it is just Martin Weissman and the angels. +The angels, Blue Angels, peer down from hundreds of photographs tacked to the walls, all clean-cut, confident, smiling young men in flight suits, men who pose beside their lovely, dangerous planes. The old bar is a shrine to all aviators, but especially the Angels, the Navy's precision flying squadron, based here, that has thrilled and terrified air-show audiences for 50 years. + "It's natural to love guys who take chances," said Mr. Weissman, the elderly but spry owner of this world-famous aviators' bar, Trader Jon's. +Since he opened it in 1950, he has been like a father to these pilots, the Navy's best. He has flown with them, again and again, delighted, like some very old child on the grandest playground swing in the world. +Their relationship has outlived wars, has witnessed the change from propeller planes to jet engines, has even outdistanced the lives of some of the men whom he loves. They died in wars, in mid-air collisions, other ways, and here and there in the bar there is an empty flight suit, or a sentiment scribbled on a black and white picture by a dead man's hand. +Of the thousands of mementos that decorate this place, where pieces of wing hang from the ceiling and a giant tail fin adorns the scarred bar, it is those reminders of fallen angels that are most precious to an old man who turned a place to buy beer into a home for generations of pilots. +On one wall, past the pool tables where a civilian is drinking whisky straight up, is a golden flight suit hanging from a wall. The name patch reads "Harley Hall," who led the Blue Angels in 1970 and 1971. He befriended the old man, or the old man befriended him. When he left, he left his suit, about the most precious thing a pilot has to give. +"In 1973, he went to Vietnam," Mr. Weissman said, standing underneath the suit. "The day the war was over, he was shot down. Never been found. It wasn't right." +The face in the nearby picture is strong, intense. All of them look that way. +"It's hard to believe anything like that would come apart," the old man said. +He feels the same old sadnesses when he looks at Skip Umstead, who died in a mid-air collision in 1974. There are 12 in all, pilots of unusual reflexes and abilities who died from a twitch of the controls or a lucky shot, or other things. "Not too many. Twelve. In 50 years," he said, considering the dangers. Then he moves quickly along the walls to the ones still alive, the ones he can look at without it breaking his heart. +"He is flooded with memories," said Lieut. Comdr. Milton J. (Gus) Goss, United States Navy, retired, who flew Corsairs in World War II and taught a baseball player named Ted Williams how to fly. Commander Goss, who frequents the bar, carries a sack filled with magnolia blossoms, and hands them out to the pretty women. +"I've been everywhere and I've done it all," the former carrier pilot said. "The only thing is, I can't remember it," and he smiled. +"But he's the legend," he said, of Mr. Weismann, whom most people call by the name of the bar, Trader Jon. "I'm honored to know him." +Martin Weissman, who is 82, is as much a puzzle, a peculiarity, as the bar, where hundreds of model planes dangle from the ceiling by fishing line and old pilot helmets rest on a back bar. The Blue Angels are just part of this display, which includes photos, patches and paintings, from officers and enlisted men. They come to drink and talk jets, mixing with local people, listening to the blues. +Locals bring him their paychecks to cash. Pilots bring him a photo, or a patch or a small present, and take their place on the wall, in history. This has been the way it has been for almost 50 years. Some of the things left are a little puzzling, like the wooden statue of the South American headhunter who holds aloft a severed head. +Mr. Weissman works the bar most every night. Last week, he ate pork and beans out of a can with a spoon and explained how it all started. +He has loved to fly, since he was a boy on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. When he joined the Army in the late 1930's, he volunteered for the paratroopers, 36th Infantry. +He stepped from the plane and flew, for a few precious seconds. +"It was beautiful," he said. +Landing, he had trouble with. "I got hurt," he said, simply, and acknowledges that it is why he now walks in a kind of hurried limp, like that very old child that he is. +He has always been a bar owner, first in Manhattan, then in Key West, finally here, after the end of World War II. Word got around at the nearby naval base that the old man was friendly to fliers, to sailors. +"You got to earn their love, their friendship," he said. He found them to be like young men and boys anywhere, homesick, fearless in the sky but a little afraid on the ground. The pilots were tense, looking for someone to share their burdens. Mr. Weissman was a good listener. +They adopted him as much as he adopted them, and he has seen their characters faintly shift, especially the Blue Angels. Each team has had 10 members, and he remembers them all. In the 1950's and 1960's, they were more prone to swagger, to drink whisky. "Loose," he said. "Fancy free." +Now the young men seem much more a part of their highly technical aircraft. They drink beer. They are not swashbucklers, but triggers. If anything, they are more tense. The way Mr. Weissman sees it, they need an auxiliary family, a listener, a home away from home, more than ever. +They repay him with a ride in the clouds, a few times a year. +"I've never been afraid," he said. +He concedes that now they take it easy on him, with no loops or dives. +He flew himself, once, as a private pilot, but he has not been physically able to fly for a long time. +The Blue Angels made him an honorary flight leader some years back, but it is the rides he cherishes. +Among the mementos on the walls is a patch that was worn by an astronaut on the space shuttle. He acknowledges, sadly, that it is one flight he is just too old to make, now. +"But," he said, "wouldn't it be great?" + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Martin Weissman, owner of Trader Jon's, a Pensacola, Fla., bar that honors aviators, showed visitors flight memorabilia. His fond relationship with the Blue Angels, the Navy's best pilots, has survived for decades. (Lee Celano for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +255 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 21, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Child Insurance Bill Opposed As Threat to Cigarette Revenue + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 605 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 20 + +Republican senators attacked a children's health insurance bill today, saying the higher Federal tax it would place on tobacco would cost the states more than $1 billion in revenues annually by cutting cigarette sales. +The measure, proposed by Senators Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, and Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, calls for raising the current 24-cents-a-pack Federal tax to 67 cents to pay for subsidized insurance for children of the working poor. The sponsors of the bill intend to offer it on Wednesday as an amendment to the budget resolution. + The Republican Policy Committee, an arm of the leadership, today called the sponsoring Senators' intention "admirable" but misguided, "because states depend to a great degree on excise tax revenue." The committee estimated that decreased smoking resulting from the tax increase would cost states and localities $6.5 billion over five years. +"Even if one believes that decreased demand for tobacco is positive from a societal view, it still has negative fiscal aspects for the states," the committee said. +Mr. Kennedy scoffed at the report. +"If we can keep people healthy and stop them from dying," he said, "I think most Americans would say 'Amen; isn't that a great result?' " +He added, "If fewer people smoke, states will save far more in lower health costs than they will lose in revenues from the cigarette tax." +Mr. Hatch called the report "absolutely preposterous." +He said: "Does that mean that 419,000 Americans must die every year in order to preserve the state tobacco revenues? That's like saying we should withhold life-saving treatment from senior citizens in order to save Medicare money. If raising taxes on cigarettes results in less consumption, then it's worth it." +Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, joined the policy committee in attacking the bill. Mr. Lott said that there was already a budget agreement that had money for children's health care in it and that he hoped "the Senate will not be duped" into backing the bill. +The cigarette industry gave Republicans more than $8 million for the last election, about four times what it gave Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. But Senator Don Nickles, the deputy Republican leader, said that had nothing to do with the party leadership position. +"Oh, no, no, no," Mr. Nickles said. "It's a concern about having an open-ended entitlement program." +The legislation does not provide a formal entitlement, with as many individuals as qualify guaranteed benefits like those of Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. Instead, it offers a specific sum of money in the form of block grants that states can apply for or not. +But Republicans still call the bill an entitlement, saying states would feel politically compelled to take the grants and provide the insurance. The policy committee report said the legislation would "create a situation where states will be persuaded to assume new Federal mandates." +Mr. Hatch and Mr. Kennedy do not expect to win Wednesday's Senate vote. But Mr. Hatch said they planned to keep bringing the measure up during the year, expecting support to build. +Today they announced the support of five former Republican Secretaries of Health, Education and Welfare or Health and Human Services, and a newspaper advertisement paid for by a coalition of 150 health and children's advocacy groups that asks, "Senators, who do you stand with: "Joe Camel or Joey?" It is accompanied by pictures of the Camel cigarette advertisement character and of a winsome tyke in a cowboy hat. + + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +256 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 21, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +N.B.A. PLAYOFFS; +The Bulls Wake Up To Beat Heat + +BYLINE: By SELENA ROBERTS + +SECTION: Section B; Page 9; Column 5; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 925 words + +DATELINE: CHICAGO, May 20 + +There was no rivalry to stoke their intensity. No Jeff Van Gundy to prod Michael Jordan. No Knick cockiness to tweak them. +Only fear of losing to the Miami Heat seemed to excite the Chicago Bulls tonight. Only Michael Jordan's 37 points and Dennis Rodman's frenetic defense could roust them from their REM sleep, using a 12-4 run in a tense final four minutes to win Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals, 84-77, at the United Center. + For some reason, that detested designer coach, Pat Riley, was not a suitable incentive substitute for the Bulls. They wanted the Knicks, a fact that appeared to leave the Bulls treating the Heat as an oversight for most of the game. +"I think we might have caught them napping a little bit today," Riley said. "I know they were yawning for two days when they found out they were going to play us. Maybe we woke them up and will get their very, very best in the next game." +Was this a challenge? Riley was at it again, already working on his mental game in this four-of-seven-game series. +The master of motivation had his team ready. The Heat was up by 11 points at the half and by 5 points heading into the fourth quarter. Then the Bulls revealed their best side, using the lively Rodman (19 rebounds) on the boards and aggressive defense to force three turnovers in the last 3 minutes 23 seconds. +Suddenly, a Bulls team that was looking rickety and vulnerable -- suggesting that the age issue Tim Hardaway brought up on Monday was a real factor -- perked up like kids on a sugar binge. +"We heard comments that we may be too old to deal with them," Jordan said. "Maybe in the first half we looked like old men, missing layups and things like that. We came out in the second like young men. +"We didn't look like old men to me." +They looked like the Bulls of old, a championship team that can gather itself at will. +That experience flustered the Heat, which scored just 11 points in the fourth quarter. +"They showed their greatness with defensive pressure at the end," Riley said. "We succumbed to that." +That wasn't all. + After Alonzo Mourning had done so much -- 21 points, 6 blocked shots and 8 rebounds -- he unraveled under pressure. Once again, free throws befuddled him. He missed 5 of his last 6 attempts in the last 2:20 of the game. Same old problem. +"It's mental," Mourning said. "It's just going up there and being able to erase everything from my mind." +But how do you erase the indelible Rodman? +He slapped himself on Mourning like a neon decal in the second half, part of a double-team effort to stop the Heat's center. Rodman has a way of agitating big men, as well as officials. It was a test of who would crack first: Mourning, Rodman or the officials. At first, Rodman seemed to be sneaking by unnoticed, able to lower his shoulder into Mourning in the third quarter, leaving Mourning stretched out on the floor. He was holding his right rib cage. No Rodman foul was called. +"It's unfortunate we have to play with things like that happening on the court," Mourning said. "But if you slap me, I'm going to turn the other cheek. I can't do anything that would hurt my team. I need to be on the floor." +Mourning lasted longer than Rodman, who managed to pick up his 12th technical of the playoffs with 3:26 left in the third quarter -- when he flicked Mourning in the back -- and his sixth personal foul with 1:19 left in the game. In between the naughtiness, Rodman dived and scrambled and popped up and down. He did exactly what the Bulls needed. +The Bulls also needed that kind of effort from Ron Harper, who was assigned to contain Tim Hardaway. +All Hardaway needs is an inch on a pick-and-roll and he is launching 3-pointers as quick as skeet. Sometimes he doesn't even need an inch. Maybe he was distracted by the onslaught of his family and friends -- all of them wanting tickets from the Chicago native -- or maybe fatigue was a factor. Whatever it was, Hardaway did not have a chance to find his groove. +"They played good team defense on me," said Hardaway, who was 4 of 14 for 13 points. "We weren't aggressive with the ball at the end. We let this one slip away." +The Bulls did not seem to take the Heat seriously until the third quarter, able to trim the Heat's 49-38 halftime lead with an inspired 16-7 run. They drew that inspiration from Jordan and Rodman, able to force the Heat into turnovers and frustrate Miami's shot selection. Still, the Heat was able to remain calm enough to hold a 66-61 lead after the third quarter. +The Heat's Riley-induced will was evident from the start. Even though there was Riley on the sideline, even though the Heat had been the only team to beat the Bulls twice in the regular season, the Bulls were unprepared for what the Heat's quick start. +But in the end, the Bulls took the Heat seriously. The Knicks were the farthest thing from the Bulls' mind when they were down by 4 points with five minutes left. And yet, the Bulls won this game despite shooting just 36 percent, despite falling behind by 16 points in the first half. They won because they are the Bulls. +"With that big baseball bat they carry in Michael Jordan, they know they are going to have a chance to win at the end," Riley said. "We just needed to be stronger at the end. Instead, we got flustered. +"We led 45 minutes and we let it get away from us. We knew they were going to make a push at us. Experience has a lot to do with that." +Experience allowed the Bulls to take the Heat for granted before simply taking their opponents over. + +LOAD-DATE: May 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The Bulls' Michael Jordan slicing to the basket in the first half last night as Chicago took a 1-0 series lead. (Agence France-Presse)(pg. B12) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +257 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 21, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +SCHORR, RABBI SEYMOUR + +SECTION: Section D; Page 23; Column 1; Classified + +LENGTH: 298 words + +SCHORR-Rabbi Seymour, on May 17, 1997 (Shabbos). Precious darling husband of Audrey for 41 years. Most beloved father of Nanette and Ira, son-in-law Peter, daughter-in-law Bonnie, and sister Ruth Heller. He loved Hashem as no other has loved Hashem and, following his ordination from Rabbeinu Yitzchak Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS) of Yeshiva University where he received Smicha, he devoted more than two decades as a pulpit Rabbi where he served with distinction. He was lauded for his brilliant oratory, selfless dedication to the spiritual welfare of his congregants, his devotion to the Jewish community as well as the overall community having been Vice President of the Council of Social Agencies in one of the communities where he served. He was a was a member of the Executive Board of the ZOA during its early years having been an ardent Zionist during his youth even before the foundation of the State of Israel. Endowed with a broad intellectual curiosity, he was an accomplished Talmudic scholar, a superlative Hebrew grammarian having been instructed in his youth by the renowned Philip Birnbaum; he and Audrey were Patrons of the Metropolitan Opera for many years; he was a skilled chess player, a lover of English Literature, and a master of the English language. After retirement from the pulpit, he embarked on a successful entrepreneurial career becoming the owner of a retirement home for the elderly. He was adored by the residents for his intense, unique compassion and sense of humor, and they and the staff are devastated by his loss. He will be remembered with undying love by his heartbroken family, friends, and co-religionists at the Young Israel of North Woodmere and Young Israel of Woodmere. Please direct donations to the American Cancer Society. + +LOAD-DATE: May 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +258 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 22, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Questions Are Raised on Aggressive Heart Care + +BYLINE: Reuters + +SECTION: Section A; Page 17; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 360 words + +DATELINE: BOSTON, May 21 + +A comparison of heart attack patients in the United States and Canada shows that Americans get more aggressive care but their survival rate after one year is no better. +The study, being published on Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, may add fuel to a debate over whether expensive, high-tech treatments for heart attacks are as necessary as American doctors seem to think. + A team led by Dr. Jack Tu of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Ontario compared the treatments and death rates for nearly 234,000 elderly people in the two countries, all of whom had heart attacks in 1991. They found that the Americans were eight times as likely to have angioplasty surgery, in which a balloon is inflated inside a narrowed artery to re-open it, and eight times as likely to have heart bypass surgery. +Although slightly more Americans were alive 30 days after their heart attacks, the death rates were virtually identical at the one-year mark, Dr. Tu and his colleagues discovered. +"The strikingly higher rates of the use of cardiac procedures in the United States, as compared with Canada, do not appear to result in better long-term survival rates for elderly U.S. patients" who have had heart attacks, the researchers concluded. +The study did not compare the quality of life of the survivors, however. "Patients could be deriving substantial benefit from these procedures without there being a survival benefit at one year," Dr. Harlan Krumholtz of the Yale University School of Medicine wrote in an editorial in the journal. +In a study published in 1995, Dr. Krumholtz said, Canadian heart attack patients were less able to get around and suffered more symptoms than patients in the United States. "Whether differences of this magnitude justify our current approach requires further investigation," he said. +Other research has shown that heart attack victims are more likely to get expensive, high-tech treatments if they are admitted to hospitals that have the equipment for those treatments. If the hospital does not perform the procedure, the doctors who work there are less likely to recommend it. + +LOAD-DATE: May 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +259 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 23, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +THE AD CAMPAIGN; +First Negative Spot Attacks Opponent's Record in Congress + +BYLINE: By BRETT PULLEY + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4; Column 4; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 449 words + + +The campaign of James E. McGreevey, a state senator, Mayor of Woodbridge and a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor, has released "Two Democrats," a 30-second commercial. It is being broadcast in the southern region of the state, where one of Mr. McGreevey's opponents, Robert E. Andrews, is a Congressman. + + PRODUCER -- Struble, Oppel and Donovan Communications. + + ON THE SCREEN -- With "McGreevey" superimposed on the screen, Mr. McGreevey appears, chatting with a voter. The next scene shows the words "Full Day Kindergarten," and Mr. McGreevey is in a classroom reading to children. Next he is shown talking to college students, with the words "Deduction for College" superimposed. Then he is standing in a yard, surrounded by families, with the words "Elected Insurance Commissioner" on the screen. + + Suddenly, a gray image of the United States Capitol appears, with a slow-motion video of Mr. Andrews. Then, a shot of House Speaker Newt Gingrich fades in next to Mr. Andrews. With the words "Threatened Medicare," Mr. Andrews's image is shown next to that of an elderly man. Next, two children are seen eating lunch, with the words "Abolish School Lunch." Then a child is being vaccinated, and the words "Cut Vaccines" appear. The spot ends with the words "Is Andrews on Our Side?" + + THE SCRIPT -- Man's Voice: Jim McGreevey is a real Democrat with real solutions. Woman's Voice: Like full-day kindergarten. Man: A tax deduction for college. Woman: An elected insurance commissioner to stand up to industry. Man: But Camden Congressman Rob Andrews voted for the Gingrich tax scheme that threatened Medicare. Woman: The Gingrich welfare plan that abolished the school lunch program. Man: Andrews even voted with Gingrich against vaccines for children. Woman: So ask yourself, is Rob Andrews really on our side? + + ACCURACY -- Mr. Andrews did vote for the Republican tax plan in 1995, but so did other New Jersey Democrats. He was one of only nine Democratic representatives, however, to support the Gingrich welfare reform bill. Mr. Andrews has said he voted against making the school lunch program part of a block grant to guarantee that all states would continue to administer the program. Also, after making a campaign promise not to support any new taxes, Mr. Andrews voted against the 1993 Clinton budget, which included a vaccination program. + + SCORECARD -- By contrasting what Mr. McGreevey wants to do with what he says his opponent has done, the campaign has found a way to criticize the other side. But voters may object to Mr. McGreevey's emergence as the first candidate to use negative television advertising. + BRETT PULLEY + +LOAD-DATE: May 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +260 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 24, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Man Finds His Voice, but Forgets Having Lost It + +BYLINE: By ALAN FINDER + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 22; Column 4; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 340 words + +The Brooklyn man who had indicated to officials of a Newark hospital that he was deaf and mute has found his voice again upon returning home to New York City -- but he says he cannot remember being unable to hear or speak. +The man, Jose Gomez, began talking with doctors this week at Woodhull Medical Center, Renalda Higgins, a spokeswoman for the Human Resources Administration, the city's social service agency, said yesterday. Mr. Gomez told the doctors that he did not remember spending five days last week in St. James Hospital in Newark, seemingly unable to speak, hear, read or write. + Mr. Gomez appeared mysteriously early last week with his elderly mother at St. James Hospital. He communicated only by crude hand signals. His mother, Lydia Espina, who has Alzheimer's disease, was in a wheelchair and also appeared unable to speak. Both carried no identification, and hospital officials sought help from television stations to identify the anonymous pair. +That led to the appearance of several relatives and then a cascade of comments from Mr. Gomez's neighbors on Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick. More than a half-dozen neighbors insisted that Mr. Gomez could not only speak and write, but was fluent in Spanish and English. They said that his hearing and speech had never been a problem. +Mr. Gomez and his mother were transferred by ambulance from St. James Hospital to Woodhull, a city medical center in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on May 16. Both have since undergone extensive testing. Mrs. Espina, who remains at Woodhull, will be discharged to a nursing home after her son's medical evaluation is completed, Ms. Higgins said. +Mr. Gomez was taken yesterday from Woodhull to the Hospital for Joint Diseases Orthopedic Institute in Manhattan for neurological testing, she said. Some of his relatives said last week that he sometimes suffered seizures, and some hospital officials in Newark suggested that an accident or a neurological condition might have caused him to be temporarily unable to hear or speak. + +LOAD-DATE: May 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +261 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 24, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +More Retirees Discover Small-Town South + +BYLINE: By KEVIN SACK + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1860 words + +DATELINE: HATTIESBURG, Miss. + +There are no beaches here. No mountains. The public parks are equipped for softball, not shuffleboard. If there is a regular mah-jongg game anywhere in town, it is well hidden. +Yet retirees are migrating here in a steady stream, leaving the bustle and culture (and snow and congestion and crime) of the North to spend their leisure days in the piney woods of southern Mississippi. In the last four years, 267 retired couples have settled here in Hattiesburg, not an invasion of Floridian proportions perhaps, but enough to attract attention in a metropolitan area of only 100,000 people. + They are not alone. All across the rural South, retirees are moving to improbable places, lured by temperate weather, inexpensive living and savvy marketing by community leaders who have learned to court senior citizens as aggressively as they recruit automobile manufacturers. +Retirees who once would have flocked to the condominium canyons of South Florida, the golf resorts of coastal South Carolina or the mountains of North Carolina are today discovering small towns and country crossroads like Guntersville, Ala.; Mena, Ark., and Bainbridge, Ga., places that have never made anyone's list of retirement hot spots. +In other cases, huge retirement villages are springing up quite literally in the middle of nowhere, often far from airports and even midsize cities. In western South Carolina, for example, Cooper Communities of Bella Vista, Ark., has sold 3,600 home sites in its Savannah Lakes Village development near McCormick, a city that was described 15 years ago as a ghost town by U.S. News & World Report. +With the aging of the baby boomers making retirement a growth industry, several states are beginning to compete tenaciously for retirees. Some have established state agencies dedicated to the task. +And local governments and business groups around the South are developing tools for working the retirement market -- Web-site testimonials about the pleasures of small-town retirement, for example, and hospitality seminars that remind waitresses to show particular courtesy to elderly diners. +Mark Fagan, a professor at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, said his studies of retiree migration had demonstrated that senior citizens could help revive a slumbering economy. +"These counties in eastern Alabama didn't really have what it takes to compete in the smokestack chase, didn't have the infrastructure," Professor Fagan said. "But there are other ways to increase spending in an area." +Retirees have come to places like Hattiesburg, which is home to several hospitals and the University of Southern Mississippi, because of a growing sense that traditional retirement destinations like South Florida, Arizona and California are not as inviting as they once were. And many have come, demographers and sociologists say, because of a yearning for a sense of community that has vanished from many cities. +"We've lived in Los Angeles and Washington and New York and London, and when you live in the city, you don't become a part of the community," said Jean W. Carbonar, who moved here with her husband, Anthony, from the Upper East Side of Manhattan two years ago. "In New York, you don't meet your neighbors unless there's a real bad fire." +On paper, the Carbonars would seem unlikely prospects to spend the rest of their days in Hattiesburg. Before retiring, Mr. Carbonar was a partner with Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander & Ferdon, the Wall Street law firm where Richard M. Nixon hung his hat. In Manhattan, the Carbonars rented a $4,000-a-month apartment overlooking the Queensboro Bridge, and Mr. Carbonar collected boxes of exotic cigars. For a while, they considered retiring to New Zealand. +But after looking at Hattiesburg on the recommendation of their son-in-law, the Carbonars decided they liked the climate, the cost of living, the undulating fairways at the Hattiesburg Country Club and, perhaps above all, the hospitality extended by the community. +"We just felt we could look a long time and not find a place that duplicated it," said Mr. Carbonar, 63. "My friends in New York say, 'Isn't there a big culture shock down there?' And I say, 'Yeah, people here are polite, and for no good reason.' " +In couples like the Carbonars, business and political leaders in Mississippi and other Southern states see vast potential for economic development. When retirees relocate, they bring bank deposits and buy houses. They buy food, clothing, insurance and toys for visiting grandchildren. A 1990 study by William H. Haas, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, concluded that the average retiree household in western North Carolina injected about $36,000 a year into the local economy. +In addition, retirees pay taxes, usually on time, and place little strain on most municipal services. They do not pollute. They rarely commit crimes. They volunteer in schools and hospitals. +"Retirees have got more money than most folks," said Gov. Kirk Fordice of Mississippi, who created his state's Hometown Mississippi Retirement program in 1994. "They also are less of a strain on the infrastructure system. They don't use schools. They are what you might call ideal citizens." +The Census Bureau projects that the number of Americans age 65 and older, which was 33.5 million in 1995 (12.8 percent of the population), will grow to 45.6 million in 2015 (14.7 percent) and to 61.9 million in 2025 (18.5 percent). +In addition, some demographers predict that the percentage of retirees who migrate may begin to increase. From 1985 to 1990, 4.5 percent of all Americans 60 or older moved to another state, said Charles F. Longino Jr., a sociologist at Wake Forest University. +Florida, which has no state income tax, is still by far the most popular destination for migrating retirees, with 24 percent of the total moving there from 1985 to 1990, a study by Mr. Longino found. +But Florida's share of the retiree market declined by 2.5 percentage points during that period, while the share increased in states like Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. Many of the migrants to other Southern states are moving from Florida to escape crowds, crime and traffic. +Demographers said the movement of retirees to small towns in nontraditional retirement states was too recent to have been measured by the 1990 census. But they predicted that the 2000 census would show an acceleration in the decline in Florida's share of the market and an increase in the share of states like Mississippi. +In the last eight years, several states, including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Mississippi and Pennsylvania, have established agencies and budgets devoted solely to recruiting retirees. South Carolina has enlisted a for-profit company, the Center for Carolina Living, to do the job. +There are, of course, potential liabilities in creating an economy that is excessively dependent on retirees. In some states, notably Arizona and Florida, retirees have shown a propensity to vote against tax and bonding measures for school construction. And if the Federal Government reduces Medicare benefits, state and local governments may be forced to pick up health care costs for their elderly populations. +The potential for a heavy health care burden concerns Patrick Mason, co-founder of the Center for Carolina Living. +"We are saying to ourselves, 'Yeah, we need retirees, but we need the Cadillac-class retirees,' " Mr. Mason said. "The no-taxes, y'all-come approach in Florida drew a few millionaires but thousands of middle-class retirees. And when they spend down their assets, they're on Medicaid." +But most states seem to have decided that the benefits outweigh the liabilities. And nowhere has that conclusion been reached more definitively than in Mississippi. +The state appropriates $500,000 a year, one-fifth of all state dollars spent on economic development marketing, to the Hometown Mississippi Retirement program. To make Mississippi more appealing to retirees, the state pointedly eliminated its income tax on pensions and other forms of retirement income in 1995. +Since the state retirement program began advertising in 1995, it has helped at least 700 couples relocate to the state and fielded 100,000 inquiries via a toll-free phone number. It publishes a glossy guide to retirement cities, provides matching grants to towns that undertake their own marketing campaigns, and pays for national advertising. A typical advertisement depicts a snow shovel and the text, "You could always use it to dig out of a sand trap." +Inquiries are followed up with telephone calls, handwritten notes, Christmas cards and invitations to visit, often extended by retirees who have already moved to the state. +"A lot of states just mail out brochures," said Barbara P. McDonald, director of the program. "We knew that Mississippi, not being a traditional retirement destination, would have to go a step farther. So we try the personal touch." +A central component of Mississippi's plan is the designation of 20 cities as certified retirement communities. The state deems that the cities have met certain standards for public safety, recreational amenities, health care and housing. +In Hattiesburg, one of the certified cities, officials sell the city's proximity to New Orleans, Jackson and the casino-clogged Gulf Coast, all within a 90-minute drive. They also highlight the area's 13 golf courses, its two hospitals and large medical clinic, its four-season warmth, and its low housing costs and tax rates. +The culture of college towns appeals to many retirees. The Institute for Learning in Retirement at the University of Southern Mississippi offers bargain courses. +The Area Development Partnership, the city's chamber of commerce, sponsors outings for retirees who have moved to town. It has also put more than 200 employees of motels, restaurants, gas stations, banks and stores through a half-day refresher course in Southern hospitality. The workers are encouraged to fawn over older customers on the theory that some may be considering moving to town. +Charles Short, a marketing executive from Rochester, and his wife, Helen, a microbiologist, got a heavy dose of hospitality when they happened upon Hattiesburg while on a camping trip in 1991. After expressing interest in retiring here, they received telephone calls every other week from other retirees who had already moved to Hattiesburg. +Now the Shorts are making the calls, telling prospects how the produce manager shakes their hands when they enter the grocery store and how they bought a larger house in Hattiesburg than they owned in Rochester and still save $4,000 a year in property taxes. +They also enjoy dispelling the notion, whether held by prospects or old friends in Rochester, that they have moved to a cultural backwater. +"The response from our friends and neighbors was universally negative, that we were going to some morass down here," said Mrs. Short, 67. "So it was with some pride that I wrote them to tell them that Itzhak Perlman was headlining the symphony series. That took the wind out of their sails." + +LOAD-DATE: May 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Some states and cities are using brochures to try to attract retirees. (The New York Times)(pg. 1); Anthony and Jean W. Carbonar, former residents of Manhattan, considered retiring to New Zealand, but Hattiesburg, Miss., won their hearts. The Hattiesburg Country Club was part of the attraction.; Charles and Helen Short, impressed by the hospitality that was shown them on a visit to Hattiesburg, decided to retire there from Rochester. (Photographs by Alan S. Weiner for The New York Times)(pg. 9) + +Map of the South: Hattiesburg, Miss., is among the Southern towns wooing retirees. (pg. 9) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +262 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 25, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE BIG CITY; +Mob Metaphysician + +BYLINE: By John Tierney + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 22; Column 1; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 967 words + + +They say I broke the oath. But it wasn't the oath I thought I was taking. I thought it was about honor and brotherhood. . . . It was none of that. It was all about greed and power. In reality, it was a total joke. +-- Salvatore Gravano, in his biography, "Underboss: Sammy the Bull Gravano's Story of Life in the Mafia," explaining his decision to testify against John Gotti. + +Sept. 18, 1976. Induction Day! Dear diary, how can I describe the emotions that surged through me as I took the oath. They brought me to a basement in Bensonhurst, where a guy named Paul Castellano was presiding over a meeting. He explained that he was the leader of a "secret society" of gentlemen whose motto was Cosa Nostra -- I think that's Italian for "Community Service." It's kind of a religious group -- they burned a picture of a saint during the oath ceremony -- but they also work with a lot of local businesses, and out in Queens they have a place called the Bergin Hunt and Fish Social Club. Paul got me real inspired with his speech about family and honor and God. I was afraid the other members would look down on me because of my criminal record, but they all seemed friendly. The only awkward moment came when I stood up and asked, "When do we go fishing?" + Dec. 24, 1977. Last week, when Paul asked for a cut of my drywall company's contracts, I didn't understand the spirit of giving. I knew it was for a good charity -- Paul's raising money to build a senior-citizens residence on Staten Island -- but I didn't think my company could afford such a hefty donation. Sure enough, when I figure in charitable contributions, we get underbid for a big job at an office tower in midtown. Paul tells me to go visit the construction site. I'm shocked. "You're not asking me to whack ----." +"No, no," Paul says. "Just watch." I get to the site at 8 in the morning. The teamster at the front gate is inspecting a truck bringing in cement. He's checking the guy's union credentials, looking at the tires, the brakes -- going by every rule in the book. It takes him half an hour to wave the truck through. By noon there's 50 trucks lined up waiting for inspection. At 2 o'clock the developer calls my office and offers us the contract. I bring Paul his share of the money, but I'm still confused. "Why are the teamsters standing up for some old folks on Staten Island?" I ask. +"One word, Sammy. Brotherhood." +Dec. 15, 1985. I heard John Gotti was kind of a zealot -- besides his full-time job as a plumbing salesman, he runs an antismoking campaign in Queens that hijacks cigarette trucks -- so at first I didn't believe his accusations against Paul. Paul had set up a trash-carting operation with "exclusive routes" to make sure everyone participated in our recycling program. But today John showed me where the stuff was really going -- the Staten Island landfill! Then he drove toward the Verrazano Bridge and pointed to a huge white mansion on a hill. "That's Paul's estate," he said. "That's the senior-citizens residence you've been contributing to." +"What comes first," I ask, "our brotherhood with Paul or the club's honor?" John said he always turned to Machiavelli when he had a tough moral decision to make. He suggested I read "The Prince" before tomorrow's meeting with Paul at Sparks Steak House. +Dec. 16, 1985. I spent all night in my library. Machiavelli said some interesting things about the practical necessity of breaking promises, but I couldn't ignore what Socrates said about fidelity to your superiors. Finally at dawn I came across something in Kant's "The Metaphysics of Morals": "A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose." I decided we had to investigate Paul's finances, no matter what. On the way to Sparks, John said he had always liked the categorical imperative and agreed something had to be done. But before we even got out of the car on East 46th Street, we heard shots, and then there was Paul lying in a pool of blood outside the steakhouse. +"Must have been a hit team from one of those radical environmental groups," John said as we drove away. I was stunned. I knew those guys took their recycling seriously, but. . . . +March 8, 1988. John had doubts about being able to fill Paul's shoes, but today he proved what a great leader he is. One of our members, Louie Milito, was killed on the club's hunting expedition. John never even liked Louie, but he was so concerned about Louie's family that he personally arranged for the funeral upstate. I helped his guys load the body into the trunk for the private burial. +Dec. 12, 1990. Dear diary! I never thought I'd be writing you from inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center. They indicted John and me for racketeering and obstruction of justice. They even say John planned the hit on Paul! I was proud when John stood up and pleaded innocent, but as I watched him in court, a strange thought occurred to me: How could a plumbing salesman afford that suit? +May 5, 1991. John got mad in the jail library when he saw me reading Machiavelli. He reminded me of our oath -- and I was deeply moved. Still, doubts persist. What is honor? What is brotherhood? Why hadn't they invited me to go along on that hunting expedition? +Oct. 9, 1991. The day began grimly with a visit from my lawyer. He says I'm looking at 50 years. Then, at long last -- a moment of ethical clarity! This afternoon I was reading "Being and Nothingness" and suddenly it was as if Sartre was speaking to me in my cell: "Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth." +Should I share this insight with John? I think I'll talk to the prosecutor first. + +LOAD-DATE: May 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL WITTE) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +263 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 25, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Answering the Needs Of Elderly Alcoholics + +BYLINE: By KATE STONE LOMBARDI + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 1; Column 5; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1339 words + +DATELINE: HARRISON + +A 73-year-old Yonkers man had never been much of a drinker. He spent his career in the newspaper business and his free time collecting trophies and medals from racing his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. +But in the last five years, the things he cared about most began to pass from his life. At 68, he retired from his job. He could no longer ride his motorcycle. His health deteriorated; he had a heart attack, followed by crippling arthritis. + "All the things I could do with my eyes closed I couldn't do anymore," he said. "It had been 38 years since I drank, and all of a sudden I started drinking red wine. I found out that if I drank three or four glasses, I didn't have pain anymore. Soon I was going through a gallon a day." +For another 73-year-old, a New Rochelle resident, drinking had been a lifelong problem. He had been through several detoxification programs and had lost a number of jobs because of alcoholism. He had survived prostate cancer but had respiratory problems and a pacemaker. A widower, he had several years of sobriety behind him when he relapsed after losing a good friend. But this time, he found the problem even more intractable than it had been when he was younger. +"Lately, when I was feeling bad, I'd take a drink, but it didn't make me feel better," he said. "It made me feel worse. Your tolerance gets low. It doesn't take much to make you high and miserable. I got to the point where if I didn't feel good in the morning, I'd start drinking. The more I drank, the worse I would feel, but I couldn't stop once I had started." +Both men represent a problem of growing concern to doctors and social workers in the field of alcoholism: abuse among the elderly. +Experts estimate that about 7 to 10 percent of people older than 65 suffer from alcoholism and other drug dependencies, which is roughly the same as those in other age groups. But there are several factors that compound the problem for older people and can delay diagnosis and treatment. +First, as people age, some of the emotional stresses that can lead to alcohol abuse or chemical dependency begin to multiply rapidly. People whose lives had been full with work, marriage and friends may in a fairly short time find themselves isolated and in ill health. A succession of losses can transform the lives of the elderly, robbing them of companionship, support and structure. +"The most common thing we see is people who begin drinking heavily after the death of a spouse, retirement, serious physical illness or the loss of independence," said Sarah Davis, an alcohol counselor at St. Vincent's Westchester hospital here, which operates a program aimed at people older than 55 who suffer from alcoholism and other drug dependencies. +Ms. Davis said there are several reasons why older people are less likely to get treatment for alcohol or drug abuse. First, the effects of alcoholism can mimic those of aging. Memory loss, depression, sleeplessness, uneven gait, even slurred speech can be attributed to old age or senility when alcohol can be the culprit. +Also, because the elderly are often socially isolated, they are not subjected to the usual checks that might force a younger person to confront a problem. For instance, older people drive less, so they are less likely to be arrested for drunken driving. Most are retired, so they are not in a position to be dismissed from their jobs for alcoholism. Many are widowed, so they do not have a spouse who might detect a problem. +Compounding the difficulty in identifying the illness is the fact that while younger generations generally accept alcoholism as a disease, older people tend to view drinking problems with a sense of shame and often as a sign of weakness of character. +"Older people take a little more loving care to try to help them get past the shame and stigma of it," Ms. Davis said. "In some cases the denial of it is pretty strong. We have to work very hard to get them to understand that we are not trying to humiliate them and that this is a disease." +Ms. Davis and another counselor, John Krachenfels, helped organize the St. Vincent's Older Adult Recovery Program last August. The program, which is also offered at the Maxwell Institute of St. Vincent's Westchester in Bronxville, is part of the hospital's geriatric services. +Bernadette Kingham, a spokeswoman for St. Vincent's, said the hospital recognized that elderly people were not well served for drug and alcohol abuse treatment in the county. She said the staff realized earlythat the elderly needed to be treated for the problem somewhat differently from the way younger people are treated. +For instance, older people are less comfortable talking about their emotions and problems than are younger people, so traditional group therapy is less successful with them. When they meet in groups, older people also respond much better if they are among people of their own age and not mixed with younger alcoholics and drug abusers. +The 73-year-old New Rochelle resident, who went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings before his relapse, said that he had not been comfortable at certain meetings. "I went to a couple of A.A. meetings in New Rochelle, but they had younger people there, and they used all types of language and they had been into drugs," he said. "I didn't feel comfortable there. The other day I was at a meeting at St. Vincent's, and there were people there that have the same problems I had. That program has become like a family." +At the same time, elderly people respond strongly to education about alcoholism, Ms. Davis said. "One of the things that's easier about working with older people is that they are good students," she said. "Once they hear the education they seem to absorb it and warm up to the idea pretty well. It's always easier to hear that you have a disease than that you have a moral weakness." +The Older Adult Recovery Program meets three days a week for 12 weeks. Only nine participants are accepted at a time. Each session is a combination of education and therapy. The group discussions are paced more slowly than those for younger participants, with the understanding that it takes longer for elderly people to discuss their emotions with a group. At the same time, Ms. Davis said, the peer group becomes critically important to this age group because it provides the connection to other people that many participants, in their social isolation, have been lacking. +Program counselors then try to connect each person with an Alcoholics Anonymous group in which they will be at ease. "For some of the older people this is the key, getting them connected," Ms. Davis said. "They need to feel that life has some meaning. They can have friends and a network through A.A. that can go on for the rest of their lives." +About 25 people have gone through the program. Participants come from all over the county and have been referred by a variety of sources: centers for the elderly, doctors, home health aides and family members. The program accepts most insurance and has a sliding fee scale. +One of the most troubling attitudes counselors have to face from family members as well as from elderly alcoholics is the idea that old age is a difficult time during which it is acceptable for the person to withdraw into drinking and that such indulgence somehow enhances the quality of the rest of their lives. +"One of the reasons people tend not to bring a person into treatment when they're old is the idea that they may not have many years left," Ms. Davis said. "Why not let them just enjoy what few pleasures they have left? But people are living longer and longer and often can live productive and rewarding lives into their 80's and 90's. To say someone in their 70's should just indulge and drink themselves to death is just wrong. It's only going to cause more misery." +More information about St. Vincent's Older Adult Recovery program is available by calling 925-5261 in Harrison or the Maxwell Institute at 337-6033 in Bronxville. + +LOAD-DATE: May 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Gorka Sampedro) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +264 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 25, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ON POLITICS; +Not a Bumper-Sticker Issue, But Some Folks Are Curious + +BYLINE: By Jennifer Preston; Jennifer Preston is Trenton bureau chief of The New York Times. + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 2; Column 5; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 848 words + +DATELINE: TRENTON + +State Senator James E. McGreevey knew that Governor Whitman's proposed $2.75 billion borrowing for the state pension system was beginning to resonate with voters when two elderly women asked him about it after a church service. +Even Mr. McGreevey, one of the three candidates seeking the Democratic nomination on June 3 to challenge Mrs. Whitman this fall, was surprised. The Governor's plan is not what political analysts call a "bumper sticker issue." + But Mrs. Whitman's proposal to borrow $2.75 billion to help close a deficit in the state pension fund and her new state budget is beginning to raise questions in the minds of some voters about how exactly the Governor kept her promise to cut state income taxes by 30 percent. +And they are not questions that you necessarily want raised if you are Governor Whitman and you are running for re-election and your tax cut is what voters consider your most important achievement. +In many ways, the bond scheme is a brilliant budget maneuver. It is the latest in a series of moves by Brian W. Clymer, the soon-to-depart State Treasurer, who came up with ways to balance the budget over the last four years with a tax cut and without making equal spending reductions in state services and programs. +Under the plan, the state would use the borrowing proceeds and investment gains from the pension system to pay off a $4.2 billion deficit in the state's pension funds. That, in turn, would allow the state to use investment gains to cover the cost of $600 million that the state was scheduled to pay into the pension fund this year. +Most of the public employee unions, including the powerful teachers' union, have embraced the idea, although the New Jersey State AFL-CIO is still opposed to it. The Whitman administration insists that the plan will save the state billions of dollars in future payments on the deficit. +However, the plan has focused attention (perhaps unwanted by Mrs. Whitman) on the vast changes that she made to the pension system in 1994. It was largely those changes that helped pay for much of her celebrated tax cut. Since 1994, the changes have allowed the state to cut its scheduled contributions by more than $3 billion to the pension funds. +Democrats had planned to argue that the property taxpayers paid for most of the tax cut. Now they are arguing that Mrs. Whitman is paying for her tax cuts by trying to mortgage the state's future. +"The Governor brought this on herself," Mr. McGreevey said. "People in New Jersey are beginning to understand what this bond issue is all about." +When Mr. McGreevey and his Democratic rivals, Michael Murphy, and Robert E. Andrews, met for their televised debates, they hammered Mrs. Whitman with the bond issue almost as much as they lobbed criticism at her about property taxes and auto insurance, signaling that the pension bond issue will remain a topic of discussion in the fall campaign. +"This pension bond scheme is absolutely frightening," Mr. Murphy said last week when asked about it in the second televised debate. "This governor has brought us to the precipice of fiscal disaster." +Mrs. Whitman's top aides had not anticipated the political fallout from the proposal. They had expected that the state Legislature would have given approval to the deal by now. They had also expected that the $2.75 billion in bonds would have been sold and the $590 million budget gap would have been plugged. +But a handful of Senate lawmakers, concerned that their reputations as fiscal conservatives might be on the line, have balked, delaying passage, and therefore, the deal. And now, the budget gap could balloon by as much as $248 million more because the State Supreme Court insists that Governor Whitman and Republican lawmakers make up the difference between what the state's richest and poorest districts spend, not simply address the imbalance by setting core-curriculum standards. +Standard & Poor's, a major credit-rating agency, weighed in last week with its assessment that is certain to give Democrats more fodder. +In a newsletter distributed to thousands of prospective investors in the municipal bond market, Standard & Poor's issued a warning that the bond deal could jeopardize the state's AA-plus credit rating because it "only delays difficult decisions to achieve a prudently balanced budget." +The Senate president. Donald T. DiFrancesco, said that he would not put the pension borrowing plan up for a vote until after the June 3 primary because a handful of Republican Senate lawmakers are concerned that their support for the plan could cost them votes in contested primary elections. +That means that the Legislature will address in June what could be the three most contentious issues in this year's gubernatorial and legislative races: the bond deal, auto insurance and a new school-financing plan. +What Governor Whitman's aides hope is that voters forget all about this bond business during the summer. That's entirely possible, but unlikely. Especially when two elderly ladies are asking about it after a church gathering. + +LOAD-DATE: May 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Jennifer Preston. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +265 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 25, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WEDDINGS; +Susannah Nathan And John Files 3d + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 44; Column 2; Society Desk + +LENGTH: 202 words + +Susannah Day Nathan, a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. David A. Nathan of Bethesda, Md., was married there yesterday to John Files 3d, a son of Jane B. McDermott and John R. Files, both of Portland, Me. Dr. Arthur C. Blecher, a rabbi, officiated at the Congressional Country Club. The Rev. Michael J. Kelley, a Roman Catholic priest, took part in the ceremony. +The couple graduated from Hamilton College. + The bride, 25, is an employment and mental-health counselor at Bay Cove Human Services, a social services agency in Boston for people with mental illnesses. +Her mother, Nancy B. Nathan, is the senior producer of "Meet the Press," the NBC television program in Washington. The bride's father is the director of government relations for the American Optometric Association in Washington. Her maternal grandfather, Daniel E. Button of Delmar, N.Y., was a Republican Congressman representing the Albany area from 1967 to 1971. +The bridegroom, 24, is a production editor at O'Reilly & Associates, a technical book publishing firm in Cambridge, Mass. His mother is a nurse's assistant at St. Joseph's Manor, a home for the elderly in Portland. His father retired as a sergeant first class in the Army. + +LOAD-DATE: May 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Susannah Nathan. (Leslie Cashen) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +266 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 25, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: CARROLL GARDENS/RED HOOK; +For Elderly, New Rule Makes Check-Cashing a Task Full of Perils + +BYLINE: By DAVID ROHDE + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 8; Column 3; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 390 words + +On paper, it might seem like a technicality. But in the sprawling Red Hook Houses, a new City Housing Authority policy is causing confusion among the complex's 690 elderly residents and spurring an effort to create an escort service for them. +Beginning June 1, the Red Hook Houses, which has 7,300 tenants in its 30 buildings, will be one of the last of the city's 341 public housing complexes to no longer allow tenants to cash government-issued checks at the complex's management offices. They will have to go to a bank, post office or check-cashing business. + In most other neighborhoods, traveling to a nearby bank or check-cashing business would be simple. But in Red Hook, the options are few. There is only one check-cashing business in the neighborhood. Until a new Independence Savings Bank branch opens near the corner of Columbia and Lorraine Streets in mid-September, there are no banks. +Under the old system, most tenants cashed their benefit checks in the Housing Authority's office and paid their rent in cash. All tenants will lose this convenience and for the elderly, who often have a hard time traveling, the loss will be greater. +"The government is supposed to care for senior citizens," said Esther Pelliccia, a 65-year-old resident of the Red Hook Houses. "Yet they're imposing more burdens on us." +Ruth Colon, a spokeswoman for the Housing Authority, said the new policy was an attempt to reduce the potential for robberies in Housing Authority offices. Thieves, aware that the offices have large amounts of cash on hand on the days that government-issued checks arrive, have robbed authority offices in the past. She said that under the new policy housing, the housing authority's managers are to offer their staff workers as security escorts if the elderly request them. +But Jimmi Hammond, a member of the Red Hook Public Safety Corps, who said there were not nearly enough Housing Authority staff workers to act as escorts, hopes to help the elderly avoid the risk of traveling to banks to cash checks. He wants to start an escort service. +"The seniors are scattered all over Red Hook," said Mr. Hammond, who is trying to recruit volunteers and obtain a van for the new service. +Ms. Colon said the housing authority welcomed the proposal for an escort service for the elderly. DAVID ROHDE + +LOAD-DATE: May 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +267 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 25, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Prosecutors Who Still Haven't Rested + +BYLINE: By JOSEPH P. FRIED + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 30; Column 4; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1081 words + +Hunched forward in his chair, his hand trembling, the elderly man recalled how he had been assaulted and robbed in his Brooklyn home. +"A woman and two men," he said of the intruders, his Spanish translated by an interpreter for the two assistant district attorneys interviewing him in an office in a downtown Brooklyn courthouse. The woman was familiar from the neighborhood, he explained, so he had not been suspicious when she appeared at his apartment, seemingly alone. + "What happened then?" Caryn Stepner, 33, one of the prosecutors, asked. +"The men came in," the victim, in his 70's, replied. He said the men roughed him up after the woman told them, "He has money," and then made off with several hundred dollars. They are still being sought; the woman was arrested. +But Ms. Stepner needed more information to prepare the case against the woman, and her continuing questioning, and the constant intervention of the interpreter, made the man increasingly confused and agitated. +Suddenly, Ms. Stepner's colleague, Elizabeth Argar Fass, detoured into a seemingly irrelevant line of questions. +"How long have you had diabetes?" +"Thirty-five years." +"Do you take insulin?" +"Yes." +"How many times a day?" +"Two." +"How do you feel?" +"Nervous." +But the man had already begun to relax. He sat back, and the session continued with less strain. Perhaps Mrs. Fass's solicitous queries had soothed him, but her age, too, could have helped. At 85, a decade older than the man she was interviewing, she hardly fits the image of a hard-charging young prosecutor. +Mrs. Fass had provided the distressed victim with a "comfort zone," as she later put it. And that was the point. Mrs. Fass is one of a group of retired or semiretired lawyers who volunteer to work as unpaid assistant district attorneys in an unusual program in the Brooklyn District Attorney's office, helping to investigate and prosecute crimes against the elderly. +The District Attorney, Charles J. Hynes, said he established the program because retired lawyers "can relate and be sensitive to someone of similar age," giving elderly victims "more confidence in the system." +The 5-year-old program, in which the participants generally contribute a day or two of work each week, is the only one of its kind in the five district attorneys' offices in New York City. James Polley, director of government affairs for the National District Attorneys Association in Alexandria, Va., said he had not heard of another like it across the country. +Aside from Mrs. Fass, who retired in 1978 as a supervisor of city lawyers handling child-abuse cases and the like in Family Court, the nine volunteers include a former State Assemblyman as well as retired or partly retired lawyers with corporate, real estate or other backgrounds. +"Criminal law experience is not required," said Eugene Kelley, an executive assistant district attorney who runs the program. "We train them." +The volunteers cite various reasons for participating, usually boiling these down to a desire to remain vital by staying useful. +"Fifty percent of the people retire too early and I'm one of them," said John A. Esposito, 69, who was a Republican State Assemblyman from Queens for 11 years and who was a supervisor of bankruptcy trustees in Federal Court when he retired in 1989. Finding that it was not enough to "go fishing and do this and that," he was among those who responded to Mr. Hynes's original advertisement for volunteers in 1992. +Thomas T. Trunkes, 70, who retired a decade ago as an administrative law judge with the National Labor Relations Board, said, "I have a good retirement and I have time to help people in distress, and it gives me satisfaction." +Mrs. Fass said that joining the program "was like coming home," a reference to the downtown Brooklyn area where the district attorney's office is located and where she had spent years as a city lawyer in the Brooklyn branch of Family Court. +Besides helping interview elderly victims -- "the color of my hair helps a lot" in putting them at ease, said the gray-haired Mrs. Fass -- the volunteers guide them through the criminal justice system, which Mr. Kelley says many elderly people find confusing and intimidating. +The volunteers also work to overcome the reluctance or fear many elderly people have when pressing charges, especially if the suspect is a relative or neighbor. +Some of the volunteers with commercial law experience pore over financial records -- particularly valued because of the work's time-consuming nature -- to build cases against people suspected of having swindled the elderly out of savings or property. +"This poor old lady has had her house stolen out from under her," James Patrick McGovern, a former corporate lawyer, said recently as he pointed to a pile of mortgage papers and deeds. He was examining them to determine how an 80-year-old widow had lost her house to so-called financial counselors that the woman had consulted after falling behind in her mortgage payments. +Instead of helping her erase the arrears, the counselors had used the house as collateral for schemes that enriched themselves and left her on the brink of eviction, Mr. McGovern said. +At 55, recuperating from cancer surgery, he is semiretired from a career that included posts like group counsel with Litton Industries, the maker of electronic guidance and control systems. His reason for joining the program provides a personal riff to Mr. Hynes's theme of giving the elderly more confidence in the justice system. +Mr. McGovern said his own parents were elderly victims of a mugging in their Manhattan apartment building. The suspects were seized, but never prosecuted, and his parents were never told why, Mr. McGovern said. +The memory of his late parents was not far away on a recent day as he sympathetically questioned the defrauded widow about legal documents that the mortgage "counselors" had induced her to sign without explaining their significance. +"I did not read it," the woman said sheepishly, referring to a power of attorney that had given the con artists carte blanche over her house. "For that I fault myself. I'm sorry." +"You need not apologize," Mr. McGovern responded, reassuring her that she was not alone in being vulnerable in a world where "it's amazing what people will do for the dollar." +Invoking his parents, he said: "Like you, they were part of a generation that trusted people. Fortunately, they did not own a house." + +LOAD-DATE: May 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Elizabeth Argar Fass is among the retired lawyers who work as volunteer prosecutors for the Brooklyn District Attorney's office. (Nancy Siesel/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +268 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 26, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Other Laws Could Expire In Rent Fight + +BYLINE: By DENNIS HEVESI + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 25; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk; Second Front + +LENGTH: 960 words + +While the debate over ending rent regulations has focused on whether to continue the limits on rent increases, a host of other issues affecting thousands of tenants are dangling in legislative limbo. +They include the fate of a New York City program that exempts more than 55,000 elderly tenants from rent increases and the future of a state regulation that guarantees the right to a lease renewal. Also in limbo are a provision of the law that protects tenants from hasty evictions, and another that guarantees rights to tenants when their buildings are converted into co-ops or condominiums. + Although all parties to the debate insist that the elderly will be protected no matter what, no one has yet drafted legislation that would continue the Senior Citizen Rent Increase Exemption Program if -- in the most extreme scenario -- the laws simply expire at midnight on June 15. +Discussing the senior citizens program, known as Scrie, the city's Commissioner for the Aging, Herbert W. Stupp, said, "Everyone says they want to protect seniors, but if rent regulation were abolished we would have nothing to peg the benefit to." +At literally the same second, a law governing the way that co-op and condominium conversions can proceed is also set to expire. As matters stand, the only legislation drafted to extend those conversion provisions has been tucked into the Democratic version of the rent-regulation legislation. +"Everyone seems to be playing chicken on this one," said Stuart Saft, chairman of the Council of New York Cooperatives. +At the same time, other elemental provisions of the current rent laws hang in the balance. They include a tenant's right to a new lease upon the expiration of the old one, the grounds for eviction, a tenant's right to a base level of services and the issue of tenancy succession. +The succession question was raised recently when the State Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, a Republican of Rensselaer County, said that while he could support rules allowing immediate family members to inherit rent-regulated apartments, he insisted that gay and other unmarried couples should no longer have those rights. +The right to a lease renewal and protections against eviction are rights that many New Yorkers hold dear. As it now stands, landlords must offer a tenant a lease renewal except under specific circumstances, like illegal activity in an apartment, overcrowding by the tenant or the creation of a nuisance by the tenant. +Last December, Senator Bruno said he would let the state's rent laws expire, but he later softened his stance, saying he would support maintaining protections for the elderly, the disabled and the poor. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat of Manhattan, has insisted that the laws be renewed without changes. +Trying to negotiate a compromise, Gov. George E. Pataki proposed that the state's 1.1 million regulated apartments become exempt from rent increase limits as they become vacant -- a policy known as vacancy decontrol -- and that all households with incomes of $175,000 or more be decontrolled. Neither legislative leader budged. +Under the Scrie program, tenants who are 62 years or older and earn less than $20,000 a year are exempt from increases that would raise the rent beyond one-third of their disposable income. The difference between the allowable rent and the rent to which the landlord would otherwise be entitled becomes a tax deduction for the landlord. +If the rent regulations expire, tax laws would have to be amended to cover those formerly regulated apartments. "And if those apartments went to market rate," said Andrew Scherer, author of a 1995 book on New York's landlord-tenant laws, "New York City's tab for the Scrie program would rise astronomically." +The entire bill for the Scrie program -- $91 million last year -- comes from the city's coffers. Asked if the city could afford the jump in cost if Scrie apartments go to market rate, Commissioner Stupp said, "Not with the budget we have now." +"I presume they are going to keep regulations for people above 62," the Commissioner said, "but without a system to peg the subsidies, we wouldn't have a way to calculate the benefit for senior recipients." +The co-op and condominium conversion protections are part of the Martin Act, which regulates the sales of securities in the state. If those regulations expire, Mr. Saft said, "Tenants in rental buildings would be subject to landlords being able to convert with virtually no restrictions. Landlords would be able to evict tenants at the end of their lease. Tenants wouldn't even have to be offered the right to buy the apartment." +Other provisions facing expiration establish how many apartments must be sold for a building to be converted. A change in the law would not affect residents currently living in co-ops and condominiums, and few conversion plans have been proposed in recent years. Still, Mr. Saft said: "There may be sponsors waiting on the sidelines to see what happens June 15th." +Senator Bruno did not respond to three requests for an interview about these issues. Nor did Attorney General Dennis C. Vacco, whose office administers the Martin Act. +Vito J. Lopez, the Brooklyn Democrat who heads the Assembly Housing Committee, said, "I believe, and I'm an optimist, that in the next two or three weeks we will satisfactorily resolve all of the protections that are coming up for continuation." +A leading landlord advocate, Joseph Strasburg of the Rent Stabilization Association, said the Democrats were trying to use these other issues as bargaining chips in the negotiations. In the end, Mr. Strasburg said, he expects that both Scrie and the co-op laws will be continued "independent of rent regulation." + +LOAD-DATE: May 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +269 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 27, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +BATTLE LINES FORM IN MEDICARE FIGHT + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1261 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 26 + +Having agreed on the general outlines of a plan to balance the budget, Congress will soon begin a major effort to redesign Medicare, and the process has already set off a fierce legislative struggle that pits elderly people, hospitals, doctors and other health care providers against one another. +Congress has agreed to cut projected Medicare spending by $115 billion, or 8.5 percent, in the next five years but has not made any final decisions about how. + Each group wants to protect its share of the $1.2 trillion to be spent by Medicare in that period, and, in most cases, the preferred strategy is to appeal to "equity" and "fairness" and argue that others should bear a larger share of the cuts. +Every additional dollar of premiums paid by the elderly is one fewer dollar that must be cut from payments to hospitals. Each dollar taken from surgeons frees up a dollar for family doctors and internists. +Republicans and a few Democrats in Congress say their objective this year is not just to save money but also to modernize Medicare by giving beneficiaries a wider choice of competing health plans, including health maintenance organizations and other forms of managed care. +When President Clinton vetoed the Republicans' budget-balancing bill in December 1995, he listed 82 reasons, starting with "extreme cuts" in Medicare. The cuts have been scaled back this year, but Republicans still want to make major changes in the structure of the system, using the 1995 bill as a model. +In the 1995 showdown, the political stakes were higher. Democrats said the Republicans were undermining the insurance plan, and some Republicans paid a price in the 1996 elections. But the results of this year's battle may have more lasting effects because they will probably be written into law. +Some of the Democrats' leading experts on Medicare share the Republicans' conviction that the program, created in 1965, must be updated to keep pace with changes revolutionizing the health care industry. +Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who began his career as a legal services lawyer for the elderly, said: "Medicare is a bureaucratic Tin Lizzie in many parts of the country. If we use the next few years to make significant reforms, we can get Medicare ready for the demographic tsunami when 75 million baby boomers reach retirement age. +"Democrats can win on this issue by guaranteeing well-defined, secure benefits for seniors. But we should acknowledge that the Republicans are absolutely right about the need to increase competition and choice in the program." +Representative Bill Thomas, the California Republican who heads the Ways and Means subcommittee on health, said the 1995 experience was practice for this year's effort. +"We're going to shove as much Medicare reform as possible" into this year's budget bill, Mr. Thomas said. +Most people on Medicare, 88 percent of the 38 million beneficiaries, are in the traditional program, which pays a separate fee for each doctor's service and each hospital admission. While H.M.O.'s are readily available to the elderly in places like Phoenix and Los Angeles, there are no Medicare H.M.O.'s in 12 states and in some cities. +Congressional leaders say that to solve the problem they will reduce huge regional disparities in the payment of H.M.O.'s. That means less money, or smaller increases, for New York City, Miami and Los Angeles but more money for rural areas and for Des Moines, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Seattle. +Bruce C. Vladeck, Administrator of the Federal Health Care Financing Administration, which oversees Medicare, said the cutbacks would cause "a significant reduction in the profitability of many health care providers." +As both houses of Congress endorsed the budget deal last week, lobbyists prepared for the coming battle in these ways: +*Hospitals plotted strategy to stave off a freeze in Medicare payment rates. A freeze has been recommended by President Clinton and by a Federal advisory panel that found that hospital profit margins on Medicare patients had been rising at a brisk pace for the last five years. +*The National Association for Medical Equipment Services, meeting last week in Las Vegas, Nev., denounced Mr. Clinton's proposal to cut Medicare payments for home oxygen therapy by 40 percent. The suppliers said they would flood Congress with 100,000 letters from the industry and from patients who need such therapy for respiratory illness. +*The American Association of Retired Persons lobbied Congress last week and scheduled 100 events around the country to tell lawmakers that they must not impose any burdens on beneficiaries beyond the modest Medicare premium increase envisioned in the budget agreement. +*Nursing homes complained that they would absorb a disproportionate share of Medicare cuts under Mr. Clinton's budget. The American Medical Association ran newspaper advertisements protesting "deep, unfair cuts to physicians." The American College of Surgeons asserted that its members would bear almost all of the cuts among doctors. +*H.M.O.'s, fighting Mr. Clinton's proposal to slash their payments, negotiated with Congress on ways to achieve more modest savings, perhaps by setting annual limits on the growth of their payment rates. +The arguments over Medicare have several recurrent themes. Federal officials say costs are out of control. Health care providers say their services save lives and are cheaper than the alternatives. Cuts, they say, will harm the quality of care and lead to layoffs. +Suppliers of home oxygen therapy, for example, say the procedure saves money by reducing the need for hospitalization. William D. Coughlan, president of the National Association for Medical Equipment Services, said: "One day of hospitalization can easily cost $1,800. For that, you can get six months of home oxygen therapy." +Mr. Vladeck, the Medicare official, said the 40 percent cut in oxygen payments was "the largest percentage reduction" proposed for any group of health care providers. Nearly 500,000 Medicare beneficiaries receive oxygen therapy in their homes. +Beyond the question of how to allocate the budget cuts, Congress faces huge debates over Medicare policy. +Republicans are determined to create tax incentives for the elderly to establish "medical savings accounts," which are anathema to the Administration. Under this proposal, beneficiaries could use their share of Medicare money to set up tax-free savings accounts to pay routine medical costs, and they would buy high-deductible insurance policies to pay other medical expenses. +Republicans say the accounts would encourage the elderly to be more conscious of costs, because they could keep money left in their accounts. But Mr. Clinton has said the accounts would appeal mainly to healthy people and would leave sicker, high-cost patients in the standard Medicare program. +Another dispute swirls around whether Congress should encourage doctors and hospitals to form health plans to compete with H.M.O.'s in the Medicare market. Doctors and hospitals say such health plans should be regulated by the Federal Government, not by the states, which normally regulate insurance. +Consumer advocates say patients will suffer if the new "provider-sponsored organizations" go bankrupt or deliver substandard care. Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans, commercial insurers, H.M.O.'s and state insurance commissioners all assert that consumers will be better protected if the new health plans have to meet state standards, as well as Federal Medicare requirements. + +LOAD-DATE: May 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "THE DETAILS: Battling Over Medicare" +President Clinton and Congress have agreed to squeeze $115 billion, or 8.5 percent, from projected Medicare spending over the next five years. The big question now is how to allocate the cuts. In February, Mr. Clinton proposed $100 billion of Medicare savings over five years. Graph shows how spending for fiscal 1997 is expected to break down. It also tracks Medicare spending, assuming no change in current law, for fiscal years 1992 through 2002. In addition, it shows a breakdown of how President Clinton's proposal for 1998-2002 would reduce the budget deficit by $100 billion. (Sources: Congressional Budget Office, Department of Health and Human Services)(pg. A15) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +270 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 27, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Earnest Homage to Veterans and Village Life; +Out to the Race + +BYLINE: BY BENJAMIN WEISER + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 263 words + +DATELINE: SOMERVILLE, N.J. + +Anne Sutphen, 96, sat on a park bench several blocks from the grandstand of the annual Memorial Day bicycle races here that draw tens of thousands of spectators. "Three laps to go," she remarked, referring to the 20-mile women's race. +She was not the only spectator who was around from the days before World War I. There were Minna Orshan, 99, and Elsie Rinehart, 85. + For these women and others in this small town about 35 miles west of New York City, the Somerville bicycle races have given particular meaning to the Memorial Day holiday. The person who won the first two Somerville races, in 1940 and 1941, was Furman Frederick Kugler, and today his white racing bicycle is encased in a monument near the center of town. Indeed, many race participants remember the Kugler family and Furman Kugler's death during World War II. +"The Kugler boy was in my class at school," said another spectator, L. Gloria Honeyman, 75, as she waved to a Brownie troop marching earlier in the day in a parade on Main Street. The parade makes her remember the past, Ms. Honeyman said, while the bicycle races produce thoughts of the past and the future. Today's races were capped by the 54th running of the 50-mile Kugler-Anderson Memorial Tour for men. +It is not just the elderly who want to return to Somerville on Memorial Day. John Donnelly, of Virginia Beach, has raced 20 years in a row. +"As far back as I can remember we used to come out to the bike races, even when I was on a tricycle," he said. "It's pretty much what everybody in Somerville does." + BENJAMIN WEISER + +LOAD-DATE: May 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +271 of 633 DOCUMENTS + + +The New York Times + +May 28, 1997 Wednesday +Late Edition - Final + +Crime, Drugs, Brutality and Love + +BYLINE: By STEPHEN HOLDEN + +SECTION: Section C; Column 1; Cultural Desk; Pg. 14 + +LENGTH: 624 words + +Whenever Niels Arden Oplev's blood-chilling film ''Portland'' wants to remind you that it is depicting a living hell, the cinematography turns a ghastly yellow-orange. These sequences, filmed on grainy black-and-white stock then tinted, make the unidentified Danish city where ''Portland'' was made appear to be going up in flames. And the industrial-rock music that grinds and groans in the background adds an extra layer of ominous portent. + ''Portland'' (the title refers to cement and is not a place name) follows the violent drug-fueled adventures of two brothers, Janus (Anders Wodskou Berthelsen) and Jakob (Michael Muller) at the bottom of Denmark's social ladder. Janus, the older, more brutal brother, has just finished serving a prison sentence, while Jakob has recently come out of reform school. Under the nose of the police, the pair steal a car and reunite with Janus's old gang, a sinister gaggle of sadistic skinhead drug dealers to whom Janus still owes money. + Janus wastes no time getting down to work. His unsavory job involves forcing a network of sick and elderly people in housing projects to order prescription drugs from the national health service, which he buys from them, then turns over to the gang to be sold on the street. The scenes of Janus roughing up his frail, terrified clients produce the same sickening sense of dread as pictures of concentration camp inmates being brutalized. + What gives ''Portland'' a tone all its own is the seam of grim, antic humor built into its story. Janus and Jakob are sent by the gang leader Lasse (Ulrich Thomsen) to share decrepit quarters with Lasse's depraved sister Eva (Iben Hjejle). When first seen, she lies handcuffed on a bed by a tattooed thug who drools into her mouth. She seems thoroughly enchanted with her situation. + The mutual passion that quickly sparks between Janus and Eva is acknowledged in an outrageously roundabout way. When Eva confesses her love, Janus promptly beats her up. She retaliates by sending Lasse and his gang to do the same to Janus, who takes his punishment like a stoic hero. The lovers' bond having been sealed, the bruised and battered couple are married in a traditional white wedding ceremony complete with shoes and rice. Meanwhile, in an equally surreal sequence, Jakob is picked up by two women dressed as cowgirls who catch him attempting to break into their car and is taken to a cheery country-and-western dance. + The core of the story is Janus's teaching the sensitive Jakob to be tough. Among other tortures, those lessons involve withstanding the pain of having your arm smashed by a tire iron. (In another scene, a member of Lasse's gang is ritualistically branded on the chest.) + ''Portland,'' which opens today at the Film Forum, has the feel of a nihilistic prank. But although flashy, it has fundamental weaknesses. Partly because the actor playing him has no dramatic range, the transformation of Jakob from softhearted reform-school punk into sadistic iron man isn't the slightest bit convincing. Mr. Berthelsen's lank-haired, pill-popping Janus, however, is all too real. As this connoisseur of pain punches and lurches his way through the film, you see exactly how antisocial impulses can be warped into a code of outlaw values. + +PORTLAND + +Written (in Danish, with English subtitles) and directed by Niels Arden Oplev; director of photography, Henrik Jongdahl; edited by Henrik Fleischer; music by Sons of Cain/ Morten Olsen; produced by Peter Aalbaek Jensen; released by Zentropa Entertainments. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, South Village. Running time: 103 minutes. This film is not rated. + +WITH: Anders Wodskou Berthelsen (Janus), Michael Muller (Jakob), Ulrich Thomsen (Lasse) and Iben Hjejle (Eva). + + +URL: http://www.nytimes.com + +LOAD-DATE: February 19, 2004 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Michael Muller, left, and Anders Wodskou Berthelsen in ''Portland.'' (Henrik Jongdahl/Morten Bak) + +DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review + +PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +272 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 29, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +SENIOR CLASS; +Technology Helps Find Wanderers + +BYLINE: By ROBERT W. STOCK + +SECTION: Section C; Page 4; Column 1; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 1558 words + +NIGHT was falling over the mountains around King, N.C., when Greg Pratt, chief of the Stokes County Mountain Rescue Team, learned that an elderly man suffering from dementia had wandered away from his home. The March temperature was headed toward freezing. "It used to be, it would take us hours to find a wanderer in these woods, bloodhounds and all," Mr. Pratt said. "This time it took 12 minutes." +He had simply held out a device that for all the world looks like a small television antenna and slowly turned in a circle until it chirped. The hand-held unit pointed the way toward a transmitter bracelet worn by the missing man. + Mr. Pratt's unit, called Care Trak, is one of dozens of devices that have been developed in the last few years aimed at finding wanderers, or preventing them from wandering. The next generation, harnessing satellite and Internet technologies, is in the works. A Japanese research center plans to use international global-positioning satellite systems that now make it possible to track wild animals and give drivers directions on computerized maps. And a company in Virginia is building a communicator-locator for the wrist that looks like a Dick Tracy knockoff and is based on a different satellite technology. +When the families of demented patients describe how they feel when their loved ones suddenly vanish, the word that seems to crop up most often is "terror." Dementia steals memory and intellect, leaving patients confused and disoriented, searching for reassurance and familiar landmarks. But once alone in the outside world, they are helpless -- potential victims of the weather, accidents and human predators. The four million patients with Alzheimer's disease account for the vast majority of the demented, and experts estimate that 70 percent of Alzheimer patients at one time or another wander away from their attendants. +It happened in Brooklyn on April 8 when a 62-year-old victim of early-onset Alzheimer's went shopping with his attendant. When the attendant turned away to make a purchase, the older man disappeared. "That's the way it happens," said the man's daughter, Sophia Rabkin. "In an instant." +The attendant searched for him, in vain. Several hours later, the man and his family were reunited because he had been registered with the most widely used system for retrieving wanderers, the Safe Return program of the Alzheimer's Association. +Patients registered with the program wear a bracelet or necklace imprinted with a toll-free number and their particular Safe Return identification number. The operator who answers the toll-free number can identify the wanderer by looking up the Safe Return number in a computer database. +In the case of the Brooklyn man, a shopkeeper saw him and alerted police officers, who took him to a hospital emergency room. A nurse called the Safe Return number. +Registration with the program also places key identifying information about the patient in a national database. In most areas of the country, if someone is reported missing, a fax describing the wanderer is sent to local hospitals, emergency medical services and homeless shelters. Families themselves contact the police. +Last fall, a new national registry was established on the Internet by Marianne Dickerman Caldwell, a nurse whose 83-year-old, Alzheimer's-afflicted mother wandered away from a children's softball game in New Hampshire one September day in 1991. The partial remains of her body were found three years later. "The absolute terror of those years," Ms. Caldwell recalled in an interview. "It didn't matter that she had Alzheimer's. I had known her in the richness of her earlier years, and the feelings were the same. I was desperate to find out her fate, desperate for closure." +Ms. Caldwell, who wrote about that experience in "Gone Without a Trace" (Elder Books, 1995), found a site on the Internet last year called Birthnet, where parents can register children in case they are ever missing. She sent an E-mail message to the founder, Thomas A. Gregory, and met a kindred soul. Mr. Gregory urged Ms. Caldwell to join his enterprise and set up a similar registry for wandering elders. The new Birthnet service went on line last October and has just 500 subscribers -- compared with Safe Return's 28,000. Identifying information about a missing person who is in the Birthnet registry can be downloaded by law-enforcement agencies, the news media and medical personnel. +Alzheimer patients are often physically strong despite their mental deterioration, and they have been known to wander far from home on foot, as well as long distances on public transport and sometimes driving family cars. They can also be impatient and unruly, which can easily get them in trouble with strangers. To keep wanderers indoors, attendants have developed a thousand ruses, camouflaging doors with large plants or blankets, placing doorknobs high or low where the patient will not look for them, painting the floor near the door black -- some Alzheimer's patients will perceive it as a hole and avoid the area. +Nursing homes traditionally used chemical restraints or tied wandering patients to chairs and kept the handrails raised on their beds. But Federal laws have cut such practices, helping the market for warning devices. Though nursing homes hold less than 30 percent of the nation's Alzheimer's patients, the companies encounter steep liability claims when wanderers get in trouble. And wandering is bad for business: an ad for a warning device in a recent trade magazine inquired, "Is your reputation walking out the door?" +The newer devices often include lightweight wireless transmitters attached to wrist or ankle by hard-to-remove bands. They can be adjusted to set off remote alarms, audible or silent, when patients cross invisible boundaries set by their attendants. The devices seek to keep patients to their beds, their homes or their yards; the usual maximum range is 100 to 150 feet. +Like Care Trak, the system favored by the North Carolina rescue team, most products intended to find patients after they escape are based on picking up signals from a small transmitter and have an effective range of one mile on the ground and somewhat more from the air. Thirty law-enforcement or search-and-rescue groups around the country have adopted Care Trak's receiving unit and search antenna. Their tracking services are available to residents, who rent matching wrist transmitters. +Transmitters for wrists or ankles must be both lightweight and rugged; many Alzheimer's patients object to wearing them, and are ingenious at getting them off. Care Electronics, of Boulder, Colo., offers a transmitter embedded in a fanny pack, because some patients who refuse the wrist or ankle versions find the pack acceptable. +The universal goal, though, is to create a smaller, less obtrusive transmitter, a goal limited by the size of the batteries needed to keep it transmitting. With that in mind, Signatron Technology of Concord, Mass., is testing a system based on a low-power device that transmits only when paged. The responding signal is picked up by a series of small receivers on rooftops, which can double as cellular phone antennas. The use of existing commercial paging services would further cut costs. +Now, a publicly financed research organization north of Tokyo, the Tochigi Technology Center, has proposed that the global-positioning satellites be put to work finding wanderers, according to The Associated Press. Signals would be sent out every few minutes to transmitters. Their responses, bounced off the satellites, would make it possible to pinpoint their location. +A very different satellite-based system is being developed by Eagle Eye Technologies of Herndon, Va. The system is built around a wristwatch-size device that only transmits when a special code is broadcast from home base. The transmitter's position is determined by measuring the length of time it takes for the signal to go from the wrist unit to a satellite and back. +The search for new ways to contain and track wanderers is sure to accelerate as the baby-boom generation ages. Dementias caused by Alzheimer's, stroke and other trauma afflict up to 50 percent of people 85 and over. Today there are about 3.7 million in that age group, according to the Census Bureau. By the year 2050, there will be more than 30 million. They and their attendants will need all the help they can get. + +How to Reach Tracking Services + +FOR information on the Safe Return program of the Alzheimer's Association, which charges a $25 registration fee, (800) 272-3900. The association also provides the telephone numbers of local branches and a list of products that keep track of wanderers. For the New York City chapter, (212) 983-0700. +The Internet address of the Birthnet registry is http://www.birthnet.com. There is no charge for an all-text registry page. But for $12.95, a color photograph can also be included. +Care Trak, (800) 842-4537, charges a $35 monthly rental fee for its wrist transmitter and tracking device. For the transmitter alone, when used in a network organized by a local police or search and rescue team, the fee is $25 a month. +Care Electronics, (303) 444-2273, charges $775 for its transmitter -- for wrist, ankle or fanny pack -- and tracking system. + +LOAD-DATE: June 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo (Horacio Cardo) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +273 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +May 31, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +COMPANY NEWS; +GOLDMAN, SACHS FUND TO ACQUIRE INTEGRATED LIVING + +BYLINE: Bloomberg News + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 35; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 127 words + +Integrated Living Communities Inc. agreed yesterday to be acquired by a Goldman, Sachs & Company fund for $11.50 a share, or $77 million, and to join forces with another operator of retirement homes. Shares of Integrated, based in Bonita Springs, Fla., rose $2.0625, to $11.125, in Nasdaq trading. After the deal is completed, Integrated Living's 24 retirement facilities will be operated by Whitehall Street Real Estate L.P. VII, a $1.35 billion fund run by firm Goldman, Sachs and the Senior Lifestyle Corporation. Senior Lifestyle is a closely held Chicago-based developer, which owns 16 facilities for the elderly. The agreement makes the combination of Whitehall and Senior Lifestyle one of the largest United States operators of housing for the elderly. + +LOAD-DATE: May 31, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +274 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 1, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In the Region/Long Island; +Dormant for a Decade, Attached Housing Revives + +BYLINE: By DIANA SHAMAN + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 7; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1330 words + +AT a time when most developers on Long Island still prefer to build detached houses, some nevertheless see a reviving market for attached housing, which had been in the doldrums for a decade. +The 170-unit Stonington condominium under construction in Port Jefferson Station on Old Town Road just north of Route 347 is a case in point. + When sales first began in September 1996, the 48 units in the first phase sold out in two months, said Nick Cassis, the owner of Cue Realty in Bellmore, which is handling sales at the 28-acre project. His wife, Tina, is one of the managing partners of B-O Realty of Bellmore, the development group. +Prices originally ranged from $104,990 for a 1,129-square-foot, 1-bedroom single-level apartment to $134,990 for a 1,379-square-foot, 2-bedroom town house with a basement. They have since risen to $114,990 and $139,990, respectively. +But the higher prices have not deterred buyers. Within 10 days after a second phase of 68 units went on the market in early May, 25 more of the homes had gone into contract or contracts on them had been sent out for signing, Mr. Cassis said. +Sales at another condominium nearby, at which Tina Cassis is also one of the developers, will be opening in the fall. Most of the 176 units at that project, to be called the Ranches at Long Lakes Estates, will be single-level attached ranch-style units. Two-story town houses will also be available. +The Ranches is to be built on a 33-acre site on Boyle Road, about a mile south of the Stonington development. +"There is a big market out there for attached housing because many older people who own a house want to downsize," Mr. Cassis said. +He noted that 60 percent of buyers at Stonington were retirees or close to retirement. "These are people who have worked all their lives, and who want to take it easy and enjoy themselves and travel," he said. +In and around Huntington, James L. Neisloss and Douglas S. Partrick, the two principals of Meadowood Properties in Islandia, have also found a ready market for several of their town-house projects. +For example, a 16-unit town-house development, Meadowood at Huntington Village, opened for sales last July and was completed and sold by December. The 3-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot units sold for $185,000. +Purchasers were about equally divided between first-time buyers and older couples whose children were grown and had moved, Mr. Neisloss said. +"The town-house market is alive and well and thriving," he said. "People selling an existing house want to become less encumbered by household chores. For young couples, attached houses are also of great interest because both are usually full-time workers and when people have limited time they find it important to spend that time together rather than on gardening and fixing leaks." +The Beechwood Organization of Williston Park is building a mix of detached and attached houses in a 193-unit development in Melville called Country Pointe. About an equal percentage of each type of housing has sold. Of the 82 town houses, 40 are in contract; and of the 111 detached houses, 53 are in contract, said Michael Dubb, who owns Beechwood with a partner, Leslie Lerner. +Mr. Dubb noted that he had had the option of building only detached houses on the 35-acre site. "But I believe in the town-house market and I felt, 'Why limit myself?' " he said. "If I were building only detached houses instead of offering buyers a choice, I'd only have 53 sales." +The town houses at Country Pointe, which range in size from 1,600 to 2,000 square feet, are priced from $215,000 to $260,000; the detached houses, which are 2,000 to 3,000 square feet in size, are priced from $250,000 to $315,000. All 193 homeowners will share a pool, a clubhouse and two tennis courts. +The main advantage of attached housing is that it costs less to build because of savings on land and construction costs, and therefore it costs less to buy. +AT a North Hills development called the Links, which is under construction by AVR Realty of Yonkers on Shelter Rock Road, a semi-attached house costs $50,000 less to buy than one that is identical in size and amenities but which is fully detached. The 4,300-square-foot semi-attached house is priced at $700,000; the detached house sells for $750,000. +"People buying the semi-attached house get the same specifications and the same community for $50,000 less," said Mark C. Eickelbeck, a vice president of AVR. +Attitudes toward attached housing vary by area, said Todd Zimmerman, co-managing director of Zimmerman/Volke in Clinton, N.J., which did a feasibility study for the Stonington project. +In areas like Washington, where there is a tradition of attached housing, there is wide acceptance; on Long Island attached housing is still considered "peculiar," he said. However, he added, as land supplies diminish, attached housing will gain in popularity since many people are being priced out of the detached-housing market. +Long Island is also starting to experience a shortage of supply of this type of housing because so little was built over the last decade, said Mr. Dubb of the Beechwood Organization. +Town-house development slowed to a trickle following the 1986 Tax Reform Act, which limited tax advantages for real estate investors who had been active purchasers of town houses, he noted. +But now young couples and older couples are replacing investors as the driving force behind sales. +Typical of the older age group are George and Grace Labriola, who are selling their four-bedroom detached house in Smithtown where they have lived 31 years to move to one of the 2-bedroom town houses at Stonington for which they are paying $139,000. They expect to take occupancy in July. +"I'm looking forward to doing less work around the house, relaxing and doing some traveling," said Mr. Labriola, who recently retired as the vice president of an air pollution control company. +But, he added, the change will have some drawbacks. "The one major minus of living in an attached house is losing some privacy, and that is one of the adjustments we will have to make," he said. +DEVELOPMENTS like Stonington are redefining the town-house concept both in terms of design and the inclusion of basements to provide the storage space owners of detached houses are accustomed to having. The only units at Stonington lacking a basement are the 28 single-level apartments on the upper floor. +"By adding a lot of traditional detailing, we are giving people what they are familiar with," said Stonington's architect, Joe Garramone, senior associate at KDJ Architects of Cherry Hill, N.J. +The Cape Cod-style buildings have front porches, wraparound balconies, columns, railings, fish-scale siding, and even brass kickplates on entrance doors. +Natural light floods even interior units through a generous use of windows and skylights. Each unit on average has 14 windows. +All but three of the 14 buildings will be grouped around two ponds. Recreational facilities will include a pool, a clubhouse, two tennis courts and jogging and walking trails. Monthly common charges are $187. +Traditionally, most attached housing is built either as two-story town houses or as single-level apartments stacked one over the other and often referred to as flats. +Mr. Cassis said his next project, the Ranches at Long Lakes Estates, will break new ground by making 140 of its 170 units available as ranch-style units that will allow single-level living with no upstairs or downstairs neighbors. Two-story houses and flats will also be available. The houses will be built around a series of four ponds. +The 950-square-foot, 1-bedroom flats will be priced at $120,000, and 2-bedroom ranch-style units and town houses ranging in size from 1,150 to 1,500 square feet will be priced from $160,000 to $190,000. +Eighteen of the flats will sell for $100,000 to assist the Town of Brookhaven's efforts to provide housing for moderate-income buyers. + +LOAD-DATE: June 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Stonington development in Port Jefferson Station offers traditional detailing like porches in attached housing. (Edward Keating/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +275 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 1, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +County Readies for Computer Glitch + +BYLINE: By DONNA GREENE + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 1; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 987 words + +LIKE computers worldwide, many of Westchester County's computers could have major problems after Dec. 31, 1999, because their clocks are not programmed for the turn of the century. +The worst-case scenario goes like this: It is 2000, and prisoners are being released before their time, the needy are not getting any assistance, taxpayer checks are going out to vendors who delivered no recent service, pension records have been destroyed, traffic lights are going crazy and the elderly are being notified they are in need of their preschool inoculations. + Whether all these things happen -- or worse things or none at all -- depends on whether the Westchester County government, as well as governments at all levels, can get their computers to understand that 2000 is not 1900. That is because, except for the latest computers, all have been programmed to put a 19 in front of the last two digits of a year. +"To some extent, we don't know what the potential impact could be," said Susan S. Egginton, who as administrator of the county's General Services Department oversees Westchester's 2 mainframe computers (8 and 10 years old, respectively), about 9 mid-size computers and about 4,000 personal computers. +"This is a very real problem and not a scare people are creating as a goof," said Camaron J. Thomas, director of Gov. George E. Pataki's Task Force on Information Resource Management, which is coordinating actions on the state level to upgrade the computers. +Nor, Ms. Egginton said, is there a magic solution -- a software program, for example, that can simply be inserted into a computer to make all the important date changes. "Everything we have is written in different languages," she explained. Therefore, computer programs have to be examined line by line to see where they have to be changed. +The cost of doing so is tremendous in both time and money. It is estimated that the Federal Government will spend about $6 billion to $8 billion to make their computers "2000-compatible," while New York State will spend $100 million. Ms. Egginton said the county government would spend millions. Concidentally, it was to save money that computers were developed with a system that used only two digits, instead of four, to describe a date -- for example "97" instead of "1997." +"Twenty to 25 years ago, it made sense to save magnetic storage space by using just two characters," said John Leonard, manager of information systems for the county government. "It saved a lot of money." +As a result, when the millennium comes, computers will not know the century has turned. The date: 2000 will be read as 00 and interpreted to mean 1900. Also, because of the way calculations are done, ages become confused. Peter de Jager, a Canadian considered one of the top experts in the field, explained: "I was born in 1955. If I ask the computer to calculate how old I am today, it subtracts 55 from 97 and announces that I'm 42. So far, so good. But what happens in the year 2000? The computer will subtract 55 from 00 and will state that I am minus 55 years old." +It is only in the last few years that owners of computers -- governments, businesses and individuals -- have learned of the potential of problems for computers, especially those that do calculations, in 2000. +The need for raising awareness and information has led to a number of Web pages, one of the most significant being "The Year 2000 Information Center" (www.year2000.com), where Mr. de Jager has a countdown to the year 2000 in years, days, hours, minutes and seconds. +When it needed to learn about the 2000 problem, the state government turned to Mr. de Jager, Ms. Thomas said. It also created its own Web page, so that local governments as well as state departments know what is going on (www.irm.state.ny.us). +The county has turned to the Gartner Group, an informational technology think tank in Stamford for its expertise, Mr. Leonard said. +At this point, the state is one giant step ahead of the county in making its computers 2000-compatible. It has already done its assessment of the state's computer systems and prioritized those 40 systems that must be updated first, Ms. Thomas said. Health and safety issues, including those affecting release of prisoners and payments of welfare and pension benefits, have been given priority, she said. "We're simply not going to get the whole thing done," she said. +On the county level, such an assessment is now under way, Ms. Egginton said, with the help of a subsidiary of International Business Machines, which was hired last year to run the county's Information Services. +When the assessment is completed, the county will issue a "request for proposals" from contractors who can correct the problem. It hopes to have a vendor hired by October and corrective steps begun, she said. She stressed that the county had already taken steps to insure that prison records are given priority so that there is no chance that prisoners are wrongly released. +Westchester County Legislator Katherine S. Carsky, a Republican from Yonkers, is afraid the county's response has been too slow. "We're a little late in approaching this," she said. She said she thought that the competition for experts to correct the computer software would not only drive costs up but also make it harder to find anyone available. It was mainly for that reason, she said, that she supported awarding privatization of the county's information services to I.B.M. She said it was her hope that this will in some way give the county government a greater chance of getting the 2000-compatible services it needs from I.B.M. +An I.B.M. spokesman, Ken Neale, referred all questions to the county government. +Ms. Thomas said the state is also aware of the need to get vendors hired quickly. "The people to do the work are not available." Many, she said, have gone to more lucrative private sector work. + +LOAD-DATE: June 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Felipe Galindo) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +276 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 1, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +PERSPECTIVES; +A Nursing Home's Forward Leap + +BYLINE: By ALAN S. OSER + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 5; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1260 words + +ONE day soon -- possibly as soon as a week from tomorrow -- Helen Phillips, who is 97, will be moving. But not very far. +Miss Phillips has been living for the last two years at the New York Congregational Home for the Aged in Brooklyn, an 80-year-old residence with the look of a colonial mansion at 123 Linden Boulevard, on the leafy block between Rogers and Bedford Avenues in the East Flatbush section. Before that she lived for 25 years in a co-op on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights. + Her next stop is the new 200-bed nursing home that the nonprofit home has put up in what had been its backyard garden. From the accounts of administrators the 68 residents of the home were disappointed to have lost their garden. Their new one will be half the size. But the attractions of the new nursing center should mollify them. +"I bet it will be the talk of Brooklyn," said Miss Phillips, who worked in a corporate tax department most of her adult life and needed nursing-home care after she had a fall two years ago. She will be going from a room of her own to one she shares with a roommate, yet unchosen. "I'll adjust to whoever they give me," she said. "I just hopes it's not somebody who snores." +Kendall Christiansen will have other concerns on his mind. As the president of the home, and also of its new sister institution, the New York Congregational Nursing Center, the 40-year-old Mr. Christiansen has been the driving force behind the project over the last five years. Now he is turning his attention from the development to the operational side. +"The first challenge is can we fill it -- and how quickly," said Mr. Christiansen, who is already busy trying to raise interim operating capital for use while the new home fills up. +The New York Congregational Nursing Center -- and a small handful of other new nursing homes in the city -- have been coming into operation at a time when the long-term direction in care for the elderly is taking new forms, with greater emphasis on home care and daytime facilities for the elderly, as well as assisted-living buildings that provide meals and a variety of personal services but not round-the-clock nursing care. +These alternatives are typically less costly to operate. "If the Federal Government gets into enrolling long-term patients in managed care, then the alternatives to nursing homes will take hold," said Charles Murphy, director of the division of health facilities planning in the Department of Health in Albany. Managed care would probably establish requirements that would lead many people who are in costlier nursing homes to find appropriate but less costly alternatives, he said. +BUT even if nursing homes are de-emphasized in future projects for the elderly, many of the city's outmoded homes will need to be updated eventually or go out of business. And a certain number of new homes are coming into being, in recognition of the fact there will always be some level of requirement for round-the-clock care of the frail elderly, short-term or long-term, outside the hospital environment. +"They are there to provide subacute care for short-term patients and therapy and intensive care for more complex conditions," said Peter Bergmann, a lawyer who represents providers of medical and nursing services. "For the segments of the population that need them, they will be cheaper than alternatives." +In New York City and on Long Island, many more new beds have been authorized by the Department of Health than have actually been built. Local opposition, zoning issues and financing problems have set in for many of the nonprofit and for-profit entities that manage to acquire the essential "certificate of need" to assure Medicaid reimbursement for the patients they take in. +As the East Flatbush project shows, however, developing a new nursing home in New York City can be a long and difficult process even without these standard problems. For 12 years the Congregational Home for the Aged had been planning to use a $2.2 million bequest from the late Harriet Righter, former president of Selchow & Righter, the games company that developed Trivial Pursuit, Parcheesi and Scrabble. +But once through the predevelopment phase with a "certificate of need" in hand, a succession of problems developed, said Mr. Christiansen. An independent consultant to companies in the recycling field, he took responsibility for pushing the project through to conclusion five years ago when he became board president. +"We knew we had to grow or close," said Mr. Christiansen. "But we made a series of missteps. We had to change architects twice, and the second time we had to go to arbitration over what we owed. Then we lost a good 12 to 18 months because we didn't realize we were going to need a special permit from the Department of City Planning." The approval process took 12 months once the application was filed. +One decision that worked out well was to put the project out to bid in 1993, a time when the construction market was at low ebb. The low bids came in well below what was expected based on what the state allowed as the total development cost -- $118,000 per bed in New York City at the time, or $23.2 million. +The final construction contract of $15.2 million, given to Crow/Jones Company of Manhattan, allowed William Selan of R.B.S. & D. Architects of Manhattan to add improvements to the project over the minimum specifications required by the state. +AMONG these improvements were higher-grade interior finishing -- wood rather than Formica on window sills, wallpaper rather than paint in the hallways, ceramic rather than vinyl in residents' bathrooms. Most of the characteristics of nursing homes are standardized, but in their new building, the residents of the Congregational Home will recognize an immediate improvement in their standard of living. +They will be going from congregate bathrooms to private baths, to a building with air-conditioning, and with doorways large enough to allow wheelchairs to get through easily. They will get lounges filled with light -- in the existing building one lounge has no windows at all -- and large elevators. +"The old building is structurally sound, but it has to be modernized," Mr. Christiansen said. The plan is to find a new use for it rather than demolish it. It will probably be returned to what it was originally, a rest home, with a low level of medical care -- "in current parlance, for independent or assisted living," he said. +Now the new home is seeking to fill its beds, concentrating its marketing campaign on hospitals that are discharging patients to nursing homes, as well as local churches and community groups. +The new arrivals are unlikely to be paying the annual $91,250 private-payer fee ($250 a day). Most are likely to be single individuals eligible for Medicaid -- their financial resources will be under about $3,450 (the figure sometimes excludes such major assets as a house), and their income is below the Medicaid rate that has been established for the Congregational center, which is about $5,000 a month. +"There is a great need for this kind of care in Brooklyn," said the Rev. Arthur Wells, 80, who initiated the nursing-home project when he served as president of the board, and now is the home's chaplain. +"We had a glorious garden that had to be sacrificed, but it was not practical to go on operating with 68 beds," Mr. Wells said. "We could have torn down the old building, but what would we have done with the 68 people still in it? We'll probably use it for assisted living." + +LOAD-DATE: June 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: The Rev. Arthur Wells, chaplain, Mary Devlin, administrator, and Kendall Christiansen, president, at New York Congregational Nursing Center. The old home in 1955. (Steve Hart for The New York Times) + +Map showing the location of the New York Congregational Nursing Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +277 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 1, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ON THE TOWNS + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 18; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 3759 words + +An opinionated guide to cultural and recreational goings-on around the state this week. To submit items for consideration, write to On the Towns, Sunday New Jersey Section, The New York Times, 229 West 43d Street, New York, N.Y. 10036, or send a fax to (212) 556-7219. + +MUSIC + +BORDERS BOOKS AND MUSIC PRINCETON Apollo. Today at 3 P.M. Ken Lowy. Friday at 8 P.M. Leticia. Saturday at 3 P.M. Bill Parsons. Next Sunday at 3 P.M. All free. Route 1 at Province Line Road, Princeton. +(609) 514-0040. + +CAPE MAY MUSIC FESTIVAL Through June 29. Leon Bates, pianist, with Cape May Festival Orchestra. Today at the Cape May Convention Hall, Beach Avenue and Stockton Place. "Romances and Remembrances," music of Schumann and Brahms, with the New York Chamber Ensemble. Tuesday at the Cape Island Baptist Church, Columbia Avenue and Gurney Street. Cape May Festival Orchestra in music of Bizet, Mahler and Mendelssohn. Thursday at the Cape May Convention Hall, Beach Avenue and Stockton Place. Cape May Festival Orchestra, with Alan Kay, guest conductor, and Carl Albach, trumpet soloist, in music of Milhaud, Ibert and Haydn. Next Sunday at the Cape May Convention Hall, Beach Avenue and Stockton Place. All concerts begin at 8 P.M. Tickets: $15; $10 for the elderly; $5 for students. Subscriptions: $40 for 3 concerts, $60 for 5 concerts or $100 for 10 concerts. (800) 275-4278 or (609) 884-5404. + +CLUB BENE Wayman Tisdale. Friday at 9 P.M. Tickets: $15. The Stylistics. Saturday at 9 P.M. Tickets: $22.50. Route 35, Sayreville. (908) 727-3000. + +COMMUNITY THEATER OF MORRISTOWN Luther Allison, blues guitarist. Friday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $20 and $25. Puccini's "Tosca" in concert. Next Sunday at 3 P.M. Tickets: $25 and $35. 100 South Street, Morristown. (201) 539-8008. + +CORNERSTONE Jim Locano, pianist. Tuesday, from 6:30 P.M. Jimmy Nuzzo and Tony Ellis. Thursday, 8:30 to 11:30 P.M. Free. 25 New Street, Metuchen. (908) 549-5306. + +ENGLEWOOD PUBLIC LIBRARY "The Great American Songbook," with Jean McClelland, soprano, and Bill McClelland, pianist. Today at 6 P.M. Free. 31 Engle Street, Englewood. (201) 568-2215. + +GREAT AUDITORIUM, OCEAN GROVE Sammy Kaye Orchestra, with Roger Thorpe. Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $12 and $15. Pilgrim and Ocean Pathways, Ocean Grove. +(908) 775-0035. + +KASSCHU MEMORIAL SHELL "Tunes in June," with the Ridgewood High School Band. Wednesday at 8:30 P.M. Free. Take your own chairs. Veteran's Field, Maple Avenue, Ridgewood. (201) 670-3924. +McCARTER THEATER George Winston, jazz pianist. Friday and Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $22 to $32. 91 University Place, Princeton. (609) 683-8000. + +NEW JERSEY STATE MUSEUM The New Jersey Percussion Ensemble in works by Walter Winslow, Peter Westergaard, Evan Schwartzman, Eun Joo Lee and John Harbison, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer from South Orange. Next Sunday at 2 P.M. Tickets: $5; $3 for students and the elderly. Auditorium, 205 West State Street, Trenton. (609) 292-6310. + +RARITAN RIVER CONCERTS The Newman and Oltman Guitar Duo, with Clare Hoffman, flutist, and Martha Elliott, soprano. Saturday at 7:30 P.M. Tickets: $15; $9 for students and the elderly. Clinton Presbyterian Church, 91 Center Street, Clinton. (908) 213-1100. + +RARITAN VALLEY COMMUNITY COLLEGE "A Pops Extravaganza," with the Central Jersey Symphony Orchestra. Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $12; $9.50 for students and the elderly. Edward Nash Theater, Route 28 and Lamington Road, North Branch. +(908) 526-7890. + +SHANGHAI JAZZ Bucky Pizzarelli, guitarist. Wednesday, 7 to 9:30 P.M. Greg Cohen Trio. Thursday, 7 to 9:30 P.M. Frank Perowsky Trio. Friday, 7 to 11 P.M. Jim Pellegrino and Peter Adams. Saturday, 7 to 11 P.M. Free. +24 Main Street, Madison. (201) 822-2899. + +SOCLAIR MUSIC FESTIVAL A concert series through Sept. 7. Ensemble Rebel, a Baroque chamber group, performs works by Rebel, Couperin, Corelli, Purcell and Telemann. Next Sunday at 4 P.M.; reception at 3 P.M. Tickets: $15; $12 for students and the elderly. Subscription: $55 for indoor seating at the four concerts. The Barn, Soclair Brooks Farm, +19 Haytown Road, Lebanon. +(908) 236-6476. + +STATE THEATER The 100-member New Jersey Youth Symphony presents a benefit concert honoring the 18th and final season of its director, George Marriner Maull. The orchestra joins the New Jersey Chamber Music Society to introduce a string-and-woodwind piece commissioned from Robert Baksa. The program will also include works by Berlioz, Copland, Respighi and Sibelius. Today at 3 P.M. Tickets: $10; $5 for students and the elderly. 15 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick. (908) 246-7469. + +TURNING POINT Kenny Rankin. Today at 5 and 8 P.M. Tickets: $18. Slain Wainwright Band. Thursday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $12.50. Pat Kilbride Band. Friday at 9 P.M. Tickets: $12.50. Paul Rishell and Annie Raines. Next Sunday at 7 P.M. Tickets: $10. 468 Piermont Avenue, Piermont, N.Y. (914) 359-3219. + +WATCHUNG ARTS CENTER Ruth Kahn Siderman and Stephani Bell, violinists, and Elizabeth Latorre-Blasenheim, pianist, in works of Max Bruch, Alan Shulman and Fritz Kreisler. Saturday at 4 P.M. Tickets: $10. Watchung Circle, Watchung. (908) 753-0190. + +WATERLOO VILLAGE Crawfish Fest. Cajun music, food and crafts, featuring Dr. John, Buckwheat Zydeco, Beausoleil, Jumpin' Johnny Sansone, the Crescent City Maulers and the Canal Street Dixieland Jazz Band. Today, 11 A.M. to 7:30 P.M. Tickets: $20; $15 each for groups of 10 or more; free for children under age 14. Exit 25 North off Interstate Route 80, Stanhope. Tickets: (201) 507-8900 or +(212) 307-7171. Information: (212) 539-8830. +On the World Wide Web: +http://www.waterloovillage.org. + +THEATER + +CIRCLE PLAYHOUSE "Assassins," by Stephen Sondheim. Today at 2 P.M.; Friday and Saturday at 8:30 P.M. Tickets: $13; Sundays, $11 or two for $18; $1 discount for students and the elderly. 416 Victoria Avenue, Piscataway. (908) 968-7555. + +ELIZABETH PLAYHOUSE "Backstage Tarts." Today and next Sunday at 2 P.M.; Friday and Saturday at 7:30 P.M.; Tickets: $6 and $8. 1100 East Jersey Street, Elizabeth. +(908) 355-0077. + +ELMWOOD PLAYHOUSE "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," by Tennessee Williams. Through June 14. Fridays and Saturdays at 8:30 P.M.; today at 2:30 P.M.; next Sunday at 7:30 P.M. Tickets: $12; $10 for students under 22 and the elderly on Friday. 10 Park Street, Nyack, N.Y. (914) 353-1313. +McKINLEY COMMUNITY SCHOOL "Dance Power," by students from the Princeton Ballet School. Tuesday at 7:30 P.M. Free. 35 Dyke Street, New Brunswick. (908) 249-1254. + +NEW JERSEY SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL "A Midsummer Night's Dream," June 13 to 29. "The Threepenny Opera," by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, July 11 to 27. "Blithe Spirit," by Noel Coward, Aug. 8 to 24. All at the Community Theater, 100 South Street, Morristown. "Much Ado About Nothing," June 25 to July 26 at the Playwrights Theater of New Jersey, 33 Green Village Road, Madison. "Henry V." July 15 to Aug. 10 at the football field of Bayley-Ellard High School, 205 Madison Avenue, Madison. Single tickets: $16 to $30. Subscription packages: $66 to $125. (201) 408-5600. +On the World Wide Web: +http://www.njshakespeare.org. + +RITZ THEATER New Play Festival. Today at 2 P.M. Tickets: $10. 915 White Horse Pike, Oaklyn. (609) 858-5230. + +SETON HALL UNIVERSITY The Celtic Theater Company presents "The Field," by John E. Keane. Today at 2 P.M.; Friday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $12; $8 for students and the elderly. Bishop Dougherty Student Center, South Orange. (201) 761-9388. + +ZIMMERLI ART MUSEUM "Dance Kumikokomoto," Korean dance performance in conjunction with the exhibition "Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions: Asian-American Artists and Abstraction, 1945-1970." Next Sunday at 3 P.M. Free. Rutgers University, George and Hamilton Streets, New Brunswick. (908) 932-7237. + +MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES + +ABC GALLERY "A Dramatic Vision," watercolors by Barbara Watts. Tomorrow through July 18. Opening reception Thursday, 7 to 9 P.M. Hours: Mondays through Thursdays, 1 to 9 P.M.; Fridays, 1 to 5 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Lambertville Public Library, 6 Lilly Street, Lambertville. (609) 397-0275. + +AMERICAN LABOR MUSEUM "Workers and Immigrants," a student art exhibition. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 1 to 4 P.M. Suggested donation: $1.50. Botto House National Landmark, 83 Norwood Street, Haledon. (201) 595-7953. + +ART ALLIANCE OF MONMOUTH COUNTY "Variations on an Image," by Susan Field. Through Wednesday. "Urban Scene, Rural Dream," paintings by Mary Phillips. Saturday through June 24. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 12 to 4 P.M. 33 Monmouth Street, Red Bank. (908) 842-9403. + +ATLANTIC CITY HISTORICAL MUSEUM "Bettmann on the Boardwalk: A Celebration of Historic Atlantic City, 1890-1990," a selection of photographs from the Corbis-Bettmann Collection. Through 1997. Daily, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. Free. Garden Pier, at New Jersey Avenue. (609) 347-5839. + +BERGEN MUSEUM OF ART AND SCIENCE Recent sculpture by Sonia Chusit. Through June 22. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. 327 East Ridgewood Avenue, Paramus. (201) 265-1248. + +BRISTOL-MYERS SQUIBB GALLERY "The Visionary Field," paintings by Elise Asher, and "Rebirth," sculpture by Karl Mann. Both through next Sunday. Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursday to 7 P.M.; today and Saturday, 1 to 5 P.M. Route 206, Lawrenceville, three miles south of Princeton. (609) 252-6275. + +CHAMOT GALLERY "Surroundings," landscapes by Keith Gunderson and Bryan Perrin. Through July 13. Hours: Tuesdays through Sundays, noon to 3 P.M. 111 First Street, Jersey City. (201) 610-1468. + +COSTER GALLERY "Sentinels and Recents Works," sculpture by Ralph Greco. Through June 15. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. 233 Raritan Avenue, Highland. (908) 247-2345. + +GALLERY AT SCHERING-PLOUGH "Reflections of Summer," featuring 30 watercolor landscapes and seascapes by 19 artists. Through Aug. 28. Mondays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. 1 Giralda Farms, Madison. (201) 882-7000. + +GALLERY OF SOUTH ORANGE "Grounds for Art: Responses to the Environment," an exhibition by 25 artists. Today, 1 to 4 P.M. Baird Center, 5 Mead Street, South Orange. (201) 378-7754. + +GROUNDS FOR SCULPTURE Spring exhibition, featuring works by Robert Murray, Jay Wholley and Marisol. Through July 6. Fridays through Sundays, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M.; Tuesdays through Thursdays and by appointment, 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. 18 Fairgrounds Road, Hamilton. (609) 586-0616. + +HIRAM BLAUVELT ART MUSEUM "Wild and Wonderful," paintings and sculptures by the Society of Animal Artists. Today, 2 to 5 P.M. 705 Kinderkamack Road, Oradell. +(201) 261-0012. + +HOPPER HOUSE ART CENTER "Rocklandia," Rockland County landscapes by Monica Bradbury and Steve Burns, painters; Fred Burrell, photographer, and Ruth Geneslaw, sculptor. Through June 22. Thursdays through Sundays, noon to 5 P.M.; Fridays to 7:30 P.M. Admission: $1. 82 North Broadway, Nyack, N.Y. (914) 358-0774. + +HUNTERDON ART CENTER "Reinterpreting the New Jersey Landscape," aerial photographs by Owen Kanzler. Today, 11 A.M. to 5 P.M. 7 Lower Center Street, Clinton. +(908) 735-8415. + +J. RICHARDS GALLERY "A Voyage of Discovery," works by Batia Magal, an Israeli artist. Through June 13. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M.; Sundays, 12 to 5 P.M. 64 East Palisade Avenue, Englewood. (201) 871-1050. + +KEARON-HEMPENSTALL GALLERY "Visions of Immortality," paintings by Stan Mullins. Through June 30. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 3 P.M.; Thursday evenings, 7 to 9 P.M. 536 Bergen Avenue, Jersey City. (201) 333-8488. + +MACCULLOCH HALL HISTORICAL MUSEUM Today's "Rose Day" celebration (1 to 4 P.M.) celebrates the opening of "The Immortal Genius: William Shakespeare, Thomas Nast and 19th-Century American Culture," satirical cartoons by Nast, who used text and imagery of Shakespeare. Through Feb. 4. Also opening: "Rococo and Reason in Georgian Glass," more than 100 examples of English and Irish cut glass from th 18th and 19th centuries. Through Sept. 7. "The Timeless Folk Art of Decorative Painting." Through Oct. 12. Admission: $3; $2 for students and the elderly. Hours: Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 P.M. 45 Macculloch Avenue, Morristown. (201) 538-2404. + +MATHEY-ROCKEFELLER LIBRARY "Passion and Healing: The Art and Colors of George Yepes," the Los Angeles muralist. Today and tomorrow, 1 to 5 P.M. Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project, Mathey College, Princeton University. (609) 258-5717. + +MONMOUTH COUNTY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION "Politics as Usual: Campaigns and Elections, 1789 to 1996." Through Tuesday. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 4 P.M. Admission: $2; $1.50 for the elderly. 70 Court Street, Freehold. (908) 462-1466. On the Internet: http:// www.monmouth.com/mcha/. + +MONTCLAIR ART MUSEUM "A Personal Synthesis," a retrospective of paintings and and prints by Hananiah Harari, and "American Impressionist," paintings by Guy Rose (1867-1925). Both through Aug. 10. "Reflecting America: Highlights From the Permanent Collection." Through July 27. Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 11 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Sundays and Thursdays, 1 to 5 P.M. Admission: $4; $3 for students with ID and the elderly; free admission on Saturdays. 3 South Mountain Avenue, Montclair. (201) 746-5555. + +MORRIS MUSEUM Recent sculpture by Leah Jacobson. Next Sunday through May 24. "Portrait Paintings From the Morris Museum Collection," including works by Rembrandt and Gainsborough. Through June 30. Hours: Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M.; Mondays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 8 P.M. Admission: $4; $2 for the elderly. 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. (201) 538-0454. + +NEW JERSEY CENTER FOR VISUAL ARTS Alice Hondru. Through June 26. Opening reception: today, 2 to 4 P.M. Mondays through Fridays, noon to 4 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 to 4 P.M. Palmer Gallery, 68 Elm Street, Summit. (908) 273-9121. + +NEW JERSEY STATE MUSEUM "Current Perspectives on the Urban and Industrial Landscapes," paintings by William Hogan, Robert Kogge, Valeri Larko, Mark Metcalf, Stuart Shils and Paul Weingarten. "Amber: The Legendary Resin." "The Great Russian Dinosaurs," a traveling exhibition featuring 24 full skeletons from Russia and Mongolia. Paintings by Ron Morosan. All closing today. Masks and sculpture by Bob Justin. Through June 29. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 9 A.M. to 4:45 P.M.; Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. Museum admission by donation; special admission for "The Great Russian Dinosaurs": $5; $3 for children under 12 and the elderly. 205 West State Street, Trenton. (609) 292-6464. + +NEWARK MUSEUM "Portraits, 1975-1995," paintings by Dawoud Bey. Through Aug. 3. "Japanese Master Prints: Hiroshige's 19th-Century Landscapes." Through June 29. "The Glitter and the Gold: Fashioning America's Jewelry." Through Nov. 2. Hours: Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. 49 Washington Street, Newark. (201) 596-6550. + +NOYES MUSEUM "Treasures of Art History," works by Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec and ancient Egyptian, Greek and Ethiopian art from the New Jersey State Museum. Through June 15. "Easy Access: Highlights From the Noyes Museum's Collection of Contemporary Art." Through Aug. 17. Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 A.M. to 4 P.M. Admission: $3; $2 for the elderly and students. Lily Lake Road, Oceanville. (609) + +PASSAIC COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE Paintings by Fred Duignan. Through June 25. Mondays through Fridays, 9 A.M. to 9 P.M.; Saturdays, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. L.R.C. Gallery, Broadway and Memorial Drive, Paterson. (201) 684-6800. + +PALYMYRA ART GALLERY Paintings by Richard Nunziata. Through July 5. Opening reception Saturday, 7 to 10 P.M. Hours: Tuesdays through Sundays, 11:30 A.M. to 2 A.M. Palmyra Tea Room, 22 Hamilton Street, Bound Brook. (908) 302-0515. + +PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM "In Celebration: Works of Art From the Collections of Princeton Alumni and Friends of the Art Museum." Through next Sunday. Museum hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 to 5 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. Princeton University campus. (609) 258-3788. + +SIMON GALLERY Pastels and paintings by Antonio Carreno, and paintings by Jim Fuess and Joyce Korotkin. Tuesday through June 28. Opening reception Friday, 6 to 8 P.M. +48 Bank Street, Morristown. (201) 538-5456. + +SWAIN GALLERIES "Back in Havana," oil paintings by Enrique Flores-Gablis. Through Saturday. Gallery hours: Mondays through Fridays, 9:30 A.M. to 5:30 P.M.; Saturdays, 9:30 A.M. to 4 P.M. 703 Watchung Avenue, Plainfield. (908) 756-1707. + +WYCOFF GALLERY "The Silverman Collection," bronze sculptures by Star York, Bruce LaFountain, Sandi Clark and Walter Horton. Through June 27. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11:30 A.M. to 4 P.M. 648 Wyckoff Avenue, Wyckoff. (201) 891-7436. + +WHEATON VILLAGE "Garden Party: An Exhibition of Crafts in Nature." Today, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Free. 1501 Glasstown Road, Millville. (609) 825-6800. + +ZIMMERLI ART MUSEUM "Asian Traditions/ Modern Expressions: Asian-American Artists and Abstraction, 1945-1970." Through July 31. "Emily Mason: Works on Paper." Through July 20. "As You Can See," selections from the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art From the Soviet Union. Through July 20. Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. Rutgers University, George and Hamilton Streets, New Brunswick. (908) 932-7237. + +FOR CHILDREN + +KELSEY THEATER "Swiss Family Robinson." Saturday at 2 and 4 P.M. Tickets: $7. Mercer County Community College, 1200 Trenton Road, Trenton. (609) 584-9444. + +MONMOUTH MUSEUM "Changing Cultures: From the Lenape to the Urban Age, 1400-1900," exploring the history of America through changes in family life, from the Lenape through the Victorian era. Through June 1998. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. 761 Newman Springs Road, Lincroft. (908) 747-2266. + +NEW JERSEY CHILDREN'S MUSEUM An interactive center for ages 2 to 8. Daily programs: "Fairy Tale Play," 10:30 A.M. and 3:30 P.M. "Storytime," noon. Craft projects, 2:30 P.M. Museum hours: Mondays through Fridays, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. Admission: $7. 599 Industrial Avenue, Paramus. (201) 262-2638. + +NEW JERSEY STATE MUSEUM "The Great Russian Dinosaurs." Today, noon to 5 P.M. Special admission for dinosaur exhibition: $5; $3 for children and the elderly. 205 West State Street, Trenton. (609) 292-6464. + +PASSAIC COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE Theaterworks/USA presents "Charlotte's Web." Tuesday at 9:15 and 10:45 P.M., and "Swiss Family Robinson," Thursday at 9:15 and 10:45 P.M. Tickets: $8. 1 College Boulevard, Paterson. (212) 420-8202. + +RARITAN VALLEY COMMUNITY COLLEGE Tom Chapin. Next Sunday at 1 and 3:30 P.M. Tickets: $6. Edward Nash Theater, Route 28 and Lamington Road, North Branch. (908) 526-7890. + +RITZ THEATER "Rumpelstiltskin." Thursday and Friday at 10 A.M.; Saturday at 10 A.M. and 1 P.M. Admission: $5. 915 White Horse Pike, Oaklyn. (609) 858-5230. + +SPOKEN WORD + +ALLEN GINSBERG TRIBUTE Sponsored by the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, featuring readings by Bob Rosenthal, Andy Clausen, Eliot Katz, Laura Boss, Herschel Silverman, Joe Weil, Jan Barry, Joel Gaidemak, Danny Shot and others. Begins at Great Falls, Spruce and McBride Streets, Paterson, followed by readings at the Paterson Museum, 2 Market Street, Paterson. Next Sunday at 2 P.M. Free. (201) 684-6555. + +BARNES & NOBLE Kenneth Wollman and Nancy Swann, poets. Next Sunday at 3 P.M. Free. 518 State Highway 10, Livingston. +(201) 467-5013. + +BORDERS BOOKS AND MUSIC PRINCETON James Prosek, author of "Joe and Me." Next Sunday at 3 P.M. Free. Route 1 at Province Line Road, Princeton. (609) 514-0040. + +ENCORE BOOKS AND MUSIC Samuel Hynes, author of "The Soldier's Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War," and Eli Gottlieb, author of "The Boy Who Went Away." Tomorrow at 7 P.M. Free. Jean Hollander, poet. Thursday at 7:30 P.M. Free. 301 North Harrison Street, Princeton. (609) 252-0608. + +HAMPTON INN Poetry readings from Sensations magazine. Today at 1 P.M. Free. +250 Harmon Meadow Boulevard, Secaucus. (201) 866-7189. + +LONG BRANCH PUBLIC LIBRARY "Coney Island Verse at the Jersey Shore." Saturday at 1 P.M. Free. 328 Broadway, second floor, Long Branch. (908) 222-3900. + +RECTOR VERSO BOOK STORE Cheryl Clark and Joe Weil, poets. Thursday at 7:30 P.M. Free. 90 Albany Street, New Brunswick. (908) 247-9791. + +WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS CENTER Laura Boss, Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Joe Weil, poets. Tomorrow at 8 P.M. Admission by donation. 1 Williams Plaza, Rutherford. +(201) 939-2907. + +ETC. + +FLEA MARKET The Chester Lions Club Flea Market offers crafts, linens, books, children's clothing, housewares, plants and produce, makeup, jewelry, scarves, handbags and other accessories. Sundays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Free. West Blackwell Street, Morris and Sussex Streets, downtown Dover. (201) 442-1494. + +GRECIAN HOLIDAY FESTIVAL Greek food and pastries, live music and dancers. Today, noon to 9 P.M. Suggested donation: $1. Free shuttle bus from the parking lot at Mt. Pleasant Avenue and Main Street. St. Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church, 510 Linden Place, Orange. (201) 674-6600. + +NEW JERSEY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Sponsored by the Rutgers Film Co-op and the New Jersey Media Arts Center. Through July 27. "Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival." Tonight at 8. Free. "Ernesto Che Guevara: The Bolivian Diary," Friday at 7 P.M. "Time Bandits," Saturday at 7 P.M. Films are shown on Sundays at the State Theater, 15 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick; Fridays and Saturdays at 123 Scott Hall, College Avenue and Hamilton Street, Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Admission: $5; $4 for member on Fridays and Saturdays. Information: (908) 932-8482. +On the World Wide Web: +http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/nigrin. + +TASTE OF GREECE FESTIVAL Traditional Greek foods like moussaka, pastichio, shish kebab, spanakopita, tiropeta, gyro and souvlaki sandwiches, and Greek pastries like baklava, kataifi and loukoumades (honey puffs). Today, noon to 9 P.M. Free admission. Greek Orthodox Cathedral of St. John the Theologian, 353 East Clinton Avenue, Tenafly. (201) 567-5072. + +LOAD-DATE: June 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Louisiana Comes to New Jersey Stanley (Buckwheat) Dural Jr. of Buckwheat Zydeco is to perform at the eighth annual Crawfish Fest, an all-day celebration of Louisiana's Cajun and Zydeco music, Dixieland Jazz and Delta blues, foods and crafts. Also scheduled to appear are Dr. John, Beausoleil Avec Michael Doucet, Jumpin' Johnny Sansone, the Crescent City Maulers and the Canal Street Dixieland Jazz Band. WATERLOO VILLAGE Exit 25 North off Interstate 80, Stanhope. Today, 11 A.M. to 7:30 P.M. Tickets: $20; $15 each for groups of 10 or more; free for children under 14. Tickets: (201) 507-8900 or (212) 307-7171. Information: (212) 539-8830. On the World Wide Web: http://www.waterloovillage.org. (pg. 18); Last Chance "In Celebration," the exhibition observing the 250th anniversary of Princeton University, closes next Sunday. The show, consisting of artworks collected by Princeton alumni and friends of the Art Museum, includes this hanging scroll, "Chinese Recluse Lin Pu Greeting a Crane," by Takada Keiho (1674-1755), a Japanese painter of the Edo period. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM Through next Sunday. Museum hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 to 5 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. Free. (609) 258-3788. (pg. 19); Man of Many Styles Since the 1930's, Hananiah Harari's styles have swung from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism to trompe l'oeil realism, among other styles, and he has said his versatility serves as "an aid in preserving the artist's sense of humor." His prints and paintings, including this 1939 oil on canvas, are featured in "A Personal Synthesis," a retrospective. MONTCLAIR ART MUSEUM 3 South Mountain Avenue, Montclair. Through Aug. 10. Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 11 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Sundays and Thursdays, 1 to 5 P.M. Admission: $4; $3 for students with ID and the elderly; free on Saturdays. (201) 746-5555. (pg. 21); A Connecticut Summer The New England landscape was the inspiration for Deborah Cotrone's oil on canvas "Summer Roses," which appears in "Interpretations Through Realism and Impressionism"' with works by her fellow Connecticut artist Claire Conant. TOM JAMES GALLERY 10 Westwood Avenue, Westwood. Through July 5. Opening reception with the artists, today, 2 to 5 P.M. Hours: Mondays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M.; Thursdays to 8 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. (201) 666-5048. (pg. 22); The What Not Shop "Tom and Willie," a photograph by Jeff Martin, is featured in "Two Styles/Two Photographers," with works by Sandra Johanson. MONMOUTH MUSEUM Brookdale Community College, 761 Newman Springs Road, Lincroft. Through June 22. Hours: Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. (908) 747-2266. (pg. 23) + +TYPE: List + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +278 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 1, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +BEHIND THE WHEEL/Ferrari 550 Maranello; +50 Candles and a Car That Takes the Cake + +BYLINE: By DAN NEIL + +SECTION: Section 11; Page 1; Column 1; Automobiles + +LENGTH: 1319 words + +DATELINE: MODENA, Italy + +LIKE many Italian cities, Enzo Ferrari's hometown centers on a cathedral, a gray Romanesque iceberg floating on a sea of orange-tiled roofs. +In front of the church, out of the midday crowd, an old woman appears, her back bent like an ignition wire. She sees the car, then pauses to stroke its incandescent red fender. "Cinque-cinquanta," she said. Five-fifty. Then, in English, with a sly smile, she added, "I remember Ferrari quite well." + Oh, really? One wonders what tales the old women of Modena could tell. +Fifty years after he began building race cars in a factory outside Modena, and nine years after his death at age 90, Enzo Ferrari -- a poor, self-taught race driver who became the legendary Il Commendatore -- remains very much at the heart of this city. His portrait hangs in pharmacies, laundries and garages. The city's park is named after him. Any cab driver can show you where the company's first, cramped office was, or Ferrari's last, palatial home. +The man who brought 25 world racing championships to Modena remains in the present tense. "Ferrari, he is a magnificent man," said Valdez Gozzi, director of the Hotel Real Fini, where many visitors to the factory in nearby Maranello stay. "Because of him, the whole world knows Modena." +This week Italy celebrates the 50th anniversary of Ferrari, now owned by Fiat. There will be parades of race cars through Rome, special exhibitions, factory tours and gatherings of faithful Ferrari piloti at tracks like Piacenza, where the first Ferrari raced, or Bobbio-Penice, where Enzo himself last took the checkered flag. +At the center of these celebrations is Ferrari's latest, fastest gran turismo, the 550 Maranello. It is an exemplar of its kind, recalling the great GT's and GTO's of bygone years: a short-wheelbase, 12-cylinder, front-engine berlinetta, or coupe, with the piercing profile and urgent proportions typical of the Pininfarina studio that designed it. +It is a shape that compels traffic to part in deference as it comes into view. Teen-agers on motor scooters trail behind like schools of giddy remoras. +The twist is that the Maranello -- the 50th-anniversary Ferrari, the car the company says best captures the current state of its soul -- is probably not a car Enzo Ferrari would have built. Enzo's Ferraris had to be demanding and twitchy, with a hard-edged, race car gestalt. No excuses, no compromises. Such a car was the 512M Testarossa, which the Maranello replaces. Shaped like an ax head sharpened on all sides, the Testarossa is remembered as the most emotive cast member of "Miami Vice." Like the sweaty detectives who drove it, the mid-engine Testarossa admirably overfunctioned in a few areas but was, on a daily basis, fairly obnoxious. +Its one redeeming virtue -- beyond its peculiar, erogenous beauty -- was that it was blazingly fast. +The Maranello is a very different car. For one thing, its engine is up front. This configuration sacrifices a measure of agility (mid-engine cars react more quickly to drivers' commands) for a comfortable cabin layout, more storage, better visibility and sound isolation -- all lovely qualities but not design imperatives of top-line Ferraris gone by. +Yet the 550's cabin is an amazingly civil place to be at 200 miles an hour. The door sills are low and the firm, deep bucket seats are mounted high for ease of entry. The interior consists of two gorgeous scoops of tan Connolly leather and wool carpet cut out of the business-first black bulkhead and instrument console. The deafening sound system, climate controls, telescoping steering column and intuitively placed switches are all swaddled in high-design leather. +Visibility, headroom, legroom, cabin noise, even cargo space, are all first-rate, precisely what you'd expect if you'd spent $55,000 on a Lexus SC 400 sport coupe, but a wildly pleasant surprise for those who would lay down $220,000 for a Ferrari. +Despite its Daddy Warbucks price, a front-engine Maranello also implies a certain cost-conscious practicality on the company's part, something in which Enzo Ferrari was famously uninterested. The Maranello shares vital components with the company's elegant front-engine, four-passenger 456GT coupe. The engine is the same 5.5-liter all-aluminum V12, tweaked to produce an extra 50 horsepower for a total output of 485 horses and 419 foot-pounds of torque. +Finally -- and this is the thing that might have galled Enzo the most -- the front-engine Maranello, because it is less reactive than the mid-engine Testarossa, is also far more forgiving of driver error, less willing to pirouette off the road. +It's more than just chassis dynamics. Ferrari has fitted the Maranello with advanced electronics like adaptive suspension and traction control. To purists, this may seem like sacrilege, but it makes the Maranello far easier to drive, and drive fast, than supercars of the past. From a business perspective it makes perfect sense to expand the Ferrari brand beyond the few zealots who could both afford and handle a high-strung 500-horsepower car. +And yet a lap around a race track near Perugia confirms that this is not a car that suffers fools gladly. The Maranello delivers all the physiological yah-yahs any purist could expect of a top-line Ferrari. Jump on the throttle and the cabin is swamped with the vexed, voluptuous sound of the 60-valve V12 painting the pavement with expensive 18-inch Pirelli tires. +The power plant heaves torque at every r.p.m. in every gear. At full, brassy roar, the Maranello jets to 60 m.p.h. in 4.3 seconds. Just 4 seconds later, you're rocketing at nearly 100 m.p.h. in third gear, pinned hard to the seat. +The adaptive suspension, switched to "sport" mode (there is a "normal" setting for a softer ride), hardens to a leatherlike compliance, giving the car a stiff, flat posture when cornering. On longer turns, after a fraction of a second as it electronically sorts its various dampings, the car assumes a stance and holds it far past your willingness to test its limits, crunching you mercilessly into the door panels. +The variable power rack-and-pinion steering is fluidly light and Wilkinson sharp, with 2.2 well-weighted turns from lock to lock. Will yourself into a corner and the car obeys. Should you need to correct, it answers with instant, athletic ease. Huge disk brakes, abetted by an anti-lock system, nonchalantly haul the car down from speed. +The 550 racks up impressive lap times, but doesn't quite have the visceral excitement of the Testarossa or even the V8-powered Ferrari F355. That is by design. All the effort to make the car easier to drive makes it less a test of will. +Millionaire boy racers will love this car. With the traction control off, it is child's play to place the 550 in any posture you want. To hit the perfect angle when exiting a corner, you simply roll on the power until the car's back end drifts into alignment, add a touch of countersteer, then nail it. The scenery explodes into streaks of diverging color. +Nor can purists complain about the Maranello's top end, which the company lists at 199 m.p.h. -- give them some credit for modesty and call it an even 200. The Ferrari 550 is a full three seconds faster around the company's test track at Fiorano than the Testarossa it replaces. But, in a way, it hardly matters that the Maranello is a better performer. Purists will grumble that to civilize Ferrari's supercars is, inescapably, to diminish them emotionally. +That may be. But it seems Ferrari has built something more than just another fast car. The Maranello is a cleverly negotiated settlement between the realities of modern car building and the emotional expectations of the Ferraristi. Having reached its 50th anniversary, Ferrari may simply outlive the old-school purists who would have it any other way. + +INSIDE TRACK: Finally, a 200-m.p.h. supercar that anybody can drive. + +LOAD-DATE: June 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The Ferrari 550 Maranello, which went on sale in North America last month, on a track near Perugia, Italy. (Dan Neil for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +279 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 2, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Mary Wolanin, 86; Studied Care for Elderly + +SECTION: Section B; Page 13; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 217 words + +Mary Opal Wolanin, a nurse who did research on long-term care for the elderly, died on May 22 at Methodist Hospital in San Antonio. She was 86 and lived in San Antonio. +The cause was respiratory failure, said her brother, Calvin Borror of Wichita, Kan. + Ms. Wolanin, who was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame last year, began her career as a nurse in 1935 at Kansas City General Hospital in Missouri. From 1941 to 1943, she was a second lieutenant in the Army Nurses Corps. +Later, she joined the faculty of the University of Arizona School of Nursing. She eventually became an associate professor and worked to establish one of the first gerontological nursing programs in the country. She began to study nursing homes in 1972 after receiving an appointment with the Regional Medical Program in Arizona. Throughout her career, Ms. Wolanin focused on improving nursing care for patients suffering from dementia. +A native of Chrisney, Ind., Ms. Wolanin graduated from the University of Arizona and received a master's degree from the University of Arizona School of Nursing. +In addition to her brother, she is survived by her husband of 54 years, Maj. H. J. Wolanin; another brother, Martin Borror of Tucson, Ariz., and a sister, Florence Lewis of Quenemo, Kan. + +LOAD-DATE: June 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +280 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 3, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Giuliani Says Pataki Must Do More to Resolve Rent Impasse + +BYLINE: By RICHARD PEREZ-PENA + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1193 words + +DATELINE: ALBANY, June 2 + +With two weeks left until state rent controls expire, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani traveled here today and called on Gov. George E. Pataki to become more involved in resolving the impasse, while the Governor went to New York City to begin a public relations campaign in favor of his proposal to phase out rent regulations. +In his strongest language to date, Mr. Giuliani put the onus for resolving the dispute over the rent laws squarely on his fellow Republican, Mr. Pataki. "The Governor taking a role in this will help move it in the right direction, I believe, and I would urge him to take a stronger role," he said. + When asked what such a role might be, the Mayor, who favors continuing the rent regulations and has publicly disparaged Mr. Pataki's position, suggested that it would begin with the Governor's changing his mind. "I think that the Governor will recognize the damage that could be done here," he said. +Zenia Mucha, Mr. Pataki's communications director, said, "The Mayor's entitled to state anything he wishes, but the fact of the matter is that the Governor has said time and time again that both sides need to get together and negotiate a compromise." +The Governor has proposed ending rent regulations for apartments when they become vacant, a policy known as vacancy decontrol that would gradually end all controls as tenants move out or die. He has also proposed deregulating rents for tenants who earn $175,000 a year or more. +Mr. Giuliani, like Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and other top Democrats, opposes vacancy decontrol, and he said today that the $175,000 limit was too low. +Mr. Pataki spoke with elderly residents in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, today in the first of a series of events designed to sell his plan to a nervous public. And he announced plans for a televised forum on rent issues to be held Tuesday, a proposal that ran into trouble even before it was made public. +At the Bay Ridge Center for Older Adults, Mr. Pataki told 100 people that his plan was "a fair and balanced approach that would protect you," repeating the two adjectives he has used to describe his position since announcing it last month. +As one woman expressed the fear that the fate of ordinary people would be lost in negotiations over the laws, he said, "That's exactly why I'm here, because I want to give it right from my heart as to what we're trying to do." +Several people said they saw the Governor's plan to institute vacancy decontrol as a covert way to end regulations while not angering current voters. "You're opening the door to full decontrol," one man, Alex Staber, said angrily. "You're not being honest with the people." +As he did repeatedly during the morning visit, the Governor avoided the specific charge and simply assured Mr. Staber that "99 percent of current tenants would be protected" under his plan. +This morning, the Governor's office issued a news release stating that he would host a panel discussion on the rent laws Tuesday night on New York One, the cable television news channel in New York City. The release said that Billy Easton, a prominent tenant organizer, and Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez, a Brooklyn Democrat who supports the current system, had said they would be on the panel but that Mr. Easton was having second thoughts. +But officials at New York One said they had never made a firm commitment to broadcast the event. And even before reporters received the news release, Mr. Easton said he had never agreed to take part if the event was run by the Governor. "We'd love to do the panel if there was a nonbiased moderator," he said. +Mr. Lopez, chairman of the Housing Committee, said he initially agreed to participate but then withdrew because of the Governor's role and the composition of the panel, which he said was weighted toward Mr. Pataki's views. +This afternoon, Mr. Pataki's aides, who said the forum was his idea, said the plan had been changed to have a New York One reporter act as host, with the Governor giving introductory and closing remarks and acting as a member of the panel. Once again, they said Mr. Easton had agreed to appear, and once again, he said he would have no part of it. Mr. Lopez said that he was not sure but that he was unlikely to take part if Mr. Easton did not. +Steve Paulus, vice president for news at New York One, said, "I think they're getting closer to a format that's going to work." But he added that he was still not certain the station would do the broadcast. +The Assembly, controlled by Democrats, has passed a bill that would continue the current rent rules, and its top officials, like Mr. Giuliani, insist that the Governor's plan is unacceptable. The leader of the Senate's Republican majority, Joseph L. Bruno, who had called for ending rent rules within a few years, has indicated that he would accept something like Mr. Pataki's proposal. +Mr. Bruno has said that if there is no compromise in place when the laws expire at midnight on June 15, he will allow them to lapse, abruptly ending the regulations that limit rents and rent increases for 1.2 million apartments, most of them in New York City. +Mr. Pataki, Mr. Bruno and Mr. Silver have had little direct negotiations on rent, though the issue has held up progress on other pressing matters like the budget and welfare policy. While there have been many compromise measures proposed, one side or the other has rejected each of them as a capitulation. But Mr. Giuliani, who met with several Republican and Democratic lawmakers to lobby them on rent, insisted today that the Governor's plan "does offer possibilities of negotiating a solution," though he did not say how. +Aides to the Mayor said he was frustrated that Mr. Pataki had not held more talks with legislative leaders on the issue. But Mr. Giuliani, who generally treads lightly with a Governor whom he often petitions for favors, was careful not to criticize Mr. Pataki outright. And he dismissed the suggestion by some Assembly Democrats that the Governor had arranged not to be in Albany for the Mayor's lobbying trip. +"He has to make his own calculation, politically, where and how he wants to involve himself in it, and he's probably made the calculation that he'd rather have a little distance from it right now," Mr. Giuliani said. "The Governor has to decide, in his own way, how he wants to play a role in this. The stronger leadership role that he plays in it, the better off we're going to be." +Meanwhile today, the Manhattan District Attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, said he feared that vacancy decontrol would lead to widespread harassment of tenants by landlords who wanted them to move so rents on their apartments could be increased. +He said that in the 1980's, when the market was tight and vacancies meant higher rents, unscrupulous landlords seeking to drive renters out resorted to tactics ranging from "bringing prostitutes into the building to taking the hinges off the doors to flooding the apartments." He said the potential for abuse under vacancy decontrol would be even stronger. +As part of his plan, Mr. Pataki has proposed criminal penalties for landlords who harass tenants. + +LOAD-DATE: June 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Gov. George E. Pataki, left, spoke to elderly Brooklyn residents about rent control. (Vic DeLucia/The New York Times); Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, above left, and Sheldon Silver, the Assembly Speaker, conferred in Albany. (David Jennings for The New York Times) + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +281 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 4, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +The Medicine Woman Of the Mohegans; +Tribe's Past and Future Are the Legacy Of Its Anthropologist Matriarch at 98 + +BYLINE: By DOUGLAS MARTIN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1405 words + +DATELINE: UNCASVILLE, Conn. + +Gladys Tantaquidgeon knows how to make a tonic from 10 forest herbs. She knows that when the dogwood blooms it is time to fish for shad. She knows that spiders bring good luck, that a howling dog is a sign of death and that catnip heals colic in infants. +She knows these things because she is medicine woman for the Mohegan tribe and because three elderly women -- her grandmothers, she calls them -- took her under their wing and taught her the old lessons. She, in turn, became a published anthropologist, a social worker to Indians of many tribes and a revered elder of her own, a tribe that might have evaporated into history's ether if not for her efforts and example. + It is some example. +Gladys Tantaquidgeon turns 98 on June 15, and has never been sick enough to go to a doctor and has never needed glasses. When asked why, the medicine woman, barely five feet tall, smiles ever so slightly. She never ate hot dogs, she says. +Her importance to her people is immense. Federal researchers say that the things Ms. Tantaquidgeon knows and the things she saved were pivotal in restoring tribal status to her people. That status, granted in 1994, has allowed the tribe to build the Mohegan Sun casino, which opened here in southeastern Connecticut in October. +In its first six months, the casino earned a pre-tax profit of $55.3 million, of which the tribe gets 60 percent. Already, any Mohegan high school graduate is guaranteed a college scholarship of $20,000 a year. Other uses for the money include a new home for the elderly and an aggressive campaign to retrieve tribal artifacts now in museum collections. +Virginia DeMarre, a historian for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, said that Ms. Tantaquidgeon provided the key to proving tribal identity. No one doubted the tribe's existence up to the beginning of this century. But what was missing, she said, was concrete evidence, particularly after World War II, that the Mohegans, immortalized in James Fenimore Cooper's "Last of the Mohicans," persisted as a tribal group. +Under the medicine woman's antique bed -- in scores of Tupperware containers -- were hundreds of postcards from Mohegans, as well as birth, marriage and death records. "We needed those pieces of paper," Ms. DeMarre said. "They left no questions whatsoever." +The historian said that Ms. Tantaquidgeon provided personal testimony to what kept the Mohegans intact: a line of matriarchs who functioned behind the scenes, keeping secrets and passing them on. "To a great extent, it was the older women who throughout the 20th century kept the group together -- like glue," Ms. DeMarre said. +And, always, it has been the memory of the tiny woman that mattered most. In 1931, she and her father and brother founded a museum, the nation's oldest Indian museum run by Indians. The museum was also persuasive to Federal researchers. It houses the things that define a culture, from delicate baskets to a child's rattle made from a dog's skull to spoons of sugar maple to the little baskets in which to put meat and berries for "the little people of the woodlands," minuscule invisible beings in whom the medicine woman devoutly believes. +The objects are illustrations in the story the medicine woman has worked to keep alive. +"In my earlier years, I perhaps wasn't aware that time was going by so rapidly, and later I realized that many had gone," she said. "I seemed always to be working against time." +So was Martha Uncas, a medicine woman who lived for 98 years and died in 1859. During her life, many Mohegans were dying of the plague and she took it as a personal responsibility to produce as many more as possible. She had many mates, replacing each as he died or left to hunt, look for work or fight wars. The majority of today's Mohegans are her descendants. +She passed her secrets to several women, including Fidelia Fielding, who before her death in 1908 at 81 was the last of them to live in a traditional log house. +"She was very much a loner, very much to herself," Ms. Tantaquidgeon recalled. "Fidelia was not pleased with non-Indian neighbors." +Young Gladys also learned from two other "grandmothers," both taught by Martha Uncas and both octogenarians at death. They were Emma Baker, who knew Greek and Latin, and Merch Ann Nonesuch Mathews. Ms. Tantaquidgeon speaks of being taken into the forest with the three older women at age 5 as they searched for herbs. +"It was customary that the women would observe some of the girls," she said. "They would discuss their choice, saying, 'Perhaps it might be well to take this one to learn certain skills.' Then they would select someone." +Other Mohegans consider it likely that Ms. Tantaquidgeon long ago selected and trained her own successor, although such things are secret. The medicine woman will not even admit she is a medicine woman, much less describe what a medicine woman does. "It's not something you speak on," she said. +But then she will tell of not being surprised by much when she first visited New York as a teen-ager. "I had seen everything perfectly in my dreams," she said. +The medicine woman's life has been anything but predictable. What education she received was at home with parents and friends. She met the anthropologist Frank G. Speck when he was studying Mohegan culture and made such an impression that he invited her along on family vacations in New England. In 1919, she began studying anthropology under Dr. Speck at the University of Pennsylvania, meeting leading anthropologists during her eight years there. Franz Boas, considered the father of modern anthropology, gave her a necklace made of walrus tusk. +She returned home and applied her anthropological knowledge to writing about her tribe, as well as traveling to other Indian communities throughout New England. In 1931, she and her father, John, and brother, Harold, built the museum. +A series of jobs took her away from home. In 1935, she did social work with tribes in the Western United States, and in 1938 she was one of the first employees of the new Indian Arts and Crafts Board, supervising the production and sale of Indian art from Montana to California. She helped win Indians the right to perform ceremonies like the sun dance that had been banned on their reservations. +In 1947, she returned home. For a time, she worked as a social worker in a nearby women's prison, but then shifted her attention to tribal government and the running of the museum. Because so many were dying young and so many had left, she was considered an important elder. +In 1970, she published a book on native folk medicine, with descriptions of magic rituals. In 1994, Yale University granted her an honorary doctorate for her work in herbal medicine. +She is not sure why she never married, though a plaque on her kitchen wall provides a clue. It reads: "Women's faults are many. Men have but two. Everything they say and everything they do." +Around 9 A.M. each day, Ms. Tantaquidgeon walks up the hill from the home she shares with her sister, Ruth, 88, to her museum, where she delights in telling about the objects and "the memory trail" they represent. +Sometimes she tells people about Fidelia Fielding, who did not teach her the old tongue because those who spoke Indian were often discriminated against. Ms. Tantaquidgeon recalls Fidelia Fielding, the last speaker of her language, using the phrase "words strung like bright beads on the thread of the speaking past" to describe the treasure that would die with her. +"She instilled in us a sense of who we were," said Jayne Fawcett, tribal vice chairwoman and Ms. Tantaquidgeon's niece. "We wouldn't have survived this century without her." +It has hardly gone to her head. At noon, if she can get a break, she enjoys the simple pleasure of making herself a marmalade and Velveeta sandwich. In the later afternoon, she likes to sit in her living room and read. +She has been to the casino, much of it modeled on her descriptions of Mohegan traditional design, just once. Almost the whole tribe accompanied her, all itching to hear what she thought. +"Too much of the color green," she decreed. "Green is unlucky." +With the exception of the mounds of cash, much of the offending color was promptly painted over. Gladys Tantaquidgeon's larger accomplishment is that neither she nor any of her tribe will be the last of the Mohegans. +She has not even read the book. + +NAME: Gladys Tantaquidgeon + +LOAD-DATE: June 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Gladys Tantaquidgeon, Mohegan medicine woman, amid the tribal treasures of her museum in Uncasville, Conn., and, above, gathering herbs on Mohegan Hill in 1913. She will be 98 on June 15. (James Estrin/The New York Times) + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +282 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 4, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Seeking Bipartisan Support, Republicans Offer Medicare Plan + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1179 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 3 + +House Republicans today unveiled details of their plan to slow the growth of Medicare by cutting payments to hospitals, doctors and other health care providers, but they backed away from some of the more radical proposals that provoked a veto by President Clinton in 1995. +Mr. Clinton has already endorsed the total amount of projected savings, $115 billion, or 8.5 percent of what Medicare would otherwise spend in the next five years. But he has objected to some parts of the Republican plan, including a proposal to allow medical savings accounts for the elderly as an alternative to standard Medicare. + Mr. Clinton said the accounts would appeal mainly to younger, healthy people and would leave sicker, high-cost patients in the traditional Medicare program, undermining its finances. In an effort to accommodate the White House today, Republicans proposed setting a limit of 500,000 on the number of people who could establish such accounts. +Michael D. McCurry, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Clinton had "some very real concern" that medical savings accounts would drain revenue from the Medicare trust fund. But he said the President was open to the idea of a limited "pilot or demonstration project." +There was no limit on the number of people who could have signed up for medical savings accounts under the Republicans' 1995 bill. +Representative Bill Thomas, the California Republican who heads the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, said that this year's plan would "save Medicare from bankruptcy" at least through 2007. With no action, the trust fund that pays hospital bills for the elderly is expected to run out of money in 2001. +When Speaker Newt Gingrich unveiled the Republicans' last set of Medicare proposals in September 1995, he delivered a blistering attack on President Clinton and denounced the Democratic Party as "totally morally bankrupt." +Chastened and reprimanded for violation of ethics rules this year, Mr. Gingrich was nowhere to be seen as Mr. Thomas offered his plan today, in a more conciliatory tone. This year, Mr. Thomas said, Republicans tried to avoid "a clear conflict line with the White House." Disagreements, he said, can be resolved through "continued dialogue" with Mr. Clinton and Democrats in Congress. +Mr. Thomas said that under his proposals, Medicare spending would grow an average of 6 percent a year, to $280 billion in 2002, from $209 billion this year. Under current law, according to the Congressional Budget Office, Medicare would grow 8.5 percent a year, to $314 billion in 2002. The program has grown an average of 11 percent a year in the last five years. +The Medicare proposals are intended to carry out the budget-balancing agreement negotiated last month by Mr. Clinton and Republican leaders. In concept, the proposals are very similar to the Medicare provisions of the budget bill that Mr. Clinton vetoed in 1995. But the cuts in projected Medicare spending this year are more modest, and the proposed increases in premiums for beneficiaries are much smaller, so the package is likely to get more Democratic support. +Representative Pete Stark of California, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, said that, aside from the proposed medical savings accounts, the Republican package was "not bad." And he added: "You've got to raise $115 billion. There's no gentle way." +Mr. Stark thanked Mr. Thomas for his bipartisan efforts. "Much of this bill is good for the Medicare program, for the Americans who rely on it now and for the generations who count on its future solvency," Mr. Stark said. "A few changes would make this bill easier to vote for and easier on our senior citizens." +Doctors got much of what they wanted. In the bill, House Republicans would limit damages in malpractice lawsuits, allowing no more than $250,000 for "pain and suffering" in a particular case. +Mr. Thomas also proposed delaying changes in payments to doctors for their office employees, supplies, rent and other "practice expenses." Doctors say that these changes, scheduled to take effect next year, would cut total Medicare payments to some surgeons by more than 30 percent. The American Medical Association had lobbied for a delay, saying the Government did not have the data to justify such cuts. +The Republican bill would create special rules for doctors and hospitals that wanted to form their own health plans to compete with H.M.O.'s in the Medicare market. Such "provider-sponsored organizations" would have to seek state licenses, but the Secretary of Health and Human Services could, in some cases, override state licensing requirements. +The subcommittee is expected to approve the Medicare proposals this week, with similar action by the full committee planned for next week. The legislation would then go the House floor and presumably to the Senate, where Republicans are drafting similar legislation. +The House Republicans' plan would freeze Medicare payments to hospitals and slow the growth of payments to health maintenance organizations, doctors, nursing homes and home health care agencies. The higher premiums for beneficiaries would be more than offset by the value of new benefits they would receive, including covering the cost of diabetes treatment and screening for cancer of the breast, cervix, colon and prostate. +Mr. Thomas's bill would not solve Medicare's long-term financial problems, but would create a 15-member commission to recommend ways of preserving Medicare for baby boomers, who start retiring around 2010. +In addition, the bill would establish new consumer protections for elderly people who enroll in H.M.O.'s. For example, it stipulates that H.M.O.'s must pay for emergency medical services and establishes a uniform definition of emergency based on the judgment of "a prudent lay person." Moreover, if a health plan denied coverage, the beneficiary would be entitled to a formal hearing, with judicial review if the dispute involved more than $1,000. +The bill would toughen penalties for health care providers convicted of Medicare fraud. A third conviction would mean permanent exclusion from Federal health programs. +The Republicans' claim to political credit for preserving Medicare may be somewhat obscured by the fight over medical savings accounts. +Under the Republican proposal, beneficiaries could use their share of Medicare money to set up tax-free savings accounts to pay routine medical costs, and they would buy high-deductible insurance policies to pay other medical expenses. Republicans say this will encourage the elderly to pay more attention to medical costs, because they could keep money left in their accounts. +In 1995, the Congressional Budget Office said that medical savings accounts would increase Medicare costs by $2 billion in the first five years and by $1.5 billion in the next two years. The Government, it said, would spend an average of $4,300 a year for each person with a medical savings account, compared with $3,100 a year if the person remained in the traditional Medicare program. + +LOAD-DATE: June 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +283 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 5, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +G.O.P. BACKING OFF A DEAL TO RESTORE AID TO IMMIGRANTS + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1011 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 4 + +House Republicans today backed away from their commitment to restore Federal aid for certain legal immigrants, prompting the Clinton Administration to complain that the Republicans were violating the bipartisan budget agreement reached just five weeks ago. +In addition, a proposal announced today by House Republicans would override a recent White House ruling that state governments must pay the minimum wage to welfare recipients participating in workfare programs. + Administration officials denounced both proposals, which the Republicans have added to a comprehensive bill intended to balance the Federal budget. +Vice President Al Gore said the proposals on immigrants were "harsh, unfair and unnecessary." Moreover, he said, "they violate the terms of the bipartisan budget agreement by failing to restore a minimal safety net" for legal immigrants who have not become citizens. Mr. Gore said the proposals "would cut off 100,000 severely disabled immigrants who would receive benefits under the budget agreement." +The agreement, reached on May 2, was a framework for legislation to balance the budget. Republicans are now filling in the details, and they said today that they did not feel obliged to accept every item in the agreement. +Representative Sander M. Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means subcommittee that writes welfare legislation, said the proposals on immigrants "clearly violate the budget agreement." Accordingly, he said, "this bill is heading toward confrontation instead of bipartisan accord." +Representative E. Clay Shaw Jr. of Florida, the chief author of the 1996 welfare law, said the Republicans were improving the budget agreement, by guaranteeing benefits for certain elderly immigrants rather than for those who become disabled. +The Republicans are playing with political fire in restricting benefits for legal immigrants. Their proposals have proved unpopular in parts of Florida, Texas and other states with many immigrants. And the party itself is divided, with some Republicans like Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York urging Congress to restore aid to legal immigrants. +After learning of the new proposal by Congressional Republicans, Colleen A. Roche, a spokeswoman for Mayor Giuliani, said, "The proponents of this change should be ashamed of themselves for trying to play off the elderly against the disabled." Lobbyists for the elderly echoed that comment. +Supporters of legal immigration, including Hispanic groups, Jewish organizations and Roman Catholic bishops, criticized the Republican proposals as a retreat from the budget agreement. +The Republicans' welfare proposals are much more contentious than their Medicare proposals, which were unanimously approved tonight by the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health. +The welfare law signed by Mr. Clinton on Aug. 22, 1996, cut off many Federal benefits for noncitizens. Restoring some of those benefits is a top priority for the President. +The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 500,000 legal immigrants will lose Supplemental Security Income benefits this summer because of the law. The program, for the indigent elderly and the disabled, pays a maximum of $484 a month for an individual and $726 a month for a couple. +The budget agreement, negotiated by Mr. Clinton and Congressional Republican leaders, explicitly promised to "restore Supplemental Security Income and Medicaid eligibility for all disabled legal immigrants who are or become disabled and who entered the United States prior to Aug. 23, 1996." +The new Republican bill would restore benefits only for those who were actually receiving benefits on Aug. 22, not for those who were in the United States then and later become disabled. +Many immigrants have relatives or other "sponsors" in the United States who agreed to support them. Under today's Republican proposal, an immigrant could not receive Supplemental Security Income payments if the sponsor's income was more than 50 percent above the official poverty level. A family of three would meet this test if it had income exceeding $18,775 a year. +Republicans said they assumed that such a family could take full financial responsibility for a disabled immigrant. Vice President Gore said that the assumption was unwarranted. +When Mr. Clinton signed the welfare bill, he said he would fight to restore benefits for legal immigrants. Republicans like Mr. Shaw contend that the budget agreement went too far. "Supplemental Security Income has become a pension plan for third-world countries," Mr. Shaw said today. +Mr. Shaw also said that Republicans never intended for the minimum wage to apply to workfare participants. +Workfare programs require welfare recipients to work in return for their benefits. Governors of both parties said that any requirement for them to pay the minimum wage would vastly increase the cost of their work programs. +The Republicans' new proposal says that welfare recipients working for a public agency or a nonprofit organization shall not be considered employees for purposes of the Fair Labor Standards Act or any other Federal law. The minimum wage -- now $4.75 an hour, rising to $5.15 on Sept. 1 -- is part of the labor standards law. +The Republican proposal says that states may count welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, child care and housing subsidies as income for people in workfare programs. States divide the amount of such income by the minimum wage to determine the number of hours that a person may be required to work for a public agency or a nonprofit organization. +It is easier for states to meet the law's work requirements if they can count government benefits as income. But Elena Kagan, the President's deputy assistant for domestic policy, said: "The Administration strongly opposes these provisions. They are clearly outside the scope of the budget agreement. They violate the principle that workfare participants, like other workers, should get the benefit of the minimum wage and other worker-protection laws." + +LOAD-DATE: June 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +284 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 5, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +M.T.A. Turns Deal Maker In Promoting Metrocards + +BYLINE: By DAVID M. HALBFINGER + +SECTION: Section B; Page 9; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 740 words + +When the Mets play the Yankees later this month in New York's first regular-season interleague baseball games, Yankee Stadium will be the scene of another first: advertisements on the back of Metrocards. +Modell's, the sporting goods company, is paying the Metropolitan Transportation Authority more than $100,000 to place its logo on more than 50,000 Metrocards that will be handed out free to those attending the first game between the teams, on June 16. An additional 200,000 of the logo-bearing cards will be sold, in $15 denominations, at the 2,000 convenience and retail stores that sell Metrocards across the city. + The promotion is the first in a series meant to generate ad revenue, encourage use of the cards and persuade consumers to buy the cards outside subway stations. In late summer, the M.T.A. is expected to unveil a combination Metrocard and prepaid telephone calling card under a deal being negotiated with M.C.I. Communications, the phone carrier. M.C.I. would distribute the cards. Other promotional ideas could involve the United States Open golf tournament, Madison Square Garden, and a major soft-drink bottling company, which would sell the cards at vending machines, M.T.A. officials said. +Modell's sponsorship of the "First Subway Series Metrocard" plays off nostalgia for the days of crosstown World Series match-ups between the Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. The Yankees edged the Dodgers in seven games in the subway series of 1956, the city's last. +The promotional deal was made in March, said Jack Perlman, a marketing consultant to both Modell's and the M.T.A. Since then, the Mets have put together a better record than the world champion Yankees -- generating considerable interest in the three-game series. +Anyone attending the June 16 game will receive a Metrocard worth $1.50, a single subway or bus fare. One person, chosen at random, will get a card worth $780 -- enough to ride to and from work, five days a week, for a year. And Modell's will offer a 15 percent discount on store merchandise to customers with the cards for a month. +The subway series-themed cards will not be available at token booths. +George Carrano, senior vice president of New York City Transit, a division of the M.T.A., who oversees distribution of Metrocards, said the deal with Modell's is the first of several "strategic alliances" being planned to "move more of our sales transactions from the station booth to stores, out of the system." +Doing so, he said, shortens lines at token booths and makes purchasing Metrocards easier for senior citizens and those who ride buses with routes far from the subway system. +It also saves the M.T.A. thousands of dollars in promotional expenses. Modell's is spending $500,000 for newspaper and radio advertisements, on top of $25,000 to print the cards and more than $75,000 for the fares to be given away. +Mr. Carrano and other people familiar with the Metrocard program said other similarly themed, commercially sponsored fare cards are being discussed, such as a United States Open card bearing a picture of the late tennis great Arthur Ashe, and a New York Knicks Metrocard that might be given to any fan purchasing a ticket to a basketball game. +First, however, the authority plans to introduce a combination Metrocard and prepaid calling card. M.C.I. is concluding a deal for a test printing of 400,000 cards to be sold, beginning in late summer, through M.C.I.'s normal distribution channels, including Kmart stores and places frequented by tourists visiting New York, who are heavy buyers of calling cards. +"We're leveraging their distribution to get the card out," Mr. Carrano said. M.C.I. also will pay a fee to the M.T.A., he said, although the relationship is not exclusive: "We're also negotiating with AT&T," he added. +The M.T.A. is also in talks with a major soft-drink bottler about adapting its vending machines in the metropolitan area to sell Metrocards in addition to cans of soda, Mr. Carrano said, adding that the bottling company would pay for the investment. +Officials at the M.T.A. also plan to hire an outside agency to find companies interested in turning Metrocards into mini-billboards, in pure advertising deals. Alicia Martinez, director of marketing at the M.T.A., said estimates of the annual revenue from ads on Metrocards have run from the hundreds of thousands of dollars to $2 million a year. + +LOAD-DATE: June 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: June 9, 1997, Monday + + CORRECTION: +Because of an editing error, an article on Thursday about placing advertisements on New York transit Metrocards misidentified a sporting event that is under consideration for such a promotion. It is the United States Open tennis tournament, not a golf tournament. + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Metrocards will be getting a new face this month, in a deal with Modell's based on Mets-Yankees games. + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +285 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 6, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Role of Genes in Shaping Intelligence Is Lifelong, Study Says + +BYLINE: By MALCOLM W. BROWNE + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1073 words + +Psychologists have long assumed that the relative importance of genes in shaping a person's intelligence declines over the years, because the other determinant of intelligence, experience, increases as a person ages. +But a new study of 240 pairs of twins, all older than 80, demonstrates that genes are just as important for cognitive function in old people as they are in middle-age adults. The investigation, which is being published today in the journal Science, found that the genetic contribution to an old person's intellect is about 50 percent, the balance being attributable to education, stress exposure, occupation, socioeconomic status, geography, nutrition, disease and all the other environmental factors that shape life. + A statement by the National Institutes of Health, which sponsored the study, predicted that further study of the role of genes in intelligence in older people "could lead to beneficial interventions that might slow or reverse cognitive decline," including the ravages of Alzheimer's disease. +The two-year study was carried out by a team of Swedish, British and American scientists under the leadership of Dr. Gerald E. McClearn, director of the Center for Developmental and Health Genetics at Pennsylvania State University, under a grant from the National Institute on Aging. +Dr. Irving I. Gottesman of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who has investigated possible genetic causes of schizophrenia and other mental diseases, said in a comment published in Science that Dr. McClearn's study was a landmark demonstration that "the genetic contribution to cognitive ability is remarkably constant throughout life." +The statistical analysis that led to that conclusion was possible because several nations -- Australia, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden among them -- maintain national registries of nearly all their twins. +Dr. McClearn and his collaborators at the University College of Health Services in Jonkoping, Sweden, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, the Institute of Psychiatry in London and Penn State chose their subjects from the Swedish Twin Registry. Of the 240 pairs, 110 were of identical twins and 130 were fraternal same-sex pairs, whose genes were only as similar to each other as those of ordinary siblings. All the twins were born before World War I, and their average age was 83. +Each twin in every pair was individually tested by a different nurse and was subjected to a demanding 90-minute battery of examinations aimed at measuring not only general intelligence, but also specific cognitive abilities. Those included tests of how long it took to complete various cognitive tasks, synonym matching, manipulation of colored cubes to match patterns presented on cards, identifying like and unlike figures, memorizing strings of numbers and recognizing pictures that had been shown earlier. +The analysis of the results showed large differences between the degree of cognitive matching in the two types of twins, identical or fraternal. In general, as expected, the identical twins were much closer to each other intellectually than were the fraternal twins. Previous large-scale testing of twins, including a major investigation a decade ago by Dr. Thomas J. Bouchard Jr. and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota, yielded similar results. +"But what is so new and surprising about the latest study," said Dr. Jared B. Jobe, chief of the Adult Psychological Development Branch of the National Institute on Aging, "is that it shows the genetic influence on cognitive ability to remain very strong, even in old age." +Dr. McClearn said in an interview that another study by his group, the Swedish Adoption Twin Study on Aging, had established the importance of genes in old-age cognitive ability in another way. That investigation focuses on identical twins who were reared apart and therefore share relatively little common experience. Like similar studies on younger twins, the study has revealed the importance of genes in cognitive ability throughout life, he said. +Rather than declining with age, the role of heredity in cognitive ability seems to increase. +In 1993, a group of scientists led by Dr. Matthew McGue of the University of Minnesota published the result of a study of twins that suggested a steady rise in the lifetime role of heredity in cognitive function. They found that the genetic factor in general cognitive ability is about 20 percent in infancy, 40 percent in childhood, 50 percent in adolescence and 60 percent in adulthood. Dr. McClearn said his findings on the contribution of heredity in old age are consistent with the 1993 study. +The supposition that genes play an important role in the development of intelligence has aroused controversy since the 19th-century studies by Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin who discerned a genetic influence as responsible for the intellectual similarity between identical twins. +Dr. McClearn and his colleagues said they believed that it was important to identify specific sites in genes that contribute to cognitive ability, even though there might be up to 10,000 such sites, each playing only a tiny part. But he does not advocate "tinkering" with the genes themselves. By developing chemical means to activate genes that exert desirable effects or deactivate genes that hasten cognitive decay, scientists may significantly improve the lives of old people, he said. +One such gene, called ApoE, has already come under suspicion as a factor in Alzheimer's disease. +The widely held belief that genes play at least some role in intelligence has been hotly contested in recent years, particularly by some critics who contend that human intelligence is molded almost exclusively by environmental factors. +"This field in general is somewhat controversial," Dr. Jobe of the National Institute on Aging said. "But the new twin study focuses on gerontological issues and has nothing to do with longstanding debates over intelligence and heredity." +Acknowledging that some social scientists believe that heredity plays virtually no role in the development of intelligence, Dr. McClearn said: "They should look at the data. If you think about it, cognitive function depends on neurochemical processes in the brain, which are influenced by enzymes, which are made by genes. It would be dumbfounding for intellectual functioning to be without genetic influence." + +LOAD-DATE: June 6, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +286 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 8, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +JERSEY; +'. . . and Don't Ever Call Me Again' + +BYLINE: By JOE SHARKEY + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 1; Column 3; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 771 words + +THE phone rings around 7 o'clock. "This is Bob with the Police Benevolent Association," the caller says. "How are you tonight?" It sounds as if a PBS telethon is going on in the background. +"Bob, if you ever call me again, I'm going to have a guy come and break your legs," I reply. Bob hangs up the phone as if it just caught fire in his hand. + This asinine tactic, I will concede, has little value beyond the fleeting immature boost that a grown man receives from imitating a movie gangster. However, it does at least end a sales call. +Not long ago, my mother-in-law was visiting. She is a church organist, a gentle woman, a scholar. She was aghast when she overheard me rebuff another dialing-for-dollars caller that way. A few weeks later, without comment, she sent in the mail an electronic device called Easy Hang-Up, which attaches to the phone. When you get a sales call, you simply push its button and hang up, while a deep stentorian recorded voice like the one they play on airport monorails delivers the following message: +"I'm sorry! This number does not accept this type of call. Please regard this message as your notification to remove this number from your list. Thank you." +I use it, but only when my wife is around. +Annoying as they are, most unsolicited telephone sales calls are not fraudulent. Most come from some poor stiff struggling at minimum wage in sweatshop boiler room, desperate to meet a quota, peddling services for a bank, phone company or stock brokerage. These merely irritating calls -- including the ones that tie up your answering machine and those that won't hang up, even after you do -- are a topic for another time. This week, the focus is on telephone fraud. +"We take the position that one has a right to be free of that kind of intrusion in one's home," said Peter Verniero, the state Attorney General, whose office has become increasingly aggressive in pursuing phone fraud. "I get these calls, too," he said. "I try to take my own advice, which is to hang up. But it's not easy to do. You risk being rude." +Mr. Verniero is referring here to the phone fraud artist's greatest advantage. As much as people might hate the endless rude invasions of their personal privacy, many simply don't feel right telling a caller to get lost. This is especially true of older people, who grew up in a world where civility toward strangers was still considered a component of public order. +"One of the things we're trying to do is educate folks, especially our elder citizens, about the dangers of telemarketing fraud," Mr. Verniero said. "We say to them, 'It's O.K. to hang up.' " +Telephone fraud is the No. 1 consumer problem affecting the elderly, said Mark S. Herr, the director of the state Division of Consumer Affairs. Nationally, telemarketing is a $500 billion-a-year business. Fraud is estimated at about $40 billion of that. "On my block, that's real money," he said. +As technology hops, skips and jumps over all boundaries, including state lines, state law-enforcement agencies have begun forming new alliances. The multi-state lawsuits currently terrifying tobacco companies are one example. +Another came in April, when New Jersey sued four Middlesex County telemarketing companies as part of a national crackdown on "badge fraud" phone scams. In all, 21 states, each allied with the Federal Trade Commission, filed more than 50 suits against phone solicitation companies allegedly using police and firefighting organizations as fronts to steal money. +Last month, meanwhile, New Jersey and the F.T.C. jointly charged a Bergen County magazine-subscription company with fraud, accusing it of using deceptive high-pressure telephone tactics to persuade people to provide credit card information that was used to run up unauthorized charges. +For decades, consumer groups have charged, the United States Justice Department has been timid in pursuing consumer-fraud and corporate antitrust cases. So when the states themselves begin joining forces to fill the void, attention must be paid. +"I think you are seeing part of a pattern of an ever-increasing level of cooperation, not only between New Jersey and Federal agencies, but also between and New Jersey Attorney General's office and the attorneys general of other states," Mr. Verniero said. +As whooping robbers ride the phone lines and thunder onto the Internet like some high-tech version of the Old West, the sheriffs are finally starting to saddle up and head them off at the pass. "If they are facing not just one state attorney general, but many, that does tend to drive the message home," he said. + +LOAD-DATE: June 8, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Nancy Doniger) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +287 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 8, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Increasingly, Men in Midlife Answer Call for Priesthood + +BYLINE: By GUSTAV NIEBUHR + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1444 words + +The Rev. Michael Manning's new business card identifies him as a priest in Hamilton Square, N.J. What he might add is that the parish he will serve as associate pastor, starting on Friday, lies an easy drive from where he once practiced medicine on Staten Island and people called him Dr. Manning. +A newly ordained priest, he is, in his words, "the doctor who's been through seminary," a man who traded a physician's coat for a Roman collar. + That transformation makes Father Manning, 46, a member of what the church calls its "Class of '97," the approximately 500 men being ordained as priests this spring around the country. Neither his age nor his former career makes him especially unusual these days, when a growing number of people are becoming clergy members at midlife, after years in the secular workplace. +Catholic officials say statistics show the average age of seminarians rose to 32 in 1993 from 25 in 1966. That change is echoed among Protestants. +Priests ordained this year include former lawyers, school teachers, accountants, two farmers and a college basketball coach -- in addition to younger men who entered graduate-level seminaries straight from college. Many who had previous careers are in their 30's. A few, like the Rev. Emmett W. (Skip) Sarsfield in Yakima, Wash., are considerably older. +Father Sarsfield, 65, served as a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy, specializing in antisubmarine warfare. After he retired in 1976, he worked as a prison superintendent, a United States Energy Department researcher and a college teacher. +In 1989, he became a lay missionary in Haiti. Although he was a teacher, he said he felt drawn to volunteer work that fed children and cared for the elderly. "I figured if I were a priest, I could do so much more for these people," he said. After returning to the United States, he gained admission to a seminary that accepted older students. +Of men ordained at an older age, the Rev. Timothy T. Reker, executive director of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' secretariat for vocations and priestly formation, said, "I think the chief advantage is the wealth of experience and greater maturity, hopefully, and then an ability to relate to people in other fields." +"The drawback," he said, "depending on the age and personality, is less flexibility and less ability to benefit from" priestly training. +But ordinations of older men have fallen well short of helping the church reverse the continuing decline in the number of its clergymen, a trend that has been made worse by a steep drop in the total number of seminarians since the 1960's. Through deaths and resignations, the number of priests in dioceses and religious orders fell nearly 2 percent, to 49,009 last year from 49,947 in 1995, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, at Georgetown University. +American dioceses have tried various tacks to increase religious vocations; at least one took out a full-page newspaper advertisement declaring a need to "collar" new priests. But church officials say the best way to get young men to consider the priesthood and young women to think about becoming nuns is for priests and nuns to offer personal encouragement directly to those who express an interest. +Yet even that approach can take years to bear fruit. +The Rev. Steven A. Wertanen, 33, who was ordained in Detroit in May, said he began considering the priesthood as a 14-year-old altar boy. But he lacked certainty about it. "As I grew older," he said, "it seemed friends and teachers would say, 'You would be a good priest.' " +He forged ahead with his secular ambitions, majoring in fine art design in college, then landing a job with an advertising agency. By his mid-20's, he had a house, a car and an office in a Detroit skyscraper. From his window he could see a Catholic church across the street. "I would look at it," he said, "and say there was something missing from my life." +He joined a weekend retreat, sponsored by the Archdiocese of Detroit, for men interested in becoming priests. While praying one evening, he felt God was calling him to the priesthood. He entered a seminary not long after. +Despite their need for priests, dioceses must exercise care about whom they take. In the Diocese of Trenton, where Father Manning was ordained, the screening process includes a long questionnaire, along with numerous meetings between church officials and potential seminarians. +Asked what the diocese seeks in future priests, the Rev. Robert M. Tynski, its vocations director, turned the question around. "What we don't look for," he said, "is somebody who has gone from job to job and never found happiness, and now is looking for the church to take care of them." Another "red flag," he added, would be someone who balked when asked to help with the poor. +"The priesthood isn't plush," Father Tynski said. "You go from working in a prison, to burying an infant child who's been killed in an accident, to marrying a couple. If you're not a man of prayer, and not a man who's stable in himself, it can wear you down." +Father Tynski said he knew of no other doctor besides Father Manning who became a priest in the diocese. But among the seminarians studying for ordination, he added, are a lawyer, a psychologist and a social worker. "God calls who God wants to call, and when," he said. +Father Manning grew up in Brooklyn and thought about the priesthood as an adolescent, he said, but his parents suggested he was too young to make that commitment. He settled instead on medicine. +"It was academic, it dealt with helping people and it was a healing profession," Father Manning said in an interview. +He graduated from medical school at the State University of New York's Health Science Center in Brooklyn, he said, served as a part-time hospital emergency room director for a few years, and built a practice in gastroenterology. He said he liked his patients, owned a house, had a girlfriend and kept up a hobby raising show dogs. +But as his 40th birthday approached, Father Manning said he underwent something of a "midlife crisis," with deep spiritual overtones. He felt increasingly moved by patients' philosophical questions: What meaning did their suffering have? Was there a God who cared about them? +"Though my skills were valued and my opinions were valued," he said, he did not feel "involved in the most important things that were going on" in his patients' lives. +At one point, he visited a church, something he had not done often as an adult. "I was uncomfortable to be in the building," he said. "I wanted to pray, but I didn't want anyone to see me." Kneeling in a pew, he wept, he said, feeling like the prodigal son come home. +As time passed, he felt he wanted a closer connection with the church than being a parishioner. That worried him. "Everything logical told me, 'You're an idiot for thinking this, because you're moving into your peak career time -- you're teaching medical students,' " he said. +Anxious, he prayed more, he said, trusting what he called "another reality," beyond the skills in which he had been trained. He felt he embodied the tension between scientific and religious thinking. +One day, he saw a notice for a weekend retreat for men ages 30 to 50 who were interested in the priesthood. He was among the 8 to 10 men who went. +On the retreat, a priest asked each man to talk about why he had come. The younger men spoke first. Father Manning said that he thought them far calmer than he felt. When his turn came, he declared that the pull he felt toward the priesthood left him "a wreck" emotionally. +"I just let the barriers down," he said. But the priests, he added, seemed pleased with his honesty. Unable to sleep that night, he began a turbulent prayer. "Literally, it was like I was in a struggle -- of yes, no, yes, no," he said. When he acknowledged he wanted to become a priest, he said, he felt an overwhelming sense of God's love. +A few days ago, Father Manning heard his first confessions as a priest. As a doctor, he had counted himself empathetic, and said patients sometimes spilled out their lives to him. +But hearing confession was different, he said. People came to him burdened and he, speaking for God and the church, offered them forgiveness. It seemed as personal as the house calls he once made, except that this time, he said, what he had to tell people "was all good news" about God's mercy. +He felt he had stood at the place where repentance was met by divine grace. "That changed who I am," Father Manning said. "And I think priesthood is crammed with these sorts of experiences." + +LOAD-DATE: June 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Men are increasingly entering the priesthood later in life. At 65, the Rev. Emmett W. Sarsfield is among the oldest of the second-career priests. (Gordon King for The New York Times)(pg. 32) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +288 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 8, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Pataki Sends Fliers Touting His Rent Plan + +BYLINE: By RICHARD PEREZ-PENA + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 41; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk; Second Front + +LENGTH: 912 words + +DATELINE: ALBANY, June 7 + +With barely a week left until the state's rent laws expire, Gov. George E. Pataki has sent a leaflet to millions of renters touting his plan to phase out the rules, a sign of the political high stakes involved in the stalemated fight over rent regulation. +The mailing, which many tenants received in the mail today, was paid for by the state, Zenia Mucha, the Governor's communications director, said. She would not say how much it cost. She described it as a needed response to a mass mailing sent out last month by several Democratic legislators, also at public expense, that she described as "political hate mail" attacking the Governor's plan. + The leaflet marks an escalation in a public relations campaign that Mr. Pataki, a Republican, began last week on behalf of his proposal. In an attempt to tip the scales of public opinion on an issue that has frightened millions of tenants, the Governor has visited a senior citizens' center in Brooklyn, appeared on television interview shows and made a failed bid to organize a televised panel discussion of the issue. +The flier went to "just about every regulated apartment dweller in the city," Ms. Mucha said. "It's important that people who live in regulated apartments know the truth." There are more than 1 million rent-stabilized or rent-controlled apartments in New York City, housing about 2.7 million people. +Peter Ragone, a spokesman for the state Democratic Party, said the mailing "is obviously designed to salvage Governor Pataki's utter failure to protect New York's tenants, most of them middle class, in the battle to save rent protections." +There are no state laws barring state officials from sending mailings at public expense to promote one side of an issue, said Gene Russianoff, staff attorney at the New York Public Interest Research Group. "But it's the sort of thing that shouldn't be done," he said. +The cover of the Governor's mailing bears the headline, "Governor Pataki's Plan Will Protect New York Renters," over a photograph of a smiling Mr. Pataki. +Inside, it seeks to calm renters' fears, but it never mentions the core of the Governor's plan, and the element that has tenants and Democratic legislators up in arms: vacancy decontrol, which would lift rent rules from an apartment when the occupants move out, die or are evicted. Vacancy decontrol would eventually mean elimination of all rules, albeit over a period of decades. +Mr. Pataki has also proposed an expansion of luxury decontrol, the program that has removed rent protections for some wealthy tenants. His plan would eliminate such rules for anyone making more than $175,000 a year. +The mailing focuses on that element, saying that only "a few millionaires" would face deregulation, and on the fact that under the Governor's plan, tenants living under rent regulation would remain protected so as long as they did not move. +"My plan ensures that every tenant except the wealthiest few who earn more than $175,000 a year will have the right to remain in their apartments for the rest of their lives," it says, in a message underscored by the Governor's signature. +The mailing drew fierce criticism from groups in favor of maintaining the current rent rules. +The leaflet "is absolutely Orwellian," said Michael McKee, rent law campaign manager for the New York State Tenants and Neighbors Coalition, the state's largest renters' group. +"It never says what the plan actually does. This whole spin that they're trying to put on the Governor's plan as protecting tenants is false. They're going to decontrol 100 percent of apartments." +The state's rent laws that limit apartment rents and annual increases on about 1.2 million units, most of them in New York City, will expire at midnight next Sunday, June 15. +While there would be little immediate impact on most tenants, without some new set of rules to take the place of the old ones, the entire rental housing market would become deregulated over the next two years, allowing landlords to raise rents to whatever the market would bear, and to evict tenants at a whim. +As recently as a month ago, lawmakers predicted that either a compromise would be reached, or one side would capitulate before the laws expired. But it appears increasingly likely that the rules will be allowed to disappear before the issue is resolved. +The Assembly, controlled by Democrats, has passed a bill that would extend the current rules for four years, and the Assembly Speaker, Sheldon Silver, has insisted that he will accept nothing less. +The Democrats express confidence that it is Mr. Pataki and Republican legislators who would be harmed by the chaos and fear brought on by expiration of the laws -- indeed, by the fear already inspired by the mere talk of ending the rules. +As evidence that it is the Governor who has the most to lose, they cite his aggressive efforts to sway public opinion, like the mailing. +The battle lines were drawn last December, when the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, a Republican from Rensselaer County, proposed phasing out rent rules for all but the elderly, disabled and poor by 1999. +In the last few weeks, Mr. Bruno has indicated that he would accept something similar to Mr. Pataki's plan, though he would lower the luxury decontrol limit to $125,000 in income, a proposal that would deregulate far more tenants. +Mr. Bruno insists that if a compromise is not reached by next Sunday, he will let the rules die. + +LOAD-DATE: June 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The state paid for this flier to tenants with rent protections. (pg. 48) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +289 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 9, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +G.O.P. LAWMAKERS WANT $16 BILLION FOR HEALTH PLAN + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1058 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 8 + +House Republicans offered a $16 billion plan to provide health care for uninsured children today, but they said they could not completely fulfill their promise to set aside $1.5 billion to help low-income elderly people pay health insurance premiums. +The Republicans said they had been unable to find all the money needed to keep that promise, which is part of the bipartisan budget agreement reached last month by President Clinton and Congressional leaders. The agreement said that Congress would provide $1.5 billion in the next five years "to ease the impact of increasing Medicare premiums on low-income beneficiaries." But House Republicans said today that they had found only $400 million -- the amount the Commerce Committee expects to approve this week. + To provide any more, the Republicans said, they would have had to take the money from urban hospitals and children's hospitals, which they said could ill afford such cuts. +The decision on this issue will affect three million elderly people with incomes 20 percent to 50 percent above the official poverty level -- that is, with annual incomes from $9,468 to $11,835. +The expansion of health insurance coverage for children may prove to be one of the most significant efforts undertaken by Congress this year. Under the "child health assistance program" proposed by House Republicans, the Federal Government would make grants to the states totaling $2.6 billion a year. The money would be distributed according to each state's number of uninsured children and level of health costs. +States would have wide latitude in spending. They could use the money to pay doctors and children's hospitals, to buy private health insurance for low-income families or to expand Medicaid to cover more children. +House Republicans would also guarantee continued Medicaid eligibility for disabled children losing coverage under the 1996 welfare law. These low-income children will still lose the cash benefits they receive under the Supplemental Security Income program, but they could keep their Medicaid coverage. +White House officials and lobbyists for the elderly expressed varying degrees of annoyance and anger at the Republicans' failure to provide the $1.5 billion of assistance promised to low-income elderly people. +Howard J. Bedlin, vice president of the National Council on the Aging, said: "The Republicans appear to be backing away from the budget agreement. They could find the money if they were committed to protecting low-income beneficiaries. We will hold their feet to the fire." +Chris Jennings, a White House aide who coordinates health policy for President Clinton, said that two features of the Republican bill, as now drafted, would violate the budget agreement. +Mr. Jennings said it was essential that Congress provide the full $1.5 billion for low-income elderly people. In addition, he said he was distressed by a provision of the Republican bill that would bar Federal grants to the states for children's health insurance after 2002. +"That's absolutely inconsistent with the budget agreement," Mr. Jennings said. A table in the agreement calls for a 10-year investment of $38.9 billion, including $16 billion in the first five years, for children's health initiatives. (After hearing about the White House reaction, Republicans said they might revise their bill to allow grants after 2002.) +Republicans have deviated from the budget agreement on several other issues. Last week, they backed away from a commitment to restore Federal aid for certain legal immigrants losing benefits under the 1996 welfare law. Vice President Al Gore said the Republicans' proposals, as drafted, would violate the agreement by failing to restore "a minimal safety net" for these immigrants. +Three Congressional committees -- Commerce and Ways and Means in the House, and Finance in the Senate -- will be working this week on legislation to slow the growth of Medicaid and Medicare, the health programs for nearly 70 million people who are poor, elderly or disabled. The committees will also be working on initiatives to provide health insurance for at least half of the 10 million children who lack coverage. +Representative Michael Bilirakis of Florida, the chairman of the Commerce Subcommittee on Health, unveiled the House Republicans' proposals today as he sent copies of his legislation to members of his panel. The Republican bill would cut Federal spending on Medicaid by $15 billion, or 2.4 percent of the amount that would otherwise be spent in the next five years. The savings would be achieved mainly by decreasing payments to hospitals that serve large numbers of low-income patients. +Under the Republican proposals, states could require Medicaid recipients to get their care from health maintenance organizations, provided that each beneficiary had a choice of at least two H.M.O.'s. States could enroll children in H.M.O.'s for a year at a time, guaranteeing Medicaid coverage for 12 months, regardless of fluctuations in family income that would otherwise make the children ineligible. +The Commerce Committee is also responsible for providing financial assistance to low-income elderly people to help them with the cost of their health insurance premiums. Under the budget agreement, the monthly Medicare premium, now $43.80, is expected to rise to $66.30 in 2002 and $107.80 in 2007. +House Republicans want to repeal many Federal Medicaid standards and requirements that state officials dislike. States would no longer have to show that their Medicaid payments to nursing homes and hospitals were "reasonable and adequate." But they would have to invite public comment on new payment rates, and the average daily payment for a nursing home resident in 1998 could not be less than 95 percent of the average this year. +The Republicans' bill would also repeal a requirement that states justify the adequacy of their Medicaid payments to obstetricians and pediatricians. By law, states must submit data to the Federal Government to show that they are paying enough to guarantee that such doctors will serve Medicaid patients. +In addition, under the Republican bill, states could cut Medicaid payments to community health centers, which are now guaranteed payment for 100 percent of the cost of services they provide to Medicaid patients. + +LOAD-DATE: June 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +290 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 9, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +If Legislators Allow Rent Laws to Lapse, Then What's Next? + +BYLINE: By RICHARD PEREZ-PENA + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 6; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1284 words + +DATELINE: ALBANY, June 8 + +For many tenants in rent-regulated apartments, it is the nightmare scenario: state leaders fail to agree on extending the rent laws when they expire next Sunday at midnight, and in the following months do not budge on the issue. +If rent rules are allowed to lapse, thousands of tenants -- no one is sure quite how many -- could be served right away with eviction notices or steep rent increases. Many renters in this group are elderly people living outside New York City. + But for the largest group of people affected, the occupants of 1 million rent-stabilized units in New York City and its suburbs, sudden, complete deregulation would have a delayed effect. In the city, the first batch of rent-stabilized apartments would not be deregulated until mid-October, and some would not be affected until October 1999. +For these newly deregulated apartments, landlords would be able to charge whatever the market would bear and would also not be required to offer leases to their renters. Without a lease, a landlord can evict a renter at a whim. For elderly, low-income tenants, deregulation would also make them ineligible for a government program that helps them pay their rents. +"If the system dies, we would be entering a very strange, confusing period," said Mitchell Posilkin, general counsel of the Rent Stabilization Association, the largest landlord group. +While it has been hard for many New Yorkers to imagine that the laws would be allowed to expire, with just a week left there is still a wide gap between the Democrats who want to preserve the laws and the Republicans who want to phase them out. Indeed, some Democratic legislators who want to continue the rules see abrupt deregulation and the panic it would cause as their best weapons against Republican lawmakers, including Gov. George E. Pataki, who plans to run for re-election next year. +Today, Republican leaders said their compromise plan had provided enough protections for most tenants. But top Democrats held a news conference to say that the Republican position of vacancy decontrol would jeopardize the housing of the middle class. But there was no sign of progress in resolving the fight. +Landlords' groups, aware that the fight is likely to go past June 15, are cautioning property owners not to do anything rash that would result in negative publicity. Joseph Strasburg, president of the Rent Stabilization Association, recently sent a letter to the group's members saying, "Our actions will be in the spotlight, and anything we do can hurt our chance to achieve a phase-out of rent regulation." New York's rent regulations are the product of not one law but a complex web of city and state laws. +People governed by the state rent control law, one of the ones due to expire on June 15, would be the first to be affected if no agreement is reached by the deadline. The law, enacted in 1950, applies to an estimated 20,000 renters in Westchester County, Nassau County and the Albany and Buffalo areas who live in buildings built before 1947 and whose families have lived in the same units since 1971. +Because these rent-controlled tenants, like those in New York City, do not have leases, there would be nothing protecting their status if the laws expired, so landlords in areas outside New York City would be free to raise tenants' rents or give them eviction notices on June 16. In theory, court eviction orders could be issued as early as Aug. 1. +But landlords say the fear of such swift action is misplaced, if only because apartment owners understand the political sensitivity of the issue. It is particularly unlikely, they say, that property owners would evict elderly renters with the outcome of the dispute still in doubt. +Rent-stabilized tenants in New York City and the suburbs who do not have leases, either because of disagreements with landlords or by mutual agreement with landlords, could also be subject to immediate eviction notices or rent increases. But again, no one knows how large this group is. Michael McKee, rent law campaign manager of the New York State Tenants and Neighbors Coalition, the state's largest renters' group, said renters without leases make up 5 percent of the total market, or 50,000 apartments, while Mr. Posilkin said such situations are very rare. +The 70,000 rent-controlled apartments in New York City come under the city's own rent-control law and are not affected by what happens in Albany. Rent-controlled tenants generally pay lower rents than their rent-stabilized neighbors, but the gap has narrowed over the last two decades as landlords have been allowed larger annual increases for rent-controlled units. +The main law that is about to expire is a 1974 state law called the Emergency Tenant Protection Act, which governs about 1 million rent-stabilized units in New York City, and 60,000 in Nassau, Westchester and Rockland Counties. +In New York City, landlords are required to offer rent-stabilized tenants renewal leases at least 120 days before the expiration of their current leases. According to both tenant groups and the Rent Stabilization Association, landlords must continue to offer the option of one- or two-year lease renewals right up to June 15, even if the renewal would not take effect until well after the current law expired. "What we are telling our members," Mr. Posilkin said, "is that they have to abide by the law as it is right now and that means send the renewal notices right now." +In other words, any rent-stabilized tenant whose lease runs out on or before Oct. 13 has a legal right to a new lease, and can choose a two-year lease that would run through 1999. But if the current lease runs out on Oct. 14 or later, the landlord does not have to send a lease renewal if the laws expire, and the apartment would be deregulated at the end of the lease. After that, apartments would be deregulated at the rate of about 40,000 a month, until the final batch went to market rates in October 1999. +But tenant advocates say some landlords have been ignoring laws requiring them to offer lease renewals. "You've got landlords who have refused to offer renewal leases, banking on the possibility that the law is going to end," said Andrew Scherer, a housing lawyer with Legal Services. "A lot of people will not know their rights, so they will just end up moving." +A state program, the Senior Citizens Rent Increase Exemption, or Scrie, helps 55,000 elderly people in rent-regulated housing pay their rent if they earn under $20,000 a year, and if one-third or more of their income goes toward paying rent. "The law says that rent-stabilized housing is subject to Scrie," Mr. Scherer said. "When that housing is no longer rent-stabilized, those renters are no longer eligible for Scrie." +New York City has its own rent-stabilization law, and the people it applies to would not be affected by expiration of the state law. But there is some disagreement as to how many renters that is. The city law, enacted in 1969, originally limited rent increases on more than 300,000 apartments built from 1947 to 1968. +Among housing experts, the conventional wisdom is that the city rent stabilization law applies only to those units that have not changed hands since 1971, about 40,000 units. Those that turned over, they say, come under the 1974 state law and are subject to deregulation. +But some housing lawyers say that if the state law expires, the city law would still apply to nearly all of the original 300,000 units. "There are going to be a lot of lawsuits over this as landlords try to deregulate apartments, and tenants try to establish that they're still under the city law," Mr. McKee of the tenants coalition said. + +LOAD-DATE: June 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, left, discussed rent laws yesterday at a news conference at Tudor City Place in Manhattan. With him were Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, with her daughter, Virginia, and Representative Charles B. Rangel. Behind Ms. Maloney was State Comptroller H. Carl McCall. (Linda Rosier for The New York Times)(pg. B6) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +291 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 10, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +SCIENCE WATCH; +Alcohol and the Brain + +BYLINE: By JANE E. BRODY + +SECTION: Section C; Page 4; Column 5; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 258 words + +IT is a known scientific fact -- or so the public has been led to believe -- that alcohol kills brain cells. And presumably, those who would suffer this damage the most would be drinkers in their 70's and 80's who had been at it for decades. +But a new Australian study of 209 elderly men, 178 of whom used alcohol, revealed not a single sign of intellectual impairment or brain atrophy that could be related to the amount of alcohol they regularly consumed. + The findings are described in the current issue of The British Medical Journal by a sociologist at the Australian National University at Canberra and his collaborators in Sydney. +The men, all of whom had fought in World War II with the Australian army, represented a broad range of alcohol intake: from none to an amount that would warrant the label of alcoholism. +In fact, 40 percent of the men consumed alcohol in amounts deemed hazardous or downright harmful, a much higher percentage than has been found among the Australian population as a whole. +Nine years after their usual alcohol intake was recorded in 1982, the men submitted to 18 neuropsychological tests that measured a range of intellectual functions, including basic intelligence, memory and the ability to retain verbal and visual information. +The participants also underwent a computerized X-ray scan of their brains. +The researchers found no evidence to link heavy alcohol intake with any form of cognitive decline or with atrophy of the brain regions involved in cognitive functions. JANE E. BRODY + +LOAD-DATE: June 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +292 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 10, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +CONGRESS AND TAXES: MEDICARE; +House Panel Votes Changes to Try to Keep Medicare Solvent + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section D; Page 25; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 631 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 9 + +The House Ways and Means Committee approved legislation tonight to make sweeping changes in Medicare that would keep it solvent for a decade and offer new health insurance options to 33 million elderly Americans. +The measure, which would cut Medicare spending by $115 billion and open the program to more health maintenance organizations and other forms of managed care, was approved by a vote of 36 to 3. + The bipartisan, cordial spirit of today's session was radically different from the strident, angry tone that characterized debates on Medicare in 1995 and 1996, when Democrats accused Republicans of trying to destroy the program. +Representative Bill Archer, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the committee, praised members of both parties for their "patience and civility" today. +Representative Jim Ramstad, Republican of Minnesota, said today's session was a "love-in" compared with the debates of 1995 and 1996. +The White House generally supports the bill approved by the committee today. It still requires a vote of the full House, and senators of both parties are working on similar legislation to modernize Medicare. +The legislation is designed to carry out the terms of a bipartisan budget agreement reached last month by President Clinton and Congressional leaders. +The bill approved tonight would make the biggest changes in Medicare since creation of the program in 1965. +The $115 billion cut in spending is 8.5 percent of the amount that would otherwise be spent in the next five years. Most of the savings would be extracted from hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and other health care providers. Beneficiaries would also pay somewhat higher premiums. +The biggest change would be to open Medicare to more health maintenance organizations and other forms of managed care, including health plans established and owned by doctors and hospitals. +Presumably, elderly people would then enroll in H.M.O.'s in greater numbers, much as millions of workers under age 65 have done. +The bill would keep Medicare's Hospital Insurance Trust Fund solvent to 2007. +The trust fund, which pays hospital bills for Medicare beneficiaries, will run out of money in four years if no change is made in current law. +But the bill does not directly address the financial problems that will arise when members of the Baby Boom generation become eligible for Medicare after 2010. +The liveliest debate today focused on two issues, medical savings accounts and medical malpractice. +The bill would create tax incentives for 500,000 elderly people to set up savings accounts to help pay their medical expenses. +Republicans zealously defended their proposal for a test of such tax-free savings accounts as an alternative to the standard Medicare program. The accounts, they said, would encourage elderly people to pay more attention to health costs because they could keep any money left in their accounts. +Democrats said that healthy, affluent people would be the main beneficiaries of such tax breaks, but they repeatedly failed in their efforts to eliminate or limit the tests of medical savings accounts. +The bill would also limit the amount of damages that could be recovered in lawsuits by patients injured as a result of medical malpractice. Damages for "pain and suffering" could not exceed $250,000 in any case. +The American Medical Association and other doctors' groups have lobbied Congress to limit damages, but consumer groups have vigorously opposed such limits, saying they would eliminate important protections for patients. +The Congressional Budget Office said that the proposed limits on damages would save Medicare -- which reimburses doctors and hospitals for part of their malpractice insurance costs -- $600 million over the next 10 years. + +LOAD-DATE: June 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +293 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 10, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Deregulation in Boston: Disruption, but Also Construction + +BYLINE: By RANDY KENNEDY + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1160 words + +DATELINE: BOSTON, June 4 + +In the two years since Massachusetts voters ended most rent controls for the cities of Boston, Cambridge and Brookline, two distinct interpretations of the results are beginning to emerge: While tenant advocates and landlords agree that noticeable disruptions and turnover have occurred in some neighborhoods, landlords say there are also signs that eliminating the rules has encouraged new housing construction and repairs. +One scenario is on display at the Hemenway Hotel apartments, a rambling eight-story building in the Boston neighborhood known as the East Fens. Sitting in her apartment in the building recently, Susan Starr counted the stalwarts: the former Avon lady who had lived in her apartment for 40 years; the retired merchant marine who had been there almost as long; the man who ran the cluttered antique shop on the ground floor, a fixture for two decades. + They were among the few longtime tenants who had gone to court to fight rent increases and remain in their building, as other neighbors were replaced by college students and young professionals. +The other side of the complicated rent decontrol story unfolding in and around Boston comes from landlords, who say the return to a market system here has already been beneficial citywide, leading to an increase in property tax revenues and appearing to cause new housing construction, which could eventually bring prices back down. +Furthermore, while landlords concede that some neighborhoods have been inevitably and sometimes even painfully changed, they say that the most vulnerable tenants, the poor and the elderly, have been affected much less than expected. +It is difficult to draw significant economic comparisons between New York and the Boston area because Boston's huge student population skews the market and New York has higher demand and 20 times more rent-regulated apartments, but both sides in New York have plucked examples to use as lessons for lawmakers in Albany. +Citing the Hemenway and buildings in other neighborhoods where prices have risen sharply, tenant leaders say Boston has already proven that ending rent regulations, whether quickly or over several years, forces the working class and middle class out of desirable neighborhoods. +Tim Davis, a tenant advocate with the Fenway Community Development Association, a nonprofit housing group, said: "There are now only two kinds of people here who are able to afford to live in a lot of the buildings in this neighborhood: People who make $50,000-plus or students who are willing to double and triple up." +Blocks in the neighborhood once had an eclectic mix -- from municipal and college employees to hotel dishwashers to lawyers, artists and students -- but, Mr. Davis said, "There's really no mixture anymore." +Ms. Starr, a secretary at Northeastern University who makes $24,000 a year, has fought the owners of the Hemenway, as the building is still called, although the name was formally changed to the Parkside when it was bought and renovated in late 1994. She said the owners wanted to increase the $565 monthly rent for her one-bedroom apartment to $850. And while she has succeeded in keeping her old rent for two years, she does not think she or many other old tenants can stay much longer. +"In December of 1994, the Hemenway had about 160 tenants, most of whom were rent-controlled," she said. "As of today, there are fewer than 20 of those people left -- in a mere two years. It's not the same building." +The owners of her building, Forest Properties and Fenway Parkside Limited Partnership, did not respond to several requests to be interviewed for this article. But as a group, the city's landlords do not dispute that tenants have been pushed to other neighborhoods and sometimes to other cities by rising prices. They are not apologetic, however, saying that it was grossly unfair for landlords ever to have been saddled with the rent rules. +"The hypothetical secretary might have to come to the realization that she's not entitled to an apartment in a given block," said Edwin J. Shanahan, the managing director of the Rental Housing Association, Boston's largest landlord group. +He said the end of the rent controls appeared to be having a beneficial effect for the city as a whole and the housing industry, which could eventually increase the stock of affordable housing. +A study released this week by Henry O. Pollakowski, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported that in Cambridge, which had the strictest controls, building permits increased in 1996 and assessors predicted that residential property tax revenues would rise 9 percent. +Since the Boston area was in the middle of a housing boom when the rent controls were lifted, Mr. Pollakowski's study said, it is difficult to know how much of the building can be attributed to rent deregulation. But the current high level of renovation and repair of Cambridge buildings once under rent control had not been matched during the previous market peak, in the late 1980's, the study concluded. +Those on all sides of the issue agree that Boston rents have increased on average, but the effects of decontrol are still developing. and it is hard to pin down exactly how much they have risen and where. +In Cambridge, which adopted rent controls in 1971 and had about 15,000 regulated apartments two years ago, Stanley Lastoff, owner of Porter Square Realty, said that one-bedroom apartments then renting for $433 a month can now fetch about $900. +While landlords say that such increases were bound to happen in some neighborhoods, they contend that the effect on residents has been much less predictable. And they argue that there were far fewer elderly, disabled or poor people who had to look elsewhere than originally expected. +When rent controls were ended in January 1995, the State Legislature provided for two-year extensions for the elderly, the disabled and the poor, if they qualified under certain income guidelines. But in the three affected cities of Boston, Cambridge and Brookline, where about 45,500 units were subject to rent controls, only 3,090 units eventually qualified for the exemption, according to Mr. Shanahan and the M.I.T. study. +"Our experience indicated that a lot of people could afford the increase and they paid the increase," Mr. Shanahan said. "A lot of others just said, 'Well, the jig's up.' It wasn't a case of people undergoing mass relocation." +At the Hemenway, Ms. Starr and the remaining holdouts said they had begun to accept that they would not be able to stay much longer. The antique shop owner has already decided to move and close his store. "I probably won't be around here in a couple of years, either," Ms. Starr said. +But while she remains, she said, she will continue to argue that the landlords' purely economic viewpoint overlooks a lot: "Whatever happened to neighborhood stability and civic pride and human connections?" + +LOAD-DATE: June 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: In the two years since rent regulations ended in Boston, Susan Starr says, higher rents have driven out most of her building's longtime tenants and changed the character of the neighborhood. (Kirsten Elstner for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +294 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 10, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Giuliani Uses Conference To Rally Immigrant Cause + +BYLINE: By CELIA W. DUGGER + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 834 words + +Nearly a year after Congress voted to slash benefits to legal immigrants, a group of Republican and Democratic local elected officials from around the nation, organized by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, rallied yesterday in New York City to call on Congress to restore the aid. +They came together at a two-day conference on immigration sponsored by the city government. Backed by participants from states including California, Florida and Texas, Mr. Giuliani used the conference yesterday as a national platform to lobby against the cutoff of benefits to elderly and disabled legal immigrants at a time when a Congressional agreement to restore many benefits may be unraveling. + The conference, at the Sheraton New York Hotel, is also one more sign that the Mayor, in the midst of a re-election campaign, is ever more aggressively taking on a role as the nation's leading champion of immigrants. Last month, he announced a $12 million city initiative to help legal immigrants become citizens if they face the loss of benefits. And he often travels the country to speak on the virtues of immigration. +His fellow officials lavishly praised him yesterday for seizing the leadership on the immigration issue, which may enable the Republican Mayor to broaden his appeal to Democrats as well as to immigrants and their children, who together make up a majority of New York City's population. +Gloria Molina, a liberal Democrat who is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant laborer and the first Hispanic person elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, said she had been "longing for leadership in this area," and counted herself grateful to the New York Mayor for taking the initiative. +Likewise, Randy Johnson, a Republican corporate lawyer who is chairman of the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners, in the Minneapolis area, thanked Mr. Giuliani. As a conservative, he said, he believes it is the Federal Government's responsibility to police the nation's borders, to set immigration policy -- and to pay for the consequences. +With a tableau of local officials standing behind him, including leaders of the National Association of Counties and the United States Conference of Mayors, Mr. Giuliani described the New York conference as a way to harness the influence of local government officials from different parts of the country at a strategic moment in the Congressional budget negotiations. +As part of a budget compromise, Congressional Republicans agreed with the White House earlier this year to restore benefits to disabled legal immigrants who were in the country before the welfare reform law passed last Aug. 22. But last week, House Republicans backed away from that plan, and proposed giving benefits to certain elderly immigrants rather than to the disabled. +In his opening remarks at the conference, Mr. Giuliani condemned the latest round of negotiating on benefits for immigrants. +"I can't think of anything more unseemly or unconscionable than trading off the elderly against the disabled," he said. +His face projected on larger-than-life screens on either side of the hotel ballroom, the Mayor appealed to the self-interest of local officials, who are worried that old and infirm immigrants who lose their Federal benefits will become a burden on state and local budgets. He also declaimed on the immigrant experience as the ultimate expression of the American dream. +Officials from Los Angeles County said their borders contain 100,000 of the 500,000 elderly and disabled immigrants who will lose benefits under the 1996 welfare reform law unless Congress alters it. And they said almost one-fifth of those facing a cutoff of their Supplemental Security Income in Los Angeles County are over age 85, while almost three-quarters are women. +In New York City, about 70,000 legal immigrants are expected to lose benefits in August and September unless Congress changes the law, Mr. Giuliani said. +"There is no free lunch," said Zev Yaroslavsky, chairman of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, warning that the cost of supporting needy immigrants would fall on state and local governments. +Today, Mayors Richard J. Riordan of Los Angeles, Edward G. Rendell of Philadelphia and Alex Penelas of Metropolitan Dade County in South Florida, among others, are to join Mr. Giuliani at Ellis Island to back a "statement of principles" that lays out their own immigration agenda. +It calls on Congress to undo laws that severely limit Federal benefits to legal immigrants. "Since legal immigrants work and pay taxes like American citizens, they should be entitled to temporary assistance when they fall into personal difficulty," the statement says. +It criticizes the Federal cutoff of benefits to legal immigrants as "a massive cost shift from the Federal Government to many cities and states," hitting California, Texas, Florida and New York the hardest. +And it says more resources should be devoted to help process a backlog of citizenship applications. + +LOAD-DATE: June 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +295 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 11, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final +(New Jersey) + +New Jersey Daily Briefing; +Doctor Indicted for Loans + +BYLINE: By TERRY PRISTIN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 104 words + +DATELINE: HACKENSACK + +According to his lawyer, Dr. Manjit Singh is a good cardiologist but an unlucky gambler, who ended up borrowing more than $1 million from more than 80 of his elderly patients to repay debts he incurred in Atlantic City and elsewhere. +But prosecutors say that Dr. Singh is a criminal. Yesterday, a Bergen County grand jury indicted Dr. Singh, who practices in Ramsey, on 82 counts of fraud, said David Nathanson, an assistant county prosecutor. + His lawyer, Raymond Flood, of Hackensack, said: "He has received counseling and goes to Gamblers Anonymous. He intends to repay every penny." + TERRY PRISTIN + +LOAD-DATE: June 11, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +296 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 12, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Beijing Journal; +Chinese Old-Timers Keep the Opera Alive, Barely + +BYLINE: By SETH MYDANS + +SECTION: Section A; Page 4; Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 824 words + +DATELINE: BEIJING, June 11 + +Looking a little formal for the occasion in his gray suit and glasses, Liu Feng, a medical doctor, clasped his hands in front of him, bent slightly toward the microphone in the Huguang opera house, and let out a high-pitched squeal. +The audience burst into applause, shouting: "Great! Great!" + An amateur singer, the doctor continued in the tortured falsetto of traditional Beijing Opera, and the audience grew quieter as he spun the sad, familiar tale of a ghost nostalgic for his life on earth. +Sitting at tables with their flasks of tea and piles of dried watermelon seeds, the small audience on this Saturday morning could easily take his song to heart: almost all were elderly men, the ghosts of a dying culture, some of the last devotees of one of the world's great art forms. +A fast-modernizing China is rapidly leaving behind much of its traditional culture, and Beijing Opera, a centerpiece of the nation's artistic heritage, is mostly performed now in truncated form for foreign tourists. +Where once Beijing was home to dozens of theaters and teahouses that staged operas virtually every night, full-scale productions now are rare. The Huguang theater, which mostly performs excerpts from operas and acrobatics for tourists and official delegations, offers the elderly devotees just this one regular weekend morning to revel in the art they grew up with. +It is mostly a forum for amateurs like Dr. Liu, without the elaborate costumes and stylized drama of a full-dress performance. Opera lovers who learned the art from their parents or in local theater groups take their turns at the microphone. +"I come every week," said Rui Maochen, 70. "I'm retired now so I spend most of my time listening to Beijing Opera. I used to perform a bit, but now I just sing along." +Dr. Liu, 52, was one of the youngsters at the theater on this day. Like other amateur singers, he said his parents had passed on to him their love for opera when he was a child. But now, few parents know the art and few children are exposed to it. +Beijing Opera is becoming a museum piece in this rapidly changing country, where movies, television, rock music and new discotheques offer more accessible forms of entertainment and where fewer and fewer people know the history and legends on which the operas are based. +"That screaming stuff? I can't believe you like that," the one truly young man in the Huguang theater said his friends tell him. +In the last few years, the Government has made efforts to revive the form, and the administrator of the weekend gatherings, Li Shiying, drew encouragement from a belief that the Chinese leader, Jiang Zemin, is himself an opera buff. +The Huguang theater, which was being used as a warehouse, was renovated with both private and Government funds and reopened last year. +But the audiences for its nightly performances remain sparse and it continues to lose money. Although university students are offered free admission they rarely attend. +One difficulty, said the theater's general manager, Xu Liren, is that Beijing Opera has not evolved with changing times. Its forms, subject matter and stilted language have remained much the same throughout its 200-year history. +With its roots in some of the 300 traditional theater forms that thrived throughout China, Beijing Opera became a primary means of preserving the nation's history and culture. +"The role of Beijing Opera was not only to entertain but to educate people," Mr. Xu said. "Most of its stories come from the history and legends of China, but the young generation today does not know these stories and cannot appreciate the opera." +The art form was dealt a nearly mortal blow when most performances were banned during the Cultural Revolution, the period of upheaval under Mao that began in 1966. +With the fall of the radical Gang of Four in 1976, elderly teachers began to train a new generation of performers, but much of the audience was already lost. +One of those young performers is Wang Lichun, a 28-year-old singer who began her training at the age of 10 and spent six years learning to sing in a falsetto. +Almost every night, at the Huguang theater, she joins her fellow performers in a painstaking ritual backstage, transforming herself with thick, bright makeup into an ancient princess or goddess. +She knows that few people will appreciate her hard work. But whether the theater is half-empty or whether it is filled with foreign tourists who know little about her art, she said, she puts her heart into her performance. "The most important thing now is to keep traditional Beijing Opera alive, not only for the next generation but for the generation after that," she said. +She said there was no reason why the old and the new could not coexist. +When she is not performing, Ms. Wang likes to go with her husband to the basketball games where he is a professional player. She said they are both fans of Michael Jordan. + +LOAD-DATE: June 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Much of the audience for Beijing Opera has been lost, but there are some young performers. They include 28-year-old Wang Lichun. (Seth Mydans/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +297 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 13, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +A Generational Rent Gap + +SECTION: Section A; Page 24; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 589 words + +Joseph Bruno, the majority leader of the New York State Senate, has removed one barrier to settling the dispute over rent control that has paralyzed state government this year. Mr. Bruno dropped his fight to eliminate a section of the rent regulations that protects domestic partners of leaseholding tenants in the same way as spouses. +It is doubtful that Mr. Bruno was being utterly candid when he claimed his mind had been changed when fellow Republicans "who represent a lot of these people" revealed the news that gay couples and other longstanding domestic partners "consider themselves families." The majority leader has helped block other legislation, such as a bias-crimes bill, over the gay rights issue. + The domestic partnership item is part of a much greater battle over tenant succession that highlights some of the most irrational aspects of the rent laws. Under the present combination of statutes, court decisions and regulations, leases can be passed down from father to daughter to cousin to friend in perpetuity, as if a rented apartment were a family heirloom. A tenant who has occupied a rent-regulated apartment for 40 years can invite a niece to live with her, then move to Florida a few years later, leaving the niece the "heir" to the lease. The new tenant would enjoy the same low rent as her aunt, as well as the right to invite her own son to move in at some future date and take up his own right of succession. +It makes perfect sense that spouses, domestic partners, siblings or anyone else who has co-inhabited an apartment for a long time should not be evicted because a loved one dies. It also seems reasonable that senior citizens and the disabled who lived with the primary tenant should get special protection, as is afforded under the present law. +But the idea that the leases of very-long-term tenants, which tend to be the cheapest in the rent-regulated system, can be passed on indefinitely through a family is ridiculous. Senator Bruno has a good idea when he suggests that the right of succession should be limited to one generation. The niece in the example above could keep the apartment, but her son, upon moving in, would be notified that his rights to the lease will expire when his mother leaves. +This page has supported Gov. George Pataki's call for a gradual end to the entire rent regulation system by allowing units to return to market rates when the present tenants leave. The problem with the present laws goes far beyond the basic issue of price controls. As rent regulation has evolved over decades, it has mutated into an entitlement for individual renters that is a bureaucratic nightmare for small landlords and does nothing to help create a supply of affordable housing. +As tenants' rights to maintain their protected leases expanded, the laws became more difficult to enforce. Paperwork proliferated. Arbitration of disputes grew slower and slower. Small landlords, who are often immigrants with little experience in New York housing law, have wound up in court over rent increases that occurred before they bought the building. +Now that Mr. Bruno has made his concession, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver should show his good will by agreeing to limit the rights of succession to a single generation. Having carved out that tiny bit of rationality, the two leaders and Governor Pataki should then work quickly toward a compromise that will get as many units as possible out from under the rent regulation bureaucracy when their present tenants move out. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +298 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 13, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Commercial Real Estate; +An Attempt to Redevelop A Manhattan Landmark + +BYLINE: By RACHELLE GARBARINE + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 829 words + +Manhattan's strong housing market has given rise to a new plan to redevelop the former Towers Nursing Home, which for the last 23 years has sat vacant on its perch overlooking Central Park West. +Under the plan, a Manhattan development team will restore the four-story landmark, built in 1884 in the style of a French Renaissance chateau, and join it to a residential tower. The new building, which at 27 stories will be among the tallest buildings in the Manhattan Valley neighborhood, will have up to 240 studio to two-bedroom apartments. + The current plan is different from two earlier unrealized development attempts for the property, covering the half block from 105th to 106th Streets. While, as in the two earlier efforts, 120 of the apartments at the new tower will be luxury rentals, there will also be an equal number of "assisted living" units. These apartments, with hotel-like living arrangements that will offer tenants meals as well as help with dressing and the monitoring of medication, will have a separate entrance. +The Towers at Central Park West, as the $70 million project is known, is being developed by Frydman & Company and Savanna Partners, both local real estate firms. They bought the site last week for $5.5 million from the Greater New York Savings Bank, which had taken it back as part of a bankruptcy settlement with the last developers. The sale is expected to close in August and construction is to start this fall. +Built as the country's first cancer hospital, the landmark building has been empty since 1974, when the Towers Nursing Home, which gained notoriety during the nursing home scandals of the 1970's, closed. Its owner, Bernard Bergman, was accused and later convicted of Medicaid fraud. In 1976 the turreted brick building was declared a landmark. +Explaining why the partners got involved with the project, Jacob A. Frydman, president of Frydman & Company, said, "It is an opportunity to build a tower tied to a landmark on a site with views of Central Park in an improving neighborhood." +Philippe Weissberg of Savanna Partners said the market also supports the Towers at Central Park West project. "There is an enormous need for housing for the elderly," he said. +The partners plan to make use of existing approvals from the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission regarding the development and design of the site. The exterior plans for both the landmark towers section and the new building will follow those approved earlier by the commission, although the uses for parts of the interior spaces will be different. Zoning variances from the Board of Standards and Appeals for the earlier plans remain in force until August, and the partners are arranging to have them extended, Mr. Frydman said. +He said they also are in discussions with local and national licensed health-care providers to operate and manage the project's assisted-living residences -- the term given to housing for people age 75 and older who need help with daily chores, but do not need constant medical care. +By separating the housing from the medical care in assisted-living projects, developers and operators in New York avoid the necessity of state licenses or special permits to develop such projects. They generally offer apartment living with hotel-style services, including meals, housekeeping and social services. +Assisted-living arrangements are "a burgeoning portion" of the expanding elderly housing marketplace, and "it is expected to grow," said Carl S. Young, president of the nonprofit New York Association of Homes and Services for the Aging. +There are many such projects under way or proposed throughout New York City as developers respond to the city's growing elderly population. Among the projects are a 146-unit project in Kew Gardens Queens, one with 206 units in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and one with 128 units in Brooklyn. +The 1990 Census found 953,317 people 65 or older in the city, of which 102,554 were 85 or older. That segment of the population, the fastest growing, is expected to rise to 212,000 by the year 2010. +The assisted-living apartments at the Towers at Central Park West are expected to range in size from 400 to 700 square feet. Mr. Frydman said rents are expected to be $3,000 to $5,000 a month, including meals, services and some basic personal care, like help with grooming and bathing. +Rents for the luxury units, which will be one and half times larger than the standard units, are expected to be $1,400 to $3,200. +The new tower, which is to rise in the rear courtyard of the landmark, will feature stone details on its facade and a steeply pitched roof to blend with its historic neighbor. The renovated landmark will house common areas for the assisted-living units, such as dining rooms and a library. +Mr. Frydman said financing is to come from the partners' own money and private lenders. He said the project is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 1999. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The former Towers Nursing Home building overlooking Central Park West is vacant, but developers are hoping to build apartments there. (Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +299 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 13, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +House Bill Backs Safeguards on H.M.O.'s + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 22; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 648 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 12 + +A House committee today approved major changes in Medicare and Medicaid, including new protection for the elderly and the poor who enroll in health maintenance organizations. +The changes, in a bill by the House Commerce Committee, would slow the growth of the two health programs, as required under the budget agreement reached last month by President Clinton and Congressional leaders. Committee members added numerous amendments today to regulate managed care plans and to protect consumers. + A solid phalanx of Democrats joined the Republicans, led by two physicians and a dentist, in approving the new consumer protections. Lobbyists for the H.M.O. industry argued against the Federal legislation, saying that H.M.O.'s were voluntarily responding to concerns expressed by consumers. +The panel's vote was 39 to 7. The legislation would also provide $16 billion over the next five years to help states finance health care for uninsured children. +Today's action increases the likelihood that Congress will create protections for patients who have difficulty obtaining services in a health care industry that is undergoing rapid changes. But details of the legislation will be a subject of further debate in the House and the Senate. +The committee today approved these safeguards for Medicare beneficiaries: +*H.M.O.'s may not enforce any limits on doctors' ability to tell patients about treatments and services. +*Health plans must provide patients with access to medical specialists whenever such care is "medically necessary in the professional opinion of the treating health care provider." In other words, insurance clerks may not deny services deemed necessary by a doctor. +*H.M.O.'s must pay for emergency care in any situation that a "prudent lay person" would regard as an emergency. They sometimes refuse to pay for emergency care after concluding that there was no real emergency -- if, for example, chest pains resulted from indigestion rather than a heart attack. +*H.M.O.'s must allow doctors and patients to make the ultimate decisions on the length of hospital stays. +*Patients are entitled to appeal denials of coverage. If an H.M.O. rules that a service is medically unnecessary and if the patient appeals, the decision on coverage "shall be made only by a physician with appropriate expertise." The patient may obtain further review by "an independent outside entity." +For Medicaid recipients, the committee approved some of the same protections, including a ban on "gag rules" and the "prudent lay person" standard of emergency care. +Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has offered similar proposals, said the action by the House committee suggested that consumers were dissatisfied with the quality of care provided by H.M.O.'s in some parts of the country. But Mr. Wyden added: "This transcends managed care. It indicates that millions of people just feel powerless in the health care system." +Emma K. Ballard, a spokeswoman for a coalition of consumers and doctors who want the Government to guarantee access to medical specialists, welcomed today's action, saying, "We're beginning to win against the managed-care giants." +Her group, the Patient Access to Specialty Care Coalition, includes surgeons, ophthalmologists and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. +Julie L. Goon, vice president of the American Association of Health Plans, which represents H.M.O.'s and other managed care plans, said the proposed new regulations would increase the cost of health care for millions of people. +On another issue, the Commerce Committee voted today to repeal a Federal law that requires state Medicaid programs to pay "reasonable and adequate" rates to nursing homes and hospitals. President Clinton and the National Governors' Association have urged Congress to repeal the law, saying it drives up Federal and state Medicaid costs. + +LOAD-DATE: June 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +300 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 14, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +THE RENT BATTLE: THE AD CAMPAIGN; +Landlords' Association Tries to Turn the Spotlight on Silver + +BYLINE: By RANDY KENNEDY + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 24; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 456 words + + +The Rent Stabilization Association, the city's largest landlords' group, has produced a 30-second commercial on rent regulation that began appearing Thursday night. It will appear through Monday on New York 1; Channel 2, WCBS; Channel 4, WNBC; Channel 5, WNYW; Channel 7, WABC; Channel 9, WWOR, and Channel 11, WPIX. + +PRODUCER -- Jamestown Associates + +ON THE SCREEN -- The advertisement begins with a black-and-white picture of Gov. George E. Pataki, who is smiling. As the announcer speaks, some of the words from the script flash on the screen, and the image of an elderly couple, also smiling, appears. The screen changes to a stern-faced picture of the State Assembly Speaker, Sheldon Silver, as scraps from two newspaper editorials appear beneath him. + +THE SCRIPT -- "Governor Pataki's rent control plan protects all seniors, disabled and tenants making less than $175,000 a year. It's a good plan. Sadly, Assembly Democrat Speaker Sheldon Silver is playing politics with rent control. The Times says Silver is 'playing a dangerous game that could harm tenants.' The Daily News says when 'rent control laws expire on June 15, renters will have only Silver to blame.' + +Tell Sheldon Silver: Don't let rent control expire." + +ACCURACY -- Governor Pataki's rent-law proposal, known as vacancy decontrol, would maintain protections on all apartments, including those with elderly and disabled tenants -- but only until those tenants moved out or died, at which time rent limits would be lifted for the next tenant. Over time, that would phase out all rent controls in the region. His plan does advocate immediate deregulation of apartments whose tenants make more than $175,000 a year. +Senate Republicans, and editorials in The New York Times and The Daily News, have accused Mr. Silver of refusing to budge on rent laws because he wants them to expire. Under this scenario, voters would blame Republicans, who oppose rent controls, and Governor Pataki's chances for re-election next year would be damaged. + +Mr. Silver has adamantly denied those motives, saying that he will not accept vacancy decontrol because it would mean an end to all rent protections. + +SCORECARD -- By taking a page from Governor Pataki's strategy and not explaining that his plan would gradually end rent controls, the advertisement conveys a strong impression that only the wealthy would be affected. This could undermine the arguments of rent-control advocates that the system should be preserved intact. + +The advertisement also effectively puts a spotlight on Mr. Silver, who has portrayed his position as one of principle, but who could end up sharing blame with the Governor if the laws expire. RANDY KENNEDY + +LOAD-DATE: June 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +301 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 14, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Republicans Seek Rise in Medicare Eligibility Age + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 10; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 908 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 13 + +Senate Republicans said today that in their effort to balance the Federal budget they would try to increase the age of eligibility for Medicare and start charging elderly people $5 for each visit by a home health care agency. +The American Association of Retired Persons promptly criticized both proposals, saying they deviated from the "judicious and fair approach" to Medicare taken this week by House committees. + The proposals were advanced by Senator William V. Roth Jr., Republican of Delaware, as part of a comprehensive package of legislation to slow the growth of Medicare and modernize the program, which finances health care for 38 million people who are elderly or disabled. +Mr. Roth, the chairman of the Finance Committee, also set forth the Senate Republicans' proposals on welfare and Medicaid. The panel will vote on all the proposals next week. +The Senate proposals resemble legislation approved this week by several House committees, and the total amount of savings is the same. But there are some significant differences. Teaching hospitals and legal immigrants, for example, fare somewhat better under the Senate plans. +The measures being written in both houses of Congress appear likely to become law, in some form, because they fit within the bipartisan budget agreement negotiated by President Clinton and Congressional leaders. The legislation would make the biggest changes in Medicare since creation of the program in 1965, opening the door for many more elderly people to enroll in health maintenance organizations. +The House bill would not change the age of eligibility for Medicare, now 65. By contrast, Senate Republicans would gradually increase the age to 67. The increase would occur from 2003 to 2027. Senate Republicans defended the change as a way to make Medicare eligibility more similar to that for Social Security. +But Horace B. Deets, executive director of the American Association of Retired Persons, denounced the proposal. In a letter to Senator Roth, he said it would "create a larger group of uninsured Americans." Martin A. Corry, director of Federal affairs at the association, said insurance companies generally did not write comprehensive insurance for people 65 or 66. And if they did, he said, the price for such coverage would be very high. +Under the Senate Republican proposal, the Government would charge Medicare beneficiaries $5 for each home health care visit, except for the first 100 visits after a hospital stay. +Mr. Corry said: "This proposal could place a significant financial burden on the oldest and frailest Medicare beneficiaries. Who uses home health care beyond 100 visits? The older, sicker patients." Under the proposal, elderly people who receive home health care without a prior hospital stay would have to pay the $5 charge for each visit. +Senator Roth said he had sought a compromise in restoring disability benefits for legal immigrants who have not become citizens. Such immigrants are ineligible for Supplemental Security Income under the 1996 welfare law. The House bill would continue such benefits for immigrants who were receiving them on Aug. 22, 1996, when President Clinton signed the welfare bill. But immigrants who were in the United States on that date and later become disabled would be ineligible. +Mr. Roth would go further. He would continue disability benefits for people who were on the rolls on Aug. 22, 1996. But he would also provide $700 million for immigrants who were here then and later become disabled. Committee aides said the money would last for perhaps a year. In that time, Mr. Roth said, "it is my hope that we could come up with a permanent solution for this group of legal immigrants." +The Medicare provisions of the Senate bill are better for hospitals, especially teaching hospitals, of which there are many in the New York metropolitan area. The House bill would freeze Medicare payments to hospitals next year, whereas the Senate bill would allow a small increase. The House bill would make deeper cuts in Medicare payments to teaching hospitals. +The Senate bill would make a significant change in the way Medicare pays hospitals for the extra costs of training doctors and caring for large numbers of low-income patients. The Government now includes a special allowance for such costs in the payments it makes to health maintenance organizations caring for Medicare patients. But there is no guarantee that the money actually gets to teaching hospitals and those serving large numbers of poor people. +Senate Republicans would take the money from health maintenance organizations and give it directly to such hospitals, transferring $7.3 billion over five years. +Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, welcomed those changes. He said they were "largely due to the intense advocacy of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan," Democrat of New York, whom he described as "a tireless champion" of teaching hospitals. Mr. Moynihan is the ranking Democrat on the finance panel. +The Senate bill would make it easier for doctors and hospitals to form their own health plans to compete in the Medicare market. Such health plans could operate without state licenses and could temporarily avoid some types of state regulation if they obtained waivers from the Federal Government. After Jan. 1, 2001, they would need to have state licenses if they wanted to enroll Medicare beneficiaries. + +LOAD-DATE: June 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +302 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 15, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WESTCHESTER BRIEFS + +BYLINE: By ELSA BRENNER + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 10; Column 3; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1211 words + + +Cyclospora Returns +The second outbreak of cyclospora in Westchester this spring has sickened at least nine people, causing health officials to advise residents against eating raspberries from Guatemala. +The imported berries have been implicated in more than 100 cases of the parasitic disease nationwide since April. + The most recent cases in Westchester occurred in May, the county's Health Department said, after partygoers at a private event ate raspberries and suffered severe diarrhea. Mary Landrigan, a spokeswoman for the Health Department, said that two cases were confirmed through laboratory testing. +In April, 150 people were exposed to cyclospora at a Scarsdale wedding, and 20 of them became sick, with laboratory tests confirming 4 cases of cyclospora. +None of the Westchester victims were hospitalized with the illness, which is treatable with antibiotics. Although cyclospora does not cause life-threatening illness for most people, it may be more severe in those with compromised immune systems, according to the Health Department. +Officials recommend that people ask where the raspberries have come from before eating them. Washing them will not eliminate the risk of cyclospora. They must be cooked instead. + +An Aging Population +The county's Planning Department released figures this month showing that between 2010 and 2020, the number of residents 60 and older will increase by 25 percent. In each succeeding decade, that group will represent a larger proportion of the county's population. +Of those older than 60 in 1990, 67 percent were between 60 and 74; 15 percent were 75 to 79 and 18 percent were older than 80. By 2020, however, 63 percent of that group will be between 60 and 74; 13 percent will be between 75 and 79 and 24 percent will be older than 80. In other words, the Planning Department says, the percentage of very old people is expected to increase. +The implications are that housing for the elderly with graduated levels of service for different age groups will be in demand in future decades. +Furthermore, the Planning Department said that for all but the wealthiest households, Social Security will be the principal source of retirement income. Savings rates are very low, with at least one study showing that the median level of financial assets of those nearing retirement was $7,000 in 1991, the department said. +While the increase in value on houses has been substantial for those now benefiting from the inflation of the mid-1970's through the mid-80's, such gains will not be as high at retirement for those who have invested in the housing market after the mid-80's. + +Guilty Plea in D.W.I. +An unemployed chauffeur with a history of alcohol-related driving offenses has pleaded guilty to driving while drunk in an accident in January that killed a college professor and seriously injured his wife, District Attorney Jeanine Pirro said. +The defendant, Ildelfonso Prieto, 51, has been charged with second-degree manslaughter in the death of Burton H. Greene, who was a professor at Purchase College. +Mr. Prieto admitted to drinking seven to eight beers starting in midafternoon of the day of the accident. He said he entered his 1988 Nissan Sentra while intoxicated and speeding about 20 miles over the limit. His blood alcohol content was measured at .18 percent, nearly twice the state's legal limit. +He was convicted in 1989 for driving while his ability was impaired in Queens, and in 1996 for leaving the scene of an accident in White Plains. He was charged by the Scarsdale police with driving while intoxicated and speeding in the fall of 1996 and was convicted of driving while his ability was impaired in that case. +He faces a maximum prison term of 5 to 15 years. Sentencing is scheduled on June 25. The case is being watched by advocates of tougher laws against drunken driving. +I-287 Victims +Jury selection is to begin tomorrow for 14 victims in the case of the July 1994 explosion of a propane truck on Interstate 287 in While Plains, said Henry Miller, the lawyer representing two families affected by the blast. +The explosion killed the driver of the truck and injured 23 people living within 400 feet. The defendants in the case are Ryder Truck Rental, which leased the truck, and Paraco Gas Corporation, which hired the driver. +Mr. Miller, the former head of the New York State Bar Association, is representing Edward and Michelle Brunner and their four children and German and Blanca Garcia, their two children, two visitors that night and two tenants. +The tank of the propane truck landed in Mr. and Mrs. Brunner's bedroom, and they suffered burns and smoke inhalation while escaping. They also have continued bad dreams, flashbacks and "a heightened sense of vulnerability," Mr. Miller said. +The Garcia family, their guests and tenants suffered burns while fleeing from the Garcia house. +According to a report of the National Transportation Safety Board, the driver of the truck had little sleep in the 48 hours before the accident and was suffering from fatigue. The report found that Paraco Gas had not met standards for drivers' rest times. The employer pleaded guilty to failing to monitor 93 false driver log entries from 1992 to 1994 and was fined $1 million. Mr. Miller said he is looking for a jury that could understand the victims' suffering. Several other cases, including one involving the family of Leonard Espinal, have been settled out of court. + +Jail Care Criticized +The county is faced with at least 19 claims from inmates at the Westchester County Jail in Valhalla that a private contractor has not provided them with adequate health care. +Although the contract with the firm, EMSA Limited Partnership, stipulates that the company is responsible for all costs associated with legal actions, the company has refused to pay the county for those costs. County Attorney Marilyn J. Slatten has asked the county's Board of Legislators for permission to sue the company to recover the money. +When Westchester hired EMSA in 1995, the goal was to save money by laying off county workers and turning over health care services at the jail to the private company. Some elected officials are now questioning whether the decision by County Executive Andrew P. O'Rourke, a Republican, to privatize those services should be reconsidered. +"This is another example of misguided outsourcing," said County Legislator Thomas J. Abinanti, Democrat from Greenburgh. "This is what happens when you care more about profit than people. We should seriously reconsider rehiring those workers." +In a settlement of a lawsuit filed by the estate of Nancy Blumenthal, a Bedford teen-ager who committed suicide in the County Jail in Valhalla on May 17, last year, EMSA will be paying $750,000, and Westchester will be paying $700,000, pending approval of the Board of Legislators. +The 17-year-old girl's parents, Wendy and Lawrence Blumenthal, charged in Federal District Court for the Southern District in White Plains that Dr. Harvey N. Lothringer, a psychiatrist working for EMSA, should not have discontinued their daughter's prescription for an antidepressant. They claimed that their daughter's civil rights were violated at the jail. ELSA BRENNER + +LOAD-DATE: June 15, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +303 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 15, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In the Region/Long Island; +In Babylon, a Home-Sharing Program for the Elderly + +BYLINE: By DIANA SHAMAN + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 7; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1338 words + +AFTER living all her life in North Babylon, Virginia Goldsmith had no wish to leave the comfortable four-bedroom turn-of-the century Victorian with the wraparound porch that once belonged to her grandparents. +But when she turned 80, her two children, a daughter in Washington and a son in Islip, began to worry that her living alone might not be safe. + Last December, Mrs. Goldsmith, widowed 10 years, got a roommate and new friend, Dolly Palmer, 73, through Babylon Home Sharers, a house-sharing program sponsored by the Town of Babylon Senior Citizens Community Services, a nonprofit group. The eight-year-old program matches older homeowners with older people looking for a place to live. +Mrs. Palmer, also a widow and on a limited income, had been living with her son, but with two grandchildren in the home, it was a crowded arrangement. +Babylon's home-sharing program, which other towns are now investigating as a possible model for programs of their own, is free. Because the program is partly financed by Federal funds, at least one member of the matched couple must be 60 to meet the age guideline established by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The other must be at least 50. +Homeowners are usually seeking companionship and a little income to meet housing expenses. Sharers are usually unable to afford a place of their own. A sharing arrangement allows them to find accommodations with a private room for $350 a month or less. +"House sharing can be companionship, it can be economic and it can offer security," said Beth Eggleton, the director of the Babylon program. "It offers a continuum of care so that people can stay and age in place in a community." +Requirements are simple. Applicants fill out questionnaires listing everything from work background to health problems to hobbies, so that a compatible match can be found. They are also screened. +Homeowners must show that they can offer safe and desirable accommodations and that they have the income to operate the home properly. Would-be tenants must demonstrate that they have the income to support themselves. A provision in the lease allows each to back out of the arrangement, usually with 30 to 60 days' notice. +Living areas and the kitchen are shared. Tenants pay for their own food and usually install their own telephones. Follow-up visits are provided by Babylon Home Sharers, as is counseling if problems develop. +Programs that match people seeking shared living are widespread in some parts of the country -- New Jersey has at least 50 such programs -- but Long Island, especially Suffolk, has been lagging. +A few nonprofit groups offer matching services as part of a wider array of counseling help, but the Babylon program, which is limited to homes in that town, is the only one that is town-sponsored. Its $27,000 annual budget is financed by Federal Community Development money and private grants from local banks. The town also provides free office space. +Last year, the program provided assistance and counseling to about 170 elderly people, and 42 are currently sharing homes, Mrs. Eggleton said. +Elder-Share, a Setauket nonprofit groupthat purchased a 10-room house in Mount Sinai for elderly people who wanted shared living, had to close the house in 1992, because without public financing it was too expensive to run. +Elder-Share is now trying to start a home- sharing program modeled on Babylon's, in partnership with the town of Brookhaven. The town of Southampton is also considering the idea. "We are looking for different types of housing solutions, and I feel that home sharing is very viable and cost-effective," said Toby Wiles, director of Suffolk's Department for the Aging. +ALTHOUGH the county would support any such programs, it is up to individual towns to start them, she added. +Nassau County finances a program called Project Share, now in its 19th year. Available only to Nassau homeowners, it is run for the county by the Family Service Association, a nonprofit social agency in Mineola. +"Home sharing provides people with an affordable option to live a better quality life," said Rena Iacono, the commissioner of Nassau's Department of Senior Citizens Affairs, whose budget pays for the program. +Over the years, Project Share has helped "hundreds of people combat isolation and get the financial help they need to keep their homes," she added. +The Nassau program, which has a $16,000 annual budget, is similar to Babylon's, but no lease is signed and follow-up visits are not provided. About 100 people a year receive assistance, said Margaret Hromada, the coordinator. +The nonprofit Emmaus House Foundation in Syosset offers a different approach to the home-sharing concept by operating two private houses, one in Syosset and one in Lake Grove, each shared by eight people. +The nonsectarian program, called Harvest House, is run by Sisters of St. Dominic, a Roman Catholic order based in Amityville. The $923 monthly cost includes all meals. A third house will open in Floral Park in September. +Home-sharing and shared living, such as the Harvest House program, "fill a gap that is enormous," said Marjorie Marlin of Somerville, N.J., co-president with Helen Head of Burlington, Vt., of the National Shared Housing Resource Center, based in Baltimore. +The center, which has 350 member organizations, promotes and provides information and referrals on shared housing. +"If you have the kind of limited income that we target, you have so few options in terms of housing," Ms. Marlin said. "And when it comes to getting such programs off the ground, you're only talking about a few thousand dollars, not millions." +Housing experts say the home-share idea deserves more attention and money than it is receiving because it is a useful and inexpensive option for older people who might otherwise be forced out of their homes into institutional settings. +"The economic payoff is that you end up with two people living in housing that is affordable to both of them and who both gain from the companionship and support," said Leon Harper, senior housing specialist for the American Association of Retired Persons in Washington. +"The issue is that in the absence of formal programs, how do people go about finding someone to share their home without exposing themselves to the vulnerabilities that are out there?" he asked. +The association has a free publication, A Consumer's Guide to Homesharing, which provides general information. +"What prompted us to put the guide together is that a lot of people were interested in the idea but didn't quite know where to start," said Deborah M. Chalfie, a senior program specialist for the association. "What it does is give you things to think about, such as, is home sharing for me and how can I make it work." +After living together for six months, Mrs. Goldsmith and Mrs. Palmer of North Babylon say home-sharing is working well. +They are still getting to know each other, but sitting in their cheery living room, they banter like old friends. +"We're the odd couple," said Mrs. Palmer, who once worked in the bookkeeping department of the Republic Aviation Corporation in Farmingdale. "I'm the cutup. She's prim and proper." +"She's Catholic and I'm Protestant," Mrs. Goldsmith, a retired teacher, said. "But we both believe in God." +"She's got a bum left knee, I've got a bum right knee," Mrs. Palmer said. +Mrs. Palmer loves cats. Mrs. Goldsmith has a dog. +The two widows watch television together, and they talk about their families and their husbands. +"You miss the buddy you were married to," Mrs. Palmer said, "but if you are two older people together, you have that connection." +For A Consumer's Guide to Homesharing, write the A.A.R.P., 601 E Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20049. The publication number is D12744. +For information on home-sharing programs, write National Shared Housing Resource Center, 321 East 25th Street, Baltimore, Md.21218, enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope. + +LOAD-DATE: June 15, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Virginia Goldsmith, left, a North Babylon homeowner, and Dolly Palmer, house-sharer as of last December. (Lois Raimondo for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +304 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 15, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +GOVERNMENT; +At Last, Hope for the Elderly On Property Tax Relief + +BYLINE: By JENNIFER PRESTON + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 8; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1066 words + +DATELINE: TRENTON + +Five years ago, when Dorothy and William Fox first bought their home at Holiday Village East, a retirement community in Mount Laurel, their property tax bill was $1,900 a year. This year, they are paying $3,600. +"We haven't gotten our new tax bill yet, but it is going up again," said Mrs. Fox, 71, a retired hospital administrator who moved from Brooklyn. "Nothing is going up, except our expenses. For people living on a fixed income, we need some relief." + For years, New Jersey's elderly homeowners have loudly complained about covering the cost of rising property taxes while living on fixed incomes. State lawmakers have struggled over the years to come up with legislation that would provide them some relief. But the proposals failed to win support because they would have left municipalities with lower tax revenues or shifted the tax burden onto younger taxpayers, setting up a generational conflict that lawmakers found politically unpalatable. +Now, finally, there is a proposal for property tax relief for some elderly homeowners and disabled individuals that is expected to win legislative approval in the coming weeks. Although Governor Whitman does not comment on pending legislation, her aides say she is likely to sign the bill into law, making New Jersey the first state to freeze property tax rates for the elderly. +Under the plan, proposed by Assembly Speaker Jack Collins, elderly homeowners and disabled individuals who meet income eligibility requirements and who have lived in New Jersey for 15 years would be protected from property tax increases beginning next year. And the state, not the municipalities, would make up the difference. +"It's not right that retirees who live on fixed incomes and struggle just to make ends meet are being forced to sell their homes because they cannot afford to pay their property taxes," said Mr. Collins, a Republican from Salem County. "My goal is to make it possible for them to keep their homes instead of having to sell and settle for less. They have worked long and hard most of their lives. They are entitled to some security and peace of mind in retirement." +Mr. Collins said he objected to earlier proposals that would have shifted the burden onto younger property owners. And at first he was reluctant to propose offering assistance to only one group of taxpayers, since so many younger families were also struggling to make ends meet. "But at least, because of their age, they have the opportunity to increase their income," he said. "Elderly homeowners, living on fixed incomes, do not." +Not all elderly taxpayers would be eligible, and the Foxes, with their five years' residence, would be among the ineligible. As it is now proposed, only 260,000 of the state's million elderly residents 65 and older would qualify. Under the program, participants would have to offer proof of consecutive residency in the state for at least 15 years. To qualify, they would also have to meet the same income eligibility requirements now required by the Pharmaceutical Assistance for the Aged and Disabled, known as PAAD, the state program that covers much of the cost for prescriptions. +For single adults, the maximum income eligibility limit to qualify for the pharmaceutical assitance program is $17,550, and for married couples it is $21,519. The eligibility limits would rise with cost-of-living adjustments to the pharmaceutical programs. Participants whose income exceeded the program's limits would be able to stay in the program for one year and would be dropped only if their incomes exceeded the eligibility limits for a second consecutive year. +"You would have to qualify for PAAD to be eligible for benefits, but you would not have to receive PAAD benefits," said Assemblyman Thomas S. Smith Sr., a Republican from Asbury Park. "There are a number of seniors who do not take advantage of the PAAD program, even though they could, because they are already enrolled in a pharmaceutical assistance program." +Participants would continue to pay the full amount of their property tax bills to their municipalities. The state would then reimburse the local governments for the difference above the 1998 property tax rate. "No matter how high their local taxes go, they will never have to pay a dollar more than they pay now," Mr. Smith said. +For the program's first year, the estimated cost to the state budget is $18.4 million. In 10 years, legislative analysts predict, the cost to the state budget could rise to $100 million. +Mr. Collins dismisses criticism that the proposal is an election-year ploy to sway the elderly to vote for his fellow Republicans and Mrs. Whitman at the polls this November. Property taxes and auto insurance are the top issues on voters' minds, and elderly voters in New Jersey make up one third of the electorate, the second largest percentage of elderly voters in the nation, after Florida. +William G. Dressell Jr., executive director of the New Jersey League of Municipalities, which has rejected past efforts at such tax relief, praised the legislation. "This is the first time there is a funding source," he said. "It assures that local governments would not be forced to absorb the loss in property tax revenues. +"But it is not a panacea," Mr. Dressell said. "It is not going to solve all of our property tax woes. It is a first step. It is addressing the most needy." +Mrs. Fox, a member of a recently formed group of homeowners called the Senior Citizens Education Commission, testified in favor of the bill last week. But she said later that she hoped some changes would be made in the legislation. Mrs. Fox objected to the 15-year residency limit, saying many of New Jersey's elderly residents, like herself, had recently moved here on retiring so that they could be close to their children. +"It is a beginning," she said of the legislation. "But I don't think it is the answer for the problems facing seniors, taxwise. The answer is in finding a new and equitable funding system for public education in New Jersey to keep property taxes down. +"We love it here," she said. "The area is lovely. The people are lovely. We could be very happy here if the taxes were not so high. I am not looking for luxury, but you do want to be able to do little things when you retire. And you can't start pulling money out of the bank because you have no way to put it back in." + +LOAD-DATE: June 15, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Dorothy Fox supports a law to freeze property taxes for the elderly. (Laura Pedrick for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +305 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 15, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ON THE TOWNS + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 12; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 3260 words + +An opinionated guide to cultural and recreational goings-on around the state this week. To submit items for consideration, write to On the Towns, Sunday New Jersey Section, The New York Times, 229 West 43d Street, New York, N.Y. 10036, or send a fax to (212) 556-7219. + +MUSIC + +CAPE MAY MUSIC FESTIVAL Through June 29. Cape May Festival Pops Orchestra plays American musical theater selections. Tonight at the Cape May Convention Hall, Beach Avenue and Stockton Place. Jon Klibonoff, pianist. Wednesday at the Cape May Convention Hall. Prism Saxophone Quartet. Next Sunday at the Episcopal Church of the Advent, Washington and Franklin Streets. All concerts begin at 8 P.M. Tickets: $15; $10 for the elderly; $5 for students. Subscriptions available. +(800) 275-4278 or (609) 884-5404. + +CLUB BENE Jean-Luc Ponty, jazz violinist. Friday at 9 P.M. Tickets: $25. Corky Laing of Mountain. Saturday at 9 P.M. Tickets: $17.50. Route 35, Sayreville. (908) 727-3000. + +CORNERSTONE Jim Locano, pianist. Tuesdays at 6:30 P.M. Naville Dickey Quartet. Wednesday, 7:30 to 11:30 P.M. Jimmy Nuzzo and Tony Ellis. Thursdays, 8:30 to 11:30 P.M. Kenny Davern Quartet Friday, 9 P.M. to 1 A.M. Mike LeDonne Quartet Saturday, 9 P.M. to 1 A.M. Free. 25 New Street, Metuchen. (908) 549-5306. + +GREAT AUDITORIUM, OCEAN GROVE The Wooster Street Trolley Jazz Band. Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $12 and $15. Pilgrim and Ocean Pathways, Ocean Grove. +(908) 775-0035. + +HARD ROCK CAFE Pat Benatar. Thursday at 10 P.M. Free. Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort, 1000 Boardwalk, at Virginia Avenue, Atlantic City. (609) 441-0007. + +J.C.C. ON THE PALISADES Shirah, a Jewish choir, will present a Father's Day concert featuring works in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino and English. Tonight at 7. Tickets: $12.50; $7.50 for the elderly. 411 East Clinton Avenue, Tenafly. (201) 569-7900, extension 433. + +RIDGEWOOD KASSCHAU MEMORIAL SHELL Bucky Pizzarelli, jazz guitarist. Tuesday. Roy Meyer Swingers, jazz vocal group. Thursday. All programs begin at 8:30 P.M. Free. Take chairs or blankets. Veteran's Field, Maple Avenue, Ridgewood. (201) 670-3924. + +NEW JERSEY STATE MUSEUM David Holzman, pianist, performs works by Copland, Ralph Shapey, Jeffrey Hall, Arthur Kreiger, Hyunsook Jung and Sergei Berinski. Next Sunday at 2 P.M. Tickets: $5; $3 for students and the elderly. Auditorium, 205 West State Street, Trenton. (609) 292-6310. + +RIDGEWOOD PUBLIC LIBRARY "Homage to Heitor Villa-Lobos," with Benjamin Bunch, guitarist, in works by Milhaud, Poulenc, Albert Roussel, Manuel Ponce, Joaquin Rodrigo, Abel Carlevaro and Bach. Friday at 8 P.M. Free. The Arts Cafe, 125 North Maple Avenue, Ridgewood. (201) 670-5601. + +SHANGHAI JAZZ Rio Clemente. Wednesday, 7 to 9:30 P.M. Neville Dickie, pianist. Thursday, 7 to 9:30 P.M. Nancy Nelson and Jerry Vezza. Friday, 7 to 11 P.M. Barbara Lea. Saturday, 7 to 11 P.M. Free. 24 Main Street, Madison. (201) 822-2899. + +SKYLANDS ASSOCIATION The West Point Dixie Players from the United States Military Academy Band. Friday at 7:30 P.M. Free. New Jersey State Botanical Garden, Morris Road, Ringwood. (201) 962-9534. + +SUMMERFEST '97 Country Fest, with the Tim Gillis Band. Today, 1 to 5 P.M. Schooley's Mountain County Park, West Springtown Road, Washington Township. Bobby Syvarth Combo. Next Sunday, 1:30 to 5 P.M. Mahlon Dickerson Reservation, Jefferson Township. All programs are free. (973) 326-7600. + +TURNING POINT Livingston Taylor. Today at 5 and 8 P.M. Tickets: $17.50. Greg Trooper. Thursday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $12.50. Robin and Linda Williams. Friday at 9 P.M. Tickets: $12.50. Christine Santelli Band. Saturday at 10 P.M. Tickets: $10. Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Next Sunday at 5 and 8 P.M. Tickets: $18.50. 468 Piermont Avenue, Piermont, N.Y. +(914) 359-3219. + +THEATER + +BICKFORD THEATER "Olympus on My Mind," a musical. Through July 13. Thursdays through Sundays at 8 P.M.; matinee, Sundays at 2 P.M. Tickets: $17.50; $15.75 for the elderly; $15 for students; $7.50 for students on Thursdays. Morris Museum, 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. (201) 538-8069. + +CARNIVAL PRODUCTIONS "The Fantasticks," by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones. Through June 28. Thursdays at 8 P.M.; Fridays and Saturdays at 8:30 P.M. Matinee next Sunday at 2:30 P.M. Tickets: $12; $10 for students and the elderly. Dinner-and-show packages: $27 on Fridays and Saturdays; $22 on Thursdays. El Bodegon Restaurant, 169 West Main Street, Rahway. (908) 388-0647. + +DOVER LITTLE THEATER "Assassins," by Stephen Sondheim. Through June 28. Fridays and Saturdays at 8 P.M. Tickets: $12. Elliott Street, Dover. (973) 328-9202. + +HENDERSON THEATER The Premier Theater Company presents "The Sound of Music," by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Through June 28. Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 P.M.; matinee, next Sunday at 3 P.M. Tickets: $22; $17 for the elderly; $12 for children under 13. Summer subscriptions, for "The Sound of Music," "Grease" in July and "Evita" in August, are $49; $42 for the elderly; $33 for children under 13. Route 52, off exit 109 of the Garden State Parkway, Lincroft. (908) 747-0008. + +McCARTER THEATER McCarter Lab readings of new plays. "The Mad Dancers," by Yehuda Hyman, Thursday at 7 P.M. "The Stone Mason," by Cormac McCarthy. Friday at 7 P.M. "Spirit North," by Leslie Lee, June 23. Free; reservations required. Rehearsal Room, McCarter Theater, 91 University Place, Princeton. (609) 683-8000. + +NEW JERSEY SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Through June 29. Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 P.M.; matinees Saturdays, Sundays and Wednesday at 2 P.M. "The Threepenny Opera," by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, July 11 to 27. "Blithe Spirit," by Noel Coward, Aug. 8 to 24. All at the Community Theater, 100 South Street, Morristown. "Much Ado About Nothing," June 25 to July 26 at the Playwrights Theater of New Jersey, 33 Green Village Road, Madison. "Henry V." July 15 to Aug. 10 at the football field of Bayley-Ellard High School, 205 Madison Avenue, Madison. Single tickets: $16 to $30. Subscription packages: $66 to $125. (201) 408-5600. On the World Wide Web: http:/ /www.njshakespeare.org. + +PAPER MILL PLAYHOUSE "Man of La Mancha." Through July 20. Wednesdays through Sundays at 8 P.M.; matinees Thursdays at 2 P.M. and Saturdays and Sundays at 3 P.M. Tickets: $31 to $46; $10 for students 15 minutes before each performance. Brookside Drive, Millburn. (201) 376-4343. + +RITZ THEATER "Kiss of the Spider Woman." Fridays and Saturdays at 8 P.M. at the Club Room at Leonetti's. 901 White Horse Pike, Oaklyn. (609) 858-5230. + +MUESEUMS AND GALLERIES + +ABC GALLERY "A Dramatic Vision," watercolors by Barbara Watts. Through July 18. Hours: Mondays through Thursdays, 1 to 9 P.M.; Fridays, 1 to 5 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Lambertville Public Library, 6 Lilly Street, Lambertville. (609) 397-0275. + +AMERICAN LABOR MUSEUM "Workers and Immigrants," a student art exhibition. Through Dec. 31. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 1 to 4 P.M. Suggested donation: $1.50. Botto House National Landmark, 83 Norwood Street, Haledon. (201) 595-7953. + +ART ALLIANCE OF MONMOUTH COUNTY "Urban Scene, Rural Dream," paintings by Mary Phillips. Through June 24. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 12 to 4 P.M. 33 Monmouth Street, Red Bank. (908) 842-9403. + +ATLANTIC CITY HISTORICAL MUSEUM "Bettmann on the Boardwalk: A Celebration of Historic Atlantic City, 1890-1990," a selection of photographs from the Corbis-Bettmann Collection. Through 1997. Daily, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. Free. Garden Pier, at New Jersey Avenue. (609) 347-5839. + +BERGEN MUSEUM OF ART AND SCIENCE Recent sculpture by Sonia Chusit. Through next Sunday. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. 327 East Ridgewood Avenue, Paramus. +(201) 265-1248. + +CHAMOT GALLERY "Surroundings," landscapes by Keith Gunderson and Bryan Perrin. Through July 13. Hours: Tuesdays through Sundays, noon to 3 P.M. 111 First Street, Jersey City. (201) 610-1468. + +GALLERY AT SCHERING-PLOUGH "Reflections of Summer," featuring 30 watercolor landscapes and seascapes by 19 artists. Through Aug. 28. Mondays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. 1 Giralda Farms, Madison. (201) 882-7000. + +GALLERY OF SOUTH ORANGE "Sky Dancers," drawings by Janice Metzger, and "Herstory Part II," mixed-media works on paper and wood by Sarah Teofanov. Through July 20. Hours: Wednesdays and Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 2 P.M. and 4 to 6 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 P.M. Baird Center, 5 Mead Street, South Orange. (201) 378-7754. + +GROUNDS FOR SCULPTURE Spring exhibition, featuring works by Marisol, Robert Murray and Jay Wholley. Through July 6. Fridays through Sundays, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. 18 Fairgrounds Road, Hamilton. (609) 586-0616. + +HOPPER HOUSE ART CENTER "Rocklandia," Rockland County landscapes by Monica Bradbury and Steve Burns, painters; Fred Burrell, photographer, and Ruth Geneslaw, sculptor. Through next Sunday. Thursdays through Sundays, noon to 5 P.M.; Fridays to 7:30 P.M. Admission: $1. 82 North Broadway, Nyack, N.Y. (914) 358-0774. + +KEARON-HEMPENSTALL GALLERY "Visions of Immortality," paintings by Stan Mullins. Through June 30. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 3 P.M.; Thursday evenings, 7 to 9 P.M. 536 Bergen Avenue, Jersey City. (201) 333-8488. + +MACCULLOCH HALL HISTORICAL MUSEUM "The Immortal Genius: William Shakespeare, Thomas Nast and 19th-Century American Culture," satirical cartoons by Nast, who used text and imagery of Shakespeare. Through Feb. 4. "Rococo and Reason in Georgian Glass," more than 100 examples of English and Irish cut glass from the 18th and 19th centuries. Through Sept. 7. "The Timeless Folk Art of Decorative Painting." Through Oct. 12; demonstrations next Sunday, 1 to 4 P.M. Admission: $3; $2 for students and the elderly. Hours: Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 P.M. 45 Macculloch Avenue, Morristown. (201) 538-2404. + +MONMOUTH MUSEUM "Two Styles/Two Photographers," works by Jeff Martin and Sandra Johanson. Through next Sunday.Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. 761 Newman Springs Road, Lincroft. +(908) 747-2266. + +MONTCLAIR ART MUSEUM "A Personal Synthesis," a retrospective of paintings and and prints by Hananiah Harari, and "American Impressionist," paintings by Guy Rose (1867-1925). Both through Aug. 10. "Reflecting America: Highlights From the Permanent Collection." Through July 27. Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 11 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Sundays and Thursdays, 1 to 5 P.M. Admission: $4; $3 for students with ID and the elderly; free admission on Saturdays. 3 South Mountain Avenue, Montclair. (201) 746-5555. + +MORRIS MUSEUM "Portrait Paintings From the Morris Museum Collection," including works by Rembrandt and Gainsborough. Through June 30. Recent sculpture by Leah Jacobson. Through May 24, 1998. Hours: Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M.; Mondays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 8 P.M. Admission: $4; $2 for the elderly. 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. (201) 538-0454. + +NEW JERSEY CENTER FOR VISUAL ARTS "Color, Line and Form," watercolors and prints by Alice Hondru. Through June 26. Mondays through Fridays, noon to 4 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 to 4 P.M. Palmer Gallery, 68 Elm Street, Summit. +(908) 273-9121. + +NEWARK MUSEUM "Portraits, 1975-1995," paintings by Dawoud Bey. Through Aug. 3. "Japanese Master Prints: Hiroshige's 19th-Century Landscapes." Through June 29. +"The Glitter and the Gold: Fashioning America's Jewelry." Through Nov. 2. Hours: Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. +49 Washington Street, Newark. +(201) 596-6550. + +NOYES MUSEUM "Treasures of Art History," including works by Picasso and Toulouse-Lautrec and ancient Egyptian, Greek and Ethiopian art from the New Jersey State Museum. Closes today.. "Easy Access: Highlights From the Noyes Museum's Collection of Contemporary Art." Through Aug. 17. Wednesday through Sunday, 11 A.M. to 4 P.M. Admission: $3; $2 for the elderly and students. Lily Lake Road, Oceanville. +(609) 652-8848. + +PASSAIC COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE Paintings by Fred Duignan. Through June 25. Mondays through Fridays, 9 A.M. to 9 P.M.; Saturdays, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. L.R.C. Gallery, Broadway and Memorial Drive, Paterson. (201) 684-6800. + +PALYMYRA ART GALLERY Paintings by Richard Nunziata. Through July 5. Hours: Tuesdays through Sundays, 11:30 A.M. to 2 A.M. Palmyra Tea Room, 22 Hamilton Street, Bound Brook. (908) 302-0515. + +PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM The permanent collection, featuring Greek and Roman antiquities, Chinese painting and calligraphy and pre-Columbian art. Museum hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 to 5 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. Princeton University campus. (609) 258-3788. +PRINTMAKING COUNCIL OF NEW JERSEY A retrospective of prints by Krishna Reddy. Through Aug. 30. Hours: Wednesdays through Fridays, 11 A.M. to 4 P.M.; Saturdays, 1 to 4 P.M. 440 River Road, North Branch. +(908) 725-2110. + +SIMON GALLERY Pastels and paintings by Antonio Carreno, and paintings by Jim Fuess and Joyce Korotkin. Tuesday through June 28. 48 Bank Street, Morristown. (201) 538-5456. + +WYCOFF GALLERY "The Silverman Collection," bronze sculptures by Star York, Bruce LaFountain, Sandi Clark and Walter Horton. Through June 27. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11:30 A.M. to 4 P.M. 648 Wyckoff Avenue, Wyckoff. (201) 891-7436. + +ZIMMERLI ART MUSEUM "Asian Traditions/ Modern Expressions: Asian-American Artists and Abstraction, 1945-1970." Through July 31. "Emily Mason: Works on Paper." Through July 20. "Sequences: As You Can See," selections from the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art From the Soviet Union. Through July 20. Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. Rutgers University, George and Hamilton Streets, New Brunswick. (908) 932-7237. + +FOR CHILDREN + +BARNES & NOBLE "Animal Wonders," storytelling and crafts. Tomorrow at 7 P.M. Free. 2103 Highway 35, Holmdel. (908) 615-3933. + +BICKFORD THEATER Saturn Summer Theater for Children, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11 A.M. and 1:30 P.M. in July and August. Tickets: $6.25; $5 for museum members. Museum hours: Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M.; Mondays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 8 P.M. Admission: $4; $2 for the elderly. 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. Schedule and reservations: +(201) 538-0454. + +FORUM THEATER GROUP "Starblast," a children's musical. Through June 28. Saturdays at 1 P.M. Tickets: $8. 314 Main Street, Metuchen. (908) 548-0582. + +MONMOUTH MUSEUM "Changing Cultures: From the Lenape to the Urban Age, 1400 to 1900," exploring the history of America through changes in family life, from the Lenape through the Victorian era. Through June 1998. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. 761 Newman Springs Road, Lincroft. (908) 747-2266. + +NEW JERSEY CHILDREN'S MUSEUM An interactive center for ages 2 to 8. Daily programs: "Fairy Tale Play," 10:30 A.M. and 3:30 P.M. "Storytime," noon. Craft projects, 2:30 P.M. Museum hours: Mondays through Fridays, +9 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. Admission: $7. 599 Industrial Avenue, Paramus. (201) 262-2638. + +NEW JERSEY STATE MUSEUM "Kaleidoscope Kids," a one-week program on astronomy for children 6 to 12. Sessions begin July 7 and continue through Aug. 8. Each session meets Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 3 P.M. Tuition: $115; $110 for siblings. 205 West State Street, Trenton. Registration and information: (609) 292-6310 or (609) 292-6464. + +SOMERSET COUNTY-BRIDGEWATER LIBRARY "June Bug Jamboree," a storytelling program for children aged 3 and older. Saturday at 10 A.M. Free. North Bridge Street and Vogt Drive, Bridgewater. (908) 526-4016, extension 4. + +TRAILSIDE NATURE AND SCIENCE CENTER "Spring Celestial Sights," a planetarium program on spring constellations, including Leo, Ursa Major, Bootes and planets. For children 6 and older. Through June 29. Sundays at 2 P.M. Admission: $3; $2.55 for the elderly. 452 New Providence Road, Mountainside. (908) 789-3670. + +ZIMMERLI ART MUSEUM "Three Billy Goats Gruff," illustrations by Robert Bender. Through July 20. Museum hours: Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. Rutgers University, George and Hamilton Streets, New Brunswick. (908) 932-7237. + +SPOKEN WORD + +BARNES & NOBLE "Bloom Day," a discussion of "Ulysses," by James Joyce, led by Julian Moynahan. Tomorrow at 7:30 P.M. Free. Princeton Market Fair, Route 1, Princeton. (609) 392-0689. + +BORDERS BOOKS AND MUSIC PRINCETON Jane Pepper discusses "Jane Pepper's Garden: Getting the Most Pleasure and Growing Results From Your Garden Every Month of the Year." Tomorrow at 7 P.M. Robert Richman, poet. Tuesday at 8 P.M. "Pranic Healing," a lecture by Navin Sharma. Thursday at 8 P.M.; registration required. All programs are free. Route 1 at Province Line Road, Princeton. (609) 514-0040. + +ENCORE BOOKS AND MUSIC "Sharing the Bad," a reading with Lois Harrod, poet, and Mimi Schwartz, author of "Thoughts From a Queen-Sized Bed." Friday at 7:30 P.M. Free. 301 North Harrison Street, Princeton. (609) 252-0608. + +FIREHOUSE GALLERY Poetry slam. Friday, 8:30 to 11 P.M. Admission: $5. Reservations recommended. 8 Walnut Street, Bordentown. (609) 298-3742. + +NEWARK PUBLIC LIBRARY Blair Ewing, poet and editor of Sensations magazine. Saturday at 3 P.M. Free. 5 Broad Street, Newark. (201) 866-7189. + +ETC + +FESTIVAL '97 "A Taste of Greece," with Greek food and pastries, live music and dancers. Today, 1 to 8 P.M. St. George Greek Orthodox Church, Deal Road and Whalepone Road, Ocean Township. (908) 775-2777. + +18TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Sponsored by the Finkelstein Memorial Library. Tuesdays at 7:30 P.M., through June 24.This week: "The Young Poisoner's Handbook." Next week: "The White Balloon," in Farsi with English subtitles. Suggested donation: $1. 24 Chestnut Street and Route 9, Spring Valley, N.Y. (914) 352-5700. + +FLEA MARKET The Chester Lions Club Flea Market offers crafts, linens, books, children's clothing, housewares, plants and produce, makeup, jewelry, scarves, handbags and other accessories. Sundays, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Through Nov. 30. Free. West Blackwell Street, Morris and Sussex Streets, downtown Dover. (201) 442-1494. + +NANTICOKE LENNI LENAPE POW-WOW AND FESTIVAL Dance and drum competitions, American Indian foods, crafts, displays and storytelling. Today, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Admission: $5 a car; $3 for motorcycles. Campers welcome. Salem County Fairgrounds, Route 40, Woodstown. (609) 451-4877 or +(609) 451-1918. + +NEW JERSEY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Sponsored by the Rutgers Film Co-op and the New Jersey Media Arts Center. Through July 27."Microcosmos," today at 2 P.M. at the Forrestal Hotel and Conference Center, 100 College Road East, off Route 1 South, Princeton. Free. "The Daytrippers" and "Suburbia," Friday. "When We Were Kings" and "Lost Highway," next Sunday. Films begin at 7 P.M. and are shown on Sundays at the State Theater, 15 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick; Fridays and Saturdays at 123 Scott Hall, College Avenue and Hamilton Street, Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Admission: $8; $6 for members. Information: (908) 932-8482. On the World Wide Web: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/nigrin. + +LOAD-DATE: June 15, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: 'At Play, Barnegat Bay' Works of Impressionist painters who lived and worked on the Jersey Shore from the turn of the century through the 1930's are featured in a retrospective that includes this 1910 oil on canvas by Carl Buergerniss. PEDERSEN GALLERY OF FINE ART 17 North Union Street, Lambertville. Saturday through Aug. 10. Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 P.M., and by appointment. (609) 397-1332. (pg. 12); Jazz Violin Jean-Luc Ponty has performed with Frank Zappa, John McLaughlin and Elton John, among others, and made more than 14 solo recordings. CLUB BENE Route 35, Sayreville. Friday at 9 P.M. Tickets: $25. (908) 727-3000. (pg. 13); New Orleans Sound The Wooster Street Trolley Jazz Band, a Dixieland ensemble, has been performing together since 1972. GREAT AUDITORIUM, OCEAN GROVE Pilgrim and Ocean Pathways, Ocean Grove. Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $12 and $15. (908) 775-0035. 'Altered States' Frank Gessner's chiasmage monoprints are showcased in a solo exhibition, which includes this new work, "Medusa." COOPER GALLERY 295 Grove Street, Jersey City. Through July 8. Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 7 P.M. (201) 451-1074. (pg. 15) + +TYPE: List + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +306 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 15, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE RENT BATTLE: THE TENANTS; +City Workers Flooded With Phone Calls + +BYLINE: By CLIFFORD J. LEVY + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 29; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 725 words + +In a room usually reserved for coordinating responses to natural disasters, a phalanx of New York City workers assembled early yesterday to confront a man-made crisis, the pending expiration of state rent regulations, trying to ease worries that seemed as intense as any stirred by an approaching blizzard or northeaster. +By late morning, the workers were receiving as many as 100 calls an hour from tenants wondering what would happen to their homes if the rent laws lapsed after tonight. The anxious and bewildered voices of many callers provided telling evidence of the impact the prolonged dickering in Albany is having on the lives of city residents. + "The rent-controlled apartments are not going to be affected by this law," one worker, Elizabeth M. Marrero, told a caller who feared she would be evicted tomorrow morning if the laws expired. "You're O.K. for now. You're doing fine." +After she hung up, Ms. Marrero explained, "A lot of them are concerned about things that they don't need to be concerned about." +She and other workers said many callers did not understand their legal rights, and did not realize there was a difference between rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments. +City officials say that even if the state rent regulations expire, tenants can stay in their apartments for the duration of their leases. +And they say the city has sole authority over rent control, and has already continued the regulations governing the 70,000 rent-controlled apartments, which are occupied mostly by elderly people. The debate in Albany, they say, is over the future of one million rent-stabilized apartments. +Still, no matter how many assurances were made, the callers often remained jittery. "People are very confused," said another worker, Hugh Stroud. "They are very upset and very disheartened. They are not sure whether they are going to be put out by their landlords." +He paused to pick up a ringing phone, spoke in soothing tones for several minutes and then transferred the caller to a lawyer from the Legal Aid Society for more help. +The scores of workers were from a range of city agencies and were supervised by the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management, the same agency that handles the city's response to natural disasters or terrorism. They operated from a room on the eighth floor of police headquarters that was adorned with video screens, computer terminals and many, many phones. +At a news conference, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said the vast majority of the callers were seeking information about their legal rights. He said there had been only a handful of calls from people accusing their landlords of harassment; the Police Department has set up a unit to investigate such complaints. +Mr. Giuliani, a Republican, has expressed strong support for continuing the current laws, siding with tenant groups and seeking to distinguish his stance from that of Gov. George E. Pataki and other Republicans in Albany who are fighting to weaken the laws. +As part of that effort, Mr. Giuliani ordered the Office of Emergency Management to open the command center. The workers were required to answer the phone with the greeting: "This is the Mayor's rent stabilization hot line." +Mr. Giuliani spent much of his news conference outlining the legal protections that are available to tenants. He also maintained his attack on state officials of both parties for allowing the fight to drag on, saying tenants were suffering. +"There are people being held hostage here," he said. + +Where to Call for Information and Assistance +With the deadline looming for the expiration of state rent regulations, the city is operating emergency information lines for tenants, the Mayor's office announced. The following numbers will operate daily, from 6 A.M. to 10 P.M., until the rent-control issue is resolved: +For general information, legal assistance and for tenants facing eviction: (212) 487-5858. For complaints of landlord harassment, including illegal evictions, threats of physical harm, changing locks or cutting services like water, gas, electricity or heat: (212) 487-6633. For emergencies only: 911. The hearing-impaired TTY line is (212) 487-7010. The State Division of Housing and Community Renewal has also established a telephone line for tenants to report harassment: (888) 736-8457. + +LOAD-DATE: June 15, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Al Buzzeo of the Department for the Aging talked to a caller yesterday about possible changes in rent laws. (Edward Keating/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +307 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 15, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +BLUM, ELEANORE GRACE LOURIA + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 31; Column 1; Classified + +LENGTH: 266 words + +BLUM-Eleanore Grace Louria. Peacefully, at home, just a few days after her 104th birthday. Beloved wife of the late Richard Leon Blum, loving mother of Howard and the late Richard Jr., adoring grandmother of Howard Jr., Thomas, William, Eleanore, Richard III, Cornelius, and her six greatgrandchildren, Tripp, Ross, Mathew, Eric, Daniel, and Sarah. Interment private. In lieu of flowers, contributions in her memory may be made to Recreation Rooms and Settlement. +BLUM-Eleanore. For over half a century she led and inspired Recreation Rooms and Settlement, an agency chartered by the State of New York in 1905 for charitable and benevolent purposes, "to do general settlement work and any and all other works of any nature and description whatsoever". Under the RR&S banner thousands were served in First Street Settlement House, in the country camps Mikan, Recro and Wildwood and two community centers in NYCHA projects Lillian Wald and Breukelen in daycare, headstart, teen and after-school programs. Ella Blum was always there for the children, the poor, the elderly and the ill. We mourn the loss but celebrate her dedicated life. She will be remembered. Board and Staff of Recreation Rooms & Settlement +BLUM-Eleanore. The Board and Staff of Louise Wise Services mourns the passing of our longest serving and beloved Board Member. She was a kind, gentle and generous woman who cared greatly for children, and a dedicated leader on behalf of the best interests of children. We extend our deepest sympathy to her entire family. Glenna Michaels, President Nancy Cavaluzzi, Executive Dir. + +LOAD-DATE: June 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +308 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 17, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Deal to Create A Big Chain In Elder Care + +BYLINE: By MILT FREUDENHEIM + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 5; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 949 words + +Genesis Health Ventures Inc. said yesterday that it had agreed to buy the Multicare Companies Inc. for $1.06 billion in cash, with backing from two investor groups. The deal would continue the rapid consolidation of the nursing home industry, creating one of the biggest chains of homes and outpatient services for the elderly in northern New Jersey, the Boston area, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. +Analysts said Genesis was paying a high price. But they said it was buying a solid business in markets with opportunities for cost savings and profit in taking over responsibility for sick elderly patients of health maintenance organizations. + The deal, which is subject to regulatory approval, would create a new company, the Genesis Eldercare Acquisition Corporation. Genesis Health and the investor groups are offering $28 for each share of Multicare, which is based in Hackensack, N.J. On the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, Multicare stock rose $1.25, to $26.875. Genesis Health Ventures rose 25 cents, to $35.375. +Multicare was started in 1984 by two young lawyers, Daniel E. Straus, who is now 40, and his brother Moshael J. Straus, 44, with four nursing homes they inherited from their father, Joseph. They took the company public in 1993 at $10 a share and later split the stock, 3 for 2, making its adjusted original cost $6.67. +"We made a lot of money for a lot of people," Daniel Straus said yesterday. The Straus family will get about $455 million for their 43 percent stake in Multicare. +Genesis Health Ventures will pay $300 million and will get a 42 percent stake in the new company. The investors -- the Cypress Group of New York, which includes James A. Stern and three former colleagues in a buyout unit at Lehman Brothers, and the Texas Pacific Group -- will pay $420 million and will get the other 58 percent. There will also be $675 million in senior debt financing, and the new company will assume $342 million of Multicare's debt. +The Texas Pacific Group, based in San Francisco and Fort Worth, is a sponsor of TPG Partners II L.P., a $2.5 billion partnership specializing in corporate acquisitions. +Michael R. Walker, chairman and chief executive of Genesis, said the deal would enhance his "strategic mission" -- to provide a full range of health care services for the elderly on the East Coast. Genesis has 17,000 nursing home beds; Multicare has 15,000 plus 1,000 in assisted living residences for people who need less care. +The combined company would also provide day care centers, rehabilitation after strokes and accidents, home health care and prescription drugs for nursing home patients. +Mr. Walker said Multicare was the dominant provider in Boston and three New Jersey counties, Bergen, Morris and Essex, where it has 13 nursing homes. It has 20 percent of the market in West Virginia. +Mr. Walker is negotiating with Blue Cross plans and other managed care companies, offering discounts and case management for elderly patients with chronic conditions like depression or memory loss. +He said the object was to keep them "independent and outside a nursing home." In the fall, he said, Genesis will also start selling advice, supervision and referrals to appropriate services to people taking care of elderly parents or spouses. +Peter J. Sidoti, a health care analyst with NatWest Securities, said Multicare was "a jewel in the nursing home business, in quality of care and quality of management measured by earnings growth and stock price appreciation." +The selling price was "at the top end of the range," compared with similar recent big mergers, Mr. Walker said. The deal was valued at 13.4 times Multicare's 1996 cash flow of $104 million, defined as earnings before interest, depreciation, taxes and amortization. That compares with a factor of 8.7 in another recent nursing home deal, Living Centers of America's $1.8 billion merger with Grancare Inc. last month, and 9.8 in the acquisition of Theratx Inc. by Vencor Inc. for $354 million in February, Daniel Straus said. +Projected 1997 cash flow for Multicare, based on the first three months, was $115 million, bringing the purchase multiple to 12.1, he added. +Margo Vignola, an analyst with Merrill Lynch, said Genesis, which is based in Kennett Square, Pa., had been effective in catering to the desire of the elderly to stay out of nursing homes. It was "the first nursing home company to recognize that it could do better if it did not keep people in a bed," she said. +Mr. Walker said Medicaid patients accounted for 60 percent of the Genesis "population," low-income people for whom "we don't get paid an adequate amount," he said. +By contrast, Multicare gets about 32 percent of its payments from Medicaid and 42 percent from patients who pay out of pocket, Mr. Straus said. Most of the rest are financed by long-term-care insurance or Medicare, the Federal program for the elderly and disabled, which provides limited coverage. He said charges in the company's 155 homes averaged $160 a day. +Daniel Straus said Medicaid was "becoming less prominent" in the mix of nursing home patients because of pressure from managed care companies that push patients out of hospitals before they are well enough to go home. Nursing homes can then give such patients post-acute care, which is more lucrative than simply providing custodial care, much of it financed by Medicaid, for patients with limited needs. +Bank financing for the deal will be provided by the Mellon Bank, Nationsbank, First Union and Citibank. Morgan Stanley, Dean Witter, Discover and Montgomery Securities will provide a $200 million bridge loan commitment to be replaced by high-yield-bond financing. + +LOAD-DATE: June 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Daniel E. Straus, seated, and his brother Moshael J., who started the Multicare nursing home chain in 1984 with four nursing homes. (Frank C. Dougherty for The New York Times)(pg. D6) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +309 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 18, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Personal Health + +BYLINE: By Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section C; Page 11; Column 4; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1101 words + +WHEN a terminally ill person expresses the wish to die, nearly two-thirds of Americans, including doctors, believe that this wish should be granted and that doctors should be allowed to assist in such a death without risking prosecution. (The Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether there is a constitutional right to assistance in dying by the end of June.) +But some researchers and medical personnel who specialize in the care of dying patients say that before accepting at face value the requests of patients for help in dying, the reasons behind their suicidal thoughts warrant a closer look. Recent studies have revealed that most terminally ill patients who contemplate suicide are seriously depressed. + Although it may sound at first like a bad joke, experts agree that dying does not have to be depressing. The end of life is always sad, but when pain and other problems are controlled, it does not have to be a period of grim despair. That is usually depression, and even as death nears it can be recognized and treated. When it is, thoughts of suicide can evaporate. In one study, for example, Dr. Harvey Max Chochinov, a psychiatrist at the University of Manitoba and the Manitoba Cancer Treatment and Research Foundation in Winnipeg, Canada, found that among suicidal cancer patients who expressed a consistent, unequivocal desire for death, more than half were clinically depressed. In a New York study of 378 AIDS patients, the strongest predictor of a personal interest in doctor-assisted suicide was the presence of depression. In another study among elderly patients, treatment of depression prompted many to decide to accept life-sustaining therapy and to be more realistic and optimistic in assessing its risks and benefits. +Two other conditions, also reversible, can foster a desire for death in the terminally ill: severe, uncontrolled pain or the fear of it and inadequate support from family and friends, although in Dr. Chochinov's study, these were less influential than depression. But the three factors are often intertwined. In some cases, untreated pain is the main cause of depression; in others, the patient's depression is the main reason others fail to provide adequate support. + +Is Depression Normal? +Based on their own studies and those of others, researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York maintain that focusing on suicide "is inappropriate when so little has yet been done to ease suffering without having to kill patients or to assist in their killing of themselves." +Furthermore, Dr. Kathleen M. Foley, co-chief of the pain and palliative care service at the cancer center, cautions that wishes to die often fluctuate, and a patient requesting doctor-assisted suicide one week may reject this option two weeks later. +Many families and doctors may assume that being seriously depressed is a natural state for people with an incurable disease or terminal illness who are nearing death. It is not. Various studies have shown that even among patients with advanced cancer who know they are dying, only about 25 percent are clinically depressed. Of course, people who are terminally ill are likely to be sad. But sadness, which is perfectly normal, is not the same as depression, which is not. Sadness does not rule out hope, whether it is the hope of seeing a new grandchild or enjoying a movie. Depression does. Sadness does not render a person helpless. Depression does. +Millions of terminally ill Americans currently suffer from serious depression, a treatable yet usually untreated condition that turns the end of life into a time of desperation, blocking the dying person's ability to enjoy anything during the last weeks or months of life and inhibiting meaningful interactions with family and friends. +Not only are the patient's last days nightmarish. family and friends suffer too, because they are unable to offer comfort and love to a person who repeatedly pushes them away. And, as Dr. William Breitbart, chief of the psychiatric service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, points out, "If death occurs in a context of uncontrolled pain and depression, that unpleasant legacy lingers with the survivors for generations." + + Diagnosing Depression +Dr. Breitbart says doctors contribute to the problem by failing to diagnose depression or, even if they do recognize it, failing to prescribe effective treatments. Since treatment for depression will not change the patient's prognosis, doctors often think there is no point in making the investment, he said. Doctors are also often reluctant to prescribe antidepressant medication for fear it will interact badly with painkillers or other medication the patient is receiving. +Diagnosing depression in a very sick person can be tricky, Dr. Breitbart said, because many of the usual physical signs of depression, like fatigue, sleep disruption, loss of energy and poor appetite, may be caused by the patient's medical illness or its treatment. But Dr. Chochinov and colleagues in Manitoba found that it was not necessary to rely on such criteria to determine whether a sick person was seriously depressed. They showed that simply asking the patient whether he or she is depressed could produce a reliable diagnosis. +In a face-to-face interview, the patient is asked, "Tell me about your mood," and if the answer reflects serious depression, the next question is "Are you depressed most of the time?" Dr. Chochinov and colleagues showed that this brief interview, which can be initiated by family members as well as doctors, was as effective a means of diagnosing depression as more sophisticated tests. +Treating depression in the terminally ill need not be complicated either. In fact, it can sometimes counter symptoms of the disease or the side effects of treatment, Dr. Breitbart said. Many patients respond to brief cognitive therapy, which helps them to recognize and appreciate sources of hope and to experience pleasure. When antidepressive medication is the best treatment, the choice of drug depends in part on how long the patient is expected to live, since some drugs take weeks to show an effect, Dr. Breitbart said. +He said he had found that psycho stimulant drugs like Ritalin and the amphetamines were especially useful in treating the terminally ill "because they work within a day, the proper dose is easily determined, they counteract the sedative effects of opioids used for pain control. and they enhance the effectiveness of opioids." A favorite in his repertoire is pemoline (sold as Cylert), a mild stimulant that is not subject to abuse. + +LOAD-DATE: June 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +310 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 18, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Senate Panel Rebuffs Clinton on Child Health Plan + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section D; Page 22; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1085 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 17 + +Conservative Republicans scored a big victory tonight as the Senate Finance Committee rejected a bipartisan proposal to expand Medicaid to cover millions of uninsured children. +The action, by a vote of 11 to 9, was a rebuff to President Clinton, who endorsed earlier today the bipartisan proposal offered by Senators John H. Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, and John D. Rockefeller 4th, Democrat of West Virginia. + The committee decided instead to give states a choice between Medicaid and a new program that would offer each state a lump sum of Federal money, with broad discretion to devise individual health initiatives for children. +Many states say they will take the block grants, because they know best how to meet the needs of children in their states. And they say their programs can serve more children at a lower cost than Medicare. +Mr. Chafee and a handful of other Republicans rebelled against the leadership of their party, which has strenuously resisted any expansion of Federal entitlement programs like Medicaid. +Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, and governors of both parties put intense pressure on members of the Finance Committee to reject Mr. Chafee's proposal. +"An amazing number of governors -- governors who had never evidenced an interest in children -- have been calling in the last two days," Mr. Rockefeller said. "There's a reason for that. Under the block grant, they'll get money. They like that. Medicaid is a 30-year-old program that works, and it's a better deal for the children of America." +But Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma, the majority whip, said that states could be trusted and should be allowed to design their own health programs for children. Under Mr. Chafee's proposal, he said, the Federal Government would, in effect, have increased Medicaid spending for children already enrolled. +Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato, Republican of New York, defended the block grant option, saying it "provides a flexibility that our Governor seeks." +Three moderate Republican Senators -- Mr. Chafee, Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and James M. Jeffords of Vermont -- voted for Mr. Chafee's proposal. And three Democratic Senators -- John B. Breaux of Louisiana, Bob Graham of Florida and Richard H. Bryan of Nevada -- voted against it. +In other action tonight, the Finance Committee approved a proposal to require affluent elderly people to pay more for their Medicare coverage. The details of the plan offered by Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, are to be worked out by the staff of the committee. +The bipartisan budget agreement reached last month by Mr. Clinton and Congressional leaders stipulates that the Federal Government will spend $16 billion over the next five years to expand health coverage and services for low-income children. The Senate and the House must now decide precisely how the money should be used. Mr. Chafee wanted to earmark $12 billion for Medicaid and $4 billion for block grants. +With tonight's vote, the Finance Committee upheld its chairman, Senator William V. Roth Jr. of Delaware, who wanted to give states a choice between Medicaid and block grants. +Under his proposal, states choosing the block grants would have to use the money to provide health insurance coverage for children with family incomes below twice the official poverty level (less than $26,660 for a family of three). The money could be used to subsidize workers' premiums under health insurance coverage provided by employers. Or it could be used to provide other coverage for children, with a package of health benefits roughly comparable to those provided under the Government health program for Federal employees. +Last week the House Commerce Committee approved a similar proposal, but it imposed fewer restrictions on the use of block grant money. Under the House proposal, states could use the money to pay doctors and hospitals, rather than to buy insurance. And it did not set any standards for the minimum benefits that must be provided to children. +The legislation, filling in details of the bipartisan budget agreement, is expected to go to the floor of the Senate and the House next week. +Mr. Hatch and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said they would keep fighting for an increase in the Federal tobacco tax, to finance health coverage for children beyond the $16 billion already approved. James P. Manley, a spokesman for Mr. Kennedy, said the two Senators would offer an amendment on the Senate floor. +Partisan divisions over Mr. Chafee's proposal seemed to harden today. President Clinton endorsed the proposal at a White House ceremony this morning. "This legislation will be the biggest investment in children's health care since Medicaid passed in 1965," he said. "It would be the most significant thing that we could do, by committing us to providing health insurance coverage for up to five million uninsured children." +In his own budget in February, Mr. Clinton proposed a modest expansion of Medicaid: to locate and enroll children who were already eligible for the program. He would also have required states to keep children on the Medicaid rolls for one year at a time, regardless of fluctuations in family income that might otherwise make the children ineligible. +The Congressional Budget Office said that "Medicaid costs would increase by almost $14 billion" over five years if all states guaranteed 12 months of continuous enrollment. Such year-round coverage is an option, but is not required under Mr. Roth's proposal. +Under current law, the budget office said, "children stay enrolled in the Medicaid program for an average of nine months in any year." +In theory, Mr. Roth's proposal gives states a choice between the block grants and Medicaid. But President Clinton said, "Given the incentives in the proposal, no rational state would choose Medicaid." +The White House also objected today to provisions in the Senate Republican bill that would gradually raise the age of eligibility for Medicare and start charging elderly people $5 for each home health care visit. Under current law, there is no charge for home health services -- a very popular benefit, whose costs have soared in recent years. +In addition, Franklin D. Raines, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, complained today that the Senate bill did not provide any of the $1.5 billion promised in the budget agreement to help low-income elderly people pay their Medicare premiums. + +LOAD-DATE: June 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Members of the Senate Finance Committee began marking up their health and tax proposals yesterday. The chairman, William V. Roth Jr., Republican of Delaware, seated second from the top, conferred with Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, Democrat of New York, back to camera. (Paul Hosefros/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +311 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 19, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +MEDICARE REVAMP ADVANCES IN VOTE BY SENATE PANEL + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1349 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 18 + +The Senate Finance Committee unanimously approved sweeping legislation today that would redesign Medicare and increase charges for affluent elderly people under the program, provide new money for health coverage of uninsured children and restore welfare benefits for more than a half-million legal immigrants. +The bill would alter health and welfare programs touching almost all Americans. The changes in Medicare would be the biggest since its creation in 1965. + Today's vote signaled bipartisan support for the spending bill, which would seem to bode well for the ultimate approval by Congress of at least some of its provisions. But lawmakers will have to work out many differences among themselves and with President Clinton before the proposals can be translated into law. +The White House reacted cooly to the notion of increasing medical care costs for wealthier Medicare recipients. Furthermore, a companion bill moving through the House contains neither that provision nor another controversial one: a proposal to raise the eligibility age for Medicare recipients from 65 to 67. +A major purpose of the legislation is to offer new health insurance options to elderly people in all parts of the country, but especially in rural areas. Under the bill, Medicare would sharply increase payments to health maintenance organizations in many rural areas, while health plans in high-cost areas like New York City, Miami and Los Angeles would receive very small increases. +To save money, the bill would replace Federal price regulation with competitive bidding for some medical equipment and services. +One politically explosive provision would require Medicare beneficiaries with incomes above $50,000 a year to pay more of their doctors' fees -- in some cases, much more. +"The idea is to establish a program that doesn't provide a subsidy for those who don't need to be subsidized," said Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, who proposed the income test. Aides to Mr. Kerrey said that 2.4 million of the 38 million Medicare beneficiaries would pay the higher deductible. +Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, sounded upbeat when the committee completed its work today. "A unanimous bipartisan vote, that's a very positive sign," he said. +Mr. Lott praised Senator Kerrey and the Democrats who supported his amendment, which was approved by a vote of 18 to 2. The Senators who voted against it, John D. Rockefeller 4th of West Virginia and Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois, both Democrats, opposed the amendment but later voted for the whole package. +Senator Lott said: "For wealthy individuals to pay more for their Medicare benefits, that's a responsible thing to do. The Finance Committee showed its courage. Will the rest of Congress follow our example?" +Patricia P. Smith, a lobbyist for the American Association of Retired Persons, predicted that the proposed income test for Medicare would prove unworkable. Forty percent of beneficiaries do not file tax returns, mainly because they have low incomes, she said, and the Government has no way of knowing what their income was or will be. +The Senate bill would gradually increase the age of eligibility for Medicare, to 67 from 65. The change would occur from 2003 to 2027. A comparable The House bill does not alter the eligibility age or impose an income test. +Administration officials appeared to be surprised at the whirlwind of activity in the Finance Committee. +Michael D. McCurry, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Kerrey's proposal was not part of the budget agreement reached last month by the President and Congressional leaders. But, Mr. McCurry added, "we have never ruled out the principle of means-testing" in Medicare, and the principle "may be useful in the future in another context as we deal with longer-term problems related to entitlements, and particularly the Medicare trust fund." +Today's 20-to-0 vote on the overall bill was radically different from the bitter conflicts on Medicare in 1995 and 1996. Members of both parties said the unanimous vote was a tribute to the even-handedness of the committee chairman, Senator William V. Roth Jr., Republican of Delaware. +Democrats scored some victories. The committee voted to cut back an experimental program allowing elderly people to establish tax-free "medical savings accounts," as an alternative to the standard Medicare program. The House would allow 500,000 people to set up such accounts; the Senate Finance Committee would allow only 100,000. +The President opposes such accounts on the ground that they will divert healthy and wealthy people from the regular Medicare program. But Republicans say it will encourage people to pay more attention to their health costs. +The committee also voted to let Texas move ahead with a plan under which private companies could determine eligibility for benefits like welfare, Medicaid, food stamps and job training. The Clinton Administration had blocked the plan, and labor unions vehemently opposed it, in part because thousands of state employees might lose their jobs. +On another issue, the Senate would go further than the House in restoring disability benefits to impoverished legal immigrants who are losing aid under the 1996 welfare law. +The House has already taken steps to lure H.M.O.'s to rural areas with higher Medicare payments, but the Finance Committee went further. +Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said his constituents wanted the extra benefits available from H.M.O.'s, including coverage of prescription drugs, eyeglasses and hearing aids. +Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato, Republican of New York, exploded in anger. He said that senators from rural states and small states were engaged in "a new kind of warfare" with big urban states. +After the committee approved a series of amendments to increase Medicare payments to H.M.O's in rural areas, Mr. D'Amato said: "This is ruinous. This is nonsense. This is greed. This is overreaching." +Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, said, "If you can find a mutual fund that specializes in H.M.O.'s that do business in rural areas, go buy it." +Under Senator Kerrey's proposal, elderly people with annual incomes of less than $50,000 for an individual and $75,000 for a couple would experience no change in the amount of the deductible they must pay on doctors' bills, now $100 a year. At those income levels, the deductible would increase to $540 a year. And it would rise on a sliding scale to a maximum of $2,160 a year for individuals with incomes exceeding $100,000 and couples over $125,000. +With millions of baby boomers scheduled to become eligible for Medicare after 2010, Senator Kerrey said, Americans must seriously consider such income tests. +Most Medicare beneficiaries have private insurance that pays costs not covered by Medicare. Such Medigap policies could pay the higher deductibles envisioned by Mr. Kerrey. But the premiums charged for such Medigap insurance would presumably rise as a result. +The committee approved a proposal by Senator John B. Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana, under which H.M.O.'s and other health plans would bid for the privilege of serving Medicare beneficiaries. Medicare H.M.O.'s now do not compete on price. For any elderly person in an H.M.O. in a given county, the Government pays the same basic amount. +Under Mr. Breaux's proposal, the Federal contribution would be roughly equal to the average of the bids, but the Government would negotiate with H.M.O.'s to make sure that Medicare did not pay more than the average cost for a person in the conventional fee-for-service program. +The Senate bill, like the House measure, would set aside $16 billion to provide health coverage for low-income children in the next five years. On Tuesday, the Senate rejected a bipartisan proposal to earmark $12 billion of this sum for Medicaid. Instead, the committee decided to give states a choice: they can get the money through Medicaid or they can take a lump sum, with freedom to design their own programs, as many states want to do. + +LOAD-DATE: June 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Senator Bob Graham, in suit jacket, as he introduced an amendment to a sweeping health and welfare bill. (pg. A1); Senate Finance Committee members listened to Senator Carol Moseley-Braun yesterday. From left were Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan; Lindy L. Paull, committee staff director, and Senator William V. Roth Jr. (Paul Hosefros/The New York Times)(pg. B12) + +Chart: "THE DETAILS: Senate Budget Bill: Major Provisions" + +MEDICARE -- Saves $115 billion over five years +Increases health insurance options for elderly people. +Raises payments to health maintenance organizations in rural areas. +Adds new benefits for diabetes treatment, mammography and colon cancer screening. +Allows 100,000 recipients to establish "medical savings accounts." +Requires affluent people to pay more of their doctors' bills. +Gradually increases eligibility age to 67, from 65, over the years 2003 to 2027. +Lets doctors and hospitals set up their own health plans to compete in the Medicare market. + +MEDICAID -- Saves $14 billion over five years +Cuts payments to hospitals serving large numbers of low-income patients. +Relaxes requirement for states to pay "reasonable and adequate" rates to nursing homes and hospitals. + +CHILD HEALTH -- Costs $16 billion over five years +Provides $16 billion to cover uninsured children in the next five years. +Allows states to expand Medicaid or take the money as a block grant, with freedom to design their own insurance programs for children. +Guarantees benefits equivalent to those under the Federal employees' health benefits program. + +WELFARE -- Costs $13 billion over five years +Restores Supplemental Security Income and Medicaid for may legal immigrants losing aid under the 1996 welfare law. +Provides $3 billion to help long-term welfare recipients get jobs. (pg. B12) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +312 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 20, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +London Journal; +In Ontario, Some Bare Breasts, Some Beat Them + +BYLINE: By ANTHONY DePALMA + +SECTION: Section A; Page 4; Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 926 words + +DATELINE: LONDON, Ontario, June 16 + +Finally, the bony fingers of winter have left central Canada and with the first warm days of summer have come the first encounters with the province's new judicial ruling that allows women to go topless anywhere they please. +Well, not quite anywhere. As quickly as it took Ontario's notoriously brief spring to come and go, the question of where and when a woman has the right to bare her breasts has turned into a legal and moral tango about sexuality, equality and Canadian character. + For example: a woman who swims without the top of a two-piece bathing suit in Ottawa can be arrested at an indoor municipal pool, but not at an outdoor pool or at a beach. Whether that new municipal ordinance violates the judge's ruling is not clear, but it has dismayed Norma Murray of Westport, south of Ottawa, so much that she wrote a letter of complaint to The Ottawa Citizen. +"Since we women are at last emancipated," wrote Mrs. Murray, 76, "a busload of older girls from the senior citizens home here in Westport had planned to visit a heated Ottawa pool to experience the exquisite pleasure of swimming topless. Now the rules have been changed, alas!" +While cities in the United States continue to debate whether to allow breast-feeding in public places, here in London, a working-class city about 120 miles southwest of Toronto, a topless car wash opened this spring. (It closed a few weeks later, because it violated water pollution standards, not because of the attire of the attendants.) +And when the Brass Cafe, a restaurant and bar not far from London City Hall, challenged customers to "dare to be bare," a woman who took off her top made it onto the local television news. +There are some in Canada who say all these incidents are just a case of spring fever. Others see them as the nervous adjustments of a society adapting to changing times. +"This puts women's equality back several steps," said Mayor Dianne Haskett of London, who thought the judicial ruling violated her community's standards of decency. "This is a very misplaced area for political activism by the feminist community." +It is not the law that creates problems, but the way it is interpreted, said Joan Grant Cummings, president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women in Toronto. +"The point of this is the desexualizing of women's bodies," Ms. Cummings said. "But what has been happening since the court ruled really demonstrates the way society tends to view women as objects." +It all started last December when an Ontario appeals court overturned the conviction of Gwen Jacob, who as a university student in 1991 tried to make a point about equality on a steamy July day by taking off her shirt and going for a walk in downtown Guelph, Ontario. +She was convicted of indecency and fined the equivalent of $58. She appealed and, last December, a provincial judge overturned the ruling, saying that the federal criminal code on indecency did not prevent any woman from taking off her top in public, so long as it was not done for commercial or sexual reasons. +The ruling set a precedent but nothing much happened for months because it was simply too cold to think about anything but putting on extra layers of clothing. Then two weeks ago, temperatures rose in central Canada. +Many Canadians seemed surprised by the number of Canadian women, often stereotyped as shy and conservative, who went topless. Neighbors gawked when Roxane Reid of Welland decided to mow her lawn without a shirt. She said she was hot, and that she had seen plenty of men do the same thing. +In Toronto, a topless young woman got on stage at a picnic for the elderly. And young women who make money washing windshields at busy intersections realized that by going topless they could increase their incomes. +That was too much for Mike Harris, Ontario's Premier. "I don't think that is acceptable," he told reporters, "and I don't think my view is far off society's views." +Pamela Robinson, 15, who washes windshields in Toronto, said a policeman came by and told her to put her shirt back on when she tried working topless. She kept her shirt off, and put down her squeegee instead. +"Women have this right," Miss Robinson said. "It shouldn't have been illegal, and if they make it illegal again, I'm going to do it anyway." +Ms. Jacob, the woman who started all this, declined requests for interviews about the current situation, but her lawyer, Margaret Buist of London, said the young woman was dismayed by the commercial exploitation as well as the ways in which municipalities have tried to restrict the application of the new ruling because of their own interpretation of what is indecent. +"What the municipalities are attempting to do through the back door is infringe on women's equality rights," said Ms. Buist, "but they're just wasting taxpayers' money." +There has been no shortage of wisecracks and comments about top lessness since lawn mowers replaced snow blowers. But Paul Cress, a semi-retired software developer from Ottawa, thinks the whole thing has got out of hand because officials have forgotten a basic tenet of Canadian political life. +"You know the old joke about Canadians crossing the road to get to the middle," Mr. Cress said. He thinks Ontario's city councils should have passed bylaws "stating that females must, in all public places, wear attire that covers at least one breast." +"If you take the middle road, as we usually do in Canada," he said, "nobody's really satisfied but nobody's completely unhappy either." + +LOAD-DATE: June 20, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: In Ottawa, women are allowed to go topless at beaches and outdoor pools. At a beach, Lisa Regimbal walked by a topless Connie Morden. (Canadian Press) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +313 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 20, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +HOUSE IS CRITICAL OF MEDICARE PLAN BY SENATE PANEL + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 983 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 19 + +The bipartisan shine on Senate efforts to revolutionize Medicare and protect its finances started tarnishing today, as the plan met pained silence from House Republicans and withering attacks from Democrats. +On both sides of the Capitol, high-ranking Congressional aides said the central elements of the plan -- to raise the Medicare eligibility age to 67 from 65 and increase payments by the well-off elderly -- were unlikely to become law. + The obstacles amounted to the same barrier that has thwarted efforts for several years to protect Medicare against the surge of baby-boomer retirements foreseen in the next century: the fact that old people vote. +That urgent reality, especially in the House where other elements of the Medicare issue nearly cost the Republicans their majority last November, makes the idea of systemic change in Medicare seem hazardous to the political health of many members of Congress. +Two years ago, House Republicans held hearings and long negotiations to develop a plan to push Medicare sharply in the direction of managed care. After months of careful work, they still found their plan to be a political disaster. +Today they showed no appetite for signing on to a plan produced suddenly, without hearings or consultation, in a Senate committee. Aides said their bosses expected the Senate itself to kill the plan on the floor next week -- and spare them the need to kill it in conference. +They got an early taste of the sort of attack the Senate plan could draw from several Democrats who are not members of the Senate Finance Committee. +Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who has led most of his party's successful efforts on health care, told the Senate that the idea that the plan was needed to preserve Medicare for future generations was "hogwash." +"Our goal is to save Medicare, not destroy it," Mr. Kennedy said. +He contended that raising the eligibility age to 67 would break a compact made with millions of working Americans and "will throw millions of seniors into the ranks of the uninsured." +And he attacked the plan for increasing the annual deductible to $540, from $100, for individuals with incomes over $50,000, and to $2,160 for those with incomes over $100,000. He said that unlike previous proposals to charge the more affluent higher monthly premiums, now $43.80 for everyone for coverage of doctor's bills, this approach would amount to a "sickness tax" because it would fall hardest on the sickest old people. +Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the House minority leader, told a news conference that deductibles that varied by income would destroy "the social contract that we have in this country that everyone is part of the same program," adding, "Everybody pays their premiums, pays their taxes, and gets a similar kind of benefit." +The American Association of Retired Persons, the nation's largest organization of the elderly, denounced both provisions, and others. They called the income-based deductibles "unworkable and onerous." +The harsh reaction was the sort that the plan might have faced if Congress had held hearings on it. But as the Finance Committee worked late nights this week, neither proposal even attracted debate from members. +The plan to raise the eligibility age was in the original proposal of the chairman, Senator William V. Roth Jr., and was never challenged even though two years ago it was held out of order on the Senate floor. It is likely to face the same fate this year, under rules that limit budget bills to those that will affect the debt within five years. The gradual phase-in of the age increase would only begin in 2003. +The proposal to charge higher deductibles came from Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a new Democratic member of the committee. He had originally proposed raising monthly premiums but explained today that he had changed the approach on the advice of Senator Phil Gramm, the Texas Republican who heads the subcommittee on health care. +He said Mr. Gramm told him that focusing on deductibles would "have a constructive impact" by reducing overutilization of the health care system, because if people had to pay more they would not go to the doctor so often. And Mr. Kerrey agreed. His plan was adopted by an 18-to-2 vote, with only Senators John D. Rockefeller 4th of West Virginia and Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois, both Democrats, voting no. +Mr. Kerrey, a maverick Democrat who has been an insistent advocate of curbing spending on entitlements since he came to the Senate in 1989, said both changes were wise. To avoid such curbs, he said, was "to stick your head in the sand and ignore it because you are afraid of what's going to happen at the polls." +Speaking for the Clinton Administration, Chris Jennings, a White House aide, said he believed that neither proposal had been "carefully vetted" before being passed by the committee. He said raising the age requirement would create a class of very hard-to-insure elderly people and variable deductibility would be administratively unworkable because of the difficulty of determining just what people's incomes were. +As part of the budget reconciliation legislation, the Medicare proposals, along with tax issues and changes in Medicaid, the health care program for the poor, will come to the Senate floor next week under procedures that bar filibusters. +But before they do, the Budget Committee has to package them and may produce a "manager's amendment" that could seek to alter any part of the measure. +Those procedures, observed Robert Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget office now at the Brookings Institution, "cut through all the restraints that keep policy from developing in Congress, good and bad." +"It's freshening to have a mechanism like this," he said, but "you sometimes get some very dubious policies." + + +LOAD-DATE: June 20, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +314 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 22, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In The Region/Westchester; +For Muted Bronxville, a Spurt of Construction + +BYLINE: By MARY McALEER VIZARD + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 6; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1143 words + +DATELINE: BRONXVILLE + +THIS one-square-mile village, known for its turn-of-the-century housing and quaint Tudor downtown, will soon be adding 188 new apartments in two separate projects, the most construction the village has seen in 25 years. +Both projects have been in the planning stage for years, and it is just happenstance that they are coming to fruition at the same time, said Bill Regan, the village administrator. + A 110-unit luxury rental and a 78-unit senior residence will be built at opposite ends of Bronxville's downtown, which is divided by Metro-North's railroad tracks. +The main section of the downtown, what most people think of as Bronxville, is concentrated along Pondfield Road, which is on the east side of the tracks. +Considered one of Westchester's liveliest downtowns, it is characterized by distinctive globe lighting, upscale restaurants and boutiques and a three-screen cinema. +On this side, right along the railroad tracks, a 78-unit Kensington Manor condominium for the elderly will rise at the corner of Kensington and Sagamore Roads. +The site, which is owned by the village, is a little under two acres. It is now occupied by a rundown building that was once the Gramatan Garage, which will be demolished to make way for a three-and-a-half story Tudor-style building. +"There will be a main level with two three-and-a-half-story wings," said Henry George Greene, the developer, who is based in Scarsdale. In addition, there will be a 290-car underground parking garage with about 90 spaces for building residents, the rest for municipal parking. +"With this project comes many benefits for the village," said Mayor Nancy Hand, "including getting rid of a derelict garage, putting a property back on the tax rolls and getting 200 parking spaces for our downtown." +Mr. Greene will lease the land from the village for 50 years, with provisions for two 50-year extensions. He will pay $1.5 million for the first five years, then $1 a year after that. +The project is expected to generate more than $4 million in taxes for the village by the year 2005, Mr. Regan said. +"For 20 years, we've been talking about providing for our seniors, allowing them to stay in the village once they sell their homes here," said the Mayor. "I think this project is ideal because it's what people look for in retirement living and it's within walking distance of everything." +Kensington Manor is designed for the independent elderly who want housekeeping, transportation and "some nursing services," Mr. Greene said. +"There will be a gourmet restaurant for residents that will serve one meal a day," Mr. Greene explained. There will also be a reception area for visitors, an exercise room and "probably some banking services," Mr. Greene added. +Residents will hold a life lease on their apartments, meaning that upon vacating the unit, they -- or their estate, should they die -- will receive a 90 percent refund of the purchase price. +Prices for the one- to two-bedroom units will range from $275,000 to $500,000; monthly charges will range from $2,000 to $3,500 a month. +Mr. Greene has just begun marketing the units. According to the terms of the lease, he must presell 70 percent of the units before he can begin building. +In the meantime he has agreed to begin demolition of the garage and will pave the property to provide 60 interim parking spaces for the village. +Bronxville's other project, a 110-unit luxury rental, promises to enliven a section of town now known as kind of a poor relation to Bronxville's more glamorous east side. +Two Tudor-style pitched roofed buildings will be built in an L-shape along the intersection of Parkway Road and Milburn Street. +The 1.65-acre property borders a shopping district, which consists of a collection of small stores and restaurants, many of which get most of their business from the employees of Lawrence Hospital directly across from the shopping district on Palmer Avenue. +In 1991, the site had been approved for condominiums, the Mayor said, but the real estate market collapsed and plans were put on hold. +"We think rentals are the hot market right now," said Arthur Collins 2d, executive vice president of Collins Enterprises of Greenwich, Conn., which is developing the project. +Rentals were also the housing option preferred by the village since it did not want housing that would add a substantial number of children to its school system. +To ameliorate this concern, Mr. Collins agreed to build 56 one-bedroom units, 44 two-bedrooms -- both simplexes and duplexes -- and 10 three-bedroom duplex penthouses. Rents are expected to range from $1,500 to $3,000 a month. +The Mayor said the project would have its own parking garage for about 165 cars. +The village enforces strong architectural guidelines and insists that all new projects blend in with existing structures. "Bronxville has a very strong architectural tradition," said Do Ho Chung, a Stamford, Conn., architect who is designing the project. +Mr. Chung based his design on a nearby co-op called Alger Court. "It is the most beautiful apartment building I've ever seen," Mr. Chung said. With its stone foundation, light beige stucco walls, pitched roofs, archways and wrought-iron gating, Alger Court is indicative of what could be called the "Bronxville look," Mr. Chung said. +For his project, Mr. Chung said, "we're going for a similar look, but with a pinkish-brick foundation and grayish stucco." +The five-story buildings will look like three, explained Mr. Chung, since the penthouse apartments will be in the gabled roof line. The steeply pitched roofs will be shingled in asphalt, "but they will look like weathered wood," Mr. Chung said. +Most of the one- to three-bedroom apartments will have terraces, and there will be a garden in the interior courtyard, Mr. Chung explained. Rents will range from $1,500 to $3,000 a month. +"We expect to attract singles, young professionals, empty-nesters, and divorced people," Mr. Collins explained. "And we'll probably get some internationals on temporary work assignment and a percentage of corporate rentals." +A two-story retail building and a garage will be razed to make way for the project. Most of the existing merchants have already been relocated, Mr. Collins said, adding that "we're still trying to find space for the others." +The developer has agreed to make improvements leading from his project, along Parkway Road to Palmer Avenue. "We're going to be putting in globe lighting on Palmer, taking the image of Pondfield and extending it across the tracks," Mr. Collins said. +To address village concerns about additional traffic, Mr. Collins agreed to redesign a traffic circle connecting Palmer and Pondfield Roads. "We'll make it more efficient and better able to handle whatever additional traffic is generated by the project," he said. + +LOAD-DATE: June 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Renderings of Kensington Manor, a 78-unit senior residence, top, and 110-unit rental project, below. + Henry George Greene (Do Ho Chung) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +315 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 22, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ON THE TOWNS + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 12; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 2912 words + +An opinionated guide to cultural and recreational goings-on around the state this week. To submit items for consideration, write to On the Towns, Sunday New Jersey Section, The New York Times, 229 West 43d Street, New York, N.Y. 10036, or send a fax to (212) 556-7219. + +MUSIC + +CAPE MAY MUSIC FESTIVAL Through June 29. Prism Saxophone Quartet. Tonight at the Episcopal Church of the Advent, Washington and Franklin Streets. Paramount Brass, a quintet. Wednesday at the Cape May Convention Hall, Beach Avenue and Stockton Place. The Jazz Maniacs Delight. Next Sunday at the Cape May Convention Hall. All concerts begin at 8 P.M. Tickets: $15; $10 for the elderly; $5 for students. (800) 275-4278 or (609) 884-5404. + +CORNERSTONE Jim Locano, pianist. Tuesdays at 6:30 P.M. Jill McCarrin Trio. Wednesday, 7:30 to 11:30 P.M. Jimmy Nuzzo and Tony Ellis. Thursdays, 8:30 to 11:30 P.M. Larry Ham Quartet. Friday, 9 P.M. to 1 A.M. Don Friedman Quartet with Glenda Davenport. Saturday, 9 P.M. to 1 A.M. Free. 25 New Street, Metuchen. (908) 549-5306. + +GREAT AUDITORIUM, OCEAN GROVE "Yesterday," a tribute to the Beatles. Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $12 and $15. Pilgrim and Ocean Pathways, Ocean Grove. (908) 775-0035. + +RIDGEWOOD KASSCHAU MEMORIAL SHELL Opera in the Park. Tonight at 7. Ridgewood Concert Band. Tuesday at 8:30 P.M. Bob Conrad, magician. Thursday at 8:30 P.M. Free. Take chairs or blankets. Veteran's Field, Maple Avenue, Ridgewood. (201) 670-3924. + +NEW JERSEY STATE MUSEUM David Holzman, pianist, in works by Copland, Ralph Shapey, Jeffrey Hall, Arthur Kreiger, Hyunsook Jung and Sergei Berinski. Today at 2 P.M. Tickets: $5; $3 for students and the elderly. Auditorium, 205 West State Street, Trenton. (609) 292-6310. + +NEW JERSEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Take 6 and Stewart Goodyear, 18-year-old pianist, to perform with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leslie B. Dunner, in an AT&T Community Partners Concert to benefit Newark non-profit groups. Tonight at 7. Tickets: $10 to $35; post-concert Reception, $20.Symphony Hall, 1020 Broad Street, Newark.(800) 255-3476 or (201) 624-8203. + +SHANGHAI JAZZ Harry Allen Trio with the Joe Cohn Trio. Wednesday, 7 to 9:30 P.M. Bob DeVos, guitarist, and Steve Freeman, bassist. Thursday, 7 to 9:30 P.M. Grover Kemble Trio. Friday, 7 to 11 P.M. Steve Minzer Trio. Saturday, 7 to 11 P.M. Free. 24 Main Street, Madison. (201) 822-2899. + + +SUMMERFEST '97 Bobby Syvarth Combo, with an appearance by Country Rich. Today, 1:30 to 5 P.M. Mahlon Dickerson Reservation. 995 Weldon Rd. Jefferson Township. Hanover Wind Symphony. Next Sunday, 3 to 5 P.M. Frelinghuysen Arboretum. All programs are free. 53 East Hanover Avenue in Morris Township. (973) 326-7600. + +TURNING POINT Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Today at 5 and 8 P.M. Tickets: $18.50. The Jazzabels and Peter Nelson. Thursday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $10. Rhett Tyler and Early Warning Friday at 9 P.M. Tickets: $10. George Kilby Jr. and the Coolerators. Saturday at 10 P.M. Tickets: $10. Martin and Jessica Simpson and the Angels. Next Sunday at 7 P.M. Tickets: $12.50. 468 Piermont Avenue, Piermont, N.Y. +(914) 359-3219. + +THEATER + +CARNIVAL PRODUCTIONS "The Fantasticks," by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones. Through Saturday. Thursday at 8 P.M.; Friday and Saturday at 8:30 P.M. Tickets: $12; $10 for students and the elderly. Dinner-and-show packages: $27 on Friday and Saturday; $22 on Thursday. El Bodegon Restaurant, 169 West Main Street, Rahway. (908) 388-0647. + +CIRCLE PLAYHOUSE "Alone in the Rain: The James Dean Story," by Michael Boyd. Through July 5. Thursdays through Sundays at 8 P.M. Tickets: $10. 416 Victoria Avenue, Piscataway. (908) 968-7555. + +DOVER LITTLE THEATER "Assassins," by Stephen Sondheim. Friday and Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $12. Elliott Street, Dover. (973) 328-9202. + +HENDERSON THEATER The Premier Theater Company presents "The Sound of Music," by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Thursday through Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $22; $17 for the elderly; $12 for children under 13. Route 52, off exit 109 of the Garden State Parkway, Lincroft. (908) 747-0008. + +McCARTER THEATER McCarter Lab readings of new plays. "Spirit North," by Leslie Lee, tomorrow at 7 P.M. Free; reservations required. Rehearsal Room, McCarter Theater, 91 University Place, Princeton. (609) 683-8000. + +NEW JERSEY SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Through next Sunday. Today at 2 P.M.; Tuesday through Friday at 8 P.M.; Saturday at 2 and 8 P.M.; next Sunday at 2 and 7 P.M. "The Threepenny Opera," by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, July 11 to 27. "Blithe Spirit," by Noel Coward, Aug. 8 to 24. All at the Community Theater, 100 South Street, Morristown. "Much Ado About Nothing," Wednesday through July 26 at the Playwrights Theater of New Jersey, 33 Green Village Road, Madison. "Henry V." July 15 to Aug. 10 at the football field of Bayley-Ellard High School, 205 Madison Avenue, Madison. Single tickets: $16 to $30. Subscription packages: $66 to $125. (201) 408-5600. On the World Wide Web: http://www.njshakespeare.org. + +RITZ THEATER "Kiss of the Spider Woman." Through July 26. Fridays and Saturdays at 8 P.M. at the Club Room at Leonetti's. 901 White Horse Pike, Oaklyn. (609) 858-5230. + +SUMMERFUN THEATER "Sylvia," by A. R. Gurney. Tuesday through Saturday at 8 P.M.; matinee Thursday at 2 P.M. Tickets: $18 and $22. Six-show season tickets: $72 and $88. Weiss Arts Center, Montclair Kimberley Academy, Lloyd Road and Bloomfield Avenue. (201) 256-0576. + +MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES + +AMERICAN LABOR MUSEUM "Workers and Immigrants," a student art exhibition. Through Dec. 31. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 1 to 4 P.M. Suggested donation: $1.50. Botto House National Landmark, 83 Norwood Street, Haledon. (201) 595-7953. + +ART ALLIANCE OF MONMOUTH COUNTY "Urban Scene, Rural Dream," paintings by Mary Phillips. Tuesday, 12 to 4 P.M. 33 Monmouth Street, Red Bank. (908) 842-9403. + +ATLANTIC CITY HISTORICAL MUSEUM "Bettmann on the Boardwalk: A Celebration of Historic Atlantic City, 1890-1990," a selection of photographs from the Corbis-Bettmann Collection. Through 1997. Daily, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. Free. Garden Pier, at New Jersey Avenue. (609) 347-5839. + +BERGEN MUSEUM OF ART AND SCIENCE Recent sculpture by Sonia Chusit. Today, 1 to 5 P.M. 327 East Ridgewood Avenue, Paramus. (201) 265-1248. + +GALLERY AT SCHERING-PLOUGH "Reflections of Summer," featuring 30 watercolor landscapes and seascapes by 19 artists. Through Aug. 28. Mondays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. 1 Giralda Farms, Madison. (201) 882-7000. + +GALLERY OF SOUTH ORANGE "Sky Dancers," drawings by Janice Metzger, and "Herstory Part II," mixed-media works on paper and wood by Sarah Teofanov. Through July 20. Hours: Wednesdays and Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 2 P.M. and 4 to 6 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 P.M. Baird Center, 5 Mead Street, South Orange. (201) 378-7754. + +GROUNDS FOR SCULPTURE Spring exhibition, featuring works by Marisol, Robert Murray and Jay Wholley. Through July 6. Fridays through Sundays, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. 18 Fairgrounds Road, Hamilton. (609) 586-0616. + +HOPPER HOUSE ART CENTER "Rocklandia," Rockland County landscapes by Monica Bradbury and Steve Burns, painters; Fred Burrell, photographer, and Ruth Geneslaw, sculptor. Through Today. Thursdays through Sundays, noon to 5 P.M.; Fridays to 7:30 P.M. Admission: $1. 82 North Broadway, Nyack, N.Y. (914) 358-0774. + +KEARON-HEMPENSTALL GALLERY "Visions of Immortality," paintings by Stan Mullins. Through June 30. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 3 P.M.; Thursday evenings, 7 to 9 P.M. 536 Bergen Avenue, Jersey City. (201) 333-8488. + +MACCULLOCH HALL HISTORICAL MUSEUM "The Immortal Genius: William Shakespeare, Thomas Nast and 19th-Century American Culture," satirical cartoons by Nast, who used text and imagery of Shakespeare. Through Feb. 4. "Rococo and Reason in Georgian Glass," more than 100 examples of English and Irish cut glass from the 18th and 19th centuries. Through Sept. 7. "The Timeless Folk Art of Decorative Painting." Through Oct. 12; demonstrations today, 1 to 4 P.M. Admission: $3; $2 for students and the elderly. Hours: Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 P.M. 45 Macculloch Avenue, Morristown. (201) 538-2404. + +MONMOUTH MUSEUM "Two Styles/Two Photographers," works by Jeff Martin and Sandra Johanson. Closes today. "Transcending the Surface: Contemporary Fiber Art." Works by 11 artists. July 6 through August 24. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. 761 Newman Springs Road, Lincroft. +(908) 747-2266. + +MONTCLAIR ART MUSEUM "A Personal Synthesis," a retrospective of paintings and prints by Hananiah Harari, and "American Impressionist," paintings by Guy Rose (1867-1925). Both through Aug. 10. Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 11 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Sundays and Thursdays, 1 to 5 P.M. Admission: $4; $3 for students with ID and the elderly; free admission on Saturdays. 3 South Mountain Avenue, Montclair. (201) 746-5555. + +MORRIS MUSEUM "Portrait Paintings From the Morris Museum Collection," including works by Rembrandt and Gainsborough. Through June 30. Recent sculpture by Leah Jacobson. Through May 24. Hours: Sundays, +1 to 5 P.M.; Mondays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 8 P.M. Admission: $4; $2 for the elderly. 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. (201) 538-0454. + +NEW JERSEY CENTER FOR VISUAL ARTS "Color, Line and Form," watercolors and prints by Alice Hondru. Through Thursday. Mondays through Fridays, noon to 4 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 to 4 P.M. Palmer Gallery, 68 Elm Street, Summit. +(908) 273-9121. + +NEW JERSEY STATE MUSEUM Works by Bob Justin. Through next Sunday. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 9 A.M. to 4:45 P.M.; Sundays, 12 to 5 P.M. Free. 205 West State Street, Trenton. (609) 292-6464. + +NEWARK MUSEUM "Portraits, 1975-1995," paintings by Dawoud Bey. Through Aug. 3. "Japanese Master Prints: Hiroshige's 19th-Century Landscapes." Through next Sunday. +Hours: Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 P.M.49 Washington Street, Newark. +(201) 596-6550. + +NOYES MUSEUM "For the Love of Art: Carvings and Paintings by South Jersey Folk Artist Albert Hoffman," works reflecting Old Testament narratives and American Indian life. "Photographs by Dwight Hiscano," landscape photography. Both next Sunday through Sept. 21. "Easy Access: Highlights From the Noyes Museum's Collection of Contemporary Art." Through Aug. 17. Wednesday through Sunday, 11 A.M. to 4 P.M. Admission: $3; $2 for the elderly and students. Lily Lake Road, Oceanville. (609) 652-8848. + +PASSAIC COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE Paintings by Fred Duignan. Through Wednesday. Mondays through Fridays, 9 A.M. to 9 P.M.; Saturdays, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. L.R.C. Gallery, Broadway and Memorial Drive, Paterson. (201) 684-6800. + +PALMYRA ART GALLERY Paintings by Richard Nunziata. Through July 5. Hours: Tuesdays through Sundays, 11:30 A.M. to 2 A.M. Palmyra Tea Room, 22 Hamilton Street, Bound Brook. (908) 302-0515. + +SIMON GALLERY Pastels and paintings by Antonio Carreno. Paintings by Jim Fuess and Joyce Korotkin. Through Saturday. Tuesday through Friday, 12 to 6 P.M.; Wednesday, to 8 P.M.today and ; Saturday, 12 to 5 P.M. 48 Bank Street, Morristown. (201) 538-5456. + +WYCOFF GALLERY "The Silverman Collection," bronze sculptures by Star York, Bruce LaFountain, Sandi Clark and Walter Horton. Through Friday. Hours: Tuesday through Friday, 11:30 A.M. to 4 P.M. 648 Wyckoff Avenue, Wyckoff. (201) 891-7436. + +ZIMMERLI ART MUSEUM "Sequences: As You Can See," selections from the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art From the Soviet Union. Through July 20. Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. Rutgers University, George and Hamilton Streets, New Brunswick. (908) 932-7237. + +FOR CHILDREN + +BARNES & NOBLE "Hey Diddle Diddle," storytelling. Tomorrow at 7 P.M. Free. "Animorphs Animalfest," Fan Club meeting. Friday at 4 P.M. For ags 7 to 14; registration required. 2103 Highway 35, Holmdel. +(908) 615-3933. + +BICKFORD THEATER Saturn Summer Theater for Children. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11 A.M. and 1:30 P.M. in July and August. Tickets: $6.25; $5 for museum members. Museum hours: Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M.; Mondays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 8 P.M. Admission: $4; $2 for the elderly. 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. Schedule and reservations: +(201) 538-0454. + +FORUM THEATER GROUP "Starblast," a children's musical. Through Saturday. 1 P.M. Tickets: $8. 314 Main Street, Metuchen. (908) 548-0582. + +MONMOUTH MUSEUM "Changing Cultures: From the Lenape to the Urban Age, 1400 to 1900," exploring the history of America through changes in family life, from the Lenape through the Victorian era. Through June 1998. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. 761 Newman Springs Road, Lincroft. (908) 747-2266. + +NEW JERSEY CHILDREN'S MUSEUM An interactive center for ages 2 to 8. Daily programs: "Fairy Tale Play," 10:30 A.M. and 3:30 P.M. "Storytime," noon. Craft projects, 2:30 P.M. Museum hours: Mondays through Fridays, +9 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. Admission: $7. 599 Industrial Avenue, Paramus. (201) 262-2638. + +NEW JERSEY STATE MUSEUM "Kaleidoscope Kids," a one-week program on astronomy for children 6 to 12. Sessions begin July 7 and continue through Aug. 8. Each session meets Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 3 P.M. Tuition: $115; $110 for siblings. 205 West State Street, Trenton. Registration and information: (609) 292-6310 or (609) 292-6464. + +SOMERSET COUNTY-BRIDGEWATER LIBRARY "Twilight Toddler Time," special ways to end the day. For ages 2 and up. Wednesday, 7 to 7:30 P.M. Registration required. Preschool films: "One Kitten for Kim," "The Owl and the Pussycat" and "Scruffy." For all ages. Friday at 10:30 A.M. Free. North Bridge Street and Vogt Drive, Bridgewater. (908) 526-4016, extension 4. + +TRAILSIDE NATURE AND SCIENCE CENTER "Spring Celestial Sights," a planetarium program on spring constellations, including Leo, Ursa Major, Bootes and planets. For children 6 and older. Today and next Sunday at 2 P.M. Admission: $3; $2.55 for the elderly. 452 New Providence Road, Mountainside. +(908) 789-3670. + +ZIMMERLI ART MUSEUM "Three Billy Goats Gruff," illustrations by Robert Bender. Through July 20. Museum hours: Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. Rutgers University, George and Hamilton Streets, New Brunswick. (908) 932-7237. + +SPOKEN WORD + +BARNES & NOBLE "Looking Into Your Past Lives," a discussion and workshop led by Sandra Stevens of the Holistic Health Association. Tuesday at 7 P.M. Free. "Spiritual Perspectives: A Night of Conversation and Connection," a discussion led by Frederika Ebel of Louise L. Hay's book "You Can Heal Your Life." Wednesday at 8 P.M. "The Past: Dinosaurs!," a reading of "The Horned Dinosaurs," by Peter Dodson, and a discussion led by Jack Repcheck of "T. Rex and the Crater of Doom," by Dr. Walter Alvarez. Thursday at 7 P.M. Princeton Market Fair, Route 1, Princeton. (609) 392-0689. + +BORDERS BOOKS AND MUSIC PRINCETON Dr. Thomas J. Sugrue discusses "The Origins of Urban Crisis" and Dr. Clancy D. McKenzie discusses "Delayed Post-traumatic Stress Disorders From Infancy." Both tomorrow at 7 P.M. Discussion and demonstration of the roots of chiropractic health care. Thursday at 8 P.M. All free. Route 1 at Province Line Road, Princeton. (609) 514-0040. + +ENCORE BOOKS AND MUSIC "New Jersey: The Dinosaur State," a reading and discussion led by Dr. William B. Gallagher of his new book, "When Dinosaurs Roamed New Jersey." Friday at 7:30 P.M. Free. 301 North Harrison Street, Princeton. (609) 252-0608. + +OLD BRIDGE PUBLIC LIBRARY "People Poets of Old Bridge," an open reading. Today at 2 P.M. Highway 516 and Cottrell Road, Old Bridge. (908) 290-0595. + +ETC + +18TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Sponsored by the Finkelstein Memorial Library. Tuesday at 7:30 P.M. This week: "The White Balloon," in Farsi with English subtitles. Suggested donation: $1. 24 Chestnut Street and Route 9, Spring Valley, N.Y. (914) 352-5700. + +FLEA MARKET The Chester Lions Club Flea Market offers crafts, linens, books, children's clothing, housewares, plants and produce, makeup, jewelry, scarves, handbags and other accessories. Sundays, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Through Nov. 30. Free. West Blackwell Street, Morris and Sussex Streets, downtown Dover. (201) 442-1494. + +NEW JERSEY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Sponsored by the Rutgers Film Co-op and the New Jersey Media Arts Center. Through July 27. "When We Were Kings" and "Lost Highway," today at 2 P.M. at the Forrestal Hotel and Conference Center, 100 College Road East, off Route 1 South, Princeton. Free. "Kenneth Anger Retrospective No. 1," Tuesday. "Crash," Friday. "Fire" and "Siddhartha," next Sunday. Films begin at 7 P.M. and are shown on Sundays at the State Theater, 15 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick; Fridays and Saturdays at 123 Scott Hall, College Avenue and Hamilton Street, Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Admission: $8; $6 for members. Information: (908) 932-8482. On the World Wide Web: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/nigrin. + +LOAD-DATE: June 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Jazz Jam "The Jazz Maniacs Delight" at the Cape May Music Festival offers a variety of styles, including cool, bop, scat and modern. Big Nick Nicholas leads an all-star jam. CAPE MAY CONVENTION HALL Beach Avenue and Stockton Place. Next Sunday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $15; $10 for the elderly; $5 for students. (800) 275-4278 or (609) 884-5404. (pg. 12); Maria and Company Theaterfest presents Rodgers and Hammerstein's classic "The Sound of Music." This family musical, directed by the Broadway veteran Dennis Edenfield, features familiar songs including "Do Re Mi" and "My Favorite Things." MEMORIAL AUDITORIUM Life Hall, Montclair State University. Through July 13. Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 P.M.; matinees Fridays and Saturdays at 2 P.M. and Sundays at 3 P.M. Tickets: $25; $15 for seniors and $10 for students. (201) 655-5112. (pg. 13); Character Sketch Strictly Art in Princeton holds its third annual showcase of 100 professional artists, photographers and sculptors, including this portrait by Barbara Pappendick. CARNEGIE CENTER Route 1 and Alexander Road, Princeton. Today, 10 to 5 P.M. Rain or Shine. Free. (908) 874-5247. (pg. 14) + +TYPE: List + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +316 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 22, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +GOVERNMENT; +Dying With Dignity Is Fine, Just Not in My Backyard + +BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 6; Column 2; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 827 words + +When Mary Gotz Rother is asked why she and other hospice advocates have been fighting the city of Clifton for the past two years, her answer is simple: "I want to give other elderly people the gentle, respectful death that my father had -- one without pain, watching his garden grow in the backyard." + On its face, it would seem a point of little contention. But when the issue is not how people are going to die, but where, Mrs. Rother has learned that a hospice can produce the kind of "not in my backyard debate" usually reserved for methadone clinics and halfway houses. Angry residents have packed zoning meetings to argue that a hospice would lower property values, bring strangers into the community and expose neighborhood children to issues adults want them shielded from. + The dispute reached the State Assembly this month, with lawmakers passing a bill that would waive local zoning laws for hospices treating fewer than 16 terminally ill patients at a time, giving them -- including the 12-bed hospice planned for Clifton -- the same protections from community disapproval now accorded to domestic violence shelters and homes for the disabled. +The measure has yet to reach the Senate and those who oppose the plan have vowed to continue fighting what they see as a threat to local autonomy and their ability to fashion a neighborhood that reflects their values. +"I have nothing against hospices, my wife died in my arms in my house," said Richard S. Herman, a 59-year-old electrical engineer who lives across the street from the proposed Clifton site. "But these people are trying to put a medical center in a residential neighborhood when other commercial sites are available. Ninety percent of the neighborhood is against it but we've been completely ignored. And the assemblymen who just voted to put it here are going to have a tough time come election next year." +Mr. Herman said that most residents were worried that the hospice would increase traffic on their street and lead to mounds of medical waste on the curb. Residents have also questioned the motives of some of those pushing the site, noting that the wife of the Rev. Earl Modean, the founder of Clifton Hospice House Inc., which is trying to build the hospice, is the real-estate broker handling the proposed site and that Mrs. Rother's husband is a lawyer representing the nonprofit organization. +In response to these charges, Mrs. Rother, who works for an assemblyman who sponsored the bill, said that the real-estate agent was charging lower-than-market rates and that her husband plans to donate his legal fees to the institute. +But another problem for opponents of the hospice, only hinted at during zoning board meetings and interviews with neighbors, is a general uneasiness about having death in their midst. +Edward M. Werger, a 74-year-old retired pharmaceutical distributor, said he was worried about the children who play on his street or go to school a few doors down. +"You'd have youngsters in a playground right next door to people dying," he said. "It would leave a bad impression with them, a sadness, and I don't think people should be exposed to that." +None of these are new issues, according to Jay Mahoney, president of the Virginia-based National Hospice Organization. His group acts as a clearinghouse for the hospice movement, which opposes aggressive medical treatments for people who are dying and instead tries to create as normal a living environment as possible. +Today there are about 3,000 hospices nationwide, which care for more than 450,000 people a year, a number that has been steadily growing for the last two decades. Only about 100 of these are the kind of stand-alone community-based hospices that has been proposed for Clifton. And in New Jersey, there are only three residential facilities among the 45 groups offering hospice care -- the others are part of hospitals or are home-based. +When hospices do try to move into residential neighborhoods, Mr. Mahoney said, "you see some of the same resistance to these types of facilities that you do with group homes and the like. +"The question is how will this impact my quiet neighborhood. While most of these things can be worked out, sometimes people's positions harden and reasonableness starts to suffer. Hospice patients are the casualty." +What Clifton Hospice House Inc. would like to do is provide 12 beds for the dying in a residential setting next door to a Catholic church. While the organization has identified the private house it intends to buy, it has not actually done so. +Complaining that "everyone wants to help people into the world but no one wants to help them out of it," Mrs. Rother said that the hospice she envisions would give each patient a private room, with sunlight falling through paned windows and a garden of flowers in the backyard. +"It would be their house, a peaceful place to say goodbye," she said. "That's how death should be." + +LOAD-DATE: June 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Mary Gotz Rother is leading the fight in Clifton to allow a nonprofit group to convert this house into a 12-bed hospice. (Angel Franco/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +317 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 22, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +BEHIND THE WHEEL/1998 Ford Escort ZX2; +A 2-Door for Buyers At the Entry Level + +BYLINE: By MICHELLE KREBS + +SECTION: Section 11; Page 1; Column 1; Automobiles + +LENGTH: 943 words + +DATELINE: DETROIT + +ABOUT a year ago, the clerk at a service station was admiring the handsome European sedan I was driving, the brand of which I no longer recall. +"But, I like coupes," said the middle-aged woman, "I just can't bring myself to buy a four-door. They're for old people." + At least that's the way it used to be. +Coupes, which only a couple of decades ago dominated the car market, went hand in hand with the young. But as baby boomers aged and procreated, the practicality of four doors and the arrival of more attractive, better-mannered sedans emerged victorious. The car market did a flip-flop, and sedans came to rule. +Now, it appears, auto makers are trying that old formula of enticing the young buyer with two doors, snappy styling and spirited performance. The double-edged strategy is to resuscitate the coupe market while luring the all-important young buyers to a brand early on, so they can graduate later to larger, more expensive models. +The latest of the new coupes aimed at young buyers comes from Ford Motor. The Escort ZX2 arrived in showrooms in April as a 1998 model. Even part of its name -- according to the scuttlebutt in the automotive trade, though denied by Ford -- seems to be derived from its target market: "X," for Generation X. (The "Z" stands for its Zetec engine; the "2," for its two doors.) + It competes with the Chevrolet Cavalier Z24 and the Dodge/Plymouth Neon Sport Coupe. All the small coupes are front-wheel drive with peppy, fuel-efficient engines and a relatively sporty ride and handling. All carry price tags in the low- to mid-teens. +While it shares most mechanical features with the Escort sedan and wagon redesigned for 1997, the ZX2 was developed as a coupe by an engineering and design team distinct from the one that produced the sedan and wagon. That's in contrast to the vehicle it replaces, the Escort GT, which, in essence, was a sedan minus two doors. +The ZX2 shares no body panels with its sedan and wagon siblings. Instead, it has a steeply sloped hood and highly raked windshield, which combined with its wedge-shaped profile give it a more aggressive, sporty stance. For an even livelier look, the ZX2 comes with a sport package that includes 15-inch aluminum wheels, a rear spoiler and fog lamps. With its slanted, elliptical head lamps -- a signature styling cue for new Fords -- and outfitted in slick black paint, the ZX2 I tested reminded me of a sleek black cat lurking on Halloween night. +Features inside the ZX2 are familiar, though the interior differs a bit from that of the Escort sedan. The two models share a central integrated control panel, which made its debut in the Taurus and later carried over to the Escort. I liked the elliptical panel for the audio and climate controls because of its large, straightforward buttons and organized appearance. The full center console with dual cup holders and storage for tape cassettes is also the same as the sedan's. +And the back seat of the ZX2, like that of the sedan, splits and folds so you can carry a long item, like a surfboard. Curiously, the ZX2, like its Chevrolet and Dodge competitors, offers an integrated child-safety seat as optional equipment. I can't imagine struggling to put a baby in the back seat given the smallness of the car and the folding seat back. It was tough enough to shoehorn in my 5- and 9-year-old children. But, I suppose, using a permanently installed child-safety seat is easier than battling to load a baby as well as a seat into the back. +Other options are what you might expect for a car aimed at the young, including a six-disk CD changer and a power moon roof. +As for other safety features, the ZX2 offers optional anti-lock brakes for $570, as does the Neon for $565; the Cavalier has them as standard equipment. +The ZX2 shares its 2.0-liter Zetec four-cylinder, dual overhead-cam engine with the larger, more expensive Ford Contour and Mercury Mystique. The 130 horsepower in the coupe is about 20 more than in the Escort sedan, which is powered by a 2.0 liter four-cylinder, single overhead cam. The engine is peppy but noisier than my old ears could bear day to day. But I'm not in the target audience for this car, and it is still quieter than the raucous Neon. +While the ZX2 has the same chassis and suspension hardware as the sedan, it is tuned for more agile handling. Yet, it maintains a comfortable ride. Equipped with the standard five-speed manual transmission -- the only way I could imagine ordering this car -- the ZX2 darted handily through rush-hour traffic and zipped confidently through curves. My main complaint was with the steering. It seemed too light and imprecise, even though Ford engineers said they had focused on it. Ford also said quality was a primary concern, but before I took my first spin, the knob for adjusting the rear-view mirrors snapped off in my hand. That, however, was the only quality flaw I found in the regular production model I tested. +Feature by feature, the ZX2 is outdone by its competitors. With seating for four, it is significantly smaller than the Neon Sport and the Cavalier Z24. The Chevy takes the prize for most trunk space, with the Neon and ZX2 in a deadlock behind it. The Cavalier Z24 and the Neon, if outfitted with the optional 150-horsepower engine that will be standard on '98 models, have more power than the Ford. The ZX2, however, has the most comfortable ride and the best seats. +And the ZX2 wins when it comes to price. With anti-lock brakes included, the ZX2 starts at about $13,600; the fully equipped test model runs $15,755. + +INSIDE TRACK: A lot of fun in a tiny space at an affordable price. + +LOAD-DATE: June 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: A highlight of the new small coupe from Ford is an elliptical center control panel. (Ford Motor) + +Table: "Coupes on the Comeback Trail" lists price and features of the Chevrolet Cavalier Z24, Dodge Neon Sport Coupe, and Ford Escort ZX2. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +318 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 22, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WEDDINGS; +Robin Sparkman, Howard Robbins + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 32; Column 5; Society Desk + +LENGTH: 184 words + +Robin Hamilton Sparkman, a daughter of Beatrice S. Page of Rowayton, Conn., and Nicholas P. Sparkman of Larchmont, N.Y., was married yesterday to Howard Zachary Robbins, a son of Phyllis and Melvin Robbins of New York. Rabbi Susan Schnur officiated at Wave Hill in Riverdale, the Bronx. +The bride, 28, is a business editor in Fort Lee, N.J., for MSNBC on the Internet, an on-line venture of the Microsoft Corporation and NBC. She graduated from Wellesley College and received a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. Her father is a manager at Senior Personnel Placement Bureau in White Plains, an employment agency for the elderly. Her mother is the treasurer of the E. Matilda Ziegler Foundation for the Blind in Darien, Conn. + The bridegroom, 29, is an associate at Proskauer Rose, the New York law firm. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University and from the New York University School of Law. His parents, now retired, owned Robbins Men's and Boys' Wear, which was a New York-area store chain. +The couple met in 1988 at a debate tournament at Swarthmore College. + +LOAD-DATE: June 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +319 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 22, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Bristol Journal; +When Progress Means Back to Horse and Wagon + +BYLINE: By SALLY JOHNSON + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 10; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 751 words + +DATELINE: BRISTOL, Vt., June 21 + +The idea of hauling trash with a team of horses came from an old issue of the magazine Draft Horse Journal. Patrick Palmer was intrigued. He and his wife, Cathy, had a pair of Percherons and they had the wagon. All they needed was a customer. +So when this town of 4,000 people decided last winter to privatize trash pickup and advertised for proposals, the Palmers jumped. With a bid of $15,600 for the year -- a bit higher than some of the truckers -- they got the contract. + "Sure, there was a little grumbling that we didn't take the lowest bid," said the Town Administrator, Robert Hall, "but we thought it would be a great thing for the town because it's unique." +Mr. Hall figures that the town is actually saving money because its road crew -- freed from garbage collection -- is now available for repairing streets five days a week. +Every Monday morning, the Palmers load their team -- 17-year-old Luke and 10-year-old Zac -- onto a trailer at their farm in nearby New Haven for the short ride to Bristol. At 7 A.M., not sharp, the Palmers, assisted by Kristina Samuels, a family friend, set out along the side roads and cul-de-sacs of Bristol. They wend their way past manicured lawns and meticulous gardens, arguing good-naturedly as they go about whether to turn left or right at the next corner. +"We're still arguing about the route," Mrs. Palmer said recently from her perch high up on the driver's seat. She drives half the route while her husband walks or jogs beside the wagon, lobbing garbage bags over the side and hoisting bags of recycling material into bins strapped to the side. Then they switch jobs, while Ms. Samuels helps from the back of the wagon. +The trash wagon, in operation for only a month now, has the effect of a circus parade in miniature: drivers stop and wave, elderly people emerge from their houses, and mothers with toddlers follow along part of the route. On this sunny, windy day, a customer had left two carrots next to the garbage bags. +"The customers seem to love it," Mr. Palmer said, heaving yet another green bag into the wagon, which he built originally to haul paying guests on hayrides. "They come out with their cameras. I've never seen anybody take a picture of a garbage truck." +The contract calls for the Palmers to pick up about 200 bags of household garbage from 150 to 175 homes each Monday, which requires three or four trips to the dump on the edge of town. They also pick up recyclable material under the contract. +The number of homes with garbage varies because residents can decide weekly whether they want to avail themselves of the service, buying garbage stickers that must be affixed to the bags for pickup. Otherwise, they can haul their own garbage to the dump. +It takes the Palmers six or seven hours to complete the route, depending on the demand. Mr. Palmer said he would be able to finish the job in less time after he built a new wagon, one with a cover to protect the workers from rain, sleet and snow. +Under their contract, the Palmers are protected against prolific household dumpers. The garbage they collect is weighed at the dump, and if the quarterly average is more then two tons a week, they receive $1.50 for each additional 20 pounds. +The Palmers are longtime horse fanciers, and they got into the trash-hauling business, Mrs. Palmer said, "because these horses need to pay their way." A team for four years now, Luke and Zac are used for sleigh rides in the winter and hayrides in the summer, for birthday parties and for office outings. Those enterprises net the couple $2,000 to $5,000 a year, said Mr. Palmer, who also works as a real estate agent. +Mr. Hall said he hoped that the Palmers were satisfied with the deal. "A lot of these guys who bid on the job heard $15,000 and their eyes lit up," he said, "but this is not as easy a job as some of them thought it would be. You have workers and equipment tied up for several hours." +Mr. Hall said his office had received one call of complaint, on the first day, when the Palmers were running late. +"One of our older residents called to say her recycling hadn't been picked up, so I told her that we'd just started making pickups with a horse and wagon," Mr. Hall recalled. "She said: 'A horse and wagon?' This is the 20th century. That's stupid.' +"But on the whole, I would say it's been very popular. The merchants along the main drag love it, and a lot of the older folks tell me they listen for the clop of the horses' feet." + +LOAD-DATE: June 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: For Bristol, Vt., progress in garbage collection meant returning to an older method. Patrick and Cathy Palmer do the job every Monday with a family friend and their wagon, drawn by their horses, Luke and Zac. (Paul Boisvert for The New York Times) + +Map showing the location of Bristol, Vermont: In Bristol, Vt., a town of 4,000, horses pull the garbage wagon + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +320 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 22, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE DOCTOR'S WORLD; +Is the Longer Life The Healthier One? + +BYLINE: By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D. + +SECTION: Section 14; Page 18; Column 5; Women's Health + +LENGTH: 890 words + +TO EMPHASIZE the differences in the health of the sexes, Dr. Eugenia Eng tells students at the University of North Carolina, "Women are sicker; men die quicker." That women in the United States live about seven years longer than men is hardly disputed, though the reason for the gap is a mystery. +The perception that women are sicker, not only in their extra years but throughout life, is also widely shared and used to counteract the notion that women are healthier because they live longer. It is also used to justify the need for more health care for women and the way in which research money is allocated. + Yet there are little solid data to indicate that women are sicker, and even less about the quality of their health in those extra years. A better understanding could help identify the factors underlying longevity, like social networks, so that they could be used to improve public health. +"We need information about women over and beyond all the activists who demand it for its own sake," said Dr. Maureen M. Henderson, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. +The male-female mortality gap starts in the womb, holds into very old age and has widened in recent decades. It is now about seven years in the United States, compared with two to three years early in this century. As longevity improves for both men and women, it is uncertain whether the gap will grow. +Sir Richard Doll, an Oxford University professor and an international leader in epidemiology, cited a study of centenarians in England -- made possible by Queen Elizabeth's tradition of sending birthday telegrams to all citizens who reach 100 -- revealing that at 105, men and women begin to die at the same rate. +Dr. Doll said he believed that an important factor in the gap was that the male body was bigger and had more cells, providing a greater chance for something in a cell to go wrong. "Lung cancer mortality in nonsmokers, for example, is about 20 percent higher in males than females, and one can easily account for that by the greater number of cells" in the airways, Dr. Doll said. +Hormonal differences are an obvious factor. But fewer people are aware that women have lower rates of certain infections, suggesting that they have an immunological advantage over men. The biggest factor appears to be the difference in the smoking and drinking habits of the two sexes and the larger number of deaths among men from homicides, suicides and accidents. +And there is a growing awareness among scientists that some diseases may progress differently in men and women and that biological differences may account for variations in how each responds to treatment. +Over the course of their lives, women visit doctors and hospitals more often than men, and surveys show that both sexes consider women to be the sicker sex. +But a study by Dr. Eileen Crimmins, a demographer at the University of Southern California, found that women and men spent similar proportions of their lives without disability. Using data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics in 1990, Dr. Crimmins found that men were free of disability for 58.8 of their average 71.8 years (nearly 82 percent) and that women were disability-free for 63.9 of their average 78.8 years (just over 81 percent). +Dr. Henderson, the Seattle epidemiologist, said the nature of the American health-care system might explain why women are perceived to be sicker than men throughout life. +Women are accustomed to responding to checklists to report symptoms during their routine medical visits for birth control, Pap smears and mammograms, among other things. Men generally do not have the same requirements for regular visits, Dr. Henderson said, probably because they don't generally make regular visits. +"If someone asked me every year to fill in whether or not I have pain in my neck, then I am going to think about pain in my neck, whereas somebody who has never been asked about pain in the neck is not going to think about it unless it is really bothering him," Dr. Henderson said. +What do the extra seven years mean for women? +The data analyzed by Dr. Crimmins are not nearly as bleak as is commonly believed. "The difference in death rates makes women look less healthy in old age," Dr. Crimmins said. "The males have died off before they become disabled." +Her calculations based on the 1990 data showed that for women, on average, 5.1 years were free of disability, an additional year involved living in a community with a disability and another 0.7 year was lived in an institution. +"It is not that women have a greater tendency to get health problems," Dr. Crimmins said, "but that they live long enough" to fall into the most vulnerable period of life for disabling illness. And, she said, "they live longer once they have them." +Dr. Crimmins concluded: "If a man and a woman are both alive at a given age, the likelihood that they will lose their ability to walk or to lift is about the same." +Dr. Eng said that one reason there are few relevant data to explain this gender gap is that Government-supported studies focus on specific diseases, while the gap "is much more a community-societal issue." +Such studies might address the questions Dr. Eng also poses to her students: "Is it better to die quicker, or live longer but be sicker?" + +LOAD-DATE: July 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +321 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 24, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Senate Finance Panel Adjusts A 'Means Test' for Medicare + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 13; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 516 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 23 + +Leaders of the Senate Finance Committee said today that they had agreed to revise their proposal to make affluent elderly people pay more for Medicare. +The change would retain the idea of such a "means test," but would make it more workable and easier for the Government to administer than the original plan. + Lobbyists for the elderly said that the revised proposal was somewhat more acceptable, but that they still disliked it. Liberal Democratic senators said they would try to kill the proposal, just as they had intended to fight the original. +The new proposal would increase premiums for elderly people with incomes above a certain level, starting at $50,000 a year for an individual. For most beneficiaries, the monthly premium, now $43.80, is deducted from Social Security checks. +The original proposal, approved last week by the Finance Committee, would have required affluent elderly people to pay larger shares of their doctors' bills. The proposal would have affected only people with doctors' bills that exceeded $100 a year, the amount of the current deductible under Part B of Medicare, which covers doctors' services. +The Senate began debating Medicare today as part of a large bill intended to carry out the bipartisan budget agreement reached last month by President Clinton and Congressional leaders. Even if the full Senate approves an increase in Medicare premiums for affluent people, the House may balk. +Martin A. Corry, director of Federal affairs at the American Association of Retired Persons, said the proposal to increase premiums for higher-income beneficiaries was "less harmful to the integrity of the Medicare program" than the proposal to increase the deductible. +But Mr. Corry said: "It will still be controversial. If you apply this progressive principle to the elderly, why not apply it across the board? Why should high-income workers get generous Federal tax subsidies for their health insurance?" +The original income test for Medicare was proposed last week by Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, who said, "Taxpayers should not be asked to subsidize those who do not need a subsidy." The proposal was approved in the Finance Committee, 18 to 2, with support from 11 Republicans and 7 Democrats. +Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, ranking Democrat on the committee, said today that members of the panel had agreed that the income test should be carried out by increasing Medicare premiums rather than the deductible. +Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said, "I'm strongly opposed to an increase in the deductible and the premium, as well." +Asked why the Finance Committee had endorsed the original proposal, Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrat of Minnesota, said: "It was late at night. People were tired." +Mr. Clinton has said he is not philosophically opposed to a "means test," but does not want to jeopardize the budget accord by pressing the idea this year. Rather, he said, it should be considered later, when Congress addresses the long-term financial problems of Medicare and Social Security. + +LOAD-DATE: June 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Marion Brown, 82, visited the Capitol yesterday to urge the Senate to vote against a $5 co-payment for home health visits, a change in Medicare that is part of a spending bill before Congress. Behind her were, from left, Senators Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Paul Wellstone of Minnesota and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, all Democrats. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times) + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +322 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 25, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +In Florida, the Young Are Gaining on the Old + +BYLINE: By MIREYA NAVARRO + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1478 words + +DATELINE: FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. + +When the bell rings to signal a change of class at Parkway Middle School here, the principal, Willie Dudley, turns traffic cop as a mob of boisterous teen-agers pours out onto the 16-acre campus. His task is to get hundreds of students into their next classrooms within five minutes. +Ten minutes later, he is still yelling: "Let's go! Daniel! Don't make the girls late now, you're holding them up. Come on, you all. Come on, young lady. Jacob! Let's go! Come on, ladies, hustle up!" + Delays during class changes are one result of severe overcrowding at Parkway, a school built for 1,200 students that now has 1,800. The situation underscores a demographic shift that is giving a face lift to the state: Long identified with old people, Florida is struggling with a surge of young people. +Children 5 to 17 years of age now account for 2.2 million, or 16 percent, of the state's population of 14 million, demographers at the University of Florida say. That figure is up from 2.01 million in 1990 and is expected to go to more than 2.5 million in 2000. The growth rate among children in that age group is sprinting ahead of that for the elderly, with demographers projecting that from 1990 to 2000, the number of school-age children in the state will grow by 25 percent, while that of residents 65 and over will grow by 22 percent. +"Because Florida has this image of a retirement state, you tend to forget it has a bunch of kids," said Stan Smith, director of the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida. "Right now, these kids are growing faster than the elderly population, and both groups are growing faster than the population as a whole." +At Parkway, lunch, served in five shifts over three hours, comes smack in the middle of some classes, splitting them into two short sessions. Nearly half the students attend at least some of their classes in trailers set on concrete blocks, some in the softball outfield. There is no home field advantage for Parkway's softball or track teams -- home games and meets are held at schools with enough space. +The overcrowding at Parkway reflects a crisis of such magnitude that Gov. Lawton Chiles has formed a commission to study the problem and plans to summon the State Legislature to a special session in the fall to deal with it. +The state's public school system of 2.2 million students is growing by about 60,000 new students each year, part of a national trend caused by a baby boomlet of the baby boomers, increased immigration and high fertility rates in the Hispanic population, Federal education and Census Bureau officials say. But here in Florida, the growth is among the fastest in the country and twice that of New York City, where the system of 1.1 million students is growing by 20,000 a year. +In Florida, the nation's retirement mecca, the trend has rejuvenated many areas, putting single-family home developments next to retirement villages and forcing baby strollers and canes to vie for the right of way at the mall. +At Century Village, a retirement community here in Broward County, some residents complain that their quality of life has been invaded by loud music, reckless driving and the construction of new homes and town houses that start at $100,000. +"The ladies with the baby carriages, you got to get out of their way or else they'll run you over," said Vincent Gaudiello, an 83-year-old resident of Century Village with his wife, Madeline, 73. +This friction between the old and the young may be inevitable, given the need of state officials to shift spending priorities. The proportion of people 65 and older in Florida peaked in 1995 at 19 percent, and it is not expected to rise again significantly until after 2010. By 2020, that group will make up nearly one-fourth of the state's population as the baby boomers age, according to demographic studies by the University of Florida. The school-age population is expected to be 15 percent by 2020, demographers say. +Youth-related issues like school overcrowding now top the government's agenda, forcing public officials to juggle resources to accommodate new needs, in addition to old needs like nursing-home care and social services for immigrants. State officials say they need to find $3 billion more for school construction in the next five years to keep up, in addition to the $11 billion spent each year to run the schools. +School officials and teachers' groups advocate raising taxes to build schools, but the Republican majority in the Legislature this year refused to break their no-new-tax pledge to voters and rejected proposals to raise a utilities tax or to allow school boards to raise local property taxes. +Some advocates for children say politicians still do not regard investing in younger generations as a priority, particularly when taking into account the cost of caring for older generations that are living longer. +"If you're 66 in America, you're guaranteed health care; if you're 6, you have to beg and borrow it," said Jack Levine, executive director of the Florida Center for Children and Youth. "It's a question of how we balance the generations, and right now, it's not favoring investing in children." +But Florida legislators play down any intergenerational conflict over government spending, with some noting that they are equally mindful of the needs of children and the elderly because the voters they regard as most critical -- those in the middle -- care about both. +"Their concern is their kids -- they've got to get a good education -- and their second concern is who's going to take care of grandma, who's going to pay?" said State Senator Locke Burt, an Ormond Beach Republican who is the majority leader. +For now, school overcrowding is taking center stage with the help of Governor Chiles, a Democrat who has made children a major theme of his last term. +The extent of the problem is still being defined, but in areas like South Florida, "some counties can build schools and still not catch up," said Bob Bedford, the State Department of Education's deputy commissioner for educational programs. +At least 300,000 of the state's public school students, or 14 percent of the student body, attend classes in portable classrooms, the Governor's Commission on Education said. In Broward County, school board officials list 33 of the county's 200 schools as "critically overcrowded," that is, at 125 to 175 percent of capacity. The county has one of the nation's fastest-growing school populations, according to the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents the largest school districts in the United States. In the last six years, enrollment increased 35 percent, the council said, the second-highest rate in the nation, after Las Vegas, Nev. +As state officials look for sources of money, they are considering everything from belt-tightening and cheaper construction methods to reversing some tax exemptions and expanding the lottery. +One problem that some school boards need to surmount is a blemished record on managing school construction -- by misspending the money on operating expenses or by permitting programs to become riddled with corruption. Some polls have shown that working-age voters with children are helping to defeat school bond issues because they doubt that the money will be spent well. The Republican-led Legislature says school systems must be held accountable before it approves more money for school construction. +The Legislature has already taken one step: It passed a law this year declaring that 75 percent of the state's portable classrooms are permanent, rather than temporary -- in effect, lowering the estimate of the need for new schools. +"That's like calling ketchup a vegetable," said Mr. Levine of the Florida Center for Children and Youth. +Some state officials like Mr. Bedford, of the Florida Department of Education, say that failure to address school overcrowding effectively may have a ripple effect on the economy, from the poor academic performance of students entering the job market to reluctance by some businesses to relocate to Florida. +At Parkway Middle School, a magnet school for the performing arts, student concerns dealt more with not having enough time to eat lunch (a half-hour) and the pushing and shoving when school lets out and 46 buses line up to take the students home, giving the school the maddening pace of Grand Central Terminal. +Worse, some students said, individual attention from teachers is scant. +"You have to be one of those people who catch up quick because the teacher is not going to stop to help you," said Laura Denny, 12, a sixth grader. +A new $3.4 million building is being built to replace 24 portable classrooms by next year. But the principal, Mr. Dudley, was anything but hopeful. "We'll still need portables," he said. "We won't catch up." + +LOAD-DATE: June 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Overcrowding at Parkway Middle School in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., has led to the use of portable classrooms. (pg. A1); At the Parkway Middle School in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., a school built for 1,200 students that now has 1,800, students wait in long lines to eat lunch in 30-minute shifts. Some do not eat until 1:30 or 2 P.M. (Andrew Itkoff for The New York Times)(pg. B6) + +Graph: "DEMOGRAPHICS: A Changing Florida" +By the year 2000, the number of school-age Floridians is projected to grow faster than the number of those over 65. Graph shows percentage of those 65 and over and of those 5 to 17, during 1970, 1980, 1990 and a projected 2000. (Sources: U.S. Census Bureau)(pg. B6) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +323 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 25, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +James S. Todd, 65, Surgeon Who Led Medical Association + +BYLINE: By ERIC PACE + +SECTION: Section D; Page 20; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 644 words + +Dr. James S. Todd, a New Jersey surgeon who was the executive vice president and chief executive officer of the American Medical Association from 1990 until he retired last year, died yesterday in Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, N.J. He was 65 and lived in Ridgewood. +The cause was metastatic cancer, said James Stacey, a spokesman for the association, which has about 300,000 members. + At the time of his death, Dr. Todd was retired from the practice of surgery. +Mr. Stacey said yesterday that Dr. Todd's years as the organization's executive secretary had been "a time of dramatic change and pressure for change." +One of his main accomplishments, Mr. Stacey said, was guiding the association through the implementation of a dramatic revision in the system of payments to doctors in the Medicare program for the elderly. +The payment method under Medicare changed from the old "reasonable and customary fee" basis to a system that takes into account the resources that doctors bring to their professional discipline: their education and training and also the complexity of the services provided. +That system was begun in 1991 by the agency that administers Medicare, the Health Care Financing Administration, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. +"It certainly was an improvement over the old system, which was cumbersome and in some ways inequitable," Mr. Stacey said. The association provided advice for the Government about the change in systems. Its main means of doing that during Dr. Todd's tenure as its executive vice president was by contributing to a Harvard University study of the new system. +Dr. Todd also won praise within the association for the way he guided the organization through the national debate on universal health care reform in 1993 and 1994. +The association did not support or oppose any of the various proposals that had been made, but it did provide information about the implications of the proposals for the public as well as for the medical profession. +But the debate proved inconclusive. A universal health reform proposal put forward by the Clinton Administration in 1993 failed for lack of support in Congress. Since then, Congress has enacted some small-scale changes. +Dr. Todd also worked actively, with an organization of companies providing professional liability insurance for doctors, on ways to curb the escalating cost of malpractice insurance. Mr. Stacey said part of that work involved drafting guidelines for the practice of various medical specialties to reduce the number of errors committed by doctors. +Mr. Stacey said the first guidelines, for anesthesiologists, had been notably effective in reducing errors. +As executive vice president, Dr. Todd also oversaw preparations for the establishment of the National Patient Safety Foundation. Its chief mission is to identify and correct errors in medical systems, notably in the hospital system. Its formation was announced in the fall of 1996, after he had stepped down. +Dr. Todd was born in Hyannis, Mass., grew up in Massachusetts and received a bachelor's degree in 1953 and his medical degree in 1957, both from Harvard. +He interned at what is now Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan, was a resident in surgery there and went on to a private surgical practice in Ridgewood from 1964 to 1985. He maintained professional affiliations with hospitals in Manhattan and New Jersey. +He went on to be senior deputy executive vice president of the American Medical Association from 1985 to 1990, when he was chosen by the association's board to become the executive vice president. In that post he replaced Dr. James H. Sammons and was followed by Dr. P. John Seward. +Dr. Todd is survived by his wife of 38 years, the former Marjorie Patricia Thorn, and a son, Kendall Scott Todd, who lives in New Jersey + +NAME: James S. Todd + +LOAD-DATE: June 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Dr. James S. Todd. + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +324 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 25, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +News Summary + +SECTION: Section A; Page 2; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1323 words + + +INTERNATIONAL A3-9 + +U.N. Monitor Says Iraq Is Bluffing on Disarmament +The outgoing leader of the United Nations commission in charge of monitoring Iraq's disarmament, Rolf Ekeus, said Iraq had consistently refused to cooperate with inspectors, using alibis he compared to "Thousand and One Nights." He said scientists there were still under orders to be ready to make lethal chemical weapons at short notice, even if stocks are destroyed. A1 + +China Trade Wins House Vote +Congress renewed China's normal trade privileges, known as "most favored nation" status, with the United States. The vote was 259 to 173 against punishing China for its human rights record, an annual proposal which received more votes this year than any time since 1992. A6 + +American Freed in Hong Kong +Hong Kong authorities released a senior United States immigration official from custody. The official was arrested a year ago for trying to sell blank passports to help people illegally enter the United States. He had argued in court that his life might be endangered after Hong Kong reverts to Chinese rule, but officials said he was released because he agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in a pending case against another United States immigration official. A8 + +Subpoena for Winnie Mandela +Officials of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established to investigate atrocities committed during apartheid, said Winnie Mandela, former wife of President Nelson Mandela, will be summoned to testify before a closed session of the panel. A3 + +Netanyahu Survives Vote +Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel scraped through a no-confidence vote following an angry debate in the Parliament. His plans to re-arrange the Cabinet were blocked, however, by the insistence of a Likud hawk, Ariel Sharon, that he not only take over the powerful Finance Ministry but that he also be included with the Defense and Foreign Ministers in shaping negotiating strategy with the Palestinians. A5 + +Croatia Loan Delayed by U.S. +The Clinton Administration, frustrated by the failure of President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia to comply with the accords that ended the war in the former Yugoslavia, succeeded in postponing a vote on a $30 million World Bank loan. But the Administration stopped short of opposing the loan outright, and it appeared to be having difficulty winning support from other members of the World Bank's governing body to postpone the loan for long. A9 + +Vatican Warns Against Cloning +Human cloning would not lead to identical souls because only God can create a soul, a panel set up by Pope John Paul II has concluded. The Pontifical Academy of Life said the spiritual soul, "the constitutive kernel" of every human created by God, cannot be produced through cloning. (AP) + +NATIONAL A10-17, B7-9 + +Senate Approves Increase In Some Medicare Fees +The Senate voted to increase Medicare premiums for affluent elderly people and to raise the age of eligibility by two years, to 67. Together, the proposals would make profound changes in Medicare, forcing elderly people to take more responsibility for their health care and their health insurance. A1 + +U.F.O. Report Released +The Air Force made public its latest report on the famous 1947 incident in the New Mexico desert near the town of Roswell that is at the heart of claims by flying-saucer fans that extraterrestrials have visited the Earth and which has become a celebrated part of American popular culture. The report, in voluminous detail, debunks the supposed evidence. B7 + +Impasse in Ratings Talks +The television industry and a coalition of parent-advocacy groups were at an impasse in their negotiations over revising the six-month-old television ratings system. The networks insisted that the groups and politicians pledge not to bring up the issues of violence and sex on television for at least two years. A10 + +Drug Report Tracks Trends +Many people who snort heroin have taken to injecting the drug for a more efficient high, according to a report on national trends in illicit drug use. Other drug users have begun substituting heroin for crack cocaine, dismissing crack as a ghetto drug and believing that heroin is easier to manage, the report found. A14 + +Abortion Ban Endorsed +The American Medical Association endorsed a Federal ban on a type of late-term abortion, a ban that imposes criminal penalties on doctors who perform the procedure. The vote marks only the second time in the organization's 150-year history that it has supported making a medical procedure a crime. A11 + +D'Amato Backs E.P.A. +Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato threw his support behind the embattled Environmental Protection Agency and its proposal to toughen air quality standards, promising that he would lead a fight in Congress against any lawmakers who oppose them. In a letter to President Clinton, the New York Republican joined other party leaders from northeastern states, including Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, who have spoken out strongly in defense of the E.P.A.'s proposal to tighten health standards for smog and soot. A13 + +The United States Conference of Mayors voted to oppose the E.P.A. plan, saying the proposed standards could jeopardize local economies. The resolution, introduced by Mayor Dennis Archer of Detroit, faced little opposition. A13 + +Debate on H.M.O. Rules +The budget bill coming up for debate in the Senate and the House would establish new protections for elderly people who join health maintenance organizations. A16 + +NEW YORK/REGION B1-5 + +Woman Charged in Death Of Baby Born at Prom +The New Jersey teen-ager who gave birth in a bathroom stall at her senior prom was charged with murder after the authorities said they determined that she had delivered a healthy boy, cut the umbilical cord, strangled him and put him in a plastic bag that she threw in the trash. A1 + +2 Diplomats Leave New York +Two diplomats from Russia and Belarus who scuffled with New York City police last December, setting off a season of testy relations between Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and the United Nations diplomatic corps, have quietly left the country.Their departures were a clear signal that the two missions did not want to tangle with the city any longer. B4 + +Judge Rules for Immigrants +The Government cannot use the 1996 antiterrorism law to automatically deport legal immigrants who were convicted of crimes before it was enacted, a Federal judge ruled. B3 + +SPORTS B10-15 + +Upsets at Wimbledon +The second day of play at Wimbledon brought a series of upsets including that of the 5th-seeded player, Michael Chang. B11 + +HEALTH C11 + +Friends Keep Colds Away +A new study has found that people with a broad array of social ties are significantly less likely to catch colds than those with sparse social networks. The lack of diverse social contacts was the strongest of the risk factors for colds that were examined in the study, including smoking, low vitamin C intake and stress. C11 + +BUSINESS DAY D1-19 + +Dow Jones Surges Back +Investors surged back into the stock market a day after it was shaken up in the biggest selloff of the year. The Dow Jones industrial average soared 153.80 points, or 2.02 percent, to close at 7,758.06. D1 + +Business Digest D1 + +EDUCATION B6 + +LIVING C1-10 + +ARTS C13-19 + +OBITUARIES D20 + +Brian Keith +The burly star of television's "Family Affair" and "Hardcastle & McCormick" was 75. D20 + +EDITORIAL A18-19 +Editorials: The Supreme Court -- wrong on sex offenders, right on Whitewater; another broadcast giveaway; summertime for the unions. + +Columns: Maureen Dowd, William Safire. + +Chronicle A16 + +Crossword C18 + +Weather B16 + +LOAD-DATE: June 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +325 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 25, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +SENATE BACKS RISE IN MEDICARE COSTS FOR WEALTHY AGED + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1397 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 24 + +The Senate voted today to increase Medicare premiums for affluent elderly people and to raise the age of eligibility by two years, to 67. +Together, the proposals would make profound changes in Medicare, forcing elderly people to take more responsibility for their health care and their health insurance. + Both proposals are politically explosive, so their fate is in doubt. President Clinton wants Congress to take them out of the bill. The House version of the legislation omits them. The Senate has not only voted to raise the eligibility age but also put itself on record in favor of a form of means test, requiring well-off elderly people to pay more for their health insurance. +Lobbyists for those elderly people promised a campaign to block the changes as the two chambers try to work out their differences this summer. +Today's votes surprised many lawmakers, who recalled the way Democrats attacked Republicans on Medicare in last year's elections. +The vote to charge higher premiums for higher-income elderly people was 70 to 30. Twenty-one Democrats and 49 Republicans voted "yes." Six Republicans and 24 Democrats voted "no." +The vote to increase the age of eligibility was 62 to 38. Twelve Democrats joined 50 Republicans in voting for the increase. Five Republicans and 33 Democrats opposed it. +The proposed increase in the eligibility age for Medicare would take effect gradually from 2003 to 2027, in lock step with increases in the age of eligibility for full Social Security benefits. It would not affect people now over the age of 59. +Earlier today, by a vote of 60 to 40, the Senate decided to establish a new charge of $5 a visit for home health care services under Medicare. +Senate Republican leaders said the changes would help solve Medicare's financial problems, preserving the program for current beneficiaries and for baby boomers. But liberal Democrats said the proposals would break a bargain between the generations, increase the number of uninsured people and cause financial hardship for hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries. +The Republicans' support for these changes was no surprise. But it was noteworthy to see the "yes" votes from Democrats like Senators John B. Breaux of Louisiana, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Bob Graham of Florida and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. +"Medicare is going insolvent in 2001," Mr. Breaux said. "We have an obligation to try and fix it." +Mr. Moynihan said the votes disproved the thesis that "only crisis brings us forward to some sensible responses" to the fiscal problems facing the social insurance programs. +The vote on Medicare premiums put the Senate on record in favor a form of means test, which requires well-off elderly people to pay more for their health insurance. Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, said it was absurd for low-income workers to be subsidizing health care for wealthy retirees, through their payroll taxes. +But Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, said: "This bill breaks the bonds of faith between the people and their Government. It changes 30 years of Medicare in three days. This bill would end Medicare as we know it and turn it into a welfare program." +Under the Senate proposal, the monthly Medicare premium, now $43.80, would quadruple for beneficiaries with annual incomes over $100,000 for individuals ($125,000 for couples). People with incomes under $50,000 a year ($75,000 for couples) would not be affected. For people in between, premiums would rise with their incomes, as the Government reduced its subsidy. +Senator Breaux said 1.6 million of the 38 million Medicare beneficiaries would have to pay higher premiums because of the proposed means test. The proposal would raise $3.9 billion over the next five years, he said. +The Congressional Budget Office said the increase in the eligibility age would not save any money in the next five years, but would save $10 billion from 2003 to 2007. Supporters said the increase was fair because life expectancy had increased since the creation of Medicare in 1965. +For most Medicare beneficiaries, premiums are taken from their monthly Social Security checks. Senate leaders dropped an earlier proposal to enforce the means test by increasing the Medicare deductible for doctors' services, now $100 a year. Clinton Administration officials said the higher deductible would have been virtually impossible to administer and would have been inequitable, because it would have affected many sick people with high doctors' bills. +The changes in Medicare were adopted as part of a large bill intended to balance the Federal budget by 2002. On Wednesday, the House is expected to pass its version of the legislation. +The Senate today brushed aside the objections of President Clinton, who had said Congress should take no action at this time to establish a means test for Medicare, raise the eligibility age or establish co-payments for home health services. +Mr. Clinton said he was willing to consider those proposals at a later date as a way to address Medicare's long-term financial problems. But Senator Phil Gramm, Republican of Texas, said Congress should not wait. Mr. Gramm said it took "an extraordinary act of courage" for senators to support an increase in the eligibility age. +Senator John H. Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, said: "We are facing an emergency here. Something has to be done if the Medicare trust fund is going to survive." +The trust fund that pays hospital bills for the elderly is expected to run out of money in 2001. +Likewise, Senator Conrad said an increase in the eligibility age would help Medicare "deal with a demographic time bomb" as millions of baby boomers start to retire after 2010. +But Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said the proposal would increase the ranks of the uninsured because many people 65 or 66 years old would be unable to obtain or afford private coverage. In Chicago, Mr. Durbin said, private health insurance for a healthy man over the age of 60 costs an average of $6,500 a year, and for those with medical problems, the cost often exceeds $10,000 a year. +"You are retired, you are going fishing, you are taking it easy, and all of a sudden -- no health insurance," he said. "You wait, counting the days until you are eligible for Medicare." +Mr. Durbin said the Chamber of Commerce of the United States and the National Association of Manufacturers opposed an increase in Medicare's eligibility age because it would impose new costs on many businesses. Thousands of companies, he said, have made commitments to provide employees and retirees with health insurance until they become eligible for Medicare. +Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, said it was reckless for Congress to deprive elderly people of Medicare for two years without offering any substitute. +William V. Roth Jr., the Delaware Republican who heads the Senate Finance Committee, said the $5 co-payment was justified because "home health care has exploded in cost." +Medicare spending for home health services increased 31 percent a year, to $16.7 billion in 1996 from $3.3 billion in 1990." +Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma, the assistant Republican leader, said the $5 charge was "not a lot to pay for visits that may cost $70 or $80." +But Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, attacked the proposal, saying it would impose a new tax on "the oldest, poorest and sickest Medicare beneficiaries." +Mr. Kennedy said the money raised by the co-payments -- $4.7 billion over five years -- would be used to finance tax cuts for wealthy people, an assertion that Mr. Nickles dismissed as "total hogwash." +Franklin D. Raines, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said two-thirds of the elderly people using home health services were women, one-third lived alone and nearly half had incomes less than $10,000 a year. +Mr. Roth said poor people -- those with annual incomes under the official poverty level of $7,890 for an individual -- would not have to pay the $5 charge. Medicaid, the Federal-state program for poor people, would pay their fees. +The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Federal share of these Medicaid payments would total $900 million over the next five years, while the states would incur new Medicaid costs of $700 million. + +LOAD-DATE: June 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: As the Senate debated whether to raise Medicare's eligibility age, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan left the floor to take a call on the issue. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times)(pg. A16) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +326 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 25, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +H.M.O.'s Fight Plan to Pay For Some Emergency Care + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1093 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 22 + +For six months, as Congress has considered far-reaching proposals to regulate managed health care, the industry has waged a public relations offensive under the slogan "putting patients first." +But last week, lobbyists for the industry mobilized an extremely different offensive, resisting any requirement to pay for patients who go to hospital emergency rooms reporting severe pain. + The budget bill coming up for debate in the Senate and the House this week would establish new protections for elderly people who join health maintenance organizations. The measure says, for example, that health plans have to pay for emergency care in any situation that a "prudent lay person" would regard as an emergency. +The lobbyists are working overtime to put their imprint on the legislation as Congress, following the lead of many states, sets standards for the quality of care. +Patients, doctors and hospitals say H.M.O.'s have often refused to pay for emergency-room services, saying there was no real emergency, if, for example, chest pains resulted from indigestion rather than a heart attack. +Such denials can leave patients with thousands of dollars in medical bills and discourage them from seeking emergency care. +H.M.O.'s contend that Federal standards are unnecessary and set a bad precedent for Government intervention in the practice of medicine. In the last few weeks, as three Congressional committees endorsed the "prudent lay person" standard, more than a dozen H.M.O. lobbyists patrolled the halls, pressing their case. +Senators Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, and John H. Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, proposed an amendment to make clear that severe pain might be a symptom of an emergency medical condition. +The Senate Finance Committee approved the proposal, 17 to 3. But the fight, which continues as the legislation moves to the floor, epitomizes the struggle over countless items in the budget bill. +The American Association of Health Plans, the national lobby for H.M.O.'s and other managed-care companies, developed "talking points" for its members to use in attacking the Graham-Chafee proposal. In strongly urging lawmakers to oppose the amendment, the association makes these arguments: +*"Pain is a highly subjective term and has vast differences in meaning among consumers, depending on their threshold or tolerance for pain." +*"Overuse of hospital emergency rooms drives up health care costs" and harms care. +*"Hospital emergency-room waiting times are often extensive, causing patients to leave without any medical intervention." +*"Incorrect medications are often prescribed, and medical conditions are often misdiagnosed" because emergency-room doctors have none of the patients' medical records. +The document in which the arguments were published carries no letterhead or other indication of its source. But in an interview, Kristin Bass, director of legislative affairs at the American Association of Health Plans, said: "It was prepared here at A.A.H.P. It was written by our policy analysts and people in our medical affairs department." +The president of the association, Karen M. Ignagni, said the talking points had been distributed to Washington representatives, lawyers and lobbyists for 70 H.M.O.'s who meet once a week to coordinate strategy. +Ms. Ignagni asked, "If you have a root canal and experience severe pain, does that justify a visit to the emergency room?" Another H.M.O. lobbyist said Mr. Graham's amendment would require health plans to pay for patients who stubbed their toes and went to emergency rooms for treatment. +Such arguments infuriate doctors who specialize in emergency medicine and the treatment of pain. +Dr. Joel R. Saper, director of the Michigan Head Pain and Neurological Institute in Ann Arbor, said: "Severe pain can be a sign of serious life-threatening illness. Abdominal pain can be a sign of acute appendicitis. Severe head or neck ache can signal a hemorrhage in the brain. Severe back pain can be an early warning signal of an abdominal aneurysm or cancer of the pancreas." +Thus, Dr. Saper said: "Medicare H.M.O.'s should not be allowed to deny coverage for emergency-room visits by patients in severe pain based on the eventual diagnosis. Patients cannot make this distinction prior to a physician evaluation." +Dr. Andrew T. Nathanson, an emergency-care doctor at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, said: "I frequently evaluate patients having a major heart attack or pulmonary embolism or collapsed lung whose only symptom is chest pain. Other patients with similar symptoms have benign conditions. But the patients and, many times, the doctors don't know the cause until a thorough evaluation is performed. +"If it's one of the benign conditions, insurance companies may retrospectively deny payment, saying the person's condition was obviously not an emergency. But that wasn't obvious at all when the patient first showed up." +Under a 1986 Federal law, a hospital has to provide a diagnostic examination and treatment to stabilize the condition of any patient who requests care in its emergency room. The law explicitly mentions severe pain as a symptom of an emergency medical condition. +But Mr. Graham said, "Current law allows Medicare H.M.O.'s to deny payment for emergency services that the hospital must provide." His bill is intended to eliminate that disparity by establishing a uniform standard for treatment and payment. +Since December, the American Association of Health Plans has issued six policy statements to show its commitment to "putting patients first." H.M.O. officials have said the statements are intended to address consumers' concerns and to head off Federal and state legislation. +Dr. Joanne Wilkinson, coordinator of emergency services at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, an H.M.O. with more than one million members in New England, agreed that a person in severe pain should have access to immediate care. +But in a letter to Senator Chafee, Dr. Wilkinson wrote: "The unacceptable concept is that these services must be reimbursed in emergency rooms if a person chooses to be present there. Many of the symptoms covered in the language of the bill -- e.g., low back pain, migraine headaches, urinary tract infections and sprains -- represent conditions which can be adequately cared for outside of a hospital setting with far less cost." +In her letter, Dr. Wilkinson said the American College of Emergency Physicians was using "emotional anecdotes" to win support for Senator Graham's proposal. + +LOAD-DATE: June 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +327 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 25, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +On Beijing's Leash, the News In Hong Kong May Lose Bite + +BYLINE: By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 4; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 2009 words + +DATELINE: HONG KONG + +For all his amiable veneer, Fong So spends his days in a small office here tormenting a group of old men. +As a book publisher and magazine editor, Mr. Fong regularly skewers China's Communist Party elders. But at midnight on June 30, when China regains control of Hong Kong, the party leaders will have the chance to strike back -- and they may relish the chance to torment Mr. Fong for a change. + Yet Mr. Fong is not fleeing, and neither are many other writers whom Beijing considers counterrevolutionaries or "reactionary elements." +Contrary to the expectations of just a few years ago, China's critics in the local press are mostly sitting tight, preparing for a wrestling match with Communist Party cadres to determine the territory's future. +"We're going to continue," the silver-haired Mr. Fong said grimly as he sat amid a clutter of back issues of his Chinese-language magazine, The Nineties, denouncing the Communist Party. +The willingness of China's critics to stay on is a tribute to the upbeat mood in Hong Kong, and it means that for the first time in Communist China's history, one part of the country will abound in books and magazines openly hostile to the rulers. +Yet the optimism in Hong Kong also sets the stage for a major confrontation in the next few years with Communist hard-liners who never met a publication that they did not like to censor. At stake is Hong Kong's role as an information hub for all of Asia. +Hong Kong is a special headache for international news organizations. Time, Newsweek, the news agencies, CNN and The Wall Street Journal all have regional editions or offices based in Hong Kong, and The International Herald Tribune, owned by The New York Times Company and The Washington Post Company, is printed here. +This is a regional center for news bureaus for publications all over the world, with more foreign correspondents than any other city in Asia. And for decades, Hong Kong has been a prime center for China watchers who publish books and magazines that poke through the Communist Party's dirty laundry. +Can this situation endure? No one really knows, but 86 percent of Hong Kong business executives polled recently by the Far Eastern Economic Review predicted that the territory's press would no longer be free under Chinese rule. +Indeed, the Hong Kong press is already losing some of its vigor, although the responsibility for that seems to lie more with Hong Kong capitalists than with Chinese Communists. +Without Beijing even taking control of the territory, many publications have already begun censoring themselves. Martin C. M. Lee, the leader of the democracy forces in Hong Kong, describes it as "bending even before the wind starts to blow." +This year, the most distinguished of Hong Kong's newspapers, Ming Pao, has reduced the space given to columnists critical of China and has toned down its previously aggressive reporting of China and of Hong Kong politics. +Even some foreign-edited English-language publications are making a pre-emptive retreat. +In a sprawling Roman Catholic mission on a hillside on the south side of Hong Kong Island, Sister Betty Ann Maheu edits Tripod, a newsletter about the Catholic Church in China. Her brow furrowed as she explained her new soft-hitting editorial policy. +"Initially, I think our themes will change, to avoid being political," she said. "You've got to stand by your principles, but you've got to be careful. Because if you're shut down, that won't do any good either." + +Press Freedom: Luxury or Necessity? +If foreigners shielded by the Catholic Church feel intimidated, the anxiety is even greater among Hong Kong Chinese who have no such protections. +"The most insidious thing is that reporters and editors have stopped going after negative aspects of the transition," said one newspaper reporter, who is concerned enough to be considering a switch to a new field. +This is, to be sure, not a universal view. Many business executives argue that the distinguishing feature of the news coverage about Hong Kong these days -- particularly in the foreign press -- is a lurid emphasis on worst-case scenarios that ignores the self-confidence that is much the most obvious side of Hong Kong. +Another basic question is simply whether press freedom matters very much for Hong Kong as a whole. Journalists warn that Hong Kong's currency is information and that the territory will collapse as a business center if it loses the free flow of news. But others argue that a vigorous press is a luxury for Hong Kong rather than a necessity. +"The fact is that Singapore, with press censorship, is a business center, and the Philippines, without censorship, is not," said Robert Broadfoot, a business consultant in Hong Kong who has just produced a report on the news media in the region. "If you're looking at where investment is going, it's going to China, which has the heaviest censorship." +In the 1980's, there was widespread speculation that some of these news organizations might have to move to a new home after 1997. But in fact, Western publications are not only keeping their headquarters in Hong Kong but expanding them. +"For 50 years our Asia edition had been edited in New York," said Donald M. Morrison, the editor of Time magazine's Asia edition, with a circulation of 300,000. "Now this year we moved every vestige of it to Hong Kong." +"We think this is a great place to run a regional news operation," he added. +So far only a few publications -- principally China-watching publications edited by Christian groups -- have moved from Hong Kong for political reasons. Reuters is moving the headquarters of its news-gathering and financial services operations in Asia to Singapore this year, along with about 30 jobs, but it says the purpose is to save money. +"If the concern were freedom of the press," said Marion R. King, managing director for Reuters in East Asia, "we probably wouldn't have chosen Singapore." +The handover to China marks the first time that most Western news organizations have had major assets and operations under Communist rule, and it raises the delicate question of whether China will gain leverage over the editorial policies of Western news organizations. +One nightmare would be a quiet warning by a senior Chinese official that a media company's non-editorial business operations in China and Hong Kong would be jeopardized unless an aggressive reporter was reassigned. + +The Pressure Of the Pocketbook +Companies like Dow Jones and Reuters are potentially among the most vulnerable, because they have major business ventures that sell financial data like stock quotes and exchange rates in both China and Hong Kong. +For Dow Jones, an article exposing a scandal about the Chinese President, Jiang Zemin, in The Asian Wall Street Journal or The Far Eastern Economic Review, which it also owns, could potentially harm Dow Jones Markets, its data service. In business terms, Hong Kong is arguably more imporant to these companies as a financial market rather than as a base for news operations. +Commercial pressure from China may already have led a Western company to gut its news product. +In 1993, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation acquired control of Star TV, a Hong Kong-based satellite television service that upset the Chinese authorities because it beamed BBC television news into China. Mr. Murdoch wanted to discuss a range of business projects with China, and soon Star TV quietly dropped the BBC channel. +Still, many news organizations say they would strongly resist any pressure on editorial content. +"People know that Dow Jones has over the years paid a considerable price for maintaining its editorial independence," said L. Gordon Crovitz, the senior executive in Asia for Dow Jones. He noted that the Far Eastern Economic Review had been banned in almost every country in Asia at some point in the last 50 years. +The challenges of taking on China are strikingly apparent in the travails of Jimmy Lai, one of the territory's media magnates. Mr. Lai owns two of Hong Kong's hottest and hardest-hitting publications: Next magazine, a sprightly mix of politics, fashion and popular culture, and Apple Daily, a best-selling newspaper. +The difficulty for these publications is that Mr. Lai is hated by China, in part because he once referred to Prime Minister Li Peng as a "turtle's egg" -- a Chinese expression raising doubts about one's paternity. +As a result of this tension, many mainstream Hong Kong companies are steering clear of Next and Apple Daily by avoiding interviews and holding back advertising. +This spring, Next Corporation tried to go public, in part because it thought that the move would give it a bit of protection against harassment by the Chinese authorities. But when it approached a dozen investment banks, not one would handle the public offering, apparently in part for fear of associating with a company unfriendly to Beijing. +Newspaper and magazine editors in Hong Kong have several nightmares. One is that the Chinese authorities will learn from Singapore's example and rely on a cooperative legal system to sue publications for defamation, so that critics are not so much banned as bankrupted. +One of the latest examples of Singapore's approach came a few weeks ago when a court in that country ordered a critic of the Government to pay senior officials $5.7 million for defaming them. The critic, Tang Liang Hong, had called Singapore leaders liars after they attacked him as an ethnic Chinese chauvinist. +Mr. Tang has fled Singapore, and officials there have said they may force him into bankruptcy. +Another fear in Hong Kong is that criminal laws will be used to harass and punish aggressive journalists. In particular, some experts are concerned that the new Beijing-backed Government in Hong Kong has decided to import the Chinese legal concept of "state security." + +Journalism's Crimes And Punishments +"We know what China means by state security," said Robin Munro, the director of the Hong Kong office of Human Rights Watch/Asia, the New York-based human rights organization. "It means suppressing perfectly innocent and innocuous dissidents by putting them in prison for 15 years." +Another fear is that journalists will be punished under Chinese rather than Hong Kong law. Several Hong Kong reporters have been detained over the years in China, and Chinese officials have occasionally kidnapped suspects abroad and hustled them into China to be tried by Chinese courts. +"Many people are worried that the State Security people will come to Hong Kong and spirit a reporter out to China, so that he would be tried in China and would have no recourse to the Hong Kong judicial process," said a reporter for a major Hong Kong newspaper. +Yet another concern is that Chinese officials might ask criminals to maim or kill journalists who write annoying articles. "That is not yet happening, but it may happen in the future," said Leung Tin Wai, publisher of the free-spirited Surprise Weekly. +Mr. Leung knows something about gangster violence. Last year, two men entered his offices, pulled out meat cleavers and chopped off his left hand. Mr. Leung and others say they do not know who ordered the attack, although few suspect that it was linked to politics. +In the days of dictatorship in Taiwan, Government officials sometimes asked gangsters to assault critical journalists, and a similar cooperative web has developed between some Chinese officials and criminal gangs. Still while many journalists acknowledge the possibility of being physically attacked, they tend to view it as unlikely. +Most probable, many say, is a growing pressure on critical publications and a moderate decline in the vigor of Hong Kong news organizations, a trend that they say is already visible. +"I'm not saying that the press in Hong Kong won't change," said Jin Zhong, the editor of Open Magazine, which publishes frequent exposes about China. "It's already changing. But it's a change that Hong Kong can live with." + +LOAD-DATE: June 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +SERIES: WAITING FOR CHINA: A Jittery Press + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Newsstands in Hong Kong sell scores of newspapers and magazines produced there and around the world. Hong Kong's role as an information hub for all of Asia is at stake as the territory returns to Chinese control. Like other critics of Beijing, Fong So, a book publisher and magazine editor, is sitting tight, ready to wrestle with Hong Kong's new rulers. (Photographs by Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times)(pg. A8) + +TYPE: Series + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +328 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 25, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +How Senate Voted On Medicare Costs + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 311 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 24 + +Following is the 70-to-30 roll-call by which the Senate voted today to charge higher monthly Medicare premiums for higher-income elderly people. A "yes" vote was a vote to increase the premiums. Voting "yes" were 49 Republicans and 21 Democrats. Voting "no" were 24 Democrats and 6 Republicans. + +REPUBLICANS YES + +Allard, Colo.; Ashcroft, Mo.; Bennett, Utah; Bond, Mo.; Brownback, Kan.; Burns, Mont.; Campbell, Colo.; Chafee, R.I.; Coats, Ind.; Cochran, Miss.; Collins, Me.; Craig, Idaho; DeWine, Ohio; Domenici, N.M.; Enzi, Wyo.; Faircloth, N.C.; Frist, Tenn.; Gorton, Wash.; Gramm, Tex.; Grams, Minn.; Grassley, Iowa; Gregg, N.H.; Hagel, Neb.; Hatch, Utah; Helms, N.C.; Hutchinson, Ark.; Hutchison, Tex.; Inhofe, Okla.; Jeffords, Vt.; Kempthorne, Idaho; Kyl, Ariz.; Lott, Miss.; Lugar, Ind.; Mack, Fla.; McConnell, Ky.; Murkowski, Alaska; Nickles, Okla.; Roberts, Kan.; Roth, Del.; Santorum, Pa.; Sessions, Ala.; Shelby, Ala.; Smith, N.H.; Smith, Ore.; Stevens, Alaska; Thomas, Wyo.; Thompson, Tenn.; Thurmond, S.C.; Warner, Va. + +REPUBLICANS NO + +Abraham, Mich.; Coverdell, Ga.; D'Amato, N.Y.; McCain, Ariz.; Snowe, Me.; Specter, Pa. + +DEMOCRATS YES + +Baucus, Mont.; Bingaman, N.M.; Breaux, La.; Bryan, Nev.; Bumpers, Ark.; Conrad, N.D.; Dodd, Conn.; Feingold, Wis.; Feinstein, Calif.; Glenn, Ohio; Graham, Fla.; Harkin, Iowa; Hollings, S.C.; Kerrey, Neb.; Kerry, Mass.; Kohl, Wis.; Landrieu, La.; Levin, Mich.; Lieberman, Conn.; Moynihan, N.Y.; Robb, Va. + +DEMOCRATS NO + +Akaka, Hawaii; Biden, Del.; Boxer, Calif.; Byrd, W.Va.; Cleland, Ga.; Daschle, S.D.; Dorgan, N.D.; Durbin, Ill.; Ford, Ky.; Inouye, Hawaii; Johnson, S.D.; Kennedy, Mass.; Lautenberg, N.J.; Leahy, Vt.; Mikulski, Md.; Moseley-Braun, Ill.; Murray, Wash.; Reed, R.I.; Reid, Nev.; Rockefeller, W.Va.; Sarbanes, Md.; Torricelli, N.J.; Wellstone, Minn.; Wyden, Ore. + +LOAD-DATE: June 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: List + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +329 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 26, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Transit Aid Is Offered To Workers On Welfare + +BYLINE: By JENNIFER PRESTON + +SECTION: Section B; Page 2; Column 6; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 779 words + +DATELINE: TRENTON, June 25 + +Gov. Christine Todd Whitman announced today a new transportation program intended to help welfare recipients overcome one of their biggest barriers to moving off the welfare rolls -- getting to their jobs. +Experts say that transportation is the second biggest obstacle, after child care, facing welfare recipients, who must find jobs within two years or risk losing cash benefits under the new state and Federal welfare laws. + New Jersey is among a handful of states to come up with a program addressing increased demands by welfare recipients for transportation to jobs, training programs and child care sites. In New York State, the Legislature is still debating Gov. George E. Pataki's welfare proposal, which would give county governments block grants to pay for transportation programs and other welfare support services. Officials in Connecticut have agreed to spend $2.2 million in the coming year to help develop alternatives, like van pools and new bus routes, for welfare recipients in Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport. +The Whitman administration's new $3.7 million program would offer free New Jersey Transit bus and train passes to welfare recipients for two months after they have found work. It would also help counties pay for other transportation services and the expansion of programs that ferry Medicaid recipients, senior citizens and disabled people to doctors' appointments. +Governor Whitman said the state has a commitment to provide welfare recipients the support and services they need to find and keep a job. +"This new initiative will insure that they can get to that job," she said during a visit to United Parcel Service's plant in Secaucus. "Clearly the jobs are there. Now we will be augmenting existing transportation networks to help individuals who leave the welfare rolls get to those jobs." +Phil Harris, district manager for United Parcel Service, said the company would have 5,000 entry-level job openings this year, at plants around the state, for which welfare recipients in New Jersey's Work First program may be qualified. +The company's plant in Secaucus is not near a train station, and bus service is limited. But the state program could help pay for van pools to transport welfare recipients to the job, state officials said. +Even in states with extensive public transportation systems like New Jersey's, traditional mass transit corridors are intended to move commuters from suburbs into cities. They do not provide access for many city residents seeking to travel to entry-level jobs in the suburbs, where most new jobs have been created in recent years. +Until passage of the new Federal welfare law, most states did not have to address the problem of helping welfare recipients get to jobs. If welfare recipients could not find transportation, they were exempted from work requirements. But welfare recipients now face a five-year lifetime limit on cash benefits and the prospect of losing benefits if they do not find a job within two years. +Most New Jerseyans get to work by car, state officials said. But operating a car costs $6,000 a year in the state, forcing most welfare recipients to depend on public transit or family and friends. Under the new program, the state will create a Transportation Innovation Fund to help county governments develop alternative transportation routes and to cover much of the cost of two demonstration projects that are under way in two counties. +In Gloucester County, the state determined that 95 percent of the welfare recipients lived within a half-mile of a bus stop, but that most participants in work programs were not using their $6 daily transportation allowance on bus fares because bus routes took them only part of the way to their jobs. +Under the demonstration program, welfare recipients use public transportation for most of their commute and then shuttle buses pick them up and take them to their community work assignments or job sites. Now, 61 out of 70 welfare recipients in work programs use bus passes, state officials said. +At United Parcel Service in Secaucus, Lashawn Bevins, 22, of Jersey City, began working as a part-time loader five weeks ago, being paid $8 an hour. She is hoping, she said, that the job will help end her dependency on welfare benefits, which she has been receiving for the last three and a half years. +Ms. Bevins leaves her home at 9:45 A..M. to catch a bus to get her to work by 11 A.M. She previously worked at Newark International Airport, but could not endure the two-and-a-half-hour bus trip she had to make to arrive by 6 A.M., she said. +"I have a 4-year-old, and I was trekking out at 3:30 A.M.," she said. + +LOAD-DATE: June 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +330 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 26, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +SENIOR CLASS; +When Gambling Threatens a Nest Egg + +BYLINE: By ROBERT W. STOCK + +SECTION: Section C; Page 8; Column 3; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 1067 words + +"ALL those years I worked, I wanted to make sure of one thing," said Al, a 75-year-old retired New Jersey businessman who declined to give his last name. "I wanted to have financial security in my old age. I almost lost it all at the craps table." +Wherever there are games of chance, there are older people, feeding the slot machines in the neon glow of casinos, lined up for lottery tickets or bingo boards, signed up for gambling cruises or logged on to Internet games. And as the ranks of the elderly increase, so does the number of problem gamblers. + Al (who, like all members of Gamblers Anonymous, uses a truncated surname) never gambled until he stopped working. "Then, my wife and I would go down to Atlantic City once in a while," he said. "She died a year ago and my friends moved to Florida." Like so many older people, Al, in his loneliness and depression, turned to gambling. Soon, he was spending three or four days a week at the casinos, winning sometimes, but mostly watching croupiers collect his life savings. +The term "problem gambler" encompasses both those who are compulsive gamblers, victims of a bona fide psychiatric disorder, and those who are on the verge. Compulsive gamblers like Al have lost control of their urge and constantly increase the size and frequency of their bets, obsessed with the need to find ever more money to wager. +No one knows exactly how many Americans are problem gamblers. Fifteen states have conducted surveys over the years, but there has been no national study since the psychiatric criteria for compulsive gambling were defined by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. It is estimated that, nationally, 4 percent to 6 percent of adults are problem gamblers. But among the states studied, New York leads, with 7 percent of its adults having a problem with gambling. +Many problem gamblers quit as they age. The elderly in general tend to have fewer gambling problems than younger generations, but that may be changing. Various state councils on problem gambling report growing numbers of calls to their help lines from and about older addicts. In New Jersey, 13 percent of the calls last year concerned gamblers who were 55 and over -- up from 11 percent the year before. In Minnesota, calls about gamblers 63 and over rose to 8 percent of the total last year, from 3 percent in 1992. Spurred by such numbers, some state councils have developed programs to alert organizations for the elderly to the dangers of gambling. +Whatever their ages, compulsive gamblers are no less addicted than alcoholics, gambling experts say, but they often go undetected until the late stages of their illness. They don't stumble or slur their words. Yet, they have the same kind of uncontrollable urge, and the effects of their addiction can be devastating. +Most late-onset gamblers are seeking escape from the boredom of retirement or the loss of loved ones, said Marvin A. Steinberg, a clinical psychologist and the executive director of the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling. "Sitting in front of a video poker machine, in this fantasy world, they forget their problems," Mr. Steinberg said. "Then they can't stop. And once they've lost their nest egg, unlike younger people, they can never get it back." +A woman who gave her name only as Joan, of Upstate New York, became addicted to gambling a decade ago at age 50. She did it all, from craps tables to poker machines to pull-tabs at bingo parlors. "I started out just for the high, and lost, and then I had to make back the losses," she said. "Of course, I never did. I maxed out six credit cards and spent my daughter's trust fund. I hid it all from my husband, beating him to the mailbox and the phone. In the end, I tried to kill myself." +Society is tough on problem gamblers, said Laura Letson, the executive director of the New York State Council on Problem Gambling, because people think gamblers should be able simply to stop. +At a recent 8 P.M. meeting of Gamblers Anonymous in a basement auditorium at St. Clare's Hospital in Manhattan, members greeted each other with great warmth, reflecting the many hours of confession and consolation they had shared. Like members of Alcoholics Anonymous, they believe they can maintain normal lives only through abstinence. +"My name is Morty L., and I am a compulsive gambler," said one 78-year-old speaker, using as they all do only the initial of his last name. "I had 36 years of hell, and on July 14, I will celebrate 30 years of abstinence." The room echoed with cheers and applause. +"I'm a responsible individual," he continued. "I have people who love me. I'm financially secure. In hell, none of that was true. My children went without food. Therapists gave me antidepressants and sent me to a hospital for shock treatment. It didn't work. G. A. worked." +Several state councils on problem gambling have recently introduced programs to identify and assist hidden older addicts. In Minnesota, the council distributed posters that show an older woman at a slot machine and ask: "Do you really want to spend your golden years hooked up to a machine?" New Jersey last year began dispatching speakers to senior centers and retirement communities to talk about the warning signs of addiction and where to get help. +Those signs include mood swings, a tendency to be constantly short of money for food and bills, and a growing impatience with everything and everyone unconnected with gambling. (Information on treatment options, including local mental health care services and local Gamblers Anonymous meetings, is available from the National Council on Problem Gambling, 800-522-4700.) +Experts say the increase in older problem gamblers is likely to continue, in part because the elderly population is on the rise. The elderly these days also tend to have more disposable income, while gambling opportunities are multiplying. New, ever more enticing varieties of video gambling games are making their appearance, and the Internet has brought casinos to the elderly homebound. The Internet has also brought them the stock market, which can be a problem for gambling addicts. +"These people obsess on the market," said Mr. Steinberg of the Connecticut council. "They're in action all the time, calling their broker. They're just like any compulsive gambler, except that they're older -- and they've got everything to lose." + +LOAD-DATE: June 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +331 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 26, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Inevitable Surgery on Medicare + +SECTION: Section A; Page 26; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 445 words + +The Senate's votes to raise Medicare premiums for wealthy retirees and to raise the age of eligibility were a sensible start down a road that has to be taken. If Congress does not reduce soaring Medicare costs in ways that protect the needy, it will eventually be forced to cut wantonly. But the policy implications are less remarkable than the fact that 70 senators had the guts to take necessary action despite the opposition of the elderly, a powerful constituency. When Congress voted in 1988 to raise Medicare premiums on wealthier retirees, the elderly forced it to repeal the decision. Something has changed for the better on Capitol Hill, in ways that will color future debates on Medicare and other privileged sanctuaries of the Federal budget. +Senators have known, in part because Phil Gramm of Texas tells them so at every provocation, that Medicare is at the forefront of an imminent budget crunch. It will drain the treasury over the next 10 years of $1.6 trillion, because health expenditures are outstripping inflation and because tens of millions of baby boomers are lining up to retire. Everything else the Government does will have to survive on rapidly diminishing resources. + This week's Senate vote shows that Congress is moving from a sterile debate over whether to cut Medicare growth to a useful debate about means. The Senate Finance Committee, behind Bob Kerrey of Nebraska and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, took the lead, arguing that Congress should target the inevitable cuts on those who could afford a small hit. The chairman, William Roth, provided leeway for a bipartisan debate. The starkest proof that the political landscape has shifted, however, is the vote of Bob Graham of Florida -- a Democrat up for re-election from a state chock full of retirees. Compare his courage with the timid platitudes from the White House. President Clinton says the Senate reforms might make sense, but not yet. +Some senators had legitimate reasons to oppose the Medicare changes. For example, the Senate plan would raise the age of Medicare eligibility in parallel with already approved hikes in the age of Social Security eligibility. But the Senate plan does not allow for early retirees to sign up for Medicare, as they can for Social Security. Congress will need to correct this defect. +The Medicare changes are unlikely to survive a House-Senate conference. But now that 70 senators have voted to means-test premiums and 62 have approved raising the age of eligibility, no member need any longer run for cover when Congress, or, as expected, a Presidential commission next year, debates cutting entitlements for the elderly. + +LOAD-DATE: June 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +332 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 28, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Doctor in Negligence Case Gets His Sentence Eased + +BYLINE: By ESTHER B. FEIN + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 25; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 705 words + +Gov. George E. Pataki announced yesterday that he was commuting the sentence of Dr. Gerald Einaugler, a New York physician who was convicted of criminal negligence for his treatment of an ailing nursing home patient who later died. +Six weeks ago, Dr. Einaugler began serving what was to have been a year of weekends at Rikers Island because a jury found four years ago that he had acted criminally when he failed to hospitalize a patient after making an error in his treatment of her that jeopardized her health. + Governor Pataki has ordered that instead of the 52 weekends in jail, Dr. Einaugler serve 52 days of community service as a physician. It was the 10th time since he was elected, and the first time this year, that the Governor has granted clemency. +"My decision to commute this sentence does not signal a lack of respect for the jury's decision," the Governor said in a statement. "Rather, it reflects my belief that the people are better served if Dr. Einaugler is required to perform community service." +Representatives of the Medical Society of the State of New York, the American Medical Association and colleagues and patients of Dr. Einaugler had written to the Governor, maintaining that Dr. Einaugler had been wrongly charged, tried and convicted for exercising his medical judgment in good faith. +Several supporters of Dr. Einaugler said yesterday that it was ironic that although the doctor was convicted of treating a patient improperly, the Governor had ordered that he perform his community service as a doctor. Surely, they reasoned, Mr. Pataki had concluded that Dr. Einaugler acted as a competent physician, or else he would never have entrusted him to practice medicine as his alternative sentence. +Dr. Einaugler's case generated tremendous controversy. Prosecutors argued that he acted recklessly and negligently in May 1990 when he held off transferring a nursing home patient to the hospital after discovering that he had ordered nutritional supplements pumped through a dialysis catheter that he had mistaken for a feeding tube. +The patient, an elderly woman near death from renal failure, later died, and while Dr. Einaugler was never charged in her death, prosecutors said the lapse in admitting her to the hospital was criminal. +Scores of doctors jumped to Dr. Einaugler's defense, saying that when he discovered his error, he had sought and followed the advice of the patient's kidney specialist. +Although Dr. Einaugler failed to have the conviction overturned, at least two judges who reviewed the case said they believed the judgment was wrong. The statement from the Governor's office yesterday referred to one of those judges, citing a statement by Federal Judge Edward R. Korman, who had said he regretted that it was not within his legal authority to change Dr. Einaugler's fate. "If I had the power to set aside the verdict in the interests of justice, I would," Judge Korman said when the case came before him. +The Governor's statement also noted that although Dr. Einaugler had been convicted by a jury, the State Office of Professional and Medical Conduct reviewed the case and decided that he did not deserve to be sanctioned. His medical license was never suspended or revoked, and he continued to treat his mostly elderly patients in his office in Brooklyn. +Yesterday, Dr. Einaugler said that he was grateful and relieved by the Governor's decision, and praised Mr. Pataki for "having the courage and integrity to commute my sentence." +In the six weekends he spent at Rikers Island, Dr. Einaugler said that he was treated well by the guards and inmates and that he relieved his boredom by watching television. As a weekend prisoner, he was not allowed to bring any reading material with him and the library was closed during the time he was there, from Saturday mornings to Sunday evenings. +"For seven years, it's been a terrible ordeal," said Dr. Einaugler, who was planning a quiet evening at home with his family, grateful that he would not have to wake early to make the drive from his house in Hewlett to the prison. "And while I wish to express my everlasting gratitude to the Governor, nobody is going to give me or my family those seven years back." + +LOAD-DATE: June 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +333 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 28, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Liberties; +Starrk Raving Mad + +BYLINE: By MAUREEN DOWD + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 21; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 706 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + + +THE WASHINGTON POST +Saturday, June 28, 2027 +STARR EXPANDS CLINTON PROBE +By Bob Woodward +Washington Post Staff Writer +F.B.I. agents and prosecutors working for Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr's Whitewater investigation have questioned gerontologists and pharmacists in recent months about any knowledge they might have of whether former President Bill Clinton has switched from Fibercon to Metamucil, according to sources close to the investigation. + Agents have also questioned a number of elderly women whose names have been mentioned in connection with Clinton since he moved to a condo on the 16th hole at the Tiger Woods Golf Retirement Villas and Racial Healing Center in Oxnard, Calif., the sources said, to see if the ex-President had confided in them about changing brands. +Sidney Blumenthal, a spokesman/ taster for Clinton, said last night he had no immediate comment on the 81-year-old former President's level of fiber intake. +Mr. Clinton's former wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton Rodham, chairman of the board of RJR Nabisco Disney and president emeritus of the Chicago Commodities Exchange, said she "no longer had to worry about what Bill Clinton put in his stomach. But I wish him well." +Susan McDougal, who has been manacled to Starr's desk for several years now, reiterated that she would "never rat out my honeybear Bill for getting me that illegal loan." +The nature of the questioning by Starr's office marks yet another sharp departure from previous labyrinthine avenues of inquiry in his 33-year-old investigation. +Starr started out with an incomprehensible land deal from 1978 and widened his scope to include everything incomprehensible Clinton had ever done. Then he widened his scope to include everything incomprehensible Clinton might have done, including whether he had used a $25,000 "sex slush fund" from James McDougal's S.&L. to buy little black teddies and big bottles of Soave Bolla for girlfriends. +He also looked into Clinton connections to Area 51 and Roswell, the Bay of Pigs, the Trilateral Commission and the Iran-contra affair. +After Clinton left the White House and accepted a job as dean of the Pepperdine Law School in Malibu, Starr's probe grew much wider. Starr adopted the maxim "Follow the honeys," looking into all contacts Dean Clinton had with his female students. Excited to be doing his sexual sleuthing in real time, Starr would sometimes escort the young ladies to their appointments with the dean. At night, the Independent Counsel would break into the dean's beachfront office with a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass to search for evidence. +Earlier this year, when Chelsea Clinton Cuomo became the youngest Supreme Court Justice in history, appointed by President Joseph Kennedy, Starr, who was mentioned as a Supreme Court contender back in the era when people did not think he was just a dirty old man, responded by widening the probe yet again. His office tracked down the grandchildren of eight Arkansas state troopers, now deceased, to see if they had heard anything their granddads might have said about anything any women who knew Clinton might have said about anything Clinton might have said about anything at all. +Starr now runs the second-largest division in government, after the Bureau of Government Reinvention, which grew like Topsy during President Gore's terms. +The reclusive Starr emerged for a few moments to speak to CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer Jr. His hair scraggly, his fingernails curling a la Howard Hughes, Starr shook his fist at critics who say his probe has become a creepy obsession. +He was unmoved, 28 years ago, when Paula Jones recanted and said she thought Clinton had "sexy hair." +He said that, given the ex-President's age, he would no longer investigate whether Clinton was cavorting with a lot of women. He will only look into whether Clinton still thinks about cavorting with a lot of women. +Starr said he would not be satisfied until he got the deathbed confessions of Bruce Lindsey and Webster Hubbell, but conceded that that might take awhile, since both remain in robust health and share a condo at the retirement home with Mr. Clinton and Mr. Blumenthal. +See GEEZERGATE, A14, Col. 1 + +LOAD-DATE: June 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +334 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 29, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WHAT'S DOING IN; +Cooperstown + +BYLINE: By JAMES DAO; JAMES DAO is chief of the Albany bureau of The New York Times. + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 16; Column 1; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 1847 words + +More than two centuries after it was founded by a New Jersey transplant named William Cooper, Cooperstown still seems to rise out of an unspoiled wilderness to greet the traveler like a snug village stuck in time. Nestled on the south shore of placid Otsego Lake -- dubbed Glimmerglass by the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, William's son -- the village is rimmed by verdant hills, beyond which are rolling cornfields and a brown creek called the Susquehanna, just beginning its journey to the Chesapeake Bay. +The town, about four and a half hours by car from New York City, has preserved a frontier feel. With 2,400 residents, Cooperstown has barely grown since 1800, when it was a major stop for pioneers going west. It is dotted with mint-condition 19th-century buildings made of clapboard or red brick, with many fine examples of Victorian or Federal architecture. And for all the commercial hoopla generated by the most famous local business, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, the tidy village center is still only three blocks long, split by a single blinking light and a flagpole. + Summer brings the induction of new members to the Hall of Fame and the Glimmerglass Opera, at the Alice Busch Opera Theater, on the lake 10 miles north of the village. And the region has other offerings to savor, from antique shops and museums to fishing and hiking. + +Events + The 23d Glimmerglass Opera season begins on Thursday and extends until Aug. 25. This year's offerings are Puccini's "Madama Butterfly," "Iphigenie en Tauride" by Gluck, "L'Italiana in Algeri" by Rossini and "Of Mice and Men" by Carlisle Floyd. The performers, directors and crew have worked at such opera companies as the Metropolitan, the Lyric of Chicago and the Royal Opera, Covent Garden. +Performances are in the 912-seat Alice Busch, a spare, elegant building designed by Hugh Hardy to blend into the surrounding farmland. Tickets are $19 to $65 for weekday performances and $29 to $70 Friday through Sunday. Discounts for groups, senior citizens and students are available. Reservations are recommended for matinees and weekends; call (607) 547-2255. +The opera's Gala Weekend, July 24-27, offers the first chance this summer to see all four operas on successive days. The weekend includes a symposium, "The High Classical Tone: Gluck and the Fine Arts," with the historian and philosopher Jacques Barzun and the art historian Rosamond Bernier. For information, call (607) 547-5704. +The Hall of Fame induction ceremony, which is free, will be Aug. 3 at at Clark Sports Center, on Lower Susquehanna Avenue. Phil Niekro, Tom Lasorda, Nelson Fox and Willie Wells will be enshrined. The annual Hall of Fame exhibition game -- this year it is the Los Angeles Dodgers against the San Diego Padres -- will be on Aug. 4 at Doubleday Field, a block from the Hall of Fame. The game is sold out, but tickets sometimes become available at the last minute. The weekend begins with a free game between minor league teams, the Oneonta Yankees and the Auburn Doubledays, on Aug. 2 at 2 P.M. Information: (607) 547-0215. +The region is ripe with antique shops, and a major antique show will be held on July 6 outside Wood Bull Antiques on Route 28 in Milford, about 10 miles south of Cooperstown. Under tents, 100 dealers will display country and Victorian furniture, fine china, jewelry, quilts, pottery and more. Hours are 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. Admission is $2.50 or for early buyers at 7 A.M., $20; (607) 286-9021. The show will be repeated Aug. 31. + +Sightseeing + The Hall of Fame, a brick Federal-style building on Main Street, is open daily from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M. It was built in Cooperstown based on the story -- disputed by many historians -- that Abner Doubleday organized the first modern baseball game there. +The memorabilia includes Joe DiMaggio's locker and Brooks Robinson's glove, and rooms are devoted to Babe Ruth and baseball in the movies. A new exhibit, "Pride and Passion: The African-American Baseball Experience," documenting black players as far back as the mid-19th century, opened June 12. Admission is $9.50, $8 for those 65 and older and $4 for those 7 to 12. +This week, "Matty," a one-man show by Eddie Frierson about the pitcher Christy Mathewson, which played off Broadway last year, will be presented in the museum's theater. Performances are at 7:30 P.M. Thursday and Friday, and 6 P.M. Saturday. Tickets are $12, $6 for children, but discounted with museum admission; (607) 547-7200. +As one might expect, there are any number of baseball souvenir shops in the village. But Toad Hall, at 63 Pioneer Street, can sate other shopping desires. In what was originally a church, the store offers a huge collection of handmade furniture, pottery and folk art; (607) 547-4044. +Fenimore House Museum, one mile north of Cooperstown, has a fine collection of folk art. A new wing devoted to the Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art contains a wide sampling of clothing, pottery, jewelry and wood carvings. Other exhibits are devoted to paintings depicting Cooper's family and scenes from his novels, landscapes by Thomas Cole and others of the Hudson River School, and folk art. The museum is on Route 80 in a fieldstone mansion. Tickets: $9, $8 for 65 and older, and $4 for 7 to 12. Hours: daily 9 A.M to 5 P.M.; (607) 547-1400. +Just across the road is the Farmers' Museum, a collection of 19th-century buildings moved from their original sites to recreate a working farm village. The main barn has exhibits of farm technology and tools, and the 12 other buildings include a one-room school, an apothecary and a Methodist church. Volunteers pound out horseshoes, roast coffee at the tavern and make and sell soap and candles at the general store. There is also a snack bar and shop. +The museum is open 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. daily. Admission is the same as for the Fenimore House, but a combined ticket for both museums is available for $14.50, $6.50 for children. At 7:30 P.M. on Friday in July and August, there is live bluegrass music at the barn; $8, free under age 14; (607) 547-1450. +Following the rolling eastern shoreline of Otsego Lake north on Route 31 leads to Hyde Hall, a 50-room limestone mansion built in 1817 eight miles from Cooperstown by a wealthy property owner, George Hyde Clarke. It was nearly demolished earlier this century because it was in bad shape when the state acquired it. About a quarter of the rooms have been restored with elegant 19th-century period furnishings. Admission is $5; (607) 547-5098. +Glimmerglass State Park is on 600 acres adjacent to Hyde Hall, and includes a sandy beach, 36 campsites, picnic areas, a beaver pond and hiking and biking trails. Reservations for campsites are recommended; (800) 456-2267. If you want to try to catch coho salmon or lake trout (or just want to tour the lake), Sam Smith's Boatyard, on Route 80 on the west shore, rents boats. Canoes cost $10 an hour and four-seater motor boats for $125 for four hours; (607) 547-2543. +To offer a few golf balls to the fish, head to Otsego Golf Course, a public links on Route 80 at the north end of the lake. The greens fee is $20 for 18 holes; (607) 547-9290. + +Where to Stay + Accommodations can be hard to find on most summer weekends. For help, call the Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce, (607) 547-9983. +At 16 Chestnut Street just off Main Street is a fine example of local architecture, the Inn at Cooperstown, built in 1874 under the direction of Henry Hardenbergh, who also designed the Dakota apartment house on Central Park West. This recently renovated Victorian hotel has 18 small but comfortable rooms with country-style furnishings and private baths. Guests are offered afternoon tea on the sweeping front porch. Doubles begin at $98 a night, including Continental breakfast; (607) 547-5756; fax, (607) 547-8779. +In the middle of town is the Angelholm, a five-room 1805 Federal B & B at 14 Elm Street, overlooking Doubleday Field. Rooms, all with private bath, begin at $85; (607) 547-2483. +Edgefield is a formalized farmhouse with five rooms (with private baths) decorated in the English country manner. It is in Sharon Springs, a 20-minute drive east of the opera house. Rooms are $95 to $125; (518) 284-3339. +Budget: The lake shore is lined with motels. The Hickory Grove Motor Inn on Route 80 six miles north of Cooperstown has 12 rooms, all with cathedral ceilings and views of the lake, a beach and paddle boats. A double is $98; (607) 547-9874, fax (607) 547-8567. +Three miles from the opera house is the Glimmerglass Motor Inn on Route 20, a mile west of Route 80 in Springfield Center. Set back from the road on three wooded acres, the motel has 10 rooms, with doubles starting at $59; (315) 858-2777. +Luxury: The Otesaga, on the southern tip of Otsego Lake, is the signature hotel of Cooperstown. Built in 1909, this five-story brick hotel with mansard roof and towering white-columned portico has 136 rooms, a heated pool, 18-hole golf course and 2 tennis courts. Most rooms have high ceilings and Colonial-style furnishings. A wide patio in the rear provides a panoramic view of the lake, rocking chairs and cocktail service. Rates include breakfast and dinner in either the casual Hawkeye Bar and Grill or the main dining room, where jackets are required. Doubles start at $270. Call (800) 348-6222, fax (607) 547-9675. +The Cooper Inn, a hotel owned by the Otesaga, is at Main and Chestnut Streets in the heart of the village. This landmark Federal-style house has 20 rooms and suites, each with private bath, and offers the atmosphere of a B & B, with cozy reading and living rooms. Continental breakfast is included, and guests can use facilities at the Otesaga. Doubles are $145. Call (800) 348-6222 for reservations, or fax (607) 547-1271. + +Where to Eat + Under the green awnings at the corner of Main and Chestnut is Gabriella's on the Square, a charming trattoria that opened in April. Appetizers include grilled portobello mushrooms with roasted peppers ($6.95), entrees seared chicken and artichoke hearts in red pepper sauce over fettuccine ($15.95) and grilled swordfish with fresh fruit salsa ($18.95). A meal for two with wine is about $80; (607) 547-8000. +The Blue Mingo Grill, at Sam Smith's Boatyard, doesn't look like much, but this tiny patio restaurant (607) 547-7496, serves some of the area's most interesting dishes. Entrees include osso bucco with garlic mashed potatoes ($18.95), grilled salmon with red pepper marmalade ($17.95) and crispy chicken coated with buckwheat in garlic cider sauce ($14.95). With wine, dinner for two is about $65. +The Pit, (607) 547-9611, in the basement of the Tunnicliff Inn at Main and Pioneer Streets is a tap room that serves quiche for $6.95 and hamburgers for $5.85. Dinner or lunch with beer for two runs about $25. +For a picnic or takeout lunch, Danny's Market, 92 Main Street, (607) 547-4053, prepares sandwiches like Black Forest ham and munster cheese, or mozzarella, roasted peppers and chicken. Both cost $5.45. + +LOAD-DATE: June 29, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: The Alice Busch Opera Theater is the home of the Glimmerglass Opera. Uniforms on exhibit at the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. The patio of the Otesaga Hotel overlooks Otsego Lake. (Photographs by Nancie Battaglia for The New York Times) + +Chart: "Vital Statistics" lists travel information and statistics on Cooperstown. (Sources: Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce, Northeast Regional Climate Center, local businesses) + +Map of Cooperstown. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +335 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 29, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ON THE TOWNS + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 12; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 2661 words + +An opinionated guide to cultural and recreational goings-on around the state this week. To submit items for consideration, write to On the Towns, Sunday New Jersey Section, The New York Times, 229 West 43d Street, New York, N.Y. 10036, or send a fax to (212) 556-7219. + +MUSIC + +BERGEN MUSEUM OF ART AND SCIENCE "Spring Music," featuring Lenny Bord and Marsha Tyshkov, pianists, and Miriam Lachenouer, flutist, in music of Khachaturian, Mozart, Chopin, Gershwin and others. Today at 2 P.M. Tickets: $4. 327 East Ridgewood Avenue, Paramus. (201) 265-1248. + +CAPE MAY MUSIC FESTIVAL "The Jazz Maniacs Delight." Tonight at 8. Cape May Convention Hall, Beach Avenue and Stockton Place. Tickets: $15; $10 for the elderly; $5 for students. (800) 275-4278 or (609) 884-5404. + +DEER PATH PARK The Pioneer Band of Allentown. Thursday at 7 P.M. Free. Take chairs and blankets. West Woods Church Road between Route 523 and Highway 31, Reddington Township. + +RIDGEWOOD KASSCHAU MEMORIAL SHELL Wooster Street Trolley Jazz Band. Tuesday at 8:30. Ridgewood Concert Band. Free. Take chairs or blankets. Veteran's Field, Maple Avenue, Ridgewood. (201) 670-3924. + +MEMORIAL PARK Fair Lawn Summer Music Festival. Symphonic Concert Band, conducted by Chris Wilhjelm. Tonight at 8:30. Free. Berdan Avenue, Fair Lawn. (201) 796-6746. + +NEW JERSEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA "Music for Dance,"A concert and picnic on the lawn of Giralda Farms. Today, picnic at 3 P.M., concert at 6 P.M. Tickets: $10; $4 for children under 12. Gate entrances at Woodland Avenue and Madison Avenue (Route 124), Madison. In case of rain, the concert moves to Morristown High School Gym, 50 Early Street, Morristown (concert only). No pets or barbecues. (800) 255-3476 or (201) 624-8203. Summer Pops Concerts, conducted by David Commanday, exploring great orchestral dance music. Wednesday at Echo Lake Park in Westfield; Thursday at East Side Park in Paterson; Friday at Bergen County Community College in Paramus; Sunday at Brookdale Park in Montclair. Free. +(201) 624-3713, extension 234. + +RUTGERS UNIVERSITY ARTS CENTER Summerfest. The Rutgers Festival Orchestra, conducted by Richard Auldon Clark, in "An American in Paris," "Five of a Kind," "Candide" overture and "Irish Rhapsody." Saturday at 8 P.M. "Brave Old World,"klezmer music. Next Sunday at 2 P.M. Tickets: $24; student discounts available. Nicholas Music Center, George and Hamilton Streets, New Brunswick. (732) 932-7591, extension 514. +SHANGHAI JAZZ Terry Blaine, singer, Mark Shane, pianist, and Ed Polcer, cornetist. Wednesday, 7 to 9:30 P.M. Chuck Slate, Thursday, 7 to 9:30 P.M. Buffalo Rhythm Kings, Dixieland band. Friday, 7 to 11 P.M. John Bunch, pianist. Saturday, 7 to 11 P.M. Free. +24 Main Street, Madison. (201) 822-2899. + +SUMMERFEST '97 Hanover Wind Symphony. Today at 3 P.M. Free. Frelinghuysen Arboretum, 53 East Hanover Avenue, Morris Township. (973) 326-7600. + +TURNING POINT Martin and Jessica Simpson and the Angels. Tonight at 7. Tickets: $12.50. Blues Jumpers. Saturday at 10 P.M. Tickets: $12.50. Richie Havens, folk singer. Next Sunday at 5 and 8 P.M. Tickets: $22. 468 Piermont Avenue, Piermont, N.Y. (914) 359-3219. + +VETERAN'S MEMORIAL PARK Bergenfield Community Band, outdoor patriotic program. Thursday at 7:30 P.M. Take chairs or blankets. Free. Pershing Avenue, Dumont. (201) 387-8847 + +THEATERS + +BICKFORD THEATER "Olympus on my Mind," a musical farce about Greek mythology, with book and lyrics by Barry Harman and music by Grant Sturiale. Through July 13. Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 P.M. and Sundays at 2 P.M. Tickets: $17.50; $15.75 for the elderly; $15 for students and members; $7.50 for students Thursdays only. Morris Museum, 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. (201) 538-8069. + +CIRCLE PLAYHOUSE "Alone in the Rain: The James Dean Story," by Michael Boyd. Through Saturday. Tonight and Thursday through Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $10. 416 Victoria Avenue, Piscataway. (908) 968-7555. + +DEGNAN PARK Theater Under the Stars. "The Fantasticks." Through July 19. Fridays at 5 and 8 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays at 8 P.M. Free; donations accepted. Take chairs and blankets. Next to West Orange High School on Pleasant Valley Way, West Orange. +(973) 325-0795. + +ALAN P. KIRBY ARTS CENTER Opera Festival of New Jersey. "La Cenerentola" ("Cinderella"), today at 2; Saturday at 8 P.M. "Faust," Thursday at 8 P.M.; next Sunday at 2 P.M. Tickets: $20 to $48. Lawrenceville School, Route 206, Lawrenceville. (609) 683-8000. + +MEMORIAL AUDITORIUM Theaterfest '97, "The Sound of Music." Through July 13. Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 P.M.; matinees Fridays and Saturdays at 2 P.M. and Sundays at 3 P.M. Tickets: $25; $25 for the elderly and $10 for students. Life Hall, Montclair State University. (201) 655-5112. + +METROPOLITAN OPERA IN THE PARKS "Carmen," with Denyce Graves, Vinson Cole, Hei-Kyung Hong and Greer Grimsley, conducted by Christopher Schaldenbrand. Monday. "Cavalleria Rusticana," with Stefka Evstatieva, Fabio Armiliato, Frederick Burchinal and Marianne Cornetti, and "Pagliacci," with Daniela Dessi, Vladimir Boggachov, Bruno Pola and Mark Silvio, conducted by Christian Badea. Tuesday. Both at Brookdale Park in Montclair. "Carmen," with Wendy White, Neil Rosenshein, Jeffery Wells and Ainhoa Arteta, conducted by Yves Abel. Thursday at Buccleuch Park in New Brunswick. "Cavalleria Rusticana" and "Pagliacci." Saturday at Cooper River Park in Pennsauken. All performances at 8 P.M. Free; take chairs or blankets. (212) 362-6000. + +WILLIAM MOUNT-BURKE THEATRE "Hand in Hand," a new musical play based on John Milton's "Paradise Lost." Today at 2 P.M. Tickets: $15. Peddie School, South Main Street and Ward Street, Hightstown. (609) 490-7550. + +NEW JERSEY SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL "A Midsummer Night's Dream," today at 2 and 7 P.M. "The Threepenny Opera," by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, July 11 to 27. "Blithe Spirit," by Noel Coward, Aug. 8 to 24. All at the Community Theater, 100 South Street, Morristown. "Much Ado About Nothing," Wednesday through Aug. 2 at the Playwrights Theater of New Jersey, 33 Green Village Road, Madison. "Henry V." July 15 to Aug. 10 at the football field of Bayley-Ellard High School, 205 Madison Avenue, Madison. Single tickets: $16 to $30. Subscription packages: $66 to $125. (201) 408-5600. On the World Wide Web: http:/ /www.njshakespeare.org. + +PAPER MILL PLAYHOUSE "Man of La Mancha." Through July 27. Wednesdays through Sundays at 8 P.M.; Thursdays at 2 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays at 3 P.M. Tickets: $31 to $46; $10 for students 15 minutes before curtain. Brookside Drive, Millburn. (201) 376-4343. + +PLAYWRIGHTS THEATER OF NEW JERSEY New Jersey Theater Festival. "The Book of David," by Bob Clyman of Montclair. Tonight at 8. "One With God," by Rose Caruso "Who in the Hell Is Amber Bell?" and "Marvin and the Grizzlies," by Sid Frank of Springfield, and "Ithaca," by Paul Parente of Hoboken. Monday at 8 P.M. Free. 33 Green Village Road, Madison. (201) 514-1940. + +RITZ THEATER "Damn Yankees." July 11 to Aug. 9. Fridays and Saturdays at 8 P.M.; Sundays at 2 P.M.; Aug. 6 at 7:30 P.M. 915 White Horse Pike, Oaklyn. (609) 858-5230. + +SUMMERFUN THEATER "Ravenscroft," by Don Nigro. Tuesday through Saturday at 8 P.M.; matinee Thursday at 2 P.M. "Shadowlands," by William Nicholson. July 8 to 12. Tickets: $18 and $22.Weiss Arts Center, Montclair Kimberley Academy, Lloyd Road and Bloomfield Avenue. (201) 256-0576. + +MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES + +AMERICAN LABOR MUSEUM "Workers and Immigrants," a student art exhibition. Through Dec. 31. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 1 to 4 P.M. Suggested donation: $1.50. Botto House National Landmark, 83 Norwood Street, Haledon. (201) 595-7953. + +ATLANTIC CITY HISTORICAL MUSEUM "Bettmann on the Boardwalk: A Celebration of Historic Atlantic City, 1890-1990," a selection of photographs from the Corbis-Bettmann Collection. Through 1997. Daily, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. Free. Garden Pier, at New Jersey Avenue. (609) 347-5839. + +GALLERY AT SCHERING-PLOUGH "Reflections of Summer," featuring 30 watercolor landscapes and seascapes by 19 artists. Through Aug. 28. Mondays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. 1 Giralda Farms, Madison. (201) 882-7000. + +GALLERY OF SOUTH ORANGE "Sky Dancers," drawings by Janice Metzger, and "Herstory Part II," mixed-media works on paper and wood by Sarah Teofanov. Through July 20. Hours: Wednesdays and Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 2 P.M. and 4 to 6 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 P.M. Baird Center, 5 Mead Street, South Orange. (201) 378-7754. + +MACCULLOCH HALL HISTORICAL MUSEUM "The Immortal Genius: William Shakespeare, Thomas Nast and 19th-Century American Culture." Through Feb. 4. "Rococo and Reason in Georgian Glass," more than 100 examples of English and Irish cut glass from the 18th and 19th centuries. Through Sept. 7. "The Timeless Folk Art of Decorative Painting." Through Oct. 12. Admission: $3; $2 for students and the elderly. Hours: Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 P.M. 45 Macculloch Avenue, Morristown. (201) 538-2404. + +MONTCLAIR ART MUSEUM "A Personal Synthesis," a retrospective of paintings and prints by Hananiah Harari, and "American Impressionist," paintings by Guy Rose (1867-1925). Both through Aug. 10. Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 11 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Sundays and Thursdays, 1 to 5 P.M. Admission: $4; $3 for students with ID and the elderly; free admission on Saturdays. 3 South Mountain Avenue, Montclair. (201) 746-5555. + +MORRIS MUSEUM "Portrait Paintings From the Morris Museum Collection," including works by Rembrandt and Gainsborough. Closes tomorrow. Recent sculpture by Leah Jacobson. Through May 24. "Women's Fashion in Sports," exploring the cultural impact of sports on women's clothing from the late 19th and early 20th centurie. Thursday through Aug. 31. Hours: Sundays, +1 to 5 P.M.; Mondays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 8 P.M. Admission: $4; $2 for the elderly. 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. (201) 538-0454. + +NEW JERSEY STATE MUSEUM Recent sculpture and drawings by Mary Ann Unger. Through July 20. "New Jersey Nightscapes," a specially lighted display of New Jersey and its nighttime skies. Through February. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 9 A.M. to 4:45 P.M.; Sundays, 12 to 5 P.M. Free. 205 West State Street, Trenton. (609) 292-6464. + +NEWARK MUSEUM "Portraits, 1975-1995," paintings by Dawoud Bey. Through Aug. 3. "The Glitter and the Gold: Fashioning America's Jewelry," jewelry celebrating the one hundrd years of Newark as the city of gold and precious stones. Through Nov. 2. "Destination Mars," an interactive exhibition exploring the possibility of life on Mars. Through 1999. Hours: Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 P.M.49 Washington Street, Newark. +(201) 596-6550. + +NOYES MUSEUM "For the Love of Art: Carvings and Paintings by South Jersey Folk Artist Albert Hoffman," works reflecting Old Testament narratives and American Indian life. "Photographs by Dwight Hiscano," landscape photography. Through Sept. 21. "Easy Access: Highlights From the Noyes Museum's Collection of Contemporary Art." Through Aug. 17. Wednesday through Sunday, 11 A.M. to 4 P.M. Admission: $3; $2 for the elderly and students. Lily Lake Road, Oceanville. +(609) 652-8848. + +PALMYRA ART GALLERY Paintings by Richard Nunziata. Through Saturday. Hours: Tuesdays through Sundays, 11:30 A.M. to 2 A.M. Palmyra Tea Room, 22 Hamilton Street, Bound Brook. (908) 302-0515. + +ZIMMERLI ART MUSEUM "Sequences: As You Can See," selections from the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art From the Soviet Union. Through July 20. "Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions: Asian American Artists and Abstraction, 1945-1970," demonstrating the blending of Eastern and Western art through the use of traditional techniques and philosophies. Through July 31. Hours: Wednesdays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. Rutgers University, George and Hamilton Streets, New Brunswick. (908) 932-7237. + +FOR CHILDREN + +BARNES & NOBLE Teddy Bear Picnic. Take your teddy bear and a snack for a bear hunt and stories. Wednesday at 11 A.M. Ages 2 to 4. Free. "Hercules Is Here!" Junior Olympics and storytelling. Saturday at 11 A.M. Ages 3 and up. Free. Princeton Market Fair in Princeton. (609) 897-9250. + +BICKFORD THEATER Saturn Summer Theater for Children. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11 A.M. and 1:30 P.M. in July and August. Tickets: $6.25; $5 for museum members. Museum hours: Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M.; Mondays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 8 P.M. Admission: $4; $2 for the elderly. 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. Schedule and reservations: +(201) 538-0454. + +MONMOUTH MUSEUM "Changing Cultures: From the Lenape to the Urban Age, 1400 to 1900," exploring the history of America through changes in family life, from the Lenape through the Victorian era. Through June 1998. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. 761 Newman Springs Road, Lincroft. (908) 747-2266. + +MORRIS MUSEUM Museum Munchkins, an introduction to the museum for ages 3 to 5. Wednesdays through Aug. 20 from 10:30 to 11 A.M. This week: "Round and Round." Fee: $5.50 a week per student. Museum hours: Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M.; Mondays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 8 P.M. Admission: $4; $2 for the elderly. 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. (201) 538-0454. + +NEW JERSEY CHILDREN'S MUSEUM An interactive center for ages 2 to 8. Daily programs: "Fairy Tale Play," 10:30 A.M. and 3:30 P.M. "Storytime," noon. Craft projects, 2:30 P.M. Museum hours: Mondays through Fridays, +9 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. Admission: $7. 599 Industrial Avenue, Paramus. (201) 262-2638. + +NEW JERSEY STATE MUSEUM "Kaleidoscope Kids," a one-week program on astronomy for children 6 to 12. Sessions begin July 7 and continue through Aug. 8. Each session meets Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 3 P.M. Tuition: $115; $110 for siblings. 205 West State Street, Trenton. Registration and information: (609) 292-6310 or (609) 292-6464. + +ZIMMERLI ART MUSEUM "Three Billy Goats Gruff," illustrations by Robert Bender. Through July 20. Museum hours: Wednesdays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. Rutgers University, George and Hamilton Streets, New Brunswick. (908) 932-7237. + +SPOKEN WORD + +BARNES & NOBLE Women's literary discussion group. Jamaica Kincaid's "Autobiography of My Mother." Tomorrow at 8 P.M. Dorothea Straus discusses her book "The Paper Trail: A Recollection of Writers." Tuesday at 7 P.M. Science fiction and fantasy group to discuss D. Steakley's "Armor" and D. Brin's "Heart of the Comet." Wednesday at 8 P.M. Princeton Market Fair, Route 1, Princeton. (609) 392-0689. + +ENCORE BOOKS AND MUSIC Carol Saline and Sharon J. Wolmuth discuss the stories behind their book "Mothers and Daughters." Mark Di Ionno introduces "New Jersey's Coastal Heritage," a guide to the coastal areas of New Jersey. Tomorrow at 7 P.M. Free. 301 North Harrison Street, Princeton. (609) 252-0608. + +ETC. + +FLEA MARKET The Chester Lions Club Flea Market offers crafts, linens, books, children's clothing, housewares, plants and produce, makeup, jewelry, scarves, handbags and other accessories. Sundays, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Through Nov. 30. Free. West Blackwell Street, Morris and Sussex Streets, downtown Dover. (201) 442-1494. + +NEW JERSEY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Sponsored by the Rutgers Film Co-op and the New Jersey Media Arts Center. Through July. "Fire" and "Siddhartha," tonight at 7 at the State Theater, 15 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick.Admission: $8; $6 for members. Information: (908) 932-8482. On the World Wide Web: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/ +nigrin. + +LOAD-DATE: June 29, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: And Speaking of Brass . . . The Chestnut Brass Company plays music from the American Civil War era in the Fourth of July concert at Rutgers University, part of the Summerfest concert series. NICHOLAS MUSIC CENTER Douglass College, New Brunswick. Friday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $24. (908) 932-7511. (pg. 12); Remembering a Time Gone By Paintings like "Pohatcong Gas Station" are featured in an retrospective of work by Eric Fowler. ARTIFACTS GALLERY 1025 South Broad Street, Trenton. Through Saturday. Hours: Tuesday and Friday, 10 A.M. to 5:30 P.M.; Wednesday and Thursday, 10 A.M. to 8 P.M.; Saturday, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. Free. (609) 599-9081. (pg. 14); Art With Dimension "Seated Figures and Others" is an exhibition of oil paintings in two and three dimensions by Jane E. Silverman. Pieces like "Seated Woman, Seated Cat, Seated Dog, Seated Bird," above, are constructed of canvas over carved wood to create the multi-dimensional relief. PIERMONT FINE ARTS GALLERY 218 Ash Street, Piermont, N.Y. Through next Sunday. Hours: Thursdays and Sundays, 1 to 6 P.M.; Saturdays, 1 to 9 P.M. Admission by donation. (914) 368-1907. (pg. 15) + +TYPE: List + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +336 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 29, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WEDDINGS; +Sally A. Amick and Richard C. Russo + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 38; Column 2; Society Desk + +LENGTH: 145 words + +Sarah Ann Amick, a senior copywriter at the Estee Lauder Companies in New York, was married yesterday to Richard Charles Russo, a television producer and director at Fox Sports in New York. The Rev. Hugh Smith, a Presbyterian minister, performed the ceremony with Rabbi Israel Wolmark at Spring Mill Manor in Ivyland, Pa. +Mrs. Russo, who is known as Sally, graduated from Susquehanna University. She is the daughter of Donna and George Amick of Trenton. Mr. Amick is the editorial page editor of The Times of Trenton, and Mrs. Amick is the executive director of Echo, a social services agency that provides programs for the elderly. + Mr. Russo graduated from Pennsylvania State University. He is a son of Muriel and Robert Russo of Manhasset, N.Y. His father, who is retired, was a founder of Roanna Togs, a children's clothing manufacturer in New York. + +LOAD-DATE: June 29, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Sally A. Amick and Richard C. Russo. (Richard Charles) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +337 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 29, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +GOVERNMENT; +Making Social Policy by Mixing the Old and the Young + +BYLINE: By BARBARA STEWART + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 6; Column 2; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 894 words + +DATELINE: MEDFORD + +Because a residence for older people got involved in the child-care business, Fred Greenley, 86, a retired financial manager, is able to pursue the hobby he prefers to progressive bridge or birding. +On a recent afternoon, he silently opened the door of a darkened room where two toddlers lay sleeping on mats and a baby dozed in a crib. He gazed at them, his eyes softening, his face lighted with quiet delight. + "Kids are nice," he said, waiting patiently for them to awaken. "It's so nice to watch them develop. To watch them smile." +Mr. Greenley -- Pop-pop to the children -- regularly drops by the day-care center for children of employees of the Medford Leas Continuing Care Community here in Burlington County. Some 50 children, ranging in age from 6 weeks to 6 years, are cared for on weekdays at Medford Leas, which has 300 employees and 500 residents. The program has inspired some state legislators to try to promote similar efforts at senior residences around the state, as part of a package of bills to alleviate a chronic shortage of affordable day care. +The child-care center gives Medford Leas' workers reasonably priced day care and the chance to visit their youngsters during breaks. The children get extra attention and informal lessons from volunteer senior residents. And the older people have the pleasure of the proximity of children -- as much or as little as they want. +"It's got to be a good thing for so many adults to think you're special and wonderful," said Lois Forrest, executive director, explaining why, in her view, Medford Leas' children are especially well adjusted. +The bill designed to encourage other senior residences to start employee child-care centers was introduced earlier this month by two members of the state Assembly, Loretta Weinberg, a Democrat from Teaneck, and Carol Murphy, a Republican from Morris Plains. It would provide low-interest construction loans and give volunteers training by the Division of Youth and Family Services. +Other bills in the package would increase from 5 to 10 the number of children allowed at small home day-care centers; provide training and grants to schools and churches to open day-care centers, and provide low-interest loans and tax incentives so smaller businesses can help their workers find day care. +Currently, 12,000 parents are on a waiting list for one of the state's 7,400 day-care slots reserved for low-income families; some of the parents register at more than one center. There are no statistics on nonsubsidized day care, but experts say infant day care is especially scarce, no matter what the family income. Welfare recipients going back to work are guaranteed child care for two years after finding a job and currently account for a few thousand additional subsidized slots. +The real pressure is on parents with low-income jobs. +"It forces people who've gotten jobs and gotten off welfare to go back on," said Gail Rosewater, director of the Bergen County Office for Children. "It forces parents to choose unregulated care in places where health and safety standards may not be met, to maybe have to put their infants and toddlers in somebody's house with 30 kids, unregulated." +Senior-living complexes in New Jersey could, in theory, offer day care to tens of thousands of children. The cost of providing child care in an institutional setting isn't high, said Mrs. Forrest, a board member of the New Jersey Association of Nonprofit Homes and Services for the Aged. But most are for-profit institutions and would probably be unwilling to spend the money, said Mrs. Forrest. +Medford Leas, a nonprofit Quaker center with cottages and enclosed walkways set among its wooded grounds, opened its child-care center in the hope of attracting and keeping employees at a time when good ones were scarce. The cost to employee parents is about $13 a week. Neighboring parents, whose children are admitted when there is space, pay twice that. +But what is most striking is not the quantifiable cost of the care but the unquantifiable benefits of mixing children with elderly people. +On a recent morning, outside on the grass and pine needles, children and older residents in wheelchairs did hand and arm exercises together. They grabbed handles on the sides of a big red, blue and yellow parachute, bouncing it up and down. For the elderly people, this physical therapy is brightened by the children, who think it's a game. The children, meanwhile, get time with a few dozen grandparents. +The children become familiar with old age and wheelchairs and disabilities. No Medford Leas graduate would ever embarrass a parent by yelling "Why does that old lady have to walk with a stick?" +And the children add another dimension to residents' lives. Margot Young, 89, a Bronx schoolteacher of 43 years who is now blind, has been outlining in her mind a big project: a puppet theater for the children. She would like to make the hand puppets as she did when she was teaching. The men could make the theater in the wood shop. She has scripts for Pinocchio and many other shows. "It would give me great joy," she said. +Mr. Greenley doesn't say that, exactly. But as the toddlers awaken, the sensible voice he used when talking to adults softens. And he smiles broadly when a small girl, swinging on the doorknob, yells: "That's Pop-pop! Hi, Pop-pop!" + +LOAD-DATE: June 29, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Playing with a parachute is physical therapy for residents and fun for children. Inge Raven, a resident of Medford Leas, teaches music at the child-care center. (Photographs by Frank C. Dougherty for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +338 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 29, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +June 22-28; +Signs That the Cost Of Medicare May Rise + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 2; Column 4; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 118 words + +The Senate sent a message to baby boomers and the elderly last week: get used to the idea of paying more for Medicare. In a surprising action, Senators voted to increase Medicare premiums for affluent elderly people, to raise the age of eligibility by two years and to impose a charge of $5 a visit for home health care services. + No one is sure whether the proposals will survive this year. President Clinton says the proposals are outside the scope of the bipartisan budget agreement. House members, burned by the politics of Medicare last year, are wary. And lobbyists for the elderly have just begun to fight. But Senate leaders will push ahead with their plans this summer. ROBERT PEAR + +LOAD-DATE: June 29, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +339 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 29, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Votes in Congress + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 26; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 940 words + + +Tally Last Week in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. + +Senate + +1. Home Health Care: Vote to kill a Democratic proposal to delete a provision of the balanced budget bill that would establish a $5 co-payment for home health care services. The Democratic proposal was killed, 59 to 41, June 24. (The effect of a "Yes" vote was to favor retaining the co-payment provision.) + +2. Medicare Age: Procedural vote to support an increase in the age of eligibility for Medicare by two years, to 67. Approved 62 to 38, June 24. + +3. Medicare Premium: Vote to kill an amendment to the balanced budget bill that would delete a provision to increase Medicare payments for affluent elderly people. Approved 70 to 30, June 24. + +4. Balanced Budget: Vote on a bill intended to balance the budget by 2002, curb the growth of Medicare and Medicaid and spend $16 billion on health care for uninsured children. Approved 73 to 27, June 25. + +5. Tax Cuts: Vote on a bill that would provide about $135 billion in tax cuts over the next five years, partly offset by $55 billion in new or extended taxes, including an increase in the Federal tax on cigarettes from 20 cents a pack to 44 cents. Approved 80 to 18, June 27. + + + + +Connecticut + 1 2 3 4 5 +Dodd (D) . . . nay nay yea nay yea +Lieberman (D) . . . yea yea yea yea yea + +New Jersey +Lautenberg (D) . . . nay nay nay nay +Torricelli (D) . . . nay nay nay nay yea + +New York +D'Amato (R) . . . nay nay nay yea yea +Moynihan (D) . . . yea yea yea yea yea + +House + +1. B-2 Bomber: Vote on an amendment to a $268 billion Defense Department budget bill for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 that would eliminate $331 million for components to begin expanding the B-2 bomber fleet beyond the 21 planes paid for already. Rejected 216 to 209, June 23. + +2. China Trade: Vote on a measure that would have disapproved President Clinton's decision to extend most-favored-nation status to China. Rejected 259 to 173, June 24. + +3. Bosnia: Vote on an amendment to a $268 billion Defense Department budget bill for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 that would cut off funds for American ground troops in Bosnia after June 30, 1998. Approved 278 to 148, June 24. + +4. Defense: Vote on a $268 billion Defense Department budget bill for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. Approved 304 to 120, June 25. + +5. Balanced Budget: Vote on a bill intended to balance the budget by 2002, curb the growth of Medicare and Medicaid and spend $16 billion on health care for uninsured children. Approved 270 to 162, June 25. + +6. Tax Cuts: Vote on a bill that would provide about $135 billion in tax cuts over the next five years, partly offset by $55 billion in new or extended taxes, including an increase in the Federal tax on cigarettes from 20 cents a pack to 44 cents. Approved 253 to 179, June 26. + + + + 1 2 3 4 5 6 + +Connecticut +1. Kennelly (D) . . . yea nay nay yea yea nay +2. Gejdenson (D) . . . yea yea nay yea nay nay +3. DeLauro (D) . . . yea yea nay yea nay nay +4. Shays (R) . . . yea nay yea nay yea yea +5. Maloney (D) . . . nay yea yea yea yea yea +6. Johnson (R) . . . nay nay yea yea yea yea + +New Jersey +1. Andrews (D) . . . yea nay nay yea nay nay +2. LoBiondo (R) . . . yea yea yea nay yea yea +3. Saxton (R) . . . nay nay yea yea yea yea +4. Smith (R) . . . nay yea yea A yea yea +5. Roukema (R) . . . yea nay yea yea yea yea +6. Pallone (D) . . . yea yea nay yea nay nay +7. Franks (R) . . . yea nay yea nay yea yea +8. Pascrell (D) . . . yea yea yea yea nay nay +9. Rothman (D) . . . yea yea nay yea nay nay +10. Payne (D) . . . yea yea nay nay nay nay +11. Frelinghuysen (R) . . . nay nay yea yea yea yea +12. Pappas (R) . . . nay yea yea yea yea yea +13. Menendez (D) . . . yea yea yea nay nay nay + +New York +1. Forbes (R) . . . nay yea yea yea yea yea +2. Lazio (R) . . . yea nay yea yea yea yea +3. King (R) . . . nay yea nay yea nay yea +4. McCarthy (D) . . . yea yea nay nay nay yea +5. Ackerman (D) . . . nay nay nay nay nay nay +6. Flake (D) . . . yea nay yea yea nay nay +7. Manton (D) . . . nay nay yea yea nay nay +8. Nadler (D) . . . yea yea nay A nay nay +9. Schumer (D) . . . A nay A nay nay nay +10. Towns (D) . . . yea nay nay nay nay nay +11. Owens (D) . . . yea yea yea nay nay nay +12. Velazquez (D) . . . yea yea nay nay nay nay +13. Molinari (R) . . . yea yea yea yea yea yea +14. Maloney (D) . . . A nay nay yea nay nay +15. Rangel (D) . . . yea nay nay nay nay nay +16. Serrano (D) . . . yea nay yea nay nay nay +17. Engel (D) . . . yea yea nay nay nay nay +18. Lowey (D) . . . yea nay nay A nay nay +19. Kelly (R) . . . nay nay yea yea yea yea +20. Gilman (R) . . . nay yea yea yea yea yea +21. McNulty (D) . . . yea nay nay nay nay nay +22. Solomon (R) . . . nay yea yea yea yea yea +23. Boehlert (R) . . . yea nay yea yea yea yea +24. McHugh (R) . . . nay nay yea yea yea yea +25. Walsh (R) . . . nay nay yea yea yea yea +26. Hinchey (D) . . . nay yea nay nay nay nay +27. Paxon (R) . . . A yea yea yea yea yea +28. Slaughter (D) . . . yea nay nay yea nay nay +29. LaFalce (D) . . . yea nay nay nay nay nay +30. Quinn (R) . . . yea nay yea yea yea yea +31. Houghton (R) . . . yea nay nay yea yea yea + +LOAD-DATE: June 29, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: List + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +340 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 29, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Phone Swindlers Dangle Prizes to Cheat Elderly Out of Millions + +BYLINE: By The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 17; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 561 words + +DATELINE: CHATTANOOGA, Tenn., June 28 + +An 80-year-old Narrowsburg, N.Y., woman said she had sent thousands of dollars to telemarketers because she had become "addicted" to the attention her new telephone friends had offered. +"I've been a widow for 19 years," she said softly. "It's very lonely. They were nice on the phone. They became my friends." + A 77-year-old man from Canastota, N.Y., said he had fallen prey to the same slick-talking telemarketers from Chattanooga. +"I wasn't a victim -- I was a sucker," he said. "I lost $200,000." +Both New Yorkers were among thousands of elderly Americans across the country who believed the stories of 30 telemarketers operating schemes from Chattanooga. Federal prosecutors say at least 100,000 people, most of them elderly, sent $35 million to fraudulent telemarketers based here from 1992 to 1995. +The schemes were connected loosely, if at all. They ranged from single operators to 30-person phone banks. Typically, the lonely grandmothers and grandfathers were told that they had won one of four prizes: a new car, a Hawaiian vacation, $25,000 in cash or $100. They were asked to send a check, usually for hundreds or thousands of dollars, by overnight mail to cover taxes, postage and handling for the winnings. If the taxes were this high, the salesman would say, then the prize must be wonderful. +The victims often fell for more than one scheme. +Fraudulent telemarketers bilk Americans out of $40 billion a year, the Federal Trade Commission says. +The two New Yorkers say they finally wised up. They cooperated in what prosecutors say was a groundbreaking investigation. They talked about their experiences on the condition that their names not be used. +The widow said she was too embarrassed. "I haven't told anyone about this except my family," she said. "And I thought I would lose them. But I'm very lucky. They still love me." The Canastota man said he feared retribution for working with prosecutors. +With a task force led by Assistant United States Attorney John MacCoon, prosecutors won convictions of 50 people. The sentences in those cases totaled more than 141 years in prison and involved more than $35 million in restitution. Mr. MacCoon acknowledged that many victims, because of their ages, would not live to see the restitution. +Mr. MacCoon and a Federal Trade Commission lawyer, Chris Couillou, said that breaking up the telemarketing companies in Chattanooga did not solve the telemarketing fraud problem nationwide. But the investigation created a blueprint for future law-enforcement efforts, they said. +As the Chattanooga operation is wrapping up, investigators who worked here are fanning out over the nation for similar efforts. +Experts in consumer fraud offer these tips: +*Beware of a request for money to prepay taxes, make a refundable deposit or cover shipping and handling costs. In legitimate awards, promoters pay delivery charges. With a cash prize, the promoter will withhold taxes or report the winnings to the Internal Revenue Service. +*Beware of a request to send a check by overnight delivery services or Western Union. +*Beware of a request for a credit card number to show eligibility. Legitimate sweepstakes do not need a credit card number to award a prize. +*Beware of a rush for action, high-pressure tactics and calls in the evening or on weekends. +*To fight back, just hang up. + +LOAD-DATE: June 29, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +341 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 29, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +After Tax Bills, Congress Faces The Long Haul + +BYLINE: By ADAM CLYMER + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1237 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 28 + +The Republican celebrations over tax bills were not finished before the Clinton Administration and Republican leaders began talking confidently about how to work out final legislation to balance the budget in 2002. But that route is easy compared with the effort required to keep the budget balanced and avoid abysmal deficits when baby boomers retire a decade later. +By the time the Senate finished passing its tax bill on Friday, work was under way on the formidable short-term issues of Medicare and capital gains. And officials at the White House and on Capitol Hill were already pondering how to deal with the long-range challenge. + The task of turning the two House bills, one on spending and the other on taxes, and the comparable Senate versions into compromises that the President would sign began on Thursday evening. Representative Bill Archer of Texas, who managed the House bill for the first important tax reductions since 1981, talked to Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and the White House chief of staff, Erskine B. Bowles, within minutes of Thursday's House vote. +The Administration likes Mr. Archer's version less than the Senate bill because it gives less to low-income taxpayers and is more generous on capital gains. But Mr. Archer said after the meeting: "We want tax relief for the American people, and this President wants to be able to sign tax relief for the American people. The pressure on both sides is to find a way to come together." +In some ways, the week's votes were easy. Cutting $135 billion in taxes for more than 50 million Americans is something politicians find agreeable. And unlike many past budget bills, this one has spending increases in the short run. +But the sort of discretionary spending caps that have worked since 1990 are here, too. Most important, just about all Republicans and most Democrats cast votes for Medicare savings that expose them -- fairly or demagogically -- to the risk of television spots accusing them of callousness toward the elderly. After the advertisements of 1996, that took political nerve. +But even though the process so far has a notable credibility among experienced budgeteers who have watched past plans fail, they are not convinced that Congress has the courage to face the long-term problems. Bob Greenstein, executive director of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, spoke of them as "the demographic tsunami of the baby boomers retiring and the mushrooming of the tax cuts at about the same time around 2011. Even if you have balanced the budget before then, deficits return and return with a vengeance," worse than in the mid-1980's. +At the White House, Gene Sperling, head of the National Economic Council, said that Washington's conventional wisdom held that only in a crisis can there be bipartisanship on long-term issues like Medicare and Social Security. But now, he said, "The political challenge for the President and others is how to get the country to address a long-term problem not because it is a crisis at the doorstep but because acting now is an opportunity to deal with something in a more sensible, more long-term and less disruptive way." +One central figure, Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, argued that the tough votes cast in the Senate to raise the Medicare age limit and charge higher premiums to the high-income elderly were a hopeful sign. Relaxing after what he called the "best week of my legislative career," Mr. Domenici, the Budget Committee chairman, said there was no doubt that Medicare would be harder to solve than Social Security. "We just have to face up to it or there will be an enormous problem." +The same sense of political imperative leads both Mr. Archer and Mr. Domenici to expect that the budget will not just be momentarily balanced in 2002 and then, exhausted, return to deficit status. +Mr. Archer acknowledged that "neither the Congress nor the President has repealed the business cycle." But he said he thought balanced budgets "will be the norm from now on," that no Congress would be willing to be the first to let deficits return. Mr. Domenici said: "I think we will grow accustomed in reasonably good times to being in balance. The tax base has grown enough so we can do that." +Several economists are more skeptical about the long run, although they share a striking willingness to consider three things possible in the near term. First and easiest, that Congress and the President will agree on the legislation. Second, that Congress will vote for the discretionary spending cuts it has promised to figure out. Third and hardest, that barring a serious recession, in 2002 the Federal Government will actually spend no more than it takes in. +Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a research organization, said the plan could work "if the economy cooperates, but only if the economy cooperates." +Martha Phillips, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan lobby for balancing the budget, said that she doubted the goal would be achieved, but that the robust economy could make it happen. "If it keeps up," she said, "we might accidentally balance the budget." +Mr. Greenstein, a critic who says the legislation shortchanges the poor, even concedes, "It's certainly possible, if the economy stays strong, the budget would stay balanced for a while." +But he said, from "2008 to 2017 tax cuts rise to those terrific levels." Ms. Phillips shared his concern, saying she feared that whatever was accomplished in the first years might be "swamped by the tax pieces in the out years." +She was encouraged by the Senate moves on Medicare, but noted that the "graying of America" would be marked in 2008, when the first postwar children begin to take early Social Security benefits at 62. "We have to get on with dealing with the generational issues," she said. +Ms. Sawhill was skeptical about the political ease of increased spending in the first years, spending that goes to education and children's health. Whatever the merits of particular proposals, she said, this style of budget balancing is like "a diet that begins with dessert." And even if a buoyant economy gets the budget through its 5-year path to balance, "we should be worrying about the following 10 to 15." +She conceded that the Medicare cuts amounted to "a little progress on tackling some of the difficult political issues." But she found them inconsistent with "putting in place, particularly on the tax side, a set of commitments that are eventually going to come out of somebody's side." +At least some rank-and-file Republicans have an opposite set of concerns. They are arguing about what to do with the budget surplus they expect to see. +Representative Mark W. Neumann of Wisconsin is writing legislation to deal with a budget surplus. Under his bill, which assumes 6 percent annual growth in Federal revenues, the current $5.3 trillion national debt would be paid off by 2026, using two-thirds of the surplus he foresees while the other third would go to tax cuts -- an additional $112 billion by 2002. He said on Friday he already had 90 co-sponsors, including Representatives John R. Kasich of Ohio, chairman of the Budget Committee, and Robert L. Livingston of Louisiana, chairman of the Appropriations Committee. +Ms. Phillips was scornful. "You can't divvy up the surplus," she said, "until you have it in hand." + +LOAD-DATE: June 29, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Bill Archer, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman. (The New York Times); Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin is working on a budget deal. (Associated Press)(pg. 19) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +342 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +June 29, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +BASEBALL; +Pampered Pitchers: A Debate Is Stirring + +BYLINE: By MURRAY CHASS + +SECTION: Section 8; Page 7; Column 1; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 2011 words + +Baseball's universal complaint is lack of pitching. So here is one way to alleviate the shortage: use fewer starting pitchers and return to the four-man rotation of yesteryear in place of the modern version of five. +"I think teams would love that," Lou Piniella, the Seattle Mariners' manager, said of the idea. "I think pitchers' agents would hate it. When you can win 20 games and make $6 million pitching every five days, why do you have to pitch every four and maybe cut a year or two off your career?" + Piniella, an old-timer at heart, was just getting started. +"It's gotten even more absurd," he said. "They've put these kids on pitch counts of 100 pitches pitching every five days. How do you develop good mechanics and good location and how do you learn to pitch yourself out of trouble and get your second wind throwing 100 pitches?" +Teams are playing with a double-edged sword, Piniella continued. +"They're so concerned about the lack of pitching," he said, "that they pamper these kids and they overprotect them and they don't learn how to pitch. It's the darndest thing. They're more protected than the manatees are in Florida." +Pampered and overprotected. First came the five-man rotation, then the pitch count. Pampered and overprotected. That says as much about the state of pitching today as ball one, ball two, ball three, ball four. +Since the 1960's, when baseball's first expansion prompted a change in pitching philosophy, starting pitchers working their way up from the minor leagues to the majors have been conditioned physically and mentally to believe they can't pitch more often than every fifth day. More recently, they have additionally been programmed to go only so far -- 100 pitches in many cases -- in the games they start every fifth day. +The product that has emerged from this dual practice is not one readily recognized by their predecessors. +"I've talked to some of the old-timers that threw hard and pitched for a long time," Piniella said. "My goodness, they threw 140, 150 pitches every fourth day." +Retired now for four years, Nolan Ryan probably qualifies as one of those old-timers, if not by age, then by state of mind. "I played so long people started looking at me and asking what is wrong with that grumpy old man," Ryan said recently, discussing his views on pitching and other parts of the game. +Ryan, who is 50, spanned a few pitching generations, beginning his major league career in 1966, the year that was Sandy Koufax's last, through 1993, the year in which Greg Maddux won the second of his four successive Cy Young awards. +Aside from his record seven no-hitters and 5,714 strikeouts, Ryan was noted for his durability. He pitched more than 200 innings in 14 different seasons and in two of those years exceeded 300. In still another season, he fell one inning short of 300. In pitching those innings, however, he was not unique, as he was with his no-hitters and strikeouts. +Among his contemporaries, for example, Gaylord Perry exceeded 200 innings 17 times in a 22-year career, working more than 300 innings six times in a seven-season span. The hardly svelte Mickey Lolich went 12 successive seasons pitching more than 200 innings, topping 300 in four straight seasons with a remarkable career high of 376 in 1971. Steve Carlton worked more than 200 innings for 13 consecutive seasons and 16 of 17, twice exceeded 300 and three other times went beyond 290. +But no pitcher has reached the 300-inning plateau since Carlton pitched 304 innings in 1980. In the 1990's, the most any pitcher has compiled in one season is Roger Clemens's 271 1/3 innings in 1991. Meanwhile, only 10 active pitchers have worked more than 200 innings in as many as five consecutive seasons during their career. And Maddux, who has registered nine consecutive 200-inning seasons, was the only one of the 10 who carried that kind of workload last year. +Barring a reversal of the trend that has rendered workhorse pitchers obsolete, baseball has less chance of seeing a 300-inning pitcher again than it does a .400 hitter. No one seems to be prepared to return to the days of the four-man rotation and the complete-game pitcher. +"When I came up, pitchers threw every fourth day," Ryan said. "Tom Seaver was the first guy I came in contact with that was adamant about pitching every fifth day." +That timetable was not for Ryan. +"I wanted the ball every fourth day," he said. "I can't ever remember going out, when I was accumulating all those innings, thinking I wish I had a couple more days. In those days you wanted the baseball." + +'I Didn't Want Anybody Else in My Game' + Ryan recalled another first. When he was a teammate of Don Sutton with the Houston Astros in 1981, he said, Sutton was the first pitcher who said: "My goal is to get them to the seventh inning and then let the bullpen take over. I've done my job." +"I never had that mindset," Ryan said. "It never crossed my mind. I didn't want anybody else in my game." +Today, starting pitchers generally are only the first of several, if not many, pitchers a manager uses in a game. With few exceptions, pitchers are not expected to last nine innings. Many are not even permitted to exceed a designated-pitch limit, 100 being the number that has become more magic than the one that clinches first place. +"How did someone come up with that?" Ryan asked. "There's no science behind that. I threw 242 pitches in a game, then came back four days later. I didn't do too well, but I didn't hurt myself." +Ryan and others believe pitchers have become spoiled. +"If they get to 100 pitches, they say, 'That's it for me,' " Ryan said. "They've done their job. It's out of their hands. It's a mindset." +By pitching less often and fewer innings, pitchers are being cheated of arm strength, control of the strike zone and pitching knowledge, critics of the current system believe. +A pitch limit, David Cone of the Yankees said, "doesn't allow young pitchers to work on getting through tough innings." +In his experience, Cone added, he has often found that he pitches with greater ease and rhythm later in the game than early. +"To me," he said, "pitch 100 to 120 is a lot less taxing than 1 to 20." +Tom Glavine, who was the first cog in the Atlanta Braves' intimidating rotation, said he has no doubt that pitch limits have had a direct effect on the development of pitchers. +"Whatever the reason, pitchers are getting pampered," he said. "When you keep cutting guys off, you don't give them an opportunity to learn how to pitch late in the game or how to pitch when they're a little tired. That makes a big difference." +Furthermore, Glavine said, "Every time you go out with a pitch count, I don't care what a pitcher tells you, you know in the back of your mind 'I'm only throwing X number of pitches' and you end up thinking more about that than you think about just going out and pitching." + +Economic Crisis Arises on the Mound + Why do managers and pitching coaches treat pitchers so delicately these days? +"Because of the investment involved now," said Leo Mazzone, the Braves' pitching coach, who does not pamper his pitchers. "A lot of people cover their rear ends by not allowing pitchers to throw." +Ray Miller, another noted pitching coach now working for Baltimore, agreed that the matter has become an economic concern. +"The Pirates just signed Kris Benson for $2 million, said Miller, whose previous job was with Pittsburgh. "You want to take him to A ball and start throwing him every four days. But he's a big power guy and everybody's going to say: 'My god, if he gets hurt, it's my job. We better stay with five. Count his pitches. Make sure he doesn't get hurt.' " +A team's medical staff is influenced by economics as well, Miller said. +"In my first 10 years in the big leagues," he said, "if a pitcher had something bothering him. the trainer said go to the doctor's office tomorrow morning. The guy said it's not that bad and he pitched through it. Now you have an orthopedist in the clubhouse every day. This pitcher is making $3 million a year. If he says he's a little tender, the doctor is going to say I think you should rest him. He's not going to say pitch through it and have the guy go out and get hurt." +Phil Garner, the Milwaukee Brewers' manager, offered his own recent experience with Cal Eldred as proof of the prevailing mindset. Eldred, the American League's top rookie pitcher in 1992, averaged slightly more than seven innings a start in his first two and a half years in the major leagues. Then, in 1995, he developed an elbow problem, had ligament surgery on his right elbow and missed more than a season. +"I think everyone is scared to death of pitching a kid too much," Garner said. "We lost Cal Eldred, and part of the consideration is I threw him too many pitches. I'm not going to let that happen again. Whether that's right or wrong, and I've done research with several different doctors to try to determine if it was too many pitches, I don't want that to happen to a Jeff D'Amico or to Cal again." +But in exercising such caution, some baseball people believe, teams are risking the very thing they're trying to avoid. +"You end up trying to do so much to avoid arm injury," Mazzone said, "that you raise the risk of arm injury because the less you throw -- and when you do throw, you throw hard -- raises the risk." +Glavine readily agreed with his coach. "Everybody errs on the side of caution and that means keep throwing to a minimum," Glavine said. "The only problem is I don't think that's doing them any good. It's probably hurting them more." + +Cy Young Winners, Despite Little Rest + Since the Braves developed the starting rotation that has produced five of the last six National League Cy Young awards, they have come the closest of any team to using a four-man rotation, at times using the starters with three days rest but at other times inserting a fifth starter when the schedule doesn't provide a day off. +Whether Glavine is pitching every fourth or fifth day, though, he keeps busy between starts, throwing a baseball in some manner virtually every day. When he is on a five-day schedule, he plays catch the day after he starts to get loose, throws from a mound on the side the next two days, and then plays catch in the outfield with Mazzone the day before he starts again, going through his sequence of pitches in the process. +"It keeps my arm stronger," Glavine said, explaining the reason for his routine, "and the more you can throw a ball, the more you're going to develop touch with your pitches, the more you're going to develop feel for your pitches. The only way you're really going to be able to totally understand your mechanics and totally understand what it feels like when you throw the ball right or don't throw the ball right is to practice it." +A runner, the left-hander added, trains by running, a weight lifter by lifting weights. "Why if you're a pitcher, can't you throw?" he said. +Glavine recalled that it was Mazzone's throwing program that enabled him to strengthen his arm and overcome a naggingly sore arm he endured throughout the 1992 season. In a similar manner, Earl Weaver's pitching policy in Baltimore benefited Jim Palmer. +George Bamberger, who as Weaver's pitching coach helped produce 18 20-game winners in 10 years, told about how they nursed Palmer and his sore arm in 1968. +"Here's a guy who is hurt and doesn't know if he's ever going to play again," Bamberger, now retired, said. "We start pitching him in a four-man rotation and he wins the Cy Young award three times and 20 games eight times. A four-man rotation certainly didn't hurt Jim Palmer." +Palmer and the other three pitchers in the four-man rotation all emerged as 20-game winners in 1971. Palmer and Pat Dobson each pitched 282 innings, Mike Cuellar 292 and Dave McNally 224. No team has had four 20-game winners since, and it has been 10 years, since 1987, that the four busiest pitchers in either league collectively have thrown as many or more innings. + +LOAD-DATE: June 29, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Greg Maddux, talking with a coach, Leo Mazzone, is one of the more durable pitchers, registering nine consecutive 200-inning seasons. (Barton Silverman/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +343 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 2, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +FILM REVIEW; +On Board and on the Loose + +BYLINE: By JANET MASLIN + +SECTION: Section C; Page 11; Column 1; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 623 words + +On a 10-day cruise that feels longer, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau offer the comedic equivalent of shuffleboard. In the wake of their "Grumpy Old Men" success, not to mention their long history of lovable teamwork, these two stars provide a calculated vacation from summer movie syndrome. +Frankly geriatric, and made without a single gunfight or explosion, the weak but genial romp "Out to Sea" supplies touristy scenery, familiar players and enough rumba scenes for 10 weddings. Everything about the film is as intentionally dated as its gag about Normandy. + Senior humor worked fine for the funnier "Grumpy Old Men" films, perhaps because the stars played geezers with such sneaky flair. This time they're meant to be more debonair and are cast as brothers-in-law who sign on for jobs aboard the Westerdam, a ship that was actually in the midst of a cruise when many scenes were shot. "As dance hosts, it's our job to flirt with all the classy broads," explains Mr. Matthau's Charlie Gordon to Mr. Lemmon's Herb Sullivan, a widower who winds up finding new love. Be warned: "Out to Sea" includes kissing. +Herb is the sentimental one, as Martha Coolidge's film establishes instantly by introducing him as he drinks a toast to his late wife. Charlie, another of Mr. Matthau's great elbow-flapping rascals, is more of a pragmatic sort. Charlie gambles and is broke, but he hopes to strike it rich with one of the passengers. Dyan Cannon does a vampy turn as a latter-day Lady Eve, with Elaine Stritch as her wisecracking mother. +"Aw, what happened to the good-looking one?" Ms. Stritch wails, when the daughter announces that she's taken a shine to Charlie. "This is the good-looking one," Ms. Cannon answers, and it's true. Lined, rucked, saggy and baggy, the very funny Mr. Matthau has a natural look that's noticeably absent in the rest of the cosmetically enhanced cast. He also has most of the good quips in the screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs, though Mr. Lemmon gets his moments of humorous exasperation and a nice allusion to "Some Like It Hot." +The scene-stealer here is Brent Spiner, Data of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," as the amusingly tense cruise director who tries to run his team of dance instructors with military precision. "I'm your worst nightmare," he says memorably, "a song-and-dance man raised on an army base." The cruise director's own musical numbers are something to see. +The large cast, with marquee value for the older audiences who may find the mild "Out to Sea" a pleasant diversion, includes Hal Linden, the dashing Edward Mulhare and Gloria DeHaven as a demure new flame for Herb. Ms. DeHaven made her film debut at 9 in Chaplin's 1936 "Modern Times" and looks almost as lovely now as she did then. +Also here, and in a fine position to give dance instruction, is Donald O'Connor. Though Mr. O'Connor hasn't enough to do and mostly stands by cheerfully, sometimes the film just stops to let his fancy footwork draw a well-deserved round of applause. +"Out to Sea" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It includes mild profanity, hot-cha ogling and harmless sexual innuendos. + +OUT TO SEA + +Directed by Martha Coolidge; written by Robert Nelson Jacobs; director of photography, Lajos Koltai; edited by Anne V. Coates; music by David Newman; production designer, James Spencer; produced by John Davis and David T. Friendly; released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 106 minutes. This film is rated PG-13. + +WITH: Jack Lemmon (Herb), Walter Matthau (Charlie), Dyan Cannon (Liz), Gloria DeHaven (Vivian), Brent Spiner (Godwyn), Elaine Stritch (Mavis), Hal Linden (Mac), Donald O'Connor (Jonathan), Edward Mulhare (Carswell) and Rue McClanahan (Mrs. Carruthers). + +LOAD-DATE: July 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Less grumpy: Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in "Out to Sea," with Dyan Cannon. (Peter Sorel/20th Century Fox) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +344 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 2, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +A New Leader Outlines His Vision for Hong Kong + +BYLINE: By EDWARD A. GARGAN + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1699 words + +DATELINE: HONG KONG, July 1 + +For the first time in Hong Kong's history a Hong Konger, Tung Chee-hwa, stepped before his people as their leader today, explaining in their own dialect of Cantonese how the onset of Chinese rule, and his stewardship of the territory, would change their lives. +In what may be the first test of China's pledge that Hong Kong would be allowed its own distinct form of government, the police allowed a demonstration by a group, the Hong Kong Alliance, that China has branded subversive. About 2,500 protesters marched, some carrying red signs saying "Build a Democratic China" and "Put an End to the Dictatorship in China." + The marchers, by applying for a permit, had complied with rules in force under colonial administration; new rules restricting demonstrations had been laid down by the new legislature appointed by Beijing within hours of Hong Kong's reversion to China, and technically the marchers were not in compliance with those. +For most Hong Kongers, though, the demonstration was a sideshow to the speech by Mr. Tung, China's choice as Hong Kong's new chief executive, who for the first time outlined in detail how he planned to lead what has become a special autonomous zone of China. In a detailed review of the issues that consume Hong Kongers, Mr. Tung promised to solve the territory's housing problem -- "the aim is to achieve a home ownership rate of 70 percent in 10 years," he said -- as well as to reinvigorate the school system by improving teachers' qualifications and insure full day schooling at the primary level, introduce a mandatory retirement fund, and establish a government Commission for the Elderly. +"Like most people in Hong Kong," he said, "I am not a passer-by. Our home, our career, and our hope are here in Hong Kong. We have deep feelings for Hong Kong and a sense of mission to build a better Hong Kong." +Then, Hong Kong's new leader laid out a vision of a Government far more involved in people's lives than the old colonial administration. Ranging from exhortations for grown children to live with their parents, to direct involvement in the housing market, to steps to build and encourage a high-tech industrial belt in the territory. Mr. Tung's governmental activism, bred from both a belief in a quasi-Confucian paternalism and the instincts acquired running a shipping conglomerate, suggests a new direction for Hong Kong, one more akin to Singapore, which he has said he admires. +Mr. Tung's address came on the first day of Chinese rule, a day marked by a blizzard of concerts, operas, martial arts displays, what was billed as the world's largest karaoke and a sky-scalding display of fireworks and laser lights, accompanied by the elegaic strains of Yo Yo Ma's cello. +Mr. Tung spoke just hours after the red flag of China was run up flagpoles across the territory, from the former British military compounds to the glittering five-star hotels on the waterfront. His address was a speech for everyone, ranging from grand themes of identity and values to daily life concerns. It was, Mr. Tung explained, a blueprint that begins charting a Hong Kong different in many ways from the one left behind by the British. +Mr. Tung made only a passing reference to the loss of democracy in Hong Kong, saying only that his government would "resolutely move forward to a more democratic form of government in accordance with the provisions of the Basic Law," the mini-constitution devised by Beijing for Hong Kong. +China's President, Jiang Zemin, also addressed Hong Kong's elite gathered at the new convention center, in a speech intended both to reassure Hong Kongers and to confirm his own stature as the man who oversaw the end of colonial rule. +Speaking in the Mandarin dialect of northern China, Mr. Jiang repeatedly told Hong Kongers that they were to govern themselves, that their fate was in their own hands, that Hong Kong, a place so utterly different from the rest of China, would chart its own course. +"Hong Kong will continue to practice the capitalist system," declared Mr. Jiang, as the members of the new government, the territory's multitude of tycoons, its social elite and a bevy of foreign dignitaries listened, "with its previous socioecoomic system and way of life remaining unchanged and its laws remaining basically unchanged while the main part of the nation persists in the socialist system." +In an apparent test of the right to demonstrate, the group of protesters, organized by the Hong Kong Alliance, marched across through central Hong Kong this afternoon. Like a rally of democratic protesters who climbed the Legislative Council building just after midnight this morning, they were given enough leeway by the authorities so that no confrontation occurred. +The police seemed to handle the march in the same way they had in the past, even though new civil order legislation gives the government a legal means to block a demonstration on the basis of a threat to China's national security. +The march was relatively small by Hong Kong standards. +"Today we are here to fight for democracy within China," said Lee Cheuk-yan, one of the organizers. "We are fighting for democracy now as a part of China, from within China for the first time. I think that's very significant." +Mr. Lee said he was "warned" by the police that the march had exceeded the 2,000 demonstrators specified in its application, reaching what the police estimated to be about 2,500 marchers. Mr. Lee said he responded that the group had actually only reached about 2,300, not too much above the original number expected. +However, senior superintendent Gregory Lam, said the police had not issued a warning but had simply pointed out that the march had exceeded the number in the application and asked the group to try not to let the demonstration grow any larger. +"There was no problem," Mr. Lam said. "We estimated the crowd at 2,500. They thought it was about 2,300. We don't want it getting too large and we told them that." +No effort was made to break up the march, which soon dissipated. +Mr. Tung, who has come under considerable criticism for imposing new constraints on civil liberties, has struggled in the last six months since Beijing named him chief executive to overcome skepticism here about his loyalties and motives. +Some of the questions surrounding Mr. Tung's autonomy from Beijing stem from China's bailout of his virtually bankrupt shipping company in the 1980's, a financial rescue he has never explained. Indeed, he has refused repeatedly to explain the details of that arrangement although he insists it was, in his words, a purely "commercial" transaction. +As one friend of Mr. Tung put it, however, "he knows very well that Beijing saved his company. They haven't forgotten and he hasn't either." +He isalso immersed in the West, having spent six years in England. He went on to the United States where he spent a decade, working mostly for his father's shipping company. While there, and during his tenure as chairman of his shipping company, Orient Overseas (International) Ltd., he developed and cultivated contacts with a broad network of American and European business and government leaders. +His choice by China was ordained 18 months ago during a visit to Beijing when Mr. Jiang singled him out from a group of Hong Kong luminaries for a warm handshake. +Because of his seeming eagerness to please Beijing -- Mr. Tung immediately embraced China's demand that Hong Kong's elected legislature be abolished and that a range of civil liberties be curtailed -- many Hong Kongers have come to regard him as a puppet. Indeed, in the last opinion poll taken before Mr. Tung's investiture early this morning, the outgoing British governor, Christopher Patten, won an approval rating of 79 percent, 22 percentage points above that of Mr. Tung. +Today, Mr. Tung sought to speak as his own man, committed to his Chinese heritage while engaging the virtues of the West that Hong Kong has so eagerly absorbed. +"Every society has to have its own values to provide a common purpose and a sense of unity," declared Mr. Tung. "We will continue to encourage diversity in our society, but we must also reaffirm and respect the fine traditional Chinese values, including filial piety, love for the family, modesty and integrity and the desire for continuous improvement. We value plurality, but discourage open confrontation; we strive for liberty, but not at the expense of the rule of law; we respect minority views but are mindful of wider interests; we protect individual rights, but also shoulder collective responsibilities." +"I hope," intoned Mr. Tung, "these values will provide the foundation for unity in our society." +Recognizing that an erosion of more traditional family values has occurred to some extent in Hong Kong, Mr. Tung insisted that government "will encourage families to live with their elderly members." +Hong Kong's principal English-language newspaper, The South China Morning Post, argued that Mr. Tung must pay more attention to the territory's political needs. "His first, and most critical, political challenge," the paper insisted in this morning's edition, "will be to restore the degree of democracy that existed before today's swearing-in of the Provisional Legislature," the Beijing-appointed body that will now pass Hong Kong's laws. +Reaction to Mr. Tung's speech across Hong Kong ran the spectrum from enthusiasm to doubt. Cheng Suk-hon, a 48-year-old property manager, was on his way home on the subway and said that he was impressed and reassured. "I did watch Mr. Tung on television this morning," he said. "I'm confident of him governing Hong Kong. He's the first chief executive of Hong Kong so he must set a good example. He calmed people's concerns. I think he'll keep his promises." +But Kitty Ho, a college junior who has been studying in the United States and who was scampering toward the harborfront to watch the evening's fireworks, was less charitable. "He can say anything he wants but he won't necessarily do it," she said. "He's been saying the same thing over and over again. I don't trust him because he's just saying what he's been told to do." + +LOAD-DATE: July 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +SERIES: HONG KONG, CHINA: THE OVERVIEW + +GRAPHIC: Photos: The newly inaugurated chief executive of Hong Kong, Tung Chee-hwa, left, and the Chinese foreign minister, Qian Qichen, raised their glasses in a toast at a reception yesterday celebrating Hong Kong's return to China. (Pool Photo by Vincent Yu); A pro-democracy group held a carefully controlled march on the streets of Hong Kong. (Reuters)(pg. A1); Chinese sailors waved early yesterday at an accompanying vessel carrying journalists as they sailed into Hong Kong harbor. A sweeper used a shopping cart yesterday morning to carry a bag of garbage in the streets of Hong Kong after a night of celebration, while two young workers from the Philippines paused under a portrait of Tung Chee-hwa, the new Chief Executive of the autonomous region. (Photographs by Associated Press)(pg. A10) + +TYPE: Series + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +345 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 2, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +BOXING; +Tainted Hero: Neighborhood Split on Tyson + +BYLINE: By IAN FISHER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 891 words + +On one issue, at least, there was little disagreement along the block in Brownsville where Mike Tyson lived as a boy of 9 or 10: Boxing regulators in Nevada had every right to continue the temporary suspension against him yesterday for behavior that would not have earned him respect on the rough Brooklyn streets where he grew up. Even little children know: You do not bite. +"He ate a piece of his ear off," Kristie Rey, 6, said in disgust as she parked her bicycle just off Amboy Street. "It's bad. He doesn't have any business doing that." + But on the larger issues that have always surrounded Tyson here -- where he once watched over a pigeon coop with a friend named Tony and returned years later with gifts of cash and holiday turkeys -- his old neighborhood seems surprisingly divided. He is still a hero, a black man who made it out as a world heavyweight champion. Something, though, rang false in the weary ears of old neighbors when, on national television Monday, he begged for forgiveness by conjuring up Brownsville: "I grew up in the streets," he said. "I fought my way out." +Yesterday, the Nevada State Athletic Commission took another step in disciplining Tyson for biting Evander Holyfield during their heavyweight title fight Saturday night in Las Vegas. At a hearing next week, the commission will decide on a fine and how long it will be before he can return to the ring. [Page B9.] +"It doesn't explain it to me," said Rosemarie Washington, 43, sitting in a crowd of older women and girls off the stoop of the four-story brick building, at 178 Amboy Street, where Tyson once lived. "It doesn't matter where you grew up. As you grow older, you grow out of those things. You don't hold your childhood and carry it into your adulthood." +Bobby Rattley, 17, who lives with his grandmother in the apartment next door to the one where Tyson used to live, said he admired Tyson while growing up but soured with each new scandal. Biting Holyfield's ears was the last straw. +"I used to look up to him when I was younger because he did something positive by being a boxer, instead of just standing on the street," he said. Now, he said, "How can a rapist be a role model?" +People in Brownsville, indeed anywhere, could choose to believe whether Tyson had actually raped Desiree Washington six years ago, but no one could deny what they saw beamed, at a premium price, into their living rooms on Saturday night. In Brownsville, even Tyson's most loyal admirers -- and there are many of them -- said that a temporary suspension seemed called for, even though many people blamed Holyfield for head-butting Tyson first, not only in this fight but also in their first match won by Holyfield last November. +"If a guy bumped me in the eye, I'm going to get mad too," said Myles Moses, who is 16 and a student at South Shore High School. "But he didn't have to bite him. He should have knocked him out." +But the support for Tyson has been compromised by a deep sense of disappointment in this latest incident, in a neighborhood that has stuck by him through thick and thin, watched him grow from a troubled youth who mugged women to a hero who found something near to redemption in boxing. +Marcel Simmons, 23, said the bites were stupid and dropped Tyson down a few notches in esteem. "Iron Mike is corny Mike," Simmons said. "That's corny, biting him." +But, underscoring the divided feelings in Brownsville, Tyson is still a hero to Simmons, who said he himself had been in prison for attempted murder, drug dealing and other crimes. +"Regardless of one fight," Simmons said, "Tyson is always going to be the man." +Standing a few feet away from Simmons, beside a Dumpster parked in front of Tyson's old apartment, Cory Armstrong, 14, said he agreed. +"He comes from the streets, and he made it to the pros," Armstrong said. "The average black man wouldn't have made it. The average black man would be in jail right about now." +Many others on the street, closed to traffic this afternoon for children who jumped rope, rode bicycles or skateboards, said there seemed little to excuse Tyson for his behavior. +"There are thousands of people who come from this neighborhood," said Andrae Stanley, 39, who was teaching one of his five children, Aja, 5, how to ride a bike. "And they don't go around biting people and using that as an excuse of how they came out in life. +"He's on the good side of things, as far I'm concerned." + Down the block, at the Amboy Neighborhood Center, where Tyson was enrolled for three years, Julien Grant, 50, the executive director for 23 years, seemed slightly amused as he traced Tyson's development from young tough to local hero to this most recent chapter of a very public life. Like almost everyone else in the neighborhood, Grant had strong opinions about the fight: how Holyfield had played dirty in the first match, then head-butted Tyson early in the second. +Grant said he knows Tyson and the neighborhood well, and he tried to explain the twisted logic of what he saw on television Saturday night. +"I think the link between what happened in the ring and the environment he grew up in is at some point you don't let anyone push you anymore," Grant said. "And you retaliate without regard for consequences. + "I'll do anything to let you know you can't do this to me." + +LOAD-DATE: July 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Claudia Jordan, standing at center, was among the Brownsville residents critical of Mike Tyson's actions. (Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times); Andrae Stanley, who lives in Mike Tyson's former neighborhood, said "thousands of people" come from there without using it as an excuse. (pg. B12) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +346 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 3, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Assisted Suicide Decision Looms in Florida + +BYLINE: By MIREYA NAVARRO + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1215 words + +DATELINE: MIAMI, July 2 + +After the Supreme Court left it up to individual states to deal with the legal and ethical morass of whether to allow doctor-assisted suicide, few find the stakes higher, the debate richer or the question more immediate than Florida. +The Florida Supreme Court could rule as early as Thursday on the case of Dr. Cecil McIver and Charles E. Hall, a doctor and an AIDS patient who sued the state last year seeking to collaborate on Mr. Hall's death without the risk of criminal prosecution. Earlier this year a Palm Beach County Circuit Court judge sided with the plaintiffs and found that Florida's privacy rights laws outweighed the state's prohibition of "assisting self-murder," a second-degree felony. + The same ethical, religious and practical concerns that have made assisted suicide so divisive across the country have appeared in the legal briefs and arguments presented to Florida's highest court, the first such court to review an assisted suicide claim since the United States Supreme Court ruled last week that states may continue to ban the practice. But underlying the issue in Florida is also fear that in a retirement state where about 1 in 5 residents is 65 or older, the potential for abuse is tremendous, pitting countless terminally ill patients and others against the forces of ageism, economic coercion and depression. +"If you legalize assisted suicide in Florida, it'll spread like a wildfire to populations beyond the terminally ill," said H. James Towey, a former Florida health and rehabilitative services director who now heads the Commission on Aging with Dignity, a private group. +"You're talking about the depressed, the chronically ill, people with aches and pains who on any given month may have a bad month," Mr. Towey said. "In a state with a frail safety net for the elderly poor and with people thousands of miles away from family, it'd be a disaster." +Polls have shown strong support among the elderly and other age groups for the taking of life to end the suffering of the dying. But disagreement over physician-assisted suicide is sharp enough that the American Association of Retired Persons has refused to take a stance. +Drew Smith, a senior analyst for the Public Policy Institute at the retired people's association, said that beyond the moral questions, opinions among the elderly were split between empathy for those who want to be released from pain, and anxiety over the new mindset that assisted suicide would bring to the older patient's bedside if doctors, family members and the patients themselves accept a physician's role in hastening death rather than alleviating pain as one more option. +"There's fear of any kind of institutionalization of assisted suicide, that people might feel that somehow it becomes a duty to die," said Mr. Smith, who said that the retired persons' group had chosen to focus on improving the care of the dying. +People 65 and older have the highest rate of suicide among any age group in United States. +In Florida, Mr. Hall's legal arguments for assisted suicide hinge on a state constitutional amendment approved by voters in 1980 that asserts a stronger right of privacy than that offered in the United States Constitution. With few exceptions, the amendment says, "every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into his private life." The state Attorney General argues that the amendment never contemplated a privacy right for doctors who assist suicides. +Other states offer similarly broad privacy rights, and legal experts say state supreme courts are likely to become a popular target for constitution-based efforts to legalize assisted suicide. +While the Florida Supreme Court can limit its ruling to Mr. Hall's case, lawyers for the state say a finding for Mr. Hall would inevitably be seen as a precedent and would discourage prosecutions of doctors who aid in suicide. But even if the state court upholds Florida's ban on assisted suicide, both sides expect more litigation and debate. +"The question of the right to die with dignity is not going to die easily no matter what this court does," said Laurence H. Tribe, the Harvard professor of constitutional law who argued before the United States Supreme Court in favor of assisted suicide. +Mr. Hall, 35, a former restaurant owner who said he acquired H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, through a blood transfusion, is still mentally competent, his lawyers say, but he is deteriorating physically. Mr. Hall testified this year at his Palm Beach County trial that although he was not yet ready to die, he wanted Dr. McIver to give him a fatal dose of prescription drugs when he faced only extended suffering. He said that without a doctor's assistance, an attempt on his life could fail and might only worsen or prolong his suffering. +Dr. McIver, 74, a retired Jupiter doctor who is a member of the Hemlock Society, which paired him with Mr. Hall, is not willing to risk prosecution for manslaughter under the current law. But he defends assisted suicide for patients whose lives doctors cannot make tolerable. +"My responsibility to the patient is to do what's in his best interest," Dr. McIver said in an interview. "Usually his best interest is to live. But when it is to die, isn't it my responsibility to help him die?" +But the state Attorney General's office argues that it would be impossible to impose safeguards to limit assisted suicide to the patients for whom it was intended. The difficulties cited include determining mental competence and defining terminal illness, the role of depression in a patient's choice to die, coercion by relatives and fear that cost control factors could enter into the equation in the age of managed care. +The state considers elderly and disabled people the most vulnerable to abuse. +"Fifty percent of Medicare expenses is spent during the last six months of an elderly person's life," said Michael A. Gross, the Assistant Attorney General handling the appeal to the State Supreme Court. +Susan A. MacManus, a professor of political science at the University of South Florida, in Tampa, who is an expert on issues of the elderly, said older Americans might become less supportive of assisted suicide as they become increasingly concerned with cost controls in medical care. +"The growing disgruntlement among the elderly with H.M.O.'s is something that's going to enter into the Florida equation very fast," Ms. MacManus said. +But among about 40 friend-of-the-court briefs in Mr. Hall's case, the only senior citizen group to file one has sided with the patient. Members of the Florida Silver-Haired Legislature, a group that drafts mock bills dealing with concerns of the elderly and then promotes them among real legislators, call the purported danger for abuse "a red herring" for moral and religious arguments. +"It's like saying we shouldn't have money because somebody would steal it," said Monroe W. Treiman, 77, who is the head of the group. +"The elderly are abused for money and everything else," Mr. Treiman said. "But to say because that happens you're going to demand under law that they don't have a relief to get out of life when they want to is thwarting their rights. We say this is completely and absolutely wrong." + +LOAD-DATE: July 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Charles E. Hall, who sued for the right to enlist a doctor's help in his suicide, talked to one of his lawyers, Florence Rivas, earlier this year. (The Palm Beach Post via The Associated Press) + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +347 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 6, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Rome's Green Havens + +BYLINE: By MAUREEN B. FANT; MAUREEN B. FANT lives in Rome. + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 10; Column 3; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 1942 words + +LOOK at a map of Rome and you will see an outer ring of enormous green parks. Some are private; others, such as the Villa Doria Pamphili and the Villa Borghese, are open to the public. Farther toward the center, inside the line of the partly preserved third-century Aurelian Wall, which still demarcates central Rome, are visible small and medium-sized patches of green. Though many of the most beautiful of these are the gardens of private villas (like the villas Medici and Aurelia, belonging to the French and American academies respectively), a number of them are public. During the day they are frequented by small children with mothers, grandmothers or nannies, joggers, couples, the elderly, solitary readers and, after school, the Italian World Cup soccer team of the year 2012. In other words, Romans. +Situated near many of the city's principal monuments and attractions, the parks also provide a refuge and a welcome shot of oxygen for tired tourists who want a place to eat a sandwich (excellent drinking water is supplied by the public fountains about the size of fire hydrants placed throughout the city) or recharge before the next round of sightseeing. + The three intramural parks described below reflect my own preferences and haunts. These parks are generally adequately maintained, though nobody would call them manicured. People use them from sunrise to sunset. (As might be expected, the cast of characters can change after dark.) During the summer months, the parks are used for outdoor concerts and other events that give pleasure to many and annoy their respective neighborhoods, as well as for alfresco snacks or quiet walks. +All three are reasonably close to sources of picnic supplies or good places to eat. All three are also on top of hills and have views of Rome. + +Parco Savello +The Aventine Hill, the southernmost of the canonical seven hills of Rome, is an exclusive residential neighborhood known for high rents, tree-lined streets, historic churches, some with underlying ancient temples, and the Priory of the Knights of Malta. A park has to work hard to be a refuge from that, and in fact for me this tiny, one-acre park, known popularly as the Giardino, or Parco, degli Aranci (park of the orange trees), will always be Rome's secret garden, an island of orange trees, pines and oleander. +The park, which was opened to the public in 1932, lies between the fifth-century Church of Santa Sabina and the scant remains of the medieval fortress of the Savelli family, and is the adopted home of two orphan fountains transported there when their homes, a palazzo and a piazza, ceased to exist. The neighborhood is also adjacent to the popular Testaccio quarter (a place of trattorias, restaurants and a famous market) and such monuments as the Circus Maximus, the Pyramid of Cestius and the Protestant Cemetery. +It is a very small park -- not vest pocket but maybe overcoat pocket. A terrace at the end opposite the entrance overlooks the Tiber, straight across to the Janiculum and Vatican, one of the best views in Rome, the most conducive, for some reason, to identifying domes, from the flattish concrete mass of the Pantheon to the Baroque cupolas of St. Peter's basilica and the church of Sant'Andrea della Valle to the elaborate spiral of Sant'Ivo. +The Aventine is separated from Testaccio by a single street, the Via Marmorata, where the best picnic supplies in Rome can be picked up at the Volpetti shop, or around the corner at the Volpetti tavola calda (cafeteria). The selection includes both hard-to-find and classic cheeses and cold cuts, as well as freshly baked pizza, excellent breads (try the dark and chewy pane di Lariano) and prepared dishes. Fresh fruit and vegetables are found a couple of blocks away, at the Testaccio market. +Once in the park, most people gravitate down a broad path lined with tall pines and chunky potted oleanders (the medium-sized orange trees are scattered about) to the rather plain terrace on the edge of the hill. My friend Franco and I often come here on Sundays -- through the front gate, down the path, stopping briefly for a dome quiz, then out the little gate leading to the Clivo di Rocca Savelli. + +Parco del Colle Oppio +The Oppian Hill, or Colle Oppio, is the one of the seven nobody ever remembers. But its role in the topographical history of Rome is as central as its location, just near the Colosseum. This is Nero's hill. The remains of his Golden House, built in the 60's A.D., lie beneath it. Though the site is closed to the public, some ruined bits of the house are visible in a sad, abandoned sort of way around the large park. +When Nero was assassinated, in 68, his residence was torn down and public baths erected opposite the Colosseum, also erected after Nero's death. The principal consequences for us moderns are two: during the Renaissance, young artists used to sneak into the "grottoes" of the demolished palace and copy the wall paintings, giving rise to a style that came to be called grotesque, from the word grotte, and, second, the few remains of the first baths, those of Titus, and the rather more majestic ruins of their successor, the baths of Trajan, dot the park, producing a sort of Piranesi effect. But the park's gates and fountains are geometric and ponderous reminders of the Fascist era in which a public park was made from part of the gardens of Palazzo Brancaccio (which houses the Museum of Oriental Art), which stands just outside the park. +Paved paths, benches, open spaces and an extensive rose garden provide plenty of variety to the park, which is about five acres. The view is monolithic: the Colosseum looms in closeup, a striking effect produced by the elevation of the park to the approximate level of the amphitheater's upper stories. The park is a major feature of the neighborhood in which Franco and I live and work, and we regularly cut through opposite ends of it to reach our favorite restaurants, Hostaria Nerone, a classic trattoria on its western edge, and, for special occasions, Agata e Romeo, an elegant restaurant a couple of blocks outside the opposite end, near Santa Maria Maggiore. Inside the park a little kiosk serves coffee and cold drinks; for solid fare to take in for a picnic, a good source of bread, pizzas, sweets and fried snacks, near Santa Maria Maggiore, is Panella, a fancy bakery in the Via Merulana. + +Pincio Gardens +For a break from the galleries and shops of the Via del Corso and the Piazza di Spagna in downtown Rome, the park on the Pincian Hill (not one of the seven hills), which rises above the Piazza del Popolo, is the largest park within the Aurelian Wall -- about 10 acres -- and an attraction in itself. It also provides a pleasant refuge among the shades of a more elegant era, namely the 1830's, when postrevolutionary France was exercising its influence. The architect and urban planner Giuseppe Valadier designed the park (as well as the piazza) on terrain that once contained the gardens of rich families of the Roman Empire. +The park can be reached from the top of the Spanish Steps by the road that goes past the Villa Medici, but the most pleasant approach is from the Piazza del Popolo. Climb Valadier's "salita del Pincio," which zigzags up from the piazza, at first in competition with motor vehicles, but farther up picturesque and lined with trees. (As you face the hill, there is a staircase on the left, or you can take the road.) The reward for the climb is one of the most celebrated panoramas in Rome, the view from the Piazzale Napoleone I, straight across the river to the Vatican. +Bygone grandeur best characterizes the Pincio. It is a bit noisy and dusty around the edges, and the statues of dead notables are sometimes headless. Around part of the hill's perimeter runs the stretch of the Aurelian Wall known as the Muro Torto ("twisted wall"), paralleled by a heavily trafficked road separating the Pincio from the larger Villa Borghese, which lies on the other side of the Wall (though pedestrians may cross a bridge). +But the quieter heart of the park rewards exploration, not only with hedged walks and shaded benches; there are also two delightful and eccentric fountains. In one, Pharaoh's daughter discovers the infant Moses among, if not actual bulrushes, at least a fair setting of aquatic plants. The other fountain is a clepsydra, a water clock, made rather like a grandfather clock. In better days jets of water moved a mechanism to operate its pendulum. While we wait for the charming neo-classical structure within the park known as the Casina Valadier to reopen with a restaurant and cafe, the best bet would be to cruise the many food shops of Via di Ripetta for picnic materials. +Alternatively, a walk up the hill and around the park makes a good preliminary to (or penance after) lunch at Dal Bolognese, an excellent restaurant that faces the Pincio from the opposite side of the Piazza del Popolo. + +Finding the way to the parks + + There is no admission charge to any of the three parks. The Parco Savello, or Parco degli Aranci, closes its gates at sunset. The two others are open all the time but, as with any big city park, it is wise to stick to daylight hours. Except where noted, eating places and shops are closed on Sunday. + +Parco Savello + Main entrances to the Parco degli Aranci are in Via Santa Sabina and Piazza Pietro d'Illiria (next to an extraordinary fountain in which the water flows from an ancient stone face). A secondary entrance can be reached from the highly picturesque (mostly pedestrian) street known as Clivo di Rocca Savella, which climbs the Aventine Hill from the Lungotevere. To reach the park by public transport, take the subway (Line B) to Piramide or the 30 or 13 tram to Piazza Albania and walk up the Via Sant'Anselmo. +The Volpetti shop is at 47 Via Marmorata, (39-6) 574-2352); Open 8 A.M. to 2 P.M. and 5 to 10:15 P.M.; closed Thursday afternoon in addition to Sunday, but will be open all summer. The Volpetti Piu, the tavola calda, is around the corner at 8/10 Via Alessandro Volta; (39-6) 574-4306. Open 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. and 6 to 10 P.M. Closed for vacation from Aug. 11 to 28. + +Parco del Colle Oppio + The park is bordered on the west by the Via delle Terme di Tito and on the east by the Via delle Terme di Traiano, both of which have entrances. Other entrances are on the Via Labicana and the Viale del Monte Oppio. Take the subway (Line B) to Colosseo (exit up the steps to Largo Agnesi, not toward the Colosseum) or the 85 or 87 bus to the Via Labicana, one stop past the Colosseum. + Agata e Romeo, 45 Via Carlo Alberto; (39-6) 446-6115. On vacation from Aug. 10 to 30. Hostaria di Nerone, 96 Via delle Terme di Tito; (39-6) 474-5207. Reservations should be made; closed the entire month of August. Panella, (39-6) 487-2344, 2/10 Largo Leopardi (on the corner of Via Merulana). Open 8 A.M. to 1:30 P.M. and 5 to 7:30 P.M.; closed Thursday afternoon and, during August, Saturday afternoon. + +Giardini del Pincio + The Pincio is accessible on foot, bike or horse from the Villa Borghese. Taxis can reach the edge of the park, and pedestrians can enter from above the Piazza del Popolo or the Viale del Belvedere, an offshoot of Viale Trinita del Monte, which starts at the top of the Spanish Steps. Take the subway (Line A) to the Piazzale Flaminio or the electric 117 bus to the Piazza del Popolo. + Dal Bolognese, 1/2 Piazza del Popolo; (39-6) 361-1426. Closed Monday, except in July and August, when it is closed on Saturday and Sunday instead. On vacation for 15 days in the middle of August. M. B. F. + +LOAD-DATE: July 6, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: A corner of the Parco del Colle Oppio. Pharaoh's daughter with Moses in the bulrushes, a fountain in Pincio Park. (pg. 10); Romans use the Parco Savello from sunrise to sunset. (Claudio Martinez for The New York Times)(pg. 16) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +348 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 6, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Nursing Homes With Bars; +America's Aging, Violent Prisoners + +BYLINE: By FOX BUTTERFIELD + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 3; Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1179 words + +DATELINE: SOMERSET, Pa. + +STANLEY WILSON can no longer recall his age or why he was sent to prison. Alzheimer's has stolen his memory. His hazy mind wanders through space much more freely than his body these days, and he believes he will be released from his prison in the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania "this weekend." +Mr. Wilson is 59 years old, though he looks at least 70. He is an exemplar of a major unintended byproduct of the imprisonment boom of the past two decades -- a sharp growth in the number of elderly and geriatric inmates. + Since 1980, the number of inmates in state and Federal prisons has more than tripled to nearly 1.2 million. The number of prisoners considered geriatric, those 55 years or older, has jumped to an estimated 30,000 from 9,500, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, with some in their 80's and even 90's. +This growth, which parallels the increase in the elderly population in the nation, presents special burdens to prison authorities. Medical costs for these inmates are two to three times those for younger prisoners, specialists say, and health care expenses are the fastest growing item in prison budgets, which are themselves the most rapidly growing part of state budgets. +While the stereotypical view of elderly inmates is that they are lifers who have committed their crimes in the distant past and therefore may be deserving of release, the reality is that most of them are new to the system. +A full 25 percent have been in prison for less than a year and 68 percent for less than five years, said Allen J. Beck, chief of corrections statistics for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an arm of the Justice Department. Only 1 percent of geriatric prisoners have been incarcerated for 30 years or more. Mr. Wilson himself was sentenced for burglary only last year. + +Physiologically Older + Older inmates also turn out to have committed more violent crimes than their younger counterparts. Of all prisoners 55 and older, Mr. Beck said, two-thirds are serving time for a violent crime: 25 percent for murder or manslaughter; 27 percent for rape or sexual assault. +Take the case of John Saxon, a 56-year-old paraplegic, who like Mr. Wilson is at Laurel Highlands, a new prison for geriatric and infirm inmates, 70 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. One night in 1990 he got so drunk that when he tried to shoot his wife, he ended up killing one bystander, wounding two others and shooting himself in the head. +Mr. Saxon is confined to a hospital bed, serving a 15- to 30-year sentence; he can't even feed himself or go the bathroom without help. Like many older inmates, who have either alienated or lost touch with their families, he has no visitors. "I doubt I'll live to make it out," he said, lying in a sunny day room that looks more like a nursing home than a penitentiary. +Martin F. Horn, the commissioner of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, said cases such as Mr. Saxon's show that "growing old by itself does not end criminal careers." But age and infirmity, he said, do make inmates less dangerous and less likely to escape or assault guards or fellow prisoners. +So to help geriatric inmates and lower their medical costs by putting all of them in one place, a half dozen states including Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Alabama have recently opened special prisons for them. These new prisons, several of them converted from state mental hospitals, are just the beginning of a trend: the number of elderly prisoners will explode in the next 10 to 20 years with the increase in longer prison sentences, the abolition of parole in many states and the new "three strikes and you're out" laws. In Pennsylvania there are now 3,000 inmates serving life sentences without parole with an average age of 39, and they will only get older. +Another factor driving the increase in elderly prisoners is that as the number of convicts grows, more of them are released and tend to be rearrested, Mr. Beck said. It is the prison system metastasizing. +In 1980, 82 percent of all inmates admitted to state prisons were entering for the first time. By 1995, that had shrunk to 65 percent. +Adding to the difficulty, said Dr. Lester Lewis, medical director of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, is the tendency of inmates to age faster than other people. They may be 10 years older physiologically than they are chronologically, perhaps as a result of lifelong drinking or drug use and a lack of good medical care. "Often on admission an inmate will say it is the first time he has ever seen a doctor, except maybe in an emergency room," Dr. Lewis said. +Prison further speeds up the aging process because of the constant stress of worrying about being robbed or raped and trying to keep up with younger inmates in the daily rush to the chow line where meal time is strictly limited, said Dr. Herbert Rosefield, director of health services for the North Carolina Division of Prisons. +The plight of older inmates has sparked a movement to gain early release for some of them, both on humanitarian grounds and to cut costs and to create bed space for more violent inmates. The main argument for paroling older inmates is that "the most reliable factor predicting recidivism is age, as a person grows older, he becomes progressively less dangerous," said Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University and founder of the Project for Older Prisoners. +POPS, as the program is called, has won the release of 168 inmates in a number of states. But even Mr. Turley acknowledges that age alone does not stop people from committing crimes, so all the prisoners he supports have been carefully selected after checking their disciplinary records, the severity of their crimes, whether they have drug or alcohol problems and whether their victims' families consent. None of the 168 has been rearrested. +It is impossible to calculate how much extra geriatric inmates' health care costs because most states buy their health care in bulk for all inmates. But the medical records of a 78-year-old inmate in New York, Dr. Charles Friedgood, are suggestive. According to information he supplied, his total bill for medical care in the past few years, including treatment for cancer and heart disease, has been $230,000. Dr. Friedgood was sentenced to 25 years to life in 1977 for murdering his wife. +The greatest fear of elderly inmates, Mr. Turley said, is that they will die in prison without at least one night outside. One older inmate he tried to get paroled, Floyd Grigsby, was in Louisiana's Angola State Prison for armed robbery. The man "was distraught," Mr. Turley said, "that he would die in prison and be buried at Point Lookout," a hill inside the vast prison compound. +A week before his parole hearing, Mr. Grigsby was unexpectedly moved to a new cell block, "a move we strongly opposed," Mr. Turley said, "because older prisoners like older people on the outside have a terror of the unknown." That night, Mr. Grigsby had a heart attack and died. He was buried at Point Lookout. + +LOAD-DATE: July 6, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: John Saxon, a convicted murderer, is confined to a bed in a Pennsylvania prison for elderly and infirm inmates. (Scott Goldsmith for The New York Times) + +Graph: "Aged, but Not Necessarily Infirm" +A 1991 study of state prisoners, who make up about 90 percent of the nation's prison population, found that: The number of older prisoners has risent sharply . . . and 68 percent of those over age 55 have been imprisoned less than five years. More than two-thirds of older inmates were imprisoned for violent crimes. Graph tracks the total number of state prisoners in custody, 55 and older, from 1979 through 1991. It also shows a breakdown of the number of years prisoners over 55 have been incarcerated. Finally, it shows percentages of crime types for which they were imprisoned. (Source: "Growth, Change and Stability in the U.S. Prison Population," by Allen J. Beck, chief of correction statistics at the Bureau of Justice Statistics) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +349 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 6, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Rome's Green Havens + +BYLINE: By MAUREEN B. FANT; MAUREEN B. FANT lives in Rome. + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 10; Column 3; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 1942 words + +LOOK at a map of Rome and you will see an outer ring of enormous green parks. Some are private; others, such as the Villa Doria Pamphili and the Villa Borghese, are open to the public. Farther toward the center, inside the line of the partly preserved third-century Aurelian Wall, which still demarcates central Rome, are visible small and medium-sized patches of green. Though many of the most beautiful of these are the gardens of private villas (like the villas Medici and Aurelia, belonging to the French and American academies respectively), a number of them are public. During the day they are frequented by small children with mothers, grandmothers or nannies, joggers, couples, the elderly, solitary readers and, after school, the Italian World Cup soccer team of the year 2012. In other words, Romans. +Situated near many of the city's principal monuments and attractions, the parks also provide a refuge and a welcome shot of oxygen for tired tourists who want a place to eat a sandwich (excellent drinking water is supplied by the public fountains about the size of fire hydrants placed throughout the city) or recharge before the next round of sightseeing. + The three intramural parks described below reflect my own preferences and haunts. These parks are generally adequately maintained, though nobody would call them manicured. People use them from sunrise to sunset. (As might be expected, the cast of characters can change after dark.) During the summer months, the parks are used for outdoor concerts and other events that give pleasure to many and annoy their respective neighborhoods, as well as for alfresco snacks or quiet walks. +All three are reasonably close to sources of picnic supplies or good places to eat. All three are also on top of hills and have views of Rome. + +Parco Savello +The Aventine Hill, the southernmost of the canonical seven hills of Rome, is an exclusive residential neighborhood known for high rents, tree-lined streets, historic churches, some with underlying ancient temples, and the Priory of the Knights of Malta. A park has to work hard to be a refuge from that, and in fact for me this tiny, one-acre park, known popularly as the Giardino, or Parco, degli Aranci (park of the orange trees), will always be Rome's secret garden, an island of orange trees, pines and oleander. +The park, which was opened to the public in 1932, lies between the fifth-century Church of Santa Sabina and the scant remains of the medieval fortress of the Savelli family, and is the adopted home of two orphan fountains transported there when their homes, a palazzo and a piazza, ceased to exist. The neighborhood is also adjacent to the popular Testaccio quarter (a place of trattorias, restaurants and a famous market) and such monuments as the Circus Maximus, the Pyramid of Cestius and the Protestant Cemetery. +It is a very small park -- not vest pocket but maybe overcoat pocket. A terrace at the end opposite the entrance overlooks the Tiber, straight across to the Janiculum and Vatican, one of the best views in Rome, the most conducive, for some reason, to identifying domes, from the flattish concrete mass of the Pantheon to the Baroque cupolas of St. Peter's basilica and the church of Sant'Andrea della Valle to the elaborate spiral of Sant'Ivo. +The Aventine is separated from Testaccio by a single street, the Via Marmorata, where the best picnic supplies in Rome can be picked up at the Volpetti shop, or around the corner at the Volpetti tavola calda (cafeteria). The selection includes both hard-to-find and classic cheeses and cold cuts, as well as freshly baked pizza, excellent breads (try the dark and chewy pane di Lariano) and prepared dishes. Fresh fruit and vegetables are found a couple of blocks away, at the Testaccio market. +Once in the park, most people gravitate down a broad path lined with tall pines and chunky potted oleanders (the medium-sized orange trees are scattered about) to the rather plain terrace on the edge of the hill. My friend Franco and I often come here on Sundays -- through the front gate, down the path, stopping briefly for a dome quiz, then out the little gate leading to the Clivo di Rocca Savelli. + +Parco del Colle Oppio +The Oppian Hill, or Colle Oppio, is the one of the seven nobody ever remembers. But its role in the topographical history of Rome is as central as its location, just near the Colosseum. This is Nero's hill. The remains of his Golden House, built in the 60's A.D., lie beneath it. Though the site is closed to the public, some ruined bits of the house are visible in a sad, abandoned sort of way around the large park. +When Nero was assassinated, in 68, his residence was torn down and public baths erected opposite the Colosseum, also erected after Nero's death. The principal consequences for us moderns are two: during the Renaissance, young artists used to sneak into the "grottoes" of the demolished palace and copy the wall paintings, giving rise to a style that came to be called grotesque, from the word grotte, and, second, the few remains of the first baths, those of Titus, and the rather more majestic ruins of their successor, the baths of Trajan, dot the park, producing a sort of Piranesi effect. But the park's gates and fountains are geometric and ponderous reminders of the Fascist era in which a public park was made from part of the gardens of Palazzo Brancaccio (which houses the Museum of Oriental Art), which stands just outside the park. +Paved paths, benches, open spaces and an extensive rose garden provide plenty of variety to the park, which is about five acres. The view is monolithic: the Colosseum looms in closeup, a striking effect produced by the elevation of the park to the approximate level of the amphitheater's upper stories. The park is a major feature of the neighborhood in which Franco and I live and work, and we regularly cut through opposite ends of it to reach our favorite restaurants, Hostaria Nerone, a classic trattoria on its western edge, and, for special occasions, Agata e Romeo, an elegant restaurant a couple of blocks outside the opposite end, near Santa Maria Maggiore. Inside the park a little kiosk serves coffee and cold drinks; for solid fare to take in for a picnic, a good source of bread, pizzas, sweets and fried snacks, near Santa Maria Maggiore, is Panella, a fancy bakery in the Via Merulana. + +Pincio Gardens +For a break from the galleries and shops of the Via del Corso and the Piazza di Spagna in downtown Rome, the park on the Pincian Hill (not one of the seven hills), which rises above the Piazza del Popolo, is the largest park within the Aurelian Wall -- about 10 acres -- and an attraction in itself. It also provides a pleasant refuge among the shades of a more elegant era, namely the 1830's, when postrevolutionary France was exercising its influence. The architect and urban planner Giuseppe Valadier designed the park (as well as the piazza) on terrain that once contained the gardens of rich families of the Roman Empire. +The park can be reached from the top of the Spanish Steps by the road that goes past the Villa Medici, but the most pleasant approach is from the Piazza del Popolo. Climb Valadier's "salita del Pincio," which zigzags up from the piazza, at first in competition with motor vehicles, but farther up picturesque and lined with trees. (As you face the hill, there is a staircase on the left, or you can take the road.) The reward for the climb is one of the most celebrated panoramas in Rome, the view from the Piazzale Napoleone I, straight across the river to the Vatican. +Bygone grandeur best characterizes the Pincio. It is a bit noisy and dusty around the edges, and the statues of dead notables are sometimes headless. Around part of the hill's perimeter runs the stretch of the Aurelian Wall known as the Muro Torto ("twisted wall"), paralleled by a heavily trafficked road separating the Pincio from the larger Villa Borghese, which lies on the other side of the Wall (though pedestrians may cross a bridge). +But the quieter heart of the park rewards exploration, not only with hedged walks and shaded benches; there are also two delightful and eccentric fountains. In one, Pharaoh's daughter discovers the infant Moses among, if not actual bulrushes, at least a fair setting of aquatic plants. The other fountain is a clepsydra, a water clock, made rather like a grandfather clock. In better days jets of water moved a mechanism to operate its pendulum. While we wait for the charming neo-classical structure within the park known as the Casina Valadier to reopen with a restaurant and cafe, the best bet would be to cruise the many food shops of Via di Ripetta for picnic materials. +Alternatively, a walk up the hill and around the park makes a good preliminary to (or penance after) lunch at Dal Bolognese, an excellent restaurant that faces the Pincio from the opposite side of the Piazza del Popolo. + +Finding the way to the parks + + There is no admission charge to any of the three parks. The Parco Savello, or Parco degli Aranci, closes its gates at sunset. The two others are open all the time but, as with any big city park, it is wise to stick to daylight hours. Except where noted, eating places and shops are closed on Sunday. + +Parco Savello + Main entrances to the Parco degli Aranci are in Via Santa Sabina and Piazza Pietro d'Illiria (next to an extraordinary fountain in which the water flows from an ancient stone face). A secondary entrance can be reached from the highly picturesque (mostly pedestrian) street known as Clivo di Rocca Savella, which climbs the Aventine Hill from the Lungotevere. To reach the park by public transport, take the subway (Line B) to Piramide or the 30 or 13 tram to Piazza Albania and walk up the Via Sant'Anselmo. +The Volpetti shop is at 47 Via Marmorata, (39-6) 574-2352); Open 8 A.M. to 2 P.M. and 5 to 10:15 P.M.; closed Thursday afternoon in addition to Sunday, but will be open all summer. The Volpetti Piu, the tavola calda, is around the corner at 8/10 Via Alessandro Volta; (39-6) 574-4306. Open 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. and 6 to 10 P.M. Closed for vacation from Aug. 11 to 28. + +Parco del Colle Oppio + The park is bordered on the west by the Via delle Terme di Tito and on the east by the Via delle Terme di Traiano, both of which have entrances. Other entrances are on the Via Labicana and the Viale del Monte Oppio. Take the subway (Line B) to Colosseo (exit up the steps to Largo Agnesi, not toward the Colosseum) or the 85 or 87 bus to the Via Labicana, one stop past the Colosseum. + Agata e Romeo, 45 Via Carlo Alberto; (39-6) 446-6115. On vacation from Aug. 10 to 30. Hostaria di Nerone, 96 Via delle Terme di Tito; (39-6) 474-5207. Reservations should be made; closed the entire month of August. Panella, (39-6) 487-2344, 2/10 Largo Leopardi (on the corner of Via Merulana). Open 8 A.M. to 1:30 P.M. and 5 to 7:30 P.M.; closed Thursday afternoon and, during August, Saturday afternoon. + +Giardini del Pincio + The Pincio is accessible on foot, bike or horse from the Villa Borghese. Taxis can reach the edge of the park, and pedestrians can enter from above the Piazza del Popolo or the Viale del Belvedere, an offshoot of Viale Trinita del Monte, which starts at the top of the Spanish Steps. Take the subway (Line A) to the Piazzale Flaminio or the electric 117 bus to the Piazza del Popolo. + Dal Bolognese, 1/2 Piazza del Popolo; (39-6) 361-1426. Closed Monday, except in July and August, when it is closed on Saturday and Sunday instead. On vacation for 15 days in the middle of August. M. B. F. + +LOAD-DATE: July 6, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: A corner of the Parco del Colle Oppio. Pharaoh's daughter with Moses in the bulrushes, a fountain in Pincio Park. (pg. 10); Romans use the Parco Savello from sunrise to sunset. (Claudio Martinez for The New York Times)(pg. 16) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +350 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 6, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Nursing Homes With Bars; +America's Aging, Violent Prisoners + +BYLINE: By FOX BUTTERFIELD + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 3; Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 1179 words + +DATELINE: SOMERSET, Pa. + +STANLEY WILSON can no longer recall his age or why he was sent to prison. Alzheimer's has stolen his memory. His hazy mind wanders through space much more freely than his body these days, and he believes he will be released from his prison in the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania "this weekend." +Mr. Wilson is 59 years old, though he looks at least 70. He is an exemplar of a major unintended byproduct of the imprisonment boom of the past two decades -- a sharp growth in the number of elderly and geriatric inmates. + Since 1980, the number of inmates in state and Federal prisons has more than tripled to nearly 1.2 million. The number of prisoners considered geriatric, those 55 years or older, has jumped to an estimated 30,000 from 9,500, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, with some in their 80's and even 90's. +This growth, which parallels the increase in the elderly population in the nation, presents special burdens to prison authorities. Medical costs for these inmates are two to three times those for younger prisoners, specialists say, and health care expenses are the fastest growing item in prison budgets, which are themselves the most rapidly growing part of state budgets. +While the stereotypical view of elderly inmates is that they are lifers who have committed their crimes in the distant past and therefore may be deserving of release, the reality is that most of them are new to the system. +A full 25 percent have been in prison for less than a year and 68 percent for less than five years, said Allen J. Beck, chief of corrections statistics for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an arm of the Justice Department. Only 1 percent of geriatric prisoners have been incarcerated for 30 years or more. Mr. Wilson himself was sentenced for burglary only last year. + +Physiologically Older + Older inmates also turn out to have committed more violent crimes than their younger counterparts. Of all prisoners 55 and older, Mr. Beck said, two-thirds are serving time for a violent crime: 25 percent for murder or manslaughter; 27 percent for rape or sexual assault. +Take the case of John Saxon, a 56-year-old paraplegic, who like Mr. Wilson is at Laurel Highlands, a new prison for geriatric and infirm inmates, 70 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. One night in 1990 he got so drunk that when he tried to shoot his wife, he ended up killing one bystander, wounding two others and shooting himself in the head. +Mr. Saxon is confined to a hospital bed, serving a 15- to 30-year sentence; he can't even feed himself or go the bathroom without help. Like many older inmates, who have either alienated or lost touch with their families, he has no visitors. "I doubt I'll live to make it out," he said, lying in a sunny day room that looks more like a nursing home than a penitentiary. +Martin F. Horn, the commissioner of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, said cases such as Mr. Saxon's show that "growing old by itself does not end criminal careers." But age and infirmity, he said, do make inmates less dangerous and less likely to escape or assault guards or fellow prisoners. +So to help geriatric inmates and lower their medical costs by putting all of them in one place, a half dozen states including Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Alabama have recently opened special prisons for them. These new prisons, several of them converted from state mental hospitals, are just the beginning of a trend: the number of elderly prisoners will explode in the next 10 to 20 years with the increase in longer prison sentences, the abolition of parole in many states and the new "three strikes and you're out" laws. In Pennsylvania there are now 3,000 inmates serving life sentences without parole with an average age of 39, and they will only get older. +Another factor driving the increase in elderly prisoners is that as the number of convicts grows, more of them are released and tend to be rearrested, Mr. Beck said. It is the prison system metastasizing. +In 1980, 82 percent of all inmates admitted to state prisons were entering for the first time. By 1995, that had shrunk to 65 percent. +Adding to the difficulty, said Dr. Lester Lewis, medical director of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, is the tendency of inmates to age faster than other people. They may be 10 years older physiologically than they are chronologically, perhaps as a result of lifelong drinking or drug use and a lack of good medical care. "Often on admission an inmate will say it is the first time he has ever seen a doctor, except maybe in an emergency room," Dr. Lewis said. +Prison further speeds up the aging process because of the constant stress of worrying about being robbed or raped and trying to keep up with younger inmates in the daily rush to the chow line where meal time is strictly limited, said Dr. Herbert Rosefield, director of health services for the North Carolina Division of Prisons. +The plight of older inmates has sparked a movement to gain early release for some of them, both on humanitarian grounds and to cut costs and to create bed space for more violent inmates. The main argument for paroling older inmates is that "the most reliable factor predicting recidivism is age, as a person grows older, he becomes progressively less dangerous," said Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University and founder of the Project for Older Prisoners. +POPS, as the program is called, has won the release of 168 inmates in a number of states. But even Mr. Turley acknowledges that age alone does not stop people from committing crimes, so all the prisoners he supports have been carefully selected after checking their disciplinary records, the severity of their crimes, whether they have drug or alcohol problems and whether their victims' families consent. None of the 168 has been rearrested. +It is impossible to calculate how much extra geriatric inmates' health care costs because most states buy their health care in bulk for all inmates. But the medical records of a 78-year-old inmate in New York, Dr. Charles Friedgood, are suggestive. According to information he supplied, his total bill for medical care in the past few years, including treatment for cancer and heart disease, has been $230,000. Dr. Friedgood was sentenced to 25 years to life in 1977 for murdering his wife. +The greatest fear of elderly inmates, Mr. Turley said, is that they will die in prison without at least one night outside. One older inmate he tried to get paroled, Floyd Grigsby, was in Louisiana's Angola State Prison for armed robbery. The man "was distraught," Mr. Turley said, "that he would die in prison and be buried at Point Lookout," a hill inside the vast prison compound. +A week before his parole hearing, Mr. Grigsby was unexpectedly moved to a new cell block, "a move we strongly opposed," Mr. Turley said, "because older prisoners like older people on the outside have a terror of the unknown." That night, Mr. Grigsby had a heart attack and died. He was buried at Point Lookout. + +LOAD-DATE: July 6, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: John Saxon, a convicted murderer, is confined to a bed in a Pennsylvania prison for elderly and infirm inmates. (Scott Goldsmith for The New York Times) + +Graph: "Aged, but Not Necessarily Infirm" +A 1991 study of state prisoners, who make up about 90 percent of the nation's prison population, found that: The number of older prisoners has risent sharply . . . and 68 percent of those over age 55 have been imprisoned less than five years. More than two-thirds of older inmates were imprisoned for violent crimes. Graph tracks the total number of state prisoners in custody, 55 and older, from 1979 through 1991. It also shows a breakdown of the number of years prisoners over 55 have been incarcerated. Finally, it shows percentages of crime types for which they were imprisoned. (Source: "Growth, Change and Stability in the U.S. Prison Population," by Allen J. Beck, chief of correction statistics at the Bureau of Justice Statistics) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +351 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 6, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +SOAPBOX; +Tickets, Please + +BYLINE: By CAREN LISSNER; Caren Lissner is a freelance writer who lives in Hoboken. + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 11; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 645 words + +AN amusement park is always a happy place until you've worked there a few months. Sometimes it still is after that. But more often, even the most cheerful workers eventually succumb to day after day of brain-frying heat, screaming children and parents shouting about who cut in front of whose kid in line. +Such was my experience when I spent a summer working at a big New Jersey theme park. To be honest, my job as an admissions gate attendant wasn't too bad. All the hundreds of summer employees received free guest passes and discounts in the employee store. Food in the staff cafeteria was cheap. These things were important: while some people didn't really need the money, others did. The latter group included elderly people on fixed incomes and people like me who were trying to scrape money together for the next semester of college. + Admissions was an easy job that required, basically, tearing an admission ticket along the perforation and handing back the receipt. Life was even easier if you were at the season-pass gate or the hand-stamp entrance: no tearing, just a cursory glance. It always seemed that certain favored people ended up in those spots, something that was the source of endless conspiracy-theory hatching by co-workers, along with the issue of who got the most hours and therefore the most money. +I was happy to have work, though, so I didn't complain much, even when we all became sweaty and bored and had to think up ways to entertain ourselves. +The biggest source of entertainment was provided by the security guards who stood behind us. It was their job to burrow through the guests' pockets and bags for contraband: guns, knives, drugs and so on. Once in a while, a visitor would step through the ticket turnstile, see the security and run back out. A chase would ensue -- someone taking his new authority a little too seriously -- and we would crane our necks to watch the show. Often the hidden item was marijuana, or occasionally cocaine. That's entertainment. +A quieter diversion was the employee suggestion box. One of my "suggestions" was actually a question about whether standing near metal detectors for long periods of time (like an entire summer) was dangerous. I dropped it in the box, as I had done with so many others, and forgot about it. +I went back to worrying about how I could get in good with my supervisors so they wouldn't send me home early and I could get my eight hours. I really needed the money. My situation was so dire that summer that I refused to allow myself one of the funnel cakes whose sweet powdered-sugar fumes I inhaled all day long. +One day, things changed. I was sitting at my gate when a supervisor came up to me, seemingly aghast, to tell me that the vice president of the whole park was on the phone for me. What did he want? I walked to the office, followed by many pairs of eyes. +"I just wanted to let you know that I got your question about the metal detectors," he said. "We're going to do some research and get back to you in a couple of weeks." +Later, when someone finally got the nerve to ask what we had talked about, I replied vaguely that it had to do with an employee suggestion. +I was treated much more nicely after that. For the last three weeks of the summer, I was never sent home early, and one week I even made overtime. Maybe this was just because the park was busier. I didn't know, and I didn't care. I was just happy to be earning more money. +I went back to school before I received an answer about the metal detectors, and I didn't set foot in the park again for four years. +Then, two summers ago, I decided to go back. I submitted a coupon to pay half price, passed through the admissions gate and plunked down some scrip for a funnel cake. Memories of my summer of boredom and poverty were swept away. I was a tourist again, and happy to be so. + +LOAD-DATE: July 6, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Felipe Galindo) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +352 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 6, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +SOAPBOX; +Tickets, Please + +BYLINE: By CAREN LISSNER; Caren Lissner is a freelance writer who lives in Hoboken. + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 11; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 645 words + +AN amusement park is always a happy place until you've worked there a few months. Sometimes it still is after that. But more often, even the most cheerful workers eventually succumb to day after day of brain-frying heat, screaming children and parents shouting about who cut in front of whose kid in line. +Such was my experience when I spent a summer working at a big New Jersey theme park. To be honest, my job as an admissions gate attendant wasn't too bad. All the hundreds of summer employees received free guest passes and discounts in the employee store. Food in the staff cafeteria was cheap. These things were important: while some people didn't really need the money, others did. The latter group included elderly people on fixed incomes and people like me who were trying to scrape money together for the next semester of college. + Admissions was an easy job that required, basically, tearing an admission ticket along the perforation and handing back the receipt. Life was even easier if you were at the season-pass gate or the hand-stamp entrance: no tearing, just a cursory glance. It always seemed that certain favored people ended up in those spots, something that was the source of endless conspiracy-theory hatching by co-workers, along with the issue of who got the most hours and therefore the most money. +I was happy to have work, though, so I didn't complain much, even when we all became sweaty and bored and had to think up ways to entertain ourselves. +The biggest source of entertainment was provided by the security guards who stood behind us. It was their job to burrow through the guests' pockets and bags for contraband: guns, knives, drugs and so on. Once in a while, a visitor would step through the ticket turnstile, see the security and run back out. A chase would ensue -- someone taking his new authority a little too seriously -- and we would crane our necks to watch the show. Often the hidden item was marijuana, or occasionally cocaine. That's entertainment. +A quieter diversion was the employee suggestion box. One of my "suggestions" was actually a question about whether standing near metal detectors for long periods of time (like an entire summer) was dangerous. I dropped it in the box, as I had done with so many others, and forgot about it. +I went back to worrying about how I could get in good with my supervisors so they wouldn't send me home early and I could get my eight hours. I really needed the money. My situation was so dire that summer that I refused to allow myself one of the funnel cakes whose sweet powdered-sugar fumes I inhaled all day long. +One day, things changed. I was sitting at my gate when a supervisor came up to me, seemingly aghast, to tell me that the vice president of the whole park was on the phone for me. What did he want? I walked to the office, followed by many pairs of eyes. +"I just wanted to let you know that I got your question about the metal detectors," he said. "We're going to do some research and get back to you in a couple of weeks." +Later, when someone finally got the nerve to ask what we had talked about, I replied vaguely that it had to do with an employee suggestion. +I was treated much more nicely after that. For the last three weeks of the summer, I was never sent home early, and one week I even made overtime. Maybe this was just because the park was busier. I didn't know, and I didn't care. I was just happy to be earning more money. +I went back to school before I received an answer about the metal detectors, and I didn't set foot in the park again for four years. +Then, two summers ago, I decided to go back. I submitted a coupon to pay half price, passed through the admissions gate and plunked down some scrip for a funnel cake. Memories of my summer of boredom and poverty were swept away. I was a tourist again, and happy to be so. + +LOAD-DATE: July 6, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Felipe Galindo) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +353 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 8, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Brain Size Is Studied In Elderly + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section C; Page 2; Column 4; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 341 words + +DATELINE: DALLAS, July 7 + +High blood pressure may speed the loss of memory and other cognitive abilities in the elderly and cause their brains to shrink, a study indicates. +The changes seem to occur in spite of drug therapy to control blood pressure, said Dr. Gene E. Alexander, the study's senior investigator. + The results suggest that more effective treatment may be needed for elderly patients with high blood pressure, Dr. Alexander said. +But a neurologist who was not involved with the study, Dr. Larry B. Goldstein, an associate professor of medicine and neurology at the Duke University Medical Center and the Durham Veterans Affairs Hospital, said further work was needed before the standard therapies were changed. +Dr. Goldstein said the differences in brain size and cognitive performance found in the study "were clearly significant but seemed over all to be relatively small." He added, "You have to factor in not only the potential benefits but all the other side effects and costs related to altering therapy in an elderly population." +Elderly people with blood pressure that is too low may faint, Dr. Goldstein said. +In the study, Dr. Alexander and other researchers at the National Institutes on Aging of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., compared people with normal blood pressure in two age groups -- 56 to 69, and 70 to 84 -- with people who had long histories of high blood pressure that was well controlled. +One of its possible limitations was the small number of patients evaluated: 27 with high blood pressure and 20 in the control group. Dr. Alexander said the numbers were small because of the labor involved in measuring the size of each person's brain. The study appears in the July edition of Stroke, a journal of the American Heart Association. +The participants underwent brain-imaging scans to evaluate brain size and took neuropsychological tests. +Dr. Alexander said the patients with high blood pressure, who were otherwise healthy, showed more brain atrophy and memory loss than the other patients. + +LOAD-DATE: July 8, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +354 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 8, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Conservative Advocate and His G.O.P. Ties Come Into Focus + +BYLINE: By LESLIE WAYNE + +SECTION: Section A; Page 12; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1639 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 7 + +In the closing weeks of last fall's elections, with Congress up for grabs, polls showed that one issue causing voters to hesitate supporting Republican candidates was a fear that a Republican majority in Congress would cut Medicare benefits to the elderly. +Into the breach came Grover G. Norquist, an emerging leader in conservative circles. Armed with $4.6 million from the Republican National Committee, Mr. Norquist's nonprofit anti-tax group, Americans for Tax Reform, flooded 150 Congressional districts with a direct-mail campaign assuring voters that the Republicans had no intention of cutting Medicare and that voters were being subjected to "political scare tactics" to think otherwise. + Mr. Norquist's efforts apparently paid off. After this late-October blitz, Republican polls showed that a significant shift had taken place, with the party actually winning on the Medicare issue, and on Election Day a Republican majority in Congress was re-elected. +What was striking about Mr. Norquist's effort was that, although it was financed with Republican money, none of the mailings revealed this connection. The late October mailings were issued under the name of Americans for Tax Reform and were designed to look as though they came from an independent group. +Now, however, the relationship between Mr. Norquist and the Republicans has come under scrutiny. +The Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, which will begin hearings on campaign finance abuses on Tuesday, is questioning the arrangement between the Republican Party and Mr. Norquist, a lobbyist and columnist, among other things. While the bulk of the hearings will look at alleged wrongdoing by the Democratic Party, the committee will also examine the role that nonprofit conservative groups played in helping Republican candidates when it looks at possible Republican Party abuses. +Just last weekend, Senator Fred Thompson, the Tennessee Republican who is chairman of the investigative committee, said, "You have to address the relationships that there are with these independent groups." +"It's the use of these independent groups who can produce monies, funds, people and so forth that are just as important as the soft money," Mr. Thompson added. +Investigators are asking whether the Republicans' relationship with Mr. Norquist's group violated Federal laws banning coordination between political parties and other groups. They will also see whether the Republicans funneled money to nonprofit groups to circumvent laws prohibiting use of "soft money" -- unrestricted donations to political parties -- in individual Congressional races. Federal law allows soft money to be used only for party-building activities. +"The 1996 election saw an explosion in the perversion of nonprofit groups becoming tools of the parties," said Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit research group in Washington. "Millions of dollars were laundered through these groups with no disclosure. Americans for Tax Reform is a front for the Republican Party. Republicans are hiding money in this group, and that is fundamentally dishonest." +Both the Republican National Committee and Mr. Norquist insist they did nothing wrong. +"As far as the Americans for Tax Reform is concerned, the R.N.C. routinely makes contributions to like-minded organizations," said Scott Hogenson, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee. "In this case, the R.N.C. and the Americans for Tax Reform see eye to eye on the need for changing the way American working people are taxed. +"As for what an organization may choose to do with a contribution, well, that's up to them." +Mr. Norquist agrees, saying: "We had zero coordination with the R.N.C. If the Senate committee is hoping to argue for coordination, they will not get anywhere. We advertised which candidates would be for the taxpayers and which would vote against them. If that redounds to the detriment of the Democrats, well, then the Democrats have some explaining to do." +Mr. Norquist said it was by design that no mention was made of his group's Republican ties. The mailings stated only that the group was sincere about telling "The Truth . . . No One Is Cutting Medicare." +"All the Republicans needed was for accurate information to get into people's hands," Mr. Norquist said in an interview here. "That's why they could use a nonprofit group. We were just talking about the issues accurately." +"The paradox," he added, "is that if the Republicans gave the money, they'd have to put out a Republican message. All we had to do was put out a factual message. It doesn't say 'Vote Republican' and it doesn't name candidates. It doesn't say who to vote for, it just says 'Here are the facts.' It fits comfortably within the law." +The spotlight on Mr. Norquist has also been cast on his work as a lobbyist, his growing involvement in conservative circles and the financial ties between those roles. +A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, Mr. Norquist operates out of a Dupont Circle office decorated with a live boa constrictor (along with a chart marking its growth). On the walls are photographs of Mr. Norquist as a rifle-toting supporter of Angolan anti-Marxist rebels, a poster of Janis Joplin and grip-and-grin photographs of Republican politicians, including President George Bush and Representative Sonny Bono. +Mr. Norquist, a close friend of Speaker Newt Gingrich and a columnist for the conservative publication The American Spectator, is best known in conservative circles as the head of an ad hoc organization called the Leave Us Alone Coalition. The coalition brings together conservative groups, including the Christian Coalition and the National Rifle Association, to lobby Congress. Every Wednesday morning representatives of the groups meet in Mr. Norquist's office with members of Congress or their staff to discuss issues of the moment, like abolishing affirmative action or killing the National Endowment for the Arts. +Conservatives disagree on many issues, but the coalition unites them behind the goal of less government. +"There are a lot of people who want to be left alone by government," Mr. Norquist said. "They are small-business men, home schoolers, private-school operators, gun owners. The reason the center-right movement can hold together is because they are now focusing on how they can help each other rather than on their divisions." +Mark Bloomfield, president of the American Council for Capital Formation, a nonprofit group in Washington, said, "Grover is at the hub of the wheel of a lot of conservative activists. He's the nexus, the glue. And he's helped the conservative movement redefine the Republican Party." +Ralph Reed, who will soon step down as executive director of the Christian Coalition, added: "Grover is a synthesizer of disparate elements of conservatism. He brings together elements who wouldn't normally be in frequent communications and has made the conservative movement more effective." +Mr. Norquist's main organization, Americans for Tax Reform, presses state and Federal politicians to take the "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" not to raise taxes. This group, which has 60,000 members, wants to cut the Government in half in 25 years by privatizing Social Security and education and by eliminating several Cabinet departments. +Some occasional allies question his effectiveness. +"There's lots of energy going on," said Edward H. Crane, president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian research organization, "but it's almost like Grover is a creation of the media. People sit around these meetings and talk tactics and stuff, but I'm skeptical of the impact in the grand scheme of things. +Mr. Crane also said he wondered whether Mr. Norquist's ties to Republican leaders affected his ability to promote conservatives broadly. +"Any intellectual movement is ill-served by being partisan," he said, "and Americans for Tax Reform is clearly too closely identified with Gingrich and, after having taken all that money from the R.N.C., from being too identified with Republicans. How could Grover sell to Democrats when he is so tied to Gingrich?" +Mr. Norquist also heads a lobbying firm, the Merritt Group, whose clients include the Microsoft Corporation (at $10,000 a month); Joseph E. Seagram & Sons., the United States branch of the Canadian liquor and beverage company Seagram; the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States and the island Republic of Seychelles, in the Indian Ocean. He was a registered foreign agent, at $10,000 a month, for the political organization of Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan rebel leader, until the group did some belt-tightening after paying Mr. Norquist $80,000 last year. +But the lines between advocate and lobbyist can conflict. For instance, Mr. Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform Foundation, the arm of his organization that can accept tax-deductible donations, has argued for lower taxes on liquor and beer -- the same issue that Mr. Norquist promotes as a paid lobbyist for Seagram and the liquor industry. +"You can wear too many hats and he does," said Mr. Lewis, of the Center for Public Integrity. "He's a whole hat store. And that's the conflict of interest: He's head of a nonprofit. He's a corporate lobbyist. He's a foreign lobbyist. This gives nonprofits, which are supposed to be doing research, a bad name." +Mr. Norquist sees no problem with his work. +"I'm not in conflict," he said. "My work is a seamless web. I advise my corporate clients on how to work with conservatives, and I work so Congress doesn't get in their way. +"Yes, my work is eclectic. And, yes, my work is a little bit weird. But however weird some of it may seem, it is consistent with my conservative beliefs. I'm a conservative, not an anarchist." + +NAME: Grover G. Norquist + +LOAD-DATE: July 8, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Grover G. Norquist, in his Washington office, says his varied work is "a little bit weird," but consistent with his conservative beliefs. (Amy Toensing for The New York Times) + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +355 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 8, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +Integrated Health Services to Buy Rotech + +BYLINE: By Bloomberg News + +SECTION: Section D; Page 2; Column 4; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 458 words + +DATELINE: OWINGS MILLS, Md., July 7 + +Integrated Health Services Inc. said today that it had agreed to buy the Rotech Medical Corporation for about $615 million in stock, the latest consolidation in the nursing-care business. +Care companies are seeking to offer as many services as they can to compete better for contracts from cost-conscious health maintenance organizations. "We have a lot of consolidation going on in outpatient rehabilitation in order to move it away from the hospitals, where it's more expensive," said Bernard Lirola, an analyst at Needham & Company. + Under the terms of the transaction, which is valued at about $915 million when debt assumption is included, Integrated Health will issue about 15.8 million shares. The deal values each Rotech share at about $22.61, based on Integrated Health's closing stock price of $38.9375 last Thursday. The stock market was closed Friday for the Fourth of July. +Rotech shares rose $1.125 in Nasdaq trading today, to $20. On the New York Stock Exchange, Integrated Health fell $3.25, to $35.6875. +The two companies said the combined operation would have 1997 revenue of about $2.3 billion and would operate in more than 2,475 locations in 43 states. Rotech is based in Orlando, Fla., and Integrated Health in Owings Mills. +Integrated Health is already the nation's fourth-largest provider of home health care services. +"This is a big move," Robert Wasserman, an analyst at Southeast Research Partners, said. "Rotech was the third-largest respiratory care provider, and I.H.S. certainly didn't have a significant amount of service in that area." +Until now, analysts said, Integrated Health had to refer patients needing respiratory therapy to companies like Rotech. +Mr. Wasserman also noted that the Federal Government was seeking to reduce spending on the kinds of services the companies offered. Recent bills approved by the House and the Senate seek to restrain spending in Medicare and Medicaid over the next five years. +The bills aim to trim spending on Medicare, which is the Federal health plan for the elderly, by $115 billion, and on Medicaid, the Federal plan for the poor and disabled, by $14 billion. Some of these savings would come from trimming payments for services like oxygen and respiratory therapy, as well as other home health care services. +Rotech's management team is expected to remain after the transaction is completed in the fourth quarter. +Integrated said in February that it had hired Robertson Stephens & Company, a San Francisco investment bank, to find possible acquisition or merger candidates. +Integrated said it expected the transaction to add to earnings immediately and reduce its debt-to-equity ratio to about 55 percent from 65 percent as of March 31. + +LOAD-DATE: July 8, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: July 15, 1997, Tuesday + + CORRECTION: +An article by Bloomberg News in Business Day last Tuesday about a proposed acquisition of the Rotech Medical Corporation by Integrated Health Services Inc. referred incorrectly to an earlier action by Integrated Health. It did not hire Robertson Stephens & Company to identify companies that might be acquired. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +356 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 9, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Clinton Is 'Open' to Making the Well-Off Pay More for Medicare + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 557 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 8 + +In a subtle but significant shift, the White House said tonight that President Clinton was open to the idea of requiring affluent elderly people to pay higher Medicare premiums, starting next year. +In the past, Mr. Clinton has said he does not oppose an increase in premiums for high-income elderly people. But until now, he has urged Congress to defer discussion of the idea until this year's budget bill is passed. + The version of the budget bill approved by the Senate on June 25 would establish a "means test," imposing higher Medicare premiums on individuals with annual incomes over $50,000 and couples with incomes over $75,000. The House version includes no such provision, but House Republicans have said they might support it if Mr. Clinton sent a clear signal that he would go along. +Gene Sperling, assistant to the President for economic policy, said tonight, "The President is open to a high-income premium increase, but has not made a final decision." +Mr. Sperling said the President wanted to be sure that any move to increase Medicare premiums would not endanger bipartisan support for the budget-balancing bill. +Chris Jennings, a White House aide who coordinates health policy, said the Administration had questions about how the higher premiums would be collected. The regular premium, now $43.80 a month, is deducted from monthly Social Security checks. But Mr. Jennings said that procedure would probably not work for the proposed new premiums. He suggested that the "income-related premiums" should be collected by the Internal Revenue Service through annual income tax returns. +In addition, Mr. Jennings said, Congress would have to provide additional money to the Internal Revenue Service so it could assess and collect Medicare premiums. +Finally, Mr. Jennings said, the increase in premiums must not be so steep that it spurs affluent beneficiaries to drop out of the part of the Medicare program that covers doctors' services. Such defections would leave poorer, less healthy people in the program and could cause a sharp increase in their premiums, he said. +Under the Senate bill, the monthly Medicare premium of $43.80 would quadruple for individuals with annual incomes over $100,000 and for couples with incomes over $125,000. +The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the higher premiums in the Senate bill would generate $3.9 billion in revenue in the next five years and $19.6 billion in revenue from 1998 through 2007. These figures would be much higher if the premiums were collected by the Internal Revenue Service rather than the Department of Health and Human Services, the budget office said. +Administration officials said that only the Internal Revenue Service had the experience and expertise needed to collect higher premiums. +Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader, said that Mr. Clinton "would be willing to look at various ways of addressing progressivity in premiums," meaning higher premiums for higher-income beneficiaries. +But Mr. Daschle said the Administration still "strongly opposes" raising the eligibility age for Medicare. The Senate bill would gradually increase the eligibility age to 67, from 65, over the years 2003 to 2027. +House and the Senate negotiators plan to meet later this week to iron out differences between the two bills. + +LOAD-DATE: July 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +357 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 10, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +U.S. Job Machine Absorbing Fresh Workers + +BYLINE: By LOUIS UCHITELLE + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 2; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1966 words + +DATELINE: LOUISVILLE, Ky. + +The hailstorm that did so much damage to roofs here a little more than a year ago pulled Antonio Rodriguez into the labor force. Kneeling on the lawn in front of a white clapboard home recently, he cut strips of asphalt shingles while four other young men lugged the shingles up a ladder and nailed them in place. Soon after, the team moved on to the next damaged roof. +Mr. Rodriguez, traveling from Mexico, settled here five years ago, but making a living came hard. Stints as a day laborer alternated with longer periods of idleness in which he rarely even looked for a job. "My friends offered me work sometimes," he said. And then the hailstorm, and the prospering Kentucky economy, brought Mr. Rodriguez full blast into the labor force. + About 18 months ago, the American labor force, which is everyone working or actively seeking work, began to grow at a rapidly accelerating rate. By early this year, it was expanding at nearly twice the rate of other years in the 1990's, although in recent months the growth has eased a bit. What's more, the labor force is continuing to grow considerably faster than the working-age population. +The result is that about four million more workers have been fed into a growing economy since the start of 1996. Hispanic people are the biggest contingent, but younger women and men over 55 also figure prominently among the new entrants. +Many are being pulled into the labor force by employers who are offering better pay than the minimum wage and -- with the unemployment rate hovering at 5 percent or below -- are less choosy than they once were about whom they hire. Mostly the new people are entering at relatively low pay, like Mr. Rodriguez, who is earning $50 a day. +Indeed, companies are recruiting among those ignored in the past: mothers at home with their children, older men who had retired or had been laid off, students, immigrants, people with criminal records. State officials here who help former prisoners get jobs say companies now reject fewer convicted felons. And tens of thousands of welfare recipients are being pushed off the rolls and into work by changes in the Federal welfare system. +"There is a huge and chronic reserve of working-age people in this country," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Regional Financial Associates, "and when conditions are right, or they are pushed, they come into the labor force. That is happening now." +One of the big national economic issues is how long the American labor force, now numbering 129.4 million workers and 6.8 million people actively seeking work, can continue growing at this faster rate. During the 1980's, similarly strong labor-force growth started shortly after the recovery began and lasted for five years, helping to keep the economy expanding without the inflation that can result from labor shortages. This time, except for a brief spike in 1992 as the nation came out of recession, the above-normal labor-force growth only kicked in during the fifth year of recovery, and could continue to the end of the century. +"Millions of people are out there willing to enter the labor force without bidding up wages very much," said Alan Krueger, a Princeton labor economist. "This implies that the unemployment rate can remain low without the inflation that usually accompanies low unemployment." +Much of the labor force growth is in Eastern states, with their big concentrations of immigrants and people on welfare, and in prospering Southern states like Kentucky that are producing many new jobs. As workers shift from one sector to another in pursuit of better jobs, new workers move in to fill the empty slots. Often they are Hispanic people like Mr. Rodriguez, who have accounted for 28 percent of the labor force growth in the last 18 months, and are clearly among the nation's most mobile workers these days. +In Kentucky, for example, new auto plants -- particularly Toyota's sprawling factory in Georgetown 75 miles east of here -- have attracted networks of parts suppliers in recent years, offering thousands of new jobs at $10 an hour or more. They have hired many people who have shifted to the new factory work from lower-paying jobs in construction and tobacco fields. Hispanic people, drawn to the state in the last decade, have led the way in replacing them. +"It happened gradually, but one day you wake up and you notice," said James F. Thompson, a regional administrator for Kentucky's Department of Employment Services. +Mr. Rodriguez had come here to visit a friend from his hometown of Guanajuato. The friend stayed and Mr. Rodriguez did, too, in time marrying an American and applying for legal status. And as jobs have opened up in construction, steady work has made Louisville his home. +For the nation as a whole, the Labor Department counts 67 million working-age people -- 16 and older -- neither holding jobs nor seeking them. Most are out of the work force willingly: as students, retired people, mothers with young children and older women who rarely worked outside the home. Many are now being drawn in, while others find themselves forced to enter. +From this pool, Nadirah El-Amin made the transition in June. Ms. El-Amin, 43, and 16 other black women on welfare, graduated in late June from a 13-week course at the Y.W.C.A. in Manhattan where the women were taught the latest office computer software. The goal is to land office jobs that pay enough (at least $23,000 a year) to get by in New York without too much privation. +By graduation, only five had been offered such work, but the rest, including Ms. El-Amin, began an anxious search for jobs before they are forced off welfare in August and into whatever minimum-wage work they can grab. "I am putting on my happy face to look for a job," said Ms. El-Amin, who has a year of college and last worked as a salaried school aide in the early 1990's -- taking a $4,000 buyout in 1994 as an alternative to layoff. "If I don't find an office job soon," she said, "this training won't be worth beans." +Men over 55 are also entering, or more precisely re-entering, the labor force in unusual numbers. Jobs are now easier for older people to find, particularly in such physically less demanding work as security guards, clerks, stadium ushers and cashiers. +Sometimes they go head to head with the young, as Thomas Ball, a 70-year-old former appliance repairman, has done here in Louisville. Hoping to earn extra money to pay expenses on his car, which he uses for Red Cross volunteer work, Mr. Ball applied to United Parcel Service last fall for a Christmas season job at its huge distribution center here. He did not get the seasonal job, but in early January U.P.S., short-staffed, hired him as a permanent part-timer, earning $8 an hour on a 2:45 A.M. to 7 A.M. shift. +Mr. Ball was delighted by what he viewed as recognition of his youthful vigor. "The younger people might outlift me on a dead lift," he said, referring to U.P.S.'s loosely enforced requirement that each employee have the strength and agility to lift 70-pound boxes. "But at the end of four or five hours, I'm still working steadily and they aren't." +Edward Nelson, 47, also sees his situation as unusual. He is a regular at Labor Ready, a nationwide temporary help agency that opened a storefront recruiting office in Louisville last year near a public housing project. Across the country, temp agencies are playing big roles in drawing people into the labor force, and Labor Ready is in the thick of this process, its storefront sign here announcing, in colored block letters, that there is work "today" for anyone who walks through the door. +That is not quite true. From the two dozen men and women who gather at 6 A.M., Corry E. Branson, the office manager, makes his selections of people to go out as a plumber's helper, or to touch up rust spots on cars at an auction lot, or as a laborer at a mall construction site. Some he ignores, judging them too listless or unreliable. Others in whom he has confidence fare well, including Mr. Nelson. For a month now, he has gone each morning to Anita Spring Water, where he packs bottled water, earning $6 an hour. +He is surprised at Mr. Branson's trust. "They don't know at Anita that I have a criminal record, not unless they asked Corry, and they haven't," said Mr. Nelson, who finished a three-year prison term in March, for stealing $2,000 from an office safe to finance, he says, a new life after getting a divorce. +Corry Branson sees the felony as a nonissue. "You do a good job and your past won't haunt you," he said. "We don't ask about criminal records unless the customer asks, and they don't ask these days." +United Parcel Service, in its quest, operates several notches up the ladder of potential jobholders waiting in the wings. With 14,000 employees in Kentucky, it is the state's largest employer. Like most American companies, U.P.S. says its full-time jobs, those that pay upward of $25,000 a year, with health insurance, are relatively easy to fill, very often through promotions. Part-timers are the hard part. U.P.S. operates its largest distribution center at the airport here, sorting and shipping packages on 170 flights a day. That effort absorbs 7,500 part-time employes. How the company finds people to fill these jobs -- using standard corporate tactics -- helps to explain why the labor force is growing so fast today. +College students once held 70 percent of the U.P.S. jobs, which start at $8 an hour. Their youthful strength and flexible schedules made them favorites. "If you had 10 people lined up for 10 jobs, and 9 were students, you picked the 9 students first," said Patrick O'Leary, U.P.S.'s work force planning manager. +Now U.P.S. has fewer than 4 college students in any 10-person lineup. With an unemployment rate of only 4 percent in the Louisville area -- similar to the 5 percent or less nationally in recent months -- the students find work elsewhere, just when the company has added 500 part-time jobs. So Mr. O'Leary's people are out recruiting full blast, even running job fairs in parking lots and hiring biplane pilots to drag help wanted signs across the sky. +The U.P.S. distribution center increasingly accommodates young mothers like Dawn Overall, 26, whose children are 6 and 3. To get such women back to work, U.P.S. offers them a choice of schedules. Ms. Overall, who re-entered the labor force at U.P.S. in late 1995, is about to move from days to a four-hour night shift, having decided to work while her children sleep. +"I came here to prove a point to my husband, who thought I couldn't do this work; I was too prissy," said Ms. Overall, who, as she spoke, heaved boxes from a conveyor belt into a plastic and aluminum shipping caisson that would later be loaded on a plane. "But now I don't want to work anymore and he is making me. He insists on the money. We are building a house." +But for all the hiring problems of a company like U.P.S., Kentucky still harbors tens of thousands of people outside the labor force who resist re-entry. Most live 100 miles away, in the rural counties of Eastern Kentucky, where coal fields once offered employment. Rather than travel far from home, they survive on support payments and by scrounging, neither working nor searching for work. +To lure these people, the state government has organized a recruiting effort, particularly on behalf of the new auto parts suppliers. Ted A. Beebe, a field office manager for Kentucky's Department of Employment Services, is part of this effort, often working with local ministers. +"We recruited seven people last month for one auto parts company," Mr. Beebe said. "They had to commute two hours each way, and after two weeks four stopped coming. Two, however, are still there, working." + +LOAD-DATE: July 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Hispanic people, younger women and older men have been having success breaking into the labor force in recent months. A roofer, Antonio Rodriguez, found work in Louisville, Ky., as did Dawn Overall, who loaded shipping containers at United Parcel Service. (Michael Clevenger for The New York Times)(pg. D5) + +Graphs: "New Workers: Who and Where" +Recent growth in the labor force has not come evenly across the spectrum of workers and regions. Young women, people near retirement age and Hispanic people have increased their rates of participation faster than most other groups. Participation rates have been rising on the coasts and falling in most other areas. (The participation rate is the number of people working or looking for work as a percentage of the total population.) Graph shows change in the labor force participation rate for various groups, from December 1995 to May 1997. It also shows the change in the labor force participation rate in nine U.S. regions, from May 1996 to May 1997. (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics)(pg. D5) + +Another graph tracks growth of labor force and of working age population, since 1991. (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Haver Analytics)(pg. A1) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +358 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 10, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +President Gives Nudge To Deal on Budget Bill + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1220 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 9 + +With a new push from President Clinton, House and Senate negotiators meet on Thursday in the first of many sessions intended to wrap up agreement this month on legislation to balance the Federal budget and help preserve Medicare for millions of baby boomers. +Then on Friday, lawmakers from the two chambers will start ironing out their differences on a tax bill, which was described today by Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader, as "probably the single most important piece of legislation" in this Congress. + Congressional leaders said they hoped to send final versions of both bills to Mr. Clinton by early August. +The tax bill has provoked a fierce ideological struggle as Republicans and Democrats argue over the proper distribution of tax cuts to wealthy people, middle-income families and the working poor. +The two parties agree on a surprisingly large number of provisions in the budget bill, which would make the biggest changes in Medicare since the health insurance program for the elderly was created in 1965. But President Clinton and Congress disagree on many of the details, and lobbyists will swarm outside the rooms where lawmakers from the two chambers negotiate. +The budget and tax measures, though packaged as separate bills, are politically interrelated. Robert D. Reischauer, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said: "Republicans won't send the spending bill to the President unless they have an assurance that he will sign the tax bill. The tax-cut locomotive is pulling this train, as far as Congress is concerned." +One of the biggest issues in dispute is whether to charge higher Medicare premiums for elderly people with higher incomes, as the Government would do under the budget bill passed by the Senate last month. +At a news conference in Spain, where he was attending a NATO conference, Mr. Clinton confirmed today that he might support such a change -- not as part of some future effort to address Medicare's long-term financial problems but as part of this year's budget bill. +"I have never been opposed to means-testing Medicare," he said. His comment may embolden House Republicans to join senators of both parties in support of a means test. +But Mr. Clinton said he opposed another provision of the Senate bill, which would gradually increase the age of eligibility for Medicare to 67, from 65, over the years 2003 to 2027. +R. Bruce Josten, senior vice president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, denounced this proposal today, saying it would impose hundreds of millions of dollars in new costs on employers that provide health benefits to retirees. +The final push to balance the budget comes against the backdrop of a strong economy generating so much tax revenue that the Federal deficit will fall sharply, even without action by Congress. +President Clinton predicted in February that the deficit for the current fiscal year would be $126 billion. In May, when he and Congressional leaders agreed on a plan to balance the budget, they assumed that this year's deficit would be $67 billion. Now Administration officials say the robust economy may push the figure below $50 billion. +But economists said some of the strength of the economy and of the stock market was a response to the bipartisan commitment to reduce the Federal budget deficit. Interest rates are relatively low and markets are vibrant, in part, because investors believe that the Government's fiscal condition is good and is improving, the economists said. +Mr. Daschle said the forecasts of lower deficits would not reduce pressure on Congress to balance the budget. +"Now that the end is in sight," the Senator said, "it may even have enhanced the pressure to finish the job. We can't let up now." +Here is a summary of the many important issues on which the House and the Senate disagree: +CHILDREN'S HEALTH CARE The House set aside $16 billion to provide health care or health insurance for half of the nation's 10 million uninsured children in the next five years. The Senate set aside $24 billion, stipulated that states must use the money for insurance and guaranteed comprehensive benefits, including hearing and vision services and mental health care in most cases. +Governors strongly prefer the House version, saying it would enable them to cover more children because the average cost for each child would be lower. But the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children's Defense Fund favor the Senate bill. +President Clinton supports a 20-cent increase in the cigarette tax, which is now 24 cents a pack. But unlike the Senate, he would devote all the new revenue to children's health insurance. His proposals would provide a total of $31 billion for coverage of children in the next five years. +MEDICAID FOR DISABLED CHILDREN The House would allow states to provide Medicaid for 30,000 disabled children who will soon lose Supplemental Security Income benefits under the 1996 welfare law. The Senate version of the budget bill includes no such provision. +Mr. Clinton says that House and Senate negotiators should require states to provide Medicaid to these children. He says that such coverage is required under the bipartisan budget agreement. +NEW MEDICARE OPTIONS The House and Senate versions of the budget bill would both increase the health insurance options available to elderly people in all parts of the country. In theory, they could enroll in the standard Medicare program, in health maintenance organizations or in health plans owned and operated by doctors and hospitals. +On both sides of the Capitol, lawmakers want to reduce huge geographical variations in Medicare payments to H.M.O.'s in different parts of the country. The Senate measure is more generous to health plans in rural areas, but over the next five years, it would freeze or even reduce Medicare payments to H.M.O.'s in some big cities like New York, Miami and Los Angeles. +The Administration and the managed care industry say the Senate bill would force many H.M.O.'s to cut back coverage of prescription drugs and other benefits. +Under current law, Medicare beneficiaries dissatisfied with an H.M.O. may drop out of the health plan and enroll in the standard fee-for-service program with just one month's notice. Under the House bill, elderly people could eventually be locked into an H.M.O. for nine months at a time. The Administration prefers the Senate bill. +TAXES The Administration is pressing for changes that it says would shift some benefits of the tax cuts away from the wealthy. For example, the White House wants to make more low-income working families eligible for the $500-a-child tax credit. It also wants to limit the cut in capital gains taxes, imposed on profits from the sale of stocks, real estate and other assets. +Studies by the Treasury Department found that about two-thirds of the benefits of the House and Senate measures would go to the wealthiest 20 percent of taxpayers. But Republicans say that the tax cuts should be concentrated on those people who pay most of the taxes, and that their plan is not skewed to the wealthy in any case. +Because of Mr. Clinton's veiled threats to veto the tax legislation if it is not changed, Republican leaders have agreed to give the Administration a seat at the table. + +LOAD-DATE: July 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +359 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 11, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Pataki Steps Up Pressure for His Lilco Plan + +BYLINE: By BRUCE LAMBERT + +SECTION: Section B; Page 5; Column 4; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 557 words + +DATELINE: EAST MEADOW, N.Y., July 10 + +Gov. George E. Pataki opened a new counteroffensive for his besieged plan for the state to take over the Long Island Lighting Company and lower its electric bills, now the highest in North America. +The Governor demanded a showdown on the issue next week with the Assembly Speaker, Sheldon Silver, who holds a potential veto. For the first time, Mr. Silver indicated that he was ready to vote on the plan, although he declined to say which way. + "No more excuses, no more delays, it's time for your energy rates to come down," Mr. Pataki told a mostly receptive crowd of about 150 elderly people at the East Meadow Senior Center. Some were bused to the event, and a few wore yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan "Power for Prosperity," provided by the plan's advocates. +The Governor will follow up his campaign-style appearance here in Nassau County with a rally on Monday outside the Suffolk County Legislature, which released a report this week denouncing his plan as "a worst-case scenario." +Mr. Pataki's redoubled efforts reflect his determination to win the plan's approval in Albany, but they also reflect the growing resistance to it. The issue could be vital to his own future, since Long Island's heavily Republican vote was a major factor in his unexpected 1994 election. +The $7.3 billion Pataki plan calls for a partial state takeover of Lilco's electric system. It would be operated by Lilco and its planned merger partner, Brooklyn Union Gas, under a state contract. Years later, bids from other energy companies would be considered. By using tax-free bonds and other means, the plan would cut rates up to 20 percent, the proponents say. +The Governor is focusing on Wednesday as the next critical juncture, when the state's Public Authorities Control Board convenes. Approval of his plan requires unanimity of the three voting members, one of whom represents the Governor, another the Democratic Speaker and the third the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, a Republican who backs the plan. An attempt to force a vote last month was dropped at the last minute because Mr. Silver was holding back. +But this time Mr. Silver is ready, his spokeswoman, Pat Lynch, said. "We're very comfortable with a vote on Wednesday," she said. +The Assembly's analysis raised major reservations about the plan, and most of the Assembly Democrats from Long Island are opposed. +Some people on both sides of the issue have said they expect Mr. Silver, in classic Albany bargaining, to demand changes in the plan for his approval, or even to barter his vote for changes in the budget or other big issues now pending as the legislative session ends. He has denied that he would make such a trade. +Critics dispute the Pataki plan's projections of costs and savings. They say the plan would create a bigger monopoly and lock it in while the rest of the country is moving toward deregulation and competition. They also say the debt, including paying for the abandoned nuclear plant at Shoreham, would burden customers with high rates for 35 years. +Mr. Pataki, flanked by business and labor leaders and many top Nassau Republican officials, received a favorable reaction from the crowd. +"We want our electric bills lowered," Freda Tobin of East Meadow said as Mr. Pataki left. "I don't care how they have to do it." + + + +LOAD-DATE: July 11, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +360 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 12, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Lott Rejects Any Role for I.R.S. In Collecting Medicare Premiums + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 8; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 521 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 11 + +Senators of both parties insisted today that Congress must impose a Medicare premium increase on the affluent elderly, but the Senate Republican leader said his party would not go along with a White House proposal to have the Internal Revenue Service collect those extra premiums. +Clinton Administration officials say the tax agency could collect the proposed new premiums much more efficiently than the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs Medicare, or the Social Security Administration, which deducts regular Medicare premiums from monthly Social Security checks. + Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Republican leader, said he strongly supported the idea of charging high-income beneficiaries higher premiums. But, he said, in the eyes of Republicans "it's a poison pill" to have the extra premiums collected by the I.R.S. +All the money raised by the new premiums -- $19.6 billion over the next 10 years -- would be devoted to Medicare rather than to general purposes. But Mr. Lott said that having the I.R.S. collect it, with individual beneficiaries doing a "means test" calculation on their annual tax return, "turns it into a tax." +The question of who would collect the new premiums could become a serious snag in negotiations on theMedicare means test, a proposal that has already survived much longer than many politicians and health care officials had expected. +Just a few months ago, lawmakers were saying it would be an act of political suicide to increase Medicare premiums. Now many senators, led by Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a Democrat, are openly pleading with President Clinton and with Speaker Newt Gingrich to lend strong support to the proposed increase as a way to help preserve Medicare. +The Administration has so far expressed a willingness only to consider the means-testing, as long as the I.R.S. does the collecting of the new premiums, and Mr. Gingrich has not taken a public position on the issue this year. +Fourteen senators, including the two from Florida -- Bob Graham, a Democrat, and Connie Mack, a Republican -- vowed today to keep fighting for the higher premiums. +In a typical comment, Senator John H. Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, said, "It makes no sense for people working at low-wage jobs to pay the doctors' bills of very affluent seniors." +Mr. Kerrey laid out the case for a Medicare means test in a meeting today with House and Senate negotiators trying to work out their differences on a comprehensive bill to balance the Federal budget by 2002. The fate of the Medicare means test, a provision of the Senate's version of this broader bill, will probably be decided by these lawmakers next week. +The Senate version of the bill, but not the House version, would charge higher premiums to individuals with incomes of more than $50,000 a year and couples with incomes of more than $75,000. The premium -- now $43.80 a month and assessed each beneficiary enrolled in Medicare Part B, which covers physician and outpatient services -- would more than quadruple for individuals with incomes over $100,000 and couples with incomes over $125,000. + +LOAD-DATE: July 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +361 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 13, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WESTCHESTER BRIEFS + +BYLINE: By ELSA BRENNER + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 4; Column 4; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1032 words + + +Indian Point 3 Cleared +The New York Power Authority has reported that after two years of sustained improvement, its much criticized Indian Point 3 Nuclear Power Plant in Buchanan has been removed from the United State Nuclear Regulatory Commission's watch list of plants that require special oversight. + Four years ago, the plant was placed on the Government list after a series of problems that caused the plant to be shut down for 27 months. +C. D. Rappleyea, the authority's chairman and chief executive officer, said the Government's decision was a result of a "vigorous pursuit of excellence" at the plant. +A letter from L. Joseph Callan, executive director for operations for the Federal regulatory agency agreed that the power plant had "demonstrated sustained improvement." The letter also said personnel errors were on the decline. +In more good news for the plant, the Government gave it passing grades in a periodic review. +Road to Ruin? +A coalition of three Washington-based organizations said in a recent report that a proposed $365 million car-pool lane for Interstate 287 is one of "the 37 worst proposed highway projects that would waste $13 billion, harm our communities and damage the environment." The report, called "Road to Ruin," was drafted by Taxpayers for Common Sense, Friends of the Earth and the United States Public Interest Research Group. +Plans for the high-occupancy-vehicle lane on the Cross Westchester section of Interstate 287 should be canceled, the coalition said in the report, adding that the project is "an unwise use of Federal dollars" encouraging more traffic congestion and urban sprawl in environmentally sensitive land. +The road now carries about 110,000 cars a day, and the coalition is worried that open space, like Sterling Forest and the Croton watershed, would be negatively affected by increased traffic. +The report said the expressway's closely spaced on and off ramps often cause traffic backups during rush hours. +David Hirsch, a spokesman for Friends of the Earth, said his organization would prefer to see an existing lane converted to a high-occupancy-vehicle lane. As proposed by the state Transportation Department, the H.O.V. lane would be an additional one and run from Route 303 in Rockland County to Route 120 in Harrison. + +Elderly Unit at Hospital +New York Hospital, a White Plains institution specializing in psychiatric and geriatric care, has announced plans to develop an extended care residence with 171 units for the elderly. The site will be built and managed in conjunction with Marriott Senior Living Services. +It is expected that the new center, to be situated on its Westchester campus, will provide 100 new jobs and work for the hospital's staff at a time when in-patient nursing units are being closed because of limitations set by managed care and the deregulation of mental health reimbursements. About 940 people are currently employed at the hospital. +The Marriott chain operates 21 extended care institutions in eight states, with 16 more under construction and another 15 scheduled to begin later this year. +Dr. Gary Tischler, medical director of the hospital's Westchester division, said it was part of the hospital's long-range plans to develop partnerships with third parties like Marriott Senior Living Services. + +Only the Dog Knows +Only Maddie, a 70-pound Labrador mix, knows what happened that afternoon, and she is not talking, her owners say. +"She's a dog of few words," said David DeMilia, who lives in a Briarcliff Manor home apparently targeted by a deer on the prowl. +Mr. DeMilia, 21, the son of Joseph and Molly DeMilia, who own the house, said the driver of a car reported coming around a curve in the road on June 30 and frightening the deer, which jumped in the house through a screened entranceway. +It appeared that the deer ran around inside the house frantically, jumped on the kitchen counter, knocked dishes out of the kitchen sink, broke glassware and then left though a living room window -- but not before knocking over a dining room chair. +The liner of the family's above-ground pool was found ripped, indicating that the frightened animal cooled off before taking off. +Meanwhile, the 10-year-old black and white family dog was hovering in a corner, where she goes during thunderstorms, David DeMilia said. +"This was so hard to believe that it was almost funny," the son said. "Except it wasn't funny." + +Not the Usual Case +A 73-year-old retired department store appliance salesman is facing Federal drug charges and 15 years in prison for reportedly smuggling almost 500 pounds of high-grade marijuana into Westchester County over the last two years. +Benjamin Kronenberg of Yonkers, was arrested earlier this spring by detectives from the Yonkers Police Department and the Westchester County Drug Enforcement Administration Task Force for illegal possession of 31.5 pounds of marijuana. +A search warrant was executed at Mr. Kronenberg's residence on April 3 as part of an investigation with the United States Attorney's Office, Southern District of Florida, involving the illegal indoor cultivation, possession and sale of marijuana between Florida and New York. +The seized marijuana was hydroponically grown and genetically bred to produce potent plants -- eight times that of naturally grown marijuana -- the District Attorney's office said. The hydroponic version sells for up to $5,000 a pound in the New York area, compared with $1,200 a pound for more common marijuana, the office said. +Mr. Kronenberg's lawyer, Jeffrey A. Cohen of White Plains, said two of his client's three children died in separate highway accidents in 1972, his wife was killed in 1983 when a truck's hubcap struck her in the head, and Mr. Kronenberg had to have his cancerous left eye removed last year. +Mr. Cohen refused to discuss his defense of Mr. Kronenberg or the merits of the case, but he did say the case had its unusual aspects, given his client's age. +In addition to facing the Federal drug smuggling charges in Florida, Mr. Kronenberg is also scheduled to appear before a Westchester County grand jury, his lawyer said. ELSA BRENNER + +LOAD-DATE: July 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +362 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 13, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +TAKING THE CHILDREN + +BYLINE: By ANITA GATES + +SECTION: Section 2; Page 26; Column 1; Arts and Leisure Desk + +LENGTH: 198 words + + +Out to Sea +Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Dyan Cannon, Gloria De Haven, Brent Spiner +Directed by Martha Coolidge +PG-13 106 minutes + A badly dressed compulsive gambler (Mr. Matthau) tricks his lonely-widower brother-in-law (Mr. Lemmon) into working with him as a dance host on a cruise ship. Their aim is to meet rich widows. In the process they bumble, they bicker, and they both fall in love with great women, all in "Odd Couple"-style. + +VIOLENCE None. +SEX A couple of romantic kisses and a lot of double-entendre. +PROFANITY A good deal, although much of it is mild. (The outtakes shown during the closing credits include some very frank language.) +FOOTNOTE The cast, consisting mostly of actors over 60, are comic, but they never make older people look foolish. + +For Which Children? +AGES 3-7 Only if they need a nap. For youngsters this age, boredom incarnate. +AGES 8-10 Ditto. +AGES 11 and up The film isn't meant for children, but at least three aspects could keep them amused: loads of slapstick, a general mood of silliness and, for "Star Trek" fans, their favorite android, Data (Mr. Spiner), as a wicked, egotistical cruise director. ANITA GATES + +LOAD-DATE: July 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +363 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 13, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ON THE TOWNS + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 16; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1958 words + +An opinionated guide to cultural and recreational goings-on around the state this week. To submit items for consideration, write to On the Towns, Sunday New Jersey Section, The New York Times, 229 West 43d Street, New York, N.Y. 10036, or send a fax to (212) 556-7219. + +MUSIC + +ARTS IN THE PARK Stirling Chamber Orchestra. Wednesday at 7:30 P.M. Free. Take chairs and blankets. Flood's Hill, Meadowland Park, 5 Mead Street, South Orange. +(201) 378-7754. + +CLUB BENE Tom Grant. Friday at 9 P.M. Dave Mason. Saturday at 9 P.M. Tickets: $20. Route 35, Sayreville. (908) 727-3000. + +CORNERSTONE Ted Brancato Trio. Wednesday, 7:30 to 11:30 P.M. Glenda Davenport Quartet. Friday. 9 P.M. to 1 A.M. Rick Stone Quartet. Saturday. 9 P.M. to 1 A.M. +25 New Street, Metuchen. (908) 549-5306. + +ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY "Community Folk Singing," led by Jeanine Rosh. Friday at 7:30 P.M. Free. 516 Prospect Street, Essex County. (973) 763-1905 + +GREAT AUDITORIUM, OCEAN GROVE The Queen's Chambermaid, featuring Elaine Camparone, harpsichordist. Thursday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $10. Gordon Turk, organist. Saturday at 4 P.M. Free. The Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra with Nancy Knorr. Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $17 and $20. Pilgrim and Ocean Pathways, Ocean Grove. (908) 775-0035. + +RIDGEWOOD KASSCHAU MEMORIAL SHELL The Amazing Incredible, country swing. Tuesday at 8:30 P.M. The Ridgewood Village Band plays American music, with director, Deborah Venezia. Thursday at 8:30 P.M. Free. Take chairs or blankets. Veteran's Field, Maple Avenue, Ridgewood. (201) 670-3924. + +MEMORIAL PARK Bucky Pizzarelli Trio. Tonight at 8:30. Free. Take blankets and chairs. Berdan Avenue, in Fair Lawn. (201) 796-6746. + +RUTGERS UNIVERSITY Alicia de Larrocha, pianist, performs Bach, Mompu and Granados. Friday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $28. The Rutgers Festival Orchestra. Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $24. Nicholas Music Center, George and Hamilton Streets, New Brunswick. (908) 932-7591, extension 514. + +SOMERVILLE BOROUGH HALL Outdoor concerts. Fridays through Aug. 29 at 7 P.M. Borough Hall lawn, Main Street. (908) 704-1010. + +SOCLAIR MUSIC FESTIVAL Shanghai Quartet. Today at 4 P.M. Tickets: $15; $12 for students and the elderly. The Barn, Soclair Brooks Farm, 19 Haytown Road, Lebanon. +(908) 236-6476. + +SUMMERFEST '97 A. J. and the Hearts, 1950's music. Today, 3 to 5 P.M. Frelinghuysen Arboretum, 53 East Hanover Avenue, Morris Township. Free. (973) 326-7600. + +THEATER + +BICKFORD THEATER "Olympus on My Mind." . Today at 2 P.M. Tickets: $17.50; $15.75 for the elderly; $15 for students and members. Morris Museum, 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. (201) 538-8069. + +CIRCLE PLAYHOUSE "Is There Life After High School?" A musical. Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $10. 416 Victoria Avenue, Piscataway. (908) 968-7555. + +COUNT BASIE STAGE Phoenix Productions presents "The Who's 'Tommy.' " Today and next Sunday at 3 P.M.; Friday and Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $15 and $19; $13 and $17 for the elderly. 99 Monmouth Street, off Maple Avenue, Red Bank. (908) 747-0014. + +DEGNAN PARK Theater Under the Stars. "The Fantasticks." Tonight at 8; Friday at 5 and 8 P.M.; Saturday at 8 P.M. Free; donations accepted. Take chairs and blankets. Next to West Orange High School, Pleasant Valley Way, West Orange. (973) 325-0795. + +ALAN P. KIRBY ARTS CENTER Opera Festival of New Jersey. "La Cenerentola" ("Cinderella"), today at 2. "Faust." Saturday at 8 P.M. "Vanessa." Friday at 8 P.M.; next Sunday at 2 P.M. Tickets: $20 to $48. Lawrenceville School, Route 206, Lawrenceville. +(609) 683-8000. + +McCARTER THEATER "Laundry and Bourbon" and "Lone Star," by James McLure. Today at 7:30 P.M. Tickets: $5; students $3. Rehearsal Room, McCarter Theater, 91 University Place, Princeton. (609) 683-8000. + +NEW JERSEY SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL "The Threepenny Opera." Through July 27. Today at 2; Tuesday to Saturday at 8 P.M.; matinees Wednesday and Saturday at 2 P.M.; next Sunday at 2 P.M. At the Community Theater, 100 South Street, Morristown. "Much Ado About Nothing." Through Aug. 2. Tonight at 7; Tuesday to Saturday at 8 P.M.; next Sunday at 2 P.M. At the Playwrights Theater of New Jersey, 33 Green Village Road, Madison. "Henry V." Tuesday through Aug. 10. Tuesday through Friday at 8 P.M.; Saturday at 2 and 8 P.M.; next sunday at 2 and 7 P.M. On the football field of Bayley-Ellard High School, 205 Madison Avenue, Madison. (201) 408-5600. + +PAPER MILL PLAYHOUSE "Man of La Mancha." Through July 27. Wednesdays through Sundays at 8 P.M.; Thursdays at 2 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays at 3 P.M. Tickets: $31 to $46; $10 for students 15 minutes before curtain. Brookside Drive, Millburn. +(201) 376-4343. + +RITZ THEATER "Damn Yankees." Friday through Aug. 9. Fridays and Saturdays at 8 P.M.; Sundays at 2 P.M.; Aug. 6 at 7:30 P.M. 915 White Horse Pike, Oaklyn. (609) 858-5230. + +RAMAPO COLLEGE Shakespeare in the Garden series presents "The Merry Wives of Windsor." Saturdays and Sundays through July 27 at 6 P.M. Free. West lawn of the Mansion, 505 Ramapo Valley Road, Mahwah. (201) 529-7596. + +SUMMERFUN THEATER "After-Play," by Anne Meara. Tuesday through Saturday at 8 P.M.; matinee Thursday at 2 P.M. Tickets: $18 and $22. Weiss Arts Center, Montclair Lloyd Road and Bloomfield Avenue. +(201) 256-0576. + +MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES + +BERGEN MUSEUM OF ART AND SCIENCE "Al Stewart: In Performance," candid photos of musicians and performers. Through July 26. "Gloria Kisch: A Refinement of High Spirits," sculpture. Through next Sunday. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. 327 East Ridgewood Avenue, Paramus. (201) 265-1248. + +GALLERY AT SCHERING-PLOUGH "Reflections of Summer," landscapes and seascapes by 19 artists. Through Aug. 28. Mondays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. 1 Giralda Farms, Madison. (201) 882-7000. + +GALLERY OF SOUTH ORANGE "Sky Dancers," drawings by Janice Metzger, and "Herstory Part II," mixed-media works on paper and wood by Sarah Teofanov. Through next Sunday. Hours: Wednesdays and Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 2 P.M. and 4 to 6 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 P.M. Baird Center, 5 Mead Street, South Orange. (201) 378-7754. + +GROUNDS FOR SCULPTURE Summer exhibition. Through Sept. 14. Fridays to Sundays 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. 18 Fairgrounds Road, Hamilton Township. (609) 586-0616. + +MACCULLOCH HALL HISTORICAL MUSEUM "The Immortal Genius: William Shakespeare, Thomas Nast and 19th-Century American Culture." Through Feb. 4. "Rococo and Reason in Georgian Glass." Through Sept. 7. "The Timeless Folk Art of Decorative Painting." Through Oct. 12. Admission: $3; $2 for students and the elderly. Hours: Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 P.M. 45 Macculloch Avenue, Morristown. (201) 538-2404. + +MONMOUTH MUSEUM "Transcending the Surface: Contemporary Fiber Art." Works by 11 artists. Through Aug. 24. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. 761 Newman Springs Road, Lincroft. (908) 747-2266. + +MONTCLAIR ART MUSEUM Paintings and prints by Hananiah Harari, and paintings by Guy Rose (1867-1925). Both through Aug. 10. Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 11 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Sundays and Thursdays, 1 to 5 P.M. Admission: $5; $4 for students with ID and the elderly; free admission on Saturdays from 11 A.M. to 2 P.M.; always for children under 12. 3 South Mountain Avenue, Montclair. (201) 746-5555. + +NEW JERSEY CENTER FOR VISUAL ARTS "Union County Juried Show," Through Aug. 17. Hours: Mondays through Fridays, noon to 4 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 to 4 P.M. Palmer Gallery, 68 Elm Street, Summit. +(908) 273-9121. + +NEWARK MUSEUM "Portraits, 1975-1995," paintings by Dawoud Bey. Through Aug. 3. "The Glitter and the Gold: Fashioning America's Jewelry." Through Nov. 2. "Destination Mars." Through 1999. Hours: Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 P.M.49 Washington Street, Newark. (201) 596-6550. + +NOYES MUSEUM "For the Love of Art: Carvings and Paintings by South Jersey Folk Artist Albert Hoffman." and landscape photographs by Dwight Hiscano. Through Sept. 21. Wednesday through Sunday, 11 A.M. to 4 P.M. Admission: $3; $2 for the elderly and students. Lily Lake Road, Oceanville. (609) 652-8848. + +ZIMMERLI ART MUSEUM "Sequences: As You Can See." Through next Sunday. "Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions." Through July 31. "Three Billy Goats Gruff." Illustrations by Robert Bender. Through next Sunday. Hours: Wednesdays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. Rutgers University, George and Hamilton Streets, New Brunswick. (908) 932-7237. + +FOR CHILDREN + +BARNES & NOBLE "Kindermusik." Linda M. Fields introduces children to the sounds of the small insects of summer. Tuesday at 11 A.M. Ages 2 to 4. Registration required. "Have a Beach Ball." Pretend you're at the beach with stories and sunglass craft. Wednesday at 11 A.M. Ages 2 to 4. Take beach blankets. "Three-Ring Fun." Singing, face painting, and reading. Saturday at 11 A.M. Ages 4 and up. Free. Princeton Market Fair in Princeton. (609) 897-9250. + +CIRCLE PLAYERS "Pinocchio," adapted and directed by Nick Pelino, Jr. Today at 3 P.M. Tickets: $6. 416 Victoria Avenue, off Vail Avenue, Piscataway. (732) 968-7555. + +MORRIS MUSEUM Saturn Summer Theater. "The Willow Girl," Catskill Puppet Theater. Tuesday. Ages 3 to 11. "Harlem Wizards," by Class Act Performing Artists. Thursday. Ages 3 to adult. All shows at 11 A.M. and 1:30 P.M. in the John H. Bickford Theatre. Tickets: $6.25; $5 for members. Museum hours: Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M.; Mondays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 8 P.M. Admission: $4; $2 for the elderly. 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. (201) 538-0454. + +NEW JERSEY STATE MUSEUM "Kaleidoscope Kids," a one-week program on astronomy for children 6 to 12. Through Aug. 8. Each session meets Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 3 P.M. Tuition: $115; $110 for siblings. 205 West State Street, Trenton. Registration and information: (609) 292-6310 or (609) 292-6464. + +SUMMERFUN THEATER Crabgrass Puppets present "The Princess and the Pea" and "The Frog Prince." Wednesday at 1 P.M. Tickets: $7. Weiss Arts Center, Lloyd Road and Bloomfield Avenue, Montclair. (973) 256-0576. + +SPOKEN WORD + +BARNES & NOBLE "The World of Publishing," a panel discussion. Tuesday at 7 P.M. Princeton Market Fair, Route 1, Princeton. (609) 392-0689. + +BARNES & NOBLE "The Art of Shelling," new books for adults and children by Debbie and Chuck Robinson. Tomorrow at 7:30 P.M. Cooking discussion group led by Helen focuses on fresh herbs. Wednesday at 7:30 P.M. Free. 3981 Highway 9, Freehold. (732) 409-2929. + +ENCORE BOOKS AND MUSIC Lawrence Block discusses his new mystery, "The Burglar in the Library," and Mimi LaFollette Summerskill discusses her memoir, "Daughter of the Vine: A Vinter's Tale." Both tomorrow at 7 P.M. Free. 301 North Harrison Street, Princeton. (609) 252-0608. + +ETC. + +CENTRAL JERSEY BICYCLE CLUB 20th anniversary of the Raritan Valley Roundup Bicycle Tour. Next Sunday. Registration, 7 A.M. to noon Fee: $20; family (one adult and one child under 18), $25. North Branch Park; exit 10 from New Jersey Turnpike to Rte. 202 South to Milltown Road. (732) 745-4368. + +NEW JERSEY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Through July. "Les Voleurs" ("The Thieves") and "Angel Baby," tonight at 7 at State Theater, 15 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick. "Pink Flamingos," Friday and Saturday at 7 P.M. at 123 Scott Hall, Rutgers University, College Avenue and Hamilton Street, New Brunswick. Admission: $8; $6 for members. Information: (908) 932-8482. + +LOAD-DATE: July 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Indian Celebration Kartik Seshadri, a disciple of the prominent sitar player Ravi Shankar, will perfom Indian classical music in celebration of the 50th anniversary of India's independence. RUTGERS UNIVERSITY Summerfest. Wednesday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $24. Nicholas Music Center, George and Hamilton Streets, New Brunswick. (908) 932-7591, extension 514. On the Internet: http://mgsa.rutgers.edu/ mgsa/ + +TYPE: List + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +364 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 13, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Two Years That Make a Big Difference + +BYLINE: By Robert D. Reischauer; Robert D. Reischauer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, was director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1989 to 1995. + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 17; Column 2; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 962 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + +One of the biggest issues that the House and Senate will have to resolve in the current budget negotiations is whether to raise the age at which Americans are eligible for Medicare. The House chose to keep the age of eligibility at 65, and seems determined to stick to that position. The Senate's plan, on the other hand, calls for raising the age to 67. This proposal creates more problems than it solves. +The Senate proposal parallels a scheduled increase in the eligibility age for Social Security benefits. Under this reform, enacted in 1983, the "normal retirement age" for Social Security will rise two months a year starting in 2003, until it reaches 66 in 2008. This schedule will be repeated in 2020. By 2025, the normal retirement age will be 67. + At first glance, the Senate's proposal appears logical and equitable, reflecting demographic reality and future fiscal constraints. +Since the Medicare program's inception in 1966, the average American life expectancy has increased by 2.8 years, and it is projected to increase an additional 1.1 years by 2025. Today, people in their 60's are in better health and have fewer disabilities. Presumably, they can work a few more years, especially since most jobs are not as physically demanding as they were in the mid-1960's. +Considering these advancements, and the fiscal pressure that the baby boom generation will soon place on Government retirement plans, it seems reasonable to make people wait a bit longer before they can qualify for Medicare. +But proposals that appear logical at first glance often turn out to be full of problems upon closer examination. Such is the case with the Senate's plan, which has four basic flaws. +* It would be unfair to lower-skilled, lower-paid workers. Many skilled, higher-paid and unionized workers have employer-subsidized retiree health insurance. Therefore, they can retire before they qualify for Medicare without the fear that they will either become uninsured or have to pay for expensive individual coverage. These workers -- who make up about 44 percent of those close to retirement age -- will be largely unaffected by the Senate's proposal, as long as their employers do not cut back their coverage. (More on that later.) But other workers, those who tend to be less-skilled, lower-paid and in more physically demanding jobs, will bear the brunt of the change. +* It would increase the number of uninsured senior citizens. Today many workers retire before age 65, with reduced Social Security benefits, and before they are eligible for Medicare. Some retire by choice; others retire because of health problems or because of corporate downsizing. +Many of these retirees do not have health insurance and do not qualify for Medicaid. Indeed, almost half a million Social Security beneficiaries who are between 62 and 64 years old are uninsured. If the age for Medicare eligibility is raised to 67, many 65- and 66-year-olds will retire without health coverage, and the ranks of the uninsured will grow significantly. +* It would lead employers to cut back their health coverage for retired workers. If the Senate proposal is accepted, employers will be faced with the prospect of having to foot the entire health-insurance bill for their 65- and 66-year-old retirees. Many employers might decide that this benefit is just too expensive -- and drop all insurance for their retired employees. +This would also affect those retires older than 66 who receive Medicare. They would lose supplemental insurance, which many employers provide to cover expenses that Medicare does not. +* It would pass costs to state governments. If the Senate proposal is enacted, Medicare, which is fully financed by the Federal Government, will simply funnel some of its responsibilities to Medicaid programs, which are partially financed by the states. +For instance, uninsured 65- and 66-year-olds with moderate incomes would be forced to rely on Medicaid when faced with catastrophic medical expenses. In addition, Medicaid would have to pick up the full medical costs -- doctor visits, hospital charges, medical tests -- incurred by 65- and 66-year-old recipients of Supplemental Security Income. Currently, Medicare pays part of this bill. +The Senate exhibited considerable courage by addressing Medicare's uncertain future. Its proposal, however, is fraught with problems. Fortunately, there is an alternative, one that follows the example of Social Security even more closely. +When Congress decided in 1983 to gradually increase Social Security's normal retirement age, it did not change the age at which workers could receive early or reduced benefits. Workers can still retire at 62, but the value of their Social Security benefit falls. For instance, people retiring today at 62 receive 80 percent of the benefit they would have received if they had retired at 65. When the normal retirement age is 67, 62-year-old retirees will receive only 70 percent of their full benefits. +This approach could be applied to Medicare. Those who choose to sign up for benefits at age 65 or 66 could be required to pay a supplemental, early-retiree premium for the rest of their lives. Today, a monthly charge of roughly $50 would be needed to fully compensate Medicare for the added costs of early coverage. +A more modest and practical proposal would call for partial compensation. Presumably, programs that now help low-income senior citizens pay their Medicare premiums, deductibles and co-insurance could also pick up the premiums for a poor senior citizen forced to retire early. +This simple plan could help avoid the negative consequences of the Senate's proposal. And it keeps with the spirit of its plan -- to make Medicare look more like Social Security. + +LOAD-DATE: July 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +365 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 14, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +PIONEERING STATE FOR MANAGED CARE CONSIDERS CHANGE + +BYLINE: By MILT FREUDENHEIM + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 6; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1564 words + +DATELINE: LOS ANGELES + +Leading a national surge of second thoughts about managed health care, California, long a pacesetter in the field, has plunged into a wholesale review of its managed-care system, which now covers more than half the state's 32 million people. +An avalanche of proposals for tighter government regulation is advancing in the California Legislature. The Governor and legislators have appointed a joint commission to recommend improvements in managed care. And patients are expressing their qualms: State officials registered more than 2,000 consumer complaints about health maintenance organizations last year, an 18 percent increase over 1995. + The growing skepticism about managed care, which reduces health care costs by rejecting treatment that is deemed not medically necessary, is fueled by cases like those of Joyce Ramey, a 69-year-old retired nurse in Riverside, who was awarded $1.1 million last week in a binding arbitration with her Medicare H.M.O. +Mrs. Ramey, who has required kidney dialysis treatments twice a week since April 1995, said her health plan had for two years ignored or rejected her primary doctor's requests to send her to an H.M.O.-approved kidney specialist. The arbitrator, John K. Trotter, a retired California appeals judge, said in his ruling that the H.M.O.'s conduct was "unconscionable." +The health maintenance organization, Inter Valley Health Plan Inc. of Pomona, is considering an appeal on the ground that "the medical facts of the case don't support the decision," said Mark Covington, the company's president. +Defenders of managed care say that California -- and the nation, as well -- is legislating by anecdote, exaggerating the importance of cases like Mrs. Ramey's. They say that the benefits to the public of managed care -- lower health care costs foremost among them -- are being obscured in a haze of story telling. And insurers can point to surveys showing high levels of patient satisfaction with their health plans. +But consumer groups, doctors and spokesmen for the elderly say they are countering the excesses of the managed-care avalanche, which in the last decade has brought at least 150 million Americans under some sort of plan that reviews or restricts health care choices. Most of the legislation these groups are backing would make it more difficult for health maintenance organizations to deny care. Several bills would also weaken their sway over doctors. +Across the country, state legislators have introduced about 1,000 managed-care bills so far this year. At least 182 bills have become law, following the adoption of 100 such laws in 1996, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. +Recently adopted laws require H.M.O.'s in a number of states to authorize hospital stays after mastectomies and to pay for emergency room visits that turn out to have been avoidable. Health plans are being ordered to allow direct access to obstetricians and certain other specialists without permission in advance from a primary doctor. +So far this year, 16 states -- including Connecticut, Florida, Minnesota, Ohio and Texas -- have adopted comprehensive consumer-rights bills covering a number of managed-care issues; New York and five more states enacted similar bills last year. In June, the New Jersey Legislature approved and sent to Gov. Christine Todd Whitman a bill that would establish an independent appeals process for H.M.O. members, forbid financial rewards to doctors for denying care and require managed-care companies to subsidize care by doctors outside their networks. +In May, Texas attracted national attention by enacting the first law allowing medical malpractice lawsuits against H.M.O.'s. Similar bills have been introduced in Congress. +Managed-care companies have always insisted that they do not make medical decisions, and insurers lobbied hard against the Texas measure. In June, Aetna Inc. filed a lawsuit in United States District Court in Houston seeking to invalidate it under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or Erisa. Erisa has often been invoked to thwart state regulation of health insurance, but recently there have been conflicting court decisions about its reach. +California, though, is the cockpit for some of the most hotly contested battles. The State Senate has scheduled hearings this week on 50 health care bills already passed by the Assembly. The Assembly health committee, meanwhile, will take up 30 measures approved by the Senate. +A coalition that includes labor unions, the American Association of Retired Persons, Consumers Union and Health Access California, an umbrella advocacy group, is promoting an 11-point legislative package it calls a "patient bill of rights." Recently, dozens of supporters of the package came to the Capitol in Sacramento to lobby and demonstrate. +One of the measures would make H.M.O.'s and the physicians who are their medical directors liable in malpractice lawsuits involving denials of care judged by the H.M.O.'s not to have been a "medical necessity." +Other bills backed by the California coalition would give protection against reprisals to patients, doctors and health care workers who complained about managed-care misconduct. Health maintenance organizations would also have to state reasons and give advance notice before dismissing doctors, nurses, therapists or medical technicians. +The H.M.O. industry and the California Chamber of Commerce are lobbying vigorously against five bills in the Health Access package, as well as a number of other proposals. Allan Zaremberg, executive vice president of the chamber, said the measures were "job-killer legislation" that would raise medical costs, especially for small employers, and add to California's 6.5 million uninsured. +Myra Snyder, president of the California Association of Health Plans, a trade group, agreed. "Everything they add to a benefit package, no matter how worthy, will increase the cost," she said. "No one is looking at the big picture, at what happens to the monthly premiums and to the numbers of uninsured." +However, the business representatives said that they would not oppose popular bills that would make it difficult for managed-care companies to send women home without a hospital stay after a mastectomy, or within 48 hours of giving birth. +Self-interest is evident on all sides of the debate. The California Medical Association is backing a measure to make it harder for H.M.O.'s to drop physicians from their networks. It also supports a bill that would require the companies to disclose the "actuarial criteria" on which they base capitation payments to doctors -- the set monthly amounts paid for each enrolled member. +Some doctors complain that H.M.O.'s cut these rates arbitrarily, forcing them to skimp on care or absorb financial losses. +Dr. Melvin Kirschner, a family practitioner in Van Nuys, a suburban area of Los Angeles, said that one managed-care group with which he is affiliated had reduced its monthly payment per patient by 30 percent in May. "I can't make a living," he said. +Ms. Snyder of the health plans association said capitation rates remained "appropriate," and remarked that H.M.O.'s perform actuarial studies "to negotiate with physicians, not to help them to negotiate with us." +Alain Enthoven, a Stanford University management professor who is a longstanding advocate of managed care, said the backlash in California against H.M.O.'s had been encouraged by a sharp rise in enrollment, to 14 million last year, with 3 million more Californians in related types of managed care. +"It has been worsened by the fact that a lot of the media are dealing with it quite irresponsibly," asserted Mr. Enthoven, chairman of the state's Managed Health Care Improvement Task Force, which is scheduled to report to Gov. Pete Wilson on Jan. 1. "They take one episode and blow that up into a huge story." +He mentioned widespread coverage of the refusal by Healthnet, a big California H.M.O., to pay for a cancer patient's bone-marrow transplant. The company said that the procedure was experimental. +"It was unfair to attack Healthnet," Mr. Enthoven said. "All health insurance has exclusions for experimental treatment." +In the wake of the publicity, a law was passed giving patients the right to an independent medical review when a health plan rejects a treatment as experimental. +He acknowledged that managed- care consumers need protection from corporate excesses. "This has to be the most complicated product or service in our economy," he said. "A health insurance contract is extremely complex. Anybody who says they understand their health insurance doesn't understand the problem." +Steven Thompson, vice president of the California Medical Association, said that changing managed care had lately become a bipartisan issue, because more and more people in "the middle and upper middle class" were experiencing H.M.O.'s firsthand. +Jeanne Finberg, a lawyer with Consumers Union in San Francisco, said she was worried that Governor Wilson, a Republican who is generally opposed to regulation, might reject most of the managed-care legislation. +"I worry that the task force will be used as an excuse for delay," she said. But Mr. Enthoven said that would not happen. The Governor's office, he said, had pledged that each bill would be considered "on its merits." + +LOAD-DATE: July 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Joyce Ramey, 69, a retired nurse in Riverside, Calif., was awarded $1.1 million in arbitration. She said her health plan ignored or rejected her doctor's requests to send her to an H.M.O.-approved kidney specialist. (Ed Carreon for The New York Times)(pg. D8) + +Protecting Patients +A few years ago, the main focus of state legislation to rein in health maintenance organizations was on protection for doctors and other providers. This year, many states have passed or are considering bills to protect patients. + +Map shows states where comprehensive consumer rights bills have been enacted or are pending. Specific provisions vary from state to state, but most of the bills require grievance procedures for patient complaints; ban "gag clauses that limit what doctors tell patients; require payment for emergency-room visits even if, in hindsight, they might have been avoided; limit financial incentives for doctors to deny treatment; and require direct access to certain specialists, like obstetricians, without going through a primary care doctor. + +Similar legislation was passed in New Mexico this year but was vetoed by the Governor. Some states primarily use regulations rather than laws to govern health care; some of these have written aspects of comprehensive consumer protection bills into their regulations. + +(Source: National Conference of State Legislatures Health Policy Tracking Service)(pg. D8) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +366 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 14, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +After a Church's Collapse, a Stoic Congregation Resolves to Rebuild + +BYLINE: By NORIMITSU ONISHI + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 4; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 862 words + +A day after the roof of their church collapsed, dooming the building to a quick demolition, some members of the Great Joy Baptist Church in Bushwick, Brooklyn, held to their Sunday morning routine yesterday. Dressed in their Sunday best, church hats barely shielding them from the noon sun, a half-dozen members sat in white lawn chairs and gazed across Greene Avenue at what used to be their church. +Such was Rebecca Middleton's faith that even though she lived around the corner and knew that the city had declared the 101-year-old church in imminent danger of collapse, she had hoped to pray inside one last time. She said she was "very, very disappointed" at the sight that greeted her: a tractor sitting atop a 10-foot-high heap of wooden planks. + "We're going to start all over again -- from the ground," Ms. Middleton, 62, said. +Maggie Johnson, 57, who sat next to her in the front yard of of a congregation member, agreed. "The church is going to be missed," she said. "It was a landmark." +"Yes, that's what it was," Ms. Middleton said, nodding. "A landmark. Thank you." She added some time later: "It was like someone knocked down where I was living -- spiritually." +Adding to their problems, congregants were unable to hold formal services at another location yesterday. Their pastor, the Rev. Jared Feggens, had complained of chest pains as he watched his church's demolition and fell unconscious. Mr. Feggens was in stable condition yesterday at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center. +Given the church's history, its members said they never imagined that something as small as a falling roof would close the Great Joy Baptist Church. +The tiny wooden church had survived the looting and arson that devastated Bushwick during the power blackout of July 1977. Over the years, even as its congregation dwindled to about 40 members, mostly middle-aged and elderly women, the church stood unwaveringly between two graffiti-covered, abandoned row houses that were often the site of fires. +The congregation moved into the building at 1171 Greene Avenue in 1971 after its former tenant, the Greene Avenue Methodist Church, disbanded. Great Joy had been celebrating its 42d anniversary this month. +On Saturday morning, a few days after members noticed chips falling from the ceiling, the roof, just below the steeple, buckled and collapsed. A half-dozen members, who had been holding a meeting, scattered outside, unhurt. +That night, after Department of Buildings officials said that the church could crumble at any moment, the tractor arrived. +As church members looked on, the pastor suddenly asked one of the members, Richard Daniels, 42, to call for an ambulance. "He told me he was about to collapse," Mr. Daniels recalled yesterday. +"I don't think he could digest this," said Mr. Daniels's mother, Blanche Daniels, in whose front yard the half-dozen women sat looking at the remains of the church. +At Wyckoff Heights Medical Center yesterday, Mr. Feggens said he was returning home from his job as a ramp serviceman at La Guardia Airport when he heard of the roof's collapse. By the time he reached Great Joy, he said city workers had already begun demolition. +Mr. Feggens, who has been pastor for 11 years, said the congregation knew that the building needed repairs and that contractors had been called for estimates. +"The condition of the church was good," Mr. Feggens said, adding that he was angry that the city had not consulted with him before tearing down the building. "We laid new floors, a gate, a boiler, bathrooms and a water cooler. We renovated the kitchen. This is heartbreaking." +Even though Mr. Feggens described Great Joy as a poor church, he said it offered an outreach ministry program, vacation Bible school and a day camp for about 50 children. "They should have let us get our valuables," he said. "We had pipe organs, antique pews and a pulpit Bible." +On Saturday, officials in the Department of Buildings said the church's structure was so fragile that they had to prohibit congregants from going inside to retrieve their possessions. +City workers, however, managed to save one of the organs by lifting it out of the building with a crane. Yesterday, the organ sat in the foyer of Mrs. Daniels's house. +As news of the church's end spread, a former resident of Bushwick came to visit. The resident, William Munchmeyer, 76, who, like most of the former residents of Bushwick, is of German ancestry, rode the bus and subway from Flushing, Queens, to Bushwick, which he had not seen in more than 15 years. +Mr. Munchmeyer leaned over a fence in Mrs. Daniels's yard to reminisce. "I was confirmed in that church in 1933," he told Ms. Middleton. "I was born around the corner in 1920." +Everything had changed, he said. +"My, my, times have changed," Ms. Middleton said. +"Sometimes not for the better," he said. +"Usually not for the better," she said. +"Maybe you can start with a tent when things get cleaned up," he said. "Some of them are winterized. You start with a tent, and in five years you'll have a new building." +"May you pray for us," Ms. Middleton told Mr. Munchmeyer before he started back to Flushing. + +LOAD-DATE: July 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Workers demolished a Brooklyn church on Saturday after its roof fell in. Yesterday, Blanche Daniels, a congregant who lives nearby, gave a home to the church organ. (Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)(pg. B1); Marion Boatwright, left, Maggie Johnson and Georgia Triblet discussed the loss of their church yesterday in Bushwick, Brooklyn. (Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)(pg. B6) + +Map of Brooklyn showing location of the Great Joy Baptist Church. A 101-year-old church had to be demolished because its roof fell in. (pg. B6) + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +367 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 14, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +A New Breed Of Scientists Studying Mars Takes Control + +BYLINE: By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD + +SECTION: Section A; Page 10; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1061 words + +DATELINE: PASADENA, Calif., July 12 + +Brian Muirhead, deputy project manager for the Mars Pathfinder mission, sat in the control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here, waiting for sunrise on Mars and the next communications with the spacecraft. He looked a little out of place. At 45, he is one of the project's senior citizens, a balding, bearded man among bright-eyed, bushy-maned youth getting their initiation in space flight. +The last time a spacecraft landed on Mars, in 1976, many of the engineers in charge of Pathfinder were in grade school or just entering kindergarten. Some old-timers were in college. Mr. Muirhead figured that the average age of the people who designed, tested and guided the spacecraft and its rover -- as many as 500 people -- is in the low 30's. + So not only is the $266 million Pathfinder mission the first in a new era of ambitious Mars exploration, but it has brought to the fore a whole new generation of planetary explorers, young men and women meeting the challenge with refreshing esprit. They carry their seriousness lightly, bubbling with excitement each time "their" lander or "their" rover does well on "their" planet. +They are also learning by their mistakes, as others did in the past. A slight miscalculation sent the roving vehicle Sojourner bumping into a large rock. A timing mistake in transmitting instructions caused both the Pathfinder and Sojourner to lose a day of work on Friday. +"We had to do things differently on this mission, inventing new ways to land on Mars at low cost," Mr. Muirhead said. "Younger people were highly motivated by this challenge. They were not bound by traditions of earlier projects, and they were more willing to take chances." +Looking around the room, he called to a woman at a computer console in one corner, sitting under a "Mars or Bust" sign. "Cindy, how old are you?" Cindy Oda, an engineer who started out designing mission software and now sends the daily commands to Pathfinder, is 32. +At another console sat Rebecca Manning, 25, a flight controller who joined the project three years ago, right out of college. Her first work was testing the entry, descent and landing procedures for the spacecraft. +"I hadn't even thought about space until I got this job," she said. "Now I don't think I could give it up." +David Gruel, 27, is known as the project's "gremlin." His assignment has been to think of things that could go wrong with the lander or rover and then find ways to overcome the problems. In recent days, he has spent his nights in a 30- by 50-foot sand box, using models to test the next maneuvers for Sojourner. +One of the most prominent young members of the team is Jennifer Harris, 28. She was the flight director during the tense hours after the radio link between Sojourner and Pathfinder suddenly and mysteriously went on the blink. It was the day after the landing, and for a while, the mission's success seemed in doubt. +For hours Ms. Harris, wearing earphones, stood coolly in front of her console, asking questions of other controllers, weighing their answers, conferring with engineers and project managers. Eventually the crisis passed. Engineers are still not sure what caused or corrected the communications lapse. +Many of the young team members, like Ms. Harris, said they feel comfortable in their demanding jobs because they have worked closely together for more than three intense years, becoming, they often said, "like family." As Ms. Harris told reporters, "We have a camaraderie that's beyond belief." +The young Pathfinder engineers are already in demand by other projects. "They're being snatched away from us," said Dr. Donna Shirley, manager of the Mars exploration office at the laboratory. +There are several reasons for the emergence in this mission of a new generation, officials said. +In the late 1970's through most of the 1980's, new planetary missions were few and far between and the laboratory, which is part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, had no money to hire new people. Existing projects like the two Voyagers to the outer planets and Galileo, which is now orbiting Jupiter, consumed years of preparation and flight, with their teams aging on the job. The typical mission team then was much grayer. +Once the first of the new missions to Mars were approved early in this decade, many of the engineers and scientists who pioneered planetary flight in the 1960's had retired and others were occupied with Galileo or Cassini, a large spacecraft to orbit Saturn that is to be launched this fall. The result was an infusion of youth to take on Mars, and a more exuberant way of doing things. +Much of the credit for turning the exuberance into creativity, team members say, should go to Tony Spear, the project manager, who has the white hair befitting his 61 years. Mr. Spear gave the young people wide latitude. If they did the work, they got the job, whatever their age. +"He gave us enough rope, and none of us swung," Mr. Muirhead said. +All week after the landing, Mr. Spear let the younger team leaders take the bows for the project at news conferences. "You are young," he told them, "you need the glory." +Now that they have cut their teeth professionally, the new generation should have many opportunities to apply their newly gained experience. Over the next eight years, American spacecraft are to be launched to Mars at every opportunity -- once every 26 months -- drawing on Pathfinder's technology. Current plans call for a mission in 2005 to return rocks from Mars for analysis on Earth, then at least two more sample-return flights. +Mr. Muirhead said that at the end of the year he expected to shift to planning a mission to land on a comet and bring back the first sample showing what comets are made of. The spacecraft has been named Champollion, after the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion, who deciphered the Rosetta stone. If the mission is approved, the craft will be launched in 2005. +And Mr. Spear, who has been at the laboratory since 1962, will be leaving the Pathfinder team in a few days. He will begin research on new technology for miniaturized spacecraft to fly to the outer planets. +"As long as it's this good," Mr. Spear said, reflecting on Pathfinder's success and the prospect of developing more new ways to explore the planets, "I'm going to stick around and get older here." + +LOAD-DATE: July 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Pathfinder team members are bringing youthful enthusiasm to the project. Brian Muirhead, 45, foreground, is a deputy project manager. (Associated Press) + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +368 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 16, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Clinton and G.O.P. Leaders See Hope for Means Test for Medicare + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 15; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 568 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 15 + +President Clinton and Senate Republicans said today that they believed they could agree on legislation to charge higher Medicare premiums to affluent elderly people, even though House Democrats and some liberal Democratic senators dislike the idea. +Mr. Clinton met at the White House with Congressional leaders from both parties. They agreed that they would try to finish work this month on legislation to balance the budget and cut taxes. + "In principle," Mr. Clinton said, "I support means-testing" of Medicare. And he said more clearly than ever before that he hoped to devise some arrangement to charge higher premiums to higher-income beneficiaries. "I would hope we can agree to some sort of a premium that's enforceable and that's fair and that doesn't drive people out of the Medicare system," he said. +After the meeting, the Republican leader, Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, said, "We can probably find some agreement on means-testing for Medicare." +Mr. Lott said he and the White House still disagreed on who should collect the additional premiums: the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Health and Human Services or the Social Security Administration. But Mr. Lott said the President had told lawmakers, "We'll work through that, as we're doing with everything else." +Chris Jennings, a White House aide, said the President would support "income-related premiums" if they were collected by the I.R.S. +The proposed new premiums would raise $8.9 billion in the next five years if the tax agency collected the money with annual income tax returns, Mr. Jennings said. But under the cumbersome procedure envisioned in the Senate bill, he added, the Government would collect only $3.9 billion over five years. +Under the Senate bill, the Treasury would share income data with Medicare officials, who would calculate the extra premiums and send the information to Social Security. The extra premiums, like the basic monthly premium of $43.80, would then be taken out of monthly Social Security checks. +Negotiators from the House and the Senate met tonight to try to work out their differences. They resolved just one issue: they accepted a provision of the House bill that says health maintenance organizations and other health plans may not limit what doctors tell Medicare patients about treatment options. Doctors would thus be free to discuss costly treatments with patients, even if the H.M.O. would not pay for them. +Consumer groups and doctors supported this measure as a protection for patients. The Senate version of the bill had no such ban on "gag clauses." +The negotiators still must grapple with several big issues, including provisions of the Senate bill that would gradually increase the eligibility age for Medicare (to 67 from 65) and impose a new charge of $5 a visit for home health care services. +Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato, Republican of New York, joined Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, at a rally of Medicare beneficiaries fighting these proposals today. +Mr. D'Amato, who is up for re-election next year, denounced the proposal for a $5 co-payment on home health care services, saying, "It is reckless, going after the poorest of our seniors, without examining their ability to pay." +Mr. D'Amato also opposed the Medicare means test and the increase in the eligibility age when they were approved by the Senate last month. + +LOAD-DATE: July 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +369 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 16, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +COMPANY NEWS; +LAZARD FRERES' STAKE IN NURSING HOME OWNER + +BYLINE: Bloomberg News + +SECTION: Section D; Page 4; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 94 words + +Lazard Freres & Company said yesterday that it had agreed to buy a 49.9 percent stake in ARV Assisted Living for $135 million, becoming the latest Wall Street investment bank to invest in a nursing home owner. Lazard Freres's real estate unit would buy 9.6 million newly issued shares of Assisted Living for $14 each. It would also get four board seats, increasing the number of directors to 11. The shares of ARV, which is based in Costa Mesa, Calif., rose 93.75 cents, to $12.3125. ARV Assisted Living operates 48 facilities for the elderly with 6,150 units. + +LOAD-DATE: July 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +370 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 17, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +AUDIT OF MEDICARE FINDS $23 BILLION IN OVERPAYMENTS + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1157 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 16 + +In the first comprehensive audit of Medicare, Federal investigators said today that the Government overpaid hospitals, doctors and other health care providers last year by $23 billion, or 14 percent of the money spent in the standard Medicare program. +The books and records of the Medicare agency and its contractors were in such disarray that they could not be thoroughly audited, said June Gibbs Brown, inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. Ms. Brown said there was no way to tell how much of the overpayment resulted from fraud. + The estimate of improper payments, based on an exhaustive review of a sample of actual claims, is substantially higher than previous estimates by health policy experts. It tends to confirm the suspicions of elderly people who say their Medicare bills are riddled with errors. +The amount of improper payments detected by the inspector general is, by coincidence, the same as the amount of savings to be extracted from Medicare under the budget bill now pending in Congress -- $115 billion over five years, or an average of $23 billion a year. Congress is considering major changes in Medicare, including an increase in the age of eligibility and higher fees for more affluent beneficiaries, to prevent the program from going bankrupt before baby boomers need it. +In her report, the inspector general said: "We estimate that during fiscal year 1996 net overpayments totaled about $23.2 billion nationwide, or about 14 percent of total Medicare fee-for-service benefit payments. These improper payments could range from inadvertent mistakes to outright fraud and abuse. We cannot quantify what portion of the error rate is attributable to fraud." +The report said the Government had no reliable way to prevent or detect improper Medicare payments, and no reliable estimate of what it might owe on unpaid claims for services already provided. +Auditors found a $4.5 billion "computation error" in the agency's estimate of unpaid claims. They found that contractors sometimes mixed up Medicare's two trust funds, for hospital care and doctors' services. Other contractors confused amounts owed to the Government with amounts owed by the Government. The contractors, typically private insurance companies, review claims and pay bills for Medicare. +Medicare officials acknowledged tonight that the Government made substantial erroneous payments, but they said they did not get credit for all the proper, accurate, timely payments they made. +Melissa T. Skolfield, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said: "This is the first comprehensive audit of Medicare's financial statements that we've ever had. It's a useful road map in our efforts to improve the integrity of the Medicare program." H. Christopher Peacock, a spokesman for the Medicare agency, said, "We are preparing an action plan to deal with the recommendations." +The report made these points: +*Controls over cash are loose. Checks were signed by people who had no authority to do so. +*Medicare's vast computer systems have so little security that records can be easily altered or destroyed, with few safeguards for the privacy of "sensitive medical history information, personal beneficiary data and claim information." +*Hospitals and clinics received the biggest share of improper payments, 35 percent of the $23 billion. Most of the remainder went to doctors (22 percent), home health agencies (16 percent), nursing homes (10 percent) and medical laboratories (6 percent). +*Payments were classified as improper because medical records did not show a need for the services provided, or the services were not covered by Medicare. Routine billing errors and improper diagnostic codes accounted for only 9 percent of the improper payments. +*Premiums paid by Medicare beneficiaries have not been audited. The amounts owed to the Government by hospitals, doctors and others who were overpaid cannot be audited because the Government and its contractors keep inadequate records. +In each of the last three years, the inspector general has found severe weaknesses in Medicare's bookkeeping and internal controls. Today, for the first time, Ms. Brown estimated the amounts of overpayments and for each type of service. +Bruce C. Vladeck, who runs Medicare as administrator of the Federal Health Care Financing Administration, has concurred in most of the auditors' prior recommendations and has repeatedly promised improvements. But Ms. Brown said today that many of the problems "remain uncorrected." +In the 1994 audit, made available today by the Government, Ms. Brown said Medicare actuaries "were not available to provide sufficient information to audit the details" of Medicare spending because they were "involved in the President's health care reform initiative," the ill-fated effort to guarantee health insurance for all Americans. +In today's report, Ms. Brown said Medicare was "inherently vulnerable" because it had 38 million beneficiaries and paid 800 million claims a year through 59 contractors governed by a complex set of reimbursement rules. The Health Care Financing Administration "has not adequately monitored these contractors," she said. +The auditors examined 5,314 claims for 600 patients chosen to be representative of Medicare beneficiaries across the country. The report said that 1,577 of the claims, or 30 percent, "did not comply with Medicare laws and regulations." +Richard J. Davidson, president of the American Hospital Association, complained last week that health care providers were "under siege by Federal law-enforcement and investigative personnel." He said Federal agents did not distinguish between innocent billing errors and criminal activity. The association asked for a six-month moratorium on new investigations of hospitals suspected of filing false claims. +Under Federal law, health care providers are supposed to keep records to support all claims, and they must make the documents available when Federal investigators request them. Ms. Brown said many health care providers failed to supply the documents. +The inspector general gave several examples of erroneous payments. In one case, a nursing home was paid $15,362 for a 61-day stay by an elderly patient. Medical records did not show any condition that required skilled nursing care. +In another case, a nursing home billed Medicare separately for routine services already included in the fixed amount paid by the Government for each day of care. In other cases, auditors found that patients' medical problems were much less severe than indicated on claims, so doctors were entitled to less money than they received. +Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California, said, "The inspector general's audit shows that billions of dollars are being wasted every year by Medicare because of fraud, abuse, shoddy accounting practices and improper payments." + +LOAD-DATE: July 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +371 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 18, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Some Fond Farewells for the Mainstay of Main Street + +BYLINE: By NORIMITSU ONISHI + +SECTION: Section D; Page 4; Column 3; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 635 words + +Florence Hillig, after retiring six years ago from her office job in Manhattan, took to coming to the Woolworth's store in Flushing, Queens. Tuesdays, she seldom missed a chance to shop because of the 10 percent discount for seniors. +But it was the store's S-shaped lunch counter that drew her just about every other day. + "The girls here I get along with," said Ms. Hillig, 71, as she worked on a serving of string beans. "You get to know them. That's why I was so shocked when I heard about it at 11 o'clock." +What Ms. Hillig heard was the talk of the lunch counter yesterday at the Woolworth's on Main Street in Flushing, as it was perhaps at other Woolworth's stores on hundreds of Main Streets in the country: the Woolworth Corporation announced yesterday morning that it was shutting its 400 remaining stores after years of decline. +The closings affect New York more than any other region in the country. About a quarter of the stores are in the New York region, company officials said, with 61 of them dotting the city. Manhattan alone has 21 stores. +At a store on the corner of Third Avenue and 86th Street in Manhattan, customers said they would miss Woolworth's not only for its bargains but also for the place the 117-year-old chain occupied in the country's history and people's lives. +"I grew up with a five-and-dime store," said Ken Isador, 42, a neighborhood resident who was wearing a $5 pair of shorts from the store. "My grandfather would take us there." +But, Mr. Isador quickly added, "I guess if there's a need for a place like this, someone will fill it." +The store in Flushing, like many of the other Woolworth's stores in the city, has appeared a little out of place and time in recent years. Squeezed in by a giant Caldor's, surrounded by Chinese- and Korean-owned shops that have transformed the neighborhood since the early 1980's, the store's exterior signs appeared to need some burnishing, its interior some renovations. +Yesterday, inside the store, which opened in October 1956, the reaction ranged from shock to anger, especially among the regulars at the lunch counter. +"It's terrible, it's so stupid," said Phyllis DiFrancesco. "Everyone is slow. What if they don't make that much money?" +A waitress, who said she had worked at the counter for eight years, said most of her customers were elderly, who came for lunches averaging $5 to $6. "Some of them can't talk," said the waitress, who asked not to be named, "but I know what they want." +About 20 people sat on stools at the lunch counter around 2 P.M. Patricia Lang, a 26-year patron, chatted with Ernestine Thomas, 85, to her right. +"It's like a family gathering here," Ms. Lang, 64, said. +Joan Wayne, who was Ms. Thomas's companion, asked her how long she had been coming to the Flushing store. +"Every time I get hungry," Ms. Thomas said. "I've been coming here for 30 years, nearly every day." +"I'm going to get three fans today -- them standing fans," she went on. "I want a cool house." +"Some places sell fans for $30; others, $26, " Ms. Lang chimed in. "It's $19 here." +For Ms. Thomas, who was a young black woman in pre-World War II Atlanta, years before four black students sat at a "whites only" Woolworth's counter in Greensboro, N.C., the closing of Woolworth's had a particular resonance. +"When I was a little girl, we used to walk miles to go to the five-and-dimes," Ms. Thomas said, turning to a plate of turkey and mashed potatoes. "We could buy food. But we had to go outside and eat it. We weren't allowed to sit." +"That's something to think about," said Ms. Wayne, her companion. "We've come a long way, haven't we?" +"That's what I told you," Ms. Thomas said. "You don't know." +"I know. I know," Ms. Wayne said. But Ms. Thomas said nothing and turned to her turkey. + +LOAD-DATE: July 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +372 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 18, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Medicare Cuts That Harm Cities + +SECTION: Section A; Page 28; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 412 words + +Congressional conferees may decide today whether the Medicare cuts they are determined to impose will be apportioned fairly or will victimize urban areas and transfer the funds to rural areas. +Congress has already decided to knock more than $100 billion out of Medicare over five years to help pay for spending increases and tax cuts in its balanced-budget plan. Two House bills and one in the Senate propose reductions in payments to hospitals, physicians and managed-care plans. But there are important differences. + Medicare currently pays premiums to managed-care plans that reflect the local cost of treating patients in traditional fee-for-service coverage. That way, managed-care plans in high-cost areas, like New York City and Los Angeles, are paid enough to provide quality care. +Under the Senate bill, but not the House proposals, these adjustments for prices and wages would be eliminated, reducing payments for health plans in New York City by up to 30 percent. The formula flows from the political weight of farm-state senators, not from a rational calculation of health needs. It should be dropped by the conferees. +Regional Medicare costs differ not only because of wages and prices but also because of differences in the number of tests and procedures performed. The Senate and House bills would base Medicare payments on an average of regional and national Medicare costs. The proposed formula would raise payments in low-cost (rural) regions and lower them in high-cost (urban) regions. There is some virtue in blending local and national rates so as to encourage fiscal discipline in the high-cost areas. But the Senate formula goes too far too fast and should be rejected in favor of the fairer of the two House bills. +In one respect, the Senate proposes to help urban hospitals. Currently Medicare helps subsidize teaching hospitals and hospitals that treat the poor by granting them high reimbursement rates. But these hospitals cannot always collect such extra money when the patients come through managed-care plans. So the Senate bill and one of the House bills would reduce payments to managed-care plans and turn more money over directly to teaching and indigent-care hospitals -- a smart way to direct money where it is needed. +It will be hard enough to absorb cuts of this magnitude without harming care of the elderly. It will be even harder if the conferees adopt the city-punishing parts of the House and Senate bills. + +LOAD-DATE: July 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +373 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 18, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Power Broker Looks for Deals to Keep New York Cool + +BYLINE: By DAVID M. HALBFINGER + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 827 words + +At 2:30 yesterday afternoon, New York City's power broker of the moment took his seat at his desk and picked up the phone to do a deal. Before him stretched a panoramic view of the metropolitan area, from Dutchess County all the way to Fresh Kills on Staten Island. +He was not calling in markers from a politician or a corporate chief. He was not sitting in a corner office high in the World Trade Center. He was not even looking out a window. Thomas Leo was sitting in Con Edison's dimly lighted nerve center, looking at a movie screen-sized schematic map of the power company's entire system, and dialing up utilities from Canada to Ohio, trying to get a deal on a few hundred megawatts of spare electricity. + The fifth day of New York's first heat wave of the summer brought a welcome dip in humidity, easing not only the sweltering feeling on city streets and in the subways but also the pressure on Mr. Leo, the 2:30-to-10 P.M. power dispatcher, and the other engineers in the Consolidated Edison Company's Bulk Power Control Room. +Here, in an unmarked office building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (the utility requested that the exact location be withheld, for security reasons), a handful of people work in air-conditioned comfort to make sure that Con Edison, the nation's fifth-largest power company and the biggest in the Northeast, can deliver enough electricity to satisfy the demands of its 3 million customers. +On the map across the curved front wall, tiny gold and green bulbs light up at points representing the connections in the system -- between out-of-state power lines and Con Ed plants, between substations and the networks that deliver power to residences and businesses. There are five gold bulbs for each link in the system, each bulb representing 20 percent of the connection's capacity. +One by one, the bulbs blink on, as kids returning home from playgrounds and day camp turn on the TV, as elderly residents crank up the air-conditioning, as businesses keep their cooling systems on high and workers hunch over their computers late into the afternoon and early evening. By midafternoon, the peak hours in summer, the screen is ablaze. +In a closely watched corner of the board, never out of anyone's peripheral vision, a red readout shows the level of voltage coursing through the entire system. All day long, until about 5 P.M., it rises every few seconds. Four digits are safe. Five can make people nervous. Until this week, the record was 10,805 megawatts, set in August 1995. On Tuesday, between 3 and 4 P.M., the city's demand reached 11,013 megawatts. +Keeping up with that rising demand can be a difficult job, said Michael L. Miele, the general manager of the control room. Although Con Edison has enough of its own oil-, gas-, and nuclear-powered generating plants to produce about 11,000 megawatts of power at once, he said, its costs are far higher than those of some other utilities in western New York and other states, which can burn coal and other cheaper fuels, and where taxes on fuel purchases are lower or nonexistent. +All day long, Con Edison's power dispatchers look for opportunities to buy less expensive power from other utility companies, especially those in cooler areas with surplus power. +On the hottest days, however, Con Edison cannot rely on imported electricity. This week, as temperatures broke records across the East Coast, the pool of utilities in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland canceled its sales to Con Edison as its surplus of power shrank. +"They can't take care of their own native load, so they appropriately stopped their transmission to us," Mr. Miele said. +For times like this, Con Ed maintains a backup fleet of barges, tied up in the Gowanus Canal, in the Narrows and on other waterways throughout the region, each with a battery of gas turbine generators aboard. There are 74 turbines, which, together, can provide an extra 2,000 megawatts. Yesterday, about half were up and running, as the region's electricity demand peaked between 3 and 4 P.M. at 10,607 megawatts, seventh on the all-time list, a Con Ed spokesman said. +Despite the high temperatures and power usage, the control room was hushed yesterday, Mr. Miele noted proudly, saying his crew was well-prepared. But things do not always go smoothly. +On Tuesday, as a number of equipment failures increased the demands on Con Edison's system, 28,000 homes in Westchester lost power for several hours and the utility had to reduce voltage by 8 percent in some parts of Brooklyn. Mr. Miele said a flick of a switch in the control room would reduce voltage across Con Edison's entire system by the same amount. He said homeowners might perceive it as nothing more than a dimming of their lights. That is one of several emergency measures that should prevent a recurrence of a catastrophic blackout like the one in1977, he said. Another is simply turning off power in entire parts of the city. + +LOAD-DATE: July 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: In the cool, dim control center of Consolidated Edison in Manhattan, a flick of a switch could reduce voltage throughout the metropolitan area. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times) + +Graph: "A CLOSER LOOK: Beating the Heat" +High temperatures over the last few days have led to record electricity use in the city. Graph shows daily peak use and temperatures for July. (Source: Con Edison) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +374 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 19, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Republican Leaders Exempt 'Workfare' From Labor Laws + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 7; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 678 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 18 + +Stepping up the pace of work on legislation to balance the Federal budget, Republican leaders decided today that welfare recipients engaged in community service should not have the full protection of the minimum wage and other Federal labor standards. +The decision to exempt welfare recipients in state "workfare" programs from such worker protections sets up a conflict between the Republican Congress and the President. + President Clinton has said people on welfare are generally entitled to the minimum wage and other protections of Federal labor laws. +The decision on welfare was one of many made today by committee chairmen from the House and the Senate as they held a series of meetings with Congressional leaders in the office of Speaker Newt Gingrich. +Senator Pete V. Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said the Republicans had resolved 85 percent of the issues in the deficit-reduction bill. Representative John R. Kasich, the Ohio Republican who is chairman of the House Budget Committee, said "we got a long way today" in devising a unified position for negotiations with President Clinton. +The lawmakers did not resolve the biggest disputes between the Senate and the House over Medicare: whether to impose higher premiums on higher-income beneficiaries, whether to increase the age of eligibility and whether to establish a new charge of $5 a visit for home health care services. +Republican Senators continued to push for the "means test," an increase in the eligibility age and the $5 copayment. House members continued to oppose all three, saying they would not accept any of the changes unless President Clinton unequivocally endorsed them. +Mr. Clinton has said he is, in principle, willing to accept the idea of a means test for Medicare, perhaps even as part of this year's budget bill. +The Republicans decided to let 500,000 elderly people drop out of the standard Medicare program and establish "medical savings accounts" with Federal money. Such accounts would pay routine medical expenses. The beneficiaries would buy private insurance to pay catastrophic medical expenses. +President Clinton opposes such medical savings accounts, saying they appeal mainly to people who are healthy or wealthy. The House version of the budget bill would authorize 500,000 accounts. The Senate would allow 100,000. +The House and the Senate passed different versions of the budget bill last month. Republicans, having made limited progress in their talks with Democrats, decided today to start making the major decisions themselves. +On welfare, the Republicans said they would move to override parts of a recent directive issued by Mr. Clinton with strong support from labor unions. The directive says that welfare recipients working in community service jobs are "employees" and are therefore covered by Federal labor laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets wage and hour standards. +Senate Republicans agreed to accept a provision of the House-passed bill that would exempt welfare recipients in state "workfare" programs from many requirements of those laws. +Welfare recipients who take jobs in private industry would, like regular workers, be entitled to the minimum wage and other workplace protections. +But many states have established community service and work experience programs, which require poor people to work at public-sector jobs or for private nonprofit organizations as a condition for welfare. +Governors say that if they have to pay the minimum wage for such workfare programs, they will not be able to create enough jobs to meet the work requirements of the 1996 welfare law. The governors say workfare participants are being trained for work and are not employees in the usual sense. +The House version of the budget bill sets a limit on the number of hours that a workfare participant may be required to work. The maximum number of hours is calculated by adding together the value of welfare benefits and food stamps, then dividing by the minimum wage. + +LOAD-DATE: July 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +375 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 20, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +YOUR HOME; +Services That Help The Aged + +BYLINE: By JAY ROMANO + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 3; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1113 words + +EARLIER this year, as Helen Murray was backing her car out of her garage to run some errands, a gust of wind nudged the garage door just enough to snag it in Mrs. Murray's front bumper. +"It was something to see," she said. "I pulled that door clean off the hinges." +Having thus assessed the damage, Mrs. Murray decided to continue with her errands. + "I'm 84 years old," she said. "Couldn't take care of it myself if I wanted to." +Like many elderly residents in New York City, Mrs. Murray is most comfortable living in surroundings that are most familiar -- in her case, the Bronx home she and her husband bought 35 years ago. But being 84 years old and a widow -- her husband died about 20 years ago -- Mrs. Murray is hardly able to keep up with the unending supply of household chores, and the occasional repairs, that inevitably confront a homeowner. +Mrs. Murray, however, knew enough to call the New York Foundation for Senior Citizens, a not-for-profit organization based in Manhattan that provides elderly homeowners on limited incomes with the tools they need to remain safe and secure in their own homes. And the tool most often needed, it seems, is a handyman and his tools. +"He did a beautiful job, believe me, it was beautiful," said Mrs. Murray, referring to how the staff handyman dispatched to her house reattached the garage door. "When my clothes pole fell down, they sent someone to fix that, too. And next week, I have an appointment to get my locks fixed." +The Foundation for Senior Citizens is one of several not-for-profit organizations in the New York City area that, in cooperation with state and city agencies, form a safety net of sorts for elderly residents -- particularly elderly homeowners. +"The whole point is to keep senior citizens independent and able to hang onto their homes for as long as they want to," said Herbert W. Stupp, Commissioner of the New York City Department for the Aging. +The department, Mr. Stupp said, provides funds for several not-for-profit organizations that offer services to elderly homeowners. Among them are the Metropolitan New York Coordinating Council on Jewish Poverty in Manhattan, the Citizens Advice Bureau in the Bronx, the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council and the New York Foundation for Senior Citizens. In addition, Mr. Stupp said, the department itself administers several programs for elderly residents. +For example, he said, the department's Elderly Crime Victims Resource Center provides elderly residents living in apartments or private homes with window gates and security locks that are installed by independent contractors working for programs financed by the department. +In addition, Mr. Stupp said, the department's weatherization, referral and packaging program provides emergency boiler and furnace repair to residents 60 years of age and older in one- to four-family dwellings who meet certain income criteria. +At present, he said, to qualify for the program, a one-person household age 60 or older may have amonthly income of no more than $934; two-person households cannot exceed $1,254 a month and three-person households must have combined income of less than $1,574. +The New York Foundation for Senior Citizens has also established certain criteria for those who want to participate in the Minor Home Repair Program. Linda R. Hoffman, president of the organization, said that participants age 60 or older must own their own home or apartment and reside in it. +She said the maximum allowable income for a one-person household to qualify is $2,288 a month or $27,450 a year; for a two-person household it is $2,612 a month or $31,350 a year and for a three-person household it is $2,942 a month or $35,300 a year. +Once a homeowner qualifies, Ms. Hoffman said, the organization will provide "home handyman" services free of charge on an "as needed" basis. (Co-op shareholders and condominium owners must provide proof that the board of directors has given permission for the work that is needed.) +"All the homeowner has to do is supply the materials," Ms. Hoffman said, adding that, in some cases, even materials are free. +"We sometimes get contributions from manufacturers and retailers who send us electrical switches, door bells, door locks, smoke detectors and things like that," Ms. Hoffman said. +The vast majority of participants in the program -- nearly 80 percent -- are elderly women living alone. The list of services offered through the Minor Home Repair Program reads like a table of contents from a home repair encyclopedia. From fixing broken windows to snaking stuffed-up drains to replacing bathroom tiles or crystal pieces on chandeliers, the foundation's five full-time professional handymen (there are no handywomen on staff just yet) travel to homes in all five boroughs, three homes a day, five days a week. +"I've been doing this for over 12 years," said Martin Grossman, 45, the foundation's senior repairman. +Mr. Grossman said that since he and the other repairmen used their own vehicles to travel to client's houses, they are limited in what they can bring to a job. +"We don't carry ladders and we only carry power tools when we know we'll need them," he said, adding that in many cases, the handymen were able to make use of tools on the premises. And while the workers do not get involved in any major repair work or painting projects, the program does go far beyond simply providing help with minor repairs. +"Sure, we fix toilets and leaky faucets," Mr. Grossman said. "But we also hang curtains, install extension phones, put up Christmas decorations and program VCR's. There are so many things that an older person living alone can't do for themselves -- like get up on a ladder and change a light bulb." +In addition, Mr. Grossman said, any time that a handyman is at a client's home he will conduct a safety audit to insure that there are no hazards present in the home. The repairman will insure, for example, that there are no dangerous electrical cords or extension wires being used; that all rugs and runners are slip-resistant; that handrails are securely fastened; that step-stools being used are stable and that smoke alarms are installed and functioning properly. +"When you own a house, there's always something that needs to be done," Mr. Grossman said. "After a while, you get to know the clients and their homes. After a while, you might even become their friend." +Residents who are interested in information about any of the above programs or organizations -- as well as retailers or manufacturers who wish to donate materials -- may call the New York City Department for the Aging at (212) 442-1000. + +LOAD-DATE: July 20, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Tom Bloom) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +376 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 20, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +MUSIC; +Altruistic Moves at Arts Center + +BYLINE: By ROBERT SHERMAN + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 8; Column 4; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 991 words + +THE Paramount Center for the Arts in Peekskill has embarked on several outreach programs. One with long-range implications is the center's invitation to nonprofit organizations to use the stage and services of the staff without charge so long as presentations are free and of benefit to the community. +"We're not here to get rich," the executive director, Numa Saisselin, said. "We're here to serve our community, and there are quite a number of grass-roots organizations in the area who are doing good things but simply don't have the funds at their disposal to rent the theater. We want to foster these groups, and by giving them a showcase platform, to help them on the road to bigger and better dreams." + One worthy program is the Paramount's own Senior Matinee Series. "We understand the special needs of our senior citizens," the marketing director, Nina Gabriele-Cuva, said. "So we've designed performances just for them at 1:30 in the afternoon in an air-conditioned environment so they can feel cool, comfortable and safe traveling to and from the event." +The first of three Wednesday shows takes place this week with the T. J. Tomlin Dixieland All Stars. On Aug. 13, T. J. returns on drums to provide old-time jazz with Chuck Trepede on keyboards, Carmen Leggio at tenor sax and the vocalist Michele LeBlanc. The Sept. 24 finale is an afternoon of comedy and songs with Glen Super. These are not free events, but tickets are only $5. For more information, call the box office at 739-2333. +For free Wednesday jazz, there is the Sculpture Garden at the Katonah Museum of Art, where a summer series is presenting the Zusaan Kali Fasteau World Jazz Trio this week at 6:30 P.M. The group offers "a world music potpourri with an explosive range of sounds on sax, strings, flutes, piano and drums." The music moves indoors if it rains. The information number is 232-9555. +Also free and designed as family entertainment for age 6 through grandparents are Tuesday programs at 7:30 P.M. at the New Rochelle Public Library. The cycle encompasses songs, stories and dances from around the world, and this week it offers a taste of the Orient from the Chinese Folk Dance Company. On July 29, Maryanna Cassells focuses on Jewish stories and songs. Haitian music is featured on Aug. 5, and the group Latino Fix appears on Aug. 12. Concluding the series on Aug. 19 will be Portuguese dances and songs by the Folkloric Group of Our Lady of Fatima. The library's phone number is 632-7878. +An outstanding free event is the yearly visit by the New York Philharmonic. Next Saturday at 8 P.M. at Westchester Community College in Valhalla, Keith Lockhart, conductor of the Boston Pops, makes his Philharmonic debut with works by Dvorak, Copland, Bernstein and Gershwin, concluding with a Grucci fireworks display. The Philharmonic's summer information number is (212) 875-5709. +Mendelssohn wrote a raft of wonderful "Songs Without Words," but today at 5:30 P.M. at the International Music Festival at Caramoor in Katonah, it will definitely be music with words, as Mendelssohn's incidental music to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" accompanies readings by Claire Bloom. The program includes several other fascinating fusions of text and tone, similarly narrated by the actress, in partnership with the flutist Eugenia Zukerman and the pianist Brian Zeger. +On Thursday at 4:15 P.M. at Caramoor, Peter Oundjian, the festival's artistic director designate, gives a string quartet master class, then returns next Saturday at 8:30 P.M. to conduct an all-Beethoven concert, including Mahler's transcription of the Opus 95 String Quartet and the Fourth Piano Concerto with Garrick Ohlsson as soloist. Next Sunday at 5:30 P.M. Mr. Oundjian's former colleagues in the Tokyo String Quartet -- now with Mikhail Kopelman in the first violinist's chair -- play Barber, Brahms and Schubert. +On Friday at 8 P.M., the St. Petersburg Quartet makes its Caramoor debut with Haydn, Brahms and Shostakovich. For reservations to Caramoor concerts, call 232-1252. +The last of the Summer Sounds Dance Concerts at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers takes place Friday at 8 P.M. when the New York Tango Trio upholds the honor of the sensuous Argentinian dance form, "incorporating jazz improvisations into the traditionally rich, robust melodies and distinctive rhythms." The number to call for tickets is 963-4550. +The jaunty, typically American rhythms of bluegrass will be heard next Saturday at 8 P.M. when the Nashville Bluegrass Band comes to Whippoorwill Hall in Armonk for a program sponsored by Friends of the North Castle Library. The reservations number is 273-8638. +Also for folk fans is the Falcon Ridge Festival in Hillsdale, about an hour's drive from Albany near the corner of New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Described by its planners as "a three-day community of folk music and dance," it offers a New Artist Showcase on Friday at noon and a Summer's Eve Song Swap Friday night with Greg Brown, Janis Ian, Cheryl Wheeler and David Wilcox. There will also be dancing on an 8,500-square-foot wooden dance floor. The festivities continue next Saturday and Sunday starting at 11 A.M. each day with concerts, songwriting workshops, craft demonstrations, children's events and, of course, more dancing. Among the performers are Dar Williams, David Roth, Jay Ungar and Molly Mason. For directions, call (860) 350-7472. +The 82d season of Maverick Concerts in Woodstock offers recitals on Sundays at 3 P.M. along with Saturday night musicales and matinee shows for younger listeners. Today the Audubon String Quartet plays works by Dvorak, Schumann and Peter Schickele. The Brentano Quartet is scheduled next Sunday, and in August there will be appearances by the Tokyo, Borromeo and Cassatt Quartets. There is no reserved seating at these concerts, so early arrival is a good idea. For travel directions or a schedule of concerts, call 679-8217. + +LOAD-DATE: July 20, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Claire Bloom + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +377 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 20, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +SIGNOFF; +The British Detective as 'a Kind of Dinosaur' + +BYLINE: By SARAH LYALL + +SECTION: Section 12; Page 55; Column 1; Television + +LENGTH: 600 words + +DETECTIVE Superintendent Andy Dalziel is more caveman than new man -- a cigarette-puffing, beer-swigging detective with a large gut, a foul mouth and a scowl that seems carved into his face. With his thick Yorkshire accent and his abrasive demeanor, he serves as a fine foil to Peter Pascoe, the boyishly handsome and semi-yuppified Detective Inspector who works for him in "Dalziel and Pascoe," a British import coming back to New York this week. It will be shown on Tuesday at 9 P.M. on A&E. +Dalziel and Pascoe's police work is filled with bickering and sniping, as the two pursue their own idiosyncratic detection methods, but is also laced with a grudging mutual admiration. It's their combative, complicated relationship -- and the unconventional character of Dalziel -- that sets this series apart from many police shows featuring unlikely partnerships. It's also what drew Warren Clarke, who plays Dalziel (a Scottish word, pronounced dee-ELL), to the part in the first place. + "When I was first offered it, I didn't really want to do it -- I didn't want to do a cop series," said Mr. Clarke, 46, interviewed on the set of "A Respectable Trade," a BBC film in which he plays an 18th-century slave trader in Bristol. On a break from filming a bedroom scene, he was wearing a long white linen nightgown and a white nightcap and smoking a cigarette. +"But I found the character really very amusing and totally, utterly un-P.C., which I thought was very attractive," Mr. Clarke said. "He's a kind of dinosaur, a throwback to the 60's, and I found that the biggest attraction. I also love the interplay between Dalziel and Pascoe." +The detectives first appeared in 1970 in "A Clubbable Woman," by the British mystery writer Reginald Hill. The book,, which describes the murder of the unpopular wife of a rugby club member, was made into the first "Dalziel and Pascoe" episode. +Later episodes based on novels by Mr. Hill include "Deadheads," in which the life of a wealthy accountant seems unnaturally punctuated by the deaths of people who stand in his way, personally and professionally, and "Exit Lines," in which Dalziel is accused of drunken driving and Pascoe, investigating the death of an elderly man killed in the bath, begins to have serious concerns about his boss's ethics and integrity. +British television critics have been kind to "Dalziel and Pascoe," and episodes in the second series have drawn as many as 13 million viewers, or more than a fifth of the British population. +Since he took on the role of Dalziel, Mr. Clarke, a veteran actor whose three-decade career has included appearances in "A Clockwork Orange" and "Anthony and Cleopatra," has become increasingly visible to the English public. Tabloids delight in finding new, unflattering ways to describe his appearance ("things like 'his face is like a flat tire,' " Mr. Clarke said) and in reporting on every hint of life's reflecting art (The Daily Mirror gleefully reported that on a filming trip to Poland, Mr. Clarke spent a few hours in jail after trying to buy a drink for a barmaid). +But Mr. Clarke says that while there are things he admires about his character -- his underlying humanitarian principles, for instance, and his lack of pretense -- most similarities between him and Dalziel are purely unintentional. +"Hopefully, I'm not like him," he said with a sharp look. "I'm not saying I'm P.C. more than he is, but there are very few things I share with him. I don't drink the way he does. I smoke, but not has much as he does, and I don't scratch my parts or pick my nose in public." + +LOAD-DATE: July 20, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Warren Clarke says his character, Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel, is "utterly un-P.C." (BBC Worldwide) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +378 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 21, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +ELDERLY PATIENTS MAY GET A BREAK ON MEDICAL COSTS + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1312 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 20 + +Relief is in sight for elderly people who, in recent years, have been forced to pay a large and rapidly growing share of the bills for hospital outpatient services like cataract surgery, hernia operations and all sorts of diagnostic tests. +The budget bill now moving through Congress would impose new limits on what Medicare beneficiaries pay for such services. Beneficiaries are ordinarily responsible for 20 percent of what the Government determines to be a reasonable amount for care provided under Part B of Medicare, which covers doctors' services. + But because of a quirk in the Federal Medicare law, there is no limit on what a patient may be required to pay for tests and services in the outpatient department of a hospital, which are also covered under Part B. The patient is responsible for 20 percent of whatever the hospital charges, not 20 percent of the amount approved by Medicare. +Medicare beneficiaries are now responsible, on the average, for 47 percent of the total payments to hospitals for outpatient services like surgery, radiology and diagnostic procedures because hospitals often charge more than Medicare approves. The patient's share is far more than Congress intended, and the burden is rising rapidly because such services account for a growing portion of all health care in the United States. For a patient, the additional costs can easily amount to several thousand dollars a year. +In many cases, hospital records show, the patients' share of outpatient bills exceeds 50 percent, and beneficiaries pay more than the Government. In a report to Congress last year, Donna E. Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, predicted that beneficiaries would be paying 68 percent of the bills by 2000. +Since 1983, the Government has paid a flat amount for each Medicare patient admitted to a hospital, depending on the diagnosis. And since 1992, Medicare has used a fee schedule to pay doctors. But there is no such system of fixed payments for hospital outpatient services. +The provisions dealing with Medicare outpatient services are identical in the House and the Senate versions of the budget bill passed last month. So while negotiators from the two chambers are trying to work out the differences in the bills, those Medicare provisions are virtually certain to be included in any bill that becomes law. They would take effect in 1999, making the biggest changes in Medicare since the creation of the program in 1965. +One of those changes would establish a fee schedule for hospital outpatient services. A hospital would not be allowed to charge more than the fee. +The amount paid by beneficiaries for a particular type of outpatient service would be frozen roughly at current levels. But the total amount paid to hospitals -- by Medicare and patients combined -- would increase slightly faster than the costs of goods and services used by hospitals. +Kirsten A. Sloan, a lobbyist at the American Association of Retired Persons, said: "This change is a start toward fixing the problem. It would stop further growth in beneficiaries' co-insurance. Beneficiaries should notice the change right away because the problem won't get any worse." +In recent years, Medicare patients have often assumed that they were saving money by using hospitals' outpatient clinics and avoiding overnight stays. But that was not always true because there were no limits on what they could be charged for outpatient services. +Thus, for example, Jeanette L. Dority, 77, of Santa Teresa, N.M., had a mastectomy at a nearby hospital in El Paso. The hospital billed $6,275 for the outpatient procedure, and she paid 20 percent, or $1,255. But Medicare paid $816, or 80 percent of the amount deemed reasonable by the Government, $1,020. +In an interview, her husband, Guy E. Dority, said the couple's share of the bill was "unfair and totally ridiculous." +Likewise, Dorothy E. Wade, 80, of Land O' Lakes, Fla., had cataract surgery at a hospital in Tampa, Fla. The hospital billed $3,132, and she paid 20 percent, or $626. By contrast, after much effort, she learned from the Government that Medicare had paid $532. +Her son, Richard C. Wade, who lives with her, said: "Senior citizens are being financially raped because of this loophole in the law. It's not an equitable situation for Medicare recipients." +Several Congressional committees have described the current situation as an anomaly: higher payments by beneficiaries do not necessarily result in lower payments by the Government. The Government still pays 80 percent of the "reasonable amount" even if beneficiaries pay far more than 20 percent. There is no dollar-for-dollar reduction in what the Government pays. +In her report to Congress, Secretary Shalala said that a hospital could often increase its revenue "by simply increasing its charges" for outpatient services. +Hospitals say they are required to charge the same amounts to Medicare beneficiaries and others for outpatient services. The charges were originally close to the amounts considered reasonable by Medicare, but the gap has widened in recent years as the Government tried to limit its costs and hospitals sought additional revenues. +The Medicare handbook, sent to all beneficiaries, explains the situation this way: "When you use your Part B benefits, you are responsible for paying the first $100 each year of the charges approved by Medicare. This is called the Part B annual deductible. After the deductible is met, Medicare pays 80 percent of the Medicare-approved amount for most services. You are responsible for the remaining 20 percent." +But, it says, there is one big exception: "If you receive outpatient services at a hospital, you are responsible for paying 20 percent of whatever the hospital charges, not 20 percent of a Medicare-approved amount." +Medicare spending for outpatient services has been growing twice as fast as outlays for inpatient hospital care and now totals $20 billion, against more than $95 billion annually for Medicare patients admitted to hospitals. Since 1980, the total number of hospital admissions for all types of patients has declined, but the number of outpatient hospital visits has more than doubled. +Hospitals cite many reasons for the boom in outpatient care. New surgical technology and advances in anesthesia have reduced the need for overnight hospital stays. Complex procedures like hysterectomies and reconstructive knee surgery are now being done in hospital outpatient departments. +Managed care companies are prodding hospitals to release patients as soon as possible, and Medicare creates a financial incentive for hospitals to do so because it pays a fixed amount for each admission, regardless of how long the patient is hospitalized. +In theory, outpatient surgery and other procedures save money because patients avoid costly hospital stays. But some of the expected savings have been offset by explosive growth in the number of Medicare claims for outpatient services. +Many elderly people have supplementary insurance, known as Medigap policies, to help pay costs not covered by Medicare. But as they pay more for outpatient services, their Medigap premiums increase. These premiums have risen sharply in the last two years, and insurers cite the increased use of outpatient services as a major reason. +Congress's decision to change the way it pays for outpatient services results in part from evidence compiled by the American Association of Retired Persons. The organization was deluged with 1,500 letters last fall after it published an article in its Bulletin asking readers to send in hospital bills documenting their experiences. +In addition, a Federal advisory panel, the Prospective Payment Assessment Commission, has repeatedly urged lawmakers to correct what it describes as "a flaw in Medicare's payment method." + + +LOAD-DATE: July 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +379 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 21, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +BUSINESS DIGEST + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 610 words + + +Philippines to Get Emergency I.M.F. Loan +In an important test of new methods to cope with instability in world financial markets, the International Monetary Fund has for the first time used emergency procedures set up after the Mexican financial crisis to arrange an urgent loan of $1 billion to the Philippines. +The move was an unusual response to the pressure placed on some other Southeast Asian economies since Thailand was forced on July 2 to devalue its currency. [Page A1.] + +New Cap Near for Outpatient Bills +Relief is in sight for elderly people who, in recent years, have been forced to pay a large and rapidly growing share of the bills for hospital outpatient services like cataract surgery, hernia operations and all sorts of diagnostic tests. The budget bill moving through Congress would impose new limits on what Medicare beneficiaries pay for such services. [A1.] + +At the Silicon Ranch +Technology is transforming the cattle and dairy industries. Competitive pressures, high feed costs and the demand for prime, specialty beef have forced more farmers and ranchers to drive their herds into the electronic frontier. Perhaps it was inevitable when cows started appearing on those Gateway 2000 boxes. [D4.] + +Are Papers Doing Their Jobs? +The business prospects of newspapers have improved sharply, with advertising up and newsprint costs down. But are papers fulfilling their mission to inform readers? At least four different efforts are under way to try to plumb some of the underlying problems. Iver Peterson: Publishing. [D9.] + +Intel Settles Suit Over Chips +Intel has settled a class-action suit brought in the wake of the disclosure last year that an error in a testing process had led the company to overstate the speed of some microprocessor chips by about 10 percent. The chip maker will offer rebates on the purchase of new processors for some customers and add new language warning computer users to carefully assess comparisons of processor speed. [D6.] + +A Loud Battle in Audio Systems +A war is under way for control of the music and the video soundtracks Americans play in their living rooms. Most people are completely unaware of the fight, or even that there's anything to fight over. But Digitial Theater Systems is mounting a nasty challenge to Dolby's primacy in the audio world. [D9.] + +Investors Consider Coney Island +Inspired by the success of efforts to redevelop Times Square, private investors and state officials are now turning their attention to another long-neglected part of the New York City: Coney Island. The efforts have gained new momentum because Bruce C. Ratner, a developer with a track record in several large projects, has shown interest. [B1.] + +Radio, Welcome to the Club +Even children who have yet to master their ABC's know that mouse ears mean Disney and Mickey Mouse. Now that icon of family entertainment, which has helped sell videos, magazines, television programs and films, is heading into radio, a medium that for decades has mostly tuned out listeners younger than 12. [D10.] + +Problems Seen in Gas Tank Device +Several million cars to be sold this autumn will get a costly new pollution-control device that will make it harder to fill the gas tank at some service stations and may pose a safety risk. The new device is designed to capture the gasoline vapors that occupy a mostly empty gas tank and are usually pushed out into the air when the tank is refueled. [A15.] + +Talking It Up, on Line +The bigger the Internet gets, the more new discussion forums seem to pop up on the World Wide Web. Taking In the Sites. [D6.] + +LOAD-DATE: July 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Chart: "LAST WEEK" +Dow Industrials -- 7,890.46, down 31.36 +30-yr. Treasury yield -- 6.52%, Unchanged +The Dollar -- 115.57 yen, up 1.55 + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +380 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 21, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +NEWS SUMMARY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 2; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1595 words + + + +INTERNATIONAL A3-11 + +Cautious Relief in Ulster As Cease-Fire Takes Effect +The Irish Republican Army's new cease-fire has officially begun, bringing a cautious sense of relief to Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. The current effort to halt violence followed indications by the new British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, that he would make the pursuit of peace in Northern Ireland a priority. The previous I.R.A. cease-fire had lasted 17 months, ending in February 1996, and people know that a return to mayhem is always possible. A1 + +Warlord Ahead in Liberian Vote +Preliminary results from Liberia's presidential election on Saturday placed Charles Taylor, the warlord who started the civil war in Liberia in 1989, as the leader in the race. His party had 62.4 percent of the vote, while his nearest opponent, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, garnered 18.1 percent, according to reports given by 250 of 1,890 polling places. There was no immediate claim of victory by Mr. Taylor, nor were there any concessions of defeat from the other 12 candidates. A4 + +Vietnamese Cast Their Ballots +Vietnamese voted for national lawmakers in elections to choose all 450 members of the National Assembly. Although more than 80 percent of candidates represented the ruling Communist Party, voters could choose among workers, union representatives, educators and others who were nominated by state-backed organizations or ran as independents. No dramatic shifts were expected, but the vote was likely to start a swing toward a younger generation of Communist leaders . Ballots are being counted by hand, and results are expected to be announced in a week. A4 + +Malawi's Ex-Dictator Retires +Hastings Kamuzu Banda, who led Malawi to independence from Britain in 1964 and went on to establish a dictatorship that lasted 30 years, announced his retirement from politics. Mr. Banda, the self-styled "President for Life," said he was stepping down because of age and failing health. Now in his 90's, he has rarely appeared in public since he was ousted in 1994 elections, but he remained the symbolic head of the opposition Malawi Congress Party. His regime was accused of killing, detaining without trial, torturing and hounding into exile thousands of opponents. (AP) + +Europe Battles Flooding +As river levels in Central Europe continued to rise from torrential rains, rescue workers paddled up a road flooded by the Oder River along the Poland-Germany border. The authorities fear that dikes protecting the eastern German plain might not hold. Flooding has already caused the deaths of 50 people in Poland and 48 in the Czech Republic. A6 + +NATIONAL A12-15, B6-7 + +Elderly May Pay Less For Outpatient Care +The budget bill moving through Congress would impose new limits on what Medicare beneficiaries must pay for hospital outpatient services like cataract surgery, giving elderly people some financial relief. The bill would establish a fee schedule for such outpatient services, and a hospital would not be allowed to charge more than the fee. A1 + +Juvenile Courts Under Scrutiny +Judges and politicians are debating what was once unthinkable: abolishing the troubled juvenile justice system and trying most children as adults. The crisis began building a decade ago, when prosecutors responded to the growth in high-profile crime by youth by pushing for trials for more children. But the courts have become so choked that they are even less effective. A1 + +New Pollution Control in Cars +Several million cars will go on sale in the next few years with a costly new pollution-control device, required by the 1990 Clean Air Act, that will make it harder to fill the gas tank at some service stations and may pose a safety risk. The device is designed to capture the gasoline vapors that occupy a mostly empty gas tank and are usually pushed out into the air when the tank is refueled. A15 + +Many Tips but No Suspect +At least 1,500 calls about Andrew P. Cunanan, the suspect in the killing of the designer Gianni Versace, have poured into the tips line set up in Miami Beach. But Mr. Cunanan appears to be everywhere and nowhere. Callers have reported him in places as diverse as the bars of South Florida and an okra field in Arkansas. A12 + +Tax Cuts Still in Question +Negotiators from Congress and the Clinton Administration met to try to narrow their differences over how to allocate tax cuts, but both sides said they were making only slight progress. Administration officials said they had no intention of giving any ground, asserting that President Clinton had already moved substantially toward the Republicans. A14 + +Hurricane Winding Down +Hurricane Danny was finally downgraded to a tropical depression, after a weekend in which the storm seemed to single out Mobile Bay and nearby towns in Alabama. One death was attributed to the hurricane, but most people on the Alabama coastline say they got off easy. A12 + +NEW YORK/REGION B1-5 + +Seven Arrested in Case Of Smuggled Mexicans +Seven Mexican immigrants were arrested on charges of running a smuggling ring that sneaked scores of deaf Mexicans across the border, stashed them in safe houses in California, flew them to New York City and forced them, under threat of beatings, to work as trinket vendors in the subways. An eighth suspect, Reinaldo Paoletti, who is considered to be the ringleader, is still at large and the authorities are searching for him in the United States and Mexico. A1 + +A Roman Catholic priest who ministers to deaf people summoned his flock to an emergency meeting after Mass in Mexico City to warn of agents who seduce deaf Mexicans into traveling to the United States to labor as street vendors. "Be careful with those offering a better life elsewhere, and don't be misled by deceitful promises," said the Rev. Martin Montoya, holding local papers reporting on the rescue of 62 deaf Mexican immigrants from abusive employers. Passing the word through hand signs and lip-reading, thousands of deaf Mexicans shared the stunning story, which confirmed rumors of ill treatment. A1 + +The neighbors knew that a lot of deaf Mexicans lived in the fourth house from the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and 93d Street. They knew they worked long hours, selling trinkets in the subways. The immediate neighbors even heard the guttural screams, felt doors slamming and fists pounding the walls and saw shoeless women in night gowns running away from men. But they chose not to get involved, for reasons that were deeply rooted in cultural mores and a profound mistrust of the authorities. B5 + +Remaking Coney Island +A new proposal by the developer Bruce C. Ratner has added momentum to efforts to improve a long-neglected part of New York City: Coney Island, where the amusement area has shrunk to 3 three blocks in length from 20 and much of the land lies vacant. Mr. Ratner's proposal is to link a new multiplex theater and virtual-reality amusement park with an amateur sports facility that would be built with money from state bonds. Mr. Ratner would have to acquire the land from the city, which now owns it, and the plan must also pass environmental and zoning reviews. B1 + +ARTS C11-15 + +SPORTSMONDAY C1-10 + +Texan Wins British Open +Justin Leonard of Dallas overtook the leaders with a final round of 65 to become the third American in a row to win the British Open, at the Royal Troon course in Troon, Scotland. The 12-under-par total for Mr. Leonard, 25, was three shots better than the total for Jesper Parnevik of Sweden and Darren Clarke of Northern Ireland, who tied for second place. C1 + +BUSINESS DAY D1-11 + +I.M.F. to Lend to Philippines +The International Monetary Fund for the first time has used emergency procedures set up after the Mexican economic crisis two years ago to arrange a loan of $1 billion to the Philippines. It is an important test of new ways to cope with instability in world markets. A1 + +Pay for Failure on the Rise +When John R. Walter resigned under pressure last week after less than a year as president of AT&T, he walked away with nearly $26 million after the company's board said it was reneging on its promise to name him chief executive in January because he was not up to the job. As job security in the business world diminished in the 1980's, executives began demanding a guaranteed payoff if things did not work out. These days, getting ousted delivers a lump sum of cash and other benefits equivalent to several years of work. D1 + +Business Digest D1 + +OBITUARIES B9 + +Marvin J. Sonosky +The Washington lawyer who championed the cause of the American Indian throughout his long career was 88. Mr. Sonosky served as general counsel to Assiniboine, Sioux and Shoshone tribes in Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas, successfully litigating many of their land claims against the Federal Government. B9 + +Stuart Jewell +The cinematographer who pursued natural wonders from sunrise to sunset for half a century was 84. Mr. Jewell was a pioneer in the use of time-lapse photography, and he was best known for such work in Walt Disney's landmark nature movie, "The Living Desert." B9 + +EDITORIAL A16-17 + +Editorials: The I.R.A. cease-fire; keep cameras in the courtroom; Brent Staples on slavery. + +Columns: Thomas L. Friedman, Bob Herbert. + +Chronicle B4 + +Bridge C14 + +Crossword C12 + +Weather B10 + +LOAD-DATE: July 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos. + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +381 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 23, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +President Offers to Back Congress in Effort to Reduce Costs of Medicare Program + +BYLINE: By ALISON MITCHELL + +SECTION: Section A; Page 18; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1180 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 22 + +In a push to achieve long-range savings in the Medicare program, President Clinton today vowed to "defend the vote of any member of Congress, Democrat or Republican," who supported raising premiums for the affluent elderly. +Mr. Clinton spoke a day after Congressional budget negotiators reached an impasse in talks to rein in the cost of the Federal health insurance program for the elderly. House Republicans said they feared that adopting the proposed savings would make them vulnerable to Democratic attacks in next year's Congressional campaigns. + With frustrated Senate Republicans also complaining that the President had not done enough to reassure their House counterparts, Mr. Clinton today firmly supported the politically sensitive move to charge the affluent more for Medicare. +The Senate has proposed that premiums rise on a sliding scale for single beneficiaries with incomes of more than $50,000 a year and for couples with incomes of more than $75,000 a year. The proposal would affect about 8 percent of those now receiving Medicare benefits. +"My best judgment is that a big majority of the American people will support this," the President said. "They understand how big the baby boom retirement generation is. They understand how large the subsidy is on Medicare. And I would be happy to defend the vote of any member of Congress, Democrat or Republican, who votes for this." +But it was unclear whether Mr. Clinton's stance would provide new momentum for the proposal to tie premiums to income. +Mr. Clinton, responding to Republican complaints that premium increases would look like tax increases, also proposed that the Treasury Department, rather than the Internal Revenue Service, collect the payments for higher premiums from the affluent, who would make the checks out to the Medicare Trust Fund instead of the I.R.S. "We think that would ease a lot of the Republican -- and frankly, some of the Democratic -- concerns that it wouldn't look like a tax increase," he said. +Some Republicans guardedly welcomed the President's suggestion, while others were less receptive. +"I don't think he's got it yet, but I view that as a positive move," Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, said after a meeting on budget and taxes with House Republicans. +Representative Bill Archer, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, initially said Mr. Clinton's suggestion "may be a movement in the right direction," but he also said skeptically that "the only collection arm I know at Treasury is the I.R.S." +Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia said Mr. Clinton was "trying to be very positive." +Democrats remain divided over the issue, with moderate senators strongly endorsing it while more liberal Democrats, particularly in the House, oppose it. +The talks on Medicare are only one aspect of wide-ranging negotiations on tax and spending legislation as Congress and the President struggle to put in place a plan to balance the Federal budget by 2002. +An impasse over the question of charging the affluent elderly more for their health insurance would not imperil the budget talks as a whole. Most of the proposed $115 billion savings in the Medicare program are to be accomplished with reductions in payments to doctors, hospitals and health maintenance organizations. +But a coalition of Democrats and Republicans in the Senate has been fighting to charge high-income beneficiaries more for Medicare as a way to begin tackling long-term questions about the health program's solvency raised by the impending retirement of the baby boom generation. +The Senate went along with the coalition's plan last month. It voted to raise Medicare Part B premiums, which pay for doctor and outpatient services and are now $43.80 a month, on a sliding scale for single Medicare recipients with annual incomes of more than $50,000. Under the proposal, individuals with an income of more than $100,000 and couples with an income of more than $125,000 annually would have seen their monthly premiums quadruple. +But the House shied away from such a proposal in its own bill. House Republicans believe that they nearly lost their majority last November as a result of Democratic campaign charges that they had tried to make vast savings in Medicare to give tax cuts to the wealthy. +And Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the House minority leader, has been dead set against any effort to tie premium payments to income. His spokeswoman, Laura Nichols, said today that he had not altered his views. +But Michael D. McCurry, the White House spokesman, said Republicans should be comforted by Mr. Clinton's pledge to work to defuse the issue. "If the President says publicly that you made your vote, it was a good vote, it makes it a lot harder for a Democratic candidate, or a Republican candidate for that matter, to attack," he said. +And Senator Bob Kerrey, the Nebraska Democrat who proposed the premium income test approved by the Senate, said: "The President's comments were very constructive. The President has played a very important role. I see it as a basis for an agreement." +But many Republicans complained that House Democratic leaders and groups like labor unions and the elderly would continue to use the issue against them in 1998. "They did this on Medicare last time," said Representative John Linder, the Georgia Republican who is chairman of the National Republican Campaign Committee. "They'll do it again." +Indeed, the continued sensitivity on the issue was clear today in the technical dispute over how the Government would collect the extra premium money from affluent Medicare recipients. +The premium is now automatically deducted from Social Security checks, which is an easy task because everyone is charged the same monthly Part B premium regardless of income. +The Senate had assumed that the extra premium payments would be subtracted from Social Security checks, using data from the Internal Revenue Service sent to the Department of Health and Human Services, which would then calculate the extra premiums and inform Social Security of the amounts. But the White House said that would require a new and costly bureaucracy, and it proposed instead that the I.R.S. collect the extra money retroactively at the end of each tax year. +Republicans complained that this would resemble a tax increase. So Mr. Clinton today proposed that instead of filling out an I.R.S. form, Medicare recipients with higher incomes would calculate how much they owed the Government in additional premium payments each year on a "Medicare premium adjustment form." They would then mail checks to the Treasury Department instead of the I.R.S. and make them out to the Medicare program. +Some Republicans were quick to note that the Treasury Department is the parent body of the I.R.S. and said this would still resemble a tax increase because upper-income elderly people would be required to mail a separate form -- and payment -- with their tax returns to the Treasury by April 15. + + +LOAD-DATE: July 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +382 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 25, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Last Chance + +SECTION: Section C; Page 28; Column 5; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 466 words + + +Here is a sampling of shows and exhibitions in Manhattan that are to close soon: + +Closing This Weekend + + "CANDIDE," Gershwin Theater, 222 West 51st Street. A revival of Leonard Bernstein's musical satire; book by Hugh Wheeler; lyrics by Richard Wilbur, Stephen Sondheim and John La Touche; directed by Harold Prince. With Jim Dale, Andrea Martin, Harolyn Blackwell and Jason Danieley. Through Sunday. Performances: Today at 8 P.M.; tomorrow at 2 and 8 P.M.; Sunday at 3 P.M. Tickets: $20 to $70. Information: (212) 307-4100. + + "COLLECTED STORIES," Manhattan Theater Club, Stage I, at City Center, 131 West 55th Street. A drama by Donald Margulies about an aging writer and her protegee; directed by Lisa Peterson; Debra Messing and Maria Tucci co-star. Through Sunday. Performances: Today at 8 P.M.; tomorrow at 2:30 and 8 P.M.; Sunday at 2:30 P.M. Tickets: $45.Information: (212) 581-1212. + + "VICTOR/VICTORIA," Marquis Theater, 1535 Broadway, at 45th Street. A musical based on the 1982 film by Blake Edwards; music by Henry Mancini; lyrics by Leslie Bricusse; with Raquel Welch. Through Sunday. Performances: Today at 8 P.M.; tomorrow at 2 and 8 P.M.; Sunday at 3 P.M. Tickets: $65 and $75. Information: (212) 307-4100. + + "MY NIGHT WITH REG," New Group, at Intar, 420 West 42d Street, Clinton. A comedy by Kevin Elyot, set in London, about six gay men who juggle their romantic, sexual and personal lives in the era of AIDS; directed by Jack Hofsiss; with Maxwell Caulfield. Through tomorrow. Performances: Today at 8 P.M.; tomorrow at 4 and 8 P.M. Tickets: $25 and $30. Information: (212) 279-4200. + + MIDSUMMER NIGHT SWING, Lincoln Center, Fountain Plaza. Outdoor dancing to live and recorded music. Through tomorrow. Tonight and tomorrow at 8:15 P.M.; lessons begin at 6:30 P.M. Tickets: $9. Information: (212) 875-5766. + + "GODS, KINGS AND TIGERS," Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street. Paintings and decorative artworks, primarily from the royal house of Kotah. Through Sunday. Today and tomorrow, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M.; Sunday, noon to 5 P.M. Tickets: $3; $1 for students and the elderly. Information: (212) 517-6397 + +Closing Next Weekend + + "CARTIER: 1900-1939," Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82d Street. A survey with more than 200 examples of jewelry, timepieces and design drawings. Through Aug. 3. Tuesday through Thursdays and Sundays, 9:30 to 5:15 P.M.; Fridays and Saturdays, 9:30 A.M. to 9 P.M.; closed Monday. Admission: $8, contribution; $4 for children and the elderly. Information: (212) 879-5500. + + "ODC/SAN FRANCISCO," Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea. Through Aug. 2. Tuesday through Fridays, at 8 P.M.; Saturdays at 2 and 8 P.M. Tickets: $28. Information: (212) 242-0800. + +LOAD-DATE: July 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Schedule + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +383 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 25, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Critic's Choice/Film; +Old but Ageless, by Truffaut + +BYLINE: By JANET MASLIN + +SECTION: Section C; Page 10; Column 5; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 294 words + +To beat the heat of this summer's blockbusters, nothing looks cooler than the French New Wave. Now, in the wake of the hit reissue of Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt," Francois Truffaut's marvelous 1973 "Day for Night" will also make a welcome return engagement. "Day for Night" inaugurates a new regime at the Paris Theater, at 58th Street and Fifth Avenue, under the management of Jeffrey Jacobs, the longtime film buyer and programmer at the Angelika Film Center. The Paris is once again the most civilized moviegoing oasis in midtown. +Truffaut's droll and generous celebration of filmmaking remains an enchanting experience, transporting its audience into the artful deceptions of the movie world. In a film that still seems as startlingly current as the more brooding "Contempt" and that has lost none of its mature, rueful wisdom, Truffaut wittily celebrates his love of filmmaking with the help of a splendid cast. + With Jean-Pierre Leaud at his wiliest as a hilariously lovelorn actor and cineaste, Jacqueline Bisset as a coolly mysterious beauty, Valentina Cortese as that unforgettably mixed-up diva with a drinking problem and Jean-Pierre Aumont as her debonair ex-lover, "Day for Night" has a wistful acuity to match its comic fizz. Time has turned the muted performance of Truffaut (who died in 1984) into this story's most memorable, and a reminder of how much his elegant touch is missed. Playing a beleaguered director, Truffaut is seen gratefully receiving a care package of books on filmmaking giants. "Day for Night" affirms his own place in that pantheon. +The Paris Theater, 4 West 58th Street, Manhattan, reopens today with "Day for Night." Admission: $8.50; $5 for the elderly and children under 12. Box office: (212) 688-3800. + +LOAD-DATE: July 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Jacqueline Bisset and Francois Truffaut in "Day for Night." (Warner Brothers) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +384 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 25, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +The Mayor Is Rebuffed On Welfare + +BYLINE: By JAMES BARRON + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 6; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 777 words + +In a setback for the Giuliani administration, a judge in Manhattan yesterday upheld the constitutionality of the Federal welfare law that cuts off benefits for legal immigrants who are not citizens. +While acknowledging that the measure, which ends food stamps and disability payments for resident aliens, would pose hardships, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of United States District Court for the Southern District of New York said it was up to Congress to make such decisions. + The Giuliani administration had argued that the measure was unconstitutional because it would deprive legal immigrants -- who had paid taxes and, in some cases, even served in the military -- of benefits available to citizens. City officials have also expressed concern that the cutoff of Federal benefits will increase costs to the city. +Judge Kaplan did rule in the city's favor on a small but related issue, saying the Government could not withhold accrued benefits for about 10,000 elderly and disabled aliens residing legally in New York, Connecticut and Vermont. Those noncitizens applied for aid before President Clinton signed the welfare law in August but have not received any checks. +Under the welfare law, Federal benefits to millions of recipients were to end this August. But the cutoff has been delayed until October, and the budget bill now moving through Congress is likely to restore the benefits. Nonetheless, Paul A. Crotty, the city's Corporation Counsel, said the city would appeal Judge Kaplan's decision. +"The bottom line is, they will be left penniless by this decision," said Scott A. Rosenberg, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society. "We hope that Congress sees that making elderly and/or disabled people penniless is not only foolish public policy, but also life threatening. I would hope Congress would look at this and say, 'That is not what we intended.' " +Judge Kaplan's 53-page ruling focused on Section 402 of the welfare law, which disqualifies legal aliens from receiving Federal Supplemental Security benefits and food stamps. Judge Kaplan called those persons "guests in our nation" who had "succumbed to poverty, age and disability." +The city and a coalition of nonprofit legal groups had sought to preserve benefits for about 100,000 elderly and disabled legal immigrants in the city and the two states. They stand to lose their Supplemental Security Income benefits, the city argued, and could become "destitute and homeless" unless the city pays for their care. +"The impact of this legislation" on resident aliens, Judge Kaplan acknowledged, "will be severe." He noted that the 1997 Federal welfare benefit was $484 a month, with supplements from New York State bringing the total to $570 -- "still a figure far below the current poverty level of $657.50 per month," he wrote. +Because noncitizens might be eligible for some benefits under city-run home relief or Aid to Dependent Children programs, Judge Kaplan said, "the financial burden that will be shifted to the city is substantial." +But the judge said that the Social Security Administration was wrong to deny benefits that accrued to legal resident aliens who applied for them before the President signed the welfare bill. +Mr. Crotty estimated that that element of the judge's ruling covered about 10,000 noncitizen aliens in New York City and the two states. And the director of the nonprofit New York Legal Assistance Group, one of the organizations that was joined by the Giuliani administration in the series of lawsuits that led to Judge Kaplan's ruling, said that they could look forward to retroactive checks, though if the benefits are indeed stopped nationwide, they will receive no further payments. +"From the poor people's standpoint, this is an important first step in overturning the mistake that Congress made in August of '96," when it passed the welfare bill, said the director, Yisroel Schulman. "The court is clearly sending a message that there are parts of this where Congress needs to rethink its logic." +One of the issues in the fight over the budget bill is whether immigrants who are in the United States legally and become disabled in the future could qualify for Supplemental Security Income benefits. President Clinton wants such a safety net; the Senate bill would provide it, but House Republicans rejected that idea earlier in the week. +In the case before Judge Kaplan, the city had argued that cutting off benefits to legal resident aliens was not what Congress intended, unless doing so encouraged self-sufficiency among immigrants and discouraged foreigners from entering the country in search of cash benefits. + + +LOAD-DATE: July 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +385 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 26, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Flake May Leave the Congress For an Expanded Church Role + +BYLINE: By JONATHAN P. HICKS + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 25; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 825 words + +Representative Floyd H. Flake, an 11-year incumbent who also leads a sprawling congregation in Queens, said yesterday that he was considering retiring from Congress at the end of his current term to devote more attention to the church he has been pastor of for 21 years. +While Mr. Flake, a 52-year-old Democrat, said in an interview that he planned to make a decision within the next two weeks, several people who are close to him said that he had decided not to seek a seventh term in Congress, and that he would announce his decicion to his congregation next week. + Rumors of Mr. Flake's deliberations have traveled in political circles in Queens for several months as some thought that the Congressman might seek the position of bishop in the Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church in Jamaica, Queens. And although he declined to seek that post, that has not stopped several Democratic politicians from discussing a possible run for his seat in the 1998 Congressional elections. +The name mentioned most prominently by Queens Democrats is Gregory W. Meeks, 43, a state assemblyman with close ties to Mr. Flake who is also the chairman of the state Council of Black Elected Democrats. Another is State Assemblywoman Barbara M. Clark, 58, who has been in office since 1987 and has already begun discussing fund-raising strategies, several political officials said. Also, State Senator Alton R. Waldon Jr., 60, is said to be interested in the seat. +Archie Spigner, one of the City Council's most senior members, is also mentioned as a possible contender. Mr. Spigner yesterday described the idea of a Congressional race as "a rather stimulating concept," but declined to discuss the matter further. Mr. Meeks and Mr. Waldon were traveling yesterday and could not be reached, their staff members said. Ms. Clark did not respond to telephone messages. +Mr. Flake said he was considering leaving Congress because his duties to the Allen A.M.E. Church will expand with the opening of a $23 million, 2,500-seat cathedral. "I have a certain standard in terms of attending to my Congressional and church responsibilities," Mr. Flake said. "And I'm not certain I could really keep pace." +A Democrat who has leveraged his political power with Republicans to gain economic clout for his church in southeast Queens, Mr. Flake has developed a formidable social-service and economic empire at Allen A.M.E. that many suggest far outpaces the one established a generation earlier by Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in Harlem. +Under the pastorship of Mr. Flake, who was once a Xerox Corporation market analyst, Allen A.M.E. has established an elementary school for about 500 students, a 300-unit senior citizens complex, a bus chartering corporation and a community center that operates a health clinic and a Head Start program. The church's development corporation has also purchased commercial storefronts. +Mr. Flake said that he did not wish to discuss any potential successor. "The seat is not vacant and, God knows, it may not be," he said. The Sixth Congressional District includes most of southeastern Queens, and includes the neighborhoods of Jamaica, St. Albans, Cambria Heights, Laurelton and South Ozone Park. It also includes the western portion of the Rockaway peninsula. +The new Allen Cathedral, which will have its first worship services on Sunday, will be the second-largest predominantly African-American church in New York City, after the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn. +Mr. Flake is known as an independent Democrat. He has decided not to join with the Queens Democratic organization, which has endorsed the mayoral candidacy of Ruth W. Messinger, the Manhattan Borough President. Mr. Flake said yesterday that he would not make a mayoral endorsement this year. "I feel favorably disposed to the positive things that have happened to New York in the last three years," he said, adding that his words should not be construed as an endorsement of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. "But if the economy is up and crime is down, it's difficult to fight against the things you have fought for all of your life." +Mr. Flake has sometimes run into difficulties during his stewardship. In 1990, after a former church secretary's testimony to a grand jury in Brooklyn accused Mr. Flake of financial improprieties, Federal prosecutors charged the Congressman and his wife, Margarett Elaine, with not reporting $177,578 in income from the church and dodging Federal income taxes. The following year, three weeks into the trial, prosecutors, their approach derailed by an early ruling by the judge, dropped the charges against the Flakes. +But later in 1991, the Justice Department brought a civil suit against Mr. Flake, accusing him of improperly using Federal housing funds to build a portion of the church school. In a settlement in 1994, Mr. Flake and his church agreed to repay the $500,000 with interest but admitted no wrongdoing. + +LOAD-DATE: July 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Representative Floyd H. Flake, at pulpit of Allen A.M.E. Church. (William Lopez/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +386 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 27, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +If You're Thinking of Living In/East Meadow, L.I.; +Where Rarely Is Heard the 'Nimby' Word + +BYLINE: By VIVIEN KELLERMAN + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 3; Column 2; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1532 words + +RESIDENTS of East Meadow work hard for their community. Among their accomplishments have been the forming of a volunteer civilian patrol to keep crime at bay, the turning of an ordinary sump into a bird sanctuary and aid for two families whose children were killed in a bus crash. +Some years ago, when it became apparent that there was not enough housing for elderly people with limited incomes, local groups help create almost 1,000 units. + "We never say, 'Not in our backyard,' " said Norma Gonsalves, president of the Council of East Meadow Community Organizations, a coalition of 34 local groups. +Indeed, with a Nassau County park, jail, medical facility and children's shelter, plus Federal military housing all on East Meadow soil and all draining much needed tax money from the local school district, residents could justifiably throw up their hands and say, "No more." +Instead, Ms. Gonsalves said, East Meadow residents take pride in their community's low crime rate, abundant shopping as well as accessibility to major parkways and a school district that keeps its tax rate down while providing excellent education. +"We don't look at what we don't have," Ms. Gonsalves said. "We focus instead on what we do have. And what we have is a community that cares." +Raymond McCloat, Superintendent of the East Meadow School District, said it had controlled spending by keeping administrative costs to a minimum. "We have to keep the per-pupil expenditure down in order to allow us to continue our programs," he said. +Among those programs are courses in advanced science research, pre-engineering, advanced computer language and law, the latter beginning in grade nine and ending with an internship in a legal office or government-related community service in the high school. A program for the gifted and talented begins in grade three and continues with honors programs in middle and high school. +And to address the needs of the students at risk of falling behind, next year the district will introduce an intensive reading program for them. +With an enrollment of 7,800, East Meadow is the largest public school district in Nassua County. It serves all of East Meadow and small parts of both Westbury and Levittown. +It has five elementary schools for kindergarten through fifth grade, two middle schools and one high school, which in 1996 sent 86 percent of its graduates on to higher education. +At its peak in 1968, the district had 18,000 students. In the next two decades, enrollment declined, but it is rising once again. Since 1992, 500 students have been added to the district, with 700 more anticipated in the next five years. +Although over the years the district has closed three of its buildings and now leases one to the Board of Cooperative Educational Services, Dr. McCloat said he did not anticipate a problem. "There'll be a few bumps along the way," he said. "But we won't need to do major work." +A WIDE variety of housing is available for newcomers with children as well as others. Richard Krug, manager of Coldwell Banker Sammis Realty in East Meadow, said that prices for single-family homes ranged from $130,000 to more than $300,000 for newer custom homes or those extensively renovated. +With little land left to develop, there are not too many newer homes. Most were built in the 50's and 60's. Barnum Woods is one of the most desirable areas. Prices there begin around $160,000 and go up to about $300,000. +Rental apartments in East Meadow are scarce, with only 90 units in two buildings. Two-bedroom apartments rent for $750 a month, and three-bedroom units rent for $1,200. +Meadowlanes Estates is an 87-unit, two- and three-bedroom town-house co-op. Prices for a two-bedroom go for about $140,000 while three-bedroom units sell for $180,000. There are also two condominiums with a total of 93 units. Prices range from $70,000 for a studio to $160,000 for a three-bedroom duplex with a basement and a garage. +Most of the rental and co-op apartments, nearly 1,000 units, have been reserved for those at least 62 years old. There are two co-op complexes for this age group, with a total of 678 units, with 102 more to be added at the Knolls on Salisbury Drive later this year. +Maximum income guidelines for these units is $40,000 for a couple and $25,000 for a single. There are also 100 rental units subsidized by the Town of Hempstead. Maximum income levels for these apartments are $26,600 for a couple and $23,300 for a single. +An indication of the strength of the real estate market in East Meadow, Mr. Krug said, is that the average length of time a house stays on the market has declined to 90 days this year from 103 days in 1996. +"Interest rates are good and there seems to be a good feeling about the economy," Mr. Krug said. "While there are a lot of houses on the market, they are also selling." +After deciding to move out of their Queens Village home, Dr. Harold Claude and his wife, Rose, spent nine months looking for a house on Long Island. A friend recommended East Meadow and the couple, with their three children, -- Harold Jr., 10, Larissa, 5, and Caroline, 3 -- searched the area. Last September the family moved into three-bedroom modified ranch across the street from a park. +Dr. Claude, a pulmonary specialist, works in Manhattan, about a one-hour drive away. Mrs. Claude, 42, is a student in respiratory therapy at Malloy College in Rockville Centre, about a 15-minute drive away. +In addition to good schools, Mrs. Claude said the family liked East Meadow because it offered good shopping and neighborhoods safe for children. +For recreation for both children and adults, the community offers Senator Speno Memorial Park and Veterans Memorial Park, with ballfields, playgrounds and a giant pool, available to families for $140 a season. It is also the site of Nassau County's 930-acre Eisenhower Park, which is open year-round. +Among that park's offerings are three 18-hole golf courses and several athletic fields for team sports like baseball, softball, football, soccer, rugby, lacrosse, field hockey and cricket. Some fields are illuminated for night play. There are also 16 tennis courts, three playgrounds, a lake and a special activities center for the elderly. A 50-meter pool is under construction and is expected to be opened in 1998. +The Harry Chapin Lakeside Theater offers free outdoor summer entertainment. Among the performances scheduled for this summer are ethnic music programs celebrating the music of Italy, Africa, Poland and Hispanic countries, and of American Indians. +Anyone over 13 years of age is required to have a Nassau County Leisure Pass for entry into many recreational facilities. The pass costs $7 a year and can be obtained at many county parks. +SHOPPING in East Meadow is spread out essentially along a seven-mile stretch of Hempstead Turnpike and one mile along East Meadow Avenue. The stores are varied and offer a full array of services. There are at least a dozen restaurants, several supermarkets and larger chain stores. +In 1655, Thomas Langdon reported to the Hempstead Town Meeting that he had surveyed the East Meadow and found it suitable for grazing and watering cattle. He advised that efforts be made to exterminate the wild beasts that preyed on domestic animals and that cowherds be hired to care for the cattle. This was accomplished by 1658, and for the next 200 years, East Meadow, part of the Hempstead Plains, was essentially used as grazing land for cattle and sheep. +Around 1850, a number of large estates and farms began to spring up in East Meadow, continuing until about 1915. The largest of these was the 2,500-acre farm of Sarah Ann and Peter Crosby Barnum. +The early 1920's saw the first real building boom in East Meadow, with real estate organizations bringing in busloads of city dwellers for all-day picnics to promote their properties. +Once development began, there was no holding it back. On April 18, 1955, a record was set when three new 20-room elementary schools were opened simultaneously to 1,450 children -- while painters and electricians continued to work around them. +The Hempstead Town Supervisor, Gregory Peterson, moved into East Meadow in 1950, when he was 5. He remembers new developments springing up among forests and farms. "We used to ride our bikes to the woods," he said. +Except for a one-month stint in an apartment in Hempstead Village, Mr. Peterson has never left East Meadow. In 1971, after marrying Linda Karanfilian, a schoolteacher, the 31-year old assistant district attorney decided to try his hand at politics, and after taking "every nickel we had from the wedding and all our savings," they bought a house "in the same neighborhood where I used to deliver newspapers when I was a kid," Mr. Peterson said. +The couple have lived there ever since, raising three daughters, who all went through the same school system as their father. Mr. Peterson's parents live a block away, while his brother and sister-in-law also live nearby. +"I have really grown to appreciate East Meadow in my adult years," Mr. Peterson said. "It's like a fine wine. It gets a little better all the time." + +LOAD-DATE: July 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Homes in Barnum Woods, above, one of East Meadow's most desirable areas. Giant pool in Veterans Park. Family seasonal fee is $140. (Photographs by Eddie Hausner for The New York Times); On the Market: 3-bedroom, 1-bath ranch, fireplace, updated kitchen at 2630 Cypress Avenue, $139,000. 4-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath split-level ranch, 2-car garage, c/a at 126 Bellmore Road, $242,500. 4-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath split-level ranch, fish pond, c/a at 105 Melanie Drive, $325,000. + +Chart: "GAZETTEER" + +POPULATION: 35,090 (1996 Lilco estimate). + +AREA: 6.3 square miles. + +MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME: $69,659 (1996 census update). + +MEDIAN PRICE OF A ONE-FAMILY HOUSE: $170,000. + +TAXES ON MEDIAN HOUSE: $5,303. + +MEDIAN PRICE A YEAR AGO: $167,500. + +MEDIAN PRICE 5 YEARS AGO: $150,000. + +MEDIAN RENT OF A 2-BEDROOM APARTMENT: $750. + +MEDIAN PRICE OF A 2-BEDROOM CONDOMINIUM: $130,000. + +MEDIAN PRICE OF A 3-BEDROOM CO-OP: $160,000. + +PUBLIC-SCHOOL SPENDING PER PUPIL: $10,334. + +DISTANCE FROM MIDTOWN MANHATTAN: 25 miles. + +RUSH-HOUR COMMUTATION TO MIDTOWN: Ten minutes to Westbury or Merrick, then 43 minutes by Long Island Rail Road, $7 one-way, $154 monthly. + +GOVERNMENT: Hempstead Town Supervisor (Gregory R. Peterson, Republican) elected to 2-year term and 6 at-large Council member elected to 4-year terms. + +CODES: Area, 516: ZIP, 11554. + +PRIDE DAY: On June 15, about 3,000 East Meadow residents showed up in Speno Memorial Park for the seventh annual Pride Day for three hours of free games, pony rides, food and soft drinks provided and donated by local merchants, residents and business people. There were demonstrations by Boy Scouts, and children planted flowers at the edge of the park spelling out "Pride Day." The event began in 1991, at the height of the recession, when people were losing their jobs, the housing market was declining and when, said Norma Gonsalves, the president of the Council of East Meadow Community Organizations, residents of the community needed something to lift their spirits. + +Map showing the location of East Meadow, L.I. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +387 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 27, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Retirement and the Adjustments in a Couple's Life + +BYLINE: By JULIE MILLER + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 1; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1131 words + +LOVE one another and seize the day -- that was the advice offered by the writer John Updike in an article in New Choices, a magazine directed toward older people. +Couples who take Mr. Updike's words to heart seem to savor retirement, having weathered the initial adjustment to being constantly together. For some, in fact, the transition from work to retirement seems to take place almost effortlessly. + Helen and Roland Johnson of Preston, for example, who have been married for 67 years, breezed into retirement. Mrs. Johnson, now 88, had several different careers and was a grandmother when she graduated from Connecticut College with a major in Far Eastern history. Mr. Johnson, 95, traveled frequently as sales engineer for a manufacturing company. "He was used to my being independent," Mrs. Johnson said. "I always had a mind of my own. He appreciated that." +Mr. Johnson smiles at his wife as though he were discovering her for the first time. "I love her," he said to a visitor at the couple's home. "I wouldn't know what to do with myself without her. She's a darling." +The two were involved in so many interests during their early retirement that they never had a chance to get on each other's nerves, Mrs. Johnson said. They traveled to South America, Asia, India and the Soviet Union. Now, she is busy writing her memoirs while her husband tends his garden. One of the reasons their marriage has lasted so long is that they don't tell each other everything, Mrs. Johnson explained. "We try not to hurt each other." +Shortly before their 50th anniversary, they attended a wedding, Mrs. Johnson recalled. The minister told the bride and groom that they should never keep things from each other. Later, she said, her husband asked her, "Can you imagine being married 50 years if we told each other everything?" +But according to the experts, it generally takes time and thought to fashion a post-retirement life style that fits the needs of both spouses. +After being distracted for years by work and child rearing, many couples suddenly find themselves adrift in a sea of free time. How successful they are at handling their new situation depends on how skillful they are at taking inventory of their lives and talking through their expectations, said Anne Sharpe, the owner of Geriatric Consulting Service in Norwich. +The relationship has to be renegotiated, added Emily Williams, clinical director of Family Service in New London. "You're pushed to deal with your relationship more than you did when one person was at work full-time," she explained. "You're in each other's presence much more, like it or not. All the good stuff and not so good stuff is going to surface." +Personal space and freedom become important. A woman who has been a homemaker may resent having to share her territory. A man may wonder where his wife is when she is gone during the day. Both people need to adjust. +After they retired nine years ago from Electric Boat Corporation in Groton, Otto and Alice Welper of Norwich, who are in their early 70's, created a schedule that allows periods away from each other as well as plenty of time for doing things together. On the same days each week, Mr. Welper works at a part-time job, and Mrs. Welper serves as a volunteer for various organizations. +"The first three or four years, I was pretty busy doing things around the house," Mr. Welper said, "and we did a lot of traveling. Then I decided I needed something to keep me busy. I got a job delivering flowers three days a week." +The Welpers seldom travel or socialize separately. But when a discussion between them becomes heated, they get away from each other for a while. "Otto and I sail over times like that," Mrs. Welper said. "Keep love alive. That's the best thing." +Men and women handle retirement differently. An especially bitter blow for men is the loss of human connections that often accompanies retirement from a job, according to Allen J. Sheinman, a senior editor for New Choices. For women in the current retirement generation, who rarely took the same fast-track career paths as men, a whole range of social contacts that are not dependent on work exists, Mr. Sheinman noted. They have more invested in family, friends and outside interests, all of which serve them well in retirement. +Louise and David Thompson of Norwich, who are in their 60's, both missed the companionship of their co-workers when they retired at the same time five years ago. They learned new things about each other as they filled the void in different ways. Mrs. Thompson worked in a store for a while and now does volunteer work. Her husband gardens, spends time in his workshop and is active in several sportsmen's clubs. +"Whatever you do, make sure you have days to yourself," Mrs. Thompson said. "One thing we found is that we're individuals." +When Mr. Thompson first retired, he said, he felt he should be getting up in the morning and looking for a job. "It took six months to get over that feeling," he said. "One of the things I missed most was the companionship of the fellows I worked with. We were like a family." +Mr. Thompson said men should be prepared with ways to fill the days when the house is quiet and the phone doesn't ring. "You'd better have a hobby," he advised. "Plan ahead and have a place to occupy yourself." +Couples should be flexible, Ms. Williams said, especially since one spouse may have to take over some duties when the other becomes ill. Her husband, who retired recently, helps with household chores and errands while she continues working. "It makes a huge difference," she said. "He is a support to me, so that when we have free time, we have it together. People with rigid roles have more difficulty." +Florence and Eugene Frank of Norwich are among a small number of couples involved in volunteer work together; many more women than men volunteer. The Franks, who enjoy the theater, attend local productions free of charge by volunteering to be ushers. They have also taken courses, in everything from religion to astronomy, at the University of Connecticut and Three Rivers Community-Technical College in Norwich. +The Franks, who retired within six months of each other, said they don't miss work. Mrs. Frank was eager to leave a stressful job with the state Department of Labor. Her husband worked at Electric Boat, where jobs were being cut. "I had seniority," Mr. Frank said. "It wasn't any fun knowing the people I worked with for 30 years would have to be let go. I thought if I left I might save somebody else's job." +Since she left her job, Mrs. Frank said, minor upsets don't bother her the way they used to. She and her husband enjoy each other's sense of humor. "It's important if you can laugh together," she said. + +LOAD-DATE: July 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Helen and Roland Johnson of Preston, about to celebrate their 68th anniversary, make it a rule not to tell each other everything. (Susan Harris for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +388 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 27, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +INVESTIGATORS SAY A MEDICARE OPTION IS RIFE WITH FRAUD + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1092 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 26 + +Federal investigators say they have found widespread fraud, overcharges and substandard care in the medical services provided to frail homebound elderly people under Medicare. +The General Accounting Office, an auditing arm of Congress, said that almost any business could be certified as a home health agency, with little or no experience, and that hardly any were expelled from the booming, highly profitable field. The amount of Federal money available for inspections and enforcements has lagged far behind the demand for home health care services, which are immensely popular with Medicare beneficiaries. + More than 3.8 million of the 38 million Medicare beneficiaries receive services from 10,000 home health care agencies at a cost to the Federal Government of $19 billion a year. The total number of home health visits financed by Medicare doubled from 1992 to 1996, reaching 280 million last year. +Home health agencies can be initially certified for payment under Medicare even if they are not complying with Federal health and safety standards, the auditors said. +Moreover, "home health agencies repeatedly cited for serious deficiencies are rarely terminated or otherwise penalized," said Leslie G. Aronovitz, an associate director of the General Accounting Office. +In testimony prepared for a hearing of the Senate Special Committee on Aging on Monday, Ms. Aronovitz said that home care agencies cited for violations of Federal standards could avoid expulsion from Medicare merely by submitting "corrective action plans" to Federal or state authorities. In many cases, she said, Medicare inspectors do not revisit the agencies to verify that they actually correct the violations. +Thus, she said, the Government "certifies nearly all home health agencies seeking certification," and "the threat of termination has little, if any, deterrent value." Such terminations, she said, have been "exceptionally rare -- about 0.3 percent of all certified home health agencies in 1996." +Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is chairman of the Committee on Aging, said, "The fraudulent providers are giving the whole home care industry a black eye." Mr. Grassley has led efforts to curtail such abuse. +Val J. Halamandaris, president of the National Association for Home Care, which represents 6,000 home health agencies, agreed with the criticism of how agencies are inspected. +"Everybody and nobody is responsible," Mr. Halamandaris said. "The Federal Government says, 'We're trusting the states.' The states are supposed to do it. But they say they don't have the money to do it." +The General Accounting Office said Medicare officials reviewed few claims to check whether patients were eligible, needed home care or even received the services billed to Medicare. The Government reviewed 60 percent of claims filed 10 years ago, but only 2 percent of those filed last year. The money for such reviews has lagged far behind the increase in the number of claims. +In a separate report, June Gibbs Brown, Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs Medicare, estimated that more than one-third of Medicare payments to home health care agencies in some states were improper or unjustified. Payments were classified as improper if medical records did not show a need for the services provided, if the services were never provided, if they were not covered by Medicare, if the provider's staff members were not licensed or if doctors' signatures were forged. +Details of the reports to be issued on Monday were provided by officials eager to focus attention on the investigation of abuses. +Certification represents Medicare's seal of approval on the services provided by a home health agency. As a condition of receiving Federal money, the agencies are supposed to comply with Federal standards for patients' rights, the training and supervision of home aides, medical records, physical therapy and other services. +In 1987, Congress authorized Medicare officials to impose fines and other penalties short of terminating all payments to an agency. But Ms. Aronovitz said Medicare officials had not developed or imposed such penalties. +In an intensive review of 44 agencies in California, Ms. Aronovitz said, Federal auditors found that nearly three-fourths failed to comply with at least one Federal standard. Most violations were not detected in the "standard survey," which assesses compliance with only half the Federal standards, she said. +"It is simply too easy" for agencies to be certified for Medicare, Ms. Aronovitz said. Federal law does not require the owners to have experience providing health care. +In one case, Ms. Aronovitz said, "an individual with no experience in health care started a Texas home health agency in the pantry of her husband's restaurant." Inspectors found that the company had hired home health aides on the condition that they first recruit patients. The agency was suspected of providing unnecessary services and was cited for violating Federal standards. +The General Accounting Office also made these points: +*The Government certifies about 100 new agencies a month. "Initial certifications frequently occur when agencies have been serving as few as one patient for less than one month." Inspectors "may never see any patients" served by the agencies they certify. +*"Branch offices of home health agencies frequently escape any evaluation." The number of branches has grown fourfold in four years, to 5,500, and some are extremely large. But Medicare inspectors rarely review their operations or visit their patients to assess the care. +*"While many home health agencies are drawn to the Medicare program with the intent of providing quality care, some are drawn because of the relative ease with which they can become certified and participate in this lucrative, growing industry." +A major reason for the increased use of Medicare's home health benefits is that the Government liberalized the rules in 1989 to cover more frequent visits. +Mr. Halamandaris of the home care association said there had been "a collision of values" between older companies and new ones drawn to the business by "the notion of making huge profits." +Ms. Brown, the Inspector General, said proprietary for-profit agencies were quite likely to bill Medicare for more visits and more services than nonprofit agencies did. But, she said, the data did not suggest that the patients who received more frequent visits were sicker than those who received fewer visits. + +LOAD-DATE: July 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "Snapshot: Home Health Care Takes Off" +Home health care under Medicare has grown rapidly in the past several years. It now serves 10 percent of all beneficiaries with an average of nearly 80 visits each. Graph tracks the increases in home care visits, people served, and Medicare payments, from 1984 through 1996. (Sources: Prospective Payment Assesment Commission; Department of Health and Human Services)(pg. 14) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +389 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 27, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Both Sides Say Accord Is Near On the Budget + +BYLINE: By JERRY GRAY + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1015 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 26 + +With each side speaking encouragingly of progress, White House and Republican negotiators today made a significant push toward an agreement on tax cuts and a balanced budget. +"It's coming together," said an official involved in the budget discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity. + He said the talks had progressed far beyond the rhetoric of the last few days, to the point that Congressional aides had started writing draft legislation on certain issues. +The discussions ended about 6:30 this evening after a full day, and officials said Republican and Democratic staff members would meet on Sunday to work on what they said were small issues. There were no plans for the principals to meet on Sunday. +The Clinton Administration views the negotiations on the tax cut side as a no-lose proposition. [Page 14.] +On Medicare, which is the biggest issue in the budget bill, Administration officials and Congressional leaders said the three most contentious proposals appeared to be off the table, at least temporarily. +Those proposals, approved last month by the Senate, would increase Medicare premiums for the affluent elderly, raise the eligibility age (to 67 from 65) and charge $5 a visit for home health care services. +Senators of both parties have said all three proposals are needed to help keep Medicare solvent for the baby boom generation. And President Clinton said this week that he would support a means test requiring higher premiums for beneficiaries with higher incomes. +But House members of both parties and lobbyists for the elderly have resisted the three proposals, saying they should be referred to an advisory panel that will study Medicare's long-term financial problems. +Gene Sperling, President Clinton's economic policy adviser, said late this afternoon, "A lot of issues have been narrowed on the spending side. But things will not get done tonight." +Senior leaders spent the day shuttling between a series of large meetings and smaller ones -- some on spending, others on tax cuts and still others involving just Republicans and Democrats huddling among themselves to discuss the most recent offers or counteroffers. +Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and Erskine B. Bowles, the White House chief of staff, led the Administration's negotiating team, while the Republican side was anchored by Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senator Trent Lott, the majority leader, backed by the chairmen of their budget and tax-writing committees. +"There really are very few items that have to be resolved," Representative Bill Archer, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, told reporters about midday. "If a couple of major items get resolved on the tax bill, the rest of it will all fall in place rapidly." +The tax question has become the linchpin in the talks and the problem in resolving it is as much philosophical as it is fiscal. A central sticking point is whether working families with incomes of $25,000 a year or less will get any benefits from the proposed tax credits for children. +The Republicans argue that many such families pay little or no income tax, so giving them the child tax credits would be a form of welfare. But Democrats counter that those same people have payroll tax deductions and need relief much more than higher income families. +A shrinking circle of negotiators was among the subtle signs today that the sides were moving toward agreement. +For example, it appeared that Mr. Archer, who has been among the most adamant Republicans in insisting on cuts in capital gains taxes and corporate taxes, might have to fight to protect his role in the final negotiating rounds. Mr. Archer's committee is responsible for all tax legislation in the House and for considerable parts of the spending deal because of its authority over Medicare. +Although he was involved when the talks resumed this morning, Mr. Archer said he did not think he would continue to be involved in the portion of the talks dealing with spending. +Asked by reporters whether he would continue to participate in the tax portion of the talks, Mr. Archer said, "We'll see." +In recent days, each side has spoken optimistically of progress in the negotiations, which are focused on cutting taxes, limiting the growth of Government and balancing the Federal budget by 2002. +"We're close to an agreement with the White House that would accomplish all those goals," Mr. Lott said today in the Republican radio address. "But you know the old saying: 'Close, but no cigar.' Any celebration at this point would definitely be premature." +At an appearance on Friday before the National Association of Elementary School Principals in Arlington, Va., President Clinton said: "I think we're going to get this agreement." +The pace of the negotiations is being driven by an effort to have both the budget and tax legislation completed before Congress leaves on Friday for its summer break. +But Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate have argued against making that a deadline. +"There is no artificial deadline," "If it takes until September to do it right, let it be September," Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader, said on Friday. +The two sides also resumed negotiations today on other vexing issues: welfare, estate taxes, education tax incentives, tobacco taxes and medical savings accounts. +They settled a major issue, disability benefits for legal immigrants, on Friday. +The Republicans agreed to restore disability benefits to legal immigrants who were in the country last August, when the new welfare bill was signed into law. +The Republicans also agreed to continue Medicaid coverage for tens of thousands of children who face losing it, along with disability benefits, under the new welfare law. +Entwined in the rosy talk about progress were some political barbs. +Mr. Lott complained in his radio address: "I have worked with six Administrations, both Democrats and Republicans. This one, let me tell you, is unique. Its public assertions are often fanciful; its private data are often contrived." + +LOAD-DATE: July 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Senator Pete V. Domenici, chairman of the Budget Committee, center, spoke with Dick Armey, the House majority leader, in the Speaker's office. Significant progress was reported in yesterday's budget talks. (Erik Freeland/Matrix, for The New York Times)(pg. 1) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +390 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 27, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +July 20-26; +Hey! Speaking of Charging For Health Care . . . + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 2; Column 4; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 150 words + +Old people had good reason to follow last week's budget negotiations on Capitol Hill. +First negotiators agreed to changes in Medicare that would offer relief to elderly people who, in recent years, have had to pay a growing share of their bills for hospital outpatient services like cataract surgery and diagnostic tests. + Then President Clinton said forcefully that he would support an increase in Medicare premiums for Medicare beneficiaries with incomes above $50,000 a year. The Senate had approved the higher premiums as part of the budget bill, and senators of both parties were pressing House leaders to accept them despite objections by lobbyists for the elderly. +Changes to Medicare, the health insurance program for 38 million people who are elderly or disabled, accounts for most of the savings in the budget bill -- and many of the biggest issues in dispute. ROBERT PEAR + +LOAD-DATE: July 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +391 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 27, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +FROM THE DESK OF; +A Senior Discount? I Don't Deserve It + +BYLINE: By TED M. LEVINE; Ted M. Levine, age 60-plus, is the founder and chairman of Development Counsellors International in Manhattan. The firm helps cities, states and countries attract business and tourism. + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 12; Column 4; Money and Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 756 words + +A FEW years ago I began getting expensive gifts from people I didn't know. +A generous benefactor paid half the price of my movie theater tickets; I received discounts at hotels and motels around the country, and prestigious universities offered to teach me fascinating courses for free, or almost so. Earlier this year I purchased a round-trip ticket to Charleston, S.C., from New York City at a price 50 percent lower than the going rate. + In recent years, the trickle of gifts has grown to a flood of largess that I figure may be worth tens of thousands of dollars to me. +What did I do to deserve all this? Basically, I didn't die. +To be more precise, I lived long enough to qualify for a cornucopia of senior subsidies. Actually, I only had to make it to age 50. So baby boomers, now that you're starting to reach that milestone, take note: There is a 294-page directory especially for you and me titled "Unbelievably Good Deals and Great Adventures That You Absolutely Can't Get Unless You're Over 50" (Contemporary Books). The book details senior discounts offered by hotels, motels, airlines and even universities. You'll also find resorts where you can ski for half price. +"Deals" also explains why I am entitled to these things: "You deserve them, having successfully negotiated your way through life's white waters." +Well, call me a grizzled grinch but I don't buy it. I have to say that the trend toward giving goodies to golden-agers is insulting, and terrible public policy. +Some decades ago, it was different. The over-60 crowd was among America's poorest citizens. But now Social Security, pensions, financial planning and parsimony are changing that. Consider these statistics: +* In 1970, almost one-fourth of all Americans aged 65 and over were living below the poverty line, the Census showed. By 1995, that figure had plunged to 10.5 percent. +* The net worth of older Americans is pulling farther ahead of the net worth of younger people in some of their prime years of earning power. The latest figures from a survey issued every three years by the Federal Reserve showed that in 1995, the average net worth of Americans aged 65 to 74 was $331,600, compared with $308,300 in 1992. The net worth of those aged 35 to 44, meanwhile, remained virtually unchanged, at just over $144,000. +No, seniors don't need cheap movie seats or even free vacations. But I'd go a step further: Many of us don't even want them. +We not only know we own more, spend more, travel more and vote more than any other age group, but we're also proud of it. And being crudely seduced into the market with half-price off-peak train tickets or nominally discounted rental cars tends to stick in some of our collective craws. +Having grown up reading "Self-Reliance," by Ralph Waldo Emerson, I wonder what we have done to deserve all this commercial generosity. Somehow, not dying doesn't seem a sufficient justification. +Ah, but I hear a voice explaining that while carloads of senior loot may not be good public policy, it is good commercial policy. Companies are, it is argued, making billions of extra dollars by luring the over-the-hill gang to buy, buy, buy what they might not without the discount incentive. +That argument may have been true at one time, but it isn't now and it certainly won't be in the future. +The 65-plus contingent is the fastest-growing age category. Lester Thurow, the economist, has called this group the "revolutionary class" and has cited numbers to show its increasing weight: The group represented only 4 percent of the American population in 1900. Today, it's 13 percent, and by 2025, it is expected to be a stunning 20 percent. In that year, there will be an estimated 75 million people aged 65 and over. And we can expect that, having been a group of relatively high-income earners, they will remain among the richest in retirement. +IT is brainless to offer so many discounts to so many relatively wealthy people. Like other subsidies, these gifts will turn around and bite the first commercial subsidizers. Subsidies may be O.K. when offered to a few people, but anyone who starts subsidizing a large group will ultimately have to charge everyone else more. In the end, the under-65 consumer -- that is, a lot of you -- will be penalized. +Now let's get back to me. Don't I enjoy a little thrill in paying half the price of the folks on line at my local movie theater? +The answer is yes. But I'd get an even bigger thrill from letting everyone know I was paying my own way. + +LOAD-DATE: July 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +392 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 28, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final +(New Jersey) + +NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFING; +Pharmacy System Restored + +BYLINE: By NOAM COHEN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 187 words + +DATELINE: TRENTON + +A computer system that reimburses New Jersey pharmacists for prescription sales was back on line late Saturday after it was shut down for the third time this month, The Associated Press reported. +Technicians from the Unisys Corporation, in Bluebell, Pa., which maintains the system, have not yet identified the cause of the 12-hour shutdown, said Laurie Facciarossa, a spokeswoman for the State Department of Human Services. + Officials said they believe the breakdown over the weekend could be related to earlier difficulties, including problems with an electrical transformer that knocked out service for six days earlier this month. +About 2,000 pharmacists use the system, which provides information about Medicaid and Pharmacy Assistance programs for the elderly and disabled. It verifies medical prescriptions, checks for potentially harmful drug interactions and handles billing. +With the breakdown in the computer system, pharmacists had to check eligibility through the beneficiary's identification card or by calling a toll-free phone number that provides the latest information, Ms. Facciarossa said. + +LOAD-DATE: July 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +393 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 29, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +A Money Trap Leaves 'Irish Houdini' No Escape + +BYLINE: By JAMES F. CLARITY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 4; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 900 words + +DATELINE: DUBLIN, July 28 + +To the millions of Irish men and women who made him Prime Minister three times, Charles J. Haughey was The Boss, an intelligent and benevolent ruler with a tight smile for his friends, a steely blue-eyed glance for his enemies. +He gave old people free passes on the trains, exempted creative writers from taxes and straightened out the country's muddled finances. It did not matter if he seemed to live well above the income he earned in 30 years in public office. + To his enemies, he was cunning, conniving, imperious, a closet supporter of the Irish Republican Army. Privately, they said, his way of life -- a large mansion north of Dublin, a private island off the west coast, race horses, a seagoing yacht -- was evidence that he had become a multimillionaire by using his office for personal gain. +Mr. Haughey (pronounced HAW-hee) denied charges that he had accepted about $2 million from a department store chief executive. It came as a national shock, therefore, when he admitted recently that he had indeed taken the money. Now the political fallout from that admission could cause problems for his party. +His detractors, with chagrin, called him the Irish Houdini. But Mr. Haughey, 71 and retired since 1992, found himself in a trap with no way out when he agreed with the accuracy of evidence produced by a special tribunal looking into his financial ties to Ben Dunne, head of Dunnes, the country's largest department store chain. +Among Mr. Haughey's enemies were many of the country's most prominent journalists, but the evidence was not dug up by reporters. It surfaced in court papers involving the Dunne family's successful attempt to oust Ben Dunne. +Although his old friends have been virtually silent about Mr. Haughey's admission, it produced unrestrained gloating among his enemies, since the scandal is expected to affect national politics and the future of Fianna Fail, the party that took control of the Government in a national election last month. +The new Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern, a former protege and ally of Mr. Haughey, said the admission was "tragic and deplorable." He is under pressure to set up a new investigation of his former boss once the current tribunal issues its final report on accusations that Dunnes gave $5 million to members of Parliament. +The tribunal ended its hearings last week, and its head, Justice Brian McCracken, is expected to issue a report in September. He has the option of referring information to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. +A new investigation, focusing on other money Mr. Haughey may have accepted from private businessmen, would probably embarrass his party in the presidential election in November. Voters, analysts say, could express their anger at Fianna Fail by choosing a candidate of the second-largest party, Fine Gael. +In the days after Mr. Haughey's admission, during which he said that he did not consider his way of living lavish and that he did no favors for the money, Ireland re-examined his career and tried to determine what his fall meant. +In a sense, the scandal was a coming of age in a country that has had to satisfy its appetite for skulduggery by devouring reports of political malfeasance from Britain and the United States. +Many Irish people, none of them elected officials, still supported The Boss, especially in highly popular call-in radio programs. Frankie, a caller to the national radio show "Liveline," said: "They've been trying to get him for years, and now they're enjoying every minute of it. He's done more for the country than any of them in there now." +The begrudgers, as the Irish often call each other, got what they wanted when Mr. Haughey testified for two hours before the tribunal in Dublin Castle, the ancient seat of British colonial power where, as Prime Minister, he had regularly entertained world leaders at state receptions in the 1980's and early 1990's. +By then he had made a remarkable political comeback after his career was halted in 1970 when he was tried on charges of conspiracy to send arms illegally to Roman Catholics involved in the sectarian violence in the North. He was acquitted after his lawyers argued that while arms trafficking was illegal, it was at the time the policy of Ireland to help Catholics in the North. Within 10 years he was back in Government as a minister. +Referring to his earlier denial that he had taken Dunnes money, Mr. Haughey, an accountant by profession, said that a friend handled all of his financial affairs and that he did not pay attention to the details. +He also said, "I apologize to you, Mr. Chairman, the tribunal team and to all concerned, but wish to emphasize that this serious lapse in the management of my personal affairs did not in any way affect the discharge of my public duty when in office." +Under questioning by a tribunal counsel, he said: "I didn't have a lavish life style. My work was my life style, and when I was in office I worked every day. There was no room for any sort of an extravagant life style. I'd just like to make that point." +But he offered no explanation of how he accumulated wealth, nor was he questioned on this. Opposition politicians are pressing for a new inquiry to dig into how the Dunnes money paid to Mr. Haughey wound up in an account that transferred some $50 million from a bank in the Cayman Islands to one in Dublin. + +LOAD-DATE: July 29, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Charles Haughey, the former Prime Minister of Ireland, is in hot water over a $2 million gift. He had been accused of living beyond his official means in a mansion near Dublin. In 1995, he held a tea party at the house. (Eamonn Farrell/Photocall) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +394 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 29, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Closest to Their Hearts + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 939 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 28 + +President Clinton got his way on many of the big disputes over Federal spending, while Congressional Republicans prevailed on the tax issues about which they care most deeply. +That appears to be the secret of the success announced tonight by budget and tax negotiators from the White House and Capitol Hill. + Mr. Clinton got large amounts of money for children's health insurance, welfare and other domestic programs. +Republicans got a $500-a-child tax credit, the heart of their 1994 Contract With America, while making concessions to the White House to guarantee that families with lower incomes would share the benefits of such credits. +Republicans got a deeper cut in capital gains taxes than they expected. They got a bigger cut in estate taxes than Mr. Clinton wanted to give them. And they won new authority for elderly people to establish "medical savings accounts" instead of the standard Medicare program. +Many elements of the deal, most notably the commitment to a balanced budget by 2002, were conceived and initially pushed by the Republicans. But the ultimate articulation of those ideas owes much to the pressure applied by White House negotiators, who pushed Republicans to the left. +Since the framework for a budget agreement was announced on May 2, Franklin D. Raines, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, and Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin inundated Congress with letters commenting critically on every detail of the Republicans' budget and tax bills. +White House officials said they were surprised at some of their victories in the negotiations. And they had good reason to be surprised. +In his February budget, Mr. Clinton requested $15 billion over the next five years to provide health insurance for children and jobless workers. Congressional leaders agreed today to provide $24 billion, as the Senate wanted, rather than $16 billion, as the House proposed. +The new money represents the biggest new Federal investment in children's health care since the creation of Medicaid in 1965. +On two tax issues, Mr. Clinton prevailed. He persuaded the Republicans to provide more than $35 billion in tax credits and other tax breaks for college students over the next five years. +The Republicans also were persuaded to accept a big increase in cigarette taxes to help finance children's health insurance. The increase is less than Mr. Clinton wanted, but far more than political insiders had predicted in March, when Senators Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, and Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, began their crusade for a new children's health program. +When Mr. Clinton announced on July 31, 1996, that he would sign the Republicans' welfare bill, reversing six decades of social welfare policy, few expected him to succeed in restoring disability benefits to legal immigrants. From that day until April of this year, the President's efforts seemed to have little chance of success; Republicans said they would not do anything to reopen or undermine the 1996 law. +But in the last few days, Republicans bowed to the White House and agreed to restore benefits to a larger group of legal immigrants than the President or Congress had proposed. The compromise restores benefits to noncitizens who were receiving Supplemental Security Income last August, and to those who were here then and become disabled later. +The cost of restoring these benefits, estimated at $11.4 billion over five years, is nearly half of all the savings that was to have been achieved by restricting benefits for immigrants under the 1996 law. +Mr. Clinton also persuaded the Republicans to continue Medicaid coverage for children who lose disability benefits under the 1996 welfare law. Without such dispensation, many children would have lost Medicaid along with their disability benefits. +The measure of Mr. Clinton's success can be gauged from comments by two observers at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Senator Kennedy, a liberal Democrat, said the budget deal was "a landmark achievement for children's health." Robert Rector, a senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the bill's provisions on welfare represented "a decisive liberal victory." +Mr. Rector said "the Republicans appear to have capitulated on almost every welfare issue," including Mr. Clinton's demand that local governments pay the minimum wage to welfare recipients in community service and workfare programs. +Republicans and Democrats forged a consensus on Medicare, the Federal health insurance program for 38 million people who are elderly or disabled. They agreed to cut payments to hospitals and other health care providers, and they approved some financial legerdemain to keep Medicare's Hospital Insurance Trust Fund solvent for six years beyond its projected bankruptcy in 2001. +The budget deal incorporates many of the changes in Medicare proposed by Republicans in the Balanced Budget Act of 1995, which Mr. Clinton vetoed. For example, it will create new health insurance options for the elderly, opening the Medicare market to numerous managed care plans. But under pressure from Mr. Clinton, the Republicans dropped several proposals that would have imposed substantial new costs on Medicare beneficiaries. +Over strenuous objections by Mr. Clinton, House and Senate negotiators decided to let 390,000 Medicare recipients establish medical savings accounts. The President says such accounts will appeal mainly to elderly people who are healthy and wealthy. But Republicans say the accounts will make elderly people cost-conscious buyers of health care. + +LOAD-DATE: July 29, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: News Analysis + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +395 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 30, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +THE BUDGET DEAL: Details of Some Provisions Covering Children, Health, and Welfare -- MEDICARE; +New Options Include Shift Into Preventive Benefits, and Slightly Higher Costs + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 17; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 687 words + +The budget agreement would make vast changes in Medicare, offering new health insurance options to the elderly, broadening coverage of preventive services and creating strong new financial incentives for managed care companies to serve people in rural areas. +Beneficiaries would pay slightly higher costs, but not nearly as much as they would have been required to pay under the budget bill that President Clinton vetoed in December 1995. + The new budget bill would establish seven new Medicare benefits to cover the costs of preventive health care services, including mammography, Pap smears and screening for colon cancer, prostate cancer and osteoporosis. +The budget bill would also pay for training and education to help people with diabetes care for themselves, as Speaker Newt Gingrich proposed. +These preventive benefits represent a major new emphasis for Medicare. +The budget agreement would increase payments to health maintenance organizations caring for Medicare beneficiaries in rural areas, where the payments have been too low to attract many H.M.O.'s. +Elderly people have been clamoring for such health plans because health maintenance organizations often cover prescription drugs, eyeglasses, hearing aids, basic dental care and other items not covered by the standard Medicare program. +The budget agreement would slow the growth of Medicare payments to H.M.O.'s in high-cost areas like New York City, Miami and Los Angeles. But the basic payment to health plans in these high-cost areas would still grow at least 2 percent a year, lawmakers said. +Other new options for Medicare beneficiaries would include "medical savings accounts" and private health plans owned and operated by doctors and hospitals, rather than by insurance companies. +This year's bill differs from the one vetoed in 1995 in several respects. It would not establish an overall limit on Medicare spending, for example. +Nor would it provide the beneficiary with a fixed amount of Federal money in the form of a voucher. And it would not automatically cut payments to doctors and hospitals if the cost of Medicare's conventional fee-for-service program exceeded goals set by Congress. +Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said: "Much of what was in the 1995 bill is also in this new bill, in a moderate form. The cuts in Medicare have been scaled back." +But he added, "You don't need such Draconian cuts" to keep Medicare solvent now because inflation and the growth of Medicare have slowed. +This year's Medicare package was developed with bipartisan cooperation; the 1995 proposals were written entirely by Republicans. +Still, Representative Pete Stark of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, said yesterday that he could not support the final version of the Medicare changes. +"Much of this Medicare bill seeks to promote managed care and to encourage the great mass of beneficiaries to join managed care plans, while letting the richest doctors and patients in our society avoid the inconveniences of managed care," Mr. Stark said. +In their final agreement, the budget negotiators killed proposals made by the Senate to increase Medicare premiums for higher-income beneficiaries, to raise the eligibility age for Medicare and to impose a new charge of $5 a visit for home health care services. +But the bill would create a 17-member Federal advisory commission to suggest how Medicare can avoid a financial crisis when baby boomers become eligible for the program after 2010. +Horace B. Deets, executive director of the American Association of Retired Persons, said the Medicare package unveiled this week was "a victory for all Americans and takes Medicare into the 21st century." +But Senator Phil Gramm, Republican of Texas, said: "I am profoundly disappointed that we have failed to reform Medicare. What passes for reform in this budget deal is taking the fastest-growing part of Medicare -- home health care -- out of the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund and financing it with general tax revenues." ROBERT PEAR + +LOAD-DATE: July 30, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Illustration + +Chart: "MEDICARE" +The proposal would provide $4 billion over five years for preventive health care services, a new emphasis for Medicare, including: + +Mammograms +Pap smears +Screening for colon cancer, prostate cancer and osteoporosis +Education for diabetics on self-testing and preventive treatment + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +396 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 30, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +THE BUDGET DEAL: THE OVERVIEW; +Clinton and G.O.P. Cheer Plan to Balance Budget + +BYLINE: By ALISON MITCHELL + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1294 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 29 + +President Clinton and the Republican leaders of Congress jubilantly -- but separately -- celebrated today their long-sought agreement on a plan to balance the Federal budget after decades of deficit spending and to provide the first Federal tax cut in 16 years. +"We have put America's fiscal house in order again," an ebullient President Clinton proclaimed on the south lawn of the White House where he was surrounded by about 100 Democrats from the House and Senate. Grinning and giving the Democrats a thumbs-up sign, he called the deal "an historic agreement that will benefit generations of Americans." + In their own news conference on the steps of the Capitol, Republicans called the agreement the culmination of their quest to reduce the size and power of the Federal Government. They posed with children as red, white and blue balloons floated from the banisters. +"Today we celebrate the beginning of a new era of freedom," said Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader. He said the five-year plan would "lead us to less Washington spending, to tax relief for working Americans, to security for our senior citizens and less dependency on the Government." +In fact, the compromise legislation negotiated after two and a half years of often bitter partisan fighting, had signature elements dear to each political party and the separate appearances today allowed each party to put its own political cast on the agreement. +The $94 billion in net tax cuts in the agreement would benefit students and families with children, but would also provide large cuts in the capital gains and inheritance taxes. +The deal also would establish a new $24 billion health care coverage program for as many as five million uninsured children, financed partly through a tobacco tax increase. And the legislation would restore disability benefits for legal immigrants and some money to help welfare recipients find jobs -- two elements that were eliminated last year in a welfare law. +Republican leaders planned to bring the agreement, broken into two separate bills, to the floor immediately in order to pass it by Friday, when Congress is scheduled to leave for a summer recess. +While Representative Richard A. Gephardt, the minority leader was noticeably absent from Mr. Clinton's side and had openly expressed some dissatisfaction with the outcome, the agreement was expected to win majority votes from each party with some liberal Democrats as the most prominent dissenters. +If the booming economy continues to perform as expected, the agreement would insure that the Federal budget deficit would be erased by 2002. It would be the first time since 1969 that the Federal Government would have a balanced budget, leading Mr. Clinton to call the agreement "historic" several times. +Spending over that five-year period would be reduced by about $140 billion under the agreement, with most of the savings coming from the Medicare program of Federal health insurance for the elderly. +While the agreement grants the first Federal tax reduction since 1981, the tax cut package amounts to about three-tenths of 1 percent of the economy. In economic terms, that is far less significant than the tax reduction that Ronald Reagan pushed through Congress at the beginning of his first term. +Though it is a fiscal milestone, the deal is also a political watershed, muddying the sharp distinctions that had existed between the two parties for decades on the issues of taxes and spending. +For Mr. Clinton, the deal was the finale of an ideological journey he began when the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994. +In 1995, he made the Republican call for a balanced budget his own. Now he has made good on the middle-class tax cut he proposed in 1992, but not until after he pushed through a tax increase in 1993, to tackle the deficit. +Along the way, he eventually wrenched most of his party along with him. +No less a liberal than Representative Charles B. Rangel of Manhattan, stood by the President's side today, saying, "So we have now shattered the myth that we, as Democrats, are spending Democrats and taxing Democrats, because we have come forward in support of the President's package." +For the Republicans, the agreement could be said to make good on the fiscal principles of their 1994 campaign manifesto the "Contract with America." They propelled the drive for a balanced budget and originated the call for a $500-per-child tax credit. +"Balancing the budget and cutting taxes are Republican ideas -- make no mistake about that," said Senator William V. Roth, the Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. +The agreement also bolsters the position of embattled House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was the first to take the microphone at the Republican news conference to call the pact "a great victory for all Americans." +The tone today was striking in contrast with the acrimony between the parties in 1995, which led to partisan veto fights, a television ad campaign and two Government shutdowns that came back to haunt the Republicans. +But the parties were forced to work together when voters in 1996 sent a mixed message, re-electing a Democratic President and a Republican Congress. +The task of balancing the budget was also made easier than expected by the prosperous economy and the resulting decline in the deficit. Even without the budget agreement, the deficit was expected to fall to $50 billion this year, from the peak of $290 billion in 1992. +Despite widespread talk of bipartisanship today, it was clear from the fact that Democrats and Republicans held separate news conferences that each side was already preparing to try to use the bipartisan agreement to advantage in the 1998 midterm elections. +The Democrats chose to showcase education programs today, ranging from the $35 billion in tax relief for college tuition costs to increases in spending for scholarship grants and literacy programs. "At the heart of this balanced budget," said Mr. Clinton, "is the historic investment in education -- the most significant education funding in more than 30 years." +The President, who tried and failed in 1994 to push through comprehensive health care coverage for all Americans, also highlighted the plan to extend health insurance coverage to as many as five million children. +"We want every child in America to grow up healthy and strong and this investment takes a major step toward that goal," Mr. Clinton said. +The Republicans by contrast put much of the emphasis on the tax cuts. +"We believe that those who work hard and follow the laws," said Senator Pete Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, "ought to pay less taxes and ought to keep more of their money because they can make better decisions than we can." +Mr. Gingrich said the tax reductions would help families "because we believe that parents are more important than bureaucrats in raising children." +Democratic Presidential politics were in the air as well. Mr. Clinton turned the microphone over to Vice President Al Gore, who sounded like he was trying out a campaign theme for 2000. "We are eliminating the deficit, while investing more in our future, and cutting taxes for the middle class," Mr. Gore said. "Promises made, promises kept." +Mr. Gephardt, who is expected to challenge Mr. Gore for the Democratic presidential nomination from the left, opposed the agreement because of its program cuts and tax cuts. +"I had hoped that we could have provided the tax relief to the middle-class working families that Democrats and Republicans alike had promised them," he said. +"Instead, only a quarter of the tax relief goes to people making less than $100,000 a year," Mr. Gephardt said. + +LOAD-DATE: July 30, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Celebrating the budget compromise, from left: Speaker Newt Gingrich, Representative John R. Kasich and Senator Pete V. Domenici, chairmen of the House and Senate Budget Committees, and Senator Trent Lott. (Associated Press)(pg. 1); House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia helped lead Republican representatives and senators on the steps of the Capitol yesterday in a celebration of the proposed balanced-budget agreement with the White House. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times)(pg. A15); Democratic members of Congress, on the South Lawn of the White House, responded yesterday to the President's comments on the budget. (Paul Hosefros/The New York Times)(pg. 15) + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +397 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 30, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +BUSINESS DIGEST + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 574 words + + +Stocks Set Records, With the Dow Up 53 +Stocks reached new highs, buoyed by economic reports that pointed toward low inflation and moderate growth. The Dow industrials surged 53.42 points, to 8,174.53. +Financial companies, American Express in particular, and companies that tend to prosper when the economy is doing well, like Caterpillar, were the catalysts. [Page D8.] + +The signs of tame inflation, reported in the Government's Employment Cost Index, helped the bond market continue its rally, with the yield on the 30-year Treasury bond falling to 6.38 percent from 6.40. [D6.] + +Confidence in the economy fell unexpectedly this month but remained close enough to a 28-year high to suggest that spending might accelerate, a survey showed. [D2.] + +Clinton and G.O.P. Hail Plan +"We have put America's fiscal house in order again," President Clinton proclaimed of the agreement to balance the Federal budget and to provide the first Federal tax cut in 16 years. Republicans called the agreement the culmination of their quest to reduce the Government. [A1.] + +Child care credits are the most expensive part of the package. Other items include cuts in capital gains taxes; relief for college students; new rules for I.R.A.'s to make millions more Americans eligible; new Medicare benefits and health insurance options for the elderly; higher airline ticket taxes; lower estate taxes, and an increase in the cigarette tax. [A16.] + +Change Looms in Airtouch Deal +Airtouch Communications' $5 billion purchase of U S West Media Group's United States wireless business will have to be restructured because Congress would not change the date that an adverse provision of the new tax bill takes effect. [D4.] + +Pension Fund to Be Taxed +T.I.A.A.-C.R.E.F., the retirement system that serves many of the nation's college professors and administrators, has lost its battle to retain its tax-exempt status. [D4.] + +Mercury Cougar Gets Another Life +Ford Motor announced plans today to rejuvenate its tired Mercury division by reviving Mercury's oldest nameplate, the Mercury Cougar. [D6.] + +McDonald's Picks DDB Needham +McDonald's, which has been troubled by sluggish sales, selected the Chicago office of DDB Needham Worldwide as its lead domestic advertising agency, relegating Leo Burnett, which has held that role for 16 years, to secondary status. The blow is yet another in a series of big account losses for Burnett. Advertising. [D7.] + +Japanese Brokerage Firm Raided +Prosecutors raided the offices of the Yamaichi Securities Company, the latest large Japanese brokerage firm to be suspected of making illegal payoffs to a racketeer. [D2.] + +Disk Maker in Microsoft Deal +Shares in the disk maker Nimbus CD International rose 14 percent after the company announced that it had signed a contract to become an authorized maker of digital disks for Microsoft. [D2.] + +Bear Stearns Profit Is Flat +Bear Stearns said its quarterly earnings were almost unchanged, though they were well above analysts' expectations. [D4.] + +Opposition for Tobacco Deal +David A. Kessler, the former F.D.A. Commissioner, and C. Everett Koop, the former Surgeon General, urged Congress to reject the $368.5 billion legal settlement with the tobacco industry. [B7.] + +The use of ammonia in cigarettes can dramatically increase the level of nicotine available to smokers, a study found. [B7.] + +LOAD-DATE: July 30, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Chart: "YESTERDAY" +Dow Industrials -- 8,174.53, up 53.42 +30-yr. Treasury yield -- 6.38%, down 0.02 +The Dollar -- 118.43 yen, up 0.83 + +Graph: "TODAY" + +New Home Sales + June figures due at 10 A.M. Eastern. + Expected: -0.6% + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +398 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +July 31, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +SENIOR CLASS; +When Older Women Get H.I.V. + +BYLINE: By ROBERT W. STOCK + +SECTION: Section C; Page 1; Column 1; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 1704 words + +"WHEN I was tested at the health center, the young doctor went into shock," the tiny stylish Manhattan woman said. "I heard him tell someone, 'Oh, no! Not her!' That's how I found out I was H.I.V.' " +She was 67 at the time; she is 73 now, and she has kept her secret from friends and family all that time. She will not allow the use of her name, first or last, and she agreed to an interview only because it could alert other older women to a danger they might never have imagined. + Because the efficiency of the immune system declines with age, older people, men as well as women, may be more susceptible to the AIDS virus. And older women may be especially vulnerable because of the thinning of the vaginal wall that accompanies aging and their frequent failure to use condoms. +About 2,500 cases of AIDS among women 60 and over have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control, and the number of new cases has been growing year by year, from 102 in 1986 to 305 last year. Blood transfusions accounted for most AIDS cases among women in that age group a decade ago; now, heterosexual contact leads to 69 percent of them. +"The C.D.C. statistics don't begin to reflect the real numbers among older women," said Marcia G. Ory, a research director with the National Institute on Aging. "Doctors don't expect to see the disease in this group, so they often don't. The women seldom think of having a test for H.I.V. So many of them are not diagnosed or misdiagnosed and are never properly treated. They die and no one ever knows the real reason why." +Nine years ago, distressed by her husband's drinking and verbal abuse, the patient from Manhattan attended a church event and caught the eye of a man in his late 40's. "I had a brief sexual interlude," she said, "three or four times." When she heard that her former lover had died after several hospital stays, she said, "I just knew he was too strong and healthy for that." Her suspicions led her to take the AIDS test. +Over the last decade, there have been several reports of older women who had contracted AIDS from husbands infected by prostitutes, but scientists now believe that female-to-male transmission is relatively rare. Generally, the men have been intravenous drug users or have had male lovers. The Manhattan woman said she had no idea how her former lover had contracted the disease. +So far, her medications have kept her feeling strong -- she walks several miles a day -- and that has helped in hiding her condition from friends and family (her husband died a year before her diagnosis). +"Nobody knows or needs to know as long as I can keep going," she said. "I don't want to put it on people who love me. I don't want the type of comfort they'd give. I'm looking to God." +When she first became infected, she had little or no understanding of the disease. "I was afraid to go on a vacation trip with friends because I thought I might infect them, washing at the same sink," she said. Many older people who shy away from seeking medical advice have all but totally isolated themselves from any human contact for that reason. The Manhattan woman, however, had joined a therapy group for older women who are AIDS patients at Mount Sinai Medical Center -- and the other members convinced her to take the trip. +When the women first come into the therapy group, they talk about their shame and their guilt said Mary Ann Malone, a social worker who leads the sessions. "For example, they worry about the reactions of their grown-up children, who looked up to them as role models. They talk about their symptoms, because you know every new thing makes them wonder if the AIDS is gaining on them. If they forget where they left their keys, they become afraid it's the start of dementia." +"What you have to remember," she said, "is that these are people who were already experiencing the physical and emotional losses of aging. The AIDS losses come on top of that." +At meetings, when the subject of death comes up, however, the members do not talk much about it. "For them, it's a given," Ms. Malone said. +At the North Shore Community Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., dozens of women 60 and over have been treated at the AIDS clinic in the last few years. Twenty of the 170 women now under treatment are elderly. +"We draw on Long Island and Queens, particularly," said Carol Garrett, a psychiatric social worker who has led a therapy group for older AIDS patients there. "The husbands commute, and it's easier for them to have a secret, bisexual life style in Manhattan." +In the case of one 66-year-old patient, who also refused to reveal her first or last name, her husband of 40 years told her he was going to the gym when he arrived home late once a week. That had been going on for 10 years when he became ill; pneumonia was diagnosed and he was hospitalized. He was soon found to have full-blown AIDS. She had it, too. +"I was brought up in a strict home," she said. "I'd only known one mate, and he was a loving, caring person and a good father. This upsetting news was more than I could cope with. It was an immediate death sentence. The group therapy restored my sanity." +In the beginning, she said, she was terrified of dying. "Then I realized there were the medications, and I became more hopeful," she continued. Still, she misses having a partner in her life. "There's that void now," she added, "but I plan to stay away from having another relationship. I'm distrustful, and also, I don't want to do any more damage to my body." +She has told her immediate family but no friends. She finds it difficult enough to mention it to those she must, including doctors and dentists she has known for years. "One of them was very rude about it," she said, and she got the impression she was no longer welcome as a patient. +The members of the therapy group range in age from the 20's to the 60's. "The younger women have outside peer groups they can talk to about sex and divorce and dying," Ms. Garrett said. "They're used to doing that. They're used to talking about sexual encounters. The older ones have nothing like that. They are desperately ashamed that this has happened to them, and they have a hard time even asking questions about it. They don't know the words to use." +"Most of these older women live alone," she said, "and this disease is something they feel they have to keep to themselves and deal with pretty much all on their own." +Another member of the group, a 69-year-old woman who was told she had H.I.V. nine years ago, explained why she does not tell her friends of 40 years about her infection: "I hear the remarks they make about other people, and I don't want to take a chance." +She was tested for AIDS after her husband was told he had the disease. +She said she had "no idea" how he became infected. Her children have been very supportive, she added, but still her life has changed in many ways. +"If I kiss my grandchildren anywhere," she said, "it is on the top of the head." +Older people, men as well as women, may be more vulnerable to the AIDS virus said Dr. William H. Adler, a professor of geriatrics at Johns Hopkins Medical Center and the former chief of clinical immunology at the National Institute on Aging. "We know that the immune-system change diminishes their ability to handle bacteria and viruses," he said, "though we have no specific data as to AIDS." +Moreover, once older people become infected with H.I.V., they tend to deteriorate more rapidly because of the combined effects of other ailments that often come with age. Even the medicines they take to treat those other ailments take their toll, making it more difficult for physicians to find the right AIDS treatment because of potentially dangerous drug interactions. +"We expected the older people to die faster, and they do," said Dr. Amy C. Justice, an AIDS researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. +Older women have extra strikes against them, Dr. Justice said. The thinning of the vaginal walls and lessened lubrication after menopause increase the likelihood of abrasions, which can open the way to infection. +Because physicians do not expect older women to have AIDS, they are less likely to make an early diagnosis. Symptoms of AIDS, like dementia and pneumonia, mimic those of age-related diseases. Alzheimer's is a common misdiagnosis. +"Early intervention allows time for medical, social and psychological preparation before the real onset of the disease," Dr. Justice said. "Those things are especially important for older women who are widowed or divorced and live alone. They often don't get the chance." +Dr. Marcia Epstein, an infectious-disease specialist who cares for many of the women at the AIDS clinic at North Shore Community Hospital, also emphasized the importance of early diagnosis. "We've had considerable success with older women and advanced medications, including protease inhibitors," she said, "but it's harder to arrest the disease in someone with a more advanced case, partly because they have trouble tolerating these more potent cocktails." +Dr. Epstein says she thinks that more physicians are beginning to test women in their 60's for AIDS -- women who are running fevers or have what seems to be chronic fatigue and might not have been tested a few years ago. +"Older women really have a hard time," Dr. Epstein said. One patient told her that she would sometimes get into her car, roll up the windows, turn on the radio as loud as she could -- and scream. "She was just so overwhelmed, and she couldn't share it with anybody." +Researchers like Ms. Ory of the National Institute on Aging have called for a campaign to bring the risk of AIDS home to older women through programs at senior centers and advertisements that recognize that AIDS is no respecter of age. +The 66-year-old woman in group therapy at North Shore University Hospital would include some other categories besides age. "AIDS doesn't just happen to male homosexuals as some people think," she said. "It doesn't just happen to uneducated people. It doesn't just happen to people who use drugs or people who are single. I used to think, when I first went to the group, I don't belong here. But I did." + +LOAD-DATE: July 31, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Yvonne Buchanan)(pg. C9) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +399 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 1, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +ULLMAN, GUIDO + +SECTION: Section A; Page 25; Column 3; Classified + +LENGTH: 229 words + +ULLMAN-Guido. We mourn the passing of our longtime good friend and associate, Guido Ullman. Guido was always loved and respected by all who knew him. He conducted his business affairs in a highly professional manner and was a good and charming friend who was also a lover and connoisseur of the arts. After retiring from his professional life, Guido devoted much of his time to charitable activities. He was personally and directly involved in helping the elderly and the infirm living in New York. We extend our heartfeld condolences to his wife Annette, his children and his family. Lieber & Solow Ltd. +ULLMAN-Guido David, on July 31 at his home. Beloved father of Anthony and Claudia, husband of Annette, brother of Billie, Monica, Anne, Robert and the late Jacqueline and grandfather of Nicholas. He will be deeply missed by all who loved him. Services today at 9AM at "The Riverside", 76th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. +ULLMAN-Guido. We are deeply saddened by the loss of our friend and colleague of many years, Guido Ullman, and extend heartfelt sympathy to his widow, Annette, son, Anthony, daughter, Claudia and entire family. The Friends at Solow & Company +ULLMAN-Guido. We deeply mourn the loss of our very good friend, Guido. We will miss him. We extend our heartfelt sympathy to his wife, Annette, his children and the entire family. Ruth and Joe Dresdner + +LOAD-DATE: August 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +400 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 1, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Fraud and Waste in Medicare + +SECTION: Section A; Page 30; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 462 words + +The Federal agency that oversees Medicare points to the program's tiny overhead as proof it is well administered. But recent reports suggest that Medicare's administrative costs are shockingly low, below 2 percent of costs, because Medicare is shockingly unsupervised. The amount of fraud and waste is huge, and supervision of the quality of medical care provided recipients is largely nonexistent. +In recent weeks, Federal auditors have estimated that $23 billion in Medicare payments last year -- about one dollar in every seven -- was due to fraud or mistakes. In Medicare's home-health program, which spends about $20 billion a year treating about four million elderly people, fraud and waste account for perhaps 40 percent of expenditures. At 125 teaching hospitals, a yearlong investigation is uncovering Medicare overpayments of hundreds of millions of dollars. Two Philadelphia hospitals have coughed up $40 million in reimbursements and fines, and officials of the nation's largest for-profit hospital chain have been indicted. + Some of these gargantuan overpayments reflect outright fraud. Others reflect billing errors and other inadvertent mistakes. The truth is that the Health Care Financing Administration, the Federal oversight agency for Medicare, has neither the financial means nor the ability to tightly supervise the numbingly complex system. +The agency can do very little to oversee the quality of care that Medicare recipients receive. An agency that cannot even check whether the services it paid for were actually provided can hardly be expected to tackle the much harder problem of guaranteeing that the services are medically appropriate. Federal oversight of a $200-billion-a-year program catering to 40 million enrollees will succeed only if the task is radically pruned. +The best solution may be like the one that currently serves members of Congress and other Federal employees. Medicare would provide the elderly with a voucher worth a fixed dollar amount to cover the cost of quality health plans, and the elderly would then choose from among local health plans, including traditional fee-for-service coverage. Federal overseers would collect and publicize information about the quality of rival plans so that Medicare enrollees could make informed choices about their health insurer. The overseers would also provide legal help for Medicare enrollees who believe their health plans failed to live up to their contracts. +Congress intends to start a timid demonstration project along these lines, but the approach should be tried more broadly. Health plans that collect a fixed dollar amount for treating Medicare enrollees will have no reason to overbill Washington for treatments that are inappropriate or dangerous. + +LOAD-DATE: August 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +401 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 2, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Golden Years for H.M.O.'s; +Budget Deal May Push More Elderly Into Managed Care + +BYLINE: By MILT FREUDENHEIM + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 31; Column 2; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1435 words + +Older Americans escaped the costly overhaul of their Medicare benefits that some lawmakers in Congress were seeking in Washington's budget negotiations this week. But like younger people with employer-paid or individual health insurance, the elderly are finding it harder to dodge the pressures to sign up for managed care. +Attracted by coverage for prescription drugs and other expensive features that the Government does not pay for in traditional fee-for-service Medicare, five million elderly and disabled people, almost one in seven, have joined a health maintenance organization, almost all in the last 12 years. + Each month, 100,000 more sign up, trading the freedom to choose their doctors and hospitals for the simplicity and lower costs of managed care. And though the proportion of elderly in managed care is far less than the majority of working Americans in such plans, the budget agreement will very likely speed the narrowing of that gap. +It provides for higher payments to H.M.O.'s in rural areas, which will most likely draw more elderly patients into managed health plans, without cutting the generous payments that have allowed urban H.M.O.'s to offer broad coverage. +Patients have the legal right to return to traditional Medicare if they later become unhappy with their health maintenance organizations. But going back is not easy because fee-for-service coverage for the elderly is becoming more costly. +Under the budget agreement, the $43.80 monthly Medicare premium for doctors' care and other nonhospital charges will gradually rise to $105.40 by 2007, according to the Congressional Budget Office. +Meanwhile, after four years of shadowing the general inflation rate, premiums for the so-called Medigap policies that supplement traditional Medicare are rising sharply as well. +No one has analyzed the latest rates set by the hundreds of insurance companies that sell Medigap coverage. But last year, the average cost of a basic Medigap policy rose 31.4 percent in Arizona, 32.4 percent in Ohio and 27.2 percent in Virginia, said Lisa Alecxih, who headed a recent study of Medigap plans conducted by the Lewin Group, a research firm in Alexandria, Va., for the Commonwealth Fund. +Not least of the reasons why Medigap rates are skyrocketing is that it is the healthier elderly who are joining health maintenance organizations, leaving a smaller pool of sicker people in the market for Medigap coverage. Moreover, most private carriers and Blue Cross plans now base their Medigap charges on age, so older people pay higher premiums. And even the American Association of Retired Persons, which does not have age-based premiums, raised its prices by 45 percent in the last two years, opening the floodgates to increases by commercial carriers, health finance experts said. +The bottom line is that out-of-pocket spending on health care by the elderly averages more than $2,600 a year, or 21 percent of their income, according to another Commonwealth Fund study. +So while the Clinton Administration says it favors choice for the 38 million people served by Medicare, remaining in -- or returning to -- traditional Medicare is becoming a luxury beyond the reach of many people of modest means, just as working people are being priced out of traditional fee-for-service health care. +"An H.M.O. is the only way I can afford medical care," said Steven Brown, a taxi driver in Venice, Calif., who recently became eligible for Medicare. +Indeed, about five million elderly people enrolled in traditional Medicare are unable to afford any kind of Medigap plan, said Patricia Newman, director of a project on Medicare policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. That leaves them without coverage for the first $736 of annual hospital charges, the first $100 each year of doctors' fees and then 20 percent of all remaining medical charges. +About 12 million people pay out of pocket for Medigap coverage; 9.6 million more retirees have employer-financed Medigap benefits, although many employers have been pushing their retirees, like their active employees, into health maintenance organizations. +Elderly H.M.O. members have told researchers that they prefer managed care because of the lower costs and extra benefits, made possible by lavish Government payments to health plans in cities where Medicare payments are already high. +A survey of 11,000 Medicare beneficiaries by the Sachs Group, a health care information firm, found, for example, that H.M.O. enrollees were more likely to be satisfied than those with traditional Medicare. Moreover, fewer than 100,000 each year have returned to traditional Medicare. The budget agreement would make the move back more difficult starting in 2000 by narrowing the time frame in which the switch could be made without the patient being denied coverage for pre-existing medical conditions. +The H.M.O. recruits are attracted by reduced or no monthly premiums, nominal out-of-pocket fees -- typically $5 or $10 for a visit to a doctor -- and free or low-priced extras such as prescription drugs or eyeglasses. Coverage is especially generous in California, Florida and cities like New York, Boston and Philadelphia, where Medicare rates are high, the elderly are numerous and the competition among H.M.O.'s is fierce. +Mimi Schreiber, 67, of Lakewood, Calif., said she had "loved every minute" of her care at Kaiser Permanente, a unit of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals and the biggest health maintenance organization in California. "If I was rich, I could afford a private doctor," she said. "You have to be realistic." +In part, such expressions of satisfaction reflect the ways that health maintenance organizations focus on the elderly population. "The beneficiaries who enroll in H.M.O.'s are systematically younger and healthier than those who don't," said Bruce C. Vladeck, head of the Federal Health Care Financing Administration, which runs Medicare. The American Association of Health Plans, an H.M.O. trade group, argues that this is not true. +Experts note that health maintenance organizations do not advertise to attract the chronically ill, who only add to their costs. "No health plan says, 'We are really good at arthritis,' " said Stan Jones, a health insurance policy analyst at George Washington University. +In fact, H.M.O. members in several surveys have expressed less satisfaction than other elderly patients when asked about delays in getting care and referrals to specialists. +Stories like that of George Thomas, a 72-year-old retired Navy pilot who lived near San Diego until recently moving to a Los Angeles suburb, fuel their fury. +As a member of a Medicare H.M.O., Mr. Thomas said, he was shuttled among hospitals and nursing homes last year and ultimately was sent home when he complained of fainting spells and intense neck pains. His weight dropped 47 pounds to a skeletal 118 in nine months, and he was too weak to walk. +"He was dying," his daughter, Sharon Cain, said. "His doctor in San Diego threw up his hands and said, 'I don't know what else I can do.' " +Luckily, Superman came to Mr. Thomas's rescue. His grandson, Dean Cain, the actor who played the superhero in ABC's "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman," arranged to have Mr. Thomas transferred to the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center. +Because FHP International, Mr. Thomas's health plan, refused to approve the move, Mr. Cain said he had to provide a $30,000 cashier's check before U.C.L.A. would admit his grandfather. The Los Angeles doctors diagnosed a dangerous spinal infection that had also damaged Mr. Thomas's heart. +Now, Mr. Thomas is suing FHP, contending that the health plan and its doctors failed "to provide reasonably necessary care" without regard to cost, as required by state and Federal H.M.O. regulations. The suit contends that FHP and the doctors knew that "financial considerations" would "override reasonable patient care needs." +Cheryl Brady, a spokeswoman for Pacificare Health System, which bought FHP in February, said the H.M.O. was "not aware that they had any problems, or an issue over the quality of care or the treatment being provided by the medical group." After the suit was filed, Pacificare recently paid part of the U.C.L.A. hospital bill. +Mr. Thomas, who is back on his feet and feeling stronger, said he would like to return to traditional Medicare. But like many older patients, he said he was unable to find a Medigap insurer that would cover his "existing conditions" -- not to mention the $500 he spends each month for medicine. + +LOAD-DATE: August 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: George Thomas, 72, of Thousand Oaks, Calif., is suing his health care provider, contending that it failed to "to provide reasonably necessary care" without regard to cost. H.M.O. doctors failed to diagnose a life-threatening infection, he says; Mimi Schreiber, 67, shown during lunchtime at the Jewish Community Center in Long Beach Calif., said she had "loved every minute" of care at Kaiser Permanente, California's largest health maintenance organization. (Photographs by Edward Carreon for The New York Times) + +Charts show Medicare managed care enrollment, cost considerations for enrolling, and managed care companies with the largest enrollments. (Sources: The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation; Interstudy) + +TYPE: News Analysis + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +402 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 3, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In the Region/Long Island; +Transforming Parish Schools to House the Elderly + +BYLINE: By DIANA SHAMAN + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 7; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1437 words + +UNTIL it closed three years ago because of a falling enrollment, the Roman Catholic kindergarten-through-grade 8 St. Hedwig's School on Depan Avenue in Floral Park had served parish children for almost 70 years. +Now workmen are transforming the three-story brick structure built in 1926 into housing for the elderly. The interior has been gutted, an elevator is being installed and 26 one-bedroom apartments and a studio unit will replace the former school's 12 classrooms, auditorium and gym. + Rents, with heat included, will be $650 a month for the one-bedroom units and $525 for the studio. More than 200 names already are on a waiting list, with successful applicants to be chosen by lottery in September. +The sponsor of the $3.88-million project, called St. Hedwig's Gardens, is the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre. Through Catholic Charities, its social services arm, it has become a leading developer in Nassau and Suffolk Counties of rental housing for low- and moderate-income elderly people age 62 or older regardless of religious affiliation. +Since 1979, the diocese has built 892 housing units in nine projects, with the most recent, the 85-unit St. Paul's Gardens in Brentwood, completed last December. Residents also are assisted with a variety of support services. +"We anticipate doing two projects a year at a minimum," said Msgr. John D. Gilmartin, the Catholic Charities diocesan director. +A 10th complex, scheduled to open this December, is Bishop McGann Village, which is under construction in Central Islip. The $10-million project, which is named after the current bishop of the diocese, the Most Rev. John R. McGann, will have 125 one-bedroom apartments. +St. Hedwig's will be ready for occupancy next February, and several other projects, including the 100-unit St. Anne's Gardens to replace the former St. Anne's parish elementary school in Brentwood, are in the planning stages. +Occupancy in all the residences is limited to people whose annual income is at or below 50 percent of the Long Island median, which means an individual's income cannot exceed $23,300 and a couple's income cannot exceed $26,600. +But in many cases incomes are even lower, said Robert A. Murphy, director of housing at the diocesan office of Catholic Charities. +"Over 16,000 elderly people in Nassau and Suffolk, some spending as much as 70 percent of their income on rent, are in need of this housing," he said. +Some 5,000 names are on waiting lists for diocesan apartments and 852 names are already on an inquiry list for the Central Islip units even though application forms have not yet been sent out. A lottery for the Central Islip apartments is to be held Aug. 18. +With the exception of St. Hedwig's, where a mix of tax credits, state and Federal grants and private mortgage financing is paying the cost of construction, financing for the diocesan projects has until now been provided by the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. The program covering them is Section 202 of the Federal Housing Act of 1959, designed to provide low-cost rental housing for the elderly. A total of 300,000 units have been built nationwide. +Under the Federal program, private nonprofit housing corporations receive funds to cover the full cost of a project. A 40-year mortgage is placed on the property by HUD, but neither interest nor amortization payments are due as long as apartments remain rented to the low-income elderly. At the end of 40 years, the loan is forgiven. The program is combined with subsidies that keep rents at 30 percent of income. +So far, 1,331 units have been completed in Nassau and Suffolk Counties under the 202 program. Almost 70 percent of them were built by the diocese. +HUD'S New York State office received a $39.2 million allocation this year, down from $47.4 million last year. But the Federal low-income housing tax credit program created by the 1986 Tax Reform Act has become another source of funds that the diocese is now utilizing. +Under that program, investors in rental housing built or rehabilitated for low- and moderate-income families purchase tax credits that can be used to reduce their corporate Federal income tax. Developers must compete for the credits, which in New York State are allocated by the state's Division of Housing and Community Renewal. +One of last year's beneficiaries was St. Hedwig's Gardens, which received a $1.99 million tax-credit allocation. A $750,000 New York State Housing Trust Fund grant, a $300,000 Community Development Block Grant from Nassau County and a $750,000 mortgage from the Allied Irish Bank in Manhattan were the major sources of funds for the remainder of the $3.88 million cost. +The diocese purchased the Floral Park school from St. Hedwig's Parish, which will use the $500,000 it received to pay off some debts and for the future upkeep of its 94-year-old church and rectory. +"The school will now serve the community in another way," said the Rev. Francis Filmanski, who has been the pastor of St. Hedwig's parish for 23 years. "It will become a safety net for senior citizens who were born and raised in this community and who can't afford to live here any more because of the high taxes." +Indeed, some former students, like 82-year-old Anne Lechmanski, hope to live in their one-time school. Mrs. Lechmanski, a widow whose children and grandchildren all attended the school, said she was finding it hard to stay in her house in Garden City Park. Besides, she said, "I want to take it a little bit easier" and live closer to St. Hedwig's Church, now a daily two-mile walk. +The architect of the renovation is David L. Mammina of Forest Hills, Queens. Architectural details on the front of the school building, including the archways over what used to be two doorways, will be preserved. A landscaped courtyard and parking will replace a small convent building, which has been demolished. +Bishop McGann Village in Central Islip is being built under the 202 program on 7.7 acres that the diocese purchased from the New York Institute of Technology. In 1984, the school, based in Old Westbury, bought most of the land once occupied by the Central Islip State Hospital for use as a college campus. But it has sold off some surplus parcels. +The 125 one-bedroom apartments will be in five buildings, two of them three stories tall with elevators and three of two stories with stairs. A 5,000-square-foot community building will contain common areas for recreation programs, dining space and a medical office. Rents will vary because of the differing income of residents, who will pay no more than 30 percent of their income for the monthly outlay. The project architect, Michael C. Lagnese of the Martin Goodman firm in Plainview, described the buildings as brick colonial style.. +CATHOLIC CHARITIES is re-applying this year for $9.7 million in tax credits for the 100-unit project in Brentwood. An earlier tax credit application was turned down, but now the plan is closer to receiving a rezoning from the Town of Islip. +St. Anne's elementary school had space for 1,200 pupils but an enrollment of only 350 when it closed five years ago. It then merged with a nearby parish school in Central Islip. +The former school building is currently rented out for offices, but housing for the elderly is the great need in the community, said the Rev. Gerald Twomey, the co-pastor with the Rev. Thomas St. Pierre of St. Anne's Parish. +"The Township of Islip has the largest percentage of seniors in the United States," Father Twomey said. "Many of the older people would like to stay here, but they can't afford the taxes so they are forced to move away." +The original plan was to use the existing H-shaped building, but that was deemed too costly. Under the present plan, one of the three foundations would be kept and modular components would be used for new construction as cost-saving measures. The proposed Neo-Georgian style buildings are also the design of Mr. Mammina of Forest Hills. +The project would cost a total of $14.7 million, Mr. Murphy of Catholic Charities said. It has already received seed money in the form of a $200,000 Community Development Block Grant from the Town of Islip and a $350,000 Affordable Housing Program Grant awarded by the Federal Home Loan Bank through a member, the Roosevelt Savings Bank. +In addition to the $9.7 million in tax credits, Catholic Charities is applying for a $1.3 million state Housing Trust Fund grant. A $2.8 million mortgage from the Allied Irish Bank will provide the remaining funds needed for the project. + +LOAD-DATE: August 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Rendering of St. Anne's Gardens (Richard Osborne). The Rev. Francis Filmanski, pastor of St. Hedwig's Church, at the former school with Robert A. Murphy of Catholic Charities. (Vic Delucia/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +403 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 3, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ON THE TOWNS + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 12; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 3377 words + +An opinionated guide to cultural and recreational goings-on around the state this week. To submit items for consideration, write to On the Towns, Sunday New Jersey Section, The New York Times, 229 West 43d Street, New York, N.Y. 10036, or send a fax to (212) 556-7219. + +MUSIC + +BERGENFIELD HIGH SCHOOL Bergenfield Community Band outdoor summer concert, Thursday at 8 P.M. Free. Front lawn, Bergenfield High School, South Prospect and West Clinton Avenues. Free. Rain site: school auditorium. (201) 387-8847. + +CLUB BENE Fishbone. Wednesday at 7 P.M. Tickets: $14. Fates Warning. Thursday at 7 P.M. Tickets: $10. George Howard, contemporary saxophonist. Friday at 9 P.M. Tickets: $10. Route 35, Sayreville. (908) 727-3000. + +CORNERSTONE Randy Johnson Trio. Wednesday, 7:30 to 11:30 P.M. Harry Skoler Quartet. Friday, 9 P.M. to 1 A.M. Mike Hashim Quartet. Saturday, 9 P.M. to 1 A.M. 25 New Street, Metuchen. (908) 549-5306. + +COUNT BASIE THEATER The Glenn Miller Orchestra. Wednesday at 7:30 P.M. Tickets: $22.50; $3 discount for the elderly. 9 Monmouth Street, Red Bank. (908) 842-9000. + +FELICIAN THEATER The Oak Ridge Boys. Friday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $20 to $40. Felician College, Lodi. (201) 939-2323. + +GREAT AUDITORIUM, OCEAN GROVE Fred Swann, organist. Wednesday at 8 P.M. Free. "Big Splash," a youth program of Christian music and fellowship with Helen Baylor and Her All-Star Band, Gary Oliver, and Phillips, Craig and Dean. Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $20 and $24. Pilgrim and Ocean Pathways, Ocean Grove. (908) 775-0035. + +RIDGEWOOD KASSCHAU MEMORIAL SHELL Ramapo Valley Spotlight Chorus. Tuesday at 8:30 P.M. Justa Buncha Banjos. Thursday at 8:30 P.M. Free. Take chairs or blankets. Veteran's Field, Maple Avenue, Ridgewood. (201) 670-3924. + +THE MANOR "Cabaret Soiree," with Jeff Harnar. Thursday. Dinner seatings at 6:30 and 7 P.M.; showtime, 9 P.M. Tickets: show only, $25; dinner and show package, $65. 111 Prospect Avenue, West Orange. (201) 731-0141. + +MEMORIAL PARK "An Evening of Operatic Vocal and Instrumental Favorites." David Shapiro, conductor; Melody Alesi, soprano; Kurt Willett, baritone. Tonight at 8:30. Bill Turner and Blue Smoke, country music with Joe Inacio, in a tribute to Elvis Presley. Next Sunday at 8:30 P.M. Free. Take blankets or chairs. Berdan Avenue, Fair Lawn. +(201) 796-6746. + +NORTH BRANCH PARK Nelson Riddle Orchestra. Tonight at 7. Free. Milltown Road, Bridgewater. (908) 722-1200, extension 232. + +PNC BANK ARTS CENTER Barry Manilow. Tuesday and Wednesday. Jethro Tull. Thursday. Hall and Oates. Friday. "Reggae Explosion," with Maxi Priest and Shaggy. Saturday. All at 8 P.M. Exit 116 off the Garden State Parkway, Holmdel. Information and ticket prices: (908) 335-0400. + +SHANGHAI JAZZ Nancy Nelson, singer, and Keith Ingham, guitarist. Wednesday, 7 to 9:30 P.M. Patti Dunham, singer, and Gary Haberman, pianist. Thursday, 7 to 9:30 P.M. Vic Juris Trio. Friday 7 to 11 P.M. Steve Minzer Trio. Saturday, 6:30 and 8:30 P.M. Free. +24 Main Street, Madison. (201) 822-2899. + +SOMERVILLE BOROUGH HALL Outdoor concerts. Fridays through Aug. 29 at 7 P.M. Free. Borough Hall lawn, Main Street. +(908) 704-1010. + +SUMMERFEST '97 Black Cat Crossing, blues band. Today, 3 to 5:30 P.M. Free. Frelinghuysen Arboretum, 53 East Hanover Avenue, Morris Township. (973) 326-7600. + +TURNING POINT Jim Dawson with David Walter. Tonight at 7. Tickets: $12.50. Marshall Crenshaw and So-Called Friends. Tuesday at 7:30 and 10 P.M. Tickets: $15. Nathan and the Zydeco Cha-Chas. Wednesday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $15. Ellis Paul. Thursday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $10. Big Jim Wheeler and Wheels of Fire. Friday at 9 P.M. Tickets: $12.50. Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. Saturday at 8 and 11 P.M. Tickets: 17.50. 468 Piermont Avenue, Piermont, N.Y. (914) 359-3219. + +WESTMINSTER CHOIR COLLEGE Westminster Summer Music Theater Workshop presents a showcase concert of musical selections. Today at 3 P.M. at the Playhouse. Hymn sing led by Richard Frey. Tomorrow at 7:30 P.M. Sing-in of Haydn's "Lord Nelson" Mass, led by Melanie Jacobson. Tuesday at 7:30 P.M. Geoffrey Dorfman, pianist. Wednesday at 7:30 P.M. Anthony Strong, pianist, and Joanne Hansen, harpist. Thursday at 7 :30 P.M. All free. Bristol Chapel, Westminster Campus, Princeton. (609) 921-7100. + +THEATER + +CAPE MAY STAGE "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)," a comic compilation of 37 plays in two hours. Through Aug. 31. Wednesdays through Sundays at 9 P.M. Tickets: $18; $15 for the elderly; $8 for children. Chalfonte Hotel, 301 Howard Street, Cape May. (609) 884-1341. + +CIRCLE PLAYHOUSE "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown," a musical based on "Peanuts" cartoons. Through Aug. 17. Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 P.M.; matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 3 P.M. Tickets: $10. 416 Victoria Avenue, Piscataway. (908) 968-7555. + +DEGNAN PARK Theater Under the Stars. "Oliver!" A musical based on Charles Dickens's "Oliver Twist." Through Aug. 23. Friday and Saturday at 8 P.M. Free. Take chairs or blankets. Next to West Orange High School, Pleasant Valley Way, West Orange. (973) 325-0795. + +IRON MOUNTAIN STAGE COMPANY "Lend Me a Tenor," by Ken Ludwig. Through Aug. 16. Friday at 8 P.M.; Saturday with dinner at 7 P.M.; next Sunday at 1 P.M. Tickets: $12 to $30. Cupsaw Lake Clubhouse, Cupsaw Drive, Ringwood. (9730 962-9007. + +WILLIAM MOUNT-BURKE THEATER "The Nerd," a comedy by Larry Shue. Saturday at 8 P.M.; next Sunday at 2 P.M. Tickets: $10. Peddie School, South Main Street and Ward Street, in Hightstown. (609) 490-7550. + +NEW JERSEY SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL "Blithe Spirit," by Noel Coward. Through Aug. 24. Friday at 8 P.M.; Saturday at 2 and 8 P.M.; Sunday at 2 P.M. At the Community Theater, 100 South Street, Morristown. "Henry V." Today at 2 and 7. On the football field of Bayley-Ellard High School, 205 Madison Avenue, Madison. Single tickets: $16 to $30.Subscription packages: $66 to $125. (201) 408-5600. On the World Wide Web: http://www. +njshakespeare.org. + +NEXT STAGE Theaterfest '97 presents "Do Not Disturb," directed by Olympia Dukakis. Today at 3 P.M. Tickets: $25; $15 for the elderly; $10 for students. Valley Road, Upper Montclair. (201) 655-5112. + +PARAMOUNT THEATRE Metro Lyric Opera of New Jersey presents "Aida," conducted by Anton Coppola. Saturday at 8:15 P.M. Tickets: $15 to $40. 40 Ocean Avenue, Asbury Park. (908) 531-2378. + +PENGUIN REP "The Vows of Penelope Corelli," a new comedy by Richard Vetere. Through Aug. 17. Thursdays and Fridays at 8:30 P.M.; Saturdays at 6 and 9 P.M.; Sundays at 2:30 P.M. Tickets: $20; $18 for the elderly and students. Exit 15 off Palisades Parkway, Stony Point, N.Y. (914) 786-2873. + +PLAYS-IN-THE-PARK "The Music Man." Tomorrow through Saturday at 8:30 P.M. Tickets: $3; under 12 free. Roosevelt Park Amphitheater, one block south of Menlo Park Mall, Edison. (908) 548-2884. + +RITZ THEATER "Damn Yankees." Today at 2 P.M.; Wednesday at 7:30 P.M.; Friday and Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $12 to $15. 915 White Horse Pike, Oaklyn. (609) 858-5230. + +SHADOW LAWN SUMMER STAGE Monmouth University presents "Grannia," a Celtic musical drama. Today and next Sunday at 7:30 P.M.; Thursday through Saturday at 8:30 P.M. Tickets: $18 and $15. Lauren K. Woods Theatrer, 400 Cedar Avenue, West Long Branch. (732) 571-3483. + +THOMPSON PARK "Fiddler on the Roof." Today and next Sunday at 7 P.M.; Thursday through Saturday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $10 and $12. The Barn, 805 Newman Springs Road, Lincroft. (732) 842-4000. + +VILLAGERS THEATER "The Who's 'Tommy.' " Through Aug. 24. Fridays and Saturdays at 8:30 P.M.; Sundays at 3 P.M. Tickets: $15 and $17. 475 DeMott Lane, Somerset. +(908) 873-2710. + +MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES + +AMERICAN LABOR MUSEUM "Workers and Immigrants," a student art exhibition. Through Dec. 31. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 1 to 4 P.M. Suggested donation: $1.50. Botto House National Landmark, 83 Norwood Street, Haledon. (201) 595-7953. + +ATLANTIC CITY HISTORICAL MUSEUM "Bettmann on the Boardwalk: A Celebration of Historic Atlantic City, 1890-1990," a selection of photographs from the Corbis-Bettmann Collection. Through Dec. 31. Daily, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. Free. Garden Pier, at New Jersey Avenue. (609) 347-5839. + +BRISTOL-MYERS SQUIBB GALLERY The 24th annual employee photography exhibition. Through Aug. 12. "Art by Architects." Through Sept. 2. Hours: Mondays through Fridays, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursdays, 9 A.M. to 7 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. Free. Route 206, Lawrenceville, three miles south of Princeton. (609) 252-6275. + +EDUCATIONAL TESTING SERVICE Watercolors by Robert Sakson. Through Sept. 10. Hours: Monday to Friday 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. Free. Conant Hall, Lounge B, Rosedale Road, Princeton. (609) 921-9000. + +GALLERY OF AMERICAN CRAFT "Ceramic Vessels," works by 26 clay artists. Through Sept. 1. Daily, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Free. 1501 Glasstown Road, Millville. (609) 825-6800. + +GALLERY AT SCHERING-PLOUGH "Reflections of Summer," featuring 30 watercolor landscapes and seascapes by 19 artists. Through Aug. 28. Mondays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. 1 Giralda Farms, Madison. (201) 882-7000. + +GROUNDS FOR SCULPTURE Summer exhibition of works by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Raffael Benazzi, Anthony Caro, Charles Ginnever, Brower Hatcher, Alexander Liberman, Clement Meadmore and George Sugarman. Through Sept. 14. Fridays to Sundays, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. 18 Fairgrounds Road, Hamilton Township. (609) 586-0616. + +HUNTERDON ART CENTER "The Artist Looks at Hunterdon," paintings and drawings of local interest. "Sally Shearer Swenson (1940-1977): A Memorial Exhibition." Both through Sept. 14. Hours: Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 A.M. to 5 P.M. 7 Lower Center Street, Clinton. (908) 735-8415. + +JOHNSON AND JOHNSON GALLERY "Ties That Bind," woodworking by Phyllis Rosser. Through Aug. 22. By appointment only. 1 Johnson and Johnson Plaza, New Brunswick. (908) 524-3698. + +LONG BEACH ISLAND FOUNDATION OF THE ARTS AND SCIENCES "Native Perspective: Graphic Art from the Pacific Northwest," ajuried show of crafts and art.Through Aug. 13. Hours: Saturday to Sunday 10 A.M. to 4 P.M.; Monday to Friday 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Free. 120 Long Beach Drive, Loveladies. +(609) 494-1241. + +MACCULLOCH HALL HISTORICAL MUSEUM "The Immortal Genius: William Shakespeare, Thomas Nast and 19th-Century American Culture," satirical cartoons by Nast, who used text and imagery of Shakespeare. Through Feb. 4. "Rococo and Reason in Georgian Glass," more than 100 examples of English and Irish cut glass from the 18th and 19th centuries. Through Sept. 7. "The Timeless Folk Art of Decorative Painting." Through Oct. 12. Admission: $3; $2 for students and the elderly. Hours: Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, 1 to 4 P.M. 45 Macculloch Avenue, Morristown. (201) 538-2404. + +HOWARD MANN ART CENTER Works by Alexandra Nechita, an 11-year-old artist. Through next Sundays. Hours: Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. (609) 397-2300. + +MIDLAND GALLERY "Out on a Limb." 10 artists submit their interpretations of birdhouses to Habitat for Humanity. Through Aug. 31. 13 Midland Avenue, Montclair. (201) 744-6305. + +MONMOUTH MUSEUM "Transcending the Surface: Contemporary Fiber Art." Works by 11 artists. Through Aug. 24. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. 761 Newman Springs Road, Lincroft. (908) 747-2266. + +MONTCLAIR ART MUSEUM "A Personal Synthesis," a retrospective of paintings and prints by Hananiah Harari, and "American Impressionist," a retrospective of paintings by Guy Rose (1867-1925). Both through next Sunday. Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 11 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Sundays and Thursdays, 1 to 5 P.M. Admission: $5; $4 for students with ID and the elderly; free admission on Saturdays from 11 A.M. to 2 P.M.; always for children under 12. 3 South Mountain Avenue, Montclair. (201) 746-5555. + +MORRIS MUSEUM "Focus on Rodin: Selections From the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Collection," including 21 bronzes. Through Aug. 17. "Bicycles: History, Beauty, Fantasy," tracing the evolution of the bicycle from 1817 to 1920. Through Sept. 7. "Women's Fashion in Sports," exploring the cultural impact of sports on women's clothing from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through Aug. 31. Recent sculptures by Leah Jacobson. Through May 24. Hours: Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M.; Mondays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 8 P.M. Admission: $5; $3 for the elderly. 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. (201) 538-0454. + +NEW JERSEY CENTER FOR VISUAL ARTS "Union County Juried Show." Through Aug. 17. Five sculptures by Peter Reginato in the outdoor art park. Through Sept. 30. Hours: Mondays through Fridays, noon to 4 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 to 4 P.M. Palmer Gallery, 68 Elm Street, Summit. +(908) 273-9121. + +NEW JERSEY HISTORICAL SOCIETY "By Industry We Thrive: Educating Children in Early 19th Century New Jersey." Through January. "Teen-Age New Jersey: From Frank Sinatra to Bruce Springsteen." Through July 1998. "History's Mysteries," artifacts of New Jersey linked by a common theme. Through January 1999. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. 52 Park Place, Newark. (973) 483-3939. + +NEW JERSEY STATE MUSEUM Recent paintings and drawings by Bradley Wester. Through Sept. 7. "New Jersey Nightscapes." a specially lighted display on New Jersey and its nighttime skies. Through February. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 9 A.M. to 4:45 P.M.; Sundays, 12 to 5 P.M. Free. 205 West State Street, Trenton. (609) 292-6464. + +NEWARK MUSEUM "Portraits, 1975-1995," paintings by Dawoud Bey. Closes today. "The Glitter and the Gold: Fashioning America's Jewelry," celebrating the 100 years of Newark as the city of gold and precious stones. Through Nov. 2. "Destination Mars," an interactive exhibition exploring the possibility of life on Mars. Through 1999. Hours: Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. 49 Washington Street, Newark. (201) 596-6550. + +NEWARK PUBLIC LIBRARY "In Harmony for 75 Years: The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, 1922 to 1997." Through Sept. 6. Mondays through Fridays, 9 A.M. to 5:30 P.M.; Wednesdays to 8:30 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 1 P.M. Free. 5 Washington Street, Newark. +(973) 624-3713. + +NOYES MUSEUM "For the Love of Art: Carvings and Paintings by South Jersey Folk Artist Albert Hoffman," reflecting Old Testament narratives and American Indian life, and landscape photographs by Dwight Hiscano. Through Sept. 21. "Easy Access: Highlights From the Noyes Museum's Collection of Contemporary Art." Through Aug. 17. "Immortal Beauty: Artists Capture Miss America." Through Dec. 14. Shore bird, swan and goose decoys from the museum's collection. Continuing. Wednesday through Sunday, 11 A.M. to 4 P.M. Admission: $3; $2 for the elderly and students. Lily Lake Road, Oceanville. (609) 652-8848. + +PALMYRA ART GALLERY "Forward," paintings and works on paper by Ellen Sherman-Zinn. Through Sept. 5. Hours: Tuesdays through Sundays, 11:30 A.M. to 2:30 A.M. Free. Palmyra Tea Room, 22 Hamilton Street, Bound Brook. (908) 302-0515. +PIERMONT FINE ARTS GALLERY Solo exhibition of Mel Stabin's watercolors of his travels in the United States and abroad. Through Aug. 17. Hours: Thursdays and Sundays 1 to 6 P.M.; Fridays and Saturdays 1 to 9 P.M. 218 Ash Street, Piermont, N.Y. (914) 679-6179. + +TRENTON CITY MUSEUM Group show by eight artists. Through next Sunday. "Graham Holmes: Bridging Trenton and New Hope," oil paintings, watercolors and plate designs for Lenox china. Aug. 16 through Nov. 2. Hours: Tuesday through Saturdays, 11 A.M. to 3 P.M.; Sundays, 2 to 4 P.M. Free. (609) 989-3632. + +WBGO FM 88.3 STUDIOS Artworks about jazz by Andre de Krayewski, artist, and Michael Skaggs, photographer. Through Aug. 31. Mondays to Fridays, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Free. 54 Park Place, Newark. (201) 624-8880. + +FOR CHILDREN + +BARNES & NOBLE Reading of Spot books, with craft. Wednesday at 11 A.M. For ages 2 to 4. Free. A visit from Spot the Dog. Saturday at 11 A.M. For ages 2 to 4. Free. Princeton Market Fair in Princeton. (609) 897-9250. + +ELIZABETH PUBLIC LIBRARY "Go Buggy With Books," summer reading with craft activity. Tuesday at 2:30 P.M. 11 South Broad Street. "Films on Friday," through Aug. 22. Fridays at 2:30 P.M. Elmora Branch, 740 West Grand Street. Fridays at 3:30 P.M. LaCorte Branch, 408 Palmer Street. Elizabeth. (908) 354-6060. + +MONMOUTH MUSEUM "Changing Cultures: From the Lenape to the Urban Age, 1400 to 1900," exploring the history of America through changes in family life, from the Lenape through the Victorian era. Through June. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 to 4:30 P.M.; Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M. 761 Newman Springs Road, Lincroft. (908) 747-2266. + +MORRIS MUSEUM Saturn Summer Theater. "Cinderella's Storyland," by Kit's Kaboodle, featuring Kitty Jones. Tuesday. Ages 3 to 8. "Myths, Music and Make-Believe," an exploration of world cultures using stories, masks and music. Thursday. Ages 3 to 8. All shows at 11 A.M. and 1:30 P.M. in the John H. Bickford Theater. Tickets: $6.25; $5 for members. "Museum Munchkins," an introduction to the museum for ages 3 to 5. Wednesdays through Aug. 20, 10:30 to 11 A.M. This week: "Wonderful Whales." Fee: $5.50 a week per student. Museum hours: Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M.; Mondays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 8 P.M. Admission: $4; $2 for the elderly. 6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown. (201) 538-0454. + +NEW JERSEY HISTORICAL SOCIETY "A Closer Look at a Book." Explore historic books used by children in the 19th century for learning to read and write; then create your own book. Saturday, 1 to 2 P.M. Free. 52 Park Place, Newark. (973) 483-3939. + +NEW JERSEY CHILDREN'S MUSEUM An interactive center for ages 2 to 8. Daily programs: "Fairy Tale Play," 10:30 A.M. and 3:30 P.M. "Storytime," noon. Craft projects, 2:30 P.M. Museum hours: Mondays through Fridays, +9 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. Admission: $7. 599 Industrial Avenue, Paramus. (201) 262-2638. + +NEW JERSEY STATE MUSEUM "Kaleidoscope Kids," a one-week program on astronomy for children 6 to 12. Through Friday. Each session meets Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 3 P.M. Tuition: $115; $110 for siblings. 205 West State Street, Trenton. Registration and information: (609) 292-6310 or (609) 292-6464. + +SPOKEN WORD + +BARNES & NOBLE Dr. Marty Tashman discusses "Stress: The Causes and the Cures," on regaining control of your life through relaxation and massage. Tuesday, 7 to 10 P.M. Frank A. Melfa discusses his new book, "Body Building: A Realistic Approach." Thursday at 7 P.M. Free. Princeton Market Fair, Route 1, Princeton. (609) 392-0689. + +ENCORE BOOKS AND MUSIC Jennifer Preston, Trenton bureau chief of The New York Times, discusses her experiences as editor and columnist. Diana Wells discusses "100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names." Tomorrow at 7 P.M. Free. 301 North Harrison Street, Princeton. (609) 252-0608. + +LAWRENCEVILLE PUBLIC LIBRARY Delaware Valley Poets Workshop. Thursday at 7:30 P.M. Darrah Road, Lawrenceville. (609) 392-0689. + +ETC. + +ELIZABETH PUBLIC LIBRARY Film program: "The New Jersey Shoreline," "Mysteries of the Deep" and "The Voyage of the Brigantine Yankee." Wednesday at 10 A.M. 11 South Broad Street, Elizabeth. (908) 354-6060. +FLEA MARKET The Chester Lions Club Flea Market offers crafts, linens, books, children's clothing, housewares, plants and produce, makeup, jewelry and other accessories. Sundays, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Through Nov. 30. Free. West Blackwell Street, Morris and Sussex Streets, downtown Dover. (201) 442-1494. + +SHOW HOUSE AT THE SHORE Interior design rooms, decorative painting and outdoor living spaces. Through next Sunday. Daily, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Wednesdays and Thursdays to 8:30 P.M. Admission: $15. Evergreen, South Derby and Ventnor Avenues, Ventnor. "Seashore Conversations," a lecture series. Through Wednesday. Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 11 A.M. Gary's Little Rock Cafe, 5214 Atlantic Avenue, Ventnor. (609) 345-8181. + +LOAD-DATE: August 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Fruits of Labor Lisa Mahan's "Lemons and Bowls" is part of "Light and Dark," a joint exhibition with Roy Freedle that contrasts the artists' distinct styles of painting. ARTISTS' GALLERY 32 Coryell Street, Lambertville. Through Aug. Friday. Today, Thursday, and Friday, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. Free. (609) 397-4588. (pg. 12); A Slant on the Self This self-portrait sculpture by Peter Reginato is part of his outdoor solo exhibition of five pieces constructed of colored steel, representing human artifacts like toys and tools. NEW JERSEY CENTER FOR VISUAL ARTS The Art Park, 68 Elm Street, Summit. Through Sept. 30. Mondays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. and 7 to 9 P.M.; Saturdays, 12 to 4 P.M.; Sundays, 2 to 4 P.M. (908) 273-1457.; Alternative Rockers Fishbone is on tour, with a sound that fuses funk, punk, ska, blues, rock and jazz. The group is regarded as having helped to put the Los Angeles alternative-music scene on the map. CLUB BENE Route 35, Sayrevile. Wednesday at 8 P.M. Tickets: $14. (908) 727-3000. (pg. 13); Festive Family Frolic Myrna Packer and Art Bridgman will teach a dance workshop as well as perform their special brand of dance as a part of Summerfare, a family arts festival. Their dance duet will immediately follow their workshop. BLAUVELT ART MUSEUM 705 Kinderkamack Road, Oradell. Today. Workshop at 2 P.M.; performance at 4 P.M. Call for registration: (201) 967-1751. (pg. 14) + +TYPE: List + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +404 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 3, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Medicare Crisis Is Nearly On Hold + +BYLINE: By Warren Rudman and Sam Nunn; Warren Rudman, a former Republican Senator from New Hampshire, and Sam Nunn, a former Democratic Senator from Georgia, are co-chairmen of the Concord Coalition. + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 13; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 654 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + +For the last few days Washington has been indulging in a well-deserved round of self-congratulation over passage of the first balanced budget in three decades. After 10 years of failed deficit reduction efforts, the bill passed last week stands out as a significant bipartisan accomplishment. So why are we applauding with only one hand? +While the new balanced budget is a short-run fiscal encouragement, it fails to address the much tougher challenge waiting for us in only a decade, when the oldest members of the baby-boom generation begin signing up for Social Security, in 2008, and Medicare, in 2011. Unless we tackle this huge problem, all of the hard work to balance the budget in 2002 will be washed away in a sea of red ink. + The numbers are relentless. Today, the United States has about 24 million retirees. When the boomer generation is fully retired, the figure will be 48 million. But the number of working age citizens, whose payroll taxes finance most of the seniors' Social Security and Medicare benefits, will increase only 20 percent in that period. And Medicare spending per beneficiary will have continued to rise. +Well, if the balanced budget neglects the country's long-term generational challenge, how does it do in the short term? +The economy and the private sector are performing so well that revenue is pouring into the Treasury faster than politicians can claim credit for reducing the deficit. But the assumptions in the balanced budget plan mean the economy must continue performing at a strong pace. Congress, of course, can't repeal the business cycle, and the plan leaves no reserve for error. +To reach balance also requires that future Congresses and the next President live up to tough limits on discretionary spending. These ceilings have provided spending discipline for a decade. The new plan conveniently allows a $7 billion boost in the current round of appropriations bills, but the limits tighten dramatically after that. By 2002, discretionary spending will have to be reduced by 10 percent, something that sounds easier in the abstract than it will be politically, since these cuts remain unidentified. +Finally, the budget agreement will reduce Medicare reimbursements to doctors, hospitals and other health care providers by $115 billion over the next five years, which will help patch up the program's balance sheet temporarily. So will program changes that encourage beneficiaries to choose from various plans that will be offered in addition to the traditional, and expensive, fee-for-service system. But these steps, while helpful in the short term, are nowhere near enough. +The failure to respond to the long-term challenge does not mean that elected leaders are unaware of it. The Senate voted 70 to 30 in June to phase out the subsidies received by the upper-income elderly enrolled in the Part B Medicare program, which covers doctors' bills. The same day, 62 Senators voted to phase in over 30 years an increase in the Medicare eligibility age to 67 from 65, in tandem with the increase scheduled for Social Security. Both of these structural changes would help meet the long-term challenge, but, sadly, both were dropped in the final negotiations. +A bipartisan commission will be charged with reporting recommendations by March 1, 1999, on how to meet Medicare's long-term crisis. It is critical that this commission not serve as yet another excuse for delay, diversion and denial but instead call for fundamental restructuring, including means-testing, higher eligibility ages and adjustments of cost-of-living allowances. It is also important that policy makers not focus on Medicare without also considering Social Security's financing and benefit problems. The generational challenge extends well beyond Medicare and requires all of us to consider what benefits we are prepared to provide and pay for when the baby boom becomes the senior boom. + +LOAD-DATE: August 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +405 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 3, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +DIARY + +BYLINE: By JAN M. ROSEN + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 2; Column 3; Money and Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1103 words + + +SHAREHOLDER REVOLUTION +Sallie Mae's Management Ousted in Favor of Dissidents +In what one analyst called "the stock market equivalent of the Boston Tea Party," shareholders of the Student Loan Marketing Association ousted the management by electing a dissident slate of directors to run the company. "It's a revolution," said the analyst, Jonathan E. Gray, of Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. Shareholders also overwhelmingly approved a plan to turn Sallie Mae, a Government-sponsored enterprise, into a fully private, state-chartered corporation. On the New York Stock Exchange, Sallie Mae's shares immediately surged almost $5. + +BALANCING THE BUDGET +Is Everyone Happy? +In Washington, euphoria reigned as politicians of both parties congratulated themselves on agreeing to balance the Federal budget and to provide the first Federal tax cut in 16 years. "We have put America's fiscal house in order again," President Clinton proclaimed. Republicans, like Representative Bill Archer of Texas, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, hailed the agreement as the culmination of their quest to slim down Government. But economists, ever the dismal scientists, were skeptical that all would go as planned. Taxes on long-term capital gains are to be cut to a top rate of 20 percent, and eventually to 18 percent. And new rules increased the tax advantages of individual retirement accounts for millions of Americans. The package also provides child care credits, tax benefits for college students, health insurance options for the elderly, higher airline ticket taxes, lower estate taxes and higher cigarette taxes. + +THE ECONOMY +Looking Up, Looking Down +Adding to Washington's cheer was news that the economy slowed during the spring as consumers cut back on spending. The gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the April-June period, less than half that of the preceding quarter, showing no danger of inflation, even though employee compensation costs rose slightly in the spring. Sales of new single-family homes rose 6.1 percent in June, showing the housing sector entered the third quarter on a solid footing. "It's about as good as it can get for a fully employed economy," said Robert G. Dederick, economic consultant to Chicago's Northern Trust Company. But on Friday two reports revived fears of inflation. The unemployment rate dropped to a 24-year low of 4.8 percent in July, and the National Association of Purchasing Management index rose to its highest level in two and a half years, 58.6, showing expansion in manufacturing. + +THE MARKETS +A Whiff of Inflation +After a record-setting first part of the week, inspired by the favorable economic data and the budget agreement, markets stumbled on Friday as the unemployment and purchasing managers' numbers reignited fears of inflation and higher interest rates. The bellwether 30-year Treasury bond, whose lower yields have recently propelled stocks higher, sank 1 26/32, pushing its yield to 6.45 percent from Thursday's close of 6.29 percent. The Dow Jones industrial average was still up 80.60 points for the week, at 8,194.04. The Nasdaq composite rose 24.75 points, to 1,594.33. + +CAREER MOVES +New Chief for Donna Karan; Jobs Tries Recruiting for Apple +Deciding to concentrate on her role as chief designer, Donna Karan stepped down as chief executive of her namesake company and named John Idol, right, an executive from Polo Ralph Lauren and an expert in licensing, to the post. Wall Street analysts hailed the move. Stephen L. Ruzow resigned as president of the company but will remain a consultant for six months. Attempting to restore Apple Computer to health, Steven P. Jobs, its co-founder and now an adviser to the company, has been trying to persuade Eastman Kodak's chief executive, George M. C. Fisher, to come to Apple, according to an executive who knows both men. So far, Mr. Fisher is not biting. + +THE MERGER FRONT +Chips on the Table +Consolidation in the chip industry accelerated, as National Semiconductor agreed to acquire Cyrix in a stock swap the companies valued at $550 million, and Intel said it would acquire Chips and Technologies, a producer of graphics processing chips for personal computers, for $384 million. Fujitsu of Japan said it would pay $850 million for the 58 percent of Amdahl that it did not already own. Also, Sun Microsystems agreed to acquire Diba Inc., a start-up company that is developing technology for small communications and computing devices called information appliances. Terms were not disclosed. + +THE DEAL FLIES +KLM to Sell Northwest Stake +KLM Royal Dutch Airlines agreed to sell its 19 percent stake in Northwest Airlines back to Northwest for more than $1 billion -- a tidy profit on an initial investment of $400 million. The two have maintained a successful operating alliance, but a two-year legal squabble over KLM's investment threatened to undermine it. Now the lawsuits are to be withdrawn, and the carriers are to expand their relationship into potentially lucrative new areas like cargo transportation and linking their computer systems. + +SCANDAL IN JAPAN +Penalties for Nomura And a Leading Bank +Japan's Finance Ministry, in the strongest punitive action it has ever taken against major financial institutions, ordered Nomura Securities and Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank to suspend part of their operations for the rest of this year as punishment for making payments and loans to a racketeer. Still, analysts said, the penalties were more lenient than expected and should not result in red ink. Illegal dealings that could undermine the market's credibility are believed to be widespread in Japan. Tokyo prosecutors raided the headquarters of Yamaichi Securities on suspicion that it, too, had made payments to the same racketeer. + +THE SPORTS BUSINESS +G.M. Goes for Gold +Is the business of America still business, or is it sport? General Motors committed some $900 million to sponsor the Olympics through 2008 -- a wager that the next six Winter and Summer Games will continue to galvanize public interest. The deal with NBC and the United States Olympics Committee is expected to be the first of many. AT&T, Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Busch, all longtime Olympic sponsors, may well follow suit. Nor is America's obsession unique. Alan Shearer, captain of Britain's national soccer team and center forward for Newcastle United, badly tore his ankle ligament in a preseason tournament last weekend. When the London stock exchange opened for trading on Monday, $20 million disappeared from Newcastle's share valuation. + +LOAD-DATE: August 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos (Associated Press; Marylin K. Yee/The New York Times) + +Graphs show unemployment rate and annual rate of change in the value of the gross domestic product. (Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Commerce Department) + +Drawing (Tom Bloom) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +406 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 3, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Nation: Clinton Sees History in the Budget-Making . . .; +. . . as Congress Touches the Third Rail and Lives + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 5; Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 723 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON + +FOR years, officials have described Medicare and Social Security as the third rail of American politics, untouchable by any politician who wanted to survive. But this year's budget debate suggests that less voltage is flowing through that rail. +Congress made sweeping changes in Medicare, encouraging elderly people to enroll in health maintenance organizations and other health plans like those offered by employers. Those changes, plus more being discussed for the future, make clear that America has begun a fundamental re-examination of this immensely popular but hugely expensive program -- just as 75 million baby boomers begin to wonder what will remain of Medicare when they turn 65 in the years after 2010. + In the last few months, Congress seriously considered proposals to strengthen Medicare's financial condition by charging extra premiums to the affluent, raising the eligibility age and imposing a co-payment of $5 a visit for home health care services. +None of those proposals survive in the final bill, which sailed through Congress last week. But lawmakers and lobbyists said it would be a mistake to consider them dead. Baby boomers planning for retirement would be prudent to assume that they will have to pay more for their medical care. + +Get Out Your Wallets + The budget bill creates a Federal advisory panel to study Medicare's future and strongly hints that future beneficiaries may pay a bigger share of the program's costs. The panel, the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, is to recommend ways of establishing an "appropriate balance of benefits covered and beneficiary contributions to the Medicare program." It is also to make recommendations on modifying Medicare's eligibility age to match changes in that for Social Security, which will gradually rise to 67 from 65 between 2003 and 2027. +President Clinton hesitantly endorsed an increase in premiums for higher-income beneficiaries, saying "a big majority of the American people will support this" if they understand the size of the baby-boom generation and the extent of the Federal subsidy. +Only five years ago, Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, looked liked a quixotic dilettante when he issued gloomy fiscal forecasts suggesting that Medicare, Social Security and other entitlement programs would bankrupt the Government if their costs were not reined in. This year Mr. Kerrey won plaudits as a leader of the bipartisan effort to put Medicare on a sound financial footing. +Contrary to third-rail imagery, Mr. Kerrey said, such efforts do not require great political courage because Americans understand the need for change when they are given the facts. "It's not hard to sell to people," he said. + +The Old-People's Lobby + Senators were not defensive about trying to set a Medicare means test or to raise the eligibility age. Such proposals, they said, would help save Medicare from bankruptcy. +House members of both parties, scorched by the battles over Medicare in 1995 and 1996, were far more reluctant to impose new costs on the elderly. But Senator Phil Gramm, Republican of Texas, said, "Senator Kerrey and I are going to reintroduce our reforms as a freestanding bill, and we are not going to let this issue die." +Throughout the debate over Medicare in the last 30 months, Speaker Newt Gingrich and his aides talked continually, behind the scenes, to lobbyists for the American Association of Retired Persons. This year the association supported the House version of the Medicare legislation, even as it criticized Mr. Kerrey's proposals as reckless. +One lesson is that in a program like Medicare, with 38 million beneficiaries, the mechanical details are every bit as important as the underlying policy. The proposal to link premiums to beneficiaries' income died in part because officials could not decide who should collect the premiums. +Similarly, critics suggested that Mr. Kerrey had not analyzed the effects of raising Medicare's eligibility age. Such a change, they said, would increase the number of people without insurance. Mr. Kerrey countered with a proposal to let older Americans "buy into" Medicare before they are entitled to coverage. But no one seemed to know just how such an arrangement would work. +That issue is sure to be part of future debates and battles. + +LOAD-DATE: August 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +407 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 3, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +Westchester Q&A: Lila R. Ogman; +A Retiree Who Leads Others to Learning + +BYLINE: By DONNA GREENE + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 3; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1218 words + +THERE are no tests, no term papers and no forced attendance in the school that Lila R. Ogman, a longtime New Rochelle resident, helps run. The school is the Learning in Retirement Institute at Iona College and is for people of retirement age who want a creative or intellectual outlet. +An affiliate of the Elderhostel Institute Network, the institute is in its fifth year of offering daytime educational programs, study groups and social activities. Among its offerings for the fall, the institute will have classes titled Civil Liberties, Radio Goes to the Movies, Play Reading, Character and Values of American Presidents (1933-1997), the Intimate World of the String Quartet and American Architecture. + Mrs. Ogman, a founder and the president of the institute, was a preschool teacher in New Rochelle for 23 years before retiring in 1981. The institute will hold an open house on Sept. 7 at 3 P.M. at the Joyce Auditorium at Iona College to introduce its fall program to potential students. The number to call for more information is 633-267. +Here are excepts of a recent conversation with Mrs. Ogman: +Q. Why did you not just retire and go off into the sunset or travel, or the like? +A. It seemed important to me to do something more. I loved working with children, and when I first retired I worked as a volunteer in the early childhood intervention program, and that was wonderful for me because I was able to use my expertise and stay in touch with things. Then I started to work with WISH, Women in Self Help. But it wasn't enough. +I and some other retirees had this vision of a retirement institute. I thought it was a wonderful, wonderful idea. And we made it happen. It's important for me to spend my time in ways other than pure self-indulgence. It has always been important for me to think that I make a contribution in some way. +Q. Can you describe the institute? +A. It's a membership institute. We're in the academic community of Iona College. We offer study groups and other cultural activities for men and women of retirement age. We are a completely volunteer group, and we differ from other academic institutions in that we offer only daytime activities. We are a community. We become very important to each other. +Q. Is it important, therefore, that this is only for retirees? Sometimes older people who go back to school like being among a lot of young people and sometimes they do not. +A. Yes, the idea for us here is that we are only people of retirement age. I think there are probably as many people that find it very important to have that stimulation of the younger generation as there are people who don't want it. I think it's wonderful to have that stimulation but also to have the other option as well. +Q. Here you are working with older people when you spent most of your professional life working with children. What is the common ingredient? Are the older people who come to your programs like 3 and 4-yearolds in that they are curious? +A. That's for sure, that is a very important aspect to the kind of people we have here. They are very curious about so many things. And the wonderful thing about our groups is that it is proof positive that just because one retires one need not, as you said earlier, go off into the sunset. It's a time in life when we can do things that you never did before and learn about new things you never learned about before. +Q. How many people do you have as members of your organization? +A. We have grown, and we have close to 200 members from lower Westchester, for the most part. +Q. How do you decide which courses to offer? +A. By committee; we have a curriculum committee. And within the committee there are three subcommittees: humanities, science and social studies. Sometimes there is someone who offers to be the instructor. +Q. Is there a charge to take these courses? +A. Oh, yes, we charge a membership fee of $150 annually, but it's a bargain because for that one membership fee you may take all of the classes. It runs from Sept. 1 to Aug. 30, and we offer two eight-session semesters and two mini-sessions. For your $150, you can sign up for them all. +Q. Clearly, this is fun for you. What makes it so much fun? +A. Doing something you want to do, learning something new, being with people with whom you can exchange ideas in a very civilized fashion, being together and getting to know people and sort of meeting them over and over again at classes, taking a hiatus from them at times and them coming back to remake their acquaintance in another class. +Q. Do many friendships come out of this? +A. Yes, the community aspect of it is of vital importance. We have special events, such as, perhaps, a field trip to a wildlife preserve, or it may be one to a museum that very few people have heard of. We may organize a theater party. We have had luncheons. There are a variety of things that we plan, and those are fun. It's the exchanging of ideas that is just so wonderful. +Q. What is your role at this point? Can you let it run on its own? +A. Would that it were so. I was the first president. I'm now serving my second term. +Q. Are you stuck with it for life? +A. No, I'm not stuck with it for life. I think it's very important that we constantly look for new people, new blood, to run the organization. We are at the age where none of us will be around forever, nor is anyone, but more so at our age. +Q. How many people are typically in a class? +A. Oh, it varies. Some of our groups are small with 10 or 15; some are with as many as 40 or more. +Q. What are the most popular kinds of classes? +A. That also is hard to say. There is a Natural World summer semester class that draws a lot of people. Anything we do in music is always popular. We have 20th-century music or opera, taught by one of us. We have had philosophy classes that have been attended by 60 people. We have had film festivals that are attended by 30 to 55. One of the great things about our program is you need not commit yourself, and many of us travel, live elsewhere part of the year and may miss two or three sessions or maybe half a semester -- no problem, you can always come back and pick up. We're very relaxed. +Q. No term papers, no tests? +A. Absolutely not. +Q. Where would you like to see this program go from here, or is it there already? +A. This is our fifth year, and we would love to have a fifth year gala of some sort. We haven't quite finalized those plans. I'd like to see it with a firm membership of 200, so that we can expand and provide more courses. +Q. Where are courses held? +A. Friday afternoon courses are at Iona. Others are at the Elks Club in New Rochelle. +Q. What is your relationship with Iona? +A. Iona is our host. We are completely self-sufficient. We have even in the past offered a scholarship to attend our courses to someone at Iona's Columba school, which is its college for adults. Columba is different than L.I.R.I.C. because it's a college for the returning adult, for continuing education. It gives academic credits. The students are working at the same time, so their classes are late in the afternoon or evening. I want to mention the generosity of the Iona faculty. We often invite them to do lectures or sessions for us, and they're enormously responsive. + +LOAD-DATE: August 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: August 10, 1997, Sunday + + CORRECTION: +The Q&A column last Sunday about the Learning in Retirement Institute at Iona College in New Rochelle gave the telephone number incompletely. It is 633-2675. Because of a schedule change, the article also misstated the time of the institute's open house for potential students. It is at 2 P.M. on Sept. 7, not 3 P.M. + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Lila R. Ogman, head of Learning in Retirement Institute at Iona College in New Rochelle. (Norman Y. Lono for The New York Times) + +TYPE: Interview + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +408 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 3, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +'Teddy Bear Lady' Gave Her Heart, Plus $18 Million + +BYLINE: By DIRK JOHNSON + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 12; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 856 words + +DATELINE: CHICAGO, Aug. 2 + +Few people at Children's Memorial Hospital knew her name. She was simply "The Teddy Bear Lady," the sweet old woman who brought stuffed animals to sick children and vowed to leave a "special gift" to the hospital someday. + The woman, Gladys Holm, who died last year at age 86, was a retired secretary who never earned more than $15,000 a year, never married and lived alone in a tiny apartment in suburban Evanston. + But she was more than just sweet. A tall woman with a wickedly delicious sense of style, she favored vivid red suits and wore big rings, drank scotch at the dinner table, weaved outrageous tales and skewered corrupt politicians. + And in her will, she left $18 million to Children's Memorial Hospital, the largest single donation in the institution's 115-year history, surpassing the $10 million gift from Ray Kroc, who built the McDonald's chain. + Miss Holm had been buying stocks for a long, long time. + "When her attorney called to tell me the amount," said Jan Jennings, the president of the hospital, "I asked him to repeat it, since I was certain I had misheard." + Nearly a half-century ago, Children's Hospital had saved the life of a little girl in a family very dear to Miss Holm. She had watched the little girl's parents go through the agony of a sick child, Mr. Jennings said, and had witnessed the triumph of new medical technologies. + Her donation will go for research for diseases of the heart. It was a heart problem that threatened the life of her friend's daughter, who was saved by a new technology. Indeed, it was the first "blue baby" surgical procedure in the United States. + The baby, Lynn Adrian, is now a professor of American studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. And she said she was as shocked as everybody else that her Aunt Gladys - "I was 10 years old before I knew she wasn't technically my aunt" - had a boatload of money. + "You know, you hear about these shy old women who lead isolated lives, keep to themselves, don't speak up much?" Ms. Adrian said. + "Well," she added, with a delighted chuckle, "my Aunt Gladys wasn't like that at all." + She recalled Miss Holm's parlor talk as being so adventurous that other adults often whisked the little ones out of the room. + "Aunt Gladys did not keep much to herself," Ms. Adrian said. + But she kept quiet about her riches, and her generosity. + "We now know that the teddy bears were a pretext," said Mr. Jennings, the hospital president. "It was a way for her to discreetly learn about a family's money situation. If she learned they didn't have much money, she quietly took care of their finances." + Born and reared on a farm in Wisconsin, Miss Holm, the daughter of Norwegian, Miss Holm, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, moved to Chicago at 18 and took a secretarial job for a fledgling company, American Hospital Supply Corporation. + Miss Holm worked for the company's founder, Foster G. McGaw, in small offices in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. When the company went public in 1951, she was given stock options and put on the executive committee. + American Hospital eventually became a giant in the industry, and Miss Holm's stock soared like a helium balloon. Baxter International bought the company in 1985. + Friends said Miss Holm had also bought other stocks, especially those in companies that specialized in health research. + Her lawyer, Dale Park, sometimes accompanied her on her teddy bear trips to the hospital, and they saw some almost unbearably said situations. Miss Holm was always profoundly shaken. + "We would leave the hospital," he said, "and neither one of us could talk." + Seven years ago, friends got a hint that Miss Holm might have a little money socked away when she decided to throw herself a lavish party for her 80th birthday and had distant relatives flown in from Norway. + She had been weakened by osteoarthritis for many years. And at the end of her party, she fell and broke her leg. She was bedridden for the rest of her life. + While Miss Holm lived in a modest apartment on Central Avenue in Evanston, she woned a king-size bed red Cadillac. + In her will, she left the car to a woman who had cared for her in recent years, on three conditions. First, the car must be perfectly restored, at Miss Holm's expense. Second, the Cadillac must follow the hearse during her funeral. Third, the big red car must make one final trip around the block where she lived in Evanston, as a farewell. + Because Miss Holm had no immediate family and had outlived most of her friends, her funeral was sparsely attended. Only 25 to 30 people came to pay respects. There were not enough men to carry the casket, so a graveyard worker was asked to help. + After the burial, the church pastor told those in attendance that Miss Holm had made arrangements with a restaurant across from the cemetery. She had picked out a menu and left money to pay for lunch for everybody. + The pastor delivered her final request: "She asks that you talk about the good times." + The hospital held a memorial service on Wednesday to honor Miss Holm. A teddy bear was place on every seat. + +LOAD-DATE: August 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Gladys Holm, shown in an undated photograph with her boss, Foster G. McGaw, turned small opportunities into a giant legacy to a hospital. (Associated Press) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +409 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 4, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Harold Sheppard, 75, Teacher And Researcher on the Elderly + +BYLINE: By WOLFGANG SAXON + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 320 words + +Harold Lloyd Sheppard, who studied and wrote about the aging of America, particularly in the workplace, died on July 10 at St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa, Fla. He was 75 and lived in Clearwater, Fla. +The cause of death was heart failure, his family said. + Dr. Sheppard was the White House counselor on aging in the Carter Administration. At his death, he was a professor of gerontology at the University of South Florida in Tampa. +In the late 1950's, he took part in an innovative study of older workers who faced the loss of their jobs at a Packard automobile plant in Detroit. His research was published in a 1959 book he co-wrote, "Too Old to Work, Too Young to Retire: A Case Study of a Permanent Plant Shutdown." +Dr. Sheppard combined a teaching career with work with government agencies, labor unions and private groups concerned about the problems of an aging population. He directed the International Exchange Center on Gerontology at the University of South Florida from 1983 to 1991. +He was born in Baltimore and received a master's degree in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1945 and a doctorate in sociology and anthropology from the University of Wisconsin in 1949. +Dr. Sheppard taught at Wayne State University in Detroit, lectured in France and Germany and held various research and staff positions in government agencies and private organizations that focused on age discrimination and retirement. +He was the author, co-author or editor of several books, including "Where Have All the Robots Gone?" (Free Press, 1972), "The Graying of Working America" (Free Press, 1979) and "The Future of Older Workers" (University of South Florida, 1990). +Dr. Sheppard is survived by a son, Mark, of Detroit; a daughter, Jenny-Ann Graf Sheppard of Chicago; his companion, Lisl Schick of Clearwater, and a brother, Norman Silverman, and sister, Tresa Hughes, both of Manhattan. + +NAME: Harold Lloyd Sheppard + +LOAD-DATE: August 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +410 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 4, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Once Prized, Japan's Elderly Feel Abandoned and Fearful + +BYLINE: By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1959 words + +DATELINE: OMIYA, Japan + +As Kuni Kanbe fusses over the frail figure of her 84-year-old husband, gaunt and bedridden with cancer, she thinks of her four children, all sympathetic and loving -- and a long way away. +When she married 56 years ago, Mrs. Kanbe recalled softly, she lived with her husband's parents and cared for them as they aged and sickened and died. But now, as she and her husband struggle with age and sickness in this little town in central Japan, her house is full of emptiness and resounds with the deafening absence of her grandchildren. + "I took care of my parents-in-law, but nobody will take care of me," she said resignedly. +"I suppose," she mused, and for the first time a hint of bitterness crept into her tone, "it's better for young people this way." +The sense of unfairness endured so stoically by Mrs. Kanbe is common among the elderly in Japan even though, by everyone's standards but their own, the Japanese are models of filial piety. Some 55 percent of Japanese over the age of 65 live with their children, compared with fewer than 20 percent in the United States and virtually every other industrial country. +Indeed, as the baby-boom generation approaches retirement, threatening the bankruptcy of social security systems across the globe, Japan in one sense seems to be the best-positioned of all major countries. It has a flexible and caring system that might be able to cope with retirement of the baby boomers: the family. If retirees can depend on their children for care, the nation is likely to survive the demographic upheaval relatively smoothly. +Yet in the winding alleys of little towns like Omiya, a farming community in the mist-shrouded hills of the Kii Peninsula nearly 200 miles southwest of Tokyo, the mood is one of disquiet. +A revolutionary shift in attitudes toward the elderly appears to be under way in Japan, and to some extent in Korea and China as well. One result is that now for the first time a considerable share of the elderly in East Asia are growing old apart from their children, and the resulting loneliness and guilt and resentments cast a long shadow on family life across the region. +Even if a bit more than half of people over 65 live with their children in Japan, the proportion has plummeted from 80 percent as recently as 1970. Surveys suggest that Japanese attitudes are changing very rapidly and that many young Japanese feel even less of a debt to their parents than do young Americans. +"Young people are scary," Mrs. Kanbe reflected soberly, as she kneeled on the tatami-mat floor a few feet from her sick husband. "The reason young people can kill humans as if they were insects, or fail to understand the feelings of their own parents, is mostly because they haven't had proper moral education. +"I'm scared of young people now." +Such comments are particularly surprising because Mrs. Kanbe is, by Western standards, well cared for by her children. They visit regularly, and her sons have asked her to come and live with them after her husband dies. +Yet she and many elderly women like her are reluctant to move in with their children because they know they would not occupy the traditional throne of the mother-in-law, that of matriarch of the household. Instead they would be guests, staying by the grace of their daughters-in-law. +Japanese families are sometimes built more on proximity than closeness, and tensions revolve in particular around the traditional axis of home life in East Asia: relations between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Deng Xiaoping, during his leadership of China, once gave a major national speech on mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relations; in East Asia, this tie is a central one in society. +Mainly this is because men are out working most of the time and pay little attention to child rearing, so it is the two women who spend the days together and who do battle over the children's future. +In a growing number of cases, this divide between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law has led elderly people to move in, not with their eldest son -- the age-old custom -- but instead with a daughter. +"Life is upside down now," complained Akemi Hayashi, an 83-year-old widow who lives alone and who has not even received an invitation to live with any of her three children. "The daughter-in-law is on top, and Granny is a nuisance." +Mrs. Hayashi, who was tending her vegetable garden beside a highway, sat down on the grass and grumbled delightedly about the times. The term for widow in Japanese, mibojin, means "a person who has not yet died," and Mrs. Hayashi's plight, as such a person awaiting death and living alone, sends a shudder down the spine of any traditional Japanese. Yet it is becoming steadily more common. The proportion of elderly living alone has almost doubled since the early 1970's, to 13 percent. +"There are tough-talking daughters-in-law around here," Mrs. Hayashi said, "so the grannies just sit around in the shadows and complain." +What if she becomes ill and cannot care for herself? +"I just hope that I die a quick death," she answered promptly. + +The Tradition +Loyalty to Parents: The Core of Society +The elderly grumble in part because they grew up steeped in concepts of filial piety that once pervaded not only Japan but also China and Korea and other countries influenced by Confucianism. In Japan, in fact, filial devotion traditionally ran a close second to loyalty to one's feudal lord, but in the mid-19th century a new Government tried to subvert feudalistic loyalties by re-emphasizing the primacy of filial piety. +Schools taught famous stories about filial piety, like the tale of the couple who decided, after running out of food, to kill their child so they would have more to feed their parents. They were rewarded for this when they dug the child's grave and found a treasure. +Those were legends, but in the 19th century in the town of Matsue in Japan a real 15-year-old girl named Omasu won acclaim for her piety. She was summoned by a judge to give testimony against her father in a theft case, and she grew fearful of saying something that might get him in trouble. So she paused, and suddenly blood came gushing from her mouth. +Omasu had bitten off her tongue. She survived, unable ever to speak again, and her father was acquitted. A wealthy merchant so admired her devotion that he married her and looked after her father in his old age. +By that exalted standard, it is easier to see that weekend visits from a son fall a bit short. +After World War II, Japan reorganized itself socially and cast off many traditions, like the classes in shushin, or moral education, which had drummed the idea of filial piety into schoolchildren. The notion of special reverence for parents faded, and two years ago Japan even abandoned its traditional law decreeing a harsher punishment for the slaying of a parent or parent-in-law than for other murders. +"In the old days we had shushin to teach us filial piety," said Masae Minami, 86, the matriarch of a family that runs a clothing store in Omiya. "But now that's all gone. I think the old system was better, because society has become very chaotic. Now it's as if you can do anything you like to parents." +That seemed a trifle like hyperbole, because as Mrs. Minami grumbled, she was surrounded by relatives from four generations of her family, all deferring with great respect to her and her 91-year-old husband, Suezo. +So what is there to complain about? +Three patterns of unfilial behavior came to light in her household: the teen-agers show no interest in watching the samurai television dramas that their great-grandparents adore; the younger generations like to eat meat instead of the austere rice dishes favored by the elders, and no one observes the old custom of letting Grandpa take a bath first. +"In the old days," Mrs. Minami lamented, "the master of the house would bathe first, and no one could eat until he came home and was ready to eat. That's all gone now." + +The New Generation +Caring for Elderly: Shame Is a Motive +Evidence of a far-reaching change of attitudes toward the elderly emerges from opinion polls in which younger Japanese now come across as less devoted to parents than Americans are. +When a broad range of people in both countries were asked what a child's responsibility is to parents who have become disabled, Americans were twice as likely as Japanese to choose the most devoted answer: "Children should look after their parents, even if they have to make sacrifices." +Conversely, Japanese were twice as likely to choose the answer at the other end of the spectrum: "Because children have their own responsibilities, there is no need for them to look after their parents." +Why do Japanese invite their parents to live with them so regularly, even if they do not feel any strong moral debt to them? Why do they act more devoted than they feel? +One explanation may be strong social pressure and a culture of shame, as fundamental a force in Japan as gravity. Even if middle-aged Japanese feel no moral obligation to look after their parents, they would be humiliated by the gossip if they packed them off to a nursing home. +This pressure may explain why only 2 percent of the country's elderly live in nursing homes or similar institutions, compared with 5 percent in America. +"Only recently are people letting their parents enter these facilities," said Dr. Yoshihisa Yamazaki, director of the Firefly Nursing Home, nestled on the edge of a valley against a forested hillside. "Most Japanese basically feel that they should take care of their parents by themselves." +One indication that a good chunk of Japan's filial piety may be a result of community pressure is that once children overcome their reluctance and put their parents in a nursing home, they do not often visit. +"For some families," Dr. Yamazaki said, "visits become very rare, so that the only contact we have with them is a discussion every three months about whether to renew the contract." He added that some people arranged "temporary" stays for bedridden parents, and then hoped the parents would not recover enough to go home. +"We try to help those bedridden old people so that they can walk again," Dr. Yamazaki said. "But family members tell us they don't want their parents walking again." + +The Social Setting +A Role for Grandma: Helping at Home +Ironically, the decline in multigenerational living is coming just as it is beginning to offer more practical advantages than before. As in most of the industrialized world, the proportion of mothers in the work force has risen steadily, and it is far easier for a mother to get a job if grandparents are around to help look after the children. +Partly for this reason, the latest boom in Japanese home styles is in the "multigeneration" house. It typically includes a separate wing for the grandparents, with their own entrance, bathroom and kitchen. The idea is to share a home while avoiding a situation in which the elderly wake everyone up when they rise at dawn each day. +A few years ago Kazufumi and Taka Sakai tried a similar compromise, living next to their children instead of with them. Mr. and Mrs. Sakai moved out of their son's home but built a new house right next door. +"My main thought when building this was that by living separately we could avoid troubles," said Mr. Sakai, 66, and he says it is a near-perfect arrangement. There are no longer strains about what to make for dinner, and the grandchildren still drop in all the time to propose a game of catch. +"Grandpa's O.K. at softball," allowed Mr. Sakai's 8-year-old grandson, Fumiya, during one pop-in visit. "But he's not quite good enough to make the third-grade team." + +LOAD-DATE: August 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +SERIES: MAIN STREET, JAPAN: Generations Apart + +GRAPHIC: Photo: In Japan, many elderly parents feel a loss of honor as they cope without the traditional support of their children. In the town of Omiya, Kuni Kanbe, 76, cares for her husband, 84, who is bedridden with cancer. (Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times)(pg. A4) + +Map showing the location of Omiya, Japan: In Omiya, far from their family's care, one aging couple struggles. (pg. A4) + +TYPE: Series + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +411 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 5, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Jeanne Calment, World's Elder, Dies at 122 + +BYLINE: By CRAIG R. WHITNEY + +SECTION: Section B; Page 8; Column 4; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 764 words + +DATELINE: PARIS, Aug. 4 + +Jeanne Calment, born a year before Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone and 14 years before Alexandre Gustave Eiffel built his tower, died today in a nursing home in Arles. At 122, she was the oldest person whose age had been verified by official documents. +Jean-Marie Robine, a public health researcher who is one of the authors of a book about Mrs. Calment, said she had been in good health, though almost blind and deaf, as recently as a month ago. + The French, who celebrated her as the doyenne of humanity, had their own theories about why she lived so long, noting that she used to eat more than two pounds of chocolate a week and treat her skin with olive oil, rode a bicycle until she was 100, and only quit smoking five years ago. +Longevity ran in the family; Mrs. Calment's mother lived until she was 86 and her father until he was 93. But Mr. Robine said her great strength was her unflappability. +"I think she was someone who, constitutionally and biologically speaking, was immune to stress," he said in a telephone interview. "She once said, 'If you can't do anything about it, don't worry about it.' " +Jeanne Louise Calment's claim to fame is the Feb. 21, 1875, listing in the birth register in Arles, the southern French city where she began her days and ended them. +She was 12 or 13 when she saw Vincent Van Gogh in Arles, and she said later that he was "very ugly, ungracious, impolite, sick -- I forgive him, they called him loco." +She married a cousin, Fernand Nicolas Calment, in 1896. As the prosperous owner of a store in Arles, he was able to support her in style, and she never had to work. She played tennis, took up roller skating, bicycling and swimming and took great pleasure in joining the hunting parties he organized. She also studied the piano and enjoyed the opera. +Her husband, 46 when World War I broke out, was too old for military service. His business survived the Depression, but a dessert of spoiled preserved cherries killed him, but not his wife, in 1942. +They had one child, a daughter, Yvonne, whose marriage to Joseph Billot produced a single child, Frederic Billot, in 1926. Eight years later, Yvonne died of pneumonia, and Mrs. Calment raised her grandson in the family home. He became a medical doctor and died before her, in an automobile accident in 1960. +Mrs. Calment rode a bicycle until she was 100 and walked all over Arles to thank those who congratulated her on her birthday that year. +At age 110 her increasing frailty forced her to move into a nursing home. "She complained about the food in the nursing home, which was sort of like baby food," Mr. Robine said today. "She said it always tasted the same." +At the age of 115, she fell and fractured two bones, and her memory began to fail. But she retained a tart wit. "When you're 117, you see if you remember everything!" she rebuked an interviewer five years ago. When somebody took leave by telling her, "Until next year, perhaps," she retorted: "I don't see why not! You don't look so bad to me." +By the time she turned 122, she was so hard of hearing that it was difficult to communicate with her. +The name of the person who has taken Mrs. Calment's place as oldest living human was a topic of considerable international confusion today. Philip Littlemore of the Guinness Book of World Records in London said the oldest known person whose date of birth was as well documented as Mrs. Calment's was Lucy Askew, a British woman who turned 104 last Sept. 8. But several others may also have claim to the title, including at least one in the United States. +Mrs. Calment left no heirs. She also outlived Andre-Francois Raffray, a lawyer who 32 years ago, when she was merely 90, bought the apartment she used to live in on a contingency contract. He would pay her 2,500 francs (now about $400) a month until she died, and then the apartment would become his. +Mr. Raffray died a year ago at 77, after paying Mrs. Calment more than $180,000, better than double the apartment's market value. His family was still paying when she died. +"In life, one sometimes makes bad deals," Mrs. Calment said. +Mr. Raffray's widow, Huguette, told French radio tonight: "She was a personality. My husband had very good relations with Mrs. Calment." +Michel Vauzelle, the Mayor of Arles, said: "She was Jeanne the Arlesienne, one whose picture went around the world. But above all, she was the living memory of our city." +She may be most famous in France for her many bons mots. One of them was: "I've never had but one wrinkle, and I'm sitting on it." + +NAME: Jeanne Calment + +LOAD-DATE: August 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Jeanne Calment, believed to be the world's oldest person, died yesterday. (Associated Press, 1995) + + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +412 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 5, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +New Flexibility For Medicare, But at a Price + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1147 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 + +The budget bill awaiting President Clinton's signature includes two new health insurance options that give Medicare beneficiaries greater freedom to choose their doctors and hospitals, but also exposes elderly patients to much higher costs. +The options, which represent a radical departure from current Medicare policy, are likely to appeal to rugged individualists who resent Government interference with their medical care and can afford to pay more for it. + The new alternatives would allow elderly people to drop out of the standard Medicare program, spend their own money and avoid the limits imposed by managed care and Medicare fee schedules. +Under current law, doctors can be prosecuted if they charge Medicare beneficiaries more than the amounts allowed by the Government, even if patients are willing to pay the extra fees. +Doctors are generally required to submit claims for all services covered by Medicare, and Federal officials have said it is illegal for doctors to sign private contracts with Medicare patients for services covered by the program. +John C. Rother, chief lobbyist at the American Association of Retired Persons, said, "Beneficiaries who choose these options will probably see higher costs and fewer protections, compared with the regular Medicare program." +Mr. Clinton plans to sign the budget and tax bills on Tuesday. +One option, championed by Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, allows Medicare beneficiaries to sign private contracts with doctors for any medical service at any price. The doctors could charge patients far more than the amounts allowed under Medicare's fee schedule. Neither doctor nor patient would submit a claim to Medicare, and the Government would not make any payment for any of the services covered by private contracts. Patients would have to pay all of the costs with their own money, or private insurance. +Thus, while patients would continue paying Medicare premiums and could rely on Medicare for basic services, they might pay extra to obtain the services of a well-known cancer specialist or brain surgeon, for example. +Under the second option, Medicare beneficiaries would enroll in private health plans that gave patients freedom to choose their doctors and hospitals. Medicare would make fixed monthly payments to such health plans, and there would be no limit on the premiums that the health plans could charge patients. The health plans would have to pay doctors a separate fee for each service and could not impose financial penalties on doctors who ordered large numbers of tests and procedures. +These "private fee-for-service plans" are intended to avoid the restrictions of health maintenance organizations, which typically require patients to use specified doctors and hospitals and often reduce the compensation of doctors who exceed their budgets. +Supporters of these options say they are trying to return Medicare to the way it was at its creation in 1965, when the Government assured patients of "free choice" and promised doctors they would be reimbursed for their "reasonable charges." +The Clinton Administration and the American Association of Retired Persons opposed the new alternatives, saying they would increase costs for beneficiaries and siphon off healthy, wealthy patients, leaving sicker, more expensive patients in the standard Medicare program. Premiums for people remaining in the program would probably rise. +Donna E. Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, said, "We could have some extraordinary human tragedies" if older people chose these options without fully understanding that they might have to pay much higher costs. +The American Medical Association supported the new options, as did the National Right to Life Committee, which said patients should be free to spend their own money to get life-saving medical treatments. +Burke J. Balch, director of medical ethics at the National Right to Life Committee, hailed the new fee-for-service option as a way to protect older Americans against the dangers of rationing health care. Such rationing, Mr. Balch said, will become inevitable as Medicare payments fall further behind rising medical costs. +Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California, said, "These provisions, for rich doctors and rich patients, start to unravel Medicare's social safety net." Mr. Stark said the budget bill encouraged doctors to establish "boutique health care centers for the privileged few who can afford the extra charges." +In general, the bill encourages Medicare beneficiaries to join H.M.O.'s, Mr. Stark said. But, he said, the new options allow the richest doctors and patients to "avoid the inconveniences of managed care." +Mr. Balch said "the National Right to Life Committee originally developed the idea" of a private free-for-service Medicare option in 1995. "Since its inception," he said, "the pro-life movement has fought against euthanasia as well as abortion. When people are denied life-saving treatment against their will, that's a form of involuntary euthanasia." +This year, Mr. Balch said, "we were involved in writing the language" of the new fee-for-service option with Republican leaders of Congress. Under this option, he said, "older Americans can voluntarily add their own money to Government Medicare payments in order to get unrationed, unmanaged private health insurance." +Clinton Administration officials summoned lobbyists for the American Association of Retired Persons to the Capitol on July 26 to discuss the proposal. The bill was modified to guarantee that Medicare beneficiaries would be told of the possibility of extra costs before they enrolled in a private fee-for-service health plan. +The National Right to Life Committee contends older Americans may have a problem finding doctors who will treat them unless they supplement what Medicare pays. +A Federal advisory panel, the Physician Payment Review Commission, has estimated that Medicare pays doctors 70 percent of what private insurers pay. +Mr. Kyl's amendment makes clear that a doctor may enter into "a private contract with a Medicare beneficiary for any item or service," at any price. The contract must clearly indicate to the beneficiary that Medicare will not pay for such services. In addition, the doctor must sign an affidavit promising not to file Medicare claims for any service provided to any beneficiary for two years. +Psychiatrists led the way in supporting Mr. Kyl's proposal. Jay B. Cutler, director of government relations at the American Psychiatric Association, said: "For many years, psychiatrists have wanted the right to sign private contracts with Medicare patients, with no reimbursement from the Federal Government, because the doctors were concerned about the confidentiality of medical records and did not want the Government looking over their shoulders." + + +LOAD-DATE: August 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +413 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 5, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +A California Man Earns Distinction for the Ages + +BYLINE: By TIM GOLDEN + +SECTION: Section A; Page 12; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 731 words + +DATELINE: SAN RAFAEL, Calif., Aug. 4 + +With the passing today of a 122-year-old woman in France, Christian Mortensen, 114, expects to be recognized soon by the appropriate authorities as the oldest person in the world. +It was clear today that he was prepared to rest on his laurels. + Not that there is any shortage of activity available to Chris, as he is fondly called by the much-younger women who attend to him at Aldersly Garden Retirement Community in this leafy suburb of San Francisco. +This afternoon, for instance, Mr. Mortensen sang a bit, soaked up the Marin County sun and smoked a rather fat cigar. Although he is blind and nearly deaf, he valiantly held court for a small mob of photographers and reporters. +As a journalistic challenge, the news conference was perhaps not unlike Bob Woodward's last interview with the Reagan Administration's Director of Central Intelligence, William J. Casey. Like Mr. Casey, Mr. Mortensen seemed determined to leave certain subjects clouded in mystery. Over and over, he said, "I don't get it." Only later did it become obvious that the retirement home's activity director, Linda Stucky, had done an amateurish job of trimming Mr. Mortensen's cigar; he was not getting the smoke. +Yet there was an obvious difference between Mr. Mortensen and Mr. Casey: Mr. Mortensen had the help of an eager press agent. +"All the homes have them now," the agent, Sharon Cooke, explained as she hurried after Mr. Mortensen's wheelchair with a packet of fresh Aldersly information kits. "The competition is fierce, especially in Marin." +In a world of wealthy professionals looking for the best care they might find for elderly relatives, Mr. Mortensen's longevity speaks for itself. He has been happily retired since 1950. +"It feels good to know," Mr. Mortensen said today, apparently referring to his new status as the oldest of the old. He paused for some time. "Have a good life." He paused again. "But I am the oldest. She died, and I am the oldest." +Even before Mr. Mortensen laid claim to the title, however, a dispute appeared to have broken out. +A spokesman for Guinness Publications, Clive Carpenter, told The Associated Press today in London that the firm had unconfirmed news of a 118-year-old woman living in California. Another woman, in Brazil, Maria do Carmo Geronimo, claims that she is 126, but she has thus far been kept out of the Guinness Book of World Records because of some questions surrounding her baptismal papers, which were issued by Roman Catholic missionaries. +Mr. Mortensen had already taken firm hold of the unofficial title of World's Oldest Man on the strength of documents recording the birth in Skaarup, Denmark, of Thomas Peter Thorvald Kristian Ferdinand Mortensen on Aug. 16, 1882 -- the same year that James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Franklin D. Roosevelt were born. +In an article last year in The Gerontologist, John R. Wilmoth, a professor of demography at the University of California at Berkeley, followed Mr. Mortensen's paper trail from the parish of Fruering in Denmark and the 1901 Danish census, on to Ellis Island and the floor of the Continental Can Company in Chicago, where Mr. Mortensen made cans from 1929 until his retirement. +In a letter written more than two years ago, Dr. Wilmoth said that even before his 113th birthday, Mr. Mortensen might have been close to the record as the oldest, reliably documented person who ever lived. +But today Dr. Wilmoth sounded more equivocal. He has become a friend of Mr. Mortensen's, but he is also a don't-call-'em-before-you-see-'em social scientist. +"I don't know if it's really true that he's the oldest," the demographer said. "It could be that there's some woman somewhere." +Mr. Mortensen himself evinced no such doubt. +"Yipee-ay-oooh!" he sang. "Yipee-ay-yay!" +Questioned further about his passions, Mr. Mortensen told a story about one of his brothers, who was about 90 years old and would play poker as long as anybody wanted to play. +For his part, Mr. Mortensen said he had especially liked the time he spent as a cowboy in Denmark. +"I wouldn't mind being a cowboy again," he said. "A cowboy is a healthy life -- to live with the cows." +Mr. Mortensen seemed less romantic about women, one of whom he briefly married. +"The cows -- that's a happy life," he said. +But did he have many girlfriends? +"No, no. I didn't live with girlfriends. I lived with cows." + +NAME: Christian Mortensen + +LOAD-DATE: August 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: August 8, 1997, Friday + + CORRECTION: +Because of an editing error, an article on Monday about Christian Mortensen, who, with the death of a 122-year-old woman in France, may now be the oldest person in the world, misstated a demographer's comment about him. John R. Wilmoth, a professor of demography at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote two years ago that even before his 113th birthday, Mr. Mortensen might have been close to the record as the oldest reliably documented man who ever lived, not the oldest person. + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Christian Mortensen of San Rafael, Calif., is now believed to be the oldest person in the world. He was born in Denmark on Aug. 16, 1882. (Audrey Shehyn for The New York Times) + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +414 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 8, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Frank F. Furstenberg, Doctor, 92 + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 144 words + +Dr. Frank Folke Furstenberg, a Baltimore physician and an advocate of national health care legislation in the 1940's, died on Tuesday at his home. He was 92 and lived in Baltimore. +Dr. Furstenberg was the director of the Sinai Hospital Medical Care Clinic in Baltimore and served on the Executive Committee for the Nation's Health, which lobbied for the Wagner-Murray-Dinger national health care bill, introduced in 1943. In the 1970's, he became an advocate for the elderly and served as vice-chairman of the Baltimore City Commission on the Aging. + He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Edith Hollander Furstenberg; three daughters, Carla Cohen of Washington and Ellen and Anne Furstenberg, both of Philadelphia; three sons Frank Jr., of Philadelphia, Mark, of Washington, and Michael, of Newton, Mass.; 12 grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren. + +LOAD-DATE: August 8, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +415 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 9, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Minister Is Found Stabbed to Death + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 27; Column 6; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 204 words + +An elderly woman who only two years ago became an ordained Baptist minister was found stabbed to death yesterday in the living room of her Brooklyn home. +The body of the woman, Bette B. Buffa, 74, was found on a couch in her Flatlands home around 9 A.M. by a health care worker who came daily to tend Mrs. Buffa's 81-year-old husband, Elliot, who suffered a stroke several years ago. + Mrs. Buffa had been stabbed several times in the neck and chest by an assailant who appeared to have entered the couple's row house through a back door, said Chief William Taylor of the Brooklyn police. +"The place was tossed and the dresser drawers were empty," he said. "We believe property was taken, and we believe it was by somebody she knew." Mrs. Buffa's car was missing from the driveway. +Mr. Buffa, a retired transit worker, was sitting up in bed near his dead wife and seemed to be in shock when the police arrived. He appeared to have witnessed the crime, they said, but since he was unable to speak, they could not question him. He was taken to Beth Israel Hospital. +Chief Taylor said that the police are looking into assertions by neighbors who said that they heard Mrs. Buffa arguing with someone Thursday night. + +LOAD-DATE: August 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +416 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 9, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Despite Indictment, Hikind Is Supported by a Party Chief + +BYLINE: By JOSEPH P. FRIED + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 27; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 517 words + +Although he has broken with his party to support Republicans in major races in the past, State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, the Brooklyn Democrat indicted on Thursday on charges of stealing Government funds, can still count on the support of his party's local leadership, the Brooklyn Democratic chief said yesterday. +"No one has given a hint of opposing him" in next year's Assembly election, "and if they did they would not have our support," Assemblyman Clarence Norman Jr., the chairman of the Kings County Democratic Party, said. + Mr. Hikind, a conservative Democrat and one of the most outspoken political figures among the city's Orthodox Jews, has supported such prominent Republicans as Alfonse M. D'Amato in his race for the Senate, George E. Pataki in his successful effort to unseat Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, and Rudolph W. Giuliani in his mayoral race. But in more local races, Mr. Norman said, "Dov has been with us." +Mr. Norman cited last year's Democratic primary for Brooklyn surrogate judge in which Mr. Hikind supported Mr. Norman's candidate, Michael H. Feinberg, against Lila Gold, the candidate supported by Mr. Norman's rival for party leadership, Anthony J. Genovesi. Mr. Hikind's support of Mr. Feinberg was an important factor in securing Mr. Feinberg's victory, Mr. Norman said. "Dov has been very supportive of myself and our political endeavors in Brooklyn," he said. +"I think he'll ultimately be vindicated," Mr. Norman said, referring to the criminal charges against Mr. Hikind, who represents Borough Park and nearby areas of Brooklyn. "I've known him a long time; his integrity is above reproach, and an indictment is nothing more than a charge." +Mr. Hikind, who is 47 and a 15-year veteran of the Assembly, is accused in the Federal indictment of receiving at least $40,000 in payoffs from officials of a social-services group in return for obtaining hundreds of thousands of dollars in state funds for the group and its affiliates. The group, the Council of Jewish Organizations of Boro Park, known as COJO, also received millions of dollars a year in Federal and city funds for its programs of job training and aid to businesses, immigrants, the elderly and others. +Mr. Hikind is accused of receiving the payoffs in the form of payments for school and day-camp tuition for his children and other relatives, payments for family trips to Israel and France and payments for various politically related activities. On Thursday he denounced the charges as "baseless and politically motivated" and vowed to fight them while remaining in office "to serve my constituents and community." +He is to be arraigned on the indictment on Monday in Federal District Court in Brooklyn. If convicted on the most serious charge, misappropriation of Federal funds, Mr. Hikind could receive up to 10 years in prison. A conviction would also bring immediate expulsion from the Assembly. +While Mr. Norman expressed strong support of Mr. Hikind, a spokesman for Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, one of the state's top Democrats, said Mr. Silver had no comment on the indictment. + +LOAD-DATE: August 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +417 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 10, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +SUNDAY, AUGUST 10, 1997: LAW ENFORCEMENT; +Welcome, Incorrigibles + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 17; Column 1; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 288 words + +Tomorrow marks the 63d anniversary of the opening of Alcatraz as a Federal prison. (It closed after 29 years in 1963.) This weekend, a dozen or so former inmates and correctional officers are gathered on the site of the most infamous jail in America to talk to the public, sign autobiographies and reminisce about the bad old days. Other activities include a (voluntary) sleepover in the cramped, chilly cells that a handful of these senior citizens once called home. + The annual event was conceived a few years back to reunite the dwindling population of Alcatraz veterans, and memories are obviously still a bit painful. Nathan Glenn Williams, an 84-year-old former bank robber, says that during his first sleepover in 1994, I didn't sleep much -- it was too much. Jim Quillen, 77, a retired robber/kidnapper/burglar/prison escapee, reports the same. Very traumatic, he says. Alcatraz, after all, was where the most hardened, difficult career criminals were sent and forgotten, including Al Capone, George (Machine Gun) Kelly and Robert (the Birdman of Alcatraz) Stroud. Quillen, who served time in the 1940's, doesn't have fond memories of his 10-year stretch. Alcatraz was designed, operated and worked to break you, he says, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. +So why come back? Mainly for the company. To their mutual surprise, the ex-cons and ex-guards have found that, by and large, they like one another. We get along great," says George DeVincenzi, a former guard. Quillen agrees, mentioning an old captain of the guards, Phil Bergen, who was instrumental in trying to kill 26 of us in D-block during a 1946 riot. But the guy's 92 years old, he says. What's the point of being angry at him now? + +LOAD-DATE: August 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +418 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 10, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Q. & A. + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 8; Column 6; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 638 words + + +Realty Tax Exemption For Elderly + +Q. Is it true that the New York City Finance Department offers a special property tax exemption for the elderly? What is the amount of the exemption and what are the eligibility requirements? . . . Gilbert Munkooly, East Elmhurst, Queens. +A. The Department of Finance offers exemptions of 5 percent to 50 percent on New York City real estate taxes for qualified property owners. Generally, to qualify for the Senior Citizens Property Tax Exemption, a property owner must be 65 or older on or before Dec. 31 of the year in which benefits will begin. + In the case of a married couple or siblings who are co-owners, only one of the pair needs to meet that requirement. In the case of unrelated co-owners, both must be 65 or older. In all cases, the applicant or applicants must live in the property and must have held title for at least 12 consecutive months before March 15 of the year the exemption goes into effect. Eligible properties include one-, two- or three-family houses, condominium units and co-op apartments. +The combined total income for all owners from all sources must be less than $26,900, including Social Security. (Applicants are authorized to deduct unreimbursed medical and prescription expenses when calculating total household income.) +The amount of the exemption is based on a sliding scale geared to the total combined income. So, for example, a household with total income of $26,899 would qualify for a 5 percent exemption while a household with a total income of $18,500 or less would result in a 50 percent exemption. +The annual filing period for the exemption runs from July 15 through March 15. Applications and additional information may be obtained from the New York City Department of Finance by calling (718) 935-9500. + +Impound Accounts For Mortgages + +Q. What are impound accounts and why do some mortgage lenders require them? . . . J.W. Dearborn, Forest Hills, Queens. +A. Robert B. Withers, president of Withers & Company, a mortgage lender in New Rochelle, N.Y., said the letter writer's use of the term impound account appears to be a reference to the escrow accounts most residential lenders require when providing a mortgage loan for the purchase of a home. +In most cases, Mr. Withers said, a lender will require a borrower to deposit with the lender a sum sufficient to enable the lender to pay the borrower's property taxes and fire insurance premiums when they are due. Typically, he said, amounts due from the borrower are spread out over the year and are included in the monthly mortgage payment. +In addition, Mr. Withers said, to insure that the lender will always be somewhat ahead of the borrower, most lenders require that a cushion of two or three months' escrow payments be made at the time of closing in case taxes or insurance premiums increase from one year to the next. Monthly escrow payments are adjusted each year to account for such changes, he said. +The reason lenders insist on escrow accounts, Mr. Withers said, is to protect their investment. If a fire insurance policy lapses for nonpayment, for example, a significant portion of the lender's collateral will be lost if a fire destroys the structure. +Lenders also insist that property taxes be paid when due, Mr. Withers said, because if a borrower fails to pay them, and the municipality places a lien on the property, the municipality's lien supersedes the lender's lien and must ultimately be repaid -- with interest and penalties -- thereby potentially reducing the lender's collateral. +Mr. Withers pointed out that there are times when a lender may elect to forgo the payment of escrows. Such situations occur, however, only when there is sufficient equity in the property to enable the lender to feel comfortable in face of the risks. + +LOAD-DATE: August 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Question + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +419 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 10, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THE NEW TAX LAW: Amid Complexity, Opportunities Abound; +Beyond Medicare: New Choices in Health Insurance + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 4; Column 2; Money and Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 722 words + +For all Washington's celebratory mood over the nation's first major tax cut in 16 years, Congress and the Clinton Administration hardly issued an open invitation to the party. Rather than an across-the-board tax cut, the $96 billion package is a series of narrowly focused measures intended to achieve specific goals. How much you benefit depends on your personal circumstances. Here is a guide to achieving key financial objectives under the new rules. +IN theory, the new budget law will create a supermarket of health insurance options for older Americans. +Today, most people 65 and older are in the standard Medicare program, which pays a separate fee for each service. The new law creates a parallel "Medicare+Choice" program, with several alternatives. + * Elderly people can enroll in health maintenance organizations. About 4.4 million of the 38 million Medicare beneficiaries are already in H.M.O.'s, and enrollment is sure to increase, as these health plans will find it more profitable to sign up Medicare beneficiaries in rural areas and some medium-size cities. +* Older people can also get care through "preferred provider organizations," which send patients to a select group of doctors but let them go outside the network for an extra charge. And doctors and hospitals will be able to form their own health plans -- to be known as provider-sponsored organizations -- to compete for Medicare business. +* Elderly people can establish "medical savings accounts" to pay their routine medical bills, while buying private insurance to cover catastrophic expenses, all subsidized by several thousand dollars a year of Federal money. +* Medicare beneficiaries can enroll in private fee-for-service health plans, which would offer unlimited choice of doctors and hospitals. Patients would use their own money to supplement Federal Medicare money, and there would be no limit on the premiums that patients might be charged. +* Beneficiaries may sign private contracts with doctors for particular services. This option may appeal to some affluent people who want to avoid all the constraints of managed care, but there is a price: Medicare will not pay any of the bill, and the doctors may charge substantially more than fees deemed reasonable by Medicare. +Patients should be cautious in choosing any of these new options, as costs may be higher, and protections fewer, than under the standard Medicare program or in H.M.O.'s. +For several years, Medicare beneficiaries will be able to get out of H.M.O.'s with just a month's notice. But after 2002 beneficiaries can be locked into an H.M.O. for nine months before being allowed to switch. +Elderly patients who try out managed care need to think about whether they will be able to get supplementary Medigap insurance if they return to the fee-for-service Medicare program. Many people leaving H.M.O.'s have medical problems; Medigap insurers might not cover their pre-existing conditions, or the premiums might be very high. But, under the new law, beneficiaries will be able to obtain Medigap policies if they return to the traditional program within 12 months of their first enrollment in a Medicare+Choice plan -- or if they move out of the health plan's service area. +The basic Medicare premium paid by beneficiaries, now $43.80 a month, will rise faster under the new law than previously. The monthly premium is scheduled to reach $67 in 2002, compared with $51.50 projected for that year under the old law. Beneficiaries with low incomes will be eligible for Federal help in paying their premiums. +The budget law offers new or expanded Medicare coverage for preventive health services, including mammograms, Pap smears and screening for cancer of the prostate and colon. Medicare will now pay for tests to detect osteoporosis in some women and for training, education and blood-testing strips for diabetics. +The new law will impose new limits on elderly patients' share of their bills for hospital outpatient services. +Elderly people escaped two onerous new burdens considered this year, an increase in the eligibility age for Medicare and imposing still higher premiums on higher-income beneficiaries. Baby boomers, beware: those proposals are sure to be reconsidered some day, as lawmakers seek solutions to Medicare's long-term financial problems. + +LOAD-DATE: August 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graph: "Medicare Gets Costlier" shows estimated rise in monthly Medicare premiums under the old and new laws. (Source: Congressional Budget Office) + +Drawing + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +420 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 10, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +University Forced to Pay $1.6 Million To Researcher + +BYLINE: By PHILIP J. HILTS + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 13; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 700 words + +Ending seven years of court action and appeals, the University of Michigan has paid $1.67 million in damages to a scientist who said her work had been stolen by her supervisor. +The money went to Dr. Carolyn Phinney, 46, a researcher in psychology who specialized in issues of aging and adult development, in a civil case that began in 1988. + The award is believed to be the largest ever won by a scientist against a university in a misconduct case, said Dr. Robert Sprague of the University of Illinois, who maintains a data base of misconduct cases in science research. +The case was also unusual because a jury awarded damages for retaliation by university officials as well as for fraud. The university turned over the $1.67 million to Dr. Phinney on July 30, along with a box of research data that had been taken from her. About $500,000 went to her lawyer, Philip Green. +Dr. Phinney said in a telephone interview last week that she would use part of the money to finance a fledgling nonprofit organization, called WISE, (for Whistle-Blowers for Integrity in Science and Education), which she hopes will be able to help other whistle-blowers with counseling and legal help. +Dr. Phinney said she was relieved that the case was over, but that it was not a joyous time. "I have lost my data on 10 years of work," she said. "I've lost my career. I got very sick. I believe what happened to me was intellectual rape." +She said she had not worked steadily for several years because of the clinical depression and post-traumatic-stress disorder. +Lisa Baker, a University of Michigan associate vice president for university relations, said that the university "remains convinced that the decision of the jury in the lawsuit brought by Dr. Phinney against the university was in error." She added, "The U.M. continues to stand behind our personnel in this matter and believe they acted appropriately." +The university dropped its appeal when it became clear that there was very little chance that the jury verdict would be reversed, a university official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. +The two senior scientists cited in the civil lawsuit, Drs. Marion Perlmutter and Richard Adelman, did not return calls seeking comment. +The case began in 1988 when Dr. Phinney was doing part-time research at the Institute of Gerontology at the University of Michigan while she finished a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute for Social Research. Dr. Phinney was working on what is recognized as a difficult topic: how can wisdom, or understanding gained through living, be defined and measured? Her aim was to try to determine if the elderly had more wisdom than young people. She had just solved the core of the problem, and her supervisor, Dr. Perlmutter, a recognized researcher in aging, suggested she write up that and other research in applications for research grants. +Dr. Perlmutter promised Dr. Phinney that she would be listed as the first author on papers resulting from the work as well as a job at the Institute of Gerontology, Dr. Phinney said. But after Dr. Perlmutter had Dr. Phinney's research and grant applications in hand, Dr. Phinney asserted, Dr. Perlmutter said the work was her own. +When Dr. Phinney complained to university officials, the lawsuit contended, Dr. Adelman, who was director of the Institute of Gerontology, threatened Dr. Phinney. He said in court testimony that he had told Dr. Phinney that if she did not drop the matter against her senior colleague, she would be dismissed. Dr. Perlmutter then dismissed Dr. Phinney from her laboratory. Dr. Phinney found work elsewhere at the university until 1992. +After a year of negotiation failed, Dr. Phinney took the matter to the Washtenaw Circuit Court in Michigan. In 1993, a jury found unanimously that Dr. Perlmutter had committed fraud and Dr. Adelman had retaliated against Dr. Phinney. +In April, the Michigan Court of Appeals upheld the jury's award against Drs. Perlmutter and Adelman, but said that the university's Board of Regents should not be held accountable for the retaliation. In July, the court denied a motion for reconsideration, prompting the university to pay the damages. + +LOAD-DATE: August 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +421 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 10, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Helping Victims Of Schemes + +BYLINE: By FELICE BUCKVAR + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 15; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 742 words + +DATELINE: WHITE PLAINS + +AT first, Castrenze J. DiCarlo, director of the county's Department of Consumer Protection, was surprised to see the same faces again and again when he spoke to the elderly about schemes. One woman told him: "I came again because I wanted to be reminded of your warnings. I couldn't remember everything you said before." +After speaking to almost 2,000 elderly residents countywide, Mr. DiCarlo became used to people coming up after a speech to tell him how they had lost money to a swindler. Some also had questions about investments they were planning, recommended by telemarketers. Some of the telemarketers were legitimate, but others were obviously con artists. "I personally stopped five scams that seniors were seriously considering," Mr. DiCarlo said. + His experiences inspired him to start a program, Adopt a Senior Citizen, which uses volunteers to make weekly calls to those who have been the victims of schemes in the past to discuss how to avoid being swindled again. Because of Adopt a Senior Citizen, Mr. DiCarlo was one of six consumer advocates in the country hailed by the National Association of Consumer Agency Advocates. But so far, Mr. DiCarlo has found it easier to get volunteers than elderly residents willing to sign up for the program. He has about 30 participants receiving calls from volunteers and 21 additional volunteers waiting for assignments. He said he was asked by others who work with the elderly not to call them because that could make them more vulnerable to telemarketing frauds. He limits his recruitment efforts to the elderly who sign up in person at his lectures. +Catherine Helgeson of Cortlandt Manor, a secretary at the Frank G. Lindsey School in Montrose and a volunteer in the program, said she joined because she liked to help people and she knew people who had been cheated. Her late father had overpaid bills by at least $3,000, which Mrs. Helgeson got back. And friends of hers had parents living in Florida who squandered thousands of dollars on questionable sweepstakes and lotteries. +Although many recent schemes are often not limited to the elderly, Annette Buchanan, a consumer representative for the American Association of Retired Persons, said that more than 80 percent of the telemarketing schemes are directed at older people. Recently, callers have congratulated so-called winners of contests or lotteries and offered to put the money directly into the winner's credit card account. All the caller needs to use the account for his own purposes is the card's number. In another instance, a so-called winner must call a 900 number, a call that can cost $75. +Bank schemes often require a victim to show good faith by giving the swindler what the victim thinks is a small percentage of the money he is going to get. Overbilling for home improvements never done or completed for a fraction of the cost are also a problem, experts say. +Besides the Department of Consumer Protection, other agencies are trying to prevent fraud involving the elderly, recover money and stop others from being swindled. New York State's Attorney General, Dennis Vacco, said his office would "take any case that comes our way." +"We have no prosecution threshold," he added, observing that recent schemes have increasingly involved penny-stock frauds aimed at residents of affluent neighborhoods. +Many victims call the Attorney General's office in the hope of getting their money recovered, and in 1995-96, more than $800,000 was returned to 3,400 complainants. +Although an 84-year-old Bronx woman lost her home and her money in investments with her daughter's boyfriend in a series of meetings that took place in Tarrytown, the man was convicted of grand larceny and is serving a prison sentence. +District Attorney Jeanine Pirro of Westchester County said of such victims, "We need to be proactive in prevention. We publicize our prosecution of these crimes so the criminal defendant knows we are going to be aggressive in educating the public." She said she keeps in touch with about 400 groups for the elderly and issues warnings about fraudulent schemes at speaking engagements and through a newsletter. +For information or to report a scheme, the number to call for Mr. DiCarlo is 285-2155. The consumer hot line at the Attorney General's office and the special Elderlaw Unit there is (800) 771-7755. The District Attorney's office can be reached at (800) 898-8477 or 288-8477. + +LOAD-DATE: August 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Castrenze J. DiCarlo in his county office in White Plains. (Susan Harris for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +422 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 13, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Personal Health + +BYLINE: By Jane E. Brody + +SECTION: Section C; Page 8; Column 1; National Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1089 words + +A 73-YEAR-OLD Memphis woman was discharged from the hospital with a prescription for medication that was not covered by her Medicare managed-care health plan. Because she could not afford to pay for it herself, she did without it, suffered a relapse and had to be readmitted to the hospital, where she was able to get the drug she needed. +A Maryland woman in her early 50's seemed to break a bone every time she bumped into something. After the third fracture, she asked the primary care doctor in her managed-care plan what might be causing her bones to break. The doctor said she was clumsy and did nothing further. Not until the sixth fracture, a broken toe that resulted from kicking a foam-rubber ball, was she given a bone density test, which revealed advanced osteoporosis. + A New York woman was having trouble getting in to see a dermatologist in her managed-care plan. Exacerbated, she shouted into the phone: "It's on my face and it's growing. I can't wait six weeks for an appointment." +Such incidents are not unusual, said Deborah Briceland-Betts, executive director of the Older Women's League, a Washington-based organization that sponsored an analysis of how women fare under managed care, which is fast becoming the nation's leading means of financing and delivering health care. The findings suggest that while managed care offers important advantages over fee-for-service medicine in the areas of prevention and early detection, it often limits access to specialists and reduces the treatment options for many women, especially older women, who live longer and suffer more chronic ills than men. + +The Pluses and Minuses +Managed care is prepaid health care that makes a profit by holding down the costs of patient care. It comes in several forms, but it typically puts more emphasis on prevention and early detection of disease than fee-for-service medicine does. By inexpensively providing procedures like Pap smears, mammograms and blood pressure screenings, managed care makes them affordable for many women. +But many experts question whether doctors working within a system designed to save money can always act in their patients' best interests. Under managed care, patients must first see a primary care doctor, the gatekeeper who controls referrals to specialists and access to procedures. Managed-care plans usually maintain lists of drugs that they cover, and many refuse to pay for certain costly but potentially lifesaving treatments, particularly those they consider experimental. +Middle-aged and older women may be especially at risk under managed-care plans because of their greater medical needs and more limited finances. Women live, on average, seven years longer than men, and they have a higher incidence of chronic diseases, like osteoporosis, arthritis, diabetes, depression, multiple sclerosis, lupus, urinary incontinence, thyroid disease and breast and gynecological cancers. Many older women have several chronic ailments that require treatment by different specialists. Limited finances often make it impossible for older women to find the money to see doctors or buy medicines not covered by their managed-care plan. +In theory, primary care doctors coordinate their patients' care, keeping track of their problems and treatments, making sure that the right specialists are seen and protecting patients against inappropriate procedures. Too often, however, as in the case of the Memphis woman who needed to be hospitalized for lack of a drug, the system is penny-wise but pound-foolish. It can put patients through many hoops, wasting much of their time, money and effort before getting to the bottom of their health problems. +For example, my sister-in-law, Cindy Brody, who is in managed care, noticed a hearing problem and sense of fullness in her ears. Her primary care doctor saw her three days later and put her on an antihistamine for five days, which did no good, then referred her to an ear, nose and throat specialist. +After waiting two weeks for that appointment, the specialist said he could do nothing until Mrs. Brody had a hearing test. Four weeks later, test results in hand, she saw the specialist again. He diagnosed oto-sclerosis, a bone problem in the middle ear, and referred her to yet another specialist. +That doctor said he was not taking patients under her plan and told her to see a colleague, who said he could give her an appointment six weeks later. Furious, she went back to her primary care doctor for a referral to another specialist, who saw her in a week and a half and evaluated her for a hearing aid. Had she not been in the plan, Mrs. Brody said, she would have gone directly to an ear specialist in the first place and avoided four or five of her six appointments. + +What You Can Do +The report commissioned by the Older Women's League suggests steps consumers should take, preferably before enrolling in a managed-care plan. +*Learn about the plan's rules, including its pre-approval process. What will the plan pay for if you need or want services outside the network of providers? +*Ask about limitations on coverage, like the number of visits to a chiropractor, physical therapist or mental health specialist that are covered. Ask whether there are lifetime caps on such coverage. +*Find out how the plan handles emergencies. What if you need medical attention when out of your coverage area or in another country? +*Ask for a list of the names and locations of the doctors, including all specialists you are likely to need, in the plan's network. Are they accessible to you? If you have a chronic health problem requiring the care of a specialist, ask whether you can use a specialist as your primary care doctor. Otherwise you will always have to see another doctor first before you can get to the specialist. +*Find out what can be done to get medications that are not on the list of covered drugs. Is there a grievance procedure? Will your primary care doctor go to bat for you? +*Explore the plan's appeal mechanism. What can you do if the plan refuses to pay for a treatment or the doctor delays a service you think you need? Find out how long it takes for appeals to be settled. What would happen if you were denied care that was urgently needed? +If you lose an appeal within a managed-care plan, do not hesitate to take your complaints to the state insurance commission or other regulatory body, to state or Federal lawmakers or to the press. An active stance may be needed to save your health and even your life. + +LOAD-DATE: August 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +423 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 15, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +World News Briefs; +Canadian Is Ruled World's Oldest Person + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 7; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 209 words + +DATELINE: LONDON, Aug. 14 + +A Canadian woman who has documents to prove she will be 117 years old this month is the world's oldest person, a spokesman for the Guinness Book of Records said today. +Marie-Louise Febronie Meilleur of the northern Ontario town of Corbeil succeeds to the title last held by Jeanne Calment, who died this month in her native France at the age of 122. + Mrs. Meilleur, who was born on Aug. 29, 1880, has been married twice and has about 300 descendants. +Her family said the secret of her long life was hard work and keeping active. +Jean Bosse, one of Mrs. Meilleur's 75 living grandchildren, said recently that his grandmother had the reputation of being "a woman with a lot of character." He added, "She wasn't someone you could push around, not a submissive woman at all." +She was born in the town of Kamouraska, Quebec, 95 miles east of Quebec City. +Guinness verified her age through her certificates of birth and baptism, census records, two marriage certificates and other documents. +Not far behind is Sarah Knauss of Philadelphia, who has documents to prove she will be 117 on Sept. 24. +"Since Jeanne's death, we've been inundated with potential record claims from around the world," said Clive Carpenter, a Guinness records-keeper. + +LOAD-DATE: August 15, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +424 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 17, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Late-Summer Lark + +BYLINE: By SARAH FERRELL; SARAH FERRELL is the associate editor of The Sophisticated Traveler, a part 2 of The New York Times Magazine. + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 12; Column 1; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 1695 words + +"NO tattoos," my husband says firmly, "and no bungee-jumping." But even with these restrictions, the Great Allentown Fair in Pennsylvania offers plenty of diversions, from livestock judging to hay-bale-throwing and cake-baking contests, to say nothing of rides, freak shows and several acres of food. +The fair, which traditionally runs from the Tuesday before Labor Day through the holiday itself, is one of the classic American end-of-summer rituals. Older citizens remember when the factories that once flourished throughout the Lehigh Valley would close on Big Thursday, the Thursday of the fair, so that everyone could attend. The same older citizens -- or at least the sprightly geezer with red socks with whom I'm chatting as we wait for the gates to open at noon -- also remember when there were predictable fistfights in the beer tent. + My husband, Tom, and I have been issued a map to the 46-acre grounds with our $4 admission ticket, but it's hard to pay it much mind among the distractions that beckon from every direction. The tattoo stand is just inside the entrance, and two young matrons, each with an infant in a stroller, are checking out the designs. "Way too expensive," says one, clearly speaking from experience. On the near horizon, the bungee-jump platform joins four Ferris wheels or Ferris wheel variations to form a fanciful skyline. +A long gallery of arresting posters announces the sideshows. See! See! See! The World's Smallest Woman; Big Willie, the Giant Alligator; the Headless Woman, formerly "a voluptuous model," now a Medical Marvel. +Bobo the Clown jeers at us from his perch above a tank of water. We do not take it personally -- he jeers at everyone. The idea is to get the jeerees sufficiently exercised to buy five baseballs ($2) to throw at one of a pair of targets. Hit a bull's-eye, and Bobo goes into the drink. A little boy dunks him. "Good shot, you little varmint," Bobo screeches. "Don't do it again -- I know where you live and I'll send my brother to get even!" The varmint dunks him three times running. +A showmanship competition is going on in the judging tent, with 4-H youngsters putting well-brushed beef cattle through their paces. Nearby, children are getting nose-to-nose with farm animals in a 4-H exhibit designed for that purpose. The star is a very pink sow, blissfully nursing a dozen piglets. ("Babe!" exclaims a somewhat confused child.) In other tents, sheep, wearing what look like slipcovers, are waiting for their moment on stage, while other pigs loll about en deshabille. +The dairy cattle have already been judged, and stand around looking proud of their ribbons. A much-decorated cow named Kortney tries to eat my skirt. As we move among the goats, a Nubian gets a good grip on my dress; as I turn to defend myself, another sneaks up to eat my notebook. +The poultry hall is safer, if noisy with cock crows. The guinea pigs and rabbits and fancy hamsters and pigeons and chickens are caged, and will bite only if you stick your fingers in their eyes. If you can find their eyes -- with some of the fancier chickens it's a matter of guesswork. With some of the really fancy chickens, it's hard to tell head from tail. +It's now time for a chic late lunch, and we skip the food stands in favor of Rich's, a permanent installation under the permanent grandstand. We settle under the ceiling fans -- the afternoon has become hot -- for pork barbecue sandwiches and iced tea. And then big ice cream things, a specialty of the house, which has been making its own ice cream for some 60 years. Tom orders a hot fudge sundae, and I study the menu and ask what a C.M.P. might be. What it is is a giant sundae topped with chocolate and marshmallow sauces and, oh my, chopped peanuts. I lapse into a state of piggish bliss. +Outdoors the crowd has begun to thicken -- up to 100,000 attend the fair each day if the weather is good -- and prizes are now in evidence. Big inflatable plastic hammers seem to be favored, along with more conventional stuffed animals and goldfish in little bowls of brightly colored water. I try a ring-toss game, and do not win anything at all. +We pass through the agriculture building, with its displays of quilts, pickles and preserves, crafts and house plants, on our way to the Pennsylvania (Tennessee) pleasure walking horse exhibit. There are four horses, each labeled by name, nickname, age, color, height, favorite snack, favorite colors, favorite song and favorite pastime. It's all a little too anthropomorphic for me, but the animals are handsome, and I rather enjoy knowing that Kid likes going to parties, while Hiway prefers watching sunsets. The horses are going to give a show, but a conflict of interest will not allow us to see them. +What we have decided that we cannot possibly give up, for walking horses or anything else, is the wrestling in mashed potatoes. A direct descendant of the women wrestling in mud that was once an attraction in raunchy bars, this has become fun for the whole family, as witnessed by the first contestants, a married couple named Bill and Dawn, who enter the ring and begin thrashing about. Dawn wins. Things get really messy with the professionals: the three-woman team of Allentown Slammers; Baby Boom-Boom; Wild Thing; and the Florida Swamp Woman. All wear modest bathing suits, there are not many rules, and everyone (including the referee, Big Ugly Paul) falls down a lot. Goo spatters in all directions, but we are laughing too hard to move out of range. +After the matches I talk to Bruce Rosenbaum, of Catawissa, Pa., the impresario of this and many other novelty wrestling events. (They are popular fund-raisers, especially in schools.) I implore him to tell me that Bill and Dawn are ringers, but he insists that they are real volunteers. He invites me to come back for the evening show, which features amateur sumo wrestling. +At this point, a visit to the beer garden is an absolute necessity. We are restored after a couple of drafts of Yeungling's lager, an excellent local brew. No fistfights occur. +The afternoon is drawing in, and the crowd has swelled considerably. Some fairgoers now appear in tooled boots and sequined denims; others sport T-shirts with the pictures of the country singers Brooks and Dunn, who are performing in this Saturday evening's grandstand show. Everyone is eating something: pizza, cheese steaks, apple dumplings, funnel cakes, sausages, deep-fried mushrooms, corn dogs, hot dogs, hamburgers, corn pie, sno-cones -- the list goes on. +We review the sideshows and spend 50 cents each to see the Giant Brazilian Swamp Rat, which looks like a capybara to us. Although, come to think of it, a capybara is a giant Brazilian swamp rat. +ON a platform in front of the World's Weirdest Women tent (Tortellina the Turtle Girl, Grace Walker the Four-Legged Enigma and Sadistica, Empress of Pain are only a few of the promised W.W.W.), a very small elderly man is eating fire. The barker identifies him as one of the original "Wizard of Oz" Munchkins, which does not seem unlikely. Beside him sits a demure young woman, draped in a well-behaved python. As the barker warms to his task of describing the wonders to be seen inside, I would swear that I hear the word "illusions." Well, rats. If Spidora doesn't really have the body of a tarantula, I'm not interested. +While Tom watches fitness show offs climb an artificial cliff, I decide to have my fortune told. I am willing to settle for having one palm read ($5), but can't resist the offer of both palms, and a $3 handwriting analysis for a total of $8, with a little aura reading thrown in. The fortune teller is, surprisingly, a man. He tells me that his name is Rocky, and that he inherited his gifts from his mother and grandmother. He has a beard and nice brown eyes, and predicts all kinds of swell things for me: I'll live to be about 90, come into money soon, travel and get a nice present, "something gold with small diamonds," from my lover. My handwriting reveals me to be a person of singular grace and charm. I leave feeling like a million bucks -- this is more fun than therapy, and much cheaper. +By now the midway lights have come on and the rides are going full blast. The Ferris wheels are shooting neon rainbows into the darkened sky, and the bungee-jumpers plunge into pools of colored light. The throngs, the ambient music and the motion are euphoric. We pause to gaze in wonder at Pharaoh's Fury, a huge swinging boat with lighted King Tut heads at each end. It sweeps through the sky in a great arc, at the ends of which the braver passengers, shrieking, thrust their arms into the air. +It looks like the most exciting ride in the history of rides, but, alas, the lines are long, and we really must go home to wash the mashed potatoes out of our hair. + +Rates, route and rooms + +This year's Great Allentown Fair runs from Aug. 26 through Sept. 1. The hours are noon to midnight daily except on preview night, Tuesday, Aug. 26, when the fair is open from 5 P.M. to midnight. Admission is $4, with children under 12 free. For prices and information about grandstand shows and other special events, among them the J. & J. Demolition Derby with the Jurassic Car-Eating Dinosaur, call (610) 435-7469. +Allentown, Pa., is about an hour and a half from New York by car; look for exit signs off I-78. The entrance to the fairgrounds is at 17th and Chew Streets. There is some on-street parking, and several lots whose fees of about $5 go to worthy causes. +There are motels on U.S. 22 and around route I-78, among them a Holiday Inn (610) 391-1000 at 7736 Adrienne Drive in Breinigsville, just outside Allentown, which has 180 rooms, a restaurant and an outdoor pool. Double rooms are $105 during the week of the fair. +The Allentown Hilton (610) 433-2221, downtown at 904 Hamilton Mall, has 224 rooms, a restaurant and a fitness center with an indoor pool. Double rooms range from $105 to $126. +Lunch at the Ritz Barbecue is about $15 for two; fair food is inexpensive, with, for example, Pennsylvania Dutch corn pie with cheese for $2.50. Yuengling's lager, on draft, is about $1. S.F. + +LOAD-DATE: August 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Bobo the Clown jeers from his perch. Rocky the fortune teller, prize-winning grape preserves, meeting the livestock. (Photographs by Sal Di Marco Jr. for The New York Times)(pg. 12); Fairgoers must be willing to suspend disbelief. (Sal Di Marco Jr. for The New York Times)(pg. 18) + +Map of Pennsylvania showing the location of Allentown. (pg. 12) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +425 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 17, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ARTS/ARTIFACTS; +Portraits of a Distant People By a Pioneer With a Camera + +BYLINE: By MITCHELL OWENS + +SECTION: Section 2; Page 34; Column 1; Arts and Leisure Desk + +LENGTH: 874 words + +DATELINE: LONDON + +EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC portraits, no matter how expert the man or woman behind the camera, always seem a little stiff to modern eyes. Not only do the subjects' Victorian costumes lend a faraway, fancy-dress air but the people themselves seem artificial -- pokerfaced, stiffly arranged, life-size dolls rather than human beings. And distance of time often renders that earliest era's most celebratedly beautiful visages strangely unappealing. But John Thomson was that rare being, less a photographer than a fine artist, capturing his subjects, quirks and all, in ways that transform them from historical figures into lively companions. +An exhibition of Thomson's work -- 40 photographs of the people and places of the Far East taken between 1866 and 1871 -- opened here on Aug. 6, at the Atlas Books/Gallery. Each of the images has also been reproduced in a limited edition of 350 hand-finished silver gelatin prints made from original glass-plate negatives. Prices for the new prints, which measure roughly 12 inches by 16 inches, range from about $215 to about $370. + An intrepid Scotsman who ended up being appointed an official royal photographer, Thomson, who died in 1921, is known largely today for his poignant photographs of life in the slums of Victorian London. After the royal nod, he branched out into Sargent-like at home portraits of England's dandies and duchesses. But behind the establishment glamour of his mature years lurked a man of adventure. +In 1862, for reasons no one knows, Thomson, then 25, left the tweedy comforts of his native Edinburgh for the malarial promise of the Malay Peninsula. A year later, he moved his studio to cosmopolitan Singapore. From there, he and his Chinese assistants, Akun and Ahong, would lug their unwieldy equipment -- tents for sleeping and on-site processing, several cameras including a large wooden boxlike model, fragile glass negatives measuring about one foot square and gallons of developing chemicals -- from bustling wharves to the remotest parts of China. Eventually, the three traveled more than 4,000 miles over the next nine years, bringing back images of an Orient innocent of Western products, ideas and settlers. +Though the fruit of Thomson's Asian expeditions was "Illustrations of China and Its People," a series of majestic folios published in 1873 and 1874, he was no coolly appraising anthropologist. +What is particularly moving about his work is its sensitivity, Thomson's intimate, considerately detailed approach to men and women who probably had never seen a camera. Whether it was children wading in a stream, proud housemaids, a pipe-smoking diplomat, skinny street gamblers or an elderly Cantonese lady in pensive thought, Thomson approached his subjects on an even footing, one equal regarding another, honestly, respectfully, even reverently. +"That's what I find so appealing, his empathy," said Ben Burdett, the director of the Atlas Books/Gallery, which specializes in topographical photography and related literature. "You can see that in the people's expressions. They look as if they understand that Thomson, unlike many other white explorers of the day, regarded them as people, not curiosities." +A FEW OF THE SUBJECTS, LIKE a trio of stolid Chinese gentleman, have all the ease of wanted posters, but much of the time, Thomson character studies are imbued with uncommon vivacity -- a not inconsequential feat considering that the typical exposure time in Thomson's day was nearly two minutes. +A smile flickers on the lips of a Chinese merchant holding a fan, while Prince Kung of China, sunlight glinting off his tanned forehead and nails like daggers, sits in a stony Peking garden. A beautiful young woman in a checked kerchief gazes at the camera with the suave flirtatiousness of a Vogue supermodel, while another photograph records the grave but nervous beauty of a Manchu bride, probably no more than 14, sheathed in gleaming embroidered silk, her pearly face emerging from an inky background. +The exhibition offers a welcome bit of revisionism too: thanks to Thomson, who visited Bangkok for six months in 1865, King Mongkut of Siam looks every inch the modernizing monarch he was in real life, instead of the tantrum-tossing, grammar-garbling skinhead of "The King and I." But lest any Westerner think the king backward in terms of taste, the monarch brought along a change in wardrobe. In one photograph, he sits on an elaborately carved Siamese throne, bejeweled and barelegged. Then he changed into a Western-style suit, with a dapper cane in one hand, a carved Victorian table by his side. +Thomson's humanistic sincerity, however, did not impress everyone. On more than one occasion, Mr. Burdett said, he was physically attacked for pointing his camera into someone's private life, episodes that lend a certain modern paparazzi tang to the exhibition's Victorian subject. +Rebuffed in a previous attempt to photograph a group of humble wooden cottages in Canton, Thomson returned at dawn, certain that the residents would be sleeping. Instead, no sooner had Thomson snapped the picture, Mr. Burdett said, than "the people rushed out and jumped on him, knocking his tripod over and breaking the glass-plate negative." + +LOAD-DATE: August 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: The Scottish photographer John Thomson turned an artist's eye on the subjects of such pictures as "Chinese Merchant," above, from about 1872; "Manchu Bride," left, taken in Beijing, also about 1872, and "Chinese Female Coiffure" from 1869. (Atlas Books/Atlas Gallery) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +426 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 17, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Center to Treat Those With Early Alzheimer's + +BYLINE: By LYNNE AMES + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 4; Column 5; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 597 words + +WHEN people think of Alzheimer's disease, they often envision the latest stages, the total devastation of personality and body functions lost to the illness. But the early symptoms of Alzheimer's may be equally destructive in their own insidious way: an individual who first experiences forgetfullness and disorientation and is aware of his diminished capabilities can be embarrassed, bewildered and terrified. +This fall, the Alzheimer's Association of Westchester-Putnam is opening a center for people in the early stages of Alzheimer's. The nonprofit association, which has its main branch in White Plains, currently offers counseling, referral and education to Alzheimer's patients and their families. + The new center, which will be in Mount Kisco, will focus on those whose symptoms are just emerging. There will be social workers, nurses and volunteers available, but most important, there will be daily activities for the patients: group discussions, lectures on health issues and current events, journal-writing classes, little parties and outings. Individuals who are in the early stages of Alzheimer's -- and who in many cases are all too aware of what they are going through -- will have a chance to get together with others in the same situation. +"We recognize the need for a program exclusively for people with early-stage Alzheimer's," said Lenise Dolen, a gerontologist, psychologist and a consultant in the care of the elderly who is the president of the Alzheimer's Association of Westchester-Putnam. "Other programs around the county mix early- and late-stage patients. But we are going to offer more of a club-like atmosphere for those exclusively with early stage. +"These people are often very aware of their own changes. Some are still working. They are confused and somewhat forgetful and somewhat disoriented. But they can definitely carry on conversations, and they definitely need help so they don't become depressed and isolated. We want to enhance the abilities they still have." +Dr. Carl Rosenkilde, a neurologist in Mount Kisco who will be one of the consultants at the center, said Alzheimer's disease is not a normal consequence of aging. The memory loss and mental impairment caused by the disease differs "qualitatively as well as quantitatively" from the changes associated with normal aging of the brain. With normal age-related memory loss, "you can continue to function," he said. +"You may have some short-term memory loss but can compensate for it easily," he said, and eventually remember. A person experiencing normal minor memory loss, for example, may momentarily forget where he put his car keys, while an Alzheimer's victim may look at the keys and wonder what they are. +No one has yet come up with a definitive cause of the illness, although researchers know it is a result of pathological changes and the structure in biochemistry of the brain. Many scientists believe that the culprit is the abnormal production of certain proteins and/or a deficiency of certain neurotransmitters. There is no cure, although some drugs have shown promise in slowing memory impairment. +People with Alzheimer's, their families and friends should seek as much help as they can get, said Barbara Olivier, executive director of the Alzheimer's Association of Westchester-Putnam. "Through our early Alzheimer's center, we hope to keep people stimulated and ward off depression and give help to family members. We may not have a cure yet for this terrible disease, but we can try to offer as much support as possible." LYNNE AMES + +LOAD-DATE: August 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +427 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 18, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Dark-Horse Albanese Seeks His Stride + +BYLINE: By ADAM NAGOURNEY + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1498 words + +Sal F. Albanese spent just three minutes the other day discussing his mayoral candidacy in the basement of a Greenwich Village church, finally giving up after trying to compete for attention in a clamorous room filled with elderly New Yorkers more interested in the 75-cent plates of chicken, corn and watermelon than in a serving of mayoral politics. +"Does anyone have a question for our mayoral candidate here?" asked Caryn Resnick, the moderator of the "Ninth Annual Political Picnic" at Our Lady of Pompei Church on Carmine Street. She scanned the steamy basement, filled with delegates from three local senior-citizen groups, most of them Democrats and more than a few wearing Giuliani buttons. + "We have no questions for our mayoral candidate?" Ms. Resnick continued. She paused again. "Are there any questions?" There were not, so Mr. Albanese smiled cordially, thanked his audience, and gamely proceeded to work the room before heading for the stairs. +Six months ago, Mr. Albanese, a personable Councilman from Bay Ridge with an iconoclastic voting record and some definite ideas about ways to defeat Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, loomed as potentially the most unpredictable force in the mayoral contest. +He appeared, on paper at least, the perfect challenger to Mr. Giuliani: an Italian Catholic from a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood, a former public-school teacher, a liberally inclined Council member who had represented one of the most conservative districts in the city for 15 years. So it was that Mr. Albanese seemed to be in the best tradition of the dark-horse candidate: the unconventional scrapper, poised to topple first the Democratic front-runner, Ruth W. Messinger, and then the Mayor himself. +Raymond B. Harding, the Liberal Party leader and one of Mr. Giuliani's main political advisers, said that he had long feared that Democrats, tepid at the prospect of a Messinger candidacy, would surprise Mr. Giuliani and select Mr. Albanese in the Sept. 9 primary. "Albanese would be the stronger candidate," Mr. Harding said. +But in politics, what looks good in the script often does not look quite as good on the stage -- and particularly, it seems, when it comes to the understated and underfinanced Mr. Albanese. +With just three weeks to go until the primary, Mr. Albanese's candle remains unlighted. He is still the little-known Councilman from Brooklyn, trailing in polls and, to his constant irritation, struggling to break into the pages of the city's newspapers or onto the television news shows with his singular message: a dramatic curb in campaign contributions and a warning that New York is in danger of becoming a city of two economic classes, the rich and the poor. + Mr. Albanese's best hope may be a burst of late television advertising. But he cannot afford it: fund-raising efforts have been so lackluster that he will be forced this week to head to Buffalo to produce advertisements -- it is cheaper to film there than in the city where he wants to be mayor. +New York primaries are always unpredictable, and Mr. Albanese said that a combination of factors could thrust him into the lead after Labor Day. Those factors could include the lack of enthusiasm for Ms. Messinger, a strong showing by the Rev. Al Sharpton -- particularly after the attention he received in the days following the allegations of police brutality in Flatbush -- and what Mr. Albanese described as the compelling rationale of his own candidacy. +"We're beginning to climb and she's beginning to decline," Mr. Albanese said, referring to Ms. Messinger. "I happen to believe that even though we're working hard -- we're working seven days a week -- the bottom line is people still aren't paying attention. I believe the last three weeks will be critical. +"I'm very happy with the way our campaign is being conducted," he said. "We're raising some very important issues that the other candidates aren't raising." +But as the primary approaches, Mr. Albanese may be almost alone with that perception. "Potentially, it is there: but it would take a massive, massive Messinger mistake at this point," said Hank Morris, a Democratic consultant. Indeed, talk about Mr. Albanese has shifted -- if unfairly -- from what might have been to what went wrong. +"He was fresh," said Henry A. Sheinkopf, a consultant who worked for the now-ended mayoral campaign of Fernando Ferrer, the Bronx Borough President. "He was entirely candid. He was certainly the least disingenuous quantity I've seen in politics for along time, and he was an outspoken ethnic who appeared to relate to people in the outer boroughs. But it never jelled." +Mr. Albanese has heard these tidings, yet pushes ahead optimistically, alternating between bursts of frustration and wry humor. So when the sound system failed in Brownsville after he had waited 30 minutes for the chance to speak for 30 seconds (someone had stepped on the plug), Mr. Albanese just grinned, if tightly. "A bad omen," he said. And when State Assemblyman William F. Boyland of Brooklyn introduced him as someone with the "dubious distinction of running for mayor," Mr. Albanese hiked an eyebrow and muttered to himself: "Did you hear that? Dubious distinction?" +The other morning at Times Square, Mr. Albanese even seemed unfazed as many people rushed past him, ignoring his pleas for them to stop so he could register them to vote. He did not even seem to mind that a young aide in aviator sunglasses kept bellowing at his back, "This is your last chance! This is your last chance!" -- a reference not to Mr. Albanese's electoral prospects but to the voter registration deadline. +"Here's my analysis, and I know the city pretty well," Mr. Albanese said as his campaign van bounced along the Belt Parkway. "If you got problems in your own base -- which Ruth has -- and then she doesn't have a real appeal in the outer boroughs, and to top that off, she was banking on a heavy African-American vote, which isn't going to be there . . . " Mr. Albanese ended the sentence with a "Well-what-do-you-think-is-going-to-happen?" shrug of the shoulders. +Still, a few hours later, Mr. Albanese let his poise slip for a moment, turning in his seat to inquire, "Will you be shocked if I pull it out?" +A number of things are working against him. He is not a particularly accomplished campaigner; on the stump, his words come out in a quick and mumbled monotone. Mr. Albanese's lack of campaign funds reinforces his indistinct image. While Ms. Messinger drives in a van filled with six aides, Mr. Albanese travels with a single assistant, who drives the car, guides the candidate from apartment complex recreation rooms to street fairs, and hands out literature. +To succeed, observers say, Mr. Albanese has to find a way to emerge from two shadows at once: Ms. Messinger's and Mr. Giuliani's. And he has to do that as a City Councilman who is barely known outside his own neighborhood. +In truth, Mr. Albanese has distinguished himself with the kind of explicit and contrary campaign themes that are rarely heard from Ms. Messinger (though such ideas are often floated by Mr. Sharpton). +His central argument is that campaign contributions should be sharply reduced. "It's one of the big issues in the campaign," he said. "The system is polluted. The system is being driven by big money so that what happens is when you get there, you simply can't run the city properly." +Mr. Albanese has said he would support some tax increases -- like a change in the city's tax structure that would increase the tax rate on the wealthy. "People are willing to pay a little more if they can get something in return," he said. +And Mr. Albanese's style, if low-key, can be endearing to voters more accustomed to the higher-voltage breed of politician. "I wish he were running for another office so I could vote for him," said Anita Schmidt, a Democrat from Manhattan, who plans to vote for Mr. Giuliani. "He seems like a fine, decent man." +Not surprisingly, Mr. Albanese has his dark moments. He refers to Ms. Messinger as the "alleged front-runner," and complains that Ms. Messinger's excitable and quotable press secretary, Leland T. Jones, gets more public attention then he does. +He is most displeased with the media, which he describes as biased in favor of the Mayor. "I happen to believe that Messinger is the weakest candidate against Giuliani and I think there are some in the media who are trying to prop up Messinger so she can be Giuliani's opponent," Mr. Albanese said. "I just don't think we're getting a fair shake." +But Mr. Albanese endures, and people seem to notice that -- though it remains to be seen if that will count for much on Election Day. +"Giuliani is a shoo-in," said Sylvia Seidman, a Democrat and a retired school teacher who lives in Chelsea, after shaking Mr. Albanese's hand at the Greenwich Village church. "But this guy is trying so hard, I have to give him credit. He may not win, but maybe next time." + +NAME: Sal F. Albanese + +LOAD-DATE: August 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Sal F. Albanese, a mayoral candidate, marching during the recent Puerto Rican Day parade. With the Democratic primary approaching, Mr. Albanese, who trails Ruth W. Messinger in the polls, is having trouble rousing enthusiasm among voters. (Frances Roberts) + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +428 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 21, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +U.S. Hopeful on Food Safety Efforts, but Critics Are Skeptical + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL JANOFSKY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 29; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 987 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Aug. 20 + +The Federal investigation into the possible contamination of 1.2 million pounds of ground beef at a Nebraska processing plant has underscored a longstanding debate over the Government's efforts to safeguard food production. +Consumer groups, and Federal veterinarians who supervise plant inspections, say the recall of the beef last week might have been less extensive if a monitoring system proposed almost five years ago had been in place, even though officials from the plant, owned by Hudson Foods of Rogers, Ark., said they had already adopted voluntary measures. + The critics also question whether the Government is properly training inspectors to use the new procedures, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point systems. The procedures are a crucial part of the Clinton Administration's effort to improve food safety, a $43.2 million program in the 1998 fiscal budget. +Agriculture Department officials say it is too soon to know whether problems at the Nebraska plant could have been avoided. But they describe the new procedures as a major improvement in food safety that should help restore public confidence, severely strained since 1993, when four children died and hundreds of people became ill from E. coli bacteria in undercooked hamburgers sold by Jack in the Box fast-food restaurants in the Northwest. +"This is such an important change for us," said Thomas J. Billy, the Administrator of the Food Safety Inspection Service, referring to the system set to go into effect next January. "It should have a huge impact on the whole industry." +Every year in the United States, bacteria in meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, fruit and vegetables kill as many as 9,000 people, mostly children and elderly people, and sicken millions of others. Contaminants can be introduced anywhere from the slaughterhouse to the dining table. +Mr. Billy said some food-processing plants had been voluntarily using the new controls since 1995, two years after they were recommended by a Vice-Presidential commission because of the contamination found in the Northwest. +Congressional wrangling kept the initiative out of the Federal budget until this year. Now, large plants with 500 or more workers are required to have the system in place by Jan. 26 and smaller plants are to phase it in over the next two years. Any plant that fails to follow the new procedures, correct problems or keep proper records will face the risk of giving up the right to operate. +The Government also plans to open an Omaha office to provide new technical assistance to inspectors and the veterinarians who supervise them, "the nerve center for the new system," Mr. Billy said. +But critics say such steps are not being taken soon enough and may still be inadequate to meet the challenge of keeping harmful bacteria out of the food supply. +Federal agencies acknowledge as much. In their recent report to the White House outlining the broad program to improve food safety, including the new monitoring system, the Agriculture Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conceded that "our understanding of some disease-causing organisms is so limited that our ability to protect the public health is seriously constrained." +"The system has been out of date for the last 20 years," said Carole Tucker Foreman, coordinator of the Safe Food Coalition, a consulting group. "The Government has finally bitten the bullet and tried to bring it up to current science." +Until now, inspections have been largely visual: viewing carcasses at the slaughterhouse for signs of disease or making sure temperatures are kept at proper levels. +The new monitoring system will add a series of checkpoints during production when food could be vulnerable to bacteria. Inspectors will be required to have a wider knowledge of microbiology, chemistry and food-processing technology as well as the ability to recognize when a piece of machinery should be shut down for cleaning. +That worries some critics, who say the Agriculture Department's 8,000 inspectors, many of whom have only a high school education, are ill equipped to perform the new duties. The Government plans to offer them the equivalent of two weeks of training. But Dr. Edward Menning, a past president of the National Association of Federal Veterinarians who has retired from the Agriculture Department, said that would still leave the inspectors incapable of fulfilling basic requirements of the job. +"With everything they're doing, the process is supposed to be more scientific, and that requires more scientific people," Dr. Menning said. "But increasingly, we're seeing people less trained than before, people who do not know what to look for." +Dr. Menning and others said they also had a serious concern about another major element of the Administration's initiative, which would shift major responsibilities for monitoring to the plant management. When the new procedures go into effect, each plant will be required to designate its own control measures to prevent bacterial hazards. The safety controls would be based on plant characteristics like its equipment, hours of operation and output. +The plant would be responsible for following its own protocols. Inspectors will still check plant operations, said Dr. Theodore Bek, a retired Federal veterinarian, but giving management a free hand to choose set up its protocols is a case of the fox guarding the henhouse. +"I think it's a disaster waiting to happen," said Dr. Bek, who was an area supervisor in Illinois, Indiana and southwest Michigan. +He added: "The main thrust of the industry is profits. You can't add to profits by taking the time to run tests on a product. If the company had an in-plant quality control agent reporting to the local plant manager, I would be suspicious about how that would be carried out." + +LOAD-DATE: August 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +429 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 22, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +The Spoken Word + +SECTION: Section C; Page 29; Column 1; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 430 words + + +FRANCOISE GILOT, John Drew Theater of Guild Hall, 158 Main Street, East Hampton, N.Y. The 10th Annual Pollock-Krasner Lecture, "An Artist's Journey, Paris-New York." Sunday at 5 P.M. Admission: $12; $10 for Pollock-Krasner House supporters and Guild Hall members; lecture and reception, $50. Information: (516) 324-4929. + +"CARNIVAL OF THE ANIMALS," Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, Montauk Highway, Bridgehampton, N.Y. Elaine Stritch appears as the guest narrator, reading comic poems by Peter Schickele in Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals." Today, as part of a children's concert, at 5 P.M. Admission: $10 for adults; $5 for children. Sunday at 6:30 P.M. Admission: $20 for adults; $15 for the elderly. Reservations: (516) 537-3507. + +FICTION AND LITERATURE READING GROUP, Barnes & Noble Union Square, 33 East 17th Street, Manhattan. Kevin Coogan leads a discussion of William Styron's "Confessions of Nat Turner." Today at 6 P.M. Free. Information: (212) 727-4810. + +BROOKLYN MUSEUM OF ART, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park. For families, "Stories and Art: Allison Day" offers tales about the trickster and the god Maui; tomorrow at 4 P.M. In "The Spoken Word: Hanging Loose Press," Bob Hershon, a Brooklyn resident, poet and publisher of Hanging Loose Press, is the host for a reading with Donna Brook, Larry Zirlin, Carole Bernstein and Dennis Nurske; tomorrow at 5 P.M. Admission to each is free with suggested museum admission: $4 for adults; $2 for students; $1.50 for the elderly; free to members and children under 12. Information: (718) 638-5000. + +METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, Fifth Avenue at 82d Street. TODAY: "Courbet and Manet: Women with Parrots," by Howard Matthews, 11 A.M.; "A Closer Look: Pieter Breugel the Elder's 'Harvesters,' " by Tomlyn Barns, 12:30 P.M.; "The Pursuit of Pleasure in French Rococo Painting," by Kathryn Calley, 3 P.M.; "Precious Materials, Precious Objects: 18th-Century Decorative Arts," by Ronald Freyberger, 6 P.M.; "Art of the Assyrian Palace," by Erica Ehrenberg, 7 P.M. TOMORROW: "Treasures of Chinese Painting at The Metropolitan Museum of Art," by Laura Greenwald Einstein, 11 A.M.; "Manet's Spanish Heritage: Goya and Velazquez," by Howard Matthews, 3 P.M.; "African Women: Two Traditions of Masquerade," by Gayle Rodda Kurtz, 7 P.M. SUNDAY: "Two Great Masters of the 17th Century: Caravaggio and Rembrandt," by Ines Powell, 11 A.M. Admission: Free with suggested museum admission: $8 for adults; $4 for students and the elderly. Information: (212) 535-7710. + +LOAD-DATE: August 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Schedule + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +430 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 22, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +U.S. Looks at Columbia/HCA Elderly Programs + +BYLINE: By KURT EICHENWALD + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 2; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1142 words + +Federal prosecutors have obtained evidence that some hospitals owned by the Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation may have improperly billed the Government for costs related to a series of programs operated by the health care giant to attract the elderly as patients. +Such programs have long been a critical component of the company's competitive strategy, and have been used at Columbia hospitals to expand their outreach to the elderly. Senior citizens are among the most lucrative population segment in the health care market, since they combine both a great need for medical services and significant levels of insurance through Medicare and private health programs. + A significant portion of the evidence obtained by the prosecutors is contained in secret sets of reports on expenses that were maintained by Columbia hospitals, as well as related work papers. Federal cost report filings are used to obtain partial reimbursement for particular types of expenses that are directly related to patient care. Billions of dollars each year -- with hundreds of millions going to Columbia hospitals alone -- are paid by the Government under the Federal cost reporting system. +Even as the Federal inquiry into Columbia's practices is expanding, the company is stepping up its efforts to cooperate with investigators. Yesterday, lawyers for the company drafted legal papers to withdraw motions that Columbia had filed previously in El Paso opposing certain Government investigative efforts. +In the earlier motions, Columbia sought to compel the Government to provide details of what information was contained in documents seized by Federal agents in a March raid of company offices and hospitals in El Paso. The motions also sought to restrict Government access to certain documents that had been sealed after Columbia asserted that they were protected from disclosure to investigators by a lawyer-client privilege. +The papers being drafted yesterday, which are expected to be filed today, would withdraw both motions, a strong sign that Columbia is working to create a less antagonistic relationship with Federal investigators. +The legal papers were being prepared "with the intent of being more cooperative," said Victor Campbell, a Columbia senior vice president and spokesman. "We think it does reflect the company's desire to work in the spirit of cooperation rather than confrontation in order to bring a swift and satisfactory resolution to these matters." +Mr. Campbell declined to comment on the issues relating to the programs for the elderly, saying that the Government's investigation and Columbia's own internal inquiry were still in progress. "It will be some time before we know any of the details regarding potential cost report issues," he said. "But we are committed to doing the right thing." +Michael Gordon, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said that he could not comment on any aspect of a continuing criminal investigation. +The programs for the elderly that Government officials are said to believe were improperly accounted for in Columbia's cost reports include free screening tests for such illnesses as high blood pressure, as well as educational activities and the provision of certain health information such as pamphlets. Such efforts are considered patient solicitations under Federal Medicare rules, and are not reimbursable. +Counting the costs for those programs as reimbursable expenses under the Medicare program would increase total reimbursement in two ways. First, the hospital would be able to obtain some direct reimbursement for the program itself. +More important, the hospital would be able to obtain partial reimbursement for the portion of general administrative expenses that should have been assigned to the elderly programs. +Under Federal cost reporting rules, certain expenses that are not compensated by Medicare are supposed to be assigned to what is known as a "nonreimbursable cost center." Once such a cost center is established in the hospital's accounting, a portion of administrative expenses are supposed to be assigned to it. That way, the Government does not reimburse a hospital for administrative costs related to activities with expenses that are not compensated under the Federal rules. +As a result, a hospital could illegally use the Medicare program to finance more of its administrative activities than is allowed under the law by failing to account properly on its expense filings for nonreimbursable expenses through such a cost center. +Indeed, prosecutors have found multiple indications in the work papers of improper accounting at some Columbia hospitals for nonreimbursable services. For example, prosecutors have obtained evidence that certain hospitals improperly accounted for such nonreimbursable items as gift shops and cafeterias, seeking reimbursement for related expenses. By failing to include those expenses in nonreimbursable cost centers, the hospitals would be able to have higher overall administrative expenses without significantly effecting total profits. +Columbia has long focused on the elderly as a critical market in its competitive efforts. It has heavily advertised its National Association of Senior Friends, a membership organization for the elderly that now boasts more than 250,000 participants throughout the country. While many of the programs for the elderly that are being examined by investigators are also offered by Senior Friends, it is not clear whether it is the organization's efforts through the Columbia hospitals or separate hospital programs that have attracted Government scrutiny. +But there is no question that Senior Friends has been an important piece of Columbia's strategy to build business. The company in the past has set up displays in the lobby of its Nashville headquarters promoting the program to visiting hospital administrators as "a turnkey business strategy" that "builds market share by directing business to sponsoring hospitals," and that also "generates physician and product referrals." +One hospital administrator was quoted in a display in the lobby last year as crediting the program with doubling his hospital's Medicare market share in eight years. +For $15 a year, members of Senior Friends receive numerous benefits from more than 100 chapter locations at Columbia hospitals nationwide. +The Senior Friends program has also offered Columbia an important weapon in its effort to deal with Washington: a large and vocal lobbying force. When changes have been proposed in Medicare compensation, Columbia has outlined the issues to members of Senior Friends, and invited them to write their members of Congress. In years past, the company's former management has boasted that those efforts have been highly successful in getting the company's message heard in Washington. + +LOAD-DATE: August 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +431 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 22, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +25 Million Pounds of Beef Is Recalled + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL JANOFSKY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1237 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 + +A meat-processing company is closing its Nebraska plant indefinitely and is expanding its recall of ground beef to 25 million pounds after Federal investigators found evidence that far more meat might be contaminated by a hazardous bacteria than originally suspected. Last week, the plant recalled 1.2 million pounds of meat. +Today's actions were voluntary, but they were undertaken by the company, Hudson Foods of Rogers, Ark., under an implicit threat from the Agriculture Department that unless the processing and administrative problems at the plant were corrected, the department would force the plant to close by withdrawing food safety inspectors. + Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman said at a news conference today that the latest recall was the largest in United States history. Mr. Glickman said Federal investigators found evidence this week that hamburger patties left over from production on June 5 -- which showed evidence of the potentially deadly bacteria, E. coli 0157:H7 -- were added to production the next day. As a result, the company could not guarantee that any meat produced subsequently would be free of the bacteria, leading the Agriculture Department to press for the latest recall. +Every year in the United States, bacteria in meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, fruit and vegetables kill as many as 9,000 people, mostly children and elderly people, and sicken millions. So far, Colorado accounts for all 17 cases of E. coli poisoning traced to the Nebraska plant, and all of those people have recovered. +Mr. Glickman said: "I believe that the action we are taking today, while tough, is the only option based on the new information our investigators have uncovered. This is a big step, but the evidence indicates we have contained the outbreak." +Because a recall is only voluntary, Mr. Glickman said he would ask Congress in the fall to give the Agriculture Department the authority to impose a recall and civil penalties against plants that do not comply with Federal regulations. +In any case, supermarkets and restaurants that use or sell ground beef that might have been contaminated with E. coli bacteria were removing it today and were seeking to reassure customers about the safety of their products. [Page A18.] +The tainted meat from the Hudson plant, in the eastern Nebraska town of Columbus, is the most prominent case of the E. coli bacteria since four children died and hundreds of other people became ill in 1993 after eating undercooked hamburgers from Jack in the Box outlets in the Northwest. +That outbreak led to the creation of a Vice-Presidential commission, which proposed more stringent methods of monitoring hazardous bacteria in food-processing plants. A system of protocols recommended by the commission was a major part of the Clinton Administration's effort to improve food safety, a $43.2 million program in the 1998 budget. +The Agriculture Department began investigating problems at the Hudson plant after company officials expanded their recall of ground beef to 1.2 million pounds on Aug. 15, the largest such recall at that time, from an initial recall of 20,000 pounds three days earlier. Hudson made the first recall after public health officials in Colorado identified the E. coli 0157:H7 bacteria in Hudson beef patties in late July and on Aug. 12. +But Thomas J. Billy, the administrator of the Food Safety and Inspection Service, an arm of the Agriculture Department, said that as Federal investigators looked deeper into plant operations they found that they plant had weak quality control standards, an inadequate system of record keeping and a routine practice of returning unused raw material into the next day's production. +It was on the basis of those conditions, Mr. Billy said, that the company agreed to recall the additional meat, which Mr. Glickman said had been distributed across the country in the form of four-ounce frozen patties to chains including Burger King, Boston Market, Wal-Mart, Sam's Club and Safeway supermarkets. +Department officials conceded they did not know how much of the 25 million pounds remained uneaten. Whatever is returned, they said, will be destroyed by a Hudson plant in Van Buren, Ark. +The company's chairman, James T. Hudson, said in a statement the decisions to expand the recall and close the plant until problems were corrected had been made "out of an abundance of caution to restore the public confidence." Mr. Hudson also said the company believed that the source of any contamination had come from the slaughterhouses that supplied the raw, deboned meat and not the plant, where the meat is processed into frozen patties -- an assessment with which Agriculture Department officials concurred. +Department officials said they had identified seven slaughterhouses that brought raw product to the plant. The officials declined to identify them until they were certain whether any one had supplied contaminated meat, but they said they had found no other indication of illness from meat processed by other customers of the slaughterhouses. +Long concerned with problems of contamination, the Agriculture Department and other Federal agencies approved the new system of hazard controls for processing plants to replace the current means of inspection, which Mr. Glickman described as "poke and sniff." +The new system is scheduled to take effect on Jan. 26 in plants with 500 workers and more. But plants with 10 to 499 workers, including the Hudson plant in Nebraska, are not required to have the new controls in place until January 1999. The smallest plants, those with fewer than 10 workers, are required to phase in changes by January 2000. +The new monitoring system includes more detailed and frequent inspections of the processing equipment during operation. Many plants around the country have begun using the controls voluntarily. In an interview on Wednesday, a senior official at Hudson's Nebraska plant, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the plant had already put the controls in place. "We're way ahead of the curve," the official said. +Mr. Billy, the food inspection official, said investigators had found that the plant had "some sort of hazard plan." But he dismissed the assertion that Hudson was using the protocols from the new system. +"I am unaware that their plan conforms to the regulations," Mr. Billy said. "I am unaware their science has been validated and I am unaware that Hudson is following the plan on a day-to-day basis." +Mr. Billy said investigators had been alarmed by inadequacies in the plant's record-keeping, which obscured daily levels of production. He also questioned the plant management's sincerity in dealing with the contaminated product because Federal investigators prompted the wider recall last week, not the company. +Mr. Hudson said he hoped that the closing of the Nebraska plant, which employs about 230 people, would not last long. But Mr. Billy said it would remain closed until Federal officials were convinced that there were no more indications of contamination in the plant, that the latest monitoring system was in place and the plant's record-keeping was improved. +Consumers are advised to return all Hudson Foods frozen beef patties with Establishment No. 13569 printed inside the U.S.D.A. inspection seal. Consumers may also call the U.S.D.A. hot line at (800) 535-4555, or Hudson's hot line at (800) 447-2670. + +LOAD-DATE: August 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: With operations halted, the employee parking lot at the Hudson Foods meat processing factory in Columbus, Neb., was all but deserted yesterday. (Associated Press)(pg. A18); Federal investigators found weak safety standards and risky practices at this Hudson Foods Company hamburger plant in Columbus, Neb. (Associated Press)(pg. A1) + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +432 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 22, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +2 Deaths Prompt Warning on Bat Encounters + +BYLINE: By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 732 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 + +Two elderly men, one in Montana and the other in Washington State, died from rabies earlier this year after encounters with bats. The deaths have prompted Federal health officials to recommend that people seek medical attention if they have touched bats, whether or not they have been bitten. +In both cases, said officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is no evidence that the men were bitten by bats. The deaths were at first incorrectly attributed to a degenerative brain disease. And it was only in autopsies that the authorities discovered evidence of a strain of rabies common to bats. + "People will handle bats and not think anything about it," said Dr. Lisa Rotz, a centers epidemiologist who reported on the deaths in Friday's issue of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. "But contact with a bat should be taken seriously. Bats should not be handled or kept as pets." +People who have even limited, seemingly insignificant, exposure to bats should consult their doctors, Dr. Rotz said. Such exposure could include shooing a bat out of the house with a broom, as did the 66-year-old Montana man who died, or discovering one swooping over the bed in the middle of the night. +Rabies, a viral infection that travels through the nervous system and inflames the brain, is always fatal if not treated. It is very rare in humans in the United States; only 34 cases have been reported since 1980, 19 of them attributed to bats. +But this year's deaths, both in January, come at a time when centers officials have noticed a slight but significant rise in the annual incidence of the disease. From 1981 to 1993, the number of rabies cases ranged from zero to three, said Dr. Charles Rupprecht, chief of the rabies section at the centers. There were six cases in 1994 and four each in 1995 and 1996. But experts said it was also possible that additional rabies deaths might have been wrongly ascribed to other diseases. +Despite an epidemic of rabies among raccoons on the East Coast, Dr. Rupprecht said, there have been no reports of humans' becoming infected by raccoons. Most of the new cases involve bats. +"It's a very mysterious trend," he said. "We are concerned; the majority of the cases of late have been bat-related, and we are struggling with why that is." +One possible explanation, Dr. Rupprecht said, is a rise in reporting. Another is that victims of bat bites do not seek medical help; most bats are not rabid and many people do not realize that the bites can be dangerous. A third is that people do not realize that they have been bitten, as was the case with a child in Washington who died several years ago. +Treatment for people exposed to rabies is not nearly as painful as it was years ago, when patients received a series of excruciating shots in the stomach, said Dr. Claire Panosian, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of California at Los Angeles. The new therapy, called post-exposure prophylaxis because it is meant to prevent the disease after exposure, is two pronged. +First, patients receive shots of a rabies immune globulin, a horse serum with antibodies to the rabies virus, in both the arm and the area of the bite. Then they receive five separate shots of the vaccine. +Bite victims should be treated as soon as possible, and no later than 24 to 48 hours after the injury occurs, Dr. Panosian said. By the time the first, flu-like symptoms of rabies appear, she said, it is too late. And because rabies is so rare in this country, many doctors do not even recognize it when they see it. +That was the case for the Montana man, who was 66, and the Washington man, who was 64. Both times, doctors suspected Creutzfelt-Jakob disease, a neurological disorder. When pathologists found that the men's tissues contained evidence of the rabies virus common to bats, health officials interviewed the families. +The family of the Montana man recalled that a bat entered their home through the window in the summer of 1996 and was roosting during the daytime and flying around the house. The man later forced it out of the house with a broom, but his family did not recall that he had had any direct contact with the animal. +The Washington man lived in a heavily wooded area near a lake. Although bats were common to the area, his family did not recall his ever having been exposed to one. + + +LOAD-DATE: August 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: August 25, 1997, Monday + + CORRECTION: +A article on Friday about a recommendation for medical attention after casual contact with a bat misstated the source of rabies immune globulin, a therapy for exposure. It is derived from human antibodies, not from horse serum; a separate treatment, the rabies vaccine, at one time contained horse serum. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +433 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 24, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +SUNDAY: AUGUST 24, 1997: LABOR; +Send in the Seniors + +SECTION: Section 6; Page 21; Column 1; Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 291 words + +Monnie Callan (left) and Thelma Nesbitt (right) may look like kindly grandmothers, but they're actually union diehards who spent their summer raising a ruckus from Wall Street to the Bronx. Glowing from its success last year in recruiting young liberals as temporary organizers, the AFL-CIO decided to tap into a virtual gold mine in six cities across the country: retired union members with plenty of time on their hands. +As a result, Callan and Nesbitt, along with 40-odd seniors and a dozen college students and recent grads, had a very busy July and August. They picketed Merrill Lynch's midtown offices and inhaled exhaust fumes while handing out union material to limousine drivers gliding in and out of the Holland Tunnel. Lending moral support to U.P.S. strikers, the retirees donned sunshine-yellow caps on Aug. 7 and marched to the main depot at Eleventh Avenue to sing union songs on the picket line. + Both women obviously have the necessary pep. Nesbitt, a 67-year old with generous cheeks and a closely cropped gray Afro, earned the nickname "Mayor of the Floor" while awaiting a 1996 liver transplant because she paced through the hospital incessantly, giving motivational talks to other patients. Armed with a cane, Callan, 71, just returned from a two-week tour of Sweden with the New York City Labor Chorus. Callan is convinced her generation can revive the thinking here that still pervades Europe's trade union movement. +Marching around in the blistering heat can take a toll, but Nesbitt says that having survived arrests in her youth and surgery in her old age, she relishes this latest stage in the labor-management tussle. "In fact," she says, "I think this is just what I'm going to do until the day I die." + +LOAD-DATE: August 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: (Evan Kafka for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +434 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 24, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +For the Elderly, the Benefits of Belly Dance + +BYLINE: By CYNTHIA MAGRIEL WETZLER + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 13; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 914 words + +DATELINE: YORKTOWN HEIGHTS + +HER gold coin belt jingled around her hips as she walked to face a group of more than 35 elderly residents at the Country House in Westchester, a retirement home here. As strains of Middle Eastern music and the fragrance of frankincense filled the room, Zohar, a belly dancing instructor, performance artist and Katonah resident, began to spin and shimmy, cutting graceful circles and moving in rippling undulations. +The many layers of her shimmering coral costume flowed softly around her and her finger cymbals, known as zills, sounded a heartbeat. Zohar and seven of her dance students, the Casbah dancers, entertained the residents in a presentation filled with silky veils and sacred blessings. And when she invited the residents to dance with her and her troupe, they let their bodies sway to the exotic music. Some tied fringed scarves around their hips, "to wiggle better," one resident, Bea Sabel, 82, said. + Others set canes aside and shook tambourines. As the music intensified, smiles grew wider. "When I see the dancers moving, I feel like moving my stomach that way," said Marie Mastriano, 88. "If we just sit here in chairs we get stiff." +William Freese, 79, said: "It does a lot for your body. And, of course, the attractive girls are so expressive -- my goodness." +Zohar, who chose her adopted name, which means light, from the Kabbalah, an ancient Jewish religious text, said, "I wanted to create a playful and joyous mood." Her aim, she said, is to bring to light the true significance of belly dancing and to present it as the sacred prayer and meditation it was originally meant to be. +Zohar said she works to erase the tawdry notions associated with belly dancing, to take it out of the nightclub and back into the temple. Thousands of years ago, she said, it was the dance of the temple priestesses of the ancient goddess religions. "In the old paradigm, belly dancing is viewed as a seductive dance for the pleasure of men," she said. "Women are sexual objects. In the new paradigm the dance is a graceful prayer filled with passion: a dance of renewal." +For Zohar, the dance connects women with their archetypal feminine energy. "When I dance I feel the power of the feminine as the energy rises through my spine, my arms, up toward the heavens, a fluid, mystical surge framed by a veil, which floats about me like an ethereal cloud," she said. "When I perform this dance, it is with sensitivity and good taste. In this manner, the dance can once again be appreciated as the art form it truly is." +At the residence, Zohar placed her palms together over her head and said to her audience, "These are prayer arms and signify the body as the temple of the soul." She raised one arm and at the same time lowered the other in a sensuous flow. "These are snake arms and can signify giving and receiving love," she said. "Now wiggle and vibrate your hands." Many hands went up, stiff fingers unbending. "This is fire energy and will break up stuckness," she said. "Now imagine you are kneading bread and undulate your hands and wrists. This is water energy." +Rose Greenfield, 77, who is partly blind, said, "It's so exciting, so exciting." A Casbah dancer, Cai McPhee, a nurse specializing in head trauma who has been studying with Zohar for a few months, said: "The energy in the room was very low before we began. They were waiting quietly. But as the performance progressed I saw them light up and come alive." +Zohar has been performing dance for more than 16 years and has been teaching belly dancing for 10 years. "Women of all ages from maidens to crones, in almost any condition, can benefit physically, emotionally and spiritually from belly dancing," she said. She pointed out the flexible backs and spines of her dancers, strengthened from the graceful serpentine movements. +"You don't have to be 20 and thin," said Louis McConnochie, a nanny who studied with Zohar for a year. "It works with the shape of a woman's body." Another dancer, Bina Bora, said, "It makes me feel like a woman." +Besides the belly dancing classes she teaches in the Katonah area, Zohar gives workshops for women interested in the history and relevance of dance in the goddess religions. +In a recent workshop at the Unitarian Church in Mount Kisco, Zohar introduced women to belly dancing, which were the movements of the ancient priestesses who danced circles, spirals and figure eights. There were gasps when Zohar took the cover off a small basket and lifted her two pythons, Yin and Yang, onto her wrist and shoulders and began to dance. +"Since Paleolithic times," she said, "the serpent has been considered the benevolent power animal of the goddess." She gently placed one of the snakes around a participant's neck like a necklace. After a moment of alarm crossed her face, the woman danced with the snake and said that she felt "a new sense of empowerment." +Zohar is artistic director of a professional dance troupe, the Aladdin Dancers, and coordinates Arabian Night theme parties for galas and fund-raising events and other occasions. +"When women learn this dance, they get back in touch with a part of themselves which our culture hasn't fostered," Zohar said. "You can be powerful and feminine, strong and soft, enticing and modest, chaste and voluptuous. This dance embraces all these aspects of being a woman that we don't have a chance to explore through regular means." For information on classes, the number to call is 232-3451. + +LOAD-DATE: August 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Zohar teaches belly dancing to Rose Greenfield at the Country House in Westchester, top, a retirement home in Yorktown Heights, where other residents also tried undulating. (Chris Maynard for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +435 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 24, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Elderly Are Turning To Assisted Living + +BYLINE: By MARCELLE S. FISCHLER + +SECTION: Section 13LI; Page 1; Column 1; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 2522 words + +TWENTY years ago, Ted Peck left New York to retire to a condominium in Florida. Now his daughters, Randee and Merri, both with college-age children of their own, are looking to bring the 83-year-old Mr. Peck back to Long Island to live in an assisted care facility. +Typical of aging baby boomers, the Peck daughters have worried about their father since their mother died last year. One daughter, Randee Bernstein of Briarcliff Manor, has flown to Florida three times in the past five weeks and the other, Merri Sickle of West Babylon, will do the next round of caretaking visits. + "He's let himself go and we'd like to get him back to what he was; it would be much easier for our lives to have him here at this point," Ms/ Bernstein said in an interview recently as she surveyed potential accommodations at the Regency at Glen Cove, an assisted living residence for the elderly. "It was a wonderful life," she continued. "Everyone went down to Florida when they were 65. He was very active. Unfortunately, they're all 85 now." +Because of Mr. Peck's age, his daughters would like to have him nearby, in a place close to both of them where they know his meals and housekeeping are taken care of and that someone will supervision his medication. They would also prefer him to have plenty of companionship, activities and a good quality of life in a setting where the other residents are not too sick. +Enter the booming assisted living marketplace. Fueled by adult children worried about taking care of their increasingly frail parents, developers of housing for the elderly are racing to construct new, upscale facilities to accommodate the gap between active retirement and full scale nursing care. +In Great Neck Plaza, two such facilities, literally around the corner from each other, were approved simultaneously by the Village Board in July and ground is expected to be broken by the end of the summer. In one, publicly traded Kapson Senior Quarters Corporation and Armstrong Management Company of Garden City, will build a licensed assisted living residence, Senior Quarters at Great Neck, on the site of a former car dealership on Great Neck Road. In the other, Hassett Belfer Senior Housing LLC and the publicly traded Carematrix of Massachusetts, are developing the Mayfair at Great Neck on the site of a former marble yard on Cutter Mill Road. Both hope to finish first and have waiting lists before construction is completed at the end of 1998. +"We're competitors," said Glenn Kaplan, chief executive officer and chairman of the Woodbury- based Kapson Senior Quarters Corporation. "We know each other pretty well. It's not the first market we are competing in. The village basically made it clear that because there are two of us they were going to run a parallel path and not let one get in front of the other. The market is strong so that we think the demand is tremendous." +While one-third of Great Neck Plaza's population of 6,000 is elderly, developers and caregivers involved in the project expect 50 percent of the residents will be returning retirees from Sunbelt states whose children live in Great Neck and the surrounding North Shore area. +"The parents went to Florida in their 60's, one spouse died, typically the husband, maybe mom is living there having a little difficulty getting around, not being able to get on a plane that easily," said Andy Belfer, a principal of Hassett Belfer Senior Housing, LLC. "The children live here, they have a two-income family and the grandchildren. It's a lot easier to bring mom back home to stay close to you than it would be to get on a plane and visit. That's why youre seeing stuff come to Long Island in a bigger way than its been in the past." The reason for going down and retiring is not the same anymore, said Mr. Kaplan. "At 85 years old, you're probably not playing too much golf or too much tennis and your physical activities are limited so therefore you might as well be home closer to the kids and closer to the family," he said. +Mayor Robert Rosegarten of Greak Neck Plaza said those residents who do come from the Plaza, a mostly fixed income group, will do so with the assistance of children and family in the area. Both facilities, the Mayfair and Senior Quarters at Great Neck on Great Neck Road, will be private pay residences and rents will run from $3,000 to $5,000 monthly. +While the price tag for assisted living rentals is hefty, the formula used to determine how much a resident is able to afford is different than when purchasing a home or renting an apartment. Mr. Belfer said the rule of thumb was 70 percent of income goes to assisted living since virtually all expenses are included. "Someone with a $25,000 income with a pension, Social Security and interest from investments plus assets from the sale of a home should be able to afford it," he said. "If they start spending $10,000 to $15,000 a year of that principal to supplement it, they still should be able to live very comfortably. What will also happen is the children will pitch in if there is a shortfall. If the parents are spending $2,000 a month, the child is spending $1,000 a month. The person getting home care services in their home will often spend $100 a day just for that," he said, adding that as long-term care insurance becomes more popular and policies cover it, more and more of the elderly will be able to afford assisted living. +In fact, the developers of both the Mayfair, and Kapson Senior Quarters, the largest owner operators of assisted living facilities in New York State with 2,000 beds, aim their marketing at the middle-aged children of their potential residents who want their parents close enough to lend a hand but in a facility with meals, housekeeping services, social activities, transportation and built-in home health care. The Mayfair provides supportive independent living with a separate health care option, while Senior Quarters is a state-licensed adult home with built in personal and health care. +Part of a trend in the Northeast, these full-service hotels for the elderly will also cater to the local elderly who no longer want to maintain their own home but are not in need of the extensive medical care a nursing home provides. The Mayfair complex will have 148 units, consisting of 134 one-bedroom and 14 two-bedroom apartments. There will be 42 studios, 75 one bedroom and 27 two-bedroom residences in the Senior Quarters at Great Neck, the seventh such facility on Long Island for Kapson. They also have 17 assisted living projects in various stages of development in several states. +Both Great Neck complexes will be built on former commercial sites. The Village Board, receptive to a low impact type of development in a busy downtown area, rezoned the properties to accommodate the assisted living facilities. It also fills a void in Great Neck Plaza, which has Grace Nursing Home but no other housing for the elderly. +"This is the wave of the future, certainly as my generation ages," said Mr. Rosegarten. "There's got to be a place for these people to go. I am convinced by the time they open, they will be completely rented." +There are other projects aimed at the elderly as well. The Mayfair in Glen Cove, also a project of Hasset Belfer Senior Housing and Carematrix, and a similar facility are scheduled to open Oct. 1. Situated at Town Path and Glen Street, it's about a mile from Kapson's Regency Senior Quarters at Glen Cove on School Street. +Herbert Friedman, executive vice president of the Gurwin Jewish Geriatric Center and assisted living project, said land had been purchased and designs were being drawn for a new assisted living facility on the center's Commack campus. Phase one of the project includes 150 one- and two-bedroom apartments. Residents will have priority admission to the nursing units. Designed in response to numerous inquiries from the commmunity, groundbreaking is expected within the next year. +The center, the only not-for-profit Jewish assisted living facility on Long Island, will complete the full continuum of care on the Gurwin campus. The center includes medical adult day care, home care, skilled nursing units, subacute care, short-term inpatient rehabilitation and a new diagnostic and treatment center and outpatient rehabilitation facility scheduled for construction in August. Residents of the assisted living complex, who will be entitled to up to 45 minutes daily of personal care, will have full access to the Olympic-size pool and theater and other facilities of the neighboring Suffolk Y/J.C.C. as well as a full inhouse recreational program of actitivites. +In conjunction with North Shore University Hospital, Carematrix is developing sites in Bayport, Islandia and Dix Hills, each with more than 100 units. Michael Zaccaro, Carematrix executive vice president of operations, said those projects were all in the zoning, prezoning, approval and preapproval phases. Glenn Kaplan, chief executive officer of Kapson Senior Quarters Corporation, is in the process of converting a hotel in Plainview to a licensed assisted living facility and will open another facility on the South Shore in the next 12 to 24 months. He is also working on projects in the New York City neighborhoods of Forest Hills, Riverdale and the Upper West Side. Hassett/Belfer plans to build five to eight additional facilities on the Island in the future. +Citing demographic studies showing that the population approaching retirement is growing three times faster than any other age group on Long Island, the town of North Hempstead is negotiating a contract for $26,900,000 with North Shore Partners to develop a 42-acre parcel of the Morewood property in Port Washington as a life-care community run by the Marriott Corporation. An assisted living facility will be part of that residential community of 675 units offering a continuum of care that includes skilled nursing care suites, 150 stand-alone retirement units and a midrise condominium. +Unlike individual assisted living facilities, which are rental units, continuing care retirement communities like the Morewood project require an initial entrance payment and monthly maintenance fees, but guarantee long term health care and admittance to a nursing facility on the premises as the need arises. +There are seven new applications for enriched housing to serve the frail elderly who need personal care and supervision, all for more than 100 beds in apartment type buildings on Long Island currently on file with New York State, said to Bob Kelliher, acting director of certification and financing of the New York State Office of Housing and Adult Services. +"It's been very active over the whole state," he said. "The numbers are up considerably. What is unusual is that we have as many applications as we do from Nassau County." +Assisted living is a 15 billion-dollar industry that is expected to grow to $30 billion by the end of the decade, saidWhitney Redding, spokeswoman for the Assisted Living Facilities Association of America. One of the contributing factors to the growth of the industry is just how long people are living. It is tremendously popular because it fills that historic gap between independent living and full-time nursing care, she said. There are about 1.25 million elderly people in an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 facilities nationwide. +On Long Island, 10,000 assisted living beds are expected to be built in the next three years, said Susan Peerless, executive director of the Empire State Association of Adult Homes and Assisted Living Facilities. In New York State, 10,000 to 20,000 beds are under development, with a 60,000 increase expected in the next three years. +"This is a big state for back migration," she said. "Consumers are now driving the expansion of assisted living. They are able to age in place and age in dignity. For the first time in the history of mankind, what is good for business is good for people. Whereas three years ago, there were three publicly traded corporations in the industry, now there are 20." +Assisted living may become more affordable in the future as managed care associations are showing more interest in it as a viable option. The irony is that overall, it is a sensible option, said Ms. Redding, less expensive than nursing care or subacute care. It is a market-driven, consumer-driven industry. Providers are looking at ways to make it more affordable. +Efforts to bring health care through Medicaid to assisted living facilities are under way, said Ms. Peerless. "Assisted living is here to stay. Government is starting to pay attention and managed care is starting to pay attention. Four or five years from now, we're going to see assisted living as the place of preference for managed care." +The number of elderly aged 85 and over is the fastest growing group in Suffolk County, said Roy Fedelen, a planner with the Long Island Regional Planning Board. In many cases, he said, the children of elderly people from Nassau County have moved to Suffolk, so it makes sense to look for retirement housing in Suffolk. +While the two Great Neck projects appear to be identical, the Senior Quarters is a residential adult home licensed by the New York State Department of Social Services. Senior Quarters bundles personal care assistance and health care monitoring into the monthly rental while the Mayfair project is a full service hotel with optional home health services provided on site by North Shore University Hospital that can be purchased upon necessity. The Mayfair units will have kitchens with convection microwaves while the Kapson model only provides a sink and refrigerator. The average age at both facilities will be 80. +The residences have design features geared to make everyday tasks easier for the elderly like grab bars in bathrooms, electrical plugs situated higher on walls to minimize the necessity for bending and emergency response telephone systems. +"The market is big enough for both of us," Mr. Belfer said. "I think we have a different operating style. Theyre both good but I think one is focused on a little more independent senior and one is focused on a more frail senior. It's a different kind of style. It's the difference between going to the Four Seasons as a hotel and going to the Holiday Inn. They're both giving you beds, they're both giving you rooms. You'll sleep well and they'll give you a wake-up call, but it's a different experience. Be that as it may, I think there's a need for both projects." +Plans for both Great Neck facilities call for billiard rooms, coffee bars, lounges, private dining rooms, libraries and outdoor terraces. Senior Quarters will have a theater/ chapel and movie studio. The Mayfair will have an atrium courtyard and a spa with a pool. Both Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Belfer expect their tenants will shop and occasionally dine in Great Neck Plaza. +"Our residents are ambulatory and have the majority of their faculties," Mr. Kaplan said. "They're not bedridden, they're dressed, they come down for meals, it's a nice level of living." + +LOAD-DATE: August 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +436 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 24, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +JERSEY; +Visit Palm Beach. No, Not That Palm Beach. + +BYLINE: By Joe Sharkey + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 1; Column 3; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 763 words + +ON the northern end of the Jersey seashore, Charlie Rooney, semi-retired bon vivant and longtime Mayor of Sea Bright, has become a firm believer in palm trees. Real ones. +As parrots and other tropical fashion statements became popular in recent years, clusters of swaying palm trees have been sprouting here and there on the New Jersey shore. + Each spring, they are trucked in from nurseries in Florida, where a stately 30-foot queen palm goes for about $275 (delivery extra). In Sea Bright, where private beach clubs like to set themselves apart from the hoi polloi crammed onto the public beaches, palm accessorization has been especially popular, Mayor Rooney said. +"It looks surreal," remarked one veteran Sea Bright habitue, Cindy Zipf, who runs Clean Ocean Action, the seashore environmental group. +"As far as I know, we were the first beach in New Jersey to have palm trees," Mayor Rooney noted proudly. "But they're all at the private clubs. Next summer, though, I'm going to have the borough buy 10 or 15 of them for the public beach." +Mayor Rooney, one of those rare public officials along New Jersey's largely exclusive northern seashore who actually believe the public should be able to use the beaches that taxpayers expensively restore and maintain, thinks the palm trees will be a nice touch. Beyond that, there is the matter of competition for weddings. +"I marry a lot of people," the Mayor said, referring to his official, rather than personal, activities. (The $100 fee he charges goes to help support a local senior citizens group.) Some couples ask the Mayor to marry them on the beach, and ever since the private clubs put in palm trees, he has watched their wedding business increase. "Palm trees look very nice in wedding pictures," he said. +They're also practical, he suggested. Not long ago, Mayor Rooney helped perform a Jewish wedding ceremony on the beach. "Thirty-five people, very romantic," he said. "We're in the sand, and I realize I got to break this glass as part of the tradition. We start stomping on it, but the glass won't break. It would have been no problem with a palm tree nearby." +Of course, there are those who believe that it is horticultural vandalism to truck an exotic palm tree out of Florida just to tart up a New Jersey beach -- especially since palms go into an operatic swoon and croak after the first frost. Each year, they have to be knocked down and replaced. +Mayor Rooney has a way of mollifying tree-huggers who ask him about the fate of the palms over a miserable Jersey winter. He lies. +"I tell them, we got so much beach out here that for some reason these palms live all year. It's like a paradise," he said. +Mayor Rooney wants Sea Bright's live palms to set a certain tone for the northern seashore. But at the far southern end of the coast, in the three boardwalk towns known collectively as the Wildwoods, an entirely different style is on the rise. +"Plastic palms are coming back big time," said Jack Morey, a vice president of the Morey Organization, which runs Wildwood amusement piers. +Mr. Morey is the leading force behind the Wildwood Doo-Wop Preservation League, a redevelopment movement that has drawn serious academic interest to the town's funky architecture, especially its 200 vintage motels from the 1950's and 1960's. This school year, the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts and the Yale University School of Architecture are conducting a joint study on the Wildwoods' quirky 1950's seashore architecture, which evoked then-exotic locales like Miami Beach and Hawaii. A preliminary report by the schools describes the Wildwoods' "vivid 50's imagery, rich palette of color, decoration, lights, plastic and glitz" and concludes that in Wildwood, "to paraphrase 'The Graduate,' the future is in plastics -- palm trees." +In keeping with the retro motif, Mr. Morey has blueprints for a renovation of one of the two 1950's motels his family still owns. The plans for the porte-cochere, for example, include mounds of painted concrete fruit piled high on either side. "I call it the Carmen Miranda Veranda," Mr. Morey said. +The preliminary design report by Penn and Yale on the future of Wildwood suggests that the town "turn the visual volume up" and promote its Doo-Wop architecture as intensely as nearby Cape May endlessly promotes its Victoriana. +So the trucks hauling live palms to places like Sea Bright won't be making any stops in Wildwood next spring. "We want the big plastic ones," Mr. Morey said. "They have to look fake or it isn't real." + +LOAD-DATE: August 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Nancy Doniger) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +437 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 24, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBOORHOOD REPORT: GLENDALE; +Facing Up to Elder Abuse + +BYLINE: By CHARLIE LeDUFF + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 10; Column 5; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 449 words + +Anne DeBraw lives in fear. On a dark night not long ago, she heard the footsteps of a prowler on her roof. There was a tormented moment of silence before the intruder came crashing through the skylight. +"I felt so scared, so alone at that moment," said Mrs. DeBraw, 71, the memories tumbling out in tears. The man had been there before, but there was little she was willing to do. "He is my son and I didn't want to hurt him." + Mrs. DeBraw's is a common story, but one not often told. Many elderly parents like Mrs. DeBraw live in silent fear of their children. Quieted by shame, Mrs. DeBraw was battered and browbeaten for a decade. +People like Mrs. DeBraw, who have been abused by their children, may soon have a refuge of their own. By next spring, a Long Island City-based organization hopes to open a 20-bed emergency facility that will offer shelter, counseling and medical assistance to victims of elder abuse and their families. +"Elder abuse is New York's dirty little secret," said the Rev. Coleman Costello, founder and director of Walk the Walk, the group that plans to build the shelter. "Many of our old people are isolated and dependent on those who hurt them. Nobody wants to report that they're suffering at the hands of their children." +With $350,000 in grant money, Father Costello and his organization expect to close this week on a piece of property in Glendale, Queens, where the shelter is to be built. Father Costello, a Catholic priest, assisted Mrs. Debraw after the court system was unable to stop her son's uninvited visits to her home. +Father Costello believes that the shelter in Glendale may be the first in the country just for victims of elder abuse. According to statistics provided by the National Center on Elder Abuse, more than 5 percent of New York City's 1.3 million people over the age of 60 are the victims of domestic mistreatment. Usually that abuse comes at the hands of an adult child and it can include physical or emotional duress, financial exploitation or abandonment. As the baby boomers age, those numbers will skyrocket, particularly in Queens and Brooklyn, where the majority of New York's elderly live. +"This is a disgrace that is not perceived of as a problem because nobody wants to talk about it," said Herbert W. Stupp, Commissioner of the New York City Department for the Aging. Although abused elderly people can take refuge in shelters for battered people, they often leave after only a few days, Mr. Stupp said. +"They have different physical and emotional needs," he said. "As difficult as it is, a young woman can start another life while a senior citizen is coming to the end of hers." CHARLIE LeDUFF + +LOAD-DATE: August 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +438 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 24, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Nation; +So Let's Just Have Veggies + +BYLINE: By TOM KUNTZ + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 3; Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 457 words + +DOES the picture at right evoke Norman Rockwell -- or Alfred Hitchcock? The question seems a fair one in light of the scary news lately about food. Last week the meat processor Hudson Foods recalled 25 million pounds of possibly tainted ground beef and shut down the Nebraska plant that it came from, causing shortages at Burger King and Boston Market restaurants. +Only a handful of people have gotten sick from potentially deadly E. coli bacteria in the meat, but every year in the United States, bacteria in food kills thousands of people, mostly children and elderly people, and sickens millions. + So a practical question for the coming weekend is, what's a Labor Day chef to do? +Here's help from the United States Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service: +*You may think your wacky "Hot Stuff" apron is essential, but what about a meat thermometer? Yes, a meat thermometer. The U.S.D.A. says you should use one to make sure meat has been cooked enough to kill E. coli and other bacteria. Hamburgers should be cooked to 160 degrees; whole poultry and thighs to 180 degrees, breasts to 170 degrees. Steaks need only be cooked to 145 degrees and can be reddish inside since bacteria collects only on the outside of such cuts. +*Completely thaw meat and poultry before grilling so that it cooks evenly. +*Keep cold foods cold (40 degrees or lower), and hot food hot (at least 140 degrees). +*Clean all work surfaces and utensils and your hands before and after preparing food. +*To prevent cross-contamination, make sure raw meat and poultry are separate from other foods. Never put cooked food on a platter that held raw meat. +*Shop with summer heat in mind: put meat in the shopping cart last, just before checkout. Meat should go in the car's air-conditioned interior -- not the trunk -- or in a cooler for trips of more than 30 minutes. +*Thoroughly wash fruits and vegetables to be eaten raw. No nibbling grapes from the grocery bag. +*Hold the carcinogens: Some studies suggest there is a cancer risk from grilling food at high heat. To avoid the hazardous chemicals formed by charring meat, grill at medium temperatures. Trim as much fat as possible to avoid grill flame-ups. Microwave precooking helps drain off fat. +*As for dangers from the grill itself, the Barbecue Industry Association says pollution from charcoal units has been minimized with a reformulation of lighter fluid. Among its common-sense tips: set up the grill in an open area away from buildings. When lighting a liquid-propane grill, always keep the lid open to prevent an explosion from built-up gas. And as for that wacky apron, make sure its strings aren't hanging loose near the fire, or you really will be hot stuff. + +LOAD-DATE: August 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Cold war fears overlooked the enemy in our backyards: undercooked burgers. A 50's barbecue. (Elliott Erwitt/Magnum) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +439 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 27, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Whitman Order Allows Some Legal Immigrants to Retain Food Stamps + +BYLINE: By JENNIFER PRESTON + +SECTION: Section B; Page 5; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 539 words + +DATELINE: TRENTON, Aug. 26 + +New Jersey will continue to provide food stamp benefits to legal immigrants who are children, elderly or disabled even after the Federal Government stops paying for them next week, Whitman administration officials announced today. +New Jersey will join New York and nine other states in the nation that are replacing food stamp benefits or providing emergency food assistance to legal immigrants. Except for those in a few categories, including refugees and people on active military service, legal immigrants will no longer be eligible to participate in the Federal food stamp program after Sept. 1. + Under the executive order signed today by Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, legal immigrants who are age 17 and younger, 65 and older or disabled but not yet eligible for citizenship will receive food stamp benefits until they reach the five years of residency in this country that is required for citizenship. +To keep receiving food stamps after that point, they will be required to apply for citizenship within 60 days. The food stamp benefits would continue until their application for citizenship is processed, state officials said. +In New Jersey, 16,000 households with legal immigrants will become ineligible for the Federal food stamp program on Sept. 1 under the Federal welfare law that took effect last year. Governor Whitman's executive order restores benefits to an estimated 10,000 of those households. Able-bodied legal immigrants between 18 and 64 will lose their benefits next week, even if they are able to meet the new law's strict work requirements. +"The extension of benefits for legal immigrants who are children, disabled, or elderly," Governor Whitman said, "will insure the health and welfare of these New Jerseyans with special needs while they work toward becoming U.S. citizens." +But Tanya Broder, a staff attorney with the National Immigrant Law Center in Los Angeles, said that she remained concerned that the parents of immigrant children will lose their own food stamp benefits. +"It is wonderful that the state is trying to fill in the gap that was left by the Federal Government," Ms. Broder said of Governor Whitman's executive order. "But providing food stamps only to some members of the family will not adequately provide for the nutritional needs of everyone in the family." +The State Commissioner of Human Services, William Waldman, estimated that the state's policy would cost $15 million, money that is already included in the budget for the state's welfare program. The executive order would not apply to immigrants who arrived in this country after the Federal welfare law took effect on Aug. 22, 1996. +Eleven states, including New Jersey, have decided in recent months to pick up the cost of food stamp benefits to some legal immigrants. The state programs range from an emergency food assistance program in Colorado to a plan in Washington State that fully replaces Federal food stamp benefits to all immigrant households. +In New York, the Pataki administration agreed with the State Legislature last month to continue providing food stamp benefits to legal immigrants who are children, elderly or disabled. Officials said that the measure would cost the state $31.2 million. + +LOAD-DATE: August 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +440 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 28, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +An Eden, Yes. But Whose?; +Jockeying for Position in a Battle Over 8 Hidden Cottages on Third Avenue + +BYLINE: By TRACIE ROZHON + +SECTION: Section C; Page 1; Column 2; Home Desk + +LENGTH: 2019 words + +RIGHT along Third Avenue, behind a facade of tired 1930's storefronts, lies an eccentric, lush and ivy-strewn Eden known as the Cottages, a row of eight miniature Regency-style residences occupied now by only five tenants -- and seen by mere handfuls of New Yorkers in its 60-year history. +Designed from the start, it seems, to be torn down, the blocklong two-story development nevertheless has sailed along for decades through New York City's tempestuous real estate markets, protected only by an aging owner who came to love this unusual brick and glass-block oasis between 77th and 78th Streets. + Here, overlooking the courtyard garden, hidden from the avenue, a retired Navy commander mows his handkerchief-size lawn, puts away his old-fashioned red mower and strolls down the path to have tea on the terrace with his 76-year-old neighbor. Three mornings a week, another neighbor, 81, sets off at 7:30, walking to her job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On Thursdays, her 86-year-old neighbor leaves to board a bus to Queens, where she nurses a friend recovering from a stroke. +The elderly renters of the Cottages, each of whom has lived here for more than 25 years, say the landlord always assured them they would never have to worry about anything as unpleasant as eviction. +But in this particularly New York drama, a play with a yet-to-be-determined number of acts, the renters -- who pay $225 to $1,650 a month -- have at last been roused from their idyll. The owner, Arthur W. Diamond, died in 1996. This March the residents were served intent-to-evict notices from developers planning to build a 32-story condominium tower with three-, four-, five- and six-bedroom apartments. The developers plan to rip out the existing garden, demolish half the Cottages and reface the other half in limestone and granite, to match their tower. +As the summer wanes, each side is feverishly staking out its positions and lining up its spokesmen and supporters in anticipation of a September ruling in State Supreme Court. +The tenants, whose homes are rent-controlled or rent-stabilized, joined by the residents of an 11-story rental apartment house that overlooks the garden, are using every means they can think of to fight the new building. They have filed lawsuits and hired a publicity agent associated with preservation struggles. They have enlisted celebrities to lend their names to their cause. They reel them off: Woody Allen, Tony Randall, Celeste Holm, Tammy Grimes and others. +They have recruited preservationists, including Robert A. M. Stern, the architect, who has called the Cottages and the garden "high-quality examples of 'everyday architecture' of a type that seems to have disappeared from our more cynical and expedient post-World War II city." And the Friends of the Upper East Side calls the Cottages one of the neighborhood's 11 most endangered sites. +"The developers' big mistake," said Ruth Berns, 81, a statistician who lives in Cottage G, "is that they looked at us on paper and saw how old we were -- and thought we were just some senior citizens they could push around." +F OR their part, the developers argue that the Cottages only benefit a handful of elderly tenants in a city that desperately needs family-size housing. They dismiss the garden as "ragtag and scruffy,""an eyesore" and a "hostile environment." They say the storefronts need work. +Aby Rosen, a partner in the proposed development, pointed out that the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission had declined to consider landmark status for the Cottages four times, most recently this past spring. A commission spokeswoman said the Cottages were judged not significant enough "architecturally, historically or culturally." +The developers say they could round up their own celebrities -- "we could get some ex-mayors," one said -- but they are so confident they will prevail and won't need them. Yet, despite their confidence, the developers are very angry with their opponents. +His face red and his voice irritated, Trevor Davis, one of the three partners in the $75 million joint venture of Davis & Partners and RFR Holding, said the tenants seemed unwilling "to approach us directly and sit down in a civil manner and interact." +Mr. Rosen and Mr. Davis say they have changed the project's original design to satisfy preservationists: they will now keep four of the eight Cottages, without their current tenants, to sell as condominiums. +In the space now occupied by the courtyard garden, they propose a new landscaped open space. Current drawings show a fountain surrounded by shrubs, similar to the existing fountain, and plantings covering the flat rooftops of the remaining Cottages. Altogether, they argue, they will actually increase the square footage of open space. +Their opponents scoff at their attempts, categorizing the design concessions as waffling. "How can you trust what they're telling people now when they've changed their position so many times?" said Deborah Valcourt, a leader of the tenants' group, whose apartment at 177 East 77th Street overlooks the garden. +Since they first heard about the developers' demolition plans, the tenants of the Cottages have opened their doors to outsiders: since April, there have been six open houses, giving the public a rare glimpse of the interiors and of the inhabitants of this cloistered setting. + LESLIE L. YOUNGBLOOD of Cottage H is a former Navy commander and Rhodes scholar, a hearty 76-year-old with a buxom mustache as white as an avalanche, who still keeps the pronounced drawl of his native Augusta, Ga. On Jan. 10, 1966, Commander Youngblood moved into what is arguably the finest of the Cottages: on the north end of the row, it is filled with light and has an extra room, an elegant, slate-floored sun room. +He proudly gives a tour, starting first with his little lawn, then into the sun room and on into the long living room with its wood-burning fireplace and step-up dining room, its refinished table and chairs silhouetted against the big square window stoppered with hefty 12-by-12-inch glass blocks. The blocks serve to mask noise from Third Avenue and endow the apartments with a shimmering light: yellow taxicabs, for instance, appear as fleeting spots of color in a shifting video-art landscape. +In the large bedroom, which faces the garden, the back wall is covered with wallpaper ornamented by sailing ships, and there are ships' models and photographs of sailboats everywhere. Commander Youngblood picked up a framed photograph of himself as a young man in a Navy uniform. "I was pretty full of myself just then," he said with a chuckle. "That was before I saw the action off the beaches in Korea." +Down the row, in Cottage E, Rue Faris Drew is a young-looking 76-year-old blonde who, in what she laughingly calls her "photography phase," shot two covers for Life magazine in the 1950's. +"I don't even know how to use all that equipment they use now," she said nonchalantly. "I just went out with my Nikon and took pictures." +Ms. Drew was visiting friends in California in March when she got a telephone call from one of her neighbors, warning her of the threatened demolition. She flew back and, several days later, she received her intent-to-evict notice. +Then there was the visit from a developers' representative, who, she said, offered to pay moving expenses if she would relocate. "He was snide and sneaky," Ms. Drew said. "He didn't even buzz through the doorman at 177, like everyone else does. He just came and knocked on the door, and caught me in my bathrobe." +From then on, she said, the tenants have sought to avoid the developers or their representatives. She expressed dismay that the developers tried to offer another of the tenants, an 86-year-old woman, one of the apartments at 177 East 77th Street, a Diamond family building that the developers also plan to buy. +"It's really important that we stick together now," she added. "If they try to approach any of us, we tell them to talk to our lawyer." +Ms. Drew is adamant: "I never want to leave here," she says. +Commander Youngblood takes a slightly different tack. +"We want very much to stay here," he said, measuring out each of his words, "but nobody can say we would never consider any offer ever." He paused. "If they want to settle with us on a money basis, it will take a lot more money than they think it will." +T HE original advertisement for what are now called the Cottages appeared in early 1937. It featured a sketch of the terraces overlooking the tennis and badminton courts that stood where the garden is now. +In the shadow of the Third Avenue El, the apartments were "insulated against noise" and had a "private entrance guarded day and night." Those interested were advised to apply to the Estate of Ogden Goelet, a member of the real estate family that built the Goelet Building, the 1932 white-and-green-marble Art Deco wonder at 49th Street and Fifth Avenue. Both were designed by E. H. Faile. +What the advertisement did not mention is that the two-story block-front development was built as a "taxpayer," a more or less temporary structure whose tenants pay enough in rent to cover the taxes on the property while the owners wait for a bigger, more lucrative opportunity. +Even the second owner, Mr. Diamond, intended to develop the property eventually, said his his lawyer, Jack Adelman, who is also co-executor of his will. But that assertion is challenged by some of the tenants. "Mr. Diamond told people we would never have to worry -- we'd be able to stay," Ms. Drew said. "He should have written it into his will." +But Mr. Adelman, who said he was "Mr. Diamond's closest friend" for the last 15 years of his life, is vehement. "Pretty clearly, he did not intend that," he said. "As proof, he never made a lease for any of the stores longer than two years." +"Every month or so, he'd ask me what the property was worth," Mr. Adelman continued. "He wanted to know, because he was leaving it to a charitable trust, and he wanted to leave them as much as he could." +But if the property is not sold and the tenants are allowed to stay, "this would be a gift to these tenants of millions of dollars," the lawyer said. +Developers have signed a contract to buy the property from Mr. Diamond's heirs for close to $15 million. +If the deal goes through -- a State Supreme Court justice is set to rule on one of the lawsuits next month, and the developers say they are ready to close on the property when they can proceed with construction -- the money will go to the Diamond Foundation, the trust Mr. Diamond established in his will. The foundation's trustees have pledged a gift of $7 million to Columbia University's law school. "These lawsuits may prejudice our ability to give this gift," Mr. Adelman said. +In the end, proponents of the development plan say they assume that the tenants of the Cottages, like most holdout tenants in New York City's development history, will be bought off. But at this point, no one is speculating for how much; serious money has not been discussed. +Meanwhile, the public-relations campaign is gearing up. Last week, word came down that Woody Allen had been recruited by the preservationists who want to save the Cottages. When asked for an interview, Mr. Allen declined. "He was glad to lend his name to the benefit committee," said Lauren Chapin, his assistant, "but he's working on a new project now and can't take the time to be interviewed on this subject." +Tony Randall was more accessible, explaining that several friends had lived in the Cottages, including Richard N. Barkle, 76, the retired public-relations director of Pan American World Airways, the current tenant in Cottage F. +Mr. Randall, sounding depressed, said he kept losing his preservation battles, most recently, the fight to save the Hayden Planetarium. "All the beautiful things are gone . . . ," he said, his voice trailing off. +Asked what the chances of saving the Cottages were, he paused to think. +"About 50-50," he said briskly, before saying goodbye. + +LOAD-DATE: August 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Ruth Berns, 81, is one of the few residents of the Cottages who has left her 1937 glass-block window bare. It quiets the traffic and makes Third Avenue a kaleidoscope of shimmering images. Brick storefronts on Third Avenue at East 77th Street, left, mask one of New York's largest private courtyards. Plans for a 32-story condominium tower, below, would demolish half of the Regency-style Cottages. (Photographs by FRED R. CONRAD/The New York Times)(pg. C1); Two development partners, Trevor Davis, left, and Aby Rosen, with a model of the Gothic-inspired condominium tower. Proudly tending his patch of lawn, Leslie Youngblood says it will take "more money than they think" to move him out. Rue Drew, a resident since 1971, takes her 15-minute stair exercises every morning in the Cottages' courtyard garden, above. Under the current development plan, the garden would be torn out and a new open space built there. Photos from 1937 show curvy canopies in front, far left, and Regency roofs in back. (Photographs by FRED R. CONRAD/The New York Times)(pg. C6) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +441 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 28, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +2 Brothers, Town Leaders, Die in a Fire in Secaucus + +BYLINE: By RONALD SMOTHERS + +SECTION: Section B; Page 5; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 610 words + +DATELINE: NEWARK, Aug. 27 + +A fire early today in Secaucus took the lives of two brothers, John and Daniel Flanagan, who played prominent roles in the life of the town of 13,000. +John Flanagan, 50, a 19-year veteran of the Secaucus Police Department and president of its Policemen's Benevolent Association, was found in his second-floor bedroom in the home the brothers shared with their mother, Florence, and another brother, Bill. + Daniel Flanagan, 36, who was the township's Democratic chairman as well as chairman of the Housing Authority and the Library Board, was found on the first floor, his body pressed closed to the front door. +The 12:42 A.M. fire, which investigators have ruled accidental, moved quickly through the two-story frame house. Mrs. Flanagan escaped through a rear door, and Bill Flanagan was not home at the time of the fire. +Detective Sgt. David Kieffer said that the fire appeared to be electrical in origin but that the investigation was continuing. Autopsies have not been completed, he said, but the police found no reason to suspect foul play. +There were early reports that neighbors heard gunshots in the midst of the fire. Neither man had bullet wounds, and the police speculated that Officer Flanagan unsuccessfully tried to shoot out the thick, double-glazed windows of the bedroom. Investigators said they found bullets in the window frame, and Officer Flanagan was found slumped over the bed with the gun in his hand. +Flags flew at half staff today and both Town Hall and the library were draped with the black and purple of funereal bunting. +The deaths cast a pall over what was to be the swearing-in of Kathleen A. Walrod today as the first female municipal judge in town, said Mayor Anthony Just. He said that almost everyone in town had known the Flanagan family, which had nine siblings between the ages of 30 and 60. Two family members owned the gas station across the street from Town Hall. +"They were a big family in a very small town," Mayor Just said. "There is a void here now." +Anthony Impreveduto, the district's State Assemblyman, was a close friend of Daniel Flanagan, whom everyone called Dan and whom he taught at Secaucus High School. He said there was "a deep sadness enveloping the town" because of the deaths. +Daniel Flanagan had become Democratic chairman after Mr. Impreveduto's father, Rocco, the former chairman, died a year ago and had, as well, assumed the unpaid, part-time posts with the Housing Authority and Library Board. +"Senior citizens have been coming into my office all day crying and asking what they are going to do without Danny," Mr. Impreveduto said. +Both the Hudson County Executive, Robert C. Janiszewski, and the county Democratic chairman, Hank Gallo, issued statements praising Mr. Flanagan's political activism and his skill in unifying a fractious local party. +John Flanagan played a less partisan but no less visible role in town as a policeman for two decades. A Vietnam War veteran and winner of the Bronze Star, he had been active with the local American Legion Post 118, serving as commander and as its representative to the county executive committee. +"He was a real presence who stood for what everyone else stood for and wasn't controversial at all," said Ed Bienkowski, a friend for 25 years. +John Flanagan had worked his way up the ranks of the local police officers' union before being elected president two years ago. At his death, he was involved in negotiations for a new contract to replace one that expired two years ago. But even there, he had not engendered bad feeling. +"John bargained respectfully," Mayor Just said. "He was a big man but not a big mouth." + +LOAD-DATE: August 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Daniel Flanagan, 36, above, Secaucus Democratic chairman, and Officer John Flanagan, 50, its police union head, died yesterday. (Photographs by Associated Press) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +442 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 30, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +3 Versions of Ex-Lax Are Recalled After F.D.A. Proposes Ban on Ingredient + +BYLINE: By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 8; Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 708 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 + +The maker of Ex-Lax, the nation's top-selling overnight laxative, pulled three versions of the product off store shelves today after the Food and Drug Administration proposed a ban on the main ingredient, which has been linked to cancer in rats and mice. +The ingredient, phenolphthalein, has been used in Ex-Lax for 91 years, since the laxative was introduced in 1906. The manufacturer, Novartis Consumer Health of Summit, N.J., said it believed that the chemical was safe but decided to withdraw the products and reformulate them. + "F.D.A.'s decision is based on animal studies involving very high doses," a Novartis spokeswoman, Mary-Fran Faraji, said. "We still feel that, based on over 90 years of human experience, the product is safe when taken as labeled and does not present any human risk. However, we have decided to take action because we realize that F.D.A.'s announcement will cause some consumer confusion." +The three products being withdrawn are the regular, maximum relief and chocolate formulas. The reformulated versions, which the company said would be available within 60 days, will contain senna, a natural laxative derived from the senna plant. +Officials at the drug agency acknowledged that there was no evidence that phenolphthalein, which is in other over-the-counter laxatives, caused cancer in humans. But Dr. Robert Temple, associate director for medical policy at the agency's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said the evidence was "fairly convincing that this is an animal carcinogen." +"There is always going to be debate about how to apply that information to humans," Dr. Temple added. "But the reason you do these studies is so you can potentially apply them to humans." +The studies that prompted today's action by the drug agency were conducted at the National Toxicology Program in Research Triangle Park, N.C., where researchers spent two years looking at the effects of phenolphthalein on rodents. They found that rats and mice developed a variety of tumors when fed the chemical in doses 50 to 100 times those recommended for humans. +One particularly convincing study, Dr. Temple said, involved mice that were fed high doses of the chemical for six months at 30 times the human dose. The mice developed damage to a vital gene, called p53, that suppresses tumors. Mice of both sexes had an increased incidence of cancer of the thymus, apparently as a result of the genetic damage, Dr. Temple said. +The findings were especially disturbing given that some people use laxatives regularly for years, even though the labels on the products warn that they are for occasional constipation only. No one knows how many people ignore the warnings, but experts suspect the elderly are among the most likely to do so. +In announcing the proposed ban, the F.D.A. said it was opening a 30-day comment period on a proposal to reclassify phenolphthalein as a Category II ingredient, one that is not generally considered "safe and effective," the standard that products must meet to gain the drug agency's approval. A final ruling will be issued after the comments are reviewed. +Dr. Temple urged consumers to read laxative labels carefully and avoid those that contained phenolphthalein. +"Our advice is to find another laxative," Dr. Temple said. +The agency said there were more than two dozen laxatives that did not contain phenolphthalein. +As concerns about the chemical emerged, some manufacturers shied from its use. In 1995, when preliminary findings of the phenolphthalein studies were released, Schering-Plough Health Care Products reformulated two of its laxatives, Correctol and Feen-A-Mint. +But until now, Novartis has resisted reformulating its Ex-Lax products. With annual sales of $41 million, the five versions of Ex-Lax, three with phenolphthalein, two without, account for about one-ninth of the annual $360 million market for stimulant, or overnight, laxatives. +The company would not say how much the reformulation will cost, but said it is offering coupons worth $1.50 to people who stop using Ex-Lax in the wake of today's announcement. In addition, the company has established a toll-free telephone number, (800) 706-6600, for consumers with questions about the product. + +LOAD-DATE: August 30, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +443 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 31, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +A School for Dance in Rye That Says Fun Breeds Talent + +BYLINE: By CLAUDIA ROWE + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 1; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 866 words + +DATELINE: RYE + +THERE are no formidable old women tapping out ballet combinations with pointer sticks at New Dance, and despite worn-out toe shoes hanging in clusters over the studio mirror, no painfully deformed dancer's feet among the students. Not if Heidi Blair can help it. +The school Ms. Blair opened here five years ago with 92 students has grown to more than 650, largely on the strength of its director's philosophy: that dance should always be fun, that discipline does not mean drudgery and that there is no call for hurt feelings or embarrassed children in her program. + "I want to make sure that each kid walks out of here with a smile on their face, no matter what," Ms. Blair, 31, said. "They should feel confident and creative and liked, not picked on and teased and harassed." +The 3- and 4-year-old girls wearing tiny ballet skirts and waving scarlet scarves in Ms. Blair's Tuesday morning class appeared to get the message. They giggled and twirled to classical music, dancing through beams of sunlight on the floor and trying to imitate their graceful teacher as she circled the room. Afterward, they ran proudly to waiting parents, asking: "Did you see me?" "Were you watching?" +Older students like Rebecca Jacobs, 14, often take ballet, jazz and modern dance. Several said New Dance combined unusually attentive technical training with a relaxed attitude that they missed in other programs. "I really wanted to do serious dancing," Rebecca said. "And at New Dance, there are rules and everything -- it's real ballet. It's just more laid back." +In a converted 1914 school building in the heart of Rye, New Dance students jete and releve in what were once the offices of an architecture concern and public relations company. Ms. Blair, a former dance and biology student at Purchase College, borrowed $40,000 from her family to gut the space. Her father, a retired postmaster, flew east from the family home in Arizona to build the school's anti-injury sprung floors himself. In September 1992, after hiring a half-dozen teachers who shared her ideas about dance, Ms. Blair opened the doors. +Anyone who has ever taken a traditional ballet class will recognize what Ms. Blair was trying to avoid: shrill instructors and biting competition, which she said discourages children. New Dance's primary ballet teacher, Colleen Blair (who is not related to her employer) knew it all too well. After years spent pirouetting through the rigorous School of American Ballet in Manhattan, Colleen developed knee injuries and a battered sense of self-esteem by the time she was 17. +"I cut off all my hair, gained a lot of weight and just sat in my apartment eating peanut butter out of the jar," she said. "It was terrible." +Modern dance at Bennington College in Vermont brought her back to the fold with some valuable insights. "I try to teach ballet with a 'safe body' technique you get from modern dance," she said. "A lot of very traditional ballet schools don't look at you as an individual. They look at you as a shape they're fitting you into. But I'm not doing this to make ballerinas. I'm doing it to give people a love of dance." +Not that she is not a stickler for technique. Colleen Blair gives pointe classes only to pupils she deems strong enough for toe shoes and watches over their first store fittings herself. She invites professional choreographers from the Alvin Ailey and Paul Taylor dance companies to prepare pieces specifically for New Dance children. At the end of each year she includes all ballet students into a three-act production at the Performing Arts Center at Purchase College. Last spring's show was "Coppelia." The year before, Mario M. Cuomo was there to watch his granddaughters perform in "Sleeping Beauty." +"What ballet is really teaching them is self-discipline and confidence," said Sallie Putz, the mother of two New Dance students who have been in the program for two years. "In 'Coppelia,' they couldn't wait to get on stage. They showed no fear. I thought, 'Wow, that's something.' " +Ms. Putz became so impressed with the school that she enrolled in it herself, though she had no dance experience. "I never thought I would do this. I'm 42 years old -- not exactly the optimal time to start ballet," she said with a laugh. "But I was spending a lot of time at the school with my kids who both take classes, and I thought, 'Why not?' I love it." +The Putz family approach is common at New Dance. Heidi Blair tries to design schedules -- which also include jazz, modern, yoga, adult ballet and aerobics classes -- to mesh with school dismissals and car-pool convenience. While a 4-year-old is taking creative movement in one studio, for example, her mother might be doing aerobics across the hall. New Dance students range in age from 18 months to the elderly. +"We get all kinds and all ages," Heidi Blair said. "I've had retired Rockettes who are 80 take classes here." +When someone like that walks in, the teachers recognize them instantly. "People always know if you've had dance in the past," Colleen Blair said. "It's the way you hold yourself, your ability to listen, to focus. It's a great foundation for everything -- for life." + +LOAD-DATE: August 31, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Various New Dance summer programs in a former 1914 school building in Rye provide instruction for dancers 8 to 18, left, and for those 3 to 7. (Photographs by Susan Harris for The New York Times)(pg. 1); Heidi Blair, left, director of New Dance in Rye, with young students, who practice, and dance in the studio in a summer dance program. Heidi Blair leads a group of students in a ballet class. She says she wants each child to "feel confident and creative." (Photographs by Susan Harris for The New York Times)(pg. 14); Fifties Recalled -- Children at Blythedale Children's Hospital in Valhalla recently learned hand motions and steps of dances popular in the 1950's from Shenan Reed, the first Miss Westchester in 11 years. Taking part in the event, sponsored by the Starlight Foundation, were Ana Lopez, left, Freddie Ramos, Jatiana Cooper and Verenique Ludvig. (Roberta Hershenson for The New York Times)(pg. 15) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +444 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 31, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: ASTORIA; +. . . and Not Only for Young + +BYLINE: By CHARLIE LeDUFF + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 7; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 267 words + +Louie Williams, 74, stood over his photo album and began to weep. Pictures can be horrible with their cackling faces, dulled and made strange by time. +"We mustn't talk about Marty anymore," Mr. Williams said to a rare visitor. + Marty was Mr. Williams's companion for 37 years. They lived in Astoria for a decade before moving to San Diego. Mr. Williams returned when Marty died two years ago. +"Imagine my suprise when I got here," he said. "There is a style and a rare bit of elegance that there never was in the 80's." +The gentrification of Astoria south of Broadway is one of the finest things that has happened to the area since the Steinway family began making pianos, Mr. Williams says. And though most older people who have lived in the neighborhood for years may not share Mr. Williams's blithe outlook, a tour through the area appears to show that many of them do agree that the "kids" have been a good influence on the community. +"You know, there used to be a lot of empty spaces around here," said Charlie Pyrcholas, 67, who has lived in his rent-controlled apartment for 33 years and spends his retirement in a lawn chair. "I don't mind them if they don't bother me." +Mr. Williams spends his days drinking tea and drawing portraits at the Cafi Bar. He speaks in what he describes as a stream of unconciousness. +"People don't want you when you're old," he said, "but this place is very warm." +Deborah Keenan, 58, agreed. Very warm and nicely decorated, she said, but, oh!, the prices. +"Two dollars for coffee?" Not to worry. Today it was on the house. CHARLIE LeDUFF + +LOAD-DATE: August 31, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Louie Williams is an older Astoria resident who likes the changes. (Rebecca Cooney for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +445 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +August 31, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: SHEEPSHEAD BAY; +Elevator Repairs Leave Elderly Tenants Marooned on High + +BYLINE: By AMY WALDMAN + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 8; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 597 words + +At 81, Mildred Fogel is spry, and she is wily. Last week found her walking across the roof of the building in the public housing complex where she lives to the top of an adjoining building. From there, she climbed down a flight of stairs and found a working elevator. +"I shouldn't do it," she said of her cat burglar routine, "but I have to get my food." + After 47 years in a six-story building with an elevator, in June Ms. Fogel suddenly found that she was living in a walk-up. The City Housing Authority had decided to upgrade the elevator in her building and the 67 others in the Sheepshead-Nostrand complex. But fixing the elevators means taking eight elevators at a time out of service for three months or more. +Each building has only one elevator, which means residents, many of whom are elderly or disabled, have had to take to the stairs, or use the roofs. The woman who cares for Ms. Fogel's bedridden neighbor put her in a wheelchair, lugged her onto the roof and then down into the neighboring elevator, all so she could get to a doctor's appointment. +Once a day, Anna Sussman, 96, spends 20 agonizing minutes gingerly descending five flights so she can volunteer at the local Y.W.H.A. Then she treks back up, her swollen ankles recording every step. +"If I have to go up twice, I'm pooped," she said, so most of the rest of the time she sits in her apartment "like a prisoner," her home for 33 years now her jail. +An 82-year-old woman who would identify herself only as Estelle said she too could drag herself down and up only once a day. +"It's been murder," she said. "I don't know how I survived. It's torture, real torture." +Young mothers have also had a hard time. Ula McQueen has four young children. She said she has to make several trips to get them and their assorted bicycles, strollers and baby carriages down from the fourth floor and back each day. +The 5,100 residents would probably agree that the 50-year-old elevators need a total overhaul, which was started in May; what baffles them is why it takes 12 weeks. Several tenants in Ms. Fogel's building, 3019 Avenue W, say they are particularly galled because the elevator has been inoperable since the beginning of June but they have not seen anyone working on it in nearly a month. But an authority spokesman, Hilly Gross, said that workers have been on the job every day. "They do a lot of work in the motor room and the shaft," he said. +Mr. Gross also said that the contractor, Millar Elevator, was barred by its agreement with the authority from commenting on the work. +Councilman Anthony Weiner said he has sent a letter to the authority's chairman, Ruben Franco, to amend its contract with Millar to require faster work on fewer elevators at a time. But, he said, the authority has been intractable. "They seem reluctant to change their game plan," Mr. Weiner said. +Asked if the work could have been completed faster, Mr. Gross replied with "an emphatic no" and insisted that the work is too complicated. "We think we did and have done everything possible to minimize the impact on residents," Mr. Gross said, including offering to move them to ground-floor apartments for the three months, providing aides to help with shopping, and offering to install temporary lifts on buiilding stairways to enable wheelchair-bound tenants to leave their apartments. +But tenants said they had never seen the lifts and rarely seen the aides. They scoffed at the offer to relocate. "They're crazy," said Ms. Fogel. "I'm living here 47 years and I'm going to move?" AMY WALDMAN + +LOAD-DATE: August 31, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Mildred Fogel, 81, resents having to use the roof "to get my food." (Richard Lee for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +446 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 2, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Ernest Schwarcz, 76, Dean at Queens College + +BYLINE: By WOLFGANG SAXON + +SECTION: Section D; Page 15; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 437 words + +Dr. Ernest Schwarcz, a dean emeritus at Queens College of City University who raised its continuing-education enrollment from dozens to thousands of older adults seeking degrees or just recharging their minds, died last Tuesday after being struck by a car near his home in Fresh Meadows, Queens. He was 76. +He was struck at an intersection and died later that day at Mary Immaculate Hospital, the college said. + Dr. Schwarcz retired as dean of the School of General Studies and professor of philosophy at the end of 1992. But he remained active on the campus as senior fellow of Jewish studies and recently traveled to Israel with Allen Lee Sessoms, president of Queens College, to discuss exchanges with several Israeli universities. +Dr. Schwarcz was a founder of the college's Center for Jewish Studies and conducted a symposium in June on the chasm dividing Orthodox Jews from the Conservative and Reform branches. He planned to teach a Jewish Studies class on ethics this semester. +Dr. Schwarcz fostered many innovative programs as dean, adding courses taught abroad, including some taught in China and Israel. The Continuing Education Division had an enrollment of 12 when he began to direct it, but the numbers have grown to about 10,000 students yearly, a result of the addition of course offerings in time to take advantage of the growth in interest in such programs nationally. +At the Center for Jewish Studies, he was chairman of the Ethnic Studies Council and the Black-Jewish People to People Project. The project brought Jewish and black participants together at Queens College to discuss relations between their communities. +A native of Hungary, Ernest Schwarcz graduated from the University of Budapest, from which he also received his Ph.D. and began to teach philosophy in 1948. He taught at the University of Vienna and the University of Melbourne, Australia, before joining Queens College in 1959 as a part-time lecturer. +In the three decades that followed, he became an influential figure in the educational ground swell that attracted more and more people in their mid-20's and older to the nation's colleges. +At Queens, he directed the Adult Collegiate Education program, one of the oldest adult degree programs in the country, which now enrolls 1,500 students every year. +The college promoted him to professor of philosophy in 1970. He was the co-author of books on American education and the learning process and contributed frequently to professional journals on those subjects, as well as Jewish education, educational leadership and Plato. +He is survived by his wife, Marta. + +NAME: Ernest Schwarcz + +LOAD-DATE: September 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Ernest Schwarcz. (Karen Leon) + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +447 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 2, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS: The Face of The Future In Japan; +Economic Threat Of Aging Populace + +BYLINE: By SHERYL WuDUNN + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 2; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1865 words + +DATELINE: TOKYO, Sept. 1 + +The year is 2025. The nation has twice as many old people as it has children; its economy is groaning under the weight of heavy taxes; its population is shrinking, and the Government's reserve of social security funds has run dry. + America in the next generation? Not exactly. For unless things change, this is the not-too-distant future of Japan, once the fastest-growing economy on the globe and now the world's most rapidly aging industrial society. With one person in six already older than 65, the challenge of how Japan will support its aging society grows more bedeviling with each passing year. +Not that the United States will be exempt from some of the same hardships. But Japan will be the world's guinea pig: No nation has ever had experience with such an elderly society and Japan is graying faster than the rest of the industrial world in North America and Europe. So how it faces the quandaries presented by a rapidly aging society is likely to serve as a model -- or a warning -- to other nations that will eventually undergo the same transformation. +The lessons from Japan so far are not encouraging, for it seems that the only way that Tokyo will be able to finance the nation's wrinkled future will be with significantly higher taxes and considerably smaller benefits. +"There is no golden egg," Atsushi Seike, an economics professor at Keio University, said. "So we have to get money from somewhere and that is only from the people or an increase in their productivity." +A declining birth rate and a graying society -- rather than exchange rates and trade surpluses -- are likely to be the key factors during the next several decades in shaping the economies of Japan and other rapidly aging industrial countries. +Unless policies change substantially, high payments will exhaust Japan's pension reserve fund sometime before the year 2025. By that time, the total social welfare burden -- much of it retirement and health care costs for the elderly -- could reach as high as 73 percent of national income, according to an official forecast. Taxpayers, of course, will have to pick up much of the swollen tab, and higher tax rates could lead to a flight of talent -- even among the famously loyal Japanese. +"Who's going to work?" asked Robert Alan Feldman, chief economist at Salomon Brothers Inc. in Tokyo. "The most productive guys will go somewhere else." +A simulation analysis by Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto's advisory council forecast that unless the Government's finances are overhauled, the burden from social welfare and fiscal debt will balloon. For 2025, it projects an overall national debt of 153 percent of gross domestic product, compared with just 11.5 percent of the overall economic output in 1995. +As a result, the analysis concluded with perhaps a touch of typical Japanese alarmism, if the current system is not changed, the "economy will collapse." +"We don't have any concrete direction," Junichi Sakamoto, an official at the Health and Welfare Ministry, said. "But I think that many people think a cut in the benefits is inevitable." +The future strains on society are evident in the reaction of those unlucky workers, like Atsuto Hayahara, who have already suffered pension cuts for other reasons. A 55-year-old employee at Seishoku Kohyo, Mr. Hayahara saw his benefits cut when the pension fund at the troubled textile firm was bankrupted by the ailing economy and a stifling regulatory climate. Mr. Hayahara had been anticipating a lump-sum pension payment of 2.21 million yen -- or roughly $18,300 -- but that has been cut by more than half, to 880,000 yen, or $7,285. +"I'm just infuriated," Mr. Hayahara said. "I believed in the system, and look how it turned out. I've been betrayed. +"I wanted to do something good for my wife, who has had a harsh life, but now that the pension will be reduced, my dream has evaporated," he added. "We were putting in our own money. What we thought would be for our retired life has disappeared." +Japan's experience is relevant precisely because it is not unique, just ahead of its time. Many experts say that the United States and other countries face similarly difficult outlooks, as the populations born after World War II all begin to age at about the same time. +Still, America is aging more slowly than Japan, and -- at least for now -- its Social Security program is running decent surpluses. Elderly Americans will make up only 20 percent of the population in the year 2030; in Japan, they will account for 25 percent of the population by 2015. +By the year 2029, though, America's Social Security program could be technically bankrupt, too. Unless the Government restructures the system, argues Martin Feldstein, a Harvard economist who served for a while as President Ronald Reagan's chief economic adviser, it will become a "bad deal" for participants in the program who stand to receive less and less in benefits. +In some respects, Japan is better off than America. For starters, 55 percent of Japanese older than 65 still live with their children, compared with less than 20 percent in other industrialized countries. That means that even if pension checks do not come on time, someone will look after most of the elderly here. +The Japanese are also legendary savers, and worries about their future have already driven them to accumulate an average of 9.6 million yen, about $79,500, in savings for each man, woman and child. +But even this tendency to save may be in jeopardy. In general, most people save money in middle age and then spend it after retirement, so that an elderly population is expected to have a much lower savings rate. +For the rest of the world, that means that Japan may no longer be the source of excess savings that are channeled into investments abroad, helping to prop up foreign bond markets. +"The savings rate could be zero or negative by 2010," said Charles Horioka, an economist at Osaka University who has analyzed the savings habits of the elderly. "Japan will have less savings, less money to finance investment and the economy won't grow as fast." +In any case, since the United States and other countries are not far behind in their own aging process, Japan will be forging a plan from which others may learn. +That is, if it develops a plan. Many economists say that the Government has been slow to revamp the nation's archaic pension system, a pay-as-you-go arrangement like the United States' Social Security system and most others in the industrial world. +The Government pension system has generally tried to provide enough money to cover all of a retiree's daily expenses. Every Japanese worker is now required to join the national pension system, and some also join supplementary corporate plans. Most workers pay at least the basic fixed monthly amount, around 12,700 yen, or $105, into the national system regardless of how much they earn. +But many individuals, mainly the self-employed, are not making their contributions to the national pension system because they no longer trust it. Failure to contribute is technically illegal but quietly tolerated. +Japan's complex social security system embraces a network of public, corporate and individual pension plan with numerous quirks and peculiarities that have developed over the years. +As in Mr. Hayahara's case, many employees join company pension plans to supplement the national program, and the troubles of the economy since the stock market collapsed in the early 1990's have plunged numerous pension funds into bankruptcy. Interest rates are at rock bottom in Japan, with the benchmark overnight lending rate at half a percent. The conservatively managed pension funds have been able to get returns of only 2 percent to 3 percent, which could cut deeply into future payments. +In the meantime, pensioners are making out well, for many of them joined pension plans later in their working lives but collect full benefits now. The result is that young and middle-aged workers are effectively subsidizing the elderly. +"If we keep the structure of the present system unchanged, then there will be intergenerational inequities," Mr. Horioka said. "The younger are getting less than they paid, losing out to the older people who are making out like bandits." +Many company pensions do not have enough money in reserve to cover their future payouts comfortably, and collectively, publicly listed companies could be underfinanced by as much as 40 trillion yen, roughly $331 billion, according to estimates by Watson Wyatt, a pension consulting firm in Tokyo. Official statistics show that 53 percent of the nation's 1,873 pension funds are running deficits or just breaking even. +This year, even the Honda Motor Company, which is flush with profits, said that for the third consecutive year, it had set aside extra money, about 25 billion yen, or $207 million, to bolster its skimpy pension reserve. Honda may be well able to afford it, but for most companies, such moves come at the cost of missing important business opportunities. +"It's a big deal for corporations," Mr. Feldman of Salomon said. "You can't build capacity for expansion. If you normally make a hundred bucks and buy a machine to build your business, now you've got to put that into a pension fund." +So far, the Government's remedies, like the actions taken in Washington, amount to little more than tinkering. Starting in 2001, Tokyo plans to gradually push the age at which pensions begin to 65 from the current 60. The Government has also suggested that pension benefits will have to be cut by one-fifth. +Government projections show that by 2025 workers' monthly contributions at corporations will have to be raised to about 35 percent of the average salary from an average of 17 percent now. But many experts say that the Government's fiscal system must be overhauled along with the social security system. +"Japan's scheme will not bring success," Kiyoshi Murakami, a prominent pension specialist in Tokyo, said. "There must be fundamental change." +Any solution is likely to include proposals to extend the employment of the aged, cut benefits to the wealthy and rebalance the system's benefits and burdens among the different generations. For the first time, the Government is also considering shifting part of the pension system to the private sector, an idea that is also under discussion in the United States. +But these considerations have increased mistrust of the public system among the Japanese. In a recent survey, more than 70 percent of those polled said that their biggest worry about retirement was whether their Government pensions would continue. Like aging baby boomers in the United States, many individuals here are setting up their own retirement funds in what has become one of the fastest-growing areas in pension management. +"One housewife in her 20's or 30's said she couldn't count on the public pension in the future," said Junichi Nezu, who monitors a hotline on old-age financial matters at the Japan Institute of Life Insurance. "So she said, 'I would like to stop paying the premium for the public pension and solely invest in an individual pension.' " + +LOAD-DATE: September 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: As Japan ages faster than the rest of the industrial world, most older Japanese receive Government-sponsored health care and a pension . . . but the system is in danger of becoming so expensive that it would send taxes soaring and weaken the economy. (pg. D1); In front of the Togenuki Jizo temple in Tokyo, which draws elderly Japanese who pray for continued good health, the street is filled with vendors catering to an aged clientele. Japan will be facing the difficulties of financing its elderly population sooner than other major industrialized nations. (Kaku Kurita for The New York Times)(pg. D14) + +Graph: "Aging Societies" +Projections show that the elderly are becoming an increasingly large share of the populations of many industrialized countries, straining the government resources of those countries. Graph tracks the percentage of population 65 and older in five industrialized nations, from 1995 through 2020. It also shows health spending in 1993 for people 65 and older as a share of total heath care spending in these nations. (Source: Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development)(pg. D1) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +448 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 3, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +KATZ, MO + +SECTION: Section D; Page 20; Column 1; Classified + +LENGTH: 299 words + +KATZ-Mo. On August 31, 1997. A man of many parts. Enormously gifted in intellect, artistic in temperament, & forthright in manner, Mo Katz was a loving husband of Mary Jane Koren, a fiercely proud father of Zev and Ivon Katz and devoted grandfather of Nicholas Katz. He was a tenacious friend and mentor to many outside his family. A senior New York City hospital administrator for most of his professional career, Mo earned a national reputation as an industry leader. He was an unmitigated idealist, endowed with a keen sense of what was doable, and the intuitive ability to engage others in achieving it. Mo was most of all a humanist who loved to tell stories as a way of expressing the ironies & triumphs of daily living. He always made his point. His was a fearless spirit-one that animated us all. Memorial services will be held on Tuesday September 23 at 6PM at Riverside Memorial Chapel, Amsterdam Avenue & 76 St. In lieu of flowers contributions in his name may be made to Amnesty International, 322 8th Avenue, N.Y., N.Y. 10001. +KATZ-Mo. A Senior Member of The Commonwealth Fund Staff for a decade, Mo was tireless in developing and supporting programs to help the most vulnerable in our society, from the frail elderly to the young. Experienced in policy planning and development, Mo Katz never lost sight of the true audience, the individuals who would be served. His contribution to The Fund went well beyond professional expertise. For The Fund's Staff and Grantees, Mo was a mentor to many, and a friend to all. He delighted in people, and they responded in kind. On behalf of The Board of Directors and Fund Staff, our most sincere condolences to his wife and family. Charles A. Sanders, M.D., Chairman The Commonwealth Fund Karen Davis, President The Commonwealth Fund + +LOAD-DATE: September 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +449 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 3, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +Rudolf Bing, Titan of the Met, Dies at 95 + +BYLINE: By JAMES R. OESTREICH + +SECTION: Section A;Page 1;Column 2;Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 1429 words + +Sir Rudolf Bing, who as the dapper and acerbic general manager of the Metropolitan Opera from 1950 to 1972 ushered the company into the modern era and into Lincoln Center, died yesterday at St. Joseph's Hospital in Yonkers. He was 95 and lived at the Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale in the Bronx. +Sir Rudolf firmly established the Met as not only the biggest but also in many ways the most prominent company on the world stage today. He used his well-developed European contacts to draw some of most prominent international stars to the Met, and he offered significant new opportunities for Americans. In particular, he broke the company's racial barrier by hiring Leontyne Price in 1953 and Marian Anderson in 1955. + He cut an autocratic figure at the Met, where he seemed to relish controversy when he did not actively court it. He had run-ins with some of the top international stars of the time, including Maria Callas and Lauritz Melchior. In 1968, he was called the man who "fired" Callas, although the incident, as he later took pains to explain, was not so simple, and he made attempts, which were unsuccessful, to lure her back to the Met. +His tenure included devastating strikes by members of the company in 1961 and 1969. He offered the Met board his resignation after the first one and resigned not long after the second. +"He revolutionized the way the company's productions looked by bringing to the Met the world's greatest directors and designers," said Joseph Volpe, the Met's current general manager, who started with the company as a carpenter. "On a personal note, I shall always remember that it was Mr. Bing who gave me my first opportunity when he put me in charge of getting the opening production of 'Antony and Cleopatra' on the stage." +Sir Rudolf's later years took a farcical turn with a romance that was played out in the tabloids. In 1987, at 85, he married Carroll Douglass, who was 47 and had a history of three hospitalizations for psychiatric causes and three marriages to significantly older men. Sir Rudolf was suffering from Alzheimer's disease, those close to him said, and they were able to have the marriage annulled in 1989. +Sir Rudolf was born in Vienna in 1902, the youngest of three children. He studied voice. "I still believe that if I had stayed with it I might have become a lieder singer of real distinction," he wrote many years later. +Menial jobs with bookstores opened a new avenue when the Hugo Heller bookstore entered the field of concert management. Sir Rudolf took an active hand in the agency in 1921, establishing contacts that led to appointments as assistant manager of the Darmstadt Opera in 1928 and the Municipal Opera in Berlin in 1931. + +The Benefits Of Steady Nerves +"With all this pressure, amid all these crises, with artists losing their nerves and their heads several times a day," he wrote of the experiences in opera houses, "a young man who kept his nerve and his head could make a real contribution." +He married Nina Schelemskaya-Schlesnaya, a Russian ballet dancer, in 1928, and they lived together until she died of a stroke in 1983. Both eventually became British citizens. +In 1934, Sir Rudolf helped found the first Glyndebourne Festival in England. He was named general manager of the festival in 1935 and maintained the relationship until he left for the Met in 1949, although Glyndebourne ceased its standard seasons of opera productions during World War II and did not resume them until 1951. +During the war years, Sir Rudolf eked out a living working for the John Lewis department stores in London. For a time, he was a divisional manager at the Peter Jonesdepartment store, but he leapt at the opportunity to re-enter the arts, reopening the Glyndebourne office in 1944 and running a children's theater. +On Glyndebourne's behalf, he played an crucial role in the founding of the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland in 1946 and was its artistic director until 1949. "Until Edinburgh, I had worked all my life as someone's assistant," he later wrote. There he discovered the "fine sense of freedom which accompanies the assumption of ultimate responsibility." +Sir Rudolf moved to New York in 1949, taking up residence with his wife in a suite at the Essex House on Central Park South. He lived there until after his wife's death, leading a closely regulated existence. +After a season spent observing the Met's operation under his predecessor, Edward Johnson, Sir Rudolf took control in June 1950. "All my life up to 1949 could be seen as the proper preparation for being manager of the Metropolitan," he wrote later. +In 1966, the company moved into its new home at Lincoln Center, with the premiere of Samuel Barber's "Antony and Cleopatra." The occasion was dampened by poor reviews. +In addition to assigning that production to Mr. Volpe, the current general manager, Sir Rudolf also hired James Levine, now the company's artistic director, for his Met debut as a conductor in 1971. +"You don't need wit to run an opera house," Sir Rudolf wrote in his memoir "A Knight at the Opera." "You need style." Style he surely had, yet few would have denied that he also had wit, and a quick one. +His targets included himself. "Don't be misled," he once said. "Behind that cold, austere, severe exterior, there beats a heart of stone." +Sir Rudolf has often been been criticized for a perceived neglect of contemporary music and innovative stage direction. Operas given their premieres during his tenure, in addition to 'Antony and Cleopatra," were Barber's "Vanessa," in 1958, and Marvin David Levy's "Mourning Becomes Elektra," in 1967. +Perhaps the most hotly debated staging was an aborted Wagner "Ring" cycle, darkly directed as well as conducted in its first installments by Herbert von Karajan. +His favorite directors included Franco Zeffirelli, who mounted a late production Verdi's "Falstaff" at the old Met, in 1964 and Verdi's "Otello" as the last new production of Sir Rudolf's tenure. + +A Favorite Opera And Chagall Murals +But perhaps his favorite production of all was the Mozart's "Zauberflote," designed in 1967 by his friend the painter Marc Chagall. Sir Rudolf also arranged for Chagall to paint the large murals at the new Met, which are visible from Lincoln Center Plaza. +Sir Rudolf was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1971. He left the Met in April 1972 with a gala concert and a performance of Verdi's "Don Carlo, with which he had also opened his tenure. +"As the steadily expanding Met season collided with the jet age's increased mobility for star performers, Bing at first succeeded in maintaining some semblance of a resident company, and, when this became impossible, kept up a steady flow of talent that assured, if not cohesive casts, at least many memorable performances," the Metropolitan Opera Encyclopedia cautiously summed up his achievement in 1987. +He was to have been succeeded by the Swedish producer Goeran Gentele, who was killed in a car crash in the summer of 1972. Schuyler Chapin took the position from 1972 to 1975. +After leaving the Met, Sir Rudolf taught at Brooklyn College just long enough to decide that he was not cut out for the job. At the same time, he took up employment at Columbia Artists Management, a position he found more congenial. +He wrote two books of memoirs, "5,000 Nights at the Opera," in 1972, and "A Knight at the Opera." In 1973, he also took his first role in an opera, a nonspeaking part in Hans Werner Henze's "Junge Lord" at the New York City Opera. +In January 1987, on his 85th birthday, Sir Rudolf married Miss Douglass. The couple's trips to Florida, Anguilla, England and Scotland provided frequent fodder for the tabloid press. +In September 1989, Justice Carmen Ciparick of the New York State Supreme Court annulled the marriage. "Sir Rudolf Bing, as a result of the degenerative nature of his disease, lacked the mental capacity to enter into a marriage," Justice Ciparick wrote, citing the opinion of a medical expert. +In 1989, Sir Rudolf was admitted to the Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale with what was diagnosed as Alzheimer's disease. He remained there until a week before his death, when, suffering from respiratory distress, he was taken to St. Joseph's Hospital. There are no survivors in his immediate family. +Sir Rudolf's passing finally removes the sting from one of his most famous barbs. When told that the conductor George Szell, with whom he had crossed swords several times, was his own worst enemy, Sir Rudolf responded, "Not while I'm alive." + +NAME: Sir Rudolf Bing + +LOAD-DATE: September 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: September 11, 1997, ThursdaySeptember 19, 1997, Friday + + CORRECTION: +The obituary of Sir Rudolf Bing on Sept. 3 misstated the year when Leontyne Price made her official debut at the Metropolitan Opera during his regime as general manager. It was 1961, not 1953. Her earlier appearance was in a fund-raising concert, the Metropolitan Opera Jamboree, at the Ritz Theater. The obituary also misstated the year of Sir Rudolf's dismissal of Maria Callas. It was 1958, not 1968. +An obituary of Sir Rudolf Bing on Sept. 3 referred incorrectly to the departure of Maria Callas from the Metropolitan Opera after her dismissal by Sir Rudolf in 1958. It was not permanent; she returned to the Met in "Tosca" in 1965, seven years before his retirement. + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Sir Rudolf Bing with Maria Callas on Feb. 6, 1958, when she began her second season at the Metropolitan in the title role of Verdi's "Traviata." (European, from "Callas: Portrait of a Prima Donna," by George Jellinek, Ziff-Davis)(pg. D20); Sir Rudolf Bing outside the Metropolitan Opera House in 1972. "You don't need wit to run an opera house," he wrote. "You need style." (Jack Mitchell)(p. D20); Sir Rudolf Bing, the former general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. (Jack Mitchell, 1972)(pg. A1) + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +450 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 4, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Tentative Columbia Accord in Alabama + +BYLINE: By Bloomberg News + +SECTION: Section D; Page 4; Column 3; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 171 words + +The Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation has reached a preliminary settlement with the State of Alabama over a Medicaid billing investigation at one of its hospitals, a state official said yesterday. +Columbia and the state reached a tentative agreement concerning "billing irregularities" at the Northwest Alabama Medical Center in Russellville, an Alabama Medicaid agency spokeswoman, J. D. Schremser, said. The investigation, begun in May 1996, predated a wide Federal Government investigation into Columbia. + A final settlement meeting with state officials is expected in the next few days, a Columbia spokesman, Jeff Prescott, said. The original investigation stemmed from concern over billing for tubal ligation operations, he said. +Federal authorities are investigating whether Columbia overbilled the Federal Medicare health insurance program for the elderly. The investigation has already resulted in the resignation of former top management, and Medicare fraud indictments of three midlevel executives. + +LOAD-DATE: September 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +451 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 4, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Calcium and Vitamin D Halve Bone Fracture Risk, Study Says + +BYLINE: By The Associated Press + +SECTION: Section A; Page 21; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 529 words + +Calcium and vitamin D supplements can cut in half the risk of broken bones for older people, according to a study by Tufts University researchers. +Older people taking the supplements slowed the rate at which bone tissue breaks down and rebuilds, called bone turnover, and maintained or slightly increased their bone density, according to the study. + Aging is often accompanied by osteoporosis, in which bones become extremely fragile. Osteoporosis and fractures resulting from it lead to an estimated $10 billion or more a year in medical bills. +Other studies have shown that calcium supplements -- with or without vitamin D, which is known to help the gut absorb calcium -- can slow bone loss. But the study by Dr. Beth Dawson-Hughes and other Tufts researchers found that when people taking the supplements fell, they were only half as likely to break a bone as people taking placebos. +The study, being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, looked at 389 men and women 65 years old or older who were fairly healthy and living at home. The average subject was getting about 700 milligrams a day of calcium and about 200 international units of vitamin D through diet. +For three years, half of them took daily supplements containing 500 milligrams of calcium citrate and 700 international units of vitamin D. The rest were given dummy supplements, or placebos. +In that period, 37 of them suffered fractures: 11 of 187 in the group taking supplements, or 6 percent, compared with 26 of 202 in the group taking placebos, or 13 percent. Members of each group reported about an equal number of falls. +Because the difference in bone density between the two groups was modest, the researchers said the protective effect of the supplements might have been the result of the slower rate of bone turnover. +Dr. Richard L. Prince of the University of Western Australia said in an accompanying editorial that the study added to evidence that calcium supplements could help prevent broken bones in elderly people at little cost and with few side effects. +Panels from the National Institutes of Health and the Institute of Medicine have recommended increasing the daily allowance of calcium to help slow osteoporosis among older Americans. +Foods rich in calcium include milk, cheese, yogurt and dark leafy greens. The body manufactures vitamin D when exposed to sunlight. Vitamin D and is commonly added to milk because it is so hard to get enough of the nutrient through diet alone. +As people age, it is more difficult for them to absorb calcium from food, so they may need to consume even more. Elderly people who spend little time in the sun may also need vitamin D supplements. Women are more likely than men to have osteoporosis. +A panel at the National Institutes of Health recommended three years ago that men and women 25 and older should consume at least 1,000 milligrams of calcium daily, while postmenopausal and elderly women should consume as much as 1,500 milligrams, the amount in five 8-ounce glasses of milk. The Institute of Medicine recommended last month that all adults consume 1,000 to 1,300 milligrams daily. + +LOAD-DATE: September 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +452 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 5, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +In Their Words + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 331 words + + +SAL F. ALBANESE +At noon yesterday, at a rally attended by dozens of union and small-business supporters in front of City Hall, he said: + +"The way to run this city in the 21st century is to run it fairly and make sure our small business and commercial strips thrive, that workers in this city will get paid a fair wage. We shouldn't balance the budget on the backs of workers while we're giving hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks to big corporations. There's no money for workers, no salary increases for two years, and yet Bear Stearns, which made a billion dollars in profits last year, got $75 million in tax breaks just last week." + +RUTH W. MESSINGER +In a fund-raising letter that was sent out to 55,000 people and made public yesterday, she made these comments: + +"Rudy Giuliani wasted no time in taking a page from Alfonse D'Amato's playbook -- spitting out insults, innuendos and labels that play into people's negative stereotypes of strong women. Rudy may be no gentleman, but he's no fool either. D'Amato did it against Hillary Clinton. The radical right did it against Anita Hill. Now, Rudy Giuliani is trying to do it to me." + +AL SHARPTON +At the A. Phillip Randolph Senior Citizens' Center on West 146th Street in Manhattan, he told a group of more than 50 people: + +"The present commuter tax is 0.45 percent of 1 percent. If we raise that just a fraction of a percent, it would generate another $500 million a year. It would still be 3 percent lower than most commuter taxes in most major cities around the country. People from Connecticut, New Jersey and Long Island would have to pay more of their share. They work here, yet they go pay their taxes out in the suburbs. They make their money downtown and spend their money in the suburbs. They say, 'I wouldn't live in the city.' Good, then don't work here either. If you think it's not fit to sleep in, then let those of us who sleep here have the jobs and spend the taxes here." + +LOAD-DATE: September 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Text + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +453 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 7, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Books in Brief: Nonfiction; +Covered With Fur in the Naked City + +BYLINE: By Anita Gates + +SECTION: Section 7; Page 24; Column 2; Book Review Desk + +LENGTH: 223 words + +Canine New Yorkers are a lot like their human counterparts, as can be seen in NEW YORK DOGS (Chronicle, $14.95), a collection of photographs by Andrea Mohin, a staff photographer at The New York Times. For some, city life is all about career: the airport luggage inspectors, professional models, police detectives, arson investigators, guides, guards and trackers. For some, there is time for charity work: making an appearance at the A.S.P.C.A. walkathon in Central Park, for instance, or visiting the elderly at a Bronx nursing home. And of course there are layabouts, like Kiko, the soulful-eyed American Staffordshire terrier who spends his days on a stool at a Greenwich Village bar. The 55 black-and-white photographs reveal a preference for relatively large dogs (Rottweilers, German shepherds, Labrador mixes). This may leave cuteness addicts hungry for just one more Pomeranian in a backpack or the equivalent. They will like Dancer, a Chinese crested powder puff, relaxing on a chaise longue on a penthouse terrace. If Mohin's view has a flaw, it is that she sometimes makes a New York dog's life look a little better than it really is. Never mind what taste treat the English bulldog is desperately trying to reach in that silver chafing dish. How did he get into the buffet line at Tavern on the Green? Anita Gates + +LOAD-DATE: September 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: (from "New York Dogs") + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +454 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 7, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Those Too Friendly Telemarketers: Lessons to Heed + +BYLINE: By DARICE BAILER + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 4; Column 3; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1431 words + +AT first, Anna Hartley didn't realize that the telemarketers who called her were leading her astray. The 83-year-old widow, who lives in housing for elderly people in Wethersfield, said she believed that the men and women who called her cared about her, and were sincere when they told her that she would win a new car and increase her chances of winning big prize money if she sent in more money or bought magazines or books. +"I did it for the money, to win," Mrs. Hartley said. "I did it because I never went anywhere, to a show, to a movie, or to a play." + Mrs. Hartley did win a new 1997 car, but it cannot take her anywhere. It is a very small red model, worth perhaps half its $21.99 shipping and handling fee. It was on display for the 400 men and women who attended a consumer university held at late last month at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain. +Consumer university is a free, 2.5-hour course offered by the Attorney General's office, the American Association of Retired Persons, the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program, and American Express Financial Services. Its aim is to help prevent elderly men and women from being taken advantage of dishonest marketeers. +In less than a year, Mrs. Hartley says, she lost $50,000 to telemarketing people, clearing out her bank account. Now, she has only her Social Security check to live on. "I went right down to the bone," Mrs. Hartley said. "I did it to myself. It breaks my heart." +At the grocery store, Mrs. Hartley says, she now wheels her cart past watermelon, ice cream and other items she once loved. She sticks to "just the butter, the milk and the cold cuts and that's it," she said. +Telemarketers themselves argue that the number of unscrupulous practioners among them is tiny and that some people are just plain vulnerable. +John Awerdick, for example, is a partner at Stryker, Tams & Dill in Newark, N.J., which represents several direct marketing companies, including Michigan Bulb, which the Connecticut Attorney General's office is suing for a deceptive sweepstakes. He said he is sympathetic to elderly people like Mrs. Hartley. But, he continued, "there are some people who are just desperate to be winners. How do you protect people from themselves?" +It is the targeting of elderly people that infuriates Arnold P. Schwartz of New Britain. Mr. Schwartz is a senior advocate in the Attorney General's senior volunteer assistance program started two years ago by Attorney General Richard Blumenthal in cooperation with state and local chapters of the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program and the American Association of Retired Persons. +In the program, elderly people educate each other about telemarketing and sweepstakes abuses. Mr. Schwartz, who had retired as a service manager for the Xerox Corporation, was the first volunteer. He speaks to groups around the state, displaying Mrs. Hartley's car with other disappointing prizes in what he calls "Arnie's Scam Show." +Each year, Connecticut consumers, a third of them elderly, lose an estimated $400 million to telemarketers, according to Mr. Schwartz, who spends many hours at the Attorney General's office, seeking refunds for people. He and the 29 other volunteers have helped recover more than $500,000, he said. "If we recover 1 percent each year, we're doing a great job," he added. +Linda A. Goldstein is a partner at Hall, Dickler, Kent, Friedman & Wood, a Manhattan law firm and chairwoman of the Promotion Marketing Association of America, which represents more than 700 companies. +"It's unfortunate that the practices of a small group of unscrupulous telemarketers has tainted the image of all telemarketers in the public's mind," she said. "At a recent workshop held by the Federal Trade Commission with representatives of the magazine publishing industry, the F.T.C. acknowledged that, given the volume of telemarketing activity, the incidence of abuse is small." +But, according to Neil G. Fishman, assistant Attorney General, "It's not just some fly-by-night operator who lurks in the shadow. "It's Publisher's Clearinghouse, Reader's Digest, American Family Publishers, Fingerhut, and United States Postal Exchange that consumers are losing money to." +Some companies, he said, keep lists of people who have responded to telemarketers; the lists, salable for as much as $200 a name, purchasers may even call the men and women on the list and say that they're going to help victims recover lost money, or that they have the money in hand and will return it if the victim pays a processing fee. +"It is true that some unscrupulous telemarketers have engaged in improper targeting of the elderly through the use of so-called 'sucker' lists," Ms. Goldstein said, "but again that is not typical of industry practice. Legitimate telemarketers look to target only those consumers who are most likely to be interested in their products." +Prosecuting telemarketing or direct mail firms is difficult because they often operate from temporary out-of-state addresses or from outside the United States. "There's just so much money involved, and the penalties are minuscule compared to what they make," Mr. Schwartz said. +The law is trying to react, though. The Telemarketing and Sweepstakes Act of 1996 took effect Oct. 1, 1996 and makes it illegal for companies to require an individual to make a purchase before entering a sweepstakes. The law also makes it illegal for a company to charge a fee to participate in a sweepstakes or claim a prize. +In addition, sweepstakes advertisements must clearly state a prize's value, the odds of winning it, and any restrictions on using it. If a person agrees to buy something over the phone, the law requires telemarketers to mail out a written contract disclosing the full terms of the transaction. +This contract must be signed and returned before an individual's credit card can be charged. +If sweepstakes companies send out a simulated check, "THIS IS NOT A CHECK" must be written diagonally across the check. Finally, consumers have three days to cancel their membership in a buying club if the membership fee is more than $200. +Mr. Blumenthal said that his office would probably have legislative proposals in the next session to further curb the efforts of sweepstakes and telemarketing companies. The industry is becoming highly regulated. "As a result, there is a lot of built-in protection for the consumer," Ms. Goldstein said. Ms. Goldstein said the industry as a whole supports educational efforts like the consumer university. "The more educated a consumer is," she said, "the more able that consumer is to distinguish a call coming in from an honest telemarketer with one coming in from an unscrupulous telemarketer." +Martha Wolverton, 77, of Farmington thanked Mr. Schwartz at the end of last month's consumer university. She said she is a widow who could easily have become a victim. +She is lonely at times, she admits. "I've gotten girls on the phone and they talk and I listen," Mrs. Wolverton explained. "I have nothing else to do." + +Some Tips +Consumer advocates and state officials concerned about telemarketing abuses offer several pieces of advice for avoiding victimization, among them the following. +* If a stranger calls you, hang up the telephone. Don't verify your address or provide any information. +* Don't give out your credit card or bank account numbers unless you made the call or know the organization with which you're dealing. +* Be wary of prize notification letters. Don't call 900 numbers to claim a prize; such a call can cost you quite a bit. (You can ask your local phone company to block access to 900 numbers from your phone. There should be no charge.) +* If a telemarketer calls you after 9 P.M. or before 8 A.M., it's illegal. Notify the Attorney General's Senior Hotline at (800) 660-7787. +* Don't donate money over the phone, and don't send money to anyone you don't know. Ask for written information, then, if you wish to donate, do it by check. +* To reduce the number of unsolicited calls you receive, write: Telephone Preference Service, c/o Direct Marketing Association, P.O. Box 9014, Farmingdale, N.Y. 11735-9014. Request that your name be placed on a list of people who do not want to receive unsolicited telephone calls. +* To reduce the amount of unsolicited mail you receive, write: Mail Preference Service, c/o Direct Marketing Association, P.O. Box 9008, Farmingdale, N.Y. 11735-9008. Ask that your name be placed on a list of those who do not wish to receive unsolicited mail. + +LOAD-DATE: September 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Arnold P. Schwartz of New Britain advises older people on how to avoid telemarketing scams. State officials say older people are often targets of consumer fraud. An audience in New Britain learns some defenses. (Photographs by George Ruhe for The New York Times)(pg. 4) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +455 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 7, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Produce To Be Given To Elderly + +BYLINE: By LYNNE AMES + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 11; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 444 words + +DATELINE: RYE + +IT is harvest time again and people 60 and over who meet income criteria will be able to get coupons for free fresh produce at local farmers' markets. +In a Farmers' Market Nutrition Program, sponsored by the New York State Department of Health, the state's Department of Agriculture and Markets, the state's Office of the Aging and the Cornell Cooperative Extension, a low-income, elderly person can receive one book of four coupons worth $2 each. Income requirements are $986 or less a month if single and $1,326 a month or less for a couple, said Ann Darcy, nutritionist with the County Office for the Aging, which administers the program. + Distribution sites are Yonkers General Hospital, 2 Park Avenue in Yonkers (377-6824); Ossining Community Center, 95 Broadway, Ossining (762-8953); Hugh A. Doyle Senior Center, 94 Davis Avenue (235-2363) and Martin Luther King Center, 95 Lincoln Avenue (235-5507) both in New Rochelle, and the Mount Vernon Armory, 144 North Fifth Avenue (665-2434) in Mount Vernon, and the Doles Center, 250 South Sixth Avenue (665-2439), also in Mount Vernon. (Coupons were being distributed in White Plains, Greenburgh and Cortlandt as well, but there are none left there, Ms. Darcy said.) +Farmers' markets, which accept the coupons, are situated near the distribution sites. Among them are Green Seasons Farmers' Market on North Avenue in New Rochelle, open Fridays 8 A.M. to 4 P.M.; Ossining Farmers' Market on Main and Spring Streets in Ossining, open Saturdays 8:30 A.M. to 2:30 P.M., and the Yonkers Farmers' Market in Getty Square, open Thursdays 8 A.M. to 4 P.M. +"This is a very nice way for seniors to get a chance to meet some of their nutritional needs," Ms. Darcy said. "Often, the elderly scrimp on nutrition. They tend to eat very little, and then they may eat only what's convenient. They might not want to bother cooking for themselves, or they might not be able to get fresh produce in small quantities." +Ideally, she added, an individual should eat something daily from each of the food groups of dairy, meat, poultry, fish, of fruit and vegetables, of grains and of fats. She said:"We should be consuming five fruits and vegetables daily -- three vegetables and two fruits. That's a shocker, right? It's hard, but that's the name of the game." +People should also eat lots of grain, a moderate-to-small amount of dairy and meat and a minuscule amount of fat. "Fruits and vegetables are very important and very nutritious," she said. "Fall is a great time to get them. Hopefully, this program will help people who might not otherwise get some of these delicious and important foods." LYNNE AMES + +LOAD-DATE: September 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +456 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 7, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In Russia, Dreams on Wheels + +BYLINE: By MARINA LAKHMAN + +SECTION: Section 11; Page 1; Column 1; Automobiles + +LENGTH: 1330 words + +DATELINE: MOSCOW + +ALTHOUGH the third annual Moscow auto show lasted only a week, Kostya Bagaturov can forever treasure the images of the Mercedes-Benzes, Audis and BMW's on display: While many Russian car lovers spent hours making themselves comfortable behind the wheels of Volgas, Volvos and Volkswagens, Mr. Bagaturov was caressing the streamlined bodies with the lens of his camcorder, insuring that he could view over and over the finest offerings of the world's automobile industry. +"If I could, I would buy this one," said Mr. Bagaturov, a 19-year-old student, focusing on a BMW Z3 M roadster as it gently took its turns on a rotating platform with crowds watching its every move. "But in the meantime I will just look." + Like Mr. Bagaturov, many Russians love cars -- perhaps more than Americans do -- and their affection was on full display at the show, called Autosalon '97, that ended here last Sunday. +The fascination is generally seen as a product of long-repressed desires set free in a capitalist economy. And though many imported luxury cars have appeared in Russia since the fall of Communism, owning one remains a dream for most Russians. Still, the ability to chase such a goal has become as essential as life and liberty, and is often equated with the pursuit of happiness. +At a time when senior citizens receive a monthly pension of less than 300,000 rubles (about $52) some 420,000 adults from across Russia lined up to pay $7 each to enter the Autosalon. Like those who attend auto shows in the West, only a fraction were buying a car; most were just basking in the excitement reflected off gleaming fenders. +Near the displays of German cars, the gold standard in Russia as in most of the world, the cellular phones were abuzz. Well-dressed men adorned with gold chains and flashy rings ogled the Mercedes-Benzes, BMW's and Audis. Teen-agers stood in line to sit in cars they hope to afford someday. +"First and foremost, a car is for pleasure," said Igor Kolesnikov, 34, getting out of the driver's seat of a shiny Audi. "And secondly, it is useful for getting around." +Mr. Kolesnikov is an admirer of Audis who drives a 1991 model. "When I see a car like this I find it hard not to get in," he said. +Cars offer more than just pleasure for Russians who can afford the best. Particularly in the sometimes shady world of what is broadly called "business," a fine car serves as a symbol of acceptance into an elite club -- like being a Communist Party member in Soviet days. Some go so far as to sell their apartments and live in rented rooms so that they can buy a BMW. +The tally of officially sold imported cars does not begin to match the actual number on the streets. While Moscow is commonly said to be home to more Mercedes-Benzes than any other city in the world, there were only 724 official sales of Mercedes cars in Russia in 1996. Many of the cars cruising the increasingly crowded streets are bought used in Europe and brought here illegally, circumventing import duties that can approach 100 percent of the price. +But a foreign car -- particularly a new one -- has a special allure. Sergei Smirnov, an investment banker from Omsk who traveled 1,500 miles to the auto show, was checking out the Langanza, the latest luxury model from Daewoo, the South Korean car maker. He took a seat at the wheel at the invitation of the long-legged model standing guard over the glistening chrome. +"I like it because it looks like a Lexus," said Mr. Smirnov, 30, examining every curve of both the car and its protector. He said he had been driving a Daewoo Espero for two years and was ready for a change. He said the Langanza, at $25,000 to $28,000, would serve well until he could move up to something better. +Glancing at the splashy Avtovaz display, where blinking lights washed over new Ladas, and at the Gaz display, where a Volga 3110 was perched slanting downward over passers-by, he said he would not even look at Russian autos. "I can allow myself a better-quality car," he said. "I want air-conditioning and a good suspension." +Though the 3110 is said to be new, the angular front-wheel-drive Volga has not changed much since it served Communist functionaries. It is somewhat more aerodynamic, and while comfortable, it continues to be plagued with mechanical problems. +Indeed, Russians are turning to foreign cars for reliability as well as status. Last year, when Avtovaz came out with a new compact, the Vaz 2110, it had an average of 92 defects per vehicle. The Moscow Times has reported that of the 700 Volgas bought each year for the President's staff, 200 break down immediately and 300 need repairs within weeks. +To compete better with foreign companies in a market where sales may reach 3.5 to 4 million annually by the end of the century, Russian auto makers are beefing up their cars with many extras. But the souped-up versions often cost just as much as imports -- making it harder for Russians to justify buying a shoddy domestic model. +And some foreign companies are now building vehicles in Russia, including General Motors, which is making Chevrolet Blazers in Tatarstan and plans to make Opels in a joint venture with Avtovaz. +Patriotism may influence some Americans to buy American-made cars, but it has no such hold over most Russians. If they drive Russian-made cars, it is because they are cheaper to buy, cheaper to fix and can handle pervasively rough roads. +The bad roads are at least partly responsible for the popularity of sport utility vehicles, including the Blazer, Toyota Land Cruiser, Jeep Cherokee and Ford Expedition. And this is one category in which Russian manufacturers are keeping up. The Niva, reminiscent of a hardtop Jeep Wrangler, is popular at a price of $8,000. +Yet competition has taken its toll on the 11 Russian vehicle manufacturers, whose production has plunged by half in recent years, to about a million cars a year, though output did rise 13 percent in the first seven months of this year over the period a year earlier. Factories are antiquated and inefficient, taking up to 30 times as long to produce a car as the Japanese require. The overstaffed auto makers cannot afford the investments needed to develop new power trains and modern designs, and some are becoming the public charities of politicians. +At the auto show, Russians closely examined Avtovaz's latest models: the Lada 10; the Bohemia convertible with a modern 16-valve, four-cylinder engine, and the Consul mini-limousine, which comes with a television, stereo, wood-trim interior panels, folding tables, leather upholstery and a price of $30,000 to $35,000. But there were few takers. +The show was also a second birth for the struggling Moskvitch, which has a dreary reputation for being unreliable. Spinning on a platform, a blunt-looking new model, the Knyaz Vladimir, seemed to get the same reaction as the bearded lady at the circus. After a quick look, Roman Babikov, a 28-year-old grocery store manager, shook his head and said, "It's a car of a previous decade." +But one aspect of Russian life makes the ownership of a Russian car attractive: the roads. Poorly paved and pocked with potholes from severe winters, the roads are so bad they have become the subject of poetry and proverbs. And while foreign cars are prestigious, many Russians admit that the roads are best handled by sturdy Russian frames. Thus, Moskvich is installing Renault engines in its newest models, and Tekhnoservis, a company in Nizhny Novgorod, is retrofitting Volga cars with reliable Rover, Ford and Toyota engines. At the auto show, the sight of a powerful Rover V8 inside a black Volga body made Tekhnoservis's display a popular attraction. +While noting that the Volga's native engine is unsophisticated, inefficient and polluting, Mikhail Smirnov of Tekhnoservis praised its body. "For our Russian roads, our exterior is the best," he said. "If you have an accident it's still 10 times cheaper to fix a Volga than a Ford." + +LOAD-DATE: September 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: At the Moscow auto show, Avtovaz displayed its new virtual limousine, the Consul. (James Hill for The New York Times); A fashionable model drew spectators to a concept car, the Daewoo Mya, from Korea. Tekhnoservis showed the reliable import engines it installs in sturdy Russian sedans. + +Table: "A Car Shopper's Guide to Moscow" +Import duties, partly based on engine size, inflate the prices of new cars and trucks in Russia. Table shows popular 1997 models and their starting prices. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +457 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 7, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +SPENDING IT; +Florida Bank Merger May Ruffle Customers + +BYLINE: By DAVID J. MORROW + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 11; Column 1; Money and Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 771 words + +MERGERS like Nationsbank's planned acquisition of Barnett Banks, the biggest banking company in Florida, are nothing new for Manu Patel. When completed, the $15.5 billion deal, one of the biggest yet on Wall Street, will mark the fifth time since 1979 that his bank account has changed hands through a buyout or a merger. +Bank buyouts in Florida have been so frequent that Mr. Patel, 56, an accountant in Lakeland, cannot remember all the banks' names anymore, though he knows the directions to the branches he once visited. + "I can remember 10 years ago when there was a lot of competition," he said. "They'd say, 'Come on over and we'll give you a television or an alarm clock.' " +The pending acquisition of Barnett has been unsettling for some customers of its 629 branches in Florida. And because this state has huge numbers of elderly residents, the deal may prompt special concern: Many older customers shy away, for instance, from A.T.M.'s, preferring teller services. But in the interest of cutting costs, merging banks tend to move away from teller services and to stress technological advances like computerized banking or A.T.M.'s on virtually every corner. Merging banks also tend to close branches, which means more inconvenience for the elderly, who may find it hard to travel to another bank's branch. +Consumer groups are concerned that the merger will raise banking fees to new highs. They are particularly alarmed that two banks -- Nationsbank and First Union, both based in North Carolina -- will control about half the Florida market. +"Usually, bigger means better for consumers," said Mark Ferrulo, executive director of the Florida Public Interest Research Group, a consumer rights organization based in Tallahassee. "But in banking it means a raw deal. The banks don't pass on their savings to consumers. This lack of competition here is going to be a serious problem." +Barnett customers may not feel any pain immediately. A Nationsbank spokesman said the company had yet to decide about branch closings. And, after raising its banking fees in July, Nationsbank recently froze all service charges through August 1998. +But banking analysts expect Nationsbank to close some Barnett branches and to raise some fees. While both banks already have some of the highest fees in Florida -- Barnett levies a $29.50 charge for every bounced check -- Nationsbank has become especially aggressive about fee revenue. +Along with First Union, Nationsbank is one of the few banks in the country to charge for deposit and withdrawal slips inside branches. Call Nationsbank's automated computer too many times to check your balance, and you could be charged 50 cents a call. Customers who call the bank's operator more than once may be charged $2, then placed on hold; low-profit accounts go to a separate operator. +"What we're seeing in Florida is a three-fold strategy by the big banks," Mr. Ferrulo said. "They are increasing fees, making it harder to avoid existing fees and then after all that, they're inventing new fees. There's no way fees are going to go down in a merger." +While rising fees and closing branches could hurt the banks' elderly customers, wealthy account holders could gain from the merger. Nationsbank's recent deal to acquire Montgomery Securities should give Barnett's customers easier access to the market and to their investments. "There's usually a silver lining to these takeovers," said William Gregor, a senior vice president at Gemini Consulting, a management consulting firm in Morristown, N.J. "The merger will allow Barnett's customers to be exposed to new products and services." +Consumer groups offer some options for Barnett's customers. Instead of paying higher fees, Mr. Ferrulo said, they can move their accounts to local banks or credit unions, which usually offer most of their services free. One drawback is that credit unions usually have only one A.T.M. machine, while big banks like Nationsbank have networks of thousands. +Other people in the banking industry say that staying put may be best, at least for a while. "It's not a bad idea in any merger to keep your account where it is until you see what happens," said Michael Auriemma, managing director of the Auriemma Consulting Group, a banking consulting company in Westbury, N.Y. +Consumer advocates also suggest that customers check their statements closely, because mergers tend to produce computer mistakes. Customers should also ask questions of tellers, since visits inside both Barnett and Nationsbank branches are free. +And if a fee seems too high, complain, Mr. Ferrulo says. + +LOAD-DATE: September 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Table: "How Much for a Withdrawal Slip?" +Bank mergers usually lead to higher fees, but consumer advocates worry that Barnett's merger with Nationsbank could set new records. Nationsbank is one of the few banks that charges for deposit slips in its branches; in some ways Barnett is even more expensive. Table compares fees of the two banks. Withdrawl slips are free but cost $1 at Nationsbank off the counter. (Sources: Barnett Bank; Nationsbank) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +458 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 7, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +RACE FOR CITY HALL: In Uphill Battles, 3 Democrats Offer Visions to Challenge the Mayor's; +Albanese Sees a City Divided + +BYLINE: By NORIMITSU ONISHI + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 47; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 753 words + +At a center for the elderly in Harlem the other day, Sal F. Albanese described himself once again as the embodiment of "the New York experience" -- a garment worker's son who rose to city councilman and mayoral candidate thanks in part to the city's long tradition of generous social support. +But that tradition, he warned, has eroded under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. + "When I talk about the city, I talk about a city that elevates people, which is the strength of New York," said Mr. Albanese, a Brooklyn Democrat. "We always had the ability to do that. We had the services to do that: good schools, living-wage jobs. We're moving away from that toward a two-tiered system: a small group of very wealthy people and the rest of the city, poor and working poor." +The listeners at the A. Phillip Randolph Senior Center applauded politely when Mr. Albanese finished speaking and took his first -- and only -- question. After you lose the Democratic primary on Tuesday, an elderly man asked, will you endorse one of your two rivals? +Mr. Albanese appeared irritated -- as he did again later that day when a columnist for a Queens weekly posed a similar question -- and insisted that he was going to win. +Lacking the money of Ruth W. Messinger, the Manhattan Borough President, or the prominence of the Rev. Al Sharpton, Mr. Albanese has nonetheless doggedly pushed his theme of an increasingly divided city throughout his campaign. +His rivals have also accused Mr. Giuliani, a Republican, of creating a similar climate. But Mr. Albanese has made that message his campaign's central theme, using his personal and political life as backdrops. +Although the message seemed to resonate well in the working-class neighborhoods he had visited throughout the city, Mr. Albanese's campaign faces more practical problems. +Despite a late burst of television advertising, Mr. Albanese can still step outside his campaign headquarters on Lexington Avenue and 41st Street without being recognized. +At the Pelham Parkway subway station in the Bronx last week, as Mr. Albanese greeted early-morning commuters, Kenneth Agosto, a registered Democrat, told him he would support him. But later Mr. Agosto said he was not hopeful about the Councilman's chances in Tuesday's primary. +"I'm not crazy about Messinger, and I think he's the best candidate," Mr. Agosto said. But he predicted a victory for Ms. Messinger. "I think the machine is too powerful." +Mr. Albanese -- a former public school teacher who, despite a liberal voting record, has served for 15 years in conservative Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst -- long ago earned a reputation as a maverick. +He voted repeatedly, for instance, against budget agreements worked out between Mayor Giuliani and Peter F. Vallone, the City Council Speaker, criticizing their effects as too severe on middle- and lower-income New Yorkers. +In keeping with those views, Mr. Albanese sponsored a so-called living wage bill that required some city contractors to pay higher minimum wages. The bill was enacted last year over Mr. Giuliani's objections. Mr. Albanese has also proposed another bill that would sharply reduce campaign contributions and curtail the influence of big donors. +"I want to be a Mayor that offers all the people the same opportunities I had when I was growing up in this town," said Mr. Albanese, who often points out that he attended York College, which is part of the City University of New York, when tuition at the university was free. +"You can bring people together around the issue of economic fairness," he said and, referring to the contrasting reactions Mr. Giuliani's appearances often elicit in the city, added: "I don't want to be a Mayor that goes into one neighborhood and gets jeered, and goes into another neighborhood and gets cheered." +At a voter's drive at Manhattan Community College, Reggie Mason, a former student and current member of the Independence Party, which has placed Mr. Albanese's name on its line in November, said he supported Mr. Albanese. More than Ms. Messinger or Mr. Sharpton, the Councilman could unify the city, Mr. Mason said. +A few minutes later, Mr. Albanese's low-key remarks were lost amid Mr. Sharpton's thunderous appeal to "rock the vote! rock the vote!" Mr. Mason could not help pumping his fists in the air, but quickly added that he thought Mr. Albanese's almost reserved style of politicking could work in his favor. +"Sal is a very humble man," Mr. Mason said. "I think people will respect that." + +LOAD-DATE: September 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Sal F. Albanese marching in Labor Day parade with Andrew Letwin, 8. (Frances Roberts for The New York Times) + +Chart: "ISSUES: The Candidates' Plans" +Where the Democratic mayoral candidates stand on issues. + +CRIME + +Sal F. Albanese -- Would not support any reduction in size of police force. Supports creation of an independent board to monitor instances of police brutality. Would hire 500 sergeants to increase supervision of younger officers. Would institute tighter screening in hiring. + +Ruth W. Messinger -- Would put more officers on police patrol through increased use of civilians on desk jobs, but might also seek to reduce overall size of force to trim the budget. Supports creation of an independent oversight agency to monitor police brutality. + +The Rev. Al Sharpton -- Opposes reduction in size of police force. Would push for more focus on community policing and having officers work closely with community groups. Supports independent review board of police department. + +EDUCATION + +Sal F. Albanese -- Would hire more teachers to reduce class sizes to under 25 in first three grades. Supports perfor 2/3mance-based standards for principals, using salary increases or, converse 2/3ly, specter of dismissal to im 2/3prove their performance. Undecided on retaining Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew. + +Ruth W. Messinger -- Would hire more teachers to decrease class size. Would set tougher standards for student promotion, eliminating automatic grade promotion based on age. Would institute performance standards for teachers and principals. Would likely dismiss Chancellor Crew. + +The Rev. Al Sharpton -- Would hire 3,000 more teachers and review each teacher's performance and negotiate for penalties for teachers who don't perform well. Undecided on Chancellor Crew. + +ECONOMY + +Sal F. Albanese -- Would hire an economic development czar from the business world to encourage small-business develop 2/3ment. Would advocate residency for prospective city employees to increase local employment. Would focus most economic development efforts on small businesses. + +Ruth W. Messinger -- Supports targeted tax credits to foster development. Believes companies that do business with New York should be required to hire a certain number of city employees. Believes that companies that get tax abatements should be required to create jobs in New York. + +The Rev. Al Sharpton -- Would set goal of 120,000 new jobs and pledges to cut unemployment in half. Would accomplish that with a public works program and a requirement that contractors and companies that get tax incentives or city business pledge that 80 percent of new employees be city residents. + +WELFARE + +Sal F. Albanese -- Believes welfare recipients should be required to work. Would bring in someone from a city that has been innovative in welfare reforms. Would increase day care programs for welfare recipients. Supports giving welfare recipients working in government jobs the right to organize. + +Ruth W. Messinger -- Believes welfare recipients should be required to work. Believes participants in Work Experience Program should be allowed to organize and are entitled to workplace protection. Supports increased spending on day care and education training. + +The Rev. Al Sharpton -- Says welfare recipients should be required to work in real jobs or be placed in training programs. Would give people in welfare work programs the right to organize. Would emphasize training and day care programs. + +TAXES + +Sal F. Albanese -- Supports increasing taxes if we needed to, and specifically mentions the commuter tax and the tax rate on higher income New Yorkers. Supports cutting taxes on unincorporated business, com 2/3mercial rent and clothing sales. + +Ruth W. Messinger -- Does not believe taxes would have to be raised in her term. Supports cutting taxes on unincorporated business and commercial rent, and also supports cutting sales tax on clothing. + +The Rev. Al Sharpton -- Would ask state Legislature to increase the commuter tax and, if the city went into a downturn, would reinstitute a stock transfer tax. Would not support any other for city residents. Supports cutting taxes on unincorporated business, commercial rent and clothing sales. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +459 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 9, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +MARGOLIS, LAURA + +SECTION: Section D; Page 27; Column 1; Classified + +LENGTH: 156 words + +MARGOLIS-Laura. The Officers, Board and Staff of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JdC), deeply mourn the passing of one of the outstanding figures in JDC history, who was involved in the rescue and relief of thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. A true Woman of Valor, she directed JDC's humanitarian programs in Cuba, Shanghai, Portugal, Spain & Sweden before and during W.W. II. Her courage, daring and resourcefulness made her a legend. Afterwards, she directed JDC Services in France, later settling in Israel and helping forge JDC's Malben Homes For The Aged, into a model of services for the elderly. A giant has passed on. Funeral sevices were private. We express our condolences to her nephews: Donald l. Margolis of Teaneck, NJ and James A. Margolis of Brookline, Massachusetts. Jonathan W. Kolker, President Milton A. Wolf, Chairman Michael Schneider, Executive VP Ralph I. Goldman, Hon. Exec VP + +LOAD-DATE: September 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +460 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 9, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final +(New Jersey) + +New Jersey Daily Briefing; +Guard Is Charged in Fire + +BYLINE: By JESSE McKINLEY + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 94 words + +DATELINE: PARAMUS + +Two days after a fire at the Bergen Pines Hospital in Paramus forced the evacuation of 150 elderly patients, a security guard at the hospital was charged with setting the blaze, officials said. + The guard, Arnaud Protin, 32, was charged yesterday with aggravated arson and official misconduct, said Ralph Lilore, an assistant Bergen County prosecutor. No one was injured in the minor fire in a second floor-storage area on Saturday night. Bail was set at $100,000. Mr. Protin checked himself into the hospital and was undergoing psychiatric evaluation. + +LOAD-DATE: September 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +461 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 9, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +MARGOLIS, LAURA + +SECTION: Section D; Page 27; Column 1; Classified + +LENGTH: 156 words + +MARGOLIS-Laura. The Officers, Board and Staff of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JdC), deeply mourn the passing of one of the outstanding figures in JDC history, who was involved in the rescue and relief of thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. A true Woman of Valor, she directed JDC's humanitarian programs in Cuba, Shanghai, Portugal, Spain & Sweden before and during W.W. II. Her courage, daring and resourcefulness made her a legend. Afterwards, she directed JDC Services in France, later settling in Israel and helping forge JDC's Malben Homes For The Aged, into a model of services for the elderly. A giant has passed on. Funeral sevices were private. We express our condolences to her nephews: Donald l. Margolis of Teaneck, NJ and James A. Margolis of Brookline, Massachusetts. Jonathan W. Kolker, President Milton A. Wolf, Chairman Michael Schneider, Executive VP Ralph I. Goldman, Hon. Exec VP + +LOAD-DATE: September 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +462 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 9, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final +(New Jersey) + +New Jersey Daily Briefing; +Guard Is Charged in Fire + +BYLINE: By JESSE McKINLEY + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 94 words + +DATELINE: PARAMUS + +Two days after a fire at the Bergen Pines Hospital in Paramus forced the evacuation of 150 elderly patients, a security guard at the hospital was charged with setting the blaze, officials said. + The guard, Arnaud Protin, 32, was charged yesterday with aggravated arson and official misconduct, said Ralph Lilore, an assistant Bergen County prosecutor. No one was injured in the minor fire in a second floor-storage area on Saturday night. Bail was set at $100,000. Mr. Protin checked himself into the hospital and was undergoing psychiatric evaluation. + +LOAD-DATE: September 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +463 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 11, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +In America; +Racing to Oblivion + +BYLINE: BY BOB HERBERT + +SECTION: Section A; Page 31; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 686 words + +New York does not need this. Two losers, one meek and essentially devoid of leadership qualities, the other brash, irresponsible and very loud, vying for the right to concede the mayoralty to a man who would like nothing more than to crush his opponents and govern the city with something approaching absolute power. +On Tuesday night, after learning that he would be in a runoff with Ruth Messinger for the Democratic mayoral nomination, the Rev. Al Sharpton waved his arms and jubilantly sang: "I can fly! I can fly!" + Perhaps. But what he is flying through is the leadership void left by the incompetence and cowardice of Democratic politicians who ought to own this town. Reasonable people are shaking their heads at the idea that the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York should come down to a race between Ms. Messinger and Mr. Sharpton. Not that long ago it would have been easier to believe that a delegation from Pluto had landed in Sheepshead Bay. +Nothing good will come of this runoff. Mr. Sharpton is a polarizing figure who forfeited any right to run the city when he went on the radio two years ago to describe the Jewish owner of a clothing store on 125th Street as a "white interloper." Mr. Sharpton promised his listeners that "we are not turning 125th Street back over to outsiders." +The clothing store, called Freddy's, had been the target of protesters. On Dec. 8, 1995, in an act of utter madness, a gunman invaded the store and set it on fire, killing himself and seven others. +Ms. Messinger, who has been campaigning as if she were running for schools chancellor, has to try to beat Mr. Sharpton in the runoff but is reluctant to criticize him harshly because she needs to inherit all of his black support to have any chance of running a credible race against Rudolph Giuliani. +This is a tightrope she'll never be able to negotiate. A great deal of Ms. Messinger's support in the runoff will come from whites, many of them Jews, who are appalled at the mere thought of Al Sharpton kicking back in Gracie Mansion. +"No, not him. Never!" said Erica Krause, who runs a nail salon on the East Side. "I will vote for Ruth in the runoff, although I am not impressed with her. In November, I will vote for Giuliani." +On Tuesday afternoon, even as the meager turnout of Democratic primary voters was making its way to the polls, Mr. Giuliani was happily holding a very public press conference at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. The museum was swarming with voters, senior citizens who were attending a festival sponsored by the city's Department for the Aging. +It might as well have been a campaign rally. An advance team had set up the Mayor's wood and blue velvet podium (very much like the President's) on the decommissioned aircraft carrier. Four large flags were then arranged as a backdrop for the Mayor's announcement that the weeklong sales tax exemption on some clothing had been, in his estimation, a "tremendous success." +The senior citizens standing behind the reporters applauded. +It was one of the more bizarre press conferences I have attended. The reporters might as well not have been there. The Mayor said that he had purchased the shirt he was wearing for $20, and his tie for $25 or $30, and that he would enjoy them even more because of the tax exemption. +There was a Nixonian quality to the Mayor's appearance, the awkward attempt at affability, the rigid smile, the extreme condescension. He rambled on at one point (in response to a convoluted question) about Mother Teresa. She was a saint, he said, a wonderful woman. She had blessed his two children. He had never expected to meet a saint, or something like that. +He may have rambled but you could tell he is on a roll. The people at the museum on Tuesday, from senior centers around the city, are a lock for Mr. Giuliani, and he has a similar lock on many other segments of the population. Most voters, whether they like Mr. Giuliani or not, see no reason to get rid of him. Crime and quality of life remain the paramount issues. Along with the dismal quality of the Democratic candidates. + +LOAD-DATE: September 11, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +464 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 12, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Last Chance + +SECTION: Section C; Page 31; Column 1; Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 211 words + +Here is a sampling of shows and exhibitions in Manhattan that are to close soon: + +Closing This Weekend + +"MARC RIBOUD: 40 YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN CHINA," International Center of Photography, 1130 Fifth Avenue, at 94th Street. Through Sunday. Hours: Today through Sunday, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. Admission: $4; $2.50 for students and the elderly; $1 for those under 12. Information: (212) 860-1777. + +Closing Next Weekend + +DANCE THEATER OF HARLEM, Aaron Davis Hall, Convent Avenue at 135th Street, Harlem. Through Sept. 21. Tickets: $12 to $35; $50 for a benefit performance and reception on Sept. 21. Performance information: (212) 650-7148. Ticket information: Ticketmaster, (212) 307-7171. + +"KEITH HARING" AND "FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: DESIGNS FOR AN AMERICAN LANDSCAPE, 1922-1932," Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street. The first, a retrospective featuring more than 100 works. The second, drawings, architectural models and other items. Both through Sept. 21. Hours: Wednesday and Fridays through Sundays, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M.; Thursday, 1 to 8 P.M.; closed Monday and Tuesday. Admission: $8; $7 for seniors and students; free for those under 12 and for everyone on Thursdays, 6 to 8 P.M. Information: (212) 570-3676. + +LOAD-DATE: September 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Schedule + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +465 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 13, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Opening the Doors on Family Court's Secrets + +BYLINE: By JOE SEXTON + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1734 words + +At 9:30 on Monday morning Judge Philip C. Segal, suddenly a public figure, sat in his courtroom in Family Court in Brooklyn, a converted office roughly the size of a bedroom. +The day's calendar held 50 cases. With a portable fan blowing in his face, Judge Segal began the unending effort simply to gather together the people required for each case: city lawyers, child welfare caseworkers, parents and court-appointed lawyers. + "Is the respondent here?" Judge Segal asked about one case. +"No," said the woman's lawyer. "She is incarcerated. As far as I know, anyway." +The cases kept coming -- child abuse, abandonment, domestic violence, 12-year-olds charged with assault. Ten minutes was spent on a 16-year-old's trial on a probation violation, to be continued later in the month. A custody fight, involving two fathers, one mother and six lawyers, was adjourned. An order of protection was granted to an elderly woman afraid of her elderly husband. +Unlike actions in criminal and civil courts, most proceedings in the state's Family Court have long been closed to the public. The secrecy was intended to protect the privacy of people embroiled in intimate family battles, but journalists and others have pushed for access, arguing that the closed doors shielded judges and other public officials from scrutiny. +But starting this week, the state's chief judge, Judith S. Kaye, ordered that most Family Court hearings be opened. +One reason, she said, was to help the public better understand the dire conditions in the court, where the caseload has grown rapidly and which has handled a string of notorious cases recently -- from the abuse case of Elisa Izquierdo, the 6-year-old who was murdered by her mother, to the trial of Malcolm X's grandson for setting a fire that led to the death of his grandmother. +Judges still have the discretion to close certain proceedings, like those involving the mistreatment of young children. But under the new rules, New York joins just one other state, Florida, in routinely opening Family Court cases to the public. +"It is high time public consciousness was raised about the issues surrounding Family Court as well as about the people inside Family Court," Judge Kaye said. "The conditions of the courts do so much to undermine the experience of the people who work there and who come there. Days for Family Court judges are unbelievable. This can't go on forever." +But the openness will also put a sometimes harsh spotlight on the work of the judges, caseworkers and lawyers in Family Court. "There was a certain sense of safety in all the confidentiality -- for the judges and the practitioners and the city agencies appearing in Family Court," said Peter Reinharz, chief of the city's Family Court prosecutors. "The enforcement of that confidentiality was used to shield not only victims, but the players in Family Court, too." +The players themselves acknowledge that the system often works badly or barely works at all, but they differ on where to place the blame. Judges, for example, make clear that they do not trust much of the monitoring work done by the city's child welfare agency. +Judge Maureen A. McLeod on Wednesday ordered the child welfare agency to do another investigation of a grandmother seeking visitation rights. "But I am telling you," Judge McLeod said, "you better be very specific about what you want investigated or we are going to get another report saying her apartment is clean." +In another courtroom, Judge Betty E. Staton, trying to decide if two children could be returned to their parents, asked why a child welfare caseworker was absent and why a court-ordered investigation had not been done. "Unfortunately," Judge Staton said, "this happens a lot." The parents left crying. +Meanwhile, both city prosecutors and Legal Aid Society lawyers say the work of the judges is often below par. They say some can not manage their calendar of cases, and others regularly arrive late to the courtroom. One Brooklyn judge, according to numerous lawyers, gives religious advice in court. +"Many judges seem almost not to care what the rules are," said Ralph Sabatino, senior city prosecutor in Brooklyn. "There are judges with agendas." +Mildred Negron, a senior Legal Aid lawyer in Manhattan, has reservations, too. "The judges make precipitous decisions based on what they see in the five seconds they look up," she said. +Judge Segal, who was plowing through his 50 cases on Monday, is one of 43 Family Court judges in the city, appointed to 10-year terms by the Mayor. He handles part of an enormous citywide caseload. In 1996, there were 226,000 Family Court cases filed in the city, 100,000 more than were handled in 1986. A judge can have 800 active cases. +The circumstances inside Judge Segal's courtroom, Room 571, on Monday were often clumsy and claustrophobic, perpetually flirting with chaotic. Lawyers, seeking clients or colleagues, circled in and out. An abandoned 4-year-old child, so traumatized that he could not say how old he was, was cleared for long-term foster care. +Another case entered. "Wait a minute, I have to get back on that frequency," Judge Segal said. Later, exasperated, he said, "It's an amazing phenomenon. Whenever you are about to call a case, lawyers disappear." +The logistical problems often create a paradox: an overwhelmed court where judges are commonly forced to sit and do nothing. "It's hard for an outsider to know what's going on, and half of it is still secret," said Judge Segal, who said he was confident that, despite the surroundings, his decisions were sound. "The message will go out, though: the city's children and families deserve better. There is not much dignity to what they encounter." +Indeed, they encounter the worst conditions of the city's court system. In the Bronx, one courtroom is an old Department of Probation office. In Queens, three prosecutors often have to use the same room to interview three sets of young victims. +"The victims who come through Family Court often feel revictimized," said Lara Treinis, a Family Court prosecutor specializing in sex crimes. "They appear, but their cases do not get called. The judges, with so many cases, lose a sensitivity. I have to apologize for the judges a lot. The consistent tone in the buildings is that victims come cheap." +Brooklyn Family Court is regarded as the worst environment. Women seeking orders of protection sit in waiting rooms alongside their victimizers. Child welfare caseworkers are next to the parents of children they have removed from dangerous households. Law assistants to the judges negotiate pleas and parents agree to foster care placements in the building's hallways. +On Wednesday in Judge Lee Elkins's courtroom, as a girl, 16, testified about being abused by her father, the courtroom door repeatedly swung open inches from her. "You have to judge what we do within the context of the means we are given to work with," said Judge Elkins. +With anyone allowed inside -- including friends or enemies of parties involved in the traumatic litigation -- security is a constant concern. Court officers have asked for an increase in staff and for more officers to be armed. +The judges do not know how much to fear. "We already work in combat conditions," said Judge Joseph M. Lauria in Queens. +The combat was more literal than metaphorical on Tuesday morning in Judge Lauria's courtroom when Leroy Bethea, accused of threatening to kill the mother of his child, entered. The mother, Nicole Price, was seeking a final order of protection. "This guy could explode," said Judge Lauria. Mr. Bethea, 23, did -- lunging at the woman and provoking an uproar. +A dozen court officers descended. "Get him off the bench," the officers screamed, and they hustled the judge and the mother out. Mr. Bethea was removed in leg irons and two sets of handcuffs. +"Give us a couple of minutes to put the courtroom back together," Capt. Michael P. DeMarco, a court officer, told the judge. +"It is going to be a reality check for the public," Judge Lauria said of the coming scrutiny. "As for us, our talents vary, our motives vary. In Family Court, we are not going to make people happy." +It is the judges who will feel the harshest glare of the new public exposure. "You have to see this as a bizarre place," said Judge Michael A. Ambrosio, supervising judge in Brooklyn Family Court. "Law is founded on reason. The experience inside Family Court is founded on emotion. Lots of terrible things happen. +"Of course, it's legitimate to question the quality of judges," said Judge Ambrosio. "But it is going to be difficult for people to measure. The quality of most of our decisions -- to terminate parental rights or return a child to a troubled household -- are not discernible for some time. But people are welcome to come, see, call me a moron if that's what I am. I am a public figure." +Judge Segal said he, too, welcomed the light. "In other courts, there are cases dealing with questions about what happened -- what happened in this crime, what happened in that accident," Judge Segal said. "Here, you want to know what happened, but you also have to ask who and what people are. Can they care for a child? Will they hurt their spouse? It would be hard, and take time, under the best of circumstances." +As for those whose lives and families are judged, disrupted, torn apart or put together in the court, no one is pleased at how the system operates and many are furious. +Joseph Rivera, trying to recover his child after nearly a year, sat waiting for hours on Wednesday. So, too, did Kathya Sanchez. Her child had been taken away last spring. Both Mr. Rivera and Ms. Sanchez derided the system, their court-appointed lawyers, the judges, the waiting, the repeated delays by the child welfare agency. +"It's a fiasco," Mr. Rivera said. "My lawyer is here for a paycheck; the judge is covering his rear end; the adjournments come and go. I am sympathetic to everybody's caseload. But it's my child." +Ms. Sanchez wept in the hallway of the fifth floor of Brooklyn Family Court. She was told the child welfare agency's investigation had not been done. She screamed. +"The place is so antiseptic," she said. "Lawyers duck in and out of doorways. Judges come and go. They all worry about their schedules -- their vacations, their son's play. How do you think that feels to me?" + +LOAD-DATE: September 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: In the hallways of Brooklyn Family Court, tedious waiting and a volatile mixture of opposing sides. (Angel Franco/The New York Times) + +Chart: "The Search for Answers" +Court officials have set these programs in motion to make New York State's Family Court system work better. + +NIGHT COURT To deal with the expanding number of cases, many involving daytime workers, Brooklyn Family Court opened two courtrooms this month from 5:30 to 9 P.M. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. + +DRUG COURT In Manhattan, all cases of child abuse and neglect where drugs are a problem will be directed to a designated judge. A court-monitored drug-prevention program will be enforced. On-site drug testing and more frequent court appearances are planned. + +DOMESTIC VIOLENCE In a pilot project in Manhattan, one Family Court judge, Richard Ross, has been designated to handle all domestic violence cases. Social workers are frequently assigned to make sure complainants return to court. + +'FAST TRACK' ADOPTION The court identified children in foster care who were cleared for adoption but were languishing. Concentrated action resulted in 2,100 adoptions from April to August. + +REORGANIZATION The state's top court administrators are exploring a reorganization plan that would raise the status of Family Court. This could mean more money from the state, and help from judges in other courts. + +Graph shows the number of cases filed in New York City Family Court. + +In 1996, most cases involved paternity, support, custody and abuse of children. + +(Source: Office of Court Administration)(pg. 26) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +466 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 13, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +RACE FOR CITY HALL; +In Their Own Words + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 27; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 256 words + + +RUTH W. MESSINGER +Speaking to the elderly yesterday at the Riverdale Y.M.-Y.W.H.A. in the Bronx: + +"Unfairly in the last several years there have been constant efforts to cut back on Medicare protections, to cut back on Medicaid protections, which many people need, to make it harder and harder to be eligible for health protections. There is no one that is hurt more by this than seniors because you are at a point where your income is fixed, where your income is limited and you are at a point where, unfortunately from time to time, you are ill and you need health care. Believe me, I know, I knock on wood and consider how lucky I am. My mom is 81, my dad is 89." + +AL SHARPTON +At a ceremony for the Harriet Tubman Women of Distinction: + +"The only way that Rudolph Giuliani can be beat is if we all mobilize and organize, and it can't be no nice thing. Ms. Messinger is a nice lady, but this ain't a fight for nice people. I went to high school with a bully. I was a boy preacher and we tried to talk and the bully didn't talk. He would jump and carry on, in the locker room at the gym. Finally one day, I went to a schoolyard and hit him in his jaw, and I found that the bully wasn't that bad after all. And that's what you've got to do to Giuliani. You need somebody to go out there right in the middle of the political yard and take him on. I don't think he's as bad as he acts. He just hasn't had somebody to take him on. He needs somebody who is as bad as he is to say, 'Let's get it on, Mr. Giuliani.' " + +LOAD-DATE: September 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Text + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +467 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 14, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +LONG ISLAND GUIDE + +BYLINE: By BARBARA DELATINER + +SECTION: Section 13LI; Page 24; Column 4; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1039 words + + +FREE CHOICES +TODAY Consisting of two ordained ministers -- Janet Rhodes and Jimmy Only -- and three lawyers -- Ross Rhodes, Howard Miller and Zoilo Silva, who just happen to be musicians, too -- Country Rhodes is about as unusual as country bands get. The quintet, which released its first compact disk in December, appears at 3 P.M. at the Bellmore Library on Bedford Avenue (785-2990). + TOMORROW Although reluctant to sit for a film portrait, Alan Berliner's reclusive father finally did permit his son, the film maker, to explore their family history. "Nobody's Business" is the documentary result of that study and Mr. Berliner will screen and discuss his work at 8 P.M. at the Port Washinhgton Library on Library Drive (883-4400). +THURSDAY Capping her two-day stint as "Distinguished Jurist in Residence" at the Touro Law School, United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will discuss "Reflections on Way Paving: Jewish Justices and Jewish Women" in a public lecture at 6 P.M. at the school on Nassau Road in Huntington (421-2244, ext. 352). + +NEW ORCHESTRA PLAYS +The Joseph G. Astman International Concert Series at Hofstra University is one of the best musical bargains on the Island. Each week during the school year, promising and frequently leading musicians from all over the world perform and it only costs $10 a ticket or $8 for the elderly and students to attend. The series opens Tuesday at the Monroe Lecture Center Theater on the Hempstead campus on a local note, with the Chamber Orchestra of the New Orchestra of Long Island. With Naomi Drucker as clarinet soloist and Eric Knight as conductor, the ensemble plays Bach, Britten, Holst and Mozart at 8 P.M. (463-6644). + +'WEST SIDE STORY' +Two veterans of television soap operas take to the stage of the Westbury Music Fair Tuesday in "West Side Story," the Laurents-Bernstein-Sondheim classic. Brian Lane Green, who appeared in "All My Children" as well as "Sabrina, the Teen-Age Witch," plays Tony, and Francine Sama of "Sunset Beach" fame is Anita in the production featuring the dance sequences originally choreographed by Jerome Robbins. The musical runs through next Sunday at the fair on Brush Hollow Road and is the first in a quartet of musicals coming to Westbury: Morgan Brittany and Avery Schreiber in "Crazy for You," Oct. 28 to Nov. 2; Tony Orlando in "Jukebox Dreams," Feb. 17 through Feb. 22, and Barbara Eden in "Gentleman Prefer Blondes," April 28 to May 3 (334-0800). + +PLAY DEBUT +Described as "a story of two '90's love triangles of boy meets girl meets girl," a new romantic comedy by Jospeh deSane, "Excuses," debuts Thursday at Guild Hall's John Drew Theater in East Hampton. Presented by Dark Horse Productions, the play, which features Bea Alda, Alan Alda's daughter, in a cast sprinkled with Actor's Equity Association members like Roderick Griffis and Georgia Hester, runs Thursdays through Sundays through Oct. 5 (267-6299). + +BEACH CLEANUP +Like communities throughout the world, Long Island celebrates International Coastal Cleanup Day Saturday, which means that volunteers will take to the beaches to collect the junk that summer brought. Last year more than 6,000 New Yorkers cleaned 220 miles of shoreline of more than 150,000 pounds of debris at 248 sites. The state parks on the Island have made it a two-day affair through Sunday and will give the first 75 picker-uppers a free T-shirt (669-1000, ext. 247). To find out about other local locations, call Barbara Cohen, beach cleanup ccordinator for the American Littoral Society, at (718) 471-2166. + +POETRY FESTIVAL +For those inclined to spend Saturday at more intellectual pursuits, the Huntington Y.M.C.A. has an ambitious alternative on tap: the all-day inaugural "Huntington Y Write Poetry Festival." From 8:45 A.M. to 11 P.M. on streets, the waterfront and indoor sites like Old First Church on Main Street, some 50 poets, including the United States Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky; Alfred Corn; Suzanne Gardinier; Sam Hamill; David Lehman; Sharon Olds; Karen Swenson; James Tate and Quincy Troupe, will read their works, hold seminars and symposiums and even join in sessions of improvisation with jazz musicians. Schedule and registration information: 421-4242. + +PHILHARMONIC +The Long Island Philharmonic returns from its hot weather break with three concerts this weekend. With the music director David Lockington on the podium and Santiago Rodriguez, pianist, as soloist, the orchestra performs Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Dvorak's Symphony No. 8 and "A Laurentian Overture" by Alan Shulman, a Long Island composer and the father of the Philharmonic's cellist, Jay Shulman. In its Long Island premiere, the work, dedicated to Tallulah Bankhead, was first played by the New York Philharmonic in 1951. The performances are 8 P.M. Saturday at Staller Center on Stony Brook campus of the State University; 2 P.M. next Sunday at East Islip High School in Islip Terrace, and at 7:30 P.M. Sunday at Tilles Center on the C. W. Post campus in Brookville. Mr. Rodriguez will also offer a master class at 3 P.M. Friday at Suffolk Community College in Selden that will be open free to the public (293-2222). + +FROM THE CHAMBERS +Chamber music dominates the musical scene Saturday as two Long Island-based ensembles begin their season and a series devoted to imports gets under way. They are: +The Long Island Baroque Ensemble, which starts is 28th season with "Polished Brass," a program of works for brass and strings by Telemann, Vivaldi and other Baroque composers, at 8 P.M. at St. Andrews Lutheran Church on Brookside Drive in Smithtown. The concert will be repeated next Sunday at 3 P.M. at Christ Church on Route 25A in Oyster Bay (724-7386). +The Waldorf Chamber Players will perform "An Evening of Music to Welcome the Fall Season," featuring Brahms, Dvorak and Haydn at 8 P.M. at the Waldorf School on Cambridge Avenue in Garden City (536-2911). +The Emerson String Quartet, which opens the 21st Chamber Music series for the Islip Arts Council, performing Beethoven, Mozart and Smetana at 8 P.M. at the Sayville Middle School on Johnson Avenue (224-5420). BARBARA DELATINER + +LOAD-DATE: September 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +468 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 14, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: QUEENS UP CLOSE; +Guiliani Kills 2 Burning Issues With One Campaign Stop + +BYLINE: By CHARLIE LeDUFF + +SECTION: Section 13; Page 12; Column 3; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 556 words + +There is perhaps no hotter topic in Forest Hills than a proposed super-shopping center and 24-screen multiplex movie theater planned for 25 industrial acres to the south of Metropolitan Avenue along Woodhaven Boulevard. Some residents see it as an architectural alligator that would clapperclaw the guts out of their neighborhood. +So there they sat in folding chairs Tuesday night in the Continental Post No. 1424 of the American Legion Hall, the bedrock of Mayor Giuliani's constituency: mostly white, mostly homeowners and mostly elderly. The Mayor, who has made it known that he supports superstores, was to make a campaign appearance. And the members of the Forest Hills Community and Civic Association were waiting to bawl him out. + The Mayor, arriving a half-hour late, received a quick refresher on the development, which include a 136,000-square-foot Home Depot, a Sports Authority, several smaller projects and, most needling to locals, the multiplex. The plan would overwhelm their calm neighborhood, clog traffic and drive small merchants out, a gray-haired gentleman respectfully told the Mayor, adding, "Is it quid pro quo, Mr. Mayor?" +The Mayor looked displeased. The man was referring to the fact that the developer of the multiplex, Bruce C. Ratner, is one of his contributors. +"You should be ashamed of yourself," the Mayor said to the elderly man in a schoolmasterlike tone. "Contributors do not make my decisions. In fact, I am against the theater. So it will not be built." +The Mayor explained that he has welcomed superstores like Home Depot because they can bring back business lost to the suburbs. +For their part, the other developers on the site plan to go ahead despite the opposition. The area is zoned for light manufacturing, and under the zoning laws, they are entitled to build hardware stores, toy stores, book stores, warehouse stores and movie theaters "as of right." +Mr. Ratner originally planned a 170,000-square-foot supermarket that was not covered under the law and would have needed a zoning variance. +When the idea was loudly opposed by residents, Mr. Ratner floated the idea of the monster movie center, which would not need a zoning variance, although it would require permits from various city agencies. Responding to the local clamor, the Mayor, who can influence building and fire permits, vetoed the theater idea. In the meantime, local attitudes have softened about the supermarket. +"We have not decided anything," said Joyce Baumgarten, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ratner's Forest City Ratner Companies. "But something is definitely going to happen on that site." Another possibility is that Mr. Ratner may sell the land to the city for a school, Ms. Baumgarten said. +Home Depot, a hardware store under the zoning laws, plans to open its third store in Queens on the site within two years. Sports Authority, considered a warehouse, says it will open soon. +After 10 minutes discussing superstores, the Mayor steered the talk to tall grass and fallen trees. At the end, the audience, pleased with his stance on clean streets, mowed grass and welfare, gave him a gushing ovation. +"You can't always get everything you want," said Paul Betancourt, who promised to fight on, despite his pledge to vote for the Mayor. "After all, I'm a Republican." CHARLIE LeDUFF + +LOAD-DATE: September 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Mayor Giuliani met in Forest Hills with opponents of a new retail complex that he supports. (Lenore Victoria Davis for The New York Times) + +Map of Queens showing the location of the proposed developement site. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +469 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 14, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In Gangs, Youths Say They Find Quick Route to Respect + +BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 40; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 478 words + +William and Chelsea and their friends liked to hang out together at a local pool hall on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 119th Street. Some days they would look for jobs, other days they would make a few dollars selling anything from T-shirts and socks to drugs. Most of the group -- there were about 30, and they had been friends for nearly a decade -- had given up their dreams of becoming basketball and baseball stars. +When Chelsea and William -- they would not give their last names -- began talking last year about forming a gang, many of their friends readily agreed. William said he was well-schooled in the Blood creed from watching television, and Chelsea had studied gangsta rap artists like Tupac Shakur, a suspected Bloods gang member from the Bronx who helped to popularize gang culture before he was killed in a drive-by shooting last year. + They called themselves the Rolling 30's Bloods, etching phrases like "Bloods Forever" in the soft green felt of pool hall tables and spray-painting it on the security fences around the block. Chelsea, a printing press operator, walked around wearing a belt fashioned from small gun replicas. Some chose to display the gang's colors in red T-shirts, caps or bandannas. +It was about getting respect, Chelsea said, adding that disrespect was what "leads to a lot of flower bringing and hymn singing." +But while their language gained a few more slang terms and they began to greet each other with secret handshakes, their hustles remained the same and little actually changed in their lives. None of them has apparently been linked to violent crimes, like the gang initiation rite the police said is called "eating food," meaning to shed someone's blood in a random attack. +Even after the police arrested seven gang members for selling drugs or guns to undercover officers, elderly women continued to stop by and chat with those left on the corner, while small children rode up to have them fix their bicycles. +The gang members themselves say that even after the recent mass arrests of dozens of suspected gang members throughout the city, they are firmer than ever in their desire to remain Bloods, with William saying it is the only symbol of black power left to believe in. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. died and left them behind in the ghetto, he said, adding: "I couldn't become a black Muslim, because it would have taken forever." +"Some Bloods are misinformed about what this is all about," he said. "I've never cut nobody or shot nobody and to me 'eating food' is having a ham and cheese sandwich when you're hungry. +He added: "I mean, I've got two kids. But I'm still a Blood because being a Blood just takes having respect for your set. Everyone out here is just trying to find a decent hustle and survive. Being Bloods keeps us together and getting arrested ain't going to stop that." + +LOAD-DATE: September 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +470 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 14, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +POSTINGS: New York City Exemption of 15 or 25 Percent; +Co-op Tax Break For Some Veterans + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 1; Column 4; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 308 words + +A program of partial tax exemptions for military veterans has been extended to veterans who own and reside in co-op apartments in New York City. The exemption, put into effect last month after action by the City Council and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, was authorized by an amendment to the state's Real Property Tax Law the month before. +The Veterans Property Tax Exemption Program provides reductions to qualified veterans by exempting part of the assessed value of a residence from property taxes. + To qualify, an individual must have served on active duty during a period of armed conflict, including World War I or II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf conflict. Also qualified are merchant marines who served in World War II, and military veterans who participated in expeditionary operations in Lebanon, Grenada and Panama. Under previous law, veterans who owned co-ops were not eligible. +Marc Wurzel, a spokesman for the City Department of Finance, said qualified veterans or surviving spouses can get a 15 percent exemption. Those who served in a combat zone are eligible for a 25 percent exemption, he said; disabled veterans can get additional exemptions based on the severity of their disability. There are no income limits. +Applications, being mailed to co-ops in New York City, can also be obtained from the Tax Assessor's office in the borough where the veteran's property is situated. Mr. Wurzel said that the tax exemption program, along with similar programs that benefit elderly homeowners, was the result of the efforts of Charles Rappaport, founder of the Federation of New York Housing Cooperatives. Mr. Rappaport, who lobbied vigorously for property tax relief for veterans and the elderly, died Aug. 28 at age 75, a week after the veterans' exemption became available to co-op shareholders. + +LOAD-DATE: September 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: September 28, 1997, Sunday + + CORRECTION: +A rendering with the Postings column on Sept. 14, showing three penthouses to be built atop 1150 Fifth Avenue, carried an erroneous credit. It was by Platt Byard Dovell Architects. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +471 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 16, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Will Hare, 81, a Founder of Actors Studio + +SECTION: Section D; Page 23; Column 1; Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 224 words + +Will Hare, a veteran character actor and a founding member of the Actors Studio, died on Aug. 31 at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. He was 81 and lived in Weehawken, N.J. +He died of a heart attack after collapsing onstage during a rehearsal at the Actors Studio, said his agent, Jerry Kahn. + Off Broadway, Mr. Hare starred in Brian Friel's "Crystal and Fox" (as the leader of a provincial acting company), played Dylan Thomas in a revival of Sidney Michaels's "Dylan" and was in John Ford Noonan's "Older People" and Conrad Bromberg's "Dream of a Blacklisted Actor." He also appeared in plays by Horton Foote, Clifford Odets, David Rabe and Maxim Gorky. +Mr. Hare was born in Elkins, W. Va., and moved to New York City in the late 1930's. In 1944, he was on Broadway in Jack Kirkland's "Suds in Your Eye," and was also in Mr. Foote's "Only the Heart." +In 1953, he appeared on Broadway with Lillian Gish in Mr. Foote's "Trip to Bountiful." Through the next four decades, he worked on and off Broadway, in films and on television. +His first film was "The Wrong Man," directed by Alfred Hitchcock. On television he appeared in "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman." Mr. Hare gave his last New York performance in 1996 in Samuel Beckett's "Nacht und Traume," directed by Joseph Chaikin. +No immediate family members survive. + +NAME: Will Hare + +LOAD-DATE: September 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Will Hare. (The New York Times, 1972) + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +472 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 16, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Norway Chief Steps Down As Votes Fall Short of Goal + +BYLINE: By The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 10; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 504 words + +DATELINE: OSLO, Tuesday, Sept. 16 + +Prime Minister Thorbjoern Jagland had posed an ultimatum to the voters of this oil-rich welfare state: if his Labor Party did not get 37 percent of the vote in Monday's national election, he would resign. With 95 percent of the votes counted early this morning, Mr. Jagland was 2 percentage points shy of his goal, and he announced that he and his government would step down. +Norway's Christian Democratic Party, which opposes abortion and seeks to instill strict Christian values in schools and society at large, was preparing to lead the Government. + Mr. Jagland said he would resign effective Oct. 30 if the voting pattern stayed firm. Barring a surprise in party jockeying in the coming weeks, the leading candidate to take over the Prime Minister's office will be Kjell Magne Bondevik, 50, a leader of the Christian Democrats. He heads a coalition of three center parties that are considered moderate on economic matters and conservative on social issues. +Another winner in the vote is Carl I. Hagen, the leader of the anti-immigrant Progress Party, which advanced from being a fringe party to the nation's second-largest single party with 15.3 percent. The Progess Party grew in part at the expense of the Conservative Party, who received 14.3 percent and whose leader still hopes to engineer a coalition of its own with the Christian Democratic Party. +Mr. Bondevik's three-party coalition will actually end up with fewer seats in Parliament than the Labor Party alone, which remains Norway's largest. So Mr. Jagland was not forced out of office. Rather, he gave it up, saying that Labor's departure from leadership would help "clarify the political landscape." +Bjarne Christiansen, a spokesman for the Norwegian Gallup Institute, predicted a short, turbulent period of governance for the Christian Democratic coalition followed by a return of Labor. He said no other party or coalition enjoys the credibility of Labor, which has ruled for 9 of the last 10 years on the strength of former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland's immense popularity. She resigned last fall to give Mr. Jagland a year in office before an election. +Mr. Jagland's 37 percent ultimatum reflected the level of support received by Labor in the last election, in 1993. The leader of the Socialist Left Party, which often cooperates with Labor, said that if Mr. Jagland resigned unnecessarily "he would go down in history as Norway's most puzzling politician." +His year in office was marred by a series of scandals among the ministers he appointed. He further hurt his chances when he described as "nauseating" an opposition proposal to raise pensions for the elderly. Then, last month, a former Soviet K.G.B. agent said in a book that Mr. Jagland, as a budding politician in the 1970's and 1980's, had been classified by the K.G.B. as a "confidential contact" because of his willingness to discuss political affairs with Soviet agents posing as diplomats. Mr. Jagland insisted that the conversations were innocent exchanges. + +LOAD-DATE: September 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +473 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 17, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Man Charged With a Wave Of Muggings In a Subway + +BYLINE: By JOHN SULLIVAN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 582 words + +Prosecutors say a blank check led the police to charge a Manhattan man with a string of subway muggings of the elderly that began in early June and stretched through most of the summer. +The man, David Irons, 25, was arrested Aug. 21 after he jumped a turnstile at the subway station at 34th Street and Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan, said Lieutenant Paul O'Connor, commander of the Manhattan Robbery Squad. The police, who had the station under heightened surveillance because of the robberies, found the check, which had been stolen earlier that month from an 80-year-old man, in Mr. Irons's possession, the Manhattan District Attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, said yesterday. + Prosecutors have charged Mr. Irons with 14 robberies and say that he and two accomplices may be linked to 15 to 25 other robberies. +"This guy was part of a three-man crime wave," Mr. Morgenthau said at a news conference. He asked anyone with knowledge of any similar robberies to contact his office. +An assistant district attorney, Matthew Bogdanos, said that Mr. Irons and his accomplices looked for elderly people inside the 34th Street subway station. He said the men would typically choke the victims and threaten them with a knife or gun before grabbing their cash and jewelry. In one case, the robbers cut a 70-year-old man's pants off during a robbery, and in another they held a 67-year-old man down and repeatedly kicked him in the legs. +Prosecutors said that Mr. Irons and his accomplices made as much as $500 in some robberies, and estimated that the men made $5,000 to $10,000 altogether. If Mr. Irons is convicted, they said, he will face up to 25 years to life under sentencing as a persistent felon because he has three previous convictions. +Mr. Morgenthau said the police knew the names of Mr. Irons's accomplices but had not arrested them yet. He declined to identify them. +The first attack, prosecutors said, occurred on June 9. They have accused Mr. Irons of choking a man until he was unconscious and stealing his wallet. The rest of the robberies generally occurred between 10 A.M. and 3 P.M., usually somewhere in the 34th Street subway station. +Lieutenant O'Connor said that the police noted the rash of robberies in the area, but did not attribute it to one group until midsummer, in part because of the different weapons and different numbers of suspects. +Using information from witnesses, detectives put together a general profile of the man they believe committed at least three of the robberies, including one in which blank checks were stolen from an elderly man. Lieutenant O'Connor said undercover officers from the Transit Bureau used the profile to spot Mr. Irons, of 144th Street in Harlem, as he walked through the 34th Street station. +"The transit patrol force was staking out the area out," the lieutenant said. "He fit the general description." +When Mr. Irons jumped a turnstile, Lieutenant O'Connor said, the undercover officers arrested him and found the check. The officers knew that detectives were investigating the case, and they turned the matter over to the robbery squad. Lieutenant O'Connor said detectives questioned Mr. Irons for two days, extracting information about different cases and using that information to go further. +"He started talking about the cases that he was initially charged with and then he started expanding on it," the lieutenant said. "When we got him going, we found out more about him, more about the other cases." + +LOAD-DATE: September 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +474 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 19, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +A Gene Link To a Disease Of the Eyes Is Identified + +BYLINE: By DENISE GRADY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 21; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 781 words + +Scientists have found the first genetic link to age-related macular degeneration, an incurable eye disease that strikes 25 percent of Americans over the age of 65 and is the major cause of vision loss in the elderly. +Mutations in a newly identified gene were found in 16 percent of patients with macular degeneration, but in fewer than 1 percent of people without the disease, researchers are reporting today in the journal Science. A difference of that size is strong evidence that the gene is involved in the disease. + "This represents the first really good lead on the cause of macular degeneration," said Dr. Carl Kupfer, director of the National Eye Institute. "It's a major public health problem, and it's becoming worse as the population ages." +Dr. Kupfer was not involved in the study, but his institute helped pay for the research. +Researchers say they hope the new genetic findings will eventually help them understand how the disease damages the eye, identify people at risk and lead to methods of treatment and prevention. But for now, doctors do not recommend that people be tested for the gene defect, said Dr. Michael Dean of the National Cancer Institute and an author of the study. +"There's no clear evidence of a way to prevent macular degeneration," Dr. Dean said, adding that there is also no treatment for the most common form of the disease. People at increased risk could only be given the advice already offered to the rest of the population: avoid smoking and fatty foods, which studies have linked to the disease, and eat a diet high in fruits and vegetables, which contain nutrients that may ward it off. +About 1.7 million Americans have impaired vision from macular degeneration. The disease attacks the retina, the layer of light-sensitive cells at the back of the eye. It destroys the macula, a region in the center of the retina that enables a person to see straight ahead and to discriminate fine details. Victims gradually lose their ability to read, drive and recognize faces. They come to rely on their peripheral vision, looking at the world out of the corners of their eyes and missing much color and detail. Most do not lose their eyesight completely but do become legally blind. +About 80 percent of people with macular degeneration have a type in which yellow spots appear on the macula, called the "dry" form. The other 20 percent have a more serious type called the "wet" form in which blood vessels beneath the macula grow abnormally. +There is no treatment for the dry form, and only about 5 percent of people with the wet form can be helped by laser treatments, which cannot repair the damage but may slow it down. +The study was conducted by teams from the National Cancer Institute, in Frederick, Md.; Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston; the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, and Harvard Medical School. +It was a follow-up to findings reported last March by some of the same scientists. In the earlier study, they identified the gene that causes Stargardt disease, a severe form of macular degeneration that usually develops in childhood. The disease develops when a child inherits two copies of a defective gene, one from each parent. +Stargardt disease somewhat resembles age-related macular degeneration, and so the researchers began a second study, to determine whether the Stargardt gene might be involved in the age-related disease. +Their theory was correct: of 167 unrelated patients with age-related macular degeneration, 26, or 16 percent, had mutations in one copy of the Stargardt gene. "That's a very high percentage," said Dr. Kupfer. By comparison, a defect in that gene was found in only 1 of 220 healthy people. +In the remaining 84 percent of patients with macular degeneration, the researchers attributed the disease mainly to different genes, as yet undiscovered, and factors like smoking and a fatty diet. Included in this group were people with the more serious wet form of the disease. +It is still not clear how the mutations cause macular degeneration. Researchers know that the gene is normally active in the retinal cells known as rods, where it controls the production of a molecule called a transporter. The transporter is thought to pump some unwanted substance out of the cells. +But what the unwanted substance is and how the mutations cause the transporter to malfunction, leading to retinal damage, are subjects for future research, said Dr. Richard Lewis, an author of the study and professor of ophthalmology at Baylor. +"We're hoping we can figure out what this gene transports," Dr. Lewis said, "because transporter molecules are amenable to drug therapy." + + +LOAD-DATE: September 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +475 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 19, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Flu Outbreak on Ship; Shots Are Advised + +BYLINE: By DAVID ROHDE + +SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 282 words + +A cruise ship carrying scores of passengers and crew members stricken with the flu is scheduled to dock in New York City tomorrow, and health officials yesterday advised New Yorkers in high-risk groups to consider getting flu shots. +Federal officials noted that influenza does not require quarantine, but Fredric D. Winters, a spokesman for New York City's Department of Health, said those at risk should get shots to safeguard themselves against infected vacationers and crew from the ship, Holland America cruise line's Westerdam. + "People who are in high risk groups should get their flu shots," Mr. Winters said. "Senior citizens, people with serious underlying respiratory conditions and people whose immune systems are compromised -- chemotherapy patients, H.I.V. patients, AIDS patients." +About 20,000 people a year die of complications related to the flu, said Tom Skinner, a spokesman for the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. +Twenty-nine of the boat's 1,500 passengers and 40 of its 600 crew members have reported flu symptoms over the course of a 10-day cruise that began on Sept. 11 in Montreal and ends tomorrow in New York, according to Lawrence Dessler, a Holland America spokesman. Crew members are taking rimantadine, intended to block the spread of the virus, he said. The drug is also being offered to passengers. +Officials at the Centers for Disease Control had criticized Holland America for a letter distributed to passengers, saying it played down the seriousness of the situation. But a second letter was issued later, urging passengers to take the medication, said Dr. Robert Wainwright, head of the C.D.C.'s Quarantine Division. + +LOAD-DATE: September 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +476 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 21, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THEATER; +'A Father's Day Diary' as Confession + +BYLINE: By ALVIN KLEIN + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 9; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 639 words + +DATELINE: CROTON FALLS + +IT is better than an hour of Oprah Winfrey, Sally Jessy Raphael or all those other overpaid purveyors of the tell-all genre, with their spotlights on the dysfunctional. +But the disputatious Mac, a 25-year-old college malcontent, with no career, a pregnant wife and a cocaine habit, would say it is not. Mac would want his father, Jake, to adapt "A Father's Day Diary," a confessional play, to the screen, large or small, so Jake could have a crack at the big time instead of wasting his life on small regional theater stages. + In "A Father's Day Diary" at the Schoolhouse here, Jake is a struggling actor, not a playwright, but George Bamford, who wrote the play and plays Jake, is so transparently a stand-in for the character that the difference between the real playwright and the invented actor is a mere technicality. In this play, God is not in the details. +Whether the actualities of the other two characters -- Mac and his grandfather Jacob, Jake's father -- are an observer's assumptions is of no consequence. "A Father's Day Diary" is clearly another autobiographical work in a line of plays about sons who never sang for or are having epiphanic conversations with their fathers. +Between Mac, who is in Baltimore, and Jake, a 1960's type white liberal who quotes Karl Marx and lives in Harlem, the goal of a life's misperceptions and animosities is contact. The symbol is the telephone, as opposed to the speaker phone, which represents distance and hostility. In a reversal of the stock father-son conflict, Mac, though he has none, thinks that money is the measure of success. He goads his father to get a job and move to Los Angeles. He calls him a bum and a failure (Jake agrees) who has blown 25 years. Even though Mac, a loudmouth representative of Generation X, shoots aphorisms like "without truth we have nothing" at his father, he is as much an evader as Jake, who on the other extreme needs to stop the war that has defined the worst years of his life with father. +A warming peace is effected between the two older men: a truce between Jake and Mac. Whenever the play buckles under overworked verbiage, the director, Cara Caldwell Watson, seems dead set on giving it a whack. +Mr. Bamford saddles himself with maxims like "a man who doesn't respect his father doesn't respect himself" and "tolerance is not an act of altruism, it's an act of self-preservation." That last one is heard not just twice. Then there are Jake's defensive rules about what a father must do and what a father never does as well as fancy phrases out of nowhere ("collective thought," "duplicity of options"). The play bulges with inevitable references to guilt and denial; feminism and homophobia are both less relevant to the evening's dramatics than to its didactics. Over three generations, accusations fly; fault and blame are the operative words. +Deluding himself into believing he is a good and necessary leveler, while intensely spewing forth a resentful son's rage, Michael Teigen as Mac embodies the contradictions within a human time bomb. +Donald Symington gracefully negotiates the journey of an ornery 75-year-old man (Jacob) from narrowmindedness to a reconciled enlightenment, which the actor makes believable. +Mr. Bamford as Jake juggles emotional blocks and fragments of truth, all the while being goaded by his son and his father to grow up. As a playwright and as an actor, Mr. Bamford is most effective at transmitting the love of theater. Still, Jake's facile wrap-up is even less convincing than the combat and the recriminations that led to it. "A Father's Day Diary" is Mr. Bamford's fault but not as an actor. +"A Father's Day Diary," produced by Wordplay II at the Schoolhouse Theater, 1 Owens Road in Croton Falls. Performances through Oct. 5. Phone number for tickets: 277-8477. + +LOAD-DATE: September 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: George Bamford and Michael Teigen in "Father's Day Diary." + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +477 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 21, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THEATER; +Accusations Flying Over the Generations + +BYLINE: By ALVIN KLEIN + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 11; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 636 words + +IT is better than an hour of Oprah Winfrey, Sally Jessy Raphael or all those other overpaid purveyors of the tell-all genre, with their spotlights on the dysfunctional. +But the disputatious Mac, a 25-year-old college malcontent, with no career, a pregnant wife and a cocaine habit, would say it is not. Mac would want his father, Jake, to adapt "A Father's Day Diary," a confessional play, to the screen, large or small, so Jake could have a crack at the big time instead of wasting his life on small regional theater stages. + In "A Father's Day Diary" at the Schoolhouse in Croton Falls, N.Y., Jake is a struggling actor, not a playwright, but George Bamford, who wrote the play and plays Jake, is so transparently a stand-in for the character that the difference between the real playwright and the invented actor is a mere technicality. In this play, God is not in the details. +Whether the actualities of the other two characters -- Mac and his grandfather Jacob, Jake's father -- are an observer's assumptions is of no consequence. "A Father's Day Diary" is clearly another autobiographical work in a line of plays about sons who never sang for, or are having epiphanic conversations with, their fathers. +Between Mac, who is in Baltimore, and Jake, a 1960's-type white liberal who quotes Karl Marx and lives in Harlem, the goal of a life's misperceptions and animosities is contact. The symbol is the telephone, as opposed to the speaker phone, which represents distance and hostility. In a reversal of the stock father-son conflict, Mac, though he has none, thinks that money is the measure of success. +He goads his father to get a job and move to Los Angeles. He calls him a bum and a failure (Jake agrees) who has blown 25 years. Even though Mac, a loudmouth representative of Generation X, shoots aphorisms like "without truth we have nothing" at his father, he is as much an evader as Jake, who on the other extreme needs to stop the war that has defined the worst years of his life with father. +A warming peace is effected between the two older men, a truce between Jake and Mac. Whenever the play buckles under overworked verbiage, the director, Cara Caldwell Watson, seems dead set on giving it a whack. +Mr. Bamford saddles himself with maxims like "a man who doesn't respect his father doesn't respect himself" and "tolerance is not an act of altruism, it's an act of self-preservation." That last one is heard not just twice. Then there are Jake's defensive rules about what a father must do and what a father never does as well as fancy phrases out of nowhere ("collective thought," "duplicity of options"). The play bulges with inevitable references to guilt and denial; feminism and homophobia are both less relevant to the evening's dramatics than to its didactics. Over three generations, accusations fly; fault and blame are the operative words. +Deluding himself into believing he is a good and necessary leveler, while intensely spewing forth a resentful son's rage, Michael Teigen as Mac embodies the contradictions within a human time bomb. +Donald Symington gracefully negotiates the journey of an ornery 75-year-old man (Jacob) from narrow-mindedness to a reconciled enlightenment, which the actor makes believable. +Mr. Bamford as Jake juggles emotional blocks and fragments of truth, all the while being goaded by his son and his father to grow up. As a playwright and as an actor, Mr. Bamford is most effective at transmitting the love of theater. Still, Jake's facile wrap-up is even less convincing than the combat and the recriminations that led to it. "A Father's Day Diary" is Mr. Bamford's fault but not as an actor. +"A Father's Day Diary," at the Schoolhouse Theater, 1 Owens Road in Croton Falls, N.Y. Performances through Oct. 5. (914) 277-8477. + +LOAD-DATE: September 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: George Bamford and Michael Teigen in Mr. Bamford's "Father's Day Diary" at the Schoolhouse in Croton Falls, N.Y. + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +478 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 23, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +The Hot Zone: Technology Issues Continue to Rise + +BYLINE: By DAVID BARBOZA + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 2; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 979 words + +When Wall Street strategists were asked last December to select their favorite sector for the coming year, the choice was just about unanimous: technology. +They have not been disappointed. Through nearly three quarters, shares in technology companies have skyrocketed, largely because of robust sales of personal computers, sharply higher profit margins and a steady stream of news suggesting that technology will rule the stock market roost for some time to come. + This year, and especially this summer, technology issues have stormed ahead of almost every other sector, including the consumer goods industry, which has been bolstered by the performance of the likes of Colgate-Palmolive and Wal-Mart Stores. +Yesterday, for instance, technology shares led the market higher after I.B.M. -- one of the industry's senior citizens -- said it had developed a new computer chip using copper rather than aluminum, a manufacturing breakthrough that could result in faster and more powerful chips. +As a result, shares of I.B.M. soared 4 5/8 to 103 7/8, helping lift the Dow Jones industrial average 79.56 points, or 1 percent, to 7,996.83. The Pacific Stock Exchange Technology Index fared even better, gaining 1.6 percent, while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose 2.7 percent, the equivalent of about 218 points on the Dow. +Just last week, the Intel Corporation, the semiconductor giant, said it, too, had developed a new process, one that doubles the storage capacity of some memory chips. +What all this means is more powerful and efficient computers, and with PC sales booming and companies like Microsoft weaving themselves into the lives of growing numbers of Americans, it is no surprise that shareholders are gobbling up more and more high-technology shares. +"At the end of the day, business results drive stock prices," Michael T. Moe, director of growth stocks at Montgomery Securities in San Francisco, said. "And what we've seen is that technology is playing an ever-increasing role in the new economy, in terms of productivity and competitiveness. Investing in technology is mission critical for a lot of companies." +The chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, has probably even intensified the investor hunger for technology as he has cited its key role in enabling the economy to grow at a steady pace without a resurgence in inflation. +There have been setbacks this year, and warnings of profit slowdowns at some high-technology companies -- which may be why some of the best-known technology leaders, like Microsoft, I.B.M. and Intel, have slipped below their all-time highs. +Still, investors seem eager to build on last year's solid gains, when the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite rose 22.7 percent, and the phenomenal returns of 1995, when the Morgan Stanley High-Tech Index rose 50.8 percent. +This year, technology shares have easily outperformed the stock market's major indexes. While the Standard & Poor's index of 500 stocks is up 29 percent, the Pacific Stock Exchange Technology Index -- an index of 100 of the nation's leading technology companies -- is up 42 percent. The outperformance this summer has been even greater, with the S.& P. 500 index up 6.3 percent since June 20, while the technology index has risen 20.2 percent. +A driving force behind the summer romp was the sector's better-than-expected second-quarter earnings. "They were the best," said Charles Hill, director of research at First Call, which tracks earnings, noting that earnings for technology companies were 29 percent higher than a year ago. "Technology was head and shoulders ahead." +By comparison, earnings of consumer goods companies placed a distant second, Mr. Hill said, with a 14 percent gain. And the outlook for third-quarter profits? First Call said that analysts are estimating a gain of 25 percent for the technology sector over the period last year. +Mary Meeker, a managing director in the technology group at Morgan Stanley, Dean Witter, Discover & Company, said that investors are still rushing into technology stocks because they believe that regardless of the already dizzying ascent of the sector, individual issues can still take off. +"The thing that's driving this is money flows and a good economy," she said. "People are enthusiastic, but there's also a major supply-demand imbalance. And we've also hit an inflection point as far as Internet opportunity goes. People are saying, 'I'm Joe Investor and I missed Yahoo, but I'm not going to miss Amazon.com.' " +Yahoo, the hot Internet search engine stock, is up 373 percent this year, and Amazon.com, the online bookseller, has been in heavy demand recently. Yesterday, more than 1.4 million Amazon.com shares traded hands -- nearly one in every two shares available -- sending the stock up 6 5/8 a share, to 54. +Other big gainers yesterday were Texas Instruments, up 5 a share, to 139 5/8; Micron Technology, up 3 1/8, to 40 1/2, and Dell Computer, up 2 1/16, to 99 13/16. Intel rose 15/16, to 96 3/8, helping push the Nasdaq up 9.09 points, to 1,689.45, another closing high. +Indeed, sales of PC's seem to be fueling much of the optimism. That optimism has driven shares of Dell, the best performing S.& P. 500 stock this year, up 276 percent. +"The fundamental backdrop has been better than people expected," said Roger McNamee, a principal at Integral Partners. "The PC industry has seen phenomenal growth." +Mr. McNamee noted that this performance has come even as the industry has seen its share of problems this summer. "There's been a lot of bad news the market has just shrugged off," he said. "At the moment, investors are choosing to see something half full as overflowing." + +ON THE WEB +The latest stock and mutual fund quotations, along with news updates, are available on the Internet from The New York Times on the Web: www.nytimes.com + +LOAD-DATE: September 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Table: "The Favorite Stocks" shows performance of the 15 issues with the most shareholders. (pg. 17) + +Graphs: "Beating the Summertime Blues" +Alghough there has long been talk of a summer slowdown in technology shares, in the past three summers they have generally outperformed the broader market. Plotted are the percent changes of the Pacific Stock Exchange Technology Index and the S. & P. 500 from June 21 to Sept. 22 of 1995, 1996, and 1997. (Source: Bloomberg Financial Markets) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +479 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 24, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Eating Well; +Folic Acid: Pop a Pill, Or Eat The Food? + +BYLINE: By Marian Burros + +SECTION: Section F; Page 9; Column 1; Dining In/Dining Out/Living Desk + +LENGTH: 748 words + +WILL folic acid turn out to be the latest miracle nutrient, following in a long line of other miracles that never quite lived up to their advance billing? Beta carotene and vitamin C come immediately to mind. Or will folic acid prove to have staying power after the initial rush to buy it? +Folic acid, one of the B vitamins, does have more going for it than many other dietary supplements, because clinical trials appear to show that it reduces the risk of two birth defects. The Food and Drug Administration will now require the fortification of certain grains with folic acid and will permit these foods as well as dietary supplements with folic acid to make health claims. Also pumping up the value of folic acid is increasing epidemiological evidence -- though no clinical trials have been performed -- that folic acid may reduce the risk of heart disease and colon cancer. + Lost in all of this rush is the fact that folic acid, in the form of folate, is plentiful in dried beans and fruits and vegetables. +"I really do think folic acid is an important nutrient, a rising star," said Dr. Irwin H. Rosenberg, director of the Agriculture Department's Human Nutrition Center on Aging, at Tufts University. +But he added, "Once a nutrient becomes a rising star, people quickly lose interest in its place in a good diet" and concentrate instead on the single nutrient. +In other words, it is much easier to pop a pill than to eat the foods it is in. +There is an important caveat: no one yet knows all the possible risks associated with too much of the nutrient. Scientists are already aware that too much folic acid can mask the symptoms of pernicious anemia, a problem prevalent among the elderly. +Dr. Marion Nestle, chairwoman of the department of nutrition and food studies at New York University, says that fortifying foods is a mistake, partly because of the lack of "an upper limit of safe intake." +In a paper published in the November-December 1994 issue of The Journal of Nutrition Education, Dr. Nestle writes that there are so many uncertainties in the data and concerns about safety that the Governments of Canada and the Netherlands recommend supplementation only for women of child-bearing age who are at special risk of giving birth to babies with neural tube defects. +Nutritionists who disagree have been trying to get all women of child-bearing age to take folic acid supplements to prevent the two neural tube defects, spina bifida and anencephaly, without much success. Unlike supplements that promise renewed sexual drive, a painless way to lose weight or a more youthful appearance, folic acid is a dowdy relative. But a combination of Government plans to promote folic acid to prevent birth defects, and the more recent findings about its role in combating heart disease and cancer, are likely to make sales of the supplement take off. +AS of Jan. 1, 1998, Federal regulations require that the following foods be fortified with some folic acid: enriched bread, rolls and buns; all enriched flour; enriched corn grits and cornmeal, farina and rice, and all enriched macaroni and noodle products. The level of fortification is intended to keep the daily intake of folic acid below 1 milligram, because researchers say intakes above that amount could mask the symptoms of pernicious anemia. +In addition, breakfast cereals can add up to 100 percent of the Federal Government's Recommended Dietary Intake of 400 micrograms a day. +And under the new rules, manufacturers will be allowed to state on the labels of both food and dietary supplements that an adequate intake of folic acid has been shown to reduce the risk of neural tube defects. +Of course, fortification and supplementation would be unnecessary if Americans ate adequate amounts of the foods in which folate occurs naturally: citrus fruits, dark green leafy vegetables, broccoli and asparagus, dried beans and peas, peanuts, wheat germ, yeast, mung bean sprouts and liver. The trouble is, Americans are not especially fond of these foods. +Like Dr. Rosenberg, Bonnie Liebman, the director of nutrition for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington-based nutrition advocacy group, wants people to eat fruits and vegetables, but she also wants the insurance of supplements. "We should push both fruits and vegetables and supplements," she said. "We're talking about such a huge risk, you want to do whatever you can to lower that risk. I don't see the harm in that." + +LOAD-DATE: September 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +480 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 24, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +H.M.O.'s Seen as Easing Death for the Elderly + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 13; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 487 words + +DATELINE: CHICAGO, Sept. 23 + +Health maintenance organizations may be making death more merciful for elderly patients, researchers say. +Although the cost-cutting practices of the organizations are sometimes criticized as harmful to patients, a new study has found that Medicare patients in H.M.O.'s are less likely to get prolonged, costly and ultimately futile care than those with traditional Medicare coverage. + "If we can avoid these kinds of outcomes, which have suffering associated with them, we can improve the quality of care-giving," said Dr. Leslie A. Lenert, a co-author of the study, which is reported in Wednesday's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association. +Skeptics said that the data might underestimate the cost of treating patients in H.M.O.'s and that Medicare beneficiaries who chose H.M.O.'s might be people who would decline aggressive care at life's end anyway. +Nationally, about 13 percent of Medicare beneficiaries belong to H.M.O.'s. +In the study, based on 1994 data, Medicare patients hospitalized in intensive care units in California were 25 percent less likely to receive aggressive, highly expensive care that proved futile if they were H.M.O. members than if they were covered by fee-for-service reimbursement. +The H.M.O. patients did not die at a higher rate than fee-for-service patients while they were hospitalized, and they died at an only slightly higher rate, 8 percent, in the 100 days after release. +"This suggests that H.M.O. practices may be better at limiting or avoiding injudicious critical care near the end of life," the authors wrote. +H.M.O.'s treat patients under a prepaid agreement rather than according to the actual cost of care and services. H.M.O.'s also reward doctors financially for withholding unnecessary care. Critics argue that the cost-cutting sometimes deprives patients of treatments they need. +In the study, of 81,494 people, H.M.O. patients generated $49 million less in bills for aggressive care that proved futile. That is nearly 5 percent of the intensive care costs, the researchers said. +Knowing when to turn off a breathing machine or to stop kidney dialysis because a patient is probably beyond saving requires difficult medical judgments, said Dr. Lenert, an assistant professor of medicine and molecular pharmacology at Stanford University Medical School. +"At some point, the physicians have to start to talk to the family about limiting care and saying: 'This is enough. We're not going to be able to salvage this person,' " Dr. Lenert said. "And that's always a difficult thing to do, with family. It's almost always easier to continue on." +Dr. J. Randall Curtis, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, said hospital billing data used for the study might understate the cost of care given to H.M.O. patients. +Dr. Curtis also said less aggressive care at life's end was not necessarily better. + +LOAD-DATE: September 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +481 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 25, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +3 Big Health Plans Join in Call for National Standards + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 28; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 952 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 + +Three big health maintenance organizations joined two consumer groups today in calling for more regulation of managed health care, saying all health plans should be subject to "legally enforceable national standards." +Such standards, they said, are essential to restore confidence in the health care system, which has been eroded by reports from many H.M.O. patients that they have had difficulty getting the care they need. + The proposals represent a significant development in the struggle over regulation of the health care industry. That struggle is comparable to the debate over regulation of railroads in the second half of the 19th century, and it is just as important for consumers, businesses and the economy. Until now, H.M.O.'s had generally sought voluntary, not government, standards. +Today's "statement of principles for consumer protection" was issued by three nonprofit H.M.O.'s: Kaiser Permanente, HIP Health Insurance Plans, based in New York, and the Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound. Together, they have more than 10 million members. +The principles were worked out by the H.M.O.'s in a year of negotiations with two consumer groups, Families USA and the American Association of Retired Persons, which has more than 33 million members. +The proposed national standards would replace a crazy quilt pattern of regulation that now varies from state to state. The Federal Government has set basic standards for Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor. But states regulate private health plans and private insurers in radically different ways. Kaiser and HIP said it would be simpler to comply with national standards than with conflicting state regulations. +Daniel T. McGowan, president of the HIP Health Plan of New York, said: "We have failed to convince the public of our commitment to quality. That's the crisis we face today." +Anthony L. Watson, chairman of the parent company, HIP Health Insurance Plans, said that "we are more than willing to see laws enacted" to guarantee higher standards of care. +Kaiser, HIP and the Group Health Cooperative see themselves as having a deeper commitment to consumer protection than many commercial H.M.O.'s, but they say it is difficult to fulfill that commitment if they can be undercut by competitors not bound by the same standards. +Dr. David M. Lawrence, chairman of Kaiser Permanente, said that if the standards did not apply to all health plans "it would put us at a disadvantage competitively." +Kaiser Permanente, established in 1945, operates in 19 states. HIP, which does business in four states, and the Group Health Cooperative, which has customers in Washington State and Idaho, were formed in 1947. +Here are some of the proposed standards: +*Health plans should provide access to round-the-clock care seven days a week. Women should have direct access to obstetricians and gynecologists. Patients should be able to see outside doctors at no additional cost if their health plan does not have a doctor with "appropriate training and expertise." +*"Individuals should be given a choice of health plans." +*Health plans should be required to pay for emergency care in any situation that "a prudent lay person" would regard as an emergency. H.M.O.'s sometimes refuse to pay if, for example, chest pains are found to be a result of indigestion rather than a heart attack. +*Health plans should pay for experimental treatments if outside experts conclude that such services are necessary to treat a condition likely to cause the patient's death within two years. Likewise, when H.M.O.'s cover prescription drugs, they should be required to pay for items not on the list of approved medications if the items are necessary. +*Every H.M.O. should have an ombudsman to investigate patients' complaints and to help appeal the denial of coverage or services. +*Health plans should not pay doctors in any way that directly encourages them to limit medically necessary care. +Other H.M.O.'s were cool to the idea of more regulation. Susan M. Pisano, a spokeswoman for the American Association of Health Plans, which represents managed care companies, said, "Rather than micromanage, the Government should provide a framework in which the marketplace can play its proven role" in fostering innovation. +The authors of the new proposals said they had not yet decided how the standards should be enforced. +In a separate action, the General Accounting Office reported today that it had examined 1,150 contracts used by 529 H.M.O.'s and had not found any explicit "gag clauses" limiting what doctors can tell patients. +It found a number of contract provisions that doctors said could have a "chilling effect" on doctor-patient communications. But the General Accounting Office said that even those clauses were unlikely to alter doctors' behavior because doctors did not always read their contracts carefully and sometimes disregarded the restrictions. +The accounting office said that 38 states had passed laws to guarantee open communication between doctors and patients. Explicit gag clauses would violate such laws.In addition, the report said, many doctors fear that they will be sued for malpractice if they do not tell patients about all treatment options. +Senate Republican leaders cited the findings in arguing against heavy-handed regulation. Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma, the assistant majority leader, said today, "This report provides a cautionary message about the Federal Government's typical knee-jerk reaction to a problem. We should not move forward pre-empting state law or regulatory authority on any issue without full consideration of sound science, thorough research and data." + + +LOAD-DATE: September 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +482 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 25, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Home Health Attendant Is Guilty of Murder + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 136 words + +A home health care attendant charged with killing two elderly women in Bensonhurst in May 1996 was convicted of first-degree murder yesterday afternoon in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. +A jury found the attendant, Lavonda Prater, 27, guilty of killing Concetta D'Andrea, 85, and her cousin, Vincenza Weaver, 75, by striking them with a blunt instrument and strangling them with a cloth belt in their apartment. + Ms. Prater was also convicted of forgery in the second degree for signing Ms. Weaver's name on three $200 checks. She is scheduled to be sentenced on all the charges on Oct. 28. +'The Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles J. Hynes, said he intended to seek a sentence of life in prison without parole. Mr. Hynes had said the death penalty was not appropriate in the case. He did not elaborate. + +LOAD-DATE: September 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +483 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 26, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +A 41-Story Tower Is to Rise Over the West Side Y.M.C.A. + +BYLINE: By THOMAS J. LUECK + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 887 words + +The Y.M.C.A. of Greater New York said yesterday that it would proceed with a fiercely opposed and long-stalled plan for a 41-story condominium over its branch on West 63d Street, creating one of the tallest residential buildings to overlook Central Park. +The tower, first proposed in 1986, is to be built by two large real estate concerns, the Vornado Realty Trust and the New York development company owned by David Edelstein. Y.M.C.A. executives said they had signed a contract to sell their development rights to the two companies for $9.3 million in cash and improvements to their existing building valued at about $9 million. + The plan provoked immediate protests from community groups on the Upper West Side. They said they would challenge the proposal. Neighborhood groups had sued to stop the Y.M.C.A.'s 1986 plan, saying it would create too much traffic congestion, overburden municipal services and cast a long shadow over Central Park. Although the courts ultimately ruled in favor of the development plan, the Y.M.C.A. was forced to put the plan on hold when the city's real estate market sank into a deep recession at the end of the 1980's. +"If we can find a way to stop it, we will," said Olive Freud, vice president of the Committee for Environmentally Sound Development, which has challenged several large developments in the neighborhood. +Under the new proposal for the Y.M.C.A. site, the tower would be built over the former McBurney School, a five-story building that is owned by the Y.M.C.A. and adjoins the west side of its 14-story building at 5 West 63d Street. Meeting rooms, athletic areas and other Y.M.C.A. facilities would either be rebuilt or left untouched by the developers, and the ornate facade of McBurney School, which is protected as a New York City landmark, would be left intact. +The residences would begin on the sixth floor, with the eight lowest residential floors reserved as rental apartments for low-income people, senior citizens and artists. +Beginning on the building's fifteenth floor, where it would ascend over the ornate roof line and cantilever over the Y.M.C.A., it would become a luxurious building by any measure. Most, if not all, the condominiums would command sweeping views of Central Park, extending beyond the Y.M.C.A. and two smaller buildings on Central Park West that house the Ethical Culture Society and its school. +Real estate executives said the condominiums might fetch prices of almost $1,000 a square foot, or $1.2 million for a two-bedroom apartment. +Y.M.C.A. executives said they had received all necessary development approvals from the city and could begin to erect the new condominium immediately. John M. Preis, the chief financial officer of the Y.M.C.A. of Greater New York, said he expected construction to begin early next year, but he declined to be more specific. +One immediate cause for concern, according to many parents in the neighborhood, is the West Side Y.M.C.A. Co-op Nursery School, with 180 full-time students and educational programs for more than 1,000 others. Parents said they were informed of the Y.M.C.A.'s plan at a meeting on Monday night. +"They definitely didn't give parents enough notice," said Moisha Blechman, a resident of a cooperative building at 64th Street and Central Park West, who attended the meeting. "There will be noise, dust in the air and other disruption. Just being in that atmophere will create problems." +Mr. Preis said the Y.M.C.A. had retained a real estate broker, Cushman & Wakefield Inc., to find space in another nearby building for the school during construction. He also said other measures would be taken to protect children who will use the Y.M.C.A. building while construction takes place. "We know we are dealing with a bunch of 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children, and we will go the extra five miles," he said. +Others in the neighborhood said the Y.M.C.A. project may become a catalyst for the kind of tightly organized community resistance that emerged in the 1980's and has since ebbed even though several large condominiums and commercial buildings have been built or are nearing construction on nearby blocks. Indeed, the burst of building has made the blocks just west of the south end of Central Park one of the city's most active development areas. +"This is becoming Times Square North," said Arlene Simon, president of Landmark West, a community group. "People in this neighborhood don't want it to stand still, just slow down enough so we can evaluate what is going on around us." +But real estate executives said yesterday that rapidly rising real estate values, particularly along Central Park West and on the blocks around the West Side Y.M.C.A., are providing a powerful incentive for developers. +"The prices are astounding," said Clark Halstead, owner of the Halstead Property Company, who said prices in the most sought-after Central Park West buildings now exceed those along Park Avenue. He said the building planned over the Y.M.C.A. could become among the most expensive in the city. +Mr. Preis said the timing of the Y.M.C.A.'s decision was guided in part by the resurgence of property values. +Despite neighborhood protests, he said the money raised through the sale would be used mainly to expand and improve services in the West Side building. + +LOAD-DATE: September 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: A plan to build a 41-story condominium tower over the 14-story West Side Y.M.C.A. on West 63d Street would substantially change the skyline along Central Park West. (pg. B1); A condominium tower would begin next to the West Side Y.M.C.A., at 5 West 63d Street, and over the historic McBurney School, then cantilever over the Y.M.C.A., which would also receive improvements. (John Sotomayor/The New York Times)(pg. B6) + +Map of Manhattan showing site of proposed tower: Condominiums would be built alongside and above the Y.M.C.A. (pg. B6) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +484 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 26, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +COMPANY NEWS; +AMERICAN HOMEPATIENT, RETRENCHING, TO LAY OFF 300 + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section D; Page 4; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 121 words + +American Homepatient Inc., one of the nation's largest providers of home oxygen, said yesterday that it would lay off 300 workers, close offices in 16 states and post losses for the third quarter and the year to deal with coming Medicare cuts. The health care company, which is based in Brentwood, Tenn., plans to close or consolidate 15 percent of its operating centers, close or scale back 9 billing centers, abolish 4 of its 20 operating regions and eliminate marginal products and services. The company cited cuts in the reimbursement rates that the Medicare health program for the elderly pays for oxygen services, which account for 23.5 percent of American Homepatient's revenue. Its shares rose $2.625, to $22.25. + +LOAD-DATE: September 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +485 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 28, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +TRAVEL ADVISORY; +Britain Salutes American Airmen + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 3; Column 4; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 299 words + +The American Air Museum, a tribute to the 500,000 United States airmen who served in Britain during World War II and a memorial to the 30,000 who died, opened last month at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford Airfield, 50 miles east of London. Duxford, which is still an active airfield, was home to the 78th Fighter Group of the Eighth Air Force during World War II. +Among the displays are combat aircraft used by Americans, including a Spad XIII biplane, a French-designed fighter used during World War I; a Boeing B-29A Superfortress bomber from World War II, and fighter jets used in the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars. +A sculpture, "Counting the Cost," has been created by Renato Niemis, a Briton. It comprises 52 glass panels leading to the entrance of the museum, engraved with outlines of the 7,031 aircraft flown by Americans that were lost on missions from Britain during the war. +Designed by Sir Norman Foster, a pilot himself, the building resembles a vast hangar, with its great domed precast concrete roof and giant glass doors opening to an airfield. Inside, eight aircraft are suspended from the ceiling, while 13 stand on the floor. The centerpiece is a B-52 bomber, with its eight engines and a wingspan of more than 200 feet. +Visitors enter the 70,000-square-foot museum from the higher back entrance and come face to face with the nose of the B-52. An encircling walkway leads down to the museum floor. +Computer and video displays explain the conflicts in which the aircraft were used, and simpler displays of personal memorabilia, including uniforms, cigarette packets and gum wrappers, offer a human perspective. +The museum is open daily. Admission is about $10.50, with discounts for children 5 to 16, senior citizens and families. Call (44-12) 23 835-000. + +LOAD-DATE: September 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Grumman Avenger above B-25J bomber at the Duxford museum. (Nigel Young) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +486 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 28, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THEATER; +One Company's Four Seasons in Three Spaces + +BYLINE: By ALVIN KLEIN + +SECTION: Section 13CN; Page 19; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 743 words + +GIVE a good director a couple of chairs, a plank of wood and a light bulb, or some such manifestation of the elementary and the minimal -- and theater will happen. Be it in a five-flight walk-up, in an unfinished basement or, of course, in a barn, the show will go on. +But would it not be lovely to show off a real stage: seats fastened to the floor; lighting, not just lights, even a lobby and a box office? + Although Lewis Arlt has had far more than the rudiments to work with as producing director of Fleetwood Stage in Westchester County, N.Y., the fact is that in four seasons, the company has been making do with the makeshift -- in three different spaces. +One was a Mount Vernon elementary school auditorium in August -- with an eviction notice taking effect when September came. During that first summer, Mr. Arlt would make a nightly pre-performance plea for a home. Two employees of a center for elderly people in Mount Vernon were in the audience one night and invited Mr. Arlt's company to take up residence in one of the Wartburg's 20 buildings. Fleetwood Stage wound up in two. +One was a lecture hall that was used for day care; the other was a part of a nursing home. "We put up risers," Mr. Arlt recalled, "and lighting grids; we built a stage -- and created a space, as well as dressing rooms, and we were told they might take the space back." +And they did. +"Come to New Rochelle, Mr. Arlt," a member of that city's Council on the Arts beckoned. +And he did. +Fleetwood Stage now holds a three-year lease on the Wildcliff Center for the Arts in New Rochelle. +Welcome to a theater, Mr. Arlt. +Fleetwood Stage's fifth season is to begin in its new space on Thursday with "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" by Tennessee Williams. Mr. Arlt is to direct. The play is scheduled to run through Oct. 12. The season's next three plays are "The Real Thing" by Tom Stoppard (Nov. 6 through 23), "Mass Appeal" by Bill C. Davis (Feb. 26 to March 15) and "Intimate Exchanges" by Alan Ayckbourn (April 30 through May 17). The telephone number for ticket information is (914) 654-8533. +"I don't think we've lost our audience; we're approximately three miles east of the old space, and our passport membership has doubled," Mr. Arlt said after a rehearsal the other night. Instead of subscriptions, Fleetwood Stage offers what it calls a user-friendly flexible plan, which allows buyers of four tickets to use them for whatever performances and in any combination they choose. +Wildcliff, a 19th-century stone mansion, once served as a nature center, then a popular museum for children. The short-lived East Coast Arts Company took up residence in 1985 after the building was converted to a theater. +Mr. Arlt spoke with glee about the building's history and the scenic splendor that surrounds it. One hundred and one seats were shipped to East Coast Arts from a Shubert theater in renovation on Broadway. "The dressing rooms -- we have real dressing rooms, all renovated!" he said. "They were once snake pits, so we've named them the cobra room and the viper room and the asp room. We even have an art gallery as well as a view to die for. You can look across the water and see Great Neck." +That sent Mr. Arlt's imagination reeling with thoughts of staging "The Tempest" on Wildcliff's outdoor stage with Prospero and the shipwrecked ascending from Long Island Sound onto lawn. "This is our Mount, our Delacorte," Mr. Arlt said, referring to outdoor theaters in Lenox, Mass., and Central Park. +"And having a theater brings out the best in people," he continued. "New Rochelle is primed for a cultural blossoming for revivification." In "The Real Thing" Mr. Arlt will appear in the role played by Simon Jones on Broadway; Mr. Arlt was understudy to Jeremy Irons and Mr. Jones in the original Broadway production. He went on for Mr. Jones for several weeks; never for Mr. Irons. Soap operas pay for Mr. Arlt's theater habit. He is seen regularly on "As the World Turns," and he is a director for "Another World." +Going over Fleetwood's mission, Mr. Arlt said: "I still believe the arts are not an optional extra, but intrinsic to the lives of everybody. We mean to be not just entertainment but challenging." +He added: "TV subsidizes my other life, and I like it too, but putting on plays is irreplaceable, unmatchable. It's a wonder that this theater is actually happening, how an idea has grown. It is gratifying, it is honorable, it is good." + +LOAD-DATE: September 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +487 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 28, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +THEATER; +A New Space for Fleetwood Stage + +BYLINE: By ALVIN KLEIN + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 10; Column 4; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 752 words + +DATELINE: NEW ROCHELLE + +GIVE a good director a couple of chairs, a plank of wood and a light bulb, or some such manifestation of the elementary and the minimal (the polite word for meager) -- and theater will happen. Whether it is in a five-flight walk-up, in an unfinished basement or, of course, in a barn, the show will go on. +But would it not be lovely to show off a real stage: seats fastened to the floor; lighting, not just lights -- even a lobby and a box office? + Although Lewis Arlt has had far more than the rudiments to work with as producing director of Fleetwood Stage, the fact is that in four seasons, the company has been making do with the makeshift -- in three different spaces. +One was a Mount Vernon elementary school auditorium in August -- with an eviction notice taking effect when September came. During that first summer, Mr. Arlt would make a nightly pre-performance plea for a home. Two employees of a care center for the elderly in Mount Vernon attended one night and invited Mr. Arlt's company to take up residence in one of the Wartburg's 20 buildings. Fleetwood Stage used two. +One was a lecture hall that was used for day care; the other, a part of a nursing home. "We put up risers," Mr. Arlt recalled, "and lighting grids; we built a stage -- and created a space, as well as dressing rooms, and we were told they might take the space back." +And they did. +"Come to New Rochelle, Mr. Arlt," a member of that city's Council on the Arts beckoned. +And he did. +The Fleetwood Stage now holds a three-year lease on the Wildcliff Center for the Arts, an old mansion. +Welcome to a theater, Mr. Arlt. +Fleetwood Stage's fifth season is to begin in its new space on Thursday with "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" by Tennessee Williams. Mr. Arlt is to direct. The play is scheduled to run through Oct. 12. The season's next three plays are "The Real Thing" by Tom Stoppard (Nov. 6 through 23), "Mass Appeal" by Bill C. Davis (Feb. 26 to March 15) and "Intimate Exchanges" by Alan Ayckbourn (April 30 through May 17). The telephone number for ticket information is 654-8533. +"I don't think we've lost our audience; we're approximately three miles east of the old space, and our passport membership has doubled," Mr. Arlt said after a rehearsal the other night. Instead of subscriptions, Fleetwood Stage offers what it calls a user-friendly flexible plan, which allows buyers of four tickets to use them for whatever performances and in any combination they choose. +A 19th-century stone mansion, Wildcliff once served as a nature center, then a popular museum created for children. The short-lived East Coast Arts Company took up residence in 1985 after the building was converted to a theater. +Mr. Arlt spoke with glee about the building's history and the scenic splendor that surrounds it. One hundred and one seats were shipped to East Coast Arts from a Shubert theater in renovation on Broadway. "The dressing rooms -- we have real dressing rooms, all renovated!" he said. "They were once snake pits, so we've named them the cobra room and the viper room and the asp room. We even have an art gallery as well as a view to die for. You can look across the water and see Great Neck." +That sent Mr. Arlt's imagination reeling with thoughts of staging "The Tempest" on Wildcliff's outdoor stage -- yes, there is an outdoor stage as well -- with Prospero and the shipwrecked ascending from Long Island Sound onto Wildcliff's rolling lawn. +"This is our Mount, our Delacorte," Mr. Arlt said, referring to outdoor theaters in Lenox, Mass., and Central Park. +"And having a theater brings out the best in people," he continued. "New Rochelle is primed for a cultural blossoming for revivification." In "The Real Thing" Mr. Arlt will appear in the role played by Simon Jones on Broadway; Mr. Arlt was understudy to Jeremy Irons and Mr. Jones in the original Broadway production. He went on for Mr. Jones for several weeks; never for Mr. Irons. Soap operas pay for Mr. Arlt's theater habit. He is seen regularly on "As the World Turns," and he is a director for "Another World." +Going over Fleetwood's mission, Mr. Arlt said: "I still believe the arts are not an optional extra, but intrinsic to the lives of everybody. We mean to be not just entertainment but challenging. +"TV subsidizes my other life, and I like it too, but putting on plays is irreplaceable, unmatchable. It's a wonder that this theater is actually happening, how an idea has grown. It is gratifying, it is honorable, it is good." + +LOAD-DATE: September 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +488 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 28, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In the Region/Westchester; +Role for Elderly Nears on Former Iona Campus + +BYLINE: By MARY McALEER VIZARD + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 7; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1101 words + +DATELINE: YONKERS + +THE former Iona College campus on North Broadway, which for the last year has been used by this city's public schools, has moved a step closer to also becoming the site of a 250-unit residence for the elderly at the southern end of the campus. +Last month the City Council voted unanimously to remove any environmental hurdles to the project, which would be built on seven acres of the 21-acre campus. The move essentially excuses Henry George Greene, a Scarsdale developer, from having to do an environmental-impact statement. + The developer's next step now is to present a detailed site plan to the City Council, which must grant a zoning change before it can be built since the property now permits an educational use only. +In a related development, Tara Circle, an Irish cultural organization, just announced its intention to begin negotiations with the city next week to buy five acres at the northern end of the campus to establish its first cultural and recreational center in Westchester. +"Plans for the campus are definitely moving along and we're very pleased about it," said Lee Ellman, the city's planning director. "I think all three uses of the campus, including the public elementary school, the senior housing and Tara, are compatible and are all needed by the city." +Such multiple uses for college campuses are an increasingly frequent occurrence. Once a college fails, its campus can be the subject of a flurry of development proposals. The Iona campus, which sits on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River, was particularly desirable. But since it is one of the last remaining green spaces along the Hudson, Yonkers was determined to control its future to the extent that it could. +As a result, the city took a very pro-active stance with Iona from the start. Two years ago it purchased two-thirds of the campus for $3.75 million, with the intention of using a portion for the Foxfire elementary school and marketing the rest. +The city is also a third party in the contract Mr. Greene signed for his portion of the campus. It states that he will purchase the property for $3.25 million only if the city grants approvals for his project. +If not, the city is required to find another buyer in 18 months. Failing to do so, it must buy the property from Iona. The city does not, however, anticipate such an eventuality, according to Mr. Ellman. +"We have stipulated a number of conditions Mr. Greene must meet to move ahead with his project," Mr. Ellman said. "If he meets these I see no reason he should not move forward in the approval process." +Among those conditions are that construction of the residence must not disrupt the elementary school classes and that the entire project must be shielded from the school by dense and strategic landscaping. +Mr. Greene intends to construct a building ranging from two to five stories in height. "The design will be in keeping with the other buildings on campus and in the surrounding area," Mr. Greene said. +OF the 250 apartments, 180 will be for the independent elderly and 70 will be for assisted living, Mr. Greene explained. One-bedroom apartments, some with den, and two-bedrooms will range in size from 800 to 1,150 square feet. At this time, it has not been decided whether the units will be for sale or rent. In either case, prices still need to be worked out. +The Iona campus started out as Elizabeth Seton College, a two-year school that catered to economically disadvantaged students. When the small private school ran into financial difficulties, Iona purchased it in 1989 to use as a satellite campus to its main school in New Rochelle. +Because of declining enrollment, Iona sold Yonkers the major portion of the campus, which included several buildings. The city wanted the buildings, in large part, to relieve overcrowding in its schools. +For the last two years, the Foxfire School, covering pre-kindergarten through grade 6, has occupied an 86,000-square-foot classroom building. In addition, there are two large buildings -- the 1912 Alder Mansion, designed by Carrere & Hastings, architects of the Frick mansion and the New York Public Library in Manhattan and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and Basch Hall, a 51,000-square-foot dormitory, which is now being used to house the city's continuing-education program. +Tara expects to pay $1.2 million for five acres and the two buildings and has scheduled a meeting this week with the city to discuss terms, according to James Rice, Tara's president. +In anticipation of Tara's purchase, James Grasso, director of operations for the city's schools, said he had already been asked to find another site for the continuing-education program. +This is the second time that Tara has attempted to purchase part of a college campus in Westchester. The first target was Kings College in Briarcliff Manor, a four-year multidenominational Christion school that fell on hard times and became ripe for re-use. . For years, Tara Circle had been trying to purchase the campus to establish a cultural and sports center. The group has since abandoned those plans, due to vociferous community opposition. +KING'S COLLEGE has just filed for bankruptcy protection, according to Mr. Rice. "We still have a financial interest Tara Circle is a creditor in bankruptcy proceedings as a result of a $200,000 down payment on its aborted purchase in what comes out of those proceedings, but we're not interested in the campus anymore," Mr. Rice said. "We wish Briarcliff well with King's College." +As for its plans in Yonkers, Mr. Rice would like to establish a hall of fame in the Alder mansion and use the dormitory building for classes in Irish history, music and dance. Tara Circle now runs classes for 250 students a semester at a White Plains high school and on the Manhattanville College campus in Purchase. +"It would be great to consolidate the classes, which have proven to be very popular," Mr. Rice said. The group is still looking for a suitable location to hold Gaelic football and hurling games, which was a big bone of contention at King's College. +Residents living near the school feared noise and traffic resulting from the sporting events. Since the Yonkers property is too small for such use, Mr. Ellman sees little concern about Tara's gaining approval for its cultural center. +"Having an Irish center in a community that already has an Italian center, a Polish and Chinese center, seems a natural to me," he said. "We're a very ethnic town in a Metro-New York kind of way. Rather than recoil from it, we actually revel in it." + +LOAD-DATE: September 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Tara Circle hopes to purchase the 1912 Alder Mansion, left, and another building as well as their five-acre site on the former Iona campus in Yonkers; interior of mansion.(Chris Maynard for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +489 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 28, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +POSTINGS: $7.6 Million Residence in East New York; +Rental Housing For the Elderly + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 1; Column 4; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 268 words + +A $7.6 million, six-story residence with one-bedroom rental units for low-income elderly couples or individuals is going up at 568 Rockaway Parkway, between Linden Boulevard and Church Avenue in the East New York section of Brooklyn. +The two-tone red-brick facility is Federally financed and affiliated with Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center across the street. It is to be completed by next summer. + "My hope is that it will draw people from the community, which has a significant geriatric population," said Frank J. Maddalena, president and chief executive officer of the hospital. +Half the 86 unfurnished units are for residents able to manage on their own; the other half are for those who require assistance but do not need to be in a nursing home. +"We're trying to give them a decent place to live," said Albert Efron, a principal with Schuman, Lichtenstein, Claman, Efron, its architect. Each 540-square-foot apartment, equipped with emergency call systems, will have a living room, bedroom, separate kitchen and full bathroom. Assisted-living residents are to have access to necessary services. +A community room, club room and arts and crafts area are to be found on the ground floor, along with a 24-hour security station and mailboxes. The exterior is to be landscaped and include a sitting area and a 20-car parking lot. +The project has income limits: $14,600 for individuals and $16,700 for couples. Rent is 30 percent of income. Applications will be available six months before the project opens, though those interested may send their names to the hospital now. + +LOAD-DATE: September 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +490 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 28, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ON POLITICS; +It's Not the Economy, It's the Monthly Bills + +BYLINE: By Jennifer Preston; Jennifer Preston is Trenton bureau chief of The New York Times. + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 2; Column 5; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 832 words + +DATELINE: TRENTON + +The national economy must be doing better if voters in New Jersey, and Virginia, the only states with gubernatorial elections this year, are preoccupied with the cost of running a car. +In New Jersey, it is the cost of automobile insurance that is dominating the debate in the race between Governor Whitman and her Democratic opponent, State Senator James E. McGreevey. + In Virginia, it is a personal property tax on cars that is infuriating voters and prompting both the Republican and Democratic gubernatorial candidates there to say they will consider eliminating that tax and come up with alternative sources of revenue. +So, why auto insurance and excise taxes? As one political expert said, voters focus on minor irritants during a strong economy when they are not as worried about the next paycheck. It would be easy to conclude that voters here in New Jersey, and perhaps in Virginia, are just cranky and have nothing else to complain about it. +But interviews with dozens of New Jerseyans over the last few weeks suggest that they are not just bellyaching. There is a high level of frustration over the cost of auto insurance, as well as property taxes, here in New Jersey because voters do not believe that they are getting ahead despite the strength in the economy and Governor Whitman's tax cuts. +Only 16 percent of New Jerseyans surveyed in the most recent New York Times/CBS News Poll believe that their state income taxes have gone down. Another 28 percent said that their income taxes have gone up. The the largest share of respondents, 43 percent, said their state income taxes had remained the same. +Why did 40 percent of those surveyed in the same poll spontaneously cite the cost of auto insurance as their top concern, and property taxes as their next biggest gripe? Their concerns over these two issues reflect the growing financial pressures on many working families and senior citizens to make ends meet. Unlike the telephone bill or the electric bill, or even the mortgage, the property tax bill and the auto insurance bill are two bills that voters believe government can lower. They are two measures that they can point to and argue, rightfully, that government can do something about. +As everyone knows by now, New Jerseyans pay the highest auto insurance rates in the nation. The average cost of auto insurance per vehicle in the state is $1,113. And according to a recent study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in Washington, New Jerseyans also pay the highest property tax bills. The average young married couple who own a home in New Jersey paid $3,562 in property taxes in 1995. The next highest property tax bills were in Connecticut. The average bill there is $2,573. +The Dow may be soaring, but not everyone in the state is benefiting from the Wall Street boom. New Jersey may be on the verge of replacing all of the jobs that the state lost in the recession of the late 1980's and early 1990's. However, many of the jobs lost were in manufacturing, where workers without college educations could rely on getting decent salaries and benefits. Many of the new jobs are in the service industry. They do not pay nearly as well, and they do not always come with benefits. +Meanwhile, property taxes and automobile insurance bills continued to rise over the last four years, further squeezing already tight household budgets across the state. And while Governor Whitman has taken some steps to address both bills, polls show that voters do not think that she has done enough. +"In our family, two 80-year-old widows had to give up their homes because they could not afford the property taxes on their homes," said Jean Phillips, 50, of Roselle. "The property taxes on one house was $7,800 a year. On the other house, the property taxes were $5,500. This is not the American way. And the cost of automobile insurance is outrageous." +Mrs. Phillips said that she voted for the Governor in 1993. "I will not vote for her again," she said. "I don't think that she has done anything." +Mr. McGreevey is seeking to tap into this frustration and anger among voters who want government to do something to ease their daily financial pressures. Last week, he unleashed his first television advertisement spot, reminding residents that they are paying the nation's highest auto insurance and property tax rates. His campaign advisers said that they will focus on these two issues and education. +Mr. McGreevey is getting the attention of voters by recognizing their plight. But empathy alone will not help him win the State House. +This campaign is really not about auto insurance and property taxes. It is about paying the monthly bills without relying on the line of credit in your checking account. +In the final weeks leading up to the Nov. 4 election, voters are hoping that the candidates will present their plan to bring down monthly household expenses by addressing those two big bills. Folks are just looking for a break. + +LOAD-DATE: September 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Jennifer Preston. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +491 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 29, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +System Is Swamped for Immigrants in Quest of Citizenship + +BYLINE: By CELIA W. DUGGER + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1425 words + +In the midst of a vast movement of immigrants to citizenship that dwarfs those of earlier eras in its magnitude and diversity, the creaky, understaffed machinery of naturalization ground virtually to a halt last week in Brooklyn and Queens, national centers of immigration. +Even as 216,000 applicants in the New York metropolitan area are awaiting naturalization -- more than the number who sought citizenship in the entire nation in 1991 and more than double the New York district's total just last year -- the wood-paneled Federal courtroom in Brooklyn, where about 1,200 immigrants a week have been swearing allegiance to the United States, fell silent on Wednesday. + "Unfortunately, after that date, the number of eligible applicants for naturalization has been exhausted," an official from the Immigration and Naturalization Service informed the Federal court clerk in a letter, then expressed the hope that the ceremonies would resume in a month or so. +In New York and other major metropolitan areas across the country, obsolete computer technology and stringent new procedures to screen out applicants with criminal records have slowed the troubled naturalization process, but it now appears that staff shortages are hobbling it even more. +Immigration officials say staffing levels have been eroded by high turnover among temporary workers hired for yearlong stints with no health benefits to handle the surge in applications. The agency's request to Congress for the authority to hire 400 workers for two to four years with benefits has not been approved. +New York has been particularly hard hit by this problem. The number of workers interviewing citizenship applicants and handling their paperwork has sunk to 194, from 289 last year. In Los Angeles, the staff has dropped to 231 from 269. In Chicago, the staff has shrunk to 57, from 73. And in Miami, it has dropped to 118, from 127. +The slowing pace of naturalizations is occurring at a moment when citizenship, for many immigrants, has become a key to putting food on the table. Nationally, Federal officials said 935,000 poor immigrants were expected to lose food stamp benefits under the welfare law adopted last year. It made legal immigrants who have not become citizens ineligible for food stamps. +New York State decided in August to give counties the option to restore food stamps to legal immigrants who are children or are disabled or elderly, as long as they have applied for citizenship, but the state will still deny such aid to able-bodied adults until they become citizens. +New York City, home to more than 70,000 such food stamp recipients, chose to participate. The food stamp restoration will cost the state and localities an estimated $20 million. +As the time it takes to become a citizen has stretched from five months last year to more than a year now, immigrants in the queue, especially the elderly, say they have grown increasingly nervous. Most of the aged students in a civics class sponsored by University Settlement House on the Lower East Side of Manhattan are taking it for the second time, trying to refresh fragile memories in preparation for the civics examination they will have to pass to become citizens. +The teacher, Eleuteria Ventura, asked Julian Fonseca Cruz, 91, of Nicaragua, for the date of Independence Day. "July 24?" he asked tentatively. Mr. Fonseca, who wears a worn fedora and walks with a cane, cannot read or write and finds that facts now slip easily from his mind. He took the class for the first time in March, when he applied for citizenship, and is now in it again. He still has no exam date. +"I am worried that I haven't heard from the I.N.S.," said Mr. Fonseca, who receives food stamps. "It takes so long." +The growing waves of new immigrants seeking citizenship in the last few years have been driven by a variety of factors, including the feared loss of Federal benefits and concerns about a national backlash against immigrants. +But while the number of citizenship applications nationally has continued to climb this year and is expected to reach a record 1.8 million, the number of completed naturalization cases has tumbled at an accelerating pace, compared with last year -- by almost one-third in the first three months of this year and by more than half from March to June, Federal statistics show. +And the backlog seems especially likely to worsen in New York's already clogged naturalization pipeline. New York City has opened six offices and hired 120 people in the last two months in a $10 million effort to help even more of those whose food stamps are at risk to apply for citizenship. +In the last two months, it has contacted 9,700 people at risk of losing food stamps. Most had already applied for or attained citizenship. So far, city workers have helped 650 to prepare applications. City officials say there are still tens of thousands more immigrants to contact. Until that work is done, they said, they will not know how much demand there is for the citizenship services the city is offering. +"Whether or not this initiative is ultimately a success I can't tell after a month," said Martin Oesterreich, Commissioner of the city's Department of Youth and Community Development. "We've not been in operation long enough to draw any conclusions." +The state and private philanthropies are spending an additional $4 million this coming year on English and civics classes and other services immigrants need to apply for citizenship. +"It's not going to do any good for all these people to apply if they can't get through the process," said Jane Stern, a program director at the New York Community Trust, which has dispensed almost $2 million to nonprofit groups for naturalization efforts. "That's a huge problem. Obviously, we don't have any power to do anything about the I.N.S." +This week, there are only two small ceremonies for a total of 200 immigrants scheduled for the Federal District Court in the Eastern District of New York, which covers Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and Nassau and Suffolk Counties. After that, there are no more on the calendar. +The immigration service submitted a $150 million request to Congress in July to support its naturalization programs in the Federal fiscal year that begins on Wednesday, but the request has been bogged down in the acrimonious debate about the agency's failure to screen out criminals in the citizenship process. Last fall, Republicans accused the Clinton Administration of rushing to naturalize immigrants before the election without conducting thorough criminal background checks. In May, the Administration announced that it would try to strip 5,000 people of citizenship who have criminal histories and were wrongly sworn in. +The chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations subcommittees that oversee the immigration service, Representative Harold Rogers, a Republican from Kentucky, and Senator Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican, have both made it clear that they are leery of giving the agency more money for naturalization staff until they are convinced that it has set up a system to insure that no more criminals will become citizens. +The immigration service asked Congress in July for authorization to increase spending on overtime and to hire 246 permanent workers and 400 employees with contracts of two to four years to chip away at the naturalization case backlog. +A spokeswoman for Mr. Rogers, Susan Zimmerman, said last week that he would review the staffing request after the appropriations bill that contains the immigration service's budget for next year is approved in the coming week or two. "He remains gravely concerned that there are serious management problems at the I.N.S.," she said. +Senator Gregg expressed similar reservations. "I don't want to give them more money to approve applications incorrectly," he said. +Their inaction on the immigration service's request has infuriated advocates. "Chairman Rogers is out to cripple naturalization," said Mark Hetfield, a lawyer at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a nonprofit group that serves immigrants. "His idea of fixing it is to bring it to a complete screeching halt." +Immigration service officials say the modernization of the naturalization system's computers and other efficiency measures should begin to speed the process next year. +"With the proper resources and the time to apply them, we can start to ease the backlog," said Eric Andrus, an I.N.S. spokesman. "If that doesn't happen, the backlog could likely increase." + +LOAD-DATE: September 29, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Immigrants in a class taught by Eleuteria Ventura on the Lower East Side are preparing for a civics exam. The class, sponsored by University Settlement House, meets at the Rafael Hernandez Community Center. (Angel Franco/The New York Times)(pg. B7) + +Chart: "KEEPING TRACK: A Backlog of Citizenship Applications" +Applications for citizenship are rising, but the I.N.S. has acted on fewer of them, so the number of pending applications just keeps growing. Chart shows the number of applications for citizenship, of applications that have been either approved or denied, and of pending applications in Los Angeles, New York City, and Miami during both 1996 and 1997. (Source: U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service)(pg. B7) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +492 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 30, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +SCIENCE WATCH + +BYLINE: By JAMES GORMAN + +SECTION: Section F; Page 4; Column 6; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 374 words + + +Old Men and Baby Boys + THE old advice, enshrined in a folk song, is, "Maids, when you're young, never wed an old man." Unless you want a son, according to a report in the current issue of the journal Nature. +Dr. John T. Manning and his colleagues at the University of Liverpool looked at 301 English families from diverse backgrounds and found that the size of the gap in ages between parents predicted the sex of each couple's first child. + If the man was older than the woman, the first offspring was more likely to be male. In pairs with men up to 5 years older than their wives, there were 117 sons and 84 daughters; with a 5-to-15-year gap, there were 37 sons and 20 daughters. With older wives, daughters prevailed. +The authors did the research because it had been noted that male births increased in relation to female births after a war. They suggested that perhaps during wartime, women preferred to marry older men with more resources. +Although the authors did not have a biological explanation for the phenomenon, they speculated that women might somehow unwittingly influence the success of sperm that carried sex-determining chromosomes. + +Babies Tuning In +Children actually do listen to grown-ups, at least when they're 8 months old. Dr. Peter W. Jusczyk of Johns Hopkins University and Dr. Elizabeth A. Hohne of AT&T Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., tested infants' memory for spoken sounds by reading them children's stories each day for 10 days. Then they tested the babies to see whether they paid more attention to a list of words from the stories, like back, laugh, out and best, or to a list of other words, like front, burp, change and beach. +The babies paid more attention to the words from the stories. Their attention span was about seven seconds for words from the stories and less than six seconds for other words. The researchers concluded that when a parent read one of those books about bunnies or trucks or ladybugs to an 8-month-old, the baby was already separating out words and remembering the sounds. + What the researchers do not point out, but which might give parents an added incentive to read to babies, is that the infants will inevitably get older and stop listening altogether. + +LOAD-DATE: September 30, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Nurit Karlin) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +493 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +September 30, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +John F. McMahon Jr., Leader of Volunteers, 87 + +SECTION: Section B; Page 8; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 114 words + +John F. McMahon Jr., president of Volunteers of America from 1958 until retiring in 1979, died on Tuesday in Louisville, Ky. He was 87. +Mr. McMahon was the organization's first national president who did not come from relatives of Ballington and Maud Booth, who founded Volunteers of America in 1896. + Mr. McMahon is credited with helping to expand the organization to what is now 37 states and some 160 social programs. It is one of the largest nonprofit providers of housing for the elderly, the poor and disabled. +Mr. McMahon's wife, Irene, died in 1977. A son, Michael, died in 1989. He is survived by a son, John F. McMahon 3d, of New Jersey, and four grandchildren. + +LOAD-DATE: September 30, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +494 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 1, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +MCCLINTOCK, JOHN T. + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7; Column 1; Classified + +LENGTH: 87 words + +McCLINTOCK-John T. The Board of Directors of Amsterdam Nursing Home records with sorrow the passing of our esteemed former director, John T. McClintock, on September 25, 1997. Mr. McClintock served from 1953, when we were known as the Home for Old Men and Aged Couples, to April of 1987. Despite his retirement from the Board, Mr. McClintock remained a devoted supporter of the nursing home until his death. We extend our sincere condolences to his entire family. Dyer S. Wadsworth, Chairman James Davis, President + +LOAD-DATE: October 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +495 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 3, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +THEATER REVIEW; +Was There a Boy or Not? Secrets, Lies and Ghosts + +BYLINE: By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER + +SECTION: Section E; Part 1; Page 5; Column 1; Movies, Performing Arts/Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 348 words + +"Mickey's Home" is an enigmatic little play of secrets, guilt and roiled psyches that unravel in the apartment of an elderly Jewish couple on the Lower East Side. +Well-acted by its cast of three but at times vexatiously manipulative, Stephen Fife's mixture of drama and comedy raises the ghosts buried in horrible memories of the Holocaust, murder and abandonment, and makes of its characters both haunts and the haunted. + At its outset, an elderly, long-married couple, Esther (Sylvia Gassell) and Ira (Joel Friedman), bicker and joke before dinner. Their conversation alludes to jealousy, infidelity and a child named Mickey, who may be imagined or who may actually exist. +Soon they are joined by Robert (Ron Bagden), a young man who says he is writing a book about changes in the neighborhood. "Nobody remembers what happened yesterday," he says, and he asks to hear about the couple's "long and wonderful life" and any children they might have. +Questions like these provoke Ira at times to anguished grief or insane rage at a little box that holds many memories, and they prompt Esther to turn frustratingly evasive. +Ira's past lies in Poland, where his first wife and their two sons perished in the Holocaust. But in the United States, he and Esther, the daughter of a restaurant owner, have accumulated their own festering history. And so, it soon becomes clear, has Robert. +Plays like "Mickey's Home," which approach their revelations in fits and starts, can seem arbitrary and capricious in their pacing, and this one is no different. But "Mickey's Home," directed by Thomas Caruso and playing until Oct. 12 at the Theater for the New City, gathers momentum in its second act, and its players at all times are well worth watching. + +MICKEY'S HOME + +By Stephen Fife; directed by Thomas Caruso; stage management and lighting by Rebecca Smithmeyer. Presented by the Theater for the New City, Crystal Field, executive director. At 155 First Avenue, at 10th Street, East Village. + +WITH: Sylvia Gassell (Esther), Joel Friedman (Ira) and Ron Bagden (Robert). + +LOAD-DATE: October 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Guilt rules: Sylvia Gassell and Joel Friedman in "Mickey's Home." (Tom Brazil) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +496 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 5, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +A French Director With a Taste for the Gritty and Unglamorous + +BYLINE: By LESLIE CAMHI + +SECTION: Section 2; Page 26; Column 5; Arts and Leisure Desk + +LENGTH: 1224 words + +DATELINE: PARIS + +AS SHE SITS AND TALKS IN her agent's offices on an elegant boulevard near the Place de l'Etoile, the director Claire Denis is a long way from the remote French colonies and the working-class urban neighborhoods in which she has set each of her four feature films. But Ms. Denis navigates the distance gracefully. +She's an elfin woman with a shock of white blond hair, a small face that tenses with extreme concentration and a voice that's surprisingly bright and deep. She's also a daring filmmaker, who for the last decade has been breaking and remaking the esthetic and political codes of French cinema. + Her most recent film, "Nenette et Boni," which opened in New York on Friday, explores the troubled, inscrutable relationship between a disaffected teen-age brother and his pregnant younger sister as they move through the parallel economies and faltering social services of the port city of Marseilles. Beautiful, lost youth is the film's constant focus. +"My way of making films is tied to desire," says Ms. Denis, who is 49. "Not just the physical desire for another person but desire in general. All my films function as a movement toward an unknown other and toward the unknown in relations between people." +The power of this approach was evident as early as "Chocolat" (1988), the director's first feature. Loosely based on Ms. Denis's childhood in French West Africa, this story of colonial officials and their servants in the Cameroon of the 1950's centers on the mysterious and intimate tie between a young French girl and the African domestic who looks after her. +"Chocolat" made Isaak de Bankole, who played the servant, a star; it was the first of three films in which the director's eye focused, with passionate curiosity, on the intersection of European, African and West Indian cultures, and on the bodies of black men. (It also began the collaboration between Ms. Denis and her camerawoman, Agnes Goddard, who has worked on all her major films since then.) +In 1991, "No Fear, No Die" starred Mr. de Bankole and Alex Descas as partners who raise and train cocks for fights organized by a white entrepreneur in a deserted commercial zone outside Paris. Three years later came "I Can't Sleep," inspired by the true story of Thierry Paulhin, a black, gay transvestite who, with his white lover, murdered at least 20 elderly women in Paris during the 1980's. "The press called him a monster," Ms. Denis says. "My question was, Could I have been the mother of this monster, or his sister?" +Amid critical praise, "I Can't Sleep" earned the director vicious attacks in the right-wing news media, but she also received a flood of letters, she says, "from ordinary people, who felt that it spoke to the loss of social and affective ties that is perhaps the primary pain of our modern condition." +"Nenette et Boni" was born of Ms. Denis's collaboration with Gregoire Colin and Alice Houry, two young actors who starred in "U.S. Go Home," a short film she made three years ago for French television. That film is a portrait of a teen-age brother and sister growing up in a desolate Parisian suburb in the 1960's. +LIKE "CHOCOLAT" IT IS loosely autobiographical; when Ms. Denis, at the age of 13, returned with her family to France from Africa, she lived in the same suburb, or banlieu. (Later, she went to college, and then to the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques, the prestigious state-run film school, before a decade of working as an assistant to directors like Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch.) +These and other suburban neighborhoods, abandoned by the French middle class, are now impoverished ghettos inhabited by immigrant communities; they're the subject of sociological speculation, political debate and the so-called films de banlieux, a new cinematic genre. Intimate, sensual and complex, "Nenette et Boni" is in part Ms. Denis's reaction to the stereotypes of the banlieux genre. +"It's a neighborhood film," she says. "Though I don't show postcard shots of the city, I wanted Marseilles to be present in the characters, in their language and way of being." +Boni (Gregoire Colin) drives a pizza truck around the streets of Marseilles; when he's not baking and serving pies, he's reveling in overwrought sexual fantasies that focus on his neighbor (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi), the voluptuous wife of a baker. +He lives with assorted friends in a house he inherited from his dead mother. One day, his sister, 15-year-old Nenette (Alice Houry), appears at his door. She has run away from school because she is pregnant; the child's father, she says, "doesn't exist." Their own father (Jacques Nolot) runs a lamp store and has problems with the mob; his attempts at paternity are useless. Nenette regards her growing middle with misery and stubborn lack of interest, but her predicament begins to startle Boni out of his daydreams. +Ms. Denis's gift is to integrate the characters so fully in their milieu that they emerge from it almost insensibly. "It's always been interesting for me to refuse the idea that everything in a film be organized around the main characters and their needs," she says. "I like the idea that viewers arrive as strangers in what appears to be a total mess, and little by little the main characters materialize." +Contemporary Marseilles is a place of conflict between a vibrant (and ancient) immigrant community and supporters of Jean-Marie Le Pen's extreme right-wing (and anti-immigrant) National Front party. In "Nenette et Boni," the actor Alex Descas has a small role as a black gynecologist. "Curiously, it's very rare to see that kind of role in French film," he says. "If you take the subway, or go into a cafe, or a courtroom, or a bakery, you'll see black people, Asians, Arabs. All that exists; why not show it in film? Well, for Claire, it's natural and normal." +Yet the roots of "Nenette et Boni" go deeper than politics. "When I was an adolescent I read Jean Cocteau's 'Les Enfants Terribles,' " Ms. Denis says. "Later I thought about the constant haranguing between brothers and sisters that exists alongside the unacknowledged desire for this bond of childhood to be their real love story, the one that binds them forever." +Growing up the eldest of four siblings, she only realized later, she says, that "the bond between brothers and sisters is troubling and mysterious, a blood tie as in ancient Greek tragedy." +Mr. Colin's performance as Boni is at once raging, sex-starved and tender. The role was written for him. "What I love about working with Claire," he says, "is that she lets the actor imbue the character with everything he is at a given moment. She never gives orders; she offers a critique of what she's seen." +This approach has much to do with Ms. Denis's faith in her medium. "Cinema has this incredible way of making us feel what psychology can't explain," she says. "You can read 15 books about serial killers, but that has nothing to do with the way you may look at people in the subway, or your own brother, or your mother, that mysterious element that makes you sense that what unites us, as human beings, is our opacity for each other. Cinema is made with light and shadow, but the beauty of light is that it delimits shadow. And that element of shadow is the part of cinema I'd like to continue exploring." + +NAME: Claire Denis + +LOAD-DATE: October 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: TO BE YOUNG AND TROUBLED IN MARSEILLES Alice Houry, left, in the new film "Nenette et Boni," about a teen-age boy and his pregnant runaway younger sister, and the film's director, Claire Denis, in Paris. (Strand Releasing/Monlau/Rapho) + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +497 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 5, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Older Faces Affect Colleges + +BYLINE: By MERRI ROSENBERG + +SECTION: Section 13WC; Page 29; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 890 words + +WITH substantially smaller enrollments, more homogeneous student bodies and, in many cases less modern campuses, the college landscape of a generation ago was significantly different from today's. Many programs that have become entrenched as institutions at various colleges did not exist or were in their infancy. Demographic and social changes, including an overall shrinking traditional college population and the return of women to both college and the work force, transformed the county's colleges. +At Purchase College, for example, construction was barely completed. The weekend college program that has since become such a significant part of Marymount College was a year old, and few colleges had any sort of computer studies. The Science Building did not exist at Sarah Lawrence College, nor were there nearly as many male undergraduates at Manhattanville College, which had begun admitting men just a few years before. + Perhaps most significantly, the 1976-77 academic year saw nontraditional college students entering classrooms in sizable numbers, a trend that has echoed across the years. "Everything is a continuum," said Dr. Joseph Hankin, president of Westchester Community College. "Nineteen seventy-six was a continuation of the early 1970's or even the late 1960's. It was the first year that more women graduated from high school than men, and as many women went on to college. We were getting older women and nontraditional students. There was a revolution in technology, and we had secretaries coming in to upgrade and refresh their skills in noncredit courses." Disabled students also began to appear on campus in greater numbers. +Westchester Community College this fall has an enrollment of 11,210 students, but 20 years ago the enrollment was 7,800. Familiar fixtures today, like the Science Building, the Academic Arts Building and the Administration Building, had not been built. The college had opened its doors to 3,000 elderly students, who took noncredit courses like conversational Italian and computer classes. +As for courses for women, Sister Brigid Driscoll, president of Marymount College in Tarrytown, recalled: "There was an enormous need for higher education for women who had returned to the work force. We began the Weekend College Program in 1975. Many women had gotten a two-year degree, but there was a huge number of women returning to the work force without a four-year degree who had no access to lateral or upward mobility. We were one of the first to provide this opportunity. +"Enrollment in women's colleges was in decline, men's colleges were going co-ed, and this forced us to take a look at the real needs of women. And shortly after 1977, the trend toward transfer students coming in grew significantly." +At Manhattanville College in Purchase, Ann Bavar, now an associate studio art professor, returned there as an older student, graduating in 1977. "I had never gotten a fine arts degree, although I was already an exhibiting artist," Ms. Bavar said. "There were not a lot of returning adult students then. I was in classes with mostly 18-year-olds." The campus had a less international flavor then, and Ms. Bavar remembers a more wooded campus. "Back then, there was still a sense that it was a holdover of being a girls' Catholic school, even though it had separated from the church. It was a much more homogeneous student body then. Now it's much more diverse." +Twenty years ago, Purchase College had not yet established an image, Richard Maass, chairman of the College Council, said. "It had a fine teaching staff, but wasn't known at all," he said. "It was a smaller school then, of about 2,000 students, compared to 3,000 today. The Performing Arts Center was completed in 1977." At that time, Mr. Maass said, there were no master's degree programs and the college's continuing education program was a small part of the campus compared with its presence today. The partnership with public schools had not yet been established, nor did the college have any booster groups. +Despite some external changes, some campuses have changed little in their fundamental mission. "The College of New Rochelle has always been a women's college," said Dr. Stephen J. Sweeny, president of the college. "It was obvious to us 20 years ago that to preserve the nature of the college as a women's college, we needed to diversify." +In the early 1970's, the college began the School of New Resources for adult women who wanted to earn a bachelor's degree, as well as offering master's degree programs in art, psychology and education. Satellite locations were developed, not only in New Rochelle, but also in the Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn, to reach students where they lived and worked. The school of nursing was begun as a baccalaureate program in the 1974-1975 academic year. +And at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, Dr. Barbara Kaplan, Dean of the College said, the school's graduate program was just beginning. One significant difference was that the student body was far less diverse than it is today. In 1976, there were 773 undergraduates and 50 graduate students; today there are more than 900 undergraduates and 275 students pursuing advanced degrees. "Back then, students were more insular," Dr. Kaplan said. "Today, their concerns are more global." + +LOAD-DATE: October 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Rick Donald of Yonkers, a music major, practices in the parking lot at Purchase College. (Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +498 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 5, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +For the Elderly, The High-Rise, High-End Life + +BYLINE: By ALAN S. OSER + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 1; Column 4; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 2952 words + +WHEN we were young we thought we would retire to some exotic place," said Hugh Appling. "In the end we went where the children were." +Mr. Appling is 76; his wife, Mary, is just a bit older. He retired in 1976 as deputy director general of the Foreign Service, but it was not until 1993 that the Applings sold their house in McLean, Va., and bought a condominium at the Jefferson in the rapidly developing Ballston section of Arlington, Va., across the Potomac from Washington. + The Jefferson is an elegant five-year-old, 21-story building that the Marriott Corporation, the developer and operator, calls a "senior living retirement community." In many ways it is a particularly lavish example of the high-rise, high-end, service-oriented retirement projects that have occasionally been built in northern cities, and will be arriving at an accelerated rate in New York City over the next few years. +The Jefferson has a health-care center and suites for assisted living, but for the most part the accent is on independent living, with monthly fees that cover one meal a day served by a uniformed staff in a handsomely furnished dining room, plus other household and recreational services. +As Mr. Appling sees it, most people wait too long to choose appropriate housing after they retire, and when circumstances force change upon them, they have trouble adjusting to the idea. "We are still healthy and we enjoy making new friends," Mr. Appling said. "We can cope with the change in life style. It's hard for people in failing health to do this." +Where the Applings went and why, and the age at which they went there, point up the likely characteristics of the many of the early arrivals at the new market-rate urban developments for the elderly. They will typically be people in their 70's or 80's who are still capable of independent living, but are seeking hotel-like services and communal dining, with assisted-living facilities available when dependency sets in. +With the decision of the Battery Park City Authority to put up a building to house elderly residents in the northern section of its Lower Manhattan riverfront site, Manhattan will be getting its own version of unsubsidized new housing designed specifically for luxury retirement living. +The 14-story building will have 220,000 square feet or space and be close to the varied facilities at the northern end of Battery Park City -- schools, high-rise family housing and a spacious park along the Hudson River. The authority is expected to choose the development team by the end of this month, and the building will probably be completed within three years. +Other market-rate developments for the elderly in New York City will no doubt arrive sooner -- in Riverdale in the Bronx, in Forest Hills and Kew Gardens in Queens, and, in the rehabilitation of an existing apartment hotel, at Cambridge House on West 86th Street near Riverside Drive in Manhattan. +Most of these projects will be rentals, without the initial fee charged by "life-care" communities, also called continuing-care retirement communities, which assure future assisted-living or full-time nursing care with little or no additional charges. Nor will they have the real-estate investment feature of a condominium, in which buyers or their estates may later resell their units. +Newly built unsubsidized housing for older people is unusual in Manhattan, because of the costs and regulatory complexities involved. But the demand may prove strong. It will enable the well-to-do elderly to stay in Manhattan, or move into it, in a place where they will get security, services and activities, and served meals. +It won't be cheap. Retirement-housing specialists said that at today's building costs, rents in Battery Park City for a studio apartment will probably be at least $3,500 a month, while a one-bedroom will cost at least $4,500 a month, including a meal a day and weekly housekeeping. +The three finalists in the Battery Park City bidding are the Rockrose Development Corporation, in collaboration with Goldman Sachs & Company and Senior Lifestyle Corporation, a Chicago-based operator of housing for the elderly; Forest City Enterprises, the Cleveland-based national real estate company; and Brookdale Living Communities, a Chicago company that is a publicly held spinoff of the Prime Group, a privately owned development company. Brookdale owns and operates 10 retirement communities in the Middle West, including the Hallmark, a luxury 37-story development on North Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. +Joseph T. Howell, whose Washington firm, Howell Associates, acted as consultant to the Battery Park City Authority, said he expected most of the renters at the development to be in their late 70's and have incomes above $50,000 a year. "About 15 to 20 percent will be two-person households and the rest will be one-person," Mr. Howell predicted. +B UT the market for retirement housing doesn't only come from nearby. Consultants and developers note that retirees often relocate from afar to get closer to their children. Battery Park City, with its pleasant city-within-a-city environment, can also be expected to draw suburbanites and others who want to get nearer to Manhattan's attractions without taking on the burden, or experiencing the isolation, of living in a conventional apartment house. +Moreover, retirees often make more than one move, sometimes because they regret an earlier decision, sometimes because they are ready for a change. Robert and Sandy Bryman, in their early 60's, gave up a house in Oceanside, L.I., in 1993 and moved to Scottsdale, Ariz., after Mr. Bryman sold his travel business and retired. But they found the heat intolerable. +"It was 115 degrees six months a year," Mrs. Bryman said. "Now it's down to 102; I just checked." So they sold the house and bought another at an adult leisure community called The Ponds in Cranbury, N.J. +In Florida, Daniel and Pearl Rosenthal, who are in their late 80's, said they had lived in five different places since they moved South from Great Neck, L.I., in 1969. It turned out that to feel well Mrs. Rosenthal had to be near the ocean. They live at the Seasons, a 167-unit high-rise in Pompano Beach owned and operated by Classic Residence by Hyatt, an affiliate of the Hyatt Corporation. +And in Riverdale, in the Bronx, Betty Bennett, who is 91, went to live near her son in West Virginia after her husband, Irving, died in 1979. She came back to Riverdale only three years ago in an independent-living unit at the Hebrew Home for the Aged. "I thought I would be happier where I have roots," she said. +The existence of an independent living component at the Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale, on a 19-acre campus high over the Hudson River off Palisade Avenue, is a commentary on the longterm changes occurring in housing for people of advanced years. New York State regulations have prevented publicly owned corporations from providing medical care and skilled nursing; also, until recently, life-care programs were prohibited. +Accordingly it is primarily the nonprofit operators of nursing homes that have moved toward developing assisted-living buildings and also independent living, with services and activities for the healthy elderly. The residents of the Hebrew Home's independent-living building -- a 137-unit eight-story building called River House West -- may eventually be candidates to move on to assisted living or nursing care. Meanwhile, their meals and activities are separated from those of the infirm. +Daniel A. Reingold, the executive vice president, said that developments that lack the capacity to deal with the infirmities of old age may be storing up problems for themselves and their occupants. +"Retirement housing is not a real estate play, it's a service play," Mr. Reingold said. "Fifty percent of the people who are in the building the day it opens will develop Alzheimer's disease. Thirty percent will be in wheelchairs in three years. Whatever age group the building is designed for, add three or four years to the average age of the move-ins." +The Hebrew Home used Federal funds under the program that finances housing for the elderly, the Section 202 program, when it built River House West in 1981. Using regulatory leeway that has since been withdrawn, it was able to supplement the Federal subsidy by 20 percent, thereby using its own money to create amenities not eligible under the Section 202 rules: a larger lobby, a Judaica museum, a store, more windows in the corridors, a finer dining room. +There is a three-year waiting list to get into River House West. All currently arriving tenants are getting a Federal rent subsidy under the Section 8 program. This means they pay 30 percent of their income as rent, but there are income limits. In New York City the current limits are $27,450 a year for a single person and $31,350 for a couple. +T HE newer market-rate retirement communities offer far more amenities than the Federally subsidized Section 202 projects, whether the sponsorship is for-profit or nonprofit, said P. Douglas Powell, president of Retirement Living Services in Hartford, Conn. They are likely to have pools, libraries and high-quality decoration and furnishing. "This is what you have to do to attract the market," Mr. Powell said. +The elimination of the tax on a capital gain of up to $500,000 on the sale of a house, effective this year under tax revisions adopted in Washington last year, should further stimulate the development world to provide higher-end retirement housing, he said. For years, the only new housing produced for the elderly in New York City has been built under the Section 202 program. Middle- or upper-middle-income people often find it necessary to leave the state to find retirement housing. +The most active company in the metropolitan area so far is Kapson Senior Quarters Corporation of Woodbury, L.I., known as the Kapson Group before it went public a year ago. Kapson owns and operates 20 projects in the metropolitan area, and now has 22 more under development or in construction, including four in New York City, said Glenn Kaplan, chairman of the company. +The emphasis is on assisted living, where people get help with such chores as bathing and dressing. "Rents will be generally between $3,000 and $4,000 a month, but there's a service package -- three meals a day, full housekeeping, a recreation program," Mr. Kaplan said. "We get a lot of people who were already retired and are coming back to live closer to their families, and they need a little bit of help." +Two of these projects are new construction, done in partnership with J. E. Levine Builders of Douglaston, Queens -- a 14-story, 205-unit building at 3718 Henry Hudson Parkway in Riverdale, and an eight-story, 142-unit building at 117-01 84th Avenue in Kew Gardens, Queens. +The two others are rehabilitations of existing buildings -- Cambridge House, at 333 West 86th Street, a 217-unit apartment hotel, in partnership with Philips International Holding Corporation, and the Midway Hotel at 108-25 Horace Harding Expressway, in Forest Hills, with AVR Realty of Yonkers as partner. It will have 150 units. +A NOTHEr development impetus is coming from Forest City Enterprises, in partnership with Classic Residence, the Hyatt affiliate. They are planning a development on a three-acre site adjacent to the College of Mount St. Vincent on Riverdale Avenue, close to the Yonkers line. It is expected to have 202 independent-living apartments, 79 assisted-living units and, tentatively, 32 Alzheimer's units. +In the Northeast, the model for the life-care community in a downtown urban setting is the 13-year-old Logan Square East in Philadelphia. A 418,000-square-foot building 24 stories high, it provides all three levels of housing and services associated with a continuing care community: independent living, assisted living and skilled and intermediate nursing care. +Built and operated on a nonprofit basis, it has 327 units of independent living on 19 floors; 17 units for assisted living on one floor, and 128 nursing-home beds on two floors. Incoming independent-living tenants buy life care contracts, currently paying $52,000 to $72,000 for a studio apartment and $78,000 to $116,000 for a one-bedroom. +"We think life care is the way to go because it assures you a place to go when you can no longer live independently," said Peggy Brown, the marketing director. In addition to initial fees, independent-living residents pay monthly fees of $1,600 for a studio to $2,000 a month for a one-bedroom. A second person is an additional $876 a month. +Logan Square East draws from Manhattan and Long Island and also has a large contingent that has moved back from Florida, Ms. Brown said. "They want the city life," she said. The average age of a new arrival is 82, and 65 percent are single. +But the new New York City projects are to be rentals, not life-care facilities with their major upfront fees. The Battery Park City building will occupy a site at North End Avenue and Chambers Street, across the avenue from a mixed-use building now in construction that will house a public elementary and intermediate school, P.S./I.S 89, with 151 rental apartments above. +The development teams have received considerable leeway in designing the interiors. They also must make a financial bid for the longterm ground lease the authority awards to developers. The senior facility will receive no tax abatements or special tax incentives. "The market will be affluent people," said John LeMura, president of the authority. +In one plan, advanced by Brookdale Living Communities, the Chicago firm, there would be 216 apartments, with 39 of them two-bedrooms. There would be 128 one-bedrooms, and only 49 apartments would be studios, of which 20 would be on the assisted-living floor. The public spaces on the ground floor include private and communal dining rooms, a library area and billiards room, an ice cream parlor and a garden terrace area. +The relatively large number of two-bedrooms illustrates the recent direction of retirement housing as the home-sales market improves, enabling retirees selling their homes to put more money into retirement housing, specialists say. "People want more space," said Erik Gjullin, vice president of Joseph Howell Associates, the Washington consulting firm. Residents of 10-year-old communities who want to sell and move are now finding their one-bedroom apartments difficult to sell, he said. +Mark J. Schulte, president of Brookdale Living Communities, said that residents of its projects typically pay no more than 65 percent of their annual income for their retirement housing, and in addition have a pool of income-producing assets of at least $200,000. Brookdale provides no licensed medical services, but it may affiliate with a hospital or home-health-care agency. The turnover rate in independent-living units is about 20 percent a year, half of it caused by a death, he said. The average age of an arriving tenant is 79. +Mr. Howell, the Washington consultant, said that in retirement housing living quarters should resemble conventional apartments, adapted for use by older people. "It should be as noninstitutional as possible," he said. +Noninstitutional is descriptive of several of the independent-living retirement housing centers in the Washington area. At Maplewood Park Place in Bethesda, just over the Maryland line from Washington, immense carpets and furnishings create a sumptuous feeling for arrivals at a five-story building approached by a circular drive and a port cochere entrance. At the Classic Residence in Chevy Chase, Md., an underground parking lot attests to the intention of many residents to continue to get around by car. +In the late 1980's and early 90's, however, developers had trouble with some developments, which leased up far more slowly than they expected, partly because they provided insufficiently for assisted living, consultants report. Some of the failed projects had received Federal mortgage insurance. They have been revived by adding assisted-living or home-health-care services. +LIVING independently are some surprisingly vigorous people of advanced years who speak enthusiastically of the programs that keep them socially and intellectually busy much of the day. +In Chicago, Alice Rosenberg, 81, who lives in the Hallmark on the lakefront, says she no longer drives, but she still takes the three-mile bus trip to downtown Chicago three or four times a month to go to the movies or the theater, in addition to organized van trips with other residents. The bus stops a block from her building. +At the Jefferson, the Marriott residence in Arlington, Va., residents buy rather than rent. In recent resales, buyers have been paying about $163,000 for a 715-square-foot one-bedroom with a den, and $257,000 for a 1,000-square-foot two-bedroom with two baths, the management reports. Monthly condominium fees average $110 for a one-bedroom and $150 for a two-bedroom. Buyers also pay service fees under varying plans, ranging in cost from $1,100 to $1,500 a month. The fee pays for 30 meals a month, weekly housekeeping, linen service, group trips and other services. +Among the residents are Kendrick and Bradford Holle, 68-year-old twins who retired from the Army Corps of Engineers in the 70's, and bought a two-bedroom, two-bath condominium at the Jefferson in 1992. Both are bachelors. +"There's never nothing to do here," said Kendrick Holle. "But we also have people concerned with our welfare looking out for us. If you don't show up for a meal on a regular basis, someone will come looking for you." + +LOAD-DATE: October 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: The Jefferson (Marty Katz for The New York Times), a 21-story condominium for the elderly in Arlington, Va., has a health-care center and suites for assisted living, but accent is on independent living. Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale also has independent-living component. (Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times) (pg. 1); Bradford, left, and Kendrick Holle, twin residents of the Jefferson, an Arlington, Va., condominium. Classic Residence in Chevy Chase, Md. (Photographs by Marty Katz for The New York Times)(pg. 13) + +Map showing the location of Battery Park in Manhattan: Battery Park City plans a 14-story building to house the elderly. (pg. 6) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +499 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 5, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +IN BRIEF; +The State Is Ranked No. 2 In Pedestrian Deaths . . . + +BYLINE: By KAREN DeMASTERS + +SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 6; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 206 words + +Crossing the street can be hazardous to your health in New Jersey, especially for senior citizens and children. The state has the country's second-highest rate for pedestrian injuries and deaths, following New York, according to a new study. +Last year 183 pedestrians died in traffic accidents in New Jersey and approximately 6,000 other pedestrians are injured each year, according to a study released last week by New Jersey Public Interest Research Group, a citizen lobby organization that advocates on consumer and environmental issues, and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a coalition of groups organized to work for traffic safety. Only New York regularly tops New Jersey, with an average of 250 deaths each year. +While seniors make up 13 percent of New Jersey's population, they accounted for 34 percent of the pedestrian deaths last year; those under 20 years of age make up one-fourth of the population but accounted for nearly half of the deaths, according to Kristen Brengel, a spokeswoman for N.J.P.I.R.G. +Police in the state do not enforce pedestrian laws, the report said, and cited low priority given by the state and Federal governments to sidewalks and other traffic safety features.KAREN DeMASTERS + +LOAD-DATE: October 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +500 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 5, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +FROM THE DESK OF; +Be Patient, And I'll Be A Loyal Customer + +BYLINE: By MARILYN A. GELMAN; Marilyn A. Gelman is a writer living in North Jersey. + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 9; Column 1; Money and Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 759 words + +OTOBER is Brain Injury Awareness Month, but I do not need a calendar to be aware of the devastating impact of this often invisible injury. Ever since a BMW crashed into my Chevrolet in June 1994, I have been trying to take back my life. +With the help of friends, fax machines and an Olympian tolerance for frustration, I have tried to manage simple banking needs, make doctor appointments, get information from customer-service phone lines and deal with an army of insurance representatives, lawyers, social workers, transportation providers and doctors who specialize in things I'd never heard of before the crash. + I strive to work around my impairment. But I am surprised that I also must work around the poor business habits of people who should know better, especially those who earn a living from the rapidly changing consumer needs of accident survivors, sick people and the aged. +"What do you want to do with the car, lady? What do you want to do?" demanded the policeman, angry because I could not choose one of the options for removing my car from the accident scene. "If you don't want to give me your address, move away from the window," shouted the hospital admissions worker when my injury prevented me from giving her the information quickly. +When a receptionist or customer-service representative machine-guns me with the usual office spiel, this is what I hear: "Fillinthis formfrom toptobottom signat the dotted lineand bringitto mewitha copyofyouridentifi cationcardas soonaspossible." +Then I have to translate before I can follow the instructions. +The Brain Injury Association reports that every 19 seconds someone in the United States suffers a traumatic brain injury. When you add to our numbers the aging baby boomers and the elderly Americans who are living longer, more active lives, we total a rapidly growing slower-moving population that can translate into dollars for you. But how can we do business with you if we cannot understand you or your employees? +So that I won't cost you $1.50 for every dollar you get from me, I have modified my consumer behavior in these ways: +* To save your time, I do my homework and get my facts in line before I call. I research products, or I check the availability of transportation. +* To speed the exchange of information, I put it in writing. I fax questions to avoid the difficult task of leaving messages. +* I find out the best time to call, and I offer to speak with a supervisor if that is best. +* When necessary, I explain the nature of my disability in terms that relate to our business. For example, "I am recovering from a head injury. This means I have to speak slowly (or deal with one topic at a time, or speak to the same person I spoke with earlier, or call back with an answer or combat information overload by doing only a little of our business at one time)." +* I ask friends to call on my behalf. +Now, this is what you can do to meet me, and others like me, halfway. (These recommendations, incidentally, may even be appreciated by your customers and clients who do not have special needs.) +* Speak slowly, softly and simply. Neither shouting nor industry jargon helps my comprehension. Information given twice quickly is not as effective as information given once slowly. +* Eliminate sources of confusion. On the phone, give me the option of no music while I'm on hold, and give me time to take notes. In person, stand still and make eye contact. One person speaks at a time. Does your company have a procedure for dealing with customers who easily become flustered? +* Stick with standard sales savvy. Listen to me. Let me finish speaking before you assume you know what I mean. Deal with one concept at a time. High-pressure techniques will cost time and lose business. +* Share. Tell me what I can do to make doing business with you easier. Can you send me background material in advance of our next conversation? +IT'S a new ball game for me. Sadly, I have had to stop using merchants I patronized for more than 20 years. Despite my explanations, they were accustomed to the old me and confused by how I now think or what I now say. Don't become angry with me because I am the way I am; I hate it more than you do. Be kind. By a quirk of fate, I was the one the guy hit, not you. +Go the extra mile, and I'll reward you with loyalty and referrals. +And remember the disabled, aged and ill when you train your staff. If your employees are not communicating with your potential clients, patients or customers, why are you paying them to talk? + +LOAD-DATE: October 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Carla Siboldi) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +501 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 7, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Monkeys, Like Mice, Live Well and Prosper On Low-Calorie Diet + +BYLINE: By DENISE GRADY + +SECTION: Section F; Page 3; Column 1; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 1021 words + +IF you eat less, will you live longer? It is tempting to quip that life would at least seem longer. But the question is serious and has intrigued scientists since the 1930's, when it was discovered that a very low-calorie diet would lengthen rats' maximum life spans from three years to four, an increase of 33 percent. +Over the years, the finding has been confirmed many times in mice and other small animals, and has proved the only reliable means of extending a mammal's life span. Normally, old rats and mice turn grizzled, gray and humpbacked, much like old people. But a carefully balanced, low calorie diet -- 30 percent to 50 percent fewer calories than the animals would normally eat -- prolongs not just life, but also youth. Rodents stay sleek and supple longer, navigate mazes swiftly and resist many ailments associated with aging, including diabetes, hypertension, cataracts and cancer. + To help determine whether people might similarly benefit, researchers began a decade ago to study caloric restriction in a closer relative, the rhesus monkey. Although it is still too soon to tell whether monkeys will live longer on a low calorie diet, medical findings so far do suggest that they are healthier and aging more slowly than animals permitted to eat as much as they want. +The latest study, published in the October issue of The American Journal of Physiology, compared 30 monkeys that were allowed to eat freely with 30 others that were fed a diet containing 30 percent fewer calories than normal. Both groups of animals were given the same kind of low-fat food, with only the amounts differing. +Animals on the low-calorie diet developed several traits associated with a reduced risk of heart disease and stroke: they had higher blood levels of a type of "good cholesterol," HDL2B , lower blood pressure, lower triglyceride levels and less fat stored around their midsections. +"Their biochemical markers for cardiovascular disease are moving in the right direction," said Dr. George Roth, an author of the paper and acting chief of the laboratory of cellular and molecular biology at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore. Dr. Roth and his colleagues have been studying the monkeys since 1987, and now have about 200. +His team also reported in July that calorically restricted monkeys showed still another sign of a slower aging process. They maintained higher levels of two forms of the hormone DHEA, or dehydroepiandrosterone, which normally decrease over time; the decline is considered a marker for aging. +But no matter how well the monkeys do, Dr. Roth said, the ultimate goal of this research is not to apply caloric restriction to people. A 30 percent reduction, the amount imposed on the animals, would be too extreme. "Most people have a tough time staying on a diet," he said. Although the monkeys in the study are healthy and appear content, he said, they are hungry much of the time. "They eat all their food, and if we gave them more, they would eat more," Dr. Roth said. +He and his colleagues are trying to discover the mechanism by which calorie reduction slows aging in the hope of designing drugs that mimic its effects -- without cutting calories. +Dr. Richard Weindruch, who also studies caloric restriction in monkeys and other animals at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, said he had already begun working with a company that will make antioxidant drugs to counter the aging process. Many scientists, including Dr. Weindruch, think an important factor in aging is cellular damage caused by substances known as free radicals, which are generated during normal metabolism. Antioxidants can protect against free radicals, perhaps taking the place of calorie restriction, which lowers the rate at which free radicals are produced. +But Dr. Weindruch did not completely rule out caloric restriction for people, provided that meals are carefully planned to include all essential nutrients. In an article in the current issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, he suggested that people from families prone to cancer or degenerative diseases associated with aging might be motivated enough to stick to a low-calorie diet. He says that safe appetite suppressants may eventually be developed to help dieters control eating. +People are already practicing caloric restriction. Many base their diets on books by Dr. Roy Walford, a researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles who recommends cutting back calories and body weight by about 20 percent. In eight people he has studied on such a plan, Dr. Walford has found beneficial changes in blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol similar to those now reported in the monkeys. +A person who begins 20 percent caloric restriction at age 18 might live to be 140 years old, Dr. Walford has estimated. At 73, he himself eats only 1,800 calories a day, as opposed to the 2,000 to 2,800 normally recommended for a man his age. +Brian Delaney, a 34-year-old graduate student in philosophy at the University of Chicago, is among those who have put Dr. Walford's ideas into practice. Five feet 11 inches tall, Mr. Delaney weighs 137 pounds, down from about 150 when he started the plan a few years ago. He said he eats two meals a day, feels well and has plenty of energy. "I got used to being hungry all the time," he said. "There's this pit in your stomach, but you get used to it. I think of it as a pit of immortality." +Mr. Delaney said he was convinced that caloric restriction could prolong life. Nonetheless, he said he hoped researchers would find an another way of achieving the same thing. "I don't really want to look this skinny," he said. "It's not so attractive." At times, he said, he has looked like he had AIDS, and people have worried about him. "I'm into this whole life extension thing, living to be 120 or 130 or 150, but the idea of having to live like this for another 80 or 90 years is unappealing." +Dr. Roth said he did not find it appealing, either. "We all like food, and that's why we're all working hard on the mechanisms, because we'd like to continue to eat," he said. + +LOAD-DATE: October 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Dr. George Roth of the Gerontology Research Center of the National Institute on Aging (Marty Katz for The New York Times) reports that monkeys on low-calorie diets, like the one at left, show signs of slower aging than those in a control group, like the one at right. (National Institute on Aging) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +502 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 7, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +PERSONAL HEALTH; +Breast Cancer Awareness May Carry Its Own Risks + +BYLINE: By JANE E. BRODY + +SECTION: Section F; Page 1; Column 4; Science Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 1204 words + +HAS the concern about breast cancer gone too far, prompting many women to neglect far more serious risks to their health and life? Two 1997 polls certainly suggest that. A New York Times/CBS News Poll found that 52 percent of women think that they are more likely to die of breast cancer than heart disease. And a survey of 1,000 women 30 to 80 years old by Merck Media Minutes, a newsletter from Merck & Company, reported that women ranked breast cancer as the leading risk to their health, above heart disease and lung cancer. But the facts say otherwise. +Heart disease is responsible for 30 percent of the deaths among American women. Breast cancer accounts for only 3 percent. And breast cancer is not even the leading killer among the cancers that strike American women. Lung cancer causes many more deaths among women, yet it does not come close to breast cancer when women are asked about their health concerns. The Merck survey showed that five times as many women listed breast cancer rather than lung cancer as the health topic that interested them the most. + Of course, lung cancer rarely strikes before age 50, even among women who have been lifelong heavy smokers. Heart disease, too, is unlikely to kill women younger than 60, while breast cancer does sometimes strike women in their 30's and 40's. But premenopausal breast cancer is not nearly so common as most women seem to believe. +Breast cancer is primarily a disease of older women. By age 35, a woman has 1 chance in 622 of developing breast cancer. The risk rises to 1 in 93 by age 45, 1 in 33 by age 55 and 1 in 17 by age 65. The "one woman in eight" figure now frequently heard refers to the lifetime risk of breast cancer for a woman who lives beyond the age of 85. And while the incidence of breast cancer rose during the 1980's, it has leveled off in recent years, suggesting that the "epidemic," if there was one, has begun to wane. +Furthermore, breast cancer is not nearly so deadly as many women think. The death rate has been dropping lately, thanks largely to earlier detection and improved treatments. The five-year survival rate for women with localized breast cancer is now 97 percent (up from 72 percent in the 1940's). Even if the cancer has spread to tissues surrounding the breast, 76 percent of the women will be alive five years later. Over all, including cases diagnosed in an advanced stage, 65 percent of women with breast cancer will survive for 10 years and 56 percent for 15 years. +But don't think I am callous about this disease. It took three of my friends in their early 40's, and two of them left behind young children. But a dozen other friends who had breast cancer are alive and well many years -- for some, decades -- after their cancers were discovered. + +Who Is at Risk? +Women are confused about the factors that can influence the risk of developing breast cancer. Many worry unduly because there is breast cancer in their families. It is only cancer in first-degree relatives -- a mother, sister or daughter -- that might raise a woman's risk above that of the general population. Only 10 percent to 15 percent of breast cancers are familial, and not all of those are hereditary. Environmental factors might also play a role. Now that researchers know which genes are responsible for hereditary breast cancer, a woman who can afford genetic testing can find out if she is at increased risk. +As for the 85 percent of cases without a family history, there are several well-established risk factors, and some are amenable to adjustment. The primary risk factor is aging, something we are all stuck with. The risk also increases if menarche comes at an early age or menopause starts late -- both lengthen the exposure of breast tissue to high doses of growth-stimulating estrogens. A woman who started to menstruate before age 14 has a risk that is 30 percent higher than a woman who reached menarche at 16. Because of improved nutrition, better control of childhood infections and reduced physical activity among girls, the average age of menarche has dropped to less than 13 from 16 in the last 130 years. Likewise, a woman who enters menopause at age 55 or later has a risk 50 percent higher than that for a woman whose menopause begins earlier. +Another risk factor is having a first baby late in life or having no biological children, which one study suggests could account for almost 30 percent of the breast cancer cases in this country. A pregnancy carried to term changes breast cells in a way that helps block abnormal growth later. Having a first child at age 30 or later, or having no children, nearly doubles the risk of breast cancer, compared with the risk faced by a woman who bears her first child before she is 20. Furthermore, the earlier a woman has a child, the more children she is likely to have, and these additional pregnancies further protect her breasts, as does prolonged breast feeding. + +Reducing the Risk +Women do not always have a choice about when -- or if -- they give birth and nurse babies. But there are other factors that can raise the risk of breast cancer over which women do have control. According to Dr. Graham A. Colditz and Dr. A. Lindsay Frazier of Harvard Medical School, preventive efforts should be focused on girls because it is young breasts that are most vulnerable to the molecular damage that can accumulate over the years. +Two habits that often start in the teen-age years are especially dangerous: alcohol consumption and cigarette smoking. The Nurses' Health Study, based at Harvard, found that compared with nondrinkers, women who consumed more than one drink a day faced a 2 1/2-fold increase in breast cancer risk. Other studies have indicated that this risk is limited almost entirely to women who start drinking before age 25. +As for smoking, a large Danish study found a 60 percent increase in the risk of breast cancer among women who had smoked cigarettes for more than 30 years. Smokers also tended to develop cancer at younger ages than nonsmokers. The Harvard researchers noted that among women who smoked more than 25 cigarettes a day, those who had started to smoke before they were 16 faced an 80 percent increase in breast cancer risk. +On the other hand, vigorous physical activity in adolescence and young adulthood is protective, perhaps because it can delay menarche and, like pregnancy, reduce the number of ovulatory menstrual cycles. But even after menopause, exercise is likely to be helpful because it reduces body fat, where estrogens are formed from other steroids. As you might guess, weight gain in adulthood increases the postmenopausal breast cancer risk. +As for diet, women would be wise to eat more fiber and less fat. Women on high-fat diets have higher levels of estrogen in their blood, which can spur the growth of breast cancer. However, in a new study of premenopausal women by Dr. David Rose of the American Health Foundation, wheat bran -- one cup or two servings of a whole-bran cereal daily -- diminished blood levels of estrogen. Studies at Tufts University have indicated that dietary fiber from vegetables and fruits, legumes and cereal brans can lower the risk of breast cancer. + +LOAD-DATE: October 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +503 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 7, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +HEALTH WATCH; +Agency Urges Elderly To Get Their Flu Shots + +BYLINE: Reuters + +SECTION: Section F; Page 10; Column 5; Science Desk; Health Page + +LENGTH: 299 words + +DATELINE: ATLANTA, Oct. 6 + +Federal health officials say more elderly people should get the annual flu shots that have been available for free through Medicare since 1993. +The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week that 58 percent of Americans 65 and older had received flu shots in 1995, an 8 percent increase since 1993. + But only 39 percent of older African-Americans and 50 percent of elderly Hispanics got their shots in 1995, the agency said. +The C.D.C. said 20,000 people die from the flu each winter and recommended that older Americans get flu shots in the next two months. +"We've seen a slight increase in vaccinations among Hispanics and African-Americans, but health care providers and communities need to make an extra effort to close that gap and keep the overall number of older Americans receiving flu shots going up," said Dr. David Satcher, director of the health agency. +The C.D.C. said hospitals often missed opportunities to vaccinate the elderly because their medical records did not include vaccination histories. Hospitals in 12 Western states missed the chance to administer flu vaccine to 65 percent of pneumonia patients on Medicare in a four-month period in late 1994, a survey found. +The health agency said some elderly people wrongly believed that they could catch the flu by getting a flu shot. "It's impossible for the flu vaccine to cause influenza," said Dr. Jose Cordero of the C.D.C. "That's a myth that needs to be corrected." +Medicare began paying for flu shots without requiring a co-payment in 1993. The shots are free for patients enrolled in Medicare Part B from doctors who accept Medicare payment as full payment, the health agency said. Medicare also covers vaccinations against pneumonia, the most common complication of influenza. + +LOAD-DATE: October 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +504 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 10, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +BLUMBERG, ALBERT E. + +SECTION: Section D; Page 19; Column 1; Classified + +LENGTH: 72 words + +BLUMBERG-Albert E. The Audubon Reform Democratic Club mourns the passing of our longtime President. A political leader, senior citizens advocate, philosophy professor and an activist in the truest sense, he worked hard to organize people in northern Manhattan to improve their communities and especially to empower the Dominican community. He has left an indelible mark and will be greatly missed by all who worked with him. + +LOAD-DATE: October 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +505 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 10, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +COMPANY NEWS; +EMERITUS EXPECTS INVESTMENT FROM SOROS-BACKED FUND + +BYLINE: Bloomberg News + +SECTION: Section D; Page 4; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 117 words + +The Emeritus Corporation said yesterday that an investment fund backed by Soros Fund Management L.L.C. had agreed to invest $25 million in the company. Emeritus, which builds and operates housing for elderly people who need daily assistance, said Northstar Capital Partners L.L.C. would buy 1.37 million newly issued preferred shares, representing about 10 percent ownership in the Seattle-based company. Northstar, based in New York, makes investments on behalf of Quantum Realty Partners, a real estate fund affiliated with the financier George Soros. Emeritus owns and operates about $500 million worth of housing communities for the elderly. Its shares were up 87.5 cents yesterday, to $15.6875. + +LOAD-DATE: October 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +506 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 11, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +BLUMBERG, DR. ALBERT E. + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7; Column 1; Classified + +LENGTH: 93 words + +BLUMBERG-Dr. Albert E. The Congress of Senior Citizens of Greater NY deeply mourns the loss of our long-time president and friend who died October 8, 1997. Al's dedication, leadership and support for the seniors of our city will continue to remain an inspiration for the Congress of Senior Citizens. Al's commitment to the welfare of children and seniors would have him shouting from the grave, "Don't privatize Social Security." Arrangements for a memorial service are being drafted for a later time. We extend our very sincere condolences to the family. + +LOAD-DATE: October 11, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +507 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 11, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; +A Legend at Home With Life and Art + +BYLINE: By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER + +SECTION: Section B; Page 11; Column 3; The Arts/Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 610 words + +"When I was young, life seemed long and endless to me," the elderly man says. +His name is Marcello Mastroianni, and his life ended on Dec. 19, 1996, at the age of 72. + But a fine and loving memorial that preserves his charm, his intellect and his splendid body of work is to be shown tomorrow at 3 P.M. at Avery Fisher Hall as part of the 35th New York Film Festival. +Titled "Marcello Mastroianni, I Remember," this 3-hour-and-20-minute documentary is the work of Anna Maria Tato, the actor's companion in the final 22 years of his restless, accomplished life. +Part travelogue, part biography, part philosophical rumination on cinema and the actor's art, this long and loving film renders a splendid portrait of a man who entered his profession as a child, honed his craft on the stage and made more than 170 films, among them such enduring works as Federico Fellini's "Dolce Vita" and "8 1/2," Ettore Scola's "Special Day," Vittorio De Sica's "Marriage, Italian Style" and Nikita Mikhalkov's "Dark Eyes." +His last, Manoel de Oliviera's "Voyage to the Beginning of the World," shown on Monday at the festival, provides "Marcello Mastroianni, I Remember" with its framework. +While making that film, the actor is seen traveling through Portugal by car or floating leisurely aboard a boat on a river that is almost a metaphor for life. There and at other locations, the man who once intended to become an architect reveals an irrepressibly comic outlook as he reminisces about his career, recalls the great directors he worked with, disclaims the title Latin Lover ("a crazy, stupid idea"), refers to his readings in Proust, Chekhov, Stendhal and Kafka, tells funny stories about his family, heaps scorn on television, distances himself from Method acting ("Why all this suffering and torment?"), discusses cities and travel and floats some of his unrealized dream projects (playing an elderly Tarzan). +"Marcello Mastroianni" is filled with clips from the actor's movies, including some hilariously awful ones ("only saints and heroes never make mistakes") and from his stage appearances, as well as newsreel film and video. Though the documentary refers only fleetingly to some of his romantic liaisons and his daughter by Catherine Deneuve, it is never less than a thoroughgoing rendering of Mastroianni's career and his attitude toward life. +It differs from many documentaries in one important respect. Unlike films where the camera seems intrusive, where the subjects seem all too conscious of the filmmakers' presence, here is a documentary whose subject's natural home is before the camera. At ease, addressing the lens in an un-self-conscious manner, Mastroianni is the ideal model for a portrait on film, a man who never lost the best of his childish qualities or his love of adventure and who was neither afraid to grow old nor too vain to portray the elderly. But he didn't feel old, he says, because he never stopped working. +"I like people," he says. "I love life." +"Marcello Mastroianni, I Remember," whets the appetite to see the remarkable actor's great films once more. This rich, funny documentary heightens the realization of how much the art of the cinema is impoverished by his loss. + +MARCELLO MASTROIANNI, I REMEMBER + +Directed by Anna Maria Tato; in Italian, with English subtitles; director of photography, Giuseppe Rotunno; edited by Ms. Tato; music by Armando Trovajoli; produced by Mario Di Biase; released by First Look Pictures. Shown tomorrow at 3 P.M. at Avery Fisher Hall, as part of the 35th New York Film Festival. Running time: 200 minutes. This film is not rated. + +WITH: Marcello Mastroianni. + +LOAD-DATE: October 11, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Marcello Mastroianni in a film by Anna Maria Tato, to be shown tomorrow at the New York Film Festival. (Film Society of Lincoln Center) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +508 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 11, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO NEWS BRIEFS: NEW YORK; +Developer Is Selected For Residence for Elderly + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 184 words + +The Battery Park City Authority announced yesterday that it had selected Brookdale Living Communities, a company based in Chicago, to develop a 14-story residential rental building that is expected to appeal to the well-to-do elderly. +The 216-unit building will be the first in Manhattan to offer market-rate, large-scale unsubsidized housing for the elderly. Most of the units would provide so-called independent living, with recreational and housekeeping services and a meal or two a day. About 20 studio apartments are designed for assisted living, in which help is provided in bathing, dressing and medical monitoring. + The building will be at the northern end of Battery Park City, near Stuyvesant High School. +The authority said the building would have 39 two-bedroom apartments, 128 one-bedrooms and 49 studios, with private and communal dining rooms and various specialized spaces. +Construction is expected to start next year and be completed within three years, the authority said. +Mark J. Schulte, president of Brookdale, said the company would take applications next year. + +LOAD-DATE: October 11, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +509 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 11, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +When Bad Economic Theory Threatens Good Times + +BYLINE: By Robert Eisner; Robert Eisner, professor emeritus at Northwestern University, is the author of the forthcoming "The Great Deficit Scares: the Federal Budget, Trade and Social Security." + +SECTION: Section A; Page 11; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 751 words + +DATELINE: EVANSTON, Ill. + +Just when we thought Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, had settled into a wise laissez-faire approach to our surging economy, he warned this week that we may soon be tasting some foul medicine. +Why? Because we are doing too well. Unemployment has been at or below 5 percent for six months and below 6 percent for three full years. And the growth in our gross domestic product has been running at 3 percent for the last four years, instead of the roughly 2 percent that many thought was the best we could do. + The conventional wisdom has long been that such figures could not be achieved without accelerating inflation. Yet inflation and even prices themselves have been falling, and Mr. Greenspan seemed to have abandoned this conventional view. +Until this week, that is, when he unexpectedly declared that wages may rise unless the recent two-million-plus annual rate of job creation is cut to the million a year that would be consistent with population growth. +When we're shrinking unemployment, why stop now? We even have a legislated target, in the old Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978, of 4 percent unemployment. In fact, Mr. Greenspan is required to testify regularly before Congress about policies to meet that target. +Might 4 percent unemployment bring some increase in wages? It might, after years of decline in real wages. When few people are unemployed, employers have to bid higher to find workers. +But with profits at record highs, productivity rising, the dollar strong and international competition brisk, companies have little reason to increase prices, even if they give employees modest wage increases. And there is certainly no excuse for the peremptory strike of raising interest rates to slow the economy, a move that -- thanks to Mr. Greenspan's remarks -- Wall Street now fears when the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meets Nov. 12. +More fundamentally, there is no reason to hold employment growth to the long-term rate of population growth, as Mr. Greenspan suggested. There are millions of black Americans and Hispanic Americans, as well as women, youths and elderly people of all races and ethnic groups, who would take jobs if they could get them. +In some cases putting these people to work would require more and better education and training, but in all cases it would require a brisk, growing economy. This employment growth will not occur if Mr. Greenspan follows through on his implicit threat to hold the economy down. +The underlying culprit in all this, openly espoused within the Federal Reserve Board, is the dogma that there is an unemployment rate below which inflation goes crazy (a "non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment," or Nairu, in the economist's jargon). Until recently the idea that there is such a magic number was widely accepted by liberal and conservative economists alike, liberals putting it at 6 percent and conservatives at 6.5 or 7 percent. +Whatever the figure -- and recent work has indicated increasing doubt as to just what it is, if it exists at all -- unemployment below these rates would do more than simply generate higher inflation, the believers say. It would give us continuously accelerating inflation -- that is, inflation that would get higher and higher: 2 percent, 5 percent, 10 percent, 20 percent and so on. Who would dare risk letting this genie out of the bottle? +I have been pointing out for years that the theory simply does not hold up to evidence, and other economists have increasingly been agreeing. Really high unemployment, as might be expected, has reduced inflation. In the Depression, inflation turned negative. And in the recession of 1982-83, with unemployment approaching 11 percent, inflation slowed markedly. +But the critical fact is that unemployment and inflation are not linked so tightly. Relatively low unemployment for whatever reason -- increasing productivity may be one -- has simply not been associated with either higher or rising inflation. +So Mr. Greenspan should resist the Nairu dogma. And he certainly shouldn't follow his counterparts in the German Bundesbank, who have just announced an increase in an interest rate even though unemployment there is more than 11 percent. +Mr. Greenspan should aim for maximum employment, maximum growth and real wages that befit our mighty economy. He shouldn't even threaten to shoot at inflation until he sees the whites of its eyes. + +Maureen Dowd is on vacation. + +LOAD-DATE: October 11, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +510 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 12, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +TRAVEL ADVISORY -- CORRESPONDENT'S REPORT; +The Forbidden City Gets a Face Lift + +BYLINE: By SETH FAISON + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 3; Column 1; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 740 words + +DATELINE: BEIJING + +OF all China's illustrious and history-rich places to visit, perhaps none is quite so stunning in scope and design as the Forbidden City, the palace complex where emperors once lived and ruled. +It may also be the hardest to keep up. A vast collection of courtyards and enormous halls and former living quarters spread out over 250 acres, the Forbidden City is forever fighting crumbling walls, decaying roofs and shaky pavilions. + China's Bureau of Relics recently announced that it would begin a $25 million renovation of the Forbidden City, or part of it anyway, mostly along the exterior walls, where a moat surrounds the old palace. "The renovation will not affect visitors," said Wang Hongnian, a senior official at the relics bureau. "We will do it part by part. Some visitors even like to come see how traditional repair work is done." +By the southwest corner, where the towering gray brick walls seem to have suffered from the elements worse than in other places, a dozen workmen have set up camp to recast enormous bricks, two feet long, to replace bricks that are missing -- many of them stolen by Beijing residents, who either needed building materials desperately or wanted to boast that they had a piece of the Forbidden City in their own homes. +The workmen carefully measure the gray bricks, filing down the corners just so, trying to preserve the original look as closely as possible. +"After another 100 years, you won't be able to tell the difference between these and the originals," said one workman, only partly in jest. He pointed out that the existing wall just behind him was 570 years old. +Today the moat that meanders around those walls is lined by soft willow trees, and a few elderly men with long fishing poles can be found sitting beside it on any given afternoon. But the water itself is somewhat dirty, with clumps of algae and assorted urban detritus. +Another aim of the renovation is to clean that water and dredge the moat, clearing away the thick piles of mud that have collected at the bottom. +"The moat hasn't been dredged since the mid-1970's," said Mr. Wang, the relics official, who wonders what may turn up this time. "Older people say they found all kinds of things in the moat, like musical instruments that were abandoned during the Cultural Revolution." +Over by Wu Men, a horseshoe-shaped gate that seems to draw in, like a magnet, all who approach the Forbidden City from its south-facing entrance, the crimson walls have faded from years of rain, wind and snow, and are peeling badly in some places. +But the imperial yellow roofs that sit atop the gate, and are visible straddling the long halls and other buildings within, still glisten in the afternoon sun. A renovation earlier this decade cleared the incipient plant life growing on the roofs, and their rich saffron luster was retained. +Although long overdue, and clearly necessary for the long-term health of the palace, the renovation has its human costs as well. It brings to an end one of Beijing's minor secrets: a few dozen people have actually been living within the Forbidden City. Employees of the Palace Museum, they occupied a few rows of ramshackle houses along the inside of one of the enormous external walls. Built to be temporary, but somehow lasting into semipermanence, they are now run down and cramped. +Yet these houses offered their inhabitants an atmosphere virtually unmatched in Beijing. At night, after the crowds of tourists had gone and only imperial ghosts were left, the quiet air was rich with history. +Anyone lucky enough to know someone who lived in one of these houses, and lucky enough to be invited there one evening, could walk in the silent darkness of the Forbidden City and sense the echoes of Chinese culture that seem to lurk within the majestic walls and courtyards. +Parts of the palace's old living quarters, where the emperors and their thousands of attendant concubines, eunuchs and servants once stayed, are now offices of the museum, while other parts are open to visitors. But the museum authorities have decided that many of the rundown offices and the temporary housing should be razed or fixed up, as should the aging electrical wiring that has long been a fire hazard. +A New China News Agency account of the renovation said it would be complete by 2000. But Mr. Wang said repair work on the palace never really stops: "It will go on and on and on." + +LOAD-DATE: October 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Map of Beijing showing the location of the Forbidden City. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +511 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 12, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In the Region/New Jersey; +For Tinton Falls, a Vast Continuing-Care Complex + +BYLINE: By RACHELLE GARBARINE + +SECTION: Section 10; Page 7; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1301 words + +CONSTRUCTION of one of the state's largest retirement communities is to begin later this month in Tinton Falls. It will eventually turn 134 acres into a complex of 1,786 residences that will offer people 62 and older meals, services and health care at each stage of aging. +The first phase of the project, known as Seabrook Village, involves 92 residences and a 60,000-square-foot community center. They will be joined over the next four to six years by 1,694 more residences and two other community centers, which collectively will include six dining rooms and a medical center. There will also be a 240-bed nursing home and amenities, ranging from a health club to computer and crafts rooms to continuing-education classes and shops. + Seabrook Village will have 1,650 independent-living apartments, where residents capable of living on their own will get such services as housekeeping, transportation, social activities and one meal a day. There will also be 136 assisted-living units for residents who need help with daily living. They will receive all the services plus three meals a day. For those who need more medical attention there is the nursing home. +As is typical of many continuing-care retirement communities residents at Seabrook Village will pay an entrance fee that will entitle them to access to a1l levels, as well as a monthly service fee. +The fees are being targeted to middle-income residents "which is a solid and definitely underserved market," said Daniel Rexford, vice president of marketing at Senior Campus Living, in Baltimore, the developer. Financing for the $300-million project is coming from the company and its financial partner, a division of LenLease, an international developer based in Sidney, Australia. +Two years after the initial wave of independent-living units is built construction will start on the health-care component, either the assisted-living apartments or the nursing home, said Mr. Rexford, adding that since marketing began in April deposits had been taken on 85 percent of the first 92 units. +Elda and Benjamin Pinz, who have two grown daughters, reserved one of the initial units. The couple -- she is 72, he is 80 -- say they are ready to surrender the maintenance and chores tied to their single-family home in Marlboro. "We want to be independent," said Mrs. Pinz. "This is a way to leave our care to someone else rather than our children." +The Pinzes are among the growing number of older people who are seeking an alternative to nursing homes that offers care as they age, but avoids the regimentation of a medical setting. Stoking the trend are demographics and the desire by the aging to stay close to their families and friends. +With nearly 1.1 million of its 8 million residents age 65 and older, New Jersey has the ninth-largest aging population in the nation. The fastest growing segment of that population is people 75 years of age or older. +Those demographics attracted Senior Campus Living, which hopes to open up to five communities in New Jersey as part of its 10-year expansion program. The company is negotiating to build a second continuing-care development, a 1,400-unit project in Pequannock, in Morris County. +Seabrook Village is getting under way at a time when a spate of varying kinds of specialized housing for the elderly is also advancing in the state. The big surge is in assisted-living complexes, a relatively recent alternative to nursing homes. Beyond such services as dining and housekeeping, these complexes have staff on hand to help with daily needs like dressing and bathing and taking medications. +Since 1994, when the state started licensing assisted-living communities, 36 have been built and licensed and 234 more are in various stages of the approval or application process, according to state figures. +UNLIKE continuing-care retirement communities -- there are 21 in the state and two more are planned -- assisted-living projects do not offer three levels of care or guarantee access to each. But an entrance fee is not required. +Some communities that offer all levels of care, such as the Windrows at Princeton Forrestal in Plainsboro, also do not require entrance fees. Windrows is structured as rentals and a condominium "so residents have control of their assets while maintaining a continuum of care," said Michael Zaccaro, executive vice president at Care Matrix of Needham, Mass., the developer. +The project, which will have a medical as well as a community center, is rising on 45 acres in Princeton Forrestal Center, the mixed-use complex developed by Princeton University. It contains 180 nursing beds and 83 assisted-living units, with monthly rents, including all meals and services, of $2,350 to $4,000. There will also be 294 independent-living residences priced at $174,900 to $444,900. Monthly fees of $1,135 to $2,268 will cover all services and 30 meals a month. +Because of the rising number of options the growth of continuing-care retirement communities, which surged during the 1980's, has leveled off, said Barbara Kleger, president of Senior Living Associates, a Philadelphia-based marketing firm. "But the ones being developed tend to be well-planned and cater to certain niche markets," she said. +At Seabrook Village, the entry fee will be 100 percent refundable upon death or departure after the unit is reoccupied. The fees, which will range from $107,000 to $312,000, will be used to pay off construction costs and, later, to finance improvements. +There will also be a monthly fee of $1,167 to $1,172 for the studio to 2-bedroom independent units, which will have 625 to 1,414 square feet of space. For a second person there is an added $554 fee. For the 550-square-foot assisted-living units the fee wi1l be $2,200. The monthly fees will cover everything but advanced medical care, which residents will pay for as they need it, Mr. Rexford said. Those entering the nursing home will pay a "competitive" daily rate, he added, noting that it was too early to give exact figures. +"It is very reasonable for what the community is providing," Mr. Pinz said of the monthly fee, which he said was slightly more than what he and his wife pay per month to maintain their home. "But I will not have to worry about the washer or some other appliance breaking down." +Having so large a project allows the company to achieve certain economies of scale. But the size was a tough sell in Franklin Lakes and Wayne, where the company advanced earlier development plans that were derailed by local concerns. +But the Monmouth County community of Tinton Falls welcomes Seabrook Village, which will rise on Essex Road, a mile east of a point between Exits 100A and 102 the Garden State Parkway. "It is a self-contained community that will have little impact on municipal services, especially schools," said Anthony J. Muscillo, the township's Business Administrator. +From 1985 to 1995 the population of Tinton Falls rose to 15,000 from 8,000, prompting the expansion of three elementary schools. But the township did not see corresponding commercial growth, Mr. Muscillo said, adding that "this project will go a long way to keep real estate taxes stable." +Mr. Rexford said his company had bought the site, which was rezoned from office use, because of its size and highway access. Moreover, he said, a market study showed that 22,258 people age 75 or older live within a 10-mile radius of the site. +The independent-living units will be in 12 residential buildings laid out in 3 neighborhoods, each with 4 buildings around a community center. The assisted-living units will be in a separate structure, as will the nursing home. All the buildings as well as the community centers will be linked by enclosed walkways. Initial occupancy is scheduled for next fall. + +LOAD-DATE: October 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Rendering of Seabrook Village in Tinton Falls. The 134-acre complex will target middle-income residents. (The Hillier Group) + +Map showing the location of Tinton Falls, N.J. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +512 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 12, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +IN BRIEF; +New Jersey, Healthy for All, Aiming at Health of the Elderly + +SECTION: Section 14NJ; Page 6; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 357 words + +New Jersey residents lead healthier lives than those in three-fourths of the nation, according to a survey released last week. +New Jersey ranks 12th from the top when all of the factors considered by the Reliastar Financial Corporation of Minneapolis in its annual evaluation are combined. The survey considered such seemingly diverse factors as a state's unemployment rate because that has a bearing on a person's ability to obtain health insurance; the rates of heart disease, cancer and infectious diseases like AIDS; the mortality rate; job-related fatalities, and motor vehicle deaths. + Minnesota, the home state for Reliastar, a life insurance, employee benefits and mutual funds holding company, comes in first with the healthiest residents followed by New Hampshire, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Wisconsin. Louisiana and Mississippi tie for last place. +"This is a general survey, not something that is necessarily precise," said Leah Ziskin, deputy commissioner of the state Department of Health and Senior Services, "but I think our concerted effort to reduce youthful smoking and to promote the use of seat belts and reduce the number of drunken drivers contributed to our high ranking." +Residents of nursing homes or those 65 and older being discharged from hospitals will be offered influenza and pneumonia vaccinations under regulations being drafted by the state Department of Health and Senior Services. +Thirty-seven percent of New Jersey residents 65 and older now get flu shots, compared with 41 percent nationally, and 13.5 percent get pneumonia shots, vs. 16 percent nationally. The new requirements for nursing homes and hospitals are designed to reduce the 2,000 deaths among New Jersey seniors that are caused each year by the two diseases, Len Fishman, state health and senior services commissioner, said in announcing the program Thursday. +Until the regulations are changed, the health department is asking hospitals and nursing homes to begin immediately to offer the shots voluntarily, which are covered by Medicare. There are slightly more than one million New Jersey residents over the age of 65. + +LOAD-DATE: October 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +513 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 13, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Albert Blumberg, 91, Philosopher and Communist + +BYLINE: By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr. + +SECTION: Section D; Page 11; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 755 words + +Albert E. Blumberg, an idealistic philosophy professor who fought for economic and social reforms as an oft-harassed Communist Party official in the 1940's and 50's, then continued the fight with somewhat more success as a Democratic Party district leader in Manhattan, died on Wednesday at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center near his home in upper Manhattan. He was 91. +To the Congressional committees and Justice Department officials who hounded him over two decades, Dr. Blumberg's professed interest in improving the plight of workers and minority groups was a sham. + As they saw it, his work as secretary of the Communist Party in Maryland and the District of Columbia, and as the national party's legislative director, was a cover for his role in a Stalin-directed conspiracy to overthrow the Government. +To those who knew him during his years as a respected philosophy professor and department chairman at Rutgers University and as a Democratic leader in New York, his commitment to helping others was real. +Among other things, since settling in northern Manhattan in 1965, he organized and led numerous community organizations, served as president of the Audubon Reform Democratic Club and of the Congress of Senior Citizens of Greater New York and became an adviser to officials like City Councilman Stanley E. Michels, Assemblyman Herman D. Farrell Jr., State Senator Franz S. Leichter and Mayor David N. Dinkins, who named him chairman of the senior citizens advisory panel. +A native of Baltimore whose parents were immigrants from Lithuania, Dr. Blumberg was a brilliant student who graduated from Johns Hopkins University before going off on a grand academic tour, picking up a master's from Yale, studying at the Sorbonne and receiving a doctorate from the University of Vienna, where he was attracted to the Vienna circle of logical positivists. +In recent years, Dr. Blumberg talked so little about his past that it is hard to know just how or why he became involved with the Communist Party, but a nephew, recalling his uncle describing campaigns against Jews in Vienna in the 1930's, suggested that, like many European Communists of the day, he came to see Soviet Communism as an antidote to Nazism. +Whatever the initial attraction, Dr. Blumberg and his Baltimore-born wife, Dorothy Rose, quickly became prominent in party circles. +In 1940, for example, he was cited for contempt for refusing to identify party members to the House Un-American Activities Committee, but apparently did not learn the intended lesson: in 1957, he refused to answer similar questions before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee. +By then, Dr. Blumberg had become one of the first Communists convicted under a provision of the 1940 Smith Act equating party membership with conspiring to overthrow the Government. +Despite that 1956 conviction, Dr. Blumberg did not go to prison. In 1957, while his appeal was pending, the Supreme Court declared the provision unconstitutional. (His wife, convicted earlier under a different section, served a three-year term.) +For Dr. Blumberg, the victory was a hollow one. Although he had taught philosophy at Johns Hopkins in the 1930's, he could not get a teaching job and worked in a bookstore until he was hired by Rutgers in 1965. +There he helped organize Livingston College, the university's first residential college for men and women; served as chairman of its philosophy department; wrote an acclaimed textbook, "Logic: A First Course," and was repeatedly elected president of the faculty governing body. As a colleague, Dr. Peter Klein, recalled on Friday, Dr. Blumberg was a master synthesizer who would often astound his colleagues by tapping his gavel during a rancorous dead-end debate, declaring, "I think I hear a consensus," then articulating an inspired compromise. +After retiring in 1977, he stepped up his political activities in New York. By then he had become such an established figure in the local Democratic Party that he won a 1977 election as leader of the 71st Assembly District even though his opponent had tried to use his Communist past against him. +As district leader, Dr. Blumberg was chairman of the county committee's policy committee and worked to bring his upper Manhattan neighborhood's growing Dominican population into the party's inner circles, succeeding so well that he lost his post to a Dominican rival in 1985. +Dr. Blumberg, whose wife died several years ago, is survived by a brother, Harold, of Boston. + +NAME: Albert Blumberg + +LOAD-DATE: October 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +514 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 14, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +The Aging Eye: Researchers Aim To Stop the Clock + +BYLINE: By JANE E. BRODY + +SECTION: Section F; Page 1; Column 2; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 1955 words + +DATELINE: UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. + +AGING Americans expect more from their eyes these days than ever before. People in their 70's and 80's want to be able to drive, play cards, recognize people on the street, travel with their grandchildren, take advantage of senior discounts in the movies and read the books they missed while working full time. +But eyes have a way of aging that can render such expectations unrealistic. Far worse than the loss of visual acuity that prompts most middle-aged people to resort to magnifying lenses are sight-robbing diseases like glaucoma, cataracts, age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy and other retinal disorders that afflict tens of millions of Americans, usually after age 50. + The incidence of such potentially blinding disorders is increasing rapidly as the number of older people grows. Experts predict, for example, that by the year 2030, 6.3 million older Americans will develop macular degeneration, up from 1.7 million in 1995. It is a still-irreversible disorder that robs people of the central vision needed to drive, read, watch television, recognize faces, play cards or do any fine work. If Grandma Moses had had macular degeneration, her artistic talents would never have been noticed. +Fortunately, research is progressing on a number of promising new treatments, including low doses of radiation, and a combination of lasers and light-activated chemicals, both of which are used for some particularly hard-to-treat forms of macular degeneration. Other research is concentrating on how to stop toxins that damage the eye in glaucoma, and the genetics of several different eye diseases. +"Older Americans today expect to enjoy their retirement with the same visual capacity that they had in their younger years," said Dr. Harold Spalter, professor of ophthalmology at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. But, alas, as was apparent at a four-day seminar that Dr. Spalter chaired here last month, researchers are still a long way from knowing how to reverse most blinding eye disorders. +Still, major progress in understanding and treating these conditions -- and perhaps detecting them early enough to blunt their effects -- was evident at the seminar, organized by Research to Prevent Blindness, a New York-based voluntary organization. Unfortunately, though, many elderly Americans cannot afford the early detection procedures described at the seminar because Medicare and many other insurance programs do not cover such preventive measures. +For example, while insurance companies would routinely cover a visual field examination for a patient who already has glaucoma, most would not pay for this test for a person who has not yet experienced vision loss, when the disease process might be stopped without lasting vision damage. +Furthermore, an ongoing study of 2,520 men and women aged 65 to 84 in Salisbury, Md., has revealed that the usual eye chart test for visual acuity is inadequate to assess vision losses that interfere with the ability of elderly people to get around on their own, perform tasks of daily living and avoid accidents that can result in serious or fatal injuries. Rather, Dr. Sheila West, professor of ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, reported that tests for contrast sensitivity -- the ability to distinguish, say, a step from the one below it -- are more revealing of functional disability in older people. +"We have found that loss of contrast sensitivity is as important as arthritis and heart failure in determining loss of mobility in the aged," Dr. West said. She traced this loss to "nonspecific retinal changes" and the beginnings of cataracts, a gradual clouding of the lens of the eye that eventually obscures vision. However, early-stage cataracts are rarely recognized by those who have them and are often dismissed as inconsequential by eye doctors. +Sunlight, Dr. West said, is a major factor in the formation of cataracts, and the damage is cumulative. By assessing the exposure of study participants to sunlight, Dr. West and colleagues determined that for every 1 percent increase in exposure to ultraviolet-B light, the risk of developing cataracts rose by 10 percent. +"There is no threshold for sun-related damage, the dosage is cumulative and no group is immune to it," Dr. West said the study showed. She recommended that when out of doors, everyone -- starting in childhood -- should wear lenses that block ultraviolet light and a cap with a brim that shades the eyes. +Dr. M. Cristina Leske, head of preventive medicine at University Medical Center in Stony Brook, N.Y., and associates, identified other risk factors for cataracts. Through a five-year study of 764 patients, they found that Caucasians are three times as likely as blacks to develop cataracts. Those who take the gout medicine allopurinol face more than a two-fold increase in risk, and smokers have a 60 percent increase. +On the other hand, certain nutrients appear protective. The risk was 30 percent lower among those who took multivitamin-mineral supplements and nearly 60 percent lower among those who took a vitamin E supplement, a finding that is now being tested in a clinical trial sponsored by the National Eye Institute. Still another study of 247 women aged 56 to 71 conducted at Tufts University in Boston found that taking vitamin C supplements for more than 10 years reduced the risk of early cataracts by 77 percent and the risk of moderately advanced cataracts by 83 percent. +But while cataracts can usually be treated very successfully by surgically removing the damaged lens and replacing it with a synthetic lens implant, age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of legal blindness in the elderly, has yet to yield to an effective treatment. Macular degeneration involves progressive damage to the cells in the center of the retina that are responsible for straight-ahead vision. +Early cases are often treated with lasers, which have the unfortunate side effect of destroying normal retinal cells as well as the damaged areas beneath them. Furthermore, after laser treatment, the vision-damaging tissue often grows back. +Dr. Dennis M. Marcus, an ophthalmologist at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, said that laser therapy usually cannot be used for the most severe form of the disease -- so-called wet macular degeneration, which involves the growth of leaky blood vessels beneath the central retina. Instead, he and his colleagues are testing low-dose radiation to destroy the blood vessels but spare the normal retinal cells. Thus far, 100 patients have been treated in a clinical trial that will eventually involve 500 people with wet macular degeneration. While it is too soon to evaluate the effectiveness of the treatment, Dr. Marcus said that he has seen no radiation-induced complications. +Another clinical study is testing a technique called photodynamic therapy. It starts with the intravenous administration of a photosensitive dye that collects in the damaging blood vessels that are growing beneath the retina. The eye is then exposed to laser light that activates the dye, destroying those vessels only. Dr. Joan W. Miller, an ophthalmologist at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, said that preliminary studies showed that the technique effectively closes off the leaky vessels in the majority of patients. And while these vessels reopen and leak in some patients, the treatment can be repeated, if needed, without harm to the eye. +Some seminar participants said the best hope for conquering blinding eye diseases was unraveling the sometimes complex genetics underlying many if not all of these conditions. Just last month, for example, a team of scientists announced the discovery of the first genetic link to age-related macular degeneration, which strikes 25 percent of Americans over the age of 65 and is the major cause of vision loss in the elderly. The researchers hope that by studying mutations in this gene they will gain an understanding of how the disease damages the eye, a means of identifying those at risk and methods of prevention and treatment. +Glaucoma, for example, usually involves elevated pressure inside the eye, leading eventually to the death of ganglion cells, the nerve cells that transmit information from the eye to the brain. This disease afflicts perhaps eight million Americans and causes blindness in 5,500 each year. Currently the only available treatment involves continual use of eye drops that reduce intraocular pressure. This only works if treatment is begun early. +Dr. Robert W. Nickells, an eye researcher at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, said, however, that "new advances suggest that glaucoma could be treated during the second or even the third stage of the disease." The second stage involves the release of high concentrations of "excitotoxins," amino acids that are toxic to nerve cells. Dr. Nickells said that several compounds that intervene in the formation of excitotoxins have been developed to treat other neurodegenerative disorders and may also prove useful in treating glaucoma. +As for the third stage, he and his colleagues have found in monkeys and rodents that ganglion cells succumb to a form of programmed cell death that appears to be controlled by three genes that act as a molecular switch. One of the genes, called bcl-x, prevents the fatal blow and might be harnessed therapeutically to override the cell death mechanism, Dr. Nickells said. +But discoveries about the genetics of eye disorders can sometimes raise more questions than they answer. For example, Dr. Fulton Wong of Duke University Medical Center reported that as many as 50 genes are believed to be involved in the progressive disease retinitis pigmentosa, which begins as night blindness and loss of peripheral vision and eventually destroys central vision, leaving people blind. Thus far, four genes have been identified, each with multiple mutations that may result in different aberrations of the condition. One of the genes that codes for the production of the visual pigment rhodopsin can exist in 92 different mutated forms, Dr. Wong reported. +This year alone, three genes for various forms of glaucoma have been identified. But Dr. Janey Wiggs, an ophthalmologist and geneticist at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, said: "This is a very complicated disease, with maybe 20 or 30 genes involved. And finding genes is only the first step. Where and when is the gene required and how does it produce disease? Does it result in too much or not enough of a gene product or make a toxic product?" +Still, she and others expressed guarded enthusiasm for the prospects of gene therapy to treat various devastating eye diseases. "The eye is accessible," she said. "It can be given selective treatment, using the other untreated eye as a control to see how well the treatment is working." +Dr. J. Timothy Stout, head of the division of ophthalmology at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles, said, "The potential use of gene therapy is nearly limitless for the ophthalmologist." He and his colleagues are exploring in animals the potential of a so-called suicide gene to treat eye diseases that involve excessive cell division, such as intraocular proliferative disease, macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy. Normally, most cells in an adult eye are not dividing. Using as a gene carrier a virus that infects only actively dividing cells, he introduces into the eye a gene that by itself is not toxic but that results in cell death when combined with the drug ganciclovir, which also does not harm normal cells. Thus, the treatment is specific for the proliferating cells involved in the eye disease. + +LOAD-DATE: October 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Chart: "As Time Goes By" +The aging eye is prone to a number of vision threatening conditions. Researchers are exploring new ways of treating them. Diagram lists some treatments. (Charles M. Blow/The New York Times/Photographs courtesy of National Eye Institute) + +Diagram: "Seeing Things Clearly" +Normally, light is focused through the +1 -- Cornea +2 -- pupil and +3 -- lens and onto the +4 -- retina, where it is converted to +5 -- electrical impulses and +6 -- sent to the brain. +(Sources: National Eye Institute; The American Medical Association Encyclopedia of Medicine (Random House); "Human Anatomy and Physiology' (Benjamin Cummings)) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +515 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 14, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Health-Care Workers Spread Flu Among Elderly + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section F; Page 7; Column 1; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 525 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 + +Doctors, nurses and other health-care workers are major sources of influenza infections that kill thousands of elderly residents of nursing home every year, a new study has found. +Dr. Gregory Poland of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said that health-care workers were lax in getting annual flu shots and that only about half of people over 65 received the vaccine. + Even fewer of the elderly have received shots that protect against pneumonia infections. +This results, he said, in thousands of deaths that could be prevented. +"The very people who are charged with protecting the elderly from the flu may bring the virus into nursing homes and expose residents to this disease and its life-threatening complications," Dr. Poland said. +"Physicians, nurses and health-care workers who have not received flu vaccine are regularly putting the patients under their care at risk," he said. +Dr. Poland said a British study of 1,059 residents at 12 different centers for long-term care found that the death rate among patients dropped to 10 percent from 17 percent when health-care workers were required to receive annual flu shots. +"Just immunizing the health-care workers gives significant protection for these patients," Dr. Poland said. +About 25 percent of health-care workers become infected with flu every year, he said. Yet surveys show that only about 30 percent of doctors, nurses and attendants get flu shots every year. +Dr. Poland said flu shots gave a high level of protection against infection from the virus. In addition, he said, people protected by the vaccine are much less likely to spread the virus to others. Dr. Poland emphasized that the flu vaccine was made from killed virus, which means the shots cannot cause the infection. +People over 65, particularly those already in poor health, are very susceptible to flu and its potentially lethal side effect, pneumonia. Dr. Poland said many elderly people who got the flu went on to develop pneumonia, and about 10 percent of those patients died. +Dr. Jay Butler of the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta cited an alarming rise in strains of pneumonia-causing bacterium that do not respond to antibiotic treatment. +Dr. Butler said that about 20 percent of the pneumococcus strains now found in elderly patients did not respond to penicillin, an antibiotic that has long been the mainstay against the infection. Ten percent of the bacteria are now unresponsive to even advanced types of antibiotics, he said. +This makes it even more important, Dr. Butler said, that people over age 65 receive not only the flu vaccine but also shots that protect against most of the types of pneumococcus. +"As many as 22 million elderly have never been immunized against pneumococcal disease," he said. +The combination of flu and pneumonia was the sixth-leading cause of death among Americans last year, claiming about 40,000 lives. There were about 500,000 cases of influenza that required hospitalization, Dr. Poland said. +Inoculation against flu and pneumonia can reduce the risk of death from these infections by about 80 percent, Dr. Poland said. + +LOAD-DATE: October 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +516 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 14, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +43 on a Holiday Die In Quebec Bus Crash + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 8; Column 4; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 154 words + +DATELINE: ST. JOSEPH DE LA RIVE, Quebec, Oct. 13 + +A bus carrying elderly people on an outing on Canada's Thanksgiving holiday fell into a ravine in central Quebec today, killing 43 of the 48 people aboard. +The Quebec provincial police said the accident had occurred 60 miles northeast of Quebec City. The bus crashed at the bottom of a steep hill. + Real Ouellette, a Quebec Provincial Police spokesman, said faulty brakes were the probable cause of the wreck. There were no skid marks at the bottom of the hill, where 15 people died in an accident in 1974. +The passengers were from the Beauce region southeast of Quebec City, a police spokesman said. +Michelle Robitaille, a spokeswoman for the Charlevoix Hospital Center in Baie St. Paul, said that five injured people were brought there in critical condition and that four of them were transferred to a trauma center in Quebec City. +The bus was headed for Ile aux Coudres, an island in the St. Lawrence River. + +LOAD-DATE: October 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +517 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 14, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +COMPANY NEWS; +EMERITUS MAKES AN OFFER FOR ARV ASSISTED LIVING + +BYLINE: Dow Jones + +SECTION: Section D; Page 4; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 139 words + +The Emeritus Corporation said yesterday that it had offered to buy ARV Assisted Living Inc. for $16.50 a share, or $210 million. Emeritus, based in Seattle, operates care centers for the elderly. It already owns 8 percent of ARV, which is based in Costa Mesa, Calif. A merger of Emeritus and ARV would create an assisted-living company with 164 residential communities and capacity for 17,200 residents. Emeritus said its bid topped a $135 million offer for 49.9 percent of ARV made earlier this year by an affiliate of Lazard Freres Real Estate, a unit of Lazard Freres & Company. The affiliate, Prometheus Assisted Living L.L.C., had offered to buy 9.6 million ARV shares for $14 each. Lazard already owns a 17 percent stake in ARV. Shares of Emeritus closed down 25 cents, to $16, while shares of ARV rose $1.625, to $16.875. + +LOAD-DATE: October 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +518 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 16, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +THEATER REVIEW; +If 6 Million Jews Moved Back to Germany? + +BYLINE: By ANITA GATES + +SECTION: Section E; Page 9; Column 1; The Arts/Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 450 words + +President Clinton is really sorry about slavery. The Swiss are sorry about banking practices during World War II. So a future German Chancellor in the early 21st century might conceivably wake up one morning and decide to apologize for the Holocaust by inviting six million Jews to return to Germany to live. +"Lebensraum," a new play from Israel Horovitz, begins with that scenario and ends with a disturbing possible answer to the question "Could it happen again?" + Mr. Horovitz, best known for his 1968 play "The Indian Wants the Bronx," presents dozens of characters with differing points of view. One German reacts to the news by shouting, "Heil, Hitler!" (He is promptly stomped to death by the crowd.) A rabbi declares, "We must reclaim this place for Jews." An Israeli predicts, "These Jews will be shot in the back." The situation reminds an elderly camp survivor of a joke that ends "Buchenwald -- those were the days!" +The first Jews to arrive are two gay Frenchmen, in matching blue berets, with a fondness for public kissing. They're quickly hidden away so the Linskys, a lovely, all-heterosexual family from Massachusetts, can be the official first arrivals and become the talk-show celebrities that the Chancellor's plan needs. +An unemployed dock worker in Bremerhaven is outraged that new jobs are going to newly arrived Jews ("Take care of Germans first"). His 15-year-old daughter falls in love with the Linsky son. Meanwhile, the elder Linsky decides "they owe us." +"Lebensraum," which takes its title from Hitler's promise of "living space" for Germans, is scattered at first, with a plethora of characters, events and shifting scenes to keep up with, but eventually the play becomes both powerful and touching. +All the parts are played by only three actors, who occasionally go into character by wearing masks or poking their heads and hands through portrait cutouts. Emme Shaw and Jeremy Silver's most affecting work is as the teen-age lovers. Scott Richards's finest moments are as an elderly man who finds a job in Germany caring for the woman who turned in his family to the police 60 years ago. She is now bedridden and unable to speak. Alone with her, he considers murder but finds a better, absolutely legal and particularly satisfying way to have his revenge. + +LEBENSRAUM + +By Israel Horovitz; directed by Richard McElvain; sets by Lisa Pegnato; lighting by Scott Poitras; costumes by Jane Alois Stein; production stage manager, Jeff Benish. Presented by the Miranda Theater Company, Valentina Fratti, artistic director. At 259 West 30th Street, Manhattan. + +WITH: Jeremy Silver (Actor 1), Scott Richards (Actor 2) and Emme Shaw (Actor 3). + +LOAD-DATE: October 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +519 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 16, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +In His Own Words + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 97 words + + +JAMES E. McGREEVEY +During a visit to Classic Residence by Hyatt, a luxury retirement apartment house in Teaneck, N.J., on the need to provide home health care insurance for the elderly. + "I want to encourage a wife to take care of her husband. I want to encourage a husband to take care of his wife. That's why I believe you need to have a differential rate schedule for home health care providers. It's been done in seven other states successfully, and it provides for home health care, which is not only less expensive to the state but it's where people want to be." + +LOAD-DATE: October 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Text + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +520 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 17, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Close-Knit and Proud, Quebec Town Mourns Crash Victims + +BYLINE: By The New York Times + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 504 words + +DATELINE: ST.-BERNARD-DE-BEAUCE, Quebec, Oct. 16 + +The choir that sang at the community memorial service came from a neighboring town. St.-Bernard's own choir, mourning members killed in the worst bus crash in Canada's history, was unable to perform at the ceremony today in the town's Roman Catholic church, Saint Bernard's. +Forty-three people were killed when the bus, chartered by the town's senior citizens club for a fall foliage tour in the Charlevoix region, smashed through a guardrail and plunged 60 feet into a ravine on Monday. + Today, they were remembered in a nationally televised funeral mass attended by Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Quebec's Premier, Lucien Bouchard. +As the names were slowly read, family members put roses in an urn and white candles were lighted for each victim. +"It will take years to get over this, and there will be some, I believe, that will never get over this," said Lise Berthiaune, 52, who lost three cousins in the accident. +St.-Bernard is a proud French Canadian town south of Quebec City. The majority of its inhabitants work farms that have been passed through generations. +"The people of St.-Bernard are strong," wrote the Mayor, Liboire Lefebvre in a book published for the town's 150th anniversary. "They don't do things halfway. They are proud to say that here it is special." +A page was designated for each family to write its history in the book, and most of them wrote in an unadorned French used by the local residents. Several of the writers died in the crash. In a town that occupies a mere 4 1/2 pages in the phone book, the bus crash meant a devastating loss. Nearly all of St.-Bernard's 2,100 citizens have lost a family member, relative or friend in the accident. There were only 20 different names shared among the 42 victims from the town. The driver, Andre Desruisseaux, 29, was also killed. Five people survived the crash and are hospitalized. +Dozens of graves will be dug in the small, freshly raked cemetery behind the church that parishioners have attended for more than a century. And 17 houses were left empty by the deaths. +St.-Bernard has no funeral home; nor does it have any establishment big enough for a group funeral service to be held for all the victims. For the ceremony today, the church, which holds 800 people, was full, as was the 500-seat community hall. +Individual funerals will be held over the weekend. +The area of the crash is well known for its stunning autumn colors, and it is also known for its steep roads, which have been the site of fatal bus crashes in the past. A tour bus crashed into the ravine in 1974, killing 13 elderly passengers and injuring 24. Twenty more people died in the same area in 1962. +"The Government doesn't act quickly enough," said Rachelle Gregoire, who lost two neighbors in the crash. "It always waits till something awful happens before acting." +Investigators are examining the condition of the bus to determine whether a mechanical failure led to the crash. +An autopsy is also being performed on the driver. + +LOAD-DATE: October 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +521 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 17, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Successful Births Reported With Frozen Human Eggs + +BYLINE: By GINA KOLATA + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1228 words + +In an advance that promises to make it vastly easier for older women to remain fertile, researchers at a private clinic in Atlanta said yesterday that they had frozen human eggs, thawed them, fertilized them and created a successful twin pregnancy. +The recent birth of twins in Georgia is the first successful pregnancy in this country using an egg that had been frozen, experts said. Fertility clinics have long been able to freeze sperm and embryos, but they had been stymied by their inability to freeze eggs. + One immediate consequence would be to allow women to freeze their eggs when they are young, for use later when they are older and their eggs are of poorer quality. This would make menopause obsolete, in effect, because women could have their own babies, with eggs they stored when they were younger, at any time in life. It would also enable women who are undergoing chemotherapy, which can damage the ovaries, to save their eggs for later use. +Researchers in Hong Kong and Australia reported successful pregnancies from frozen eggs about 10 years ago, but the work was not repeated. One advance that made the new work possible was the ability to fertilize an egg by injecting sperm directly into it. Ordinarily, sperm cannot penetrate an egg that has been frozen and thawed. +Dr. Michael Tucker, an embryologist at Reproductive Biology Associates in Atlanta who led the team that achieved the pregnancy, said that the frozen eggs were from a 29-year-old woman and that they had been frozen for 25 months before he thawed them and fertilized them. The recipient, a 39-year-old woman from Georgia who had undergone premature menopause and so had no eggs of her own, became pregnant and gave birth to healthy twin boys in August. +Dr. Tucker said he would describe the results this weekend at a meeting of the American Society for Assisted Reproduction in Cincinnati. He said in an interview that a second woman was 12 weeks pregnant with a fetus his group had created from a frozen egg. He also has nearly 100 other eggs frozen, awaiting recipients. +Infertility experts said they were greatly encouraged. +"This is very good work," said Dr. Jacques Cohen of St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J., who is also working on freezing eggs. +Dr. Alan DeCherney, an infertility expert at the University of California at Los Angeles and the editor of the journal Fertility and Sterility, said: "They're a credible group -- they definitely did it. If this can be repeated, it's a breakthrough." +Dr. DeCherney added that he would publish a paper describing the new results in a forthcoming issue of the journal. +This month, the journal carries a report by investigators in Bologna, Italy, of a baby girl born from an egg that had been frozen for four months and then fertilized. +Now that the egg-freezing barrier seems to be falling, infertility experts said, they will be able to take their art to a new plane, building banks of frozen eggs for infertile women or for those who want to store eggs when they are young for possible use later. +"We all know that the eggs of a woman who is 18 are a lot better than those of a woman who is 48," Dr. Cohen said. "If you can freeze eggs of young women, that's what you would want to do." +Dr. Mark Sauer, an infertility expert at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, said that many of his patients were women who had decided when they were in their late 30's or early 40's that they were ready to have children. The problem, they discover, is that they are now so old that their eggs are difficult to fertilize. +"If you told men going into their careers when they are in their 20's that by the time they are ready to have kids, their sperm might be no good, you know the men would be banking their sperm," Dr. Sauer said. So, he added, if egg freezing is successful, "maybe women should bank their eggs." +Donor eggs would also become much less expensive, Dr. Tucker said. It now costs about $8,000 for a donor egg, with the donor, matched with a single recipient, getting about $1,500 to $2,000. But donors, who take drugs to stimulate their ovaries, typically produce as many as 25 to 30 eggs, which could be frozen and used by several women. +The egg-freezing problem had bedeviled scientists for more than a decade. +Normally, when scientists freeze cells, they replace the water in them with chemicals that do not form crystals, putting the water back when the cells are thawed. That method allowed investigators to successfully freeze human embryos. But most cells, including embryos, have membranes that allow cryoprotectants, the protective chemicals, to enter and leave. The membranes of unfertilized eggs are nearly impermeable. +In addition, sperm no longer penetrate eggs that have been frozen and thawed. It was only with the recent development of a new method, called intracytoplasmic sperm injection, or I.C.S.I., in which doctors inject sperm directly into eggs, that this obstacle loomed less large, experts said. +A final problem is that an egg's chromosomes, containing the genes, are spread out and fragile, and are susceptible to shattering when an egg is frozen and thawed. Research with mice in the late 1980's indicated that freezing eggs could damage chromosomes, Dr. Tucker added. And so, "suddenly, everyone panicked and everyone just forgot egg freezing," he said. +Dr. Tucker said he did nothing special to succeed in egg freezing. He and his colleagues had been working on the method for four years but, he said, what was required was mostly perseverance, tinkering with each of the many steps of freezing until the method worked. +Then he had to find a woman who would agree to take a chance with an egg that had been frozen and thawed. +It took 25 months before he found the recipient, who insisted on anonymity to protect her children's privacy. +Because she had undergone premature menopause, she could not produce eggs of her own and initially tried to become pregnant using fresh eggs provided by donors. Soon, she ran out of money, because in vitro fertilization with a donor's eggs cost about $16,000, Dr. Tucker said. +"This was a couple who needed a break," Dr. Tucker said. His group offered free in vitro fertilization if they would accept frozen eggs. "In a sense, it seems like a monetary coercion," Dr. Tucker said. But, he said, the couple gave informed consent and the study had been approved by an outside ethics review panel. +The young donor had taken drugs to stimulate her ovaries and had produced 44 eggs in a single menstrual cycle. The investigators froze 31 of them, then thawed 23 when they found a recipient for them. Sixteen seemed healthy and so the doctors fertilized them with sperm from the recipient's husband, using I.C.S.I. Eleven of the 16 developed into embryos. The doctors implanted four of the embryos into the woman's uterus and froze the rest for future use. Two of those embryos survived and the woman had twin boys. +She said she wanted a large family and had had two girls but put off having more children while she went back to school and got a master's degree. In her late 30's, when she decided to try to become pregnant again, she discovered she was infertile. +She added that she was not nervous about using frozen eggs. +"All I wanted was to have a happy baby," she said. + + +LOAD-DATE: October 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +522 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 17, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +PRO BASKETBALL: Holding Class on the Court; +Larry Brown Takes On Task of Teaching the Young 76ers 'What the Game Is About' + +BYLINE: By MIKE WISE + +SECTION: Section C; Page 1; Column 2; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 1001 words + +DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 15 + +It is a special day in Larry Brown's class. Jimmy Jackson is celebrating a birthday. A humongous, two-layer frosted cake is wheeled onto the court after practice. Jackson's teammate, Jerry Stackhouse, plays maestro and everyone sings along. +There is no sign of a disgruntled power forward asking to be traded or a cocksure point guard who wants to go 1-on-28 against the National Basketball Association. Everyone is harmonizing on this Wednesday, even the new kid at school, the rookie Tim Thomas, who playfully puts a piece of cake (chocolate and vanilla with custard filling) in the face of the old man Jimmy. + Jackson is only 27, but that makes him an elder to 11 players on the training-camp roster of the Philadelphia 76ers. They are restless youngsters, but who better to guide them than the game's most nomadic coach? +"I think God sent me Larry Brown," said Allen Iverson, the dizzying second-year point guard whose game, like Brown's coaching career, has been all over the map. "People say Coach Brown is real hard on point guards, but he was a point guard himself and he knows a lot about the position." +Brown's chore is clear, really. He has to implore Iverson, a No. 1 overall draft pick, to pass the ball to Stackhouse, a No. 3 draft pick, and Jackson, a No. 4 pick, and have enough assists left over for Derrick Coleman, another No. 1 pick. +The ultimate goal is to stop a once-proud franchise from collecting any more top draft picks. +To that end, Brown brought in 37-year-old Terry Cummings, who will play both power forward and mentor. "I don't even think they know he scored more than 18,000 points in his career," Brown said of the 15-year veteran. "It's mind-boggling to me. I'm trying to remind them what the game is about." +It's easy to forget when you finish 22-60 and your soon-to-be-deposed head coach is egging on a point guard with a twitchy shooting hand. Even as Iverson piled up rookie of the year votes last season, his accomplishment was tainted by a three-game stretch in which Coach Johnny Davis told him to score and score some more, an enterprise that became more bacchanal than basketball. +Iverson averaged 40-plus points a game, but the 76ers were blown out in each of the three contests. +"We hadn't won any games," Iverson said. "It was time to do something. We're going into games nine deep. Guys were sitting out hurt. Guys didn't want to play. We were out there with two guys on 10-day contracts. I mean, my coach asked me to go out and score points. And that's what I went out there to do." +Brown wants and demands more. Figuring he made Reggie Miller and Ron Harper pass the basketball, he believes Iverson will fall in line, too. +"Allen is an unbelievable talent," he said. "Sometimes, he thinks he can beat five guys by himself. Until he realizes he can't, it's going to be a struggle. But he's trying to do what's right. That's the thing that makes me believe. Everyone is. +"These kids, they want to do it the right way. Now we've got to have a little success to show them." Because if they don't, Brown said, the habits about rewarding individuals will crop up again. +Brown's things-to-do list grows daily. He wishes Thomas would learn to practice through pain and Jackson would worry more about scoring than trying to be unselfish. He's also busy persuading Coleman and Clarence Weatherspoon to jettison their love handles, and he's helping Stackhouse through a serious case of contract envy. +Over the summer, some of Stackhouse's peers, like Bryant Reeves and his former college teammate, Rasheed Wallace, signed large contracts based on two years of mixed results. +"Can you blame this kid?" Brown said of Stackhouse. "I look at him, he's got to be thinking in his mind. It's not a selfish thing on his part. He's in the last year" of his contract. +Yet for Brown, who took the Indiana Pacers to within a game of the N.B.A. finals in 1995, there is no greater task than stabilizing Iverson. +Iverson, 22, pleaded no contest to a weapons charge over the summer; he was a passenger in a car going 90 miles an hour. It fostered his rotten-apple image and earned him a one-game suspension by Commissioner David Stern to open the season. The suspension is under appeal. +"He'll turn all this negative stuff around," Brown said. "There is no doubt in my mind." +Said Iverson: "I have a lot of learning to do, I know. But I think people are a lot tougher on me because of me being picked first. I don't know. People are not giving me a chance to learn the basketball game, the N.B.A. basketball game. +"It was my first year and I was criticized more than guys that have been in the league 10 years. So, I mean, it's rough. But that's life, man. Everything's not going to be peaches and cream." +Today, Iverson and his teammates had white-and-yellow frosting all over their faces. And so far through training camp the only person to go astray is the 20-year-old Slovenian guard Marko Milic. +Milic, who has spent less than a few months in America, knew his new city from two images: Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia" video and Sylvester Stallone running up a flight of museum steps in "Rocky." +Milic was visiting a mall in the city's west suburbs only a few minutes from his house, got lost and decided to drive toward the airport, miles out of the way, because he knew how to get home from there. +Cummings, whose career has run the gamut, is amused. +"Marko asked me one day, 'Did you have trouble when you were a rookie coming off the bench?' I said, 'Marko, my situation was different. I played a lot of minutes.' He said, 'Huh?' +"I said, 'I was rookie of the year my rookie year.' " +"You?!" Milic said, shocked. +Cummings, who averaged 23.7 points for the San Diego Clippers in his rookie season, 1982-83, laughed. +"Another history lesson," he said. The veteran power forward nodded approvingly and smiled, the way Brown does when he speaks of Iverson, the way elders do when they feel the kids are beginning to listen. + +NAME: Larry Brown + +LOAD-DATE: October 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Larry Brown has taken a hands-on approach to teaching Allen Iverson. (Associated Press)(pg. C1); Larry Brown instructing his 76ers, including Kebu Stewart (41), Eric Montross (00) and Brett Szabo (50). (Associated Press for The New York Times)(pg. C4) + +TYPE: Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +523 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 19, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +SPENDING IT; +How That Free Social Security Card Can Still Cost You $15 + +BYLINE: By RACHELLE GARBARINE + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 13; Column 1; Money and Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1281 words + +TWO weeks after the birth of her son, Connor, Irene M. O'Brien received a letter, amid mounds of advertisements for baby products, that angered her. +She had applied for a Social Security card for her son through the hospital. So she was startled to get the letter, which she said looked "official" but was actually from a private company offering to obtain a card for her newborn -- for $15. + "Someone knew I had a baby and found an easy way to try to make money," said Ms. O'Brien, 28, of River Edge, N.J. Annoyed, she tossed the letter in the trash. +Ms. O'Brien is one of many consumers -- from new parents and recently married and divorced couples to senior citizens -- who receive letters from companies that charge for services available free from Government agencies like the Social Security Administration. And while Ms. O'Brien did not pay, many other people do. +Such solicitations are so widespread that a bill has been introduced by Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, that would require companies to disclose that the services they offer can be obtained free from the Government. +It is not illegal for these companies, which have been around since the 1970's, to charge for such services. But under a 1988 amendment to the Social Security Act, it is illegal to solicit business by using words, materials, emblems or names that could lead consumers to think the company is affiliated with the Government. +Acccording to the Congressional Record, when Senator Harkin produced the bill in June, he wrote in the introduction that companies operating under "official sounding names, like Federal Document Services, Federal Record Service Corp., National Records Service and U.S. Document Services are scaring people into remitting a fee to receive basic Social Security benefits and eligibility information." +Such mailings say the firms will help obtain a Social Security card for a newborn or a change of name in the event of marriage or divorce. Some letters offer to help the elderly obtain entitlements like death benefits or information on retirement benefits, services that are also provided free by the Government. +Senator Harkin said the number of mailings had increased in the last few years amid talk of money problems at Social Security and Medicare. John B. Trollinger, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration in Baltimore, said the increase was also fueled by a new law requiring that any child, regardless of age, listed as a dependent on 1997 tax returns must have a Social Security number. +Because the companies' fees are not very high, and because consumers tend to feel embarrassed if they realize they have paid a few dollars for something that should have been free, some people may decide not to complain. Thus these companies are not the subject of intense inquiries and Capitol Hill hearings, which allows the practice to continue, Government officials said. Senator Harkin's office says the money paid to such companies for services offered free by the Government has added up to tens of millions of dollars over the last three or four years. +The services of some companies that help consumers navigate the Federal bureaucracy are not at issue. For instance, visa and courier companies typically provide expedited services for consumers seeking passports if the consumers do not need to apply in person, said Maria M. Rudensky, a State Department spokeswoman. +But of the companies that have drawn questions, Social Security mailers seem to be among the most widespread. One sent recently to a Manhattan woman after the birth of her daughter came from a firm that noted in small type that it was not part of the Government, but the letter and its business reply envelope looked and read like an official document. +Under the bold, black heading "Federal Record Service Corp," it starts: "Important notice: New Federal legislation requires that all dependents reaching one year of age by the end of the tax year must be listed by Social Security number on your income tax return." It then offers, for $15, to obtain and complete an application form for a Social Security card, which the applicant must then submit to the appropriate Social Security office; the process could delay rather than expedite the cards, Mr. Trollinger said. +In the last two years, 819 complaints have been filed against 178 entities that consumers think are using deceptive advertising in relation to Government services like issuing Social Security numbers, according to the Social Security Administration's Office of the Inspector General The 178 entities include companies and individuals, according to the office, which has been reviewing such complaints since it was established in 1995. +Karen M. Shaffer, assistant inspector general for operations, said the office first tries to work with companies to change questionable advertisements but can then fine those that continue to violate the act. The law was amended in 1995 to remove the $100,000 cap on such penalties. +Senator Harkin's office said that when these companies feel heat, they tend to close down and reopen under new names. Ms. Shaffer said the inspector general had not levied any fines in the two years the office has been responsible for enforcement. +The Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement arm of the Postal Service, can investigate firms suspected of mail fraud, and Senator Harkin's staff said the Postal Service was or would be reviewing the firms named in his statement. The Postal Service said it had received complaints about many firms. +Government officials said companies read newspaper announcements, buy mailing lists, or tap into public documents like birth records, for leads. +A few months before her wedding last year, Teresa Bernardi, 28, of New Rochelle, N.Y., paid $15 to Federal Record Service to help her get a new Social Security card. +"It was a crazy time for me," she said. "I was harried, so I thought I would just pay someone to take care of getting a new card." +She said that her heart sank when she learned Social Security offered the service free and that she now "is paranoid" that someone else could be using her Social Security number. +Ms. Bernardi filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau of New York City against the company, which lists addresses in Manhattan and Washington. The Better Business Bureaus in New York and Washington show that the company has "an unsatisfactory rating and has failed to eliminate the underlying source of customer complaints." +Edward J. Johnson, a spokesman for the Better Business Bureau in Washington, said Federal Record Service "represents one of the most active complaint-related activity companies in the history of the Better Business Bureau," which was founded in 1920. +Calls to the company's Manhattan office were often answered with a recorded message, but one time a woman answered and said only that she did not have time to talk. Another call was answered by a man who said he was a janitor; he declined to give a name, saying the company had a policy of making no comment. No phone number was listed for the company's Washington office. +In May 1996, the Massachusetts Attorney General sued Federal Record Service, contending that its mailings were deceptive and in violation of the state's Consumer Protection Act. According to the Attorney General's office, a settlement reached that summer requires the company to disclose that its services are available free from the Government. +Senator Harkin's bill would make such disclosure mandatory. "Our best defense is an informed consumer," he said. +Ms. Bernardi agrees. "It was a lesson learned," she said. + +LOAD-DATE: October 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Teresa Bernardi paid $15 to Federal Record Service for a new Social Security card when she got married. The company also sends out forms like the one above to new parents. (Jack Manning/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +524 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 19, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Elderly Wield Their Might in Florida; +In the Silver-Haired Legislature, Building a Political Powerhouse + +BYLINE: By MIREYA NAVARRO + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 16; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1013 words + +DATELINE: TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Oct. 16 + +For a week, the corridors of power in the State Capitol were devoid of campaign finance troubles, sex scandals or hovering lobbyists. Even more strikingly, agreement to pass or reject bills came swiftly as the Florida Silver-Haired Legislature, where the average age is 80, showed little patience for posturing, meandering speeches or tardiness. +"Do you know what's the most important thing for seniors? Food!" Senator Robert P. Franklin, 81, of Broward County, said as he looked at his watch. It was 11:35 A.M. and the Honorable Gerald Kogan, Chief Justice of Florida's Supreme Court, was more than a half-hour late to address the session. + "Come 12 o'clock, everybody is going to run out of here," Mr. Franklin said seconds before Justice Kogan rushed in. +For a week every year, the Silver-Haired Legislature, whose 300 members include former judges, teachers, doctors, business owners and even former legislators, takes over the Senate and House chambers here to consider dozens of issues of concern to the state's elderly. They pick five priorities and take those to churches, civic clubs, condominium boards and mobile home park associations to enlist support, and then go promote them among real lawmakers. +Now in its 20th year, the Silver-Haired Legislature is a working example of grass-roots politics and why older adults are a powerful lobby in Florida. During their annual session here this week, they were courted by the Democratic Governor, Lawton Chiles, at the executive mansion for two hours; by the Attorney General, Robert Butterworth, a Democrat and possible candidate for governor next year; by the Secretary of State, Sandra B. Mortham, a Republican and possible running mate in the governor's race; and by the all-in-one Treasurer, Insurance Commissioner and Fire Marshal, Bill Nelson. Mr. Nelson, a Democrat who is up for re-election next year, sent an aide on Wednesday to ask to be squeezed into the group's program. +About half of the states now have similar bodies, but Florida, a state where 3.5 million of 14 million residents are 60 or older, has among the most active and politically influential senior legislatures. Its members estimate that more than 100 of the issues they debated have gone on to become state law. Their greatest achievement: the creation in 1988 of a State Department of Elder Affairs. +The Silver-Haired Legislature, whose members must be at least 55, has also pushed for bills to eliminate waste, fight consumer fraud, and press for adequate health care. It has also taken stands when other organizations for older people have balked. This year, for example, the senior legislators were alone in filing a friend-of-the-court brief with the State Supreme Court as it considered a ban on physician-assisted suicide. +The senior legislature sided with repealing the law, one of their priorities last year, saying that to deny such relief thwarts the rights of many older people. The court let the law stand, so this year the members of the Silver-Haired Legislature plan to take the fight to the full Florida Legislature. +"We come up with ideas on the cutting edge," said Monroe Treiman, 77, a former judge from Hernando County in central Florida, who serves as House Speaker. "We don't expect the priorities to be adopted right off the bat. We figure it's going to take some educating of the legislators" -- the real ones. +On Tuesday, for instance, the senior legislature's joint Commerce and Consumer Affairs Committee debated a bill urging the state to approve the use of radiation to protect food from bacteria. Senator Bobbe Taffel, 70, from Palm Beach County, persuaded the panel to vote it down with an argument that questioned the safety of irradiation. +"More than 30 years later, we found out X-rays lead to muscle damage," she said. "If any of you want to know what a destroyed muscle looks like, see me later." +Up next was a bill requiring all residents over 75 to be tested for "reflexes, sight and coordination" in order to renew a driver's license. Representative Lemoria Lester, 69, a Baptist church deacon from Palm Beach County, spoke for the bill, saying that "it should be more important to give up driving than to cause a death." But opposition was overwhelming. +"I'm 80 and I drive very well indeed," said Representative Evelyn Winchester, from Largo on the Gulf coast. "I'm very alert. I've seen people in their 50's and 60's who are awful." +Although many are active in party politics as individuals, members of the Silver-Haired Legislature strive to appear nonpartisan. Language, nonetheless, can get blunt. +"People are stupid to do it," Representative Jeanette Slavin, from Delray Beach, said in arguing for a bill to protect consumers who pre-pay their funeral expenses if the funeral home goes out of business. +Representative Evelyn Fisher, 77, from Largo, one of three committee members who sheepishly admitted to pre-paying, responded that she had done it "because prices go up." The bill passed with a requirement that the customers' money be placed in a surety bond. +Members of the senior legislature get no government money, paying their own way to the state capital and usually seeking sponsors for some expenses, like meals. Costs and illnesses have kept the body from filling all 120 seats in the House and 40 in the Senate. This year, 97 delegates from the state's 11 regions showed up. +For Halley B. Lewis, 87, a Democrat who served two terms in the Florida Legislature in the late 1930's, the senior legislature is a matter of habit. "They speed it up," he said of the senior body, compared to the real one. "Otherwise, it's the same." +And while some of the elder senators and representatives may argue a little louder and may be more forgetful than their junior counterparts, many look decades younger than their age. They attribute it to remaining active in civic life. +"When I come here, I feel like a big shot," said Senator Taffel, a retired school librarian, mother of two and grandmother of six. "Then I go home and the kids go, 'What do you do there?' " + +LOAD-DATE: October 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Although she needs a walker to help her go about her business in the State Capitol now, Ruth Hodges, left, remains a member of Florida's Silver-Haired Legislature, as does Helen Elleck, 91, the oldest person there. (Manuel M. Chavez for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +525 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 19, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ANALYSTS EXPECT HEALTH PREMIUMS TO RISE SHARPLY + +BYLINE: By PETER T. KILBORN + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 6; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1175 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 + +After four years of near stability brought about by the spread of managed care, the premiums that most Americans pay for their health insurance are poised to rise significantly next year, industry groups and health care consultants report. +Many say the average charge for health benefits, deducted from paychecks, will go up at least 5 percent, or more than twice as much as wages and inflation have been rising. For very large employers with great negotiating clout, the increases could be smaller, they say. Such companies in California, for example, appear to be holding the line at 1 percent. But across the nation, at some small companies with older and illness-prone employees, analysts say, the premiums might rise as much as 30 percent. + "We're finding about a 5 to 10 percent increase across the board with our renewal rates" for managed care plans, said Mark Psleger, director of marketing for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association in Chicago, which represents the nation's Blue Cross companies. +"I'm sorry; it's going to happen," said John C. Erb, a principal of the William M. Mercer benefits consulting firm who surveys employers on health care trends. Mr. Erb, who is based in Miami, said he had three large clients in the area. One negotiated a health benefit increase from its insurance company of 3.5 percent. "But one had 12 percent," he said, "and the other had about 6." +Chris Jennings, President Clinton's chief White House health care adviser, said: "Do I expect premiums to go up at a higher rate than in the last few years? The answer is probably yes." +But with most private industry contracts still being negotiated, with the economic impact hard to discern as yet and with costs stable in two big Government health insurance programs -- Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor -- Mr. Jennings said he did not yet see grounds for Government complaint or intervention. +Most experts doubt that the 1998 increases portend an explosion in premiums like that of the 1980's and early 1990's, which was driven by surging hospital and doctor fees. That led to Mr. Clinton's failed effort to overhaul the health care system, and to the proliferation of managed care plans that have achieved most of the cost savings that were one of the President's goals. +Many health industry analysts expected significant increases this year, too, as insurance companies and managed care organizations began trying to raise premiums to recapture profits that they were losing after they froze or cut premiums in the intensely competitive market for patients and their employers. And they had predicted that medical costs would increase by 5 to 10 percent in 1998, increasing the pressure to raise premiums. +But in contract negotiations this year, employers resisted the pressure. Thus, the average premium has risen just 2.1 percent this year, said Jon Gabel, director of the Center for Survey Research at KPMG Peat Marwick, a large accounting and consulting firm. +"But they underpriced their products," Mr. Gabel said. "They ran out of profits. And now they're trying to catch up." +This fall, one giant, often trend-setting employer, the Federal Government, agreed to substantial increases for the first time in five years. Nine million Federal employees, retirees and family members, from members of Congress to park rangers, are covered by contracts negotiated by the Office of Personnel Management. Under the 1998 contracts that the office signed last month, Federal employees face an average 8.5 percent increase under the 350 health plans covering them. +Because of the formula used to allocate payment of the premium, many employees will actually pay about 15 percent more each month, though still somewhat less than most private industry workers with equivalent coverage. The Government, which, like most employers, shares the cost of health insurance with its workers, will pay 6 percent more. +As a result, Federal workers who insure only themselves will see an average charge of $27.74, up from $24.42, for health care in their twice-monthly paychecks next year, an increase of 14 percent. The average charge for family coverage will rise 16 percent, from $54.15 to $62.79. +What is also driving the increase is an underlying 6 or 7 percent annual rise in medical cost inflation, a result of new technology and an aging population, said Edward Flynn, the personnel office's associate director for retirement and insurance. +Managed care programs helped purge the health care system of cost increases exceeding medical inflation, he said. "But there's a point at which the big gains from managed care begin to diminish," he said, and future gains will be much smaller. "All employers are going to face the same things we have this year," he said, "and I don't think they will be as successful as we have been." +Indeed, managed care groups can be expected to invoke the contracts they worked out for Federal employees in negotiations with private industry. "That program's a bellwether of what we'll see in rates," said Kate Paul, president of the Rocky Mountain division of Kaiser Permanente, a part of the nation's largest health maintenance organization. +The parent Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals has said it will lose money this year for the first time in its 50 years in business. Many other health care organizations and major insurance companies like Aetna, the Cigna Corporation and the Prudential Insurance Company of America are suffering losses this year or acute erosion of their profits. +The dynamics of the marketplace have shifted in other ways. In many communities, the fierce competition for customers has driven out some contenders, leaving those remaining freer to seek higher rates. +Meanwhile, doctors and hospitals, once pressed by insurers and health maintenance organizations to cut charges and fees if they wanted to participate in the organizations' programs and keep their patients, are now uniting into stronger bargaining groups. "They're not stupid," Mr. Erb of the Mercer firm said. +In addition, employees are demanding more choice in their health plans. In a reaction against the closed system of a health maintenance organization, in which patients make appointments with a "gatekeeper" doctor who can refer them only to specialists within the network, employees are choosing more open preferred-provider organizations and point-of-service plans that let them bypass gatekeepers and seek out specialists anywhere. +Greater choice also involves higher costs. Tom Bowser, executive vice president of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City, predicts increases of 5 to 8 percent for H.M.O. members, but 9 to 12 percent for preferred provider organizations. For very small programs with disproportionately high numbers of chronically sick members, he predicts increases exceeding 30 percent. +Only the largest employers, and those in cities where competition for customers remains fierce, are expecting lower increases than the 5 percent or more that most face. + +LOAD-DATE: October 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +526 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 20, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Immigration Law's Fine Print Emerges, Setting Off a Debate About Welfare Provisions + +BYLINE: By CELIA W. DUGGER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1305 words + +On Dec. 19, the Government will begin enforcing a new law that will make it more difficult for poor and working-class immigrants living legally in the United States to have members of their families immigrate to join them. +The law will require an income test for the half a million legal immigrants and citizens who annually seek to bring relatives to the United States. Research sponsored by the Government found that 30 percent of the sponsors of immigrants would not have passed the new income test. + Under the new law, the sponsoring relatives will generally be required to prove that they earn 125 percent of the poverty level, or $20,062 this year for a family of four. +Forty pages of rules spelling out how the law will be applied and when it takes effect will be published today in The Federal Register. +The new law also requires the sponsoring families to sign contracts to support the newcomers and to reimburse the Government if their relatives receive welfare benefits. +But the new rules limit the definition of such public aid to the major anti-poverty programs -- food stamps, Medicaid and income supports for low-income families and for poor people who are elderly or disabled. +The new reimbursement requirement will have little impact for at least a few years because the welfare law adopted last year made most legal immigrants who enter the country after August 1996 ineligible for the major Federal anti-poverty programs for at least five years. +The rules exempt the sponsoring families from reimbursing the Government if their relatives use a range of smaller programs, including school lunches, Head Start, foster care, student loans and emergency medical care. +Before the new law was passed, there was no income requirement for families sponsoring their relatives, nor had the courts found sponsors' general promises to support relatives to be legally enforceable. +Typically, able-bodied immigrants who showed proof that they had a job waiting for them in the United States were not required to have sponsors who promised to support them indefinitely. +The new rules drew sharp criticism on Friday from an author of the law, Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas and chairman of the House immigration subcommittee, who said the Clinton Administration had defined the liability of sponsoring families too narrowly and should have defined welfare benefits more broadly. +"The effect of the Administration's groundless interpretation will be to relieve immigrants' sponsors of all responsibility to repay the taxpayers for a vast set of welfare benefits," Mr. Smith said. +But Federal officials said their interpretation of which welfare benefits were covered was consistent with both the law and Congressional intent. They included programs in which benefits are based on recipients' incomes and spending is mandated by Congress. Programs like Head Start, whose financing is discretionary, were not included. +The Clinton Administration opposed the new income test for sponsors, but it supported the requirement that sponsors sign contracts to support their relatives. +Despite their disagreement over the definition of welfare benefits, both the Congressional authors of the provision and Clinton Administration officials say the law, part of the immigration bill adopted in September 1996, sends an important signal to immigrants that their sponsoring families are responsible for supporting them. +Under the guidelines, sponsors will have to commit to supporting immigrant relatives until the new arrivals have become citizens, worked for 10 years in this country, left the United States permanently or died. If the immigrants receive welfare benefits, state and local government agencies will be able to sue their sponsors for reimbursement. +Advocates for immigrants and some scholars say the income test will have unnecessarily harsh consequences and is likely to backfire. It will prevent many poor and working-class immigrants and citizens who do not meet the new test from legally bringing in relatives even though those relatives would be unlikely to wind up on welfare under the new welfare law, they said. And it will encourage wives, children and others who want to be reunited with their families in this country to come illegally, the critics of the income test say. +"It's another example of the law of unintended consequences," said Thomas Espenshade, a sociology professor at Princeton University. "It's particularly perverse because Congress has long set as its objective to preserve legal immigration and reduce the number of immigrants coming illegally." +The new income test will make it extremely difficult for immigrants who work in the underground economy and do not pay taxes to bring in relatives, even if the relative has a job offer here. +For example, some farm workers, day laborers and sweatshop workers may have trouble qualifying as sponsors. The new guidelines state that sponsors must provide income tax returns for the past three years to establish their income. +The new law is also likely to hit Mexicans and Salvadorans hard because their incomes are generally lower than those of other groups, according to research sponsored by the Immigration and Naturalization Service that has not yet been released. The analysis of a random survey of 2,160 statements signed by sponsors of family immigrants in 1994 found that roughly half of Mexicans and Salvadorans would not have met the new requirement. +A third of Dominicans and Koreans, a fourth of Chinese and Jamaicans and a fifth of Filipinos, Indians and Vietnamese would not have met the requirement, say several people familiar with the survey, including both critics and supporters of the new law. Over all, the survey found that 3 immigrants in 10 had incomes below the new standard. +Similarly, a study of 1993 Census Bureau data by the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research group in Washington, found that 40 percent of immigrant families and a quarter of Americans born in the United States would not make enough to sponsor an immigrant. +But it is impossible to predict how many prospective immigrants will be excluded because the guidelines provide two ways that poor families can bring in their relatives, even if the head of household alone does not earn enough to qualify. +Family members who have lived in the sponsoring household for at least six months can pool their earnings to reach the income standard, though each person must then sign a contract promising to help support the newcomer. +The family is also allowed to find an employer, friend or relative who is not part of the household to co-sponsor the immigrant. Again, the co-sponsor has to sign a contract to support the immigrant in hard times. +Advocates for immigrants say that families who are considering sponsoring relatives fear that the new rules can spell financial ruin in extreme circumstances and play havoc with relations within families. +What if a relative develops a catastrophically expensive illness after arriving? What if a husband brings in his wife, and she leaves him for another man? Under the guidelines, divorce does not release a sponsor from the responsibility to support a former spouse. In fact, immigrants can sue their sponsors for financial support under the new rules. +The immigration service says it will keep computer records on the estimated 565,000 immigrants who will be sponsored annually by family members and will make this information available to state and Federal agencies that provide welfare benefits. +Sponsoring relatives will be required to notify the immigration service if they move. Sponsors who fail to send in a change of address form can be fined $250 to $2,000, or up to $5,000 if they know that a relative they sponsored has received welfare benefits. + +LOAD-DATE: October 20, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +527 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 20, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final +(New Jersey) + +NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFING; +Program to Protect the Elderly + +BYLINE: By JESSE McKINLEY + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 76 words + +DATELINE: WESTAMPTON TOWNSHIP + +Hoping to discourage crimes against the elderly, police officials in Westampton Township are to announce a special program today to prevent crimes often committed against the elderly, a sheriff's official said. + The program, paid for in part by a $52,000 grant for Burlington County Office of Aging, will include teaching older residents about confidence schemes and home security, said Jean Stanfield, the undersheriff of Burlington County. + +LOAD-DATE: October 20, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +528 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 23, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +In America; +A Revolution Subsides + +BYLINE: By BOB HERBERT + +SECTION: Section A; Page 27; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 705 words + +It's not more than a stirring at the moment, like a soft breeze that heralds a change of seasons. But it's there. It's happening. +The conservative hold on the national electorate is loosening. + The so-called conservative revolution has more or less exhausted itself. It has left its mark, but it has also left a majority of Americans to face the 21st century with the unsettling sense that they are on their own when it comes to such potentially overwhelming matters as earning a living, raising a family, sending their children through college, caring for aging parents, securing adequate health care and providing for their own retirement in an increasingly insensitive and unforgiving global economy. +The conservative philosophy tells these working Americans to forget about turning to their government for help. There is nothing to be done. We are in a new era in which giant corporations rule the economic world according to the merciless dictates of a free market. The best the government can do is get out of the way. +Not surprisingly, this cynical, self-serving and ultimately inhumane approach is increasingly being seen as unsatisfactory. The conservative revolution has not raised the standard of living of most Americans, has threatened such cherished and hard-won supports as Social Security and Medicare, and has not come up with a game plan for addressing the economic and cultural challenges ahead. +Ever so subtly, ever so warily, the American gaze is drifting to the left. Let's not get crazy. We're not talking about a paradigm shift. And God forbid we should use the term liberal. That's out. But "progressive" is O.K. +Whatever the terminology, the evidence seems to be there. We found that there was a great deal of sympathy for the workers striking against United Parcel Service, and overwhelming public support for an increase in the minimum wage. Last fall we saw Republican Congressional candidates sprinting away from Newt Gingrich and the harshest elements of the conservative ideology. And in the past two Presidential elections we have seen the so-called Reagan Democrats, as worried as anyone about the economic uncertainties, returning to the fold to vote for Bill Clinton. +A recently published book, "The New Majority: Toward a Popular Progressive Politics," argues that an opportunity exists for the Democratic Party to regain the support of a solid majority of the electorate by re-establishing its traditional identification with the struggles and aspirations of working Americans -- the middle class, the working class and the working poor. +The book was edited by Stanley B. Greenberg, a pollster and former adviser to President Clinton, and Theda Skocpol, a professor of government at Harvard. It's a compilation of essays by progressive (get used to that word) thinkers, including the historian Alan Brinkley; the president of the Economic Policy Institute, Jeff Faux, and the sociologist William Julius Wilson. +The book points out that while we have been in an economic recovery for several years now, the gains are not being properly shared. Most working Americans -- despite a booming economy and a recent modest uptick in wages -- are either treading water economically or slowly sinking. +A poll taken not too long ago showed that 60 percent of whites, 58 percent of blacks and 55 percent of Latinos say that, "compared to 10 years ago, they are now farther away from attaining the American dream." +Very few of those respondents see their interests being well served by the Republican Party, the conservative ideology or the corporate juggernaut. The question is whether the Democratic Party can get its act together and seize the opportunity to fashion this new majority. It can do so only by addressing in a compelling way the real-world concerns of working families. +Right now both parties are stumbling around Washington in a dance of mutual incoherence. The Republican leadership is feuding and the top Democrats are ducking subpoenas and hiding from special prosecutors. If there are any good ideas around, they are being carefully concealed. +Which is a shame. Because there is a new majority that is just waiting for responsible, progressive leadership. + +LOAD-DATE: October 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Op-Ed + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +529 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 23, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Walter W. Curtis, 84, Bishop Of Bridgeport for 27 Years + +BYLINE: By JAMES BARRON + +SECTION: Section D; Page 27; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 401 words + +Bishop Walter W. Curtis, the former head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport, died on Saturday at St. Joseph Manor, a nursing home in Trumbull, Conn. He was 84. +The cause was pneumonia, said the Rev. Michael K. Jones, the vice chancellor of the diocese and the secretary to Bishop Curtis's successor, Bishop Edward M. Egan. + Bishop Curtis was the second bishop of the diocese, which covers Fairfield County and had 286,000 Roman Catholics when he was installed in 1961. In his 27-year tenure, the diocese grew to include more than 300,000 Catholics, and he started a high school building program and established a string of homes for the elderly. +He also decided to keep St. Augustine Cathedral in downtown Bridgeport in the 1970's, when church officials considered moving the spiritual and administrative center of the diocese to a less urban site. Instead, he oversaw the renovation of the cathedral and, in 1979, its rededication. +Born on May 3, 1913, in Jersey City, Bishop Curtis graduated from Seton Hall University in 1934. He was trained at Immaculate Conception Seminary in Darlington, N.J., and the North American College in Rome, and was ordained there and assigned to the Archdiocese of Newark in 1938. He did graduate work at Gregorian University in Rome before being appointed a professor of moral theology at Immaculate Conception. He was awarded a doctorate from Catholic University in Washington in 1978. +In 1951, he was named to the editorial board of the archdiocesan newspaper, The Advocate. Bishop Curtis was named auxiliary bishop to Archbishop Thomas A. Boland of Newark in June 1957. In 1958, he was named pastor of Sacred Heart parish in Bloomfield, N.J. +Pope John XXIII appointed him to the post in Bridgeport Sept. 23, 1961. He was installed in November of that year. +In the 1960's, he founded Sacred Heart University as a commuter college. It is now the third largest Catholic university in New England. He also started two nursing homes, the Pope John Paul II Health Care Center in Danbury and the St. Camillus Health Care Center in Stamford. +In addition, he founded the Fairfield Foundation, a nondenominational group that helps people in need in Fairfield County. +Bishop Curtis stepped down in 1988, when he reached the mandatory retirement age of 75. +He is survived by a sister, Edna Feehan of Bridgewater, N.J., and by six nieces and nephews. + +NAME: Walter W. Curtis + +LOAD-DATE: October 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Bishop Walter Curtis in St. Augustine Cathedral in Bridgeport. (The New York Times, 1971) + + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +530 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 24, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Residential Real Estate; +Luxury Assisted Living On the Upper West Side + +BYLINE: By RACHELLE GARBARINE + +SECTION: Section B; Page 8; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 796 words + +Hoping to capture a segment of Manhattan's growing elderly population, developers are converting an apartment hotel on the Upper West Side into luxury rental housing that will provide tenants with services and help with daily chores. +At present, 120 of the 217 units in the prewar building at 333 West 86th Street, between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, are vacant and are being turned into assisted-living units. The studio to two-bedroom apartments, renting for $4,000 to $7,500 a month with hotel-like living arrangements, will offer residents meals, recreation and housekeeping services as well as assistance with dressing and the monitoring of medication. The remaining 97 occupied units are rent-stabilized. + The $63 million project is being developed by the Kapson Senior Quarters Corporation of Woodbury, N.Y., and the Philips International Holding Company of Manhattan. They are leasing the 22-story structure, which will be renamed Senior Quarters at West 86th Street, for 45 years from the owner, a group of limited investors. The building is now known as the Cambridge House. +The former lessee, Cambridge House Hotel Inc., ran the building as a residential hotel since the early 1980's. Under the conversion, which began last month and is to be completed next September, improvements like new mechanical systems and elevators and refurbished hallways are also planned. So is the renovation of 21,000 square feet of space on the lobby and lower levels into common areas for the assisted-living residences, like a dining room, beauty salon, convenience shop and activity-exercise room. The top floor will become a library. +"Given the city's demographics, there is a need for such housing, and the building's location in a residential neighborhood close to shopping and transportation supports it," said Evan A. Kaplan, Kapson's president. Despite the complexities of developing a partly occupied building, he said, "With over 100 vacant units, we can make the economics work." +Kapson owns and operates 20 similar projects in the metropolitan area and has 22 more under development, including 4 in New York City. Two of those are a 143-unit building in Kew Gardens and a 206-unit structure in Riverdale. They are being done in partnership with J. E. Levine Builders of Douglaston, Queens, which is the general contractor at the Manhattan project. +Assisted-living residences are among the newer alternatives to nursing homes for older people who need some help, but do not need constant medical care. They have been slow to come to New York City in general and Manhattan in particular because of high development costs and tight regulations. +By separating the housing operations from the health care services, companies like Kapson have found an entry. They avoid the need for state licenses or special permits to develop such projects. +The 86th Street conversion will be among the first upscale projects in Manhattan to offer such housing, though more are planned. They include projects at Battery Park City, at the former Towers Nursing Home site on Central Park West, and on Fifth Avenue between 109th and 110th Streets. One of four redevelopment plans for the old armory, set on one block from 14th to 15th Streets between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas, also includes assisted-living units. +The 1990 Census found 953,317 people 65 or older in the city, of whom 102,554 were 85 or older, including 23,315l in Manhattan. That segment of the population, the fastest growing, is expected to rise to 212,000 by 2010, indicating a need for specialized housing with some health service, industry experts said. +"We welcome such housing," said Herbert W. Stupp, the commissioner of New York City's Department for the Aging, "because it provides more options for and another way to keep seniors of all income brackets in the city." +Existing tenants at the 86th Street building, while wary, are taking a wait-and-see attitude about their building's future, said Charles A. Carner, a member of the Cambridge House Tenants Association and a 23-year resident. "There's a sense of cautious optimism," Mr. Carner said. "Any physical improvements made to the building will be a benefit." He said he also hopes the new population will bring stability. +The assisted-living units at the building will range in size from 294 to 1,251 square feet. There is a charge of $1,000 a month for an additional person. Personal care assistance can be provided at extra cost by a Kapson affiliate and will be available to existing tenants. +Mr. Kaplan said he expected most of the renters at the building to be in their 80's and have annual incomes of at least $65,000. He said leasing is expected to begin by December, with occupancy next September. + +LOAD-DATE: October 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The apartment hotel on West 86th Street in Manhattan that developers are converting into luxury rental housing, with services provided. (Nancy Siesel/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +531 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 24, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +INSIDE METRO + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 4; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 171 words + + +ELECTRIC CAR'S JOURNEY -- For two decades, electric cars have been seen as a "someday" kind of technology. But yesterday, a pioneer of electric car design drove a consumer-ready model from Boston to Manhattan. B3. + +PARKING DISPUTE -- A dispute between a Bronx parking lot owner and transportation officials, which began three weeks ago, has grown nastier. B3. + +BRAWLEY CASE IN SPOTLIGHT -- Nine years later, the Tawana Brawley case creeps back to the public consciousness in a slander suit. B4. + +TRIPLE SLAYING -- A wholesale diamond dealer and two other men were killed in the merchant's modest home on a quiet street in Bogota, N.J. B4. + +ON CAMPAIGN TRAIL -- Mayor Giuliani touted his record against organized crime. But his Democratic opponent, Ruth W. Messinger, tried to shift the spotlight to his fund-raising. B7. + +LUXURY-ASSISTED LIVING -- Hoping to attract a segment of the elderly population, developers are converting an apartment hotel in Manhattan into luxury rental housing. B8. + +LOAD-DATE: October 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo (Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times) + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +532 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 25, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Health Care's Weird Geography + +SECTION: Section A; Page 10; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 509 words + +In medicine, as in real estate, location turns out to be everything. That disturbing message emerges from an extensive survey by Dr. John Wennberg and colleagues at the Dartmouth Medical School, which shows that hospitalization rates, surgical choices and other medical practices vary across regions for reasons that appear unrelated to patient desires or medical needs. +The Dartmouth study shows that Medicare enrollees in Miami receive about twice as many surgical procedures and tests as enrollees in Minneapolis, even after adjusting for differences in the incidence of illness between the two cities. People are five times more likely to use hospital intensive care during the last few months of life in some regions than in others. + There are more than 330 physicians per 100,000 residents in White Plains, N.Y., but fewer than 90 in McAllen, Tex. Surgeons in some regions perform three times as many coronary bypass grafts or non-emergency prostate operations as their colleagues in other regions. +The shocking fact is that Dr. Wennberg finds no medical necessity for these disparities. The elderly who live in Minneapolis, where Medicare costs are low, live as long and as well as the elderly in Miami and other regions where surgery and end-of-life intensive care are more prevalent. Hospitalization for illnesses like asthma is three times more frequent in Boston than New Haven, with no evidence that Bostonians are healthier. +One implication of such "idiosyncratic" care is that the nation could, by using less costly but equally effective treatment, cut specific types of surgery by perhaps 40 percent. The more profound implication is that millions of patients across the country are routinely subjected to risky surgery and invasive procedures without medical justification. Indeed, the study shows that "medically necessary" -- the standard that health plans use to define coverage -- is largely meaningless. What is deemed necessary in Miami is deemed unnecessary in Minneapolis, and no one seems to suffer. +Dr. Wennberg's favorite process for finding the best medical decisions is to give patients more say in making them. In a Colorado study, patients informed of the benefits and risks were less keen on surgery to eliminate mildly uncomfortable prostate symptoms than were surgeons. More medical research and dissemination of the results would help patients make sensible decisions. +Managed care was supposed to be, and may yet prove to be, another solution, provided consumer complaints about ease of access and choice of physicians in managed-care plans can be satisfied. Under fee-for-service coverage, doctors are largely unsupervised and tend to hold onto bad habits. Managed care was supposed to study medical outcomes from different treatment practices and replicate the best practices for all patients. That happens at some managed-care plans. But judging from the Dartmouth study, there is little evidence that managed care has yet turned idiosyncratic medical practices into a more reliable science. + +LOAD-DATE: October 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +533 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 25, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +THE 1997 ELECTIONS: CAMPAIGN JOURNAL -- THE MAYOR; +While Not a Natural, Giuliani Has Learned to Work a Crowd + +BYLINE: By R. W. APPLE Jr. + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1248 words + +Nobody would call Rudolph W. Giuliani a natural. +In his first campaign for mayor, eight years ago, and to a degree in his second, four years ago, he was awkward, wooden, ill at ease. His gestures were metronomic, his smiles forced. The suits fit badly, the hair was hopeless. Like Richard M. Nixon, he seemed exceptionally ill-suited to the stump. + But Mr. Giuliani learned, and these days, he works the crowds as if he loves it. The crowds reciprocate. His oratorical style will not make people forget Mario M. Cuomo's any day soon, but people laugh at his jokes and joke back. +Nothing is too corny. Forget the lesson of frozen-faced Calvin Coolidge and the Indian war bonnet that he was once photographed in; the Mayor poses in funny hats, too. Crossing from Manhattan to Staten Island this week, he donned a ferry captain's cap and mugged for the cameras. +Staten Island is the most Republican of the boroughs, and polls show Mr. Giuliani with a bigger lead there over his Democratic rival, Ruth W. Messinger, than anywhere else. So the Mayor could expect to be well received. What was surprising was how enthusiastically a man known better for his fierceness than his charm threw himself into the hokum of New York-style campaigning. +At a daily news conference, the Mayor took a few pokes at Ms. Messinger, linking her to what he called huge job losses during the administration of former Mayor David W. Dinkins. Without naming her or them, he described her supporters as "the doomsday people, the naysayers, the can't-be-done crowd." He fended off charges that his administration had been sloppy about social services. +But most of the time, he sounded like a candidate cruising worry free. "We have had some successes," he said rather loftily, "and my opponent has not made a case for a change in the direction of city government." +At City Hall, he may be aggressive and even abrasive. But not on the campaign trail, at least not lately, at least not since the snide comment about his opponent's nonattendance at Mass. Graciousness comes more easily to Mr. Giuliani -- as it does to any candidate -- while sitting atop a big lead. +In Staten Island, he posed with anyone who asked -- from three young girls to a dozen women, some of them blue haired, at the Mount Loretto Senior Center in Tottenville. He signed autographs on newspapers, paper napkins and campaign fliers. He hugged a few of the elderly, kissed a few and danced with one, while Guy V. Molinari, the Staten Island Borough President, crooned, "When the moon hits your eye, like a big pizza pie . . . " He told them about his 88-year-old mother, told a Jackie Mason story, told them they had built New York. +In the ferry terminal, Mr. Giuliani's aides herded the commuters toward him as they left the boat -- the John F. Kennedy, named in a day when the Democrats still owned City Hall. One woman complained about cuts in financing for after-school activities, and another shouted, "Not everyone likes you, Rudy! Boo! Boo!" But hundreds of others -- white, black, Hispanic, Chinese-American, Indian-American, leather-jacketed, stockbroker-suited, jog-togged -- happily shook his hand, and many said things like, "Doing a great job, Mayor." +Clearly, the Mayor connects with his demanding, fickle, wildly heterogeneous electorate. Maybe not so fully as Edward I. Koch or John V. Lindsay at the peaks of their careers, not with the magnetism that made people yell, "Hiya, Rocky!" when Nelson A. Rockefeller hit the streets and certainly not with the charisma that set crowds to tousling Robert F. Kennedy's hair and stealing his cuff links. But he connects. +And he knows now how to shake hands: "You shake their hands, you don't let them shake yours." He learned, he said, after he shook hands with 4,000 firemen at the St. Patrick's Day parade one year -- "you've never seen hands as big as New York firefighters" -- and had to ice his right hand for days. +"Most politicians end up pretty much the way they start out," said Mr. Molinari, not always a Giuliani ally. "Not him. The old, stiff Rudy is gone. There's been a transformation, no question; he's learned how to meet and greet." +Even in a city of 7.3 million, Mr. Giuliani practices retail politics whenever he gets the chance, and he gets the chance a lot. New Yorkers approach him with the kinds of questions that ward heelers deal with in most big cities. +Thekla Hansen-Young, 15, who moved here from Hawaii with her mother six weeks ago, approached the Mayor about an intern's job. He invited her to walk around with him so he could evaluate her meet-and-greet technique. Stephanie Nesbitt, who asked for help in finding a clerical position, got a promise that "we'll call you -- someone from my office will call you tomorrow." +When one of the heavy motorized metal doors started closing while he talked to another commuter, threatening to make her miss her (city-owned) boat, he pulled rank, telling the doorman to wait a second so she could finish her spiel and still get on board. +"Service politics," he said, with half a wink. +Like any successful pol, Mr. Giuliani knows the uses of incumbency. Standing in front of Borough Hall in St. George Terminal, he used a chart listing crime statistics for the last four years: homicide down 40 percent, burglary 46.7 percent, auto theft 47.75 percent, overall crime 35.81 percent. +He took credit for it, of course, and for the city's prosperity, and for other good things that have happened on his watch (though to be fair, he did not claim responsibility for the cerulean blue sky or the Statue of Liberty or the beauty of the sharply etched Manhattan and Brooklyn skylines). +Before opening the senior center, he mentioned that it was he and Mr. Molinari, a fellow Republican, who had found the money to build it. And he pointedly reminded Staten Islanders that he had abolished fares on their ferry. +Compared with politicians who strut the national and international stages, though, Mr. Giuliani sounded a lot less partisan, no doubt in part because he is a Republican running in a city where Democrats predominate by a 5-to-1 ratio. +He sounded proud, in a conversation later, that he had managed to agree on three budgets with a City Council composed of 45 Democrats and 6 Republicans (though actually he is required to do so by law), and he made a point of listing occasions when he had worked with President Clinton (like the crime bill) as well as mentioning issues on which they have disagreed, such as the line-item veto. +"When I was young, bipartisan cooperation on foreign policy and major domestic programs was the norm," the Mayor said, "and here in New York the greatest mayors, like Koch and La Guardia, have taken the same approach. That's my model, but in Washington today, partisanship gets worse every year. They spend all their time settling old scores, and the voters can't stand it." +The main reason he expected to be re-elected, Mr. Giuliani said, was the decline in crime. He called crime, which is going down in most parts of the country, "the major impediment to people enjoying the spirit and all the resources that New York City has to offer." The main reason for the decline in New York, the Mayor argued, was the redeployment of police forces every week so they could work on high-crime neighborhoods. +"People come to you and tell you they need five more cops on their block," he said. "You can only give them three, but they're happy with you." + +LOAD-DATE: October 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani celebrating the renovation of Mount Loretto Senior Center on Staten Island. The Mayor, once known as a stiff campaigner, has learned the skills of personal political contact. (Ruby Washington/The New York Times)(pg. B5) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +534 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 26, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Beyond 50 and Blazing Trails on the Frontier + +BYLINE: By CAROLYN BATTISTA + +SECTION: Section 14CN; Page 10; Column 3; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1173 words + +ONE afternoon Carole Bobruff and Dale Callahan were at their kitchen table, talking about health care, money, entertainment, relationships and a sprightly fellow named Otto. Most mornings they're in a studio at radio station WSUB-AM in Groton, talking about such matters -- and more -- with listeners in a dozen states. +The Mystic residents are hosts of "Senior Focus," a radio show for those they call "seasoned citizens." The show, which began in 1990 with local, once-a-week broadcasts, has been syndicated since February. Now on the air Monday through Friday, it's a success with listeners and with advertisers. "I think that's because it's something that hasn't been done before," said Ms. Bobruff. She doesn't know of any other prime-time radio talk show "that's targeted to the needs of the 50-plus audience and reflects the tremendous diversity of our interests." There's certainly no other show where Otto -- a character that she created -- gets to speak his seasoned mind. + On the air, Ms. Bobruff, who's 62, uses the name Carole Marks. She and Mr. Callahan, who's 59, chat with each other, callers and guests (including politicians, doctors and a milkman). They aim to inform as well as entertain. "Now that we're living so much longer, we need information to get through the next 20 or 30 years," said Ms. Bobruff. +The two also hope to open some eyes to the needs, contributions and power of older people. "We're on a frontier, but people don't know it," Ms. Bobruff said. For one thing, Mr. Callahan said, advertisers are just beginning to recognize the growing market of people over 50. "They're still concentrating on people 24-45, but they're suddenly realizing that they may be targeting the wrong market. It's economics," he said. +Senior Focus is "a fight against agism -- and that's a fight that has to be fought," added Ms. Bobruff. On the show the character Otto (played by an actor) often observes that Americans treasure old things, not old people. "We have to turn our society around a little bit," said Ms. Bobruff. +The hour-long show is syndicated through Talk America II, a radio talk show network based in Canton, Mass. Besides reaching WSUB audiences in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Long Island, the show is sent via satellite to stations in Arkansas, California, Florida, Idaho, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada and Texas. Broadcasts are live, not taped, with guests interviewed in the studio or by phone. +Much -- but not all -- has changed since 1990, when Ms. Bobruff, who'd been the director of a volunteer program staffed by older people, decided that a radio show could help older people be better informed and less isolated. She'd never done any radio work before, but she plunged into the tasks that she still carries out -- researching topics, scheduling interviews, writing scripts and selling advertisements. "I've never been afraid to take a risk," said Ms. Bobruff, who went to college in her 40's. Mr. Callahan, who'd never been involved in radio either, gamely became the show's producer. "We were together, and she needed some help," he explained. His past experience included selling insurance and cars. +In 1995, he became a co-host. He says that his sales background helps him to put people at ease, "so we can talk." Ms. Bobruff says, "It's valuable to have a male point of view." +Mr. Callahan reads three or four newspapers daily, to stay informed on varied issues and perspectives. Ms. Bobruff finds the Internet useful. The two share in the show's national and local advertising revenues. In Groton, Ms. Bobruff said, Senior Focus draws more local advertising than the Rush Limbaugh show. +Since syndication, Senior Focus has had more guests with national appeal. The hosts frequently mention toll-free numbers -- like that of a national insurance association, for instance -- so that listeners anywhere can get information on particular topics. This summer they introduced Otto, a character who has apparently lived for centuries. "He's the ultimate senior citizen," said Ms. Bobruff. "He's seen it all. He can comment." +Recent topics on the show have ranged from the workings of the weather to the discovery of the genes linked to macular degeneration, a visual impairment. Guests have included Connecticut's attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, who discussed the state's settlement with tobacco companies; the artist Peter Max, who talked about his work, and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who talked about his proposal to support training for medical students in gerontology. +It wasn't easy, Ms. Bobruff said, to persuade Jack LaLanne, the long-time promoter of physical fitness, to be interviewed at 9 A.M., Connecticut time. That's 6 A.M., California time -- and that's when Mr. LaLanne, a Californian who's 83, is into his daily workout. Nor was the 9 A.M. slot so good for the milkman who still makes daily deliveries. He was more tired than talkative, recalled Mr. Callahan, because he'd been up and working since 2 A.M. +The hosts said they especially enjoyed their interviews with older entertainers, including Steve Allen and cabaret singers like Julie Wilson and Margaret Whiting. "Lots of them are working," said Mr. Callahan. "They still sound good." Ms. Bobruff calls Mr. Allen, who's 76, "a mentor." He's given them advice and allowed them to use some of his music. +Senior Focus gets calls from people of varied ages. "We have lots of younger listeners," said Ms. Bobruff, adding that often younger people call because they're concerned about their parents. +Calls from different areas reveal regional differences, like more conservatism in the interior of the country. But more often they indicate common concerns. The hosts say that, everywhere, people who once served their country are distressed by cuts in military retirement benefits. And everywhere, said Ms. Bobruff, older people are concerned about "health, health and health." They're also worried about finances. +She and Mr. Callahan see plenty to be done. "If I could accomplish one thing through the show," said Ms. Bobruff, "it would be to try to work through the political system to get premiums for long-term care, and for home health care, completely tax deductible." That, she says, would make the expensive premiums more feasible for more people. +More attention should be paid, the hosts say, to problems like drinking and depression in the older population. Recently they informed listeners about a nation-wide depression-screening program. +They'd like to look at how much older people are helping their adult children these days. With downsizing and other changes in the workplace, Ms. Bobruff said, "It's so much harder for your children to become secure. You worry; you care, you're going to help out." +Mr. Callahan said, "There should be more talk about relationships between older people. People say, 'It's all over.' It's not true." He turned to Ms. Bobruff with a big smile. "Maybe," he said, "Otto can advise on personal relationships." + +LOAD-DATE: October 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The character known only as Otto, left, offers his views of the day to Carole Bobruff and Dale Callahan on "Senior Focus." (Thomas McDonald for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +535 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 26, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Long Island Q&A: Gerard T. Breitner; +Setting the Right Course for Retirement + +BYLINE: By SUSAN KONIG + +SECTION: Section 14LI; Page 2; Column 1; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1631 words + +"AMERICANS have fallen in love with mutual funds, but beware," cautioned Gerard T. Breitner, president of Excomp Asset Management, a Manhattan-based financial planning concern that uses mutual funds exclusively to create investment portfolios. +Over the past five years, Mr. Breitner said, thousands of mutual funds have come to the marketplace, giving investors much more choice. Yet, selecting from all of these funds can be confusing, he cautioned, and investors need to know what is in these funds, and if there are hidden fees, to avoid investment disasters. + Mr. Breitner founded Excomp in 1982. The company currently oversees $60 million in client assets. He is also the host of "The Mutual Fund Report," a four-year-old radio show that airs Mondays at 7 P.M. on Long Island's WGBB (1240 AM), where he interviews top mutual fund managers and answers listener questions live on the air. +Mr. Breitner has worked in the financial services industry since 1974. He earned a bachelor's degree from St. John's University and a master's in financial services from the American College. He is a certified financial planner, a chartered financial consultant and a member of the Estate Planning Council of New York. +He and his wife, JoAnn, live in Rockville Centre. They have one daughter. +Q. You say the mutual fund industry is booming partly because people aren't prepared for retirement? +A. There are some major changes happening in our society today. Baby boomers are shifting from being consumers to being savers and investors. I think they hear the footsteps of retirement off on the horizon, and it's creating a dramatic change in the way they spend their money. Therefore, there's a tremendous flow of money into mutual funds, and a slow-down in the shopping binges they went on in the 1970's and 80's, and the real-estate explosion that occurred when they bought their homes. +However, there have been two studies -- one by Fidelity Funds, the other by Scudder -- which say that most baby boomers' goals for retirement are on a collision course with what they're actually saving and investing. They view retirement as playing on the golf course, spending time with the grandchildren, living half the year in Florida and half the year here. But saving for retirement is something you've got to do all along. +Q. Should people start saving for retirement as soon as they enter the work force? +A. Yes. One of the biggest secrets to a successful retirement is to start saving early. Another is to invest well. But saving early can even make up for investment mistakes. +Q. Is this a realistic expectation when people are faced with high living expenses, caring for children and elderly parents, etc.? +A. There are lots of temptations not to save-- putting the kids through college, keeping up with the Joneses, etc., and I don't pretend to have the answer for each individual case. But I think people need to pay themselves first. They need a strategy. They need to make sure they're taking care of their 401k plans and saving a little on top of that. If you want to spend the rest, then that's O.K. But pay yourself first. +Q. You say the notion of retirement has changed dramatically from just a generation ago? +A. Most people are going to spend a third of their life in retirement. We used to view this as sitting in our rocking chairs. Now, people consider retirement a very active part of life, a transitional phase where they've got more time to do the things they like. And that takes money. It's funny; I have clients in their early 80's who still play singles tennis. I don't ever remember seeing anything like that before. +Q. How does one go about creating a portfolio for a comfortable retirement? +A. You need to set specific goals and have a specific plan. It's not just a question of saving; you need to know what you're saving for and whether you're accumulating enough. You need checks and balances to know where you're going. People can do this on their own. More often than not, though, I think you need help from someone who can be objective, a professional who knows how to deal with taxes, inflation, etc. +Q. Are you a proponent of asset allocation? +A. Asset allocation and diversification are wonderful tools to help reduce the risk of investing. There are 8,000 mutual funds out there. Sometimes, people own 10 or 12 funds and think they are diversified when, in fact, a lot of the funds own some of the same kinds of holdings. You really need to what kinds of things are in the funds and who the manager is. Have an eyeball-to-eyeball meeting with the manager, see if he or she is focused on and passionate about what they do. Since a lot of funds are similar, statistically, you're likely to do better with a fund manager who loves what he is doing. +Q. What advice do you have for investors trying to select mutual funds? +A. You have to be wary of what I call "rear-view mirror investing." If you want to drive to a particular destination and you only look in the rear-view mirror, you're not going to have much success. And, I think using past performance as the main tool to make your investment decisions is just as futile. +It's important to take a forward perspective. Look at what's happening in the economy, make an assessment as to what Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve might be doing. Then ask yourself, "What kinds of funds do I want to own based on what's happening in the economy in the next 6 to 12 months?" +Q. Is investing in mutual funds -- or the stock market in general -- too risky for some people? +A. The bigger risk is not being invested, particularly for the long-term. I consider 65-year-olds as still having a long-term horizon, based on the fact that their life expectancy is probably another 20 to 25 years. The biggest risk is being too conservative, because inflation really annihilates conservative investments like CD's and bonds. +Q. You're somewhat skeptical of major mutual fund families. Why? +A. There are 8,000 mutual funds, and a good fund family might have 60 or 80 choices. If you restrict yourself to one particular fund, you're really only using about 1 percent of the choices that are available to you. And, you're not choosing from the best 1 percent; you're choosing from the 1 percent that has a particular brand or fund name on it. Each fund has a couple of good choices. The rest become mediocre, and some are downright "dogs." So, to the extent that you're moving around within one particular fund family, you're going to wind up with mediocre performance in your portfolio. +Q. Why do you prefer mutual funds over high-performing individual stocks? +A. There are a number of reasons. Funds today allow you to diversify more effectively than individual stocks, international funds and real-estate securities. Secondly, and equally as important, a mutual fund, being broad-based and diversified, will tend to be less volatile and risky than individual stocks or bonds. Since the market's been good, people are kind of lulled into a sense that there's no risk involved in being an investor. But, we've seen much more volatility in 1997 than in the two years previous. We stress to our clients that they need to have a specific strategy so that, when periods of volatility and down markets occur, they won't lose sight of the long-term picture, panic and make some bad investment decisions. +And, it's not just investors who panic -- the professionals can too -- which is why it's important to have a definitive strategy from the very start. +Q. What strategy do you recommend? +A. We take a three-pronged approach: we use a buy and hold strategy, a market-timing strategy and a sector rotation strategy, which means investing in different sectors of the market, i.e., utilities, technology, bonds, etc. We combine them to try and get the benefits of each without the down sides. +Q. You don't put a lot of client investments into bonds. Why? +A. I look at portfolios as being like daisies. The core funds -- the funds you want to hold for three to five years -- are the center of the daisy. The "petals" are other groups of funds you're using to try and add some performance over the short-term -- to add some zip in good markets and some stability in bad ones. I see bonds as being out on the petals, rather than in the core, because I believe they have as much risk as stocks but nowhere near as much of the upside. +Q. Why do you prefer "no-load" funds? +A. The world is global today. It's moving very fast. Commissions kind of stick people's feet in concrete; they prevent them from being proactive with their portfolios. No-load funds allow you to move about fairly freely. +Q. What are the greatest concerns of your clients? +A. Clients don't have a good sense of what risk is all about. We've done studies on human behavior and investing, and most people aren't necessarily rational about their portfolios from a risk standpoint. +If people are given a choice between something that's a sure gain or a chance to win more, overwhelmingly, they choose the sure gain. But, when given a choice between paying a traffic fine or gambling on being assessed a much greater fine, they usually take the chance of paying the higher fine. Risk aversion seems to apply only in the gain dimension; in the loss dimension, most people aren't risk-takers. Statistically, people view losses as being 2 to 2 1/2 times more painful than gains are pleasurable. +Investing isn't necessarily trying to get the greatest of gains. I think it's about taking the least amount of risk, while trying to have your portfolio and investments help you achieve your financial goals. They need a strategy to figure out the least amount of risk they can take for their plan to be effective. + +LOAD-DATE: October 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Gerard T. Breitner, head of Excomp Asset Management, which uses mutual funds to create investment portfolios. (Thomas Dallal for The New York Times) + +TYPE: Interview + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +536 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 26, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +In the Region/Long Island; +In Mt. Sinai Project, a Little Something for Everyone + +BYLINE: By DIANA SHAMAN + +SECTION: Section 11; Page 7; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1472 words + +IT has taken 12 years for a controversial development plan for a 404-acre tract in Mt. Sinai to evolve. +Final details still have to be worked out, but the major components for a development that combines a variety of housing units with a nursing home, golf course and country club are finally in place. The property borders Route 25A, Mt. Sinai-Coram Road and County Road 83. + Lori Baldassere, the president of the Mt. Sinai Civic Association, which opposed a previous plan giving the developers more density, and the developers, Robert Worrell of Syosset and Donald M. Eversoll of Commack, say there are disappointments in the resolution. But, they all add, they can live with the result. "There was a lot of wailing at both ends of the table, and that is why I feel it was a fair resolution," said Mr. Eversoll, a partner with Peter Klein of the Klein & Eversoll development group. +Under the agreement, the project, called the Villages at Mt. Sinai, will include 185 houses for people 55 and over, 600 attached and detached houses for all age groups, 225 housing units for older people able to live independently but needing some health care, and a 120-bed nursing home. +In addition to the housing, there will be an 18-hole, 6,700-yard golf course and country club, with a restaurant, catering facilities, eight tennis courts, a health spa and other amenities, all open to the public. Of the 600 houses, 154 will be built around the fairways of the golf course. +The developers, under an agreement with the Mt. Sinai School District, will donate $2.1 million to the district as houses are sold, to mitigate the impact so many new families will have on its schools. The town will receive up to $600,000 for park improvements. The $100 million development is expected to generate $1.7 million to $2 million annually in tax revenues, over and above the cost of new services. +The agreement follows a lawsuit filed in 1995 by the civic association against the town of Brookhaven, of which Mt. Sinai is an unincorporated area, after the town rezoned what was then a 346-acre parcel to allow the two developers to build 784 houses, 166 assisted-living units and a 200-bed nursing home. An additional 58 acres was later added to the project, bringing the total acreage under the current proposal to 404 acres. +The developers had originally applied for a rezoning of the 346 acres in 1988, but their first proposal for 981 housing units, 225 assisted-living units and a 120-bed nursing home was rejected by the town in 1990. +Some local residents felt that the 1995 rezoning still permitted too high a density, even though it gave approvals for 256 fewer housing units, including those for assisted living. Their lawsuit alleged among other complaints that the town violated the State Environmental Quality Review Act in approving the project, and that it also rezoned the property while a hamlet study it had commissioned in 1994 was still under way. +"Just as we were trying to look into the future with the hamlet study, our biggest piece of land was downzoned," said Mrs. Baldassare, who had been the co-chairwoman of the hamlet study and who became president of the Mt. Sinai Civic Association last year. +The biggest concerns were that too many houses were proposed on small lots, and that an influx of young children would lead to overcrowding in local schools, she said. +LOCAL residents raised a preliminary $14,000 and hired the Manhattan law firm Neufeld & O'Leary to represent them in the lawsuit against the town. +Expectations are that the final version of the new agreement, which contains some technical revisions, will be signed by the end of this month, said Denis P. O'Leary, who is representing the civic group. It will then be submitted to Justice H. Patrick Leis 3d of State Supreme Court in Central Islip. Once it is signed by the judge, the agreement becomes a court order by which all parties, including the town, are bound, he said. The new agreement was worked out with the support of Felix Grucci Jr., the town supervisor. +Thereafter, the developers must still file site plans and maps before sales can start, a process that could take another 12 to 18 months. +The developers say their troubles began in 1986, when they decided to join forces to build a planned community rather than building on land each owned separately. +Mr. Eversoll and Mr. Klein had purchased a 150-acre tract for $5.9 million. The existing zoning permitted them to build 207 single-family houses on 135 of the 150 acres, and 150,000 square feet of commercial space on 15 acres fronting on Route 25A. +"We could have filed a site plan and been in and out, because we had interest from King Kullen and Genovese Drugs for the commercial space," Mr. Eversoll said. +But since an adjoining 133-acre pumpkin crop farm zoned for houses on half-acre lots had also just been purchased by Mr. Worrell, "it appeared to me that this provided a really good opportunity to build a master-planned community," Mr. Eversoll said. +"If we had done it piecemeal instead, it wouldn't have seemed so massive and it could have been done a lot faster." +Interest on his $5.9 million initial investment has cost him $10 million during the 12 years, he said. +"It's been a money pit," said Mr. Worrell, adding that his expenses have been $19 million. "Don and I bought adjoining pieces of property and we said, 'Let's put it together,' so that we could design a contiguous community with a diversity of housing. Had we asked for approvals of 50 acres at a time, it would have been a lot easier." +Mr. Worrell subsequently entered into agreements with adjoining property owners to purchase three additional parcels totaling 121 acres, which have been added to the overall project. The parcels included the 34-acre Davis Peach Farm, established in 1910 and still in operation. +Mr. Worrell will develop the 193-acre golf course and country club and 154 houses of up to 3,600 square feet along the fairways. The houses are expected to sell from $285,000 to $340,000. He will also build town houses and small detached houses in a 34-acre section bordering Route 25A. Those houses, expected to attract mostly couples and singles without children because of their 1,400-square-foot to 2,100-square-foot size, will be $150,000 to $200,000. On another 34-acre section bordering County Road 83, Mr. Worrell will build houses of up to five bedrooms from $200,000 to $250,000. +Klein & Eversoll will build the 185 houses for buyers 55 and over on 40 acres. The two-bedroom dwellings on 55-foot by 110-foot lots will be 1,400 square feet to 1,800 square feet and will sell for $180,000 to $200,000. The developers' other 185 single-family houses with no age restrictions will be built in an 85-acre section on quarter-acre lots. Prices for the houses, which will be 1,600 square feet to 2,500 square feet, will be $190,000 to $220,000. Each of the residential sections will have its own pool and other recreational amenities. +Mr. Eversoll said he intended to sell the 25 acres approved for the 225 assisted-living units and the 120-bed nursing home. The parcel is on the market for $7 million. +Mrs. Baldassare, the civic association president, said residents never wanted to pursue a lawsuit, they simply wanted a better project. +"Felix Grucci, the town supervisor, said he would help bring the parties together if we were all willing to talk, and I was very willing to do that," she said. "I felt that if we talked about what everyone's needs were, we could find something that worked for everyone." The current plan "solved a lot of problems, and I think the developers have a very marketable product," she said. +THE idea for a golf course was generated by proposals developed through the hamlet study. "Financially, the golf course works for Robert Worrell, yet it gives us open space and it will increase our property values, as well as the property value of the new houses," Mrs. Baldassare said. By increasing the number of houses for people 55 and over, and specifying that some of the other units be town houses "the project won't bring in so many children," she said. +"Now there will be a better housing mix, we will have a stronger tax base, which we desperately need, and this project gives us 193 acres of open space because of the golf course," she said. +Even her former opponents concede that she has a point. "This civic association recognized that a property owner is entitled to develop his property," Mr. Eversoll said. "On the other hand, builders today must also try to work something out that meets the community's needs." +"We could have resolved this 12 years ago," Mr. Worrell said. "We had a good plan prior to this, but this is a good quality plan that works for all parties, and everyone can now move on." + +LOAD-DATE: October 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Lori Baldassere, the president of the Mt. Sinai Civic Association, with the developers of the 404-acre Villages at Mt. Sinai, Robert Worrell of Syosset and Donald M. Eversoll of Commack. (Vic DeLucia/The New York Times) + +Map showing the location of Mt. Sinai, Long Island + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +537 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 26, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Clintons Focus on Importance of Mammograms + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 18; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 219 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 + +President Clinton was joined by his wife, Hillary, today on his weekly radio broadcast to stress the importance of mammograms in detecting breast cancer. +Mr. Clinton, whose mother died of breast cancer three years ago, said Government financing for research, prevention and treatment has nearly doubled under his Administration. + He also said the recent discovery of two breast cancer genes holds great promise for finding a cure. +"Until that day, we know that early detection is the most potent weapon we possess in our battle against breast cancer," the President said. +"And we know that mammography is the best way to detect breast cancer so that it can be treated before it's too late." +Mrs. Clinton lauded the ongoing work of the National Mammography Campaign, an effort begun three years ago to increase awareness about the issue through public service announcements and partnerships with the private sector. +"Mammography can mean the difference between life and death for millions of women," Mrs. Clinton said. "Yet, I know from my conversations with women around the country, particularly older women, that far too many think they don't need mammograms because they are past their childbearing years." +Others do not know that their health insurance and Medicare cover the test, she said. + +LOAD-DATE: October 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +538 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 27, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Smart Rules for Health Plans + +SECTION: Section A; Page 22; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 440 words + +The "bill of rights" for patients that was tentatively approved last week by a Presidential commission would, if adopted by Congress, build in sensible consumer protections without strangling health plans with innovation-killing rules. There are important holes in the commission's work, but on the whole its draft is promising. +The rise of managed care has brought innovative coverage and a surprisingly swift deceleration of health care inflation. But managed care imposes obstacles to choosing doctors and treatments and can reward plans that skimp on care. The insecurity surrounding managed care has triggered calls for Government action, and Congress is inundated with ill-conceived bills that would dictate how health plans treat patients. President Clinton deftly cut off the rush to legislate by appointing the commission, which will reconvene in November to adopt a final report. + The draft requires disclosure of key information -- such as the number of times surgeons have performed specific operations and their outcomes -- so that consumers can judge which plans are best. The draft also guarantees consumers the right to appeal to an external authority their plan's decision to deny care for a treatment that the patient believes was covered by the plan's contract. The commission's focus is exactly right. Patients can feel secure about their health plan only if they have enough information and a right to appeal denials of promised benefits. +The commission's report is also interesting for what it does not say. On the positive side, it does not delve into specific mandates, like restrictions on the right to hire and fire doctors, that would raise costs and crimp flexibility. Anything that raises medical costs leads employers -- which cover most non-elderly Americans -- to drop health coverage entirely. On the negative side, the plan does not say how to implement any of its recommendations. +The plan also sidesteps the crucial component of a consumer-friendly health care system: choice. The best way to achieve choice is to require that employers give employees a choice of health plans. Only when consumers can drop one plan for another will their needs drive what health plans do, rather than the other way around. The commission need not fear that employers will drop coverage when faced with a mandate to offer choices. In fact, the evidence is clear that employers save money on premiums when they set up competition among employee health plans. +Of course the biggest hole in the commission's plan is not of its doing. Nothing in a bill of rights can cover 40 million uninsured Americans. + +LOAD-DATE: October 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +539 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 28, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +NEW YORK CITY MARATHON: SPECIAL PREVIEW SECTION; +For Seniors, A Group Walk In the Park + +BYLINE: By RON DICKER + +SECTION: Section G; Page 4; Column 4; Sports Desk + +LENGTH: 628 words + +For all the people it has touched through the New York City Marathon, the New York Road Runners Club had overlooked a huge segment that would never run a block but wanted to stay fit: walkers, especially older ones. So when club members told Allan Steinfeld, the club's president, about the lack of outlets for their elderly parents, he knew it was time to reach out. +"My father is 86 and walks every day," Steinfeld said. "I just figured, what can we do for the community which is noncompetitive?" + The Road Runners' seniors walking group has been around since June, and is already a hit with its members. The core of 30 devotees that began walking through Central Park last summer is still around, with 10 or so additions. +The walkers, 60 years and older, meet every Tuesday at 10 A.M. at Fifth Avenue and 90th Street. There is no fee; they simply show up. +Some come to battle illness. Dorila Morano is recovering from surgery for colon cancer. "I can't go very far yet," she said. +Betsy Frew, one of the few with competitive race-walking experience, has a leaking heart valve and faces open-heart surgery. "I just got out of the hospital; I'm not looking forward to it," she said. +The walkers are divided into 1-mile, 2-mile and 3-mile loops. Beforehand, there is a lecture and stretching exercises led by one of the Road Runners' volunteers. +The eldest of the walkers is 86-year-old Walter Piekarski. The Tuesday gathering has become part of the 6-mile route that he has been taking daily for 10 years. "I know this is the best medicine," he said. +Piekarski, wearing a houndstooth hat, walked alone in a determined stride, balling his hands in a fist and pumping his arms as if he were a sprinter. He does not need to be pushed or educated. But Marion Scott, a volunteer who is a 1992 marathon finisher, is on the trail in case someone does. She ran back and forth between the leaders and the stragglers, yelling encouragement and instructing everyone to accelerate for a lamppost or two before resuming their normal stride. +"I try to make them aware to move their arms," Scott, 65, said. "Once they move their arms faster, their legs are going to go faster, too." +Just then, Scott noticed two women strolling. "Now those two, I have to bark at them," she said. +Scott backpedaled to the conversing pair -- one in heels -- and urged them to pick up the pace. +They spoke no English, but they understood. "We speak the language of walking," said Rita Suarez, another member of the Spanish-speaking contingent. +The woman in the pink dress shoes, Glorinda Caban, explained that she had no intention of walking, but was just accompanying another walker to the starting point. Would Caban return the next Tuesday? Yes, she said shyly, but in softer shoes. +Scott said beginners are often unaccustomed to taxing themselves for aerobic benefit. "People have a tendency when they're concentrating to hold their breath," she said. "We want them to relax and breathe." +One of the intermediate walkers, Darlene Kimbrough, aspires to run the New York City Marathon someday. Hampered by blood clots and asthma, she already has covered a considerable distance, losing 24 pounds and drastically lowering her blood pressure since the program started in June. "I'm doing beautifully," she said. +The walkers come from Murray Hill to Harlem and are mostly women. But Doris Summers is doing her best to change the gender mix. +After the constitutional, as everyone was catching his or her breath at the kiosk behind the reservoir, she pointed to her husband, James, sitting in a car on 90th Street. They have been walking together, but he has been hesitant to join the group, partly because of the dearth of men. +"At least I got him out of the house," she said. + +LOAD-DATE: October 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +540 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 28, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Helio Beltrao, 81, Official In Brazil Who Cut Red Tape + +BYLINE: By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO + +SECTION: Section B; Page 10; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 405 words + +DATELINE: RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil, Oct. 27 + +Helio Beltrao, who served in the cabinets of three governments during Brazil's 21-year military dictatorship, died on Sunday morning here. He was 81 years old. +The Brazilian press reported the cause of death as respiratory insufficiency due to a brain tumor. + After a long career in Petrobras, the state-owned oil company, Mr. Beltrao began his public life under the military dictatorship that ended in 1985. He was one of the signers of a December 1968 decree that shut down the Brazilian Congress and abrogated civil rights. +Mr. Beltrao served as Minister of Planning from 1967 to 1969, during the government of Gen. Costa e Silva, and as Social Security Minister from 1982 to 1983. But it was as special minister in charge of "debureaucratization," under the Government of Joao Baptista Figueiredo, that Mr. Beltrao attracted attention and popularity. A reporter visiting Mr. Beltrao at the time found letters on his desk addressed to "Mr. Champion Minister." +He started his crusade against red tape in a country sorely in need of paperwork relief. In interviews while he held the job, he expressed the levels of absurdity the blizzard of documents, signatures and attestations had reached, using the anecdote of an elderly woman who waits for hours in line to apply for Social Security benefits. When she reaches the head of the line, she is turned away, having forgotten the essential "atestado de vida," a document confirming she is alive. +In another case, a retired military lawyer who wanted to register at the local bar association needed proof of a clean criminal record from every place he lived since the age of 18. But each certificate was valid for only three months. By the time he managed to obtain the last clearance, the first ones had expired. +"Brazilians are very informal and they trust everybody," Mr. Beltrao told The New York Times in a 1979 interview. "But this culture inherited the laws, decrees and regulations of Portugal, which had copied the centralization and the formalism of France." +In 1981, Mr. Beltrao told the newspaper O Globo that he had faith in his country, though he did not consider himself an optimist. "Optimism is for those who don't know the facts," he said. "I have faith because I do know them." Mr. Beltrao is survived by his wife, the archaeologist Maria da Conceicao and three chldren, Helio, 30, Christiana, 28 and Maria, 26, as well as a grandchild, Marcos. + +NAME: Helio Beltrao + +LOAD-DATE: October 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Helio Beltrao (Camera Press Ltd., 1980) + + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +541 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 28, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +First Lady's Hometown Birthday Bash + +BYLINE: By DIRK JOHNSON + +SECTION: Section A; Page 21; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 829 words + +DATELINE: PARK RIDGE, Ill., Oct. 27 + +Back in her hometown to celebrate her 50th birthday, Hillary Rodham Clinton sat in her old grammar school today, surrounded by old chums and teachers, reminiscing about the innocence of their childhoods. +Mrs. Clinton recalled walking to school as a kindergartner. Another friend noted that bikes never had locks. Somebody else remembered the freedom "to go everywhere, trick-or-treating at every single house -- except maybe for the one place, where some real old lady lived." + "Yeah," chimed in a fellow Baby Boomer, "she was probably 50." +While most people in their 40's are not particularly eager to turn 50, it must help to come home as a globe-trotting celebrity greeted adoringly by foreign crowds, and to then be able to show off the gold necklace given to her by her husband, the President. +In what seemed as much like a day on the campaign trail as a birthday celebration, Mrs. Clinton arrived at O'Hare International Airport to high school bands playing "Sweet Home Chicago," and then whisked around her hometown, sharing hugs and handshakes with old neighbors and going to a new park in Chicago being named the "Hillary Rodham Clinton Women's Park." +After that was a big party at the Cultural Center on Michigan Avenue, with Mayor Richard M. Daley and other dignitaries, celebrities and movers and shakers on hand to toast the First Lady. +There were a few anti-abortion pickets in Park Ridge, where one sign denounced her as the anti-life co-President. And inside the Happy House coffee shop here, a white-haired man grumbled into his soup about Mrs. Clinton's being feted so extravagantly. +"Why should we be proud of her?" he asked. "And who's footing the bill for all this?" +But no sooner had the elderly man spoken, muttering something about women "belonging in the kitchen," than the restaurant's owner, Soula Tsapralis, the mother of three daughters, dispatched with that customer-is-always-right business. +"Women are equal," she told him. +In general, Mrs. Clinton, whose birthday was on Sunday, was showered by praise all day. And she returned the favor at every turn, paying homage to Park Ridge for teaching her lasting values. +Park Ridge, a prosperous, uniformly white, conservative-to-the-bone Chicago suburb, did not, however, succeed in keeping her within the Republican fold. +There are still people here who regard the bright, well-behaved Rodham kid from Wisner and Elm as something of a wayward daughter, abandoning the good sense of her childhood years -- she belonged to Youth for Goldwater as a teen-ager and played Carrie Nation in a high school play -- and straying into the clutches of the Democrats. +Standing in front of her childhood home, a brick colonial with arching windows and tall shade trees, Mrs. Clinton recalled the day she brought "this Arkansas boy" to meet her father, a "gruff, strict" man, especially when it came to young suitors. +"He didn't know what to make of Bill Clinton," she said. +But within three days, she added, her father was "completely charmed" by the future President, and even traveled to Arkansas to do some campaign work for him. +"And this was a man," she said of her father, "who never had anything good to say about a Democrat in his entire life." +Her mother, Dorothy, and her brothers, Tony and Hugh, also came home for the celebration. +While young Hillary was irresistibly drawn to academics -- a freshman teacher recalled her handing in a 75-page typed term paper -- her brothers had more luck as wrestlers and football players, and succeeded in ruffling a few feathers at school. +Mrs. Clinton waited until a bit later to ruffle feathers. A lightning rod for conservatives and a hero to liberals, Mrs. Clinton's politics have long been a point of discussion around Park Ridge. A few years ago, the suggestion that the library hang a portrait honoring the local-girl-made-good sparked fierce letters to the editor, on both sides. +In the end, no portrait went up on the library wall. A painting of Mrs. Clinton ultimately was put up in her high school. +Mrs. Clinton made a trip to Orchestra Hall in Chicago this afternoon, the place where her youth pastor took her to listen to a speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on a day in 1962 that Mrs. Clinton says made a lasting impression. +Even as a child, Mrs. Clinton seemed to be trying to change the world, one parent at a time. When a friend was forbidden by her father to wear nylons to the sixth-grade dance, young Hillary circulated a petition among the students asking the strict parent to reconsider. He did not. +Besides the academics, Mrs. Clinton recalled, there were other things in Park Ridge that prepared her for the world of politics. +In speech class as a freshman, Mrs. Clinton recalled, some of the senior boys in the front row, most of them football players, "would sit there and insult me, say mean things," to try to get her rattled. +"So," she said, with an easy smile, "Washington's nothing." + +LOAD-DATE: October 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Showered by praise, Hillary Rodham Clinton visited her elementary school in suburban Chicago yesterday to mark her 50th birthday, which was on Sunday. The First Lady also visited her old home in Park Ridge. (Todd Buchanan for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +542 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 28, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +MEDICARE NOMINEE IS CAUGHT IN FIGHT OVER RULE ON FEES + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1284 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 + +Senate Republicans are holding up action on President Clinton's nominee to run the Medicare program in an effort to force Mr. Clinton to let doctors sign private contracts with affluent elderly patients willing to pay more than the fees set by Medicare. +Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, said that he had placed a "hold" on the nominee, Nancy-Ann Min DeParle, as a way to pressure the Administration. Mr. Kyl said he wanted the White House to accept his bill letting doctors negotiate private contracts with Medicare beneficiaries. Under such contracts, doctors would not be bound by Medicare's fee limits, but could charge whatever patients were willing to pay. + "Private contracts would give seniors more freedom to choose their doctors, to be treated by physicians of their choice outside the Medicare system," Mr. Kyl said in an interview. "Even beneficiaries of Britain's notoriously inadequate National Health Service have the right to enter into private contracts." +Republicans said they had no specific objections to the nomination of Ms. DeParle. At her confirmation hearing, Senator Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, said she was very well qualified. +Mr. Kyl said he would lift his "hold" on Ms. DeParle's nomination if the Administration would "just agree to the language of our bill" on private contracts. Referring to Administration officials, Mr. Kyl said: "They have my phone number. They know what I want." +A "hold" is a shadowy Senate practice by which one or more senators serve notice to the Senate leadership that they object to taking up a nomination or a bill and are threatening to filibuster it. The Senate majority leader can call for consideration of a nominee, but leaders ordinarily try to accommodate senators who have registered their concerns by putting a hold on a nomination. Such holds are usually anonymous, though Mr. Kyl is quite open about his effort. +Melissa T. Skolfield, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said today that Ms. DeParle had become "a pawn in the end-of-the-year politics of Capitol Hill." +If confirmed, Ms. DeParle would become administrator of the Federal Health Care Financing Administration. The agency spends more than $300 billion a year on Medicare and Medicaid, which finance health care for 74 million people who are elderly, disabled or poor. +The vacancy at the top of the agency comes at a crucial time, just as Federal officials are trying to carry out vast changes in Medicare made by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which Mr. Clinton signed on Aug. 5. +Representative Bill Thomas, the California Republican who is chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, supports Mr. Kyl's bill but objects to the use of the nomination as a bargaining chip. +"That whole approach drives me up a wall," Mr. Thomas said in an interview. "It's so petty to think that you can stop the world until your little issue gets addressed. To hold up a nominee over one specific issue -- that's in the category of bribery and blackmail, not policy. It's like assault and battery on a Government nominee." +Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, held up Ms. DeParle's nomination for several weeks until she assured him that she would find more money to fight Medicare fraud. +Ms. DeParle, who is married to Jason DeParle, a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, was nominated on June 27 to succeed Bruce C. Vladeck. Mr. Vladeck left the job on Sept. 13. +Senator Kyl's bill, called the Medicare Beneficiary Freedom to Contract Act, has 43 co-sponsors. +In the House, 135 lawmakers have signed up as co-sponsors of an identical bill. Mr. Kyl said he might try to attach it to an appropriations bill or other measure that Congress must pass before adjourning next month. +Mr. Kyl's bill has been embraced by the American Medical Association and by Republican leaders including Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma, Speaker Newt Gingrich and Representative Dick Armey of Texas, the majority leader. They see it as a way to blast a small hole in the price-control regime enforced by Medicare. +But the American Association of Retired Persons and many Democrats said Mr. Kyl's bill would undermine Medicare the foundations of Medicare, expose patients to higher costs and create new opportunities for billing fraud. +"The bill would allow doctors to charge much more than the Medicare fee schedule," said Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California. "It's pure greed wrapped in the flag of freedom." +"We like to think of contracts between equals, negotiated fairly," Mr. Stark said. "But there is no equality, no fairness, in a contract with a doctor who holds your life in his hands, who demands that you give up your Medicare benefits and let him charge anything he wants." +Under Mr. Kyl's bill, doctors and patients who signed private contracts would forgo Medicare payments for services covered by the agreement. +Congress hopes to adjourn by Nov. 7 or Nov. 14. Under Senate rules, unconfirmed nominations are returned to the President unless there is unanimous consent to carry them over to next year's session. +Most doctors have agreed not to charge more than the Medicare fee schedule amounts, even though they are allowed to charge 15 percent more. +For cataract surgery, one of the more commonly performed procedures, the basic Medicare fee is $960. But doctors said that affluent patients would be willing to pay two or three times that amount to eminent specialists. +The original Medicare law said nothing about private contracts. In recent years, Medicare officials have told doctors that they must abide by all Medicare rules, including limits on fees, even if some elderly patients want to use their own money to pay for services. +In the budget law passed this year, Congress allowed doctors to enter into private contracts with Medicare beneficiaries but stipulated that such doctors could not submit any claims to Medicare for any services provided to any patients for two years. In other words, a doctor who signs even one private contract is excluded from Medicare for two years. +The American Medical Association and other physician groups said that few doctors would enter into private contracts under those conditions. +Mr. Kyl said, "Our bill would repeal the punitive two-year exclusionary requirement and allow seniors to enter private contracts with the physician of their choice on a case-by-case basis. +"If you require a two-year opt-out, you are almost forcing doctors to dump their Medicare patients in order to engage in private contracting." +Federal spending on Medicare has been growing an average of 10 percent a year for a decade. As Congress tries to rein in costs, some doctors, especially surgeons, expect to see their Medicare fees decline in the next few years. +In view of such cutbacks, the A.M.A. says, doctors are "being forced to restrict the number of Medicare beneficiaries they take or to scale back services to these patients." +Private contracts may offer doctors a way to offset the loss of income. A recent article in the journal of the Medical Group Management Association, a trade group, said doctors could tap a lucrative "niche market" by offering "top-of-the-line care" to affluent consumers willing to spend their own money. +Doctors said that with the extra income from private contracts, they could afford to provide more charity care. +John C. Rother, chief lobbyist at the American Association of Retired Persons, said, "There may be some very sincere physicians who would use that income to subsidize charity care, but for most doctors, the private contracts would be just a way to increase their own income." + +LOAD-DATE: October 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, left (Associated Press), said yesterday that he had put a "hold" on the nomination of Nancy-Ann Min DeParle to head Medicare. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times)(pg. A18) + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +543 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 28, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +NEWS SUMMARY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 2; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1426 words + + +INTERNATIONAL A3-15 + +Chinese President Swims In Hawaiian Waters +Afternoon strollers on Waikiki Beach were surprised by the unexpected arrival of President Jiang Zemin of China. Mr. Jiang, 71, swam the breast stroke for a full hour, probably to dispel rumors in China that he has been suffering from heart trouble. A12 + +No Quick Euro for Britain +Britain's Labor Government ruled out the country's early entry into European monetary union. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the House of Commons that Britain would not join a common currency in the first wave, but that membership in a successful monetary union was right "in principle" and urged both Government and businesses to start "preparing intensively" for that eventuality. A11 + +Scientology Protest in Berlin +The Scientology movement held a march in Berlin designed to depict modern Germany as being as intolerant toward Scientology as Hitler was toward Jews. Police estimated that 3,000 people took part, though the Scientologists said there were 6,700. Even fewer attended a counterdemonstration, where participants waved a flag proclaiming the official German view that Scientology is not a religion but a mercenary and undemocratic movement. A11 + +Teachers Strike in Canada +Most of the 126,000 public and Catholic school teachers in Ontario went on the largest teachers' strike ever in North America. They oppose a provincial government proposal to weaken local school boards and allow some noncertified instructors to teach. A8 + +Non-Orthodox Jews Press Suit +Leaders of the Conservative and Reform Jewish movements announced they would pursue legal action to gain recognition of their conversions to Judaism in Israel. They rejected a Government request to postpone their litigation while negotiations continue with the Orthodox rabbinate over who can perform conversions. A3 + +Iraq Ponders Counter Tactic +Iraq's Parliament recommended suspending the country's cooperation with United Nations arms inspectors to counter a Security Council resolution threatening more sanctions against Iraq, the Iraqi news agency INA said. The report said the Parliament proposed the freeze until a timetable is set for lifting the United Nations embargo imposed after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. (Reuters) + +Algerians Protest Voting Fraud +Thousands of Algerians marched through the capital as both pro-Government and opposition parties protested what they said was widespread fraud in elections won by the governing party last week. The protests were no help to President Liamine Zeroual's hopes of widening his political base and crushing an Islamic insurgency. (AP) + +NATIONAL A16-21 + +G.O.P. Stalls Nomination In Medicare Policy Battle +Senate Republicans are holding up action on President Clinton's nominee to run the Medicare program in an effort to force him to let elderly people go outside Medicare and use their own money to pay some doctors higher fees. But the American Association of Retired Persons and many Democrats say that a bill to create that option would undermine the foundations of Medicare, expose patients to higher costs and create new opportunities for billing fraud. A1 + +Labor Fights Image Setback +The wave of corruption charges involving the teamsters and other unions has badly embarrassed the labor movement just when John J. Sweeney, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s president, was boasting that efforts to improve labor's image were finally paying off with some major organizing victories. A21 + +Hillary Clinton Visits Home +Hillary Rodham Clinton, back in her hometown of Park Ridge, Ill., to celebrate her 50th birthday, sat in her old grammar school surrounded by old chums and teachers, reminiscing about the innocence of their childhoods. A21 + +Miami Celebrates Its Series +Miami, the home of the new World Series champion Florida Marlins, woke up giddy from celebrations that did not even begin until the early morning hours, its euphoria tempered neither by the work day nor the uncertainty over the possible sale of its winning team. A16 + +Fight Over Donor Records +Secret bank documents containing the names of donors to two conservative nonprofit groups that helped elect Republican candidates in 1996 have inadvertently fallen into the hands of Democratic members of the Senate Governmental Affairs committee -- and the Democrats are refusing Republican demands to give them back. A18 + +Clinton Orders Help for Schools +President Clinton will order the Department of Education to help cities and states find ways to deal with failing schools, using existing programs to improve them or, as a last resort, shutting them down, Administration officials said. A18 + +Amtrak Strike Compromise +Amtrak and negotiators for several unions finalized an agreement to keep the Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit trains running on weekdays only, for at least a few days, if the track workers' union goes on strike, which could occur as early as 12:01 A.M. Wednesday. The agreement allows about 100 Amtrak supervisors and workers from other unions to cross the picket lines to keep trains running into Pennsylvania Station, which Amtrak owns. A19 + +Secessionists Disrupt Court +Two leaders of the Republic of Texas secessionist movement were ejected from the courtroom at their own trial after repeatedly interrupting jury selection. (AP) + +NEW YORK/REGION B1-8 + +11 Girls Infected By Man With H.I.V. +A 20-year-old man with H.I.V. has apparently infected at least 11 teen-age girls in western New York with the virus that causes AIDS, and officials says that the man -- or his sex partners -- may have infected up to 50 other people. Six of the girls, including a 13-year-old, were infected after the man had been tested and told he had H.I.V. A1 + +New York Digest B1 + +SCIENCE TIMES F1-10 + +Seahorse Sexual Roles +Scientists have long known that the male sea horse is the one that becomes pregnant, carries the young in his belly and gives birth. But new findings show that the female is doing most of the work. F1 + +Tracking the Y Chromosome +New research has determined almost all of the genes of the Y chromosome as well as the emergence of a pattern that explains how the chromosome evolved. The new findings may also help toward understanding the sources of male infertility, the cause of half the childlessness that affects some 10 percent of American couples. F2 + +HEALTH F9 + +Treatment for Parkinson's +An experimental treatment for Parkinson's patients involves a pacemaker-like device that stimulates the brain electrically to prevent uncontrolled movements. F9 + +SPORTS C1-8 + +FASHION B9 + +ARTS E1-8 + +OBITUARIES B10 + +Mina S. Rees +A mathematician who broke new ground for women as a university administrator and a leader among her peers in the sciences, she was 95. B10 + +BUSINESS DAY D1-26 + +U.S. Stocks Plummet +A worldwide plunge in stock prices erased more than 7 percent from the Dow Jones industrial average and forced the New York Stock Exchange to halt trading, the first time that has happened other than following presidential assassination attempts. The Dow average ended the day down 554.26 points, or 7.2 percent, at 7,161.15, the worst in a decade and the 12th worst ever. The drop was only about a third as large as the 22.6 percent, 508-point, drop on Oct. 19, 1987. A1 + +Oxford Reports Billing Lapse +Oxford Health Plans, the big New York area health plan that has been held up as a model of keeping costs down while satisfying patients, said it had been losing money because it fell behind in sending bills to customers and underestimated how much it owed doctors and hospitals. The shares of Oxford fell $42.875, to $25.875, making it the biggest decliner on the New York Stock Exchange. A1 + +Intel to Buy Digital Unit +Intel has agreed to buy Digital Equipment's semiconductor manufacturing operations for $700 million and to pay royalties to the computer maker as part of a broad settlement of a patent infringement suit brought by Digital. D1 + +Business Digest D1 + +EDITORIAL A22-23 + +Editorials: The plunging Dow; call a constitutional convention; baseball's free-market champs. + +Columns: Russell Baker, A. M. Rosenthal. + +Chess F2 + +Crossword E4 + +Chronicle B8 + +Weather C7 + +LOAD-DATE: October 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +544 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 30, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +After Childhood of Violence, A One-Man H.I.V. Epidemic + +BYLINE: By JOE SEXTON + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1907 words + +Nushawn J. Williams, a Brooklyn neighbor put it with plain-spoken certainty, was "running wild from Day 1." +And Mr. Williams's sprint into trouble -- from a broken home to childhood thievery, from gangs to crack dens, from girl to girl -- has left a breathtaking array of damage, recounted by former neighbors, acquaintances and the authorities. +There was the elderly man who was regularly beaten for his pocket change by Mr. Williams when he was a child, neighbors say. There was the store owner who used to chat about the Knicks with the 16-year-old Mr. Williams but said he wound up being shot by the teen-ager in a robbery. There were the Crown Heights residents who said they found themselves on the wrong end of Mr. Williams's two regular trades: drug sales and street holdups. +And now there are dozens of people who the state authorities have said may have been infected with H.I.V. as a result of their contact with the 20-year-old Mr. Williams or his sexual partners. +Mr. Williams, state health officials have charged, had unprotected sex with scores of women, many of them after he learned that he had the virus that causes AIDS. Apparently he told none of them he was infected. +City and state officials yesterday continued the grimly painstaking work of locating potential partners, and partners of partners, in both the city and Chautauqua County in western New York State, where Mr. Williams lived for a time. For the moment, they say they have no way of even estimating how many people might have been harmed, but officials in Chautauqua County fear that their earlier estimates may have been too low. Page B12. +The rough outlines of Mr. Williams's route from troubled child to street thug to potentially deadly womanizer, who could mix charm with threats in his accumulation of sexual encounters, do not include many moments of innocence or stability. And they end, for now at least, with Mr. Williams in an isolation cell on Rikers Island, self-identified as a member of the Bloods street gang and classified by prison doctors as requiring observation for possible psychiatric problems. +A neighbor said those people who had tried to discourage Mr. Williams, known as JoJo, from his pursuit of trouble -- a grandmother, a friend -- had a futile task. "They couldn't keep up with JoJo," she said. "He was too much in the fast lane." +The road began on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. Mr. Williams's mother, described by neighborhood residents as dangerously dependent on drugs, was the subject of repeated investigations by the city's child welfare agency. No one interviewed could recall the presence of a father. Mr. Williams was assigned to special education classes in the city's public schools. It could not be learned when he dropped out. +The arrests accumulated early and often. There was a robbery conviction when he was 15, a murder charge when he was 17. He spent a year in jail, from 1994 to 1995, before being acquitted of the killing, and began his series of ricochets from New York City to Jamestown, N.Y. In all, he amassed eight arrests with at least three convictions, though the disposition of some cases was unclear last night. +"He made his bones here in the streets -- selling crack, doing stick-ups," one Brooklyn detective said. +But in Jamestown, investigators said, his routine was one more of bravado than violent criminality. Mr. Williams dealt drugs, they said, and may have been transporting them from Brooklyn to Jamestown, but he was not seen as a major criminal. Still, he struck the pose of the big-city gangster, using it to attract any number of the Jamestown area's poorer, street-hardened and disaffected girls. +Neighbors and acquaintances said sex was the one constant in his life. It was often bartered for drugs, they said, and took place in public places or miserable circumstances, but that did not deter Mr. Williams. +Neighbors in Brooklyn say Mr. Williams had frequented known crack houses for years with a steady stream of women, some young, some prostitutes. In the Bronx, a variety of people tell of Mr. Williams's selling drugs on the street, sleeping in a garage and having sex with younger girls over the last eight months. +Delroy G. Hanson, a plumber, said he used to park his car in the Bronx garage in which Mr. Williams was sleeping earlier this year. He said he walked in one afternoon to find Mr. Williams having sex with a girl he estimated to be roughly 15. "He laughed, and I went about my business, took the car, shut the door and went to work," said Mr. Hanson. "The guy was laughing, but the girl was in shame." +Mr. Williams was the oldest of Denise Williams's three children. The family -- including a grandmother, Eleanor Johnson McRae -- moved from apartment to apartment in central Brooklyn. Ms. Williams, according to child welfare workers, had a major drug problem. One neighbor said that as many as 30 people once appeared to be using the family's apartment as a flophouse. +Nearly a dozen investigations of Ms. Williams were conducted by the child welfare agency from 1981 to 1996. One of her daughters was placed in foster care; another child has been formally adopted. City child welfare workers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the investigations over the years had found that Ms. Williams was unable to provide for or care for her children. Mr. Williams, the workers said, may have spent part of his childhood in foster care, too. +In 1993, the grandmother, Ms. McRae, asked the Family Court to take over control of Mr. Williams, who was then 16. Court records do not indicate if action was taken. +"I knew him since he was 5 years old," said another Brooklyn neighbor. "His family was always pretty unstable. He was very rebellious. If you told me JoJo killed someone, I wouldn't be surprised. But that he has the AIDS virus is a shocker." +Collin Lawrence, the owner of a record store on Nostrand Avenue, used to give the young Mr. Williams a couple of dollars on weekends and talk with him about the Knicks. But in 1993, he said, Mr. Williams entered the store with a gun. "If you are going to be robbed by someone who knows you, chances are they are going to kill you," said Mr. Lawrence, who said he was wounded in the hand but did not press charges. "But God was on my side." +Detectives from the 77th Precinct said that if anything, Mr. Williams was remarkable for how widely and aggressively he was disliked by others in the neighborhood that stretches along Eastern Parkway. Describing him as one of the regulars they encountered, the detectives said people often could not wait to offer incriminating information about Mr. Williams when crimes were being investigated. +"Everything we found out about him, someone in the street told us," said Ernie Bostic, a retired detective who arrested Mr. Williams in 1994 in the murder of a 34-year-old Queens man, Frederick Douglas. "People were afraid of him. I think he had threatened people in the past. So people were eager to get him off the street." +After spending 12 months in the juvenile jail on Rikers Island, Mr. Williams was acquitted in the 1994 killing. Law enforcement officials said that upon hearing the "not guilty" verdict, Mr. Williams walked from the courtroom without speaking, without thanking his lawyer, without waiting to hear the guilty verdict that then came against the man tried with him, Mitchell Raife. +"In all the time I represented him, no family called me, nobody came to the trial on his behalf," said Luis F. Candal, the lawyer who defended Mr. Williams in the murder case. "He was more like a street person." +It was upon his release from Rikers in 1995 that Mr. Williams, apparently joining relatives, moved to Jamestown. +Law enforcement officials there said Mr. Williams lived at three different locations in and around Jamestown, dealing drugs from all. He was a regular at parties with girls as young as 14, and apparently used his charm and the image of a big-city gangster to great effect. +Several girls in Jamestown said he cooked for them after he became involved with them -- chicken, macaroni, lima beans -- and that they were excited to braid his hair. He took the girls shopping in Buffalo or Erie, Pa., buying them rings, music tapes and watches. +Natasha Schuler, 15, and Lanie Philbrick, 17, said they had three friends who had tested positive for H.I.V. since they had had sex with Mr. Williams. Of one friend, Natasha said: "He treated her like Princess Di. If anyone tried to step in her face, he was on them." +But Diane Doty, who said she lived downstairs from Mr. Williams and one of his girlfriends for several months in a building on Barrows Street in Jamestown, said the young woman sometimes appeared at her door with black eyes or bruises, fearful of Mr. Williams. The girlfriend had also had an infant, Ms. Doty said, but it was not clear whether the baby was Mr. Williams's. +Mr. Williams moved back and forth between Jamestown and Brooklyn from 1995 until early this year, when he returned to New York City more or less permanently. Brian Jones, a resident of the Albany Houses project in Brooklyn, said he had been a partner with Mr. Williams in his drug ventures upstate and elsewhere. Mr. Jones, who said he had later given up dealing drugs, said Mr. Williams would take crack to Jamestown, do $600 in business and return. He said Mr. Williams also made similar trips to Boston, Richmond and Washington. +Law enforcement officials say the Albany Houses project in Brooklyn is home to many members of the Brooklyn version of the Bloods street gang, and New York City police detectives and officials with the city's Department of Corrections confirm Mr. Williams's membership. +In February 1997, Mr. Williams was shot and wounded after being held up by three men outside the Albany Houses in what investigators say was a gang-related incident. +Police officials and residents interviewed at the Albany Houses estimated that a half-dozen girls there feared that they had been infected with H.I.V. by Mr. Williams. "He had it and he could have done something about it," Mr. Jones said, "instead of infecting all those girls and killing all those daughters." +After having been shot, Mr. Williams appeared to have lived chiefly in the Bronx, first in a house with a family and then a garage in the Williamsbridge section, and then on the streets of Baychester. Those who came across him in the Bronx describe a man with a blossoming crack addiction, who could sleep for 48 hours straight and then pester women on the street, coax girls to a car or a blanket, hang out with prostitutes trading drugs for sex. +He was arrested several times, most recently on Sept. 21 on charges of selling drugs to undercover officers and then assaulting them. +At Rikers Island, he was evaluated and ordered kept under watch. One correction official said he had spoken of suicide. On Oct. 21, Mr. Williams was interviewed by an investigator with the city's Department of Health. He named several dozen recent sexual partners in New York City, and gave vague descriptions of more, department officials said. +Health Department officials refused to say if he was remorseful, agitated, depressed or aware of his damage. He was described only as cooperative. +Last night, he sat in an isolation cell, watched 24 hours a day by a single corrections officer. The man who had run wild from Day 1 could not go anywhere. + +LOAD-DATE: October 30, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Chautauqua County, N.Y., has issued posters warning sexual partners of Nushawn Williams that they are in danger of developing AIDS. (Associated Press)(pg. B12) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +545 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +October 31, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Spare Times + +SECTION: Section E; Part 2; Page 41; Column 1; Leisure/Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 2683 words + + +ATTRACTIONS +Museums and Sites + +AMERICAN NUMISMATIC SOCIETY, Audubon Terrace, Broadway at 155th Street, Washington Heights. The society has the most extensive coin collection in North America; its library is open to the public. On permanent display is "American Numismatic Design, 1892-1922," which includes all coins issued during this period. Also on view is "The World of Coins," a history from 600 B.C. to the present. Free. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 9 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 4 P.M. Information: (212) 234-3130. + +CZECH CENTER NEW YORK, 1109 Madison Avenue, at 83d Street. The center has an exhibition on Dvorak that includes photographs, letter facsimiles, musical scores and contemporary documents through Nov. 21. Hours: Tuesdays through Fridays, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Free. Information: (212) 288-0830. +HISTORIC RICHMOND TOWN, Staten Island Historical Society, 441 Clarke Avenue, Richmondtown. About 27 buildings from the late 1600's to the 19th century, many restored and furnished. This authentic village and outdoor museum complex depicts three centuries of the history and life of Staten Island and the surrounding region. A Victorian Masquerade Ball, tomorrow from 8 to 11 P.M., offers the opportunity to come disguised (or not) as a historical character and learn 19th-century dances. Live music and refreshments will be available. Prepaid Reservations: $16. Hours: Wednesdays through Sundays, 1 to 5 P.M.; closed most holidays. Admission: $4; the elderly and ages 6 to 18, $2.50; 5 and under, free. Information: (718) 351-1611. +INTREPID SEA-AIR-SPACE MUSEUM, Pier 86, West 46th Street at the Hudson River, Clinton. A converted World War II aircraft carrier featuring two full decks of displays, including four theme halls: "United States Navy Hall"; "Pioneer Hall"; "Technologies Hall" and "Intrepid Hall." Also on view is a 1950's French naval fighter jet, the Etendard IV-M, given to the museum by the French Government. On view through Jan. 5, 1998, the exhibition "On the Waterfront," photographs of New York City's Hudson River waterfront by Maggie Hopp, focusing on the area that stretches from Battery Park City north to 59th Street. Free with paid admission to the museum. Hours: Wednesdays through Sundays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Admission: $10; the elderly, veterans, reservists and ages 12 to 17, $7.50; ages 6 to 11, $5; 5 and under, $1. Information: (212) 245-0072. +THE MUSEUM OF JEWISH HERITAGE: A LIVING MEMORIAL TO THE HOLOCAUST, 18 First Place (West Street and Battery Place), Battery Park City, lower Manhattan. Artifacts, documents, photographs, videotapes and film clips are included in exhibitions on the Holocaust and on Jewish life before and after World War II. Hours: Sundays through Wednesdays, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursdays, 9 A.M. to 8 P.M.; Fridays and the eves of Jewish holidays, 9 A.M. to 2 P.M.; closed on Saturdays and Jewish holidays. Admission: $7; students and the elderly, $5; 5 and under, free. A limited number of same-day tickets are available at the museum; because of the current crowds, tickets should be purchased in advance through Ticketmaster: (212) 307-4007. Information: (212) 968-1800. +MUSEUM OF TELEVISION AND RADIO, 25 West 52d Street, Manhattan. A collection of taped historic radio and television broadcasts, as well as exhibitions of other media, including drawings, posters and photographs. Through Dec. 4, the museum is featuring a tribute to Arte, a French-German cultural channel, with a screening series that spotlights 15 programs. "The Age of Possibilities" (1996) by the French filmmaker Pascale Ferran will be shown today at 5 and 7 P.M. and tomorrow and Sunday at 1 P.M., "Ex" (1995), directed by Mark Schlichter, will be shown today at 6:45 P.M. and tomorrow and Sunday at 3 P.M.. Hours: Tuesdays through Sundays, noon to 6 P.M.; Thursdays, noon to 8 P.M.; closed Mondays and holidays. Admission: $6; students and the elderly, $4; 12 and under, $3. Information: (212) 621-6800. +NEW YORK TRANSIT MUSEUM, Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street, downtown Brooklyn. Current exhibitions include "Building to Last: The Restoration of Grand Central"; "Steel, Stone and Backbone," a display that traces the construction of the subway system from 1900 to 1925 through photographs, construction tools, films and other objects; "Ceramic Ornamentation," a look at the mosaics, tiles and terra cottas used to adorn subway stations from 1904 to the present, and "Here to There: Signs for Moving Around Underground," an exhibition of more than 100 subway signs. Also on view are 19 fully restored subway cars from 1903 to 1960. Hours: Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 P.M.; closed Mondays and holidays. Admission: $3; the elderly and ages 6 to 17, $1.50; 5 and under, free. Information: (718) 243-3060 or (718) 243-8601. +SOUTH STREET SEAPORT MUSEUM AND MARKETPLACE, South and Fulton Streets, lower Manhattan. The 19th-century port district has an array of restaurants, shops and bars. Among the display areas at the museum are three gallery spaces, a children's crafts center and a boat-building center. Among the current exhibitions: "City in Play: Toys and the Transformation of New York From 1865 to 1945" and "Traveling in Style: 20th-Century Ocean Liners." Hours: daily, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; closed Tuesdays. Admission: $6; the elderly, $5; students, $4; children 12 and under, $3. Information: the museum, (212) 748-8600; the marketplace, 732-7678. +WORLD FINANCIAL CENTER, Liberty Street Gallery, 200 Liberty Street, lower Manhattan. "Mechanical Marvels: Invention in the Age of Leonardo," a display of 50 working models of machines designed by artist-engineers of the Renaissance, including Filippo Brunelleschi, Mariano di Iacopo and Leonardo da Vinci. Hours: Tuesdays through Fridays, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. Admission: $6; $3 for students and the elderly; free for children under 6. Information: (212) 945-0505. + +ON THE STREET +Parades + +VILLAGE HALLOWEEN PARADE, Avenue of the Americas, from Spring Street to 22d Street, Greenwich Village. Today at 6 P.M. + +Street Fairs + +GREENWICH AVENUE FALL FESTIVAL, Greenwich Avenue, between Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue, Greenwich Village. Tomorrow, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. Sponsored by the Federation to Preserve Greenwich Village. +ASTOR PLACE AUTUMN FESTIVAL, Astor Place, between Broadway and Lafayette Street, Greenwich Village. Tomorrow, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. Sponsored by the Women's Democratic Club. +PARKSIDE FESTIVAL, Union Square West, between 17th and 23d Streets, Manhattan. Sunday, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. Sponsored by the Gramercy-Stuyvesant Independent Democrats. +WAVERLY PLACE PUMPKIN FESTIVAL, Waverly Place, between Avenue of the Americas and Macdougal Street, Greenwich Village. Sunday, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. Sponsored by the Waverly Block Association. + +EVENTS + +FALL CRAFTS PARK AVENUE, Seventh Regiment Armory, Park Avenue and 66th Street. Today, 3 to 9 P.M.; tomorrow, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M.; Sunday, noon to 5 P.M. Admission: $8; free for those under 16. Information: (800) 649-0279. +NEW YORK CITY MARATHON, five boroughs. The 28th running of the 26.2 mile race beginning Sunday at 10:40 A.M. at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The race ends at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. Sponsored by the New York Road Runners Club. Information: (212) 860-4455. +21ST VILLAGE HALLOWEEN COSTUME BALL, Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue, at 10th Street, East Village. An indoor and outdoor event with music, dance, juggling and storytelling. Outdoor entertainment, which is free, begins tonight at 5; tickets are $15 for the indoor performance that begins at 7:30 P.M. Reservations advised: (212) 254-1109. +"JEKYLL AND HYDE" PUMPKIN CARVING CONTEST, Plymouth Theater, 236 West 45th Street, Manhattan. Pumpkins carved by junior and senior high school students on the theme of good and evil will be judged by cast members of the show; the winner will receive tickets to the show for his entire English class, along with dinner at an area restaurant. Participants should take their entries to the theater today at 6 P.M. Information: (212) 391-0555. +HALLOWEEN TOUR AT KING MANOR MUSEUM, King Park, Jamaica Avenue, between 150th and 151st Streets, Jamaica, Queens. A tour of the 18th-century house (properly decorated for the holiday) that was the country home of Rufus King, a Revolutionary War hero and a United States Senator. Also music, pumpkin-painting and a costume contest. Today at 4 P.M. Fee, $2.50. Information: (718) 206-0545. +"THE MASQUERADE," Landmark on the Park, 160 Central Park West, at 76th Street, Manhattan. A masquerade ball with dancing and refreshments. Tonight at 8. Admission, $75; proceeds benefit the Madison Square Boys and Girls Club, an organization that provides social services to New York City children. Information: (212) 532-0858. +"BORIS KARLOFF: THE GENTLEMAN MONSTER," American Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Avenue and 36th Street, Astoria, Queens. A screening of "The Raven," a 1963 spoof of the Poe story featuring the actor, along with Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Jack Nicholson. Sunday at 4:30 P.M. Part of a three-week tribute to the actor. Included in museum admission: $8; $5 for the elderly and students; $4 for children 4 to 18 years old; free for children under 4. Information: (718) 784-0077. + +WALKING TOURS + +"THE NEW DOWNTOWN," lower Manhattan. A tour that focuses on the history of the financial center, with stops along Wall Street, the World Financial Center and Battery Park City. Meets today at 11 A.M. at the Heritage Trails Kiosk, Broad and Wall Streets. Fee, $14; students and children 7 to 12, $7; the elderly, $10. Sponsored by Heritage Trails New York. This is the last tour of the season. Information: (888) 487-2457. +"THE HALLOWEEN PARADE: A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE MASK," Greenwich Village. A behind-the-scenes look at the preparation for the annual parade. Today at 5 P.M. Fee, $25. Sponsored by Cooper Union. Reservations and meetingplace: (212) 353-4198. +HAUNTED AND HISTORIC HALLOWEEN WALKING TOURS. A tour of scary spots from Union Square to Madison Square, including haunted theaters and houses and hidden graveyards. Meets today at 6 P.M. at Union Square South and 14th Street. Also tomorrow and Sunday at 2 P.M. Sponsored by the American Renaissance Theater of Dramatic Arts. Fee, $10. Reservations: (212) 924-6862. +"BURIAL GROUNDS OF LOWER MANHATTAN," lower Manhattan. A walk past some of the oldest cemeteries in the area, including the African Burial Grounds, with a stop at the grave site of Alexander Hamilton. Meets today at 5:30 P.M. in front of Trinity Church, Wall Street and Broadway. Fee, $10; $8 for students and the elderly. Sponsored by Big Onion Walking Tours and Fraunces Tavern Museum. Reservations: (212) 425-1778. +"MACABRE MIDTOWN: MURDER AND MYSTERY," Manhattan. A tour of sites associated with the deaths of Nelson Rockefeller, the former New York Governor; Gig Young, the actor; and Arnold Bernstein, a gangster. Meets today at 6:30 P.M. in front of the Broadway Diner, East 52d Street and Lexington Avenue. Also tomorrow and Sunday at 2:30 P.M. Fee, $10. Sponsored by NYC Tours. Reservations and information: (212) 465-3331. +"GOTHAM CITY GHOST TOUR," Greenwich Village. A tour of macabre sites including two in Washington Square Park : the "hanging elm" and the burial ground. Meets today at 6 P.M. in front of Barnes & Noble, 4 Astor Place, between Broadway and Lafayette Street. Fee, $10. Also tomorrow and Sunday at 11:30 A.M. Sponsored by NYC Tours. Information: (212) 465-3331. +"THE HAUNTED BIG APPLE PART I," Greenwich and East Villages. A tour that includes sites said to be haunted by the ghosts of Peter Stuyvesant and Aaron Burr. Today at 1 P.M. Fee, $5. Sponsored by Adventure on a Shoestring. Reservations and meetingplace: (212) 265-2663. +"THE HAUNTED BIG APPLE PART II," Manhattan. A tour of "haunted midtown" including the Belasco Theater, where the late David Belasco is said to make appearances. Today at 3:30 P.M. Fee, $5. Sponsored by Adventure on a Shoestring. Reservations and meetingplace; (212) 265-2663. +"ALL HALLOWS EVE TOUR: GREEN-WOOD CEMETERY," Brooklyn. A tour of the historic cemetery that contains the final resting places of Louis Comfort Tiffany, Peter Cooper and Leonard Bernstein. Tomorrow at 10 A.M. Fee, $25. Sponsored by Cooper Union. Reservations and meetingplace: (212) 353-4198. +IRISH ELLIS ISLAND. A tour of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum as well as Castle Clinton, with an emphasis on Irish immigration. Meets tomorrow at noon at Castle Clinton National Monument in Battery Park. Fee, $15; $13 for students and the elderly. Sponsored by Big Onion Walking Tours. Reservations necessary: (212) 439-1090. +"GHOSTLY GREENWICH VILLAGE." A tour of some of the area's "haunted" sites including Mark Twain's house and the sites of public executions. Meets tomorrow at 6 P.M. at the Washington Square Arch. Fee, $10. Sponsored by Street Smarts N.Y. Information: (212) 969-8262. +"GREENWICH VILLAGE PAST AND PRESENT." The area as seen through the eyes of the writers and artists who have lived there. Meets tomorrow at 2 P.M. at the Washington Square Arch. Fee, $10. Sponsored by Street Smarts N.Y. Information: (212) 969-8262. +BROOKLYN HEIGHTS. A tour of parks in the area. Meets Sunday at 1:30 P.M. in front of Supreme Court, Borough Hall. Contribution, $1. Sponsored by the Friends of the Parks. +"FROM BEAUX-ARTS TO ART DECO IN THE FINANCIAL DISTRICT." A look at the early-20th-century buildings that tell the story of American big business. Meets Sunday at 11 A.M. in front of the National Museum of the American Indian, 1 Bowling Green. Fee, $17; 12 for students and the elderly. Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts. Registration: (212) 501-3013. +JEWISH LOWER EAST SIDE. A walk past a kosher winery, a bialy bakery and one of the largest synagogues in the area. Sunday at 3:30 P.M. Fee, $5; refreshments not included. Sponsored by Adventure on a Shoestring. Reservations and meetingplace: (212) 265-2663. +"HISTORIC LOWER MANHATTAN: CITY HALL TO THE BATTERY." A tour of the area called New Amsterdam by the Dutch, where the city's first skyscrapers appeared. Meets Sunday at 11 A.M. by the statue of Nathan Hale, Broadway and Murray Street. Fee, $12. Sponsored by Citywalks. Information: (212) 989-2456. +THE FAR WEST VILLAGE. A tour that combines the architecture, business and history of the area. Sunday at 11 A.M. Fee, $16. Sponsored by the 92d Street Y, at Lexington Avenue. Registration: (212) 996-1100. +"WALDORF-ASTORIA WALKING TOUR," Manhattan. A tour past of the historic buildings and mansions in the area. Meets Sunday at 2 P.M. at 550 Lexington Avenue, between 49th and 50th Streets. Fee, $10. Sponsored by New York City Cultural Walking Tours. Information: (212) 979-2388. +"BOSS TWEED AND LA GUARDIA'S NEW YORK," lower Manhattan. A tour of sites associated with the political leader as well as Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Moses. Meets Sunday at 2 P.M. at 110 Church Street. Fee, $10. Sponsored by Dr. Phil, New York Talks and Walks. Information: (718) 591-4741. +WALKS IN OLD CHELSEA. A tour of some of the "secret" spots of the neighborhood. Meets Sunday at 2 P.M. in front of the Flatiron Building, Broadway, at Fifth Avenue and West 23d Street. Fee, $10. Sponsored by Street Smarts N.Y. Information: (212) 969-8262. +"MORE TEEMING THAN BOMBAY: THE OLD JEWISH LOWER EAST SIDE." A look at the history, foods and architecture of the area. Meets Sunday at 1 P.M. at Straus Square, East Broadway and Essex and Canal Streets. Fee, $12. Sponsored by Joyce Gold History Tours of New York. Information: (212) 242-5762. +ABIGAIL ADAMS SMITH MUSEUM AND SUTTON PLACE, Manhattan. A tour of the museum and its neighborhood, which evolved from a working class area to an upscale residence. Sunday at 1 P.M. Fee, $25. Sponsored by Cooper Union. Information: (212) 353-4198. + +LOAD-DATE: October 31, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: ON THE STREET -- The Village Halloween Parade starts tonight at 6. (G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times) + +TYPE: Schedule + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +546 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 1, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +THE 1997 ELECTIONS; +In His Own Words + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 57 words + + +JAMES E. McGREEVEY + Referring to Gov. Christine Todd Whitman as he spoke to about 30 residents of a housing complex for elderly people in Newark yesterday. + "She gave insurance companies four premium increases in the last four years. It has doubled their income. Who here has seen their income double in the last four years?" + +LOAD-DATE: November 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Text + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +547 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 1, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +THE 1997 ELECTIONS: THE GOVERNOR; +Whitman Works to Shore Up Her Softer Areas of Support + +BYLINE: By FRANK BRUNI + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 598 words + +DATELINE: CRANFORD, N.J., Oct. 31 + +With the clock ticking down until Election Day and new polls showing that her re-election remains in doubt, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman turned her attention today to some of her softer areas of support, giving a speech on personal responsibility that seemed intended to appease social conservatives in the Republican Party and expressing her solidarity with minority voters who traditionally favor Democrats. +Mrs. Whitman, whose positions in favor of abortion and gay rights have alienated some fellow Republicans, told hundreds of teen-agers at Cedar Grove High School in Cedar Grove that she wanted to begin a dialogue with children in New Jersey about the importance of choosing between right and wrong. + Alluding to a number of widely publicized crimes by teen-agers in New Jersey over the last year, Mrs. Whitman said, "We as adults have not been doing a very good job of communicating to you and the people coming up after you about consequences and responsibility. +"When you make a decision and take an action, there are going to be consequences," she said. +Later, Mrs. Whitman stood on a dais outside the Oak Avenue School in Orange, a relatively poor city that has traditionally been a Democratic stronghold, and accepted endorsements from several local black leaders. +The words she chose to thank them tacitly acknowledged the broad spectrum of support she needs to win on Tuesday. +"To have people such as this come across party lines, step forward and be willing to back a Republican woman governor means that everything we've been doing over the last three-and-a-half years to help people is being recognized," Mrs. Whitman said. +"We didn't put policies in place that helped black people or white people or Oriental people," she said. +"We put them in place to help people. We didn't put them in place to help Democrats or Republicans or independents. We put them in place to help people." +The Governor made more than a half-dozen campaign stops in three counties in northern New Jersey today. For the most part, the events were short of speechifying and heavy on symbolism. +She teetered delicately on an undersized chair, looking like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, to read stories to young children at a day-care center in Bloomfield. She embraced elderly people who were waving red, white and blue pompoms at an assisted-living residence in Cranford. +And as she had been almost every day last week, Mrs. Whitman was flanked by prominent Republicans whose presence underlined her own stature. +The people accompanying her today were former Gov. Tom Kean and United States Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. +At a stop in Union, Mrs. Whitman announced that a major pharmaceutical company, Pharmacia & Upjohn, had decided to relocate its worldwide headquarters from London to New Jersey, though the exact place has not been determined. Mrs. Whitman framed the announcement with upbeat assessments of economic vigor in New Jersey during her administration. +Mrs. Whitman began the day in a more defensive posture, sparring with her Democratic challenger, State Senator James E. McGreevey, during a taping in New York City of a segment of WNBC-TV's "News Forum" that is scheduled to broadcast on Sunday. +In what was expected to be their last meeting before Election Day, the candidates turned to familiar points of contention: auto insurance rates and government debt. +But Mrs. Whitman jettisoned such prickly topics for the rest of the day, focusing instead on shaking hands and posing for photographs with just about anyone who strayed near her. + +LOAD-DATE: November 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +548 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 1, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +THE 1997 ELECTIONS: THE CHALLENGER; +McGreevey Given Counsel by Newark Voters + +BYLINE: By RONALD SMOTHERS + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 4; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 554 words + +DATELINE: NEWARK, Oct. 31 + +Even before State Senator James E. McGreevey walked in the door at most of his stops here today, it was clear that he was preaching to the converted. +"Attention," read the notice posted in the lobbies of two high-rise buildings for the elderly. "Come and meet Governor McGreevey." While some of the residents seemed more interested in the fruit baskets being handed out by Democratic workers supporting Mr. McGreevey's gubernatorial campaign, others saw value in Mr. McGreevey's presence. + "It's a nice gesture, you know, for someone to bring you something," said Verna Lillie Bridgeforth, one of the elderly residents at 1 Court Street. "But I think McGreevey's going to make it because everyone seems to like him." +At the campaign stops with senior citizens, as with others throughout the day, the 40-year-old Democratic candidate hit on his major campaign themes, criticizing Gov. Christine Todd Whitman's inaction in the face of high automobile insurance rates in the state and charging that her policies are at the root of local property tax increases. And he said the core-curriculum standards she had introduced into the state's schools were vague and inadequate. +"You are the next generation and I want to set standards of excellence and not mediocrity," he said to a gathering of students at Paramus High School. It was a theme he would repeat to the senior citizens, invoking their concern for their grandchildren. +In his appearances he alluded to the expected visit tomorrow by President Clinton to campaign with him. Mr. McGreevey also plans to campaign with Senator Robert G. Torricelli, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg and former Senator Bill Bradley over the weekend. These appearances are aimed at energizing the traditional Democratic voters in the state whose support for his candidacy was a rather anemic 56 percent, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll this week. +It was 88-year-old Annie McClanahan who seemed to genuinely buoy Mr. McGreevey as he paused to sit with her for a time in the lobby of the Newark apartment building where she has lived for 17 years. He asked her what her secret to longevity was and she answered, "Be good, kind, honest and work hard." It was the wisest thing he said he had heard in years, and Mrs. McClanahan, who will turn 89 on Nov. 4, then assured him, "You can't miss on Election Day." +Later in the day, Mr. McGreevey visited Councilman Luis Quintana's annual East Ward Halloween Party. Mr. Quintana said that Mr. McGreevey's message in the last days of campaigning had to be "an urban message" to heighten the contrast with Mrs. Whitman, who the Councilman said was more concerned with the suburbs. Mr. Quintana conceded that many in his district had deserted the Democrats four years ago to vote for Mrs. Whitman, but he said they were now disappointed with her and her policies. +Millie Mendez, an employee of the Newark Housing Authority, who was waiting to get into the party, said she had voted for Mrs. Whitman last time because of her anger at then-Gov. Jim Florio for increasing the state's income taxes. +"This year I'm mad at Whitman, especially because of the auto-insurance issue," she said, noting that the high cost of insurance was a particular problem in poorer, urban areas. "So this time I think I'll give McGreevey a chance." + +LOAD-DATE: November 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +549 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 2, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Elderly Seek To Keep Fit Longer And Reap Benefits + +BYLINE: By KATE STONE LOMBARDI + +SECTION: Section 14WC; Page 1; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1278 words + +DATELINE: RYE + +RAYMOND EHRENBERG'S hair was still damp from swimming laps in the pool. Trim in his maroon warm-up suit and seated in the fitness center at the Osborn, a retirement community here, Mr. Ehrenberg conceded that he had had to give up downhill skiing at the age of 82. Still, at 91, he swims at least three times a week, and when the weather permits he takes his sailboat out on weekends. +"I'm in pretty good shape," Mr. Ehrenberg said. + Nearby, Evan Johnson was bench pressing. On the wall next to the weight machine was posted a chart that showed heart-rate targets illustrating the level of exercise intensity appropriate to different age groups. When Mr. Johnson was asked his age, he indicated the poster, which only went as far as 80. +"See the chart?" he said to a visitor. "I'm not on it." +Mr. Ehrenberg and Mr. Johnson are part of a growing trend of older adults who are trading rocking chairs for walking shoes. Belying the notion that being old means being sedentary, more and more elderly men and women are exercising regularly. In doing so, doctors say, they are reaping benefits as close to the fabled fountain of youth as nature provides. +To be sure, this is not a population that wears spandex leotards and engages in high-impact aerobics while rap sounds thump out of speakers at ear-splitting levels. In general, moderate exercise under the supervision of a doctor is the optimal plan for older adults. +As with all age groups, there is a wide range of fitness and ability -- from 80-year-olds who enter marathons to 55-year-olds who become winded when they rise from a chair. But geriatricians and fitness experts agree that the benefits of exercise for older adults are far reaching and that there is some form of activity appropriate for everyone. +This year the Federal Government released the Surgeon General's Report on Physical Activity and Health, which advised everyone to get 30 minutes of moderate physical activity five days a week. Most important to the elderly was the report's suggestion that exercise need not be vigorous to be beneficial. +Experts say that while exercise cannot stop the aging process, it can prevent certain conditions and slow the onset of others. Among the many improvements in health and well-being for older people who take up exercise, the Surgeon General noted these: +*Physical activity can halve the risk of developing heart disease or stroke. +*Exercise lowers the risk of developing certain cancers. As at any age when exercise is started, it can increase the density of bones and reduce the risk of fractures. +*Older people who are active are less likely to develop diabetes than their sedentary peers. +*Stretching and regular moderate activity reduces arthritic pain and the need for medication. +*Mental health is improved with exercise, which has long been known to help people overcome depression. Insomnia is also helped by physical activity, as is memory. +Dr. William Martimucci, chief of geriatrics at United Hospital in Port Chester and the medical director at the Osborn, said that while the benefits of physical activity in older adults were indeed far reaching, it was important to keep in mind that the elderly face risks of certain illnesses associated with age, like heart disease. Before beginning any exercise program, an individual should talk to his doctor to get an appropriate pre-exercise assessment, which may include an exercise stress test. +"The degree of exercise that an older person could or should sustain is less than that of a younger one, excepting those individuals who are very aerobically fit," Dr. Martimucci said. "Obviously, jogging is not for everyone. An individual has to choose the type of exercise with their physician." +Dr. Martimucci said that while people tend to think of exercise only in terms of aerobics, weight training is increasingly recognized as beneficial to older adults. Not only does it improve muscle mass and bone strength, but weight-bearing exercises are also considered one of the best preventative activities for osteoporosis, he said. +The benefits of exercise are not confined to elderly adults like Mr. Ehrenberg and Mr. Johnson, who enjoy independence and health. Even the most frail elderly person can reap physical and emotional rewards from activity. At a recent exercise class in the nursing home division at the Osborn, participants sat in a semicircle of wheelchairs to get their daily workout. They stretched to the music of Vivaldi and tossed a ball back and forth while Irish jigs played. +One participant was in the early stages of a progressive, neurological disease. Another, Cecile Davidson, is blind. At 100, Lucille Canfield occasionally gets sleepy during class. But the mood in the room was upbeat, and the activity, though gentle, was restorative, said Susan Postal, activities director at the Osborn. +"The movement improves circulation and oxygenation, and the use of music makes it more enjoyable," Ms. Postal said. "Inevitably, people notice a change of mood from the beginning to end. They're revved up." +Ms. Postal said that even those who have Alzheimer's disease and other dementia disorders are able to enjoy the movement and music. She said one woman who came to class could not speak in comprehensible sentences but suddenly sang "You Are My Sunshine" clearly and on pitch. +Even those who are unable to work some part of their bodies can exercise other parts. Bob Cullen, the fitness director at the Osborn, said that people who need walkers on land can sometimes swim with relative ease. They can also use treadmills, which have rails for balance. Those who use wheelchairs can exercise their upper bodies. +While the younger population may exercise for esthetic reasons, for the elderly population, the key motivation is to improve the quality of their lives. At this stage, sculptured muscles or a flat abdomen are less compelling than being able to climb stairs more easily or get out of a chair without pain. +Dr. Martimucci said that for the very frail elderly even small improvements in medical conditions can have a large impact on everyday living. "Having an individual be more independent, for instance, to build strength in his upper elements, so he can transfer himself from bed to chair, can make a very big difference to an impaired individual." +Those who work in fitness are paying attention to population trends. Mirroring the national picture, the county's fastest-growing population group is the elderly. In 1970, there were 34,770 people older than 75 living in Westchester; by 1990 that number had grown to 56,067. The County Planning Department projects that by 2020, the number of elderly older 85, now 13,794, is expected to double. +With an eye on those numbers, the Y.M.C.A. in White Plains began its "Active Older Adults" program this fall, which includes water aerobics, low-impact exercise classes, strength training and special exercise classes for people suffering from arthritis. The music played in those classes is tailored to the tastes of an older population and substitutes show tunes for the pulsating rap usually heard in gyms. In addition, the older-adult program offers seminars covering issues like nutrition, getting started on exercise and protecting oneself from unscrupulous salespeople. +Formal exercise programs are not the only way to stay fit. Florence Adamson eschews classes but never misses her daily walk. With flushed cheeks after her rounds at the Osborn recently, she said: "I'm 102 and three-fourths. I love to walk, and I walk every day. I'm terribly lucky, and I'm very thankful. My daughter enjoys it too. She's 70." + +LOAD-DATE: November 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Fritzi Ughetta, exercising at the Osborn in Rye. (Susan Farley for The New York Times)(pg. 1); Robert Cullen directs exercises for residents at the Osborn retirement community in Rye. (Susan Farley for The New York Times)(pg. 19) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +550 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 2, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +A Garden For Adults Of Any Age + +BYLINE: By FRANCES CHAMBERLAIN + +SECTION: Section 14CN; Page 19; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1258 words + +A WOMAN at the East Shore Regional Adult Day Center in Branford was wheeled outside for a breath of fresh air one day a couple of years ago. She turned to her attendant, as Donald Hyatt, chairman of the board, tells it, and remarked how wonderful it was to be outdoors. +"This woman was ecstatic," Mr. Hyatt said. "She hadn't been outside in two or three months and all we had done was wheel her out in the driveway to look at the grass." + It's a lot more than grass these days. Her comment spurred the board, the home's director. Thomas Russell Romano, and an army of volunteers to transform a big field into a carefully designed garden with plenty of benches, serpentine walkways, shade trees, flowers, sculptures and a gazebo. +Two years after the wheelchair-bound woman expressed her pleasure in just sitting in the parking lot, the garden is finished, a setting for a recent party held in honor of those who had contributed, in work and materials, to the effort. +Eighteen people from the Regional Water Authority and several from People's Bank, coordinated by the United Way, spent the day weeding, raking, mowing and spreading mulch. They are part of a much larger cadre of volunteers at the center, a place for the elderly and physically or mentally challenged, who spend time reading, walking, singing and just visiting. +Adult day care, according to Mr. Romano, is a desperate need today. "Sixteen years ago I was finishing my master's degree in gerontology and I asked to be a resource person for a feasibility study here," he said. "There were 17 centers in the state in 1980, and so I visited them all." +The East Shore group got a Federal grant for $100,000 and hired Mr. Romano as director. He in turn hired staff and started programs in the basement of Branford's Baptist Church. Fourteen years ago the agency moved into the vacant Short Beach school building, and it now has about 70 people enrolled. +Mr. Romano said he was determined to have people of all ages. "I don't like to see segregation," he explained. "We started off with senior citizens and then got other funding. The majority of our clients are frail and elderly, probably 60 percent, but 20 percent are in the 40 to 60 age range, with psychiatric problems, and 10 percent are younger people with cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury and mental retardation." +The new garden is especially helpful for Alzheimer's patients, Mr. Romano said. "If you keep an Alzheimer's patient indoors, they don't know where to go," he said. "The garden gives them a chance for fresh air and exercise. One of the last things to go, for an Alzheimer's patient, is his or her ability to walk." +The center serves a challenged but still independent population. "There was an 80-year-old woman living in a retirement village," Mr. Romano recalled. "She had Parkinson's disease, but didn't belong in a nursing home. Her husband couldn't care for her all the time, so a home health aide helped out some; our bus picked her up on other days, and he could have time to do things for himself." +Another typical person at the center might be a 95-year-old who is still living independently but forgets to take his medications. Then there is John Greenleaf of Clinton, who suffered traumatic brain injury in an accident. Mr. Greenleaf, now 49, was in a coma for four years, and, although he is restricted to a wheelchair, he is at the center four days a week for activities, socialization and to provide some respite for his mother. +"Our service costs $7.95 per hour, with a sliding scale, and we provide door-to-door transportation, breakfast, a full-time registered nurse, program activities, and a full meal at lunchtime," Mr. Romano said. "Thank God we have fine nursing homes, when people need them, but adult day care saves the state millions of dollars that would have otherwise been spent on nursing care." +The East Shore Center has won its share of awards. In 1985 the Administration on Aging's Project Independence Award for Connecticut went to the center, the same year that Mr. Romano won a Certificate of Award from the state's Department on Aging. In 1987 and 1989 the Friends of East Shore Regional Adult Day Center received a Congressional Award. Mr. Hyatt, the board chairman, is a retired NBC producer whom Mr. Romano describes as "my mentor." +Friends of Adult Day Care, the center's volunteer organization, coordinates fund raising events and activities for those at the center, and donates as much as $3,000 each year from a raffle. The Homemaker Thrift Shop, another volunteer organization, gives proceeds to the Visiting Nurse Association and the adult center -- as much as $12,000 per year, Mr. Romano said. +In addition, the center benefits from student interns and community volunteers. "Several years ago we had many more volunteers," Mr. Romano said, "but this is the sandwich generation. People are working, taking care of elderly parents and children." +One special volunteer during the development of the new garden was Tom Piscatelli of Branford who worked on his Eagle Scout badge by helping out. But in general, Mr. Romano said, "We don't need special talents; we just need someone to take a walk in the new garden or read to someone." +The center employees six part-time bus drivers, four full-time and four part-time certified nurse's aides, one full-time recreational therapist, one registered nurse, the director, an assistant director, one counselor and a part-time development director. +The nursing care is an important part of what adult day care does, Mr. Romano noted. "If you go through a home care agency it costs about $22 per hour to hire someone to give a bath, or $12 to $14 per hour to hire a companion," he explained. "We are a medical/ social model, certified by the state, which means we can provide both the social activities and fulfill the medical needs of clients. One lady had to be catheterized four times a day. We were able to do it here twice daily, for free, saving her the $95 fee for each time the home care agency would have to do it. The fee for changing a dressing is about $75 to $95 per visit; our nurse does it just as part of the daily routine." +A nursing home might cost $50,000 to $90,000 per year, with the average at about $70,000. The state, then, could pay $23,000 per year for seven days of adult day care each week, with some home health care, and save a total of $50,000 per person, Mr. Romano estimated. +East Shore Day Center was a forerunner in the adult day care field, Mr. Romano said. "The next evolution is overnight respite care," he added. He described the case of a young couple expecting a baby, who were trying to deal with one parent suffering from Alzheimer's and another who had a heart attack the day the young mother went into labor. "It took me hours to find a place for the elderly father to stay while the young couple had their baby," Mr. Romano said. +"The fastest growing segment of the population is 85-plus," Mr. Romano added. "We need the wherewithal to care for the elderly in the future. People live longer, but they want to live in dignity." +Or, as Mr Hyatt put it, "The question is what adult care is all about. This runs the gamut from those who are disabled to those who are just lonely. Many need companionship and sociability. We fit into the health care revolution because we take care of so many people who would otherwise be in homes, a depressing alternative. People say 'This is my home away from home.' They get a sense of community here." + +LOAD-DATE: November 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: At the East Shore Regional Adult Day Center, exercises led by Rosemary Hayens, top center. Above: Donald Hyatt, chairman, gardening with Kate Powell. Left: Thomas Russell Romano, center's director, with John Greenleaf. Below left: Arlene Driska and Grace Lee, seated, in crafts class. (Photographs by Thomas McDonald for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +551 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 2, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +PEARCE, HENRY + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 45; Column 3; Classified + +LENGTH: 778 words + +PEARCE-Henry, 89 years young. Loving Husband of Sally; Adoring Father of Dr. David and Linda and Dr. Norton Rosensweig; Proud Grandfather of Jonathan and Laurie Rosensweig and Julie and Paul Schwartz. Founding partner of Pearce Mayer & Greer in 1928, devoted his career to Real Estate Philanthropy and his Family. Memorial services will be held at the "Riverside", 76th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, on Monday, November 3rd, at 11:15 A.M. +PEARCE-Henry. The Board, staff and members of the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged (JASA) note with profound sorrow the passing of our beloved mentor, friend, colleague and supporter, Henry Pearce. He joined the JASA Board shortly after the organization's founding and was instrumental in guiding its growth. As Co-Chair of the Executive and Nominating Committees, he had a profound impact on the evolution of JASA's policies and programs. He gave his love generously and was loved by all who were privledged to know him and share in his dreams. He was persistent, caring, kind, funny and totally committed to JASA. He personally recruited most of the members of the Board of Trustees, for when Henry asked you to do something it was difficult, if not impossible, to say no. Through programs he helped initiate, his comitment to older volunteers, his inspiring pep talks to his colleagues and friends, his philanthropy, but most of all through his personal example, he helped us all to better recognize the capacity of older persons to continue to grow, create and contribute to society's well being. With his brilliant mind, passionate heart, boundless energy, and love of life he continually pushed us to do more and to do better. He faced his illness with dignity and courage, and remained active and vital until the end. We will miss him. But we shall be guided by his legacy as we seek to perpetuate his vision of service to older persons. Our hearts go out to his beloved and devoted bride of more than 60 years, Sally, and to his children and grandchildren. Marilyn F. Friedman, President Steven M. Jacobson, Chairman David J. Stern, Exec VP +PEARCE-Henry. The officers, leadership and staff of UJA-Federation of New York mourn the passing of Henry Pearce, a dear friend and dedicated supporter of our mission around the world. Together with his beloved wife, Sally, a former officer of UJA-Federation and longtime board member and community leader, the impact of their extraordinary philanthropic activities will continue to be enormous. Henry was involved for many years in our Real Estate Divison and was a founding trustee of the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged (JASA), a beneficiary agency of UJA-Federation. He and Sally established a generous fund to promote volunteerism within the Jewish commuinty. They also funded a kindergarten in Israel which bears their name and which they loved to visit together. To Sally, to their children Linda and Norton Rosensweig and David Pearce, to their grandchildren J.P., Julie and Lori, to his brother Leon, and to the the nieces, nephews and friends who loved and admired him, we send our deepest sympathies. Judith Stern Peck Board Chair Louise B. Greilsheimer President Charles Borrok Chair, Real Estate Division Stephen D. Solender Executive V.P. +PEARCE-Henry. The Board of Trustees and staff of the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services acknowledge with great sorrow the death of Henry Pearce, husband of Sally Pearce, our devoted trustee. Henry was an inspired leader of the Jewish community and supported Sally's important work with our agency, including leadership of the Sally Pearce Passover Outreach Program. We extend our affection and heartfelt sympathy to Sally and her family. Seymour R. Askin, Jr, Pres. Joseph S. Kaplan, Pres-Elect Fredric W. Yerman, Chairman of the Board Gladys Wiesenthal, Chair, Volunteer Services Divisional Committee Alan B. Siskind, Ph.D., Executive Vice President +PEARCE-Henry. Older brother of our late founding partner Saul Pearce. Henry was more than a client, friend and inspiration. Everything he touched he infused with energy, wit and integrity. We share with Sally and his wonderful family a sense of tremendous loss. Robinson Silverman Pearce Aronsohn & Berman, LLP +PEARCE-Henry. The Officers, Board of Governors and Members of Metropolis Country Club mourn the passing of our esteemed member, and extend our heartfelt condolences to his wife, Sally, and his family. Murray B. Hirsch, President Howard Ecker, Secretary +PEARCE-Henry. A dynamo in the real estate industry, a good friend whose advice I cherished. I will miss him. My condolences to Sally and the family. Benjamin Duhl + +LOAD-DATE: November 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +552 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 3, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +THE 1997 ELECTIONS: THE VOTERS; +In Rutherford, the Disgruntlement Factor + +BYLINE: By EVELYN NIEVES + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 4; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 988 words + +DATELINE: RUTHERFORD, N.J., Oct. 31 + +At Station Square, thick with morning train commuters en route to New York, the topic of the hour was the election, and John Martin, an insurance and mutual funds broker, was getting grumpy. +With the New Jersey governor's race reaching its end, he was still undecided about his vote and was becoming unhappy with the choices. Mr. Martin, president of the East Rutherford School Board, said the three chief candidates had spent too much time on auto insurance rates. "The person who I'm going to vote for is the person who is going to do the most for the New Jersey school system," he said. + But Mr. Martin, a registered Republican with a daughter in high school, said he could not figure out who the education candidate was. He voted for Mrs. Whitman four years ago, but has been unimpressed with her on education. He said her rivals, State Senator James E. McGreevey, a Democrat, and Murray Sabrin, a Libertarian, seemed to have glossed over the subject. "I guess I'm disgruntled," Mr. Martin said. +He has company. A sampling of voters in this tree-shaded borough nine miles from Manhattan revealed quite a few grumpy undecideds in the last days before the election. In random interviews over two days with two dozen voters from Rutherford and nearby communities, eight said they were completely undecided, while the rest were equally divided between Mrs. Whitman and Someone Other Than Whitman. +This says a great deal about the election, since Rutherford, in must-win Bergen County, is a political bellwether. Mrs. Whitman won here by a narrow margin four years ago, mirroring her victory in the state. President Clinton carried the borough last year, while George Bush won four years before that. Among its registered voters, Republicans and Democrats are far outnumbered by undeclared voters and independents, reflecting the state's political composition. +The Governor would not be pleased to know that of the eight completely undecided voters, six voted for her before, as did four who said they would vote for someone other than her. +Mr. McGreevey would not be happy to hear that his support here looks soft. While he has seized on high auto insurance rates and property taxes as big campaign issues, voters seemingly have not connected him to the solution. Of the eight voters who said they have decided to vote for someone other than Mrs. Whitman, only four planned to vote for the Democrat. The others were still weighing their options. +Rutherford (population 18,000) is like several New Jersey suburbs rolled into one: it has blue-collar neighborhoods with two-bedroom Cape Cods, and fancy enclaves with $600,000 Victorians; it has old money, new immigrants, formerly urban professionals with young children and senior citizens with empty nests. But voters interviewed seem to share the same concerns: property taxes, education, high auto insurance rates and crime, in that order. +Over the last four years, property taxes have been climbing, so that someone with a property assessed at $190,000 pays $5,176 a year, $635 more than in 1993. Yet many voters said they doubted that any of the candidates would be able to change matters. For them, their decision seemed to boil down to how much the administration deserved blame or credit for the state of the state. +Take Susan McConville and Gerry Bellotti, administrators at Fairleigh Dickinson University having breakfast at the Boiling Springs Diner. Both said New Jersey was in average shape. For Ms. McConville, a registered Democrat who voted Democratic four years ago, this meant the glass was half empty. She said she planned to vote for Mr. McGreevey, largely because "I haven't been satisfied with the job Whitman has done." For Mr. Bellotti, a Republican, the glass was at least half full. "She hasn't done a bad job," he said of Mrs. Whitman. +Others who gave the Governor high marks, like Norman Stampone, a retired truck driver, praised her dedication, sincerity and efforts. "That other guy raised taxes in his town 43 percent," he said, quoting one of the Governor's campaign ads that attacks Mr. McGreevey's record as the Mayor of Woodbridge. +But those who gave the Governor the worst grades seized on her 30 percent cut in income taxes. "I don't understand how people could think the Governor could cut income taxes and not have it come out of somewhere else," said Alex Thomson, a psychotherapist and self-described "old hippie" liberal Democrat. "I call it typical Republican voodoo." +Ann Perry, having her hair done at the Permanent Solution beauty parlor, would agree. To her, the Way Things Are ("car insurance and property taxes sky high") are so far from the Way Things Ought to Be ("reasonable and well managed") that Mrs. Whitman had to be stopped. "You want to know who I'm voting for on Tuesday? Not Whitman! Not Whitman!" she said, flapping her arms so wildly that her colorist had to warn her that she would leak auburn onto her forehead. +But while Ms. Perry, who voted for Gov. Jim Florio four years ago and Bob Dole for president last year, had nothing good to say about Mrs. Whitman, she had nothing at all to say about Mr. McGreevey. She said she was as likely to choose Mr. Sabrin in casting her Not Whitman vote. "I might make up my mind in the voting booth," she said. "It wouldn't be the first time." +Mary Bolobanic, Ms. Perry's hairdresser, had a similar notion. While she voted for Mrs. Whitman before, she now blames her for making education jobs disappear. "I don't know what the Governor has done, exactly," she said, "but she cut programs. I know it's her fault." +Still, Ms. Bolobanic admired her ads. "She's very attractive and she seems sincere," she said. +"Don't believe her," Ms. Perry said. "There's only one candidate who is really good. He's brilliant." +"McGreevey?" Ms. Bolobanic said. +"It's that Mayor Giuliani," Ms. Perry said. "I wish I lived in New York so I could vote for him." + +LOAD-DATE: November 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Norman Stampone: Retired truck driver -- He praised the Goveror and said, "That other guy raised taxes in his town 43 percent."; Mary Bolobanic: Hairdresser -- On education, she said, "I don't know what the Governor has done, exactly, but she cut programs. I know it's her fault." (Photographs by Norman Y. Lono for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +553 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 3, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +In Congress and White House, Debate Begins on How to Use Future Budget Surpluses + +BYLINE: By RICHARD W. STEVENSON + +SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1226 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 + +After decades in which huge Federal budget deficits cast a shadow over politics and the economy, Congress and the White House face the possibility that the Government will begin running surpluses in the next few years, and a heated debate is already breaking out over what to do with the money. +Many conservative Republicans want to dedicate all or most of any surpluses to paying down the mountain of debt accumulated over decades of wars, recessions and fiscal profligacy. Other Republicans are pushing for tax cuts. + Members of both parties are eagerly promoting more spending on roads, bridges and other politically appealing construction projects. Many Democrats lean toward additional spending on education and health programs. +Both White House officials and members of Congress are pondering how surpluses could help address the looming shortfall in financing for Social Security retirement benefits and the Medicare system of health insurance for the elderly. +That the debate is taking place at all strikes some officials as premature, given that the budget deficit, while falling rapidly, has not been eliminated and may never be if the economy falters. Even if the economy remains robust, just talking seriously about surpluses could erode the political will needed to bring the budget into balance, they said. +"We need to stop hyperventilating and complete the job of balancing the budget," said Representative John R. Kasich, the Ohio Republican who is chairman of the House Budget Committee. +The rapidly improving fiscal situation has nonetheless opened the door to a wide-ranging consideration of policy and political priorities as the glow of prosperity is beginning to alter the way official Washington is addressing the nation's long-term problems. +The deficit for the Government fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 was $22.6 billion, its lowest level since the early 1970's. If the economy remains strong, many analysts say, the budget could show a surplus within the next several years and continue to do so for years to come. +"For 15 years or more, the most important question you could ask about a public policy idea was what its effect was going to be on the budget deficit," said Franklin D. Raines, the White House budget director. "Now you have to ask what an idea's contribution to the country is going to be and how does that compare to other options." +In its broadest terms, the debate is dominated by two camps. One considers reducing the national debt to be the best use of any surplus, likening the nation's fiscal condition to that of a consumer who has learned not to use a credit card so much but still must muster the discipline to pay off the card's balance. The national debt is $5.3 trillion, and interest payments on it account for 15 percent of all Federal spending. +The other camp believes that there are other more pressing uses for the money, like tax cuts, transportation projects, higher Pentagon spending, school system improvements and access to medical care. +"Maintaining a surplus for use in reducing the national debt is good policy but bad politics," said Robert D. Reischauer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and former director of the Congressional Budget Office. +"It would help increase the productivity of the work force and national living standards, help keep interest rates down and significantly reduce the fraction of the total budget that goes to debt service," he said. "But those types of benefits are very distant and diffuse, and politicians want concrete rewards and immediate ones. So it's natural for this debate to begin, and it's likely to intensify." +When Speaker Newt Gingrich presented his views on how to use the surplus to the House Budget Committee several weeks ago, he provided a perhaps unintentional look at how expansive a political appetite there is for new and expensive initiatives. +Mr. Gingrich started by saying that Congress should do whatever it takes, including cutting Federal spending further, to eliminate the annual deficit and push the budget into surplus. Then, he said, the country should push to run an annual surplus "large enough that a reasonable recession doesn't stop it" for use in paying off the national debt. +But Mr. Gingrich went on to lay claim to a slice of any surpluses for other uses, starting with a tax cut every year. Then he called for increased spending on science, the military and transportation. And last, he noted Congress's responsibility to shore up the Social Security and Medicare programs. +Mr. Kasich responded, somewhat wryly, by telling Mr. Gingrich that his proposals were "a tall order, you will have to admit, for a surplus that is yet to materialize" and that any surpluses that do materialize might never be big enough to pay for Mr. Gingrich's entire wish list. +"I think you are pushing the envelope with what you propose, but nevertheless, I think it is the kind of debate we need to have," Mr. Kasich told Mr. Gingrich. +There is no shortage of proposals to debate. Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio and Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan, both Republicans, have introduced a bill that would set aside any revenue collected by the Government beyond that projected in the balanced budget deal negotiated by Congress and President Clinton earlier this year. The money would be reserved primarily for tax cuts or to pay for the costs of a fundamental overhaul of the tax code, another Republican priority. But the legislation would bar the use of any of the money for new spending programs. +Representative Mark W. Neumann of Wisconsin, a Republican, has introduced a bill that would cap increases in Federal spending at one percentage point below the rate of increase in tax revenues and mandate that two-thirds of the resulting surplus be applied to paying off the national debt and the other third to tax cuts. +"I feel pretty strongly that we have a moral and ethical responsibility to pay off the debts we've run up in the last 15 years," Mr. Neumann said. +But Representative Bud Shuster, a Republican from Pennsylvania who is chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, is leading a push for more spending on highways and other transportation projects. +Democrats in Congress, wary of being tagged as tax-and-spend liberals, have shied away from detailed proposals for increased spending. But their leaders, including Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, have made clear that they see health, education and transportation as priorities. +The White House has taken a hard line against using any unexpectedly high tax revenues to finance spending programs before the budget is balanced. But Administration officials have begun meeting to discuss how to use any consistent surpluses. Officials said the options included things like tax incentives to reducing the emissions that cause global warming, more spending on education, training and health care, and getting an early start on fixing Social Security. +"Our general approach," said Gene Sperling, the director of the White House's National Economic Council, "is to take a deep breath, don't spend money you don't have and, if it does turn out that you have sustainable surpluses, to think long and hard about what would be best for the economy and average families." + +LOAD-DATE: November 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: November 4, 1997, Tuesday + + CORRECTION: +An article yesterday about a debate over what should be done with a possible budget surplus misattributed a quotation in response to Speaker Newt Gingrich's proposals at a House Budget Committee hearing. The speaker -- who called Mr. Gingrich's proposals "a tall order, you will have to admit, for a surplus that has yet to materialize" -- was Representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the committee, not Representative John R. Kasich, the Ohio Republican who is the committee's chairman. +"I think you are pushing the envelope with what you propose," Mr. Spratt said, "but, nevertheless, I think it is the kind of debate we need to have." + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +554 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 4, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Science Watch; +Churchgoing May Aid Health + +BYLINE: By CORNELIA DEAN + +SECTION: Section F; Page 4; Column 6; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 285 words + +REGULAR attendance at religious services does a lot for the soul, but now researchers at Duke University Medical Center say it may help the body as well. +In a survey of older North Carolinians, the researchers found that those who attended services at least once a week were much less likely to have high blood levels of interleukin-6, an immune system protein associated with many age-related diseases. + The researchers, Dr. Harold Koenig and Dr. Harvey Cohen, said they could not explain the findings but suggested that attending services might help counteract stress. +"Perhaps religious participation enhances immune functioning by yet unknown mechanisms, such as through feelings of belonging, togetherness, even perhaps the experience of worship and adoration," Dr. Koenig said. +The researchers said they studied interleukin-6 because it was a good marker for a number of conditions, including some cancers, autoimmune disorders and certain viral diseases. Dr. Cohen said his earlier research had shown an association between high levels of the immune system protein and difficulty with routine tasks like walking, dressing and cooking. +The researchers discounted the possibility that their findings might be skewed because healthy people would be more likely to attend services. They said many of the participants in their study were regulars at church despite severe disabilities. +The study, reported in the October issue of The International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine, involved 1,718 adults over age 65, who were some of the 4,000 North Carolinians participating in a larger study, financed by the National Institute on Aging, on the health of the elderly. CORNELIA DEAN + +LOAD-DATE: November 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Nurit Karlin) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +555 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 4, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +THE 1997 ELECTIONS: THE GOVERNOR; +Vote, and Stay With Party, Whitman Tells Republicans + +BYLINE: By MELODY PETERSEN + +SECTION: Section B; Page 8; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 509 words + +DATELINE: LACEY TOWNSHIP, N.J., Nov. 3 + +On the final stops of her 10-day bus tour, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman worked on shoring up her Republican base today, repeatedly urging party members to vote and not to meander to a third party. +At most of her stops, Mrs. Whitman was clearly in friendly territory. And she often gave a thumbs-up sign, showing her confidence. + At the Lacey Township fire hall, Terry Farina paused from pouring coffee for the senior citizens in the crowd and reached up to touch the Governor's cheek as she passed by. +"I wanted to know if she remembered me," Ms. Farina explained, referring to having shaken the Governor's hand at a parade. +And at a stop at the fire hall in Whiting, Catherine Kenny, 72, shook Mrs. Whitman's hand and said, "We'll be out there for you." +"We believe in her," Mrs. Kenny told a reporter later. "There's something about her. She comes across as very honest." +Talking to the mostly Republican crowd of 300 people jammed into the Lacey fire hall, Mrs. Whitman said that voters should not believe the television advertisements of Murray Sabrin, the Libertarian Party's candidate, who has been attracting the attention of some of the Republicans' most conservative members. +"All that you are hearing is just garbage," Mrs. Whitman told the crowd. "It's not true. But we need your help in getting that message out, making sure that everybody understands how important tomorrow's election is, and what it's really about." +While conservative Republicans rallied around Mrs. Whitman in 1993, some are now quiet or are even fighting to defeat her. Members of the Christian Coalition, for example, who were angered by her veto of a ban on certain late-term abortions, have been urging Republicans to vote for Mr. Sabrin or Richard J. Pezzullo, the Conservative Party candidate, both of whom oppose abortion. +Mrs. Whitman told about 300 supporters gathered at the Monmouth County Hall of Records in Freehold: "We need your help, we need your votes, we need your neighbors' votes and your families' votes." Her voice hoarse from weeks of campaigning, she went on, "We want to keep this state on a road to a brighter future." +As her red-and-blue campaign bus rolled some 200 miles through New Jersey today, Mrs. Whitman benefited from the perks of office as the local police stopped traffic so that the bus and the press corps following her could make it to her eight scheduled stops on time. +Her day began at the train station in Hoboken, where she greeted early morning commuters heading to their jobs in Manhattan. Her night ended with a rally with Hunterdon County Republicans in Flemington, not far from her farm in Oldwick. +At the Freehold rally, Tom Sichort of Egg Harbor City said he had come because he was told that Mrs. Whitman had found some money to help the annual Senior Olympics. Mr. Sichort, 74, a speed walker and horseshoe thrower, said, "We got the call to come up because she was giving a donation." +Of Mrs. Whitman, he said, "You can always complain about a few things, but I think she's done quite well." + +LOAD-DATE: November 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +556 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 5, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Studies Show Overall Value In Air Bags, Despite Deaths + +BYLINE: By MATTHEW L. WALD + +SECTION: Section A; Page 18; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 448 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 + +Even though air bags have killed dozens of children, old people and short people, they are still a benefit over all, according to a study published today by researchers at Harvard University who have found that that benefit is as large as that of common medical procedures that cost the same. +But the study made clear that the balance of costs and benefits for passenger-side air bags was considerably less favorable than for driver air bags. + A second study, by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, found that for 1992-1995, passengers in the right front seat were 18 percent less likely to die in head-on collisions if the car had air bags, although children under 10 had a 34 percent higher risk of dying in such cars. Both studies were published in The Journal of the American Medical Association today. +The Harvard study showed that installing driver and passenger air bags in all cars, which costs about $400 each, was about as expensive, in terms of lives saved, as many medical screenings, said the lead author, John D. Graham, a professor of policy and decision sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health. The authors said their study was the first peer-reviewed scientific analysis of costs and benefits. +It was also a cold numerical look at a topic that has been the subject of emotional hearings in response to cases in which small children were killed by air bags that deployed in fender-benders, some at less than 10 miles an hour. The controversy has led the Government to consider letting mechanics disconnect air bags, and auto makers have asked for a change in the rules that could lead to air bags that inflate more slowly and less dangerously. +Safety advocates, including Mr. Graham, point out that air bags are the first Government-ordered equipment that increases risk for a large segment of the population, children. Researchers also say that statistically, air bags have little or no benefit for people over 65. +The study employed a counting system widely used in health-care planning, in which researchers calculated the years of life that were saved or lost through air bags. For adults whose lives were saved, researchers said that on average, 40 years of life were added; for each child killed, 80 years of life were subtracted. Researchers also subtracted a small number of years from the adult total to account for adults who survived with permanent injuries, which reduced the quality of their lives. +The cost, per "quality-adjusted life year," was $24,000 for drivers and $61,000 for passengers, although the researchers said that the passenger figure could be reduced by $10,000 by getting children out of the front seat. + +LOAD-DATE: November 5, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +557 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 6, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +German Court Rejects Claims of 21 Auschwitz Slave Laborers + +BYLINE: By ALAN COWELL + +SECTION: Section A; Page 5; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 561 words + +DATELINE: BONN, Nov. 5 + +In a ruling likely to dim the hopes of thousands of survivors of forced labor in the Nazi era, a state court here today rejected a vast majority of claims by a group of elderly Jewish women seeking payment for their work as slaves at Auschwitz. +Of a total of 22 claims, Judge Heinz Sonnenberger upheld only one, awarding $8,600 to Rywka Merin, a woman from Poland who emigrated to Israel in the late 1960's. She missed her chance to apply for payment under Germany's Federal Compensation Law, adopted in 1953, because she lived in a Soviet-bloc country at the time. + Under that law, Germany has paid $58 billion in reparations to survivors of Nazi persecution. Judge Sonnenberger ruled against the other claimants -- now living in Israel, Canada, the United States and Germany -- on the ground that they had already received payments under the compensation law. +"The claims of the other women are not justified, because they all received compensation under the Federal Compensation Law and some are still receiving pensions," the judge said. "No damage claims can be paid alongside this law -- not even for slave labor." +The case, which took five years to reach today's conclusion, was seen by the German authorities as a potential precedent for thousands of other survivors. +Millions of people, many of them Jews, were forced to work under murderous conditions for German private companies sustaining Hitler's war effort with vehicles, synthetic rubber and fuel. +While the authorities have insisted that claims for slave labor itself -- as opposed to damages caused by injury or incarceration -- are invalid, Judge Sonnenberger said in his ruling that the question "is a political issue for which lawmakers could find a new ruling." +The 22 women who brought the court case against the current German Government -- as the legal successor to the Nazi regime -- originally came from Hungary and Poland and were forced to work at the Union Werke munitions plant, part of the Auschwitz complex of death camps and factories. +They were represented in Germany by Klaus von Munchhausen, a college lecturer from the Institute for the Study of Genocide and Xenophobia at Bremen University. He took on their cause after meeting one of the former Union Werke workers during a vacation in Israel 12 years ago. +Mr. von Munchhausen, who said he would appeal today's ruling, maintains that some 30,000 former slave laborers have never received compensation. Since the current court proceedings opened, 2 of the 22 claimants, all in their 70's, have died. The claims they made were for up to $39,000 each. +Mr. von Munchhausen said he believed that the ruling would help some other former slave laborers claim pensions, but not all. "I am very disappointed," he said. "All foreign slave laborers have a right to remuneration. We do not agree that a court can rule them out." +By the end of World War II, Albert Speer, Hitler's armaments minister, had turned the slave labor system into a brutal colossus employing at least seven million people. +Speer and some German industrialists, including the steel magnate Alfried Krupp, were sentenced at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal for using slave labor. The issue has remained contentious in the postwar era, with some hugely successful companies paying only modest reparations and others paying nothing. + + +LOAD-DATE: November 6, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +558 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 8, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Review/Fashion; +3 Thinking Designers Outdo Themselves + +BYLINE: By ANNE-MARIE SCHIRO + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 3; Style Desk; Fashion Page + +LENGTH: 1093 words + +Each collection challenges the designer to make clothes that are good enough to reap praise from the press, to be photographed by magazines, and to be bought in quantity by stores. Of course, some designers have sufficient financial clout to advertise widely, which assures them of a certain acceptance even in a weak season. +But beyond all that, there are designers who test themselves in other ways. They want to outdo themselves each season, to propel fashion forward by devising new ways of working those few yards of fabric, and if in the process they manage to tempt women to covet clothes they don't really need, well, that's one of the aims of high fashion, isn't it? + Any woman who cares about fashion should be tempted by the fresh ideas that walked the runways of three thinking designers who are never satisfied with what they did the previous season. +Geoffrey Beene proved himself yet again the designer's designer, a man who can show the others how it should be done. +Calvin Klein continued to experiment with fabric, turning out clothing so ethereal it might have been sewn by invisible hands. +And Isaac Mizrahi displayed a new maturity as he turned away from jokes and gimmicks and toward making serious clothes. +An unusual thing happened in the Beene showroom at the end of yesterday morning's show. As Mr. Beene retreated backstage after taking a brief bow, the photographers shouted "Bravo," inspiring the audience to a fresh surge of applause, which built in a crescendo, drawing the surprised designer -- a notoriously shy man -- back into the room. It was, as they say in the fashion world, a moment. It was as if the people present suddenly awoke to the fact that they had just seen something truly special after a week in which such treats were rare. +In fact, a Geoffrey Beene show is always special, but every so often he scales a new height. This time, he seemed to be telling the world that anything some other designer can do, he can do better, whether it's a jacket that wraps to the side, a skirt that folds back on itself, an asymmetrical neckline or a dress that combines sheer and opaque fabrics. But he also did something else: he injected youth into a collection that in recent years has tended to look mature by today's standards. +Mr. Beene didn't desert his older customers. He supplied plenty of the impeccable suits and covered-up dresses they prefer, but he put striped T-shirts under those suits and showed plenty of bare arms for the well-toned. +He also made a strong case for the dress, showing both day and night versions of calf-skimming silk jerseys with tiny tops and softly flared skirts. They came in pretty shades of blue, pink and ivory as well as gray and had waistlines defined by narrow Lucite belts trimmed with Lucite flowers. An evening version glowed in lime green with yellow outlining the low V neckline and a cutout triangle in back. +Sheer organza jackets topped striped T-shirts and slim short skirts for a slightly askew take on sportswear. And Mr. Beene's sense of whimsy surfaced in jackets printed with circus performers and animals, in giant-size jagged rickrack trimmings, in two child-size gloved hands beaded near the shoulders of a black and white dress, and in bracelets that looked like french cuffs (or were they french cuffs worn as bracelets?). +Evening dresses were as varied as a column of blood-red satin with a sheer back and an organza dance dress with a tight bodice of wine with giant white dots and a full skirt of red with white dots floating over a narrower skirt of black and white dots. +The mood at Calvin Klein's show, though in a huge loft space, was more romantic, but not in an obvious way. The clothes were light and airy, devoid of color except for a few injections of pale blue, yellow, pink and peach for evening. +Models wafted by in loose dresses and skirts of georgette, parachute silk or cotton sheeting with hems that either turned under or had delicate drawstrings. Suits were in lightweight wool voile and had unlined, totally unstructured jackets and pants with elastic waistbands or dropped waistlines with a narrow yoke. Sweaters were as thin as stockings and were in fact knitted on hosiery machines. +Mr. Klein said before the show that he had been inspired by athletic wear and classic American sportswear. But the results were anything but classic or expected. The designer was exploring new ground, as he has in recent seasons, by moving away from stark minimalism, not by adding ornamentation, but by seeking a fresh way to handle fabric. +Anoraks were of parachute silk, T-shirts of ruched silk georgette or gauze. And there was a new take on the pants suit: a shirt, sometimes sleeveless, sometimes double-breasted, often short-sleeved, was made of stretch wool voile and tucked into matching pants. As a variation, the jacket, equally light in weight, was cropped to end where the low-slung pants started. They looked like a perfect way to go to the office, or anywhere else, next spring and summer. +But it was those airborne dresses that made the deepest impression, with touches like uneven hemlines, hand-ruching, intentional wrinkling, insertions of sheer floating panels and ingenious wrap-and-tie techniques that may present quite a puzzle in the dressing room. +Isaac Mizrahi was also experimenting with fabric, but rather than setting it free to billow away from the body, he tugged it close and wrapped it snugly. He cut some suit jackets so small they looked shrunken. He said last week that losing weight had led him to think about pulling clothes tight for a sleek, elegant look. +He had also been thinking about ancient Greece and Rome, he said, and that led to wrapping the clothes with narrow stringlike ties. He might also have been thinking about Clare McCardell, who borrowed the idea from the ancients before Mr. Mizrahi was born. Or of Ann Demeulemeester, who has done quite a lot of side-wrapped jackets. But to his credit, Mr. Mizrahi worked out his own ways of using the technique, so his clothes don't really look like anyone else's. +Some other ideas in the fashion wind that he made his own include corselets, which he put under jackets or in lace over a T-shirt; the mannish oversize pants suit, which he scaled down, and the wrap skirt, which he adapted for trousers in a modified form. +The show marked an interesting point in Mr. Mizrahi's career, highlighting his transition to a more ambitious level to match the changes in his life as he becomes more involved in films and the arts. + +LOAD-DATE: November 8, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Calvin Klein's drawstring-hem skirt. His skirt with uneven hem. Black silk and chiffon dress. Isaac Mizrahi's wrap cardigan. Mr. Mizrahi's gold Grecian goddess dress. His beaded lace corselet over a T-shirt. Geoffrey Beene's flowered column with a sheer back. His jersey dress with Lucite belt. Short black dress with a sheer net cage. (Photographs by Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +559 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 8, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +H.M.O.'s Faulted for Inadequate Preventive Health Measures + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section B; Page 5; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 420 words + +DATELINE: TRENTON, Nov. 7 + +State health officials, in releasing their first report on New Jersey's health maintenance organizations, said today that the organizations should be doing a better job on preventive measures aimed at maintaining the health of their customers. +The report of a dozen of the managed care companies covering more than 1.7 million New Jersey residents found that on average, only 57 percent of the children covered by H.M.O. plans had received recommended doses of vaccines by age 2. Only 4 in 10 new mothers had a checkup at least six weeks after having a baby, and nearly 20 percent did not receive early prenatal care. Only 6 in 10 older women had tests for breast cancer within two years, and an equal number had tests for cervical cancer within three years. + "There is significant room for improvement for H.M.O.'s when it comes to preventive services," the State Health Commissioner, Len Fishman, said. "Preventive services are supposed to be the stock in trade of H.M.O.'s. They're called health maintenance organizations for a reason. While H.M.O.'s are doing a good job in some areas, they are falling far short in other areas, like keeping people healthy." +The report does give the managed care companies better marks in a number of areas for which they have been criticized. About 85 percent of the customers surveyed said they could easily find a doctor that they are happy with, and 79 percent reported few problems getting a specialist. +The report measured 27 categories for 12 companies that account for 98 percent of the 1.8 million New Jerseyans who get their health care from managed care companies. The department did not rate Medicaid or Medicare. Paul R. Langevin Jr., president of the New Jersey H.M.O. Association, said the reports give a wide range of information about the managed care companies. +"We're not perfect." he said, "That's not a shock to us, but we're the only ones who are measuring to find out how imperfect we are." The association represents 9 of the 12 managed care companies included in the study. +The report is part of changes in the state laws regulating the managed care companies adopted earlier this year in response to consumer complaints. It is intended as a shopping tool for businesses and individuals because it compares one plan with another. For example, only 2 of the 12 plans -- Aetna U.S.H.C. and AmeriHealth -- got higher than average ratings for the overall quality of their plans. H.M.O. Blue, QualMed and United got lower than average ratings. + +LOAD-DATE: November 8, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +560 of 633 DOCUMENTS + + +The New York Times + +November 9, 1997 Sunday +Late Edition - Final + +Life as a Quilting Bee + +BYLINE: By Bruce Weber. +Bruce Weber is the national cultural correspondent for The New York Times. + +SECTION: Section 7; Column 1; Book Review Desk; Pg. 10 + +LENGTH: 626 words + + +ANY GIVEN DAY +The Life and Times of Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux. +By Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux. +Illustrated. 287 pp. New York: +Warner Books. $19.95. + Oh, brother, what a setup to make a reviewer look like a grinch. Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux is 98 years old, and this memoir, undertaken when she was 80 for a writing class for senior citizens, is her first book. Of course, one's initial reaction is applause, especially in the opening chapters, which are about a happy girlhood in a family that traversed rural America in the early part of the century and show the author to be possessed of a genuine, utterly guileless voice. There is a lot of cheery fruit-gathering and quilting. You almost believe that the good old days really did exist. + ''We didn't have fancy reels, just lines and hooks tied to a pole with a red bobber that lay on the water until a fish jerked it under,'' Foveaux writes about fishing near the family home in Quick City, Mo. ''No greater joy can I imagine than a clean blue sky, a quiet stream, a fishing pole, a good book and an apple in your pocket.'' Unhappily, guilelessness soon gives way to tedium. Foveaux's story is full of dramatic event. Her loveless marriage was sundered by her husband's drinking, and there was plenty of hardscrabble living, sickness and death. Indeed, her family history has enough tragedy in it to support an epic, but her inexperience as a writer means it is never done justice. The book's anecdotal recollections are organized fitfully into short chapters -- there are 120 of them -- that often fall short of resonance. The two World Wars are witnessed from the home front, but the apprehension and sadness of those years are more duly noted than effectively illustrated. And Foveaux doesn't seem to have a trustworthy sense of how to weight her recollections. In her youth, the family moved frequently -- back and forth between Kansas and Missouri, once to Arkansas and once to Anacortes, Wash., where her father found work in a sawmill -- and the narrative would have you believe that leaving various pet dogs behind was much more memorable for her than the time she saw a man shot to death in a train station. + It should be said that the book was never meant for publication. Foveaux wrote it to assuage her children's and grandchildren's desire to learn about her life. And the close-in look she provides at her populous family tree has undoubtedly been instructive for them. So, one can imagine, is the lecture she provides near the end on the evils of drinking. But for the rest of us, the rewards are elusive. Introduced by name are dozens of relatives and neighbors, rarely made distinct enough to keep them straight. After all those names it's curious that when Foveaux, despondent over her husband's alcoholic fecklessness, is brought out of her funk with the encouragement of a man she refers to as ''an old friend I hadn't seen in a long, long time'' who ''saved my life,'' she never tells us who he is. It is equally curious that near the end of the book she says she named her eighth child after a woman she hadn't yet mentioned and never mentions again. + All of this is simply amateurish. A prefatory note from the publisher explains that ''other than standard copyediting changes, Jessie Lee's words come to you here just as she wrote them for her family.'' Ostensibly this was done (or not done) to preserve the authenticity of Foveaux's voice. But it seems more cynical than that, more like a marketing ploy for a book that Warner paid more than $1 million for. In the end, Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux is no more authentic a writer than, say, Paul Reiser or Whoopi Goldberg. The only difference is that one wishes Ms. Foveaux had begun her literary efforts sooner and profited by the experience. + +URL: http://www.nytimes.com + +LOAD-DATE: March 29, 2004 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review + +PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +561 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +A Town Is Dazed After a Deadly Church Dinner + +BYLINE: By MICHAEL JANOFSKY + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 16; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 882 words + +DATELINE: CHAPTICO, Md., Nov. 7 + +The head-shaking has not stopped for days. People around here still cannot believe what happened last Sunday night. They say they are stunned, saddened and amazed. +"People put their heart and soul into that dinner," said John Keegan Jr., manager of the Chaptico Market and Deli. "It's sad, really sad. They need to find out what happened to prevent it from ever happening again." + Last Sunday night at Our Lady of the Wayside Parish, nearly 1,400 people crowded into the church meeting hall for the annual fall dinner of stuffed ham, turkey and fried oysters. In this part of Maryland, annual church dinners are as much a tradition as the food served, and this one has been held for 50 years. +But in the days that followed, many of the people who dined or went to buy carry-out platters grew sick with nausea, cramps, dehydration and fever, classic symptoms of salmonella poisoning. Two elderly people died, more than 100 visited a hospital emergency room and about 700 people, some from as far away as Baltimore and the Washington suburb of Silver Spring, Md., have reported feeling ill. +Three independent tests, including one by the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in Baltimore, have determined that the illnesses were caused by the bacteria salmonella-B in the ham, although tests have not confirmed whether the deaths were directly linked to the food. One was a 75-year-old woman from Baltimore, the other an 83-year woman from Chaptico who belonged to the church. +"We were extremely lucky," said Mary H. Novotny, a spokeswoman for the St. Mary's County Health Department, referring to the speed with which officials isolated the cause of contamination. "They sold so many carry-out dinners that people brought them in and we could send up every item for testing." +The salmonella was the second bacteria to cause problems in recent months for southern Maryland residents. Directly east of here, on the western banks of the Chesapeake Bay, the microbe Pfiesteria piscicida killed thousands of fish and made people who were exposed to the waters sick, prompting state officials to close several bay tributaries. +Like the Pfiesteria outbreak, salmonella poisoning is not unknown around here, a rural section of Maryland with dozens of towns and villages on tributaries leading to the lower reaches of the Potomac River. +But as Ms. Novotny said, "We've never gotten anything this big." +Even now, almost a week after the church dinner, local residents like Mr. Keegan still seem visibly shaken. At first, he did not want to talk about it today. Then he could not stop. "This town is pretty strong, and it has a tight community," he said. +He said he felt especially sorry for the owner of the market, Virginia Tennyson, who has helped coordinate the dinner for 20 years and keeps the hams, which are prepared at the market, stored in the market freezers. They are a local specialty -- stuffed with kale, cabbage, hot peppers and spices and then boiled. +He said Mrs. Tennyson had gone home early today because she was "stressed out." +"She focuses so much on that dinner," Mr. Keegan said. "She puts her heart into it. She lets her business go for a month to dedicate herself to the dinner." +The town of Chaptico, which was founded in 1683, is not much more than than the market, a liquor store, a gas station, the post office and the homes of its 100 residents. Probably no one has lived in the town longer than Erva Davis, the unofficial historian. She has lived in the same white house across from the gas station and post office since 1938. She is 91. +"This is the second-oldest port in Maryland and we have the second-oldest post office," she said. "The British marched through here in 1814, during the War of 1812." +She does not get out much anymore, she said, because of bad knees. But she was at the dinner on Sunday night "and stuffed myself with fried oysters -- never ate so many in my life." She said she also ate the stuffed ham with mashed potatoes and gravy, suffering no consequences. +"But I was scared to death," she added quickly, remembering early in the week when the reports of sickness began making the rounds. "I called my doctor to ask him what to do when you're not sick before you get sick. I told him I already had a glass of sherry, and he said, 'You're doing fine.' I am doing fine." +Others were not. Ms. Davis said she had many friends who had attended the dinner and were "desperately ill." Ms. Novotny said 17 people remained in the hospital but were out of danger. +The Rev. John Stack, a native of the Bronx who came here eight years ago to lead the Roman Catholic congregation of about 350, sat behind his desk, smoking a cigarette, and said the outbreak was "not only astonishing but devastating" to the church and community. "This is such a small parish, one you would call a family," he said. +With health officials now declaring the crisis over, other churches are preparing for their annual dinners. One is scheduled for Sunday night at St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church in nearby Morganza. +Thinking about next year's dinner, Father Stack said: "I don't think anything will change. We will get through this, try to get over our devastation, pick up the pieces and go on. We always have. That is unchanged." + +LOAD-DATE: November 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: John Keegan Jr., the manager of the Chaptico Market and Deli in Chaptico, Md., was still shaken up on Friday by the salmonella poisoning that broke out at a church dinner. "It's sad," Mr. Keegan said, "really sad." (Amy Toensing for The New York Times) + +Map of Maryland showing the location of Chaptico: Seven hundred people fell ill after a church dinner in Chaptico, Md. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +562 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Medicare Pays Millions in Ambulance Overbilling, Report Says + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 33; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1066 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Nov. 8 + +Federal investigators, having documented many instances of overbilling and false claims by ambulance operators, say that Medicare wastes hundreds of millions of dollars a year by paying for unnecessary ambulance services provided to elderly patients. +In a new draft report, the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, June Gibbs Brown, said that ambulance companies frequently billed Medicare for "medically unnecessary transportation." In addition, the report documents how some ambulance companies falsified "destination information" and charged the Government for supplies and services that were not needed or not provided. + The Inspector General said that more than 100 providers of ambulance services had been cited for civil or criminal violations of Medicare laws in the last five years. Medicare's system of paying for ambulance services, she said, is so complex that it "encourages fraud and abuse and thwarts efforts to control expenditures." +Ambulance operators, however, said that in its zeal to crack down on abuse, the Clinton Administration would inadvertently reduce services to victims of heart attack, stroke and other medical emergencies. +About 10 percent of the 38 million Medicare beneficiaries use ambulances each year. Outlays have more than tripled in the last decade and now total $2 billion a year. +"Medicare payments for ambulance services appear to lack common sense," said the report, to be issued later this month. +Ms. Brown said that some ambulance companies billed Medicare for supplies even though their vehicles were "restocked free of charge by local hospitals." In some cases, she said, companies misrepresented the condition of patients, stating, for example, that women were bedridden when they actually walked from the ambulance into the hospital. +Moreover, Ms. Brown said, some ambulance companies have run up huge expenses by taking Medicare patients on regularly scheduled trips to kidney dialysis treatments three times a week. Federal investigators found that most of these claims did not meet Medicare guidelines for medical necessity because the patients could have safely used other means of transportation. +The Ambulance Industry Journal, published by the American Ambulance Association, regularly carries news of ambulance owners who have pleaded guilty or agreed to pay monetary penalties to settle accusations of submitting false claims, though the organization insists that these are a tiny minority of all ambulance companies. +Federal investigators have repeatedly described the problems in confidential reports to top Medicare officials in the past three years. The Government has increased audits of ambulance companies, but a Medicare official conceded that "we have no way of insuring that we are paying properly for the services." +Congress this year required the secretary of Health and Human Services to establish a fee schedule, with fixed payments for each type of ambulance procedure. But the fee schedule will not take effect until Jan. 1, 2000. Under the law, the secretary must negotiate details of the fee schedule with the ambulance industry. +David A. Nevins, executive vice president of the American Ambulance Association, which represents 750 companies around the country, said the rise in Medicare spending was a good thing because it reflected improvements in ambulance technology and service that were saving lives. +"Where fraud exists," Mr. Nevins said, "we fully support efforts to ferret it out and prosecute the wrongdoers. But a major reason for the increase in Medicare expenditures is that we have more advanced ambulance units on the street, saving more lives. Many studies have shown that a patient's chances of survival are linked to ambulance response time. Well-trained paramedics and well-equipped ambulances can reduce death and disability from heart attack, stroke and trauma." +Many cities and counties are buying the most advanced equipment because it saves lives, Mr. Nevins said. To help pay for it, he said, some rescue squads and volunteer fire departments have begun billing Medicare and other insurers for ambulance services formerly provided at no charge. +In her report, the Inspector General gave these examples of problems: +*The owner of an Ohio ambulance company altered trip tickets submitted by his drivers "to show that patients were bedridden when, in fact, the patients were in wheelchairs and, in some instances, could walk." In some cases, "the company billed for ambulance transports when patients were transported in a company station wagon." +*An ambulance company in Illinois "falsified medical and trip records and back-dated them" in an effort to justify ambulance services provided to nursing home residents who did not need them. +*A woman convicted of Medicaid fraud used "front men" to form an ambulance company. She "then billed Medicare and Medicaid for individual services when multiple patients were transported in unlicensed personal vehicles." +*In Indiana, an ambulance operator improperly billed Medicare when he took patients from nursing homes to medical appointments at doctors' offices, clinics and hospitals. The ambulances billed Medicare for oxygen that was not provided. +*Federal officials rarely checked with patients to see whether they had received the ambulance services billed to Medicare. +*Ambulance companies in the same area often get different payments for the same service. Payments vary widely among states but have "little or no relationship to the cost of doing business in an area." +In 26 states, Ms. Brown said, "Medicare pays more for routine nonemergency basic life support transportation than it does for advanced life support emergency transportation." This is paradoxical, she said, because the crew on an advanced life support vehicle can provide a wider range of medications and a higher level of care. +In June, the Clinton Administration proposed changes in the way it pays for ambulance services. Under the proposed rules, the Government would prescribe a specific type of ambulance service -- basic or advanced -- for each of 43 medical conditions. +Mr. Nevins of the American Ambulance Association said, "The proposed rules will result in lower payments to ambulances, but higher payments to hospitals because thousands of patients will arrive at the hospital in worse condition." + +LOAD-DATE: November 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +563 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEWS SUMMARY + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 665 words + + +INTERNATIONAL 3-8 + +House Continues Dealing On Clinton's Trade Power +The wheeling and dealing on President Clinton's trade legislation began in earnest as the House of Representatives went into an unusual weekend session, trying to rewrite agriculture provisions to gain more votes. The measure would give the President the authority to negotiate trade pacts that Congress could vote up or down but could not amend. 1 + +Chinese Divert the Yangtze +An army of workers and engineers in China diverted the Yangtze River from its natural course, clearing the way for construction to begin on the world's biggest dam. President Jiang Zemin attended the event, turning a feat of engineering into a major political celebration. 1 + +A Torturer's Tale +As South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation commission continues its work, the brutality of the country's past is being itemized in the testimony of victims and apartheid functionaries, like Jeffrey Benzien, a paunchy police officer who acted as a professional torturer. 1 + +NATO's Anonymous Pitchman +Javier Solana, NATO's most senior civilian official, commands little notice in the United States despite his emerging role as an important pitchman for why the world's biggest military alliance needs to get bigger. 3 + +Struggle for Spoils in Serbia +Three top associates of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and about a dozen of their lieutenants have been killed in recent months, apparently as part of a struggle within the ruling elite for control of state-run industries and vast black-market rings. 13 + +NATIONAL 16-36 + +United Way, Facing Fewer Donors, Gives Away Less +Five years after its former national president was found to be converting charity money to his own use, United Way is in crisis, abandoned by 4.5 million people -- 20 percent of its donors. And most of its 17.7 million remaining donors give less through payroll deduction, United Way's bread and butter. 1 + +Church Dinner Turns Deadly +Nearly 1,400 people crowded into the meeting hall at Our Lady of the Wayside Parish in Captico, Md., for the annual fall dinner of stuffed ham, turkey and fried oysters. But in the days that followed, many grew sick with nausea, cramps, dehydration and fever, classic symptoms of salmonella poisoning. Two elderly people died and more than 100 visited a hospital emergency room 16 + +Assault on the J.F.K. Mystique +In his new book, "The Dark Side of Camelot," the investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh portrays John F. Kennedy as an often immoral cad who accepted the aid of mobsters, was obsessed with killing Fidel Castro, and steered the United States deeper into the Vietnam war so as not to appear weak in his campaign for a second term. But historians question the plausibility of key accounts and the reliability of the 35-year-old memories of Mr. Hersh's sources. 26 + +Overbilling on Ambulances +Federal investigators, having documented many instances of overbilling and false claims by ambulance operators, say that Medicare wastes hundreds of millions of dollars a year by paying for unnecessary ambulance services provided to elderly patients. 33 + +NEW YORK/REGION 37-41 + +Welfare and Drug Abuse +On Nov. 1, New York State ordered that all people receiving or applying for welfare be interviewed to determine whether they abuse drugs or alcohol. Those found to have a problem will immediately be denied all cash benefits. The new rule has experts re-examining the relationship between drug abuse and welfare. 37 + +A Legal Cavalry +The four little-known lawyers who represented Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant who, prosecutors say, was tortured by New York City police officers in a Brooklyn station house, now find themselves sharing the case with three big-name colleagues, including perhaps the most famous lawyer in America today, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. 37 + +OBITUARIES 43 + +Cong. Vote 40 + +Weather 42 + +LOAD-DATE: November 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +564 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +National News Briefs; +San Francisco Charges 5 In Deaths of Elderly Men + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 34; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 209 words + +DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 7 + +Five people were indicted and jailed on Friday in a case that investigators said involved the swindling and poisoning of five elderly men. +Investigators said the victims had been slowly poisoned with the heart drug digitalis, which is derived from the foxglove plant. The authorities say the men were killed from 1984 to 1994 after being bilked out of more than $1 million total in cash, property and investments. + The suspects were associated with the Tene Bimbo clan, which gained notoriety in "King of the Gypsies," the 1974 book by Peter Maas, and in a film of the same name. +For weeks, a grand jury here heard testimony from dozens of witnesses into the deaths of the men: Philip Steiner Jr., 93, Konstantin Liotweizen, 92, Nicholas Bufford, 87, and Stephen Storvick, 91, whose bodies were exhumed. Harry Glover Hughes, 94, has been reported as the fifth victim. +The police said three of the suspects either befriended, married or took care of the elderly men. In each case, the police said, they managed to persuade the men to make them beneficiaries of their property. +Those charged with conspiracy to commit murder were identified as George Lama, 39, Angela Bufford, 37, Mary Tene Steiner, 57, Danny Tene, 35, and Teddy Tene, 27. + +LOAD-DATE: November 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +565 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 9, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Pain of Being Forbidden to See or Contact Grandchildren + +BYLINE: By DARICE BAILER + +SECTION: Section 14WC; Page 20; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1466 words + +ELEVEN years ago, a Manhattan businesswoman lost three people she dearly loved. First, her 36-year-old daughter died of leukemia. Then, her daughter's husband kept her from seeing her two granddaughters, even though they lived not far away. +The woman's son-in-law never explained why he was shutting her out of the girls' lives. When the woman invited the girls, then 5 and 12, to visit, her son-in-law said he was busy, or that his car had broken down. When she asked to speak to the children, he said they were in the shower or at his mother's house. "In a quiet voice, he denied me access," said the woman, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, as did many other grandparents in this article. + The woman heard about a grandparents' support group at Scarsdale Family Counseling. When she began attending the Westchester meetings, she discovered that she was not alone. An increasing number of elderly people have a very difficult time seeing their grandchildren after a death, divorce or quarrel even though they may previously have seen the children several times a week. +"What you're left with are grandparents who once had a very close relationship with their grandchildren, suddenly being told that they cannot see them anymore," said Judy Levin, a senior outreach worker and family therapist at Scarsdale Family Counseling. "It's devastating." +Edith Engel of Larchmont, a former grandparent support group co-leader at Scarsdale Family Counseling, said, "It's a very serious problem all over the 50 states." Grandchildren may grow up before the estrangement ends, Mrs. Engel said. And, while the bitterness leading to the separation can endure for many years, grandparents cannot. Some die without having seen their grandchildren in years, leaving behind grief-stricken grandchildren who, as young adults, are painfully aware of the love they missed. +Mrs. Engel said adult children are usually the adversaries and grandchildren the pawns in what she calls "an intergenerational fight." She said the role of grandparents has changed dramatically over the years. Mrs. Engel, 81, remembers a time when grandparents were part of the household and were considered a precious source of love and advice, but that is not always true today. Grandparents often do not play the same role in families and grandchildren lose out on an additional source of nurturing. +"Grandparents," Mrs. Levin said, "can offer a wealth of caring and a wealth of love." +In New York State, grandparents can petition Family Court to visit their grandchildren. But in most situations, parents' rights supersede grandparents' rights. In a divorce, judges usually want to see parents who do not have custody of the children get more time with them first. Grandparents may win a few hours each month after thousands of dollars in legal fees and further estrangement from their children or in-laws. +It is rare that grandparent visitation cases go to trial, perhaps because of the expense. "I would say the most we would have is five a year," said Judge Adrienne Hofmann Scancarelli, supervising judge of the Family Courts of the Ninth Judicial District, which covers Westchester. "That's very small considering our caseload," she added. +Judge Howard Spitz, who presides in Yonkers Family Court, said he sees 10 to 15 cases a year. +Grandparents who turn to Family Court must prove that they had a good prior relationship with their grandchildren. Once standing has been established, judges listen to the parents' objections. Judges must decide whether visits are in the best interest of the child and then decide the related questions of how often the visits should occur and whether they should be supervised. +Judge Spitz said he tries to mediate a case before trial and preserve the grandparent-grandchild relationship. He said he would be devastated if he could not see his grandchildren. +Rosemarie Paloscio is the site coordinator at the supervised visitation program at the Y.W.C.A. of White Plains and Central Westchester and the Y.W.C.A. of Yonkers. Ms. Paloscio, Roger Burchell, program director, or Deana Tietjen, court liaison, oversee the visits of grandparents and grandchildren, which take place in the Y.W.C.A. nursery or preschool classrooms. They insure that grandparents comply with the ground rules. For instance, gifts are allowed only on birthdays, Christmas or Hanukkah. A monitor sits in and observes the visit, taking notes. The notes are summarized for a court report. +"It can be an alien atmosphere to producing a productive exchange," Mrs. Engel said. +Ms. Paloscio said the grandparents in her program are upset when a relationship ends in monitored visits. She has seen grandparents in their late 70's and early 80's, hunched over and leaning on canes as they pass through the center's metal detection scanner to see their grandchildren, she said. When accusations against them are accepted by the court, it is up to grandparents to prove the allegations untrue. +The Manhattan businesswoman was cautioned against going to court by her support group at Scarsdale Family Counseling, which she attended in the 1980's. Instead, members encouraged her to continue sending cards and presents to her granddaughters, showing how much she loved them in every possible way. So she did. She said she also "prayed that I would stay alive long enough to see the girls grow up and have access to them." +The girls are 16 and 23 now, and their grandmother said she has a wonderful relationship with them. Mrs. Engel's story has a happy ending, too. In 1978, Mrs. Engel's older daughter left her two children in the care of her husband and disappeared because she was afraid of harming them or herself. Mrs. Engel's son-in-law seemed to blame her for his wife's emotional frailty. He refused to let her or anyone on her side of the family see the children. +Two years later, Mrs. Engel led the grandparent support group at Scarsdale Family Counseling with Marjorie Slavin, who was then a social worker. Six years after that, she was reunited with her grandchildren. The support group disbanded after 15 years, but Mrs. Levin has started a new one for grandparents, whom she calls "the forgotten people of divorce." The group, called Grandparents in Divided Families, meets once a week at Scarsdale Family Counseling, and focuses on emotional support. One Westchester husband and wife were very close to their son's four boys before his 1986 divorce. The husband taught his grandchildren how to climb a big oak tree in the couple's backyard. In the winter, there were sleigh rides, snowball fights and walks together in the snow. +In the divorce, the couple's daughter-in-law won sole custody of the two youngest boys, then 9 and 11. She severed the relationship with her in-laws. +Within months of the divorce, her father-in-law suffered a paralyzing stroke. He died five years later in a nursing home. The boys attended his funeral and wept, begging their grandmother for forgiveness. Death reunited them. Both boys invited their grandmother to their weddings and are very close to her now. +Another Westchester retired couple lived a block away from their son and daughter-in-law and played with their grandchildren several times a week. Now that the couple's son is divorced and their daughter-in-law has sole custody of the children, she keeps them from talking to other children in the street or watching their soccer games. The couple says their daughter-in-law is angry. "This is her aim in life, to prevent us from seeing the children," the husband said. +The Manhattan businesswoman still cries when she recalls what she lost. "I missed out on all the good years," she said, adding that her grandchildren "missed out on all the love I had to give them." + +When Patience Counts the Most + Edith Engel, a former grandparent support group co-leader at Scarsdale Family Counseling, offers these tips for grandparents who cannot see their grandchildren: +*Keep in touch with your grandchildren any way you can. Continue sending cards and presents, even if they are returned, destroyed or not acknowledged. Let your grandchildren know that you love them. +*Be flexible. If there is a family conflict, do not insist that your grandchildren spend traditional holidays with you. Celebrate whenever you can. "It's getting together that's important," Mrs. Engel said. +*Avoid litigation. It costs thousands of dollars and often makes the situation worse. If possible, when your child is seeking a divorce, have your visitation rights included in the divorce agreement as a precaution against having to go to court later. +*Be patient and do not give up. You may miss out on a lot of years, but most likely you will be able to see your grandchildren one day. DARICE BAILER + +LOAD-DATE: November 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Edith Engel of Larchmont, who has counseled other grandparents, and her husband, Henry, with their grandson, Stuart Beck, whom they were not able to see for eight years. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +566 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 11, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +An Acne Drug Eases Rheumatoid Arthritis + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section F; Page 6; Column 4; Science Desk + +LENGTH: 336 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 + +An antibiotic used to treat acne significantly improves the swollen, painful joints caused by rheumatoid arthritis if therapy begins early, scientists say. +Rheumatologists said the new study, by researchers at the University of Nebraska, provides enough proof of the worth of the antibiotic, minocycline, that the drug may soon be widely prescribed. + "This isn't a cure," said the lead researcher, Dr. James O'Dell, who presented his study on Sunday at a meeting of the American College of Rheumatology. "If the medicine is stopped, the problem comes back." +But Dr. O'Dell said the drug seems to block enzymes, called metalloproteinases, that destroy irreplaceable cartilage inside joints. "By inhibiting these metalloproteinases early on, maybe we can help shut off the whole inflammation cascade," Dr. O'Dell said. +If his theory is right, these enzymes could aid the treatment of osteoarthritis, the much more common form of arthritis that largely affects the elderly. Tests in osteoarthritic dogs suggest that anti-enzyme compounds offer similar protection, prompting other scientists to begin clinical trials of a minocycline cousin called doxycycline. +Antibiotic therapy has been controversial because doctors have been unable to prove that an infection causes rheumatoid arthritis. And early studies of minocycline showed only a modest effect, said Dr. Doyt Conn of the Arthritis Foundation. +Thinking that earlier treatment might work better, Dr. O'Dell tested 46 patients who had had rheumatoid arthritis for less than a year and were not taking strong arthritis medicines. Sixty-five percent of the patients showed a 50 percent improvement in joint swelling, stiffness and pain after six months of therapy. Just 13 percent of patients given a dummy pill had similar responses. +The main side effect of minocycline is dizziness among elderly patients, Dr. O'Dell said. About 5 percent of long-term users develop dark splotches on the skin that disappear when they stop the drug, he said. + +LOAD-DATE: November 11, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +567 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 12, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO NEWS BRIEFS: NEW JERSEY; +Safety Director Resigns After Theft Accusation + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 162 words + +DATELINE: TRENTON + +The public safety director of Trenton resigned on Monday after being accused by state officials of embezzling $270,000 from two elderly women who had entrusted him with their assets. +The safety director, James A. Waldron Jr., was also disbarred after the State Office of Attorney Ethics uncovered the theft during a random audit, said Robert Seidenstein, a spokesman for the State Department of the Judiciary. + "Waldron knowingly misappropriated client funds by making numerous unauthorized and improper disbursements totaling more than $270,000 from the accounts of two elderly, legally incompetent widows for whom he had power of attorney," Mr. Seidenstein said. +Mr. Waldron signed papers consenting to his disbarment, Mr. Seidenstein said. +The case will be referred to the Mercer County Prosecutor's office for possible criminal prosecution, Mr. Seidenstein said. As public safety director, Mr. Waldron was in charge of police, fire and emergency services. + +LOAD-DATE: November 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +568 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 12, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +National News Briefs; +Apartments Damaged By Blast in Vault + +BYLINE: AP + +SECTION: Section A; Page 24; Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 89 words + +DATELINE: WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif., Nov. 11 + +Three apartments were damaged today by the concussion from an underground electrical vault explosion that rocked a four-story building like an earthquake and rattled its elderly residents. +No one was hurt and there were no evacuations, although dozens of residents left the building while firefighters searched the building to make sure no one was hurt. + The vault exploded at 7:23 A.M. and blew out the windows of apartments in the 140-unit building. There was no fire. +The cause of the blast was not immediately known. + +LOAD-DATE: November 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +569 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 16, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: BROOKLYN UP CLOSE; +Speed Humps That Divide + +BYLINE: By AMY WALDMAN + +SECTION: Section 14; Page 11; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 476 words + +Christopher R. Lynn was the most unpopular man in Brooklyn last week, at least among the borough's community boards. In district after district, Mr. Lynn, the Transportation Commissioner, was under fire for what critics described as an autocratic management style, characterized by a refusal to consult or advise the boards. +The eye of the political hurricane was Board 14, which represents Flatbush and Midwood. Mr. Lynn had installed speed humps at several sites in the district. Officials said they had not been asked whether or where the humps should be installed, and residents had been complaining of increased traffic on nearby streets and screeching brakes. + Board 14 is not the only one gunning for Mr. Lynn. On Wednesday night, Board 6 passed a resolution condemning Mr. Lynn for "various and sundry acts performed by him in his capacity as a public official," said Craig Hammerman, the board's district manager. Mr. Hammerman said Mr. Lynn had repeatedly refused to send representatives to apprise the board of ongoing major capital projects. +Some board officials also said when they had tried to follow up citizen complaints with the agency, they had been told to file Freedom of Information requests. The department, they said, seemed to be trying to circumvent their authority by encouraging citizens to call a help line (212 or 718 CALL-DOT) directly to report potholes, broken traffic lights and other problems. +Robert Leonard, a spokesman for Mr. Lynn, said the Commissioner sought input from community boards during the budget consultation process but could not do so day to day. "Does Howard Safir ask the commnity boards when he wants to arrest someone?" Mr. Leonard asked, referring to the Police Commissioner. +Community boards, he said, "are not made up of engineers." He said that having citizens call the department directly would eliminate the time-consuming paper trail that community boards used to process citizen complaints. +On the streets of Board 14, meanwhile, opinion on the humps was divided. Sandra Stein, the president of the board for Terrace Garden Plaza, a housing co-op on East 17th Street, was so upset by the humps on East 16th Street between Avenues I and J that she collected 250 signatures on a petition, which she presented to the community board. +Her neighborhood was a warren of one-way streets and dead-ends, she said, and East 16th Street was the main egress for the emergency medical vehicles that Terrace Garden's elderly residents relied on. "This is a safety issue for everyone," she said. +But some neighborhood residents said they thought the humps enhanced safety, especially considering the Yeshiva of Flatbush High School at the corner. "People were trying to make the light, and there's a school there," said Renee Saperstein, 65. "So it's a good thing." AMY WALDMAN + +LOAD-DATE: November 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: There's no missing the speed bump on East 16th Street, near Avenue J. (Frances Roberts for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +570 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 16, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Inquiry Begun on Klan Ties Of 2 Icons at Virginia Tech + +BYLINE: By The New York Times + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 38; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 693 words + +DATELINE: BLACKSBURG, Va., Nov. 15 + +Virginia Tech has begun an investigation into whether a longtime professor for whom a dormitory was named was a student leader of the Ku Klux Klan a century ago. +An undergraduate class studying the 125-year history of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University found in an 1896 college yearbook a brittle, yellowed page devoted to the Klan. "K.K.K.-1895-96" reads the headline on page 101. Beneath a drawing of a skeleton covered by a white sheet, the group lists as its objective: "To right the unrighteous." The favorite pastime is listed as "(Midnight) field sports." + Claudius Lee, a student, is listed as the organization's "Father of Terror," founding leader of the campus Klan. Another student, O.M. Stull, is called "Right Hand of Terror." The yearbook shows that Mr. Lee belonged to another campus group called the Pittsylvania Club, whose sketched logo depicted a black man hanging by his neck from a tree. +Mr. Lee went on to teach electrical engineering at Virginia Tech for 50 years. By the time he retired in 1946, he had been nicknamed the school's "Grand Old Man." Virginia Tech named a dormitory for him in 1968, six years after his death at age 90. +Mr. Stull, as a student, coined the school yell, "Hoki, Hoki, Hoki, Hy!/ Tech, Tech, V.P.I!" from which the nickname for Tech students, Hokies, is derived. A former quarry company executive, he died in 1964. +"These are core icons of the school," said Peter Wallenstein, a history professor whose students found the yearbook. If the Klan material is true, he said, "It's kind of ugly." +The college president, Paul Torgersen, appointed a committee to look into the issue. "It is regretful that this did happen, if in fact there was an affiliation with the K.K.K.," he said. At a meeting with students this week to discuss the discovery and incidents of intolerance on campus, Mr. Torgersen said that although the jury was still out on the nature of the yearbook material, "When I first saw these pages I was sickened by them, and still am." +Historians are unsure whether the yearbook page was a sophomoric joke or the record of an active group. +The Klan was founded in 1866 in Tennessee by Civil War veterans and quickly spread throughout the South, becoming a secret terrorist organization intent on keeping blacks and Republicans from gaining political power during Reconstruction. +Historians say the Klan disbanded by the early 1870's, not to be revived until 1915, when it broadened its activities to target Jews, Roman Catholics and foreigners, as well as blacks. The 1895-96 date of the yearbook raises the possibility that the Klan item was a prank. The Klan entry does not appear in other yearbooks. +"To the best of my knowledge, there's no Klan activity and there's no Klan in that era," said John Kneebone, a historian of the Klan in Virginia who lives in Richmond. +The students' designation of members as "Angels of Terror" is in keeping with the Klan's white-sheet symbolism, which sometimes represented the ghosts of Confederate dead, Mr. Kneebone said. But identifying members by name is "very un-Klanlike," he said. +Family members, former students and colleagues who knew Mr. Lee and Mr. Stull said the two did not appear racist. +Bill Stull of Buchanan, Va., Mr. Stull's grandson, said: "I never saw any evidence of that prejudice or anything. My gut feeling is he may have felt that way, but I believe he may have gotten over it." +Black students who made the discovery were appalled. +"I honestly cringed when I opened the yearbook and it was there," said Cordel Faulk, a black senior in the history course. A white student, Geoffrey Buescher, who is also in the class, said he did not respond as viscerally as did black students like Mr. Faulk. +The committee -- Professor Wallenstein, a black studies professor and a black graduate student -- will try to find out whether the Klan group existed on campus and recommend possible responses, including whether to remove the Lee name from the dormitory. +"Even at that time, what the K.K.K. stood for was common knowledge," Mr. Torgersen said. "Even if it was a joke, it was a very bad joke." + +LOAD-DATE: November 16, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +571 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 17, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Kalgoorlie Journal; +As a Tourist Lure, the Leer of a Naughty Museum? + +BYLINE: By CLYDE H. FARNSWORTH + +SECTION: Section A; Page 4; Column 3; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 1153 words + +DATELINE: KALGOORLIE, Australia + +As a tourist attraction, it hardly competes with Sydney's Opera House or Ayers Rock, but fat tour buses inevitably crawl along Hay Street, the brothel quarter of this hard-edged capital of Western Australia's goldfields. Skimpily dressed young women wave from gaudily lighted stalls. Sometimes tourists wave back. +Prostitution has been a fact of life in Kalgoorlie since 1893, when Paddy Hannan, Tommy Flanagan and Danny Shea scooped out the first nuggets from nearby Golden Mile, now recognized as one of the world's richest gold-bearing lodes. + As reports of the find drew fortune-seekers from all over the world, women too began arriving, chiefly from Japan, Britain and France, to work as nurses, barmaids, and in the flashy pink, blue and orange establishments lining Hay Street, making it the national icon for wantonness. +Three brothels remain, and the town of 20,000, which lately has become a considerably more family-and-church-oriented place, is divided over one madam's plans for a $1 million renovation of her premises at 181 Hay Street, which would include a Museum of Prostitution. +"We can make Hay Street into an even bigger tourist asset," exclaimed Mary-Anne Kenworthy, whose front-stoop advertising brags: "At one-eight-one, the girls are yum." Her proposal just cleared a major obstacle with a 7-4 vote in the town council granting building approval. She intends to start construction on Feb. 1. +"The museum, occupying the front ground floor, would be open during the day before the girls arrive," she said. "There will be a guide, photographs, paintings, a lot of history, including one of the old working beds." +Ms. Kenworthy believes her museum will be especially popular with women. "Not a woman exists who doesn't itch to get her nose inside a brothel," she said. +One recent early evening, four older women strolled by 181 as blonde Tanya, 23, trying to pay her mortgage, and raven-haired Niki, 22, planning to finance college, were beckoning to men in cars. +"It's a fact of life,' said Molly Wooller, 63. She and her three companions, all widows on pensions, were visiting from Perth, 350 miles to the west, and "decided to take a walk on Hay Street" a hop-skip from the main business district. +They said they favored the restorations. "Why not, if it'll make conditions better for the girls?" asked Mrs. Wooller. When the women encountered Tanya and got to talking, they expressed curiosity about the inside of 181. As Tanya had a little spare time, she gave them a tour. Inside, the place looked tacky and rundown, in need of paint. +But many Kalgoorlie citizens see Ms. Kenworthy's proposal as the thin edge of the wedge. Should her establishment be upgraded, this could encourage others to upgrade as well, and, according to Jay Townsend, deputy editor of the local daily, the Kalgoorlie Miner, "You could turn what exists today as a historic tourist attraction into something more." +That "something more" makes many townspeople skittish, including Mayor Ron Yuryevich, who believes that while the sex industry will never be crushed, it must be compressed to keep from suffocating other businesses. +"We've always recognized the brothel situation because of our large contingent of single young males, so you'll probably never build a home on Hay Street," he said with a cautious smile. A third of Kalgoorlie's population is aged 25 to 35, and half aren't old enough to vote. +"What we don't need," the Mayor added, "are the takeaways -- call girls operating from the brothels, sometimes knocking on the wrong doors at night, or more massage parlors and freelancers offering discount services." +If only for health reasons, he emphasized, it's important to "keep a handle" on the situation. +So far the brothels don't seem to have suffocated other business. Despite a slump in world gold prices, the town is thriving. +The population is up by 50 percent over the last 15 to 20 years, largely thanks to new discoveries of nickel near the gold seams. Instead of wizened prospectors, newcomers are computer specialists, accountants, engineers and other skilled professionals brought in by big mining corporations, often with young families. Real estate prices have never been higher. +Although the Mayor, who operates a local air-conditioning business, lost the fight on the council to stop the renovation of 181, his support for brothels as they now exist makes him a moderate in the broader civic struggle. +Seeking to root them out completely is a formidable coalition of local church leaders and the Australian Family Association. +"Are we trying to present ourselves as the brothel capital of Australia, or a place for families?" asks Thomas Graf, minister of the Uniting Church, composed of former Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists. +Adds the Rev. Terry Raj, a Roman Catholic priest born in Bangalore, India, "No parents want their children walking along Hay Street. The redevelopment plan and creation of a museum, by glamorizing prostitution, breaches the limits of acceptability." +Robert Hicks, president of the family association, opposes anything that might adversely affect a family environment. +"We see prostitution as not conducive to good relationships," he said. "It should be squashed, subverted, kept underground. If it pops up, the police should go after it." +Under Section 190 of the criminal code of Western Australia, prostitution is illegal. But because the law is hard to enforce, a policy of containment has evolved. Kalgoorlie's three brothels are tolerated without threat of prosecution, along with nine brothels in Perth and two Perth escort agencies. +The state government is considering legalizing prostitution, but from the array of opposing forces mustered in Kalgoorlie alone, that path will obviously run into thickets of opposition. +Yet many believe renovations are needed if only to keep the old structures from becoming fire hazards, and that a prostitution museum, along with the Goldfields Museum and the Superpit of surface workings three miles from town, will draw tourist dollars. +Ray Delbridge, former president of the Australian Workers Union's mining division, led the successful fight in the council for Ms. Kenworthy's proposal. "We have a duty to the people of Kalgoorlie to give them what they want." +So contentious is the issue, it divides colleagues. Manila-born Vergel Licerio, a computer technician who works two blocks from the brothels, utterly opposes them. "They're illegal, do no good for the town." +His boss, Bill Main, argues that brothels perform a community service, for example, in reducing the number of rapes, and should be treated like any other business. +"The girls are not legal but the police accept them because they are there, and because they are well controlled, everything is done in a very open manner," he said. "There are no heavy men controlling prostitution here." + +LOAD-DATE: November 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: It's enough to make a tough old mining town like Kalgoorlie blush. The owners of a bordello called Club 181 want to renovate the premises and include a Museum of Prostitution. Proponents say it would draw tourists. (Clyde H. Farnsworth/The New York Times) + +Map showing the location of Kalgoorlie, Australia: Since 1893 brothels have been a fact of life in Kalgoorlie. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +572 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 17, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Mechanic Held in Series of Killings; +Police in Louisiana Say Gambling Habit Motivated Suspect + +BYLINE: By CHRISTOPHER COOPER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 18; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1078 words + +DATELINE: LaPLACE, La., Nov. 16 + +At the Airline Motors lunch counter in sugar-cane country, a rifle-shot away from the muddy churn of the Mississippi River, the talk about Daniel J. Blank is as straightforward as the food served here: he was a gifted mechanic, a quiet customer with deep blue eyes, a family man who drank his coffee black. +But last week Mr. Blank was jailed, arrested on three charges of first-degree murder. The local authorities said he had confessed to six murders, including a double bludgeoning of an elderly couple just across the street from the diner. + His arrest, a big event in a town that often goes a year without a killing, stirred the memory of a waitress, Gloria Vicknair. Only a few months ago, Mr. Blank, the son of a sugar-refinery worker, emerged from the video poker stall in the back of the restaurant and asked her to change two crisp $100 bills, a lot of money for a man who usually ordered only black coffee. +Ms. Vicknair said she made the change but thought nothing of it. "They say it's always the quiet ones that'll surprise you -- he was extra quiet," she said after the arrest was announced. "Of course, I was lucky. He went after wealthy people. I work for a living, thank God." +A quest for the big win and lust for a piece of the American dream, the police said, was what drove Mr. Blank to kill six elderly residents within 20 miles of his family's home in the River Parishes, a water-bound stretch of chemical plants and sugar cane between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Most of the dead were elderly; most were found in their homes with their pockets turned inside out. Nearly all had at least a nodding acquaintance with Mr. Blank. One couple survived being beaten and shot, Leonce Millet Jr. and his wife, Joyce, both 66, of Gonzales. +The authorities said Mr. Blank had killed to feed a gambling habit. He favored slot machines and video poker, acquaintances said, and visited many different gambling parlors. +Toward the end of his suspected string of killings, Sheriff Wayne Jones of St. John the Baptist Parish said, it became apparent that Mr. Blank was either on an extraordinarily lucky streak or was up to no good. The authorities estimate that he had stolen as much as $200,000, much of which he was believed to have squandered at the casinos. +"He was without question a gambling addict," Sheriff Jones said. "I guess you could say his income didn't quite correspond with his life style." +He has confessed to these murders, the authorities said, which occurred between October 1996 and June 1997: Victor Rossi, 41, of St. Amant; Barbara Bourgeois, 58, of Paulina; Lillian Philippe, 71, of Gonzales; Sam Arcuri, 76, and his wife, Louella, 69, of LaPlace, and Joan Brock, 55, of LaPlace. Mr. Blank is to be arraigned in LaPlace on Monday. +The police have given little information about the case, saying only that a tip had led to the arrest. But their relief is obvious. +"It was the first homicide we had experienced since 1986," Chief Bill Landry of Gonzales said. "We weren't prepared. We had to retrain ourselves." His office handled three of the cases -- one murder in April and a double murder attempt in July. +Acquaintances and family members said that since the killings began late last year, Mr. Blank had lived at a notch or two above transient status, making three moves in the River Parishes and then moving in the summer to a small resort town in eastern Texas. Mr. Blank was taken into custody in Onalaska, Tex., on Friday, about four months after he reportedly tried to buy a four-bay automobile repair shop there for $65,000 in cash. +During this time, Mr. Blank periodically appeared at his boyhood home, a jumble of trailers and frame structures in Paulina, west of LaPlace, to report on his new fortune. +Once, Mr. Blank, known as Bone to his family, wheeled into the dusty yard on a shiny red Suzuki motorcycle. +On two other occasions, he arrived with huge cardboard copies of checks from casinos in nearby Kenner and Baton Rouge. The checks, payable to Daniel Blank, totaled $33,000. "Daniel went to casinos pretty often," said Mr. Blank's sister, Sally Blank, a 34-year-old cosmetology student and one of eight siblings. "He said he won big, and he showed us the papers to prove it. He told us they took his picture at the casino." +Sally Blank said the family had taken her brother at his word and had been shocked by his arrest. Her brother had been in trouble before, Ms. Blank said, but not since he was a teen-ager. +"He burned down a building when he was a teen-ager and had to go to reform school," Ms. Blank said. 'But a lot of teen-agers get in trouble. I don't think he did it. At least not all alone, not all by himself." +Mr. Blank had apparently been living quietly in Onalaska, a small town a few hours from Houston, in a double-wide trailer with his wife, Cindy, and their four children. He was working as a mechanic out of a former muffler shop he leased from Don Evans, a retiree in Onalaska. +"What happened was the mayor referred him to me, said he was looking to buy a piece of property," Mr. Evans said. "I leased him the shop, although he did offer to buy it. Said he'd pay me $65,000 in cash. +"That kind of scared me," Mr. Evans said. "I refused." +Mr. Evans said he was later told by his 12-year-old daughter, a friend of Mr. Blank's 12-year-old daughter, that Mr. Blank had made a fortune playing video poker machines. +To Mr. Evans, Mr. Blank was an expert mechanic. "I've been at this for 35 years," Mr. Evans said, "and just from talking to him I knew he must have been born and raised a mechanic. That boy knew transmissions inside and out. +"I don't know about all that gambling nonsense. It seemed to me he was interested in being successful in business and living in a way he'd never been able to as a kid." +The problem was, Mr. Evans said, Mr. Blank was nearly broke when the Louisiana and Texas authorities surrounded his trailer on Friday. +Among the items recovered, according to news accounts from Texas, was a cane-cutting knife, apparently smeared with blood and hair. +Mr. Evans locked the repair shop after Mr. Blank's arrest. As he went through the jumbled contents of the office, he said, he came across the latest bank statement for Daniel's Automotive. +"He had $123 in it, and 11 cars in the lot waiting to be repaired," Mr. Evans said. +"Thank God they arrested him," Mr. Evans said. "I'll tell you what, I think he was just about ready to do it again." + +LOAD-DATE: November 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Daniel J. Blank, right, arrested in multiple killings, is taken into custody in LaPlace, La., by Sheriff Wayne Jones of St. John the Baptist Parish. (Associated Press); Copies of checks made out to Daniel J. Blank, accused in a series of killings, are held up in Paulina, La., by a brother, Jerry Blank Jr. Below, Jerry Blank Sr. displays a school picture of his son. "I can't believe something like this would happen," the elder Mr. Blank said after his son was arrested. (Photographs by Thom Scott for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +573 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 19, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +The Bronx: An All-America City, Thonx + +BYLINE: By BARBARA STEWART + +SECTION: Section B; Page 4; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 522 words + +Sure, plenty of Manhattan residents still raise their eyebrows at the prospect of setting foot in the Bronx -- at least anywhere outside of Riverdale. +Sure, it has the poorest Congressional district in the country and the city's highest number of evicted tenants. + But for the moment, the Bronx can forget all that. Yesterday, Fernando Ferrer, the Borough President, returned from the White House with a new appellation for the Bronx, one that is 180 degrees from Tom Wolfe's jungle or the place Ogden Nash dismissed in a poem with "The Bronx? No thonx." +The Bronx has now been recognized as an All-America City by the National Civic League, a national nonprofit group of municipal administrators and public policy scholars. It was among 10 so honored this year -- an honor handed out by Vice President Al Gore. +"This place, the Bronx, getting an award is literally man bites dog," Mr. Ferrer said. "Over a decade ago, the Bronx was everybody's idea of urban failure. Now it's a national example of what you can do to revive cities." +That is precisely what the award is intended for: cities that have had bad reputations and are making efforts to fix themselves up. Quincy, Fla., for instance, had one of the state's highest rates of teen-age pregnancy and infant mortality. Fosston, Minn., with a population of 1,529, was watching its Main Street stores dwindle away. Each set up committees to address the problems and, to some extent, they succeeded. +While the Bronx's honor included the overall improvement of the borough, it specifically cited three projects, according to Hy Frankel, Mr. Ferrer's chief of staff. One was the rehabilitation of the long-abandoned Morrisania Hospital, which was gutted and rebuilt with 132 units of low-income housing, a day-care center, an employment center and a bilingual elementary school. +Another project was a turn-of-the-century mansion converted by the Bronx Senior Citizens Council to house indigent elderly people. The third honored project was the cleanup of the Underwood-Sedgwick neighborhood, an area that "looked like bombed-out rubble, abandoned cars, really bad," Mr. Frankel said. +Borough officials have been eager to cite other upbeat statistics. The Bronx, until recently spurned by banks and book superstores, has increased its number of jobs by 3,256 between 1987 and 1995. In the last decade, 20,000 new housing units have been created. +But not everyone thinks the picture is so bright. "The Bronx is looking much better," said Matthew Lee, executive director of Inner-City Press/Community on the Move, a community reinvestment advocacy group. "But the downside is that low-income people can't afford the new housing." +Mr. Ferrer also cited such worthwhile destinations as Yankee Stadium, the Bronx Zoo, the Botanical Gardens and four of the city's most prestigious and competitive high schools: Bronx High School of Science, Horace Mann, Fieldston and Riverdale Country School. +He said the recognition had already resulted in "nibbles" from manufacturers planning to relocate. "For us, we've been recognized as innovative and can-do," he said. + +LOAD-DATE: November 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +574 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 20, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +ZARROW, SADIE + +SECTION: Section B; Page 13; Column 1; Classified + +LENGTH: 67 words + +ZARROW-Sadie. Dearly loved and loving wife of the late Joseph, mother of Walter and the late Marilyn, grandmother of Laura, Andrew, Gayle, Scott, and Susan, and great grandmother of Matthew, Anna, Blaire, and Danielle on Nov. 17th at the age of eighty-seven after a brief illness. She was a great lady. Contributions to the Daniel Cantor Senior Citizens Center, Sunrise, FL, will be appreciated. + +LOAD-DATE: November 20, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +575 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 20, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO NEWS BRIEFS: NEW JERSEY; +Judge Stops Company From Phone Solicitations + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 6; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 152 words + +DATELINE: CAMDEN + +A Federal judge in Camden granted an order on Tuesday temporarily halting the operations of a Mount Laurel telemarketing company accused of preying on thousands of elderly people. +The company, S.E.L., offered customers the chance to store their medical histories in a computer database that would be made available to doctors through a 24-hour telephone line, said Paul Blaine, an assistant United States attorney. About 20,000 subscribers signed up at a cost of $120 a year, Mr. Blaine said. + In a civil complaint, the Government accused the company and its owners, Diane and Frank Giordano of Medford and Christine Watson of Mount Laurel, of failing to enter nearly 90 percent of their subscribers in the database. +The temporary restraining order granted by Judge Jerome B. Simandle freezes the defendants' bank accounts and stops them from using mail or electronic wire to conduct their business. + +LOAD-DATE: November 20, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +576 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 20, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +METRO NEWS BRIEFS: NEW JERSEY; +Atlantic City Man Is Charged in Robberies + +SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 6; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 105 words + +DATELINE: ATLANTIC CITY + +A 28-year-old Atlantic City man was arrested at the Showboat Casino Hotel Tuesday and charged with robbing at least seven elderly women within the last two months, the police said. +The man, Ernest Brathwaite, is considered a suspect in at least five other robberies, said Capt. Richard Andrews of the Atlantic City police. The police had been looking for Mr. Brathwaite after video cameras caught him knocking down women and taking their purses, Captain Andrews said. + In all, Mr. Brathwaite made off with about $1,000 from robberies at Bally's Park Place and Trump's Worlds Fair and Trumps Marina, Captain Andrews said. + +LOAD-DATE: November 20, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +577 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 21, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +ZARROW, SADIE + +SECTION: Section B; Page 11; Column 3; Classified + +LENGTH: 67 words + +ZARROW-Sadie. Dearly loved and loving wife of the late Joseph, mother of Walter and the late Marilyn, grandmother of Laura, Andrew, Gayle, Scott, and Susan, and great grandmother of Matthew, Anna, Blaire, and Danielle on Nov. 17th at the age of eighty-seven after a brief illness. She was a great lady. Contributions to the Daniel Cantor Senior Citizens Center, Sunrise, FL, will be appreciated. + +LOAD-DATE: November 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +578 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 21, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +Greenspan Issues Call for Action To Rescue Social Security System + +BYLINE: By RICHARD W. STEVENSON + +SECTION: Section A; Page 24; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 470 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 + +Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, urged Congress today to act quickly to fix the looming problems in Social Security, saying the political and economic difficulties of addressing the impending shortage in the program's financing would only grow with time. +Mr. Greenspan, who was chairman of a national commission on Social Security in the early 1980's and has long used his platform at the Federal Reserve to warn of the problem's urgency, said the solutions to the retirement system's financial difficulties would not be painless, but were within reach. + "More important," Mr. Greenspan said, "most entail changes that are less unsettling if they are enacted soon, even if their effects are significantly delayed, rather than waiting five or 10 years or longer for legislation." +"We owe it to those who will retire after the turn of the century to be given sufficient advance notice to make what alterations in retirement planning may be required," he said. "If we procrastinate too long, the adjustments could be truly wrenching." +Mr. Greenspan's statements, to the lone Senator at a hearing called by the Senate Budget Committee's Social Security Task Force, came as Congress and the Clinton Administration are beginning to grapple with the problems of the pension program. Social Security will start running out of money in the decades after the baby boom generation begins reaching retirement age in 2010. +The task of the White House and Republican leaders will be made easier by projections that the Government will begin running budget surpluses in the next few years. Both parties are exploring how the surpluses could be used to shore up the system or to help create a new one that would give people more responsibility for retirement savings. +Yet neither the White House nor the Republican leadership has developed a plan or even a timetable for dealing with the issue, which is among the most politically sensitive facing either party and is certain to draw pressure from constituencies as diverse as the elderly and Wall Street. +Among the questions being debated is whether Washington should address Social Security before the next Presidential election in 2000 and whether a Social Security overhaul will have to wait until after Congress deals with similar problems afflicting the Medicare system of health insurance for the elderly. +Mr. Greenspan said it would be a mistake to use any budget surplus to increase Government spending. Although he suggested that surpluses alone would probably not be enough to restore the retirement system's health, he offered no new solutions. +Instead, with Congress out of session, he conducted what amounted to a tutorial for Senator Judd Gregg, a Republican from New Hampshire who is the chairman of the task force. + + +LOAD-DATE: November 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +579 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 22, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +LIBROT, SUSAN + +SECTION: Section D; Page 16; Column 3; Classified + +LENGTH: 136 words + +LIBROT-Susan. On November 20, 1997. Of New City, NY. A graduate of Columbia University, she had a special interest in music therapy. Worked as a volunteer with senior citizens for many years. Devoted wife of Dr. Irwin. Loving mother of Mitch and Ken and their wives Diane and Lynn, of Allendale, NJ. Cherished grandmother of Justine, Michael, Amanda, Jeffrey, Emily and Andrew. Services Sunday 1:30 PM, at Hellman Memorial Chapels, 15 State St, Spring Valley, NY. Entombment to follow at the Sanctuary of Abraham and Sarah, Paramus, New Jersey. In lieu of flowers, please make donations to Tomorrows Children's Fund, 30 Prospect Avenue, Hackensack, NJ 07601 in the name of Sue Librot, or Temple Beth Shalom, 228 New Hempstead Road, New City, NY 10956, to the Rabbi's Discretionary Fund in the name of Sue Librot. + +LOAD-DATE: November 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +580 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 23, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +ART; +Erotica Whose Purpose Was Scholarly + +BYLINE: By DOUGLAS WISSING; Douglas Wissing is a writer and art consultant living in Bloomington, Ind. + +SECTION: Section 2; Page 47; Column 1; Arts and Leisure Desk + +LENGTH: 667 words + +DATELINE: BLOOMINGTON, Ind. + +TWO ELDERLY WOMEN pressed their noses to the display case of erect Japanese phallus fetishes while students peered at photographs of copulating couples and glistening musclemen in classical poses. Tattoo art of a naked woman grappling with a cobra and posters from stag movies like "I Want More" and "Jungle Virgin" shared the gallery walls with a Matisse odalisque and a Rembrandt boudoir scene. +A security guard idly perused the entangled nude figures in Picasso's "Man and Woman." A wall label next to the painting read: "When asked to distinguish between art and eroticism near the end of his career, Picasso said, 'But there is no difference.' " + The works are part of "The Art of Desire: The Erotic Treasures From the Kinsey Institute," an exhibition here that celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction. It is the first comprehensive show of the institute's erotic art, a collection that spans 3,200 years as well as the globe, ranging from folk art to Old Masters to the amatory works of amateur photographers. It remains on view through Dec. 5 at the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts Gallery at Indiana University. + The collection is composed entirely of donations, many from Dr. Alfred Kinsey's contacts with postal, customs and prison authorities, who had confiscated some of the materials on display. The 75,000 photographs in the collection include a trove from the 19th and early 20th centuries, some of them on postcards. Others were taken as part of research; there are pictures of swimming sperm, for example, and copulating elephants. All are catalogued with the scholars' arid code (for instance, FIG NUDE XG SIT HND ABV translates as "female figure, nude, genitals covered, sitting, hand above waist"). +The 200-plus works on view reflect the range and ubiquity of sexual themes in human culture since ancient Egypt. Academic art commingles with the unschooled: there are elegant etchings and pristine prints by George Platt Lynes alongside "Tijuana Bibles," comic books depicting characters like Popeye and Olive Oyl in anatomically unlikely situations. Condoms embellished with motifs like waving red hands and heads with cowboy hats are preserved in test tubes. +The show is attracting a cross section of the public: students and teachers, women's groups, Hoosiers from the surrounding hills who seldom visit the campus and older people who knew the Kinseys, who were revered figures in the community. "They're really packing in here," said Betsy Stirratt, the gallery director and co-curator of the show. "I've never seen people look at a show so intently. They get so close to the cases, it takes a lot of cleaning every day." +In mining the institute's erotica for material, the curators had to be sure it fell within the standards of decency of this university town, tolerant though it is. Given the mass of art, the chore was like "Hercules cleaning out the stables," said Sarah Burns, a co-curator of the show. +The result is decorous. The show depicts beauty, humor and fantasy that appeal to both sexes and sexual orientations while eschewing the borderlands of violence, pedophilia or zoophilia. "No animals, no nuns," Ms. Stirratt said. "We wanted this to be a positive show, kind of 'up with sex.' " +The exhibit represents a new, more public profile for the Kinsey Institute even as it has come under attack. Last month, a conservative group, the Concerned Women of America, picketed the institute's offices, protesting research findings. And a recent biography, "Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life," presents Dr. Kinsey as a pervert, a portrayal that the institute has condemned as a distortion. +"So far we've had no negative responses about the exhibit," said John Bancroft, the director of the Kinsey Institute. "We recognize the need to make the institute more open. We want people to know as much as they can. After all, demystification is very much the name of the game." + +LOAD-DATE: November 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: FANTASY "Woman in Boots," a 1936 photograph by J. A. S. Coutts. (Kinsey Institute) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +581 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 23, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: ROCKAWAY PARK; +After Slashing, New Wounds + +BYLINE: By CHARLIE LeDUFF + +SECTION: Section 14; Page 8; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 473 words + +When four teen-agers slashed a priest across the face with a box cutter on the A train early one morning in July, it set off a string of events in which nothing much good happened. +The priest went back to Ireland with a 45-stitch scar. Three boys were sent to an upstate home for juvenile delinquents, and the 16-year-old who did the slashing is now jailed on Rikers Island. Moreover, residents in Rockaway Park held regular Saturday morning protests in front of the St. John's Residence for Boys, a foster care home for 85 boys on Beach 111th Street where the young men had been staying. + "Enough was enough, and the priest episode was the last straw," said Lew M. Simon, the Democratic leader of Assembly District 23, who led the protests. "There were just some kids, too many bad kids that just didn't belong here." +There is no doubt that there were some bad boys at St. John's. Last June, four boys from the home were arrested for trying to rob an elderly man at an automated teller machine. (The charges were later dropped because the man could not identify the boys.) A few weeks later, a teen-ager from the home was arrested for riding a bike around the neighborhood with a loaded pistol in his waistband. +After several meetings between community representatives of Rockaway Park, elected officials, the commissioner of the Administration for Children's Services and the director of the home, Brother Thomas N. Trager, a compromise was reached. +Under the agreement, the number of boys living at St. John's will be reduced to 75, from 92. The Administration for Children's Services has pledged to better screen new arrivals to weed out troublemakers, drug abusers and children with a record within the juvenile justice system. They will also share the boys' personal information with the home. +"We're going to be a little more discerning about the kids we send to St. John's," said Nicholas Scoppetta, the commissioner of the Administration for Children's Services, which oversees the 42,000 children in foster care in the city. "We will also be establishing better lines of communications with elected officials and community representatives." +"We've gotten more flexibility," Brother Trager said. "They've given us the ability to decline prospective clients based on their needs and history." Historically, Brother Trager said, they had to accept whomever the agency sent, and the home could have lost its contract with the city if it refused a child for any reason other than a clear "theraputic objection," such as refusing to take a child on several behavioral medications. +"Those were a few bad apples," Brother Trager said. "The majority of these kids are good people who need a little help through the world. Since the slashing, things have gotten better for everyone around here." CHARLIE LeDUFF + +LOAD-DATE: November 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Brother Thomas N. Trager had to change policy at St. John's Residence. (Rebecca Cooney for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +582 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 27, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma Is Treatable by a New Drug + +BYLINE: By LAWRENCE M. FISHER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 28; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 599 words + +DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 26 + +The Food and Drug Administration today approved a new genetically engineered drug for the treatment of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. +The drug, Rituxan, was approved for treating low-grade or follicular B-cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a slow-growing but fatal and incurable cancer of the immune system. It will be made and marketed by Genentech Inc. of South San Francisco. + In clinical trials, Rituxan was shown to be comparable to chemotherapy in slowing progression of the disease, but with fewer side effects. +Rituxan is the first of a class of drugs called monoclonal antibodies to be approved for treating cancer, but F.D.A. officials said there are at least two dozen such drugs in various stages of clinical trials. +Monoclonals, which are genetically engineered copies of powerful immune system proteins, were one of the first technologies pursued by the biotechnology industry, but have until recently failed in most applications. +"To me this is a milestone for monoclonal antibody technology for this field," said Dr. Kathryn Stein, director of monoclonal antibodies for the F.D.A. center for biologicals evaluation and research. +Most impressive, Dr. Stein said, is that Rituxan is a "naked" antibody, meaning that it is not linked to a radioactive or chemical drug, but is itself an anticancer therapy. +"It really is a turning point," she said. +Because monoclonal antibodies were initially produced in mice, they caused allergic reactions in human beings, which limited their effectiveness. The antibodies now advancing in the clinic have been genetically engineered to be either chimerized, about half human, or humanized, more than 90 percent human. +Rituxan follows Reopro, from Centocor Inc., an antibody for the prevention of blood-clotting in heart patients, which was approved in 1996. +"Unquestionably, monoclonals are gathering momentum," said Viren Mehta, an analyst with Mehta & Isaly in New York. "While it has clearly taken some time for the basic elements of the science to come together, we now have the second important monoclonal in a year, and this is just the beginning." +The most common side effects of Rituxan were moderate flu-like symptoms that occurred in the majority of patients during the first infusion. And unlike the typical four- to six-month chemotherapy regimen or high-dose radiation treatment, Rituxan can be administered in four infusions on an outpatient basis over 22 days. +"Although it is not a cure, we finally have a cancer agent that can be effective with less serious side effects than with conventional chemotherapy," said Dr. Myron Czuczman, assistant professor of medicine at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, and a main investigator of the new drug. +"This is exciting news, especially for elderly patients and relapsed patients who have failed at least one standard treatment regimen." +Genentech also has a monoclonal antibody of its own invention in clinical trials for the treatment of breast cancer, and plans to develop more drugs based on this technology for other solid tumors. +Monoclonal antibodies aim at proteins implicated in the cause or maintenance of cancer, so they can be more specific than a chemical drug that simply kills fast-growing cells. The more specific a drug, the lower the toxicity, meaning physicians can prescribe higher doses without serious side effects. +Rituxan works by binding to a protein known as the CD20 antigen on the surface of mature B cells and B-cell tumors. Then it recruits the body's natural defenses to attack and kill both malignant and normal mature B cells. + +LOAD-DATE: November 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: December 2, 1997, Tuesday + + CORRECTION: +Because of an editing error, an article on Thursday about Food and Drug Administration approval of Rituxan, a drug for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, omitted the company that discovered it. It was Idec Pharmaceuticals Inc. (As the article reported, the drug will be made and marketed by Genentech Inc.) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +583 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 30, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +WEDDINGS; +Sheila Patel, Steven Benfield + +SECTION: Section 9; Page 9; Column 1; Society Desk + +LENGTH: 222 words + +Sheila Harilal Patel, an equities trader, and Steven Carroll Benfield, an investment banker, were married last evening at the Burden Mansion in Manhattan. The Rev. Dr. Douglas L. Trees, a Roman Catholic priest, performed the ceremony. +Ms. Patel, who is keeping her name, works in the equity-derivatives department of Morgan Stanley & Company, the investment bank in Manhattan. She graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University and received an M.B.A. degree from Columbia University. She is the daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Harilal N. Patel of Grymes Hill, Staten Island. The bride's father retired as a general surgeon in private practice in Brooklyn, where her mother, Anne T. Harilal, was the office manager. + Mr. Benfield is a managing director at Prudential Securities in Manhattan. He graduated from Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., and received a master's degree in history from New York University, where he also received an M.B.A. He is a son of the Rev. and Mrs. Dwayne R. Benfield of Toccoa, Ga. The bridegroom's mother, Jane Benfield, is a teacher's assistant at Eastanollee Elementary School in Toccoa. His father, who retired as the pastor of Carnes Creek Baptist Church, is a minister to the elderly at Grace Baptist Church, both in Toccoa. +The bridegroom's previous marriage ended in divorce. + +LOAD-DATE: November 30, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Sheila Patel. (Andrea Sperling) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +584 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 30, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +COPING; +Wheels of Misfortune + +BYLINE: By ROBERT LIPSYTE + +SECTION: Section 14; Page 1; Column 3; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 798 words + +THE mail and calls have been angry and anecdotal in recent days in response to a perceived surge in police brutality, or at least discourtesy, toward middle-class citizens, and to the death of a 68-year-old businessman as he stepped out of an Upper West Side restaurant into the path of a food delivery bicycle being ridden illegally on the sidewalk. +Outrage is easy to share. While relatively few people have been killed by the sidewalk riders, many pedestrians report having been hit, forced off the sidewalk, routinely intimidated. Older people feel particularly vulnerable. Except for Councilman Andrew S. Eristoff, himself a victim of a sidewalk rider, few politicians have addressed it seriously. It simply wasn't a tape-at-11 issue. Illegal sidewalk riding could have been stopped on the precinct level years ago by cops on beats handing out warnings to the restaurant owners who exploit this underpaid, overworked, often undocumented cavalry. Now the Mayor has called bicycle scofflaws a major quality of life issue, and some bike people are concerned. + "That was the same phrase and tone he used to demonize the squeegee men," said a rider, requesting anonymity, who works in a city agency. "Does that mean bike riders are going to be driven out of the city in another cosmetic gesture? Are we not going to be able to deal with the real problems, congestion, double-parking, illegal driving?" +No one died during the long night of Melva Max, although her story seemed to strike an even more exposed nerve. I've heard a dozen similar stories in the past week. Last month, outside her Chelsea restaurant at midnight, Ms. Max waved down a passing patrol car and asked the sergeant inside to quiet some noisy motorcycles. When he seemed dismissive, she asked for his name and badge number. Exactly what happened next is scheduled to be Rashomoned out early next year in Criminal Court. What no one denies is that Ms. Max was arrested, cuffed behind her back, taken to the precinct house, strip-searched and held until nearly 4 A.M. She refused to accept an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, a sort of plea bargain, in a community court; she wanted to go to trial on the minor midemeanors of disorderly conduct and obstruction of government administration to make her point. +Few of my middle-class callers think she should have just "paid the $2." Most say they think there is some kind of class war going on between cops and citizens, which reminds some of their "off the pigs" 60's protests. Several asked for the telephone number of Ms. Max's high-priced criminal lawyer. They didn't seem put off that he was also representing one of the police officers indicted in the Abner Louima assault. +This is, after all, the post-irony age, which means we don't necessarily make connections anymore. Do you really think deliverymen ride on the sidewalk to bowl over peds? Or is it because they don't want to be "doored" or bumped or run over by bigger bullies, cars and trucks? In one city program that deserves our support, if not awards, the Department of Transportation distributes an orange safety vest for bikers with Share the Road on the back. Now that should be the message of the age. +But will City Hall and the police brass order officers to enforce that, and to keep cars off bike paths, to do something about double-parking, stuck streets and all the cars that routinely make right turns in front of bikes and sometimes over them? And how will super-sensitive, easily offended, obviously insecure cops learn the brisk professionalism of the majority of officers? +"Everyone knows that New Yorkers are tough and have attitude," Ms. Max said last week, "but so many cops act like surly teen-agers behind the deli case who want you to go home without buying anything." +She has been trying to form a coalition of Chelsea groups to stage a public forum about what many residents and store owners feel is a general lack of responsiveness by the 10th Precinct. Her so-far disappointing experience in bringing her case before the Civilian Complaint Review Board leads her to believe that the City Council's override of the Mayor's veto of a new independent police review board may be a terrific idea. +Meanwhile, it would be helpful if the Mayor, who apparently loves to dress up, would wear a Share the Road safety vest, and if you noisily boycotted neighborhood restaurants that ship food via sidewalk. +Otherwise, wait until Disney privatizes the city and teaches theme-park courtesy to the cops they hire as security guards under the new plan to allow them to wear their uniforms while moonlighting. It probably won't be so bad. No one will get into midtown without a ticket. If you mouth off, you'll have to wear mouse ears for the rest of the day. + +LOAD-DATE: November 30, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Mark Matcho) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +585 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 30, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +A Safety Net for the Neediest + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 8; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 377 words + +The city seems safer and more prosperous to those with good jobs and peaceful homes, but New York's most vulnerable residents struggle daily for food, shelter and freedom from violence. With unemployment in the city at 10 percent, boom times have not come to people on the margins of society. +All over New York, neglected children are waiting to be fed. Young mothers are struggling to cope with too few resources. The elderly, often cut off from families, are languishing alone in silent apartments. Unexpected illness, a divorce or a lay-off from a job can push a family into crisis. Private generosity is now more important than ever as governments at all levels retreat from sustaining society's weakest members. + Today The New York Times's Neediest Cases Fund begins its annual appeal to help seven of the city's largest and oldest charities provide the poor and the abused a shot at a better life. In a big city, it is often hard to see how one can help one's neighbors. The annual drive, first held in 1912, does that by putting every dollar into direct aid for people in the city's five boroughs. No money is diverted for solicitation or administrative expenses. +Donations will help the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service pay for a program in the New York public schools to combat child abuse and provide emergency cash and food aid for families on the verge of collapse. The Children's Aid Society, another beneficiary of the fund, reaches 100,000 children a year with services ranging from transitional housing for homeless families to running mobile health clinics in the poorest neighborhoods and tutoring programs for teen-agers all over the city. The Community Service Society of New York, another beneficiary, prevents homelessness by giving clients cash to help them stop evictions, while rehabilitating buildings to house the homeless and low-income families. These efforts form part of a social safety net that no city can survive without. +Every dollar can help make New York a more humane and caring place to live. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. Checks should be made payable to The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund and mailed to P.O. Box 5193, General Post Office, New York, N.Y. 10087. + +LOAD-DATE: November 30, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +586 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +November 30, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +The Last Best Friends Money Can Buy + +BYLINE: By Ted Conover; Ted Conover is a contributing writer for the Magazine. His most recent article, in March, was about documentary film making. + +SECTION: Section 6;Page 124;Column 1;Magazine Desk + +LENGTH: 5008 words + +Normally you didn't have to interview for a home health care placement -- the agency just told you where to be, and when, and a little background information on the client. But Lorna Kingston didn't mind. It would be a good job if she got it -- $150 a day for a 24-hour live-in. The client, as Nick Newcombe, who was overseeing her home care, had explained, was resisting help and had fired a succession of workers. Newcombe thought the client would feel empowered if she had a choice, and so had arranged for Lorna and two other aides to be interviewed by the woman, her nephew Howard (Buzz) Katzen and his wife. +Dressed in a pale yellow suit, Lorna, a 35-year-old Jamaican immigrant, sat in the lobby of the building on Central Park West and waited to be summoned upstairs. She went over in her mind what more she knew of this woman's history: that the week before, Rose Enselman had called the police, saying she was being held prisoner by the home attendant. Then she had barricaded herself in her bathroom while naked and demanded the bread and water that was any prisoner's due. The police, upon arrival, had summoned an ambulance, and Rose was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital for psychiatric evaluation and treatment. + The interesting thing about the delusion was the grain of truth it contained. Just months before, as Buzz had explained to Newcombe, 99-year-old Rose was still leading a relatively independent life in her apartment of three decades, with only occasional visits from a housekeeper, a laundry woman and a social worker from Dorot, an Upper West Side service agency for the elderly. She had recently attended the wedding of her geriatrician, Dr. Cathryn Devons, unaccompanied, wearing Ferragamo shoes and a coat from Bergdorf Goodman. +But a number of little falls had prompted Buzz, her only available relative, to hire an agency whose aides Rose "hated" -- and whose presence had not prevented a fall out of bed that resulted in an injured hip, the pivotal crisis for many elderly. As Newcombe put it, "When you're 99 and you sneeze wrong, all of a sudden your brain's crooked." +Rose quickly became truly feeble, and delusional as well. The aides had done nothing to restrain her; her own decrepitude was responsible for that. But home health care and real infirmity had arrived around the same time, and late that night, Rose's mind conflated them into one malevolent force. Hours after her arrival at Mount Sinai, a calmer Rose still spoke of the "nice attendant" she knew from the daytime and the "monster woman" who invaded her apartment at night. +Back at home now, medicated by the anti-psychotic drug Haldol, Rose ran the interview herself, explaining to Lorna what the job required -- assistance in bathing, dressing, preparing food and getting around the city. She was a frail, stooped woman, hard of hearing and poor of sight -- but not the least bit timid. Why did Lorna think she was right for such a responsible position? Rose demanded. +Lorna explained that in Jamaica she had cared for her grandmother and great-grandmother, who had lived past 100, and that she was a good listener and accustomed to hard work. "I told her I would try to make her happy," Lorna said. Rose hired her on the spot -- even though Buzz and his wife had been impressed with another of the aides, who had worked with Rose. ("She was very professional," Buzz said, "and had lasted two nights with Rose. Any sane person would already have jumped off the balcony.") +Lorna started work the same day, Oct. 11. Rose immediately forgot her name and began calling her Cookie. "I thought the reason she hired me was my great-grandmother," Lorna recalls. "But that night she told me: 'Cookie, the reason I picked you instead of the other one? She was too big.' " If push came to shove, maybe with Lorna she'd have a fighting chance. +The American home health care boom began in the early 80's, a response to increases in both the number of elderly (there were 25.6 million Americans 65 and older in 1980; there will be around 70 million in 2030) and the cost of nursing-home care. The average home now charges $127 a day, though special services can add hundreds more. And then there is the homes' notoriety as a last stop for the very old and ill, the point of no return. Though a variety of alternatives now exist -- from hospices to assisted-living complexes to adult day care -- the most popular place to stay, unsurprisingly, is home. +Seven million people now receive some form of paid home care in this country, without which many would have to enter an institution. Endorsements of the practice by Medicare in 1965 and Medicaid in 1971 gave home care a big boost; meanwhile the desirability of aging or recuperating at home was growing in the popular mind. It was in 1979 that Norman Cousins, in "The Anatomy of an Illness: As Perceived by the Patient," wrote that "a hospital is no place for a person who is seriously ill." +The quality and experience of home care workers varies widely: many individuals providing paid home health care have relatively little formal training. It still takes a nurse to give intravenous injections, insert catheters, monitor kidney dialysis and the like. But many older people can manage with a little help and can thereby maintain some degree of independence amid the comfort of familiar possessions and routines. These are people who need only a companion-housekeeper who cooks and cleans but provides no "hands on" care, or a licensed home health aide with at least 75 hours of training in the specific needs of the elderly like bathing, dressing and the taking of medication. +For those 65 and older, Medicare will pay for skilled recuperative care after an acute illness -- generally up to four hours a day, 7 days a week, for 40 days or so. For anyone poor, Medicaid pays for ongoing home care for those with chronic maladies; when those costs reach 90 percent of the cost of a nursing home, the patient is usually sent to such an institution. Families with money can find comfort in the care they can buy for elderly relatives -- and nightmares in the endless ways that the costs can quickly exhaust a fortune. +For home care aides, of course, the signs are auspicious: their field is expected to be one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States in coming years, with a 119 percent increase in jobs predicted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1994 to 2005. But this growth is not occurring in an entirely savory way. Perhaps because the Federal budget for it has increased so rapidly (Medicare's home care budget in 1996 was $16.9 billion, up from $3.5 billion in 1990), perhaps because it is difficult to monitor, fraudulent billing by companies has been epidemic. Indeed, it was so easy to make home care money off the Government that nearly 100 new companies a month were getting on the gravy train until President Clinton placed a moratorium on them in September, pending the establishment of a better vetting system. The two top executives at the Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation, the nation's largest health care company, resigned in July during an extensive investigation of Medicare billings, particularly for home care and laboratory tests. +Other problems have to do with abuse on a more personal scale. The elderly at home with attendants are vulnerable in the same way as babies left with nannies. When two cousins in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, last year accused their home care aide of writing herself $600 in checks from one cousin's account, the woman bludgeoned them with a 36-inch metal rod and then choked them to death. Sometimes it's the worker who's abused. In the Westchester town of Eastchester last November, both an 80-year-old millionaire and his 35-year-old home attendant were murdered. Articles on the killings revealed that two of his previous aides had filed criminal charges against the man, one for threatening her with a gun, the other for forcing her to perform a sex act. +But these horrors distract us from a more subtle and significant story. While at least two-thirds of home care for the elderly is still provided by relatives and other nonpaid caretakers, that figure appears to be shrinking. We don't take Grandma in anymore -- or at least not as readily as we used to. In part it's because we're busier, or we've moved away, or we still have kids to support, or because she's likely to live so long. Nobody feels too good about it, but old age has expanded faster than we can handle. The nanny tradition for children is time tested, but at the other end of life there is a new kind of nanny -- and a caretaking relationship fraught with guilt, resentment and love that we are very likely to be wrestling with for years to come. +You see it on the sidewalks and in the parks and lobbies of neighborhoods throughout cities like New York: elderly people, often white, assisted or simply accompanied by younger women, usually black or Hispanic. As our parents and grandparents live longer, and spend fewer and fewer of their final years with us, a caring woman from the Caribbean -- her face, her voice, her touch -- will very likely be the last human contact many of them will have. +Though Rose's one-bedroom apartment was new to Lorna, she found many of its trappings familiar. In the living room were a large-button telephone and a daybed she knew without asking would be hers; in the bathroom were baby wipes and Depends. Rose's twin bed had a railing on it; the dining-room table was given over to the bottles of prescription drugs that Lorna would dispense. And the thermostat was set at a tropical level, which suited Lorna fine. +Other than that, the apartment, like many older peoples', was a shrine to a life already lived -- with photos of dead relatives, books read long ago, furnishings from another era. A Christmas card from George Bush was tucked into a dusty Venetian blind, near a card, hand-drawn in crayon, that read, "Dear Person, Have a Happy Passover." There was a signed, framed photograph of Albert Einstein, as well as a photo of Justice Louis Brandeis. +Even though Lorna was more diminutive than the competition, she still felt that Rose was afraid of her. She tried to break down barriers by fussing over Rose's appearance and by listening. "You have to give them room and talk to them so nice to see what they're like," she says. She realized that Rose loved dancing in her walker -- or "race car," as she called it -- and after a couple of days Lorna got permission to play her records, and the two would dance. And when she saw that Rose was having trouble swallowing, a side effect of the sedating medication, she used the blender she found under the Heritage Foundation calendar in the kitchen to increase the variety of things Rose could eat. +Nursing is one of the few careers traditionally open to women in Jamaica -- a fact that dovetails nicely with Americans' growing needs. Lorna's mother, now employed by a nursing home in Brooklyn, left the island for New York in 1988; Lorna had arrived a year earlier, at age 25. Lorna's aunt and stepmother are also here, both employed as home care workers. "In the countryside, we always take care of old people ourselves," Lorna says. And frankly, she feels, it is superior to the American system. When you do it yourself, "you give them more love, you understand much more about them. You make them more happy." That happiness is important, she says, because "you have some old people who just give up on their life." One client she was fond of had suffered bouts of depression and died one night in a fire -- probably from smoking in bed, firemen suggested outside the Lower East Side apartment when Lorna arrived for work. But a friend of Lorna's, who had met the woman and felt he knew her, told me he thought she had set it intentionally. Lorna didn't contradict him. "I took very good care of her; she was my baby. We could sit down and talk -- she called me Character. She said, 'You don't know how much joy you bring to my life.' " +Lorna comes across as a joyful person. Though she doesn't make much money, she is glamorous, always wearing stylish clothes, gold bracelets and gold earrings. She has a ready smile and makes good use of lipstick. She paints her fingernails and toenails red and braids her own hair. She lives in a two-story townhouse of recent construction on a redeveloped block of the South Bronx with her fiance, Robin Stephenson, and her sons, Courtland (Junior), 14, and Germaine, 12. Though work can force her to leave them for days at a time (live-in pays the best), she feels the sacrifice is small compared with others she has made. +To bring that joy to her clients -- and advance her own prospects -- Lorna entered into the kind of Faustian bargain that immigration presents to many from poorer countries. When she came to America, unable to procure visas for her children, she left them behind. +"I leave Germaine when he was 2, and Junior when he was 4," she says, "and Germaine was so close to me, I cried every day." When after five years she finally went home to fetch them, in 1992, "Germaine didn't know me. He really didn't. I'd say, 'Come here,' and he'd run away from me. It hurt so much. When I left Jamaica with them, the immigration man said, 'Why you go and leave your kids like that?' I felt so bad! I said I did it because I had to get them a better life." Doubtless the official knew that already -- New York City is full of immigrant mothers who leave their own families to take care of other peoples'. But Jamaican culture is conflicted about the trade-offs -- just as Americans are about leaving the care of our parents to strangers. +Lorna earned her license to be a home health aide at Caliber Training Institute in New York, but says that doing the actual work taught her more. She once saw a colleague knock down a demented elderly person who kept barging into her bedroom. "I felt so bad, I will never forget it," she says. "I would never do that -- you don't do that to nobody who's not in their senses. I said, Remember, you have a mother and someday you could be like that. Some old people are like a baby, they don't understand. +"This field is not for everybody. People who don't have patience should stay away. You have to love people." Lorna's own patience would soon be put to a big test. +Lorna and Rose had wound up together because Buzz, 65, of Westport, Conn., a Xerox executive on the verge of both retirement and departure with his wife to a winter home in Scottsdale, Ariz., was at the end of his rope. His aunt Rose "hated each and every one" of the home health aides supplied by the first agency he engaged. After brief trial periods, she had rejected assisted living in Connecticut and White Plains ("she didn't like the way people there dressed," he says); a place in her own neighborhood that had once seemed appealing would no longer accept her because she couldn't walk by herself. +Under the circumstances, Buzz sought out Fine & Newcombe, one of the larger of the three dozen geriatric-care-management businesses in the New York metropolitan area. Such firms typically oversee all aspects of the care of an aging person -- everything from advice on living arrangements to consultation with doctors to accounting help for monthly bills. Thirteen years ago there were only a handful; now there are more than 1,000 nationwide. Fees range from about $100 to $150 an hour in New York, making them affordable to only a small segment of the population. Older people sometimes sign themselves on, but the agencies are particularly useful for relatives of the aged who live in other cities, providing a means of watching over the elderly from afar -- like a kind of child surrogate. +For an amazing number of years, Buzz explained to Newcombe in the care manager's Upper West Side office, Rose had taken care of herself, riding buses alone into her 90's. She had outlived a husband who died 28 years ago, a daughter who died seven years ago at 70 and virtually all of her friends of her generation. A forceful, some would say controlling, woman, she had alienated three nieces who lived in Manhattan; when Buzz's mother and another sister died, the care of Aunt Rose fell on him. It was a responsibility he had never sought. +"Rose expected me to transfer my affections to her," he says. "I couldn't, but I felt I had to take care of her for one reason. And that is, if my mother were alive, she'd tell me to take care of her sister. I was the only one geographically available." The first request was to help her rewrite her will. She had an annual income of about $15,000 on $220,000 of assets, and received a $400 monthly check from Social Security. She wrote the new will "exclusively for the purpose of eliminating her granddaughter -- her only living descendant." When Rose decided to write yet another will, Buzz persuaded her to put the granddaughter back in. In addition, she made a large gift to Brandeis University (though she had not attended, Rose was a longtime benefactor) and "gifts of $1,000 to 18 people, half of whom are no longer alive," Buzz says with resignation. +As she deteriorated, he assumed power of attorney for her. The stabilized rent for her one-bedroom apartment with terrace was only $560 a month, so 24-hour home care (at $150 a day) and the services of Fine & Newcombe were things Buzz felt she could afford, given her advanced age. He signed on with Nick Newcombe, interviewed and hired Lorna, returned to Westport and then, with eight days to go until he left for Scottsdale, he phoned Lorna at Rose's, praying that his problems were solved. +They were not. Though Rose by day was acting reasonable enough, by night the demons came. "Cookie! Cookie!" she called, all night long, but when Lorna came, Rose couldn't say what she needed. She got out of bed by herself, clambering over the rail, and turned lights on and off all over the apartment. About 3 A.M. she came under the spell of what would come to be known as the Scream: head back, eyes closed, she began a high-pitched ululation that went a-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi! +"I try to give her something cool, I try to give her something warm, nothing help," sobbed Lorna in frustration. She called Robin, who told her to stick with it if she could but not feel bad if she couldn't. The next night was the same. And the next. Exhausted, Lorna told Newcombe she couldn't do it anymore. She hadn't slept in three days. Newcombe begged her not to quit, and sent over Claudia Piper, 30, to relieve her from 8 P. M. to 8 A.M. +Another Jamaican living in the Bronx, Claudia Piper was not as cheery as Lorna, but she was steady, capable and articulate. She was hopeful for the new job because her previous one had been awful. The client, a woman in her 60's with Alzheimer's, had been fine. But the crowded Upper West Side apartment also contained the client's imperious and inconsiderate husband, who wouldn't let Claudia receive phone calls, fed her only leftovers from his plate and urinated all over the toilet seat that Claudia helped his wife use. Claudia knew that home care work suffered from many such pitfalls. There was the 300-pound woman she had had to lift onto and up from her bed; the four-packs-a-day smoker who demanded that Claudia hide the habit from his nurse; the squalid condition of many apartments. +Newcombe warned her that taking the new job could be like jumping from the frying pan into the fire, but Claudia said the frying pan was so bad she'd be willing to try. She was paid $10 an hour, $120 for the shift -- the same as Lorna now got -- but she had to suffer, she soon realized, a bit more. While Lorna could focus on the salon and doctor appointments, Claudia would become the expert on Rose Enselman's nocturnal dysfunction. She quickly discerned a pattern. +"It starts about 10 P. M., and sometimes it goes on all night," Claudia says of that time. "Sometimes I get two hours of peace and then it starts again." It, of course, was the uncontrolled screaming from the bedroom. Claudia sighs to recall how neighbors complained. She moved Rose to the living room. "And then that neighbor started banging on the wall, I think with pots." Claudia seldom got five hours of sleep a night, and what little she did get came in many small parts. Claudia's mother in the Bronx, who cared for her 8-year-old daughter when Claudia was on a job, would receive calls in the middle of the night. "At 2 o'clock I would call her. And she'd say, there's nothing you can do. +"At first I felt frustrated for me, not for her. It's like, it's night, and you're supposed to be sleeping at night." One morning after a long night, Claudia opened the door for Lorna and said, "Lorna, I think I'm going to quit." +"I was saying, oh, Claudia, please don't give up," Lorna says now. "I said: 'Don't quit tonight. Come tonight and see how it goes.' " Lorna was finding that the daytime Rose, the coherent Rose, was a person who could grow on you. She had told Lorna of her love of the opera, about her journeys to four continents, about her lifelong support of women's rights. "The life she used to live!" Lorna said at the time. "And how fast it changed for her. I feel sorry for her -- she can't help it now." She felt Claudia would come to feel the same way. "You know what happens?" she told her. "After a couple of weeks, you get so close to her you don't want to give up." +Claudia didn't give up. But Rose was contemplating it. Though she had no specific recollections of her nighttime delirium ("I was screaming? Oh, darling, I'm sorry," she'd tell Claudia in the morning), she felt physically and spiritually awful. Claudia had been working only a few days when she and Lorna began to fear that Rose wasn't eating enough. Her ability to swallow had deteriorated to the point where food stuck in her throat made it sound like she was gargling when she talked. Buzz, Newcombe, Evelyn Morris (the social worker from Dorot who had been checking on her weekly for nearly two years) and an accountant Buzz had hired to pay her bills met in the apartment to discuss her affairs. Lorna, as seemed to be the protocol at such moments, left the room. +Rose, appearing exhausted, horrified the rest of them by saying, "If I have to live like I'm living now, I'd rather die." She complained about the job being done by Lorna, but only halfheartedly. Not just her presence, Newcombe suggested out of Rose's earshot, but the gathering of all of them had driven home to her "just how managed she was," how dependent on others. The next day she had a fever, and Cathryn Devons suspected that aspirated food had brought on pneumonia. Rose was readmitted to the hospital. +Lorna and Claudia sat by her there for 10 days (a common practice, which prevents a client from having to find new caretakers when her hospital stay is over), helping to nurse her through the crisis. Even though questions remained about how to handle Rose's trouble swallowing while on the sedating medicine, once the pneumonia was cleared up, she was sent home. +Lorna and Claudia resumed their shifts at Rose's residence. When I came to visit, it was a big production: Rose wouldn't receive me unless she was well put-together, and there was nothing Lorna liked better than dressing Rose up. Would she prefer the readier access to doctors that a nursing home might provide? I asked her. Never, she said. "In your home, you got a right to get mad, you got a right to get glad." Did she miss the opera? "Ever so much." What was her favorite television show? "Charlie Rose." +Claudia watched her and talked with her as late into the night as she could but the Scream returned and intensified. Once Rose got started, she wouldn't take any of the medications intended to calm her down. And it was hard to anticipate when it would begin -- sometimes late afternoon, sometimes early morning, once for 48 hours straight. "Claudia and Lorna were living in a screaming hole," says Newcombe, who made frequent visits. "I couldn't tolerate the intensity of it for even 15 minutes, and I've heard a lot of screaming patients. I said: 'Rose, use your other voice. You have a lower voice than that.' And she said: 'Oh dear, I don't know what's wrong with me. I just a-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi!' This began to go on night and day." +Lorna says: "I always hurt for Rose, always. When she's good, she's such a sweet person. I would say, 'Oh, Rose, I love you,' " she says, indicating how she would embrace Rose, "and she hugs me, too." +One night, suffering a fit of delirium in her bed, Rose seemed to Claudia like nothing so much as a baby who needed comforting. "Normally they train you to be so cautious, to wear gloves all the time," she says. That didn't seem the right thing in this situation. "You want to stop the baby from crying, so you hug it, you just do it." The young Jamaican woman went over and put her arms around the frail, quaking Jewish woman. It seemed to help. Both women were in their nightgowns. Rose seemed to calm down a great deal. Claudia lay down next to Rose with her arms around her, and both of them fell asleep. +"I don't know what's wrong with families here," Claudia told me on a day when she and Lorna overlapped at Rose's apartment. "They don't spend time with their mother or father, they don't care. I've been into maybe 100 homes. Most don't get affection from their family. They have to get it from an outsider. And it helps, I'm telling you, it helps. It's a very good healing process. To have a person who really cares about them be around them. +"This one lady, her granddaughter wouldn't do anything for her anymore. She called up her mother, and told her the grandmother did a b.m. And she wouldn't clean it up. +"I said: 'Clean her! I do the same thing every day. What's so hard about it?' And the daughter told the lady, as soon as you get home, I'm putting you in a nursing home." +It is easy to be hard on children of the dependent elderly. No one ever does enough. Americans, perhaps, do less than those in poorer countries, but our parents live to be older and can persist much longer in a debilitated, needy state. The American dilemma, at the century's close, is what to do about the hidden costs of longevity -- not just the economic ones, but the intimate, personal costs as well. Home health care aides, among our least educated and less well paid, understand these costs as well as anyone else. +"I know if they put Miss Rose in a nursing home, she would die," Lorna says. +Jamaica exists like a shadow reality for women like Lorna and Claudia. Memories of wood fires and dirt roads, heat and humidity, spicy food and reggae, the "jelly" of the coconut and the closeness of families create aches of longing alongside equally sharp memories of why they left. +The morning I visited the small town of Maggotty in St. Elizabeth parish, Lorna's sister May had got up before 6 A.M. to sell fish. She had purchased the freshwater red snapper at a local farm using money provided by Lorna, and then shared two taxis to get to the neighboring Ginger Hill area. There, with a 40-pound bucket of fish at her side and a 45-pound bucket of fish heads on her head, she walked door-to-door until all were sold. She returned to the tidy, two-room shack she lives in with her husband, Joseph, and their four children. She was soaked with perspiration, her $30 profit in small damp bills in a skirt pocket. I thought now she'd be free to talk, until I realized that the school teacher on the porch was waiting for May to braid her hair. "When do I stop working?" asks May. "When I close my eyes on the pillow!" +Nearby I visited Lorna and May's childhood home, a green-painted cinder-block structure with a corrugated roof. Their brother Man lives there now, with his toddler son and girlfriend. He drives a minivan taxi that Lorna bought for him; Lorna's next project is to buy May and Joseph a bigger house. Now that she has a green card, she comes home every couple of years. Her father, buried out back, died of a brain tumor after Lorna left but before she had got the green card that would let her re-enter the United States if she flew home. One of the agonies of her life was not being able to come visit and tend to her own ailing father in his last days. +If Lorna and May didn't bear a strong resemblance to each other, I would never guess they were sisters. As girls, they went barefoot, skipped school for the sugar-cane harvest and bathed together in the creek under the No. 1 Bridge. But today, Lorna wears stylish outfits and makeup and keeps her hair just so; May wears plastic sandals and a T-shirt and is covered with a sheen of sweat. Lorna has taken many classes in New York and speaks clear English; May's accent is so thick I often don't know if she's speaking English or the Jamaican patois. May tells me she would "leave tomorrow" if a visa came through -- "everyone around here would." She thinks Lorna might come to live in Jamaica again. Back home, Lorna tells me no, not after New York, not after what she has achieved. "In this country, I learned to read and write a lot better. I got my G.E.D. here, nice clothes, a nice apartment full of furniture -- it all make me feel so good. It make me feel this high!" +A hundred feet down the road from Lorna's childhood home lives her grandmother, Claribel Brown, age 83. She serves visitors a plate of small, sweet bananas and says that when she's too weak to take care of herself, there are many, many relatives nearby who will step in. "All my life I took care of children," she says. "Now they carry me." +I report this to Lorna and ask who will take care of her when she's an old lady. Would she never consider Jamaica? She shakes her head. "I talk to Junior about it. He already says he won't put me into a nursing home. He say, 'Mama, I'm going to get you the best care there is. And I'm going to check on it all the time to make sure you get it.' " +Then she voices a very American sentiment: "And I sure hope he don't forget." + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +587 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 1, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +GLOBAL WARMING; +Getting New York Ready For a Hotter, Wetter Future + +BYLINE: By ANDREW C. REVKIN + +SECTION: Section F; Page 8; Column 4; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 560 words + +THE Port Authority isn't planning to start building dikes around the runways at Kennedy International Airport just yet. But a variety of groups have begun identifying steps to limit global warming's potential impact on the New York region -- steps that, in many cases, experts say are worth taking no matter how the climate changes. +The most serious predictions concern the length of summer heat waves, which now average about 14 days. In the warmer world predicted by some climate scientists, the heat waves may stretch out to become twice as long. + Under a recent study by the Regional Plan Association, a private group that analyzes long-term trends around New York City, global warming could lead to a less reliable supply of drinking water as precipitation patterns shift, more smog, shortages of electricity and flooding. "This is not going to unfold overnight, but it could have enormous consequences for us here," said H. Claude Shostal, the association's president. +City planning officials and engineers for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey have determined that the city does not yet need to start spending money to protect, say, its low-lying airports, which could be vulnerable to flooding if sea levels rise as predicted. "This will be a gradual change over 100 years," said Allen Morrison, a spokesman for the Port Authority. +But some planning experts say cities like New York could immediately begin taking some steps to lessen the impact of any warming, steps that also make sense for other reasons, like increasing energy efficiency by toughening building codes, planting trees and encouraging building owners to replace black rooftops with light reflective materials. +Studies by the Department of Energy show that planting trees and making roofs and pavement light instead of dark, so they reflect sunlight, could cut summer temperatures on city streets by up to 7 degrees. +"That's enough to offset the predicted warming," said Dr. Douglas Hill, a consulting engineer from Huntington, N.Y., and the editor of "The Baked Apple: Metropolitan New York in the Greenhouse," a book published last year by the New York Academy of Sciences. +Because of what is called the heat-island effect, the city, with all its concrete and asphalt, already tends to be 3 to 5 degrees hotter, on average, than surrounding areas during the summer. +Along with higher temperatures would come higher levels of ozone pollution in the air close to the ground, leading to more smog and endangering the health of the elderly and people with breathing problems. +New York City has more deaths from heat than any other large American city, Dr. Hill said. "The mortality rate from heat in New York is twice that of Chicago," he said. "And it could double by 2030." +The region may also experience coastal flooding if seas rise a foot or more, as many climate models predict. Flooding and erosion are already costly problems in many parts of the New Jersey coast and Long Island. +Finally, he said, there are likely to be significant indirect effects of a warming world. +"There could be 17 million refugees just in Bangladesh from sea level rise," Dr. Hill said. "They're going to want to go somewhere. And New York City has always been a magnet for dislocated people. In the end, the most severe consequences of all this could be indirect." + +LOAD-DATE: December 1, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +588 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 2, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +U.S. Proposal on Pension Funds Is Faulted + +BYLINE: By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON + +SECTION: Section D; Page 2; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 506 words + +Retirement advocates warned yesterday that a Labor Department plan could seriously erode the ability of workers to make sure that their pension funds were being handled properly. +Large pension funds must annually disclose what stocks, bonds and other assets they hold. Under the Labor Department plan these holdings would no longer be disclosed in the annual reports, known as Form 5500's. + The annual disclosures are critical to making sure workers collect promised benefits, said Karen Ferguson, executive director of the Pension Rights Center, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington. Workers, unions and reporters have used the disclosures to bring to light misuse of pension funds, she said. +"This list of investments is where you find the problems because your company's pension plan has invested most of its money in a failing company owned by your boss's brother-in-law," Ms. Ferguson said. +Ending the annual disclosures would also increase the risks of workers who are in defined contribution plans, who now bear all the investment risks even though they may not directly control their retirement money, said Vicki Gottlich, a lawyer with the National Senior Citizens Law Center in Washington. +In a traditional, or defined benefit, pension the Government guarantees at least partial payment of benefits if the plan fails, Ms. Gottlich said, "but if you are in a defined contribution plan you have no protection at all and now you would not have disclosure," which could raise red flags. +The American Association of Retired Persons is "concerned about the fact that they would be knocking out a lot of information," said David Certner, a pension specialist. "There are hundreds of thousands of pension plans, which the Labor Department, with its limited resources, obviously cannot monitor. Indeed, the pension law was meant to be self-enforcing, with individuals having a role to play in monitoring their pension plan." +The annual disclosures have been under attack by some large pension plan sponsors as a waste of resources. +"For a plan with $20 billion in assets the filing is the Manhattan phone book," said Alan Lebowitz, Deputy Assistant Secretary for pensions at the Labor Department. "The truth is it has not been useful to us." +He said participants would still receive an annual summary giving total assets in a plan, which is sufficient to alert them if assets are being dissipated. +Pension plans would have to make their list of investments available on request by the Labor Department, Mr. Lebowitz said. Workers would also be entitled to examine the documents and, if they feared reprisals, could have the Labor Department obtain them on their behalf, Mr. Lebowitz said. +Lynn D. Dudley, a vice president of the Association of Private Pension and Welfare Plans, said it favored simplifying the disclosure statements, but supported disclosures that helped participants monitor the plans. +The Labor Department said it would accept comments on its proposed rule through tomorrow. + +LOAD-DATE: December 2, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +589 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 3, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +HARTIGAN, NANCY IRENE + +SECTION: Section D; Page 20; Column 1; Classified + +LENGTH: 101 words + +HARTIGAN-Nancy Irene. On December 1, 1997. Beloved wife of John D., mother of Anne Harrison, Carol, Patti and Thomas. Devoted grandmother of five. Since 1985, she was a Reference Librarian at the Harrison Public Library where she was invaluable to patrons from youngsters to senior citizens. Visiting hours are 2-4 and 7-9 PM today at the William H. Graham Funeral Home, 1036 Boston Post Road, Rye, New York. The funeral mass is 10 AM tomorrow at Resurrection Church in Rye, New York. In lieu of flowers, contributions to The Friends of the Harrison Public Library, Bruce Avenue, Harrison, New York. + +LOAD-DATE: December 3, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +590 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 4, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Long Island Economy Is Thriving, Economists Say + +BYLINE: By JOHN T. McQUISTON + +SECTION: Section B; Part 2; Page 21; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 480 words + +DATELINE: HEMPSTEAD, N.Y., Dec. 3 + +The Long Island economy is booming, with shoppers spending, builders building and businesses hiring, according to year-end reports by local economists. +"At long last, the Island's economy is now back to where it was in the heydays of the mid-1980's, with one major plus," Dr. Irwin L. Kellner, the former chief economist for Chase Manhattan's Regional Bank, told a group of business executives today at Hofstra University in Hempstead. "It's not a one-trick pony, dependent on only one industry, defense." + He said there has been an increase in tourism and financial services and growing diversity in areas like technology, biotechnology, telecommunications and filmmaking. +"I think we're in great shape here and safely out of the woods," said Dr. Kellner, who holds the August B. Weller Distinguished Chair of Economics at Hofstra. +Dr. Pearl M. Kamer, chief economist for the Long Island Association, the region's largest business group, was even more optimistic. +"Long Island's economic recovery has finally caught fire," Dr. Kamer said in her year-end regional review. +She said that Nassau and Suffolk Counties had 1,123,000 nonfarm jobs in September, up 22,500 from September 1996. The service industry alone added 9,800 jobs, she said. +And while an estimated 37,000 people have entered the labor force since May, there has been no increase in the unemployment rate because many of them were able to find jobs, she said in her report. +In his speech, Dr. Kellner noted Nassau County's 3.5 percent unemployment rate and Suffolk County's 4 percent rate. "A growing number of manufacturing jobs offered opportunities to many people who perhaps don't have a higher education but who have physical skills," he said. +"On the other hand, there are some continuing shortages of people for jobs such as programmers and computer operators, machinists and even accountants," he said. +Consumer spending, meanwhile, has led to a 5.5 percent increase over last year in sales tax revenues in both Nassau and Suffolk Counties, easing the pressure to increase property taxes, Dr. Kellner said. +"And when you consider that prices are up 2 percent, if that much, you're talking about real goods being moved off the shelves and out of warehouses to the tune of 3 to 4 percent over a year ago," he said. +Builders constructed more than 5,500 new residential units this year and could be expected to do the same next year, he said, even though there is little available space. +"There has been a sharp increase in the number of senior citizen assisted-living units being built here," he said. "We're on the cutting edge in this area, adding to the economy not only in terms of building, but in wages and other spinoff effects." +Because the area has an aging population, he said, "this is something that I think will provide at least a modest push to the Long Island economy." + +LOAD-DATE: December 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +591 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 4, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Fire Damages Meals Center + +BYLINE: By The Associated Press + +SECTION: Section B; Part 2; Page 16; Column 6; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 114 words + +A fire that investigators believe was intentionally set damaged the kitchen at a Brooklyn senior center, leaving 125 to 135 people without their daily hot lunch yesterday. +Because the center, the Dorchester Senior Citizens' Center, is in a synagogue, Prospect Park Temple Issac, the police were investigating the fire as a possible bias attack, Officer Joseph Cavitolo said. The police said it was reported at 11:30 P.M. on Tuesday and was quickly put out. + The fire started in trash next to the building, which is on Dorchester Road in Flatbush, Janet Schur, director of the center, said. She said the kitchen, which is next to where the trash burned, was heavily damaged. + +LOAD-DATE: December 4, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +592 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 6, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +M. S. Knowles, 84, Adult Education Pioneer + +BYLINE: By WOLFGANG SAXON + +SECTION: Section D; Page 15; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 537 words + +Malcolm Shepherd Knowles, widely acknowledged as a founder of adult education as a separate discipline, died on Nov. 27 at the Washington Regional Medical Center in Fayetteville, Ark. He was 84 and lived in Fayetteville. +The cause was a stroke, his family said. + Dr. Knowles contended that the education of adults should address the specific needs and approaches to learning of more mature and experienced students. He called this concept andragogy, introducing it in the late 1960's and inspiring a new line of research and literature in the field. +In essence, Dr. Knowles worked from the notion that adult students -- whether they seek a degree they had missed, wish to enhance their professional skills and standing or merely want to satisfy their curiosities -- are a wholly different breed. Typically they are members of the work force, spouses or parents and must be taught in their own social context. +His own exposure to the special needs of young adults past freshman age and older people seeking to broaden their horizons began in the 1940's. He first built a comprehensive education program for adults at the central Y.M.C.A. in Chicago, where he worked from 1946 to 1951. +He then became the founding executive secretary of the Adult Education Association of the United States and led it until 1959. In 1982, it merged with a parallel group to form the present American Association for Adult and Continuing Education, based in Washington. +"He pioneered the idea in this country, and put it into coherent form, that adults learn differently from children or 18-year-olds who enter college," said Dr. John A. Henschke, the association's president and a professor of adult education at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. +Dr. Knowles, who was born in Livingston, Mont., graduated from Harvard College with a degree in history in 1934 and, at the University of Chicago, received a master's degree in 1949 and a doctorate in adult education in 1960. He was a professor of adult education at Boston University from 1960 to 1974 and then at North Carolina State University until 1979. +After retiring, he remained active in the field into the 1990's. He taught at the Fielding Institute, a graduate school in Santa Barbara, Calif., offering degrees in clinical psychology and related subjects and at the University of Arkansas. +He took his theories before scholarly assemblies and explained them to practitioners in workshops, conferences and consultations worldwide. He wrote about 200 articles on the theory and practice of adult education, and his books are used as texts in adult education programs around the world. +The books include "The Modern Theory of Adult Education: From Pedagogy to Andragogy" (Cambridge, 1988), "The Adult Learner, A Neglected Species" (Gulf, 1990), "A History of the Adult Education Movement in the United States" (Krieger, 1994), and "The Making of an Adult Educator: An Autobiographical Journey" (Jossey-Bass, 1989). +Dr. Knowles is survived by his wife of 62 years, Hulda Fornell Knowles; their son, Eric S., of Fayetteville; a daughter, Barbara E. Hartl of Orange, Calif.; a sister, Margaret K. Sterling, of Black Mountain, N.C., and five grandchildren. + +NAME: Malcolm Shepherd Knowles + +LOAD-DATE: December 6, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Malcolm Shepherd Knowles. + +TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +593 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 6, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Partisanship Imperils Advisory Panel on Medicare + +BYLINE: By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1155 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 + +Medicare is such a hot political potato that politicians here realized long ago that using normal legislative procedures, they would never be able to agree on measures to make the program financially secure for baby boomers when they retire. +So they took a traditional Washington escape route. They voted last summer to create a commission to tell them what hard choices to make. + But there are strong signals that this approach will not work either, from the partisanship that infects most things here to the natural unwillingess to take political risks. The commission, even though President Clinton filled it out by naming his appointees today, has a task ahead that is all but insurmountable. +The problem is that beginning in the second decade of the next century, there will be many more retirees and many fewer workers paying taxes to support the retirees' health insurance under Medicare. Any long-term solution is bound to have unpleasant aspects: higher taxes on the working-age population, more out-of-pocket costs to retirees, fewer Government-paid medical services for the elderly, restrictions on who is eligible for the program, or some combination of those steps. +"We have an obligation to strengthen it for the next century, to insure that it is as strong for our children as it has been for our parents," the President said today. +In that vein, provision was made in the Balanced Budget Act that Congress adopted and Mr. Clinton signed last summer for an advisory commission, the members to be appointed by the President and Congressional leaders by Dec. 1, to study the program and recommend changes. +The notion was that if a commission of experts could lay out for the public the dire situation facing Medicare when the baby boomers begin to retire, that would provide the cover politicians would need to make difficult choices and cast tough votes. +Now, prospects have dimmed that the commission will be able to set aside partisan differences and resolve how to change the health insurance program for the elderly and the disabled. +First, Mr. Clinton and the Republican leaders in Congress found themselves unable to agree on who should become chairman of the commission. The President initially decided to miss the Dec. 1 deadline for picking members and wait to name the four members of the 17-member panel he is allotted until he could announce a chairman. But with the chairmanship still unresolved, he went ahead and named his appointees anyway. +Commission chairmen are generally the ones responsible for whether an advisory panel succeeds or fails. They choose the staff and set the tone for the panel's work. +Then Speaker Newt Gingrich's office said on Monday that he had required his four appointees to pledge in advance that they would not accept a tax increase as a solution to Medicare's fiscal problems. +Most authorities on health policy assume that taxpayers, beneficiaries and health-care providers will all have to contribute eventually to making the Medicare system sound. The Speaker's stricture severely limits the options available to the commission members. +That was the point made by Horace B. Deets, executive director of the American Association of Retired Persons, who was approached by Mr. Gingrich about becoming a commission member and declined because he could not take the no-tax pledge. +In an interview later, Mr. Deets said: "The commission should look for all possible solutions. It's too early to take anything off the table. I hope the commission will approach its work with an explorer's mentality, not a crusader's mentality." +Mr. Clinton had a similar response. A tax increase may not be needed, he told reporters on Tuesday, but he added, "I hate to see the commissioners themselves have their hands tied at the outset." +Mr. Gingrich's strong stand against increased taxes had the additional effect of anointing the commission with a distinctly partisan oil. +Republicans have made it clear that they intend to make their opposition to taxes in all forms the cornerstone of their Congressional campaigns next year. The implication of the Speaker's position is that Democrats will be forced to defend themselves at every turn if they do not explicitly reject higher taxes to bolster the Medicare system. +Of course, this is not the first time that politicians have used Medicare for political advantage. For more than 30 years, Democrats have reminded voters in election after election that most Republicans voted in 1965 against the establishment of Medicare. +A repeated theme in the President's re-election campaign last year was his accusation that Republicans were out to gut the program. +But the history of Federal advisory commissions on politically sensitive topics is that the only ones that succeed are the ones that set partisanship aside. +That was the case with the National Commission on Social Security Reform, a panel headed by Alan Greenspan, then a Wall Street economist and now chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. With support from Democrats and Republicans, the Greenspan commission voted in 1983 to recommend a package of Social Security benefit cuts and tax increases. Congress enacted the recommendations almost intact. +By contrast, the National Economic Commission, which was supposed to find ways to lower the Federal deficit at the beginning of the Bush Administration, split along party lines and was never able to agree on a set of recommendations. +Rank partisanship is not the only reason to doubt that the Medicare commission will resolve the problem of how to pay for the program after the baby boomers retire. +No one doubts that a serious problem exists. Even if the rise in medical costs could somehow be restrained, the demographics demand change. There are now almost four workers paying taxes for each retiree on Medicare. By 2015, the ratio will fall to about 3 to 1, and by 2050, there will be only two workers per retiree. +But the crisis in Medicare is years away, and politicians almost never make difficult choices unless their backs are against the wall. +In the case of Medicare, Congress adjusted the program this year to stave off insolvency until at least 2007 (the estimate of the Congressional Budget Office) and perhaps 2010 (the estimate of the Clinton Administration's health care actuaries) or even 2015 (the latest Office of Management and Budget estimate). That was plainly responsible in the short term, but by making a long-term solution more difficult, it was perhaps irresponsible in the long run. +The crunch is "at least four election cycles" away, said Robert D. Reischauer, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, an authority on health care financing. +"For a Congress in which over half of the members were not on Capitol Hill four elections ago, that is a political lifetime," Mr. Reischauer added. "The Medicare problem will become someone else's problem." + +LOAD-DATE: December 6, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: News Analysis + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +594 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 7, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +New Health Giant Pledges Millions for Community + +BYLINE: By JOHN RATHER + +SECTION: Section 14LI; Page 20; Column 4; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1298 words + +IN the rush of events leading to the recent merger of North Shore Health System and the Long Island Jewish Medical Center, one aspect of creating a health-care giant with an annual budget of $2.5 billion has gone nearly unnoticed. +The less than two-month-old North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System has guaranteed that it will contribute $50 million to $100 million over five years in new health services for the community. + The money, from savings anticipated in the merger, would exceed the more than $120 million a year that the two hospitals now contribute in caring for the medically indigent. Both hospitals treat patients regardless of their ability to pay. +The sum for new programs would depend on the extent of savings from the merger. Spokesmen for the new system said last week that it was premature to forecast how the money might be spent. +The possibilities include prevention, new clinical programs and working with the elderly. +The final decisions will rest with the board of the system and administrators, who are now focused on merging two institutions that had been competitors. +The two hospitals agreed on the $50 million guarantee and a rate freeze for two years in an effort to advance the merger, which the Justice Department opposed. In October, Judge Arthur D. Spatt of Federal District Court in Uniondale ruled against a Justice Department contention that the merger would violate antitrust laws, lead to higher rates and lessen choice for consumers. The Federal officials have until the end of the month to appeal. +The agreement was also a factor in a decision by State Attorney General Dennis C. Vacco that the merger would not hurt competition and was in patients' and the state's best interests. +In addition to Nassau and Suffolk Counties, the system serves Queens, home to half the patients at L.I.J., and Staten Island, the site of two of 10 acute-care hospitals that belong to North Shore. The other North Shore hospitals are five in Nassau, two in Suffolk and one in Queens. +Ambulatory care adds Brooklyn to the service area, and the system is examining how to provide care, particularly complex procedures, for other parts of the New York metropolitan region. +"We will study the total geographic area we cover and find out where there are program needs and where there are underserved populations," a spokeswoman, Carol Hauptman, said. "We haven't zeroed in on anything specific yet." +On Long Island officials of health groups said even a relatively small amount of money for new programs, in a period when government spending on health is declining, could bring major benefits. +"There are underserved populations, and specific well-targeted efforts can make a difference," said Marge Rogatz, president of Community Advocates, which works with what Ms. Rogatz described as "the most vulnerable populations in Nassau County." +Ms. Rogatz, who is also on the board of the Nassau-Suffolk Coalition for the Homeless, suggested sending mobile units to shelters, churches and other places where the homeless and needy congregate. +"A few units out there would make an enormous difference," she said. "They could pick up people desperately in need of care and refer them quickly." +"Homeless people don't have cars," the chairman of the coalition, Ralph G. Fasano, said. "Medical-outreach programs to shelters would certainly help." +The coalition estimates that Long Island has 50,000 homeless people, including a small number who live on the streets. +Other programs could help a wider group. The executive director of the Long Island region of the American Heart Association, Edward W. Webb, said training additional people in cardiovascular pulmonary resuscitation would have major benefits. +"Imagine if every school kid on Long Island could be trained in c.p.r.," Mr. Webb said. "But those things cost money." +Two weeks ago, Mr. Webb said, he was at a meeting of the Mineola-Garden City Rotary when a Rotarian collapsed from cardiac arrest. "Thank God two of us were trained in c.p.r.," he said. "We kept his heart pumping until the emergency crew got there." +The patient survived. +Mr. Webb said he would like to discuss c.p.r.training and research on heart disease with officials from the merged system. +Dr. Edward M. Condon, an endocrinologist at North Shore Diabetes and Endocrine Associates, said diabetes programs needed money. "Eleven percent of the population has diabetes, but only half of those recognize it," Dr. Condon said. "If they use money for outreach, prevention and to uncover cases early it can have a dramatic impact." +The pledge of up to $100 million could set a pattern for other hospital mergers, affiliations and joint ventures. "We would hope that other hospitals would enunciate how their new relationships will benefit the communities that they serve," said Richard Klarberg, a spokesman. +The state now bans profit-making hospitals. If they were allowed, one result could be hundreds of millions of dollars in charity care. Federal tax laws require that when a nonprofit hospital is sold to a for-profit company, the proceeds of the sale have to go to charity, in exchange for donations and years of tax exemptions. +Nearly $9 billion in charitable assets had been transferred that way in other states by April. +New York nonprofit hospitals are required to treat patients, regardless of their ability to pay, and to give other benefits to communities in return for tax exemptions and other benefits. +North Shore has more than 150 outreach programs, many for speakers on prevention and other problems. But the donations and services that nonprofit hospitals provide depend on their financial health. +Some experts say New York changed regulations, creating conditions in which care for the poor and uninsured could falter. Assuring care for the poor was cited by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre when it reorganized the four Catholic hospitals on Long Island into a unified system. Msgr. Alan J. Placa of the diocese said the deregulation of hospital rates in New York in January and resulting competitive pressures meant that "the poor are in a more precarious position than ever." +Last year, Monsignor Placa said, the 136 parishes on the Island reported 300,000 visitors to outreach programs, with many who sought food or shelter also having medical problems. +The elderly and people receiving Government social services are eligible for Medicare and Medicaid, he said, but the church is concerned about the growing number of employed people without medical coverage. "We are trying to make sure we have the ability to respond quickly to those needs," he said. +Monsignor Placa said the diocese applauded the North Shore-Long Island Jewish pledge, but he added that the merger of the two large former competitors was "a clarion call to the rest of the market" that the new system could further destabilize other hospitals that are already dealing with major changes. +Those changes involve rate deregulation. In the free-market system rates are heavily influenced by what management organizations are willing to pay to deliver patients. As lower rates negotiated by health maintenance organizations cut into hospitals' margins, that part of the total proceeds from patient payments, government reimbursements and donations above the break-even point, hospitals have to reduce costs to avoid deficits. +Mergers are one way to do that. Larger systems have added leverage in negotiating rates with H.M.O.'s. +Hospitals unable to compete on rates face losing patients, lower or negative margins and cost-cutting steps that reduce services and purchases of equipment. In such cases only fund-raising or large subsidies from private or church sources may sustain operations. + +LOAD-DATE: December 7, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +595 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 9, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Direct-Mail Guru Tells (Almost) All + +BYLINE: By DAVID STOUT + +SECTION: Section G; Page 16; Column 4; Giving + +LENGTH: 854 words + +MOST Americans have never heard of Jerry Huntsinger, but they have probably heard from him. Mr. Huntsinger, 64, is a direct-mail fund-raiser, one of the best in the business by most accounts, and he spends much of his energy devising ways to keep people from tossing their junk mail into the wastebasket. +"How do you get them to open the envelope?" he asked in a recent interview. If they do open the envelope, how do you keep them reading? And, praise God, if they read on, how do you get them to give money? + So, Jerry, how do you? +"I give people the opportunity to participate in a charitable endeavor," he said. +What is this? Science? Craft? Art? A little of each. Let us begin with the envelope. He picks the words, typefaces and colors -- none too garish, thank you -- on the envelope, striving for a package that is eye-catching "but not too slick, no screaming headlines." If 1 recipient in 50 opens the envelope, Mr. Huntsinger calls his campaign a success. +All right, the envelope is open and the recipient is reading the letter. No fool, the reader sees that someone wants money. Does the letter go into the trash? Usually, yes. +To get even a small percentage of recipients to read on, Mr. Huntsinger said, the letter must have the right blend of simplicity, clarity and sophistication. It should also appeal to the idealism and generosity he sees in the American character. +"I try to give them a vision of sharing the good life they've experienced," he said. +Warming to the subject, he soon dashed an interviewer's skepticism by asking what he does with his own money when feeling generous. All right, the interviewer gives money to his Midwestern university alma mater; it gets him on an inside track for football tickets. +"You'd be a good candidate to give to the American Indian College Fund," Mr. Huntsinger said, picking up on the interviewer's underlying impulse to help young people the way older people once helped him. +"I have developed certain intuitive feelings about things," Mr. Huntsinger added. "Women open up their hearts. Men protect themselves from emotional response. You have to give them a reason to donate." +But he is wary of stereotypes, particularly those that apply to fairly well-off people in their mid-50's and beyond. These third-agers, as he calls them, are a fast-growing segment of the population and, Mr. Huntsinger thinks, pose a major fund-raising opportunity. But woe unto fund-raisers who patronize them or call them senior citizens. "They don't like to be called that," he said. +Mr. Huntsinger conceded a paradox. The third-agers, like many Americans of all ages, are savvy and sophisticated, yet the key to winning their hearts and wallets is simplicity: "If I can't articulate a concept in one sentence, it's too complicated for the people out there to understand." +Eight years ago, for example, Mr. Huntsinger came up with a slogan for the Center for Marine Conservation: "Will a dolphin save your life?" That simple reference to the dolphins' ability to drive away sharks, he said, "worked like gang busters." +Once he drafts a solicitation letter, Mr. Huntsinger edits with these principles: Don't talk down; don't try to change minds. Just make it clearer, more user-friendly, with a crystalline opening paragraph and "little road maps" along the way. One technique is to underline and indent a crucial paragraph, coaxing the cautious eye to linger a second longer. +GOOD as his intuition is, Mr. Huntsinger has more to go by. Direct mailers have reliable tests to determine what works and what doesn't -- by sending 10,000 letters to carefully selected homes, for example. +Sometimes Mr. Huntsinger will have a test mailing compete with one of his previous efforts. Improving the rate of opened letters by even a single percentage point can be tremendously important in a fund-solicitation campaign of, say, 20 million letters. He has had a few flops. In a test mailing for a population-control organization, he came up with "Will a condom save the world?" He doesn't know if the slogan was too flip, too embarrassing or what. He does know it failed spectacularly. But "I don't make many mistakes," he said matter-of-factly. +Mr. Huntsinger's professional eminence was made official a few years back when he received the Professional Achievement Award from the Direct Mail Advertising Association's nonprofit council. +He can make a pitch for a client without agreeing personally with what the client stands for. But he is no mercenary. He does not work for political candidates, he said, and since he believes in gun control he will not work for the National Rifle Association. +He wrote his first fund-raising letter 35 years ago, for a Roman Catholic organization. His fee was $10. A month later, the same group sought his services again. Reasoning that the first letter must have worked, he raised his fee to $25. Today, he gets paid, um, much more, conceding he is very comfortable (though he declined to say how comfortable). But in his business, as he put it, "You're only as good as what you've got in the mail right now." + +LOAD-DATE: December 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Jerry Huntsinger, shown on his Virginia farm, believes that the most effective fund-raising letters appeal to an American streak of idealism. (Timothy Wright for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +596 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 9, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +THEATER REVIEW: 'Doctor, My Life's Just a Joke.' 'So Laugh.'; +A Couple of Young Septuagenarians Bask in Simon 'Sunshine' + +BYLINE: By BEN BRANTLEY + +SECTION: Section E; Page 1; Column 5; The Arts/Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 1212 words + +"You know what your problem was, Willie? You always took the jokes too seriously." So says one aged ex-vaudevillian to another in Neil Simon's "Sunshine Boys," a comedy in which living for punch lines has nearly fatal consequences. It's obvious that Willie Clark, the character played by Jack Klugman in the revival of the play that opened last night at the Lyceum Theater, would be a healthier man if he could just uncoil a little. But aren't we lucky he can't? +Otherwise, we would miss the delicious and oddly affecting spectacle of Mr. Klugman wielding one-liners like a cornered, exasperated terrorist with an Uzi. Or the snapping-turtle aggressiveness in the way he extends his neck to punctuate catalogues of his dislikes. Or the manic, evangelical heat with which he explains why words with a "K" are funny. As a lonely septuagenarian holding on like a lockjawed terrier to the rhythms of the routines that made him famous, Mr. Klugman does indeed give a seriously funny performance. + That his partner in John Tillinger's highly enjoyable, surprisingly touching revival for the National Actor's Theater is Tony Randall adds inescapable resonance to the verbal combat on stage. Younger versions of Mr. Klugman and Mr. Randall can be seen, of course, in an eternity of mutual irritation in the syndicated reruns of "The Odd Couple," the 1970-1975 sitcom based on Mr. Simon's earlier play. +Here, they do and don't look like their vintage television selves. Unlike their previous appearance together for the Actors Theater (of which Mr. Randall is the founder) in "Three Men on a Horse," this one makes no attempt to pretend its stars are younger than they are. Balding pates and slackened jaw lines are, if anything, emphasized rather than camouflaged. +The effect is jolting at first, as though these men had suddenly been released from the deep-freeze of the small screen and started melting. At 75 and 77, respectively, Mr. Klugman and Mr. Randall look, in a word, old. They do not, however, act it. +Oh, sure, they mime their characters' deterioration convincingly enough. (Or Mr. Klugman does; Mr. Randall often seems ready to spring from his assumed stiffness and dance a tarantella.) But there's the energy of young men in the rancor of the old comedians they portray: Al Lewis (Mr. Randall) and Willie Clark (Mr. Klugman), a pair of Smith-and-Dale-like headliners from a lost era of theater. As Mr. Klugman, especially, makes clear, hostility can be a vitalizing force. So can pretending that all the world is indeed only a stage on the vaudeville circuit. +Nearly all of Mr. Simon's plays are crammed with quips, but he has never used one-liners as relentlessly or, more important, as appropriately as he does in "The Sunshine Boys," first seen on Broadway in 1971, with Jack Albertson and Sam Levene, and the basis of the 1975 hit movie starring Walter Matthau and George Burns. +The play is a portrait of men for whom comic style is a religion. They define themselves by their delivery and timing, and even in the full throttle of anger, fear or despair, they can't break the cadences of their old routines or stop behaving as if the world were their straight man. To level the usual accusation against Mr. Simon, that he overdoes the jokes, is to miss the point here. Those jokes are organic; Lewis and Clark are reflexively writing the script as they bicker along. +You probably know the plot. Clark stopped talking to Lewis 11 years before the play begins, when Al announced he wanted to retire just after they had appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Now, Willie's nephew and agent, Ben (Matthew Arkin), has been asked by CBS to reunite the two for a television special. +The setup is obvious, and the payoff is, too. But for the most part, Mr. Simon has managed to inflect a contrived form with a variety of emotional shadings. Because of this, "The Sunshine Boys" still works and probably always will; it's the author's most eloquent statement on comedy as a defense system. +Mr. Klugman knows exactly how to manipulate that system, too. The play's opening scene, set in Willie's hotel apartment (a model of domestic degeneration designed by James Noone) on the Upper West Side, finds Willie asleep in a chair in rumpled pajamas. He seems hopelessly inanimate, an unmade bed in human form. But from the moment he's wakened by a whistling tea kettle, he's on, bouncing quips off the television set and the apartment walls. +Even the increased sandpaper qualities of Mr. Klugman's always raspy (and here specially miked) voice, a consequence of his battle with throat cancer, feed effectively into the picture of decrepitude animated by an inextinguishable spark. And once Mr. Arkin, in a likable performance as the solicitous, aggravated nephew, arrives onstage, the portrait just keeps getting richer, locating feelings of rage and abandonment in Willie's snappy comebacks, which perversely makes them even funnier. +Those expecting an exact reproduction of the chemistry between Mr. Klugman and Mr. Randall in "The Odd Couple" may be surprised to find a shift of emphasis. Though Mr. Randall's Al, like his Felix, has a dapper, fastidious mien (as opposed to Mr. Klugman's unredeemable slob), the balance of energy has changed. It's Mr. Klugman who progresses to the edge of hysteria here, while Mr. Randall milks laughter from the long, impassive set of his face. +Mr. Randall doesn't inhabit his part as thoroughly as his co-star does. (For one thing, his Brooklyn accent keeps slipping.) But there's a haunting, Buster Keaton-ish quality to his melancholy presence that complements Mr. Klugman's ferocity. Their characters are both, in different ways, men in mourning. +Mr. Tillinger's affectionate, lively direction has a few inspired new touches, including a lovely image of Al and Willie when they're first left alone together, with their backs to each other like bookends. Other bits of business, like Al noisily stirring his tea, go on for too long. And the second act, both as written and performed, isn't quite up to the first. +But these are small objections about an evening that keeps you laughing and then leaves you surprisingly moved. Certainly, there are worse ways of staring down old age and mortality than with barbed comedy. And while your first reaction on seeing the stars of "The Sunshine Boys" may be to wonder at how old they now look, that will quickly give way to sense of how impossibly vital they are. A life in the theater, for all its ego-bruising wear, is apparently a most effective tonic. + +THE SUNSHINE BOYS + +By Neil Simon; directed by John Tillinger; sets by James Noone; costumes by Noel Taylor; lighting by Kirk Bookman; sound by Richard Fitzgerald; technical supervision, Arthur Siccardi; production supervisor, Mitchell Erickson; production stage manager, Anita Ross; general management, Niko Associates Inc.; managing director, Fred Walker. Presented by the National Actors Theater. At the Lyceum Theater, 149 West 45th Street, Manhattan. + +WITH: Jack Klugman (Willie Clark), Tony Randall (Al Lewis), Matthew Arkin (Ben Silverman), Jack Aaron (Patient), Stephen Beach (Eddie), Peggy Joyce Crosby (Sketch Nurse), Ebony Jo-Ann (Registered Nurse) and Martin Rudy (Voice-TV Director). + +LOAD-DATE: December 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Jack Klugman, standing, and Tony Randall play a pair of feuding comics in the Broadway revival of Neil Simon's "Sunshine Boys." (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)(pg. E1) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +597 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 9, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Schwab Name Used in Fraud, U.S. Says + +BYLINE: By LESLIE EATON + +SECTION: Section D; Page 14; Column 3; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 325 words + +In a new twist on an old swindle, a Brooklyn man raised $195,000 from investors by falsely contending that the brokerage firm Charles Schwab & Company was selling shares in his computer software company, prosecutors said yesterday. +In fact, the man's only connection with Schwab was that he had opened an account with the brokerage firm and deposited his victims' checks there, according to complaints filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan by the United States Attorney and the Securities and Exchange Commission. + The case comes as law enforcement officials complain that stock fraud has soared along with the stock market and attracted a new group of con artists. Most of these swindles involve small or illicit brokerage firms that aggressively sell stocks over the telephone. +The Brooklyn man, Mark Shkolir, who was described as a Russian emigre, was arrested yesterday along with an associate, Eric Vainer of Staten Island, on charges of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, said Thomas M. Finnegan, an assistant United States attorney. They were in jail late yesterday, did not yet have lawyers and could not be reached for comment. +Mr. Finnegan said at least 28 people had been defrauded. "Unfortunately," he added, "many were elderly people, and they were threatened." +The court froze the assets of Mr. Shkolir's company, Millennium Software Solutions Inc., which prosecutors said contended that it had a solution to the problem that computers are expected to encounter with the year 2000. The company, which was incorporated only last month and gives as its address a mail drop in Manhattan, is not related to the closely held Texas company of the same name, said Andrew J. Geist, associate regional director of the S.E.C. +Schwab also asked the court for a temporary restraining order against the software company and anyone associated with it, "to safeguard against further abuse of our name," a spokesman said. + +LOAD-DATE: December 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +598 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 9, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +Mr. Pataki's Fair Fares + +SECTION: Section A; Page 28; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 375 words + +Gov. George Pataki put himself behind imaginative discounts in transit fares yesterday when he endorsed unlimited-ride monthly, weekly and daily passes and other breaks for New York City's subway and bus riders. The Governor's plan is sensible and superior to that proposed by city officials. He needs to insure that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's board, which he dominates, approves the development of discount options and gives transit executives freedom to experiment and fiddle with fares at the M.T.A.'s next board meeting later this month. +Mr. Pataki's proposal will lessen the transit drain on many riders' wallets, and it suggests that those who share responsibility for governing New York and nurturing its economy want the city and region to offer the array of rapid-transit fares long taken for granted in London, Paris, Tokyo and other world capitals and in U.S. cities as well. + The Governor's plan sets out to introduce deep-discount options in exchange for unlimited rides for customers with different needs, desires and incomes: a monthly pass priced at $63 (the cost of 42 rides), a weekly one priced at $17 and a one-day $4 pass, as well as breaks for senior citizens and users of express buses. Equally important, his proposal will allow the transit executives to begin to exploit the Metrocard's vast untapped power to lure different kinds of customers to ride more often. Designing an off-peak fare that can relieve rush-hour overcrowding should be on the M.T.A.'s agenda. +While not much was said about when these fare options will kick in, it appears that the M.T.A. is poised to roll out its set of discounted, unlimited-ride fares next summer. That is too far off. It should only take about 90 days to assess the fare structure's fairness to riders of various incomes, adjust accordingly if necessary, and build customer awareness. +With such a long lead time, transit executives might well seek advice on fine-tuning the pricing from an advisory panel composed of individuals sensitive to the city's social goals and others who are experts at defining the right price points for generating revenues. Few issues have such impact on individuals and businesses as the fares charged for mass transit. + +LOAD-DATE: December 9, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +599 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 10, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +Defendant Becomes an Issue in Slander Case + +BYLINE: By FRANK BRUNI + +SECTION: Section B; Page 5; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 710 words + +DATELINE: POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y., Dec. 9 + +Lawyers at the defamation trial of three former advisers of Tawana Brawley waged a fierce battle today over the character and credibility of one of the defendants, C. Vernon Mason, whose fourth day on the witness stand yielded moments as dramatic and exchanges as bitter as any in the proceedings so far. +The swirl of angry, overlapping remarks forced the court stenographer to ask for an unusual sidebar conference with the lawyers, whom she had repeatedly begged to speak one at a time. +And on several occasions, what emerged from the contest of voices in State Supreme Court here were racially charged statements that recalled some of the ugliest aspects of the public debate over the Brawley case a decade ago. +Mr. Mason, once a prominent black civil rights lawyer, was disbarred in 1995 for 66 instances of professional misconduct with 20 clients, most of them African-American. +But he testified today that he had not received a fair hearing from the court disciplinary committee, which he said had been intent on punishing him for the Brawley case. +"It was an all-white panel," he said. "They rubber-stamped it." +And when the plaintiff's lawyer, William E. Stanton, who is white, grew flustered and mistakenly referred to Mr. Mason by the surname of another defendant, Alton H. Maddox Jr., Mr. Maddox fired off a barbed retort. +"I know we all look alike," said Mr. Maddox, who is black, gesturing to Mr. Mason. "But I'm sitting over here. He's sitting over there." +About an hour later, Mr. Stanton, again flustered, referred to Mr. Mason as "Mr. Stanton." +Mr. Mason, Mr. Maddox and the Rev. Al Sharpton were advisers to Ms. Brawley, a black woman who said white men raped her in November 1987, when she was 15. The three publicly accused Steven A. Pagones of being one of the rapists. +The next year, a grand jury said there was no credible evidence to support Ms. Brawley's claim. It exonerated Mr. Pagones, who is now suing the three for defamation. +Today, the defense team sought to portray Mr. Mason as a martyr for equal justice for blacks, while Mr. Stanton painted him as an irresponsible, mendacious firebrand. +The scores of spectators in the courtroom watched raptly as Mr. Stanton rolled a snippet of videotape showing a demonstration here in early 1988 about which Mr. Mason had previously testified. +Mr. Mason had said that he watched John M. Ryan, a state official leading the investigation of Ms. Brawley's charges, beat up a blind, elderly black man. The testimony was relevant to Mr. Mason's stated belief that law enforcement officials could not be trusted to pursue justice for Ms. Brawley. +But the footage, flickering across two large television screens, challenged Mr. Mason's account, presenting images of an old man apparently instigating a brawl with a state trooper. Mr. Ryan came upon the conflict belatedly and did not seem to participate in it. +Mr. Mason, 51, is now a student at the New York Theological Seminary in Manhattan, preparing for a new career as a hospital chaplain. +When questioned by Mr. Maddox, who is acting as his own lawyer, Mr. Mason spoke of his church work, his two daughters and his moral outrage over Ms. Brawley's accusations. +"This showed me something that touched my very essence," he said. +Mr. Mason's reputation was not the only one under a spotlight today. +Mr. Sharpton's lawyer, Michael A. Hardy, used his cross-examination of Mr. Mason to elicit observations that Mr. Sharpton's conduct in the Brawley case had been no different than it had been in other famous cases, such as the Howard Beach case, in which a group of young white men killed a young black man by chasing him into a busy highway in Queens. +Mr. Mason compared Mr. Sharpton repeatedly to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and once to Mahatma Gandhi. Prodded by Mr. Hardy's questions, Mr. Mason also testified that after a white man stabbed Mr. Sharpton during a demonstration in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in 1991, Mr. Sharpton pleaded with the courts to be lenient in the man's sentencing. +Although Justice S. Barrett Hickman then struck these comments from the record, saying they were irrelevant, Mr. Hardy had succeeded in giving jurors a glimpse of Mr. Sharpton as a man without racial animosity. + +LOAD-DATE: December 10, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The Rev. Al Sharpton arriving in a crowd of reporters yesterday at the courthouse in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He and two other former advisers in the Tawana Brawley case are being sued for defamation. (Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +600 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 12, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +For 30 Minutes, Elderly Callers Get Best-of-All Long-Distance Rate + +SECTION: Section B; Part 2; Page 21; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 284 words + +When Moysey and Fenya Saponar, both 68 and recent emigrants from Moldova, arrived at Brooklyn Borough Hall yesterday morning, they came prepared with lists of eight friends and relatives in their homeland and Israel. "We've been waiting for this for the last year," Mrs. Saponar said. +The Saponars joined more than 500 elderly residents of Brooklyn and 1,500 elsewhere in the city in taking advantage of a program called Holiday Calls, courtesy of Teleport Communications Group, a Staten Island-based company that provides local phone services. + For the ninth year, the company has given the elderly in New York and 24 other cities in the United States 30 minutes of free calls anywhere around the world. "It's to give back to the communities where we operate," Donna Suky, a company spokeswoman, said. Last year, the company estimates, 2,000 callers in the city made more than 20,000 phone calls, at a cost to the company of $175,000. +Dr. Bill Morganstern, 80, an optometrist from Brighton Beach, tried reaching an old Army buddy from World War II who now lives on the Hawaiian island of Maui. "We haven't spoken since The Big One," he said. The line was busy, so he dialed a sister in Los Angeles. +While most of the callers tried to reach loved ones, Daphne Jackson, a 71-year-old retired nurse from Bedford-Stuyvesant, spent her allotted time giving a lawyer in Kingston, Jamaica, an earful. "He owes me more than $4,000 from my sister's will," she said. +Francesca Gippen, 69, from Kensington, Brooklyn, went to Borough Hall to call her son in Portland, Ore., a daughter in Manhattan Beach, Calif., and seven others. "This is a nice Christmas gift," Miss Gippen said of the free calls. + +LOAD-DATE: December 12, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +601 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 13, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Our Hungry Legal Immigrants + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 1; Editorial Desk + +LENGTH: 380 words + +Close to a million legal immigrants across the country have had food stamps revoked under the 1996 welfare law, 50,000 in New York City alone. The city's food distributions to soup kitchens and food pantries are soaring, and some are reportedly running out of food each month. But statistics mask the individual tragedies. As reported by Rachel Swarns of The Times, a mother of four from Trinidad has been forced to use her rent money for food and substitute Kool-Aid for orange juice. A Peruvian mother spends her days pleading for groceries in one food pantry after another. +White House officials will meet next week to decide what programs need additional money next year. No item should rank higher than food stamps for the legal immigrants cut off by the harsh 1996 act. Congressional leaders and some Administration officials smugly believe that this year's balanced-budget plan corrected the worst of the 1996 cuts in aid to immigrants. But Congress restored Medicaid coverage and cash assistance for only some elderly and disabled immigrants. It did not restore food stamps. Food stamps are crucial because they are the only surviving welfare program whose benefits are set by Washington and not dependent on the generosity of state legislatures. + A dozen states, including New York, have decided to spend their own money restoring food stamps for immigrants. But almost all of these state programs cover only some groups of immigrants, like children or the elderly, and are likely to shrink once state budgets contract under the weight of the next recession. Even in these generous states, however, the picture is not pretty. In New York, for example, a Cambodian father of six has seen the value of food stamps fall to $127 a month from $354. A Dominican mother of three has lost $214 a month in food stamps. +Rising tax revenues in flush economic times should give the Administration some leeway to raise spending next year. White House officials have already drawn up a tentative list of entitlement programs to trim to make way for new initiatives. The cost of restoring food stamps need not be huge. Providing them for immigrant households with children would cost only about $400 million a year -- a small price to put food back on children's plates. + +LOAD-DATE: December 13, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Editorial + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +602 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 14, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Family Firm Offers Elderly Luxury Living + +BYLINE: By PENNY SINGER + +SECTION: Section 14WC; Page 8; Column 3; Westchester Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1134 words + +JUST because the calendar says 80, it does not mean exile to Florida. +One entrepreneurial family, the Scharfs, say older people are like everyone else and may want to live a fuller life. So in 1993, when a prewar apartment hotel on West End Avenue in Manhattan fell on evil days and went into receivership, the Scharfs bought it. + "Ten months later, after millions of dollars worth of renovations, we opened the Esplanade as an upscale residence for seniors, the only one of its kind, in Manhattan," said David Scharf who, at 28, is the youngest member of the family company started by his grandfather, Elias Scharf, in 1950. +"My grandfather had four sons, including my father, Tommy, head of the company today," Mr. Scharf said. When the family arrived from Poland in 1950, they settled on a farm upstate where they raised chickens, but as soon as they were able they moved to Long Beach on the south shore of Long Island on the ocean but near the heavily populated metropolitan area "because my grandfather had an idea, something different in residences for older people, whom he identified with," Mr. Scharf recalled. +The family opened the 150-room Scharf Manor in Long Beach, a residence for the elderly in a hotel setting. "It was the first of its kind and was very well received, judging from the competition that quickly appeared," Mr. Scharf said, adding that eventually five similar establishments were opened in the New York region; most were hotels, and one was a nursing home. "We still own them, but they are managed by others." The Esplanade in Manhattan is the prototype, he said, of future Scharf projects. +"It is in one of the city's most desirable neighborhoods, a block from Riverside Drive, a block from Broadway with its shops restaurants and is near Lincoln Center," Mr. Scharf said. "In the heart of things, not like other retirement communities. And people can get anywhere and everywhere without a car. Everything is available to them." Housekeeping services and three meals a day are included in the monthly charge of $2,500 to $4,500 a person for Esplanade apartments. +"We even have tenants who made the reverse move -- from Florida," Mr. Scharf said. "The place is so popular there's a nine-month waiting list." Encouraged by success, the Scharfs began looking for other suitable properties, and three years ago when the White Plains Hotel came on the market, they bought it. +"The hotel was built in the 60's in downtown White Plains," Mr. Scharf said, "and for years it was the No. 1 choice of business and leisure travelers and the scene of business meetings, conventions, weddings and social events, but eventually it fell on hard times and by the time we bought it, it was as a 'distressed' property." +Mr. Scharf, whose part-time and summer jobs have always been in the family business, was named the managing partner in charge of the conversion of the White Plains Hotel into the Esplanade. +"It was a very capital-intensive project," he said. "We ended up spending $3 million on improvements. The mechanical plant needed overhauling and updating. Bathrooms and bedrooms had to be configured, new carpets and draperies installed." +The high-rise hotel was eventually converted into a luxurious residence for the elderly, offering tenants a choice of room arrangements ranging from studios to one- and two-bedroom, two- and three-bathroom suites, including some with terraces. Monthly rates range from $2,100 to $4,700 in single occupancy with an additional $600 charge for double occupancy. +Three meals a day, housekeeping, personal laundry, linens and towels, a full recreation program, 24-hour emergency call system and 24-hour emergency care assessment are provided. +On the site are a licensed home care agency offering a full range of health care services and a floor devoted to the care of Alzheimer's patients. +Stephen W. Harrigan, the Esplanade's general manager, was formerly a nursing home administrator. +In describing some of the differences between a nursing home and a residence for the elderly, Mr. Harrigan said, "Nursing homes are regulation driven, dictated to by the state. As a private enterprise, the Esplanade is consumer driven, which means we're operating in a competitive environment which sets much higher standards. It's a very different atmosphere here. These people are still living. I enjoy it. I call it the Jewish hotel experience." +Indeed, about 90 percent of the residents, whose ages range from 85 to 100, are Jewish. The food is kosher, which Mr. Harrigan said, has not deterred a number of Catholic residents. "We track referrals," he said. "So we know that The Catholic News is a source for us. A priest visits once a week." The Catholic News is a weekly newspaper for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. +What all the residents share, he said, is a certain level of affluence. "Most of the people here have led the good life," he said. "Others have children who foot the bills. And we have our snow birds. They live in Florida but stay here for a couple of months. Some belong to country clubs and still play golf." +One former golfer, Beatrice Gardner, 93, moved into a terrace suite at the Esplanade in September. "For years my husband and I were members of a country club in Westchester," she recalled. "We lived on Manhattan's East Side, but we spent weekends at our club. My daughter lives in White Plains, and my granddaughter and her children live in Croton, so they all visit often. This is such a convenient location. I like being in the heart of White Plains. It's exhilarating. There's a lot to do. I keep active and walk up to Mamaroneck Avenue, one of my walking destinations. I also take advantage of activities here, which are many and varied." +A day's activities taken from the Esplanade's recreational calendar offers a shopping trip, exercise video, current events, arts and crafts, an afternoon walk, a sing-along and an evening movie. +"By next summer, gardening will be included," Mr. Harrigan said. "We're building a roof garden that will feature arbors planted with wisteria and honeysuckle. And raised beds for those who want to garden." +The newest Esplanade, a conversion of a 90-unit apartment house in Branford, Conn., is expected to open in six months, Mr. Scharf said. "Branford is a shoreline community that has the conveniences of a city," he said. "We're looking at properties in Stamford and New Jersey. My dad and my brother Joseph are in charge of acquisitions. My brother Alexander manages our real estate portfolio, and our sister Susan does the marketing and advertising and the interior decorating. We're a close family, and I think that's what makes us different from our competitors -- the Marriotts and the Hyatts. Ours is a personal business." + +LOAD-DATE: December 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Beatrice Gardner, at home at the Esplanade in White Plains, with Stephen W. Harrigan, general manager. (Richard Harbus for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +603 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 14, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +YOUR HOME; +Homeowner Tax Cuts In New York + +BYLINE: By JAY ROMANO + +SECTION: Section 11; Page 3; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1089 words + +LAST August, Gov. George E. Pataki signed into law one of the most significant property-tax cuts in memory -- the New York State School Tax Relief Program, known by the acronym STAR. +Officials expect the measure to cut the school-tax portion of local property taxes on most owner-occupied, primary residences in the state by about 27 percent -- and by as much as 45 percent on residences owned by certain elderly homeowners. The cuts are to be phased in over the next four years. + Simply stated, the STAR program, which was signed into law Aug. 7, offers eligible homeowners a property-tax exemption that will ultimately reduce the portion of their property taxes that go to pay for public schools in the taxpayer's school district. +While the application process is relatively straightforward -- in most cases, the application consists of just one page -- the variability of the local property tax-collection system has made implementation of the program a bureaucratic nightmare. +"I can't begin to tell you what a can of worms this thing has opened up," said Douglas F. Wasser, a Manhattan real estate lawyer. "We're talking about a 27 percent reduction in school taxes, and many people don't have a clue as to what is going on." +Mr. Wasser's concern was triggered when he started to write a memo to clients about the STAR exemption and how to go about applying for it. First, Mr. Wasser said, he was perplexed by the different deadlines for applications being imposed in different areas of the state. +"In Nassau County, they told me the application deadline was Dec. 31, 1997," he said. On the other hand, he continued, the deadline in New York City is Jan. 5 and in Suffolk County it is March 2. +Moreover, Mr. Wasser said, while New York City officials said they had mailed notifications and applications to all property owners in the city, not every property owner received them. +"My mother lives in an 1,800-unit co-op in Queens and she didn't receive a notice," he said. "And I've spoken to three lawyers here in my office who also live in the city and they haven't received notices either." +Most puzzling of all, however, was an item contained in the New York City notice and application. +The application, Mr. Wasser said, contained a statement indicating that "all applicants, not just eligible seniors" must file their application by Jan. 5. +He pointed out, however, that the first year's exemption is only available to elderly residents who meet certain income requirements. All other homeowners must wait until the second year of the program to receive the tax reduction. +"What the heck is going on here?" Mr. Wasser wondered. "Does that mean you lose the exemption forever if you don't file by January?" Charles Deister, a spokesman for Governor Pataki, offered this explanation of Mr. Wasser's confusion: +"The deadline dates could be anywhere from Oct. 15 of this year through Aug. 1 of next year," Mr. Deister said, explaining that the deadlines vary because they are determined by the tax years used by the individual school districts. The deadline for Westchester County, for example, is next June 1, except for Peekskill, where it is June 29. +Only certain elderly homeowners can receive the exemption in the first year, he said. To qualify for the first year's exemption, Mr. Deister said, the property must be the primary residence of its owners -- at least one of whom must be 65 or older. Also, the maximum annual allowable household income for eligibility for the first year's exemption is $60,000. +"There should be no confusion on this," Mr. Deister said, referring to published reports of widespread perplexity over the definition of income and reports that elderly New York City homeowners would be ineligible for the program. +"Every senior citizen who meets the requirements of the program is eligible for the enhanced exemption," Mr. Deister said. "Enhanced exemption," he added, describes the tax reduction starting in the 1998-1999 tax year that is available only to eligible elderly homeowners who meet age and income requirements. +He said that the definition of income includes Social Security and retirement benefits, interest, dividends, total gains from the sale or exchange of capital assets (which may be offset by losses from the sales of capital assets in the same tax year), net rental income, salary or earnings and net income from self-employment. +Excluded from income, Mr. Deister said, are supplementary security income, welfare payments, gifts, inheritances, the return of invested capital and moneys earned through the Federal Foster Grandparent Program or reparations received as a victim of Nazi persecution. +Elderly homeowners who apply for the first year's benefits, Mr. Deister said, might be asked by local tax officials to provide proof of income -- such as income-tax returns or certifications of total annual Social Security benefits. Those who now get a Senior Citizen Property Tax Exemption, he said, do not have to apply for the STAR exemption because it will be granted automatically. +Beginning in the 1999-2000 tax year, he said, the owners of all owner-occupied residences in the state -- including co-ops and condominiums -- will be eligible for the exemption, regardless of age or income. +When the program is fully phased in, Mr. Deister said, the average annual tax savings for qualified elderly homeowners in New York City will be $320 and $190 for other homeowners; in Nassau, $1,240 and $750, respectively; in Suffolk, $1,170 and $700, and in Westchester, $1,990 and $1,200. +Applications and information may be obtained from the local tax assessor's office. +Mr. Deister also said that, despite the warning in New York City's application, it is not necessary for those who are not eligible for the first year's exemption to apply right now. +Richard LoConte, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Finance, agreed. +"We asked everyone to file by Jan. 5 because there was already enough confusion out there about this and we didn't want to confuse people with different dates," Mr. LoConte said. "But that's not to say we won't accept applications for next year's exemption next year." +Mr. LoConte added that while the tax assessor's office attempted to contact every property owner -- more than 950,000 applications were sent out in November -- it is possible that some did not receive applications. New York City residents who have not yet received applications should call (718) 935-9500 for further instructions. + +LOAD-DATE: December 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (Tom Bloom) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +604 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 14, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +EARNING IT; +Same Players in New Roles + +BYLINE: By LOUIS UCHITELLE + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 13; Column 1; Money and Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 373 words + +So the husband is about to retire while the wife stays on the job. That is a momentous change in routine, a reversal in roles for older men and women who were raised in a tradition of men as the chief breadwinners. The potential for marital stress is considerable. +Here is a checklist of issues that psychologists say couples must discuss before taking such a big step: + * Make a budget. Sacrifices must be agreed upon, particularly by the man. His pension is rarely as much as his salary was, so a working wife may grow resentful if she cuts back on new clothing while her husband eats lunch regularly with his pals. Settle what he will spend beforehand. +* Redivide the chores. If she is the spouse earning a salary, then he must do more at home, picking up tasks she was willing to do when they both worked. Cooking is a big issue, particularly dinner, as is shopping. A working wife may be irked to find that her retired husband has done nothing around the house all day. +* Keep him busy. The man must find productive and satisfying ways to fill his days, and what he will do should be settled before he retires. Women often arrange a couple's off-hours social life when both are working, and she must not feel that he is waiting for her to get home to plan his life. She may feel guilty -- and resentful that he is so dependent. +* Tell the children. Discuss in advance how they might react, and then raise your concerns with the children, who are presumably young adults, before Dad takes the step. They may resent a father for not carrying his share, as they see it. And they will wonder about asking Mom and Dad for money. Lay out the new parameters. Make clear that Dad is supportive of Mom's decision to keep working. +* Tell the neighbors, too. The working wife and the retired husband are not yet the norm. So while he is still employed, head off gossip by telling neighbors and friends about the plan and the reasons for it. +* Keep talking. Once he retires, new frictions arise. He gets up after she leaves, and that annoys her. He is refreshed in the evening, having taken an afternoon nap, and she is exhausted. He may resent that she is not around. Whatever the problem, hash it out. LOUIS UCHITELLE + +LOAD-DATE: December 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +605 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 14, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: VOLUNTEERING; +Agencies That Need a Hand + +SECTION: Section 14; Page 13; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 1272 words + +Here is a list of some organizations around the five boroughs that can use your help. + +THE MAYOR'S VOLUNTARY ACTION CENTER -- 49-51 Chambers Street, Suite 1231, Manhattan. A volunteer clearinghouse that uses a database listing more than 3,000 volunteer jobs in the five boroughs to match people with agencies that could most use their help. Call Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M., for an appointment. (212) 788-7550. + +NEW YORK CARES -- 116 East 16th Street, Manhattan. Requires a one-hour orientation at which volunteers receive a monthly calendar listing opportunities to help at 100 to 150 organizations. No long-term commitment required. Orientation by appointment. Office hours: Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. (212) 228-5000. + +THE LIGHTHOUSE INC. -- 111 East 59th Street, Manhattan. Reads to blind or visually impaired business people and students in two-hour sessions. Also needs volunteers for Saturday youth program, annual sale of new and used designer clothes, and office help. For interview or reading audi tion, Monday through Friday, (212) 821-9406. + +VOLUNTEER SUPPORT PROJECT -- Department of Aging. 2 Lafayette Street, Manhattan. Provides basic care and assistance to blind and visually impaired people in communities. Volunteers can be any age. Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. (212)442-3168. + +FOSTER GRANDPARENT PROGRAM -- City Department of Aging, 2 Lafayette Street, 14th floor, Room 1419, Manhattan. Elderly volunteers care for children with physical or mental illnesses. Applicants must be over 60, and meet low-income requirements. Transportation, training and food provided. Small stipend available. Five days a week, four hours a day. Information: Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. (212) 442-3117. + +INSURANCE AND HEALTH COUNSELING -- Department of Aging, 2 Lafayette Street, Manhattan. Volunteers over age 60 are needed to provide information about health insurance options to other seniors. Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. (212) 442-1382. + +R.S.V.P. -- (Retired Senior Volunteer Program) 105 East 22d Street. Locations in all five boroughs. Fills 10,000 volunteer spots annually. Volunteers are ages 55 and older. Openings include tutoring positions, museum docents and food delivery people. Office hours: Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. (212)674-7787. + +RIVINGTON HOUSE -- 45 Rivington Street, Manhattan. Residential health care facility for people with AIDS. Volunteers visit with and counsel residents and perform clerical and administrative tasks. Volunteers are required to complete a six-hour orientation. Office hours: Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. (212) 539-6219. + +THE SAMARITANS OF NEW YORK SUICIDE PREVENTION HOT LINE -- P.O. Box 1259 Madison Square Station. Volunteers must complete 24 hours of training and then commit to four shifts a month, including one weekday shift of 11 P.M. to 8 A.M. Volunteers must be 21. Donations welcome. (212) 673-3041. + +G.M.H.C. -- (Gay Men's Health Crisis), 119 West 24th Street, Manhattan. The name may be deceiving because the Gay Men's Health Crisis helps everybody with AIDS. Volunteers take part in all aspects of helping the ill from home care to clerical work in the G.M.H.C. office. Volunteers must complete a training session. Office hours: Monday through Friday, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. (212) 367-1030. + +NOW -- (National Organization for Women), 105 East 22d Street, Suite 307, Manhattan. Needs volunteers both for daytime and nighttime work. They can handle the help line, do clerical work or at night, be an advocate. Office hours: Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M.; (212) 260-4422. + +PARTNERSHIP FOR THE HOMELESS -- 305 Seventh Avenue, Manhattan. Will train volunteers for any of its seven programs for the homeless. Ask for Jennifer Brady for more information. Office hours: Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. (212) 645-3444 ext. 118. + +GOD'S LOVE WE DELIVER -- 166 Avenue of the Americas, Manhattan. Prepares food for homebound men, women and children with AIDS and will accept toys, and new articles of clothing. In Manhattan, volunteers do not need a car. For other boroughs, delivery person must have a vehicle. Program needs van assistants and weekday delivery help. Office hours: Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. (212) 294-8104. + +THE BRONX ZOO -- 2300 Southern Boulevard, the Bronx. The Friends of Wildlife Conservation will train volunteers once a week for 12 weeks to assist in guided tours of the zoo and all facets of the animal education program. Office hours: Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. (718) 220-5141. + +POWARS -- (Pet Owners With AIDS/ARC Resource Service), 1674 Broadway, Suite 7A, Manhattan. Powars is a privately financed volunteer organization to care for the pets of people with AIDS. Volunteers are needed for dog walking, veterinarian visits, clerical work, grant writing and public relations. Volunteers must complete two training sessions. Hours: flexible. General office: (212) 246-6307. + +VICTIMS SERVICES AGENCY -- 2 Lafayette Street, third floor, Manhattan. Victims Services offers support and counseling to victims of domestic violence, rape, incest, muggings and other violent incidents. Volunteers are trained in accordance with the job they choose. Opportunities include counseling, child care, client intake, clerical and answering the hot line. Office hours: Monday through Friday 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. (212) 577-7409. + +COALITION FOR THE HOMELESS -- 89 Chambers Street, Manhattan. The coalition has several mobile soup kitchens that each feed at least 750 a night and need volunteers. Orientation required. Office hours: Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 6 P.M. (212) 964-5900, ext.163. + +MIRACLE HOUSE -- P.O. Box 30931, New York, N.Y. 10011-0109. Miracle House provides housing and support to the out-of-town family and friends of New Yorkers with AIDS and cancer. Volunteers go through a two-hour training program. Office hours: Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. (212) 462-8096. + +LITERACY PARTNERS -- 30 East 33d Street, Manhattan. Literacy Partners/ Literacy Volunteers of New York City has programs in Manhattan. Volunteers can either teach reading after an eight-week training program or do clerical work immediately. Need volunteers in evenings, 6 P.M. to 8 P.M. Office hours: Monday through Friday, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. (212) 725-9200. + +COVENANT HOUSE RIGHTS OF PASSAGE PROGRAM -- 346 West 17th Street, Manhattan. In need of mentors to work one-on-one with youths 18 to 21. Mentors offer a sense of stability and a realistic view of the work world to young people who are just entering the job market. Qualifications: Over 30 years of age; established in career and able to offer a consistent and supportive adult relationship. Training provided. Flexible hours. Limited time commitment. (212) 727-4198. + +JEWISH BOARD OF FAMILY AND CHILDREN'S SERVICES -- 120 West 57th Street, Manhattan. More than 1,600 men and women work side by side, in 20 volunteer programs, with mental health and social service professionals to provide support and caring as an adjunct to the therapeutic services provided by the agency. (212) 397-4090. + +WOMEN IN NEED -- 115 West 31st Street, Manhattan. Provides shelter for homeless women with children. Volunteers welcome to tutor women, help children with homework, crafts or computers. (212) 695-4758. + +NATIONAL MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS SOCIETY -- New York City Chapter. 30 West 26th Street, Manhattan. Volunteers welcome to help with fund-raising events, office work and programs. (212) 463-7787, ext. 3011. + +LOAD-DATE: December 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: List + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +606 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 14, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +EARNING IT; +She's Wound Up in Her Career, but He's Ready to Wind Down + +BYLINE: By LOUIS UCHITELLE + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 1; Column 1; Money and Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 2065 words + +AFTER a career as a salesman, Ruth Cambron's husband retired, and she thought she might, too. She took a leave from her job as a health care specialist in California, and the couple traveled on cruise ships. "That convinced me not to retire," Mrs. Cambron said. "I did not want to feel useless." She also wanted to build her pension. And 12 years later, at 73, she still draws a paycheck -- a stalwart in the growing ranks of older women who continue to work after their husbands stop. +Sandra Kaul, an art gallery director and consultant, is just entering those ranks. Her husband, lured by the offer of a sweetened pension, retired in June at 58, after 30 years as a college art professor in Minnesota. "I encouraged him," said Ms. Kaul, who is 55. "I knew he really wanted to stay home and paint, while I have a career to pursue." + Helena Genovese, 63, stays at her job out of both necessity and desire. Her husband, a professional hypnotist, now 68, retired seven years ago, worried that if he did not ease up he might suffer a fatal heart attack, as a friend had. But his $850 in monthly retirement benefits, mostly from Social Security, is insufficient to maintain the couple's suburban life style without Ms. Genovese's $1,900-a-month salary as a manager of the parking facility at Buffalo's airport. +"Besides, what would I do all day at home?" she asked. "He plays with the dog, builds model planes and visits our children. I think that if two people are home together constantly, they could end up killing each other." +Having distinguished themselves as the first generation to leave the house to work in large numbers, women in their late 50's and early 60's are now in retirement range. If they are single, divorced or widowed, they often keep working, surveys show, because they lack the Social Security credits or pension savings of men their age, who earned more and worked more years. But in growing numbers, married women in this age group are also staying on the job -- breaking with the practice of sharing their husbands' retirement. +Surveys are just beginning to catch the shift and the reasons for it. A big one is the promise of an independent pension to avoid the poverty that often comes to widows who rely on their husbands' benefits. Social Security, the main ingredient in most cases, is cut after a husband's death. +"Older women keep working to secure their economic survival," said Heidi Hartmann, director of the Institute for Women's Policy Research in Washington. +What is more, the extra income earned by the women helps maintain family living standards, particularly if a husband has been pushed out of the labor force before he had planned to retire. And there is what Mathew Greenwald, a market researcher who polls people on retirement issues, calls the sociability aspect. +"Building friendships on the job is often more important to women than it is to men," he said. "Women may want to go on working to maintain these friendships. They find the idea of being retired more isolating than men do." +Whatever the reasons, women's persistence in working could have broad implications for the economy. It could, for example, relieve some of the financial pressure on the Social Security system, which will be stretched thin when the baby boomers retire. +The statistical evidence is still sparse, but the shift appears to apply mainly to those 55 to 64 and not to those 65 and older. The number of working men and women in that older group has traditionally been relatively small, although it has crept up slightly for both sexes in the 1990's. +The University of Michigan, which is tracking people in their 50's and 60's in a federally financed study that is just beginning to produce data, found that of 813 married women whose husbands had retired, 45 percent still worked, most of them full time. "These are serious workers, not just women doing real estate," said Marjorie Honig, a Hunter College economist who helped tabulate the results. +Labor Department surveys also suggest that married women are working in increasing numbers after their husbands stop, or at least that married women aged 55 to 64 are staying in the labor force in rising percentages while men are not. Nearly 3.5 million women in this group were in the labor force last year, or 48.6 percent of all married women 55 to 64, up from 41.3 percent in 1989 and 36.3 percent in 1980. But the percentage of married men in that age group in the labor force has fallen to 70.2 percent, from 75.4 percent in 1980. +"Women are beginning to realize that by working just a few more years, they become eligible for good pensions," said Olivia Mitchell, a labor economist at the University of Pennsylvania. "The benefit of those few extra years can be quite high." +MS. GENOVESE, who took a salaried job in 1980 when the youngest of her four children was 13, came to exactly that conclusion. "If I work three more years, I'll be eligible for a pension of $1,000 a month," she said. She made it clear that if her health held up, she would work indefinitely, qualifying for an even bigger pension. Her job also provides the couple's health insurance. +Many other women are also working for bigger pensions. The Social Security Administration projects that if current trends continue, by 2015 nearly 60 percent of married women will be entitled to higher pensions upon retirement than the spousal benefit they would receive under their husbands' Social Security. That would be up from 33 percent today. And 20 percent of the women will qualify for pensions that are higher than those of their husbands, up from less than 10 percent today. +But there is a caveat about projecting the trend forward. What Ms. Cambron, Ms. Kaul and Ms. Genovese share with many older married women is this: They took jobs and began careers relatively late in life after raising children or at least staying home until their children were in junior high school. Younger women, on the other hand, are far more likely to have careers that parallel those of their husbands. Once they reach retirement age, husband and wife, having gone through the same career cycles, may think alike about retirement. +"The question is, will these younger people prod each other to stay on the job or will they prod each other to retire," said Angela O'Rand, a Duke University sociologist and retirement specialist. +For now, however, older husbands and wives are increasingly going in separate directions. +Six months after her husband retired, Ms. Kaul is in high career, having entered the work force only 14 years ago, once her two children became teen-agers. She is even expanding her domain, looking into using retail stores as small, makeshift art galleries for Minnesota painters. Actually, her work as the art gallery director at Bemidji State University, 100 miles north of Minneapolis, where her husband, Marlin, had taught for 30 years, is a part-time job. But Ms. Kaul has five part-time jobs, most of them as a paid consultant to various art councils and art projects in Minnesota. +"I am in the process of proposing to the university a larger position for myself," she said. "It will probably be three-quarters time. I am suggesting that we start a museum program, to manage art collections and curate them for traveling exhibitions." +Still, the Kauls do not have to rely on her income. Marlin Kaul's sweetened pension -- a lump-sum payment and $40,000 a year -- is enough for them to live comfortably. The $15,000 she brings home helps, of course, but her decision to keep working separates the Kauls from three couples who are their friends. The men, also professors at Bemidji, accepted sweetened pensions, too, and their wives have decided to retire with them. All three women had worked much longer than Ms. Kaul. +"Two of them were in teaching careers," Ms. Kaul said, "and they no longer like their jobs enough to keep doing them anymore now that their husbands are retiring." +The decision also swings the other way. And when it does, a wife who continues to work sometimes ends up on Rosalind Barnett's couch. Ms. Barnett, a psychologist and senior researcher in women's issues at Brandeis University and Radcliffe College, recounts one patient's story: +"Her husband, a lawyer who never liked what he did, lived for the day he could move to the woods in New Hampshire, and this was a nightmare for her," Ms. Barnett said. "She was the director of a nonprofit organization, involved in work and community life, with a big network of people around her, and he wanted to retire to a rural life style." +In the end, the husband did not retire. "He cut back his hours," Ms. Barnett said, "but he is still working as a lawyer. He is very unhappy." +EVEN husbands who support their wives' decisions to keep working can take awhile to get there, as Dominic Genovese did. +He had never cooked, and for five years after he retired he stayed out of the kitchen, which meant that his wife could not relax until she had prepared dinner. "The stress for me did not end with the job," she said. And the dinner hour became later and later. "That ticked me off," Mr. Genovese said, "But cooking is something I did not think of doing. I made the bed; that took only a few minutes. And I vacuumed; I did not want to be home with dog's hair around." +A life-threatening stomach ailment changed his attitude toward cooking, he said -- as did the fact that the couple's three adult sons cook. He now makes dinner four nights a week. +Howard Aronoff, 57, of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., also cooks. His mother had taught him, and in retirement, he took over that task from his wife, although she still does the grocery shopping. Unlike Mr. Genovese, Mr. Aronoff did not willingly retire: he took a buyout in 1993 from I.B.M., where he was a senior planner, rather than risk being laid off without any payment. After briefly trying a new career as an insurance salesman, "I drifted into retirement," Mr. Aronoff said. "When people found out I was no longer at I.B.M., they looked on me as a piece of dead wood." +Her husband's changed status scared his wife, Roberta, who is 53. His earnings suddenly deflated from more than $80,000 a year to a $35,000 pension even as the couple, who were nearly finished paying for their two children's undergraduate education, were counting on the next five years to save for retirement. So she has continued in her nearly $30,000-a-year job as the manager of a dental office, a position she had held for a decade. +"You have to sit down and work out the money issues," she said. "My husband did that. He showed me, with spreadsheets, how we would get by, and that eased my mind. He found a way even to save a little." +The new budget meant belt-tightening. They bought a new car for her, for example, but he still drives a 1988 model. And their daughter, now at Harvard Law School, pays her own way. "My wife would have liked some new jewelry," he said, "and I would have liked to help my children more." +Sometimes a husband chooses retirement because changes at work suddenly make the job much more difficult. William Cambron found himself in this situation in 1985, when he was 62. For years, he had been a salesman for a wholesale company that offered a line of toasters and household wares to hardware stores. As those stores lost out to big discounters like Sam's Club, the Wal-Mart unit, Mr. Cambron had to travel farther from the couple's home in Sacramento. +"They kept widening his territory as the market dwindled, and he was tired," Ms. Cambron said. And so he stopped. "He does not have a need to work. Basically, he enjoys supporting me in what I do. He even keeps my car filled with gas. I never have to do that anymore." +When her husband retired, Ms. Cambron, a year younger, was only a decade into a career as a health care specialist in the California Department for the Aging. That job paid her $50,000 a year when she retired two years ago and shifted to a job monitoring nursing homes for a nonprofit organization, earning just $7,000 but working far fewer hours. Being older than 70, she is permitted to draw her full Social Security and a California state pension. They total $37,000, exceeding her husband's retirement payments by $7,000, even as she still draws a paycheck. +"I would not be well off," she said, "if I had not continued working." + +LOAD-DATE: December 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: In larger numbers these days, women like Ruth Cambron, 73, of Sacramento, Calif., are choosing to continue their careers for years after their husbands have retired. (Don Preisler for The New York Times)(pg. 1); Sandra Kaul, 55, knew that her husband, a retired professor, wanted to stay home and paint, but she felt she had to pursue her career as an art gallery director and consultant. (Monte Draper for The New York Times); Helena Genovese, 63, works because of desire and necessity. Her pay as the parking director at Buffalo's airport allows her and her retired husband to maintain their life style. (Robert Kirkham for The New York Times)(pg. 13) + +Charts: "Shifting Gender Patterns" +The percentage of married men age 55-64 in the labor force has declined, but the share of older married women has risen sharply, suggesting that a growing number of women work after their husbands retire. Graph shows percentage of working men and women age 55-64. (Source: Labor Department) + +"The Rewards of Working a Little Longer" +A few extra years of work can substantially increase a woman's monthly Social Security benefits. For example, a woman who started working in 1981 at age 45 and is earning $30,000 annually at the time she retires could double her benefit by working to age 70. Chart shows increase in benefits. + +As more women keep working longer, a growing percentage, as shown below, will collect higher Social Security benefits from their own account than by relying on spousal benefits from their husband's account. (Source: Social Security Administration)(pg. 13) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +607 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 14, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +EARNING IT; +Shattering The Age Mystique + +BYLINE: By LOUIS UCHITELLE + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 13; Column 6; Money and Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 332 words + +Sure, older married women are continuing to work after their husbands retire. They took jobs later and are not done yet. But that is a passing phenomenon, Betty Friedan says, and really off the point. A decade or two from now, a much healthier phenomenon will kick in, she hopes. Older men and women will both skip retirement, which in Ms. Friedan's vision will become passe. +"The idea of retiring at 65 is obsolete; it is based on an outdated life expectancy," said Ms. Friedan, who is 76 and certainly not retired herself, teaching at Cornell this winter, among other projects. Her 1963 book, "The Feminine Mystique," helped break the psychological and social barriers that kept women at home and out of the work force. Now she would break the age barrier, extending everyone's working life into their 80's, a goal she first articulated with the publication in 1993 of "The Fountain of Age." + For Ms. Friedan, who lives in Washington, working past 65 opens new possibilities. "Should we have two or three careers?" she asks, and suggests that we probably should. "Once liberated from the need to prove yourself and be promoted, the second career can be chosen with different considerations. We are on the verge of having to do a lot of new thinking for a society in which the working years last until age 80." +Ms. Friedan does not yet know just how the new system might work. But she says older people who work remain healthier than those who retire -- and that many older people today are as vital as younger ones. Certainly, extending the working years would mesh with several proposals for financing Social Security that come down to this equation: Work longer and collect less in benefits. +"The mix at work will be different," she said. "There will be periods for study, for job training, for sabbaticals, for time out for children and adventure. Work will become much more flexible as it sinks in that people will spend many more years at work." LOUIS UCHITELLE + +LOAD-DATE: December 14, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The author and teacher Betty Friedan says the concept of retirement will itself become obsolete. (Reuters) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +608 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 15, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +OTTINGER, LOUISE L. + +SECTION: Section B; Page 7; Column 3; Classified + +LENGTH: 60 words + +OTTINGER-Louise L. The Board of Directors of Municipal Concerts, Inc., mourns the death of Louise L. Ottinger. For many years Mrs. Ottinger made possible free concerts in parks, day centers for older adults, and homes for the aged in areas where such enriching experiences are rarely available. Dr. Irwin Feigin, President Julius Grossman, Musical Director + +LOAD-DATE: December 15, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +609 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 15, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +An Aging Nation Ill-Equipped for Hanging Up the Car Keys + +BYLINE: By SARA RIMER + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 2; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1833 words + +DATELINE: TAMPA, Fla., Dec. 9 + +When Herb Corwin, 73, was married in September to Lucille, a widow from his retirement community near here, the groom's cousin said in his toast that the bride had landed the most eligible bachelor in all of southwest Florida. +Besides being a great guy, Mr. Corwin's cousin said, "Herb drives at night." + In a country where the car reigns supreme, Mr. Corwin, whose previous wife died, is still on the road, zipping about town in his cherry-red, 1996 Pontiac Grand Am, taking his wife out to dinner, to dances, to Shriner's events -- to Miami and Boca Raton, wherever and whenever they want to go. For millions of other older people, the issue is not whether they can drive at night but whether they can drive at all. +The first driver's license is a rite of passage signifying independence, the move from adolescence to adulthood, and the initiation into the nation's car culture. As people move into middle age and beyond, a valid driver's license is as much a certificate of continued youth, vitality and freedom as a basic necessity. +"Man, I feel like I'm 25," Mr. Corwin said, his car radio blaring a Glenn Miller tune as he drove around his retirement community, Sun City Center, waving to his neighbors, some in Cadillacs, others relegated to electric golf carts. +To have to give up driving is viewed as a step toward dependency, and even death. Yet that moment will come for more and more Americans as the ranks of the "old old" increase. The issue poses a dilemma for the children of the elderly, for whom the prospect of taking the car keys from their parents is a poignant reversal of roles. And experts say that a suburbanized America is not ready to cope with a population that can no longer take to the highway. +But it is the elderly who will feel the most pain. +In Richmond, Va., Deborah Perkins, a geriatric nurse practitioner, recently advised a woman in her 80's with severe memory impairment to stop driving. +"She burst into tears and said, 'You might as well shoot me,' " Mrs. Perkins said in a telephone interview. "It's like telling a patient they have a terminal illness." +Experts say it is the lack of adequate mass transit that makes the nation unprepared for the rising number of older people who have to stop or limit their driving. +"We plan for retirement," said Donna Cohen, chairwoman of the Department of Aging and Mental Health at the University of South Florida, in Tampa. "We don't plan for the day when people have to stop driving." +Nowhere is this more vividly demonstrated than in sprawling Florida, which has lured millions of people to its suburban retirement communities, but not put in place the public transportation to support them when they reach their 80's and 90's and physical or cognitive impairments force many of them to give up their cars or use them less. +"You can't live down here without driving," Bentley Lipscomb, secretary of Florida's Department of Elder Affairs, said. "You can't go to the grocery store, the doctor, the hospital. You can't go anywhere." +With the soaring ranks of older drivers -- nationwide, there will be an estimated 40 million drivers over age 70 in the year 2,020, up from 24 million in 1995, according to census data -- experts are grappling with another problem: How to identify unsafe drivers, and get them off the roads without restricting those who are not at risk. +Overall, older drivers, who spend far less time on the road than other drivers, have fewer accidents. But on the basis of accidents per miles driven, they have a higher rate of crashes than middle-aged drivers. The rate rises after age 75 and increases significantly after 85. +Factors like vision and hearing impairment, loss of mobility, dementia and other memory disorders, and side effects from medicines are largely responsible. +Eleven states, including Florida, California and Pennsylvania, require physicians to report medical problems to motor vehicle departments. Only a few states require age-related testing of driving skills; one of the most restrictive, Illinois, requires drivers over 80 to renew their licenses every two years and those over 86 must renew every year. +Florida, with 3.4 million people over 60, and 85 percent of them still driving, is one of the states most lax when it comes to testing. Under current law, drivers can renew their licenses for six years, with testing required in most cases only after the second renewal. +"It's feasible someone could go for 18 years without a test," said Sandy Lambert, head of the state motor vehicles bureau, who has called for people over 65 to be tested every two years. +There is a powerful senior citizens lobby in Florida, and every year the state legislature considers -- and soundly rejects -- legislation for more frequent testing. +"They should check up on us," said Aileen B. Chapman, who is 90 years old and plays violin for the Pinellas Park Civic Orchestra. She can still drive safely to evening concerts. + +Taking Away the Keys Can Be Painful +Clare Conant, 60, moved into her parents' condominium in a retirement community in Clearwater, Fla., last spring on one condition: that her father, who is 86 and physically impaired after a stroke, sign a piece of paper saying he would stop driving. +"He was leaving the complex on the wrong side of the street," Ms. Conant said. "The neighbors said if we didn't take the car away, they'd have a warrant out." +Her father, who had made his living as a traveling furniture salesman in the Midwest, signed, but kept driving. So Ms. Conant took the keys. +Her father took them back. +Finally, she hid his car in another part of the complex. +Around the same time, her brother informed the bureau of motor vehicles that their father should not be driving. A doctor concurred, and after failing to report for a driving test, their father's license was revoked. +"I cried," Ms. Conant, who works in a nursing home, said. She said the home's residents proudly display their drivers' licenses on top of their dressers. "It's demoralizing when it's your own parents. It's their last grasp of independence." +It is particularly traumatic for men to give up their cars. About 75 percent of men over 75 still drive, compared with only 26 percent of women, according to national transportation statistics. +"You're talking about one of the last vestiges of manhood," John Eberhard, a psychologist for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said. +Ms. Conant's father, who declined to be identified, was seated on his living room sofa one afternoon, going through the cards in his wallet. The spotless white 1996 Mercury Marquis that he no longer drives, but still has regularly washed, was parked in front of his condominium complex. +When he and his wife moved to Florida 26 years ago, they were both active and in good health. These days their daughter takes them to the bank, the supermarket and the church, outposts of their vastly reduced world. +With shaking hands, the man who once won a Pontiac Bonneville for being his company's salesman of the year, pulled out his no longer valid license. He pointed to the designation, "Safe Driver." In 26 years in Florida he had not gotten a traffic citation or been in an accident. +"Being cooped up without a license," he said, "it's like doing time in a jail." + +Some Drivers Know When It Is Time to Quit +There are plenty of older drivers who voluntarily give up the car keys. One is Morton Massey, 87, a retired electronics equipment salesman whose eyesight is blurred due to macular degeneration. +For Mr. Massey, the moment of truth arrived a year ago, when he was driving to a supermarket near his home in Tampa with his wife, Frieda. +"I narrowly missed a crowd of people on the curb talking," Mr. Massey said. He told his wife she would have to drive home and, after more than a half century on the road, he turned in his license. +For the first 57 years of their marriage, Mr. Massey had done all the driving. "He thought it was the manly thing to do," said Mrs. Massey, 80, a retired statistical typist. +Now, she is the one behind the wheel of their 1984 silver Cadillac. "He always did for me," she said. "Now I'm doing for him." +Just as Mr. Massey depends on his wife to get around, Betty Zentgraf, an 89-year-old widow, looks to her best friend and roommate, Bernice Payne, 91. +Mrs. Zentgraf, a retired kindergarten teacher, gave up her license 11 years ago, when she began to lose her eyesight. Ms. Payne, a former Girl Scout executive, who did not learn to drive until she was well into her 30's and always felt more comfortable in the passenger's seat, took over the driving. +Mrs. Zentgraf and Ms. Payne live in a four-story apartment building for the elderly. "June up on the fifth floor -- she's in her 70's -- she still drives," Mrs. Zentgraf said. "Eugene and his wife on the second floor, they take us driving. So does Mrs. Sanford on the second floor, and Paula on the fourth floor." +On a recent Sunday, the two women climbed into Ms. Payne's 1977 Chrysler Le Baron, as they do every Sunday, and headed to Kissin' Cuzzins for their ritual lunch of chicken fingers and mashed potatoes. The restaurant, five miles from their apartment in St. Petersburg, is about the farthest trip Ms. Payne makes. +"I haven't driven the interstate in years," she said. +Nationwide, there is a large network of individual transportation services, public and private, for the elderly. But only 11 per cent of those 65 and over have ever used them. +With the number of older nondrivers increasing, a handful of pilot projects have been created in several communities. +In Portland, Me., for example, Katherine Freund in 1995 founded an on-demand, low-cost car service after her young son almost died after being run over by an elderly driver. +In Eugene, Ore., Ethel Villeneuve, an 80-year-old retired social worker, runs a support group that helps older people who cannot drive negotiate alternative modes of transportation. +The American Association for Retired Persons offers refresher classes for older drivers that teach defensive driving techniques, and introduce safety equipment such as special rear view mirrors that provide a wider view of the road. +Katie Graham, an 85-year-old widow, lives in a neighborhood on the east side of Tampa, where she raised seven children, working as a maid. Mrs. Graham, who has used a walker since she broke her hip, does not drive. But it hardly matters. +Her church, St. John Progressive Missionary Baptist, sends a van to bring her to Sunday services, and Wednesday prayer meetings. Her fellow church members, her neighbors, her children, and her grandchildren all make themselves available to take Mrs. Graham anywhere she wants to go -- to the store, to friends' houses, out to dinner, to Disney World. +Mrs. Graham, who recalls getting behind the wheel of her father's Model T when she was young, said she does not miss driving at all. + +LOAD-DATE: December 15, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Betty Zentgraf, 89, of St. Petersburg, Fla., switched to the passenger seat after eyesight troubles. Her roommate, Bernice Payne, 91, drives. Before remarrying, Herb Corwin, left, was a leading bachelor in Sun City Center, Fla. He drove at night. He met Gene Diehl yesterday. (Photographs by Cindy Karp for The New York Times)(pg. A20) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +610 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 17, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +U.N. Tells How Taliban Were Killed By the 100's + +BYLINE: By BARBARA CROSSETTE + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 1; Foreign Desk + +LENGTH: 631 words + +DATELINE: UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 16 + +A United Nations team investigating reports from Afghanistan that more than 2,000 Taliban fighters held as prisoners were killed has found hundreds of bodies in wells and shallow graves, officials said today in Geneva. +Many had been thrown into the wells alive or shot at close range with their hands tied behind their backs, the officials said. + "The manner of death was horrendous," said John Mills, spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, in a telephone interview after briefing reporters in Geneva on the investigation. Mr. Mills said the United Nations had not yet determined the total number who died or exactly when. But he said the bodies appeared to those of Taliban soldiers captured earlier this year. +"Prisoners were taken from detention, told they were going to be exchanged and then were trucked to wells of a type used by shepherds," Mr. Mills said at the briefing. "They were thrown into the wells either alive, or those who resisted were shot and then tossed in. Shots were fired into the wells and hand grenades were thrown in before the top of the well was bulldozed over." +Dr. Mark Skinner, a Canadian forensic expert on the team who represented Physicians for Human Rights, estimated that each well, near the northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif, could contain up to 100 bodies. There were about nine wells, each between 30 and 100 feet deep with 30 to 45 feet of water. The shallow graves in the same region contained an undetermined number of bodies that appeared to have been shot with heavy-caliber machine guns. +The investigators were led by a South Korean lawyer, Choong Hyun Paik, who watches developments in Afghanistan for the United Nations. He will submit his final report to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in March. +Mr. Paik also investigated allegations that the Taliban, a militant Islamic movement that controls more than 80 percent of the country, had itself killed noncombatants in northern Afghanistan. +The investigators visited two villages where local people said that Taliban fighters had shot civilians of the Hazara people as the troops moved from place to place demanding weapons. The local people said the Taliban fighters had killed 53 civilians of various ages in one village, and 30 elderly people in another. The Hazara, who are Shiite Muslims supported by Iran, have resisted Taliban rule. +Taliban leaders have said for months that prisoners were being killed by forces of the Northern Alliance, the remnants of the former mujahedeen government. Those remnants are largely made up of Tajiks and Uzbeks, who were driven out of Kabul in September 1996 and now fight from bases along the border with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The alliance still holds Afghanistan's seat at the United Nations. +In May, a second-rank northern military leader, Abdul Malik Pahlawan, allied himself briefly with the Taliban, who entered the north's stronghold of Mazar-i-Sharif for the first time. But General Pahlawan then double-crossed them and drove them out of Mazar-i-Sharif, taking thousands of prisoners. +Last month General Pahlawan former commander, Abdul Rashid Dostum, who had been driven into exile, said he had found the graves of Taliban prisoners around Shibarghan, near Mazar-i-Sharif. He accused General Pahlawan of murdering the prisoners. +The Taliban tried to take Mazar-i-Sharif again in September but failed. United Nations officials are not certain whether prisoners taken then were also killed. +Responding to the disorder in Afghanistan -- troops in the north have looted United Nations food supplies and stolen vehicles, and Taliban forces have blocked food shipments to their enemies -- the Security Council today called on the two sides to find a political solution. + +LOAD-DATE: December 17, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Map of Afghanistan showing the location of Mazar-i-Sharif: Deep holes near Mazar-i-Sharif could each hold up to 100 bodies. + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +611 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 18, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Senior Class; +Living Independently, but Not Going It Alone + +BYLINE: By ROBERT W. STOCK + +SECTION: Section F; Page 1; Column 3; House & Home/Style Desk + +LENGTH: 2000 words + +MARY E. ZOELLER, 65, is a technical writer with plenty of reservations about typical retirement communities. + "I don't play bridge, and I don't want to be with people my own age exclusively," she said. +Last year, she heard about an unusual housing alternative and decided to check it out. + Today, Ms. Zoeller is one of 29 residents of an intergenerational co-housing "village" in Berkeley, Calif., among the growing number of new housing options for older Americans who are looking for ways to balance their desire for privacy with their growing need for companionship and support. +What Ms. Zoeller found on her first visit to the community was a cozy group of cottages and town houses around a common yard, on a property abundantly landscaped with redwoods and stone pines, fruit trees and palms. +There was only one home for sale, a three-bedroom unit she thought was too large for her needs. "But I'd promised to attend a community dinner in the common house that night," she recalled, "and afterward people sat around chatting. A toddler came over and leaned against my knee. I felt like it was home -- a comfortable family gathering. I changed my mind on the spot and bought in. It's been like family ever since." +Most older Americans want to remain in their own homes: 84 percent, according to a 1996 survey by the American Association of Retired Persons. But physical weakness, loneliness and financial need lead millions to give up that dream. Some move directly into assisted-living sites and nursing homes because they require continuous medical care. Others are healthy enough, but they sell their homes because they have trouble with the activities of daily living: opening windows, getting out of a tub, driving a car. Perhaps their neighborhoods have deteriorated or they can't pay their heating bills. +"For these people, some form of communal living seems only logical," said Deborah Chalfie, a senior program specialist with the association, in Washington. "It's less expensive and it's personally supportive." +Across the country, the idea of communal housing options for the elderly is growing, albeit slowly. Possibilities range from a low-cost apartment complex in Los Angeles to the middle-class co-housing condominiums in Berkeley where young and old live independently side by side to a sprawling Tudor house in Staten Island, with rooms by the month. But there's one major stumbling block: For now at least, many older women especially, who far outnumber older men, take pride in maintaining their own homes and resist moving. +"A lot of them are widowed or divorced and living alone, and they can concentrate on their own needs for the first time in their lives," Ms. Chalfie said. "They also worry about the group dynamics, about getting along with the other people." +But Ms. Chalfie says she suspects that women of the baby boom generation, who are more likely to have experienced group living in college, may be more receptive to the idea. +Following is a closer look at three evolving styles for communal living. + +Alternative Living for the Aging +Janet L. Witkin was years ahead of her time when, in 1978, at age 32, she founded a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles called Alternative Living for the Aging. "In most places, there were just two basic kinds of housing for seniors," she said, "independent living and institutions. I wanted to find a way to give them something in between, a bridge, where they could help each other -- independence through interdependence." +She has since created five rental apartment complexes for middle- and low-income older residents in the Los Angeles area. At three of her "villages in the city," as she calls them, units have no kitchens and everyone helps with dinner. At the others, residents do their own shopping and cooking, except for an occasional holiday or birthday celebration held in a common room. +Prospective tenants of the West Hollywood residence must be at least 62 and healthy enough to be on their own, since no medical services are provided. They may have an annual income of no more than $17,000; most have incomes far below that. The rents range from about $400 to $500 a month. +On a recent afternoon, Sylvia Rainey, 67, was seated with a few of her 15 neighbors in the neat, grassy courtyard of the complex. All the units in the two-story building face the courtyard, which functions as a kind of town square. +"If I feel I want to talk to someone, I can come down here and be with people," Ms. Rainey said. "If I want to be private, I can do that, too." +Looking out for one another is a comfort for the residents. When the building opened, two years ago, a formal buddy system was organized, but gradually a free-form buddy system has replaced it. Ms. Rainey told of receiving a phone call from a neighbor who was worried after noticing that her car had not moved for several days. +Ms. Rainey is African-American; seven of the residents are from the former Soviet Union, and they tend to stick together. "Even if we can't really talk with some of them, the friendliness is there," Ms. Rainey said. "We use body language." +Bertha Bunimovich, 80, who was born in Latvia, agrees. "I feel very good and safer because everybody has a care about you," she said. +Ms. Witkin makes certain that new residents in any of her villages have a cooperative spirit. "The idea is to set up a situation where older people will be there for each other, whether it's help with shopping or a sympathetic ear," she said. "Everything I've seen tells me they live longer that way." +Further information about Alternative Living for the Aging is available from (213) 650-7988. + +Age-Integrated Co-Housing + In the common yard shared by the 29 residents of the intergenerational co-housing village in Berkeley, a skateboard rested precariously on a picnic table; a nearby stroller awaited its 6-month-old passenger. "I get to hold him every day," a pleased Nina Falk, 67, said of her tiny neighbor. +It was 1992 when Ms. Falk joined a group that was planning the project, which was completed last June. She and most of the residents, which include couples and families, lived on site while the 14 units were being renovated or built from scratch. +Co-housing, a form of communal living in which residents design and manage their own housing complex, had its start in Denmark about a quarter-century ago. Thirty American projects are up and running, with 22 others under construction and 150 in the planning stages, said Charles Durrett, a co-owner of the Co-Housing Company, an architectural firm in Berkeley that is a clearing house for such projects. Mr. Durrett says the elderly are well represented in his plans: the number who have expressed interest in co-housing is far greater than their percentage in the population. He expects that will increase, he said -- and a 1996 American Association of Retired Persons survey of people 50 and over may prove him right: when asked where they preferred to live, 76 percent chose a mixed-age neighborhood over one of only people their own age. +Co-housing communities, which do not segregate by age or race, typically include a common house where residents share dinners a few times a week and meet to discuss the upkeep of the gardens and the shared laundry room. A co-housing community may be wooded and spacious, but it is not suburbia. There are no private lawns, and the homes, which range from separate cottages to two-family town houses, are clustered together. Prices in the Berkeley village range from about $125,000 for a one-bedroom unit to $220,000 for one with two bedrooms, office space and a deck. The price includes a one-14th share of the whole property, including the common grounds and common house. Decisions about common concerns, including the design for the village itself, are made by consensus. +"We've been through a lot together, and we've developed systems for getting along," Ms. Falk said. Some of those systems are formal: bulletin boards beside the washer-dryers record the loads so electrical costs can be divided up. A more elaborate board in the kitchen indicates who is responsible for cooking and cleaning up after the the common meal (held three nights a week). +Items on the agenda of each monthly meeting are posted in advance. When a dispute arises, all parties have up to three minutes to state their positions. If the dispute remains unsettled, a committee may be appointed. If all else fails, the village may call in an expert on conflict resolution. (So far, the only two unresolved issues are the village's name and a policy on pets.) +Ms. Zoeller said a major plus was the "diversity of personalities and types." "At the same time there was the intention of people to live together as neighbors, to make decisions based on the common good," she added. There was also a real respect for individuality and privacy." +"I found the young people's idealism to be very enriching," she added. "It rekindled in me some of my former hopes and belief in change that I'd allowed to be stifled by life. As a telecommuter, I used to have little contact with the outside world. Here, there are others like me, people to have lunch with. Or if I decide to throw some laundry in, I run into mothers with young children who are doing the same thing and I get to see kids, then go back to my desk and get back to work." +More information on co-housing and village locations is available from the Co-Housing Company, (510)549-9980, www.cohousingco .com; the Co-Housing Network, (510) 486-2656, www.cohousing.org, publishes a magazine. + +Marie's Place + At some moment of the day, when the mood is upon him, Tony Lorenzo, 94, will retreat to his tiny, second-floor bedroom and put one of his 200 records on the phonograph. Beethoven or Bing Crosby, the music will be shared, willy-nilly, with his nine neighbors at Marie's Place, a large renovated Tudor former doctor's house in the Westerleigh section of Staten Island. Living on top of one other, as one resident commented, eases the loneliness, but also puts a premium on privacy. +The residents gather for the three daily meals prepared by their live-in manager-cook, Jeffrey Kantrowitz. Except for an occasional outing -- two residents still drive -- or a game of cards, they tend to keep to themselves or watch the big television set in the high-ceilinged living room, especially for "The Price Is Right." +Mr. Lorenzo, who calls himself a grouchy bachelor, allowed that the food at Marie's Place was good and that the residents felt like family. +Richmond Senior Services, a nonprofit agency, opened Marie's Place a year ago; it is one of several similar residences run by the group. "We had a group of these older men and no place to put them," said Dorothy Landau-Crawford, the executive director. Most of the people with houses to share were women, and a strange man was not what they had in mind. So Marie's Place, named after a board member, started out all-male. (It now has women, too.) +Residents pay $1,000 a month in return for meals, a room (which they are expected to furnish) and linens. Heavy cleaning, including rugs and windows, is provided; medical care is not. When residents can no longer take care of their rooms and themselves, they must leave. That happened when a man in an early stage of Alzheimer's disease summoned fire engines at 4 A.M., obeying, he said, his dead wife's instructions. +For Gaspare Russo, 87, a former longshoreman, Marie's Place is a safe harbor. His wife died two years ago, and a stroke and arthritis prevented him from living alone. He didn't want to move in with any of his sons. "I didn't want to spoil their marriages," he said. Shared housing was the solution. +"I take short walks, watch TV, talk with the others and eat lasagna," he said. "It's what I needed." +Information about Marie's Place and other shared housing sites operated by Richmond Senior Services is available from (718) 816-1811. + +LOAD-DATE: December 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: No gap: Nina Falk, 67, and a neighbor at a "village" in Berkeley, Calif. (Terry Schmitt for The New York Times)(pg. F1); THE WARMTH OF COMPANY -- Home but not alone at Marie's Place. Left, Warren Davis and Jeff Kantrowitz, manager; right, Tony Lorenzo. (Photographs by James Rexroad for The New York Times)(pg. F9) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +612 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 18, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Doctors' Reliance on Technology Is Bringing House Calls to an End + +BYLINE: By The Associated Press + +SECTION: Section A; Page 22; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 361 words + +Doctors' house calls are disappearing in the United States, in part because doctors have become dependent on modern medical technology, which they cannot carry in their black bags, researchers say. +An analysis of Medicare claims in 1993 found that fewer than 1 percent of elderly patients received house calls. Most of those patients were very sick, the researchers said in a study being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine. + The main reasons for the decline are low Medicare payments for house calls and the failure of medical schools to train students in low-technology diagnosis, said the study's chief author, Dr. Gregg Meyer of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. +In 1993, the study found, Medicare paid doctors an average of $87 per home visit, $3 more than for an office visit. But reimbursement has improved, and doctors now get about $20 more for a house call than for an office visit. Still, Dr. Meyer said, that does not cover the additional time and travel involved. +Even with higher Medicare payments, the number of home visits by doctors continues to decline, to 984,000 in 1996 from 1.6 million in 1988. +In part, that is because younger doctors are trained to rely more heavily on laboratory medical tests, said Dr. Thomas Cullen, a 60-year-old general surgeon in Gilford, N.H., who was not involved with the study. +"Not many of them are prepared to go to the home of an elderly patient and listen to her chest and say, 'I think she's developing pneumonia,' and prescribe antibiotics without the backup of a chest X-ray," he said. +In an accompanying editorial, Dr. Edward Campion, a deputy editor of the medical journal, called for medical schools to resume training young doctors in how to make house calls. +Doctors who make house calls can get a more complete picture of the patient by seeing, for example, whether the person has food in the refrigerator or a ramp up the front steps, and is taking his or her medicine properly, Dr. Meyer said. +Before house calls disappear altogether, research is needed on whether they can save insurance companies money, Dr. Meyer said. + +LOAD-DATE: December 18, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +613 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 19, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +U.S. Publishes First Guide To Treatment of Infertility + +BYLINE: By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG + +SECTION: Section A; Page 22; Column 5; National Desk + +LENGTH: 801 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 + +In its first clinic-by-clinic guide to the confusing and often emotionally wrenching world of infertility treatment, the Government reported today that high-tech methods of conception failed 70 percent to 80 percent of the time. +The report was issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta five years after Congress approved a measure requiring the agency to publish statistics for consumers on the pregnancy rates of infertility clinics. It provides data from 281 infertility programs around the country, including the percentages of multiple births, information about the diagnoses of patients and success rates categorized by age. + Using figures provided by the clinics, the agency reported that in 1995 doctors initiated 59,142 treatments using "assisted reproductive technology," or A.R.T. The treatments, which occur over the course of one month and are therefore called cycles, resulted in 11,315 live births. +Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who sponsored the bill, described the report as an important step toward increased protections for infertility patients, who are often vulnerable and sometimes find themselves lured by emotional appeals from clinics that promise to help them have children. +The report said that in 78 percent of the cycles, fresh embryos from a couple's own egg and sperm were used, and most of those came from the procedure called in vitro fertilization, in which an egg and sperm are fertilized in a laboratory dish and transferred into the woman's uterus. In 14 percent of the cycles, frozen embryos were used and in 8 percent, donated eggs were used. +For women who tried to become pregnant using their own eggs, as opposed to a donor's, the report said the national "take-home baby rate" -- the percentage of births per cycle of treatment -- was 19.6 percent. The rate was higher, about 30 percent, for those who became pregnant with a donated egg, a procedure typically used for older women who are unable to produce eggs or whose eggs are of poor quality. +The statistics varied widely by clinic, with success rates ranging from 7 percent to more than 35 percent. Infertility experts cautioned, too, that the numbers could be deceiving; the success rates of any given clinic depend, in large part, on the number of patients treated, their age and their diagnoses. +"There is too much emphasis on numbers and not enough emphasis on patients," said Dr. Jamie A. Grifo, director of reproductive endocrinology at New York University Medical Center. "Some of my 43-year-olds have babies. I could make my pregnancy rates look better by not allowing them to cycle. So should I have refused them treatment?" +At Dr. Grifo's clinic, for example, the overall take-home baby rate was 37.5 percent, when adjusted for the patient's age. But for women under 35, the rate was 45.9 percent. For women 35 to 39, the rate fell to 38.6 percent, and it dropped to 13.8 percent for women older than 39. +The agency avoided ranking the clinics, said Dr. Lynne Wilcox, who directs the agency's division of reproductive health. The report, Dr. Wilcox said, is simply "a starting place" to help consumers decide if they want to use reproductive technology. It is not meant to compare one clinic against the next, she said. +Even so, Dr. Grifo and others have said they are concerned that with so much emphasis on statistics, some clinics might change the way they treat patients, turning away women who may be most in need of help because they fear it will hurt their numbers. For that reason, some experts urged Congress not to get into the business of infertility reporting. +"I testified against it," said Dr. Zev Rosenwaks, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. "I was not in favor of it because I felt that any legislation regarding reporting of statistics was going to affect practice in some way." +Dr. Rosenwaks is a past president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, which since 1989 has published data similar to the report by the disease control centers, and helped publish today's report. +But advocates for the infertile said there were two advantages to the agency's report: it is easier to understand, and it will be provided free by the Government. The society's report cost $35. "With this report, you can compare how you do nationally, which really puts it in a context," said Diane Aronson, executive director of Resolve, an advocacy group for the infertile that also joined in publishing the report. "You can say, 'O.K., I have endometriosis, I'm 37, what are my chances?' " +The report is available on the World Wide Web, at www.cdc.gov/ nccdphp/drh/arts/index.htm. Or copies can be obtained from Resolve by calling (888) 299-1585. + +LOAD-DATE: December 19, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Graphs: "BY THE NUMBERS: Tackling Infertility" shows pregnancy rates in 1995 for women who used procedures like in vitro fertilization to try to conceive. (Source: Centers for Disease Contol and Prevention) + + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +614 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 20, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +PASTER, FRANCES (NEE KASS) + +SECTION: Section D; Page 16; Column 3; Classified + +LENGTH: 80 words + +PASTER-Frances (nee Kass). On December 19, 1997. Beloved wife of the late Aaron. Loving mother of Fredi Pomerance and Leslie Slocum. Cherished grandmother of Janice and Yoji Nimura. Beloved sister and aunt. Friends may call Saturday, December 20 7-9PM Frank E. Campbell, 1076 Madison Ave at 81 Street. Service Sunday December 21, 2PM at Frank E. Campbell. Contributions in her memory may be made to the New York Foundation for Senior Citizens, 225 E. 93rd St, NY, NY 10128. + +LOAD-DATE: December 20, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +615 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 21, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Paid Notice: Deaths +PASTER, FRANCES (NEE KASS) + +SECTION: Section 1; Page 51; Column 3; Classified + +LENGTH: 80 words + +PASTER-Frances (nee Kass). On December 19, 1997. Beloved wife of the late Aaron. Loving mother of Fredi Pomerance and Leslie Slocum. Cherished grandmother of Janice and Yoji Nimura. Beloved sister and aunt. Friends may call Saturday, December 20 7-9PM Frank E. Campbell, 1076 Madison Ave at 81 Street. Service Sunday December 21, 2PM at Frank E. Campbell. Contributions in her memory may be made to the New York Foundation for Senior Citizens, 225 E. 93rd St, NY, NY 10128. + +LOAD-DATE: December 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +TYPE: Paid Death Notice + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +616 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 21, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Commercial Property/Lodging; +For Many City Hotels, Some Guests Are Permanent + +BYLINE: By JOHN HOLUSHA + +SECTION: Section 11; Page 9; Column 1; Real Estate Desk + +LENGTH: 1456 words + +THIS is a profitable time to be in the hotel business, with occupancy levels nationwide nearing record levels. It's an even better time to be in the hotel business in New York, where most hotels are effectively full from Monday to Friday. Average occupancy this year was a record 85.5 percent, according to a survey by Coopers & Lybrand's lodging and gaming consulting practice. And average daily room rates rose 9 percent to $175 this year, as hotel operators took advantage of booming demand. +Within this outpouring of prosperity to hotel owners and operators, and scarcity for people who want to visit New York, is a curiosity produced by the city's rent regulations: hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hotel rooms are permanently occupied by residents who pay only a fraction of the rates paid by overnight guests. + "I have people paying $200 a month for rooms I could rent for $200 a night," said Bernard Goldberg, the chief executive of the Gotham Hospitality Group, which operates five remodeled hotels in Manhattan. All have permanent, rent-regulated residents. +Many of these occupants are elderly people who have had no other home for a long time. Hotel operators say most are reluctant to leave even if financial incentives are offered, especially since as hotels are renovated they become even more attractive places to live. +Don Lewis, the owner of the Riverside Tower Hotel at Riverside Drive and 80th Street, said his informal research found that about one-third of the approximately 100 hotels in New York City have permanent residents. These rooms, Mr. Lewis said, constitute an invisible hotel the size of the 1,400-room Waldorf-Astoria that could be added to the 65,000 rooms now available to accommodate visitors but for the legal restrictions. The Riverside Tower has 120 rooms, with 18 occupied by rent-regulated tenants. +"It would benefit the city mightily if more middle-class tourists were able to visit here," he said. "But at this point we are full, so a lot of these people are locked out." He said that because business and tourist visitors tend to spend much more on food and entertainment than permanent residents do, the city loses tax revenues and businesses lose potential sales when their numbers are restricted because of a lack of available rooms. +Tenant advocates, however, note that these residents have a legal right to their rooms and that coercion to remove them can constitute illegal harassment. "There is pressure on tenants, and it is directly correlated to the conditions of the market," said Karen Stamm, managing attorney for the East Side SRO Legal Services Project. "During the slump, things were easier for tenants." +One tenant, Bern Marcowitz, said he had been a permanent resident of the Roger Williams Hotel, a Gotham property, for almost a decade, and described it simply as his home. "This is my legal residence," he said. He said officials of the company wanted to relocate him while the hotel's recent renovation was under way, but he declined. "I was not coerced," he said, "although they may try to raise my rent based on the investment in the building." +Nobody doubts that if hotel operators had more rooms available, they could rent them immediately. "New York is not only one of the tightest hotel markets in the country, it is one of the tightest in the world," said Francis J. Nardozza, national hospitality director for KPMG Peat Marwick. "From Monday to Friday it is virtually impossible to get rooms in the better-known hotels in the city." +He said the recovery was all the more remarkable because hotels could be purchased for what he described as "bottom basement prices" as little as four years ago. +Rent-regulated hotel rooms are largely a New York phenomenon, said Daniel Lesser, national director of hospitality services for Cushman & Wakefield. "As you survey the land, you don't find many places that have the residential rent controls that New York has," he said. And those regulations are not likely to change, since the State Legislature approved a six-year extension this summer. +A thousand or more rooms held off the tourist market? "That figure does not surprise me in the least," said Arthur Adler, who follows the New York market for Coopers & Lybrand. "It's a holdover from the days when these hotels were residential, and rent controls still apply. Hotels like the Barbizon were places where aspiring actresses lived when they came to the city. They may not be aspiring anymore, but they are still there." +Clearly, having rent-regulated permanent tenants occupying rooms that could be rented to affluent visitors affects the financial values of a property. "Permanent residents have a negative impact on hotel valuation," said Michael Fishbin, a hotel specialist with E&Y Kenneth Leventhal, a consulting company. "A property would have a higher value if those rooms were available for transient use." +HE said placing a value on a hotel was a combination of analyzing cash flow and making some estimates about how long it would be before the rent-regulated rooms would become available for tourists, as well as other subjective factors. "You want to look at the rooms to see if they are the smaller units," he said. "If they are grouped on the lower floors? Can you buy out the tenants or group them in one part of the building? These are all factors." +Even if the rooms become available, they may not be immediately suitable for the tourist trade. Many of the rent-regulated rooms in older hotels do not have their own bathrooms; the tenants must share one down the hall with other residents. Since renovating a room at a time is usually not practical, many will stay empty even after being vacated, industry analysts say, until enough can be combined. +"It is not as simple as vacating a unit and converting it to transient use," Mr. Adler said. "You have to redo rooms in blocks." +Nevertheless, the demand for hotel rooms is providing a powerful incentive for developers to supply them. Several new hotels are under way and, according to Coopers & Lybrand, 15 major renovations are under way or recently completed. Not all involved rent-regulated units, but many do. +"The only way to treat these people is well and with respect," Mr. Goldberg said. "You have to renovate around them and give them the same services as everybody else, like changing the sheets every day. Being obnoxious leads to immense trouble." +Ian Schrager, who will have to deal with over 150 permanent tenants in his newly acquired 1,000-room Henry Hudson Hotel on West 58th Street, said that to make sense an acquisition has to be financially viable even if all the tenants remain. His Ian Schrager Hotels plans to convert the building to a budget hotel, with rooms renting for about $75 a night. +"The numbers have to work with all the tenants staying there," he said. "If they don't, you should not make the acquisition. That, to me, is the threshold issue." +He said that in some cases tenants were offered financial incentives to move on, but added that "we are dealing with people's homes, so we don't always get a rational business decision." He said people who wanted to stay in their existing rooms would be able to do so, even though moving all the permanent residents to a few floors might simplify the renovation. +Not all property owners have been as enlightened, tenant advocates are quick to point out. "Landlords hired professional thugs to get people out of buildings," Ms. Stamm said. "We were able to prosecute them for theft of leasehold." +Even now, she said, renovation can be difficult for permanent residents. "These people are under siege, with jackhammers going at all hours," she said. "If the electricity goes off or the plumbing fails, they are the ones affected." +As a result of past offenses, tenants have more weapons at hand today. One is a "Certification of No Harassment" from the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which is required on some projects before a developer can file plans with the Buildings Department. +"If a building is to be converted or upgraded, the owner cannot do so unless there is a determination of no harassment," said Miriam Calabro, a supervising lawyer at the department. "We post announcements, mail notices and do field investigations to find if there has been harassment." She said the investigators tried to talk with tenants who have been gone from the building as long as three years, to find evidence of tough tactics. +Armed with tools like this, tenants can make owners' lives miserable if they feel ill used, Mr. Schrager observed. "The tenants are protected and they have to be treated sensitively," he said. "That's a fact of life in New York." + +LOAD-DATE: December 21, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: Don Lewis, owner of the Riverside Tower Hotel (left), says that about one-third of the city's hotels have permanent residents. (Photographs by Frances Roberts for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +617 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 22, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +BUSINESS DIGEST + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 559 words + + +Managed-Care Companies Trim Benefits for Elderly +Managed-care companies nationwide are starting to cut some of the generous benefits that millions of elderly Americans on Medicare counted on when they signed up with health maintenance organizations. + Because of rising drug costs and a lid set by Congress on next year's payments to Medicare H.M.O.'s, some plans are beginning to charge monthly premiums or are increasing fees. And a few are eliminating some of the most popular features: free drugs, eyeglasses and dental care. Page A1. + +Opportunity in Digital TV +A plan by the nation's largest cable television companies to buy 15 million digital set-top boxes could sharply accelerate the delivery of new digital services to viewers. But the deal also heralds a race by computer companies to enter the far larger television business. D2. + +College Computer Plan Under Fire +A proposal to give a consortium formed by four giant technology companies the exclusive right to modernize and maintain the computer and telecommunications infrastructure of the California State University system has spurred resistance on some of the system's 23 campuses. D3. + +Marketing in Virtual Reality +An Indiana University professor has developed computer software that enables consumers to stroll virtual supermarket aisles stocked with laundry detergent, toilet paper and breakfast cereal. The "shoppers" select products that appeal to them, while researchers tally the results. D3. + +New Names in Almanacs +Even in the era of CD-ROM's and the Internet, publishers remain enthusiastic about the business of almanacs. Two new titles are entering the market, bringing the total to four. D10. + +Health Magazine a Hit in Russia +A new magazine, meant to enlighten Russian men on diets and romance while offering news-you-can-use articles on subjects like "How to Win a Drunken Fight," was a surprise hit when it was introduced last week. The first 50,000 copies of Men's Health were snapped up in Moscow and other cities even before the publisher began promoting the title. D10. + +Rides Push Entertainment Envelope +A pair of motion-simulator rides soon to open in Las Vegas not only push technological limits but embody two different answers to the question of how a multimedia attraction can best entertain. One uses electronic gadgetry to assault the senses with fantasy visions, the other to create the most lifelike experience possible. Entertainment. D10. + +Taxing Matters on the Web +Consider a visit to a few tax sites on the World Wide Web in the next few days. The money you save on taxes by taking advantage of moves no longer available after Dec. 31 could pay those mounting bills for presents and parties. D7. + +Cults and Their Adherents +Technology and religion sometimes seem to be woven from similar cloth, as some technocrats argue that technology promises salvation, or at least transformation. In a new book, a Canadian history professor argues that the connection between technology and religion is, in fact, a fundamental one. Edward Rothstein: Connections. D3. + +Advertisers Bring on New Shops +A flurry of activity by large marketers in the year's waning days means accounts with total billings in excess of $325 million will change hands. Stuart Elliott: Advertising. D12. + +LOAD-DATE: December 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Chart: "YESTERDAY" +Dow Industrials -- 7,756.29 Down 89.01 +30-yr. Treasury yield -- 5.92% Unchanged +The Dollar -- 128.93 yen Down 1.52 + +TYPE: Summary + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +618 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 22, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final + +MEDICARE H.M.O.'S TO TRIM BENEFITS FOR THE ELDERLY + +BYLINE: By MILT FREUDENHEIM + +SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 6; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1941 words + +Managed-care companies nationwide are starting to cut some of the generous benefits that millions of elderly Americans on Medicare counted on when they signed up with health maintenance organizations. +The health plans have become popular because they fill many of the biggest gaps in Medicare, notably costs for prescription drugs, which otherwise have to be covered by expensive supplemental policies known as Medigap insurance or out-of-pocket cash. Best of all, there is often no charge, or only a modest one, to belong to one of these Medicare H.M.O.'s. The cost is largely paid by the Government, which has tried to save money by applying managed-care methods to soaring Medicare expenses. + But because of rising drug costs and a cap set by Congress on next year's payments to Medicare H.M.O.'s, many of the plans are rewriting the rules. Some are charging monthly premiums for the first time or are sharply raising fees. And a few are eliminating some of the most popular features: free drugs, eyeglasses and dental care. +Gloria Blevins, 75, a part-time nurse in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., received a letter this month from Senior Options, a unit of First Option Health Plan, saying it was ending her coverage for prescription drugs, eye examinations and dental care. Ms. Blevins said her arthritis medicine alone cost $120 a month. +"I'm desperate," she said. "How do I afford it? If I stop the medication, I get stiff as a board." +Dennis Wilson, a spokesman for First Option, which has 12,000 Medicare H.M.O. members in New Jersey and is based in Neptune, said revenues from Medicare "were not covering our medical expenses and drug expenses." +While Medicare H.M.O.'s have tinkered with benefits in the past, the changes that are being announced amount to the first widespread cutbacks. They will take effect on Jan. 1. +"If plans are making major reductions in benefits," or charging more for the same benefits, "that would be a reversal of the trends we have seen in the 90's," said Patricia Newman, director of the Medicare Policy Project at the Kaiser Family Foundation. +One of the biggest national managed-care companies, Humana Inc., told Wall Street analysts earlier this month that it planned to triple the fees that members pay for some brand-name drugs. +"Other H.M.O.'s will be making similar announcements," said Mimi Willard, a health care analyst with Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. "It is going to be widespread." +Many health care experts think the Government's payments to Medicare H.M.O.'s have been unjustifiably high in certain parts of the country, including New York, Miami and Southern California, and in effect have rewarded inefficiency, said Marilyn Moon, a Medicare expert with the Urban Institute in Washington. Congress's decision to curb the payments "was a necessary thing to do," Ms. Moon said, "but a real hardship for some people who made a decision to go into these plans." +In the end, added Ms. Willard of Donaldson, Lufkin, the Government's austerity move "will boomerang onto the elderly, who will be left with less complete coverage and higher medical bills." +And many may find themselves with little recourse, experts say. H.M.O. members who want to switch back to a traditional fee-for-service Medicare approach may be turned down for Medigap coverage if they have health problems, said John Rother, legislative director of the American Association of Retired Persons. Others may wind up paying a lot more for a new Medigap policy than if they had kept their old policies. That is because most insurers tie their Medigap rates to an applicant's age on the theory that an older policyholder is more likely to have higher health costs. +The changes have important national policy implications, too. Congress and the Clinton Administration are counting on managed care to help slow Federal spending on Medicare, reduce budget deficits and stave off perceived threats of bankruptcy in the program, which faces spiraling costs as the baby-boomer generation ages. +But if the benefit cutbacks are widely copied, they could put a damper on the rapid growth in Medicare H.M.O. enrollment, which has increased by more than one million in the last 12 months. The plans now cover 5.9 million people, or almost one in six of the 38 million elderly and disabled Americans eligible for Medicare. +The effect of the changes will not be felt equally across the country. In states like Minnesota, where health costs are relatively low, Medicare H.M.O.'s have not become a big factor. By contrast, the plans have tended to proliferate in states like California, Florida and New York, where costs are the highest. Medicare payments, which are based on those costs, have been high enough in those states to make it possible for H.M.O.'s to offer liberal benefits. +That will become harder to do, however, as the new payment levels take effect. In passing balanced budget legislation earlier this year, Congress approved a payment increase to Medicare H.M.O.'s for 1998 of just 2 percent to 3 percent more than the 1997 level. That compares with a 5.9 percent increase in 1997 and a 10.1 percent rise in 1996. +Many Medicare H.M.O.'s are still deciding how to react to the new payment level, and it is unclear just how many policyholders will be affected. But premium increases or benefit cutbacks have already been announced by H.M.O.'s in California, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and other states. +"Plans are finding themselves between a rock and a hard place," said Bruce Fried, director of the Federal Center for Health Plans and Providers, which oversees Medicare H.M.O.'s. +In California, Fred Perkins, a 70-year-old retired shop mechanic for United Airlines, said that Aetna Inc. had recently called and said that his Medicare H.M.O. premiums would be raised to $49.50 a month from nothing. He said he had been told that premiums were being raised in San Mateo County, where he lives, "because Aetna was not making enough money here." +Mr. Perkins said it would be hard for many elderly people to break longstanding ties with doctors they trusted to switch to another H.M.O., which might raise premiums later. +Jill Griffiths, an Aetna spokeswoman, said Medicare reimbursement did not fully cover expenses in San Mateo County. She said Aetna was raising premiums in some places and lowering them in other cities. +"One thing we are looking to do is maintain or enhance our profit margins," Ms. Griffiths said. +For each Medicare member, healthy or not, managed-care companies receive a monthly fee from the Government that is slightly lower than the per-capita cost of all Medicare spending in a given county. In high-cost New York City, Medicare pays as much as $671 a month for each H.M.O. member, essentially subsidizing zero premiums and generous drug benefits. +But Oxford Health Plans, a big, financially troubled H.M.O., said earlier this month that Medicare payments were inadequate to cover its costs in downstate New York counties. Oxford did not say what it would do about the problem. +Even with higher premiums, the typical Medicare H.M.O. will charge less than the traditional Medigap policies available in its region -- at least for now. Monthly premiums for Medigap policies range from $23 for basic coverage in rural New Mexico to $183, including prescription drugs, in Southern California. Still, if an H.M.O. policyholder is suddenly without coverage for drugs, any saving in premiums could be quickly eaten up by a mountain of bills for prescriptions. +Prescription drugs are one of the biggest concerns for people older than 65, and many elderly people have supplementary private drug coverage, often subsidized by former employers. +Mike Megarian, 81, a retired rancher in Coalinga in central California, said he and his wife had joined a Blue Cross plan without a premium in August to "save ourselves some money and get the benefits," which included free drugs, eyeglasses and dental care. A few weeks ago, California Blue Cross announced a $65 monthly premium and eliminated the drug, vision and dental coverage for the Megarians and several thousand others. +"This really made us mad," Mr. Megarian said. "We let our good policy go and signed up with this. We didn't think that after three months they were going to start raising prices." +A Blue Cross spokeswoman said the Medicare payments were "too low to cover what we were paying out to customers" in four California counties. Another Blue Cross executive said unhappy H.M.O. members were being "encouraged to call local agencies that can advise them on other competitive plans." +Indeed, Leonard Schaeffer, chairman of Wellpoint Health Plans, the parent of California Blue Cross, has said that Medicare H.M.O.'s are not good for his business. He has "shied away" from expanding in that area, said Cynthia Coulter, a Wellpoint spokeswoman. +Many health plans try to keep drug costs down by charging a few dollars for low-priced generic drugs, twice as much for selected brands for which the H.M.O. receives a rebate and much more for more costly drugs. +Actuarial consultants who help big companies negotiate with health plans on behalf of retired employees say that individuals, not big employers, will pay most of the increases in Medicare H.M.O. premiums. Indeed, after Congress voted to slow the growth of Medicare spending, many companies quickly demanded a freeze on 1998 premium rates for their retirees, said George Wagoner, a health care actuary in Richmond at William Mercer, a consulting firm. +That does not please consumer advocates. "The big companies have leverage, so everybody else ends up paying more," said Diane Archer, executive director of the Medicare Rights Center in New York. "Medicare is supposed to provide the same care to everyone at the same price." +Large employers often insist on an unlimited drug benefit for retirees. Mark Schafer, the health insurance administrator for 48,000 members of the Pennsylvania School Employees Retirement System, said health plans could manipulate the drug benefit to get rid of expensive, sicker members. +"If an H.M.O. could get away with offering little or limited prescription drugs," Mr. Schafer said, "it could encourage people whose health has deteriorated to leave the H.M.O. It would be too easy for the H.M.O.'s to make themselves unattractive to a group of people who are heavy utilizers of health care." +One H.M.O. said it would no longer provide unlimited drug coverage for the Pennsylvania retirees, Mr. Schafer said, adding, "We told them that was not acceptable." The H.M.O., Keystone Health Plan Central, then raised the monthly premium 133 percent, to $72.75, and doubled the payment for each prescription, to $20, Mr. Schafer said. +Brian Herrmann, a spokesman for Keystone, a joint venture of Pennsylvania Blue Shield and Capital Blue Cross based in Harrisburg, said the H.M.O. had raised monthly premiums and eliminated drug coverage for individual members in five counties. +"We've had to make some changes based on the Medicare reimbursement and primarily based on the cost of drugs," he said. He said that expensive new drugs were constantly being introduced and that drug use in general had increased. +Pamela Hastie, a principal in Chicago with Buck Consultants, said most H.M.O.'s "didn't anticipate the sharp increase in drug costs -- they are much greater for retirees than for active employees." +Whatever the reason for the changes, many policyholders are not taking the news well. +"It's a rip-off of the people who are most vulnerable," said Mr. Perkins, the retired shop mechanic. + +LOAD-DATE: December 22, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +619 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 23, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final + +THE MEDIA BUSINESS: ADVERTISING; +Efforts are under way to change the image of older consumers as tradition-bound tightwads. + +BYLINE: By Stuart Elliott + +SECTION: Section D; Page 7; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 948 words + +EFFORTS to interest advertisers, agencies and the media in older consumers are being redefined to make the older audience, well, younger. +For almost two decades, there have been initiatives aimed at burnishing the image of consumers in their 60's and 70's to counter perceptions of them as tradition-bound tightwads. Those attempts have made some headway -- think high-fiber cereals and decaffeinated beverages -- but not enough to offset the longtime obsession on Madison Avenue with youth who are believed to spend more freely and have more malleable brand preferences and buying habits. + So now, those trying to bolster appeals to the so-called mature market are increasingly portraying that demographic segment as beginning with people in their 50's. That reinterpretation seeks to revitalize the market by including the baby-boom generation, the 76 million Americans born from 1946 through 1964 who are turning 50 at a rate of one every seven to eight seconds. +However, seeking to expand the mature market by counting the estimated 10,000 boomers a day who celebrate a 50th birthday runs a risk: the boomers are notoriously Peter Pan-like in refusing if not to grow up then not to grow old. +"The focus has been on the younger audience because that's where the fun seems to be," said Louis Van Leeuwen, managing partner of Fifty Something Marketing, a shop in Riverside, Conn., being started by several longtime advertising and agency executives. +"But by 2000," he added, "Americans 55 and older will have twice the discretionary income of those who are 18 to 34." +One advertiser presenting younger older people is the VF Corporation, in a campaign for Vanity Fair lingerie recently introduced by the Martin Agency in Richmond, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies. One print ad begins: "How could you know, when you were 20 and impossibly sexy and unable to imagine yourself otherwise, that time would teach you something. That age is not a loss but an exchange: of wisdom for youth, grace for foolishness, love for lust." +"Important companies are beginning to accept that there is an aging America and they will start to lose share of market if they do not adjust their advertising messages," said Leda Sanford, vice president and senior editorial director of the targeted marketing division at the Age Wave Communications Corporation in Emeryville, Calif., which concentrates on older demographic groups. +"The force of the boomer wave is what will change what America feels about aging," she added. +For instance, for the Miracle-Ear hearing aids sold by the Dahlberg Inc. division of Bausch & Lomb Inc., Age Wave is designing a publication, titled Better and Better, that will seek to capitalize on what Ms. Sanford described as "a much more pro-active approach to aging" among boomers that differs from attitudes among the boomers' parents. +"A 70-year-old accepts deafness as part of aging," Ms. Sanford asserted, "but it's our belief deafness is something boomers will not accept. The boomers fight back and want to solve problems." +The contrast between the younger old and the older old will be even more pronounced among women, Ms. Sanford declared, because "when a 40-year-old woman turns 55 now, she will have for the most part worked." "She will be proficient," Ms. Sanford added. "Nobody will push her around." +To reflect that, Age Wave has introduced a younger version of Always on the Go!, a magazine aimed at women in their 50's that is published for the Buick division of the General Motors Corporation. The new magazine, Get Up and Go!, is directed at working women ages 40 to 50. +The CBS television network unit of the CBS Corporation has been working hard to convince Madison Avenue to rethink demographic definitions to consider baby-boom age groups like 35 to 54 as well as younger age groups like 18 to 34. +One reason is the median age of CBS's viewers: 52.4, the oldest of any of the six broadcast networks, according to a study released last week by BJK&E Media, a unit of Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon & Eckhardt. +"The baby boomers have established the cultural and social agenda of this country since they were in school," said David Poltrack, executive vice president for planning and research at CBS Television in New York. "They're not going to concede that leadership position as they break 50." +He added, "There will be a degree of affluence and consumption with boomers as a 50-plus generation that no 50-plus generation has had." +Besides, Mr. Poltrack asserted, age ought not to be deemed "an absolute determinant of whether someone is in the market for a product or not," adding, "Income, education and family size are more important." +Those involved in boosting boomers into the ranks of the mature market are aware of the pitfalls. +"The boomer is not going gently into that good night and will continue to gravitate to youthful images," Ms. Sanford said. "As we're getting older, we want to be perceived as younger." +At the same time, she added, "some of the best ad agencies in the world are afraid of 'contaminating' the younger part of the market: if they do things right for the older market and the younger people see it, they worry younger people will be turned off." That is important because the boomers' children are becoming an important market for products like cosmetics, movies, snack foods and soft drinks. +And while "the concept is gaining momentum," Mr. Van Leeuwen said, so far only "a small fraction" of marketers are "beginning to see the light" about the mature market. +"You can't sell everything to everybody," he added. "I can't sell you a car if you're not in the market for it." + + +LOAD-DATE: December 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +620 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 23, 1997, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +FILM REVIEW; +Forget the Mittens; They're Wrapped In Life and Loss + +BYLINE: By STEPHEN HOLDEN + +SECTION: Section E; Page 5; Column 1; The Arts/Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 778 words + +Phyllida Law and Emma Thompson bear such a remarkable physical resemblance that if you didn't know these wonderful British actresses are actually mother and daughter, you could almost imagine that the same person wearing different makeup and aided by trick photography was playing both their roles in "The Winter Guest." In this solemnly talky film, adapted by Sharman Macdonald (with the director Alan Rickman) from his play, Ms. law and Ms. Thompson are Elspeth and Frances, a mother and her recently widowed daughter who spend a frigid winter day trudging through the bleakly beautiful landscape around a Scottish seaside town. +It is so cold that even the sea around the village has frozen solid. And the film, with cinematography by Seamus McGarvey, luxuriously drinks in a magnificent desolation that conjures up somber thoughts of mortality and human loss. Frances, a professional photographer, is still grieving over the death from an unidentified illness of her dashing husband, whose pictures crowd the mantelpiece of the roomy cottage she shares with her teen-age son, Alex (Gary Hollywood). When Elspeth arrives uninvited to offer emotional support, Frances is not happy to see her. And half the dialogue during their hike consists of petty bickering over matters like Frances's short, allegedly unalluring haircut. + A fussy, sentimental exercise in theatrical counterpoint, "The Winter Guest" interweaves Elspeth's and Frances's dialogues with simultaneous little dramas in the lives of three other pairs of villagers. Lily (Sheila Reid) and Chloe (Sandra Voe), two elderly women, take a bus to a nearby town to attend a funeral. While Frances is out of the house, her bashful son brings home Nita (Arlene Cockburn), a brash tomboyish new girl in town for his first serious kiss. Meanwhile, Sam (Douglas Murphy) and Tom (Sean Biggerstaff), two pubescent schoolboys, hang out together exchanging bogus sexual lore that prompts Tom to conduct an excruciating experiment involving some fiery ointment. He also saves an abandoned kitten. +It is easy to see why Mr. Rickman, a talented English actor who personifies a rakish literary worldliness, was drawn to "The Winter Guest" as his first directorial feature. With its four pairs of seaside partners seen at various stages of life, the play offers tour-de-force acting opportunities. And the film's verbal pas de deux are so polished and fine-tuned that they go a long way toward camouflaging the creaky portentousness of much of the dialogue. Elspeth, who has a voracious appetite for life despite signs of failing health, looks at her well-creased face in the mirror and remarks that she can't reconcile that face with the fact that inside she is still 17. It's one of the movie's many heavily underlined reflections on youth and age. +The dramatic tension between Elspeth and Frances hinges on a question that hangs teasingly (and falsely) in the air and is not answered until the film's end: Is Frances planning to leave her grief (and her mother) behind and move to Australia? In an equally false moment, Alex's imminent loss of virginity is suddenly pre-empted by his glancing up at a picture of his father, who seems to be staring at him. The boy explains sheepishly that he thinks his father has been haunting the house. +As the movie goes along, its stiff upper lip quickly begins to tremble and then to flutter. By the end, it has degenerated into an unabashedly mushy assertion of ties of need that bind us together. Somehow those ties make everybody in the movie bizarrely oblivious of the climate. If it is the coldest day of the year, why is no one wearing gloves, a hat or ear covering? And why does no one's breath come out white in the freezing air? Could it be those hot salty tears that the characters are just barely able to suppress have created a freakish momentary thaw? +"The Winter Guest" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It contains sexual situations and some profanity. + +THE WINTER GUEST + +Directed by Alan Rickman; written by Mr. Rickman and Sharman Macdonald; director of photography, Seamus McGarvey; edited by Scott Thomas; music by Michael Kamen; production designer, Robin Cameron Don; produced by Ken Lipper, Edward R. Pressman and Steve Clark-Hall; released by Fine Line Features. At the Paris Fine Arts Theater, 4 West 58th Street, Manhattan. Running time: 110 minutes. This film is rated R. + +WITH: Phyllida Law (Elspeth), Emma Thompson (Frances), Gary Hollywood (Alex), Arlene Cockburn (Nita), Sheila Reid (Lily), Sandra Voe (Chloe), Douglas Murphy (Sam), Sean Biggerstaff (Tom) and Tom Watson (the Minister). + +LOAD-DATE: December 23, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: December 24, 1997, Wednesday + + CORRECTION: +A film review of "The Winter Guest" yesterday referred incorrectly to the author and co-adapter of the play on which the film is based. Sharman Macdonald is a woman, not a man. + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Emma Thompson, left, and her real-life mother, Phyllida Law, as a grieving widow and her supportive mother in "The Winter Guest." (Clive Coote/Fine Line Features) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +621 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 24, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +There's Been No Rush for Medical Savings Accounts, but Idea Is Gaining Favor + +BYLINE: By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM + +SECTION: Section A; Page 11; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1151 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 + +Republicans believe medical savings accounts are a sensible way to cut health insurance costs for the Government and private employers, to provide more affordable coverage for those who are uninsured and to help consumers save money. +Democrats, though, see these accounts -- which involve tax-free savings and low-cost, high-deductible medical insurance -- as a tax break for the healthy and wealthy and a potential trap for unwary workers and some of the elderly. + Unable to resolve their differences, President Clinton and Congress agreed in 1996 to begin a four-year pilot project this year to determine how medical savings accounts would work in practice, as opposed to theory. Beginning next year, the project will be expanded to include a limited number of retirees covered by Medicare. +The test in the private market has been under way for a year, and the early returns are in. They show that far fewer people than Republicans hoped or Democrats feared have decided to participate. But there is evidence the idea may be picking up steam. +"Expectations of rapid growth may simply have been unrealistic," concluded the General Accounting Office, the auditing arm of Congress. But in a draft of a report that was sent to Congress this month but has not been made public, the auditing agency added, "Insurers indicated that sales have been steadily increasing over the past few months." +Here is how medical savings accounts work: +Consumers buy (or their employers or the Government, in the case of Medicare, pay for) relatively inexpensive medical insurance that covers them fully against very expensive illness or injury. But this medical insurance pays nothing for as much as the first $2,250 in annual medical expenses for individuals or $4,500 for families. +Edwin Hustead, an actuary here who studies medical insurance, said that the premiums for such policies were generally about 25 percent lower than premiums for conventional insurance with low deductibles or managed-care plans. +For some, the saving may be even more. Joan Jacobson, an employee benefits consultant in San Francisco, said that for a single person under 30 in her area, a high-deductible plan cost only $51 a month, 40 percent less than the $85 a month for a Blue Cross policy. +Part of the money saved from the lower premiums is placed in a tax-free account in the consumer's name, somewhat like an individual retirement account or a 401(k) retirement plan. +The money in the account can be invested and allowed to accumulate from year to year. It can be withdrawn without owing taxes to meet uncovered medical expenses -- not just doctor and hospital bills up to the deductible, but even the cost of treatments like cosmetic surgery, dental care and psychological counseling not covered by ordinary medical insurance. +Consumers can also withdraw the money for nonmedical purposes, but then it is taxed and subject to an additional 15 percent penalty. +Such accounts could be a good deal for healthy people or those affluent enough that they do not have to worry about unexpected out-of-pocket medical costs. Government statistics show that each year about 10 percent of Americans incur 70 percent of all medical expenses. Even among the elderly, 17 percent of those covered by Medicare in a typical year do not file a single claim. +But people who are less well-off could be devastated if they took the risk that they would not get sick and were hit with doctor and hospital bills that were several thousand dollars more than what had accumulated in their savings account. +And some experts in the economics of health care worry that if enough healthy people sign up for medical savings accounts, the result would be much higher premiums for people and companies that stick with ordinary insurance policies. +When lawmakers set up the test program last year, the White House feared that so many people might sign up that the Government would suffer a significant loss of tax revenue, so strict limits were imposed. +The only people eligible are those who are self-employed or who work for companies with fewer than 50 employees. The law specified that no more than 525,000 medical savings accounts would be allowed nationally in the first six months of this year. +Many fewer people than that have signed up. The Internal Revenue Service found that only 22,051 accounts had been set up by June 30. Of those, 3,670, or 17 percent, were opened by people who had not previously been insured. +The General Accounting Office found that consumers had been cautious because of "the complexity of the product and a lack of understanding" about how medical savings accounts worked. The audit also discovered that many insurance brokers and agents were not selling the policies aggressively because the sales pitch for a new product took time and because commissions on low-premium insurance are less than commissions on conventional policies. +But proponents have taken heart in the fact that twice as many accounts were opened in May and June as in the first four months of the year. Many more have been opened since then. American Banker magazine reported last month that its survey had found that about 100,000 accounts had been opened nationwide. +A spokesman at Golden Rule Insurance Company of Indianapolis, the leading underwriter of high-deductible medical insurance policies, said that its customers alone had opened 19,000 medical savings accounts this year. +The company is a big financial supporter of Republican politicians. In the 1996 election campaign, Golden Rule, its executives and its employees donated more than $480,000 to the Republican Party and Republican candidates, according to the Committee for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan watchdog group. +No one knows yet the characteristics of those who are opening the accounts -- whether they are primarily wealthy professionals, as Democrats suspect, or mostly people with modest incomes who are looking for a way to cut their insurance costs, as Republicans believe. +That will be studied, a Treasury Department official said, after 1997 income tax returns are filed in April. +One of the main Congressional advocates of medical savings accounts, Representative Bill Archer, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said in an interview that he was encouraged by the pilot project. +"As is customary with any new product, the start was relatively slow," Mr. Archer said, "but demand is increasing as the sellers and the individuals covered learned more about it." +But Representative Pete Stark of California, the top Democrat on the Ways and Means panel's health subcommittee, said he expected the pilot project to be the death knell for medical savings accounts. +"It's a whacky idea," Mr. Stark said, "and they will be sold only to people who are bamboozled by slick insurance salesmen." + + +LOAD-DATE: December 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +622 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 24, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +High-Fat Diet for Men Is Linked to Fewer Strokes + +BYLINE: By JANE E. BRODY + +SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 3; National Desk + +LENGTH: 1123 words + +A long-term study has found that men who eat more fat, including more saturated fat, are less likely than men on lower-fat diets to suffer a stroke. +The finding, which is supported by two prior studies in Japan and Hawaii as well as by experiments in laboratory rats, is the latest in a series of conflicting reports in recent years about how much and what kinds of fats are most healthful. + Experts say the finding does not mean it is safe to indulge in a diet of hamburgers and other high-fat foods, or even in a fatty holiday meal, which can temporarily reduce the flexibility of blood vessels and may precipitate a heart attack in susceptible people. +Rather, they said, the study suggests that the Mediterranean diet, which is not low in total fat but contains little saturated fat and focuses instead on monounsaturated olive oil, fruits and vegetables, may be the healthiest diet of all. A previous report linked a high intake of fruits and vegetables to a reduced risk of stroke. +The new study, which is being published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association, followed the fate of 832 initially healthy middle-aged men in Framingham, Mass., for 18 to 22 years to determine the relationship between their risk of stroke and the kinds and amounts of fats they typically consumed at the beginning of the study. +During the follow-up period the men who were eating the highest fat diets in the late 1960's were least likely to suffer a clot-caused stroke, while those consuming the lowest amount of fat had the highest stroke risk. The association between high fat intake and low stroke risk was found for total fat, saturated fat and monounsaturated fat, but not for polyunsaturated fat, which can lower blood levels of cholesterol. +The study was directed by Dr. Matthew W. Gillman of Harvard Medical School among participants in the ongoing Framingham Heart Study, now in its 49th year. No similar study has been completed yet in women or elderly men, and the researchers said the findings in men might not apply to them. +Dr. Scott M. Grundy, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, said the results should be considered preliminary and questioned the validity of basing such findings on a single measurement of fat intake that was then projected over a 20-year period. +"It's just totally confusing to the public," Dr. Grundy told The Associated Press. He helped write Federal guidelines that advise limiting fat intake to 30 percent of calories consumed. +Before people resume eating fats of all kinds with abandon, Dr. Thomas R. Price, a neurologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said, a high intake of saturated fats -- the kinds most prominent in meat and dairy products -- can significantly raise the risk of heart attack, which is a much more common killer in Western countries than is stroke. In 1993, for example, heart disease caused 490,000 deaths in the United States, while strokes accounted for 150,000 deaths. +"If a person eats more saturated fats, he may prevent a stroke but cause a heart attack," Dr. Price said, adding that while stroke is responsible for more long-term disability than is heart disease, "we shouldn't be trading one disease for another." +He said that as the Japanese have increased their fat intake in recent years, "they've gone from more strokes and fewer heart attacks to fewer strokes and more heart attacks." +Furthermore, among Americans, 60 percent of whom get no regular physical exercise, "a higher fat diet can result in putting on more weight, which itself increases the risk of a heart attack," said Dr. Price, co-author with Dr. Roger Sherwin of an editorial in the journal commenting on the new study. +"It's time to take a more sophisticated point of view than simply saying eat more fats or eat no fats," Dr. Price said. He and Dr. Sherwin suggested instead that emphasizing monounsaturated fats like those in olive oil, canola oil and nut oils would increase neither stroke or heart attack risk and may be the most sensible approach. +"In particular, this study speaks against the extremely low-fat diets that Pritikin and Ornish have been recommending," said Dr. Sherwin, an epidemiologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He was referring to diets containing about 10 percent of calories from fat advocated by the late Nathan Pritikin and by Dr. Dean Ornish of Sausalito, Calif. +The researchers also questioned the advice of the National Cholesterol Education Program to limit total fat intake to 30 percent of calories, which in the study was associated with the highest risk of stroke. +The average American now consumes about 34 percent of calories from fat, while in the new study the total fat intakes, which were measured only once in the 1960's and placed into one of five groups, ranged from a high of 46 percent to 53 percent to a low of 10 percent to 31 percent of daily calories. +Dr. William Castelli, former director of the Framingham Heart Study, said there were problems with the old dietary history data used in the study, among them that in Framingham "people who ate the most fat had the lowest cholesterol levels, and people who ate the most calories weighed the least," which is the opposite of what happens when people are placed on experimental diets in a hospital ward. +The reason for the different findings, Dr. Castelli said, is that in Framingham the people who were most active ate the most of everything, and activity lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease. +Dr. Philip A. Wolf, a neurologist at Boston University School of Medicine who is a co-author of the new study, said it was possible that the participants, who were 45 to 65 years old when the study began, were a select group that did not include high-fat eaters who developed or died of heart disease or stroke before the age of 45. +Nonetheless, Dr. Wolf said, the study indicates that heart attacks and most strokes have different causes. Only about 10 percent to 15 percent of strokes result from fatty deposits in the large arteries that feed the brain, while nearly all heart attacks result from such deposits in the coronary arteries. "Clearly, there are different arteries affected in heart attacks and strokes," Dr. Wolf said. "If we can explain this, maybe we can learn something useful from it." +The editorial writers also note that dietary advice has to be based on the best evidence available at the time, and that this advice will change when new evidence comes along. Still, Dr. Price said that even if the new finding is borne out by further studies, "most of the advice we're now giving will still be good advice." + + +LOAD-DATE: December 24, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +623 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 25, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final + +Behind Bars, Reaching Out to Others; +Inmates Restore Castoff Wheelchairs for Third World's Disabled + +BYLINE: By JAMES BROOKE + +SECTION: Section A; Page 16; Column 4; National Desk + +LENGTH: 949 words + +DATELINE: BUENA VISTA, Colo. + +Behind two rows of fences topped with glinting concertina wire, Jerry Madrid toiled, rebuilding a rusted wheelchair for shipment in January to a disabled person in Qingdao, China. +"I like the idea of helping someone else, of helping someone get around in life," said Mr. Madrid, whose own mobility is limited by the walls of a medium-security prison here in an alpine valley, framed by the soaring, snow-covered peaks of the Continental Divide. + To skeptics, Mr. Madrid notes that he passed up a $600-a-month job in the Buena Vista Correctional Institute's trout hatchery to earn $12 a month rebuilding wheelchairs for charity. +The global link between inmate workers in the Colorado Rockies and disabled people on the Yellow Sea coast of China was forged by Wheels for the World, a California aid group. This charity responds to the intersection of two new phenomena in American life: an explosion in used wheelchairs in this country, and, as evidenced by the campaign to ban land mines, growing concern over medieval living conditions endured by disabled people in poor countries. +Without wheelchairs, disabled people routinely remain bedridden and warehoused for years on end, said Joni Eareckson Tada, founder of JAF Ministries, an evangelical group that runs Wheels for the World from Agoura Hills, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb. Disabled people are often carted around in wheelbarrows, or parked on street corners to beg. +"In Poznan, Poland, we found a 14-year-old boy with cerebral palsy who was being pushed around by his parents in a rusty, beat-up baby carriage," said Ms. Tada, who has had to use a wheelchair since 1967, when a diving accident rendered her a quadriplegic at age 17. "In a mountain village in Albania, we delivered a wheelchair to a woman who had been unable to leave her bedroom for 15 years." +Roughly 28 million people in the third world need wheelchairs, John Wern, director of the charity, estimated. On the other side of the equation, in the United States, as many as one million wheelchairs are thrown out as trash or stored in attics and garages every year. Liability worries have led insurers to discourage hospitals and nursing homes from repairing broken wheelchairs. With new wheelchairs selling for as little as $300 apiece and Medicare paying most of the cost, health professionals often prefer to have patients buy new chairs. With the nation's elderly and disabled population growing rapidly, the United States' fleet of castoff wheelchairs is growing, too. +As wheelchair waste mounts, a wheelchair recycling movement is taking root. +Formed in 1994, Wheels for the World conducts wheelchair drives and operates repair centers around the nation. +Sea-Land, the shipping company, has promised free overseas shipment of 3,000 wheelchairs every year. The company began its service last year, when it shipped about 1,300 refurbished wheelchairs to Chile, Poland, Romania, Russia and Ukraine. +Whirlwind Wheelchair International, a secular nonprofit group based at San Francisco State University, has set up 35 wheelchair production shops in 25 third world countries since 1980. The workshops have made 12,000 chairs, all from locally available materials. +Fueling this aid and development movement is growing concern over the human toll from land mines. +In October, the Nobel Peace Prize was bestowed on the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and on Jody Williams, the group's American coordinator. Two weeks ago, representatives of about 120 countries -- although not the United States, Russia or China -- signed a treaty to ban the global production and use of antipersonnel mines. +Galvanizing world support for the treaty, its drafters said that the 100 million land mines around the world cripple about 2,000 civilians a month. +This global concern has filtered through the thick white walls of the state prison here, filling an inmate movie auditorium converted into a wheelchair repair workshop. +Today, 10 inmates in green uniforms worked stripping down wheelchairs. Rust was sanded off. Wheel bearings were repacked. Spokes were tightened, and brakes repaired. Footrests were spray painted. Upholstery was brightened. With chrome glistening, the end product looks as if it had just rolled off the floor of a hospital supply showroom. +One man restores a chair a day -- a rate that should allow the shop to restore 2,000 chairs next year, and inmates say the work is doubly satisfying. +"It feels good when you go home for the day knowing you've finished a chair," Gilberto Encinias said. "It also feels good knowing that this chair is going to put a smile on someone's face." +Prison officials hope that skills learned here will help freed convicts find jobs repairing bicycles or wheelchairs. The biggest immediate benefit, they say, is to morale. +"The inmates feel immediate pride and satisfaction when they see wheelchairs rolling out the door to other countries," said Gene Atherton, the prison superintendent. "Inmates feel better about themselves. They do time with less discontent, with less anger." +In inaugurating the program here in November, Ms. Tada of Wheels for the World said: "I've got a life sentence in this chair, and you have sentences, too. The idea is: what are you doing with that sentence?" +To foster a sense of personal achievement, Wheels for the World plans to send to the prison workshop snapshots of each wheelchair recipient in Qingdao. +Raymond Lewis, an inmate worker who described himself as a born-again Christian, had one complaint about the program: "I don't know if there are any Christians in China, but it would have been nice to have sent out these chairs in time for Christmas." + +LOAD-DATE: December 25, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: At the Buena Vista Correctional Institute in Colorado, an inmate refurbishes a broken wheelchair for a disabled person in the Yellow Sea city of Qingdao, China. Inmates at the prison workshop will repair about 2,000 wheelchairs next year for export to China as part of the Wheels for the World program. (Photographs by Kevin Moloney for The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +624 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 26, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +New Video Releases + +SECTION: Section E; Part 1; Page 40; Column 4; Movies, Performing Arts/Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 492 words + + +Conspiracy Theory +Jerry Fletcher (Mel Gibson, left) is the kind of paranoid who padlocks his refrigerator and constantly spouts cockeyed theories about myriad plots against everybody up to and including the President of the United States. Having achieved annoying lunatic status at the psychiatric hospital, he is ignored by all but the gorgeous Dr. Alice Sutton (Julia Roberts, above), who in the service of a limping thriller that could use a romantic lift, is the only one who will lend him an ear. Later a dark, demented scientist (Patrick Stewart) appears and a black-clad swat team drops from the sky (in the middle of Manhattan yet), but ultimately they don't do that much for a film that remains, Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times, "trumped-up, ultra-slick." + + +1997. Warner. $107.11. Laser disk, $49.98. 135 minutes. Closed captioned. R. Release date: Tuesday. + +Out to Sea +They were funnier as grumpy old men in earlier films, but once again Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau go to the geezer well as a pair of geriatrics who sign on as dance instructors on a cruise ship. In a film to nowhere, the two cavort with their elderly rumba students and risk cardiac arrest in December-December romances with a frisky older vamp (Dyan Cannon) and her mother (Elaine Stritch). A cast with good marquee value (Hal Linden, Edward Mulhare, Gloria DeHaven and Donald O'Connor, who has plenty of fancy footwork left in him) bolsters a "weak but genial comedy" (Maslin). + +1997. Fox. $108.70. Laser disk, $39.98. 109 minutes. Closed captioned. PG-13. Release date: Tuesday. + +'Til There Was You +In a hackneyed twist of fate, a disappointed young woman with sensible shoes and a load of Annie Hall tics (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and a glib, pretty-boy architect (Dylan McDermott) trip through separate lives before getting together in time for the closing credits. But why bother? The only life in Scott Winant's film is Sarah Jessica Parker as Francesca Lansfield, a funny and winningly dominating former child star. Otherwise, architecture takes its lumps as metaphor for the grand blueprint of love between two people who "truly don't seem made for each other despite all the story's efforts to fling them together" (Maslin). + +1997. Paramount. $102.32. Laser disk, $34.98. 114 minutes. Closed captioned. PG-13. + +Le Samourai +Collecting $4,000 a hit but living in seedy solitude, the natty, impassive contract killer Jef Costello (Alain Delon) exists completely outside society's complicated interdependencies, expressing himself solely by the grace and efficiency of his services. Jean-Pierre Melville's film refines the American gangster movie to present a world working at cross purposes, in the process making "a lovely introduction to the work of a most idiosyncratic filmmaker" (Vincent Canby). + +1972. New Yorker. $89.95. 95 minutes. French with English subtitles. No rating. Release date: Tuesday. + +LOAD-DATE: December 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +625 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 26, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final + +FAMILY FARE; +Magic, Movies And Moomins + +BYLINE: By Laurel Graeber + +SECTION: Section E; Part 2; Page 51; Column 1; Leisure/Weekend Desk + +LENGTH: 914 words + +In Scandinavia, the Moomins are to little Finns what the Muppets and the Smurfs are to Americans. (In Finland, there's even a Moomin World theme park.) Cartoon characters that look like plump ponies, the Moomins will appear tomorrow in "Northern Lights Holiday Sparkler," part of the Lincoln Center Film Society's "Reel to Real for Kids" series. +"They're not hired New Yorkers in costume," said Eileen McMahon, a spokeswoman for Lincoln Center. "They're Finns who appear as the Moomins in Finland." + The Moomin family will do a magic show and tell tales about their home, Moomin Valley, a place created by the children's author Tove Jansson in the 1940's. Her books have since appeared in 31 languages (including English), and the Moomins are regulars on Finnish television. +"Reel to Real" will also celebrate other renowned Scandinavians: the Bergmans. "Brenda Brave," a film by Daniel Bergman (son of Ingmar), is about a foundling, Brenda, who lives with a kind elderly woman who makes and sells candy. +But when her adoptive grandmother breaks her leg, it looks as if Brenda will not have her longed-for Christmas doll. +"I watched it and cried," Ms. McMahon said. "It's so Bergman." (Except for the happy ending.) +The program also includes "Lotta Leaves Home," a Swedish film by Johanna Held about a 5-year-old girl who runs away with her stuffed pig. +And to conclude on a festive note -- many, really -- the Swedish Children's Choir and the Christopher Columbus High School Choir from the Bronx will sing seasonal songs. +"Northern Lights Holiday Sparkler," tomorrow at 11 A.M. and 1:30 P.M. at the Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, Manhattan, (212) 875-5601 (after 2 P.M.). Tickets: adults, $8.50; 16 and under, $5. + +Those Unsinkable Bears +Teddy bears take much abuse from childish hands, but few have been through as much as Polar. A New York bear purchased at F.A.O. Schwarz, Polar went on a sea voyage in 1912 with his young master, Douglas Spedden. Their ship? The Titanic. +Polar, fortunately, survived, as did Douglas and his parents. He has since become the hero of "Polar, the Titanic Bear" (Little, Brown), a book edited by Leighton Hammond Coleman 3d, who discovered Polar's tale among some family papers. (His grandmother's cousin was Douglas's mother, who wrote a story from the bear's perspective to entertain her son after the ordeal was over.) +Children will be able to meet Polar this weekend at the South Street Seaport, which is holding teddy-theme activities. +At 1 P.M. today, there will be an interactive tour of "City in Play: Toys and the Transformation of the City of New York, 1865-1945," an exhibition at the Melville Gallery. +Afterward, children will participate in a teddy bear march. (Polar will be the parade marshal.) Their destination will be the museum's Children's Center, where they will build circus parade wagons with boxes, glitter, spangles and paint. +"The whole point is to bring your own bear to the museum," said Peter Neill, the museum's president. All who do can swap bear stories and sip hot chocolate at 3 P.M. on board the Wavertree, an 1855 ship. +More bear doings are to take place tomorrow: "Polar, the Titanic Bear" will be read at 2 P.M. in the Melville Gallery. And tomorrow and Sunday at 3 P.M., visitors are invited to the Children's Center to create pop-up books about teddies, the Titanic or whatever they please. +Next week, the museum will also be open every day except Jan. 1, with "City in Play" tours at 1 P.M. and circus wagon workshops at 2 P.M. +The South Street Seaport Museum, 207 Front Street, lower Manhattan, (212) 748-8600. Hours: 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. All events are free with admission: adults, $6; the elderly, $5; students, $4; children under 12, $3. + +Light Entertainment +Although Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa are very different celebrations, there is one element they share: light. Who could imagine the season without bright stars, blazing menorahs and Kwanzaa candles? +Mme. Starless Nightsky could. The villain in the New York Youth Theater's new musical, "The Lights," Mme. Nightsky (Sharon Quinn) feeds on light. +Grinchlike, she steals every sparkle with the help of her henchmen, Doom (Raymond Santiago) and Gloom (Erich Bergen). +What Mme. Nightsky doesn't bargain for, however, is three intrepid children. Christy (Chloe Patellis), Quinn (Bernard Jones) and Sarah (Alexandra Cassens), who each celebrate a different holiday, go after the lights. +They succeed with spectral inspiration from Sarah's late grandmother (Meghan Lynch), known for delicious latkes and sage advice. +With such a premise, "The Lights" could easily have more sugar than a holiday fruitcake. But thanks to the director, Lawrence Axmith, who wrote the book, and Phill Greenland, the composer and musical director (the men collaborated on the lyrics), the musical offers humor and spunk. +Doom and Gloom do a gruesomely funny, but not tasteless, number about torture, and Ms. Quinn, the only adult in the cast, takes clear pleasure in belting out lyrics about all she's devoured, from the Cape May lighthouse to fireworks. +"The Lights," through Jan. 11 at the Greenwich Street Theater, 547 Greenwich Street (between Charlton and Vandam Streets), Greenwich Village. Performances: Thursdays and Fridays at 7 P.M. (except Jan. 1); Saturdays at 2 and 7 P.M. and Sundays at 3 P.M. Holiday matinees: today and Jan. 2 at 2 P.M. Tickets: $10. Reservations: (212) 242-2822. + +LOAD-DATE: December 26, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Mathilda Lindgren in "Brenda Brave," a film at Lincoln Center. (Film Society of Lincoln Center) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +626 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 27, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +So Much for Table Manners; +Directors Squabble Over How to Carve Up Firm's Spoils + +BYLINE: By JOSEPH B. TREASTER + +SECTION: Section D; Page 1; Column 2; Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1848 words + +For as long as anyone can remember, the senior executives who built the venerable insurance brokerage firm of Johnson & Higgins have congregated every holiday season for a black-tie dinner at an exclusive club in Manhattan. +They came together -- almost exclusively men, graying and affluent -- from around the country like fraternity brothers in a ritual of fellowship and fine wine. "We all looked forward to it," said Kenneth A. Hecken, who retired as vice chairman in 1991 after 31 years with the firm. + But this year there was no dinner. +Johnson & Higgins, a 152-year-old insurance giant that worked with little fanfare to arrange coverage for America's biggest corporations, is no more. After repeatedly rejecting takeover bids and suggestions to sell stock to the public, the firm's partners agreed in March to sell to their archrival, the Marsh & McLennan Companies. +For some firms, that would have been all the more reason for an evening of fond reminiscences. But the sale of Johnson & Higgins has driven a wedge through the clubby firm, with its cloistered partnership structure. Moreover, Johnson & Higgins operated for decades with an unusual charter that was designed to give retired directors a financial interest, and a voice in the business, well after they had left the daily fray to younger partners. +Now the firm is at war: the retired directors versus the 24 active directors who orchestrated the sale to Marsh & McLennan. Nine of the 23 retired directors -- who expected to receive dividends for as long as a decade -- have filed suit. Another says he is joining the suit and eight or nine others say they are considering it. The plaintiffs say the active directors maneuvered to exclude the retired directors from participation in the sale of the company, then kept the biggest share of the $1.8 billion in proceeds for themselves. +"I think they sort of forgot the values of the company," said George Benjamin, a marine and aviation specialist who retired four years ago. +The retired partners -- who not long ago had been working shoulder to shoulder with the current directors to provide coverage for companies like General Motors and Boeing -- say they learned of the deal in the newspapers. At first, they were stunned. Then they became angry. Finally, they began to seek redress. +Another group of even older retirees, 18 in all, have been told they have less of a legal claim. They are just as furious. "The active directors have done a perfectly dastardly thing," said Richard I. Purnell, who was chief executive of Johnson & Higgins from 1972 to 1981. +But Paul C. Saunders, the lawyer representing the active directors, says the retirees simply do not have a case. +"Just to say that you had a warm feeling that things might have been different does not entitle you under the law to receive something that you are not otherwise entitled to receive by virtue of contract," Mr. Saunders said. "They don't have anything in writing to argue about." +The suit, of course, focuses mostly on money. But more than that, it is a deeply wrenching dispute about loyalty and friendship and trust at a firm that dates from an era when its founders personally handled insurance claims from the docks of New York harbor for wooden-masted clipper ships. And it reflects the disintegration of an inbred Johnson & Higgins culture, knitted together by ritual dinners, golf outings, fly-fishing adventures and the like. +"A lot of us feel betrayed," said Sam Aiena, who retired as head of the firm's Philadelphia office in 1993. +More to the point, the active directors awarded themselves half the money from the sale, $900 million, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. They allocated $300 million for the retired directors. The remaining $600 million was spread among several hundred senior employees. +Most of the active directors received about $36 million each. David A. Olsen, the chief executive of Johnson & Higgins at the time of the transaction, received roughly $63 million and his deputy, Richard A. Nielsen, got about $55 million. Those payments compare with the average of about $12 million each for the retired directors in the younger group and about $1 million to $3 million for each older retiree. +In most partnerships, there would be nothing striking about such a division of the spoils. Indeed, it may even seem to be overly generous to the retirees. At many law or accounting firms, partners routinely cash out when they retire, expecting little beyond their accumulated share of the partnership at the time they leave. But Johnson & Higgins was different. +And that difference is now coming back to haunt the firm. In a refrain often heard in divorce court, the retired directors contend that the effort they put in over several decades helped make the firm such a rich prize. Some of the active directors, they complain, had been on the board no more than a few years. +Then it gets personal. +"Do you think the chairman who got $63 million made a greater contribution to the firm than I did?" asked Mr. Purnell, the former chief executive. "I question if he made one-tenth the contribution I made." +Because documentation is sparse, plenty is open to dispute. What the retired directors say is that the firm's culture was grounded in the understanding, said Mr. Benjamin, the retired marine specialist, that "should the firm, ever, for important reasons" be sold, "the incumbent directors would treat the retired partners in the same manner as they would treat themselves." +Or as Robert Hatcher, chief executive from 1981 to 1990, put it, "Some got less of a share than they should have and some got more than they should have." +The active directors do not see it that way at all. They argue that they handled the sale properly and that the retired directors were treated more than fairly. +In an interview that was limited to half an hour, Joseph D. Roxe, the chief financial officer at the time of the transaction; Gardner M. Mundy, who was general counsel of Johnson & Higgins, and Mr. Saunders, the group's lawyer, spoke for the current directors. +"We feel that we were very generous in sharing the proceeds," said Mr. Roxe, a 10-year veteran of Johnson & Higgins who is now an executive with Marsh & McLennan. With consolidation sweeping through the insurance business, he argued, Johnson & Higgins was forced to join with another firm or risk falling behind. +"We felt the company was facing a crossroads and we didn't want to be dwarfed in a land of giants in the 21st century," Mr. Roxe said. "We needed a partner who could get us the size to compete. And that's why we thought the merger was necessary." +Apart from the money itself, some of the retired directors say that the current directors should at least have consulted with them before selling the firm. +"The boards I served on clearly understood that we didn't own the company," said W. Mitchell LaMotte, who retired as a director five years ago in Chicago and joined the suit earlier this month. "We were trustees." +But those who arranged the deal dispute that point, too. +Mr. Mundy, who is also working at Marsh & McLennan now, said the directors were obliged "to do what was best for the company, the employees and its clients." And the active directors were free to change the bylaws to allow the sale, Mr. Saunders, the lawyer, added, as long as they fulfilled their contractual obligations to the retired directors entitled to dividends. +Marsh & McLennan, which reclaimed its spot as the world's largest insurance brokerage firm with the acquisition of Johnson & Higgins, is also a defendant in the suit. But Barbara Perlmutter, a Marsh & McLennan spokeswoman, said, "We believe we should not be involved in this matter." She declined to comment further. +In a system worked out long ago to preserve Johnson & Higgins as a closely held firm, directors were required to buy an initial block of 500 company shares when they were named to the board. The price, in recent years, was just $10 a share. When they retired, they returned those shares and others they accumulated as directors in exchange for a certificate giving them the right to the annual dividends from the shares for 10 years. The shares that retiring directors turned in were eventually redistributed to active members who collected no dividends on them until the 10-year contracts had expired. +Last year the dividend per share was $225. And for the plaintiffs in the suit, who were entitled to the payouts from 2,000 to 4,200 shares each, the payments ranged from $450,000 to $945,000. In many cases, that was more than they got as active partners. +The arrangement permitted retired directors to benefit from rising profits. And for a long time, an especially attractive feature was that the retirement payments were treated as capital gains, which allowed them to be taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income. That advantage was phased out in the late 1960's. +To sell the company, the 24 active directors had to amend the certificate of incorporation. Until the directors did that, the document prohibited the sale of stock to anyone other than a Johnson & Higgins employee and did not allow any sale of assets unless approved by two-thirds of the directors who had retired within a decade. That was supposed to assure the retired directors that the company could not be sold without their participation. +With the change in the certificate of incorporation, the active directors were free to sell the stock. Since the assets were not formally sold, approval of the retired directors was not required. +There is no dispute between the two sides that the active directors had the legal authority to amend the documents. +But Michael L. Hirschfeld, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, says that in making the amendments, the active directors changed the rules on which the retired directors had based their decision to exchange stock for dividend certificates. Mr. Hirschfeld regards the certificates as securities and, in his complaint, accused the active directors of violating securities law. +Mr. Saunders, the active directors' lawyer, says the certificates were contracts, not securities. He contends that the only legal obligation was to see that the retired directors received the money specified in their contracts. +Based on last year's dividend of $225 a share, the active directors calculated that the total value of the contracts was $75 million, or just one-fourth what they agreed to give the retired directors. +Still, the sense of betrayal among the retired directors is strong. In early December, about two dozen of them gathered for dinner in Manhattan. It was not at the traditional club and they were not in tuxedos. None of the active directors were invited. +Mr. Roxe, the Johnson & Higgins chief financial officer, said he hoped the formal dinners might be revived in the future. But he acknowledged that rebuilding the prior collegiality would be difficult. Indeed, he added wistfully, "It isn't clear how we can do that." + +LOAD-DATE: December 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo/Chart: "Humble Pie? Hardly." +Earlier this year, the active directors of Johnson & Higgins sold their venerable insurance firm for $1.8 billion. But many of the retired directors, who continued to receive dividends after stepping down, objected to the manner of the sale and the division of spoils. They have filed suit seeking a greater share of the proceeds. + +RETIRED DIRECTORS 17% +The 41 former directors were allotted $300 million. The directors who had retired within the last 10 years received an average of $12 million each; those who had retired earlier got about $1.3 million apiece. + +CURRENT DIRECTORS 50% +There were 24 directors at the time Johnson & Higgins was sold. They gave themselves $900 million, which worked out to about $36 million each. + +SENIOR EMPLOYEES 33% +Several hundred senior employees split $600 million. +(Naum Kazhdan/The New York Times) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +627 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 27, 1997, Saturday, Late Edition - Final + +Connecticut Pulls Back From a Managed Care Plan for the Elderly + +BYLINE: By JONATHAN RABINOVITZ + +SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk + +LENGTH: 1076 words + +DATELINE: HARTFORD, Dec. 23 + +Almost three years ago, Gov. John G. Rowland proposed what was to be the centerpiece of his efforts to rein in the cost of caring for the state's elderly people: a managed-care system that would cover everything from nursing home care to home visits by a cook. +Now, months after the proposal was scheduled to be completed and with the state budget counting on saving $55 million with the program in its next fiscal year, Governor Rowland says the plan is virtually dead. Recent announcements from some managed-care programs about reduced benefits and higher premiums washed away enthusiasm for the plan, he said. + "I'm looking at possibly pulling the plug on that," Mr. Rowland said in an interview on Monday. "My best look at it says we might not save any money for quite a long time, for something like seven years out. So there's a pretty good chance that we will not pursue that." +The proposal would have established the first statewide system bringing together money from the federally run Medicare program and the state-run Medicaid program to manage the health care and social support needs of the state's elderly poor people. +In Mr. Rowland's 1995 budget proposal, he called on Connecticut to "be a pioneer" in a "radical restructuring" of long-term care, and declared that it "would be impossible for us to meet future needs of elder care if today's system remains unchanged." +But the proposal appears to have fallen victim to growing questions about managed care. In the last few weeks, managed care organizations for Medicare recipients have announced that they will raise premiums and cut benefits, and Mr. Rowland said managed care no longer appeared to be as clear a solution as it once did. +From the start, his plan to develop managed care for long-term services met stiff opposition. Nursing home operators saw it as little more than an effort to cut rates. The union that represents nursing home workers criticized it as a step toward cutting wages and laying off workers. Groups organized to win benefits for elderly people worried that the plan, to save money, would limit access to care rather than improve quality. +The effort to create the plan was part of a nationwide movement, encouraged by the Federal Government, to better coordinate Medicare and Medicaid in the hope of improving care and saving money. +Policy experts say Medicare and Medicaid are increasingly at odds, with the friction between the two leading to greater costs in both programs. +Medicare, which is financed entirely by Federal money, covers most acute health care needs, like hospitalizations and visits to physicians, for elderly and disabled people. Medicaid, which is financed 50-50 by the states and the Federal Government, provides health care for the poor and is the primary source of public financing for nursing home care for the aged. +For elderly poor people, Medicaid also fills in gaps in the health care coverage provided by Medicare, such as paying premiums, pharmacy bills and co-payments. +The conflict between the two is this: the Federal Government feels that states and nursing homes do not take the needed steps to prevent elderly people from using expensive acute-care measures, because Medicare ultimately foots the bill. +In turn, states complain that the Federal Government is pushing people into nursing homes so it will not have to cover costs of caring for people in their homes, which in the long run would be less expensive, they say. +Several states, including Minnesota and Wisconsin, have already received Federal approval to experiment with a new approach, and they have started pilot programs that try to use a managed care model to provide a continuum of long-term services, like assistance with chores, adult day-care centers and nursing home care, using both Medicaid and Medicare funds. This year, Massachusetts filed an application for a waiver from the Federal Government to offer such a program for the entire state. +In Connecticut, the push stalled this month. +Last week, Rowland administration officials admitted that the plan that they had hoped to submit to Washington by the end of January was seriously flawed. +At a fund-raising party with nursing home operators on Dec. 17, Mr. Rowland said for the first time that he had "major concerns" about the latest version of the waiver that had been released that day. +By the next day, the State Social Services Commissioner, Joyce A. Thomas, had sent a letter to the legislator overseeing the proposal saying that the state planned to delay submission of the waiver. +Marc S. Ryan, a top policy adviser to Mr. Rowland, said that the state had no schedule for when it would be resubmitted. Instead, Mr. Ryan said that the state was intending to try a much smaller pilot program that would involve a couple of centers for elderly people. +The plan was originally intended to be offered to 43,000 poor elderly people, whose health care needs comprise almost half the medical budget. +Mr. Ryan said that it was not clear whether any of the elderly people for whom the state had been intending the program would voluntarily enroll. "Given the number of people that would enroll and the cost of setting up the networks, the state would not be seeing any savings at all," he said. Mr. Rowland had wanted Connecticut to be at the forefront of the national move to develop a long-term managed care system that would bridge the gap between Medicaid and Medicare. +The state was part of a consortium of the six New England states that has been working closely with the Federal Health Care Financing Administration for more than two years to develop a common framework for this new system. +Ms. Thomas, the Social Services Commissioner, is chairwoman of the New England group. Connecticut officials have had dozens of meetings, including public hearings, to develop a plan, hiring several outside consultants for guidance. +At Mr. Rowland's urging, the Legislature passed a measure in 1995 calling for the waiver to be completed by summer 1996. +Meanwhile, the cost of long-term care continues to rise. In the fiscal year ending next June 30, it is projected to be $810 million, about 8 percent of the state budget, according to projections by the Office of Fiscal Analysis, the nonpartisan legislative budget office. That figure represents a 13 percent increase from the fiscal year ending June 30, 1995, Mr. Rowland's first year in office. + +LOAD-DATE: December 27, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +628 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 28, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +PRACTICAL TRAVELER; +A Free Museum Is Harder to Find + +BYLINE: By BETSY WADE + +SECTION: Section 5; Page 4; Column 5; Travel Desk + +LENGTH: 1202 words + +SEEING museums, gardens and art galleries is often the major purpose of a visit to a great city. But admission, once generally free or nearly so, is increasingly steep, both here and abroad. +In Florence this fall, Leda C. Goldsmith of the Bronx and her husband, Gerald, saw a sign at the Pitti Palace saying that people 60 or older were admitted free. When they reached the ticket window they were directed to a posted list of countries whose senior citizens were entitled to free admission. It was a long list but it did not include the United States. So they paid about $7 each for one collection, and $4.75 to visit another. They wrote to The Times saying they considered the charges discriminatory. + The Italian Government Tourist Board in New York replied that admission to state museums is free to people under 18 and over 59 who come from European Union countries, or from other countries that grant Italians reciprocal privileges. +The United States is not on that list. But the matter is muddy. The museum that considers itself the largest in the world still grants free admission to all comers, regardless of citizenship or age. That is the Smithsonian complex in Washington, unquestionably the "state museum" of the United States. + +Erratic Rules in Europe +Admission policies in European museums and galleries are unpredictable, as in the United States, because ownership and subsidies vary. +In 1989 the European Union Commission urged its members to create an "over 60" card for citizens entitled to discounts on public transit and at cultural activities. But Chris Matthews, a spokesman for the European Union, said he found no evidence that the proposal was followed up or that a card was ever developed. +The tide may be running against it. At the end of 1995 the 30 French national museums stopped lowering prices for senior citizens of any nationality. The Louvre is open until 9 P.M. on Monday and Wednesday and there is always a reduced admission fee after 3 P.M.; on the first Sunday of the month, admission is free. Regular admission to the Louvre is about $7.50, and the reduced admission is about $4.30. +Four royal palaces in London -- the Tower of London, Hampton Court, Kensington Palace and Banqueting House at Whitehall -- still offer discounts to senior citizens and students. Regular admission to the Tower of London is about $14, while the reduced price is about $10.40. At the British Museum, the Tate Gallery, the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, admission is still free, although there may be a charge for special shows. +Tourist passes for cultural sites in France, Britain and some other European countries can be bought in the United States as well as on the spot. The discount is not great, but with them holders can go the the head of the line, a plus for older travelers. +The London White Card offers unlimited access to 15 major private attractions in London, among them the Barbican, the Transport Museum, the Museum of London, and the Victoria and Albert. The prices quoted for 1998 by the British Tourist Authority are $35 for a three-day pass and $53 for seven days. White Cards are available from two New York ticket brokers, Edwards & Edwards, (800) 223-6108, and Keith Prowse, (800) 669-8687. Marketing Challenges International at 10 East 21st Street in New York, (800) 869-8184, sells the White Card at $32 for three days and $53 for seven, plus a $10 handling charge. +The Paris Carte Musees et Monuments provides entrance to 65 attractions in Paris and environs. According to the French Government Tourist Office, the 1998 prices in France are $13 for a one-day card, $27 for three days and $40 for five days. This card is also sold by Marketing Challenges (address above). Its prices are $20, $34 and $50 plus a $10 handling charge. HSA Voyages in Texas charges $15, $30 and $45, with no handling fee: 5609 Green Oaks Boulevard, S.W., Suite 105, Arlington, Tex. 76017; (800) 927-4765. + +Finding the Bargains +Apart from the Smithsonian, there are still free museums in the United States, although the number seems to be waning. The American Association of Museums in Washington said its last survey indicated that 55 percent of museums charged admission or suggested a donation. +A spokesman for the Metropolitan Museum, Harold Holzer, said that its "suggested donation" policy went into effect in 1970, with $1 the proposed gift. In the day of the $10 movie, he said, the museum considers its current request of $8, $4 for students and seniors, to be the best entertainment buy in New York. +The museums and galleries with no entry fee are mostly at colleges and universities, according to Susan Coppa, a spokeswoman for the American Association of Museums. They range from the well known, like the Yale University Art Gallery, to the almost unknown, like the Farnham Galleries at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. +These places are free because they see their mission as providing a service to the community, said Peter B. Tirrell, president of the Association of College and University Museums. But many are now discussing admission fees, he said. Mr. Tirrell, who works at the Oklahoma University Museum of Natural History, runs his association from his briefcase. He said that many of the museums do charge for special events. +Finding free culture is not particularly easy. Modest help is provided by the American Association of Museums, which has published a 112-page booklet, "A.A.M. Admission Policy Guide," listing at least a thousand museums and galleries that responded to a survey. The booklet indicates which museums are free, although it does not provide addresses or telephone numbers. The association sells the booklet for $ 8: The American Association of Museums, 1575 Eye Street, Suite 400, Washington, D.C. 20005; (202) 289-1818. +The major resource for finding places of interest that are free or low cost is a hardcover reference book too expensive for most families. "University and College Museums, Galleries and Related Facilities" by Victor J. Danilov (Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn., 1996) costs $99.50. The New York Public Library has it in the reference section of the Mid-Manhattan Branch; universities may also have it. The book is in chapters by subject, not ideal for travelers. Tenacious use of the index and appendix listing colleges will lead to what you want, but browsing is fun. +The 16 units of the Smithsonian in the capital are free because 72 percent of the institution's financing comes from the Federal Government, according to Linda St. Thomas, a spokeswoman for the Smithsonian. The George Gustav Heye Center, now in the Custom House in New York, adheres to the free-admission policy of its parent, the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, according to its spokesman, Russ Tall Chief. But the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Center in New York, also a Smithsonian museum, behaves like a New York museum, Ms. St. Thomas said, and has admission fees except for 5 to 9 P.M. on Tuesday. Barbara Livenstein, a spokeswoman, says the admission fees, $3 for adults and $1.50 for seniors and students older than 12, will rise in June to $5 and $3. + +LOAD-DATE: December 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Drawing (J. D. King) + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +629 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 28, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +Suddenly Single in the Suburbs, and in Middle Age + +BYLINE: By NANCY RUBIN + +SECTION: Section 14LI; Page 1; Column 1; Long Island Weekly Desk + +LENGTH: 2137 words + +SOME married soon after high school or college. Others continued to date for an additional 10 years before saying "I do." Others ended first marriages, only to rewed with equally unhappy results. +Whatever their histories, the number of people divorced in their middle years is increasingly visible. Census figures show that the percentage of Americans divorced between 40 and 54 in 1995 made up nearly 14 percent of the population, up from 11 percent a decade ago. + Specific figures are not available on the marital status of Long Islanders by age. The State Health Department found that of the 2,125 divorces filed in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, , one-fourth involved couples who had been married 15 to 30 years. +Officials, lawyers and other experts attribute much of the increase in midlife divorces to social and economic changes over the last 30 years. +"It's definitely changed," the Director of Women's Services in Nassau, Geraldine Linton, said. "And now that women have had some role models ahead of them it's easier for them than it used to be. Women who work and are unhappy in their marriages are more likely to get divorced once their children leave, because they have something to fall back upon." +A major factor are the personal and social changes of midlife, Ms. Linton said, adding: +"It may be related to the empty nest syndrome. When the children are there they often act as buffers between the husband and wife. But when they leave, when the connections with children are gone, suddenly you've got two people staring at each other across the dinner table without that much in common, and everything dries up." +Some people attribute the rising divorce rate to expanded expectations. +"Many of us, especially in the suburbs, where people tend to be upwardly mobile, are raised with the illusion that once we reach middle age we will be on Easy Street," said Dr. Michael Watson, a psychotherapist in Bayville and the director of the Professional Forensic Group. "But actually it's often the middle years when life is most difficult." +Although the children may have left, many continue to be financially dependent. That, combined with aging parents, means that the middle aged are often burdened with added responsibilities. +"The standard position for most middle-aged people is that they are facing their own aging and simultaneously not accomplishing the goal of being happy and secure," Dr. Watson said. Those disappointments, combined with the accommodations that couples have to make in the empty-nest years, can jeopardize relationships. +Other disappointments may include business failures or debt. "It's a form of denial," Harriette M. Steinberg, a matrimonial lawyer in Westbury, said. "There's a sense that it's time to get out. So the marriage gets the blame. Divorce becomes a way out, because, frankly, it cuts off responsibility for everything after a period of time." +One consequence is economic duress. "We see a lot of women who are frightened about how they're going to support themselves," Ms. Linton said. "Most cannot maintain the style of life they had when they were married. Many women call because they cannot maintain the house, and their homes go into foreclosure." +Many middle-age Long Island women do not work outside the house while they raise their children. A lawyer for the Nassau Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Helen Scofield, said: "This is especially true for women in their 40's and 50's who were raised with the expectation that they would be homemakers and mothers and that their husbands would be providers. At that age it's very difficult to get a well-paying job, and no one can live on a minimum wage." +Courts routinely award half the house to the woman but the maintenance is usually for a limited time. +"In most cases," Ms. Scofield said, "the man is better set up. Chances are he's been working all his life and has an income and pension plan. While she may be entitled to half of that, she has to hire a lawyer to force him to share it." +On Long Island housing costs are high, Ms. Scofield said. "I've seen houses in foreclosure in some affluent families and wonder how could anybody do that. I don't think there's tremendous understanding by the courts about how much it costs to live here." +A study in June 1996 published in The American Sociological Review indicated that women's postdivorce standard of living decreased by 27 percent and men's increased by 10 percent. Yet divorced middle-age men have their own troubles. +"While a divorced man may make more money than his ex-wife, the courts often order that he pays for everything he paid for before, as well as maintaining his own household," said Mark Strauss, who practices family and matrimonial law in Flushing. "That often means he has to continue to work very hard and has few dollars left to live on himself." +In addition, men often suffer a loss of connection to the family home and their community. "Men often experience their wives as keepers of the home, and when they lose that, when they lose their refrigerator, the Sunday barbecues and their nest, it can be quite disorienting," said Joan Hertz, a psychoanalyst in Hicksville who often treats divorcing couples. "In contrast women tend to keep the connections, especially if she has remained in the family home with the kids." +One solution for newly divorced men is remarriage. "What men tend to do is re-establish a second family and relive the whole round of family responsibility once again," said Dr. Watson. +Men who remain single may have to learn to establish a household. "One of the things that upset me the most was learning to prepare my own meals -- that, and taking care of my clothes," said Bruce Hasnas of Huntington. +After his divorce four years ago Mr. Hasnas attended a cooking class at a local high school, and he learned to wash his own laundry. "I discovered it really wasn't so difficult and that I could handle it," he said. +Because some divorced fathers fear losing daily contact with their children, a number remain in Nassau or Suffolk, often in the town where their children go to school. +"I bought a house in the same neighborhood so that my kids can stay with me as comfortably as with my ex-wife," a divorced father, Michael Kisver of Jericho, said. +Spouses frequently experience a sharp sense of isolation from former friends and neighbors after a divorce. "To begin with," Dr. Watson said, "Long Island is traditionally the bastion of the married. And once you get divorced it's more likely in the suburbs that you get dropped like a hot potato. Very often both sides of the couple feel like they've been abandoned by their entire social structure." +Such was the case for Marcia Feuer of Westbury. "We were all married and had a decent life and kids and husbands," Ms. Feuer recounted. "But once you're divorced life changes drastically. Even when a couple has well-established roots in the community, those who become divorced find they no longer have as much in common with old married friends." +"It's difficult to be middle aged and live here in such a coupled world," said a sales representative from North Babylon. "Until you get out and start mingling with others and get involved in activities and organizations it's very lonely." +"Both men and women," Dr. Watson said, "have enormous difficulty trying to meet people of the opposite sex in the suburbs. But it's much more difficult for women because there are fewer single men around." +One reason for that scarcity is that many suburban divorced men tend to remarry quickly while others move to the city. Census statistics from 1990 indicated that Nassau and Suffolk had 39,771 divorced men and 67,589 divorced women. +Another problem is that older men often prefer to date younger women. "It's become ever so much more difficult to date now than in the past," said a 50-year-old Oyster Bay woman who had been married for 18 years before her divorce 8 years ago. +"The men my age want to date 35-year-olds and those who are in their 60's are too old for me." +A partial solution has been the creation of clubs and social activities specifically designed for those who have become single in mid-life. Perhaps the best known of these is The Dallenger, a nightclub in the Garden City Hotel that is host to dances on Friday nights for those over 40. The club, which opened in June 1996 with live music and video screens, accommodates over 1,000 single middle-aged Long Islanders on Friday nights. +The club's popularity, according to Brian Rosenberg, general manager of The Dallenger, is as much a result of the proliferation of Long Island singles as it is of the club's marketing techniques. "The baby boomers are now getting divorced and many of them live on the Island," Mr. Rosenberg said. "They're back out there again. And this time it's no longer the health club scene but nightclubs where people can talk and meet." +A survey conducted at The Dallenger showed the needs of that older singles population who wanted to meet others at the club. "What we found is that our guests don't want the music so loud that they can't talk, they don't like cigar smoke and they want a mix of music from the 60's to the 90's," said Mr. Rosenberg. The club's goal, he added was "to focus on fun and entertainment and not necessarily be a place where people expect to find a mate, but where they meet others with whom to socialize." +For Francisca Turi, a divorced mother from Deer Park, The Dallenger represents such an opportunity. "It took me a long time to raise my daughter," she said. "And it got to the point where I was sitting home alone and waving good-bye to the kids as they went out. That's when I decided to go out myself, to come here and meet people. Ideally, I'd like to find someone to be with for the rest of my life, to grow old together. But meanwhile I'm just here to have fun." +Other Long Island organizations offer still more creative ways to meet middle-aged singles. Among the best known are the semimonthly Saturday night tennis parties at Rockville Raquet and the Sunday night parties at the Jericho Westbury Tennis Club sponsored by Marion Smith, an entrepreneur. "Playing tennis is an easy way to meet others," said Mrs. Smith, who began giving tennis parties on Long Island 14 years ago. "It's a good way to get some exercise, hone your tennis skills and make new friends." +Mrs. Smith, who organizes singles dances at local country clubs and in Manhattan hotels, has over 14,000 Long Island singles on her mailing list. Mrs. Smith maintains that it is easier for singles to socialize on Long Island than it was in the past. +"A decade ago it was more difficult to be single in the suburbs because there were fewer divorced people and many moved to the city. But today, many of the divorced people have remained in the suburbs. They like the outdoors, the tennis, the golfand the amenities that the suburbs offer," she said. +The growing singles population in the suburbs has also motivated some individuals to start activities through nearby institutions. Among them is the Single Friends group of the Nassau County Museum of Art. In 1995, two single middle-aged members of that museum approached the director, Constance Schwartz. "They felt the museum had such splendid resources, talented docents and magnificent atmosphere that it would a wonderful place for singles to meet," said Mrs. Schwartz. +Before long, the museum announced a six-program membership called Singles Friend. "We were so besieged with people that we finally had to limit the membership," said Mrs. Schwartz. +Today the museum accomodates 500 singles, most of whom are middle-aged, in their Singles Friends group. One reason for the program's popularity, according to Mrs. Schwartz, is its location. "We understand that the museum has a certain atmosphere where people feel safe, where they feel they're going to meet a different level of person than they might in a bar." +One of those enthusiasts was Joan Oliver, a former teacher and an aspiring artist who recently attended a wine-tasting party at the museum. Like many divorced middle-aged individuals, Ms. Oliver believes that being single can be viewed as an opportunity to explore interests she neglected when she was married, rather than as an empty time between mates. +"I suppose that being single can be difficult if you make finding a mate the sole purpose of what you do," said Ms. Oliver, who has been divorced for seven years after a long marriage. "But that's not my focus. I don't go to activities specifically because they are designed for singles. I participate in activities that interest me. Being single can be interesting as long as you keep an open attitude and simply try to enjoy what is." + +LOAD-DATE: December 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photos: The Island, like the nation, is seeing a rise in divorced middle-aged singles. Some gather at The Dallenger, a club inside the Garden City Hotel, that caters to people over 40. (pg. 1); Patrons get acquainted at The Dallenger in Garden City, a popular spot for divorced middle-age singles. A couple dancing at The Dallenger. (Photographs by Rebecca Cooney for The New York Times)(pg. 6) + +Illustration by Gorka Sampedro + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +630 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 28, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final + +December 21-27; +Curbs on Elderly Benefits + +BYLINE: By MILT FREUDENHEIM + +SECTION: Section 4; Page 2; Column 1; Week in Review Desk + +LENGTH: 126 words + +Health maintenance organizations are supposed to provide care at a lower cost than traditional insurance. But as Federal programs often do, Medicare has surprised its sponsors by spending more, not less, per person on the 5.9 million elderly and disabled Americans who have joined H.M.O.'s. +Congress recently limited the increase in next year's payments to Medicare H.M.O's to 2 to 3 percent, down sharply from 10 percent only two years ago. Some H.M.O.'s reacted by raising prices and ending freebies, upsetting elderly members who often live on tight budgets. + That was only one of a number of conflicting concerns. "One thing we are looking to do is maintain or enhance our profit margins," an H.M.O. spokeswoman said. MILT FREUDENHEIM + +LOAD-DATE: December 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +631 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 28, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final +Correction Appended + +EARNING IT; +A Company Where Retirement Is a Dirty Word + +BYLINE: By JULIE FLAHERTY + +SECTION: Section 3; Page 1; Column 1; Money and Business/Financial Desk + +LENGTH: 1440 words + +DATELINE: NEEDHAM, Mass. + +AS far as he can recall, Frederick Hartman has never dismissed an employee. In its 65-year history, his company has never had a layoff. And he has never asked anyone to retire. +Quite the contrary. When Mary Boyt retired recently -- at the age of 89 -- Mr. Hartman was not at all happy about it. + "That got me ticked off," he said, shaking his head in disgust. "Her daughter pushed her into retirement. She was a great worker. I hope I'm as sharp at that age." +Mr. Hartman is president of the Vita Needle Company in Needham. And at Vita Needle, there is no such thing as mandatory retirement; even the suggestion is scoffed at. After all, the average age here is 73. Most of the 35 employees joined the small factory as a second career, after retiring from jobs as engineers, nurses, bakers or what have you. +Not that Mr. Hartman, who is 45, is just being nice. He says he recruits older people because he finds them loyal, responsible and eligible for Medicare -- eliminating the need for company-paid health coverage. +Rosa Finnegan, a retired waitress and a widow, took a job here a year ago because her Social Security check was not paying the taxes on her Needham home. +Like most of those who work and chat at the wood benches on the factory floor, Ms. Finnegan praises the flexible hours, the plant's location a few miles from her home and the opportunity just to keep busy. The work, assembling small metal components by hand, is less than exciting, but, she asked, "Who else is going to hire me at 86?" +Actually, in today's tight labor market, someone just might. The national unemployment rate was 4.6 percent in November, the lowest since 1970, and as it has fallen, employers have sought out workers in age brackets they might not otherwise have considered. In 1995, some 3.8 million people 65 and older had jobs; that is 2.9 percent of that age group, up from 2.5 percent a decade earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. +When the American Association of Retired Persons Bulletin asked its readers to complete a questionnaire about their employment, 2,700 people working after age 65 wrote in, many of them former retirees. "We think it's a growing phenomenon as the labor market tightens and employers are finding it hard to fill jobs," said Robert Lewis, senior editor of the publication. +At Vita Needle, though, hiring older workers is nothing new. In 1934, Mr. Hartman's great-grandfather, Oscar E. Nutter, came out of retirement from the textile industry to start the business, which makes a variety of industrial and medical needles. He was 68, and he ran the company until three days before his death at 96. His nephew Carl Nutter worked until he was 88. And despite gall bladder surgery recently, Fred Hartman's father, Mason, at 72, the employee with the most seniority, was soon back at his desk keeping the books. +When Fred Hartman took over the family business 10 years ago, he saw that recruiting retirees would be in keeping with the company's experience with older workers. Mr. Hartman hired Bill Ferson, who was 68, as a design engineer. Now 79, Mr. Ferson is still here because, he said, "they treat us like human beings." +Lena Ferrara, who is 73, said Mr. Hartman called her not long after she left her job at an oil company and asked her to help out. Last week, she put in 40 hours. "He didn't give me a chance to retire," she said. +Having a staff of predominantly older workers has its ups and downs, Mr. Hartman acknowledged. But he is committed to them. +"They are motivated; they take care of the equipment; they don't have the P.T.A. meetings or the kids in day care," Mr. Hartman said. Most important, he said, "coming to work is a high priority" for them. +According to a 1993 report by the Commonwealth Fund in New York, most employers surveyed nationally said workers over 55 were better than younger workers when it came to work attitude, turnover and absenteeism. Another report by the fund found that of older Americans who did not work, one in seven was willing and able to do so. +"This work is kind of like therapy," Ms. Ferrara said. "Getting up early, getting dressed every day, not sitting around in your pajamas. It was too boring to be at home when no one's there. You clean your house for two days in a row, and then what?" +Almost all the older workers in Vita Needle's nonunion work force are part-time, some working as little as 15 hours a week. Two-thirds of them are women, with the workers' pay ranging from $6 to $12 an hour. The company promotes flex time, giving workers a lot of leeway in their choice of workdays and hours. Many employees have keys to the building, so some come in before daylight while others work into the evening; the last ones out shut off the lights. +"Older people are more likely to leave jobs that are physically demanding or have rigid schedules, and more likely to re-enter jobs with flexible schedules," said Diane Herz, an economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. +THE downside of such laissez-faire scheduling, Mr. Hartman said, is occasionally not having all the hands he needs when he needs them. "Summers and winters are harder on us," he said. "People want to go to Florida, or go down to Cape Cod with their grandchildren for a few weeks." +But his workers, he noted, do not need as much supervision. "People are letting themselves in at 5 in the morning," he said. "I'm not here telling them what to do." +A paper tacked on the bulletin board reads: "Remember, old folks are worth a fortune -- with silver in their hair, gold in their teeth, stones in their kidneys, lead in their feet and gas in their stomachs." And the physical limitations of aging do not go unnoticed. Jim Connolly, a design engineer, remembers one woman who would doze off at her workbench. And, he said, "you get the occasional oddball who makes you a little nervous." +Because the factory is housed in what was once a second-floor movie theater, "the stairs are a bone of contention," Mr. Hartman said. Although no previous experience in the field is necessary, applicants must be able to make it up the steps. +The aging building that houses the business has no loading dock -- it did not even have hot water until the late 80's. It is also cramped for space; the former theater stage is packed with yards of steel tubing. But moving to another site would mean losing employees; many walk or take a short ride to work. Last year, the company, which had been renting its space, bought the whole building. "We're in it for the long haul," Mr. Hartman said. +OLDER workers, of course, can be more resistant to something new. "Change isn't always easy when you have a labor force that is advanced in years," Mr. Hartman said. Mary Bianchi, 76, the office manager, threatened to quit when he replaced her typewriter with a word processor. There were arguments over the addition of the fax machine ("No one thought it would work"), the air-conditioner, even the microwave. "I still think a third of our people won't go next to it," Mr. Hartman said. +On the other hand, the company has remade itself in recent years. In the 1980's, the spread of AIDS caused a huge shift toward the use of disposable needles, making obsolete the re-usable medical needles that were Vita's specialty. +To reinvent itself, Vita found other uses for its type of product -- developing tubes for embalming, tagging salmon, vaccinating wild animals and injecting foam into car seats. One customer, Sea World, contracts with Vita for 4-foot-long needles used to medicate killer whales. +The workers, many of them widows, hardly blush when discussing the special needles for piercing navels, noses, tongues and, um, other body parts. "We're kind of a player in that market," Mr. Hartman said, with slight embarrassment. +By adapting to new manufacturing procedures, the staff has proved itself as versatile as the products. Mr. Ferson used his 30 years of experience in a machine shop to create a gauge that allows him to work with tubing the size of a human hair. +With its new customer base, the company has grown to 35 employees, from 15 in 1984. Sales have doubled in the last five years, and are expected to grow 15 to 20 percent this year. +More change is on the way. Although Ms. Bianchi, the office manager, keeps the company paperwork in files on a shelf behind her desk, computerization is in the works. As he helped her pull down a box, Mr. Hartman, 31 years her junior, joked about when she would retire. +"You're here until three figures, Mary, three figures," he said. +She smiled and said, "You'll have to put the elevator in for me." + +LOAD-DATE: December 28, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +CORRECTION-DATE: January 4, 1998, Sunday +January 11, 1998, Sunday + + CORRECTION: +An article last Sunday about the Vita Needle Company, where the work force includes many retirees from various occupations, misstated the year it was founded. It was 1932, not 1934. +An article on Dec. 28 about the Vita Needle Company, where the work force includes many retirees from various occupations, misstated the number of Americans age 65 and older who had jobs in 1995. It was 3.7 million, not 3.8 million. The article also misstated the percentage of people in that age group who held jobs in 1995 and 1985. It was 11.7 percent in 1995, not 2.9 percent. It was 10.4 percent in 1985, not 2.5 percent. + +GRAPHIC: Photo: The Vita Needle Company in Needham, Mass., offers flexible schedules to its staff of predominantly older workers. Marion Archibald, 87, is among the 35 employees. (Kirsten Elstner for The New York Times)(pg. 11) + +Chart: "Who's Who" +Some of the venerable employees of the Vita Needle Company. + +1. Mary Bianchi 76 +2. Frederick Hartman 45, the company's president +3. Mason Hartman 72, his father, who keeps the company's books +4. Kay Whitcher 77 +5. Joan Golley 63 +6. Marilyn Devine 65 +7. Marion Archibald 87 +8. Ann Poulos 73 +9. Ernie Garron 53 +10. Al Goodrow 73 +11. Alice Walker 79 +12. Marsha Clifford 85 +13. Florence Hollis 88 +14. Jennifer Cushman 34 +15. Eleanor Clark 82 +16. Blake Harrison 41 +17. Roland Hickok 75 +18. Michael LaRosa 39 +19. Jim Connolly 74 +20. Rosa Finnegan 87 +21. Helen Morrissey 75 +22. William Bradley 86 +23. Bill Ferson 79 +24. Frank Fiorello 86 +25. Tom Mann 84 + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +632 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 31, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +FILM REVIEW; +Joy of Good Old Love, Or at Least Lust + +BYLINE: By STEPHEN HOLDEN + +SECTION: Section E; Page 8; Column 5; The Arts/Cultural Desk + +LENGTH: 553 words + +Truman Capote, observing the 60-ish Katherine Anne Porter flirt with a handsome young man, is reported to have once remarked acidly that "the last thing that dies in a snake is the tail." Restated in a kinder way, our sexual urges may diminish with age, but they never completely vanish. Desire lives on in memory if not in action. +The notion that sexuality and the life force are synonymous lies at the heart of Heddy Honigmann's wise but lighthearted documentary, "O Amor Natural," which opens today at the Film Forum. In this meditation on desire, memory and age, the filmmaker invites randomly chosen older people in Rio de Janeiro to read aloud the erotic verses of the Brazilian poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who died in 1987. The volume from which they read was published posthumously because Drummond worried that his language would be considered pornographic. But translated into movie subtitles, his rhapsodically sensual odes to lovemaking and female body parts, and his celebrations of his own anatomy ("a gentle leaping jaguar") are only slightly more explicit than the Song of Solomon. + Almost to a person, these impromptu readers, all in their 60's, 70's, and 80's, are not only unembarrassed but delighted by what they read, and many are stimulated to confide their own erotic histories. Interwoven among the interviews are shots of beautiful young people frisking on the beaches of Rio de Janiero. +A still vigorous, but sexually inactive 85-year-old man recalls his happy 50-year marriage to a woman who tolerated his numerous affairs because she never doubted his love. "Variety," he says without making excuses, was essential to his well-being. An 81-year-old woman who swam in the 1936 Olympics in Germany reads a poem about making love in a shower that evokes a mystical connection in her mind between sex and water. Recalling her sex life, a weather-beaten woman scoffs at "softy" lovemaking, declaring that she could only be satisfied by being taken violently, "because I am violent." +The filmmaker also interviews acquaintances of Drummond's, including a hat maker who supplied him with his Panama fedoras and remembers the poet as a rakishly elegant man who was quite vain. We hear Drummond's voice reciting his own verses from an album he recorded in 1972. +If the movie is groundbreaking in its focus on geriatric sexuality, its mostly upbeat picture of older people smiling contentedly as they dredge up ancient flings and quenched passions is a reassuringly sentimental portrait of old age. Most of the subjects look back on youth with a rosy benignity that is largely untainted by bitterness and regret. Late in the film, only one woman who had a very active sex life admits, on the verge of tears, that she was lying when she said she wasn't nostalgic. +A word of warning: "O Amor Natural" is likely to leave you itching to go out and make hay while the sun shines. + +O AMOR NATURAL + +Directed by Heddy Honigmann; in Portuguese, with English subtitles; director of photography, Jose Guerra; edited by Marc Nolens; produced by Pieter van Huystee; released by First Run Features and First Run/ Icarus Films. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, South Village. Running time: 76 minutes. This film is not rated. + +FEATURING: Residents of Rio de Janeiro. + +LOAD-DATE: December 31, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +GRAPHIC: Photo: Residents of Rio de Janeiro reading poetry and talking about their love lives in the film "O Amor Natural." (Film Forum) + +TYPE: Review + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company + + + +633 of 633 DOCUMENTS + +The New York Times + +December 31, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final + +A Conservative Group Sues on Medicare Rule + +BYLINE: By ROBERT PEAR + +SECTION: Section A; Page 13; Column 1; National Desk + +LENGTH: 951 words + +DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 + +A new Federal law scheduled to take effect on Thursday has set off a dispute over the right of elderly people to choose their own health care and to negotiate fees with their doctors. +A conservative group that represents more than a half-million elderly people filed suit in Federal District Court here today to block the law, which was included in the balanced-budget bill signed last summer by President Clinton. + Republicans originally drafted the legislation to guarantee that doctors could sign private contracts with Medicare beneficiaries willing to pay more than the fees set by the Government. But in an effort to protect elderly people against price gouging by doctors, Democrats insisted that Congress impose many restrictions on the use of such private contracts. +Plaintiffs in the lawsuit, led by the United Seniors Association, contend that the law, rather than protecting elderly patients, severely limits their right to use their own money to buy more health care, or pay higher fees, than Medicare deems appropriate. +The lawsuit is the opening salvo in what promises to be a long-running battle in Federal courts and in Congress over the new law. +Sandra L. Butler, president of the association, asserted that the law would destroy "seniors' ability to pay the doctor of their choice, for services of their choice, without the interference of the Federal Government." +Medicare pays doctors according to a fee schedule and strictly limits their ability to charge higher fees even if Medicare patients are willing to pay more. Doctors say some patients are willing to pay two or three times the Medicare fee for the services of an eminent specialist. +Ms. Butler and many Republican members of Congress contend that Medicare beneficiaries need an unfettered right to sign private contracts with their doctors, even for services that would otherwise be covered by Medicare. They say such contracts will become increasingly important as the Government is tempted to control costs by rationing care. +But Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California, said that private contracts exposed patients to "extortion" by doctors. Sick patients, fighting for their lives, are in a weak bargaining position and have no realistic opportunity to negotiate the terms of contracts with their doctors, Mr. Stark said. +Medicare finances health care for 38 million people who are elderly or disabled. It has a pervasive influence on the practice of medicine, extending far beyond the elderly, because most doctors receive some payments from Medicare. +The new law, the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, says that a doctor may enter a private contract with a Medicare beneficiary for a specific item or service only if the doctor signs an affidavit promising not to file any claims with Medicare for any services provided to any patients for two years. +In other words, a doctor who signs even one private contract must agree to stay completely out of the Medicare program for two years. Few doctors are willing to make such a financial sacrifice. +Influential Republicans, including Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma, Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia and Representative Dick Armey of Texas, are supporting bills to lift the restrictions on private contracts. At least 47 senators and 170 House members have endorsed the legislation. +Under current law, doctors can charge up to 15 percent more than the amounts listed in Medicare's fee schedule. Under private contracts, there would be no limit on what a doctor could charge a patient, and Medicare would not pay any of the doctor's bill. +The Clinton Administration and the American Association of Retired Persons are generally skeptical of private contracts, saying they expose elderly patients to price gouging. But the Administration has been extremely cautious in its public statements, basically defending the compromise struck in the new law. +The American Medical Association strongly supports the right of doctors to sign private contracts, but is not a party to the lawsuit. The A.M.A., like the plaintiffs, contends that doctors should be able to sign private contracts in a selective way, case by case and service by service. +Nancy-Ann Min DeParle, administrator of the Federal Health Care Financing Administration, which runs Medicare, said: "Beneficiaries have always been able to pay out of their own pockets for services not covered by Medicare without penalty to themselves or their physicians. The new Balanced Budget Act does not change that." +Donna E. Shalala, the Secretary of the Health and Human Services, is the defendant in the lawsuit, which was assigned to Judge Thomas F. Hogan of Federal District Court. +The Administration insists that Medicare beneficiaries can use their own money to pay for goods and services that are not covered by Medicare, like hearing aids or routine physical examinations. Private contracts, it says, are needed only when a patient wants to pay a higher fee, or obtain more care, than Medicare deems appropriate. +Two of the plaintiffs, Peggy Sanborn and Toni Parsons of Florida, said they were particularly concerned that they would no longer be able to obtain certain laboratory tests used to screen people for cancer. Medicare pays for many such tests when the patient has symptoms of cancer, but not when the patient is healthy, they said. +Lawmakers said they had been inundated with letters expressing concern about the new law. Diane Archer, executive director of the Medicare Rights Center, a consumer group based in New York City, said the A.M.A. and the United Seniors Association had scared elderly people by disseminating inaccurate information about the new law. + + +LOAD-DATE: December 31, 1997 + +LANGUAGE: ENGLISH + +Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company \ No newline at end of file